James Maxey - Dragonforge

"Look," said Jazz, waving toward the glowing blue-white orb above them. "Have you ever seen anything so beautiful in all your life? That's an entire biosphere you're looking at. It's not just a big ball of wet rock. It's the largest living thing you're ever going to lay eyes upon. You have to understand something important: If it weren't for me, that wonderful living planet above us would be dead. The world owes me big, but I'm not expecting any thanks. I did it out of love."

Jandra stared at the earth, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Icecaps and oceans and land masses green and gray and tan. It seemed unimaginably small and impossibly big at the same time.

"I was born into a world that was dying," said Jazz. "The world had already toppled over the brink of environmental catastrophe before I was out of diapers. The atmosphere and oceans were poisoned in order to satisfy the consumption of the wealthy. The richer nations could afford the illusion of environmental health by shipping their most polluting industries to remote corners of the globe. Except, there were no remote corners of the globe-pollute the air in Timbuktu, and eventually the poison spreads everywhere."

"I've heard that mankind once ruled the world, then fell," said Jandra. "Did the environmental catastrophe cause this?"

"Curiously, no," said Jazz. "The more poisoned the world became, the wealthier people grew. It was a perverse cycle. When people are rich enough, they can afford to live disconnected from nature. What does it matter if the atmosphere is fouled when you live cradle to grave in sealed vehicles and buildings where the air is finely controlled? Sure, there were millions of people who cared and tried to save things. But there were billions more who carried on their happy lives as planetary parasites, shopping and gorging with endless appetites, forever plugged into an endless stream of distracting entertainments that allowed them to ignore the greater truth around them."

"So what-"

"Double, triple, quadruple whammies," Jazz said, anticipating her question. "Atomic warfare in Asia was followed quickly by big bioterrorism attacks in the world's largest cities. Seventy percent mortality in London and New York, almost ninety percent in Hong Kong. The biggest earthquake ever seen flattened California and set the world ringing like a bell. Tidal waves, volcanoes, earthquakes; it was a lousy year. Economies collapsed faster than consumers could shop them back to health. Megamolds evolved and ate half the south. Then, right in the middle of this mess, Atlantis showed up."

"You keep talking about Atlantis like I should know what it is," said Jandra.

"Well, you should, girl. You're using Atlantean tech."

"Vendevorex mentioned it but didn't go into detail. Who are the Atlanteans?"

"The Atlanteans are us," said Jazz. "Just people. But Atlantis isn't us at all. Right around the time that the world was falling apart, the Navy built a fancy piece of equipment called a warp door. It functioned using the concept of spooky action at a distance-entangled particles are able to communicate information instantaneously no matter what their distance, as if they are connected via some higher space. The Air Force built a very fancy and very expensive portal that connected a room in Dover, Delaware to a room in Houston, Texas. The two sides of the warp door were separated by over a thousand miles on the map, yet occupied the very same space due to the higher dimensional nature of entangled particles."

"I don't understand a thing you're saying to me," said Jandra.

"Don't worry about it. The important thing is, use of the warp door created ripples through underspace, and an alien intelligence came to earth to check us out because of this."

Jazz pointed to a gleaming silver snowflake in the center of an ocean. Jandra's enhanced vision could see that the snowflake was actually an island, covered with gleaming spires miles high.

"That's Atlantis. I don't know who designed it, but it arrived as a tiny seed of intelligence and grew into a city searching for inhabitants to care for. It's nearly godlike in power, and almost limitlessly altruistic. It was going to share its advanced technology freely with mankind-until I crippled it."

"Why would you cripple something you say was altruistic?"

"Because mankind had done so much damage with its primitive tools, I could only imagine the horrors unleashed if every man had the power of a god. Fortunately Atlantis was, at its heart, a machine intelligence. I was the FBI's most wanted cyberterrorist. So, when I met Atlantis, I hacked it. I wasn't able to destroy it, but I was able to give its omnipotence some boundaries. Its altruism ends at its shores now. The people of Atlantis live in bliss, but Atlantis withholds its blessings from the remainder of the world. The Atlanteans are mostly blind to the rest of the planet. The passage of a thousand years has proven I made the right call. As the rest of mankind has fallen back into barbarism, the earth has slowly begun to heal."

"I have so many questions I don't know where to start," said Jandra. "I feel like I only understand every other word you're saying."

"Yeah," said Jazz. "I suppose I could patiently explain the entire history of mankind to you over a long course of lectures. Or, I could do this."

Jazz reached out and touched a finger to Jandra's forehead. Images splashed through her mind, like the pages of a million picture books being flipped at blinding speed. A city of gleaming spires; a small reddish dragon attacking a marble angel; a black doorway that opened into emptiness; an apple; a starry sky; a silver key. She dropped to her knees, dizzy, stirring up a cloud of fine gray dust. She saw a dead man walking even though he was plainly disemboweled. She saw emaciated monkeys dropping down from rainbows. She brought her hands to her scalp. Her temples throbbed. It felt as if her brain were swelling against the confines of her skull.

"What are you doing to me?" she gasped, as tears blurred her vision.

"I commanded the nanites to physically rearrange your synapses to give you some of my memories. You won't be able to understand them instantly, but as we talk you'll discover you have the context to understand me. You're going to have the mother of all headaches for a while, but in the long run you'll be much more pleasant company."

"I don't remember agreeing to be around for the long run," said Jandra, certain she was going to vomit. When had she last eaten? All she could think of was that unidentified jerky that Adam had offered her. Salty and tough, the way it kept growing in her mouth as she chewed. Her body spasmed, yet, somehow, she held it all in. Trembling, she said. "I-I just want to find Zeeky and her family and take them home."

"Right," said Jazz. "That won't be happening."

"W-why?" said Jandra. The pain in her grew worse. Her head was being stabbed at its core by a million sharp knives. Her intestines knotted. She fell as her strength fled. It seemed to take forever to fall to the gray dust. "W-what d-did you do to them?"

"You won't understand yet," said Jazz.

"That h-hasn't s-stopped you so far," Jandra said, her fingers digging into the moon soil. She clenched her jaws and closed her eyes, trying to calm the storm within her. She wanted Jazz to keep talking. Her voice was a welcome distraction from the cacophony within her own skull.

"True," said Jazz. "Those rainbows that got us here pass through underspace. When I go through them, there's nothing in between. I step in one side, I step out the other. But a thousand years ago, I met a man who got lost between the rainbows. His name was Alex Pure. He was the first human ever to use the door, and he survived in underspace for years. He told me that being inside was akin to being omniscient. He said you see anything you want from inside: the future as well as the past. It's possible he was delusional, but I'd like to find out. I'm already immortal; omniscience would be a nice bullet point on my godhood resume."