Ceramic DM- The Renewal ( Final judgement posted)
orchid blossom
Explorer
mythago said:
I fear the oppsite. That someday Clay with put a "minimum" word count on and then I'll be up the creek!
orchid blossom
Explorer
Maldur said:
All comments are helpful, but don't bust your brain trying. I've written enough stories at this point to have gotten a good feel for my stengths and weaknesses.
orchid blossom
Explorer
Berandor said:These pics are great!
I would love to write something off of them, but at the same time I'm glad I don't have to
Nothing stopping you from using them! And you wouldn't have that pesky time limit. You could let them percolate through your brain for weeks, plenty of time for plotting and editing....
It's always easier when you don't have to.
Thanks for the comments Maldur. I've been feeling my stories were getting worse. But then, maybe I'm just getting pickier.
Berandor
lunatic
get off of the internet and write!orchid blossom said:Nothing stopping you from using them! And you wouldn't have that pesky time limit. You could let them percolate through your brain for weeks, plenty of time for plotting and editing....
It's always easier when you don't have to.
Thanks for the comments Maldur. I've been feeling my stories were getting worse. But then, maybe I'm just getting pickier.
alsih2o
First Post
Orchid Blossom commentary-
Awesome first pic use. The shadow jumping into the plane is fantastic. This makes the second pic use brilliant as well. I really feel strongly about this.
Actually, all the pics are really strong except for the witch doctor one. This is a very passive use (of a passive pic, yes) where all the others seem to be strong story moments.
I like the disconnection of “Witch doctor” and male shadow and such at the beginning but I would have liked to have had some names by the end.
The story is strong, and woven together pretty well EXCEPT for exactly what the womans crimes/changes were. Some more definition here would have easily drawn me over to the witch doctors side and made me care a bit more.
Awesome first pic use. The shadow jumping into the plane is fantastic. This makes the second pic use brilliant as well. I really feel strongly about this.
Actually, all the pics are really strong except for the witch doctor one. This is a very passive use (of a passive pic, yes) where all the others seem to be strong story moments.
I like the disconnection of “Witch doctor” and male shadow and such at the beginning but I would have liked to have had some names by the end.
The story is strong, and woven together pretty well EXCEPT for exactly what the womans crimes/changes were. Some more definition here would have easily drawn me over to the witch doctors side and made me care a bit more.
mythago
Hero
Otherworld
The monitor under the seat of Llewellyn's wheelchair made a soothing, muffled beep, alerting him that another two milliliters of rexynol had been safely pumped into the base of his spinal column, numbing the nerves that ran to the warped stumps that had once been his legs. He directed the chair to roll smoothly along the architecturally impeccable hall of Building D, Eighth Floor, of the Carfax Institute. His institute, although he was careful to keep that knowledge confined as tightly as he could inside these walls, with the outside world seeing him merely as an eccentric, if laudably generous, benefactor who had turned to the sciences as a sort of hobby in his declining years. Llewellyn was careful to donate large sums to institutions seeking a cure for the disease that was eating him from the ground up, but in truth he paid little attention to whether his money was bringing them success. Stopping the slow destruction of his body was the least important use of his fortune.
His chair gracefully turned to the left, and the door of Meeting Room 801 irised open to admit him. Llewellyn knew that it was an extravagant waste of money and maintenance time to have such doors, but if he couldn't have the jetpacks and sentient robots and rayguns he'd so loved reading about as a child, he could at least have doors that irised open. He'd even insisted the engineers design them to make a soft whoosh sound when they opened. Unlike the architects, the engineers hadn't argued with him. They understood.
The people waiting for him in 801 looked up and carefully rearranged their faces into professional, neutral expressions. They sat up straighter in their temperfoam chairs and waited for their benefactor to address them.
"You young people," Llewellyn said, "you think you invented love."
They shifted uncomfortably. Llewellyn choked back a laugh. He knew they'd been gossiping about him while they waited, the best and the brightest of MIT and Stanford and Rand, speculating why an old man would pour money into bleeding-edge theoretical science for the sake of long-dead lovers.
Not dead, he thought fiercely, as long as we remember those we love they never truly die. Not when I can bring them back.
Anthony Parilla, the thirty-year-old with two doctorates, pushed his chair back and stood up. The rest of them hastily did the same, and Llewellyn waved them to sit back down. Dr. Parilla stayed on his feet. Whatever he had to say, he was too excited to sit calmly in a chair and read a bullet-point animated slide off the holoscreen.
"Mr. Davies," he said, "we've identified two, possibly three options that we think are finally viable. One of them is the MWI option that Dr. Haversham proposed in her tentative results last month." He nodded slightly toward the woman sitting two chairs to his right, the one who didn't look a day over seventeen, hired away from a senior research position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. "The second are the cloning and bio-personality overlays. Cloning is more likely to be stable in the long term, but it--"
"Could take years," Dr. Alexus broke in. Haversham rolled her eyes."Really, Mr. Davies, I think the overlay method would be quicker, and we can reinforce any leaks. The tests on volunteers have been very promising."
"They're still in beta, if that," another scientist said, and they started bickering and interupting one another, letting off the excitement and tension that had built up around the idea that that their enormous salaries and endless hours of research would pay off for something real: crazy, but real.
Llewellyn's monitor reminded him that another dose of rexynol had made it through. He cleared his throat, loudly, as only an old man with an old man's supply of ragged tissue and phlegm can do. The talking stopped as though he'd cut off their oxygen.
"Let me remind you, again, that I don't have much time," he said quietly. "You will all get to try your your pet theories, and you will all get ridiculously large bonuses if they seem close to being right. Your papers will be published. What's important is that we bring Lily, Matt and Shawn back."
They shuffled their papers and made noises of agreement. Llewellyn could see they were looking at him with pity and embarassment now, his mentioning Lily and Matthew and Shawn with such love reminding them that he was an old man driven by a passion and longing that they'd never imagined happening in anyone older than their parents. You young people, he thought, and forced himself to concentrate on what Parilla was saying about options.
#
"What the hell is it with lanterns, anyway?" Matt asked. He flipped his head and part of the orange wig fanned his shoulder. Shawn, at his easel, frowned but kept sketching.
"It's a standard puzzle," Llewellyn said. "An early meme. Colossal Cave was based on a real cave, and in real caves you need a light source. Torches go out down there; it's wet."
"I cannot believe," Lily said, "that you two are still arguing about this. Anyway, I was talking about Plundered Hearts, not Zork. The only torch in that game is the one I'm carrying for the dashing pirate captain." .
"You're kidding me. You're playing a PG-rated romantic game?"
"I'm hoping there are some X-rated easter eggs. Which I am not going to be able to find if you two keep moving around, because Shawn will have to keep stopping to re-position you, and we'll be here all afternoon."
"I'm not enough of a dashing pirate captain for you?" said Llewellyn. "Look, I even have an eyepatch."
"Don't forget the phallic-looking trident," Matt added.
"If you two don't settle down, I swear I am going to pick up this stuffed fish and whap you both."
"Finished for now," Shawn called over his easel. "Pillow break."
Matt immediately pulled the orange wig off his head and let it drop. "You mean lunch break, darling."
"No, pillow break," Shawn said, "I found Lily to be very inspiring," and before Matt could open his mouth Shawn whomped him with a feather pillow, turned and made a lightning dash for the bedroom.
Matt chased after him, and the unmistakeable sounds of a no-holds-barred pillow fight came down the hallway.
"Should we get lunch first or join them?"
"I think it's too late to make that choice."
"What do you mean?" Lily asked, a second too late, as Llewellyn tossed a throw pillow from the couch at her and ran like hell.
"Oh, you'll pay for that," she shouted, running after him to the bedroom, "in spades," and then they were all thumping each other with pillows until they all were laughing and wheezing too hard to move, with nothing more to do on a warm, lazy Saturday afternoon than cuddle and talk and try to decide what takeout Chinese to get and whether they were going to study Comp Lit tonight or do some more modeling for Shawn.
#
Dr. Sandoval handed him the lantern. Llewellyn turned it over and over in his hands. It was almost a perfect replica of the one hanging on the back of his new wheelchair, the miniature lantern a gag gift he'd given Lily as Valentine's Day present. The one he'd brought with him when he'd moved out of their apartment, too numb to take anything but tokens of the woman and the two men he'd loved and had torn away from him in the blink of a drunk driver's eye.
He blinked rapidly to stop himself from crying. Dr. Sandoval had stepped away after handing him the lantern, as though she thought him dangerous, or fragile. Llewellyn supposed he couldn't blame her. He'd dressed up in an old costume left over from one of Shawn's art assignments; he couldn't remember the name of the painting or whether it had ever gotten finished, only that it was one of the few things he had left from that time and so it was important to wear it today.
"...you can think of it as a homing beacon," she was saying. He suddenly remembered that the woman's first name was Mercedes and that she was one of Haversham's protegés. He nodded sincerely as though he'd been listening all along.
"Of course, that's not really an accurate description in terms of the physics, but it should generate a kind of Bloch shell, so that if the waveforms collapse, the complex path-sphere will snap you back to the original locus. Did that all make sense?"
"Absolutely," he said. She smiled as though she believed him.
He leaned forward slightly, and the gyroscopic engine of the wheelchair obeyed. Llewellyn stopped at the center of a huge red X marked on the floor with colored electrician's tape. He propped the big lantern on his lap and waited patiently as machines were adjusted, sensors fine-tuned, and large whirring devices with no apparent purpose other than to look impressive were aligned overhead.
There was a silent flash of light that made Llewellyn duck his head away from the brightness, and then it was very dark.
He pushed the sleeve of his jacket back and checked his Patek Phillipe watch. It had stopped. The lantern, though, had started to give off a cold, steady glow. "In for a penny, in for a pound," he said aloud. His words sounded oddly flat. There was an echo, but it was all wrong. This had to be the place; Haversham's team was sure that if any branching universe had some trace of Lily, Shawn or Matt, it was this one. He shifted his weight and urged his chair forward. The flat, undifferentiated ground got bumpier and rougher. Something tangled in the wheels. He looked down; brown, weedy grass was being flattened as he rolled along. Ahead of him, the darkness thinned out and differentiated into a plain of the same dead-looking grass and a dull ochre sky. The air was just warm enough to keep his breath from turning to vapor.
He had been rolling for what seemed like hours when he realized the monitor hadn't beeped once. Electric-powered, it seemed to have died when whatever quirk of this universe also killed his watch. Llewellyn felt in his coat pocket for the emergency injectables. Enough rexynol for several hours was there, but after that? Even in the chill air, he started to sweat. Without the rexynol he wouldn't die. He'd just want to.
There was a break in the endless level plain, an upright line that might have been a pillar or a tree. He urged the chair forward through grasses that grew to the seat of his wheelchair and now sported an occasional, lackluster flower. Quicker than he expected, the line resolved itself into the a wide, leafless tree with thin branches that stuck up like broken fingers.
Children stood around the tree like sentinels. They faced away from Llewellyn. He leaned back and the chair bumped to a stop. He waited, whether for a friendly overture or an attack, he wasn't sure. The children, if they were really children, stood impassively.
"Lily? Shawn? Matt?" he said. His voice had the same, strange flatness as before. The children didn't react at all, and he began to wonder if they were alive. Llewellyn rolled his chair to the nearest child, a young girl, and tapped her on the shoulder. She ignored him.
Frustrated, Llewellyn gave her a gentle push. She swayed. Something about the way she had moved bothered him. He looked down again. She wore no shoes. Her legs ended in brown, twisting roots that burrowed down past the grassed and into the soil.
Llewellyn rolled forward to the other side of the tree, the one that had faced away from him, knowing that he didn't want to see, unable to stop himself from going to look anyway. The trunk of the dying tree gaped open from some old and terrible would. Wedged into the tree was an enormous child, his eyes closed where the eyes of the other children, now facing Llewellyn, were open. He'd never seen pictures of Lily or Shawn as a child, but he recognized the boy in the tree trunk, his face the same as the one in a picture Matt had shown him, taken with his father before Matthew Senior was shipped off to Vietnam and never came home. Matt was smiling and happy in the photo, his eyes open, not closed like the boy's in the tree, but shape of his face and the cowlick in his chestnut hair were exactly the same.
From here, Llewellyn could see the snaking roots that connected the scattered children to the trunk of the main tree. He wondered if it were reproducing or merely dying, like a fungus that sends out shoots and rots in the middle, and then he wondered if the children had somehow grown here or gotten tangled in the long grass and had no choice but to stay. He fumbled with the big lantern, looking for a switch or a button or anything that would get him away from this terrible place, and then there was light so brilliant that he threw up his hands to shield his eyes.
The lantern slid off his lap and shattered on the laboratory floor.
#
"So when do you get to do actual painting?" Lily asked. "Oils and stuff. Or even watercolors. It's like they think you're a little kid, who has to do his homework in pencil because he can't be trusted with a pen."
Shawn sighed. "It's not like that. Artists always sketch a painting to start with, anyway. I don't want to take a good sketch and just, just goop it up for the sake of painting if I'm going to do it wrong. You know? I want it to be right."
"I modeled for that damn 'Modern Mariner' thing for so long I got a leg cramp," Matt said. "The only thing that saved me was that I could look down the front of Lily's costume. Hey! Ouch!"
"My costume wasn't good enough for you?" Llewellyn said. "I thought I looked very dashing and, uh, nautical."
"You did, you did. But boatneck crews just don't flatter your figure."
"Arrr, I'll have you walking the plank, scurvy dog!"
"It'll be finished when it's ready," Shawn said. "When I think I can do it justice...I'll paint it. It's not going anywhere, and neither am I."
#
Dr. Alexus was talking so fast that Llewellyn could barely understand what he was saying. Personality overlay, genetic infusion, of course this was only a test run and it wouldn't be permanent--
"Overlay of what? Of people who already have personalities? I thought you started with a blank slate, a new clone of some kind."
"This is the first stage," Alexus said. "Clones are still very difficult to get right and they take a long, long time, so we want to be sure the technology is perfect. These people are all volunteers, they've all been fully briefed. The overlay technology's been in development for a long time, licensed as you said you wanted, so plenty of other teams have had successes, this is just the first time we've had so much genetic material and data in the same subjects--"
"Slow down," Llewellyn said. "You're making me wonder if having free coffee in the break rooms is such a good idea. They're volunteers, they've agreed to be genetically modified somehow? Isn't that dangerous?"
"Sorry about that, Mr. Davies. It's not dangerous, it's a temporary genetic shift, their bodies will flush out the excess cells harmlessly over a few months, and they'll only have dim memories of the personality overlay, we've got one of them out already and he'll probably be ready to talk, the others are still being brought out of the procedure, would you like to see?"
"Yes, yes, let's see, if they're up and ready. You have...you have three?"
"Four, sir; Lily, Matthew, Shawn, and yourself."
Llewellyn blinked. "You cloned me?"
"As I said, Mr. Davies, it's not a clone situation exactly, we're still experimenting and we had four solid volunteers, so we thought it might be a problem if we duplicated one of the subjects, kind of an evil twin possibility, heh, so anyway let's go in the lab, I believe 'Shawn' has been walking around and talking to the technicians."
There was a high, faint shriek. Llewellyn instinctively reached down and checked the monitor in his wheelchair for a malfunction. Alexus broke into a run and Llewellyn realized it was not a mechanical noise; it was a woman screaming in terror, somewhere down the hall. He urged his wheelchair forward and sped down the hallway after Alexus. The scientist nearly tripped over the bodies of three white-coated laboratory assistants that sprawled in front of a single door. A ragged pool of blood spread across the seamless white floor of the hallway. The door irised open and Llewellyn rolled through at Alexus's heels.
The small room had been painted and textured in someone's attempt to make it decorative. Two sets of recovery tanks flanked a small painting by Syré. "Llewellyn" lay dead, the membrane of his tank shredded and gone, his support tube trailing from the tank to his corpse. "Lily" slumped against the side of her own tank, bleeding freely from a vicious wound between her neck and shoulder, the blood seeping over the sill of the tank's window. "Shawn," dressed in some kind of short hospital gown, clutched a long-handled axe made of scrap and wire. It looked as though he had torn open a mechanical repair station with his hands and made a weapon out of whatever he had put his hands on first. Alexus dived forward and grabbed the long wire shaft of the axe. "Shawn" yanked it away and cracked the flat of the axe blade against Alexus's head with a sound like a table leg snapping. Alexus collapsed on the sticky floor.
"Matt" struggled to free himself from his support tubes. Shawn spun around and saw Llewellyn. The madman stared at him with the expression of a man who knows he's met someone before but is at a complete loss to remember their name.
"Shawn," he said, "it's me. Llewellyn. You were a vegan. You never hurt a living thing in your life. What are you doing? "
Shawn shook his head like a dog throwing off water. "We're dead," he howled. "Dead and this is not alive! We were killed and buried and that is not Lily! That is not Matt! False faces!" The lunatic heaved the axe and turned. Matt screamed in terror as the blade came up. Llewellyn hid his face in his hands and tried to stop his ears against the terrible sound.
The armed guards arrived and got Llewellyn out before they did what they had to do. Llewellyn was taken to his private suites at Carfax Hospital, where he stayed for a month, resting and talking to no one and looking out his window with its beautiful garden view.
#
The sketch Shawn had done on the day of the pillow fight hung on the east wall of Llewellyn's private office. He'd had it framed and covered with UV-resistant glass, but it was hard to look at; it hung behind his desk, where he'd need to turn to see and be reminded of it.
Llewellyn turned the wheelchair and tilted it back so that he could look up at the sketch, the quick pencil strokes and shade lines the same as the day Shawn had made them. "But not me," he said aloud. "I'm old, you three, and I'm dying, only it's taking me a lot longer than it took any of you. I thought I could buy enough brains to find you and follow you and bring you back, but I can't do that, can I?"
Branching universe, he thought, alternate existences. The physicists' name for the Land of the Dead? How could I find you in the darkness? You need light or you fall down and die, or get killed by a monster. Matt always thought that rule was stupid. What if there were a puzzle where you needed to be in the dark, where the light kept you from finding something that was right in front of you?
"Right in front of me," he said. He looked up at the sketch, and then down at the monitor. He took the letter opener from his desk and broke the plastic safety loop that kept the dosage indicator in place. The monitor beeped in alarm as he slid the dosage level all the way to the right. He knew the side effects of a rexynol overdose: numbness, loss of the ability to regulate core temperature, internal bleeding, death.
He felt a chill, and wrapped his lap blanket around his shoulders and head. It didn't help; the cold got worse, then it faded. He tasted something like iron, far back in his throat. His lips felt numb and dry; he tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was thick and sluggish.
Llewellyn looked up at the sketch. It was no longer a sketch, but a painting, watercolor or possibly even oil, but brilliant and fresh in its color as though Shawn had just stepped away from the easel. And it had changed. The ridiculous thrift-store wig blazed orange, but it was draped over Shawn's head. The backdrop, just a collection of curved lines in the pencil sketch, swam into focus with blues and greens and a dolphin that seemed to be swimming up to talk to them. Lily's feathery gray wrap was a goldenrod yellow against her skin. Matt, lithe and dark, stared challengingly at him, his right eye hidden by the eyepatch that Llewellyn had worn on the left.
"You don't look any better in a boatneck crew than I did," he said, or tried to; it came out as a slurry of sounds that his lips and tongue couldn't manage.
The reality outside the painting collapsed and took him with it.
The monitor under the seat of Llewellyn's wheelchair made a soothing, muffled beep, alerting him that another two milliliters of rexynol had been safely pumped into the base of his spinal column, numbing the nerves that ran to the warped stumps that had once been his legs. He directed the chair to roll smoothly along the architecturally impeccable hall of Building D, Eighth Floor, of the Carfax Institute. His institute, although he was careful to keep that knowledge confined as tightly as he could inside these walls, with the outside world seeing him merely as an eccentric, if laudably generous, benefactor who had turned to the sciences as a sort of hobby in his declining years. Llewellyn was careful to donate large sums to institutions seeking a cure for the disease that was eating him from the ground up, but in truth he paid little attention to whether his money was bringing them success. Stopping the slow destruction of his body was the least important use of his fortune.
His chair gracefully turned to the left, and the door of Meeting Room 801 irised open to admit him. Llewellyn knew that it was an extravagant waste of money and maintenance time to have such doors, but if he couldn't have the jetpacks and sentient robots and rayguns he'd so loved reading about as a child, he could at least have doors that irised open. He'd even insisted the engineers design them to make a soft whoosh sound when they opened. Unlike the architects, the engineers hadn't argued with him. They understood.
The people waiting for him in 801 looked up and carefully rearranged their faces into professional, neutral expressions. They sat up straighter in their temperfoam chairs and waited for their benefactor to address them.
"You young people," Llewellyn said, "you think you invented love."
They shifted uncomfortably. Llewellyn choked back a laugh. He knew they'd been gossiping about him while they waited, the best and the brightest of MIT and Stanford and Rand, speculating why an old man would pour money into bleeding-edge theoretical science for the sake of long-dead lovers.
Not dead, he thought fiercely, as long as we remember those we love they never truly die. Not when I can bring them back.
Anthony Parilla, the thirty-year-old with two doctorates, pushed his chair back and stood up. The rest of them hastily did the same, and Llewellyn waved them to sit back down. Dr. Parilla stayed on his feet. Whatever he had to say, he was too excited to sit calmly in a chair and read a bullet-point animated slide off the holoscreen.
"Mr. Davies," he said, "we've identified two, possibly three options that we think are finally viable. One of them is the MWI option that Dr. Haversham proposed in her tentative results last month." He nodded slightly toward the woman sitting two chairs to his right, the one who didn't look a day over seventeen, hired away from a senior research position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. "The second are the cloning and bio-personality overlays. Cloning is more likely to be stable in the long term, but it--"
"Could take years," Dr. Alexus broke in. Haversham rolled her eyes."Really, Mr. Davies, I think the overlay method would be quicker, and we can reinforce any leaks. The tests on volunteers have been very promising."
"They're still in beta, if that," another scientist said, and they started bickering and interupting one another, letting off the excitement and tension that had built up around the idea that that their enormous salaries and endless hours of research would pay off for something real: crazy, but real.
Llewellyn's monitor reminded him that another dose of rexynol had made it through. He cleared his throat, loudly, as only an old man with an old man's supply of ragged tissue and phlegm can do. The talking stopped as though he'd cut off their oxygen.
"Let me remind you, again, that I don't have much time," he said quietly. "You will all get to try your your pet theories, and you will all get ridiculously large bonuses if they seem close to being right. Your papers will be published. What's important is that we bring Lily, Matt and Shawn back."
They shuffled their papers and made noises of agreement. Llewellyn could see they were looking at him with pity and embarassment now, his mentioning Lily and Matthew and Shawn with such love reminding them that he was an old man driven by a passion and longing that they'd never imagined happening in anyone older than their parents. You young people, he thought, and forced himself to concentrate on what Parilla was saying about options.
#
"What the hell is it with lanterns, anyway?" Matt asked. He flipped his head and part of the orange wig fanned his shoulder. Shawn, at his easel, frowned but kept sketching.
"It's a standard puzzle," Llewellyn said. "An early meme. Colossal Cave was based on a real cave, and in real caves you need a light source. Torches go out down there; it's wet."
"I cannot believe," Lily said, "that you two are still arguing about this. Anyway, I was talking about Plundered Hearts, not Zork. The only torch in that game is the one I'm carrying for the dashing pirate captain." .
"You're kidding me. You're playing a PG-rated romantic game?"
"I'm hoping there are some X-rated easter eggs. Which I am not going to be able to find if you two keep moving around, because Shawn will have to keep stopping to re-position you, and we'll be here all afternoon."
"I'm not enough of a dashing pirate captain for you?" said Llewellyn. "Look, I even have an eyepatch."
"Don't forget the phallic-looking trident," Matt added.
"If you two don't settle down, I swear I am going to pick up this stuffed fish and whap you both."
"Finished for now," Shawn called over his easel. "Pillow break."
Matt immediately pulled the orange wig off his head and let it drop. "You mean lunch break, darling."
"No, pillow break," Shawn said, "I found Lily to be very inspiring," and before Matt could open his mouth Shawn whomped him with a feather pillow, turned and made a lightning dash for the bedroom.
Matt chased after him, and the unmistakeable sounds of a no-holds-barred pillow fight came down the hallway.
"Should we get lunch first or join them?"
"I think it's too late to make that choice."
"What do you mean?" Lily asked, a second too late, as Llewellyn tossed a throw pillow from the couch at her and ran like hell.
"Oh, you'll pay for that," she shouted, running after him to the bedroom, "in spades," and then they were all thumping each other with pillows until they all were laughing and wheezing too hard to move, with nothing more to do on a warm, lazy Saturday afternoon than cuddle and talk and try to decide what takeout Chinese to get and whether they were going to study Comp Lit tonight or do some more modeling for Shawn.
#
Dr. Sandoval handed him the lantern. Llewellyn turned it over and over in his hands. It was almost a perfect replica of the one hanging on the back of his new wheelchair, the miniature lantern a gag gift he'd given Lily as Valentine's Day present. The one he'd brought with him when he'd moved out of their apartment, too numb to take anything but tokens of the woman and the two men he'd loved and had torn away from him in the blink of a drunk driver's eye.
He blinked rapidly to stop himself from crying. Dr. Sandoval had stepped away after handing him the lantern, as though she thought him dangerous, or fragile. Llewellyn supposed he couldn't blame her. He'd dressed up in an old costume left over from one of Shawn's art assignments; he couldn't remember the name of the painting or whether it had ever gotten finished, only that it was one of the few things he had left from that time and so it was important to wear it today.
"...you can think of it as a homing beacon," she was saying. He suddenly remembered that the woman's first name was Mercedes and that she was one of Haversham's protegés. He nodded sincerely as though he'd been listening all along.
"Of course, that's not really an accurate description in terms of the physics, but it should generate a kind of Bloch shell, so that if the waveforms collapse, the complex path-sphere will snap you back to the original locus. Did that all make sense?"
"Absolutely," he said. She smiled as though she believed him.
He leaned forward slightly, and the gyroscopic engine of the wheelchair obeyed. Llewellyn stopped at the center of a huge red X marked on the floor with colored electrician's tape. He propped the big lantern on his lap and waited patiently as machines were adjusted, sensors fine-tuned, and large whirring devices with no apparent purpose other than to look impressive were aligned overhead.
There was a silent flash of light that made Llewellyn duck his head away from the brightness, and then it was very dark.
He pushed the sleeve of his jacket back and checked his Patek Phillipe watch. It had stopped. The lantern, though, had started to give off a cold, steady glow. "In for a penny, in for a pound," he said aloud. His words sounded oddly flat. There was an echo, but it was all wrong. This had to be the place; Haversham's team was sure that if any branching universe had some trace of Lily, Shawn or Matt, it was this one. He shifted his weight and urged his chair forward. The flat, undifferentiated ground got bumpier and rougher. Something tangled in the wheels. He looked down; brown, weedy grass was being flattened as he rolled along. Ahead of him, the darkness thinned out and differentiated into a plain of the same dead-looking grass and a dull ochre sky. The air was just warm enough to keep his breath from turning to vapor.
He had been rolling for what seemed like hours when he realized the monitor hadn't beeped once. Electric-powered, it seemed to have died when whatever quirk of this universe also killed his watch. Llewellyn felt in his coat pocket for the emergency injectables. Enough rexynol for several hours was there, but after that? Even in the chill air, he started to sweat. Without the rexynol he wouldn't die. He'd just want to.
There was a break in the endless level plain, an upright line that might have been a pillar or a tree. He urged the chair forward through grasses that grew to the seat of his wheelchair and now sported an occasional, lackluster flower. Quicker than he expected, the line resolved itself into the a wide, leafless tree with thin branches that stuck up like broken fingers.
Children stood around the tree like sentinels. They faced away from Llewellyn. He leaned back and the chair bumped to a stop. He waited, whether for a friendly overture or an attack, he wasn't sure. The children, if they were really children, stood impassively.
"Lily? Shawn? Matt?" he said. His voice had the same, strange flatness as before. The children didn't react at all, and he began to wonder if they were alive. Llewellyn rolled his chair to the nearest child, a young girl, and tapped her on the shoulder. She ignored him.
Frustrated, Llewellyn gave her a gentle push. She swayed. Something about the way she had moved bothered him. He looked down again. She wore no shoes. Her legs ended in brown, twisting roots that burrowed down past the grassed and into the soil.
Llewellyn rolled forward to the other side of the tree, the one that had faced away from him, knowing that he didn't want to see, unable to stop himself from going to look anyway. The trunk of the dying tree gaped open from some old and terrible would. Wedged into the tree was an enormous child, his eyes closed where the eyes of the other children, now facing Llewellyn, were open. He'd never seen pictures of Lily or Shawn as a child, but he recognized the boy in the tree trunk, his face the same as the one in a picture Matt had shown him, taken with his father before Matthew Senior was shipped off to Vietnam and never came home. Matt was smiling and happy in the photo, his eyes open, not closed like the boy's in the tree, but shape of his face and the cowlick in his chestnut hair were exactly the same.
From here, Llewellyn could see the snaking roots that connected the scattered children to the trunk of the main tree. He wondered if it were reproducing or merely dying, like a fungus that sends out shoots and rots in the middle, and then he wondered if the children had somehow grown here or gotten tangled in the long grass and had no choice but to stay. He fumbled with the big lantern, looking for a switch or a button or anything that would get him away from this terrible place, and then there was light so brilliant that he threw up his hands to shield his eyes.
The lantern slid off his lap and shattered on the laboratory floor.
#
"So when do you get to do actual painting?" Lily asked. "Oils and stuff. Or even watercolors. It's like they think you're a little kid, who has to do his homework in pencil because he can't be trusted with a pen."
Shawn sighed. "It's not like that. Artists always sketch a painting to start with, anyway. I don't want to take a good sketch and just, just goop it up for the sake of painting if I'm going to do it wrong. You know? I want it to be right."
"I modeled for that damn 'Modern Mariner' thing for so long I got a leg cramp," Matt said. "The only thing that saved me was that I could look down the front of Lily's costume. Hey! Ouch!"
"My costume wasn't good enough for you?" Llewellyn said. "I thought I looked very dashing and, uh, nautical."
"You did, you did. But boatneck crews just don't flatter your figure."
"Arrr, I'll have you walking the plank, scurvy dog!"
"It'll be finished when it's ready," Shawn said. "When I think I can do it justice...I'll paint it. It's not going anywhere, and neither am I."
#
Dr. Alexus was talking so fast that Llewellyn could barely understand what he was saying. Personality overlay, genetic infusion, of course this was only a test run and it wouldn't be permanent--
"Overlay of what? Of people who already have personalities? I thought you started with a blank slate, a new clone of some kind."
"This is the first stage," Alexus said. "Clones are still very difficult to get right and they take a long, long time, so we want to be sure the technology is perfect. These people are all volunteers, they've all been fully briefed. The overlay technology's been in development for a long time, licensed as you said you wanted, so plenty of other teams have had successes, this is just the first time we've had so much genetic material and data in the same subjects--"
"Slow down," Llewellyn said. "You're making me wonder if having free coffee in the break rooms is such a good idea. They're volunteers, they've agreed to be genetically modified somehow? Isn't that dangerous?"
"Sorry about that, Mr. Davies. It's not dangerous, it's a temporary genetic shift, their bodies will flush out the excess cells harmlessly over a few months, and they'll only have dim memories of the personality overlay, we've got one of them out already and he'll probably be ready to talk, the others are still being brought out of the procedure, would you like to see?"
"Yes, yes, let's see, if they're up and ready. You have...you have three?"
"Four, sir; Lily, Matthew, Shawn, and yourself."
Llewellyn blinked. "You cloned me?"
"As I said, Mr. Davies, it's not a clone situation exactly, we're still experimenting and we had four solid volunteers, so we thought it might be a problem if we duplicated one of the subjects, kind of an evil twin possibility, heh, so anyway let's go in the lab, I believe 'Shawn' has been walking around and talking to the technicians."
There was a high, faint shriek. Llewellyn instinctively reached down and checked the monitor in his wheelchair for a malfunction. Alexus broke into a run and Llewellyn realized it was not a mechanical noise; it was a woman screaming in terror, somewhere down the hall. He urged his wheelchair forward and sped down the hallway after Alexus. The scientist nearly tripped over the bodies of three white-coated laboratory assistants that sprawled in front of a single door. A ragged pool of blood spread across the seamless white floor of the hallway. The door irised open and Llewellyn rolled through at Alexus's heels.
The small room had been painted and textured in someone's attempt to make it decorative. Two sets of recovery tanks flanked a small painting by Syré. "Llewellyn" lay dead, the membrane of his tank shredded and gone, his support tube trailing from the tank to his corpse. "Lily" slumped against the side of her own tank, bleeding freely from a vicious wound between her neck and shoulder, the blood seeping over the sill of the tank's window. "Shawn," dressed in some kind of short hospital gown, clutched a long-handled axe made of scrap and wire. It looked as though he had torn open a mechanical repair station with his hands and made a weapon out of whatever he had put his hands on first. Alexus dived forward and grabbed the long wire shaft of the axe. "Shawn" yanked it away and cracked the flat of the axe blade against Alexus's head with a sound like a table leg snapping. Alexus collapsed on the sticky floor.
"Matt" struggled to free himself from his support tubes. Shawn spun around and saw Llewellyn. The madman stared at him with the expression of a man who knows he's met someone before but is at a complete loss to remember their name.
"Shawn," he said, "it's me. Llewellyn. You were a vegan. You never hurt a living thing in your life. What are you doing? "
Shawn shook his head like a dog throwing off water. "We're dead," he howled. "Dead and this is not alive! We were killed and buried and that is not Lily! That is not Matt! False faces!" The lunatic heaved the axe and turned. Matt screamed in terror as the blade came up. Llewellyn hid his face in his hands and tried to stop his ears against the terrible sound.
The armed guards arrived and got Llewellyn out before they did what they had to do. Llewellyn was taken to his private suites at Carfax Hospital, where he stayed for a month, resting and talking to no one and looking out his window with its beautiful garden view.
#
The sketch Shawn had done on the day of the pillow fight hung on the east wall of Llewellyn's private office. He'd had it framed and covered with UV-resistant glass, but it was hard to look at; it hung behind his desk, where he'd need to turn to see and be reminded of it.
Llewellyn turned the wheelchair and tilted it back so that he could look up at the sketch, the quick pencil strokes and shade lines the same as the day Shawn had made them. "But not me," he said aloud. "I'm old, you three, and I'm dying, only it's taking me a lot longer than it took any of you. I thought I could buy enough brains to find you and follow you and bring you back, but I can't do that, can I?"
Branching universe, he thought, alternate existences. The physicists' name for the Land of the Dead? How could I find you in the darkness? You need light or you fall down and die, or get killed by a monster. Matt always thought that rule was stupid. What if there were a puzzle where you needed to be in the dark, where the light kept you from finding something that was right in front of you?
"Right in front of me," he said. He looked up at the sketch, and then down at the monitor. He took the letter opener from his desk and broke the plastic safety loop that kept the dosage indicator in place. The monitor beeped in alarm as he slid the dosage level all the way to the right. He knew the side effects of a rexynol overdose: numbness, loss of the ability to regulate core temperature, internal bleeding, death.
He felt a chill, and wrapped his lap blanket around his shoulders and head. It didn't help; the cold got worse, then it faded. He tasted something like iron, far back in his throat. His lips felt numb and dry; he tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was thick and sluggish.
Llewellyn looked up at the sketch. It was no longer a sketch, but a painting, watercolor or possibly even oil, but brilliant and fresh in its color as though Shawn had just stepped away from the easel. And it had changed. The ridiculous thrift-store wig blazed orange, but it was draped over Shawn's head. The backdrop, just a collection of curved lines in the pencil sketch, swam into focus with blues and greens and a dolphin that seemed to be swimming up to talk to them. Lily's feathery gray wrap was a goldenrod yellow against her skin. Matt, lithe and dark, stared challengingly at him, his right eye hidden by the eyepatch that Llewellyn had worn on the left.
"You don't look any better in a boatneck crew than I did," he said, or tried to; it came out as a slurry of sounds that his lips and tongue couldn't manage.
The reality outside the painting collapsed and took him with it.
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