A man replied, "is he awake? I think he is awake, now. Come on out, young man we won't hurt you."

The woman snorted a laugh and then shut up. Singh approached the door, there was a large wooden door set into the semi-smoothed edge of the cave. It wasn't so much a cave than a rough-hewn room in stone, now that he looked at it more carefully. But it certainly wasn't his home.

"Where am I?" He asked, and realized that he was wearing his work gear. He hadn't slept in it. He had to be dreaming. Had to be. He wasn't known for altering his appearance in the Matrix, he liked doing that the old way of going through the motions.

The pair of people standing before him in a gently lit hallway (a nice square, building-like hallway) were tall, slender, darker skinned, and with the same jet black hair and bright blue eyes as one another. But the woman was pregnant, and the man looked protective. He struck out his hand though, "welcome to the Healing Den," he said.

Singh dumbly stood there, then gripped the man's long fingers. "Where?" He said, "I... I'm ... really lost."

"A lot of people get lost here," said the woman. "I am Baeris Kshau, and this is Kalkin, and the Healing Den is a kind of place that lost folks seem to gravitiate toward."

"Then I gravitated, but I really didn't mean to," Singh said. "How do I get back? I mean... so far as I know this is a dream."

"It's not," Baeris said, "you materialized here earlier in the morning, but we haven't figured out from where. And you've got the dragons all aflutter."

"... Dragons?" Singh said, "Is this Vere, then?"

The pair gave the same expression, furrowed brows and a shrug. "No, this is the Healing Den," said the man. "You seem to be coming from a different place than we normally get."

It was about this time when Singh started to get a tight feeling in his gut.

This wasn't reality, but it wasn't the Matrix, and if it wasn't this other Matrix of Vere, then... Just what had he done? He looked around and didn't see any signs that this was a viewable, Awakened kind of place. He had no spectacular powers here - he was normal, a person of ... flesh?

But if that were true why did he come with his clothes? What had happened?

***

Charybdis was in a panic, and that was not a nice sight for her friends. She fluttered around, hair waving and barely contained. She stomped - on the floor - back and forth in a pattern. "Where is he?" She asked, and no one in the Great Escape could answer.

Wiretap had gone missing the night before, something about his disappearance from the Matrix had startled Chary awake. So she went to his hideouts, but didn't find him in any of them.

"But... how could he just go? You didn't contact anyone from Zion," said one of the other Awakened. "They only pick up when they know where the pod is they need to find."

"I know, I know," Charybdis said, "but... Wait, his pod," she spun around. "You take care of this place, for a moment. Put up the walls and programs and ice, and if I don't come back shortly, keep them there until someone from Zion does contact you."

Then she abruptly swept out of the building in a flash of orange-gold light.

There was an Agent standing around the hard line, apparently waiting for someone else. Charybdis showed up at the edge of his vision like a huge red stain of anger, and he turned to see her in her true form.

He abruptly left the scene. Charybdis moved toward the hard line, one which was known to actually have a direct connection to a power line nearby. Charybdis had kept this one from Merovingian for the longest time, if he had it he might not have to go through so many hoops to import people from Zero One.

But it was just what Charybdis needed, for the moment. She tapped into it (Wiretap would do this! She cursed herself for not having kept a close eye on the boy, knowing that Agents had seen them together.) and was easily able to put out a quick broadcast to a nearby Sentinel outside. It got close enough, and when it did so she downloaded herself into it completely. It was refreshing, though a little cramped for her AI's size.

She sped off to the pod where Singheizhe was kept. It took only minutes, she had all of her Awakened friends on a kind of speed dial in her mental map and knew just where to go. The power plant was gigantic, with a hundred million people within easy sight in any direction. But she still knew just where to go.

She slowed up, thought about finding a medical bot instead, just in case something had really happened to him in there. But she made it in the Sentinel's body anyway, and ...

Sped back to the hardline, and back into the Matrix.

***

"So you're saying that you're not even in space?" Singh asked, and the people near him nodded. "Or time, which is bothering me, because like, you're pregnant and obviously time has to pass if you're going to be doing that..."

The pair laughed, waved it off, and looked out to the entertainment area past the offices. "Well, there are two more of Baeris' children right there, and one of mine," Kalkin said, of Cynonix, Bali and Kaeleb.

"Th.... that guy has fur." Singh said. He pulled in a deep breath. He kept feeling the back of his head: if this wasn't the Matrix then he ought to have one of those head-plugs that Chary described being inserted into every inhabitant of the power plant. But it wasn't there.

And his self image hadn't changed. What had he done?

***

"So... wait, he's --"

"He's still in his pod," Charybdis said, pacing but at a different level and with a more curious cast to her glow. "He's not in there, but he's alive and fine, his ... mind is just elsewhere right now. I didn't think that was even possible."

The other Awakened, a pair of girls and several younger kids, weren't sure what to make of this. Wiretap was definitely one of Charybdis' closest friends, an associate that she trusted completely and kept him around protected most of the time. So he'd gone off and... what, materialized outside of the Matrix?

"If we could get to Vere we could see if he is there," said one of the girls. "But in order for one of us to do that, we'd have to be unplugged, and... um..."

"Oh I don't think he's there either," Charybdis said, mysteriously. "I think... He's safe, and he'll come back to us when he is ready to."

With that, they went back to their lessons, and Charybdis put a sentinel on her watch list, to keep the pod safe.

***

Wiretap wandered around the Healing Den, gazing at the dragons, the flitters, and everything. There were people he couldn't describe - animal people, winged ones, fairies, elves, and just plain old people... But mostly he watched the dragons.

When he sat down near the big screen tv and reached for the remote, he felt a tingling in his hand. Concentrating on the remote, he activated the television with his mind, and felt an immeasurable relief. He could still control something electronic, even though it was more than code.

He wasn't positive it was more than code, but he was pretty sure that it was electricity that he was commanding here anyway.

Something still seemed a bit weird to him, and eventually he got up and wandered the halls some more.

The place was large, most of the hallways were big enough for a smallish dragon to walk down without trouble. He wondered how the big ones got around, but then realized there had to be ways out of here. So he followed one large, wide corridor which had many lines painted on it in brown, red, blue, green, and other shades. When they all got to one large mass, he looked up to see the opening of the Healing Den's entrance dome.

And ... that ... "Is that a parking lot?" He asked of no one in specific, there was no one nearby anyway. He stepped out, and saw that there was no sky, no horizon, just a kind of static. There wasn't even a sense of space, he got the feeling that this was a place that you couldn't really see from much of a distance, as distance didn't really mean a thing here.

He started to understand.

Turning back in, he followed one line of color until he reached a particular room which held a number of computer terminals. Wiretap sat at one of them, fiddled with the mouse, and got a display of items. They had names, like Dragonstake, Nidus, Weyr. He clicked on one, and was surprised to see what looked like a webcam of a nest of eggs.

He clicked on an icon, which printed out a little map, though it wasn't a map he could easily read. It was a star map, really, and it was to the Cy Dragonstake.

"What is this?" He asked of the furry guy, Cynonix. The cheetah nearly jumped out of his spotty skin, but then turned and looked at the map.

"It is directions to and from Cy Dragonstake, from here. They have a clutch... Say," he got a strange look and Singh realized that in fact this was no son of Kalkin, this was Kalkin too. "Do you think you might want to see it?"

"... It? the... the nest? The eggs? There?" Wiretap pointed at the paper, turning it over and upside down."

"Yes, those eggs. As I recall there is a specific nest there, requests for, well, people like yourself. Techies."

Singh blinked. A couple times. "What do you mean, 'for people like me'. Like you want me to get a dragon? Like..." He blinked again.

"Yes, like mine," Cynonix turned and looked at his brown, and shouted over his shoulder, "no there is no one like you, you pain in the neck." He turned back and smiled, fangy.

"Well... I ... guess it can't hurt, but since I... I don't even know if I'm here, for real. What about the Matrix? What happens then?"

"If you have to vanish and come back, we've had people do that," Cynonix said, draping his long arm over Singh's shoulders. "You can come back here, and we will take care of any dragon you've got bonded to yourself, if you have to leave. And we can work on ways to bring it to you, wherever this 'Matrix' thing is."

"Oh I doubt that very much," he said, but wondered. There were dragons in Vere, were they real too? He didn't know, and had really no way of knowing. Would he really want to hook up a dragon, another sentient being, to the Matrix's power plant?

Well that'd be if they could even locate his universe. It had gotten infinitely more complicated, this trip he'd taken. He'd been told that he was a Genrehopper, that there were numerous people around that could do it, and should he ever encounter himself he ought to keep in mind that every universe was separate for a reason.

Whatever that meant!

And if he did get back - what would he be able to do then? He could ... leave and come back? What if he wasn't there, what if he were dead?

That wasn't something he was interested in dealing with at the moment. So for the time being, he followed Cynonix around and got geared up to be sent to Cy Dragonstake for a peculiar tech-oriented nest.