When Sally woke, she lay in her bed for a while, just thinking about things. It was probably time for her to put a real effort into becoming mobile, except she just wanted to lie under her covers. She’d totally lost track of day and night because the light never changed. She could probably ask Jon, but it was a pain to not just know.
She also felt a little hollow inside. Probably the liquid diet was catching up with her. She had expected Jon to have found something to supplement her diet by now, but he hadn’t said anything. As far as Sally could tell, he spent all his time checking the doors, over and over. She didn’t really understand him, but if she could move on her own, then she could look for food by herself, or at least do something along with Jon.
It was time! The day to excel! Or at least to try and crawl.
First, she had to get moving, but she was feeling lazy. So, instead of doing anything useful, she reached over and pulled at a bunch of grass sticking out from under the blanket. It felt more like plastic than normal grass. She tried to rip out a few strands, but they didn’t break, so she pulled as hard as she could, and still couldn’t pull any of the blades out. This was yet another strange thing. How had the spider-rabbit done it? She would have to watch more closely if one of them wandered into the room.
Back to the business at hand. This wasn’t going to be pleasant. Sally dragged herself out of bed and over to the wheelchair. Today her arms were working fairly well, so she tried a few ways to haul herself up onto the seat of the wheelchair. She found that if she pushed up to a kneel, then it was possible to pull herself onto the seat, wiggle around, and end up sitting normally. After getting her breath back, she went about going to the bathroom and eating. Along the way, she repeated her butt dunking comedy routine. Dang, the water was cold!
Relieved and refreshed she tried to drum up some enthusiasm about convincing her legs to cooperate.
She took a deep breath. Bad idea. It reminded her that her gown was getting somewhat ripe, and she could use a bath. She only had the one gown, so if she washed it and herself she could probably use the blankets for cover, or just go naked. She wasn’t overly shy and well, whatever, Jon didn’t seem to care. Sometimes you had to do what you had to do. Just not right now. She would relegate bathing and laundry to the to-do-later list.
Enough procrastinating! Time for the real work of the day. Sally rolled back to her bed and threw the extra blanket on top of the other two. She climbed onto her bed and threw two of the blankets around to make a blanket path, away from her bed. This was her cunning plan to spare her knees. She started out crawling. Her arms were doing okay, legs not so much. It took a lot of convincing to make them do what they were supposed to. When she got on the last blanket she grabbed the previous one and threw it ahead to continue the path. After about fifteen minutes, she’d managed to cover six whole blanket lengths and was totally spent. Her legs were trembling and barely supported her. She collapsed. Crawling, along with her morning routine, had used up all of her energy.
She realized she was currently stranded an impossible distance from the wheelchair. Time for a short nap. She dozed for a while, rallied, then commenced the long trek back. She made it, although she had to take a lot of rests. Surprisingly, her legs were shaking less than at the halfway point, but she was sweating as if she’d run a marathon. That was enough for now. She rested for another minute, or ten, then heaved herself onto the wheelchair seat.
She looked over where Jon was playing with the doors. It was time for more answers, or different questions, at least.
She rolled herself to the door Jon was currently crouched next to. He was in tentacle mode and held his normal hand by the corner of the door. Sally looked closer. She had been wrong, even his normal hand had something in its palm that looked like a lens. More body mods. She was becoming used to the new normal.
“What are you doing?” She asked.
“Checking this room for significant issues.”
“Haven’t you done this, like, a hundred times, already?”
“Yes.”
...
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“Um, why?” Sally was sure she would have to do the old cross-examination to nail him down, but Jon surprised her.
“It is just as important to check information as it is to acquire it. There is information in repeatability. The data can be regarded with a higher degree of trust when it is verified.”
“Don’t you get bored?”
“No.”
“Well… okay then. Since you have thoroughly checked these doors and verified that there are actually... uh, rooms on the other side, then what is inside these rooms?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I have sensor readings, but I have not physically verified them.”
“You mean, in all this time you haven’t gone in and checked out what's inside? Aren’t you curious? Oh, don’t answer. I know, no.”
“I have physically investigated the small rooms connected to the previous atria I traversed. The contents consisted of various items from a number of cultures, mainly degraded foodstuff, various materials for construction of common items, and other small items used in day-to-day living. I have current observations and sufficient previous samples to know to a high degree of probability that these rooms contain similar material. In the low likelihood that they are different I will revise my probability tables, but for the current time, it is more important that I ensure my source of higher value information remains secure. By higher value information I refer to the instances that cause an increase in the variance of the statistical representation of my analyses of events.”
“Huh? What? Are you saying that you think something is more important than what is in these rooms? What would that be? I think you said you have already been through a bunch of rooms, and they are basically the same? The only thing different about this room is us… wait!” Sally paused. “You mean me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What is special about me? I'm just a girl from a little town, stuck in, well, wherever we are.”
“No, you are not.”
Not what she had expected. “What?”
“When I entered the hospital-room analog I analyzed you using multi-dimensional imaging and a thorough chemical and atomic analysis. You are overtly what you think, a twenty-first-century girl from mid-America. You have many of the expected genetic and environmental markers to substantiate this. There are, though, a number of indicators present that show that you were constructed, much as I was.”
Sally was flabbergasted! What the heck was he saying? She yelled, “I grew up just outside Parkersburg, Iowa! My mom and dad died when I was a baby, and I was raised by my aunt and uncle. I went to school there and graduated from high school last year. I remember all this! I don’t know what you are talking about! You don’t make any sense!”
Jon responded, “Sorry to upset you, it is normally my task to answer questions and provide support. I spend a great deal of effort in building my knowledge base and checking the validity of the data. I spend even more effort correlating facts than actually adding new information because data without verification is not useful. What I am doing here is a compromise between my drive to find new information, and to protect potential sources of high-value unique data. As we concluded, this source is yourself. I can now estimate, to a high degree of likelihood, where we are, why we are here, and I can eliminate some alternatives of how we came to be here. You must understand, this is the sort of analysis I was made for.”
Sally stared at him. This very dry presentation helped her calm down. She was still upset but was ready to admit that wherever they were, it wasn’t anywhere she knew. At least Jon appeared to have some of the answers.
Sally sat and attempted to come to grips with everything, which took a while. Fortunately, Jon was patient. Eventually, she broke the silence. “I want to know more, but… this is all so...” She didn’t know what to say.
Jon looked at her. “Nothing I can tell you will fundamentally alter our situation. It is best to regard what I will say as an intellectual exercise. We can talk about the details later. I have calculated that there is a high probability that we are in a dimension of the multiverse that is called the Infinite City because that is indeed what it is. What you see around you goes on forever, and is populated by everything that is possible. The city changes to accommodate the inhabitants. We are in an area that is reasonably friendly to your species. However, one anomaly is that it is very unusual to have an empty space that is as large as we have here. The city is infinite, but it is also densely populated. This leads me to the conclusion that we are in an artificial island, fundamentally a spatial eddy in the City.
“A thorough analysis results in a very high probability that a high-level entity has arranged for it to be so and that our presence here is not accidental. I need to gather further information to resolve our situation in more detail.
“In the larger scheme of things, it is not unusual for people such as us to be knowingly or unknowingly involved in some complex plot directed by more advanced beings, and we may never completely understand what is happening. This can be because we will never have enough information, or that the situation is so arcane that we cannot understand it. Not that we should consider ourselves stupid, but it can be likened to explaining calculus to a dog.”
Sally went over what Jon had said. Maybe the two of them were involved in something so complicated not only would they never know why, they may not be able to know why.
Sally really thought about what this meant.
“Woof,” she said.