Jaron raised the cube up to an indentation in the wall that Taven guessed was a charging port. When it was close enough to almost touch the port, Jaron carefully released his grip of the cube. The object floated there, seemingly suspended in midair.

  “The EM junction lock has engaged,” Jaron said. “Now let’s see if we can communicate with the mainframe.”

  The way Jaron had said it made Taven even less sure this was going to work. But moments later, there was a flash on the forward wall’s screen. Jaron first glanced at it, then turned back smiling. “We did it,” he announced.

  Taven didn’t know what had changed on the screen or what it meant exactly. “We shut down the cyber grid?”

  “No,” Jaron answered, almost with disgust in his voice. “But we can now. When the time’s right.”

  “Uh…what are you waiting for exactly?”

  “For the signal,” Jaron said matter-of-factly. He touched the headgear he was wearing. “Ironically, next to the cyber grid’s energy source, we’re off grid here. But it doesn’t mean we’re out of communication range.”

  Jaron knelt at his bag and dug out a handheld device. “Let’s see. I spotted it earlier.” He moved to one of the desks. “There it is.” He then placed the device into what looked like a receptacle designed precisely for it.

  “With this, I can get updates in real time from Kairos,” he said. He waved his hand, and a holographic screen popped up, much like the ones Taven had seen after Jaron’s speech. “As soon as the Seekers arrive, I’ll know, and I’ll be able to shut everything down instantly,” he said.

  Taven was confused. “Why not just pull the plug now? Why wait?”

  Jaron chewed on his lip. It was as if he was about to explain an embarrassing secret. “You don’t understand what the cyber grid means,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not just augmented reality for us. This has been part of daily life on Kairos for millennia. Turning it off would be like eliminating all electricity and running water on Earth. People just aren’t ready to live that way.”

  Taven didn’t know what to say. “Well, I guess I should go,” he began. “Time waits for no man. You know, the Seekers may have already begun their attack. Until I drop the temporal field, there’s no way to know. Are you sure you have what you need? Food, water, the inter-sim comm?”

  “Yeah,” Jaron said, patting his sack of goodies. “I’m all set. And if I get bored, I’ve got—what did you call him, Ironsides? Do you think he knows how to play Baloot?”

  Taven let out a heartfelt laugh, and he was glad for the tension to be broken. “I hope to see you again, my friend,” Taven said.

  “Me too,” Jaron stated solemnly.

  Then Taven turned, closed his eyes, and pictured the interior of the Braun Orbiter. He started to create a portal, but he hesitated. There was one last thing he needed to do before leaving Kairos, and he didn’t know why. It was like a mental itch that would bug him until he scratched it. And this might be his only chance to do it. Taven changed the mental picture before creating a portal and jumping through.

  CHAPTER 9

  AS SOON AS Taven came out the other side of the portal, he checked the temporal bubble. It had collapsed, just as he had expected. Closing his eyes, he grabbed the high-pitched sound with his mind’s hand and pulled it down to the ground.

  Satisfied he had caused no harm to Kairos or the mission at large, Taven opened his eyes and took in his surroundings. He was back at the entrance of the tunnel leading to the power station, back in the Oldlands.

  He felt suddenly alarmed, fearing that because time had passed that the sun would be setting or at least be in a different part of the sky. But not only had he kept this sim frozen while he and Jaron had made their way to the power station, but this planet’s sun didn’t set. There were no alternating days and nights here, only subtle changes in the angle of the sun over the course of seasons.

  Taven looked left of the entrance and found the same shimmering object he’d seen before. He had thought he might have to use his Gatekeeper vision to find it again, but there it was. Why he felt drawn to this object, he didn’t know. Maybe it was intrigue, profound interest in how Jaron had described Kairos’s prehistory. Maybe he wished he could live a life like the ancient Kairosians, devoid of the trappings of technology and blissfully ignorant of the Sim-Verse.

  As he walked toward it, the glimmer disappeared behind a monolithic stone ruin resembling something Taven had seen pictures of on Earth, maybe from Easter Island. It had a doorway, half filled by silt and shade-loving vegetation, but its unfinished carved exterior made him think that the structure had been intended for ceremonial purposes instead of mere habitation.

  Reaching the ruin, he placed his hand along its exterior. The carvings were difficult to decipher, and not just because he couldn’t read ancient Kairosian. The markings had eroded over time, and dirt, moss, and sprigs of grass filled the crevices.

  Taven stepped around the stone structure and looked where he expected to find the reflective object. The shimmer was now gone, but he didn’t need to search any further. He’d found it, alright. That much was sure. But his harried mind couldn’t comprehend it. It simply didn’t belong here.

  The cockpit of the crashed slicer lay open, its clear glass hood raised and its pilot missing. Taven stooped down and examined its interior, a space only large enough for one person to lie down in. Most slicers he’d seen were nondescript, their pilots seeing them as mere tools for the job. But this one was different, and he knew in an instant who its owner was.

  Glued to the empty spaces between its digital gauges and comm screens were cut out pictures: scantily clad women, a canard-style race rocket, and a picture of a respectable looking older woman. There was only one person he knew who could paste pictures of naked women next to his own mother’s photo.

  “Mack,” Taven whispered.

  CHAPTER 10

  “JUST TELL ME what it’s doing there if Mack didn’t survive,” Taven demanded, standing and jamming his finger down onto the boardroom table.

  Everyone was quiet. Taven noticed they were avoiding eye contact with him, and he knew that none of them believed his friend was still alive. Stafford was the only one interacting.

  “You have to face facts, Taven,” Stafford said. “The Kairosians would have picked up his signal by now if he was on the planet’s surface.”

  “Not out there,” Taven challenged. “The cyber grid doesn’t extend to the Oldlands.”

  “I know you want to help Mack, but it’s highly unlikely he’s still alive,” Stafford said. “The battle with Cat was months ago. We assumed that Mack had perished along with the orb that was sent through to Kenna’s home world. That’s where you told us you sent it.”

  Taven shuddered at the memory of the orb, the object Cat had used to devour entire simulations.

  “Is there any chance my simulation still exists?” Kenna asked calmly.

  Hewitt chimed in. “No, it was one of the first things we checked after the battle. Meyer Corp wanted to be certain the orb had been destroyed. I’m sorry to say, your world is lost.”

  “If I’d sent Mack to Kairos, the orb would have gone there too,” Taven said. “And clearly it didn’t. Somehow—I don’t know how—Mack found a way to escape before the orb blew up.”

  “Look,” Stafford said, “I’ll talk it over with Minister Dault when he comes back from his meetings on Earth.”

  “Taven,” Isham said with a conciliatory tone, “I know you want Mack to be alive, but if things are the way you say they are on Kairos, he couldn’t have made it this long out there by himself.”

  Taven shook his head and took his seat. None of it made sense. He just couldn’t accept that the impossible had happened—Mack had escaped destruction—only to wander around Kairos’s Oldlands and starve to death.

  “I expect a full search when…” Taven stopped short, knowing that there was no certainty that Kairos would prevail against the Seekers.

  “There may be another way to get answers,” Stafford suggested. “That’s actually why we’re all here right now. As important as your discovery is—and trust me, we’ll have our scientists examine the slicer and its contents for more clues—Hewitt and Kenna may be on to something even more important: a way to find Mack and defeat Eleazar at the same time.”

  “Sure you don’t want to wait around for Dault?” Taven asked sarcastically.

  “Minister Dault has been briefed on the situation and the Joint Council has already given its approval for our next steps,” Stafford said, seemingly unamused by Taven’s quip. “Dr. Hewitt, please explain what you’ve found.”

  “Sure,” the pudgy scientist began. “Everywhere we looked, I kept running into references of someone that denizens of Meta believed had all the answers—some kind of final arbiter when there were Gatekeeper disputes. For a long time, I suspected it was one of their members held in high esteem. But that didn’t make sense. She was given too much credence, too much authority to just be another Gatekeeper.”

  “She?” Taven asked.

  “Mother, to be exact,” Hewitt said. “That’s what they called her. Kind of weird if you ask me, but anyway. It all clicked the last time Kenna and I were examining a section of paneling. I noticed the interior conduit was already exposed and easy to access. When I saw the data after we switched it on—only for a split second, mind you—I realized that Mother wasn’t a Gatekeeper; she’s a subroutine inside what can be best understood as a modeling construct.”

  “We think,” Stafford said, taking over, “that this Mother is some sort of guide that Gatekeepers consulted with for answers.”

  “More than that,” Hewitt went on, “the modeling construct appears able to emulate other sims.”

  “That sounds like nonsense,” Taven said. “What do you mean simulate a sim?”

  “I mean run a concurrent simulation in order to forecast the future,” Hewitt almost squealed. He clearly was eating this up. “The modeling construct is like a predictive algorithm. The Gatekeepers must have used it to know which way to go when they had an especially difficult problem policing the Sim-Verse.”

  Taven sat there for a second, trying to take it all in, before saying, “Well, what are we waiting on? This Mother can tell us how to beat Eleazar, and how to find Mack.”

  “Precisely,” Stafford said. “Our problem is energy.”

  “I was only able to power the construct for a split second,” Kenna said. “The draw was too great for me.”

  “When Meta was fully operational it had a core,” Hewitt explained, “which we first thought was its main computer. Now we know it was more like a buffer for the city’s power supply. That’s why Kenna is still able to activate sections of the city. It’s computing power, constructs, and circuits—they’re all still intact. They just lack power.”

  “I know all of this,” Taven complained. “What are we going to do about it?”

  Taven expected General Stafford to take back over, but clearly there was no known plan. Because the military man turned and faced Hewitt as if expecting an answer.

  “There is a way,” Hewitt began. “We’ve never done it before, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work if we had enough resources and enough time.”

  “Why don’t you try telling us, and then we’ll decide if it’s a good idea or not,” Stafford admonished.

  “Right,” Hewitt said quickly. “Dyson spheres.”

  “Oh, come on,” Taven complained. “People have talked about those forever. There’s a reason no one ever built one.”

  “The reason,” Hewitt argued, “was because we only have one sun in our solar system. It was too extreme a project, and it never got enough popular support. But now, we don’t have to use our sun. We can go harness some uninhabited sub-sim’s star and channel its energy back here. Not only that, but using a sub-sim means we can operate in a faster simulation; it would take far less time to construct, relatively speaking. And time is of the essence.”

  “Dr. Hewitt,” Stafford said sternly, “please be specific about this Dyson sphere.”

  Taven realized the general didn’t know what a Dyson sphere was.

  “Sure,” Hewitt replied, his tone professorial. “Dyson spheres are a theoretical invention, structures designed to fully encapsulate a star. The sphere is created thousands of miles from the star’s surface. But once completed, it’s capable of turning nearly one hundred percent of the star’s radiant energy into usable power.”

  “Wouldn’t one of these spheres block out all of a star’s light?” Stafford said, puzzled.

  “Precisely!” Hewitt exclaimed. “Capturing it for our purposes.”

  “And we can build one?” Stafford asked.

  “We can build several,” Hewitt said.

  “But how are you going to send the power back to Meta?” Taven objected. “It’s not like you can hook up cables between different simulations.”

  “Actually, that’s not so hard,” Hewitt said, with a childish smile. “Our friend Cat—”

  Kenna made a guttural sound like she was about spit in disgust.

  “Oh, right,” Hewitt said, recovering from the interjection. “Anyway, Cat left the Kairosians the inter-sim comm technology. The same way we talk to Jaron on Kairos while we’re here on Earth is the same way energy can be transmitted from a sub-sim to Meta. It really just takes a mild adjustment to send energy instead of information. Everything in the Sim-Verse is energy, after all. Matter is…an illusion.” Hewitt looked off, lost in reverie.

  “And you can find suitable simulations?” Stafford asked.

  “Sure,” Hewitt said. “With Kenna’s help, I can search Meta’s library and find several in a matter of minutes.”

  “And you can use Meyer Corp’s—” Stafford corrected himself. “You can use the Joint Council’s fleet to accomplish all of this?”

  “It should be rather simple,” Hewitt answered. “No harder than navigating to the Belt and back. The biggest hurdle will be modifying the jumper’s inter-sim drive to accommodate the larger starships, but…I’ve been working on this problem for quite a while. And if you give me the green light, I’m confident we can equip the ships quickly.”

  Stafford was quiet for a second. “This will be a hard sell with the Joint Council,” he finally confessed.

  “What, they don’t want our ships jumping to other sims?” Taven asked.

  “It’s worse than that,” Stafford said. “Except between Meta and Earth, they don’t want any jumpers traveling between sims right now. They fear that if one is captured by Seekers, they’ll access Earth’s frequency on the jump drive.”

  “That’s a fair assessment,” Isham offered. “It’s only a matter of time before one is captured.”

  “Yeah, but how are we supposed to fight them if we stay here? We’re like sitting ducks,” Taven argued.

  “No one said you couldn’t travel,” Stafford said, almost with a twinkle in his eye. For the first time Taven had noticed, Stafford appeared to be bending the rules, going around the system via a technicality. “You don’t have a jump drive with Earth’s frequency on it, Taven. And you can jump out of harm’s way anytime you want.”

  “So send me back to Kairos then,” Taven insisted. “At least I can do some good while you try to get the Dyson spheres built.”

  Stafford turned to Kenna and Hewitt. “Do you both understand what to do next?”

  They stood up and said they did. “I’ll send word as soon as we locate proper simulations for the project,” Hewitt promised.

  After they had left, Stafford walked over to the corner of the boardroom and picked up a small black suitcase. It was plain, so inconspicuous, in fact, that Taven hadn’t noticed it until then. Stafford brought it to the table, and as he did, Taven noticed it had two adjustable shoulder straps in addition to the handle. The general was taking unusual care with the suitcase, placing it down gently before unlocking the two clasps. After it was open, he turned it around for them to see its contents.

  “A bomb?” Taven asked, shocked.

  “A U-235 tactical nuclear weapon, to be more exact,” Stafford replied.

  “I don’t understand,” Isham said.

  “These are powerful enough to blow up an entire city, maybe even a small nation,” Taven explained. “It’s enough to give Eleazar a really bad day.”

  “I don’t mean any of that,” Isham responded. “I just mean, why do you need Taven’s help? You certainly don’t need mine. The Joint Council could send one of these bombs in a jumper to any sim they’d like.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Stafford said. “We’ve tried using the frequency you gave us for Eleazar’s palace sim. There’s nothing there now.”

  “That’s impossible,” Taven said, standing up. He closed his eyes and imagined the front gate of Eleazar’s palace. Try as he may, he couldn’t open a portal.

  “What’d I tell you?” Stafford chided.

  “He has shifted it,” Isham said, sounding unsurprised. “It’s the logical thing to do.”

  “Why don’t I know how to do that yet?” Taven muttered.

  “If I knew how, I’d tell you,” Isham promised.

  “Yeah, yeah. We’ve been through this already,” Taven said.

  “We still think we can reach Eleazar’s sim,” Stafford continued. “We’re hopeful it’s still there, part of the Ghost City index.”

  “Wait, he changed his sub-sim’s frequency but not the primary sim above it?” Taven asked.

  “Apparently,” Stafford said. “We intended to send a recon team, but then the Joint Council’s restriction on inter-sim jumps came through and shelved the mission. But the project itself is still greenlighted.” He had that same look in his eye that told Taven this was a loophole Stafford was intentionally leaving open.

  “Why not blow up the entire Ghost City index?” Taven asked when it occurred to him.