Chapter 21: Part 21

I landed, if that’s the right word for it, in the street next to one of the ruined buildings. Chunks of brickwork littered the street and the lot of the building. Oddly, the building seemed to have been made of solid brick all the way through, judging by the size of some of the chunks. Whatever had destroyed it hadn’t much cared through. Nothing higher than my knee remained.

I zipped a few more times around the damaged area and saw the same outcome reflected a few dozen times. Different materials, of course. One was even made of log walls, like an old frontier house. Or rather, as with the first building, solid log, all the way through. It looked weird seeing logs that way, like a bunch of straws glued together.

As I surveyed the destruction, I kept my mental ears and eyes alert for any sign of what had caused it. I was more and more certain that the city planning committee for this mindscape had consisted of Rookie, working for whoever had created him (I still think it was Carver, even if Boddy is certain he isn’t a constructor). But I didn’t think the tear-down had gone on at his say-so. It was a great dusty scar on his otherwise perfectly rendered House crest. Something else had been in my mindscape. Apparently, it had been working against Rookie. That meant, in theory, that it was helping me. Was there a third constructor in play?

After checking all the buildings and finding no sign that any of them had actually contained anything of interest, or anything at all, I chose a piece of rubble at random. It was brickwork, like the first building I had examined. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, so I ran my hands along the edge, trying to glean any information that I could.

The edge snapped into greater focus as I concentrated on it. Originally it had been rough, with no discernable pattern. But as I touched it, grooves began to take shape, left there by whatever had torn the original structure apart. It took me a moment to realize that my mindscape was molding information to a way I could interpret. That was a neat trick. Well, for anyone whose mind might have been tampered with by outside forces, at least. I guess for most people it would come out as a useless sort of memory synesthesia.

As the grooves became more detailed, I noticed that they were gathered into clusters of three to five parallel lines. They didn’t look like any tool I recognized, though I’m sure there are stoneworkers and bricklayers whose knowledge far exceeds mine. I reached out to run my fingers down one of the groups. They were an almost exact fit, width-wise. Maybe some construct had torn these buildings apart with its bare hands? But what had five parallel fingers? Bears? Had someone placed a giant bear kaiju in my mind to help me. But…where was the bear now? I hadn’t seen any signs of another active construct in here. It should just be me and the…

Oh. That would explain why the different claw groupings had different numbers and widths of claws. It certainly had enough of them. Apparently, my very own sleep nightmare didn’t like Rookie any more than I did. Not that I could blame it. Since it effectively lived in my brain, Rookie had effectively held a gun on both of us. I’d want some revenge too.

I decided to get away from its rampage radius before I got sleepy enough for it to come back and start up again. I blipped over to the undefined neighborhood where I had first arrived. I had gotten a feel for how to mold my landscape. That was a good start. If I was going to practice more, here in this place inside my head, I would need a…a workshop. I chose a blank house-form with an appealing shape and I got to work. In the physical world, I moved myself to the room’s solitary chair and got comfortable. I was going to need to space out for a while.

I had just finished putting an exterior on my domain and hollowing out enough rooms to build what I thought I would need when a bee crawled in through the hotel window. I couldn’t tell one bee from another, so I grabbed one of my shoes and held it out towards the bee. “Boddy, if that’s you you’d best say so because if it’s not I’m going to mash it.”

An outside viewer would probably think I’d feel silly, threatening a bee like it could understand me. Referring to it by name. But to me, in that moment, it was the most normal thing. I guess spending the better part of--I checked the clock--an hour and a half slowly tearing off bits of myself to impose my designs on a piece of mind-stuff roughly shaped like a house in a city in my own mind had desensitized me to the weirdness of irrealis. Or maybe it had been that mad sprint down the Alley. Or the time when my evil clone jumped out of my own mind to hold a gun on me after spending three and a bit days dutifully helping me. I considered at this point that everything was weird, and there was nothing to do about it except keep moving. When this was all done, I would do my best to imagine it was a bad dream.

The bee, it turned out, was Boddy, making my speech ironically appropriate for how strange it would seem. It buzzed twice, then in his voice said “I found us a white picket fence. It’s a couple miles from here in the air. On foot, going around all these buildings, not much further.”

I lowered my shoe. Turning inward, I decided to leave my mindscape for the moment, and by instinct and guesswork, slowly managed to reincorporate my mental projection with my physical self. I gotta admit, even if it was completely invisible outside my own mind, it was a cool power to have. Like being a lucid dreamer whenever I wanted.

“Okay,” I answered once I was all in one place again. “We should get some rest. It’s late and we’ll want to be fresh in case Maps or Rookie is waiting for us.”

“Agreed,” buzzed Boddy.

I took the bed, since I was a human-sized person and Boddy took a spot on the table that the lamp made warm, since he was a bee-sized person. As my construct rose from somewhere in my mind to grab me and drag me off to sleep, I realized something that should have been obvious from the beginning.

The construct had to have done its destruction before Rookie betrayed me. Did it know something that I didn’t?

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