Sharl in a Bottle

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl was alone. Gina was asleep, he was sure, she hadn't said anything to his last few queries, and he didn't want to worry her by yelling or doing anything else to attract a lot of attention. He was alone in this alien place, in these rooms that were a strange mirror of the world he knew, with only his 'Net connection and the television for company. He'd found himself spending a great deal of time on the terminal here paging through the physical reality of the network that had been such a miserable nightmare for him.

_Do you really accept everything she said that so readily?_ he asked himself, all the while wondering if his innermost thoughts were laid bare before the cyberkinetic who'd built a home for him here. _Mom, Dad, Tronik, the Exodus, everything was a lie?_ The thought made his blood run cold as he pictured his home, his family, everyone he'd ever known, trapped in a computer on a table somewhere, ready to be crushed in an alien's hand..._It makes sense_, he thought, depression twisting in his chest. Computer error would certainly match some of the stories he'd heard about alien contact and strange events.

_And it would certainly fit what happened to me._ He shuddered a little at the memory of being lost in the Network, at the feeling of reality all around him shattering into a confused, babbling madhouse. _I fell out of reality, and found the way the universe really works. More fool me._ Part of him regretted ever leaving home, regretted ever trying to push the boundaries of the universe and uncover the truth of things.

_But on the other hand, I suppose I can't really go further than this, can I?_ He got to his feet and started to pace, walking a slow circuit of his cell. No, not his cell; of the refuge built for him by his friend. _I found out the way the world really works. I found out that my people need help; more help than they ever knew they did...and so do lots of other people too._ He turned back to the page he'd been looking at, an account of some of the grimmer moments in this world's histories; invasions and disasters and destruction, so many of them bettered by superheroes.

_I wonder if I could learn to do that,_ he thought. _To manipulate the computer world the way Gina does, to shape it...it seems like I should be able to!_ he thought. Moving to speaking aloud now that he was alone, he added "If I am a being of stored data, I should be able to manipulate data!" Grandiose visions of returning home with fantastic powers came to him; building new roads and cities, raising new soil from the sea and even making the Sun larger and more healthful all came to mind. "I could make Bantam as big as the sun, and give Neo the same orbit as the Earth! I..._

He sighed, softly, and laughed, slumping back into his chair. "That's all really nice, Sharl," he chuckled, running his fingers through his hair, "but it's a Grue's chance in Lorton right now." He was nothing more than a powerless program right now, depending on someone in the 'real world' to give him everything he wanted. "But maybe someday," he speculated, looking up at the ceiling from his chair. "Maybe someday, I'll learn all I can from the real world, and use it to save my own people. Someday..."

But first, he was going to have to get out of here! "I wonder what Gina's lab looks like," he speculated. Was it like this room, all soft blankets and woodwork? The alien architecture had to come from somehwere, and surely she'd rebuild a room like what she was familiar with. While his personal image of a 'cyberkinetic' would have been all liquid circuits and plasma coils, he'd already seen that this world's technology was (perversely enough) less than what'd grown up with. His ancestors had journeyed to the stars and beyond, while the people of Earth had barely reached their nearest satellite and the other planets of their star system. Superheroes had apparantly gone further, but they were the exception, not the norm.

It occurred to him, thinking about it, that she probably could have shown him the lab easily enough. "I mean I saw her, or at least her avatar. Would it have been that hard to set up a camera for me?" He wasn't complaining; if Gina hadn't done it, she must have had a reason. But what reason could she have had? "I guess I am an alien," he said thoughtfully, "and maybe she doesn't want me getting a look at her lab so I don't try and replicate it in Tronik. If people here have computers big enough to hold a whole city, maybe they don't want us building that where we are."