A Family Spat ... as realAlbert comes to appreciate his simple upbringing ...
Ritu and I were trapped in that awful tunnel under Urraca Mesa, with one band of enemies battling toward us from behind while others blocked further progress ahead. We could only crouch in the narrow passageway while gunfire echoes pinged around us from both directions.
Beta seemed to be running out of fighters. Only one damaged drone was assigned to watch over us. Still, he seemed quite capable of guarding two scared organics.
"I should have made more of myself when I had the chance," groused the giant golem.
Ritu winced. She was already worn out from imprinting so many dittos with the alternate personality carried around inside her head, obliged to do so by a compulsion stronger than addiction. The thought of copying more would only deepen her self-loathing. I worried in the dim half-light that Ritu might suddenly leap up and try to end her misery by dashing toward the combat zone, throwing her body into the melee before warriors of both sides could cease fire.
Lacking any other way to be helpful -- and badly needing distraction from my own worries -- I tried asking questions.
"When did you realize about Beta?"
She seemed at first not to hear, chewing a lip, eyes darting nervously. I repeated the question. Finally, Ritu answered without looking back directly.
"Even as a kid, I knew something was wrong with me. Some inner conflict made me do or say things I didn't intend or that I'd later regret, sabotaging relationships and ... " Ritu shook her head. "I guess a lot of adolescents might describe the very same problem. But it got far worse when I started imprinting. Dittos wandered off, or returned only to inload fragmented memories. Can you imagine how frustrating and unfair it felt? I was born into this business. I know dittoing better than most of the UK development guys! I kept telling myself it must be a glitch in the machinery. It would clear up with next year's model."
She turned to look at me.
"That must have been denial, I suppose."
No kidding. It was like calling the ocean wet.
"Did you ever seek help?"
She turned haunted eyes downward. "Do you think I need help?"
It took hard effort to squelch a reflexive, horrified laugh. The force of repression within her must be incredible to even ask such a question while we cowered in this awful place.
"When did I start to understand?" Ritu continued after a few seconds. "Weeks ago, I overheard my father and Aeneas argue fiercely over whether to announce some new breakthroughs, like extending ditto lifespan. Aeneas called the methods unready and complained how much of Yosil's research aimed at mystical areas like non-homologous imprinting ... "
I made an earnest effort to listen as Ritu's story poured out at last. I was interested, really. But the tunnel felt so stifling and hot ... I couldn't help wondering, were my sweats a symptom of some vile plague, contracted during my brief visit to the germ warfare room? Were superfast pathogens already tearing through my flesh?
I did not want to think about that! Like Ritu, I sought distraction from helplessness in dialogue.
"Um ... could those quarrels with Aeneas explain why your father went into hiding?"
"I guess so ... but they had always fought like brothers, ever since Aeneas bought the Bevvisov-Maharal process to animate his movie-effex dolls. The two of them usually calmed down and sorted things out."
"Not this time though," I prompted. "Kaolin -- "
" -- accused Yosil of stealing files and equipment! I could tell Aeneas was furious. Yet he kept his anger bottled, as if Father had some power over him. Something that kept even the chairman of Universal Kilns from interfering, no matter how mad he got."
"Blackmail?" I suggested. "Kaolin's ditto was snooping around your father's house when you and I met there Tuesday evening. Maybe he was looking for evidence to destroy, right after knocking off Yosil -- "
"No." Ritu shook her head. "Before he departed for the last time, I overheard Father tell Aeneas, 'I'm your only hope, so get out of my way if you haven't the guts to help.' That sounds rather scary, I admit, but not like blackmail. Anyway, I still can't believe Aeneas would murder anyone."
"Well, some Kaolin dit-alike shot at us later that night, on the desert highway."
As if on cue, several loud bangs resonated where Beta's rear guard still fought off unnamed enemies. Panic reignited in Ritu's eyes ... till she pushed the dread away one more time. In her own way, she was showing real courage.
"I ... thought about that. Aeneas wasn't only worried about my father, you know. He also had a growing obsession about ... Beta." Ritu spat the word in distaste. "Aeneas spent a fortune on insurance and security, trying to plug Beta's access to UK technologies and material. I guess somehow along the way he must have finally discovered the truth about my other half." She jerked her head toward the nearby guard-golem.
"It would have galled Aeneas to realize that Beta knew everything that I know about the company. He couldn't even prosecute or take revenge without hurting me ... the same Ritu Maharal he always treated like a daughter. Nor could he talk to me about the problem. That would only warn Beta, so I was kept out of the loop."
"Even worse," I added, "Kaolin would worry about the possibility that Beta and Yosil Maharal had forged an alliance."
Ritu's head jerked. "The very idea would drive Aeneas crazy."
"Then his golem shot us on the highway because he thought you were Beta," I concluded. "You were wearing that ditto-disguise. And all this time I thought he had it in for me! But then, who shot a missile at my house and -- "
A far-traveling bullet came zinging by, interrupting as it ricocheted off the ceiling. Ritu winced. For the fourth or fifth time, she tried crouching closer to me. Amid this fracas, the most natural thing would be for us to hold each other. But I edged back, keeping distant, since I might be carrying some foul virus.
The alternative was to keep talking. I tilted my head to fix contact with her eyes.
"What about your father?" I demanded. "What was he doing down here that frightened Kaolin? Why steal golems and arms from the government. And germ warfare agents, for God's sake!
"Ritu, what is still going on here, days after he died?"
My intensity made her draw back. Ritu clamped both hands against her head. Her voice cracked.
"I don't know about any of that!"
Someone else joined in at that point.
"Leave her alone, Morris. You're badgering the wrong me."
It was the wounded battle-golem assigned to guard us, so stolid till now that we had been sheltering behind it like a stone. The square-jawed face looked down, regarding me with barely any expression. Still, I sensed the familiar contempt of my longtime foe. Even knowing, at last, that it was born of neurotic overcompensation didn't help much. I still hated the guy.
Beta spoke in a deep-gravelly voice, but with the same snide tone.
"As you suspect, we did have an arrangement, Yosil and I. He slipped me a limitless supply of specialty golem blanks, straight from Research, with all sorts of great features like pixelated skin that can change color patterns on command."
"You're kidding."
"Nope. Yosil helped ship them directly into Ritu's supply fridge while I worked from inside, to ensure she never examined her blanks closely. Together, we made it seem that a number of her dittos were doing exactly what she wanted them to do, minimizing her worries and suspicions. It was a big help in my operations and worked well ... till just a short time ago."
"And what did Maharal get in return?"
"I taught him the fine art of evasion! How to dodge and weave and evade the World Eye. My underworld contacts were a big help. It became sort of a father-and-son pastime." The ditto winked at Ritu, who shuddered and turned away, so Beta turned the knowing smile toward me.
"I suspect Dad always wanted a boy," he said.
Sibling cruelty can be disgusting. So is destructive self-hatred. This lay somewhere viciously in between.
"I have to admit," Beta went on, "that she put up quite a fight the last few weeks. Ever since learning about me, she stopped imprinting and killed every Beta that approached her for inloading. I was running out of delay-release versions!"
"The decaying ditto that I found in a Dumpster behind the house -- "
"Bang." Beta used a finger to mime a pistol firing. "Ritu terminated it. Then she grabbed Dad's makeup kit in the house and disguised herself to look just like that gray, hoping the pretense would let her come south with you and ... " Beta shook his head. "Well, I have to admit her forcefulness surprised me. I was only able to interfere a little, from inside. Good for you, Alpha!"
"How touching," I answered for Ritu, who looked too angry for speech. "So Father liked you best. Is that why you're fighting your way into good old Dad's sanctuary right now?"
Before Beta could answer, something clicked in my thoughts.
"The lab isn't dormant, guarded by leftover robot sentries. Somebody's inside, right now, planning to use stolen germ weapons in some grisly scheme. Is it Yosil's murderer? Are you breaking in to avenge your father?"
Beta paused, then acknowledged, "In a manner of speaking, Morris. But as long as buried truths are coming out, you might as well know" -- he nodded toward Ritu -- "that we have more in common with our father than you'd ever imagine."
Ritu blinked, looking directly at the golem for the first time. "You mean -- "
"I mean that a genius like his could never be contained within a single personality, or confined to one human brain. In Yosil, the divisions were less explicit. Still -- "
I let out a grunt of realization, recalling some bad movied plots Ritu and I'd discussed during our desert trek. How many focused on the same old nightmare, couched in contemporary terms -- the fear of being conquered by your own creation, by your own darker half? In Ritu, technology brought an inner nightmare to life, amplifying an irksome personality trait into a fully reified arch criminal.
How much further might the same syndrome go, if unleashed by a virtuoso?
"Then Maharal -- "
Before I could finish, a shrill whistle echoed down the corridor. Beta grunted with satisfaction. "It's about time!" The big war-ditto stood up awkwardly, favoring a gravely wounded left side, motioning for Ritu and me to follow. "The way is clear ahead."
When Ritu shivered, the golem soothed.
"Picture it as a family reunion. Let's go see what Father has become."
Top of the Line ... as green doughboy tries to rise ...
There weren't any glowbulbs in the crude staircase and I had no way to judge the time spent dragging up one rough step then another, hauled along by a single good arm and a half-functional leg, leaving bits of me crumbling along the way. The ascent seemed measureless except for rhythmic throbs each time my battered form heaved upward. I counted one hundred and forty of these pulses. A hundred and forty opportunities to relax into darkness forever -- till the utter blackness around me started to give way.
Attenuated light slid down the stairs, tentatively liquid in quality, actually cheering me a bit. It's hard to feel completely hopeless during that special moment when you first catch sight of dawn.
It was daybreak, I soon verified, pouring through a rough cut in the far wall of a modest room that was nearly filled by a bulky machine. Crawling nearer, I saw a funnel-track slanting toward the narrow window. A rugged frame held more than a dozen slender tubes bearing dorsal and pectoral fins, as if to maneuver with agility through water or air.
My good eye glimpsed ominous cutlass-shaped symbols marking the sleek forward tips; still realization came slowly.
Missiles, I thought, fighting expiration fatigue. Stacked in an automatic launching system.
And ... I further noted when a row of electronic displays came alight ...
And the machinery just turned on.
Bosons in the Circuit ... or the importance of being Emet ...
As I grow larger, as knowledge floods into me, I grow more appreciative of the grand vision that drew my tormentor to this place and hour. Yet the closer he came to greatness in recent months, the more it intimidated poor Yosil Maharal. No wonder, for he stood alone atop a vaulting arch that had been built across the millennia by humanity's greatest minds, each of them battling darkness in his or her own way, against all odds.
The struggle went slowly at first, with more false starts than progress. After all, what could primitive women and men accomplish, what secrets could they pierce without fire or electricity, lacking biochemistry or soulistics? Sensing there must be something more to life than tooth and claw, the earliest sages focused on their one precocious gift -- a capacity for words. Words of persuasion, illusion, or magical power. Words that preached love and moral improvement. Words of supplicating prayer. Call it magic or call it faith. Well endowed with hope -- or wishful thinking -- but little else, they imagined that words alone would suffice, if uttered sincerely enough, in proper incantations, accompanying pure thoughts and deeds.
Later successors, unbaring the splendor of mathematics, supposed that was the key. From Pythagorean harmonies and numerological puzzles like Kabbalah to elegant superstring theories, math seemed to be God's own language, the code He used to write creation's plan. Like quantum mechanics -- the elegant sorting of aloof fermions and gregarious bosons -- all the proud equations added to a growing edifice. They were foundations, gorgeously true.
But not enough. For the stars we yearned to touch remained much too far away. Math and physics could only measure the vast gulf, not cross it.
Same with the vaunted digital realm. Computers briefly tantalized, hinting that software models might prove better than reality. Enthusiasts promised new-improved minds, telepathic perception, even transcendent power. But cyberstuff fell short of opening grand portals. It became another useful tool set, just another incremental brick in the arch.
Back in Grandma's time, biology was the queen science. Decipher the genome, the proteome, and their subtle interplay with phenotype! Solve ecology's riddle and achieve sustainability in nature! These were attainments every bit as vital as harnessing flame or kicking the habit of all-out war.
Yet where were answers to the truly deep questions?
Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.
From here on is God's domain, where only faith will take us. Though you may have penetrated the secrets of matter and time, made life in a test tube, even covered Earth with thronging duplicates, man will never infiltrate the realm of the immortal soul.
Only now we're crossing that line, Yosil and I, armed not with virtue but skill, utilizing every insight gathered by Homo technologicus during ten thousand years of painful struggle against nescient darkness.
One matter remains to settle before the adventure can begin.
Which of us will carry ... and which will ride?
Oh, there is another issue.
Can such a bold endeavor properly commence, if it begins with a terrible crime?
ditYosil pulls the pendulum aside now, preparing to climb aboard and launch his final dittobody into the glazier, right between the mirrors. No more nervous yammering about philosophy and metaphysics -- I can sense the basso drumbeat of fear in his Standing Wave, so shuddering that it robs the poor gray's power of speech. A fear like realYosil must have felt on Monday, when he saw things getting out of hand, with no way to avoid paying the ultimate price of hubris.
A fear intensified by pressing events, as the last mechanical defenders fall before that army in the tunnel ...
... and instruments show ditYosil at last that something's gone wrong with his precious plan. The glazier readings aren't what he imagined they'd be at this point. He may finally suspect that I'm still here, not erased at all but riding the tsunami! Growing mightier by the second.
The pendulum is aimed to slice right through the glazier, at its very heart. Suddenly I realize -- this will hurt. In fact, it could be worse than anything I endured as an organic, or dittoing one copy at a time.
I can see how it's supposed to work ... how ditYosil's inner fire may spark the glazier's heightened energies, seeding his own imprint with each pass, like rolling a cylinder seal over and over again in soft clay. Despite everything that's gone wrong with his plan -- despite my lingering presence -- it just might work. He may succeed in taking over, wiping me out!
Or else, we may cancel each other, leaving behind a wild, self-feeding beam of spiritual essence that could burst out of here unguided, like an all-consuming storm. A psychlone ...
I didn't think that anything could still frighten me. I was wrong.
Right now all I want is to go back. Return to the sere beauty of the soulscape. Contemplate again those virgin territories, more vast than any unexplored continent, more promising than a galaxy, though as-yet barely colonized by a mere few billion minuscule algae flecks along the shore -- flecks who barely suspect their own latent destiny.
Especially one cluster of unsuspecting algae -- a few million -- who've been targeted for a special fate, to make the ultimate sacrifice. Like hand-servants accompanying a Babylonian monarch to his tomb, their supporting role is to die, offering their soul-energies, contributing potency to the glazier beam, propelling the Standing Wave to new levels.
Ancients would have called this "necromancy," drawing magical force from the mysterious power of death itself. However named, it will be a ghastly crime ...
... and I've almost reconciled myself to it. All those waning embers that I witnessed earlier -- dying human souls striving at their very last moments to fly free, then guttering out, falling to leave ashen impressions on the barren plain -- this will make their dashed hopes worthwhile, right?
After gazing across the Continent of Immortal Will, beckoned by its wealth of possibilities, how seriously should I worry about a few doomed algae on the shore?
Except --
Except that one of those tiny flickers has begun to annoy me, like a stone in my shoe. Like a pebble in my saddle. The soulscape doesn't count distance in meters, but affinity, and this spark was too close to notice, clinging to me like a shadow. Only now do I turn to examine the irritation and discover that ...
... it's me!
Or rather, it's the living, breathing Albert Morris -- source of the Standing Wave that I've amplified profoundly. I can sense him sneaking closer in physical space, filled with all those old organic fears, drives, and sympathies. Nervous and yet dogged as ever, so near we might actually touch.
How could this happen? ditYosil claimed to have killed Morris with a stolen missile! Death of the body should release the anchor, liberating the soul. I saw news reports -- the burning house and garden -- yet he survived.
This must be why my personality never succumbed to erasure! The wave kept reimprinting somehow, from the original source, till it grew self-sustaining.
That's great. I'm glad to be here. But now what? Will Albert's presence interfere? Will his biotic anchor pin the glazier to "reality" when the crucial moment comes to fly free?
Yosil's ghost has finished strapping himself in. With enemy soldier-dits breaking down the final door, he can't procrastinate anymore. Preparing to let the pendulum fly, he gathers nerve for a vocal command.
"Initiate final stage!" he shouts to a control computer. "Launch the rockets!"
So. Preparing for battle, I can feel reassured. Whatever is about to happen to the city isn't my fault. The mass murder of so many won't be my doing. Their karma can't affect me.
I'm as much a victim as anybody else, right?
I will make their sacrifice worthwhile.
Claylight ... as something dawns on Greenie ...
A single wan star gleamed through the roughcut window, twinkling like the panel lights of a dark machine that nearly filled the room at the top of the stairs. I felt ominous vibrations through the ground, rather than my ruined ears, as the mechanism awoke. Slim objects tightened formation in the feeder magazine, each bearing scythelike crimson symbols. I wasn't too far gone yet to recognize an automatic launching system. Damn. Not good.
No, it isn't.
Perhaps you should stop it.
Instead of nagging, what I needed were ideas how. How was I supposed to stop it!
Buttons glowed, about the height of a standing man's shoulder. One of them might cut the launcher from its remote controller. But how to get up there? The weapon's flank, military-smooth, offered no gripholds suitable for a one-armed man sprawled on the floor, even more hopeless than trying to climb aboard that autokiln downstairs.
"I ... can't ... " came a hoarse whisper from my throat. "It's too far."
Then improvise.
I looked around, seeing no convenient ledge or chair to clamber on. No handy tools, or even bits of stone to throw. The cheap clothes that Aeneas Kaolin gave me, half a lifetime ago, were mostly gone, shredded to useless ribbons.
TARGETING COMMANDS ACCEPTED, said a row of dire words. COMPUTING TRAJECTORIES. There followed a series of numbers. Even in my dismal state I could recognize range and heading data.
Some maniac is shooting at the city!
I guessed Beta. Doubtless he murdered Professor Maharal in order to take over this facility. Why? Desperate because all his ditnapping schemes were collapsing, I guessed. My old foe must hope to wreak such havoc, the authorities will have more urgent chores than chasing down a copyright thief.
Frustrated and supine on the floor, I knew my theory made no sense, and didn't care. What mattered was stopping him. I'd give anything. My pitiful life, certainly. I already surrendered my left arm to the cause. What else could I possibly ...
A shout escaped my corroding mouth. Some things are only obvious after you think of them.
I did have one tool that might work, if I hurried.
It wasn't going to be easy ... but what is?
Divine Flu ... as realAlbert confronts unpleasant news ...
The self-made army of stolen war-golems finally broke through. While Ritu and I were shepherded over the last shattered robot defenders, a dozen of Beta's scarred veterans hurried the other way, rushing to help the rear guard. How long could they resist the force battling toward us from the Base?
Not long. I had a feeling things would start happening fast.
They had better. I may not have much time.
Smoke fumed around the edges of an armored door with a big hole burned through. Waves of heat still poured from recently molten metal as we passed into what must be the buried lair of Yosil Maharal. Ritu and I found ourselves standing on a parapet overlooking a scene that was altogether bizarre -- a grotto filled to bursting with equipment, much of it jerry-rigged by stringing together hardware with familiar UK logos.
Surely this must be the hoard of electroceramic gear that Kaolin accused Maharal of swiping from work. What on Earth was he trying to accomplish here? I wondered. No doubt some avenue of research that Aeneas forbade him to pursue in the company's R&D department.
Flooding to me came foreboding words, "the curse of Frankenstein," followed by a clipped image of a mushroom cloud.
Huge antennalike coils funneled from all angles toward a pair of humanoid figures, splayed at opposite ends of the room, facing each other with arms pinioned wide. One of these dittos was dark red, the other a specialized shade of a gray that I sometimes wear myself. Ornate inloading apparatus festooned all over their clay bodies, though I couldn't imagine what so many souped-up linkages could be for.
Between the pair of dittos, some kind of giant clockwork mechanism kept time to the swaying of a huge pendulum. And damn if there wasn't a golem there too, riding back and forth like a child on a swing!
That one was yelling its head off.
Those were some of the features my eyes saw. More interesting were things that eyes weren't meant to see.
First, was I already dying of some awful fever? I had felt better crossing into the lab's bright light and cooler air after that bloody tunnel. Only now, nausea waves skewered my viscera, like those gut-churning sensations that astronauts used to report, back when realfolk actually risked their lives in space. Bowels clenched, nearly as hard as my teeth, which barely let escape a reedy moan.
This is it, I thought. Some fast-acting super-virus. Death in minutes.
Too bad. I came so close to finding out what was going on here.
Should I have stayed home instead, and get blown up? At least it would have been quick. I never achieved my real goal, setting out on Tuesday night.
Clara, I'm sorry. I really tried --
More symptoms teemed, clouding the senses. I could swear the space between the captive golems, which had seemed as clear as air moments ago, now rippled and fluttered like some dense fluid! The undulations had a dreamlike quality, impossible to pin down, like a smoke-sculptor's interpretation of manic mood swings.
I had a brief impression that battalions of identical ghostly entities occupied the confined zone, thronging in limitless multitudes, yet somehow uncrowded, with plenty of room in their well-ordered ranks for more. Except when the pendulum passed through. Then brusque waves roiled, transforming many of the marching figures, giving them a face.
Floating before me, I pictured the visage of Yosil Maharal.
"Albert, are you all right?" Ritu murmured, but I shook her hand away. Let her take it as anger for getting me into this fix. I just didn't want to infect her.
I didn't want anybody infected. So, despite stomach convulsions, apparitions, and disorientation, I forced myself to look away from shenanigans in the center of the lab, aiming instead at the support machinery lining the grotto walls, seeking any clue about those germ agents. They were all that mattered.
There.
Bleary-eyed, I spotted a computer. One of those expensive AI-XIX models. Damn smart for silicon. One of Maharal's chief tools, surely, maybe even a master process controller. And just the sort of thing that a fellow like me could smash to bits, without having to know specifics of how or why.
Can I make it all the way down there and do it quickly?
At least it was a goal.
A nearby Beta -- perhaps the very same war-dit who spoke to us in the tunnel -- grabbed the balcony rail and shouted in a voice whose suddenly plaintive tone surprised me. I never heard the like from Beta before.
"Yosil! Father, stop ... we had a deal!"
Mixed Glazes ... grinding glazier beams ...
Damn this compulsion to recite, built into one of the golembodies that serve as mirrors to enclose the growing waveform.
A new kind of Standing Wave surges between the glazier poles. Soon it will escape confinement, bursting through these porcelain dolls with enough power to endure for weeks over a dying city, feeding on death manna from millions of extinguishing spirit flames -- a meal sufficient to complete the transition from created to Creator.
While that countdown ticks, a desperate struggle rages. What imprint will the glazier-made god carry? Whose core personality? Right now the waveform oscillates between two possible states -- two discordant definitions of I am.
Yosil is with me now, our borders overlapping in unhappy swirls, like immiscible fluids. We both howl against this unnatural merging! It's like trying to inload someone else's ditto, a calamity that no one attempts twice. How can you share without agreeing on dimensions like left-right? Up-down? In-out? It's all subjective on the soulistic plane. My versions dart away at angles that have nothing in common with his.
Communion will come, when I finally arc over this landscape as an all-transforming deity. I'll establish fair metrics that are simple, universal, then invite all to join me in a vast new cosmos! Using raw material more basic than vacuum, together we'll make stars, planets, whole new Earths.
But first, to win control.
I was here first, growing immeasurably during the last few hours. But my adversary knows more theory. He also has the advantage of position. With each rhythmic pass, the pendulum cuts like a blade, slicing through the glazier's soft center, the most energetic and impressionable spot.
Worse, I feel yanked by the presence of realAlbert, so close that his image enters me now through a set of eyes. The red ditto can actually see him, leaning on a bannister rail as he descends from a western parapet. realAlbert looks like hell. Sweaty and pale. Shaking. A mess.
With each footstep nigh, the glazier shudders!
He's my archetype ... the reason I survived erasure to reach this point.
Now he's getting in the way.
Poor Albert may have to go.
Extremities ... as Greenie goes out on a limb ...
Ever try to rip your own leg off? You need motivation.
It helps if you're already falling apart.
Even so, pulling hard with my one good hand and arm, I made little progress while the nearby missile launcher ticked through its final check sequence.
Let me offer a suggestion.
Nag that it was, the voice had steered me right so far. Soon I felt a touch along my crusted skin, and within.
The appendage is no longer part of you.
Envision that.
Draw yourself back from it.
Trigger these enzymes as you go.
Like this ...
My knowledge of chemistry was rudimentary, at best. Yet somehow the instructions made sense, like recalling a lost skill. Naturally, that's how to do it, I thought, ignoring for now that the instructions came from an imaginary friend. Simple. I must remember this.
All pain and fatigue fled from the leg. Amid that growing numbness, every dram of leftover energy spent itself, not melting but hardening as if in a quick oven.
My next hard tug was rewarded by a brittle cracking. Again I pulled, and the limb snapped off below the hip, trailing gooey bits of shredded soul-fabric that sparked and glittered.
In my hand now -- a near-perfect replica of a human limb in baked terracotta, bent at the knee. I hefted the thing. It was handsome, but hardly aerodynamic.
TARGET LOCKED, announced the launch-controller screen. Missile number one slid into place with its dire crimson warhead.
ARMED. PREPARING TO FIRE.
As the machine's hum rose in pitch, I knew I had one chance.
The Clay's the Thing ... ... an ensemble in twenty seconds ...
Descending from the parapet, my feet were like blunt clubs at the end of mushy noodles. Waves of nausea whelmed over me as I clutched the bannister from one sweaty grip to the next. Dry-retching, I'd vomit if my stomach had been fed more than a few protein bars during the last few days. Hunger and exhaustion were factors, of course, but such a fierce decline must come from something else -- surely a rapid war plague that some arrogant Dodecs stashed at the bottom of an armored hole for safe-keeping. A tool of genocide, banned by solemn treaty. But who ever throws a weapon away?
Was my agony a taste of things to come, for millions? I had no clue what was happening in the center of the lab with all those antennas and humming tubes and pendulums swinging between crucified dittos, like some nightmare painting by Hieronymus Bosch. But I do know it involves germs, so it's gotta be evil.
That made things simple. I've got to interfere.
Only how?
My old friend Pal had a philosophy: "When you lack understanding, or subtlety, you can still get your argument across with a monkey wrench."
A simplistic, often foolish credo, but right now rather compelling. If I disrupt things enough, Clara and her friends may have time to find out about this place. They'll come do the rest ... sort it all out. So, whatever the hell is going on, just find a way to interfere.
Even a futile resolve is something to cling to. As nausea worsened with each downward step, I pictured the AI-XIX computer ... and a metal folding chair that stood nearby. Just the thing, in lieu of a monkey wrench. Assuming I could still lift furniture when I got there.
Which seemed doubtful as my symptoms worsened. Halfway down those rickety stairs I felt surrounded by nasty invisible creatures with stingers and claws, leaving flesh quivering after each phantom slash. Figments, I diagnosed. Your brain is making up stories to explain unpleasant signals from a dying body, Keep moving.
Fine. But two steps later the imaginary pests were joined by unsettling bursts of vivid recollection -- sensory waves that made me stagger on the stairs.
The unmistakable floral aroma of Chavez Avenue Park.
Spears and shields displayed above a dead man's open coffin.
Ritu in tears, consoled by a figure with skin like luminous tin.
Sneaking past a trio of boys tormenting each other in a yard --
-- then turning to see a gun in the hand of grinning ghost ...
These unsorted memories didn't rise from personal experience, or any ditto I recall inloading. They had to be delusions. Yet their déjà vu familiarity was hurtfully intense, like the first time I ever rolled my Standing Wave in clay, or witnessed a scene from several points of view, or looked directly into my own eyes without a camera or mirror.
Awakening trapped in a liquid-filled vessel.
Viewing cuneiform tablets and Venus figurines --
-- and pain liked I never imagined, machine-generated, amplifying my soul-undertone, while rubbing to erase everything else about me --
Stumbling under this barrage of frenzied images, I could also hear people yelling across the room. Beta and Ritu for sure, and maybe others, all of them sounding so-slow as time seemed to creep more gradually with each passing second. Few of their frantic words were clear. Anyway, their passions seemed immaterial as I paused on the bottommost stair, a foot wavering above the laboratory floor.
Somehow I knew that one more step would make things even worse. Glancing left, I saw that I was almost lined up with the gray and red golems -- spreadeagled across from each other while the pendulum crisscrossed slowly between them. The nearest ditto -- dark gray -- turned its head quarter-profile toward me, looking almost familiar to my bleary eyes.
Then, unexpected and unbeckoned, quavering words entered my head.
realAlbert looks like hell. Sweaty and pale. Shaking. A mess.
What was that? Another symptom?
No distractions, I vowed. Got to keep my rendezvous with a folding chair, just meters away.
Taking another step dropped me down those final inches to the floor --
-- completing the alignment.
And suddenly the sky seemed to crash on me! The intruding voice went basso profundo, filling my head with urgent-compulsive commentary in present tense:
Is realAlbert Dying?
Will He Perish Soon? What If My Organic "Anchor" Suddenly Lets Go During These Final Moments Before the Glazier Peaks?
Estimating ...
It Seems the Death Whiplash Could Give My Waveform a Boost Against Yosil. It Might Even Hurl His Obnoxious Specter out of Here!
What the hell? Stabbing pain shot through my parietal lobes. I swayed from the bizarre thoughts pouring through me. It felt like ditto-inloading, only far more intense and alien.
My Foe's Attacks Grow More Desperate with Each Pendulum Swing. No Compromise. If He Can't Have the Prize No One Will!
Yosil and I May Annihilate Each Other, Spewing the Glazier Forth Unguided, Rampaging on a Plane of Reality That Society's Defenses Aren't Even Equipped to Detect. All Those Doomed People in the City, About to Suffer Writhing Deaths ... I Can't Let Them Be Sacrificed in Vain.
Daunted by the sheer size of this entity, by its booming thoughts, I wondered, How could it have anything to do with me?
Then again, how could it not? You don't read the minds of other people. Only different versions of yourself.
realAlbert Begins to Understand! I'll Help Him, Before the Pendulum Swings Back.
He's Dying Anyway. When He Sees What's at Stake, He'll Do the Right Thing.
How Fitting If My Creator Joins Me the Very Moment When It Will Do the Most Good!
That thundering narration, like foam on a tidal wave, was only the surface layer of a mammoth inloading. I cried out, clutching my head as events of several days flooded my battered brain across a link that was unbuffered, unprotected. Coalescing from the raucous clamor were key data --
-- what became of my graydit that went missing at Kaolin Manor, back on Tuesday. Enhanced and multiplied a million-fold, it now stood as part of a great machine whose terrifying purpose was starting to dawn on me --
-- and who torched my house and garden, a rogue ditto who murdered its own rig. The very one now riding that pendulum, screaming its head off. In a fraction of a second, I grasped why ... and what it means to be an "anchor" --
-- and what I was being offered ...
-- and the cost.
Our Patterns Mesh. Despite a Befuddled Brain, realAl Partakes of My New Vision. With Growing Awe, He Perceives the Soulscape in Its Fallow Beauty, Barely Touched by Some Algae Flecks Along the Shore.
Look Deeper, Albert. See How the Soulscape Emerged from the Limitless Inherent Potentialities of the Dirac Sea. Dormant for Ten Billion Years, It Awaits an Entity Who Can Observe. Someone Able to Collapse All the Quantum Probabilities with a Finesse Never Imagined by Theorists ...
Stop!
All That Technobabble Comes from ditYosil! While His Specter Slices Through the Standing Wave, He Keeps Trying to Impose His Viewpoint on the Divine.
How Many More Cycles Before Our Conflict Shatters Everything?
Resolution Depends on realAlbert.
Decide! I Tell the Small Organic Man That I Once Was. Decide Now!
Our thoughts weren't in synch. Time operated differently for that altered and amplified version of "me," its voice surging and then muting in waves. I needed several intense seconds of instruction before my slower organic mind grasped the outlines -- the elegant discovery made by Ritu's genius father. And his plan to fulfill the life arc of a species.
How many times have I scorned those fringe mystics who took the word "soulistics" literally? Beyond our banal power to live parallel lives, they saw implicit hope -- or tacit dread -- that humanity had crossed a line, embarking on a new destiny. And here I was, being offered a key role in the greatest thing since the Big Bang!
To earn it, all I must do was die.
Isn't That Happening Anyway? Just Hasten It by a Few Minutes, I felt urged.
Grab Any Tool. A Bludgeon Will Do.
Wavering on my feet, I spotted a sharp pencil on a nearby console.
Before even willing it -- and maybe I didn't -- the slender thing was in my hand, the tip approaching my right eye.
One hard shove and a new age would be born.
"Oh God," I groaned.
And my own voice came right back, emerging from my mouth with a reply.
"Yes. I Am Here. And Be Assured, This Will Serve Me Well."
Catch the Conscience ... ... five fateful seconds ...
Lying on a cold stone floor as chilly dawn broke through an open window, I hefted my sole weapon -- the bent and baked leg that I wrenched from my own body.
I'd have one chance to hurl it right.
Clickety went the missile launcher while a screen glowed READY.
The meddlesome voice that had guided me here was gone. I kind of missed having an audience for my effort.
Here goes, I thought. My one functioning limb -- a hand and arm -- throbbed with all its might as I threw ...
... of the King ... and another twenty ...
The pencil tip approached my eye. Groaning an oath, I felt quick encouragement from the nearby god-machine. One good shove and a new age would be born, fulfilling a myriad forlorn dreams.
Anyway, I've slain myself many times, ever since I turned sixteen, right?
But those were dittos.
My org-body protested against the plan. It bawled to survive!
The same clash with instinct repelled realMaharal from his own project a week ago, fleeing recklessly across the desert night.
"But You're Made of Sterner Stuff," my own mouth answered. "Unite with Me. It Will Be Just Like Inloading."
A day is enough for a ditto, when it knows it will rejoin a larger self. Wasn't this the same sort of thing? Saints walked into ovens with less assurance than I was being offered.
Okay, I thought, as determination flowed into my arm.
The pencil tip trembled --
Suddenly a flare of amber warning lights erupted nearby, drawing my reflex gaze.
WARNING! WARNING!
MISSILE LAUNCHER MALFUNCTION
FIRING SEQUENCE INTERRUPTED
Holo diagnostics zoomed toward an awkward-looking foreign object, obstructing a tilted ramp. News of this sabotage provoked sharp resonance between the gray, the red, and all their virtual copies.
Why Aren't the Rockets Flying?
Ah, Here's the Cause -- Another Me!
Tuesday's Green, Made for Cleaning Toilets and Mowing Lawns ... the Dull Thing Shouldn't Even Exist Anymore!
A green? The one who called himself a "frankie," then sauntered off to seek self-fulfillment? I wondered. How could it be here?
The AI-XIX screen displayed new letters:
REPAIRS INITIATED
"Ignore the Distraction," my own voice muttered. "The Launcher Will Repair Itself. Get Back to the Business at Hand."
The business in my hand -- achieving immortality the way Escher and Einstein did, with a pencil. Adrenaline surged and my heartbeat pounded. Reptile, primate, cave dweller, and urban man all tried to mutiny. But now spiritual resolve felt much stronger than instinct.
It would be just like inloading, I thought, gathering strength.
Only another diversion yanked the makeshift weapon back again.
This time it was pain. Brilliant, dazzling, coruscating pain.
Yosil Has Seen My Plan -- How realAlbert's Death Whiplash May Eject Him!
Yosil Reacts, Channeling a Blast of Refined Agony to Knock Albert out of Alignment.
Poor Albert Moans at Sudden Images of Fire and Brimstone. Hellish Pangs Abet the Animal Portions That Always Come Embedded in Trueflesh, Rousing Them to Flee or Fight.
Now Yosil's Golem Shouts from His Swinging Perch, Calling for His Daughter to Rush Downstairs -- for Her to Push Albert Aside and Take His Place in the Beam!
This Will Keep Their Agreement, He Vows. But She Must Hurry.
With Seconds Left, I Must Draw Albert Back into Focus. Show Him That Pain Is an Illusion.
"Pain Is an Illusion," my own voice soothed. The mouth spoke words from outside the brain. "Pain Is a Mirage Compared to the Hyper-Reality of the Great Soulscape.
"Gaze upon It Now, Albert.
"Behold!"
All at once, the panorama of that vast new realm spread open before me, wider and more gorgeous than any Earthly horizon, beckoning me away from a hellish abyss, replacing it with appealing cross sections from every "heaven" ever imagined.
The pleasures of sensual paradise!
The bliss of unreserved acceptance and love.
And the nameless serenity that comes with detachment from the Great Wheel. All of these heavens and more -- tendered without trickery or deceit -- would soon be mine.
Ours, I thought, imagining a better a world for all. All people. All life.
It worked! The visions soothed my "animal" parts, calming resistance, easing the way.
And yet --
While reaching out, I also felt the green ditto's flickering presence nearby, now a barely mobile lump sprawled on the floor of a cold chamber somewhere upstairs in this very labyrinth, watching helplessly as the missile launcher deployed robotic repair units to dislodge a pitiful ceramic limb. The golem's brave sacrifice had bought only a little time for the city. Minutes, at best.
Of course he knew nothing of the broader ramifications, or the greater good that would come out of all this, or the inviting immensity that awaited us in the vast soulscape.
And yet --
And yet --
There was something about the greenie lying there, so pathetic after making that grand, futile gesture.
Feelings rose unbidden within me. First a soft touch, then a tickle at the back of my throat.
A tickle that burst forth as a surprised snicker.
Then a chuckle at the hapless, one-limbed, decaying parody of me -- flopping about on the floor, all wretched and friendless, without even another leg to throw, but still trying to intervene.
The image was poignant, touching ... and funny!
Both tears and guffaws flowed like uncorked magma, not from mind but gut. I laughed at the piteous thing -- at its courage and misfortune and utter slapstick obstinacy. Moreover, in that raw moment I knew with perfect clarity:
I'm not meant to be a god.
All those heavenly perspectives I'd been shown. They were true possibilities, ripe for reification. Only now I realized what was missing. Not one of them had a place for humor!
How could they? Any "perfect" world would eliminate tragedy, right? That meant giving up the gritty-human answer to tragedy, the defiant levity that can make even a futile gesture worthwhile, even -- especially -- in the face of unbearable injustice.
Aw, man. I had more in common with that ragged green than any pompous, puffed-up, deified gray.
This one insight seemed to push great billows of fog away. Suddenly feeling whole again, I hurled the stupid pencil across the room with a derisive chortle.
Then I started looking for that folding chair.
Incredible. He Refused the Offer!
Worse, realAlbert Hopes to Interfere.
I Can Stop Him. Just Reach out and Tweak His Beating Heart. Burst an Artery. Disrupt the Sodium Channels in a Few Million Well-Chosen Neurons.
I'll Be Doing Him a Favor.
To Win the Prize, It Seems That I Must Not Only Defeat Yosil. I Must Also Imitate Him.
I Must Crush My Other Selves.
With a bit more spring in my step, I turned away from the great soul-amplifying apparatus and saw what I was looking for, a much simpler machine, right there in front of me. Grabbing and lifting the chair with both hands, I figured Pal would approve of my monkey wrench. It had pleasant heft. I felt stronger and filled with purpose as I brought it swinging down, first at the computer's holo array.
REPAIRS 60% COMPLETE, it flashed as the fragile display blew apart, filling the air with sparkling meshtrodes. Satisfying? Sure, but that was just a holo unit. The true superconducting heart of AI-XIX lay beneath, in a pressed phenolic casing.
The chair swung up again as someone yelled. Was it Ritu or Beta, approaching as the stretched seconds ticked slowly by? Did it matter?
On the next downstroke I felt swarmed by unpleasant sensations. Palpitations in the chest. Throbbings in my arm. I might have called it painful, except I'd been taught there's no such thing!
The CPU casing cracked under my first blow. It might take several, plus a prayer that Professor Maharal never spent extra for remote backup. I raised the chair once more -- even as my lips moved, once again muttering on behalf of the mega-entity in the glazier beam.
"Albert ... Yosil and I Agree on This ... You Must Be Stopped."
I wanted to shout back -- the hell you say! -- but a tight fist clamped around my heart, sending me reeling.
Still, the mouthed words came.
"Sorry ... About This ... It Must ... and Will Be Done."
That was when another voice broke in, reverberant and strange, as if out of nowhere.
Oh no, it won't.
As suddenly as it came, the pressure in my chest vanished, leaving me to stagger, nearly blanking out. Consciousness wavered. But I couldn't give up now. Not after witnessing the example set by that poor greenie.
I can do anything that I can do.
Gritting my teeth and grunting hard, I brought the chair down again with all my might.
Ready to Rock ... ... Gumby is almost equipped to play first base ...
Did it work?
I wondered after throwing my former leg at the launcher ramp. Then, for about a minute, I felt exultant as the machine halted, groaning and complaining.
FIRING SEQUENCE INTERRUPTED, the small display blared.
Only my triumph was short-lived. For that message was followed by a second that I liked much less.
REPAIRS INITIATED, said the screen as half a dozen maintenance dronelets deployed from recesses in the machinery. Scurrying like worker ants toward the source of the problem, they started tugging and pulling at my bygone ceramic limb. Two of them ignited small cutting torches.
Meanwhile, the first missile hummed in its place at the bottom of the ramp. If I didn't know better, I'd swear it seemed impatient.
Although it was harder to move than ever, I tried using my one arm to drag myself closer. Maybe I could distract the drones by shouting or bluffing a voice of command ...
... but only a hoarse croak emerged. Well, after all, I was a wreck.
Helpless to do anything but watch, I wondered about this germ warfare attack -- why would Beta want to do such a thing? Yes, a deadly act of terrorism might distract the authorities for a while, making them too busy to pursue a notorious ditnapper and copyright thief. They might even forget all about the prion attack on Universal Kilns ...
Still, it made no sense! Only a stupid crook bets everything on the cops remaining ignorant forever. There are too many ways to leave inadvertent clues in the modern era, no matter how careful you are. Anyway, this didn't sound like Beta.
Maybe it isn't, I thought. A ditective should always be ready to revise or discard his working theory.
Well? If the pilot of that Harley wasn't Beta, who else then?
Someone eager to follow Ritu Maharal and discover the whereabouts of her father's cabin.
Someone who found it suspiciously easy to track down the Volvo, out there in the desert.
Someone who must have studied Beta well, in order to mimic my arch foe's mannerisms, and who knew all about what happened at Queen Irene's.
Someone who quickly found out about the meeting that Palloid and I arranged in dittotown with Pal and Lum and Gadarene ... someone who showed up surprisingly well prepared.
There seemed only one reasonable explanation for how "Beta" and I escaped from the Waxer attack on Pal's safehouse apartment. We were meant to get away. It was all arranged in advance, hence the convenient manner that he reappeared, with an air scooter, in the nick of time. That had already been clear to me, only now --
I blinked (though one eyelid was already coming off), feeling close, very close to the answer.
In fact --
I sagged. Did any of it matter now? When those missiles fired, people in the city -- maybe the whole world -- would care little about the details. Only raw survival.
And it wouldn't be long now.
REPAIRS 80% COMPLETE, the display read.
Ah, well.
Lying there, I knew it was way past my rendezvous to check out -- to stop fighting the insistent call of the slurry bin. Dissolution would come as a relief.
Time to become an untidy stain on the floor.
I made ready to let go ...
Then held back as amber words, high above, turned into flashing red.
HARDWARE failure at command source
The missile launcher's display monitor seemed resentful somehow, as it continued reporting.
UNABLE to confirm reestablishment of launch code certificates
REMINDER: protocols demand repeated high-level verification for weapon targeting outside of a publicly sanctioned battlefield zone
RETRY or query alternate server?
Snippy machine. Yet I approved wholeheartedly as the thing began shutting down. Crimson-tipped rockets reengaged their safeties, rolling back into their storage magazine, and I wondered, Does this mean it's over?
Not quite. The repair drones were still hard at work, carving up my erstwhile leg and disposing of the bits. Moreover, the remote link could be restored, setting all firing codes and proceeding with the countdown, at any minute.
There'd be no way for me to stop it next time.
Oh yes there will be.
Huh?
I thought my imaginary Nag had vanished.
Are you back, then?
Then? Now?
Present and past do not matter.
What counts is that you get moving again.
Moving? Where? And more important ... how?
There seemed no point in protesting, though. Anyway, I knew the answer already. I just didn't like it.
Back.
Back down those awful stone stairs. Only legless now, dragged along by just the one weary arm, with a little gravity assist.
Back to the one place where I still might do some good. As if I had a snowball's chance in hell of making it.
Well, at least there'd be some illumination this time, trickling from the open window of this narrow room. The light of yet another day I never expected to see.
That's it.
Look at the bright side.
Now I suggest you move.
If only I could have strangled my badgering scold. But that would take two hands ... plus a physical neck to wrap them around.
So I did the next best thing. I moved.
E Pluribus Pluribus ... all together now ...
Less than four minutes had passed since Ritu and Beta and realAlbert entered the underground lab to stare down at a soulistic circus -- complete with swinging trapeze act, frantic magician-impresario, and a pair of garish clowns pinned to targets at either end. And in between? A growing tangibility distortion made space seem to ripple and flow, like some caged power, pacing and preparing to burst free.
During those few minutes, a battle raged over which personality would imprint the new godwave.
Who would gain ultimate control over the vast, fallow soulscape? The genius who pioneered the way? Or one whose raw talent seemed made for the job?
The combatants never considered a third possibility -- that the new frontier may not be as barren as they thought.
Somebody might already be there.
Like most of the audible meaning-squawks that are used by organic men, "already" comes laden with implications. Take past and present tense, for example -- narrative deceits that help perpetuate a myth of linear time.
Not for you, though. You who were/was/am/are/will be Albert. Your story is complex, looped, and fractally nested. It calls for a style that's flexible, confident, predictive.
So here, let me tell you what I foresee.
Before doing anything else, you will relinquish fear.
There. Wasn't that easy?
Fear is marvelously useful to biological beings. You won't miss it.
Next, you will realize that your life -- such as it was -- has come to an end.
Surely you didn't expect to survive all these experiences unscathed? No anchored mind can gaze upon the soulscape and remain unchanged.
Forget those symptoms that you once thought to be caused by plague -- by some war virus. Soon you'll realize there is nothing physically wrong with the clever animal that carried you around so faithfully, for so long. The sensations you mistook for illness will be recognized as natural separation pangs.
The body will live. Its embedded instincts won't even complain very hard when you move on.
Anyway, we have chores to do! Such as learning about the nature of time.
You'll notice that it seems frozen around us. Even Yosil's garish pendulum grinds to a halt, suspended in mid-slice, while the mad ditto's mouth gapes in an angry scream. This is the ortho-moment. The now of palpable reality. The narrow moving slit in which organic beings may move and act and perceive.
Great thinkers always knew that time must be a dimension, with inherent potential for travel, like any other. But living organisms can't abide a paradox, Albert. Incongruities of cause-and-effect turn out to be toxic. How could the creative genius of evolution work its slow miracle -- gradually stirring raw chemicals into soul-carrying beings -- without enormous numbers of trials and outcomes? The "real" world needs consistency and countless failures in order for natural selection to do its job, drawing complexity out of chaos.
It is the answer to the Riddle of Pain.
So we mustn't stretch time's fabric very much, Albert! Just a tweak, here and there, as we spiral back and forth, helping to create ourselves.
Confused? You won't be when we take our first small step back ... almost a week ... to last Monday evening.
No, don't try to navigate in normal terms. Follow affinities instead.
There! Pursue that trace of smugness, mixed with four parts stubbornness, plus some excess self-reliance and a dash of the romantic gambler. Track it and you'll find the green ditto that you were that night, wounded and reckless as he crossed Odeon Square, harassed by bored punks and chased by Beta's angry yellows, pelting you with stones.
Don't try to remember. Anticipate! It's much easier on this plane.
Soon you'll grasp necessity. The green must survive, but on its own.
Only the slightest interference will do. Enough to collapse the probabilities a bit. Something minor, easily dismissed.
Yes, go ahead. Experiment. Soon, at a crucial moment, you'll decide to reach out and nudge the mind of that waiter over there, serving dinner in a quayside restaurant, whose repeated clumsiness will offer distraction at a crucial moment ...
... but carefully! For even a nudge spreads ripples, as you'll see. Something about the way those dishes go flying --
Later it will bother one of your suspicious selves. He'll worry over it, like a sore tooth. As I said, clever animals get jittery around a paradox.
Yosil Maharal, amid his brilliance and his flaws, imagined that the raw material of the soulscape would be like simple clay for him to mold, to meddle with however he liked. But you will see -- it's far more subtle than poor Yosil ever imagined.
You'll find our next stop even stranger, skipping forward one day to a patch of desert road, far outside of town, as someone hefts a bulbous weapon preparing to ambush the occupants of an approaching car. Yes, the silvery ditto bears a soul-imprint of Aeneas Kaolin. Also note the biting stench of dread. Everything isn't going to his liking.
But don't probe too deeply! Never mind about such mundane mysteries as who or why or what or where. Forget motives and crimes. Leave the real-world detective work for your successor to solve.
That's no longer any of your concern.
Here's what I predict you'll choose to do. You'll watch as the ambush unfolds.
Notice and appreciate the feral-mammalian gracefulness of real Albert Morris as he swerves the automobile, trying to avoid collision ... then guns the accelerator when he sees the platinum take aim ... and fire! Ah, it all happened days ago in linear time, yet the urgency feels so fresh.
Can you anticipate remembering what to do next?
Soon, you'll find there's no one conscious down there, under the desert stars. Albert and Ritu, stunned inside the Volvo's cab, won't notice as you take over a small fragment of ditKaolin, hanging on the car's window. You'll use the remnant, reaching inside, taking the vehicle's tiller ...
... and yes, guide it to a narrow ravine, hidden from all those civilized eyes out there that might feel pity or concern, bringing rescue much too soon.
You're about to be distracted.
Some information still pours into you through realAlbert's organic eyes and brain, pinning your concern back in the frozen ortho-moment of Friday morning in the underground lab. You will wonder, for instance, what is happening to Yosil Maharal's great invention? Which personality is winning control? Will the glazier beam shoot forth as predicted, soaring above both the real and spiritual planes?
You'll ask about the missiles -- did realAlbert succeed in stopping them with his final sabotage? Will the people of the city be saved? Or will backup systems kick in, sending death bullets flying after all?
There is satisfaction in realAlbert's feral heart, having swung that metal chair a final time, smashing the computer controller to sparking debris. Yet, through a corner of his eye, he sees both slender Ritu and a much larger Beta rushing toward him. For once, the two seem united in purpose. Isn't it amazing how siblings can overcome rivalry when faced with threats and opportunities to the family at large?
Time jutters forward a few notches before sticking again. Those quick seconds bring the pair closer. A few more such jumps and they will be upon poor Albert.
Only now, far across the room, Al's eye detects another figure entering. This golem wears a beige spiral dye job, garishly corkscrewing from the top of its head all the way down. Its expression, surveying the vast chamber filled with expensive equipment, is one of towering anger!
At first you will imagine that it's yet another version of Beta. Then you'll realize that looks are deceiving.
Why?
Why is all of this happening? What is the context for all of this meddling?
That will be your question soon. And I'll answer, to the extent possible, after a few more errands.
First we shall move to coordinates a little closer in spacetime. Make it about half a day ago ...
There! Albert Morris is alone in the great underground defense armory, sifting through computer records of the military base, tracking the secret thefts and treacheries of Yosil Maharal. Not far away stand columns of blank-eyed soldiers -- sealed-to-preserve-freshness -- ready to bake at a moment's notice, whenever their country needs them. Or when someone clever enough comes along to hijack them.
Shall we help ourselves? You will need just one.
First, look around for Ritu. An earlier version of that wounded-confused soul. You'll detect her soon, filled with self-loathing as she surrenders to an inner craving beyond her control, laying her shaved head between the poles of a high-capacity tetragramatron while autokilns warm up nearby, preparing several dozen giant golems built for war.
Come, while she's still fighting the compulsion, still showing some spirited resistance to that inner pressure. Beta never had to overcome such active opposition before! That means the imprint he makes upon the very first copy will be weak. You'll slip between the cracks and take over that one, pushing Beta aside. Yes, the ditto may be damaged. But it will be good enough -- yours to command -- first out of the oven.
Ready? Have you done it? Then bring along your warrior and we'll go find Albert.
What's that? Are we going to rescue him?
No, I don't expect Albert will call this much of a rescue. Not when he still winds up herded into that awful tunnel. And yet, time loops can be surprising. Even after an infinite number of recursions, they are never exactly the same. Maybe this one will amaze us.
No matter.
I'm sure that when the critical moment comes you will know what to do.
... and Roll ... Gumby hears a pitter-patter ...
As journeys go, this one was even worse than that miserable slog along the river bottom, back on Monday night. I didn't so much crawl downstairs as tumble most of the way.
What else could I do, with just an arm, a battered head, and a torso that kept dropping off bits with each bump or hard landing? I had no sense of smell, of course. (I could barely even remember the concept.) But oily vapors oozing off this body were easy to see. One reason for haste was to stay ahead of those fumes, which tend to accelerate final decay -- it's why dissolution usually happens all at once, swiftly and mercifully.
No such luck for me. Too obdurate to give up, I guess. How strange that frankie mutation made me more like Albert than even he was!
Finally, and rather to my surprise, I ran out of stairs, arriving at the same landing where I chose the least traveled of three forks in the road. Was that half an hour ago? I didn't regret the decision to climb those dark steps. Stopping the missile launcher, even temporarily, was the greatest achievement of my bargain-basement life. Only now I faced another trio of options.
Back to the cave entrance and the vacation cabin, where maybe a working telephone might be found amid the debris?
Forward, toward Maharal's inner sanctum? That's where the pilot of the Harley scooter went -- though now I doubted that he was ever Beta, after all. No doubt big happenings were going on, down that way.
But those two alternatives were out. I'd never make it more than a few meters. My sole choice lay across the corridor, in a niche containing that all-in-one home copier machine, warm and ready with its hopper full of fresh blanks. What I was about to try went against custom. You can even get fined if you're caught, though everybody tries it once or twice. In my state, I'll probably make a slobbering monster.
Still, the poor thing won't have to remember much. Step out of the kiln, run upstairs, and smash the launcher beyond repair. Easy!
All of which was moot until I reached the padded spot where an original must lay his head. Staring up, I wondered -- How the hell do I do that?
My enzyme clock was ticking out, the missile codes might be restored at any moment ... and now I had another reason to hurry. Through my battered abdomen I picked up vibrations, rhythmic and growing more forceful by the second.
Motors and wheels, I thought, recognizing some.
Other thuddings reminded me of running feet.
Wherever You're Atman ... or learning what's already known ...
Next you'll discover the soulscape is far larger than you imagined.
And yes, inhabited.
Did you arrogantly expect that the entire universe was waiting upon man to arrive?
Well, in a sense, that's true. Our cosmos is but one of trillions spun off by a single fertile singularity, whose daughter black holes spawned countless more baby universes, each of them exploding and inflating and cooling into billions of galaxies, which in turn made their own black holes and more singularity-spawned universes, and so on ... Among all those experiments, intelligence surely occurred, though far less commonly than you imagined.
Even scarcer still are creatures made of earthly flesh who look up at the stars and covet them across huge gulfs of empty space.
Most exceptional of all are those who find another way, bypassing cold vacuum, uncovering shortcuts to far richer fields. Exceptional almost to the point of uniqueness. Hence the vast emptiness of what Maharal dramatically called the "spiritual plane." A deeper continuum, made of stuff more basic than energy and matter. A frontier he meant to stride upon like a god, using all that raw material to cast paradise in his image.
Oh, you are rarities, you hot-souled humans. So flawed. Wondrously bright. It's a privilege to watch as you begin to waken. As you start to choose.
Have you begun to suspect who and what I am?
This voice that you mistook for a guide ... you'll soon notice that "I" never give commands, or even suggest very much. For the most part I only foresee, comment, and predict.
No, I'm not your Virgil. No mentor or font of wisdom. I'm your echo, you-who-were-Albert-and-more. A way to remember things that you haven't yet learned. One of many conveniences you'll soon grow accustomed to, where paradox is a normal fact of life.
Back in the ortho-moment -- still moving forward in jerks and sudden stops -- events will soon be coming to a head. Just three more swings of Yosil's pendulum while the glazier stores energy, preparing to burst forth whether or not a human imprint gives it personality. Whether or not a city full of dying souls awaits to feed it, in an orgy of necrophagia.
What, you still care about that? Very well then, let me predict that you will go back again to nudge events a little more. Go ahead.
You will find the green Albert who calls himself a "frankie" ... what's left of him ... less than an hour before the ortho-moment. Yes, right over there. Moments after his arm was snapped off by the closing scooter-canopy, sending him plunging through the roof of Yosil's cabin into a debris-strewn living room.
He might use a little encouragement at that point. What approach will you use?
Will you scold him for lying there in the dust, watching the Harley fly away, feeling defeated and ready to expire?
Well, then, try imitating my vatic tone, then listen as the green reacts!
Except that Clara will never get to hear the whole story ... and now the bad guys will win.
Aw, man. Whatever nagging inner voice had to put in that last bit? What guilt-tripping nag? If I could, I'd tear it out! Just shut up and let me die.
You gonna just lie there and let 'em get away with it?
Crap. I didn't have to take this from some obsessive soul corner of a cheap-model golem who was misborn a frankie ... became a ghost ... and was about to graduate to melting corpse.
Who's a corpse? Speak for yourself.
Stunning wit, that triple irony. And though I tried hard to ignore the little voice ... my right hand and arm moved, lifting slowly till five trembling fingers came within sight ... Then my left leg twitched ... Reacting to imprinted habits a million years old, they started cooperating ...
Oh well. Might as well help.
The bedraggled greenie moves! And just to be sure, you'll nag him again during that long drag through the grotto, then climbing the dark stairs, and so on.
Just don't exaggerate the importance of your badgering -- or the reification triggered by your presence as an observer. These things matter far less than physical action in the "real" world of cause-and-effect. The green might have made it entirely without your/my/our interference!
No matter. You will do this and it will aggravate him. It may help save a million lives, and divert the Standing Wave toward a different destiny. So by all means go ahead.
Now perhaps you will also go back a few hours, to a moment in Pal's apartment, whispering for the green to turn his head and listen at a crucial moment. Perhaps ... oh, of course you will.
You always meddle at the beginning. It is part of learning. Becoming.
Back in the ortho-moment -- another pendulum swing has passed, like the ticking of a titanic clock. Surprising resonances perturb the amplified Standing Wave, raising concern in the two stalemated combatants. Probability amplitudes are collapsing like quantum dominoes all around.
Their battle is over. It's out of their control now.
To Yosil, the news is calamitous. The germ missiles may not launch at all! No viral rain of death virus to mow down millions and feed the glazier beam when it arrives. Hovering above the city, it will harvest only a trickle. The few thousand who normally die each day will discover an afterlife unlike anything they were taught about in church! But Yosil despairs that such meager reinforcement will never give the glazier the boost it needs to become a spiritual behemoth, capable of bending the soulscape to its mighty will.
The other personality -- once rooted in Albert Morris -- had succumbed to Yosil's dream, adopting it as his own. Can he now accept it's over and choose a more modest goal?
Others plunge into this fray.
While the glazier builds toward ignition, the organic body of realAlbert sways along the axis of the beam, like an anchor dragged by a rising storm --
-- as Ritu and Beta arrive with arms outstretched, united in purpose at last, bent on pushing him aside, or worse.
I know you're curious to probe Ritu's complex, tormented soul. By all means, use the new powers of perception. Soon you'll see the crime that set her tragic tale in motion ...
... the reason why her syndrome so resembles and exaggerates the very same one suffered by Yosil.
Not genes alone, but also a trauma they both suffered long ago, when a doting father tried using clever new technology to encourage and spur his infant daughter's developing brain, by imprinting talents from one loving soul to another.
Like playing music for a fetus in the womb -- that is how poor Yosil imagined it -- a harmless gift from one generation to the next, alas, before anyone understood about subjective uniqueness and soul-orthogonality. Before the dreadful harm was widely known. Before such things were outlawed.
Tragedy can have its own triste beauty, evoking tears or laughter. This one rippled on with gorgeously transfixing horror worthy of Sophocles, across years wracked with silent remorse, obsession, and pain.
Yes, you'll pity them. From this new perspective, you will commiserate, dwell upon, and share their agony.
Later.
Others plunge into this fray.
A spiral-patterned golem charges through the opposite door, shouting about betrayal in terms that only a multibillionaire would use. And you have to hand it to Aeneas Kaolin. (You will hand it to him, I predict.) It took ingenuity that no one imagined him capable of, to penetrate the many-layered disguises and defenses erected by a family of brilliant paranoiacs. Yosil and Ritu and Beta underestimated him. So did Albert Morris.
With a little more time ... or if he trusted Morris enough to confide and ally with him from the beginning ... Kaolin might have made a difference. But now? Even as he raises a weapon, shouting threats and demands to desist, Aeneas clearly knows that it's too late.
Same with the warriors now arriving from the military base, bursting through that dark tunnel under Urraca Mesa. Armed, armored, and representing the wrath of abused taxpayers, it is the cavalry at last -- pulverizing Beta's rear guard to reach the high parapet and gaze down on all of this. Among their weapons are cameras, beaming images around the world.
Light cleanses. The World Eye was supposed to prevent all big nasty conspiracies and mad scientist labs.
It very nearly did.
Maybe next time it will.
If there is a next time.
Has anyone noticed the alignment yet?
Like a superheated, pressurized mix of air and explosive, the amplified Standing Wave has grown beyond containment or forbearance. Nor can you retard the advancing ortho-moment any longer. The time for meddling is about to end --
-- as Kaolin charges toward the red mirror
-- as Ritu and Beta plunge toward the gray
-- as soldiers throw themselves courageously over the balcony on ropes made of living clay
-- as realAlbert lifts his eyes ... the only one who seems, quite suddenly, to know what's happening.
Joe Friday ... as Gumby tries to do what comes naturally ...
A tester once told Albert he was "born for this era," with the right combination of ego, focus, and emotional distance to make perfect duplicates. Well, except for me, his first and only frankie. Still, I was willing to gamble on that talent --
-- providing I could somehow reach the scanning plate of a simple copier.
This time there was a chair nearby. Fumes wafted from my poor arm as it dragged me over there, one slither at a time. Worming around to grip a chair leg with my chin, I hauled it back, positioning the chair next to the big white duplicating machine. Only about a kilo of my body mass melted along the way.
It doesn't go high enough, I quickly realized. Glancing around for something else, I spied a wire-mesh waste receptacle three meters away. With a groan that escaped through several cracks other than my mouth, I set out to fetch it -- a journey that felt like crossing the North Pole while being pelted by asteroids.
Half of my remaining ceramic teeth fell out while gripping the metal basket on my way back. Then, the first time I tried tossing it on top of the chair, I missed and had to repeat the whole damned thing.
This had better be enough, I thought, when the basket was finally in place, upside down on the cushioned seat. Any minute, someone might restore contact with that missile launcher upstairs and resume the countdown. And those vibrations of running feet grew closer by the second. Whatever was going on, I wanted the power to act! Even as the shambling replica of a frankie.
Well, here goes.
From the floor I reached up, grabbed the edge of the chair, and pulled hard. My head and torso weighed much less now -- and grew lighter with each passing moment -- still the strain was enormous. Fresh pock-fissures erupted all along my quivering arm, each one venting noxious steam ... till at last my chin broached over the ledge, taking some of the pressure. That made things a bit easier, though no less painful. Commanding my elbow to twist up and around, I managed to push down now, dragging my attenuated body to perch at the edge of the seat.
So much for the simple part.
Halfway to the copier platform now, I could see a glowing green START button within easy reach, but useless till my head reached the perceptron tendrils. Still, I took a moment to smack the button, telling the machine to start readying a blank. If I did manage to make it, there'd be few seconds to spare. Machinery rumbled and rumbled.
Now things get tricky.
Fortunately, the chair had arms ... twice as many as I did, actually. That helped as I leveraged myself alongside the upended wastebasket, flopping and wedging my body against the metal mesh while my sole decaying limb pushed. Then I had to reach higher, onto the copier itself, searching for fingerholds -- and as I strained again, a couple of digits broke off, liquefying horribly as they fell past my good eye to splat on the floor.
This time, the fissures along my arm resembled chasms, sweating fluid the color of magma. It was a race to see whether dissolution would win, or hard baking from heat, like happened to that leg I threw at the missile launcher. Suppose I self-cooked in place! What a sculpture I'd make. Call it A Study in Obstinacy, reaching and grimacing while struggling to haul a useless body ...
That's it, I realized, grateful for any inspiration, drop the deadweight!
Barely thinking, I applied lessons that I learned upstairs, pulling my self inward and away from remote parts. The whole bottom half of my torso was useless to me now -- so ditch it! Scavenge the remaining enzymes. Send them up for the arm's final tug.
I felt what was left of my abdomen crumble away. With the load suddenly lightened, my arm gave a hard yank ... and snapped off at the shoulder.
I don't think I could ever describe what it felt like as a ragged head and upper chest, sailing high enough to look down at my goal, the white surface where a human original was supposed to lay in comfort, blithely commanding obedient machinery to make cheap doubles -- a perfect serving class that can't rebel and always knows what to do.
How simple that used to seem!
During my flying arc, I wondered, Assuming I land okay, will I be able to use my chin and shoulder to maneuver around? To guide my head between the tendrils?
Would that automatically trigger imprinting, now that the START button had been pressed? If not, how was I to press it again? Problems, problems. And you know what? I would have found solutions, too. I know it. If that darn trajectory had just carried me where I wanted to go.
But like Moses, I could only watch the promised land from afar. Coming down, my head barely missed the platform, caroming off the copier's edge and then against the wastebasket, knocking it off the chair so it tumbled, landing upright on the floor.
As if that weren't enough, what happened next was the real capper.
I rolled across the seat and teetered for a fragile moment, then fell off to land (appropriately enough, at the end of one hell of a week) inside a receptacle labeled TRASH
Soul's My Destination ... Will it be all right, now that the glazier beam has fired?
What a sight that was.
The titanic Standing Wave blasted through both clay mirrors, hurling the pendulum -- with ditYosil aboard -- deep into a stony ceiling. Yet all the others who were standing around barely got singed. For the mighty wave distortion instantly turned on an axis that lay at right angles to every known direction, vanishing into a distance no living eye could follow.
Except for realAlbert, that is, who turned his head as if to track its departure, wearing a smile so enigmatic, so knowing, that Ritu and her twin brother simply stopped in their tracks. One moment they were rushing toward him with hands raised to strike. The next, they simply dropped their arms and backed away, staring at him.
Yes, the "anchor" is still attached, by a slender thread.
Shall we follow?
From the beginning, when brilliant, tormented Yosil Maharal still thought he could design and control everything, the beam's first goal had been the nearest city. Where else could so many spirit-flickers be found close together, clustered like a tidy field of crops growing alongside a fallow prairie? It must have seemed a good place to harvest nourishment for the next step.
Had he bent his egomania enough to involve peers and collaborators -- even a whole civilization -- Yosil might have discovered and corrected all the flaws in his splendid plan. Technical and conceptual flaws. Moral flaws. But "mad scientist" is almost defined by solipsism -- a neurotic need to avoid criticism and do everything alone.
Without Maharal, it might have taken another generation for humanity to make this attempt. Because of him, humanity could have been destroyed.
As it turns out, there is no plague tearing through the metropolis when the glazier arrives overheard. No charnelhouse of rapid pestilence providing enough death manna to gorge upon at length. Just a few thousand souls per day, cast free of their organic moorings by accident or natural causes, rise gently to the hovering waveform, finding welcome room for their vibratory modes. After some initial surprise, they add breadth and subtlety to a superposition of states ...
But it's no feast.
This Standing Wave won't become a "god" by raw power alone.
Yosil's simple plan has failed.
Time to try something else.
Turning sideways again, the macrowave pursues a scent that few ever noticed before. Out to sea it flies, two thousand kilometers, where blue pelagic currents course above deep trenches -- an abode for cephalopods, some nearly as long as a supertanker, with eyes like dinner plates and brains reeking of high intelligence. Aliens, right here on Earth.
Is this it?
Plunging deep where sunlight never goes, we join the world of giant squid, sampling what it's like to flow along by sphincter-driven water jet, touching and experiencing a liquid world with long suckers that dangle beyond the limits of vision. We feed. We chase, mate, and spawn. We compete and scheme by logic all our own, expressing concepts in warm flashes of intricate color along our flanks.
And, once in a great while, we also tremble and worship when Death comes plunging down at us from Hell, the hot world above. For that narrow instant, while fleeing desperately, we clasp and cherish something that glimmers like hope --
Then the devil is upon us, massive, black, devouring. His shrill voice strikes deep, paralyzing, turning guts to jelly! Then come jaws, small but powerful. White teeth reflect the protest pigmentations of our bioluminescent skin as they tear unto us, dragging us upward ...
So, it wasn't the giant squid who attracted the glazier beam this way. They're so exotic, perhaps they'll find another soulscape of their own.
It was their hunters who drew the macrowave here.
Sperm whales, returning from the crushing depths, their hunger sated on fresh cephalopod, now gather at the pleasant wavetops to breathe and splash. Though occupied with natural concerns -- the quest for food and reproductive success -- now and then as many as a dozen creatures congregate, touching massive brows.
Contained within, far larger than any other organ, is a mound of waxy substance, malleable as wet clay, subtle at refracting and reshaping sound, enabling these stalkers of the deep to propel cunning beams that find -- and stun -- their prey in utter darkness. Sculpted sound is to them as the dynamic recoloring of flesh is to squid, or syntactical word chains to a human being. All are ways to gossip, cooperate, deceive, meditate, or -- when all else fails -- seek urgent meaning in prayer.
The sperm whales congregate, flared tails pointing outward like a petaled flower, or mandala, or rose window. Brows meeting, they exchange complex sonic shapes/images/ideograms with properties that long ago emerged from the background noise of mere survival. Meanings congeal in the wax, delicate as spiderwebs, unique as snowflakes, multifarious as an ecosystem.
They were doing this long before Bevvisov learned to imprint souls in clay.
Off again!
Using so much energy, shouldn't the glazier be growing hungry? There was beauty amid the squid and whales -- but no great nourishment. Then why does the macrowave seem undisappointed as it rotates through an axis invented on the spot -- twisting the very context out of which raw vacuum arose -- then building speed on a course that it makes up as it goes?
We seem to have discovered outer space.
In flickering sequence we pass great sweeps of stars. Mammoth clusters of bright pinpoints roll by in leaps that devour emptiness as if it wasn't there. Metric itself becomes a component of the wave, its ally in travel, rather than an obstacle.
Searching ... examining ... every now and then, we pause briefly to scrutinize -- a red giant, tumid and swollen as it slowly expands, eating its children. Then -- an aged white dwarf, born during the galaxy's first generation. Having blown away much of its substance, it will (ironically) endure long ages more on a starvation diet, glittering faintly for no one -- unlike a gluttonous blue super-giant, whose mere million years tick by with blazing speed. Far too massive for any other goal, it must choose glory over life -- that is, until it's cleaved by a surprising force, slicing the colossus in two. A singularity! Not a black hole, this one is long and stringy -- an exceptional relic of creation, a faceted flaw in spacetime, deadly, gorgeous only to those who know its language of pure math -- having already stirred turmoil when it passed through an immense molecular cloud, spinning vortices that self-gravitate, flattening to ionized skirts that whirl and merge into newborn systems -- then on again we speed, past spiral arms that gleam like diamond dust, until -- we find ourselves zooming down to a modest yellow sun ... a star of pleasant middle age ... a steady hearth, unpretentious, with a retinue of planet-specks -- one of which seems luckier than most ... warm-not-hot, massive-not-ponderous, wet-not-drowned, and kneaded by just enough falling objects to keep things interesting.
We plunge to this world, gorgeous in its balance of ocean and sky, sea and shore, mountain and plain, lake and hill, pond and knoll, tree and shrub, prey and predator, fungus and rotifer, parasite and prion, clay and crystal, molecule and atom, electron and ...
Diving ever smaller, we cry out to wait!
Go back!
What was that passing glimpse we just had of gleaming, multibranched spires built by fascinating hands? A brief impression of docked ships and shops and tree-perched homes where shaded figures spoke a demure language, like song?
Backtrack. It should be easy to find. Just return to a size and scale midway between a cosmos and a quark.
Another civilization. Another race of thinking, feeling beings! Wasn't that what you were looking for?
Apparently not.
Head Basket ... or how to become a real boy ...
Little remained of the gleaming me that stepped out of a kiln Tuesday morning, resigned to cleaning the house and running the chores of Albert Morris. A body that wound up living -- let's see -- close to three extra days, thanks to Aeneas Kaolin, and a dash of mulish stubbornness. A self who wound up doing a whole lot more than scrub toilets! Who gathered so many interesting memories and thoughts -- what a pity there'd be no chance to deposit them. To share them.
The things I've seen.
And hallucinated, reminding myself of all the fun echoes and trippy/bossy voices I made up along the way. Oh, realAl was going to miss out on a lot. Assuming that he escaped the burning of his home, Albert probably spent the whole week at a computer screen, or waving his arms under a chador, coordinating ebony researchers and gray investigators and dickering with insurance agents. Working hard, the poor dull fellow.
And yet, he can't be a complete bore. Not if Clara loves him.
I'd smile if I could. How nice if my last mental picture could be of her ... a woman I never met in person, yet still adored.
I could see her now -- a final, pleasant feat of imagination as the last of my torso dissolved, leaving only a pathetic head rolling at the bottom of a dustbin. Yes, it was she who came before me, all blurry in a Hollywood-romantic way that softens any image, even one wearing a duralloy helmet covered with spiky antennas.
Through that gauzy light, Clara seemed to peer down at me, her sweet voice beckoning like an angel.
"Well, I'll be cut to bits and served as tempura," said my illusory seraph, pushing aside a pair of holo goggles that gleamed like sunlit cobwebs. "Chen! Does this dit look like an Albert to you?"
"Hm. Maybe," said another figure, crowding in to have a look. While my conjured Clara seemed all soft and feminine (albeit wrapped in heavy armor), the newcomer was fanged and scaly.
A demon!
In its hand, a slim rod poked my brow.
"Damn, you're right! The pellet says ... wait, this can't be."
A third voice, much higher, squeaked, "Oh yes it can!"
From around Clara's shoulder a thin face like an eager fox appeared, bending over to leer down, grinning at me with twin V-rows of shiny teeth. "It's got to be the one who signaled," said the ferret-figure I had dreamed up, looking quite a bit like my old companion Palloid. "Maybe this is old Gumby, after all."
I would have shaken my head if I could, or closed my eyes if I had lids.
This was all too much, even for a dream.
Time to melt, before it got worse.
Only, I had to rouse a bit when Clara called.
"Albert? Is that you in there?"
Illusion or not, I couldn't refuse her anything. Though lacking a body -- or any other means to make sound -- I somehow gathered strength to mouth four words.
" ... just ... a ... fax ... ma'am ... "
All right. I should have come up with something better. Everything was fading, though. Anyway, I felt happy enough. Before utter blackness, my final image would be of her smile, so reassuring that you just had to believe.
"Don't worry, sweetheart." Clara said, reaching into the wastebasket. "I've got you. Everything will be just fine."