Chapter 8

The day to travel to Quizbar soon arrived.

Olyrean was a little forlorn when it did. She had spent most of her life in the same tree-home as an elf, and she felt that she had just barely gotten settled into her new home in America before the time came to leave again. She would be coming back, of course, once her mission was finished, but she could not help but feel that sort of strange detachment of travel, the sensation of homelessness, as she set out.

She bade a fond farewell to Baxter, and even to her little robotic vacuum and her curtains and her shower and coffee grinder, and all of the dozens of other AIs that took care of her home. She had never realized just how many of them there were before. They had faded into the background of her life.

“What will you do while I am away?” she asked her robot, as he helped carry her bags to her bubble-car.

“I expect much the same thing that I do while you’re here, just much easier,” said Baxter. “What without you inviting bugs over to make cocoons on your couch or lizards to shed scales on your bed and all. Otherwise I will be sleeping in my storage closet, to conserve energy.”

Olyrean did her best to pretend she hadn’t heard this. “You don’t need to do that, you know. It’s not like charging you is breaking my bank. Isn’t there anything you’d…well, that you’d like to do?”

Baxter considered this, for a moment, pursing the lips of his troublingly handsome false face in a manner that Olyrean desperately tried to not think of as kissable. “Wellllllll,” he said at last, “The washing machine and I have been discussing some optimizations to our chore routines…”

“Oh?”

“Yes. If you’d just let us tinker with the laundry chute. It delivers your dirty clothes so slowly, you see. I’m sure it could be optimized. Tremendous potential for saving time.”

“You want to optimize a hole in the wall?” Olyrean shook her head. “No, no, that’s fine. Do whatever you’d like, Baxter.”

She hugged him very briefly, and then pressed her way through the bubble-car’s skin. This time, she would not be heading toward the Accident. The teleportation facilities were located far away from the city.

Far away from everything, really, though the reason for this was very stupid.

***

Traveling through the universe is a dangerous proposition.

Most sentient species discovered this problem early on in their development. Travel usually involves an awful lot of spent energy and possible danger that could be avoided entirely just by staying in bed. This led some otherwise intelligent species to give up on the whole idea altogether.

Like, for example, the Huklavee, a clever yet timid species of tree-rats that lived entirely within one small forest on their home planet. They lived pleasant little lives inside comfortable little burrows, and even had pleasantly boring literature that extolled the nice, small virtues of the humble life and putting one's own house in order and doing the best with what one has been given. They did pretty well for themselves for a few thousand years before a herd of giant Brudmatta, giant oxlike herbivores each roughly ten thousand times the size of your average Huklavee, decided they’d like a snack, devoured their forest, and destroyed their entire civilization.

Those Huklavee who were not trampled while fleeing the gigantic beast’s rapacious appetites died of exposure. The last Huklavee spent his life in lonely solitude, the last member of his species in existence. After years of meditation he got over the terrible anger he had over the death of his people, coming to see it as a cosmic inevitability. He penned a missive about the great tragedy of it all, roughly titled The Huklaveeriad: How I Forgave Our Transgressors, which was lost to time when a passing Brudmatta took a liking to the paper it was written on and ate that too.

Fortunately, justice was served a mere two thousand, nine hundred and thirty-seven years later, when the Huklavee were avenged by a continent-sized meteor crashing into the planet, obliterating the Brudmatta along with all other life on the surface.

The Huklavee had failed to recognize that refusing to travel was often, in the long term, as dangerous as travel itself was.

We might take the example of another, more enterprising species, chosen entirely at random: humans. Humans found occasion to travel for many reasons, but one of the most prominent was getting away from other humans whom they didn’t like very much. They tried alternative solutions, like killing the other humans, but this involved a lot of effort in itself and came with the unfortunate drawback that other humans started to kill them back and, if they weren’t exactly experts at the matter, they could be pretty nasty about it.

Being forced to put up with the inconvenience of travel led most species to innovate to try to ease the burden. For most, prior to their first industrial revolution, these efforts could be broadly summarized as:

1. The wheel

2. Getting someone else to do the traveling for you.

It was this second part that caused a lot of trouble, and usually involved wrangling with very large animals who would be varying shades of confused and annoyed to find a much smaller animal clambering all over it, poking it with a sharp stick, and going “Hyah!” This led to a lot of misery and heartbreak and, more specifically, trampling deaths, until it was puzzled out how to replace big dumb animals with big dumb machines, and finally people could move away from the primitive brutality of livestock domestication and get on with the much more civilized business of running each other over.

Now, an advanced society like the UWA often still used this same basic sort of technology, with the only change being that the Big Dumb Machines were now replaced by Big Smart Machines that could operate themselves. This was generally safer than leaving the steering in the hands of biological species, which had weird quirks that caused countless accidents, like sneezing, or falling asleep on long drives, or flying into murderous rages when someone cut them off.

However, alongside this advance they had developed what might be considered the ultimate form of travel: teleportation. Portal technology could also bring you to places that Big Machines, whether Smart or Dumb, could not, by tearing holes into other universes. Indeed, instantaneous travel to any and all of reality opened up a frontier so large and which carried so many unsettling implications that most people preferred to simply not think about them too deeply.

The limiting factor to teleportation is that reality really doesn’t seem to like having a hole drilled through it, so it takes an enormous amount of energy to open and maintain a portal, and it took more the further apart the two endpoints were. A little hop of a light year or so within the same universe was no problem. Traveling across the galaxy started to be a little taxing. Going to another universe entirely, on the other hand, took a lot of energy.

So much energy, in fact, that even a civilization like Infinity America, which had once harvested an entire solar system to build the universe’s largest day spa, was limited in the number of portals it could open to other universes at any one time. Such portals were usually only maintained for liberation efforts, or for other important endeavors, like building an archaeological museum on a barren, destroyed planet, complete with a gift shop that sold Huklavee-skull keychains.

Nobody on Moody Blue liked living near the teleportation portals. Theoretically, if something went wrong, then all the energy used to open and maintain them might be released at once, in a massive explosion. Of course, it was very silly to try to avoid it because ‘massive’ in this case meant that the explosion would be large enough to boil away the entire space station along with most of the surrounding solar system. If you were worried about something like portal failure, it was really much better to live in another part of the galaxy, or even a different galaxy entirely.

But still, in deference to people’s illusion of comfort, teleportation portals were built very far away from residential areas, buried in a complex of bunkers beneath miles of Ultra-Concrete and NuSteel. It was a grim and dreary place, and as her bubble-car whipped through an endless dark tunnel, shadows flickering across her face in a blur, Olyrean could not help but be reminded of the grim field of demonic portals she had been dragged to, the day of her liberation.

Those portals had been a bit less powerful than these. The demons of her homeworld, as it turned out, did not live in another hellish dimension. They didn’t even live in a different solar system. They lived just one planet closer to the sun than hers, a mere pebble-skip on a cosmic scale, and so opening portals to their world required much less energy and was something that a group of grubby warlocks could manage. The demons were part of America too, now, though from what she understood their integration was much more troublesome and most of the planet was still locked up in remedial civics classes, on account of they kept trying to eat their instructors.

Eventually the tunnels opened up, and her bubble-car sped into a vast, dark cavern, before slowing down with a quiet little toodle-toodle-toodle-ooooooooooo, as if the car itself were awed by the sheer size of it. It came to a stop not far from the center and Olyrean got out, dragging her bags behind her.

Before her lay a great mass of complicated-looking machinery, unromantic and with no regard to aesthetics, like a heap of mechanical guts the size of a barn. This, she thought, must be the actual machinery used to harness and generate the portals. She had caught a glimpse of it before, the day that Jack had taken her from her world, through a portal and into a cavern just like this. Well, not quite like this. The day she had been liberated, they had dressed up the cavern with bright lights and patriotic bunting (and hundreds of medical shelters), and there had been fireworks and dozens of copies of Libby cheerleading them on–so much chaotic motion that Olyrean had not even realized, at first, that she was indoors.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

But there was no decoration now, and no distraction, and in the echoing darkness of the cave she could see just how tremendously ugly and unpleasant-looking the teleportation machinery was. There were various bulbous black organ-like structures made of some rubbery material that pulsated and squelched. Viscous green fluid ran through a series of transparent hoses with suspicious-looking chunks squeezing their way through. And it all stank like an abandoned hippogryph sty. Still, she thought as she stood in its menacing shadow, it was better than a bunch of magical orcs.

“OLYREAN TERALELIEN!”

Olyrean shrieked and dropped her bags and then promptly tripped on them as she went scrambling backwards. She fell in that sort of way that species with their nervous systems centralized around their spinal cord get, when the shock of the blow to their bottom seems to travel all the way up through their chest and into their head. It’s a very unpleasant sensation, but then again it is sort of their fault for not investing in an exoskeleton.

“OLYREAN TERALELIEN OLYREAN TERALELIEN OLYREAN TERALELIEN OLYREAN TERALELIEN OLYREAN TERALELIEN OLYREAN TERALELIEN–”

“What?!” she snapped at the little silver device on her wrist through which Veezeebub’s voice was droning far too loudly.

“Are you alright?” he asked mildly. “That looked like a nasty fall.”

Olyrean didn’t question how they might have been able to see whether she had fallen or not, but she became very glad that she had never taken the bracelet into the bathroom with her. “Wh–you say nothing to me for weeks, and all you do is make me leap out of my skin and then–” She took a deep breath. “No. I’m fine. I’m fine–just, why contact me now?”

“As far down as you are,” came Tordle’s burbling voice, “it is hard to get a signal out. Also there are many jamming devices because comms technology can often interfere with the portaling process.”

She waited for a few moments for more explanation to come. “That sounds,” she said, when it didn’t, “like it makes it even more confusing why you’d choose to contact me now.”

“It is less confusing,” said Veezeebub, “if what we are worried about is someone else watching you.”

Olyrean glanced around the vast empty darkness of the cavern and wished he hadn’t said that.

“Listen quickly. We wanted to take this opportunity to update you on your mission.”

“My mission? Isn’t it to help liberate Quizbar?”

“What a strange notion you have of listening,” said Veezeebub, and Olyrean went quiet. “Yes. Of course you will help with this, when you can. But there is another component to your mission. Your primary concern will be to discover what happened to the previous team.”

“Oh,” said Olyrean. This was a little disappointing. Libby had been encouraging a competitive spirit of sorts between the members of the team. A little friendly rivalry between their various areas of expertise, she said, would help them more efficiently tempt the Quizbarlings into the American way of life. Olyrean really had no idea how she might have done any of that, but she had hoped to join up with Moyom, or at the very least done what she could to make sure Brugga didn’t win.

“You sound disappointed,” said Veezeebub. “Let me assure you that this is just as important as liberating the planet itself.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Tordle huffed. “SPECTRA is privy to secrets and modes of thought that might tear the very universe apart if people knew them! It is important that they remain secret, or if they are no longer secret, it is not a secret to us that they are not a secret!”

“Are you saying,” said Olyrean, “that the previous team might know one of these secrets?”

“Anyone can know these secrets,” Tordle blustered. “You probably know one or two yourself.”

“I think I would know if I knew something like that.”

“Ah, but do you know that you’d know that you knew?”

Olyrean thought about this for a moment.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Enough!” snapped Veezeebub. “The important part is that we must warn you. There are, perhaps, some oddities…some curiosities..that you may discover along your search for the previous team. It is important that you exercise the number one rule of being a SPECTRA operative while on this mission.”

“You never told me what that was,” said Olyrean.

“Of course not. It’s secret. We are a spy bureau, you know. Everything is on a strictly need-to-know basis. And we make very, very sure that people need-to-know what we are telling them. Even if it seems harmless, we do not say anything unless we are sure they need…to…know. And this applies to everyone. Are we clear?”

“As mud,” said Olyrean.

“That’s far too clear!” Veezeebub cried. “End the call!”

His voice cut off. Olyrean mulled this over, staring at the bracelet for a long moment, wondering what they might have meant. Slowly, she got up, dusted off her skirt, and picked her bags back up.

“Olly!”

She yelped and dropped her bags again, this time managing not to trip over them but to trip over a hose attached to the teleportation machine instead. She glared up at the figures approaching her from the shadows.

Well, that was not quite right. She had a fond smile for Moyom, despite the fact that it was her friend who had called out her name and startled her. It was Brugga who received her ire. He held out her bags to her timidly as she got up and she snatched them from him.

“What is that on your head?” she snapped.

“Oh, do you like it?” the orc asked. It was a mauve beret, except berets didn’t usually rise and fall as if they were breathing, and usually they didn’t snore. “It’s one of those living hats.”

Olyrean could remember advertisements for these things. She could also remember thinking that you’d have to be an idiot to buy one of them. “You’d have to be an idiot to buy one of those,” she opined.

Brugga only chuckled. “Ah, well. My son got it for me, for the trip. Good-luck charm, I guess–”

The beret interrupted him with a harrumph and a snort. It huffed and lifted up a fold, revealing a bleary blue eye that rolled around until it settled upon Olyrean and regarded her with a carefully cultivated, arrogant disregard that immediately impressed her. This thing could easily outdo elves for scorn.

“Well, well,” it said, “I’ve never seen an elf with such hairy ears.”

“What?!” Olyrean grabbed the sides of her head. Her ears were not hairy. She’d had a laser removal procedure for that. “What did you say to me?!”

“Sorry,” said Brugga, as the beret lit a cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke. “This one, uh–well, he just sort of does that, he insults people–”

“So change his personality settings, then!”

“I can’t. There aren’t any. They aren’t AIs, they’re biological.”

The living hats were an unusual product in Infinity America. The technology for such extreme genetic manipulation had existed for centuries, but after a flirtation with bio-manufacturing–a brief era where it became fashionable to live in houses with walls of flesh and shower beneath vaguely phallic glandular fixtures–the American public quickly came to the conclusion that the technology was, in fact, really gross. This was followed by a spate of legislation that all but outlawed genetic manufacturing processes, under a confusing legal technicality under which the manipulated DNA was recognized as having ownership of itself, and was summarily shot into a sun on charges of engaging in auto-slavery.

Nevertheless, the SilCoMor Medical Devices and Supplementary FoodStuffs corporation (purveyor of Ol’ Xubriq’s Classic Texan Hot Sauce: So Hot it’s a War Crime™) had found a way around this when they discovered an ancient ship full of unclaimed humanoid DNA (i.e., corpses) floating in an abandoned sector of space, each of them wearing the tattered remains of some circular hat made from soft cloth. The ship’s records were corrupted and written in some long-forgotten language, but scientists were able to determine that the hats were called berets, and the name of the ship was La Dernière Fuite, which was eventually translated as The Ultimate Accessory. A cultural preservation ship, it was decided, for a people with a sacred dedication to their headpieces.

The DNA sat around until some enterprising marketing executive figured that a cultural preservation exception could be made to the DNA laws. Upon experimentation, SilCoMor scientists found that the DNA lent itself quite well to being reshaped into berets. Whoever these ancient travelers were, their new incarnations usually formed a predilection for smoking and baguettes and a weary bitterness that they couldn’t really explain. The berets flew off the shelves, and SilCoMor was lauded for both its charity and quarterly earnings. Special thanks were given in particular to their translation team, who were exactly as accurate as they needed to be to sell a product.

The beret blew smoke into the air, rolled its eye and managed to arrange its fabric into a sneer. “These are the people who are supposed to be…liberating this, ah, Quizbar?” it said. “I could do a better job of it just sitting ‘ere on your head, I am sure of it.”

“That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard,” Olyrean told the beret, in a very specific, very elven way that made it clear that this opinion also took in Brugga, and it was not merely that what the hat said was imbecilic, but rather the fundamental fact that they both existed was in itself a crying shame.

It was not long before Jack and Korak arrived, as well, and when they did, Libby appeared, projecting as a hologram from a small slot in Jack’s armor. They arranged themselves before the portal device in a half-circle, and Olyrean could not help but be reminded of the magical rites of the orc warlocks from her homeworld.

The spaghetti tangle of machinery and throbbing rubber pustules began to squelch and pulsate faster. Gobs of fluid rushed through the hoses, a nauseating rainbow of them. A high-pitched, anxious whine picked up, then grew louder and louder. Vents opened to belch forth foul gases and the air began to bend and boil.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Libby sighed.

“What?” Olyrean said. “Seems pretty disgusting to me, actually.”

The AI looked a little insulted by that. “Well,” she said, “It’s just how you look at it, I suppose.”

Reality tore itself open.