Chapter 9

Dandelionaid

At first that’s all there was; blackness. The lights on the ship didn’t respond, and it seemed as if the all of eternity had come to an end. But it was still there. I could feel the cushion of the ship against my back and the controls to the chair on my finger tips. Also, I could hear Jake trembling somewhere in front of me.

“Chris…? Are we alive?”

“Jake, just be patient. Something’s gotta happen soon.”

“Like what?”

Then it hit us. A spray of different colors came out in a whir. At first it was a random array, but then it formed into patterns and straight lines. Light shined in brightly, illuminating the whole bridge. It was like we had been pulled into a time warp…or space warp…or something. We were being pulled through some kind of freaky place.

Then, it all began to slow down. Soon the colors that were rushing past at high speeds became uniform. Then it became apparent that the colors weren’t the ones moving, but us. The ship was moving relative to their position.

“Jake, are we still moving?”

He checked the dial and nodded. “Confirmed; we’re still moving…but where the hell are we?”

I leaned forward, and looked at the random colors out there. There was still the black background, but the colors dominated the view. Most weren’t moving, but reacting to the main source of activity, which was in the center of it all. It was a big, ball of pulsating color that often shot off bursts of energy that changed whatever side it hit. While it was bizarre, it was a sight to behold.

“What do we do now?” Jake asked.

Suddenly I remembered our current situation. “Quick, bring up the radio transmitters.”

Jake did, and at first there was a little hint of static, but then it began to clear. At first I couldn’t tell what I was hearing, but then I realized.

It was Jessica, and she was crying.

“Is the voice audio on?” I asked.

“Let me check…”

There was a beep, and I spoke. “Jessica, can you hear me?”

She made a startled sound, and began panting hard. “Ch— Chris?”

“Jessica, it’s me. Where are you?”

“I— I don’t know. Everything’s so cold. So cold…”

I turned quickly to Jake. “We’ve gotta hurry!”

“What do you want me to do?!”

I looked back at the screen, towards the pulsating orb of color. “Fly us in there.”

“Are you crazy?!”

“Jake, we just flew into a black hole. I’m pretty sure this thing is safe…”

He sighed, and touched his key-board. The ship sped up, and we moved directly towards the orb. As we passed in, everything became a whir of rainbow colors again, with nothing solid or specific. Then it cleared.

What lay before us was even stranger than before. It appeared to be a landscape of some sort, but it was square-like.

Everything was straight, and built on perfectly square angles. On top of that, what might have been constituted as sky was black, like before. Behind us lay the same pulsating energy orb, which I imaged would take us back out of here if we chose to leave.

“Where to now?”

I looked over the landscape. It spread as far as the eye could see, but none of it looked cold. We’d have to investigate further. “Take us forward. Stay at a maximum height of a couple hundred feet. We don’t want to crash into anything.”

The ship moved forward, and I got my first real look down onto this strange place. It was indeed a landscape, but it looked more like a series of canyons and mesas. It also looked like it had been constructed out of Legos instead of rock eroded by water. Hell, this place looked just like the computer world from Tron. The only thing that didn’t look 70’s graphics was our ship.

“Now what we do?” Jake asked.

I pushed the radio button on my chair again. The audio played, revealing Jessica still panting. She was still mumbling about it being so cold.

“Jessica, can you hear me?”

“So…so cold…”

“Jessica, it’s me, Chris. We’ve come to get you. We’re not leaving you…”

“So, so cold…”

I left the audio on the entire time. I could barely listen to it, but I couldn’t bear to turn it off either. It was killing me. I don’t know about Jake, but he didn’t seem any more thrilled too. He was constantly taking sensor scans to see if we could pick up any sign of anything other than landscape. So far we had turned up nothing. We were on the outer edge of reality, where nothing grew or lived. As for me, I could only hope that we would get to her in time.

Then we encountered something very, very odd—of course it fit with our current run of luck. As we passed over a particularly deep canyon, we came to a new type of design. Although it was something nice to look at that was different, it was just the basic canyon structure in a new style, with several large plateaus and valleys. However, this was not what struck me as odd.

Instead, Jake’s scanner started detecting moving objects. At first it started with only a few, but then the scale continued to rise until we had several tens of thousands. A quick look and we realized we were flying over a wide road. Down in it were several large armored military vehicles moving along what appeared to be armies upon armies of some kind of soldiers. While the military vehicles looked 70’s, the soldiers looked just as real as Jake and I. A closer look still, and I realized they were the bug aliens we had encountered.

“Holy crap!” Jake said, straining for a better view. “They’ve invaded the alternate plane of this game!”

“No…that can’t be right. Look, they’re being forcefully led.”

And indeed it was true. The armored vehicles were what were keeping them going. These particular aliens had been captured. But how had they been captured? Was there a war going on between both realities? Or had they been pulled out of the first one, and brought here?

Whatever the problem, they seemed to take no notice to us. Our ship was flying directly overhead, and no one seemed to care. No one opened fire; nothing.

“Never mind them, let’s just keep looking for Jessica.”

Jake shrugged, but kept the ship going. The various landscapes continued to change, but it was still the basic canyon layout. Eventually we lost the mass exodus of aliens being moved on by the Tron tanks.

That’s what I had started calling them now. This world was so goofy, it seemed fitting. Jake laughed the first time I mentioned the name to him. It was official though. We were in the Tronny universe.

Things continued to get bizarre. The canyons became more organized, and these tall structures started appearing every so often. They were spaced at what I judged to be five miles apart, and very tall. Of course the tops were visible, but there was no denying their magnitude in height. They had huge bases, which progressively got smaller in blocks as the tower rose. It was like looking at one of those Middle Eastern super skyscrapers. While most of them were just the structure, a few were lit up. There were intense beams of red, blue, or green protruded from the top spire, and expanding off into space beyond our vision. Jake had tilted his head to try and look up higher, but they kept going.

“Where are we?” Jake asked.

“Who knows…but we’ve stumbled onto something.”

Past the giant towers we came to large pits. They weren’t in the traditional sense of being deep, but they were wide. They were very wide, actually, and filled to the brim with countless souls, both human and alien. I was surprised though, when I discovered only one of these many pits filled. The others were all empty. In fact, the main feature of its occupants was that they were bug aliens. The few humans that were in there were few and far between. But what was stranger was that they didn’t seem to be doing anything. Sure they looked like they were moving about, but they weren’t interacting. They just simply were.

“What are they?” Jake said.

“I don’t know, but something doesn’t seem right…”

Then suddenly the radio transmission got stronger. “So…cold…”

“Jessica?” I stood up.

Jake also looked surprised. “We’ve got a lock. She’s very near.”

“Is she down there?” I said, looking at the pit of unusual souls.

Jake looked at his controls. “No… But she’s close; probably in one of the buildings.”

“Then that is where we are going…”



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