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I don't think we ever had a choice really, the situation more chose us, despite all the work Redge had to put in before we ever even had a system up in running. When he found the plans and the stock of material, he knew he had to keep going back to that warehouse on the seaboard with the elevator he had to electrically shock open to let us in. He only found out recently there was a password he could pop in instead of tasering the thing, but that's Redge for ya.
Actually, I guess that bears some more explaining. Redge is a bit of a genius savant. You show him hardware plans and piles of software and he's always been able to make it into a complete system, better than whatever you had imagined. He was always tweaking personal computers to the maximum overclock he could obtain, with the wackiest custom cooling systems, then running programs just to push them. The flip side was, he couldn't talk to other people for crap though, it seems like he's a little autistic or something. He dressed the same way every day pretty much, always a polo shirt and slacks. His black curly hair was saved from being a mess only by the fact it was short. I'd known him for a couple of years already, and he never seemed to bother with more than instructional level speaking to people. I was used to it though, and I knew he really meant well, even if he couldn't process the need for the usual pleasantries of human interaction.
The first time we went out to the warehouse, I thought sure even Redge had lost it. I was curious though, because he'd spared me the first 'please' I'd ever heard out of him to get me to trust him and follow through with whatever scheme he was hatching. For him that was downright emphatic begging, if you ask me, so I put up with it, even as we trudged through the dead-fish and heavy machinery reek of the coastal industrial district.
The top of that warehouse is nothing special, abandoned for one ownership reason after the next, the building was a combination of a large boat dock on the outside and what seemed to be various out of repair seafood processing equipment in the rear rooms. I didn't quite understand why the main room was so large and open with nothing apparently going on there, but Redge motioned to an old freight style elevator I assumed went down to the coast and punched the buttons sending us down into the darkness.
In the gloom we eventually stopped, and I'm glad I couldn't see too well, because I was pretty nervous at this point and if I'd seen Redge produce the taser I might have freaked and attacked him to protect myself. As it was, he overloaded the circuit next to the control panel with a bright flash and the large door jumped to life, popping some electromagnetic locks with loud 'chunk' sounds and opened up
"Nothing here yet, but you need to see the plans." He dreamily informed me, surveying the metal walled room we stepped into. It should have been totally dark without any obvious light source, but there was a dim green gloom throughout the room, and Redge's already dark black skin seemed to be absorbing the little ambient light that was hitting him.
"This is an odd room for the fishing business, eh? How far down are we anyway?" I asked. "I figure we've got to be below sea level."
"Yeah, completely incongruous, doesn't fit the pattern, doesn't belong here. Even weirder because nobody owns it. Then the plans pull it all together for me." He said.
He rummaged in hastily packed cardboard boxes along the far wall and produced a big blueprint for my viewing. He spread it out on the floor next to a chair sitting lifelessly in a large tracked groove. "It's a secondary that somebody never built," he explained, gesturing to the chart "What it describes is – well, should be – impossible."
"Redge, you know I'm kinda simple at this stuff, you're gonna have to break it down more."
"I know, I don't expect you to read the circuit diagrams. You can see the construction plans though. 4 distinct pieces. Can you discern any of them?"
"That," I pointed to the largest picture "Looks like one of the supercomputers on your wall posters."
"Near enough based on an old one as far as I can tell, does more though if the notes aren't crazy. Near limitless power generation, quantum stuff I can barely understand. It's all in another book left here."
"Jeeze, Redge, quantum computing is still for single case lab tests and science fiction."
"Nobody told the engineer that... Two things, it takes some unique material they labeled 'Exertainum' and even I'm not sure what this bit is." He was gesturing at a roughly 10 foot to scale picture of a large steel cylinder with complicated wiring coming out every hole. "I can probably build it, but I'm not sure why it's necessary, it seems to have minimal computational rigging inside, It's 80% empty space."
"Redge, call me crazy, but that looks like a door, and it's about the right size for a person."
"Intriguing" was all he managed in response to that.
I left that afternoon, and Redge was walking down the street of the suburb by sundown. I didn't see him much for almost a month after that, despite the fact we usually did something at least weekly. I could tell one night that he was using his dad's abandoned workshop equipment, welding away on something, no doubt soldering his head off too.
Finally one day, afternoon after school, he just shows up at my door knocking and waved toward the coast "You've gotta see this, it's crazy." I was a bit surprised when he didn't head for the coast directly but to the public park about a block over. "Turns out the sewers lead straight there, and we aren't exposed to the crazies up there."
I was about to protest that 'the crazy' was right here as he slid off a manhole cover, but living as close to the coast as we do, the sewers were a very open well lit tunnel system that had to be maintained frequently. Didn't mean the smell was any more pleasant, but Redge had a reason as he always did, he had apparently been stocking equipment down here and gestured for me to grab a tank of welding fuel.
"I'm about half done, thanks to the generous contributions of the city repairs department and local businesses" I was sure he meant theft, and realized that in all the time I'd known him, this was the first time Redge was trying to crack a joke. I guess this project must have been good for him, giving him an outlet all the time for the crazy. I let out a bit of a chuckle and we marched out of the dark to find ourselves at an open outlet below the sea wall with the warehouse right above.
I was about the worry how we were going to get the heavy tank of fuel up while climbing a ladder, but Redge stopped me and waved at a small loading crane, probably for getting people down here to service boats that pulled in. We were up in the main room in no time, and took the elevator down, lower than I had the first time, to a darkened room circulating water beneath the floor. "Lowest level," Redge explained, "Where the computer needs to be to keep it cool. Runs right in water most the time. Fortunately they already finished the desalinization processing plant a long time ago."
What I saw pop up, or more accurately telescopically fold out upward from the water cooling hole, was a framework of steel with various golden plates running crisscrossed and humming softly. "Bet you wouldn't believe they left a radioactive fuel core here." He laughed, at what was apparently not a joke, "First thing was to get its power source going. I'm halfway done on the core here, only a more pre-assembled plates to go. Fortunate they left a stash of the material too, because I can only find theory about it on the Internet at best. It doesn't really seem to exist yet."
"What'd you say it was called?"
"Exertainum. Room temperature superconductor. Plays well with quantum particles. Very important to the radiation particle for power exchange."
"What do you think it does when you turn it on?"
"Don't know, it's very non-linear. Very sideways thinking. Can't turn one part on until it's all finished for some reason."
I was amazed by what I was hearing, but the more Redge worked, the less like a story it became and the more reality it transformed into.
It was another two weeks later when by random chance, I watched him leave for the shore down the street one Saturday morning, and sighed, stepping out onto the street to stop him and make sure he was still all right, after all of this.
"Redge, Redge! You ok? How far along is the science fair?"
"Huh, oh yeah, I'm fine. I think three quarters. You should see the cabins. I think you're right, they had to be meant for people. What's more, I'm close to understanding the notes on the software's high level design now. You know what it is? It's a VR, but more-!"
"Redge, don't set yourself up for a disappointment, this has been science fiction from the beginning."
"Wouldn't believe it if the principles didn't make sense. It's all spot on accurate so far, and somebody gifted me all the pieces necessary to see it through."
"See what through?" Came a tiny voice from behind us.
"Hello, Penny" Redge sighed, in a practiced way he had learned to greet everybody with despite not seeing the point.
He had in fact guessed correctly, because somehow Penny had snuck up behind us. Penny was another local girl in first year high school with us. She was short and small for the age though, and her long brown hair was hiding a lot of her face as usual. She gave the feeling of a very mousy presence, and was pleasant enough despite not being my type.
"Nothing Penny, just too much sci-fi in Redge's head and I'm trying to keep him down to Earth."
"No," She squeaked "I heard more of that. Virtual Reality?"
"Not sure. Can't determine anything else those cabins might be for though. Odd however, they aren't an environment, too small."
"Redge you can't just go telling everybody about this!" I said, a little exasperated. "If anybody important found out what you were doing, you'd get shut down for sure!"
"I see your point," He muttered "Wouldn't hurt to have some hands to help me though, if both of you wanted to come."
At first I didn't believe she'd ever say yes: Just say something snappy, turn around and keep on walking figuring us for being crazy. Then her expression changed, curious instead of worried or dismissive. I didn't have many friends at the school, so when Redge had pulled me in to this, it wasn't likely I was gonna say anything, but Penny was more popular by a bit, and I found myself worried, so before we even took a step I turned to her, dead serious. "Penny, if we take you there, show you this stuff, you've got to keep quiet about it. Absolutely, you understand?"
She seemed to mull it over for a moment, but finally answered "All right, IF it's a secret worth keeping, I'll keep it for you. If this is stupid and fake, don't expect me to hold back in telling everybody you guys are nuts."
"You can only expect so much. Whatever it is, it's not finished yet." I said.
"Might be today, with three sets of hands." Redge commented "Most of the rest of the work is assembly, and it would have taken longer to do myself."
I wondered if I had the same range of expressions on my face the first time as I watched Penny's on the way there. Redge declined the sewers since we were taking somebody new, and I was rather glad, since I felt crazy enough anyway. It only took three or four blocks and about a half hour by the surface streets. She had a look of disbelief as we walked to the seaboard, shifting to a little wonder and fear as we walked into the warehouse, nervousness in the elevator and finally wonder as we stepped into the lab room with the metal walls.
"Found out this whole place is electrically shielded." Redge commented "There's more of that superconductor in the walls too which is why it keeps glowing ambiently despite little artificial light."
"What-" Penny managed to start asking, but fell silent again.
"I admit, it's more impressive than before." I said, staring blankly ahead at a slowly rotating hologram of 'no link available.'
"Hologram generator is easy when you have limitless power and a superconductor that emits ambient light." Redge said, like there was nothing big about it.
"Redge, you really ought to work on making it clear you're telling a joke sometimes." I said.
"Hologram is quiet real." Was the only response he gave me. "If you two can hold this in place, I can go up on the framework and bolt it in."
It was a large monitor and necked framework leading up to the wires and metal frame above. Redge was fearlessly scaling a wall ladder and tightrope walking the narrow metal traces above. He seemed to have become comfortable up there.
"It's a little heavy." He loudly spoke down at us "But if I could pick it up, the two of you can most likely hold it long enough for me to bolt it in."
I had trouble seeing how Redge had ever picked this thing up, the monitor part was heavy enough, but the long drop-down steel frame it was going to bolt to made it both heavier and unwieldy. Penny had recovered from the stunned wonder I had the first time I'd come down and was already lining up to give me a hand with the assembly.
"Guess we weren't kidding, huh?" I said
"It'd be quite a set up if you are." She said, just barely audibly.
Scurrying around up top, Redge started directing us home, to a rolling track up above where the top of the monitoring system met an outfaced plate. With the two of us lifting, it really wasn't bad, and I guessed Redge could have moved this piece before with some difficulty or mechanical help. We got it into place and did our best to hold it still at what was chest level for me and maybe neck level for her. Redge bolted it down with an electric drill, the whine echoing from above through the room.
"Lots of wiring to do. More lifting later if you wouldn't go too far." He called down, still busy over our heads.
"Don't suppose you were planning to spend your day this way?" I asked Penny
"I can't say that I was. This is – way - better than what I had planned though. You think it's really a VR system?"
"What's the interest?"
"My oldest brother worked on projects he said were the gateway to VR. Really advanced stuff like implants to let the blind see light patterns on another part of the brain."
"Wanted to see that for yourself?"
"Wanted to have the chance to tell Redge he was full of it."
I just slumped on the floor, back to the large groundswell that was the holographic system. She had enough sense to sit in the chair, still locked in place although now with the monitor of the assembly facing it like an honest to god computer interface. Redge was still clambering above, but was pretty severely lost in doing wiring and soldering.
"Don't much like him?" I asked, pitching my head behind me to where he was up clambering around
She answered quietly. "Redge is the guy you want to like but just can't because he doesn't know how people feel. My family used to live closer and I understood he was trying to be my friend, but after a while, well, you know."
"He's gotten better since I've known him really, being polite mechanically if not knowing why he needs to."
"It helps you actually dig being a tech geek more, Kit. I can understand a little, but it doesn't mean it thrills me." She said with a weak smile.
I couldn't help but laugh a little, and not at the subject at hand. "Been a while since anybody who used to call me Kit gave me the time of day. It's just 'Chris' now."
"Doesn't have to be, you know, I remember you used to be the coolest guy."
I shrugged. She was right in a way, but... "People say me and Redge are the same, but there's a difference. I act the way I do by choice, being the center of attention was never anything but bad for me, even if I felt cool."
"It – doesn't bother you then?"
"They say you're not supposed to understand being yourself at this age, but I totally get it. If I wasn't happy, I'd just change again."
She decided to let it drop, I guess, and Redge had more things for us to hold as he bolted and wired into place. The highlight was dropping great cables a little bit at a time between floors. There were some that ran all the way to the giant framework computer at the bottom, and some that only ran to the giant cylinders midway between them. Redge finally got us down there at one point to help plug them in, and I was forced to wonder how on Earth Redge got these eleven foot monsters upright.
"Modified some of the fishing stuff upstairs into supports." Was all that I ever got from him about it, but I congratulated him on the Herculean effort it must have been to get solid metal panels into place even so.
We couldn't tell from down in the basement rooms but by the time we were done the sun was kissing the horizon upstairs. The Ocean was warmed with the orange and red light of sunset. I wanted to see what would happen when we fired it up, but Redge was adamant that it would take a day of a screwing around with at a minimum, and wanted to start fresh in the morning. Since I was sure by this point that he'd be the only one to understand, and didn't care to wind up in trouble, I finally relented.
Walking out of the cavernous warehouse portion, Redge stopped us for a moment.
"Don't know what will happen, but I'd like both of you here tomorrow." He paused for a moment "Please?"
I guess it shocked Penny kinda like it had done for me on the first day when all this equipment was still blueprints and parts, because she wordlessly nodded back at him. I of course gave the high sign that I was more than willing to see what kind of power this super system would give. Penny had a little farther than us to go, since she not only had to get back past the big public park but a block or two further. Apparently she made it home all right, because she never mentioned any trouble the next morning.
It was a long night, I couldn't get much sleep thinking about whatever it turned out to be Redge had built down there with those leftover plans, we were all on Cray Street again, in front of my house, about to set out. I was worried for a bit the Penny wasn't going to make it, but apparently she figured she was in deep already and might as well see it through to the end.
We made our way through the sewers again this time, showing Penny our traced out route and the fact that Redge still had a stockpile of mundane construction elements down here. He never did tell me where the superconductor stuff was stored, but I guessed back in one of the warehouse rooms originally.
We arrived on that narrow beach below the sea wall, and I was thankful to see Redge had though ahead and lowered the crane elevator so we wouldn't have to hoof it up the 20 foot wall mounted ladder. We made our way quickly into the elevator inside which Redge ordered down to the lowest framework computer room.
I realized that while I had seen it before, the only one who had been down here the previous day was Redge and Penny was in for a shock. The framework emerged to greet the elevator, shining more brilliantly gold than I remembered and inviting Redge to go up to the main switch, a huge mechanical relay like one would see at a power station. He grabbed hold of it, turned to us, and I swear, winked.
Next thing I knew my hair was blown back like an intense pulse of static electricity had filled the room, Redge had fallen on his rear, and Penny was clutching the wall of the elevator. "I think it's on" was all I could think to say at the time.
Redge picked himself off and without bothering to dust off or anything, calmly walked back into the elevator and punched the button for the lab. I just barely got back between the closing magnetic lock door and into the lift. Penny was busy trying to work the static out of her hair, and touching any of the walls by any of us produced neat cracking pops of charge. It was funny the first 5 or so times, but I was soon tried of the perpetual wool socks on a carpet effect and glad it faded over the next hour.
The lab looked largely unchanged except for the fact the slowly spinning 'no link available' hologram had been replaced by an empty grid-lined sphere. Redge plopped himself on the finally live chair in the track, and rotated it up to the monitor which linked to the chair's position when he finally got close enough. A series of hardware connection menus ran, Redge clicking through them furiously, but finding nothing to change, opted to go onward.
He hit our first big snag almost immediately. He frowned and tapped through various pieces of text that came up, but decided he couldn't decipher it. "It's in another language. One of the European ones, romance based. French I think, but I can only pick up a couple of words."
I shrugged immediately; languages had never been my thing. Penny peered over his shoulder and affirmed that it was indeed French, but beyond a few words she knew here and there too, she couldn't read it any better than he could. Redge had a look of true frustration on his face, and he slammed a fist on the top of the monitor, rattling himself more than the casing probably, but relieving a little explosion he had building up.
"Easy Redge" I finally advised him, standing well back "We can bring one more person in, I guess. We need to find somebody who can translate."
"Not a bad plan." Penny added trying to be helpful.
"Can I trust you two to handle it?" He said, not really facing us, still ready to hit the computer more for letting him this far and not giving him language he could understand.
"Yeah Redge, we'll ask around at school tomorrow. Think you can hold a week?"
"Not really. Don't have much choice though. Won't go randomly pushing buttons, not after I got this far through."
I was disappointed to be leaving this quickly after we'd gotten there. The sun hardly traced the edge of the sky, and I had a whole day – heck, a week – to blow before Redge and the rest of us got any answers. What surprised me was that Penny, still reeling from all this equipment even being there was as down about not knowing as I was.
"So how do normal people spend their weekends these days anyway" I sighed, a little exasperated.
"They go see their friends or hang out at the park or something. Thought you knew what to do if you wanted to change."
"Guess I still don't want to. I should go to that park sometime without intending to pass through a sewer, though."
She seemed to consider something I said for a moment, but then decided against it. "I still do have friends to see who probably wondered why I didn't show up yesterday, if you don't mind."
"Just –"
"Yeah, I'll keep your secret, I'm impressed so far, right?"
"Stoop to seeing me Monday while we find a French speaker?"
"Yeah, not until after lunch though, all right?"
"Sure. Don't worry, I'll make sure Redge doesn't hurt himself or anybody in the meantime."
She just gave a little wave and walked off back toward her home, leaving me to make sure Redge wasn't still down in the lab kicking equipment. We got to his home, and though a poor substitute for the mystery we had available, video games helped while the hours away until it was time to get some sleep and I left to go to bed.
Monday morning crawled by slowly, classes conveying no information I didn't already have. Though I had no trouble talking to her for who she was wandering the streets, I was a little nervous about approaching Penny here. She worked pretty hard to make sure her ring of friends was a solid little organization. Nevertheless, she found a way to single me out in the afternoon, getting a friend of hers to pass me notes in class.
I felt sadly like a little sixth grader receiving it. While Penny focused on friends and popularity to a point, and Redge was gifted with machines and such to make up for not doing so, I found myself spending whatever energy I had on trying to be ahead of the curve, in academics and maturity.
Penny grabbed me from behind as I was milling around near where the note had instructed me to wait. Most immediately I was surprised at how strong her grip was, as I instinctively tried to pull away.
"Geeze, you spaz" she laughed. "I think I see part of what your problem is."
"I don't like folks grabbing me is all." I grumbled "What's your plan."
"We spend the next five minutes talking to the French class students."
"Worked that one out yourself did you?"
She knuckled me in the back, which I admit I may have deserved a little. Nevertheless, the basic theory was sound, and we made it into the room housing the more advanced foreign language students. Penny started asking all around, but the answer was universally the same, they were all students who would need a book and a lot of time to translate something, whereas we wanted a fluent speaker. With the teacher's first salutations we finally ducked out.
Penny shrugged at me, and only suggested we try after school before running off down the hall to try and catch her class fast enough to get off with the excuse her last teacher had held her up. I meandered my way through the halls and decided to just skip study hall altogether since nobody would miss me. What I found bizarrely enough was another language class, since I was listening for it so intently anyway I suppose. The students were repeating what I guessed as being tourist Italian phrases from the sound of it. What caught my attention, staring in through the open door was the fact that somebody was muttering something under their breath between the English and Italian repetitions. And I could swear I caught one or two of the words that Penny had pointed out on the monitor the other day.
Too many eyes focused on me and lost track of the repetitions, so I ducked around the corner just in time to avoid the gaze of a teacher glancing around the edge of the door. I must have been there half an hour more just listening to them speak in various tones that weren't familiar to my ear, but I never lost track of the almost sub-audible muttering in-between. I was surprised the teacher didn't stop whoever this girl was, I was sure it was a girl's voice after a while, but apparently there was some reason not to.
The bell finally rang and as the students started to spill out into the hall from everywhere, I began trying to ask anybody who would give me the time of day to identify the secondary speaker. I finally got a rough grunt and a wave to 'Elise' by a guy way too large to still be a student. From the door all I could make of her was that she was a pretty girl with a little bit of a figure and wavy shoulder length blond hair. I moved in closer as the class filed out.
"Elise?"
"Erm, yes?" she responded, with an odd accent I couldn't yet place.
"Hello, I'm Chris Celtic. We're you repeating French between the English and … Italian right?"
She laughed, long blonde hair shaking behind her. "Surprised you could tell the quiet one and not the spoken one. Yes, I repeat the French in-between. Makes it easier and connects all the languages I know."
"So you're fluent in French?"
"For sure. At least, I was, I try to practice it in-between other languages these days, but I don't get much chance to use it every day."
"You probably have to get to your next class and so do I, but can you speak to me or Penny Janeway after school?"
"About speaking French, I take it?"
"We could use a little help you could say, we need somebody fluent."
"I've met Penny, I'll see if I can talk to her later."
"Thank you."
"Have a good day, was it Chris?"
"Yeah that's it, thank you again Elise."
It seemed that luckily I had found the next link in the chain we needed. The rest of the afternoon dragged on slowly. I never got the chance to find Penny after school before enough time passed and my parents would get worried, and I took off, heading on down the street. Redge was trudging home too, completely out of it. I hoped he would be all right, as I tried to distract myself with the usual menial tasks of homework and house chores. It's always harder to concentrate when something big if afoot though, and I didn't get much done.
It must have been going dark, 7 or so that night, when Penny rapt on my window and once I opened up the slat blinds and looked out, she motioned for me to join her. Rather than try to explain going anywhere at this hour to my parents, I just opened the window, moved the screen and jumped out into the bushes. They turned out to be a little spikier than I'd bargained for, since it was getting spring enough for them to put on sharp leaves again.
"Slick." She sniped at me, but I was too busy recovering and rubbing my arms to care.
"Is he always so blunt?" an accent I recognized asked from the gathering dusk.
"It's actually a virtue in this case. We wouldn't have found out you could translate for us without him."
"Where exactly is this great riddle of a system anyway?"
"Cajun" I blurted
"Excuse me?" Elise looked at me, face twisted.
"Your accent, it's just a bit Cajun," I observed, "No disrespect or anything meant."
"I speak clearly," She told me, still frowning a little "But yeah, there was once a time the people here didn't even seem to understand what I was saying."
I was in a flurry of various conversations now though, and I turned to Penny "Why are we doing this tonight? I thought we agreed the weekend."
"We're getting started now so that by this weekend we'll be ready to really see what it does."
I hadn't even had that kind of foresight, although dealing with computers as much as I did hanging around Redge, I should have. "That's pretty forward thinking of you."
"Told you I knew about this stuff." She said to me triumphantly, then was cut off by Elise.
"Hello! Still here! What is this project?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you, and we'd have to walk a ways."
"That's not terribly convincing." she answered.
"Let's get Redge, he can do the talking better than anybody." I suggested
"Just a little further then?" Penny checked.
Elise just nodded at her and we trekked down a couple of houses and across a darkened cooling Cray street. To coast kept it kind of warm year round, but it was still just barely spring and after dark the temperature started to drop. Redge's long-suffering mom was already asleep by the time we got there, and he just walked out to meet us. The relays in his unique brain clicked when I introduced Elise as a French expert.
"So we can start work tonight, then?"
"Work on what?" Demanded Elise again.
"I need a translation of a French Operating system for some highly advanced pieces of computational technology hidden in a warehouse on the oceanfront."
I was amazed, Elise didn't miss a beat.
"Well this has been a good laugh to all of you I'm sure. I'm done."
She turned to walk away, but when none of us even let out a peep, she turned back. She eyed Redge quizzically for a moment, then turned to Penny. Finally she spun away and back again and looked at me. "You're serious, aren't you, Chris."
"Redge almost never jokes about anything." I told truthfully.
"We can work for a few hours if we leave now." Redge added.
You can guess what happened next, there was the usual series of disbelief and wonderment on our new companion's face as we stepped through the various environs and down into the terminal lab. I was amazed how in stride Elise took it once she got over the fact that we weren't lying to her. Redge kept her busy, asking for translations of lines almost immediately. In a mere hour they'd mastered basic navigation and Redge had already learned he could start rewriting large parts into English with her help.
What came next though was more interesting to me.
"That settles it, I'm not in the real operating system yet." Redge pointed. "We have to choose settings and fix the displayed language from out here."
"Settings?" I inquired, looking up from the book I'd brought with me. Penny looked up dreamily from the game she was playing on a cell phone.
"Apparently the system requires some kind of central symbol to build around. The best translation I can give you is a 'keyword." Elise added for him.
"So just pick whatever it comes up with first and go on."
Elise swore, in French I think. Redge just frowned at me.
"We don't even know what it means yet, there is a lot more to read through, and we won't be done tonight."
My watch finally beeped 10:00 and I decided to call the party off. I don't think it was really my right to decide, but they saw logic pretty easily when I gave them a reminder what we all still had to go to school the next morning.
That was how the next week went. Every afternoon after school, we would check in at home and then meet out at the warehouse. Elise and Redge, at their best, worked tirelessly. They had the whole thing hacked through by Friday, and Redge finally had the chance to explain what he'd talked about before.
"The help file, after we translated it, explained it all. The proprietary core the original developer created was codenamed Lyoko, but he hadn't decided what he wanted it to look like. So he drew a few symbols up that could form the center of the visual setup throughout the system, both external and in the VR."
"We think we should use this one" Elise said, as Redge brought something up on the screen. It was a strange symbol with a central dot and two transcribed circles, with a line off the top and three in a mirror configuration on the bottom.
"It's the symbol for an unstable quantum byte, the advance that makes this computer so unbelievably powerful." Redge explained.
"It's in the creators own notes for all this" Elise beamed. "He left a lot of notes for such a
'basic' Operating System."
He typed in a few words and then frowned as a red exclamation came up on the screen. He pointed at it unhelpfully to Elise, who quickly translated for us. "Basically Error. In use."
"Reserved by the system, I guess?" I asked Redge, who just shrugged back.
"Just try another one." Penny suggested.
"Probably this one then," Elise pointed to Redge who had called up on the screen another symbol, it looked like a dot and a transcribed circle with three Y's joined at the base sprouting from the center. It seemed a bit like the classic biohazard symbol to me, but Elise quickly explained "Next best thing, it's the symbol for a 'high' or '1' quantum state according to the notes."
Redge typed some codes and suddenly a green plus highlighted his screen instead. The glowing hologram switched to a textured 3D Sphere instead of the grid, and then zoomed back from it quickly revealing some generic gray islands orbiting it roughly on four spokes.
"It's a virtual environment template and… this other stuff it can't be right." Elise and Redge did a flurry of point and reads and Penny jumped up to look over his shoulder. I couldn't resist crowding in at this point.
"I'll try forest first, it seems like a good basic template." Redge declared, and as he typed, we all turned to face the glowing holographic display, on which one of the spokes started to bloom and add miniature shape and color to the terrain.
"I can do this easy!" Redge declared, grinning at his power. He tapped Elise though and they started pointing and translating the last remaining French phrases.
"That's more science fiction than the rest of this even" Elise frowned. "The translation would be 'scanner' like a paper document reader. That's explicitly 'human' though."
"Any life would work, though?" Redge questioned.
"You're the guy who built it." Elise shot back.
He turned to me "We need to catch a rat."
It was full dark on that Friday night when we set foot in the sewers. I could hear the furry jerks skittering in the dark, and Redge supplied me only with the most quickly put together steel cage trap. Again, I'll never know where he got it. Nevertheless with a little fruit and grain from a leftover granola bar Penny gave me, one of them ran right up to it even at the edge of the tunnel and got stuck. It was enough for me as I raced back with the skittering thing to the crane lift. The less time I had to hold this diseased rodent the better, I reasoned. Penny joined me in the elevator down the scanners. She seemed even less enamored with the rat than I did, pressed up against the far wall.
"Are you ready, guys?" Redge's voice echoed around the room on loudspeaker.
"Can he hear us?" Asked Penny.
I figured it was quickest just to shout back and see "Can you hear us Redge!?"
"Yes, you're loud and clear. Mostly loud."
"See, that's the third joke he's made in a month." I whispered to Penny. "This project is good for him."
"Put the rat in one of the 'scanners.'" he echoed again. "To keep the complication down, the cage can't be in there though."
"Wonderful." I answered him.
"The auto sequence does all three scanners at once on a timer, so stand clear."
I dumped the rat cage into a scanner and opened a door shaking the box. For a moment after it fell out, the thing stayed put and I yelled a simple 'Go.' up to the two-way intercom. And then about five things happened in 10 seconds:
The rat decided that, to hell with us, even if we were large and menacing, the back wall of the scanner wasn't good enough and he was going to stop standing where I wanted him. Penny let out a moaning 'Ohhhhh' and started backing away. The rat, noticing that we were large and menacing things which were now also about to step on it, changed directions straight through the center of the room scaring Penny further back further as she issued profanities. Unfortunately, more occupied by the rat than Redge continuing to yammer, she backed into the scanner cabin behind her, and only when her back hit the wall did she work out something was wrong and try to run foreword. The doors were too quick and closed with her hollering inside. Forgetting the rat completely, I tried to scream for Redge to abort, but he came back confused and announcing the progress of the automatic program. The muffled cries and banging by Penny ceased and I was for a moment very scared except that Redge kept reporting that the process was working as intended and scanning data.
Exhausted I issued a weak "Redge, it's Penny, stop." My voice seemed stuck in my throat though, and I barely croaked it out loud enough for Redge to notice. He heard me but only at the last second and told me with some finality "At this point it's safer to go forward than back."
There was a loud whoosh and blast of steam and the cabins all opened again, to my horror, having nobody inside. Somewhere, faintly, Elise was half crying something frantically, and Redge was the only one who remained calm, emotion either choked on purpose or never there to begin with, I couldn't tell.
Then, long seconds later, Redge announced with the same finality. "She's ok."
True or not, a world of weight lifted from my shoulders and stomach and I slumped down beside the scanner cabin. Elise was quiet too for a moment, then muttered something about headphones. I got the feeling I wasn't getting the full story and used the elevator to fly upstairs. Redge and Elise were chattering excitedly at a map on the computer monitor and Elise was relaying things into an earpiece headset.
"Yeah, he's tracing the command to pull you back out now, but it's going to take him a moment." Elise admitted between requests to Penny that she calm down.
"Where is she?" Was all I could ask of them.
Redge pointed to the monitor, and Elise pointed onto the big 3D sphere, to one of the forested islands Redge had willed into being with a few keystrokes earlier that evening.
"What, in the VR?"
"It isn't VR you just interact with, that's what we were so eager to test," gasped Elise. "It's apparently a whole virtual world you can live on!"
I couldn't help feeling they were a little nuts and we were in way over our heads for good at this point.
"Kit?" came a tiny voice from the headphones. "Kit, I'm all right, I think."
Elise graciously handed them to me "Penny, is that you? I asked into the mouthpiece."
"Kit, you should… wow, you should see this. I thought I was dead for a minute but, this. It's amazing, like a storybook."
"Can you get her out of there?" I asked Redge.
"There's a script for it and everything, but it's going to take like 5 minutes to get ready to run."
"I trust Elise, Kit, and she trusts Redge, so it's ok." She told me, maybe a little deliriously. "But… would you join me?"
I dropped the headset from aside my ear. I wasn't sure if she was playing the façade of cheerfulness to hide that she was miserable, and misery just wanted to company, or if the gasping wonder I was hearing was real. Redge rolled his eyes and picked them back up. "He's thinking, give him a second."
"Of course" I finally replied, unable to turn down her emotional appeals. It seemed apparent she was fine and Redge believed like nobody else that it was reversible, so I couldn't refuse. "Tell her I'm coming. Just one question." I nodded to Redge, who relayed it to the mic "Did it hurt?"
"She says no," Redge echoed "Just a little numbness, then a lot of pressure."
I stepped into the scanner, a big golden metal tomb like nothing so much I had ever seen in my life, with more than a little trepidation. Redge declared something from up in the control room that I never even heard, as the door shut and I stood trying to remain brave. All I heard after that was Redge reading off the status of the process to me. A transfer of needed data, the scanner buzzing me for some reason, and then a blast wave and it all fell away like going to sleep.
I felt like I was falling forever, through wires and circuits, my mind free from any physical sense at all, and it was almost a shame when I felt my own arms and legs again, still falling. Falling. It seemed kind of odd, right up until I fell on my rear. The shock woke me back up.
"Yeah, that wasn't the best part" a familiar small voice from nearby told me. "You're gonna want to open your eyes slowly Kit, it glows."
Slowly the forest tips above me came into view, and a glorious washed yellow light emanated from and to everywhere. I opened my eyes, but found the signal to my brain not quite right. I tried to push my glasses up into place only to find them missing from my head.
"I kinda wondered about that," she laughed, "Since it changed us anyway."
I caught a look at my hands, now in fingerless gloves. There were no lines or fingerprints apparent on them, and they were a little paler than my usual tan. I had to flex my fingers one at a time to convince me it was really my hand attached to my body. The whole thing was like a storybook, simplified and over saturated with color.
I finally stood up and wished I could get a full look at myself. I could tell I was wearing a more form fitting suit than my regular street clothes. At my sides, through a simple sash were a couple of forked weapons. Over my shoulders was something that wasn't quite a cape, more a short cloak. My hair felt as short and a little spiky as normal when I reached a hand up, and I slowly worked out I was indeed inside the computer setup I had been viewing the map of moments before.
"You in there, Chris?" Redge's voice seemed to stream from everywhere, like the multiple intercoms of the scanner room, but without the echo, like it was right to me. Much like before, I reasoned the quickest way was to see if I could communicate myself and answered "Fine!" to nobody in particular.
"All right, I'm working on tracing through the program that will pull you and Penny back out, see if you can find her. My screen says… she's right behind a tree to your left."
"Awww, I wanted him to play hide and go seek" She hollered back, stepping into view.
She was something of a sight, like I must have been. Replacing her usual simple sports jersey and tennis skirt were a well fit silver miniskirt over some kind of leggings and detailed matching top that stopped asymmetrically shorter on the right sleeve. Across her back was a long shining spear. Her hair was held out of her face with clips. It actually really worked well for her, but unfortunately all I could manage was a snapping "Do I look that goofy?"
She frowned, crossing her arms. "Well, I- I like it. It's very much like something I'd wear if I were the heroine of a fairy tale. You look like you were trying too hard to be a dumb ninja though."
She might have been right, my sash and shirt were black, Different tones of gray, broken by white stripes along the shirt sleeves and across the pants.. The sais only helped prove her right.
I was about to open my mouth to admit it and make up, but the world spun away and the last thing I saw was her silvered boots and leggings, half turned into a wire frame outline. The world spun away again and I woke up in the middle of foul smelling smoke and loud whooshing. I about darn near fell into the door in front of me except that it opened and Elise caught me.
My hands had regained all their detail, scattered freckles and hair on the back and lines of a fingerprint. Relatively content I was back outside of the scanner, I stumbled into the elevator and collapsed. I was out for a while after that..
What finally roused me unfortunately was shouting.
"-Could have been killed!"
"To be fair, I wasn't trying to test it on you or anything, it was.-"
"Stow it!"
I rolled over to find Redge exasperated, trying to work into his mind what the problem was. It was Penny screaming at him no less, roused from the load the journey had taken out of us.
"Please, you seem to be all right, stop freaking out." Elise urged her.
"Uhnnn." was all that I managed to contribute, but it was enough to get her to turn to me.
"Kit, tell these mad scientists that they can stow this little project up their-"
"Easy." I managed, finding my voice finally. "Are we ok, in one piece?"
"Near enough, I guess" She relented for just a moment before starting in again. "But do you know what happened to us? It ripped us apart Kit! It took us apart and all that was left was a digital copy in the computer.
"I'm back outside though, so are you. It put us back together just fine." I said, not entirely sure if it was true. I seemed to have two arms and legs, and everything else too, but you could never be sure. While I was waiting though, it all came back quickly. I remembered the storybook rendered world all around me, looking odd and sounding strange, with not a breath of wind or heat. "Holy crap, I was inside the – We were in the computer, it was the perfect VR!"
"Kit, doesn't it scare you?"
"No, I think it was awesome." I said, smiling at the thought of it. "It was like, I was me, but then it was different and I could do more. I wish I'd had some time to test it. Also, I'm sorry, you didn't look goofy."
"I – no – what?"
Redge and Elise had wisely just elected to let me do the talking since she had stopped screaming at them. I wondered briefly how long it had been going on for while I was out.
"Come on, you were pretty impressed, looking around in there. I heard the kid in a candy store tone."
"I wasn't myself and the fact that it might be cool doesn't make it any less dangerous or … nerve-wracking. Redge explaining what he thought happened didn't help any."
"Look, we're in one piece, and I'm willing to go right back there and try again."
"I don't know, Kit. Maybe someday, but it shouldn't be us, somebody else should work out if it's safe more than once."
"Penny" I gasped a bit "You can't tell! You swore if we weren't lying you wouldn't tell a soul!"
"This is way over our heads – Chris." She said. I knew what the dropping of that old nickname from my past meant: I was losing.
"Look, I dove in after you, and I'm willing to do it again, that has to be worth something?"
"Something… I guess."
"I want to go too." Elise volunteered, grabbing our attention. "I want to see what it looks like from inside. Redge already demonstrated he could get us back safely."
Penny finally seemed to be at a loss for words. I was pointing to the elevator and finding I could stand easily enough again, was about to head that way myself, hoping a demonstration would sway Penny. Redge cut in though. "Twelve hours."
"What?" I asked, hardly processing what he'd said.
"You have to wait twelve hours. Notes say it won't take you again for that long to prevent you possibly being system shocked. Whoever left all the pre-existing programming was very safety conscious." He offered, trying to help in his own way. Penny was still quiet though, and I was afraid we were gonna have to figure out how to cover all this up.
"Don't you want to see, Redge?" Elise asked.
"Sometime, sure. I don't think any of you could operate the console yet except me. It wanted some pretty fierce user decisions made when it – transferred them." He said, matter-of-factly.
"Tomorrow then, I'm going in again." I said, standing tall.
"Me too, oh I can't wait." Elise beamed, putting her hand into the middle of where we were standing, which I reciprocated. Redge got caught up in the moment and put his hand in too. "I've got to see this through."
I eyed Penny, and just like that, she relented. "Fine, I won't tell, but I may not go in again, I'm telling you right now. Only because you apologized for saying I looked stupid, Chris."
It was really late that evening, as we trekked up out of the Seaside warehouse. The moon was overhead and the warm air helped to make the darkness seem quite inky. Neither the weather or Penny could dampen the rest of our moods though; we were almost celebrating just the good fortune of being alive. I finally made it home about midnight even and got a good chewing at by my folks for "being over at Redge's" so late. Fortunately I didn't get myself grounded, which I had worried about a lot lately sneaking around late and without permission.
Sunlight came a little quick for my tastes the next morning, and I was out the door before my parents were even awake to continue their protest. I found myself a little stiff and out of breath to begin with, probably owing to my adventure yesterday, but a little stretching and ambling later, with the sun generally warming me, I felt better. Redge was pouring over a document on his monitor when I knocked on the back door and came in.
"The Process is called Virtualization." He told me plainly, as if I fully understood what he was talking about. "I suppose the opposite is materialization then."
"Redge."
"Yeah, hang on. They're not even here yet, and this is fascinating."
I just had a seat and let him go to town, I only understood a little outside of the technobabel he used, but the gist of it was that he could turn any simple object into a template to program on top of just by putting it in the scanner. Even we left a template, he explained, that he could perhaps modify later.
"Where did our looks come from so far anyway? It was like I was a wholly different costumed actor or something."
Redge seemed at a loss "Beats me, guess it picked what you wanted to be out of your mind."
A knock at the front door (Nobody who knew Redge at all went to the front door,) signaled Elise, who politely half waved to Redge's mom, who was out of it once again this morning. She gave me a very pained awkward smile as the three of us made our way back into Redge's corner of the house.
"So then Elise here can pick whatever she wants?" I continued undeterred. I'd known Redge's family troubles for too long to be much phased anymore.
"Maybe, it might be totally subconscious too though."
"What now?"
"Default looks." Redge explained "I was telling him about coding things out of basic objects put through the scanner."
"I ended up a ninja. Wonder what my train of thought was that wanted that."
Redge seemed about to explain, and Elise wanted to speculate, but a knock at the back door interrupted them both. Redge sighed and finally closed the document for another day, and waved us out the back door as he shut his home system down.
Penny didn't look so great today. Her hair seemed to be lacking its perk and rather than just hiding her face seemed to dominate it completely. She waved off questions as to her willingness to try again and just commented that she wasn't in that much trouble at home. We didn't press her: at least she was willing to come along.
I'll spare you the travel details except to say we used the sewer route and Redge grabbed the last of the equipment out of the storage cache he'd jury-rigged along the way to take to the warehouse. I was starting to feel that this exercise was becoming less temporary all the time. I hadn't spent a weekend with anybody that wasn't in this group for a month or two.
All too fast I was faced with the mouth of the scanning tube again. I had willingly jumped in before, and I would again this time as well. Elise practically leaped into the third tube, excited to try something she'd witnessed twice but not felt. Penny though, hesitated for a long time, just being nervous. Elise was getting ancy and finally decided she'd had enough.
"Just go watch with Redge if you aren't coming."
Penny, with a look of pure concentration tried twice, putting one foot in before backing up and trying to steel her nerves at it again.
"I can. It's not that big a deal. Really I'll, just a moment –"
"Penny if you don't want to, don't worry." Elise said again, with a flat tone. "There's always later."
A picture of Penny inside the storybook flashed through my mind, and I spent seconds while they talked trying to come up with the right word: Knight, Amazon….
"Valkyrie." I blurted out, disconnected from what they'd been saying.
Penny brushed her hair out of her eyes and looked straight at me, as if I'd said something personal.
"It's what you looked like, I just remembered. Is that what you think of being in a fairy tale?"
"Oh, I get it, just like you were the ninja." Elise answered. "Oh, I can't wait to see what I'm thinking of.
"You don't get to be a Valkyrie without a little bravery." Was all the more I would say.
She put one foot across the threshold.
And then the other.
"Go Redge." She called out for us.
The door closed and I felt the odd calm of waiting for an operation. It was getting my tonsils out all over again, but without the bleeding and being under the weather for a week afterward. I heard Redge announcing something to us in a muffled fashion, and then just felt a little numb. Held in place I closed my eyes a little and just waited for the process to start.
This time the falling felt more graceful. I was tracing a familiar path of wire and the neat lines of a circuit road I knew, and then suddenly: Light. Once again I was in the storybook forest, this time awake enough to notice that Penny had entered next to me, and we caught ourselves with a quick spread of limbs rather than falling flat on the ground.
Elise took a second more, still a wire frame and texture tiles fitting into place as the computer considered her and what she had always wanted out of a virtual identity. She dropped, primitive angled scimitar – no it looked like a scythe almost but with the outside edge sharpened, already held out. She looked like a mix between a warrior and priest from ancient Egypt, mostly simple white wraps but with a large gold overlay and a hieroglyphic tabard hanging down from the waist. By consequence of her disorientation and the curved sword starting at arm's length by default, she fell flat on her face. I suppressed the urge to laugh, still remembering landing on my own butt. Penny just cringed.
"I should have warned you about that." I apologized, "You'll catch yourself next time."
"That's an unusual sword" Penny offered, tilting her head a little while staring at it.
Elise was still taking stock of her new surroundings, and trying to catch a look at herself. She checked down the length of her arms and then straight down, dusting off the wrapped tabard hanging down in front. By instinct of course, the dust here didn't actually seem to settle on you.
"It's not what I was expecting, I guess." She finally said, a small frown at the corners of her mouth. She seemed to think better of it though and admitted, "It's not bad either, it reminds me of a history report I once gave. Why a khopesh, though? Anyway, what about you two?"
I shrugged, not quite knowing how to answer that. To be honest, I felt maybe my subconscious was trying a little too hard to be 'the awesome mysterious guy' with the whole black and white ninja garb and the forked sais. Penny laughed a bit, twirling her shining gold tipped spear idly in her off hand. "He kinda spoiled my reasoning for you already." She said, sharply pointing the spear at me. My hands flew up in defense and I took a step back.
"If it makes you feel better, mine does feel a little too much like I'm overcompensating." I admitted truthfully. It apparently didn't help, she was still scowling, but at least she went back to twirling the spear. Elise was still marveling at the surrounding, but had hooked her oddly scythe-like sword across her back. I took a few steps this way and that, craning my neck to see around trees and looking at the sky and the ocean far below the lip of the floating grassy plain.
"So Redge," I called out "Now what?"
"I don't know. Look around; it can't all be the same."
"Sure it can, you have a map out there right?"
Redge was silent for a moment, and I guess he was furiously pushing on buttons or something to see if I wasn't right. I started in a brief run to test myself and found the trees moving a little faster by than I was expecting. It wasn't like I was moving in a blur or anything, I just seemed a little quicker. I could tell the girls were running to catch up now, and I got a bit of a wild hair.
Giving a wild 'ha ha!' I nimbly lifted the forked weapons from my sides and giving my best spring into running jump, pegged them into a tree wedged in the middle of the path ahead. It was almost disquieting how easy it was to lift myself up hand over hand.
"Redge, I'm superman." I laughed.
"Towers." He replied enigmatically.
"Kit, get down" Penny barked at me, but the grin gave it away that she was impressed or at least interested in trying it herself.
"Come again?" I asked, vaulting backwards off the tree and landing after pulling a picturesque back flip. It was all very physical, but it almost seemed to work just because I felt it should.
"There are towers dotting the landscape. I don't know what they're about." Like a mechanical relay engaging, I practically heard him switch gears and finally process what I'd said. "You're Superman?"
"I can run faster, jump higher, and have more upper body strength in here." I beamed, maybe a bit too proud. I've never been the muscular athletic type, and it was fun to pretend it was so, since I roughly felt what I was doing and it seemed real enough despite the lack of color ranges and accurate textures.
"It was probably meant to be a wish fulfillment fantasy for the creators." Redge hypothesized. "Improved bodies would be par for the course. Anyway, head northwest, one of those towers is pretty close to you guys."
Penny was off in a flash, with Elise close behind. Apparently they wanted to see if what I had said was true and were really enjoying the boosted athleticism the virtual bodies seemed to grant. I recovered from my landing crouch and set off after them trying to catch up. The forest poured by on either side, the oddly floating tree trunks guiding and sometimes shaping the path.
The tower looked like another tree at first. It seemed rooted to the ground in a series of dirty organic tendrils. But as it rose above the forest carpet, it was more metal and angular, reminding one very distinctly of the scanners outside this world. The whole thing glowed with a foggy sheen as you stared up at it for long.
Penny was there first and was running her hand along the rough outer base, wondering at why this was the sole different feature on the terrain. Elise rather preferred staring at the shine coming off and dancing along the middle and top of the structure.
"What do you think, Redge?" I asked out loud.
"It wants me to declare somebody 'Tower Admin' or maybe 'keyholder' apparently. I mean, the block of text is in French, I don't know how we missed it, but it still isn't readable, I just picked those things out of it."
"Play you for it!" I called to the other two.
I swear that Penny was up in my face with that spear WAY too quickly. She waved the thing around with way too lackadaisical attitude. All the effort was apparently a show for nothing too, as she casually dropped it and asked "paper rock scissors?"
"Three way, but fine" I grinned, reminding her Elise was there. Reminding Elise that we were there too for that matter. I guess this being her first trip, everything was taking more out of her than it seemed to be for us.
We smacked opened palms, and on three, they both gave rock, whereas I had paper. I was pretty proud of myself and called on Redge to give me whatever honor it was I had just won. More furious typing was his only response.
"Well, we got the next file translated, I guess." He muttered "It's explaining to me about how you all have access between regions and can run programs from the tower. Only Chris seems to be able to override or break processes since I set him as admin though."
"What other regions" Elise questioned.
"We didn't set them yet, although I can at any time."
"What choices do we have?"
"Let's see, Desert, Volcano, Mountain, Iceberg, Swamp-"
"Wait, wait." Penny told him "Give us a second." She just nodded at me and waved at Elise "Mountain. Is mountain ok for a test?"
I nodded, and I never noticed if Elise gave a reply.
Redge clicked away and informed us that it was a little slower to phase in than the forest had been since the computer was already running hot to keep track of us.
"Hey, how do we use the tower?" I asked the sky.
"It's a building, I guess, I think the interface is inside."
"There isn't any door." I replied, matter of factly.
"Feel around then. Jeeze, you guys are the ones right there, All I see is a wire frame and some stats." Redge was frustrated, and I wondered if maybe next time, or whenever we had a good enough grasp on how the system worked, we should let him take a trip too.
I pushed my hand along the roots of the tower, up to where they became smooth and organic like metal. It was interesting, I got less tactile feedback the higher up I ran my hand. Suddenly, and without warning, the solid wall gave way in a hum of electric current being disrupted, and I barely caught the edge of a platform in front of me, in a room with a bizarre wallpaper of millions of processing windows.
I pulled up onto the round central platform, and noticed it bore the odd 3 Y's branching from the base with transcribed circles that we had selected earlier. This must have been what Redge meant by the system would build around the image. After a moment or two (Redge must have assured them it was a good idea) Penny and Elise followed me in, somehow they had the good luck or sense to enter the tower on the side where a little path touched the wall and didn't have to grab on for dear life. Maybe it was automatic, I reasoned.
"He's fine Redge, how do we go to the mountains" Elise called up.
"Look, your guess is as good as mine, try anything."
Penny must have been a little frustrated at his lack of native knowledge, and stomped
"Why not just jump off the edge, This was identified as a waypoint of some kind of my wire frame monitor, Maybe its automatic."
Damned if she didn't try it. You could pretty much hear Redge roll his eyes. A second or two later though, he flatly informed us that the transfer had worked and she'd come out of the waypoint tower in the mountains. I gathered myself up, and jumped off the ledge, flinging myself into the raw data below. It was like being virtualized all over again, I kind of lost a sense of my virtual hands and feet, and just kind of perceived the world in a raw electrical way. My senses un-blurred as I was slung back up to a corresponding tower's platform. Elise was right there with me and stepped out waving me on.
It was quite a vista, like the forest with its endless golden glow and crazy floating trees, the mountains had an endless cloudy sky and grayish purple rock as far as the eye cared to follow in any direction. Again the predominate landmasses were islands and narrow paths, but you could see how they twisted and connected, and it made for a very interesting landscape.
"Whoa, whoa. Hold still" Redge broadcast to use, a little furious typing coming in over the headset. My legs locked into position. As Redge goes, that was fear in his voice, and I needed to listen to him carefully.
"Excursion's over for today." He flatly informed us, which was fine by me if something was worrying him that badly. And then like before I noticed a strange flicker of pixilation, looked down to see my virtual body coming apart, and quicker than I could blink really, was regaining consciousness inside the scanner cabin. My lungs were still pressed and I couldn't get my eyes to focus, but I didn't feel the urge to pass out or anything so severe as last time. The doors glided open and I noticed Penny waving me on quickly. She seemed fine too, but Elise was wiped out, like we were after the first trip. We caught her and helped her to the elevator.
We took the elevator up to the lab, and were greeted by the sight of the back of Redge's chair. He was still working on something, but he flipped a hand up over the chair back and waved us in. "Moron who designed this didn't put in any shield between the simulation and the random data below. So much safety otherwise and that gets ignored."
"Uh, what?" I asked, looking over at Penny, who bore an equally confused expression, fortunately.
"Random data, sort of a sea worth of uncontrolled information, surrounds the simulation. There's no barrier preventing you from just falling into it. I only have notes and theory, but I think if you hit it, you're scattered for good, I would have to come up with some kind of program to dig you out and manually materialize you. Don't know if I could do it, much less how long it would take."
He had to take a breath, which was fortunate, because I needed to let that sink in.
"So if we fall off, game over for good?" Penny asked.
"I can't say for sure, but I'm inclined to believe it." Redge answered. "We're done until I can program in some kind of safety net. Maybe a shield around the islands, maybe an instant retrieval program, I don't know."
He cut off the monitor, and nobody had any argument that could convince him otherwise.
*****
Redge never did come up with a way to do either of those. The next time he turned on the supercomputer interface, it was because of an anomaly it forwarded to his desktop at home. It had been about two weeks, and though I spent the last weekend hanging with all of them, my new best friends, it was looking like our secret was going to become a buried thing of the past for months if not years.
Redge knocking on my door and doing his best to be polite to my parents while asking if I was in was the first notion I had that something had occurred. I was busy at the time, and had no way of slipping my parent's gaze and not finishing my homework, but he gave them a cryptic message to pass on to me. "The Lyoko computer has news." My mother kind of shrugged after she delivered it to me, figuring it was just another crazy electronics reference between us.
We met at the fishing dock about an hour and a half later, and he wordlessly led the way down to the elevator. The monitor was already back online in the lab, and had a text message repeating again and again in a terminal window.
"I am Jeremie Belpois. I need to contact you. Be here at eight. I don't know how long I can hold open the link, or if it can even be reestablished. Be here at eight."
Redge and I stared at it in the darkness. It really did seem addressed directly to us. He flipped up his watch to show we had scant seconds before the deadline. He would have been here without me anyway, I gathered. The feed window opened up, and after some garbage scrolling past it greeted us with English text again.
"I am Jeremie Belpois. Are you there? If so, who are you?"
Redge just shrugged for a moment, and I elbowed him into sitting down and typing in a reply in the terminal window.
"I am Redgenald Blackburn. How did you know to contact us?"
"This is a long story, and I hope I can get it all through the link in time. You're a phantom timeline, Redgenald, A quantum subreality that exists because we set off a time revision, our original time revision, in fact. The reason your universe persisted when all the other timelines faded back into quantum foam is that there was doubt that we knew how to operate the return trip and a good probability it would fail. I never detected you for all this time because there was no quantum computer activity. In your timeline, or reality, or whatever you want to think of it as, our supercomputer in France must have been turned off, if not moved or destroyed by the authorities."
Redge shook his head up at me. A month ago this would have been unbelievable SciFi, but here we were with a supercomputer that could turn us into digital copies and place us in a complete artificial world.
"Even if all that is true, why contact us?"
"Your universe gives no sign of fading back into quantum instability, so I want to set things right there. We went through an incredible ordeal to save the world once; I want to save you some time and heartache in doing the same. First of all, accept this transfer."
Redge though it might have been a virus or worse, because he hesitated.
"First, what is it? You can explain in detail."
"I don't have time Regenald. It's the basis behind a protocol to connect you across the world's existing binary data networks to another quantum computer. If I'm right, and you already sent others to Lyoko, You can use this to send them into the network and look for your universe's Aelita, and maybe find out what happened to us."
"What's an Aelita?"
"Who is Aelita, you mean. She's the daughter of the system's creator. The backup material and instructions you used are one of the three caches' we know he left around the world, not including his main work in France. Anyway, if it still exists she'll still be stuck in the original supercomputer here in my country, hence the transfer."
Redge was apparently placated, because he accepted it, at least enough to store it in a restricted access area.
"I need to cover three things, in case the orriginal quantum supercomputer still does exist somewhere, you successfully turn it on, and you find Aelita. One, she will not remember who she is, but her name, Aelita Hopper, or maybe Schaeffer will help this some. Second, find her father, hiding deep in the data of the original Lyoko. He may answer to Franz Hopper or Waldo Schaeffer. Third, do not ever trust XANA. You will need to retrieve Aelita's memories from him, but he will take every opportunity to attack you or escape. He is evil, crazy and limitless."
"I can't promise any of this, you know" Redge replied.
"I understand, and it doesn't affect me personally, but I had to at least ask you to try. One more thing, as a side note, see if you can find out what happened to the following people. They previously attended the same academy as me: Ulrich Stern, Odd Della Robia, and Yumi Ishiyama."
I just shook my head some more, I was in serious doubt this would ever go anywhere.
"The link is closing, so I have one more gift to share with you. This is a sequentially generated program from the original supercomputer that unleashed a capability even Franz didn't expect. This set of commands will result in a return in time of about twelve to thirty-six hours, and only those who have been scanned into the computer will remember it. Take its use very seriously, it's the reason you exist as you know now, and even time revisions won't restore the dead to life. "
*****
That was the last we ever heard of the "original" Jeremie. For a long time, Redge and I stood in disbelief in the lab, but he finally decided we had to try out the gifts we'd been given. If nothing else, he wanted to work out if any of this was true. First thing was first, he gave me detailed step by step instructions to follow on how to just take a scanner 'snapshot' of him for the supercomputer. It wasn't too bad, this was just commands to follow instead of math to calculate or anything else to go through.
What was even more extreme is when he motioned me over to the monitor and pointed to a display of the international dateline and some ticking numbers. "If it isn't lying, we'll actually go back twelve hours."
"Redge, if this…" I stopped, prefixing my phrases with 'if this works' and 'if this is real' seemed to be fast becoming pointless. "Redge, when we do this, won't it create more copies of us out there somewhere."
"The damage is done, and that 'Jeremie' told us they usually fade anyway. I'm sure of what I'm doing, so I imagine we don't create any more lasting duplicates."
"I'll leave it up to you."
"Return to the Past" He intoned, and I lost track of time and space for about 30 seconds.
When I... 'woke up' seems to be the wrong way to say it... reoriented to my environment, I was in my house again that morning. It was obviously morning, since I was still only in shorts and a night shirt, and I was apparently brushing my teeth.
I powered through my homework, finding it much easier since I knew the answers already, and had to prove to my mother that I wasn't faking and knew my material. I was surprised to see Redge running out to meet me at noon. Honestly, I had found it odd that he had something to take care for that long instead of seeing me immediately, but with the way his mom was, I wasn't going to question him. Penny had apparently called him first to inquire, none too happy at being surprised with losing a whole day, and we could only assume Elise chalked it up to us doing something and got on with things until much later.
We had the whole gang together and in the warehouse before five that evening, and Redge replayed the text log between that Jeremie guy and us. When he was finished he did himself justice and just sat and waited patiently for Elise and Penny to consider it.
"So let me get this straight." Penny began "This guy says he spent a long time, years maybe, fighting to free this girl and her dad and beat that… XANA? We're just the result of his first near loss?"
Redge shrugged "Likely we existed anyway, and it's just in his universe, or timeline, or whatever you want to call it, he beats XANA and gets rid of the backups before we ever have a chance to build this."
"Right." She continued, "So he wants us to pick up where he left off? He wants to make you do a lot of work and put us all in danger, just to make things here like they are for him? That's nuts, I hate to be the voice of dissent again, but this shouldn't consume our lives."
"I'm in favor of it." I answered. "Maybe it's just because I was there to see it live, but this guy's requests seem genuine, and he gave us programs we didn't even know about. It's sort of a fair trade."
Elise had been silent, but finally spoke up. "It's the right thing to do. We've been given an incredible gift just to have this system, we should help the creator in turn."
"I won't go ahead with this unless we're all in." Redge said, eyeing Penny. "Chris is right, it won't work that way. It's your call."
I dunno if she felt pressured or what, but like the last time she nodded, resolved to it, if not enthusiastic.
"Start it up. We'll take the risk. As a group, we can take whatever gets thrown at us, right?"
Redge genuinely smiled, at the prospect of playing with the system more if not at us, and flicked a switch to turn on the display.
"It will be time to dive in soon then."