No, my goal is a more real, heightened reality. Stronger and sharper than the flat wafers we are fed through our senses.
Arnon D’Bvaym
THE WALLS, CEILING, and floor were made of dull, gray metal. A single, flickering light, set into the ceiling, cast the room into indistinct visibility. The door in the wall was very tall, reaching the ceiling, with no handle on the inside. There were no windows, there was no furniture, and Cortex felt utterly, utterly alone.
He’d initially woken up on the floor in darkness. He’d felt confused and scared as he groped his way around the room, quickly learning the exact dimensions of his small prison. Unable to think of what to do, he spent a short time leaning against a corner, before the room drove him to standing—the metal of the walls and the floor was very rough, like extra-coarse sandpaper, though that didn’t explain why it felt so aggravating to Cortex. He tried to avoid touching the walls and floor as much as possible, preferring to stand, or sit rigidly, avoiding lying down or leaning against a wall until he was too tired to do otherwise.
It took several hours, but Cortex eventually realized why the roughness of the room agitated him so much: the walls and floor were subtly vibrating. The vibrations themselves were hardly noticeable, but they were just enough to make him feel like he had a pebble stuck in his shoe, only spread across his entire body. These vibrations, combined with the coarse texture of the metal that made up his prison, were just enough to leave his skin feeling red and raw if he touched a wall or the floor for more than a few moments.
Cortex beat his hands against the door to the room. “Let me out!” he screamed. His voice echoed cruelly in the small space, hurting his ears.
There was no answer, not even the merciless grunt of a jailor yelling at him to be quiet. Cortex had absolutely nothing telling him he hadn’t been locked in a small room to die, utterly alone, forgotten about, and lied to.
Lying down, face pressed against the rough, vibrating metal despite feeling that his skin was being worn away, Cortex whispered, “Hannah!” as streams of salty water ran from his eyes and down his nose, dripping off the tip. Why did she do this to him? Why did she promise him that some prophet wanted to meet him? Why did she make him feel special, then abandon him here in this . . . hell?
Hours more passed, or days, or weeks; time became meaningless to Cortex. He cried until he could cry no more, then explored his surroundings again. He could find no cracks, no seams, other than the thread-thin lines around the door. The light in the ceiling shut on and off with no warning, sometimes halting his exploration. His internal sense of time told him that the light followed no particular schedule, at least no natural day and night cycle, not that Cortex knew what time it was. The light was on when it was on; it was off when it was off.
The room wore against Cortex’s nerves. He paced in circles around it for days, trying to avoid touching the floor and walls as much as possible despite the thinning of the bottom of his slippers. Eventually, tiredness would force him to sleep again, and when he awoke, he’d find his robe thinned where he had been sleeping. Eventually he knew his clothes would wear down entirely, leaving him naked, only his skin to protect him against the ceaseless grinding, wearing, and tearing of this god-forsaken room.
Cortex didn’t know how long had passed, but the tired ache in his heart and head made him madly guess months. His mind, working in a feverish haze, cycled endlessly. Something isn’t right, something isn’t right, something isn’t right . . . he thought, over and over, unable to quite put his finger on what made everything seem so bizarre, so surreal, in this moment.
Perhaps I am going mad, Cortex thought. Or I’m already there. At that thought, he realized it wasn’t the madness itself that seemed cruel to him—it was the sudden, unfortunate timing of it. He had finally begun to feel important!
Later, leaning against a wall, Cortex felt the last threads on the back of his robe give up and crumble away—his back was leaning directly against the offending wall as it rubbed, rubbed, rubbed. This last offense was too much. He stood and shook his fist at the ceiling. “Why? Why have you abandoned me?” he screamed. He didn’t know who he was speaking to—the master, 64Bit, the Creator, Hannah, the parents he never knew. He screamed until his body shook, until his throat ached, and he collapsed to the ground, sobbing again for the first time in days.
Please . . . if You can hear me . . . Please . . . take me away from here . . . Cortex prayed, palm over his heart.
The only sound in the room, beside the soft, soft hum of the vibrating walls, was Cortex’s tear-filled hiccups. He wiped his face with his robe, looked down at it, and frowned. Despite the spots worn away by the walls, it was spotlessly clean. Why was it clean? It had been dirty even before the rozies took him away.
Cortex looked at the other sleeve. Also clean. Same with the front of his robe. The surrealism of the moment sharpened, and Cortex felt that he was looking at the room from a great distance. He stood and looked around. He ran his fingers over his exposed skin—despite touching the walls and floor, despite feeling his skin wear away, he had no injuries and only the slightest bit of irritation.
He wasn’t hungry. Or thirsty. And despite being in this room for ages—he had no clue how long—he hadn’t felt the need to use the bathroom once.
Feeling detached, Cortex looked around. “This isn’t real, is it?”
The door silently swung open; if Cortex hadn’t been looking at it already, he wouldn’t have noticed. Beyond was darkness, syrupy and black. He hesitated, then stepped through without looking back. Whatever awaited him, it had to be better than this hellish dungeon.
#
64BIT STARED AT the small, black cube in front of him. It had lights on some sides, screens on others. A Therexe Cube—probably Cortex’s, as his own was in worse condition from being thrown on occasion. Somehow, this one had ended up in the master’s room under a bit of smashed wall. 64Bit knelt down and picked up the cube.
“Cortex,” 64Bit whispered. He remembered the boy praying in front of the master’s bed, begging for forgiveness for a sin he didn’t commit. It was 64Bit’s particle battery that had failed, after all. “Possibly avoidable if it weren’t for the poor timing of that vision,” he muttered, a cloud of darkness passing over his mind. It did seem remarkably poor timing for the Creator to send him a vision. Not only did the particle battery explode, but 64Bit hadn’t time to examine the vision while it was fresh in his mind. He still remembered it, but he almost certainly would have acted differently if the vision had come sooner or later.
With how perfectly everything had fallen apart, he could almost believe it was intentional that his vision had come at the worst possible moment. 64Bit shook his head, finding his thoughts blasphemous, but also unable to dispel the question in his heart.
64Bit stood and sighed as he surveyed the master’s room and dropped the Therexe Cube at his feet. He’d shuffled through half of it, lifting debris, shaking out clothing, tapping on walls and floorboards, and inspecting inside holes here and there. There was no sign of the master’s auxiliary memory unit. Even concentrating and trying to locate it by a sixth sense, as he had with the rozies the day before, yielded no results, but did remind him that the settlement was still full of danger.
Westley was on the other side of the house, searching for a metal box or computer. Occasionally he wandered back and presented several such things, all bent and broken, and 64Bit shook his head for each. While he wasn’t deeply familiar with every machine the master had accumulated, he was familiar enough to immediately recognize that most of what Westley found wasn’t what he was looking for.
“Assuming his memories were stored in the house in the first place,” 64Bit muttered. He hadn’t checked the shed with the particle battery generators yet; though he trusted his work on his mechanical finger and its new integration with his body, he didn’t want to plug it into anything earlier than necessary, until his hand was more healed up.
Dust puffed into the air, the particles suspended in space, as 64Bit shifted more debris, then lifted a torn robe. As he did so, something fell out and landed on the floor with a solid thump. 64Bit knelt to get a closer look .
It was a statuette of a man sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, with his left palm on his chest and his right holding a brain in his lap. 64Bit stared for several moments, then turned his eye screens off and on again. The statuette was still there on the pile of clothes, blankly staring upward and maintaining its grip on the brain.
“The Binary,” 64Bit whispered. Or a symbol of the Binary anyway, hidden in the master’s room. Was he a part of some secular Binary cult? “Another secret . . .” 64Bit murmured as he picked up the statuette and felt an electric shock run up his arm.
connecting with the binary, a voice filled his mind.
64Bit’s pixelated eyes widened. The master had always made him reach out to the Binary via a satellite link—the connection slow and sometimes spotty. And the master had a personal, direct connection hidden in his room all this time? Why keep such a thing hidden?
success. connecting you with a representative, the voice continued.
64Bit’s vision flickered as an image presented itself on his eye screens. He could tell he was still in the master’s destroyed room when he moved around his hand that wasn’t holding the statuette and felt splintered wood and dirtied clothing on a warped wooden floor, but he saw something else: a clean office space, like something from pictures of the old world. The walls were a soft off-white, the floor carpeted brown, and a potted plant that may or may not have been plastic was next to a metal door.
Hearing shifting sounds behind him, 64Bit turned about physically, the image moving with him, and started when he saw, sitting at a wooden desk with a keyboard and a boxy old-world computer on it, a gigantic, pink brain with a slimy mucus membrane. 64Bit turned his eye screens on and off again just to be sure of what he was seeing.
The brain wriggled a bit, and 64Bit got the sense of someone looking in his direction. “Hello? Gizmo? I thought I received a ring. You better not drop the call a second time.” The brain’s voice was feminine, but a husky feminine—like a very large, athletic woman.
You know my master . . . by name? 64Bit thought, attempting to interact with the statuette like he interacted with any piece of technology he’d plugged himself into.
The brain shifted around, its fleshy bulk pressing against the desk in a way that made 64Bit uncomfortable. Somehow it didn’t leave mucus on the chair or desk. “Well this is strange. That statuette only responds to technomancers. Where are you? How are you avoiding being read by our communication technology? I’ll pay handsomely for such information.”
64Bit’s good hand clenched around the statuette. It was just like the Therexe Cube—no matter how badly he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to interact with it since he couldn’t mentally communicate with technology. He nearly threw the statuette into the street.
“Hey, buddy, don’t damage that—they’re hard to replace,” the brain said. “I don’t know who you are, but I’d rather that I didn’t have to get a new communicator to a valuable partner. Set the thing down and walk away, right now, and I promise not to find you, and your family or tribe, and then destroy both. Okay?” Despite this blistering threat, the brain sounded very upbeat.
“Interesting,” 64Bit muttered. He sat and distracted himself from sudden gloom by examining the statuette. Somehow, it was reading the conditions it was in—or at least the pressure it was under—and transmitting that information somewhere else. Unfortunately, he didn’t see a port hidden anywhere on it that would let him manually connect with it. “Forged in just one piece, it appears, just like the staff. Did they both come from the Binary?” he wondered.
“Staff?” The brain said. “Gizmo, is that really you? I don’t have time for games right now. I’ll give you exactly ten seconds before I cut the connection, and don’t expect me to accept a call so quickly again.”
64Bit sat up. The brain had mentioned a staff—had it heard him?
“Five seconds left,” the brain said.
“My name is 64Bit,” 64Bit blurted, speaking directly to the statuette. “Who are you? Do you represent the Binary? Why does my master have a communicator in his room that connects directly to you?”
The head shifted again, its front pointing in several directions as if it was looking around the room. “Very strange, very strange. Do me a favor and grip that device a little tighter, will you?”
64Bit did so. He realized he could see himself—a flickering, blurred version of himself—when he looked down and to the sides. The brain leaned against its table, angling its front down toward 64Bit, so 64Bit stood again to put them on the same level.
“There you are,” the brain said. “There seems to be something wrong with your ability to emit signals. No matter—we’ll read the unfocused electromagnetic waves from your brain and pair that with reading vibrations in your body to catch your voice and your image. If you stand still, the picture gets clearer—hold your breath for a moment, slow your heart if you can.”
The statuette vibrated in 64Bit’s hand. He froze, then wondered why he was taking orders from this brain—it hadn’t really answered any of his questions, so he knew nothing about it. “Do you represent the Binary?” he asked.
“I do,” the brain said. It settled back against the chair it rested in, its bulk spilling over the arm rests. “How did you get ahold of this communicator?”
“You must not have heard me earlier,” 64Bit said. “My name is 64Bit. The master—uh, Gizmo is my master.”
“Oh,” the brain said. It turned toward its computer. 64Bit heard the clacking of keys being hit hard but didn’t see anything typing. Wrinkles on the front of the brain narrowed like eyebrows, and 64Bit almost thought he could make out a face sketched in wrinkles on the front of the brain. Then it relaxed and the illusion was gone. “Well, interesting. I didn’t think this would happen for years and years yet.”
“Didn’t think what would happen?”
“You,” the brain muttered. Some more typing noises, shifting in its chair, then, “Well, what happened to the old man? He’s still alive, so this meeting wasn’t triggered by his death.”
64Bit felt as if the world froze for a moment. “You know that for a fact?”
“Oh, of course. He wouldn’t let us monitor anything else, but he did allow a chip to be implanted in his heart to alert us when it stops. Can’t be tampered with or removed without us knowing. I suppose a technomancer with extremely sophisticated medical technology could remove his heart and keep it alive outside of his body and fool us that way, but what reason would a technomancer have to do that unless they already knew about the chip? Might make for an interesting form of torture, I suppose—Gizmo has his fair share of enemies.”
64Bit felt as if his head were spinning. His master had a personal relationship with this brain, whatever it was. He was close enough to the Binary to allow them to implant a chip in his heart. He apparently had secret enemies that 64Bit didn’t know about.
And he was alive. Confirmably alive.
64Bit wanted to launch into a barrage of questions, but he remembered how disorganized his conversation with Westley had been earlier that day, how much he’d had to backtrack and re-explain things. He took a deep breath, then said, “Fort has been destroyed. I feared that my master was dead, but I thank you for confirming my hopes.”
“Don’t mention it,” the brain said. Then it shifted toward 64Bit, its wrinkles bunching into what seemed to be a clear glare. “If you do, I might remember that I should have made you pay for that information.”
“Fine,” 64Bit said. “I found this device investigating what is left of my home. I didn’t even know that my master had such a thing. I’ve been learning a lot of . . . hints at secrets lately.”
The brain chuckled. “Oh, acolyte, you have no idea. None at all. But you will, in part. I need to deliver you something. Your master paid us in a great deal of information over the years to ensure certain things for him, including giving you some information in the case of his untimely death, disappearance, or long-term incapacitation.”
The wires of the frame in 64Bit’s arm warmed slightly as information poured into it, data streaming like blood through his veins. His frame didn’t literally heat up, he knew, but for whatever reason his body told him the wires were in use by sending the sensation of warmth.
Before allowing the data in his head, he did a quick scan for viruses.
“You really think we deal in tainted data or programming?” the brain scoffed.
“Never too careful,” 64Bit muttered. Something held him back from opening the data—a sense that he would not be able to think of anything else for a long while afterward. Aye, well, we need to speak more about this then. Rather than just letting it fester. About time as well, I suppose, the master had said. Was this what he had hinted at?
“Now, this is a business transaction, as far as I’m concerned, so that’s the end of our communication if you don’t have anything else to offer,” the brain said.
64Bit stepped forward, feeling uncertain about his movement in the brain’s office. He knew what he saw was an illusion and worried about tripping over something unseen in the real room around him, but need drove him to step forward as he pled his case. “I need help. I need—”
The brain shook itself side to side. “Oh, no, no charity work, and we don’t involve ourselves in wars if we don’t have to. Bloodmonger, Jared the Cleaver, or whoever destroyed your settlement and took your master, we won’t participate in retaliatory efforts, and if you want weaponry or supplies then you need to trade for it, same as everyone else. Gizmo is an unfortunate casualty—would have made a good member of the Binary if he let go of a few false ideals—but there was nothing personal there.”
“Could you at least tell me where my master is, then?” 64Bit begged.
The brain hesitated just for a moment, but a moment was long enough for 64Bit to sense that it knew more than it let on. “I told you, Gizmo didn’t accept any monitoring beyond simply keeping track of whether he was alive or dead. We heavily encrypted the signal to help prevent us from using it to determine his location. Even if you—”
“You made the chip. You made the encryption. You could undo it, if you wanted to,” 64Bit said. “Triangulate his location. I’ll pay.”
“You don’t have anything worth that information,” the brain said dryly. “Goodbye.”
64Bit paced back and forth as the room around him fuzzed and then began to dissolve, revealing a darkening sky and cracked, dirty walls. He ransacked his brain for information, anything that he might trade to the Binary, but assumed that everything he had been taught was known to the Binary already—after all, he had learned it through his master, and none of it was revolutionary anyway.
A spider began crawling on the wall, its gray, bloated body dragging on the wall behind its legs. 64Bit’s eye screens narrowed on the arachnid. Maybe he did have something of value.
“I know the approximate location of some nearby pseudotech!”
The image of the office space fully disappeared. 64Bit looked around, lips pressed tightly together, and breathed out long and low through his nostrils. He had been so close!
Then, he heard the brain speak in his mind: Describe this pseudotech.
“It looked like a trunk with a woman’s face on it. It had metal, spiderlike legs—”
The office snapped back into focus. 64Bit stepped backward in surprise at how sudden the change was, as well as how close the image of the brain was to him. It was leaning so far forward that it was nearly lying on its desk instead of sitting on its chair. The brain spoke slowly. “Repeat. That.”
64Bit nodded and cleared his throat. “A trunk. Like a large suitcase. Its clasps are copper-colored, and it can open its lid of its own volition. It moves about on long, thin metal legs.”
“Was this trunk accompanied by a rozie?”
64Bit paused. How could this brain know about Zed? “Yes. They kidnapped me.”
“And you’re alive.” The brain shook side to side, a low chuckle emanating from it. “Oh Thelema, you can’t hide forever. And Zed, you miserable, flat-bellied, biting worm—” The brain stopped for a moment, quivered, then went still. Finally, it said, “Where?”
“I want my master’s location,” 64Bit said. “And anything you have that might help me find him and rescue him.”
Another pause, then the wrinkles on the front of the brain formed a ghost of a smile. “All right, acolyte. At the bare minimum I will release your master’s location to you in a usable form, and possibly provide more useful information depending on how useful your information is to me.”
“They should be near the settlement of Fort,” 64Bit said. “We encountered them about two days’ hard hike south and west of Fort. They were hunting us when we left them. We hope that we escaped them, but, if I were them, I would find it obvious where we were going.”
“. . . Oh, that’s it?” the brain said. The condescension in its voice made 64Bit flinch. “Really? Two days ago you encountered Thelema and Zed, in an unspecific location in a thick forest, and that’s sufficient information for us to just go out and find them?”
“I did say ‘approximate’ location,” 64Bit said, looking away. “And I delivered. We made a deal.”
“Well, I’m altering it. Instead of a fair exchange of information, I’m going to exchange information and you are going to exchange a service. Thelema and Zed are hunting you, you say? They will find you, if they have enough interest. When they do, live long enough to plant the communicator you are holding in Thelema—the trunk, as you call her. I’ll even give you the information that you seek now if you accept this exchange.”
“I accept,” 64Bit said.
“So quickly!” The brain laughed. “Then accept this second data dump, and check it for viruses, if you must.”
64Bit’s frame warmed ever so slightly once again.
“Goodbye,” the brain said abruptly, and then 64Bit’s vision of the office began to fuzz and fade once again. Just before it fully disappeared, 64Bit heard the brain whisper, “Oh, and good luck with that doomsday prophecy . . . Gizmo was obsessed with it.”
“Doomsday prophecy?” 64Bit said, looking around, but he only saw open sky, broken walls, and debris on the ground. He felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle, so he spun around and saw Westley standing in the doorway, staring at him, with his mouth slightly open. In his hands were several metal boxes.
“I, um . . . found more computers for you to inspect,” Westley said. He cocked his head. “Doomsday, you say?”
64Bit waved his hand to indicate to Westley that he was occupied, then turned again and stared up at the sky. He was curious about the brain’s parting statement—but with how little information he had, speculation wasn’t worth much, not when he had two large data dumps waiting to be assimilated into his brain. He paused as he considered the two files sitting in the chip in his brain, waiting to be converted to actively known information. “Where the master is . . . or, something he didn’t want me to know until he was dead or gone,” 64Bit muttered, feeling tugged in both directions.
“You looked like you were speaking to someone,” Westley said. “But I didn’t see anyone or anything to communicate with. Does it have to do with whatever is in your hand?”
64Bit selected the data dump that the master had left for him. His brain filled with information that he began scanning through as quickly as he could in preparation for a deeper dive. He found medical charts, notes the master had written to himself, and other files. As 64Bit scanned, his chest began to hurt, then his arms and legs began to shake, and a minute later he collapsed onto the floor, shouting, “By Creation!”
Westley rushed to 64Bit’s side and held his head and shoulders up, cradling them. “Bit, are you okay? What’s happening? Is something hurting you? Did the finger surgery go wrong?”
64Bit shook his head at Westley’s questions, his face twisted in agony. If he could still cry, tears would be waterfalling down the side of his face. He scanned key documents one more time, just to confirm what was there, what he didn’t want to be true. “My master . . .” 64Bit croaked. Westley had to lean in to hear 64Bit speak. “My master . . . he broke me. He intentionally made me broken.”
Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow
Boo Ludlow 