by Matt Ruff
“The oxygen level in the cabinet reflects general air quality in the game world,” Roy explained. “Less breathable air equals less breathable air. Now the good news is, air quality has no direct effect on play, so if pollution control doesn’t excite you, you don’t have to worry about it. From a purely economic perspective, it’s better if you don’t. But. . .”
Vanna stood off in a corner, watching them, feeling her sanity begin to fray and flake around the edges, thinking: It’s happening again. You only had to let your guard down a little, start to feel safe, start to trust reality, and then . . .
Shorty laughed at something Roy had said, and Vanna took an involuntary step back. Something shifted behind her, some piece of the clutter Harry had collected in his office. She reached a hand around to steady it, and felt a smooth wooden handle. It was a baseball bat—a Swingspeed Training Bat, manufactured by the same toy company that made Gant’s puzzle boxes. It measured the batter’s swing velocity and displayed it in miles per hour on a digital readout at the bottom of the handle. The bat’s surface was hard ashwood, its tip weighted.
Now Roy was laughing, the laugh directed at Harry, with barely masked contempt. Vanna started forward without thinking. She aimed for the top of Roy’s head, the bat’s velocimeter blurring into triple digits.
Roy didn’t even bother to look at her, just raised a hand and caught the bat in mid-swing, holding it motionless until he’d finished enjoying his joke. Only then did he turn to Vanna, his smile going tight and sharklike, and say: “Are you through?”
Vanna let go of the bat. Her anger crumbled and her courage broke; she fled, out through her own office and into the Cortex. Shorty pivoted to shoot her down, but Roy stopped him. “Save it,” Roy said. He tilted his head slightly. “Amos. Andy.”
“Gots you,” Andy said. The two of them sauntered out after Vanna, shutting the office doors behind them, leaving the players to their game.
Roy tipped up the bat, checked the readout in the handle. “Hmm,” he said, sounding impressed. “Well. . . .” He returned his attention to Harry, and the game rig. “Shall we?”
The Trap
The sewers under Harlem were full of smoke; Joan saw no flames, but the air grew so thick as she traveled east under 116th Street that she had to put on her oxygen mask. The barge’s floodlights did little but reflect back off the smoke, so she shut them off again and used the Electric Mercator to steer. She turned north below Madison Avenue and zigzagged through several smaller passages seeking clearer air.
She didn’t see the other barge until she was almost on top of it. There were three Automatic Servants on board, two with assault rifles, one with a pistol and a long knife, all of them looking the wrong way. Joan veered to the right, coming alongside the barge from behind, the sound of her approach masked by the rush of a nearby waterfall; she had her shotgun up and blasted both rifle bearers before they had a chance to react. Then the two barges bumped, rocking in the effluvia. The third Servant lost its balance as it turned, stumbling towards Joan; it stuck its knife in her thigh, piercing muscle to the bone, even as she pressed the muzzle of the shotgun to its chest and pulled the trigger.
“Are you all right?” Ayn Rand said, as the third Servant splashed into the water. “Are you all right?”
Joan dropped the shotgun and lowered both of her hands to the knife haft protruding from her leg.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m excellent, Ayn!” Joan said, gritting her teeth. She remembered too late that it wasn’t always smart to yank a knife out of a wound, that it could do as much damage coming out as going in. That certainly seemed to be true in this case: the pain and blood flow both increased as the blade came free. Joan’s scream echoed in the tunnels.
She was hyperventilating in her oxygen mask. She tore the mask off, unzipped her body suit, got out a cigarette, lit it—nearly igniting the oxygen in the process—and inhaled two-thirds of its length in her first draw. Her breathing stabilized. She finished the butt with a second inhale, pitched it, and broke out the first aid kit. She bound her wound with gauze and sterile padding, applying pressure but not making a tourniquet. She told herself she hadn’t nicked any major arteries; she couldn’t afford to have.
She got the barge moving again. The smoke in the tunnels had thinned to a fine haze, or maybe the haze was from shock. After a time Joan realized that Ayn was giving her directions: “Left here . . . now right. . . now take this next side tunnel. . . now right again . . .”
“There,” Ayn said finally. They were in a narrow secondary, one with just enough effluent to keep the barge afloat. The Electric Mercator placed them at 124th Street, between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm X boulevards—a nonexistent street segment. They were under Babel.
A hole had been broken in the tunnel wall, large enough for a human or a Servant to step through. A metal cleat had been driven into the wall beside the hole.
“This is it?” Joan said.
“Yes,” Ayn said.
“What’s inside?”
“I don’t know.”
“You knew how to get here.”
“That doesn’t mean I know what’s inside,” Ayn said, uncomfortable.
Joan looped a mooring line around the cleat. She checked her leg: it was stiff and painful—it felt like there was still a blade in her thigh—but no part of it had gone numb, and she could still walk. I guess I really didn’t cut the artery, she thought, with forced optimism. The bandage had soaked through, and blood dripped from her heel.
She reloaded the shotgun with sticky fingers. After changing her bandage, she quizzed the Electric Mercator about other entrances to the building, hoping to find one less likely to be a setup. According to the Mercator, there was a manhole just south of her that would bring her up right in front of the Mother Tongue Gate; the only catch was that she’d have to climb a fifty-foot ladder to reach it. Joan put her weight on her good leg and bent her other knee, simulating a step up to a higher rung. She nearly fainted from the pain.
“Hell with it.” Leaving the oxygen tank behind, holding the gun in one hand and the Lamp in the other, she entered the hole in the tunnel wall.
A narrow excavation led through packed earth and another broken-out wall. Joan found herself in a dark corridor of poured concrete, with pipes running overhead. There were light fixtures, but the power was out; she needed Ayn’s Lamp to see.
“Which way?” Joan asked.
“North,” Ayn said. “Straight ahead. Those barred gates, you see? That’s it.”
“That’s what?”
“I don’t know.”
The gates were new, an obvious addition. Set on Automatic Hinges, they were shiny steel, with bars too close together to thrust the Lamp through; Joan sensed a larger space beyond, but Ayn’s light wouldn’t penetrate far enough to show her what was inside.
“Brighten up, would you?” Joan said.
“I can’t.”
Joan pushed against the gates; they wouldn’t budge. She searched for an unlocking mechanism and found a metal box with a microphone grille on the front.
“It’s a sound lock,” Ayn explained, without prompting. “A certain combination of sounds will open it.”
Joan looked at her. “You know the magic word, Ayn?”
Ayn thought about it. “Yes,” she said. “It’s. . . . Oh! Oh! You bastard!”
“What?”
“You bastard!”
“Ayn, what is it?” The philosopher looked angrier than Joan had ever seen her.
“This is pure, unadulterated evil!” Ayn said. Then, with an expression of absolute disgust, forcing out each word individually, she chanted: “‘From . . . each . . . according . . . to . . . his . . . ability, . . . to . . . each . . . according . . . to . . . his. . . need.’”
The lock clicked; the Automatic Hinges turned, and the gates swung open. Joan took a tentative half-step forward, holding up the Lamp. The light seemed to dim in proportion to the distance she held it
in front of her, so that she still couldn’t see what was beyond the gates, not without passing through.
“This is a trap,” Joan said, just to hear the words. Then she added: “Right, Ayn?”
Ayn didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. Of course it was a trap. And Joan knew in her bones that Fatima Sigorski had been right, that she should refuse this, just turn and walk away, leave the lion’s den unentered.
She knew it, but she didn’t like that idea.
Just inside the gates was a series of shallow steps down. Joan stood motionless on the top step for over a minute, waiting to see what would happen. Nothing did. She went down another step, and then another.
Nine steps to the bottom. Joan got more and more uneasy the farther down she went; her muscles tensed, ready to spring her back up and out if the gates started closing behind her. But they stayed open, and Joan reached the bottom feeling vulnerable and exposed.
“Now,” Ayn Rand said, as she came off the last step onto a dusty concrete floor. The Lamp flared suddenly, and in the new light Joan saw at last where she was standing and what surrounded her.
“Holy Christ,” she said.
We Been Flanked
“Ain’t you got that ready yet?” Kingfish demanded, peering down into the open shaft of the construction elevator. “They’s comin’ up!”
Behind him, an Automatic Servant and a Gant Portable Television wrestled with an oxyacetylene welding set. The Servant was a construction worker, one of fourteen units in the Babel crew converted to the service of G.A.S. The Television had come up with Kingfish after the human workers had evacuated the site. All told, Kingfish had about two dozen bodies with which to defend the upper reaches of the tower until the virus dropped—overkill, if things had gone according to plan.
Things weren’t going according to plan. That in itself was not unexpected, but the degree to which they weren’t, was. G.A.S. was still trying to figure out where the Marines had come from and who had sent them; and while the supercomputer tackled the big questions, Kingfish rushed to improvise a stronger defense.
“Come on, come on, come on!” he urged. The construction worker used electrician’s tape to fix the welding torch in place, with its nozzle aimed at the valves of its own fuel tanks. The Portable Television lit the jet with a sparking tool, and they hurriedly dropped it down the elevator shaft. Seventeen floors below, the welding set punched through the roof of the cage lift and exploded; oxygen-acetylene combustion scoured out the cage and cut the lift cables, sending the elevator plummeting.
“Bye-bye, soldier blue,” Kingfish said. Then he raised his head, sensing new movement: someone had started up the kangaroo cranes. “Hey! Who’s doin’ that?” He concentrated, instantly aware of the location and activity of every Servant under his command; none of them were doing it. “Who the hell’s in them crane cabs?”
“There doesn’t have to be anyone in the cabs, Mr. Kingfish,” the construction worker said. “Those cranes can be operated by remote control. By radio.”
“By—Aw, shit.”
A crane arm swept by overhead, swinging a one-legged Marine on a string. A grenade fell out of the sky and bounced between the wingtips of Kingfish’s Buster Browns.
“Boys,” Kingfish said, “we been flanked.”
Do Not Run
“For your safety and comfort, this elevator bank has been temporarily taken out of service,” the elevator bank said. “Please remain where you are until given instructions by a proper authority figure. If you are in imminent danger from fire or other hazard, proceed to the nearest emergency exit as indicated on the posted evacuation map. Do not run.”
The nearest emergency exit was a set of fire stairs to the right of the elevators; but when Vanna tried the stairwell door, it wouldn’t open.
“For your safety and comfort,” the Electric Door Lock told her, “this emergency exit has been temporarily sealed. Please try an alternate. Do not run.”
The closest alternate was in the southwest corner of the building, across the Cortex. Vanna turned to go that way and saw a pair of black scarecrows standing amid the desks and workstations.
“What do you think, Amos?” the first scarecrow asked. “Is she gonna run?”
“Why no, Andy,” replied the second. “I do believe she’s gonna fly.”
Andy clucked: “I’s never seen a woman fly before. I seen time fly . . .”
“I seen the fur fly,” said Amos. “I seen accusations fly . . .”
Vanna grabbed the monitor of a Cray PC and tried to throw it. Tethered to half a dozen other pieces of equipment by a snake’s nest of cables, it went all of two feet before jerking short and crashing to the floor.
“Mm, mm, mm,” clucked Andy. “I guess that ain’t time, fur, or an accusation.”
Amos crooked a finger at Vanna. “Come here, sweetmeat.” Vanna skimmed a fax machine at him, then leapt up and started running an evasion course across the desktops. Amos grabbed a phone handset and slung it at her, aiming to trip her with the cord; she dodged it, but a second toss by Andy tangled her ankles and brought her down. She fell headlong, hitting a water cooler with the force of a football tackle.
“Mm, mm, mm,” Andy repeated, strolling over to where she’d fallen. As Vanna tried to get up, he cuffed her on the side of the head, stunning her. He grabbed her arms, while Amos took her legs; they lifted her between them and began swinging her, chanting: “I seen a swan dive . . .”
“. . . I seen a lemon drop . . .”
“. . . I seen a native land . . .”
“. . . I seen a belly flop . . .”
They lobbed Vanna in a flat trajectory at the Cortex’s window wall. She hit with a resounding boom, but the glass didn’t break.
“Damn,” said Andy.
“Solid,” said Amos.
An explosion smashed a hole in the window wall. A window washer’s platform rose into view on well-oiled tracks, its one-armed passenger wearing a bucket on her head as protection from falling glass.
“Huh,” said Amos. “I ain’t ever seen that before.”
Kite blew his chest out.
Andy dove for cover a fraction of a second ahead of her next shot; the explosive-tipped slug breezed past the tail of his suit jacket and dismantled a laser printer. Andy dropped behind a desk and disappeared.
Kite used a fire ax to enlarge the hole in the window. Removing the bucket from her head, she stepped inside to where Vanna lay in a ragdoll heap. The comptroller was conscious but badly dazed, bleeding from her ears; she reminded Kite of the first battle casualty she’d ever seen, a malamute pup that had lost its skirmish with the Moncton mail coach.
“Can you understand me?” she asked, in a low voice; Vanna forced a weak nod, then made an abortive attempt to sit up, too dizzy to handle the vertical. “Here,” Kite said, pressing the Colt revolver into her hands. “In case something happens to me, though of course it won’t.”
Amos had sprawled backwards over a Xerox machine, and Kite checked him next, flipping open the remains of his suit jacket. She found a straight razor in the pocket of his waistcoat, but no guns, which she thought was encouraging. She turned towards the desk Andy had vanished behind. Andy, crouched in the kneewell, threw the desk at her.
“Shitfire,” Kite swore. She had to vault the Xerox machine to escape being crushed; the desk landed on Amos, but the ergonomic swivel chair that came after it caught Kite squarely and sent her reeling. In the process of bouncing off several other pieces of office furniture, she lost the Hand Cannon.
She cursed and unsheathed her saber. In an open aisle between the desks, Andy squared off against her, waving a short-bladed machete. His face stretched in what was supposed to be a menacing leer, but Kite was too angry to feel menaced, and Andy’s eyes—brown, flat, and lifeless—held no terror for her.
“Come, then,” she said.
He came, taking quick, mechanical steps. Kite feinted a parry, sidestepping at the last moment, wise to his strength; the machete chopped e
mpty space, and for an instant he was vulnerable. An instant was all Kite needed: the android’s frame might be steel where she was flesh and blood, but her nerves, like his, were electric. She hacked at his outstretched arm, her blade biting metal. There was a twang of high-tension wire separating, and Andy’s fingers unfurled; the machete dropped to the carpet. Kite wrenched the saber free and hauled back, meaning to swipe his head off.
Vanna popped up, blazing away with the Colt revolver. Like Kite, she aimed for Andy’s head, but she was still quite dazed, and her accuracy reflected this. The first bullet actually did put a crease in Andy’s derby, but the second slapped the saber blade aside, and the third drilled Kite through the ribs.
“Yowch!” Andy said. Vanna snapped off three more wild shots and fell down again.
Head still intact, Andy bent to retrieve his machete.
Kite lay on her back, bleeding. Lying next to her was a wastebasket that had fallen over on its side, and because she had nothing better to do just then, she looked inside it, and saw that it contained scrap paper, two apple cores, a Coke can, a Xerox toner cartridge, and a .70-caliber Browning Automatic Hand Cannon.
“Hey there, soldier gray,” Andy said, coming to stand over her with the machete. “Looks like bottom rail on top, this time.”
And Kite reached out, with an arm that seemed at least a million miles long, picking up the whole wastebasket with the gun, lifting it until the shape of the basket covered the shape of the sneering mannequin who was about to cut her to pieces. She pulled the trigger four times.
Andy went away.
The wastebasket was a tube on her arm, open at both ends; she couldn’t feel her toes. She wanted to go to sleep but didn’t think that would be a good idea, so she tried to strike up a conversation instead: “Ms. Domingo?”
On the floor somewhere near, Vanna Domingo let out a groan.
“Ms. Domingo,” Kite said, “I don’t know how well you can hear me, but I was just curious. . . . If I’m still alive tomorrow—not that I think I’m going to be, but if I am—would you consider giving me a job?”
