The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction MayJune 2015 (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Book 128) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2015-07-06T22:00:00+00:00

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They gave him no guide to lead him back to ground floor. They probably never thought of it. Once the director's door closed and vanished behind him, he was lost. He couldn't locate a lift entrance or even the walls of the tower core. It must have been a shift's quitting time, for people now swarmed around him, hurrying on their way to wherever tower-dwellers went after selling their daily lives to their jobs. Among them were the occasional trans-specied individuals like his former guide.

He dodged mere images and ran into real people. The real people bumped him along with the flow of the crowd. Bodies jammed against him from all sides. He walked into a wall he couldn't detect, then another. He could see only part of what was there. In a fleeting moment of insight, he recognized a band of wild horses browsing on prairie grass, a pair of moose stripping leaves from trees, salmon leaping to climb an ethereal cataract in midair. The moment was gone, and what remained were incomprehensible lights, links, and datastreams. None of what he heard was intelligible, just a cacophony of buzzes and clicks and whistles and beeps that he could no more interpret than he could the speech of porpoises. People were constantly running into him and glaring in annoyance, as if it was his fault they failed to detect him. He, the anomaly.

He tried to work his way out of the busy travel routes, but they shifted around him constantly. He felt the invisible ceiling and walls closing in on him, leaving no personal space or air to breathe. His legs wanted to run, anywhere, until he was out of there. His knees were coming unhinged. His bad knee buckled and he almost went down.

Jack caught hold of himself and took a slow, deep breath. They're watching us, Katie . They must be. Somebody watched everything here, the stage for a million reality shows. See the poor enclaver-hick lost in the tower. The thought held him together. He willed himself to take slow, deep breaths. Okay. He'd been lost in the woods a time or three. When that happened, you stayed calm until you could orient yourself. He elbowed a path through the mob and parked himself out of the way in the middle of a diorama that appeared to display the lifecycle of a freshwater mussel. He stayed put, ignored the chaos around him.

At last he caught a glimpse of a door opening in the air ahead and two people came out of a lift. He headed quickly for the lift doorway, squeezing through before it could close and disappear from view. He had no means to operate the lift, and it moved through a number of higher and lower floors before finally opening to a level where he saw the surface view of outdoors. He exited quickly.

A line of people in white robes was filing through an entrance. He squeezed past them and at last stood breathing the fresh air of outdoors.

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