For a time, there was only darkness. Transference was usually almost instantaneous, simply one environment overlaying the other. Something must have gone wrong. She panicked and cursed herself for letting a stranger 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, and nowhere. “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. The room instantly oriented itself to accommodate this new perception.
Next, pinpoints of light rose from the floor, slowly forming an abstract shape. Blue lines grew out from the points, connecting themselves to adjacent points as the pattern slowly 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. She watched red polygons of light grow out of the blue skeleton, forming muscles and tissue to give it a more human-like, if generic, shape. The monotone flesh didn’t seem real until it was bathed in multi-colored lights – eventually forming into skin, clothing, and her own unique features.
Now fully formed, she stood on a platform, two steps off the floor and about two meters from where white lines outlined a basic set of double doors. Wherever she was, she had a feeling she’d somehow barely made it here. It was almost as if she’d stepped off the map. She attempted to pull up her interface to get details of the construct. There was no response.
The platform around her went dim. She scanned the room. It was made of basic white lines. The “doors” seemed the only access point now. There were no terminals or controls to bring back the transport booth as near as she could tell. Wherever she was, she was trapped.
Slowly, she stepped down and walked toward the doors. They opened without explanation or effort, revealing an enormous, cathedral-like room.
In her travels, she had visited Notre Dame and the Sistine Chapel. Still, 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 stood, some sat, and some knelt in prayer or reverence. Small groups sat alongside solitary individuals. 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 tried to focus on a specific feature, it moved or morphed into something else, like spots in one’s vision that 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.”
Serah felt her heart beginning to beat harder. “Look, I don’t know who you people are, but I’m not comfortable being led around like this.”
“You’re perfectly safe here.”
“Safe!? Who are you people? What happened to my interface? What are you going to do to me?”
“We’re friends of Erik’s. You have to trust us.”
“Fine, where’s Erik then? Let me hear it from him.”
“He’s close by, I assure you. He knows where you are.”
“I have to know what’s going on. Your friend, Y, said something about a shade? What is 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. Any of them can theoretically “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’re 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 fail-safes 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 do nothing more than echo a pattern from their former life, but whatever is chasing you has the appearance of 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 Buddha 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 make up the whole. It’s like watching a magician perform a trick you figured out as 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?”
“Well, first off, to get you to calm down. Your mind is racing, and your vitals are spiking.” Serah took a deep breath reflexively. “More importantly, this place has a special filter at the junction. It rejects SIs and even LiMs. Only living 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. Therefore, I too will do anything to help you.”
“I’m starting to think I don’t give him enough credit,” Serah admitted.
“That’s by design, you know,” 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 skill sets 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.”
“Yet you go all out when asked to help,” Serah noted.
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 unstructured 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. It’s 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 that they were using her 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 with room to spare. Storage capacity isn’t the limiting factor; retrieval is. You will always forget things. Sometimes a scent or a sight will bring them back, sometimes they are lost forever. You can implant memories or information in the unused portions of the brain as a STEM upload and then tie them back to the conscious mind with a simple chemical connection. Until those pathways are created, however, the data being pushed into your mind is only accessible to your subconscious, which is continually processing it. So, essentially, you can dream the data, but you can’t remember it until the connection is created, presumably when the upload is complete. 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 now, though. 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 thought so, too. 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. Still, 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. Your increased adrenaline and constant panic are actually slowing the process down.”
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 it 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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