I swam in an empty void, beneath a nebula of lights that stretched as far as my mind could see. My persona drifted far below the horizontal plane on which the Matrix existed, where the physical positions of countless devices became pinpricks of light or great glowing masses and hosts from the miniscule to the massive drifted high above the digital city, untethered to any physical location as distant personas passed through their membranes and datastreams anchored them to digital reality.
As I sank further and further away from the city, I began to cut the ties that bound me to the matrix, severing the datastreams that tied me to the team, to my home, to the exclave the natural world had carved out in the resonance. I lost my sense of time, my messages, my awareness of the data that even now drifted around me as stray datastreams fell into the void, becoming undeliverable messages or glitches in the system.
With it went my sight, and I found myself completely alone in all the world with nothing but my thoughts, the ambient resonance of my own form and the resonance that had crept into the matrix around me, drifting in through cracks in its supposedly impenetrable walls. Finally, I began to fray away at the tether between my persona and my organic body, turning a stout lifeline into a fragile thread.
When Labyrinth had brought me to the brink of the event horizon, she did so by anchoring a resonance spike into my persona and physically pulling me away from my body. To enter the resonance realms on my own, I needed to learn how to make that last jump myself. I began to centre myself, shifting my focus from the lifeline to the resonance that made up my persona.
I had known for years that it was an intrinsic part of me, but in that self-imposed sensory deprivation I came to realise that it was me. While most people interacted through the matrix via personas formed from code, those were nothing more than avatars that they controlled. They were like Rachel’s drones, on the digital rather than physical plane.
But I wasn’t made of code. I needed no device to project me into the world. I was like the Matrix itself, like the resonance that surrounded and suffused it. If all the matrix-capable devices in the world were to shut down, completely and irreparably, we would still be here.
I discovered my connection to the resonance when I was fourteen – collapsing unconscious in the middle of the halls and waking up in the nurse’s office with just enough sense to blame it on heatstroke – and yet I couldn’t help wondering whether it was the dreamer or the dream that came first.
With that thought, my very body seemed to fray at the edges, losing its cohesion as it resonated in harmony with its surroundings. Though I no longer had the senses to feel it, I sunk deeper and deeper until I found myself passing through the invisible membrane of the matrix once again.
The process was painful, violent, as the event horizon tore my psyche apart once more. I thought it would be easier to bear the second time, but I was wrong. I saw every hesitation, every path not taken, every missed opportunity. I stood in the corridors of Medhall Pharmaceutical Plant 43-BB, my hands trembling as I lined up the barrel of my Ares Executioner with a hired security guard, her own weapon burnt out by the sprite resting on it. I didn’t shoot. I couldn’t shoot.
Falling beyond the event horizon, I was drawn inexorably into a tunnel formed from blinding light, propelling me forwards at an impossible speed. I reached out, not with my arms but with the resonance that made up my persona, trying to match it to the frantic pace of the space around me.
As I grew more and more in sync with the resonance that formed the tunnel, I found myself drifting apart from the data it carried. I went from one part of a transmission, surrounded on all sides by other packages of data, to something separate from it as the data rearranged itself to account for my absence. I could feel the boundaries of the tunnel, the mechanisms that propelled the endless stream of data through it.
I reached out, grasped that mechanism, and anchored myself in place. I didn’t feel any deceleration as I went from the speed of infinite bandwidth to stationary, just an intense feeling of vertigo as the data that had surrounded me disappeared into the distance as fast as light.
I held out a hand in front of me, watching the distortions caused by the sheer mass of data passing through my persona. It was blurred, dragged out like colour running from cloth. What’s more, I could feel echoes of the data as it passed through. A chemical analysis machine sending out an endless stream of numbers with mathematical precision, the packaged metadata of an Idol’s livestream from the heart of Shinjuku, the end-to-end encrypted comm data of Wuxing’s executive messenger app.
There was, as far as I could tell, no pattern to the data. No common content, destination or origin. It wasn’t even flowing in the same direction; the tunnels branched and split, forming a fractal maze of raw resonance. What’s more, I knew that the tunnels behind me were the same.
In elementary school, we’d gone on a class trip to the science museum downtown. It was part of an outreach programme Medhall funded, to get kids interested in biology. They sat us all down in this room made up to look like an old-fashioned yellow schoolbus and placed simsense wreaths on our heads, letting us see the body from the inside, shrunk down to a microscopic level as a museum staff member whose persona was dressed like a schoolteacher talked us through what we were seeing.
The tunnels reminded me of the circulatory system; myriad capillaries collapsing down into arteries and veins as they were carried off to who knows where. But the system was reversed; if the event horizon was the skin in this metaphor, it drew blood into the body before some unseen heart pumped it deeper in. It was almost predatory; the resonance pressing in on the matrix and drawing out its essence.
But I knew that, of the two, it was the matrix that was the intruder.
In front of me, the resonance wavered like strings carrying the vibrations of some distant force, before it coalesced, shifting apart at the very instant of Labyrinth’s arrival, her own persona as smeared by the force of this place as my own.
“I made it,” I boasted, proud. “I’ve found my own way through.”
“So I see,” Labyrinth nodded. She’d always seemed more vivid than the matrix, but here it was like she glowed with an ethereal light. We were both fundamentally connected to this place and the energy that it was formed from, but there seemed to be some deeper level to her connection.
“We are not the only ones to cross the event horizon,” Labyrinth explained, her mind clearly elsewhere as she played with the streams of data flowing through her persona. “Other technomancers explore the resonance realms, some even catalogue and disseminate information on them. Even to those without the resonance’s touch.” There was something in her tone, some combination of distrust and a little anger. “They categorise this realm as Out of Band; an in-between space linking the realms together.”
“I didn’t know we were so organised,” I mused. I’d never even considered it was an option; my first reaction upon learning about my powers had been to hide them away from everyone.
But that was six years ago, I thought. Maybe things are different now?
“We are not,” Labyrinth retorted. “There are tribes forming, in the largest cities and the busiest parts of the matrix. They cooperate, coordinate. They have common causes and act to advance them. They make targets of themselves.”
“You don’t approve, I take it?” I asked.
“What is the point in sharing knowledge of this place with those who cannot see the resonance in any form?” Labyrinth asked. “Why announce to the world what we can do? There is power here, but it would have been more powerful if it had been kept a secret.”
I nodded, agreeing entirely.
“How did you find me, anyway?” I asked. “These tunnels seem to go on forever, and I don’t think you came through in the same place as me.”
“There is no truly reliable method,” she answered. “If we had undergone submersion together, I would have been with you from the start, but we would also have shared in the journey through the event horizon.”
I almost shuddered. My failures were my own to keep.
“Then how?”
“Everything in this realm is connected. You can attempt to feel the resonance around you, divining where you need to go by pure instinct. I brokered a deal with a sprite, who knows these passages far better than either of us.”
“That works?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around the idea of sprites being sapient. “You can reason with them?”
“That depends on your definition of reason. They do want, but not in the same way we want.”
“I think I found something made by one of those other Technomancers the last time I was here,” I said, changing the subject. “A file, called The Resonance Library.”
“That was made by our kind, yes,” she explained. “I have read it, though my own techniques were discovered through trial and error. You’ll find it is useful in creating complex forms out of the resonance; to do more than twist it into a spike or direct sprites to do your tasks for you.”
“I’ve been trying to go through it, but it’s difficult. It’s like it doesn’t want to be understood.”
“It is easier here,” she said. “The file is formed from resonance, not data. Reading it in the Matrix renders it nonsensical to non-technomancers and simply difficult for our kind. Now that you have learned how to come here on your own, you can peruse it at your leisure.”
“Something for later, then,” I said. “You said there was a price for showing me how to use the realms. I don’t want to be in debt for long.”
“As with the last lesson, the task itself will teach you. There are many reasons why you might want to come here that go beyond simple exploration. You can find files that have long since been wiped from the matrix, make edits to data stored in the most secure servers, weaken the defences of a host from afar or even form a bridge between the resonance and a host’s foundation, to attack it from another angle.”
“That’s what we’re doing?” I asked, picking up on the slight change in tone on the last item in the list.
“That’s what we’re here to prevent,” Labyrinth clarified. “One of my hosts is under attack by a technomancer who is using the resonance to create their entrance.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“A confidential data host. Faultline is a fixer and an information broker in equal measure; Palanquin sits atop a treasure trove of data. It is impossible to tell what their target actually is. Attacks aren’t uncommon.”
“If they’re building a bridge between the resonance realms and your foundation, I take it we need to find the other end?” I asked.
“Precisely,” Labyrinth replied, even as her form grew hazier as she began to resync herself with the data passing through the tunnel. “Through bargains, I have already discerned the realm they are using to construct their backdoor. We will travel there, locate the intruder, subdue them and discern who they work for.”
“Just like that?” I asked, rhetorically. “Lead the way.”
Labyrinth disappeared as she re-entered the stream as motes of light, accelerating to impossible speeds in an instant. I followed her, flinging myself back into the blinding tunnels as we followed branching paths down through the capillaries and into the bloodstream of the resonance.
I had no idea how far we travelled, because concepts such as distance and time seemed utterly irrelevant in this realm of alien data, but gradually the paths branched out again, data diverting from the main flow as it was siphoned off into side passages, duplicated out in a copy and paste process as it was filed to what I had to assume were a myriad of different realms like the one I had found myself in the first time I crossed over.
When Labyrinth turned, it was abrupt, and yet the action felt almost instinctive to me. It was like the resonance had grasped hold of our essence as well, had filed us into the right realm long before we drew close and simply slotted us into the right pathway to get there.
As the capillaries branched out further, the light around me dimmed. With fewer branching paths surrounding us and a lower amount of traffic in our own tunnel, the glow receded and shrunk into a filament-thin wire down which we travelled, before the realm itself came in a sudden burst of darkness.
I fell to my hands and knees, my palm digging into the warm marble floor beneath me, with etched writing carved into it like a gravestone on the floor of an old church. As I looked to one side, I saw Labyrinth standing next to me, seemingly unaffected by the transition. In an instant, I was standing. This realm was closer to the matrix in feel than the last, which meant it was simplicity itself to shift my persona’s positioning without physically moving.
As I took in the realm that surrounded us, I was struck by an inescapable sensation of grandeur that sank deep into my core. It was as if thousands of places of worship from dozens of different religions had been layered on top of each other to create a single structure, whole sections of churches, mosques, temples and tiny private shrines merged together to create a nonsensical amalgamation of differing styles.
“Have you been here before?” I asked Labyrinth, as her familiar crow sprite shimmered into existence on her robed shoulder.
“Only once,” she answered.
“What is this place?”
“You should be able to tell that yourself.”
I looked down at the stone beneath my feet, frowning as I tried to make out the words.
“Stop.” Labyrinth said, abruptly. “This place is formed from pure resonance, as are we. We’re part of its structure, even here. You shouldn’t need sight to tell me what this place as a whole is for, and the same is true of devices and hosts formed from mundane data.”
Taking her advice, I ignored the words on the stone in favour of taking in the environment as a whole. I reached out, harmonising my own resonance with that which made up this realm before sending it out in pulses and listening to the returning tones like a ship’s radar. I’d done it once before, in the strange library, but it still took a moment to bridge the gap between what I could see and the reality of the place.
“It’s belief,” I began, but that didn’t sound right to me. “No, it’s truth. Data that asserts itself as true in such strong terms that there is no need to prove the claim because the data doesn’t consider itself a claim in the first place. All of it gathered here. An infinite number of mutually contradictory beliefs, and yet every single one of them flagged as the truth.”
I looked at the stone beneath me once more, seeing the file it represented rather than the visual layer. It was a transcript of a forum post, asserting the firmly-held beliefs of the person who typed it, but that others would call a wild theory at best. The one next to it was a court transcript recording the judgement of a case, but not the back and forth of the case itself. After that was a passage from Walking to the Light; the holy text of the Path of the Wheel.
I looked up, taking in the grand temple-collage as a whole, and saw that the artwork on the walls was moving. They were recordings of preachers, presentations, lessons, briefings and fierce arguments. Scientists delivered public health warnings, unfamiliar in the face of a camera but utterly certain in the data they were relaying. Online bloggers asserted their truths in videos filmed on their own personal commlinks, or off the webcams of their laptops. A hundred politicians were visible just from where I was standing, emphatically declaring what will happen when they’re elected. All of it was interpreted through a myriad of different art styles and mediums.
“Precisely,” Labyrinth said. “It is a fairly well-known realm, called the Temple of Belief by other technomancers, but it does not see much traffic as the data here is mostly publicly available and of little use. No doubt, that is why our target chose it.”
She paused, casting her gaze around the space before turning her attention back to me.
“Never forget that everything you ‘see’ here, or in the matrix, is nothing more than your brain interpreting this environment into something your eyes can understand. It is useful, and the reflex can never be truly un-learned, but your brain is capable of interpreting the data on its own.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Looking around at the environment, I couldn’t help but feel that I could have made the same conclusions using only the visual imput, as illusory as it may be. This particular realm was a place of metaphors – and not subtle ones. Which, I thought, fit with the blunt assertions of the data it draws in.
“Are all realms like this?” I asked. “Focusing on one specific type of data?”
“Some are,” Labyrinth answered. “Others don’t draw in data of any kind, existing simply as places on their own. Some even draw in all data, without restrictions.”
I frowned, as something struck me.
“How does this realm judge what qualifies? The data itself is formed from the same code as anything else. ‘Truth’ is a metahuman concept; it won’t show up in a file type.”
“That I do not know,” Labyrinth answered. “But while we observe the resonance, the resonance is observing the matrix – and perhaps the world beyond the matrix. It might have learned the difference through the eyes of its technomancers.”
It was strange; I knew the thought of a passenger looking through my eyes should have unsettled me, but instead I was completely indifferent to her words. It wasn’t just that I had spent a great deal of time looking through the eyes of others, it was that the resonance was an inherent part of me. The idea of it using my eyes felt no more consequential than me doing the same.
“Now…” Labyrinth turned to her crow. “We have a target to find, and an immense amount of ground to cover. I suggest you call on aid.”
I held out my own palm, watching as the resonance took shape as a dragonfly, and Labyrinth and I released the sprites together, sending them flying away down the halls even as we began leaping from point to point, jumping instantaneously from balconies and pulpits to the tops of indoor minarets as we traversed the space, all the while sending out pulses through the resonance.
We were practically screaming our location out into the space and, just like radar, it was a two way street. We found our technomancer, nestled in a small shrine to some hidden, private religion built in the corner of a Shinto-style transept. His persona was that of a human man with ash-white plastic skin and shamanic-looking robes, stripped down to the waist with glowing patterns of blue circuitry tattooed into his skin.
Whatever altar the little shrine had contained was simply gone, replaced instead with a glowing portal that seemed to warp the space around it, drawing the resonance that made up this place into a tunnel that was similar in structure to the one that carried us here. It was incomplete – I could see as much even from this distance – but even as the technomancer turned to face us, it was still reaching out into the resonance, drawing ever closer to the foundations of the matrix, and Labyrinth’s host.
I didn’t know if he was splitting his focus or the process – whatever it was – was happening without his conscious input. In the end it didn’t matter, as Labyrinth seemed to exude menace as she pounced down from the high elven-revival balcony on which we were perched, a trio of snarling wolves with a metal sheen to their fur crawling up out of the floor of the transept.
For my part, I extended the elongated spider-like limbs from the back of my persona, the tip of each loaded with spikes of concentrated resonance, and drew on the space around me to call forth wasps whose wings were almost incandescent with yellow light.
The technomancer raised up a hand in front of him and I could see the resonance gathering at his fingertips through the vivid glow of his tattoos, before it shot out in an arc of lighting that hit me right as I made to follow him, locking my limbs together as it held me in place mid-leap, suspended in the air in a web of digital electricity.
My wasps had managed to evade the attack in time, however, and together with Labyrinth’s wolves they swarmed the technomancer, nipping at his defences as the fault sprites sought out vulnerabilities into which they could sink their stingers and teeth.
Rather than answering with sprites of his own, the technomancer seemed to shimmer for a moment as his tattoos glowed until they were blinding, causing the sprites to stagger momentarily as my vision wiped out, before it dropped to reveal two identical copies of the technomancer.
As my sprites made a split-millisecond judgement and lunged for one, the other reached out and grasped one of the sprites in its hand, sending a flurry of resonance through its form like a clown’s joy buzzer, the sprite disintegrating into motes of yellow light under the electric force as the technomancer’s duplicate disappeared the moment I realised its false nature.
Labyrinth and her wolves had been more perceptive, however, and one managed to sink its teeth into the leg of the persona even as the elven woman directing the wolves did something I couldn’t quite understand, twisting the resonance around the technomancer in a way that frayed at his persona, rendering it more sluggish like the human was operating inside a spam zone.
That gave me an idea, and as I finally managed to break free of the spam zone I flew across the floor of the transept, churning the resonance inside me into the familiar pattern I had felt back in the library.
As I drew close enough to strike the persona, I opened my mouth and screamed, as the realm screamed with me. A million fireflies spilled out of the chitinous joints of my persona, filling the air with irritating yellow light and the chittering of untold wings in a way that would have had me clutching my ears and closing my eyes tightly if it had actually been sound and light that assailed me. My opponent was equally effected, but only I was expecting the onslaught. It gave me just enough leverage to drive a spider’s leg through a gap in his defences, flooding his core with poisonous code.
As the connection was made, however, I was struck by a horrific sense of wrongness at the technomancer. Something about the resonance that made up his form seemed warped in ways I couldn’t quite comprehend, like it was rotten somehow.
Something deep inside me screamed at it, at the dissonance between it and the shared harmony of myself and this realm – and the resonance entire.
So I screamed back, intensifying the storm of fireflies in an attempt to drown out his dissonant hum, fumbling blindly in a morass of my own creation even as I drove spike after spike after spike at my equally blind opponent. Around us, wolves and wasps darted in and out of the melee, affected by my storm even worse than either of us were.
Only Labyrinth seemed unaffected, having spread out her own resonance to anchor herself into the structure of the realm itself, giving her an idea of our positioning in relation to our surroundings, rather than relying solely on what her senses could see. I was only peripherally aware of her through the storm, but I could guess enough of her intentions to know to press my attack, even as the technomancer managed to grip my face and drive an electric palmprint into it, my synapses burning at the pressure.
If we were on the grids, and he were using a commlink to connect, it would have been enough to fill his vision with bandwidth errors, driving him out of the matrix without ever actually harming the device itself. In the resonance, however, there was nowhere to run, and as his persona frayed with the storm I knew with every certainty that his mind was fraying alongside it.
“What is he?” I asked, knowing that if I were in meatspace I would be breathless with exertion and shock in equal measure.
“He is dissonant,” Labyrinth answered. “An Apophenian.” The persona before us had been stripped of almost all its tailored individuality, reduced to a flickering humanoid shape of bare resonance that seemed so inherently wrong to my senses it was all I could do to keep it in my attention.
“The resonance that makes up his form has been corrupted into dissonance,” she explained. “Where we are in harmony with the resonance, he stands in opposition. Apophenians are as deranged as all dissonant technomancers, driven to connect disparate things in odd ways. No doubt this one raids hosts as a way of funding his compulsion.”
“Connecting a host of empirical facts to one of asserted truths,” I picked up the thread, before gesturing at the swirling vortex in front of us. “He made that? It doesn’t feel… dissonant.”
“It is not,” Labyrinth said. “There are connections between the resonance and the matrix that bypass the event horizon, emerging as wells of resonance. They are vanishingly rare, and always fought over when they do emerge. This Apophenian was redirecting this nascent well to my host. Once it was rooted in the foundation, he would no doubt have polluted it into a permanent, dissonant well.”
There was anger in her tone, so different from her usual stoicism. She looked down at the technomancer, kneeling beside his featureless persona as she dug a palm into his chest.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I was going to have you do this,” she explained, “but dissonance can have a corrupting effect on the unprepared. I am digging through the history of this persona, following its trail to trace its activities. It may take some time.”
“Should I do anything about the well?” I asked.
“No need,” Labyrinth shook her head. “It is forming quickly. With the Apophenian neutralised it will emerge on the Denver metropolitan grid within two hours. More than enough time for us to disappear before tribes, adventurers, nations and megacorporations come calling.”
After a moment, she withdrew her hand from the technomancer and stood.
“He is in the Miami Metroplex,” she spoke with absolute confidence. “He was hired by a contact in Aztechnology to destroy or retrieve confidential prototype data one of our teams stole from a facility of theirs. No doubt a physical team is preparing a raid on the secure storage site where we are keeping the actual prototype.”
Abruptly, her wolves tightened their grip on the persona, flooding it with resonance spikes. Instinctively I had my wasps do the same, eradicating the feeling of wrongness, but in the aftermath I found myself wracked by uncertainty.
“Is he dead?” I asked, forcing the words past my hesitation.
“It is of no consequence,” Labyrinth answered. “I have transmitted his location to Faultline, alongside a summary of the situation. She has contacts in the Caribbean League who will recover his corpse, or kill him while he is crippled by dumpshock. Security at our storage facility will be bolstered.”
“And the executive?”
“Out of our reach,” Labyrinth said nonchalantly. If she were a more expressive person, she might have shrugged our shoulders. “But if she is prepared to go this far to retrieve the file, she will no doubt suffer for her failure to do so.”
“It kind of sucks,” I sighed. “It feels like we treated the symptom of the problem, not the cause.”
“It is the way of that world,” Labyrinth answered. “And not worth worrying about.”
I looked at the swirling vortex before me, staring into pure resonance without even a cosmetic layer to interpret the data. If I was still a troll in that moment, I might have sighed.
“You know…” I began, my words faltering. “I picked Bug for my username because I used to feel like a glitch in the system. I’ve been a technomancer for longer than most, but for most of that time I didn’t even know what I was. I just knew that I didn’t fit. But here? Now? Now it’s the name that feels like it doesn’t fit anymore.”
“It’s easy to change,” Labyrinth answered. “Your persona as well. All it would take is a thought.”
“I know,” I said. “I just haven’t had the right thought yet. And I like my persona, chitin and all. We’re the world’s bogeymen, until a new one shows up. Might as well own the aesthetic.” I shook my head. “Why’d you pick Labyrinth, anyway?”
“It is what I am,” Labyrinth answered, with a hint of emotion in her tone. “It is what I did, when I belonged to Mitsuhama Consumer Technologies. I made hosts for them within a localised network surrounded by a facility-wide faraday cage. I did it again and again, layering complexity after complexity onto them as they studied my work. I was their most powerful subject, which meant they subjected me to constant brain scans rather than simply dissecting me like the others.”
“It’s the old myth, right?” I asked. “A sacrifice a year, fed to the labyrinth. The minotaur’s just… detail. If it didn’t kill them, starvation would.”
“Someone told me the story as well,” Labyrinth said. “At the facility, or… before. I can’t remember anymore. Regardless, the image appealed to me.”
I couldn’t help but find it admirable; the way she’d taken the worst moments of her life and turned them into a strength. It reminded me a lot of everything the rest of my team had gone through, as well as being a prescient example of what I needed to do if I was going to keep myself out of the rut I had fallen into.
Both of us were shocked out of our reverie as the nascent well expanded, the maelstrom now large enough that it had almost completely obscured the small shrine.
“We should leave,” Labyrinth said. “Even a decker can travel into this realm through a resonance well.”
“Right,” I agreed, reflexively leaping back from the rift. “Where to next?”
“You have kept up your end of the bargain and eliminated the threat to my host,” Labyrinth said. “I will go through the resonance library you found and see if I can teach you any of the forms within; you are skilled enough in combat, but you lack finesse. This will be easier somewhere quiet.”
“Actually, I think I know a good place,” I said, instinctively. “The realm I found myself in when I first came through. It’s a lot smaller than this one, as far as I can tell, and it was as quiet as a dead zone.”
“That will do,” Labyrinth said. “Lead the way.”
Finding the exit to the realm was as simple as retracing our steps, though I doubted it was the only one in this place. It might not even be an exit, but some allegorical representation of the path we’d taken through the resonance, formed by the now completely imperceptible thread linking my persona back to my body like the air cable of some ancient submariner.
Travelling through the tunnels of light felt instinctive, my path as clear as it had been when I was simply following Labyrinth a few metres in front of me. I wondered if it was because I had been there before, or if all the resonance realms were this easy to locate if you knew what you were looking for. Somehow, I doubted it.
As before, I emerged from the tunnel of light into the depths of inky black water, my momentum cancelling as my virtual lungs were suddenly made real and filed with fluid. This time, however, I stamped down on the instinctive panic and calmly swam upwards, knowing that the burning in my lungs was no more real than anything else in this place. Before I’d even broken the surface, I had forced the perfect facsimile of my organic body back into the familiar shape of my persona.
I still had to physically haul myself out of the water, black fluid dripping off chitin onto the stone floor. When the pool stilled, I looked back into its depths and saw the comforting form of the insectoid face, as my spidersilk robes dried rapidly in the resonance-turned-air. I stepped back from the pool, leant against the cool stone wall, and waited for Labyrinth to emerge from the pool.
After a minute, I was frowning. After five, I was back over by the side of the pool on my hands and knees, staring into its depths as I stirred the water with an outstretched spider leg. When I came through into the Temple of Belief, I was right behind Labyrinth. With the advantage in knowledge and experience she had over me, it was impossible to believe she had somehow lost track of me.
And yet, after ten minutes, I concluded that the impossible had somehow happened. I wondered if it was something to do with this place; the entrance was far harder to reach than the other realm, depositing a persona into an uncomfortably physical obstacle rather than into an open space. For someone like Labyrinth, who emphasised the actual resonance over the form it took, might it have been too much of a barrier to overcome? Or was something else at play and this place was filtering out technomancers in the same way other realms filtered data?
Either way, I wasn’t in a place to fix things, and if there was some underlying mystery to this place I wasn’t going to find it in the antechamber. So I left the pool behind, wandering back through the gently-curving hall with locked doors running along the right wall and stained glass windows that let in a shimmering green light along the left, all the while marvelling at just how perfectly it felt like real light, real gravity, real air and real green carpeting beneath my feet.
The library was as I had left it, the blinking racks of servers stretching off into the distance, each one containing seemingly random files and fragments of data. Above me, behind the vaulted glass of the ceiling, that same constellation of light glimmered amidst a black void. It was like a nebula, full of the potential of new-born stars, and it was no less entrancing on the second viewing than it had been on the first.
Remembering the Temple of Belief, I reached out into the resonance and tried to harmonise myself with the place, sending out pulses of resonance and waiting for the return signals.
But no matter how hard I focused, I couldn’t completely disassociate myself from the cosmetic layer of this place, which meant I couldn’t see the true nature of the resonance that comprised it. The physical laws here were too focused, too real, which in and of itself was so out of keeping with the rest of the realms that it almost made me feel uneasy.
I turned away from the starfield, looking up and down the stacks of blinking servers. Idly, I picked one at random, wheeling over the moveable ladder with its desktop terminal and slotting in the archaic wired connector.
This time, the file was clearly from someone’s own personal computer. It appeared to me as the same mass of spaghetti code, while simultaneously being completely comprehensible as an artist’s portfolio, full of technical drawings that depicted patterns on fabric and how those patterns would be weaved together into beautiful dresses ranging from fantastical high fashion to practical eveningwear.
I unplugged the connector, moving it to the next server up. This file was far smaller, belonging to a Stuffer Shack franchise and largely consisting of spreadsheets detailing the arrival of fresh stock, the financial balance of the business and the timesheet by which its workers lived their lives.
The next was different once again. It was a familiar format of old message logs, but the file only had one side of the conversation.
»I feel like I’m trapped. Either I follow the path that’s been set for me and lose out on the chance to choose my own future, or I go my own way and leave things in the hands of those people. Nothing will change, and maybe things will get worse.«
- Tantalus (20:04:23/02-3-2070)
»It’s easy to say that when it’s just your own life you have to worry about, but this is about so much more than just me.«
- Tantalus (20:04:51/02-3-2070)
»Yeah, sorry, I worded that wrong. I don’t mean to diminish your own experiences, but whatever I choose, it’ll affect a lot of people. That’s why I can only talk about this here, where nobody but you knows who I am.«
- Tantalus (20:05:13/02-3-2070)
»That’s the problem, I don’t really know for certain. I suspect a hell of a lot, but that’s not the sort of thing he’d let me see. I think he thinks I don’t have the stomach for the real picture. He’s right, of course.«
- Tantalus (20:06:25/02-3-2070)
»Believe me, I wish he’d agreed to let me attend UH has well. The distance would have been good for me, and I’d love to meet up with you for real. You’ve certainly sold me on Hawai’i. But I guess he didn’t want me going out of the country for university, especially to a country that used to be part of the USA. So here I am, practically on his doorstep.«
- Tantalus (20:07:42/02-3-2070)
»If I was there, I think I’d never come back. Instead, I’m still here. He’d stop me from leaving if he found out, and it’s so hard to ignore the effect leaving would have while I’m still in Brockton Bay.«
- Tantalus (20:08:04/02-3-2070)
»I’m sorry for venting again. You’re the only person I can talk to about this.«
- Tantalus (20:08:16/02-3-2070)
I stepped back from the terminal, my eyes wide in shock. The coincidence was impossibly small. Brockton Bay didn’t even rank amongst the largest cities in the UCAS and if the realm drew on global data, like the Temple did, then the chance of me stumbling across data from my city within the first few files was infinitesimally small.
A deep sense of foreboding crept into my as I looked up and down the length of the racks of servers, before my eyes were drawn inexorably up to the distant nebula twinkling overhead. It all suddenly made sense; even why I’d been so naturally drawn to this place, while Labyrinth hadn’t been able to enter. After all, at my heart I was just data of a different sort.
I couldn’t find the nature of this place by looking through the resonance, but I understood metaphors when they were staring me in the face. It wasn’t anchored to a concept, but to a physical location, and with that physicality came the gravity and air that defined the distinction between physical and digital reality. The starfield above me was achingly familiar, but it had taken me this long to realise what the image really depicted because I had never before seen it from this angle, or this far away.
I’d called this a library, but that was just one part of the whole structure. It was an observatory in the shape of an immense, circular eye, staring unblinkingly up at my home city as it drew into the resonance all data that originated in Brockton Bay.