As my body fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, I unintentionally projected into my mindscape. I was relieved that my projection didn’t share the pains and aches of my physical form. I took in my surroundings. Just as my outside scan had suggested, my mindscape was largely intact, other than damage dealt by the sleep metaphor to the city portion, which I was all to happy to let continue.
I was also freed from the fogginess that consumed my thoughts while awake, which made me wonder why it was that I hadn’t been visited by my own personal nap monster while I was drifting to sleep this time. If I didn’t know it was in here, currently tearing apart a parking garage in what approximated to downtown, I would have assumed it was because it had gotten truly loose. But now, I was perplexed.
I shaped a bench into the front of my workshop and faced the city, trying to decide how to best approach the new, more lethal-looking monstrosity. Leaving it alone had worked quite well up to now, but up to now it had seemed to lack any sense of awareness, acting on pure…instinct. Pure drive. Maybe I could reason with it. Train it, like a dog. Not that I really had much experience training dogs. Or ally with it, if it was capable of speech. That seemed unlikely; it might have an eye now, and even something resembling a body with a distinct front and back and a rough approximation of symmetry, but it still lacked a mouth.
A faint whistle reached my ears. That was extremely unexpected. The only active constructs in my mind right now were me, the sleep creature that couldn’t possibly whistle, and my hammer, which was even less capable of whistling considering that it lacked not just a mouth but all means of autonomous movement. Had Rookie left some sort of trap here that the metaphor had unwittingly uncovered?
The whistle repeated, a short and meandering tune. After a minute or two, it repeated again. It slowly dawned on me that I recognized that tune. It was…it was a piece of memory that was so old I literally felt the dust fall off of it in a distant part of my mindscape. That was my brother’s whistle. He used to whistle that same tune whenever we were out in the park playing at being spies, or Robin Hoods (he said he should get to be Robin Hood because he was the oldest and therefor in charge. I said I should get to be Robin Hood because he was the coolest. In the end, we were both Robin Hood and some squirrels served as our Merry Men. Badly.), or…whatever other fancy had struck our childlike brains that day. Always the same tune. It didn’t mean anything. Wasn’t a signal, nothing like that. It was just…his.
It was coming from the city. Slowly, then twanging into place like a snapped rubber band, a thread of light led the way for me. I could see the notes of the little tune drifting along the thread; each its own mote of distinct light that came with built-in synesthesia. Right, my mindscape could filter information for me, if I needed it to.
Whatever that whistle was coming from, it was definitely not me or the sleep creature, and it likely wasn’t Rookie, since he was unraveled, according to Boddy. It was always possible that it was another constructors creation, maybe even the same one that had built Rookie and planted him in my mind, but it didn’t seem terribly likely. Rookie hadn’t ever really made references to my life outside the Lane. I suspected now, with the benefit of a whole thirty-to-forty hours of hindsight, that this was because he genuinely couldn’t access my full mind without my noticing. He wasn’t made of my fabric. It would…I realized I knew exactly what it would feel like for a construct made of a different fabric to tamper with my existing memories. It would be like a horrible feedback from a cheap microphone, but it would resonate in my skin and bones, too. Yeah, Rookie and any of his kin wouldn’t be able to access that memory on their own, unless I gave it to them or they got help from one of my own constructs.
Which left only one option that I could think of. Somehow, this whistle was coming from a construct that I had created. Since I didn’t remember making any other constructs besides the hammer and the dream creature, it was either a purely involuntary one or it was the construct that Rookie had displaced. I made a decision, and blipped to the other end of the thread of light. Sleep monster be damned, I wanted to know what was going on.
I landed next to a familiar-looking building made of glass. The door I had shaped two nights previously was still in the wall there. The thread seemed to be coming up from somewhere underneath the building. I walked around the block, trying to pinpoint where it was entering the ground or the building, but as far as I could tell it was exiting directly from solid glass.
Of course. I should have thought about this when I was projecting here the first time. Glass. Glass was the form that illusion took in my mindscape. This whole tower…it had been built to keep parts of my mind covered up. Presumably, the parts that Rookie didn’t want me to see. The parts that explained this plot, for example. The parts that wanted to prevent Rookie from building more illusions, or from creating artificial loyalty to the House of Community.
He must have imprisoned my actual thought police here. That’s why the interior had resolved as a police station the first time I was here. My mindscape had been filtering information to me that I didn’t even realize I was looking for.
I blipped to the top of the tower and looked out over the rest of the city. Several other buildings were made of glass, maybe one in five of them. A lot of buildings in a city the size of the one Rookie had built. But now that I knew what to look for, I could tell the difference between illusion and simple shapings chosen for their aesthetics. I felt anger boiling up inside me. I also saw anger boiling in the sky of my mindscape.
I was done. These illusions couldn’t be tolerated any longer. With a rush of energy and a chord like a guitar tuning up, my hammer materialized in my hand. No. That wouldn’t do. This hammer was a tool of construction. I needed something else. Something…volatile. A weapon, not a tool. Reaching up, I wound some of that boiling anger around the haft of my hammer, like a cotton candy vendor preparing a fresh cloud. I blipped back to my workshop and fed the anger into my refinery.
I looked at the moulds I had created previously. Hammer. Body armor. Handgun. No. I needed something else. Something…I reached for one of my mould blanks and began to shape it. I needed a symbol of destruction. A symbol of revolt. Through the haze created by refining my anger, I nearly felt mad in the other sense. I laughed. It was probably manic. Yes. This would be perfect.
I slid the mould into place and pulled the necessary theatrically-large levers to set the channels. I turned to the refinery. A haze of yellowish smoke was still emitting from it, but a slow drip of liquid sunlight was starting to fill the output reservoir. I needed more material. Reaching up straight through the ceiling, I grabbed the edge of my anger and pulled it down to feed it directly into the machine. Then I shaped a vent hood to collect the yellow gas. I knew, instinctively, that it was the irrational behavior my anger would cause. Refining it out would leave me with something…something I suspected that most human languages didn’t have a word for. Not quite righteous anger, because revenge and hate weren’t being distilled out. Pure, directed, anger, with all the motivations intact but the myopia filtered out.
The machine ate up the clouds of boiling anger hungrily. As it pulled them down, I noticed a weave to them, like the fabric of my mindscape was being laid bare for my eyes for a moment. The yellow smoke was contained in a large tank on the second floor of my workshop, where it would cause no harm until I could properly destroy it.
When the refinery finally had enough anger in it, I threw the last lever to release the reservoir and took up my forging hammer. The anger I had felt now seemed more…academic. It no longer boiled, either in my sky or in my chest. Of course. I had consumed the whole surge getting the materials for this.
The liquid sunlight filled the mould. I pressed the top plate into place and gave it two solid raps with my forging hammer. Three breaths, then a third rap. I moved the top plate off to reveal an object that seemed to be made mostly of an unknown pale wood, except for the head, which was instead made of platinum or maybe another metal too unearthly to have a name. I carried the object to my anvil. Letting my mindscape guide my strikes, I carefully removed any flaws in the haft. Then the head, one tine at a time.
Once I had filed off the rough edges from the mould and tempered the metal of the head, I felt the gentle hum of power. My weapon of revolt was almost ready. Four more strikes. One on each of the tines. Sparks flew in a cloud with each hammer blow, then gathered around the point of impact. When the fourth blow landed, the sparks all coalesced together into a brilliant white-hot flame. It wouldn’t hurt me, but it would be very dangerous to anything that had made me angry.
I held my creation up to the light, in a pose that I realized was too dramatic but that I also couldn’t resist. What I held was a large fork, with four simple, slightly curved, tines. A flickering flame danced between the tines, as bright as the sun on a clear day, but comforting to view.
It was both torch and pitchfork. What can I say. I’m a fan of the classics.
