Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series Page 3

  Lunar City became a bright smear of light that briefly illuminated the dark side of the Moon. When the light faded, Lunar City was gone, a funnel-shaped cloud of dust and debris jetting into space in its place.

  Alexander gaped at the dust-shrouded crater where more than two million people used to live. He slammed his fists against his armrests.

  “Bishop, get us away from the debris!”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “Incoming transmission—audio only,” Hayes reported.

  “Patch it through!”

  The deep, toneless voice was the same as before. It said, “This is only the beginning.”

  Alexander turned to his XO. McAdams stared back at him with wide eyes and a furrowed brow.

  “Hayes—trace that signal!” Alexander ordered.

  “It came from the wormhole again, sir. Same source.”

  “You don’t think she fired those missiles, do you?” McAdams asked.

  Alexander shook his head. “I don’t know who fired them, Commander, but whoever it was, they just declared war on Earth.”

  Chapter 2

  2819 A.D.

  —Five Years Earlier—

  “I want to take our relationship to the next level,” Skylar Phoenix said between bites of her steak.

  Dorian de Leon, A.K.A. Angel Hunter, glanced up from his plate, his brows drawing together in wary confusion. The next level? he wondered.

  “We already live together…” he said, as if that were the highest possible level any relationship could reach. Surely she doesn’t mean marriage. His parents hadn’t exactly set a stellar example of that. Then again, they’d been married in the real world, not a virtual one. Regardless, Dorian wasn’t ready for either kind of marriage. He was only 25 and just recently earned his masters in synaptic processing.

  “You look frightened.”

  Dorian shook his head as if to deny it.

  “Clear skies, Angel. I don’t mean marriage,” she clarified.

  Dorian blew out a breath. “You had me worried for a minute.”

  Skylar’s luminous features lifted in a smile. Her skin was an attractive, opalescent white that sparkled wherever the light hit, her eyes like liquid amber and her hair a river of gold.

  This particular mindscape, Galaxy, was one of the more popular ones. There were over a hundred million players—not counting the billions of procedurally-generated AI characters. In Galaxy you could choose to be any of more than a dozen humanoid and alien races in a galactic civilization set somewhere in the distant future. He and Skylar had both chosen to be Seraphs—beautiful, human-looking aliens with luminous skin and hair, and feathery white wings.

  Dorian turned his head to the view. They sat on the balcony of a restaurant on Eyria, the Seraphs home world. There were no railings to interrupt the view from the balcony, nothing but clear blue skies draped high above the colorful fields of flowers and dense forests below. The ocean sparkled in the dying rays of Eyria’s sun. Thin slivers of cloud drifted over the horizon in fiery reds and yellows, while stars pricked holes high in the evening sky as the sun sank below the horizon.

  Dorian’s momentary distraction ended, and he turned back to Skylar. Her steak lay forgotten and steaming on her heated plate, but her wine glass was conspicuously empty. She was still looking at him, her gaze exactly where he’d left it. While he’d been watching the view, she’d been watching him, waiting for him to ask the obvious question.

  “Then what do you mean by taking our relationship to the next level?”

  Skylar’s smile broadened, and she nodded. “Let’s meet.”

  “We’re meeting now…”

  “In the real world, Dorian.”

  “Don’t you mean Angel?”

  “Dorian is your real name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes…”

  “Then I mean Dorian.”

  “Sky…” he began, shaking his head.

  She reached for his hand again, and he stared absently at it. Five slender, sparkling fingers wrapped around his. “Before you say no, you need to hear my reasons.”

  “What reasons?” he blurted, looking up from their hands. “Do you know how many virtual relationships end when people try to carry them over into their real lives? I don’t even know what you look like! You don’t know what I look like either.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “That depends on your expectations.”

  “I want you to know me. The real me. I don’t want any secrets between us.”

  “The real you? What’s real, anyway?” Dorian asked. He gestured to their surroundings, his wings flexing with agitation as he did so. “This is real. You are real. Reality is just a bundle of sensory data collected by our bodies and interpreted by our brains. What does it matter where and how that data is generated?”

  “It wouldn’t matter if we never had to wake up, but we do. The real world exists, and until we can spend every available second in the Mindscape, the real world will still be important. One measure of that importance can be determined by how much time we spend living in each reality. How many hours a day do you spend in Galaxy with me?”

  “I don’t know… four, maybe five, I guess.”

  “And in other mindscapes?”

  “A few more hours. But in my defense, I don’t have a job yet.”

  Skylar nodded. “Jobs are hard to come by. Do you know how many hours a day I spend in here?”

  “Six?” he guessed.

  “Twenty-two.”

  Dorian felt his eyes grow round. “That’s impossible. It’s also illegal.”

  Skylar smiled. “Are you planning to report me to the authorities?”

  “You’d need life support to manage that.”

  Skylar nodded.

  “And you want me to meet you? Your body must be a shriveled up husk!”

  A muscle in Skylar’s cheek twitched and she looked away. The stars were out in full now. So was Eyria’s moon, a bright purple orb casting a pale lavender glow over the valley below. “Never mind. This was a bad idea.” Skylar pushed out her chair and stood up. Her amber eyes were suddenly vacant, and her expression looked like it might have been chiseled from a rock. “Would you get the bill? I’ve lost my appetite.”

  Dorian gaped at her. “You’re leaving?” Rather than reply, she turned and walked toward the edge of the balcony. “Hold on! Sky! I’m sorry!”

  When she reached the edge, she paused to glance back his way. “If you change your mind, you can meet me tomorrow. I’ll send the details to your comm band.”

  Skylar spread her wings in a flash of white feathers and then dove off the balcony, disappearing in an instant. Not sticking around to pay for their meal, Dorian pushed out from the table and ran after her. He reached the edge of the balcony and dove headfirst after her.

  His stomach lurched. He felt weightless. A warm wind roared in his ears, ripping at his clothes and hair, and ruffling his feathers, threatening to open his wings. He stubbornly held them flat against his back so he would fall faster and catch up to Skylar.

  It was at least a kilometer down to the field of flowering grasses below, once bright and variegated with color, now dim and monochromatic in the light of the moon and stars. Dorian searched desperately for a bright white speck—moonlight reflecting off her wings—but there were dozens of specks below him, some near, some far… Dorian focused on them one at a time to read their comm beacons and check their names, but none of the names that flashed up on his holo lenses read Skylar Phoenix.

  Where did she go?

  Confused, desperate, he looked up, and found a few pale gray specks, seraph wings shading themselves from the moon and stars. As he focused on the nearest one, Skylar’s name appeared, taunting him in bright green letters. Dorian cursed his stupidity. Why had he assumed she’d continued down? She must have dived at an angle and then come back up.

  Now spreading his own wings, he angled them to slow his descent and then flapped hard to gain altitude. The air felt like a physical
wall pushing back, and the pressure of his considerable momentum threatened to snap his wings like twigs.

  He gritted his teeth and strained against those forces. By the time he’d mostly arrested his momentum, he could no longer see Skylar. Activating his comms, he tried sending her a message. “Sky, where are you?”

  No answer.

  “Talk to me!”

  But all he heard was the relentless buffeting of the wind. Clearly she wanted to be alone.

  Dorian felt sick. Why was it so important to her that they meet in the real world? Especially considering what she’d said about spending just two hours a day in the real world. And why was he so averse to the idea? Dorian glided down as he thought about it. He was afraid that meeting her for real would change how he felt about her. It wouldn’t actually matter what she looked like unless she wanted to spend time interacting with him in the real world, too, a conclusion which seemed inescapable at this point. Why else would she want to meet?

  Dorian noticed the ground sweeping up fast below him. Goldwood Forest rose on the horizon, casting a dark shadow over it. Soon he was soaring low over the treetops. He banked eastward, back toward the jagged Dagger Mountains and the restaurant where he’d been dining with Skylar just a few minutes ago. As those jutting spires came into view, they peeled back the stars with a glittering wall of light—Pinnacle City. Seraphs lived almost exclusively in the mountains, suspending their dwellings from the cliffs and burrowing into them with elaborate cave systems. Dorian flapped hard to reach those heights once more, intent on returning to the restaurant, settling his bill, and going home for the night. He hoped he’d find Skylar there, but something told him she wouldn’t head home for hours yet, and long before that he was due to wake up in the real world so he could go to sleep.

  How had he not noticed that Skylar never took those breaks with him? If she spent twenty-two hours a day in the Mindscape, then that meant she slept there, too. How did she eat? Or even go to the bathroom? Two hours a day didn’t seem like enough time to attend to her body’s physical needs. He shuddered to think what kind of life support she must need to avoid those concerns.

  Maybe that was why she wanted to meet him in the real world. To show him how she did it so he could join her. Then they could become shriveled up husks together.

  Dorian grimaced at the thought. The whole setup turned his stomach, but if her reaction tonight was anything to go by, it would be the end of their relationship if he didn’t agree to meet with her, and that made him feel equally sick.

  Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t, Dorian concluded as he soared up to the balcony he’d departed moments ago. Their waiter caught his eye and glared, as if to reprimand him for leaving before paying the bill.

  All of twenty minutes later he was home, lying in bed with an ache in his chest and an empty pillow beside his. Real fatigue mingled with the simulated version, reminding him that he needed to go to bed in the real world.

  As soon as he closed his eyes to sleep, he woke up lying in bed in his room, back in his parents’ home. He felt momentarily disoriented, but that faded quickly enough. He was back on planet Earth—not that he’d ever really left.

  Turning to his bedside table he reached for his comm band and found a message from Skylar already waiting for him. As he checked it, text appeared in the air above the device.

  If you really do love me, meet me here tomorrow at 2:00 PM. There’s something I need to show you.

  The message contained a link to a location. Dorian touched the link and the message disappeared, replaced by a holographic map. The map panned over to an apartment complex in the City of the Minds, just a few hours from his parents’ home in the suburbs. Getting there wouldn’t be hard.

  Dorian frowned, wondering what Skylar needed to show him. His mind ran through a list of dark possibilities.

  Her profile in the Mindscape was verified, which meant that whatever she chose to reveal to people could be compared with verified facts about her in the real world. Her gender had been genetically verified, her sexual orientation corroborated by a brain scan, her legal status checked against real and virtual marriage records to prove that she was indeed single, and finally her chronological age had been genetically verified along with her gender—she was thirty-two, older than Dorian, but only by seven years—and what did age matter when people were immortal?

  Dorian had also gone to the trouble to have his profile verified at a local clinic. In theory the system was supposed to put people at ease about engaging in virtual relationships, because it meant there wouldn’t be any nasty surprises—or at least, not as many. Profiles were theoretically impossible to hack. Then again, it was supposed to be impossible to stay in the Mindscape for twenty-two hours a day, and Skylar had somehow found a way to do that.

  So what did she need to show him? Was she a man? A minor? An old woman? The possibilities were unfortunately endless. His imagination going wild with such horrors, Dorian knew he had no choice. He had to meet Skylar, if only to put the most chilling possibilities to rest.

  Chapter 3

  2824 A.D.

  —Present Day—

  “Admiral de Leon, Admiral Anderson from Fleet Command is requesting to speak with you,” Lieutenant Hayes announced from the comms.

  “On screen, Lieutenant.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  A man with prickly, short blond hair and fierce, deep-set gray eyes appeared on the Adamantine’s main holo display. Anderson’s chronological age appeared to be frozen around forty-five, but Alexander knew that he was actually over a hundred years old. He dated back to before the Alliance had made it illegal to have natural-born children in the northern states.

  “Sir,” Alexander saluted.

  “What the hell happened, Admiral Leon?” Anderson said after a slight delay.

  “We’ve lost Lunar City, sir,” Alexander said.

  “I know that! The whole world knows!”

  Alexander’s brow furrowed. “That was fast. How did they—”

  “A cruise liner on approach to Earth saw the whole thing. Not to mention everyone on Earth suddenly lost contact with their loved ones in Lunar City.”

  Alexander grimaced. “I accept full responsibility, sir.”

  “Never mind that. How did it happen?”

  “We detected the incoming missiles at over a million klicks, moving at one third the speed of light. We had just a few seconds to intercept. It wasn’t enough time.”

  Anderson’s jaw dropped. “You’re telling me we got hit by relativistic weapons?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any sign of what fired them?”

  Alexander shook his head. “Whatever it was, it must have been very far from Earth when it dropped the ordnance. By now I’m sure they’re long gone.”

  Missiles couldn’t get up to those speeds by themselves. Large starships could, but only by spending long periods of time accelerating at a constant rate.

  “Give me a ballpark,” Anderson added.

  Alexander’s glanced down from the main holo display to the Adamantine’s engineering station. “Rodriquez?” he asked her.

  “A few seconds to calculate, sir.”

  Alexander nodded.

  “Take your time,” Anderson said after a slight transmission delay.

  Rodriguez reported, “Assuming an initial velocity of zero, and a maximum of fifteen Gs sustained acceleration, you’d have to travel almost 180 astronomical units just to accelerate a ship up to a third of the speed of light. Since we didn’t see any ships crash into the Moon behind those missiles, and since no one reported detecting a ship headed for the moon at that kind of speed, we can assume they must have launched those missiles when they were still a long way off and difficult to spot on sensors. How far off is anyone’s guess, but we know they must have traveled at least another 180 AU toward us while decelerating. Add to that whatever minimum distance they decided to keep from us to avoid detection—let’s say 20 AU—and in total we’re looking at
over 360 AU.”

  Anderson slowly shook his head. “Give me a reference point for that, Lieutenant.”

  Rodriquez bobbed her head. “Yes, sir. You know one astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. Neptune orbits at about 30 AU from the sun, and the Kuiper Belt and the dwarf planets orbit as far out as 50 AU. The Heliopause, or the outer edge of the solar system, is over 100 AU away, so this ship had to have begun accelerating toward us from interstellar space.”

  “Then it’s possible that we are actually looking at an alien attack—or an attack by some surviving remnant of the confederate fleet,” Anderson said.

  Alexander blinked. “Sir, with all due respect, I think we need to consider other more likely possibilities.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as someone sent a warship on a very long trip so that they could later turn around and shoot missiles at us at relativistic speeds.”

  Anderson’s gray eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Then why did it look like both the transmissions and the missiles came from the Looking Glass?”

  “If I may—” Bishop began from the helm “—that’s not so hard, sir. You’d have to make a near miss with the mouth of the wormhole, but assuming they accounted for that brief tug of gravity in their firing solution, there’s no reason it couldn’t work.”

  “That actually might be how we detected those missiles so far out in the first place,” Frost added from sensors. “Dead-dropped, zero-thrust ordnance is impossible to detect at a million klicks, but our logs show those missiles were firing their thrusters over the last few seconds of their approach. They were making last minute course corrections, maybe to compensate for the wormhole throwing them off their target.”

  Anderson sighed. “At least we have our atmosphere to protect us from attacks like that on Earth.”

  “Actually, Admiral, at those speeds our atmosphere would not act as an effective shield—all it would do is help spread the damage,” Bishop said from the helm. “The effect of a weapon like that hitting Earth would be much worse.”