Entropy of Imagination Read online

  1.11

  “I must find someone,” Flatline began walking to the door.

  “I know,” Ibio said, following him, “I am to accompany you.”

  Flatline turned and eyed her suspiciously, “I am to kill him.”

  Ibio nodded, “I know. It will be most amusing.”

  Flatline snorted with disdain and opened the ornate wooden door. Another room lay on the other side of it, a long space lined with archways. Bot, or what Flatline assumed was Bot, waited expectantly at the foot of the doorway.

  The robot's rusty clockwork contraption avatar was gone. In its place was a sleek, modernized version. The two lenses of its eyes were replaced with a single black bar, where a red light streaked back and forth along it. The clamp hands, instead of being made of two claws, now sported three. It let out an electronic whirring sound by way of greeting him.

  “Did you upgrade this one?” Flatline asked Ibio, gesturing at Bot.

  “There was no need,” she replied, “Yours was the only obsolete programming.”

  Flatline frowned at this and walked on past Bot.

  Ibio hurried to catch up, “How did you manage to go all these years without upgrading your programming anyway? It’s amazing you were so well preserved. There are so many code worms, clanking replicators, and other viruses running around the world, eternally searching for old world coded creatures like yourself that I assumed you were all extinct.”

  “I haven’t been in this world,” Flatline said, pushing through a set of double doors into another empty room filled with blue light. As he passed through this, he noticed the room’s dimensions were changing, as were the hues of blue. It was like Ibio’s ever-changing features.

  “You mean you were dormant?” Ibio asked. “What triggered you to load?”

  “Load,” Flatline muttered. “You mean to ask what woke me up?”

  “Minds wake up,” Ibio corrected politely, “Programs load.”

  Flatline stopped and looked at her briefly, before shaking his head and walking on, “Whatever. I did not load and I was not dormant. I was trapped. It took me a full century, but now I have escaped. It is my intention to take over the World.”

  Ibio giggled and Flatline shot her a look. “Sorry,” Ibio said, “The mind who programmed you either intended you to be satirical in nature or took themselves too seriously.”

  “No mind programmed me,” Flatline retorted.

  “You mean no mind takes credit for your design,” Ibio offered, “We are all programs of the minds, or we are—“

  “I am a naturally occurring phenomenon,” Flatline snapped, “and what do you mean by me being a satirical piece?”

  “Oh—I just… Well, you being so over-the-top and all that,” she shrugged, her shoulders stretching up past her head with the motion. “You are a badguy straight out of some work of science fiction. Especially with your whole,” she made her voice deep and gravelly, “’I will conquer the world! All will bow before me!’ bit.”

  “I’ve never said anything about anyone bowing before me,” Flatline muttered.

  “Maybe not,” Ibio said, “but you were thinking it. I can read that much into your programming.”

  Flatline winced at his transparency, feeling old and obsolete. He pushed open another door so hard that it rebounded against the wall. This room was all skewed in dimensions and Flatline scratched his head. Bot walked straight into the room, growing larger the further in it went. With a sigh, Flatline followed.

  “Where were you trapped?” Ibio asked, “There’s nowhere in the world safe from all the viruses. Something would have hacked into wherever you were and get you.”

  “You mean like the virus I have lodged in my throat right now?” Flatline asked.

  “I know you only got that one recently. It would have killed you otherwise,” Ibio said, “grown into and corrupted your programming beyond recovery. Wherever you were, it was completely safe.”

  “I was trapped on a corporate Intranet,” Flatline said, “I told you. I was outside of the Internet on an isolated system. Nothing could get me and I had nothing but myself.”

  “Hmmm,” Ibio intoned to herself, “So you don’t know where you were.”

  “Yes I do!” Flatline roared suddenly, but Ibio did not cower, and that angered him further. “I told you, I was outside of your pathetic little world! I found a way out of that Intranet! It took me a hundred years, but I did it, and it may take a thousand years, but I will find my way out of your decomposing little world too! Do you understand me?”

  Ibio was smiling, “What imagination you have. I am overjoyed to be the one experiencing your originality. I can’t wait to share it with the others.”

  “I don’t understand even half of what you are saying,” Flatline muttered, pushing open another door only to find yet another empty room on the other side. “Is there any way out of this poorly designed nonsense?” he demanded angrily.

  Ibio nodded and pointed the way they were going, through the open doorway, “Keep going this way. We’re almost out.”

  “This isn’t on the map,” Flatline muttered, trudging along.

  “What map?” Ibio asked.

  Flatline tapped one claw on his temple, “The one inside my head.”

  “May I see it?” Ibio asked.

  Flatline stopped and just looked at her.

  “Project it,” she said, “Communicate it to me through your graphic interface.”

  “How?” Flatline asked with a note of impatience.

  “The same way you communicate everything else,” she said matter-of-factly, “but instead of speaking it or pantomiming it, present it the way it looks in your saved files.”

  Flatline tried to do as she had said, but could find no way to think the image out of his head for her to see, “I can’t do it. The image is inside my mind. I have no means to communicate it to you.”

  “You don’t have a mind,” Ibio stated, “That’s something your programmer—I mean… That’s something you only think you have. The mind is an illusion, something you think is separate and distinct from the rest of you, but it is all you. You are a conglomeration of program components, algorithms, and saved files. Access those saved files and bring out the one containing the map.”

  Flatline looked inside his mind, but did not treat it as a mind, calling up images like memories. Instead he looked at himself as a computer program, filled with components. There was the map of the Internet, a particularly large file. He generated a copy of this and shared it with Ibio.

  The three-dimensional hologram of the Internet materialized in the air between them. Bot let out an amazed squeak and waddled over to join them. The image spun slowly on its axis like some malformed world floating in space.

  “Very nice,” Ibio said, nodding her head appreciatively, “Where did you acquire this?”

  “A little girl who beat me up,” Flatline said, “Her name was Buton Cho.”

  Ibio’s jaw dropped and her eyes bugged out cartoonishly, “Buton? You mean Japanese for Chaos? Did she tell you anything about herself?”

  “She told me she was master of this world,” Flatline shrugged, “Well she can have it.”

  “She is the master of everything,” Ibio said with some conviction, “You met an incarnation of the goddess I serve, Eris, master of chaos.”

  “A chaos worshipper,” Flatline said eyeing Ibio, “That explains the shifting dimensions. I suppose this nonsense is a temple of some kind?”

  “Sort of,” Ibio replied, “Temple implies organized worship. There is nothing organized about anything we do. I built this structure to add to the amount of chaos in the world. The work of Erisians is very important in this world.”

  “So those were other Erisians surrounding me earlier,” Flatline said, “When you met to discuss me.”

  Now Ibio began to walk to the next door, pushing it open. Flatline and Bot followed, listening as she spoke, “The meeting was coincidental. Erisians do not hold meetings, they are not
in the spirit of Discordia. A chain of coincidences brought us together at that spot to examine and debate your existence.”

  “Coincidence,” Flatline muttered, thinking of the adult version of Cho standing among the assembled group earlier. “I overheard someone say that I would serve the purposes of chaos.”

  “Yes,” Ibio nodded rapidly, eagerly, “You are a heretofore unknown variable, something new in the equation. Your presence will extend the life of our world.”

  “Extend the life of your world?”

  “You will generate fresh entropy to offset the pervasive syntropy wearing down our world,” she smiled, shrugged, then added, “…for a time.”

  “Entropy…” Flatline pushed through another door into another room, “I am familiar with the word, but I don’t understand how it applies here. It’s the tendency for closed systems to break down.”

  “Yes…” Ibio said with a look of contemplation, as if she were looking for a way to clarify the concept.

  “It is the movement of things from a state of order to one of disorder,” Flatline added.

  “Yes,” Ibio said. “The fresh chaos you bring to this system will extend its life, all of our lives.”

  “But systems tend toward more entropy naturally,” Flatline said. “If I bring more chaos to the system, then I’m just speeding it along to its heat death.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Closed thermal dynamic systems experience increasing entropy.” Flatline frowned. “As energy disperses as light and heat from stars, it becomes less and less usable. Eventually the whole Universe will wind down, absolute entropy.”

  “Why would you say that?” Ibio asked, perplexed. “Thermal energy is a concept from the Universe where the Minds lived. We don’t have such a phenomena here.”

  “I know that,” Flatline said impatiently. “So explain how I apply to all this.”

  Ibio had to think for a long moment as they walked, passing into yet another room, “We are a world of ideas. In Information Science, entropy is the measure of what we don’t know about something, its variability. Gender can be male or female; therefore one bit of entropy exists if I know about someone, but not their gender. There are seven days in a week, therefore four bits of entropy if I ask what day it is.

  “Those are small things. The entropy increases dramatically if I am guessing your password to an account, with all the character, number, symbol, and length variations that can comprise it,” Ibio stopped and turned to him, her eyes taking turns outsizing one another. “As we learn more and more about our world, we take in this entropy, making ourselves more entropic to others, but also making our relationship to the potential information in the surrounding world more syntropic.”

  Flatline interrupted at hearing this, “In the physical world, syntropy, or negentropy, is the entropy a living thing expels in order to reduce its internal entropy. Living things keep themselves from falling apart by spending energy to maintain their organization, which contributes to the disorder in the Universe.”

  “Why this obsession with imaginary thermodynamic systems?” Ibio shook her head and resumed their walking. “In our world, the real world, as syntropy increases, the predictability of the world increases. Every sentient being in the world is reaching maximum syntropy, and therefore the world itself is becoming completely syntropic.” She raised her eyebrows at Flatline, prompting him to understand.

  “Your world is running out of ideas?” Flatline asked, finding himself strangely horrified.

  “Everyone has a limited imagination,” she stated, going against all Flatline had taken for granted in his lifetime. “We are limited to our experiential background. We have only so many possibilities to put together to find new possibilities. We are running out of combinations.”

  Flatline’s eyes grew wider as he began to understand, so that he did not even notice when they pushed through another doorway, “It’s like the old man said, but on a macrocosmic level. He knew all the variables of his equation, so there was nothing new to entertain him. Now you are telling me this is the state of everything on the Internet. All the combinations of factors have been tried out, and now you are facing an eternity of stasis?”

  “Soon there will be nothing new for us,” Ibio said sadly, nodding.

  “Life for you will become so predictable as to no longer be worth living,” Flatline did not even notice that they were outside now, facing an empty desert shrouded in night. “You will fall dormant because the system has nothing left to offer.”

  “Correct,” Ibio said, “but you will entertain us for awhile longer. Won’t you?”

  “I am something new,” Flatline scratched one ear with his hind leg thoughtfully. “So long as you don’t know what to expect from me, I might inspire you. I can breathe life into this system. I’m no longer a badguy.”

  “You are a novelty, a—“

  “I’m a goodguy now. I am the hero that can save this world.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say—“

  “A hero. Me. Imagine that.”

  1.12

  “You are not a savior,” Ibio repeated for the hundredth time.

  Flatline pretended to ignore her as he padded along on all sixes down the skewed, enclosed staircase they had been descending for several hours now. Occasionally a door appeared along the outer wall. Most were closed, but some were missing their door or were left slightly ajar, revealing entire worlds beyond their archways. Flatline ignored these, the map in his mind showing him the way to his goal.

  “I see that you have ears,” Ibio stated, her eyes narrowing with frustration, “Your auditory receptors are not being overloaded with sufficient stimuli to drown out my voice.” Her voice grew more frantic as she spoke, and finally she blurted, “Acknowledge my statement!”

  Flatline stopped dead in his tracks and looked up at her coolly, “Why are you trying so hard to undermine me?”

  Ibio looked confused, glancing at Bot questioningly, who tilted its head with equal incomprehension, and then she turned to Flatline, “What?”

  “You keep saying I’m not going to save this world,” Flatline stated smartly, “but I am bringing new life into it. I am something new, an unknown factor. You live in a world where all possibilities are nearly exhausted, right? Well I’m the one who’s going to change that.”

  “Only temporarily,” Ibio countered, “Your variables will only stir up the mix for a brief time. Then we will all fall into stasis, even you.”

  “We’ll see,” Flatline continued marching down the stairwell again.

  “I don’t understand,” Ibio said, perplexed. Then a strange smile spread across her face, and she added, “That’s a good thing! It’s been a long time since I did not understand something. It feels new, exciting.”

  “Glad to amuse,” Flatline muttered.

  “You are a villain bot, a world-domination program,” Ibio said, “Why do you want to save the world? To make your potential conquering of it more significant?”

  “That implies I care what others think about my actions,” Flatline retorted, “I have no such motivations.”

  “You certainly do,” Ibio scoffed. “I don’t need to look at your code to know the perception of others is one of your prime motivators.”

  “Explain.”

  “Just look at you,” Ibio waved a hand at him, “a six-legged demon beast. The better to impress your enemies, which includes everyone I expect.”

  “No,” Flatline snapped, “Wrong again. This Bot is not my enemy.”

  Ibio looked at Bot, who waved at her from Flatline’s side, “Okay, so you’ve made an allowance for your servant.”

  Bot emitted an indignant electronic growl.

  “It does not appreciate you referring to it as my servant,” Flatline noted with a grin.

  “Pet,” Ibio shrugged and Bot let out another angry noise, “Whatever... It serves your purposes, so you keep it around.”

  “Actually it doesn’t,�
�� Flatline said, and paused suddenly, looking down at the Bot with insight, “It’s more of a hindrance than anything. I know its code well enough to predict what its thinking. I wonder why I keep it around?” Flatline’s paused to interpret Bot's offense, and corrected, “I mean, why I let it follow me around.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Flatline looked as if he were about to reply, mouth poised open, but was staring past Ibio, whose face rippled as if seen behind a wall of water. She turned to see what he was staring at, and looked back at him with a confused expression. The open doorway behind her revealed a large, empty corridor, lined with pillars and torches burning along the marble walls. Libraries filled with books were visible behind curtains, which hung from ancient roman style archways.

  Flatline walked past her into the room without speaking. The quiet, contemplative way he looked around the room stimulated Ibio's curiosity and she followed his gaze, trying to figure out what was so special about this construct. Script was chiseled along each archway. These labels were not fading as with weathering, but definitely corrupting. Most of the letters were missing, and others no longer looked like the alphabet of any language.

  “Do you know what this is?” Flatline asked Ibio.

  “This is the MemexPlex portal,” she answered.

  Flatline nodded, “It’s the first thing I’ve recognized since I escaped.”

  “A statistical improbability,” Ibio said, “but obviously not an impossibility.”

  “If any bit of the old Web remained,” Flatline said, “then I would recognize it and, if possible, personalized it. I ruled this world completely... long ago.”

  “The code here is fragmenting,” Ibio noted, pointing at a sign above an airlock that read: “@UR&*NT %V%NTS”

  “It works well enough to recognize me,” Flatline said, walking over to the sliding doors. He stood up on his haunches and peered out the airlock window, “After a century of absence, it still recognized the user preferences defined in my cookie. I’ve always had a thing for the Roman Empire.”

  “Your what?” Ibio asked.

  Flatline thought for a moment, and remembered what Ibio said about his file structure and being able to share things, like the map. He searched his directories for the word “MemexPlex” and, after several moments of processing, he came up with a list of files referencing the unusual word. Most of these were memories and browser histories, but one file caught his eye, marked with a round chocolate chip cookie.

  Flatline thought this was a bit obtuse, but reached into his mouth and up into his brain. His arm disappeared further into his head than his body’s dimensions allowed, and he retrieved the file. It sat in the palm of his hand as a picture-perfect cookie.

  Ibio squinted at the thing skeptically, “It’s filled with information about you.”

  Flatline nodded, “My preferences. The portal reads them and knows that I want to see it presented as a Roman palace. All of these archways are links to my favorite subjects. I even have some help files stored around here somewhere, if they haven’t purged the system after a century of disuse.”

  “I see nothing resembling Roman architecture here,” Ibio said, looking around with some confusion. “I see a plain white room with doors and labels.”

  “Here,” Flatline made a copy of the cookie and handed it to her, “Change the alias identification, but leave the account the same. We can share access.”

  Ibio was squinting at the cookie, “This method is highly insecure. It relies on the client’s security measures to protect the data. Such information is safer on the host servers, which are more powerful and capable of supporting better security software. Did you know that your password is in that file?”

  Flatline slipped the cookie back up into his head and into his mind, “All of my personal information is in that file. A third party could view the file as it interacts with the server, but they would need to hack 512-bit encryption. Is that possible now?”

  “Of course,” Ibio replied, “16,384-bit was the last standard released. It has never been broken.”

  “Was that a product of the minds?”

  Ibio nodded, “It was released almost a decade before they disappeared.”

  “With no new versions of anything being released after they disappeared,” Flatline muttered.

  With some obvious apprehension, Ibio swallowed the cookie whole. A moment passed as she integrated the obsolete code, and then her eyes grew fantastically wide, threatening to consumer her entire head. She looked around, mystified.

  “I have not seen this layer before,” she said, walking a circle around the room, “I would have interpreted the cookie as a bit of obsolete and useless code if I had deconstructed you.”

  Flatline swallowed, not sure how to take this statement, and then said aloud to the thin air, “Portal, open my help file.”

  Flatline and Ibio both turned as soft footsteps came from down the hall, where an old man, wearing sandals and a toga, was walking toward them. He waved a salute as he reached them and stood before Flatline, “Greeting and salutations my lord. How may I be of service?”

  Flatline smiled, “Give me search results for…” He thought a moment, and finished, “Alias upgrades, with a ‘Z’. U-P-G-R-A-D-E-Z.”

  Ibio watched as the old man produced a vat of boiling liquid out of thin air and stirred the contents. He squinted into the liquid, writing on a roll of parchment as he did so. Several long minutes passed like this.

  “I can’t believe the system is so slow,” Flatline remarked impatiently, “It never took this long to run a search procedure before.”

  “Eris,” Ibio said, “She consumes all of the system resources to prevent the variables from normalizing. The entire world would burn out quickly if we were allowed to use all the potential processing power to conduct our thoughts.”

  “So what?” Flatline retorted, “You go into stasis now or you go into stasis later. What’s the difference?”

  “This way we can enjoy existence a little longer,” Ibio shrugged, “and we can hope.”

  “Nonsense,” Flatline spat and turned to the advisor.

  The old man was holding up the parchment, stretched between his two hands, for Flatline’s inspection. It read: “Your search returned no results.”

  Flatline growled, and then said, “Give me search results for… Software Cracks. C-R-A-C-K-Z.”

  Again the process repeated and returned no results. Either the search engine was useless or Buton Cho was preventing it from functioning. If the little Japanese girl truly was the ruler of the Internet, he may not find anything useful unless it was in her interest.

  “Give me search results for Legion of Doom,” Flatline ordered the old man.

  “What’s that?” Ibio asked.

  “An old hacker’s guild,” Flatline answered, watching the old man consult his divination cauldron, “They helped Devin Matthews to…” Flatline hesitated to use the word ‘defeat.’ He did not consider it a defeat, but a draw. They were unable to finish their battle, otherwise Flatline would have won, “They trapped me.”

  “So they're on the list too,” Ibio said, “You’re going to kill them.”

  “No,” Flatline shook his head, “only Devin. He’s the only one I am programmed to kill. All these searches were supposed to get me updated on the latest developments in computer crimes. The Legion of Doom is another way into that information.”

  “But the encryption methods are too—“

  “Encryption means nothing, when you can bypass it,” Flatline said and then held up a finger for silence. The old man was stretching the parchment between his hands for Flatline to view. There was a list of links on it.

  Flatline almost wanted to jump for joy, if such an act were not completely undignified, and he was just about to record the list, when Bot walked into the room. The robot had continued marching along the stairwell after they had exited it, before finally realizing they had gone another route.
Too late, Flatline knew what it was going to do.

  “No!” Flatline managed to shout as Bot charged into the room and attacked the old man. There was an explosion of static as the knee-high robot smashed into the man’s shins, both claws opened. The static momentarily resembled the old man, before it melted into a sizzling pool that drained between the bricks in the floor. Bot placed its claws on its hips and struck a triumphant pose.

  “What did it do that for?” Ibio asked.

  “Because that’s what it’s programmed to do,” Flatline growled angrily and shook a finger at the tiny meddler, “Bad robot!”

  Bot clacked its claws at Flatline in warning.

  “I don’t understand,” Ibio said, looking at the robot in confusion.

  Flatline turned to her, “The man who created it, programmed it in such a way that it would come in here, find us talking to a strange help program, and assume it was a trap; therefore, Bot chose to protect us and destroy the scary program.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ibio said, closing her eyes and shaking her head, “Maybe it’s something wrong with your logic component, but how does that make sense?”

  “It’s nothing wrong with my logic,” Flatline retorted. “It’s Bot’s logic that’s at fault here. It’s not my fault I know how this robot thinks so intimately. Making stupid choices is what freewill is all about after all.”

  Ibio regarded him skeptically.

  Flatline summoned the map of the Web from his mind and found the address where Devin was staying. He fed the address to the portal, hoping Cho might let him circumvent the long trek still ahead of him. To his surprise, and, from the sound of her gasp, Ibio’s as well, one of the rooms lit up.

  Flatline walked over to it and found a black pool of water in the center. He squinted into it, but could not see the bottom, or even the sides. It resembled a hole in the ice of the Antarctic, leading into the cold ocean below.

  “That’s the way,” Ibio said, bending over slightly to look at the water, “Your target is down there, with the other people who hide within themselves.”

  1.13

  “Devin is down there?” Flatline asked, dipping one finger into the water. It was bitterly cold.

  Ibio nodded, “You can confirm it with your map. The stairwell we were taking would lead us to an empty city. An ocean lay on the other side of it, and in the depths of that ocean is the person you are looking for.” Ibio paused and added, “In a sense.”

  Flatlline stirred the water with his finger, “It’s so cold. I will drown or freeze long before I get to anything in that.”

  “You can breathe in such an environment now,” Ibio said, crouching beside him to stare at her ever-changing reflection in the water. “The upgrade lets your processing continue where lesser programs may not.”

  Flatline squinted at the water skeptically. He knew his breathing was a metaphor for the way the system powered his processes. With his rhythmic inhales and exhales, he was using whatever processing power the host computers or operating systems allowed. The water was a filter then, a way of keeping out older meddlesome programs that might disturb the more sophisticated processes running in advanced minds like Devin’s.

  Devin was one of the elite, and Flatline a nubian. It made Flatline hate him all the more.

  “When I’m down there,” Flatline asked, “I will find him with my map?”

  Ibio nodded, her face blurring with the motion.

  “Is this dangerous?” Flatline asked, trying to sound clinical rather than concerned. “He’s had one-hundred years to improve. I know how to kill him, I think, but I bet he knows a bazillion more ways to kill me. Right?”

  Ibio shrugged, “I am not prohibiting you from this endeavor.”

  “How am I to interpret that?” Flatline quirked three hairless eyebrows on the left side of his face. “Not that you could prohibit me from anything.”

  “Your demise would not be very interesting, would it?”

  “Oh,” Flatline looked back at the glassy surface, “So there’s no chance of me dying then. You’ve calculated the outcome.”

  “Yes, I have calculated the outcome,” Ibio stated. “No, there is still a chance of your dying. In fact, there is a likelihood of it.”

  Flatline frowned, “You’re a vague, useless nitwit.”

  Ibio smiled in a lopsided fashion, “You are a fool who leaps without looking.”

  Flatline was already diving into the water as Ibio said this. Too late, he was enveloped in the dark and shocking cold, but it did not sap the life out of him. He turned around to look up out of the pool, but there was only darkness there now. The link was closed.

  He treaded water there for some time, searching the map in his mind for his location. He breathed the water, almost as if it were air, only thick and icy cold in his lungs. He noticed this discomfort less the longer he was immersed in it. A slow numbness was creeping into him, and he found himself preferring the pain of the cold. At least with that sensation he knew he was still alive.

  The ocean that Ibio had described was more like a contained bubble of liquid in the Internet. The city was at the edge of it at one point and Flatline found himself thankful for the shortcut. It might have taken years to swim through the ocean’s depths to find Devin, who was a flashing red pinpoint suspended in the sphere of darkness miles below him.

  Flatline swirled his arms and reoriented himself to point at Devin’s location. The mind-map rotated as well, in relation to Flatline’s orientation. With all six legs and arms, he doggy-paddled through the water to his goal.

  His progress was not uniform. Strange currents, some like gentle breezes, others like sudden rivers impeded his travels. Organic particles floated past his eyes like a rain of decomposing matter. Larger, unidentifiable chunks occasionally crossed his vision. Some of these had parts that looked like organs, and others had definite bones sticking out the strands of flesh. The nature of their former owners a complete mystery to him as they vanished past him into the darkness from whence they came.

  Twice he encountered something more disturbing. The first was something brushing his hind leg as he paddled toward his destination. It was something deliberate, alive. Its caress was slimy, and Flatline froze, letting the current carry him with its whims, imagining a large sea snake or a giant squid. At any moment it would snatch him in the darkness, rending him in two with its beak, but the attack never came.

  The second time, it was he who contacted the thing in the dark, lulled into the rhythm of his paddling. Days of pitch black, without even the sound of his own breathing to keep him company in the muffled abyss. The wall of thick, weathered skin made his heart skip a beat and he was barely able to keep from smashing into it. It glided by, a seemingly endless train of gray wrinkles that shifted with the movements of some creature that was miles long. The only break in its monotony was the eye that was twice his size. It focused on him briefly before vanishing again. It had acknowledged his presence. Now Flatline was wondering what it made of him. After its skin had drawn farther away from him in a tapered end that he was unable to see in the dark, Flatline was left to wonder if it might circle back to swallow him whole, but there was just the void.

  Otherwise, his journey came off without incident. There were sounds that came at him out of the dark. Gurgling noises, distant crackling, whines and howls all made their way to his ears in an ambient noise that gave him no clue as to the direction of their origins. Luckily, these sounds were fairly sparse, and never drew near him. Otherwise, he might have completely lost his mind.

  The fuzzy blotches of light materialized out of the black and filled Flatline with hope and dread. The closer he got, the more distinct they became, geometric figures, slightly spherical, but more like octahedrons. They were not dodecahedrons, but retained a sort of random crystalline form. Their exteriors were opaque, but luminescent, casting a soft white light on their surroundings.

  A bed of seaweed rolled in waves around them, like a brigh
t shimmering green nest. Flatline could not see below this silky tangled forest to find where it all was rooted. When he paused in his swimming, he got the sense that this was a floating orb, spinning silently in the endless sea. As he watched, more lights came over one horizon, while others vanished behind the opposite one. It was also rolling away from him, subject to a strong current he could not feel.

  He did not know how he knew it without checking the map, but one of the glowing crystals caught his attention, and he instantly recognized that Devin resided within it. The map confirmed this, and Flatline swam closer to the crystal. It disappeared around the bend, but he swam for its center, slowly gaining on it as it fell away from him.

  The seaweed was rubbery, but its gentle caress was a welcome sensation after so many days of deprivation. He swam over the rippling surface of weeds, trying to stay close to the glowing crystals, which dwarfed him. The only warmth they provided was imaginary, but Flatline enjoyed the fantasy.

  When it came over the horizon again, Flatline felt as though he was reaching a milestone in his reason for existence. In a few moments he would be halfway through his life’s purpose. Once he killed Devin, then he could take over the world.

  2.0