MALIK WAS SCARED. Good and scared. He was in a place impossible for his mind to understand or explain. It was in some sense like being buried inside a fantastic junkyard. All around him were things that should have been connected, should have been part of some recognizable structure, but all rationality was subverted. He could make out lengths of structural steel, big I-beams, but they hung in midair, attached to nothing . . . unless he changed the angle of view, in which case, like glass beads in a kaleidoscope, objects moved, touched, intersected, or alternately separated, even disappeared entirely.
Who needs hallucinogens when you can travel in n-dimensional space?
Malik was fairly sure that everything around him was part of the casino or the people in the casino and hotel—at least he hoped so. But he caught glimpses of things that he could not rationalize as being any part of 3-D space: at certain angles he thought he saw a sort of faint web, like one of those orange plastic fences they put up around construction sites, but more pink than orange. He thought more than once that he saw a solid object become fluid. He saw tendrils, like a squid’s legs, dangling and withdrawn, curled up like a measuring tape only to disappear, so that he wasn’t at all sure they were real and not figments.
Malik knew that the apparent randomness of everything around him was a problem inside his own head. He was a man of three spatial dimensions, up and down, left and right, forward and back. He was now in four—well, who knew how many—dimensional space, a place where there was at least one more “direction” that was none of the usual three. His eyes were eyes evolved for three dimensions; his brain was a brain that could not really even picture extra dimensions. What he was seeing around him was his brain’s futile effort to make sense of what it could never hope to understand.
I’m an ant walking across a computer motherboard.
The worst came when he saw parts of himself seeming to stand apart. He saw inside his body, saw the burns, the exposed bone, saw through the superficial normality of the morph he was doomed to remain in. He saw his organs, his liver seething with blood. He saw his intestines slowly pulsating with chewed food, but at the same time saw startling glimpses of that very food in its original, intact form. A bagel. Fried eggs which were simultaneously in and out of their shells. He saw the inside of his own brain, a pink cauliflower in a bone cage. Tendrils of light seemed to reach out from his brain, twisting and poking, turning objects this way and that.
I’m seeing my own consciousness!
He cried out in shock when his own eyes floated before him, staring at him, meeting his own gaze before erupting like a stop-motion video of a flower blossoming. He peered closer and he saw his own iris contract, saw the thousands of muscle fibers straining and releasing.
It was literally sickening, and he might or might not have vomited; it was impossible to be sure.
I have no way out of here.
Panic swelled, and he could see it as a wave of swirling blue crystals that followed his arteries—arteries which, if he looked at them from the wrong angle, would separate, become sections of tubing, with blood seeming to cross from piece to piece.
Sensory overload.
He tried shutting his eyes again and even put his hands over his eyes, but even his hands were no more an impediment than a dirty windshield.
“Am I going to die here?” He spoke the words aloud, but the sound was distorted, alien, not human.
Why had he not snapped back to reality? Francis had moved him into this dimension, and he had assumed that only her power was keeping him there. But that wasn’t the way it was working. Her power was the ability to cross the line between there and here, and once he was across that dimensional line, he had no power to escape.
The amoeba he’d seen earlier, the amoeba that had panicked him, had not returned. But then again, he had not tried finding that . . . what to call it? Direction? If it was a direction, it was one that was neither up, down, left, or right.
Try again.
He focused his thoughts and actually saw a swirl of yellow paisley rise from a brain that had been exploded into separate gobbets of flesh awash in a pool of cerebral fluid.
There!
The instant he focused on the hole, an amoeba came rushing at him, and just like before wrapped itself around his head. But this time he did not panic, but tried to will himself toward that hole.
The amoeba evaporated, and Malik reassured himself that he had passed the defensive system. He felt himself moving toward the hole, which seemed to recede as he approached, growing ever so slightly larger, far too slowly, as if it was moving away almost as quickly as he advanced.
Suddenly there was another organism, a mass of organs and bits of bone, and things he did not even want to guess at. He stopped moving and began to pull back, but then, a slight shift of perspective, and he saw a face.
“Francis?”
Her answer was not a sound but a color. A color never represented in even the biggest Crayola box. He knew nevertheless that it was an affirmative.
She reached with a bony claw wreathed in pulsing veins. He held out his own hand, a hand as deconstructed as hers.
And all at once the two of them were back in the bedroom. In three-dimensional space.
For what felt like a very long time Malik just stood there trembling, breathing hard, looking at Francis. The rainbow effect in her eyes faded and disappeared. Solid objects were solid again, their insides hidden from view.
“Are you okay?” Francis asked, and Malik realized it was for the third time.
“I think so,” Malik said in a harsh whisper. Then, “Wow.”
“I’m really sorry I let go of you,” Francis said. “You must have been scared.”
“Scared? I was terrified,” Malik admitted. “It’s . . . I don’t even know how to make sense of it.”
“Yeah, it’s weird, huh?” Francis said.
“You have a gift for understatement. There are people who spend a lot of money on drugs and never see anything one tenth as weird.”
“Did you find what you were after?”
Malik considered. “Maybe,” he allowed. “You know what didn’t happen? I did not feel the Dark Watchers. Just like you don’t. Whatever they are, the effect—the Watcher effect—is something in three dimensions that is gone or transformed in n-space.”
Francis nodded politely, but Malik was pretty sure that she was not interested in the physics of it all, let alone the metaphysics. To Francis, it was a trick she could do. It was a power. But she didn’t grasp just how great a power it was.
“They have defenses, those things, those amoeba-looking things,” Malik said. “But I think that’s sort of an automated system, and not very effective. I would guess they are system cleaners, subroutines designed to redirect any random bit of data that takes the wrong turn. But I’m not some random databit, I’m a whole system.”
“So, no more of that, huh?” Francis said, already losing interest and edging toward the door.
“Well, not today, anyway. It’s very . . . unsettling.”
But did he intend to go back to find out what was through that blank hole of nothingness? To seek out whoever was behind this deconstruction of reality? To confront whoever or whatever was screwing with the software of the universe to allow the growth of monsters and destroy human civilization?
Hell yes, I’m going back.
But he wisely said none of that, and instead said, “Shall we go find the others, see what they’re up to?”