KAL TOOK a step back from the table in his treehouse and looked over his work. He grinned as he typed out the last few commands, and re-checked for syntax errors. His pad sat on the table, projecting a hollow, three-dimensional representation of his body. A glowing layer of auto-defense nanites covered the hologram’s skin. Popup windows surrounded the figure, each displaying a chunk of code, all of them modifications Kal had made to the base program. Together, they would allow his nanite defenders to deflect even artificially generated forces, like those he had encountered on Spele.
Two of the cats were yowling at one another below, probably Variable and Constant.
Cat fight. Kal smirked.
The light of the holograms danced about his empty apartment. Kal sighed, looking around his empty room. His latest feat of programming expertise would go unnoticed, yet again.
He sat down in a chair and let his mind drift back to fourth grade.
They had been studying insects. He and three other students were assigned to study an unconscious dragonfly in an immobilization field. They were given a list of measurements to take and anatomical features to describe. But the poor dragonfly turned out to be at least partly conscious due to a bug in the immobilization field’s program. He and his classmates struggled to do their work as the poor creature convulsed sporadically against malfunctioning restraints.
Kal, tired of watching it suffer, pulled up the immobilization program on his pad. Of course, he knew better than to make any changes himself, so he typed his revisions into an empty document. Just five minutes later, he handed his corrections to the teacher.
Kal’s teacher, a tall man with a big, furry beard, at first eyed the pad suspiciously. However, upon looking the program over, a smile spread across his face. The teacher ended up submitting Kal’s revisions to the Council for approval without any changes at all. He congratulated him on a job well done, but reminded him that he should not really be writing any code before taking the high school prep classes.
Still, it was all Kal had talked about for days: the broken program, written by some adult, that he had fixed.
Kal stood now in the treehouse and looked over his work. Loneliness crept into him. If he sent any communication to Earth about his intra-metaxic activities, the Fermilab scientists might deactivate his nodes remotely, or worse, forcibly return him to Earth against his will. That would essentially be a death sentence.
He shook his head, returning to happier thoughts. He picked up his pad and activated the new program. The layer of auto-defense nanites on his skin shimmered ever so slightly, then became invisible once more.
Kal pulled up the stills of the next world he wanted to explore. It was uninhabited (by humans, or anything else with speech), and was therefore unnamed. Glancing through the stills piqued his curiosity further. Something was alive there.
“Interesting,” he muttered to himself, reading over the collected data in more detail.
Kal made some food for the cats. Max whined and paced anxiously below the treehouse until Kal hurled the food out the window. Variable and Constant ceased their play and ran up to the treehouse to gobble up their portion. Other pride cats emerged from the forest upon hearing them.
Kal climbed down from his home, walked to a safe distance from the tree, and entered the metaxia.
~
The buildings pulsed.
And that was only the most unsettling part. The reason they were throbbing was because of the translucent cords that covered the surface of, well, everything. They lay across the facades of buildings, wrapping themselves around corners, through windowpanes, all the way up the tallest skyscrapers as far he could see. They lay across other architecture too — miniature cords spiraled up a lamp post, all across a post box, a few abandoned cars and trucks, the billboards and street lights, even the struts and overhead tracks of the elevated rail line.
They came in various sizes too. The ones running up the buildings and rail lines were relatively small, no thicker than a light pen, but the one that lay through the adjascent intersection a block to the east was two stories tall.
And they beat out a rhythm.
Kal forced himself to focus on his pad, trying to shake the icky feeling that he was an invader inside an enormous organism, an organism that also happened to be an alternate Earth Chicago.
He tapped a few more buttons.
Just a few more scans, he thought.
He took careful steps across the asphalt toward the throbbing wall of a nearby building and gazed at the cords more closely.
Their exterior seemed almost like skin. In fact, were the cords perspiring? He looked at his interface and confirmed that they were. The cords were cybernetic – organic skin, veins and blood mixed with some kind of fiber optic wire and metallic compounds he didn’t even recognize. Did they insulate? Protect? Who knew.
Looking closer, Kal could see that the cords emited a dull glow. The bright, midday sun had drowned it out from a distance. And inside he could see them pumping a clear fluid, and the outline of the glowing fiber optic wire, illuminating all the rest.
Kal sighed. This was truly fascinating, but there was nothing about this organism or its DNA that was remotely related to his genetic aversion to nanogenic radiation. Time to get back to Felis.
Kal heard a clicking sound behind him and turned. He saw nothing unusual, just the same empty street covered in cords.
He returned to his pad to make sure he hadn’t missed something and promply heard the same sound again, louder this time.
He turned back and still saw nothing out of the ordinary. Well, ‘ordinary’ for this city, anyway. It must really be time to leave. He prepped the program that would usher him back into the metaxia.
He looked around one last time for the source of the clicking and saw nothing. Listening carefully, he heard only the light, steady thrum of all the cords beating in unison.
He shook his head. You’re losing it, Kal.
Pain shot through his right forearm.
“Ow!” He shook his arm vigorously and felt something fall from his skin. He pulled his arm up to his face and ran his fingers over a long, thin, red line of missing skin.
He looked down at the ground and squinted at the riot of blue and red squares inching its way across the pavement in stuttering bursts. The concussions of contrastive light erupted so intensely from it that Kal could look at it only through his peripheral vision without squinting.
He pulled out his pad and had the nanites run a full bioscan of his body. A window appeared, with the message “No pathogens detected.” A small wave of relief passed through him, though the thought of something unknown inside him brought on a wave of nausea. He breathed deeply through his nose to make it pass.
Kal turned his attention to the thing that had attacked him. He couldn’t look at it, but he could certainly have his nanites scan it.
The form of a worm appeared before him on the pad’s holographic interface. It was cybernetic, just like the cords.
The pixel worm limped spasmodically into the wall of a nearby building and stopped. Kal watched it as best as he could through nearly closed eyes. The creature curled up against one of the cords and began… doing something… biting into it, maybe? Bright, white sparks sprayed from where the worm bit the cord, the cord itself decaying into a black and brown bile.
The whole city rumbled and shuddered. The cords’ pulse quickened. All of them, across every surface, retracted off all the artifices of human construction, spinning, wrapping, twirling and unwinding into a new configuration. The large cord a block away heaved itself upward, and unraveled itself, while new enormous cords appeared, laying themselves down into the other three adjoining intersections.
The ground shook so hard that Kal lost his balance and fell, catching himself just before he hit the pavement.
When the quake stopped, Kal grabbed his pad and hit the icon to initiate his escape. The familiar, circular field of blue electricity formed around him.
Without warning, the sphere of blue static wobbled and collapsed partway inward. Blue sparks sprayed toward him, and Kal raised his arms to shield his face.
He looked up through the rain of sparks to see that more of the blue-red pixel worms had appeared on the walls of nearby buildings and were now leaping down at him, dive bombing his metaxic bubble.
His pad interface screamed bold, red warnings in multiple holographic windows:
‘Quantum-Locking Instabilities Detected!’
‘Nanite Activities Impaired!’
‘Metaxic Field Collapse Imminent!’
Three buttons blinked helpfully into existence: ‘abort’, ‘retry’ and ‘fail.’
He slammed the ‘retry’ button, but this only caused his computer to churn some more while the metaxic bubble continued to wobble precariously under subsequent attacks. The same three buttons reappeared.
Kal felt the urge to throw his pad at something, but decided instead to save that act for when he met the person who’d written the nodes’ programming.
Kal pressed ‘fail,’ and the dysfunctional sphere of blue static dissipated.
An incandescent river of red and blue coursed over the top of the nearest building and surged toward him in an erratic, purple haze.
The cords on the nearest walls ripped out of the ground and flung the majority of the worms away before they could hit Kal. It was the last thing he saw before he fled through the empty city streets, away from the river of broken red and blue, and down the path that the cords had cleared during their reconfiguration.
~
After what seemed like miles, Kal stopped to catch his breath and pulled out his pad. Just as the blue static haze of the metaxic bubble began to form, the river of worms surged around the corner.
He cursed, quit the program, and took up running again.
The path between the enormous cords on either side of him took him east and slightly south. He emerged from between buildings, the cords guiding him across a street and into a grassy field. Kal turned another corner and discovered a building he instantly recognized — the Art Institute of Chicago. He’d been to Earth’s at least half a dozen times as a child. This version even had the lion statues and the great steps, though thin cords covered them as well as the entire building, making the whole structure throb.
Kal ran up the steps as quickly as his feet would take him. He glanced back and caught a glimpse of the worms crashing around the corner that the giant cords had created, flooding toward the steps.
He yanked open the doors to the Art Institute, ran inside and slammed them shut behind him. He backed away from the doors, gasping for breath. His gaze fixated on the entrance.
Would it hold? Could the worm creatures eat through it as easily as they could knock out metaxic bubbles and sear through the layer of auto-defense nanites on his skin?
He got out his pad and began firing up the nodes again. Before the sphere of blue sparks could even form, the holographic interface flickered out of existence. His pad was dead.
Kal gulped and shivered. A bead of sweat dripped off his forehead onto its sleek, black surface. Kal jabbed at it, but it remained inert.
He jumped as the door shuddered, once, then twice more. They held fast.
A few smaller shudders and then silence.
Kal looked around him. Near the entrance, the typical vaulted ceiling stretched out overhead, but the further his eyes moved inward, the more alien the building became. The translucent cords were not laced over the building’s interior, they were the building’s interior. The grand entraceway lost its rectangular shape, forming into a staircase of cords leading down a tube.
No light fixtures hung from the ceiling. Instead, the cords’ bioluminescence permeated the space, bathing everything in their soft, white glow.
Kal felt his heart sink. He kicked himself mentally. He shouldn’t have let the building’s familiar facade lure him inside.
He took a few tentative steps forward, and lurched to a halt, gasping for breath. The bioluminescene of the cords had shifted, following him as he moved. Those stairs of cords were bright too, and they weren’t pulsing, like the rest of the room, making them easier to traverse. Someone was guiding him.
Kal pulled out his pad and tried to turn it on once more. It remained inactive. No escape.
His heart raced and he wiped sweaty hands on his jeans. Slowly, he made his way down the stairwell tube. He noticed, the cords that comprised the tube did not flow downward in straight lines. They had a slight twist to them that, combined with the throbbing, was more than enough to make his descent dizzy and disorienting.
Kal took deep breaths, forcing himself to remain calm.
At the bottom of the cord tunnel, he found an arched entryway that opened into a sterile, cubic, empty room with walls of gray metal. Lights hung in a grid on its ceiling. Kal walked very slowly to its center.
“Welcome home,” a voice said directly behind him.
Kal lurched forward and turned to see a man in a black dress suit and white tie. He had light skin, blond hair, and blue eyes.
It was the last thing Kal registered before he fainted.
~
Kal blinked and opened his eyes. He lay on the soft mattress of a bed, a white ceiling above him. A miniature Saturn passed over his head, a holographic representation traversing the space between the bed and the ceiling. Outside, he could hear birds chirping in trees. A train whizzed by in the distance, the elevated rail just beyond his house.
Kal ripped the sheets off himself and lurched out of bed, and the holoraphic solar system on the ceiling shimmered out of existence. He grabbed at the mattress, then stumbled into his desk. He felt the grain of the wood, ran his hands over the sleek, black telescope by the window, and snatched up his school pad, the one he’d used for his sixth grade homework. It was all just as he’d left it.
This couldn’t be. It absolutely couldn’t be.
Earth?
He clutched at his chest. He didn’t feel winded. He didn’t even feel short of breath. Had they removed the nanites from the entire city? That couldn’t be possible.
He jammed his hand into the interface at his desk and the window forcefield dispersed, allowing a blast of humid, summer air to roll into his room.
This was Illinois, all right. His Illinois. But how did he get here?
A scream erupted from behind him. Strange—it sounded almost like his own voice.
Kal turned back toward his bed, but the bed was gone. Inky blackness seemed to spread across the room, consuming it. Moments later, the entire room had been inundated and the humidity and heat in the air dissipated. There was only himself, the black void… and another Kal.
The other Kal sat huddled on the ground, but his arms were outstretched, away from his body, and he was trembling.
“Hello?” Kal tried.
The other Kal screamed, and fell backward, shuddering.
“Are you… me?” Kal didn’t dare take a step forward.
The other Kal shifted backward, his eyes radiating fear and his limbs shaking. “Who… who are you?”
“My name’s Kal. What’s your name?”
“Tria.”
“How did you get here, Tria?”
“I don’t know. I just know that I’m scared.”
“Well, that makes two of us.” Kal took a deep breath and exhaled. “Tria, can I come closer?”
Tria nodded hesitantly, still shivering. He wore the same clothes Kal had on. They could have been identical twins.
Kal took a few steps towards Tria and extended his hand. At this, Tria shook his head violently, and squirmed away.
“Don’t!” Tria shouted.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t… touch me.”
“Why?”
Tria gulped and looked at the floor. “I woke up in a bed, but when I tried to pull the sheets off me, my hands moved right through them. I started sinking into the mattress, and... it was horrible.”
“How did you—?”
“I— I got my feet onto the floor, and I stopped falling. But my hands passed through the bed and the desk and—” Tria shook his head, facing the floor. “There’s something wrong with me.”
Kal furrowed his brow, and gazed out into the void all around him. Just him and Tria.
Kal sat down, face to face with his doppel.
“Do you know how this happened?”
Tria shook his head.
“Do you remember anything before now?”
Another no.
“Tria,” Kal said softly. He waited until Tria had lifted his head up. Those eyes were his own, and they were so incredibly scared. “Tria, I don’t know how this happened to you either. But, you know what? There’s something wrong with me too. I have this genetic aversion to nanogenic radiation.”
“What’s that?”
“There are these tiny robots called nanites. I can’t go home because I’m allergic to the radiation they emit. But I’m searching for a way to go there safely. I might be able to find another organism with the same problem, or some other solution. I don’t know. It won’t be easy. But I’m going to keep trying.
“I think… maybe we could work together? We could search for a way to make you solid, too. We have a better chance of figuring all this out if we combine forces.”
Tria reached out to Kal, and Kal reached out his hand, too.
They went through each other.
Tria recoiled, then reached out with his other hand. Clasping both his hands around Kal’s, even though Tria’s had no substance.
“You’d do this,” Tria said, “for someone you just met? Someone with no memory, who doesn’t even know who he is?”
“You look like me,” Kal said.
Tria smiled. “Okay then. Let’s try.”
Kal’s vision became blurry. Tria faded away.
Kal began to fall.
~
Kal fell and fell.
His descent slowed, the sensation of falling evaporating completely.
Something cold pressed up against his back.
His eyes flitted open. Before him lay himself, or rather, a clone of himself. The clone’s eyes were closed, and he was naked.
Kal looked down. He was naked too.
“Oh, god, they cloned me.” Kal fought back nausea and overwhelming sense of violation.
A thought popped into his mind: The clone has no physical body. And his name is Tria.
…
How did he know that?
Kal jumped up off the metal slab, his feet hitting the cold floor. He was in the square room he’d seen before, just before the blond-haired man had appeared. The slabs were recent additions, but everything else was the same. Just an empty, gray cube with an array of lights on the ceiling.
Tria remained inert.
Kal scrambled around behind the slab. He was breathing heavily. His vision was going blurry. He felt gross and icky all over. What had happened to him? What had that man done to him? What would he do to Kal next?
His clothes lay neatly folded behind the metal slab. Kal pulled at them, anxious to cover himself. He’d just managed to get his jeans on when he rolled over onto the floor, the sickening feeling of having been genetically violated overwhelming him.
He’d heard stories from earlier in the century, horrible stories of countries who’d gotten their hands on nanotechnology before they were ready for it. They had altered humans, done horrible things to their DNA. Unspeakable things.
Kal pulled on his shirt, then grabbed at the slab.
Just find your pad, Kal. Find the pad and everything will be okay.
Kal gazed about the room. It wasn’t on the floor and there didn’t seem to be any indentations or crevices in the walls.
There! His pad lay in a corner of the ceiling, fixed to the wall. Although there certainly wasn’t any way to reach it, the fact that it was intact gave him some small comfort.
Tria’s eye’s fluttered open. He waved his head about, then looked at Kal.
“Tria…” Kal said. He still didn’t know how he knew the name.
“Kal?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m scared.”
“Me too.”
“Kal, where are we?”
“I don’t know. It’s an alternate Earth.”
“What’s Earth?”
“That’ll take some expl—”
“Where are my clothes?”
Tria jumped down off his slab, then ran behind it and shrieked.
“Tria, you okay?”
He shrieked again, and Kal ran to him. “What’s wrong?”
Tria was trembling, holding his hands out in front of him. “I tried to touch the metal, and my hand it— I’m not… I’m not real, Kal. I’m so scared. What’s going on?”
“Don’t worry.” Kal somehow knew better than to try to reach out and comfort Tria with touch. Deja vu washed over him. “Everything’s going to be alright. We’ll work together, okay? We won’t let anyone hurt us.”
“Our designation is UsrLocal,” a voice called out from the center of the room.
Kal nodded to Tria, and Tria nodded back. They stood and slowly emerged from behind the metal slab.
The man in the black suit was back. When he saw them, he beamed with delight.
“How are you feeling, my lord?”
Kal and Tria exchanged another, even more confused glance.
“Lord?” Kal asked the strange man.
“Of course. You are my… our god after all.”
Tria’s eyes went wide.
Kal waved his hands. “No, I think you’ve got me confused with someone from—”
“Homo sapiens sapiens,” UsrLocal said. “The species who created me… us, Linaxia Gnopus.”
“This is fascinating,” Tria said, not looking fascinated in the least. “But I really just want some clothes… please?”
UsrLocal tilted his head mechanically, then reached up and snapped his fingers. Kal’s pad shot down from the ceiling and swiveled around, stopping directly in front of him. It hovered there, Kal and Tria gaping at it.
“I’ve made some modifications to assist you, my lord.”
The lighting flickered, and a crashing sound could be heard from somewhere distant above.
UsrLocal screwed up his face. “I’m so very sorry, my lord. If you’ll excuse me.”
His form shimmered and vanished. Another hologram.
Tria stared at Kal with wide eyes. Kal gulped and grabbed at his hovering pad. To his surprise, it came to life at his touch, and the interface had indeed changed. The main menu contained about a dozen new toggles and buttons. New programs had been uploaded into primary memory. And his sartorial program had been updated… for two.
Kal opened it. The new interface was easy enough. Tria’s body shimmered and he now wore clothing similar to Kal’s, except that his T-shirt was blue instead of red.
More slamming noises erupted in the distance, and this time the room shook slightly.
UsrLocal shimmered back into existence. “My lord, I’m afraid we must leave immediately.”
“Why?” Tria asked.
“You’re in danger here.”
“What’s going on?” Kal crossed his arms.
“The Xplirir Contagion will shortly breach this structure. I… we believe they wish to render you.” He turned to Tria. “No offense.”
Tria just blinked at him. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Me either,” Kal said. “But if you’ll let me use my nodes, I can leave this world—”
“No!” UsrLocal screeched, his eyes wide with terror. “We can keep you this time. Please don’t leave us.”
Kal shared a look with Tria. He was just as taken aback as Kal was.
“It’s okay,” Tria said. “Calm down. We won’t leave you. Just help us understand what’s going on. From the beginning. What are those noises? How did I get here? Who am I?”
UsrLocal looked up at Kal. “Is he… you really don’t know? At all?”
Kal shook his head.
UsrLocal collapsed onto the floor, sobbing. The slamming noises were getting louder and more frequent. The room shook again, more violently, and the lights flickered.
Kal knelt down and tried to put his hand on UsrLocal’s shoulder, but it went right through. Kal nodded to Tria.
Tria reached out and his hand contacted UsrLocal’s shoulder. Kal and Tria shared a smile.
“What’s wrong?” Tria asked.
“It’s just…” UsrLocal said between sobs. “I thought you’d come back. It’s been so long. I’ve… we’ve been so lonely. You have no idea how lonely!”
“How long since your humans left?” Kal asked.
“Eight—” he sobbed. “Eight hundred years.”
Kal was taken aback. Another slam and the lights flickered off for a full second before returning to their normal illumination.
“Is that the worms?” Kal asked.
“Worms?” Tria turned to Kal skittishly.
“Before, when I first arrived on this world, there were these blue and red worms. One of them attacked me. Then there were hundreds or thousands of them in a giant wave. The cords rearranged themselves and guided me here.”
UsrLocal looked up at Kal, smiling through teary eyes.
Kal gasped. “That was you! You’re the cords, aren’t you?”
“Yes, my lord.”
More slamming. The lights flickered out again. One of the lighting appliances plummeted from the ceiling and exploded on the floor.
UsrLocal frowned and sobbed again, shaking his head. “You have to leave. For your own safety. The Xplirir Contagion will breach this structure any moment.”
“What will happen to Tria?” Kal asked. “Is he stuck here in your computer system?”
“No,” UsrLocal said.
“Well, where am I then? Is my mind just a simulation too? Some artificial intelligence?”
“No.” UsrLocal sighed. He pointed at Kal’s head.
Kal clutched at his face, then looked at Tria.
“No… you didn’t…”
“Our gods loved the mind clones.” UsrLocal sniffled, wiping away tears.
“Tria’s… in my brain?”
“I’m a hallucination?”
“No,” UsrLocal said. “Not a dream or an illusion. A duplicate of Kal’s mind, cohabiting his brain. Tria, your form is projected by the pad’s holographic emitters and your mind is your own, but you share Kal’s brain. However, you are not limited by it! You can extend your consciousness into any computer with sufficient memory. Both Kal’s pad and nanite technologies are adequately equipped.”
“Make him a body.” Kal crossed his arms.
“I can’t. The gods taught us to clone minds, not bodies. We have tried to build artificial gods before. Not a single replicant lived for more than a week.”
Another light slammed into the floor and exploded.
“I will fix Lehr for you,” UsrLocal said. “I will continue my struggle against the Xplirir Contagion so that you might return to us.”
Tria smiled and shook UsrLocal’s shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”
“We’ll be back then,” Kal said as he began firing up the metaxic nodes. “We promise.”
The slamming noises reached a peak and the room shook violently. The main lighting went off and red emergency lighting flooded the room.
“Please do. We won’t disappoint you. We’ve held together your cities, protected your computers. We will make Lehr a place you can inhabit again. I… we promise.”
Kal smiled and nodded.
“Goodbye, UsrLocal.” Tria waved as the bubble wrapped around both him and Kal. Lehr swirled away into the blue.
“Kal…” Tria said, gazing out at the eddies and fleeting glimpses of alternate Earths. “What is this?”
“The metaxia,” Kal said.
“It’s blue.” Tria grinned.
“Yeah,” Kal said, his expression falling. Tria didn’t seem to remember anything. He was a clone of Kal’s mind, but tabula rasa. No explicit memories. Everything was new to him.
“Hmm,” Kal said. He pressed a button, and Tria’s form shimmered out of existence.
Not funny. It was Tria’s voice, but Kal heard it in his mind.
No way! Kal thought back.
Yes way, Tria thought. I can see your filesystem, you know. This is a disaster. Don’t you know how to organize?
Kal grimaced. This was an unexpected turn.
Leave my filesystem alone!
Kal had promised to get Tria a real body, hadn’t he? He didn’t remember doing that exactly, but he felt like he had.
Wow, Tria thought. This folder is taking up so much space. What do you need all these pictures and videos for? Oh, niiiiice—
“Stay out of there!” Kal shouted. He took a deep breath. That’s very personal, private stuff.
Geez, sorry. Just trying to bring some order to this chaos. Say, Kal, can I have my own personal, private folder like yours?
New body for Tria it was.