KAL SWIPED through the pictures, trying to reconcile the disparity between them and the world around him. They depicted a technologically advanced cityscape teeming with people, but he stood instead in a forest. Oaks and pines, aspens and birches, all with typical bark and green leaves, loomed over grasses and prairie underbrush. There were no flame-spitting fungi or crystalline ferns. No, this forest could have easily passed as one of the parks he’d visited in his youth on Earth.
He programmed a nanite to enter the metaxia and return to realm #1384. He waited, and his pad registered the nanite’s return. Kal shook his head. He was indeed standing on the world that the pictures had come from. But there was no city, no lake, and no people. Just the forest.
Kal latched his pad onto his white suit pants and furrowed his brow. In that moment, he realized just how much he hated the clothes he’d adopted for this world. They felt too stiff and formal, not at all appropriate for an Illinois summer. He wondered why he should even bother with them now. He pulled up the sartorial program and, a few button presses later, his clothing shimmered and reverted to the T-shirt and shorts he was used to wearing on Felis. Having the air against his skin felt much better.
He felt a pin prick against his neck. Thinking it was a mosquito, he rubbed it off.
Wait a minute. Mosquitos shouldn’t be able to penetrate the auto-defense nanites.
A wooden arrow with a metal tip and bright red feathers clattered to the ground.
Kal grabbed up his pad and reached instinctively for the auto-defense control panel. He maximized its interface and jacked the sensitivity all the way up to its highest setting. He heard the whiz of another arrow and, though he felt nothing, glanced a splintered tangle of wood as it fell to the ground.
“Hello?” Kal tried.
Two more arrows struck him and fell to the ground as crumpled masses.
“I’m willing to talk,” he called out.
A ferocious face leapt out of the underbrush at him wielding an axe. She lunged forward and slammed it into his chest. Instead of slicing into him, the weapon writhed out her hands, distorted and twisting, then fell to the ground as frayed, wooden shreds and metallic dust.
The young woman jumped away from Kal, her facial features twisted up in panic. He eyed her suspiciously, perplexed at her behavior.
She was about his age. Her hair was a tangled mess, her clothes hardly anything more than tattered, gray rags. Her eyes darted at him, then across the prairie brush, then up into the trees.
“Kill me!” she shrieked.
Kal covered his ears. When it seemed she would not scream again, he tentatively pulled his hands away from his head. “Why would I kill you?”
“Why?” she asked, as if the question were absurd. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Kal. What’s yo—”
“Rakan!” She leapt up onto the nearest tree branch, not pausing before scurrying further upward, away from Kal. She had started mumbling something to herself repeatedly, but Kal couldn’t hear what it was before she was out of earshot. She scaled the tree with incredible speed and ferocity. Kal spotted a bow and full quiver attached to her back as she receded into the foliage.
Kal sighed and turned his attention back to his pad. Maybe he’d glossed over some crucial piece of information his nanites had gathered about this world’s supposed culture. He doubted he’d find out anything more talking to Rakan.
That city he’d seen had exhibited all the indicators of an advanced and stable culture, not violently insane savages.
Rakan jumped down beside him and attempted to grab his pad. The nanites pushed her hand gently away from the device. Rakan’s face twisted up at the sight of her own hand being propelled backward against her will.
Kal grinned. He’d never seen the auto-defense system’s highest setting before. Just as expected, the nanites were repelling living things, while their crushing and grinding force was reserved for inanimate objects.
“What is that thing?” Rakan asked.
“It’s called a computer pad,” Kal said, still reading Spele’s cultural report.
“You’re going to have to kill me, you know.”
“I don’t have to kill anyone. And I certainly hope that you don’t think you have to either.”
“Oh, I have to kill.” Rakan nodded. “I have to kill them all.”
Kal turned off his pad’s display. “All of who?”
“The other players.”
“What other players?”
“Of the game!”
“What game?”
Rakan laughed loudly – too loudly, like a small child. When Kal didn’t respond, she stopped and her face tensed up.
“The adults make us play,” she said. “They put us in here. They hide weapons, then we use them to kill each other until there’s only one of us left.”
Kal frowned, worried that she might actually be telling the truth. “Why on Ear— Why would any of the adults want to do that?”
“Entertainment.” Rakan pulled out her quiver.
“What?!” Kal gaped at her.
“That’s right.” She pulled at the quiver, bringing it in front of her, and began counting the remaining arrows. “They put us in here and make us kill each other with weapons, and then there’s what the birds see. Up there. In the trees. It’s what the birds see.”
Kal raised an eyebrow at her, and blinked a few times. “Sorry. Lost you. Horribly unjust and ruthless social system of adults oppressing children. I’m with you there. And then there’s what the birds see?”
Rakan nodded as though this should be perfectly comprehensible. She unhitched the empty axe sheath from her belt and discarded it nonchalantly.
Kal gulped.
“How about we team up?” Rakan said. “You can draw the others out, since weapons don’t hurt you. Hey, can that computer make it so that weapons won’t hurt me either? The killing would go so fast if we were both immune. What do you say?”
“Uh, no.” Kal wanted to retch just thinking about what she had proposed.
He eyed her with disdain, turned his attention away, and continued poking around his pad. Just then, a thought occurred to him. This was the only person he’d met here. Maybe there was some truth buried beneath the many layers of her sociopathy.
It was clear that the story she had told him about a game and adults watching children kill each other was utterly ludicrous. His computer’s cultural analysis programs were imprecise, but not that imprecise. A culture as horrifically degenerate as the one Rakan had described would have to be degenerate across a huge number of social vectors, vectors his programs should have reported, but hadn’t.
Where was the city he had seen? Were there doctors there? Did they have an advanced understanding of genetics? Which was right, Rakan or his computer?
Kal turned back to Rakan, who’d taken up counting her arrows again. “Actually, I think that we should work together. I’ll protect you from harm, but only if you promise not to hurt or kill anyone else.”
Rakan nodded vigorously in agreement, a manic grin plastered across her face.
“Good.” Kal pulled out his pad and made the necessary adjustments, putting Rakan under the protection of his nanites. “We’ll send a message to the adults that we’re in control.”
~
As Kal and Rakan trudged through the woods, he learned from her that fourteen other young adults of varying ages were left alive in the game. She also told him that a forcefield surrounded the woods, and that anyone who touched it would explode. She told him these things between bouts of needing to “see what the birds see.” On such occasions, she would rush up the branches of the nearest tree and descend again a minute or two later.
During one such excursion, Kal pondered the forcefield she had described and sent a contingent of his nanites out looking for it. Rakan came down from the tree and reported that she’d spotted a boy named Orra.
“Who is he?” Kal asked.
“One of the other players.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He’s got a mace. Weak though. Easy kill.”
“No, I mean, do you know anything about him? What’s he like as a person? Can we appeal to his sense of right and wrong, justice and morality?”
Silence. A blank stare.
Kal calmed his growing internal frustration and resolved to try again. “Does Orra hate the adults?”
“Dunno.” Her head twitched twice to the right.
Kal decided the irritation was mutual. At least they had something in common now. He walked a bit further, then turned to ask her another question and realized that she was no longer beside him. He felt hands on his shoulders pulling him down into the brush.
“There he is,” Rakan whispered, pointing through the thicket.
Orra, the boy in the distance, could not have been more than thirteen years old. He stumbled through the forest, holding a mace he could barely lift.
Kal stood up. “Over here!”
“What are you doing?” Rakan hissed.
Kal ignored her and walked out toward Orra. The boy spun around, hefting the weapon up over his head, and rushed Kal, the mace wobbling in his hands.
Kal sighed and shook his head.
Orra swung the spiked ball into Kal’s neck, and his auto-defense program crushed it like an eggshell.
“We just want to talk.”
Orra backed away, breathing heavily. His mouth opened and closed awkwardly, like he was trying to talk, but couldn’t.
“Do you understand me?” Kal asked. He took a step closer, his right hand extended.
Orra glared at him and staggered away, his mouth still opening and closing.
Kal looked him over. He wore the same tattered clothes as Rakan, had the same frizzled hair. His facial features even looked similar to hers, like he and Rakan could be siblings.
“Is your name even Orra?” Kal asked.
Orra’s neck exploded in red, gushing up a fountain of blood as his body toppled over. The red spray gurgled from his neck and mouth, forming a pool on the ground. Crimson dots lay splattered across the green grasses.
Kal blinked, gulped, and then turned and lurched into a tree, throwing up everything he’d eaten for both lunch and breakfast, maybe more.
“Rakan!” he managed to shout between heaves. “Rakan, what the hell was that? I thought we agreed—”
He heaved again at the thought of what she’d just done. Though ill, he held his pad tightly and programmed away the nanite defenses he’d set on Rakan between gasps and bouts of retching. “I thought we agreed…”
She popped up from the bushes beside him. “We have to kill them. It’s the rules.”
“To hell with the damned rules!”
“There are only seventeen left, anyway. With your help, we’ll be through all of them soon enough.”
“Wait, what? I thought you said there were fourteen…” Kal trailed off. Rakan was already on her way up a tree, mumbling to herself about what the birds see.
Fine, Kal thought, if you won’t help me get the adults’ attention, I’ll get it myself.
~
Later that day, the nanites Kal had sent out to the explosive forcefield returned from their expedition. To his disappointment, he discovered that they’d never reached their target. In fact, they hadn’t even reached the forest’s perimeter. They’d traveled fifty kilometers then made a complete circle around his current location before giving up and returning. Their data showed no signs of any forcefield, any city, or even any other people, just the endless tracts of deciduous forest. Kal puzzled over this, and wondered if Rakan had been lying about the forcefield’s existence, or if she believed some lie she’d been told.
The sky glowed orange and red through the trees, the daylight waning.
“Where have you been sleeping?” Kal asked Rakan.
“On a tree branch.” She nodded vigorously. “It’s so I can see—”
“—what the birds see,” Kal finished in unison with her, sighing deeply.
At that, realization seemed to strike Rakan, like the birds were something she’d long ago forgotten and only just now remembered. She rushed away, scaling the nearest tree.
That mantra of hers had shifted from annoying to tedious a few hours ago. At this moment, Kal was half-considering sealing her mouth shut with nanites. Every damn thing the two of them talked about seemed to come around to ‘the birds and what they see,’ regardless of their topic of conversation.
Kal hitched his pad to his jeans and began gathering up fallen twigs and branches. He piled them up, encircling the makeshift fireplace with stones.
Rakan jumped to the ground just as Kal pushed the button on his pad that ignited the pile of wood.
“Fire?” Rakan gazed at Kal. “No, no, no. The others will see the smoke and come attack us.”
“I’ll be fine.” Kal flicked a finger into his left shoulder, his auto-defense nanites shimmering in mild exertion.
“Need a tree farther away…” Rakan mumbled, letting her gaze sweep across the forest.
“How do you sleep on a tree branch without falling off?” Kal asked.
Rakan unhitched two long, ragged, leather straps from her waist that Kal had thought were belts and presented them. “I strap myself in.”
Kal pondered that a moment, wondering how it was even possible. Even “strapped in,” shouldn’t she slide off the branch the moment she went unconscious? Kal watched her refasten the straps and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble asking.
“Will you at least stay at the fire long enough to eat something for dinner?” Kal gestured to the growing blaze. “I can make anything you want.”
She perked up. “Anything?”
“Sure. If you can describe it, I can make it.”
“Hasparjat roll,” she said, grinning. Rakan’s excitement had lost its manic edge for the first time since Kal had met her.
“What are the ingredients?”
“Bread, torquin, potatoes, lettuce, menall, rezzik sauce—”
“Hold on, you’re going to have to explain some of those in a little more detail.”
And she went on, telling Kal all about the ingredients and how to combine them, not once mentioning birds the entire time. Kal programmed the nanites to construct the roll she’d described, and it materialized before them.
Rakan’s eyes went wide in amazement. He handed it to her, praying she would like the taste. He’d substituted a few Earth ingredients for those of Rakan’s that were alien.
She took a bite and her eyes lit up. She began gobbling it down.
“Do you know any of the adults who put you in here?”
Rakan nodded.
“Do the other players know the adults too?”
Another affirmative.
“Are all of the other players from the same city?”
She shook her head.
“Is there a city near here?”
Nod.
“Is this it?” Kal held up the holodisplay on his pad. Brilliant towers of glass and metal refracted the light of day, casting rainbow shards of light over the populace. People moved through the streets, and a modern, multi-level elevated train system wound through the buildings.
Rakan nodded again, just as she stuffed the last of the roll into her mouth.
“Tell me what you know about the adults,” Kal said.
Rakan’s face seemed to seize up, instantly forgetting the delicious roll she had just eaten. Her mouth hung open momentarily, no sound coming out.
“Rakan?”
“The birds… the man with the birds… I thought he was going to take care of everything, but…”
“But what?”
Rakan gazed off into the distance.
“What the birds see!” She jumped up. “Your fire’s going to draw the others here. And I have to go see what the birds see.”
Kal put his head in his hand, and watched Rakan through his fingers as she ran to the tree she’d picked earlier and shimmied up its branches.
Kal slumped against the trunk of his tree and locked down his pad. He tended to his fire, drifting slowly into an uneasy sleep.
~
Kal woke to Rakan whispering into his ear. He groped about for his pad. Finding it safe and sound, he clasped it tightly.
“He’s close by,” Rakan said. “You distract him, and I’ll loop around and shoot him. Just like before, okay?”
Kal opened his eyes and yawned. She was gone before he could protest. He glanced around and spotted a boy darting between trees in the distance. He was older than Orra, closer to Kal and Rakan’s age, but looked oddly similar to Orra, like they could have been brothers. He held a bow very much like Rakan’s.
Kal stood up next to the smoking fire pit and stretched his arms out. He yawned widely, and then turned on the pad. He opened up the programming interface and started typing. He just had to string together a few programs he’d already written, but with some new targets.
An arrow whizzed through the interface, disrupting the projection only momentarily before crumpling and falling to the ground.
He sighed deeply and focused on finishing his program. More arrows flew into him and fell to the ground as shriveled masses.
“What’s your name?” Kal called out.
“His name is Zell!” Rakan shouted from somewhere above and behind them both.
Both Kal and Zell turned to Rakan, who wasted no time loosing an arrow directly at Zell’s throat. It hit him full in the neck, but instead of piercing him, his neck shimmered. The arrow bounced harmlessly off him and shriveled into nothing as it fell to the ground.
Zell stumbled backward, not expecting the protection. He gazed at his hands a few moments.
An enraged bellow erupted from a nearby tree, and Rakan fired another futile arrow, just as Zell drew one of his own. The two loosed arrow after arrow onto one another, but Kal had applied protection to them both.
Kal hit a button on his pad. A platform with two swords on top of it materialized into existence a few meters in front of him.
“Come and get them,” Kal shouted.
Zell and Rakan both ran for the swords. Zell, being closer, grabbed his up first, and hacked uselessly away at Rakan as she ran up to grab hers.
Kal watched as the two of them thrust the enormous, metal blades at each other over and over, nanite interference deflecting each attack. An odd mix of emotions filled him. He was proud of his programming work. He’d gotten the defenses on Rakan and Zell to protect them from harm, but also not shred the swords. Still, no one in the forest seemed capable of considering any solution to their problems other than violent attack. And that fact filled him with despondence.
Both fighters paused, their faces turning to Kal and twisting up in rage at the unwanted protection Kal had bestowed.
Kal rolled his eyes, and jabbed another button on his pad. Rakan and Zell froze in place.
“I’m putting an end to this!” Kal shouted out into the forest. “Talk to me if you’re there, if you’re watching this. I can take this all away from you. No more killing wherever I go in the game! How would you like that?”
He paused and stared up into the trees, just listening. A few birds chirped.
Kal turned to see Rakan and Zell, their expressions locked in mutual hatred. He crossed his arms and tapped his foot. He looked at his pad and sighed.
Then Zell moved.
It was barely perceptible at first: a slight twitch of his fingers, then a slight nudge from his arm. Zell gained momentum and more control with every passing second. Before long he was hacking away at Rakan again, although she remained immobile and protected.
Kal gawked, and fumbled with his pad, before regaining his composure, his hands darting over his interface in a quest for answers.
That’s not possible. It’s simply not possible!
The immobilization field that had surrounded Zell was intact. At least, it was intact in the spot Zell had stood moments before. Zell’s body had somehow passed through it. He’d defied the nanites, and by proxy, every law governing physical matter that Kal understood.
Kal glared and instructed the nanites to dissolve both swords. Zell lost his balance as the weight of his weapon dissipated, falling away to dust as he tried to swing it. He stumbled toward the still-immobile Rakan, then shot Kal an angry glare before running off into the woods.
Kal hesitated, staring at Rakan. He tapped his foot on the ground and twisted up his lips. He stared at her, grasping desperately at straws to find some shard of ethics that would allow him to leave her in the immobilization field.
His only moral choice clear, he pressed a button on the pad interface and released her.
Rakan immediately ran for him, her eyes filled with the fiercest of rages, and slammed her hands into his chest. The auto-defense nanites shimmered. Kal didn’t budge or feel it in the least, but she’d clearly intended to knock him over.
“Damn you!” she shrieked.
“Damn me? You were ready to kill that boy! What did he ever do to you?”
“For the last time, it’s the rules of the game! The only way to survive is to kill everyone else!”
“Rakan, listen! Violence isn’t the answer to your problems, and it never will be. No one can make you kill. No one. The society you come from, people must have some concept of morality and ethics, right? Somewhere in your culture someone must have suggested that violence is wrong under any circumstances, right?”
Rakan just stood, her fists clenched, breathing heavily, her eyes ablaze. She didn’t make any attempt to answer his question.
“I see.” Kal shook his head. “You know what? Never mind. I give up. I’m leaving. Go kill all the people you want.”
He activated the pad and loaded the program to take him into the metaxia. Just as he reached to press the activation button, an arrow hit his shoulder. Not only did his nanites fail to crumple it, the arrow actually contacted him, and it did more than just sting. It went straight through his left shoulder. Shot from behind. The head of the arrow protruded a couple of centimeters, covered in his blood.
Kal yelled out in pain and heard his pad clatter to the ground He fell to his knees, gasping. He gazed momentarily at the arrow shaft, transfixed. He felt dizzy and nauseous, and decided to tear his eyes away from it.
Gasping for breath, he cast his gaze wildly about. A group of two girls and two boys, one of them Zell, had appeared and were attacking Rakan. Something felt wrong. He glanced at Zell, then at the two girls, then at the other boy. They were too similar. It was like they were all siblings. The boy who wasn’t Zell was a dead ringer for Orra. And the two girls looked too much like Rakan for it to be a coincidence.
Rakan broke from the attacking horde and shimmied up a tree. She wasted no time finding purchase, and began picking them off with her bow. One of the girls hurled daggers at her, but Rakan dodged them with ease. She also seemed to have some protection left, although, like Kal’s, its influence was diminishing. Still, the nanites gave her a huge advantage.
Rakan ran out of arrows and jumped down from the tree. She snatched up a dagger and hurled it into Zell’s chest.
“Focus,” Kal told himself. He smacked at his pad with his limp left hand. He even tried jamming the indentation on the pad with his right thumb, even though he knew that was useless. The security mechanism for the pad was simple—Kal’s left thumb and only his left thumb could turn it on, a security measure he promised himself that he would change.
He looked up at Rakan and her attackers in the distance. Zell was nowhere to be seen, probably lying in the grass somewhere with the dagger sticking out of his chest. One of the girls had disappeared too. The boy who looked like Orra and the other girl were still going at Rakan. The boy had a machete and the girl a spear.
There has to be some way this makes sense, Kal thought. His sight grazed the arrowhead sticking out of his shoulder, and he felt dizzy again. He fell into a nearby tree. Breathing heavily, he clutched the bark. His mind found purchase on the texture of the tree, and he opened his eyes, gazing up at it. Something about it…
It hit him all at once. This was the exact same tree he’d fallen against when he’d seen Orra killed, the tree he’d thrown up onto. But that tree must be kilometers away from here. They had definitely walked in a straight line from there to here, hadn’t they…?
Kal dug his fingernails deeper into the bark, daring it to be unreal. He ripped a hunk of it off and gazed over the grit on his hand, the dirt and sinuous strands of wood. He threw it on the ground, more frustrated than ever.
Whatever this place was, Kal was convinced that there was, in reality, no game at all. But where was that damned city? Where was the real Spele and how had he ended up here? Those answers were locked away, somewhere inside Rakan’s twisted mind, behind those fearful, wild eyes. He had to reach her.
Rakan had retrieved some of her arrows and shot the Orra-esque boy through the neck, just like she had his doppel. That left only the girl, who limped away from her, haggard, winded, and bleeding from multiple open wounds. Rakan scurried up a tree, and Kal knew it was too late. He watched Rakan shoot the girl in the head, knocking her down.
Rakan jumped back down from the tree and picked up the spear Zell had dropped. She took it to where the girl lay, and Kal gasped as he watched her jab the weapon violently into the grass again and again and again.
Kal felt woozy, unsure if it was loss of blood or the thought of what Rakan was doing to the poor girl whose name Kal had never even learned. His peripheral vision had faded, and he could only see a tunnel in front of him, a tunnel that contained Rakan running toward him with the bloody spear perched over her head. He tried again to grip the pad with his left hand. He tried so hard that he cried out in pain, whacking the useless appendage against the pad’s inert surface.
Rakan was getting close now.
He felt something against his leg. Something metallic. He picked it up. A gun. It had a translucent hand grip, and an indentation for his finger. A trigger.
Kal stared at it in his hand. Then he looked up at the charging Rakan. He felt the urge to point it at her – a deep, primal, survival instinct urge.
He shook his head, ashamed of himself, and threw the gun back into the grass. He turned his eyes back to Rakan, so close now, clutching the spear over her head.
The point came down and a sharp pain exploded through his chest. Numbness overcame him, and his vision diminished, the sight of Rakan’s hateful eyes smearing away into black nothing.
~
Kal awoke in what was clearly a hospital room. Machines beeped around him. His left shoulder and chest were wrapped in bandages. Breathing was agony. He could see the shapes of people moving through the hallway beyond his room through the frosted glass windows. On the opposite wall was another window, one to the outdoors. He saw the city he’d been searching for, the buildings of glass and metal and rainbow shards of light.
“Hello,” a man said. He stood in the door frame. Kal had been gazing so intently at the city that he hadn’t noticed the man’s entrance. He was older and wore white robes, not unlike doctors on Earth. He closed the door behind him. His voice seemed solemn, and Kal wondered if, despite waking, his life might still be in jeopardy.
“Hi,” Kal said, finding his voice shaky. Talking hurt too.
“I’m Dr. Selar. What’s your name?”
“Kal Anders.”
“I know talking must be difficult, so let me explain. Then you can ask me any questions you want.”
Kal nodded.
Dr. Selar sat down in a chair next to Kal’s bed.
“Has the physician talked to you yet?”
Kal shook his head.
“I just spoke to him myself. He says you’ll make a full recovery.”
A wave of relief washed over him, interrupted by the searing pain in his chest. Dr. Selar winced.
“Would you rather I come back later?” Dr. Selar stood up. “I can explain when you’re feeling—”
“No,” Kal hissed. “Tell me now.”
Dr. Selar nodded and returned to his seat. “I am the lead psychiatrist assigned to the girl you know as Rakan. She is, as you are well aware, a very disturbed individual. She was abused as a young child, and later moved to a foster home. There, she latched onto the groundskeeper, but… there was an incident, and she killed him. In our culture, Kaal, killing is a terrible, terrible crime. We do not inflict it as a punishment.”
Kal’s eyes narrowed.
Dr. Selar shook his head and held up a hand, seeming to understand Kal’s perspective. “Yes, I know. Hear me out. In circumstances where standard rehabilitation will not work, we put the criminal into a hologram chamber and run a program that is keyed to his or her psyche. For now, Rakan is still angry, hateful and dangerous, so those are the kind of characters the program creates. Eventually, we hope, she will tire of this. She will want something better for herself, and she will start to create emotional bonds with the holographic characters instead of killing them. At that point, we may be able to transition her to relationships with real people. But for now…
“Anyhow, everything she told you, the game, the killing, the adults who watch for entertainment, I assure you those are all elements of her delusion. Everyone in the simulation was a holographic projection, besides Rakan and yourself.”
“How?” Kal wheezed. “Holograms with physical substance?”
“Forcefield generators provide the illusion of physical substance. Even texture.”
That explained why his nanites had seemed to stop working. Once the computer program generating the holograms had learned that it could move its projections independently of Kal’s nanite forcefields, it had simply begun ignoring them.
“The truth is…” the man paused, his lips tightening up. “The truth is that when you appeared, we thought that you were just another holographic person that Rakan’s mind and the program had generated. We had hoped you to be a projection of some part of Rakan that wants to end her torment. We only discovered the truth after your trick with the swords. Of course, such chambers designed for criminals are not easy to exit… or enter. We regret it took so long to get you out and are deeply sorry for the injuries you suffered.
“I also feel responsible for telling you that Rakan’s other specialists and I realize you possess metaxic flux technology and that it is how you came here. It is illegal in this country. If we release you from this hospital, our defence forces will likely arrest you. However, if you want to leave when you are better, we’ll let you, presuming you do so discreetly.”
Kal nodded. “May I have my computer?”
Dr. Selar retrieved the pad from a drawer in a nearby cabinet and handed it to him.
Kal reached out toward it, wincing in pain, moving his thumb into position over the activation button. Dr. Selar watched as the holographic interface appeared, nonplussed. He did, however, raise an eyebrow as Kal activated some of his more complex medical programs. Kal coughed and began taking in deep, gasping breathes, his lungs regenerating in a matter of seconds. Selar nodded, thoroughly impressed, as Kal began ripping bandages from his shoulder.
“Thank you for explaining what happened,” Kal said, his voice back to normal, talking no longer painful. “You said… you’re Rakan’s doctor. Do you think she’ll ever get better?”
Dr. Selar shook his head solemnly. “I don’t know.”
“Give her my regards when she does. Tell her I don’t blame her. Sounds like I won’t be able to come back and tell her myself.”
Dr. Selar regarded Kal quizzically as he stepped toward the door.
“Kaal?” he asked, stopping at the doorway.
“Hmm?” Kal pulled his T-shirt over his head.
“What do you call your Spele, your world?”
“Earth.”
“There’s something I want you to know. On Spele, this country in particular, we’ve had rather unfortunate interactions with metaxic visitors and our own metaxic explorers. I wish we’d had the opportunity to visit Earth. I think circumstances here might be different if we’d met you and your people instead.
Kal smiled weakly. “I’d liked to have known Spele, the real Spele, better too.”
Dr. Selar smiled sadly and turned to leave.
“Oh, sorry. One more thing.” Kal said. Selar turned and looked at him. “Rakan kept going on about the birds. What was that all about?”
Dr. Selar sighed, and his face fell once more. “The groundskeeper at the foster home I told you about kept a sanctuary for birds on the roof. Rakan walked in on him and a lady friend of his, in that sanctuary. She must have caught them together, and, well…”
Kal nodded solemnly. “I understand. Thank you for helping me.”
Selar left the hospital room, shutting the door behind himself.
Kal looked out the window into the city. He watched two elevated trains weave around one another, crisscrossing, and he sighed.
Holograms with forcefields providing texture… Their technology could probably rival Earth’s, even with their lack of nanotechnology. Was his genetic fix here somewhere, trapped inside a culture that would have nothing to do with quantum visitors?
He pulled up his pad and stole one last look out at the brilliant city before he activated the metaxic nodes.