Battle for the Known Unknown Ch. 06

"I'm very well, thank you," answered Paul who was actually rather pleased to see his elderly friend. There wasn't really anyone else, either in the real world or Nudeworld, with whom he could enjoy such intelligent and wide-ranging conversation.

"And that's despite all the incidents that have been troubling you?" remarked the gentleman referring to Paul's earlier conversations. Indeed, it was because of a long, rather intense conversation with Virgil that he'd been detained in the cocoon of cyberspace when his house was in the process of being demolished by malfunctioning nanobots. Had he disengaged from Nudeworld sooner then he might no longer be alive.

"I'm not going to be on Godwin for much longer," confessed Paul, who'd already forgotten his instructions not to speak to anyone of the plans that had been made for him. "I'm going to be heading into deep space."

"And why's that?" asked the gentleman. "Does your research involve foreign travel?"

"Not until now," admitted Paul as Virgil sat down next to him. He was offered a glass of wine that his companion held out to him in a gnarled hand. "It seems that the Anomaly I've been researching has reappeared."

"Has it now?" said the gentleman with a sympathetic smile. "And where might that be?"

"The same place, I think," said Paul. "Just beyond the Heliopause."

"Thatisa strange place for anything to be! Does anyone in the thirty-eighth century have a better idea than the scientists in the twenty-second century had of what it might be?"

"All they have is a better idea of what it isn't," admitted Paul.

The two men, one naked and the other fully dressed, sat silently in the shelter of a huge eucalyptus tree while sheep wandered by, far more interested in grazing than in the people resting in their midst.

"Do you think this Anomaly is restricted only to the real world?" the gentleman asked. "Could it ever appear in a virtual world like Nudeworld?"

This was a thought that had never occurred to Paul. "I don't see how," he replied. "Unless, of course, it infects the servers that house the virtual world. But it's so far away from anything else that I don't see how that's possible."

"So, it's very definitely a thing of the material world," said the gentleman. "Is it composed of real matter and energy?"

"Whatever it is, I don't see how it can't be," said Paul.

The gentleman paused, as if in deep thought. "So as long as you or anyone else is in virtual space you're safe from whatever evils associated with the Anomaly as long as the servers generating the virtual universes remain secure?"

"I guess so," said Paul. "But I wasn't aware the Anomaly could ever cause harm. Nobody knows what it is, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing."

"Do you have an opinion on what the Anomaly is, Paul?"

Paul wasn't a man given to theorising. He was far more interested in the how of things rather than the why. He could think of no answer to Virgil's question.

"You don't think it's an alien intelligence, do you?" continued his companion. "Do you think it's supernatural? Like a spirit or the manifestation of God or something like that? Do you think, for instance, that it's an incursion from another parallel universe?"

"I really don't know," said Paul at last. "But whatever it is, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation."

"I'm sure that's true," Virgil agreed.

When Paul finally left the park and returned to the night club, where Blanche was waiting for him as if he'd not been away at all, he briefly contemplated whether he'd been wise to be so frank to the elderly gentleman about his forthcoming role in the mission to the Anomaly. Hadn't Special Officer Fitzwilliam been adamant that Paul shouldn't talk about it to anyone? After all, the avatars in Nudeworld very often represented real people.

However, Paul dismissed his worries. If Virgil was the avatar of a real person, how could that person possibly know that the Paul he encountered in Nudeworld was the same Paul who lived and worked as a researcher in Godwin?