Distortion Offensive (21 page)

Down, down, down.

It wasn't like accessing knowledge, not in the sense that former archivist Brigid Baptiste understood it, anyway. It was like hearing the voice of something so immeasurably superior to her that it might truly deserve the appellation of god. And not even hearing words, more like being caught in that infinitely superior, omnipotent being's breath as it sighed.

She was swimming in a sigh.

Brigid let the breath, the sigh, wash over her, lapping at the contours of her brain.

There was a wonderful burning sensation at her temporoparietal junction, the part of the brain that processed visual and touch signals, provided for balance and the spatial information generated by the inner ear. The burning was her disconnecting from her body, at least in the sense that she understood it. One thing that temporoparietal junction was responsible for was processing information from a human's proprioceptive sensations, the sense of where one's body ended. Suddenly, as the slow, pleasing warmth filled the back of Brigid's brain, she felt as though she had disconnected from her body, as if she were floating away from it.

She was being asked something, she realized, though the question was unspecific, unclear and hidden within her own mind, like hints of a forgotten dream. She
searched for the question, trying to find it, to decipher it, her sense of self seeming to spin, to invert and re-form all about her. It was like translating a foreign language, putting together the musical structure of the words until she could sense the pattern and from the pattern divine the meaning.

Of what do you seek, Brigid Baptiste?

Was that it? Is that the question resonating in my head?
Brigid wondered.

She tried listening again, but it was a different kind of listening to anything that she had ever experienced before, more like working a Chinese puzzle box, sliding all the pieces this way and that until the solution was finally revealed, a listening that required logic and understanding more than any act of simple hearing.

The library was speaking to her, she realized, feeling giddy and quite, quite mad.

Her eyes roved the room, optic nerves sucking at the light around her, framing and reframing shapes to create context for her brain. Her vision, her ability to see, seemed to have altered, too, disconnected from the place where she associated her eyes, like a remote feed from a camera. The coral walls of the vast chamber had gone, and so had the floor and the wonderful, terrible room. The sounds of gunfire had also disappeared. In their place, Brigid heard bell chimes with the texture of tumbling waves on a beach, saw a wonderful, subtle miasma of everything. This was the face of the all.

Brigid blinked, using the action to recenter herself, to lift her mess of thoughts back to something coherent. As she did so, the cloudlike form took shape, and she found herself seeing things she thought that she recognized, but it was like seeing sounds or smells—familiar, yet the input felt wrong, contrary.

The Ontic Library was speaking to her, feeding her simple mammalian brain with a cloud of information. Information as an explosion, as a billion facets with no emphasis, no focus. Information that was unsorted, that had never considered sorting as an important part of the process of gathering information.

The structures that underpinned the world, Brigid realized, were laid bare before her, but she was too ignorant to comprehend what it was that she was seeing. With this information, with this knowledge, she might change the world, might rewrite everything in the world.

It was all emotion. Emotion held it all together. The sense that life had to endure because life
should
endure, because it was so deserving.

She spun through the cosmos then, seeing everything, and it felt like swimming or like poetry. The world spun around her, beneath her, turning on its axis as it held its place in the Milky Way like some gigantic gyroscope. And what she saw she didn't see, she felt. It was a new definition of seeing, a thing done with one's core, one's being, perhaps something that was only done with that thing one called the soul.

The world, the universe, was made up of so many more colors than Brigid had ever seen, so many more shapes than she had thought possible. She could look forever, as she walked there among the stars, and never have a name for everything she could see.

There were angles, too, angles that defied Brigid's understanding of mathematics. Angles that were hidden in the straightest of edges, angles that no one had ever perceived. She recalled for an instant the way the teenage girl, Pam, had described her hair as a tesseract. “That's where you hide your memories,” she had told
Brigid. Brigid realized now how all those angles could exist, how they were and yet they were not, dual things occupying the same space. The angles were like music, all the notes that made up a song, the song nothing without the notes, the single notes nothing without the song.

Outside this vision, out in the immense room beneath the Pacific Ocean, Brigid's body was shaking with trauma, her physical form shuddering as it tried to absorb the vast input of the vein feed that poured into her brain. The wealth of input, all of it so unstructured, unordered, was like seeing a million faces in a second and trying to perceive every difference and every similarity, a contradiction of requirements so overwhelming it made the task impossible.

It felt like poetry. Knowledge continued to pour into her temporoparietal junction, running along the inside of her scalp like wriggling, burning fingers.

Brigid was struck by a weird sense of déjà vu, as she felt the thing scampering across her scalp. She sensed that she had been here before, done this very thing before. It was strange, and all the more so since Brigid Baptiste had an eidetic memory and the vague sense of déjà vu was, to say the least, very unusual in her because her powers of recollection were so potent.

She pushed the thought aside, blindly reaching into her hair and placing her fingers around one of the creature's limbs. In a second, she had tossed the thing to the floor, and she stamped on it as it struggled to right itself, crushing its body beneath the ball of her foot. Gloop oozed out around her boot as the creature was turned to sludgy pulp. Brigid ignored it, turning back down the corridor and shouting for Kane.

“We need a plan here, and quick,” she called.

“I know,” Kane growled. He looked around, playing the bright xenon beam across the corridor that they were in until it hit Brigid in the face, and she blinked so hard it was almost like waking up.

The cloud of knowledge inside her—or perhaps about her, she could no longer be sure—came back into focus and Brigid realized her sense of time had become muddled. She had been somewhere that was earlier than now, been in a place when she was just entering the Ontic Library with Kane and the others. The real was all of the rules, she knew then. The real was everything that ever was and ever could be.

Brigid Baptiste had an eidetic memory and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. These things were at the very core of her being. Suddenly, here she was holding all the knowledge of everything ever, and she didn't know what to do first, what part to deconstruct, what thing to pick up and hold and examine.

She had been shown time. How did time work? How could time work? And what was time anyway? A line, a slope, a rushing river?

From this viewpoint, with this information, she could…

Time rushed at her. Just the very action of thinking about it had brought the library's full resources to bear, filling her mind with so much information she could not begin to comprehend any of it. Having all the knowledge in the world created a time machine, Brigid realized, a thing that could be molded and changed. If she could perceive all of time in the same instant, she could pick a spot and examine it, pick a spot and stay there, outside of time's flow or caught up in the time loop, just like the one she had experienced less than a minute before.

Dammit, Brigid realized. Thinking about the time
loop made the Ontic Library show her the time loop; she could effectively trap herself in too much knowledge if she thought about the wrong stuff.

Wicked thoughts, she realized.
Wicked thoughts could kill you now; they could make you something wicked.

But by that logic, good thoughts could generate goodness, couldn't they?

Almost without really thinking it at all, a face appeared before Brigid's eyes. A girl's face of tenderness and such innocent beauty that Brigid felt her heart break in two. It was Abigail, her niece, her surrogate daughter, her munchkin. Abigail, the girl who didn't exist.

The Ontic Library contained such supreme knowledge that Balam had insisted that its destruction could ultimately threaten reality itself. So, Brigid realized, by the same token could that supreme knowledge not be employed to reshape reality? Could she bring Abigail, her niece from a computer-simulated reality, to life?

Brigid pictured Abi in her mind's eye, a girl of five years old, with messy honey-blond hair that fell past her shoulders, and eyes the same wonderful shade of emerald as Brigid's own. She could smell her, hear her laughter, hear Abi's endless requests for ice cream in her voice that never whined, just sang like a musical instrument given life. Brigid reached for the girl, her arms outstretched to hug her close, to hold her tight. Temptation lurks.

Those words came unbidden to Brigid's mind then, a raging inferno blasting at the heart of her brain. Perhaps it was her conscience, that one thing that separated man from the beasts, that one trait that seemed to separate humanity from the Annunaki invaders.

The beautiful girl with the honey-blond hair looked
at Brigid with wide, clear eyes in her pale face like emeralds in the snow. Brigid felt the mothering instinct welling within her, the desperate urge to hold the fruit of all that she believed in and fought for, all that she dreamed of.

“Stop!”

Brigid reared back at the sound of her own voice, seeing the girl's body form before her, feeling all those emotions she had felt for the dead thing that was just a computer program tapping into her brain, feeding her what she wanted.

Using this omnipotent knowledge, the vast power of the Ontic Library, for personal gain was wrong. Manipulating time, making unreal things into real things, into sentient things—this was not why she was here. Without focus, it was easy to lose herself in her own thoughts instead of tapping what was being presented to her, easy to become consumed by the lure of temptation.

“Sorry, munchkin,” Brigid muttered, and in the real world, where her body sat at the base of the towering octopuslike core, her lips moved, forming the words.

Brigid needed to command this thing inside her head, needed to make sense of it, not let it overwhelm and tempt her. She had once been an archivist, a voice told her, whether her own or the library's she couldn't say.

Archives were storage facilities that kept things ordered, that held records of things that have happened. The Ontic Library had to surely be no different, Brigid realized; it was just an archive on a grander scale. She simply—simply, ha!—had to know what it was she was looking for.

Though Brigid was unaware of it, her lips moved once more, whispering the instructions in the way she had years ago to the mike pickup of her computer back
in the Archives Division at Cobaltville. Some things, it seems, some habits, became so ingrained within us that we could never fully shake them.

“Ullikummis,” was the first word that Brigid's lips formed, working slowly, like those of a drunk or a stroke victim in speech therapy.

The library did not respond. The breath or sigh or whatever it really was that Brigid felt all over her was still there, a slow, regular breathing, as of someone drifting off to sleep.

“Ullikummis,” she said again, the name feeling more familiar in her head now. “The interloper.” Was he an interloper? she wondered. Wasn't she the interloper, and Ullikummis the one who was here as a part of his heritage? She had come here to block his access to this incredible knowledge base because his very access was damaging the Ontic Library, but he belonged here far more than she did. The moment in the time loop had shown her how unprepared she was for this sort of archive, and her own brush with temptation just moments ago had confirmed it. She was in well over her depth.

Brigid recalled something then, a conversation she had had years ago, in her earliest days with the Cerberus operation. She had been expressing reservations about having to actually hit people during a self-defense session with Grant. It was something that had seemed so removed from her previous life as an archivist. Her trainer had explained it simply to her as he showed her how to throw a man.

“This is who you are now,” Grant had said. “This is the world you've always lived in.”

“No, it's not,” Brigid had insisted. “You're a Magistrate. You and Kane were trained to do this.”

Grant had shaken his head in disappointment. “You
have to learn to assert yourself, Brigid, or the whole world is going to knock you down.”

With that, he had insisted that she try again, despite her protestations. “I don't want to throw you,” she told him. “You're my friend.”

“You won't hurt me,” Grant assured her, showing her once again where best to place her hands to throw an opponent twice her weight.

Under Grant's tutelage, Brigid had thrown him to the mats that lined the floor of the training room, 250 pounds of solid muscle launched over her shoulder in defiant proof that she could be the person she needed to be to face this new world.

It was strange to think that archiving required her to assert herself just as much as that throw had. But she began to see now how to get the information that she required from this alien library so that she was not tempted or distracted, so that she could make it bend to her will.

“Show me the entry path,” Brigid said, forming the instruction in her mind. “Show me
his
entry path.”