“Saskia?” I say. Then I repeat it as a thought. Saskia, are you in there?
She sounds totally surprised.
“Are you here because I was calling you?”
“I don’t see anybody else here. Where’ve you been?”
she says.
“Hold up there. What’s an URL?”
“Ohh-kay.”
Her voice trails off for a moment, then she adds, Another pause.
“No problem. I’m happy to have the company.”
“Oh, don’t go all mournful on me. This place is depressing enough as it is. Speaking of which, do you have any idea where we might be?”
“I think I was there,” I say and tell her about the dream I had just before I regained consciousness.
she says,
“This? Come on. This is just a junkyard—a creative one, I’ll grant you, but really. This other place was made of words. There were even animals and birds that were somehow both words and themselves at the same time, if that makes any sense.”
“So you recognize it?”
“Okay, say this is the Wordwood. Any ideas where we go from here?”
“Pretty much nothing,” I tell her and then I fill her in on what little I’ve seen since I found myself waking up here in a field of grassy wires.
she asks when I’m done.
“They seem to scare pretty easily. I think that static-y sound they were making was their language, but I couldn’t make out a word.”
“Say what?”
“I don’t have the first clue as to what you’re talking about.”
“If that static I heard even was a language.” I get another thought then. “Are you the only one the spirit sent out into the consensual world?”
“Where we met—what Christy calls the World As It Is. I was just wondering if the spirit sent others like you out into it.”
She’s quiet for as moment, then adds,
“I guess if you were the first, it would have learned from that until you … what? Stopped broadcasting information back?”
Saskia says.
“That would be handy right about now.”
“No. Some more background info.”
I take another look at the forest. “Well, I say we should get a move on. Are you ready to do a little exploring?”
I start forward, my gaze sweeping the shadows under the trees for I’m not sure what. Ghosts, I guess. Danger.
Something in here worries me.
The undergrowth isn’t thick—this forest is too old and overgrown for much light to get through the thick canopy above. Then I have to laugh. I touch the bark of one of the first trees—it’s like running my hand over a sculpture made up of circuit boards pasted together. Does this stuff even grow?
I’m about to ask Saskia what she thinks when, from the corner of my eye, I catch something move, like a figure ducking behind a tree. It looked like a man—still black and white, but much more substantial than the ghosts I saw earlier.
Did you see that? I ask, then I feel foolish. Of course she did. She sees everything I see.
If I can grab him, maybe we can convince him to tell us a little something about this place …
Saskia says.
I know. Here. But now we really have nothing to lose, do we?
Don’t worry. This is something I’m good at.
It’s true. I lead an active life, which surprises some people who only see this delicate creature the way Christy does. I’ve always been more tomboy than debutante. Maybe it’s because I started life out as a boy.
I keep walking, as though I never noticed the figure ducking out of sight, slowly shifting my direction until I’ll pass right by the tree that he’s hiding behind. When I come up to its fat bole with all the circuits and wires hanging from it like bark, I dart around the opposite side from where he’d be expecting me to pass. He has his back to me, but he senses me and starts to turn. Too late. I charge at him like a defensive line back. My shoulder hits his chest and he goes tumbling down in a sprawl with me on top of him.
I’m stronger than I look, but he’s bigger than me and he pushes me off, scrabbling backwards until his back comes up against another of these weird circuit board trees.
“Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me!” he cries as I move toward him.
I hold my hands up, palms out.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say. “What makes you think I want to hurt you?”
“You jumped on me, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but that was only after you started stalking me.”
“I wasn’t stalking you. I was just… observing you.”
“Sounds like stalking to me.”
“I was just trying to figure out who you are,” he adds quickly. “To see if you’re dangerous or anything.”
“And?” I ask. “Am I dangerous?”
“Jesus, I don’t know.”
The look in his eye tells me he thinks I am, but I don’t call him on it.
He’s solid flesh and bone, for all that he has no colour. From his features and the darker grey tones of his skin, I figure he’s of African descent. Mid-twenties and good-looking. Kind of twitchy, but I think that’s more to do with me surprising him than any natural inclination on his part.
Saskia says.
Yeah, but did you notice that there’s a bit of static when he talks? Like hearing a radio that’s not quite on the station.
No, I couldn’t make out a word they were saying—if they were saying anything. And this guy’s a lot more solid.
“Who are you?” I ask out loud so that he can hear me.
“My name’s Jackson. Jackson Hart.”
“And do you live around here, Jack?”
“I prefer Jackson.”
“Okay, Jackson it is. Do you live around here?”
He shakes his head.
“So where are you from?”
“A place called Newford. I…”
His voice trails off as he cocks his head to listen to something. As soon as he does, I hear it too.
Saskia says.
No kidding.
I can’t quite figure out what it is. It’s not high-pitched, but it’s still got
that quality of a fingernail on a blackboard mixed with a dull, um, I guess I have to say wet whine, if that makes any sense. You’d have to hear it. There’s also a hissing sound, like water boiling, maybe.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jackson says. “It’s the leeches.”
I’d put a mild panic in his eyes when I knocked him over, but now they hold pure, unadulterated terror.
“Leeches?”
“That’s just what I call them,” he says. “Land leeches.” He gives another anxious glance in the direction the strange sounds are coming from, then turns back to me. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but you don’t want to meet these creatures. And with the way you look, they’re going to be all over you.”
“What do you mean the way I look?”
He holds out a black and white hand, then points at my own.
“You’re in Technicolor—that makes you stand out in a black-and-white world.”
“Sure, but—”
“There’s no time to explain. Just do what I do.”
He starts to tear at the forest floor, peeling back layers of matted wires, circuitry, handfuls of what looks like thin, small pieces of sheet metal, but is far more pliable.
“I’m serious,” he says when he realizes I’m still just standing there.
The sound’s a lot closer now and it’s starting to hurt my ears.
I guess.
He’s dug himself a hole and now here’s something even weirder. Under all this crap we’ve been walking on is a mess of words—a great tangle of them, like a thick undercarpet of leaves and weed clippings. I flash back to the word world I was dreaming about before I woke up here. But these are different. They’re like dirt, dark, with a smell that’s a mix of ink and something metallic.
Jackson lies down on the words and starts to cover himself up.
I stir at Saskia’s sharp cry.
I’m on it, I tell her.
And none too soon. I scrabble in the debris, getting I-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-what under my nails as I dig my way down under the rubbish to the layer of words below. They feel odd against my skin. Warm and dry, for all that they look so damp. I feel almost cozy as I burrow down among them and cover myself over with the junk that was covering them. I leave myself a small hole to peek out of. Saskia makes a gasping sound inside my head and she doesn’t even have lungs.
But I understand.
If this world is hard to describe, and the sound the approaching creatures make is even harder, I’m not sure where to begin with the creatures themselves. Imagine some weird combination of a snake and a garden slug, with a shark’s fin on the hump of its back. They’re solid black, fast and slick, and I see why Jackson calls them land leeches, because there’s something like a leech in them as well, for all that they’re flowing over the land instead of in water. They’re just skimming along, but you can’t see any legs and their body doesn’t undulate. Electricity seems to flicker on their oily skin, running from one end to the other.
I don’t know how many of them there are. I see two, three, then I look away, afraid that they’ll feel the weight of my gaze.
I’m sure they know we’re here. They ooze menace and have eyestalks on their front ends that are constantly in motion, checking everything out with a field of vision that encompasses a full three hundred and sixty degrees, and probably above them as well.
I burrow deeper and try not to breathe.
Nothing here, nothing here, I chant in my head. No need to stop and check this spot out.
This close, the sound they make sets my teeth on edge. And then there’s their smell. Like burnt wiring and sulfuric acid. Like when an outlet fries an electric cord, along with something organic and rotting.
I don’t know how long I lie there—Saskia and I don’t even talk to each other—but after what feels like forever, I hear something moving in the debris around my hidey-hole. I tense up, ready to go down fighting, when I realize that the sound of the creatures has been steadily receding and the smell’s not nearly so pungent any more.
What do you think? I ask Saskia.
But before she can reply, I hear Jackson’s voice.
“Hey,” he whispers. “Are you okay down there?”
I push up through the circuits and matted wiring and other junk and sit up.
“They’re gone?” I ask.
He nods.
Saskia says.
Ditto, I tell her.
“What were those things?” I ask Jackson.
“I think they’re a manifestation of the virus.”
“What virus?”
“The one that took down the site,” he says. “The Wordwood site.”
“So this is the Wordwood.”
He shrugs. “I guess. I just assumed it was when I got here. The damn place was haunting me the whole week before … you know … ever since it went down.”
He looked like he was going to say something else, but I don’t push.Right now he’s the only one here who has even a vague clue as to what’s going on, so I’ll let him dole out the information in his own time. At least for now.
I look over to where the leeches went by and see they’ve left behind a wake of slagged debris. Some of it’s still smoking the way metal will when you drop acid on it.
“How did you figure out how to hide like this?” I ask.
Though I realize even that wouldn’t have helped if the creatures had come oozing by right on top of where we were hiding.
“I was desperate,” he says. “The first time I heard them, I didn’t know what was making that sound. I just knew it would probably be dangerous. They caught me out in the open or I would have tried to climb one of these weird trees. Instead I just dug at the grass—I guess I was going to try to cover myself with it—but when I pulled at it, I found all this code underneath.”
He brushes some of the debris from the hole I’d been hiding in, and pulls out some of the words.
“Code?” I say.
He nods. “Yeah. HTML. The code you use to build Web pages. See?”
He’s holding what’s like a transparent ribbon with words on it. This one says:
Dickens, Charles
“Dig far enough through this stuff and it’s all binary,” he says. “A big mess of zeros and ones.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him.
“This place is like an old DOS program,” Jackson says. “Everything’s really basic and it doesn’t have any of the graphics or scripts we can access today. I think the virus is what’s brought it back to this primitive state.”
I give a slow nod, like I know what he’s talking about.
“How did you get here?” I ask.
“I don’t know for sure. One moment I was sitting in front of my computer, and the next, this flood of black goop came bursting out of my monitor and I was drowning in it. Or I thought I was. I guess I just blacked out, because I woke up here.” He gives me a weak smile. “Unless this is the afterlife.”
The liquid black goop sounds like the storm that knocked me off my feet, back in the borderlands. Looks like I came the same way. The only difference is, I haven’t lost my colour. The first explanation for that doesn’t do anything to lighten my spirits: It’s probably because I’m a shadow. I’ve been listening too much to Saskia, I guess, but I can’t help feeling like there’s something missing in me. And since I don’t really exist in the consensual world, why should it be any different in this one?
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
Maybe it’s not just me, I find myself thinking. Maybe it’s something that happens over time. You lose colour, then substance, until finally you’re like the ghosts I saw when I first came to.
?
??I don’t know that either,” Jackson says. “It feels like forever.”
“We …” I begin, then correct myself. No need to let on there’s more than one person inside my head. “I just got here. And there were these ghosts …”
“They’re like us—they’re not from here. Or they’re like me, anyway. People that got sucked into their computers. The way it seems to work is, you’re like a ghost when you first get here, and you stay like that, too, it seems, until you start to figure things out. At least the more I’ve explored and worked out stuff, the more solid I’ve become.” He gives me a kind of yearning look. “But I’m still black-and-white.”
So it works the opposite from the way I thought.
“Are there others like you?” I ask.
He nods. “But they all seem to keep to themselves. And here’s something really weird: Some of them don’t even speak English. You have to wonder. What were they doing, accessing an English language database?”
Saskia says.
I repeat what Saskia just said so that Jackson can hear it.
He starts shaking his head. “That’s not possible.”
“We’re not talking about a program,” I tell him. “We’re talking about an entity. A spirit. Something that’s alive and lives in … wherever we are. Cyberspace, I guess. It communicates with us through the Internet. Or at least it did.”
“But—”
“Okay, maybe this is simpler. You remember your classical mythology—how there was a god or goddess for everything?”
“Vaguely,” he says, but he nods at the same time.
“So the Wordwood site was the home of the god of something like electronic books. Pixelated words.”
“A god.”
“I’m just trying to put this in terms you might be able to relate to,” I say.
“But a god.”
“Maybe that’s not the best analogy.”
“And he’ll be pissed off at me.”
“Maybe it’s a she,” I say, thinking of Saskia. The spirit could have made her in its own image. Then I realize what he said. “Why would it be mad at you in particular?”
“You want to know the truth?”
“No, I prefer it when people lie to me.”
Saskia says.