Free Omega Point by Guy Haley Page B

snagged at his mind. "Hang on a minute," he said eagerly. He scanned the village, turning his head slowly left to right: that way the flow diminished, fading back into a world of broken homes and dead toys, but this way he sensed it again, a flicker in the world, a crackle in his head. "Bingo!" said Richards. "I knew he wasn't from in here!" He set off toward the church.
      "Oi! Stop!" shouted the bear. He grabbed Richards' shoulder again.
      "Stop pawing at me, will you?" Richards shrugged the paw off, so Bear knocked him to the floor.
      "We cannot leave the giraffe behind!" growled Bear. "He is my friend, and I won't abandon him to die. No tarrying!"
      "Do you want to save this place or what?" said Richards.
      The bear shuffled from foot to foot. "I suppose," he said eventually, with a sniff.
      "Then let me do my job. In there –" Richards pointed a finger at the village church "– there's a way to the outside."
      "But you're my prisoner," wheedled Bear. It came with no force, and Richards went on. Clasping his helmet to his head, Bear hurried to catch up.
      They went into the church, stepping over a spill of shrivelled YamaYama fanned around the door. The roof ridge was broken, and there were large holes punched through the tiles. The floor was cratered and covered with shrapnel, rubble and splintered wood. YamaYama bodies were crushed and dismembered everywhere. In a pulpit at the front a YamaYama in an ecclesiastical surplice stood, pinned by a spear to the wall. A spread of ornate breads, fruit and vegetables lay on an altar before a cross, untouched but for a layer of fine debris.
      Richards stopped and pointed at something on the far side of the church. "See?"
      "What?"
      "I'm not people, but they were." Five more corpses lay in a grotesque pile, half phased into each other and the stone wall. Richards peered closer. One of the blocks flickered. "Someone's been trying to break in. Looks like it was shut off pretty quickly, too quick for these poor idiots, but there's something still there." Richards closed his eyes. "It's slippery, but I can feel…"
      "Yeah, whatever, Mr La-di-da Richards AI Level Five man," said Bear. He flapped a paw and crunched over the rubble to the food. He dusted a loaf off and sniffed it. He hit it against the altar. It made a thud; hard and stale. He put it back. "I'm going to keep watch," he said, and went to stand by the church's shattered nave windows.
      There was a fountain of data rippling intermittently from the outside, a gash in the world through which Richards could taste the wider Grid. Richards positioned himself in its path, and tentatively extended part of his mind into the flow.
      He hooked in.
      "Got it!" His mind burrowed into the fabric of the world. He poked a sensing presence out of the shell of the construct and found himself looking at the firewall that surrounded all of the Reality Realms, living and dead. A tiny rip blinked in it, already closing. No way out there. He turned his mind back in and ran his thoughts into the reality he stood within. Creative coding wasn't his strong point, and the mass of numbers he was confronted by was nearly beyond him, but the stream of equations rushing through him were of indescribable complexity, way beyond most everything else out in the world. "This stinks of k52," he muttered. He pushed harder, trying to snag himself onto the world, to give it a tweak, make a hole from the inside out he could use to escape, send a message, anything. He pulled back frustrated. He could just about hear and feel his own Gridpipe, but the way back into the Grid remained elusive.
      He pushed harder. There, another stream of data, a second layer under the first, simpler, old-fashioned, mismatched. He scanned through it quickly, and his eyebrows raised. This was the core script for the world that he was in, not the complex stuff. Still, it was not like anything he'd seen before either. It was a patchwork,