The Silver Dream

“Hey, Jayarre,” I said as we passed through one of the open doors. Unlike the school I was used to, we never called teachers by their last names and “Mr.” or “Ms.”—after all, some of them didn’t even have last names.

Jayarre focused on me—I thought he’d been looking at me anyway, which was why I’d said hello, but it was hard to tell with the monocle—and gave a cheerful smile accompanied by an exuberant wave. Jayarre was the Culture and Improvisation teacher. He hailed from an Earth more toward the magic side of things, where he’d once explained that all the world was, literally, a stage. I didn’t really understand it beyond that, but he had the look of a circus ringmaster and the disposition of your favorite uncle. “Hello, hello! Showing the lady around, are we?”

He also, like most of the other teachers, often seemed to just know things.

“Yeah,” I said, pausing in the doorway. “This is Acacia Jones.”

“Well met, my dear, well met!” He rose and crossed the room in three giant steps to shake her hand. She didn’t seem at all rattled. “Are you enjoying your tour du jour, madame?”

“Vachement, monsieur!” she responded, which I recognized from Basic Language Studies as an emphatic agreement.

Jayarre’s eyebrows rose almost to the brim of his top hat, mustache lifting with his grin. “Merveilleuse, ma bichette!”

“I was going to show her the Hazard Zone,” I interrupted, only to have those eyebrows turned toward me next.

“Were you, now? Well, why not, why not? If she has prime clearance, I see no way at all in which this could go even remotely wrong!” Jayarre was kind of like Jai sometimes, except that instead of using words with lots of syllables, he just used a lot of words. “Perhaps I shall join you on your wondrous journey!”

I hadn’t anticipated that, but before I could come up with any possible reason he shouldn’t, someone else passed by the door.

“Office. Meeting,” she said shortly, turning to glance at me. Jirathe was the Alchemy teacher, and never used two words if one would do. She looked as human as me, save the minor quibble that her cells were made from ectoplasm instead of protoplasm. As a result, her body was sort of a uniform translucent gray when she wasn’t moving. But when she was . . . well, the human body is made of more than six trillion cells, each one mostly water. Whenever Jirathe moved, it was like six trillion prisms catching whatever light there was. Or, to put it another way, it was like a rainbow exploding.

“Should I head back to the briefing room?” I hadn’t heard anything over the speakers, but maybe something important was happening.

“No.” Jirathe gave Jayarre a significant glance, then continued down the deck, through a shaft of crimson sunlight that made her bare arms and shoulders ripple like a fireworks display.

Jayarre murmured, “Sorry about that, my boy. Sounds like senior staff only.” He turned back to Acacia, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “Lovely to meet you, my dear. Perhaps we can exchange pleasantries another time, but now I’ve got to dash. à bientôt.”

“Enchanté!” Acacia called over her shoulder as we parted ways, and I noticed several of the other teachers filing out of their classrooms and heading in the direction of the Old Man’s office. What was the meeting about? Acacia, probably. Was he going to revoke her clearance? No, he’d have no reason to. . . . He wouldn’t have given it to her in the first place if he didn’t trust her.

“It’s about me, I bet,” she said cheerfully. If she was sharing any of the same thoughts as I, she seemed completely at peace with them.

“Probably. That doesn’t bother you?”

“It’d bother me if they weren’t having a meeting,” she said, and I paused to glance at her. “You’re fighting a war here, and you’ve suddenly got a stowaway on your boat. Wouldn’t you call a meeting to make sure everyone knew about a potential threat?”

“The Old Man didn’t think you were a threat.”

She tilted her head at me. “You sure? He gave me clearance, but do you really think he’s not making sure everyone knows it, just in case?”

I thought about that for a moment, going over what she’d said and the way she’d said it. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“A potential threat.”

“You’re a Walker, aren’t you? You move between dimensions. You know that ‘potential’ is a heavy word.”

I couldn’t help it; I smiled, just a little. “True. So you are a potential threat.”

“Sure I am,” she said, looking at me seriously. Her eyes, as I noticed before, were unmistakably violet, not that she looked anything other than human. Aside from her circuit-board nails, that is. “Or I’m an ally. You think that’s only up to me?”

Behind us, reality shimmered, twisted, and re-formed into a completely different, though no less extreme, environment. I tore my gaze from Acacia’s to find that we were hovering over an equatorial glacier. Welcome to Snowball Earth, where for millions of years even the oceans were frozen solid. I glanced back at Acacia to see if she’d noticed the small time jump. She was looking out the window as well, with an odd, peaceful smile.

“No,” I said in response to her last statement, and she smiled at me. The heating elements kicked in as I turned toward the physical training section of the ship, but I was pretty sure that smile could have warmed me up by itself.

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THE HAZARD ZONE IS like the best virtual reality game ever, except that on occasion—or even most of the time, really—it will try to kill you. It’s the Holodeck and the Danger Room combined, with five stages of different variables and conditioning. It’s not that stage 1 is entirely harmless and stage 5 is real danger—the different levels merely indicate how badly things will hurt you. Some of the challenges are real, some of them are illusory, and all of them are programmed with random or hidden variables: A rock appears under your foot as you’re trying to dodge a series of spears, or a swarm of hornets is stirred up by the particle blast you’ve just diverted into a tree.

Getting hurt in the Hazard Zone is like a rite of passage. Everyone does it at least once. You’re not really one of us until you’ve been sent to the infirmary with a third-degree burn because there was the tiniest bit of doubt in your mind that the fire-breathing salamander that just leaped out of the cave could really hurt you.

You learn fast. I did.

My first Hazard Zone injury was better than some (J/O had broken a servo when part of the ground had actually caved under his weight) and worse than others (Jerzy Harhkar’s only injury had literally been a paper cut during an “attack on the school” scenario). I’d stumbled onto a spinedog variable while training in a jungle simulation. If you’ve never met a spinedog, don’t feel bad; I hadn’t, either. It seemed likely that they had those spines for a reason, and that they knew how to use them—what I hadn’t known was that part of the reason (aside from the obvious) that they were called spinedogs was their choice of habitat. Not wanting to disturb their nest, I’d ducked around the nearest tree, putting a hand on the bark to steady myself—

—and nearly jumped out of my skin as the tree swelled up like a puffer fish. Hundreds of tiny, wooden needles stabbed into my palm, and not only had I stumbled back into the path of the simulated HEX agent I’d been playing cat and mouse with, I failed the sim because I couldn’t draw my blaster with my arm numb to the elbow.

It was hardly the most painful thing I’d ever experienced, but having those needles removed was no fun at all, and using my hand was difficult for two weeks afterward. It hadn’t even left me with any cool scars to show off.

Acacia was looking at the empty room with the kind of interested skepticism we all start out with, but I really didn’t want to drag her to the infirmary after her first session. “It doesn’t seem very big,” she commented finally, crossing from one wall to the next in about twenty-five big steps.

“Not until you’re running for your life from a cyborg velociraptor, no. The floor is made of anisotropic treadmills that move with you when you run. The scenery moves around you. Makes it feel pretty real, once you get over the fear that it’s gonna malfunction and send you smack into a wall.”

Acacia giggled. “Has that ever happened?”

“Not that I know of, but I’m always afraid it will.”

“I would be, too.” She paused. “Can we . . . ?”

I hated having to tell her no. I wasn’t sure why, but I did. “Nah. Only a few people have the codes, and they’re all . . . not here. Right now.” I was also hesitant to remind her of the meeting—which was most likely about her—going on upstairs, even though she hadn’t seemed particularly concerned. I just wanted her to feel welcome . . . after all, she might be staying. “Probably tomorrow, though. People use it all the time, and you’re a guest, so I’m sure we could fit you in.”

“That’s okay. Is there a kitchen around here? I’m starving.”

“Yes,” I hedged a little. Kitchen meant mess hall, and mess hall meant people, and people meant awkward. At least in this situation. “But it’ll probably be pretty full . . .”

“I don’t mind. Which way?” She smiled cheerfully at me, and I felt my heart and stomach collide. I was pretty nervous about having to introduce her to everyone who’d been calling her my girlfriend.

“Uh, back the way we came.” I turned to go, offering a hand to Hue as he met us at the door. Hue didn’t like the Hazard Zone. He’d popped in to see me once in the middle of a simulation, and I thought he was going to have a coronary—if mudluffs even have hearts. He’d turned a confused grayish, then a few different shades of red or pink, all of which seemed to mean alarmed, then he’d basically turned into a multi-colored disco ball. If anyone in the room had been prone to seizures, Hue would have done them in right then. Then he’d vanished, and I hadn’t seen him for almost a whole week. To tell the truth, I’d been getting worried by the time he finally showed up again.

I’d tried to ask him about it, but hadn’t gotten much of a response. He seemed confused any time I’d brought it up. The one time I’d been sort of “linked” with him, I’d gotten an impression of the In-Between making perfect sense, from his point of view. I suspected that, for Hue, being in the Hazard Zone was like how my mom used to get sick on virtual reality rides at theme parks; she’d say that because her body wasn’t doing what the world around her was telling her it was doing, it caused a weird dislocation. I guess being a multidimensional life-form in a room full of 3-D special effects and things that weren’t actually what they looked like must have been a little bizarre.

Walking through the halls with a girl on one side and a mudluff on the other was, as I’d mentioned before, a little weird. I mean, I knew I was the odd one out as far as many things went—and let me tell you how much fun it was living with a bunch of people who are as similar to you as people could get and still being the odd one out—but this only served to reinforce it. I was the one who’d gotten Jay killed. I was the one who’d been captured by HEX. I was the one who’d made friends with a mudluff. I’d stumbled into a HEX trap a second time, lost my entire team, been kicked off Inter-World, and somehow regained my memories and found my team again. And I was the first redheaded J-named person to bring someone new to the base. No one else here could say any one of those things, let alone all of them . . . and here I was again, standing out, with my girl friend (not “girlfriend,” mind you) and my mudluff friend, wandering through the halls like I hadn’t a care in the world.

Really, it was no wonder some of my para-incarnations still disliked me.

“Deep thoughts?” asked Acacia, and I realized I was neglecting my duties as tour guide. We’d passed through several hallways without my saying a word, not that there’d been anything interesting to say about them. They were hallways. Some of them had doors that led to other hallways.

“No, sorry. Just thinking about . . . the mess hall. You’re gonna get swarmed,” I warned her, unsurprised when she merely assured me she’d be fine.