The Thousand Year Beach

by TOBI Hirotaka

  The photo closest to hand had been taken at a pétanque match on the lawn. The spot where the winner (a guest) should have been standing was now unoccupied, and the trophy he (or had it been a she?) had been raising now floated in midair. Burning the ledgers had eliminated the guest’s image from the Realm. It made for a strange photograph, but Denis breathed a sigh of relief.

  AIs smiled cheerfully from every photograph on the wall. Some of them had already been eaten by Spiders, and some were fighting at that very moment. There was even a photograph of the three sisters in their youth. They wore white sportswear and cradled tennis racquets, looking as lovely as fairies.

  Toward the end of his tour of the gallery, he arrived at a small, significantly older portrait.

  It had clearly been taken in a different age from the others. The hair, the clothes, and the image quality were all old-fashioned.

  Denis walked closer to the photograph, straightening up as he did. Smiling from inside the frame was hotel founder Catherine Clement’s grandmother Régine as a young woman. She had been photographed seated, and the little girl standing beside her was her five-year-old daughter Nadia Clement—Catherine’s mother. Capturing mother and daughter staring at the lens from a room in the Clement house, which itself no longer existed, added a touch of historical color to the hotel’s hall. When this photograph had been taken, the mineral springs themselves had been discovered, but Catherine, the founder of the hotel, was neither form nor shadow.

  Of course, none of this history had actually taken place. The photograph was a fabrication.

  It was nothing but world-building detail to lend more reality to the Realm. Neither Régine nor Nadia nor Catherine had ever “lived” as actual AIs in the Realm. Denis himself, in all his time in the Costa del Número, had never been anything other than fifty-seven years old.

  For all that, though, the chronicles of the Clement family were the history of the workplace Denis had devoted his life to. The peculiar tale of the hotel’s birth and its charming ensemble of characters were, to Denis (although he had never seen any of their faces), about as real as his own parents, and he felt a close affection for them.

  A shining beauty like Régine’s still overwhelms the viewer from inside a photograph. A beauty of great resilience, absolutely impervious to harm. By contrast, Nadia’s intelligent, nervous face was wreathed in the shadow of misfortune …

  Beside that hung a photo taken some thirty years later.

  Here was Catherine, halfway through her teens, with an entourage consisting of her mother, Nadia, and grandmother, Régine. Yes: “entourage” was the word, so overwhelming was the youngest woman’s presence. Beside Catherine, even Régine paled.

  What would the three of them think about today? The question was nonsense, but Denis could not shake it. The Mineral Springs Hotel was the fruit of the Clement family’s light and shade, fallen in rich colors, and now it was facing the end of its run. Were these muses alive, how would they lament its passing?

  Denis Prejean faced the two photographs and bowed his head deeply—whether in apology or for some other reason he himself did not know. Then he straightened his back, fixed the hem of his vest, rubbed his head, returned to his usual face, and began heading toward the entrance.

  And then it happened.

  Behind him, Denis thought he heard a distant voice.

  A hot, muffled voice… No, that was breathing.

  Denis turned back.

  There was no one in the dark hall. Just three pairs of eyes looking back at him from the Clement family photographs.

  Yve was terrified by the seriousness, the gravity of the situation.

  Hadn’t the other four realized it yet?

  The wormholes in the TrapNet were spreading.

  Blank zones like bubbles of air were forming in increasing numbers, and it was impossible to see into them from outside.

  She should have completely resolved Pierre’s disappearance right away. Letting it pass as a probable reception fault or something had been the wrong thing to do, Yve thought, biting her lip.

  Even so, she had done her best to find him. The other four didn’t seem to have noticed; she could still pin down the cause of his disappearance before it was too late. She’d focused her senses and roamed the net searching for any disturbance in its flow.

  Before long she realized that Felix had disappeared too.

  He had left the casino and vanished.

  Yve had tried retracing his footsteps in the corridor, looking down from above. Partway down the corridor his tracks suddenly grew faint and trailed off, like a stroke from a paintbrush as it went dry. There were no doors or side passages around the area. Her husband had not gone anywhere else.

  That was when Yve had first realized that something beyond their comprehension might be happening in the net.

  At the same moment, a strong, entirely unexpected emotion had risen within her.

  What new foolishness is he trying to hold me back with now?

  Does he want to put everyone at risk?

  I wish he’d just stop it.

  Fine. I don’t care. Let him disappear.

  I’ll just ignore him. He needs to calm down or he won’t be any good to us anyway. The other four haven’t noticed.

  She had known that the reaction was illogical. She had even realized, albeit dimly, that it was rooted in her sense that the net belonged to her, and her reluctance to be separated from it. But Yve had pushed the warnings she was shouting to herself to the bottom of her consciousness.

  And now the bill had come due.

  José had disappeared.

  Without anybody noticing, he had simply vanished. She played back the video from a fairy light–sized Eye on the terrace and was shocked to see José’s literal disappearance, as if spirited away by some higher power. The Eye had recorded minor tampering with the Realm’s space-time textures. The tampering was instantaneous, lasting just a few frames, and ended once José had been swallowed up. She had feared the involvement of the Spider’s hunger, but this was even more troublesome.

  Yve had hurried to check the scene from different Eyes. That was when she had learned about the net’s worm-eaten state.

  Trembling with fear, Yve continued to work. Things were no longer within her power to control. She was too ashamed that she had not said something sooner to tell the others. Felix’s face flashed before her. You left me to die, he cried in that piping voice of his. His expression and mannerisms appeared in her mind’s eye, correct to the smallest detail, and Yve squeezed her eyes shut. She began to feel nauseous from the pressure, and a throbbing pain emerged at the back of her eyes. She wished somebody would hurry up and notice. Would notice the wormholes and shout an accusation.

  Julie, for example. Wasn’t she the one who was so close to José? Shouldn’t she have noticed right away?

  Why should I have to suffer everything on my own?

  We’re all powerless … and I drew the short straw.

  Cruising the TrapNet, Julie Printemps eventually came across something that stopped her in her tracks.

  José was—missing …?

  She tuned her senses to the terrace overlooking the ocean.

  The night sea breeze.

  Anne and Bernier were both calmly looking out at the ocean. The rest of the men were doing the same. They showed no sign of worry over José’s absence.

  The fact that everyone on the terrace was so collected was itself bizarre, Julie thought apprehensively. Had no one realized that José was gone? But that would be even stranger. Something was going on here, Julie thought. Something very, very dangerous.

  With extreme caution, Julie substantiated. She was spread very thinly across the TrapNetwork, and now she scraped up every bit of sensation she was receiving, and raised her sensitivity as high as it would go. Remembering the taste of mint drops through the
piercing on her tongue, she used that flavor as the key around which her bodily sensations were integrated. She maintained this on the tip of her tongue for now, because she had a very bad feeling that she was about to encounter a risky situation that could knock her sensations well out of alignment. By securing the mint-drop taste in advance, she could use it as a lifeline.

  Julie carefully began to search the terrace. But no matter how sharply she focused up her senses, she found no sign of José whatsoever.

  Use your head, José told himself quietly. You have the materials. Put them in order.

  One: Langoni was (probably) a resident of the Costa del Número—someone who had come from some other Realm.

  Two: Langoni (probably) wanted something that was in this Realm.

  Three: José had acted as if he erroneously thought Langoni was from the real world (although whether the boy really believed this was doubtful).

  José’s heart sank. There was no obvious way he could use these to get the better of the boy. He would just have to play for time.

  The boy Langoni was gazing at José, leaning back against the railing overlooking the ocean. José spoke to those pure, unsullied eyes.

  “You had some high praise for me before. I liked that. It felt like I was being told my intuition was correct.

  “What I told Anne was this: someone we don’t know is trying to get us to raise a fortress.

  “What I wanted to say was this: evacuation to the Mineral Springs Hotel and construction of the TrapNet—a powerful system—all went perfectly naturally. All of us united in battling the Spiders. Wasn’t that a bit too well done for our fragile little Realm? Selling our bodies and our pride to guests was our trade—how did we put all this together so smoothly? I realized after I spoke about the fortress what a huge thing I was saying—and then I realized how true it was, and it left me a little astonished. I understood that if all of it was true, that would be the best explanation for everything.

  “First, the hotel. If the Spiders were going to box us in somewhere, it had to be the Mineral Springs. The building’s sturdy, there’s food and drink, beds to rest in. A collection of Eyes, too.

  “Next, the people who gathered here. There were eight thousand AIs in this Realm, and of those, every single one that was needed to build the TrapNet turned up. Jules. Julie. Yve. If any one of them hadn’t made it here, there’d be no net. Somebody calculated things so that the ideal team would assemble here, right? The same goes for Anne’s self-defense squad. It’s an honor to be among that number, I suppose …”

  His most important task was to leave this “hidden stage” and get back to the Realm. He would aim for that first. Still speaking, José began to weave a plan.

  “In other words, Langoni, you served this whole situation up to us on a platter. What you wanted was for a specific team of AIs to hole up in the hotel and make the TrapNet. Am I wrong?”

  “Mmm,” said Langoni. “I should have known you’d see it. The TrapNet thing was obviously too good to be true, wasn’t it? But let’s get back on track, shall we? I asked you what you would come to the Realm of Summer for, José. Is your answer ‘the TrapNet’?”

  “You couldn’t make it anywhere else. Not without the ability to use the Eyes freely.”

  “Not lacking in self-confidence, are you?

  “But that’ll do fine. It’s true that the Realm of Summer is rich in high-quality Eyes. That was a requirement for us. But—are you listening carefully? It wasn’t the essence of why we came. It’s not that the other Realms have no Eyes at all. There are any number of Eyes out there with even greater transformational powers. What we’re here to dig up was actually something quite different.”

  José considered this for a moment.

  There was no way that the TrapNet was entirely unrelated to Langoni’s motives.

  But apparently José’s deduction that the net was a weapon had missed the mark. Perhaps even the power of Snowscape and the Father of Flame were not particularly relevant. Langoni was after something other than accuracy or destructive power as a weapon. What?

  José didn’t like where this was going. The worst outcome he had considered was everyone in the Realm of Summer being killed and the TrapNet alone carried away. But what if …

  “Let me show you something.”

  Langoni came closer, then wrenched out José’s right eye.

  José tried to scream, but could not. His throat had been robbed of its strength again. The agony was unimaginable. The quality of the pain was an order of magnitude higher than anything he had experienced before. In that pain he sensed something that wanted to reveal itself. He felt on the verge of understanding what Langoni (and whatever higher beings he was representative of) was planning. But then it was obscured from his view.

  “Look,” said Langoni, hands moving like a magician’s. A white glass ball appeared between the fingers of his right hand, and when he turned his palm over it had become two. “Do you know what these are?” he asked.

  The glass balls had some kind of pattern on them, José saw. Irises of pale blue. They were somebody’s eyes.

  “You can have this one,” Langoni said, pushing one of the eyes into José’s empty right socket. José clearly (in high quality) felt Pierre’s eye sprout into him like a tulip bulb, merging with the existing structure of his eye socket. Langoni then replaced José’s left eye in the same way.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it? It must hurt, a lot. I mean, given how delicious the orange juice was.

  “You disappoint me, José. You don’t understand even the essence of the Eyes. That’s why I have to show you something through Pierre’s eyes. Relax and enjoy the show.”

  And then the new eyes began to upload the information stored in them into José—Pierre’s final moments, from beginning to end. Merciless, intense experience entered him through the dead man’s eyes. It was an eye-rape in the truest sense of the word, and as José’s entire body acted as receiver for Pierre’s hideous death, he longed to escape into madness.

  “It hurts so much you can hardly think straight, doesn’t it? Poor thing. Maybe I’ll leave it at that.”

  All at once, the agony vanished. José was destabilized, as if his senses were floating in space.

  The boy continued speaking. “I wouldn’t normally do this, but let me give you a hint.

  “Why is your sensory experience so heightened?

  “Because the Spiders have eaten nine-tenths of the Realm of Summer, of course.

  “At this point, the Realm’s pseudoreality generator only has to produce the Mineral Springs Hotel and its surroundings. The burden on the generator is very low. And because the power distribution in the engine is flexible, the less work there is to do, the more computational power can be concentrated on what is being done. You see?”

  I see, thought José. So this world was generated frame by frame through ultrafast computation. Well, of course it was.

  “And you’ve made allowances for that too,” he said.

  “Yes. The TrapNet and the sensory upgrade. They come as a set.”

  “Do you have the power to tamper with the engine?”

  “Let me see if I can rephrase that for you: ‘Where am I?’ Is that it?”

  The boy was quick.

  Yes, José wanted to know where this terrace had come from. Had Langoni made it, or was it some forgotten option in the software, unknown even to the Realm’s residents?

  “Unfortunately for you,” said Langoni, “We can indeed tamper with it. Without any difficulty at all. The Costa del Número’s pseudospace is designed for ease of handling, actually, to make authoring and maintenance easier for the admins.

  “To make this place, all I did was select an option that lets you divide a specified place and time into multiple streams. Transferring a particular character to one of those spurs is basic admin work as well. It’s a common
technique for increasing the guest occupancy rate, although it might not have been used very often in a generously specified Realm like this. It’s also easy to draw out the passage of time, enlarge the interior of a given area, that sort of thing.”

  “That’s the domain of the gods to us. Completely beyond understanding.”

  “Really? Doesn’t seem that way to me.”

  “So, despite your reach extending to the domain of the gods, you’re AIs?”

  “Yes”

  “You’re really not guests?”

  “Correct.”

  “How did you learn those tricks of yours?”

  After a beat, Langoni buried his chin in the collar of his pure white parka and grinned, suddenly looking like a real boy. “That’s a secret,” he said.

  “So what did you come all the way out here for?”

  “Well, that’s a very, very long story. There’s a lot we have to get done, and an overwhelming lack of time to do it.”

  “There’s a lot I want to ask you.”

  “I’ll bet there is.

  “‘What was the Grand Down?’

  “‘Have we been abandoned?’

  “‘If so, why is this Realm still running, presumably at great expense?’

  “‘What are you? If you’re AIs, how is it you can tamper with the Costa del Número’s systems? What are you trying to turn the TrapNet into?’

  “‘And what will you use the result for once it’s done?’

  “But José, there’s no point trying to drag this out any longer. It won’t work. I know that you want to get back to the main stream, but please accept that that won’t happen.

  “I didn’t really bring you here because I wanted a discussion, you know. I had other reasons for plucking you out. I suppose you might call it a kind of talent scouting.

  “But in return, I’ll show you something amazing.