Read Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series Online
Authors: Jasper T. Scott
Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series (2 page)
The transmission faded to black, and Alexander scowled. “Hayes—analyze that recording.”
“What am I looking for, sir?”
“‘Scapers tags, signatures, anomalies—any sign that what we just saw is part of a mindscape, and if possible, some clue that might lead us to the ‘scaper who built it.”
“On it, sir.”
“You don’t believe it’s real,” McAdams said.
Alexander regarded her with eyebrows raised. “Do you?”
“I guess not, but if this was the work of some rogue ‘scaper terrorist, why were there no demands?”
“What if someone from the Confederate colony fleet actually did make it?” Bishop suggested from the helm.
Alexander shook his head. “Even if that were possible, it would mean that that bit about passing judgment and delivering a sentence was just to make us wet our pants. There’s nothing they can do to us from the other side of the wormhole.”
“Her voice was off,” McAdams said.
“And her eyes,” Cardinal added from gunnery.
Alexander considered that. “Assuming I believe this signal is real—which I don’t—those features could be explained by implants used to repair physical damage after traveling through high radiation and high gravity zones inside the wormhole.”
“Her word choice was also wrong,” Hayes added. “She called us
wretched creatures
, as if she didn’t consider herself to be one of us. Then there’s that part about how
a race that kills its own will do worse to others.
It’s almost like she was trying to say that she isn’t human.”
“So what is she then?” Alexander asked. “An alien? She looked human enough.”
“Maybe that’s what it wanted us to think,” Hayes said. “We still don’t know who created the wormhole. We’ve known from the start that it can’t be a natural phenomenon.”
Alexander shook his head, incredulous. “Come on people—there’s a rational explanation here, and we’re going to find it. Remember Wonderland? Fool us once, shame on them. Fool us twice—I’ll be damned if there’s going to be a second time. Things aren’t always what they appear to be. Someone, somewhere, wants us jumping at shadows. The question is who, and why. It’s our job to find out. Hayes, pass that recording back to fleet command. Maybe they can make more out of it than we can.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
Alexander frowned, and went back to studying the view from the
Adamantine’s
bow cameras. Lunar City was now almost directly below them. Alexander absently watched the towering spires, all glittering with lights. He remembered when Lunar City had been nothing but an Alliance naval base. Now it was a bustling city with a population of more than two million.
The day side of the Moon appeared in the distance, a dazzling silver crescent rushing toward them like a tidal wave.
Beautiful…
Alexander saw a ring of stars wink at him.
“Admiral, we’ve got incoming! Looks like ordnance!” Lieutenant Frost reported from sensors.
Those aren’t stars,
Alexander realized with a jolt. A second later, the ship’s combat computer highlighted those winking pinpricks of light with bright red target boxes.
“McAdams, sound general quarters! Frost, get me vectors!”
“Aye, sir.”
The lights on the bridge dimmed to a bloody red, and the ship’s battle siren screamed out a pair of warning cries before McAdams silenced it.
“Bishop, take evasive action! Ten
G
s to port.”
“Wait—” McAdams said. “—the rest of the crew isn’t strapped in yet!”
“Tell them to belt in at emergency anchor points! They’ve got thirty seconds. Bishop, set thrusters to fire in thirty-one.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Vectors calculated!”
“On screen,” Alexander ordered.
Hair-thin red vector lines appeared between the incoming missiles and their target. Those lines all converged on…
Lunar City.
“They’re not headed for us,” McAdams whispered.
“One million klicks and closing… They’re moving at relativistic speeds! Over one third the speed of light!” Frost reported.
“Cardinal, intercept those missiles now!” Alexander roared.
“Aye!”
“Hayes—warn Lunar City. They need to get their defenses tracking.”
Alexander watched bright golden streams of hypervelocity rounds go streaking out from his ship along the paths of the incoming ordnance. Lasers snapped out in a flurry of dazzling electric-blue beams of light. Seven out of ten missiles winked off the display with pinpricks of fire. The remaining three sailed on.
“Too late!” McAdams screamed.
Lunar City became a bright smear of light that briefly illuminated the dark side of the Moon. When the light faded, Lunar City was gone, a funnel-shaped cloud of dust and debris jetting into space in its place.
Alexander gaped at the dust-shrouded crater where more than two million people used to live. He slammed his fists against his armrests.
“Bishop, get us away from the debris!”
“Aye, sir!”
“Incoming transmission—audio only,” Hayes reported.
“Patch it through!”
The deep, toneless voice was the same as before. It said, “This is only the beginning.”
Alexander turned to his XO. McAdams stared back at him with wide eyes and a furrowed brow.
“Hayes—trace that signal!” Alexander ordered.
“It came from the wormhole again, sir. Same source.”
“You don’t think
she
fired those missiles, do you?” McAdams asked.
Alexander shook his head. “I don’t know who fired them, Commander, but whoever it was, they just declared war on Earth.”
Chapter 2
2819 A.D.
—Five Years Earlier—
“I
want to take our relationship to the next level,” Skylar Phoenix said between bites of her steak.
Dorian de Leon,
A.K.A. Angel Hunter
, glanced up from his plate, his brows drawing together in wary confusion.
The next level?
he wondered.
“We already live together…” he said, as if that were the highest possible level any relationship could reach.
Surely she doesn’t mean marriage.
His parents hadn’t exactly set a stellar example of that. Then again, they’d been married in the
real
world, not a virtual one. Regardless, Dorian wasn’t ready for either kind of marriage. He was only 25 and just recently earned his masters in synaptic processing.
“You look frightened.”
Dorian shook his head as if to deny it.
“Clear skies, Angel. I don’t mean marriage,” she clarified.
Dorian blew out a breath. “You had me worried for a minute.”
Skylar’s luminous features lifted in a smile. Her skin was an attractive, opalescent white that sparkled wherever the light hit, her eyes like liquid amber and her hair a river of gold.
This particular mindscape,
Galaxy,
was one of the more popular ones. There were over a hundred million players—not counting the billions of procedurally-generated AI characters. In
Galaxy
you could choose to be any of more than a dozen humanoid and alien races in a galactic civilization set somewhere in the distant future. He and Skylar had both chosen to be Seraphs—beautiful, human-looking aliens with luminous skin and hair, and feathery white wings.
Dorian turned his head to the view. They sat on the balcony of a restaurant on Eyria, the Seraphs home world. There were no railings to interrupt the view from the balcony, nothing but clear blue skies draped high above the colorful fields of flowers and dense forests below. The ocean sparkled in the dying rays of Eyria’s sun. Thin slivers of cloud drifted over the horizon in fiery reds and yellows, while stars pricked holes high in the evening sky as the sun sank below the horizon.
Dorian’s momentary distraction ended, and he turned back to Skylar. Her steak lay forgotten and steaming on her heated plate, but her wine glass was conspicuously empty. She was still looking at him, her gaze exactly where he’d left it. While he’d been watching the view, she’d been watching him, waiting for him to ask the obvious question.
“Then what do you mean by taking our relationship to the next level?”
Skylar’s smile broadened, and she nodded. “Let’s meet.”
“We’re meeting now…”
“In the real world, Dorian.”
“Don’t you mean Angel?”
“Dorian is your real name, isn’t it?”
“Yes…”
“Then I mean Dorian.”
“Sky…” he began, shaking his head.
She reached for his hand again, and he stared absently at it. Five slender, sparkling fingers wrapped around his. “Before you say no, you need to hear my reasons.”
“What reasons?” he blurted, looking up from their hands. “Do you know how many virtual relationships end when people try to carry them over into their real lives? I don’t even know what you look like! You don’t know what I look like either.”
“Does it matter?”
“That depends on your expectations.”
“I want you to know me. The real me. I don’t want any secrets between us.”
“The
real
you? What’s real, anyway?” Dorian asked. He gestured to their surroundings, his wings flexing with agitation as he did so. “
This
is real.
You
are real. Reality is just a bundle of sensory data collected by our bodies and interpreted by our brains. What does it matter where and how that data is generated?”
“It wouldn’t matter if we never had to wake up, but we do. The real world exists, and until we can spend every available second in the Mindscape, the real world will still be important. One measure of that importance can be determined by how much time we spend living in each reality. How many hours a day do you spend in
Galaxy
with me?”
“I don’t know… four, maybe five, I guess.”
“And in other mindscapes?”
“A few more hours. But in my defense, I don’t have a job yet.”
Skylar nodded. “Jobs are hard to come by. Do you know how many hours a day I spend in here?”
“Six?” he guessed.
“Twenty-two.”
Dorian felt his eyes grow round. “That’s impossible. It’s also illegal.”
Skylar smiled. “Are you planning to report me to the authorities?”
“You’d need life support to manage that.”
Skylar nodded.
“And you want me to meet you? Your body must be a shriveled up husk!”
A muscle in Skylar’s cheek twitched and she looked away. The stars were out in full now. So was Eyria’s moon, a bright purple orb casting a pale lavender glow over the valley below. “Never mind. This was a bad idea.” Skylar pushed out her chair and stood up. Her amber eyes were suddenly vacant, and her expression looked like it might have been chiseled from a rock. “Would you get the bill? I’ve lost my appetite.”
Dorian gaped at her. “You’re leaving?” Rather than reply, she turned and walked toward the edge of the balcony. “Hold on! Sky! I’m sorry!”
When she reached the edge, she paused to glance back his way. “If you change your mind, you can meet me tomorrow. I’ll send the details to your comm band.”
Skylar spread her wings in a flash of white feathers and then dove off the balcony, disappearing in an instant. Not sticking around to pay for their meal, Dorian pushed out from the table and ran after her. He reached the edge of the balcony and dove headfirst after her.
His stomach lurched. He felt weightless. A warm wind roared in his ears, ripping at his clothes and hair, and ruffling his feathers, threatening to open his wings. He stubbornly held them flat against his back so he would fall faster and catch up to Skylar.
It was at least a kilometer down to the field of flowering grasses below, once bright and variegated with color, now dim and monochromatic in the light of the moon and stars. Dorian searched desperately for a bright white speck—moonlight reflecting off her wings—but there were dozens of specks below him, some near, some far… Dorian focused on them one at a time to read their comm beacons and check their names, but none of the names that flashed up on his holo lenses read
Skylar Phoenix.
Where did she go?
Confused, desperate, he looked up, and found a few pale gray specks, seraph wings shading themselves from the moon and stars. As he focused on the nearest one, Skylar’s name appeared, taunting him in bright green letters. Dorian cursed his stupidity. Why had he assumed she’d continued down? She must have dived at an angle and then come back up.
Now spreading his own wings, he angled them to slow his descent and then flapped hard to gain altitude. The air felt like a physical wall pushing back, and the pressure of his considerable momentum threatened to snap his wings like twigs.
He gritted his teeth and strained against those forces. By the time he’d mostly arrested his momentum, he could no longer see Skylar. Activating his comms, he tried sending her a message. “Sky, where are you?”
No answer.
“Talk to me!”
But all he heard was the relentless buffeting of the wind. Clearly she wanted to be alone.
Dorian felt sick. Why was it so important to her that they meet in the real world? Especially considering what she’d said about spending just two hours a day in the real world. And why was he so averse to the idea? Dorian glided down as he thought about it. He was afraid that meeting her for real would change how he felt about her. It wouldn’t actually matter what she looked like unless she wanted to spend time interacting with him in the real world, too, a conclusion which seemed inescapable at this point. Why else would she want to meet?
Dorian noticed the ground sweeping up fast below him. Goldwood Forest rose on the horizon, casting a dark shadow over it. Soon he was soaring low over the treetops. He banked eastward, back toward the jagged Dagger Mountains and the restaurant where he’d been dining with Skylar just a few minutes ago. As those jutting spires came into view, they peeled back the stars with a glittering wall of light—Pinnacle City. Seraphs lived almost exclusively in the mountains, suspending their dwellings from the cliffs and burrowing into them with elaborate cave systems. Dorian flapped hard to reach those heights once more, intent on returning to the restaurant, settling his bill, and going home for the night. He hoped he’d find Skylar there, but something told him she wouldn’t head home for hours yet, and long before that he was due to wake up in the real world so he could go to sleep.
How had he not noticed that Skylar never took those breaks with him? If she spent twenty-two hours a day in the Mindscape, then that meant she slept there, too. How did she eat? Or even go to the bathroom? Two hours a day didn’t seem like enough time to attend to her body’s physical needs. He shuddered to think what kind of life support she must need to avoid those concerns.
Maybe that was why she wanted to meet him in the real world. To show him how she did it so he could join her. Then they could become shriveled up husks together.
Dorian grimaced at the thought. The whole setup turned his stomach, but if her reaction tonight was anything to go by, it would be the end of their relationship if he didn’t agree to meet with her, and that made him feel equally sick.
Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t,
Dorian concluded as he soared up to the balcony he’d departed moments ago. Their waiter caught his eye and glared, as if to reprimand him for leaving before paying the bill.
All of twenty minutes later he was home, lying in bed with an ache in his chest and an empty pillow beside his. Real fatigue mingled with the simulated version, reminding him that he needed to go to bed in the real world.
As soon as he closed his eyes to sleep, he woke up lying in bed in his room, back in his parents’ home. He felt momentarily disoriented, but that faded quickly enough. He was back on planet Earth—not that he’d ever really left.
Turning to his bedside table he reached for his comm band and found a message from Skylar already waiting for him. As he checked it, text appeared in the air above the device.
If you really do love me, meet me
here
tomorrow at 2:00 PM. There’s something I need to show you.
The message contained a link to a location. Dorian touched the link and the message disappeared, replaced by a holographic map. The map panned over to an apartment complex in the City of the Minds, just a few hours from his parents’ home in the suburbs. Getting there wouldn’t be hard.
Dorian frowned, wondering what Skylar needed to
show
him. His mind ran through a list of dark possibilities.
Her profile in the Mindscape was
verified
, which meant that whatever she chose to reveal to people could be compared with verified facts about her in the real world. Her gender had been genetically verified, her sexual orientation corroborated by a brain scan, her legal status checked against real and virtual marriage records to prove that she was indeed single, and finally her chronological age had been genetically verified along with her gender—she was thirty-two, older than Dorian, but only by seven years—and what did age matter when people were immortal?
Dorian had also gone to the trouble to have his profile verified at a local clinic. In theory the system was supposed to put people at ease about engaging in virtual relationships, because it meant there wouldn’t be any nasty surprises—or at least, not as many. Profiles were theoretically impossible to hack. Then again, it was supposed to be impossible to stay in the Mindscape for twenty-two hours a day, and Skylar had somehow found a way to do that.
So what did she need to show him? Was she a man? A minor? An old woman? The possibilities were unfortunately endless. His imagination going wild with such horrors, Dorian knew he had no choice. He
had
to meet Skylar, if only to put the most chilling possibilities to rest.
Chapter 3
2824 A.D.
—Present Day—
“A
dmiral de Leon, Admiral Anderson from Fleet Command is requesting to speak with you,” Lieutenant Hayes announced from the comms.
“On screen, Lieutenant.”
“Aye, sir.”
A man with prickly, short blond hair and fierce, deep-set gray eyes appeared on the
Adamantine’s
main holo display. Anderson’s chronological age appeared to be frozen around forty-five, but Alexander knew that he was actually over a hundred years old. He dated back to before the Alliance had made it illegal to have natural-born children in the northern states.
“Sir,” Alexander saluted.
“What the hell happened, Admiral Leon?” Anderson said after a slight delay.
“We’ve lost Lunar City, sir,” Alexander said.
“I know that! The whole world knows!”
Alexander’s brow furrowed. “That was fast. How did they—”
“A cruise liner on approach to Earth saw the whole thing. Not to mention everyone on Earth suddenly lost contact with their loved ones in Lunar City.”
Alexander grimaced. “I accept full responsibility, sir.”
“Never mind that.
How
did it happen?”
“We detected the incoming missiles at over a million klicks, moving at one third the speed of light. We had just a few seconds to intercept. It wasn’t enough time.”
Anderson’s jaw dropped. “You’re telling me we got hit by relativistic weapons?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any sign of what fired them?”
Alexander shook his head. “Whatever it was, it must have been very far from Earth when it dropped the ordnance. By now I’m sure they’re long gone.”
Missiles couldn’t get up to those speeds by themselves. Large starships could, but only by spending long periods of time accelerating at a constant rate.
“Give me a ballpark,” Anderson added.
Alexander’s glanced down from the main holo display to the
Adamantine’s
engineering station. “Rodriquez?” he asked her.
“A few seconds to calculate, sir.”
Alexander nodded.
“Take your time,” Anderson said after a slight transmission delay.
Rodriguez reported, “Assuming an initial velocity of zero, and a maximum of fifteen
G
s sustained acceleration, you’d have to travel almost 180 astronomical units just to accelerate a ship up to a third of the speed of light. Since we didn’t see any ships crash into the Moon behind those missiles, and since no one reported detecting a ship headed for the moon at that kind of speed, we can assume they must have launched those missiles when they were still a long way off and difficult to spot on sensors. How far off is anyone’s guess, but we know they must have traveled at least another 180 AU toward us while decelerating. Add to that whatever minimum distance they decided to keep from us to avoid detection—let’s say 20 AU—and in total we’re looking at over 360 AU.”
Anderson slowly shook his head. “Give me a reference point for that, Lieutenant.”
Rodriquez bobbed her head. “Yes, sir. You know one astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. Neptune orbits at about 30 AU from the sun, and the Kuiper Belt and the dwarf planets orbit as far out as 50 AU. The Heliopause, or the outer edge of the solar system, is over 100 AU away, so this ship had to have begun accelerating toward us from interstellar space.”
“Then it’s possible that we are actually looking at an alien attack—or an attack by some surviving remnant of the confederate fleet,” Anderson said.
Alexander blinked. “Sir, with all due respect, I think we need to consider other more likely possibilities.”
“Such as?”
“Such as someone sent a warship on a very long trip so that they could later turn around and shoot missiles at us at relativistic speeds.”
Anderson’s gray eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Then why did it look like both the transmissions and the missiles came from the Looking Glass?”
“If I may—” Bishop began from the helm “—that’s not so hard, sir. You’d have to make a near miss with the mouth of the wormhole, but assuming they accounted for that brief tug of gravity in their firing solution, there’s no reason it couldn’t work.”
“That actually might be how we detected those missiles so far out in the first place,” Frost added from sensors. “Dead-dropped, zero-thrust ordnance is impossible to detect at a million klicks, but our logs show those missiles were firing their thrusters over the last few seconds of their approach. They were making last minute course corrections, maybe to compensate for the wormhole throwing them off their target.”
Anderson sighed. “At least we have our atmosphere to protect us from attacks like that on Earth.”
“Actually, Admiral, at those speeds our atmosphere would not act as an effective shield—all it would do is help spread the damage,” Bishop said from the helm. “The effect of a weapon like that hitting Earth would be much worse.”
Anderson’s eyes hardened. “If that’s true, then why didn’t they fire those missiles at Earth instead of the Moon?”
“I was just wondering the same thing myself, sir,” Alexander added.
“It might be because the wormhole was not pointing in the right direction for an Earth attack,” McAdams suggested.
Anderson considered that. “Then we’d better keep an eye on that wormhole.”
Alexander glanced at his XO and frowned. “And what if the attack comes from somewhere else next time?”
“I don’t think it will, but President Wallace has insisted that we spread out the First Fleet and most of the Second to guard us from all possible angles, while the rest of the Second Fleet will go to defend our remaining cities on the Moon.”
Alexander nodded. “That seems wise, sir. I assume you’ll want us to rejoin the First Fleet.”
“No, actually, we’re sending the
Adamantine
to guard the mouth of the wormhole—just in case the attacks really are coming from there.”
“Admiral, the area around the Looking Glass is a demilitarized zone. If we send the
Adamantine
there, the Solarians are not going to like it.”
“Let the politicians worry about politics. If your orders change before you get there, we’ll be sure to let you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“On your way there, set scanners to detect anything along the trajectory those missiles came in on. If we’re lucky, the ship that fired them is still decelerating somewhere along that vector.”
Alexander considered that. “It depends how long ago the missiles were fired, but it’s certainly possible, sir.”
“Plot your course, Admiral, and get there with all possible speed. Fleet command out.”
Alexander saluted as Anderson’s face faded from the screen. “Bishop, you heard the admiral, set course.”
“Aye, sir.”
“McAdams, scramble the crew to their tanks, and prep the bridge for submersion. Everyone else, begin the switch over to virtual command.”
“Aye aye,” the crew said in unison.
The sound of safety harnesses unbuckling filled the air. Panels in the ceiling popped open and dozens of thick, mechanized cables came snaking down, trailing life support equipment and new crew harnesses. Each set of cables guided itself to a corresponding anchor point in the floor to form a cross-braced assembly above each of the crew stations. The straps of Alexander’s new harness dangled down around his ears. He mentally disengaged the nutrient line and waste-handling tubes in his acceleration couch and then removed his helmet and clipped it to the back of his couch. After that, Alexander stood up and began fastening himself into his submersion harness. Peripherally he noticed McAdams doing the same. The rest of the crew joined them in quick succession.
“Ventilator and harness check!” McAdams ordered.
Affirmative replies chorused back from the crew.
Once the bridge was flooded, the entire room would function like one big
G
-tank, allowing them to endure extreme accelerations such as the sustained ten
G
s they’d been ordered to set on their approach to the Looking Glass.
As soon as Alexander was done strapping in and connecting his new nutrient line and waste-handling tubes, he grabbed the much bulkier assembly of his liquid ventilator and inserted the tracheal tube. He gagged as the tube slid down his throat, and then he strapped on the attached mask. The mask sealed around his nose and lips with a squeal of escaping air, making sure that the perfluorocarbon from his ventilator wouldn’t mix with the solution inside the bridge once liquid breathing initiated.
A green light appeared beside the ventilator, indicating it was functioning optimally, and Alexander mentally indicated his readiness to his new control station. The entire harness and cable assembly lifted him up until he was floating in midair above his control station.
The rest of the crew came springing up one after another like grasshoppers, while their old control stations and other sensitive equipment on the bridge slid away into recessed compartments in the walls and floor. Alexander glanced around the room, his breath fogging and reverberating inside his mask.
The other seven members of his bridge crew were all suspended in mid-air above the deck, trailing tubes and wires.
Alexander noticed a line of glowing green text appear before his eyes, conveyed directly from McAdams’ mind to the heads-up display of his augmented reality lenses.
The bridge crew is strapped in and ready, sir.
Initiate submersion, Alexander thought back.
An Inertial Compensation Emulsion (ICE) came swirling into the room beneath their dangling feet. Overhead pipes opened up and streams of the emulsion gushed down. In the near zero-
G
environment the solution ricocheted and floated through the room in spinning droplets and globules that caught the light and sparkled like a galaxy full of stars dancing in a chaotic ballet. As the liquid crowded out the air, globules turned to cohesive pools of shimmering, distorted light. Finally, the lights began to dim and Alexander’s ventilator started up with a rhythmic
whooshing
sound. A warm, oxygenated liquid filled his lungs, making them feel heavier than usual.
The lights went out altogether. Moments later they snapped on again, and he found himself sitting back in his acceleration couch at his control station as if he’d never unbuckled from it. The illusion was so perfect that the only way he could tell it wasn’t real was by noting the faded watermark at the top of his field of view—
(C) 2824 Mindsoft.
“All stations report,” Alexander said, his voice sounding normal to his ears even though he knew it was impossible for him to speak around his tracheal tube or to be heard through the thousands of cubic meters of liquid now flooding the bridge.
One after another the crew all checked in, their voices all sounding equally normal to his ears.
“Bridge submersion successful,” McAdams announced. “All one hundred and twelve
G
-tanks report filled. All present and accounted for, sir.”
Alexander nodded. “Good. Thank you, McAdams. Bishop, fire up the mains at ten
G
s.”
“Aye, sir.”
Chapter 4
2819 A.D.
—Five Years Earlier—
T
he car rolled to a stop, but the doors remained locked. “You have arrived at your destination,” the car announced in a pleasant voice. “That will be $16.50.”
Dorian passed his wrist over the car’s scanner. The deduction flashed up on his augmented reality contacts (ARCs), and then the car doors unlocked. It would have been cheaper if he’d used one of his parents’ cars, but then he would have had to explain where he was going.
“Thank you for choosing Green Valley Taxis. Have a nice day!”
Dorian stepped onto the curb. A cold, lonely wind whistled between the buildings, rolling an empty soda can down the sidewalk. He shivered and thrust his hands into his pockets. His taxi hovered up, pushing out a cushion of hot air before rumbling away.
A bird gave a piercing cry. Suddenly he doubted the wisdom of this trip. Maybe Skylar was a killer and she had lured him here as her next victim. Feeling watched, he looked around. The building where Skylar had asked to meet soared up over a hundred floors, casting a deep shadow over him. More skyscrapers ran the length of the street. Across the street from them was New Central Park. Stately trees stood watch over lush green grounds, their leaves turning colors in the fall—vibrant reds, yellows, and golds. Another wind whistled in, rustling leaves and jostling them from their branches in a steady rain.
Dorian spied a hot dog stand with a bot vendor. A handful of human pedestrians wearing old, mismatched and faded clothes walked down that side of the street, heads down, hands in their pockets, shoulders hunched. Some were out walking anemic-looking dogs. Others were no doubt taking a mandatory break from their virtual lives. It was a Saturday. The City of the Minds had a population of more than ten million, yet there were only a handful of pedestrians, and all of them looked like homeless bums. Dorian found that curious. Thanks to the dole there weren’t any homeless anymore. Dolers were the closest thing, and all of them were clothed, fed, and housed by the government. But they were relegated to the outskirts of the city where the free housing projects were, and they rarely ventured downtown. So these pedestrians were the wealthy, duly employed denizens of the city. Either they didn’t have the money to spend on appearances, or more likely, they didn’t care what they looked like in the real world anymore.
Turning back to the fore, Dorian walked toward the apartment building where Skylar had asked to meet with him.
One71
, it was called. Dorian reached the doors and a bot doorman greeted him.
“How may I help you, Mr. de Leon?”
Being greeted by name threw him, but then Dorian remembered that his comm beacon was broadcasting it for anyone to read. “I’m here to see Skylar Phoenix.”
“I’m sorry, no one lives here by that name. Perhaps you are looking for someone who is a guest in the building?”
“Yes,” Dorian decided.
“Do you have an apartment number I could call?”
“76C.” Dorian replied.
“One moment, please…”
Dorian tapped his foot while he waited, jittery from a combination of nerves and the cold.
“The owner has buzzed you in,” the doorman announced. “I notice her first name is Phoenix, perhaps she is the one you are looking for?”
“So Skylar was an alias…” Dorian mumbled to himself.
“I’m sorry, I have no reference point for that question.”
In her supposedly
verified
Mindscape profile her real name had matched her user name—Skylar Phoenix. She must have bribed someone to falsify it for her. The burning question was
why?
and what else about her profile couldn’t he trust? Maybe he shouldn’t go up.
“Sir? Would you like to enter the building now?”
Dorian nodded and the doors parted for him. He walked into a lavish lobby with high tray ceilings, massive crystal chandeliers, recessed lighting, shiny marble columns and floors… The sheer opulence of it made his head spin. He walked by a bot concierge that smiled and greeted him by name. Dorian continued on. If Skylar—Phoenix—whatever her real name was actually owned apartment 76C, then she had to be disgustingly wealthy. Dorian reached a bank of elevators with black mirrored doors. One of them opened automatically for him. Feeling eyes all over him, he hesitated before stepping inside. There was no control panel to select a floor. Instead the number 76 appeared on a display above the doors. The doorman must have already selected his floor for him.
Nice security system.
It took all of a few seconds for the elevator to race up to the 76th floor, and Dorian’s ears popped with the sudden change of air pressure.
The doors parted, and he walked out into a private foyer, a miniature of the one in the lobby below with a pair of illuminated frosted glass doors at the end. As he reached them, a pleasantly feminine bot voice asked him to state his name.
“Dorian de Leon.”
There was a momentary delay, and then that voice returned. “Welcome, Dorian. I’ve been expecting you. Please come in.”
Dorian’s brow furrowed at the personalized greeting system. He started toward the doors, and they now parted for him automatically.
He gasped when he saw the apartment. The ceilings were fully two stories high with floor-to-ceiling, frameless windows running all the way around a large, open living area, giving a breathtaking view of New Central Park and the surrounding city. Thick, illuminated stone columns ran around the edges of the room. Dark hard wood floors polished to an immaculate luster contrasted with spotless white furniture and sparkling cream-colored rugs. The furniture looked like it had never been sat on, every chair, ottoman, lamp, and throw rug perfectly arranged. The kitchen looked equally disused.
“Hello?”
No answer.
Does anyone even live here?
he wondered, glancing back the way he’d come in time to see the front doors slide shut behind him.
A soft, mechanical whirring drew his attention to one side of the open living space. It was a bot. A friendly housekeeper model with a holographic human face.
“Welcome, Mr. de Leon. My name is Matilda. My mistress is waiting for you in her room. Would you like me to accompany you there?”
Dorian nodded. Forcing some moisture into his mouth, he said, “Yes. Thank you.”
“This way, please,” Matilda said.
He followed the bot through the lavish apartment, still marveling at the views. They walked down a hall along the side of the building, more frosted glass doors to his left, floor-to-ceiling windows to his right. One of those doors lay open to a powder room that was big enough to fit a king-sized bed and still have room to walk—an excessive waste of space in a city where every square foot came at a premium.
They continued on, and Dorian’s gaze was drawn out the windows, back to the view. There was so much light pouring into the apartment that it almost hurt his eyes. The vertiginous view reminded him of the cliff-side home he shared with Skylar in
Galaxy.
No wonder she’d chosen to be a seraph. She lived in the clouds in the real world, too.
At the end of the hall they came to another set of double doors, not as wide as the entrance, but still wide enough to be grand. The doors parted as they approached, revealing not another room, but a small foyer. Dorian followed the bot inside and the doors slid shut behind them. Here the windows were darkened by a decorative blackout shade, and the only light was from a dimly-lit crystal chandelier hanging overhead. Another set of glass doors faced them, more opaque than the last. After just a moment those doors slid open, too, revealing a darkened room with more shades blocking the light from the windows. Thin bars of light glowed on the floor between the shades.
Matilda walked inside, but Dorian lingered in the foyer, too afraid to move. A beguiling floral fragrance wafted out from the room.
A lure?
he wondered, his whole body felt tense and ready for a fight.
Matilda announced him to whoever was waiting inside.
“I’m glad you came,” came the reply. It was the feminine bot voice that had first greeted him at the entrance of the apartment.
Dorian frowned. “Phoenix?” She couldn’t be a robot. Of all the hideous possibilities he’d imagined,
that
wasn’t one of them. It was absurd. He would have known by now if she were a non-player character (NPC). They’d spent too much time interacting virtually, and besides, bots couldn’t own apartments.
“Don’t be afraid,” the voice said. “Please, come in.”
The bot housekeeper turned to him with an encouraging smile and said, “This way, Dorian.”
As if there were any other way left open to him. Would the various sets of doors between him and the exit even open if he tried to leave now?
Not ready to abandon the comparative brightness of the foyer yet, Dorian said, “Your name isn’t Skylar.”
“No, but it is Phoenix. I’m sorry for the deception, Dorian, but it was necessary. I’ll explain everything in a moment.”
A mechanical whirring came from within the room, heightening Dorian’s sense of horror. She
was
a bot!
But the shadowy form that appeared before him wasn’t that of a traditional bot, or even a human. It was something else entirely. A squat, hulking shape, rolling toward him on
wheels.
As it drew near, Dorian’s eyes picked out more detail. The hulking shape was a wheelchair with a human sitting in it, head slumped to one side.
Dorian frowned. “What’s the point of getting me to meet you if you won’t let me see you?”
The wheelchair stopped in front of him, but still far enough beyond the dim light of the foyer that he couldn’t make out any features of the person sitting in it. That person could still be a man. A man with an artificial female voice for a cover.
Dorian shivered.
“I have the shades drawn to help lessen the shock for you, Dorian.”
“I don’t think that’s working. You have to use a wheelchair because your muscles have all atrophied from spending so much time in the Mindscape,” Dorian said.
“Yes, and no. My muscles have atrophied, but not because of the Mindscape. I have ALS.”
“ALS?”
“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Juvenile onset. It’s a rare disease that attacks and destroys the motor neurons in the brain. It paralyzed me by the age of eight. My treatments have kept me alive, but so far none of them have been able to reverse the damage.”
Some of the tension left Dorian’s body as fear turned to empathy. “I’m sorry.”
“Besides my name, everything else you know about me is true. I am 32 years old, and I
am
a woman, in case you were worried. Shades up—”
The shades in the room rolled slowly upward, letting in a blinding river of light and once again revealing a startling view of New Central Park. Dorian winced against the sudden glare and held a hand up to shield his eyes. At first the woman in the chair was just a dark silhouette, but then his eyes adjusted and her features came clear.
Phoenix was beautiful in the way that a statue or a painting was beautiful, and she looked startlingly like her character from
Galaxy
—golden hair, amber eyes, pale, flawless skin, and fine feminine features. Dorian felt a familiar thrill at the sight of her, but it was diminished by sorrow and pity for her condition.
He grimaced in dismay. “Surely there’s something they can do for you.”
“There is not.” The voice came to his ears without the woman before him so much as twitching. Her thoughts translated directly to speech. “Believe me, I’ve tried. No amount of money in the world can fix me. At least not yet.”
Dorian walked into the room, feeling drawn to Phoenix’s side. Her eyes followed him as he approached. He reached her chair and got down on his haunches beside her. Reaching for her hand, he found it limp and lifeless.
“I cannot move, but I can still feel.”
Dorian nodded. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I wouldn’t have been afraid to meet you if you had told me
this.
”
“I had hoped you would react this way,” Phoenix said, her voice smiling for her. “I knew you were different.”
“Now I understand why you spend all your time in the Mindscape. Where’s your life support?” he asked, eyes flicking over her wheelchair. There was a blanket drawn across her lap, perhaps to hide feeding and waste removal tubes.
“It’s all built into my chair. I’ve had it made to be as unobtrusive as possible.”
Dorian nodded. “How did you bypass the wake-up code?”
“My father did that.”
“So he was a mindscaper.”
“One of the first. He worked hard to build virtual worlds for me so that I could experience all of the things I never could in the real world. The money was always secondary to him.”
“Was?”
“He died tragically a few years ago. I inherited his fortune and his empire.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dorian said, wondering at her choice of the term
empire.
“Who was he?”
