Halcyon System 3 Chapter 27

The wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round, all through the town.

The ride from Ten Mile Point to Albert Head was only like fifteen miles. It shouldn’t have taken over an hour. But it did. Every. Single. Day.

And every. Single. Day. Alice and I got on that bus and rode it across Victoria to go to school where she wanted, so she could play soccer on the team she wanted to be on. I hated her for it—not as much as I could have, because Sora ended up going to West End, too, but enough. It felt ridiculous. Unfair.

Like a waste of time.

Now that I look back on it, having figured out who—and what—Alice has always been, I’m starting to get it. She didn’t want to go to West End. She didn’t want to waste my time.

She needed it.

Just for a change of masks.

◄▼►

Location Unknown, Reality 3109 - Time Unknown

- - - - -

The tank’s still moving as Alice’s Smoke-Formed, red-eyed body plunges through the wall and rushes our attackers.

They open fire immediately. Gunfire rips across the hall, slamming into the mountain of destroyed bots I’m hiding behind, and I resist the urge to reality skipper my way over with a micromerge. I could probably beat them, but this is something Alice wants for some reason. Or something she needs.

For a long time, I’ve been focused on myself. On what I want and need, and how she’s a liar and a fake and somehow responsible for my wants and needs not being met. And that hasn’t been the truth. The truth is that, outside of Alice’s stay in my Mindscape, she’s been the only thing keeping me alive. She’s sacrificed her needs, her wants, for me. The Valedictorian and Soccer Star Alice masks weren’t just masks. They were the only time she got to be herself without being Mom Alice.

And now the infovampire is part of her, and it has needs and wants, too.

As she flies into a rage and the sounds of gunfire give way to screaming, I can only think about what that might mean for the future. Because this isn’t just a mask. It’s not something she can just get rid of when it’s convenient. It’s a part of who she is. And it probably means changes for her that she doesn’t want. For one thing, I can’t imagine any university would want someone who consumes knowledge—literally, at least—on campus. That’s just asking for trouble.

SHOCKS won’t want her running loose, either. Hell, SHOCKS won’t want me running loose. But there’s a chance that we’re both uncontainable. After all, they can’t stop me from leaving Reality Zero, and Alice can literally phase through any crack in any wall.

But that won’t mean they’ll stop hunting either of us. This alliance we have is one of convenience and a common enemy. SHOCKS is still a problem—they’re just one that’s more of a problem for the real enemy than for us.

[Claire, I think she’s done,] James says. [Can we please get moving?]

I nod and climb over the robot pile.

It’s a horror show out there. Alice didn’t just kill the soldiers. She ripped them to pieces. All of them. The alarm’s still blaring, and one armored figure’s still alive. They’re even mostly intact. Four arms, four legs, spider-like shape, but if it was a centaur, too. It’s trying to breathe through a shattered helmet, but blood comes out instead of air.

I shoot it, and it dies.

“That was easy,” Alice says. The hall’s completely devoid of anything resembling language or images. It’s just plain steel. Didn’t there used to be a warning symbol next to the hatch exit? Did she eat that, too? “Now what?”

[Now the two of you get ready to depart,] James says. [The jump to Li Mei’s reality is soon. If you’re not prepared, you’ll miss it.]

“But if we go out there too early, the tank will kill us,” I say.

[It’s leaving the battlefield. Now’s your only opportunity before it’s gone.]

He’s right. He’s always right. Stupid omniscient AI/human/System hybrid mind. But…

“Okay,” Alice says. She’s made up her mind, and with that, my mind’s also made up. She heads for the hatch up into the too-bright, too-loud world of war, and I follow her.

◄▼►

The next eight minutes are hell.

The stadium-sized supertank’s retreating—or at least going somewhere else to kill something else—but it won’t stop shelling the battlefield. The missile barrages are bad enough, but the two gigantic turrets have to be throwing nukes or something. Small ones, but even so, the waves of heat as it blasts whatever it’s blasting leave my skin tanned.

[Skill Learned: Radiation Resistance 1]

[Skill Learned: Radiation Resistance 2]

That keeps going, all the way up to six. And the whole time it does, Alice and I destroy tentacles, go toe to toe with the same Scythestalkers Strauss and I fought in the reality below Aberdeen Hospital—except there are dozens of them—and run from a pair of massive, tree-shaped anomalies that wade across the battlefield, a wave of spores rotting everything in front of them as they go.

Alice has a dozen injuries by the time we’re ready to leave. I’ve got more; it’s harder for me to fight in Smoke Form than it is for her. But as I level the Revolver, Bullet Time, and punch three holes in a Scythestalker’s chest, James says the words I’ve been waiting for. [Merge window open. Go, go, go!]

I turn, throw myself at Alice, and wrap my arms around her waist. Then, before she can react, we Mergewalk. The thinning doesn’t open, but I go through it anyway, and so does my sister.

And then…

There’s nothing.

Not blackness. Not the not-gray of the nothing outside of my Mindscape. There’s a presence, and it’s the presence of nothing.

I’ve been here before. So has Alice. Kind of. A part of her, a memory of a memory. We’re in Li Mei’s reality.

And somewhere, perhaps, is Li Mei.

She’s the monster I least want to find on her home turf. The supertank was terrifying, but it was just doing its job. The tree-things? They’re fighting because they fight. But they don’t have anything against me specifically, or against Alice. Li Mei? She hates me, and she’d probably give anything to get Alice’s body back.

Or to get out of here.

[The timer’s still running,] James says.

“Right. How long are we here for?” I ask.

[Unknown.]

“What do you mean, unknown?” Alice asks. “You said you have a timer running.”

[Yes, but you’re in nothing right now. By my timer, you’ve been in that reality for…forty-five minutes. How long does it feel to you?]

“Two minutes,” I say.

Alice pauses. “An hour and a half or so?”

[I’ll keep track of the time, then,] James says. [Settle in and wait.]

So we do.

It takes maybe forty-five seconds. Maybe an hour. I’m not sure. But either way, something happens in the end. It’s a cloud of smoke, moving through the nothingness all around us. And it’s huge. Absolutely massive. Hundreds of feet wide and tall. It fills the nothingness with its presence, and Alice steps back. “She’s in there,” she says. Then she pauses. “But she’s also…not.”

The Revolver’s in my hands a second later, and I’m already looking for the thinning that has to be at Li Mei’s core. I don’t know what shooting it here will do, but it has to do something, right?

“Stop.” The word slaps into me. It’s packed full of meaning—meaning and pain. Like it hurts Li Mei to say it. No. Not Li Mei. It sounds nothing like the infovampire. This voice is deeper, more broken, like it hasn’t been used in…ever. Like it hasn’t had anyone to talk to in…ever.

But even so, I stop. The sheer weight of the compulsion’s that strong. Alice stops, too. She’s midway to turning into a ball of smoke and attacking, a ghostly, translucent figure. But she stops.

“What…are…you?” The voice sounds hesitant. It’s struggling for words. But the question carries all the weight of Li Mei’s strongest commands, and even my massive resistance isn’t enough to stop it from crushing me.

“Humans,” Alice says.

“From…where?”

I don’t want to tell them. But the weight’s too much. It’s like that superhero move, where the main character can’t quite hold up the train, and it slowly pulls him off the bridge. I can’t remember which one, and maybe it wasn’t a train. Maybe it was a truck. Either way—

The weight redoubles. “Earth, Reality One.”

“Where the other one was sent?”

James is trying to say something. I can’t quite figure out what, though. I try to focus my hearing in on just my aug. It helps. A little.

Alice shrugs. She doesn’t know the answer. The weight settles entirely on me. I can feel the infovampire starting to pry its way into my mind, to pick it apart for whatever information it can. It’s starving. As hungry as Li Mei was, she never got even close to this.

[Analysis complete! Mergewalk, now!] James yells through my aug.

I don’t waste any time. I lunge toward Alice, grab her shoulders, and Mergewalk again.

Anywhere is better than here.

◄▼►

Location Unknown, Reality 389, Time Unknown

- - - - -

A maroon sun. The buzzing in my ear. The electrical tang on my tongue.

I’ve been here before. And I remember everything.

When Alice and I Mergewalked away from the infovampire, James didn’t tell us where we were going. It didn’t matter. Anywhere was better than there. At least, that’s what I told myself.

But that was a lie. There’s one place that’s worse—not because it’s a threat to Alice and me, but because it’s a memory. A Truth. One that’s shaped us both.

"Where are we?” Alice asks.

I could tell her. But she’s never—not once—believed me about this. And even though this reality—this truth—shaped us both, it’s going to hurt us both. So, instead, I take a deep breath. “I’ll tell you, but I need to tell you a story first. Can you listen, and trust me? I’ll only tell you the truth, and nothing else.”

The world around us is still. There aren’t thousands of squid-like, robotic monsters with glowing eyes waiting to kill us. It’s just red-tinted sand under a too-large, dark-red sun. It tastes like battery acid—I can’t get it off my tongue. I spit on the sand. So does Alice. Then she nods, and I start talking. As we walk across the sand.

“A long time ago, there was a little girl. She lived in an apartment with her big sister and her parents, and she loved that her dad was always around. She hated prunes, liked to draw, and loved when her big sister read stories to her. She was excited to start school, but really nervous about it, too. And her mother…her mother was the best person who ever lived.”

I spot something. It’s way out at the edge of my vision, hovering over the sand. I could probably shoot it from here, especially with a couple of reality skippers. But there’s no point—and no need. The thing, whatever it is, hasn’t seen us. It’s not moving toward us. As far as it’s concerned, we might as well not exist.

Alice, though…she stares at it for a long time, eyes changing colors. “Are you going to…?”

“No. We shouldn’t be here. The best thing we can do is keep our heads down and wait for James to figure out what’s next. James, what’s next?”

[You need to keep moving. I can get us back on track, but it’s going to be complex. Lots of Mergewalks, not much time to do them in, and they’re going to tough places. Bomb timer is ticking, right? Go this way.] An arrow appears on my aug, pointing a bit to the left.

“Thanks. So, this little girl, she had the best life she could imagine. Almost—if she could have banned prunes from existence, she would have. They made her tummy hurt, and then she had to go to the bathroom too much. But other than that, she enjoyed everything. Especially her mom. Until the night her mom died.”

Alice starts to laugh. I glare at her until she stops. Then she clears her throat. “You’re pretty convinced this is real, right?”

“Why wouldn’t it be? Director Smith told you as much when he was in our apartment, before I…”

“Killed him, right?”

I nod. “So, the night Mom died. She put us to bed. Dad hadn’t been doing that as much. I don’t know what he was up to, but—“

“Job applications, phone interviews, all sorts of things he had to do. Mom kept him focused on finding something, but she kept saying that ‘things were tough,’ and ‘don’t give up.’ Don’t ask how I know this,” Alice says. “I had a lot of time to put it all together, and a lot of anger to make me do it.”

“Okay. He was busy. Whatever.” I take a deep breath. “So, he didn’t tell us stories that night. It was all Mom. And then she hit the light, but the light didn’t turn off—not exactly. It just changed direction. Went yellow. Then red. And then she was there, in front of us. She didn’t die in a car accident. She died trying to keep us alive from the things that exist here, and that came over when our realities merged.”

Alice wants to say something. But she doesn’t. We walk for a while under the maroon sun. It’s shockingly cold here; even though the star’s huge compared to the Sun, it’s just a touch above freezing, and neither of us are dressed for this crap. It might be a desert, but that doesn’t mean it’s warm.

“And then?” she finally asks a minute later.

“And then what?” I wait. She doesn’t say anything, and I sigh. “And then she was dead. And I put the pills between my toes in my socks instead of taking them, and that’s how I realized they were all liars. But you and Dad were liars, too. And I hated you for that. Everything you ever did for me, and I hated you for lying. About everything. But it didn’t matter. You couldn’t see the truth. It wasn’t even a lie—not yours, at least. It was SHOCKS’s.

“Did Mom…?”

“Go to the hospital? They loaded her into an ambulance, but I doubt it. James said she didn’t go to SHOCKS Victoria, though. He doesn’t know where she ended up.”

“Somewhere like the black sector?”

“Maybe, but…” It’s so nice to be believed—especially about this—that for a second, I miss the sound.

The buzzing in my ears. It’s getting louder.

“Get ready,” I say.

“For?” Alice tilts her head. Then she nods. “I hear it, too.” She pulls her submachine gun, and I get the Revolver ready, and we wait.

Wait for flying robot death squids. Wait for a terror that’s deep in my gut.

Wait for revenge.

◄▼►

The first one erupts from the sand a few hundred feet away. It hovers in place for a second, then its glowing eye lands on me. It starts to hum louder. I pull the trigger three times, and three reality skippers punch into it from different angles.

Its light flickers and dies. A second later, it does, too. But even as it hits the ground, a dozen others appear, see us, and start flying or loping across the sand toward us.

There’s no cover. Not for them, and not for us. No walls or plants or Moms to hide behind.

Just a double handful of anomalies, my sister, and me.

The submachine gun rips out across the battlefield. Alice has it shouldered, and she’s firing what Strauss would probably think are sloppy bursts at the monsters. I hold fire. “James, plan?”

[Gotta go through them.]

I nod. Then I switch to the flame lance rounds. “Got it.”

I take aim, activate Bullet Time, and pull the trigger. The single shot that fires when time restarts is almost blinding. It’s a fiery meteor the size of my skull, with a trail of embers and ash that stretches all the way from the gun’s barrel to the monstrous squid-cyborg in front of me. It makes contact. For a split second, we’re connected by death.

Then it dies. Explosively.

There’s no time to watch it die, though. I tear my eyes away from the flying steel tentacles and shattered core just in time to tackle Alice out of the way of another one. And then they’re to us, covering the distance impossibly fast. All of them. I open fire from the ground, punching molten holes big enough for my fist that look like pinpricks compared to the first shot. They’re not enough by themselves. But two to a target—or Alice hosing one down with the submachine gun—is. We kill two. Three. Six.

But there are still more.

I push myself up off the sand, Smoke Form through an attacking squid as James yells in my ear, and reload the Revolver. Alice is still shooting. That’s one advantage of the submachine gun. She doesn’t have to reload as much, and it’s just as easy.

My ears are ringing. James’s noise-dampening helps. But it’s not enough. The humming’s almost overwhelming. My bones feel it, and my ears are almost overwhelmed. They pop, and sound rushes into the gap.

I keep shooting. This time, it’s reality skippers. Then it’s fire again. Then gravity.

And the squids keep dying. As I fire, I keep imagining that this one is the one that attacked Mom. That that one was there, in our apartment. I kill and I kill and I kill.

And eventually, there’s nothing left to kill.

It’s just Alice and me. And James, urging us to keep moving.

“Did you see them load her body?” Alice asks. She hardly seems to care about the fight, or about the half-dozen empty magazines in her ammo pouches. She’s completely out—one magazine, half-full, in reserve—but she’s not out of options. There’s a certain amount of desperation in her voice. I know; I’ve wished things were different for ten years. She wants Mom to be here, alive. I’ve wanted that for ten years, too.

She’ll have time to come to terms with it.

“I mean, you said they were liars. How do you know they weren’t lying to you?” she asks.

I don’t want to do this, but I have to. I shake my head at her. “There’ve only been a handful of documented cases of someone visiting another reality for more than a few minutes and surviving, not counting you, me, or a team with me. All of those were healthy people, and they only recovered one of those people. And I saw her. She…she couldn’t have survived.”

Alice’s face contorts for a second. Is she letting the infovampire out? I ready myself, just in case, but no—she’s not enraged. She’s heartbroken all over again. I’ve had ten years to come to terms with the truth. She’s had ten minutes to override a decade of lies.

It’s going to hurt. She doesn’t have a choice.

[Ladies, we are looking at several Mergewalks to get back on track. That’s the bad news. The good news is we won’t lose much time, and you’ve been to several of these realities already,] James interrupts.

I keep an eye on Alice as I respond. “What do you have for us?”

◄▼►

SHOCKS Black Sector, Location Unknown - June 23, 2043, 1:04 PM

- - - - -

Director Paul Ramirez, head of Control Zones Victoria/Vancouver Island and Olympia, couldn’t do anything but help evacuate.

The black sector was truly black. Whatever had happened when that girl walked in, he’d be willing to bet the external, rogue JAMES Unit was behind it. It had attacked everything, all at once, all across the black sector, and now he was working on evacuating his people as best he could.

It wasn’t easy when you were still hurting—and boy, was he hurting. Plus, every single person had to be checked over to make sure there wasn’t a single incriminating thing on them. If there was, the external JAMES Unit would catch on, and they couldn’t allow that. Ramirez had three of his best people checking everyone else over and reporting in as best they could. They just had to be perfect for a handful of hours—but they had to be perfect.

And something was bugging him.

“I’m going to check on the black sector’s JAMES Unit,” he said, pushing himself out of his seat with a grunt. Everything hurt. He’d only barely survived the trip to Provisional Reality ARC, and he shouldn’t be pushing this hard. But they didn’t have time for anyone to sit around. Any minute, the bombs would go off. They’d know pretty quickly after that whether the girls had completed their mission.

The best thing Paul could do was check on the black sector’s JAMES Unit. He hobbled across the chain-link-lined bridge and entered the suspended room. The keypad sat there, ready for him to use. He ignored it, panning the flashlight over all the readouts and sensors that covered the tank.

Every one of them was offline, except a single function labeled ‘life support.’

Paul almost laughed. Whatever was in there, it was either dead or had never been alive. It didn’t need life support. And if it had, the external JAMES Unit would have turned it off. It—and the System—weren’t going to suffer imposters, Paul was pretty sure about that.

He turned and hobbled back to rejoin the evacuation. They needed to get out of here, back to Reality Zero. And they had to do it before the bombs went off.

◄▼►