They were blinded by startlingly bright sunlight when they left the place in-between and then they sank. A wal of water struck them, and
Matthew was washed from Desacus’s back.
Karen managed to keep her seat, but the dragon was suffering again from a bout of serious nausea, which was only compounded when he
managed to inadvertently swalow a huge mouthful of salt water. Flailing his legs and wings, he surged up and down in the choppy water while she hung on for dear life.
Meanwhile, Matthew sank into the blue depths. He had kept his mouth closed, but being unprepared, he hadn’t taken a ful breath before being plunged into the water. With his magesight again being severely limited it was difficult to get his bearings, but he didn’t panic. He surrounded his body with a shield and waited until he could figure out up from down.
One direction was considerably brighter than the other, though it was getting dimmer by the second. That had to be up. Envisioning a fish, he shaped his shield accordingly, creating a large fin on the part beneath his feet and wiling it to swing back and forth. There was no air inside his shield, and his armor made him heavier than the water, but his motions created enough thrust to move him upward. He seemed to pick up speed as he went, and when he reached the surface, he burst into the air like a dolphin breaching on a summer day.
He flailed in the air but retained enough presence of mind to solidify the surface of the water beneath him before he fel back into it. He landed with enough force to thoroughly remind him of al the bruises on his back. He lay stil on the shifting surface for several seconds, breathing and getting his bearings.
Sitting up, he saw Desacus some twenty yards away. The dragon had steadied himself and was now treading water gently while Karen studied
the water around them.
“Matthew!” she yeled in relief. “I thought you had drowned!”
Taking a firmer grip on the water around him, Matthew stood with what dignity he could muster and smoothed the surface in front of him so he could walk over to his companions. He was rewarded by yet another look of amazement from Karen.
“You can walk on water,” she said as he climbed back onto the dragon’s back.
Matt shrugged. Exerting his wil again he helped Desacus to march up out of the water onto a smooth surface he could launch himself from.
Karen’s stomach lurched as they were suddenly airborne.
I’m glad your father chose not to give us feathered wings, observed the dragon.
Karen gaped at Matthew’s back, Your dad made Desacus?
That’s a long story, said the young mage. Do you have any idea where we are? We need to choose a direction.
The world is seventy percent ocean, we could be almost anywhere, she informed him.
Desacus was stil beating his wings in powerful down strokes, Let me get some altitude first. I may be able to see land once we get higher.
The air grew cold as they ascended, and Matthew began to despair of sighting land. His dragon enhanced eyesight was extremely acute, and he saw no sign of anything that might help them decide which direction to take.
To the east, announced Desacus.
Really? I can’t see anything that way, said Matt.
Trust me, said the dragon, my eyes are even better than yours. There’s a shadow on the horizon there. It might be an island, though it would have to be very large at this distance.
After a quarter hour Matthew could see the first hints of land, though Karen stil saw nothing. A short while longer, and they could al see it. If it was an island, it was big, for it stretched to the north and south as far as they could see and there was no hint of ocean behind it.
We need to fly low, suggested Karen. They may already have us on radar.
The word she used, ‘radar’ carried al sorts of strange connotations when it passed through Matt’s brain. Desacus was already descending
rapidly, but Matthew wanted to better understand, Explain this radar to me.
It’s a little bit like magesight, but it’s done with machines, she explained. They send out pulses of radio waves and read the reflections that come back. They can’t see us precisely, but they can judge our relative size, position, and speed, in the air.
Why would they be looking for us here? he asked.
We have them everywhere, on land at least, she replied. They used to be important for tracking planes when people traveled a lot.
The word plane carried with it an image of some sort of flying machine that carried people through the air. He had encountered the idea in her thoughts before, but Matthew stil marveled at some of the things Karen thought of as commonplace. Your people don’t travel much anymore?
Desacus had leveled out and was flying just above the waves as she answered, There aren’t that many people now, in the physical sense, less than a hundred million I think.
A hundred milion was an almost inconceivable number to him. How many lived in Lothion? He had no idea, but he doubted the entire nation
had more than a few milion at most. How many did there used to be?
Karen shrugged, I think we topped out at around nine billion before people started uploading. Technically our world population is around ten billion these days, but most of them don’t have bodies any more.
Matthew was shocked. The numbers were unbelievable. The idea of that many people living in a world, no matter how large, was impossible to consider, but that wasn’t the strangest idea her reply had carried. The concept she had conveyed with the word ‘uploading’ was bizarre. In Karen’s thoughts, it had seemed similar to the way she thought of their travel to his world, as though the people of this place had begun transporting themselves to another plane of existence.
Except that she had said they no longer had bodies. Were they spirits? Was her world populated by ghosts? He directed his question to her, What do you mean by ‘uploading’?
She didn’t answer at first. Karen had seen enough of his world that she knew technology and computer science would be foreign ideas, so she composed her reply carefuly, We have machines that think, that can hold any amount of information. In the beginning, we used them to improve our lives, to connect people all over the world, but later scientists found ways to create artificial universes. It was entertainment of a sort, like books, except people could work and play in these imagined places. Eventually they figured out how to transfer themselves completely, giving up their bodies and becoming permanent residents of that other world.
His confusion was palpable, so she went on; They aren’t physical, not like your world. They’re still here. The computer world is like an immense book, except that it can change like the real world. For those inside it, it feels real, except that anything you can imagine is possible to create there. Games where you can be anyone or anything.
Like a dream? he questioned.
She nodded, Like a dream, except it’s real, and you can share it with others. A dream you never wake up from because it’s just as real as the physical world.
But you have to give up your body to go there?
No, most of the people that still have bodies go there all the time. We have implants, tiny machines that people have in their brains, that allow them to explore those worlds whenever they choose. Over time, though, most people eventually decide they want to stay there forever. So they go through a process we call ‘uploading’, but it’s more complicated than that. Their bodies are scanned in a destructive process to extract every bit of information, and they are recreated inside the network.
Matthew was horrified, Why?!
Immortality. Once you give up the flesh you can never die, not so long as the system continues.
He didn’t know what to say, so he kept his thoughts to himself, but he couldn’t believe her description of her people’s new world was a good thing.
***
They landed on a smal beach that was overlooked by a steep rise of land. The wind was blowing fiercely, and it made Matthew glad he could
/> warm himself. He extended the bubble of warmth around Karen as wel. She stil didn’t know how to use her incipient abilities, and in this world without aythar it would have quickly exhausted her anyway. She didn’t have the advantage he did, Desacus.
He had been relying on the dragon’s stored power to keep from using up his own reserves. Since the dragon had been created to store nearly a ful Celior of aythar there was little danger he would run out anytime soon.
The rocky cliff wasn’t too high, perhaps thirty or forty feet, and it was topped by a long sloping grassy plain. They could see a crumbling stone wal along part of it and what appeared to be a stone staircase led up to it on their right.
“Do you know where we are?” he asked Karen.
She shook her head, once again she wished she stil had her PM. It would have been able to tel her exactly where she was. If she had been
anyone else in the world, she would have had implants, and the PM would have been irrelevant, she could have tapped the network and located her position instantly.
Matthew started up the stairs, and she folowed. There was no one to be seen when they reached the top, but a long sidewalk stretched away
in both directions. Smal houses could be seen in the distance on one side, and the remains of an ancient ruin on the other. A smal sign with an arrow proclaimed its name, “Tintagel Castle”.
Desacus beat his wings powerfuly several times and landed beside them as Karen announced, “I think I know where we are, roughly.”
“Where?”
“This is England, the southeastern part,” she said, as if the words would have meaning for him.
“You know the area?” he asked.
“No, not realy. I’m from Colorado,” she admitted, and then pointed in the direction the sun was starting to set, “Several thousand miles that way. We are a long way from where you met me.”
He was beginning to have difficulty folowing her language, so he switched to direct mind to mind communication, You know where we are?
Thousands of miles east of where we started, she explained.
How do you know this place then?
It was a good question. She had never been to England, but she had had a fondness for Arthurian legend as a girl, otherwise the name
‘Tintagel’ would have meant nothing to her. This place has a famous history, she told him, simplifying. I have never been here, but I have an
aunt who lives in Ipswich.
How far is that?
Karen wasn’t sure, but she could guess, Several hundred miles to the east and a little to the north of here.
That was a flight of several hours on dragonback . Are you on good terms with her? Will she help us?
I’m sure she would, Karen replied. Her Aunt Roberta had always been a lively figure in her childhood, though they had only met on two occasions. She stil remembered the odd candies her father’s sister had brought with her whenever she had visited them.
“Let’s go then,” said Matthew.
“Wait,” said Karen. “There should be a visitor’s center here. We can use the cel station to cal her from here.” She was forced to explain
herself mentaly afterward, and then her friend readily agreed.
They searched the area carefuly, exploring old stone buildings and a few more modern facilities before they found the exhibition shop. There were no people anywhere to be found, though, and Matthew couldn’t help but wonder at the absence.
There are so many buildings and walkways, where are the people? he asked at last.
Karen chuckled, England is almost empty now. A few people live in Ipswich and to the north in Edinburgh, but most of the country is
wild now. The reclaimers have dismantled everything but the important heritage sites, like this one.
Reclaimers?
Giant machines that recycle materials, she explained. They remove old roads and buildings that are no longer needed. Since there are so few organics left it was decided to restore most of the world to a natural state. Only places where people live and some historic sites are left, like this one.
The idea of removing roads made no sense to Matthew. Roads were a fundamental feature of civilization, the lifeblood of any nation. In
Lothion, good roads were a rare and precious resource. His father’s world-road had done much to aleviate the problem, but it stil served to underscore how vitaly important roads were. “They destroy roads?” he protested.
We don’t need most of them anymore, she responded. There aren’t that many people and those who remain don’t travel. Any goods that need to be transported are moved by air now anyway. Most of the world is like a park now, or a nature preserve.
He was stil boggling at that thought, when they found the visitor center.
It was a grey stone building built from the same material that everything else in the area was constructed from. In some ways, it looked similar to buildings Matthew was used to seeing back at Castle Cameron; the doors were faded oak with black iron strap hinges. The most notable
difference was the strange booth that stood beside the entrance, a red box that was tal enough for a person to enter with glass panels set in a metal framework from top to bottom.
Karen opened a narrow door and stepped inside while he watched her. She touched a panel on one side, and it began to glow.
“What is that?” he asked her.
“An old cal terminal…,” she began, but the look on his face was one of confusion, so she switched to a telepathic message. A call terminal; boxes like these used to house public phones but they later replaced them with network terminals. The exterior look is mainly British
nostalgia. Once everyone started getting implants they stopped making these, but they still keep them active in some public locations—
like this one.
Matthew got the idea that they were some sort of messaging system, something like his father’s enchanted letter boxes, but the concepts
coming across from her mind were ful of confusing details. He tried his steadily improving English once more, “Who does this one connect to?”
She smiled, “Anyone. Just watch.” Facing the screen, she spoke, “Terminal connect, please.”
The screen flashed, and a series of strange symbols scroled across it. Matthew was mildly startled when a voice emerged from the box itself,
“Positive identification, user Karen Miler, network access granted.”
“Voice cal to Roberta Plant in Ipswich, please.”
The machine spoke again, “You have five priority messages waiting. Would you like to view these first?”
Karen chewed on her lip for a moment before answering, “Display please, chronological order.”
A man’s face appeared on the screen, dark haired and thick browed. Matthew almost believed a portal had opened, but as he shifted his
position he could see that the picture seemed flat from the side. It was some sort of magical viewing rather than a direct spatial connection.
“Karen! This is your father. It’s been two days since you messaged, and your pert’s logs show it hasn’t rendezvoused with you in that time. Are you ok? Please cal me as soon as you get this.” The face vanished and the screen went dark for a moment.
He hadn’t understood al of what had been said, but one thing had been abundantly clear. “I thought you said your father was dead,” said
Matthew.
She glanced at him, “That’s not realy my Dad. It’s a simulacrum, an AGI that stores many of his memories and a close approximation of his
personality.”
“A what?”
“Artificial General Inteligence,” she clarified, then her hand waved at him to wait, and she returned her attention to the terminal, “Next message.”
A young blond woman appeared. Her features were flawless, and she appeared no older than twenty at the most. “Karen, please give me a cal. That hideous robo -dol your father made is so upset that it’s interrupting my work. Hones
tly, what were you thinking when you turned that thing loose? It’s nothing like, Gary. The damned thing is twice as annoying as he ever was.”
“And he cares about me more than you ever wil,” grumbled Karen as her mother’s face disappeared.
“Who was that?” asked Matthew.
“Mother,” she said simply.
He couldn’t reconcile the face he had seen with Karen’s. If anything, the woman on the screen had looked younger than her adopted daughter.
“How old is she?”
“You can look any age you want after you upload,” explained Karen. “I’m surprised she hasn’t gone for the teenage look—the superficial
bitch. Next message.”
Her father’s face appeared again, “Karen, I’ve notified the authorities that you’re missing. Or I meant to, but it seems that they are already searching for you. What’s going on? They’ve put a tracer on me to report any contact you make, but I’ve encapsulated it. Do you want me to activate it? I won’t turn it on unless you give the authorization, but they’re bound to notice my deception before too long. Are you in some kind of trouble ? Please cal me, I’m worried. Even your mother is sending me queries about your whereabouts.”
That was interesting, her mother claiming that her father’s simulacrum was pestering her, while he said she was contacting him. Hmmm. “Next message…”
It was her father again, “Karen, I’m realy worried. I hope you’re okay. Please cal.”
The final message was from him as wel, “I don’t think they’ve realized the trace stil isn’t active. Whatever is going on has realy stirred up a hornet’s nest, honey. Let me know if you’re safe.”
She stared at the screen after his face vanished. No matter what her mother thought, her father’s simulacrum was exactly how she remembered him, and he was more of a parent than her mother would ever be. A light began blinking at the top of the screen, and the terminal spoke again,
“Incoming cal from Gary Miler.”
With a sigh Karen answered, “Go ahead.”
Her father’s face reappeared, “Karen? Is that you? Where have you been?!”