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= META 4 CITY =

a DarkSF Novel

by John Argo

Page 25.

Chapter 19

“Are you starting to feel comfortable with your new life?" Lindy asked early one morning as they headed back to the fortress after a long night in the Bit Cave. They walked uphill along the dark street that had high stone walls on either side, and no street lighting. The brightness of the university campus was falling behind them.

"I think yes." Tedda took a deep breath and exhaled, watching her breath come out as vapor. It was still dark out, and lights gleamed in many university windows. The wet walls gleamed with reflected ice on the sidewalks. "I'm beginning to feel more focused. That make any sense?"

Lindy shrugged, walking along her scarf over her lower face and her hands jammed deep in the pockets of an old army coat that swung as low as her ankles. She had her dark hair pinioned inside a faded wool beret.

Tedda felt livelier than she had in a long time. "I have this feeling that something is wrong down there, and that I can help them somehow."

"Isn't that why the fatherland supposedly plugged you in?"

Tedda laughed. "I imagine they know what they are doing. Don't you?"

Lindy seconded with a less animated laugh. "Glad to see you're on a roll. So what do you think you can do for them?" Her face looked shadowed under the walls.

"They have a proliferation problem with their algorithms. I'm going to think about whether that is related to the energy input when the Rules shape things. In other words, they pull out the black flavor monopoles, and then tell the gray flavor monopoles to act in certain ways under the sea floor or Bottom so that the quarks will swarm this way or that, and in turn the subatomic particles line up and form a stone wall or an iron bar or a pond full of water. They can even replicate finer and more complex artificial structs like a golf cart or a fluorescent light." She trailed off, lost in a flood of equations—balances, relationships, imbalances, potentials, transformations, a wealth of such underlying music that defined the scaffolding of reality. "They just can't seem to tell the process how hard or easy to go at it, when to stop, or how many scooters or caverns to make."

Lindy added: "They also hear the East Gothans doing the same thing on the other side."

Tedda had a growing surge of insight. "Not sure. If it's a mirror image, that would be curious. But it seems we are on the defensive, while they are the aggressor in this business. You know…what you said…and I heard that banging, ringing, as if they were having an anvil concerto…I wonder if rhythm, wavelengths, timing, focus, concentration have something to do with it." She answered her own question: "Of course they do. Everything hangs together, Lindy. Sometimes the hard part is getting one's arms around the whole thing. Until that works, nothing falls into place. Once you go around it a couple of times, the larger parts start falling into place, and then the smaller ones, until the whole picture makes sense."

"So what's you guess?"

"West Gotha invented a peaceful technology, for data storage and tunneling, which was stolen from us and now seems to be being developed into a weapon to invade and attack us. So we must react by developing the same thing, only a little bit more powerful, to stop them. Maybe we can deter them."

Lindy said: "Maybe the whole thing was a bad idea, and we should let the particle sea fill in the tunnels, let the connections close up forever, and we forget it like it never happened."

Tedda shook her head. "You can never turn back progress. If you lose your nerve and back away, you enemy will double his efforts and clobber you."

"You sound like a Cheddar Billo propaganda soundtrack," Lindy said, grinning. Cheddar Billo was a quaint myth from the pre-Moss days. Then, realizing the treason she'd spoken, her smile faded and she looked straight ahead. She walked a bit faster, avoiding Tedda's curious gaze.

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