Microstory 840: Low Man on the Ladder

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The Ladder. It is the single greatest challenge and honor. If chosen to ascend this monumental feat of engineering, it means your life is complete, that you gave accomplished everything you possibly can. Or so we’re told. Of course, as it is a challenge, just because you’re selected to attempt it, doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. Hundreds over the years have tried, and no one has heard of a winner. Perhaps that is the point, they say. They believe it to be one final lesson, that no matter how you lived, you die like everyone else. Which I guess is true, but that doesn’t make things any easier when most of the people are living in squalor, and the few rich want for nothing. Others think the point is to not climb, but to fall off, and meet The Abyss smile first. It is true that roughly three-fourths of selectees choose this route, and let go after working up enough courage. Many, however, still attempt to make the full climb. Few are given the privilege to watch—ritualizers, administrators, guards—and what little information on the truth of the event that leaks out suggests that everybody eventually falls. The rungs are far apart and slippery. The wind is fierce and unyielding. It would take a massive amount of physical strength to make it all the way to the top, if such a place even exists. The ladder rises above the clouds, so no one has seen the top. People have spent their whole lives training for it, only to find themselves never being picked. It would seem that the more you want it, the less of a chance you have in getting it. And I swear there’s a negative correlation between the amount of wealth you possess, and your chances of being chosen.

I never wanted it at all. I had no interest in trying to reach the top, nor in learning the reality behind it. I was always totally content just keeping my head down, and being me. So naturally, I was selected two days after my twenty-fourth birthday. “Any advice?” I ask the attendant as she’s preparing me for my journey. A few people have tried to run, and escape their fate, but none of them has ever made it, so what chance would I have? All I can do is hope for a quick death, because honestly, I don’t think there’s anything up there. I think our leaders just kill people. The attendant smiles at me shyly, and points to a patch of fungus in the corner of the cave. I kneel down to inspect it. “Powdernose. For traction. Perfect, thanks.” I tear some of off the ground, and rub it into my hands, as well as all up my arms, just for good measure. She directs me to the cave exit, where I can see the Ladder cross from bottom to top. The guards don’t look at me, nor do the ritualizers, whose chorus of speeches I ignore. They’re not saying anything that will help me through this. It’s all just a bunch of spiritualistic nonsense designed to make them feel better about what they’re doing. I wonder how committed they would be to their beliefs if they were ever chosen. I bet they’re exempt. My attendant leads me to the edge, and motions for me to begin my climb. With no choice, I hold onto the nearest rung, and swing around to face the mountain. She’s not smiling anymore. I reach up to the next rung, but the ladder begins to sink, which I wasn’t ready for, so I lose my grip and fall right off.

As I’m plummeting to my death, I’m imagining all those people up there, rolling their eyes, and joking with each other about how quick I lost. Maybe they’re paying one of them money, having bet on how long I would last. I can’t give them the satisfaction. I’m determined to catch the ladder once more, and at least climb far enough back up to see their faces again. I stick my arm back towards the Ladder, and grab onto the rung, holding on for dear life, knowing that my action will start it sinking once more. I don’t know how I manage, but I don’t break my arm. I scramble to get my feet back on, so I can restart. I have to get up there before most of them leave. The Ladderwatchers are literally always looking at the Ladder, but I want everyone to see before they go home for the week. I want to prove that I’m better than they think. Oh no, it was the adrenaline, which is wearing off now. I did break my arm, and it’s killing me. My God, I thought I knew what pain was. All I can do is cling to the wood, letting myself drift further and farther toward the darkness. As I draw nearer, I begin to hear incredibly frightening sounds. They’re cries of agony, and monstrous howls. Whatever is down there, I do not want to see it, but I’m too tired, and too hurt. Again, I just have to hope it ends quickly. But then the darkness passes, and I see ground below me. The Ladder continues to sink and be swallowed by the soil. I see bodies too; some fresh, some just bones. Once I’m only a few feet above the surface, I hop off, and take a look around. An old man comes out of the shadows with a huge grin. “You’ve figured out the secret. Come, friend. We built a better society here than we ever had on the mountain. We are all equal.”

Microstory 839: Alien

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My whole life, the only thing I ever wanted was to get out of the lab. The nice people taking care of me taught me all about the world outside, but never let me see it for myself. They recited histories, and read me current events. They let me listen to music, and personal interest stories on public radio. They didn’t let me watch any television or movies, though, which made it difficult to conceive how they worked. Still, they developed me into one of the smartest individuals in the world, simultaneously keeping me the most sheltered, and least experienced. Hell, I never even knew what they looked like. Everything was provided for me remotely, using robots and other automation tools. One mistake they made, however, was teaching me technical skills, which I ultimately used to escape my room. There appeared to be no security in the hallways, probably because they never dreamed I would ever do anything like this, and likely had no reason to believe anyone outside knew this place existed. Once I opened the door to the outside, though, the alarms started blaring, so I had to run as far as I could, as fast as I could. There was no time to waste gawking at all these new stimuli, filling my sense of wonder with brand new encounters, or to savor the moments. I just kept going, all through town. I could see some figures around me, but it was the middle of the night, so there weren’t a lot of people about, and I couldn’t make out any faces. Thinking it best to get off the streets, I ducked into an alleyway, and found an unlocked door to a movie theatre. This is a good place to hide out, I thought. It won’t open for another several hours, and hopefully my trail will have gone cold by the time I have to leave. I sneak into the auditorium, find a row of seats on the end, right up against a large pillar, and try to get some sleep.

When I wake up, I can hear people around me. The lights have risen to a dim, but I’m bleary-eyed and afraid, so I stay curled up, and hope that no one notices me, which they don’t. I must have overslept, but as long as I wait until the movie starts, I should be okay. The house lights go down, leaving us in relative darkness, and I finally feel safe enough to sit up. There aren’t many others in the first matinee showing, and no one pays me any mind. I look around with a smile, glad to be in the real world, and excited to see more. While I’m here, though, I might as well enjoy the film. They’re playing Paranormal Activity 2, which I remember reading about. Supposedly, a lot of people went into the first in the franchise thinking it was real, but I’m not sure I believe that. I really like this one, and don’t have much trouble understanding it, but they never explained why it was billed a ghost story when it’s clearly about aliens. I would have preferred my first time to not be so scary too, but I’m just grateful I didn’t wait to break out until next week when Saw 3D is released. Once the movie ends, the house lights come back up, and I can finally see the other people there. They look completely bizarre to me, with two large ears, and tiny beady eyes. There’s hair on top of their heads, like eyelashes, but a lot longer. Their skin is pink and translucent, and I don’t see a single person with a tail. Is this a theatre for aliens? They look exactly like the ones from the movie. How did they get here, and for what purpose? Then I realize that they’re not the aliens. I am. Now it all makes sense. They named me Géënmu, but I’ve never heard of anyone else with that name, and they even gave me a baby naming book to reference. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. Géënmu. Genetically engineered mutant. I don’t belong out here. I have to find a way back.

Microstory 838: Man of War

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The galaxy is a big place, but we have mapped every single star, and conquered nearly all of them. Along the way, we discovered a few alien races, but life is so much rarer than even the most skeptical of scientists predicted. Most of our neighbors were technologically inferior to us, so when we declare a star system to be ours, there is little use for them to fight us on it. There are enough habitable planets here to satisfy the needs of every family, and though people tend to cluster together, it remains an option. Still, we set aside certain worlds for specific purposes, treating each one like our ancestors used blocks in a city. There’s one for giant immersive theme parks, and another for escape scenarios and scavenger hunts. I was on my way to a water world known for the best surfing in the quadrant when our ship suffered a cataclysmic failure, and I was forced to jettison myself in an emergency pod. I waited amongst the debris for two days, waiting to either be rescued, or at least make contact with other survivors, but I was running out of rations, and had to find the nearest system. Pods can’t last forever on the power they store—really just enough to make it a few light years, so I place myself in hibernation—and set course.

As my pod approaches, the computer wakes me up, and alerts me that the only planet with a satisfactory atmosphere is marked classified, and that I’m not allowed to land. That won’t be a problem, because I just need to hang out in orbit around the sun for a few hours, then I can make my way to the next system over. It’s tedious, and I may not find civilization for years, but it’s better than dying. The planet seems to have other plans for me, however. A message comes through, with the voice of an angry military man, scolding me for deserting the war. Obviously I’ve done no such thing, but some computer down there is programmed to react to a vessel in a certain way, and I’ve somehow triggered that action. I try to get out of its way, but it won’t leave me be. I try to explain myself, but it wasn’t programmed to recognize my responses. After some digging, I discover this to be an abandoned military training planet, built after the Bot Wars of the 22nd century, in preparation for a second uprising that never came. The messages continue, with the General telling me that my unit is counting on me, along with hundreds of thousands of other soldiers. Despite my best efforts, the training computer has designated me a soldier with an obligation, so it takes control of my pod, and drags me down to the surface. It lands me in the middle of a bunch of debris, proving that others have crashed before me. Once I’ve learned that there’s no way to fix my pod from inside of it, the exercise begins automatically, sending millions of robots to attack me, unaware that I am literally the only human even here, except for a bunch of corpses scattered around. From what I remember, I realize this must be a reenactment of the Battle of Kanapthes, which no human survived. I don’t know why they’re using real weapons, but I do know I have to get the hell out of here. I quickly learn that none of the other ships will work either, though, so my only hope is to reach the core processor of this training program, and shut this whole thing down. It’s only a few kilometers away, so I can make it if I’m smart about it. I peek over a ridge to inspect my surroundings, and a robot shoots me in the head. I roll down the hill, and die next to the other poor schmucks who probably had the same idea.

Microstory 837: Family Trip

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Our parents died in a plane crash when my two sisters and I were still just children. Well, it wasn’t so much a crash as a hole blew through the cabin, and their row of seats was sucked out. The rest of the plane landed somewhat safely on the highway. The news of it was overshadowed by certain other aircraft tragedies that happened on the same day a week earlier. The third man with them left a family behind too, which served to bring us all together. My older sister wasn’t quite eighteen years old, but she was given emancipation, and started taking care of all four of us. I didn’t appreciate until I got older how much she did for us. The youngest of our foster brothers was a child prodigy, and a scientific genius. We all moved into their house, and found it to be equipped with a full laboratory in the basement that would bring Dexter to tears. He became obsessed with time travel, as you can imagine, hoping that one day, he would see his parents again. He had no plans to change history, seeing that as far too dangerous. All he wanted was to be able to speak with them again, and we supported his delusion. We discovered nearly ten years later that he was not so crazy after all, when he asked us down to his lab to show us something, and dropped us all the way back to 1974 with absolutely no warning. He wasn’t exactly aiming for that year, but he apparently hadn’t worked out all the bugs, so this was where we found ourselves. Only then, standing at the welcome sign, did we realize our parents all grew up in the same small Iowa town. As far as we knew, my mother and father stepped onto that plane without knowing the passenger they were seated next to, or his wife, who had died of cancer two years prior.

But here we were in Watland, a town so small I don’t even think they bother putting it on the map in 2011. We asked our resident physicist to send us back, but he said his recall device was damaged in the trip and he would need time to fix it, so we decided to go ahead with his plan to meet the younger version of our parents, who were now still in grade school. It was a surreal experience, being older than mom and dad, smiling as they tried in vain to build a sand castle with the pebbles under the jungle gym during recess. We knelt down to help them, glad for the fact that the 1970s were a different time, and the staff was too busy smoking around the corner to be bothered about five grown adults at a playground. We talked about what their favorite subjects were in school, and who their friends were. Just then our foster sibling’s new parents came over. They really did know each other this whole time. We wondered whether they recognized each other on the plane, or if it was just this crazy coincidence, and they had been too long estranged. The bell rang to end recess, and we knew it was time to leave. Our brother flipped a switch, and told us he was ready, revealing that the device hadn’t really been broken, and he was just stalling for time. But he was wrong, because if it wasn’t broken before, it certainly was now. We were stuck in the past, and he didn’t have the materials he would need to build a new machine, and get us back home. He worked on it for the better part of the rest of the day, though, and realized there was some kind of temporal interference, which he was able to track by rewiring his device. It led us to the edge of a cliff, where we found an eclectic group of people, strapping themselves into parachutes, and other gear. They smiled as we approached, seeing our futuristic clothes, and knowing we didn’t belong there, just like them. They hinted that they were from further in the future than 2011, but wouldn’t say exactly when. They provided us with our own special parachutes, which would evidently read our unique temporal signatures, and take us back to our own time, while they went off to theirs. Our brother seemed to think this to be sound scientific logic, so we trusted them, and strapped in too, ultimately finding ourselves back in the basement we had left, not minutes ago. It was another twenty years before I looked at my adopted children, nieces, and nephews, and remembered that I had already met them...in 1974.

Microstory 836: Goodbye Children

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I’m standing in the corner. I’m the one who first discovered the message, but I’m nobody, so I just need to leave it to the professionals to deal with all this, and figure out what’s going on. When I noticed it, I thought it was some kind of hoax, but it still meant someone had tampered with one of the most precious documents in our nation’s history, so I had to alert my superior. She didn’t understand it either, so she reached out to her own boss. He didn’t know what it was about, so he went up the food chain, and on and on it went. No one knew what to make of it. We hear footsteps out in the hallway, and this feeling that we’re in the presence of darkness. A man walks into the room, immediately commanding it, even though no one seems to know exactly who he is. “What does it say?” he asks. The woman with the highest clearance there steps back from the table, and hands him the magnifying glass. “Goodbye, children. Please pretend you’re fighting for our cause,” he reads aloud. “Hm.” He’s thinking these words over. In the more than two hundred years that the United States Constitution has existed, no one has ever seen this. These words suddenly just appeared, right before my eyes, like they had been written in invisible ink. But I was just selected to place the document in a new encasement. Was that it? Was exposure to the air in the lab what revealed these words? Or was it something else? The mysterious man continues to think over what he read, then he nods. “So it’s time.” He leans over to someone in his entourage, and issues some kind of order, which prompts the lackey to leave. Then he scans the rooms, ensuring that he’s made eye contact with everyone here, but he misses me, because like I said, I’m nobody. “In May of 1836, President James Madison requested access to this copy of our Constitution. His petition was granted, not only because he was a former president, but also the Father of the Constitution, so it belonged to him. Acting as the last surviving member of Constitutional Convention, he encoded this message, designed to appear at a grave time in the future, when the country was at a turning point. The reëlection of a black man to the presidency seems to have triggered this event, and called my people to action. We were created decades after Madison’s death, interpreting his words to mean that our country must remain great. It will take the world four years to fully understand, but we are in charge now.” Then he takes out an assault rifle, and kills everyone here, but misses me, because I’m nobody.

The Advancement of Leona Matic: September 1, 2178

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Leona returned to the timeline with Dubravka on August 31, 2177, which was even better than the end of the day in 2176. Hanging there in the closet was the emergency teleporter. Hokusai had managed to send it back to them sometime during the interim year. She took it down and placed it back in its rightful place on her shirt, then jumped back to the ship with her new friend. Once there, she learned that no one knew anything about the note about Dubravka scratched on the door, nor was Hokusai able to aim the teleporter to the right location. It somehow just worked itself out, aided by some unknown angel.

The two of them rested until the end of the day, then both squeezed into the entrance for pocket two. Dubravka still needed somewhere to live, and pocket two was likely the safest. There were no concerns about some sort of angry mob or rebellion starting up there. She could have stayed on the ship, but she didn’t want to. It was getting cramped anyway, since their janitor was deemed innocent, and the man who stole Leona’s teleporter had to be kept locked up. They had to guess that Dubravka being the chooser version of Leona and Serif was enough to allow her to jump into the pockets, and this turned out to be right. They landed there together, a full five years after Annora’s murder. Leona was determined to continue the investigation, despite everything that had happened. Based on what little criminal profiling she was able to perform just by being an intuitive human being, she guessed that the chances the killer was back in pocket one were pretty high. Still, it wasn’t safe to go back there, at least not yet, so she might as well move forward, just hoping she hadn’t encountered the culprit yet.

The people of pocket two were actually quite welcoming to them. They all appeared to have been wide awake before the sun flipped on as a side effect of their arrival, like they were waiting. When she questioned this, a preteen or early teenaged girl stepped forward with a smile. “I’m an astral projector. I can visit anyone or any place. I can observe, or I can communicate with others, but I cannot interact with the world physically.”

What appeared to be the girl’s fathers stepped up behind her, each placing a hand on one of her shoulders. One spoke, “she has been using her gift to monitor the goings-on in the other dimensions, and on the ship itself. We are fully aware of your investigation, and are proud to announce that the killer is not amongst us.”

“How do you know this?” Leona asked.

“We’ve been conducting our own investigation.”

Now another man stepped forward. “I am no police detective, but I’ve watched a lot of public court cases on LoaTV. I know what kind of questions to ask. I interviewed every single one of the residents of this world years ago, multiple times. And I’ve been watching them ever since...for any suspicious activity.

Leona looked back to the astral projector. “You can only witness present events.”

“Thank God,” her other father said. “Otherwise, we would have had to accept her witnessing the murder itself, for the sake of the truth. Though we recognize the unfortunate fact that this makes your job much harder.”

Leona nodded understandingly. “Can you take people with you?”

“One or two,” the girl answered. “It’s a little harder.”

“I would have asked her to take me to the other dimensions for more interviews,” the self-professed investigator began. “Her fathers and I agreed, however, that it would not be appropriate for the girl to participate in that.”

“We hope you understand,” the first father said. “We allow her to watch from a distance, and make her come back to her body as soon as things become too...mature. She was only eight when this all happened.”

“Of course,” Leona said sincerely, before stepping back so she could address the whole crowd. “I want to thank you all for your cooperation. I understand that this has been a difficult time, being trapped in here. Others have not been so...” she trailed off looking for the words.

“Enlightened?” someone suggested.

“Humane? Civilized?” another offered.

Leona cracked a smile. “It’s just nice to know that I’ll be leaving my new friend here in good hands, and that I don’t have to do any work today,” she joked.

They laughed.

“Three years,” the astral projector said, to her fathers’ unease.

“What’s that?”

Her tone was more serious now. “In my culture, we become adults at sixteen. Life’s harder on Durus than on Earth. We don’t have the luxury of waiting to mature. In three years, I will catch this killer, because I’ll have been freed from my leash.”

“All right, that’s enough, Vitalie,” a father warned.

“Vitalie,” Leona said, “you’ve done so much. I can take it from here. You’re not on Durus anymore. This is a nice dimension. You should just enjoy your life.”

“But I can help,” Vitalie claimed. “And I have an obligation to; to use my powers for others. It’s not for long-distance calling. It’s to connect people, and with people.”

“That’s very honorable of you, and once you’re on Earth, maybe you can find your calling. While you’re on this ship, though, I think your fathers and I can agree that you should try and stay out of trouble.”

Leona was about to say some final words to the group, then enjoy the simulated sun for a while before returning to The Warren, when Vitalie stopped her. “You can talk to Serif again.”

“Vitalie, no.”

“That would actually be lovely,” Leona said.

“I’m afraid...” her father began. He then gave the crowd this look, and it caused them to disperse, and go back to their lives. “We can’t go to that planet.”

“It’s not a planet, it’s—”

“It is,” he interrupted. “We’ve seen it. We don’t let her go often. Only to monitor its growth. And it is growing. Fast.”

“Faster every day,” his husband added. “Come next year, it probably will be a full-fledged globe.”

“And there are people there,” the first one continued. “Thousands of people, and some of them might have powers. Some of these people with powers might be able to cause Vitalie harm.”

“If this is true, I do need to see it. She said she can take two, so one of you can come with me, and at the first sign of trouble, we’ll jump right back. We’ll go there as observers.” Leona directed her attention to Vitalie, “you can be invisible, right?”

“Right.” Vitalie was ready.

“Please, Mister...”

“Crawford. Wayne Crawford. This is my husband, Raphael Neville.”

“I know it’s asking a lot, but the safety of this ship, and every dimension attached to it, is at risk the larger that thing grows. Your daughter will be in danger whether she projects there or not, but I can stop it, as long as I’ve seen it.”

“Wayne,” Raphael said calmly. “She’s not a baby, and we have no real reason to believe anything can hurt her in there. Let her help.”

“She has helped,” Wayne argued.

“Let her help some more,” Raphael returned, just as calm.

“Okay,” Wayne agreed. “But I’ll be the one going with her.”

“As you wish, love,” Raphael said to him.

Leona took Vitalie’s left hand, and Wayne took her right, while Raphael went off to show Dubravka to her new quarters. Just before Vitalie projected them away, they saw the sun turn off.

They were standing on top of a butte, which was high enough to show mountains in the distance, and a city below. “They built all this that quickly?” Leona asked.

“We don’t know how they’re doing it. Somehow the space and vegetation increase seems rather normal, but yeah, the buildings are strange.”

“Serif!” they heard Saga’s voice behind them. “I see them!”

When they turned around, they could see Saga and Serif on the other side of the butte. The former was holding binoculars, while the latter was jogging towards her, holding a portable radio, which she spoke into, “Camden, they’re on their way to you.”

“This is pretty isolated,” Leona noted as the three observers were making their way across. “Do you feel comfortable letting me speak with them?”

Wayne wasn’t so sure, but Vitalie was. “I would be happy to open communication,” she said sternly.

Upon seeing Leona, Serif did that thing where she tried to hug her, only to be met with open air. “Dammit,” she said. “So close, yet so far away.”

“Report,” Leona said simply, trying to make this quick, even though she wanted to tell Serif everything she had been through without her.

“It’s growing exponentially,” Saga said. “The one good thing about it is that Adamina always creates new resources to keep ahead of the people that Esen creates.”

“Do you have any idea how we could stop this?”

“Short of killing two four-year-old children? No,” Serif said.

“Those people down there are interested in it, though.”

Leona was about to borrow Serif’s binoculars, but stopped herself when she remembered she wouldn’t even be able to touch them. “And you’re here to stop them?”

“We have no choice. The children are gods, even more dangerous than the original Durune sourge mages. They die, the world is thrown into chaos. We’ll have to protect them their entire lives. Right now, Camden’s keeping watch in the city they’re visiting.”

“Why do the people down there want them dead? This world ain’t big enough for all of them?”

“They’re humans,” Saga explained vaguely. They weren’t created by Esen’s power. They’re the original passengers of Warren pocket four, and they have no place in this new world, so they’re pretty upset.”

“Esen doesn’t create humans? He only makes paramounts?” Leona assumed.

Serif shook her head. “They’re not human at all. Esen doesn’t make scion in his own image. His...subconscious preschooler mind, I guess, has come up with something different. They’re an approximation of a human, but definitely not like us.”

Leona looked to Wayne and Vitalie, who each abashedly indicated that they knew all about this, but just hadn’t said anything.

“It gets worse,” Saga said. Then she sighed, hesitating. “Esen creates a new one of these...Maramon he randomly chose to start calling them with each passing breath.”

“What?” Leona was astonished. “How long has he been doing that?”

“One hundred and eight days. I was right, the girl developed faster.”

Leona quite nearly gulped, starting to do the math, but not having enough information. “Every breath?”

“I’ve been using my nursing skills to get his breathing under control, so he breathes less, but it’s still quite a bit. I estimate twenty breaths per minute.”

Wayne didn’t really know what that meant. “How many...Maramon would that mean there are?”

Saga ceded the floor to Leona, who had already completed the math. “Three million, one hundred and ten thousand, four hundred people...give or take a few thousand, depending on breathing fluctuations.”

Saga nodded, having already calculated this with pen and paper. “In a year, there will be over thirteen million. More, actually, because he creates them as adults, so they’ll be having their own children at some point soon.”

“By the time we reach Earth,” Leona pointed out, “there will be forty-five million of them. The good news is that their birth rate is actually lower than what we have on Earth.”

“That’s assuming he doesn’t grow up to be a power-hungry dick who wants as many people under his control as possible. He’ll start hyperventilating just to build more followers. Meanwhile, based on the curvature that I’ve done my best calculating, the size of this world is shaping up to be comparable to Earth. If this doesn’t stop eventually, they’ll just run out of usable space.”

“All right,” Wayne finally said. “We’re leaving.”

“Wait, not yet,” Leona pleaded.

He took his daughter by the hand, and urged her to take Leona’s.

“I love you,” Serif said quickly.

“Tell Hokusai what’s going on, and that she needs to get us the hell out of here ASAP,” Saga added.

Vitalie took her hand, and spirited them away.

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Missy’s Mission: The Future is Written (Part V)

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There was a dichotomy for Missy and Dar’cy as they stepped out of Westland Rehabilitation Center, after having spent one year in decent prison conditions. On one side were the cheers and smiles from their fans, accompanied by a group of protesters using this whole incident as a vehicle to open discussion on legal reform as a whole. On the other side were angry protesters, adamantly opposed to their release at all, or their move to a more lax facility. A few believed they should be put to death, or at least that their deaths should moved up on the schedule, like their victim’s was. But after the scandal that landed them a greater sentence than they supposedly earned by Durune law, no deathwatcher in their right mind would risk their own freedom by being involved with the two of them, in any capacity. Others harbored less violent thoughts against them, believing they deserved nothing short of life in prison, perhaps even back in the considerably less hospitable Silversmith Pen. Most of the protesters just thought they owed the full original sentence of eleven years, possibly with parole.

They stood in between these two groups, wondering exactly how far their house was, and how they were going to get there. A car pulled up from the side, and stopped right in front of them. A man stepped out of the driver’s side, and opened the backseat door for them. “Please come with me.”

“Who are you?”

“I work for The Librarian,” he answered. Maybe now that they had faced the consequences of their actions, she had decided to help them with their quest for the cure for chooserism.

They crawled inside, but before they could put their seatbelts on, the driver was opening the door on the other side of the car. “We’re here.”

Missy stopped and looked around. The prison, and all the people around it, were gone. They were parked right next to the main library branch. “This is a teleporting car,” she noted.

“Yes,” the driver answered.

“Why would you need a car at all, if you can teleport?” Dar’cy questioned.

The driver took her hand, and helped her out cordially. “I cannot teleport,” he explained. “The car can.”

A woman they didn’t know stepped out of the building and greeted them. “My name is Keuhla Derricks. I am The Sublibrarian.”

“Oh, so you’re on duty when the Librarian is busy?” Missy guessed.

“Or dead, as is the case now, yes. My family has been passing the torch for decades, waiting for the need to take responsibility.”

“The Librarian is dead?”

“Yes,” Keuhla said. “They all are. Come inside, we will discuss it.”

Such a good day suddenly turned terrible. Once they were inside, they found the place to be deserted. Apparently, few people saw the use for it now that it was back in the right dimension. Or perhaps they were just scared.

“When you pulled the building out of its temporal dimension, time started catching up with it. I told you that everyone was dead, but that is not entirely accurate. A few had entered the dimension at a young enough age to still be alive today.”

“They aged rapidly?” Missy asked, knowing the answer.

“Indeed. But do not feel guilty about this. You could not have known this would happen, nor would there have been any way to bring the library back without this side effect.”

“But all those people,” Dar’cy disagreed. “They’re gone now.”

“True, but I hold no sympathy for them. They came in here to escape. They didn’t escape the horrible abuses of a loved one, or the tyranny of a harsh ruler. They came to escape reality. They came to stick their noses in books, so they wouldn’t have to deal with the little inconveniences of life in the real world.”

“But they were doing research,” Missy cried, feeling again that guilt she was told she didn’t need. “They were learning. What is more noble than learning?”

Keuhla looked at them over her glasses, which always made Missy uncomfortable and agitated when people did that. “What is learning but a precursor to application? The people here contributed nothing to society. They were selfish and closed off. They would have died here having accomplished nothing beyond their own enrichment.”

“And the Librarian? Was she just as bad?”

“It was her job to protect the library. As you’ve expressed, the purpose of knowledge is to share it, and what you did was in service to the spirit to the exchange of ideas. She died proud of you for doing something she had forgotten she should have been working towards figuring out. Do not mourn our loss of her, for she was much older than she looked. The only thing that matters is the library, which is now my responsibility.” She started ruffling through some papers in a bag that was leaning against her chair. “As praxis demands, I will honor her deal with you, by providing the necessary tools for you to find what you’re looking for.” She placed a book on the table between them. There was nothing drawn or written on the cover. Nor was there anything written on the inside.

“It’s blank,” Dar’cy pointed out.

“Do we need lemon juice, or something?”

“It’s a time book.”

Was that supposed to mean something to them?

“It hasn’t been written yet,” she added. “You’re going to have to find someone invoke the text from the future.”

“You wouldn’t happen to kno—” Dar’cy began to ask.

“No,” Keuhla interrupted. “Last I heard of someone like that, who could do something like that, they lived seventy years ago.” She stood up with finality. “I’m just the one who gives you the book.”

Dar’cy looked like she was about to fight her on the imprecision of her help, but Missy stopped her. “Thank you very much. I’m never going to stop being sorry about your boss, or all those people.”

“I know someone who can remove those memories from your brain,” Keuhla said as the other two were turning away.

“But can they remove the scar on my soul?”

The driver ferried them to the house that Andromeda built. He took them the long way around, without using the teleportation feature, so they could get used to being on the outside again. In an odd role reversal, he gave them a silver coin, instead of the other way around. They tried to refuse it, but he said it was important that they take it. When they walked in, they found the place to be immaculate. They hadn’t needed to cover any furniture with blankets, or anything. The appliances switched on without issue, and the faucets worked perfectly. Either someone had come in occasionally to affect maintenance, or the wards that one guy placed on their home had preserved it. Even the food they had left there was still good.

That evening, they stood the book up on end, and placed it at the head of the table while they ate dinner, almost like it was their guest of honor, who just wasn’t hungry right now. They both stared at it, independently trying to decide how they might go about finding someone to make the thing legible. The obvious option was to petition for access to the paramount database, but their relationship with the government was rather awkward at the moment, so that didn’t seem like the absolute best idea.

“Why don’t we just find someone to take us to the future, and read a copy of the book after it’s written?” Dar’cy suggested.

“Time travel trips are expensive ‘an hell. We ain’t got no money. Besides, she never said when it was written. Could be a year, could be a millennium.”

The silence returned for a few more moments.

“We could hold it up to a time mirror,” Missy offered. “Not the easiest way to read text, but not impossible.”

“Do you know anyone who owns a time mirror?” Dar’cy asked. “Besides Leona?”

“Wait, why don’t you just thread it to the future?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to use my powers.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Solidarity.”

“This mission is to find a way to get rid of my powers, not yours. Go ahead and give it a shot.”

Dar’cy took the book in her hands, and concentrated on threading to some future point in time, not really worried about exactly when in the timeline. Missy watched Dar’cy’s body shudder around a little, but it never disappeared completely. She stopped and tried a few more times, but never went anywhere. “My God, it’s like this thing doesn’t exist in the future, or even the past. It’s perpetually stuck in the present.”

Missy shook her head. “This was all worth a try, but there’s a reason the Sublibrarian gave this to us, and why she told us how we can read it. We have to do it that way, or not at all.”

“If we can’t talk to the government, I don’t know how we’ll find someone with the right powers,” she said, like a defeatist.

“They’re not the only people on this planet. There’s also a reason we pushed for voluntarily staying in jail for all that time. We have friends now.”

“We don’t have friends,” Dar’cy clarified. “We have fans.”

“Even better. They tend to be more loyal. Let’s reach out, and see what people know. If they don’t know anyone, they probably know someone who does. We’ll talk to as many people as it takes to get to the bottom of this.”

“Okay,” Dar’cy said, nodding. “I’m down.”

They did as they said they would, and they did it for weeks. They traveled all over the globe, finding people willing to help them any way they could. Many had never heard of anybody who could do anything like that, and couldn’t even lead them to someone who might. Instead, they helped by providing them some good home cooked meals, and places to stay, when they were too far away from home. Of course there were those who denied them from the start, because of Oskari Belker’s death. What would they say if they knew quite how many people Missy had killed? More importantly, how was the Sublibrarian keeping that all under wraps.

They started out with enthusiasm, and twinkling eyes, but as time went on, the tedium wore on them. They became depressed and hopeless. But like a prime minister searching for the love of his life on the longest street in the world, just before they were ready to give up, a pretty brunette answered the door, and knew who they were asking about. The man with said power evidently lived right next door.

He opened up, not with disgust at seeing them, but not with any level of joy either. By all accounts, he was an extremely apathetic person, with an unfathomable poker face.

“Do you know who we are?” Dar’cy asked him.

He shook his head lightly, and shrugged.

“No matter,” Missy said. “We have this book.”

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“We don’t really know.” She presented it to him, and showed some of the pages. “It’s supposed to help us, but the words haven’t been written yet.”

He put on some reading glasses, and peered at the book. Then he took it from her, and examined it closer. “How did you know how to find me?”

“We’ve been at this for over a month,” Dar’cy replied. “Your neighbor seems to think you can do something about this.”

“That woman’s an idiot. As is whomever told you this was a time book.” He swung his arm, and tossed it right into the flames squirming in his fireplace. “It’s just a journal with blank cover.”

“What?”

“I imagine you were conned. How much did they make you pay for it?”

“Nothing. She just gave it to us. It was...it was a present.”

“Hm. It was a bad present. Maybe she’s the one who overpaid for it. I guarantee it’s not a time book.”

“How do you know for sure?”

He ushered them into his house, and set them down on the couch while he went in the back. Dar’cy grabbed a rice bag from the coffee table, as well as Missy’s hand. “Just in case he comes back with a shotgun, and I have to thread us the hell out of here,” she whispered.

He returned quickly, holding a book of his own. “I know the burning journal isn’t a time book, because this is the time book; the only one of its kind. And I know this...because I created it.”

< > Entire Story

Microstory 835: The King and the Scourge

< > Table of Contents

Games. My whole world is about games. Our scientists long ago predicted this concept of the singularity, wherein technology goes so far beyond what we believe it can do, that it’s impossible to know what will come of it. Science fiction writers and futurists tried to come up with their ideas of what would look like in the future, but they were always off the mark. It’s understandable; no one was expecting them to be perfectly accurate, because they were interesting and entertaining. The truth is that the future is boring. Technology, as it turns out, was always working towards one thing: making life easier to live. We have nanites swimming through our blood, constantly monitoring our health, and alerting us to what we need to improve, or to fix an issue they can’t handle on their own. They tell us what to eat, which exercises to do, and how long to sleep. Meanwhile, other nanites are surging through our brains, allowing us to connect with each other on a telepathic level, or experience the limitless possibilities of a virtual construct with no rules. But these constructs are just that; not real, and after a good decade of this, people starting signing off, because what was the point? Life was boring inside cyberspace, and outside of it, and since we figured out how to subvert death, nothing held any weight. There was no danger, so we had to find ways of creating this ourselves, and doing so in a world where physical laws are immutable. Hence the games. Some are voluntary, some are forced. Some are deadly...most are deadly. For some games, you even have to forego any of your transhumanistic abilities that normally prevent your life from ending permanently. I am technically in one of those games now. Fortunately, it is by no measure the most dangerous one.

Centuries ago, children would play a fairly simple game called King of the Mountain. The object was to be the one person at the top of a hill, and the only way to maintain that position was to fight off any comers. The rules varied, according to how rough the players wanted to be, but they never killed each other, because murder was pretty frowned upon in those days. In the new world, however, it’s normal. We are not just playing a deadlier version of the original game though. Ours focuses more on those left at the bottom of the hill, which is why the creators call it Scourge of the Valley. As with the original, the goal is to get to the summit, but you can’t get there just by running up, and resisting anyone who’s trying to keep you back. It’s more deliberate and methodical than that, combining elements of strategy games, such as the ancient chess. It gets pretty complicated, but the idea is to move as far as possible by killing as few competitors as possible. Sure, you can massacre everyone, and get to the top quickly, but once you do, you’re in real trouble, because every player whose death you were responsible for, now has the opportunity to take your summit for themselves. And if they win, you die for good. No one has ever gotten out of this game having never died at all. Ghosts are incredibly difficult to destroy, and they’re very good at killing others. I’ve always been convinced that the only way to survive unscathed is to make it to the top without killing anyone else to get there. I’m about to prove it. Wish me luck.