38
Only a second from when he dove into the blackness of Bellick’s computer, Faraji found himself in completely new surroundings. The first sensation to strike at him was the unreal heat of the place. It was truly stifling; only moments later he was struggling to breathe the air. He knew it was only coming from the mask he was wearing, but that made it no less uncomfortable or certainly no less confining. Orisen, one of the elders of the Raiders, had said once during a council meeting that life in Oz was simply keeping a calm head and knowing that it was all just a complex puzzle. Faraji was determined to find the key.
Buildings loaded up pixel by pixel around him. They were a dirty white color with dark grey ornamental roofs. He knew the architecture was Asian but not whether it was Chinese, Japanese, or from somewhere else entirely. The streets were cobbled roughly with uneven stones and a slow-moving canal divided the area with its dark waters. The sky above Faraji—and even the air around him—had been saturated by a frightening and perpetual half-light that made it hard for him to see farther than fifty meters.
He wasn’t ultimately sure what he was looking for in this place. He knew the longer he stayed the more likely that he would make his presence known to whomever might be monitoring Bellick’s security systems. Casting his gaze about widely, he made his way along the canal, inspecting everything as he went: otherworldly houses, doors standing open, red lanterns hanging from most open windows. All this was made even more surreal by the complete and utter lack of movement. The seams, he reminded himself, find the seams, watch for the seams and pull on them until they unravel. He narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow and tried desperately to catch sight of the familiar thin greyness that had saved him in the pitch black only the day before. There was nothing. As least, nothing he could touch. The greying light was all around, as if a thousand threads were dancing around him at any moment, but so close they blinded him to their own existence. The dark water in the canal rolled slowly, primordial, motherless. They were so dark they seemed to swallow the light from the air above them. Even the greyscale in the atmosphere was too light to escape their event horizon.
Through all this, the heat never lessened or subsided. It muddled his thought process, prevented him from concentrating, made him sweat inside the experience suit.
There. A serpentine grey shape in the canal. Condensed mist had turned, for a split second into a seam. But it was gone only moments after it had appeared. Faraji moved closer to the canal, to a stone bench that ran the length of the moving water and then down a short flight of brick-laid stairs and its very edge. He saw the seam again, out from the side of the canal perhaps two meters. He dipped his index finger into the water. He was half hoping to escape from the oppressive heat and half-hoping to feel a seam under the surface. He received neither, but as his finger dipped down, almost out of sight in the murk, he found only an immediate and jarring pain. He jumped up instinctively and rose suspended over the terrifying canal.
Oh, he remembered. I can fly.
But the terrible hurt in his finger mitigated the joy of this moment. The pain was so intense and just wouldn’t go, even now that he was clear of the water. It soon began to creep into his palm and the other fingers on his right hand. Slowly, it seemed the infection was spreading.
He remained suspended there, facing down toward the dark and deadly water, trying to concentrate through the pain, to keep his mind on the seam he knew was there. He saw it again for a split second and flew himself nearer to it and peered down at where the seam had been only moments before. Zeroing out the pain, Faraji taught himself the art of digital fishing. He swayed slightly with the water, floated to the left, then right, trying to peer into the water. The thread flickered again, away, back and away again. He could see it well below the surface. It crawled into focus the longer he stared and the thread soon appeared to rise closer to the surface. Faraji extended his pain-filled hand toward the water one more time only to watch the thin grey line waiver and dance back deeper into the water.
Pain slouched up into his forearm. He couldn’t wait any longer; the pain was becoming too intense. He had to find the seam quickly while he could still think, before the pain became too overwhelming. He took his hand back and rose higher into the air but kept his eyes on the seam. And all at once went from rising into a steep dive. Both hands outstretched in front of him.
As he hit the water the pain he had expected charged ruthlessly through his body. Shooting pain rushed through his head and torso. His little frame spasmed but he kept his eyes open and grabbed desperately, catching hold of the thread, he pulled. Water rushed into the widened seam and poured into the next environment, and sucked Faraji along with it as he kicked and writhed in pain.
Being thrust out of one dimension and into another was not something that the boy would soon forget. The heat was gone. The tremendous pain, which had only just shocked his system, had lessened and then disappeared soon after he had been sucked through the seam. He had, however, fallen from a height of about ten feet onto some hard mass that was not immediately clear to him. The waterfall created by the seam thrust him down with great force and prevented him from flying to safety.
He laid there a little while with a needling ache in his back and then sat up to look around. He had fallen on a cluster of tree roots growing about half a meter above the water’s edge. In front of him a great blue expanse of ocean stretched past the far horizon. Behind, there was nothing except this same forest of mangroves. Mangroves. The tree brought back a flash of memories. He had never truly seen them in his life, but he remembered his mother speaking of them to his father, telling him of the forests that once breathed life into Kenya and the Horn of Africa. She had spoken of their near miraculous cleaning properties, how they breathed life and oxygen back into the air even more than regular trees.
Faraji wasted little time in remembering—this was after all, not some tailored representation of his past. It was a riddle, a timed test, and he needed to remain concentrated.
He rose into the air for the second time. The tree branches interlocked densely and formed a thick low lying canopy that was nearly impossible to climb through. He hovered away from the forest’s edge just to where the sea water began to change color from a muddy sediment brown to a natural blue. The forest seemed to go on infinitely even as he flew higher into the air; there was no end. It simply stretched as far as he could see, no matter how far he could see. Faraji had little doubt as to the matter. If he were to fly as fast as possible as far as possible, he would still encounter nothing more than an experiment with Infiniti.
So what, then, he wondered, could the puzzle possibly be? He turned three hundred and sixty degrees, but there were few obvious details to grab his attention. The sun was high in the sky—midday in computerland, apparently. The smallest of waves lapped at the rooted shore and disappeared while a light wind prevailed out toward the sea and rustled the forest canopy. He reminded himself once again that he needed to look for the spaces in between, for the seams. Beautiful as the scenery might be, it was only a distraction, but in the brief time he had been examining this place, nothing had presented itself as a possible weakness in the system’s defenses.
After a moment, the wind shifted directions and brought with it a distressing smell. Thick and viscous—almost as if he were drinking into his nostrils. He searched for the source of the eminence and found it on the far horizon. He was smelling oil, a great slick of it, greasy brown and black, a widening finger that was extending toward the forest’s edge in a cumbersome black tide.
Coming for him.
The mass was still perhaps half a mile from the waiting mangroves, but some crude spring was feeding it. He watched as it stretched and strengthened with every passing minute.
In the last environment, the seam was hidden in the dark water. Would it, then, also be inside the underwater plume of oil?
Bringing himself closer took less than a minute. He suspended himself only a meter above and peered down at the slick with growing disgust, as if this were real ocean, real trees, real life and not merely a simulacrum. He stared long and hard but there was nothing, no threads, no seams, only the thick oozing avarice of the oil. The slick seemed to move without moving. There was no rush to its movements, no disturbance to the water or the trees. But suddenly he would look away and then look back again to find the oil had advanced to some new threshold. Nearly the whole of the visible ocean was dark with its advance now, barring a small and shrinking area near the coastline.
Now he was above, staring down in unhappy scrutiny of the oil’s continuous march. His feet were only inches away from its edge but all he could do was follow it. He cried for the trees when it reached their roots and lapped up, coating their lower trunks, killing them slowly, unreal as they were. Until this time he’d kept his wits about him—he knew this wasn’t real, he knew, but still it felt truly painful to watch. He wanted to run away, to some place, to any place he might escape from the horrible sight of the roots soaking in poisoning juices.
Finally, it became too much for the boy. He carried himself into the windy sea breeze and looked down from a height. He was considering doing something. The first thing he had ever learned in Oz. He knew that he might die if he did, but watching this was so sad, so wrong. And no one but he could see it.
He’d already made up his mind. Extending his hand with a carefully concentrated thought, he made the fireball, and cast it down into the greedy oil.
First, there had been water. Next, the oil. And now, a sea of fire.
Straight away Faraji felt that he had made a grave mistake. Only seconds later fire filled the ground and smoke billowed into the air. He could escape the flames but not the smoke, which plumed even in the strong coastal winds and invaded his lungs. To his shock, Oz simulated this with complete unadulterated accuracy. Already he was coughing and feeling faint. He flew like a banshee, seeking fresh air, but found that he could not fly fast enough. He was passing out. He held his breath. His lungs ached. His eyes watered in pleading agony.
He found that he was falling through the smoke. For the first time in the ordeal the pressure had become too much and he’d lost his concentration. The fog turned from black to grey as he fell. A cloud of grey surrounded him. Faraji just barely perceived the color around him and he reached out for what he hoped would be there, somewhere in the grey. He caught it. His momentum dragged it open.
In an instant, everything had changed from apocalyptic to silent. He was lying on a bed of grass. He coughed and hacked, expelling oily phlegm, but when he breathed in the air was fresh. His hands caressed the grass at his fingertips. When his eyes had finally cleared of the smoke, what he saw made him smile.
He was in a beautiful lotus garden. Lilies floated demurely on a small lake to his left and lush flora grew in every direction. More importantly, the environment was not like the others. It was not closed. He could see every hole in its code, every seam to be stretched, every thread to be pulled. At his bidding a screen snapped to attention, growing from the very ferns in front of him. He wasted no time contacting Jay.
F:
im in
Jay allowed for only the briefest moment of elation as he received word from Faraji. He followed the link that came shortly after and breathed deep, gazing at the convoluted maze of folders and directories that made up the contents of Bellick’s massive hard drive. Curiosity surged through him and kicked his chemically enhance brained into action. First, he isolated all emails, pictures, video and documents and began copying them to the two memory drives plugged into his console. He knew he couldn’t wait for the transfer to finish before looking through the materials, so he brought up everything and filtered them through a team of keywords. He started with names, all their names, continued with historical keywords, and then began adding anything he thought might return essential information. Faraji, Nkiruka, Gus, Jay, Blake, Rosie, Billy, Hurn, Bellick, Kingston, Sefu, Melissa, James, Flora, Mollec, Biomerge, Seventh Day, Villa, Proof of Property, Protest, Outskirts, Within Reach—these keywords formed the initial limitations of the search.
F:
hey! i found them the three giants i told you they were real
Faraji sent him the file, which he labelled and copied to memory. He looked at the transfer time—two minutes to go.
He resumed his scan, reviewing the contents of the keyword search. Never in his life had he truly felt this awake. He read each document in a fraction of a second and remembered nearly everything. With each discarded document his understanding of Bellick grew, but still there was nothing incriminating, nothing damning. Not yet.
The transfer finished with a satisfying bleep and he yanked each of the drives from their ports. He sent a message to Faraji, but kept looking through the documents via the open connection.
J:
Get out. I’ve got all the documents.
F:
cant leave yet still reading
J:
Get out now. I’ve got it all.
F:
not yet
Faraji was not sticking with the plan, but there was really nothing he could do to force him to leave. He could only continue his own search. It was at this moment of need that he found something. Something that might change the game they played, without a doubt, a powerful piece of information.
Nestled inside a folder calledSEEDS was a long list of over two thousand documents with over four thousand names. One of these documents flashed results for not just one but two names.
J:
Faraji, get out now!
There was no response.
Looking for something, boy?”
A very dead voice.
Faraji hadn’t seen him standing there. And it was him alright, he knew without looking. Hurn—with all the same powerful and fearful aura rippling through cyberspace that he exuded in real life. The man who had killed his father. Who would kill his mother. He cried out and tried wildly to exit from Oz, but as his hands went up to remove the mask, the suit around him constricted to form unbreakable shackles. He was completely immobile.
Exit, exit!”
He struggled and wriggled until he was completely exhausted, finally slumping into his bonds, avoiding his captor’s piercing eyes.
Jay knew exactly what it meant, and it wasn’t before long that his suspicion was confirmed as the screen before him went black in total eclipse. Angry yells rose up from cubicles around him. The lights overhead blinked, made a serpentine hiss, and threw the area into dark. Jay grabbed his memory drives and made hastily to leave.
Only seconds later Ms. Omid rounded the corner of the cubicle. He could not see her, but there was no mistaking her voice or its tone.
Just what the f*ck have you brought on us?!”
I’m so sorry,” he said, pressing one of the drives into her palm as he passed.
He yelled behind as he ran:
You said you knew a good journalist or two. Find them, fast, give them that. Save my life!”
He ran away in the dark without another word and stumbled up the raised outline of the stairs and followed the guardrail to the entrance to the cafe. He knew what he would have to do—although not at all whether it would work. His plan was a gamble, without a doubt. He was betting that there was some tattered shred feeling in him, the most brutal man he had ever encountered. Something in which he lacked almost all confidence.
When he reached the daylight of the Cyberdistrict, five hundred floors above London Proper, he pulled the contacts from his eyes, found the nearest security camera and stared directly into it.
Come here. Find me.
He rushed to the elevators. If he were to do this, he had to do it quickly. He prayed they might catch him soon.