Do You Sleep? • A Crystal World • An Interesting Hypothesis • A Voracious Reader • Weeds and Perennials • Unwelcome Arrivals

“There’s one thing that concerns me, Vicki.” We sat on the sand, packing the last of the useful things into our bags – cooked fish wrapped in broad leaves, some seeds Minna had harvested, the fishhooks we’d found. “Do you sleep?”

“I am capable of shutting down my systems for a predetermined time, or until a given stimulus occurs. I thrive on data, and it’s useful to shut down my consciousness during times when no new data is forthcoming. If I hadn’t been charting fish and bird populations and astronomical events, I would have been dormant when you arrived. That state is my closest analogue to sleep. Why?”

“I took a person with me to another world once, when I was asleep, and they were awake. Something about the experience destroyed her mind. When we landed in the new world she ran away, screaming. I don’t know what she saw, or felt, or what happened to her during the transition… I couldn’t find her before I fell asleep again. I don’t know if that kind of damage is something that would happen to everyone, or if it would even affect a crystal consciousness like yours, but I’ve never risked taking anyone with me again while they were awake.”

“I see. I can go dormant if you wish, though I am curious about what the transition entails… May I suggest a compromise?”

“We’re always open to compromise here.”

“I am capable of partitioning my consciousness, temporarily. I can create an isolated kernel of myself that will remain conscious and recording data, while the remainder of myself ‘sleeps.’ I can then run a diagnostic on that kernel when we reach our destination, and determine whether it is in good working order, without actually accessing its data in the process. If there is some madness-inducing stimulus present during the transition, at least we’ll know for sure, and I will purge the kernel rather than let it infect my consciousness. If not, or if the harmful information doesn’t prove detrimental to my non-biological consciousness, I can examine the data and perhaps even share it.”

“If you think it’s safe, it’s worth a try.” I didn’t want Vicki to go mad, but I trusted them to know their own capabilities. In the worst-case scenario, an insane chip of diamond was unlikely to cause harm to others at least, and, best case, perhaps I’d finally get some answers.

We settled down on the beach. Minna took her sedative, and Vicki shut most of their consciousness down. I swallowed my pill too, and just before I fell asleep, I heard Vicki’s conscious kernel say, quietly, “I am so happy.”

We awoke in a crystal world, number 1011. The sun was bright, but not so bright we couldn’t look upon it, with an intensity like that of a powerful overhead lamp. The star was surrounded by a sphere of faceted crystal. We were in the heart of a city, but one where all the buildings had been encased in a glittering armor of translucent glass, in shades of green and blue and pink and yellow. Tiny crystals crunched under our feet, like sand.

“Nothing lives here, Zax.” Minna took deep, slow breaths, and her fingers interlaced with mine, gripping hard. I knew worlds without life were hard for her, but she was getting better at coping.

“Can you stand it here for a little while? We could look for supplies.”

Minna nodded, but she was chewing on her lip. I decided to be swift. I began walking, to put some distance between us and our point of origin, just in case we were still being followed. We’d have to tell Vicki about the Lector and Polly before long, but I wanted to let them get settled into this new life a little before I told them we had enemies.

“Are you all right, Vicki?” I kept one eye on the crystals at my feet, to make sure they wouldn’t start climbing up my boots and onto my body. I couldn’t tell if this crystalline strangeness was the aftermath of a weapon or some kind of pollution or even an alien life form, but it was better to take care.

“I am. I apologize for not speaking. There is a cascade of new data here, and I am still doing a first-level sort.”

“How’s your, what did you call it, your other kernel? Can you access whatever that part of you experienced when we traveled?”

“I… Hmm. The partitioned portion shut itself down, and purged itself. I can’t access the data, because there’s nothing to access. How peculiar.”

“I would have said ‘ominous.’”

“That as well. It is at least another data point, duly recorded. I am more interested in the data available in this world. As far as I can tell, these crystals are not conscious, or, at least, they do not communicate in any way that I can recognize. Still, I find it an interesting coincidence that we should appear in a world full of crystals immediately after I joined you.”

I nodded. “It’s strange. Sometimes there are… not patterns, but sort of, affinities? If I think of gardens just before I fall asleep, sometimes I appear on a garden world, and if I think of cities, sometimes there are cities… but it doesn’t always work. It doesn’t even usually work. Sometimes I concentrate ferociously and it doesn’t make any difference. I’ve imagined home with great vividness and fervor hundreds of times and never returned there, that’s for sure. I can’t tell if the phenomenon is real, if some part of my mind is helping me choose the next world, or if it’s just confirmation bias. Sometimes I try anyway, because it can’t hurt, but it’s frustrating, not knowing how any of this works, and the occasional sense that I can control my destination to some extent makes my total failure to control it even more disheartening.”

“Maybe you are just in the wrong part of the garden sometimes,” Minna said.

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Yes, explicate,” Vicki said.

Minna got that thinking-hard line that appeared sometimes on her forehead and gestured vaguely with her hands. “Let us say you are in the garden, and you are hungry. You are hungry for many things and must decide which to pick. There is nothing in the part of the garden where you stand but blackberries and… tomatoes. If you say, ‘I want a bunch of blackberries,’ and reach out, you can pluck them and you are happy and have what you want. If instead you want tomatoes, you can have those, too. But let us say you want an apple. The apple trees are in another part of the garden. You can say, ‘I want an apple,’ and reach out all you want, but you cannot pluck one then and there. There are no apples there to be picked, only blackberries and tomatoes. You would have to walk down a long path and take many turnings to reach the apples. Do you see?”

“You are saying that each world may be, in some sense, adjacent to or coterminous with a number of other worlds,” Vicki said. “That there could be choice, but not infinite choice.”

“Is that what I am saying?” Minna asked.

Vicki went on. “Perhaps from here we could reach a desert world, or an ocean world, but not a city world – the nearest city world is, as Minna says, in another part of the garden. If Zax wants to go to an ocean or a desert, his wish will be granted. If he wishes for a city, though, the multiverse is unable to oblige, so instead he travels to a world at random, or the one that’s ‘closest’ to his desire, in some multiversal sense, perhaps. The same random process happens if he expresses no desire at all when he travels. Hmm. I will have to gather more data, but that is an interesting hypothesis.”

“Huh,” I said. “I never thought of that. It’s no more provable than any other idea I’ve come up with, but it does make me feel a little better about my various failures.” I kept walking, toward a building that looked like a shop of some kind. The door hung open, but the opening was covered by a crystal shell. I gave the crystal a kick, and it shattered into tiny coin-sized prisms. I ducked inside, sighing. “I had such wonderful lanterns a while back, and a glowing blade, but I lost them. Minna can glow, a little, but keep your eyes open for something brighter.”

“Let me be light.” Vicki glowed, shining out pure white light from their place on my hand. “I can widen or tighten the beam as desired.”

“You’re a useful gem to have along.” We were in a shop or a warehouse, with lots of shelves, sadly most empty. Whoever once lived here had done some panic-shopping or looting as their world changed to crystal.

Minna came in after us, glowing with bioluminescence herself, and moved off among the shelves to look for things worth salvaging. I investigated, too, moving carefully and quietly. I kept expecting to see dead bodies cocooned in crystals, but there were none, and while there was disarray, the place wasn’t a disaster. It had been some sort of general store, and I found bottles that seemed to be rubbing alcohol, and bandages, and needle and thread, and strong thin rope. There were cans with pictures of unfamiliar vegetables on them, and I took a couple of those as well.

I met up with Minna in the back, and she was wearing something different from before, a loose-fitting dress of pale blue she’d pulled on top of her overalls, and a lacy emerald-green scarf wrapped around her neck. “There are such colors!” she said, and led me to the back corner of the store, where a small section of clothes hung on racks and rested on shelves. The only thing in my size was a T-shirt with a picture of a grinning, pig-like creature on the front, beneath a few words in an alien script. I wished again that the linguistic virus worked with written language, though I supposed I was unlikely to encounter anyone else who could read the text, either. I did find some thick wool socks – they came in trios instead of pairs – and happily put those in my bag as well. “Do you see anything you want, Vicki?” I said. “Do you… eat, or anything?”

“I absorb solar energy. If I wish to grow in size, I must take in additional physical matter, usually liquid with silica in suspension, though other feedstocks are usable. Mostly I hunger for information, and you are already providing a feast. I wonder if the entire planet – based on the gravity, this seems to be a planet – is crystal. The shell around the local star certainly suggests it is a more than purely local phenomenon.”

“There’s no way to tell for sure,” I said. “I can never explore more of a given world than I can see in a day or two or three. Still, we can sit down for a while, eat our fish before it goes bad, and I can update my journal–”

“You keep a journal?” Vicki said.

We dragged a table and two chairs outside so we could enjoy the sparkling sunlight while we ate… though I didn’t eat anything myself until I’d taught Vicki enough of my language to begin devouring my data; it would have been cruel to make them wait when they were so excited. I began by reading aloud from the journal. Speaking deliberately in my own tongue, instead of letting the linguistic virus do its work for me, required a conscious effort. Then I translated what I’d read into Vicki’s native language, as best I could; fortunately, their tongue is a logical and constructed one, too, with many structural commonalities. It turns out Vicki’s computational capabilities are almost as effective as the linguistic virus at processing speech, and since that processing power can also be turned toward comprehending written language, it’s superior in some ways. If I’d had someone who spoke my native language to converse with, Vicki said they would be able to learn it rapidly, just by listening to us and analyzing the patterns. “Language acquisition is akin to code-breaking, and that was one of my functions.”

I wrote down all thirty-four characters of the Realm’s alphabet and noted the sounds each letter corresponds to, though of course some of them make different sounds in different contexts. Vicki scanned the first few pages of my journal as I read them aloud and pointed at each word to indicate in which direction I was reading. Vicki queried various words and phrases and idioms as I read, but the questions diminished as they began picking things up from context: “I am an extrapolation engine,” they said, which seems like a useful thing to be.

After a couple of hours, Vicki said, “I have enough working knowledge to continue on my own.”

I’d expected this to be a multi-step process, perhaps taking weeks or months, so I just blinked down at the ring on my hand. “You learned to read that quickly?”

“I process information the way that you breathe, Zax,” Vicki said. “Data and patterns and systems are like air. May I read the rest of your journal?”

I resigned myself to swiping the digital screen a thousand times to turn the pages, but it turns out Vicki can run all sorts of machine peripherals – something to keep in mind if we reach a sufficiently advanced world, I suppose. Vicki figured out how to interface with the digital journal and send signals that would swipe the pages on their own. “I can’t just download all the data in a gulp,” Vicki said, “because you’re essentially drawing pictures of your alphabet on the screen. I could create an interface with a keyboard–”

“I like writing with a stylus,” I said. “Back on my world, I used ink on paper when I wrote. For some reason it helps me think better than typing on a keyboard does. I feel closer to the language, somehow.”

“There’s no use arguing with someone’s subjective experience,” Vicki said. Who knew crystal intelligences could sigh? “I might put together a character-recognition program to copy your journals to a more easily machine-readable format, if you don’t object?”

“As long as I get to keep scribbling,” I said.

Minna extended tendrils from her arm, and one of them held Vicki’s ring up to see the journal. (That freed up my hands to finally eat something.) The process didn’t seem to require much in the way of conscious attention from Minna, as she sat and basked with her eyes closed. She was very green, soaking in sunlight.

“Minna, what do you call the beings who ruled your world?” Vicki asked at one point.

She made the “[unable to translate]” sound again, and Vicki said, “Hmm. Zax, my language acquisition method differs from yours, and I have an interpretation to offer. I think you might render the word as ‘those who judge and guide from on high,’ though ‘those who bring death on those who displease them’ fits too, along with a range of meanings in between. Something seemingly self-contradictory like ‘Nurturer-Butchers’ might be closest. Do you agree, Minna?”

“You said what I said, in different words,” she replied.

“I don’t know if I feel better knowing that or not,” I said.

“It is always better to know,” Vicki admonished before returning to my account.

I scooped bits of cold fish into my mouth, wondering how worried we should be. We’d put a handful of worlds between us and the Lector, but was it enough? He’d pursued me for hundreds of worlds, so when he said he was “running low” on serum, I had no idea what that meant.

“This Lector is an interesting figure,” Vicki commented after a while. “He demonstrates a very methodical approach to understanding your condition. You didn’t write about meeting him, though.”

“I didn’t start the journal until after we met, and was kind of haphazard about catching up my prior history. I probably should document the story of how we got together, but honestly, I don’t much enjoy thinking about it.”

“Ah. An unhappy parting of ways, then. I suppose as I keep reading I’ll find out what became of him.”

“The Lector is a weed,” Minna said. “And a perennial. He goes away and reappears.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“He stole my blood and made a serum that lets him travel to other worlds the same way I do,” I said. “He’s pursuing me even now, trying to get more of my blood, and to keep studying me. Minna and I encountered him not long ago – he changed tactics, and traveled to a world before me instead of just following, to lie in wait. Which, now that I think of it, disproves the hypothesis that I – and he – can somehow control where we go, or even narrow down the choices. We must be traveling a pre-set path of worlds, or else how could he get ahead of me?” That idea depressed me.

“That’s not necessarily true,” Vicki said. “If the Lector only got ahead of you once, it could be luck or coincidence that you ended up in the same world as he did.”

“Sure, but he followed me successfully across hundreds of worlds.”

“Indeed, but what do you think the Lector was hoping for, desiring, desperately wishing to find, every time he closed his eyes and transitioned?”

Oh. “Me.”

“Yes. He was probably thinking, ‘Take me to Zax.’”

“Ugh.” I pushed the last bits of fish away from me. “He’s obsessed.”

“Invasive plant,” Minna muttered. “Thief of resources.”

“I didn’t realize we had foes,” Vicki said.

“I’m so sorry. We should have told you what you were getting into before we brought you with us. Maybe it won’t be an issue. We hope we’re left the Lector behind forever by now, that he’s out of serum, but we can’t be sure.”

“I always appreciate more information, Zax, but having an enemy doesn’t frighten me. That is a paradigm I understand well. You do realize I am, in part, a tactical and strategic engine? I thrive in the face of a conflict. What is your current plan to deal with this threat?”

“Just… put space between us. The Lector failed to get more of my blood last time we met, and we’re hoping to keep jumping through worlds until he runs out of serum and gets stranded. In fact, we should probably move on pretty soon, just to be safe.”

“Why retreat? Why not set a trap, if you know where he’s going to appear?”

“Yes,” Minna said. “This is a question I also have asked.”

“I don’t want to kill the Lector, or anyone,” I said. “I want him to leave me alone, but I’m not a murderer.”

“I am still reading about him, but it seems clear he will not hesitate to kill you in order to further his own ends. If he is not stranded, and continues his pursuit, you may be forced to kill him in order to save yourself, and to spare the multiverse his depredations.”

“I’m… We’re not at that point yet, Vicki. My purpose, all my training, is to help people live in harmony – not to stop people from living entirely. It’s always better to run away from a fight if you can.”

“Your rules of engagement are noted,” Vicki said. “Will you accept non-lethal measures?”

“Yes. In fact, Minna set a trap just a few worlds back that should slow him and his companion down–”

Minna bolted to her feet, eyes wide. “Zax! There is other life in this world now! Suddenly and from nowhere like poof!”

That could only mean the Lector and Polly had caught up to us.