d I, was dead and gone, long gone! We descended for about six minutes. The shaft was totally black . . . but at last, we saw a blue glowing door. But we went right past it without stopping! "First-floor dungeon," Jill announced out of the blue. "Whips and tortures. Racks, pressings, iron cages, and bats." She stood in a perfect at-ease posture: feet shoulder-width apart, chest and shoulders squared away, hands clasped behind her back. Another long interval passed, during which we continued to descend. I put my hand out and felt the walls around the shaft sliding against my fingers. We were moving slowly, not like we were in an elevator in a high-rise, but at a stately pace ... as befitted a holy place. Another door hove into view, red this time. "Second-floor dungeon," Jill recorded. "Iron maid- ens, thumbscrews, rat cages . . . ladies' underwear." Arlene snorted, trying hard to look stern and not smile . . . This was a holy place, after all! The third floor took the longest. I swear, we rode for twelve minutes in silence, but maybe it was shorter. At last, a simple wooden door rolled up into view-- and at last, we stopped. The door opened, showing us a nice comfortable hallway. "Third-floor dungeon," Jill impressively tolled, "ev--ery--bod--y out!" Arlene and I stepped through, and I paused, waiting for Jill to join us. She shook her head sadly. "Sorry, Corporal--I mean, Sergeant--" "Lieutenant," corrected my ever-so-helpful help- meet, Arlene. "Really? Cool! Sorry, Lieutenant, and, um, Lance Corporal ... all ghosts must stay aboard the elevator. It's like a rule." Smiling sadly, Jill faded away slowly . . . starting at her feet and working her way upward, until at last only the smile remained, then even that vanished. Arlene sighed. "I always did love that book," she said--another one of her patented, semantic-free comments. The hallway stretched both directions, but right in front of us, where we couldn't possibly miss it, was a chalk scrawl. J.L., it read, and there was an arrow pointing left. "Jill Lovelace," A.S. and I said simulta- neously. We followed the arrow. There were about a hundred twists and turns, doors to pass through. It was a labyrinth there, on the third- floor "dungeon" below the Tabernacle! Mostly offices, but a few looked like labs--a far cry from the tanks and artillery pieces below the original Tabernacle, but then, these were happier, more peaceful times. We'd have been utterly lost without the chalk initials and arrows--and I appreciated the reference to our first mission: that was how I eventually realized Arlene was still alive and how I found her. At last, we were led to the door of a huge lab. Through the clear window in the door, I saw a room as vast as the inner Tabernacle above us, but stuffed full of laboratory equipment. As we approached, a motion detector felt us coming and opened a panel in front of a palm-size touchplate. Arlene and I stopped abruptly, looking back and forth to each other. I was quite disturbed to see the wild light of hope in her eyes. "Look, don't get your hopes up into orbit, A.S. You know you're not going to find Albert, so don't even think it! I don't want you collapsing later, when you finally realize the truth." She just looked at me, and I don't think her expression changed a millimeter. "You going to touch it--or should I?" she asked. I inclined my head. I was sure Jill would have programmed both our palm prints into the doorlock, since both were on file in the old FBI database. Arlene reached her hand out, hesitated a moment, then placed her palm against the plate. I heard a loud click, and the door rolled down into the floor so quickly that I almost didn't see it moving. We entered the huge lab, and the door slid up and locked behind us. We were probably trapped until Jill's AI program decided to let us leave. We strolled around a bit, taking in the sight: tables, tables, tables, full of elaborate machinery and strange swirls of tubing; rows of tiny devices that looked suspiciously like computers linked together into a neural network; huge tubes big enough for humans, full of humans, I should add, doubtless in some sort of life stasis; and glassware everywhere . . . test tubes, beakers, flasks, you name it--but nobody walking around tending things. It was entirely automated. And in the center of it all was a huge sarcophagus, like the things they buried Egyptian mummies in. We approached, and Arlene suddenly reached out and grabbed my hand, squeezing so hard she almost cracked my bones! I knew exactly who she expected to find, and exactly who she wouldn't find in the case. Sadly, I was right. We got closer, and it was obvious that whoever was in there, it wasn't Albert . . . who was, after all, about my size. The sarcophagus was much too small. But neither of us was prepared for what we did find: the case contained the fifteen-year-old body of Jill! She looked like she was just sleeping, nude and serene, but I couldn't see her breasts rise and fall, as I would have expected if she were breathing. Arlene leaned over the case while I was still staring, trying to avoid looking at parts I wasn't supposed to look at. "Jesus, Fly!" said my bud. "It's a clone!" "A ... clone? How do you know?" Arlene reached over and picked up a nameplate, handing it to me: Sleeping Cloney-- A prick on the finger shall make her sleep A hundred years in dreams so deep, Until she wakes in love and bliss, Restored to life by a princely kiss. We stared at Jill, Arlene and I. "Do you think it's the real Jill?" I asked. Arlene shook her head. "That's not how Jill would do it. She'd want to live her life and die normally, or at least preserve herself as an adult. No, I'll bet you this is a clone, grown to the age she was when we left, her brain filled only with the memories a fifteen-year- old would have." "Does she remember us?" "Why not? Jill isn't cruel. She wouldn't put that torture on us, Fly ... to know the new Jill, but not be known, to see her as sullen and withdrawn as she was before, after the monsters killed her parents." Arlene reached out and gently touched the glass cover of the sarcophagus. "Hang tight, honey, we'll come back, as soon as we've seen the present you left us." "Maybe that's it," I said, nodding at Jill. But Arlene shook her head impatiently. "Come on, Fly! She's a pest, but she's certainly not that egotis- tical!" A booklet sat on the case, and I took it down and skimmed it. Then I stopped and said, "Holy cow! You know what this is, A.S.?" I handed it to her. The title was: The Deconstruc- tionists' New Clothes, Being the Oh-so-secret History of the Galaxy's Most Stupidest War. The author was Jill Lovelace, PhD, LLD, CIA, MAD. It was a short story, but we both realized what it really was. Somehow, Jill had managed to pry out of someone, maybe the Klave--Scars and Roebuck's uncles?--the whole freaking mystery that we never could get. .. what the damned war was all about! Yeah, right, the Six Million Year War that resulted, eventually, in a strategic chess move by the Freds, of House Deconstructionists, to invade Earth and kill us by the millions. The war that had started the whole thing. I'm not going to quote the whole story. It was long and pretty damned good, and I don't want Jill's electrifying prose to make my own look lamer than it already does. So I'll paraphrase the intel instead. Of all the secrets Arlene and I had faced since we first found ourselves under attack by space demons, that was the most frustrating, the most galling ... or to Arlene, the outright funniest: that a war could erupt and be prosecuted for six million years between two competing schools of literary criticism! But at last we got the full, complete story of how it happened. According to Jill's book, the same "First Men" who built the Gates and the gravity zones and scattered them throughout the galaxy left behind only one other legacy--eleven fragments of prose. That's it, the sum total remains of a race that was technologically sophisticated and advanced at least three billion years ago: Gates, gravity zones, and eleven pieces of literature. All the races of the galaxy in roughly our own time (six or seven million years ago, which on the three-billion-year scale is negligible) began to analyze these fragments--each used its own most highly refined theories of literary criticism, but because literary criticism is at its core nothing much but a projected map of whatever weird cobwebs infest the mind of the critic, naturally each race painted a different picture of what the First Men were really like. Eventually, the war of words turned ugly, and important literary critics became casualties--not that anyone cared much. But when one coalition, the Deconstructionists, decided to end the argument by deconstructing the Klave homeworld--and they failed!--the Great Divide became law and eventually custom, which is a billion times stronger than law. For six million years, give or take a month, the Decon- structionists and the Hyperrealists had been duking it out for control of the literary forms of the galaxy . . . and for the right to re-construct the past. And that was it! As Arlene said when she finished reading, quoting some sci-fi book she loved, Nineteen Eighty-Four: Who controls the past controls the present; who controls the present controls the future. So ever since just around the time the first proto- humanoids were climbing down out of the trees on Earth and looking up at the great white light in the night sky, wondering if it were a divine eyeball, these ginks have been murdering each other over half the galaxy over some artsy-fartsy, lit-crit interpretation of eleven story fragments. Then, when they got tired of fighting in their own backyard, the bloody-handed Deconstructionists decided to take their college liter- ature thesis to our lovely planet! God, this universe is an absolute treasure. I love every centimeter of it-- no, really. I put the book back down, resisting the impulse to fling it across the room. To hell with them all, Hyperrealist and Deconstructionist alike! I didn't give a damn about the stupid fragments--I had more important fish to smoke. We hunted around for a few minutes, and suddenly Arlene let out a glad cry. Another arrow! J.L., it read, and pointed at a small room. The room had a regular door, with a good, old- fashioned handle. I turned it and opened her up. The room was bare, save for a single card table, dust free. On the table was a small black box with a single orange light showing unwinking on the side. We crossed the space together, my lance and I, and together we saw the single sign left on the box. It was hand-lettered, and I recognized Jill's atro- cious handwriting. There was a single word: Albert. We stared. Arlene fell to the ground on her butt, but she didn't take her eyes off the black box with the bright glowing eye. Albert! Albert? I didn't know what to say, so, Goddamn it, I decided to just shut up and be a Marine. Semper fi, Mac ... I know when I'm beat! 22 It was Arlene who found the Door, but Slink Slunk was more excited than the rest of us, for she recognized what it was. All of the rest of our apostles--Whack, Sniff, Chomp, and Swaller, our spineys, and Pfc. Wilhelm Dodd, the zombie--had been created within the simulation by the normal "monster-spawn" process that mimicked the vats and genetic programming the Freds used to create the original monsters. But Slink was the prototype spiney; she was the "firssst and only," as she put it, generated specially by the Newbies inside their program environment, be- fore the rest of the simulation was even running. And Slink remembered her existence before the rest of the simulation was built. The Newbies were better artists than they realized: they hadn't intended to give freak- ing free will to their program demons, and they sure as hell didn't want the code to remember its own creation! We had searched the immediate vicinity of the star- shaped chamber after ducking out Arlene's crack, but we didn't find anywhere else to go but the huge Gate. "It's me," she said, crestfallen. "I still remember the last time, and I searched for almost a whole day before giving up and heading through the Gate." The ground was jagged with sharp broken pieces of dead plant life, and the stench of sulphur almost knocked me out. The spineys seemed to love it, though, and even Dodd looked a little less tormented. The sky overhead was inverted, white with black stars; I tried not to look at it, since it gave me vertigo like I'd never felt before, not even in zero-g. "Fly," said my partner. "I'm trying to remember how Olestradamus managed to escape his doom at the claws of the hell princes. He survived, didn't he? He's out here somewhere, waiting for us?" I tried to "remember" it that way with her, but Olestradamus's death was too vivid. In the end, we both had to give it up--the poor pumpkin would have to remain our first martyr. Damn it! I thought. What's the use of lucid dream- ing if you can't actually control everything? I didn't have a good answer, so I pointed wordlessly at the Gate. Holding hands, we shot through, then we fairly flew through the Deimos base, avoiding traps we remem- bered, converting a few more monsters, and killing what we couldn't convert. We picked up a Clyde-- despite my objections that I didn't remember the genetically engineered human with the machine gun until we got back to Earth--three more spineys, and a passel of zombie buddies for Dodd. We even managed to convert a fatty, but the planet-shaped critter with the fireball shooters where its hands should have been, Fats Jacko, he called himself, was so overweight that he just couldn't keep up. In the end, I dubbed him our first missionary and sent him off at his own pace to convert the rest of monsterland. But before we got to the nasty spidermind at the bottom of Deimos, Arlene finally managed to find the Door. She first started looking for the Door when she remembered the three courses in program design that she took during her brief stint in college. "Fly," she whispered, while we crouched in the hand-shaped gully where Arlene had killed the Dodd-zombie the last time. "Whenever we wrote a program, we always used to stick in what we called back doors. Maybe the Newbies did, too!" "What the hell is a back door?" She licked her lips, sighting along her .45 rifle at a lumbering pinkie. So far, it hadn't smelled us. We weren't worried about it hearing us; they made so much noise just walking and breathing that they probably wouldn't hear a freight train coming up behind them on the railroad tracks. But there were other creatures out there with acute hearing--silence was best. "When you want to test some aspect of a program, you create routines to set the various variables to, well, anything you like." "Ah, setting variables. More college stuff. How's this supposed to help us, Lance?" College was insidi- ous. You started out just to learn a thing or two, then suddenly--wham, bam--you're wearing lieutenant's butter-bars on your collar! No thanks. I would never become an officer--and I would never go to college. "You need a combination," Arlene answered. "A password to access these procedures, but if you have it, you can move around the software like a ghost in a haunted house, passing right through walls and doors like they weren't even there." I stared at a rough rock wall to our left. "You mean, if we found this back door, we could phase right through that stone wall?" "Fly, if we found this back door, we might be able to get out of the whole simulation and get loose in the Disrespect's operating system. I stared at her, feeling real hope for the first time in days--simulated days. "Jesus, Arlene! Maybe I should have gone to university!" We both stared at each other, shocked by the words that came out of my mouth. "Ah, that is just a joke," I explained. "All right . . . I'm remembering now." She stared at a particularly juicy rock. She grunted with the strain of "remembering" a Door. She sweated, but nothing happened to the rock. "Christ, I can't just visualize it from nothing!" Too loud: a horde of imps heard and came over to investigate. We shot them from cover while they threw their mucus wads at us. I took a shot in the face and was blinded again--criminey! Arlene backed away, pumping shot after shot from the lever-action rifle she had picked up in a storage locker in the inverted-cross chamber on Deimos. It was easier for her to remember the most recent weapon she actually remembered using; I tried for a double-barreled shot- gun, but I was still stuck with the damned Sig-Cow. The spineys moved close enough that our own spiney corps could open fire from the sides with their piles of sharp rocks. The imps didn't know what to think! They hurled their snotballs for a while until they realized their attackers were other imps, immune to the fire, then the enemy broke and ran. Arlene cleaned me up with a medical kit, also salvaged from the locker where she had found the rifle--same place we found uniforms (but no armor) to cover our nakedness right after the jump. Dodd was perfectly content to wander around starkers, once we got him a shotgun, but a red-faced Arlene ordered him to cover himself up. Evidently, the sight of her naked ex-lover, the one she had killed once, brought back too many horrific memories. Bad memories could be savage enemies in this place. I was thinking about the Door, or lack of a Door. "I think just visualizing isn't enough. You have to have it really strong in your mind." "I did!" "No, I mean like obsessing about it. You have to anticipate, salivate for it, visualize it some distance ahead of you and hold the thought in your mind as your life's goal all the way down there." She sat down beside me and put her arm over my shoulders, holding me like a frightened lover. "It's a pretty horrible thought, Flynn Taggart. Means we have to go deeper, doesn't it?" "'Fraid so, A.S." Arlene nodded slowly. "Well, that's why they let us wear the Bird and Anchor. Okay, Fly, it's all starting to come back to me, now. I remember where the Door is." "Where is it?" "It's three levels down. Remember that head- twisting open courtyard with all the freaking teleport- ers that zapped us to all the different rooms? Well, it's--it's in the room at the back of the courtyard with all the crushing pistons." I struggled to remember. In the intervening months (and thousands of monsters), it had all become a blur. But I thought I remembered what she was talking about. "Good deal, kiddo, just keep visualizing it. When we get there, we'll see it--I guarantee." I hoped I wouldn't have to eat those words, but the only thing that might do the trick now was total assurance on my part. Maybe it would be infectious. Three levels down, we entered the courtyard. I decided we had better clear the central buildings first, which contained pumpkins, some spineys, and a hell prince--too much firepower to leave at our backs. With so many of us, virtually an army, we could use real tactics. Arlene volunteered to take point, which in this case meant she got to jump from teleporter to teleporter, until she found the one that dropped her in the center of the courtyard again, incidentally activat- ing the door to one of the buildings. She did it. When she appeared, she took one look into the eyes of a hell prince, squawked, and fell facedown in the dirt. Smart girl: we were all in ambush position, and we opened fire on the poor hell- spawn. The minotaur never knew what hit it. Nine flaming snotballs, a machine gun, shotguns, and my own M- 14 BAR--I'd found one at last!--and the hell prince staggered back against the rear wall of his building, unable even to muster up a lightning ball from his wrist launcher. We repeated the process with the other three build- ings, and when we finished, we had four empty bunkers and one very dizzy female Marine. I picked her up off the ground and held her under her arms, while we approached the chamber at the rear of the courtyard--that was where we both clearly remem- bered we would find the Door. The front Door was locked. I was about to waste a few rounds when Slink stepped forward. "This one may?" she asked, and before I could answer, she shoved her iron fingers behind the latch, splintering the wood, and ripped the entire mechanism off the Door! The unbound wood swung slowly open, creak- ing like the cry of a banshee. Inside were three zombies waiting for any visitors. Pfc. Dodd staggered forward, pushed past us, and entered the room. He strode up to his zombie broth- ers (two brothers and a sister) and began to "talk" in the swinelike grunts and moans of the recently un- dead. The female zombie raised her rifle and fired a single shot. It hit Dodd in his mouth, taking out his entire lower jaw. We stared in shock for a moment. Arlene recovered faster than Yours Truly. She pumped the lever on her .45 rifle, firing six quick shots. Arlene killed all three zombies before the rest of us fired a shot. . . . She killed them before she even had an instant to think. Then she dropped her gun and ran forward to Dodd, who was flopping disorientedly. She cradled the head and upper body of the rotting corpse in her lap, cooing to it softly. "I'm sorry," she said. I don't think she even realized the rest of us were there. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to shoot you--I had to! Oh, please forgive me, I'm so, so sorry. . . ." I knew who she was really apologizing to--the real Dodd was dead and long past caring. But Arlene was alive, and she needed forgiveness. I don't know how it happened. Her memory of the original Dodd must have been strong. But just for a moment, the zombie Pfc. Dodd reached up and stroked Arlene's cheek! No zombie would have done that, I reckoned. A moment later he died. Again. I turned away, leading the rest of the crew deeper into the building. Behind me, the crying lasted anoth- er couple of minutes, then it stopped as if cut off like a faucet. Arlene the lover was finally buried; Lance Corporal Sanders returned to the group and an- nounced, "We'll find the Door behind the rear right piston. Careful not to get crushed." It was Arlene who found the Door, but Slink Slunk was more excited than the rest of us, for she recog- nized what it was. "Is bridge!" she cried, capering and gibbering, swinging her hands so violently that she tore a hole in one of the building walls. "Is bridge-- connects other place!" "The other place?" I asked. Arlene sounded strangely detached, a stranger in- habiting the body of my buddy. "She's right, Fly, it is a bridge connecting us to main operating system of the Disrespect." "How do you know that?" Arlene smiled apologetically and shrugged. Her eyes were red from . . . from something she must have got in them. " 'Cause I remember it. Of course." I approached. The Door looked like a bank vault, solid steel with a combination lock in the very center. The lock comprised eleven wheels, each lettered from A to Z with a space tag between last and first. The mechanics were obvious: line up the wheels so they spelled out the password and turn the huge handle to open the Door. The only fly in the ointment was guessing the right sequence of letters. So what's the big deal? I wondered. There can't be more than about 150 million billion combinations! "Well," I said, sighing. "I guess we'd better get busy. What should we try first?" I looked around, but nobody spoke. "Wait, I have something. Let's try this one." Smiling, I set the wheels to spell P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D- Space-Space-Space-Space. I turned the handle. The Door clicked and opened. I stood in the Doorway, staring like a total doofus. If there'd been a snake, it would have bit me; if there'd been a bear, it would have hugged me to death. A password spelled PASSWORD? That was the stupidest damned password I ever saw! When I was in the Applied Crypto Advanced Training Facility in Monterey, that was the standard joke among the students: the idiot who was so stupid that his pass- word literally was that very word! But I had never believed until that moment that anyone could really be so--so braindead. Evidently, it never even occurred to the Newbies that anyone would ever find one of their back Doors. I smiled. Every time I ran into these Resuscitators, they reminded me more and more of a bunch of college boys. That made it easier. I could whup college boys. We leveled weapons and slunk through the Door, Slink at my back while I took point, Arlene taking rear, everyone else in between: our standard forma- tion. The Door led to a long corridor--I mean, a long corridor! Six klicks at least and arrow-straight the whole way. At the end was another Door, just like the first, except this one had no combination lock. I opened the Door abruptly, prepared for the worst. I wasn't prepared for what I saw. Staring at me was a seven-foot-tall, pearly black shell covered with mil- lions upon millions of squirming vibrating cilia. It sat utterly still except for the cilia--a rounded blob without eyes, ears, or any other sensory organs. We had found the answer, if only we knew what question to ask. 23 "A bug ... a bug? A huge freaking bug, that's what we're fighting?" Arlene was unhappy; I could tell. She stomped around the tiny cell, looking at the bug from all angles. It pretty much looked the same from every direction. "I don't think it's an insect," I rumbled. "It's a bug! Who cares what kind?" "Corporal, remember where we are." I spoke sharply, and she hauled up, shutting her mouth. "What did we just pass through? What was that Doorway you remembered, A.S.?" "I don't know, Sarge. A back Door." "Come on, what were you thinking? What kind of back Door?" "Um, something like what they used on us to suck our souls out. That probe that got up inside my nose and into my brain; that was kind of a back Door, like." I thought for a long moment, closing my eyes to visualize the system. "Arlene . . . you saying that all this time, the last three levels, you've been thinking of that soul-sucking probe as the back Door we were looking for?" "That's what I'm saying." "Well, I think that's exactly what we found." Her eyes went as wide as dinner plates. "The probe itself?" "Why not?" I pointed back at the six-kilometer- long corridor we had just spent the last hour travers- ing. "Isn't that the tube, the one that sticks through your sinuses into your brain? It looks like it. Why can't it be?" She turned back to the bug. Behind me, Slink Slunk, her intended Chomp, and the rest of the crew waited impatiently, not understanding all the talk. "Let'ssss kill bug!" Slink suggested, licking her lips. "Not just yet, soldier," I ordered. "Fly, if that tube connects the system to a soul, then what the hell is this bug anyway?" I turned up my hands. "How the hell should I know? It's a soul, right?" "One of the Res-men? Do they have the probe hooked up to one of them?" "Well, there's no one else on the ship, so that's probably a pretty good guess, A.S." She rolled her eyes at my sarcasm. "But why doesn't it look like a person then? I mean, you look like you to me, and I presume I look like me to you-- why does this guy look like a huge bug with squirmy tentacles?" The answer popped simultaneously into both our minds, and we spoke in unison: "Because . . . it's a Newbie soul!" "Jinx," Arlene added. "You can't talk until some- one says your name, Fly." I circled the bug, still trying to wrap my brain around the concept that I was looking at the soul of a Resuscitator. It didn't look like a Newbie--but it wasn't a Newbie, it was the soul. . . . Who knew what their souls looked like? They were sure as hell differ- ent from ours. That was the whole guiding principle behind every freaking invasion and study done on Earth in the last several hundred thousand years--by the Klave, by the Freds, and now by the Resuscitators! Maybe our souls looked just as weird and disgusting to them as theirs did to us. Maybe they were filled with as much violence and anger against us as I was against all the other races in the galaxy, even the Klave. Of course, the difference was that we were just defending ourselves. They were the aggressors. They had dragged us into their ridiculous war between different schools of literary criticism, not the other way around! We didn't invade or attack the Fred homeworld, not intentionally. We didn't infest the Newbie minds. We didn't even set up observational posts and spy on the Klave! It was these bastards, they were behind it all--all of them, all the so-called bio-freaking-logical races of the galaxy, who didn't even consider us living beings because we had different souls than they. "Fine!" I declared, aloud. "So if you can steal our souls, you bastards, then you shouldn't object if I do this." I slung my rifle behind my back, stepped forward, and without even a thought for poison or acid, I wrapped both arms around the damned bug and hoisted it off the floor. Despite its huge size, the damned thing didn't weigh much more than twenty or thirty pounds. "Fly!" Arlene screamed, evidently thinking about what I had just ignored. But nothing happened to me. I didn't start feeling sleepy or sick or anything, and nothing stung me. The cilia squirmed frantically; I think the thing realized something bad was happen- ing. But it had no way to stop me--the Newbies had long since evolved beyond the "need" for things like arms and legs. "Fly, put that down!" "No way, A.S. We're taking a prisoner of war back with us." "Back where?" She hovered around me like a mother hen, clucking and poking at the thing with her lever-action. "You got somewhere else in mind? Back into the simulation, of course. This is a dead-end back door you found. . . . This is as far as it goes, into the head of a Res-man." Suddenly, the room shook violently. Outside the door, the corridor detached and started pulling away. "Arlene, jump!" I shouted. It wasn't altruism on my part to get her to go first--she was in my way! Arlene didn't waste time asking who, what, where, like a civilian would; she was a Marine, and Marines act first and ask stupid questions afterward. She dove through the door, and I piled through right on top of her. Behind us, the little room--the brain of a Res-man?--pulled away, vanishing into the distance. Outside our door was only emptiness now, a void of nonexistence that turned my stomach when I looked at it--so I didn't look at it. "They must've figured out we'd gotten up the probe," Arlene said, "and they yanked it out. But we're so speeded up, compared to them, that they couldn't yank it out fast enough." "Well, before they think of ripping out the other end," I suggested, "let's get the hell back to Dodge City." The Newbie soul was like a giant sponge. I discov- ered I could wad it up into a more manageable ball and tuck it under my arm. We ran the entire six kilometers back to the Deimos lab. The monster apostles never seemed to get tired, and Arlene and I were in Marine-shape. Still, it took us twenty minutes to hoof it back. Why didn't the Resuscitators destroy the machine? I guess they couldn't believe we had done what we did, or else they were afraid of destroying the soul of their own guy. What was it that the late, lamented Sears and Roebuck said? Something about the great- est crime in all the galaxy being the deliberate de- struction of a living soul, a crime so horrific for them to contemplate that there wasn't even a word for it! Even in a pure hive culture--an interesting bit of intel, potentially useful in a war. Too bad the crea- tures that made the observation were no longer among the living. We burst through the Door back into the room with all the pumping pistons in the corners. A new pump- kin had decided to invade the place and set up shop. . . . While Slink Slunk and the boys fought with it and shouted a conversation, trying to convert the thing-- they told it about the great martyr Olestradamus-- Arlene and I laid the soul of the Newbie on the floor. A lightning ball brushed just over my head, sizzling the ends of my hair and making all my muscles jerk. The Newbie soul expanded from its wadded-up shape. Now it looked totally different, short and fat, and the cilia were absorbing into a fabriclike coating covering the damned thing's hide. I stared at what used to be a bug. "What the hell? Arlene, is this what it looks like in the simulation?" She shook her head. "No, that's not it--look, Fly, it's changing again!" She was right. The Newbie soul split into two main globules connected by about a million strands of--flesh, connective tissue?--like pulling apart two lumps of slimy prechewed bubble gum. It changed color from black to dark purple. Then it changed again: the connections widened, flattened, and now they were spatula-shaped. The globules spread out, growing tendrils that circled around until they connected with each other, forming a circle around the flat spatula core. The color changed from static to prismatic, flickering through every color of the spectrum from dark red to nearly white violet, parts of it transparent--maybe too high or low a frequency for us to even see. "My God, Fly," Arlene said- "It's evolving! It's evolving into something new every second." A wild shot from our own spineys whizzed between Arlene and me. We dove back, then continued imagi- neering. "I remember that, A.S. I remember how fast the Newbies evolved . . . remember?" "Huh? Yeah, it's evolving right in front of us! What are you saying?" "Remember what the one we had as a prisoner from Fredworld said? They evolve faster and faster, speeding up with no upper bound to the curve? Remember?" Arlene stared at me--a true college kid! Then she finally got it. "Yeah . . . yeah, I do remember that! And they're evolving farther and farther away from being a threat to us, remember?" "Arlene, all this time they've been evolving farther away from even being physical beings. Look, see how fast it's changing now?" I wasn't joking. The Newbie was flickering through its different forms so quickly now that it was impossi- ble to fully grasp what one version was before it was subsumed into another. I had a glimpse of crablike claws, a million mouths opening and closing in uni- son, a spray of spoors! I leapt back, terrified in spite of my training--I'd never been trained to deal with something like this! But I knew what we had to do, the direction we had to push it. Here, in the Newbies' own simulation, everything moved a thousand times faster than on the outside . . . including the Newbie evolution. Arlene moved close and put her arms around me. "I'm remembering real hard now, Fly. They're evolv- ing away from physicality, just like you said. . . . They're evolving away from even caring about this universe. Evolving toward the, ah, the mind of Brah- ma, simultaneous connection with the entire uni- verse, all the other dimensions above ours." "Uh . . . yeah, I'm remembering all that, too." I thought I pretty much grasped what she was saying-- enough to get a really, really good mental image anyway. We stood and remembered. The Newbie-- definitely no longer a Resuscitator--contracted to a pinprick, then without warning, it exploded in a burst of white light and soundless energy. The light flooded through us, illuminating us from the inside out. But it continued to expand, not pausing even a nanosecond at me or Arlene or Slink Slunk or the other apostles or the monsters or anyone else in the world--in the simulation. The Newbie was gone. Arlene didn't let go. "See?" she said. "I always said there was some use to science fiction." I didn't say a word. I was just damned glad she hadn't attributed her brilliant idea, the one that saved all humanity, to a college philosophy course--that, I would have had a very hard time living down! I looked back at our crew and saw that the fight had ended. The pumpkin was sitting on the ground, receiving instruction from Chomp, the most articu- late of the imps, on the new quest: hunting down the False-One Freds and butchering them. Arlene still didn't let go of me. "Fly," she said, "do you think it just went off into the universe all by itself? Or did ... ?" "Did it take its buddies with it? I don't know, A.S. Maybe we'll never know. Arlene, I--I don't think we can ever leave this simulation." She raised her orange eyebrows, swishing her tongue from one cheek to the other. "I guess you're right. Our empty bodies are back behind on that planet. If the Newbies are gone, I doubt the former Res-men know how to pull us out of here and stick us back into our bodies anyway." "But something occurs to me. There's no reason this simulation should end unless they turn off the power. If they do that--" "Then we're dead, and we won't even know it. But if the Res-men keep it on, Fly . . ." She scowled at me. "You saying we can live here, in this simulation?" I cleared my throat. "I don't see as we have much choice, Arlene. You got an appointment somewhere else, soldier?" I softened the tone. "Look, it's not so bad. We're getting pretty good at remembering things the way they ought to be, rather than the way they happened to happen the first time. It's like casting magical spells. We don't have to remember a horrible world where monsters are trying to kill us every second!" I pointed at the pumpkin, bouncing slowly into the air and settling back down again, listening to Chomp and Slink take turns proselytizing. (They held each other's hand . . . how touching.) "We can remember a world where the damned monsters just go away to live in monasteries. We can remember how we returned to Earth, but we can remember how we stopped the entire invasion this time, turned them back without the millions of dead civilians." Arlene looked up at me, blinking a tear out of her eye. Must have been a dust mote; Marines don't cry. "Do you think I can ever forget Albert's death?" "Arlene, given enough time and energy, maybe some of that hypnosis . . . I'll bet anybody can forget anything." I detached her arms and sat down, sud- denly so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. "At least, we'll go to our graves trying to forget. He's in here somewhere, Arlene. . . . The whole place was constructed from our memories--so he's here! It's just a matter of finding him." Arlene sat down next to me, expressionless. Her voice sounded as dead tired as mine. "We stopped the Newbies, Fly. We saved Earth . . . again. That ought to count for something, right?" "Counts for a lot, A.S." "So if your Somebody is up there . . . maybe He'll let us find Albert?" I lay back, feeling consciousness ebb, sleep over- whelming me. I think I answered her, but maybe I only dreamed it. The best Somebody for us to rely on, Arlene, is the somebody inside. . . not the one up- stairs. I think I slept for twelve or fourteen hours. I awoke to a brave new world that had such damned peculiar creatures in it! The End...?