“Nicholas” she said with that slight accent of hers.
The world hasn’t fully settled in for me or maybe our interfacer hasn’t even begun the Transference process. Yet there I see her, Sophia, biting her nails like always. Like she’s done since she was alone in her bedroom as a child, in a panic about something…fuzzy.
“Relax, there’s no point in stressing” I told her, there was a moment where a wave of calm passed her face but that panic in her rose up again.
“Our ‘host’ is killing himself. It’s like he knows what he’s doing and that we’re not meant to be here but he doesn’t care. I…no I guess we haven’t even hit a wall with this guy instead every time we get somewhere he figures out to break something fundamental. We can’t leave.”
Everything becomes clearer, we’re in a forest but the trees are missing something. I touch the bark of one and I realize it’s the grooves. I’m trying to distract myself, compose myself but Sophia looks like she’s been at this for a while. While I’m standing around she’s trying to reconnect to the interfacer to maybe find an exit? There’s no point in trying to complete a job like this right?
“Soph maybe we can pull a looping dream type situation on him? Maybe it’s because we’ve been here for a while but I don’t think our guy is the rampage-type in the real world. So-”
She cut me off with a sad smile and said “We tried that. It worked for a while…then he somehow dropped the loop right up top of us. It crashed and then we crashed.”
She looked at me like she was going to say something more but then just paused for a minute. Then out of nowhere when I was just about to return to thinking of ways to get out this thing she started explaining again.
“It’s not even that the guy is resistant to the loops because we’ve been using them to cut him off from certain key memories and concepts. But the second he’s out of one it’s like he’s recharged,” she shoves her hands in the air to show her exhaustion and then adds a tired smile.
“We’ve done fucked up things to people I thought were fucked up. But most of them were scum or uncaring piles of shit. This guy, he is the fucked up thing. So any idea you have needs to be something powerful. I threw the usual tricks at him and he easily adapted. I threw everything I had, and he’d just get back up or just to spite me break something in himself so I’d be slowed down. Just enough so that he could continue literally breaking himself.”
I need to ask about how long until we edge too close to the point of no return yet maybe we’re already too late. Maybe Soph hasn’t told me that because she knows there’s no future for us. Maybe we’re here trying to kill the world before it kills us or kills itself.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I stay quiet for a while and Soph seems to be working away at trying to breach through the guy’s defenses using the interfacer. I just inspect our current environment, the trees are missing details, the sky a literal void of information and the ground has literally no consistency. This is all normal because obviously our job is exploring environments like this, you eventually get a feel for this. Though even a novice could feel the lack of details and usually they struggle with it. It’s almost suffocating at first but it gets better. It gets so much worse when the person you’re interfacing with is aware of what’s going on even if it’s only slightly but this is wrong.
This place, it’s like it’s missing details on purpose. Trees missing their grooves in their bark is normal, hell in the real world we’d probably ignore a detail like that. Yet here that lack of grooves has a discomfort attached to it. I touch the bark one more time and the texture isn’t like a smooth piece of wood but like sliding your finger on glass.
The icing on this messed up cake is the sky. The ground changing is normal, it’s within perimeters that maybe the host screws up the position of a far-off hill or two. The sky though is a void, it’s not a goddamn sky but the end result of our host’s rampage it seems like. Maybe that’s where we came from, the aftermath of the crash Soph was talking about. It looks stable though it’s not really much to look at. Just a hole that makes up the sky. Though you can feel the loose thread of ideas coming through it.
Soph looks up from her watch, her take on my token, a means of connecting with the interface.
She then looks up to the sky.
“Nicholas, if I die here try to piece me together.”
“You know that’s not-”
She looked at me with a piercing glare with undertones of exhaustion and nervous energy.
“Nicholas, just do it if you have to alright?”
“All right. So do you have a plan?”
“Yes, we’ll be using that-”, she points to the non-sky, “and we’ll be surrounding it with this place…or maybe world? I don’t know but we’ll be using here to surround the void once he finds this place. If we’re lucky, we lock him in there for a while and if we aren’t, then he somehow gets us.”
A scoff escaped my throat.
“Even if he’s broken out of and survived a loop, how the hell would he even survive a void. Think about it logically unless we’re trying to take him out at all costs then why the hell would we do this. You'd be trapping him in a part of him that’s so broken it thinks it’s nothing. It's like putting the sun in a black hole.”
“I…fuck. Shit, you’re right, I just saw you looking at the sky and thought…Nevermind. It wouldn’t have even had a high chance of working without you…being active.”
“So instead maybe we try going into his memories?”
She opens her mouth to say something like “We did that” but holds off.
“We go into his memories, we insert dummy memories. Confusing ones, impossible ones and ones where we’re important people to him. We try to fill up all the holes he’s made and if we’re really lucky, we make a bridge out of here. If we’re even luckier, maybe we’ll find our original objective but let’s not push it.”
She touches her watch a bit and sits on it for a second.
“All right, it’ll take a while and probably some close calls with our host but it could work.”
So we set off and by set off I mean I follow her.
Though I have to wonder how long has all of this been going on that this guy can rip a literal permanent hole in his imaginary worlds? I want to say it’s a fast deterioration if she hasn’t even thought of this? Or maybe she has pulled something off like this but on her own? We split up in an attempt to cover more ground but ultimately failed? Two hands, two pretty good hands, would make this idea work but only a master memory manipulator could cover the same ground we could.
Either way, we go forward, going deeper into a shifting forest with a non real sky above it