For a few hours, we planned our next move. We found out that Subject 249’s name was Aaron, and that he came from LA, just like us. There were two reasons why Benedict didn’t like to kidnap people from other dimensions. The first was that the cost of teleportation doors was significantly lower than dimension hopping ones. The second was that he was scared he could have missed a high-ranked benevolent god, who would have immediately felt him enter his world as an interloper and tried to stop his plans. The mad scientist didn’t even trust the D worlds, short for dead, where he had found no sign of life with all his futuristic gadgets. We learned that over the whole multiverse, there where actual constant rules, notably entropy and the impossibility of going faster than lightspeed, which prevented the doors to let you travel back through time. The way everything had begun was pure luck, he had found a dimensional door randomly laying around in our world and after a lot of testing, had found a way to change the destination of the door. He then managed to get a lot of technology from A3 to help him in his endeavours, A3 basically being our Earth but with a 300 000-year upstart. The construction of the space station consisted in doing a thing so horrible we couldn’t read through Benedict’s cold explanation of the fact without reliving some of the things he had done to us, so we skipped most of it. To summarize, he had wished for it in the only world where you could wish for things. The cost was so high that that world was now part of the dead dimensions.
Finding new worlds and dimensions was Benedict’s hobby when he wasn’t torturing and organizing kidnappings, but he very rarely went through the doors himself. Bonnie was apparently charged with a lot of automatons, cleaning and maintaining the station, and some of them served as scouts. The only people he contacted were criminals employed to set up his kidnapping schemes, and a Chinese restaurant in Beijing. To capture his targets, he overlapped a teleporting door on a real one at the split second where his target touched the handle, and voilà, free guinea pig.
He had all the resources he could want, but what he lacked was manpower. He needed people on the ground to provide the research and surveillance to catch his victims. That was why we had been made like models, what explained our appearance.
We were a new project of his. We were a gift to someone in another world, someone who would have given Benedict a foothold in that world, giving him access to new sapient species.
“And that’s where I want to go.” L told me.
“Where we were supposed to be sold to? Why?” I asked. I had been busy asking Bonnie how we could send Aaron back home and hadn’t read the short description that described the world.
“First, because it’s one of the only five S worlds. Second, because it’s the most documented one of those five worlds. It doesn’t really say anything about the world, not even the system, more on the different races and politics. I didn’t go into it. But the other worlds are summarized as Fantasy world 1, Fantasy world 2, Neanderthals and Expected dead world in ten years, so not great. He didn’t give a shit about the system or anything else. Just nice fresh bodies and how to get them.”
She fidgeted on her seat.
“Spit it out.” I recognized her body language.
“Well, third I’d really like to fucking kill the jackass that wanted to buy custom-made slaves.”
“You can’t even hurt a kitten, L.”
She turned around to face me.
“I can.”
Silence grew between us.
I understood what she meant. I lived it through her eyes.
Finally, after minutes of reliving things that shouldn’t have been lived in the first place, I spoke.
“I’m not a killer L, you know that the only way I’ll ever…”
“Read his profile, L.” She interrupted me.
Oh, he was a scumbag, I quickly realized, being sold to such a man, he was called Gorunt Fay, would have been an atrocious experience but… Then I read the last sentence.
“He sells children. Sometimes he sells parts of children.” I said out loud, deep, low anger growing in my belly.
“See? We could make a difference. Saving children and slaves would help me cope, ruining anything Benedict touched, even better.”
My sister was suddenly making a good argument.
“Yeah. But it’s not that simple. We can’t just kill him, we need to break down the whole organization. Benedict gathered a lot of info about them, he clearly describes them as a super organized group, with weird powers and unknown strength. They’re using this system as well. How would we manage to do that? We’ll be new arrivals in a strange world with new rules, they lived there their whole lives.”
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“Well, I thought we could use the station, it surely has weapons, right?”
“Maybe? Bonnie, are there weapons on the station?”
“…The station is not equipped with any weaponry, except the Laser-Push Array.” The computer answered immediately.
“What’s that?”
“Text-to-speech is unable to process this question, please consult libraries to answer your query.”
I sighed. “Well sis, seems like you’re going to prove yourself. Are you better than an AI?”
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it.”
As the page popped up on the screen, we both started reading it.
“Oh…” We said simultaneously.
It seemed the Laser-Push Array, or LPA in short, was an impossibly large weapon system that was used to…push stars and large planets falling towards the black hole away from the space station. It pushed stars. When it was used against less massive planets, it literally vaporized them. It was also the size of Earth.
“It would kill the bad guys.” I said with a grin.
“Nothing else?” My sister didn’t comment on my sarcasm.
“Bonnie, can’t you make guns, something like that?” I questioned the AI again.
“My programming prevents me from creating any weaponry in case of a Rogue AI event.”
My grin fell. “Rogue AI event? Oh. Mh. Maybe I should be nicer to Bonnie.”
My sister gave me a sad look. “I don’t think it matters anymore.”
One problem at a time, I told myself, trying to focus.
“So, what’s the plan then? We can’t just waltz in a new world to kill people who have magic.”
My sister put a hand on her chin, her expression thoughtful.
I waited. When she wanted something, I knew it was a lost cause to try and change her mind.
“Ok. So, we send back Aaron through the door, send a message to mom and dad telling them we’re fine. We killed our kidnapper but are now on the run because he was like…a bigshot Democrat. Dad will swallow that like there is no tomorrow. We’ll put in something only we can know so that mom will be reassured as well. We come back here and prepare for our trip. Test the waters. The only sad thing is that the system apparently doesn’t carry through dimension but, eh. Could be wrong, could be right, it’ll still be fun.” She shrugged as I was starting to get a bit lost. “Not carrying over, the one thing that Benedict found important to note about the system. But anyway. We go there, we try the system out. Maybe we’ll find an easy loophole with Bonnie helping us. Or maybe we’ll get like an instant super achievement like [World Traveller] and get a gazillion stat points. Then we carry on day by day, with the final goal to kill this Gorunt Fay fucker. What do you say?”
“Erm, is there a door that goes to LA? The doors Benedict used were temporary ones, right?” I pointed out. “That’s what Bonnie told me at least.”
She opened her mouth, and it stayed like that for a while. “Good point.” She said as she closed it.
“Weren’t you listening?”
She shook her head. “No, I was reading about S3’s different races.”
“Our dearest Ai friend explained it all.” I said respectfully. “We can use a one-way temporary door to LA, but it’ll take a few days for it to recharge so we can come back here. There needs to be an anchor, something that Bonnie can lock on to, and the only uplink in the city that isn’t in a criminal meth-house is on the beach. Great to drop Aaron, but far from home. Bonnie can give us money, apparently, but we have no papers, no id, no shoes, no phones.”
“A shit walk of shame, in summary.”
“That’s not the problem though. If Bonnie can get us money, I think she can get us those things as well. Maybe not the id. All in all it’s just an annoyance.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What’s the problem then?”
“The problem is we’ll be arriving with an unconscious guy that’s almost certainly being looked for by the police. I’d rather avoid popping up in a crowded place with a missing person next to me. Not even talking about just appearing out of thin air in a crowded place. And we can’t just drop Aaron there during then night with no one to help him. A bad tide and he’ll drown.”
“So? We just need to come at different times, oh but then we’ll have to wait there while the energy thing recharges… What about a permanent door? Is there none?”
“Yes, there is the original one that has been moved in a secret lab in Antarctica.”
“Not optimal… you know what, fuck it. Let’s drop Aaron with a message addressed to our parents, and we’ll go to S3 through the permanent door. The world description said that it was hidden deep in the woods, but with a village nearby. I don’t want to plan the perfect thing or anything like that. I just want to experience a world with video game rules and have fun. Helping kids as a long-term objective. Isn’t that fine?”
“I…” I felt like it wasn’t. We had so many better options than just rush in a new world. I wasn’t sure that a video-game world was such a great place to go to either. It was the home to child-parts vendors after all. The little I had managed to read about the world’s politics also didn’t seem that great. A medieval world with weird races, most of them being racist of some of the others, big monsters that ate entire villages and kingdoms even greedier than Jeff Bezos during a Covid pandemic. “I haven’t seen what races there were, can I…”
“Nope! Let’s go! You’ll ask Bonnie when we’re there.”
“She can’t answer half the time…”
“Just ask yes or no questions, it’ll be fine.”
Something in my sister’s tone of voice sounded a bit suspicious, but then if I had to guess it was probably that there were cat-people on the S3 world, and she didn’t want to admit that it was the only reason why she wanted to go.
My sister was a self-proclaimed weeb.
She rose back on her feet and started gently pulling me to the door.
“Aaron first.” I reminded her.
“I wasn’t going to forget! We need to find a paper and pencil too for a letter.”
It seems our planning had stopped, abruptly, and it was now time for action.
I knew we were rushing things, but I also knew how painful thinking was for the both of us right now and overthinking it would probably do us more harm than good. It was a fine line to walk. I knew me and my sister were on the brink, I had Lila, but Gaëlle only had me to keep her out of the deep waters of madness. We were using our memories and relationship together to hold on. The more we talked, the more we acted like humans again, the more chances we would have to pull through what had happened to us. We had taken a common decision, unsaid but well understood, that we would survive together or fall together.
So I decided I would follow Gaëlle through her manic episode of wanting to discover a new world. I believed in saving kids as well. It was a purpose, a hold on the future.
It was good for us.