The Portal of the Beast

by J. A. Hailey

  “Yes, Abe. You are going to talk your way into or out of death. I am thinking of stepping out of this Humvee, so you can shift into the driver’s seat. Know how to drive in the desert? It’s not difficult, but it is a special technique that comes with practice. If you don’t know, don’t try too hard to move the vehicle, as you would end up digging its wheels into the sand, and then there will be no way at all to get it moving.”

  “If it gets stuck, I will die,” said Grietzmann. “I have been in the desert quite often, but always in a vehicle driven by someone else. I don’t know how to drive in the desert, and I am not going to try to move this Hummer.”

  “That’s smart,” said Caesar. “This colonel that I am inside knows how to drive in the desert. If you’re with him alone, you will both be in the same boat, of course, faced with death in the desert, and so he will drive the two of you out of here, and return you both to safety.

  “There is simply no way to walk over twenty miles from here to the road, and we have brought no water along with us, besides that half bottle, by chance rolling around on the backseat floor. Twenty miles, as the crow flies, is probably forty miles up and down the dunes. No hope. And, as you know, there is no mobile signal in this area, and aircraft are banned because of proximity to the palace in which the King is currently in; so no search-and-rescue mission.

  “Anyway, no one will actually be looking for you in the desert, or in any place other than in the King’s wonderful garden. When they find their good friend, Abraham Grietzmann, missing, their first thought will be to order a search through the dead bodies; the hundreds of corpses in the palace. We ourselves have shot dead over a hundred.”

  “How will I live?” croaked Grietzmann.

  “If I leave, by which I mean leave virtually, you will find yourself in the company of Colonel Abood Dawah, who happens to be the man in this uniform. He is a security chief at the palace; he undoubtedly recognizes you, and he will hope to gain the King’s favor by saving your hide.

  “He knows nothing of what has happened, and will drive you both out of the desert by driving the Hummer out of here.

  “There is another way for me to leave, and though it will still be virtual, it might be by way of shooting myself, which means this colonel, in the head.

  “Thereafter, even if I have a change of heart, which is highly unlikely, I will not be able to return to assist you, because there will be no living, chip-implanted body into which I might enter for the purpose. You can die, holding this little gadget that I am placing on the sand by my side. It is what we have used to bring in amplified satellite signals for our mission.

  “Let us now step out of this vehicle, because it would be far more comfortable to lie back on the sand, and look at the stars while hearing your story. The desert, as you have surely always been taught, is somewhere between cool and cold at night, and as we are in the very deep desert, it will undoubtedly get cold. But it doesn’t matter if you shiver a little. Just fish for that half bottle of water and carry it out to keep your lips and your throat moist, to help you talk for your life.

  “I’ll carry this pistol out and keep it on the sand. If you tell even one lie, or cause us to judge you are being evasive, deceptive, I will shoot myself, which means this poor colonel, in the head.”

  “Caesar, please don’t judge me harshly and get me wrong. I will not lie. You tell me what you want to know.”

  “Abe, I will not judge you at all. There are fourteen of us who will be listening to you talking, and that number could include Esmeralda and BC, who are still running to get away from the palace. The moment you lie, or are evasive; the moment you might be suppressing something that should be spoken in the flow of things, we will know. We will know without a doubt.

  “I want to tell you something else. We are asking you to spill the beans, but never imagine that we will not get to the bottom of things by other means, if we stop bothering to listen to your deception, and do end up leaving you to die over here.

  “I won’t lie. Cross my heart.”

  “Cross what you like. This is what we want to hear from you.

  “What exactly has happened with Patrick Sagan and Michael Gales? It is clear that there is some plot that includes you, the King and the Sheikh. Keep your eye on the gun, Abe. You can take hold of it whenever you want, and shoot whoever you want. But right now, have a sip of the water in the bottle next to you.

  “And start spilling them. The beans. Immediately!”

  34

  Quite naturally it was Michael Gales, the computer specialist, who saw that a parallel and secret version of screenside, safe from its virtual owners through insulation, made possible by very big money, had to somehow be created in a computer world utterly disconnected from the human Internet.

  “The problem we must contend with at all times is the management of secrecy,” he said. “As long as they consider the two of us to be part of their world, wherever we are becomes a secret spot in a sense, as we are within the umbrella programs created by the virtuals to ensure inviolable privacy. It is sure they will never look in on us. All handled by guardian managed privacy programs, which means inorganic and automated.”

  “Never listen in either,” added Sagan. “Inorganic, and therefore not involved, which makes our conversations also of no interest.

  “The problem is that our activities in the human world will surely get picked up by their surveillance teams, where we are potentially under observation by organic rather than inorganic. They are always watching the world. To some extent, we might be able to deny that we are involved, but that will mean a non-stop game of hide and seek. And you know that people like the King and the Sheikh are going to be impossible to control in the long term.”

  “If busted, we’ll be doomed,” said Gales, morosely. “And yet, living like saints is never going to be the game plan. It is bound to be a variant of hell, which is the only world that will be created when these people are ruling the roost.

  “Goodness knows how we’ll manage it,” he added. “Screenside is a vast place, where everything works within a purpose-created program they call Real Virtuality, or RV in short. Human consciousness, which means the two of us, has been designed to work within RV, and we are created in a way to be alive exclusively within RV, primarily because we cannot actually function exactly like them, cannot be alive in virtual space of computer and Internet.

  “This means that we are surely not going to be able to function as consciousnesses if we break away altogether from screenside, disconnect, because the world of RV itself will disappear.”

  They sat gloomily, brooding. That particular afternoon, the three men were examining means of implementing their greater goals of forming a society with new human inductees, which would only be feasible if a bit of the screenside world, beyond consciousness alone, could be moved outside the ambit of screenside.

  “I’ve had a thought,” said Grietzmann. “An idea that needs checking out. Why don’t you both travel through the screenside world and come to meet yourselves here in this room?”

  “We’ve been here all along,” said Sagan. “It is practice of sorts, because only by being locally present here can we hope to control third-party bodies.”

  “What should be of greatest concern is that the entire world we are hoping to steal from screenside is going to be contained entirely in just this one solitary machine,” said Gales. “Everything can be ended with a single bomb, or even a plane dived into the building. They know exactly where this supercomputer is; expert pilots who navigate by satellite.”

  “One computer won’t do it, that’s for sure,” said Grietzmann. “I’m calling the King to join us here, right now. Let’s stick some panic into him,” and he immediately signaled to their personal attendant to come forward.

  “Run to the King, run, run, and tell his Highness that a great emergency has arisen, and that his American friends want him to race here for most urgent confabulations. Go. Your head is
safe, as I will tell him that disturbing him has been my instruction. Go.”

  The man hurried away, caught between the devil and the deep, clearly fearing for his personal safety.

  A few minutes passed in silence, and then King and Sheikh came hurrying in from the children’s wing.

  “What has happened? What has happened? Is it over for us?” screeched the King, in alarm.

  “Not over, but we are dangerously exposed,” said Grietzmann. “Our measures must be extensive and immediate.”

  “You say. You say, and we will implement. What is required?”

  “Our world is just this one supercomputer, and we have to immediately expand our world. Cannot be just this single unit, which one bomb can destroy. How can we find out what has happened to the other supercomputers you ordered?”

  “I’m calling the head people in my personal office in this palace. They sit in the separate building just outside the main gate, and will be able to give us the information you seek, and can be also be assigned to follow up on whatever instructions you give.”

  The King made a phone call, and three people from his office came running. “The other supercomputers,” said the King. “Give Mr. Ibrahim whatever information he wants, and implement his orders immediately. But I am also going to be sitting here, listening.”

  With everyone getting onto their telephones and talking with various people in the King’s other offices, the information Grietzmann required was soon made available.

  All ten supercomputers had been shipped out by the Chinese company, and two had already been installed in the King’s palaces in his two major cities, the ones he ruled from.

  With one on its way to Sheikh Abdul, and one already installed in this remote palace, it left six supercomputers still to be assigned their locations.

  “That’s good enough for the start point,” said Gales. “It will be a world of eight supercomputers, because we must exclude the big city ones.

  “All the rest have to be installed with the same system of isolation and security we have implemented for this one here. Let’s look at a map.”

  They sat and stood around the King, using his gigantic monitor to look at a map of the region.

  “Let us plan for Sheikh Abdul to be our southernmost geographical location at this stage, stage one. Point out the King’s palaces, used or unused, old or new.”

  Someone from the office turned out to have good knowledge of the subject, and they soon had a list of three, small and mainly abandoned, palaces, practically as remote as the one they were in.

  “Everything does not need to be a palace,” said Gales, after sending the office staff out. “We could also construct very solid isolated structures, not for physical habitation, but to house our eternal world networked machines, where we are able to incorporate security measures as we need, perhaps tighter than we have here, much tighter.”

  “We’ll have to maintain bodies to occupy, in every location that we establish,” said Grietzmann.

  “Yes,” agreed Sheikh Abdul. “We will probably become very careless after immortality, and could die all over the world. Then what?”

  “Much to figure out,” said Gales. “Especially to sort out how we are going to move physically throughout the world, while having no intersection points with the human Internet.”

  “Money will do it,” said the King, arrogantly. “Money does everything, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re probably right, Highness. We’d have to set up a worldwide network, possibly an extensive landline one, with private dedicated satellites for Wi-Fi broadcast, to ensure that we have signal wherever we are. We’ll sort it all out when we are up and running. Right now, let’s sit down and think through the ways currently available to secure our world. We have to ensure that they cannot destroy us completely with a physical assault.

  “It’ll have to be landline connections to a newly created supercomputer network, let’s call it the Kingnet. We’ll just have to make it as widespread as we can, and somehow create the maximum footprint possible on the planet.”

  “When is the Korean dictator next coming to see you, Sheikh Abdul?” asked Grietzmann. “I’ve been thinking of him, as he is another ruler like you Arabs, able to maintain his grip on power. Those are the types of people we need, to join us in our journey into the future, if our goal is to remain fabulously wealthy and to gain complete and eternal control of all humanity.”

  The Arabs nodded agreement and returned to their interrupted work, leaving the three Americans alone again.

  “As you know, we are here now, in this room, seeing you and ourselves, Abe,” said Gales. “And we’ve been listening in to our conversation, practicing.

  “The problem is that without being connected to the Internet, the screenside world we have would disappear, and, as we are creatures of Real Virtuality, which supports our existence, we, too, would probably disappear.

  “I might have to ask some of the seniors to hand over a local area RV maintenance program, by which I can maintain an RV environment, even in a computer disconnected from the vast RV world that extends throughout the Internet’s billions and billions of computers and phones.”

  “What sort of reason could we possibly think up for such a strange request?” wondered Sagan.

  “Just a moment, please,” said Grietzmann. “I left something in there; will go and fetch it. Our drinks are down to the bottom. Order me another beer, along with your own orders, please; the same one.” He pointed at the bottle he put down on the table.

  He was gone into the computer room for less than a minute, and when he came back in, he sat at the small side of the huge desk, across from Sagan and Gales, to play around on the monitor on that side.

  The beer arrived, as did fresh drinks for the other two, and they sat in air-conditioning, looking out at the dangerously hot and bright world outside the window.

  Some more time passed, when Grietzmann pointed at the screen in front of him and asked, “You guys still in here?”

  They nodded that they were very much present in the room.

  Grietzmann rang a bell and summoned a waiter. “One more round; exactly the same,” he ordered, and when the man had left, said, “Michael, I have failed to understand, and am sorry to ask you to repeat, but please refresh my memory, or maybe even help my understanding of the problem you have regarding being disconnected from the virtual world.”

  “Simple, Abe,” answered Michael. “They have created us to be digitally formed in a way that we interact with the physical world operational in screenside, which is a world system called RV. Very creative, absolutely brilliant, and as we’ve told you before, it is impossible for us to tell the difference between being outside, here, and being inside, there.”

  “And why might disconnection from the Internet bump you guys off?”

  “Simple, Abe. RV is normally created by many small computers working in collaboration, generally computers from the same physical neighborhood in the real human world. So, if you disconnect any computer, it obviously stops being able to continue an RV environment on its own.”

  “RV is a moment to moment interactive program,” added Sagan. “Throughout the world of screenside, it updates things like weather and what not, including pedestrian traffic on roads, which means it is probably a continuous feed from the headquarters in New York. You can understand what disconnection from the feed might mean.”

  “What we have here is a supercomputer,” said Grietzmann. “Okay, it’s a commercial Chinese supercomputer, and it may not be the best in the world. But what I have gathered is that it is huge. And when looking at the housing, I can see that it could hold hundreds of PCs, like the ones we have in our homes and offices. Those are monster machines in their own rights, hundreds of times more powerful than what we had just ten years ago. In fact, I believe smart phones are much more powerful than the older computers. So here is my question.

  “How many regular or regular-equivalent com
puters would be inside that supercomputer? You understand what I’m asking, don’t you?”

  “Logical query, Abe. And the answer is thousands; many thousands,” answered Gales. “I could work it out for you.”

  The waiter came in with the new drinks, and Grietzmann had a huge gurgling go at his beer.

  Putting down the bottle and wiping a little bit of spill from the corner of his mouth, onto his upper sleeve, Grietzmann laughed. “You are sure you’re in here, in this room? Absolutely sure?”

  Gales nodded ‘yes’, but Sagan spoke emphatically, sounding slightly irritated. “Of course we’re here, Abe. We are together, next to each other in the computer world, watching through the cameras on all three monitors here, selecting by choice, and listening through the microphones on the King’s side of the desk.”

  “Problem solved, then, isn’t it?” said Grietzmann, smugly.

  “What problem is solved?” asked Gales, irritably.

  “You saw me going into the computer room, didn’t you?” asked Grietzmann, employing a patronizing tone. Sagan and Gales nodded ‘yes’.

  “About fifteen, twenty minutes ago, wasn’t it?” They again nodded ‘yes’.

  “You know for a fact that there is only one Internet input point into the supercomputer, don’t you, Mike? And it is through a dedicated landline that you and I supervised the installation of, at the time the supercomputer was brought into this palace.”

  “Yes,” said Michael. “There are a few Wi-Fi broadcast points enabled, just three, but only one Internet connection into the machine, and it is through a landline especially laid through the desert for this one and only machine. We all know that, Abe; old crap. Why are you bringing it up now?”

  “Because, Michael; because, Patrick, when, fifteen or twenty minutes ago, I went into that computer room, I yanked out the landline Internet connection from the machine.

  “From that moment, until now, you have been disconnected from the Internet computer world!