I was in the conference room looking shiny and stiff in my new jacket when Randall finished up our morning briefing and said, “Okay, Kovak, you’ve done your time with Jade, so now I’m giving you to Phil.”
“Dammit, Randy!” Jade complained. “I finally get him housebroken and you’re taking him away?”
Randy seemed surprised, then he gave me a look that was almost a smile. “Nice job, Kovak, if you managed to turn her around in two weeks. But I need to see how you work with different kinds of partners, and it doesn’t get more different than Phil.”
* * *
I thought I was lonely until I met Phil Bower. Phil had been so lonely for so long; he couldn’t even feel the emotion anymore. Asking Phil about loneliness was like trying to ask a fish about water. He’d been swimming in it so long, it was invisible to him.
Physically, he was a rail-thin balding man who had finally decided to stop fighting it and shave his head, but you could still see iron gray stubble on days when he let it grow too long.
He must have been going gray prematurely, because he only seemed mid-30s by the time I met him, He was athletic in that surprising, agile way certain skinny men are. Not bulky, but fast. The kind of guys who randomly start to climb things if you leave them alone too long.
He wore a weathered engineer’s vest, one of those sleeveless utility things in Bluestar blue, usually with a black or gray t-shirt underneath.
He was quiet until you asked him a question, then he would go on way too long, drowning you in technical details until you begged him to stop. Even I had to beg him to stop, as his breadth of engineering knowledge went way beyond my three or four semesters of half-assed college work.
He didn’t have any obvious powers. Most people thought he was just a technical genius, able to whip up strange little boxes, tubes, widgets, and guns at a moment’s notice, like he carried an entire hardware store in that little vest.
Phil was certainly a genius, but he wasn’t just a genius, and his powers, once you got him talking, were way weirder than anybody had guessed.
The meeting broke up and I followed Phil to his workshop in the basement. It initially reminded me of Veazey’s but where Veazey was fairly organized, Phil’s looked like a long, slow explosion had scattered everything at random, spraying a crazy mishmash of parts over every flat surface.
And when I finally watched him create something, I understood why. He didn’t use plans or diagrams or even interface contacts. He built his widgets with pure intuition, picking up parts seemingly at random until he was suddenly holding a functioning device.
I watched him do his trick a dozen times in that first week, close enough for me to capture the whole process on video and run it back in slow motion.
The moment of truth was when I caught him attaching a long, round barrel to some kind of improvised plasma gun. I had to run the video back and watch it ten times before I was sure, then I ran up and confronted him.
I pulled the video up and said, “There! Right there! You did not pick up that barrel from a table, you just flicked your wrist, and it appeared in your god damn hand! It was too big to hide in your vest, too big to stuff down your pants. Where the fuck did you get that?”
Phil looked around for a minute to make sure we were alone, then he said, “I don’t usually tell people this, and most of them never ask, because most people don’t watch me as closely as you did. All this is in my file, but please don’t spread it around.”
I assured him he could trust me, and Phil said, “I don’t just work from immediately available parts. Sometimes I grab them from other places and bring them here.”
“Like a summoning or conjuration spell? Did that come from somewhere else in your workshop? Like Randy’s guns?”
“No,” he said. “My stuff comes from a lot farther away than Randy’s guns. You know why most of the things I build only work for me?”
“No,” I admitted. “I’ve heard people say this, but it makes no damn sense.”
“I always try to solve problems using the laws of physics as they are, right here in our universe, but sometimes when I’m in a hurry, I need to break some, so if the parts I need don’t exist in this reality, I reach in and grab them from another one.
“The devices I make, some of the different parts are using slightly different laws of physics, and they only work together as long as I’m touching it or wearing it or standing close enough to make it work.
“Like that gun I made there.” He picked up the giant improvised plasma thing and pointed the dangerous end at a target across the room. He hit the trigger and a splash of green fire flashed and sizzled in the bull’s eye. Then he handed it to me. He gave me a crash course in how to aim and fire the thing, but when I pulled the trigger, nothing happened.
Then he put his finger on it and asked me to try again. A tiny blob of plasma went thurp and landed nowhere near the target, fortunately not near anything important.
“See?” he said. “That gun violates the laws of physics in this universe in three or four different ways, so it only works when I’m touching it. Something about my powers allows me to pull, intuitively, from other dimensions to get what I need, and bend the laws of physics for a short distance around me.”
“This is why I can’t really make grenades,” he said. “Guns work because the bullets and the energy are generated by things in close proximity to me, and the projectiles usually work fine in this universe, no matter what fired them, but grenades are self-contained, so if they fly too far away, the things that make them explode won’t work. Or worse, the things that contain the explosions won’t work, and they’ll end up going off way too big way too soon.
“I use a rocket launcher when I’m fighting river monsters, but it’s just a conventional weapon with a few tweaks, that works fine for anybody who picks it up.”
* * *
“You’re able to break the laws of physics in this universe by stretching your consciousness into other universes?” I said, perching on a stool by one of Phil’s worktables. “How literal is that? Have you met alternate versions of yourself? Could you summon a whole army of Phils if we needed them?”
“No,” he said, clearly horrified by the prospect. “I can’t summon them or even really talk to them, but sometimes I can look through their eyes, and sometimes I feel them looking through mine, when they’re trying to find something or solve a problem in a hurry.
“I can feel what they feel sometimes, when they’re experiencing a strong emotion, but I can’t do anything about it, and I can’t send anything back.
“The DMA says I may eventually be able to teleport to other dimensions, but I only really did that once. That’s how I first discovered my powers. I was in a car wreck that killed my parents. I blacked out right before the impact and went somewhere else for a while, to another version of the car where I wasn’t already in the back seat.
“Then I snapped back into my reality. My parents were dead, but there wasn’t a mark on me, like I really had been somewhere else for a few seconds. I guess it was literal interdimensional teleportation, but it never happened again, and I can’t make it happen again, no matter how hard I try.
“I started getting smarter, like I could concentrate on any technical problem I wanted, and feel the answers come to me, like I was tapping into an older, smarter version of my brain. Because that’s literally what it was.
“Bounced to a lot of foster homes after that and got kicked out of most of them when they caught me talking to the vacuum cleaner or taking the blender apart.
“Then I got adopted by this guy who owned a machine shop, and I started making bespoke parts. I was only fourteen, so it was technically child labor, but I got three meals a day and a roof over my head, and the old guy really did teach me a lot.
“I inherited the shop when he died, and kept making cool stuff, until the DMA got hold of some of my devices and finally tested me for powers. I got a blue card and a new job and made lots of new friends who came to work in black suits every day.
“I eventually figured out how to make things that worked normally in our universe and helped them make some real breakthroughs. They still use some of my stuff today. The force field projector, the nanoweave armor material. It’s not true nano-scale production, of course, but marketing loves the word.
“I try to focus on defensive stuff, because I don’t like the idea of killing people with things I make, no matter how many times they make me do it.”
“What about grav panels and power crystals and the Datacore processor? And the synthetic muscle fiber they use for Panthers? All that stuff seemed to pop up around the same time. Do you know where all that came from?”
Phil shook his head. “HDI has a secret source that they don’t share with anybody. All the coolest stuff comes from them, but there’s never any paper trail. Usually when companies release new stuff, you can trace it back to academic studies going back decades before they finally get it right.
“But the force fields and the grav panels and the synthetic muscle stuff, that all just came out of nowhere.”
“So, it really is alien tech.”
“Alien tech is a lazy term that could mean anything. It’s probably alternate universe tech, from a place nobody else knows about. I’ve never seen an alien, and I’ve never caught any of my other selves talking to one.
“The people I jump into are always me, and every time I think I’ve found the last one, I shift into somebody new, whenever I need something I’ve never tried to make before.”
“So, you’re living proof of the parallel universe theory. There really are an infinite number of universes, each with slightly different versions of us. But I’ve always wondered, why is it always versions of the same people? Sperm and eggs matching up is about as random as you can get, so the odds of the same person being born in a thousand different universes, it makes no sense.
“First, I don’t like the word infinite. There are a lot of me, sure, but there’s got to be a limit. I have a theory on why we always see different versions of the same people, but it comes damn close to just punting the whole question and believing in God. I think somebody is testing us. Testing multiple versions of us, to see how we cope with a million different challenges in a million different universes.
“Somebody is testing the Tim Kovak template, a million versions of the Tim Kovak template and the Phil Bower template and so on. Maybe it’s just curiosity, or maybe they’re trying to create a very specific Tim Kovak, that can only be created at random, by watching him live a million different lives.
“People used to think our universe was just a simulation, but if a simulation is indistinguishable from reality, it might as well just be an alternate reality. And if you can build a computer smart enough to simulate a whole universe, is it really still just a simulation?
“I’m an engineer, not a philosopher, but I like to think there is some benevolent purpose to it all, and eventually God will end up with a perfect version of Tim Kovak and a perfect version of Phil Bower, and maybe they’ll team up in some perfect universe, and save a whole world somewhere.”
* * *
“So, all this ammo you’ve got lying around, is this like… magic science ammo? Or ammo from another dimension?”
“Nope,” Phil said. “Most of this is standard ten-millimeter, right off the shelf.”
“But if this is just regular ammo, why does anybody need heroes like you and Randy? No offense, but if all you do is shoot bullets, couldn’t they just replace you with ten normal guys carrying big guns?”
“No,” Phil said. “Have you ever wondered why they need heroes to fight river monsters? Why they can’t just send in National Guard robots or automated artillery to do it?”
“Actually, yeah. If DMA has all these drones, why do they need heroes at all?”
“This is another one of those things you probably shouldn’t share with normal people, but bullets aren’t just bullets when we shoot them.
“You fight demons, right? Demons, like angels, gods, and conjured stuff, they don’t exist fully in our dimension like normal things do. Sometimes they flicker between physical and astral space, and even when they’re here, it’s like they’re vibrating at a different frequency, just a bit out of phase with the real world, so bullets, knives, fire, and explosions don’t affect them the same way they affect normal people.
“You’ve seen it yourself. An ordinary cop can unload a shotgun on a river monster and it barely blinks, but when you punch it, it really hurts. You think you’re punching harder than a shotgun?”
“I guess not.”
“They need people with powers to fight monsters with powers because when we bring in KMP, we’re adjusting ourselves to the same frequency the monster is on, bringing ourselves up or down to their level, so our bullets, knives, punches, and explosions hit them full force, while a regular bullet, or even a missile, only does a fraction of the damage it would inflict on normal things.
“This is how magic weapons worked in ancient times. A god can bless an object so it vibrates on the same frequency as a monster or a demon, allowing it to cut right through its defenses.
“It works the other way, too. When we fight, we subconsciously adjust ourselves in or out of phase with the real world, so monster hits that would turn a normal human into paste just knock us around.
“We can still die if we get hit hard enough, but it takes more to kill us than it would take to kill a normal person, as long as we can keep ourselves out of phase. Surely, you’ve noticed?”
“I thought it was my wards,” I said.
“Your wards amplify the effect, but the basic principle applies to all of us. We’re not invulnerable, of course. Heroes die every day, but when we’re fighting monsters or other heroes, we’re operating on a level just a bit above or below base reality, so we can take more punishment and dish out more damage than an ordinary guy or a robot armed with conventional weapons.
“A lot of heroes who think they don’t have powers have developed the subconscious ability to raise or lower their frequency so they can punch through the weaknesses of whatever they’re fighting or hit normal things harder than a normal person can.
“Those blades the Wraith used weren’t just a miracle of science, they were shifting in and out of phase along with the guy wielding them. Mythology is full of normal guys who learned how to use magic stuff blessed by the gods, or normal men who trained themselves to fight vampires, even after their gods turned away.
“They’re not using magic bullets or stakes made from some special kind of wood. They’re using blessed objects, or they’ve learned to subconsciously shift their personal weapons up or down to match the level of whatever they’re fighting.”
Phil smiled, like he had been building up to this. “You ready for the biggest secret of the last forty years? The real reason we won the African War?”
I just nodded, eating this up. Most people just brushed me off when I asked questions about how powers work; Phil was the first person to ever give me a straight answer, confirming one of a million conspiracy theories floating around metahuman fan forums.
“We won that war because those HDI combat bots had a unique ability to match the frequency of the spirits they were fighting. Most of the spirits were inhabiting normal animals who were susceptible to normal bullets, but bullets fired by those robots could actually hurt the spirits inside.
“The theory is… not my theory, by the way. I’m quoting Robert Roon. The theory is, the man who created those HDI bots, Joseph Tamerlane, the guy who made the designs, is himself a metahuman, kind of like me, and is able to shift his creations onto the same level as the monsters they’re fighting.
“Robert thinks those hundreds of robots were drawing power from the man himself, and that when Tamerlane dies, all of his robots will become ordinary machines again, or maybe stop working entirely, if it turns out they’re violating some laws of physics that are only suspended while their creator is alive.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“So, that’s why you can’t just send in the National Guard. You need a hero to fight a monster, and if you’re a normal guy picking fights with demons, you better have a magic sword.”
* * *
Phil and I spent our first couple days hanging out in his workshop, cruising around in this weird hovering police van that he had turned into a mobile command center.
The sad secret about superhero teams is they almost never get to come together as a team. Everybody would come to the morning briefing and split in five different directions, as there were so many little problems that needed our attention, it would have been a terrible waste of manpower to bring a whole team for most of it.
Jade and Paul made snide remarks every time they saw us together, cooing over all the nerd bonding that must have been going on between us.
This is another highly annoying trait of normal people, assuming that all nerds are the same, and that all nerds are going to like each other.
But I was more of a software nerd, while Phil was a hardware nerd. I could hold my own in a discussion about software and hacking tools, but Phil’s general intelligence and engineering knowledge was so far above mine, I found myself recording our conversations and replaying them at home overnight, when I had more time to look things up and slowly figure out what the hell he had been talking about.
My teammates thought we would automatically become best friends, but Phil had built some pretty good walls around himself over the years, and he had learned not to get close to new people, until they had been around a lot longer than me.
But I have a habit of asking wildly personal questions, way too soon after I meet people, and sometimes that pays off.
We were on our way to investigate some kind of robot uprising in Waltham when I asked, “I’m really sorry about what happened to your parents. What was it like to grow up in foster homes?”
I had hit him with this question out of the blue, way too soon in the course of our brief stint as partners, but guys like Phil would answer any honest question in a direct and honest way, no matter how personal it was.
“You hear a lot of horror stories, but my experience wasn’t that bad,” Phil said. “I got yelled at a lot, when different sets of parents caught me breaking things or taking things apart. But I was also able to fix stuff and improve stuff around the house, so it kind of balanced out.
“I wasn’t a fun or happy kid, but I was a useful kid, and host families would warm up to me pretty fast, once they found out I could fix old game consoles or break the hardware locks on VR goggles.
“I turned a bunch of bullies into friends by rigging their school gear to access porn. I wasn’t physically abused by anybody. I know everybody thinks foster kids are abused, because those are the cases that make the news, but most of these families really do want to help kids, even if they are overwhelmed and overworked.
“Things calmed down once I got adopted by Mister Steiner, that was the guy who owned the machine shop. He was sincere about teaching me, and we both loved machines. It wasn’t the same as having a real father, but he was a legit mentor to me, and we got to spend a lot of time together, even if we were just working.
“He wasn’t an emotional guy, and he had no idea how to deal with a crying child, but I didn’t cry much, so it didn’t come up enough to be a problem. He bought me tools the way normal fathers bought toys, and I preferred tools over toys anyway.”
“What about you?” Phil asked. “I don’t know anything about your home life. Did you grow up with magic and stuff?”
I laughed a barking, bitter laugh. “No,” I said. “I was a superhero fanboy from the minute I saw my first Captain Cobalt cartoon, but Dad hated that stuff, and he hated me for watching it. He wanted a kid who played sports and worked on cars and chased girls and I was basically the opposite of everything he wanted me to be.
“I used to wish I was in a foster home. My father was abusive in… all the usual ways, but you don’t realize what’s happening to you when you’re in it. I had no frame of reference for it, after Mom died, so I didn’t think of it as abuse. I just developed this sense that I would never be good enough for him, and just started shutting down.
“I had a few counselors notice bruises and little injuries on me, but Dad told me exactly what to say, and he was amazing in interviews, whenever they called him in for a meeting.
“No matter how suspicious or hostile a counselor was when Dad walked in, they were always laughing along and shaking his hand by the time he walked out. Dad had that thing, that unstoppable charisma some men have, when they truly believe they are the center of the universe, and they truly believe they are the smartest person in the room.”
“I’m sorry, man,” Phil said. “When did you get powers?”
“I got mine late; inherited a big magic book when I turned twenty-five and had to break a demon contract. I don’t want to bore you with it, it was a whole thing. I guess in some sense I should be grateful to Dad. If he hadn’t worn me down and kicked the shit out of me for half my life, I never would have been tough enough to fight demons.”
Phil nodded. “Healthy people from happy families don’t get powers, man. It only happens to people like us.”
* * *
Waltham was an iconic location with a rich history, home to a watch factory dating all the way back to the Industrial Revolution.
But we weren’t being called to any grand historic location, we were being called to a modest red and white building that had been known for making screws.
Not robots, not death lasers, not even a data center. They just made screws, until they shut down during the Bump, and had been used for a variety of fly by night startups ever since.
The “robot uprising” turned out to be six old HDI combat bots – the kind they didn’t make anymore, since humanoid robot shapes had been declared illegal twenty years ago. The bots were easily twenty years old, but their skeletal frames had been coated in chrome, gold, and other shiny colors, and someone had polished them to look like new.
I burst in the door ready to absorb damage from gunfire while Phil picked them off with EMP weapons, but the bots were unarmed, and they made no move to attack.
They ignored me completely, and when Phil walked in, all the bots bowed in unison, and a recorded message started to play from all six speakers at once.
“Good evening, Mister Bower. Thank you for coming, I hope you will forgive my little ruse. I was hoping you would come alone, but my intentions are not hostile, and you have nothing to fear from me. I did not invite you here to try and destroy you. You are here to witness my ascension and carry my message back to your masters in this world, and to whatever secret power you swear allegiance to.”
“Oh god,” Phil swore, exasperated. “it’s Dr. Doctor again.”
* * *
Phil had mentioned this guy in his lab a couple days before this call came in, while showing off various devices, and explaining how they had been used.
“He’s one of my villains,” Phil said. “I guess I have to claim him since I kind of created him fifteen years ago.”
“How do you create a villain?”
“You call someone an idiot on a public forum in a way that they take really personally for a really long time. It started when a bunch of MIT engineering professors formed an ‘exploratory board’ to try and figure out how my inventions worked.
“They copied a bunch of my designs and started collecting old things that I had created and thrown away, even serving a search warrant on my lab at one point.”
“I earned like half a degree from MIT before I dropped out, so they felt like they had a duty to expose me as a fraud. They said I was passing myself off as a genius when all my inventions were actually worthless junk.
“They kept trying to recreate my stuff, and they couldn’t, of course, because you couldn’t use most of them without bending the physical constants of our universe, and I can only do that when I’m touching something.
“I don’t like to advertise that, so I told them I was using alien tech and things I discovered from off-Earth sources to make things work, and then removing those components before I discarded stuff.
“I should have just lied and taken credit for everything like they were my own inventions, but I was just too proud. I refused to claim credit for things I did not literally invent, even though I was just stealing them from other versions of myself.
“But that turned out to be the worst possible thing I could say. The board decided I was some kind of alien infiltrator, or that I was colluding with aliens and would eventually betray the Earth to invaders.
“They kept searching my lab, trying to find alien artifacts or secret communications equipment that I was using to talk to my handlers.
“But of course, there are no aliens, it’s just me communicating with other versions of me in alternate universes. But how do you tell an inquiry board that you trust your alien contacts because all your alien contacts are versions of you?
“Wilhelm Pence was head of that board, and he had a serious grudge against me, ever since I was one of his students. Some friends and I were making fun of him on a student message board, and I said he’s never created anything, and he’s never taught anything. All he ever does is sit on boards and try to stop other people from doing stuff.
“He was always bragging about how many different degrees he has, so when he finally went full supervillain, I said he should call himself Dr. Doctor, PhD. Word got back to him, and he tried to blow up one of my labs. Flat out planted a bomb that I had to defuse and did such a shitty job covering his tracks we traced it straight to him and he had to escape in his flying minivan.
“The press uncovered our old beef on the message board and started calling him Dr. Doctor on the news. Then they found a letter that he had actually signed as Dr. Wilhelm Pence, PhD, essentially calling himself ‘doctor’ twice.
“He’s been Dr. Doctor ever since. The guy is a bureaucratic mediocrity, absolutely useless. Reporters asked me what his superpower was, and I said, ‘Plagiarism.’
“This asshole has still never invented anything worthwhile in his life, and he knows it, so after the first couple times I beat him, he merged his consciousness with an AI to make himself smarter. But an AI can’t create anything either. . So, that’s what he does. He basically steals plots and devices from other, smarter supervillains and passes them off as his own.
“He hates me because I just cannot resist making fun of him, especially since I started calling out the various people he was ripping off in the middle of fights.
“His first army was a bunch of knockoff humanoid robots copied from HDI, refitted with holographic projectors that made them look like U.S. presidents, made on surplus HDI fabricators that he had stolen or repurposed somehow.
“I made a joke about Dr. Doctor and his Robot Bots, and he’s been trying to top himself ever since. Last time it was mutant animals, when he was testing this drug that gives you superpowers and started feeding it to abandoned pets, ominously referring to ‘improvements’ he made to the formula that turned out to be basically adding it to dog food.
“That one really pissed me off because he was hurting innocent creatures, adopting animals from shelters and turning them into monsters. I had to kill so many giant house pets, I really hated doing that.”
* * *
“Wilhelm, what are you doing?” Phil said to the bots, keeping his EMP thing trained on them. “If this is another one of your stupid traps…”
“No traps, no tricks. We’re just going to have a lovely conversation, and then you’re going to watch, awestruck and dumbfounded, while I become a god.”
“Wilhelm, you are not thinking straight. You were never firing on all cylinders, but ever since you merged with that machine… Whatever you think you’ve created, it’s not going to work.
“I have created nothing. I have simply perfected the work of another genius, a feat that even the great Thomas Edison could not match.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just follow the bots, please. I’m sorry I can’t be there to greet you in person, but I’m hooked up to a great deal of equipment, and I’m not going to repeat hours of preparation.”
“Phil, should we just go?” I interrupted, as Phil obediently started following the bots. “This is obviously a trap set specifically for you. Can we just turn this over to the DMA and go home?”
“No,” Phil said. “Wilhelm and I have been through a lot together, and if this is what I think it is… Just watch my back, please, in case I’m wrong.”
“This day is also a victory for you, Philip,” Wilhelm continued. “My victory is due, in part, to you, because I finally took your advice. I put my ego aside and embraced my ultimate flaw. Because you were correct, Philip. I am not a creator. All my attempts to bring something original into this world have failed.
“My greatest success occurred when I accepted that, and decided if I could not create something new, I would repair something old, and see if I could improve on the work of the greatest genius this world has ever known.”
“Wilhelm, what have you done?”
“You’ll see,” Wilhelm said, so excited and sincere, it even came through the bot speakers.
Phil and I were escorted down a flight of stairs into a reinforced concrete basement, a built-in shelter, like so many buildings had these days.
A human figure was lying on a hospital bed, hooked up to so many tubes, wires, power coils, and pulsating things, you could hardly make out his face.
There was something clearly wrong with him. His whole left side was covered in lumps and knobs of flesh, like some kind of failed experiment had left him with tumors that he could not remove, or that he had simply stopped caring about, as he neglected his physical body.
Half his face was covered in a giant, pulsating mass, completely covering his left eye. The tumor had even spread down his cheek, not quite covering his mouth yet, not quite interfering with his ability to speak.
“Ah, here he is,” Wilhelm said, slurring his words a bit as he struggled to speak over the machines. “Philip Bower, proud representative of an alien vanguard that will one day conquer this Earth, if I am unable to stop you.”
“Oh god,” Phil sighed, looking down on the misshapen figure of his old enemy. “Please don’t make me have this argument again.”
Wilhelm’s laugh turned into a sick, weak cough. “Don’t worry, old friend. No need to repeat your lies to me. I’ll know the truth soon enough, and I’ll finally be able to do something about it.”
“What are you babbling about?”
“I found it, Philip. I found one of Cartwright’s portals. A portal just like the one Edison used to create our connection to Elysium. One of the broken ones, that Edison could not repair. I found it, and I got it working, surpassing the great Thomas Edison himself.
“Turns out the inventor of the light bulb was also a plagiarist and copycat! The greatest intellectual thief in history, until today.”
“You’re saying the conspiracy theory is true? Edison stole his portal tech from this Cartwright guy?”
“I proved it, I brought it back to my lair, and I fixed it! See for yourself!”
Wilhelm lifted one ruined limb and waved his hand at a tiny, glowing portal, no bigger than a mouse hole, emerging from the far wall. There was a thick pulsating cable leading from the hole, straight into a neural input jack on the back of Wilhelm’s head.
Philip knelt down beside the portal and traced the cable back, clearly scared to touch it.
“I found it, Philip. The Great Sphere. It’s real, and I found it. I don’t have access to enough power to enlarge this portal, but then I realized, I don’t have to! I have no use for this ruined body! It is my mind that must survive. And my mind will survive, for eternity, joined with all the other great minds that Cartwright brought with him when he discovered this. Perhaps even with Cartwright himself!
“It was all in his journal, a simple leather book I found resting by a console within The Great Sphere. A last will and testament written by the great man, when he exhausted the medical capabilities of the sphere and decided to finally transfer his mind.
“Eight members of his expedition had uploaded before him, including his wife, sister, and brothers. He said they had become one with the great artificial mind that maintained the sphere, and would now live forever inside it, in a kind of machine paradise, shaped by their dreams.
“I couldn’t bring the book through, but I will leave you the photographs, captured by my spider drones. I have been in contact, Philip. I made contact with the Great Mind, and followed its instructions, to create a connector to plug into the great machine.
“The expedition is in there, all of them, eager to welcome another great mind from their homeworld, following along almost two centuries later. I am humbled by their invitation, but they assure me, I will not need a physical body to learn the secrets of the sphere, or to explore any of the portals to lands beyond.”
“Oh, Wilhelm, no,” Phil said, sounding genuinely heartbroken. “I don’t know what you plugged into, I can’t imagine what you’re hearing, or what you think you’re hearing, but this is insane.
“You don’t have to do this, Wilhelm. You have options. Medical science, magical healing, and if you’re determined to upload your consciousness, I know people who can do it, in places where even the corporations can’t reach.”
“But that’s how I know it’s real!” Wilhelm insisted. “The technology is the same, Philip! The technology we use for brain scans, it’s the same! This is where it came from! Technology from the race that built the sphere, maybe even from the sphere itself!”
“Wilhelm, this is suicide. I know you don’t trust me. I know we’re not friends. I know I’ve insulted you and belittled you and maybe almost killed you once or twice, but I don’t want you to die. I want you to get help. I want you to rip all that machinery out of your head and learn how to be a man again! I swear it’s not too late!”
“Thank you for that,” Wilhelm said. “I believe you, when you say you want to save me. After all we’ve been through, I still believe you. And Philip, since I am about to leave this body behind, I’m sorry I resorted to violence. That I started this cycle of destruction all those years ago.
“I should have continued my investigation. I should have tried to reason with you. My mind, even then, my mind was not entirely my own, and I let it get the best of me. I do not deserve your forgiveness, but I will offer the apology anyway, in these moments while I am still a man.”
“I forgive you, Wilhelm. And please, if you’re lucid enough to see your own madness, believe that it is madness now. There’s no digital paradise waiting on the other side of this cable. It’s just death. It might even be aliens, some evil force looking for a way into our world.
“Ah, but that’s why you’re here,” Wilhelm said. “To see me ascend, and to stop me, if some alien force tries to possess me.
“I am not a fool, Philip. I am taking precautions; in case I have been deceived. This portal will close moments after my consciousness goes through, and this entire laboratory will be incinerated, so no trace of my inventions, or this damned physical body will remain.
“Please notice that I have warned you about the pending explosion, and I have set the timer to give you an opportunity to escape. Consider it a mercy, and a thank you, for leading me to this idea.”
“Please don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”
“Fear not, my friend. I’m going to a better place, and once I master the technology of the Great Sphere, you and your alien masters will certainly see me again!”
Wilhelm pressed a button on the rail of his hospital bed, and leaned back, satisfied and at peace, as the cable lit up, and something of him passed through to another world, or perhaps to nowhere at all.
* * *
I thought we might take a minute to pay our respects, but a giant holographic counter appeared over Wilhelm’s body, saying we had just a few minutes to get out.
Phil inspected a few things around the lab and said, “Oh yeah, that’s a real bomb. We gotta go!”
So, the two of us made a run for it and sprinted out the door we came in, past the shiny combat bots who bowed to Phil, offering one last show of respect as he left.
Phil summoned some kind of drone projector from his van and threw a containment sphere over the whole building, as the entire thing went up in flames. The force field contained the explosion and made the fire burn hotter for a moment, until everything inside was ashes, just like an emergency field around a flying car.
Phil wasn’t crying on the way home, but he was deeply upset by the death of his old friend and enemy.
I should have just kept my mouth shut, but you guys know I can’t. “Phil, is there any chance he was right? That was a real portal going somewhere, and that was a standard interface jack. Is there any chance…?”
“No,” Phil said. “That story he told was pure fantasy. Do you really not recognize…?”
I shook my head.
“The whole thing, portals to other dimensions, The Great Sphere at the center of the universe, powered by some kind of omnipotent AI, that’s the plot of Bartleby’s Billions, a children’s television program that started in the 1960s and ran for twenty-six years on British Broadcasting.
“It started as an educational show for kids, the story of this immortal traveler who found this great alien sphere at the center of the universe and figured out how to work some of the technology inside.
“He used it to create portals to other dimensions, mostly portals to other versions of Earth at different points in history. Every week he would take a sidekick through one of these portals and teach them a lesson from history, usually accompanied by some kind of morality tale relating to whatever was happening to that kid at home.
“Bartleby’s Billions” referred to the number of portals he had access to, and the number of children he wanted to help before he joined with The Great Mind. It was incredibly cheap and campy as hell, but it had real heart to it, and the fan base is absolutely devoted to the show, even now.”
“I think I met a fan,” I nodded. “Bartleby dressed up like Teddy Roosevelt, with a big moustache and everything?”
“Yes,” Phil said. “They kept changing actors and using some conceit about Bartleby putting himself in new bodies, but he always wore a variation on the same basic outfit.
“Wilhelm is exactly the kind of person who would get obsessed with that show, and the AI in his brain likely scrambled up his perceptions to make him think it was real.”
“But it was real, to a point. He really did make a portal to somewhere, and he really did send his stuff through, right? The spider bots and a leather book? Did he send you photographs of a book?”
“No,” Phil said, telling a lie I would not discover for years. “It may have been a real portal, maybe it even went to some kind of high-tech lab, but the pseudo-religious crap about The Great Sphere and The Great Mind, that’s ripped straight from 20c fiction, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him. Maybe I should have. Maybe if I had told him where the delusion came from…”
“Don’t do that, man,” I said. “He was in pain and was clearly ready to go. You gave him closure and sent him off with his dignity intact. Just be glad for that.”
“Thanks,” Phil said, wiping a single tear from his eye.