The Desolate Guardians Page 8

  Chapter Four

  Two days.

  Two days.

  I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever escape the office. For two days, nothing changed. I spent hours wandering around dark halls and avoiding the windows. Out there, nothing moved except roiling fog and slimy things carrying the occasional animal carcass. I peered over the edge of brick at one point to watch, and thought that one of those carried carrions had been? a bear. In some sense, that reassured me, because normal life still existed, or had existed recently in this place - but if a bear couldn't fight off one of those incomprehensible creatures, I certainly couldn't.

  The fridge contained a wide array of food, both company-owned for events, and marked with coworkers' names. I ate, because I believed that I should, but I tasted nothing. All I could think was: how did this food get here? If this place was in another reality, which it clearly was, shouldn't my coworkers' cubicles be empty? Why were their pictures, sundries, and leftovers still around the office? Had they been here during the day recently, and simply never returned?

  What if I wasn't in another world? What if something terrible had happened to my world during the night? I was one of the few people awake that late. What if that had something to do with it? Maybe the other side of the world, different timezones, were fine, and I just had to wait for rescue?

  Except they'd never find me. Not in time. I went beyond the local office network and tried to figure out where exactly I was in relation to all these servers, mainframes, and Internets. I couldn't even tell which network was specifically this world - there weren't any clues or indications. Who could I contact? Nobody would believe me or be able to help me, and? I was still afraid of drawing too much attention to myself.

  There was a chance that my imprisonment here hadn't happened through malice. There was a chance that I could make my situation worse by messing around on the network.

  With all the tech at my disposal, it took me a day and a half to think to use a phone.

  I sat in a back cubicle in darkness, worried about what would happen. If I tried this, and it didn't work, a little sliver of hope would be gone. On the other hand, the food in the fridge wouldn't last forever? I reached out and lifted the phone.

  Almost immediately, a loud, chaotic, and high-pitched sound filled the cubicle. I dropped the phone back in place, heart pounding, and silence resumed.

  Screaming? it was screaming.

  I steeled myself and lifted it again - the only sound on the phone, that phone, and many others in the office, was a large number of people screaming in terror and agony at the top of their lungs.

  Yes, something was very wrong here.

  It didn't take me long to map out all the possible avenues of escape from my office building, which brought home the realization that there was nowhere to go. I'd kind of expected that from the beginning, but what else could I have done but try? Welded shut doors, creatures outside the windows, screaming on the phones, blocked air vents? there was a logic to this situation, hovering somewhere just outside the grasp of my current facts, but I couldn't quite reach it.

  Feeling strange and bitter, I decided to get on with my other efforts, and I began looking into the situation in the other realities as discreetly as I could. A few hours into that work, my trigger searches popped up with a phrase that couldn't be mistaken: purple slice.

  It was her. She had a laptop connected to a decently functioning Internet, in a reality which seemed more or less intact from what I could tell. Looking at the network map I'd been building, she was currently in one of the inner realities of the structure I was beginning to see emerge? and she'd posted things, based on our short interaction, that would specifically draw my attention. She already had a voice chat server set up.

  "Is it you?" she asked, noticing me logging in.

  "Yes," I responded, excited to hear someone else's voice - well, any voice that wasn't screaming.

  "That was fast."

  "Since we last talked, I found out I'm stuck here."

  "You're stuck?" she asked, immediately concerned.

  "I'm trapped in my office building. I can't get out. There are weird slimy creatures outside? one ate a goddamn bear? and the doors are welded shut."

  "Have you tried calling someone? Email?"

  "I can't figure out who to email, or who would even believe me? and the phones just have screaming on them."

  She sounded confused. "Screaming?"

  "Yeah, screaming. Men, women, even kids, screaming in terror. All the time."

  "That sounds? odd."

  "Right? I think I triggered something, or activated something, or maybe something terrible happened to the world here just like so many others -"

  "What do you know?" she asked abruptly, seizing on that mention.

  "I've started outlining our communication infrastructure and all the networks it connects to. I've done it based on connection speed, assuming there's some sort of distance involved. It's turning into a map of sorts. It looks? well it's like a map, honestly. Like I can tell you're in one of the inner realities."

  "Really?" she responded, intrigued. "Can I see this map?"

  "Sure, I'll send it to you." I guided her through the technical details of accepting a file directly from me on her old and crappy laptop. I was particularly proud of the file I'd built. I'd made each reality into a circle, full of the most relevant information I could find about each place, and then arranged them the way I thought they might fit together. A three-dimensional movable image wasn't technically accurate, but it was the best representation of a four-dimensional structure I could manage.

  "So there's the GLORWOC world, and there's where they tested the dimensional fracture bomb? " She murmured for a few moments inaudibly before speaking louder again. "And I've been there, and there recently? there's an actual shape to it."

  I studied the file on my end, too. "Definitely. There are similarities between worlds that are close together, and they get more different the further you go. The inner realities seem decently well off, with actual functioning societies and governments, but the further out you go, the more you see struggles and issues. And on the outer shell?"

  "? nightmares," she said, completing my sentence. "Nightmares, moving inward. Looking at these, I've been consistently hitting the outer shell. I've been seeing the worst of the worst on a regular basis."

  "That would make sense," I told her, considering ideas I'd have thought impossible a month ago. "Whatever this structure is - network and sphere of realities, both - someone went through a ton of effort to build it. It wouldn't have much point if there wasn't some sort of protection mechanism, either natural or constructed."

  "Walls," she murmured. "They're walls."

  "Like a walled-off city?"

  "Yes. And the inner realities survive as long as the walls stand." She took a moment to think. "I've been outside the walls. It's not pretty out there. The multiverse is not a kind place."

  "You've been beyond the map?" I asked, hopeful that she had some sort of method to rescue me. "How?"

  "Just like you keep your identity to yourself for your own reasons, I'll have to keep that one secret," she replied. "I've been able to reach realities fantastic and horrible, unlike any of our Earths, and far beyond these walls? but, judging by this map and the locations I've been to in the past few weeks, the shell seems to be preventing me from getting out now. Something's changed."

  "Something seems to have happened to whoever was in charge a little over a year ago," I suggested.

  "No, it's not that. I was going places as recently as Thanksgiving. Whatever it was, it happened very recently."

  I thought about the sudden changes in my office building and my inability to escape. "And I just got trapped here in the last two days. What if it's not something that did happen, but something that is happening?"

  "Interesting point. I do have one more move to make here. I've got a dead sentient flame in a metal box, and a device that can talk to souls. If living flames
have souls, it might know something. I know for certain that the flame world is outside our shell?"

  "And you're trying to find somebody that went through there."

  "Yes. So you were listening that whole time?"

  "Watching, really. But I wasn't just being weird. I've been following your trail on the system for a while now. I want to help - and, maybe, now, I'm hoping you'll help me get out of here."

  "I can try," she said calmly. "I would like to save you, but I can't guarantee anything. Do you know where you are in the structure?"

  "Not yet," I sighed. "I'll keep working on it. Any information you give me will help, though."

  "Then maybe I'll type up what I read in the device and send it to you."

  I sat and waited, suddenly confused. A device that talks to souls? What? Did that mean that souls were real? Did that mean I had a soul? Wasn't that some kind of religious revelation people should know about?

  The file came shortly, and I forgot all about those unknowable concerns.

  ---

  What are you doing? Don't you think I see what you're doing? Get that thing away from me!

  I can't move? I can't get away?

  Why would you ally yourself with such a monstrous creation?

  Don't you know what it does? Do you relish in sadism and evil?

  Stop, I don't want to -

  We are not driven by hunger like our pathetic neighbors. They consume and burn, moving from plane to plane in search of unlockable energy. We are an enlightened species of flame, and are more interested in learning the complexities of existence than eating matter. We draw energy from the vacuum, in any case, and have left consumption behind. It was a necessary development once no energy beyond ourselves was left in our home plane. That's the price of growth.

  Stop hurting me, I -

  We became aware of the existence of the bubble only recently as we traveled from plane to plane. It's a very interesting phenomenon, and so we spent some time near it. Eventually, part of it cracked - exploded from within - and we found ourselves able to get in and look around.

  Weird fleshy organisms were all about, however, a purely physical kind of life we'd never seen before, and they did not like us at all. Worse, that crack was just one of many, and investigating became dangerous. Many places we'd deemed inhospitable began to seep together? and when we became aware of the greater danger, the Crushing Fist, many of us started dissenting from the flamespirit for the first time in generations. I myself -

  ...died.

  I died.

  I'm dead? oh, that explains quite a bit. Will you revive me?

  I hear your desires through the device. The beings you seek? I did see them, and we conflicted with them for a time, but held back when we realized they were like us, but in disguise. I don't know where they went. Wait - one of them is nearby. You should ask him.

  He doesn't know? I see.

  Please close the device. I can't take the pain anymore. If you revive me, I will take you to the last place we saw them go. It was close to somewhere we are no longer, but once were.

  Thank you.

  ---

  "Are you going to revive it?" I asked, fixated on what it had mentioned about consuming its entire home universe.

  "I think I have to," she said after a moment.

  "It said one of the beings you're looking for is nearby?"

  "Don't you worry about that."

  "Alright." I let it pass, despite my curiosity. "What do you think the Crushing Fist is? That doesn't sound promising at all."

  "No idea, but I'm sure we'll find out. It sounds like something's coming for us."

  Over the next several hours, I worked with her to set up a mobile radio that she could use to connect to the structure and talk to me from almost anywhere - as long as her mode of travel to other realities remained active. A few trips to a computer store and a hardware store produced a reasonably rigged headset that would let me see what was going on, too, for the most part. She turned out to be surprisingly technically capable? I wondered if she'd had training before.

  In fact, there were quite a few mysterious things about her. She took control of the situation and made decisions with the calm air of someone who often faced choices with limited information, someone who understood the risks, and the impossibility of making perfect plays.

  I wondered, too, how she was getting between universes. Did she have someone helping her? On this topic, she would say nothing at all.

  It was many hours before she declared that she was ready to travel.

  A few minutes later, she turned on her headset - and I found myself looking at a vast but close-cropped verdant landscape filled with low ferns and patches of moss. The sky above was a simple blue, like the kind I remembered vividly from my time before this dismal office prison.

  Before her, a bright ball of flame danced a path forward. Somehow, despite not having a face, I could tell it was happy to be alive again. A few moments after guiding her to that plane, it puffed up - and vanished in a sliver of light.

  She must have revived it and had it lead her to this place before turning on her camera - what didn't she want me to see?

  "Where are we?" she asked.

  I ran a few tests on our connection, and compared it to the matrix I'd built. I measured out an appropriate spot and added a new circle to our file. "You're pretty far out past the walls. How'd you get out there?"

  "I don't know, since we can't communicate, but the flame did say it was aware of many cracks in the bubble's shell," she said quietly, her tone concerned. "I've got myself pretty tightly wrapped up here in a makeshift environment suit. I have it on good authority that, after the world where the people I'm looking for met the flames, they ran into trouble with some sort of fungus that ate them from the inside out."

  "It certainly looks like it has fungus," I noted, studying what I could see of the thick, low jungle flora. "What now?"

  "I don't know. I'm hoping to find some clue where they went." She looked around. "Or maybe? if he's been here before, it should be nearby?"

  "Who?"

  "Nobody." She moved along a small natural path between the thick bush-like fronds. Following a small light green creek that was comfortably clear of any growing things, she worked her way along mossy rocks, breathing loudly inside whatever facemask she'd rigged up.

  I think I saw them before her. "What's that?"

  She came up short, peering into a clearing ahead.

  Several dozen people stood all around the clearing, facing random directions. They wore plain brown nondescript clothes with no identifying symbols.

  None moved.

  They simply stood there, a scattered crowd, each staring directly ahead.

  I couldn't make any sense of it. "What are they doing?" I zoomed in to get a closer look.

  "I don't think they're doing anything at all?" she whispered. Despite her low words, something still noticed her.

  At once, every single person in that silent crowd turned and stared directly at her.

  She froze in place, thinking the situation through. "They're not invisible?"

  "Huh? Why would they be invisible?"

  "I encountered some kind of gigantic mechanical construct that controlled legions of dead humans converted into invisible walking corpses," she whispered, too matter-of-factly for my tastes. "They were a hive mind, but this isn't them. This is something else."

  "Cordyceps fungus," I realized, thinking back on stuff I'd seen on the entire Internet I'd absorbed. "It's a common fear - a fungus that can control your mind. You see a lot of self-written horror stories on the Internet that involve some variant of it."

  "Maybe," she murmured. "Got a lot of time on your hands, then?"

  I wished I could grimace. "Um, yeah. I've sort of seen the entire Internet. I get bored here."

  "Office building, internet time, computer skills? some sort of I.T. person?" she guessed. "Probably late shift, judging by how much you get away with."

  How th
e hell? This woman didn't miss a thing. I suppose that was a necessary skill for survival, doing what she was doing? whatever that was. "Something like that."

  "Any other ideas from the Internet?" she asked, still not daring to move.

  "Um? um? zombies?"

  "No, zombies aren't real. They fundamentally don't make sense."

  "But you said you met invisible corpses?"

  "Clearly controlled and animated by an outside source," she whispered. "Those weren't zombies. They were corpse-puppets."

  "Oh. Um? lockstep."

  "Lockstep?"

  "They move if you move. That's a common one, too."

  "Maybe - but how?"

  "Maybe they're not human," I suggested, excited to use my Internet knowledge, and worried that it might actually be true. "Maybe they just look human. They could be robots, aliens, illusions? anything. They're not smiling. That's a good sign."

  "Why?"

  "Because smiling things are the worst," I breathed, feeling sick as I thought back on all the stories I'd read.

  "Think it through," she instructed. "Logic it out. Why are smiling things the worst?"

  "Because?" I thought about it for a moment. "Because they're aware of you, and aware of how they make you feel, and they've got an agenda."

  "These people aren't smiling," she said with a tone of affirmation. "So?"

  "So they're not aware of you?" I realized aloud. "At least not directly."

  "Right. So we can reasonably assume they're only responding to stimuli. Now what did I do that caught their attention?"

  "Well, we've been talking this whole time, so it isn't noise?" I grabbed a portion of her stream and rewound it.

  As I did so, the people in the clearing moved again, each taking two steps closer, their eyes blank.

  "I didn't do anything," she whispered.

  I couldn't believe it, but - "I think it's me. They moved first when I zoomed in on the feed, and then again when I rewound some portion of it."

  "How could they possibly be aware of that? Unless?" She took in an unhappy breath. "These are some of the people I'm looking for. Energy beings in the guise of humans. I was told the fungus ate them."

  "So the energy being part of them is responding to things I'm doing on the computer here?"

  "Maybe. Discontinuous electromagnetic signals, different from the ongoing chatter of our feed. Or maybe they're connected by some sort of greater whole that's aware of you. Stop doing things on the computer." She took a step to her right.

  None of the strange blank-eyed people moved.

  "I can't leave just yet," she told me, unhappy about it. "If there are any clues here, they've got them."

  Stepping further into the clearing, she approached the nearest brown-clothed person - a man with long, scraggly black hair and blank eyes. Touching him with a plastic-gloved hand, she gently patted his pockets.

  He made no move, and gave no reaction.

  Ever so slowly, she moved to the next, an older grey-haired woman. She, too, stared blankly ahead. With one trembling hand, my ally reached into a pocket of her jacket and drew out a small metallic square.

  Without warning, the old woman turned her face and addressed us directly. Her voice rang out hollow and multi-tonal. "We don't like your kind."

  To her credit, my ally remained calm, her hands up - the small metallic square hidden behind two of her fingers pressed together. "I'm just going to leave? no hostility intended."

  A small blank-eyed child to her left spoke in the same voice, as if a crowd was communicating through him. "Go now."

  With the camera shaking visibly from her tension, she crept slowly out through the gathered crowd of silent stares. I heard her make a noise of anger, and she threw one hand at the air briefly as she left.

  "What is it?" I asked, concerned.

  "I just?" She looked around, and then settled her gaze on a distant deer. It bent over the light green creek, sipping quietly. "I have to make sure."

  "Come on, get out of there! What if you get infected?"

  "I don't know, but I have to see this through. I have to know if there's a chance to save them." Moving along the creek, she followed it upstream, and higher. In just a few minutes, she reached a higher outcropping. "Look."

  From her vantage point, I saw a tremendous plain of patterned greens and greys that stretched out to the horizon. Set dead center was a staggered collection of office buildings - we were looking at a recognizable city, sprawled out in a vast pattern of suburbs. The only thing out of place was the green? patches of mossy green grew splattered along the tall buildings. "It's Richmond," she commented. "Humans."

  Jumping down from her rock, she moved along the forest until she found something specific - a bird, sitting and staring blankly at nothing. Its lungs moved in and out visibly as it breathed, but it made no move to escape from her.

  A little further down another trail, she found a normal young man in jogger's clothes, staring blankly down his trail.

  Instinctively, I zoomed in to get a better look at him - and froze - but he made no move and gave no response. Odd?

  Heading back to her original location, she sighed into her facemask. "I have to try this."

  "Try what?"

  "Didn't you see the deer? It's the details that matter."

  "The deer? the deer was moving and alive."

  "Exactly." Heading for the creek, she scooped up some of the oddly pale green water in her gloved hands and carefully brought it over to the brown-clothed people. Tipping her hands, she poured some into the mouth of the male with the long black hair.

  Nothing happened for one minute, two?

  The entire clearing, people, bushes, and mossy ferns, seemed to convulse as if struck. Many multi-tonal voices cried out.

  The man she'd given the water blinked and fell forward weakly. "I'm free?"

  Around them both, everything living began moving. Even as I watched, what I'd thought were bushes began uprooting and slogging toward them. The blank-eyed people moved in like a wave.

  "Let's go," she ordered him, tugging him in the direction of her point of entry.

  "How long has it been?" he asked between ragged breaths.

  "I don't know."

  I watched as they stumbled and ran up along the creek. The oddly colored creek remained the only path ahead, as all the life around them clustered frenetically closer. It seemed that nothing living wanted to get near the stream.

  "What happened to you?" she asked, using her shoulder to support him. "Can we save them?"

  "It's a brain," he breathed, eyes wide. "It's a giant plant-based brain, and we were all forced into being a part of it. Haven't you noticed the distribution of the plant nodes around here? They're neural cluster equivalents. And that creek is full of toxic material it's excreting back along a vein of sorts."

  "How big is it?" she asked, her voice haunted.

  He groaned at some pain in his chest. "The whole planet."

  "God?"

  "That's what it calls itself, yes."

  She turned her head and looked at him for a moment as they ran, but I wasn't sure what she was thinking. "We can't save the rest, can we?"

  "It'll never let you near them again," he coughed. His stance weakened, and he half-fell. "It doesn't even want to let you take me."

  "We're almost out," she insisted, practically dragging him. "It's right -"

  She stopped without warning, and dropped his hand.

  "What are you doing?!" I shouted. "Go!"

  "He's dead."

  "But you're not! Get out of there!"

  "I'm already here. I'm safe. If he'd lasted just a few more seconds? god damnit, I almost had him." She looked slowly in a circle at the plant life and blank-eyed people clustered along the edges of the toxic creek. Although I couldn't see her face, I could practically feel the anger flowing from her.

  The view included a gaping irregular oval in space next to her. Beyond, several children of varying ages waited and watched.
>
  She said it once more, this time to herself. "God. Damnit."

  I saw her reach up, and then? the feed went blank.

  Her audio resumed maybe twenty minutes later. I leapt to the comm. "Are you alright?"

  "I need to figure out what this little metal thing is," she replied, her tone as calm as before, like nothing had happened. "Can you investigate on your end?"

  "Sure," I told her, wondering how she could just be alright after enduring that situation and having a man die inches from safety.

  Once I was left to myself again, I couldn't quite bring myself to work. The thought of all those people on that planet being absorbed into a giant plant brain ecosystem? were they in pain? Were they conscious? They had to be? the man had said I'm free with such relief?

  Was there nothing we could do for them?

  I thought about what that first lonely soul had said, the man whose untraceable message had started me down this insane path. Just death? just death was better than worse fates.

  I had an idea, but I tucked it away for some future situation. How twisted was existence when the best thing you could do to help was to ask a race of sentient flames to go somewhere and burn people alive rather than let them remain mentally imprisoned forever in a megalomaniacal plant that thought it was God?

  I filed away those dark thoughts and focused on figuring out where I was in the structure of realities.

  If I don't get out of here soon, I think I'm going to go insane?