Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
“Why would he tell you that? I mean, he didn’t tell me that.”
She shrugs. “I don’t think he understands me. He was probably just thinking out loud or something. But if we’re looking for 702, then…” I almost wince. It takes a lot of self-control not to. “Then we’re looking for… home. My home.” Her forehead goes crinkly. “Are you taking me home?”
“Absolutely not.”
Which makes her chuckle. “Just checking because I did specifically tell you that I didn’t want to go home.”
“No worries, darlin’. You’re stuck with me. But this 702 place is where all the activity is happening. So we’re goin’ there, but not to all the way to Tau City. That’s far, far down the line.”
“Good. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”
“We are.”
“OK. Sorry to interrupt. I’ll stand here quietly while you proceed to figure things out.”
And now I feel bad because I was actin’ like she was just an augment accessory, and she’s not. She’s a weapon. “Well, let me explain it to you. We’ll figure it out quicker if we do it together.”
This answer delights her because she shrugs up her shoulders and beams me a bright smile. A little bit of spark even seeps out of her.
And this makes my overlay blink with brightness.
“What just happened?” she asks.
“You saw that?”
Clara nods. “Yeah, your eyes just went… white.”
White? Well. I’ll have to file that under shit-to-figure-out-later, because I’ve never seen augments with white eyes before. “I dunno. You were grinnin’ because I decided to treat you like a weapon instead of a bracelet, and a little bit of spark came off you. This made my augments… I dunno. It was like a power surge.”
“Well, that makes complete sense.”
“Does it?”
“Of course. I’m a battery.” Then her forehead crinkles again. “Well, not really. When Delta was lecturing me about not being a Looking Glass, he was also saying that I wasn’t just a battery, but he couldn’t figure out what the other part of me was.”
“He said all this to you?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t awake yet, though. It was kind of like a dream. But it wasn’t a dream, it was real.”
“Delta entered your mind to have a conversation?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Well, that’s… unusual. I’ve heard of it. But it’s how gods communicate with each other. You know they’re not real, right? They’re just really good holograms.”
“I didn’t know that. But anyway,” she sighs. “Can we find the world now? I have to pee.”
I side eye her, suddenly thinkin’ this deployment is not like any other mission I’ve ever been on. “We just left the house like twenty minutes ago.”
She shrugs with her hands. “It is what it is.”
“Anyway,” I sigh. But secretly, I’m glad she’s injecting all this novelty to the experience of soldierin’, so I want to take the time to fill her in. “Let me explain what I’m seein’. Imagine… a screen—like for TV, and shit, but it stretches all the way across your field of vision.”
“OK.”
“Now imagine that it’s alive.” She shoots me a look, one eyebrow raised. “It’s…” I attempt to clarify. “It’s a library of information. And every time you look at something—like this wall here.” I point to the wall. “It spits out information about it. A little pop-up label appears to relay details. This wall is made of concrete. And my overlay is tellin’ me that this concrete is a mixture of limestone, clay, and synthetic fibers. It gives me facts about everythin’ I’m looking at. The floor – also concrete. The lights—a borosilicate glass tube filled with solid sodium, neon, and argon gas mixed in with metal electrodes—and everythin’ else, whether I want to know about it or not.”
“Well, while it seems very useful, it sounds chaotic.”
I point at her. “Exactly. And that’s just one world. Here, in this space, all the worlds want to capture my attention. It’s like they’re fightin’ for it in here. And each world has an overlay.”
“And we’re trying to find 702 in that chaos?”
“Yes. It’s a fuckin’ mess.”
“How will you sort it?”
I shrug. “Go through them one at a time and see if any of them are what I’m lookin’ for?”
“Sounds pretty inefficient.”
“You got a better idea?”
“Hmm.” She taps her finger to her chin and begins to pace the room. It’s small, so she only gets about six steps away before she has to turn back again. “You need to find the filing system.”
“How do I do that?”
“Well, you find something they have in common, but is different for each world. If there’s a world called 702, it stands to reason that here are worlds called 701 and 703.”
She’s right. “Give me a minute to look through a few.”
“No pressure, but I still have to pee.”
I smile, but don’t reply. Instead, I go into my overlay and start lookin’ at all the data spillin’ out on the screen that describes this room. There’s a lot of little tabs, and labels, and numbers. But I don’t know what dimension this is, and Delta didn’t give me any instructions on how to hop dimensions. He just told me to show up here in this room. I assumed it would be self-explanatory.