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29.
Rory came to visit again not long after. This time he was alone. Tedda was glad to see him. He sat down on the floor with his back to the wall and his knees under his chin. His eyes had a relaxed, understanding twinkle. "How is your exile coming along?"
"Dreadful," she said. "I miss you guys terribly."
"I can imagine. If it helps any, we miss you a lot also." She basked warmly in those words, as he continued: "I've been authorized by the Monorail Players Association to let you in on a secret."
She giggled. "The MPA? Is there really such a—?"
He put a finger over his lips and looked furtively left and right. "Shhh. This is serious, Tedda. We could get in a major jam. You have to swear you'll keep it secret no matter what."
She shrugged. "Sure." She could almost guess what it was she must keep secret, but when he told her, it surpassed her expectations and left her breathless.
"You know the Monorail game we all enjoy so much?"
"Yes?"
"You know how we software engineers are. In our spare time, we have created our own Monorail City game."
"No." She pictured the tattered, worn game board with its pastel squares. She visualized how the dog-eared play money lay in untidy piles amid skyscrapers of soda bottles and stacks of sandwiches while the young programmers and techs bantered and rolled the dice.
Before she could coax her imagination further along, he rose. "Want to see?"
"Yes," she said dreamily.
"You'd better bring a jacket. It may be cold."
"Very well." She took down her brownish corduroy jacket, the one with the tan leather lapels with moss-green velour rectangles worked in, from its hook behind the door. Holding the jacket draped over one arm, she followed him out into the corridor.
"Where is Lindy?"
Rory shook his head. "She doesn't know about the game. Please—for her own good, and yours, and all of ours—don't tell her."
"Why?"
He didn't answer.
They walked under the sterile lights along empty corridors. Once or twice, they ducked into a doorway or into a side tunnel as they heard the sound of human activity nearby. Aside from the whirr of air conditioning motors in hidden ducts, and the buzzing of fluorescent lights, the only major sound was a distant, pile-driver pounding of the enemy side's Intereality burrowing. They ended up leaving the femtoworld by the step-down collar. They were back in the hangar near the Bit Cave.
He said: "We use the same step-down collar. The management doesn't know about it. It lets us have our own little play world next to the official one. You're going to love this, because we've made our Monorail game three-dimensional, live, and real-time."
"No!" Intrigued, she followed him through a narrow concrete tunnel that made her claustrophobic. It seemed hotter, too.
"Are you ready?" he asked, and then, without waiting for her reply, he pushed open a door leading to a descending stairwell. She inhaled that raw, almost damp concrete smell she remembered from construction sites over the years. Sand and grit rasped under her feet. Stray wrappers lay kicked and jammed into corners. A dead little lizard lay dry, brown, and flattened on a splash of dried mud grains.
Rory explained: "We kids, playing around, have created an embedded, encysted Monorail City world. We figured if the game is so much fun—what if we could descend into the game, become directly part of it, enjoy it from inside instead of from above? Besides, some of us are doing doctoral papers, and we have experiments to run. How do the rules play out?"
"The rules?"
"Well, yes, you know, the way we make virtual stuff happen inside this raw intereality environment. We write rules for how we want certain things to occur, above and beyond the normal way hydrogen, helium, and the other elements aggregate in our own universe. Remember, there was no Big Bang here. We've pinched off a segment of our own universe, tamed it, created a sort of femto-small sheltered bay in which the wildness of the ocean doesn't smash its big chaotic waves. There is chaos here, but it's just the eddies of the big waves in the macro-universe we inhabit. It's almost a challenge to stir things up, get life going, so to speak."
"Life?" she echoed. Suddenly, she had a dread suspicion. "You've populated this little play universe?"
"Not exactly. It populates itself. We just set the rules in motion and it all happens. We don't create or populate anything—the people just occur, though sometimes we can help nudge the circumstances along. By the way, we call it interchangeably Monorail City or Monopol City."
They came to the bottom of the shaft. There, on a smooth concrete floor that looked as though it had been flooded recently with rain and sand, he paused. He had one hand on the emergency fire bar of a door opening to someplace unknown. He looked at her in surprise. "Yes. Haven't you seen any of the Monopol City denizens outside your office?"
She shook her head slowly. "I didn't know there were any."
"You have a lot to learn," he said. "Life is just a more complex instruction set. The basics are ingrained in the mathematical laws that govern how the elements interact. Life, as evolution tells us, is inevitable. It's just a more interesting level of complexity. Complexity means that more events happen in less time in an interactive manner, and it's not just more events, but different events—in other words, not the same lapping of water against a stone dock in a river, but all the events that transpire inside a mouse or a person or a diatom in a given second. The point is—we can write rules. Here, see for yourself." He flung the door open, and Tedda stepped into a gripping, complicated world that communicated its vibrancy and love of life—but above all, doused her in a shower of rain and fresh air.
"Welcome to Monopol City," Rory said.
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