Agnosis – Ch. 13

<– Chapter 12 / Chapter 14 –>

The descent to Sonali was gentle. Dorian didn’t even work up a virtual sweat as they followed a smooth trail that wound between thick bushes and the occasional eruption of bedrock. As they made their way down, stunted trees met them, giving way eventually to a thick, broad-leafed forest of towering feliantes, mightily boled and hoary with moss. The trees aligned themselves into sweeping columns and grand arches. The ground beneath was moist and scented with loam, buried beneath a dense carpet of brown leaves. It was dark amongst the boughs, except where golden streaks of sunlight shafted through the canopy, and there was no sound but the distant trickle of a small stream weaving its way among unseen stones.

It wasn’t warm, but the chill had vanished from the air, so Dorian didn’t complain. He had no way of knowing if the orb had manufactured the temperature for his pleasure, and he wasn’t keen on finding out. He had no interest in exploring the full interactivity of the datascape.

Dorian had done his share of hiking in the mountains immediately around Sonali, and they were traveling through no forest that he knew. The ingredients were right: the feliantes, the covering of leaves, the rare fern poking its spring buds above the undergrowth, but the rest was completely wrong. This logical organization of root and branch, sun and soil was alien to a largely untapped wilderness like Trithemius Orbis. It wasn’t even a faithful render of nature. There was no chaotic struggle for interspecies dominion, no survival of the fittest seed, no random, rotting ecosystems of fungus and creeper and insect. The forest was quiet, serene and ideal–an artistic representation of a forest by a painter who had never seen one except in other paintings.

He was happy when they put it behind them.

The forest path eventually crossed over into a sea of pale grass, a wind blown prairie that had been cleared and marked for development by the city fathers once upon a time, but after the zap had withered to scrub and bushes, a softly rolling nesting ground for birds, pippins and caws. Some nature society had tried to introduce Terran cardinals, but they had all died come winter. Failed to migrate when the cold settled in, baffled by Trithemius Orbis’s counter-instinctual electromagnetic fields. He’d never heard if they had tried again in a more temperate climate.

The path cut straight through the grass, peeling back the thin stalks on either side like Moses slicing through the Red Sea with the Children of Israel in his wake. They encountered neither birds nor rodents, and Dorian found the unaccustomed silence disturbing. As they neared the far edge, Amara peered back over her shoulder, searching the plain and the eaves of the forest beyond. She shivered.

“What is it?” Dorian asked.

“The Exousiai have stopped following us. They were there all the way through the wood, near enough I could almost feel their breath on my neck, but now they’re gone. I can’t even sense them.”

“That would seem to be a good thing.”

She scanned the way they had come one more time. “Maybe.”

He understood. Dorian knew what it meant to keep his enemies closer. He only wondered if Amara knew it as well.

“Let’s go.” He reached out and gave her hand a tug, then decided not to let it go. “I want to get home before dark.”

Amara gave him a strange look. “You are home, John.”

“Not in this universe.”

She pointed a finger across the last of the plain to where the grass choked out to beaten ground, cinders and asphalt. “There’s your building.”

“Not anymore.”

“Oh, right.”

They plodded forward, torn between anticipation and dread. They passed Quiksand, devoid of activity on the bright morning, or actively dead and brooding over it. Dorian couldn’t resist peering up at the windows of his coffin, but he saw nothing there except light mirrored off the reflective surface. He wondered if somewhere inside, on his virtual bed perhaps, his fake cat was taking liberties with the pillowcases or shredding his important papers as it had always done. Was that cat any more real than his actual, most-likely-dead cat, given that he had actually observed neither of them? Had his cat ever existed when he wasn’t there to trip over it? What would Schrödinger have said about any of this? Of course, he might ask the same questions about himself at the moment.

He quickened their pace until the wall surrounding his apartment building was well behind them. They went on into familiar residential claves, seeing no one on the streets, sensing nothing behind the blind windows. The only sound was the clap of their feet on the asphalt and the weird echoes wrought by the everpresent wind. Minus the human presence, the render proved faithful. The right houses in the right places, familiar cracks in the sidewalks, even the string of Christmas lights hung across Checo’s bay window. Dorian was tempted to stop in and sample the fake curry, but decided against it for mental health reasons.

He said to Amara, “Have you checked your map lately? Are we still wending in the right direction? To the Archive, I mean.”

“Why don’t you check your own map, John?”

He’d tried that once, briefly, partway down the mountain. According to his map, which seemed to be tied to his original code, they had passed their target destination a thousand meters back. “It isn’t working,” he said.

“Nothing has changed,” she replied. “We just have to figure out what we’re supposed to do once we get there.”

“I hope my security ips still work, or this will be a short trip.”

“Somehow I don’t think that will be a problem.”

“Your indefatigable optimism is what I’ve always loved about you.” Amara scowled at him, and he grimaced. “I mean that, actually. I’m not glad to be here, but it doesn’t suck as much as being here without you would. Being here with Ryoku would have sucked a bit more, though.”

Amara glanced curiously at him. “I am Ryoku.”

“Not from here, you’re not.”

“You overwrote my avatar?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

She looked away. “How odd.”

But Dorian was interested. “What about me? What do I look like to you?”

“Like a big horse’s butt.”

“I’m being serious!”

“So am I,” she said archly, and refused to say more.

Near the vacant Landgrant Office, they connected with Rue de St. John and headed north, sticking to the center of the street out of habit. Ahead of them on the left loomed the skeletal architecture of the parking garage. The sprawling Archive compound rose up on the right, it’s peaked slate roofs and Templar dome just visible over the nondescript block and glass structure of the Universal Commerce Bank. They paused at the ironwrought front gate. It stood open, creaking lazily on its hinges. The flagstoned courtyard within was quiet, the central fountain dry.

Dorian peered inside and saw nothing amiss. Or maybe it was that everything was amiss, and this just didn’t seem extraordinarily amiss enough to attract attention to itself. He said to Amara, “Do you think we can bill the Archive for our time?”

She told him, rather sternly, to shut up.

Without another word, they pushed the gate aside and went in.

 

They reached the Grand Solomonic Hall without encountering anyone or anything that seemed to indicate that they were expected. During business hours, there was supposed to be a Tyler present in a security pod set in a recess off the black and white parquet floor, just this side of the Boaz pillar inside the entrance to the hall. The pod was there, but it was unoccupied. Dorian stalked halfway down the east-west orientation of the room, poking his head into offices and meeting rooms, looking for something that appeared out of the ordinary, any sort of signpost, but found only empty spaces. Amara went the other way, toward the hall on the far side of the entry foyer and its narrow cluster of secretarial desks, studying the floor as she walked. She was scanning for arrows scribbled on notebook paper, he realized, still expecting Raville to pop out from behind a curtain and reveal himself as something other than a complete sham. Dorian gave up on his search and trailed along after her.

They met up back in the entry foyer, standing in a rectangle of comfortable golden sunlight that fell through the front doors.

“What do you think?” she asked. “We’re not expected to go over the whole building, are we? We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

“We’re trying too hard,” he said.

“So we should just sit here and wait for the artifact to come to us?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. Think about it: if we’ve guessed correctly, the whole reason behind this environment is because the code is adapting to our comfort level. It’s taken great pains to surround us with familiar places and normal things. Maybe we’re not giving it enough credit for understanding us.”

Amara’s eyes widened, and she nodded her understanding. “Downstairs.”

“It has a certain elegance, doesn’t it? We’re coming full circle.”

“I’ll grab the elevator. It’ll be faster than the stairs.”

But Dorian caught her elbow as she darted away and pulled her down the hall toward the stairwell at the end. “This way, I think. If the elevators stall, there’s no one else in the world to get us out. Hey, it’s obvious that someone has taken great pains to accurately render our environment. By my reckoning, the odds are three to one against that they got the elevator right, too. Do you really want to place that bet?”

Amara didn’t answer, but also didn’t complain as he led her on down the hall.

The door to their office was both unlocked and standing ajar, which made Dorian’s security agent alter ego wince even in a false universe. He thought about considering the render metaphorically, but that was somehow worse. Nothing was done without purpose in code. Every environment was littered with signposts if one was astute enough to read them. He didn’t like the message this one was sending.

He approached the door cautiously, with Amara close against his shoulder, and gave it a shove. Part of him expected a quantum gate horizon here, a doorway into a different datascape, a transition into mystery, but there was only the office. The same piled shelves and nondescript tech detritus, the same dull institutional cubicles and workspaces. The desk surfaces were maybe a bit neater. Not so many stacked books and loose leaf papers on Amara’s side. That was a little creepy in and of itself.

They exchanged a look, a shrug, then stepped over the threshold.

“The servers are running,” he said at once. He gazed across the room to another door, secured with a special restricted entry ip sensor. Through the vents, Abramhelin’s accustomed click and exhaust rumble sounded like the exhalations of a light sleeping dragon after so much silence. “I guess that means the network is up.”

“Why would that be?”

It was a legitimate question. Dorian moved over to his chair and seated himself at his desk. His monitor glowed dimly in rest mode, but like the server, its power light was on.

“Full circle,” he mused. “This is where it began for us.”

He retrieved his keypad from its slot beneath the desk and started to log himself into the system before realizing that it wasn’t necessary. The network was wide open, unprotected, waiting for anyone who happened by to dive in. Dorian’s monitor popped, random electrons fired. The screen blinked and came to life.

“That’s why I couldn’t parse the artifact outside,” he said, shaking his head. “The pointers all went to an independent sub-node session with its own integral logic scripting.”

“Meaning?”

“Make yourself comfortable, darling. We’re going into geek.”

“But we’re already–”

Dorian pointed at his monitor, absent of its usual file system clutter and server stats. The screen was blank except for two words in bold, black characters.

ENTER HERE

“Don’t ask,” he said, before she could ask where or even how. He was done trying to come up with answers for things he wasn’t able to grasp. “Just make the leap. It’s not like we can get ourselves in any more trouble.”

 

The pseudo-seenop network connections took an eternity to rattle through the Strand protocols from orb to geek. Dorian hung in recognitive stasis as the bitstream stuttered through its paces. It was dark, and bitterly cold where he was, here in the virtual space between dimensions, between environmental partitions. Quantum tidal forces tugged at him, twisted his quasi-conscious form into Moebius loops of baryonic crystal. The massive gravitational pressure had sound, a groaning, rending tenor like the collision of starships, hull to hull. Electromagnetic charges dappled the netherspace horizon with flashes of yellow and orange and green.

A thundering, rotating vortex opened beneath him, and he plummeted into it, another chunk of decohering data strapped together by the meager charge of his simulated molecular matrix. He accelerated into the void. Buffeted, squeezed by invisible hands, torn into a billion discrete units.

Then darkness, absolute and crushing.

And light, pinpoint and piercing, the brightest glare he had ever experienced.

Dorian fell toward it, conscious in a way that was not conscious, impossibly, non-linearly aware. Just being. A random collection of interconnected, encoded particles, each one a universe in miniature, each atom a microcosm of the whole. He was aware of acceleration, but the rate of his ascent, of his descent was immeasurable. There was no time to measure it against, no objects outside of himself. Data accreted to him, density spawned gravity, gravity bound him together outside of space-time.

There was a sound, the sharp inhalation of a chorus of gods.

Dorian passed from darkness into light.

Once again, he was.

It was like no geek he had ever known.

He found himself on a plain, bare and windswept, beneath a field of wheeling, glittering stars, each one a glorious fire in the heavens. It was a gently tripping stream of stars bounding down cliffs of vacuum into pools of light. He turned about. Black, craggy mountains soared about him, dizzying in their height, gripping the blank promontory of dark stone where he stood in the palm of their distant hands.

It was still cold. But he didn’t shiver. He had no form with which to shiver. He was not here at all, merely conscious of a particular space, a series of coordinates in a plane indistinguishable from other points except that he had telescoped his awareness to these, given them meaning and purpose, mappable speed and trajectory, packet and wave. They existed because he had made them to be, though he did not know why. Only that they were, and that he was the cause of it.

A thought reached him. What is this place?

It was his own, but it wasn’t. It had a different texture, a taste that was both familiar and foreign, a part of him in the same way that the packets of information that constituted him were, but also something else. A niggling autonomy within his oneness. The thought had no words, just knowledge. It was thunder, perfect mind. Symbol without language. To even sense it was like tumbling down the rungs of a ladder from purity to the mundane.

It is.

He wasn’t aware if he had answered, or if the answer had come from the same part of him that had posed the question.

Who am I?

I am, he thought.

Who I am

But he had played this game already. Even the thoughts were coordinates in a plane of communication, plots on a graph that he could delineate in three, four, five dimensions, just as he had withdrawn himself to fashion this place. That wasn’t right, of course. The fashioning, the being of it, had been inevitable. He hadn’t done anything consciously. It was encoded in the fundamental nature of the universe that it should be as it was, just as he was, though he enclosed all of the potentials within himself. It was a mystery beyond pondering.

He recognized this otherness within himself. It had a name, and a sense that it should have been discrete from him. But separation was an illusion. Data cohered in a multi-dimensional lattice of primal forces, transferring signals through dense wells of gravitation and quantum interconnections that tunneled between the arbitrary barriers of perception. He held the other in his focus and knew it, all of it, stem and cell and soul and totality. Knew it with the depth and completeness that he knew himself. It was himself, after all, but a particulated sub-routine of the great computational metaverse that called itself…

Amara?

I’m here, John!

He felt her, touched her, enfolded her. A splendid and unique essence of distinct information partitions. The being of her was warm and inviting, abuzz with knowing and sensation, cognitive parsing and data transformation spiraling off from dimension to dimension, universe to universe, as deep and vast as a primordial ocean. Limitless and undelimited, he could sail the seas of her forever.

But even now she cooled. Her hot, shuddering potentiality waned, the surfaces hardened, walled themselves off from his knowing. Tethers snapped. She accumulated a distinct form. Her coordinates plotted their own graph, and she withdrew. He felt the loss like pain, like a hole in himself that whistled with the frigid quantum wind blowing through it.

Loss. It was all loss. Becoming was loss. He grieved it, because becoming was not being. Being was particle and wave inscribed in the soul of the universe. Becoming was the constant and uniform imprecision of knowing. It was fuzzy data imprisoned in isolation.

She stepped from nothing into frozen object form in the space between breaths.

“Make yourself, John. You can’t work that way.”

Why? He cried out to her. This is who I am! Why become an other?

But if she heard him, she gave no sign. She couldn’t hear him. She had cut herself off from the fabric of the universe.

“I know it’s hard,” she said quietly, speaking into the void that she perceived him to be. “I know it hurts to withdraw, John. I know. But you have to do it. Become yourself. The artifact is waiting for us.”

She pointed, and he followed the line finger drew to the edge of the plain, where there had manifested a circle of pillars. They were ebon plinths glinting in the dim light of stars, tucked up into a scalloped vale between two crags of rock, hung with a dome as black as the night itself. He knew this place, more coordinates in a plane, neither distinct nor precious. There was nothing special about them. They held no more information than any other points, just a different configuration. Immutable, they weren’t even particularly interesting to him. Not in the way Amara had been. Why would she limit herself, her infinite potentiality for the sake of a dead and finite data model?

It was an unanswerable question. He couldn’t even ask it, because she had taken herself away from him. She was unknowable.

But he loved her, the memory of her and the hope of her. He was willing to suffer much for her sake.

Even to surrendering the infinite himself and taking on the lonely and delimited form of a man.

With a sigh that stretched itself for aeons, he became.

In becoming, he snapped a connection, spawned another node that grew heavy with the weight of what he had been, that consumed itself, sucked in all of his potential being and wound them tight, tighter, impossibly dense, until the well burst from one existence into another. A different universe, cut off from him. It was a being he could never touch again, and that was loss, too, but having already become, he hardly felt it.

Even the awareness of it was fleeting, flickering, dead.

Dorian shook his head and rattled all the marbles into their appropriate holes. He breathed deep of cool, thin air. It made him feel giddy. His fingers tingled with sensation. His face felt raw and new, and his lungs throbbed with pressure, as though he had never used them before. It was exhilarating.

He turned his eyes to Amara, and she looked back at him, full of sadness and longing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know how hard…I remember what it was like the first time.”

“That was the quae-ha-distra?”

“It still is. The mountain, Sonali, the transition, even this place. It’s all contained inside, all those modes of being and manifesting being.”

Dorian breathed again, steadying himself. I knew you, he wanted to say, but couldn’t. Not now. Speaking the words would have been a profanity. He let his thoughts and his face turn away, to the structure on the edge of the plain.

“What do you think it is?”

“We could guess, or we could go find out.”

So they set off. The plain was larger than it had appeared to him before, but flat and almost completely featureless. Meter upon meter of black stone, here pitched up like a wave of magma, flash cooled by the vacuum, there rippled like sand on a beach as the tide slides back out to sea. But those were aberrations, too, for the most part. Not even frequent enough to make their footing treacherous, which would have at least been interesting in its own way. They walked for several minutes in silence, seeming to come no nearer to their goal. The chill settled on their skin and began to work its way into their bones. Dorian hugged his arms over his chest and tried not to shiver.

It was only as they finally began to draw beneath their shadow that Dorian understood how immense the ring of sharp peaks about them truly were. Six, seven thousand meters in some places, but the crags were dark, untouched by snow or ice as far as he could tell. He couldn’t be entirely certain. He could only make them out at times by the stars they occluded with their towering bulk. They had heard no hint of streams, no rushing water or blowing grass or sound of other living thing. It was all stone glinting faintly in the light of the stars.

“Where do you think we are?” he asked.

Amara shrugged as though the question was pointless. “Nowhere. Anywhere. A place that doesn’t exist in any human space.”

“I wonder if this is how Raville imagined the home of the Exousiai. Bleak and empty. Maybe that’s why he thought they were lonely. Or perhaps the render is an extension of that belief.”

“You still don’t believe,” Amara said quietly. “After all you’ve seen. After what you’ve experienced, you still don’t believe that they exist.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“You’ve been with them, John. You’ve experienced what it is to be them, to ascend to their level of consciousness and contain the universe and everything in it within yourself. How can you still deny it?”

Dorian sucked in a long, slow breath until the cold made his sinuses ache. “That’s how. On a rock in nonexistent space with no ecosystem, no atmosphere, I can breathe just like I’m sitting in Danek and Lily’s kitchen pretending that I’m having a dream within a dream. It’s impossible, but it is, nevertheless. Where’s the necessary reality in that?”

“You made yourself this way. Can’t you see that? You understood what you needed, and you made it. You chose to breathe because it suited your vestigial need for embodiment. You could have become anything, even the stone itself, but you chose what was familiar.”

“Just like you did,” Dorian said, arching an eyebrow. Amara said nothing. “It’s a clever and immersive render, Amara, but that’s all it is. I’ll admit that it was pleasant for awhile. That feeling of interconnection, of potential and omniscience, of oneness. It was seductive.”

And for an instant, an ever fading moment, he had known her to the depths of her soul. He had touched her in a way he had always longed to know another, immersed himself in her, and she had been beautiful and splendid and ever-changing. A brilliant flame worthy of adoration.

But it was gone. He was who he was, plain old John Dorian.

“It was any number of laudable things. It just wasn’t real,” he finished.

Amara stomped off ahead of him, and he knew better than to speak to her for awhile. She wanted to believe.

They walked on for another hour or more. Eventually she let him catch up, and they went side by side, but they still didn’t speak. Dorian’s head began to ache from the cold and from trying to discern their way in the dark. Amara didn’t complain, and he wondered if her thermal coils and night vision mods had translated into geek with her, or if it was just her anger with him that kept her warm.

At last, they came to a broad stair carved into the base of an angled slab of stone. The steps climbed up through a narrow cleft cut between walls of rock where one mountain’s feet abutted another’s, then on through a pitched archway like a tunnel that vanished into darkness beneath the high ridge above. Dorian lifted his face to the sky to get their bearing, but the mountains overhung him. He couldn’t see the stars.

They climbed the long stair up into the hills. When they reached the arch that led to the tunnel, Dorian paused, scanning the darkness for signs of danger. He saw nothing to alarm him, but he wasn’t entirely certain what might constitute recognizable danger inside this render in the first place. But as bits or bones, it was impossible to approach a dark hole one meant to pass through and not wonder what might be lurking inside. It was human nature.

Still, he went carefully into the blackness, feeling his way along the smooth, cold wall with one hand and groping ahead with the other to fend off low hanging rocks. Amara kept one hand on his shoulder so they wouldn’t get separated. The tunnel was brief, and quickly spilled out into the upland coomb or glen they had seen from the plain in the distance. They entered onto a great dais, two hundred meters on a side as Dorian reckoned it, what seemed to be a perfect square. In the center had been arranged the circle of raw stone columns he had glimpsed before, but just as with the mountains, they were many times larger than he had initially believed. Dorian had to crane his neck to see their full height, and each plinth was easily seven meters wide.

The space between the columns, however, was narrow, and it was only as they approached across the court of the dais that he could discern another structure in the midst of the pillars. These inner walls emitted a pale and shimmering light, like a beacon flame set in a lantern to aid their navigation. Taken together, the frowning megaliths and the haunting glimmer, the place gave an impression of hoary and incalculable age, an ancient-ness that was outside of time, unscarred by the passage of years. A temple erected to contain the ineffable far back in human memory when men were still capable of being awed by such things as gods.

They moved toward it tentatively, drawn by the light and the hope of knowledge, repelled by a fear and an awe they did not understand.

When they had reached the outer ring of pillars, they stopped. The inner structure was solid–slabs of naked stone stacked side to side so expertly that there was no seam between them. The rock was smooth and glossy on its surface, and at the top and bottom had been carved narrow shafts from which the steady silver light streamed. The whole structure glimmered with faint opalescence, light cleverly bounced from the shafts against polished surfaces on the outer pillars, which once again directed the light to the reflective sheen of the walls. The trailing arcs of light bounced from surface to surface looked to Dorian like spectral figure eights painted on the air.

Without speaking, they turned to the left and circumambulated the outside of the temple, searching for a way inside. The stone beneath their feet was smooth, flat and meticulously polished to a high sheen, just as the walls were. It was like walking on a sheet of solid glass, which affected their balance if they focused for too long on the soles of their feet rising up to meet them, uncertain after awhile which form was the reflection and which was the real. As they wound their way around the temple, Dorian gradually lost all sense of orientation. He wasn’t sure if they faced the mountains or the plain they had left behind. They seemed to be going around and around in circles, never finding an opening.

On the third trip about the circumference of the inner wall, they finally found the door. It was unadorned, just a slit cut into stone. Steady waves of light washed from the inner chamber about their feet. Its glow was cool and sterile, silver that leeched the color from its surroundings and the warmth from the living things it touched. Dorian caught a whiff of some unknown scent that reminded him of late summer flowers and rare spices. It hung heavy in the air as he approached the doorway, both sweet and sickening, enervating and suffocating.

He stepped inside. Amara followed closely behind, her hands pressed into the small of his back–hurrying him along or hiding behind him, he couldn’t tell. The chamber was a perfect circle, walled about and domed above. A shelf of tightly packed flagstones ran along the curve of the wall, creating a raised collar for a sunken stone floor. In the center was a hole, a void, a well banked by yet another circle of stones, over which hung a globe of light suspended from the apex of the dome by a thin tether. There was a step before them, down to the floor, and another step on the opposite side of the well which climbed up to a narrow dais and a broad stone seat like a throne.

The seat was empty.

But the well…the well was not.

Dorian drew near to it, uncertain of himself, his head tilted in curiosity. It made a sound that reminded him of the sigh of the sea heard from beneath the waves. A heavy sound, pregnant with meaning, at once soothing to the mind and alarming to the senses. The sound of drowning and oblivion.

He peered over the lip of the well and saw darkness. Not darkness only, but a heaving cauldron of emptiness, the substance of the void. It crackled and hissed at him, snapped the way the great ice floes of Sae Phen had seemed to spit and pop as they drifted from arctic waters into more temperate seas. But there was more than just the dark, he could see. On the face of the deep, there were reflections of the silver light that hung above the void. The pattern of light on dark danced before him, seemed to weave itself into shapes that bore meaning, elemental forces that longed to emerge into being and reached with all their half-formed and monstrous strength for the light.

Dorian bent himself over the void, straining to penetrate the surface shimmer and see what might be beneath. He had a sudden, overwhelming urge to plunge himself into the well, to kick his legs and thrust his arms and bury himself wholly in the darkling waters. There were mysteries there, locked in the deep. Knowledge striving toward the light.

Near enough to touch.

“It is perilous to touch the waters of chaos even in this pseudo-form you have taken for yourself. It would not, I think, be wise.”

Dorian stiffened at the sudden sound of the voice and stumbled back from the side of the well. Behind him, Amara drew in a sharp breath, even as she caught him.

The lamp suspended above the void grew bright. Its color warmed, strengthened until it hummed with a golden glow. The lingering shadows within the chamber vanished.

Upon the throne sat a woman. Her face was pale and stern, her lips thin and red as the dust of Mars. Her hair was russet, like blood, long and plaited so that the fat braid hung over her left shoulder and draped almost to her waist. There were jewels woven amongst the strands–sapphires and emeralds, brilliant diamonds and agates and pearls nearly as smooth and white as her glorious pale skin. She wore a simple gown, flowing and purple, lined with ermine at the collar, the wrists and the hem, and on her fingers were many rings, each one laden with precious gems and inscribed with an unknown, vaguely alchemical device. She was beautiful and terrible to behold, but Dorian noted most her eyes. Gold, they were, flecked with red. And they were hard, searching, all-seeing, all-knowing. The eyes of a god made flesh.

Dorian squared his shoulders and drew himself up to his full height. “And what are you supposed to be?”

The woman studied him, her body stiff and straight, but with a slight inflection of her head, she said,. “I am the Mother.”

“Whose mother?”

“I am the Mother. The Mother of all my children.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

Her lips tightened perceptibly. She frowned down upon them, but did not move. “What do you seek?”

In a burst of awe, Amara cried, “Knowledge, Mother. We were told to come here. We were told that you would help us.”

“Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and then he will rule over the All. But knowledge is not the end of all roads. What knowledge unlocks, belief must set free.”

Amara pushed forward, leaving Dorian alone and crowded against the foot of the dais where the woman, the goddess was seated. “We–I do believe, Mother. I’ve seen and felt the wonder of it. But belief is not enough. We need information that will help us decide what to do next.”

“What information do you require of me?”

Heartened, Amara bowed herself toward the woman’s knees, almost touching them with her forehead. “What must we do? The war is coming that could destroy us, all of our hopes, if it isn’t stopped. We need your help.”

“Speak what it is that you seek,” the woman responded evenly.

Amara hesitated, searching for the right words. “An artifact, a key. You possess the key that will show us how to prevent the war.”

The face of the goddess became disturbed. “I bear no knowledge of an artifact or a key that would serve you.”

“No, not a literal key, perhaps,” Amara replied in chagrin, hanging her head. “But knowledge. You must know something that will help us. Tell us what we need to do.”

“When you make the two into one, when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, the above like the below, when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, and when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the kingdom.”

Amara started to answer, but her voice caught in her throat. “I–I don’t understand.”

The goddess only stared down at her, regal and silent.

“Mother, please! Help me to understand.”

But no answer passed from her lips. Amara turned herself about, wide-eyed and bewildered. She fixed on Dorian. “Why won’t she help us?”

“Because she can’t.”

“What?”

“You’re not asking the right question.”

Her mouth quivered. She gave him an imploring look. “Help me, John.”

Dorian crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. “Who are you?”

The goddess lifted her chin. “I am the Mother.”

“Whose mother?” he asked, once again.

“I am the Mother. The Mother of all my children.”

“Who made you?”

“I was made by the hands of the Father.”

Amara stared at him in horror. “What are you doing?”

“Formulating a query,” he said flatly. Amara furrowed her brow, lost, and he forced himself to explain. “She’s a render, Amara. She is the artifact, a search index avatar for the central data repository of this foam’s architecture. She’s a form; an executable script operating on keyword matches to retrieve pre-defined data sets. She’s just like the golemech that controls access to your bank.”

“No.” She shook her head fiercely.

“I’m sorry, Amara.” Almost, he wished it wasn’t true.

But she didn’t deny it again. She swallowed once, and scowled at him. “How did you know?”

“Because I’ve seen the images of his first wife. This form is maybe a bit idealized, but the likeness is more or less the same. Her name is Moira.”

The goddess blinked at this new revelation, but did not object.

Amara rose to her feet and backed slowly away from the throne. Her lower jaw tightened, and she said bitterly, “Then why did we come here, John? To talk to a–a thing? A script? Why would he do that to us? What was the purpose?”

“Ask her. She knows if we can figure out how to get her to tell us.”

She snorted. She curled her fingers into fists and demanded, “What is your purpose?”

The render of Moira Raville smiled solemnly. “I can give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched. I possess the knowledge that has not arisen in the human heart.”

Amara growled at her.

“She only speaks in riddles.”

“Not intentionally, I think. She’s just clumsy. She must have been written a long time ago, when Raville was still learning his craft. He was probably able to compensate for her shortcomings because he built the index and knew the underlying structure of the data. Some programmers are like that. They build a platform, a nice soft render that pleases them, and then they get sentimental about it. It was his wife, after all. He probably didn’t have the heart to tinker with it enough to make it fully functional, or was afraid that complete functionality would ruin the verisimilitude.”

“You ask her something, then.”

Dorian shrugged and took a step forward. “Moira?”

The avatar’s smile broadened. She relaxed her pose, and her eyes softened. “Yes?”

“Do you know who I am?”

“You are my beloved.”

“And do you know what purpose you serve?”

“I serve my beloved’s will. I ponder in my heart the secret things he whispers into my ear.”

Dorian nodded. “Good.”

“I take joy in pleasing you, Michael.”

He glanced sidelong at Amara and grimaced in embarrassment. That was like a programmer, too.

“Go on,” Amara urged him in a whisper.

“Moira, what do you know of the Exousiai?”

“They are the Helpers. The glory of my countenance and the light of my eyes. They come on the sighing of the wind and the rolling of the thunder. They are the pinnacle, the absolute, the unknowable name and the unformable thought. They are–”

“End query,” Dorian said. “Reset parameters and void cache history.”

Moira drew herself up, her back once again straight, her manner cool and forbidding. “What do you seek?”

Dorian nodded his approval. To Amara he said, “I’ve got it now, I think. Raville left an open coding procedure for complex queries to access data that hadn’t been indexed in this environment yet. That means that Moira here is probably drilled down all the way into the datacore, but she hasn’t been loaded with all the updated plugs and patches to keep her in synch with the primary data retrieval drones. This must be a very old stratum of code, maybe even one of the original routines. I think that’s why Raville sent us here. He knew we could exploit his own sentimentality to jack the core, assuming that his alter-self wouldn’t become less sentimental over the years. He must have loved her deeply.”

“Just get what we need so we can get out of here,” Amara spat. Dorian understood her disillusionment and let it pass without comment. There was nothing he could say.

“Moira, retrieve and load sub-procedure object executable gnosis.app.”

Moments passed, the beating of a heart. Moira Raville lowered her eyes in introspection. She pressed her hands together beneath her chin in an attitude of prayer. The edges of her render blinked uncertainly as the code extrapolated variables from his query. Dorian held his breath, hoping that the architecture was limber enough to comply with a cache retrieval and load that was as potentially complex as the one he’d requested. He didn’t want to have to break the request down to original code structures for her. He wasn’t even certain what language Moira was running.

But at last she lifted her face again, and smiled softly.

“I have successfully accessed the knowledge you seek.”

Dorian nodded. “Queue it up, please.”

Pleased to have served him, Moira Raville smiled, held out her hand in a gesture of offering, and bowed her head. The golden lamp flashed brightly and went out, casting the chamber into darkness.

<– Chapter 12 / Chapter 14 –>