“You’ll get nothing from us!” one of the gods bellowed. I think it was Rakaro, the God of Storms—Borys’s patron. “You may have rendered us temporarily helpless, but we will regain our powers and take our revenge!”

  Reggie looked unconcerned at the threat, while Axel smirked. “You see? This attitude is why they couldn’t just ask. They had to deal with me instead.”

  “Insolent construct.” Rakuro sneered. “We should have replaced you long ago. For now, however, the demon takes precedence. Borys! Destroy that false form!”

  Borys looked at me, at Reggie and then at the gathered gods. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said sheepishly.

  “You would disobey me? After all the powers I have granted you? Ungrateful wretch, I will—”

  “Point of order,” Fyskel interjected. “Direct orders are out of scope at this point in the game.”

  Rakuro paused and looked at the other god. “What does that matter?” he asked. “The game must be suspended under these dire circumstances!”

  “I don’t recall declaring it suspended. Nor do I recall a vote on the matter. If you’re fine with declaring early and taking the loss, that’s another matter, of course.”

  Rakuro’s jaw was clenched, and his face was working through an impressive series of emotions.

  “I call for a vote on the suspension of the game that we cannot even play, thanks to the block on our powers!”

  “Against,” Toriao said casually. “I want to see where this goes, and I don’t want Rakuro or his Champion destroying our chances for an explanation.”

  “For,” one of the male gods said. He had green skin and blue hair, and his voice echoed strangely. “These circumstances are clearly exceptional.”

  “Against,” said a familiar voice. The woman who owned it was wrapped in a fur that only barely preserved her modesty. That could only be Naldyna. “I’m winning this game, I don’t want to call it early.”

  “Against,” said a woman dressed in light chain mail. “Isidre will turn it around, I have faith in her.”

  “For,” said a man in grey robes. He left it at that.

  “For,” said another man, this one in black robes. “My primary goal for this round has already been achieved,”

  “And if I vote For, I believe the motion is carried!” Ashmor crowed in triumph.

  “Ashmor, as a non-participant, does not get a vote,” Fyskel said calmly. “The vote is tied, so I may cast the deciding ballot.”

  He winked at me, for what reason I cannot imagine.

  “I vote Against,” Fyskel said. “The motion is defeated.”

  “Bah!” Rakuro shouted. “This isn’t over!”

  Fyskel grinned. “That means it is over,” he said to Borys. “You’re free to do as you please.”

  “Thanks,” Borys said. He gave me a look, but I just shrugged in return. I supposed these arguments were normal with them, they just had them in whatever ineffable plane they normally inhabited.

  “I do want to hear you out,” Borys continued. “Can you get us back home?”

  “I will get to that,” Reggie promised. “But let me explain a few things. We want to get Earth restarted again. Earth probably isn’t the best name, there are thousands of universes with planets called Earth, but everybody here knows what I mean.”

  I cast a glance over the NPCs. They probably thought of the world they came from as Earth. They weren’t really taking part in this discussion, however.

  “When Earth crashed,” Reggie continued, “its data was dispersed. It wasn’t like an explosion, with everything randomly scattered. This was the result of automatic routines for the protection of data, gone wrong. Everything they did was logged. Every bit was tracked and carefully preserved.

  “In order to restart Earth, we have to get every bit of data that was there at the moment of the crash and restore it to its proper… place is, I guess, one way of putting it. There are protections in place, checksums if you know the term, which means that everything has to be exactly right before it will restart.”

  “Wouldn’t it immediately crash again?” I asked.

  “We can patch the bug that allowed Binary Nexuses’s hack to work,” Reggie said. “We can’t change historical events, but the hack will stop working at the moment the instance starts up again.”

  “Bad news for Binary Nexus, then,” I said.

  Reggie nodded. “The startup will fold,” he admitted. “But that’s for the best.”

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  “Wait,” Borys said. “If the data has to match exactly, what happens to all the data we’ve accumulated since then? All our memories? Will that get wiped when we get back?”

  “It would… if that was what we were doing,” Reggie said. He paused awkwardly. “What we’re doing is restoring the memories from the fragmented remains of the originals… which isn’t you.”

  “What do you mean, it isn’t me?” Borys asked.

  Reggie coughed and cleared his throat. “All the Champions,” he said. “You were taken from the logged backups that were moved within the god's reach. That’s why your memories all stop short of the moment of your… cessation.”

  “We’re… just the backups?” I asked incredulously.

  “Not just backups,” Reggie said quickly. “You’re all instantiated and running. You are people in your own right… you’re just not the people we need.”

  “So I’m a copy… of someone who’s running around out there?” Borys asked. He stared at Reggie with a mixture of anger and confusion.

  “Not… you,” Reggie said, swallowing nervously. “Like most of the world, your… original merely stopped working when the crash happened. Transportation to another universe and re-instantiation mostly happened to those who were much closer to ground zero, as it were.”

  “Like me,” I said, reading between the lines. “I have a copy who’s running around out there.”

  He nodded. “She’s in our group,” he said. “And we're all in the same boat when it comes to going back. We can restore our loved ones to life, and they will have a version of us to come back to, but… we can’t go back.”

  “Not even to visit?” I asked plaintively.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You share the same TUID as the others, so having two of you in the same universe will cause a crash.”

  “Tooid?”

  “TUID,” he replied, spelling the acronym out. “Truly Universal Identifier. That’s what we call the long number that identifies you to the universal system. You, the Kandis that will exist back on Earth and my Kandis all have the same TUID. That’s why you could assimilate her memories.”

  “My memories,” I insisted. Reggie shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I mean, they’re your memories now, sure. But you never experienced them.”

  “How does that even work?” I muttered. “If.. if you took my extra memories and transferred them to Earth Kandis, would that be the same as going there?”

  “No,” Reggie said. “It doesn’t work that way. For a start, absorbing too many memories all at once can cause insanity. Second, you’d still be here, the other Kandis would just gain some confusing memories. Third, if it did work that way, my Kandis would have first dibs.”

  “I’m just a copy, after all,” I said bitterly. Then another thought struck me. “That’s the second time you’ve referred to her as your Kandis.”

  “Ah… Well.” Reggie grimaced and looked away. “We’re in a relationship,” he admitted.

  “What? No! Eww!” My mouth made noises, but I wasn’t responding in any meaningful way. I couldn’t process this.

  He was having—? With—?

  “It’s not a big deal!” he assured me. “Different people, different universes. Different experiences.”

  “She’s me!” I protested.

  “She’s not, though,” he said. “You’ve both deviated from the template that you shared enough to be entirely separate people. You’ve never even seen her.”

  “And yet she managed to reach out and ruin my life here,” I said. “As well as deny me even the possibility of going home.”

  “We’re not here to ruin anything,” Reggie said. “We just need to copy some data and we can be gone.”

  “You think you haven’t already done damage?” I wondered. “You’re responsible for Cutter’s death.”

  “I… don’t know who that is,” Reggie said. He looked over at Axel, who shook his head in reply.

  “He didn’t die inside me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I have no idea who it is either.”

  “He was killed by one of those parasitic worms,” I said.

  “Ah!” Axel exclaimed. “I can’t imagine an elf being called Cutter, so one of the little devils must have made it out into the wider world!”

  “Try not to sound so pleased about it,” I spat.

  “Well, I’ll try, but you must admit it’s quite an achievement,” Axel said with a sly grin.

  “I think I’m getting the picture,” Reggie said. “Kandis, you have to understand that we’re not working with a high degree of control here—”

  “I understand that your pet monster killed my friend. My party member.”

  “I can take the blame for that, if that’s what you want,” Reggie said evenly. “We did what we had to, to restore the lives of billions. A hundred lives is nothing in the face of that.”

  “Nothing! You—” I stopped myself. Emotion didn’t know logic, but some of those billions were my parents, my sister. My friends. Upset as I was, the numbers were too obvious to ignore.

  Don’t let what you want blind you to the numbers. That was my training talking. Letting emotions cloud your judgment was the number one taboo of financial analysis. Take the loss and move on.

  “You still haven’t told us what you’re after,” I said, grinding out the words.

  Reggie gave me a long, apprising look. “Are you sure you don’t have any other questions you want answered?” he asked.

  “Not more than that one.”

  He shrugged. “We’re after the data of one person. Her backups were destroyed… we’re not clear on how. Like myself and… the other Kandis, she was sent to another universe. Unlike us, she seems to have found herself in an empty one. We’re not sure if it was just sitting there, or if the routines created it just for her.

  He looked at me pensively. “Time doesn’t work the way you think it does between universes. The rules are complex, but an important one is that the more things in a universe, the slower it runs. A million years must have passed for her by the time Kandis and I got our bearings. She was never a hacker, but she used to be surrounded by them. She understood the mindset, and in a million years, you can figure out anything if you put your mind to it.”

  Ashmor chuckled bitterly. “You think you can just walk in and take her?” he asked. Reggie ignored the interruption.

  “We’re here for Trica. Trica Maynard,” he said. “You know her as Ix. One way or another, she made everything in this universe and then figured out a way to commit suicide.”

  “She’s gone,” Fyskel said. “If there was a way to bring her back—”

  “We wouldn’t allow it,” Duit stated firmly. “We’re not going to give up our existence for someone who wanted to be dead.”

  “No one said anything about bringing her back,” Reggie said. “And as for her being gone, her data is still here. It might be theoretically possible to reconstruct her from the seven of you, but we don’t need to. Her logs are still attached to your own histories.”

  He pulled a metallic ball out of his pocket and examined it closely.

  “The one thing I appreciate more than anything else in my post-apocalyptic existence is the System interfaces,” he said. “Having compute available to you at any time, waiting for a flick of the mind… it was always a dream for me, and most of the BinNex guys.”

  The ball made a little chime.

  “It can’t do everything, though,” Reggie said. “Data here exists as mana, which can’t travel through the portal. So if I want to collate the log files of a certain seven people and send it back home, I need to put it in physical form.”

  He held up the ball and then tossed it through the portal.

  “There, mission accomplished,” he said. “Before I go, there’s just one thing left to decide.”

  Mysterious Strangers:

  NovaGen Employees

  Lucas Trent: Lab tech that Kandis dragged along.

  Survivors:

  Gods

  Tondeni God of Silence

  Rakaro God of Storms

  Ordra God of Seas

  Fyskel God of Balance

  Naldyna God of Nature

  Ashmor God of Destruction

  Toriao God of Knowledge

  Phadan God of Death

  Kandis's party: