The horizon glowed a faint red. In front, dark rags of clouds were floating around, grayish, thin. Some stars were still out, ever more faint, as the world was being flooded with light from below.
Under a fence a hedgehog hurried through, its tiny legs flickering underneath in the run. It suddenly came to a halt, sniffed around, and made a sharp turn before continuing. Finally, it arrived at a large, blue, somewhat worn-down cooking pot with a rim almost its height. From inside, a faint but pleasant smell was wafting out. The hedgehog jumped in happily and started to crunch on the remaining dogfood with its tiny teeth.
Dewdrops were sitting blurrily on the large, green clumps of grass. Not even the asphalt was radiating the past day's heat anymore; it was cold, too, ready to soak up sunlight again.
From the distance, a car's engine could be heard from the direction of main road. The hedgehog paused, pricked its tiny, round ears, then carried on with the feast. The noise was getting stronger for a while, then grew more quiet, and, eventually, stopped.
After a couple seconds, barely audible, two doors being slammed. A dog started barking in the distance, joined by some others later.
Akos got around the car, and started looking for his keys, in the glow of the street lights. Meanwhile, Aladar locked the vehicle, parked in front of Akos's house.
"Quiet; we might end up waking them up" Akos spoke up.
"Not sure about you, but..." answered Aladar disapprovingly, "I think I've had my daily dose already, of things like... 'let's enter the building without anyone noticing'..."
In the semi-darkness of the room, beams of sunlight shining through were making dust particles glitter. Behind the darkness of the curtains, two pairs of tired eyes were browsing through the lines showing up on the screen.
"So... what we're looking for are... images. Like, connections. Just like the four eyes. Right?"
"Exactly. I think they'll look somewhat like those thingies from the e-mail. If we can download these, they might shed some light on what happened to Anne and how we could undo it."
"You're such an optimist again. Are you even sure they're here?"
"They must be. There has to be a program, or... it's just not obvious where. This is where they keep the experimental e-mail server, too; we already got that one."
"... how about... tomorrow we..."
"If they change the password, we won't be this lucky another time. We'll find it no matter what!"
They've been on the server for a while already, but they haven't found anything comparable yet. Using this account, not even the promisingly-named "documentation" folder was accessible.
Akos grabbed yet another package of biscuits from the shelf, poured it out to to the middle of the desk, and continued thinking. He occasionally placed one of them into his mouth, absent-mindedly.
He looked around again on the hard drive of the machine... there wasn't anything interesting there, he had checked countless times already, but... Although...
"Last time... did we see... this one?" he asked Aladar, who was sitting next to him, lost in his thoughts.
"This... hey, I wasn't even sleeping, but I had a dream in which..."
"Sure, sure. Has this already been here the last time we looked? This file. It's called... 'look_at_this'..." Akos pointed at the screen.
"Well... it might be worth... say... looking at it? It's either the right thing or not, and... it sure feels good to imagine it is, but... given the previous twenty-three similar..." and then he glanced at the screen, too.
Just one line:
"hey there! If you want to come in, try 'iterm' :)"
As if that file really wasn't there before... at least they surely wouldn't have missed it.
"... want to come... 'in'?" mumbled Aladar. "What's... 'in'?"
Akos was typing the command already. Hit return. The cursor was blinking for a while, lonely, in the darkness. Then...
"Awesomeness! Really haven't seen you for a looong time. What's up in the world btw?"
Akos suddenly felt the world was spinning around him. Instead of hex codes and symbols...
"This is... unreal. Just like my sister. Or... just some sneaky sysadmin from FCI who wants to catch me?" He wasn't too serious about the latter one either, but the situation was so unbelievable that he didn't want to believe to himself even.
"Aren't you a little paranoid? Just go and answer something!"
"Wait a bit. One: who are you, two: who do you think I am." Akos typed calmly. Still. He'll still see whether to believe his own eyes.
"You must be Akos, only you ask stuff like this. As for me... wanna guess?"
No more doubts. Unreal, but true. This is his little sister! For real! She's finally here, he can talk to her about things that actually make sense, and...
"Yeah, that's definitely her" Aladar was staring at the lines. "How did they do this??? Copying an entire brain? Better be cautious though, it's still FCI after all on the other side. It's... just like you said, a bunch of images that were copied out. She might be similar to your sister, but it's not her. Be careful."
"Wait. We'll see. ... and I'm the paranoid?"
'Was it you sending the e-mails?' Akos typed.
'Wait a bit. There is a graphic terminal, too, you can get it from www.proj.fci.com, here is the password.' Then, the program quit.
"OK then. Let's fetch it then." Akos brought up a browser lightning-fast, and located the program with a few clicks; even in the password-protected part of the site, it was named "special system administration utility", to avoid anyone noticing it. The program started, was printing all kinds of things on the terminal for a while, and then a window showed up.
Akos was staring at the screen motionless, for seconds. He wasn't expecting even more coming, and then...
A big, wide, green field, it's a field of wheat, yes. Ripples of wind are flowing though it, the crops are swaying, fluffy white clouds are sailing across the sky, the sun is shining.
Exactly... exactly like in his dream.
"This is better, right?" Anne showed up on the screen. Her long, white gown was floating in the wind, her blue eyes were smiling. "So good that you're here! So... e-mails: sure it was me."
"I... see. And... sorry for asking stuff like this, but you do know how weird of this entire situation is. Can you... objectively explain, who you actually are, where you are and what you're doing?" Akos was slightly embarrassed. He looked at Aladar, as if he knew what he didn't: what now?
"Well... isn't this a lot right away?" Anne started hovering about a foot above the wheat field, just on a whim, and carried on from there. "I know it's weird, but... at least what I feel is that... I'm who I look like? Although... not a lot is entirely sure around here." Her jingling laughter was rendered by the speakers in excellent quality.
"What do you mean?" Aladar interrupted.
"You know what? I'll tell you about the entire thing, and then you'll understand."
"Sounds good. Not a lot of time ago, we were under the impression that it's up to us to figure all this out."
"So... There was that one math camp. Where I was sending the RSA things. Then... on the third day, I went to sleep in the evening, and... as far as I remember, I was dreaming about all kinds of weird things. There are more blurry ones, but I remember most of them fairly well: I was walking around in various mazes, interesting symbols everywhere, which I had to decode."
"Sounds... familiar? I did have dreams like that, too."
"Weird. You aren't in here though. By the way, there were really cool ones, it feels like when you're studying, or solving math problems, you just start knowing more and more things... and then I ended up here, on this large, green field. It's my favorite ever since, too."
"And... that's the entire world?"
"Nope! The best thing about is that whatever you make up, it'll just... be there and it'll work! Wish you two were here! For example... this one, you'd like a lot!"
She turned around and drew a circle in the air with a finger; a bright rift emerged in the air, which then expanded into a teleport gate, glowing with a shining, white light. "You only need these to keep things in order", she explained. "It wouldn't be neat to just jump around willy-nilly."
She stepped into the gate, causing the entire screen to flash, turning into a bluish blurriness. The image cleared slowly: the landscape looked as if it wasn't based on Earth. Dark clouds on a purple sky, bluish, crystalline ground, dark blue waters, with a thin, fragmented layer of ice.
There was a familiar, chewing noise from the right, which was also where the "camera" was panning towards while also starting to descend. They slipped through a milky-white cloud, which then tore apart into drifting whisps.
The blue ground was covered in a thick, purple slime, hugging a few blue crystals, which were being chewed on by strange organisms. As a fragment broke off, one of the creatures picked up into its sizeable, horizontally aligned jaws, and started heading towards a large, similarly organic... building?
The two of them kept staring at their favorite computer game, almost turned into actual reality. On the slime, they saw a couple other buildings, too, all of them familiar, but not quite the same as as the originals, with quite a few bizarre-looking critters around. All this with the purple sky above them.
From the side, a large and ugly beast floated into their field of vision. It consisted of a gas-filled bladder, with wiry appendages hanging from the sides; it also came with eyes and a trunk-like organ on the front. Its body was covered in various attachments and antenna-like protuberances... with Anne standing on top of all of it, demonstrating the giant proportions of the organizsm: it must have been more than a hundred meters long.
They could see it from up close now. Below, in the background, a bluish, crystalline landscape, over which they were hovering slowly. She stopped the great abomination with a quick thought, smiling at them. Her white clothes were billowing beside her, in the strong, high altitude winds.
"You did mention a couple times that it would be cool if Starcraft 2 was finally released... well," she paused to think for a bit, "... I did make a couple of them, but... I thought you'd like this one the best? But then... you guys surely don't see this too well from over there; a video feed is a lot worse than reality...?"
"... reality?" Aladar was making a good attempt to ignore the fact that he'd actually love to be standing on that Overlord, over there, too. "Well, reality is, for the time being, us here. So... returning to the actual topic: what do you know about what's going on, how this entire thing works, and... why?"
"But... you... like it, right?" Anne was looking at them from the screen, with hope in her eyes.
"Of course I like it!!!" Akos interjected. "You can't imagine how happy we are, seeing you... and that... you're still... yourself? But: there are some important things we could really, really talk about first."
"Ookay, right", she relaxed a bit. The video feed switched, with no blur or continuity this time, in a split second, back to the green field. "I'm curious about quite a few things about you two, anyway... Like... I know that this is some server of Fenyes Laci's dad's company, but... I have no idea what they're up to with me? That's why I started doing all kinds of exploratory expeditions, this is how I found the file manager and the e-mail system. Actually, how did you end up getting in?"
"It's... a bit complicated. The point is... we got an admin password from somewhere. Also, it might or might not work tomorrow."
"Admin? Too bad, I do have that one already... but... how did you even get to the point of looking for an admin password into here? Was it the machine name?"
"... and the symbols. The apple and the four eyes."
"Odd! How did you figure that one out?? Those symbols are proprietrary FCI tech... would have been very hard, out of just two e-mails."
"I don't know; maybe they abducted me in a math camp, too; as it happens, the 'apple' one ended up having a pretty strong effect on me... and... you."
"Ohh yes" Aladar dropped in, "... how much was it exactly? Eight experiments, nine apples, or..." he recalled the "classic" case.
"Yeah right, I don't know... but... apparently, you have not met... me inside, right? Very odd." Akos added.
"Well, I indeed didn't. It would have been... nice though, to have you here. Anyway... what's up with, um, me? I still exist somewhere outside, too, right?"
"To... some degree? Can you imagine that... you don't care about math, creatures with four eyes, or ... about new things? That... you're listening to disco music all day and... go to parties... with Fenyes and his pals?"
"Me??? And... before this... I was not like this, right?"
"Definitely not! You were like... you are right now. Entirely. To hell with this entire thing..."
"Okay, good... since... in here, time doesn't quite flow in such a simple way as you typically imagine? So... sounds like we need to make up a plan right now. Like... how can you make it in here."
"Or, just maybe, you make it out of there?" Aladar asked, with raised eyebrows, watching the girl effortlessly strolling on top of wheat stalks.
"How much do you know about what they actually did to you? We can tell all the stories later", Akos got to the meat of the matter.
"Kinda...? They have a brain writer reader thingie that can read & modify neural synapses. Of course only when you're thinking of the particular thing. I guess I changed this much outside because they couldn't just read everything at once, so they had to switch off the parts that they've read already."
"... and you're just telling us this. You're... terrible. First of all, Starcraft 2, the cool things you made up" Akos exchanged glances with Aladar, smiling, "and, only afterwards, y'know, the part about what actually happened, and what we could do to fix it! Anyway... can this thing be used to... write synapses?"
"Theoretically... well, all of this is just theoretical anyway. I once discovered this doc titled 'Brain Scanner Design Goals Overview', in their file manager, and... since I still remember that it exists, I guess they didn't think it was too important or accurate? Or they didn't count on me ever using it for anything?
"Got it. And... as for the the part of where this is, or how it looks like, or..."
"Yep, right, I have absolutely no idea. But it's surely here in this building, which is... guarded. Heavily."
"We... noticed." Aladar remarked. "Where did you think we got the password from?"
"You... came in??? Okay, I knoow, no stories yet. So, the server is up on the 13th floor, surely the brain things are around there, too. I'll look into how to program them until then. It... would be great to have a root password though; you can access everything with that one. But... wait. The part where we're now talking, they might not notice it, as long as I'm not thinking about it too often. But... as for you actually, entirely, coming in here..."
"We won't. Or, actually, by the time they'll notice, it won't matter anyway, because we'll be out of there already. all three of us." Akos announced, with great resolve.
"... out of here? It's such a very nice place though! Oops, it's almost 8am! They'll come, Cron and the Great Devil, and if they see me... come back tomorrow, after midnight! Bye!!!"
The program exited, and, two seconds later, the text terminal hung up, too. Another three seconds: the computer clock flipped to 8:00.
They continued to stare at the empty screen for some time; eventually, Aladar drew the curtains and opened the window. Into the stuffy room, together with the fresh morning air, the sounds of the waking city poured in: buses rumbling, dogs barking, trees swaying in the wind...
Akos's thoughts have been going in circles for a while, around the brain scanner and the 13th floor. He got up and slowly walked to the window. The landscape looked surprisingly average, no overlords, no blue crystals... no Anne.
"Isn't this like... as if this was a dream?" Aladar got lost in his thoughts too.
"Speaking of that... we better actually get some sleep at last. We had a... complicated day, and we'll have one tomorrow too, regardless of... when it actually starts..."
"Yep" Aladar added. "Will be heading out then. You have an adorable little sister, no surprise that you're missing her."
Akos gave him a soft smile. They stumbled down the stairs, the lack of sleep catching up with them. Tomorrow it is.
Their schedule did not happen to apply equally to everyone though.
"Hey Akos! Where have you been for so long?" his mom showed up in the kitchen, somewhat unexpectedly. "And why so early... oh hi Aladar! What do you want for breakfast? I'm guessing Anne will join soon too, she went to sleep pretty early yesterday."
"Hi Mum... well... there was the party over at the Fenyeses... it... ran a bit long. And then we talked a bit more... with Aladar."
"I see, sounds good then. Well, you could have told Anne too about going. She would have surely joined if she knew! You do know how she's been so open to new things lately!"
"Maybe. Yeah. Sure. Next time? I think we'll... go to sleep now, will eat something later, but thanks!!!"
"Okay then, sleep well... you should tell us about how it went though, tonight!"
"Sounds good! Bye!"
Aladar was heading out homewards, on the increasingly crowded roads; meanwhile, Akos, up the stairs. They were both asleep, not much after.