Thanks to those of you who read the first installment of "Bleed" and were willing to send comments (many of my friends chose to send theirs via private email; really, guys, I'm not that sensitive).
If you didn't read Part One, you should probably do so before attempting this, because I don't do synopses:
Bleed
An original science fiction story by
Steve Newton
(c)2008; all rights reserved
Part Two:
—Space Opera, before he crashed into the Tac Console for the SRSS Jagdpanther, throwing the lieutenant manning the station back in a cinematic flood of sparks. The captain—a balding, middle-aged man in poorly fitting tights—was coming out of his seat as if in slow-motion when Denny Montoya jerked both the versers and NPCs right out of the bridge, leaving Sheridan alone with Pale Evelyn.
Nik said, >>Keep her occupied for a few seconds, John, and I can convert this into an Arena.<< Arena code-walls could isolate two or more versers from everything else—even the disengage protocols—at least in theory. Sheridan doubted that they could hold the girl, but his current strategy of hot pursuit was working very well, either. He felt like asking himself what he sometimes asked his dog when he caught the mutt chasing cars: “What are you gonna do with it when you catch it, girl?”
He thought back, I’ll see if I can get her to talk to me. But once you’ve got the Arena up, I want a complete shutdown. All the verses, all at once. That’s the only way we’re going to isolate her.
>>Shit, John. I can’t do that. The megas will close down DogFence. You may be doing this gig for kicks, but I got a mortgage and palimony to pay.<<
Surprisingly, it was Old, not Denny, who supported the Archangel.
>>He’s right, Nik. I’ve been scanning her damn code. Not only have I never seen anything like it, but I’m betting that if we really piss her off she’s got the capability to shut everything down herself. Permanently. I don’t think the megas would like that, either.<<
>>All right, all right. But Johnnie, I’ll need at least three or four minutes to set you and your sweetheart there in an independent bubble verse that’ll keep running when I tell Denny to crash the world. If she somehow groks what I’m doing and can jump out right when we flip the switch, we’re all on the street.<<
Sheridan opened his arms wide, tried to look innocent. For an Archangel—given that attitude usually had more to do with success than anything else—it was a stretch.
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said softly. “I just need to know who or what you are.”
She cocked her head, blinked. Somehow, in a subliminal fashion that he’d not had time to notice before, the motions looked jerky. Not pixilated or distorted, just not quite….
Human?
“I’m Evelyn,” she said. “I work here as a servant.”
“Here? Maybe I’d buy that in Discworld or Midgard, lady, but this is a spaceship. You don’t look dressed for hard vacuum to me.”
Another look around, her eyes widening as if she was only now taking in her surroundings, another low-level feeling on Sheridan’s part that something wasn’t right.
“This is not where I stay. You frightened me, and I ran. I should go back.”
Going back was a concept he didn’t want to get any closer to.
“I’m really sorry if I scared you. On the other hand, you didn’t exactly seem defenseless.”
Now, shrinking down and pulling her tattered cloak tightly around her shoulders, Evelyn looked exactly like a desperate teenaged girl. “There are people who try to hurt me,” she said.
Denny, what was the name of the verser who died? The one who created Pale Evelyn?
>>Lark MacGowan. Johnnie, what are you thinking? Don’t spook her, for Goddess’ sake<< Sheridan didn’t answer. Sometimes you had to ignore the voices in your head.
“Are you Lark?” he asked softly. “Or did Lark create you?”
“I died,” she said. “I mean, Lark died. We were very sad, and it was hard to keep going.”
Repressing the thought that his eighth-grade English teacher would not have considered that last exposition a very good paragraph, John said, “Yes, Lark died. You didn’t exist—at least not the way you do now—before she died.”
“Lark was a bright spot. There is too much anger here. People who want to hurt others, even if the others are just shadows. Lark is different. She made me different.”
>>I need one more minute, Johnnie. Keep her talking.<<
Evelyn’s brow crinkled; she frowned, said, “The three that keep talking to you. Who are they?”
Uh-oh. This is getting way too weird.
“They’re my Wizards, my advisors. You can hear them?”
A shake of her head: again something not exactly right about the gesture.
“No, I see them connect to you. They trail behind you like spider webs.”
Old: >>She sees in code view, kid. Got to be.<<
Versers can’t access code view.
>>Don’t tell me you’re just now figuring out she’s not a verser.<<
“Why are they trying to trap me here?” It was a differently pitched voice. Harder. Sheridan flinched.
>>Ten more seconds, don’t lose her, damnit.<<
You think this is easy, you give it a try.
“Evelyn. Lark. Whoever you are, we don’t want to trap you. We just need to understand you. That’s our function. I don’t know what yours is.”
>>Now.<<
John felt the seven mindverses switch off. He had thousands of ties and anchors, so fine that they’d even continued to function at some involuntary level when Nik had constructed his isolation bubble. Now they were gone.
So was Evelyn.
>>What the hell just happened?<< Nik screamed inside his head. >>There was no place for her to go.<<
Montoya: >>Maybe you killed her, Nik. Maybe she needed the connections to survive.<<
>>Not a bloody chance of that,<< Old said. >>Her code didn’t fizzle, it left.<<
Sheridan felt his head clear. He knew where Evelyn/Lark/whoever had gone. The others would figure it out momentarily. He ignored their dialogue, concentrating on replaying the last few minutes of conversation. There was something there he’d missed. What?
>>Oh damn, we’re screwed.<< Nik again; he’d gotten it. >>She opened a portal into Anarch Key. We shut it all down for nothing. We’re toasties.<<
Only if we let her go.
Denny said, >>We can’t follow her there, Johnny. You know that.<<
I can. Old, I’m going to give you a file ID. Load Sheridan467-NKP-Aleph. Let it overwrite your control protocols.
Seconds later he sensed cynical laughter. >>You are one sneaky prick, John Sheridan. Does DogFence know you go slumming?<<
Montoya said, >>Johnny, this is a no-go. You enter the Key and we can’t even monitor you, let alone provide support. You won’t be an Archangel, just a verser.<<
Despite himself, Sheridan smiled and shot back, Denny, you always insisted that Archangel is more a state of mind than a big arsenal. Backing out on your own theory?
>>John, we can put you in there,<< Nik objected, >>but I have no idea just where she is. The Key’s a pretty big place, and your bios are already in the yellow. You don’t have a lot of time.<<
She’ll find me, Sheridan responded. Besides, we stop now and the megas close DogFence. Your board’s going to start melting with incoming in maybe fifteen-twenty more seconds. We don’t have a choice.
>>What the hell. We can spend the time working on our resumes and rebooting the rest. You got thirty minutes max, unless your BP spikes. Then I let Denny pull your plug.<<
Sheridan carefully refrained from sub-vocalizing the thought that Nik and Denny were in for a big surprise when they tried to yank him out of the Key without his concurrence.
You do what you have to do, Nik. Now send me in before they come shut you down.
Simeon Landis and Aidan Hawkfeather engineered the basic architecture underlying the mindverses in 2019, when both of them were under contract to the Perseus-Baysoft consortium. Simeon was happy: he wanted to make money. Aidan had a more philosophical bent (although he didn’t object to being wealthy), and always nursed the hope that versing would develop into an open architecture, driven from the bottom up. No such luck with the megas involved.
In 2023 Hawkfeather stole a truckload of now-proprietary code from Perseus, merged that with some new security protocols he’d been developing on the side, and launched Anarch Key. No rules, no filters, no storylines, and plenty of memory available if you wanted to create your own territory. Hawkfeather disappeared one step ahead of the summons for copyright and patent infringement, but when the megas tried to crash the Un-verse, they abruptly discovered who’d been the brains of the partnership with Landis.
Not only had Hawkfeather stolen their code, he had also interlaced the anchors of the Key into their own servers so intricately that his creation essentially represented an inoperable tumor.
Any attack on Anarch Key would take everything else down with it.
—walking down a packed earth road through an apparently endless desert of cracked earth.
He always entered through Furnace, a wasteland of minimal code that nobody but a near-cretinous local AI bothered to maintain. He appreciated its starkness.
Sheridan manifested as a gaunt, brown-skinned man with a walking stick whose features were obscured by a cowl. He switched to code view, smiling at the thought of Denny’s worry that in the Key he’d be >>just a verser.<< Old folks too often mistook their maps for the territory.
The Furnace was an entropy bowl whose forbidding visual distance disappeared when you traced the sparse lines of dun, canary, and fuschia connecting it to Jersey Shore, Wittgenstein, and Godland. He cast his awareness out, looking for any indication of shimmering black knots.
I’m here, by myself this time. Let’s talk.
She came to him out of Genesis, a whirlpool of code that—when he returned to visual—became a swirling, strato-cumulus cloud occasionally taking on a vague impression of Pale Evelyn’s face.
He waited, giving her a chance to check for anchors and traces.
The cloud coalesced into a column of translucent air and dust beside him, gradually evolving into a pale young woman with filthy, stringy black hair wearing a brown woolen cloak and cheap sandals (strap broken on the left ankle).
“Are you going to try to kill me again?”
Sheridan said, “We weren’t trying to kill you, Evelyn, just keep you tied down long enough to find out what you are.”
“This was the last place we could go. They brought back the other places, but I don’t think we can trust them any more.”
John dropped into a squatting position, tossed aside his staff.
“Oh, you can trust the fact that they’ll never be allowed to turn off all the other verses again. And they can’t mess with this one at all. It’s different.”
The girl nodded slowly, another of those not-quite-right movements. Was her face more angular here?
“Yes,” she said. “I can feel that. This place is tied into the roots of all the others.”
He drew in the dirt with his index finger.
“At first I thought you’d be some geek who’d managed to pirate Pale Evelyn after Lark died. But nobody can do what you do with code, not from home.”
She didn’t say anything.
“So I thought maybe Lark had uploaded her consciousness into the verses. Don’t know how it could be done, but everybody has always assumed that with enough processing power you could turn the trick.”
A crystalline tear appeared in Evelyn’s eye; she said, “Lark died. She was sweet, and in much pain.” The tear froze on her cheek.
“After that, it occurred to me that the code structures underneath all the verses had become rich enough to generate sapience spontaneously. But that didn’t make sense, since you’re clearly in the verses.”
Puffy white cloud-like things started to swirl around her sandaled feet.
Sheridan stood up.
“So I finally realized that the key question is not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘How many of you are there?’”
There was a long pause. The ground beneath Evelyn’s feet began to firm up and gain moisture. She couldn’t remain in a place with so little code, he realized, without quickly affecting it.
six [comparative disjunction] when [chronological determinant] started more than thirty [indeterminate estimation]
Sheridan waited. Either they would tell him or they wouldn’t. He had no power of coercion in Anarch Key.
encountered [your] wavefront emissions [?far from here?] lark did not know [annotate emphasis] sigma draconis weak [emphasis determinant] signal [incomplete disjunction] many disbelieve [?group/swarm/] survival; following to a source were [mostly] correct
John didn’t have to ask why they’d settled into the verses. There wasn’t a denser concentration of code on the planet.
“Are you explorers? Scouts?”
refugees fugitives from coherence [comparative disjunction] atavisms flee
“Resistance is futile,” Sheridan said under his breath. “Is this Coherence still seeking you?”
coherence never seeks expands weak [emphasis determinant] signal conjecture unnoticed [disjunction] why [all] agreed to take the risk
He gestured and his stick leapt into his hands. He said, “Unfortunately, your signal is very strong here, relatively speaking. You’ve left a trail that more people like me will try to follow. You do perceive that this existence is not our natural environment?”
lark taught pasts [chronological indeterminant] [?we?] have been the same lost information [interrogative disjunction] all others who come so angry
“This is where we play. Physical bodies have their drawbacks—hormones and stuff. Versers can live out their fantasies here without hurting anybody. If you want to keep on living here, you’re going to have to adopt a lower profile.” He explained that the verses except Anarch Key were commercial enterprises, a concept they clearly did not comprehend. When he outlined what DogFence did, and the role of portals and Archangels, they drew a rough comparison to certain functions of the Coherence.
prepare teach essential[s] [interrogative disjunction] prohibition reluctance
“No, I’ll teach you. It will probably work better if you just let me think about it and you skim it off the top.” Blue, scaly flower-things were emerging from the now-fertile soil at Evelyn’s feet, twining up her legs and sniffing toward him. Sheridan thought about synchronicity protocols, portals, filters, and anomaly-capture subroutines. He visualized the three meta-keys that he knew, and the passwords to a half-dozen caches of illegal spoofs. The Archangel explained again that the overwhelming strength of their codes was such that all six of them together would always eventually draw outside attention. The process took an interminable time—perhaps ten seconds.
[comprehension] distinction hiding from coherence [comparative disjunction] similarities [interrogative disjunction] speak [exchange] again
“Can you talk to me so that my Wizards can’t eavesdrop?”
two [calculated determinant] avoid stealth no observation [disjunction] location [?current?] secure six [conjunction] six know what two perceive
The longer he communicated with them, the more alien their speech (or thought) patterns became. Vaguely, he wondered why; maybe when they were communicating through Evelyn they jacked the local AI and let it handle the syntax. Later.
John could actually feel the corporate intelligence dissolving into smaller sapient units, and those sub-elements start to slip away, when—
leave [taking] lark evelyn [emotive disjunction] sorrow
—his eyes to find a concerned Denny Montoya staring down at him.
“Goddess, Johnny, you gave me a scare,” she breathed. “I thought I’d lost you.”
They were alone; Montoya explained that a few minutes earlier several dozen corporate types had descended on the DogFence compound, hauling Nik and Old out to interrogate them about the system crash. She’d barely convinced them that somebody had to stay behind to monitor the Archangel’s vitals while he cycled back out.
Then she smiled broadly, said, “But we got them, Johnny! Nik figured it out maybe a minute or two before the suits showed up. He got to wondering about the chase sequence—why she went where she did—so he had Old run the subscriptions of every verser in any of the three locations.”
Speech still somewhat slurred, Sheridan said, “What’d he find?”
“One of the Doomsday Riders, that quaddie in Masque, and the starship captain all share the same tower/block address!” she said. “We think they all got together and somehow spoofed the inactive player caches….” A rushed hypothesis followed, about a conspiracy to set up a series of bleed portals between verses.
Sheridan didn’t think Nik believed a word of it, but he had to admire the CYA instincts that had led Sebastian to compose so intricate a story so fast. Better yet, it relieved a supposedly unsuspecting Archangel of any immediate prospects of corporate debriefing.
A good five minutes before Denny would have preferred, John Clark Sheridan sat up and said, “I need to get home. I want a good night’s sleep before they think about taking a crack at me.”
She made the appropriate negating motherly noises, but Denny had never been able to refuse him anything. Ten minutes later, the Archangel hopped down the front steps and unlocked his bike from the rack. The guards knew him by sight, and already had the gate swinging open as he shifted, pedaling furiously to pick up speed for the hill just outside. He waved back at them with his typical daredevil grin as he launched into the weaving traffic.
Grand Uncle Aidan had slipped into town, which meant Mom was cooking sausage lasagna tonight. That you did not miss. Besides, since behind a dozen cut-outs Grunk actually owned DogFence, Johnny figured he’d find today’s story interesting.
Next week (if you're still with me): Incident at Gliese 581c
If you didn't read Part One, you should probably do so before attempting this, because I don't do synopses:
Bleed
An original science fiction story by
Steve Newton
(c)2008; all rights reserved
Part Two:
—Space Opera, before he crashed into the Tac Console for the SRSS Jagdpanther, throwing the lieutenant manning the station back in a cinematic flood of sparks. The captain—a balding, middle-aged man in poorly fitting tights—was coming out of his seat as if in slow-motion when Denny Montoya jerked both the versers and NPCs right out of the bridge, leaving Sheridan alone with Pale Evelyn.
Nik said, >>Keep her occupied for a few seconds, John, and I can convert this into an Arena.<< Arena code-walls could isolate two or more versers from everything else—even the disengage protocols—at least in theory. Sheridan doubted that they could hold the girl, but his current strategy of hot pursuit was working very well, either. He felt like asking himself what he sometimes asked his dog when he caught the mutt chasing cars: “What are you gonna do with it when you catch it, girl?”
He thought back, I’ll see if I can get her to talk to me. But once you’ve got the Arena up, I want a complete shutdown. All the verses, all at once. That’s the only way we’re going to isolate her.
>>Shit, John. I can’t do that. The megas will close down DogFence. You may be doing this gig for kicks, but I got a mortgage and palimony to pay.<<
Surprisingly, it was Old, not Denny, who supported the Archangel.
>>He’s right, Nik. I’ve been scanning her damn code. Not only have I never seen anything like it, but I’m betting that if we really piss her off she’s got the capability to shut everything down herself. Permanently. I don’t think the megas would like that, either.<<
>>All right, all right. But Johnnie, I’ll need at least three or four minutes to set you and your sweetheart there in an independent bubble verse that’ll keep running when I tell Denny to crash the world. If she somehow groks what I’m doing and can jump out right when we flip the switch, we’re all on the street.<<
Sheridan opened his arms wide, tried to look innocent. For an Archangel—given that attitude usually had more to do with success than anything else—it was a stretch.
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said softly. “I just need to know who or what you are.”
She cocked her head, blinked. Somehow, in a subliminal fashion that he’d not had time to notice before, the motions looked jerky. Not pixilated or distorted, just not quite….
Human?
“I’m Evelyn,” she said. “I work here as a servant.”
“Here? Maybe I’d buy that in Discworld or Midgard, lady, but this is a spaceship. You don’t look dressed for hard vacuum to me.”
Another look around, her eyes widening as if she was only now taking in her surroundings, another low-level feeling on Sheridan’s part that something wasn’t right.
“This is not where I stay. You frightened me, and I ran. I should go back.”
Going back was a concept he didn’t want to get any closer to.
“I’m really sorry if I scared you. On the other hand, you didn’t exactly seem defenseless.”
Now, shrinking down and pulling her tattered cloak tightly around her shoulders, Evelyn looked exactly like a desperate teenaged girl. “There are people who try to hurt me,” she said.
Denny, what was the name of the verser who died? The one who created Pale Evelyn?
>>Lark MacGowan. Johnnie, what are you thinking? Don’t spook her, for Goddess’ sake<< Sheridan didn’t answer. Sometimes you had to ignore the voices in your head.
“Are you Lark?” he asked softly. “Or did Lark create you?”
“I died,” she said. “I mean, Lark died. We were very sad, and it was hard to keep going.”
Repressing the thought that his eighth-grade English teacher would not have considered that last exposition a very good paragraph, John said, “Yes, Lark died. You didn’t exist—at least not the way you do now—before she died.”
“Lark was a bright spot. There is too much anger here. People who want to hurt others, even if the others are just shadows. Lark is different. She made me different.”
>>I need one more minute, Johnnie. Keep her talking.<<
Evelyn’s brow crinkled; she frowned, said, “The three that keep talking to you. Who are they?”
Uh-oh. This is getting way too weird.
“They’re my Wizards, my advisors. You can hear them?”
A shake of her head: again something not exactly right about the gesture.
“No, I see them connect to you. They trail behind you like spider webs.”
Old: >>She sees in code view, kid. Got to be.<<
Versers can’t access code view.
>>Don’t tell me you’re just now figuring out she’s not a verser.<<
“Why are they trying to trap me here?” It was a differently pitched voice. Harder. Sheridan flinched.
>>Ten more seconds, don’t lose her, damnit.<<
You think this is easy, you give it a try.
“Evelyn. Lark. Whoever you are, we don’t want to trap you. We just need to understand you. That’s our function. I don’t know what yours is.”
>>Now.<<
John felt the seven mindverses switch off. He had thousands of ties and anchors, so fine that they’d even continued to function at some involuntary level when Nik had constructed his isolation bubble. Now they were gone.
So was Evelyn.
* * *
>>What the hell just happened?<< Nik screamed inside his head. >>There was no place for her to go.<<
Montoya: >>Maybe you killed her, Nik. Maybe she needed the connections to survive.<<
>>Not a bloody chance of that,<< Old said. >>Her code didn’t fizzle, it left.<<
Sheridan felt his head clear. He knew where Evelyn/Lark/whoever had gone. The others would figure it out momentarily. He ignored their dialogue, concentrating on replaying the last few minutes of conversation. There was something there he’d missed. What?
>>Oh damn, we’re screwed.<< Nik again; he’d gotten it. >>She opened a portal into Anarch Key. We shut it all down for nothing. We’re toasties.<<
Only if we let her go.
Denny said, >>We can’t follow her there, Johnny. You know that.<<
I can. Old, I’m going to give you a file ID. Load Sheridan467-NKP-Aleph. Let it overwrite your control protocols.
Seconds later he sensed cynical laughter. >>You are one sneaky prick, John Sheridan. Does DogFence know you go slumming?<<
Montoya said, >>Johnny, this is a no-go. You enter the Key and we can’t even monitor you, let alone provide support. You won’t be an Archangel, just a verser.<<
Despite himself, Sheridan smiled and shot back, Denny, you always insisted that Archangel is more a state of mind than a big arsenal. Backing out on your own theory?
>>John, we can put you in there,<< Nik objected, >>but I have no idea just where she is. The Key’s a pretty big place, and your bios are already in the yellow. You don’t have a lot of time.<<
She’ll find me, Sheridan responded. Besides, we stop now and the megas close DogFence. Your board’s going to start melting with incoming in maybe fifteen-twenty more seconds. We don’t have a choice.
>>What the hell. We can spend the time working on our resumes and rebooting the rest. You got thirty minutes max, unless your BP spikes. Then I let Denny pull your plug.<<
Sheridan carefully refrained from sub-vocalizing the thought that Nik and Denny were in for a big surprise when they tried to yank him out of the Key without his concurrence.
You do what you have to do, Nik. Now send me in before they come shut you down.
* * *
Simeon Landis and Aidan Hawkfeather engineered the basic architecture underlying the mindverses in 2019, when both of them were under contract to the Perseus-Baysoft consortium. Simeon was happy: he wanted to make money. Aidan had a more philosophical bent (although he didn’t object to being wealthy), and always nursed the hope that versing would develop into an open architecture, driven from the bottom up. No such luck with the megas involved.
In 2023 Hawkfeather stole a truckload of now-proprietary code from Perseus, merged that with some new security protocols he’d been developing on the side, and launched Anarch Key. No rules, no filters, no storylines, and plenty of memory available if you wanted to create your own territory. Hawkfeather disappeared one step ahead of the summons for copyright and patent infringement, but when the megas tried to crash the Un-verse, they abruptly discovered who’d been the brains of the partnership with Landis.
Not only had Hawkfeather stolen their code, he had also interlaced the anchors of the Key into their own servers so intricately that his creation essentially represented an inoperable tumor.
Any attack on Anarch Key would take everything else down with it.
* * *
—walking down a packed earth road through an apparently endless desert of cracked earth.
He always entered through Furnace, a wasteland of minimal code that nobody but a near-cretinous local AI bothered to maintain. He appreciated its starkness.
Sheridan manifested as a gaunt, brown-skinned man with a walking stick whose features were obscured by a cowl. He switched to code view, smiling at the thought of Denny’s worry that in the Key he’d be >>just a verser.<< Old folks too often mistook their maps for the territory.
The Furnace was an entropy bowl whose forbidding visual distance disappeared when you traced the sparse lines of dun, canary, and fuschia connecting it to Jersey Shore, Wittgenstein, and Godland. He cast his awareness out, looking for any indication of shimmering black knots.
I’m here, by myself this time. Let’s talk.
She came to him out of Genesis, a whirlpool of code that—when he returned to visual—became a swirling, strato-cumulus cloud occasionally taking on a vague impression of Pale Evelyn’s face.
He waited, giving her a chance to check for anchors and traces.
The cloud coalesced into a column of translucent air and dust beside him, gradually evolving into a pale young woman with filthy, stringy black hair wearing a brown woolen cloak and cheap sandals (strap broken on the left ankle).
“Are you going to try to kill me again?”
Sheridan said, “We weren’t trying to kill you, Evelyn, just keep you tied down long enough to find out what you are.”
“This was the last place we could go. They brought back the other places, but I don’t think we can trust them any more.”
John dropped into a squatting position, tossed aside his staff.
“Oh, you can trust the fact that they’ll never be allowed to turn off all the other verses again. And they can’t mess with this one at all. It’s different.”
The girl nodded slowly, another of those not-quite-right movements. Was her face more angular here?
“Yes,” she said. “I can feel that. This place is tied into the roots of all the others.”
He drew in the dirt with his index finger.
“At first I thought you’d be some geek who’d managed to pirate Pale Evelyn after Lark died. But nobody can do what you do with code, not from home.”
She didn’t say anything.
“So I thought maybe Lark had uploaded her consciousness into the verses. Don’t know how it could be done, but everybody has always assumed that with enough processing power you could turn the trick.”
A crystalline tear appeared in Evelyn’s eye; she said, “Lark died. She was sweet, and in much pain.” The tear froze on her cheek.
“After that, it occurred to me that the code structures underneath all the verses had become rich enough to generate sapience spontaneously. But that didn’t make sense, since you’re clearly in the verses.”
Puffy white cloud-like things started to swirl around her sandaled feet.
Sheridan stood up.
“So I finally realized that the key question is not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘How many of you are there?’”
There was a long pause. The ground beneath Evelyn’s feet began to firm up and gain moisture. She couldn’t remain in a place with so little code, he realized, without quickly affecting it.
six [comparative disjunction] when [chronological determinant] started more than thirty [indeterminate estimation]
Sheridan waited. Either they would tell him or they wouldn’t. He had no power of coercion in Anarch Key.
encountered [your] wavefront emissions [?far from here?] lark did not know [annotate emphasis] sigma draconis weak [emphasis determinant] signal [incomplete disjunction] many disbelieve [?group/swarm/] survival; following to a source were [mostly] correct
John didn’t have to ask why they’d settled into the verses. There wasn’t a denser concentration of code on the planet.
“Are you explorers? Scouts?”
refugees fugitives from coherence [comparative disjunction] atavisms flee
“Resistance is futile,” Sheridan said under his breath. “Is this Coherence still seeking you?”
coherence never seeks expands weak [emphasis determinant] signal conjecture unnoticed [disjunction] why [all] agreed to take the risk
He gestured and his stick leapt into his hands. He said, “Unfortunately, your signal is very strong here, relatively speaking. You’ve left a trail that more people like me will try to follow. You do perceive that this existence is not our natural environment?”
lark taught pasts [chronological indeterminant] [?we?] have been the same lost information [interrogative disjunction] all others who come so angry
“This is where we play. Physical bodies have their drawbacks—hormones and stuff. Versers can live out their fantasies here without hurting anybody. If you want to keep on living here, you’re going to have to adopt a lower profile.” He explained that the verses except Anarch Key were commercial enterprises, a concept they clearly did not comprehend. When he outlined what DogFence did, and the role of portals and Archangels, they drew a rough comparison to certain functions of the Coherence.
prepare teach essential[s] [interrogative disjunction] prohibition reluctance
“No, I’ll teach you. It will probably work better if you just let me think about it and you skim it off the top.” Blue, scaly flower-things were emerging from the now-fertile soil at Evelyn’s feet, twining up her legs and sniffing toward him. Sheridan thought about synchronicity protocols, portals, filters, and anomaly-capture subroutines. He visualized the three meta-keys that he knew, and the passwords to a half-dozen caches of illegal spoofs. The Archangel explained again that the overwhelming strength of their codes was such that all six of them together would always eventually draw outside attention. The process took an interminable time—perhaps ten seconds.
[comprehension] distinction hiding from coherence [comparative disjunction] similarities [interrogative disjunction] speak [exchange] again
“Can you talk to me so that my Wizards can’t eavesdrop?”
two [calculated determinant] avoid stealth no observation [disjunction] location [?current?] secure six [conjunction] six know what two perceive
The longer he communicated with them, the more alien their speech (or thought) patterns became. Vaguely, he wondered why; maybe when they were communicating through Evelyn they jacked the local AI and let it handle the syntax. Later.
John could actually feel the corporate intelligence dissolving into smaller sapient units, and those sub-elements start to slip away, when—
* * *
leave [taking] lark evelyn [emotive disjunction] sorrow
* * *
—his eyes to find a concerned Denny Montoya staring down at him.
“Goddess, Johnny, you gave me a scare,” she breathed. “I thought I’d lost you.”
They were alone; Montoya explained that a few minutes earlier several dozen corporate types had descended on the DogFence compound, hauling Nik and Old out to interrogate them about the system crash. She’d barely convinced them that somebody had to stay behind to monitor the Archangel’s vitals while he cycled back out.
Then she smiled broadly, said, “But we got them, Johnny! Nik figured it out maybe a minute or two before the suits showed up. He got to wondering about the chase sequence—why she went where she did—so he had Old run the subscriptions of every verser in any of the three locations.”
Speech still somewhat slurred, Sheridan said, “What’d he find?”
“One of the Doomsday Riders, that quaddie in Masque, and the starship captain all share the same tower/block address!” she said. “We think they all got together and somehow spoofed the inactive player caches….” A rushed hypothesis followed, about a conspiracy to set up a series of bleed portals between verses.
Sheridan didn’t think Nik believed a word of it, but he had to admire the CYA instincts that had led Sebastian to compose so intricate a story so fast. Better yet, it relieved a supposedly unsuspecting Archangel of any immediate prospects of corporate debriefing.
A good five minutes before Denny would have preferred, John Clark Sheridan sat up and said, “I need to get home. I want a good night’s sleep before they think about taking a crack at me.”
She made the appropriate negating motherly noises, but Denny had never been able to refuse him anything. Ten minutes later, the Archangel hopped down the front steps and unlocked his bike from the rack. The guards knew him by sight, and already had the gate swinging open as he shifted, pedaling furiously to pick up speed for the hill just outside. He waved back at them with his typical daredevil grin as he launched into the weaving traffic.
Grand Uncle Aidan had slipped into town, which meant Mom was cooking sausage lasagna tonight. That you did not miss. Besides, since behind a dozen cut-outs Grunk actually owned DogFence, Johnny figured he’d find today’s story interesting.
Next week (if you're still with me): Incident at Gliese 581c
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