6/16/2000 Geoff Ashbrook
Edited 1/16/2005 Geoff Ashbrook
One soldier stood up and began to walk down the field. A little walking path had formed from people using it to get water for their canteens or grabbing a few bags of army potato chips or getting together a few accomplices because they heard or smelled that someone was having a barbeque. He made his way through and to the path and then used it. The soldier watched the ground mostly, minding that he didn't stub his boots on the bowling ball sized blueish rocks that pocked the terrain. But he noticed, as if for the first time, the little patches of blue and yellow flowers that hung around together here and there, blowing slightly in the wind but not moving all that much.
He looked up. They had been quite fortunate because even though the sky was mostly blue, it was also filled with small fluffy white clouds that always seemed to be covering the sun, so it wasn't raining down all the time. He heard a few notes from a harmonica that had drifted to him in pieces, too far away to hear the whole song. He looked around at the people, careful to look back at the path to see where he'd be stepping. Most of the people were sitting down, but some were standing up. They were usually just staring off into space. A few people were scribbling notes, it looked like a one soldier had drawn a small crowd reading palms. Others went about leaving small bags of peanuts or pretzels by the non-responding soldiers. Occasionally someone would say thanks, or just nod. Other people were giving out cups of tea and hot water, and still others had carts full of soda cans and coffee pots, which they wheeled with difficulty through the rocky grass. To either side of the path the soldiers had slightly different color uniforms, slightly different colored faces, but that could have been the lighting. He saw a boy take out a map on the other side and he walked over. As he walked among the soldiers some didn't care, but others looked up at him; startled and frightened. One absent mindedly pointed a depleted roll of paper towels at him.
He walked around behind the person with the map, and tried to look on over his shoulder. The boy with the map turned. "Hello," he said.
"Where are we, on that? Do you know?"
"Well," said the boy, turning back to the map. "I haven't quite figured that out. I've only just started looking. Do you recognize any of this stuff?" The boy waved his fingers over all the beads.
The soldier sat down on a squat flat rock and reached out to the edge of the map. There was a little tab sticking out of the thick paper, actually there were a number of tabs, but he grabbed onto this one and moved it slowly down the margin of the map. As he did so the thousands of differently colored and differently sized beads shifted as the meshes of wires they were on shifted. It was almost tempting to look at the sea where there were no beads, just to see the patterns that the light made passing through all the levels of crossing wires. But as for the beads, the land shapes were slowly becoming smaller, and new shapes were appearing from the edges of the map. None of them seemed familiar.
"Hold it," the boy said suddenly, "Keep on going a bit further, I think I recognize this thing here." He jabbed tapping at a cluster of beads archipelago and the other land masses jingled and the seas shimmered. "Yes, I do. But how could that be?"
"What is it?" the soldier asked.
"It looks like," he said, and turned the map different ways, "It looks like our planet." He turned to the soldier with a grin. "Look here, doesn't that look just like the continents on half of this planet we're on?"
"Yeah, I have to say it does."
"Ok, then there should be a tab around here somewhere..." The boy searched the tab littered margins with his fingers. "How about this one," he said, and he slowly moved the tab from right to left across the top. The shape they were looking at which they suspected of being their planet began to change, the string of land masses moved around and formed a single ball. "No, no, that must have moved it all back in time." He replaced the tab to its previous location, which corrected all the other lands that changed too. And then he said, "How about this one?" and he moved a tab at the far left to the middle. All of a sudden all the continents on the map started moving to the right, curving into a thinner and thinner crescent, and then disappearing as other lands appeared just to the left of them. He moved the tab a bit further and then they could both see, as it all sped up a bit more, that all the land masses were planets, as they were all rotating in space on their variously tilted axes"
"I thought that was ocean," the solider said, pointing to the spaces between the spinning spheres.
"I did too," said the boy.
"Well," said the soldier, "Can you bring it around so our planet takes up the whole map?"
"I suppose so," he said. "Seems a bit of a shame, though. All those planets. How about... this." And the view of the map swung around. Beads zoomed around under the fabric of space, passing little bulges along. The planet swelled and the features of the land sprouted out as all different colored beads popped out from between others, and layered themselves and even stood out in scale topology.
"Now, I guess we still don't know where we are, do we."
"Last night I heard some officers saying something about Sakto, or something. Or Greetz." He shifted another tab and a square section on the bottom corner of the map turned all blue and then tiny beads made a pale bar and then a keyboard of letters jumped out, though still flat, below that. He typed in 'Sakto' by poking the letters and then hit return. Nothing happened. The word disappeared. They waited a spell and then he tried typing in "Greetz." The globe stopped spinning and then titled north and then the image zoomed in on a patch of land, a bit hilly, with a river zagging across one corner of the screen.
"That must have been the river I saw on the way here," the soldier said.
"I guess we came from the south, I sort of remember these mountains. Or hills, I guess."
"Can you zoom in any further?"
"I don't see why not." He tried two tabs that moved the view vertically and then diagonally across the landscape, then another that shaded the land with political lines.
"Leave that one on," said the soldier.
Then he tried another one and it zoomed in. "Right, I should have known that. I recognize the symbol now."
"Now zoom in to the border,"
"How close?"
"Close enough to make out the troops."
"Do you think we'll all be on this map?"
"I think so. We are here aren't we?"
"Ok." He used the tabs that moved the view to scan alone the border until they saw a bunch of specks clustered around the border.
"Is that us?"
"Maybe," He zoomed in further until they could make out the shapes of people and the worn path that formed between the sides. "Wow, it is. Let me see if we can find specifically you and me. Is there anything distinctive around us?"
"I've got something." The soldier stood up and pulled a long silvery thing out of his pocket. "It's a bag for if you get cold." He ripped it open so it was a big shiny bed sheet like aluminum foil.
The boy zoomed along the line until he saw something reflective. "I think I've got it."
The soldier walked back over and looked, and watched as the image zoomed in on his back and the top of the boy's head and even the map showing a smaller image of the same thing. "Here check this out," the solider said. Zoom in on the map so that they overlap completely." The boy zoomed in and the image of the image filled the image completely. It became completely black.
"That's strange," the boy said.
"Well what did you expect?"
"I don't know, not nothing though."
"Well look at this." And he stuck his hand out over the map, and below his hand was an infinite regress of hands sinking into space as far as they could see.
"Neat," the boy said. "Let me try this." He took his watch off and put it on the map. The hands ticked in unison all the way down. "Do you think there's any delay when you go down further?"
"Zoom in and see."
The boy nodded and zoomed in down the row of images of watches, but they all seemed to tick the same as the top one. "I wonder if that's right."
"I don't know. Ok, try this. Zoom back out until you can see us again, and then try to find that time tab."
"Ok," he pulled the zoom back so that they could see each other from the top and then he jiggled the time tab. He watched the soldier spread out his silver blanket back and forth in faster than life speed, over and over, chuckling, and then he went back forward to the two of them as they were. Then he pushed it forward. For a while they didn't do anything. Then they saw in the image, which they could see themselves holding, that someone walked up to them and gave them some peanuts, then after about the same amount of time someone brought peanuts to the first image of themselves they were looking at, then after twice as much time since the start someone really did come up and give them some peanuts. "That's really weird."
"I've got another idear," said the soldier.
"You do? An i-deaR?"
"Oh, shut up. Move it back in time to where we are now." The soldier waved his hand around over the map so that the boy could synchronize it, which the boy did, smiling. "Now, move it forward just slightly." He waved his hand again, but before he did the column of stacked hands below his moved first, so that his real hand was the last to move. He even tried moving it in circles and making animals shapes, but the map always anticipated. "Try it yourself, I'll hold the map. It's a weird feeling to watch yourself be so unoriginal."
The boy did it, and eventually slowed down and pulled his hand away. "It's shorting out my thinking process. It makes me feel almost like I'm going to start thinking everything backwards."
"Now, can you do a freeze frame?"
"I'm sure. It should be that same tab that started the planets revolving."
"Do you think you could focus this thing on the space between moments in time?"
"What on earth does that mean?"
"Here stick your head over the map." They both peered over the map so that their image image showed columns of their heads. "Now can you move into that space and then turn the view so that we could see our profiles?"
"I'll try. What would that do?"
"I don't know, that's what I want to find out. But first synchronize the map with the present moment, and then move the time tab the smallest amount you can; forwards." The solider waved his hand in front of their faces and the column moved around and then straightened and then bent ever so slightly in advance of his movements. Then he said, "Now I recon that each of those pictures of our heads is one moment in time."
The boy zoomed in and then found a tab which rotated the view, and fixed it so that a profiled of his own face filled the map.
"Ok, now slowly pull back so that you can see two of you. Then freeze the image, or maybe you don't have to freeze it."
The boy pulled the image back until two of he and the soldier were stacked in empty space.
"Now move the image around and see if you can see anything in-between your two heads. You might have to freeze the image for that."
"Right," said the boy. He froze the image and then panned it slowly up and down, until they could see a faint strip of light colored beads pop up only to disappear instantly as they passed the middle of the two images. "Hold on," the boy said, and he put the map on the ground and laid down over it. "I've got to be real steady," he said. Back and forth he went, getting closer and closer to the strip of blue. Then he got it, and the blue stayed.
"Now can you zoom in on that?"
"I'll try." He moved it forward, but he had to move the tab all the way to the end to get the blue to swell up to fill the whole screen. "And that's a lot of zoom," he said, "But I guess the vanishing point's a long ways away."
"Look," the soldier said. He pointed to the blue screen, and it was changing. The pail shape of a girl who was sitting at a desk like a newscaster crystallized out of the blue.
"She's sort of cute," the boy said.
"Yeah, but she's not moving," said the soldier. "Try moving it into the future again."
The boy moved the tab and the girl started moving very slowly. So, like the other tab, he pushed it all the way to the edge of the map, and her image not only came into real time but dissolved from the beads into being as crisp and clear as anything.
"Hello," the girl said, and reached up to adjust something on her headset.
"Are you an angel?" The boy blurted out,
"Oh will you shut up," said the soldier smiling, "You'll have to excuse him, he hasn't seen a girl in months."
"But," the boy continued, now turning to the solider, "How could she be real, she's sitting at a desk in a space that doesn't exist. Did you think we'd find a girl this pretty playing around with longitudes?"
The girl's cheeks became just a little red, and she said, "My name is Day, and I'll be your switchboard operator."
There was a pause.
"So," the solder said at last, "There's other people out here too?"
"You mean you aren't trying to call someone? Hold on a sec." She placed two fingers over her ear device and then she typed something onto a keyboard that they could hear but couldn't see and then she looked off at something else they couldn't see, and then she said, "There isn't anyone broadcasting from your planet. Or, I mean, you're the first people to log on."
"To..." the solder started, but the boy broke his pause.
"To log onto what? And how could you be from another planet? You look just like a girl and you speak the same language that we do. It's a bit fishy if you ask me." He looked at the soldier and then back at the map.
She typed some more and looked off the screen for a bit. "It looks like," she said, "There aren't any broadcasting networks on your planet for another twenty five years. I'm actually from your planet, this is your planets switchboard, but I'm not physically there anymore and I won't be born as far as your concerned for another seventy five years...I just do this on the weekends," she added.
"So, what? You go to school and ride your bike in there?" the boy asked.
"Sort of," she said. "Something like that."
"Is there enough room?"
"Oh, there's plenty."
"So, what exactly-" the soldier began again, but again the boy cut him off.
"Can we go in there?"
The soldier turned to him, "What are you think'n?"
"I guess so," the girl said. "I mean, I don't see why not. You two don't seem very 'dangerous,' " and she fingered the quotation marks in the air.
"Are you serious?" The soldier almost shouted, and the boy punched him in the arm and gestured to remind him of the people all around them. "You won't get in trouble?" said the soldier to the map in a quieter voice.
"How could I, this is my own business."
"But you're just a girl," he said.
She laughed out loud and waved her hand at him, "Ah, you old-timers crack me up. It's great. Ok," she cleared her throat, "Now, you're going to need a mirror, preferably a silvered mirror. And you’re going to need to prop up whatever you're talking to me through, so it has the same spatial relationship to the direction of gravity as mine does. And it should be on something solid, that'll help."
The boy disappeared from her view and appeared back a minute later with a small mirror. "My grandmother gave me this," he said smiling.
"Good, now... I have to find one," she said. "Hold on a sec." And she disappeared from the map.
The boy turned to the soldier, "I wouldn't think they'd still use that same expression in the future, 'hold on a sec,' " he said.
"Ok," her voice came on before her image. And then she was standing closer then before and holding up her mirror. "Mine isn't silvered, but oh well, it should work."
The two of them brought the map and the boy's bags over to a large rock near by, and propped up the map against the bags with its edge along the rock and then the soldier turned to the girl and said, "right."
"Right," she said, "Now hold out your mirror slowly, until the flat of it touches mine. Try not to let it touch the membrane before or after mine, and don't let your fingers or anything get between them. That could hurt. You ready?"
"Ready," the boy said.
"Ok, lets go, slowly, slowly," Very slowly their mirrors got closer to each other, and then the space closed, and there was a little tinking sound as they touched. "Ok, good," she said, "now let go, and step back."
"What?" the boy started to say.
"Just do it, quick."
The boy let go expecting his grandmother's mirror to fall in the dirt but the two mirrors just stayed there in the air.
The girl was still backing away when the soldier asked, "I was meaning to ask you, how come we can hear what your saying," and then there was a popping sucking noise and the two mirrors fell down and bounced off the bottom edge of the map and then both mirrors, still stuck together, fell out of the map and started rolling off the rock. The boy reached forward and caught them both before they fell to the ground.
"Oh, good, they didn't explode," she said, "Ok, you can climb through."
The boy and the soldier looked at each other. The boy shrugged, and the soldier walked up. He stuck out his hand to touch the map and it went right through. So he put both of his hands down and wrapped his fingers around the bottom of the window. He stuck his head through and looked around. It looked like an office in any office building. He pulled himself through and let himself pour onto the floor, and sort of forward-rolled to a stand. The boy was shorter and so, with a hand from the girl, he crouched and hopped through. Then he handed her her mirror.
"So," she said, "How did you figure out how to broadcast?"
"Well," said the soldier, putting his hands on his hips and sticking his chest out, "I may be an old timer but-"
"Oh we were just play'n around," the boy said.
"Oh," she said, and she walked off toward the door and the boy followed. It took the soldier a minute to realize he was done speaking, and then he walked after them.
"Weren't you working?" The soldier asked, as she led them down a hall.
"There's other switchboard operators," she said, "I just do it when I have time."
At the end of the hall there was an elevator, and they walked right up to it and hit the button. "I'm going to show you two around a little," she said. "Oh, what are your names?" and she took her nametag and head-set of and put them in a large side pocket of a skirt.
"I'm Rhent," said the soldier.
"And I'm... Top," said the boy after a pause.
"Are you serious?" she asked.
"Well, yeah."
"Hmm..." she said, "I don't know." Then there was a ring and the door opened. They stepped in after her.
On the panel inside instead of buttons there was a digital readout. It said they were on floor two hundred and sixty seven.
"Two hundred," the boy said in a rather loud voice. He looked back and forth between the two of them. "Is that possible?"
"Of course it is," said the soldier.
"Probably not," said the girl, "But that doesn't matter here. This building goes up to floor four hundred and fifty. But the top floors are hardly full."
"How?" was all the soldier could say.
"You'll see," she said. She typed in floor "0" and the elevator began to sink. "Look," she said, and the pointed to the wall behind them.
As the elevator dropped, they could see that between floors that through the clear walls of the elevator they were free to view what was outside. Only they couldn't figure out exactly what they were looking at. All around them, or in the directions they could see, there were tall building that reached up and out of view. And in-between the buildings were equally tall trees of incredible breadth, and of all kinds both evergreen and leafy. But the thing about the buildings, and the trees, was that it seemed the bottoms were a lot closer together than the tops, as if they were all sticking out of some surface not quite big enough to hold them all normally. As they got lower the walls and trunks that had been hundreds of feet away were now almost touching, and their view of any significant distance was gone. Then their view was cut out altogether and they were back to looking at a white wall.
Another bell rang, and the girl said, "Ok, this is it." And she walked out.
The boy and the soldier looked at the panel as they left and indeed it said zero. The room they walked out into had the strangest floor of any building lobby they had ever been it. It was also a good deal bigger than any building lobby they'd ever seen. Ordinarily you could expect a rather squarish room, with counters fitted with rows of tellers and clerks and then a few elevators. On that account neither was sure this was a lobby at all. When they turned around to see what they had come out of, it wasn't an elevator along a wall of other elevators, it was an elevator door on the left half of a wall of a narrow rectangular structure that extended from floor to ceiling. When they looked around they could see hundreds of these small elevator towers, evenly spaced as far as they could see, which was not all that far because the ground was not flat. The ground sloped down in every directly so that you couldn't see the floor after a fifty yards in any direction (which is itself larger than most lobbies). Also, the 'floor' was mostly green grass or ground cover or large gardens. Through all of that there were straight and curving paths that led from island to island. There were also a number of great circular desks of tellers and clerks. And there were also shops here and there, only without any walls. The boy could see a clothing store and a restaurant that had grown together. The restaurant appeared to be busy and a couple was being seated in the middle of a cluster of pant racks.
They walked along the ground, which looked like varying arrangements of raw slate and polished other stones, right toward one of the round counters. "How come the building we were in looks so small at the bottom?" The boy asked Day.
"There's four elevators in the building and they start together at the bottom. The building doesn't start until you get up there a ways," and she pointed to the ceiling.
"Is the building really that small at the bottom?" The soldier asked.
"I think for a few floors the elevator is inside the building, not running along the outside like it is above. But, as you saw, down that low there isn't anything to see. The building itself...I don't think it gets any bigger at the top. It might though. Some buildings do have satellite buildings that hang off the sides up at the top for about fifty floors or so. Only some people don't like that because they say it ruins their view. Can't please everybody."
She waved to a few of the clerks as she walked straight ahead through a revolving door. The soldier and the boy also waved to the clerks who also waved to them. Day walked on down a short hall and stepped onto an escalator. Before they even got on, they noticed that it didn't go straight down. It appeared to be a spiral escalator. "This may feel strange," she said, "but don't worry."
Right after she said this the path of the escalator seemed to shift from just going down, it almost felt like they had turned and were now going up, upside down, only they didn't fall or feel that anything was out of place. Then it seemed to level off, moving more straight ahead as through it were becoming a normal escalator, then it curved and started going up, and then bend around becoming a spiral again, but going up.
"Why are we going up, didn't we just go down?"
"We're still going down."
"But, how?"
"You're gonna love this," she said.
Then the escalator straightened out and kept moving forward and let them off in a small room with cylindrical walls and a hollow pointed ceiling. They walked forward and out of a pair of sliding glass doors that opened as they were reaching the top of the escalator, and they followed Day outside. Not only did they see when they looked around that they had just walked out of a glass door in the side of a tree, but they were standing in a room that was only a few hundred feet across, which was completely spherical, and between the branches of the trees all above them they could see that people were walking around what was the undifferentiated floor and walls and ceiling of the room. And not only that, but there was a large silvery object floating in the middle of the room, from which and to which more spiral escalators were moving.
"Ok," she said, "Where should we go now?"
"Well," said Top, "Where would you be going if you weren't with us?"
"Maybe to get a cup of tea, it sounds so boring though."
"No, that sounds good enough to me," the boy said. And the soldier nodded.
"Ok, right this way." And they followed her to the base of one of the escalators that was going up. "Now," she said, "Before you use this one you have to tell it the address of where you want it to go. Otherwise you'll just come down the other side. You enter the address here, and there's a place to swipe a card if you have a business card. So let's go to...how about Fineye Rean's. It's usually nice there. She typed something into the pad and a green light in the shape of a line came up, she hit the number three and she jumped on. "Come on," she said.
They reached the top of the escalator and went into the thing, and it went completely dark. Then the light came on and they were in what looked like an elevator moving away from an object that looked no bigger than a house. It had ports and other elevator-like things were moving in and out of the holes. There was a sign on it that looked like a big wooden sign that someone had just pounded in, it read: "Cannary Servers," and had a picture of a can with a smiling songbird on the label.
"What was that?" asked the soldier.
"That was a server building," she said. "These are all server buildings," She pointed to the countless objects that were all floating with smaller things moving in and out of their ports. "We didn't have to come this way, we could have gone right to the cafe, but I wanted you to 'awe' at the server park. I think it's neat. These don't all have to be here. This is just a clustering on a theme. The theme could be anything, and any one thing, like where we just came from, can come up on a number of themes."
Then Top and Rhent turned around and saw a large black wall that was engulfing and spitting out all the little elevators. When they hit it, it all went black, and it was quiet until they heard Day say, "Sometimes I think its strange that there isn't a single place where anything is, but then I think that is what something is. Where and what seem to be the same thing." Then the lights came on and while they couldn't see anything that was behind them, a door was open in front of them leading into a lit room filled with windows. "I know the girl who made this place," she said. "Or maybe 'copied' would be a better word. But she made a lot of changes." There was a rumbling sound in the background as they all walked over to different windows. Rhent was standing in front of a cliff that went down a hundred feet or so of jagged rocks to a crashing ocean. Top was looking over the misty green and rocky landscape of a cliff coastline that turned into hills and mountains and forests. Day was standing in front of the door which led out to a peninsula of green that bulbed out with a light house at the end.
"Where's the cafe?" Top asked.
"At the top of the lighthouse, and the sea bottom too, different rooms," she said.
"Yeah, this place is really boring," said Rhent, grinning uncontrollably like a golden retriever.
They went outside into the blowing rain and ran across the grass to the lighthouse. It seemed to take forever to get there. "One thing I like about this place," she shouted into the wind, "Is that it doesn't spoil you by having an instant transport."
When they got to the base of the lighthouse, Rhent said, "Are you telling me there's no elevator to the top of this thing?"
"Just good old fashioned break-your-neck lighthouse stairs," she said, and walked inside.