“So,” Sam said, holding up the phone in front of him, “Have you secured the device?”

“Oh yes!” Orca said, the killer-whale avatar splashing about in digital waters as she trilled with joy, “There were a few bits of recording and tracking that I’ve removed and back-traced. I think I’ll leave a gift for whoever planted this in the first place, what do you think?”

“Don’t go overboard,” Sam said, although he could not resist a smile. Frustrating the Blue Mink would help establish him as an equal partner in whatever this partnership was. It would also prove that he was not so easily taken advantage of, meaning she would have to take him seriously.

“Can you explain how anchoring you on this side circumvents the resistance?” He asked, sensing a connection to his original problem.

“Well, as long as you keep this phone in physical contact with you, I can use the well of lifeforce within you as a medium to establish a connection from my point of contact on your unit to your true self. It’s sorta like waving a stick on my side of a lake to create ripples on the opposite side in a pattern, rather than trying to swim towards it against a current.”

“And if I put the phone on the table?”

“My program will continue to run, but at a lowered capacity. The phone does not really have the capacity or memory to handle my full function, which is why it’s more of a ‘shell’ than ‘me’.”

He tried it, placing the phone on the table. The orca avatar immediately stopped spinning around and generally making a mess of his home screen. Instead, it took a neutral position in the corner.

“Can you hear me?” Sam said. The avatar responded with a pop-up message, spelling “Yes, Master.”

While he was Ares, Orca calling him ‘master’ seemed natural and perfectly normal, but as Sam, he could not help but feel uncomfortable at the honorific. “Just ‘Sam,’ please,” he said, and the avatar responded with an affirmative emoji.

“How well can you perform without physical contact?” He asked, feeling it was important to establish how reliant Orca could be without being connected to her origin. The little avatar began opening up applications on the phone, accessing the web browser, and shifting between multiple tasks at a fairly rapid rate. Finally, it responded with, “What do you need, Sam?”

Having seen what it could do, Sam picked up the phone again, and immediately felt how something ‘surged’ within him and connected to the phone. The sensation was slightly uncomfortable, but the effects were significant.

“Oh, how exciting,” Orca said over the phone speaker, “I’ve never tried syncing up with myself before, quite the experience, I must say.”

“Any issues?”

“None whatsoever. My program does spend a lot of the battery charge when I’m not doing the central processing on my side, so I’d be careful with overusing it if you can’t charge the phone.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sam said and nodded. Now, with an assistant at his disposal, perhaps he could make inroads with his plans. “I’m trying to figure out a means to lower the resistance to lifeforce on my end. Do you have any ideas or data I can use?”

“Hmm…” The killer-whale took a contemplative stance for a bit, before it waved, and some imagery began appearing on the screen. It showed pictures of planets Sam had never seen before.

“These are images of the two nearby rock-planets in Elhané’s system. Compared to what I can find of imagery on your own solar system, these seem fairly similar, agreed?”

“Agreed,” Sam concurred. They looked like rocks. Giant rocks, granted, but still just rocks. They looked like Mercury, for all he could tell about them.

“Now, here’s an image of Elhané.” An image of the planet his alter ego was currently running amok on popped up on the screen, and Sam immediately had to furrow his brow. Like Earth, Elhané was an oblong spheroid, so far so similar to everything else. It also had continents, the central one looking very much like the maps of Ammedia he had seen while linked to Seila, while two other landmasses were only half-visible from the current perspective.

All in all, if he had not known what he was looking at, he might have assumed it was an image of Earth from an odd angle, if it had not been for strange lines that warped the image, obscuring the, otherwise, clear picture.

“Did you make some sort of mistake when taking the picture?” He asked, although he suspected the answer.

“Master! I am hurt! How could you imply such incompetence on my part?”

“Look, just call me Sam when I’m like this, alright? I’m sorry, but if it isn’t a mistake, then what is it?”

“Those are lines of lifeforce. It flows across the planet itself, and I tell you, half my job is to calibrate for the inevitable skewing of data those bloody lines form.”

Sam blinked. He put the phone closer to his face, as if proximity would somehow make the answer more obvious. In a sense, it did. He blinked again. A memory of his time in the forest surfaced. Sloan had used some sort of device that worked very much like a compass, but he had emphasized how it relied on lines of lifeforce.

“Orca, do you have a map of Elhané’s magnetic field? You do? Good. Please show me.” The image soon popped up on his screen, and it looked like a match to the former image. “Can you lay the two over one another?”

She did so, and the lines were almost perfectly converging. Leaning back in his chair, Sam tried to take that in. From the observable data, there seemed to be a relationship between the magnetic field and the flow of lifeforce on Elhané.

I suppose this is how Maxwell felt, Sam thought, feeling pieces of the puzzle forming in his head. Not connected yet, but at least the outlines had the potential to match. Maxwell had revolutionized physics by recognizing a connection between magnetism and electricity. If what Sam was seeing was true, then maybe…

No, there was no guarantee. Sam directed Orca to gather more data, and especially find points of departure, where the magnetic and lifeforce lines did not match up. He would have to investigate those places and figure out what the difference was. If he could establish what was different, it might allow him to define what the relationship between the two forces was.

And once the relationship was established, he could emulate it.

Ares opened his eyes and stared into the darkness. The illuminated circle around the safe zone was unable to encroach upon void all around him, and he felt slightly choked. Back in this form, the thought of the work Sam had put into research back on Earth seemed distant and removed from the very deadly situation they were still in.

On the other side of the circular field, Rex looked up from his seated position. Apparently, the kertal had been waiting for a while.

“You’re here,” he said, gaining his feet, “I thought… well… I thought this was a dream. And now, I think the other side is a dream.”

“You remember who you are now?”

Rex shook his head, then, tilting his head, appeared to think on it for a while before shaking his head again. “It’s fuzzy,” Rex said, his voice strangely lamenting, “I know it’s there… I even have some idea of who I am, but it’s like it’s just out of reach. You know, like it’s on the tip of my tongue, I just can’t quite say…”

Ares nodded, although he did not actually know what Rex was talking about. Perhaps it’s the difference between a kertal and a prime, he thought. He knew he was Sam, at least in a technical sense. That he was also different from Sam was a whole other issue.

The connection between Rex and his origin was different from Ares’ connection. Felix Gossman had indicated that he needed to be close to Rex on both sides for the connection to fully open. Thinking of this, Ares said, “If I can find you on the other side, it might help. Do you have anything you can tell me of where you are?”

“I… There is something…” Rex said, his voice hesitant, “But I don’t know how much help it is. When I think really hard, I see this image of an eye… A huge eye, but there’s something else. It’s obscured by a screen of some sort.”

Ares nodded. He had a pretty good idea of where he could find the imagery of a giant eye. Thinking about the school emblem gave him a tingling sensation up his spine. Was he feeling creeped out? He dismissed the notion and said, “I think I know where that is. I’ll find you when I go back this time around.”

Rex nodded and seemed relieved.

Looking around, Ares could not help but recognize that there was someone missing. “Where’s Izzy?”

“Who? Oh, the little creature. She went into the darkness for ‘parts,’ although I said it was too dangerous. The voice said it was alright, though, so I didn’t stop her.”

“And you didn’t think to go with her?” Ares felt the rage stir inside, but managed to keep it at bay when what Rex said made him ask, “Wait, what voice?”

“Hello, master Ares!” Orca’s jubilant voice sounded, not in his head, but from the pedestal in the center. Taken slightly aback, Ares nonetheless managed to say, “You told Izzy it was safe to roam about? Why?”

“Well, because it is. Your dominion of this place negates the effect of the infection. Those poor creatures have somehow been bred with infected cores, which makes it physically painful for them to enter here and experience the purification.”

Ares did not think there was any reason to feel sorry for those huge rats, although he supposed they did not exactly have a choice in the matter.

“So, there are just no creatures around?”

“Well, there are a few critters which are not a part of the training ground breeding program, but none of them are dangerous. She is in no danger, Master.”

“Can you locate her? Alright, Rex, you’re with me.”

The kertal looked at him with a skeptical expression, but Ares would have none of it. He was a prime and Rex was a lesser. The kertal would obey the master.

“Understood,” Rex said after a brief pause.

The two entered into the darkness, and Orca reclaimed her spot in Ares’ head, chattering away as they went. He was starting to learn how to shut her out, while still allowing her to give warning if there was anything serious going on.

With his eyes adjusting to the dim light, Ares walked through the narrow passages, following the lines that Orca had imparted onto his HUD. He soon found Izzy, who was fumbling her way forward while keeping her hands before her.

Sensing the change in light, as Ares lit up the corridor in a soft red, she turned and beamed. “Ares, you’re back! Excellent. I’ve found some material I think I can form into replacement parts. I believe I’ll be able to repair that shield of yours, although the blaster might be an issue… Well, the repairs are not the issue, but the ammunition is. I can’t really make plasma without a lab…”

“You should be alone not,” Ares said, steadily growing frustrated with his Elvish. He would need to spend some time training the language with Izzy.

“Oh, it’s fine… At least your assistant said so; Orca, was it? A simply fascinating subject, I must say. I would love to get the opportunity to study her closely. Apparently, she’s up in the sky somewhere — I don’t suppose you could let her drop down to let me have a peek at her hardware?”

“I like her,” Orca said, pleased at the attention, as if she was seriously considering dropping out of orbit to let Izzy take her apart.

‘Of course you do,’ Ares thought, shaking his head. To Izzy, he said, “No. We in trouble.”

“I suppose you’re right,” the gnome sighed wistfully, “And I’ve still got the two of you to research, so there’s no real hurry. We’ll figure it out later.”

Avoiding the argument, Ares instead peered into the darkness and said, “We need plan. Need direction.”

“I was actually thinking of that while you two were out,” Izzy said, nodding sagely to herself, “Well, I suppose I did sleep some as well, but other than that I did some thinking.”

“And…?” He prodded, hoping this would be more sensible than her plan for taking Orca apart.

“Well, you see… I think we should go see those rats.”