She spent most of the wait on her back, staring at the ceiling. There didn't seem to be any sort of light switch, so she stole a few hours sleep where she could, curled up with her eyes shut against the soft light. Every several hours, the tray in the wall would deliver some new unusual foodstuff, which she would diligently pick at, sometimes agreeably, sometimes giving what was left a hard pass and inserting it back into the food nook. By the fourth time, whatever mechanism was serving her had seemed to have honed in better on her preferences, and delivered a complete platter that more fully aligned to her tastes.
Unfortunately, she didn't get to see what it came up with the fifth time. Time was hard to mark when the light was unchanging, but true to Tavistre's word, she judged by the frequency of the meal deliveries that at least twenty hours had elapsed by the time she heard the door start to clunk open again.
Shortly after that fourth meal delivery, the tray had thunked down out of its schedule to deliver a fresh bundle of clothes. Assuming that this was meant to be something appropriate for whatever proceedings she was about to sit through, she had dutifully donned them in place of her previous white pyjama outfit. As such, she was now wearing tight black leggings that stretched down to just below her knees, and a sort of two layered shirt/jacket combo with two zippers and no buttons. The outer jacket portion extended below her waist in uneven strips similar to Tavistre's clothing from the day before, before fanning out as a kind of deconstructed skirt. The whole arrangement was fairly bewildering, and she was still attempting to adjust the fit when the door opened to reveal Tavistre, still wearing a similar outfit to the previous day. This time around, Navique was perched on his opposite shoulder.
They both looked her up and down.
"Good," he said, "and you're wearing the shoes, as well?"
She was. They were half-length boots in the same matte black. She stuck a leg out, and he nodded approvingly while examining her lower thighs, doing his best not to come off as inappropriate.
"I'm glad you're prepared. If there's anything you need to take care of before this begins, please do so now. It may last a while." His face wasn't exactly tense, but it was uncharacteristically blank, more so than it had been the day before. It unnerved April slightly.
She made a quick trip to the bathroom, just in case.
April wasn't sure she was prepared. 'It would help,' she considered, 'if they had told me what I was supposed to be preparing for.' Tavistre had used the word "trial", and so her default reference point was television crime procedurals, but she had a feeling that the place she was in was outside the jurisdiction of the CPS.
She at least did her best not to look too nervous as she let Tavistre lead her out of Quarantänekammer 4. The fact that she was no longer covered in blood helped a lot.
In fact, I think I'm handling this pretty well. She tried for a moment to determine why that was, before deciding that the reason she had been able to function at all, despite everything that had happened around her over the past few days, was because a lot of it was so outside of her ordinary reality that her brain was having trouble processing it as fully real. It was like she was in a dream, or watching a movie; just letting increasingly unlikely events flow over her while she acted out a relevant part.
She had long since consciously given up the idea that this whole series of events was a delusion or insanity, but perhaps some deep part of her subconscious was still clinging to that, using it as a coping mechanism to keep her brain running. She chuckled, darkly. There a definite irony to the idea.
Tavistre had been leading her down another long, red-lit corridor with bare metal walls. There was an unusual contrast between the inside of her quarantine cell and the rest of the facility; while the room she had slept in had felt dry and sterile, here the air was suffused with a faint traces of smoke or mist, and hints of unusual, pungent scents. Pushing through a set of heavy double doors, they walked along a gridded catwalk that lead them over some incomprehensible piece of machinery, through a small antechamber coated with more plastic tiles, and then to another set of even heavier doors, looking like they had been hewn out of cast off iron slag.
There was a lock built into the centre of them, though, attached to touch control. Tavistre keyed something in with one hand, and then Navique clambered down his arm to do the same, actuating it deftly with its paw. Only after they had both completed mirrored motions did something click, and he pushed the door open to the outside.
Whoa.
Having initially arrived, via Tavistre's peg device, inside the building they had just stepped from, April had not previously seen the outdoors of this particular world. She was getting used to seeing some unusual landscapes, but this one kicked things up a notch by incorporating artefacts—or, more accurately, an artefact—that was distinctly man-made, a colossal feature cutting through the skyline. The actual terrain wasn't too unusual; it was craggy, a bare dark-brown rock of maybe volcanic origin, spread out across a mostly flat plain that was dotted with the occasional sprig of red-leaved vegetation. The sky was red too; not deeply so, but with a definite pinkish-burgundy haze. The reddish light was cast by a dim sun near to the horizon, giving the entire scene an unusual emotional tone, and went some way towards explaining all the red light that she had seen inside the building, earlier.
But silhouetted against that red background, fading softly into it as it rose, was something vast. A massive dark-grey tower—was tower even the right word for something that didn't even appear to shrink in width as it stretched upwards?—pierced the sky, drawing a hard line towards the heavens until it shrank, at an impossible zenith, to a miniscule point that vanished from sight. Roughly cylindrical, but not uniformly so, it was dotted with tiny scattered lights which she could only assume were windows, or some kind of exterior illumination. Its base was anchored a couple of kilometres away on the other side of a shallow rise, but because of its sheer scale, it seemed to be hanging directly over the top of them.
Every mile or so along its height—because the thing was surely several dozen miles tall at a minimum—an encircling ring of struts jutted out from the central spire like the spokes of a bicycle. They were supporting doughnut shaped rings, almost as thick as the tower was wide, that encircled its circumference. Smaller spokes of uneven length and shape stuck out occasionally from these doughnut rings, pointing at apparently random angles like needles stuck through a pin-cushion, and tipped with little blazing stars of coloured light, spanning across the whole frequency spectrum.
"That's the local bridge," said Tavistre, "a static link that leads between projectives. As I said, I don't believe that there is one on your world. I think you would probably have noticed it." The corner of his mouth quirked up slightly, before falling back into impassivity.
"Yeah. Yeah, I think I might have," she whispered, a little breathlessly.
"The Committee hall is built into its base. Come." He began striding away down a path composed of interlocking tile patterns pressed into stone. It wasn't a road exactly, but had a certain sturdiness she associated with new public infrastructure, in the manner of a recently opened footpath connecting a rural rail station to the local village.
April followed him, still staring up at the bridge.
"How tall is it?"
"It depends on how you measure." Navique chirped slightly as he spoke, looking back at her. "It reaches beyond the atmosphere, if that gives any context. But many of its branches are rooted in other projectives, which is how it remains rigid. The core of the bridge will have been in place for potentially millions of our subjective years, with new cladding and facilities constructed as required."
"And, uh..." April stared out across the pinky-red horizon, then back up at the bridge, slightly lost for words. "You never told me. What, uh, planet is this?"
Tavistre laughed, Navique bobbing up and down on his shoulder as his chest shook. "A surprisingly difficult question! It is forked from your own projective, and so this is still your Earth, in a sense. An adjacent instance of it. The word in my language is different, but will be rendered the same as in yours by my tuner. The projective reality itself, however, is called Leviathan's Rest. The First Committee World."
She nodded, weakly, although the concepts hadn't quite managed to fully order themselves in her head, yet. She allowed herself to continue staring up at the bridge, slack-jawed, for a few seconds, then tried to re-focus herself towards what she was about to walk into.
"What is the Committee, exactly? Are you like... the government of this place, or...?"
Tavistre's mouth twisted slightly, his hands making a so-so gesture. "Sort of. Well, not really. There are several different civilizations that made contact by reaching across the projective strata in this interworld region. The original purpose of the Committee was to oversee inter-projective Travelling, particularly to have some sort of oversight of the Outer-Band. But it has evolved beyond that. We now coordinate certain matters of inter-world politics. And... inter-world enforcement."
April contemplated that for a moment.
"Tell me about this trial." She paused, then added, "please," as he glanced back at her. "Will I have to defend myself, or will there be a lawyer, or...?"
He frowned, and made an adjustment to a dial on his collar. After a several second pause, he nodded to himself, then replied.
"Nothing so formal as that. It is more of a judging. The Committee members, including myself, will hear out the facts, and then decide on how to proceed. If what you have told me is true, then sense willing, it is unlikely that you will be found to be at significant fault. They will have serious questions for you, however."
"And afterwards- will I get to go home...?" She trailed off, as he gave her a long look, seeming to teeter on the edge of saying something before eventually replying, curtly.
"That will be for the Committee as a whole to decide."
She grimaced, squinting over. "And, uh. What exactly are they likely to decide?"
He sighed, softly. "Listen, Miss April. I think that I have already made the stakes perfectly clear to you. Draw your own conclusions from that."
She felt the bottom drop out of her stomach a little as he turned back around, and let him lead her forward down the road, numbly. She didn't ask any more questions.
As they reached the peak of the rise, she could now look down onto the plain where the bridge was rooted to the ground. The landscape dipped lower than she expected, and then levelled out into a vast, mostly barren desertscape. It reminded her of Arizona, but as if somebody had transported it to just outside of Mordor.
The collections of sparsely scattered buildings that grew gradually more dense as her gaze moved towards their central point also put her in mind of American desert towns, except for a threshold where, a few hundred metres away from the bridge base—the anchoring, as Tavistre briefly remarked—the gradient of structural density abruptly exceeded the human settlement norm. Buildings piled on top of each other in complex cramped interlocks and at skewed angles, looking like a high-tech version of a ramshackle Victorian slum from old London.
Everything was clean, though, from the looks of things; the town shone brightly with blazing white and red artificial lights, brighter than the dim sunlight, casting a soft glow and long shadows out across the surrounding terrain. Roads weaved in and out, true roads, and she did see the occasional vehicle—it was unclear whether they were cars, or something more exotic—making steady progress along their lengths, to and from the outside of town.
The anchoring itself rose from the middle of the clustered buildings like the stem of a flower pushing from the ground. There was a vast, conical sheath, to which a few of the stacked buildings clung in the manner of barnacles, before rising up to a round peak, a circular opening cutting off that gradient like the crater of a volcano. The bridge rose out of that, separated from the rim by an empty span of a hundred metres or so, easily half a kilometre across itself and monumentally, abruptly vertical in a way that gave April full on vertigo. It was almost as if the side of the structure was the ground, and she was standing horizontally on a wall, looking down.
Tavistre lead her onwards, down the slope and towards the anchor town. They were underneath the shadow of the bridge's first ring now, the mass suspended above them ominously like an alien mothership, or else a looming asteroid that was biding its time to crash down, killing both them and everyone in the settlement below. Scattered cables and spindly spires dangled down from it, some hundreds of metres in length, but barely reaching a quarter of the way towards the ground. It was a truly dizzying thing to look at, and after a while she was forced to avoid doing so, isolating the upper half of her vision from her conscious attention as she walked onwards towards the town.
There were people here as well, now, as they began to cross into the outskirts. Odd people. April had seen some unusual figures amid the "ghost people" that she had encountered while travelling back from Charlie's house—another mystery Tavistre had so far failed to explain—and there were some forms similar to those she remembered among the people she saw now, too. There were a few scattered inhuman figures, hoisting bizarre, vast forms, too many or too few limbs, and other abnormalities that she did her best to avoid appearing judgemental or impolite about while she stared.
The majority, though, were like Tavistre. Ordinary human bodies, but with a little monkey following them about, either perched on their body, hitching a ride on whatever vehicle they were piloting, or sometimes, amusingly, being pulled along in a little hand-cart like one might tow a small child on a summer's day. Each of the little creatures had fur ranging from deep black to rich, earthy reds, and each had a fractal flower of vibrant colouration across their faces, sometimes radiating out to other parts of their bodies. It look as if their fur was trying to attract a pollinating insect.
Now that she was paying attention to faces, she noticed something else that was unusual. Some of the human-looking people accompanied by their monkeys weren't completely the same, physically, as people she was used to. A non-trivial amount of them had slightly raised ridges of skin around their face, tracing out circles with a faint, abnormal colouration. It was a muted outline that matched, or sometimes contrasted, their monkey's facial hues.
April had the strangest feeling that she had seen this feature before; not in Tavistre's face, as he didn't seem to possess the it, but somewhere else, and recently. She contemplated the matter for several blocks before finally remembering the unusual facial features of the gaunt man who had appeared alongside the first monkey at Michelle's apartment, when it had knocked against the kitchen window and warned her to leave.
'And not just then, either,' she realised in a sudden shock of recollection. 'It was him, that same man, who I almost crashed my bike into the other night. He was with the monkey then, too.'
The raised facial markings were subtle enough that if April had seen them just once, on a single person, she would have taken it for some one off abnormality, a kind of unusual scarring, perhaps. But it was present, in some form, in roughly half of the people she could see walking the streets. She remembered what Tavistre had said about "physiological divergences," and wondered if this was one of them.
That, and the memory of the other monkey, the strange man accompanying him, brought to mind another question that she felt she should probably have gotten around to asking already by that point.
"Tavistre?" she asked, using his name out loud for the first time. The emphasis sat on the sharp 'I', rhyming the word with 'Easter'.
He looked back at her. "Hmm?"
"You have to tell me. What's up with the monkeys?"
They were almost at the steep sloping face of the anchor sheath by this point, the road leading up towards a vast metal archway in it like the portcullis entryway of a castle. Despite their closeness to it, Tavistre stopped in the middle of the road, turning around and frowning at her.
"What?" she asked.
"I understand that you are not from here, and so could not have known, but. Don't call them monkeys. It is considered very rude."
"Oh," she said, awkwardly, then ventured, "sorry?"
"Navique here is my Simian. She is part of me, in the same way that your arm or your leg is part of you." Navique scampered from one of his shoulders to the other, looking down at April reproachfully.
"Huh. And everyone here has a Simian?"
"To the same extent that people tend to have arms and legs, yes."
"Right! So, is it like... a sort of- you know, His Dark Materials, daemon companion kind of thing?"
He gave her a baffled look, twiddled a knob at his collar for several seconds without it appearing to clarify anything, and then said, "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."
"Is it, like- is she like a magical companion? A familiar? A manifestation of part of your soul? Appears out of nowhere when you're born, that sort of thing?"
"No- what? No, that is nonsense. Navique was born from my mother's womb along with the rest of my body."
April stared at him, aghast. "The people here give birth to monkeys!? Uh- I mean- sorry- uh, to Simians!?"
He had placed his head in the palm of one hand and was shaking it gently, while Navique positively glared at her from his shoulder. "Simians are human. It is one of the primary divergences between our two projective histories—the original cause of the fork, some scientists speculate. Instead of evolving as a single biological caste, our primate ancestors diverged into two forms, developing simultaneously within the womb, and paired at birth. The Simian retains the more basal primate form, while the Sapien-"
He met her eyes, which were wide and staring, and cut himself off, shaking his head again.
"Look, it is like, ants, or bees, or- how both our peoples have differences regarding gender and sex, for the purposes of reproduction, or else-"
"Oh my God..." April muttered softly, not waiting for him to finish, and staring at Navique in a dawning horror. "Do you like, fuck the monkeys?!"
"I- wh- no! We do not fuck the monkeys!" His raised voice drew the attention of a cluster of passers-by, who shot him scandalized looks before noticeably lengthening up their strides. He coughed, lowering his tone again. "Ahem- please. Please, enough of this. The session is due to start soon, and it would not be prudent for either of us to be late."
He strode off at a fast pace towards the metal archway leading inside the anchor sheath, pointedly looking directly ahead and avoiding eye contact both with April and any of the surrounding pedestrians. She followed, nervously. Better not have pissed him off too much right before this trial, if he's going to be sitting in. That could backfire big-time.
Under the arched entranceway was a dim little recessed cubicle, in which a bored looking woman with dyed purple hair and one of the raised circular patterns across her cheeks—faintly red hued—was sitting in a chair. Her Simian, covered in a deep ginger fur against which its orange facial patterns were difficult to distinguish from afar, was perched on the counter, riffling through a box of what appeared to be office stationary.
The woman waved Tavistre through idly, pressing a button to unlock a metal framed entrance door, but gave April a long and curious look that lingered as they passed. April suddenly realised that she would be one of the few human-shaped people here without a Simian companion, and wondered vaguely if this was something she was supposed to be feeling self conscious about, drawing attention in the same way that amputees might draw rude looks from curious and/or nosy bystanders.
Tavistre paid the woman no mind, though. Instead, he lead April through into the interior of the anchoring sheath, which took the form of a high-ceilinged atrium, clad in metal panelling across slanted walls that followed the gradient and curve of the larger construction. Various interior entranceways were dotted around the walls in a number of clashing styles. Tavistre turned towards one that was signposted as "Sitz des Außenbandüberwach Ausschuss" in smart white lettering.
"We will be in Meeting Hall 3," he muttered, leading her towards the door. Another touch device to be actuated by Tavistre and Navique in concert was built into the handle, and the Simian clambered lightly down his arm to work the mechanism while he extended his hand to push it open in a single motion.
The interior was vaguely similar to the inside of the quarantine room, to the extent that it had recessed off-white lighting and slate grey walls, but its aesthetic punched for a slightly higher-end feel. This was conveyed with the combination of an embossed stone brick pattern across the tiling, and the occasional addition of a red-leaved ornamental plant poking its shoots out of sharp-sided diamond shaped plant pots.
After walking down a corridor for a while, they arrived in front of a pair of dark brown doors—actual wood, a rarity it seemed in this place, although April could not tell what type. A bright number "3" numeral was painted on the wall above them.
Tavistre stopped in front of the doors, turning back around to look at her.
"You will have to go in alone. I will head to the upper stalls to join you shortly."
"Uh, okay, but-"
"Just follow any instructions you are given and try not to cause any issues until I get there. Be polite, and whatever you do, don't go around asking any of the other Committee members if they... get sensual with their Simians, or anything equivalently unhelpful. Understand?"
"Right. Go in there, be nice, and don't ask anyone about their entirely non-fuckable talking mo- Simians. Got it."
He frowned at her. "Whoever said anything about them talking? They cannot." He turned away, taking a few steps to look back down the corridor before April could make to respond. "We are already late. Go on in, and I will be with you in a few moments."
April watched him stride away down the corridor, wearing a similar frown herself. She dithered for several seconds, then turned back towards the double doors, taking a deep breath and bracing herself. Then she waited for another few seconds, sighed, took deep breath, and pushed through into the interior.
Meeting Hall 3 was a tall pentagonal chamber lit by a complex hanging light fixture that glowed white-orange from above. Four of the five walls were fronted with a raised seating gallery, in the manner of an old-fashioned courthouse or the choir boxes of a church. It was panelled in metal but had wooden ornamentation around the edges, like they had wanted to go for a full wood panelling but hadn't been able to afford the materials. The end of the room that she had walked in from was the only edge without a full wall-length raised mezzanine, a slot having been cut out from the gallery to make room for the doorway. That little channel lead into the centre of the room, which was populated with a number of odd looking benches and desks, lined up in a row, the largest being positioned in the centre and facing forward.
The outer ring of the seating gallery was lined with two rows of benches, while the inner edge, looking out and down into the middle of the room, consisted of a set of twelve podiums, complete with stand microphones and neat brass nameplates. It gave the distinct impression that she had walked into the venue for a town hall meeting, but turned up extremely early.
The room was empty aside from her, an older looking man sitting at one of the podiums, picking at his fingernails, and a woman perched on a skinny metal stool directly next to the doors she had just walked through. She wore clothes similar to the ones April had been given, as well as curiously shaped glasses that she was peering through, looking at at April over the top of her nose. Her Simian meanwhile, its fur a nondescript brown colour with dark blue-blacks streaking its face, scribbled furiously on a pad of paper with a paw-sized writing implement.
"Name?" she asked, English word emanating from a small stick-on speaker attached to her neck, like she had been miked for a TV appearence.
"April Pearce?" replied April, after a moment's hesitation.
"April-Pearce...?" The woman said her name strangely, staring over her glasses at April in an almost disbelieving manner. April had the distinct impression that she had somehow already done something wrong.
"Uh, yep. That's my name!"
Her studious little Simian made a few sharp strokes with its pen.
"Very well," said the woman, "sit there, please."
She gestured towards the desk at the centre of the room, which she could now see had its own small microphone stand. April walked over and pulled out the seat, sitting down gingerly, before immediately knocking into the microphone head with one hand. A sharp popping sound echoed around the room, and the man seated at the raised podium looked up at her, startled.
"Arh- veenharbon veerhuytir hir?"
April stared at him blankly as he spoke incomprehensibly into his own microphone.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
"Hallow? Veyhrbestu maidshen? Bistudas gurdectnis kiynd?"
April was beginning to sweat, and then jumped almost a foot when a door on the upper level clanged open loudly. It was with some relief that she saw Tavistre stride through, making his way towards one of the podiums. He looked over at the older man and said something, the translating device at his collar apparently currently switched off.
"Vartuhr aynehn mohment, Merinte, ikverdedi dinenen curtseclearin..."
Navique hopped down off of his shoulder as he reached his podium, perching herself on a small raised circular platform to one side, roughly level with his chest. Tavistre tinkered with a mechanism of some sort beneath the lip of the podium, and when he spoke again his voice was two conflicting audio tracks superimposed, one in English and one in the unknown language. It reminded April of when he had initially tuned down his voice in the red forest, down from an overlapping melange to a single understandable thread, except this time the dual overlap seemed to be intentional. She did her best to tune her brain in to the half that she was able to parse.
"...if you had taken the time to fully read the brief I supplied you with, you would know that the girl is from an isolated projective and cannot speak our language, nor can she tune to it. For the ease of everyone involved, could we please conduct this meeting with our tuners cast through to her dialect, or else we will scarcely be able to get anywhere."
The other man frowned, but then seemed to comply, interfacing with something behind his own podium in the way that Tavistre had. His Simian, grey-furred with a deep, almost bluish sheen, contrasting violently with deep red markings that ran down from its face and onto its chest, hopped up from below the wooden railing, and onto a stand in the same manner as Navique. When he spoke again, his voice rang out in fully intelligible English, a single audio track this time without any layering.
"So this is the memory child, then, who has been causing us such a pain in the third ring?"
"Yes, although if her word is to believed then it was not wilful."
The other man scoffed. "Well, we shall see if that holds water, then, won't we? What was it, girl? Wanted to see the wider universes, enough to be willing fissure your own in order to get at it all?"
"I-" April began.
Tavistre cut her off. "Merinte, please, at least save the interrogation for when we are in session. Nobody else is here yet."
As if the words had been temptation for the world to contradict him, one of the pairs of upper level doors banged open loudly as he finished, an indeterminately middle-aged woman with a rounded face and incongruous half-moon glasses bustling through. She was holding a clutch of papers to her chest, only managing to keep them pressed there through the assistance of her Simian, who was struggling to hold onto the pile while dangling from her right arm by one hand and one foot.
"Ah, well there you are, Tavistre," said Merinte, sounding pleased. "Tullis," he continued by way of greeting, nodding to the woman. April briefly thought that his translation device was broken again, until she realised that this was the woman's name.
Tullis nodded back at him, then at Tavistre, briefly adjusting a metal translation collar similar to Tavistre's. "Merinte, Tavistre. Good afternoon." She strode up to one of the podiums and was finally able to set down her papers, straightening them out on the surface in front of her.
"Excellent," said Merinte, "well, I think that should be everyone. Shall we get started?"
April looked around, confused; the twelve seats were only a quarter full. Tavistre looked equally troubled by the words.
"What are you talking about? Where are Hanegre and Pashtil?"
"Out," shrugged Merinte, "on assignment. Surely you know how it's been, what with everything falling apart these days, or so it feels like. You are hardly around yourself lately."
Tavistre frowned. "But to only have three members present for a session; can we really regard anything we decide here to be a binding consensus?"
"Desperate times call for reevaluation of our approach," said Merinte, sitting back. "Besides, this shouldn't take too long, and I doubt our findings will be overly controversial, either." He clapped his hands twice. "Clerk! If you please."
The woman in glasses sitting near the door stood, and spoke up in clipped tones. "I call to order this meeting of the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee. Marking members present; Tavistre-Navique?"
"Aye," said Tavistre.
"Merinte-Semel?"
"Aye," replied Merinte, lazily.
"Tullis-Orgensis?"
"Aye," said the middle-aged woman, looking up from her papers for the first time since sitting down. "What is this concerning, again? I was forced to suspend my research to attend."
The woman by the door coughed, politely, and continued. "The tabled subject is the trial and inquiry of one 'April-Pearce,' concerning her involvement in a spate of concerning events and actions in and around the R3 stem memory projective, also denoted by the assigned common name of Mortar's Vault. These actions include making unauthorized contact with an Isolate world, risking casualties, fissuring and process corruption through the introduction of an orgoane organism into the local environment-"
"She did what?!" spat Tullis, throwing April a scandalized glare, her voice cutting across that of the clerk, who raised her own voice to continue.
"-and for breaching a Dead world, disturbing local fauna and risking further fissuring and degradation."
The looks Tullis and Merinte were giving April were withering, so she instead looked up at Tavistre pleadingly, shocked at how much she found herself suddenly reliant on a man who she had been frantic to escape from just the previous day. Tavistre spared her a quick glance before looking back towards the clerk.
"I hereby confirm the date as the fourth of the second, the time as 13:70 hours, and cede the floor to the members of the Committee," finished the woman tidily, before sitting down and adjusting the hem of her long jacket.
Merinte spoke up first. "Excellent, excellent. First of all, Tavistre, was the orgoane dealt with?"
The clerk woman began scratching away at a sheet of paper, apparently transcribing minutes of the proceedings.
"Yes," said Tavistre, "dispersed in the dead world via thermal charge. Our biological analyses have indicated that the girl didn't carry any traces of it here, either."
"Then it seems we may have caught this one in the bud to be nipped!" He turned towards April. "Shall we call it... eight years of internment for the girl, followed by period of suspended detention, say, indefinite house arrest on a Committee world?"
"I- what?!" said April, alarmed, shooting a more frantic glance towards Tavistre.
Thankfully, this time he did speak up. "Hold now, Merinte, we should not be so hasty on this."
"The suggested action seems appropriate for the reported charges," said Tullis primly, still regarding April with an unpleasant expression, "assuming that they are accurate. Are they, Tavistre?"
"I believe that there may be mitigating factors," he said, looking over at Tullis. "At the very least, I would like for us all to hear the girl's testimony before we progress further."
Merinte rolled his eyes a little. "Very well, then, let's hear what she has to say." He turned back towards April. "Out with it, if you please."
April shot her third panicked glance up towards Tavistre. "Um- should I..."
"Perhaps you should begin with the circumstances of your Travelling," he said. His voice was calm, if tense. It gave April a little confidence to speak up further, now that she had seemingly been given permission.
"Right. Yeah. Yeah." She turned back towards Merinte. "I don't know how many times I have to explain this, but essentially- all of this, none of this was my idea."
"You know, actually, that is a good point," said Tullis, glancing between the two men, "there are no mechanisms of travel native to Isolate worlds. She must have benefited from some outside intervention."
Merinte put a finger to his chin. "True, yes, true, I see. Well then, come out with it girl. Who put you up to this? Let us know who breached the accord and we can perhaps be lenient."
"No you don't-" April shook her head. "That's not what I'm saying. Nobody 'put me up to this', nobody even told me what was happening. I was living my life as normal, and then suddenly I start getting pulled into..." She gestured around, vaguely, "well, all of this!"
"She believes that her ability to Travel may have manifested spontaneously," clarified Tavistre.
Merinte rolled his eyes at him. "Tavistre... and you believed that? Nonsense. Honestly, I thought you were less gullible than this, old friend."
"It tracks with what I observed while pursuing her. Her Travellings seemed nearly random, and the orgoane—it may very well have latched on through pure chance. Overall, she clearly has no idea what she is doing," he said, before glancing down at April. "...no offence."
"None taken." It was very true.
"But, Tavistre..." Tullis' Simian had hopped down from its perch, and was leafing rapidly through her stack of papers while she watched with one eye. "You should know better than anyone how impossible what you're saying would be. You simply cannot travel between projectives except through use of a bridge, a travel kit, or via destabilization. How is she travelling, by the way? Have we determined that?"
"She seems able to initiate a travelling at will, so I am assuming it's destability."
"Did you take a sample?"
"Of course. That analysis should have completed just a short while ago."
"Send it over then."
Tavistre seemed to oblige, manipulating an interface on his podium that April couldn't see. Tullis clucked, apparently poring over something on her end.
There was a minute or so of silence, before Merinte broke it.
"Well? Is she destabilized?"
"Yes, almost certainly, but..."
Tullis' eyes were boring holes into whatever screen she was looking down at.
"...there's something unusual here. The destabilization envelope seems uncharacteristically erratic for any standard parameters..." She trailed off into silence again, prodding at something with her finger.
"And what does that mean? Is it important?" Merinte was tapping his fingers impatiently.
"Perhaps. I don't know, I'll need more time."
"Well time is the one thing we don't have right now, I'm afraid. We can't all be the Sigmoid," he chuckled lightly, "and besides, I don't see how any of this changes our calculations regarding this case. The girl was destabilized with respect to her projective; destabilization requires outside intervention, a facility with a destabilization chamber..."
"She claims to have no recollection of anything resembling that, and I am inclined to believe her," said Tavistre, "it feels infeasible that someone would have managed to construct an entire facility for the destabilization process in an Isolate memory world without anybody even noticing."
"But... well!" Merinte threw his hands into the air. "Perhaps she was taken off-world while she was unconscious, was administered the procedure there, and-"
Tullis scoffed. "Merinte, are you suggesting that this girl might have slept through a full round of destabilization shock?"
"I- well, no. That- if anything, the absurdity of that just makes it more clear that she's lying to us about not having an accomplice!"
"How many times do I have to tell you," said April, speaking up hotly. "I didn't do this. Does innocence until proven guilty not exist in this place?" She looked around the room. "You drag me in here and throw me in a cell after I've been beaten, maimed, chased across three- no, four different worlds now. I've watched people die, I've been, God, thrown around by some sort of eldritch monstrosity- and you still don't have the decency to believe I might just be telling the truth?"
Merinte looked extremely unhappy, but kept quiet. Tullis spoke up instead.
"At the very least, it seems most likely that whatever happened to this girl- to April- that it happened within her own projective. That implies actions undertaken by an outsider, and, assuming she is telling the truth, that also makes her our best witness." She turned back towards April. "Can you tell us what you remember about how this started? Did you see anything out of the ordinary, perhaps?"
She shifted uncomfortably. "My life has uh- well. Things have always been a little strange, but I don't think I saw anything actually, like, supernatural until a few days ago, which was when I first saw one of these monke-"
Tavistre coughed, loudly.
"-Simian! When I first saw a Simian, back in my own world."
"You saw a Simian in the memory world?" said Merinte, leaning forwards incredulously.
"That's would not be so unusual on the face of it, for somebody afflicted with a poorly refined destabilization from their layer," said Tullis. "The memory world acts as a fairly common crossroads for Travellers and observers, passing through while remaining de-synced from the main chain of causality of the layer's primary envelope."
"You can enter a projective in a partial capacity but remain outside the ordinary flow of events, as if you were standing off to one side in some fourth dimension of space," elaborated Tavistre, for April's benefit. "It is like walking on a pane of glass that is suspended above the ground. You can pass through and spectate, and do so without breaking the isolation mandate by being visible or tangible to the inhabitants, such as yourself."
"If her perceptions were slipping out of phase with the rest of the projective, Travellers within the spectator envelope would appear to be some of the first abnormalities to manifest," continued Tullis, "although they would continue to be minimally tangible with respect to their surroundings. The same might apply the other way around as well, with entities within the primary projective envelope passing outside of her perspective."
That would probably explain a lot. April remembered the 'ghosts' she had seen on the streets, and then, in parallel, the bizarre moment when the upper half of Charlie's head had seemed to phase out of existence, vanishing for her and her alone.
Although...
"Okay," said April, "but I still don't understand why it would be following me around."
That got their attention. Tullis looked up at her, sharply enough that her glasses became dislodged from the bridge of her nose, forcing her to steady them.
"Following you around?"
"Yes, the Simian. The same one. Different from Navique, or any others I've seen here." She cast her eyes about at the Simians scattered around the room. "Memorable little fucker, especially when it shows up repeatedly during the worst events of my life..."
Tullis looked over at Tavistre. "Any possibility it's one of ours?"
He shook his head, contemplatively. "If it were then it's somebody who is failing to report in, which would effectively make them an unknown element, regardless. But perhaps it's nothing quite so sinister—maybe some neutral spectator has taken a special interest in the girl, assuming quite naturally that they cannot be seen by her?"
"Did you see its Sapien?" asked Tullis as she turned back towards April, who stared blankly for a moment before Tullis clarified; "its non-Simian partner. Like Tavistre, or myself."
"Oh, right! Yes, sometimes there is a man with it. Blue, uh- stuff, on his cheeks. Kind of sallow-faced? But he wasn't there the first time, or when I saw it in the- the red forest place, where that- where the orgoane came from-"
Merinte had been in the process of taking a sip from a small crystal glass, into which he had decanted a small amount of burgundy fluid from a bottle that he had retrieved from beneath his podium. He put it to his lips just in time to spit it out comically at April's words.
"A lone Simian following this girl into a hostile border world? Come now, my friends, this is clearly nonsense. She's making this up as she goes along! It is a neatly spun tale I must admit, but don't let her take you both for fools..."
April silently decided that this probably would not be the best time to mention that the monkey had also been able to speak, given Tavistre's earlier reaction. She glanced over at him, expecting to see either mirrored derision or a blank-faced neutrality. Instead however she found him looking strangely contemplative, had just remembered why as he started to speak up.
"No, Merinte, now that she mentions it- there was a man with a Simian. He was there when I first intercepted her with the orgoane, in the primary envelope of the memory projective."
Merinte's eyebrows rose even higher. "You- what? Then Tavistre, why do we not have him in front of us, as well as this girl?"
"The encounter was brief, and I was... indisposed, for much of it." He flexed one arm unconsciously. "I caught a glimpse from one end of the hall. By the time our April here and the orgoane had escaped via the dead world, the Simian—and its Sapien—had vanished."
"Tavistre! Then I am afraid I must say, you are guilty of a severe misapplication of your attention!" Merinte gave him a pompous glare, which Tavistre met levelly, if perhaps with the slightest hint of a sneer. When he spoke again, though, his voice remained a uniform calm.
"My thoughts at the time were that a curious spectating Traveller had taken it upon themselves to breach the accord upon seeing an orgoane. I judged that following the creature would be the greater priority, and, given the thread it posed, I would likely do the same again. I do admit I thought little more of the other party, however, April, if that was truly not the first time you encountered this person..."
"Yes. And his Simian," said April.
Could Tavistre not have heard it speak as well, then? She looked between him and Navique. No, he was too busy trying to pull his arm out of the wall down the hall...
"And his Simian. Naturally." Tavistre looked over at Merinte. "We have a suspect, it seems."
"Are you suggesting that this... person, somehow destabilized the girl without her knowledge?" he asked, slightly bewildered.
"It would be unprecedented," Tullis chimed in, "but would answer some of our outstanding questions. We have already decided that this girl could not have begun Travelling without outside interference."
"Yes, but..." Merinte looked back and forth between his two fellows, as if hoping one of them might back him up against the other, "...but as many questions it might answer, it raises just as many, if not more!"
"Then we must make inroads to investigate," said Tullis. "If the truth of the matter is that we are dealing with some sort of rogue element, interfering with a projective protected by accord, then we cannot assume that the extent of their interference is limited to this girl."
"You keep calling me that," said April, "you do know I'm almost in my thirties, right?"
Tullis ignored her. "For all we know there could be additional fissuring already occurring within the projective. If the scenario has been sufficiently derailed, I don't have confidence that the Sigmoid would step in to rectify matters."
"Yes," said Merinte, "that's one thing we can agree on. As short-staffed as we are, it does seem the Sigmoid is doing a pretty poor job of cleaning up its own messes, as of late." He paused momentarily, then shot a beseeching gaze towards the ceiling. "No offence!"
"So it is decided then," said Tavistre.
"Yes," replied Tullis, nodding. "Tavistre, I assume you will want to remain assigned to this?"
He nodded.
"Excellent. Merinte, we should also see if we can spare Pashtil once she's done surveying the damage to the dead world. The girl-" she looked down at April, then said pointedly, "-sorry, the woman, can remain here on indefinite remand until the situation is more clarified."
April made frantic eye contact with the other woman, alarmed. "I- what? No, I- I thought you- didn't you believe me? I didn't do this!"
"Maybe I do believe you," said Tullis, "but I don't see why that would convince me to dispatch you back into a situation with so many active unknowns. Your role within the memory projective has clearly been already compromised."
"I- I can help!" she stammered, desperately. "That 'memory projective' is my home! This is my life that this is happening to, my- my friends that are dying, because of me! You say it might get worse? Let me go- I can come with you, and- and I can help you find the monkey, or-"
"I think you've done enough," proclaimed Merinte, shouting over her.
"Fuck you!" April shouted right back, tears welling in the corners of her eyes. "You can't just- you can't just decide that I don't get to go home. I- I've already accepted that all of the crazy shit happening to me is real, so you have to at least let me try- try to help save my home from all of it! I can't just let the world fall apart while I'm stuck in some box on another planet! It's my world! My life! You can't-"
"APRIL!"
Tavistre's voice sliced across the room with razor-sharp tightness, his volume amplified by the microphone in front of him, seemingly set to maximum. He took a second to adjust the control back to its default, while April bit back her words.
"April, please! I understand. In fact I think most of us here would be able to understand, assuming you are willing to extent us the benefit of that doubt."
Tullis nodded at him.
"Please think for a moment about what we know, here. I believe you; I do. So what we have is an unknown person or persons, operating across multiple projective realities, sowing chaos with an unclear motive and seemingly without regard to its consequences."
April tried to speak again, but he held up a finger.
"We also know that this person has done... something, to you. Something which we may not be able to undo, and which disconnects you from your reality. Can you fully control how it manifests around you? I think not. Which means- Listen to me! Which means that anywhere that you are, you become a risk to the fundamental stability of that reality. Do you understand me, April?"
She clenched her teeth, and nodded.
"Good. Then listen. Here, we have certain ways to mitigate that risk. Our world is used to frequent Travelling, and is far less fragile than your own. We have access to technologies and methods of study which might just be able to resolve this. But what we cannot do, what we can never do, is let you return to a world where you are liable to be the vector for more damage. You want to save your world? You want to protect your loved ones?"
He gave her a hard stare.
"You do that by staying away."
Later, when the clerk ushered her back out of Meeting Hall 3 to reunite with him in the hallway, the purple-blues of Navique's intricate facial patterns blurred together in her sight to form a blobby azure mess. The distorted image swam shallowly in her vision from the falling tears.