I had a long day working with home theater people to repair our home theater system. I only wrote half as much as a result; tomorrow’s entry will be double length, with any luck, putting me half a day ahead.

Word Count: 81,749

Variable led the group up to the edge of the island, just below one of the giant Leaves, and signaled to the group that it was time they departed. “Don’t expect this to be as fast as the light tram,” he said, and knocked on one of the boulders floating at the edge of the island. Instantly the boulder opened up, revealing a cushioned geodic interior. After stepping in, he noticed that Graham and Ames were fearful. “It’s not going to plummet, I assure you. Come in.”

Reluctantly, the two stepped in, only to realize that the base of the boulder vehicle felt more stable than the island itself, a great relief to the travelers. The interior of the rock, however, was nothing more than the upholstery, unless one counted the virtual objects inside the sphere of stone. Variable began tapping away at a special panel that was present at the “front” of this vehicle. On a pre-placed artificial screen was a dial whose range spanned from one to two hundred, and a dynamic city selector whose options changed based on the user’s choice from the dial. Variable selected “199” from the dial, and selected the city of Salvia.

The stone began to hum, a wavy noise whose tune could have been considered music from a strange pipe, yet there were no pipes to be seen. There was only stone, and much of it – not even a real window to see outside of the rock. The entire geode closed shut with a thud, and the dials disappeared to make way for an artificial window. Graham lifted his glasses; the window disappeared. It looked just like a real window with the glasses on – as if someone had truly cut a hole in the stone. In fact, it looked so real that Graham could not tell the difference between the edge of the artificial window and the real stone.

Through the artificial window Graham could see a faint green glow, which came from the bottom of the stone vehicle. These were the special materials keeping the stone afloat by magnetically repelling the surface of the planet and the magnetized particles in the atmosphere. The relative movement of the dust in the atmosphere indicated to Graham that the vehicle was quickly travelling outward towards the edge of the planet’s sustainable area. The pinkish dusty atmosphere became thinner; Graham had trouble breathing, even inside the stone vehicle, and could feel the pressure decrease dramatically as millions of micro-pores automatically safely adjusted the pressure inside the cabin to equal the pressure outside to prevent the stone from bursting.

It was nearly ten minutes in silent transit before they reached Country 199, and another minute before reaching the island containing Salvia. Graham had been staring intently out of the artificial window the entire way to Salvia, and saw countless islands floating in the sky, all above a miraculously green glowing planetary core hundreds of miles below. Salvia was much larger than Migard; the entire island had been developed and there was not a trace of greenery – artificial or otherwise – anywhere visible from the outside.

The stone vehicle docked in port. A message appeared in the artificial window thanking the passengers for choosing the Leaf Transport System (LTS), and wished them a safe stay in Salvia.

Graham, Variable and Ames departed the stone vehicle and stepped out onto a tiled port. A long stone and tile dock extended out from a main square where hundreds of people gathered, waiting to use any one of the vehicles they could acquire. As soon as the three travelers had left their vehicle, another six instantly pounced upon it in a rush to leave Salvia.
“Those people are quite antsy,” Graham remarked. “I wonder what for?”

“I haven’t a clue,” said Variable in response. “They look like tourists. Perhaps their curfew is up, and they’re returning to The Collective. But that’s only my best guess; luckily, I cannot read their minds while in my fetch, and they cannot read mine.”

“You’d better be hiding something good,” Ames said. “To abandon a life of infinite knowledge for a few secrets? I couldn’t imagine giving that up for even the most important secrets in the world.” Ames trudged forward ahead of the group, as if she knew where she was going. She stopped, realizing this. “Ah, why am I leading? Variable, take us to your contact.”

“She is located at the top of that skyscraper, there,” he said, pointing to the tallest building in the city. “She lives in a penthouse; her days of working for The Collective made her quite wealthy. The Collective pays all of its workers generously, but not generously enough to make our planet-wide currency worthless. Those working jobs for The Collective, past and present, can often afford to vacation in expensive homes and apartments. In the case of my acquaintance, she was able to purchase this penthouse before retreating from The Collective’s grasp.”

Variable led them up to the city’s entrance, blocked by a gate, but unlike Talos there were no guards – no knights – around to ask for identification. ID seemed worthless in Cydia, what with the ability to change bodies at will a freely available resource. Even if police in Cydia could track the true identity of a consciousness, it would not matter; minds were punished on a case-by-case basis, and did not accumulate over time. For when time was nearly infinite (fetches themselves never aged, and the mind is a permanent structure when not tied to a physical body), all punishments – and, for that matter, all pleasure derived from illegalities – became essentially useless. Nevertheless, Cydia had its ways of dealing with rogue minds.

Above the city’s entrance were more Leaves – they were plastered all over the city, hanging above buildings as constant reminders of where Graham was at all times, just in case he forgot. Variable led them through more streets, more back alleys; to Graham it was all the same. The buildings could be more splendid and grand, but in the end everything looked the same up close. Everywhere, graffiti – everywhere, destruction. The cities were rotting away; Graham wondered how old they were.

Even if they had been around for over a thousand years, they were incredibly wear-resistant buildings. He decided that he should expect no less from a society built upon technological achievement.

They took a light tram to their destination; Graham felt as though he’d never left Migard, although he knew that this packed city spanned for at least several more miles across than Migard’s island had. Thinking about it made him tired, and riding the light tram made him disoriented. By the time they arrived in the lobby of the building, graham was hardly sure where he was. Was he in Migard, or still in Salvia? The apartment complex told him the difference: it was nothing at all like the Equation’s building.

The light tram had dropped the three travelers off directly underneath the lobby of the gigantic apartment and office complex. Graham could never figure out why the two had been combined; possibly to save space, or possibly because corporate masters had, at one time, wanted their employees to remain close to their cubicles their entire lives. No matter what the reason, the skyscraper existed, and was taller than any structure Graham had ever seen. It made even the tallest buildings on Earth look like mere toothpicks in comparison. The building itself was over two miles high, split into over a thousand different floors of varying thicknesses. A mere elevator would have taken ages to climb up to the very top of this skyscraper, which was why the architects had utilized technology from the light trams to power a new elevator system.

Graham, by now quite nauseous, was reluctant to use a light tram elevator.

“You have to,” said Ames. “Otherwise we’ll never get the information. Just suck it up and take it like a man. You’ll make it to the top alright.” She set the number for the top floor on the virtual dial through her glasses and stepped into the light, as Variable had done before her. Graham shivered, wiped his forehead, and entered the light elevator, recalling his incredibly unpleasant experience with the elevators on Talos – was there not a single planet outside of Earth that could build practical, safe, sickness-free elevators?

Graham stepped out of the blinding blue light into a small metallic airlock, and neither Ames nor Variable was in sight. The airlock pressurized and scanned his body for contaminant before lowering a protective magnetic shield on the door in front of him. The door itself was already open. When he opened the door, Ames was already waiting on the other side.

“James, isn’t this room fantastic?” she said. “Look over there! I wonder what that is.”

The walls of the room, large, metallic, and chilly, was primarily constructed of stainless steel, or at least a resembling material, and the floor of some strange black metal, clearly not iron. Graham knocked on the floor; the sound was foreign. It could even have been some strange stone or crystal flooring, cut perfectly and smoothly. In the distance – and quite a far distance, for this one room could have fit an entire single-story house inside – was a table with a strange device rested upon it, hovering over a tiny glass slide.
After further inspection, Graham realized it looked a bit like a microscope.

“Fantastic indeed,” Graham said. “But I’m a bit concerned that we were able to get in without the permission of whoever lives here. I don’t know anyone who just leaves their front door open all the time.”

And then Graham heard him – Variable was storming about the place, looking for any trace of life, and shouting, “Maiya? Maiya, are you home? You left the goddamned door open.” He rummaged through other rooms, as Ames and Graham stood next to the door that had been left unlocked for mysterious reasons, sure that wherever Variable was searching he would find nothing of significance, and especially not the woman he sought so fervently.