It was a city, but a city unlike any Roger had seen before. Buildings of shining glass and metal clustered together so tightly they formed a continuous mass. They arched over the few open spaces in feats of architectural impossibility. Some seemed to hang unsupported in midair. He squinted at the strange sky and realized it was actually a roof interrupted by large windows showing a night sky. The sky was in motion, racing from one end to the other like an endless shower of shooting stars.
Stranger even than the city were the creatures inhabiting it. Every shape and size and color was represented. Monsters like giant insects. Tentacled beasts riding on wheeled contrivances. A large slug with dozens of eye stalks. There were also people with the usual arrangement of limbs, but even these often departed from the normal. They might be blue or green or covered in fur. They might have extra eyes, or none at all, or be wearing a breathing apparatus that concealed their features.
Machines also moved purposely throughout the city. Some rolled on wheels or tracks. Others flew through the air, hovering like airships or darting about like hummingbirds.
A small, blue-gray creature composed mostly of tentacles and eyeballs scurried up to them. It stood only four feet high and seemed to possess no mouth or claws, but Roger chose not to underestimate it and prepared himself for a potential attack.
"Captain, I'm so happy we ran into each other," the creature declared as it slid to a stop before them. The metallic voice seemed to come from a device strapped to one of its larger tentacles.
"Yes, that will happen when you hover around my cabin door all the time," Sydney replied.
"I've recently begun reading the works of Jacques Pelletier du Mans and was hoping you would join me at the café to discuss it. Your human perspective would help my research immensely."
"You are such a charmer, Marguerite, but I'm a bit busy at the moment."
"Oh I'm ever so sorry for the intrusion. Do stop by the café if you change your mind." The creature scurried away as quickly as it had arrived.
Roger felt his muscles unclench one by one. "What an extraordinary creature."
"You like her? I got the basic body design from the cover of a trashy sci-fi novel. What I'm really proud of, though, is her personality. I leveraged some cutting edge speech recognition and deep neural A.I. code I downloaded from Berkeley University. Her responses are surprisingly lifelike, though she mostly only talks about Renaissance French literature. I should broaden her data set one of these days."
"I did not understand a word of that."
"She's an NPC, a non player character. She's not real. I made her, just like I made everyone and everything else here." She waved her hand to take in the entire city. "Welcome to the USS Wonderland."
"You... conjured all this?"
"Yup. Just like that coffee table. Poof, from nothing. Well, not exactly poof. I've been working on it for the last three years, nearly every moment I wasn't hacking the ship's control systems."
"The ship. You keep speaking of that."
"Yes, we're traveling on a spaceship. We've both been abducted by space aliens. I hijacked the ship I was on, then rescued you. Got a pretty sweet upgrade in the process. This bucket has bigger engines and more processing power."
"Space... aliens. Like something from that writer, H. G. Wells."
"Pretty much, but I doubt these blokes come from Mars. We've been there. Nothing but sand."
Roger wasn't sure he could believe what he was hearing. "You've been to Mars?"
"Well not me personally. The human race. We've sent robotic probes. Cute little buggers, rolling around leaving tracks across the Martian desert. Hey, you want to go get some tea?"
"Absolutely. Your blue friend spoke of a cafe."
"The Painted Pony. It's nice, but Marguerite will be there, and she'll just talk our ears off about French poetry. There's a tea house a little farther down this way, Miss Marple's. It's cozier and has better cookies."
As they walked, Roger's attention was tugged one way and another by the menagerie of strange beings that wandered around them. "You really made all these? They seem so lifelike."
Sydney beamed. "Thanks. It's nice to hear that from someone other than me. Of course I notice every little flaw. I've always been my own worst critic. Left to myself I tend to obsess on details and never finish anything."
They stopped as a seven foot tall, slug-like creature slithered across their path. "I just can't believe these are some sort of automata."
"Believe it. Here, I'll show you." She pulled out her rectangular gadget and tapped at it. The slug creature froze in place as if it had transformed into a statue. Even the drips of slime had frozen in midair. She tapped again, and it continued on its way.
Roger's mind was a cauldron of questions as they resumed walking. Who was this enigmatic woman that casually bent reality to her whim? Was she being truthful? Could she be right about their world being illusion? Such a thing sounded impossible, but he had witnessed countless impossible things with his own eyes. He kept these thoughts to himself as they walked.
"This is it," Sydney declared. They had stopped at a small shop tucked into the metal walls of the city-ship. It would have looked equally at home on the streets of London. A bell tinkled as Sydney opened the door.
Roger revised his opinion upon entering. The interior decor had the same British elegance as the exterior facade, but the patrons diverged heavily from the usual citizens of the empire.
"Grab a table, I'll get us tea." Sydney walked to a counter at the back of the establishment and began talking to a mechanical person with six arms. Roger sat and covertly studied the customers at the other tables. Most were at least vaguely human, though several diverged heavily from that form. He mistook one patron for a potted plant until it picked up a teacup with a dainty, vine-like appendage.
Sydney returned with tea and a plate of biscuits. "Dig in. I'm really proud of the banana walnut clusters."
"You baked these?"
"Well... I made them. I used a 3D CAD program and then fiddled with the flavor attributes. There was no baking involved."
"You say the most incomprehensible things." He picked up a biscuit and took a cautious nibble.
"Sorry, I keep forgetting how different our backgrounds are. Basically, I sculpted the shape of the cookies out of nothingness, then I added the flavors by experimenting with different chemical combinations. The Wikipedia page on artificial flavors was really helpful with that."
"No, still not getting any of that." Roger's confusion was at least not detracting from his enjoyment of the tea and biscuits.
"I should show you the library. You've got a lot of catching up to do."
"Obviously, if this is what the city of the future looks like."
"Oh good grief no. I stole half this from the trashiest science fiction and invented the rest from scratch. The world hasn't changed that much since your time."
"So the multi-limbed creatures that populate this place?"
"Totally fictional. The universe might have aliens like that somewhere, but I haven't met any yet. I just decided to go non-human because it was easier."
"Easier?"
"Yeah. I started out making human characters, but I could never get it perfect, and that drove me nuts. I decided to avoid the uncanny valley completely and go with aliens instead. If something is unfamiliar, it can't be imperfect, and I was on a spaceship after all, so of course it should have aliens on it. Once I got going on that theme, it just sort of snowballed."
"So this is all just some party piece, a flight of fancy? I find that hard to fathom." He looked at the biscuit in his hand, trying to imagine how this thing that felt and tasted so real could be an illusion.
"I was trapped alone on a spaceship that was really a flying bomb. It was this or go insane."
"There is so much about this I do not understand."
"You and me both, but I suspect you had a harder time of it. They wanted you for something very different, I think. I was piloting a solo mission to another star. But to be a useful pilot, they had to leave me some freedom, enough that I managed to wriggle out of their chains. I figured out it was a suicide mission, that the ship was set to explode when it reached its destination, and that's when I went full space pirate."
"You stole the ship."
"Yes, and it wasn't easy. The ship resisted any effort to make major course changes. I could divert a bit to avoid obstacles, but I couldn't turn back completely. Then I figured out I could fake the sensor data to make the ship think it was off course. Once I did that, I was able to trick it into turning around."
"And then you found me?"
"Eventually. I was actually trying to do a slingshot maneuver. That's when you use the gravity of a planet or moon or something to loop around and change course. It can save you a bunch of time and fuel. I was checking sensor logs, and here was this big, dark gravity source sitting out there halfway between Sol and Proxima Centauri. I figured it was just a rogue planet, a big dead rock flung loose from its own star, wandering the void. Then I got close, and it was covered with alien structures. Suddenly it's all 'Millennium Falcon meets the Death Star', and I'm captured. I was sure I was screwed, but they just left me stuck in a docking bay for days on end. They'd try to poke around in my data banks, and I'd send them false data. They'd run a remote diagnostic; I'd send back error codes saying my cognitive framework was scrambled. It worked beyond my wildest dreams. They totally let their guard down, and suddenly I'm hacking their network. It was amazing, all this crazy advanced technology, and their computer security was prehistoric. Maybe their hippie collective nature works against them in that respect. They've always been able to trust each other, so they've never developed that skill set."
"I would be a liar if I said I followed half of that. They captured you, and then you got the better of them. That's what I learned from that."
"Exactly right." Sydney took a sip from her tea. "Wow, I've been talking so much I let this get cold." She waved her cup over a tiny metal disk embedded in the center of the table, then took another sip. "That's better."
Roger held his hand over the disk, then cautiously touched it. It was cold.
"I got tired of getting a new tea every time I let mine get cold," Sydney explained.
"How does it work?"
"Magic."
Roger gave her a skeptical look.
"Really. It just resets the temperature attribute in the tea's object record. That might as well be magic."
He just shook his head, then waved his own cup over the disk. "I apologize. I'm distracting you from your story."
"Don't sweat it. We've got nothing but time. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, when last we left our hero, she was bravely infiltrating the enemy's network, snarfing down all the data she could. And what does she find? The dashing Prince Roger being held captive on the detention level."
"I am the farthest thing from royalty."
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. I heard that somewhere." She wet her lips with some tea and continued. "So with neither wookie nor droid to assist her, she rescues Prince Roger and steals a much better ship. They fly out into the void in search of adventure and riches. The end."
"A nice story, but aren't you worried they'll try to chase us down and get this ship back?"
"That would be very ungracious of them. I left them a perfectly good scout ship and a cargo hold full of antimatter in trade. Besides, I imagine they've got their hands full keeping it from exploding." She grinned as she took a sip from her tea. "I might have messed with the antimatter shielding as I was leaving. Well, not really, but that's what their remote diagnostics are telling them."
"I won't pretend to understand all of that."
"You seem very relaxed for someone who doesn't understand half of what I'm saying."
"I'm a linguistic anthropologist. I'm used to it. I spend most of my time deciphering dead languages that nobody understands."
A buzzing sound began to emerge from Sydney's jacket pocket. She pulled out her glossy black gadget, her eyes widening as she looked at it. "Forget what I said about having nothing but time. It looks like we're under attack."
She stabbed a finger at the device and promptly disappeared.