Matt finished his work and gestured for Elaine to enter the construct. “Ladies first.”
Once they were airborne, she created an invisibility shield to envelop their craft, but several problems were quickly apparent. “I can’t see to fly,” said Matthew, who had been using the air to propel them. “My magesight in this world is so limited that I need light just to see the ocean directly beneath us.”
“I’ve also lost satellite signal,” added Gary.
“Which means?” asked Matthew.
“Without that, I can’t triangulate our position using GPS.”
“You told me you could pinpoint our location in just seconds.”
“I did,” Gary responded. “We are in the South Pacific, three hundred and twenty-seven miles east and one hundred and twelve miles north of New Zealand; or rather we were four minutes ago. Without a GPS signal, I can’t keep our position up to date, calculate our airspeed and bearing, or estimate our time to landfall.”
“We just need to know which way to go,” insisted the young man.
Gary’s face disappeared, replaced with a globe display of the earth’s surface. “No, I need a GPS signal and contact with the network. Otherwise I can’t arrange for transport, nor coordinate meeting that transport once it’s arranged. You should head east, by the way, and ever so slightly south.”
“We need to see the sun, Elaine,” said Matt.
“Give me a full view of the sky,” corrected the PM. “Just for a minute or two. I’ll make sure we’re on the right course and relay instructions to my larger self. We can block everything for a while after that, until we get close to land.”
Elaine Prathion obliged them, and after a few minutes she restored the invisibility veil, leaving only a small area beneath them so they could gauge their distance from the surface.
Based on Gary’s estimate of their speed, it would be over three hours before they reached land, so they lapsed into a comfortable silence, punctuated by occasional moments of conversation.
After an hour of travel, Gary offered some speculation. “While not being able to receive satellite signals is annoying, it bodes well for the rest of our mission.”
“How so?” asked Elaine.
“I wasn’t certain before, what sort of signals your invisibility would block. Since you only see visible light, it was possible that visible light was all it would hide us from,” explained the machine.
“Well, I can hide us from aythar as well,” Elaine informed him. “Though it isn’t necessary since no one here can sense it.”
“That’s the point,” said Gary. “Aythar is also something you can sense, so it’s easy for you to know when you are manipulating it, just like light. But on this world, we use many forms of light that are not discernable using normal human senses. Radio waves, microwaves, x-rays, millimeter waves, infrared, ultraviolet—any of these could potentially give us away when we are trying to sneak in, if your talent doesn’t work on them.
“From our last visit, I was able to ascertain that radio waves, infrared, and ultraviolet are also covered by your invisibility, since the military sensor feeds didn’t register you, but I wasn’t sure about the others. I can now safely rule out microwaves as a problem. That makes me feel more comfortable that the other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum are also included,” said Gary.
He had been speaking in Barion, but many of the words didn’t have equivalents in their language, so he had been forced to use several English terms.
“Elektro, what?” said Elaine, confused.
Matthew was doing better, since he had a good handle on English now, including a few of the new words. “What he means is that your talent seems to work on all the types of light they use to spot enemies.”
She gave them both a look that suggested they were only repeating the obvious. “Well, of course. When a Prathion doesn’t want to be found, they aren’t found.”
“Perhaps you were certain of it, but I wasn’t,” said Gary.
“That’s the Prathion motto,” said Matt. “They like to pull it out whenever they get the chance.”
Elaine lifted her chin slightly. “If I were you I’d be a bit more respectful of the one who’s keeping you safely out of the fire.”
Gary started laughing, but they all fell silent a second later when a thundering boom shook the flying construct.
“What was that?!”
“Sonic boom,” said Gary. “One of the interceptors must have passed by. They fly faster than the speed of sound, so the sonic energy of their passing becomes concentrated along a line behind them. When it passes over you, it sounds like thunder.”
“Sound doesn’t have a speed,” argued Elaine.
Thanks to the loshti, as well as a lot of non-traditional education over the years, Matthew knew better. He spoke up before Gary could. “Sound is just the vibration of the air. It’s a wave, just like the ones you see in water. It has a speed, but I never thought anything could go fast enough to outrun it!”
“The whole thing sounds mad, if you ask me,” said Elaine.
“Well, that certainly wasn’t thunder,” countered Matt. “The sky was clear when we looked a little while ago.”
They stayed quiet for a while after that, until Gary broke the silence once more. “It appears they aren’t tracking us.”
“You just told us that they couldn’t,” said Matthew.
“They can’t detect us directly, but the same detectors that ANSIS uses to detect the anomaly created when you shift into this world might be sensitive enough to detect smaller uses of aythar. I have little way of knowing just how good their sensor calibration is, since they keep all that data separate from the normal network,” explained Gary.
“They did find Karen, I suppose,” said Matthew with a nod.
“Exactly. It may be that the method is slow and requires time to triangulate the position of smaller anomalies, or it may be that the signal they receive is diffuse and requires time to refine. Either way, I think we’re relatively safe, so long as we don’t stay in one place too long,” agreed the AGI.
“I wonder if making us invisible to aythar would help?” suggested Elaine.
“In your world it might, since aythar is everywhere,” observed the machine. “In this world, it is largely absent. I doubt your method would work since they aren’t ‘seeing’ us in the traditional sense. You have to use aythar to generate your shield, and that will create a change in the surrounding environment that they can detect.
“In the long run, if we keep using this flying construct, or any other aythar-based techniques, they will eventually find us, or at least be able to get an approximation of our location,” he finished.
An hour and a half later, they finally reached the coast of New Zealand. They landed on a rocky beach, and Matthew took his construct apart and stored the enchanted cubes in a small pouch. On Gary’s advice, they also did away with their personal shields and completely closed their minds. It was the closest the two of them could get to becoming ordinary, mundane humans.
They still radiated a small amount of aythar, though. There was no helping that—for them it was a consequence of simply existing—but Gary thought it would be too small for ANSIS to detect, at least for a considerable period of time.
The two humans walked a short distance inland to get away from the coastline and find cover beneath what few trees they could find. There were no human settlements nearby, but it was almost a certainty that there would be drones searching the entire region soon when they weren’t found anywhere near their arrival point.
A half an hour went by, and then a pert came into view following the coastline. It settled down just twenty feet from their hiding place, and the door opened automatically.
“That’s it,” said Gary. “Get inside.”
“Who is driving it?” asked Elaine.
“I am,” the AGI informed her.
She gave him a look of disbelief. “You don’t have hands.”
“I alr
eady brought it here to meet us.”
“But you were with us the entire time,” she protested.
Matthew cut in, “He’s sort of like a spirit, Elaine. He’s everywhere in this world, so long as there’s a machine for him to speak through. I know it’s confusing, but trust me.”
They climbed in, and the pert took off smoothly and then turned north. It rose above the tree line and picked up speed until the landscape beneath them began to blur.
“Do I need to veil the carriage?” asked Elaine. She looked tired.
“No,” said Matthew. “Save your strength, you’ll need it later.”
“It feels like I’m just getting weaker. I can’t seem to recover,” she added.
Matthew nodded. “It’s because this world is barren of ambient aythar. You will regain your strength, but it takes a lot longer here.”
“You won’t need to use your abilities until we reach Karen’s location,” Gary assured her. “It will take us several days to get there. Until then, I’ll make certain they can’t find us.”
“How?” she asked.
Gary grinned. “It’s complicated. This pert for example, it belongs to a resident of New Zealand but it is rarely used. I’ve created a false identity, changed the registration and brought it here for our use. When we’re done, it will go back to its true owner and I’ll reverse the changes I made. As we travel, we will change perts frequently, for a variety of reasons, but mainly to make unraveling my web of deceit impossible for mere human investigators. It would take a super AI like myself to figure out what I’m doing, and even if they had one, it wouldn’t be able to do the job because I’m erasing the trail as we go.
“In some locations, the registration won’t be changed. In others, we will take public transportation using false identification. The only clue they will have to our whereabouts will be the faint traces of aythar that follow in your wake, and from the data I have already, I think it will be too weak for them to detect. Even if it is detectable, you will be traveling too quickly and it will be too vague for them to narrow your location down within a thousand miles or more,” explained the AGI.
The two wizards listened with varying degrees of understanding. When Matthew finally opened his mouth to speak, Gary preempted his question, “I know what you’re thinking. What about the public transportation? You’ll be exposed to public surveillance cameras, and the automated ASI will pick up your faces and alert the authorities. I’ll be intercepting those video feeds and removing the alerts. The only way they can spot you is if they use independent systems that aren’t connected to the network.
“I don’t deny there’s a small risk there that I can’t mitigate, but it is for that reason that I have limited the number of times you will be exposed to physical view. Also, if she can spare the aythar, Elaine’s talent with illusion could eliminate that risk entirely, although it will come with a tradeoff. Using aythar will increase the probability that ANSIS can narrow the search to a more precise area.”
Matthew had been waiting patiently, but when he opened his mouth again, Gary started to interrupt him once more, “Before you ask…”
“Can I just get a word in?!” he growled.
Gary paused. “Certainly.”
“I trust you,” said Matt. “That’s why we’re here. We will trust you when we reach these public spaces you mentioned as well. I think it’s better to avoid giving them anything extra to pin down our location.”
“Thank you,” said the AGI. “Now, back to what I was explaining…”
“Gary,” said the young man with a sigh. “Please shut up. I know you’re excited about your plan, but we only have a passing knowledge of this world. Let us get some rest.”
The AGI pursed his lips. “Fine.”
Chapter 35
The next two days were a blur of seemingly random transfers between different perts as they traveled north from New Zealand to mainland Asia. At one of their early stops, they collected packages from the doorstep of a stranger’s home. The boxes contained clothing that the AGI had purchased to help them blend in. They also traveled on two sparsely filled machines that reminded Matthew of a giant mechanical snake. Gary told them they were called trains. Apparently, there had been many more of them in the past, but only a few were in operation these days due to a paucity of organics needing mass transport.
When they reached a city called Hong Kong, they transferred to a special aerial transport known as a ‘hypersonic jet.’ It had seats for over a hundred people, but like the trains it was only half filled. The two wizards were fascinated by the thought that they would be traveling at nearly three times the speed of sound, but the reality was far more boring. After an exciting half hour they wound up taking a nap for the rest of the flight.
After arriving in Los Angeles, they took another short trip via train before meeting yet another pert. This one carried them all the way to New Mexico where they met the pert that Gary informed them would be their last vehicle of the journey.
“What’s the last city we are heading to called again?” asked Elaine as she attempted to scratch beneath her breasts.
“Houston,” Matt answered.
“The names here are so weird,” she replied as she reached beneath her blouse to rearrange something.
He found the activity beneath her shirt fascinating, but his curiosity was growing. “What are you doing?”
“It’s these clothes, this ‘bra’ thing in particular. It itches. I don’t think it fits right, either. While I can’t complain about the bathrooms, these people have strange ideas about what constitutes comfortable. Give me a properly tailored dress over this bizarre mish-mash of clothes any day!”
Matthew was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a cotton T-shirt. “The clothes do lack style, but these trousers are very comfortable; the shirt too. I was thinking about getting Gary to buy more for us to take back home.”
Elaine was digging around behind herself with both hands. After a brief struggle she pulled the offending undergarment out through one sleeve. “Here, if you think the clothes are so comfy, you can have this.”
He held the bra in one hand while he examined it. Matthew had never been one to ogle women, or show any other over attention to their ‘attributes,’ but he was having difficulty managing his train of thought. Elaine was quite an attractive woman and not too far away from him in age. While the women of his own world didn’t wear bras, neither did the dresses drape their torsos in quite the same way the light, soft fabric of this world’s shirts did.
He kept his eyes on the object in his hand. The bra was soft but it had a strangely stiff portion. “Why would they put wire in this?” he asked.
“It’s stupid,” complained Elaine. “It’s supposed to hold up the breasts, but it keeps biting into my skin. Look at this shirt.” She shook the material with her hands. “It’s too loose! If it had more substance and was tailored properly—like this,” she pulled the shirt in the back, stretching it tightly beneath her breasts, “then it would provide all the support I need, without any stupid wires.”
Matthew glanced at her and quickly looked away. The effect of her manipulations had been to make it look as though her shirt were painted on. He was used to seeing things ordinary men could not, thanks to his magesight, but seeing things with his eyes was different, and for some reason it embarrassed him. “I see your point,” he said non-commitally.
Elaine watched him suspiciously. “What?”
“I was agreeing with you,” he said defensively.
“Not that—you’re blushing. Did I embarrass you?” she accused, in a sly and mischievous tone.
He was very sure that he was not blushing. Probably. “No. Can we move on? This isn’t a topic I really care about.”
“That’s good to hear,” she told him. “You’re almost like a little brother to me. I’d hate to think you were harboring a secret attraction. Besides, we’re here to save your girlfriend, after all.”
Matt growled, “She’s not my girl
friend, and of course I’m not attracted to you.” An evil thought crossed his mind. “You’re more like a kindly old aunt to me.”
Elaine scowled. “That’s a relief, but it might be better if she were your girlfriend. My father once suggested it might be advantageous for our families to have closer ties. I’d hate to think how you might suffer if you were forced to marry such an old woman.”
He gaped at her for a second, but then his anger drained away, replaced by amusement. “That’s a fair point.”
She was taken aback by his reversal. “Now wait a minute!”
“You’ve always been a good friend, Elaine,” he said, trying to get ahead of her temper. “There’s no telling what the future holds, for either of us. Who knows who we will get stuck with? At least we aren’t strangers.” He handed the bra back to her.
Elaine closed her mouth, pausing for a moment, then she replied, “That’s true. Though, just to be clear, if that ever happened, you’d be the one getting the better end of the deal.”
Matthew disagreed, which sparked a new round of debate. The conversation was light-hearted after that, but he had no real doubt. Elaine wasn’t a bad person, but she was a little too superficial for his tastes, and she was definitely too much of a talker. As they bantered back and forth, he found himself thinking of Karen. While he had traveled with her, Karen had seemed mildly annoying, but in comparison to Elaine, he found himself wishing for her long periods of silence. When Karen spoke, she usually got right to the point, she wasn’t one to play word games.
He missed her, though he wasn’t ready to admit it yet.
***
The pert lowered itself to the ground, landing on a road that, unlike the few others they had seen, still appeared to be well maintained. Gary explained this was because the military still used some heavy ground transports for moving large equipment in and out.
Large trees leaned over the road on either side, and the verges were thick with long grass. The air was humid, and Matthew felt sweat beginning to form on his brow almost as soon as he exited the vehicle.
The pert’s doors closed, and it rose quietly back into the air as soon as they had stepped away from it, heading back in the direction of Houston.