Ruined Cities

by James Tallett (ed)

  Wil glanced back at the door he’d come through. Danger of Death, it said. High Radiation. Do Not Enter. His secret tomb. He stepped away, into the vault. A wave of dizziness washed through him, sending him sprawling to the ground. The stone of the floor was suddenly cold on his cheek.

  “Wil? What was that?”

  “Nothing. I fell over. I’m good.”

  “We lost everything for a moment here. The world went dark.”

  The ground lurched again beneath him. He hadn’t fallen over because he was dizzy.

  “An earthquake, I think,” he said. “Must have taken out some of the hardware.”

  “An earthquake in London? Things can’t have changed that much in a hundred years.”

  “Lots of the machines are dark. Perhaps the power supplies got damaged.”

  “The robots should have fixed anything broken.”

  “Maybe the robots got broken, too.”

  It was the dilemma they’d struggled with. How to design machinery that would last forever, fix itself when it went wrong. Eternity machinery. Sure, you could spawn enough so you never ran out. Viral machines that grew themselves up from engineered DNA. The problem you always came back to was energy. Energy and time, which amounted to the same thing. The system already needed vast amounts of power for day-to-day operation. The energy required to fabricate replacement hardware, especially given a high natural failure-rate in the process, was prohibitive. The power supply was just too restricted for the production scale required. So you needed people to intervene, fix things. Only there was no one here. Where had they all gone?

  Wil worked his way back onto wobbling legs, pulling himself upright by his walking-stick.

  “Sun,” he said. “I need you to do something.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking. There must be a reason you’re drawn to the lighthouse. You must have left a backdoor there. A way to get out of the simulation layer and down into the operating system.”

  “You think I haven’t tried? Like, a million times? When I look into the lens all I get is that fake controller telling me all is well and have a nice day.”

  “But you must have given yourself an exploit. It’s just obvious.”

  “Beats me what it might be. The only odd thing is the controller always asks me this weird question. Whatever I answer she ignores me and drops into her standard golden-age-of-humanity crap.”

  “Question?”

  “Yeah, she goes all spooky and says, “Who is the once and future king?”“

  “She does?”

  “She does. Maybe just a glitch in the routine. Nothing I’ve tried works.”

  “Try now, Sun. And when she asks say Halfa.”

  “Halfa? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Half a king. King Arthur. Bad joke. Just try it, okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  Working his way through the vault, he could feel his limbs beginning to loosen up. Progress was slow, but then he was ancient. The oldest person on the planet. It damn well felt like it, too.

  His memory was beginning to work better, though. Perhaps it was being back in his own body, his own neural mesh. Technical details of the hub operation came back to him. Ten million individual machines generating the clouds in this one centre alone. Storage capacity so vast they’d stopped counting. Over a hundred separate electricity supplies, most from dedicated power stations. 256 secure comms pathways fanning out to the other hubs around the world, all constructed from scratch, all highly secure. The scale of the thing was dazzling. They’d spanned the globe. They’d be using 20-30% of the planet’s energy resource by now across the eight hubs. It was a monumental achievement for humanity. Maybe its finest. An eternal afterlife for all.

  “Wil? I’m in.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your stupid King Halfa joke worked.”

  “You said we called it our kingdom. What are you seeing?”

  “Diagnostics, protected data structures, everything.”

  “Can you work out what’s going on?”

  “Give me some time. There’s a lot of data here. A lot of data.”

  “Okay.”

  He needed to see what was outside. There was an exit half-way down the vault but that led only to central control, a dead end. The main doors stood at the far end. On three more occasions the ground skipped beneath him, throwing him to the floor. Once, as he lay staring up at the looming racks of hardware, one of the machines died right in front of him, its lights winking out. No robot came rushing up to swap it out. In the ceiling above, a crack ran the entire width of the vault. What the hell was going on?

  “Okay, Wil, I’ve found the core status records,” said Sun. “It’s pretty ugly.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Washington, Rio, Delhi, Beijing, Cairo, Rome, Jakarta: they’re all dark. London is the only remaining hub.”

  “That isn’t possible. Maybe the links are down.”

  “The links are fine. The other hubs have just gone. They’ve been out for some time by the look of it. Months, years even. London’s been limping along on its own, running all the clouds. No wonder things have been jittery.”

  “How is that possible? They can’t all have been hit by natural disasters.”

  “Yeah. Weird thing, though, there are ten remote comms destinations being reported, not seven. Know anything about that?”

  “Are they all live?”

  “Yep. I just can’t see where the hell the extra three are going.”

  “Maybe we planned additional hubs?”

  “How could we not remember that?”

  “Like you said. We hid the memories until we needed them. So no one else could find out.”

  “Well, now would be a good time to start remembering.”

  “Are the three lines labeled at all?”

  “Nothing useful. Just Phoenix 1, 2 and 3.”

  “Great. Well, see what you can track down.”

  “Yep.”

  “And can you open the main doors? I need to get outside.”

  “Sure.”

  “You got video for anything out there?”

  “Nothing. That’s all dark, too. Seems like a lot of peripheral systems have shut down.”

  “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

  The large double doors stood before him now, tall and wide enough for racks of machinery to be wheeled in and out. They were an air-lock, designed to keep as much dust as possible away from the servers. Even the smallest amount shortened the life-expectancy of the hardware. He was doing harm just by being in here. Still, it didn’t make much difference now. Lights beside the door flicked from red to green as Sun instructed the mechanism to grant him egress. Holding the walking-stick forward like a sword he stepped through.

  Outside, he found himself in a wide atrium, smaller doorways leading off. Piles of dust and debris littered the floor, like the building was being shaken to bits. No one had come to clean things up. The hub was a sealed installation, automated, but someone should have come to fix things.

  Wil stood looking left and right, trying to get his bearings. There were no windows in the building, but there was an observation deck right at the top. He used to go up there to think when he had some tricky problem to fix. “Sun? Which way to the viewing platform?”

  “Huh?” She sounded distracted, her mind elsewhere. Irritated at being interrupted. He remembered the tone of voice well.

  “I need to get to the viewing platform.”

  “Oh, yeah. Take the blue staircase. Around the corner. Keep going up, you can’t miss it.”

  “Are there lifts?”

  “Sure there are lifts. They’re not working.”

  “Great. Have you found anything yet?”

  “Still looking. I can see the other seven hubs were running but now aren’t, whereas these Phoenix hubs have never been operational.”

  “Maybe they were never built. Or never completed.”

  “All the control and failover in
frastructure is in place.”

  “So just switch them on, see what happens.”

  “Yes, Wil. Commissioning a cloud hub is as simple as flicking the on switch.”

  “Yeah, yeah. At least try and find the on switch, okay?”

  He left the walking-stick at the foot of the stairs, afraid of getting his legs tangled in it as he climbed. An earthquake now could send him cartwheeling back down. More than once he stumbled, his clumsy legs not bending enough for his foot to reach the next step. Molten lead filled his limbs and sharp pains shot through his chest. This was what it was like to have a real body. Worse, one that hadn’t been used for a hundred years. It was all so much easier in the clouds.

  Two flights up, the blue steps led to a landing and a spiral staircase winding up to the topmost point of the building. Wil stood there, chest heaving from the effort of his climb so far. Could he make it to the top? Another shock boomed through the building, sending veils of plaster showering down around him. He had no choice.

  Wil began to climb, one step at a time. He longed to speak to Sun, see if everything was okay, but didn’t have the energy. The stairs became dark as he wound his way upwards. That reminded him of something. A nightmare of ascending an infinite staircase. No, a real experience. The lighthouse. The parallels were obvious now he thought about it: a high tower you climbed to gain perspective. Had he designed the lighthouse based on this observation deck? Or had it been subconscious? He couldn’t recall.

  But he did remember the sight he’d see at the top. The vista the controller had shown him: the towers and domes of London. Sparkling in the sun or, more likely, drenched by grey rain. But, still, his home.

  Yet when he finally dragged himself to the top, the round platform with its walls of floor-to-ceiling glass, the scene before him was utterly different. Shattered buildings and smoking ruins. It was like some giant had come along and kicked the city to pieces. He stood there in disbelief while his breathing calmed and the burning in his limbs faded.

  “Sun? Are you sure this is London?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Because it’s in ruins. London has just gone.”

  He began to make out details he recognized. There was no doubt. The Thames was clear, a wide ribbon of blue-grey water. Beyond it he could see St. Paul’s, the cathedral that had survived the Blitz. Now it was a shattered half-dome, gaping open to the sky. Nearer at hand, lying on its side, was the old London Eye, a rusting tangle of steel. Across the river from it, the Houses of Parliament were a jumble of rubble. One of the clock-faces of Big Ben stared at the sky in open-eyed disbelief. There wasn’t another building as tall as the hub anywhere in the city. Here and there, thin lines of smoke rose into the cloudy sky.

  “I got nothing,” said Sun in his ear. “I’m only seeing diagnostics from inside the cloud.”

  “It’s a miracle the hub has kept running. London is a wasteland.”

  “Okay.” She still sounded distracted. Something was puzzling her, too. Best he left her to work it out. If anyone could, she could.

  He began to walk around the platform. The devastation filled every quarter. Maybe there were earthquakes here now. Maybe there’d been a war. Something cataclysmic. Or was the whole world like this? Were all the other cities in ruins, too?

  Wil looked southward. A group of people were there, huddled around some sort of wooden crane beyond the outer security wall of the hub compound. At least someone was still alive. He watched them with his forehead pressed to the glass. Were they trying to scale the wall? There were maybe twenty of them, dressed in ragged clothes. One person, standing to the side, wore an incongruous black top hat. He or she gesticulated to the others on the crane, directing them.

  The crane jerked into life. At first he thought something in it had broken. One arm crashed towards the ground. At the same time the counterweight on the back pivoted upwards at speed. He finally realized what he was seeing. This was no crane. It was a siege engine. The sort of huge contraptions they’d used to punch holes in the walls of castles in mediaeval times. And here they were in the 22nd century, using one to attempt to destroy a datacenter. What the hell had happened to humanity?

  He couldn’t help stepping back as the projectile arced up over the outer wall towards the main building, even though it could never have the elevation to hit him on the viewing platform. As it neared he saw what they were firing: the burnt out shell of a car. Big and heavy enough to do some damage, but surely not enough to endanger the reinforced walls of the hub. He felt the building shake as the car hit. Maybe if they kept on at it, the combined effect of hundreds of such impacts would take their toll eventually. Was that what had happened to the other hubs? But why were they doing it? It made no sense. Afterlife in the clouds was for everyone. They made no exceptions or judgments.

  Wil was about to head back for the steps when a huge concussion dashed him to the ground. Another impact? He’d seen no other projectiles. Then he understood. They might have archaic siege-weaponry, but they also had high-explosives. The car must have been packed with it. That was far more serious. A few direct hits like that and the attackers really could breach the hub walls.

  “Sun? Did you get another outage just then?”

  “A flicker, yeah.”

  He watched as the people on the perimeter began to haul round a massive crank on the engine, winding it up for another shot.

  “They’re firing explosives at the hub. I don’t think it’s going to last much longer.”

  “What about the defenses?”

  “They don’t seem to be working either. You got anything?”

  “Maybe, yeah.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It makes sense, you see. The eight hubs, London and the others, they were always temporary. Stop-gaps.”

  “They were?”

  “Sooner or later they were bound to fail. Flood or fire or earthquake or war. Or whatever’s happening out there in London. We knew they wouldn’t last, don’t you see?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s what we’ve been waiting for. For the other three hubs to be ready. The permanent hubs. Only they took time to create. Because you can’t just send up all the material you need, all that metal, and start building, can you? Far too expensive. But you can send data. Sending data is cheap. Beam up the DNA of your fabrication viruses and set them to work. Microscopic at first but increasing exponentially. Eventually you’d get there, even with high failure rates. Don’t you see? You have all the space and energy you need.”

  “Sun, where are the other hubs? You’re not making sense.”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re in space. Sucking in raw solar radiation. Enough to replicate hardware for millions of years. That was our eternity machinery. All that archaic technology out there was just to keep us alive for now. But we had to keep it secret until it was all ready. Lay a trail for ourselves but let no one else know. We had to make sure nothing could threaten the real plan.

  “That’s what we did?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So, we just need to activate the other hubs, replicate the cloud data up there and we’re in the clear. It doesn’t matter what happens to London. It doesn’t matter what happens to the Earth.”

  “Yep. Except…”

  “Except what?”

  “Well, it turns out there is an on switch. Firing up the hubs is straightforward.”

  “Great. So do it.”

  “I tried. It doesn’t work. Looks like some real-world mechanism is broken.”

  “Or maybe that was the plan all along. I do the physical world stuff, you do the virtual.”

  “Maybe. Whichever, you need to get to central control and start switching shit on.”

  “Okay. I’m going now.”

  He set off for the spiral stairs, limping although he didn’t recall injuring his leg. Half way down another impact rattled the steelwork of the stairs. Grabbing the rail tight, he braced himself for the explosion. None came. The detona
tion mechanism must have failed. Two steps later the big explosion hit, sending the stairs bucking beneath him. Slipping, he tried to grab the handrail, missed, and clattered down the spiral stairs, banging his side, his face, his shoulder. He half-skidded, half-fell to the landing below.

  Pain rang through his body. His heart galloped. Was it supposed to go that fast? Maybe it was a heart attack. His chest hurt sharply, but then so did everything else.

  “Sun?”

  No reply. Must have her head deep in some code.

  “Sun? You hear me?”

  Still nothing. That roused him. He lurched back to his feet and set off again, shouting her name over and over. His body was weak and damaged, but it didn’t matter now. He had to keep going. They were depending on him: Sun, their children, ten billion other people. Half-walking, half-falling, he clattered down the blue stairs.

  Back on the ground level, a ragged hole had been punched through the hub’s outer wall. Breeze-blocks lay strewn across the floor. Burst pipes gushed water. Severed power cables sparked. His walking-stick lay pinned beneath one of the bigger lumps of stone near the foot of the stairs. He pulled it free, its solid weight reassuring. Plaster from the shattered wall crunched beneath his feet as he hobbled back to the vault.

  He rounded the corner. Too late. The airlock doors hung by their lower hinges, blown out by some huge explosion inside the vault.

  The inner doors had been blasted completely out of their frames. No need to wait for the air to be scrubbed now. Inside the vault it was utterly dark. No machine lights sparkled. The air tasted of dust and burning plastic and the chemical tang of fire-suppressant gas. The familiar, reassuring hum of the machinery was gone. He took a few steps inside, feeling his way with outstretched hands, then tripped over something metallic and fell once more to the floor.

  At that moment, red emergency lights kicked into life. They still had some power. Through a haze of smoke and dust he began to make out detail. The racks of machinery lay twisted and broken around him, their beautiful uniformity destroyed.