NETFEED/NEWS: UN High Court to Rule on "Lifejack" Case

(visual: excerpt from Svetlana Stringer episode of Lifejack!)

VO: The UN High Court in the Hague has agreed to hear the case of Svetlana Stringer, a woman who claims the netshow Lifejack! had no right to select her for surveillance and create a documentary about her love life and family problems without her permission. Her attorneys argue that unless the High Court makes a stand, continual blurring of the lines of privacy by the media will mean that soon no one will have a right to any private life at all. Attorneys for the American network that makes Lifejack! insist that a waiver Ms. Stringer signed several years ago to allow herself to be filmed for another program—a documentary on music education made when she was a teenager—means she has given up her right to resist surveillance.

(visual: Bling Saberstrop, attorney for ICN)

SABERSTROP: "UN guidelines on privacy are just that—guidelines, not laws. We consider this to be a case where the plaintiff wants to have her cake and eat it, too—privacy only when she wants it."

 

He watched the dying policewoman squirming in her own blood for a few moments after he reentered the network, but then he had to close the window. It was too distracting. Too entertaining. The problem was, he wanted to do everything at once.

Like a kid in a candy shop, he thought.

He wanted to watch the cop bitch's last moments, but it was one of the things he could set aside for later. He also wanted to drive the operating system out of hiding and break its pseudo-will once and for all, make it abandon this infuriating, pointless resistance and truly yield to him. And he most definitely wanted to hunt down Martine Desroubins and the Sulaweyo woman and all the other escapees, then carry them back to his endless white house in the virtual Outback and give each a magnificently intricate, drawn-out death. The prospects were enchanting: he would imprison them, terrify them, permit a few apparent escapes, even take the place of first one, then another, so he could live each terrifying moment with them just as he had done with the woman Quan Li, playing with alternating hope and despair until they all went almost mad.

But never completely mad, of course. Because then the ending would lose its bite.

And he would record the whole thing. He would watch it over and over after the grand enterprise was complete, edit it to highlight the artistry, add music and effects—hours and hours of the greatest entertainment ever created. Perhaps someday he would even allow others to see it. It would become an object of religious significance, at least among those few people who really understood how the world worked. His name would be spoken in awed whispers long after he was dead.

But I won't be dead, will I? I won't ever die.

No wonder he was so excited. There was so much to do . . . and all eternity in which to do it.

He forced himself down, down into calm. No mistakes, he thought. Soothing music filled his head, a glissando of strings, a gentle shimmer of cymbals. First, the operating system.

He stood on the weird, lunar plane and inspected the barrier the failing system had erected between Dread and his victims. He stroked the insubstantial but unbreachable mist. Where had this thing come from? And how could he best get through it?

It was clear he had pushed the Grail operating system to the breaking point, but although he wanted it subdued and broken he did not want to destroy it completely, jeopardizing the whole network, before he had a chance to install a replacement. That might be a little more difficult now that Dulcie was sprawled gut-shot dead on the floor of the loft, but she had cracked Jongleur's house files for him first: the Old Man would have some kind of system backup in place. So the sensible thing to do would be just to wait until he could bring another system online. But what if doing so not only killed this operating system but destroyed Martine and the rest as well? And what if Jongleur was in there with them? The thought that all his enemies might be stolen right out of his grasp by a mercifully swift death was maddening.

And they're right there. . . ! He prowled along the barrier, trying to make sense of what little he could see. As he walked he let his mind wander through the network infrastructure. It was a strange problem, trying to be two places at once, very strange. Here he stood, with the powers of a god, but he could not actually find his own location in the network: he had followed Martine and the others through into this place, but the place itself did not seem to exist on any of the network's schemata.

It's a damn strange environment, whatever it is, he thought. He had even more power here than he did in other parts of the network—the inhabitants had fled screaming from him even before he did anything—but the operating system had more power here, too.

Bloody hell! The insight was sudden and overwhelming. I must be . . . inside the damn thing.

He laughed and the wall of mist rippled back from him like sensitive tissue being poked by a surgical tool. Of course I'm powerful here. It knows who delivers the pain. It's scared of me.

So if it believes in something, he realized, that something comes true here. That explained why the barrier could hold him out—it represented the system's own faith in its last-ditch defenses. But when the last shred of belief that it could resist him died. . . .

It's all make-believe, he thought. A world of ghosts, magic. Like my bloody mother's stories. It was not a thought that went well with his celebratory mood so he pushed it away.

But where is the bloody thing, then? Where is the system hiding? Dread closed his eyes as he walked along the barrier, examining his internal map of the system. The thing, the part of the operating system that thought, must be close. Again he had the strange sense of being in two places at the same time. It worried him just a little—a lifetime's dislike of exposure and a powerful urge toward control made him uncomfortable about being spread between two spheres of operation—but his pride and assurance were growing with his power and he shrugged it off. But he could not shrug off the essential puzzle.

The two things are tangled up. Until I cripple the system's brain once and for all, I'll never be able to get my hands on the ones who got away from me. But if I cripple it too badly—if I ruin it—they'll be gone, dead . . . escaped.

He could no longer see Jongleur's two monstrous agents on the other side of the barrier. Whatever they had accomplished was over now, but they clearly had not pushed the operating system into surrender since the barrier still stood; neither had they delivered him Martine or any of the others. There were no more copies of the agents inside the barrier. Whatever he did next he would have to do himself.

Wouldn't have it any other way, he thought.

Already the excitement of the hunt was beginning to mount again. He cast his thoughts back into the network controls, searching for some clue to the location of the system's ultimate refuge. There had been a flurry of recent activity but none of it made sense, and as he struggled with the obscurities of network activity logs he had a brief moment of irritation over Dulcie's disloyalty. She would have been useful for this, the bitch. The escapees and the system itself remained hidden from him, both by this virtual barrier in this virtual world and in the immense, trackless confusion of the network. It was infuriating that with all his godlike power he couldn't simply find them—that he was forced to search through virtual landscapes, or listen in on virtual communicator conversations.

Communicators. . . ! He gestured and the silver lighter was in his hand. He opened the communication channel and discovered it was in use, but what he heard was nonsense—faint, unrecognizable voices babbling about strings and sunsets and something called a honey-guide. The communication line was clearly corrupted, and in his anger he considered returning to his loft and using Jongleur's access codes to pull the plug on the entire network, to kill it and then resurrect it with a different and more tractable operating system . . . but that would mean that Renie Sulaweyo and Martine and the Circle people would be granted a far too merciful release.

He stared at the lighter in fury. What use was the damned thing? A communicator that didn't communicate, full of ghost-voices.

But Dulcie Anwin had said it was something else as well. What had she called it? A V-fector. Something that would transmit not just voices, but . . . positional data.

Dread smiled.

He reopened the network's master records. The line was hot, so someone must be using it, even if the transmission itself was corrupted. He quickly found the positional information, but both sides of the current call seemed to have no origination point. Dread fought another flare of rage. Of course, if they were somehow inside the system itself there would be no conventional effector information. But this fairy-tale world had to be somewhere in the no-space of the network; just as he had chased the operating system through its interstices, he would chase the communication link until he found one end or the other.

He reached for it now, feeling with his mind, his twist coming to life like a white-hot filament. The open communication channel was a silver wire, trembling, delicate. He would run down it and find them all. He would find the system and he would hurt it until the barrier fell, and then he would take the others and they would be his, utterly his, until their last gasping breaths.

 

 

"I think I can . . . feel !Xabbu," Martine gasped. Sam was terrified by her anguished, death mask grimace. "But he's a million kilometers away—a billion! On the other side of the universe! It is too . . . too far."

Martine Desroubins staggered to her feet, clutching her head. Paul Jonas reached out to steady her but she pulled away with a violent shake.

"Do not. . . !" she begged him. "So difficult . . . so difficult . . . to hear. . . ."

"You must hold the connection open," Sellars said through the boy Cho-Cho. "I am not ready."

"Cannot. . . ." Martine bent at the waist, fingers squeezing her own skull as though she feared it would come apart. "Something terrible . . . ah! Ahhh! The Other! He is in . . . such pain!" Then her knees buckled and she fell forward onto her face.

Paul Jonas ran to her side. When he lifted her up she sagged bonelessly.

"Ready or not." It was Dread, whispering right inside Sam's head. "Here I come!" She cried out in fear.

The others had clearly heard him, too: in his shock, Paul nearly dropped Martine back to the ground. Then reality lurched and stuck in gear again. It lasted only a moment, but when the world around Sam shuddered back into life things were not the same.

It's so cold. . . ! The room-temperature universe had fallen into a deep winter chill. Something else came with the cold, a squeeze of terror that made it hard for her to breathe. She heard several of her companions cry out but she kept her eyes tight shut, every childhood instinct telling her to pull the blanket over her head and stay hidden until the nightmare went away.

But there was no blanket.

"Oh, Christ—it's gone!" Paul said. Sam could barely hear his voice over the rising sounds of terror from the fairy-tale folk scattered along the edge of the Well. Strong fingers curled around her arm and she cried out.

"Get up, Sam," said Orlando. "It's happening."

She opened her eyes. Orlando's Thargor body seemed different, wrong somehow, and it was more than just the strange light. He looked strangely incomplete, as though the top level of reality had been peeled away, leaving only its preliminary designs.

"It's really dying," he said, and she could hear the terror just beneath his words. "The whole thing's dying. Look at us."

Sam stared down at her own familiar tan arm, purple-gray in the pit's dimly smoldering light, now unreal as everything else. The path, the rock walls, her companions, all had lost some vital thing that had made them realistic, had slid back into a more basic state just as the black mountain had devolved beneath her feet during the long climb.

We're not people, she thought, looking at the smooth planes of Paul Jonas' face, at Orlando's stiff musculature. We're really puppets.

She struggled onto her feet, trying to fight back against the pressing fear. No, it's the operating system, the Other, not us. It's losing its grip. It's losing the dream. . . .

"Oh, this is so impacted," Orlando breathed. He held up his sword, not to challenge, but to block out an unwanted sight.

The barrier was dissolving.

At the edge of the encampment the net of iridescent cloud that had covered them was becoming raw mist again, shifting, dispersing. The refugees, who like everything else had lost some critical degree of definition, ran from it like misprogrammed robots, tripping and scrambling and shouting in childish terror. A dark form appeared out of the thinning fog, striding toward the Well as the remains of the barrier swirled around it like cobwebs. Fairy-tale folk caught too close to the disintegrating curtain flung themselves out of the shadow-figure's path and fell on their stomachs, rubbing their faces against the ground in helpless panic. The thing ignored them, walking through the cleared space like some horrible null-light Moses crossing the Red Sea. Fear held Sam pinned in place. Orlando swayed beside her and his sword dropped out of his hand into the dust.

"Now we finish," the thing said, and the terrible, gleeful voice in Sam's head made her want to smash her skull against something until she couldn't hear it anymore. "The end. Fade out. Roll credits."

"The Well!" Florimel wailed. Her voice seemed to come from half a world away. "It's sinking!"

Sam turned and saw that even the diminished light which had filled the Well was draining away into the heart of the world, emptying the great hole and pulling the empty black sky down on top of them like a rotting blanket. Now the only light in the world seemed to come from the eyes and grinning teeth of their enemy.

"Into the Well!" someone screamed behind her—Paul, Nandi, she could not tell. "It's the only place left to hide! Down into the Well!" But Sam could not tear her eyes. away from the walking darkness.

It's coming now.

The thing under the bed . . . the noise in the closet . . . the smiling stranger pulling up along the curb as you walk home from school. . . .

Orlando's hard hand closed on hers and jerked her to her feet. He pulled her toward the spot where Martine Desroubins had fallen onto her hands and knees at the edge of the pit. Most of their other companions were already scrambling down into darkness along some path Sam could not yet see. The blind woman looked as though she were shouting in pain. Orlando and Paul Jonas grabbed her and lifted her.

"Where are you?" Dread's voice whispered, flicking soft as a snake's tongue in Sam's ear, "You can't hide from me. I know you all too well."

She followed Orlando and Paul onto a ledge that ran crookedly along the inner wall of the empty pit. The two of them moved swiftly, even with Martine dangling between them. As she hurried after them Sam tripped on something and fell. By the time she clambered back onto her feet they had disappeared into the shadows below. Panicked, Sam looked back, sure that the thing with the ice-cold voice must be right behind her, and saw what she had stumbled over—a human foot. The boy Cho-Cho was lying at the side of the path, almost invisible in the deepening darkness. With her insides churned to sick horror at the thought of what must be right behind her, she only wanted to run after the others.

No, he's just a micro! I can't leave him for . . . that.

She turned against the shrieking of her own nerves and fought her way back up the slope. Cho-Cho seemed asleep, unaware of the deathly thing that was hunting them. She pulled him up into her arms, surprised and staggered by the limp weight.

"What is happening?" Sellars' phantom voice sighed from the boy's open mouth. "Who are you?"

"Everything—everything's happening! It's me, Fredericks!" She tripped again and almost went down.

"Where is Martine?"

"Just . . . shut up," Sam grunted. She fought her way down the path, struggling to keep herself upright. The walls of the pit were quickly losing the last of what had made them real; they glowed now with a strange dim light, a duller version of the liquid stars. She thought she could make out the inconstant silhouettes of Orlando and Paul just a few meters ahead on the long downward spiral.

Upside down—!Xabbu, was right! Her thoughts flitted like smoke-maddened wasps. It's the mountain turned upside down. . . !

She could see nothing behind her yet but the pictures in her head were vivid enough—the empty-eyed shadow that was Dread swollen in her mind to giant size, sifting through the shrieking refugees with immense, shadowy fingers, picking them up in handfuls, examining them, then flinging them down in crackboned heaps.

Looking for us, Sam thought. For us! He'll be coming down that path any second. . . . The horror of it made her so dizzy and scared that when she came around a bend into a wider part of the path and ran into Paul Jonas from behind, she almost blacked out.

"Sam?" he said, nearly as startled as she.

Martine was lying in the middle of the path where they had set her down, curled in a fetal ball. Orlando stepped around her to grab Sam's arm, then held it as though he didn't plan to let go. "Oh, jeez. . . ." He glanced at the limp form of Cho-Cho as if he didn't quite see it. "Frigging hell, Frederico, I didn't know where you were!"

"I . . . had to go back," she gasped. "It's the little boy—I mean, it's Sellars. . . ."

"I cannot stay involved with this." Sellers' fretful voice beside her ear startled her again. "There is too much to do. Tell Martine to keep the connection open at all costs. I will return."

"Don't go," Paul said. "That thing . . . Dread . . . he's right behind us."

"I can't do anything more here," Sellars said urgently. "I am sorry, but I still have my side of this to complete. Whatever else happens, Martine must not lose her connection to the heart of the system. She must hold on at all costs!"

"Damn you, Sellars, don't you dare. . . !" Paul began, then Sam lurched against him and almost fell off the narrow path as the small body draped across her shoulder suddenly began to thrash in panic.

"Put me down!" Cho-Cho screamed. He got a hand loose and grabbed at her face, making Sam stumble again. For a moment she felt nothing under her left foot, then found the edge of the path with her heel. She swayed, trying desperately to regain her balance.

"Let me go!" The boy's elbow hit her in the side of the head so hard that her knees went rubbery and she slipped sideways. The boy's weight vanished from her shoulders.

I dropped him, she thought, and then she too seemed to be tumbling into space until a powerful grip curled in the back of her shirt and yanked her back to the center of the ledge.

A flare of light from deep in the Well painted dim streaks of silver and blue up the side of Orlando's barbarian form. He held the still-struggling Cho-Cho clasped against his naked chest. "Are you scanned beyond belief?" he barked at the boy, then snapped his chin down hard on top of his head. Unconscious or just educated, Cho-Cho stopped thrashing and hung motionless in the crook of Orlando's muscled arm.

"You're all down there in the hole, aren't you?" It was Dread again, amused and annoyed, his words crawling through her skull like a trail of ants. Orlando was hearing it too: he grimaced in pain and disgust. "Do you really want me to come get you? Haven't you already played enough games?"

Paul Jonas had dropped to Martine's side and was trying to lift her again.

Orlando gave Sam's arm another squeeze. "Now, I might be imagining things, Frederico." His heroic imitation of a casual tone could not hide the tremor in his voice. His hand was probably shaking too, but Sam was shivering so badly herself she couldn't tell. "But our friend, Count Dreadula—is he some kind of Australian?"

 

 

Catur Ramsey burst through the door into the adjoining room in time to hear the last of Sellars' words. The old man sounded worse than ever, weak and faint, as though he were talking through a garden hose from the other end of the galaxy.

". . . I have no time to explain it all again," he said. "There are minutes only."

Kaylene Sorensen stood splay-footed in front of Christabel, fists curled, treating the faltering, disembodied voice from the wallscreen like a physical threat to her daughter. "You must be crazy! Mike, am I the only person here who hasn't lost her mind?"

"I have no other useful options, Mrs. Sorensen." Sellars sounded weary to the point of collapse.

"Well, I do." She turned to her husband. "I told you, it was bad enough that a . . . fantasy like this should drag us all out of our house, make us run for our lives like criminals. But if you think I'm going to let anyone get Christabel involved again in this . . . this . . . fairy tale. . . !"

"It's all true, Mrs. Sorensen," Ramsey interrupted. "I wish it wasn't. But. . . ."

"Ramsey, what are you doing here?" said Sellars with surprising strength. "You were supposed to stay on the line with Olga Pirofsky."

"She doesn't want to talk to me. She said to tell you to hurry up—she's waiting for her son." It had been far stranger than that, of course. The Olga he had spoken to was nothing like the woman he had befriended, detached and frighteningly distant, as though Sellars had somehow connected him to an entirely different person. She had not acknowledged any of his words of pity and commiseration, had not even quite seemed to understand them. Like Sellars himself, she seemed to have receded across interstellar gulfs.

"We have one chance," Sellars said. "If I cannot reach the operating system, all is lost. But even now, with the lives of so many in the balance, I cannot force you."

"No," Christabel's mother said angrily. "You can't. And you won't."

"Kaylene. . . ." Major Sorensen sounded miserable, both angry and helpless. "If no harm can come to Christabel. . . ."

"He never said that!" his wife snapped. "Look at that little boy in the other room—he was under this man's protection, too. Is that what you want for your daughter?"

Sellars spoke like a man climbing a mountain whose summit he already knew he did not have the strength to reach. "No, there aren't any guarantees. But Cho-Cho is different. He is connected directly into the system through his neurocannula. Christabel cannot make that kind of connection."

Ramsey felt like a traitor, but he had to say it. "How about the others who are stuck in the system—some of them didn't have direct neural links. Neither did a lot of the Tandagore children."

"You see!" said Kaylene Sorensen in fury and triumph.

"Different," Sellars said wearily, his voice barely audible. "At least I think so. Operating system . . . Olga's son . . . dying now. Can't close . . . feedback loop."

Because the Sorensens were facing the wallscreen, only Catur Ramsey saw Christabel slide off the bed, her bare feet stretching to touch the floor. So small, he thought. She looked frightened and very, very young.

Good God, Ramsey thought. What are we doing to these people?

The little girl turned and walked silently into the bedroom and closed the door.

It's too much for her—too much. It would be too much for anyone.

"I can't . . . I can't disagree with my wife," Major Sorensen was saying.

"What does that mean?" Mrs. Sorensen snapped. Neither she nor her husband had taken much notice of Christabel's departure.

"Lay off, honey," Sorensen said. "I agree with you. I just feel like shit about it."

"Then there is nothing more to be said," Sellars declared in a dying man's voice. Incongruously, the wallscreen from which he spoke displayed the hotel's in-house node, footage of smiling people enjoying various New Orleans restaurants and tourist parks. "I will do what I can with what I have."

Ramsey did not need visuals to know Sellars had disconnected. The Sorensens stared at each other, oblivious to him or anything else. Ramsey stood awkwardly in the doorway; with Sellars' departure he had changed from participant to voyeur in an instant.

"I have to go," he said. Neither of the Sorensens looked at him.

On the other side of the connecting door he leaned against the wall for a moment, wondering what had just happened and what it actually meant. Could Sellars really do nothing without the help of a girl scarcely out of kindergarten? And if he failed, what did that mean? Things had been happening so quickly that Ramsey was finding it hard to keep up. Just in the last two hours he had committed several major felonies—emptying an office building with a smoke bomb, interfering with the alarm systems for an entire island, putting a data tap on one of the world's biggest corporations. Not to mention the even more bizarre things that had come to light, the abandoned house and forest on top of the skyscraper, the tomblike pod room, the incomprehensible news about Olga's lost child being the operating system for the Grail network.

Olga, he thought. Damn, I have to get back to Olga.

The door to the Sorensens' rooms banged open and almost hit him. Michael Sorensen's face was pale, almost gray.

"It's Christabel." The major's voice, his stunned expression, made Ramsey feel like he wanted to be sick.

Kaylene Sorensen was cradling her daughter on the bed, calling her name urgently, as though the child were half a block away. The girl's ragdoll limbs and the eyes rolled upward until only the white showed told the story, or most of it. A pair of thick black sunglasses lay on the bedcover near Christabel's legs.

"He did this!" Mrs. Sorensen said to Ramsey, a hiss of raw fury. "That monster—he pretended to ask our permission. . . ."

"I'll call a doctor," her husband said, then turned to Ramsey, his face so strange and confused that Ramsey felt nauseated again. "Should I call a doctor?"

"Wait. Just . . . don't do anything. Wait!" Ramsey started back toward his room, then realized that he could call from the wallscreen here and not risk disconnecting from Olga. He barked out the number, praying he had remembered it correctly. "Sellars! Answer me now!"

"Yes? Ramsey, what?" He sounded even worse, if that was possible.

"Christabel's in a coma, damn it! A Tandagore coma!"

"What?" He sounded genuinely stunned. "How can that be?"

"Don't ask me—she's lying on her bed. Her parents just found her." He tried to think it through. "There are some sunglasses lying next to her. . . ."

"Oh. Oh, my goodness." Sellars did not speak for a moment. "I had precoded an entry sequence, but . . . but only for use if they agreed to it. . . !" Despite the strain in his voice, the unfamiliar hesitations, he suddenly became focused, sharp. "Tell them not to move her. She must be entering the system now. I have to go." For a moment, there was silence, but before Ramsey could break the connection, Sellars' voice came back. "And tell them I am truly sorry. I did not want this to happen—not this way. I will do whatever has to be done to . . . to bring her back."

Then he was gone.

 

Ramsey had left them sitting silently in the bedroom, cradling the unmoving body of their little girl. Despite his own vague feelings of responsibility, or perhaps because of them, he could not wait to get away.

He picked up the pad to talk to Olga, wondering whether he should tell her what was happening on his end, thinking that if she remained as she had been the last time they had spoken, she would not even listen. Staring at the screen, his thoughts jumbled, it took him several seconds before he realized what he was seeing.

Olga Pirofsky still sat beside the cluster of massive black pods, swaying from side to side with her face in her hands, a picture of terrible and all-consuming grief. She clearly had no idea what was happening behind her.

The lids of two of the pods were rising—slowly and apparently silently. For a moment, Ramsey felt that same sense of helpless, almost sexual horror that he had felt as a child in the darkness of a movie theater. An alien spacecraft, the door opening, something about to come out—but what would it be?

But this was no movie. This was real.

A shape lurched in the nearer pod, then began to drag itself upright, bathed by the dim lights around the inside rim of the lid.

Ramsey had the line open and was shouting at the screen now, but Olga clearly was not receiving his call. He could only shout her name over and over as an immensely fat, horribly naked man climbed out of the glowing pod.

 

 

She slid the Storybook Sunglasses on. It was good to be in the dark behind the lenses. She could hear her mother's voice in the other room. Mommy was really angry—angry at Mister Sellars, angry at Daddy, even angry at Mister Ramsey, who didn't seem to have done anything as far as Christabel could see.

It was good to be in the dark. She wished she could have sunglasses for her ears as well.

"Tell me a story," she told the glasses, but nothing happened. The lenses stayed black. There was not even a message from Mister Sellars. It made her sad—he had sounded so tired, so hurt. She almost wished that her mother and father hadn't found out about her secrets with him—her visits, the ways she had helped him, all the things, all the secret things. How he smiled and called her "little Christabel."

Their secret word.

"Rumplestiltskin," she said. Light opened out in front of her eyes like a flower.

"This will be like a call to someone far away," Mister Sellars' voice said in her ears. "Or like going on the net. I'll be with you in just a moment. . . ."

"Where are you?" she asked, but his voice was still talking, not hearing her. It was another message, a recording, like before.

". . . And then I will stay with you, I promise. But I am doing many things, little Christabel, and it may take me a moment to reach you. Don't be frightened. Just wait." The light was moving now, dancing, spinning. It made her head hurt. She tried to reach up and take the sunglasses off but for some reason she couldn't find them. She could sort of feel her head but it seemed to be changing shape—first her hair felt funny under her fingers, then it didn't feel like hair at all. Then the light swept away from her, pulling her with it as if she had been sucked down the drain of the bath, and the light had a noise, too, a moan like the wind or like children crying.

"Stop it!" she yelled. She was really frightened now. Her voice sounded wrong, close in her head but strange and echoey and far away, too. "I don't want to. . . !"

The light was everywhere. Then the light was gone. Everything was dark and she couldn't feel herself touching anything. For a few seconds she was all alone, as alone as she had ever been in her life, like in a bad dream, but awake, and there was nobody else anywhere in the whole world, not Mister Sellars, not Mommy, not Daddy. . . .

But then there was someone else.

Scared, she held her breath, but it was more like thinking about holding your breath because she couldn't feel her chest get tight. She felt like she was about to pee all over herself, but that didn't feel quite real either. Something was looking for her. Something big. It was in the darkness.

It touched her. Christabel tried to scream, tried to hit, but she had no mouth, no hands. It was so cold! It was like all the black had frozen, like she was in the refrigerator with the door closed and the light out and she couldn't get out and nobody heard her and nobody heard her and nobody. . . .

The big, cold something touched her inside her head.

That story on the net, the one I wasn't supposed to watch, about a giant gorilla that picked up a lady and smelled her and looked at her and it was so scary, and I thought he's going to throw her down on the ground or put her in his mouth and chew her with his teeth, and then I peed my pants and I didn't even know it until Mommy came in and said Ohmygod what are you watching Mike you left the screen on and now she's wet herself and ruined the couch because of your stupid monster I told you she was too young. . . .

And then it let her go. The big, cold something passed through her like a wind, and she could smell it, but she was smelling how it thought, how it felt, and it was tired and sad and angry and even very very frightened but it didn't care about little girls anymore and it let her go.

She was hanging in darkness. She was lost.

"Christabel?"

When she heard Mister Sellars' voice, his kind, hooty-soft voice, she couldn't help it. She started to cry, then she was crying so hard that she thought she wouldn't stop, not ever, not ever.

"I w–want . . . Mommy." She could barely make the words.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry—I didn't mean for it to happen this way." She couldn't feel him, not like she had felt the freezing dark, but she could hear him, and in all the blackness that was a tiny, good thing. She tried to stop crying. She had hiccups. "I'm with you now," Mister Sellars said. "I'm with you, little Christabel. We have to go. I need your help."

"I didn't mean to do it. . . !"

"I know. It was my fault. Perhaps it was meant to be—but perhaps not. In any case, it will all be over soon. Come with me."

"I want my Mommy."

"I know you do. And you are not the only one." Now she wasn't quite as scared as she had been and she could hear how much he was hurting. "Just come with me, Christabel. I'm going to take you to meet someone. I'm sorry this happened but I'm glad you're here, because otherwise I would have had to send your friend off to meet him by himself."

Then she heard a new voice—a surprising voice, because she knew the person the voice belonged to couldn't be talking, because he was asleep on the bed like a dead person. But Mister Sellars was also asleep like a dead person, wasn't he?

Am I asleep like that too? Won't Mommy and Daddy be frightened?

"Get me out of here!" the voice shouted. "Not doin' this mierda no more!"

"Cho-Cho," she said.

For a moment, he didn't talk. Christabel hung in the blackness and wondered if this was what it felt like to be dead. "Weenit?" he said at last. "That you?"

"Yes." Mister Sellars' breath was all funny and rough, as though he had stepped away for a moment and then run back. "That is her, Señor Izabal. And we are going somewhere together. You two are going to find a little lost boy. And afterward . . . and afterward I will do my very best to take you both home."

"You all crazy," Cho-Cho's voice said. "Not gonna do nothin'!"

But as the darkness began to turn into light—a gray like a morning sky, but everywhere at once, below as well as above—Christabel felt someone reach out and take her hand.

"You okay, weenit?" Cho-Cho whispered.

"I think so," she whispered back. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he said. "Ain't scared of nothin', me."

Whether that was true or not, his fingers tightened on hers as the gray light grew and grew.

 

 

Paul and Orlando carried Martine down the twisting ledge until they came to where the others were blocking the path. "Move!" said Paul in a loud whisper. "Didn't you hear that madman? He's coming after us."

"The path is gone," Florimel said. "It has dropped away. Melted. Something."

"Like the mountain," Sam murmured as she staggered up behind Paul and set Cho-Cho down on the stone. "All gone."

So this is where it ends, Paul thought. All that drifting, all that running. It got narrower and narrower until I reached the end of the trap. He looked at the others, Nandi, young T4b, all of them staring-eyed, their haunted, not-quite-real faces devolving into crude planes, the colors bleeding out of their skin and clothes and even the stones before which they stood. The walls of the pit seemed strangely abstract, like the brushstroked masses of some hurrying Expressionist painter.

"We can still fight," said Orlando. Paul thought it was a statement so patently ridiculous that it was almost comical, a bleak joke for which their pointless deaths would be the only suitable punch line.

Martine shuddered and tried to sit up. "Is th–th–that you, P–Paul?" She was trembling so powerfully that he crouched beside her and held her legs, afraid she would shake herself right over the ledge and down into the deeps. That endless blackness was the only thing that still looked entirely real.

"It's me," he said and gently touched her face. She was cold. He was cold, too. "We're all here, but we need to be quiet. That thing—Dread—is looking for us."

"I h–haven't let go," she said. "I can . . . feel . . . where !Xabbu is—and b–beyond. I can even feel where . . . the Other is. All the way . . . to the end." Her shivering had lessened, though she seemed farther away than ever.

"I'm here."

"Cold. It's so cold. Vacuum cold."

He tried to rub her hand but she pulled it away. "That is so strange—I can feel you touching me but it is like it is happening on another planet. Don't. Let me think, Paul. It's so hard . . . to keep . . . to hold. . . ."

"Hello, chums," Dread's voice crooned. "I know you must be getting tired of waiting for me." The path behind them was still empty, the light bent and strange. "I'd have been with you by now, but I've been playing with the kiddies. Listen." A thin, sobbing shriek echoed through Paul's ears, through all his companions too, making them flinch and cry out, linked by a circuit of horrified helplessness.

"He's taking his time on purpose," Florimel groaned. "Sadist. He wants us to suffer first."

"Smelling us scared, like," T4b said.

"Silence!" hissed Nandi. "We don't know how far away he is—he could be trying to lure us into giving ourselves away."

"How much trouble will he have finding us on this path?" Florimel said with ragged contempt. "I will not crawl."

"Me neither," said Orlando. "I don't care if he's Dracula or the Wolfman or the Wicked Witch of the West—we'll put some pain in his venture before . . . before the end." As the boy spoke, Sam Fredericks climbed unsteadily to her feet beside him, reflected light flickering on her terrified, determined face. Paul felt a swelling in his heart, something he could not name. These poor, brave children. How can this be happening to them?

"Cold. . . !" Martine shouted. Startled, Paul clamped a hand across her mouth. She shook it off. When she spoke again it was barely a murmur. "I can feel the Other—but he's so small! Frightened! The children . . . they aren't crying anymore. They're quiet, so quiet. . . !"

"It is cold where the Other is." Sellars' voice made them all jump.

"He's back," Sam said tunelessly.

"There is no time to waste." Cho-Cho now lay like a fitful sleeper at Sam's feet, Sellars' bizarrely precise voice issuing from the boy's open mouth. "Martine, I will try to reach you—to join my end of the connection to yours. It will be a strange feeling, I'm sure, but please try to not to fight me."

"Can't think. Too cold . . . hurts. . . ."

"The Other is imprisoned in a great coldness, both inside and out," Sellars said, rapping out the words in a great hurry. "If you understand that, you will be less afraid. He is not a machine, or at least he did not begin that way. He was a child, a human child, corrupted by The Grail Brotherhood and made the heart of their great immortality machine."

Paul felt a wash of helpless hatred. The Other, little Gally, Orlando, and Sam Fredericks, the screaming victims beside the Well—all those innocents sacrificed so a man like Jongleur could crawl on through more years of life.

"Frightened. . . ." Martine wept. "He is so small. . . !"

"He always has been, at least to himself. Frightened. Abused. Kept in the dark, metaphorically and literally, because they feared his almost unlimited potential. He affected the minds of those who guarded him, so they exiled him—put him in the crudest, most secure prison they could devise."

"Prison. . . ?"

"A satellite." Sellers spoke quietly, but his words seemed starkly loud on the ledge above the abyss. "The Other is in a satellite, orbiting above the Earth. Cryogenic engines keep his metabolism slow, make him more controllable—or so they thought. They banished him to the emptiness of space, with fail-safe devices on his prison so that if anything went wrong they could fire the rockets and push him out of orbit and into deep space." Sellers' voice was dry, cracked. "The Apep Sequence, Jongleur called it. After the serpent that tried every night to swallow the flying boat of Ra, king of the gods."

Martine gasped. "Hurry! I . . . I can't . . ." She twitched, twitched again—it was strangely rhythmic. Paul looked down to see her hands moving in a strange pattern, the fingers held in front of her chest, weaving in and out. "!Xabbu, too . . . he hurts. . . ."

"I am struggling to make the connection, even as I speak," Sellars said through the sleeping child. "It is . . . like threading a needle . . . with a thread a million miles long. And . . . I am holding the far end . . . of the thread."

Something was moving now on the far side of the Well—a point of darkness so pure that even in this shadowy netherworld Paul could see it striding down the path at a weirdly unhurried pace, winding along the wall of the pit.

"He's coming," Paul whispered, knowing it was useless to say it, knowing Sellars could not work any faster. "Dread's coming." He touched Martine with his hand, the merest featherlight brush of his fingers on her leg. She moaned and writhed.

"No!" Her hands were moving faster now, clenching and unclenching, the fingers almost too swift to see in the weird half-light. "Don't! Hurts!"

"Please don't touch her," Sellars gasped. "Please. It . . . is . . . very close. Very . . . difficult."

The shadow-shape turned along the wall, still following the path. Although it was still far away, Paul could see the gleam of two pale eyes. His heart sped even faster, hammering in his chest. We're feeling what the Other feels, he realized. But that's what I've felt all along when the Twins were chasing me—its fear of them, its terror of Jongleur. I'm not even a real person, I'm just part of the bloody network code. I don't even have my own feelings!

The dark man walked down the path.

What did all this truly mean? Paul's panicked thoughts flared and sputtered. What was the reality here? A murderer, or the devil Himself? A boy who thought he was an operating system? An operating system that thought it was a little boy who had fallen down a well? Madness. Nightmares.

It really is the Red King's dream. It's all true. When the dream's over, when this network dies, Paul Jonas will blow out like a candle.

But I'm not even Paul Jonas, he thought with a sudden, chill clarity. Not really. I'm the residue of the Grail process—a copy, like Ava. I'm just a better copy, that's all.

He looked at his companions, frozen, staring. The only sound was Martine's harsh breathing.

It's the end, he thought, and I'm still running. Still drifting. But I said I wouldn't do it anymore. . . .

Sellars needs time. This thought tore across the first like a sudden scream. The one thing we don't have. He needs time to save my friends.

And what is there for me. even if I survive? An eternity in this looking glass universe?

The black shape turned the last bend, moving in an invisible cloud of terror.

"Hello," Dread called, laughing. "Have you been waiting long?" The monster's eyes and smiling teeth gleamed out of the head-shaped shadow, as though it wore a charred mask of Comedy. "Waiting for old John? Waiting for your old chum Johnny Dark?"

The end, Paul thought. And then he ran.

He could hear the others shouting behind him, the raw surprise in their voices, but it was just noise. The poisonous fear that surrounded the shadow-figure swept over him, a stormfront of nerve-jangling, limb-deadening panic that slowed him until it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. He staggered up the path like a man running against gale winds.

The thing called Dread stopped to watch his approach. He could feel its amused interest, but that was a solitary note in a roaring symphony of utter terror which grew louder and stronger the closer he got.

Zero. The dark. He couldn't think. He pushed himself forward two more steps. Lost. Lost! Running in the dark, lost! He took another step, his heartbeat so swift it was almost uniform, a zipper being pulled along its track, beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeat. . . .

"So which one are you?" The thing reached out for him with a hand cold as the bottom of a grave. Its empty eyes widened as Paul took one last stumbling step, then his brain and spine could not drive him any farther. He fell to the ground at the shadow-man's feet, twitching in helpless horror.

"And what were you planning to do?" it asked him. "Challenge me to a fight? Marquis of Queenbury rules?" It bent closer. An icy finger lifted Paul's chin, forced him to meet the white, blindfish gaze, the smile glinting like ice in the black fog of its face. "I'm going to eat your heart, mate. And your friends—I'm going to take them home with me and rape their souls."

Paul's quivering hands, which for a moment had risen a few inches above the ground, dropped back to the path. As the blackness closed in on him he clung desperately to a single slender point of sanity.

"No more," he gasped.

Dread leaned down until his grinning mouth was only a finger's breadth away. Paul felt sure his heart would stop. "You aren't giving up already, are you? Oh, that's very disappointing. . . ."

"No more . . . drifting!" he screamed, and pushed off from the ground. He wrapped his arms around the shadow-thing and dragged them both over the side of the ledge.

For a long moment they fell, the dark man thrashing and struggling in his arms like an immense bat. Paul could feel Dread's surprised panic, and even through his own terror something like triumph rose. Then they slowed and stopped.

They hung in midair, Paul held like an infant at the end of Dread's outstretched arm. The grinning mouth was now contorted by rage. A terrible, scalding heat ran up Paul's body, flames suddenly crackling on his limbs, his hair, even inside him, racing up his gullet to fill his mouth. He let out a smoking shriek of agony as the monster swung him high, then flung him down, flaming like a comet, to slam against the sloping wall of the pit.

The first blow was so hard it was like something else entirely, as sudden and transformative as being struck by lightning. He dimly felt himself caroming down the uneven rock wall, limp, helpless, but it seemed very far away, strangely unimportant. Everything was broken inside him.

He stopped at last. He supposed he was still burning, but the flames were only more lights flickering before his eyes, and now all the lights were growing dim.

Doesn't feel like being a copy, he thought absently. Feels . . . just like dying.

A moving darkness floated down from above and hung just before him.

"You wasted my time. Bad choice."

Paul would have laughed, but nothing worked. What an unimportant thing to say. What an unimportant thing to think. His own thoughts were like smoke, curling and rising, lighter than the air, lighter than anything that had ever been.

I wonder if there's a copy of Heaven, too. . . .

And then he didn't think anymore.