When Sly came back to himself, he was somehow still on his feet. Shock shuddered through him, and he took a steadying step forward, and another half-shuffle, but froze and gasped when the toes of his boots crossed an unseen edge.
He stared down at his feet.
The place was dark but not as black as the caverns. He saw his boots clearly in night-vision, but beyond his toes was a line of utter void, its end too far down to see.
Reflexively he shuffled back, thinking to retreat the way he came.
Instead, his spine found a smooth, unyielding, icy-cold surface behind him, worked stone but with the chill of glass. He braced against it, and he caught his breath. A breeze crossed his cheeks as he recovered, and he breathed in the fragrance of eucalyptus and mint and other growing things. He turned his head but saw nothing but a grey horizon, lifted his chin and saw nothing except stars. Off in the distance he heard a coyote-like yip.
I’m outside, in the open air. How the hell did that happen?
That one fact was obvious, but took an age to sink in. He wasn’t in the caves, but it was dark, and it was night, but not freezing.
It was warm. He wasn’t in the Antarctic.
Was I drugged, shipped out to somewhere warm and then dumped? Improbable. He remembered the shadowed archway, and the feeling of being dragged through into the void by a power he couldn’t resist. Is kidnap less likely than stepping through a doorway to another world? We assumed the unlit arches led nowhere except an unknown quarter of the city. The tangos had all headed to that one archway, so they’d known where to go.
But what if the arch wasn’t simply architecture, but another portal like the great arch, but smaller. What if the portal’s destination was simply… dark? It’s night-time here, not the bright sunlight of the main arch. Did the different portals go to separate worlds or to alternate time-zones on the same planet?
Unbalanced by the weird thought, Sly switched back to the here and now.
“Hello?” Sly called softly, hoping he would hear the voice of one of his companions. There was no reply, no echo of subterranean walls, only the spiced whisper of cool wind into his face. He upped the volume. “Hello!”
He waited, listened. Nothing and no one replied. He was alone, for now.
He tried to access Gus. First nothing, then a one-word status message.
‘Recalibrating.’
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
That could signify many things, but most often it meant that his personal Gus agent had lost its wider network. Gus was a distributed AI system: its many individual nodes shared whatever computing power and information they had, over whatever connections they could find. When multiple Gus-nodes were close enough to share information without delay, each swarm formed an agent, a sort of joint personality or hive-mind. When the delay was too great, every node started again with whatever memory and processing power they individually had to hand, creating a new agent.
Gus’s links to other nodes were obviously kaput.
Fortunately, my body’s a bargain bag of processors. Hundreds of tiny processors embedded in the sensors under my skin, plus three – or was it four? – optical biochips.
His local Gus would survive, for now.
That was the positive spin. There was also bad news. The error message meant that his team had fallen out of contact. Wherever Ramirez was, he would receive the same recalibration message as his Gus agent reconnected to whatever resources it had nearby. The shades, the skin sensor network, any phones they might have. Any device with a processor.
He breathed hard and stared at the sky. Clouds moved across the stars, ships billowing sails on a mirrored sea. The night air was chill enough to feel comfortable in clothes suited to the Antarctic, but he wasn’t cold.
He stared up. He wasn’t the kind of army navigator who looks at the sky and a watch and finds he’s near Boston because of a particular star on the horizon. Me, near Boston? I’d look for light from the Zakim Bridge. There are no artificial lights at all. This better not be North Korea, that’d really make my day.
He smiled to himself but didn’t feel the joy. His HUD claimed it was the fourteenth of October but the local time was blank. The sky was paler than before, nearly dawn.
Sly imitated Gus and listed his resources.
He’d had the Sig entering the arch, and here it still was, warm from his hand. He replaced it back in its holster at his hip, opposite a seven-inch ka-bar knife. He wore black lightweight body armour, NIJ Level III, its inner pockets full of ceramic plate. The small backpack was also with him, containing items he’d collected from the dead earlier that day, plus ammunition for the Sig, a couple of non-lethal tear and smoke grenades, and some rations. Not much food, he’d not expected to be leaving Area 71 that day. More fool me.
Sly half-slung his bag and groped for Greyhair’s black cloak. The bundle of material was strange, warm like Merino wool but fizzing with a charge that didn’t go away. Finding the clasps, he let the material billow from his hands, pleasantly surprised it didn’t cling. He hauled the cloak around his shoulders, fastened the clasp, and immediately felt warmer in its embrace. Nice.
Idly, Sly checked his system stats. The current team-comparison was useless, so he switched back to the original hardcoded test-set. Five was the average score for the volunteers. Each had been in their twenties, mostly from the Marine Corps and his own unit, the Tenth. Sly scored between nine and ten for intelligence, between seven and eight for wisdom, and below seven for charisma, in comparison with the benchmark score.
It was with regret but no surprise that he had fallen below average on strength, dexterity and constitution. True, he wasn’t as young as the other participants, but a three on constitution still stung. He’d turned to more fencing and running in hope it would tick up, but it never had.
Talking of which, the fatigue of the day was taking its toll and he needed rest, but one thing was certain. He wasn’t going to sleep standing up, overlooking a crevasse.
