Guardian (6 page)

“
But they do!” I tried to push myself out of the coffin, but my strength only extended so far. My arms wobbled, I fell back against the side, and winced as something cracked around my waist. “The puppet men do! They’re not people, they’re—” what did they call themselves again? “—code! Programs. Parts of the Keeper himself. The leftovers, the upgrades that didn’t make it.” I tried to remember everything the puppet men had spouted, right before I destroyed Movoc-under-Keeper. “You programmers didn’t want them, so you cast them into the veil. They grew there. Now they want to bring down the veil to create a world of their own, and that’s just what they will do, unless you can tell me how to defeat them.”

“
What’s a Keeper?” one of the programmers called.

Beside me, Aladio shuddered, and for a moment, just a moment, he looked lost.

“The Keeper is the Guardian program,” I answered. And I met Lad’s—
Aladio’s
—eyes as I did so. “That’s what we call him, on my side of the veil. We don’t have programs there, or code. We always thought he was a god.” I reached for Lad’s face. “And he had messengers. We called them Halves.”

He jerked away, and I slipped back against the coffin.

“Tanyana,” the Specialist said. “You need to stop fighting this. Please, lie back in the chamber.”

“
But—”

“
Listen to me. We can’t help you, because those things you said, they are impossible. The veil can’t create anything, it doesn’t foster or feed. Nothing can live inside it. Or spring from it, fully formed.”

“
But they are real—”

“
Secure her, please.”

Aladio placed a white-gloved hand against my chest and pressed me slowly back into the coffin. He didn
’t look at me, just stared at nothing, jaw square, eyes hard. The cold took hold again, and the lights inside me dimmed.

“
Hook her up. And the child.”

Fear dropped into my heart.
“What—” I forced out the words, one slurring syllable at a time. “Are—you—do—with—”

“
Tanyana, hush.” The Specialist appeared above me. Two of his screens had come with him and floated at the edge of my sight. I couldn’t move my head, had no hope of sitting up again and seeing what they were doing to my child. All I could see was his fingers moving, and the symbols flickering, some shining brightly then dimming as others took their place. Such an arcane dance. So much like the way they had bobbed, crested and sunk on the bands of my suit.

“
I think—” Aladio said, beside me, his voice breaking. “I think you should tell her what you’re doing to her. And to the child. I think she has a right to know.” For a moment his face was above me, and his eyes met mine. They were hurting. How that made me ache. “Isn’t it the least we can do?”

The Specialist paused, then nodded. He looked over his shoulder and said,
“Keep it going,” then he stepped back from his panels and knelt beside me again. I wondered why they didn’t fall.

“
I don’t know how you came here,” he said. “I don’t know how you’re even alive. You seem to know something of our worlds and the veil between us, so you know you should be dead. Hell, more than dead. Your world is utterly incompatible with ours, so you should have been undone on a fundamental, subatomic way. But you weren’t. You came to our world on the back of a powerful Pionic Flare, just dropped out of it like it was birthing you. I wish we could find out why—”

“
Pi—Pi—” I struggled to speak. Pionic Flare? As in,
pions
? What was he talking about?

“
I wish we could study you, get to know you. Translate your code, and work out who could have programmed you. But we can’t. Because, Tanyana, you have a Flare inside of you, one just as powerful—if not more powerful—than the one that brought you here. The silex has managed to contain it for now, as has your own programming, but that won’t work for long. If we don’t send you back, you will die. And you will take Fulcrum, and me, and Aladio, and all the people who work here, with you.”

“
Sir, communication beam has been established,” one of the programmers called. “We’re sending signals to the Guardian program and await response.”

The Specialist nodded.
“Prepare for extraction.” He smiled at me. “This won’t be too hard on you. Unlike the programmers we send into the veil, you’re already code as well as flesh. We won’t need to translate the electronic pulses in your brain into light, purify them into manageable code, and send them on a beam back through an open Flare. All we have to do is link you to the Guardian and let it carry you across. Easy.”

Lights flickered through the crystal around me, following the fine tracks of gold. Strange, sharp little feelings, like pinpricks on my skin, surged through me in response. So, this was what it took to make a Half.

“I’m sorry you have been caught up in this, and I’m sorry you have to suffer for it. We never wanted that. Your world was not to blame.”

Your world was not to blame
? The Keeper had said that too. “Don’t—understand,” I gasped. “Pions—my world. What—Flare?” My throat felt strange, all liquid and empty again. I couldn’t see it, but I could just make out my wrists. The crystal coffin and the crystal in my flesh were merging, the thin gold wires worming their way inside of me. Just like the suit again.

The Specialist sighed.
“A long time ago our ancestors—programmers and Specialists just like us—made a bad mistake. They thought they could control the very fabric of space and time. Instead, they tore it. There are many different realities—your world and our world are just two of them. They all exist in parallel, one beside the other, so close and yet so far. Normally, we’re not aware of them, because they are so very different to us that we can’t see, can’t touch, can’t measure them. Opposites, incompatible. But the ancient programmers forced our realities too close together. So close, in fact, that they began to bleed into one another, destroying each other. The only thing that saves us is the veil.”

He paused to reach up, drag one of his panels down, rearrange symbols, then pushed it back to hover beside its fellow.

“The veil is a side effect of the experiment that first weakened the line between our realities,” he continued. “It seems to be some kind of wave function semi-reality, we think, visible on our spectrum as light. It can host programs like the Guardian program, or the programmers whose brain functions have been translated into code themselves. But it can’t give life to mathematical concepts, Tanyana. It’s not a place, or a thing.”

I would have shaken my head if I could have.
“Know—veil—Keeper. My world—doors.” The puppet men had told me, smirking, vicious, that the veil was not what the programmers thought it was. But I didn’t have the strength to warn them.

“
Don’t try to talk,” Aladio admonished me. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

The Specialist raised his eyebrows.
“Doors? How strange.”

“
Sir?” one of the programmers called.

The Specialist raised a hand,
“A moment.” He smiled down at me, probably trying to be reassuring. “We are all very lucky to have the veil. Remember I told you that our realities have been forced so closely together that they bleed into each other? They still do. And we are opposites, and cannot co-exist. We should be destroying each other, we should have been destroyed a long time ago. Only the veil saved us. It acts as a filter, and changes the particles as they move through it. So they rush into our world, burst through with sound and heat and light and, if left unchecked, would unmake, remake, warp and ultimately tear our world apart. That, Tanyana, is what a Pionic Flare is. It is a burst of particles that change the nature of our reality. That is what you have inside of you. It might not sound like we’re lucky, but we are. Because we can capture these Flares in silex, as we have done for you, and as you have seen floating in this very room. Through silex we are able to use Flares to power everything around you.”

“
Sir?” The programmer tried again. “Sir, I really think—”

“
I said wait!” The Specialist sat back on his heels. “So you see why it is so important to send you home, and do it now. You have a force within you capable of altering the fabric of reality. We could trap you in a silex Shard like the one in this room and draw on you to power this station, but I hate to think what that could do to your body, and your mind. I will not do that to you. Not if I have a choice. So, please, Tanyana, don’t fight this. Let me send you home.”

But I wasn
’t listening, not to him, not really. Instead, I listened to myself. The rush and flow of particles within me. Of
pions
. Particles that had the power to remake the world? I knew what that was. Not exactly the same as the pions of my world—ours did not arrive in a burst of heat, although they certainly did shine, and the pions I knew responded so eagerly and did not need to be captured in crystal. But still…

After all these moons, cut off from the lights of my childhood, from the world I had loved, suddenly I was filled with pions again, filled fit to burst. A Pionic Flare.

Was this Flare inside me really the mindless destructive force the Specialist thought it was? Or would it listen to me? Could it be cajoled, like the pions I knew?

“
Sir!” the programmer called again, panic in his voice. “Something’s wrong.”

The Specialist frowned, and looked away.
“Wrong?”

“
We’re not getting anything back from the Guardian program. Actually, we’re not getting anything at all. Not even static!”

“
Excuse me.” The Specialist stood, grabbed his panels, and hurried away with them.

“
Won’t—work,” I gasped. “Guardian—dead. Puppet men—absorbed. Saw—it.”

Aladio leaned forward so I could see him.
“Didn’t you understand? The Guardian isn’t a person. It’s a program—numbers and symbols translated into light. It can’t die. It was never alive.”

“
You were—too. Half. But you—still—died.”

Aladio
’s eyes took on a distant look. “H—Half?” he whispered. “That word, it calls to me. Why does it call to me?” He focused on me. “You do too. I don’t understand. I feel like I know you, but that’s impossible. I find myself thinking about you, worrying about you, knowing things. Like your name. I knew it before you could even speak. Why?”

“
Lad—”

“
And why do you call me that? That’s what my mother used to call me, before she died. No one’s called me that for more than fifty years.”

“
Interference,” the Specialist was saying, somewhere in the background. “There’s too much traffic on her Flare! It’s not us. What
is that
?”

“
I—know—you.” I had to work so hard, just to speak, even haltingly, even whispering. It wasn’t just the weakness in my throat anymore, there was something else, like buzzing, like voices, so many voices, all in my head. “You crossed. To my world. You were—my friend.”

The mesh of light above and around me started surging to a desperate beat I could feel even deeper than my veins. The rush and the flow, the movement between worlds, all trapped inside me.
Can you hear me
? I whispered, silent, to the innermost parts of myself.
Are you there, lonely, waiting for me to call to you? Little pions, little particles, little friends
?

“
Crossed the veil, you mean?” Lad leaned forward. “Yes, I did. For twenty-five years I lay in this room, frozen in my chamber, while my mind was beamed into the veil to monitor the Guardian. I don’t remember any of it. At least, I shouldn’t. But then, there is you.”

The room shook. Beams of light wavered. The crystal coffin seemed to contract around me like a living hand.

“Sir!” the programmer was shouting now. “I’m losing connection. Our beam is being rejected. Code unravelling.”

“
Rejected?” the Specialist shouted. “That’s impossible!”

Another shake. Something crashed behind me, glass on the floor. Several beams snapped off. The gold wiring retracted from my silex, slithering free of me like countless tiny snakes.

Aladio finally seemed to notice what was happening around him. He stared around us, expression horrified. “Tan?” he whispered. “What are you doing?”

I could move my hands again. With a grunt, I pulled my wrists free of the clutching cold and wiggling wires, gripped the sides of the coffin and levered myself upright.

The room was drenched in red. Warning lights flashed from every single one of the coffins that lined the walls. The great crystal at the centre was burning too, crimson like glowing blood churning, spilling, crashing against its smooth facets.

The Specialist turned to me, horrified.
“Get back in there! Let us do our job!”

Aladio jumped up, hurried to one of his fellow programmers, grabbed an inactive panel and dragged it back with him. He pressed fingers against its dark surface and symbols flashed into life across it.