We moved deeper into the facility’s network, through the digital pathways that wound their way within the system. I didn’t know what the security software had in store for us next, but whatever it was, we had to stay focused.

“Why does this look like just a regular corridor?” Raven asked. “Being inside a computer like this, I expected something… oh, I don’t know… weirder, maybe.”

“You do realize you’ve been in a computer all along?” I asked her. “Your entire life, in fact.”

“I know, I know,” she answered, dismissing my argument with a wave of her hand. “But that was something you did, right? Creating all those places we visited? I just don’t understand why anyone would do the same thing here. It’s not exactly a tourist attraction.”

“Because I’m filtering it through my geist,” I explained.

“Geist? What’s that?” Raven cocked her head. “For that matter, I’m still trying to understand what ‘gestalt’ actually means.”

“A gestalt is what some might refer to as their consciousness,” I explained, “while folks with a more religious bent might think of it as their soul. Basically, it’s what makes me me, in here,” I said, pointing at my skull. “Geist refers to one’s perception, of how they view the universe.” I shrugged. “It appears mundane to you because you’re seeing it through my eyes. This is how my mind translates this system’s architecture.”

She chewed on that for a moment. “But why translate it at all?” she pressed me. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to view it as it really is, instead of as some watered-down version of the truth?”

I grimaced at that. “Because human minds aren’t well-suited for viewing the digital verse directly,” I informed her. “Our species’ evolution developed a brain that understands the universe in a certain way. The digital verse can be a chaotic, confusing place, nothing at all like the corporeal world, and without some sort of geist to keep you tethered, it’s easy to get lost.” I paused for a moment, letting that sink in before telling her the rest. “Sometimes, folks can get lost in there forever.”

Raven gave out a small harrumph. “Seriously, how bad can it be?”

How often do you get a straight line like that? “You’d be surprised,” I said cryptically, before snapping my fingers and dropping the illusion.

I’m not sure I can explain it to you, not in a way you’ll understand, but I’ll try.

Imagine… a universe filled with fire. With roaring comets shedding glowing sparks as they zip past you, and balls of floating plasma that pulse and glow as they weave complex patterns in the night sky. The stars fall from the heavens and join the dance, racing to stay one step ahead of dark lacunae, swallowing each of them whole, snuffing out their light forever. It’s both mesmerizing and terrifying in equal measure, and after a handful of seconds I restored the illusion, re-cloaking the digital world in the cloth of the familiar.

“That’s why,” I told her. “It’s not a world for the likes of us.”

Raven turned to me, an odd expression on her face. “It’s… beautiful,” she whispered, utterly entranced by the vision. It took her a moment to come all the way back, but as she finished shaking off the effects, she gave me a confused look. “I don’t understand why you’re so threatened by it.”

I blinked.

“You didn’t find it disturbing?” I asked in surprise. “Not even a little?”

“No, not at all,” she answered, shaking her head. “Like I said, it’s incredible.” Even just mentioning what she’d witnessed left her with a wistful look in her eye.

Then it hit me. Of course it didn’t bother her, because it is her world. Despite appearances to the contrary, Raven was still merely a sophisticated program, born of the same elements that we’d just viewed. I would forever be an interloper in that universe, but for her, it was her birthplace. Her home.

If I ever needed proof that humans and simulacrum were worlds apart, I’d just found it.

“Come on,” I told her, taking her hand once more, “we’ve got to keep moving.”

She took a moment to gaze back thoughtfully to where I’d dropped the illusion, before nodding and coming with me as we went deeper into the system. “What should we be looking out for?” she asked me.

“Good question,” I said unhappily. “This is the furthest I’ve made it inside this new security program.”

Raven came to a halt. “You mean you don’t know what’s in there?” she said in shock.

“Not so much,” I flushed. “You have to understand that this is bleeding edge software, top of the line. We only crack it by trial and error. There isn’t some handy algorithm we can plug into it to bypass the security features, so we keep our eyes peeled, use what we know, and hope that Dame Fortuna is on our side.”

“And if she isn’t?” Raven challenged.

I met her gaze. “Then we’re dead. The upside is it’ll be quick.”

She started to respond, only to jerk her head and look past me, deeper into the system. “You hear something?” she asked.

A sudden sinking feeling landed deep within my chest. “Come on,” I urged her, pulling her into a side corridor and away from the noise. I heard it now too, a thrumming sound that sounded an awful lot like an early to mid-twentieth century vacuum cleaner.

... yes, I know what one sounds like. Long story.

It wasn’t something I was used to hearing, certainly not under these circumstances, and that put me immediately on guard. What in the world makes a noise like that? Hell, maybe they were vacuum cleaners, for all I knew.

“Oh, shit,” I cursed as the penny dropped.

“What?” Raven asked, caught by surprise.

“We’ve gotta get out of here!” I shouted, dragging her away from whatever was rushing towards us.

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“What the hell is happening?” she shrieked at me, even while she ran.

“The system is scanning itself for malware bots!” I explained in a rush, dodging into yet another side passage.

“Malware what?” she said in confusion.

“...us!” I howled, wracking my brain for a way to escape. If we could flank them somehow, get around them to where they’d already scanned, that would buy us some time. I wasn’t sure if we’d been detected somehow, or if the system ran regular sweeps as a precaution, but either way we couldn’t stay here. Peeking my head around the corner, I searched for a secure route that would take us out of here. Maybe over there…

I hurled myself back behind cover as a scanner appeared in the passageway; a massive cube that filled the corridor. There’d be no getting around that, and as I watched, other cubes appeared, blocking off the other aisles one by one as they moved forward, bearing down on us.

“We have to go back,” I told her, “and find another way in. Come on,” I said, pulling her back towards the entrance, “they’ll be on us soon.”

“And then what?” she insisted. “If we leave, how do we get back in? You said you could only use that device once.”

I’d actually been trying awfully hard not to think about that. She wasn’t wrong, but at the moment I didn’t see any other options. “I don’t know,” I told her, “hopefully I’ll think of something.”

Raven skidded to a halt, almost yanking me off my feet. “I can get us past them,” she vowed.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, right,” I said, dismissing the very notion while still pulling her towards the main door.

She refused to budge. “You have a better idea?” she demanded.

“Well… no,” I admitted, “but you’re not a trained agent. How the hell do you plan on getting past those sweepers?”

Raven looked me in the eye. “Do you trust me?”

I winced at that. “Do I have a choice?” I mean, I did, but at the moment I had nothing on tap, and I seriously doubted I’d be coming up with anything before we got sucked up or fried.

Which left me with a single choice; trust her or take my chances.

“All right,” I swallowed, “what’s your plan?”

She put her free hand on my shoulder. “Forget the illusion. Pull back the curtain and let me guide you.”

My jaw dropped before I remembered to close it again. It was insane. There was no way to navigate the raw digital verse, not without getting hopelessly lost. Plenty of Avatars had tried in the past; only to either give up immediately or lose their tether and disappear, never to be seen again. There was no way a human could navigate…

… right. She wasn’t human. Her world, not mine. Now that I had a moment to think about it, I realized it wasn’t the craziest idea I’d ever heard… hell; it wasn’t even the craziest thing I’d tried today.

“You’re sure about this?” I asked nervously.

“Sure as I can be,” she shrugged. “I mean… I’ve never done this before.”

“Yeah, me either.” Taking a deep breath, I raised my hand. “Here goes,” I said, snapping my fingers.

The illusion vanished, replaced a heartbeat later by the image of a galaxy being born.

I struggled to make sense of it all, my human brain overwhelmed by paradigms that shifted and swirled in random migrations. Dali would have been at home here, and Escher and Bosch, but damn few others. I held on tight as Raven studied the starscape, searching for a way past the digital guards sweeping towards us. I realized now they were the very lacunae I’d noticed on our last visit, consuming everything in their path.

“This way,” she urged, pulling me down and to the left, towards a smoky tendril that seemed to twist in on itself. It looped and whirled as it spun around the dancing balls of fire, and as I looked closer, I suddenly realized I was staring at a Fibonacci pattern; distorted, as if a black hole had torn its way through, but still recognizable. The delicate swirls gave way to fractals, repeating towards infinity, yet Raven easily guided us past the danger without distraction, without trepidation.

I couldn’t have done it. Not in a million years.

We alighted on a still pond that rippled as we touched down. “There,” she said in triumph, a broad grin on her face, “we’re past.”

I stared at her, wide-eyed. “How?” I asked in wonder.

“I just… knew,” she shrugged. “I can’t explain it.”

Something instinctual then, perhaps something programmed into all simulacra. I’d love to delve into that mystery at some point, but for right now we were still on the clock. I snapped my fingers again, bringing back the illusion, while we plotted our next move.

“I don’t suppose you spotted anything else while we were gallivanting about in cyberspace?” I asked her while I attempted to locate our next target.

“I’m not sure,” she said awkwardly. “This is all still new to me.”

“Okay,” I nodded, factoring that in. “You did great,” I smiled at her.

“Thanks,” she blushed in return.

“All right, so far we’ve encountered a static barrier at the entrance, plus mobile search platforms in the interior,” I recounted. “If I were designing this system, what would I put in next?” I asked myself. “Something environmental, perhaps?”

“You mean, something in the air?” she asked, cautiously peering at the ceiling for concealed vents.

“I was thinking more like the floor,” I replied, looking down at my feet. So far, nothing was trying to eat them.

“Well, there’s a disturbing thought,” she snapped.

“Hey, this system is new to me too,” I reminded her. “It could literally be anything.”

Raven just shook her head, getting ready to read me the riot act… when the sounds of laughter echoed down the passageway.

The pair of us stared at each other. “You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered.

“Al… what’s that?” she asked quietly.

“Nothing good,” I reasoned. “Unless it’s a bluff… a recording, maybe, like an old-style haunted house.”

“What would be the point?” she asked, point-blank.

“To spook us,” I guessed, “to make us turn back, instead of pressing forward.”

“I don’t know,” she said dubiously. “I mean, after what we’ve seen so far, it sounds kind of lame.”

She wasn’t wrong. It did. I just couldn’t imagine what else it might be.

“… Alphad…” a voice whispered.

I jumped, like I’d brushed up against a hot current. Squeezing her hand apprehensively, I asked, “... did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” she swallowed, “and it knows your name.” She stared at me in disbelief. “How could it possibly know that?”

“I don’t know,” I said hoarsely. “Neither of us have used it since we got here… I mean, you called me ‘Al’ once, but that’s it. No way it got ‘Alphad’ from that. And I haven’t tried to spoof our way in using a forged ID, either.”

“… Alphad Aemon… come closer… I’m waiting…” the voice said again, before breaking out into high-pitched, maniacal giggles.

“Oh fuck this,” I swore. “I’d rather take my chances with the Brotherhood.”

“They’ll kill you,” she reminded me.

“And that thing won’t?” I countered.

“You don’t even know what it is,” she pointed out. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “You’re right,” I told her. I gripped her hand and forced a smile on my face, as she forced one onto hers as well. We weren’t fooling each other, mostly we were trying to convince ourselves to simply keep going.

We moved forward, peering around each corner as we forged ahead. Unfamiliar sounds now found my ears; skittering noises, as if caused by a giant insect. I won’t lie, I almost turned back right there. But Raven was right. Heading back was a death sentence. Going forward might be as well, but at least there was a chance we’d make it through.

The strange sounds grew louder as we approached its lair, whatever it was. I don’t know why it didn’t come out to meet us, and honestly, that was fine with me. The longer I could put this off, the better.

The laughter reappeared with a vengeance, setting our already frayed nerves jangling. It was the laugh of the mad, of the dangerously unhinged, and the last thing in the galaxy I wanted to see was whatever was behind it. Steady, Al, I told myself, as we rounded the last bend and spotted our quarry at last.

If I’d still had a heart, I’m fairly sure it would have stopped beating.

“... Welcome, child of Earth,” it hissed, as my blood ran cold.

Raven clutched my arm tight, staring in horror at the crab-like beast. “What the hell is that?”

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was suddenly bone dry, my body trembling as I gazed upon a metallic nightmare. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real… and yet I knew, down to the very depths of my soul, that it was.

“...it’s a Yīqún,” I whispered in terror.

Holy Mother Terra.