She’d been packed for days. Months. Seconds. Waiting for Claire to come back to the Mindscape. But her sister was busy saving the world, or fighting with Dad, or whatever it was Claire did nowadays.
Madame Baudelaire wanted her out. The invisible housekeeper was perfectly polite, as always. Alice knew, though. She knew when someone was using a persona. And Madame Baudelaire had been wearing one since the moment Alice walked through the gates.
Maybe even before. That didn’t matter.
It was time to leave.
Alice shrugged the raincoat on. It’d get all sweaty and humid underneath, but Alice needed a persona that could survive the trip back to her body, and the little girl playing in the not-gray fog of the void was her best bet. The boots were too small, even though they’d looked oversized, and she struggled to pull them on. Eventually, her socks went into a pocket, and her feet slid right in. The rubber sides felt sticky and weird on her bare skin.
Then she was ready. Her three personas—the mother, the soldier, and the infovampire—were tucked away in their boxes. The first one wanted to scold her for what she was about to do—and to scold Claire for not seeing her off. The second one was quiet. She waited for the mission to start. And the third?
The third raged.
Alice ignored them all. The key slipped into the lock, the iron gate creaked open, and she skipped through it. And, left behind and blessedly alone for the first time in what felt like weeks, Madame Baudelaire swept the path through the garden clean and straightened a dozen Magic Treehouse books for what she sincerely hoped would be the last time.
SHOCKS Olympia Administrative Wing, Washington, USA - June 21, 2043, 5:17 AM
- - - - -
It’s back to the lab again.
The moment I wake up, I leave the administrative wing in my suit and body armor. There’s no time for a shower. We’ve burned a whole day and two nights getting SHOCKS Olympia in order.
You’d think it would be easy—that a top-secret facility under a mountain with entrances into pocket dimensions would just…function. But no. It turns out, before I could even start writing down the equation for finding Merge Prime, Doctor Twitchy and I had to work through dozens of security protocols that hadn’t been done, approve countless tasks that no one could do, and manually change air filters and life support systems in the pocket dimension.
James couldn’t do that for obvious reasons, and whoever was supposed to do it got melt-vanished by Alexander.
So that was a pain in the ass.
And it’s not like I had a moment to breathe. There’s not enough space in the administrative wing for everyone. Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue because it’d be a quick tram ride to the dormitory wing, but according to James, that’s a whole different mess of anomalies that I don’t have time to clean out, and without an RST, SHOCKS isn’t going to take the risk. So James popped the containment cells, and we got to bunk two or three to a cell—sleeping in shifts, of course. Hot-bunking, Daley calls it.
I’m bunked with Dad. Separate beds, same room. We’re sharing it with a pair of agents who have the night shift. But I refuse to deal with him right now. Unnecessary variables in the equation are too much of a mess.
It’s been two nights and a day, but today, I’m going to get started on the equation, because I have a feeling I’m going to need all the time I can get to make it happen. There are probably thirty or forty variables, but the big ones are as follows:
- Who might know where Merge Prime started?
- Where can I find that information if the obvious sources don’t know?
- How do I get there once I do know?
- Is it worth the risk of something worse happening to Reality Zero if we attack Merge Prime?
- Can we even pull it off in three days?
So, anyway, I leave the administrative wing, heading for the Black Sector. James hates that I’m going there—it screws with his connection to the rest of the world or his connection to me—but I need the fewest interruptions possible. Doctor Twitchy’s got a team of researchers in there, because of course he does, but they’re working on the same problem I am. They’re annoying, but necessary. We’ve got an agent at the door to keep the unnecessary variables to a minimum, though.
The first variable—‘who knows where Merge Prime started?’—has two obvious answers and a much less obvious one.
The first is the Halcyon System itself. If they’ve been opponents for as long as the System claims they’ve been, it stands to reason it knows the answer. And it knows what we’re up to. It should be willing to cooperate.
The second one is the undead reality, Reality One. But I don’t think they have the answer. They survived Merge Prime, but they did it by rebuilding their whole world to manage merge portals. That doesn’t leave room to explore the nature of the multiverse or whatever. And being Reality One in SHOCKS’s database doesn’t mean they’re the first reality to merge with any other.
So, the third option—the one that’s not obvious—is returning to Provisional Reality ARC.
It’s not obvious because there wasn’t a force in that world that could have stopped the heat elemental anomaly from covering the world. It’s all drowned in obsidian and magma now, I one hundred percent guarantee it.
But if it’s not…
If there’s part of it that’s intact…
We might have missed something.
No, we almost certainly missed something. The residents of Provisional Reality ARC knew exactly what was happening to them, and they put incredible amounts of resources into surviving their reality’s collapse. They even went so far as to create the Voiceless Singers as angels of protection. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean it was the only strategy Provisional Reality ARC tried.
What if they tried fighting back, just like Doctor Twitchy’s thinking about fighting back? What if they were trying to find Merge Prime’s origin, too? What if we could piggyback off their data instead of generating our own?
James is skeptical. But there’s a spark of truth to the mission. And Doctor Twitchy’s willing to take the risk and Mergewalk there with me, and to be the person digging into that reality’s tech. I can’t do it, but he thinks he and his research team could—if I can keep them safe. He just needs two things from me first.
SHOCKS Headquarters, Victoria, British Columbia - June 21, 2043, 11:34 AM
- - - - -
I didn’t want to come back here. Not yet.
But the first thing Doctor Twitchy wants is the file Lambda 5-4 pulled. It’s got the keys to navigating Provisional Reality ARC’s mess of an informational storage system. Without it, he’s blind.
So I hit the ground in my bedroom at SHOCKS Victoria, Revolver ready. James says it’s clear—that he’s got control of the facility, and that there have been no breaches since I left on the seventeenth. But I’ve learned not to trust him on stuff like that. Not because he’s wrong, but because he’s not omniscient. What he doesn’t know can hurt me.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
It’s quiet, of course. “James, you’re sure there aren’t any breaches?” I ask.
[Absolutely. The anomalies that Li Mei freed, she either destroyed herself or scared into the city. They’re long gone and have no interest in coming back here. I’m currently tracking three of them, though, if you’re interested.]
“No. Let me know if anything changes here, though.” I keep the Revolver at the ready instead of holstering it, and I head straight for the director’s office. It’s interesting how similar that one aspect of SHOCKS Victoria is to SHOCKS Olympia. Almost like they were built on the same plan, by the same mind. But that mind isn’t James. He came later—he had to have come later- otherwise, the whole Victoria building would have been built around his tank, instead of the exerimental sector being tacked on in a containment wing.
That doesn’t matter, though. I sit in the director’s chair and start rummaging through Doctor Twitchy’s desk. The computer’s trash. Did I destroy it, or did Li Mei? I can’t remember, and it’s only been a couple of days. I know I broke Director White’s, but maybe not this one?
But the drawers are intact. It takes me a second or two to disable the locks; James helpfully provides step-by-step instructions.
Then I’m in.
There’s a wealth of knowledge here. Not everything SHOCKS produced was stored digitally. Plenty of it’s in paper documents. I thumb through their descriptions, but none strike me as useful right now. I’ve already got Doctor Twitchy’s thoughts on the nuclear weapons plan. The rest of it—the containment protocols for anomalies that can’t be mentioned digitally, or who can’t even be mentioned with language at all—don’t interest me. What does interest me is the code.
In Social Studies—which is the second-worst class I took last year, behind Mrs. Lightsen’s English class—we learned about the Rosetta Stone. It’s a language key that, when it finally got figured out, unlocked like thirteen different ancient languages or something. The amount of knowledge that one discovery unlocked rivaled anything up to the twentieth century in terms of historical knowledge and blah blah blah.
The point is that the Rosetta Stone filled in dozens—if not hundreds—of variables. And the device I find in Doctor Twitchy’s fourth drawer, buried under the neutralization paperwork for the Stag Lord, is my Rosetta Stone. It’s going to solve the Merge Prime issue. It has to.
I slip it into my pants pocket and start heading for the door.
[Since you’re here, do you mind checking out a few things?] James asks.
“Don’t you have complete control over the whole place?” I’m ready to leave. There’s nothing for me here. But depending on what James asks, that might not be true. My sister’s body’s in his tank; it’s been there for four days, and so far, nothing bad has happened to it, but it’s only a matter of time.
[In theory, yes. In practice, I’ve recently been informed that my knowledge of SHOCKS’s various facilities is incomplete. I’ve got several locations in SHOCKS Headquarters VVI that could hide similar black sectors to the ones in SHOCKS Olympia. While I don’t expect them to, given the Victoria location’s urban setting, it would be irresponsible not to check.”
I sigh. He’s got a point. As far as either of us knows, there hasn’t been a containment breach in SHOCKS VVI since Li Mei let everything out of its cage. Over half of those breaches resulted in immediate recontainment. The other half disappeared. James knows where they are, but…
If it’s not an anomaly in James’s database, there’s no way to know what’s from a black sector and what’s from a merge. And if he doesn’t know about it, he might not be looking for it the right way.
So, I start scouring SHOCKS Victoria for black sectors.
I don’t find any.
James isn’t surprised. Annoyed. But not surprised. [I was hoping…My knowledge feels incomplete. There should be answers.]
“Tell me about it,” I mutter. The Provisional Reality ARC Rosetta Stone’s in my pocket, and it’d take exactly fifteen seconds to be in the black sector at SHOCKS Olympia. But…”I want to check the Experimental Sector, too.”
[There’s no way there’s an entrance to another black sector there. It’s already off the beaten path, but I promise that I know every inch of that room. Every. Single. Inch.]
“Yeah, but that’s where my sister is. If you missed something, I want to know. And I want to see it myself.”
[If you’re sure.]
The containment wing on the way to the experiment sector is covered in fight detritus. Li Mei did her thing here, killing researchers and agents—and inside, RST Lambda-Five. James and I pieced together what happened; she used Alice’s body to trick the team, then wiped them out at close range while their guards were down.
The merge gate I used to use to target different realities lies in a hundred pieces. Both anomalies SHOCKS used to create and power it are gone. That’s not a shock. Containment breached near here first, and with Lambda-Five down, there wasn’t anything to protect the device. Li Mei could have done whatever she wanted with it. She’d probably wanted it gone.
Alice’s tank is fine. Nothing’s touched it in four days. According to James, its readings are near-nominal. Not nominal, obviously; there’s damage across the experimental sector, but James did a good job of keeping the essential stuff running after getting control back. Her heart’s beating, her lungs are pumping, and with her in my Mindscape, that’s all I can really ask.
I start up a Mergewalk. To get back to SHOCKS Olympia, I can’t just teleport across Reality Zero. That’d be too easy; I’ve got to make a stop in a totally different reality first.
Location Unknown, Provisional Reality ARC, Time Unknown
- - - - -
The last time I was here, the city was burning and melting at the same time.
The magma monster’s gone, though. I don’t know where it went, but it left behind the shell of the city. Most of the skyscrapers have collapsed. The Research Mezzanine and the labs below it are gone. In their place is a twisted, melted soup of concrete and metal and bits of glass that look like they used to be stasis pods—all suspended in a layer of black volcanic rock. The ‘Containment and Preservation, Incorporated’ organization’s research is gone.
I didn’t expect to find anything there, though. And according to James, I’ve got a solid four or five hours—the magma anomaly burned off everything that was left of the reality-sucking vine, leaving its reality levels extremely high.
Hopefully, it won’t take that long to find a lead or two.
Not every skyscraper’s gone. I head into the city center; my Mental Fortutide is high enough at 2—plus all the levels that went into it before it combined—that I’m not worried about Mindbenders. I doubt there are any left in Provisional Reality ARC.
At least, not in this city.
One of the nearby skyscrapers seems functional. Not intact. Its windows are puddles of glass near the bottom that look like ice, and long, hanging cones that look like razor-sharp icicles fifty feet long. I hurry inside, where it’s safer. I’m tough, but I don’t think I can tank a hit from one of those if it falls.
[I’m in.]
“You sound like a kid trying to be a hacker,” I say as I head up the stairs. You couldn’t pay me to get on an elevator in this building right now.
James laughs. [I am a kid trying to be a hacker. I’m just really, really good at it. I’ve connected your augs to the Rosetta Stone. I’m going through the lexicon, making sure all the translations are correct, and then I’ll be able to interface directly with Provisional Reality ARC computer systems.]
“Why didn’t we do this the first time?”
[Because I didn’t realize I could do it until we got the lexicon to begin with. I’m not omniscient, as much as I wish I was.]
That’s a poor explanation. I choose to believe it anyway, since I don’t have a choice.
[You’ll need to help out a little,] James says when we finally find a room near the top of the building that wasn’t exposed directly to the magma anomaly’s power. [Nothing’s going to have power. We’ll need to fix that somehow.]
“What do you recommend?”
[I don’t know. Look around. I’ll know what I’m looking for when I see it.]
I start looking. Then I stop. “How much power do you actually need to get what we’re here for?”
[Not much. I have to run one of their computers for long enough to look at everything. Once we have it, I can spend time decrypting it in my own systems, so it’s really just imaging. But that’s more than you’d expect.]
“More than my augs are drawing?” The sooner I’m out of here and back in Reality Zero, the better. Something about the city and the skyscrapers—and the complete lack of anything, even Mindbenders—has me on edge.
[You want to power it off your augs? Analyzing. Analysis complete. It could work. The Radia AO-Four Silvers run off internal bioelectrics, like most models. Their heat dispersal’s supposed to—yep, I can turn off the safety guardrails and overclock…Claire, this will hurt. You’re good with that, right?]
“Yes.” It wouldn’t be the first time my augs fried me.
[Okay. The only way to get the power we need out of your augs is to disable both the aural and optic devices’ power governors and heat dispersal systems. They’re tied together, so I can’t free the governors without shutting down the dispersal. They’re going to feel like your old augs for about two minutes, and I’m going to need to simulate running every application on them for the whole time to generate enough power to run a computer.]
“I can handle it.”
[Great. Now, we just need an intact computer.]
I start checking, but even inside the building, away from the melted windows, there’s only damage and destruction. It takes almost fifteen minutes of James running all sorts of scans on my augs before we find one that might work, then five seconds of heat across my face before James announces that that one’s fried, too.
The second computer’s going to work, though. James is pretty sure. I take a deep breath. “Okay, let’s do this.”
[Hang on to something. This is going to hurt.]
James disables the dispersal and governors, and a moment later, my face burns.
Patreon has one advanced chapter available for free members and seven advanced chapters ahead of Royal Road for $5.00. Come check it out!