For a time, there was only darkness. Transference was usually a mostly instantaneous process with one environment overlaying itself on top of the other. Something must have gone wrong. She panicked and cursed at herself for allowing a stranger to hack her interface like that.
“It takes a little longer for you slowbanders,” a voice said in her ear. It was Flo’s voice, but somehow everywhere, yet nowhere simultaneously. “Just relax. It’s all good. You’re safe.”
Serah felt a sensation of light, starting as a single point, then growing into intersecting white lines that twisted and swam around her, eventually forming the outline of a black and featureless room. The room slowly rotated around her until a concept of “up” formed in her mind, and the room oriented itself to accommodate it.
Next, pinpoints of light rose from the floor, slowly forming into a shape of some sort. Blue lines grew out from the points, connecting themselves to adjacent points in a pattern that began to resemble the frame of a basic skeleton. This skeleton responded to Serah’s will, and she spent a few moments wiggling fingers and flexing newfound elbows. This was her, she decided. Next, red polygons of light grew out of and formed around the skeleton, giving it a more human-like, if generic, form. The monotone flesh didn’t seem real until it was bathed in multi-colored lights – eventually forming into her skin, clothing, and unique features.
Now fully formed, she found herself standing on a platform, two steps off the floor and about two meters from where the white lines formed the outline of a basic set of double doors. Slowly, she stepped down and walked toward them. They opened without explanation or effort, revealing a massive, cathedral-like room.
In her travels, she had visited Notre Dame and the Sistine Chapel, but even those magnificent feats of human artistry paled in comparison to the spectacle she now found herself standing in. The sheer scale of the room was like nothing she’d ever seen, reminding her more of the old sports arenas, disused for decades now, than a church sanctuary, which was obviously what it was attempting to convey.
The room was divided into 32 sections on two levels, ordered in a circle around the cathedral’s center. Each one was unique. Some had pew-like seats, some featured multi-colored patches on the floor, and others had asymmetrical, organically shaped structures that some people used as chairs. A few dozen people of all ages, races, and creeds were scattered around the room. Some were standing, some sitting, some kneeling in prayer or reverence. There were small groups as well as individuals sitting alone. They all faced a massive multi-colored spectacle in the center of the room. Two-dimensional planes of light slowly revolved in clouds of color as sparks and streaks swam through them like flames or insects. Everything seemed to be constructed of light and a type of crystal, with various colors adding fractal-like subtleties of detail. At times, she imagined she could make out patterns, but every time she went to look at a specific feature, it would move or morph into something else, the way spots in one’s vision defied every attempt to look directly at them. It was almost as if whatever was there was alive and determined not to be seen.
Then there was the music, which was not music, she decided, but a tone, or possibly a cluster of tones. She couldn’t determine whether the sound was from an instrument or a voice. It had no source she could sense and seemed to fill the room uniformly. Other musical sounds swelled and cascaded around it, much like the lights in the center of the room. She couldn’t determine if there was a relationship between the two. The music was never so loud as to be obtrusive and could have been the opening note of a symphony, the grand finale of a concerto, or a random note in the middle of a sonata. In the end, she decided it didn’t matter.
“Wow,” she exhaled. There was no other word for it.
Flo seemed to step out of nowhere to stand beside her. “I thought you’d find this interesting.” She walked forward and sat on one of the pews, gesturing for Serah to join her.
“What is this place?” Serah asked, still taking it all in.
“The official designation in the Phrame directory is Bayt Alruwh, but only certain people can see that much. Nobody knows who made it or why, only that it was one of the first constructs ever built in-Phrame, possibly left behind by one of the original engineers. We don’t know if it was even meant to be shared. Is it supposed to be art? Is it somebody’s statement? Is it a gift? Is it even complete, or just an unfinished draft?” She laughed. “I’ve been studying it for decades. It’s an amazing piece of code. It’s as if it only wants certain people to experience it, and everyone’s experience differs.”
“Look, I have to know what’s going on. Your friend, Y, said something about a shade? What’s that?”
Flo shook her head, walked over to a red velvet sofa, and gestured for Serah to sit with her. “You’ve got a classical education,” Flo shook her head, disappointed. “You’ve never heard of a shade?”
“As in, the spirits of the deceased returning from the underworld and appearing as shadows? I’m not buying that.”
“Why not? The Phrame hosts billions of living people, some nothing more than brains in preservation canisters. Not to mention, there are hundreds of thousands of psytron matrices connected to the Phrame, each being a living synthetic intelligence, either created, merged, or simulated from a living person. All of them can die. Sometimes the Phrame — whose core is the preservation and presentation of information without destroying or losing anything — can get, shall we say, a bit confused.”
“Ghosts in the machine.”
“Ghosts, shades, wraiths, yes. They’e really nothing more than corrupted data. The Phrame is designed to store, model, and present data without error or distortion, and it has a dozen failsafes and error correction protocols to make sure everything makes sense in this reality. For the most part, people don’t even see corruption unless they know what they’re looking for. Shades are echoes of consciousness still in the datastream and preserved by the Phrame. They usually don’t do anything more than echo a pattern from their former life, but whatever is chasing you has the appearance is showing intelligence, premeditation, and adaptability. Shades rarely attack people; when they do, it’s just the random, unlucky person who happens to be closest. They shouldn’t be able to tell you from any other person it meets, and it certainly shouldn’t be able to jump constructs at will like this one. No, what’s chasing you is something else. Corruption maybe, but intelligent.”
Serah rubbed her temples. “This is all becoming too much. So, is this shade thing using my dreamspinner to get in my head and make me do things?” she asked hopefully.
“No,” Flo said confidently. “It can’t. For the same reason, you can’t access your interface.”
“I couldn’t accept a stem transfer either. Something about a priority transfer?”
Flo took a deep breath and said nothing for some time. She nodded toward the center of the room. “When you look at that, what do you see?” She said, at last, changing the subject in a calm, soothing voice.
Serah regarded it for a moment. “I don’t know. Something familiar but elusive. I feel like something is there, but I can’t find it. It’s beautiful and terrifying at the same time. It feels like it should be easy to see, but,” she thought for a moment, “it’s like I’m trying too hard.”
Flo nodded at the spectacle in the center of the room. “I’ve talked to many people about what they see when they look at that. Some say definitively that it’s an aspect of Allah. One said it was Budda sitting on a rock, laughing, and he didn’t know how anyone could see anything else. A few people swear they see long-lost loved ones in the mists. A lot of people don’t see anything, just blackness and oblivion. Even more people refuse to talk about what they see.”
Serah kept staring into the center of the room. “How is that possible?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you really want to know what it is? How it defies your attempts to see, and why other people manage to see something completely different? Do you really want to see behind that curtain and destroy this illusion?”
“Maybe not,” Serah admitted. Then turned to Flo, “So, what do you see?”
Flo chuckled, “I’ve spent my whole life trying to deconstruct things, solve mysteries, and explain things that don’t make sense. Now, at my age, I only see the underlying construct. The individual pieces of code that comprise the whole. It’s like when you see a magician perform a trick you figured out when you were a kid. It’s still fun to watch the artistry and execution, but the real ‘magic’ is gone when you know how it works … or at least when you’ve decided that you know.”
“So, why are we here?”
“This place has a special filter at the junction. It rejects SIs and even LiMs. Only human minds are allowed to pass.”
Serah nodded. “Are you sure that thing is an SI? I could swear I’ve seen it in the Root Realm as well.”
Flo attempted to smile behind guilty eyes. “Well, if I’m wrong, I also have a plan for that, too.”
“Why are you going to all this trouble? Just because Erik asked you to?”
Flo smiled. “You’ve known Erik for what, about four years now? Wouldn’t you do anything you could to help him?”
“I would, but I wouldn’t trust my friends to help him if they had never met him.”
“You don’t have that many friends, though, do you?”
“Of course I do,” Serah started to protest but thought better of it. “Well, maybe not those types of friends. Not anymore.”
“So now you do – a few you just didn’t know about before,” Flo said, patting her on the leg.
“So, how long have you known Erik?” Serah asked.
Flo flashed a particularly sinister smile. “Quite a while. Long enough to know he holds you in very high regard and would do anything to help you. That means I, too, will do anything to help you.”
“I’m starting to think I don’t give him enough credit,” Serah admitted.
“Well,” Flo sighed, “he does tend to keep people at arm’s length.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
“He’s just protecting himself, as well as you. It isn’t personal.”
“I understand,” Serah nodded. “I always figured the skillsets I’ve seen him use were just the tip of the iceberg and probably didn’t come without a few sacrifices.”
“More than a few, Flo frowned. Most of our group is like that, unfortunately. Makes it hard to confide in outsiders.”
“But you seem to go all out when asked to help,” Serah offered.
Flo shrugged. “We don’t have all of the answers yet, but we’re starting to get a general idea of what is happening to you.” She put a hand on Serah’s knee. “Now, listen to me. You are in great danger. We’ve determined that massive amounts of data are being dumped into your brain through your skullcap. We don’t know how, why, or for what purpose.”
“What kind of information?”
“We don’t know. It’s being transmitted in asynchronous packets, and right now, it’s just random bits of unordered data. It’s like pulling a bunch of puzzle pieces out of the box one at a time and trying to guess what the final picture will be. We’re talking petabytes of information, though.”
“My interface. The error message said something about ‘Transmission in progress.’“
“Yes, the transmission starts about ten minutes after you put on your skullcap.”
“How is that even possible?” Serah gasped, distressed she was being used as a giant storage system against her will.
“It shouldn’t be,” Flo admitted. “The human mind can store a lifetime of information and experiences and only use a fraction of its potential. The pathways to access and use that information break down from old age long before even a 150-year-old person can fill it up. You can implant memories or information in the unused portions of the brain and then tie them back to the conscious mind with a simple chemical connection. Until those pathways are created, however, the amount of data being pushed into your mind is only accessible by your subconscious, which is always attempting to process it. Basically, you’re dreaming it. We consulted neurophysicists, and they laughed at the idea, saying that amount of disconnected information would drive someone instantly insane unless they either had the most perfectly ordered mind ever or the person sending the data had a very detailed method of scanning synapses and mapping neurons far more efficiently than any current technology.”
Serah remembered what Vijay had told her about her mind shortly after the stem dump before he started malfunctioning. She thought better of telling Flo about it now, however. She would wait and confide in Erik with that one. “Halferne has a dozen degrees in neuroscience, physiology, and biology and decades more experience on top of that. It can’t be a coincidence. He must be trying to send me a message. That’s why he’s in all of my dreams.”
Flo nodded, “We came to the same conclusion. The answer is obvious, but I needed to make sure you were ready and could handle it,” Flo said. “That’s why I had to bring you here. It’s someplace safe in the Phrame where we can let Halferne finish sending his message.”
“How much longer will it take? Apparently, I ran the dreamspinner for twelve straight hours the other day, and I’ve been in-Phrame for several hours tonight.” Serah shuddered, wondering what was happening to her physical body at this very moment. She didn’t feel any different. Certainly not like she was losing her grip on reality. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said shakily.
“Yes, you can,” the old woman assured her. “I have a feeling Halferne knew what he was doing. I think he’s been right so far, and your conscious mind can handle the transfer and process everything without realizing it, but you’ve been messing everything up by using a dreamspinner which is trying to interpret and incorporate the data.”
“So what should I do?”
“Just try to stay calm. Relax. Deep breaths.”
Serah obeyed, breathing deeply and slowly as she watched … whatever it was … in the middle of the room. How did Flo know so much about it? What could she have possibly learned from Serah’s explanation of what she saw? None of his was making any sense. Perhaps she was going insane.
She kept focusing on her breathing, listening to the music now, closing her eyes, letting it wash over her.
When sleep came, she didn’t even notice.
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