《Crystal Skies》


 Preface: Another Pandoras Box

    Being a scavenger is dangerous, but nobody in the Two Worlds was safe, really. The blasted lands were the worst of it, but decade by decade, they were shrinking. The only people who understood why or how were the Administrators, and well, they didn''t talk to people much, least of all scavengers.


    Teddy was a remarkable man in that he was born in the safe zones and still chose to make his life outside of them. His father was a chef and his mother was a mechanic, but he couldn''t follow in their footsteps. Everyone agreed that his mother had shown him the blasted lands too early, before she had a chance to explain what they were and why they were dangerous, and somehow, ever since then he could see right through them, as though the lands were not covered with living clouds of hell-bent black and white fuzz.


    Which, of course they were. Teddy saw them just like everyone else did. You had to see them to avoid them, and he did. He knew that his mother had made a very different mistake, and she and he had made a very quiet promise to keep it secret.


    So now Teddy picked his way over a pile of junk that probably should have been a building on its side. Ahead, a static monster rippled through the side of a building, turning brick into sand and sand into glass and glass into brick, and steel into copper and copper into diamond and diamond into rubber, on and on until there was no knowing what the world had once been made out of.


    None of that was worth scavenging even if the static monster went away. The Administrators provided stocks of raw materials to anyone and everyone. They didn''t provide finished goods anymore, though. Rumor had it they came from "before," and they didn''t give quite so freely as they used to. They still gave a lot, so they must have done a lot more.


    No, what Teddy was looking for was in the corpse behind the monster. It was a corpse, no question, a good one or two centuries old, but it was an Archon, so it looked the same today as it did when it died in the falling of the world. As long as the static monster didn''t trash it, Teddy would be sitting pretty on a pretty good find.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Naturally, the thing didn''t want to move on, but finally, after a good hour and a half, two hours worth of sitting and watching, it passed clean through the pile of rubble it had been rebuilding and moved on somewhere else. So after waiting another half hour to be sure, and listening intently all the while, Teddy approached.


    The woman would have been beautiful, if she were alive today. I mean yes, the coat of dust and dirt on her wasn''t exactly becoming, and at some point a steal beam had come down and torn her torso into pieces, but she had regenerated, and whatever immortality the thing gave her made sure that when she regenerated, her body twisted into a position where it had enough room, leaving only the torn remnants of her clothing where she had once been. Her exposed skin had glowing patterns of lights embedded in it, a graceful set of glyphs that meant something to someone--he had it on good authority different kinds of Archons had different patterns, but some said every set was different.


    Some people got off on finding an Archon corpse, but Teddy had a girlfriend. Well, ex now, but he wasn''t desperate, and what he was looking for was inside the body anyway. So with exceptional care and a muttered apology, he turned her head and tore into her neck with a knife.


    Not many people could do this. Yes, the gore was a part of it, and it took a real kind of crazy to knife what looked like a sleeping woman, even when you knew she was dead. But on a technical level, most people simply couldn''t get the thing out.


    The thing was ethereal. It was a pocket dimension anchored inside each Archon body, and only an Administrator should be able to command one. They... didn''t really clean up Archon bodies, though. But every now and then, people who went out into the blasted lands came back with something inside them. Teddy had been a young boy when he went out there, and he felt something just hanging in the air. Being a boy who didn''t know better, he reached out his hand and grabbed it, and it never left.


    Now he reached in with his fingers to a spot inside the woman''s skull and commanded the thing to come out. When he retrieved his bloodstained hands, he felt it it there, at his fingertips.


    Just another Pandora''s Box to add to his collection.

 1. Open the Box

    Theodore "Teddy" Elvis Helmann had a scrap yard that people came from miles around to look in. The business was pretty good, good enough he had to hire a number of guards even though he would have much preferred to just sit quietly in his junkyard and play with his toys.


    As a scrapper, Teddy went out into the world and found remnants of the old world and took them apart. That was a very concise and clean thing to tell people, and it didn''t make him sound like he had blood on his hands, but people always seemed to see things in his eyes when he spoke to them, things that scared them. As long as it ended the conversation, Teddy didn''t care.


    He didn''t like going out to find his collection of Pandora''s Boxes. That part of the job was awful. Actually cracking them open, though, that was fun.


    His last sortie had only given him one, but this one was enough. Archons had "levels", which from a certain point of view was just a number, but that number determined how much equipment was in their thing, their pandora''s box. The higher the number, the bigger the power source, the more racks of computers, and the more ansibles would be found inside. Each of those things was a prize for someone. Most Archons you found didn''t go above a Level 4, and those were very rare.


    This girl had been a 6, which Teddy honestly wasn''t sure he''d heard of before. He wished she were alive so he could learn her story, find out what happened, but well, if anyone knew how to crack open the data stored on these Archon computers, they didn''t tell him.


    Teddy was mulling it over in his head as he rode back through the gates of his compound. The guards all offered him a salute, and every salute was different; Teddy had insisted they each do something, but he didn''t care what. It was something of a security challenge, since the guards had come to know each others'' salutes, and you weren''t supposed to use anyone else''s. If you saw someone new using an old salute, there was probably a problem.


    There had been a few problems. That''s why he had guards.


    His hover sled slipped easily down the ramp into his underground lair. Beacons in the sled confirmed his identity and let the doors open for him, then close after him. The tech was neat, and he enjoyed putting things like that together. Tech from the before time fascinated him, as much because it was forbidden as anything. Oh, the Administrators wouldn''t kill him for having it--they even knew where he''d gotten the things--but they wouldn''t tell him anything and they wouldn''t make anything new, for anyone. He was also pretty clear on the fact that they were constantly monitoring what he did find, and he was okay with them taking shit he found if they didn''t want him to have it. That had happened once. He still wasn''t exactly sure the difference; all he knew was that the dead guy had been dressed real nicely, and the data tag on his box, his thing, was different.


    In any case, this girl was normal, just high level. When his sled came to a stop, Teddy hopped off and approached his workspace. It was not a pretty thing, but it worked: a giant empty wheel in the middle of his workshop with a hole on a pedestal. Teddy sidled on up to the pedestal and deposited the level six Box into the hole, giving it the proper commands to make it open up.


    In the middle of the wheel, a spark of light appeared. This pinprick opening expanded pretty quickly, but not too fast--the faster it moved, the more static electricity it generated, which sparked against the edges of the wheel. Those were very powerful bolts, and the only reason they didn''t sound like thunder was because they didn''t have far to go. That''s why, especially to start, he had to go really slow, only speeding up when the portal was almost filling the frame.Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.


    The world on the other side was normal, for this kind of thing. Pocket dimensions were designed with a "down", but they had no gravity until you opened them, so Teddy had to enter from the "bottom" of the space. The portal was the only real source of gravity, so that became "down", and Teddy would have to climb up with a ladder. The first few times that was tricky, but he knew what he was doing now, and he carefully pushed the long ladder through on its track, waiting until it connected with the steel mesh that was the deck plate above. The hooks on the ladder slipped into the gaps in the mesh, and when he pulled back down, it latched in place. Easy.


    He climbed the ladder, looking around quickly. It was definitely a larger space than normal, probably four times the size of the largest one he''d ever been inside of--and that was a big warehouse-sized place. Teddy could just about get lost in this one, if they weren''t all so straightforward.


    Once he got to the top, he found himself as always beneath a large, unbroken steel mesh floor stretching dozens of feet in every direction. The first couple times he''d cut through the mesh, but now he would hang a walkway that led to the edge of it, and then just use another ladder to climb up onto the deck proper. He had a bunch of clips that fit into the steel mesh, and after attaching two and roping himself to one, he swung out and added another pair. On and on this went until he had a parallel track all the way to the edge, at which point he came back.


    Each section of walkway was only so long, but going up and down the ladder with them was annoying, so he tended to strap a couple to his back at a time. After going and fetching the first two, he swung out to the second set of anchors and hung the far side of the walkway on the third set, then clipped the second set of ropes into the same anchor he was using, and the third to the one behind him. Six ropes was enough to hold up three scavengers people and a fair chunk of heavy equipment, but if worst came to worst, he could still end up cutting holes in the deck.


    It took a record five sections of walkway to get him up, but before long, he was standing on the bottom level of the Box, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He often wished he could open the portal here on the bottom level, but for many reasons, that just didn''t seem to work. If it were just a matter of gravity, he would have gotten used to it, but the portals all seemed to open up at the edge of the space, and the few things he was comfortable tweaking didn''t seem to change that.


    The bottom level here was storage--no great surprise. Tanks upon tanks of air, water, basic nutrients, and other things that were related to the Archon''s particular gift were all lined up, with narrow inspection paths through them. They weren''t meant to be opened; the tech that powered this whole place would just teleport the stuff in and out of the tanks directly, but then, Teddy had no use for a tank full of pure water or oxygen or whatever anyway.


    Still, he glanced them over. Nothing too weird. A couple were mag-bottles full of plasma, which might have been iron or some other solid stored in a volatile state so it could be made into whatever all at once. Maker-type and shaper-types had a bunch of that in stock; he still had no idea what type of power this woman had.


    The ladder up to the next level was built in, and the next level had a simple hole in the mesh that Teddy crawled through with easy practice. The next level was a good four hundred times larger, and was mostly computing equipment. As always, there was a terminal right there, so tantalizing, but Teddy didn''t know how to use it. An administrator, at his desperate plea, had finally given him one very important command for the terminal, and he stepped up to it, prepared to finally let the dead woman''s body decay into nothing--because even with the box taken out, all of this equipment was still keeping it alive, though it was a good sixty-seventy miles away by now.


    But the status on the terminal was unusual. It was supposed to say "Carrier disruption" and occasionally something about "reconnecting" that flipped back to the first thing very quickly. This one didn''t, and it completely creeped him out. It just said "Standing by".


    So Teddy rushed back out of the hole in a panic. He needed to speak to an Administrator about this before he touched anything else. While they might just take his Box away, he was sure that they would want to know of any possibility that someone else had survived the end of the world.

 2. A Call to the Heavens

    Chun Liao was very proud to have her job. Born on Mars and trained at Saturnalia Station, she now had a good five years of experience under her belt as an Administrator. The job wasn''t usually very difficult; nobody had a lot of hopes that the Two Worlds would really be livable anytime soon, and Administrators weren''t responsible for putting down conflicts on the planet. If anything, Administrators just served as silent witnesses to the dangers of the Two Worlds.


    The Administrators didn''t do much of anything anymore, but Liao was happy to work with them anyway. If this group of people were morose watchers who had given up on progress, the mood on Mars was worse. Some of the people there were actively against any form of innovation, and technology was restricted even if you didn''t toy with it. The Two Worlds might be a dangerous garbage pile now, but they were at least trying to dig their way out of it.


    A blinking light on her console showed another request for intervention. Without responding to it, Liao pulled up the database on the caller. Teddy Helmann, scrapper, possesses a rare Keyshard that lets him interact with ...Pandora Engines? Liao''s eyes rose silently. The Pandora Engine was tech that the highers-up refused to give any information about. They had been the source of an Archon''s power, making those who received one into "superheroes"--from a certain point of view. Nigh invulnerable, with supernatural powers, these were creatures that were set apart from the world so that they could adapt to having more power than the average human being. Supposedly, the idea was eventually everyone would have those same powers, if they were worthy.


    Then came the War... and then the Great War, and then the Last War. The Last War was... the last war. It ended with the fall of the City, the Reign of Fire, and the end of the Two Worlds. Everything since then was because of that.


    Liao put on a collected face and accepted the call from Mr. Helmann, noting without any surprise that he was confused and quite a bit put out. "How may we help you, Mr. Helmann?"


    "Yeah... uh, I don''t know if you know me, but I''m a scrapper--"


    "We know who you are, Mr. Helmann." Liao doubted he had any idea how much they knew about him, or his Keyshard. The Administrators were a tight-lipped bunch.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    "Okay, well, uh, I found... one of those things out there, and it was different than usual..." he paused. "You know what--"


    "We know what you scavenge, Mr. Helmann." Liao''s voice remained even, even as she ran her hands over the controls, trying to locate the system that he was connected to. Finding him and his call terminal was quick and easy, but trying to navigate a sensor probe from there to his workshop was trickier...


    "Well, when I got inside... uh, the status terminal was unusual." He fidgeted, clearly anxious. "It normally says something about a disruption, but this one said ''Standing by''. Like maybe the woman was still alive."


    That... should not have been possible. As a matter of habit more than anything, Liao hit the button to page her superior, but kept an even face. "Where is the Archon now?"


    "I didn''t bring, uh, the body with me. That''s... that would be... I don''t do that."


    Liao nodded calmly, receiving a notice on her screen that the supervisor was watching. After a moment, the status updated to Request for transfer. Stay on line. So Liao, still with her even expression, refocused her eyes on the man and gave polite smile. "My supervisor will speak with you. Just a moment."


    The woman who was now speaking with Teddy was so badly scarred that very few people doubted that she was from the old world. There were no wars anywhere outside of the Two Worlds, and those on the surface were not... not nearly survivable enough to earn you those kind of scars. The Administrators didn''t do much healing, but when they found reason to, they would usually wipe scars out anyway.


    "My name is Ciddia," said the woman. "I believe we met once before, Teddy Helmann."


    "Yes, when you took that other... thing away. I remember." Teddy seemed uncomfortable. Liao privately thought that nobody who saw Ciddia''s face would ever forget it.


    "I am authorizing an agent to investigate the status of the Archon you are reporting. As always, we have no interest in interfering directly unless necessary. It may be necessary for you to show us where you found the Archon, so that we can recover the body. Do you believe that will be possible?"


    Teddy thought for a long moment. "Yes," he said, "...probably."


    "I am sure you understand, if we have the ability to save that Archon''s life, we will take whatever measures necessary to do so."


    The man just nodded. "That''s why I called."


    Ciddia, for once in her life, actually smiled for a moment. "Indeed. We will be with you shortly." The connection ended, leaving Liao alone with her boss on the line. "Chun Liao. I will authorize you to carry a series of diagnostic tools. Bring along the remote access beacon in case anything comes up. And... bring at least one anti-nightmare weapon."


    "Yes, boss." Liao felt a surge of excitement. New tools, a chance to fight something, and maybe the chance to meet an ancient? This could turn out to be a very interesting week.

 3. Administrative Action

    Teddy knew better than to expect an Administrator to appear from the sky in a ship. He made sure his guards knew someone was coming--they would be forgiven if they reacted badly but it was a bad idea--and just sort of paced nervously. The two scrappers he usually had help him salvage stuff from the things were now sitting by the side waiting to see what came next.


    He didn''t really like this. He didn''t like fetching stuff out of corpses. He didn''t like opening up corpse-boxes and finding stuff in them. He didn''t like selling stuff out of corpses. Corpses, corpses, corpses, everything he did revolved around corpses, and nobody knew, and he hated it.


    He paced, trying not to think of the half-naked woman he had butchered with a knife, trying not to think about the idea that she was alive and might have memories of being trapped there for ages, seeing someone finally arrive who might have saved her, and being butchered.


    He shuddered, pacing back and forth, trying to think of anything other than corpses. He was still doing the same when a portal opened next to him with a sound like an electric zipper opening, and a small woman in a reasonably nice black pantsuit stepped out.


    Like all Administrators, she was immaculate. Her hair, her clothes, her posture... the only thing that differentiated her from any of the other administrators (except Ciddia, but she was clearly something else) was the asian cast to her features and her small studded earrings. Also, he realized after a moment, her sunglasses were probably a little less dark than the others. He usually couldn''t see their eyes, and he could just barely see hers.


    "After you, Mr. Helmann," she said simply, as the portal zipped shut behind her.


    Teddy nodded nervously and made his way into the shop. The Box remained open, and he jumped headfirst into the opening without hesitation, snagging the ladder and pulling himself up easily. Now he was glad for his decision to hang walkways instead of chopping up the floor; it soothed him to know that he had done no violence to this place, at least.


    His thoughts slid towards very bad places again, and he brought them back as fast as he could.


    The ladder led to the walkway, then to the short ladder, and then he was on the platform. He turned, expecting the woman to be right behind him, but she seemed to be taking the whole thing more casually, looking around as though she''d never seen the inside of a Box before.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    Maybe she hadn''t. Teddy had a weird sense of revelation when he realized that in spite of it all, Administrators might just be humans after all, and not some kind of mythical things beyond all reason or logic. They were not... normal. Not a part of his world. They stood above and could spend as much time as they wanted to on appearances and not get bogged down in survival and killing and static monsters and whatever else.


    He was still stewing over this when she finally got up to where he was. He took a moment to notice her, then immediately turned to the next level and climbed up to the computing floor. "I didn''t get any further than this," he said suddenly into the stillness as he was halfway up the ladder. "The first thing I always do... is to put the command into the computer to get rid of the body. I... want to give them rest. So when it wasn''t normal I stopped and didn''t go any further. I haven''t... haven''t looked at anything else."


    "I will keep that in mind," replied the Administrator, evenly.


    The terminal was just where he left it. The only thing that had changed on the display was the clock, which showed an accurate time and date according to a calendar and clock system that really didn''t matter to anyone anymore. Still, it was always kind of calming to know that the systems worked--that they made sense, that they were grounded. He could forget that they came from--no, nope, no. Stop.


    So Teddy fidgeted and started pacing as the woman stepped in front of the console and appeared a tool out of nowhere, which she inserted into a slot on the side of the machine. Teddy wanted desperately to look over her shoulder, stare at the things going by, but they couldn''t help him. Without having those tools, seeing how they worked did nothing for him. These were people who probably could make use of the equipment as it was today, could make new Archons if they wanted, but they didn''t. Seeing her with those tools didn''t change anything.


    "According to this computer, Miss Elaine is indeed still alive." The Administrator''s words reached him through the haze of his self-recrimination. "Apparently she has been... effectively asleep all this time." She looked at him. "If you can bring me to her body, we should be able to re-insert the Pandora Engine and awaken her."


    "Yeah... yeah, sure." Teddy glanced at the computer screen. It was mostly taken up with a text file, although the sidebar continued to show a number of indicators that were probably the health of the body, or something. They were always the same for each Archon... until he destroyed the body, and then they went dark. "It, uh, will take a couple hours to get there. I hope you don''t mind a ride."


    "That will be fine." The Administrator offered a polite smile. "I will also take care of any dangerous entities we meet."


    "Oh... yeah, good. There were a bunch along the way." He gestured to the ladder. "After you... unless you have something else.


    She kept the same even smile and started down the ladder.

 4. A Rude Awakening

    Elaine DeWitt woke up under exceedingly strange circumstances.


    As an Archon and elite soldier of the Canadian Freeworlds Alliance, she had woken up in strange places before. It wasn''t so much a problem that the place was strange. Nor was she immediately concerned that a giant steel beam was very close to crushing her, or that she was half-naked, or even that there was a strange man and what looked like a Blackhat standing nearby.


    No, her internal clock said she had been asleep for more than three hundred years, and she didn''t remember any of it. She remembered her life, for the most part, but there were large chunks missing out of that, too.


    She definitely had a clear image of being in this place before it was destroyed, but if that memory wasn''t so clear, she would not have believed it was the same place. The geometry of the room was the same, but the room itself was so vastly different than it was inconceivable. A wall that should have been plaster was made, in places, out of silver, and in other places made of tar. The steel beam that was crushing her had holes eaten out of it, except someone had filled some of the holes with... something else. Something else that in many cases, ran like melted wax, even if it was solid rock.


    So, yes. Strange circumstances.


    Instead of asking a series of dumb questions, Elaine appeared another body behind her two gawkers and shifted her consciousness to it, then un-appeared the old one. She was content to find that her new body''s wardrobe was intact; the body she went with was wearing a nice gray gypsy shirt, thin enough to show off the Stigma glowing across her skin but not so thin as to be indecent, and knee-length white trousers with sandals. She ran, mentally, through the rest of her inventory--a lot of military surplus, mostly--as she and her two... rescuers? Presumably? turned to face each other.


    "Gentleman... Lady." Elaine smiled. "I am Elaine Many, Duplicant Archon. You are...?"


    The woman held up a hand to the man, and stepped forward. "Greetings, Miss DeWitt. A lot has changed in the time you have been gone. I assume that you have noticed...?"


    "Yes, the clock was the first thing I noticed," she said. "What has happened here? Why did it take so long for the Blackhats to wake me up?"


    "The Blackhat organization was destroyed," the woman replied. "The Administrators--"


    "What about Domino?" Elaine''s voice almost caught. "You can''t tell me that he..."


    "World history is a ...sensitive topic." The woman glanced at the man, who avoided her look and stared at the ground for a while instead. "Domino Effect is dead. He... an enemy went through great pains to kill him. The destruction that came after has left the world in... a very bad state." The woman cleared her throat gently. "If you would like any more information... Ciddia would like very much to speak with you."


    Elaine swallowed and nodded. She half expected the woman in front of her to just tip her hat and teleport the three of them, but instead she gestured. "I should also introduce you. Elaine DeWitt, this is Teddy Helmann. He is the one who discovered that you could still be saved."


    Could still be saved? That''s ominous. Elaine offered him a hand, and he shook it with something more than relief. "Thank you very much, Teddy. I owe you a debt."If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    "No, lady... you don''t owe me anything, believe me." Although he was smiling, there was naked pain on his face. "I''m just happy that you''re alright."


    "We will return to Mr. Helmann''s facility for the moment, and then I will take you to see Ciddia." She gestured to some kind of crude hover-sled, one that was clearly not Blackhat-made, and Teddy, looking still quite awkward, took the controls. The woman sat behind him easily.


    When Teddy turned to look at her, though, Elaine just shook her head. "Go on," she said. "I prefer to fly." And then, as naturally as breathing, she lifted off the ground, instinctively dematerializing her sandals so they wouldn''t fall off, and flew out of one of the many gaps in the ruined building.


    From her perspective up here, things were bad. Worse than bad, by far. No building in the area was whole, let alone untouched, and whatever mad Archon had gone around altering the materials near her had done the same everywhere she looked. Mostly, though, everything was just...


    Gone. It was all gone. The war had been going on for decades, and Elaine thought she knew devastation, but people had rebuilt. These were lands that nobody had tried to rebuild centuries later. What had tainted these lands so badly?


    Below her, the two people on a hover sled who might have answers went off in a generally eastward direction. Elaine looked out in that direction, even flew up another couple thousand feet, but it wasn''t clear from here where exactly they were going.


    So she just swooped down after them, easily keeping pace with the slow-moving sled. They were going so slowly, in fact, that she barely felt the need to hold her streamlined flight pose; she pulled up beside the woman and twisted around so it looked like she was sitting cross-legged on nothing, and looked over at her. "He''s really gone?"


    "Yes." The woman shook her head. "It''s all well before my time, I''m afraid. I know this is a shock to you, but the world is very different. A lot of people... don''t want there to be any Archons anymore. You are a reminder of..." she paused. "Well, a reminder of this. That it''s our fault. Humans, I mean, not Administrators. People ...have given up, mostly. They want it to all be over."


    "The hell they do," opined the man loudly, as though he were having trouble hearing over the wind (maybe he was; it had been a long time since Elaine was human). "You folks in the sky may want it to be over, but the rest of us are trying to fix things, make them better. Push back the... monsters." His voice suddenly dropped, and he spoke like he was muttering under his breath, although Elaine still heard him clearly. "Trying to find purpose... and meaning in life while picking through the bones of the past."


    For some reason, after hearing that, Elaine rubbed the back of her head. It didn''t exactly ache; it felt the way she always felt when she had been hit by an attack, and it had healed up. Strange. Had they had to cut her open to bring her back?


    "The important thing," said the woman a bit louder (probably for Teddy''s benefit, not Elaine''s), "is that nobody trusts the Administrators anymore. We don''t hand out power the way Domino Effect did. We let things develop on a... more natural timescale."


    "Yeah," replied Elaine, "things were pretty chaotic, especially there at the end, but really through all of the different wars. What about the magic folk? How are they doing?"


    "I can only offer you a summary," replied the Administrator, "but the system that empowered them was broken in the breaking of the world. All those who could touch magic were driven mad by it."


    "I thought everyone could touch magic," she replied. "Except Archons, I mean. All living things."


    "Yes, that''s true."


    "So... everyone..." Elaine slowed to a stop. She looked around at the empty storefronts, the devastated landscape. It wasn''t just that the area lacked people, she realized, it lacked plants, it lacked animals, it lacked insects and birds. There weren''t even sun-dried weeds left after three hundred years, just wind-blown dirt.


    The hover sled came to a stop a little bit further on, and the Administrator''s voice crossed the distance between them. "It''s getting better," she said. "You''ll see."


    Elaine felt something deep inside her soul that she couldn''t put a name to as she moved to follow them, and Teddy started the sled moving on again.

 5. Tea with Titans

    Somehow, news seemed to have gotten around before there even was any news. Teddy had long since grown used to it; the edges of the blasted lands were a tight-knit bunch of weirdos, and they all wanted to know anything that was going on, for better or worse. It meant that Teddy never had any problem selling off his junk, because everyone knew when he had something to sell, often before he was really sure himself.


    For all anyone knew, this whole event could have been nothing, with the Administrator coming and going and saying nothing to anyone. Still a crowd of hundreds had gathered around the gate to Teddy''s well-defended little yard, and they were restless already. There was no bloodshed, not that Teddy could see, but there was also no easy path through the crowd. They were all staring, and they had every right.


    It was centuries since anyone saw a human being fly. Out here, even with all the work Teddy had done at reclaiming old technology, it was rare to see anything fly. Hover, yes, but the monsters that made the world into madness would attack anything they saw. If you couldn''t keep them from seeing you... you were in trouble. They might even chase you out of the wastes and into the sane world.


    It had not happened in an age, and most people were eager to make sure it would never happen again.


    Teddy slowed to a stop well short of the crowd, and the Administrator surveyed the gathered people for a long minute, then looked up at Elaine. "Would you please give us a lift into the compound?"


    Elaine looked at the administrator, then the crowd. She gave a thoughtful toss of her head, then said "Sure." On her feet, the sandals that Teddy had not noticed were gone reappeared, and she set down next to the hover sled.


    Then she picked it up, with both of them still aboard. As though the two people and large steel machine weighed nothing, she lifted back up off the ground, over the heads of everyone, and inside. Her movements were awkward, to be sure, but she showed no hesitation or uncertainty. Like her, the Administrator seemed unconcerned.


    Teddy, of course, was scared out of his mind. He clutched the steering as tightly as he would if the woman was shaking it trying to knock him off, and every time she shifted the sled in her arms, he gave a pathetic little whimper.


    Teddy had faced nightmare monsters, and he would again, but this? This was crazy. She was holding them up with her hands! Even knowing that it was technology, and hover fields, and... something, it was still crazy!


    Crazy though it might have been, both Elaine and the Administrator kept their cool, unaffected facades from the beginning to the end. When the hover sled touched down and Teddy was free to release his rigid, unyielding grip on the steering column, he discovered he was the only one in the compound who was freaking out.


    The others, somehow, looked on in awe, as though it were a miracle and not a sign of madness and the end of the world. To keep himself from hyperventilating, Teddy took a series of ever-slower breaths and tried to calm his shaking hands. He found himself pacing, which wasn''t uncommon for him, and eventually got his heart rate under control.


    By that time, the Administrator and Elaine had decided to take up purchase on Teddy''s single most prized possession: a couch he had dug out of a long-buried furniture store. It had taken months to get all the fine sand out of the synthetic stuffing and re-fill all the cushions, and it was his proudest accomplishment as a scrapper. Unlike too many of his wares, no blood had been spilled to get it; it was just a monument to hard work and dedication.


    It felt weird that they didn''t even ask, but then, both of them came from worlds where such furniture was not uncommon.


    Somehow, Teddy was a lot less surprised that either Elaine or the Administrator had also made a tea set--complete with hot, steaming, fresh tea--on a little end table appear out of nowhere. Teddy was not completely unfamiliar with tea, and might have had a stock of fresh leaves somewhere around, but he certainly didn''t have a sterling silver teapot or white ceramic cups with little flowers on the side, and that table...


    Actually, the table was probably his. A glance around found that it had been moved out of the corner. There, too, was his box of tea on the counter. So presumably just the tea set and some boiling water, which was reasonable for people who could fly and tear holes in space.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    So Teddy, now far calmer, set himself down on the far end of the couch, where he wouldn''t be brushing up against either of the two women, and graciously accepted a teacup from--Teddy dropped the hot tea into his lap when he realized that Elaine Many was both sitting on the couch next to him and also standing there pouring tea.


    Archons made no sense. None. It simply wasn''t possible.


    Elaine turned on the couch and smiled at him. "Sorry," she said. "I guess you haven''t seen anything like that before, have you?" Without pausing, she continued the conversation with the tea-serving Elaine, who was picking up the teacup he had just dropped. "It''s just my ability--multiple bodies, same mind, with a bunch of equipment I can call up if needed. Very useful, especially in war, although it does have its own... peculiar vulnerabilities." The sitting Elaine, who had been taking a sip of tea in the meantime, gave him a wry smile and continued, "It does however come with all sorts of benefits, not the least of which is being able to confuse the ever-loving hell out of people."


    The administrator sipped her tea silently. Teddy thought she might have been either blushing or trying not to laugh. He didn''t look too closely.


    "I have to ask," said Elaine suddenly, pointing to the oval archway and the racks upon racks of scavenged equipment, "how did you come by all this? Some of it certainly seems to be... if not made by Blackhat City, certainly of their tech level. Are you a scavenger?"


    Teddy was very pleased that he managed to neither spill his tea nor enter another panic attack. He had been forced to field questions like this a number of time, just never... from a victim. "Yes, I am a scavenger," he said. "I find..." he paused, trying to find a euphemism where he hopefully wouldn''t need to spell things out. "...decommissioned archons and recover the technology used to create them."


    That made Elaine freeze in place. The standing Elaine glanced over at the Administrator, but she was neither shocked nor disapproving. In fact, she removed her sunglasses--Teddy had never known one to do that--so that Elaine could clearly see her eyes.


    "We are aware of his activities," the administrator said quietly. "As far as we are aware, he has caused no suffering nor harm to anyone. An... oversight of previous generations mean that archon bodies were preserved when..." she paused to rephrase what she was saying. "Archon bodies, as you know, rebuild themselves. The Blackhat organization, erroneously, believed that they had accounted for all possible ways of mentally killing Archons, and whenever it detected a braindead archon, it would destroy the body. The event, the... apocalypse you could call it, proved them wrong. It mentally killed archons worldwide, and yet the death was not detected. As such, their bodies remain to this day, much as yours did."


    "And you loot the corpses." Elaine''s voice was suddenly hard and full of disapproval.


    Teddy would not have been able to respond to that comment, but the administrator did. "It is the view of our organization, the Administrators, that Teddy Helmann is doing a service both to the people of his world, and to the dead archons whom he is scavenging from. He has been respectful of the dead in ways that others, I assure you, have not." She matched standing Elaine''s stare evenly. "I know this is a shock, but I do not personally believe that he deserves any disrespect."


    Both copies of Elaine turned away from the person they were watching, and both seemed to be lost in thought. After a minute, standing Elaine set down the teapot and vanished, leaving only the one sitting on the couch.


    "How many have been found?" Elaine''s voice wasn''t on edge anymore, just... introspective?


    "Alive? A few were found within the first century. To my knowledge, there hasn''t been another since then." The administrator took another sip of her tea. "Ciddia would know for sure. This is good tea, by the way."


    A silence fell that lasted several minutes. Teddy couldn''t help himself from looking away, but when he finally looked up, he found Elaine staring at him. He matched her gaze, trying not to think about how he had butchered her half-naked body with a knife.


    "I suppose I ought to meet her," said Elaine out of nowhere. "She''s still the same Ciddia, right? From back then?"


    "Yes," replied the administrator, as she reapplied her sunglasses with one hand and set the tea aside with the other. "She is ancient. Older, I suppose, than you are."


    Elaine laughed as she stood. "Far older than me, girl. The Blackhats were around for centuries before I got there. I''m just a soldier who got lucky."


    Teddy looked at her, in her thin shirt, knee-length pants, and sandals, and wondered how she could immediately and unironically call herself a soldier.


    The administrator simply reached for her bracelet and pressed a button, and a portal ripped open in a bit of open space. She stood and moved next to it, clearly waiting for Elaine to go first.


    Elaine paused just at the entrance and looked back at Teddy for what seemed like a very long time. "I forgive you," she said out of nowhere, before stepping through the portal. Before Teddy could respond, the Administrator followed, and the portal closed with an electric zipping sound.


    Teddy alone for a long moment before he realized they had left the tea set behind. He hurried to grab it and put it away before someone decided to make off with it; among all the other problems he was having, he didn''t need or want to think that such a precious gift was going to be stolen out from under his nose.

 6. Elaine and Ciddia

    Chun Liao stood idly by as Elaine DeWitt examined the conference room of the space station. Like her, Elaine seemed more at home among this level of technology than she had been in the wastes, although Elaine had definitely been able to accept that place better than Liao ever would. She didn''t seem to understand everything, but her eyes flew over complicated diagrams and dense informational displays with more speed than Liao could possibly have mustered. Perhaps she was only vaguely skimming over them... but she had a look that suggested she was reading and thinking about everything she saw.


    Elaine was an enigma, that was certain. There were no archons anymore; even Ciddia, who was by rights one of the original Blackhats, had eschewed most technology except that which kept her alive. According to history the Archons had been developed in part, if not entirely, to be a de-stabilizing influence on a world too corrupt to adapt to changing technology--that wanted everything to stay familiar in an era where everything could, would, and inevitably had to be different than it used to be.


    The human and evoloid worlds today needed stability, not anarchists. Even well-meaning idealists could do more harm than good if they went around breaking down the very flimsy structure that kept everything in place. But at the same time, Elaine had lived through the hell and chaos of war--and understood what it was like to watch everything go wrong. Depending on exactly what her perspective was, this could all go well... or very poorly.


    That''s why Ciddia was giving her a moment to pace around while she watched, trying to get a gauge on the woman''s personality. Liao knew Ciddia to be an exceptionally shrewd woman, one who would gladly sacrifice time and energy to make exactly the right choice.


    Finally, after a few minutes, Ciddia emerged--from a door at the end of the room, not a portal, although Liao suspected she had been on Saturnalia Station until a few minutes ago. Ciddia as always was badly scarred, with a simple blue-gray business pantsuit and three prosthetic limbs--only her right hand was human, and that functioned far worse than any of the artificial ones.


    She didn''t care.


    "Elaine Many." Ciddia offered the woman her right hand, and the woman shook it heartily. "If my memory wasn''t artificially enhanced, I doubt I would have remembered you, but there''s no question in my mind you''re the same woman who led the charge against the Australian army in Azael. That was..."


    "A bad day," replied Elaine easily. "I don''t remember it as well as most, since I died a number of times that day." She paused, and sighed. "That battle shouldn''t have been necessary."


    "One could say the same about every battle, and every war." Ciddia gestured to the conference table, and took her seat at the head. "I''m sure you have questions about--"


    "I''ll cut you off there," said Elaine quickly. "I''m curious, yes, but I''ve never been a historian and I don''t honestly give a crap what the world has been through. I need to know what it takes to survive, and I want to know what I can do to help. The world as I saw it was torn to pieces, and you''re..." she stopped and shook her head. "I know the Blackhats always stood aside and let us evolve, let us decide the future of humanity on our own, but this is terrible. There are a lot of people suffering down there."


    Ciddia''s face lost any sign of warmth, and she stared back at Elaine with a cold look, one that Liao knew was perhaps her most honest face--exhausted, frustrated, resentful, and genuinely unconcerned with appearances.


    It was what she wore anywhere but in public, and the Administrators all knew it was simply who she was.


    "The Two Worlds as you knew them," said Ciddia after a very long silence, "existed the way they did because we had faith that we understood the world. Technology proved to us that we were close to the truth, close enough to make ''magic'' happen. Human beings could be like gods--flying, neigh-invulnerable, eternal, capable of almost anything--and all it took was knowledge and power."


    "The point of the Archon Project from the very beginning, if I''m being honest, was a belief from Domino Effect himself that if we just exposed human beings to enough power, eventually they would be worthy of it. Give a few people at a time nearly godly power, and we would learn from their mistakes. One person destroys a city, and we never let it happen again." Ciddia tapped a finger on the table--from her left hand, so it made a very mechanical noise. "Obviously that''s not what happened."


    "It was arrogance to believe that we understood. It was arrogance that led the Arch Sorcerers of Draco to build a system that was, eventually, the downfall of the Two Worlds. It was arrogance that led Domino to bring the City into battle against a superior foe, and arrogance that led that foe to stand his ground and spite the most powerful person in the world. There are countless examples of human arrogance throughout history, but that one battle, the one that ended all things, that proved that human beings, even after centuries of exposure to power, weren''t getting any wiser, any smarter, any... saner. We evolved to be more dangerous, Elaine, but our flaws didn''t disappear."Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    "If I had my way," Ciddia leaned forward, "I would strip you of your Archon abilities, and return you to a normal human body. It is a temptation, and a powerful one, and don''t for a minute think that I can''t. That function started being built into Archons long before you joined; it''s not as simple as pressing a button, but I do still have the key that would activate that mechanism. If needed, I will use it. But humanity is lost right now, and it needs a symbol. The Administrators can''t be it, because... we are the ones who failed humanity. I am the one who failed humanity, the last one that remains." She shook her head. "If nothing else, we need perspective and fresh blood. So I offer you instead the chance to be of value to people."


    "Of course I''ll accept," said Elaine without hesitation.


    Ciddia nodded, although she seemed a little surprised that she didn''t think it over. "Mars, Titania, and the various space stations are all intact, and we all largely need nothing from you. The Two Worlds, though... Terra and Draco are still infected by the damaged remnants of the Dragon System, and to a lesser extent, damaged copies of the Archon and Blackhat Systems. These are responsible for the monsters you might have seen--" Ciddia glanced at Chun Liao for confirmation.


    Liao shook her head. "On the way back, we didn''t see any. I took care of one before we woke her up."


    Ciddia raised her eyebrows and quirked a lip just a bit. "Oh good, that''s a definite improvement." She paused. "In any event, there are damaged spiritual entities in this world, broken things that use magic and Archon abilities on the world at random, and mostly attack people on sight. Because of this, it has been difficult to resettle outside of a few well-defended hubs. Teddy Helmann''s compound is on the outer border of one of these; safe, but only just. The hubs barely trade and have little communication, although we have given them terminals to facilitate things. Mostly, people simply fear the unknown. They have become primitive, lost people."


    "That seems unfair," said Elaine, a bit defensive. Ciddia straightened a little in surprise, but Elaine continued. "I saw Teddy''s compound. He has tons of computers stacked up there, and that hover sled, I take it, was something he created out of leftover parts. Primitive, you say, but she," Elaine gestured to Liao, "said you don''t interfere, which means everything they had was theirs."


    "Humanity, on the whole, has fallen very far from where it was," answered Ciddia.


    "You say that as someone who lived on top of everything, who still literally lives on top of everything--in space, where things are less dangerous and you can run away from your problems." She suddenly snarled fiercly at Ciddia, which surprised Liao greatly. "Stage me if you want. I mean what I say."


    Ciddia looked shocked as well, then laughed. "The Stage system is gone," she replied. "Goodness, that brings back memories. But no, the Stage system used terrawatts of power and took thousands of people to operate. We couldn''t continue that today if we tried."


    "Fine. I still mean it: you''re hiding from your problems." Elaine pushed her rolling chair back from the table and stood. "So you want me to help people to beat the monsters, trade, communicate, and regrow after the end of the world. And somehow in spite of everything you''re only now getting back into asking superheroes for help. This is what we were always for." She turned and walked towards the exit, stopping short. "You know, I used to have faith that the Blackhats were doing what they were doing for all of mankind. Even the weird aliens that we could breed with or whatever. But this? Hiding isn''t something you do for humanity," she opened the door and stepped through, "it''s something you do for yourself." With that, she slammed the door shut.


    Liao was genuinely surprised, not least because to Elaine, Ciddia should still have been a godlike figure in her time, yet somehow she was unafraid. Moreso, Elaine had simple... not cared. Not cared about Ciddia, not cared about the space station, not cared that death might await her or that people might hate her. Liao looked to her boss, raising her eyebrows high in the hopes that Ciddia would explain what exactly was going on.


    Ciddia just watched the door, deep in thought.


    Finally, though, she stood. "Make sure she''s supplied with anti-nightmare tech before you send her back," she said, her voice hard and professional as always. "I will put out a more general order in a little while, but I want someone watching her at all times. I hope we won''t have to pull her ass out of any fires, but if she underestimates nightmares and causes some shit to go down, well, for the first time in a while that might be on us, so we''ll have to handle it."


    "Do you want us to give her a shuttle or any other equipment?" Liao fidgeted with her bracelet, using the interface on its surface to add notes to her holo-display, one invisible even to Ciddia--unless she decided to override it, which she always could.


    "What for?" Ciddia laughed. "The girl could dive headfirst out an airlock and make it back to Terra from here. In fact, I''m a little worried she''s going to do that instead of waiting for you to portal her back." Ciddia waved. "Go make sure she''s okay. If she does leave, well, just catch her with the weapons on the ground. Oh, and ask her to please give up any explosives, heavy weapons, ...really any weapon meant for large fights. They won''t do her any good, and nobody would be comfortable if they knew she had them. Somehow, I don''t think she''ll argue the point."


    Liao finished adding to her notes and then hurried after the Archon.

 7. A Quiet Walk through the Sky

    Elaine DeWitt honestly thought she was being cheeky and rebellious when she appeared a body outside the station and shifted to it. The last time she had been on a Blackhat-operated space station... goodness, it had been a long time. Saturnalia Station--was the same station still there today? She would have to go see it someday--and its view of the planet Saturn was legendary, and although many archons had come close to dying just because they couldn''t find the one tiny speck of light in space that was the station, it was something of a rite of passage for anyone level 3 and up to survive in orbit around something so much vastly, vastly larger than Earth.


    Elaine, after having procured a device to point her back to the station, had made a full orbit around Saturn before returning. That was a long trip, and some would have called it very boring, but somehow the novelty simply didn''t wear off for her. She had weaved through the planet''s rings, visited several moons, taken a cut through the top layer of atmosphere no less than three times, and despite having a tool exactly to find the station, nearly given into despair that she would never find the place again.


    She knew what it was like to survive in hard vacuum, to navigate in it, and she remembered the view from space. She could look over the planet''s surface and count all of the familiar spatial tears linking the Two Worlds together--they were the same, and she saw no signs of new ones. There was also a crater... Elaine knew without being told that it was where the City had been destroyed, because it looked like an explosion there had consumed many, many square miles of land and breached the planet''s crust, probably vaporizing a chunk of the mantle. The cracks in the planet''s crust that resulted from the planet repairing the wound reached clear across Africa.


    The Blackhats were adamant that nobody had weapons of that scale; Domino himself would personally interfere if anyone showed signs of trying to make one. So if a bomb went off large enough to do that, it must not have originally been a bomb. The City''s power plant was the only thing Elaine could think of that might have done it.


    Instead of heading back to Teddy''s, or finding anywhere else in particular to start fresh, Elaine simply took a lap around the planet''s orbit. The moon at least looked normal, she was relieved to find, but nowhere on the planet was untouched. There were, however, plenty of signs of green growth, and lights on the dark side of the planet indicating electric power and civilization. It almost made up for the long stretches of empty tan that should have been green, and empty stretches of black that should have had lights.


    Almost.


    After one lap, she ducked down into the atmosphere, genuinely unconcerned about her orbital velocity and the friction of the planet''s atmosphere, and barely slowed as she passed through a spatial tear to appear in the sky above Draco. This, the other side of the Two Worlds, was supposed to be on a parallel plane, ''a little closer to magic'' they had always liked to say, and the rules of the two worlds were always slightly different. The longer the spatial tears had been open, though, the more the rules had mingled, and Elaine had never known a time when it was difficult to survive as an Archon above this planet.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    She pulled back up, not quite into orbit, but high enough to see one whole side of the planet as she soared above. No surprise, this side was the same as the other--some places had electric lights in the darkness, some places had green growth in the sun, and all too many places were barren, ruined. There was no scar on Draco to match the one on Terra, but there didn''t need to be.


    It did, however, show its own unique signs of decay.


    Elaine had once or twice fought to at or in the Devil''s Maws--the enormous heat vents that connected Draco''s Underworld to the surface. Supposedly, those vents were something designed as a power source by the Arch Sorcerers... but that was only a theory. One thing was certain, though: with magic broken, the vents had also fallen into disrepair, and enormous cracks had split from the sides of them, cracks maybe a tenth as large as the continent-spanning cracks caused by the fall of the City.


    In other words, huge. Seeing them from orbit, they looked tiny, but Elaine wasn''t fool enough to forget the scale of what she was looking at. They had be many, many miles long, and thousands of feet across. None of the growing areas were close to these vents, not that it was much of a surprise; the night lights and other signs of civilization also kept their distance. Generally speaking, it looked like nobody wanted to come near the enormous, now-broken heat vents, which centuries later were still creating huge upwells of hot air.


    Elaine eyed one familiar location after another. Of these, the only place she dared visit was the Darkness Temple in Tarmon, former home to the Dark Lord. As she slowed to a stop above it, she found that despite all sense, the barriers the Dark Lord had erected seemed to have mostly survived. The whole continent seemed to be a thriving green jungle, with signs of civilization scattered throughout. In her time, it had always been a sanctuary for those that wanted to escape the War... but only if you could survive and accept the creepy, mind-altering effects of the continent. Even exported fruits and vegetables seemed tainted by the place, filled with a slimy sense that Tarmon was the only place you ever wanted to be.


    And after everything, it was still here. Elaine flew above the Temple and found, at its usual height, the barrier of energy that had repelled armies of Archons. Some had said that Domino himself had either failed to break it, or refused to try, although she wasn''t sure what to believe.


    Some things never changed, she supposed, although this was one thing that perhaps the world would have been better without.


    Eventually, Elaine ducked back into another rift and emerged on Terra. Finding her way back to Teddy''s was easy, not because she had memorized the location of Teddy''s place in particular, but because it wasn''t hard to find the ruins of Chicago, and once close enough, she could easily find her way back to the Archon Signboard she had posted--the last and only signboard in the area. These markers were technically not real--they were just beacons that broadcast data to nearby Archons--but they were common enough in her time that she thought very little of putting one up.


    She arrived to find that Teddy''s compound either was, or had been, under siege. Honestly, she wasn''t sure which; she had yet to see the monsters that Ciddia had mentioned, which she said were spiritual somehow. So, not entirely sure what had gone wrong, she pulled an energy lance out of storage and aimed to make a hot landing in the middle of the compound.

 8. Elaine is Crazy

    Teddy had more or less given up on seeing Elaine or the Administrator again from the moment the portal closed. He spread the news to the guards, who made some effort to pass it along to those outside, that the whole thing was probably over--and he didn''t have anything new to sell. It wasn''t exactly a kick in the teeth; he hadn''t lost anything, he just had to go back out there. And the idea that he had not dirtied his hands was good. He felt a little bit good that Elaine had walked away from the violence that he did to her, unharmed and apparently uncaring.


    He knew, though, that his nightmares would be different for weeks if not months. It had been a long time since he stopped dreaming of their hands suddenly moving to grab his, of dead eyes and mouths moving to consume him, of thousands of hands pouring out of their chest to rip him to pieces...


    As if summoned by his nightmares, he heard a guard shooting. It wasn''t long before there were screams from the crowd, and yells that everyone understood, didn''t need to have explained.


    "Anomalies inbound!" The guard in the tower shouted at the top of his lungs, mostly at the crowd outside. "Get out of here! Move, move, move!"


    Anomalies. What a nice word. Teddy pulled guns off the wall and handed them to every employee that came for one. Just an anomaly. Just a thing that eats flesh and poops out glass, or gold, or flaming tar. Just a thing that turns people into people-shaped mockeries. Just a thing that erases the past and replaces it with garbage.


    A thing that ends life. Just an anomaly.


    Teddy was the last of his employees to the wall, and the last to drop his gun in shock, because there wasn''t only one or two of the static monsters on the horizon; there were a horde. If each of the men on the wall could, for the first time in history, kill each anomaly with one shot from the Administrator-provided weapons, they might have a chance.


    "Fuck this shit," said the man next to Teddy, and he was not the first to abandon the wall, but he was certainly the closest.


    Teddy hauled the gun up onto his shoulder, balancing the heavy thing as he scampered back down the wall and to the Administrator terminal. Behind him, his employees shouted curses at him, promising him wanton cruelty if he ran, but he paid no heed. Elaine had done this--the Administrators had done this. It wasn''t his fault. Everything odd that happened here was their fault.


    They could fix it. They had to fix it. Nobody else could.


    The terminal didn''t have an "emergency" button, and Teddy didn''t exactly know whether they were listening from the moment he hit the button, or whether they only came on when the camera turned on, but he was yelling at the thing from the moment the screen changed to a "Please Wait" message. "Damn you and your waiting! Damn you if you don''t get here on time! There are dozens of the damn things coming, and we can''t stop them alone. We need help! We need better weapons, more hands... anything! This has to be your fault! Help us! Get us out of here!"


    The screen remained at "Please Wait" with no sign that anything had changed.


    Teddy hesitated. He wanted to run back to the wall, but he had to make sure the message got out. He didn''t want to sit and wait while someone died, but they needed backup. He hefted the gun, but he hesitated. If they couldn''t hear him, and he left... when they finally turned on the camera they would see nothing. Would they think it was a glitch? Would they ignore it and let everyone die?


    Suddenly, the screen changed. Instead of a camera turning on, the words "Please Wait" were simply replaced with "Message Received".


    That had to be good enough.


    Teddy bolted back to the wall, entirely unsure of his place in this conflict, but his men were already opening fire, and these weapons didn''t have a lot of range. He was back on the wall in a flash... only to find that his estimate of "dozens" was looking moment by moment to be an understatement. Either that, or they were merging somehow, because there was a whole field of static that was tearing the world to pieces, and it was difficult to pin down where, if anywhere, the damn thing was going to be weak to weapons fire.


    So he did what the rest of his employees did--picked something within range and tried to empty the battery of the self-charging weapon into it. Each energy blast from the weapon opened a hole in the static, but too many of the holes were small--too small, for a massive horde of static like this. Were they really merging? Could anomalies merge? Teddy had always thought they were living, but...The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    Two very odd sounds came from behind him, and Teddy turned. The first was as he expected--two suited Administrators with much fancier weapons than they had ever handed out to him piled out of a hole in reality, followed by a third with a back-mounted unit, probably a charger or sensor of some kind. The weapons were a welcome sight; unlike the weapons his boys were using, which easily earned the title "hand cannon" and were kind of hard to aim, these things looked like proper old-school heavy automatic rifles, the kind that were still a little difficult to aim when you had two hands on them and a bipod to steady the front. That was the kind of weapon that would save their asses.


    The other noise was, he would later find out, a small sonic boom. All he knew was that as he was turning, a figure was falling from the sky, rapidly transitioning from god-only-knows-how-fast to stopped-on-a-dime right next to the portal. Her skin, underneath the wispy gray clothes, glowed with a pattern of blue light, a pattern Teddy was becoming all too familiar with. In one hand, she carried a cannon three times as long as she was tall and as thick as her shoulders were broad; exactly when it appeared was hard to know, but it was certainly only in the last few seconds. Teddy thought there might have been a pistol grip somewhere around the middle.


    "Nice gun," she commented dryly. "Is that some kind of heavy laser? I was always more a fan of plasma myself."


    "You need--"


    "I''ll figure it out." She snagged one of the guns, one-handed, out of the Administrator''s hands, and tossed it up into the air, where she... another Elaine caught it. Two more Elaines suddenly appeared on the ramparts, dressed in much more military-looking uniforms, with big tubes on their shoulders that were clearly launchers for something large. When she spoke, four voices in four different places all shouted at very high volume. "Get down!"


    Everyone got down.


    The sounds that came from the shoulder-mounted weapons suggested a measured release of propellant, or something similar, but there was no sound of detonation. That told Teddy that she was using some kind of conventional weapon--that the ordinance she fired was converted into different forms of matter before it detonated. He had seen the footage of similar attempts; it hadn''t been done in an age, but someone always thought they were smarter than the rest of the world put together.


    "Hm," said the nearest Elaine, and then the two on the wall vanished. Teddy looked around for her, but the nearest Elaine now was balancing that fifteen-plus-foot machine over her shoulder as she hovered in midair over the ramparts. As she pushed buttons or flipped switches or something, various sections of that long tube started to rotate, each the opposite direction from the adjacent ones. Whole sections of the tube suddenly detached and started to float outward in jigsaw-like pieces that maintained orientation but were now too distant from one another to stay in contact, leaving gaps where there was no obvious structure holding the thing together.


    "I''m only going to say this once," the insane cannon-wielding archon said, again at full volume, and Teddy could hear other copies further away saying the same. "The light that this thing emits will make anyone who sees it go blind. Don''t just close your eyes, turn around or get behind cover. Do not look. Firing in 5... 4... 3... 2..." The hum intensified, becoming more and more threatening, as if to underscore her warning.


    Teddy turned around and got behind cover, and covered his head with both hands. As close as he was to the weapon when it fired, he felt his skin burn, the kind of burn he rarely felt even after a week without protection from the sun as he wandered through the broken lands. It felt like nothing he had ever been exposed to.


    The burst only lasted a few seconds, but Teddy felt each of those seconds pass individually. He kept expecting everything to be over. He thought it would last a quarter second, then a half second, then one second, then one and a half, maybe, then two, then three. Every time his mind realized it was still going, it anticipated an end, but time and time again, it didn''t. It was right about the time that his mind rebelled against the idea that it would ever stop, rebelled against the idea that he was still sane... somewhere around six seconds later, that the burst stopped.


    "Well, that worked," said a voice that must have been Elaine''s, but Teddy wasn''t so sure for a long moment. "Made a mess of the landscape, though. Guess I''ll try the gun for the few left around the edges." There was a pause. "You guys can look, now. But, uh, don''t stare. It''s still pretty bright."


    Teddy remained pressed down on the floor for a moment, not because he wanted to be, but because he couldn''t muster the strength to lift himself up. When he did, he found that outside his compound, on the side that faced the wastes, was what might optimistically be termed a "sea of fire": an impossibly wide area in which everything that had ever been recognizable was gone, and things that should never have caught on fire--dirt, sand, asphault, concrete, boulders, everything--was part of the same flaming mess. Everything was on fire, so uniformly that it was impossible to tell where one thing ended and the next began.


    Except for one thing, one person, if you dared call her that. A ways away, calmly, Elaine Many was hovering near the edges of the fire, shooting at static monsters that had escaped her canned apocalypse. "Oh," Teddy thought he heard her say over the roar of the fire, "this is much more efficient. It wouldn''t have put a dent in the horde, I think, but for hunting these things one by one, it''s pretty good."


    One of Teddy''s employees came up to ask a question--most likely something along the lines of "What the hell are we going to do, boss?"--but could only manage to catch Teddy as he fainted, keeping him from tumbling off the edges of the ramparts back into the compound.


    Teddy''s nightmares were changing again, and this one would stick with him for the rest of his life.

 9. Ciddia is a cheat

    Ciddia was never the kind of person who was accused of going easy on people. Even if you went all the way back, before she met Domino Effect and became a Blackhat, she was a technical expert in a well-funded private Chinese company who rose to middle management on a very important project purely on her spunk and willingness to bust balls. Before that, her teachers had highly mixed reviews of her attitude, some praising her no-nonsense attitude and other insisting that women should not act like that.


    Then that project came to the government''s attention. A military unit took it over by force, and imprisoned anyone with technical knowledge. The discipline and oversight of that particular unit was... lacking. Bad things happened. Domino rescued her by force, gave her power and protection, and asked for nothing in return... and from that day to the day he died, she was a loyal follower. Even then, even with him, she would give him shit when he deserved it. Same for the rest of the Blackhats, even... well, no matter who they were.


    For chewing out Archons, there was no one tougher. Domino loved them too much to be a hardass with them pretty much to the end; he saved his vitriol for normal humans, especially those in the government or military who he felt betrayed the human race. So Ciddia, who in her pantsuit was often mistaken for Domino by those who didn''t know better, would frequently step in to discipline those who needed it. She made sure that Domino got an undeserved reputation for being hard on Archons, exactly because he wasn''t.


    And then there was the Fall, which Ciddia only barely survived, and only because of Timothy. It was in many ways a betrayal, but Timothy was usually right, and he was right about this. She still wished he was still around, but the future would not have accepted him and his optimism. They barely accepted her and her blunt realism, willingness to accept blame, and continued unwillingness to put up with other people''s bullshit. Timothy was soft-hearted, even after centuries of war, and would have just sacrificed himself on the altar of public opinion--more literally than Ciddia, by either stepping down or letting himself be executed as a symbol of peace.


    That would have been pointless. The future needed someone who remembered. It needed more than just her, but the way things were looking, ElaineDeWittwas probably not the reinforcements she had been waiting for.


    None of the Administrators recognized the Archon signboard for what it was, and if they had, they might not have tied it to the attack of the nightmares. For Ciddia, the facts lined up as soon as she heard them. Only Archons could see Archon signboards; none were around, since Ciddia herself had gone around making sure they were shut down. They still showed up on the scanners as a low-powered beacon, but it wasn''t enough to start a panic. In the time it took them to figure it out, the nightmares had organized an assault. It was decades since the last time the nightmares showed any sign of organization; if they didn''t sense anything, they wouldn''t gather. There hadn''t been anything lately to draw their attention, but that wouldn''t last.


    So after dispatching a small team of Administrators to arm Elaine, Ciddia locked herself in her office in order to have privacy to do something very rare: she dropped back into the subspace node where all of her abilities as a Blackhat were hidden.


    Subspace nodes like hers used to be one of the closest-held secrets of the Blackhat organization. It was Domino''s theory that if anyone understood the planar structure of the universe, they would be able to reverse-engineer Archon technology, hack it, and destroy the world... or at least the world order that they had created. He was, regrettably, exactly correct, although it took a while, a lot longer than he had expected, almost long enough that he wasn''t prepared. Regrettably, by that time, his was not the only magic on the Two Worlds, and he had no answer for what happened when the two combined.


    So for a very long time, the Blackhats, the Archons, the City... it was all a mystery how it worked, sometimes even to the Blackhats themselves. In truth, it was just hidden in rooms that "didn''t exist". Power generators, farms, huge racks of servers, materials storage, hidden weapons, and of course, the Archon engines themselves... all of them were actually just hanging around in extra-dimensional spaces. Usually, if you got a look at the truth of it, it was a lot less miraculous. Inside those rooms were industrial machines neatly organized, and nothing else of consequence.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.


    Except for a few specific instances, like a Blackhat''s avatar center.


    Ciddia dropped into a room that she had customized herself--several times, the last a long time ago. The artificial gravity was a comfortable 90% earth normal, and a number of pieces of relaxation furniture formed a circle around a meditation bench--one she probably used twice in the centuries since she created it on a whim, but it reminded her of her own ideals, and that was enough.


    She dropped onto her favorite couch for a long moment with a deep sigh. A number of user interface windows popped up in easy reach, and by reflex she toggled the time dilation up to 100x, then paused. Having extra time to think was always nice, but she had come to think of her Blackhat abilities as a cheat, a crutch. She hadn''t used them in a long time, except as the job required. She could cheat. This of all things she could get away with, and nobody would know. But wasn''t that the point of calling it a cheat?


    In the end, she compromised, dropping the time dilation to 10x. Small enough that if she wasted time, she might miss something in the real world, but high enough that she didn''t need to rush.


    After a good five minutes of enjoying the comfortable feel and smell of her couch, Ciddia got up and crossed over to her workstations. Without the City''s databases, she couldn''t connect to just anyone anymore, but because of the "diagnostic tool" she gave Chun Liao, Ciddia already had a backdoor link to Elaine specifically, and that was enough that she could administer her system remotely.


    At that exact moment, Elaine was making a hot approach to the compound. Ciddia pulled down the time dilation until she was watching in almost real-time--a measly 2:1. She cringed at Elaine''s choice of weapons, but allowed the farce to continue. It simply wouldn''t do to drive a wedge between her and Elaine--or anyone else--by revealing just how much control she still had. Again, using her abilities was "cheating".


    Then again, it had always been that way. Domino had the same attitude. The human species had to evolve on its own; no mater how advanced the Blackhats were, they couldn''t solve all the world''s problems. So, even if they could fix a problem didn''t mean they would. Too often she had just sat there watching. It always made her itch, and now was no exception. But, showing her hand now would only put her in a sticky situation.


    So she deactivated the signboard and left Elaine a brief message telling her not to use them anymore, and to please follow the instructions of the Administrators. Just to be safe, she re-activated her own neural interface to the messaging system, in case Elaine chose to reply in kind. After all, for Elaine, the message system was as natural as breathing, even if only she and Ciddia could use it anymore.


    Then, with a last longing look at her couch, Ciddia dropped back into her office. In all, less than five minutes had passed. Nobody was the wiser that she had disappeared, and nobody ever would be. She sat down in front of her mundane-technology terminal in her relatively-crappy office chair and sent notes to the Administrators on their sunglass-HUDs reminding them to confiscate any and every heavy weapon that Elaine had. She reviewed the satellite footage of the incident as it streamed in, slightly delayed, and adopted a look of supreme boredom.


    The smell of that room lingered in her nostrils for a long time. It reminded her of decades of time she had spent there, cheating death with time dilation and superior computational ability. It reminded her of day after day of analyzing the state of the world and searching for any problem she could solve. It reminded her of watching a battle between high-powered Archons, or Archons and incredible native magic users, one unending second at a time, learning every last trick that people were using, adapting her own style, finding weaknesses... and exploiting them. Of battles that lasted hours for her, and moments for eveyone else.


    Memories of cheating.


    She missed it, but not for the reasons anyone else would think. Nobody thought of Ciddia the hardass as being nervous, but she was, and had always been. She had seen humankind on the verge of destroying itself time and time again--before Domino, during his debut, throughout the Pan-Terranic Wars, through the Terra-Draco wars, through the Reign of Fire... and now those that remained were too eager to die, to give up without trying hard anymore. Every time humanity was on the brink of dying, the Blackhats cheated.


    She hoped she wouldn''t need to do so again, but she wasn''t counting on it.

 10. Disarming

    It was standard training for the Administrators, training that took months of work. Training that, if she were being honest, Chun Liao had always resented, because it seemed cheap and dishonest. Yet after years of working for the Administrators, at just this moment, she gave silent thanks a thousand times over for all the efforts Ciddia and her trainers had gone through to make sure she could keep a straight face in any situation.  It was designed to prevent escalation, in a world where any sign of aggression might worsen the situation. It was most useful when dealing with people who were... less than sane.


    Elaine DeWitt was not by any stretch of imagination what Liao would call sane, but it wasn''t quite the same kind of insanity her training referred to. The weapon she referred to in passing as a "plasma lance" was designed for taking out targets behind both shields and armor, the kind of defenses that nobody on Earth had seen in hundreds of years. The splash damage from a single firing of that weapon would mark the landscape for decades, and only the Administrators interceding would keep the fire from completely destroying Teddy Hellman''s compound--which, fortunately enough, was the only flammable thing in thousands of feet.


    Liao''s orders were to ask this woman to turn over every dangerous weapon she had. Without her training in keeping a straight face, she would not have been able to even get the words out of her mouth, but somehow, in spite of everything, she managed.


    "T-those weapons are not authorized any longer," she told Elaine, with her arms crossed behind her back to hide her fidgeting, as the other woman floated a good fifty feet up, observing her good work. "There is no need nor any use for weapons of that scale in the modern world, and we would like you to turn over any--anything you have that does not fit into the category of ''antipersonnel weapons''. And, as a reminder, th-there are no Archons for you to fight, either. High-energy and high-yield weapons m-must be turned over to the Administrators." She paused, but successfully fought back the urge to add, "Please."


    Elaine, still balancing the six-meter-long weapon on her shoulder, looked down on the Administrator with a look in her eyes that Liao thought was very dangerous. She was not able to read the Archon''s facial expression, but it seemed very blank to her, very... cold. It seemed like she could, at any moment, decide that the right thing to do was sneer at Liao and give her the finger, then walk away. The Administrators had nothing that could match her, so--


    "Makes sense," Elaine said, interrupting the cold fear inside the other woman. "This one is spent, though. I emptied the whole battery with that shot. It needed it, too; I don''t know if you guys were watching, but I''m pretty sure the first couple seconds worth of discharge was eaten up by their whole transmutation thing. But after playing the beam around a bit, the whole thing became unstable, and poof, it was gone." She sniffed, as though for emphasis, and one-handed, tossed the enormous tube to the ground, where the weight of the thing snapped it in half as it landed. "Let the scrappers pick it apart. It''s just ansible tech anyway."


    And then she was next to Elaine, in a different outfit, this one very... flirty. Liao wasn''t sure what to read into Elaine''s choices: oversized sunglasses, miniskirt, floofy midriff-baring white top, with an even shorter leather jacket, and sneakers? As Liao stood there processing the other woman''s wardrobe, Elaine fidgeted for a moment, then started to look impatient.


    "Well?" Elaine crossed her arms over her chest. "I trust you don''t want me to leave the rest of my arsenal here."


    So Liao triggered a gateway, this back to a restricted section of Saturnalia--technically a subspace attached to the station, one of many restricted rooms designed purely to hold things that should not be released. Liao would be able to get them out of the room, but once she left, only Ciddia could authorize her to get back in.


    Elaine took the portal in stride, and didn''t seem at all bothered by the lack of gravity on the other side--but then, Liao realized again, she had just jumped out an airlock and taken an orbital tour. While Liao herself barely managed to catch the railing as she stepped in, Elaine had precisely set herself in the middle of a number of weapon racks, the design of many of which completely eluded Liao.


    Liao, but not Elaine.


    Some weapon racks were obvious; Elaine split into many bodies, each dressed differently, each carrying a new piece of hardware, and anything with a rifle or pistol of any sort went in a rack that looked exactly like it should. But weapons like the six-meter plasma lance--and Elaine had many weapons of that size, if none exactly like the first--took vastly different racks. One rocket launcher, for instance, fit into a wall-mounted clamp, one that was apparently designed specifically so that it would only fit once Elaine removed the ammunition and racked it separately. She did, without even needing to experiment, as though she had seen and used them before.


    Other racks were for things that didn''t resemble guns at all. Staffs, swords, giant crystal arrays that Liao had never been briefed on at all, and numerous other artifacts that were completely unclear, plus sets of armor (which must have some kind of built-in weapons or other capabilities), and even whole vehicles, which Elaine lovingly set down (in the sense that she appeared carrying most of them, rather than driving them in this limited space, in spite of their massive size and weight) on what Liao had not actually recognized as vehicle parking spots.If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    Based on Elaine''s highly variable hesitation to part with some weapons, there were only a few she seemed to really care about, or have distinct memories of. One was a needle-barrel pistol, which she handled lovingly for a few minutes before setting in a rack. Another was a hover-variant motorcycle, which on careful analysis Liao recognized as having dozens if not hundreds of weapon-launchers packed into every available surface, although there were no obvious controls--doubtless, they were designed to integrate into the Archon''s mental controls.


    The last was a glove with a crystal on the back of the hand. Liao frowned, because something seemed off about it, but she didn''t make a fuss about it. She did make a mental note to ask Ciddia, or one of the higher level supervisors if she was busy... but given that Liao was the one only with eyes on the situation, she suspected Ciddia would at least give her a debriefing. The crystal, to her, seemed to be radiating something, something almost... intelligent, but it was no more than a hint and a suggestion of something, and Liao, however perceptive she prided herself on being, had no experience with such things.


    In general, though, Liao could only stand back and watch as Elaine went through the motions of leaving things behind. She had no way of telling whether Elaine had given up all, a majority, or only a small fraction of her arsenal, Given the sheer number of large objects she pulled out of nowhere, the potential that she was hiding something huge (in effect if not size) was non-trivial.


    When finally, Elaine seemed to have set aside the last thing she was interested in parting with, Liao''s bracelet buzzed and her holographic interface popped a message from Ciddia--two quick lines about two items she believed Elaine was hiding. Liao raised her eyebrows just a bit, but memorized the lines and swiped them away on her bracelet.


    When Elaine stepped up to her, Liao kept her face as even as she could. "We believe you have a key to the Saturnalia King''s Ground?"


    Without a word, Elaine produced in her hand a flat piece of black glass with a black pattern stenciled on it, an effect that should by rights have been subtle. As Liao looked at it, though, she saw that while every color on the plate was black, they were so qualitatively different that from every angle, each color was distinct; some were glossy, others flat, others speckled with deep grays, others given surface textures of various kinds, and others that just seemed different in ways that were hard to qualify.


    "I assume the King''s Ground is long since decommissioned...?" Elaine seemed to be taking the situation in stride. "With no Archons, it''s kind of pointless anyway."


    "It was sealed," Liao replied as she examined the plate. "I''m not sure what Ciddia has done with it... but I believe the contents are somehow sensitive, now. Or perhaps, she just wishes to let the past remain the past." She looked up at Elaine. "She says you also have a Token."


    With that, Elaine let a wide smile spread across her face. "True enough," she said. "I was wondering if you would ask. Though if you don''t mind, I think I''d prefer to return that to her in person. I am... a little bit curious what she will say."


    Then, suddenly, a message popped into Liao''s display, and she saw a tiny twitch from Elaine at the same moment--as though they were both receiving it. "There is nothing to say," was the message from Ciddia. "The system is broken. Without the resources of the City behind it, it is an unstable element and should be left behind."


    "Mhmmmm." Elaine let the sound of her disbelieving hum last a moment. "And that''s why you aren''t here in person--not because you know I''ll call your bluff if I hear it from you in person."


    Liao raised an eyebrow, but the reply that came seemed in good humor. "You can try using it if you wish," was the reply, "but you won''t receive a Wish. I was intending to examine it and see if it can be salvaged, but I doubt it."


    "That, without question, is a bluff." Elaine produced a coin from nowhere, which she flipped and caught idly. "We''ve faced off like this before, haven''t we? My memories are a little broken, but I seem to recall a conversation very much like this." She flipped the coin again. "I am pretty sure I won that argument."


    "You were always brazen," replied Ciddia by text. "Fine then, the truth. I cannot produce more and I cannot stop them. If they are broken, I cannot save you. If they are not, I cannot stop you. Yet as the last Blackhat I am responsible if anything happens. What am I supposed to do?"


    "You would destroy them, then." Elaine tossed the coin again. "What reckless thing would you do, Ciddia, if I tried to activate it? Called your bluff?"


    "That depends on whether it works, and what you ask." Ciddia''s reply was immediate.


    "Hm." Elaine let the coin rest on her thumb for a long moment, then flipped it again. "What if I gave it away? To, say, Teddy Helmann?"


    "That depends on whether it works," replied Ciddia again.


    "Do you think it will?" Elaine made the coin vanish from her fingers, and turned and paced back through the aisles of weapons she had racked. "Be honest, Ciddia. For goodness'' sakes, I gave up all of this because it was the right thing to do. I would hope you could trust me."


    "I don''t trust anyone anymore." There was a pause. "Those systems were handled by others. I honestly don''t know how it works. But I believe it was designed to work when the City was out of range, in case the Two Worlds would separate some day. But... the world is broken. The Nightmares are proof of this."


    "You think it could create one of those monsters?" Elaine ran her hands over the weapons in the rack, one at a time, pacing back towards that Liao recognized as the glove with the crystal on it.


    "That is the worst case," replied Ciddia.


    "And that''s why you won''t let me out until I give it to you," said Elaine simply. "I bet you deactivated your girlfriend''s exit, too. That''s why you''re not here; you''ll wait me out if I''m stubborn." She paused. "I should warn you I intend to be stubborn."


    "I thought you might," was all Ciddia said. To Liao, separately, a message window popped up, only saying, "I''m sorry."


    Liao kept her face blank, but now she cursed the long hours of training that ensured that Ciddia''s betrayal would look like it was all part of a plan.

 11. Elaine and Liao

    Elaine wandered through the racks of weapons idly. She knew that she could easily outlast Ciddia and her... it took Elaine a moment to recognize that the woman was no more than an employee, in spite of being dressed in a fashion that in her time was reserved for heavy-hitters. Oh, there were always fakers who wore suits, but there was something to this Administrator, a shadow of the gravitas that she mentally reserved for the real thing. Perhaps it was just being trained by Ciddia, who was without a doubt still the real thing.


    More to pass the time than anything, Elaine offered the younger woman a smile and picked up a paired sword, the other lifting off the rack next to it according to her mental command, and said, "So tell me about yourself. Don''t worry about this whole locked-in thing, I''m not that desperate to keep the thing. Just... checking." She swung the sword she wasn''t touching around like it was a nunchaku, while maintaining eye contact. When the other woman didn''t respond for a moment, she put it back, wondering if she was too intimidating.


    "I''m just her to help people," said the other woman after a period of silence. "The colonies... have given up on progress since the end of the Two Worlds. It''s better and worse depending on where you go. My mother got fired from a job for using unauthorized technology--off the shelf stuff, but her boss was a technophobe. She found another job, but for a while, it seemed like she was black-balled from everything." The Administrator bared her teeth. "The Administrators don''t do as much as I''d like, but they aren''t afraid of technology itself. They just... aren''t eager to give things away anymore."


    "Do you think that''s how Teddy sees you?" Elaine took a radiation shockwave pistol and, idly, removed the power source and racked it separately. Irrelevant, but it gave her something to do with her hands.


    The Administrator was quiet for a minute. "Perhaps not," she said quietly. "I''m sure every time that he doesn''t get something he thinks he heeds, it feels like a betrayal. And given our policies, that happens often enough. However... we watch more than just Teddy, and too many people on the Two Worlds are abusing the technology they have, let alone what we could give them." The other woman wandered, as casually as someone unused to zero gravity could, over to one of the racks. "May I ask you a question?"


    "Of course!" Elaine wanted to drop another body next to the woman and teleport over, but fought the urge. Most people didn''t like it when she did that, and while it was fun to piss off Archons or other people with power... she had no reason to dislike this woman. She seemed... professional, well-meaning, and not nearly as stuffy and cold as most of the people she remembered. So, Elaine just flew, "About some of my stuff?"


    "This one." The Administrator set her hand down next to the Dragon Gauntlet, one of the few items Elaine had been reluctant to let go of. "I''m just curious... it gives off a strange feeling."


    Elaine couldn''t help grinning. "Yeah, you wouldn''t know the feeling, would you? They call that a Dragon Gauntlet, new age Draco tech. See, magic in the Old World was two pieces--a spiritual body and a power source. Before the Two Worlds became one, there was only one real power source, and that was the planet itself--something the Arch Sorcerers did, whatever." She shrugged. "But with real power sources from Terra they could create what they call mini-dragons, fully independent of the planet. That means if you make your own custom spell, nobody can use it but you, which is very different from how the rest of magic works."


    The administrator held her hand over the glove, as though afraid to touch it. "So this is... magic?"


    "Pure and true. Though if magic is damage in the world outside..." Elaine gave a waggling wave of her hand. "It''ll probably just break, too. Like Ciddia said, it might make another one of those monsters, and why risk it? It''s just a weapon."


    The other woman''s eyes remained locked on the item for a long time. "The Two Worlds are damaged, yes," she said. "The colonies are fine."


    "But they don''t want this stuff," pointed out Elaine amicably. "You said that yourself. And again, weapon."


    "But..." Finally, the Administrator just sighed and put her hand down. "Of course you''re right. I just wish..."This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it


    "That you could live in a world of peace, harmony, and magic? Yeah, we always want the world to be different." Elaine flew up just a bit, hanging in midair over the arsenal of weapons, and gestured grandly around herself. "Behold! This is what that ideology has created. We fought to create the perfect world, and destroyed the imperfect one. Now nothing remains."


    The Administrator flinched and turned her head to the side as though she''d been struck. Elaine caught the movement and turned to look at her, there was an awkward silence for a moment, and then Elaine laughed.


    "You," she said cheerfully, "you are a piece of work, aren''t you? Don''t worry about me, I''m only half as cynical as I act. Here." Elaine summoned her Pandora Token and flipped it at the Administrator, who only managed to catch it after it had bounced once off her chest. "That''s what the lady upstairs wants. We can get out of here, now." She paused. "What''s your name, by the way?"


    The administrator, following some unseen direction, crossed to the other side of the platform and deposited the coin in a small box. A light lit up on the side of it, and she nodded in confirmation. "My name is Liao," she said as she looked up at the other woman. "Chun Liao."


    Elaine pushed off of a nearby weapons rack with one foot, flipping end-over-end with practiced grace, and landed in front of Liao--with the lack of gravity, it was just a fancy way of flying, but she did put some effort into making it look like she was fighting against gravity. Give how her flight powers worked, she was rarely actually aware of what gravity wanted her to do, anyway, unless she was keeping both feet on solid ground.


    Then she offered the other woman a handshake. "Pleased to meet you, Chun Liao." Elaine did her best to pronounce the name right, which made Liao''s lips twist into a bit of a smile. "I am Elaine Many. In spite of what your profile on me says, that is my real name now. The other one is an echo of a time long gone."


    Liao gave the other woman a small smile, still seeming more than a bit shy. "Pleased to meet you, Elaine. I am sure it will be very interesting working with you."


    "I''ll make sure of that," Elaine replied cheerfully, as a portal ripped open next to them. She measured the portal for a moment, weighing the chance of another betrayal, then shrugged and gestured to Liao. "After you."


    To her surprise, the portal dropped her right back out in Teddy Helmann''s compound, where one wall, the one closest to the blaze, was now mostly melted or fire--not a surprise for such a chintzy wall, Elaine thought. Liao kept her face an unreadable mask, but as the portal zipped shut and reopened, she couldn''t keep the stress out of her voice.


    "Ciddia would like you to put out the fire that you so casually started." Two administrators appeared from the portal, looking quite bewildered, and deposited backpacks on the ground before immediately departing. "Ideally before this place is completely destroyed."


    Even before she was done talking, Elaine had appeared two bodies, each hauling a backpack up and flying over to the wall. "Of course," the remaining Elaine said, easily splitting the mental load of the three bodies. "What''s in the tanks, water or some kind of suppressant?"


    "There''s no tank. They''re connected to the lake." Liao gestured vaguely off towards to the northeast, and the body of water once known as Lake Michigan. "That''s where the runoff will go, anyway. Try to control the erosion if you can, but we aren''t expecting any miracles."


    "Right." Two hoses came to life, and before long, the wall at least was put out. There was so little in the area that could actually burn, that while the plasma was hot enough to melt or even ignite some types of dirt and sand, it wasn''t self sustaining. Still, she sprayed a perimeter and gave the hot ground a good hosing, which led to a lot of steam and little runoff, and made double sure that the wall was completely put out.


    As things wound down, Elaine looked over the wall, and then looked around the rest of the compound. She felt her face falling a bit as she considered the place Teddy had proudly called home. She was no one''s idea of a craftsman, but the walls were shit, and the buildings, and most of the tech. But Teddy, who could afford a small standing army of guards, could only afford this much.


    "It''s a different world without civilization, without technology" she said into the open air, and Liao gave her a strange look. "There are--there used to be--mages and builder Archons who could have made a better compound than this in an hour, and a true fortress in a day. How long has Teddy been here? Years?"


    "Most of his life," replied Liao, evenly.


    "But the coin has to be locked up. But Archons shouldn''t exist. Nothing should be repaired, replaced. The Administrators sit by doing nothing." Elaine let her scorn sit naked in her voice. "I''ll bet this is better than a lot of places. Better than some hospitals."


    Liao said nothing.


    "Fortunately, I did have some things in my inventory that aren''t weapons." Elaine gave the other woman a big grin. "I''ll make amends for this. And maybe do some other things. We''ll figure something out, and make you look like cowards for sitting around doing nothing."


    Liao watched the other woman''s face for a moment, then gave a professional smile. "That''s just who you are, Elaine Many. We are the Administrators, and you are an Archon. Go be what you are."


    Elaine snorted, wondering who had written that line for her, and turned and walked away from Liao.

 12. Teddy and Elaine

    Teddy woke up from a nightmare that he had not had in a long time. It wasn''t new, though; he''d had the same nightmare at least once a week for years, after his mother died. He''d seen her face on Archon corpses, and then the corpses would come to life, begging sometimes to die, sometimes to live, sometimes to take over his body and consume him from within.


    Back in those times, Teddy was scrapping Archons and hating every last moment of his life. If he didn''t go wrist deep into someone''s neck, he might not eat, or the few workers he had would walk away. But still, day after day he would wander into the wastes and lose his nerve at the last minute, blaming things on the static anomalies or just bad luck.


    The worst part was how people let him get away with it. Maybe if someone had confronted him, he would not have had to bear the burden all alone. Maybe someone else with nerves of steel could have done everything but the very last part, letting him steel himself for the sick feel of blood, the odd feelings and noises that came from the internals of the Archon body... many things.


    Thus far he had told six people about his powers. One, of course, was his mother. Two more he had to kill in self defense when they tried to kill him for his "sins". One was an Administrator, and he promised Teddy that they would keep his secret. One he had hoped would be his business partner, until he discovered the man ...abusing archon corpses, and then he never worked with him again.


    The last was now his ex. Those two facts were deeply and painfully connected. After they broke up, Teddy occasionally saw her face instead of his mother''s in those awful nightmares, but it didn''t last.


    Now, Teddy supposed, he could add Elaine, the last Archon, to that list, although... he hadn''t gone into the specifics. The look on her face when she found out, and the fact that she felt the need to forgive him... that told him she probably understood, but could she really? Could anyone?


    It wasn''t until Teddy finally rolled out of bed and into the yard that the events of the past day really sank in. Not merely the existence of Elaine, but the battle against the static creatures, the... absurd lake of fire that she produced out of nowhere. And as he stood there in the early morning light, looking at the ruined waste that was his northern wall, he wanted to cry.


    Powerless.


    He had to scrap Archons because he was powerless. He had to venture into the wastes and dodge monsters that could have turned his body to a molten statue. He provided food, shelter, and protection for his employees, technology for... well, whoever bought it. But it was all because he couldn''t do anything. He couldn''t just make a living as a baker or a technician. He thought about trying, but he saw the same thing in himself day after day, year after year.


    He saw himself standing stock still for hours at a time, lost in his own bloody history, crying. He couldn''t go back. Nobody would understand.


    Staring at the wall, Teddy itched to take his sled and dive into the blasted lands. Not because another bounty would make things better, but because nobody would expect him to be strong. They would let him waste time out there crying and just assume that he had a plan for the future. They would think he was working for them, doing his best for them.


    Teddy felt like death. Not like dying... like this was what it felt like to already be dead, to have lost all grip on the world and just be a ghost, a wraith, a monster hanging over the world, unable to let go but unable to move on.


    Instead of running off or going back to his room to sleep, Teddy trudged with the weight of long practice to the half-roofed pavilion that acted as kitchen and dining area when the weather was warm. There were people gathered there, and the low thrum of duty in Teddy''s heart pushed him to walk over there and show his face so they knew he was still alive.


    The people eating there were all the usual faces, although there were fewer of them. Charlie and Bobbi were the guards who had bothered to return, and the two of them were sitting, as usual, together. Charlie liked Bobbi, that was clear enough, and Bobbi didn''t mind the company, although Teddy would have given good odds that she didn''t actually care for him at all.


    Like many things, Teddy kept those thoughts inside. Right or wrong, what he thought didn''t matter, and would only get him in trouble.


    His scrappers were both there. Anna would probably keep coming back as long as he fed her, and would work as long as he paid her. He''d thought about telling her his secret, but... first of all, he couldn''t bear the risk of driving off even her, and secondly, she was definitely not the sort who would ever help him with his work. Anna was a decent tech, and had helped him with some of his construction projects, but she was overweight, depressive, lazy, and generally refused to do anything exhausting or dangerous. Forget whether she was willing to go into the blasted lands, Teddy couldn''t count on her being able to survive.


    The other scrapper was Jim. He was restless and always searched for something to do, usually welding bits of metal to make something or other better. He had patched holes in the walls, constructed stairs, built towers, and a bunch of other useful things over the years, just because they needed to be done. He did, however, have a bit of a complex, thinking he ought to be the one in charge of everything, and would push people to do things his way unless Teddy had put his foot down and said otherwise. Jim was smart, but it was tiring to be around him.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    As he surveyed the eating area, Teddy finally noticed, with a kind of numb acceptance, that his cook had been replaced by a very young-looking woman with glowing marks on her skin and a relentlessly bright attitude. As he stepped up to the serving counter, Elaine offered him a wide grin and a plate full of fried meat and eggs.


    "Hey, you old buzzard. I was wondering if you were ever going to wake up." Elaine split into two just so that one of her could lean on the counter and grin at him while the other finished up cooking one more serving--probably her own. "Don''t look so grumpy. I''ll help you with the repairs." She gestured at the plate. "You should try it. Apparently none of your people actually know how to cook, because they think my garbage-ass cooking is the best they''ve ever tasted. One of your boys even proposed to me from the smell alone."


    "That offer is still on the table!" said Jim pleasantly from somewhere behind Teddy, and several people laughed, including Elaine.


    Teddy felt conflicted, because he genuinely did want to smile and laugh, and he did... a little. But another part of him was convinced he was supposed to still be depressed and miserable. It was... duty, in a way. He had to bear the weight for everyone else, and that meant being somber and heavy-hearted.


    But my god, that meat smelled delicious. How had she sliced it so thin? He picked it up with his fingers and bit off a section--delicious! Teddy stared at the rest in his hands, and turned towards a table. In his heart, the conflict warred. His problems couldn''t be solved with delicious food, but still...


    Naturally, by the time Teddy had sat down, Elaine was already sitting opposite him, leaning on the table with one hand on her cheek, looking at him. "So I''ve been thinking," she said, with an air to her that suggested that she hadn''t thought very long or hard about it, "but you need some seriously improved tech out here. Now, there''s a lot about ansible tech that I don''t know, but I asked your scrapper buddies," and she jerked a thumb to Anna and Jim, "and she said you basically have none of the docs on how this stuff works, right?"


    Teddy, his mouth full of bacon, nodded.


    "Well, I have a bunch of service manuals and some disk drives. The CFA used a lot of straight up ansible tech, and the manuals and disks were everything you needed to repair a damaged unit in the field, assuming you had the parts." She paused. "I don''t actually know that you have the right parts, of course. We used some off the shelf Qiron SBCs, Celli quantum key MUXers for communications, and pretty much any ansible board we had the drivers for, if we could connect it via PCIQ or USB." She paused. "Though of course as slow as USB is, those had to have their own onboard processors."


    Teddy stared at Elaine for a minute, his thoughts in a state of temporary paralysis. He slowly lifted a bit of fried egg to his mouth, chewed it for a minute, swallowed it, and when it was clear Elaine was waiting for a reply, said, "I''m pretty sure that most of the ansibles we pull out of..." he paused, cleared his mind, and skipped ahead, "...are 512-channel PCIQ. Someone somewhere published enough of the standards for the interface that we could hack it with an oscilloscope and some fiber optics, but we really never knew what we were doing. I don''t know the brand names you mentioned."


    Elaine studied his face for a minute, then smiled again. "Probably not," she said. "Not if you get most of your tech out of Archon corpses."


    Teddy almost choked on the very small sip of water he was in the middle of. He looked around, seeing everyone staring at him, and immediately started--


    "I already told them," said Elaine with a wave, her face suddenly showing a tiredness that she didn''t usually let through. "I wanted to know what they knew. I''m pretty sure everyone here is... well, probably not happy? But willing to keep working with you. A couple others definitely weren''t, but they''re not here anymore." She smiled again, and this time it felt just a little fake. "You surround yourself with good people, Mr. Helmann. Mostly."


    Teddy looked around, meeting the eyes of people for, in many cases, the first time ever. They weren''t... scared. Not happy. Not angry. Teddy swallowed nothing once, then again a few moments later. "...Sorry."


    "For keeping quiet? Hell, I woulda." Anna held up her plate, and another Elaine appeared to take it, and gave her another plate full of bacon in return. "Though I probably woulda quit, to be honest."


    There were some mutters of assent from Charlie and Bobbi, but Jim was looking somewhere else. The look on his face suggested he was thinking about the next thing he ought to be doing, which was fine with Teddy. Jim would be able to steady his nerves as long as he had something to do.


    "I... would have," said Teddy slowly. "Except you guys needed me. And... giving up was death. Didn''t... didn''t want to do that." He let his eyes fall to the table in front of him, not really focusing on anything.


    Where Teddy expected an awkward silence, he only got a strangely sympathetic hum from Elaine. He looked up to find her staring at him, her face drawn flat. "Yeah," she said. "The war for survival does that to you. I was a soldier, Teddy. I killed people because I thought they might. They might kill me, or oppose my people. I don''t know how much blood you have on your hands, but I have more." And suddenly, the table was surrounded by copies of Elaine, mostly in different clothes, and each laid one hand down on the table. "More hands... and every single one of these hands has more blood on it than yours do."


    "I killed people only to find out they were innocent, Teddy. I killed people that were my friends when we ended up on different sides of a battle." As Teddy watched, Elaine''s face sank until she looked very, very tired. "I know what wrestling with guilt feels like. And I know what it looks like. But butchering the dead isn''t a weight you should have to carry alone. I don''t think you should have to carry it at all. You aren''t a murderer, and you aren''t a monster. Don''t convince yourself that you are."


    Odd feelings swelled inside Teddy, and tears came. It wasn''t... relief, exactly. There was still a deep reserve that kept him from feeling quite at ease. But parts of him were able to let go, to vent deep stresses and pains, and that...


    ...that was more than he could take all at once on its own, and he cried, for hours. It hurt, and also... was important. It hurt like... like old heartaches always do, some part of him thought. It hurt like being alone always did, but... a little less than usual.


    Especially during those times when one of the others, especially Elaine, put a hand on his shoulder or gave him a hug to help him get through.

 13. Elaine is Useful

    Anna Murphy generally preferred the sedate pace that things seemed to naturally take at Teddy''s warehouse to most of the other places she, as a technician, could have worked. Teddy, after all, took on the real burdens himself, and as a result, she could just do as she was told, usually a little slowly, and receive her pay at the end of the day. Where other technical jobs she could get were either maintenance or sales, this was just... more like a protracted funeral. Picking up the pieces of the past so that people could move on.


    Comparing it in her mind to a sales job, she couldn''t imagine leaving. Salesmen were always trying to look special. They thought the best way to become known was to become a character, a caricature. They put aside anything that might jeopardize sales and became the sale itself. Teddy... even when he was selling goods, it was an honest, somber affair. The truth was laid out, and it was usually enough on its own. When the truth wasn''t enough... the thing wasn''t sold. And sometimes the truth wasn''t enough. There were racks of equipment stored here that none of the techs understood, and that made it hard to sell.


    It didn''t surprise Anna that this Archon woman knew a bit more than she did, nor did it surprise her that she still didn''t understand most of what was stored in the back. But it was a little amazing that as Elaine poured over some of the diagrams Anna, Jim, and Teddy had made, she seemed to at least understand the point of the systems.


    "I see what you were thinking," said Elaine as she gave a soft backhand slap to the life-sized piece of paper attached to the wall, depicting a 1/2 scale representation of a server farm attached to a set of ansibles. "But if these were ''blue'' ansibles, as you have them marked, they weren''t used for standard object motion stuff. Blue ansibles aren''t the right kind to apply force to a larger object; they''re for adjusting chemical structures. With how many data stores you have here, I''d say this was part of the system for rebuilding wounded Archons. Not the head, I think. I''d expect a whole set of racks just for backing up archon brains."


    "Yeah," said Teddy with a dismissive handwave, "we saw those racks, and we figured it had to be something along those lines. But tracking the whole body, piece by piece, you think this is enough for that?"


    "Oh... sure. As long as they have a template and stick to it, which is probably how they kept us forever young and healthy. I know people did tests, and Archons aren''t like human bodies in most respects. The... normal human bodies have some kind of ecosystem... bacteria and other symbiotic life forms." Elaine sat on a stool facing the other three while another of her sat next to them, head propped up by her hands, studying the diagram along with them. "Big D just kind of emulated most of that stuff. Apparently the first few generations of Archons were pretty messed up biologically, but by my time it was working okay."


    "Let me back up a second," said Jim slowly. "So based on what you said earlier, and we had just been guessing this before, but... you can have your brain destroyed, as an Archon, and survive?"


    "Oh, sure." Elaine waved that off flippantly. "There''s a whole sliding scale of damage for Archons, one that comes down as much to morale as anything. If you actively want to die it takes less to kill you than it would a comparable human. While you are in good spirits, you can come back from almost nothing. But... damage to your body affects your mind, and obviously brain damage and other major injuries do this more than flesh wounds. When your mind gives up, that''s it. You''re gone. It''s actually..." she paused. "When you watch an Archon die... it feels... weirdly natural. Like at the moment they die, you know they accepted it. A lot of humans die unwilling to accept death, but it comes anyway. You can die regretting what you did, but Archons know... that their time has come. Because if they didn''t know that, if they didn''t accept it, they would still be hanging on to life."


    "Obviously there''s something else to it, though," opined Anna, cautiously. As curious as she was, this conversation was moving a little fast for, and she felt anxious speaking up without an appropriate period of silence. She blundered on anyway, not making eye contact with Elaine or anyone else, "since Archons died all the time. I''m sure most of ''em wanted to live in spite of their wounds."


    "Oh, sure. Nobody''s really happy to die. But, there''s this whole feedback loop to it. Few Archons die in a single shot unless they''re already on the way out. You end up in combat with people that will keep hurting you until you are willing to die, and if you aren''t going to regenerate fast enough to put up a fight, you''re left with this whole eternity of torture versus death thing." The Elaine that was facing the others gave a brief grin. "I cheated death a lot because I have multiple bodies, but even Duplicants like me bite the dust. You have a kind of resource limit, like food and water except it comes back on its own. Run out of power and you''re helpless for a while. So I regenerate bodies after they die, but slowly. If I got impatient and ran out there with my last body, I''d have been a goner." Her face fell. "I had to stand by and watch other people die, because the alternative was to try to deny the truth--that I was helpless. A lot of people made that mistake."


    "And you buried them," guessed Jim.


    Teddy shook his head. "Archons don''t leave bodies," he said. "Not once... they''re gone for real."


    Jim looked from Teddy to Elaine, and she nodded. "From what I heard, it was a choice made from the very beginning. If you''ve ever seen a holographic structure dissolve because the ansible broke... it kind of breaks into threads all of a sudden, and scatters like dust. That''s what an Archon death looks like. We''re actually flesh and blood, so it''s artificial, but there''s never anything to bury."Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    Anna felt herself blanch, and she couldn''t help but flashing back to burying her father and brother in the sands of the broken wastes. "That had to have been hell," she said. "No closure, no saying goodbye, just... gone."


    "It sucked!" replied Elaine, as cheerfully as she could muster. "Can we go back to talking about tech now?"


    "Yeah... sorry." Teddy got up and moved over to the box of rolled up paper containing other diagrams. "So what kind of ansible does object motion? Black?"


    "Red. We didn''t have access to black ansibles." Elaine paused. "That probably means they were doing something that the Blackhats restricted. Everything they restricted was labelled ''black;'' they even had double- and triple-black classifications for secrets. I was actually told a double-black secret once... it was keen." She grinned. "If it''s a completely different ansible type... I''d guess spatial manipulations, teleportation, portals, that kind of thing. Archons actually could never do any of that. It was obviously happening, but we couldn''t control any part of it."


    "Really? Because I have tons of black ansibles sitting around." Teddy flipped through the sheets, pulling one out. "Here, look. This isn''t the standard one that everyone has, it''s some kind of special core. The skin markings of the Archon are on this corner..."


    "Mecha Archon," Elaine identified immediately. "They would pop up armor and weapon or special power sets, but each set was thematic. Lot of weebs and nerds picked Mecha Archons because they used special sets modeled after pop culture icons--Iron Man, Megaman, Godzilla, lots of things. They weren''t any stronger than anyone else, but they liked knowing that the set of powers were meant to be together, instead of... mixing and matching."


    There was a long silence. "I have a lot of questions," asked Jim. "What is a ''weeb''?"


    "A type of pop-culture geek focused on a specific niche. The niche was pretty large and included a lot of hero stuff, but it had a bunch of same-y elements to it. Not my thing." She paused. "For your other questions, let me guess... Iron Man was a fictional superhero focused on high tech weapons and a powered armor suit. Megaman was a game character that gained weapons by defeating enemies, a different set every game he was in. Godzilla was a giant lizard from classic movies that would destroy cities." She paused. "...Nerds and geeks are both types of enthusiasts of different types. Usually nerds were cerebral thinking types and geeks were people that formed groups around entertainment or other motivational things. Liked having a community."


    "Okay." Jim was taking a moment to soak tha tin. "So I''m guessing they had some... free time."


    "Oh yeah, this was pre-collapse, and it started before the big wars, when the economy was held up by threads but they were all pretending things were okay. Lot of entertainment, lot of backsliding on societal problems. Increased drug use, crime, wealth inequality... the kinds of things where you know, looking back, that everything was going to shit, but when you were born into those times, what could you do?"


    "I don''t think anyone here but you understands the history of the world pre-collapse," pointed out Anna, paying more attention to the diagram Teddy was pinning to the wall. "We have some records, but some of those are obviously lies."


    "Yeah. Okay, well, we can have a history lesson another day." Elaine, too, was looking at the diagram, deep in thought. "This is... interesting. It''s not just the black ansibles. It has its own power system and a set of reds. I bet this was an independent unit that was just stored inside the main unit."


    "Independent?" Jim leaned forward. "How so?"


    "The mech bodies were not part of the person who summoned them," Elaine said vaguely, as even the copy sitting in front of them turned to look at the paper. "They could be destroyed separately, and often broken into pieces. So they needed a system that was controlling the body separately from the main body. You could even hit one of those things with anti-holo fields or heavy weapons that could destroy the ansible from real-space, and the archon that used it would be fine. So this was probably in its own pocket space..."


    Anna listened as Elaine rambled on, but an idea was forming in her head, piece by piece. Her eyes flicked from one piece to another. Finally, when the conversation broke for a minute and there was a long period of silence, she cleared her throat.


    "If that whole unit was designed to be independent," she asked, "can''t we just go find one and turn it on?"


    There was only silence for a moment before the Elaine standing before her gave her a big grin, and the one sitting beside her gave her a playful (if unwanted) ruffle of her hair.


    "I like the way you think," said Elaine. "Okay. If most Archon bodies are still where they were when...." she paused, but only for a moment, "...I went under, I think I could find at least one and bring them back here. What do I need to know about finding and avoiding those badlands monsters?"


    "They are attracted to motion, they sense electricity... a lot of things," said Teddy quickly. "But also, you can kind of tell they''re there if you are in the right mindset. Like you''ll feel them on the edges of your mind long before you see them." He paused. " I mean, I do. I, uh, haven''t asked others."


    Elaine nodded. "That''s spiritual perception stuff. Archons aren''t known for it, but I can usually fake it if I have two bodies out. I can kind of sense the difference between the two. When you go to war against magic types that kind of thing comes in handy." She paused. "Anything else?"


    "I suddenly have a lot of questions," said Jim slowly.


    "About magic? Psh, yeah, I bet. Later." Elaine suddenly materialized a gun to her hand, one she had been given by the Administrators. "I''ve already got experience killing them... eh, I think I''ll be okay." She paused. I''m gonna leave one of me here, though. Should be within range if I don''t split, I don''t think he was more than two... two-hundred-fifty miles away. Barely within range. But I''ll have to be quiet for a bit." She stood up. "So... talk to you in a little bit."


    Anna looked over at Jim and Teddy as she walked away. "Just like that, huh?"


    "Anomalies have killed hundreds of people in this area alone," said Jim quietly. "But none of us had military training, let alone real experience. Some of the people on the wall didn''t even hit what they were shooting at."


    "I think it''s pretty clear," said Teddy gravely, "that if Elaine Many decides to open fire, it''s far more important what gun she''s shooting than whether or not she hits. If she misses with an Administrator weapon... fine. But I don''t for a moment believe she that she doesn''t have more surprises up her sleeves, and probably will even if the Administrators try to shake every last secret from her."


    In the dry silence between the three of them, Anna thought she heard Elaine chuckle, but when she turned her head, nobody was there.

 14. The Living, The Dead, The Goods

    Elaine usually didn''t overstate her abilities in front of other people; it was never really a great idea. Bragging tended to bring heat down on you... or made people expect more from you than you could really give. In war, making too great of a claim would just inspire people to hunt you down and kill you. In fact, Elaine had very quietly understated her powers in front of her peers for more than a century.


    If people knew she was a level 6, they would not have let her go quietly. Fortunately, the Blackhats made this a very quiet thing; there were no marks, no telltale energy signatures. You simply had more abilities, and if you chose not to use them, and appeared to be at the same level as you were twenty years ago, well, maybe you were just a coward, someone who ran away all the time.


    That said, Elaine''s suggestion that she could just roll up and find the remains of an old friend of hers some two hundred miles away was basically a complete fabrication. It wasn''t possible, and it didn''t need to be.


    Elaine dematerialized the copy she left at Teddy''s compound once it was alone. She just wasn''t good with goodbyes, and she had no idea how long she''d be gone. The idea of tearing into some meaty targets using Teddy''s ability was a nice one, but the targets she really wanted were not local, and would probably be harder to find. Starting, of course, with Bohrs.


    Scott Bohrs was probably the longest living King aside from the Maniac... but unlike Thomas Madd, Bohrs actually made it to the end, albeit in retirement. Madd and Bohrs, "The Maniac" and "Metal Monster" to their enemies, were among the greatest elite fighters on the planet, for one specific reason: they were greenlisted. They had unique powers that the Blackhats normally restricted, but those abilities only came out "on stage", when they embraced a mental and spiritual narrative that resonated with the situation.


    It was... complicated. The Blackhats did that so that heroes would win more often, but there were some Stage-fighting baddies who did just as well. And... in war, things were often too complicated to set down in black and white. Either way, the Stage system boosted people who genuinely believed in what they were doing... or could fake it really, really well.


    With Madd gone, some people claimed that Bohrs had inherited his flamboyant red cape, a piece of equipment said to be part of Madd''s strange connection to the stage system. She had never seen it, but there was no question that Scott retired immediately after the Maniac died. His location was secret enough, but somehow the right people were always able to find him.


    Not that that would work now. Ciddia said the Stage System was long gone, a part of the City that they had never bothered to replace. Even if the cape could have led her to Scott, there was no longer a system to pass those things on to her. But still... there was one place she could check, a place she had met the Metal Monster years ago. A safehouse he only reluctantly shared... and only with pretty women.


    Elaine grinned as she broke through the sound barrier flying south towards the Gulf of Mexico and, soon enough, across South America to the mountains of Chile. Archons tended to enjoy places no mortal could reach; it kept random passers-by to a minimum, of course, and it deterred armies, but it was also an ego thing. They were special, and sometimes it felt good to live that life.


    And so, more than a day later, Elaine hovered next to what was, by all appearances, a nearly vertical mountain surface. It was difficult to figure out exactly which mountain she remembered, and which section of stone was the right one, and then she had to spend a great many more hours looking for the right few square feet that contained a hidden door.


    But eventually, she did. A latch there was supposed to respond to a key, but Elaine could remember the geometry of the hallway inside well enough to pop a copy of her inside without opening the door, and then shifted over to it as her main.


    It was... exactly what you would expect for an abandoned hidey-hole in the side of a mountain. Dusty, cold. This section was unlit, but she could see a glimmer from down the hall. She floated down it without touching the sides, except once to pull a lever she had been told disarmed a certain trap. It broke off in her hand, and she shifted her main back outside, but the copy set off no traps all the way to the end of the hall.


    Out of sheer habit, Elaine knocked on the door before she opened it, and had quite a start when she found a naked woman curled up comfortably on a couch, by all appearances alive and asleep. But... instants turned into moments, into seconds, into minutes, and there were no signs of life.


    Finally, she managed to wet her incredibly dry mouth and speak out, as loudly as she could. "Nobody''s alive in here, right?" Minutes went by, and no answer.


    She examined the woman''s skin closely, but her stigma was concealed; there was no telling her Archon caste without them, and only she could turn them on. She found a blanket and tossed it over the poor woman, realizing uncomfortably that Teddy had been dealing with this madness for years. Every moment, she expected the woman on the couch to stand up and accuse her of breaking and entering, to draw a blade of darkness or fire out of nowhere and stab her in the back. It was enough that she had to split and keep one eye on the woman constantly, just to assure herself that the woman was, exactly as she had been told, braindead.


    "Son of a bitch, Teddy, how did you do this," said Elaine, quietly. "I would go mad. I will go mad if this keeps up." But she searched the rest of the hideaway, finally locating a secret hatch in the floor that led to a secret-within-a-secret room.


    And there he was, passed out sitting up with his head propped on his hand. Scott looked older, somehow, in a way Archons rarely chose to do. He was gray, and he had a gauntness to him, like he really was an old man. And he was old, for an Archon; he had been there from the start of the Pan-Terranic Wars, which consumed Earth before it ever linked up with Draco. He had been an on-again, off-again King Archon, responsible for making choices about the maintenance and power set of his Archon caste. And he had been a constant thorn in the side of pretty much everyone he ran into.


    And here he sat, covered with dust, asleep since who knows when.


    "Just to be sure," Elaine forced herself to say, again, out loud, "you''re not just asleep, you''re braindead like everyone else, right? Because I''m going to take your stuff and I don''t want you to be mad at me."


    Seconds became minutes, one heartbeat at a time, and Elaine sat on the edge of the desk and looked at Scott''s face. It wasn''t just that he looked alive; he was. His heart beat, his lungs heaved, and moment by moment, the illusion grew stronger and stronger, as though she could shake him to wake him up.


    "I hope this works... or I hope it doesn''t," she muttered, hopped off the desk, grabbed a standing lamp, and with a twirl, smashed Scott in the face with it.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Each second brought a new fear. She expected him to snap out of it from the moment she did made her first sudden movements, then again when she grabbed a weapon, then again when her intent was clear. It wasn''t paranoia; she had seen people intuit her actions before she was certain of them herself. She had watched Archons think so fast and so far ahead that they could parry bullets and deflect laser beams, then fade straight through a hail of attacks and cut one of her bodies in half. She gave him plenty of warning, so that if he were merely asleep, he could have a knife to her throat in moments.


    Or a chainsaw, or some kind of laser poleaxe, or all kinds of other options. Mecha archons like Scott had some neat kits to play with. They weren''t quite as random as Titans, but she honestly couldn''t predict what he might pull out at a moment''s notice.


    But the lamp base smashed Scott right in his sleeping face, and he flew backwards five feet and skidded to a stop. He lay there, as though in shock, and she expected him to backflip, or front flip, or hover, or put a hand to his head and stand up. She expected him to shake his head, cough, spit blood... anything. But he lay there.


    And Elaine, finally giving in to the urge, curled up in a ball on the floor and cried.


    She''d tried to be strong. She had been told. She knew. But this was insane. He was alive. He was right there. That was his face, those were his hands. The dead were supposed to be gone. This wasn''t right.


    Elaine cried until she couldn''t cry any more. Time had passed, she wasn''t sure how much, and she still couldn''t process everything that she felt. She vanished this body and with the other, crawled into the corridor leading outside. She appeared a sleeping bag from her inventory, and a portable cookstove and a can of beans. She hardly thought about the traps, but miraculously, none of them went off. And there she sat, not able to confront what was inside the door, not even able to make use of the supplies... or even the electricity inside.


    It felt like screwing with the dead. She had killed, had stolen, had done lots of things. But this felt like undeath. She felt like she was a demon, walking in frozen time. Messing with those bodies, with the living, felt like she was tampering with their souls. They were supposed to have free will. They were still "alive".


    The beans and the mild chill of her sleeping bag reminded her of war, of fighting, of killing and death. They helped, just a little bit. She might have to do violence to the "living", but it wasn''t something supernatural. It was just... death. She could put aside the thought that they were living. She could "kill". All she had to do was set aside the feeling of ancientness, the feeling of rightness, that they were exactly how they should be. They were dead, and she would kill them.


    Elaine shivered in the sleeping bag and watched her beans cook, putting off confronting that awful truth just a little longer.


    In the end, she stayed in the hall until her internal clock said a good day had passed. As the next dawn approached, she split a copy off to sit on top of the mountain and watch it crest over the the mountains. With her body split, she sensed... something, in the area, probably some of those static monsters, but it wasn''t close, and she was able to enjoy the vivid hues of the sunrise, quietly. But that moment refused to stand still, and she felt the creepy sense getting ever closer, so she split one sentry into two, both armed with the Administrator''s weapons, and went back inside.


    Her indoors copy split into three, one keeping an eye on each of the braindead Archons, and one searching the house for anything worth taking along. Archons usually didn''t keep a lot of physical things around... not that most had the inventory system that Elaine did. She kept real tangible items--not copies that she could duplicate--as equipment for each of her clones, and pulling things into and out of storage was originally a cheat; she would instantly replace herself with a "different version" that had the item equipped. When she got higher level, it simply became a feature, one she appreciated greatly.


    As high level as Bohrs was, he probably also had gained some kind of inventory, whether that was summoning pieces of a Mecha kit individually, or a more generic system that was given as a level-up bonus. Each Archon level was technically a "wish"; the same Pandora tokens that had turned mortal humans into Archons were necessary to level up, but with the additional restriction that you had to show mastery over your current abilities. That wasn''t automatic in any sense; you could kill, use your skills, meditate, do whatever you wanted, but if you never mastered your abilities, you couldn''t go up in level.


    If he did have an inventory, whatever he had would be inside, along with some number of those Mecha server racks. If she just had access to one of them, Elaine was sure she could begin to modify it. They, unlike the systems to support a real Archon body, were just advanced holo-equipment. No biology, no advanced chemistry, just virtual structures whose engine was hidden from the world. When broken, they didn''t even leave debris, they simply vanished into thread.


    Whether he did or not, though, he did keep a few things in the house. Elaine was surprised to find a fully automated farm in a back room, although it had run out of topsoil and a couple bearings had won out, so the process had broken down. An overhead truss rolled back and forth watering things and using holotools to weed, trim, and harvest, while the goods went into a large refrigerator... which was periodically emptied into a composting device. In theory, it should have remained a closed system even over centuries... but no, the composter had broken.


    It was still a fantastic design, and Elaine made a mental note to come back, disassemble it, and haul it back, but not on this trip. She suspected that somewhere, people on this world had an equivalent tech, if not the same thing, but from what she''d seen, they were hurting for the parts and the ingenuity to make use of them.


    Aside from the rotting vegetables and the damaged system that was supposed to grow more, Elaine also found a library. Not... too surprising for a Mecha Archon, Elaine found, the library was packed with "reference materials"--comics, books, movies, posters, and data storage that she would need to plug into a computer in order to read. She scanned over the titles, thinking she would leave most of them behind... until she realized that she might need some of these books in order to understand the Mecha that she was hoping to rewrite.


    "Ugh." Elaine looked at the many shelves. It wasn''t so much that she didn''t have the room, but there was a mental weight that came with having a full inventory. The weight she had just dropped off with the Administrators was, comparatively, very familiar; she knew one gun from another by its feel, smell, weight, and shape. Trying to keep track of hundreds of books, comics, and DVDs would mean running through a whole catalog of identical objects and judging them based entirely on their looks alone. Even just storing that many felt like a burden.


    But she started by grabbing a plastic box and filling it with every data card, chip, dongle, disk, cube, and matrix she could lay her hands on, and stored that all as a single entity. That done, she looked around. In theory, she could store an entire bookcase as a single object, with all of its books, but she had tried similar things before and had loose pieces fall off in her storage and disappear... which, now that she thought about it, was something Teddy could, in theory, help her remedy. If they had just come loose, they were probably kicking around her internal space, somewhere... in theory. She had no idea what her insides actually looked like.


    In the end, she picked up some video disks that looked well-worn or familiar to her. She also picked up a stack of video games, and the copy of her standing watch over the woman on the couch noted a rack full of two centuries worth of game consoles around the TV. Most of the space was taken up with originals, but there were also a few obvious third-party many-in-one consoles designed to handle a bunch of different discs, cartridges, memory cards, and matrixes at once.


    In a way, Elaine found it a little exciting, although gaming wasn''t her thing and hadn''t been since she was mortal. But she couldn''t shake the sense that this historical treasure trove was years--decades--worth of time she could spend adventuring. A few things there would be familiar, others she might recognize vaguely, but they would probably all be new to the locals. And... some of them would be informative, for her study of Borhs'' supplies.


    She grinned and shook her head, able finally to shake off some of the funk of this tomb-like place, and went back to looting.

 15. A scavengers life

    Teddy was only able to wait a couple of days before he had to go back out scavenging. He had kind of hoped that Elaine would return right away, but his optimism ended the way it always did, with lonely, miserable angst, as he looked at his meager supplies and realized that it was, as always, a life or death struggle for survival.


    As he often did when he was running into a time limit, he went back for something he had marked earlier but considered too dangerous to approach. This one had been trapped in a room between several static beasts--now gone, probably because they had gathered to attack the compound. To be thorough, he went to the next-closest marked Archon, and again, the static beasts guarding it had moved--although this time, they were not gone, just far more distant. That was more than enough, though, to let him gather the body.


    And this time he did exactly that, wrapping the living corpses in a sheet and strapping them to his sled. It was macabre, but now that he wasn''t hiding things from his employees, well, he could at least do the awful part of it when he was sure he was out of danger.


    The guards in front of the compound eyed his cargo warily, but gave him a pained smile as he passed. Teddy could only nod, grimly, and got the bodies to a back room, one normally used for welding and mechanical work. Once he moved the bodies inside, he shut the door and sat in front of it, outside, taking deep breaths, able but unwilling to go in and commit to the awful acts he knew he needed to do.


    Anna wandered by not much later, and to her credit, pulled up a pair of chairs and gave him one to sit in, taking the other for herself. She eyed the door and measured Teddy''s reaction, clearly understanding the context, but wanting confirmation.


    "Got two of them," said Teddy slowly, barely able to process what he was saying. "Just don''t... want to open them up right now."


    "You brought the whole thing back? Guess that makes sense. More sense, in a way, than leaving them." Anna stared at him for a minute, then looked down. "It''s inside them, right? You gotta do something awful to em."


    "Back of the head," said Teddy, cringing.


    Anna looked at him for a long time, and some part of Teddy kept expecting some kind of laugh or smile or sneer, some way in which she was going to look down on him. But she just looked sad, and looked down, and nodded a bit.


    So Teddy took more deep breaths, and although he was never really ready, eventually he walked back in, turned the head of the man on the table, and brought his knife to bear. In less than half a minute, it was over, and the small bloodstain on the sheet shrank moment by moment until it was gone, the knife wound healing slowly until the man looked whole again.


    Teddy watched, horrified as always, and then walked out, locking the door behind him. Before long, he was in front of his portal ring, and he inserted the box into its slot.


    Anna was there beside him, giving him an odd look. "So what do we have, boss?"


    "Nothing special. Level 2. Don''t know the markings." Teddy lined up the ladder as the portal opened, sparking against the edges of the ring, and slowly pushed it in until it latched onto the deck "above" him. "Give me a few minutes to get the walkways in place."


    "Take your time," replied Anna immediately, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Don''t rush. I know that was a bad--"


    "I''m not rushing," snapped Teddy suddenly, and after a moment in which his head swam, he stopped and sat down on the ground, dizzy without being really sure why. "I''m not rushing. I''m running. Don''t want to think. Just need to work." He stood and started climbing the ladder. "Don''t want to think about it. Don''t want to talk. Be done in a bit."


    Anna watched him go without saying more.


    The next few hours passed the way they always do. Teddy hung the walkways and got to the console, and this one was normal--"Carrier Disruption", it said, and Teddy entered the series of commands necessary to destroy the body. As always, a bunch of systems shut down in response, but that was no serious issue; the portal ring would keep this space open until they were done removing all of the systems, and he would need to shut things down in order to remove them anyway. None of them were of any use in here.


    And then Anna and Jim came in, and did their first walk through. It wasn''t a huge space, probably a small house in size, but it was tightly packed, as they usually were. The easiest things to sell were the first ones out--modular servers that could be disconnected from a rack and slid out. Resellers would take these to places that had originally had similar hardware--libraries, telecoms, fabricators, hospitals, government buildings--and those people would slowly try to rebuild what had been lost. Sometimes it didn''t work out, but it was well worth the money to have pristine hardware that they knew worked, even if it wasn''t exactly the right hardware for what they were doing.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    And it probably wasn''t, thought Teddy again, as he pulled a sleek black case out of a very standard rack. Every one of these servers was stamped with identifiers that meant little or nothing to him, and the pieces inside were equally arcane. He knew a few things, and he could wire a server rack to relays to do plenty of everyday tasks, but these were not likely off-the-shelf parts for the rest of the world, and so their utility was probably minimal. How long he could support a business based on goods that probably aren''t what anyone wants...


    Anna slapped him on the back. "You''re looking stressed, big man," she said, as she often did at times like that. "Don''t worry. Things will work out."


    Teddy nodded, and slipping the server into his backpack with the others, started in on the next one. "I just worry," he admitted.


    "About what?"


    "The market. Can''t be what people really need." He reached back to disconnect cables from the next server. "Won''t last forever."


    "No," said Anna, "it won''t. Nothing does, right? They thought the Old World would last forever, and it didn''t. This," and she gestured around, "might last our lifetimes though. And that girl Elaine, she seems like she has some ideas. So, maybe we''ll figure something else out."


    Teddy grunted, but his mind churned on those thoughts for a while. "The old world... they were just thinking one day ahead, too. Weren''t planning for..." he shook his head. "...and this is all that''s left over."


    "Oh, stop," said Jim from a few rows down. "What they built lasted centuries. We probably can''t make anything that would last one. Don''t act like you have to fix the world; either we survive... either YOU survive, or we won''t be able to scavenge any of these things ever again. I doubt we''ll figure out how to get your... shard, talent, thing, out of you when you die, so we''ll just be screwed. As long as these things," and he banged on some piece of hardware, somewhere, "are out there, people will figure out how to use them. Once they do that, the pieces we scavenged will be worth a thousand times as much. And if we''re still around... then that''ll be that. We''ll be fine."


    Teddy fit the last server into his backpack and let his thoughts simmer for a while. "Yeah," he said eventually, and shouldered the pack, making for the ladder. "You''re probably right. I just wish..."


    A voice from far below called, "If your wish was to see my pretty face again, guess what? Wish granted."


    There was a shocked silence for a minute, and then Teddy--morose, depressive, pessimistic Teddy--could feel a grin spreading over his face.


    <hr>


    Elaine loaded the two bodies she had brought back into Teddy''s locked back room, and then started spreading a bunch of miscellaneous crap into a different storage room. Teddy was baffled to a certain extent, sometimes by what she was unloading, but always by why. He recognized, of course, books, and the point of the thin, colorful comic volumes was obvious as soon as he paged through one. But why?


    "It''s like I said," Elaine explained, as three of her rapidly stacked some small plastic boxes on a set of shelves. "Mecha archons like--like the man in the other room there, had power sets that were built on pop culture. He kept a bunch of them sitting around, and while probably some of them are just random entertainment, I figure at least some of these have to be the basis for his stuff. And... he was a King, so he probably had access to pretty much all of them." The Elaine dedicated to standing there facing Teddy and Jim, who was also watching, shrugged. "Some of these are classics. Some are probably trash. And who knows, maybe they''ve degraded and can''t be used anymore, but it was worth a shot. If nothing else, they''d sell like gangbusters. People always want entertainment, and some of these things might be one-of-a-kind now.


    "I''ve seen most of these units bofore," said Teddy hesitantly, as he looked over the electronics. "Almost all broken, though." He tapped one or two of the boxes inquisitively. "So these are just entertainment devices?"


    "Sure. Some going back centuries. This box," she tapped one, "connects legacy hardware to any QOMI-compatable displays you might have lying around." She paused. "QOMI spec uses those are the braided fiber-optic cables, these ones," and she pulled one out of nowhere. "...if you don''t know the names of them, I mean. Not sure how common they are nowadays."


    "Most of the ones I''ve seen are broken," said Teddy, and Jim nodded. "Both the cables and the displays they went into. They were kind of... flimsy."


    "Yeah. And the world''s a harsh place, now." Elaine grinned. "Luckly, I did bring back a few in pristine condition. Two flat-panels and a stand-in holo display. We can set them up later. You''ll finally have a way to unwind from the stress of the day aside from alcohol and moping."


    "That..." that did sound appealing to Teddy. "What kind of stuff is this, anyway?"


    "Some are just movies. Some are interactive video games. And I''m pretty sure this console," she laid a finger on one in the middle of a stack, "was some kind of proto-AI evolving simulation machine for immersive gaming, for the holo display. I saw the adverts but I never took the time to play with one in person. It... might be garbage."


    Teddy looked the stack up and down. Truly, the one thing he hated most about his life was being left alone with his thoughts. He had mostly gotten past the point in his life where he was actively suicidal, but he wasn''t anything like happy, or stable. "You think they work?"


    "Something''s got to work," said Elaine brightly. "They were just sitting there, secure in a... vault. So we''ll try them out later, maybe tonight." She paused. "In the meantime... I really want to take a look inside the, uh, your latest victim, as it were. Do you mind?"


    "No, no, not at all," said Teddy, stepping back from the shelves full of game machines. To his embarrassment, he realized the other Elaines were done offloading things, and only one copy of the woman was left. "Do you want us with you, or...?"


    "Yes, definitely." Teddy recognized belatedly that suddenly there was no mirth in Elaine''s voice, just a soft-edged determination. "It''s going to be weird, and I don''t really want to be alone for this."


    Teddy looked the woman up and down for a minute, and nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Sure."

 16. Inside an Archon

    Elaine didn''t need to bother with the ladder that Teddy had in the entrance to... a dead Archon''s internal nexus. She didn''t need to bother with the walkways that were rather awkwardly clipped to the underside of a steel mesh floor. But she clung to those small things, feeling like this was a place that people were not meant to go. She had survived hard vacuum, been very nearly lost in space... but she also knew that if the door closed on this place, there was no way out, not for all of her skills and abilities. And unlike the Blackhat''s Armory... Administrator''s, she corrected herself, there was no all-powerful entity in complete control of what was happening.


    Elaine Many was a master of the outside world, able to go places and do things no one else could. But she was not a master of this place, and neither was Teddy. More than the wastes, she held a paranoia that there were monsters here she could not defeat, monsters that only had to drag her to the edge of the world and throw her off, and she would be lost forever.


    As she and Teddy waited by the second ladder, the one that led onto the actual platform, for Anna to work her way up the ladder, she couldn''t help asking. "So what happens if you, say, throw something off the edge? Does it disappear?"


    "It loops," replied Teddy, who was uncharacteristically interested in watching her reaction to things. "Drop it off the bottom and it comes back on the top."


    "Really? Fully intact and everything?" When he nodded, she considered. "Did you ever try jumping?"


    "I... no." Teddy gave her a look. "If I fell more than about ten feet I''d hurt myself. You do remember that humans get hurt, right?"


    "Right... I knew that," Elaine felt a blush come over her, but fought it back. "It just... doesn''t seem that far. And the gravity is a little lighter..."


    "Low gravity means you accelerate slower," pointed out Jim from just behind Anna. "You still reach the same speed over the same distance."


    Elaine started to apologize, but stopped as she ran the numbers in her head. "No," she said. "You definitely don''t land as hard. For fixed acceleration, and zero starting speed... kinetic energy gained over distance is proportional to the acceleration.


    The three of them looked at her. After a minute, Teddy''s normally morose face twisted into a grin. "I like having you around," he said out of nowhere. "You make things make sense."


    Elaine couldn''t fight back the blush this time, and instead took the ladder up without responding. "Well," she said after a minute, "the world makes sense. I just... was taught a lot of things. And also I have a pretty good computer in my head." As she looked around the lowest layer of the dead Archon''s nexus, some part of her brain continued to process what she just said. After a moment, she added, "...actually, I guess my brain is inside a pretty good computer, rather than the other way around."


    "Yeah, that''s probably true." Teddy knocked on the nearest object, a giant storage tank that was opaque but for a small service window. "Bottom level is almost always storage. It''s not really all that useful for us, but sometimes we pry a tank out and open it up. Each tank is pure, whether it''s a one-element pile or some kind of compound; we don''t exactly have the materials to make sure, but it sure looks like there just isn''t anything except what they put in the tank. I am pretty sure while the power''s still on, it won''t even interact with the tank, but it shuts off when we kill the Archon body." He paused. "That''s always the first thing I do, nowadays. It feels like giving them peace."


    Elaine nodded, relaxing slightly. She hadn''t immediately thought about whether the systems were still on, and it was calming to know that this was no longer the living heart of... she chose to correct her thinking and admit that the Archon bodies were remnants, not people, but it was still creepy. "Did you spend any time trying to work with them while they were online?"


    "Teddy didn''t even tell us they were Archons," pointed out Anna behind them. "Was always pretty cagey about what they were. I got in here once when it was still powered, but only because I snuck in. Teddy turned it off real quick after that, before I got a look at anything."


    "I just... can''t," admitted Teddy after a moment of silence. "Even now, I just... don''t want to think of this place as anything but a tomb. Signs of life are... they make me sick." He paused. "I guess... we might have to, though. A lot of the disk drives get wiped in shutdown. If you need that data, we probably can''t shut the system down until you get it."


    "Yeah. And we can''t afford to let that happen to my high priority target." Elaine paused. "So with either your spare or mine, we''ll need to experiment. Maybe both."


    Teddy shuddered a little, and Elaine patted him on the shoulder sympathetically. "Hey, I understand. I have one of these inside of me." She paused, and grinned. "Heck, you''ve been inside of me, Ted. And not in the way I''d prefer, either!"You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    Teddy started to reply, stopped, then thought about that statement for a minute, trying and failing to control the look on his face. Elaine, rather than watching him trip mentally over the comment, turned around and split into four, three of them searching this level while a fourth did a preliminary look around the next level up. As Teddy had said, the bottom level seemed to be almost, if not entirely, devoted to storage, with two isolated server racks at each end, each with a terminal that was now blank and dead.


    On a whim, Elaine pried the screen off one of the terminals and examined it. It wasn''t actually high-tech at all; she had no doubt that Domino was simply making molecular copies and could as easily have had all the displays be high-end QOMI 300fps holo-displays, these were... running off what looked like a centuries-old non-quantum copper-line spec. She frowned. She had kind of been excited by the prospect that her internals were full of top-of-the-line gear, but... realistically, what Domino wanted was stability, nothing else. If this gear ran without fault for centuries, then it was definitely the right stuff.


    Her other body, still close to Teddy, knocked on one of the tanks and peered in it, experimentally. From what she could see, it was just water. "Have you seen much sign of hardware failure in the stuff you salvage?"


    "We can''t do much testing," replied Anna, "because most of the software is wiped out. But the stuff we know how to use is always perfect." She paused. "At least at first. There''s probably no dust or water in here to start, and when it gets taken out it does age like everything else."


    Dust and water... as one, all of Elaine''s bodies took a breath. The air was clear and sterile, as far as she could tell, with the only smells she could detect coming from outside--mostly, the people who had come in. She didn''t even smell any scent of ozone or metal offhand, although it would be subtle in comparison to the air from outside, now. Maybe once she got to the top... but if space wrapped around the edges...


    "Still," she said. "Even Optical matrix storage disks have a maximum number of write cycles before they wear out. There should be something in here that fails over time." She paused, and cocked her head. "Unless there''s something in here that constantly repairs and replaces failed components. Hm."


    "That would make sense," said Jim. "Not sure which components would do that, though."


    "I trust nothing in here moves around on tracks or anything." Elaine didn''t know why she even bothered asking. "They would just have an ansible unit do everything, so it could be anywhere."


    "All the frames are welded to the deck," replied Jim. "Whenever we want to take a rack out and use it for storage or to sell it, we have to cut it free." He paused. "The tanks, too, but we don''t usually try to remove those."


    "How do you remove those? They seem heavy." She paused, considering the weight of them, and decided she could probably move one on her own, but decided not to mention it.


    "We bring in a crane, weld it to the deck, cut a hole. It''s slow going for not a lot of benefit. We once found a giant tank full of acid, though, and we were able to find a buyer for it. There are still a few things we find that are worth it..." Jim seemed perfectly content to talk about the mechanical things, and so Elaine spread her selves out through the rest of the space, looking over the inventory of the place.


    It was... mostly just racks full of computing hardware, or at least, that''s how they looked from this side. There was no telling without pulling the racks out just how many contained ansibles... each unit with an ansible would be doing real work in the real world. There were thousands of server blades in here, and each ansible could do millions of real-world operations per second. Some racks probably contained multiple ansibles, too. Some might contain dozens, for all she knew.


    Elaine gnawed on her lip for a moment. "How many ansibles do you think there are in a given Archon?"


    "I think the average for a level one is 500," said Teddy. "Higher levels vary a lot."


    Only five hundred? That seemed low to Elaine, but then, she had watched Archons wield supernatural powers for centuries. Perhaps in the face of this cold mechanical truth, she still just wanted to be special. If everything she''d ever seen was... was...


    Elaine took a long moment, with all of her bodies, to sit down and catch her breath. It was weird. It was so weird. Too weird. She had been like a goddess standing above mankind. She had been... sometimes a demon, sometimes an angel, but always something greater. Sure, the way her powers worked, she mostly did her fighting using regular guns and ammunition handed to her by others. But she was more than this. She was multiple minds meshed in perfect harmony, able to do dozens of things at once. She had put on a choreographed dance with twenty copies of her all doing different things--one of them singing! She had played every instrument in a band at once! She had had sex with a dozen people at once and never called any of them by the wrong damn name! She was special, and she was... she was...


    "I am not," she said out of nowhere, "a damned computer."


    "Elaine?" Teddy was somewhere nearby, but Elaine didn''t look for him, didn''t want to know. She collapsed her copies back into herself, got up, and ran to the edge of a platform. She flew outwards, counting on the space-warping that Teddy insisted was there--and sure enough, after she passed through some kind of sight-blocking effect, the platform was now in front her of her again, so she angled down and flew through the portal out. Although it took concentration, she made an immediate hard left and smashed through a window, not bothering to care or apologize, and took off for the skies.


    Whatever the hell she was, she wasn''t a bunch of computers locked in a room. She wasn''t just a couple hundred, or even a few thousand ansibles changing the world. She was a person. She was an Archon. She was more.


    She would prove it, if she had to go kill every static monster within a hundred miles.

 17. Liao sits and talks

    Chun Liao was not used to the concept of babysitting. She did have a younger cousin who she had sat watch over a few times in her younger years, but once she transferred into the Administrators and took a job in space... there were a lot fewer kids around, and none of the people she was close to had any. The only friend she had back home in that age range was a roaring drunk, and she wasn''t interested in long-term relationships.


    Somehow, the task of monitoring Elaine had been split between her and Ken Thompson, an affable but insincere white man who, Liao had eventually found out, was pretty solidly gay, and was a lot less interested in talking or interacting with her than he was male colleagues. That didn''t mean that they didn''t get along... it was just kind of a surface-level thing. This assignment, though, was driving them closer by sheer necessity.


    Yesterday, after the end of Ken''s watch, he stayed around and vented a little bit about watching Elaine. "I don''t know how she found that place," Ken said, "but you can just see in her face, in every detail of how she acts that it is driving her crazy. She''s terrified; it''s like watching a little girl alone in the woods. I want to just grab her and give her a big hug and tell her things are going to be alright..." he stopped and shook his head. "Except she''s like the second oldest person alive today, and maybe the single most dangerous. And... I don''t know."


    "Also volatile, and she probably doesn''t know we''re spying on her," pointed out Liao, as she studied the so-called camera footage that was being reconstructed from some kind of sensor in orbit. "Which she might not appreciate."


    "I know." Ken sighed. "I mean... everything I''ve read said that Archons were monitored and all kind of made peace with that. Maybe she knows or doesn''t care, but we can''t do anything to piss her off. I don''t know what weapons she still has in her... inventory? Is that the word? But I''m sure she could take on anyone but Ciddia and not fear for her life at all."


    "That is how Archons work, in my understanding, yes," said Liao, a little amusement in her voice. Right now, a copy of Elaine was stacking the two... decommissioned was the word Teddy used, and it was acceptable. The two decommissioned archons were on the couch, now thankfully both fully dressed, and Elaine was making one more tour of the place, looking for any secrets she hadn''t found. She missed one or two, according to sensors, but Ciddia''s word on the subject was to monitor only, and to not interfere.


    "Great. I just hope Cid doesn''t expect us to restrain her, ever." Ken sighed and stood up. "I''ll be back in a few hours. I don''t think I''m going to sleep any time soon, and I want to know what she does next."


    "I can handle it," said Liao, aware that she sounded a little hurt. Most likely, Elaine would just take the bodies back to Teddy''s, probably rest there for a few days. "I don''t think anything exciting will happen for a while, anyway."


    "Maybe. She just... I don''t know." He moved to the door, but stopped and stared at the screen again for another few minutes. "She reminds me of my sister, when she was young. I hated my sister. But... she was family, and it hurt to watch her..." he shook his head. "Never mind."


    So Liao sat quiet watch over Elaine for hours, as she hauled the two bodies across half the planet--much slower than her flight over, though Liao thought it might only have been sentiment, since certainly the bodies weren''t going to fall apart, and she had the power to spare. She watched Elaine unload her cargo, then step into the portal gateway to an area that the Administrators couldn''t monitor. In their most recent staff meeting, Liao had asked if they had any ability to peek into or control spaces like the one Elaine was now climbing into, and Ciddia had just... given her a blank look.


    "I have a lot of capabilities that I don''t share," was all her boss said before moving on.


    Liao had just raised a cup of coffee to her lips when Elaine ripped out of the portal like a gunshot. She didn''t quite spill the hot drink all over herself, but she did have to scramble for the controls in order to keep the woman in focus. She''d played with the camera angle a little to see if she could sneak a look inside, but predictably, all that had done was knock it out of auto-follow mode for no other benefit.


    She located Elaine quickly enough--but then realized the woman had already split, and not just a few times. In fact, Elaine had quietly taken every one of Teddy''s anti-nightmare weapons, obsolete though they were, plus the two automatic ones she had been given, and was aggressively searching through the wastes.


    Liao spent probably ten minutes of scrambling around trying to keep a camera on every copy of Elaine before she had time to stop and actually consider the face of the woman she was monitoring. Elaine didn''t look right. Her face was compressed with stress in a way it had never been, and not a single one of the Elaine copies that were out was acting composed or measured in any way. It was clear that Elaine was hunting nightmares, but... why? Stress relief? Was she really deadly enough that she was intending to pick fights and just assumed she would win?


    After studying the display for a moment, Liao paged her boss. At this hour, Ciddia would be taking some time off, but probably not sleeping, not indisposed in any way. She was surprised, though, when the response came back almost instantaneously.


    "Any idea what she''s upset about?" the text message flashed across her holo-interface, instead of going through the console in front of her.


    "No, ma''am. She was fine until she went inside one of the Pandora Engine units with the scrappers." Liao used the console in front of her to type, because she wasn''t nearly as fast with her mental or wrist interfaces. Again, as soon as the message went out, Ciddia responded.


    "She is most likely wrestling with the changes in the world. Probably needs someone to talk to, and not me. If you think you can talk her down, you can start a text chat with her at this address. I trust your judgement."


    Liao reviewed that message once, twice, three times, thinking about it. As Ken said, they were not supposed to interfere... as much for their own safety as anything. But she also couldn''t help feeling that the woman was vulnerable now, and miserable. Everyone had moments like that, whether they be human, kin... or Archon, she supposed.


    So Liao started a new text chat using the link that Ciddia provided, and offered only a single line: "Let me know if you need to talk."


    The reply from Elaine was instantaneous, as it had been with Ciddia: "Yes."


    Elaine blinked. Then, slowly, she nodded. Her fingers fumbled with the keys, feeling like she was far too slow to be doing things this way. "I''ll be down in a minute. I can''t fly, unfortunately. Do you have a place you''d prefer? I assume not the compound."Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    "Find the Me you first met." On the screens, Liao watched a copy of Elaine split off, wearing that same thin white shirt and sandals. She found a mostly-intact section of rooftop on what might have been a large warehouse building ages before. She looked around for a moment, then nodded to herself, and pulled something odd out of her inventory--a large cloth blob, which she set down on the ground and then collapsed into.


    So Liao paged Ken to come back and take watch, sent a note to Ciddia that was doubtless superfluous, sent the coordinates over to the technician on watch, and went over to the departure gate. The tech had the gate ready by the time she got there, and Elaine simply nodded and stepped through as soon as the man pushed the button.


    Elaine was... laying down in the cloth blob. This close, Liao could see it was holding its shape, as though it was filled with some kind of foam, or small beads, or something. "That looks comfortable," she offered as she stepped closer.


    Elaine, in reply, pulled another one out of nowhere and threw it at her. Liao caught it, feeling it in her hands. Beads--small, soft beads. Had she read about that somewhere? Maybe even seen one in a store? She had never touched one, that was for certain. She tossed it down next to Elaine and sat, feeling the thing molding to fit her shape almost effortlessly, if not instantaneously. It took a moment, but her every small motion made the thing shift to accomodate her new position.


    "Oh my god," breathed Liao. "Why isn''t every chair this comfortable?"


    Elaine laughed. It started with a little chuckle, but after a moment, it was definitely a full laugh, one that took a good long moment to pass. It wasn''t too loud or too long, but it seemed like she really felt it, and she really needed it.


    "I know exactly what you mean," said Elaine, flopping around on the cloth blob in an undignified fashion until she was facing towards Liao. "Imagine the person who invented the hard plastic chair defending his choices in the face of such majesty. ''Oh, its practical. Oh, it''s portable. Oh, it''s waterproof.'' Pfft." Elaine burrowed her face into the cushion, smothering her next words, but Liao thought it was something like "Nobody cares".


    Liao twisted her body back and forth a little, sinking deeper into the fine beads, and realized she was looking up at the sky, something she had not taken the time to do in her last visits to the planet. It wasn''t completely cloudless; the planet''s weather was not completely broken, although the spatial rifts made weather forecasting all but impossible. For the most part, though, the pale skies were unmarred, by signs of life or technology. It was, frankly, a little lonely. Mars had little air traffic, but because the colonies were compact with very little in the way or rural places or sprawl, you were never that far from an airport, or spaceport. Suborbital flights around the planet left just a bit of a mark in the sky, whether from exhaust or vapor trails. Not having that...


    "I can''t stand it," said Elaine out of nowhere, snapping Liao back to the present. "Everything that makes me, me..." She didn''t finish the sentence, and let the silence stretch out.


    Liao was quiet for a long time, wondering what she would say next, but she didn''t seem eager to continue. "You mean, the insides of an Archon?"


    "All computers. Clinical. Boring." Elaine clenched her fists tightly, gripping the fabric side of the bean bag chair, but stopped as soon as there was the first sound of a rip. "Shit," she said, pulling the fabric towards her to examine what she''d done. "Don''t want to tear that. No telling where I''ll get another."


    "What''s so great about the insides of a human?" asked Liao. "Do you really want to be filled with mystery organs? A careful balance of bacteria and chemical soup?"


    "No..." Elaine drew the word out very long, as though she knew that the argument would come up, but it was not what she wanted.


    "You were hoping for... what, then? Mystery? The Archons were an engineering project. If they didn''t know how the body worked, they couldn''t modify you, or rebuild you. They could only slowly screw you up."


    "I wanted..." Elaine sighed. "I was hoping it was more like a cyborg. Like... a bunch of scaffolding placed around a living biological body, keeping it perfectly in tune." She paused. "And maybe it is, I don''t know. But... argh." Elaine sat up, bounced a bit in the cushion, then flopped back down. "Hang on, I am gonna shoot this guy."


    Liao''s mind failed to process the sudden segue in time to not be scared off by gunshots to the south. She scrambled up, failing to get to her feet nearly as fast as she thought she ought to as the beaded cushion fought to keep her torso firmly but gently within its soft recesses. By the time she was up, the gunfire had stopped, and the resting Elaine turned to look.


    "Sorry," Elaine said, although she didn''t sound very sorry. "I''m still going to be blowing off steam by shooting those broken spirit things. In the old world..." she paused. "I didn''t go looking for fights, but somehow, there always seemed to be one close at hand. If I didn''t believe in the cause... I mostly just wouldn''t kill anyone, but kicking ass is therapeutic. Shooting things less so, but, that''s what I''ve got."


    "With that kind of attitude, the people back home would hate you," admitted Liao, as she sat back down in the chair. "The news circulars love to call out every incident of violence as a sign that humanity is sliding back into corruption."


    Elaine was quiet for a moment. "News circulars?"


    Liao looked at her. "Yes?"


    "As in published things that they actually distribute to people?"


    "...Yes?"


    "What happened to networks, decentralized platforms, all of that?"


    "They are around." Liao felt a strange tug at her heartstrings. Was this something strange? It wasn''t, really, was it?


    "Weird." Elaine let out a long sigh. "I guess... we just didn''t trust centralized media. With all of the wars and things, we ended up going to whomever we trusted for news."


    That didn''t make a whole lot of sense to her, but Liao let it go. Instead, she looked at the big blue sky above her, thinking about the past. Mars and its dome cities lacked this sense that the whole world was under one sky, and the space stations were the very definition of insular. But with the Two Worlds broken, the idea that this one sky connected humanity was wrong, too. If this area faced a threat, there would be no reinforcements from other places--only the Administrators could possibly get here in time.


    "What do you think that the Two Worlds needs?" asked Liao into the long awkward quiet moment. "Not more Archons, I''m sure."


    "...no." Elaine sat up enough to curl her body back to face Liao, then collapsed back into the cushion. "I have been thinking about it. We''re planning to try to reverse-engineer some Mecha Archon code into a vehicle. Nothing too fancy, I think. Something that can fly, haul cargo, defend itself, and communicate. Isn''t that what Ciddia said the world needs?" She stretched one hand off towards the sky. "Connect the broken world again. I might be a symbol, but I can''t do that, not the across the one world, let alone two. But if we can get the code working, we should be able to fit together dozens of them out of the stock ansibles we have sitting around. As long as the cargo capacity is high enough, we can just zip around the world, facilitating trade. Maybe airlift medical patients to hospitals, too." She sighed. "All that good stuff."


    Liao was quiet. It... still didn''t really make sense to her, that she as an Administrator had the power to link two places together with a temporary portal--and that the Administrators refused to. Yes, on the one hand, they needed to rebuild on their own. But what Elaine said was so simple--a need, fulfilled. If what the world needed was so simple, why were they sitting there doing nothing?


    "...I''m sorry," she said quietly, though she couldn''t quite put into words what made her say it.


    "For following Ciddia?" When Liao turned her head, she found Elaine looking her right in the eyes. "I''m used to it. And, heck, more than anyone else on the planet, I don''t need you. If you''re going to apologize to anyone, apologize to the ones who do." Elaine, suddenly, twisted in her cushion and floated into the air, one hand grasping the big cushion and dragging it up with her--until it suddenly vanished, back into some internal storage place of hers. "You can keep the bean bag chair, if you want."


    Liao considered that for a long moment. "I don''t have a place to keep it, really."


    "Give it to Teddy, then. Or let me know if you want me to hold onto it. I''m just suddenly really feeling motivated to work. Gonna get to it before I get distracted again." She turned and tossed Liao a salute, and then vanished. Liao had a brief moment of panic before she remembered that any particular copy of Elaine was only that--and the main could be anywhere. Maybe she already was working, somewhere.


    Liao sighed, dreading the prospect of getting out of her new comfy chair. Just another minute, she decided sleepily, and closed her eyes.

 18. Ciddias Home

    Ciddia fully expected, once she heard that Elaine was upset, that she would be hearing from the woman directly sooner or later. Although she was at home, going through the motions of relaxation--changing into less formal clothing, shoes off, cooking an old favorite rice dish with meat and mixed vegetables--her brain was stuck in a loop, waiting to hear from the woman. The first message she got, though, was a shock.


    I need driver code for black ansibles, wrote Elaine with no preamble.


    Ciddia stared at the text message for long minutes, her brain feeling like it was full of sludge. Elaine was wrestling with the destruction of the world, with her own nature as an artificial lifeform, with the death of everyone she had ever known... it took a good minute before Ciddia''s brain even caught up to what the message even said, what it meant. Did this mean that Elaine was burying her trauma with work?


    We don''t give out that kind of information, replied Ciddia, feeling numb. It was difficult for her to explain exactly why this situation bothered her, but there was no question that it was shaking her to her core. What do you want to do with it, anyway?


    Gonna make a vehicle out of ansible parts. Black ones control those pocket dimensions and portals, right? Need that for hauling cargo, and probably concealing the engine, all that stuff. If you want me to keep the code secret, we can do that. Its probably not gonna be all that special anyway, first gen stuff right?


    Where did you get information on Black ansibles? As far as Ciddia knew, nobody had documented anything about them... unless the hacker who had effectively destroyed the world had left behind some of his notes. That possibility was too great to ignore.


    Don''t have any, replied Elaine. After a moment, she continued, I know the other ansibles and I''ve been inside a pocket dimension. Its not hard, Cid.


    Ciddia felt a cold heat stirring in her chest. Was that anger? Embarrassment? Jealousy? She wasn''t even sure she remembered the feeling anymore. She rarely felt anything except wrath, or the deep depression she had been in since... well, probably well before the fall of the city. Code like that is double-black. I don''t want it falling into the wrong hands.


    I have heard double-blacks before, replied Elaine immediately. I was one of the people charged with keeping the AI stuff out of the wrong hands. There was a pause, and then Elaine spit out a long binary code, slightly more than twelve thousand digits long, which served as an authorization token.


    Ciddia blinked, then immediately dived back into her Blackhat nexus. With the City gone, the token didn''t mean anything anymore--Ciddia should have a matching code in her database, and the two codes together would unlock something in the City''s computers. Still, she should be able to confirm the code was legitimate, not that she really doubted Elaine.


    Ciddia paused, though. The impact of her bare feet on the cold steel mesh of her entry point was such intense nostalgia that she simply couldn''t move on, for a moment. The polymers of her artificial limb were, to a certain extent, more sensitive, flexible, and tough than flesh... but the sensation they gave of the mesh floor was the same as it had always been, both before and after her original limbs had been replaced. She had dived into this place millions of times in her long life, but the times when she came in barefoot were few and far between, and it had been a very long time. Her toes curled slightly against the mesh, the prosthetic senses almost indistinguishable from the real thing, and her finger unconsciously poked at the holoscreen that popped up, increasing the time dilation to give her more time to think.


    The last time... she''d been having sex. The last time she had been forced to come here barefoot, thousands of people were dying, and she was having sex. Every second counted, and she had been barefoot, naked, sweaty and emotionally charged. Domino had tried to tell her they had it covered, that she should enjoy herself, take time off... but as soon as she''d dived into this room, she had taken a subjective hour to cool hear head before anyone even knew she was coming. By the time they told her to take time off, she had already put everything else aside. It wasn''t just that the mood was spoiled; it was already forgotten. She had stared at pictures of death and mayhem and was already in the mood to rip people apart. That day she had lost yet another bit of flesh in a fight, distracted and furious for the interruption.


    Every time she had come here barefoot, Ciddia decided, she had been trying to relax. Mostly, she was told to relax. Domino, Timothy, Aria and Eris... and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Blackhats, even some Archon Kings had shown a consistent distress at her stress levels. Over and over, they told her to take time off. And whenever fate made her choose between duty and relaxation, she didn''t hesitate for even a second. She would come here and drown herself in her duty. By the time she actually talked to anyone else, she was so deeply immersed in whatever was happening that any suggestion that she go back to what she was doing was, frankly, an insult. She was already working, and sometimes had been for hours.


    After a long few minutes, Ciddia''s prosthetic feet finally started moving. She passed by her favorite couch... and an automated massage table, one she had stoically refused to use except when the stress was so bad that it was palpable for her. That brought back its own memories, but not pleasant ones; the forced relaxation that the table brought her was always in middle of another stressful situation, and every minute that she spent away from it, even if that was only fractions of a second in real time, seemed like a betrayal, a dereliction of her duty. Next to that was a recliner, and then a chair with a built-in holo suite which would simulate being in any one of tens of thousands of real theaters around the world--complete with either real-time or recorded footage of other movie-goers, to make her feel less alone. It... didn''t really work as intended.


    But she passed the furniture and found her way to the thin but acceptably comfortable office chair in front of her workstation. There was no piece of furniture anywhere in the universe as comforting and familiar as that chair, and there was no position she could sit in it that she hadn''t spent hours in before. Just on a lark, she spun the chair around and sat backwards on it, skillfully avoiding the armrests with her legs as she crossed her arms on the back of the chair and stared at the console screen.Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    There was no login, no confirmation or passcode. There was an option for it, of course, and every Blackhat had used one for a while, but they all eventually came to the same conclusion: if anyone actually got in here, accessing the workstation was the least damaging thing they could possibly do. Although they were hidden from Ciddia''s sight, there were endless fields of computing racks and storage containers surrounding this platform in every direction but straight up, fields that would give Teddy and his scrappers a fit if they found out about them. This place supported her very being, gave her immortality, infinite power, and the flexibility of the last Blackhat in the universe.


    Last alive, anyway.


    Ciddia finally let out a sigh and got to work. It took seconds to copy the message over and check the authorization code, which as she suspected was genuine. To her surprise, she actually had a cached version of the data packet locked by this pair of tokens, but after reviewing the brief, she declined to open it. Even without diving too deep into her computer-assisted memory, she remembered the scuffle to defend the vanilla AI root code. If that damn hacker had never gotten it, things would have gone differently.


    Damn Kramer and the rest of his "arch-sorcerers" for mixing technology and magic in the first place. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to screw it up. But then, she decided, there was lots of blame to go around. The whole HELIDER project was a mess, but George was probably the most directly responsible, with his militant tyrannical bullshit. Kramer and the Professor were at least trying to make things right, even if they screwed it all up.


    Ciddia let her head rest on the chair for a long moment, then brought up her chat interface again. With the time dilation, it had barely been a second. I remember that, she continued conversationally. I was busy trying to hunt the pigfucker down, so I didn''t pay a lot of attention to who was on the defensive team.


    With the message queued, with a couple seconds'' delay for the sake of appearances, Ciddia pushed back from the console, letting the rolling chair coast for a moment before she stopped it and climbed her way out. For a long moment, her eyes focused on the darkness beyond the platform, darkness that concealed more platforms, with endless racks of computers. Ciddia honestly had not laid eyes on the pieces of hardware that made her existence possible... since around the beginning. The first time Domino had let her and the other Blackhats into their own nexuses... she had faced the same things that Elaine was facing now. A disconcerting feeling that the hardware and software out there defined her, a vulnerability. And... an urge to prove that she was more than those computers.


    And she had proven it, tens of thousands of times over. She had been emotional at times, stoic at times, heroic at times, foolish at times. She could compare herself to other humans all day long and see that she was still human, for better and worse. The technology maintained her, augmented her, monitored her, and rebuilt her, but it did not define her. In a way, her prosthetics were a defiance against the ugly clinical nature of the truth: this place would only rebuild her when she said to, would maintain the version of her that she wanted to be. She was immortal, but she chose not to be perfect.


    For some reason, her eyes drifted from the darkness to the meditation bench she had laid out but rarely used. The chill of the floor on her feet, somehow, pulled her forwards to kneel on that bench, and she found a comfortable position and let her eyes close. She felt the sensation of the bamboo weave against synthetic skin, and for a long time, that was the only thing in her mind. After a little bit, she tilted her head back, and was able to clear even that away.


    But as her mind emptied, thoughts she had buried surfaced.


    Of course, her answer to Elaine was only an excuse. She was now the leader of the entire human race, plus the evoloid descendants. She was the only powerhouse in existence, and she could be tyrant over all of creation if she so chose. The idea that she had to be afraid of people doing something wrong with technology that she knew backwards and forwards was laughable. If she chose, she could raise all of humanity or destroy them.


    Somehow, an image of Domino--good god, in her mind''s eye he seemed so old now; he always looked the same, but in her mind he was ancient, more immortal than the gods and more ancient than the Earth itself--was kneeling before her. And although he was no more than an image, no more than a thought, she knew what he represented.


    Domino had only one will, and he had only from the beginning. The whole thing with Pandora Tokens, with Archons, with the Blackhats and their stupid non-interference policy, it all came down to one will, one absolutely unbreakable rule.


    They would never be tyrants.


    Domino could have enslaved humanity before they knew he existed. He could have wiped out the planet with a thought. There was not a single moment, certainly not before the Terra-Draco wars began and maybe not until the hacker started his war, in which Domino didn''t have the ability, sitting in his pocket and ready to go, to rule all of humanity. This feeling that Ciddia felt stirring in her chest, this knowledge, this certainty that she could rule everything that was left? He lived with that.


    He''d said as much at least once a year, every year, for as long as they''d known him.


    Domino was gone, and Ciddia didn''t need to maintain his legacy. She could become a tyrant, become a ruler. She could even try to be an enlightened and good ruler over all mankind. But she wouldn''t, and the image of the man kneeling in front of her, was the whole reason why.


    They had never slept together, and had only once slept in the same room, but Ciddia might as well have been married to the man. When he rescued her from a military camp where her own people had raped her and told her--her--that she was only useful as breeding stock, that her gender invalidated anything else about her, when he had taken that woman on the verge of breaking and accepting that poisonous hatred... when he had rescued her and never touched her again, never given her any reason to fear that he would touch her, when he proved his nature...


    He became her home. Wherever he went, whatever he did, she belonged next to him. If the two of them had ended up running a junkyard and playing with electronic toys as the world went to war around them, been nothing and nobody forever... she would have had no regrets.


    Ciddia found her heart pounding out of her chest, and it took a good hour of subjective time for her to calm back down. No, Ciddia would never be a tyrant. She would never rule. But as she sat there, she found that answer unsatisfying. It was very difficult to clear her mind, because it was running around in circles trying to figure out why.


    Eventually, though, as she found her calm, she had to ask herself one question.


    Why am I going to tell Elaine no?


    And as she considered the question again and again, she found she had no answer.

 19. Trying, Failing, and Alternatives

    Elaine wasn''t expecting much from Ciddia, and in truth she didn''t get much--but it was more than she expected.


    Ciddia, as she grouchily admitted over many brief text conversations, did not have the technical details that Elaine and the scrappers needed to pursue their project, and from the way she rebelled against general questions, she didn''t even seem all that confident in her general knowledge of the system. She did have bits and pieces, including private documentation that the Blackhats used to modify and design Archons... but it was high-level, designed for software that Elaine didn''t have and Ciddia wouldn''t give her.


    It didn''t help that after going through all the disk drives and documents that Elaine had about programming for ansibles, none of them helped with the immediate tasks of setting things up. A lot of it was specific versions of software libraries, how to use them properly, along with 3D modelling programs, chemistry primers, and large files full of algorithms each designed to to one or two things, like stepping through a region of 3D space and pushing or pulling on the contents to create standing sound waves--a complicated effect, but one necessary when you don''t have a physical speaker or the space in your design to emulate one. Interesting, and (Elaine recalled, and assured the others) fun to play with, but nowhere near where they were at the moment.


    Instead, over the course of the next two weeks, the team got a grasp of the fundamental layout of the Archon''s internals. Importantly, they discovered that the system was not, as they''d feared, broken by the act of killing the Archon; instead, systems defaulted to off, and would only wake up if they received the correct request over the network. Give the size and scale of the system, unfortunately, there was no way to simply "guess and check" your way into generating the right data packet.


    Which was fine, because it was never Elaine''s plan to re-use the existing system--one she didn''t understand and which was probably irrelevant to her goals. Elaine did have the ability to decompile and reverse engineer the code on that system, but... she needed context to understand what she was seeing, context that Ciddia could only provide in the vaguest terms.


    Some things she offered were helpful, though. She knew enough to steer Elaine away from messing with most of the support chips, and she offered just enough context that Elaine would not need to rewrite the core drivers in order to make use of the system. Despite that, the process didn''t leave them with a lot of confidence that they understood, well, anything.


    At the end of two weeks, they ran a test designed to see if they understood everything well enough. All the system would do was power on, drop the test rig into a pocket dimension, pull it back out, and power off. These were things that should have been straightforward parts of how the system worked.


    Naturally, the test failed.


    "Psssssssccchhhhhittt," said Elaine, when the dreaded absolutely nothing happened. "I thought we had it. What have we missed?"


    Anna and Teddy were, likewise, looking over the documents and the screens full of code and could do little more than shrug at the question. "Maybe we need to ask someone else," suggested Teddy after a long while. "I''ll pull the files for people who bought Ansible blades, maybe one of them has figured something out we missed."


    Elaine had assumed, momentarily, that Teddy meant computer files, or at least a detailed set of dossiers, but what he handed Elaine was an envelope containing business cards, photographs, and some small pieces of torn paper with names and addresses scribbled on them.You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    Elaine held her tongue. "I guess you want me to go door to door, then?"


    Teddy just shook his head. "Most of the people who bought from us are resellers," he said. "A lot of them aren''t from anywhere closer to here. Me, I''d have to leave a notice with the traders, and probably beg the Administrators to deliver a message for me. You at least could go talk to traders in other places, see if you can track them down." Teddy suddenly cringed a little bit, and looked away from her. "Honestly... at this point I''d have more or less given up. I can''t imagine how you still have momentum after hitting a goddamn brick wall like this."


    Elaine looked at the code, at the test rig that did nothing, and couldn''t help but sigh. It was the kind of situation that made her want to give up, but she was also used to pushing through much worse odds, much harder situations. As to how she got through it...


    "I guess it''s time we set up those game consoles, then," she said, startling Teddy out of some kind of depressive reverie.


    "What?" Teddy blinked at her. "...now?"


    They had been slowly going through the backlog of movies that Elaine had brought in from Bohrs'' place, but for the most part, the scrappers were less interested than she''d hoped. Too many of those fantasies assumed a future so vastly different from the past of these people, that they simply couldn''t get past it. Movies Elaine considered to be classics were based on concepts entirely foreign to the scrappers, like the internet, meme culture, the pervasive presence of superheroes, magic... multiple times they''d have to stop the movie so that Elaine could lecture for an hour about why a scene made sense.


    "Sure. It''ll be fun." A copy of Elaine stepped out of the closet with an armful of electronics and wires, shocking Teddy in a way that Elaine was getting far more used to than Teddy was. In less than an hour, Elaine had set up a big screen and a console with four controllers, three of which she handed to Teddy, Anna, and Jim.


    As the others stared at the list of games going by, unable to contain their befuddlement, Elaine finally picked an element off the menu: Minecraft Aeons: Eternity Edition. "We''ll start slow," she said. "This will help you get used to the controllers, and I think you''ll understand the concept pretty easily. This is a survival and building type game, so I think it will be pretty familiar to you, if not the specifics..."


    Within about two hours, Jim bowed out, saying it simply wasn''t his kind of thing, but one of the guards on break who had been watching in awe took his place and immediately fell in with the others. Elaine, of course, alternated between doing her own thing and coming back to help people with their problems, but as day turned to evening, each of the scrappers had at least a wood and cobblestone house to hide in from the creepers and the yetis that jumped down from the mountain, while Elaine had built an iron tower high enough to reach the Skyland biome and had about a third of the resources necessary for a satellite beacon, which she hoped to use to call in an orbital strike and break through to the Upper Underworld, which would unlock titanium.


    By the time Elaine called a stop for a late dinner, she could see that the scrappers had both lost a lot of stress, and most likely forgotten all of their plans for the next few days. She grinned and patted Teddy and Anna on the back. "See? I told you, it''s good to help get your mind off stuff. Now, you''ll find, the real problem is focusing on anything else when you could be playing video games."


    Anna nodded very seriously, and Elaine thought she could see in the large woman''s eyes a self-awareness, mixed with a sense that the woman was depressed and might become addicted. Teddy, though, seemed for a minute to be a total loss; even with the game quit and the console powered off, all she saw in his eye were plans. Not, she thought, real world plans, but Minecraft plans.


    So she grabbed him by his shoulders and spun him around. "Alright, alright. Come on, time to take a break. Don''t forget the real world, there, Teddy-boy. Come on, you can help me cook."


    Even so, she caught him several times glancing back towards the machine through the evening. Elaine sighed quietly to herself, more again when the man powered the console back on in the depths of the night.


    Whatever she did next, she would have to take Teddy with her, or else he would be completely gone by the time she got back.

 20. Getting Away

    Teddy didn''t actually stay up all night, although he considered it. More than once over the course of the night, when he grasped just how dark it had gotten, he reminded himself that he couldn''t keep doing this forever. So... when he actually started to feel fatigue setting in, he forced himself back from this beautiful old game console... thing... and went to bed.


    He didn''t manage to sleep well. All the new thoughts and experiences swirling through his head made it difficult to do anything but lay there and process them for another hour or two, after which he caught a bit of sleep.


    He awoke to Elaine''s boot rolling him off the side of his bed, but neither that nor the shiner he got on his head from falling face-first to the ground really woke him up as much as the tea did. He would have preferred coffee, but the tea was black, hot, and strong, and just the scent of him brought him around enough to realize that Elaine was squatting in front of where he sat on the floor, giving him a very judging look.


    "What?" he asked, nursing the cup she''d provided.


    "Today you and me are going out," she declared. "We''ll find those merchants, see if they know anything. Come on, up an at ''em. Already talked to Anna, she and Jim will take care of things here."


    Teddy allowed himself to be coerced into standing up and forced into the bathroom. The experience brought back some memories of girlfriends past... but Teddy didn''t dwell on it, and couldn''t. A look in the slightly-cracked mirror he had found for the bathroom showed that he needed another shave, and the stress wrinkles on his face were worse than they''d ever been. He judged his own eyes in the mirror and thought that again that he was developing a shady look that he was sure he didn''t deserve.


    None of that screamed out to him that a woman like Elaine would ever be interested, and frankly, he wasn''t sure he could handle someone that intense. Still... his reflection gave him a crooked smile, but he shook it off and started to get cleaned up.


    By the time he was done and dressed, he had actually thought about what Elaine said, and it wasn''t a prospect that made him happy. Chasing down the merchants, as he''d said yesterday, was more than just going into town... and the only transport he had that was anything like fast, was her.


    He stepped out of his room to find her there, dressed in fatigues and combat boots again, waiting expectantly, and gave her a sheepish, cringing sort of smile. "So I guess, uh, you plan..."


    "Yup." Elaine looked him up and down, her expression neutral. "I know, Teddy. I remember you freaking out when I picked up your little hover-scooter thing. I get the feeling you aren''t going to like flying with me all that much, but..." she shrugged. "I need your help, and you''re a big boy now. You can handle this, right?"


    Teddy looked at her, taking a moment to steel his nerves. The combination of the two things brought back unpleasant memories of finding her in the rubble, taking a knife to her neck... he squeezed his eyes shut, forced himself to calm down. "Yeah," he said. "I can handle it."


    "You''ve been through worse. Come on, climb on my back. If you need me to stop, just hit me or something."


    Teddy opened his eyes to find her kneeling, and with a few more deep breaths, he hopped on, wrapping his arms around her neck. "This okay with you?"


    "Teddy, the only way you could hurt me is with knives..." she paused. "More likely, grenades. You could try to strangle me and I could dance through it all. Whatever keeps you from falling off is fine with me."


    The mention of falling off did not ease Teddy''s nerves, but a moment later, with a strange sense of momentum that he honestly wasn''t expecting, Elaine lifted off the ground.


    Teddy expected it to be like riding his hover sled, or possibly like riding on a person''s shoulders as they walked, but as he clung to Elaine, he could tell that whatever power gave her flight, it was incredibly precise. Teddy could have sworn, any time that his eyes were closed, that they were still on solid ground; Elaine was simply a rock-solid platform for him to cling to. Yes, there was wind, and dust, but once they were moving, there was no acceleration--the constant, even motion seemed to him like nothing more than high winds, as long as he kept his eyes shut.


    Of course, Elaine had straightened out as though she was laying down, so if he closed his eyes, it felt like he was laying on top of the woman, on the floor, with the wind blowing... which brought to mind images that he did not need to be distracted by right now.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.


    The first hop was short, no more than a minute, and they were in town. Elaine, as could have been predicted, caused quite a stir by appearing out of the sky, but while the situation would have mortified Teddy by himself, before he knew it she had whisked them both inside the closest trade house that was on the list.


    It wasn''t the finest building in town--Teddy had been inside each of the traders'' offices at least, and Jorge''s was low on the list of quality--but for the same reason, it was one of the places Teddy was more comfortable. There was only one receptionist, Jorge''s son Juan, and aside from the locked rooms containing trade goods, there were just two offices, Jorge''s and Alli''s. Usually, one of the two of them would be here, and the other making a run to either north to Minneapolis, if they wanted to stay in Canada, or down to Indianapolis and the border.


    Juan, behind the desk, was already shouting "Papa, papa!" by the time they''d opened the door, so clearly it was Jorge who was at home.


    Jorge, when he walked out from his office, was very tall--topping seven feet and lanky. His smooth voice and accent made him sound a lot more like the southerner he was than a native Canadian like his wife, but he was always pleasant about it. "Teddy! It is rare to see you out of your compound. Come in. And this lovely lady is...?" He ducked out of the doorway and gestured Teddy in, stopping only long enough to fawn for a minute over Elaine.


    "Elaine Many. Pleased to meet you." She offered a hand, which he kissed, Teddy rolling his eyes slightly as he stepped through the doorway.


    "Elaine. A lovely name. Come in, sit." Again, he had to duck through the door, but on the far side, the room was spaciously laid out, the stuffed chairs a little more distant from each other than the narrow room would normally suggest, to accommodate his long legs. "What can I do for you?"


    Elaine looked to Teddy, who was still a little high off of the adrenaline of the flight. "We''re trying to get in contact with anyone who might have been able to make use of the computers I ...salvaged." Teddy managed to only hesitate a bit on the word. He was usually pretty good about not letting his feelings show, or at least, he hoped he was. "We are trying to do our own project with them and we are looking for any help they might have."


    Jorge stroked his chin, nodding slightly to himself. "Well my friend, as you know we have sold them mostly on speculation. Nobody was ever quite sure that what we had was what they wanted, especially since we did not have any demonstration code to prove that they worked. But... sometime last year I started to get a repeat customer. He wasn''t exactly looking for your servers in particular, just any computers he could get his hands on. I would meet him in Indianapolis, but I believe he was staying on this side of the border--he said he represented a client on the far side of Ottowa, but he never gave me any specifics." Jorge glanced between them several times, thinking. "What kind of project, if I might ask?"


    "Nothing too fancy," demurred Elaine. "If I can get some of the ansibles working I''d like to make a cargo vehicle."


    "You are an engineer?" Jorge''s voice carried surprise, but also approval. "I imagine you are as talented as you are lovely. Where do you come from? I do not recognize you, and I recognize most of the people who do business in these parts."


    "I spent a lot of time in the wastes," said Elaine smoothly. "Teddy and I met up and I was... impressed with his scavenging abilities."


    "To have survived in the blasted lands, you are either very dangerous or very well connected, yes?" Jorge''s voice carried a hint of darker amusement. "I hope you are not planning on taking poor Teddy''s work away from him. We rely on the trade from his business more than it may seem--"


    "I firmly believe that Teddy''s work is necessary," she interrupted. "Believe me, I have no interest in displacing him, or seeing anything untoward happen to him." She offered a warm smile. "I am a dangerous woman, but... only to my enemies, I promise you."


    Jorge didn''t bat an eye, just nodded for a good ten seconds straight, considering that. "Well," he said after a moment, "if you are trying to get in touch with this mystery client, I can send a message along..."


    "Actually," said Elaine, "I plan on chasing him down directly. Would you mind giving me some information on whoever your contact was? I plan on simply heading out that way to try to figure these things out myself."


    "I do not mind," said Jorge, looking Elaine up and down again. "Do you have a cargo vehicle of your own right now? Because if you are heading that direction, I might pay you to deliver the man some goods. Assuming of course," and he glanced at Teddy, "that my friend here will vouch for you. It is inconvenient, my wife Alli always heads to Indianapolis at around the same time, but my supplier can never seem to get the goods to us on time."


    "As long as the goods aren''t too bulky," said Elaine, "I can carry quite a bit."


    Jorge''s eyes swept to Teddy and stayed with him.


    "I trust Elaine with my life," admitted Teddy, with just a hint of a cracked smile. Although Elaine was doing a fine job with her performance, he just couldn''t stand leaving so much unsaid--it just wasn''t in his nature. "Though I must tell you, Jorge, that she is... underselling her abilities a bit. I have no doubt she could carry your whole warehouse to Ottowa if she tried."


    That caused Jorge to flick his eye back and forth between the two of them, suspiciously. Then, slowly, a smile spread across his face, and he started nodding.


    "You''re the one," he said. "That''s interesting. I had thought it was perhaps only rumors, but now I think I see. Let me look at my request board. Perhaps we can work something out."


    Elaine smiled winningly, and Teddy hoped he had done the right thing by revealing their hand.

 21. World Travellers

    It was a month before Elaine and Teddy returned from their trip. At first, it looked as though the trip was going to be a waste--one bad lead led to another, and several times they ended up at a dead end with no leads at all. But Elaine, usually over Teddy''s severe protest, dragged him on, always searching for someone who understood--or could possibly understand--the technical problems they were faced with.


    The short answer was, nobody had yet been successful in making use of the Archon ansible servers. There were, however, three other places across the Two Worlds where people were seriously trying, all better equipped than Teddy by far. Teddy, from the look of things, was absolutely astonished to see that his salvage had really made its way to the far reaches of both worlds, and that his works were in the hands of people who could not live a more different life than he did.


    Teddy had been agog from the first moment he stepped foot in what was clearly an actual, well-maintained, powered building, deep in southern Africa. Elaine found it amusing, while also registering the fact that whoever was keeping the building operational was clearly the kind of person willing to throw a lot of power around. There were a great many men with guns, a great many bits of trivial bureaucracy that they had to step carefully through in order to get an audience.


    All that for... not much.


    The person on the other end was a very short white man who surrounded himself with very tall, very muscular people. Teddy seemed to instantly be on edge around the man--in fact, if Elaine were honest, the feeling seemed mutual--but she did not immediately understand why.


    "My name is Frederick Zimmerman." The small man offered his hand to Elaine, who had to bend over to accept it. "I hear you had some questions about our research."


    When she sensed that Teddy was thrown off, Elaine stepped quickly into the breach. "We are looking for people who might have had success working with one of these units," she offered held out a paper roll, one that depicted in intricate detail one of the ansible units. "We heard you bought several of them."


    Frederick had his bodyguard hold out the paper for him to study, and spent the time waiting for him to unroll it studying Teddy. When it was unrolled, the man barely needed to glance at it. "Ah, the Red Ansible units. Yes, quite the mystery around those. You are curious about its origins, I suppose?"


    "We have a more practical concern," Elaine replied smoothly. "I have had some contact with the ...Administrators trying to get answers out of them but as I''m sure you know--"


    "They answer no questions about these things." Frederick sniffed indignantly. "It is not too much of a surprise; rumor has it that these items were stolen from them to begin with. In any case, we are basically starting from scratch, which is not a trivial problem with such complicated machines." He squinted up at Elaine. "What is your interest?"


    "We have some hints," said Elaine sweetly, sensing that the man was eager to be seen as the one on top. "about what to do once we can get the unit operating. However, even getting the things to turn on has been a hassle."


    "And what are you willing to trade for that information?" Frederick inclined his head back just a little further, as though the short man was turning his nose up at Elaine, but she honestly couldn''t tell if it was intentional, given the height difference.


    "That depends on what information you actually have." Elaine leveled her gaze at the man. "I can assure you, we have plenty worth trading."


    "Yes, my men did tell me that you apparently flew here, which is... something of an achievement." He glanced from her to Teddy and back again. "I take it your man here has some kind of flight-related keyshard? Certainly that would be too great a resource for you to trade away."Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    Elaine had to bite back an immediate response. Without being able to ask Teddy directly... she decided to throw a quick mental message at Ciddia instead. What the frig is a keyshard? Please answer quickly.


    It was only a moment before there was a response. The system magic was built on broke. Sometimes people find spiritual shards of magical knowledge, but you need a spiritual key to make use of it. A keyshard is both.


    Elaine processed that quickly, and immediately processed the reaction that Teddy and Frederick had to each other. "No actually," she said. "He has another use. Flight is an ability I saved for myself, you see."


    Frederick''s bushy eyebrows rose as he studied her. "Funny, I don''t sense a shard in you."


    "Indeed you wouldn''t." Elaine offered a wide smile, and let her feet lift off the floor just a bit, to prove her point. "I wouldn''t mind telling you, but then, you''re the one who believes in withholding information unless you get paid, are you not?"


    Frederick studied her as she floated, and after a moment, gave an unemotional chuckle, one that lasted more than a few seconds. "Very well," he said. "You have me intrigued. At the very least, it''s fair to say that trading with you will be... interesting." He gestured for them to follow. "Come along, let us talk over drinks."


    Over the next hours and days, Elaine gave away a few pieces of knowledge that she would otherwise have shared gladly, and Frederick grudgingly admitted that they had been able to get the Ansible units working, but only barely. They seemed to have no understanding of the machine learning coprocessor, and had completely wiped away the old software, so the notes Ciddia had given her about how that code worked would be no use to the man.


    Not that Elaine was willing to let slip that she had an ''in'' with Ciddia. The man seemed highly interested in being on the top of all things, and she didn''t want to make him jealous, not at this stage. She had no fear of his bodyguards, but extracting information from him would be a lot harder if he was hostile, even given her background. Instead, she traded a copy of her own notes from the Freeworlds Aliance, which would likely be of substantial interest to him, in exchange for working, bootable code that would not do much, but did prove that the system worked.


    Additionally, Frederick pointed them towards the only two other players in the Two Worlds that he considered competitors, insinuating that he would gladly buy any secrets that Elaine could wring out of them. One was rising from the ashes of China (Elaine had assumed she would find something somewhere over there, mostly out of sheer optimism), and was researching chemical manipulation with ansibles, while the other was an information broker in the frozen northern wastes of the Anstran continent on Draco, who was hoping to use ansibles to restore something like a global internet, but (in Frederick''s opinion at least) had no understanding of how exactly to do that.


    Hunting down those two took time, but neither had any firm successes with the ansible units, either. The leader of the Chinese Chemex firm, at least, was willing to part with information more freely, and so Elaine was able to form something of a rapport with the woman, if tenuous and somewhat strained.


    Everyone could tell that Elaine was holding a lot back, which of course she was. But everywhere she went, something stank. The closer she got to people with power, the more frightened people were; the researchers were always either frightened followers or people who seemed to have their own sketchy side agenda.


    Why couldn''t people with power ever be normal? Elaine wished she still had access to her high explosives so that she could go work off her aggression by destroying some remote part of the world, but successfully repressed her urges, even if she really did not understand the irony.


    By the time she and Teddy got back, Jim and Anna had finished salvaging and selling a lot of what they had left, and Anna had some extra notes on things she''d like to try when they got back to the test rig, but she set those aside to examine the bits of knowledge and code that they''d returned with. Jim, for, his part, had set about repairing the walls, but in his ardor to do so had torn apart parts of the internal buildings for materials. Teddy didn''t seem to mind, even if that left him with a hole in his own personal rooms, but Elaine couldn''t hide her twitch when she saw the kitchen was now--at least temporarily--unusable.


    Elaine smiled through it all--through the sketchy leaders, the scheming researchers, the cowards, Teddy''s own constant protests, and Jim''s thoughtless renovations. She smiled, even when what she really wanted was to force people to stop being stupid--at gunpoint, if she needed to.


    She smiled, but she privately wondered if she would be able to keep resisting those urges forever.