Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
“What does that mean?”
“Well…” he smiles. “They hate me.”
“Who hates you?”
“All the other gods. They hate that I have control of four cities and four factories. They punish me in various ways, not in this realm—I have a lot of power here. But in the upper dimension, I am… primitive.”
I don’t know what to make of that, but it’s good information to use later. “Clara?” I prod.
“Right. When you sent her through the Extraction Tower door, she ended up in the old god’s tower in Tau City. Which is somewhat of a slum. It’s where Tyse Saarinen was living. I don’t have specifics about their first encounter, only that somehow, they found each other and seem to have become a team. There was a dramatic escape—somewhat akin to the one that you and your woman went through in the factory version of Tau City, and they took the train to Delta City to seek refuge because the autocrats were after Clara to feed their baby god, and Delta City is where Tyse was born. Delta is his god. He also managed to smuggle out the baby god of Tau City, so Delta is now in possession of it. That brings his baby god count up to five.”
This is… way more information than I asked for. “I don’t care about a baby god, Xi. I care about Clara. Do you know where she is now?”
“Oh, of course, I do.” He smiles. “I told you, down here, in the factory world, I am somewhat of a… king.” His eyes roll up. “Is that better or worse than a god?” Then he chuckles. “Decidedly better, I think. At any rate, at last word they have… encountered some trouble on the train line.”
“What does that mean? What kind of trouble? Does Clara need help?
“Oh, probably not. I would not worry.” He redirects my attention to an elevator. “Would you like to learn more about the augmentation process? It’s just up at the top of the building.”
It’s a trap. I get it. He’s taken me away from Jasina so he can talk me into something. I don’t think he’s going to force me into whatever this augmentation stuff is, but if he is, it’s better to find out now.
So I nod. “Sure. Show me everything.”
Getting off the elevator I find myself inside a dome. Not anything as tall as the Extraction Tower or the God’s Tower, but it is much wider. There are a few pods up here, cocoons, like what the women were in down below. But most of the space is being taken up by the screens.
“What do you call all this?” I ask, pointing to them. “I mean, I get that the plates are called screens, but what is it?”
“Do you want the short version? Or the complete one?”
“If we’ve got time, I want to know everything. I want to understand it. I hate feeling like… like an uneducated idiot. None of this makes sense to me.”
“Of course not. You’ve never seen technology before.”
“Technology?”
Xi smiles. Clearly pleased that I am interested. “I’ll start from the beginning.”
What follows is several hours of information. The god is patient. He takes me around to every single plate—screen. Every single one and explains why it’s here and what it does. He explains the brain inside it. Software. And shows me how to use it. How I can touch the screen and make it do things.
He explains everything many times, but not once does he tire of my questions.
And by the time we get to the last workstation, I not only have a brand-new vocabulary filled with words like data, and biomarkers, and mods—I actually have a whole new view of the world.
Three and a half hours with this god has turned everything I thought I knew, into a lie.
I lean back in the chair I’m sitting in. We’ve been going through workstation number ten for about half an hour now—this one controls something called genetics, which Xi claims I am well-endowed with, and he’s sitting next to me, leaning in from station nine.
“Would you like to see him?”
I side-eye the god. Him. I don’t even need to ask who he’s referring to. I know what he’s doing. What he’s offering here. He wants me to see this Tyse character and be… what? Jealous? Angry? Desperate? Probably all three. But there’s no way I’m gonna say no. “Yeah. I would. Let me see him.”
In these past few hours, I have learned the difference between live viewing a person, like those women we saw in the pods, and vids. Recordings, he calls them.
It’s all very crazy, but it appears to be real.
But what he shows me now, is neither a live viewing or a vid. It’s… a drawing, of sorts. Of a man’s body. But he’s not really a man, just lines of blue light. Shapes.