Mountain High Enough

Ano and Becken tend to find themselves in peril, especially when they get trapped in the mind of a mentally disturbed client who’s virtual world is eroding around them. As the team struggles to escape the rapidly disintegrating reality they’re stuck in, the two senior team members take an accidental detour. (Excerpt from Corrupting Paradise, the first story in the series for these characters.)

-

Ano’s head whipped up from the book she’d been attempting to code back into coherency with a velocity that made her neck crick. “Did you hear that?”

Becken was already standing on a nearby couch, his dark eyes piercing the acres of gloomy shelves in the direction they’d walked from. “That really loud crashing noise? It was kind of hard to miss.”

She rolled her eyes a little and activated her earpiece. “Tri? Jenny?”

It took Tri several moments to answer, and when he did it was with a groan. “Yeah, Boss?”

“What happened?”

“We nearly got killed by boiling magma is what happened!” Jenny said. “We rematerialized ten feet above the ground in here right when we should have been dying painful, burning deaths.”

Becken and Ano traded uneasy glances. “Do we want to know?”

“You guys didn’t get stuck in the tropical volcano?” Tri demanded incredulously.

That earned a raised eyebrow from Becken. “Not last I checked,” Ano answered. Ignoring the dark muttering coming from Tri’s end of the line, she got back to her original question. “What was that noise?”

“The dying gasps of the table that broke our fall. Which I will of course be recoding later,” he hastened to add at Ano’s disapproving silence.

Before Ano had the chance to respond, the bookcase nearest to them toppled over, driven by a hurricane-force wind that whipped her hair around and slammed her into Becken’s solid bulk. His arms came around her to hold her in place and she shut her eyes tightly against the stinging wind. As suddenly as the gale started, it ceased. Ano opened her eyes warily.

They weren’t in the library any more. They stood on the apex of a mountain so high Ano couldn’t see any details of the ground below them. Close enough to brush Becken’s head, the bottom of a cloud bank misted cold rain onto them, the liquid sparkling in the blinding sunlight. Far, far below them, a gray-green ocean crashed against the foot of the mountain. Just looking at the sight gave her vertigo. Considering her hover pad experience, that was more than slightly worrying.

She blinked. “Becken?”

“Yes,” he affirmed her silent question. “We are.” He reluctantly let her go, keeping close by her side as he let his protective nature take over. When Ano strayed towards the edge to look down again, he grabbed her firmly by the arm and pulled her back to him, activating his earpiece in the same motion. “Anyone there?”

The only response was static. The big man cursed softly, ignoring Ano’s disapproving look.

Becken was trying very hard not to look down. He hated heights, especially when they were forced upon him unexpectedly. Ano took pity on him and sighed, looking around to find something to distract him with. “Well, it could be worse.”

Naturally, that was the exact moment the hurricane-force gale started up again. Grabbing Ano’s smaller frame to his, Becken planted his feet in an attempt to keep them both anchored to the mountaintop. But the wind was relentless, pushing and pulling at them so forcefully that he felt his feet slip, inch by fighting inch, towards the edge of their small pinnacle of rock, the rain seeking to force them off and into infinity.

She was so intent on staying upright that Ano realized a second too late that she was closer to the edge than he was. She felt her foot slip, and his arms tightened around her in a vain attempt to keep her on solid ground. They swayed, toppled, and then she was floating backwards. Becken grabbed her arm and she jerked to a stop, held up by her hand in his. Her shoulder wrenched and she winced.

Ano had to yell to make herself heard over the roaring wind. “Let me go!”

“You’re insane!” He shouted back, resolutely clinging to her even as he felt her start to fall. His footing wasn’t much better than hers, and he scrambled for purchase as her weight dragged him towards the edge. In a moment of ironic clarity, Ano found it appropriate that they were about to die because he followed her over the edge of a cliff.  Then he lost his footing, Ano fell backwards and the two of them catapulted off the mountain and into bottomless space.

…Only to fall about ten feet before meeting the library’s cold stone floor. Somewhere in those ten feet Becken managed to twist them so when they hit the ground, Ano was on top. For a moment they lay there, breathing heavily, cheeks still smarting from the cold wind that had been tearing at them only moments before.

Ano rolled off of him and gave him a hand up, dusting a stray piece of gravel from his shirt. “Don’t do that.”

“What, keep you from falling off mountains?”

She stopped to think about it. “…Well, no. Not when you put it that way.” He grinned smugly, and she turned away and activated her earpiece again. “Anyone there?”

Found

From Collapsing Paradise, this little scene continues where this one left off. Ano gets surprised, Becken gets suspicious, and a few questions get answered about the book.

-

Ano waited until she was alone in the lobby to finally touch the book. She ran a hand carefully over the cover, felt the page edges with her fingertips. Finally, with great care for its considerable heft, she gently lifted the thing and brought it through her office into her quarters, keeping it firmly closed against her side the whole way.

Her tiny kitchen unit was a mess, so she bypassed it entirely and made her way over to the worn sofa in the living room that she spent most of her time in anyway. She put the book down carefully on the low end table and deliberately left it there unopened as she went to get herself a drink of water. Finally, glass in hand, she sat down on the sofa again, put her drink carefully on the far corner of the table, and let herself be terrified.

Ano knew this book. She’d seen it before, albeit a very long time ago. She had no idea what it actually said, of course—no one in all of the twelve galaxies did, in all likelihood—but that had long since failed to matter. If anyone knew this was here…

The thought spurred her into action almost against her will. With careful gestures, she finally lifted the front cover to reveal the title page. There was a long line of odd, curly-cue writing that swooped in a graceful half-circle across the middle of the page. The same stylistic planet symbol was repeated here too, though this time in what looked like a hand-penned sketch in blue ink several shades lighter than the cover. An entirely hand-written book? The sheer amount of time involved in that kind of venture made Ano’s NR-Programming brain hurt.

It was Almarian. Of course, it was Almarian. It was her life, and Elim’s, all the things they’d never known about themselves sitting right here, neatly penned on these pages in lettering that no one alive could read. She realized, somewhere in the back of her mind where she wasn’t frozen in alarm, that she felt a little sick.

Oh yes, Ano knew this book alright—she would remember this title page anywhere. She recognized every odd quirk and curve of incomprehensible language with the exactness that only a photographic memory could bring.

But how had it found her?

More importantly, who had found this book of all books, and then managed to find her as well, and then left it for her without leaving a record? She had spent her entire life making that kind of thing virtually impossible. The fact that it had now been accomplished so silently, so flawlessly, made her skin crawl.

The book drew her attention again. It was like a magnet to her conscious mind; all thoughts bent towards it and stuck.

Feeling very much like she was breaking an unknown confidence, she reached out again and hesitantly turned the title page to reveal an entire spread of the whorls and curves of bizarre writing. She tried to follow what looked like a sentence, but the line ended up curving back into a half-circle underneath itself and branched into another three lines near the middle of the page. Though for all she knew, the sentences could start at the bottom of the page and work their way up. Or maybe they didn’t move in sentences at all, so much as sweeps of thought graphed across the paper…

She turned another page, and then another. It almost made sense, in the small corner of her mind that saw patterns in the way people moved across plazas and heard the things that got said in the silences between words. She had the growing idea that if she just concentrated a little harder, all the writing would suddenly decode itself and reveal its secrets to her. Just a few more–

The knock that sounded on the door from her office made her startle so badly that she actually knocked her drink over. Her nerves were swamped all at once with a surge of adrenaline that left her fingers buzzing. She slammed the book shut out of instinct, just as Becken entered her quarters.

The book gave off a huge cloud of dust that made her sneeze helplessly for a full minute. By the time she manged to focus on Becken through her watering eyes, her friend had managed to maneuver his considerable bulk into one of her chairs.

Ano summoned up all the dignity she could muster, which admittedly wasn’t much. Her heart was still thundering like she’d been shot at. The little voice in the back of her head was saying run, hide, run, run! She ruthlessly quashed it with the cold light of reason. “Did you want something?” She had the impression that she looked as flummoxed and alarmed as she felt.

Becken confirmed her suspicion by lifting a single inquiring eyebrow and narrowing his dark eyes at her in a way that expressed just how oddly she was acting. “Nervous?” he asked in his deep voice.

The question stymied Ano with its bluntness for a moment. Finally, she managed a rather weak, “Why do you ask?”

Becken didn’t dignify that with a verbal response; he looked pointedly at the overturned glass and damp carpet that he had stepped over to get to his seat. Point made, he then held out a small card of beautiful paper delicately balanced between two huge black fingers. Ano recognized it as the card that had come with the book, which she must have left out on the counter. The bright white paper made a sharp contrast with his dark skin, especially in the low light of the room. He tilted it a little so the light would catch the lettering on the card’s surface. The blue ink sparkled with what Ano suspected was crushed precious stones.

“Has your name on it,” he pointed out unnecessarily. When she didn’t immediately respond, he continued, “Found it on the front desk. Figured that anyone who can afford paper and ink like that is worth carrying messages for.” He leaned back as far as the protesting chair would allow him and folded his hands on the tabletop. “Besides,” he said in the matter-of-fact tone that said he was enjoying backing her into a corner, “You jumped like someone shot at you when I came in.”

Ano finally shook herself out of her surprise and stood to get a rag. “It’s not a customer,” she sighed. She mopped up the spilled drink in silence and returned the overturned glass to the table. She felt Becken’s gaze on her, but for the moment she ignored him. Finally, she settled across from him again, and this time she met his eyes calmly.

“It’s not a customer,” she repeated. “It came with this.” She gestured at the book still sitting in the middle of the table, as if he wouldn’t have noticed it before now until she drew his attention to it.

Becken considered the book carefully for a moment, his expression calculating. Though Ano would never say it out loud, it looked exactly like the way Tri had been examining the thing earlier.

Her friend shook off the book’s spell much quicker than she had. He looked at her expectantly over its blue cover. “So? What is it?”

The Book

This rather long excerpt comes from the beginning of Collapsing Paradise, which is the most  recent addition to the currently four-story-long Paradise series. In this scene, the Paradise staff wakes up to find a book–a real, rare, mysterious book–sitting on the desk in their main office. The book becomes mightily important later. In the mean time, I just like this scene for its interactions between the main characters.

-

Elim had meant to go and boot up his screens for the day, but…well, it was a book. A real one, with a deep blue cover and yellowed pages, still edged in what looked like real gold and bound together with ancient glue. Heavy gold and silver thread twined across the spine and cover to form an elaborate flowing pattern of reaching vines and fruit-bearing branches that encircled an archaic symbol in the middle that might have been a representation of a planet. There was no title, at least not on the cover. He hadn’t dared touch the thing, let alone open it.

It was very, very old, and probably invaluable on any number of financial and cultural levels. Finding this just sitting here was like finding a bar of platinum under your pillow, only more surprising. Elim tilted his head from side to side to see the light shimmer off the gold and silver thread. He was so absorbed that he completely failed to notice when someone else entered the room through the main entrance directly behind him.

The figure padded silently across the thick cream-colored carpet, navigated around the semi-circles of dark blue couches in the middle of the circular room, and came to a stop directly behind Elim, all without making a sound.

And then it spoke. “Having fun?”

The Operator startled guiltily and turned to see who’d snuck up on him. Unsurprisingly, he was greeted by the sight of Triyankast, his human coworker and friend, who was grinning mischievously. The expression was a very familiar one to Elim.

Triyankast was handsome in that cliché, flawless, utterly charming kind of way that rarely existed outside of advertisements. The gleaming brown eyes, perfect brown hair and slightly tanned skin, along with a dazzling smile, had the ability to stop a passing female at thirty yards if Tri focused his attention. It was a deceptive trait that he used to his advantage. Those who knew the young man well agreed that his natural mischief and penchant for trouble (not to mention the fact that he’d spent most of his early life as an accomplished thief and conman) far outweighed his physical attractiveness and charisma.

He also had a bad habit of sneaking up on people—especially Elim, whose mercurial eyes still turned magenta when he was unpleasantly surprised, no matter how hard he tried to control the reaction.

“Stop doing that,” the Almarian reprimanded, his eyes already fading to something more like blue. He ruffled his mess of black hair in a gesture that did nothing to cover his embarrassment; the silver streaks amidst his dark curls caught the light like the threads on the book behind him.

“Magenta’s a good color on you,” Tri replied without apology as he joined Elim, leaning on the back of the couch facing the desk. “What are we looking at?”

All annoyance was instantly forgotten. “It’s a book,” Elim breathed reverently, his accent giving the word a cultured kind of weight. “A real one.”

Tri gave a low whistle of appreciation. The former conman merely shrugged in response to his friend’s mockingly raised eyebrow. “Hey, I may not read much, but even I have to respect something worth more than I am in solid gold.”

Elim conceded that with a nod. They both stood silent for a moment, heads turning this way and that in identical postures to the one Tri had found Elim in a moment before. “See the way it shimmers?” Elim murmured.

The other man’s thoughts were on a different track. “It would be impossible to sell illegally,” Tri said absently. Elim turned to stare at him. “What?” he said defensively. “It’s true! Something that unique is impossible to fence off unless you have someone ready to buy it on the other end. Who’s it for?”

Elim narrowed his eyes in a way that said he’d seen right through the other man’s abrupt subject change, but he answered anyway. “It’s for the Boss.” He nodded towards the note resting next to the book. It was just a square of heavy paper, and written on it in loopy letters with thick blue ink was their employer’s name: Ano. Just the one word. No explanation, not even a sign-for receipt.

“Mysterious,” Tri whispered in the voice reserved for secrets and ghost stories. “Secret admirer, I’ll bet you anything.”

“Who has a secret admirer?”

The two men turned to see Jenny enter the lobby from her office. The wall to the right of the main entrance was a smooth curve of glass divided by five evenly spaced glass doors, each leading to the office of a Paradise team member, and farther back into their own small set of rooms. Jenny’s was the second to last, between Becken’s dark office space on one side and Tri’s on the other at the end of the row, nearly opposite the main entrance.

The young woman joined them leaning against the couch. She leaned easily against Tri’s side as his arm went comfortably around her waist. Her brown hair was brushed back into a simple ponytail, and her pale skin was still flushed pink with the remnants of sleep. “Is that a book?”

“Looks like,” Elim confirmed.

They let her have her moment of awe. Eventually she shook herself. “Who’s it for?”

“Ano,” the other two answered in unison.

“We don’t know who dropped it off,” Tri continued, his eyebrows raised dramatically.

Jenny’s blue eyes sparkled mischievously. “Has anyone opened it?”

Tri snorted disbelievingly at the same time Elim replied, “You first!”

She pouted, a little crestfallen, and tilted her head to look up at her boyfriend with pleading eyes. It was something she’d never try with Ano in the room, but with the Boss gone for the moment, it seemed that all was fair in love and books.

“Oh no,” Tri responded instantly, jostling her to disentangle their arms so he could take a step away from her, the counter and the temptation of the book. “No way am I opening that thing without an engraved invitation from a literary deity! Or the Boss.”

“What about me?”

All three junior employees froze guiltily, even though none of them had technically done anything wrong yet. They watched Ano come in through the door of her office, clearly just out of the sonishower in her quarters. She ruffled her short blue hair with her fingers, leaving it fluffed to dry. Her green eyes narrowed as she took in their expressions. Unsurprisingly, she immediately zeroed in on Tri. “What did you do?”

“Nothing!” he held his hands up again and backed up so he stood in the middle of the room, out of touching range of anything. “I have not so much as laid a finger on the priceless object! I have witnesses!”

Ano grinned a little at that, which told them all right away that she wasn’t remotely upset with any of them. “You’re getting rusty,” she told Tri with a sly smile. “That denial was much more convincing the first time I heard it.”

That startled a full-bodied laugh out of Tri, and surprised glances from Elim and Jenny. Getting Ano to talk about the past—or getting Tri or Becken to discuss it either, for that matter—had until this point been an exercise in futility. Laughing at Tri’s former criminal ways was unprecedented. A lot of things had changed since Ano had nearly died last month. Still, the new, sharing-friendly office atmosphere was going to take some getting used to.

Elim felt his shoulders relax considerably as Ano wandered over to the desk. She touched his shoulder as she passed in her normal greeting, and he had to fight to keep the blush off his cheeks, even though she’d done it every day for the last four Cycles.

Ano gave a low whistle of appreciation as she came to the book. The other three instantly gathered round her, looking for information like sharks scouted for unsuspecting fish. Her hand drifted towards the heavy cover seemingly of its volition before she redirected it at the last moment to pick up the note instead. She read it, then turned it over curiously, looking for indicators on the paper. “Who dropped it off?”

“The door doesn’t have a record,” Elim answered. He watched her face carefully as he said it—this wouldn’t be the first time that Ano had managed to get something delivered without telling any of them what it was, or who was responsible for procuring it. The three dozen bronze-plated ND manifolds that had miraculously appeared on the docks three months ago just when Elim had run out of them came to mind.

But today, Ano’s eyebrows raised in surprise at Elim’s news. “No record at all? Becken is going to have a fit.” She caught his eyes and said seriously, “Figure out how they managed to get past the protocols. Regardless of who they were, I don’t like people walking in unannounced.”

He nodded in understanding, and glanced at Tri and Jenny. They were both staring at the book again. For a few moments, they were all quiet, lost in their own personal studies.

Ano looked up from her own intent scrutiny to see the others still grouped around her. “Don’t you all have work to do?” The pitifully curious looks she received at that were enough to soften the hardest resolve. She shook her head in resignation. “This is why I need Becken here.”

“Where is Mr. I-have-to-work, anyway?” Tri wondered. Jenny elbowed him in the side rather indiscreetly. He shrugged unapologetically. “What? I haven’t even seen him in three days. I think he inspected all the 200-level pods completely on his own.”

Ano sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “He’s sleeping. Finally.”

Elim raised his eyebrows. “How did you manage that?” he asked before he realized he probably didn’t want to know.

“Threats of physical violence,” came her deadpan reply. “After this little stunt, I’ll likely never listen to him again when he complains about me not getting enough rest.”

“He was worried about you,” Jenny said softly. “We all were. We kind of…let things go, for a while.”

Ano’s gaze gentled as she gave Jenny a small smile of thanks.

When no one else spoke, Elim cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Still, the rest of us managed to find the time to sleep since you’ve been back.”

“And intelligence like that is why I hired you to begin with,” Ano said brightly. Elim noticed that she was deliberately avoiding giving the impression that she cared about the book at all. Somewhere in the back of his head, warning bells began to sound faintly. Still, he listened when she prodded them, “Now come on, we have work to do. Get moving!”

With a few last curious looks, they finally did as they were told.

Real Life Invasion

Another excerpt from my story Corrupting Paradise. In this scene, we meet Elim for the first time, and we also encounter Client 47 in Pod 109, who will be the team’s problem for the rest of the story.

—

Ano knocked on Elim’s open office door out of habit and stepped in without waiting for an answer. Stepping over a loose cable on the floor, she made her way to the sole occupant of the room, who was perched on his chair in the middle of a nest of wires surrounded by input tablets and a rack of memory crystals. Raising her voice a little to be heard over the chirps and whirring that spilled from the mass of technology around her, Ano put a hand on her Operator’s shoulder. “Talk to me.”

As an Almarian male, Elim shared his employer’s accent, but his physical attributes were similar to Ano’s only in their vividness. His mess of black hair was naturally streaked with silver and his eyes changed color according to his mood. At the moment, his irises reflected purple in the light from the screen he was staring at. Ano winced. Purple meant her friend was severely stressed.

When he spoke, his emotion was confirmed by the strain in his normally flowing voice. “This could be nothing.” She gave him a look that he caught as he glanced up at her. He read the disbelief on her face clearly and sighed heavily, turning back. “Or it could be something so big that we’ll have wished you’d have believed me when I said it was nothing and we hadn’t gone on and talked about it.”

Ano patted him on the shoulder sympathetically. “Fair enough. Now talk about it.”

With all the motivation of a prophet preaching the end of the world to people ignoring the fire raining out of the sky, Elim gestured to the screen in front of him.

For several moments, Ano was nonplussed. “It’s a portion of the roster,” she pointed out unnecessarily.

And indeed it was. Columns of information scrolled by, listing client name, requested reality, the length of the customer’s stay, date of project completion, the names of the team members responsible for the project, the form and amount of payment, and the number of the stasis pod currently holding the customer. Besides the disturbingly low numbers in the payment columns, Ano had never seen anything less like an emergency in her life.

“Yes,” Elim replied patiently, as if he was trying to talk to someone who still refuses to believe the world is ending even though her dog has just been hit by a flaming meteor. “Look at Client 47.”

She looked at Client 47. And then she looked again. And then a third time, just to make sure she wasn’t blinking and looking at the wrong line or just plain hallucinating.

She wasn’t.

There was no name in the “Name” column for Client 47. The information in the “Requested Reality” column flickered, changed from “rainy library” to “wooded beach” and flickered again as it stopped on “ocean vista” and turned into a jumble of code before righting itself and changing one more time, landing on “rainy library” again.

“Client 47,” Ano declared with the quiet dread of a person who gets hit by a flaming meteor, loses a leg and her eyesight and finally admits that maybe, just maybe, something’s wrong with the weather today, “is in a universe that is rapidly disintegrating.”

“Yes,” Elim agreed. There were several moments of silence.

“Elim?” Ano inquired politely.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to go back to that sentence where you mentioned that I was going to wish I didn’t ask and we never had this conversation.”

“Oh? What would you like to do differently?” He watched her face cautiously to make sure her eyes weren’t changing color; Ano’s green irises had a habit of turning gold when she got drastically upset.

Her expression, though, remained very calm as she answered, “I would like to agree with you.”

“This is what you get when you don’t listen to me.”

“Next time I try and disagree with you, hit me and demand a raise.” Ano straightened from bending to read over his shoulder, stretched her neck, tapped her earpiece into place and spoke the nine words that her team dreaded to hear. “We have a Real Life Invasion in Pod 109.”

She was a bit disappointed when no one answered right away, even though she hadn’t expected them to. Finally, Tri broke the silence. “Oh.”

This was followed by Becken’s, “We’re on our way down.”

Ano waited expectantly for Jenny and wasn’t disappointed when her, “Can I stay with my titanium river? Please? Just this once?” came moments later.

“Everybody downstairs. Jenny, wait for us. Elim, if you’d be so kind as to fill the others in while we go?” She headed to the door, hesitating just a second before stepping back into the main office and towards something she didn’t at all want to face.

“Boss!” Elim called, swiveling in his chair at the last second.

She turned expectantly and held his eyes for a moment, taking in the anxious blue color they’d turned. His voice was about as serious as it got. “Accidents happen. It’s just life.”

There were several things he could have said, most of which Ano wanted to hear far more. It would do. With a smile that she couldn’t back up with humor, she left the office.

Alone

The introduction to my story Collapsing Paradise, in which we finally discover the answers to many mysteries surrounding the Almarian race.

When the Universe was first brought into existence, it was utterly content. There could by no unhappiness or dissatisfaction because nothing was lacking. This state of harmony and peace lasted a relatively short time (though some would argue that time did not, as yet, exist). In any case, it was shattered in the second that the first sentient being opened his eyes and gazed up at the cosmos. For those first precious moments, all was good—and then that first man asked, “Am I it?”

Something in the universe shook. There had never been aloneness before. The problem was quickly rectified, but the echoes of that voice–“Am I alone?”– reverberate across the background of reality even now. Some words, spoken at a certain time and a certain place, can change the Universe, and these were some of those. No being in the twelve inhabited Galaxies was ever truly alone again.

Until recent Cycles, in any case.

The story of the first man (or cephalopod, or green slime-bug of Graxus VI) is more or less consistent from planet to planet and culture to culture. Variations arise here and there, as they tend to do. Still, some creation myths are truly universal, finding roots and facets in every culture because they ring true to every being who has looked up at the stars and wondered, “Is this all?”

Just one detail has changed from the original tale, which hasn’t been told in so long that no one alive today has heard it spoken aloud. In the first story, the real story, that first being was actually the first Almarian.

The significance of this can only really be appreciated if you happen to meet one of the remaining twelve members of the Almarian race in the Universe. They are infinitesimal pockets of alone in an otherwise occupied cosmos.

If you happen to stop by the space station Paradise near the transwarp that connects the Milky Way to the other eleven galaxies, you can actually meet two Almarians. It is, in official record, the largest gathering of their species in the modern history of the Universe. The mathematical probability of two Almarians being in the same place at the same time is just under 3 x 10-9 percent.

There is no explanation for their impossibly improbable meeting and eventual friendship. Except that if there is one thing that the Universe cannot tolerate, it is that anything—or anyone—should be alone forever. But Paradise is a place in which beings have bent reality because they have discovered that they cannot bend their lives.

For the Almarians known as Ano and Elim, it is somewhere that true loneliness can still be suffered, even in the company of others. This will not be the case for long. The Universe abhors a lonely being. It doubly loathes a pair of them.

First Appearances

An excerpt from my story Corrupting Paradise , in which the Paradise team has to enter the mind of a mentally unsound client in order to keep his virtual world from collapsing.

The first things Tri noticed were the books. This was for the sole reason that there were a lot of them. The endless rows of bookshelves filled the entirety of the massive cathedral-style stone building they inhabited. Triyankast had to squint to see past a few hundred yards because the lighting was so dim. He’d never understood the people who wanted this type of world.

Tri was always the first one to materialize. They’d never been able to figure out why it worked that way, though Elim had made a few comments along the lines that since Tri’s mind was never really wholly on one thing anyway, jumping consciousnesses was a piece of cake. Maybe he was right. In any case, the young man had a moment to look around before the others appeared.

It was raining outside. Not just light, sprinkling rain. This was a downpour of heavy, cold drops that exploded against the windowpanes that made up the top half of the gray stone walls and stretched from floor to ceiling in the curves of massive bay windows farther back. If not for the giant fires that burned eternally in the massive stone hearths every five or six yards along the walls, this place would have been damp and gloomy.

Tri would take a hot beach with plenty of pretty, shallow people on it any day.

With a quiet pop, Becken appeared on his left. A moment later, Jenny materialized on his right with a soft shh that sounded like wind blowing through leaves.

Ano’s voice came from behind him. “Shall we?”

Ano always appeared last; they’d never been able to figure that out either. Tri was relatively sure she could beat even him to get here first if she tried, but she always materialized after everyone else. She was the only one of them that never made a sound as she blinked into someone’s head. Ano moved silently from mind to mind, treading on the quiet feet of someone who had learned to move without leaving any trace of her existence. Tri had seen enough of that on the streets where she had found him to recognize that his boss had learned early on how to make herself disappear.

Becken cast a jaded eye around the shelves. “Not where I’d want to spend forever.”

Jenny shuddered in agreement, her fair skin glowing golden in the firelight. “Does it ever get sunny?”

Ano shook her head. “Never. He was very explicit in his directions that rain be the only sound he hear besides the flipping of dusty tomes.”

“What kind of literature did you stock him with?” Tri did a full turn, taking in the seemingly endless shelves. “At least half the history section.”

“All of it, actually,” she replied easily. “Everything we had in the library.” That earned her a few incredulous looks. She shrugged, nonplussed by their attention. “He paid a lot of money.” She tapped her earpiece into place and the others mimicked her.

Elim’s voice crackled over the channel, barely audible. Tri traded a worried look with Becken at the distortion. The building structure had to be severely strained to interfere with the team’s signal.

“Structure–ting—wor–” the Operator garbled.

It took a moment for Ano to figure out what he meant. “The building structure is collapsing.”

“What–aid!” Elim said indignantly.

“You’re breaking up, Op,” Tri informed him. “We can barely hear you.”

“—ed to—repr—str-re–”

Not even Ano caught that one. Her forehead creased in concentration. “Say again, Elim?”
Only static greeted her request.

The four looked at each other uneasily. There had never been a program so badly damaged that it completely disrupted their line of communication with the outside world. Tri caught Jenny’s hand in his and gave it an encouraging squeeze. There was nothing for it now but to get the place fixed so they could leave.

Ano seemed to come to the same conclusion. “Spread out, teams of two. Jenny, Tri, I want you to find Mr. Zebbanaca. If this really is a programming issue, we may have to remove him and I’d like you there to explain it. Becken and I will do some maintenance. Check-ins every half hour, please. We’ll keep trying to reach Elim.” She paused a moment to make sure everyone was clear. “Right. Move out.”

They did.

Accident

Becken met Ano entirely by mistake on the waterfront of Traxton VI in the Saxic Galaxy. More accurately, Becken met Ano entirely by accident on the waterfront of Traxton VI, because there was just no other word for explaining how she got shoved out of a bar door, tripped by a random passerby and promptly catapulted straight into his arms when he’d only been standing there wondering what all the ruckus was about and where the closest drink was.

Looking back on it, he’d wondered more than once if she’d planned it somehow. She hadn’t acted a bit surprised to find herself leaning back in his arms looking up at him when she’d been standing on her own two feet a moment ago.

The normal etiquette for this kind of situation generally included embarrassed thanks and an awkward parting and nothing more. And that was probably how it would have gone if Ano’s weight hadn’t thrown Becken off-balance and sent them both crashing off the dock into the purple water below. The water was warm and shallow, but being tackled and subsequently soaked by a complete stranger when he hadn’t even gotten his first drink yet was insane enough to make the whole thing seem a lot funnier than it would have been otherwise.

She pushed her damp hair out of her eyes and smiled at him, ignoring the knee-deep water they were standing in. “Hi,” she said easily.

For a moment he just stared at her…and then he started laughing. They stood there for a good five minutes in the water, laughing themselves silly and getting worried looks from passing strangers. Becken couldn’t remember the last time he’d had more fun.

After they both managed to collect themselves, Ano ended up apologizing by paying for drinks at the nearest bar neither of them had been thrown out of. At the time, that was the only kind of apology Becken would have accepted anyway. It wasn’t until their second round of Katlantian gin that introductions were finally made. For perhaps the only time in his history, Becken was the one who initiated them. He held out a giant black hand and looked her squarely in her brilliantly green eyes. “Becken.”

She simply smiled and returned both the handclasp and the gaze and Becken was struck that he was looking at one of the last Almarians in any of the twelve known galaxies as she responded, “Ano. You ever have an idea that just won’t leave you alone, Becken? Something to live for?”

Becken hadn’t had very many ideas that weren’t inspired by the bottom of a glass for what felt like a lifetime. “Can’t say I have,” he rumbled back, not entirely sure why he was being honest.

Ano grinned wryly into her glass and swirled the last of her drink around, which was the exact same shade of blue as her hair. “Well if you’re free, then…” her green eyes came up to lock with his dark ones again and in that moment, Becken realized that he would say yes regardless of what she asked. She tilted her head at him and put her drink down. “Want to help me with mine?”

Becken drained his glass, unaware that it would be the last one he’d touch for close to eighteen Cycles, and set it down. “Sure. I have nothing else to do.” The words were a pact between them, and from the moment he uttered them Becken understood somewhere deep inside himself that his life had changed.

They went for a walk underneath the twinkling green sky. Word by word, Ano painted a picture of a place where dreams came true and the universe was what you made it and where the two of them would become very, very rich. And because he felt completely helpless to ever tell this woman–this Almarian who looked at him instead of through him—no to anything, he told her that they would do it. Together. Somewhere out in the stars, they would create Paradise.

Ano laughed and threaded her arm through his, looking up at the stars. “We need a few more people to help, you know.”

He looked down at her because she was more interesting than the sky. “Who?”

She shrugged and started walking. “We’ll know when we find them.”

Becken looked after her for a second, unfamiliar with the feeling building in his cold chest. He was pretty sure that for the first time in his life, he might actually love something. The black man innately understood that Ano spent more time dwelling on the way things should work than the way things really happened. He knew without being told that this angel who’d just turned his world upside down needed protecting, needed watching after. He had the sudden insight that maybe–just maybe–he’d been destined for the job.

So he looked down at her and smiled; the expression was one he hadn’t used in a very long time; especially not twice in one day. “Of course we will,” he said simply. Ano walked on, and Becken followed.

It had been that way ever since.

Still

Triyankast was never completely sure whether Ano and Becken set him up the day he met them or if some insane coincidence worked it out so that he just happened to get caught pick pocketing from the one being in the twelve galaxies who had the ability to change his life forever. He liked to think it was the first one, because the second one was just too scary to really consider for long without getting a headache.

In any case, it happened. Right in the middle of a crowded, noisy street in Lukka, the second-largest city in the Colona Galaxy, as a matter of fact.

Tri had been leaning casually against a fruit stand as he took his time to find the perfect mark. He needed money for food and a ticket to anywhere but where he currently was, and it took a practiced eye to find just the right person to pinch it from.

The instant she stepped out of the store, he saw her; it only took him a second to choose the woman with the blue hair as his mark, if for no other reason than she’d be easy to spot in the surrounding throng.

She looked nervous and lost, craning her head around like she was trying to find someone. (Looking back on it, Tri knew that it had to be a setup just because of that. He’d never once seen Ano lost or nervous since.)

One of her hands was loosely hovering by her left pocket, which was obviously where her valuables were stored. From her state of dress (classy but not flashy) and the rings on her fingers (understated but rather expensive), Tri figured that those valuables were probably pretty significant. She looked like an easy target.

The accomplished thief pocketed a piece of fruit for later and joined the mass of sentience, putting his head down and blending in with practiced ease. At the nearest corner he stopped and waited until his mark came abreast of him. A bump, a grab, and a seemingly sincere “Sorry!” later, Tri palmed her platinum credit disc and turned, smiling widely, to spend it somewhere.

For almost an entire second, he thought he’d gotten away with it. Then a massive black hand fell on his shoulder and spun him around to reveal an equally massive black man who stared down at him with threatening dark eyes. “Very smooth,” the man rumbled with a voice that matched his stature.

Triyankast’s brain went blank for possibly the first time in his life. His mouth opened and closed a few times before he finally gave up on excuses and smiled winningly. “I thought so. Feel like rewarding me for my prowess?”

The man plucked the stolen credit disc from Tri’s hand and held it out to his side between two fingers. The blue-haired woman who owned it reached out to take it and pocket it again, sidling up to stand next to her rescuer. It was only as the two exchanged an amused look that Tri realized they knew each other.

The young thief figured he had nothing left to lose and so he smiled brightly at his former victim. “Hi there!” Then he saw her green eyes and made the connection to the blue hair and the money and realized that he’d just tried to rob one of the last Almarians in existence. This was a seriously bad day, even for him.

She cocked her head at him and those bright eyes fixed on him, like she was seeing past his smile into his brain. It struck Tri quite suddenly that she was the only being on the street that looked comfortable standing completely still. She was also one of the only people he’d ever met who looked right at him instead of past him. He found, to his surprise, that he respected that.

She had savvy. Instinctively, Tri knew something about Ano that no one else would ever suspect: she’d been out on the streets, and however she’d managed to live through it, she must have been good at it to end up this confident and to have this massive man follow at her heels.

Suddenly she moved again, her head righting itself and her eyes sparkling like they’d just had an entire conversation and she was pleased with the results. “What’s your name?” Her accent was unusual, and highly cultured.

A hundred phony identities danced across his mind and he almost used every one of them. But for some reason he would never be able to fully explain, Tri looked her square in the eye and told the truth. “Triyankast. Tri, for people who get sick of yelling the entire thing.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m Ano, and this is Becken. We have a proposition for you.”

This was not at all the day he’d expected to be having. “What kind of proposition are we talking about?”

Ano smiled at him again, and it was the kind of smile that said she already knew exactly what was going to happen and she was just humoring him by filling him in. “You’re going to come with us, and I’m going to buy you lunch.”

Tri was downright curious now, but he wasn’t stupid. “Am I going to end up in prison right after that?”

“I wasn’t planning on it, no.”

Becken’s mouth opened, Ano glared at him and he snapped it shut again. She gave Tri a look that was disturbingly sincere.

For some reason he actually believed her. “I can’t argue with that. What’s the catch?”

The Almarian traded a long glance with Becken and then her green gaze shifted back to this new arrival. “I’m going to offer you a job. And you’re going to take it.”

And of course that’s exactly what happened, for reasons Tri still didn’t understand. All he knew was that because of that day, his life changed totally and completely. He never learned to like Becken–mostly because the threatening look in the man’s dark eyes never really went away. He did, however, learn to like Ano straight away. And from the first time he called the Almarian “Boss” Tri realized that he’d follow her to the end of the galaxies and back if she asked him to.

Meeting Jenny a Cycle later certainly didn’t hurt, of course.

But still, from that moment in Lukka onward, whenever he was with Ano, Triyankast would always get the unnerving feeling that he was standing still while the rest of the galaxy rushed past him.

Odds

Elim’s entire life had been ruled by one small, simple, utterly true statement of percentage. It went something like this: There were twelve Almarians in existence, there were twelve known inhabited galaxies, and the sheer mass of sentient beings made the chance of two members of his rare race meeting just under .0000000000000000003%. Actually, the exact number was a bit longer than that, but frankly, another five or six digits just weren’t very important in a number that small.

The thing was, no one knew exactly why there were only twelve Almarians (the history books merely cited different theories, including a bounty hunter and a plague) when there had once reportedly been an entire planet of them. That had been cycles upon cycles ago, so long that no one living could remember it any more. It was one of the greatest mysteries of the twelve galaxies. Even more of a mystery was why no one knew exactly where the remaining twelve Almarians were located, or who they were at all.

But in the grand scheme of things, Elim found it didn’t matter. His adopted parents never treated him any differently than their own biological children and all in all, the young Almarian grew up relatively normally. The only odd thing that ever happened to Elim (besides his eyes changing color every time he had a mood swing, that is) was when he got a message two weeks before his coming-of-age celebration to inform him that he did not need to register in his planet’s citizen database. Apparently, someone somewhere knew who and what he was, and that was enough to put him in the inter-galaxy database. His inquiry was never returned.

Elim’s life was ruled by science and fact. He graduated as the head of his class and went on to excel at neurological reality programming because it was the only career challenging enough to keep him interested for more than a week. Numbers and systems were easy for him. His parents had raised him to see the world for what it was, to understand the equation that made a situation go one way or another. Words like faith and fate and luck were abstracts to Elim, and he was more than happy to keep it that way.

So when he looked up from his normal place in his favorite café just a block down from his house and saw a woman with blue hair and green eyes come in, his neatly structured, comfortably managed world of numbers came screeching to a halt.

So did Ano; she stopped dead in the doorway and made the elderly couple behind her run into her. She didn’t notice. Her eyes were on Elim’s and he found himself wishing he knew what color they were turning, because he had a feeling it was probably embarrassing.

Before he could even figure out what to do with the situation (they’d never taught him how to actually handle reality in school, only to manipulate it), Ano was sitting across from him at the table and holding her hand out, silver rings glittering on her fingers. The thought that this was some kind of elaborate practical joke only flashed through his mind once. Then their hands met, Ano smiled and Elim knew that this was real, and that he’d just beaten the .0000000000000000003% by accident without going farther than two blocks from his house.

“I’m here to interview someone for a position,” Ano said by way of introduction. “But I suddenly find I don’t care.”

She had his accent. Elim was smiling so big it hurt, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “Unless you need a neurological reality programming expert, I’m afraid I can’t be much help.” It was a stupid conversation to have at a moment this big, but it worked for them.

Ano stared at him for a long moment and then burst out laughing. By the time she got done explaining that a neurological programming expert was exactly what she was looking for, Elim was laughing too.

The young Almarian had never done an impulsive thing in his life. But suddenly he wasn’t alone—he wasn’t alone—and that made life different. He took the job, moved out of his parents’ house and got on the next transport out to the Milky Way with her before he even thought to ask her name.

“Ano,” she said easily, swaying with the transport’s takeoff velocity.

“Elim,” he replied. And that was that.

They never talked about it: never discussed how they were a sixth of their entire race, how the chances of a male and a female with complementing skill sets finding each other were so impossible.

All Elim knew about Ano was that she and he were bound by something deeper than mere common interest or ideals. If their meeting wasn’t fate…well, it was an awfully small percentage of probability.

It was really inevitable, then, that he would fall in love with her sooner or later. He took some comfort in that.

He still remembered that first transport ride with crystal clarity. “Where are we going?” he’d finally thought to ask.

“Paradise,” she responded with a twinkle in her eyes.

Somewhere deep inside of him, Elim realized he’d already known that.

Lost

Becken found her sitting in the empty office on one of the corner couches. She didn’t move as he drew closer. Her eyes were open, staring into space, blank with the vision that comes from looking inside your own head. As far as he was concerned, Ano had already seen more of the inside of her mind than was really healthy.

Becken slowly sat beside her, the couch dipping slightly with his weight. He stayed silent, feeling the relief of settling into old rhythms. He’d missed her–more than he’d ever admit, probably even to himself.

For a long time they sat there silent, Ano staring off into the stars and Becken watching her from the corner of his eye. It was a routine that rang familiar from times long ago.

To a man that had never had one before, this felt like home.

Finally, he spoke, quiet enough to be to himself, even though it was to her. “Where were you?”

Her eyes were still vacant, and her voice was distant when she answered, “Remember where we met?”

“‘Course.” The apparent non-sequiter didn’t worry him. She was building up to something, and he let her.

“You weren’t there,” she said.

Becken’s brow furrowed as he half-turned to face her fully on the couch. “I wasn’t there when we met?”

“Not this time.”

He stared at her. “Now you’ve lost me.” That wasn’t an easy task, especially for her. His remark seemed to bring her out of herself a little, and she looked at him for the first time, if only fleetingly.

“I lost everyone,” she sighed. “I woke up in my old place–remember, that terrible room I had in the mining colony when we first met? And I had that awful old haircut. It was like the last 20 Cycles had never happened.”

Becken took a moment to process that. It wasn’t a pretty thought; most days, he tried to forget anything that didn’t have to do with the last 20 Cycles. He had a feeling Ano was the same way.

She continued, her voice getting stronger as she went. “So I went looking for you all. That street we found Tri in, that cafe where I bumped into Elim. Paradise wasn’t here, so I didn’t even know where to look to find Jenny.” At long last her troubled gaze came to meet his, and this time it held as her voice softened. “And then I went to Traxton, to the dock, and I told myself that if you weren’t there, I was giving up.”

She shook her head like she couldn’t believe what she was saying. “I stood right there where we ran into each other, and I just waited for something to happen.”

He knew what was coming now. His head was swimming a little from the implications of what she was saying. “Nothing did.”

“Nothing did,” she agreed. At long last her eyes cleared, and Becken saw her, maybe for the first time. And also for the first time, he saw himself reflected back, and he suddenly understood deep in his chest that this, here with her, really was home. She looked away, slightly sheepish, but her words still resonated in Becken’s chest. “That was all it took. I just…I gave up. It’s a scary thing, to get lost in your own head. If you hadn’t come for me, I don’t know what–” she couldn’t finish the sentence. Becken was glad; he didn’t want to hear what she would have said.

The large man leaned back, absorbing all of this. She’d said more than either of them had ever dared to over the course of their time together. He found himself glad that she had. “Glad it wasn’t me,” he rumbled.

She glanced over at him, understanding on her face. Despite the fact that they never talked about their pasts, Ano knew him better than anyone else. They both knew he would have ended up drinking himself into a virtual oblivion. Even seventeen Cycles of sober wouldn’t have protected him from life crumbling down around him.

Not for the first time, Becken decided that Ano was the stronger of the two of them, no matter how much muscle he had.

Ano’s brain was on a different track. Her eyes traced his face again with evident fondness. “Thank you.”

He tilted his head to look at her. “For what?”

She shrugged a little. “Nothing. Coming after me. Everything.”

For the second time in their history, Becken held out his hand to Ano, this Almarian that looked at him instead of through him. She took it, but this time he didn’t shake it. He just held it.

They sat there in the dark, hands joined, and Becken felt a sense of peace that was so alien is almost startled him.

“Welcome home,” he murmered.

Ano didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed, her breathing even.

Becken held her hand and watched her sleep.