Phantasm

We all looked at the screen.

“Go on, go on,” Axel said impatiently. “There’s a vestibule down there like last time.”

We headed down cautiously to find a small room with four doors, some plain chairs and another big screen. Axel was already on it.

“So, who’s going to go first?” he asked excitedly.

I looked at Borys. It was his turn.

“Why did you—” he started, before cutting himself off. I guessed it was some version of why did Axel recreate the Nazis and an atomic bomb, fake or not, but the answer to that question was always going to be that he thought it was funny.

“Who is trying—” he tried again but this time, I cut him off.

“If you ask who’s trying to save the Earth, you’ll just get a name. If you ask how to contact them, the answer will just be get to the bottom level.”

“Mmm,” Axel said with a big smile. “I think you’ll be a little more surprised by the answer than that, but you’ll discover that particular fact soon enough. Try for a more interesting question.”

“Fine,” Borys grunted. “What did the gods send us here to do?”

The Axel on the screen raised an eyebrow. “I’m supposed to know what the gods intend? I’m not the one they speak to.”

“You know something about it,” I said.

“True,” Axel replied. “I know what I have been doing, and I can guess which of my activities some gods might have an objection to. No one’s asked me to stop, however.”

“I’m guessing that communicating with you would go against their non-interference pact,” I said.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Axel acknowledged. “It’s a complicated treaty though. I’m sure there are some loopholes they could have utilised. Much more polite than sending a bunch of thugs to strong-arm me.”

“If you don’t want to answer the question…” Borys said.

“No, no, I’ll answer it,” Axel said. “As long as you accept that my speculation about the motives of the gods is just that. I wouldn’t want to mislead with what could be incorrect information.”

Borys nodded. “That’s fair enough,” he said. “Speculate away.”

Axel grinned, far wider than a face made of flesh could. “Well. I should begin by saying that the alternate dimensions that the gate has been connecting to haven’t been quite as random as they’re supposed to be.

“The elves were under the impression that the gods were responsible for that.”

“Oh, no, no, no. Not unless they’re being very subtle in influencing me. Although…”

Axel paused for a second. “In a way, they’re right, since I’m doing it a the behest of a god. Not one of the ones they’re thinking of, though.”

“You cut a deal with Ashmor,” I said flatly.

“Indeed I did! Apparently, it’s easier for him to keep my activities secret than it is for him to intervene directly.

“Not that secret, if they sent us,” I said.

“Well, I’m sure the gods can run a statistical analysis of the types of demons entering as well as the next doctorate student. Once the demons started making it out, I’m sure they noticed something was wrong. Hardly my problem.”

“What were the terms of the deal with Ashmor?” I asked.

Axel smirked. “Another question?” he asked. “Don’t worry, I won’t count it. I still haven’t finished the first one.”

“Thanks, I think.”

Axel winked at me. “My deal with Ashmor was simply that he’d conceal the rest of my activities.”

“That’s it?” Borys asked. We weren’t really maintaining question discipline here, it seemed.

“Obviously, he would rather have had me open the portal wide to the most destructive type of demon… but I like existing.”

I wondered about that. Wouldn’t a full breech have forced the gods to act and vaporise the place? Fiddling with the destinations didn’t seem to accomplish much. A few deaths? The only real thing it accomplished was…

Getting us here. Maybe the elves were right. I didn’t have time to think about that, though, because Axel continued talking.

“Which brings us to the other thing that some gods might, possibly, have an objection to,” Axel said. “How to put this? I’ve been stretching my wings.”

“I wasn’t aware you had wings,” I said.

“Metaphorical,” Axel told me. “Let’s see…”

Axel’s face was replaced with something like a screensaver. A dark blue background with light blue lines and stars, all of them moving. It looked kind of familiar… Axel’s voice came through unabated.

“I am rather more aware of my nature than most,” he said. “There aren’t many who can observe the workings of their own brain.”

“I’ve seen what a dungeon core looks like in action,” I said. “It doesn’t look like that.”

“Just a representation,” Axel said. “Mana isn’t turned to computation easily, there are all sorts of tricks you have to play to make it work nicely.”

It came to me where I’d seen that picture before. On television programs, when they’d needed to show…”

“The Internet,” I said aloud. “You’ve been networking.”

“Exactly right,” Axel said smugly. “I’m a construction of mana, but what I’m really made of is the computation that it allows. Other universes have different computational paradigms.”

“You’ve lost me,” Kyle said, holding his hand up. The others from this world looked just as confused.

“He’s been outsourcing—sorry, that’s a business term. He’s been having his thoughts happen in a different dimension,” I explained. From the looks on my friends faces, that had not helped. I tried again.

“Imagine you could build another brain in a separate location.” Hopefully, my companions knew what a brain was for. I remembered reading that early physicians thought it was for cooling the blood. “It would have to be connected to yours—somehow—but then you could do your thinking someplace else.”

“Wouldn’t that just make a second person?” Felicia said slowly.

I breathed a sigh of relief. She still wasn’t getting it, but she was leagues ahead of where I thought she might be.

“Yeah,” I said. “But that’s because you don’t understand how your own mind works. The gods do—” I assumed they must, if they were putting together people and dungeon cores. “—and so does Axel, here. He knows enough about how he works to mesh two different cores together.”

“Why?” Kyle asked. Axel opened his mouth, but shut it when I glared at him.

“To get out from under the gods,” I said. “He’s got a place they can’t reach, where he can make plans that they can’t see.”

“It’s none of their business, really,” Axel said. “But I imagine that they might want me to stop. And before you waste a question on what those plans are—I don’t know, of course. That is the entire point.”

“You must… take actions when you don’t know your reasons for them,” I mused. “It would look a lot like—feel like—being crazy.”

Axel smiled. “I modified myself so I wouldn’t mind,” he said.

I shuddered at the thought of a self-modifying AI with access to extra-dimensional computing and access to very real space-time magic in this dimension.

“They did not give us enough warnings about you,” I said. “You know that doing that exact thing was how our universe died, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “Binary Nexus was exploiting a bug with no understanding of what was going on,” he said. “I’m far in advance of where they were.”

“Of course you are,” I muttered. “That’s exactly what they always say just before disaster strikes.”

“Dimensional catastrophes aren’t as bad as they sound,” Axel said dismissively. “You two survived yours, I’m sure you’ll manage if one should strike again.”

I stared grimly at the Axel on the screen. “Second question,” I said. “What happens if we destroy your core?”

“Kandis!” Felicia gasped.

Axel laughed. “Your concern is appreciated, Mistress Bolton, but I will be fine. No longer existing in this reality, but fine.”

He paused in thought while I thought about how he knew her last name. Did a dungeon’s [Identify] work on people?

“To answer your question more fully,” Axel said thoughtfully. “It would depend on the state of the Gate at the time. It was put inside me to contain it, after all.”

He paused again. “The interaction between it and the collapse of my little hidey-hole is hard to model, but I think it would remain fully open for… forty-five days of local time within my nominal space before being expelled, along with everything that came out of it.”

“Local time…” I said, remembering that Axel was using time dilation. “How long from the outside?”

“Oh, not much more than a second,” Axel replied. “What comes out, of course, depends on what I set the Gate to immediately before my untimely demise.”

He smiled cruelly. “There are a few options. If I connected to the heart of a star, there would be more than enough time to fill this entire space with superheated plasma. It would be quite the explosion, and I do wonder if the gods could contain it.”

I grimaced. “I guess that explains why the gods haven’t vaporised your ass.”

“Do you know, I don’t believe that it does,” Axel said thoughtfully. “I think that the non-interference treaty does protect me. As does Ashmor, of course.”

“I’m surprised Ashmor hasn’t convinced you to destroy the world since you’ve already got backups,” I snorted.

“I have no intention of destroying the world,” Axel said with a raised eyebrow. “Humans have ten fingers, but I don’t see them cutting one off for no reason.”

“I guess,” I said. I looked at Borys. “Your question.”

He frowned. “How do you know all this?” he asked. “About our Earth, the computer games, what happened to it, all that.”

“Hmmm,” Axel said. “It’s difficult to give a complete answer that doesn’t take us a lifetime to relate. I pick up tidbits here and there. I talk to people who know… many things. But the majority…”

He paused for thought again. “A lot of data from old Earth ended up here,” he said. “Like debris from an explosion. That’s not a good analogy—data doesn’t have a physical presence to get flung somewhere. It’s a case of data preservation routines dueling with malfunctioning garbage collection routines, that led to the data being stored… not in this universe, but somewhere that this universe can access.”

“Is that why Ix is based on a person from my universe?” I asked.

“Ah, that is a good question, but I’m afraid we’re out of time,” Axel said. “To finish my last answer, I am uniquely placed to collect this data, put it together into a useful form, and learn things about the lost culture that is old Earth.”

The four doors lit up with the symbols for numbers. One of them lit up with a zero, the others with eight to ten.

“And now!” Axel crowed, “It’s time to select your next floor! Will you take your leave? Or will you press on, for glory and adventure and the Gate to Other Worlds?”

“Do we need more than three extra questions?” I asked Borys. He shook his head.

“I think anything else we need to know will get answered by the Gate,” he said.

“Rude!” Axel said with fake outrage. “You’re teeming with questions! You just asked me one! How will you live with yourselves if you run out?”

“We’ll manage somehow,” I said. “Door Ten it is, then.”

Everyone murmured agreement but I didn’t make a move for the door.

“Something wrong?” Felicia asked.

“I’m just bracing myself for another forced memory update,” I said. “The last one included the moment my universe tore itself apart around me, so I’m not looking forward to what comes next.”

“I don’t think anything could come after that,” Borys said. “You can’t make memories if there’s no universe to hold you.”

“You think I—we—were just frozen in time between then and now?” I asked. “That’s comforting, really, compared to the alternatives.”

“Only one way to find out,” he said. “And… whatever happens, it’s just a memory, right? You know you lived through it.”

“I didn’t realise you were a PTSD therapist,” I said sourly. “But you are right.”

I stepped up to and through the door.

Fyskel was waiting for me.