The Goddess Gambit

by B Michael Stevens

  Let him think he is the interrogator, while I have a look around in him.

  The room in the Ministry had disappeared. Only the throne-chair remained with the simulacrum seated upon it and Warbak standing before it. For the first second or two that they were in mind-space, there was nothing around them but white. Endless, without horizon, without border. No frame of reference. Then, as the probe began to extract data from the simulacrum, patches of the white began to blur themselves into distorted colors, growing, morphing and expanding until the borders of each patch touched the others, making their virtual world into an out-of-focus jigsaw puzzle. Then the blurs shifted and focused until they found themselves on a seaside bluff. To their right, landscaped tropical vegetation, populated by sunbathing iguanas and broken up by cyclopean buildings of block granite, trimmed with warm hardwood, peeled and shaped. To their left, the bluff itself, and a gently rolling turquoise sea beyond. The sun was rising over the nigh-infinite horizon of the ocean, and the air smelled spicy and sweet.

  "Well, well. If this doesn't just prove that you are who I say you are... Maya. What do we have here, your happy place?" Warbak mocked.

  The real Maya moved her attention from the familiar, ancient tropical setting around her, and from the psychic interrogation before her, to the one object that truly interested her: the anomalous, modern metal door that stood on its own, without any supporting walls or adjoining structure, on the edge of the seaside bluff, directly behind Accoba Warbak.

  There it is. She smiled with satisfaction. Her trap had worked. She tiptoed around the images of Warbak and herself, knowing rationally that her sadistic, would-be interrogator could not see her, yet unable to shake the jitters of being so close and not wanting to be spotted.

  She could hear the line of questioning continue as she side-stepped around Warbak and approached the back door to his mind-space, but paid it no attention. Her doppelganger would provide some fabricated answers to his questions, and do it reluctantly enough to convince him that he had earned that intel. She would appear to suffer enough to meet his cruel quota, and the whole process would take long enough to give her the time she needed to do some psychic probing of her own.

  Her hand reached out and came to rest on the metal door’s switch, for it had no handle, and in all ways, it represented the style of high-tech sliding doors found in the upper levels of the Ziggurat. She hesitated for a brief moment, not because she harbored reservations about the covert action she was about to undergo. No, she hesitated because she was surprised and stunned at just how much the imagery of her mind-space, the ancient and familiar surroundings, had stirred up long-forgotten memories and emotions deep inside her.

  She remembered what it was to feel like Wyntr. To be young, and scared. To not fully understand the shapings of the world at large and of massive political events conspiring to tear your little world apart. She remembered her mother and father, now long dead. She remembered what it was like to fall in love. To dare for more. To be pulled, lifted from your station and raised higher. She remembered what it felt like to be adored and worshiped for the first time. She remembered him.

  Soon. And then, shrugging off the cloak of memories and the emotions attached to them, she depressed the door's switch and stepped inside Accoba Warbak's subconscious.

  The shape and appearance of Warbak's mind-space did not surprise Maya one bit. It did, however, help reinforce her concern about this man possessing the power that he did. For his mind, like his regime, was dark, sterile, and overly structured. No room for flaws or even individuality. Like the fevered dream of an opium-addicted mathematician, Warbak's mind-space was a Kafkaesque structure, a miniature, perfectly sealed and symmetrical city-state. A prison.

  It was a Ziggurat.

  Appropriately, she started at the top level.

  The room was as bright and clean as a well-lit hospital. Immaculate. The walls, along with the floors and ceiling, seemed to generate their own light and were featureless. All six planes of this cube were glowing with the same cream white light to the point where it was extremely difficult to tell where one met the other, creating the illusion that one was in no-space, like the momentary white void that had existed before the seaside bluff mind-space of Maya had filled their minds’ eyes.

  Only the presence of four sinister-looking robots in each of the room's corners allowed Maya some spatial awareness.

  Once she felt grounded, she moved slowly about the room, approaching one of the motionless robot sentinels. Its visage was unfamiliar to her yet frightening in a primordial way. Vaguely skeletal, vaguely demonic. The robotic was designed to look menacing, even without the obvious weaponry, both ranged and melee varieties, which was practically dripping from its torso and each limb. She cautiously reached her hand out to touch it and as her fingers made contact with the cold metal of the killing machine, a word, a name, blossomed into her mind like a concussion grenade.

  Spartan.

  She understood that this was a representation of one of Warbak's many secrets—a private army of loyal killing machines.

  Somehow, instinctively, she sensed a change in the white room. She turned away from the Spartan robot and beheld an open space in the floor, with a stairwell leading down it.

  Nodding, now fully understanding how this mind-space worked, she approached and then descended the stairs.

  Reaching the bottom, she found herself on an exponentially bigger lower level of the micro-Zigg. At first, she believed that this layer of Warbak's subconscious was set outdoors, but then quickly ascertained that it was an indoor garden, made to look like a forest, but framed by tall acrylic glass walls and a metal ceiling.

  Even without the walls and ceiling, she would have been able to tell that this place, although awash in vegetation, was anything but natural. The layout of the place was more garden than forest. Too orderly, too structured. Natural-looking, yet man-made. Despite whatever intentions the architect or gardener may have had going into it, the ultimate result was entirely unconvincing, like bad ikebana.

  She strolled through the garden with all the situational awareness of a scouting soldier, looking for more secrets and perhaps the way down to the next level.

  Frustration crept into her thoughts. Maya could hear the beat of time being drummed out as she wandered fruitlessly through this bizarre man-made forest. She knew it wouldn't be long before Warbak cracked the simulacrum and broke contact. She needed to be out of his space and back into hers before that happened, or there would be repercussions. Frightening repercussions. At best, Warbak would realize that he had been duped and start over; maybe punish her, painfully. At worst, she would remain here, trapped inside this lunatic megalomaniac’s mind for all time, leaving her body back in meat-space a vegetable.

  Just as frustration was threatening turn into full-blown panic, she heard a peculiar noise.

  It sounded like a human, moaning. Yes. Perhaps in pain or sorrow. She held herself as still as the trees that surrounded her and listened hard, concentrating, trying to zero in on the source of the sound. She heard it again, and again, each non-verbal exclamation preceded by a whipping sound. Her mind darkened slightly as if a thin cloud had passed in front of the sun of her thoughts for a moment. She didn't know what to expect from Warbak's mind, but she suspected it wasn't cheerful or happy.

  Despite her reservations about investigating whatever sickness lay about this man's mind, she knew it was her only lead, and time was running out.

  She followed the sounds of the cries until she came to the edge of a copse of evergreens, with a small clearing beyond. There she spied a small pond, with a pagoda, slightly raised on a mossy knoll, overlooking it.

  Inside the pagoda knelt another version of Accoba Warbak. His back was bare, bleeding, and turned towards her.

  What in the name of...? Maya began to wonder and then flinched when the kneeling image of Warbak flicked a large bundle of what looked to be branches—evergreen branches, presumably taken from the trees in this garden�
��wrapped in barbed wire, over his shoulder and across his own back. She heard the telltale whipping sound, followed by the moan of ecstatic pain.

  Maya's upper lip curled subconsciously in disgust and just as Warbak went to self-flagellate himself once more, she noticed the stairwell leading down, only a few feet past the pagoda.

  Should I go deeper down this sewage drain of a rabbit hole? she wondered to herself and then closed her eyes, reaching back to touch the pseudo-mind of her simulacrum. Warbak was questioning her as to the exact nature of her Strange-shaping powers; the how, not the why. That would come later. Which meant there was more time.

  Good. Keep digging. She severed the tether to her doppelganger just as it was feeding Warbak a line about the finger gestures in her dance on stage being the key elements in her shaping ability.

  Making haste, she rushed from the cover of the tree line and made her way across the open, following the edge of the pond, circumnavigating the pagoda of self-harm and heading straight to the stairwell.

  The next level down was as different from the last as the first was to it. Gone was the bright light of the artificial sun, gone were the trees and vegetation. The tranquil—if slightly creepy in an artificial way—Zen garden was now replaced with a dank, dimly lit series of intersecting hallways that ran through cold iron rooms. It reminded Maya instantly of the actual prison level that she had spent the last couple days in with Wyntr. Unlike the real version, however, this one was smaller, more condensed. Squatter, thicker somehow. There was no central courtyard which level after level of cells ringed and towered over. This place had a very subterranean feel to it as if someone had constructed a bomb-proof, maximum-security prison in the sewers of an ancient Earth-Before-The-Storm city.

  Puddles of stagnant water dotted the rusty metal floors, and sweaty condensation coated the walls, which seemed to be nothing more than large door after large door. The prison cells were stacked deep and tight. The ceiling was low and several pre-Storm-style filament light bulbs dangled from a cord every couple of yards along its length. Maybe a third of them worked, spilling their amber light in strange, random spots and filling the catacomb with all sorts of deranged shadows.

  Creeped out but determined, Maya pushed onward. A sense of urgency born from the nagging stopwatch in the back of her conscious tugged at her. Hurrying now, she made her way down the first hallway and into the Byzantine prison, looking for more useful information and perhaps another stairwell, if one existed.

  As she walked past each cell, she became aware that in the center of each door, or panel, there was a small, envelope-sized glassless window. She knew that she needed to look inside each one, or at least as many as she could manage, otherwise what had been the point of coming here? The thought made her feel as if she had swallowed a balloon filled with stones.

  Bracing herself to behold whatever sick perversions might be hiding in Warbak's subconscious, she approached the window closest to her right.

  Not surprisingly, for mind-space followed the laws of dreams and not of physics, the inside of the cell that Maya peered into did not only not look like a cell, but was much larger on the inside than its dimensions could allow.

  Inside the cell, Maya spied a large room. It appeared to be a nursery. There were bright, primary-colored letters and numbers decorating the beige walls and rectangular glass terrariums containing all manner of insects and rodents along the windowsills on the far side of the room. The open floor plan of the room was half-filled with rows of small desks, with the other half remaining open, only broken up here and there with what looked like tumbling mats. Beyond the windows, Maya could spy this room’s outside: A round pebble-filled circular lot, fenced in by chain-link and populated by a Rube Goldberg contraption upon which climbed and played dozens of young children.

  This isn't a nursery, Maya thought, comparing it to the State-run facilities which had replaced the outdated family models in the Ziggurat. Nor did it resemble any nursery from her ancient days.

  This is a classroom!

  She had, once or twice, usually on a device known as a television—as common in every Earth-Before-The-Storm home as a fire pit had been in the village in which she’d grown up—seen images of what were called classrooms. She recalled now, quite clearly, that before the Storm, the various States and governments of Earth had flirted for several hundred years with a prototypical version of the State-run education system than Warbak and Home had mastered. This was that: A pre-Storm elementary classroom.

  Besides the neatly stacked buckets labeled with their contents—Arts & Crafts, Phys Ed, and others—along with the decorations and furniture, the room was nearly empty. The desk on the right, presumably belonging to the adult chaperon, the teacher, was unoccupied, as were the rows of tiny desks to the left. She could see through the room’s windows that the strong majority of the children that belonged in this room were outside playing. All but one, to be precise. Nodding, Maya recalled that back then, the State allowed children to go outside and play for a few minutes a day, in an unstructured, semi-autonomous way.

  Beta-version, she reminded herself.

  Now her attention drew itself to the one lone child that remained in the room.

  Why would this one remain here inside while all his friends are out there, playing and having fun? The maternal instinct in Maya was lighting the signal fires of primordial early-warning radar. Something wasn't right.

  She studied the morose-looking child for a moment, how he seemed a strange blend of alienated and yet somehow at peace with himself. Happy to be alone, if you will. He sat, haphazardly, on the padded floor of the open part of the room and was playing with two small, movable, man-shaped dolls and what looked to Maya like a model or toy replica of a military jet, or what the pre-Stormers called a 'spaceship.'

  At the sight and subsequent thought of spaceships, Maya flinched. A roiling boil of memory bubbles that she hadn't realized was there was threatening to overflow. No, that wasn't true. She’d known it was there. That pain was always there.

  She shook it off and redoubled her concentration on the child. What was this scene unfolding before her? What was its significance? She thought of how little time she had left and was just about to leave this cell for another when the boy stopped his sound effects and gestures with the spaceship he held in his hand.

  Three other children, bigger and taller than the first—or is it only because he is sitting?—entered the room. The fight-or-flight impulses racing through the sitting boy’s nervous system were so strong that Maya could almost smell them, and again her maternal protective instincts were thrust into maximum overdrive.

  "Look, Accoba is playing with his stupid little toys again," one of the new boys announced, taller than the rest and crowned with an unruly mop of white-blond hair.

  Oh my. Maya frowned to herself. That child... This must be a memory. She was bewildered and momentarily stunned that a monster like the Chairman could have started out so small and helpless.

  "You little freak," said another boy, wearing a backward, pre-Storm hat, known as a baseball cap, and, like a Sniffer to its Handler, arced wide in a semi-circle, flanking young Warbak in such a way that he couldn’t see both standing boys at the same time. Surrounded.

  "L-leave me alone," young Warbak squeaked.

  "Or else what? You gonna rat on us? Are your little space buddies gonna come and save you?" the lead boy asked, his question provoking a round of cruel laughter from the other two.

  "Ye-Yes," Accoba responded, his voice trembling.

  The kid is brave, I'll give him that, Maya thought as she continued to watch the scene develop to its predictable outcome.

  "Yeah, that's a good one, Warbaby. You expect us to believe that you talk to space people and they've made these promises to you?" The blond boy sneered while Baseball-Cap began to systematically crack his knuckles.

  "It doesn't matter if you believe it or not. Umbra is real, and when he comes, you're all going to die!"

  Maya w
as so shocked by what she heard that she didn't even blink when Baseball-Cap stepped in from behind Accoba and landed the first blow. Her eyes picked up the images of the three boys, now savagely beating the smaller kid, and delivered the images to her brain. Her ears did likewise with the sounds of Warbak's cries and the thud, thud, thud of the bullies' fists and feet as they rained down. But her brain didn't open those mailed envelopes of stimuli. It didn't even bother to stamp 'return to sender' on them and put them back in the mailbox. She was reeling and didn't even realize that she had stepped back from the cell’s small window until she felt the wall-door of the cell behind her come into contact with her back.

  She stood there in the hallway, not moving for longer than she should have, trying to puzzle it together. It was a memory. She had been in other people's mind-spaces enough to know one when she saw it. And yet, while memory was a fickle thing at best, something about the scene she had just witnessed rang true to her.

  How could the child, pre-Storm version of Warbak have known Umbra? Unless... By all the gods in the Celestial Court!

  Only the potency of the Strange she had shaped to lay this trap managed to pull her out of her shock by reminding her telepathically that Warbak was nearly done playing with the simulacrum and she needed to hurry and get out of here before she revealed herself or became trapped.

  I need more time! She cursed herself for lingering too long and not finding more clues to this newfound mystery, and then broke into a half-run, looking for the stairs back up to the garden forest. She needed to get out of this place fast.

  Alarmed and confused, Maya ran blindly forward, taking the turn at the end of the hall, and stopped when she saw a stairwell leading down instead of the one she’d expected, leading back up.

  Oh no!