The Forever Gate Ultimate Edition

by Isaac Hooke

  The forum did have a search feature, however.

  He pulled up the Roq application on his aReal and navigated to the index. He chose the Trade Winds forum and waited rather impatiently for the aReal to connect. The access indicator seemed to flash forever... he began to worry that the forum had been shut down by the regime since the last time he had accessed it.

  But in a few moments the familiar logo came up and he heaved a sigh of relief. At least that avenue was still open to him.

  He logged in with the user alias he had created the last time he was at the site. His aReal transmitted the required public key and biometric data required to sign in, and then he navigated to the search box and typed the message:

  Resist the dark web of Irotas.

  No results came up. He tried browsing through the different postings, looking for signs of any dissenters. No luck. There were only firearm postings, the occasional drug listing, and some vague discussions reminiscing on the "good old days." If there were any resistance members present, they were likely communicating in private rooms.

  He selected the "member list" link near the top of the page. He was a little surprised the site would even keep a public member list, since the whole point of the dark web was anonymization, but he wasn't about to complain.

  On a hunch he skipped ahead to all aliases beginning with the letter I and began to browse through them.

  There. A member named Irotas.

  He sent the user a message:

  I want to resist.

  That was all he had. He shut down the aReal and promptly forgot about the dark web.

  He checked the forum again a few days later. To his surprise a response had come in. A single word:

  How?

  That was the same message he had left in the alleyway. He took that as a sign the resistance had seen it.

  He responded with:

  I have a plan to fight the Satori oppressors. Need others to help implement it.

  A week later Hoodwink still hadn't received a reply.

  "It's probably for the best," Sarella told him. "Contacting the resistance can't end well. Not for either of us."

  "And what if my plan succeeds?"

  She smiled wanly. "That might be the worst scenario of them all."

  A few days later he finally received a response in his Trade Winds account.

  Come to the alleyway tomorrow at three a.m.

  He stowed his aReal in the bathroom and explained the message to Sarella.

  "That will be tricky, given the curfew," she said. "Which alleyway, anyway?"

  "Presumably the one where I saw the original graffiti." Hoodwink smiled triumphantly. "I told you there was a resistance."

  "And what if the resistance is merely a honey pot?" Sarella said. "A trap laid by the Satori to enmesh anyone who tries to go against the regime. Perhaps the Shell had one of its robots paint the original words. Perhaps the Shell answered the message on the dark web forum itself. You do this, you'll be walking right into their hands. The word Irotas is Satori spelled backwards, after all."

  "If it was a honey pot, why would the Shell take so long to reply? Why not order me to come to the alleyway right away?"

  "Maybe it didn't want to arouse your suspicions by responding too quickly," Sarella said.

  "And why not simply send its robots to arrest me?" Hoodwink said. "No. I don't buy it. It's not the Shell. I'm going to the alleyway at three a.m.. Do you want to come with me?"

  She sighed. "You know I'm going to come."

  "I do," Hoodwink said. "Though I thought I'd give you the courtesy of asking."

  21

  Hoodwink waited until two thirty in the morning and then made his way into the building hallway with Sarella. They both left behind their aReals so that the Shell wouldn't know they were violating curfew. The AI had other ways to track them of course. The countless cameras on the streets. The robots. Perhaps other implants hidden inside their bodies.

  For the cameras, Hoodwink and Sarella had earlier toured the area between their apartment and the alleyway. They noted the location of all spy cams along the way, as well as the shops manned by robots, and when they returned home they planned a route that circumvented most of the surveillance.

  There was nothing they could do about the robot patrols except avoid them. As for any implants, they would simply have to hope the Shell hadn't tampered with their bodies.

  Dressed entirely in black, with black balaclavas covering their faces, they reached the apartment fire escape shared by that floor. Hoodwink gazed into the darkened courtyard below.

  "Looks clear," he said.

  They couldn't exit via the front lobby, because there was a camera on a streetlamp directly outside. There was also a music shop manned by a robot on the first floor of the building across from the apartment. That robot also monitored the lobby, no doubt.

  Hoodwink stepped onto the fire escape and proceeded to climb down the two flights to the first floor. There, he unlatched the ladder and carefully lowered it to the ground. He cringed each time the latch struck each rung; though the scraping noise was soft, it sounded loud in his ears.

  When the ladder was in place, he climbed down into the courtyard. He led Sarella through the tall grass until they reached the enclosing fence. There, he gave her a boost to the top.

  She scanned the back road beyond and then gave him a thumbs up. She reached down and helped him over.

  On the other side, they opened special umbrellas designed to conceal their heat signatures from the thermal imaging of any passing surveillance drones. There was no other way to avoid the things, as the pair wouldn't have any warning: the quadcopters flew high enough to mask any sound produced by the already quiet motors.

  The two made their way through the dimly lit lanes. They ducked into alleys or side streets whenever the mechanical hum of moving treads heralded the approach of a patrol robot.

  As one of those ground robots drove by, sweeping its search lights to and fro, Hoodwink wondered as he often did how those tank-like treads avoided chewing up the asphalt. It was perhaps a silly thought to have, considering the circumstances, but he couldn't help himself. Perhaps an ordinary human being would have been scared witless. But not Hoodwink. He blamed the cold, logical part of his quadmind, the Satori part, for asserting itself. Probably a good thing, as he needed all of his mental faculties at the moment.

  When the patrol robot was gone, they continued their clandestine advance, and soon reached the street adjacent to the alleyway. Unfortunately, that entire area was closed to them, as there were too many spy cameras and robot-manned shops.

  Instead, Hoodwink folded the umbrella and tucked it under one arm, and then climbed the lower branches of a nearby blue oak. He hauled himself onto the rooftop of the single story building beside it. Sarella did likewise.

  They reopened their umbrellas and hurried at a crouch toward the far edge of the roof. The next building was a little higher, with a five foot gap between it and the current roof. Hoodwink and Sarella took running jumps in turn and crossed the gap.

  They made their way from rooftop to rooftop like that, until one building proved a bit too far away to jump to. Hoodwink found an abandoned ladder between the superstructures of the current roof and he made a makeshift bridge. It seemed a little too convenient to Hoodwink. Nonetheless, he forced himself to cross. It was tricky, and he almost lost his balance along the way. Sarella meanwhile conquered the ladder with ease, moving like a ballerina.

  He reached the edge of the rooftop and stared at the target alleyway below. Though it appeared empty, he hesitated. There were several areas of absolute darkness down there. Anything could be lurking within the shadows. Perhaps robot soldiers, preparing to arrest him and Sarella. He thought again of the ladder, which he had left in place between the two buildings. Had the Shell put it there? Or had its opportune presence merely been a coincidence? Perhaps the resistance members had stowed it to make the crossing easier. That must be it.

 
"Hoodwink?" Sarella whispered, her voice muffled by the balaclava she wore.

  "Let's go," he said softly.

  They lowered themselves into the alleyway and waited. He stared intently at the darkness around him, searching for a glint of metal, listening for the hum of servomotors, but no robots emerged from the night.

  Perhaps it wasn't a trap after all.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder and he nearly leaped out of his boots. He spun. It was Sarella. She was pointing at the alleyway wall. A small crack had appeared and moments later a door opened inward. No light coming from within. It was darker inside than outside.

  Sarella beckoned questioningly toward the door.

  Hoodwink sighed.

  Now or never.

  The pair entered and the door sealed behind them, leaving them in absolute darkness.

  "I'm going to blindfold you," a man said. A human voice. That meant nothing. Robots were equipped with vocal synthesizers that allowed them to mimic human sounds perfectly.

  Hoodwink felt a blindfold come down over his eyes.

  The umbrella was yanked from his grasp.

  "Put your hands behind your back," the man commanded.

  Hoodwink did as he was asked, and he felt a tight cord dig into his wrists, binding them.

  "Okay, turn on the flashlight," the man said, obviously talking to someone else in the room.

  He heard a soft padding sound. A light must have gone on, because Hoodwink was led forward. He stubbed his toe on something hard, and yelped softly. He bit down on the pain, not wanting to alert any robots that might be passing outside the building.

  "Easy, big guy," the man said.

  Hoodwink was led down some stairs—he stumbled on one of the steps, but the man caught him. The flights seemed to double-back on themselves, and when he reached the bottom he walked for several more moments. The vague stench of sewage reached his nostrils.

  He was halted, and his binds were abruptly removed.

  "Don't remove the blindfold," the man said. "Here, climb."

  The man helped him to a ladder that led down through a hole in the ground. Hoodwink descended. He knew he was in a tunnel because of the way sound behaved around him, his breath and the clang of his boots on the rungs echoing ever so slightly. Also, he merely had to flare his elbows to contact the tight concrete confines.

  As he descended, the stench of sewage grew to an all out assault on the nostrils. Even through the fabric of his balaclava it was nauseating. The sound of dripping liquid echoed from below.

  When he reached the bottom his binds were reapplied and he was led forward once more.

  "Where are you taking me?" Hoodwink asked quietly.

  No answer.

  "Bree-anne, are you still there?" Hoodwink asked, using the codename he had agreed upon beforehand.

  "I'm here," Sarella said from somewhere behind him.

  Finally he was unbound and led up another ladder. At the top, his hands were retied and he was guided forward. Thankfully the sewage smell quickly faded behind him.

  He walked for several minutes through what he thought was some kind of underground pedway system. Eventually he climbed several flights of stairs, walked through a carpeted corridor, heard a door open beside him, and then stepped beyond its threshold.

  The door closed behind him and the blindfold was removed.

  Jeremy peered past the edge of the stairwell. He hadn't seen which door the party had entered: he was too worried about being spotted.

  Not that it mattered. He would get them when they emerged.

  He rubbed his weary eyes. The tracking bot had alerted him when Hoodwink and his girlfriend took the fire escape, and Jeremy had hurried after them. He had a combat robot quietly break through the hidden door in the alley wall, and when his prey had entered the sewers, he had forced himself to pursue. It wasn't any worse than the sewage his fish body lived in, after all.

  He had been watching Hoodwink for the past few weeks. When he had discovered that his hated enemy had engaged in a relationship with a human female, presumably another surrogate, he had decided to forgo killing him immediately. Instead he wanted Hoodwink to grow attached to the woman. He wanted him to feel the pain of loss when Jeremy terminated her existence, and then he would wrench Hoodwink back into his Satori body.

  As he stared at the many hallway doors, he decided he would do the deed that very night. It was time to enact his vengeance.

  "Shell," he said into his aReal. "Dispatch twenty combat robots to my location."

  Yes, great Javiol, the Shell overlaid onto his vision.

  Jeremy smiled wildly.

  22

  Hoodwink found himself in an apartment living room of some kind. Four men stood before him. All of them wore latex masks with different faces. The first mask depicted a white human skull set against a black backdrop. The second a maniacally grinning human visage. The third was a ghostly white face within a black hood. The fourth a featureless bright blue fabric with thick red goggles overlaying the wearer's eyes. Each man carried a plasma rifle strapped over one shoulder.

  Sarella stood beside him. He noticed she no longer wore her balaclava. Her hands were bound behind her back, like his own.

  Skull-Mask stepped forward and removed Hoodwink's balaclava.

  Hoodwink stared at them, waiting for someone to begin the conversation. No one did.

  "Are you the resistance?" he asked.

  No answer came from those lifeless faces. Not for a long moment.

  Then Skull spoke. "There is no organized resistance. There hasn't been in decades. We've lost our will to fight. We eke out our days in servitude, ordinary men living in an oppressed world, waiting for the Satori to take our bodies and use us as hosts at their leisure, seeking, dreaming, of one day finding freedom."

  Hoodwink thought they were lying. Of course there was a resistance. And they were part of it. They simply didn't trust him enough to reveal that fact, not yet.

  "I can give you the freedom of which you speak," Hoodwink told them.

  "Can you now?" Skull said. "We know who you are. Or rather, what you are."

  "What do you mean?"

  He heard a chuckle from behind that mask. "We know you're a surrogate."

  Hoodwink involuntarily took a step back. He felt extremely vulnerable in that moment. "How?" They weren't wearing aReals, so he wasn't precisely sure how they had determined that.

  Skull stepped forward until his mask was only inches from Hoodwink's nose.

  "Why shouldn't we kill you?" the masked man asked. "You who are a symbol of our oppressors? You who would dare infiltrate our midst, claiming that you can set us free, when you are one of them. How do we know this isn't some kind of set up to eliminate the last vestiges of resistance in the human race?"

  "I— I—" Hoodwink stammered. "Blast, I don't have proof. I don't. All I have is my word."

  "That's not good enough for us," Skull said.

  "It is for me," Sarella said.

  She slid her hands forward. She had merely been holding them behind her back, pretending to be bound.

  Hoodwink was taken aback. "What is this?" He studied her uncertainly. "All this time... you were pretending?"

  "She's very good at pretending," Phantom-Mask said. "In fact, one of the best. She was a professional thespian, in another life."

  "You're not a surrogate?" Hoodwink asked her.

  She looked away, unable to meet his eye.

  Blue-Mask spoke up next. "No, she is not."

  "But she told me she had been to the Inside. No human from Earth could know of that place."

  Sarella answered him, though she still couldn't meet his gaze. "It was you who spoke of the Inside, first. What were your words? 'You've been to the Inside, haven't you?' I simply agreed, and told you I thought I was the only one."

  In his naivety and loneliness, Hoodwink, wanting so desperately to find someone like himself, had invented a whole fictional persona for her. She was human, not Satori. How could he have
been such a fool? But despite her damning admission, even then a part of him refused to believe, and he said: "But you know things about the Satori that no human being could ever know."

  "Think back on all the conversations we've ever had," Sarella said. "Everything you told me about Ganymede or the Satori, I simply agreed with and amplified. You fell for it."

  He rubbed his eyes. "But I'm the one who's supposed to hoodwink people."

  "I know. I lived up to your namesake."

  He thought of something. "But even my aReal had you cataloged as a surrogate."

  She smiled mischievously. "That was perhaps the Satori's biggest mistake: using human technology. They should have distributed something entirely new, something alien, not something we actual humans could hack."

  "So all of this has been a set up from the very beginning?" Hoodwink asked her.

  "When you showed up, I tried to get rid of you," Sarella said. "For your own good. But you kind of grew on me. So I figured, why not. I could befriend you, glean whatever information I could. I didn't mean to fall for you, though."

  "So wait a second, you spray-painted that graffiti? You created the Irotas user on the dark web forum?"

  "Not exactly," Sarella said. "Some of us occasionally scrawl graffiti in the different surviving cities of the world, if only to draw new members."

  "So you admit that there is a resistance!" Hoodwink said.

  "We admit nothing," Phantom returned.

  "I'm still not convinced we can trust him," Skull said. "He could easily be a plant."

  "I've lived with him for the past few weeks," Sarella said. "I've been his lover. I know him. I trust him."

  "The fact that you've been his lover only hurts your case, in my opinion," Skull told her. "It clouds your judgment of him. I vote that we kill him and hide the body so that the Shell can never get at his memories."