So, about “the horse’s mouth”… it turned out, as of this, the morning of the seventh day after Merritt asked me to kill her, the horse’s mouth wasn’t really having the best day. This was understandable. Honestly, most people weren’t having the best day.

I wonder why?

Just to be clear, this is sarcasm.

I would have said we’d all had a rough night, but that would have hardly done it justice.

First off, there were the deaths. People fell down in waves. Dozens, maybe even tens of dozens of Type One cases would go into seizures in unison, or simply drop dead where they stood.

I couldn’t begin to imagine how awful it would have been elsewhere in the world.

Second, both among the public and among us healthcare workers, the people who had yet to die were causing plenty of trouble of their own. There were multiple instances of near-riots, and the causes were manifold. Sometimes it was fear or anger at the military doing experiments on zombies right under our feet. Other times it was rumors about monsters and powers. News about Nina having apparently boiled a man alive was somehow spreading, despite our best efforts to curtail it. Prayer circles formed throughout the hospital, in spite of social distancing protocols. When I’d made my midnight visit to the Self-Help Group for some rations, I’d passed a ring of corpses sprawled out in the hall in a demented fairy ring.

Much to my horror, the SHG chose to add those corpses to their rations.

I, obviously, refused to eat that sort of meat.

But where was I?

Ah yes: the general awfulness of everything and anything.

If we’re talking about corpses, I need to mention the horror-fest that our body disposal system had become. The system was as simple as could be: take bodies, put bodies into dump truck, drive dump truck to big hole in ground, empty dump truck’s contents into hole.

But even that was falling apart.

Due to roving zombies, wyrms, fungal abominations, and who knows what else, we’d settled for driving the dump trucks down Merchant Boulevard and emptying their contents into the river. This was a safe drive, and a short one. The shortness was important, because it meant that when the driver keeled over and died, someone else could easily walk up to the truck, chuck the body in the back, and start driving it themselves.

Now, as for me, I’d set up shop inside my mind-offices, expecting ghosts from GL to arrive at any moment.

But they hadn’t.

By the time morning hit, I’d gone through several dozens of souls, none of which—except a nurse from our ranks—had ever even heard of WeElMed’s General Labs building.

I guess I would be going through my backlog of souls bottom-up.

It was around the time my body felt the need to feed that I couldn’t take it any more, popped out of my mind-office, and entered my Main Menu, hellbent on getting to the bottom of the lab ghost no-show.

“Andalon,” I said, glancing down at her, “where are the ghosts?” I asked. “The ones you picked up for me in the garage, I mean.”

Andalon looked up from where she sat on the ground. “Maybe they’re comin’ soon?” She immediately returned to playing with Mr. Humby.

She really liked the big hummingbird plush.

“Tweefee twee, fee fee twee,” she muttered, in a sing-song voice.

I sighed.

At the moment, I sat in a chair floating near the swarm of soul crystals at my Main Menu’s heart. The chair was minimalistic—just a chrome exterior—but it had very comfortable upholstery. I could move the chair around with just a thought, which was very convenient.

Not gonna lie, though: it kind of made me feel like a supervillain.

Well, at least I wasn’t making the finger pyramid of evil contemplation.

The swarm’s crystals slowly gyrated before my eyes. More and more of the crystals had lit up since I was last here, casting a soft, golden light on the wet, reflective floor—the sign of new souls having taken up residence within me. The crystals would grow in size if I focused on them, and started emitting the sights and sounds of the memories of the soul housed within. Some of the crystals floated all on their own, while others had clustered together, like ice in snowflakes; those were souls of families and friends who had chosen to share their afterlives with one another.

Staring at them, I noticed many of the crystals were only partially full, with the light inside them sloshing around as it slowly filled them up.

“Andalon,” I asked, pointing at one of them, “what are…“ but then my voice trailed off as I answered my own question.

Somehow, just by looking at the crystals, I instinctively understood what I was seeing.

The partially filled crystals were my in-progress uploads.

And not only that, I could sense, at a glance, where I’d picked up the soul being uploaded into a given crystal.

As I watched, I noticed that some of the crystals were filling up much more slowly than the others.

I asked Andalon about that.

“You gotta get closer to them, Mr. Genneth,” she said. “It’s, uh… it’s like wee-fee.”

“Wee-fee?” I asked.

Standing up, Andalon slowly turned her arms in tight circles while making a vibrating, pulsing sort of noise.

I furrowed my brow. “Wait, do you mean Wi-Fi?” I asked.

She nodded excitedly. “Yeah, yeah, that!”

She didn’t know what eyes were, but she knew what Wi-Fi was?

Go figure.

“Well,” I said, “if it works like Wi-Fi, then… hmm…” I put my hand at my lightly bearded chin. “Are you trying to say the uploading goes faster the closer I am to the source? The body?”

“Yeah!” she said.

That… was useful to know.

Groaning, I pressed my hand to my forehead. “Darn it,” I muttered, “that means it’s going to be slow going as long as I’m not in or near the General Labs building.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I felt kind of like I was waiting for an app to finish downloading or updating on my console, only the fate of the world was possibly at stake.

Even though I’d been feeling much better about my ghost management, those good feelings didn’t amount to much when I knew that Vernon was one call away from dropping atomic bombs on WeElMed and the rest of Elpeck.

“Andalon, I need to hear from the lab ghosts,” I said. “I have to know what Vernon’s people are doing in General Labs!”

“They have a wyrmeh!” she said.

“Yeah, I need to know that too!”

From what I’d seen, the situation developing in GL’s basement had all the hallmarks of a ticking time bomb.

I shook my head.

There was no way in heck I was going to sit back and let that timer run out. It would be like Kreston and Joe-Bob all over again, only a thousand times worse.

I needed to stop problems before they exploded in my face, not after or during.

“Maybe enough’s been uploaded that I can work with what I’ve got,” I muttered.

Bidding my floating chair to get close to the swarm, I reached out and flicked my hand across the swarm’s edge, which caused the collection of crystals to rotate in place. I made a gripping gesture with my hands as the crystals for the incoming lab ghosts passed in front of me, stopping the swarm’s rotation.

Much to my dismay, their crystals were mostly empty.

“Those look very not-full, Mr. Genneth,” Andalon said.

“I’m gonna try anyway.”

Closing my eyes, I focused on the crystals, trying my best to summon any memories that might be housed within them. Anything would be helpful.

But nothing happened.

Opening my eyes, I lowered the chair, and turned it to face Andalon.

“Why can’t I access them?” I asked.

“Wait, wait,” Andalon said, “Andalon knows this one…” For a moment, she was lost in a vacant-eyed stare. “Error… uh… 404.”

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t know much about computers and the like. Pel, on the other hand, did, which was ironic, since, between the two of us, I was the more prolific tech user, by far.

Still, even with my meager knowledge, I knew enough to remember what an Error 404 meant. It was like an eidolon for my accumulated frustrations with technology.

I thumped one of my elbows on the armrest and then ran my fingers through my hair. “Gosh darn it!”

I looked Andalon in the eyes. “Is there another way to do this?” I asked. “Like a backdoor, or something, a way to tap into the minds while they’re being uploaded?”

Andalon shook her head. “No.”

“But you get memories that people have forgotten. Neurophysiologically, I shouldn’t be able to remember every single detail of my life—let alone of my ghosts’ lives—because that information no longer exists in the brain, but… I can.”

“Tha’s different,” she said. “People’s thinks are already in them, they’re just super duper hard to find.” She shook her head. “But you can’t find what isn’t there. Nuh-uh.”

Blowing out air like a whale, I spun my seat around, shrinking the swarm of soul crystals with an inward wave of my arms. The swarm rose up as it shrunk, and the lattice of crystal cubes beneath it—the worlds I’d made, or could make—grew in prominence. Unlike the soul crystal swarm, which was lit up like a Harrow Stone at Shrovetide, the lattice of cubes was mostly dim and meager, filled with “small” worlds, like my mind-offices, or the settings I’d made for the SHG’s tutorial demonstrations.

I focused on the one world that was neither dim nor meager.

Lantor.

The cube-crystal housing my least unsuccessful mind-world swelled in size, pushing away the other cubes and crystals until it alone hovered in my Main Menu’s air. The cube’s orange faces became translucent as it grew past Andalon and I, eventually disappearing altogether, leaving the two of us standing in a dark void. In front of us floated a glowing, twinkling cloud of orange dust—an abstract representation of my creation.

Basically, each light was a single “room” of my world, a “room” being Greg’s terminology for any location where I had decided to settle down and start building something beyond what had already been generated procedurally. I found I preferred this viewing mode to the standard globe-mode, because it let me directly access various places—buildings, streets, geographic regions, etc.—based on their relation to one another, rather than their relative physical proximity. So, for example, instead of having to jump around the world from one Precursor ruin to another, I had them all linked up in a spindly sea-urchin of interlinked lights.

“What the fudge…?” I muttered.

Leaning forward, I willed the dust cloud to come closer and get bigger, to give me a better view.

The cloud had grown since I’d last used it, and substantially, too.

“Greg’s procedural generator was just supposed to fill in the parts I couldn’t make up my mind over,” I said, turning to Andalon. “But… this is a heck of a lot more than just that. What happened?”

“Uh, Mr. Genneth…”

Andalon stepped up beside me.

“What is it?” I asked.

Andalon pointed at the Lantor-cloud, her blue eyes going wide. “There’s somethin’ there.”

“What do you mean, something?”

Andalon shook her head. “There’s some kinda… ghost there. It’s different. It’s so quiet. So far away, but… it’s also close. Too close.” Her hair and eyes briefly glowed bright. Her head trembled. “Fighting, fighting, fighting!”

She ended in a yell, only for her lights to go out. She collapsed in a fit of wooziness, though I managed to catch her after going down on one knee.

“Andalon!” I cried. “What’s wrong?”

Tears trickled down her pale cheeks. “Mr. Genneth, I don’t like it,” she said, vehemently shaking her head. “Andalon does not like it.” She pushed me back and floated out of my embrace. “Make it go away,” she said, with a fretful spin. “Make it go—”

“—Andalon, please, calm down.”

As more and more memories had returned to her—transferred into us from her greater self—moments like these where she glowed and freaked out had become increasingly nerve-wracking for me. When each revelation was bigger and more profound than the last, it was hard not to get worried when I could feel one coming over the horizon.

And, boy, could I feel this one.

I felt like I was at the edge of a vast abyss, one that was all the deeper because I couldn’t witness it for myself. No, I could only interface with it through Andalon’s experiences, her terror and her dismay.

“Take a deep breath,” I said.

She did. Clenching her fists, she floated toward the ground, toward me, breathing deep and slow.

“Good, good,” I said. “Now, Andalon, I need you to think.” Glancing over my shoulder, I pointed my thumb at the Lantor cloud. “Why don’t you like it? Think about why. No matter how powerful they might seem, feelings are always grounded in our minds. They never occur without reason,” I rolled my eyes, “even if we can’t remember it.”

“I…” Andalon pursed her lips. “It hurt me.”

“What?”

“I told you before,” she said, nodding fearfully.

“I remember,” I said, nodding back.

How could I forget?

My thoughts began to race.

The same night I first met Greg and the others, Andalon and I had established that something had attacked her, and recently, too. That was why she’d been bruised and injured in the dream in which she’d first appeared to me. Andalon had made it clear that she was petrified her assailants might have followed her or would strike again—though, she wasn’t able to give any details beyond that.

At least, not yet.

I figured I might as well assume the worst case scenario.

“Is what’s happening to Lantor related to the bad guys that hurt you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Andalon said, nodding, and crying freely. “Yeah.”

Turning around, I stared at the Lantor cloud.

“What…” I shuddered, a shiver running down my spine. “What does this mean?” I asked.

“They’re followin’ me, Mr. Genneth.” She stammered. “I… I…”

“Fudge,” I muttered.

Rising to my feet, I walked up to the Lantor cloud.

“What you are doin’, Mr. Genneth?”

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw she’d walked up behind me.

“What about the ‘sparey-mint ghosts?” she asked.

I looked back at her. “If this really is the same… thing that attacked you, if it’s found you again, it’s going to want to try to hurt you again, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

Going down onto my knees once more, I put my hands on Andalon’s shoulders and stared her in the eyes. “I promise you Andalon, I’m not going to sit back and let it hurt you,” I said. “We’re making a difference here. I’m not going to let some eldritch abomination jeopardize that,” I smiled sadly, “especially when a child is getting hurt in the process.”

Yes, I knew Andalon wasn’t a child—she just looked like one—and, for that matter, thought and acted like one, too—but that didn’t change how I felt. Just as Andalon was afraid of Lantor because of her fear of the beings that had hurt her, the pain I felt in having lost Rale meant there was no way I could stand by the wayside when a child was in danger.

“For the time being,” I said, “I guess the military’s experiments will have to wait.”

Closing my eyes, I focused on the doppelgenneth currently running my physical body. There was a brief wave of dizziness as I recoupled with him and brought our minds up to speed.

Got it, he thought-said. I’ll try to get close to GL. Hopefully, that will speed up the spirit uploads.

Good luck.

Thanks, I thought.

I decoupled my consciousness from his.

“It’s time to get to work,” I muttered.

I didn’t know what I was going to find. A new enemy to fight? Probably. But, perhaps also answers.

I kept my eyes on Andalon as I lifted my arms from her shoulders and stood up. “Andalon, I need you to come with me.”

She clasped her hands in front of her chest. “I’m scared.”

“I know you are,” I said. Reaching out, I gently grabbed her by the hand. “But I’ll be here. And I promise I’ll protect you.”

Shakily she nodded her head.

Turning around, I reached for the Lantor cloud, willing myself to appear at the source of the incursion.

Everything dissolved into light.