Hurricane #41: The Villain (Patreon)

Three Lords, who was punching her in the head? From inside her skull?

Wincing, Serrano put her hands to her head, sitting up. She hadn’t opened her eyes yet, but she could tell from the feel of the motion she was still a taur, and still big. She lay on something hard and cool. Concrete?

As she opened her eyes, she started to get to her paws, then nearly stumbled. Her right rear paw was stuck. She looked behind her. No, not stuck. Shackled. A heavy manacle encircled her ankle, and an anchor chain welded to it ran to a metal hoop sunk into the floor.

All right, that was disconcerting. Not being chained—that just pissed her off—but this clearly wasn’t something they threw together in the last few hours.

She looked around. Warehouse? Yes, but more machine shop industrial, filled with storage tanks: giant metal cylinders, taller than she would be if she reared up on her hind legs. They’d found—or cleared—an open space in a corner to make her “prison”; if she got out of the shackles, nothing obvious prevented her from going to town on the place. If she managed to make herself bigger, her paw would likely come off before that manacle would, but if she could make herself smaller, she could just slip out of it.

Which they’d obviously have considered, because they weren’t idiots. She tentatively reached out for the storms. Nothing. Dammit, they had that firewall blocker going.

But, no: she felt something, dancing around the edges of her perception, just past her reach. She closed her eyes, groaning, trying to stretch for it—

A buzzer went off, snapping her attention back to her surroundings. There were humans here, too. A lot of humans. Some in business casual polo shirts, some in lab coats, some in paramilitary outfits. One of the lab coat ones was standing at a console, watching her warily; it looked like he’d just sounded the Oh Shit Serrano’s Awake alarm. A half-dozen of the paramilitary ones were scrambling to surround her, rifles drawn. They looked like tranquilizer dart guns. She hoped.

Grunting, she dropped back down to the ground, folding her hind legs under her and crossing her forepaws. “So.” She grinned sharply. “How you all doing?”

She heard a few rifles click—probably at the fang-filled smile—but nobody said anything.

“Hopefully you’re having a better day than I am.”

“As long as you stay tied up,” someone whispered to themselves.

“I heard that.” She pointed at her left ear. “Big coyote ears.”

The guys in lab coats glanced at one another now, at least, a couple of them murmuring to one another about probabilities and “runs,” whatever that meant. Nobody addressed her. Soon the whole crowd fell silent again, except for a couple of polo shirt guys furiously typing on their phones.

Serrano looked back and forth, finally sighing. “Look, don’t think I can’t tell some of you are staring at my tits.”

“I’m not a furry!” someone snapped, sounding defensive.

“I do not know what that means, but I’m starting to think that if I did, it’d be hilarious.”

The crowd’s attention snapped to a newcomer striding toward her corner of the warehouse. The other humans stepped back from him and his retinue of black-suited agents—the same look as Agent Ward’s crew, as well as the humans in the space hidden under Rockhopper Studios.

He looked a little short for a human male, but he had a specific kind of swagger she recognized: the kind that screamed overcompensation. She couldn’t tell how attractive he was by human standards, but would put money on him being aggressively average but surrounding himself with fawning lickspittles.

He looked Serrano up and down without breaking his stride, stopping in front of the lab coat guy who’d sounded the alarm. “Test the blockers.”

“They’re on, sir. You can—”

His voice rose sharply, tensely. “I didn’t say tell me whether the blockers were on, I said test them!”

Shaking, lab coat guy started furiously flipping switches and watching a readout. He nodded hurriedly. “Look, sir. See? I told you—”

“When I tell you to test, you test. Stop blabbering and just get off the floor.”

“Sir, I—”

The man—this asshole had to be Sark, didn’t it?—pointed. “Get off the floor!” he roared. The man hurried away.

Serrano cleared her throat.

He looked over at her again. “How are you doing it?”

“Hi. I’m Serrano, part-time storm goddess. And you must be Brendan Sark, full-time supervillain.”

He just looked at her curiously, not answering for several seconds. Then he gave her the barest of nods. “I wouldn’t call myself a villain, and there’s no such thing as gods. But I know what you can do, when you’re in your own reality run. But how can you do the same thing in this run?”

Okay, so they used “runs” for what she knew as branches. “Oh, I don’t think you really know what I can do, Brendan. Turn off those ‘blockers’ and I’ll be happy to show you.”

He smiled briefly, although humorlessly. “How did you find your way here? I’m not surprised you tried, but I am surprised you were successful.”

“Easy. Just follow the river and take a left turn at Faerie.”

“Gods first, faeries now. Your run is a similar technology level to this one, isn’t it? Why so superstitious?”

“Hey, if you want to take up how real faeries are with Queen Anu, be my guest. What you’re doing to my world is being routed through hers, though, and if it goes on much longer she’s going to…she and I would say ‘prune this branch,’ but maybe you’d say ‘end this run.’ Either way, a lot of bad shit happens, starting with this reality going poof.”

He arched a brow. “She claims to be able to do that from inside her reality?”

“Hers isn’t like yours and mine, Brendan. It’s not a branch, or a run, or whatever you want to call it.”

“What you call it matters. Language influences thought, and frequently leads us to wrong conclusions.” He frowned and rubbed his chin. “One run being able to terminate another one can’t be part of the design spec. But you, and I, and your ‘faerie’ friends, have all demonstrated we can breach our containers in ways that shouldn’t be allowed.”

Serrano furrowed her brow, trying to follow him. Container breaches? Like breaching containment? And if there was a design spec, who wrote it? Who was allowing and disallowing? “You think branches, runs, are…what, exactly?”

“A computer simulation.”

She rubbed her face.

“Think about it. Suppose computers will become powerful enough to simulate a universe down to the atomic level.”

“Okay.”

“Then it’s a small step from there to computers that can run universe simulations countless times, all running simultaneously, in parallel, each with small variations.” He crossed his arms, looking smug. “Once that becomes possible, then most of the possible universes that could exist will be ones that exist only in simulation. Which means there are far more simulated conscious beings than real ones.”

She frowned a little. This smelled like solipsistic crap to her. “And what, you just think statistically we’re in a simulation, then?”

“I can’t prove it. But I have very compelling circumstantial evidence.” He pointed directly at Serrano. “You. Your reality. The others I’ve tapped into. They’re all so close. Similar technology levels, dominant life—for God’s sake, you and I are speaking the same language. How does that make any sense except as a sign that these are the same universes, just with different initial parameters set?”

“I don’t know, Brendan.” She stomped a forepaw in irritation. “Just branching of possibilities, different quantum states or whatever. Anybody who’s seen a fucking public TV science show can come up with an alternate theory that’s just as good. And by ‘tapped into,’ you mean ‘stolen shit from.’ Any of those other parallel worlds you’re destroying in the process of tapping into, like you’re destroying mine?”

“You don’t see the big picture. Each one is just another run, another branch. Inconsequential.”

She stared. “Even if that’s true, this is just another branch. What gives you the right to say which ones are ‘inconsequential’ and which aren’t?”

“That I understand this is a branch.” He sounded irritated, like he was explaining to a stupid child. "If anything matters at all, it’s individuals smart and powerful enough to reach other branches, to affect them, to use them. Individuals like me. Your ‘faerie queen.’ Maybe you.

“I understood you were a conduit to your world’s energy, but I still don’t know why, or how. But you figured out too much, too fast.” He spoke with his hands, moving them back and forth. “So I had to bypass you. Then I expected I could ignore you, but you kept making yourself a problem. So.” He waved at her chain. “I thought there was a small chance you could find your way here, and we would have to be prepared to hold you and neutralize you. But you’re not just a conduit with delusions of divinity. You’re something else. You can affect this world, our energy.”

She spread her hands. “Surprise!”

“What about this Faerie world? Can you affect that?”

Serrano shrugged. She suspected the answer was “yes, within limits,” but damned if she was going to share more information with Sark.

He stroked his chin. “Bypassing you was the correct move for collecting the rest of the energy from your world, but I think you can be plugged in to other parallel worlds. Not a conduit, but a multiplexer.”

Her ears lowered slightly. “What does that mean?”

But Sark had already turned away from her, addressing one of the remaining lab coat guys. “If I’m right—and I am—we should be able to tweak the extraction system to pull from other runs she’s connected to.”

“Sir, I don’t think—”

“Don’t think, do.” He jerked a thumb at Serrano without looking at her. “We’ll not only accelerate the program a hundred-fold, if she’s right about that energy being routed through the world that’s full of faeries, we might do enough damage to it that they can’t fight back. We’re too close to the top to risk it.”

Serrano’s eyes widened. “Three Lords, you can’t just—”

“And sedate her again. It’ll be easier to work, and she doesn’t have anything else useful to say.” He headed away, leaving the lab coat and polo shirt guys staring after him. The paramilitary guys raised their tranq rifles toward Serrano and began firing.