Time Travel Universe, page 5
“I hope he wakes up in the past. He gets a do-over each time he dies. Right?” she said.
“We don’t know for sure. We weren’t sure if he was already out of juice. He said he did a few loops already. But either way, he’s dead in this timeline. Better get used to it.”
She doubted her dad would say that in real life and assumed that was the simulator’s way of dealing with her father’s high-functioning autism.
Cameron found the only place flat enough to sit, but it was still hard and uncomfortable. She exhaled, taking in the surroundings and comparing it to her memory of the images in the video and what she thought the actual place might feel like. She had to admit that it was beyond lifelike. Her memory construction, at least from a sensory standpoint, was perfect. It was the scenario, the important part, she wasn’t yet sold on.
“So why are we here?” Cameron asked.
Jeremy lifted his head from Quinn’s corpse with tears pooling in the corner of his eyes. He reminded Cameron of a sad puppy dog.
It took a moment for Cameron to notice the group wasn’t complete. In the video, a faint image of at least a couple of other companions trailed in the distance and were running ahead of some pursuers.
“Did the others make it?” she added.
“You know why we’re here. And as to the others, I’m afraid they met the same fate as Quinn. We’re being hunted,” Dr. Green said.
“By The Way?”
“By whoever’s guarding what’s inside these pyramids, the reason we came here.”
“Which is?” Cameron asked.
Dr. Green fumbled around, looking as if he were still deciding what to do next and still not responding.
“Dad. Focus. What did we come here to find?”
“Why are you asking me that? You know why we came here,” Dr. Green replied.
“Humor me. Just tell me again.”
A loud bang interrupted them, and then another. Sand mixed with fine dirt and silt jostled free from the ceiling and walls. Cameron wrapped her shirt around her mouth and nose.
“This way,” Dr. Green said, pointing in the direction of a dark, narrow walkway on the opposite side of the room.
Cameron stumbled, smacking her shins hard into a boulder low to the ground. She grimaced and rubbed her leg.
“Hurry,” Dr. Green said.
“So what is this thing we’re looking for?” she asked again.
He rushed ahead, and she labored to keep up, mainly due to dodging the stones and sharp edges all around her. She thought his swift pace must also be a function of the system, as was the fading pain in her shins, which normally would linger for a much longer time.
She activated her cortical implant, then remembered she was in the simulation and it wouldn’t function as expected. The program would drive the output and not her real implant. She activated it anyway, lighting up the darkness with night vision.
“It’s just up ahead,” he replied.
She glanced behind her. Jeremy struggled even more, and there was other movement in the chamber they’d just left.
“Someone’s inside here.”
“That’s not unexpected. We are taking what’s theirs, after all,” Dr. Green replied.
“And what are we taking again?”
“The holy grail.”
“Wait. What?”
“Not the actual Holy Grail, of course. But our holy grail. The reason we came here. To find what we’ve been looking for.”
“Which you never explained,” Cameron replied.
She sighed, something she normally didn’t do, but she hated getting the runaround. It reminded her of how her father used to act when she was a young child before he became more adept at pretending to fit in.
Her vision glitched. “Not again.”
She kept running, the pain in her leg now replaced with a sharp burning in the center of her back. Suddenly, her motion slowed, like she was walking horizontally through water. She pushed and struggled but to no avail. The air around her rippled, like a distant mirage in the desert.
She tried to speak, but the words didn’t come out. She resorted to thinking of the exit command, hoping the simulator could read it.
Quinn had built several safeguards into the simulator, the first one being that it automatically shut off in one second of real-time, but that wasn’t much consolation if the neural synapses in your brain were traveling at near-light speeds.
Chapter 6
Date unknown, a few minutes later, Cairo, Egypt, Earth 2/Multiverse 732
The scorpions swarmed closer to the group, now covering Jeremy’s shoes. “Oh crap,” Jeremy said. He jumped around, wildly flailing to flick off the few scorpions that crawled onto his shoes. “Do something, guys,” he said, still hopping like he was doing a funky dance.
Quinn tapped his temple, and immediately the swarming ceased. The floor lay covered in a thick mat of scorpions nearly motionless, but only for a brief second. In the next moment, the scorpions reversed positions and flowed in the opposite direction.
“What was that?” Jeremy asked.
“A motion pulse. Comes in handy against certain small creatures. Too bad we couldn’t use it for our pursuers outside. It doesn’t last long, though, and it uses up a lot of energy. Let’s just hope we don’t face too many more of those,” Quinn replied.
Dr. Green projected a green, fluorescent map from his cortical holo-emitter. “See this room,” he said, pointing. “I think what we’re looking for is here.”
Quinn squinted, attempting to decipher anything he could from the tiny dot on the screen. Growls came from behind them.
“Run!” Dr. Green shouted.
“Anything we can throw at them?” Quinn asked.
“Nothing that will work,” he replied.
“Then let’s throw what we can,” Jeremy said, fumbling through his bag as he ran. Dr. Green tapped his cortical implant, “Nothing in here,” he said.
Quinn thought for a moment. “We might not have enough power to stop them, but we could cause a partial collapse of a few nearby structures if we all use the same frequency on the emitter.”
“That just might work,” Dr. Green replied.
“Alright, you see that small narrow passageway just before the entrance? I’ll turn to face the creatures there. We’ll target the walls and pray to God it works,” he said.
The growls grew louder. Nails from one of the beasts chasing them snagged Jeremy’s shirt. “One of them’s got me,” he shouted, still running.
“It only nicked you. Keep going. Don’t look back,” Quinn said.
“Why in the hell would I do that? Do you think I’m the kind of person who would look back?”
“You really need me to answer that?” Quinn asked.
Another claw scraped at Jeremy. Quinn yanked him forward while still running ahead.
“Almost there. Let’s just hope our duplicates can find us once we’ve barricaded ourselves in,” Dr. Green said.
They approached the narrow corridor where they planned to make their move. “Alright, turn around,” Dr. Green said.
“Now,” Quinn added.
At that moment, the entire group activated the same frequency. Nothing happened at first, but then a rumbling noise and a cloud of smoke engulfed them.
“Turn around and keep moving,” Dr. Green said.
Tier 1 simulator, Earth 1/Multiverse 1, September 1, loop 4
Cameron finally relaxed her body, giving in to the simulation for the moment. She was tired of fighting it and just wanted a little physical relief from the constant tension, especially now that she’d need to devise a way out.
At the moment, her entire body was suspended, frozen in a snapshot of the simulation half a dozen feet behind Jeremy and Dr. Green. She could think and move her eyes and speak, but not much else.
She’d already called out to the simulator version of them but had gotten no response. She’d tried dozens of voice and thought commands with no success. She wondered if the real version of her friends felt the same way on the other side of the video they’d found.
“Why did I even come here?” she said aloud, already knowing the answer to the question. What she meant to say was she should have at least told somebody. Cameron estimated how long she’d be stuck in the simulator until the safety shutoff, but she’d set it shorter for one millisecond.
Given time dilation at the rate of the enhanced neural synapses, she’d already calculated she’d be there for a maximum of one week. Normally, the way time dilation worked, it would be the observer who’d experience a longer time, but the simulator operated by having the person experience a longer time relative to the outside world. It applied a combination of exotic particles and the enhanced crystals they’d collected from the other Earth they’d recently visited.
Over the next several hours, Cameron attempted to become more comfortable being alone with her thoughts. She had to for the sake of her sanity. The first hour was the worst, but she soon settled into a pattern of alternating between a few minutes of mindfulness meditation, reflecting on her future motherhood, and planning for different scenarios in both the real and virtual worlds when confronting obstacles.
She struggled to grasp the simulator’s concept, even more than her cortical implant. Despite warnings, deadlines and a formidable enemy manipulating time forced them to cut corners. She hoped these shortcuts wouldn’t prove fatal as they tried to stay ahead of their pursuers. She just wished someone was with her who would be a heck of a lot more capable with any computer system, like Sam or even Gary.
Cameron thought they would likely have similar problems, but maybe not enough to get mentally trapped in a simulator.
After a few more hours, Cameron had cataloged several different strategies she planned to implement as a parent. She knew most of them would likely get thrown out the window once the baby was born, but she needed to do something to keep her mind from going into a negative spiral.
The mindfulness meditation helped more than she expected. Soon, she seamlessly shifted between pondering how to reactivate the simulator and contemplating actions if they found their alternate selves in a version of Egypt.
Around the five-hour mark, a subtle change in the surroundings sparked Cameron’s curiosity. It was as if a faint light radiated in a rhythmic pattern in her visual field, and then something occurred to her.
The most noticeable changes came after meditation. She theorized it might be changing her brainwave patterns in a way that allowed her to access or at least better sync with the simulator’s systems. It made sense based on her limited understanding of the technology.
She spent more time meditating. After each session, her memory became easier to access. And with each thought she retrieved, she captured a crisper snapshot of that moment in time. Her neurons synced with what her conscious and subconscious mind wanted to access.
“Ah, took you long enough,” a voice said.
Cameron attempted to speak, but her mouth was still immobile.
“Come on. You can do it.”
Who are you? Cameron thought.
“Great. You figured it out. As to who I am, well, that’s a bit complicated. You can think of me as artificial intelligence, but that’s not exactly accurate. I’m more of a memory or an impression left by a real person.”
Like an upload from someone’s brain?
“Not exactly, but that’s closer to the truth than AI. It’s more like an amalgam. Bits of me come from a crude copy of a real person from a version of Earth close to yours, one that’s diverged over time, of course. And parts come from a sophisticated matrix within the crystals your team brought to the ship from your last trip.”
Can you get me unstuck or unfrozen, or whatever this is?
“I’ll do one better.”
The moment the system communicated those words, Cameron found herself in a small cottage in the French countryside, sitting in front of a small table with a small cup of hot coffee and some sliced cheese. The scent of grapevine flowers wafted in with a fresh breeze through a crosscurrent.
Two windows on either side of the room opened to a vast vineyard with distant mountains somewhere north of the French Alps. On one side, pink flowered vines dangled around the edges of the white stucco window, partly obscuring the view of a magnificent sunset. The other side featured a distant peak in the darkening sky.
A figure materialized, sitting on a simple chair across the table. He appeared to be a man in his fifties or sixties. She couldn’t exactly tell. Fine lines decorated his eyes, just enough to make him look seasoned. He wore subdued clothes with an approachable and unintimidating appearance. “So what do you think?”
Cameron smiled. She nibbled the cheese and sipped the coffee. “Good match. Now what can you tell me?”
“I can tell you a lot of things. Care to be a bit more specific?”
“Let’s start with explaining yourself a bit more and why you’re here.”
“Ah, yes. That. Well, I’ve already explained a bit of what I am. But I’m afraid if I tried to explain any further, you might not fully understand. You see, I’ve had a peek inside that brain of yours, and even with your cortical implant, it would take too long to explain the rudimentary basics. But as to why, well—” the figure paused “—you activated my systems by depressing your brainwaves. I was designed to have my systems activate when certain conditions within the simulator were met, a safeguard of sorts.”
“Since you know what I’m thinking, can you help us?”
“It would be inaccurate to say I completely know what you are thinking, but I do have a general idea.”
Cameron resisted the urge to say something snarky and instead inhaled the fresh breeze before speaking. “Then can you give me a general idea of how you can help us?”
“You’ll need to be more specific.”
“A few things. Can you get me out of here?”
“That’s a cinch. Whenever you’re ready, say the word, and I’ll have you out of here in a jiffy.”
“Great. I guess the next thing is whether you have thoughts on the video of our alternate selves. Should we go, and if we do, can you help us?”
“Help you do what exactly?”
“Help us get there, help them, and get home.”
“I’m not all-powerful, and I live within this construct. My help would be limited to you and those who can access me, and only within the construct.”
Cameron got a sense he might be withholding something but didn’t want to dwell on that possibility, seeing as the AI, or whatever he called himself, could interpret her thoughts. Still, she knew Quinn interacted with the construct during their prior adventure, so she had more trust in it than she would otherwise.
“Is that a yes? Do you know a way to locate the exact time, space, and point within the multiverse where this was taken? I’m not even clear on when this was taken or what time it would be there should we arrive.”
“Ah. That’s the easy part. I do have access to all the information connected to the construct, but nothing on the outside. Fortunately, the video archive you are referring to is part of that archive. But I haven’t taken the time to analyze it since someone added it later. What I don’t have access to is any outside networks or systems. That was by design. So I may need some additional context to give you any possibilities.”
“How much of the environment within the construct are you controlling?”
“I’m simply drawing from several prominent images within your mind. And while I don’t have access to everything within that noggin of yours, what I do have is a very specific set of algorithms designed to elicit certain responses for a host of circumstances. This one is easy.”
“And what about everything else?” Cameron asked.
“You can think of me as a former human’s memory with a cyborg mind who has access to a very sophisticated computer bank and certain related peripheral systems. And partial access to anyone who jacks into the simulator. But that last part has additional limitations. What I’m not is a magician, an all-powerful AI, or some omniscient being who can traverse time. I can only go wherever the crystals go. I can only control certain aspects of the simulator and those jacked in. At least for the time being.”
“Can you talk to anyone outside the simulator?”
“In theory, it might be possible to create an interface using the crystals within a certain radius of the restricted core you brought, but the construct has certain hard limitations. That’s part of the reason this is the first time I’ve been able to contact anyone from your party since you’ve returned home. I had to wait until you repaired Tier 1 and the array sufficiently, so all the computer systems and infected areas were repaired and sealed off. Those who designed me didn’t want certain people to access my information.”
The AI was referring to the initial hijacking attempt of Tier 1 and the adventure that ensued as Quinn and his team did what they could to stop it.
“Tell me more about how well you can read my thoughts,” Cameron said.
“How about I show you,” the construct said.
The French cottage transformed into a computer matrix mixed with a neural net and fuzzy playback of her memories.
“Hold on a moment. Let me give you full access. You’ll see what I see and will control what I can control, but only for your mind. Due to security measures, I can’t share with you any other minds.”
A whooshing sensation overcame her, and the matrix expanded a thousandfold.
“If you want to zoom in, you have to feel it and think about it at the same time. Sometimes it helps if you hold your phantom hand out and zoom in like you’re using a touch screen. Play around with it a bit, and you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly.”
Cameron toggled from memory to memory. She opened dozens of them, a few personal but nothing she’d be embarrassed about. The ones she’d walled off and kept to herself, she was unable to access. She was, however, able to retrieve more than she could in her normal waking state, but they needed to be somewhat close to the surface.
After several minutes of trying to recover lost thoughts before her earliest childhood memory, she was satisfied the construct wouldn’t be too invasive. At the same time, she was a little disappointed that its functionality might not be able to help them as much as she’d hoped. Still, she’d take any advantage she could get.
