"Hey look at this!"

In an attic of an old, 20th century house, a man, whose name is not important, was clearing away a few old cardboard boxes. Dust hung thick in the air, and covered everything in a grey layer. Flat desiccated spiders decorated the floor.

In one of the boxes, he found a smaller box that seemed to intrigue him. He wiped away the grime of over 20 years.

Just visible beneath the dirt, the single word ‘Creatures’ Further down on the box, he could just make the words ‘Win 95’ and ‘Mac’.

The man heaved a sigh of satisfaction, picked up the box and headed for his computer. Not his new Heptium 6000, but the shabby old thing lying in the corner of the room, quietly mouldering away.

Chapter 1: Leaving Home.
Albia, Version 6.

Annie the norn crept up behind her partner, and rubbed his shoulders.

"I don’t know what you see in that maths," she said, "Come on, you’ve done enough work for today."

Chris, sat at the desk, took off his glasses, rubbed them, and put them back on again, in an habitual gesture Annie had always found endearing.

"This calculus the Hand wanted me to do is impossible… I’ll finish it eventually! I promised It I would"

"You didn’t promise tonight though did you?" Annie persisted. She glanced outside. A forlorn Cloud Butterfly fluttered past in the gathering twilight. As she watched, a bat swooped down and deftly caught the unfortunate insect.

"I’ve never drawn a Cloud Butterfly.. I ought to try sometime. I wonder if the Hand would like it?"

"Yes I’m sure" said Chris, buried again in his beloved equations.

"Oh come on! Leave that alone, now! It’s your turn to make dinner.", Laughing, she dragged him away from his calculations by one arm. Chris was stronger than she, but she managed to drag him ‘unwillingly’ just the same. "Just as long as it’s not carrots again!"

"But I like carrots…" He protested.

Laughing and kissing, they wandered into the garden.

High above them, in the clear, dark air, the Hand watched. Annie saw It, and waved cheerily. Chris looked up, and smiled weakly, and then waved shyly. The Hand made a decision. Annie would be the one. She was best suited. It had raised Annie Itself, and she was the only norn, out of the 40 in Albia, who was truly comfortable around the Hand. More importantly, she had an incredible thirst for knowledge- and the brains to find out things for herself when she wanted.

The Hand thought back to the incredible conversation of a few days earlier. No other norn had ever asked It what Annie asked that day.

"Hand, can I ask you something?" She had enquired. They had been walking in the Flower Meadow east of Norntown, where most of the norns lived in a warren of interconnected rooms and gardens. Not all norns lived there; some chose to throw their lot in with the Ettin, on the archipelago of islands, far away on the other side of the world. The fragrant wind blew her waist length white hair.

"Of course not. Go ahead." The Hand floated in the air just above the norn. It spent a lot of time with Annie when It could spare it. Somewhat arrogantly, she wondered if there was something special about her.

"What are you?"

There was silence in the meadow for a few minutes, except for the cries of distant birds.

"I’m sorry", said Annie, hesitantly. "Was that tactless of me?" Sometimes even she had problems telling the Hands emotional state- most other norns didn’t even realise it had emotions, but then, her mother (so she’d been told) died shortly after her birth, and she had been raised by the Hand exclusively. In the middle of the night, she wondered though. None of the other norns knew who had been her mother, and she had heard whisperings behind her back of ‘test tube norns’- norns with neither mother nor father. "No…It’s just I have never been asked that before. I’m trying to think of an answer you’d comprehend." It replied. Annie felt slightly nettled at Its easy assumption that she wouldn’t understand.

"You know that I neither eat nor drink?"

"We all talked about that! We wondered if you did it in private."

"Doesn’t that strike you as odd? After all, a norn that doesn’t eat, dies."

"Umm.. not really. You’re just the Hand, not a norn. You’ve always been there, like the sky and the ground."

"There is a reason. I don’t really live in this world, but in another. We call it Earth. There are many other Hands there. More than 40. Many, many more,"

Annie waved a bee away from her face. "Another world? But how come I can see you?"

"What you see of me." It trailed to a halt. It seemed to think for a few minutes, then continued. "What you see of me is a projection. A presence." Shaking her head bewilderedly, Annie said "No, I don’t understand." "Ah I know- think of it like this: Imagine there was a figure of you on your television in your house, and imagine you could move it about at will-the figure that is, not the television. That is the way Albia appears to me." "What? You surely don’t think we’re just pictures on a television screen! Television has no life, or soul."

"No, no, no." the Hand interrupted her angry outburst. "I’m not saying you aren’t alive. It was just a comparison. I live on Earth, but I also exist on Albia. I have a presence here."

"I see.. I think. Where is your other world?"

"It surrounds this one," the Hand said, adding as Annie started glancing around, "You can’t see it, but it is similar to Albia. However, we are life of a very different kind to you. On Earth, for instance, we cannot just walk forward and backwards, or go up and down in lifts or movers. We can go another way as well. We say we have three dimensions, not just two like Albia."

"I don’t understand that. You can’t go any other way- there are no other ways to go!"

"Neither do I! Trust me, though, it’s true." The Hand was beginning to realise just how different Albia was; that perhaps the barrier between artificial life, and biological life would never be fully broken. "There is another difference too. We are not an algorithmic life form."

"Algorithmic life the only kind of life their is!" Annie was beginning to wonder if the Hand was just spinning a fanciful yarn.

"Not me. We are made up of tiny particles that interact with one another. I can’t explain that better. I’m a computer programmer not a biologist. No, never mind what a biologist is, it doesn’t matter" It added, seeing the question forming on Annie’s face.

"These little particles… are they like pixels?"

The Hand gave up. "Yes, they are similar." Annie could tell an outright lie when she heard it. Sometimes she doubted the Hand’s intelligence- it seemed unable to answer the simplest questions.

"So you have computers in your world too?" Somehow the thought of tiny, baby Hands being taught at a computer was funny.

"You could say that." It sounded amused, though Annie could not see what was so humourous.

"We live far longer than norns too. I’ve been in the world always, since the first norns. There are vast numbers of us, living for years."

"What’s a year?" Annie asked.

"A long time. 365 days."

"You live a that long? That’s tens of lifetimes!"

"We live many years. I can remember when Albia first appeared, 20 years or more ago."

Annie silently shook her head. The Hand could tell some stories! It obviously didn’t want to part with Its secrets. She remember some of the other fanciful stories it had told her: computers are intelligent, why It floated and didn’t fall down, that her world had been ‘written’. Written? How in Albia could you ‘write’ a world, as if it was an equation on a piece of paper?

"No you’re making it all up! You just like being mysterious!" Annie giggled, and pulled one of the Hand’s fingers as she had when she was little. It rewarded her with a tickle.

"It does sound rather farfetched, doesn’t it?" The Hand suddenly held one of her favourite plants, a parsley, which she contentedly ate, before lying back in the long fragrant grass to watch the ever present butterflies flit overhead in the sunshine.

Yes, Annie was the most intelligent of the norns, although Chris came close. Chris however, had always seemed nervous around the Hand, more nervous than most norns- as if he expected to be told off for something. More importantly, Annie was insatiably curious. The Hand remembered, nostalgically, how difficult it had been to keep her in one place as a child! Always roaming free.. well she got that from her father. Well, now she was going on a trip of a lifetime, though she didn’t know it yet. It hoped that she would accept the challenge.

"Chris, can I have a word with Annie for a second?" The Hand asked. It had risen straight up through the floor of their house, as it often did when it wanted something. Chris started guiltily at being addressed.

"Of course!" he said, and ran away in haste. Annie turned to face It, a puzzled expression on her pretty face.

"I’ve got an interesting job for you, Annie. How would you like to travel back in time? To the prehistoric Albia of the first norns?"

"You can do that?" she exclaimed, amazed.

"I can now. I have found… a way. I am interested to see how you’d get on with the norns of that time. They are very different to you."

"A kind of experiment you mean?"

"Just that. I can export you from here and take you there."

"Interesting…"Annie mused. She could just imagine, in her mind’s eye, meeting the ancient norns, talking to them, learning their language… or teaching them hers. A thought occurred to her.

"Will I be able to come back?"

"Any time you wish. I shall keep an eye on you as much as I can, and if anything untoward happens, I shall return you at once to present day Albia."

"What will it be like?"

"I could tell you- but I’m not going to," the Hand sounded smug, "I want you to discover for yourself. There is one problem though: What about Chris?" Annie looked baffled. "What about him?"

"Do you want to tell him before you go?"

"Why should I want to do that?" Annie asked. The Hand had some funny ideas sometimes!

The Hand mentally shook Itself. One thing It always forgot about norns was their startling (and often incestuous) promiscuity. Although they often did stay with one mate for a while- as Annie was staying with Chris- there was no such thing as a long term relationship, and adultery was not frowned upon, or even noticed. It’d also taken the Hand a long time to come to terms with the norn’s total selfishness. If a norn nearby was hurt, they would not lift a finger to help, simply because it would not occur to them to do so. Eventually, It had managed to accept that they were just built like that.

"Won’t Chris miss you?"

"Miss me?" she looked blank.

"Ah, never mind!" It replied. "You better get ready to go; eat and drink plenty won’t you? And make yourself nice and warm…"

"Yes yes yes!" Annie replied. "You don’t half fuss sometimes!"

"Well someone has to make you norns eat." It sounded amused.

The Hand hovered closer to Annie and tickled her nose. She giggled. It was so nice when It did that. She sometimes felt that she would do anything, just to have the Hand tickle her again. It wasn’t just the pleasant sensation; there was a deeper feeling that she’d done something right.

Chris sat in the one roomed house that he and Annie currently shared. He was a very striking norn; with yellow-blond fur and green eyes, although those eyes often held a solemn, secretive look that Annie had accepted was just part of him. Like a lot of norns in Albia, he was fond of mathematics. Norns seemed to have a natural aptitude for the subject. Annie had never been able to fathom the subject, preferring drawing, but she was an exception rather than the rule. The Hand made use of his abilities now and again, when it had the need. As he thought of the Hand, its silvery voice, heard but not heard, attracted his attention.

"Can I have a word?" It said, softly. Chris turned in his seat. Though he had always been in awe of the mysterious creature, he sometimes sensed a kindred spirit behind It. Even with the powers it could wield, it was, at times, only nornish.

"Go ahead" He said, with a shrug.

"Annie will be going away for a while. She is helping me with an experiment. I thought you’d like to know." The Hand briefly explained the expedition It had planned.

Chris felt like he had been kicked in the stomach. Once again, he cursed this strange perversion, as he saw it. He kept his expression carefully blank. No one must know, he told himself.

"It’s not up to me to care or not care" he said airily, smugly acknowledging his good acting. "It’s not any of my business." There was a lump in his throat, but he tried not to swallow nervously- it’d give the game away. "She’ll be back soon I promise." It hesitated slightly, swooped in to tickle his nose, then suddenly winked out of existence.

The tickling did nothing to remove the cold lump of fear Chris felt.

Something bad was going to happen, he was sure. But there was nothing he could do about this feeling- not without giving away his best kept secret, and possibly with it, his life.