The Desolate Guardians (8 page)

"There's a central reality," I told her, the
moment she logged on to our chat server. "It's walled off by
another shell of realities around it."

"I know," she said quietly. "And the metal
square I found is a sort of message."

"What's it say?"

"Nothing - not in words, anyway. It acts like
a compass. My -" She paused. "It's pointed inward, toward the inner
worlds. I can use it as a guide, to move in that direction."

I would have leapt for joy, if I'd been able.
"That's where I'm stuck! I'm somewhere along the inner shell."

She remained quiet for several moments. "That
makes sense. You'd almost have to be, if you're somewhere with such
widespread access."

"Maybe Command is in there?" I suggested. "Or
someone
who knows what's going on."

This time, she said nothing at all, instead
signing off the chat server.

This time, she turned on her headset before
traveling. A vast oval rift in space sat open before her, and she
regarded the other side. "This look like your place?"

Beyond sat concrete hallways marked with
numerous colored lines and information. The light from her sun
illuminated what would have otherwise been gloomy darkness.

"No. But it does look military or something.
Maybe that's Command, wherever that is."

She stepped through into constantly shifting
gloom. The hallway split into a T-junction around her, and each
concrete ceiling corner contained a spinning red emergency light.
Not all of them were functioning, but enough were operational to
paint the corridors flashing crimson. I heard no sound but her
quickening breathing - if there had been a noise accompanying these
emergency alarms, it might have burned out long ago.

She looked left, forward, and right, studying
the lines on the walls. The colors were hard to see cast in red, so
she lifted a flashlight. One line was green, one was white, and one
was yellow. Each led in different directions. "Any guesses?"

"White?" I ventured.

She shrugged and began moving along the heavy
squat corridor to her right, covering her face as she passed under
a spinning red light.

"Something wrong with the lights?" I asked
her.

"No," she replied. "It's just not a good idea
to look directly at unfamiliar red lights."

Odd. I wondered why, but she was trying to be
as quiet as possible as she moved deeper into the structure.

Her flashlight fell on equipment ahead -
crates containing guns, mechanical parts, and badly rotted food.
"Seems like it's been a while," she said, kneeling over a box of
food. Rotating crimson and darkness gave the mass the illusion of
writhing, and I wished she would look away.

She examined it as best she could without
touching a thing. "Can't guess how long this stuff has been here."
Moving on, she skirted around several more piles of gear that
nearly blocked the hallway.

Passing a droning hum in the wall, she peered
down the dark flashing corridor. Beside her, a single yellow light
cycled gently off and on, casting a low glow along the floor.
"Air's still working. This might be underground. The smell is
horrendous, stale."

I hadn't even thought of that sense. Upon
hearing her mention it, I started smelling the various aspects of
the server room I must have gotten used to - the various trace
acridities of computer equipment, plastics, and electricity. I
imagined the cramped corridor around her, filled with rot and musty
air, was far worse.

The visual stream shuddered briefly as she
kept moving. "What's that?" I asked.

"Something's vibrating the floor…" she
whispered. "Something very large. Feels mechanical." Slipping down
a hallway where all the emergency lights had broken, she kept her
flashlight poised ahead. Set at the end of the corridor was a
monstrously thick metal door that had frozen in place with about a
foot of space underneath it. She kneeled down and sighed. "Not a
fan of this, not at all…"

Very carefully, she flattened herself and
began sliding underneath it, her headset scraping along the
concrete floor. Moving between two planes of grey - one rough, one
shiny - she inched herself forward.

How thick
was
that door? It looked
nearly ten feet across. What could possibly -

She made it through to the other side and
looked up.

An arcing dome of grid-patterned metal rose
high up above her, lit in vast violet by dim emergency spotlights.
It was so tremendous a space that I thought at first that she'd
come outside, and that the dome was glass over some sort of
miles-wide hangar… but, no, it was metal and concrete, probably
holding back tons of arched rock.

She stood slowly, and the camera caught a
better view of the rest of the domed chamber.

Within lay a swirling sea of rotating
movement that I first thought was a whirlpool; as I zoomed in and
studied it, I realized that
it was mechanical.
First, I saw
the enormous cranes towering over the edges, and then - dozens of
chrome rings, miles in diameter at the greatest, surrounding a
stationary circular platform. Each ring rotated at a separate
height and pace, descending with each step, but the platform in the
middle remained high and unmoving. Atop it sat a wickedly intricate
object made of chrome and black, with a shape approximating a
dodecahedron. It rested in a small framework metal lattice that
kept it suspended a foot above the rest of the platform, and the
platform itself sat on a high narrow pillar of steel that grew
straight up from the deep and unseen center of the metal vortex
below.

"I don't like the look of that," she said
aloud, mirroring my thoughts.

"Me either," I told her, and then noticed
something. "Say… how are we communicating?"

She looked back at the thick door and
concrete. "Good catch. You don't sound fuzzy at all."

I sifted through my data stream, and found
something exciting. "I'm
connected to the network there now.
My stream defaulted to the better connection. Maybe your portal is
giving me connectivity, or our signal turned something on
automatically… I don't know… but I can look at the computers."

"Do it," she ordered.

I officially logged in and began rooting
around the new network that had opened up before me. First up was a
map. "This place isn't too big, but it's complicated. It looks like
all the routes - like the white line on the wall you followed - end
up here eventually."

She nodded, keeping her gaze on the machine
whirlpool. "What else?"

"I can see you," I said, surprised. "It's got
you listed as a heat signature on the map."

"Any other signatures?"

I scrolled around a bit. "No…"

"Alright. Any files that detail what happened
here? A log, maybe?"

I worked through a bunch of personnel
directories, but came up empty. "Everything's been deleted. I could
try to recover some stuff, but it'll take time."

"Try to, if you can. We have to find out what
happened here." She began walking along the edge of the violet-lit
dome, circling the gigantic machinery within.

Eager to use my tech skills for something
useful for a change, I began the recovery process while I looked
through more of the network. I found the control interface for the
cranes in the dome, but no information about what the mechanical
vortex was
for.

Maybe twenty minutes along the edge of the
dome, she came across a factory-sized loading area at the
termination of tremendous tunnels containing several rail
lines.

I stared at everything as she studied the
area. "What do you think all this
is?
"

"Run through the possibilities," she replied
calmly. "What do you think it is?"

She sounded much like a teacher, and I
responded that implicit authority automatically. "Well, it looks
like there's infrastructure to move a great deal of freight and
supplies in and out of this room… and into the gigantic machine.
The map of the place also has no entrances or exits, and no other
structures this large. I think this might be…"

She nodded. "Go ahead. No idea is too crazy,
given what we're dealing with."

"I think it's how they do it - how they move
things between realities," I suggested, amazed. Her calm certainty
made me feel certain, too. The size of the operation - and the
logistics of the rail tunnels and cranes - meant it had to be true.
There was no way in or out… except by portal. "But… where'd they
all go?"

She said nothing, instead turning to look at
the wall of the tunnel, where large letters had been spray-painted.
The splotchy red looked ugly brown under the violet light of the
dome, but the words were clear:

WHY BOTHER?

A guilty spray-paint can sat discarded on the
concrete beneath.

She stepped close and touched the paint,
finding it long dried.

"Not exactly the kind of final message one
would expect," I said, confused.

If she had any ideas, she kept them to
herself. Her hand lingered on the wall for several moments longer.
"Do you have anyone you care about?" she asked, without
warning.

Taken aback, I could only tell the truth. The
answer was embarrassing, but… I didn't feel like I needed to lie to
this woman, no matter how strange and impossible she was. "No."

She seemed in a rare open mood. "There's
nobody in your life?"

"My hours don't really allow for much
socializing," I told her, running through my own personal
rationalizations. "I bet they chose me for this job because I was
already a loner who stayed up all night. And, I figured, why not
get paid to do it?"

"Then why do you want to escape?" she asked,
beginning to walk again.

That was a strange question. "Well… I don't
wanna die."

"If there's nobody in your life, and you're a
loner anyway, what's the difference between being trapped and being
free? You were in that room all the time either way - the only
thing that's changed is that you've become aware of your walls.
You're safe in there. Why do you want to leave?"

A deep pang of worry and sadness curled up in
me. "Why are you saying these things?"

"Strange things happen to people that don't
have something to care about," she replied. "I didn't have a
purpose for a long time, and I'm not proud of the person I was, or
the things I did… but I did find something to care about again. I
have someone to take care of. I would do anything -
anything
- to keep him safe. Do you understand?"

The protective element in her voice made me
guess that the subject in question was her son, if she had one… but
I wasn't quite sure what she was asking. "I just want to help."

She climbed across the long expanse of a
flatbed railcar as she asked the million dollar question.
"Why?"

I thought back on all my time spent browsing
the Internet and working late nights at the office. That first day
of training, bright and sunlit, still shined in my memory. I
remembered what that poor freezing man on the mountain had said:
I've still got warm sun and bright beaches and memories of you
in my head, but I'll never have those sensations again.
"Honestly?" I realized aloud. "It's because I'm lonely. This empty
server room is my world. Nobody on the Internet knows who I am, or
cares. It's more than that, though. The entire way people live now
seems… driven by outrage, and money, and being offended, and
tribalism, and hating the other guy. Even if I was out there, and
part of all that, it would still be empty for me. Life feels…
hollow somehow… and I just want to be part of something
real.
"

"That's a very human feeling," she said
quietly, approaching what looked like a control station. Jutting up
from concrete, the metal kiosks held enough controls to rival
pictures I'd seen of an airplane cockpit. Beside the kiosks sat an
odd piece of circular metal with four jutting rods. She studied it
for a moment, lifting the two-foot-wide object up with both hands,
and then placed it back down. Looking over and out, she gazed at
the center platform of the dome. "This looks like part of the metal
surrounding that device."

I zoomed in on the dodecahedron on the
central platform, and, indeed, it looked like there was a gap at
the top for the curious sculpture, where it would fit in perfectly
with the surrounding chrome latticework.

"Can you figure out what that device is?" she
asked.

"One second." Moving through files, I found
what looked like another control interface. This one wasn't
integrated with the system, however. It was a separate series of
programs with much more basic controls. My enthusiasm dropped as I
realized what was sitting idly out there on that platform, and I
instinctively resorted to dumb Internet humor. "Someone set us up
the bomb…"

"What?"

I sheepishly got a hold of myself. "Um, it's
the bomb. The same kind that broke Jonathan's world."

"Who?"

"Oh, right. You'd already run off. Jonathan
was -
is
- the guy whose eye camera I was looking
through."

She froze as she realized what I was saying.
"
That's a dimensional fracture bomb?
"

"Yes. That’s not what they call it, though,
in the file. It doesn't look like it was supposed to do that."

"Obviously," she replied, backing away from
the consoles around her. "Why's it sitting out there? Were they
trying to send it somewhere?"

I read over the logs that had been left in
the accompanying folders. "Looks like… they sent one through
before. It went to…" The realization brought a slight bitterness
within me. "The outer shell - Jonathan's world. That's all I can
tell. It looks like they gave up, after seeing what happened, and
this one was just loaded on the platform much later by automatic -"
I froze.