The Thousand Year Beach

by TOBI Hirotaka

  “Hold tight,” Yve said.

  She raised the sensitivity of her fingertips and probed at the Chandelier’s field of effect. In the next instant, she was pulled in by a power unlike any she had experienced before, losing her orientation momentarily before coming around to find herself—

  Floating in a vast empty space.

  Although …how vast was it, really?

  For that matter, was it even space?

  There was no up or down.

  There was no forward or back, left or right.

  There was no one else there.

  An unrealized space.

  A mass of accumulated sensation overwhelmed her. She felt its motion.

  It looked like a flame.

  Yes—through the Glass Eyes, Yve could see.

  Yve was aware of herself perceiving what was happening in the space as flame-like motion. Even had she not been blind, what she saw here would have been no different. This was not a response from her individual sensory organs. It worked on the roots of perception, of sensation directly.

  The blaze within the Chandelier. This, Yve correctly perceived, was the sensory reactor. The sensations surrounding and drawn into the Eye were the flickering of the flames, pure and beautiful.

  Fire of awesome ferocity streamed past her, brushing her shoulder. A loosely bound flow of fearless, rippling heat.

  The flame was a complex of sound, color, substance, sensation, and more—she sensed this from its radiance. These were what you might call the language of the Eye. But it was fragmentary, with no overarching context. Vast quantities of light and sensation, wasted on nothing Yve could see. Words and syllables simply broken and scattered, like a spilled bag of alphabet pasta dropped on the floor. She could barely stand at all in this state, much less adopt a fixed position.

  What Yve was experiencing was, in fact, no different from what could be found in even the smallest Eyes. But the Chandelier was on an entirely different scale. The sheer vastness was a challenge all its own.

  All right, then, Yve said. With surprising calmness, she began to adopt a concrete form. Most AIs would have found it impossible to identify their own sensations among the activity here; reduced to scattered fragments of sensory information, they would be completely transformed. But Yve held her inner self completely in her own hands. All sensation for her was self-aware, and she could conjure up a perfect image of her entire body at any time. Taking on concrete form here was simply a matter of performing the same trick, and so she secured a self-image distinct from the surrounding sensation without difficulty.

  Next, she looked up, like someone immersed in water looking up at the surface. Having created a bodily image permitted the supposition that “up” was above her head. Naturally, she made sure to match this to the direction from which she had come. Seeing the faces of the three sisters behind the fluttering light, she dropped anchor immediately. The concept of “up” grew firmer.

  Yve took a deep breath and looked around at the scene inside the Chandelier again.

  It was all right. She understood. She could read this.

  Her heart pounded with the excitement of a prophet surveying a vast undifferentiated wasteland and seeing in one glance the image of a city and the plans for constructing it. This plan was written into Jules’s program already, woven into the pattern of the lace.

  Yve sent a signal “up,” through the anchor. Immediately, she was pulled in the same direction. She left the Chandelier and lost her field of vision.

  She found herself sitting at the table.

  Her fingers seemed to have been lightly moving.

  Looking at the others with her pupilless eyes, Yve said, “It’s all right. We can start it up right away.”

  The women nodded.

  “It was thrilling in there,” Yve added.

  It was rare for her to reveal her feelings like that.

  “I want to go back in right away.”

  The possibility of exercising her talents to the fullest had filled her with excitement.

  “Hold on tight. I’ll go cut the coordinates,” Yve said. Once everyone had nodded, she dove into the Chandelier again.

  This time, she was gripping Jules’s lace.

  Yve was capable of re-creating the image of herself perfectly inside an Eye. To maintain a self within an Eye was to control it. If you could hold your own position firm, everything else in the Eye could be manipulated. All Glass Eye use was based on this.

  Yve descended to her previous position. She had maintained the form and image of the lace perfectly, down to the last knot. “After all, I knitted it,” she murmured to herself. She planted her feet firmly on the ground and, as if hanging out a freshly washed sheet or waving a battle flag with no flagpole, shook out the lace.

  A wind rose up.

  Within the sensory reactor, where once there had been no up or down, front or back, left or right—which had not even been a space—a place was born that could clearly be distinguished from the others. The source of the wind.

  The side of Yve where her face was became her front, and the side where her back was became her back. Up was in the direction of her head and her feet were down. Left and right were fixed; the origin of the coordinate system was established.

  Which put Yve at the center of the universe.

  With one point established and cool winds continuing to blow from it, the flames learned where they were. Self-awareness about the coordinates spread to fill the Chandelier, converting from a confined dissipation to a space that could be measured by rule—a place of possibility.

  The moment was at hand.

  Yve saw it all. Saw the flames began to circle the origin with the obedient air of a pack of wild beasts hiding their fangs. She knew, too, that she enjoyed powerful backing from invisible forces. Julie and the three sisters were palpably at her back lending their support.

  (Now)

  Yve threw the lace like a fisherman casting a net.

  The materiality of the threads, already affected by the Chandelier’s transformative powers, thinned further, exposing the logic at the knots. Carried by the inertia of Yve’s throw, the logic separated from the rest and spread to cover the entire expanse, as far as she could see. At every node of the settled lace she saw subsystems booting up. The program that had been stored in the knots expanded itself. The TrapNet should come online automatically.

  A cynical vision came to Yve. “I feel like a spider sitting at the center of its web,” she said.

  “Black widows setting a trap for the Spiders. I like it,” came Donna’s voice in her ear with a merry laugh.

  “That makes us widows,” said Anna. “Except …”

  The sisters began to substantiate inside the Chandelier.

  “We hadn’t even gotten married yet,” grumbled Luna. Julie giggled. With the location Yve had carved out as a foothold, they were finally able to secure positions to occupy within the Chandelier.

  “But this position is more important than any other,” said Yve to Julie’s hair, which was fluttering in the wind as it became visible, and within which she had also glimpsed a delicate little ear.

  “I know.” A pair of lips came into being at the source of Julie’s voice. “This is the control center, isn’t it? The wheelhouse.”

  Three sets of reading glasses glinted beyond the horizon in three different directions.

  “If only we were widows!”

  “All this peering into well-simmered Eyes …”

  “Fussing with pretend magic spells …”

  “We’re just like …”

  As the three sisters conversed, their bodies finished appearing, like plump and satisfied cats. They were far away in dreamland, but the distance also felt as close as if they were just across the table.

  Each one of them had to be beyond the horizon. If Yve and Julie
were at the center of the tiny universe of the Chandelier, the triplets had to be as far from them as possible.

  This was to ensure the safety of Jules’s program, the TrapNet. The three sisters had the habit of responding to newly input information in exactly the same way. Each of them would monitor the TrapNet constantly, and they would verify one another’s work as well.

  “Just like …?” said Julie.

  “The witches in Macbeth. Don’t you think?”

  Yve smiled. Did you know? In here, I can see you properly. Perhaps this is where I truly belong.

  The five “widows” looked around the interior of the vast sensory reactor. The glittering blaze of lights was more docile now, but it seemed to Yve that its potential had become twenty, even thirty times greater. And its true power would be several times greater than that, she thought, with something like a shiver.

  “Looks like rain.”

  On the northern horizon was sensory motion like thunderclouds filmed in slow motion.

  “The main entrance,” said Julie.

  “The battle hasn’t started yet,” said Yve, softening her voice to reassure herself too. “The net’s connecting right now.”

  The same motion appeared in the sky to the east, west, and south. The trap network had close to ten thousand Eyes connected to it, if you included even the tiniest beads, and the sensations they took in were now all flowing into the Chandelier at once.

  Taken as a whole, Yve thought, this net might even leave Driftglass in the dust.

  Straightening up proudly like an engineer about to test a newly constructed dam for the first time, Yve focused her consciousness strongly on the clouds to the west.

  Her body… A sensation of movement, of flying in that direction enfolded her.

  The smell of the woods.

  A summer night.

  Gaslight carved the manicured yard from the night. The lawn was a vivid, almost wet-looking green. The white tables with their parasols and chairs stood unoccupied. Beyond the yard, but still on the hotel grounds, stood a small forest.

  Yve was now in the west yard, having just arrived there through the security cameras installed above the doors opening onto it.

  She knew that she was actually inside the Chandelier, enfolded in the sensations sent to it, but the overwhelmingly realistic sense of being there, live, was enough to make her hesitate.

  She could not help but feel that she really was in the west yard.

  No, it was more than that.

  As she substantiated there, she felt herself become something like the night air, spreading to fill the place entirely, pervading it.

  Georges Crespin and nine other hunters cradling game rifles stood guard. They had dragged the white chairs directly against the wall of the hotel before sitting down in them. Their dogs lay at their feet, noses toward the forest.

  No one noticed that Yve was there.

  —The smell of the forest.

  The rich, green aroma of night spilled unceasingly from the grass and woods.

  Yve enjoyed the smell. Even as it seemed to her that she was the smell.

  Without taking his eyes from the trees, Georges took a swig from his hip flask. He clenched his teeth, squeezing droplets of brandy between his molars. The bouquet that sprang out, the elasticity in his gums: these were Georges’s. His keen eyes saw the jostle of the Spiders clearly in the forest’s dark groves. Borrowing his sight, Yve saw it too. The Spiders would surely attack before long. They had no fear of firearms …

  That’s what we’re counting on, of course … Georges’s smile was so faint that no one but Yve detected it.

  Yve relaxed her focus and returned to the center of the web.

  She had never moved from there in the first place. To be more accurate yet, her “real” body was still hunched over the Chandelier at a table in the casino.

  Yve let out a long breath. She had focused her attention on just one part of what the net brought in, but the information had been so vivid, so raw …

  She tried to recall the sensations of a moment ago. Even she had never experienced anything like them.

  Some of the sensations could only have been obtained if she had been within Georges himself. As well as the brandy and his gums, for example, there had been a faint hunger, an anxiety like stickiness in the throat. But had she become one with Georges completely? The answer to that was no.

  Somehow, she had been more than one self.

  It seemed to her that she had been the rough, ragged texture of the moss in the yard, the sigh of the forest, the dull gleam of the cartridges, the firing of the brandy.

  How could she put this peculiar feeling into words?

  Then she had a sudden realization.

  That’s exactly how the world would seem to me if I were an Eye.

  Her heart raced painfully.

  Could I even be an Eye in here?

  She tried changing the direction of her focus.

  The smell of the sea.

  The quiet foaming of the waves.

  Yve stood on the terrace facing the docks.

  A cluster of bonfires had been lit and Anne’s men had gathered, well over a dozen men in all. Someone (who knew who?) had brought out a barbecue grill, and the charcoal inside it burned bright red. Nobody noticed Yve standing there, of course. A thick, tattooed arm brushed past her. It was Anne, grabbing a long metal skewer. From the sheath at her waist she produced her well-sharpened knife. She cut off a great hunk of meat and wolfed it down, juices trickling from the corners of her mouth. She then cut herself another piece and passed the skewer to José.

  “José?” she asked.

  “Yeah?”

  The two of them were leaning on the terrace railing. Anne looked at José’s sharp profile as he faced the night sea.

  “Those Spiders …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where’d they come from, you think?”

  José was silent for a moment. “You care?” he asked at last.

  Anne closed her eyes and, as if trying to smell his voice, raised her nose slightly. She loved his voice when he spoke slowly. That was when his thoughts were racing fastest.

  “You don’t?” she replied.

  “I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m hung up on a few more immediate things.”

  “Hmm?” Anne opened her eyes as if to say, I knew it.

  “You think the Spiders were single-function tools?”

  “Seemed like it.”

  “Then who’s using them?

  “Does what they eat get sent to another Realm? What’d they carry off, and why? What could be so valuable in this run-down backwater?”

  His tone was leisurely as always. His eyes stayed on the ocean.

  “Hmm?”

  “You know what else? We’re not as strong as we think we are. We’re brawlers, you and I, but the world we live in is just a game. No offense to Bastin and Jules, but I don’t think we stand a chance.”

  By now, José had stripped the long skewer bare and stabbed it back into the grill so that it stood vertically. He chewed the last of the meat as he talked.

  “We don’t stand a chance. But someone’s trying to trick us into thinking we do.

  “They want us to raise a fortress. But why?”

  Anne grunted and shook her thick-necked head, obviously impressed. “You’re something else,” she said. “Your appetite, I mean.”

  Retreat. Reacceleration.

  The smell of antiseptics and still-fresh blood.

  Fourth floor, Mineral Springs Hotel.

  A corridor lined with guest rooms.

  Hopping along the string of Eyes in the ceiling lights, Yve closed in on Stella, who was pushing a wagon below.

  Stella, one of the hotel’s employees, was on her way to the service elevator. Her wagon was
piled high with bloody linen. This floor was where the sick and injured had been placed.

  Dr. Dumay’s a tough one, all right, Stella thought. Maybe he can stay awake a hundred hours seeing patients, but I can’t. Half a day as a nurse and I’m exhausted. I’m best known for breaking plates, and now they have me giving shots. If the patients were conscious, they’d turn pale and run. Oh, but I suppose they couldn’t get any paler than they already were.

  Yve picked up this unheroic grumbling clearly, finding it quite entertaining.

  “I’m pooped!” said Stella aloud. There was no one else in the corridor. She stopped her wagon, slipped into the bathroom of an unoccupied suite, and sat down on the toilet. She’d been holding it in for some time. Once she was done, she reached into her shirt, produced a small pack of cigarettes from between her breasts, and lit one up.

  She sighed, exhaled a puff of smoke as she did. Her whole body ached with fatigue. That and the taste of the cigarette whisked her thoughts away, and for a moment her head emptied completely.

  And so she did not notice the bubble that appeared briefly in the water beneath her before winking out of existence again.

  Retreat. Reacceleration.

  Yve had started to get the hang of the motion.

  I’m free.

  She could not contain her excitement. No matter where in the clouds of sensation she placed her focus, she found what felt like limitless information and nuance waiting to be taken out.

  The green smell of the woods,

  the heavy radiant heat of the charcoal,

  the clear sheen of the fat oozing from the cut face of the meat,

  the hard, smooth skin of the porcelain toilet.

  Yve began to worry. Presumably, the sensations that poured into the Chandelier would be unified, forming an identity boundary for the hotel itself. The hotel—the whole thing, right down to the AIs and Eyes inside—would be made into a single animal, fast and ferocious, to strike at the Spiders. This was Jules’s vision.

  And, at the heart of it all—there I’ll be.

  Yve was enraptured by the thought.