The Desolate Guardians Read online

  Chapter Five

  After what seemed like endless hours mapping connections between systems, I'd finally done it.

  I'd figured out where I was.

  I'd also discovered something very strange about the sphere of protected realities we were in: there was another smaller sphere in the center that I couldn't contact or connect to. I'd worked through the night verifying it, but I didn't feel tired at all. I was too excited to share the news with my strange colleague, and possibly get rescued from my inescapable office.

  "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. "We
ll, 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.

  The dome's lights shifted to bright white, and a hum buzzed in over the stream.

  She looked back and forth wildly. "What'd you do?"

  "Nothing!" I shouted back, frantic. "A ton of this stuff is automatic. I didn't even - I mean, I did, I accessed the interface, but - it's turning on!" I stared in horror as the central platform of the gigantic metal whirlpool began ever so slowly rotating.

  I heard her voice rise to an uncommon tone of emergency. "Where's it pointed?"

  "Where's what pointed?!" I asked, panicking. Was my meddling going to destroy someone's reality?

  "The destination!" she shouted. "Where's it going?"

  Of course! I stared at the process files. "It's pointed at the inner reality, the last place they went?"

  "Tell me how to turn it off," she ordered, her tone determined.

  "I don't -" I already knew I couldn't turn off the automated process without the proper passwords, but I quickly did a few key word searches for off and shut down and terminate? "That thing! That metal thing! The circle with the four rods! You have to put it in the top. That's the mechanical failsafe - it can't go off if that's in!"

  Before I was even finished speaking, she picked it up with both hands and began running? straight onto the first metal ring, which was picking up speed. In seconds, she was judging her jump to the next ring, which was moving at a different speed?

  It was eight tenths of a mile to the center, and the files said the whole process took four minutes. How much time had we wasted talking? I did some calculations, and? with a sinking feeling, I realized: she would never make it.

  Watching her leap from ring to ring, falling once or twice at each abrupt change in speed, a wave of despair passed over me. I hadn't been able to help anyone I'd read about or talked to, I'd screwed up and cost Jonathan an eye, and now this? I had the paralyzing sense I was about to watch this woman die? and her son, or whoever it was she cared so deeply for, would be left on their own? because of me.

  Before I even knew what I was doing, the crane nearest her was moving. Two bars crossed high above the machinery, supporting the crane on its own mobile platform, and I sent it at top speed after her. The two perpendicular beams moved across open space on my map of the facility, chasing her heat signature.

  I thought, as I got closer, that she might actually make it? until the i
nner rings began descending. The entire system of rings shifted and dropped slowly, their vortex configuration deepening. She stumbled, fell, and bounced down three rings, before grunting in pain at the sudden shift in velocity on her new inner ring - this one only a few feet wide, with a rising curved wall of metal on one side and a steepening drop on the other.

  From my perspective on the map, she was whirling around at incredible speed, and the camera in her headset was no help. Did the crane have a camera? It did. Turning it on and using that one, I slowly lowered the claw.

  Come on? how many videogames had I played during my existence? This was just like any other Flash game with a simple setup and devilishly difficult to master controls? it just happened to have a life on the line, and possibly a reality.

  She whipped past.

  I waited.

  She whipped past.

  I waited.

  She whipped past - and I lowered the claw.

  Despite herself, she screamed once as she impacted the metal on the next go around. Still, she clung to the deactivation rods and forced out an order as the tines closed around her. "Get me up there!"

  I'd only intended to get her out and save her, and we had less than thirty seconds left, but? even in my panic, for some reason, I trusted her.

  Lifting the claw in staggering jolts, I moved her up alongside the central pillar, and up above the platform with the bomb on it? only to find that it was spinning fastest of all.

  There was absolutely no way she would be able to jump down and stay on - not with both hands around the awkward metal object she carried.

  "Get me above it," she shouted, and I lowered her down as close as I could while trying to ignore the scant seconds left. Even as I moved the claw lower, though, the rapidly spinning platform began to drop. I understood where it was going - down into the center of the device, the nadir of the mechanical vortex - but I also knew that meant we were almost out of time.

  Lowering the claw as smoothly as I could, I brought her to just a foot or two above the sinking bomb, jolting up and down a bit as I tried to get the dropping speed right. From her camera perspective, the bomb was a whirling sphere of black and chrome? and utterly impossible to interact with.

  She tried to lower the four rods into place twice, but then judged against it. "Spin me!" she shouted at the top of her lungs, still barely audible over the intense roar of machinery.

  Could the claw do that? It could! Of course it could? turning on the servos, I started giving her rotational speed even as the bottom of the vortex dropped away. Chrome rings melted into a vast well of purple light and waves of white. Through her camera, I could see into eternity? and the platform was moving down into it.

  We were far past out of time.

  Agonizingly slowly, the rotating bomb and platform seemed to slow down? as her spinning grew to match. I could hear her straining not to get sick or pass out? I knew her spinning had to be subjecting her to painfully high g forces, but she remained ready despite the crushing intensity. The purple below us imploded into bright white lines, and the illusionary corridor widened? and the platform, from our perspective, seemed to finally stop spinning.

  It even went the other direction a little bit, but I edged off the slightest bit of servo power, and she came back to even with it.

  "Open the claw," she shouted grimly, hardly able to speak against the tremendous pressure.

  "What? But you'll -"

  "There's no choice."

  I knew she was right, and I had to listen to her order, but? I still felt horrible and empty as I gave the final command. The claw opened.

  Despite the chaos, she dropped eerily straight down, and immediately fell across the top of the bomb to keep herself from falling off. With a swift motion, she oriented the four rods and shoved them down into interlocking access ports. I saw all this through her headset camera, and I saw her descending into an infinite tunnel from the crane camera? and I saw her heat signature disappear from the base map.

  "What do I do?" I asked her, at the last, the roaring crescendo reaching a final peak. "I can't get you with the crane?"

  "You might be on your own now, friend," she told me calmly, her strained and quiet voice oddly audible despite the storm. "I needed to go there anyway. Maybe - just maybe - they can help."

  "Who?" I cried.

  She sighed with worry, regret, and a dozen other unidentifiable emotions, her hands gripping white on the bars around the bomb. "I'm going home."

  In a flash, the tunnel compacted, swirled, and was gone.

  The platform remained - with nothing on it.

  Slowly, the entire configuration began powering down and resetting position, and I lifted the crane's claw lest I damage something. I did all this automatically, without thinking, because I could not think.

  I sat and processed what had happened for several minutes. I hadn't been there physically - I'd just been watching video and listening to audio and rooting through files - but I still felt as if I'd been through a life and death situation and only barely survived.

  I hadn't even had time to anticipate it... it had all just happened. Six minutes ago, she'd been standing on the edge, and, now, she was gone.

  Shaken, I got up, and took a walk around the office building. Outside, the same slithery creatures moved, and I watched them for a time, lost in thought.

  Who had she been? Who had she been trying to keep safe? She'd been searching for some people, she'd said, and that search had led her inward, to the inner shell of our protected realities? the silent sanctum at the center. Who might be able to help? The people she was looking for, or the people already there?

  Because there had to be people already there, I imagined? that was the part I couldn't quite grapple with. She was going home?

  And now I was alone. The darkness and seclusion hadn't hit me, not with full effect, until I stood standing there at the windows and realized I truly couldn't leave. The only friend I'd ever made was gone, and the portal she'd used to get to that underground complex?

  ?was still open.

  Rushing back to the server room and my computer, I went through each and every option I had at my disposal in that distant base. Automated railcars in the tunnels, operational cranes, what else? Was there anything that could actually physically move something to her initial portal? There had seemed to be children on the other side in the brief glimpse I'd seen the other day? her family? That boy at the front?

  What would they think if she didn't come back?

  Something else occurred to me. The gigantic vortex device had to be able to pull things back as well as send. How else were men and equipment moved between realities? While I was still connected, could I use it to save myself? I could go there, then go through the portal she'd left open!

  Yes. The complex there had much more mapping and targeting capability, and I even found an approximation of the map I'd created by hand. Indeed, our entire bubble was a sphere of dozens of realities with an outer shell separating us from the rest of the multiverse, and an inner shell protecting one central world.

  The outer shell, on this map, was practically covered with warning symbols and alert signs. Numerous entire realities on the map were completely red. Had they been? destroyed? Were these the cracks the flame entity had spoken of? There were so many? what was holding back the darkness, save our lonely desolate guardians? Individuals enduring beyond all imagination, the most human of all, struggling to carry on at the walls?

  Haunted, I focused on finding my coordinates. The base already seemed to have my office on file, and I activated the machine with the new destination. Apparently, a portal would open for thirty seconds, and I would have a chance to step through.

  I watched through the crane cameras as the entire cycle spun up again. Four or five minutes later, I dared not hope as it declared the tunnel open and stable.

  Rushing out into the office building proper, I looked around for vast purple light - but found none. Racing around, I went through ever
y room and hallway - and found nothing. Where was it?!

  I stopped in place as I finally sighted it.

  A dim purple haze emanated from the fog outside.

  Staring out the window, my hope shriveled. It was out there, with those slimy things? and getting out there would require breaking a window. If I tried to reach it, and failed, there would be no more safe haven.

  Despondent, I watched the purple expire, and then returned to my server room. I knew I couldn't ignore, for much longer, the growing likelihood that I was going to die in that room. Our little corner of the multiverse was falling apart, held together only by the threadbare hardships of quietly heroic human beings, and the only person trying to fix it had just disappeared into an unknown situation with an extremely dangerous bomb, leaving her kids behind and alone? and all I could think about was the slow process of starvation and loneliness I was about to face. I could protest and call for help all I wanted on the Internet, but nobody would believe me, and their mockery would only make it worse.

  And even if I made it out of here, the Crushing Fist, whatever it entailed, was coming for us - something bad enough that even ascendant living flames were scared of it. This new threat was approaching, and there was nobody left to stop the tide.

  If only I could do something? but being trapped here made that impossible? unless?

  I looked at the base's more complete map of realities again, and something hit me.

  I already knew what the Crushing Fist was. It was already here? it was already happening? had been happening for more than a year. The exact mechanism, agenda, or plot behind it was irrelevant. Humanity was under siege.

  And there was nobody left to stop the tide? meaning there was nobody watching me. I'd wondered why nobody had ever come to check up on my activities, even as I'd begun blatantly breaking into military networks. I was the only network manager left. The bases were empty. Lone survivors manned the walls.

  There was nobody left to fear.

  Suddenly full of excited hope, rather than despair, I logged into every network I could and implemented my plan.

  I was trapped here, but that didn't mean there weren't others out there like my only friend. There had to be other people out there who knew something of our situation, or who had minor capabilities we might cobble together, or who had artifacts in their possession like her device that talked to souls. There were nine hundred and twenty-four billion human beings alive between the inner and outer shells, by all accounts? we weren't done. Not yet.

  Alive with electricity, I decided to step out from my safe anonymity and do something for the first time in my life. That's what she'd been trying to tell me, I guessed: having something to care about meant taking risks, even unknowable risks with very little hope to cling to.

  I sent out the call.

  On every single network, in every single reality, on all the Internets and all the forums I could reach, I began posting. I was fiction. I was a joke. I was a scary story. I was an entertaining read. For some, I was nonsense.

  But some people would understand. Some people would see the elements at play, and some people would know I was serious. With nearly a trillion humans alive in our little walled city, even a one in a billion chance would net us nearly a thousand people. With all that just one had accomplished, what couldn't a thousand motivated and capable human beings handle?

  I wrote as many posts on as many different Internets as I could myself, and then made a script to continue on.

  And now? I wait.