It was “morning” of day 14 since they’d found the kitchen. Outwardly, Sally spent her time switching between working at the camp and the kitchen. The simple physical tasks freed up her mind so it could run in fast time, studying and integrating everything Alex was dumping on her. Internally, months had passed. Even with her improvements, after a hard night of learning, she tended to lose track of where she was, physically. Taking a moment to stop and peer around, she deduced that since she was in her camp bed, it was most likely morning and, obviously, she was in the camp.
With nothing important pending, Sally lay back in her bed. Her new improved body was amazing: no aches, pains, sores, muscle strains, or headaches. What she wanted to know was how to move this pinnacle of excellence out of this prison she was trapped in, and give it the chance to live, meet others, and have fun. It was past time to stop avoiding the issue, and make a plan. Sally parsed through her options and decided to list out what she could and couldn’t do, plus try and figure out what resources she could apply to the problem.
What did she have? What would help her escape? She thought back over her life since she woke up in her hospital room.
Something had made her, programmed her to be a Sally, and placed her in her old hospital room. Consequently, she had a killer wheelchair and an IV bag that connected to an unknown source of fluid. Maybe she could go back and see if Jon had overlooked anything else in the hospital room that would be useful?
What else? The computing boxes, the spy, the subspace tap, her abilities to process and plan, Alex, Jon, the pile of garbage that went on forever, and a faux-blueberry muffin recipe that was to die for. A lot of stuff, but nothing leaped out as an obvious solution.
The only subspace tubes that Jon had uncovered were the small ones for the IV, the one for his pellets, and the big one that connected to the room where he’d been spawned, or however Jons came into being. She had no idea how she could use the little tubes, but maybe there was something to discover in his starting room?
What about the hole in the computer room floor? She looked down it every time she passed by, but so far, it persisted in being an unexceptional hole.
The spy said it had exit plans, but Sally had no idea what they were, and the hardware she'd inherited from it hadn’t contained any clues. Both she and Alex had examined everything the spy had left behind, and although there were many features that would be of use, there were no records for any type for an exit plan. The other Alex had queried the spy and reported that it was evasive, trying to bargain, but he concluded that it was actually full of crap; his very words.
Sally’s mind went off on a tangent, annoyed that she still couldn’t figure out how her internal version of Alex communicated with the greater Alex.
Reining her thoughts in, she returned to listing the resources she had available. The secret passages, and the place Alex came from, maybe there was some way out through the room of the black sun? What about the capricious gods of this place? Would they help? Basing a plan on them was a long shot, but it wouldn’t hurt to throw out the occasional prayer, because sometimes the gods did answer.
There were clues that other Sallys had escaped, but she didn’t have any solid data. If the spy hadn’t made her up, the super hi-tech dream Sally had used very advanced technology. She’d asked Alex about this Sally, and he’d laughed, saying that a Sally like that never existed. Maybe. Maybe not, but it seemed to be a dead-end, for now.
And, she had to deal with a possible KILL SWITCH inside her! Probably in Jon, too! Jon might have issues, but he was her friend! She had to be smart about it, but she would help a friend, even if it was difficult. Really difficult. Really, really difficult.
Sally paused. What were her strengths? Yeah, it would be nice to be able to wave her hand and transport herself and Jon out of here, but what were her real strengths?
Well, a big part of her rebuild was based on the spy. Maybe she should stick with spy-type things. Looking into the kill switch would be more up a spy’s alley. Sally thought about it. Yeah, a definite possibility.
What else? There were all the dead Sallys, and also a pile of dead companions. She could talk with Jon and see what he had figured out. There was that one floating Sally being held in some sort of suspended state. Maybe it had some kind of special clue?
Sally turned off her emotions and entered pure logic mode. Taking advantage of her perfect memory, she listed everything, no matter how small, and then applied a number of algorithms to rate the usefulness of the items as they related to finding the kill switch. And for escaping. She also noted that when her emotions were turned off, she still wanted revenge on the evil scientist. This became a secondary goal.
Eventually, one option surged ahead of the others. It depended heavily on her burgeoning sneakiness and used things she had available. She didn’t know how to escape, she didn’t know how to get revenge, but she did know that when an opportunity arose she wanted to be able to take immediate action.
A standard escape plan for a spy, if they couldn’t manage a simple exit, was to direct attention toward someone else, and leave at one’s own leisure. Properly done, the spy could escape before the subterfuge was detected. Very well done, and the opposition may never know the spy even existed.
How to do this? Hmmm... Jon was focused on recreating a Sally in some sort of artificial medium, but one of Alex’s lectures discussed an alternative. The direction he’d presented dwelt on the fact that body death wasn’t really absolute. Access to sufficient technology allowed for levels of death, if that made sense. The technology that kept her going while she was unconscious in the hospital bed could be adapted to assist in a certain amount of reanimation, making it possible to take dead cells and work backward to recover them to a healthy state.
After some thought, she concluded that there was a good likelihood she could bring back one of the dead Sallys. At a minimum, she could introduce her current mental infrastructure into the other Sally’s body, and make it seem that it was the original her. Having a second Sally would free her up to do things without worrying about Jon.
Now, this was a do-able plan. She turned on her emotions.
Sally was shocked by her logical self’s callousness. She wasn’t willing to sacrifice another Sally to escape! But… what if it was a Sally robot? Maybe then it would be okay?
Damn these moral ambiguities!
She wavered back and forth until eventually, she stood back and thought hard about the whole situation. To be honest, way down in the heart of her heart, if someone asked her to help another Sally escape, she would do it without a second thought. Well, maybe a second thought, but certainly not a third, definitely not a fourth. She would do it, but it would be sweeter if she knew that the escaped Sally would come back for her and Jon. The excellent part was that since it was her, she knew that she would do everything possible to return and help those left behind.
Sally put these thoughts aside, for now. It was necessary to lay some groundwork before the idea was even possible. She had to research if there was a way for the evil scientist to tell the Sallys apart. If she solved this problem, then she would investigate how to disable the kill switch, or switches. At this point, she had no doubt that something like the switch existed.
Alex had downloaded into her the information describing the method used by ther spy to communicate with its handler. It leaned heavily on the resources of the computing boxes, but there was a great deal of information about variations, alternatives, and how to hide its messages in other data. These methods included techniques such as noise-like encryption, mimicking other signals, obscure patterns, and so on.
Unfortunately, this information didn’t seem to apply to her. She hadn’t detected communication links of any sort within herself. If the kill switch existed inside her somewhere, then there had to be some way to activate it, but she suspected the link was a one-time event, such as a burst transmission, a viral infection, or a coded gravity pulse. Basically, something that went in one direction, from the evil scientist to her.
If Jon was a monitor, he would have a much more dynamic link. The problem was that he was so noisy. Especially when the hand sensor was operating, You could bury the entire knowledge of the universe in his data signals and never know.
Here is where the spy's abilities came in. Sally could look for some signs of extra data in Jon's signals by enabling some of her stealth decoding systems and see if there was anything that looked suspicious. It would take a lot of data to get any meaningful results, but she might as well try.
Sally used her internally configurable hardware to arrange a number of analyses on some data that she had previously stored. She wasn’t primarily an analyst, but did have some capability, and the hardware was just sitting there anyway. She kicked off the task and started to get up, when there was an internal Bing.
It was her analysis! It had found something already!
Her search had examined the data Jon was using to interface with the hand, and had discovered that the data shared some statistically similar properties with the stealth encoding the spy had been using. This was one of the unique methods that had been new to Alex. Finding this same technique being used in Jon’s data was very interesting.
It implied that her spy had some relationship with her captor, or at least there was a very good chance. Why else would she use a method that her evil scientist knew, while she was in the heart of his empire? It probably meant that the spy had lied about not being associated with the evil scientist. What a shock. Not.
It also meant she would have to be extremely careful. Very likely, her stealth algorithms were known to the evil scientist.
Dang it all! This was starting to get complicated.
Then, she laughed at herself, and got back to work.
The problem with her methodology was that it only pointed out that there was likely data present. The next step was to dig through the signals and see if she could identify and recover the data itself. With her luck it would be encoded. That would be a problem, because she had no knowledge of the algorithm or any keys. But, she could try.
On TV shows it was easy. Just push a few buttons and the super-secret code was broken, but, in real life, not so much.
Now that she was fairly sure that monitoring data was present, she could try and find out how it was added. Well, maybe not. This took place inside Jon. Hmm... that was a bit of a problem.
If she couldn’t access Jon, maybe there was some way she could get him to look?
She started to get up again, when there was another Bing.
No, way!
She was right. This second alarm was just a reminder for the earlier bing. She reset it, got up, and started her day. After washing and food, she hunted down Jon.
“Hey Jon. I'm not really doing much here. Do you think it would be okay if I went back to the kitchen by myself, this time? At least I could read more and maybe put some stuff in order, and you could keep working here.”
Jon paused for a moment. Sally was fairly sure that this was an affectation for her benefit.
“Okay. So far, we seem to be safe, I will give you a way to contact me. You will also need a light,”
Jon went off to rummage through his assorted piles of junk while Sally waited patiently, at least outwardly. She was still wondering about the morality and feasibility of resurrecting another Sally. It may not be necessary, but the bodies were so well preserved it probably wasn’t completely impossible. And, she was leaning toward thinking of it as being morally ambiguous, in a positive way.
Sally laughed to herself. Here she was, a small-town girl thinking about hacking the dead.
“Aliiiiive!” She exclaimed, just like a mad scientist should. Jon ignored her outburst.
After a while, he came back carrying a bag and a rigid tube.
“Just carry the tube in your hand. It will use your motion and body heat to glow enough for you to see. Are you sure you can find your way back?”
He was worried. How nice. He wasn’t a real boy, but he was trying, and he did care, at least in his own way. It made her feel bad that she knew he had to remain in the dark about what she knew. It wasn’t what she would have wished.
She took the tube and the bag. When she looked inside the bag she saw that it was filled with, well... small dots was the best description she could come up with. They were blinking faint flashes of light at a very slow rate.
“Most communication systems can’t pass through the walls and do not travel very far down the passages. These dots are a self-organizing nodal system where all the nodes talk to each other, and I have set them up so they can pick up audio and low-quality video. The nodes you are carrying will stop blinking if any of them can’t contact each other through their signal mesh. So, stick one to the wall and when the ones you are carrying stop blinking, go back to where they start blinking again and put another dot on the wall. This will be every half mile, or so, but it varies.”
“Aren’t you full of surprises?”
“Yes.”
Paranoid Sally screamed that now she was able to be tracked when Jon wasn’t around. This was unexpected, even though she should have foreseen that it could happen. Sally froze. Alex popped into her view. Sally nearly yelled at him to leave so Jon wouldn’t see him but caught herself as she looked at Jon, who seemed to have stopped moving.
Alex spoke up, “Don’t worry, I have sped up your clock so we could talk. Just think what you want to say and I will understand.”
“I’m in real trouble. Jon can monitor me all the time! How will I get anything done?”
“Oh, you have bigger issues than that. Remember when you ran through the passages to meet me for the first time? That was not well considered.”
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“What? What?” Sally barely remembered to keep it internal.
“You understand that one way or another, you are monitored all the time. Every little slip and mistake are recorded somewhere.”
“Then, then, then... what is the use of me trying to be sneaky?! What…” words failed her.
“You have made a few erroneous assumptions. This experiment can tolerate the escape of a Sally here or there. It’s not about keeping you ignorant, or seeing what you do in specific circumstances, it’s about finding out why a certain future event depends on you Sallys. In fact, as this experiment has progressed, it’s an inescapable conclusion that the Sallys have become more of a factor.
“For you, personally, it means that the occasional slip really doesn’t matter. It would be best that we avoid too many, but I don’t think you are close to causing the activation of the kill switch, which I know is your main worry. And I'm kind of screwing with you, on your mad dash to meet me, I arranged that your particular path avoided the monitoring. But, from here on, you are on your own. Deal with the dots yourself.”
Alex disappeared and Jon began moving. Sally was in shock. Talk about tough love; Alex had been quite brutal.
Sally guessed it was Alex's way of telling her that it was time to grow up.
She pondered what she should do. Forcing herself to move, she bean walking toward the hallway. This whole situation was a bit inconvenient. She would have to run simple-Sally the entire way, but once she got to the kitchen, she could put the leftover dots somewhere so that they couldn’t monitor her.
Sally turned on her internal hardware and found that the nodes were using a simple version of under-space grouping, and were completely unencoded. That was convenient. It let her see and hear everything that they transmitted.
She sighed and realized that she could handle this. As she passed the hallway entrance, she stuck one of the dots on the wall.
Looking back, she saw that Jon had returned to digging through the pile.
As she moved along, Sally thought furiously, which seemed to be normal, now. She was almost certain that Jon was heavily monitored, even if she didn’t know the exact data he sent out. She was also sure the format was related to what the spy had known, and if Alex wasn’t lying, this method was very rare, if not unique. That implied that the same signal structure would be used for any communication with her, as well.
The spy hadn’t mentioned anything, but then it was a completely self-oriented turd, and probably hoarded information instinctively. Thinking about the spy gave her a thought. Perhaps there was a record of what the spy had come across as she was making changes to her body?
She hunted around inside her memory and eventually found an orphaned region that contained the build log for the spy. She searched through it, and, surprise, surprise, there was a note about various structures that had been isolated. It didn’t have much information, but gave her a few hints. These had to come from the evil scientist since other than the stuff he added, she shouldn’t have had anything except her original biology before the spy started changing things.
Sally dug into the files that dealt with her internal audits as she and Alex had changed things, and found that they hadn’t been correctly set up to detect the sort of stealth technology that largely was her, now. She modified the parameters, and suddenly got millions of notices. Her alarms were a little to sensitive.
This was going to take a while. Sally set up a mental workspace and started optimizing the code.
By now, she had walked past the computer room and was about halfway to the kitchen. She had been sticking up dots as needed. A part of her debated getting a little lost, but if she wanted Jon to think she could travel without him, it was best she keep to the trail.
It took until she had nearly reached the exit before she had a decent way to run her internal checks. She started the process running and it found 36 anomalous instances. When she mapped them, she found that seven of these instances were kill switches. Carefully, Sally examined the switches. The first bit of good news was that there didn’t appear to be a unique way of identifying her. It looked as if the kill signal was just a broadcast signal with no handshaking. This was poor contingency planning, but she’d accept the gift if her opponents insisted on being lazy.
The even better news was that the spy had already disconnected the kill switches! This was the final proof that the spy and the evil scientist were linked. These switches were supposed to be almost impossible to detect, so the spy shouldn’t have been able to disable them. It wasn’t much of a surprise, but it removed all doubt.
She didn’t know what she felt about these findings. The evil scientist could still use more prosaic methods to terminate her. Her improved body would be a lot tougher to kill, but even so, she should probably have some backup plans, just in case she was attacked physically.
Although she didn’t feel like dancing around, finding the switches already disabled had lifted one weight off of her. She wasn’t as naïve as she used to be, so she played around with the search parameters to check if there was any chance that she’d missed something. Fortunately, nothing else turned up.
Sally arrived at the secret door, which they left propped open, and traveled to the kitchen. She “casually” tossed the dots on the table. A few spilled on the tabletop, but most stayed in the bag. She sat and stared at them while she drank some water. Accessing the dots, she reviewed the video from the arena. Jon was still rooting around. The long-range video was poor, but the audio pickup turned out to be very sensitive. She would have to be very careful about what noises she made and what she said, but Alex had been correct. She could handle this.
She took over from simple-Sally and put the spilled dots in the bag, leaving one so it could see the kitchen, but not the library or the hallway to the cage room. She thought everything looked natural enough that Jon wouldn’t become suspicious.
Then she walked around the kitchen for a while, and after poking at a few things, headed to the library, making no attempt to hide what she was doing. Then, while monitoring the dots, she tiptoed out of the library and ran to the mausoleum. The dots didn't pick up any sign of her movement.
She had flip-flopped back and forth concerning her right to use one of the other Sallys as a substitute for herself. At worst, the other her would be a robot. At best, she could become a real person. The new Sally would also have a chance to improve, just like she had. As long as there wasn’t any pain or chance of mental deficiencies, what was the problem?
Sally stopped. Enough of this quibbling! Yes, she was worried about how it would turn out, but she was going to do it!
She passed through the cage room and entered the mausoleum. Everything was nearly as they had found it. Jon hadn’t disturbed much, a few of the bodies had been moved and he had taken a few away to test them in isolation, then brought them back. Her new senses could see what he’d moved, and where he had been. Sally walked over to the Sally floating in some sort of glass cylinder filled with light. She was the best-preserved Sally, with no apparent damage. This version of her looked like a doll. Her hair was styled and she wore a formal gown. Sally looked closer, and yep, she even had lipstick on.
Sally used her relatively poor set of exotic sensors to examine the cylinder that the other Sally was in. There wasn’t any glass, instead it was some sort of stasis field. The dust caught in the edge of the field just made it look like glass. Alex had sent her some files concerning stasis fields; they warned against touching the field unless she wanted to lose a chunk of her skin.
This Sally might be the best-preserved but was also the most prominent. There was no way she could do anything with it, without Jon knowing.
She stood back and looked over the others. It would be best to find someone younger, in reasonable shape, and not in easy view of the main pathway. It would have to look like her, with no obvious aging, significant scars, and so on. Most of the Sallys here appeared older. Probably living in the kitchen area helped many of them survive long enough to get old.
Sally turned down her emotions so that she could paw through the bodies without suffering too much from the ever important ick factor. She investigated a number of corpses until she found a young one that seemed a little better preserved than most. There was also an advantage in that this Sally was way in the back of one of the rooms and buried under a number of other bodies.
The plan was to use a modified version of the process the spy had employed to enter her body. It was necessary to go slowly and be methodical for the best chance of success. The kill switches stopped necessary body functions from operating: the heart and lungs, and the basic clock for the brain. A complicating factor has that she couldn’t remove the switches until the body was in better shape. It would be necessary to grow some artificial structures to duplicate the body’s functions that the kill switches were affecting, then remove the switches, and then restart these functions when the body was ready. If it went well, then the heart, lungs, and brain should operate normally.
“Bwa-hahaha!” sort of slipped out. Quietly though, so the dot couldn’t pick it up.
Hopefully, there would be some of the original Sally left to salvage. Before she did anything, she would have to plot out the process and do everything she could to anticipate most, hopefully all, of the problems.
In addition, she’d have to deal with the dot monitoring. It was time to really embrace her spy-ness, hack the dot system, then substitute a signal to keep Jon unaware. She would have to reverse their roles and use the dots to tell her if Jon was returning. He moved fast, so she’d have little warning. Sally debated relocating her experiment to a remote atrium, but this would have issues if she had to return quickly, although she could pass it off as if she was out exploring. She decided to leave her chosen Sally where it was, since here was as good a place as any other. If she was careful, there shouldn’t be any reason for Jon to investigate this part of the room.
She moved toward the kitchen until she picked up the dot mesh with a decent signal strength, then she sat down. After assembling a standard hack package, she killed the dot signal while deftly substituting her own. It was a trivial exercise compared to some of what Alex had her try in dreamland yoga school.
It seemed to be working. You had to love advanced science perverted for nefarious purposes.
Sally could maintain the deception up to the range of about a mile from the other dots since her internal hardware was much better than the dots’.
Now, back to the real work.
Sally found the IV bag, which was full since she hadn’t needed it for quite some time. In addition, she gathered up the various tubes and needles that had come with the IV stand and brought everything over to her victim. Uh, patient.
She’d already prepared a densely encoded map of the changes. The process descriptors were transported by a string of molecules. The actual details resided on patterns imposed on subatomic fields, with a translation vector to expand it up to make the larger structures that needed to be built within the resurrected Sally.
With Alex’s help, Sally had analyzed and modified the programming of the IV fluid. The new version was an important part of her method to reconstitute the body. Between the IV fluid and her invader, she would be able to rebuild the Sally into a viable physical shell without any of the problems she’d had when she’d awakened.
It was the operating intelligence that could be a problem, but first, the new Sally had to get to the point where her mental resources could be evaluated.
Against all expectations, it went smoothly. Over the next few hours, the body plumped up and returned to a pretty decent state. The secondary heart pumped, the body breathed, all under the control of her newly built stealth network. Once everything looked good, Sally checked the kill switches. They were valiantly trying to shut down the body’s operation, but the bypass functions were doing the job they needed to do. Sally had debated leaving the bypasses and kill switches in place, but the duplications, like the extra heart pump, were hard to hide, it was a much better and cleaner solution to get rid of the kill switches entirely. She monitored as the sub-atomic stealth tendrils invaded the kill switch mechanisms and disabled them.
The process continued rebuilding the cells that had been damaged, and the body took over functions at a better than expected rate. There were a few stubborn cases that lingered, but the long-term prognosis was very good for 100% success.
However, there was significant damage to the Sally’s memories. It wasn’t hopeless, but, so far, the recovery rate was about 25%, which, on its own, would leave her catatonic. The good thing was that since this was a young version of her, the unique memories weren’t extensive. Sally could repair the partial memories with her own. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but the new Sally would be completely functional and would retain some of the flavor of the original. Sally wondered what this Sally could have done to trigger the kill switch so early in its... her existence.
The mad science had taken most of the day. The body would be viable in one more day and completely done in two. Sally had encoded changes to make sure that the new Sally would have the same cosmetic look as her, the same small acne scars, and other minor differences. Once she was convinced the rebuild had completed successfully, Sally would wake the new Sally.
After ensuring that the IV bag was hidden, she left the body as it was and picked her way through the pile of other Sallys until she reached the main corridor. Using all her senses, she searched for any discernible evidence of what she had been doing. There were a few clues, so she did what she could to mask them. Her plan was to further obfuscate the scene by setting up a pattern of looking through the bodies, just in case Jon showed up. Maybe she would tell Jon that she wanted to see if any of the Sally bodies had useful items with them.
Unless she was in logic mode she wasn’t entirely happy dealing with the bodies, but her time amongst them brought her to the epiphany that they really were her. Different lives, different dreams, but all her. If there was any way, she would see that they had a second, arguably a third, chance.
Sally sneaked back to the library, then removed her spoofing. Checking that everything looked normal, she rose, yawned, and noisily descended to the kitchen. She rummaged through the cupboards and piled what she found on the kitchen counter, then made a quick trip to one of the plant rooms to gather some fruit and tubers. She brought everything back to the counter and prepared her meal. Just for fun, she used the subspace tap in place of a fire and cooked a vegetable stew. Using the tap was handy because she could easily control the heat.
As she ate, her monitoring system alerted her that Jon was heading back. Very good. She was just being ordinary, doing ordinary things in an ordinary way. She kept eating as Jon strode in.
“Good day at work, honey?” she asked.
“Ah, the foreman’s a jerk. I shoulda got his job. I was screwed.”
“Oh well, next time.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“So, did you find anything useful?” Simple-Sally spoke with her mouth full. She knew better but she didn’t always do better.
“Well, maybe, but not entirely. There’s such an improbable mix of technologies in that pile, which is probably more important than the actual things I am finding. I have no record of any other instance where such a disparate bunch of hardware is found together. Operating some of the things at the same time would cause bad things to happen. I have no idea what the reason could be for everything to be jumbled together in such a manner.”
“Maybe it all came from a museum, or something?”
“Perhaps,” he answered, then in unison they both said, “I will have to wait for more data.”
Sally really liked Jon. It killed her to have to keep secrets from him. She just pushed her food around, until her inner spy told her to keep with the plan, and she started eating, again.
“So, you were worried about me?” she asked. “That’s sweet.”
“Well, yes. You were sort of casual in how you placed the dots in this area. I wanted to make sure you hadn’t had another run-in with the neighbors, or set yourself on fire. You know, the normal sort of stuff.”
“The neighbors are very quiet. They just lie around all day. In fact, you might say this neighborhood is dea… unique.”
“Yeah. D’unique. Exactly what I would say.”
“So, are you sticking around, or are you heading back for the night shift?”
“Since you are notably not on fire, I was going to go back and make some more money. You know, the overtime is sweet. Please, though, place some of the dots as you move around so I can see you. Just in case.”
“Okay, okay mom, I’ll do it. Don’t worry. First, though, I’m going to look through some of the cookbooks and see what I can bring to life.” She just had to say it.
Jon left. Sally watched him go, using the dots.
Alex appeared, still wearing his leotard. “What?” she asked.
“I wish you would look at me like you look at him,” he said.
“Everyone’s a joker.”
“Yeah, I’m here until Tuesday, try the veal.”
Nothing.
“Anyway, I received a notice that you should go to my parlor. The big me has something to tell you. It must be important if he risked making contact.”
“What! How could you get a message without me knowing? You’re a part of me!”
He shrugged, then disappeared.
Sally sighed.
“Oh, god, give me some clue what’s going on.”
Suddenly everything was gone. She was floating somewhere by herself. Alex was absent from her mind, and there were no vestiges of the spy. She was looking down on a plane filled with traces of light. Ribbons of predominately white light twisted around each other. The ribbons were of all sizes, microscopic to huge. She could see every one of them. Somehow Sally knew there were an infinite number, and the tapestry they wove extended to the horizon, in all directions.
Intertwined with the white ribbons were tiny ribbons of different colors. Many of these ran along beside the white ribbons, but some meandered in tangents. The white ribbons seemed less random: they were all running in the same direction, more or less.
She saw her viewpoint pull back and more and more ribbons came into sight. Eventually, all the white ribbons merged and as she got higher it became apparent that it wasn’t an infinite plane, but rather a river of light. This river followed a fairly straight path from one horizon to the other.
In one direction the river was quite clear, but as it passed under her, it started to get blurry and more indistinct. If she looked closely at the fuzzy horizon she could see that the wide river veered off sharply just before it went out of sight.
Her view shifted to the region just below her, where the river changed from clear to fuzzy.
She zoomed in closer and closer. The river became a plane, then split into ribbons again, and as she kept zooming in, one ribbon stood out from the others. It wasn’t pure white but more of a pinkish off-white. This ribbon had a number of other ribbons crossing it, with more running alongside, just kissing it in spots. Some of these other ribbons were huge relative to the one she was approaching. A blue dot appeared in front of her and she zoomed toward it.
She hit the ribbon right on top of the dot… and she was back in the kitchen.
After a moment, her brain began functioning again.
Well... that was interesting!