by Paul Anlee
“Don’t be fooled by his attire,” the Maître D’ said. “He has neither the wealth nor breeding it suggests.”
The men took hold of Timothy’s arms and escorted him, feeble protests notwithstanding, to the main entrance. As the door parted, they gave him an extra little shove for good measure.
“Get outta here, ya bum,” scoffed the larger of the two, and returned to his post inside the main door.
Timothy stared, entirely dumbfounded. What will I do now?
The second bouncer walked up to Timothy and leaned in close. Timothy cowered. Reaching into his pocket, the man pulled out two ten-dollar bills and pushed them into Timothy’s hand.
“Listen,” he said. “I was in your shoes once, a long time ago.” He stood back and admired the Footman’s outfit. “Well, maybe not in those shoes,” he laughed. “There’s free food at the soup kitchen two blocks up.” He pointed toward the trees of Central Park, barely visible a few blocks away. “You won’t be able to miss it. There should be a long line of scruffy men outside. If you hurry, they may even have a bed for you tonight.”
“Thank you, sir. That is most kind,” replied Timothy. “As you can see, I am far from home in this strange city.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Well, take care. It’s a rough world out there.” The bouncer returned to his post, shaking his head the whole way.
Timothy hastened toward the soup kitchen, already salivating at the thought of a meal. He didn’t know it could hurt so much to go without food for such a short time. Had someone back in DonTon told him this, and had he been self-aware at the time, he wouldn’t have believed it.
The line of men waiting for a free meal was exactly as described. He reached into his pocket and rubbed the two bills for comfort. Even if the meal were free, lodging might have a fee. Timothy boldly joined the line.
The arrival of a well-groomed man dressed in a tuxedo and white tie drew curious glances from the queue. Few appraisals were favorable. A couple of men moved in uncomfortably close behind him. They whispered and guffawed among themselves, growing louder by the minute.
A tall, emaciated man in a filthy, ragged suit a few positions back couldn’t resist an easy target. “Hey man, nice duds. You know, I don’t think they serve Lobster Thermidor in there.” This elicited uproarious laughter from his companions.
Timothy did his best not to react. He had learned that Lord Chattingbaron’s haughty approach was not much appreciated in this city.
“You never know. Maybe they hired a chef from the Hilton,” said the man behind him. Fresh laughter erupted.
Encouraged, the stranger poked Timothy’s shoulder hard enough to sway him off balance.
Timothy faced his heckler. “Now see here, my good fellow,” he began.
“See 'eah moy good feh-lah,” the man exaggerated, making fun of Timothy’s accent. His friends burst out laughing.
Timothy grew angrier. He gripped the man’s worn lapels. “Listen,” he seethed, and lowered his voice to an ominous level, ready to deliver a serious tongue lashing.
The dangerous glint in his adversary’s eyes ended Timothy’s tirade before it started. He released the man’s jacket and took a step back.
“Hey!” objected the next man in line when Timothy bumped into him. The Footman turned to apologize. A hand on his shoulder whipped him back around to face the belligerent group behind him.
“With a fancy suit like that, you oughta have plenty of dough on you,” deduced the group’s de facto leader. He placed a hand on Timothy’s shoulder in false camaraderie and pulled the footman toward him. “Why don’t you share with your new buddies?” The others nodded eagerly.
“Well, I couldn’t. I mean, I need... I mean, I don’t have anything,” spluttered Timothy.
“Now, that can’t be right,” said the man, an ugly look rising on his face. “Gentlemen,” he addressed his followers. “I believe this fellow is lying to us.”
“Oh, that’s not good,” said one of his compatriots.
“No. No, that’s not good,” echoed two men behind.
The man pulled Timothy closer to his side and rested the full weight of his arm over the footman’s shoulders. He softened his voice to a confidential tone. “If you just spare a bit of your wealth, we’ll leave you alone. No harm done.” He spat sideways onto the street.
Frightened, Timothy extracted the two tens from his pocket and held them out for all to see. “I am a fair man,” he began. “This is all I have. I would be happy to share one of these bills with you. I’m afraid I must insist on keeping the other.”
The group roared at Timothy’s earnest response, and the man tightened his grip to a headlock as he snatched the two bills. “I think we’ll just take both of these and thank you for your donation, Gov’na,” he added, with the same sneering accent he used before.
“Give those back,” said Timothy. He reached for the man’s hand. The ruffian yanked hard on Timothy’s far shoulder, twirling him backward.
The footman regained his balance and charged angrily at the thief, intending to teach him a good lesson about stealing from an Englishman, even a servant.
His tackle drove the hooligan back into his followers. That was the best shot he’d land. A small group gathered around him, punching and kicking.
Timothy dropped to the cement and protected his face and abdomen, while the men beat him. He’d never experienced such pain.
Seconds later, he lay nearly unconscious, bruised, and bleeding on the sidewalk. He didn’t hear the police whistle that broke up the gang and saved him from certain death.
The officers took him to a hospital and let the doctors administer to his lacerations before questioning him. Luckily, the beating had been interrupted before any significant internal damage was done. The police accepted his story that his identification was stolen by his assailants. Another lie. The hospital treated him efficiently, without charge, and let him back onto the streets with an admonition to be more careful and to report to the British Embassy as soon as possible.
He passed a few more days stumbling around New York, watching for better methods to acquire food. He stole what he could from street vendors and shops with outdoor displays.
Other indigents sometimes held out a plastic cup or a cap into which passersby would drop coins. Cash was important in this city, and begging was viewed by the police as preferable to theft. He found an empty Styrofoam cup laying in the street, and set up a few blocks from something called United Nations Headquarters.
For weeks, he survived on spare change from wealthy strangers, and food from the nearby street carts. His clothes became worn and dirty. His beard and hair grew long and unkempt. Every few days he would accumulate enough spare change to access a room and shower in one of the city’s shelters.
It was in this thin, disheveled, and impoverished state, hunkered over a cup of coins and slowly losing his brand new mind, that Darya first noticed him.
24
Lord Mika floated in space, sunning himself in the light of the nearest star, a piercingly bright point over a billion kilometers away. With no requirement to dissipate heat from the distant sun, his mercurial skin flowed slowly. He splayed his wings gently behind him, gathering the feeble solar rays that refilled his ultracapacitors and batteries.
Energy-wise, pushing matter around the universe the way Cybrids did was a costly proposition. They relied on powerful matter-antimatter drives to build up thrust. Angels circumvented the need for MAM drives by using built-in RAF generators to pull themselves out of the universe and shift “through” it in tiny but almost instantaneous increments. They could travel by independent means to nearby planets within a reasonable number of hours to days, and between stars in weeks. For larger distances, they relied on Alum’s starstep network.
Shifting drew minimal energy; Angels needed only enough power for the required computational resources and the specialized shifting mechanism.
Much of an Angel’s central processing unit was dedicated to navigatio
n and shifting. Identifying entangled pairs of particles and calculating short jumps left little room for other intellectual pursuits. The remaining computational resources were dedicated mostly to battle tactics. Angels were not known for their general wit.
Mika overlaid the positions of local Cybrid stations and human colonies on his visual field. Preparations to trap the unidentified adversary were going well.
Something had been triggering Alum’s detectors in an erratic pattern all across the Rafael galaxy. Only a single detector was ever tripped at any one time. No similar incursions were reported in other regions. Alum ruled out a large invasion into the Realm. The intruder could only be an individual or a small, tight-knit group.
Alum identified the star systems through which the intruder would most likely pass. He increased the network of detectors within those systems and monitored the data vigilantly. For weeks, he mapped the advance of the stealthy target.
He assigned Lord Mika to investigate and protect the Realm. Settling on a few hundred of the most probable destinations, Mika sent out a Wing of Angels, ten thousand strong, to establish a local shifting network.
They placed pairs of entangled particles across the target solar systems, ready to use wherever and whenever Alum chose to confront the interloper. The plan was straightforward. Until signaled, the Angels would remain dispersed and clear of the designated zones. The instant Alum detected the intruder, He would send a signal.
Angels would instantly shift from the stars where they’d been waiting into the target solar system. They would surround the enemy and activate their quantum decoherence field generators—shift blockers—trapping the adversary within a loose but impenetrable net. They would shrink the net until they either captured or destroyed the quarry. The only way to escape the net was by conventional rocket, and Angels could easily overtake that form of transportation. It was a tactic they’d successfully employed in the Aelu Wars over twenty million years ago, and it was still the most effective approach.
The Angels would have milliseconds, at most, to spring their trap. Alum pre-programmed their standard responses to minimize any delays due to hesitation, processing, or lag time, no matter how small. His Angels would be alerted, shifted into position, and placed in “trap and pursue” mode before they were consciously aware the plan had been activated.
The half-dozen practice runs they’d conducted were a testament to the precision Alum expected of the Angelic entities He’d created to battle in His name.
On one level, Lord Mika hoped the intruder was that same arrogant false Shard, Darak Legsu, whom he’d encountered on Gargus 718.5. Alum had hinted that was a possibility. You may have escaped me once, Darak, but you will not leave this trap alive.
At the same time, Mika hungered for more of a challenge—an Aelu habnar or bigger. It’s been so long since I’ve seen any real action. “Shard” Darak had demonstrated interesting capabilities but Mika didn’t imagine him being much of a challenge for a Wing of ten thousand Angels. In truth, that was sure to be an acutely unsatisfying case of overkill.
Nonetheless, the Wing Commander allowed himself a satisfied smile at the elegance of their deployment. They had honed their strategy and tactics in a challenging, multi-millennia war with a powerful enemy. They were experienced, well-rehearsed, and eager to be tested.
A little knot formed in the pit of the Angel’s stomach. Recalling his overconfidence the last time he encountered Darak, Mika’s smile pulled downward along one corner of his quicksilver mouth. He still burned with the shame of being fooled so easily. The half-frown transformed into a determined grimace. He would not be fooled this time.
25
Shard Trillian wandered the streets of twenty-first century virtual Manhattan, trailed by his limo. Everything about Alternus fascinated him. He was as enchanted by the quaintness of this peculiar, primitive inworld, ripe-for-the-taking, as he was confounded by its wondrous, needless complexity.
Alum had described the inworld perfectly. The detailed briefing He’d sent to Trillian covered everything a person needed to know to fit seamlessly into life on Alternus, the rogue simulation of ancient Earth. Alum’s information had made acquiring sustenance, lodgings, transportation, and money a trivial matter. Trillian, himself, had long ago purged his own memories of those times, or maybe they’d been expunged for him by Alum, as irrelevant detritus of a forgotten, and forgettable, era.
Trillian marveled at the huge variety of distinct societies co-existing on this one planet. Many had representatives in this city. How do they manage to interact with one another, to get along in spite of their differences? How could they come together in this great melting pot and yet maintain distinct cultures?
The antiquated idea of money particularly fascinated him. Money hadn’t been used in the Realm in ages. It astonished him that some people acquired trading power far beyond that of their peers. Even more intriguing, privileged positions were not based on closeness to God but on the type of work one did or their popularity among the larger populace. Some people acquired even more power by increasing the money available to them through something called “investments.”
He had to laugh at this last concept. It seemed that if you could convince others to give you some of their money, and you temporarily gave that money to someone else still, though it wasn’t yours in the first place, the people to whom you gave it would pay you back even more. You got to keep the difference between the amount you got back from them and the amount you had to return to your source of the money. The more money you amassed, the more power you were perceived to have.
It was all so wickedly deceitful. Why didn’t the first lender simply find the last borrower and provide the money directly to them, pocketing the profit the intermediary would have earned? Were they incapable of finding the opportunities themselves? If so, why didn’t they simply engage the services of the person who was most competent?
And what was “day-trading”, owning parts of active businesses for such short periods of time, all about? It seemed such a delightful game, except the traders Trillian investigated took winning or losing entirely too seriously.
If only the real humans of the original era had spent half as much effort on technological development, improving their world, or tending the natural environment as they did on these financial games. Their world could have been a garden of abundance instead of the dying cesspool it was becoming. So much futile activity, simply to choose winners and losers. Alum would never permit such nonsense within the Realm. Trillian was grateful he lived in an era of peace and prosperity for all. Still, Earth was a lot of fun.
Once he managed to hack into Alternus through the DonTon inworld, he set about making himself comfortable. He expected it might take a while to figure out which characters in this sim were leading the conspiracy against Alum, and whether they were involved in the strange incursions in the Virgo cluster.
One could easily forget Alternus was a simulation; its computer-generated physics were amazingly real. Sensory input on all channels was as rich as the real universe. The designer must have dedicated enormous computational resources to the program. No matter how far back into the side streets and alleyways he wandered, he could not detect a single false front: no giveaway shimmering or blurry facades, no building he could not access.
And, oh, what extravagant sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes! Thankfully, food was varied and delicious because one had to eat regularly to avoid feeling hunger pangs. Discomfort and pain, even physical damage to the avatar body, felt as real here as they did in the outworld. Phenomenal work. Absolutely phenomenal.
After passing a pleasant first night in what billed itself as a luxury hotel, he started looking for more suitable accommodations. He hired a real estate agent to look for something comfortable, but not too ostentatious, in the five-to-ten million dollar range. No need to draw unwelcome attention to his presence.
The housing advertisements listed a few apartments near the Central Park area. Within a w
eek, he was able to establish acceptable housing and furnishings. The apartment reminded him of one of his nicer quarters in the Cybrid garden asteroid off Andromeda 514.7, only a bit smaller.
Though he had hacked in, bypassing the conceptual virus of the standard portal, he was nevertheless required to interface with the sim. That meant he had to live by the rules of this inworld as much as anyone. Theoretically, he might have been able to tweak the inworld supervisory program to gain magical powers but he was concerned the Supervisor might vigorously resist such reprogramming and take action. So he pried at it delicately; there might come a day when he needed an edge in confronting the original designer.
Compared to the inworld Supervisor, he found the so-called security of the Alternus “banks” to be laughable. It took him less than half a minute to trace the local flow of wealth, set up a new account, and transfer significant amounts of money into it from a large institution called the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
He wasn’t sure what exactly it was reserving. It certainly wasn’t reserving judgment on his request to move a hundred million dollars from its numerous accounts to his empty one.
He set up a banking security consultancy under the name Jack Trillian. If it was that easy to steal from a central bank, smaller companies would be desperate for his services. Security consultant would make a great cover for his inworld activities.
His “job” provided the privacy and tranquility to continue his real work in Alternus. In addition to the few hundred million Cybrid presences cycling in and out of Alternus, several billion Partials inhabited the inworld permanently. And unlike those in other sims, these Partials were not mere servants or mindless backdrop. They were as close to fully self-conscious instantiations without crossing the line into legal beings as he’d ever seen.
Social standing was important in Alternus. His search for conspirators would be more effective if he were perceived as someone important. In addition to household staff, he hired a planetary Partial as a driver/bodyguard. A little additional muscle might come in useful.
