Kei

  If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

  --William Blake

  I look at the crystal obelisk, which is somehow, against all logic, looking at me as she talks. Then I look down into the abyss at our feet, the gaping hole in the center of the Maze seemingly leading into another universe. Somehow neither one surprises me.

  Then I stare over at Chris and Andrea.

  “You knew about this.” It’s a statement, not a question. It’s not even a statement freighted with meaning, or accusation, or even much emotion.

  When the obelisk told me I’m somehow bleeding my life into maintaining this nightmare, she may have been even more right than she realized. I’m feeling a bit stunned and emotionally empty – not from injury or trauma, but almost as though everything tied to my emotions – my intense emotions, anyway – really is getting siphoned away, just like she said.

  I reach out instinctively and try to claw it back. I don’t know if that’s helping at all, but my Gift naturally ebbs when my emotions are no longer at their peak. And weak as I am, now that things have calmed down for a minute, I doubt the current of power supposedly flowing out of me has much left to draw on.

  I glance down into the gaping well between realities and see a single distant light streaking towards Hammersmith’s mech as she flies for the newborn sun in the void beneath us. They meet in that strange place of light and darkness, walls of light forming again far below them, and then the mech and the light mote turn towards us.

  Interesting, but I’m not only drained at this point, I’m more than a little numb.

  I nod towards the scene. “Incoming,” I remark.

  Chris darts around the yawning breach to stand by my side, and stares in the same direction I am. The mecha is blasting towards us as though pursued by all the hounds of Hades, or something.

  Well, given Kestrel’s love of setting her Hounds on me, I understand their intensity. There’s nothing like running for your life to get your heart pounding.

  Unless you’re me, and going through this exact situation now. In which case you feel like a cold, limp ramen noodle floating in tepid water somewhere.

  Chris nods over to Andrea, who is standing beside the small, floating crystal obelisk and quietly talking to it. “They’re almost here.”

  By ‘almost’ he really meant ‘here,’ as they roared out of the Maze’s gateway a moment later.

  Hammersmith doesn’t go another foot further than falling to her first foothold on the edge of the abyss. Her feet slam into position, stumble forward a couple steps reflexively as she halts, and then she bends forward and lowers the glowing figure in her hands to the ground with a grunt.

  And the radiant man she sets down looks much smaller than the giant we saw in the Nexus. At least once he hops the intervening hedge wall the mecha dropped him behind.

  Living light clings to him like shreds of living creatures. A teen perhaps our age strides towards us. Tall, blond and with intense blue eyes, he’s powerfully built and ridiculously handsome.

  And I could say he glows like there’s something special about him, but really, he’s literally glowing.

  No longer twelve-feet tall, though, so I suppose he’s more approachable, or something.

  I’d like to say I’m too awed by his masculine beauty to say anything, but the reality is I’m only not speaking because I have too many things to say about the situation, and I’m still trying to decide where to start.

  So he goes first. “The Nexus?” he asks Chris. Who, to be fair, is still staring down into that alternate universe and is standing in power armor that presumably carries more sensors than anything short of the looming mecha.

  “Looks like you detonated the Unmaker’s wormhole,” Chris tells him. “Good work, that. And the Labyrinth is redeploying.”

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  “Good,” the bright stranger replies. “I doubted I could really break them, but it’s good to see them back in operation.”

  “Better than you think,” Chris agrees. “All the other entry wormholes seem to be opening – all the ones we can detect, anyway. Full Labyrinth Protocols are underway.”

  “Labyrinth Protocols?” I ask. “What are those?” I have no idea, but you can hear the capital letters and feel the weight of the statement. I’m pretty sure ‘Labyrinth Protocols’ doesn’t translate to ‘Nothing to worry about, and we can even go on Spring Break early this year.’

  “Standard operating procedure in the event of a multidimensional invasion,” Chris answers offhandedly. “For the Nexus, at least.”

  “SOP for Earth used to be ‘scream and die,’” the New Guy comments. “If we faced anything like this.”

  “Wait, what?” I ask. “What was all that? And are we even safe here?”

  “I’ll let someone else answer the first question,” the obelisk answers from the far side of the interdimensional gateway spread out on the ground between us, “but to the second – yes, for now. I’m checking, but the Circle and their allies seem to be in retreat. Let me see who I can reach.”

  “Okay,” I answer. “And again, what was all that? Because even by my standards, that was a lot.”

  The new, blond guy shrugs his muscular shoulders. The light around him is fading slightly, and I notice his t-shirt is more than slightly ripped up.

  “Aspect Technology,” he answers. “At its core. Which is another way of saying ‘magic’ without having to say ‘Yes, it’s totally magic and magic is real.’” He blinks at me and extends a hand. “Gavin, by the way. Gavin Whitesmith.” He flicks a glance over at the mecha. “You’ve met my sister already, I think. Sort of, anyway.”

  The mech gives an exasperated sigh.

  “‘Aspect Technology,’” I repeat, slowly and dubiously. I’m not sounding doubtful so much from the throwaway line about magic. After what I’ve seen today, I’d be surprised if they didn’t think of their tech as at least somewhat magical.

  But… “What’s Aspect Technology?” I ask, seriously.

  “An oversimplification,” Chris snorts. He looks over at the obelisk. “Can we talk?”

  A globe like a shimmering soap bubble over a hundred feet across pops into existence around us and the heart of the Maze.

  “For now,” the floating shaft of crystal replies.

  “Fine,” Chris sighs. “The Tower has lots of futuristic technology, and so do we. Aspect Technology is only, well, one aspect of what we use. There’s also supersolid light like the crystallized light structures you saw in the Nexus, some high-powered applications of psi and chi, and even more mundane tech like AI, wormholes, nanotech and quantum computing.”

  “And Aspect Technology,” I reply, “does that have something to do with your family.”

  “Distantly,” Chris says, sounding amused. “It’s named after a French physicist we’re just barely related to, Alain Aspect. His experiments showed how observation affects the quantum world. There’s tech which leverages that effect on a massive scale, affecting more than just one photon, electron or atom at a time.”

  “Effectively magic,” Gavin tells her. “Even if not everyone,” his hand sweeps out to indicate all the others, “is willing to admit that.”

  “Maybe not magic,” Andrea comments, walking around the edge of the breach towards them, “but combine it with machinery and computer chips effectively created as needed from crystallized light, and combined with quantum manipulation of the physical world on a visible scale using machinery or psi and…” She spreads her hands in surrender. “And yes, it’s effectively magic. At least as most people would understand it.”

  “The Tower’s been at this an incredibly long time,” Gavin remarks. “They laid the foundations for everything we’re doing today, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.”

  I tilt my head at him in an inquiring gesture. “How?”

  “They were around for a ridiculously long time,” Chris offers, “since at least the age of ancient Greece. And they never lost critical knowledge. Instead they picked up key discoveries and ran with them, helped doomed geniuses like Socrates and Archimedes escape their fates with sleight of hand and body doubles, and reached out across the world seeking knowledge.”

  “Throw in the early development of mechanical computers,” Andrea adds, “the Scientific Method, and the codification of what hard scientific knowledge was out there and they leapt centuries ahead while staying mostly hidden.”

  “And that,” Gavin continues, “kept building until they started fusing their scientific and mystical knowledge and engaging in one dangerous experiment after another.”

  “Most of which failed.” Chris spread his hands. “Or worse, succeeded, but not in the ways they were expecting.”

  “Such as?” I ask. “Where did these epic failures happen?”

  “Starting here.” Gavin sweeps a slightly luminous limb at the open gate. “Though this is more the case of a failure which succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Just not as they planned.” He looks over at the machine towering impassively over us. “Want to add anything?”

  The giant mech simply shrugs her steel shoulders.

  “The big thing was finding this universe in the first place,” Hammersmith notes, “and learning to visit places like it – if only in spirit. Once they realized they could slip through and influence things, if only by whispering in dreams, or shifting a few grams of matter here and there… it became an obsession for them. Or at least for some factions.”

  I look down. “That still doesn’t explain…” I wave at the moving machinery almost lost at the outer edge of darkness in the world below, and the shining walls of the rising Labyrinth.

  Hammersmith raises a gauntleted hand to forestall my objections. “The Nexus used to be incredibly cold before it was the Nexus. More or less absolute zero. The Tower found some remnant molecules here before there were fully functioning wormholes – somehow.”

  “Perfect conditions for crystallized light,” Andrea notes. “If you can make it.”

  “Supersolid states,” Chris remarks. “They could influence conditions remotely just enough to create crystallized light.”

  “In tiny amounts,” Hammersmith says. “Which they built on millimeters at a time. Like settling sediment. Or snowflakes.”

  “Which took insane levels of dedication from teams working day and night,” Andrea adds. “But it became a rite of passage to do at least a little, for those who could.”

  “And so began one of the longest intellectual exercises of the original Tower. The ones who could remote view into this reality and exert even the slightest physical influence…”

  “They figured out how to shape the light,” I realize, speaking aloud as I stare down at the shifting walls and retreating clockwork gears and chains.

  “But they could only form simple shapes,” Chris nods, flying up beside us and matching our speed. “And they knew basic engineering and how to build clocks and mechanical computers like the Antikythera Mechanism.”

  “So everything they built from hard light was clockwork.” The sheer scale and madness of all this is beginning to dawn on me.

  “For nearly two millennia,” Hammersmith agrees, her voice echoing out of the vast helmet. “They finally had more advanced tech, and eventually better ways to access the place. But for centuries this was more a way for their Shadow Counselors to practice.”

  “And the most-advanced physical technology we know of,” Andra waves around us, “is all built on these clockwork creations. Fundamentals a common craftsman in the Renaissance or earlier could have grasped.”

  “Leading to ultra-advanced steampunk tech,” Gavin observes. “Made out of pure light.”

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