I think we all know what happened to Vince. But I’m a bit surprised he didn’t figure it out sooner.

Word Count: 18,810

The interior was run-down; the wallpaper, made of a certain type of hardened fabric, was peeling off of the walls and ripped in several places, and the ugly shade of yellow didn’t do the hotel any favors. I walked up to an old man at the front desk and asked for a room, any room. He took one look at me and shriveled into a corner, saying I could have any room I liked.

“Really?” I said, thinking it might have been a gesture of kindness.

“Yes, just take whatever room you need!” He pressed a button on his glasses, and a virtual bucket of keys appeared on the counter top. I took one of the keys, not thinking. Only when I held the key in my hand did I realize that there was no way I could be seeing the keys or the bucket without my glasses.

I asked the man if either the bucket or the keys were real. The answer was, as I expected, no.

I touched the key. It felt like a real key. I ran my finger along its jagged edge and saw my finger compress to the grooves in the key. It must have been real; I couldn’t rationalize it any other way. There was nothing else it could have been, and I didn’t once consider that Maiya or The Embassy had altered my physical structure. Would anyone have thought of that? I looked at the man strangely, and held the key up close to my eyes, examining it. I told him I liked the key, and that I’d take the room. I thanked him, and then walked through the lobby to a hallway beyond.

The hallway led to several sections of the hotel, not the least of which was another lobby. To get to the light trams, I had to pass though the second lobby. The carpet was torn up. The chairs and couches looked fifty or sixty years old. I wasn’t even sure if it was safe to be in that room, much less converse with the people in it.

A group of people had gathered about in one corner of the room, next to a door. A few of them looked like very high-brow citizens, so I wasn’t sure what they were doing in this dump. The light tram, I could see, was in the other direction. My room was on the fifth floor.
I figured that the least I could do was introduce myself to these people and start a conversation. Thinking they might know something about me, or about Inland’s building here, I walked up to the group and said hello.

I was ignored, rather blatantly. The group moved a step away from me.

I walked away; if they didn’t want to help me, that was their own problem. I worked my way nearly up to the light tram before a man appeared behind me. A stout, gross looking man in a suit, who asked me what business I had at this hotel. I said I was new, trying to find my way around.

“You smell new. You from Earth?” he said.

“No, I don’t think so. What’s Earth?” I asked, hoping that smelling new was a good thing, because the hotel certainly didn’t.

“You haven’t heard? Where have you been, under a rock for the last four years?”

“Well, actually—”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll fill you in. You see those folks over there in the corner? I’m with them, and about half of them are from Earth. So, what’s Earth? Earth is another planet. Yeah, I see the look on your face – holy crap, right? Well, we made contact with another planet, and it’s pretty damn far away, too. Most of those folks, they ain’t never heard of electricity, or light trams, or glasses. None of that stuff exists to them.

“But y’see, that’s where people like me come in. We want to introduce Cydian technologies into their world so that they can build up an infrastructure and eventually give us resources. Genius, right?”

The stout man smiled a wide smile, and I nodded. Another planet? I didn’t believe it for a moment. First the keys, and now this ridiculousness about humans from another world – the surface was not only uninhabitable, but also insane! I thanked the man for his time, and he said he had to run anyway. Taking it as a joke, I approached the light tram, looking to push the button that would take me to the fifth floor. Next to the light tram was a set of floating, digital buttons – buttons that I would have expected only to see with glasses on. I couldn’t understand how I could see those buttons. I pushed the button for floor number five, and it felt as though I was pushing a physical button. I pushed harder; my finger wouldn’t move through it as it usually would. Baffled, I stepped into the light tram to be taken to the fifth floor.

Traveling by light tram is an odd experience. There are no human-accessible light trams beneath the surface, so this was my first experience traveling by one in eight years, discounting the event in the Inland building just before.

At either end of a light tram are two person-sized bulbs of blue light, concentrated, hovering in midair. Containing these bulbs are trillions of tiny nano-scale robots, each clinging to a set of photons. In this manner, light trams can also fork and take passengers to multiple destinations. Their paths are visible as a solid blue trail of light, usually bounded by a shell or safety mechanism to prevent people from touching the beam and getting one of their limbs disintegrated.

When a person steps into the bulb at either end of the light tram, his or her body is converted into a beam of light and shot toward the other end, where the body is rematerialized and spat out. It all happens so fast that nobody notices the process. You may as well be stepping in one end and out the other.

I say it’s odd because you can never get over the feeling of having not gone anywhere, but being somewhere totally different. Halfway around the world is only a single step away – the same walking distance as the fifth floor of the Cascade Inn. When I stepped out of the light tram and onto the fifth floor of the Inn, it didn’t feel like I’d gone anywhere, and yet my surroundings were entirely different. Being used to moving on foot for eight years, it was a bit of a shock.

The fifth floor was just as run-down as the first. I looked at my key; I was room 505. Walking to my room was a chore in the filth of the Cascade Inn. The yellow walls peeled away here as well; in some cases, insulation was showing. Foam was on the ground. Tiles were uplifted. Doors were lacking paint. It was a shithole if there ever was one.

Along the way, I heard a few people talking in their rooms.

“So, you say you’re from Earth?” a woman’s voice spoke. “Ah, silly me. Here, I have a spare translator. It’s so strange that you just came out of that door! It surprised me. Are many people around here from Earth?”

“Yes, ma’am. We come by invitation of the Cydian embassy. Your culture has much to teach us. It is grand that others outside of our planet are concerned for our well-being.”

“Fascinating… but why did you end up in my room?”

“To be honest, ma’am, I did not come by willingly. I was torn asunder from my land, ripped through space and time, and brought here by force. I have been taken in and out of Cydia several instances by now; each time I am somewhere else, and each time I am called upon by a new embassy of Cydia to discuss how our worlds shall interact with one another in the future. Now it seems that many more from my world are here, from region across the planet. They are gathering downstairs, and several are wandering the corridors of this building, alone.”

“Fascinating… truly, fascinating…”

I couldn’t listen to this blather; I made my way to my room and convinced myself that this otherworldly business was a joke. I held the key up to the door, and a message appeared above it, noting that the door was unlocked – a message I would have normally only seen with my glasses on, once again. I hardly even noticed it, if but for a fleeting thought. These messaged had become so integrated into my daily life, they may as well have been transparent to me.

I entered the room, not expecting anything glamorous. There was a rock-solid bed and an old hologram broadgraph took up the bulk of the room. To my right, a bathroom that I was sure I would never have the urge to use, and to my left a small set of coat hangers. There was no reason for me to stick around, and yet I had nowhere to go. My belongings were all still down in the mines with Maiya, the backstabbing son of a bitch. I can’t say I should have expected anything glamorous from my short partnership with her, either. Like the room, that relationship was beaten, tattered, and dilapidated beyond repair.

I jumped onto the bed, the tough mattress hurting me as I fell onto it, and stared up at the ceiling. In the cheesiest way, the Slate ceiling had a polished sheen to it so that it acted as a very dark mirror. At certain points throughout the ceiling were inlets where artificial light – light that I should not have been able to see – was placed to illuminate the room.

It was only through that mirrored ceiling of Slate that I caught my first glimpse of what Maiya and The Embassy had done to me back in the Inland skyscraper. I looked up, frightened and shocked by what I saw in the ceiling’s reflection: A tall, muscular man who looked nothing like me, staring at me as if ready to charge at any moment. I waved my hand at him, and his hand moved with mine.

Panicking, I picked myself and ran to the bathroom, not even registering the pain from the bed anymore.