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?”

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.

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.