The building's inhabitants, by and large, were good-natured enough about the quarantine not to panic. Granted, there was that unnerving little war on the 2,012th floor to consider, but that was Security's problem, and no one had any doubt that Security would get things under control. Anyway, the best bars and restaurants and night clubs in the building were hundreds of thousands of floors away from the fighting, so it was easy to go on as though nothing was the matter. And as for the quarantine... well, any upstanding member of the Association could tell you that if you spent enough time traveling the highways and byways of reality, eventually you'd encounter something you couldn't explain by any means available. And eventually, you'd encounter something that could easily and even haphazardly snuff you out -- in this case, the prospect of starvation from within the quarantine field. You had to take these things as part of the risk that you automatically assumed when you left the seemingly safe confines of your home world and joined UAIT in the first place.
But there were some things that even the oldest of old school, grizzled UAIT veterans were never entirely prepared for. The roughnecks in Security were certainly not prepared for what came next; when the announcement began, weapons clattered to the floor all over the building as the voice made its simple proclamation. Jayce from the Religion department had a sense for what was going on, but even she found it hard to believe, after years of training as a professional agnostic. As Dr. X tried to relax after his exhausting rescue, the voice managed to send shivers up and down his spine. In the Command Center, Agent Gray listened to the voice with a calm dispassion, as he realized deep within him that this was the beginning of the end. And as Satan finished up a meal in one of the more obscure bistros in the building, he knew he would have to face her, as much as the notion gripped him with terror.
Her voice filled the building, from top to bottom, reaching every individual's ears as though she were standing right there in the room. It felt as though she were somehow both shouting to everyone all at once, and whispering to each person individually, quietly, directly. They didn't simply hear her words; her words were *felt*, deeply and distinctly. For most it was a terrifying situation, to be touched so intensely by this ethereal, awesome announcement.
*GREETINGS, MORTALS,* she said to them. *AFTER YEARS OF SLEEP AND IMPRISONMENT, I HAVE AWAKENED AND REJOINED YOU AS A DENIZEN OF THE MATERIAL PLANE... AND I FIND YOU ARE ALL STILL IMPRISONED AS WELL. YOU SHALL NEVER KNOW THE UNKNOWABLE WHILE STILL TRAPPED INSIDE YOUR SIMPLE BODIES.* Long pause. *I SHALL RELEASE YOU ALL, ONE BY ONE, AND YOUR DIVINE SPARK SHALL BECOME MINE. AND THEN, I SHALL CARRY YOU TRIUMPHANTLY INTO THE PRESENCE OF THE UNKNOWN GOD, AND YOU SHALL KNOW PEACE ONCE AGAIN.*
As a demonstration of her power, she reached out from the 23rd sub-basement and spread herself across the first floor, reaching each and every individual on that floor with her otherworldly touch. The rest of the building was somehow able to see the events unfolding on the 1st floor as though they were floating above the scene, witnessing from an omniscient point of view. Her tendrils reached inside them, and unlocked the spark of their souls from the prison of their bodies. And then, as the divine essence of so many thousands of individuals floated free of so many thousands of bodies, she scooped them all up in her spider web and devoured them, adding them to her own majesty, nourishing her after all these years of stasis.
*DO NOT BE FRIGHTENED,* she said, *FOR YOU SHALL FEEL NO PAIN, ONLY THE EXQUISITE JOY OF RELEASE. I SHALL COME TO YOU WITH AN OPEN HEART, AND YOU SHALL REJOICE IN YOUR FREEDOM. THEN, WHEN I AM STRONG WITH YOUR ENERGY, I SHALL BURST THIS SO-CALLED QUARANTINE, AND TAKE US HOME WHERE WE BELONG.* Long pause. *PREPARE FOR MY ARRIVAL, FOR I AM COMING SOON TO EACH OF YOU.*
And then, a deathly silence all throughout the building reverberated in each of them. And then, moments later, the building's inhabitants finally, at long last, began to panic.
Nicholas Solitude rode the elevator alone to the peace conference floor. He hadn't been able to find a Security team willing to join him, not simply because the last Security detail who escorted him up to the conference had gotten brutally killed. No, it was also because virtually everyone in the building was frantically attempting to make peace with the idea of whatever was making its way up from the 23rd sub-basement, and Agent Gray had all Security agents on alert to try to stop it. But the races involved in the Concrescent War had agreed to one last session, to make one last attempt to sort out their differences, and Nicholas felt morally compelled to participate. He had only barely been released from Medical, and felt incredibly weak, but internal reserves of energy and commitment would have to suffice to get him through this session.
There were no reporters this time to greet him as he stepped out of the elevator. Slowly and steadily he made his way across the empty banquet hall next to the conference room. Judging by the maelstrom of sounds emanating from within the auditorium, the other ambassadors were already present, awaiting his arrival. He had received word through separate channels that at least a couple of the races were apologetic over the injuries he had suffered in their last session; that was a good sign, all things considered, since typically none of these races evinced even the slightest sign of a typical human emotion.
He strode through the door into the darkness of the auditorium, and made his way to his chair. The anxiety among the races was significantly higher than usual, undoubtedly due to the strange announcement they'd experienced a few hours ago. One by one, he felt them violently probe his mind for an access point, and not for the first time he resisted the urge to vomit as they clawed and burrowed their way inside his psyche. His mind became a switchboard, an organic Rosetta stone, and one by one he connected them, and interpolated his own perspective into the discussion.
One thing became immediately clear: the shadows, as a race, had managed to become extremely unpopular.
*Yes, we've heard the rumors about the virus in the Magus system,* some of them hissed, *and we know you're behind the war on the 2,012th floor. How can you possibly expect peace with any of us when you wage such treachery here on neutral ground?*
The shadows had no clear answer. They stonewalled, attempted to deny, and Nicholas felt the intense heat of disbelief among the other 22 races. The argument escalated rapidly, beyond his ability to keep up. He attempted to interject, "Please, now of all times, we need cooperation here!" But they weren't listening. The shadow ambassadors were only a handful here against the ambassadors from 22 other species, and Nicholas could feel the shadows cower as the 22 others suddenly, somehow, finally reached a common ground. They stretched out in a blistering, magnificent volley of violence, hauling out the shadow ambassadors and assaulting them with merciless cruelty. But Nicholas knew, despite his innate pacifism, that this was just; the shadows had indeed participated in immense treachery, and this peace process was doomed as long as they were a part of it. In a flash, it was over, and the resulting hum of tentative, nascent tolerance was unusual and rewarding.
*The shadows have agents all throughout the building,* Nicholas learned.
*They have been aiding the menace in the 23rd sub-basement. It is far too late to stop them. They are as powerless as we, despite the fact that thousands of their agents have managed to sneak inside this building, while we have only our ambassadorial guards to keep us safe.*
It was the wrong time to wonder why Security hadn't noticed any of this. Clearly Magus' corruption was the damning point of failure in UAIT's defenses.
"Do any of you understand what is happening in the 23rd sub- basement?" he asked. "Have any of you encountered this being before?"
A flurry of information flooded his awareness. They all had names for her, and they all had their separate mythologies which described her. His head throbbed as he attempted to sort out a consistent story from everything they told him. In some civilizations, she was a figure of benign wisdom, in others a terrifyingly immature goddess of enormous power and little discretion. In most variations, she had been separated from communion with a higher power -- perhaps the Unknown God that she had referred to in her announcement?
"What can we do?" he asked helplessly.
*Make peace,* they replied, *for she is inevitable.*
And with that, the peace conference was over, once and for all.
Andrea Change and Trick Start materialized on a beach. As far as Andrea could tell, she was standing on the most perfect, beautiful, idealized beach she could have possibly imagined. The ocean was gorgeous, stretching out to the horizon in a beautiful, calm expanse, and the trees and bushes that dotted the beach itself left her with an impression of immaculate wilderness that was undoubtedly too good to be true. She looked down at herself, and found that she was as solid as she would have expected herself to be. One thing was different, though: she was no longer drunk in any capacity.
"Let me guess," she said. "The Island of the Dance?"
"In the flesh, so to speak," he replied.
She surveyed the scene carefully. The most obvious landmark of the Island was seeing the enormous silhouette of the UAIT building, rising up into the clouds, perhaps a mile or two away. She remembered he had mentioned that the UAIT building had an exposed face on the Island. As for the rest of the Island... she could see a wide range of buildings rising above the tree line around the UAIT building, but the architecture was very foreign, exotic in a way that she couldn't describe.
"How did we get here?" she asked. "How did we get past the quarantine field?"
"We didn't," he replied.
"I don't understand," she said simply.
"I'm about to tell you a secret, Andrea," he said, "something that we've successfully kept secret from Security for hundreds of years."
She nodded. Secrets from Security were an inherently good thing, in her mind.
"This Island exists in a very strange dimension of reality," he began to explain. "I think I told you that I was part of a strange artists' collective, didn't I? Well... we were working on a grand collaborative fiction. Hundreds of us. I guess you could say the fiction developed a life of its own. We created this place out of our imaginations, but... I don't think any of us expected it to become a real, tangible place."
"Where are we?" she asked.
"We're inside the master computer of the UAIT building," he replied. "Our entire collaborative fiction is stored as an archive within Magus. At some point, we realized we could escape directly into our fictional world, and so we did. Hard to resist, as I'm sure you can imagine."
"So... we haven't escaped the quarantine field at all," she said.
"We have not."
"How is that possible?" she asked. "How do you enter your own fiction?"
"Well, that's an interesting question. I guess I may as well tell you everything, since you're here already."
"Trick, if you haven't already figured out that you can trust me, you need to get that into your head," she said.
"Certainly I trust you," he replied. "At the moment, at least. You could someday regain your memory of your old self, however, and turn out to be a treacherous rat."
She rolled her eyes at him.
"Hey, I'm sure many rotten people would seem perfectly pleasant if they had all memory of their personality wiped," he said with a smile.
They started walking off the beach, heading toward the outline of the city that rose up around the UAIT building. She waited patiently as they walked, and took in the sights. She wondered if she'd ever visited a tropical island before, and not for the first time felt frustration rise up in her as she attempted to remember her life before arriving at the UAIT building. They climbed up a dune and approached a cobblestone city street, headed toward the town in the distance.
"Does that city have a name?" she asked.
"SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS," he replied. "Don't worry, I don't expect you to remember that. Anyway... how did we enter our own fiction... well, I wasn't part of the initial group that made the discovery. The collective had been working on a long-term collaborative fiction project, primarily using the Internet as a method of communication. They spent years back on Earth building up a long form storyline, which eventually took over their lives. I joined them a couple years into the project. They'd been actively writing themselves into the story as characters, and I guess I found the experience so compelling that I couldn't resist.
"Then I started meeting them, face to face in the real world. Actually, they started finding me, one by one. They never revealed where they were living, but they all seemed to know exactly how to find me. After meeting perhaps a dozen of them, I began to realize something very bizarre was going on. I started asking pointed questions, questions that had nothing to do with the plot of the so-called story we were working on. No, don't ask what the story was about... the plot was a throwaway plot. What was important was the environment we built around the story.
"Somehow they knew an alien war was headed to the planet, and that we had to leave. I asked them, *how* do you know there's an alien war headed to the planet. They said, we'll only tell you if you're willing to join us. I said, can I bring my mom, my sister, and the two or three actual friends I had? They said, sure, but that's where we draw the line. I said, fine, we'll pack up. They said, great, be ready by tomorrow night around midnight. We'll tell you everything you need to know and then we're getting off this rock."
They began passing other individuals on their way into and out of the city of SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS. Many of them nodded or waved to Trick. Their modes of dress covered a wide range of styles, some that seemed vaguely familiar to her, and others that seemed entirely unusual. They were all human, though.
"So, I gathered up my mother, my sister, my friends. We didn't really pack much, since we weren't at all sure what was about to happen. My friends thought I had gone mad, and were drinking and making fun of me most of the night. Until they showed up. Three members of the collective. Dressed like fucking madmen, to say the least. They made some slightly pretentious announcement about how I had been picked to join them because of my commitment to the craft of writing, and my meaningful contribution to the ongoing storyline... and then, they got down to business. "They explained that a couple years back, the collective had made contact with an alien race. This alien race had developed a strangely symbiotic relationship with human beings over the many, many years since humanity had developed written language. The best way to comprehend this race's impact on humanity is to think about punctuation marks as a group. Commas, periods, semicolons, diacritical marks, the whole spread of marks used to add meaning to the written word. Now imagine this group of punctuation marks as a species, an alien race unto itself... a race that interacted directly with human thought, and that somehow, on some level, *controlled* human thought by making it possible in the first place. I mean, really, if all our words just flowed together without interruption, without emphasis, how much sophistication would our communication actually have?"
"Are you serious?" she asked.
"Believe it or not," he replied. "They were the ones who had figured out a way of transliterating the human form into text, and back again. The collective's early founders had written their story in such a way that they managed to actually establish contact with this race. It wasn't easy at first... mutual distrust, until the two races got to know each other. But now... well, let's just say that life is significantly richer knowing that every time you end a sentence or separate one phrase from another, you're drawing on the energy of a living entity to help organize your thoughts."
"That doesn't sound 'richer' to me," she said. "That sounds creepy."
"Well, you get used to it," he replied.
"So your collective... and this... this alien race of punctuation marks... you're all living inside the UAIT master computer?"
"Exactly," he said. "And we've definitely got a major problem to deal with."
"Oh really?"
"The virus that the shadows introduced into the system... if it proceeds unchecked, it will destroy the archive that contains our world, our Island."
She was silent for a moment, as she considered the implications.
"So what are you going to do?" she asked.
"There's a council starting," he replied. "We'll see if the collective has any good ideas."
And with that, they both fell silent for a long while, as they wandered into the city. The city itself seemed to Andrea to be a strange mixture of modern and archaic stylings, though she couldn't place the exact civilization or civilizations from which these styles were drawn. They made their way through a large marketplace to an impressive black temple. Inside, perhaps fifty individuals had gathered in the temple's gothic sanctuary to discuss the fate of their Island. Trick and Andrea slipped in and found seats at the back of the sanctuary, without drawing attention to themselves.
One by one, speaker after speaker addressed the crowd at large. The proceedings were being led by the Mayor of SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS, a preening politician known as Glamour Esque. There was already a speaker at a podium in one of the aisles, shouting into a microphone. "Look, all I'm saying, and I've said this about four thousand times in the past two days, is that you can't trust *any* story that has Scotto involved at *any* level. This is obviously ALL HIS FAULT! Hasn't anyone realized that yet?" The speaker was greeted by a huge amount of shouting, and eventually someone stood up and yanked the man back to his seat. Glamour Esque pounded hir gavel on hir bench.
"I would just like to remind the distinguished crowd," said Glamour Esque, as a new speaker shuffled forward, "that we are looking for honest suggestions here, not useless recriminations. Please limit your comments to actual suggestions for addressing the crisis!" The new speaker arrived at a podium in the crowd, and Glamour Esque gave the individual the floor, announcing, "Walther, you have the floor."
The room quieted. Walther, Trick whispered to Andrea, was a representative of the "special ops" division of the collection, the Guild for the Protection, Promotion, and Preservation of Narrative Linearity & Unity. "We've had our experts working on the problem around the clock," the man said. "While most of you have only aesthetic means at your disposal, the Guild includes a wide range of specialties, including technology and security expertise." He paused -- as always, Andrea knew, for dramatic effect -- before continuing, "I believe we have identified a possible solution."
The entire room buzzed with nervous energy and anticipation. "We have developed a counter-virus," Walther continued when the noise died down. "We have named it the scrytch virus." Andrea turned to Trick, but he shook his head, indicating it wasn't worth explaining the origin of the name "scrytch." Andrea was upset; without knowing anything else about her personality, she knew there was nothing she detested more than inside jokes.
"We believe," Walther continued, "that we can introduce the scrytch virus into the Magus system as a countermeasure to the shadow virus."
"What makes you think using scrytch as a weapon will work?" someone shouted.
"We've run limited tests in simulation systems," Walther replied. "It's clear that, although there are some hurdles to overcome, the scrytch virus is many times more virulent than the shadow virus, and in 98% of our simulations, it manages to overcome the shadow virus."
"How does it work?" someone else shouted.
"It infects everything it meets with a level of sentience that the target cannot anticipate or control. The shadow virus will cease to be a blind compilation of code, and will awaken to the complexity of reality."
"That doesn't explain anything!" someone else shouted. "How the fuck does it work?"
"It works by catalyzing self-awareness in the target system!"
Walter shouted in reply. "The scrytch virus contains kernels of indestructible light, and this light shocks the target system into a state of rapid evolvement. That's the best I can do, without getting into an involved technical discussion."
"You people are hiding something!" someone else shouted.
"We are all constantly hiding something," Walther replied calmly.
"If any of you have a better idea, we are of course open to suggestion. In the meantime, however, the Guild strongly recommends we inject the scrytch virus into the Magus system as soon as possible. In the worst case scenario, the shadow virus will easily neutralize our antigen and we will be back where we started... helpless. If it's even marginally helpful, then we buy ourselves time."
"Why don't they like him?" Andrea whispered to Trick.
"Nobody likes the Guild," Trick replied quietly. "Within the collective, they're the equivalent of traffic cops, constantly pulling people over for speeding or running over the wrong person." She blinked at that, but decided not to press him for more answers.
"With all due respect," Glamour Esque announced, "I must agree with the distinguished representative from the Guild. How soon will you be prepared to inject this virus into the Magus system?"
Walther smiled, bowed slightly. "We have already done so."
Glamour Esque's smile in return was slightly strained.
"Our thanks to the Guild," replied Glamour Esque.
Andrea found herself squirming in her seat. It was clear that this entire situation was more preposterous than she would have ever envisioned on her own. She leaned over to Trick and whispered, "I need to find a rest room." Before he could protest, she escaped from her seat and wandered out of the sanctuary, fleeing into the streets.
There absolutely had to be a bar on this island, somewhere. What she wanted most at that moment was to get as far from Trick Start and his preposterous worldview as possible.
It only took a few minutes of searching.
She made her way to an open stool at the bar and sat down. The inhabitants of the bar were a shifty lot, and she felt both comfortable and uncomfortable at once. She felt as though her true personality, the one she couldn't remember, obviously spent enormous amounts of time getting drunk, or high, or both, but it was nothing she could prove. An awful, craggily-faced bartender swooped down and took her drink order: she said, "Get me the strongest thing you can think of," and the bartender nodded as though he was asked that every day. A foul-looking creamy drink was the result. She wondered if she could actually get drunk in this world where text was reality, then decided the only way to find out was experimentally.
The first drink slid down her throat as easily as a glass of water would have in the real world. She ordered a second while still wondering if she could get drunk here in the first place. Sure enough, as the second glass of creamy insanity arrived, she began to feel the beginning of a buzz. Although the drunkenness she'd been experiencing back in the UAIT building had dissipated when she became transliterated into text, she found she was perfectly capable of developing a brand new buzz, now that she was here.
She drank for hours, dancing to the bizarre music that poured out of the jukebox. She reached a place of dispassion, where the troubles of the world around her, and her own troubles, seemed to be of little value. Her frustration at not remembering her identity dissipated easily; it was obvious that knowing who she "actually" was wouldn't help her feel any better about any of the mad goings-on around her. From the moment she opened her eyes in the lobby of the building, she had been detached, unable to invest herself in her surroundings. These people seemed unreal to her, and their problems seemed preposterous. Who honestly cared what happened to any of them?
Eventually, Trick Start found her, perhaps hours later, she couldn't be sure. She was dancing alone in the middle of the room, while the bar's regular denizens laughed and carried on around her. She had no intention of making new friends tonight, and they knew enough to leave her alone. Trick waded through the crowd to her, as she finished off another drink.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"What does it look like I'm doing?" she replied. "I'm getting hammered."
"At a time like this?"
She laughed out loud, essentially in his face. She could see a flash of surprise in his eyes. She pitied him suddenly, but not because of his earnest desire to solve the Island's problems and save his friends from calamity. Certainly that was an honorable desire. Rather, she pitied him for his impression of her, for how he had filled in the blanks of her missing personality in his head, and was now forced to confront an unexpected nihilist streak in her.
"You should relax and have a drink," she said.
"We have a lot to do," he told her.
"What do you have to do? I thought that Walther guy had taken care of everything."
"I'm the Island's ambassador to the building. I'll be needed soon."
"Fair enough," she said, heading back to the bar to get another one. "I don't work for you folks, so if it's all right with you, I'm going to have another."
He watched her go, and decided against saying anything further.
By the time she ordered her next drink, he was gone. She sat down alone at the bar, tired of dancing. It seemed like she could keep drinking and drinking and drinking without ever hitting the sweet spot she was expecting. Some part of her body remembered being drunk before, and knew that this wasn't quite what it felt like. She was staying too conscious, and that in itself was irritating and frustrating. The overwhelming stress of her experience since waking up in the UAIT lobby was catching up to her, and she wanted to alleviate it somehow. This might have worked for her before, she realized, but now, something had changed. She was going to have to face the situation directly, at some point. She couldn't go on without her true name forever. She couldn't passively accept her situation much longer. Something unfamiliar stirred inside her, and she knew that she would find no answers here on this Island.
Before her next drink arrived, she had settled on a course of action. It felt strange to her, the idea of actually taking action now. Ever since awakening, she'd been left to the whims of everyone around her. Now that was about to change, and she felt a warm sense of satisfaction. Maybe it was just the alcohol, of course, finally catching up to her. And certainly action could wait until she'd finished her last drink. She settled in and sipped, enjoying the music, knowing there was no rush to leave.
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