Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Larry suddenly realized he was sweating profusely. “Go—go ahead,” he said, his voice tight and dry.

The warm-up room faded away, and Larry Chao stood in uncharted darkness.

“All right,” MacDougal said. “Here we go.” The darkness faded, and the base of the Rabbit Hole—the base of the Hole as it had been five years before—bloomed up out of blackness. “This is our feed now,” MacDougal whispered in his ear. “We’re feeding the same scene to both you and Lucian.”

Larry felt his heart pounding, and his vision blurred for a moment. But then it cleared, and nothing had changed. This was the place, the horrible place where he had died. And there was Lucian, directly ahead of him, standing there in his pressure suit, looking past Larry’s shoulder at whatever was behind him. Lucian, alive, exactly as he had been.

It seemed as if time stopped in that one moment—and maybe it did. Maybe it was not some trick of his mind, but a glitch in the computer program, that had frozen time.

Where am 1 ? Larry asked himself. Am I inside the computer, inside Lucian’s mind, just here to feed a figment to his imagination? Am I inside the TeleOperator the computer is simulating? Who is the puppet, and who is pulling the string ?

Yes , I know I’m in the VR exoskeleton, but what does that matter? The VR video is not what I see, or hear. I see the past, the real past, the moment just before I died .

And suddenly he realized that it was not just Lucian who needed to break out of this moment. He had died here too, and had lived to tell the tale. But I never did tell the tale to anyone, not really. Never talked about it. Never dealt with it. Never faced it. Now I can. I can make it go away, make it never happen .

“Behind you!” Lucian called, the dead man speaking the dead man’s words in the dead man’s voice.

Larry turned around, and saw the two wheeled Charonians, just as they had been. For a moment, fear flared anew in his heart. But this time he would not let them kill him. This time the computers were controlling the sims, and the Charonians were programmed to lose.

With a strange sense of exaltation, Larry lunged for the closer Charonian, grabbed at one of its manipulator arms, yanked it from its socket and hurled it away. Larry smashed the TeleOperator’s fist through the thing’s carapace, and the machinery inside sparked and flared. He spun about, kicked the other one in the midsection, flipped it over so that its wheels spun helplessly in mid-air. He grabbed at the left rear wheel and pulled it off.

“Oh my God,” Lucian said. Larry spun around and looked at— what? at Lucian? at Lucian’s computer projection as directed by the simulator? At a projection of Lucian’s body as controlled by his mind?

“He’s still in it,” MacDougal’s voice, whispering. “We’re getting his visual output here, and he still sees it the old way. It’s a bit muddled here and there, but he’s seeing what he’s always seen—”

“They know we’re here,” Larry’s voice said through the headphones, though he had not spoken. It was Lucian’s memory of his voice, of what he had said five years before. Larry was hearing his own ghost, and the idea terrified him.

Then Lucian’s body flew up in the air, lifted by invisible arms, and he was carried away, down the tunnel, by enemies unseen.

“Good God,” MacDougal said. “I’m watching Lucian’s optic nerve output, and he saw the Charonian you just killed pick him up and run out of the tunnel with him. He didn’t see your actions at all. The computer sim matched what Lucian thought was happening to him and carried him out, even if the simulated Charonians weren’t there to move him. Incredible.”

“Yeah,” Larry agreed, panting. He realized he was still holding the Charonian’s left rear wheel, and he flung it away.

“We’re going to have to reset, try again to snap him out of it,” MacDougal said. “Do you think you can do it again?”

Larry looked down at the computer-generated phantoms of the things that attacked him, killed him five years before. He was whole, and they were bits of mangled metal. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I can do that as often as you like.”

Two more times, three, four, a dozen more times, until Larry lost track of how long ago he had lost track, until even the idea of revenge had lost its savor. The simulated Charonians would always lose. Killing them the first few times had been good for Larry’s soul, but by the twentieth time—if this was the twentieth time—his strongest reaction to killing the wheeled Charonians was that his arms were getting tired. He grabbed at the second one and kicked a hole clean through this time, just to give his arms a rest.

Larry turned around and watched Lucian being borne away by invisible hands once again—but there was definitely something jerky, uncertain, about the motion. Lucian was still heading down that damned tunnel, but it was less smooth every time.

“Okay,” MacDougal said. “One more time, from the top.”

“Right,” Larry said, his voice weary. The base of the Rabbit Hole faded to darkness, then reappeared once again. Lucian—or at least the computer image of Lucian in his pressure suit—was back where he had started.

But Lucian’s image—Lucian—didn’t stay there. He stepped forward toward Larry, did not cry out a warning. He had changed.

Changed . Larry turned and saw the wheeled Charonians there. Should he attack again? No. Nothing brutal, nothing violent this time. Enough of destruction. Show Lucian something else. Make it different. Larry raised his hand, palm out, to the simulated Charonians, praying that whoever was operating their images would have the wit to follow his lead. “Stop,” Larry said. “Go away. Don’t bother us anymore. We don’t want you here.”

The two alien machines regarded him for a moment—and then wheeled backwards, turned around, and rolled away. Larry watched them going, knowing that at least some of his own nightmares were leaving with them. He had exorcised his own demons.

But what of Lucian?

Larry turned back, toward Lucian’s image as it came toward him, moving slowly, awkwardly, the image a bit jerky, Lucian’s mind moving his body in ways it had not used in a long time. “Lar-ree?” Lucian asked. “Lar-ree… tha you?”

“It is almost impossible, and certainly pointless, to explain the Naked Purple Movement. Even the term ‘Movement’ is misleading, as it implies a large group moving purposefully toward a goal. While the number of the Purple has at times been large, no one would say they have ever moved toward any clear goal. They are not known as the Pointless Cause for nothing.

“At least the term ‘Naked Purple’ is meaningful. Paint yourself purple, and wander around naked in public, and you will achieve what at least passes for the basic Naked Purple goal: you will be annoying, disconcerting, and confusing to outsiders. In their strange dress, in their often belligerent—and yet whimsical—rejection of the norms and ideas of society, in their deliberately incomprehensible speeches and writings, the Naked Purple work to shake things up, turn things upside down, force us to look at things in a new way. While it is true that this is often a good thing to do, few would deny that the Purple tend to overdo it…

“…The catastrophe of the Abduction wiped out every other orbital facility. Only NaPurHab, the Naked Purple Habitat, survived. While that can be ascribed mostly to luck, I for one would like to suggest that it was destiny as well. Who else better suited to spend their lives in close orbit of a black hole?”