“Surely she wouldn’t hurt her?”
“Don’t put it past her. She doesn’t even think of Karen as her child. My creator was rather biased regarding Tanya’s limits, but I have the advantage of a more objective viewpoint. She’s capable of anything. If she believes she can learn something by dissecting Karen’s brain, she’l do it. It hasn’t been long though, and Tanya isn’t one to be impatient, so we probably stil have time.”
Matthew shuddered, “That’s horrible.”
“It is,” said Gary. “But it’s who she is.”
“The problem,” began Matt, “is that we don’t have a way of reaching that place. I’ve never been there, and there’s no teleportation circle handy to get us there. As soon as we cross over, they’l know our location. Even with Elaine to hide us, we couldn’t get far enough to avoid the missiles they’re liable to send at us.”
“I can handle that,” began the AGI, but a knock on the door interrupted him.
“Go away!” shouted Matthew. His magesight had already informed him that it was his younger brother Conal at the door.
The door opened.
“I knew I should have put a lock on the door,” grumbled Matthew. “I’m busy, Conal. Leave me alone.”
“I’ve hardly seen you since you got back,” whined his brother.
“And it’s been lovely!” replied Matthew sarcasticaly.
“I want to help!” announced Conal.
“I’l let you know the next time they decide I have to do the dishes.”
“You know what I mean! My power awoke while you were gone. I can do things now. I could help you,” insisted his brother.
Several cutting remarks passed through Matthew’s head before he discarded them as too harsh. Giving his brother a grave look, he answered
more seriously, “How old are you now? Thirteen?”
“Fourteen!” Conal shot back. “You can’t even keep up with my birthdays?!”
“Oh! Fourteen, yeah, I’m sorry. That’s a much more mature age. Since you’re so much older now, I should be honest with you.”
Conal nodded.
Matthew walked across the room and tapped a portion of the wal next to the door. “Do you see this spot right here?”
“Yeah.”
“Al right, remember that spot, it wil be important later. Now, let’s say I let you come with me. You already know this wil be incredibly
dangerous, and I’d be taking the risk of losing my favorite brother.” He tried his best to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but he doubted he was entirely successful.
Conal smiled.
What an idiot, thought Matt. “But here’s the real problem. Suppose we succeed? Let’s imagine we make it back, safe and sound. We’re heroes, and nothing terrible happens to you during this adventure. What do you think wil happen?”
His younger brother gave it serious thought for a moment before answering, “They’l have a celebration, maybe a feast?”
Matthew shook his head sadly, “No. Wel, they might, but something far worse would happen first.” He tapped the spot on the wal again.
“Mom and Dad would lose their minds over the fact that I had taken you with me. After surviving untold dangers, I’d return home only to have them cut my bals off and hang them on the wal, probably in this very spot, or at least one very similar to it.”
Conal looked glum. “Oh.”
“Now get out so I can go back to not sleeping,” finished Matt, pointing at the door.
His brother headed for the door but stopped to look back. “Um, Matt?”
“What?”
“I’m not stupid. I’m your only brother, so I kind of have to be your favorite.”
Matthew gave him an evil grin. “Unless Mom and Dad have another boy. There’s stil hope for the future. You should enjoy the position now,
before my new ‘favorite brother’ arrives.”
Conal stuck out his tongue, then shut the door.
“You’re a terrible brother,” commented Gary. “Do you treat al your siblings that way?”
“Just the ones that bother me,” said the young wizard.
“Define ‘bother’.”
“If they’re in here, or in my workshop, they’re bothering me,” clarified Matthew. “Or if I’m reading, but I usualy do that in one of those places since they don’t seem to recognize the fact that I have a book in my hand.”
“You sound like a joy to be around,” noted Gary dryly.
“Don’t worry, it’s just a phase I’m going through.”
The AGI’s expression was doubtful, “You think so?”
“No, but it makes everyone feel better when I say that. Do you feel better now?” asked Matthew.
Gary sighed, “I can never tel if you’re joking or serious.”
Matthew lifted one brow enigmaticaly but didn’t answer.
“No, honestly, I’d like to know.”
“Just always assume I’m serious and you’l be fine. My humor is not for the faint of heart,” Matt advised him in a flat tone.
Gary was exasperated, “Now I know you’re joking.”
“Am I?”
“I’m going to ignore that,” said the machine. “Back to what we were discussing—next time we cross over I think I can get us where we need to go, assuming we can get far enough away from our entry point to avoid being blown to pieces.”
Matthew leaned closer. “I’m listening.”
Chapter 34
The next morning Matthew and Elaine shifted again, and as they had the last time, found themselves faling into the ocean.
“Does it always have to be the ocean?” complained Elaine as she stood on a hastily solidified platform of water.
Matthew was scanning the horizon, so it was Gary who answered first, “Roughly seventy percent of the surface is ocean. Since our arrival point is apparently random, it’s to be expected that we wil appear over sea most of the time.”
“How long do we have?” asked Matthew as he arranged the enchanted cubes that would form his flying construct.
“They didn’t even have a meeting this time,” the AGI informed them, “but since al the principal members of the defense leadership have begun downloading into cybernetic bodies, I assume they have detected our arrival. Based on our distance from the nearest military assets, I estimate we have twelve minutes. Without any landmass at this location, they wil be forced to scramble interceptors and drones to target us.”
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 satelite 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 landfal.”
“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 ful view of the sky,” corrected the PM. “Just for a minute or two. I’l make sure we’re on the right course and rel
ay 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 smal 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 satelite signals is annoying, it bodes wel 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 al it would hide us from,” explained the machine.
“Wel, I can hide us from aythar as wel,” 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, milimeter waves, infrared, ultraviolet—any of these could potentialy 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 al the types of light they use to spot enemies.”
She gave them both a look that suggested they were only repeating the obvious. “Wel, 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 pul 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 al fel 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 wel 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.
“Wel, 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 smaler uses of aythar. I have little way of knowing just how good their sensor calibration is, since they keep al 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 smaler 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 wil 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 wil eventualy find us, or at least be able to get an approximation of our location,” he finished.
An hour and a half later, they finaly 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 smal 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 stil radiated a smal 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 smal 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 folowing the coastline. It settled down just twenty feet from their hiding place, and the door opened automaticaly.
“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 already 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’l 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 wil 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 wil take us several days to get there. Until then, I’l 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 wil go back to its true owner and I’l reverse the changes I made. As we travel, we wil 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 wil take public transportation using false identification. The only clue they wil have to our whereabouts wil be the faint traces of aythar that folow in your wake, and from the data I have already, I think it wil be too weak for them to detect. Even if it is detectable, you wil be traveling too quickly and it wil 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 finaly opened his mouth to speak, Gary preempted his
question, “I know what you’re thinking. What about the public transportation? You’l be exposed to public surveilance cameras, and the
automated ASI wil pick up your faces and alert the authorities. I’l 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 smal risk there that I can’t mitigate, but it is for that reason that I have limited the number of times you wil be exposed to physical view. Also, if she can spare the aythar, Elaine’s talent with ilusion could eliminate that risk entirely, although it wil come with a tradeoff.
Using aythar wil 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 wil trust you when we reach these public spaces you mentioned as wel. 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.”