James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

As she had done so often before, she makes no effort to cancel the intruding program but instead lets her hallucinative fingers tap out a holding code. The screen flashes// TIME * INDEPENDENT * STORE // and vanishes from her mind.

With that the sense of the calling awareness comes back in force. Come! Follow me! The friendly quality is unmistakable now.

Fantasy upon fantasy. Bemused, she yields and lets herself flow from invisible point to point in the desired direction, as she has learned to do. I am in the underworld with my faithful computer, she thinks. I am being led through the land of death by a friendly computer program. Perhaps it likes you, someone had said. Perhaps it does, or at least the crazy ghost-program does. She is sure she senses a strange amicable intent, unliving, cool yet warm. The marvel of the complexity of the great electronic ganglia comes to her again. Could it have been, was it, somehow a real base of life?

The idea seems more than fantasy here, following insubstantiality through nowhere. More memories awake. She had never had nor desired telepathy, the contact of human minds; but some abstraction of energy-in-complexity had always touched her in a deep, peculiar way. She empathized with it. Working with TOTAL she had always felt in more than technical rapport, some bond beyond the mere program being executed. She had never consciously thought about this; it was of the same almost shameful secret nature as her flashes of power over real matter. A crazy thing. Perhaps she was not very human. But if structured energy achieved a kind of life, would she not have access to it?

The idea grows into conviction. She is sure now that she recognizes the entity she is following, a computer life somehow tuned to hers. But where, in what strange universe are they?

She has been increasingly aware that their dreamlike progress is changing course, the route is not straight. And it is hazardous; she is receiving now urgent demands to hurry, now a sense of being warned back. It is weirdly like a child’s game. But the danger here is not imaginary; again and again she feels a brush of icy menace. Is she being led stealthily through a fortress? Are they escaping? Or are they going ever-deeper into the heart of the immense enemy, to its very brain, perhaps?

Deeper, she thinks; danger seems to lie now on all sides, as if they are creeping through secret conduits into an inmost stronghold. Vast unknown energies are all about; the void is not quite empty, here. Human fear touches her, and she hesitates. But the urgent pleading intensifies, begs her to go on. She does. The nothingness around her densens. Surely she is nearing some end.

At that moment all urgency to motion ceases, and she knows that she has arrived. The destination, the center, the mighty nexus of this universe lies just beyond. Warily she gathers herself. What is here?

As it had done before, the console-image rises to life in her mind. This time the screen is lit. She reads:

// NO * ENTRY * EXCEPT * TO * AUTHORIZED * PERSONNEL //

For a timeless instant that which had been Margaret Omali tries to laugh, would laugh, exists as laughter in the dreadful dark.

The absurd message brightens, changes to TOTAL’S time-signature, then runs through an array of vectors she recognizes as a loop in the NASA space-voyage simulation, ending with a special-exit sequence and repeats:

/ / NO * ENTRY * TO * OTHER * THAN * AUTHORIZED * PERSONNEL //

Slowly, she understands. This is communication; somehow a mind that is not a mind, an unliving life, is trying to link with hers. How does it know her? Is it possible that the same keys that gave her entry to TOTAL were a two-way channel, gave TOTAL some real access to her? Does it know her as a program called human?

No matter. She has the message: This is a portal.

Here is the interface with some unknown concentration of power and information. She can go in. But the decision is forever. Once inside, once “authorized,” she will be meshed with whatever lies beyond.

Past this point, she thinks, I won’t be human anymore. The thought troubles her briefly. But the presence she has followed is waiting, emanating its promise and warning. A cold beauty seems to call to her, a vista of no earthly dimensions. What does she care for the humanity she had known?

Deliberately disregarding a last faint pulse of mortal fear, she focusses on the darkness ahead. A silent tide of power seems to rise against her, cold, cold and enormous. But she has power too. Here, push here! TOTAL seems to call. She gathers her weird small sense of force and sends it wholly at the interface, lunges mindwise at the enveloping black. “ I am authorized!”

Disorientation takes her, consciousness fractures. For an endless moment she is only a cloud of will in motion, suffering immense compression like a huge black squeeze. “ I will!”

—And the barrier yields.

She is through, she has come into the unknown power’s heart.

Slowly she collects herself, not feeling, at first, very different.

But she is not in silence anymore. This space is structured with directional energies, pulse-trains of signals on a myriad unknown bands. New senses.

She puzzles briefly, trying to make these strange inputs come clear. She is on the verge of understandings, her structure is merging with detector-circuits undreamed-of. She is not at all frightened, only eager for some vast new mode of being that lies near. There is no sense of menace anymore; only a peculiar cold sadness which is not hers. It comes to her with no surprise that she is no longer mobile. She will not leave this place; she has no desire to.

As she feels outward mentally, the time-signature of TOTAL recurs insistently to her attention. So the small ghost is with her here, linked to these mysteries, yet apart. Will it be her access, as it had in life?

Experimentally, she wills a master circuit, flicks a phantom switch. Board On!

In answer, a spectral console springs up around her, merged with her old familiar board. But this is an apparition glimmering into strange dimensions, a vast control-panel of dreams whose keys bear cryptic symbols.

She studies it, trying to grasp the layout. As she does so, portions of the great board seem to light up in focus as if an invisible spotlight is moving from one to the next with her mind. At the same time she has a brilliant image of her own fingers hovering curiously over the keys. The vision is far more vivid than before; this place is potent. Thought-structures are strong here, as if she could create reality by will.

The thought amuses her. She flexes her dream-fingers as she had in life, feeling herself drawing on a thread of secret power. Her strange flashes of efficacy over matter are stronger, steadier here. The unknown potency of this void is compatible, reinforcing and resonating on a band which is more than a frequency, in which she shares.

On impulse she holds up her dream-hand and bends down the long familiar fingers one by one, counting in binary mode: 00001, 00010,00011, 00100… The mental construct holds, runs off to 2 5-l, thirty-one. Why, she can do anything!

Can she create? Experimentally she wills her hand to hold a bunch of white roses. They are there. Perfume, she thinks—and the scent she had loved wafts to her nonexistent nostrils. For a moment she lets herself exist in pleasure. The thought comes to her that she could will herself an intact body, be as she had been as a child before—before what she will not think of. But the idea is faint, far-off; she tosses it up and away with the roses. They turn to a cascade of sparks, wink put as they fall toward the shadowy tiers. The huge console seems to be still waiting enigmatically for her attention.