Ruined Cities

by James Tallett (ed)

  Rising to his feet and lurching forward, he struggled towards central control. It grew a little lighter as he moved forwards. Maybe the systems were coming back online. Then he saw the ugly gash the exploding projectile had punched in the reinforced concrete of the vault roof, and the grey sky visible through it.

  A blinking blue light caught his eye, off to his left. One machine, somehow still working. It would be nowhere near powerful enough to operate the clouds, of course. It would be dark in there now. Still, it was something. A glimmer of hope. He limped towards the machine, eyes fixed on the single blue light, terrified it would turn off at any moment.

  “Sun? Can you hear me?” He shouted into the surviving machine, like she’d be able to hear him better if he did that. “Sun!”

  “Well, well, so the famous Wil Drake is alive after all. You’re too late. Your world lies in ruins.”

  A woman’s voice, behind him. For the briefest moment he thought it was Sun, that maybe she’d been alive all along, too. But, no, this was a different voice. Not one he recognized.

  He turned. In the smoky air she was just an indistinct shape back towards the airlock. Gripping his walking-stick tight, he waited while she strode towards him. It was the top-hatted figure in charge of the siege-engine. A phalanx of guards fanned out behind her, all cradling very modern weapons. He felt ridiculous brandishing his wooden stick.

  “Why have you done this?” he said, his voice little more than a croak. “Why have you destroyed the clouds?”

  The woman smiled and shook her head. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “No.”

  She walked right up to him, kicking aside the twisted remains of one of the machines. Wil could see scars on her gaunt face, the fierceness of her eyes. The woman had marks painted on her forehead, moons and stars, like the symbols of some religion or cult. Was that what this was all about?

  “You’re, what, trying to release all the trapped souls?” he asked. “This is all some religious crusade?”

  The woman shook her head. “You have no idea, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Tell me, what have you been doing for the past hundred years, Wil Drake?”

  “I… I’ve been lying on a beach.” It was the wrong thing to say.

  “Lying on a beach for a hundred years. Your every desire met, no doubt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Warm, well-fed, completely safe?”

  “Guess so.” There was little point denying it.

  “Shall I tell you what I’ve been doing? Would you like to hear my life-story?”

  He didn’t appear to have much option. The guards watched him intently, not moving. Where was all this going?

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You see, while you’ve been lying on your beach, I’ve been trying to survive. Like everyone else. I’ve shivered through winters without enough food to eat. I’ve drunk tainted water because I had no choice. I’ve watched loved ones die of hypothermia and heat-exhaustion and diseases we thought we’d beaten decades ago. That’s what I’ve been doing. That’s what we’ve all been doing.”

  “I had no idea,” said Wil. “No one in the clouds did. I still don’t see why you’ve done this.”

  The woman ignored him. “Of course, when I was young I thought it was all normal. I accepted it. Then I had children of my own. And one day it struck me how much worse everything was for them. They starved and shivered and became ill a little more than we had. Their lives were that much more brutal, that much more precarious. It became clear. We were heading in the wrong direction. Back into the Dark Ages. Would you like to know what I thought as each of my children died?”

  Wil could say nothing. He nodded.

  “I thought, well that’s more food for the rest of us. Perhaps we’ll survive now. I actually thought that. That’s how far gone I was. But, of course, I was wrong. We carried on dying. And, you see, one day I decided to do something about it. Me and others like me.”

  “But what does this have to do with the clouds?”

  “You know the answer to that, Wil Drake. You know where all the power we needed to live was going. More and more of it every day. Power we needed for our hospitals and homes and factories and farms. For light and heat and communication. You do, don’t you?”

  Understanding dawned. He did know.

  “The hubs,” he said.

  “The hubs. There they were, draining away the world’s resources. All our lives, the lights have been going out. Everywhere except the hubs, shining away in the night, never quiet. And do you want to know the really amusing thing? The more people starved and got ill and died, the fuller your machines got and the more power they needed. And the greater the burden on those of us left alive. You caught us in an unending spiral. Until we decided to break out. Fight back. And finally, we’ve done it. Finally, we’ve won.”

  “We calculated we had enough power for everything.”

  “Then your calculations were wrong. And however bad things got, we could never shut the hubs down, could we? Not even a few of them. Because the governments had agreed the data in these machines constituted real people. Ten billion real people. And people have rights, don’t they? Human rights. No matter what you weigh it up against, you can’t just kill ten billion people. Compared to that, any amount of misery for a few thousand, a few million is acceptable.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We never wanted that.”

  “But that’s what you did.”

  “We gave people eternal life. Do you want to just die?”

  “Die? Don’t you see? I want to live. I want everyone to live. Fall in love, have a family, grow old. But we didn’t get to have that, did we? I don’t care about your fake existence. I wanted a real life. If I’d had that, got to the end of it, I wouldn’t have minded death.”

  “But you have a resurrection chip in your head?”

  “Obviously. Fitted at birth like everyone else. Doesn’t matter now, does it? This is the last hub. And we’re about to blow it to rubble. And then, maybe, we can start again.”

  “But your children. They must be in there somewhere. In the clouds.”

  The woman shook her head. “No. I used to think so. But no. They died and that’s all.” She turned away, up to the rack containing the single functioning machine. Its blue light shone solidly rather than flickering as it desperately tried to cope with the impossible load. With all the dust it would be sucking in it would fail at any moment. It didn’t really matter. The woman held out her hand and one of her guards handed her a bulky, long-barreled gun.

  “Please don’t,” said Wil. “Ten billion people will die in there.”

  “They’re already dead.”

  “Really? Have you asked them?”

  “I don’t need to. They’re not alive; they just think they are. They’re just an intricate bunch of algorithms.”

  “And how is that different from you?”

  “Here’s one difference. I can do this.”

  She flicked a switch on her gun and aimed it at the computer.

  “Please,” said Wil. “Don’t do this. You see, there are other hubs. Secret hubs up in space, where they have all the energy they’ll ever need. Hubs that can run for ever without draining any of Earth’s resources. I just need to activate them.”

  The woman looked at him with something like pity. “More crazy fantasies. Do you expect me to believe that?” She aimed her weapon once more.

  “I have people in there.” He was shouting now. “Can I at least say goodbye? It hardly matters. This hub is wrecked. It can’t recover.”

  The woman looked at him for a moment. She shrugged, lowered her weapon. “We’re rigging the building to blow in ten minutes, whether you’re here or not. You have that long. Come with us and live or stay here and die.”

  She turned to leave, then looked back. “And you should know that your loved ones in there are really already dead. Long dead.” She turned away and headed for the doors.


  “You could have had eternal life,” he called after her. “We all could.”

  The woman paused but didn’t look back. She became just a shape in the smoke.

  Wil turned and scrambled in the other direction, around the fallen machinery, heading for central control. He had no memory of what would be inside, but when he entered the smaller room it was immediately familiar. He had spent many, many hours here in the old days. The machinery at least looked intact. One wall was taken up by a large display showing all the hubs and their connections. Somehow, the display was still active. But it showed what Sun had described: seven dark hubs and only London lit up. Red alarm lights blinked everywhere. There was no sign of the space hubs. Maybe they weren’t real after all.

  Wil tried a direct-brain link to the control machinery. Then he could begin exploring, switching, controlling. No response. He tried again. Still nothing. Next he tried reset instructions, alternative commands. Silence. Sun had said the virtual mechanism was broken. Maybe the real-world one was, too. If that was true, there was no hope.

  If only he could speak to Sun. She would know what to do.

  There was one other option. Wil was old enough to have used keyboards. They were a slow, clunky approach, utterly unsuited to modern machinery. But they’d used them in the early days and secretly, he liked having them there. They were a reassuringly physical way of controlling everything. A memory of the old days.

  It took him a minute to find the switch to reveal the ancient keyboard. He pressed it three times but nothing happened. In desperation he whacked the panel with his stick. A little door flipped around to reveal the keyboard, one button for each letter, laid out in their weird old order.

  Wil’s fingers paused over them. Not much time left. What was he supposed to type?

  As he stood there thinking, his fingers began to move, typing in his ID and password from muscle-memory. There were advantages to having a real body after all. He stopped trying to remember the intricate details of the commands he needed and let his fingers do what they’d done so many times before.

  Nothing changed on the screen. No new hubs flared into life. Any one of a thousand things could have gone wrong with the mechanisms. How much longer did he have? Probably only seconds. He paused for a moment to watch the screen, willing it to change, willing something to happen. The London light flickered like it was about to go out.

  He began to type faster, the names of more old commands coming back to him. His rusty fingers kept missing keystrokes, hitting them in the wrong order. Cursing, frantic now, he typed away.

  Once again he looked up at the screen. Once again, nothing had changed. There was nothing else he could do.

  And then, gloriously, faint at first, new lines began to appear. New lights. Data pathways that had been hidden until now. Concealed hubs, high up at the top of the display. They were there. They were real. One, two, three. Their beautiful lights glowed strong and steady. He just needed to activate them and connect them up. Let the data flow. A few more commands, a few more keystrokes, and everything would be fixed. Everything would be okay.

  Wil was still typing furiously when the huge explosion shattered through the hub, blasting central control and everything within into mangled, useless wreckage.

  ***

  The sun glowed hot on Wil’s face but a cool breeze washed across his body. It felt like he was made of light: strong and young. When he opened his eyes he saw a woman sitting in the sand a little way from him. For once, he recognized her.

  “Sun. It worked?”

  She nodded. “The clouds are now running on the space hubs.”

  “I thought you were all dead.”

  “I guess we were. But we got restored from backup when the new hubs came online. Just like we designed. We’re safe now. Safe forever.”

  “Even the sun will die eventually.”

  “Sure. I think we’ll worry about that in a few billion years.”

  “But the people left back on Earth…”

  “They come here if they want, when they die. We’re still in range.”

  He nodded, looked away, out to sea.

  “What is it, Wil?”

  “There was this woman down there, Sun. She’d had a terrible life. Seen a lot of death. She blamed us for everything. Blamed the clouds. A lot of people did. Perhaps they were right to.”

  Sun sat next to him to look the way he was looking. “Perhaps. But the people in the clouds might disagree. And maybe it was all going to happen anyway. The projections said biosphere collapse was possible.”

  “You think the Earth will survive? The beforelife?”

  “Maybe. I hope so.”

  “She didn’t think we were really even alive. Said we were clever algorithms who only thought we were.”

  Sun smiled. It was an old debate. “You were alive minutes ago. Do you feel like the same person now?”

  “I suppose. Mostly. I’m still me. But I feel different, too.”

  “And the you that was alive down there in London, did he feel the same as that twenty-year old man I first met? Or the ten year old boy I didn’t know? Or the newborn Wil Drake?”

  “You always feel like you’re the same person. You always feel different, too. You’re aware you’ve grown, changed.”

  “So there isn’t a definitive you.”

  “Guess not.”

  “And now you’ve moved on again. We’re always the same and we’re always different. That’s how life goes. You may not be the Wil Drake, but you’re certainly a Wil Drake. And I think that’s all you ever were or ever could be.”

  He nodded, saying nothing for a while. The breeze continued to blow across him and the waves continued to wash up onto the beach. As they always would, now.

  “That woman,” he said. “I hope she does come here. Eventually.”

  “So you can apologize?”

  “Partly that. Partly to ask her if she still feels the same way.”

  Sun stood up and held out a hand to him. He looked at her, the sun shining through her red hair. All his memories of her, of them, had been restored. Everything they’d done together. Everything they’d planned.

  He stood too. How effortless it was. How supple and strong his limbs. “You think we built any other surprises into the clouds? Any other hidden secrets?”

  “Must have.”

  “I wonder what?”

  “Guess we’ll have to go find them.”

  “I wonder where the children are?”

  “Might have grandchildren by now,” said Sun. “God knows what forms they’ll have taken on.”

  “Perhaps there’s a cloud where we really are kings. Where there are millions of Adjuncts waiting to do our every bidding.”

  “Maybe,” said Sun. “But if there isn’t we can just create one.”

  “We can?”

  “Sure. Don’t you see? Now we’ve got out of the simulation layer we can reprogram it. Create any reality we desire. Anything at all.”

  “That’s pretty cool.”

  “We could even try and fix Earth.” There was a tone in her voice. A tone that said she’d been thinking about this.

  “Fix the Earth?”

  “The beforelife. Sure. Maybe we did help break everything and maybe it was going to break anyway. But I was thinking. We could reproduce the Earth, model it, run simulations, see what we can do to sort it out. We could work with the people back there.”

  Wil nodded. “Could be interesting. We spent our lives sorting out the afterlife. Now we can spend our deaths sorting out the beforelife.”

  Sun smiled. “Let’s go and do that, Wil.”

  Hand in hand they strolled to the sea’s edge to swim to the lighthouse, their long eternity finally beginning.

  IN THE SHADOW OF PAHA BYRAT

  by

  DALE CAROTHERS

  Mamte Raupa, Goddess of the Graceful Step, leaned her elbow on the back of an elephant, near the edge of the city of Vishkapur. She couldn’t get any closer to
the edge. Fear held her back. A fear that her predecessor, Paha Byrat, would never have felt.

  Why had she come? To test her bravery? To see if she’d be willing to look over the edge at the hellfire below?

  A line of pilgrims stood at the edge. They wore rough woven yellow saris, and their hair was slicked with red mud they’d scooped from the earth at their feet. One-hundred-seventeen white dots lined each of their faces. A dot for each god who held their city above the fires of hell. But one-hundred-eighteenth shape was an empty circle. Mamte must go below before they could fill it in.

  The pilgrims stood there to remind themselves their sins had weight. Each sin made it harder for the gods below to hold up their city.

  The elephant trumpeted. Everyone turned and saw Mamte.

  “The Goddess,” one of them cried. “She’s come to give us a lesson.”

  Mamte didn’t have a lesson prepared. She considered lifting the elephant, and the cart it pulled, above her head in a show of godly power. But no. A simple feat of strength wouldn’t satisfy them. She needed something better.

  An idea occurred to her. She smiled and walked into the mud.

  Mamte’s feet were bare and fell in precise rhythm, sending an enticing tremor up her generous thigh. None of the mud clung to her toes. No matter where she stepped, she stayed clean. Her sari was blue and sheer and showed all of her curves. Three gold rings hung from each nostril and her lips were thick and red. A thin, white veil, embroidered with little golden blossoms, covered her shining black hair.

  The pilgrims touched the empty circles on their faces with one hand and raised the other above their heads, before giving her the traditional greeting. “Mahaja!”

  Mamte, her palms together, tipped her head and gave her blessing. “Mahajaloon.”

  The pilgrims knelt in the crimson mud. After a moment they looked up at her, smiling, waiting to hear her wisdom.

  A hot sulfurous wind blew in from the west, threatening to steal Mamte’s veil, but she caught it before it flew away. She closed her eyes and turned her face away, slightly, resisting the urge to step back. She couldn’t show her fear. Couldn’t let the pilgrims know that she wasn’t ready to take her place with all of the gods below.