A Lot to Process

[Gambit]

A Lot to Process

Define Dexter: sharp, lanky, bespectacled, linear.  All complementary angles and golden ratios.  A mathematical specimen.  That last word—linear—commanded a certain resonance in Dexter’s life.  It was perhaps the one that described him best.

In elementary school, Dexter realized life is linear.  Every person started their life at one point, ended it at another, and the only thing that caused any deviation from that path was collisions with the paths of other people.  Everything could be determined, Dexter supposed; all a person needed was the initial positions and velocities of six billion or so people, and then to—click!—run the simulation.  The world could be resolved into one gigantic Fermi problem.

Growing up, Dexter experienced life in numbers the way others did in colors or sounds.  When people spoke to him, he busied himself counting the number of words, the number of letters per word, the syllables.  He calculated averages and searched for patterns.  People often accused Dexter of being distracted—of ignoring them.  They did not seem comforted when presented with his findings.

At home, Dexter saw thermodynamics at work.  When his parents argued, heat was supplied to the system.  Excess energy boiled to the surface, either dissipating gradually or turning into some other form of energy: the kinetic energy of a thrown teapot or ceramic plate, for instance.  After a time, entropy settled in and the house returned to an inert state.  Heat could not flow spontaneously from a colder location to a hotter one.  The energy could not last forever.  Dexter took solace in that last fact.

Dexter always knew there was a formula for everything, from shooting free throws in basketball to designing spacecraft capable of orbiting the Earth.  For most applications, the calculations were simple enough he could do them on paper.  A formula for everything, he supposed, except love.  To him, love was an abstract and ephemeral concept. It was formula immune.  Sometimes, it ended without warning and no one could explain why.  Dexter could not reconcile himself with its transient nature.

Love was not worth Dexter’s time.

Dexter grew up near Lake Chelan, Washington, but remembered little of his childhood.  The lune-shaped lake was a vague blue afterimage on his memory.  What he did remember was the science fair in his senior year.  Dexter managed to model data of a population reacting to a crisis in terms of Fourier’s heat equation.  He received top marks.

Early on, Dexter could determine the path his own life would take.  He spent hours drawing it out in flowchart form.  It did not factor in the potential for love, and so he was confident no collision would be forceful enough to impel him from his chosen course.

Once decided, Dexter’s steps to follow that path were, as always, logical and linear.  During the middle of his senior year he applied to the University of Washington; at the end of his senior year he was accepted; and, four months later, he moved to Seattle.  Dexter’s first impression of the city was that of a gigantic brain, each building a lobe thrumming with constant activity.  The university, he thought, was its frontal lobe.

To Dexter, the campus was foreign at first, the wet weather a stark contrast to the dry autumns of Chelan.  He adjusted quickly, though.  He soon found that everyone was obsessed with grades and class averages.  Dexter considered their obsession in error.  He merely gravitated toward the subjects that interested him most, barely passing English, excelling at calculus and physics.  Whereas physics in high school always had tangible applications, the physics he learned in college dealt with distances astronomically large and small.  

Dexter could sense something underneath it all: a single theory at the root of everything.

[Gambit]

It was during a gray September in his junior year that the scent of apples outside the physics auditorium attracted Dexter’s attention.

There were several communal gardens below the auditorium, and that day a girl was weeding in one of them.  From forty feet away, she seemed unremarkable.  On a normal day, he would never take a detour between classes.  Dexter, like electrical current, was an eager proponent of the path of least resistance.  Fermat’s principle held a special place in his heart.

The railing was cold beneath his fingers as he leaned over and asked what she was doing.  When she turned around she was like no one he had ever seen before.  Her skin was a dirty white that reminded him of H.G. Wells’ Morlocks.  Her eyes were the soil she was tilling.

“Weeding,” she said.  Her smile was brighter than he expected.

Dexter descended a few steps.  “What plants are you growing?”

She laughed.  “Chamomile.  Parsley.  Some other stuff.  You want to help?”

Dexter told her he was just passing by on his way from the physics auditorium.  Seconds ticked by, and when he made no move to diverge his path from her own she laughed again.

She went over the plants with him.  Chamomile was the one that smelled like apples.  Parsley, the frilly one, meant festivity.  As she told him these things, she dug into the earth with a prying tool, unearthing weeds so their pale, white roots showed.  By the time she finished, Dexter was looking forward to her smile.  He asked her why the plants meant these things, and she said that was just the way it was.

She introduced herself as Harmony from Connecticut.  A junior.  A liberal arts major, studying drama.

He introduced himself as Dexter.

[Gambit]

Harmony was.  In twenty years, she was the first thing that required no definition.

She worked part time as a tour guide for the Seattle Underground.  The rest of the time she spent reading plays and ‘discovering what life had to offer.’  If a crowd of people was running away from something, Harmony said, she would run against the crowd to see what it was.  Dexter suspected Harmony’s flowchart was a lot less linear than his own.

One night, the stars were set deep in the woolly wrinkles of the sky.  Dexter and Harmony sat against a cherry tree at the edge of the quad—a rectangle of grass crosshatched with brick paths, near the center of campus.  The tree’s branches were bare, and through them Dexter stared at the sky.

It reminded him of a physics lecture from last quarter.  The chalkboard had been thick with the ghosts of past equations, and the professor had been expounding on the rules of Einstein’s relativity.  It was sixth grade stuff to Dexter, but he always loved listening to people talk about Einstein.  Every modern physicist used Einstein’s laws as a stepping stone to their own understanding of the universe.  He took Newton’s basic laws and pushed physics closer to a unified theory than any other man.  As Jesus Christ to a Christian, Einstein was to Dexter.

Looking at the sky now, Dexter thought he understood.  The shape of the universe was a bowl.  Four-five-six… n-dimensional.  Time, synonymous with light, flowed down its sides like water.  It was not a smooth bowl.  It was like Harmony’s diligent creations from her pottery class: rough-hewn and full of life.  The stars, the planets, and the black holes were warps in its sides, but somewhere at the center, at the bottom of the bowl, there was a place that everything revolved around, where time settled and came to rest.

Dexter explained this to Harmony, who listened attentively.  He finished with how humans should be able to define the universe in terms of things they could come to grips with—how all of science was working toward this simple understanding.  He even drew up a diagram on his laptop of man’s asymptotic progression toward a cohesive, unified theory over the course of time.

“So the point is generalizing everything?” Harmony asked at last.

“Not generalizing.  Unifying.”

“But it’s putting it all into one equation?”

“Yes, one theory,” Dexter agreed.

Harmony thought about that.  “It seems shallow.”

Dexter stared at her, confused.

“I mean, where’s the creativity?  Am I supposed to assume all my thoughts just come from some giant physics equation?  That—I don’t know—Shakespeare, or you mentioned Einstein earlier, or someone like that—that all their work can be written up, summed up… you know, produced by a formula?”

“On some level…”

“But—”

“Wait,” Dexter said, “I’ll explain.  You know statistics, right?  Statisticians, they rely on human beings being predictable.  You take a handful of particles, a handful of humans, it’s the same thing… they’ll organize themselves into a system with specific rules.  They’re predictable.  Get enough of any one thing and it becomes predictable.  And all the sciences: physics, psychology, and so on, can be combined by the fact that predictability in humans has its foundations in predictability in nature.  That everything has a common root.  It’s the same with thoughts: all a thought is, is a number of particles lining up the right way and creating an electrical signal, it’s—”

“But you’re—” Harmony interjected.

Dexter plowed on.  “It’s predictable.  All we are is particles.”

“But you’re talking about groups of things, not individuals.”

“Each individual is made up of groups of many smaller things, like atoms and electrons, which are predictable in large numbers.”

“And each of those smaller things?”

“Even smaller things. It’s all about levels, I guess. We have the universe; then we have us, and the visible matter which makes up the universe; then we have atoms and the subatomic stuff that makes us up; and then we get down into quantum mechanics, which no one really understands, but it doesn’t matter.  Once you find the right theory for one or two of the upper levels, it should generalize to theories for all the levels. It’s like, I don’t know, an inductive proof or something.”

Harmony smiled. “And if it turns out none of it is real? What if all of this is just your imagination: me, the universe, the quad, all of it? And you’re just off on some fruitless quest for a holy grail?”

“I—of course it’s real.”

“Is it? Prove it!”

There was no sound in the quad, and Dexter felt temporarily blind as something intangible floated between him and the stars.

Harmony grinned and shook her head as he walked away.

[Gambit]

It didn’t take long for Dexter to realize his fascination with Harmony had become an obsession. He could not understand her.

She didn’t seem to understand him either. When Harmony asked him about his past, Dexter listed his academic accomplishments and scientific revelations. When she persisted, he realized he could hardly remember his home or his family. The only thing he recalled about his parents is how their fighting represented thermodynamics.

Harmony soon got bored. “So overall you’re just a scientist. That’s how you define yourself?”

“A research scientist, hopefully,” Dexter corrected.

“That’s not a person,” Harmony said. “That’s a shell.”

[Gambit]

By the time they stepped off the bus in downtown Seattle, the sky had folded in on itself and hung fat and dripping above their heads. Dexter used the Columbia Tower, an ominous black lobe of a skyscraper, to maintain his bearings as Harmony led him toward Pioneer Square. If the sun was out and Columbia Tower wasn’t surrounded by other buildings, Dexter calculated, they would be standing in its shadow.

“I’m on academic probation,” Dexter said. The words tasted like metal.

“Probation? You? What the hell for?” Harmony asked, suddenly interested.

“My physics professor has no sense of humor.”

Harmony nodded. “And you took any opportunity you could find to make him look like an idiot in front of the whole class, right? God, Dexter, I love you, but there’s too much going on in that fucking head of yours. I’m surprised you don’t fall over with the weight of it.”

Dexter stopped listening after the word love. A deep black hole opened in the center of his stomach and it threatened to pull him inside-out. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he noticed she was still talking. In her tirade, she hadn’t even noticed what she said. To Harmony, just like everything else, it was inconsequential.

To Dexter, it threatened everything he had ever known.

[Gambit]

From Pioneer Square, Harmony unlocked the side door of a quaint, ivy-choked house, and then it was just a quick trip down a narrow staircase into the Seattle Underground. A private entrance for tour guides, Harmony explained. For some time now, she had been meaning to give Dexter a tour of the subterranean city.

Dexter was still too perturbed to speak, so he just nodded. Harmony seemed not to notice his discomfort.

At the base of the stairs, lights hanging from crossbeams highlighted a vast, low-ceilinged, brick-walled room. The room’s walls were lined with discarded ladders, filing cabinets, drawers, and rubble. The floor had recently been swept, but as Harmony led Dexter out of the first room and down an ethereal stone passageway, they traveled into dustier and dustier terrain. Soon there were no more lights above them and Harmony produced a flashlight to guide them between the remains of ancient buildings.

“This used to be downtown Seattle,” Harmony explained.

Dexter could see the resemblance only vaguely. The fact that the tops of buildings merged into wooden slats, forming the underground’s ceiling, threw him off and made him feel like he was traveling through one huge labyrinth of brick-walled rooms.

“It burned down years ago as the result of a bunch of people not thinking properly: a cabinetmaker spilling a pot of glue; people trying to extinguish the grease fire with water; the fire department using too many hoses; a subsequent drop in water pressure, and poof! Thirty-three blocks gone, just like that, with no way to stop it. Tell me how that fits into your unified formula.”

Dexter looked at her when she finished, but all he could see was her trembling hand in the cast-off flow of the flashlight. “There’s logic in that,” he said haltingly. “The people… they acted based on reflexes and routines, which are patterns.”

“And rebuilding Seattle twelve feet above where it used to be?”

“There must have been a reason.” Under normal circumstances he would have told her why, but a lump formed in his throat and seemed unwilling to let through any extraneous words.

“I guess so,” Harmony said as she stopped by a small door. “Want to go deeper?”

All Dexter wanted to do was run away, but something he didn’t understand compelled him to stay. “Is it safe down here?” he asked. He finally had time to notice how the holes in the wall caught Harmony’s beam, and how all the supports looked centuries old.

“Sure,” Harmony said, turning the light on Dexter.

He blinked and shielded his eyes. “Go on, then.”

Slowly, his thought patterns settled. Their talks took tangents into underground opium dealing and prostitution, then segued into hypotheses of what kinds of psychopaths and serial killers might have used the Seattle Underground as a hideout. It was a fitting conversation for when the flashlight burned out.

For a second, Dexter knew he was alone. The darkness around him was overwhelming, suffocating; something Dexter couldn’t comprehend pushed and pulled from all sides, urging him to some unknown destination. Distantly, Dexter thought he heard laughter. But then Harmony’s fingers found his, a small reassurance, and they were standing together, linked in the darkness. There was no sound, no light. Only the musty smell, Harmony’s hand, and the ground beneath his feet let Dexter know he had not become untethered—left to drift in the inky black limbo of space.

When they resurfaced the sun was out. Harmony said they were underground for almost three hours. Dexter realized during that whole time he had hardly had a single scientific or mathematical thought. Those three words, spoken so casually by Harmony, reverberated in his head and lit a dull ache behind his eyes.

That night, Dexter dreamed about darkness. He remembered a time when his parents were out, and he was lying on his bed, and somehow the quiet of the night was worse than any sound, and the shadows of the furniture weren’t where they were supposed to be. Somewhere in the annals of his mind he thought he heard a voice, beckoning him to a world beyond the one he had always known.

[Gambit]

In the ensuing months, Harmony and Dexter made many trips underground. Each time they went further, deeper. Dexter began to doubt there were only 33 blocks to the Underground. Either they were walking in circles or the network of rooms stretched beneath most of downtown Seattle. Dexter believed the latter, since he had the uncanny feeling they had never walked through the same room twice.

Each time, they went until Harmony’s flashlight ran out and then talked and laughed in the darkness. At one point, Harmony discovered a basement in one of the buildings that led to an even deeper level. Dexter was only slightly worried by the existence of an under-underground. It seemed to confirm a suspicion he was not conscious of having.

“Did Seattle burn down twice?” he asked.

Harmony laughed. “No.”

Dexter wondered aloud if that made sense, but Harmony countered with, “Does it have to?” and Dexter guessed it didn’t.

Many other things made no sense to Dexter beneath the city, but he grew accustomed to the feeling of being unsettled. Down there, it was as if he walked through an alternate reality, one that tentatively clung to the world he knew above.

As they explored the underground, Dexter felt both closer to and more removed from Harmony. The further they went, the less Dexter resembled the person he thought he knew.

They did crazy things down there, in the dark.

They had sex down there, in the dark and the dust, amidst the mildew and the termites, the psychopaths and the opium dealers, and the act seemed to be the only thing that interrupted the constant echo in the back of his mind. I love you.

One time, after the light went out, Dexter hit Harmony on a whim. This was followed by silence, and he was about to apologize when Harmony hit him back. Then he was hitting her and she was hitting him, and they were falling, and the flashlight clattered to the floor as they rolled in the darkness, the beam arcing wildly across the ceiling and the floor, and her face and his face, and Harmony was laughing and there was a dangerous desire to inflict pain rising in Dexter, but thankfully nothing happened and the fight dissolved into Harmony and him lying, panting, on the ground.

Harmony laughed. “Now we’re getting somewhere, she said.

[Gambit]

For the next trip, Dexter bought an inductance flashlight. Inside the flashlight there was a magnet and a coil. Shaking the flashlight moved the magnet through the coil and generated a current to power the light.

“I want to go deeper,” he told Harmony. “This light won’t go out.” The voice still called to Dexter, seemed closer the deeper they went below ground. He rationalized it as a subconscious urge, an inexplicable emotion amidst an avalanche of inexplicable emotions. If he went deep enough, Dexter supposed, maybe he would understand.

They started off using Harmony’s flashlight and switched to Dexter’s when hers burned out on the third level down. Dexter was not surprised when, after a short search through adjoining rooms, the decrepit floor of a bar produced a trap door leading down into a rubble-strewn cellar on yet another lower level.

As they descended, Dexter laughed, and Harmony soon joined him. He felt they were the only ones ever to step into this place, that somehow it was theirs. They left two pristine sets of footprints in the thick dust. A little further in, Dexter found he was having a hard time thinking. The distant voice turned to a roar in his head. He had to develop a pattern for how to take in his environment, a routine way to move his eyes around, and it seemed only by luck that he discovered the next stairwell leading even further down. Trying to get to the stairs, he stumbled on a brick on the ground and had to lean against a wall to recover his breath and his balance.

Briefly, Dexter’s eyes met Harmony’s. “Deeper?” he tried to say, but his thoughts were floating amongst incoherent images of weeds and apples and bowls. Still the voice echoed in his thoughts, and he couldn’t form the sounds he needed.

Harmony understood. She nodded.

Dexter had to support himself against a wall as he made his way down the stairs. How many levels down were they, he wondered. Did the Seattle Underground have an end? Had they entered some alternate universe trending forever downward into an abyss of confused thoughts and emotions?

The room at the bottom of the stairs looked just as dusty and dilapidated as the one above. The walls were falling to pieces. Bricks formed random interference patterns on the cold, stone floor. The only familiar object was a mirror, coated in a layer of dust, somehow still upright in the far corner of the room.

Dexter had trouble breathing. A dull shadow echoed his movements on the mirror’s surface as he made his way forward. One step. Two. Then the flashlight went out.

Dexter shook the flashlight and the magnet inside it made its sharp clacking sound, but there was no light. He didn’t understand. He approached the mirror, leaning in close to inspect his dust-coated reflection.

“You are now entering the quantum realm,” Harmony joked in a Twilight-Zone voice from behind him and laughed.

Dexter tried to laugh as well but somehow, impossibly, he was stepping down instead of forward, and his knee knocked into something hard, and there was a crash of things falling, cascading onto the ground, and it went on much longer than any linear avalanche of items should, and nothing made sense besides Dexter’s instinctive urge to recover his balance and run to her, but which way? Then the air finally stopped ringing and Dexter staggered blindly through open space. All he wanted to do was reach out and touch Harmony, to make sure Harmony was all right, that Harmony hadn’t been hurt, and Dexter loved her too—he had loved her ever since she laughed in the communal garden outside the physics auditorium—, and his mind was screaming that she had to know.

There was nothing there. No one there.

Dexter was alone in the darkness.

[Gambit]

Dexter drifted. Suspended in a realm without shape or form, his existence became bereft of sensation—at once weightless, sightless, and soundless. Without any mechanism by which to measure the passage of time, the days—years, perhaps, or minutes?—ran together in an interminable blur.

Disoriented beyond words, beyond even thought, Dexter struggled to focus. Harmony. The single word echoed, reverberated in his mind. He remembered the mirror, deep below ground. He remembered staggering up to it to look at his reflection, but then… nothing.

The voice intruded then, drawing Dexter’s attention. “Welcome, Dexter Mills.”

Dexter noticed the silhouette of a figure approaching through the darkness. Although it had no discernable features, he could feel it smiling. Opening his mouth but unable to produce sound, Dexter’s only response was a silent outpouring of confusion.

The silhouette raised a hand to quiet him. “My name is Omni.”

Dexter found his focus, very gradually, returning. He concentrated on the silhouette—Omni?—and on a single word, a plaintive question: Harmony?

The silhouette laughed, its booming, mellifluous voice rolling through Dexter’s head like ocean waves. “This is not the world you know. This is the Omniverse.”

In that moment, absolutely nothing made sense to Dexter. Disparate thoughts and images tumbled through his mind like water through a sieve, leaving no coherence in their wake. His mouth opened and shut in a futile attempt to form another question.

“You interest me,” Omni went on. “So I have made you a part of it.” If the impossible being noticed Dexter’s sorry state, he seemed not to care.

Omni carried on a few moments longer, but its words blurred together and eluded comprehension. A dream? Dexter wondered, trying feebly to assign some meaning to the scene before him, some logic. A hallucination?

Omni chuckled, seemingly aware of Dexter’s thoughts. “There are rules,” it said at length. “I will only explain them once, so listen carefully.”

The silhouette produced an orb from some unfathomable pocket, a swirling, rainbow-colored object, and handed it to Dexter. The object had no weight. It seemed intangible yet rested neatly in his palm. Dexter accepted it with trepidation, fascinated by the object against his better judgment. The air around him thrummed with an almost audible energy. Power? Dexter wondered.

“This is Omnilium. It’s what ties the Omniverse together. Without it, you are nothing. With it, anything you desire can be yours.”

Anything? Dexter thought, transfixed by the swirling orb.

Omni continued, but again its words fell against the backdrop of Dexter’s thoughts. It had to be a dream, he resolved. Perhaps he was in a coma, still unconscious several stories beneath downtown Seattle. Or perhaps, a final idea surfaced, he had stumbled upon an alternate universe.

Omni’s voice cut back through Dexter’s consciousness. “That’s all you need to know right now. You’ll figure out the rest soon enough. I’ll be watching… and waiting.”

[Gambit]

Before Dexter’s eyes, the darkness gave way to a pristine, stark white landscape. He stumbled backward, thrusting an arm in front of his face while his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light.

His mind reeled, trying to come to terms with the series of unfortunate events that had befallen him. Curiously, Dexter found he had only a vague recollection of the time before he encountered Omni, the mysterious, grinning silhouette. “A mirror?” he mumbled, startled by the hoarse croak of his own voice. “A name… Harmony?”

Dexter clutched his head as the sharp pangs of a migraine forced him to his knees. His tongue felt swollen and dry. Hot bile surged in his throat and Dexter spun, somehow already aware of the fountain behind him as he emptied the contents of his stomach into its gurgling water. He wiped his mouth, spat, and stood.

The fountain towered over him, a remarkable, gleaming thing. It seemed to possess a thousand individual slabs of stone and sheets of metal, each moving independently, streams of clear water trickling from one to the other in an inevitable spiral down into the pool at Dexter’s feet. While it appeared chaotic to his eyes, Dexter felt a familiar stirring in himself then, a familiar understanding. A sense of logic underlying the apparent chaos of the construction.

The notion brought Dexter a brief sense of calm. Although his knees threatened to buckle exhaustion, his finely cultivated mind felt as sharp and analytical as ever in that moment. While he couldn’t quite put together the details of the traumatic episode from which he’d just emerged, he understood one thing keenly: this was not a dream. The experience was too visceral, too tangible, too painful to be a dream. Dexter suspected some form of extraplanar travel had taken place, that he now stood in a universe quite separate from his own. He was a scientist, not a conspiracy theorist, but the possibility of alien abduction also intrigued him, the idea that some superior, interstellar race had abducted him from the tunnels beneath the bustling metropolis. All available evidence pointed to the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, after all.

Either that, Dexter thought with a thin smile, or I’m dead.

Dexter had studied with interest the science of death. He knew well of the flood of DMT released by the pineal gland, a gland no larger than a grain of rice, nestled deep within the spongy nerve bundles of the brain. Although Dexter had no interest in illegal substances, much less ones that disrupted thought his thought patterns or distorted his perception, he understood the potency of DMT and the potential for a vibrant, psychedelic experience in the moments before death—a conversation with a mysterious entity, perhaps, or the image of a fountain capable of dismissing all known laws of physics?

Dexter shrugged. Whatever the explanation, it hardly mattered in that moment. The answer required more data.

For the second time in as many minutes, Dexter became aware spontaneously of the existence of something he had not yet observed. The first time it was the fountain, a convenient repository for the contents of his churning stomach. This time, it was a distinctly sentient presence.

[Gambit]

Dexter whirled around, and when he set eyes on the creature he yelped and stumbled back, wheeling his arms for balance to keep from plunging into the fountain. No, not a creature, he realized. A robot!

It was unlike anything Dexter had encountered in his studies, a marvel of technology far more advanced than what could be found on Earth. The robot was essentially humanoid, with a silver and white chassis shaped to resemble a torso, arms, and legs. Its limbs whirred and clicked, a series of gears and pneumatic tubes operating in conjunction along their lengths, culminating in wickedly sharp talons. Its head appeared as a human’s, but where its nose and mouth should have been instead protruded a long, curving beak emblazoned along one side with an acronym and a number: H.A.R.P.Y. 3.

As was quickly becoming a customary feeling, Dexter found himself unable to speak, staring into space somewhere over the robot’s shoulder.

The robot’s eye shutters irised as it tried to infer Dexter’s line of sight. Greetings, Prime.

Dexter noticed the construct’s beak did not move as it spoke, although he heard its words clearly. Rather, the voice seemed to emerge from somewhere behind its eyes—a concealed speaker, maybe?

“What… are you?” Dexter asked.

“I am Harpy,” it replied, offering no further explanation.

“Okay then, what are you?”

This time, HARPY’s beak shot open and a different voice emerged, accompanied by the faint static of a prerecorded message. “The H.A.R.P.Y. Class 3 represents the pinnacle of technological achievement, combining the unerring efficiency of robotics with the adaptability of a human pilot.”

“What did you call me?” Dexter asked, sensing he was wasting his time.

Prime. The voice appeared in his head again, distinctly that of a human male. You must be new to this.

Dexter nodded mutely.

Okay then, let me give you the rundown—the stuff Omni doesn’t tell you. This is the Omniverse. Omni brought you here and juiced you up with Omnilium. I assume he showed you Omnilium, yeah?

Dexter nodded again.

That shit is the good stuff, let me tell you. I don’t get to use it myself, I’m not so lucky, but my boss… well, hopefully you’ll meet him soon enough. Anyway, Omni brought you here for a reason. We haven’t figured that part out yet. My guess is it’s for his own sick, twisted entertainment. But whatever—it’s pretty cool here, once you get used to the constant chaos.

“So you’re Harpy’s pilot?” Dexter asked, beginning to put the pieces together.

Bingo. All the excitement, none of the danger. Don’t trust the propaganda, but at least one part of the pitch is true. The Class 3 is a hell of a build.

“You said it’s pretty ‘cool’ here.” Dexter paused to cast his gaze around the vast expanse. “All I see is white.”

Ah, you ain’t seen nothing yet, kid. Look over there. Harpy’s arm clicked and hummed into place, pointing somewhere over Dexter’s left shoulder. He turned to see what the robot was indicating. In the distance, he saw a splotch of brown and gray superimposed upon the whiteness.

“A door?”

A gate, the voice corrected pedantically. There’s eight in all, but that one’s the best. It will take you to Coruscant. Why don’t we walk? Harpy will show you the way.

Still unconvinced, Dexter planted his feet. “I just got here. You expect me to follow your robot through some unknown door? That seems like an awfully big variable doesn’t it?”

Look around you, kid. There’s not a lot of options ‘round these parts.

“I could just stay here,” Dexter replied. “Gather more information.”

I won’t be the last one you run into here, the voice imparted ominously. Believe it or not, this place can get pretty busy. And they’re not all as friendly as I am.

Dexter remained silent and unmoving.

The H.A.R.P.Y. performed a motion akin to a shrug and turned, its talons screeching across the smooth, white ground. Suit yourself. With a taut snapping sound, metal wings protracted from two slots in its back, and, with a pneumatic groan, flexed its knees and pushed off into the air.

Trying his best not to look impressed, Dexter stood firm. It was the logical choice, he knew. He needed more data to ensure he drew the right conclusion. Dexter Mills was not a creature of impulse.

Nevertheless, the resolute façade crumbled, and he found himself crying out, “Wait!”

Harpy paused in its flight, its maneuverable wings skewing sideways as it turned to regard him.

Are you sure you don’t require more data? the voice teased. It seemed Harpy didn’t even have to be in Dexter’s immediate vicinity for the pilot to communicate with him. Was that normal in this world?

“Well I’m not likely to find it here, am I?” came Dexter’s sharp retort, as he gestured to the absence of everything that surrounded him for miles in each direction.

True enough. Let’s go. Oh, and by the way: I’m Baxla.

[Gambit]

HARPY remained aloft while Dexter followed, pale light sparking off its sleek body with every graceful, mechanical movement. The splotch on the horizon grew into a more tangible thing as they approached, a constructed gateway of smooth metal.

True to Baxla’s word, other figures trickled through the gate and spread out in every direction. Dexter gaped in amazement as a procession of what looked like dwarves from the books he used to read as a kid streamed through the gate with peals of raucous laughter, hefting swords, battle-axes, and war-hammers and clapping each other on the backs with gauntleted fists. The rearmost dwarf spared Dexter an errant glance and opened his mouth in greeting before noticing HARPY and scurrying away.

The fantasy races don’t like technology much, Baxla explained, his voice ringing with mirth. Can’t imagine what they were doing in Coruscant.

“Fantasy races?” Dexter echoed, stunned.

Sure! And elves too, and orcs, and so on. They mostly stick to Camelot and some of the outlying Verses. Dwarves tend to call the Frozen Fields home; they’re a hardy bunch. If you bother to look down, you’ll see ‘em pretty much everywhere though. Except Coruscant, that is.

Dexter found himself at a now-characteristic loss. The many-worlds interpretation, while unproven, was simple enough to understand. Even some science fiction intergalactic hub made enough sense, if the complete absence of tangible evidence was ignored. But this… robots, and dwarves, and physics-defying fountains, and gates between universes, and mysterious, maniacal silhouettes in the darkness. It lent itself better to the ill-conceived scribblings of over-imaginative children than any rigorous scientific theory Dexter had encountered. He felt like laughing and crying at the same time, so overwhelming was the conflicting information flooding into his brain.

Flanking the gate on both sides, tall men in white armor with black trim regarded Dexter’s approach silently. Their bucket-shaped helmets betrayed nothing of the temperament of the men, if indeed they were men and not the next installment in Dexter’s series of staggering surprised, beneath, but Dexter’s eyes widened when he noticed the rifles they held tightly across their chests.

HARPY hummed to a landing as they neared the gate, wings protracting into its back. Its beak clicked open, and the staticky, prerecorded voice spoke again. “Coruscant is an ecumenopolis, the capital of the Republic, and the foremost cultural and economic hub of the Omniverse.”

Dexter hardly registered the words. In between the gate’s two sturdy columns, a swirling gray-blue vortex gave little indication of what existed on the other side. While Dexter had no firm concept of the technology required for teleportation, purely a science fiction concept in his world, but, as uncomfortable as it made him, he was well past the point of trying to understand everything about this place. In time, he hoped, the answers would come to him, and in the meantime, he would gather as much information as he could.

—Gizmo want with a new Prime?

What business is it of yours?

Dexter froze, listening to the words. They seemed to manifest directly in his head, the first voice unknown to him but the second belonging to Baxla, HARPY’s pilot.

The movements of fledgling Primes are Empire business. The unknown voice sounded gruff and uncompromising, in stark contract to Baxla’s young, playful tone.

Look, Baxla replied, it was a chance encounter, all right? He asked to come with me, I’m not trying to recruit him.

Even Dexter, hardly an expert in social interaction, knew Baxla was lying. The guards seemed to share the sentiment, setting their feet defensively and leveling their rifles at HARPY.

Oh, come on! Baxla protested. And you guys wonder why no one respects your fucking authority.

Surrender the Prime, came the guard’s terse reply.

During the exchange, neither HARPY nor the guard paid any attention to Dexter, as if he was not meant to be privy to their conversation. Without knowing how or why, or even if, Dexter got the distinct impression that he was not supposed to be hearing their words.

Sorry, boys, I don’t obey the orders of Stormtrooper scum.

All at once, HARPY’s wings protracted, and the robot launched itself at the two guards. The barrels of their rifles surged with red light and the weapons retorted, firing on the diving HARPY. The robot ducked and swerved the two blasts, pouncing on the left guard, its razor-sharp talons glinting before they carved through his armor with a spray of blood.

Dexter staggered back and fell into a sitting position as the errant blasts flew over his head, their palpable heat leaving a shimmer in their wake. Baxla’s words came back to him in that moment: All the excitement, none of the danger. Yet the danger to Dexter was quite real, he knew.

Making quick work of the first guard, HARPY regained its feet without regarding the mass of pulp and gore at its feet. How terrifying the bloodstained robot seemed to Dexter in that moment, in stark contrast to the moments before the engagement. Its wings caught the ambient, white light, glinting and glimmering, its savage beak dripping with the redness of its enemy.

The second guard skipped back and dropped to one knee as HARPY turned on him, firing a second blast, then a third. The first narrowly missed HARPY’s head, and the robot swept its curved wing in front of the third, striding fearlessly forward.

Dexter expected the blast to damage the HARPY in some way, to drive it back and allow both Dexter and the guard a chance to pass through the gate and into what he hoped was the relative safety of the universe beyond. Instead, the wing flashed blue as it became enveloped in shimmering light, and the guard’s blast was deflected away…

… directly toward Dexter.

Dexter had just enough time to scream as the blast clipped him in the shoulder, spinning him face first to the ground. Agony spread across his neck and torso, and an unfamiliar smell came to him—a smell he dimly recognized as smoldering flesh. He whimpered and tried to crawl away, dragging himself perhaps half a pace before blackness crept up at the edges of his vision.

The last thing he saw was HARPY’s wicked, taloned feet closing in on him.