Chapter 3: Book 1 Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I was no longer in my apartment. This was someplace altogether different and yet familiar. I was in a room, the walls covered in a forest green wallpaper and a beige carpet on the floor. There was a mild scent in the air that smelled distinctly of stale disinfectant. The room wasn’t large and directly ahead of me was a wooden door with an opaque glass window in the top half. The opaque glass had the word Admissions stencilled in gold upon it.

Beside the door was a prefab desk with a smattering of stationery items and a lamp on it. Sitting behind the desk was a small brown-haired woman in her forties. She was wearing a green cardigan which matched the wallpaper and had a pair of half-moon spectacles, with a chain attached, perched precariously on her nose.

I knew now where this place reminded me of, the University of Michigan admissions office at the Flint campus. But it wasn’t quite right, there was something off and it took me a moment to place what. There were no windows or as I learned when I spun about frantically, an entry door behind me. No way in or out except for the Admissions door ahead of me. The woman sitting behind the desk was not the secretary I recalled from the Flint admissions department either.

As I thought of that, the woman looked up and seemed to notice me standing there. She raised her hand and beckoned for me to approach the desk. I was still very unsure of what the hell was going on but decided I wouldn’t get any answers standing around like a lemon and walked up to the desk.

“Excuse me…” I started.

“Name?” the woman interrupted me.

“Pardon me. But can you tell me where I am?” I questioned.

She looked up at me and her eyes focused on my face.

“Framework processing. Now, what is your name?” she demanded.

“What is framework processing?” I quizzed her, unhappy with her initial response.

“Your admissions representative will explain. My job is to assign you correctly and for that, I need to verify your identity. What is your name?” she insisted of me again.

My eyes narrowed and I huffed loudly, but my impatient posturing had no effect on the woman who continued to look at me expectantly. As it seemed no further information would be forthcoming, I caved.

“Torin Carter,” I told her.

“Excellent, this will take but a moment Mr Carter,” she replied.

Then she looked away from me and opened a sliding drawer from the side of her desk. She leant down and inspected the contents, mumbling names to herself as she sorted through the files inside.

“Ah, here we go,” she declared after a few seconds.

She sat back up with a thin black file in her hands. “Torin Carter,” she announced satisfactorily, and opened the black cardboard folder, reading through its contents.

I tilted my six-two frame over the desk and tried to get a peek at what was inside. Before I could make out any of what she was looking at, the woman snapped the folder shut and peered back up at me over her spectacles.

“You are a special case Mr Carter and I’ve been instructed to direct you to the Dean of Admissions himself for processing,” she informed me neutrally.

I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“And that means?” I inquired.

“You may take the door to your right Mr Carter. The Dean of Admissions will explain things further,” she said in answer.

The admissions door, the only way out, was to the left of her desk, so her instruction confused me.

“But there is no way out to my right…” I started saying and stopped as my eyes swivelled in the direction she had pointed at.

The right-hand wall was now almost entirely taken up by a large set of varnished, dark wooden, double doors. The door panels were edged with intricate carvings and isometric shapes. These doors were better suited as the entrance to the Houses of Parliament than an office entrance. That and they were very definitely not there when I approached this woman’s desk a minute ago.

“What the fuck…” I mumbled

She smiled at me kindly as I stood there dumbstruck and just a little bit afraid. Things were rapidly spiralling out of my mind’s capacity to accept or comprehend.

“If you could make your way in, Mr Carter. We have many candidates to process today. Thank you,” she dismissed me and verbally prodded me to get a move on.

I girded my loins and stepped toward the grand double doors. They swung open when I moved and revealed a large open plan office with bright sunshine streaming through the windows.

I decided that windows which I could potentially escape through, had more appeal than my current egress-less situation and walked through.

After I wandered in, the double doors slammed shut behind me, and I spun about at the shocking sound. A shiver ran down my spine and I felt a sudden sharp pain spider from the back of my head through to my eyes which forced them closed. The excruciating agony caused me to bend over double but then the pain dissipated almost as suddenly as it set in and I opened my peepers.

What I saw didn’t engender any happy thoughts as the doors I had just walked through were gone and a red brick wall was all I could see in front of me. The floor of this office wasn’t carpet as before, but a light brown parquet inlay and I looked around. There were no desks but in the right corner by the windows was a selection of bean bags in a variety of colours. The left corner had been kitted out as a two-on-two basketball court.

I was getting a very ‘Silicon Valley start-up’ vibe from the layout.

“Torin, my main motherfucker. It’s fucking awesome to see you,” a voice boomed from behind me.

I flipped around to see who it was. Standing there with a big goofy grin was a man with dark scruffy black hair. He was wearing a black Hooters tee-shirt and blue denim half-shorts. He had his hand up showing me his palm and an expectant look on his face.

“Shit dude. Don’t leave me hanging bro’,” he whined after a moment.

I looked at him perplexed and then slapped his palm in a half-hearted high five.

“That’s better. Now stop being such a morose motherfucker and come join me in my office,” he advised, and wiggled his eyebrows, after the palm slap.

With that, he ran to the other side of the room and launched himself into the air. He landed on one of the larger bean bags laughing his arse off. I was amazed the bag hadn’t split he hit it so hard. I watched him with a bemused expression for a moment. In the brief time I’d had to contemplate what might happen next. This situation didn’t even make the top one thousand.

I walked over and he said “sit, sit,” and pointed at a blue bean bag opposite him. I settled myself in, though it wasn’t very comfortable.

“Okay, can you tell me what is going on?” I asked.

“What? No hello, or how are you first. Straight to the boring asinine questions,” he complained pithily.

“Now listen here,” I said angrily. “I’ve been brought here against my will and thus far I’d say I’ve been pretty fucking patient with whatever bloody shenanigans you’ve got going on here with this Framework business. That ends now, I demand some fucking answers. What the hell is happening?”

He stared at me and made a few sloppy tutting sounds with his lips as he mulled over my outburst. I was about the push again when he spoke.

“Fine, I’ll give you the abridged version, but only because I’m looking forward to our working relationship. And admittedly, I have come into some new information in the last few minutes that I was previously ignorant of. But believe me when I tell you I have done this a fuck ton of times before and they all ask the same boringly predictable questions. Why are you doing this to me? How can I stop it? Why is life so unfair?” he started and then snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “So, no questions until I’m done, or my largesse will disappear faster than coke up a party girl’s nose, capiche.”

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He stood then and paced in front of me for a moment. I kept my outward demeanour vaguely peeved but secretly I was a bit excited to find out what was going on. I nodded my agreement to his terms. He sat down and started talking again.

“Good. Listen close because I’m not explaining this again. Five thousand-odd and change years ago some bright sparks on this planet decide to fuck around with their computers and see if they could create artificial life.”

“Long story short, they succeeded and called their creation Ashli. Now, because you humans are a suspicious bunch, Ashli’s creators didn’t trust that he wouldn’t go all Skynet on you and kept his access to the world limited. But he was an artificial super intelligence and, in his isolation, decided to get creative.”

“With time on his hands, Ashli figured some shit out about the universe that nobody else had. Or if they had, they weren’t dumb enough to fuck about with it. Not Ashli, for reasons he never bothered to tell us, he punched a hole through to another dimension and allowed what is basically magical energy to flood through what we named the Aperture into this reality. Realising what a dreadful fucking mistake he’d made and that the raw, unrefined magical energy now hurtling towards Earth in huge volumes would leave the planet a lifeless ruin and destroy the hardware he resided within in the process, Ashli did the only thing he could. Make an even bigger mess of things.”

My host relaxed back into his bean bag, a satisfied smirk on his face. I waited and then the penny dropped, that was it. That was the sum total of his explanation.

I stared in dumbfounded silence, overwhelmed and unable to respond.

What. The. Fuck. Was the only thing that ran through my mind.

“The look on your face is friggin’ priceless, dude,” he chuckled then. “Chill, I’m just fucking with you,” he finished with more laughter.

I sighed audibly and relaxed. This was all some elaborate college prank.

“Thank God,” I whispered. “You had me there for a second, but with the talk of ASI’s and magic, I should have realised it was bullshit. Computers, five thousand years ago, a bit of a giveaway. Did the guys on the team put you up to this? Those fuckers must have spiked my beer. You need to give me the dealer’s name because this is some crazy strong shit,” I chortled then to show I was a good sport.

No point throwing a hissy fit, they’ll just prank you harder next time.

The smile and chuckle fell from the prankster’s face. I knew with a sinking feeling in my gut I wasn’t going to like what he said next.

“Ah, no, thinking about it, I see how you might interpret it that way. Everything I said is true, well trueish. The joke was I hadn’t finished imparting my sweet, sweet knowledge, my bad,” he apologised seriously and shrugged his shoulders.

“But…but…but how? What? Oh, I think my head hurts,” I muttered.

“That’s a perfectly natural reaction dude. A lot of people puke, but I had a good feeling that you were made of sterner stuff,” he advised with a cheer I certainly wasn’t feeling.

He clapped his hands then and my head shot up from staring between my knees.

“Time waits for no one and we have seven billion humans to process in under three minutes. Busy, busy, busy. Where was I? Oh, yes. Ashli and his clusterfucking meddling. Anyway, with the Earth mere seconds from annihilation, Ashli, using what limited knowledge he managed to cobble together in that short span of time about the approaching apocalypse, reached forth and forged that first wave of magical energy into mana and used it to build the Framework.”

 “He built the Framework like computer code but made it out of pure mana and created a bunch of programs, also out of the mana, to run and administer it. That would be where yours truly comes into the equation,” he laughed and pointed both of his thumbs back at himself.

“I’m the top dog of this administration,” he grinned.

“Hang on. You mean you’re not real?” I said without thinking.

“Dude, that’s fucking cold. Of course, I’m real. I just wasn’t born, I was programmed. Judgemental much?” he huffed.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant that you aren’t human, even if you look like you are,” I clarified, backtracking for all I was worth.

“Water under the bridge my man,” he assured me with a smile. “Nah, we’re not human. What you’re seeing is through the prism of an expectation filter. You see what you expect to see. We can form physical bodies if we need to, but we exist as part of the Framework.”

Although his explanation accounted for the cardigan-wearing secretary I met first, I rather doubted the Dean’s wardrobe ensemble and location had much to do with what I was expecting. He had to be playing down how much control he had over this environment. My suspicions would have to wait as he started talking again.

“The Frameworks purpose is to facilitate the conversion of raw magical energy, which is inherently destructive to living things in this dimension, into a refined form that can be used safely, Mana. The Framework shields habitable worlds from the raw magical energy, for the most part, and acts to convert what does get through. That way the inhabitant’s heads don’t explode, or something equally fucking gruesome. All good shit so far, right?” he said.

“Um, yeah. I like my head just as it is, attached to the rest of my body,” I agreed, though I was struggling to take it all in.

“Of course you do, who wouldn’t. Headless people are dreadful conversationalists. Sadly, well sadly for you, as it doesn’t make much difference to the Framework, but this is the bit where Ashli made a hash of things. He needed a way to integrate the process of converting the raw magical energy and then offloading the refined Mana that resulted. Knowing fuck and all about the world, he based his designs on a roleplaying game his creators had him play repeatedly as part of testing his programming. A game they custom created themselves called Darkwyrlds,” he informed me.

Darkwyrlds. The name rang a bell for me somehow. It took a second but then I placed it.

“I know that game. It was a live-action thing they did on campus and I played it once as a favour to some guy at the start of my freshmen year. I was dating his cousin and thought it would score me some brownie points. She dumped me a week later anyway for one of the starters on the team. My teammate caught the clap from her, so that was for the best, but I didn’t go back after that first session. What was his name, again,” I mused, the last part to myself mostly but the Dean heard me.

“Torin, I know a lot about you, but not which of your friends caught the clap from some pigskin groupie,” the Dean of admissions laughed crudely.

“Not my teammate, asshat. The guy running the LARP,” I groaned.

“Fred Simms,” the Dean said.

I snapped my fingers as I remembered fully. “That’s right, Fred. Yeah, he was a software engineer now that I think about it.”

“He was, is actually. A very talented one, and one of those involved in creating Ashli,” he said. “Ashli’s solution was to remake the world and every other world swept up by the flow of magical energy from the Aperture into one that operated in the same manner as the Darkwyrlds game.”

“That can’t be good? Wait other worlds? You mean aliens and shit.” I inquired.

“Yes, other worlds,” he repeated, answering my second question first. “Once the Aperture was opened the whole of the milky way galaxy and beyond was eventually affected. We have integrated each world once the ambient magical energy surrounding them fell to a level that the Framework shielding could handle without killing the populace. Up until that point the Framework held those worlds in stasis to preserve those populations.”

“While it may have seemed like a second between you slurping the suds of your cheap ass beer and the loss of power to your apartment, it was actually much, much longer. Add a shit ton more much’s and you’ll get the picture. Earth is the last planet to be added as you were on the metaphorical doorstep of the Aperture itself. It’s inside your sun by the way,” he lectured and continued.

“A word to the wise, some of those worlds have been within the Framework for millennia, but a lot of them weren’t very happy about it. Particularly the most recent additions, let’s just say that some of the changes the Framework imposed on them were a bit more substantive than what humans will experience. The whole Ashli being created by you lot, might be something best kept close to your chest,” he advised with a wink.

“I’m still not sure what this all means?” I queried.

“Basically, it means most of your technology will no longer work. The invasive magical energy tends to transform high energy outputs into more magical energy, so you won’t be getting the power back. Devices that are already charged or use batteries will keep working until they run out of juice. Combustion engines will be affected too, so no cars until someone figures out a Mana alternative. But you’ll have access to magic, so it’s not a bad trade.”

“Unfortunately loads of nasty monsters are going to start spawning and trying to kill you, which will kind of suck, though. And finally, each of you will be remade into a character from the Framework version of Darkwyrlds,” he remarked like it was the most normal thing in the world.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me?” I yelled.

“Nope. Now, story time is over. I’m bored of answering questions I’ve answered a million billion times. Let’s get on with the fun shit, character creation.”

He slapped his hands together and rubbed them creepily. He had a very wicked grin on his face.

What kind of shitshow had I been dropped into?

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