Aha, I have done it! Ames and Graham are both in Cydia now, but only just barely. ;)… it’s on to the second arc of The Typist!

Word Count: 63,444

Inconspicuously, Ford flipped a switch on the control panel he’d been working at, and continued talking. “You’re the only sick persons in this room. I am saving the planet! The Oceanic Confederacy is saving the planet. We have been able to manipulate your Cydian technology, Mr. Graham, and transform it into our own specialized science. As I speak construction is beginning on several more metropolises akin to our great Lanford City. These cities shall stand tall as a testament to our own advancement, as Lanford stands tall today, but have a much greater purpose. These power plants are equipped with extra technology, as you’ve no doubt witnessed – but beyond even that technology. They are literal propulsion engines, of the inter-dimensional sort, built with manipulated technology from your world. And when construction is complete, we shall use the cities to jettison us into this new dimension! It is ours for the taking; nobody inhabits it. I see you are speechless, or does your fetch have a malfunction?”

Graham stared at Ford; this exchange of sanity and madness lasted several seconds before Graham spoke up. “I understand everything you’ve said, except one: I have never heard of Cydia.”

Hearing this, Ford seized up – had he said all of that to the wrong man? Ford had already been nervous, but now there appeared quite visible sweat upon his brow, and he wiped it off with an equally sweaty hand, which did nothing in the end. Graham and Ames could see that he was becoming concerned for his safety, that nothing was convincing the two rebels that his life was worth sparing – and he could not understand why, for he believed in his motives and thought they were the right path for Talos.

“You… you are not from Cydia? Then,” he said, pausing and stuttering with nervousness, “where are you from? There are no other worlds to be from! Not unless…” he stopped speaking at once, interrupted by Graham.

“I am from a land called Earth, and I’m not the on—” Graham stopped talking; something to his side was rumbling. He turned and looked; Ford smiled, for the switch he’d flipped was beginning to have effect. When Graham turned to face the rumbling noise, he was facing what should have been the elevator wall he and Wheat had been strapped to, but it was no longer the same wall – now it was a similar wall, but instead of harnesses against it there was now a door. Upon the door was a lock now in the process of unlocking itself.

It looked almost exactly like the lock Graham had developed for Curie. And it was solving itself, just as it had on that fateful night so many weeks ago.

Graham froze and stared at the lock. “What’s going on? James, hat’s going on here? Why aren’t you moving?” said Ames, hoping to snap Graham out of his trance. But Graham could not remove his eyes from the lock – it was so strikingly similar to the one he’d built, and it scared him. While the lock distracted the two, Ford climbed upon the control panel and grabbed the corpus clock with both hands. With a hearty thrust he tossed the clock at the stupefied Graham and Ames.

The lock whizzed by, in between them, and hit the wall across the room. It shattered into thousands of tiny mechanical parts and pieces. The Chronophage that had once stood proudly at the top of the corpus clock was the only piece left unbroken, otherwise the clock was entirely demolished.

In the frenzy caused by throwing the clock, Ford bolted in between Ames and Graham, managing to get out of the door before Ames could fire her gun. She ended up firing at a closed door, while Ford escaped and ran to the boiler room with the greatest speed. Ames had to force Graham, still staring at the lock that so closely resembled his design, away from the observation chamber so that they could chase Ford. “You idiot! He’s getting away! Stop staring at the door; we can’t allow him to escape. He’s a danger to the entire world. Do you hear me? The whole fucking world! That doesn’t concern you?”

Graham snapped out of his trance. “I’m sorry. There’s something about that lock; it’s very familiar. But I can explain later – let’s go. I think I know where he went. If anywhere, he couldn’t have gotten beyond the boiler room. You’d need the strength of two people to open and shut those doors.”

Together they ran back through the passageway and into the boiler room, not prepared for what they saw. Ford had climbed upon one of the steam processors and was leaning of the edge, looking down upon the active melting pot and his two pursuers, who in turn were looking up at him.

Graham and Ames ran off of the deck where the melting pot stood and looked at Ford from afar. Before Ames could say anything – particularly about shooting him down if he did anything rash to surprise them – Ford began to speak to Graham.

“Earth… I have not heard that word in a long time, Mr. Graham. It has not been mentioned for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years on Talos. Your presence here is fate, truly. Then I must be subservient; my plans are meaningless – but I will not let them go to waste. The others will never know of you. When the knights have found you and Mrs. Ames here, and my body in the cauldron, they will destroy you. Even though I am finished, so too are you finished.”

Graham shouted in retaliation: “You bastard! The lock in the observation room, how did you get it?”

“Ah, the corpus lock? It is an old thing, developed years and years ago for inter-dimensional research. For the longest time, Cydia has been the only other world I knew, and I made the grave mistake of assuming you were from that place. Ignore those assumptions – how wrong I was! But rest assured, I will not be around to make any more of those mistakes. You needn’t shoot me. As I’ve said, I have witnessed the downfall of Lanford’s society – I have seen our world decay and crumble, and I have sped it along in order to ensure a safer future. Perhaps it will be in the far future, but sacrifice drives progress. Never has a society moved forward without first making the greatest sacrifices. In fact, I do believe that was how Talos was born in its current incarnation. Terribly flawed, it is.

“But the Confederacy will have to go on with the plan without me – and without you two, of course. I daresay knights should be coming to inspect the closed room any moment now, and so I bid you adieu. While society crumbles, I shall watch you from hell!”

Ames and Graham, wide-eyed, jogged backwards as quickly as they could, for no sooner had Ford finished speaking did he jump headlong into the melting pot, only a few meters away from the top of the steam processor. He did neither screamed nor made a single noise. In an instant he was completely submerged in the lava and half his skin melted off – even if he had screamed, there was not enough time between his entering the cauldron and his death for the scream to be heard.

Nobody mourned his death – not Graham, not Ames, and not any of the residents of the continent of Lanford, who did not even know of President Ford’s existence. His was not a democratic presidency, but a presidency shrouded in mystery, and now in a timely suicide. His body now fueled the very devices he had always hoped to build. But Graham could not help feeling awkward about the whole event, as though he’d heard Ford’s voice before – somehow he’d known about the man in his dream, but he knew he hadn’t met Ford before his experiences in the observation chamber.

“His voice…” Graham said, slowly. “I heard his voice.”

“Heard whose voice? What are you talking about? We should get out of here, James.”

“No, not yet! I heard President Ford’s voice, the knight I was pulled into Talos. It must have been a portal or something, I don’t know – but behind the door, there were two voices talking nonsense, and his was one of them! It feels so clear in my mind, I’m so certain it was his voice; but whom was he conversing with? I don’t remember what they were talking about, dammit!”

“James, the knights are coming! If we don’t get out of here now, we’re going to get killed. We can only handle one or two, not a dozen. Stop thinking and start running – anywhere.

Graham turned to Ames, “Yeah, you’re right. We’ve got to get out of here, and now,” he said with a voice far more nervous than the late Ford’s. “We need to get back to that observation room. I think there’s something there that will help our escape, but you wouldn’t believe me if I told you not. Just follow me back. We left before it opened, but if I’m right, you’ll see what I mean.” Together they ran back through the passageway and forced their way into the observation chamber as knights began to storm the boiler room below.

Graham’s assumptions were right – the lock in the observation chamber had solved itself, and the door upon which the lock was affixed was swung wide open. The innards of the door seemed to suck away all of the light in the room, but Ames and Graham could still see through the gigantic glass window pane all of the hundreds of knights that had stormed the room. They eventually found Ford’s body, and Ames and Graham knew this was the moment they had to escape, before chaos broke loose in Lanford. Without a leader to guide them through the martial law, the knights would undoubtedly lose control and sight of their objective.

Society as they knew it – at least how Ames knew it – would crumble beneath their feet. They had to escape to somewhere else and find a way to stabilize Lanford and stop Ford’s plans, which would continue in the hands of the rest of the Oceanic Confederacy.

Graham knew where the portal in the door with the corpus lock on it went. He knew how he had come to Talos, and believed it, as Graham believed, to be a work of fate. It must have been fate, for only such a reason would cause Curie’s lock and the corpus locks to become so strikingly similar, similar enough that when properly aligned and solved with one another they would accidentally open a portal to another world, and world Graham had never dreamt existed, a world so far removed from Earth that he doubted it was even in the same galaxy.

Now it was Cydia on the other side of the door. Voices, too, came from the door, but they were inaudible, mushy sounding, as though they were underwater. The darkness coming from the door was expanding, and Graham’s only wish was that he was wrong about Cydia’s existence on the other side of the portal. He wished Earth was on the other side of the portal, though deep inside he knew there was no possibility that this was true. In fact, he was not even sure if Earth still stood – when he’d left it, it was without electricity.

Suddenly, a new sense of urgency caught his attention: If Talos and Earth were linked by any means, that meant the extensive research and disruption of space-time caused by inter-dimensional travel might disrupt electromagnetism on Earth. And that would cause massive rolling blackouts. It was Talos that was to blame for Earth’s misfortune! And if it truly was Cydia on the other side of the portal, then Graham knew what he and Ames had to do – cease the flow of technology from Cydia to Talos. Without their precious Cydian tech the Oceanic Confederacy would be starved and unable to continue their operations. Earth, too, would reap the benefits – electricity would most likely return to the humble blue dot.

“I know you’ll think this is strange, but we have to go through that door. It’ll seem scary, but I’ve done it once before. It’s bad, yeah, but if we survive we’ll probably be taken to another world – this looks like the fruits of Ford’s inter-dimensional research. And it looks exactly like the portal that pulled me into Talos.”

“But we don’t know where this goes,” Ames said, hoping to avoid the portal, “if it goes anywhere. We wouldn’t even know where if it did; it’s probably just a closet. Look, if we stay here—”

“If we stay here, all we’ll see is Lanford slowly fall into ruin! I won’t stick around to watch that – I have a home to get to, my own planet. I’m not from here, Jessica. I want to go home.”

“You think a closet is going to take you to Earth?”

“It’s not a closet – it’s a portal. It links to other parts of the universe, and I don’t think this one goes to Earth. Ford said Earth hasn’t been mentioned in hundreds or thousands of years. It’s more likely it goes to that other planet – he mentioned that all modern technology in Talos is derived from technology that came that planet. Cydia, it was. That means they – whoever they are – are feeding technology to Talos world leaders, and probably for a reason.”

“If we stop them from sending technology…”

“…then we stop the Oceanic Confederacy from jettisoning Talos into another dimension. Yeah. And hey, I might just get to go home. If the primitive technology here in Talos can make these portals happen, I’m sure there’s something similar on Cydia. It would be nice to stop back on Earth eventually. Not that it’s important,” Graham said sarcastically, “it’s only my home world.” He smirked, and Ames returned the favor.

“Alright. But it better not be a closet,” Ames said, reassured by Graham’s proven experience at traveling between worlds.

But neither would have much more time to make the decision of whether to not to leap into the portal, for the footsteps and armor clanking of knights soon reverberated throughout the passageway outside the door of the observation room. Both parties realized that they now had no choice but to jump into the portal, but faced with the action Graham suddenly lost his nerve.

The darkness was overwhelming. He and Ames had stepped in front of the open door, and looked into the deep darkness beyond for any sign of light, but could see nothing. Only the distance aquatically muted vocals resonated from the portal’s depths. But the knights were at the door, and Graham was forced to choose life temporarily in Cydia, or no life at all – he nodded reluctantly to Ames, confirming his decision, and stepped up to the darkness.

The darkness grabbed him, but not physically. He could feel its pull, but unlike before it was not strong enough to take him on its own. This required his will to agree. Graham closed his eyes and let himself fall into the darkness, become consumed by the darkness, leave one world and enter another. It was the strangest feeling of freefalling as one flew between worlds, and for the first time Ames, too, experienced this feeling, for she followed Graham’s example a few moments later.

Into the darkness they fell, until both entities lost consciousness. Where they would find themselves when they awoke, be it Cydia, Earth, or some other strange planet, remained unknown.

* *  *   *    *     *      *       *        *          *          *         *        *       *      *     *    *   *  * *

When Graham awoke, Ames was no longer at his side, but neither was anything else. Graham was floating freely in space, at some unknown location. Below him a planet glowed purple. He slipped out of and back into consciousness every few minutes, and each time found himself at a different location.

Eventually his body found its way onto a surface of cold metal. He was on the ground, on his belly; there was nobody else in the room, if a room it could be called. Behind Graham was another open door with a corpus lock installed on it, and not a moment later did Ames appear in a cloud of black dust that quickly evaporated, her lifeless body right on top of Graham. She did not stir; gently Graham moved her body off of his, and instantly he worried if she had survived the trip. He checked for a pulse by pressing two fingers to her neck – he found one instantly, and he let out a deep sigh of relief.

The wall on which the portal was located broke into several free-floating pieces as it cascaded up into the heavens. There was no roof to this building, only a dark starry sky. The building, however, was clearly some form of research facility. The walls glowed green in between their cracks; the glow was periodic and faded in and out, calmly and gently, at frequent intervals. Eventually, Graham wondered if he was in a room at all; from high up enough it seemed like outdoors, as the walls simply faded away and there was no roof, but from where he stood it was without a doubt the interior of a building.

He looked around further by exploring the area – over a fence he could see that the building actually stretched much further down, almost infinitely far down. Miles and miles of bridges and platforms cascaded downward below him. He imagined a resilient character jumping over these fences, down for miles without the use of an elevator. He searched and searched for some sort of lift, but could not find one.

Eventually Ames awoke, and to a certain degree of shock when she saw how unlike Talos this new world was. She turned her head around and looked at the portal from whence she’d come, noticing a terror-inducing red light coming from the area above it. Most strikingly, this light had no apparent source; rather it was as a free-floating sphere in front of the wall above the portal door. Ames could not bring herself to get up, only crawl away from the strange source of red light. She bumped into Graham, still absentmindedly exploring the area.

Graham touched the tile flooring and realized that its surface was uniform, like glad. But it appeared to be tile; it even had the illusion of three dimensions. But it was flat as glass! Everything in this building completely astounded Graham, who for a while could only wonder how these objects were constructed and designed. But soon it would be his fear, instead of his curiosity, that would take control of his body.

Across a bridge-like platform a door appeared out of thin air, and a most strange being strode through – it was a man, but at the same time it was not a man. This man lacked a proper face; he was shrouded in darkness. He wore a boulder hat, which transitioned clearly into a face made entirely of black material, as though his entire head had been painted over; in fact all of his skin was this way, and he appeared as only the silhouette of a man, a mere shadow of existence. Clothing the silhouette man’s skin was a debonair suit that made him appear as though he were at a black tie event. Ames was now even more in shock than previously and began seizing up, for she had spent all of her life in a world governed by steam – such appearances were not only uncommon, but also simply impossible.

The silhouette man tipped his hat and spoke in a stately voice akin to those from Lanford and Alteria. “Good evening – looks like we’ve got some fresh visitors here tonight. I hope you’re both in good health, especially the lady there. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Variable.”