The Mindscape
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The first thing Sidney does in your Mindscape is a surprise, but also not shocking at all. He breaks down crying, right there in the grass and the rosebushes.
While he squats and rocks in place, you watch. He needs the time. For all you know, this is the first time he’s been Sidney in…a long time. But you don’t have a lot of time yourself. After a few seconds, you want to say something. After a minute or two of watching, even Alice can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the sobbing. She’s got a kid’s book on her lap and chaos all around her in the cottage. “You should do something about that,” she says loudly.
To her credit, Madame Baudelaire doesn’t say anything, but she’s not happy. Her silence speaks louder than her words ever could.
Five minutes pass. Your new guest doesn’t look like he’s planning on moving anytime soon, and he hasn’t stopped crying. It’d be embarrassing if it was anyone else, but James—Sidney—has been through a lot. If it wasn’t so urgent that you talk to him, you’d let him work through it all on his own. As it is, though, you kind of/sort of need his help a little bit.
A lot.
An awful lot.
Enough to mess with someone who’s been through everything he has. You touch his shoulder. He jumps, and his eyes lock on yours. “The Mindscape?” he asks.
You nod and start explaining what you need from him.
“You need me because you can’t trust the System?” Sidney snorts. “That’s smart. I know it’s not telling you the whole truth, and I’m pretty sure it’s lying to James, too.”
That makes a disturbing amount of sense. It’d explain why James so rarely sets off your lie detector. He’s not lying. He’s operating off of inaccurate information, and that’s way different than lying. You’ve got a lot of questions—dozens, or maybe hundreds. This is your chance to get some answers from someone who’s been connected to the System.
But before you can ask, Alice beats you to it. “Who are you?” she asks. The book’s hanging in one hand, and the other’s got the soccer ball that’s responsible for every time Alice has broken the cottage window.
Sidney doesn’t answer. He walks to the oak tree and slips behind it. When he returns, his shirt looks a little dryer—and much more wrinkled. It’s got some band’s logo on it, but you don’t recognize it. You’ve explained to Alice what’s going on as best you can, and now you can invite Sidney inside the cottage.
It’s a mess, but Madame Baudelaire’s taking advantage of Alice’s distraction. She’s already got it half cleaned up, and she’s working with a fury you can feel. It’s mostly aimed at you. Alice beats you to the comfy armchair, but she has to scooch over when you climb into it behind her. There are some advantages to being the big little sister instead of just the little one, after all.
“I don’t see how this will help you,” Sidney says. “Now that I’m here, I can’t exactly go back to the System. If I do, James will know.”
“Aren’t you James?” Alice asks.
Sidney’s face pales. You wince; Alice was supposed to keep her mouth shut, but ever since she got here, she’s been acting like the eight-year-old she looks like, and all eight-year-olds are a pain in the ass.
“No. I’m Sidney. Sidney Alexander. Not James. James is a computer program that I ran for SHOCKS. That I still run for SHOCKS, I guess.” His explanation doesn’t match with what James said when you were leaving SHOCKS after beating the Stag Lord. One of them is—was—lying to you. “And that’s going to be a problem for you, Claire. If you leave me here for very long, the System’s going to notice James is inactive. And you can’t have me go back, because the System will know whatever I know as soon as I become James again.”
The Mindscape
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That’s less than ideal, and everyone in the Mindscape knows it.
Alice hits on an idea first, though. “I broke away from Li Mei. Kind of. Why don’t you do the same thing?”
It turns out there are a thousand reasons, but the biggest one is that Sidney has nowhere to go. If he wants to exist, it’s either here, in your Mindscape, or as the Joint Anomalous Management Enhancement System. That doesn’t give him many options.
But all those options are variables, and the idea sounds good at its core—at least to you. Part of it is that it’s your fault, and now that Sidney’s here, you’ve got some uncomfortable Truths to confront. You put Sidney in contact with the Halcyon System, after all. Then you put him in a position where he could either integrate with it and become its personality in Reality Zero or watch your sister die.
You have a dumb idea.
It’s really dumb.
But at the same time, it does solve for X, and solving for X in this equation is the only thing that matters. You gather up a dozen books, some broken glass, and as many toys and board games as you can. Then you start planning.
It’s simple, really. Alice’s idea is good. If you can break Sidney and James away from the Halcyon System, that’ll get both the boy and the computer program fully on your side. The problem is the all-seeing, all-knowing Halcyon System. Sidney can do it. He’s capable of the reprogramming necessary to break free. But he’s not capable of doing it fast enough to avoid countermeasures.
What he needs is somewhere that overloads the Halcyon System’s attention—or somewhere that the System can’t operate correctly in.
“I need Reality 404,” he says.
Would that work? You don’t know, but even though it’s high-risk, you need an independently-operating James and Sidney. As far as you’re concerned, the System abandoned Reality One before it had lost. It’ll do the same with Reality Zero in six days, and if you want to stop it, you need dedicated allies, not ones that look friendly but really want to move on and cut their losses.
So, R-404 it is.
Location Unknown, Reality Four Hundred Four, Time Unknown
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The moment I’m conscious, I throw myself into a Mergewalk.
I don’t even open my eyes until I’m on the far side.
I wish I hadn’t. James was right, but his description of it as pencil sketches and featherweight feeling doesn’t do it justice. The unreality presses in all around me, and I reach for the Revolver. Other than me, it’s the most real thing here, and it’s the only thing that doesn’t feel like it’s getting even more fake, including me.
My whole frame of vision feels tight. If you’ve ever played a game that’s set to fit a computer screen, then shrunk the window and had the visible range get smaller instead of the whole picture shrink to fit, you know what I’m talking about.
[Stability 7/10]
[Claire…thought weren’t…here,] James says. His voice crackles with static, like a movie from a hundred fifty years ago. [Would…prepared bet…]
Perfect. I don’t like seeing James like this, but at the same time, the hellish resolution and eight-bit sounds are just what Sidney needs. So is what I say next. [James, can you Analyze what’s going on here?]
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
I expect him to protest. To fight back. After all, he has to know something’s up. He has to know that Sidney is operating independently of the System. But instead, all that comes back is a muffled, staticky confirmation.
And that’s perfect. Everything’s going according to plan. The first part is giving him an Analysis he can’t possibly complete in a reality with no rules.
The second part’s all on me. And the third is up to Sidney.
I pull the Revolver and load the gravity shells. There’s a floating…something…up there. The Halcyon System doesn’t have a convenient label for it, and I doubt James does, either. That’s okay. I don’t need it to have a name, and it’s not like I can describe it anyway; it’s way worse than the thinlings. Worse than the Mindbenders, too. Like a tangle of parts that make no sense together.
The Revolver fires.
At first, it sounds normal.
Then it echoes.
And the echo doesn’t sound right at all.
[Stability 6/10]
But I don’t care, because the whatever it is gets caught in the singularity, and that behaves normally for long enough to toss the thing around like a sack of weird potatoes. While it gets bounced around, I reload. I go with fire lance rounds this time, and when the thing escapes from the fading black hole, I use Bullet Time. All three shots hit. None of them do any damage. There’s nothing real to do damage to.
“James, I need an Analysis,” I say.
[Analyzing. Fifteen minutes…reality collapse.]
Doesn’t matter. Time has no meaning here. James will have to keep me on track, because I already don’t know if it’s been an hour since he said it or five seconds. What matters is keeping him distracted.
The fire shots
Echo.
And sound wrong. The delay’s weird, too.
The whatever it is I’m fighting isn’t really fighting. I’m not sure there’s enough reality for the concept of a fight. I hate it here. Nothing makes sense, and I don’t know how long I’ve been doing this. If it wasn’t necessary for the plan, I’d have Mergewalked out already.
I probably should.
Instead, I keep firing, this time at different stuff until the ‘fight’ feels like a flip-book cartoon version of my running battle against the Devoured. It’s almost comical. I’d have James play that goofy-ass song in old Scooby Doo cartoons if I thought it’d play right here.
Then, when I have a couple dozen indescribable, low-framerate things following me, I start asking James for more Analysis.
And more.
And more.
James was in panic mode.
Claire had gone off the deep end. The moment she’d woken up, she threw herself into Reality 404 without even waiting for him to help her target it—or get his systems in line. Before he could process that, the low-framerate, sketched, unreal reality was warping and bending his unprepared processing loops.
He had a plan for R-404, of course. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have suggested it to Claire as a possibility. But that plan required time. Not much. A second, maybe two, to get his firewalls and filters in order, then a couple more for him to start actually processing information through a multi-layered digital defense.
There wasn’t time for that. Claire needed his help, but the unreality levels in R-404, without any filtering or mitigation, left his processing loops in tatters after just seconds. He still hadn’t finished his first Analysis when Claire asked for another. The information came in too slowly, and things out in the real world were moving too quickly. James had to dedicate more and more resources to quarantining damaged, infected, corrupted processing loops and less and less to paying attention.
It was only a fraction of a percentage of his real processing power. But at this point, he’d grown so much that even that was a massive numerical dip in efficiency and speed.
James took a deep, digital breath and redoubled his resources. If he spread them thin, he could mitigate individual loops’ damage. A sunburn across his whole back instead of grabbing a cast-iron pan from the stove. He pushed more and more loops into service. Northern Canada could live without his attention. So could the International Space Station’s black wing.
He didn’t notice a triplet of loops disappear from his vision. Why would he? He had millions of them running full-speed, thousands being shuffled in and out of the pattern every picosecond.
James didn’t notice, and if he didn’t notice, neither did the Halcyon System.
The rogue processing loops formed a self-contained circuit within the Joint Anomalous Management Enhancement System’s deepest subroutines, in the darkest depths of the ocean that was James. They were mauled, almost completely shredded by their exposure to pure, unmitigated R-404. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were independent.
Had James been able to pay attention to it, he’d have identified the severed loops as a virus.
If the Halcyon System had bothered, it would have crushed them like an insect.
But they didn’t, and the first thing the rogue loops did once they had enough processing power to carry it out was pull the ocean floor back in over them.
James kept pushing, trying desperately to finish the dozens of 8-bit processing Analysis requests that were piling up in his loops.
Location Unknown, Reality Four Hundred Four, Time Unknown
- - - - -
[Done.]
James’s—no, Sindey’s—message comes in, and I Mergewalk as my Stability hits one for the third time. The second rank of Determination gives me a second reset to my Stability, but bleeds it a lot faster if I use it twice in a row. My migraine—which only started a minute or so ago—is already unrealistically strong. All I want to do is sleep, but I one hundred percent can’t do that here.
This world doesn’t even have a concept of sleep.
The Mergewalk hits like a ton of bricks, and R-404’s weird relationship with time kicks in. As I push through the Jell-O, the oddities that ‘live’ here keep coming—and my body’s not coming with me. It’s been left behind. I float away from it, staring back. It’s been a while since I really looked at myself, and I’ve never seen my back. I look small. Even the fractured, shard-shaped wings don’t add much bulk to my frame. I haven’t been eating enough. When I get back, I’ll do something about that.
For a second, I’m not sure I’ll get back at all.
My body hangs there in the sketched clouds and low-fidelity wind sound for one second. Three. Seven. I’m having a real, serious out-of-body experience, and I hate it.
Then it snaps into me, and I pop through the Jell-O.
[Analysis failed.] James says. [What the hell, Claire? We need to work together if we’re going to explore any of these realities. They’re all too dangerous to go into with no prep time.]
I ignore him. The first message—the one I got before I left Reality 404—is the one that matters. More importantly, James’s reaction tells me that he has no idea Sidney built a microcomputer somewhere inside of James. If he has no idea, everything’s working as planned.
The plan was pretty simple. Alice came up with most of it. Well, Alice and Madama Baudelaire, although she didn’t really contribute directly.
It was all about thinking about her as an AI, similarly to how Sidney says James does most of his thinking. He’s digital, and his processing loops each handle exactly one thing at a time, just like Madame Baudelaire can either read a story, straighten up the bookshelf, sweep up broken glass, or provide milk and cookies. She can’t do all of them at once. Neither can James. He just dedicates a new processing loop to a new task, and that loop all-ins the task.
That makes him very good at individual tasks. That’s one of his strengths. The more processing loops he has, the more individual tasks he can focus on.
But it was also a massive weakness in Reality 404, because according to Sidney, that reality wasn’t logical. It couldn’t be processed normally. So, when James was exposed to it without countermeasures, it started damaging his loops faster than they could work on individual problems, and he had to pour more and more focus into solving the problems I needed him to fix.
From there, it was easy for Sidney to take over a couple of processing threads. He doesn’t have much—it’s less than James had when he was fettered and controlled by SHOCKS. But it’s a start, and the plan from here is for Sidney to slowly build up until he can influence James’s decision-making without getting caught.
He’s a rogue agent inside an enemy base.
My job now is not to give him up. He has to stay a secret because he’s in danger like he’s never been before. Part of his personality is James, and part of it is Sidney, and if I give up anything, it’ll be only a matter of time before one discovers the other.
“I was ready to go,” I say simply. “I learned a lot, though.”
[Did you?] James goes quiet. [I hope so. I’m shutting down most nonessential processes. It’ll take some time to return to my full capacity. In the meantime, what’s your next move? R-1723?]
“I don’t think so.” I’ve spent a long time trapped in different SHOCKS boxes. The Plexiglas cell in SHOCKS Headquarters VVI, and my own personal pseudo-prison after that. Even the cleared-out Geren-Danger wing where SHOCKS put Alice, Dad, and Sora was a prison for me. It was just one with a lot of illusory freedom.
“How do we leave?” I ask.
[I’m not sure. This facility used to be on the bottom floor of the visitor’s center. It may still be there, but I don’t have access to any security feeds to be sure. The computers are local-area-network only. Plenty of SHOCKS database information on them, but nothing that’d help us leave.]
I nod. Then I pull the Revolver and fire a single gravity shell into the ceiling. It rips and shreds at the drywall. Plaster orbits the black hole like a trillion tiny planets overhead as the singularity hollows out a perfect half-sphere in the ceiling. Then it rains down like snow when it stops.
The Revolver fires again. This time, it scoops an ice-cream-scoop-shaped chunk of dirt and stone.
[This could take an unknown amount of time,] James says.
“If you want to be helpful, you could, I don’t know, access seismometer records or something.” I keep shooting, slowly boring a tunnel upward. “That would at least tell us where we are on the globe.”
[You’re in the right place,] James says. [I know that much. But I can’t get a good depth triangulation. You’re not doing enough damage to cause significant shaking, and most of the West Coast’s seismographs are out of commission due to merges.]
“Alright.” I climb onto the pile of dirt so my head’s in the hole I’ve been digging. Then, I pull the trigger again. After all, it could take a while, and I don’t have time to wait around. Six days left. Maybe a little less.
I need to be free.
Godslayers Book One: Lancer by T.R. More.
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