Page 13 of Godslayer
“Well, that makes complete sense.”
“Does it?”
“Of course. I’m a battery.” Then her forehead crinkles again. “Well, not really. When Delta was lecturing me about not being a Looking Glass, he was also saying that I wasn’tjusta battery, but he couldn’t figure out what the other part of me was.”
“He said all this to you?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t awake yet, though. It was kind of like a dream. But it wasn’t a dream, it was real.”
“Delta entered yourmindto have a conversation?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Well, that’s… unusual. I’ve heard of it. But it’s how gods communicate with each other. You know they’re not real, right? They’re just really good holograms.”
“I didn’t know that. But anyway,” she sighs. “Can we find the world now? I have to pee.”
I side eye her, suddenly thinkin’ this deployment is not like any other mission I’ve ever been on. “Wejustleft the house like twenty minutes ago.”
She shrugs with her hands. “It is what it is.”
“Anyway,” I sigh. But secretly, I’m glad she’s injecting all this novelty to the experience of soldierin’, so I want to take the time to fill her in. “Let me explain what I’m seein’. Imagine… a screen—like for TV, and shit, but it stretches all the way across your field of vision.”
“OK.”
“Now imagine that it’s alive.” She shoots me a look, one eyebrow raised. “It’s…” I attempt to clarify. “It’s a library of information. And every time you look at something—like this wall here.” I point to the wall. “It spits out information about it. A little pop-up label appears to relay details. This wall is made of concrete. And my overlay is tellin’ me that this concrete is a mixture of limestone, clay, and synthetic fibers. It gives me facts about everythin’ I’m looking at. The floor – also concrete. The lights—aborosilicate glass tube filled with solid sodium, neon, and argon gas mixed in with metal electrodes—and everythin’ else, whether I want to know about it or not.”
“Well, while it seems very useful, it sounds chaotic.”
I point at her. “Exactly. And that’s just one world. Here, in this space, all the worlds want to capture my attention. It’s like they’re fightin’ for it in here. And each world has an overlay.”
“And we’re trying to find 702 in that chaos?”
“Yes. It’s a fuckin’ mess.”
“How will you sort it?”
I shrug. “Go through them one at a time and see if any of them are what I’m lookin’ for?”
“Sounds pretty inefficient.”
“You got a better idea?”
“Hmm.” She taps her finger to her chin and begins to pace the room. It’s small, so she only gets about six steps away before she has to turn back again. “You need to find the filing system.”
“How do I do that?”
“Well, you find something they have in common, but is different for each world. If there’s a world called 702, it stands to reason that here are worlds called 701 and 703.”
She’s right. “Give me a minute to look through a few.”
“No pressure, but I still have to pee.”
I smile, but don’t reply. Instead, I go into my overlay and start lookin’ at all the data spillin’ out on the screen that describes this room. There’s a lot of little tabs, and labels, and numbers. But I don’t know what dimension this is, and Delta didn’t give me any instructions on how to hop dimensions. He just told me to show up here in this room. I assumed it would be self-explanatory.
But it’s just now occurring to me that this makes sense in only one context.
He is under the impression that Ionlyhave access to 702.
