SITE L WAS even stranger seen from the other side. It was fascinating to see the n-dimensional deconstruction of the massive steel doors. Fascinating to see the forest of wire and fiber-optic cable all surging with clouds of photons. Fascinating to see through subterranean walls into the surrounding earth, with tree roots visibly sucking water and nutrients, earthworms eating and excreting, insects crawling on legs that seemed to move apart from the body they were connected to.
All fascinating. And in another time and place Malik might have simply reveled in observing and taking mental notes and formulating hypotheses. . . . Malik had always been one of the smart kids, the ones who barely bothered to crack a textbook because school was just that easy. He’d imagined a future life working at MIT or CERN or NASA. A future of intellectual adventure, of searching for answers.
On many occasions those happy daydreams had included Shade, working beside him, or perhaps teaching at a university, the two of them with a neat little home in a nice neighborhood. Maybe kids. Sure, why not? Any child borne by Shade would be brilliant and beautiful. And as to their moral and ethical upbringing, well, Malik figured he’d better take a hand in that.
And none of those fantasies mattered anymore. All of that was dead. Dead and buried.
Malik was trapped in a life where his only escape from mental invasion by the Watchers was to de-morph back to a body that would die within an hour in agony. That was his reality.
His reality also included having seen a morphed Shade lying on the steel floor of a helicopter so mangled that he had needed no extra dimensions to see her bones and arteries and intestines. She had looked like a crab run over by a truck. He had begged her to de-morph. How many times? A hundred? With tears streaming down his face, he had begged her, and he had to his shame prayed—yes, prayed—to the Watchers.
Don’t let her die. Without her I have nothing.
The Watchers had merely watched. Malik had sensed no pity, no concern, just curiosity. Like they were scientists peering down through a microscope at amoebas.
Malik was, had always been, a controlled person. He was not hasty or careless. He monitored his own mind and thoughts the way he would monitor any other complex computer, calibrating his mental speed, guarding against false data. He felt emotion, strong emotion at times, but that had been all the more reason to control himself.
But a rage had been building within him, and to Malik that rage felt like a fire he could not fully extinguish but which he had to contain lest it burn him up inside as surely as fire had burned his body. Each time he felt the Watchers, he raged and told himself sternly that he should accept. Each time he’d witnessed some new horror he had felt like someone had thrown gasoline on that fire, and he was the fire department, limiting, containing.
Then he had nearly been burned again and had, for the first time in his life, panicked. Panicked! Screaming, flailing, unreasoning panic.
And then had found himself on his knees on the steel deck of a helicopter, begging for Shade’s life. And almost miraculously, she had done it. With the last of the dying light in her mind she had found the way to escape death.
This time.
Now Malik floated in n-dimensional space with Francis’s hand in his. The scientist within Malik still observed, but he observed through the wild flames of his own fury.
“Come out and talk to me!” he raged, his words becoming multicolored swirls that floated away like the smoke of a cigarette.
He searched for and soon found the flat, blank, featureless circle he believed to be a connection to the Watchers. He impatiently fought off the slug-like defenses and moved closer to the circle, which receded with each forward step and yet drew slowly, slowly nearer, as though it took ten of his steps to equal one.
“Talk to me, you cowards!”
The circle of nothingness grew larger, fractionally at first, almost imperceptibly, then it grew faster, expanding until he at last reached out a hand toward it, a burned hand, his true hand.
And suddenly he was no longer in the weird vortex of disconnected bits of his 3-D world. He stood now in a space that was white, nothing but white above and below and to every side. Like he’d been dropped into a bucket of white paint, or a box of cotton balls.
He glanced down and with relief saw that Francis was still there, still holding his hand.
“Come out and talk to me!” Malik cried, and this time his words were not vapor but just sound, flat, dying quickly without echo or resonance.
“Impressive,” a voice said. A human voice. A human voice with something familiar about it.
A distant dot of color appeared on the white nothingness, a human shape it seemed, but far away, though its voice was close and intimate in Malik’s ears.
“Who are you? What are you?” Malik demanded.
“No one thought it possible, but I suspected you might just be able to manage it . . . Malik.”
Malik was not surprised that the distant creature knew his name, but hearing it aloud in this place was disturbing.
“Are you still okay?” Malik asked Francis.
Her eyes were wide, her face pale. She stood beside him on one good leg, a rigid cast holding her broken bones in place. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Do you see that . . . person? Are you hearing him speak?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged.
So at least if this was some hallucination it was one they were both experiencing. Malik began moving toward the distant creature, but like the gray circle, the creature seemed to recede almost—almost—as fast as Malik advanced.
“What is it you want, Malik?”
“I want you to stop torturing me and the people I love. Do you have any idea the horror you’ve caused?”
The figure seemed to nod; he was still too far distant for Malik to be sure. When he spoke, his voice was so close he might almost have been whispering into Malik’s ear. “Strictly speaking, I did not cause any of this. Though, yes, I admit to guilt. I admit to hubris. But I have done nothing that you would not do, Malik.”
“I know my universe is a simulation,” Malik said. “And you are its creator.”
This time the head shake was near enough that Malik could be sure of it. The creature definitely had the shape of a man, a fit man of perhaps middle age. A black man, Malik thought, though what did such distinctions mean when dealing with aliens?
“Twice, just twice has any creature within the sim become aware enough to escape the simulation. You, Malik, are the second. The first was an impressive little boy named Pete Ellison. You’ve heard the name.”
Malik nodded, curiosity distracting him from simple anger. “Little Pete. Of the FAYZ?”
“Yes. Of course he was an unusual boy, too young and too limited in his comprehension to be able to explain what he felt. But now: you. And you, Malik, are quite capable of understanding.”
“Am I supposed to be flattered?”
“His voice . . . ,” Francis whispered. Her hand was sweaty in Malik’s grip.
“I am simply describing reality,” the creature said. “You and Francis have done the impossible. And I am left to wonder about intentions.”
“My intentions?” Malik asked.
“No, the intentions of your creator.”
“Are you not . . . you admitted guilt!”
“And I am guilty, but not of creating you, Malik, or the world you inhabit. You see, computational power has made astounding leaps, but still no computer, still less any number of programmers, can create a simulation as complete, as intricately detailed as the one you inhabit.”
“Then how . . .”
“No human programmer, I should have said. But an advanced AI, a powerful artificial intelligence? An AI fed a dataset extracted from living, human brains? An AI tasked with inventing a complete alternate reality using the memories of . . . of volunteers?”
The distance between them now closed more rapidly. The figure was a man. A black man in middle age, bald, still fit but with the hard-to-define caution in movement of a mature man.
“Yes, volunteers. We have learned to digitize most of the contents of the human brain. We copied those memories, Malik, and fed them to my AI. Yes, my AI, because although I did not create the sim, I did create the sim’s creator.”
“Your AI is a monster!” Malik cried, stabbing an accusing finger.
Malik could see the man’s features now. The mouth. The nose. The heavy-lidded, sleepy-looking eyes.
Chills swept across Malik’s flesh, and a new dread, a new and terrible dread hovered just at the edge of his understanding.
“Yes, it is,” the man agreed. “It has created a savage, brutal world full of unpredictability. It has rewritten the assumptions of physics to make its own physics. It’s a monster, yes, but a brilliant one.”
The man actually sounded proud, which just fed Malik’s rekindling anger. “How dare you be proud of this? The pain you’ve caused, the horror—what kind of creature are you?”
“The human kind, Malik. The very human kind. But a human from your own future. My time, in my universe, is twenty-six years ahead of your perceived time.”
Now Malik stopped moving, but the creature advanced, walking on two normal legs, two normal human arms by his side. Speaking in a voice . . .
. . . the voice.
“Do you wonder whose memories were harvested to program my AI, Malik?”
Malik took a step back.
Francis, in a pleading voice, said, “Malik . . .”
“No,” Malik said.
“You’re beginning to understand, Malik. You don’t want to understand, but already your mind knows.”
“No,” Malik said, a faint whimper.
“The memories we harvested are those belonging to a woman named Dr. Shade Darby. . . .”
“No, no . . .”
“And ours, Malik. Yours and mine. I created the AI, and I thought: who better to provide the foundational images and ideas . . . I had an obligation, I thought, to use my own memories.”
Malik wanted to turn and run away but felt his legs would not obey his commands, felt that they might buckle at any moment. He had stopped breathing. His heart thudded in his chest.
Now the man, not alien, but man, stood an arm’s length away. And Malik saw.
“Yes, Malik. I am Dr. Malik Tenerife, of MIT. I am you.”