Gemini Gambit Read online

  This was supposed to be an explanation, but none of it made any sense. Mike looked exactly like someone who skinned people alive for fun, but his voice reminded her of someone showing off family photos. “This is one of the first places you remember? How old are you? Where are you from really?” Kim asked.

  “Those are complicated questions. I’d rather show you some things first. Here, follow this.” A bright yellow frog hopped out of the bushes, coughed several times, and sneezed.

  It took her a second to understand the reference. “You’re a Pratchett fan?”

  “I love the classics.”

  What she now knew was a yellow sick toad hopped away toward the nearby windowless building. She followed, whistling a tune from The Wizard of Oz.

  The toad led her into the building and then to a room holding enormous empty swimming pools. They were startlingly deep without the blue refractions of water. The bottoms were dirty and forlorn, all broken tiles and fractured concrete. Diving platforms stood far too high on one end. Dead leaves huddled around the bases. In the center of the swim lanes, ten figures stood motionless on the grimy floor.

  As she got closer, Kim recognized them. It was like discovering her car parked at someone else’s house. “Are those my avatars?”

  “Three avatars and seven outfits.”

  Kim climbed into the pit to get closer. She’d recognize the scarring on the mechanoid’s armor anywhere. The chunk taken out of the tail of the mer-warrior still brought back painful memories. He’d even managed to rescue her avian, which was a very pleasant surprise. It’d taken her months to sculpt a construct that matched the tattoo on her own back, only in 3D. Just as Michiko promised, when modeled and mounted on an avatar, the wings worked.

  The avatars stared blankly into the distance with various versions of her face. The outfits hung on abstract mannequins, all uniforms of various sorts.

  “I took the liberty of upgrading the weapons and tools on the ones that have them. The catsuit was quite a challenge. I’m pretty sure not all of those tools are legal.”

  “You what? How? How’d you even get them? They should be impounded somewhere by now.”

  “It’s part of what I can do. I reset their contracts when I brought them here.”

  Kim pulled the first avatar’s status menu down with an electric hum. Sure enough, the words on the frosted glass told her nobody owned the avatar and nobody ever had. She flipped to the stats tab and got her next surprise. The last time she used the mechanoid all she could afford was a measly set of SRM-8 shoulder launchers from LG-Vizio. It now had LRM-20s from Apple’s realm combat division, complete with the fire-and-forget module. The rest of them were all similarly equipped with new and prerelease constructs. Upgraded, indeed.

  “This isn’t possible.” She bumped the menu closed. The contracts were quantum encrypted. They were part of what an avatar was.

  “I know. Isn’t it cool? You can keep them now.”

  The impossibilities just kept stacking up. He hadn’t just pried them out of some FBI pen; he’d stolen them in a way Kim didn’t even know was possible. Admiration was rare for her, but there it was.

  She came to a decision as the avatars and outfits swirled into her storage. Whoever this was, he wasn’t Colque. If it didn’t involve killing, Colque had no time for it. As incredible as it seemed, the lost twin theory was just about all she had left. Which meant the monster was still out there somewhere. One impossibility at a time, please.

  His voice echoed like a he was an announcer at a game show. “But wait, there’s more!”

  A door opened in the air in front of her. “And just where does this go?”

  “Hey, I’m not making you drink anything to fit through it. Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?”

  The door revealed a featureless white hall. If he was able to steal avatars from under the FBI’s nose, it only made sense he’d found a way into this realm’s BBox control suite. Still, it never hurt to be sure. Kim picked up a loose tile and tossed it through the doorway. It landed with a muffled thump on the floor, hopped twice, then threw itself back at her hard enough that she had to duck.

  If it’d just sat there that would’ve been another realm. If it had vanished, it would’ve meant the place was a lot newer than he let on. Hopping out like that meant it was old enough that the BBox still had soft rejection set up on constructs. He was literally taking her behind the curtain, and an old one at that. “My, you are quite the locksmith.” Kim walked through.

  The door vanished as she stepped out onto a white plane, the center of a ping-pong ball the size of a planet. Light came from all around her, so there were no shadows.

  Walking forward, her boots made no noise. The air smelled processed, as if it was from a hotel air conditioner. Despite her coat and gloves, she felt neither hot nor cold. There had to be controls somewhere. Kim turned around.

  A large hexagonal table sat on a column. The table was high enough to use while standing. Knobs, switches, buttons, and levers were scattered pell-mell on the surface. Every sort of dial or gauge was in between. In the center, a hole about two feet across held a tall glass container with a weird shape inside it.

  She was familiar with only some of the controls, because years ago all she ever did was rent space for the realms she made. Kim had never been inside a realm container that had been completely unlocked. There were so many controls. “May I?”

  “Please.”

  She walked to the section of the hexagon she recognized. This thing wasn’t just old; it was ancient. She took off her gloves and felt a slight pixelation on the edges of the console, as if she’d rubbed satin the wrong way. It was version one and had never been upgraded.

  The switches were there, but everything was so damned big. It was dark, disconnected. Let’s see, red button down, selector to one, open the guard, and flip the switch. There was a wheeze as the glass in the center pumped up and down. A window drew itself into existence on her right that looked into the realm they’d just visited.

  An oblong shape melted up out of the ping-pong ball that was the box, far from where she stood. It was dark gray and brown, rectangular with a top that resembled a shed roof. Kim held a silver switch down and the window beside her opened with an electric whir. Wind, music, and the dry decay of the place wafted in.

  She was fourteen all over again. Let’s break it. She closed the window and grabbed the knob that controlled the realm’s gravity, a huge knurled thing. It clicked the way a ratchet did as it moved. She looked through the window as she turned it to the right, increasing the gravity in the realm. Nothing happened at first. It had a much wider range than newer ones. Kim turned the knob faster. Soon, the force of gravity was strong enough to cause small clamps and fasteners on the amusement rides to fail. Bits and pieces fell off and shattered on the concrete below.

  Kim spun the view toward the grim concrete apartments just as they collapsed. Having this much power over an entire world made her giddy. Once the gravity knob pegged, there was nothing left standing. Kim slapped a metal button with a curved arrow pointing to the left on it that was bigger than her hand. The undo button. The gravity knob jumped to its original position with a thunk and the realm rebuilt itself like a movie run in reverse.

  “Have you ever tried bouncing?” Mike asked.

  Seemed she wasn’t the only one fighting with her inner teenager. Maxing the gravity with people inside was really just a stupid prank. Exactly the kind of fun thing teenagers did. “Once, to some… acquaintances of mine. I got grounded for a week over it.”

  “It is a quick way of clearing a realm.”

  “It’s a quick way to piss people off. Sometimes they’ve left a realm for a reason.” Squashing the rest of the Machine just after they’d entered Pride’s Lair seemed like a hilarious idea at the time. And it was—she still giggled about it. Harmless fun, since all it ever did was force someone back to the realm they’d just left. It wasn’t her fault the realm they’d just left was full of s
hrieking burglar alarms and security agents.

  Kim continued to fiddle with the controls, increasing this one, decreasing that one, undoing when she needed to. The realm on the other side of the window froze, burst into flame, melted, disintegrated, flooded, blew to dust, and—after she managed to press four widely spaced buttons down at once—turned entirely to crystal.

  The other controls were also unlocked. Right now, she was just affecting the area around the camera, perhaps a five-mile radius. The rest would let her affect the world and the universe the realm was set in. One segment she’d only ever read about. It would let her control the laws of physics and chemistry, right down to the quantum level.

  Kim stopped fiddling. “This is all a lot of fun, but it’s not an explanation.”

  “This part’s not, no. I figured you needed to relax. You seem pretty tense.”

  She set her jaw and clenched her fists. Damned right she was tense. She was still on the run. “Mike, I don’t have time for any of this. What’s going on? Who are you? Why am I here?”

  His voice was suddenly right behind her. “I’ll show you,” he said.

  She whirled around and saw a translucent caped man with a hood around his shoulders. If she squinted, she could just make out his face.

  “If you would be so kind?” he asked.

  His eyes were very nice. Wait. He asked a question. “Oh.” Kim slapped the undo button.

  “Observe,” he said and disappeared. Kim turned to the window. He stood in the realm, fully manifested with his default avatar. If she concentrated on his eyes, he didn’t frighten her at all. Kim pressed a button and a microphone rose out of the controls. “Mike? Why are you glowing?”

  “The mass of the air isn’t high enough to trigger the effect,” he said as he floated up to the decrepit ticket booth in front of the Ferris wheel. “But when I do this…” He reached out to grab the door handle.

  An actinic flash blinded her for a second. Kim blinked away the after images. The realm she’d been controlling had winked out of existence, replaced with a pair of nested shockwaves headed her way. The controller threw out bursts of sparks several times and then went dead. She should’ve known all the fun and predictability wouldn’t last. Hello, Crazytown, nice to visit again. Mike’s hologram reappeared beside her.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Total data inversion. If I touch anything solid enough in a realm, it sets up a chain reaction that can’t be stopped.” The shockwaves had come close enough for her to see more detail; it tore up the surface of the box itself. Debris, boiling with dull brown and glossy white fragments, pitched up higher and faster as it closed in on them. Some of the fragments were as big as houses, rumbling as they moved closer.

  “There’s not going to be anything left of this place when it’s done, is there?” The ground beneath her feet vibrated and the growing smell of ozone made her throat clench. The shockwave would reach them in seconds.

  Mike’s voice was so close to her ear it made her shiver. “No.” He threw his cloak around her as the waves struck, blasting what remained upward into fragments of debris and light. The chaos buffeted just outside the fabric of his cloak as they gracefully exited realmspace.

  Chapter 11: Mike

  A fireball ripped through Mike’s head as they exited. Inverting a realm hadn’t done that before. It would corrupt his threads and his garbage collection routers—the closest thing he had to a liver until tonight. It would take most of a day to clean the mess up, but eventually he’d be back to normal. None of his models had predicted the way he felt right now. He’d lost count of the different ways humans could experience pain.

  It plunged through him again, a blossoming burning thing that made him bite down on his tongue, which set off another searing rip through his mouth. If one more thing hurt, he knew he’d explode. Mike breathed deep and found yet another a new sensation—scent.

  The medical daemons examined the molecular patterns his nose delivered to his brain. The dominant notes of the scent were jasmine and vanilla. He’d spent most of a year working out how scent functioned. Now the real thing surrounded him, light and sweet. It made him feel comfortable and warm.

  He opened his eyes and found Kim wrapped in his arms.

  Mike had one job, one damned job, and he’d screwed it up. He was supposed to provide the actual explanation now, but he’d mimicked the gestures that he’d made just before they exited the realm. He’d made the most important introduction of his life and had ruined it with a classic noob mistake: moving in realspace. Usually, people trained a few times in the phone shop before they left to avoid it. Mike didn’t think he’d need that. He’d been born in the realms, after all.

  Her body was soft and warm, very nice, and if it hadn’t been so embarrassing, he wouldn’t want to let her go.

  Kim drove both elbows into his stomach. The air flew out of his lungs and his last two ribs moved as they flexed. Muscle and bone scraped together. What a way to discover a design flaw. Back off, let the body sort it out. It was a fine idea when he’d been learning how to breathe or keep the heartbeat regular, but good Lord, she had to have caused permanent damage with that.

  Kim screamed as she sprawled face-up across the corner of the bed. Her eyes were bulging and her complexion had gone blotchy.

  Mike barely managed to stand. Damage control was another thing he’d not been able to simulate properly so his host’s refusal to cooperate, its physical need to be still, was surprising. It seriously impeded his ability to help. Kim was in some sort of terrible distress and all he wanted to do was curl into a ball. He didn’t have time for this.

  She twitched and gasped, shaking her head from side to side. Spasms rolled upward as her skin turned red. When they got to her neck, she tore a breath free and sat up with a scream so loud it overloaded his ears. The distortion was so painful it triggered an entire sequence of reflexes that happened without a single conscious thought. He found his hand around the doorknob before he even realized he was moving. Something deep inside him was shouting “Monster! Death! Run!” without them ever being real thoughts.

  Kim fell on her side. The spasms hadn’t stopped and she breathed in ragged gasps. He was supposed to help, not run. Mike blew his threads, the part of him still in realmspace, outward, simultaneously searching for an answer to what was happening.

  It was too much, too fast. His integration tore, setting off critical alarms as the bridge daemons tripped offline one by one.

  The room tilted sideways and he grabbed the edge of the bed as his threads reintegrated. Well, that didn’t work at all. When his vision cleared, he tried the only thing he had left.

  “Kim!” His voice was strange, unexpectedly hoarse. This host was supposed to be a vehicle, but it did so many things all on its own. It wasn’t supposed to work this way.

  Her eyes flew open, but each one darted around in a different direction. She clawed and tore at the sheets, moaning and sobbing.

  Making his host walk toward her was another fight with the unwelcome inner ape that still wanted to run the show. “Kim?”

  Her body snapped into rigid stillness as she focused on him. The raw hatred in her eyes was worse than her spasms or screams. He reached for her, but she shouted “NO,” rolled away, and hit the floor with a thump. Mike needed to find out what this was. His integration wasn’t complete enough to allow him to split and search the realms with his threads, so he fired off a brace of agents to search realmspace for answers.

  Kim pulled herself up, dragging her face against the wall. Another one of those terrible spasms started up her legs. She ran down the short hallway screaming, then bounced hard against the opposite wall and fell into the bathroom. The door slammed shut, muffling her violent retches. Somehow, she managed to lock it.

  His agents returned with nothing medical and what came back from pop culture and religion made no sense. It was all fiction of one sort or another, horror movies and ancient myths. “Kim! What’s wrong?”

&n
bsp; The retching transformed into horrible wet coughs. When they finally stopped she said, “Never. Touch. Me. Again.”

  Someone knocked on the door behind him. Mike’s heart leapt around in his chest. Kim was dying and now they had visitors. Spencer was asleep. Nobody else could know where she was.

  Whoever it was knocked again. Mike accessed the door’s camera feed. Spencer stared at his boots, which meant he was frightened or in trouble. Since he stood next to a police officer, neither option meant anything good. The officer knocked again.

  Kim’s voice was a rough growl. “Answer the fucking door.”

  Chapter 12: Spencer

  Spencer had averaged nearly a hundred miles an hour across Tennessee just keeping up with the locals and he never once saw a cop. He’d stopped at exactly one drive-through all by himself to pick up something to eat and nobody had looked at him twice. He’d smuggled a goddamned patient out of a hospital without setting off any alarms. Tonight he had been smoking a cigarette and said “Fuck off” before turning around.

  The failure was beyond epic.

  The hotel room door opened and there was Mike, without the circus prop on his head. His face used to be an average of every man on the planet because he didn’t have a real one. The way his face moved was right, but he was bigger now. Spencer still had to tell himself it was Mike when he saw him, but it was getting easier. His coordination was visibly better than when he’d left the truck. Never mind, it was time to get their stories straight.

  He shot a plain text message to him. HI, MOM AND DAD! IT’S SPENCER KEEGAN! Mike immediately bounced a new address to Spencer so his not girlfriend got a copy too. Hopefully, they could all talk their way out of this.

  “Hello, officer,” Mike said.

  “Mr. Keegan.” The cop nodded once. “Are you the owner of the BMW SUV, license number XKZ-1358?”

  SAY THE RIGHT THING, DUDE.

  Mike checked the man’s nametag. “Why, yes, Officer Stevens.”