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The soft chiming that woke Linksano up wasn’t coming from the lab equipment, which was a good thing, seeing as he hadn’t meant to be asleep in the first place. He checked the centrifuge; it still had nearly twenty minutes left on the countdown timer, which meant he hadn’t been out for more than ten minutes. The autoclave was still happily steaming away, and the next stage of the experiment required both the separated nucleic acid solutions and clean glassware, so nothing required his immediate attention. That was probably how he’d fallen asleep to begin with.
Now, what had he been pondering before he’d conked out on the lab bench, why was his stomach in knots, and why was everything so blurry?
The speaker that had been chiming spoke. “Question: are you all right?” Nimue asked, in that calm, clinical voice that Linksano couldn’t help but find just slightly accusatory.
“Of course, I’m fine,” Linksano brushed her off. “I just let my mind wander, that’s all.”
“Information,” she announced. “Your temperature is elevated by approximately a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit. Readings indicate that your are experiencing mild inflammation of the soft tissues surrounding the eye and heightened activity of the tear ducts. These readings are consistent with either the first stages of a rhinovirus infection or an unusually strong emotional reaction.”
Linksano turned his face away from the camera that panned across the room from its niche above the door and whipped off his goggles. Sure enough, that was why he couldn’t see; there were teardrops smeared across the inside of the lenses. He swiped them against his shirt as surreptitiously as he could manage, hoping the coat would hide exactly what he was doing as he wiped his eyes and nose against a sleeve.
“Just some minor eye irritation,” Linksano explained, re-adjusting the strap on the goggles and turning to face the camera directly. “Some trace of the acidic fumes from the last experiment must have gotten through these. Nothing to worry about.”
The speaker was silent for a moment. “Information,” Nimue said again, and perhaps Linksano was misjudging, but she sounded more emphatic this time. “It has been twenty-nine hours and thirty-six minutes since the end of your last sleep cycle. The last time you consumed nourishment was twelve hours and fifty-one minutes ago. The last time you drank water was eight hours and eleven minutes ago.”
That couldn’t possibly be right. Linksano glanced at the wall display, hunting for the time counter and working backwards. No, the ship’s computer was correct as usual, and while he was too exhausted to be hungry, now that she had reminded him about water, he was utterly parched.
“All right, all right,” Linksano grumbled, “I should probably have something to drink. Is there anything in the snack bar in main engineering?”
“The mini-fridge currently contains two sixteen-ounce store-brand diet sodas, five twelve-ounce cans of non-diet store-brand ginger ale, two twenty-ounce bottles of water, half a salami sandwich which is three days past its expiration date, and a jar of sweet pickle relish,” Nimue noted. “The cabinet contains half a box of graham crackers and a peanut butter jar containing less than half an ounce of peanut butter.”
“The ginger ale sounds better than the diet soda,” Linksano decided aloud, shoving open the door from the lab into the main engineering area. “Seriously, I don’t know why Linkara and ‘90s Kid keep leaving them up here.”
“Hypothesis: Linkara leaves them in the mini-fridge because he knows you won’t remember to refill it and doesn’t want to leave you without a non-coffee source of caffeine,” Nimue suggested as he fumbled around in the fridge. “This unit has insufficient data to conjecture regarding ‘90s Kid’s motives. It is possible that they are similar. It is also possible that he intends to drink them himself and then becomes distracted.”
“The latter, most likely,” Linksano mused as he wrestled the plastic ring off of one of the cans and popped it open. Ginger ale wasn’t his favorite, but being a simple flavor, it was familiar to him in a way that many other sodas weren’t. The only other one that was even close was the standard cola flavor, and even it was subtly different from the ones in his home dimension, with more cinnamon and less vanilla.
He took a sip. This brand was fizzier than he was used to; a memory flashed unbidden into his head.
He was standing in the midst of a crowd of young teens, barely more than children, really; most of them were a little older than him, his brother’s age. They were gathered around a table decorated in white paper snowflakes and blue crepe paper streamers; there was a tall cake in the middle of the table, covered by shavings of coconut and piles of fluffy white icing. It must have been someone’s birthday party, but he had no idea whose; he was probably there because Wayne had been invited at the insistence of someone’s parents, and he had tagged along. He was clutching a paper cup of ginger ale, still fizzing merrily just under his nose, and wondering about the rate at which the carbon dioxide was leaving the solution.
Linksano gasped. He must be tired, to be thinking of - no, there was no logical reason to - no benefit in letting his mind go down that route -
His eyes stung. He flung himself back towards the lab, still clutching the can in one hand and desperately trying to think about anything else, anything at all.
Thank the void, the autoclave was done. Linksano opened it carefully with gloved hands and removed the petri dishes, stacking them upside-down to dry.
Keep busy. Focus.
“In the opinion of this unit,” Nimue announced, “your state of sleep deprivation is sufficiently advanced that your ability to perform a successful titration of ribonucleic compounds is significantly compromised.”
“Mind your own business,” Linksano snapped.
“Information: the safety of this vessel and its crew are precisely the business of this unit,” the speaker replied. Did she sound sad? Was that even possible?
Linksano finished laying out the glassware and looked up at the camera. “If I don’t perform the titration now,” he said, “I’ll have to run the samples through the centrifuge all over again.” Even he could hear how tired his voice sounded; he took another swig of the ginger ale.
“A net loss of two hours in exchange for a greatly increased probability of success seems like an acceptable compromise, in the opinion of this unit,” Nimue said.
She was arguing with him. Was she even supposed to be able to do that? Biology and mechanical engineering were more his area of expertise than AI-level computer science, although he was well-versed in the basics.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he mumbled. “Let me just take a quick nap.”
The old army-surplus folding cot he kept up here in a corner of the lab creaked as he unfolded it and wrestled it flat. He had a bunk, down in the apartment, in a room shared with ‘90s Kid (and the Ninja-Style Dancer, when he was around), but so often it was too noisy to sleep down there. Wadding up his coat to serve as a pillow, he unfolded the cheap acrylic blanket he kept for when the life support went a little wonky and yanked it around his shoulders.
“Question: should I play some music to help you fall asleep?” Nimue asked as she dimmed the lights.
He pondered that for a moment. “Sure, why not,” he acquiesced. “I’ll help cover up the noise from the centrifuge.”
It only occurred to him after the centrifuge spun down, as he was finally falling asleep, that every lullaby she played was a familiar one.
---
It was a dreadfully familiar process.
Linksano opened the cylindrical container, set a disc of explosive putty inside the lid, attached a pair of electrical leads, and wired the leads to a pre-assembled receiver chip and a tiny battery. The explosive was just strong enough to shatter the plastic of the container and scatter its contents in a ten-foot radius; the receiver would respond only to a specific command keyed to the transmitter in his pocket. The battery would last for months, maybe even years, but barring someone else hacking the transmitter signal, the risk of premature detonation was minimal. It wasn’t the explosion itself that was intended to do damage (although at short enough range it might), nor the shards of the fragile plastic; it was what it would release, at speeds too quick for the target to react. He set the container aside, awaiting someone else to fill it with its payload, and moved on to the next one.
It wasn’t the first time Linksano had worked on an assembly line for mines, or improvised explosives, as they seemed to be calling them here these days. There had been grim days when he’d done nothing else for hours, as other members of the resistance against Vyce labored on either side of him. In the back of his mind, he could hear the constant sounds of radio chatter and nervous questions from the grunts.
The only thing keeping him from lapsing fully into his memories was the containers themselves. Where on Earth had Linkara found so many used margarine tubs? And from so many different brands! Had someone greased an entire loaf of toast every week, found their current brand of oleo wanting, and moved to another one?
The door banged open, shaking Linksano from his reverie as Harvey set a large cardboard box with half a dozen paper grocery bags on the counter and began to empty them without preamble. Linksano finished soldering the receiver into the cheery yellow container in front of him, decorated with a cow in a pioneer-days bonnet, and turned to face the singer. “Find everything you needed?” he asked.
“I think so,” Harvey grumbled. “Hadda go to three different stores, though. Got a couple of weird looks.”
Linksano set the soldering iron in its holder and ambled over. The counter in the kitchen was rapidly filling up with tall plastic containers of garlic granules; the last bag was packed with coils of shiny 22-gauge sterling silver jeweler’s wire. Linksano let out a low whistle, then turned to Harvey. “Seriously?” he said. “Vampires?”
Harvey removed three smaller glass jars, the size spices usually came in, from the next-to-last bag and took the one Linksano was peering into. “That’s what the Kid says, and I’ve learned not to question it,” he answered. “How’s your end of the project coming?”
“I’m almost done,” Linksano replied, gesturing at the armed butter substitute tubs on the coffee table. “Four more to go.”
“Sounds good,” Harvey grunted. “I’m gonna have to mix this up in batches.” He hunted in the cabinets for the largest mixing bowl, then through the drawers for a knife. Linksano shrugged and went back to his soldering.
A few minutes later, Harvey plunked the bowl, now reeking of garlic, onto the end table and plopped down on the other end of the sofa. “Someone oughtta sharpen the knives,” Harvey griped. “Someone’s gonna get hurt with knives that dull.” He unfolded his own pocketknife and started uncoiling silver wire from a spool.
“No one had silver shavings?” Linksano asked as Harvey scraped the knife against the gleaming strands.
“Not in town,” Harvey said. “We could’ve ordered some online, but they wouldn’t get here until Tuesday.” He frowned and doubled the wire over several times, making a zig-zag, and scraping the knife over that instead. Jagged curls of the soft metal fell into the pile of dehydrated and ground garlic.
“Is that all we’re loading these with?” Linksano probed. “Just garlic and silver?”
“There’s another herb in there that’s supposed to keep things-that-go-bump-in-the-night away,” Harvey said, gesturing towards the kitchen with his thumb, “but it smells like someone shoved an onion in a gym sock and left it in their locker for a year. I’m adding it last.” He paused. “And the Kid wanted to add a few drops of holy water, but I told him if he needed that, he was gonna have to go talk to a priest himself.”
Linksano blinked. He hadn’t been in a church in . . . it must have been his cousin’s wedding. Unbidden, the memory swam into view:
He was small, perhaps nine or ten, and his dress shoes, rarely worn, were too small for his growing feet; they pinched. He clung to his mother’s hand as they walked down the isles; the ceiling seemed ridiculously high, dizzying, and for what purpose? That was all empty space, useless for anything but wasting fuel for heating in winter and electricity for cooling in summer. The multicolored light streaming through the windows, though, that was impressive. His parents led him and his brother to a hard wooden bench with a barely padded back, shushed them, and told them to behave well; there’d be ice cream in it for them later if they did.
The next time he saw that church, it was years later, after the invasion had started. The front half, where the altar had been, was a smoking crater. The sun through a haze of smoke still sent dazzling motes of light through those windows, cracked and crazed through they were.
Linksano shook himself. “I don’t believe in that sort of stuff,” he scoffed reflexively. “Magic, at least, I can observe, even if I don’t fully comprehend it. But faith?”
“I don’t really believe in it either,” Harvey agreed, turning the pleated wire over. “Not anymore, anyway.” His eyes seemed to be focused on a faraway memory of his own. “Thing is, though, Goggles, I don’t think it matters whether you believe in it, or I believe in it. It matters whether the Kid believes in it, because he’s the magician; he’s the one who makes images become real, right? And it maybe matters whether the vampires believe it, because it’s affecting them. But mostly him.” He flexed his hand; the thin ribbons of silver that remained bent in odd directions, and a few of them broke. “You think that’s enough for this batch?”
“I would imagine so,” Linksano agreed, “although I really don’t have enough data to make a meaningful guess.”
Harvey nodded. “Okay, so I need to add a few pinches of that asafoetida stuff, and then stir this mess,” he muttered, less to Linksano than to himself.
“I’ll get it,” Linksano offered. He switched off the soldering iron and headed for the kitchen. The smell in there was nearly overpowering; Finevoice had left the opened garlic containers on the counter. Linksano grabbed one of the small jars and fled back to the den.
Harvey carefully screwed off the cap and picked out the foil covering the contents. The odor made the dried garlic seem tame; both of them flinched as it hit them. Harvey pinched his nose, tapped about a teaspoon into the bowl, slapped the lid back on, and stirred the addition into the pile of garlic and silver shavings.
“Well, I don’t know if it’ll repel vampires,” Linksano observed, “but it’s certainly repelling me.”
“You ain’t kidding,” Harvey agreed. “Get me a funnel so we can get this into your margarine mines and sealed back up again.”
Another trip to the kitchen successfully procured a funnel, and the bowl filled three tubs to the brim and a fourth a little more than halfway. Linksano snapped the lids on carefully, making sure the leads stayed where he’d put them and that the receivers were still activated.
“Do you need a hand with the silver?” Linksano offered. “I’d like to get as much of that nastiness sealed away as we can, as soon as possible.”
“Sure,” Harvey said, “if you can find a knife that’ll shave it.”
Linksano produced a scalpel from his pocket and grinned.
With the two of them working knee-to-knee, the vampire-repellent mines were all armed and secured before two hours had fully elapsed. There was half a bottle of the asafoetida still left; Harvey proposed burning it in celebration, but Linksano was pretty sure he knew what combustion would do to the aromatic compounds and vetoed that. They decided to leave it in Linkara’s study for him to deal with as he saw fit.
“And I think I’ll be heading back to the ship,” Linksano decided aloud. “At least until the air clears.”
“We’ll let you know when we’re ready to go to Phase Two,” Harvey said. “Go clear your nose, Goggles.”
As Linksano was about to activate the teleporter, Harvey turned back to him. “And thanks for the help,” Harvey continued. He paused, steepling his fingers. “That’s not the first time you’ve done that, is it?”
Linksano’s eyes shifted behind his protective eyewear. “No,” he finally said. “It isn’t. Although the payloads were - very different.”
“I’ll bet,” Harvey answered; his face twisted into something between sorrow and a smirk. “I forget sometimes,” he said quietly, “that I’m not the only one here who’s ever lost something important.”
Linksano looked away. “I can’t say I have any idea what it’s like to lose a child,” he mumbled.
“No,” Harvey replied. “Just your whole world.” He glanced at the pile of plastic tubs. “It’s not the same. But it’s something, you know? Makes me feel a little less alone, I guess.” He spread his hands. “Just a thought.”
“One worth pondering,” Linksano said. His hand darted to his pocket. “Here,” he went on, handing Harvey the gadget in his pocket, “just in case you need to set these off before I get back - if you hold the big red button down for a full count of five, all the detonators will start a ten-second countdown and then blow. I’ll explain how to set off one at a time when Linkara gets here, but just in case of emergency.”
Harvey’s face was unreadable. “Well, I sure hope I don’t have to use it,” he drawled, “but - thanks, Goggles.”
“Be back in a few,” Linksano said, and teleported out before he did anything else out of a misplaced sense of sentiment.
---
“I don’t understand how this happened,” Linksano moaned. A pair of cybermats attempted to slither between his feet; he brought a heel down hard on the tail of one and booted the other back into the squirming heap in front of him.
“Guessing from the data I’m reading from this one,” Pollo said, “when you updated their internal maintenance software, you raised the priority for both resource gathering and construction of extra cybermat replacement parts.”
“Well, yes,” Linksano agreed, grabbing another rogue robotic silverfish attempting to slither around the larger blue bot, “but that shouldn’t have caused - this.” He tossed the robotic vermin back onto the heap.
He and Pollo stood on opposite sides of a writhing pile of cybermats that nearly filled the central rotunda of auxiliary engineering; the chrome-plated hill was at least as tall as he was, maybe a decimeter or so taller, and perhaps twenty meters across.
It had been slightly shorter than him and no more than eighteen meters across ten minutes ago.
“I mean,” Linksano continued, “there aren’t any replication instructions in their active code. Yes, they’re programmed to eat junk and use it to make spare parts, but they’re supposed to store them in the warrens under the cargo bays. Those aren’t even new instructions; I just moved them up a few notches in their priority list because we were running short on replacement tail rotors and ‘90s Kid keeps leaving empty soda cans up here.” He grabbed a push-broom and shoved a pack of tiny cybermats, perhaps half the length of their full-sized brethren, back into the pile.
“The key phrase in what you just said is ‘active code’,” Pollo replied. A thin red beam flared from his chest and scanned another of the small squirming robo-critters. “They do have replication instructions, fully detailed ones. They’re just in a subroutine that can’t be accessed through execution of their usual code base.” The larger blue robot coasted a third of the way around the pile and turned to look up at Linksano.
“That was a very early part of the experiment,” Linksano explained. “I couldn’t figure out how to keep self-replicating bots from going into sorcerer’s apprentice mode, so I locked out the code; nothing ever calls that subroutine, and this isn’t full sorcerer’s apprentice mode - they’re not eating the ship itself.”
“No,” Pollo agreed, “they’re not. They’re also not attempting to eat any of you organics, despite your useful mineral content, so the replication instruction clearly isn’t the top of the priority stack.” He glanced behind them. “The furniture, on the other hand, appears to be fair game.”
Linksano sighed, swept up another small pile of cybermats, and ran a hand through his hair. “I never liked those chairs, anyway. So how is the replication subroutine getting called into the active programming at all?”
“A corrupted memory pointer that leads to a nonexistent instruction, as far as I can tell,” Pollo answered, edging away from one of the larger cybermats. “Since it doesn’t lead to an end state or a command that returns to their main programming, they ignore the missing instruction and execute the next chunk of code in memory.”
“And the nonexistent code just happens to be stored right before the replication subroutine in the cloud storage?” Linksano groaned.
Pollo nodded. “Not bad, for wetware,” he acknowledged.
Linksano glanced at the terminal on the secondary control panel behind him. “Can you patch the code?” he asked. “You’ll be faster at it than I would.”
“Patching the code is trivial; I’ve already done it,” Pollo replied. “The problem is propagating the patch to all of the cybermats with the corrupted instruction before they execute it again and re-activate the subroutine. They’re not all synchronized.”
Linksano rubbed his chin. “Is self-preservation still higher in the priority system than either scavenging or reproducing?”
“I believe so,” Pollo said, “but how does that help?”
“Can you upload and execute the code patch in the time it takes for them to evaluate a threat?” Linksano asked, searching through his pockets.
“Unless there are other issues with the code I haven’t seen yet, yes,” Pollo answered. “But bear in mind, I have self-preservation routines of my own.”
“You’ll be fine,” Linksano assured him, as he found a smooth cylinder with a button protruding from one end in the depths of his left pocket, under a used tissue and a small coil of silver wire. “Just get ready to hit them with it. I’ll keep them in one place for the time it takes.”
Pollo made a gesture that might have been meant to be a shrug and floated off towards the control panel. Linksano watched him closely, shoving at the edges of the pile with the broom as best he could with one hand. A scant few seconds later, Pollo nodded.
Linksano yanked the device from his pocket, jammed the button with his thumb, and threw it down; he’d meant to throw it at the edge of the cyberstack, but his aim was not entirely good and it ended up right at his feet. Before he could move, it let out an earsplitting electronic screech, a blinding flurry of colorful flashes, and a great deal of salmon-colored smoke. In a fraction of a second, visibility in the room was zero, and anyone who hadn’t been prepared would have been half-blinded and half-deafened.
Linksano had forgotten to put in earplugs. Well, at least he had the goggles, not that they let him see much.
Something, almost certainly a cybermat, brushed past his leg. Linksano jumped back reflexively, his heart leaping into his throat -
”Wayne, this isn’t funny,” he was pleading. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here!”
“- Wasn’t supposed to catch fire,” Wayne coughed. “I know it’s not funny; it’s going to burn the whole thicket down - we’ve got to stop it.” His brother wheezed and staggered against his shoulder; the air, already thick with mist, smelled of smoke and aromatic hydrocarbons.
“The fog will damp it down,” he argued. “We can call the fire department from the car, we’ve got to go, come on, Wayne!”
“-Breathed too much,” Wayne gasped. “Just supposed to be fuel, is all -” His brother stumbled.
Something very small and very fast ran past them, brushing his socks as it fled the growing orange light in front of them. He slung his sputtering brother over his shoulder and stumbled in the direction of the road.
Somewhere above him, the ship’s HVAC system rumbled into high gear. The harmless pink vapor thinned and vanished; the device emitted one last burble and went silent.
Cybermats crowded the entire floor of the room, whirring softly and twitching. Those closest to the door began queuing for an orderly exit, slithering out into the corridor in single file.
Pollo appeared at his elbow. “Upload and update successful,” he reported. “But why did you have a noncombustible, reusable flashbang grenade in your pocket?”
“Because combustible ones are dangerous,” Linksano said, shuddering.
Pollo opened his beak to say something, then closed it again. “We should find out how their pointers got corrupted in the first place,” Pollo finally suggested. “I could use a second pair of eyes on the data, and since you’re the original code architect -”
Linksano shook himself out of his reverie. “Linkara’s rewritten half the routines since then,” he protested, “but certainly, we can take a closer look at the revisions.” He peered down at the blue robot. “But wouldn’t Nimue be faster? Technically speaking, all wireless code transmissions between them are on her network; wouldn’t she have a full record of the data already?”
“Information: This unit does possess all the relevant data,” the console speaker announced. “However, given that this unit did not notice the corrupted code instruction when it occurred, there is a high probability that the perspective of a non-artificial processor would helpful in this process.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Pollo agreed.
Linksano leaned over and scooped up one of the straggling cybermats. “All right, then,” he agreed, “two AIs and one natural intelligence should be able to unravel this. Just - can you convince them to stay out from underfoot for a while?”
“I’ll give them a talking-to,” Pollo promised. “Now that they’re not stuck in a recursion loop, they should be much more reasonable.”
“Let’s hope so,” Linksano mused as he retrieved the flashbang and stuffed it back in his pocket.
---
“Duuuude!” squawked the speaker. “You missed a totally bitchin’ target practice today!”
“I know, I know,” Linksano grumbled, “but I’m terribly busy up here. I’ve got three different experiments running at once, and I can’t leave any of them for more than an hour or so.”
There was a pause on the other end of the connection, followed by a rustling noise, as if someone were opening a bag of chips too close to the microphone. “I mean, I don’t want to bug you or anything,” ‘90s Kid continued, “but Linkara said everyone needed to be trained on the new heavy weaponry.”
“I invented it,” sighed Linksano. “I know how it works, I assure you.”
“I don’t think you don’t know how to fix it,” ‘90s Kid insisted, “I just need to make sure you can hit the broad side of a van with it.”
“Later. When I’m not doing something more important,” Linksano growled, and closed the channel.
That was definitely a path he didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about. Beam weapons, grenades, exploding gadgets of every sort, all those were fine, but Linksano disliked slug-throwers for a great many reasons.
The pile of ammunition boxes was stacked high enough against the cave wall it was threatening to slump over. Wayne idly propped up the top box with a ladder and kept walking, deeper into their lair.
No, he told himself. That wasn’t happening. Not today; he’d spent far too much time dwelling on the past recently. It was illogical, it was distracting him from his scientific research, and all too often it ended with him wasting time cleaning traces of salt out of his goggles.
Unfortunately, today’s experiments were all of the long-running sort, requiring him to add chemicals, transfer a beaker, or take a measurement just frequently enough to keep him from starting a new project and just infrequently enough to leave him idle for long stretches. It was very hard not to let his mind wander, and the graphic novel he’d borrowed from Linkara’s shelves to read between experimental phases wasn’t helping. Not that it wasn’t interesting, but it was full of ‘80s and ‘90s pop culture references he didn’t get, and it was dramatically reminding him of the differences between this universe and his own.
Perhaps listing the differences and points of similarity would help keep him focused instead of following rabbit trails into soppy nostalgia. Linksano hunted for the dry-erase marker he kept with his pencils and wandered over to the whiteboard, making four columns; he scrawled “Shared,” “Here,” and “There” at the top of the first three and a question mark on the fourth. He picked up the trade paperback and started again from the beginning.
He was chewing absently on the cap of the marker when the door behind him opened. “Dude, is everything cool up here?” ‘90s Kid asked, in his usual foghorn-blare. “We got cut off, and when I tried to call you again, we didn’t get an answer - wait, you guys didn’t have Alice in Chains in your home universe? Bogus!”
Linksano turned, impressed despite himself; he wouldn’t have guessed that the idiot would have figured out what the lists stood for at all, much less so quickly. “It’s entirely possible that they still existed, and just didn’t ever have a large enough hit in my universe to come to my attention,” he explained. “This is entirely from my memory, and I didn’t start paying much attention to pop culture until the early ‘90s myself. What year did they start?”
“They actually started in the late ‘80s, but they didn’t chart until ‘Man in the Box’ in ’91,” ‘90s Kid explained. “Which was an awesome song, but their ’92 album, Dirt, was totally rockin’!”
“What ought I to know from that one, if they did exist in my world?” Linksano asked, curious despite himself.
“Um, they had a bunch of hits off of that one,” ‘90s Kid mused. “Probably ‘Rooster,’ though, I think that was the only one that made it into the top ten - wait, no, maybe ‘Down in a Hole’ did, too, but I’m pretty sure ‘Rooster’ charted higher.”
Linksano shook his head. “I don’t remember either of those two titles.”
‘90s Kid tugged his phone from his pocket. “Here, I know I have ‘Rooster’ in my playlist; you can listen to it and see if you recognize it. Let me scrub forward to the chorus; the beginning is kind of slow.” He handed an earphone to Linksano and scowled at the list. “You’re missing a bunch of really extreme and awesome stuff, dude.”
Linksano pressed the earphone to his left ear and was bombarded by a wall of distorted guitars. “Doesn’t sound familiar at all,” he admitted.
“What about Pearl Jam?” ‘90s Kid asked. “I don’t see them on the board, either.”
“Maybe?” Linksano scratched his head. “The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I’m not placing any specific songs.”
“Here, let me find one,” ‘90s Kid said, searching down the screen of his phone. “I don’t have their big early hit on here - what’s wrong with me, why don’t I have ‘Jeremy’ in my track list? It even had guns in it, although in a seriously downer kind of way - ah, here’s ‘Evenflow’. This is from their first big album, too; give it a listen.”
This was still all distorted guitars, but it was more melodic, and it did sound much more familiar; the line “can’t help when his happy looks insane” made Linksano smile despite himself. Then the verse turned into the chorus, and -
The junior high gym was a blizzard of crepe paper streamers and mirrored disco balls. He was there alone, for the first time; Wayne had just moved up to high school this year, along with their mutual crush. The lights were blinding, the sound deafening, and the punch was rapidly going flat. He wanted to shrink into his shoes and disappear, or at least call his mother and have her pick him back up. Parties were never his thing.
A girl and a boy from his history class were headed his way. He prepared himself to answer a question about the homework; that, at least, was familiar and comfortable. Instead, she leaned into his ear and half-shouted over the fading music of the previous song, “We saw you didn’t have a date. Do you want to come over and dance with us? None of us have dates either, we’re just here to hang out.”
That didn’t quite make sense to him, but it did seem preferable to hanging around by the bleachers. “Sure,” he said, and ambled over as the new song started up. By the time the chorus started, he thought he might even be having a little fun.
The music suddenly stopped. “Are you okay, dude?” ‘90s Kid asked? “You looked like you were about to start crying.”
“We had that band. I recognize that one,” Linksano explained. “I haven’t heard it in a long time, though.” He ran a hand down his face; at least that memory was reasonably pleasant, one of his few semi-successful attempts at socialization with his peers. “What other bands are important that I don’t have on my list?”
Excitedly, ‘90s Kid rattled off a startlingly comprehensive list of grunge bands and the following wave of alt-rock that took them as inspiration. As he described the connections between them and the various ways different labels had screwed them over, Linksano realized that he’d opened a Pandora’s box he hadn’t even known was there. He’d always thought of ‘90s Kid as being as comics-obsessed as Linkara was, but here was a completely different facet of his titular decade about which he had a similar depth of knowledge.
He wasn’t about to complain; ‘90s Kid talking about music was far more interesting than ‘90s Kid talking about identical overmuscled dudes and anatomically impossible women. He took copious notes; the board filled up remarkably quickly.
As he flipped it over, ‘90s Kid paused for breath. “What about movies?” he asked. “Did you guys have the same movies we do here?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Linksano admitted. “We - I stuck to my lab from a pretty early age and didn’t go out to the movies much. If it didn’t come out for home video, I probably didn’t see it.”
“Titanic? Forrest Gump? The Matrix?” ‘90s Kid threw out.
“There have been multiple movies about the sinking of the Titanic,” Linksano observed, “although I vaguely remember one coming out when I was still dealing with the jocks and mushbrains in high school. Sp- I mean, a girl I sort of liked was sort of into it.”
“That would make sense,” ‘90s Kid nodded. “That one was kind of a chick flick, although it was still really good.”
“I definitely remember the Maxtrix films, mostly because the first one had some interesting ideas about cognitive science, but then the second one was terrible,” Linksano continued. “The middle one you said doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Reservoir Dogs?” ‘90s Kid suggested. “Although I didn’t get to see that one in theaters, either; I was too young.”
“I think so,” Linksano replied. “At least, I recognize the name.”
After another round of questions, the second side of the whiteboard was full and the timers on two of Linksano’s experiments were beeping. He left the marker with ‘90s Kid and leapt back to the instrument panels, making the necessary adjustments and entering the new data into his spreadsheets. He swapped out two racks of test tubes, made sure the temperature settings were still within tolerances, and returned to find ‘90s Kid drawing a timeline at the bottom of the board.
“So here’s what we’ve got so far,” ‘90s Kid said. “Everything that we’re both sure about prior to about 1986 is shared. There are a few things between ’86 and ’91 that might be actual differences, but we’re not as sure on those; that could be stuff one or both of us just didn’t ever see for some reason. But you have pretty clear memories of stuff after about ’92 that I can’t find any record of on the web, and there are also things you should definitely know if they existed in your world after ’92 that you don’t.”
“So you think we have a shared timeline until the ‘80s?” Linksano asked. “We know there are trivial differences in physical constants between your universe and mine; that’s one of the reasons so many of my early experiments failed, because I didn’t know how to adjust for them.” He ducked his head, blushing slightly. “It still happens once in a while. How could we have identical, or even nearly-identical, timelines for popular media if there are such fundamental scientific differences?”
“I don’t know, dude,” ‘90s Kid replied, “but I’d’ve expected differences in physical constants to have radical differences on stuff like just basic evolution. Why are you human and not a dinosaur, or something even more extreme, like a giant snake with spider legs?”
Linksano shut his mouth and blinked. “That’s actually a good point,” he admitted. “I also think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you use the word ‘radical’ in a non-slang sense.”
“Shyeah,” ‘90s Kid chided, “I also know what it means in math, too. I’m not totally uneducated.” He glanced over Linksano’s shoulder at the console. “You said you had three experiments running; I saw you fix up two of them.”
Linksano checked the timer. “The third one won’t need attention for another half hour. Why?”
“I thought,” ‘90s Kid said, shrugging, “that maybe we could at least test you out on the new big guns in the holodeck. It’s not the same as live fire practice, but it’s better than nothing, I can at least give you some pointers, and if something boils over in here, you’re still on the ship and can fix it.”
“Not a bad idea,” Linksano agreed. “I think I can spare a few minutes for that, but let me program the holodeck, all right? I don’t need a full Danger Room scenario.”
“Aww, but it’s more radical that way!” ‘90s Kid complained as they headed towards the turbolift.
---
The ceiling did not move. It remained the same color and shape no matter how he turned his head or how long he stared at it. It did not fade in and out of existence, it was not growing larger or smaller over time, and it showed no signs of changing its luminosity.
After the autopsy of an outer god yesterday, this was all very comforting. Organs were much the same in any organism, even paranormal ones, but certain things still bent the perceptions of a mere three-dimensional being (well, four counting time, but as far as he could tell the Entity-kin had similar relationships to time as mortals did) in somewhat distressing ways.
The rest of the team had decided not to leave him on the ship by himself after the incident, so after storing what was left of the King of Worms’s remains in the ship’s cyrostasis chamber, here he was in the bunkroom of the apartment, in his own bed, still staring at the ceiling.
It was almost enough to make him miss the days when the arrival of Lord Vyce to conquer one’s entire universe was the worst thing that could possibly happen.
He’d slept a bit, in dribs and drabs, but between the distress caused by poking among the internal organs of a Thing Which Should Not Be, the curious amnesia he’d suffered for the past several months as a captive of the platinum masks, and the larger question of what could possibly be lurking in his employer’s mind and soul that could scare said Thing Which Should Not Be to death, mostly he’d just been paralyzed by anxiety. The others seemed to understand, or at least had left him mostly alone.
The noise at the door was too soft to be a knock. “Come in,” he called anyway.
After a soft shuffling, a voice called back, “I can’t actually reach the doorknob.”
“Give me a moment,” he answered. Carefully, he levered himself upright and maneuvered around to the door; the room was a little cramped for three beds, even if one of them was a loft. He supposed it was fortunate that Boffo had his own apartment.
Linksano opened the door and saw no one. He looked down, expecting to see Pollo, but no, it was Eliza.
“Hey,” she said, looking up at him from the floor. “Um, I know this isn’t the best time, what with all the excitement lately, but can we talk?”
“I don’t see why not,” he answered. He had only the vaguest idea what she might want to talk about, but anything to distract himself from his current state of mind would be a blessing at this point. He picked his way back across the room and sat on the edge of the bed.
She jumped up next to him and found a spot on the wrinkled bedspread. It was all too obvious that he’d been sleeping, or mostly not sleeping, on top of the covers, but she didn’t seem to mind. Instead, she sat back and peered up at him. “I guess we should start with - what should I call you?” she asked.
“Just Linksano is fine,” he said cautiously. “You’re welcome to use the title if you want, but I don’t see much reason to be formal.”
The blue foam lizard tilted her head at him. “So, not ‘Dad,’ then,” she said.
Linksano opened his mouth to protest, but the words died in his throat.
“Because,” she continued, “I mean, technically you’re the closest thing to a parent I have, but then you made me to be a gift for someone else. Was I even supposed to be sapient?”
“Well, yes, you were,” Linksano said, “but that was more a side effect of the magic part than a direct result of the science part of bringing you to life. And you yourself weren’t the gift; it was more the - the idea of having a living foam lizard . . .” He trailed off and stared past her for a moment. “As I said to Linkara at the time, I was so inspired by the idea that I didn’t think it through completely.” He’d always had a touch of guilt about her, although it was less about her existence and more about Linkara’s reaction to it. He’d so hoped Linkara would find the concept as thrilling as he had.
“Well, yeah, and lots of humans are around because their parents made poor decisions that seemed really exciting at the time,” Eliza pointed out. “And most of them turned out okay. But there was all this holiday stuff, and then things started getting weird, and then you were kidnapped and replaced by a robot who didn’t seem to want to deal with me. We never really got to talk about things, and honestly, I wasn’t sure how I felt about all of you guys.”
“And you had every right to feel that way,” Linksano admitted. “This past year has been very, very complicated, even by our standards.”
“So this is sort of the first time I’ve really been able to bring it up,” Eliza said. “I don’t really know what kind of relationship we’re supposed to have. You sort of made me, then handed me off to someone else, and then you disappeared for a while.”
“I guess that does sort of fit the ‘deadbeat dad’ stereotype,” Linksano mused. “That certainly wasn’t my intent, and I hope you don’t hold the kidnapping part against me in terms of my not being around.” There was that guilt again; still, he was glad she existed, and he hoped she was glad to exist.
“No, that would be dumb,” she replied. “And it’s not like I was a helpless child or anything. You created me with an adult mind and an awful lot of stuff that I don’t know how I know.”
“RNA neuron copying,” Linksano said. “Mostly from me, which is why I was surprised that you turned out to be female.”
“Oh.” She shifted position, resting her wire on the headboard. “I guess that sort of follows. If you thought I was going to be more or less a copy of yourself as a foam lizard - although, let me remind you that there is nothing about that subordinate clause that makes sense - I can see why you figured I’d be fine on my own.”
“Still, in retrospect it all seems very rude of me.” Linksano shifted so he could look at her more directly. “Do you feel like I abandoned you? I don’t blame you if you do.”
She shifted uncomfortably on the covers. “A little? Part of it was me running off and hiding until I got a better reading on, well, everything,” she said. “I mean, have you ever even had a pet before?”
”Don’t touch it,” Wayne warned, holding one hand above the terrarium. “I haven’t figured out how to keep it from biting yet.”
He pushed past his brother and held out one hand. The gecko jumped from its branch and curled around his wrist; its scales flickered and it disappeared. “He’s not going to bite,” he said, smiling at his brother. “He likes me. How did you make him invisible?”
“I’ll explain later,” Wayne said, smiling. “Happy birthday, Oscar!”
“Should I not have asked that?” Eliza asked, her voice betraying a measure of concern her foam features couldn’t show.
“No, no, it’s fine,” Linksano answered. “Yes, I had a pet for quite some time as a child. My - my brother gave it to me.”
“I didn’t even know you had a brother,” she observed. “I mean, even if you’re not my parent, we’re still on the same team now, and I barely know anything about you.”
He sighed. It was true, but how well did anyone on the team know him? “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “If you want to call me ‘dad,’ you’re welcome to do so, but I certainly don’t feel like I’ve earned the title.”
She shuffled closer to him, her tail dragging against the wrinkles in the coverlet. “Tell you what,” she said, “let’s start with trying out being friends, first.”
“I’m not any better at that,” Linksano warned. He reached down and held his hand out flat, not quite sure what he was expecting.
She stepped onto the palm of his hand. “So far, I haven’t shown much talent for it, either,” she replied. “Maybe I got that from you. But I think we can work on that, don’t you?”
He lifted her so he could look her in the eyes, goggles and tiny sunglasses notwithstanding. “I expect we can,” he said. “I do feel responsible for you, in a way, even if I’ve done a bad job of showing it.”
“I figured you did.” Eliza wrapped her tail around his wrist. “The Linksano-bot sort of acted that way, at least when he wasn’t trying to betray us all.”
“Did he?” Linksano studied her carefully. She looked exactly like she had when he’d been working miracles of science on her. “Perhaps he was a better copy than I’ve been giving him credit for.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “Anyway, hug it out?”
Linksano did his best; the size difference meant that her front legs weren’t much use for even such an awkward embrace, and the wire in her spine got in the way, too. Still, it did make him feel a bit better, and she seemed to relax a little, too.
“I’m getting Pollo to make some coffee, and I don’t think you’ve had anything to eat or drink all day. Do you want to come out to the den and have a cup?” she suggested. “I could probably get him to make toast, too.”
Linksano’s stomach grumbled at the thought. He’d been too churned up by the autopsy to even think about eating before they’d all put him to bed last night; it had been most of a day since he’d had anything at all. “That’s probably a good idea,” he agreed, setting her back on the floor. “Just - let’s not talk about -”
“Certainly not while we’re eating,” she said, her snout wrinkling slightly. “That’s just gross.”
He followed her out into the hallway, towards other voices and the smells of a late breakfast.
---
The teleporter dropped him in a nondescript-looking living room with a slightly tacky couch. The blond on the couch looked up at him dully; the bottle in front of him was only a beer, but he still managed to look like an angry drunk. “Linkara said he was sending someone over,” Jaeris grumbled, “but he didn’t say who. I was expecting the robot.”
“We think we might have a lead on getting you home,” Linksano explained, taking several scanners out of a slightly dirty tote bag with the molecular structure of theobromine printed on the side. “But I needed some more readings to be sure. Linkara and Pollo may be coming later to help with the mana-spectrum diffuser; there’s more magic involved with that one than I can wrap my head around.”
“Readings of what, exactly?” Jaeris asked, sitting up slightly straighter.
“You, primarily, and then anything else that’s native to your home dimension.” Linksano adjusted a dial on the temporal differentiometer. “If I’m going to fix your anchor, I need to know exactly what its original settings were, but it’s too damaged to read directly.”
“Fat chance,” Jaeris snorted. “You don’t even have that kind of technology on your world here.”
Linksano bit back his first response. “They don’t even have that kind of technology, or that kind of magic, on this world,” he agreed blandly. “We had that kind of technology on my world, but not so much the magic part. Vyce had both, and I have access to his entire databank through the ship.”
Jareis sat all the way up and leaned forward, his braid falling over his shoulder. “Wait,” he protested, “This isn’t your world, either?”
“No,” Linksano explained, “it isn’t.” He ran the differentiometer over Jaeris slowly from head to toe. “I got here when this universe’s Doctor Insano opened a hypertime rift and then more or less just left it open, but I’d been hopping universes for years before that using a device we made; having a ready-made opening in the fabric of the universe just made it much easier.”
“And here I figured you for a native,” Jaeris gasped. “Do you have an anchor?”
“That’s one aspect of dimension-traveling where your world was way ahead of us,” Linksano admitted. “No, I can only go where the differences between universes are small enough to allow basic biological compatibility.”
“It’s real new,” Jaeris said proudly. “We figured it out, me and my wife and our buddies in the resistance.” He paused to let Linksano finish his scan. “Anyway, everything here, except for the other magic guns and some of the parts in Sierra, is native to my homeworld, although we adjusted some stuff so I could still live here after I was stuck attuned to your- I mean, Linkara’s world instead.”
Linksano turned in place, running the scanner beam along everything that wasn’t Sierra’s terminal. “I figured that would be the case,” he said. “Is there anything that hasn’t been altered so as not to be toxic to you? The better an idea I can get of what the physical constants of your universe are, the more likely I’ll be able to replicate them.”
“Sierra’s probably got most of that in memory somewhere,” Jaeris offered as he got to his feet.
“Pollo will get that from him when they arrive, then,” Linksano suggested. “The two AIs can transfer data much more efficiently talking directly with each other.”
Jaeris tugged a pair of heavy gloves on and removed an acoustic guitar case from the hallway past the kitchen. “I didn’t have this one changed over,” he explained, “because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that it wouldn’t damage her, and I really only play electric these days anyway.” He flipped open the case, revealing an acoustic guitar that showed signs of being both heavily played and well cared for.
“Excellent!” Linksano ran the differentiometer over it several times. “Let me go ahead and get readings on it with all of these,” he suggested, “and then we’ll only need to get it out once more, when we’re using the magical scanner.”
“Sounds fine,” Jaeris agreed. “Just don’t take too long; if you can get along on Linkara’s world without an anchor or a suit, she’s not going to agree with you too well, either.”
Linksano nodded and switched devices. The data he was gathering from the guitar showed spikes at several quantum levels that were definitely not of this Earth, or his, either.
By the time he was done, he felt a little dizzy. “Go ahead and put it up for now,” he said. “I think those readings were sufficient for the moment.”
“Yeah, I’m getting a headache, too,” Jaeris agreed as he set the guitar back in its case. “That’s how big the differences are. Our worlds are deadly poison to each other; just breathing the dust is enough to mess with you.”
“Everything on this Earth tastes wrong,” Linksano blurted. “It’s not huge, it’s like the difference between sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, but nothing tastes quite right and it drives me crazy!”
“Oh, my God, I know!” Jaeris’s hands flew to the sides of his face. “And you’ll be eating something that ought to be familiar, and there’s just something wrong with it that you can’t quite place. Smells, too, although for me some of those are just way different.”
“Not all scents, for me,” Linksano interrupted, “but some of them. I thought I was going to gag the first time I smelled what these people call lavender.” He swung the detector around the room, pointing it at several objects.
“That’s not one of the ones that’s way off for me, just wrong in a subtle way,” Jaeris observed. “What about lemons and limes? Lemons are almost right for me, but limes are way, way off.”
Linksano shook his head. “Lemons are one of the few things that are indistinguishable for me, and limes are relatively close to what I expect; it’s oranges that are different. Well, and grapefruit, but I don’t like either version of grapefruit, so it doesn’t matter much.” He switched detectors again; this device was smaller and more strictly directional. “You’re a musician - what about music?”
“Well, Pete Best never got fired from our version of the Beatles, so we never got what are their last two albums here - they broke up a lot earlier,” Jaeris answered. “Other than them, Elvis, and Chuck Berry, the genres of pop music are all the same, and all the instruments are pretty much identical, but all the artists and most of the individual songs are different.”
“Interesting!” Linksano aimed the detector at Jaeris’s head, then his midsection. “We’ve determined that popular music doesn’t diverge significantly between my world and this one until between twenty-five and twenty years ago. There’s less overall congruence between popular film and literature, but the parallels are still close.”
“That’s true for my world and clothing,” Jaeris said eagerly. “I was stunned when I saw some photos of ‘60s and ‘70s fashions here; they reminded me so much of home I had to go lie down for a while. Our movies are completely different, though; the western is still really big back home, and so are pirate films. They’re kind of a whole genre.”
“And all three of our worlds seem to have parallel language evolution,” Linksano realized aloud, “which is extremely peculiar.”
Jaeris’s eyes widened. “You’re right!” he nearly shouted. “What are the odds that three parallel universes would all have nearly identical versions of English?”
“Four,” Linksano corrected. “Vyce speaks English, too, and he did before he destroyed my world, so either it’s his native language or he learned it on the way.” He paused. “Then there’s Mechakara’s home universe, but a close enough parallel to have an alternate version of Linkara would naturally have English, too.”
“Wait,” Jaeris said, holding out a hand to stop him. “Vyce destroyed your universe? He could do that?”
“Well,” Linksano sighed, putting away the detector, “technically it’s not destroyed, in the sense that it still exists and people still live there, but he did a lot of damage conquering it, and then even more trying to root out the Entity.” He sat on the edge of the couch, rummaging in the bag for a USB stick to store his results. “I took a look at its current state once, while Vyce thought I was working for him. I shouldn’t have. It was - demoralizing.”
“Aw, man.” Jaeris sat back down a few feet away. “That sucks. At least I still have a little hope the Resistance can win, especially if I ever do manage to get back with the guns.” He gestured at the pile on the coffee table. “But now that Vyce is gone, can’t you go back and start patching things up?”
“Technically, yes, I could,” Linksano agreed, “but almost everyone I knew is dead. My hometown was a center of the resistance movement against him; it’s now a smoking crater.” His eyes burned behind the goggles, but for some reason he kept talking. “And I’m not the same person I was before Vyce came, either. Adjusting to losing my home, my family, the only girl I ever really loved - let’s just say not all of the adjustments were the healthiest.” He waved at his own chest. “I started off searching the multiverse for the power to beat Vyce, and instead I found world after world he’d already subjugated. After a while, I figured the only way to stand up to him was to emulate him, to take over worlds of my own. And then that became its own goal, to conquer my own world through the power of science.” He shrugged. “Linkara broke me of that, at least for the moment, but I’m not the man I was. Partly because that me, before, wasn’t really a man yet.”
Jaeris let out a long, low whistle. “Sorry to get so heavy,” he whispered. “I didn’t realize.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Linksano replied, managing a small smile despite the weight of all these memories. “Just know you’re not as alone as you think.”
“I guess not!” Jaeris leaned back against the couch cushions. “So, tell me more about music in your universe. Were people weird about disco there? Because let me tell you, when I read about how this universe dealt with it, I just about flipped my lid.”
When Linkara and Pollo arrived, they found the mad scientist and the renegade gunslinger still there on the sofa, raving about the respective careers of Britney Spears and Katy Perry. A pile of empty beer bottles littered the table.
“Should I be concerned about that?” Linkara asked.
“I don’t see why you should concern yourself with manufactured female pop singers,” Pollo replied. “That seems like it’s well within other producers’ purview.”
“No, not that,” Linkara chided. “I mean our two dimension-hopping former antagonists getting along like gangbusters there.” He wrinkled his nose. “And the fact that they’re both kind of drunk.”
Pollo turned to look at him while he interfaced with a silent and sulking Sierra. “Surely it had occurred to you how much they had in common,” he commented.
“Actually, it hadn’t,” Linkara admitted. “Although I guess it should have.”
“It’s all good,” Jaeris said, slurring just a bit. “We ain’t scheming or anything, we’re just enjoying having someone to talk to who gets it, for once.”
“Speak for yourself,” Linksano argued from his spot wedged between two cushions. “I’m always scheming about something. Just not against anyone at the moment, except maybe Insano.”
“Are you feeling any better?” Pollo asked the scientist. “You’ve seemed to be under a lot of stress lately.”
“A little,” Linksano admitted, “but having people around has helped. Ah, counting AIs and the foam lizard I brought to life as people.”
“As well you should,” Linkara agreed. He set a hand on his tipsy mad scientist’s shoulder. “Let’s get the scan done, and then if you and Jaeris want to keep comparing notes, you can take the rest of the afternoon off. You’ve put in a lot of overtime lately, and you’ve earned a break.”
“Right.” Linksano shook his head, trying to sober up. “Mana-spectrum diffuser’s over there by the tote bag. I don’t deserve you guys.” He wiped his eyes under the goggles; they appeared to be leaking again.
“Let’s not worry about what you deserve,” Linkara said gently as he found the diffuser and pressed it into Linksano’s hands. “Let’s just worry about making sure everyone’s where they need to be.”
“Of course,” Linksano agreed, taking the diffuser and handing Linkara back the magical linkage.
Jaeris was going home; he was going to make sure of it. And he was staying here. It wasn’t quite home yet, but one day, someday, it would be.