Patchwork Universe

Alice Wong · Average Joined: 18 Jun 2004 Posts: 6 Location: Ex Machina

Alice stepped out of the mist. Her foot met nothing solid. Then she was pitching forward into water.

This wasn't how it was before! There wasn't anywhere full of water like this!

Not in Alice's world, where the seas were covered over with hydroponic machinery extracting plankton for the teeming billions. But not in the Patchwork she'd known before, either. There'd been the islands of Sir Aggravayne, but they were islands. She couldn't see any land here at all.

She thrashed and gasped, one moment with her head above the surface, seeing something in the distance that might have been a cloud or a sail, the next submerged in blue-green dimness. Alice had never learned to swim. This was the sea as it was in the former age, empty, bottomless and deadly.

Her limbs windmilling, she managed to propel herself a few feet back towards the mist and catch on to something solid on the other side.

Hauling herself up with the strength of fear, she disappeared.

(Alice returns to "Living in a Box" in Ex Machina)