“You think it might have happened to the Baron?” Daphne asked suddenly. “You think he’s being kept somewhere?”
“Revived and then held captive?” I said. “Nah, it’s been past any respawn time now, and he still didn’t show himself.”
“Think he’s in some another Web?” she looked at me without a trace of a smile.
“Can there be another Web?”
“Who knows,” Daphne said. “Maybe just some illegal virtual space. Small space.”
“Impossible,” I said. “They made it totally impossible for a human to create a separate virtual space.”
“What if it’s not human-made?” She looked back at me again. “What if it’s computer-made? What if computers wake someone up in there instead of here?”
“Sort of like a Dreamweb heaven?” I asked.
“Or hell.”
I let this thought brew for a while. It wasn’t as absurd as it seemed. There was an international law — which was also a hardcoded computer law — that Dreamweb must remain singular and continuous, interconnected. However, logically speaking, if you die and you go there, it’s a connection, a transition, provided you may also come back. No laws broken. And still, this world could be set up separately, fully isolated from every other world in physical sense (as the transition is not physical).
This means you could kill someone in one world, then resurrect them in another, and this person would be gone from the first world without a trace!
The only thing it involved was computer-created afterlife. I had no idea why computers would build an afterlife for the Web. Wasn’t the Dreamweb itself an afterlife of sorts? This tampering with laws, this was a very human thing to do.
Or it had to look human, the way DCs had to?
Could it be computers and robots were conspiring against us after all?
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.
So we went down these rocks and spent an evening and half the night in this little fishing village, and finally hung out like a normal romantically involved couple, despite being physically dead. We found this excellent Bavarian place by the wharf where we ate something German made of meat and grilled vegetables, incredibly delicious even to us zombies. Here we heard a lot of stuff about the oncoming action (mostly auto-translated and sounding a bit weird to me). Everyone in the village was impressed by the armada. Everyone was sure the war was coming. Everyone was double-sure Teutonia would emerge as a winner.
No one seemed to have any idea who the enemy was.
***
Ben woke up. He was sealed in a tight aluminum coffin, or so it seemed. The air in his nostrils was stale, saturated by dust eternally seeping down through the huge pile of broken concrete above. Ben thought: what if the entire pile decides to settle down a bit just now, or the next moment, and crushes his unfamiliar sleeping crèche like an empty nutshell, barely interested if his body happened to be in the way?
He remembered the books about astronauts he read as a child. Ancient 2D books, the forbidden knowledge. One of the most basic tests those astronauts had to take, the book said, was virtual computer emulation of you hanging in empty black space, and it was so quiet you heard the veins in your temples tick, and the sound of your own uneven breath. Then a computer voice would inform you that you were in outer space, trapped in a damaged spacesuit, and you have air left for six minutes, and so on, everything mass-tested and psychologically acute. And you had to live through all the possibilities but mostly slow asphyxiation, over and over as you failed to mentally follow a certain course of action you were supposed to take.
And the book, which was detailed enough to provide answers, said that the correct conduct of a professional astronaut was this: first steady yourself, breathe a series of controlled breaths, then do some yoga stuff Ben hadn’t bothered to remember.
But luckily, controlled breath was enough. He was already thinking better, so he knocked on the wall of his aluminum crèche and called: “Spark! You there? How do I emerge?”
“Mnemonic lock,” a muffled voice sounded. “Think INSECTS.”
He thought, and they appeared scuttling, two little metallic things that unplugged Ben’s metallic crèche like an egg and cracked its shell open, then served as stairs for Ben to walk down to the cement floor. He remembered now what the place was, rather than a huge pile of concrete — a broken and jagged ceiling, the interior which pickaxes and plasma cutters of Academia had reshaped into a perfect dome, and underneath this dome, an old-fashioned dream pod dispenser, this early Web rollercoaster forgotten here by someone along with a pair of old-fashioned yet fully functioning stair robots. It was all streaked with neon in a tasteful way now, bizarre industrial art created in place of an industrial dump. It was a cozy place, not scary. It appeared self-sufficient and fully operational, even though it remained turned off until he and Spark had the diesel generator repaired.
Spark approached Ben as the latter emerged from the pod. The Necromancer carried a notebook and a pencil which he must have stolen from a museum, because this stuff cost real cryptomoney in 2099, a hovercar worth of cash. Ben eyed the writing tools with great interest.
“Too neo-hipster for digital?” he asked, nodding at the artifacts. “What are you doing?”
“Writing poems,” Spark said, his eyebrows raised. “What else? I just died, acid sprayed in my face. You think I’m going to skip this moment in life instead of fully documenting it, grasping it with both hands, by writing a poem full of pain and despair?”
Ben wanted to object and say this silly death from an upright grasshopper’s tube was a part of the game and not to be taken seriously, and then thought of Daphne. She did take virtual stuff seriously, and so should Ben. Spark merely enjoyed what was available to him, and if he did it for a living, Ben could only admire the man’s inventive spirit. A billion ways to poetically die.
They got back into the big silent cargo elevator. Spark beamed up a code signal and they rose, up, up and away, along the wall of the emptied office tower, through a thick interval of shadow, then absolute darkness, and then again into light, this time of many windows and Christmas decorations glowing in the strange settlement of hanging houses.
There was a tea party in the main hall of Academia village, and Ben could see it was arranged with the loss of electricity in mind: unlit candles, a samovar with real coals, a wound-up gramophone playing a scratchy jazz vinyl, each relic of the old worth another hovercar or two.
“Welcome, kids,” Susan greeted them. She took Ben’s elbow and led him all the way across the hall to Francis Kowalski, who stood there in all his Druid glory with an Oriental-looking cubical cup of tea in his fingers.
“Spark did a good job,” Ben said.
“I suppose it’s better said sooner rather than later…” Kowalski sighed and turned to face him. “Your father’s heart stopped, Ben.”
It felt as if the entire metal treehouse of their village hall slightly swayed under Ben’s feet.
“What — what do you mean, what happened?” Ben asked.
“Too much sedative,” Susan said. “They pumped a huge dose of riot-grade knockout drugs into him, Ben.”
“And…” This couldn’t be true. No, not his father. Not now!
“It’s not supposed to happen,” Kowalski said, putting down his cup. “These police drones, they cannot put old people at risk this way. The whole thing is insane.”
“Was it hacked, this drone . . . all these drones?” Ben asked, still unable to fully process the news.
Francis Kowalski nodded past him. Ben looked back, and there was Spark, former Necromancer, now a round-bellied nerd again. He said:
“You did slap one drone down, so I downloaded its dump file. Seems like it wasn’t hacked as in hacked. It was remotely controlled by some other presence.”
“I don’t understand. I…”
“An online presence of higher authority. Someone or something calling themselves REAPR.”
<
br /> Ben felt the metallic floor of the hall swoon again. “Where… where is my dad now?”
“At the hospital,” Kowalski said, then shook his head. “He’s in a coma, Ben. And you need to sign him up for the procedure.”
“The procedure…”
“Yes, the digital copy.”
Ben frowned, and then blinked. Then he blinked again, his vision blurry. He felt like he was about to pass out.
Susan put her soft, heavy arm around him and said: “Look at me, Ben. There’s a queue. Look at me. If you won’t handshake and confirm the procedure before his name pops up, he’ll die. That’s what the doctor said. A one-time choice.”
“This isn’t right.” Ben pinched the base of his nose. “Not like this.”
“This is what the doctor said.”
“Then we need to go there,” Ben said. “There, to the hospital.”
“Ben,” Susan said. “It’s problematic.”
“Why?”
“The streets are full of people,” she said.
“What people?”
As the big manually controlled elevator was crawling back down, Ben finally saw them, the sight he’d missed completely because he was looking up during his previous trip.
The streets below were filled with a dense black carpet of people. From this high, Ben could see the huge crowd, spread across the city like a dark puddle, thinning out at its sides, trickling into every nook and cranny as it crept about. Even from here he could hear the faint echo of its murmur and a sizzle of firecrackers going off here and there. He could see a few bonfires, one of them huge, its black winding column of smoke crawling up, then past Ben, then higher still, to mix with the torn grey clouds. In the middle of the crowd, there was a growing camp of tents, as big as a small town all in itself already.
“Riots everywhere,” Susan told him. “Perhaps someone up there relied on drone countermeasures too much, huh? Turns out this pacifying sonotechnology could fail us, too.”
“What do you mean?” Ben suddenly felt he didn’t want to go down there, mix into this great amoeba of a crowd, fight their way towards Susan’s truck, then press on and make it to the hospital, which was outside the huge crowd, lost amongst empty neighborhoods of dark and silent city blocks. He asked: “Fail us how?”
“Don’t you see it?” Susan nodded at the crowd. “They used to keep us pacified, full of introversion; they had us all busy gazing at our own navels. But now the Web is full of conflict and strife; it’s no longer a game because everyone’s dead aunt or dead uncle can die in there once more. Now the old Wakey-Wakey grows restless. People go out. They communicate. They look at each other, for real this time. They see what has become of them. Many of them don’t like what they see.”
“They… had something, this knockout wave which erases your memories or fixes you up of sorts,” Ben said. “I saw it once, all the people in the street falling asleep. Then they woke up, and they remembered nothing.”
Susan merely smiled, showing him old-fashioned multicolored 3D-printed bridgework, then patted herself on the hat, under which she wore a cap made of tinfoil.
“Well,” Ben said. “Guess what, now this wave doesn’t work anymore, it just makes you sick and dizzy for a while, and then it passes.”
“Seems like we just grew immune to it,” Susan said.
“Or someone sabotaged it, and the signal got weak.”
Descending into the crowd was like passing through a thick pillow of mixed smells and noises down to the bottom, where these noises grew detailed up to being overwhelming. People hadn’t found their way into the elevator shaft yet, and Susan was careful to lock the door on the way out. Yet, when she and Ben finally stepped out into the streets, he nearly lost her right the next moment, carried away by what was happening all around him.
The streets didn’t look like anything Ben had ever witnessed in the Wakeworld at all; they resembled a military camp of Albion perhaps, except extremely loud, overcrowded, and real.
The street itself felt like a huge booming outdoor event, a festival, although the music of self-made kettledrums and rattles and tambourines was nearly drowned out by a multitude of voices. Everyone in this huge crowd was talking to someone excitedly, or chanting with enthusiasm, or shouting at the top of their lungs. Everyone looked ecstatic, liberated by this entire human closeness, something no software could yet emulate, something related not to mind, but to body alone, primal and often forgotten in digital worlds.
There were lines of tables everywhere, crossing at the road intersection where many sound speakers, portable and stationary, could be seen. Along those lines of tables, people in aprons were dispensing simple meals, and others were eating, food-delivery drones and vanity drones buzzing above the crowd in a thick luminescent cloud, shooing away from Christmas rockets and firecrackers which, Ben noticed, were mostly aimed at police and municipal drones, and sometimes at private snoopers, because these were also numerous and annoying.
There were robot cookers everywhere, busy cooking new meals and making all possible mochas, cappuccinos, or green Chinese teas. All food was healthy, all drinks sober. This was a party, Ben soon learned, where you were on alert at all times.
“Watch for them sleeping darts,” Susan told him. She nodded at the sky buzzing with drones and said: “Takes one police-registered snooper to pick your face up in the crowd and match it against the troublemakers’ database.”
“Is my face already there, just like that?” Ben asked, not quite believing it.
“Look it up yourself,” she suggested.
He gave up. “Well, if I could do something about it, really,” Ben said.
“Just don’t talk to anyone.”
“WE’RE NOT HERE TO PLAY,” half the people in the crowd started to chant around them, then almost everyone joined in. “WE ARE HERE TO STAY.”
Their voices formed a strong chorus now, the same phrase by everyone, though Ben had no idea what it was supposed to mean. It seemed to be loaded with kinetic energy though, some secret meaning known by each of the chanting people, some hidden power this crowd was ready to unleash. Ben didn’t see any R2D2 trashcan bots, neither police nor cleaners. People were cleaning the streets themselves, even though some of them did use their home cleaning bots to do the job for them.
It seemed like the enemies were well defined now.
“Mayor? He’s eighty-damn-five,” some bearded man wearing a hoodie said to Ben, his eyes two fanatical shining stars. “And I don’t care if it’s fine by today’s standard, I mean he’s an old man. Show me a single young man — like yourself — who rules us! No young men rule us! Old men rule us, their minds gone! Because they’re but old toys in the hands of the real gods. The real god. Digital human. An abomination.”
“Where’s your truck?” Ben asked Susan.
“There, right across the road.”
They moved forward, past four men beating a huge kettle drum made out of some metallic industrial container, pounding away madly. People were dancing around them now. A camouflage-wearing muscular fellow, not a dancer, ran in and dropped his duffel bag on the ground. He pulled out a number of Christmas fireworks, put them on the ground, and started firing them at the drones above in quick succession, with deadly aim.
Probably a cybersportsman, Ben thought after the fellow took down a police drone which, Ben noticed in slight horror, was going straight at him, tracking Ben with its ember eye.
“Susan!”
“Get down!” Susan hissed at him.
Fireworks spent, the fellow packed up and left, barely disturbing the dance floor.
“I like this guy, be like him, low profile,” Susan shouted in Ben’s ear. “Stay low. Move. Come on, Ben. Run.”
And so they ran, bent low, trying to expose themselves as little as possible to the entire buzzing luminescent cloud above.
They ran through a throng of people wearing costumes of Chicago Mafia, holding Tommy guns in their hand
s, and Ben was no longer sure if all weapons around here were pseudoplastic.
Then there was a group of Greek warriors throwing javelins at a city maintenance bot, which did the sturdy spider no harm but made it scuttle around, and the crowd whistled and laughed and chanted at the metallic creature as if it could understand them.
“Susan?”
“Walk,” she commanded, and Ben walked past the striped maintenance bot.
It brought up a metallic leg across their way and tried to stop the two of them.
“Hey, what the hell?” Susan shouted at the robot.
“PLEASE STAY IN ONE PLACE,” it responded with amplification. “THE PERSON YOU’RE ACCOMPANYING IS TO BE DETAINED FOR THEIR CRIMES AGAINST THE STATE!”
“HEY!” Ben shouted as loud as he could above the crowd. “MY FATHER IS DYING! I NEED TO GET TO THE HOSPITAL, THAT’S IT!”
“Yes!” Susan shouted. “People, what rights does this THING… POSSESS… OVER A HUMAN BEING?!”
She grew louder as she went on, her face turning red. The crowd heard her and reacted.
“What rights do they have?” someone else joined in.
“The kid is merely going to see his father. His father’s dying.”
“His FATHER’s dying, and so this guy rebelled, see.”
“LET HIM THROUGH, HIS FATHER IS DYING!” a few other women shouted, as hysterical as Susan. Ben already felt as if he were in the center of some historical battlefield, playing a key role in the entire dispute.
Someone grabbed the outstretched striped arm of the robot, then a few people fell down on it with all their weight, then more and more, and then, all of a sudden — SNAP! — the striped limb broke off, and fell down, and a couple of strong men grabbed it, then swung it around and brought it down on the maintenance bot’s head, which — CLANG! — broke apart and detached from the body. The sturdy striped arachnid stood for a while raining sparks, then tried to make it towards the maintenance nest.
Enter the Clockworld Page 24
