The Forever Gate Ultimate Edition

by Isaac Hooke

  "Damn it," Ari said. "Find work for them if you can, and have the machines prepare new pods for those who don't fit in." Inevitably, there were a few people who were too old, or too mentally unfit, to help out with the various ship tasks. And while it cost more resources to create new pods to hold these misfits, she refused to send them to protein reclamation, or to allow them to idle away their days in the nursery, wasting calories—far less food was required to maintain an individual in the sleeping state versus the waking. "Meanwhile, I want you to reprogram the servers to immediately sedate anyone who awakens prematurely. I don't want anyone else getting out. We're already close to our caloric maximums. The food system can't keep up. If we allow anyone else out of the pods, we're going to have to start cutting back everyone's portions, crew members and dreamers alike."

  "I'll have Kade see what he can do," Stanson said. Kade was one of their top system programmers. When he'd emerged six months ago he'd demonstrated an aptitude for coding almost immediately. In his first three months he'd been responsible for creating several new macros to ease the work of the Keepers who helped maintain the Inside. In his last three months, Ari had him turn his attention to the internal ship systems: in two weeks he had demonstrated enough proficiency to move out of the sandbox environment, and he'd been instrumental in rewriting some of the core processes. If anyone could reprogram the servers to keep the dreamers sedated, it was Kade.

  She glanced at his station. He hadn't reported in yet. Someone from the fifth watch was still manning his terminal. That was one thing about Kade, he certainly liked to sleep in. Ari cut him slack only because he was so valuable. Still, she decided she was going to have to talk to him about coming in earlier.

  "Has Ben run Zak through the qualifications, yet?" Ari asked Stanson.

  Ben was the specialist Ari had assigned to assist Zak in his relearning.

  "He has," Stanson told her. "His hand-eye coordination scores were quite high for someone who has lived his whole life asleep. Ben thinks we can train him to operate the shuttles."

  "A pilot, then."

  "Yes," Stanson said.

  They had been sending out the shuttles on exploratory runs to survey the moon for mineral deposits, and to retrieve chunks of ice from the surface of Ganymede to melt into fresh water. The autopilot systems functioned well enough, but Ari preferred to have an actual human operator behind the controls. She'd seen all too well how robots and AIs could turn against them.

  "It's too bad Zak is still rejecting this reality," Stanson added.

  "Is he?" Ari said.

  "Ben says his reality disassociation is the worst he's ever seen."

  "Well, keep me updated on his progress." Ari felt responsible for him, seeing as she and Tanner had personally tracked him down.

  "Will do," Stanson said.

  The first watch liaison officer spoke up: "Briar just reported in."

  Ari looked at him. "What's the news?"

  "He says none of the Lightning Rings are missing," the liaison officer responded.

  Ari tapped her lips. "That leaves one of the Children." She surveyed the members present, only half of whom were awake. "Start a scan of the system logs. Find out if any Keepers injected Lightning Rings into the world in the past few weeks."

  "I'll get someone on it," Stanson said.

  "What are you going to do when we find the culprit?" Tanner asked from his seat beside her.

  "Zak almost killed you and me because of those rings. That's not something we can treat lightly. I'm going to permanently ban whoever did this from the Inside. I might arrange some brig time, too."

  One of the tethered operators looked up. His glazed eyes focused on Ari. "There's been an Incident on the Inside."

  In the city of Severest, Ari and Tanner moved through the wreckage of the buildings adjacent to the long rock wall known as the Forever Gate. The destruction was incredible. A blast crater twenty feet in diameter had formed in the cobblestone beside the wall. The closest structures were completely demolished, their bricks fanning outward from the wall along the ground. Several of those bricks had melted, with large sections of slag spread over the cobblestone. The buildings that yet stood were burned out husks. Roughly twenty of the nearby houses had been razed. Luckily no one had been at home during the attack.

  There was a Keeper with them, a woman wearing a skin-tight blue outfit with a red cape and belt. The digits 100000 were carved into her chest. Her name was Renna. A User also joined them. He was dressed like a farmer, and wore a fake bronze bitch around his neck. His name was Jan.

  Ari and Tanner had opted for less conspicuous attire that day, and they looked similar to Jan with the dun shirts and trousers they wore over their gol outfits. They also wore fake collars. They had scabbards strapped to their waists, but that was not an uncommon sight, at least in that city. What was uncommon was the swords those scabbards contained, though no one could see them of course, not while they were sheathed anyway.

  Ari lowered herself into the shallow crater and walked right up to the wall. The blast had carved out a concave section of the Forever Gate. She placed a hand on the damaged surface. The rock there had melted and re-solidified, becoming glasslike. "They almost got through."

  "Who did this?" Tanner said. "The citizens?"

  Occasionally citizens on the Inside attempted to blow a hole in the Forever Gates of the cities in a bid to get to the paradisiacal world they believed existed beyond. The Users had attempted that very thing years ago, with her help. They had failed. Ironically, the bombing attempts only increased after Ari and her team fixed the weather. Perhaps the citizens had become emboldened by the improved weather, and believed that the world outside the walls was not so barren, and that it was something they could actually survive and explore. In reality, a desert world existed beyond the Gates in every city. One could travel about two miles into that world before they reached the extents, which were bounded by infinite windows of glass. The lack of a true wilderness between cities helped keep the computational requirements of the simulation low.

  Ari shook her head. "I don't think any citizen did this. There's no existing bomb on the Inside that could cause damage like this. None that we know of, anyway."

  "So you think it was one of the Keepers?" Renna asked her.

  "That would seem the likely scenario." Ari looked up. That wall extended as far as the eye could see, to the clouds. It cast that part of the city in shadow.

  "The same individual who gave Zak the rings?" Tanner asked.

  "Probably." She could see no other damage to the wall farther up. That was good.

  "At least they didn't get through," Jan, the User, commented.

  Ari turned toward Renna and Jan. "I want the two of you to find witnesses. Look for anyone who was in the area this morning. Have them report anything out of the ordinary: someone they didn't recognize; a strange object lying against the Forever Gate. Anything."

  "What about the system logs of the area?" Renna asked.

  "Tanner and I will check them personally when we return," Ari told her. "We'll see if we can find specific people who were in the area that you can talk to."

  The Keeper nodded, and then she and Jan left to search for witnesses.

  "You think we'll actually find anything in the logs?" Tanner asked Ari.

  "No," Ari said. "Our culprit probably wiped the relevant entries. All of the Keepers have that ability."

  "Maybe it's time we changed their system permissions?"

  "I'll talk to Kade about that," Ari said. "Even so, I'm still hoping we'll find potential witnesses in those logs."

  Tanner surveyed the damaged wall. "Well, like Jan said, at least they didn't get through."

  "No," Ari said. "But I'm fairly certain they were merely testing the weapon." She regarded Tanner gravely. "And I fear that next time, they will get through."

  5

  Ari sat in the Control Room of the real world, tapping one foot impatiently on the deck. Moments after she had returne
d, Stanson had informed her that the Children had received a demand from an anonymous source: a Keeper found a written note stipulating that five hundred people were to be released into the real world of the Outside, or another, more powerful bomb would go off in a random city on the Inside.

  They wouldn't be able to meet those demands, of course. For one thing, the necessary caloric requirements went well beyond the capabilities of the food system. And for another, Ari and her team didn't have the manpower to handle the reintegration of so many people at once.

  One of the Children was likely responsible. It could be anyone present. Or someone whose shift occurred during another watch. A misguided, sick individual.

  She went to Kade, who was programming the system with his aReal spectacles. She rested a hand on the back of his chair and he looked up at her. Those glasses made him look like a young professor of sorts. His body was twenty-one years old, but when they had pulled him out, his mind was in the late forties.

  "Have you changed the write permissions on the logs?" Ari asked him.

  Kade nodded. "I have. Currently, the only people with the permission to change the logs are yourself and Tanner."

  "So our suspect won't be able to hide his or her tracks anymore."

  "That's the hope," Kade said.

  "Why only a hope?"

  "Well," Kade said. "There are ways to connect outside of the normal logging procedure. Connecting in zero mode, for example."

  "Can't we disable these modes?"

  "We can," Kade said. "But it has to be done on a terminal-by-terminal basis. The suspect could just connect from a rogue terminal somewhere on the ship, and we wouldn't be able to stop him."

  Ari sighed. "What a mess."

  "You should see the code," Kade said.

  Ari laughed. "That's quite all right. Tell me, have you been able to reprogram the pod system to sedate anyone who awakens prematurely?"

  Kade nodded. "Sort of. I've tested my changes on a few recent candidates. The umbilical supplies the necessary incapacitating agents, and the subjects go under. However, their brain waves tell me they're not dreaming. They're not on the Inside, but merely unconscious."

  "Well, that's preferable to having them awake and wasting valuable resources. See what you can do to get their minds re-engaged."

  "'I'm on it."

  "I have another message from Briar," the liaison officer announced.

  Ari went over to him.

  "One of his eyes and ears in the Black Faction has reported something strange," the liaison officer explained.

  "Strange?" Ari said. Tanner came to her side, wanting to hear.

  "Yes," the officer said. "Apparently this guy Leon returned to the Black Den without a collar. He says someone in the cave city of Dhenn staged a cult suicide and then handed out keys to the bystanders so that they could remove their bronze bitches."

  "Keys?" Tanner said.

  The officer nodded. "He says half the city is running around uncollared. It's chaos."

  "Damn it." Ari glanced at Stanson. "Have every Keeper congregate on Dhenn immediately. I want the threat contained. Have them coordinate with the gol guards and Users to collar as many of the people as possible. And spawn a couple hundred of the hunter class."

  "A couple hundred?" Stanson said. "I don't think so. You'll slow the system to a crawl in that area. Those AIs are too resource intense. I can send in ten, maximum."

  "Then do it," Ari said. The hunter class was basically a specialized version of the guards with several equipment upgrades. "I want the city's transit centers locked down, too. No one goes in or out of Dhenn until further notice. Save Users and Keepers, of course."

  "I'll dispatch the orders," Stanson said.

  "We can flood the associated pods with incapacitating agents?" Tanner suggested.

  Ari glanced at Kade. "How feasible is that?"

  "I can certainly put together a list of all the pods linked to the people of Dhenn," Kade answered. "But I can't discriminate between who's wearing a collar and who isn't. I might be able to have a patch for that ready sometime later today, though."

  "What if we incapacitated them all?" Ari said.

  "We could," Kade said. "But as I mentioned, I'm having trouble getting those I've sedated back into the shared dream. It would probably be wise to hold off on that, unless you want to turn Dhenn into a ghost town."

  "No," Ari said. "We don't know what the long term effects of sedation will do to their minds. Work on that patch."

  She returned to her seat. Tanner joined her.

  "I've been scouring through the logs since we got back," Tanner said. "While most of the entries have been wiped, I did find some people who were in the area this morning. Some of them could be potential witnesses."

  "Get Renna to check them out."

  "Already have," he said. "About ten minutes ago."

  The liaison officer glanced at Tanner. "Renna just checked in. She says she found a witness."

  Already? Ari thought. But then she reminded herself that time passed so much faster on the Inside. In the ten minutes it had taken Tanner to relay the order to Renna and inform Ari about it, two hours would have passed for the Keeper: enough time to track down and interview at least a few potentials.

  "Let's go meet this witness," Ari said.

  Dressed as well-to-do merchants, Ari and Tanner returned to Severest and approached a small hut positioned on an out of the way section of Forever Street. The hut stood in an alleyway beside a rusty iron portcullis that sealed off the only rope leading up the Forever Gate in that city.

  Ari ducked her head to pass through the doorway. Inside, Keeper Renna sat cross-legged on the floor in her red cape and blue outfit, looking like a superhero as she sipped tea beside a severe-looking man whose forehead appeared permanently crimped. His unkempt gray hair and slobbish way of dressing hinted at an occupation of begging.

  "Welcome, Ari, Tanner," Renna said. "Meet Spalding. My witness."

  Ari reached out and shook his grimy hand. Tanner did the same.

  "I'm going to get gold for this, yes?" Spalding said. "She promised me gold."

  Ari smiled indulgently. "You will get gold. Tell us what you saw."

  "Well," Spalding said. "This morning, I had taken up my usual position on Forever Street, in the shadow of the great wall. It's a good begging spot, because the nearby buildings are spaced just the right distance apart to offer the best view of the Forever Gate, and visitors often come there to gawk. There's a curio vendor not far from the spot, and the guilty patrons usually give me some coins after they waste their money on a miniature replica of the Gate."

  "Tell us what you saw, please," Ari pressed.

  Spalding cleared his throat. "Yes. Anyways, I was minding my own business, keeping my hat extended for donations, when this troop of four men waltz on by. And these aren't ordinary men, mind you. They walks about like they own the place, they do. Two of them were these servant sorts dressed in loincloths. Lean, mean, muscular, you know? They carried this heavy chest between them. They struggled a little, as if it weighed a thousand pounds or something. Another man walked behind them. He wore this tight fitting, black suit. I think he was a User or something, because he didn't have a bronze bitch around his neck.

  "Their leader, meanwhile, was this scary looking fella who dressed in a dark robe, his face hidden in the shadows of his hood. He carried this long white staff, knobby like it was made of bone or some shit, and its ferrule clicked loudly on the cobblestone with each step. Little threads of lightning sparked all creepy-like from his exposed hands, like the kind you see coming from the fingers of Users and other uncollareds when you make 'em mad. Scary as hell."

  Ari considered his words. "Did you see where the four went?"

  Spalding shrugged. "I didn't watch them for too long. I got the impression they wouldn't take kindly to stares, so I quickly lowered my gaze. The robed man actually deposited a coin in my hat as he passed. Can you believe it? I didn't dare look up, but I said
thanks right quick enough. And then he left without molesting me or nothing."

  "Can we see the coin?" Ari asked him.

  Spalding nodded. He reached into his pocket and produced the object.

  Ari reached for it, but hesitated: she was worried there might be some sort of trap embedded therein. She took it and was relieved when it seemed a normal coin.

  She parted the entrance curtain with one hand and held up the object to the light.

  "It's definitely a Keeper's coin," Ari said. She handed it to Tanner. "Freshly minted."

  Tanner examined it. "A robed man with a bone staff and electricity flowing from his hands gave you this?" He sounded doubtful.

  "That's right," Spalding said. "On my word."

  Tanner handed the coin back.

  "Do you think we can track down whoever owned it?" Ari asked him.

  Tanner shook his head. "We don't keep logs like that. If we did, the system would soon run out of storage space. Keeping track every time money changed hands would make for a very big log."

  Ari nodded. "All right." She handed Spalding the sack of gold she'd injected on the Inside with her. "Here is your reward."

  His face lit up and he greedily accepted the sack, quickly hiding it in his cloak.

  "Aren't you going to count it?" Ari said.

  "Don't need to," Spalding said. "I can tell when I'm rich."

  "What if I gave you a pile of rocks?"

  Spalding retrieved the sack and quickly looked inside. He grabbed a gold coin and bit into it. "Definitely rich."

  Ari smiled, then got up. "Thank you, Renna. Let us know if you find any other witnesses."

  "I will," Renna told her.

  Ari and Tanner left the hut.

  Spalding was shouting for joy behind them. "I'm a rich sonbitch! A rich sonbitch!"

  "Not if you keep broadcasting it like that," Tanner said over his shoulder.

  They left the alleyway behind for Forever Street proper.

  "You know," Ari said. "One time, Hoodwink and I were walking down a street together in Luckdown District. We passed a busker. I gave the man three gold coins. Hoodwink told me I was better than him, because I'd given that money so generously, when he would have walked on by. But he doesn't understand I only gave the money because he was there. I wanted to show him how generous I was."