Mind Park by Robert Lundeen

Author:Robert Lundeen [Lundeen, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-19T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

MANSHA HAD ALL THE TRAPPINGS of a small, self-sufficient village. I could see shared grain storages, the homes doubled as shops, and often served multiple purposes. The blacksmith was also the farrier. The herbalist was the midwife. There was no inn and no tavern; these people drank themselves stupid in the comfort of each other’s homes.

I walked down the middle of the road, right arm extended outward to my side, to test my theory on the glitch. I directed Leah to stay on my left.

I was a few yards in when the village shifted, the wall appearing directly to my right, engulfing my arm up to the elbow. Red bars flashed at the edges of my field of vision, my interface forced knowledge directly into my mind.

System_Error_Code_??? // Park_System_Fault // Invalid_Communication // Invalid_Access // Invalid_Data // Bad_Unit // Does_Not_Exist // Access_Denied . . . read the truncated the error code.

It meant nothing to me, but what I felt for the microsecond my arm and wall were fused together was absolute agony. My buffers disabled the feeling as quickly as it registered, making the pain more of a mnemonic fragment than an actual sensation. But it still hurt.

I recoiled reflexively, bringing my arm tight to my chest.

“Fuck,” I exclaimed, “that hurt.” My fingers were tingling as I flexed them open and closed. Aftershocks of pain, low enough to get through my buffer, pulsed down my arm, each weaker than the preceding.

“That was stupid,” Leah commented through a chuckle. “What did you expect to happen?”

“Not that,” I said, shaking out the last remnants of pain from my arm. “Normally I don’t even feel it.”

“There might be a stove around here you can touch.”

“Very funny,” I replied dryly.

“You wanted to come in here.”

I overlaid a ghostly, mostly transparent image of the relocated village into my field of vision. I didn’t feel like experiencing my experiment again. I cast it to Leah so she could avoid it as well.

What I got out of my test, besides pain, was more evidence this glitch was more than met the eye. Both elements, the wall and my arm, should have just existed at the same time and space, completely independent of each other. Things can do that in a Park. Instead, it felt as if my arm had been run over by a tank.

We moved down the main road to the gathering of villagers. The ground was not affected by the glitch. I didn’t know if that was significant. Some glitches affect the ground, some don’t. I didn’t know the difference but noted it for later.

A quick count gave me twenty-three residents in different positions, all chaotically arrayed around a center point of empty ground in the middle of the road.

Six of the residents were guards. They were dressed in the red tabard of Safur. Like the guards at Hajrala, they were old men, wrinkles worn deep by harsh living. The one closest to the empty center was on the ground, his conical helmet next to him, a bloody gash across his lower jaw.

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