It’s been a long death, and it’s only recently—when he’s been forced—that he’s done anything to stop it. He used to be a rock. I’ve said that before. I know I have, but he really did.
He was sick for a long time before he started dying, though. Alice told me when I got older. He’d lost his job before Mom died. Six or seven months before, maybe? Alice wasn’t so sure. And there wasn’t anything for him to bounce back into. Nothing in his field. Everyone wanted someone with more experience or newer qualifications.
That’s when he first got sick. But it didn’t get bad until Mom died, and it didn’t start killing him until basic living.
Hurricane Ridge Visitor’s Center, Washington, USA - June 18, 2043, 2:13 PM
- - - - -
Reality shifts.
This isn’t like the Voiceless Singer’s vision. Reality doesn’t burn away in a vision or try to show me what I wish had happened, like when I relived my last night with Mom. It literally changes. Here’s how it happens.
First, the blue and green crystals floating around Alexander start glowing brighter. They burn almost white, but if they’re giving off heat, I can’t feel it. They spin faster and faster, orbiting him like two tiny planets orbiting a star. I try to lift my Revolver.
Second, the ground under my feet turns to mud, and the Revolver’s handle heats up red-hot. I drop it as my feet sink into the mud past my boots, and the gun slips into the goop and gets covered. An instant later, it’s as hard as if it hasn’t rained in weeks. I overbalance but can’t fall over; the strain on my calves sends a jolt of agony up my leg as I struggle to right myself.
Third, Alexander grows both taller and less physically present. His body warps and extends and stretches, looming over me as the two crystals spin and whirl.
This all happens in about a second.
The fourth thing that happens takes a little longer.
As Alexander’s ethereal body crashes down at me and reality shifts, James starts yelling in my ear, something about a Type Four Reality-Shaping Entity, how it’s inherently unstable, and how I can fight back if I try. I ignore most of it, but not the part where I can fight back if I try. That’s a lifeline. Reality Anchoring helps, too. I’ve only used it to hold firm against Reality Anchors so far—since I’m an anomaly, they don’t love me. But this…this is something it can work with.
[Skill Learned: Reality Anchoring 4]
I can only hope that the Halcyon System’s decision to give us a week means it’s back to granting me skills at a decent rate, because I’m nowhere near strong enough yet.
The strain of simply holding on in place is overwhelming. I want to Slither. If I Slither or Smoke Form, I can pull myself out of the place I’m standing, but what I can’t do is lose the Revolver. It’s my best form of attack. I need to remember the last place it was. My hands scrabble on the dirt, fingernails bending painfully as I scratch at the place I last saw it, and I regret not cutting them the last few weeks.
Then I’m not scrabbling on dirt and grass anymore.
My fingers scrape against old carpet that’s had too many boots stomp across it. The smell of rotting flesh hits me, and I look up.
We’re back inside the visitor’s center. My first guess is that we’re in the staff-only area. But I don’t have time to take it all in—my eyes are locked on my opponent.
Alexander looks exhausted. He staggers for a map on the wall and pulls pins by the handful, blocking my view with the backpack that’s slung over his shoulder. I try to lunge for him, but my feet are stuck in the floor, and I only succeed at bending at the waist and overextending my knee painfully. “I said this is where we say goodbye, girl,” he says.
Then he’s gone. Just like that.
I finish overbalancing, propped up awkwardly on my hands and sunken, unbending feet. Then I Slither and Smoke Form up and out of the floor, landing next to the two boot-sized holes. Adrenaline pours through my body. I look left and right, then behind me, in case he’s still here. But he’s not.
I’m alone.
It takes me a minute to realize that I’m not only alone, but I’m not in the staff-only area. The carpet’s wrong; there was tile in the staff-only area. And even though there’s a map that’s identical to the one I saw before, the room’s not right.
It’s the rack of computers humming. The temperature that’s almost overwhelmingly hot instead of late-morning crisp. The poster on the wall that tells the staff to ‘Keep Your Lips Sealed; Secrets Save Lives,’ complete with a SHOCKS logo—the arrows out from the circle.
“James, where am I?” I’m not actually worried about where I am. My priority is the Revolver. It’s either in the floor or outside somewhere—I can only hope it’s the first one, because finding exactly where I was could be a pain in the ass. I don’t know if my foot-holes stayed out there or if they collapsed, or if Alexander made it so they never existed at all. I don’t even know how to get back outside, come to think of it.
[SHOCKS Security Checkpoint Hurricane Ridge,] James replies. [Claire, Alexander is likely a high-powered, low-endurance example of a Type Four Reality-Shaper. I’m running an Analysis, but it’s unlikely that I saw enough to build a framework for him. Either way, I’d place his danger level in the mid-to-high Xuduo-Danger, and that’s only because his abilities seemed to strain fast. If he had more Endurance, he’d be in the Qishi-Danger range.]
“That bad, huh?” I find a pair of scissors and get to work, scraping at the battered, stained carpet. Someone’s spilled coffee here; the brown stain stands out against the faded blue.
[That bad. Reality-Shapers are the worst. The absolute worst. It’s not that we can’t contain them. It’s that their containment is almost always voluntary.]
I’m quiet for a minute. Then two. Cutting through the carpet with a pair of dull scissors isn’t exactly easy. But eventually, I hit something metallic, and when I pull and tear the rest of the carpet up so there’s a nice, big hole, the Revolver sits there. I pick it up. It’s warm, as usual. After a quick check-over to make sure it’s clean and functional, it goes back into my hoodie pocket.
Then it’s on to the next big thing: figuring out where Alexander went.
That’s going to be easier said than done, though. This time, he pulled the map in behind him. All I’ve got are the pins, and even when James tells me which colors went where and projects the map from upstairs, they don’t match up right. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if I couldn’t follow him with the map, I’m not going to follow him without it.
The problem with this equation is that it’s not producing any right answers. There are plenty of incorrect ones, but nothing I can use. “James, who’s in charge of SHOCKS Olympia?”
[Director White,] he answers immediately. [She’s been running SHOCKS Olympia for about eight years. Veteran, very by-the-book, understands how to prioritize. She’s almost obsessed with maintaining the illusion that SHOCKS doesn’t exist and that there aren’t any anomalies in her Control Zone. If she’d been in charge of the response to your first merge, you wouldn’t remember any of it. We should all be thankful it was someone more careless.]
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That just leaves me with more questions than answers. “Would she have left a security outpost that went dark un-checked?”
[Absolutely not unless there was something worse happening,] James says. [She’d triage but try to figure out what was happening, at least.]
I sit down in one of the cleaner computer chairs—one of the ones that hasn’t had a body on it for who knows how long. “We’ve got a lot to figure out.”
The list goes like this.
- How do I get out of here?
- What’s going on at SHOCKS Headquarters Olympia?
- Are Sora and Dad in danger if they keep heading there?
- How much time do I have to get there if they are?
- How much time do I have to get there if they aren’t?
- What happens if I go after them instead of focusing on the bigger picture?
Absolutely none of these questions are easy to answer. For one thing, there’s no door to this room, and no windows to climb out of. That answers a likely question about where Alexander went when he disappeared. He popped into this room, not to Mount Olympia or Kalaloch or Hoh, whatever that is. He probably found something here that he needed—and that tells me he knows SHOCKS Olympia, because how else would he have known about this place?
But that doesn’t help me leave. No doors, no windows, and who knows how far underground I am? It could be a simple wooden floor between me and the visitor’s center, or it could be literal tons of dirt and rock. So, for now, I’m stuck.
As for Sora, Dad, and SHOCKS Headquarters Olympia—to say nothing of the rest of the Control Zone—I don’t know anything, and whatever happened in here, it’s clear that none of these computers has any information after May 25. The burn marks on the floor and the bodies make it pretty clear that whatever happened, it happened then. And no one came to check on these people.
So I’m willing to guess that SHOCKS Olympia’s in trouble. And if it’s in trouble, a few teachers with guns, a single RST trooper, and a handful of SHOCKS agents aren’t going to be enough to fix it.
That means Sora and Dad are probably in danger. And it means that either way, I don’t have much time, but I have some.
James clears his throat. [I think we should consider the possibility of an alternative means of escape.]
“What do you mean?” I ask.
[Mergewalk to another reality, then Mergewalk back,] he says.
That could actually work, but… “What’s your reasoning? It might be faster to Slither and Smoke Form through the ceiling, and then get jogging. I could catch up to them pretty easily if that worked.” I don’t think that’s going to cut it, but I don’t know that I want to leave this reality with so many questions up in the air. I don’t want to leave Sora and Dad here with Alexander, Director Ramirez, or whatever anomalies are out there in the woods.
[As far as the Halcyon System is concerned, you’re at about six and a half days. It’s an entity of its word, but if you want to stop Merge Prime, you’re going to need more time. The System is giving you a week to work on your powers and move toward solving the mystery of what Merge Prime is, who or what’s causing it, and how to stop it.]
“Right, I’m with you so far.” I spin in the computer chair. It squeaks a little as it rotates. I’d kill for a cigarette, not because of the taste, but because it’d be appropriate. Aesthetic, or something. Maybe just something to do with my fingers and mouth. My reflection glints in the black computer screen, backlit by my shattered-looking void wings. My eyes are glowing red. I blink until they stop. “So you’re saying…?”
[I’m saying that no matter how much trouble Director Ramirez can get into in six days, it’s highly unlikely to leave Reality Zero in worse shape than it is right now.]
“So we abandon Sora and Dad?” I ask.
I’m not mad about it, surprisingly. I think that’s because even though it’s painful to hear, James is probably telling the truth. No, he’s definitely telling the truth, so that’s not it. It’s that he’s trying to be gentle about pulling off the band-aid, but he’s right. I can’t waste time digging a hole who-knows-how-far up to escape this room and hiking across the Olympic Mountains.
He doesn’t say anything. Is he being smug, or giving me time to work through the equation on my own? Or maybe it’s something else? Maybe he’s still fighting a million battles, and his processing is stretched to the maximum, so he’s taking my silence as an opportunity to catch up elsewhere.
I take a deep breath. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Possibly the destroyer of realities, too. And the one reality I can’t afford to destroy is this one. Saving Sora, Dad, and everyone else from Director Ramirez—who may or may not be a villain, and may or may not actually mean to use nuclear weapons against other realities—is pointless if Reality Zero doesn’t survive.
I spin the chair again, facing the computer, and shake the mouse until it wakes up. James flows into it, taking it over and adding it to his network. “Okay. Let’s figure out where we’re going first.”
There are a lot of targets.
According to James, SHOCKS is aware of approximately one thousand eight hundred different realities—not including Provisional Realities that haven’t been categorized yet—and at least twelve thousand unique anomalies. Most of those are merged from those different realities, but a few are native to R-0.
One thousand eight hundred is too many realities to deal with, obviously. So, James and I start with a list.
R-389 is a possibility. It’s the reality the thinlings came from. The one that merged into Alice’s graduation and kicked this whole thing off.
R-091 is not. Just seeing it on the list brings back memories of roses and machine oil.
Then there’s a long list of realities I’ve seen since. Whatever took over Aberdeen Hospital. The maze reality in the basement. The God in the Machine’s world, and all the places I visited through SHOCKS’s merge generator. I remove all of them from the list, with the exception of Provisional Reality ARC. That’s the Voiceless Singer’s world. It probably has more information than any other.
But when I add it, James removes it. [Drowned in lava, remember?]
“Right.” That’s not going to work.
We keep working on the list, moving to fresh, exciting, brand-new realities. James’s processing loops must be working at full speed, because he keeps throwing new ones at me as fast as I can approve them as possibilities.
[R-79. Ultra-real. Memetic hazards everywhere. We think it’s a source reality for up to five percent of all memetic anomalies. Possibly higher. And the fact that it’s propagating memes across realities means it could be part of Merge Prime.]
[R-557. Water reality.]
“No.”
[You didn’t even let me finish.]
“No. Next.”
[Okay. How about R-404? Reality not found.]
I snort. “Is this a joke?”
[Yes, but also no. The researchers named it that because of its traits. It’s got the lowest reality levels and highest unreality of any SHOCKS has seen. It’s hard to describe it, but imagine if the world around you was less physically weighty and more pencil sketches. It’s a little like that, but at four frames per second and a terrible resolution,] James says. [I’m skeptical that I could function at full capacity there, and you’d only have an hour at a time—at most.]
I roll my eyes. “Then why suggest it?”
[Because it’s unlikely to have windows to merge in and out of it, making it fairly safe. You know, because the concept of time breaks down at the reality levels it’s operating at.] He pauses, reading my expression. [I’m confident I could keep functional enough to keep you on track and get you out before you spaghettified or something weird like that.]
“Let’s put that one on the list of maybes,” I say, hedging my bets. Surely there has to be a better reality to investigate and travel through than that.
The conditions I’m looking for are pretty simple.
Whatever reality we go to has to be close to R-0 in terms of reality level. It has to be somewhere with evidence of Merge Prime activity—either it merged with us during the last three or so weeks, or James has to be confident it’s fought its own fight and lost. That’s another condition: it has to have fought and lost.
I’m not convinced anyone has won. James is pretty sure the Halcyon System hasn’t seen it happen, either. But he’s also convinced we—and by we, he means ‘every reality that the Halcyon System thinks can resist’—just need one win. So it doesn’t matter that we keep finding more and more realities that have collapsed due to Merge Prime. We just need to find one that was closer to winning than either R-0 or Provisional Reality ARC.
It takes an hour. An hour I’m not sure we have.
[I’ve got three targets,] James says. [They’re the best three, not the only three.]
“Shoot,” I say.
[Option One: R-404. I’m pretty sure it’s as collapsed as it is because of Merge Prime. I don’t have any evidence for this. Call it a hunch.]
I nod as it pops up to the top of the computer screen, skimming through the SHOCKS information on it. It’s not much more detailed than James’s description, and somehow makes even less sense—it’s all technobabble and dry language I half-understand.
[Option Two: R-1723. This one’s probably the most dangerous reality on the list. We haven’t recorded anything less than a Xuduo-Danger anomaly merging from there. Most are low Qishi-Danger. The only reason I think it’s a Merge Prime candidate is that there’s no rhyme or reason for what comes through, but reality levels are close to R-0. It’s unlikely a single reality would have produced so many unique threats.]
“A death world?” I ask.
James hesitates. [Sort of. I think any reality we enter looking for Merge Prime is going to be a death world, though.]
[Speaking of death worlds, the last candidate is an interesting one. The Halcyon System found this one after Merge Prime was already too far in progress for it to stop, so it didn’t interfere and observed instead. It wanted to see what an uninterrupted, unresisted Merge Prime event looked like. All indicators were that the reality would be dead within a week.]
“But?” I ask.
[No buts. The reality was completely dead within a week.]
There’s something he’s not telling me. “So why send me there?”
[Because it kept living after death. The whole thing.]
I shiver. “Zombies?”
[No. Undead. You’ll have to see to understand,] he says.
I take a deep breath. Then I nod. “What’s its SHOCKS designation?”
[Reality One.]
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