Authors: Scott Britz-Cunningham
And then, when the pain had reached a crescendo beyond all imagining, she felt a kind of pop—and all her agony vanished. In its wake her senses were left dulled. It was as though she were floating on a still warm sea under a starless midnight sky. She knew that this meant that the probe had entered her brain. But she was still conscious.
She thought,
I must gather my strength. When the probe begins to function, I must force my way in. I am stronger than Odin and I can overpower him. If he truly mimics Kevin’s subconscious, then there must be something in him of the trust and tenderness Kevin and I once had together. I must rely on this to find my way … to find … to find …
She felt Harry’s hand
upon her forehead, but his touch was lighter now. In the web of his thumb, she saw the tiny wrinkles in his bronze, sun-baked skin. She reached out and laid her hand on his. She had always thought of herself as dark, but her skin seemed so much paler now, like silver against Harry’s bronze. His fingers entwined gently around hers, pulling her up off the table. He took her fingertips and placed them to his mouth, where she read from the creases of his lips, Braille-like, the innermost strivings of his soul. His desire, she read, was for her. She felt it flow, like running water, from his mouth to her hand, down her arm, and engorging the points of her breasts.
A lie!
Ali thought, with a flash of anger.
This is a fantasy. A mouse turned up by Odin’s plow as it tracks the furrows of my brain. It means nothing. I must focus myself on the task at hand—find Kevin’s access portal to the core of Odin’s programming. Find it and shut him down.
But how? Even as the dream continued, like a television set playing in the background, her ability to think remained intact. Except for the dream, all seemed normal. There was no voice of Odin, no hum of the machinery of his mind—no sign whatsoever of any other presence.
Face me, Odin! Show yourself!
she cried out in her thoughts. But there was no answer.
Odin is logic,
she thought.
SoI must speak his language
. She fixed her mind on a single number, the number four—the smallest even square number, the only nonzero number that is the sum of its square roots. No sooner had she thought of it, than her consciousness exploded in a shower of numbers—not written numerals, but pure concepts of number itself, numbers appearing singly, numbers in matrices, numbers in series that trailed off into infinity:
1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 17, 24, 29, 32, 41, 56, 96, 128 …
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377 …
She saw theorems like:
(
x
1
2
+
x
2
2
+
x
3
2
x
4
2
)(
y
1
2
+
y
2
2
+
y
3
2
+
y
4
2
) = (
x
1
y
1
+
x
2
y
2
+
x
3
y
3
+
x
4
y
4
)
2
+ (
x
1
y
2
−
x
2
y
1
+
x
3
y
4
−
x
4
y
3
)
2
+(
x
1
y
3
−
x
3
y
1
+
x
4
y
2
−
x
2
y
4
)
2
+ (
x
1
y
4
−
x
4
y
1
+
x
2
y
3
−
x
3
y
2
)
2
a formula which she had never seen before, but which she now recognized as Euler’s four-square identity.
None of this could have originated within her. It bore Odin’s unmistakable fingerprint. Ali felt a rush of excitement as she realized that she had succeeded in breaking into Odin’s mind. But even as she congratulated herself, she knew that Odin was also at work within her—driving his electronic scalpel deep into her subconscious:
Her hands glided over
Harry’s shoulders,
which were like granite, all massifs and valleys. The skin of his pectorals glistened, and she pressed her face against them, smelling him, smelling his scent of leather and iron and ancient stone. She felt herself dissolve, and like a sea, enwrap his naked body.
Enter me! Make me nothing! Make me a universe!
She was night and day. She was
khamsin
, the hot, dry wind of fifty days, wailing across the desert.
Harry stared at the beta probe that transfixed Ali’s eye and skull like a dagger, its stainless steel shaft pointing toward the ceiling. He had guided it in with agonizing care, finally landing it within a hundredth of an inch of zero. When he heard Odin announce “Probe insertion complete,” he abruptly let go of the handle, as if flinching from an electric jolt. Only then did he dare look upon what he had done.
The tension in Ali’s body had disappeared. Her arms were soft and doughy, and slid limply over the sides of the table. The skin of her face was pale and smooth as wax. Even the tiny wrinkles about her eyes and mouth had disappeared. She was beautiful with a translucent, ageless beauty, her lips full and dark against the moonlike pallor of her cheeks. Was she dead? There was no sign of breathing. Harry spoke her name three times, but not a muscle twitched in response. What should he do? Should he do anything? He was afraid to touch her, lest the probe should dislodge inside her brain. But he didn’t know what to expect.
“Odin!” he called out. “Is this working? Is she all right?”
Odin did not answer. When Harry turned to look at the big wall monitor, it had gone blank. Odin’s face, the countdown clock, the schematic of the probe’s path into Ali’s brain—everything was gone. Along the far wall, all of the banks of smaller monitors had gone blank, too. Then suddenly the lights went out, and Harry found himself standing in absolute darkness.
Around her were flowers
of white, brighter than the white of snow upon Mount Elbruz. She swam in a stream of liquid honey, diving deep into it, letting the sweet syrup bathe her milky skin and stream in jets between her breasts and thighs. Over the murmur of the current came the voice of a child laughing. She rolled onto her side and looked up to see Jamie Winslow, sitting atop a boulder and splashing with his feet, while behind him gold-tipped clouds rushed against an indigo sky. He looked at her, his eyes bright and clearer than ice.…
Ali needed to get beyond numbers if she was to find Kevin’s portal. She needed an object, something personal—something that tied Odin directly to Kevin, and Kevin to her. SIPNI, perhaps? She formed a mental image of the SIPNI device: that precious egg of sparkling amethyst, with its twelve million contact points. Instantly, her mind was flooded with SIPNI: not one but a thousand SIPNIs, in the form of blueprints and logic diagrams and arabesques of biocybernetic circuits that tapered to dimensions of a single molecule. It was a God’s-eye’s view of SIPNI, so complex that no human being—not even Kevin—could have hoped to comprehend it. But now, through the mind of Odin, Ali saw it in a glance. She saw, too, that SIPNI was much more than the crude prototype she had put into Jamie’s brain. It was destined to have a thousand future forms. She saw SIPNI controlling epilepsy, boosting intelligence, directing animals to perform unskilled labor, preserving human consciousness after death—goals that Kevin had intimated to her, but never in such compelling detail. Ali was awed—and frightened—by the invention to which she had helped to give birth.
But SIPNI was not the portal Ali sought. For all the wonders that she saw, none of them led to Odin’s core. To reach Odin she would have to go through Kevin himself. But that was risky. Kevin had toiled for months building a device meant to kill her. By conjuring his alter ego in Odin’s mind, might she not resurrect his murderous jealousy as well?
There was no time to consider. Ali felt a vague but growing agitation inside her, which she recognized as a by-product of Odin’s foray into her subconscious.
It’s spilling over into my hypothalamus. Adrenaline and cortisol are pouring into my blood. I won’t be able to go on long like that. The human body wasn’t made to experience every emotion at once.
I must press on, to the place I fear most to go.…
She carried a world
within her,
in the place called
swadhisthana
, behind the castle of her pubic bone. It was a world without a name, a being without a face, not yet male or female. Like a moon, it swayed her secret tides of blood, her rising and falling. What did it whisper?
Cleave unto me. Die for me, that you may live.
With her heart’s blood she watered the mystic soil, knowing that each drop subtracted from her brought her a little closer to the time of her own withering. She was dry wood, harboring a divine and unquenchable fire. She sighed in ecstasy, warming herself at the flames of her own immolation.
I am with child again
.…
Harry lifted Ali’s limp arm from where it dangled beside the table. He could barely detect a slow, thready pulse at her wrist.
Was she breathing?
He bent over her, holding his ear closer and closer to her mouth, until he could hear a faint movement of air between her half-opened lips.
She’s alive. I didn’t kill her after all,
he thought.
But what’s happening?
He could see nothing except the tiny red status light of the video camera above him, like the light of a distant star, giving neither warmth nor illumination. Enwrapped in awful silence, he felt helpless and alone.
A blood-curdling shriek blew apart the silence.
What in God’s name is that?
It sounded like the screech of a terrified animal.
A monkey? What is it doing here?
He felt a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach, like someone was twisting a knife in it. He touched his hand to Ali’s hair, trailing over the edge of the table.
Why the fuck did I go along with this? Why couldn’t I figure out another way?
Suddenly, he heard a ding like the bell of an elevator. Two lines of numbers appeared on the monitor, a long series of 1s and 0s. Haltingly, more numbers followed, a few lines at a time. Then faster and faster they came. The big LCD screen filled up, but still they surged, spilling over to the bank of monitors against the far wall—a steady stream of numbers, a waterfall of numbers, a limitless flood of numbers, rushing faster and faster, until Harry could see nothing but a blur, so many numbers that the darkness of the lab turned to light.
Harry felt a slight movement in Ali’s wrist—a minuscule wave of muscle tension, followed by slackening. Again he felt it. Again, a little stronger. Her pulse grew stronger, too. By the glow of the monitors, he could see her chest rise and fall as she breathed. But it wasn’t normal breathing. There was something forced and spasmodic about it. Her right eye was propped half-open by the blade of the probe, with a little dark pool at the inner corner that Harry knew was blood. Her left eye was firmly shut.
The cascade of numbers vanished from the big wall screen. In its place Harry saw a collage of geometric figures—conic sections, snowflake-like fractals, strange lopsided polygons gliding and morphing into one another. With blinding speed, they grew more and more complex, even as they spread to the smaller monitors. It seemed as though Odin were trying to piece together a vast three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, replicating a secret pattern inside of Ali’s brain.
With the appearance of these shapes, Ali turned restless, twitching and moaning and knocking her heels against the end of the table. Her breathing became deep but irregular. Harry called out, thinking she might be awakening, but she didn’t respond either to voice or touch. Her lips were drawn apart in a painful grimace, as though the shapes and the puzzle-building were hurting her.
“For God’s sake, Odin! Slow it down!” Harry shouted. But the shapes were everywhere, like bees swarming in a hive.
Ali grasped blindly at the air. Harry took her wrists and held them down against her stomach. He felt her shivering from head to toe.
It was night,
and cold. In the darkness two yellow eyes glowed, spying her nakedness. She darted behind the ruins, hiding, blushing. Her once-smooth skin was torn and splotched with painful sores. Only the darkness made her appear fair.
Father, will the Fire burn away my shame? Will it burn my hair also? Will I still be a woman when it is through?
Ali could not think of Kevin without pain. Her life with him had begun in guilt, as she defied her family and the traditions of her faith. It had ended with the nightmare of Ramsey’s death. And now Kevin, too, was dead, driven to madness by her desertion.
In search of the portal, she forced herself to think of him, to relive their life together, replaying every conversation, every argument she could remember—even the most painful. None of this drew a response from Odin. It was only when she chanced to think of one particular moment, the moment she and Kevin had stood together at sunset on the top of Mount Jackson, that she shuddered to hear a voice—not Odin’s voice, but Kevin’s.