Page 53 of Butterfly Effects

He turned and began walking briskly away, not sparing me another glance. I rolled my eyes and turned back toward the administrative building, pausing to watch the people going in and out.

They all seemed to be moving with the same level of urgency, not rushing as I would have expected if they’d been responding to news of a dangerous criminal’s escape. I approached the doors as calmly as I could, sure with every step that the guards were going to realize I wasn’t meant to be there.

As I drew closer, I could hear the people entering giving their explanations for their presence. I waited to hear an assistant explain his presence, then stepped forward and did the same for my own, changing only the name.

There was a pause as the guards considered my story, and I tensed. If they decided I was lying to them—

“Case?” asked one of the officers on the door.

Ah. This, I knew. “The unauthorized instar detected in the dimensional cluster designated,” and then the long algebraic equation. I was suddenly, fiercely grateful that the Johrlac used math in their naming system. I could no more have recited a phrase that long than I could have sprouted wings and flown away. But an equation? That was child’s play.

The guard’s eyes glazed over for a moment. “Your co-workers have already returned to work,” he said. “You departed at the same time.”

“I was delayed by the collective’s announcement,” I said. “I am not customarily assigned to this location. Several people have stopped me to ask whether I had seen anything that might lead us to the missing prisoner.”

The guard gave me a hard look, glaze blooming into earnest white. I pushed my partition toward him, holding it high and steady. I felt him pushing against its edges, checking their solidity, looking for holes in my defenses. When he didn’t find any, he pulled back, the light in his eyes shutting off.

“The prisoner is unlikely to be found anywhere near here,” he said. I nodded, taking this as an informational statement. That was apparently the correct response; he pulled the lever and the doors slid open, allowing me to step inside.

In a way, this was the real test. Outside, it had been me, the guard, and all the room in the world to turn and run if he hadn’t believed my story. In the airlock, it was me and the two guards stationed there, their faces masks of impassive neutrality. They barely even looked at me.

Before when I’d been in the airlock, I’d been leaving. This was an arrival, and that came with the same wind-based decontamination as my arrival at Fetch and Carry’s home. The air hit me and the bugs went flying, impacting with the far wall and sticking there as the plants in the corners unwound their tendrils and pulled them to their deaths. I wanted to study the various insects that had been blown off of me, to see what I could learn about this dimension from the shape of their wings and the shine of their bodies.

But a civic assistant who had lived here all her life would have no such curiosity. She would already understand. So I buried my questions beneath another layer of partition and continued staring straight ahead, waiting for the doors to open. When they did, I proceeded forward, into the vast atrium on the other side.

Johrlac of every caste strolled in all directions, distinguished only by the visual cues of their jumpsuits, walking with the calm, unified purpose of people who had never been required to make decisions for themselves. I loosened my partition slightly, letting myself hear the ambient hum of the minds around me.

They formed a single unbroken note, and I skimmed along the surface, looking for the threads of the collective. To my surprise, I didn’t find many. These people knew what they were supposed to be doing, understood the rules they lived by, and were happily performing their duties without being forced into compliance. This was how you could organize a hive mind without omnipotence: the collective didn’t need to be everywhere or know everything. They just needed to wind things up and get them started, then watch for deviation. Yes, that meant they couldn’t stop it before it happened, but in some ways, that was better. Letting things go wrong allowed them to make corrections, which was constantly reinforcing the idea that they were in control.

Two Johrlac in brown-and-red jumpsuits hurried across the floor to one of the doorways there, dragging mops and buckets with them. The people whose paths they cut across stepped smoothly out of the way, letting them pass without breaking stride in any measurable way. It was like they all had access to an unseen grid, telling them what was going to happen next.

It was nice, in a terrible way. No collisions, no one cutting anyone else off, no conflicts over space. I spent enough time in libraries and academic settings to know the controlled chaos that would normally have defined a scene like this one, and it was nothing like the smooth, regimented ease in front of me. It was like the whole room had been choreographed. It was—

Wait. Brown and red?

I looked at the two Johrlac beginning to mop the floor. Yes: brown-and-red jumpsuits, the red bright as a firetruck, blaring and undampened. It would have been a bold fashion choice … if anyone in this room had been capable of perceiving the color red. They weren’t, and so I shouldn’t have been either.

I took another look around the room, moving with perhaps more urgency than was safe if I wanted to fit into the throng surrounding me. All I saw were Johrlac, ignoring me as they went about their business. Johrlac in a dozen different jumpsuits, yes, but still members of my own species.

Then I blinked, and like a hidden object in a mobile game, I saw the figure pressed against the far wall. They were short and lithe, visibly younger than the workers surrounding them, wearing a solid-red jumpsuit that looked like it had been made by stitching pieces of other suits together, effectively creating a camouflage suit. Their hair was scruffy and brown, pulled into a high ponytail that fell shaggy along the sides of their head, breaking up their outline and allowing them to blend better with the ridges of the paper walls around them.

I started toward them, watching the crowd carefully. It was easy to move among them as long as I paid attention: they generally wouldn’t deviate from the paths that they were on, preferring to proceed in straight lines whenever it was possible to do so. There were a few near misses as people stepped in front of me and didn’t stop, forcing me to weave around them, and I was sure I would have looked odd if anyone had been paying attention, being the only person here without a clear map of the space. But no one seemed to care.

The person against the wall didn’t appear to realize I was approaching them until I was only about ten feet away. Their head snapped up, eyes widening—brown eyes, which just confirmed that this person wasn’t Johrlac. Hair dye exists, but I didn’t see this particular world dedicating a lot of resources to developing cosmetic contacts.

I sped up slightly, wanting to reach them before they could run. I wasn’t quite quick enough. They bolted, less concerned about being spotted than I was, and ran for the nearest open doorway. I scowled and followed, walking as fast as I dared, weaving between the people with focused dedication. They ignored me, I pursued the stranger, and for a moment, life was simple.

Then I came around a corner, entering an empty stretch of hall. No: not empty. The stranger was there, pancaked up against the wall like the color of the jumpsuit they wore was going to protect them. There was nowhere left to run: the hall ended here, becoming wall and closed doors rather than any sort of exit route. I slowed down, still not trying to frighten my quarry more than absolutely necessary.

I dropped my partition as far as I dared, trying to listen on a mental level. Audibly, they weren’t making any sounds. That wasn’t surprising. Mentally, they weren’t making any sounds at all. If I pushed harder than felt wholly safe, I struck what felt like a glossy dome, something solid and slick. It was like my probes slid right off the surface. Yet I knew they weren’t wearing any sort of anti-telepathy charm; I could pick up on the concept of red from them, which meant something was escaping.

Maybe that was the answer: they had taken the time to lock everything they considered important away, blocking me from their thoughts, memories, and identity, but hadn’t thought to start blocking basic concepts, like the color red.

I stopped about three feet away from where they were “hiding,” dropping my voice to avoid attracting any more unwanted attention, and said, “I can see you.”

“No you can’t,” they replied hotly, in a high, barely pubescent voice. “You can’t see me at all.”

“An interesting theory, but I followed you here, which sort of implies that I can see you,” I said. “If I couldn’t see you, I wouldn’t be following you.”