ZZAP! A bolt of electricity flashed above the replica, and the little lights winked out, then came back on.
Same as the multitude of city lights behind the tall windows.
And then thunder roared, and rain fell down, which then became hail, and then ended abruptly, the river of NYC traffic blaring away behind our office windows just like before.
“Thank you for sharing your boss’s contact with us,” I said.
Mr. Reaper swooned, his energy completely drained by this powerful attempt to send a message to other Ethereals. Spy games, now working against him. The man in the suit took a step forward, lashed out and crushed the cardboard city, swooping on it with his remaining physical strength, sweeping the entire cardboard Manhattan off the table.
And then this blast of hurricane shook our building and made our office windows rattle, and — what a breathtaking sight! — the entire panorama of shining skyscrapers behind our windows broke into thick pieces of cardboard and crumbled right before our eyes, the entire vista of Manhattan blown away and gone, replaced by cosmic silence and deep, swirling blackness.
And this was when James Reaper found out he was trapped for real, and fooled, and outplayed by his hateful Asian hackers.
“At least now we know what happened to Baron Plunkett, don’t we?” I said to Mr. Reaper, who was staring at this suggestive chasm swirling behind our windows now. I told him: “Just relax, we’re both trapped in here.”
“We cannot be outside the Web,” he said, looking around.
“I cannot,” I corrected him. “Remember how you talked to us in the limo, through a holophone? And you said it’s in fact your real head, the hologram, and you are the limo itself? This is when I thought, why can’t you be something harmless, like a memory stick? And then, when I heard how my Pan Asian friends and Academia were involved in the kidnapping of the Baron, and the Church setting them up through their mole, a Faith saboteur, I realized the Baron must have ended up on some ancient portable drive, which is in no one’s head. Because, you see, it’s solved by Necromancy here in Clockworld. This memory stick, it could be represented by something simple in here, like a thing, or an animal. So all we have to do is find how the Baron reincarnated in here, and where his Web persona is trapped now. And you will help me.”
“So you’re still on the Web, and I’m trapped inside some memory stick now, which is what, some kind of an item in the actual Clockworld?”
“An oil lamp,” I said. “In fact this office is exactly that, the interior of your oil lamp, and your new home. I’m only staying here with you to make you comfortable, because, Mr. Reaper, the fact remains, my shameful agreement with you Ethereals still stands, and to nullify it, I need you.”
“An oil lamp,” Mr. Reaper croaked; his voice suddenly psychotic and cold. “You gotta be kidding me, boy. An oil lamp, really? This all a game to you?”
“In fact, yes!” I picked up my coffee and flashed him a fake smile in likeness of his own, genuinely enjoying the situation. The man used voodoo on me; he made me feel my eyes pop inside their sockets. I decided I could poke this cobra with a stick a bit now. So I said:
“You see, Mr. Reaper, as you’ve told me yourself, you’re but a complex version of an NPC, a non-player character based on some long-dead fellow. You didn’t go to West Point. You didn’t work in this office in Manhattan. It’s all fake. Your magic is fake. It may hurt me, but the pain is tolerable when you know it’s imaginary. You may play an evil fellow, a truly disgusting villain, or a complex grey-area villain, or someone nice and totally good, but the fact remains true: it was you who killed my father, you, this REAPR entity controlling police drones remotely. You took everything that I hold dear away from me, that’s why I’ll never be your friend. And yes, it’s all a game to me, you’re right.”
“Look, I tried to warn you, kid,” Mr. Reaper was talking fast now, his eyes wide open and maniacal. “I tried to tell you, stay away, don’t create chaos, do not go down this road for once, go down that road instead, which is safe. Yet you, you conspired with the enemies of your state, you endangered your country, your people, in both of the worlds!”
“Mr. Reaper, I’m a lost generation, as you so rightfully noticed,” I said. “I only dream about silly fantastic adventures and epic battles of one kingdom of technology versus another. I don’t have your ideals, not a little drop of them. I don’t have a Homeland which I must defend. I think all people in the world are the same nation. I never notice the differences in race, or religion, or gender, or country, or anything. I’m much less passionate than you perhaps. But I am also peaceful, remember? I am a person who’s never heard about a theft even, not to mention murder, or a Virtual World War One, or a real-life revolution against something not clearly defined. Am I the end of humanity? Does my kind bring doom on people by sitting in our workshops, or is it more like your kind, always plotting, and scheming, and destroying people’s lives for the sake of feeling powerful? Is it you people who bring doom on us? I’d say I may have endangered… Is it Britain or England? Doesn’t matter. Yet you, Mr. Reaper, the people like you, they endanger humanity as a whole.”
“I EXIST FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT, DAMMIT, I’M A CLOWN EXPECTED TO SERVE YOU, SO-CALLED LIVING PEOPLE!” He roared at me all of a sudden, then jumped to the office door and threw it open.
There was no waiting room with a water cooler and a battered leather sofa behind it anymore. Just the same swirling nothingness.
Mr. Reaper looked at me. Then the white neon lamp about us flared up and popped, and the office plunged into pitch darkness, only lit up by a big ancient fax machine on the table. Mr. Reaper’s face lit by its red light looked wild and panicked. He seemed to slowly grasp the entire horror of his situation, and his likely future as well.
“First concentrate on your breath,” I told him. “Synchronize it with your heartbeat. Now slow down your rate of breathing by controlling your exhales, one, two, three… That’s right. One, two, three, until you can calm down and be in control again, one, two…”
He followed my instructions and seemed to calm down.
“Damn Pan Asians,” he said. “How could you conspire with them? We were able to see everything but this. This is the only reason why you have me here.”
“I had to,” I said. “You took all allies away from me, remember? I had to make new friends.”
James Reaper picked up his plastic cup of cold coffee and gulped it down in two greedy gulps, his Adam apple jumping. I swear I would even pity the fellow, but he was the man who killed my father.
“Imagine your safe place now,” I said. “Some location where you feel the most comfortable.”
So the man in the suit looked at me, and suddenly the windows behind him burst — WHOOSH! — the broken glass tinkling, the dust pouring in.
Mr. Reaper smirked at me.
“You think you won this game, Ben?” he asked, then walked to the office door and opened it. It led right to a dusty street of some ghost town, two rows of three- and five-story buildings with no population, their real wooden shutters banging as the potent wind blew from the dusty American wasteland.
“Huh?” Mr. Reaper asked me again, and I saw he was dressed in a robe once more, the cowl of it thrown back, a gas mask hanging across his chest from a single rubber strap. “You think this is a checkmate, don’t you, Ben? Such a… a VIRTUAL thing to believe in, I must say.”
We walked outside the building, which was no longer a penthouse office of some business tower, but rather a ground-level shop, abandoned and dusty. The new reality took root around us fast, and soon I saw two things of much greater detail up front.
“Are these my bikes?” I asked. “The Harley and the Triumph you bought from us?”
“They’re built into me from back then,” Mr. Reaper said, walking forward. “Their virtual images, of course. I’m able to recreate them. And not just them. Many things. You’re lucky I cannot hurt you.”
“This is the
best way to hurt me, in fact,” I replied. “After what you did.”
“Well,” James Reaper mounted the Triumph and looked at me. He said: “Grab the Harley. I’ll show you my ranch. Yes, the place where I grew up. There’s a stream, do you know how to fish? No, of course you don’t, the lost generation, as I said.”
And so we rode into sunset, and then went fishing, me and my arch-enemy.
“No, this is nothing like a checkmate, my dear young spy,” Mr. Reaper said, pulling out a trout. He wore a pair of dusty jeans and a checkered shirt now, and looked older, and much more tanned than he used to look.
“You captured a queen,” he told me. “Yes, I’m a powerful figure within the Ethereals, and the Church, and many other initiatives, including the British government. Yet, crucial? Or, the only figure? Not at all. By the way, you know what the real beauty of a queen is, Benjamin? Once a pawn reaches its final destination — any of your pawns! — the queen may step back in, and replace it, and be back on the board.”
“Your threats are so complex now I don’t really get them,” I said. “What game are you talking about?”
“Chess.”
“I have no idea what this is,” I admitted.
He stared at me in disbelief for a while, then sighed, and then we fished some more.
And then I fished out an old beer bottle.
“What’s that?” Mr. Reaper asked me. “How did it even catch? Is there a note?”
There was, in fact.
“What does it say?”
“It says MOON,” I said.
And then I woke up.
***
Ben’s head was lifted, then someone splashed a glass of water into his face. The water was lukewarm and smelled of chlorine. Ben’s eyes itched and burned as he opened them to the year 2100, in the snooker table room behind Dim Sum, an expensive Chinese restaurant where all food was prepared by humans.
“I’m sure you enjoyed your time with Mr. Reaper the ranch owner,” Francis Kowalski told him, holding up a short charcoal-colored memory stick. “We don’t want this entity online longer than this. He’s best for us in this form. I’ll tell you how we interrogate him; this will involve an interesting procedure, a dream within a dream if you like. Here, take it, please. It belongs to you.”
He handed the stick to Ben looking a bit like Gandalf dropping the Ring off at Frodo’s. Ben looked back at him in doubt.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“This is a digital entity which killed your father,” he said. “According to the law, we must treat this digital persona as an actual human, with human ethics applied. I deeply respect this law. Digital Citizens are human to me. I don’t want to judge another human, someone who did me nothing wrong. You, however. You have the full right to judge I believe.”
“But I must interrogate him for you?”
“If you want to do something about the oncoming virtual war, yes,” Kowalski said.
“You care about this virtual war, honest?” Ben asked him, sitting up. He jumped on the floor and the crèche behind his back instantly flipped over, driven by hidden motors, and the thing became a nondescript and fully functioning snooker table once again.
“Me?” Kowalski smirked back and put his beret on. “As far as this war is responsible for the civil unrest we have in the real world, yes, I must say I do care about the war. I think war happens in the minds of people, young man. And I know aggression gives birth to more aggression. Which leads me to believe this light version of war will eventually bring more or less everything a real war tends to bring. And this means random people dying. Or being thrown into jail, or worse, kept in prison camps, or slaughtered and forcefully digitized en masse, as an attempt to speed up this process of questionable nature.”
“Jail,” Ben remembered. He used a small drinking fountain to quench his thirst and rinse his eyes thoroughly, then he rubbed them clean. “Will Susan take us to pick him up?”
“Susan’s truck was vandalized and taken out of service, as you remember. Then the bots towed it to some police zone, where it was burned by protesters along with a few police vehicles,” Kowalski replied. “In the name of revolution.”
“Wow,” Ben said. The good old Wakeworld, he thought, the usual mess. In the Web, everything was treacherously easy, meant to be a fun rollercoaster, safe enough for him to never worry about his life. The Wakeworld sometimes seemed very cruel and meaningless in comparison. Nothing was certain here anymore, not with the Virtual World War One being such a certainty.
“I’ll take you there in my quad copter,” Kowalski said.
Ben merely looked at him. “You have your own quad copter?”
“I sold a lot of patents, young man, and I always wanted to fly one of them. And I do prefer to carry you around while you have this little memory stick with you, just so you’ll be the one to decide upon its destiny, and not our dear Ethereal overlords and their punk rocker servants dressed up as revolutionaries. Am I right? We need to stay above the crowd.”
They left the restaurant after a simple (though human-prepared) rice-and chicken meal, then entered a service elevator which took them down, then southwards, and then up another residential tower, a part of a sprawling interconnected project cluster. At the top of another tower, there was a helipad, its red beacons old-fashioned and beautiful, its satellite dishes almost hipster in their early 2000s look.
Kowalski’s quad copter was a bit old-fashioned and noisy, yet a steady and reliable craft, like more or less everything equipped with a microfusion power source. It could go pretty fast —some ancient flying monster like a jumbo jet would have chased it down, and still, twenty hours, and you’re in America, baby. One person out of a billion could afford this kind of freedom, and this person, for miles around, was Francis Kowalski.
Noise inside of the craft seemed far too loud to talk to it though, and no sound absorption systems were provided. These early personal quad copters, as far as Ben understood, were supposed to be loud, supposed to be heard and followed with a billion pairs of envious eyes.
“Where did you get this machine from?” Ben shouted over the steady yet deafening throb of the four rotors. Firecrackers crackled below above the sea of people, launched from the crowd by hooligans or vigilantes or freedom fighters, depending on which side you were.
“It was a Nobel Prize anniversary,” Kowalski said. “It ceased to exist when I stepped down.”
“What was your field?” Ben asked.
“Human brain in code,” Kowalski said. “Mathematical modeling and neurosurgery combined. I’ve never been a physicist; still they called me one. This is because otherwise they’d have to call me a part-time mathematician, which created some controversy with the jury.”
Then the noise suppression systems manifested themselves and kicked in, and the sudden silence after all the thumping and booming was crystal and oppressive, deafening.
“Wait, so you’re the scientist who created DCs then?” Ben asked in a hushed voice.
“I’m not THE scientist, thank you,” Kowalski said. “There were hundreds of people involved. I created a seed, a mathematical model they were able to derive into their self-teaching network then. The rest was done by third party algorithms, other people, other places. The major breakthrough came from the Web itself, the moment it was unified and solidified, its software properly architected to seed and grow rather than instill and form. Will you understand the terminology? I’m not sure, young man, I’m not sure you need any of it at all. Let’s just say, after the Dreamweb started to properly mimic the needs of humanity, the technical progress kicked in so hard no human scientists could ever compete with researcher AIs again. This made me step down. This brought on the end of human science. All of this was long expected of course, so nobody blamed me for stepping down. But there were many of us, doctor Frankenstein types their monster kicked out of their jobs.”
“So you created Academia,” Ben said.
�
��Yes. All because we had this one concern. Of a religious kind.”
“Religious?” Ben remembered Tranh’s warning. Was Francis Kowalski secretly a man of Faith? Did he work for the Church? Why would he give Ben the memory stick with Mr. Reaper trapped inside? Just to let him hold on to it while he was taking him to some Church hideout, where the Ethereals, his secret masters, were waiting for them? Was this but another trap?
“Religious,” Kowalski confirmed, kicking the quad copter into a powerful steady ascent, steep enough to be considered vertical. “Many people of Academia belong to one faith or another, not all of them are atheists. Yet this is not what I mean. Our question was: what if we accidentally create God?”
“Make a god?” Ben asked.
“No,” Kowalski said. “Create an ultimate master for us, a higher power to control our entire society, an entity so much more powerful than us that a single human life will mean nothing to it, or even a million human lives. With purely mathematical thinking, if we entrust the future of humanity to an AI, the best service it can do to our species is evolve us, breed us, eradicate the weaklings. Don’t you see? Given the sad truth of existence, we see that life itself, nature itself, is an endless war. From Darwinian standpoint, a good AI is an AI that would decimate us, test us, teach us miracles of survival. That would speed up the natural selection of humans.”
“So what did you do with all this? As the scientific community?” Ben asked.
“We introduced countermeasures. We wrote thousands of emails. Signed petitions. Went to political charity events and rioted in the streets. We thought we won,” he said.
“Won how?”
“We kept the real world in human hands,” Kowalski replied, steering the chopper. “AIs were only to reign in the Dreamweb, which wasn’t supposed to have serious impact on the real world. So as responsible citizens, we were to keep an eye on the technical progress, and advise the governments as a formal civil organization. We were watching things carefully until they started to unravel. We have no idea what caused all this. Since the riots began, we have been trying hard to pick a side. We’re deep into it now, and still without a clue, and this is the bitter truth, my friend.”
Enter the Clockworld Page 29
