I opened my eyes when I heard wildlife skittering through the underbrush. The sound brought an instant sense of awareness, which was odd because usually the transition was accompanied by really strange sensory effects. Most often, this felt like a kind of Doppler force that differed between my left ear and my right, along with an unexplainable shift in gravity, no matter how many times I tried to describe it. It’s like going weightless one second and then having my mass triple a half second later. Then the process repeats, but while you’re spinning and trying to sort out that Doppler ear thing simultaneously. The process seems to last ten to twenty seconds, but according to my implants, the transition between Branes takes less than a single second.
As I mentioned, it’s difficult to explain. It doesn’t make much sense, and I don’t think it matters in the end. Maybe it would if I were trying to understand and replicate the transition process, but since my ultimate goal is to stop it altogether and ensure no one can cross the barrier between worlds in the future, I really don’t care to analyze the experience. It’s sufficient to say that it’s unpleasant, and I believe that makes sense because it’s entirely unnatural for a human to shift between planes of reality.
I sat up with a start and felt the squish of damp leaves and vegetation underneath my bare ass. Vaulting to my feet and spinning quickly in a circle, I performed a threat assessment, searching for anything that could be used as a weapon. I was standing in a small clearing in dense woodland, and it was dark—middle of the night kind of dark. The sounds of the woods had gone silent, but I sensed this was more in response to my sudden movement. I saw no immediate danger, at least not in the woodland surrounding my small clearing. Ten feet away, the forest became a black curtain. I blinked to activate the light-enhancing optics in my contacts, but nothing happened.
I glanced at the holographic display on my wrist. It should engage when I look at it or when I raise my arm to my eyes. In both cases, the display remained dark. This makes some sense since the display doesn’t truly project across my wrist; it is just superimposed there in three-dimensional space. Whatever impacted my vision enhancements also disabled my heads-up display.
Staggering a step, I scanned the tree line more carefully. I heard and felt my barefoot squish through the leaf litter and the mud beneath. I understood two things instantly. First, I was standing in one of the many dead zones that pockmarked the wilds of Wild-Side. Technology didn’t work out here. Second, I’d arrived with the typical telltale sensory scramble that came with the Crossing due to my fatigue. I’d crashed hard after leaving The Borderline and been in such a deep sleep that it affected my Transition. It was an observation Doctor Cormac would be interested in since he’d long theorized that a particular sleep state was the key to my transitioning to his Brane. I didn’t know if this would support his theory or set the idea back, but I knew he would want to know.
I wiped muddy hands on my thighs and sighed. Completely naked. Every crossing had this in common. It didn’t matter what I wore when I fell asleep—every time I woke up on Wild-Side, I was entirely without clothing. There were multiple theories about why this was the case, but until one of them could be proven, it didn’t matter to me.
I mention this because it wasn’t just inconvenient. Whenever I woke up on Wild-Side following the Transition, I found myself in a different location… I mean, geographically speaking. For example, I was standing in the wilderness with absolutely no idea where I was. Luckily for me, the vast majority of Wild-Side is temperate. Specific weather systems vary depending on which part of the continent I land on, but generally speaking, I see daytime highs in the low nineties and nighttime lows down to fifty degrees. We’re talking Fahrenheit for all those not raised in the good old US of A.
On this trip, my luck held on multiple fronts. The temperature was in the low sixties, if I had to guess. More importantly, the sounds of wildlife around me suggested no Elend in the area. This was the actual risk associated with each crossing, as noted previously: the nasty creatures with teeth and claws roaming the wilderness of Wild-Side all day, every day. No one in their right mind ventures outside the city walls.
Except for me, every time I Cross, I end up somewhere different. There’s no predicting where, just like there’s no correlation between the passage of time here and the time in my world. For example, for me, it had been six days since I was on Wild-Side. The only thing I know for sure is that six days haven’t passed here. It might be more, and there’s a minuscule chance that it’s less, but there’s no way that it’s only been six days.
Why? Good question. I can’t say. Even Doc Cormac can’t be sure, and if he’s stumped, there’s no chance I’ll come up with the answer. I hate being that guy, but it’s how it works—something you just have to roll with. You won’t survive the big stuff if you sweat the little. And by the big stuff, I mean the seven-foot-tall monsters that tear people limb from limb and could attack from any direction at any time.
I headed for higher ground. Along the way, I found what could charitably be called a club. It was a recently fallen tree limb that was a little longer than a baseball bat, about as heavy, and reasonably sturdy. In addition to having heft, it had a somewhat jagged tip where it had broken off from the tree. This made a pointy weapon, which is better than nothing in the absence of a real one.
I crested a ridge that was clear of trees for nearly fifty yards. This gave me a view of the moon, which was half full. This would have been of greater value if I had any idea how much time had passed since my last visit to Wild-Side, but as I mentioned, this was always a struggle. The good news was that the more I walked, the more opportunity the nano core infrastructure in my head had to calibrate. To be clear, technology didn’t work in the dead zones, but at least the core components of my nano do-dads functioned at a firmware level. I’d been stranded in the zone before, and it was explained to me like this: you know how your cell phone can’t make calls when you don’t have a signal, but if you have the right hardware and software, you can still use it as a GPS? It was something like that. If I walked around enough, the base hardware-level functionality had a chance to calibrate. With that, I could establish what I referred to as basic services.
There are, of course, more technical details behind all this. Doc Cormac could explain it all in highly scientific and gloriously boring detail, but in my experience, it’s only valuable for curing insomnia. The real moral of the story is that the technology of this world puts everything from our world to shame. It’s not even close. If the technology of this world were described as a state-of-the-art jet fighter, the tech of our world, by comparison, would be a home-built go-kart running a lawnmower engine and driving on three flat tires.
From my vantage point, the sky seemed darker to the right. Based on this admittedly subjective assessment, I judged the left to be East and headed that way. The value of this decision would depend on what part of the continent I’d landed on, so I’d gone with the only criteria that mattered. Light brought a degree of safety, at least so far as I could see danger coming at a greater distance. With that in mind, the sooner I reached daylight, the sooner I might have a degree of safety. There was absolutely no doubt that the woods were crawling with Elend, so seeing them before they saw me was vital.
So why, you might be asking, would I not just hunker down and wait for daylight to come to me? Why risk encountering one of these creatures if I’d already been lucky? The Elend have keen senses. Those of a predator. Not the least of which is their sense of smell. And a man alone in the woods without anything to mask his sent? That’s like ringing a dinner bell. I couldn’t dig a hole deep enough to keep my naked ass safe until sunrise. And climbing a tree was out. That would only spread my cent more quickly. Plus, have you ever tried to climb a tree naked? I’ll tell you this: it’s the kind of mistake a guy makes only once.
Maybe just as importantly, I needed to give my tech a chance to calibrate. If I could determine my location, I would be able to identify the nearest outpost. From there, I could contact Cormac and find the closest transport platform. I’d been through this before. Every Crossing started in the same way. Admittedly, some just put me further out in the sticks than others.
I must have covered close to two miles by the time the sun crested the horizon. I couldn’t see it directly, but the hint of light started filtering through the leafy canopy. The ground was thick with vegetation. Imagine the Pacific Northwest if the clock could be rewound to a time a couple of thousand years before humans first invaded the continent. That’s what Wild-Side was like. The Brane was an exercise in contrasts in many ways. The surface of the world was made up of three primary land masses. As I understood it, there wasn’t much of a difference in climate from one part of the planet to the next. So, there are no arctic or tropical zones, for example.
Beyond that, the population hadn’t blossomed as it had in our world. The population was three million and had never changed before the Elend outbreak. “Outbreak” is my attempt at a politically correct description of the demon-like scourge. In truth, there was nothing virulent about them, at least not scientifically speaking. After the Elend began to gain a foothold, there was no way to keep track of the population.
The inhabitants gathered in a collection of cities. Walls were erected at their perimeter, the only defense against Elend attacks. Everyone who had made a home in the Reaches, the agrarian settlements outside the secure cities, either retreated to the safety of the walls or was unaccounted for and believed lost. The people of Wild-Side had never faced a hostile force before, not once in their history. As a result, they were utterly unprepared for conflict. They didn’t know how to fight and were entirely unfamiliar with war. They had no concept of armies and didn’t have police forces, nor did they even know how to fight one another.
Although the people of Wild-Side were technologically advanced, they had never known anything other than a peaceful existence—peace with each other and the world around them.
All of that changed with the arrival of the Elend.
A blip in the corner of my right eye was the first sign that my situation was beginning to improve. It was a red dot that began to pulse slowly. I knew from experience that it meant my HUD was starting to come back online, at least in some small way. The red dot would soon turn green if what I’d seen before held true. Then, after a few seconds, I would see a green progress bar as the nanotech booted into a baseline configuration that helped me find the nearest communication station with simple GPS-like navigation cues.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the full functionality of my HUD blinked to life. The woods around me pulsed into vivid relief as if my eyes had suddenly adjusted to the darkness and the world had become clear. A two-dimensional map projected in three-dimensional space before me. It refreshed, resolving into a 3D shape showing woodland terrain with ridges, rivers, and a red dot indicating my position relative to everything displayed. To the west, an irregular portion of the map showed the green of the forest canopy blotted in a pale, sickly gray. I was standing just outside that gray area. I instantly understood that the pale area indicated a dead zone, and my tech had come back online thanks to my moving just beyond the perimeter of it.
“Gray, are you there?” a voice sounded in my ear. “It’s Wes. Do you read me?”
“Hey, Wes,” I said with a chuckle. “Good to hear from you. I’m hoping you have good news for me.”
“We’re checking the database now. I should have what you need in a couple of seconds. Looking at your position, I’m guessing you landed in a dead zone again?”
“You bet. No party crashers so far. I’m calling it a win.”
As you can tell by the conversation, it wasn’t uncommon for me to cross over into an inconvenient location. If we ever figured out a way to control my entry point, it would be a significant win in terms of convenience and safety.
“Good news, buddy,” there was genuine relief in Wes’s tone. “Looks like we have a farm 1.6 miles north-northeast of your position. We’re getting a signal from its pad, so we expect it to be operational.”
A blue dot appeared on my HUD, so I set out jogging. The sun was rising quickly, and I felt I was already pushing my luck by not encountering any Elend while wandering through the woods. The hair on the back of my neck was starting to prickle, and I wouldn’t second-guess whatever signals were sounding from deep within my hind mind. I was no longer alone on the com channel or in the woods.
“You’re moving fast,” Wes noted. “Everything alright?”
I didn’t answer right away. I focused on the sound of my rapid footfalls and those of the surrounding forest. The woods had fallen silent. “I don’t think so,” I grumbled. My jog had transitioned to a full sprint. The nanotech in my blood worked to hyper-oxygenate it, and the same tech had already increased my muscle density, so I was moving fast. I tore through bushes and brush without slowing, feeling the lashing of every stick, branch, and vine I passed as it thrashed against my bare flesh.
“Do me a favor, Wes?” I said while keeping my tone as conversational as possible. “Send me some captures of the facility and have the pad warmed up and ready to flash? I’m pretty sure I’ll be coming in with at least one unfriendly on my tail.”
I heard the sound of something being knocked over on the other side of the connection, followed by the sound of harried voices. I couldn’t make out what was being said over the noise of my own breathing. All I know is they weren’t talking to me. A second later, a series of thumbnail images appeared in the corner of my eye. They depicted an abandoned and overgrown farm: a large, oddly shaped barn; what looked like a technologically advanced greenhouse; and a building that was a cross between a house and barracks, two stories tall. The place clearly hadn’t been used for some time. Everything was overgrown by sawgrass or thorn bushes. It wasn’t in disrepair exactly; it just looked long abandoned.
I looked closer at the greenhouse–type structure. It was two stories high and had large, double sliding doors on one end. It looked like a giant glass barn, though I knew from experience that it wasn’t made of glass. “The pad is in the greenhouse?” I asked.
“Affirmative,” a new voice sounded in my ear. “We’re sending power to the pad now and bringing it online. It will be warmed up and calibrated by the time you get there.”
I recognized the voice. “Doc? That you?”
“You bet! I heard you might have trouble, so I thought I would lend a hand. We’re trying to track your pursuers, but we can’t get a fix. The overgrowth is thick out there, and you are close to the dead zone. We don’t have many resources.”
I hurdled a log and landed in knee–deep water. It didn’t slow me down much, though I skidded on my heels for an exciting couple of feet. I jumped, made it clear of the water, and kept going. When I heard a splash behind me less than two seconds later, I knew I wasn’t just running scared. Whatever hit the water was immense. I glanced to the right and caught only a flash of movement from the corner of my eye.
Shit.
“Two that I know of,” I confirmed to the Doc.
“Hell,” I heard the Doc whisper. I don’t know if he was talking to himself or someone sitting with him. “Gray, this is going to be close. I now have a visual. If you have anything left in reserve, now’s the time to use it. They’re closing in on you.”
I broke from the tree line and saw the farm buildings come fully into view. I poured on additional speed as my feet found tracks worn into the dirt by years of moving farm equipment. I turned sharply to the left as I rounded the edge of the barn. Something hissed and crashed as it missed the turn and tumbled.
“That was one,” the Doc confirmed. “You’re in the home stretch. The buffer is warmed up and ready. You just need to reach the pad.”
The right side of the two sliding doors on the greenhouse opened wide enough to allow a man to pass. That was clever. A full-grown Elend was larger than a man, but it was powerful. It could force its way through, but the effort would cost it a step.
Overhead lights stabbed to life inside the greenhouse as I drew within twenty yards of the door. I could see the broad outline of the platform thirty feet beyond the entrance to the building. Somehow, I managed to eke out just a little more speed. My stride became a little longer, and my breathing just a little deeper. The instant my shoulders passed beyond the entrance of the building, I dove. I jumped as high and far as I could. My target wasn’t specific—I aimed for anywhere on the massive platform.
A stuttering flash engulfed me as I rolled across the glassy surface of the floor. I came to rest on my back and didn’t move. A tingle coursed through my body, starting at my toes and rippling to the top of my head. My ears felt like they needed to pop. Lying supine, it was a little like a bad fall I’d once taken while playing basketball. I’d gone up for a jump ball, only to have my legs swept out from under me and land flat on my back. That fall knocked me unconscious. In this case, I’d remained lucid but felt like my brain was slowly rebooting.
The first thought that broke through the gauze wrapping my mind was that the floor was warm under my ass and hands. Then I wondered why I was naked from the waist down. I slapped my palm on the floor and contemplated the glass. Memories returned quickly; this wasn’t my first rodeo, after all, and I’d used the teleportation platforms in this way more times than I could count.
I sat up and looked at the half-dozen people staring at me beyond the perimeter of the platform’s floor. I wondered at their aghast expressions. That’s when the bruises, gashes, and abrasions began to register. Finally, I recalled the circumstances that had led to my emergency teleportation. I was hauling ass when I reached the platform. They must have seen me materialize out of thin air, still mid-dive. Watching me crash earthward must have been quite a sight, especially given my battered condition.
A man and a woman moved in unison from the platform’s edge. The man offered me a hand, pulling me to my feet. The woman draped a blanket over my shoulders. I thanked the woman and looked at the man. “My compliments to whoever was running the platform. His timing was right on the money. A second later, and my butt was history,” I said.
The man grinned and pointed to the console a dozen yards away. “The old man wanted that honor for himself,” he said.
I chuckled at Tony referring to Doc Cormac as the Old Man. It was one of the bad habits that the people of Wild-Side had picked up from me, though I don’t think they fully understood the irony with which it was intended. Cormac and Tony were the same age, and so was Lacy, the woman who brought me the blanket. As far as I could tell, the entire population of Wild-Side was of the same age, give or take ten years.
Confused? You can read that statement again, but it won’t make any more sense the second time. The entire world’s population, this Brane, the plane of reality—whatever you want to call it—was nearly the same age. The effects of time brought relative differences, likely due to experiences and responsibilities on Wild-Side, but all were within a single generation: thousands of people in their early to late thirties. At least, that’s the age I could estimate, judging by their looks.
That’s how old they would be if they came from our world. Things worked a little differently on Wild-Side. To clarify, the Seeley were not, in fact, thirty-odd years old. As near as I have determined, they were closer to two hundred and fifty years of age. And since there are no children or elderly, their population hasn’t changed appreciably within that time.
Is your mind sufficiently blown yet? Mine was. It still is. I’ve been coming to Wild-Side for a little over twenty-two months, and I’m still wrapping my head around it. That said, strap in. I’ll expose you to the really odd stuff as we go.
Doc Cormac popped up from behind the console and looked at me with tired eyes. He shook his head, then removed a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned the lenses with the hem of his long white lab coat. I’d come to realize this as a nervous response. He did it when he was tired, stressed, or distracted. Judging by the bags under his eyes, I was betting on all three.
“Close call, my boy,” he said.
Cormac had thick black hair, equally black eyebrows, and pale blue eyes. Although unremarkable in appearance, he possessed an intellect that was second to none. On a plane of existence that was hundreds of years ahead of our world in science and technology and populated by individuals who were, on average, more intelligent than our best and brightest, this was significant.
Amusingly, despite all the technology available to him, much of which he developed, Cormac chose to wear anachronistic crafted glass lenses as corrective eyewear. No one on Wild-Side wore glasses for anything other than eye protection, yet Cormac could be seen fiddling with his glasses at all hours of the day and night.
I rolled my shoulder and felt something pop. “I never got a look at what was behind me,” I admitted, “but I felt it breathing down my neck.”
“One of them closed to within two meters,” Cormac said with an arch of his brows. “Would you like to see the footage?”
I shook my head, and a shiver ran down my spine. In fact, I’d imagined it being closer than that.
Lacy returned with a pair of gray coveralls and passed them to me. I handed her the blanket and started stepping into the outfit. If you’re wondering why I didn’t excuse myself to go somewhere more private to change, there are two reasons. First, the Seeley, Doc Cormac, Tony, and Lacy are all names I made up. Anytime a word, most often a proper noun, didn’t have an analog in the Seeley’s language, I made up my own term. The translation technology compensated, and those I spoke with heard the appropriate word in their own tongue.
Wild-Side was a different world, after all. How likely would it have been for their language to match ours?
Anyway, the Seeley don’t have art or music. Well, they don’t know what fun is either, if I’m being honest. If they had any interest at all in the birds and the bees, they wouldn’t be a race of thirty-somethings with no rugrats running around.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Secondly, anyone who crashes into a foreign world naked each time they cross the proverbial border sort of needs to check their shyness at the door. Today’s clumsy teleportation issue notwithstanding, this wasn’t an unusual day. I fall asleep in Our-World and wake up in some random location on Wild-Side. After that, the first step is to make contact. The second was finding safety in one of the main population centers. More often than not, the easiest way to do that is to find one of the remote farming outposts abandoned when the Elend forced the Seeley to retreat to their city centers. Those remote farms used teleportation technology to move farmed goods to the cities. So, assuming the farms still have operational tech, I could use them to reach safety. A few problems make that sometimes more complicated than it should be, but more on that later.
Returning to my original point: every time I visit Wild-Side, I end up walking through the woods with my business flapping in the wind. Everything out there is sharp, pointed, or itchy—sometimes all three. That’s the best-case scenario. Most of the wilderness is covered with woodland, and much of that is now infested with Elend, leaving me unprotected until I can contact Cormac or someone from his team.
Anyway, there’s no point in being shy. Not after doing this so many times in front of these people.
I tapped a button on the cuff of my new coveralls and the suit adjusted to fit me. I mean that literally. The sleeves extended to perfectly match the length of my arms, as did the legs. The waste contracted, then released several times until it found just the right comfortable adjustment without being too tight or slack. I swung my arms, tested the fit at the shoulders, and found it was perfect there, too. The range of motion was perfect. Not to get too inside baseball, but maybe most impressive was my inseam. The crotch was roomy without being either baggy or too confining. Not an easy feat given that I was going commando at the moment.
It was like having a personal tailor available at the press of a button. At home, we would call it “Smart Clothing.” Here, that’s just how clothing worked. I’m being tactful when I say this place is generations ahead of us in terms of technology. We’re still like monkeys playing with rocks and sticks compared to the Seeley.
A younger-looking guy bolted into the room through the farthest door, a broad smile spread across his face when he saw me. He had sandy blonde hair, a wispy straggle on his chin that was an ill-fated attempt at a beard, and dark circles under his eyes. He looked like he was in his early twenties, even though he was the same age as everyone else on Wild-Side. “Gray, you’re going to love this,” he said in a gasping wheeze that suggested he’d run from his workshop. “Your design is going to work. The models confirm it, but I have a ton of questions for you!”
This was Tripp. I would call him an engineer, as it seems the best title available. None of the Seeley subscribed to any single intellectual discipline. Tripp and Cormac had more widespread interests than most, which likely caused them to side with me when so many of their people preferred to keep me at arm’s length. So far, he’d been able to design and fabricate almost anything I could think of. While I wasn’t the most popular person on Wild-Side, many of the ideas and technologies I’d brought with me were highly sought after. Since I couldn’t bring anything with me physically during the Transition, it was often up to Tripp to build the novelties of Our-World—either as I described them or based on the technical schematics I could transfer digitally using my mind like a flash drive.
Again, more on that later. For now, it’s enough to say that Tripp is a genius among geniuses. If anyone could help me win over the people of Wild-Side, Tripp is likely the guy to do it. Sure, the technology of Our-World is little more than a novelty to a place with technology like Wild-Side, but when it comes to people who lack all creativity in the arts, Our-World has a great deal to offer.
“Throttle response is a problem,” Tripp said simply. “I don’t know how you will control the machine on the X, Y, and Z axes.”
Lacy looked confused by the strange way Trip held his hand in the air, fingers together and outstretched, his palm to the floor. Cormac’s eyes went back and forth between me and Tripp, and a queasy expression crossed his face. “You’re not still working on that…thing?”
Tripp nodded and laughed. “If Gray can sort out the control interface, this is going to work.”
I nodded. “Done deal. I’ve done it before,” I paused, struggling to qualify my claim. “It was on a smaller scale, but it’s a proven approach. As long as you have the motor and prop articulation sorted out, it’s all good.”
Tripp was already nodding enthusiastically. “Stop by when you have some time.” Without another word, he disappeared back through the door.
Judging by the bags under his eyes, I wondered if Tripp ever slept. I knew he’d been similarly invested when he started fabricating MP3 players. He had helped me introduce Wild-Side to music for the first time. The device wasn’t strictly necessary since everyone here had access to technology that could play audio; it was literally embedded in their bodies. However, since this was a world without art of any kind, access to music had been a novel and shocking experience.
Tripp helped me fabricate a first-generation iPod, complete with a working jog wheel and wired headphones. Once the device was built, the music selection was brought to Wild-Side in my onboard gray matter and loaded into the first flash storage ever made on Wild-Side. I admit I skipped the original iPod’s concept of a spinning disk hard drive, opting instead for more conventional flash memory. Even that was an outdated concept, according to Tripp, who found the idea endlessly amusing.
The single device circulated throughout the city and was experienced by hundreds within weeks. When I returned to Wild-Side, a little over two months had passed, and the iPod was replicated thousands of times. The technology was considered quaint, yet the concept of music captured the attention of everyone, and the experience spread to other cities as well.
I’d broken every music-related copyright law in our world in new and astounding ways. At the same time, I’d done two things perhaps more important. I’d introduced the people of Wild-Side to a form of art for the first time. I’d also broken one of the Primary Tenants of their world. More on that later because this was part of what turned so many of the Elend against me.
