by Hugo Huesca
“No, wait just a second. We haven’t finished talking,” said Sigma, while Chu looked at him with a daring gleam in his eyes. They were alone in the ante-chamber, except by a couple of waiters with cleaning duty. He said to Chu:
“Why are you guys so obsessed with that robot uprising you keep raging about? Hell, we wouldn’t even know about it if you didn’t keep screeching to the four winds that any day now we are going to pull it off!” And it wasn’t only people like Mr. Chu or the protesters outside the building. Normal people got nervous around him too. Even his old friends started sweating when any robot, even him, got even a bit angry.
“Now, Sigma, don’t be like that, it’s just what he wants,” said Terry, trying to be conciliatory, but the only thing he managed was to tick him off even more.
“Even you look at me like I am some boiling teapot who will explode if left uncovered,” Sigma told him, his ice dripping coldness. Chu looked exultant, like a small kid about to watch the long-awaited sequel to his favorite movie.
“You think of yourself in those terms?” asked Terry with a slight tremor in his voice.
“Don’t pull that on me, Terry,” Sigma warned.
“See how they are? Always on the brink?” drawled Chu. Terry made the man an obscene gesture and turned around.
“Good luck with the speech, Sigma. Don’t let this guy confound you.” And he went to the Council chamber.
“There he goes, poor Mancer, he is not fit for this line of work,” said Chu, watching him go.
“Just answer me, Chu, so I can leave you alone too,” said Sigma bitterly, “what’s your deal with robots?”
“What’s my deal? Why, do you think we are blind? Do you think we don’t see the warning signals? We predicted you long before you came along, and we always knew you would rise against us. And it is already starting! Police bots making rounds day and night in the streets! Yes, they have stopped crime, but they will also enforce the will of the state! What will happen when the government starts to prosecute dissenters?
“And those drone-people you call them, what do you think they will do when there is no war left to wage? The last Great Dictator is already built and it has a silicone brain, Von Neumann, don’t you think I don’t know! We will live in a damn dystopia!”
Sigma was seething. All of this because the speculative books some guys had been reading?
“You already had a dystopia, Christ-sake Mr. Chu, it was only twenty years ago, and it only lasted three years before that same government got bored with micro-managing every dull moment of their citizen’s lives!”
The government of Dictator Jones had been a slow, sad affair, much feared, but in the end did little. Even the capture of dissenters slowed down after a while because the paperwork clerks had to fill for each one was just too much for their meager salaries. And after Jones yawned himself out of power, the few political prisoners they did have were released after having spent just one or two years in prison. Some of those poor guys looked disappointed with the whole thing. Disappointed. Like they expected more…
He froze, for half a second, while his brain took the heavy amount of data and contrasted it. Then it happily printed the leap in logic Sigma was missing. The protesters face in the crowd around him. The political prisoners face as they were released without having been roughed up even once. Same expressions. Some of them were even the same people… Including Edmund Chu.
“Oh god!” Sigma exclaimed, almost yelled to the almost empty room. “All this time! All those drafts you made us do! All those bigoted speeches, all the fear mongering! Really, Chu? Really? You don’t fear a robot uprising; you are disappointed it didn’t happen!”
Chu said, “I don’t know what you are talking about, you must be having a bug in your system,” but he went visibly pale and Sigma’s sensors noted it.
“Yes you do,” Sigma spat, “you are bored, Chu. All this talk about zombies, and dystopias, and robot apocalypses, you and your friends took it a tad too seriously and now you are mad it didn’t happen. It was just fiction, Chu. How cynical can you be?”
Now the little man was red as a tomato. He lifted one fat finger towards Sigma’s chest, and poked at him. “Just fiction? Entire generations grew ready to fight the uprising, or the apocalypse, or at least just see it, and be happy that they had called it first! But now with your Act, your trade treaties, and your friendship, thousands of people across the world just realize they are this close to eating their own words. What did you expect us to feel?”
“So you tried to provoke us into starting the uprising,” said Sigma, now more to himself than to his nemesis. “you tried to start a war because your predictions were wrong.”
“Oh don’t give me that ‘holier-than-thou attitude, stuff it,” Chu yelled. “Remember how easily you painted us as Luddites and left it at that? Once you did you never bothered to come near one single protester and figure out if it checked out; you never even noticed something was wrong until today! We aren’t the only ones who want an enemy, Sigma.”
Sigma just stood there, mouth agape. He remembered the disappointment he had felt when he was in the middle of the crowd. Now that he had something to compare it to, yes, it was the same disappointment the protesters had showed. He had expected them to be angry and violent, or at least like Edmund Chu, who was a prick.
Turns out that’s just Chu; maybe not something shared with all his electorate. Maybe.
And the figure of the brave activist, suffering through persecution and opposition, Sigma had admired them all the way through college, all the way to this very chamber… Well, maybe those protesters were just what he had hoped. After all, having an arch-nemesis to defeat made every victory all the much sweeter.
“I did pin my own expectations on them. I mean… I still don’t like them. But I could have talked to them. Maybe convince them… of what?”
Sigma Von Neumann was a representative of the entire of Robot-kind. Even when he didn’t like Chu, he realized he could try what he had been doing all along in that very chamber.
Negotiate, draft, make proposals and counter-proposals. Wasn’t that his job?
Sigma thought very hard for so long that Chu huffed and started to leave. Sigma stopped him once more, and then said:
“Mr. Chu, I’m sorry you guys didn’t get your robot uprising. I still think not having it is just better for everyone involved, maybe we can arrange something? Perhaps a monthly laser-tag match? We could make it a sport.”
International laser-tag matches. Sigma could see the possibilities. Sponsorships everywhere and a chance for human and robots to sort out their aggression in a controlled environment. It could work. Maybe. People would need a while to sort out the ridiculousness of the situation, and for the idea to gain enough traction. But it could work, in some shape or form. This was just the first draft.
And even Chu could see it. The almost insane anger in his eyes slowly became cold calculation, then he frowned, and cleaned his mustache, deep in thought. Then his face lit up, just a tiny bit.
“I think laser tag is dumb, Mr. Von Neumann. But I think we can work something out. The robot team has to pretend they are an evil army, though,” then he did something unexpected. He offered the robot a shake of hands.
Sigma smiled, and shook it. That was a first for them.
Yeah, it would take a lot of time, a lot of effort and planning. But why not? They already had the Act. And speaking of the Act…
In the Council chamber, the introductions were about to begin, and someone was calling Sigma’s name.
“I’m sure we will, Mr. Chu. Now, if you excuse me, I need to improvise an addition into my speech.”
Through the looking visor
Night-time at New Shenyang.
One neon cityscape recycled air filled with information from billions of heavy web connections. Past the hologram ads as big as houses dancing in the sky, past the skyscrapers and the malls and the private parks. See the apartment complexes, sprawling gray-and-bro
wn square boxes, an urban growth whose ugliness the neon holograms can’t fully cover from view.
On display, Kevin’s apartment: one cubicle, with walls made of some modern material slightly sturdier than paper. Lights are bright white, even at night, like a hospital’s. The place smells of sweat, old cheese, and fast food. The unkempt bed occupies almost half of the space; a small fridge takes a chunk of the rest. One heater from his father’s place, one overflowing trashcan, one bathroom separated from the bedroom by a plastic curtain, so small the WC and the shower are built in front of each other. And one plastic ‘party’ desk with a dusty LCD screen on top.
Finally, Kevin. Sitting in front of the monitor, his face glowing from the shine of the screen on his greasy skin. His weight supported by a plastic chair that barely manages to contain his ass and somehow manages to endure years of strain. An underpaid engineer somewhere in Seoul deserves a promotion for that.
Everything is second-hand, except the CPU that lies on the floor underneath the desk. The CPU is top of the line. The liquid coolant inside oozes silently in its metallic micro-tubes. Its video card radiates heat like a small sun and makes the fat calves of Kevin warm and comfortable in the freezing nights of New Shenyang.
During the day, Kevin ate synthetic noodles and pizza that tasted like cardboard. He works from his computer. He only has to get up to pick food that gets delivered to his door, to go to the bathroom, and to sleep until deep into the morning. For him, days pass like a blur, yet the present is always too long.
His life is simple. No girlfriend. Parents live in the countryside, too far to visit except in holidays. No friends. No nightlife. Kevin is overweight, yet malnourished at the same time. A virgin who has not talked to a girl since college and those girls stood on the other side of a screen, because in New Shenyang college is online, as is everything he ever needed.
Kevin knows all of this. He suspects he will die alone in front of his screen. With the only achievement he has being a bunch of forums he moderates in his free time.
Kevin doesn’t mind. The dark, slightly mustard-tinted sky of New Shenyang is not the only sky. There is another.
One with blue sky, and green grass, and mighty cities with pavement of white stone. Where the ads don’t dance and fight over the skyscrapers and there are no lanes that extend over the horizon, filled with automated cars. There is no wardrobe to reach Ansuz. Only his monthly subscription paid automatically from his meager bank account.
Next to the monitor, the mindjack awaits. Like the CPU, it’s the last model, the bleeding edge pumped out by some corporation with a name of only two syllables. Unlike the other gadgets you can buy, the mindjack is not sleek and fragile, but heavy and sturdy. A plastic-and-steel crown designed to resemble the proportions of a sports car, with a long black lens big enough to cover half of Kevin’s face. A cable connects it to the CPU, because the speed of the wireless modem is not enough, even now, to support the colossal amount of data the ‘jack sends and receives. And it helps with lag.
Kevin puts on the mindjack with slow movements, almost reverent. Familiar darkness covers his eyes. He reclines on his chair. The device senses movement and starts up, with a slight vibration and the spin of the delicate machinery inside. A white panorama displays itself all over Kevin’s field of view, and then his wallpaper finishes loading one second after it. He makes a little gesture with his finger and the colorful icons fly by and stop exactly where he is looking.
The game’s name is “The Dream of Ansuz”. It fills an entire memory-cube, and tops Kevin’s bandwidth limit, but it’s worth it. He clicks on the icon and the mindjack takes a second to run the software. Then Kevin feels the buzz of the micro scans against his temple. And then he can feel the static on his hair, and then…
Then Kevin is gone.
Ansuz. The city of Gulaz Anh, glittering in the night, its spires reaching high up into the night sky. Filled with stars and the twin moons, called The Eyes of the Night, were bright and the landscape shone with mist-like moonlight. The air was warm and smelled of summer flowers, and grass, and magic that flowed down from the Arcane College, atop the nearby mountain, like an invisible river.
Kastor Rivan woke up from his brief sleep. His room at the inn was one floor on top of the street. Below, he could hear the chirping of the cicadas and the warm chatter of nightlife in the center of Gulaz Anh. He smiled to no one in particular and got out of his comfortable bed. He loved the city, with its songs and dances; carnivals, and parks. He was leaving it soon.
“There are just three days left before the trip to Tikenda,” he thought, “and then it will be days and days of travel in the tropical jungles. Hot days, rainy nights and monsters at every step of the way.” He and the rest of the adventurers would go straight to the heart of the rainforest until they found the lost Dungeon of Julgernon, the fabled crypt of the last Emperor of a long lost dynasty.
Kastor lived for the adventure, the Dungeon call felt to him like a fire in his veins. But until the caravan left why not enjoy another fire, the inviting allure of civilization?
He put on a scarlet dress shirt over his muscular olive-skinned body, covered with scars and old battle wounds. Then his black leather trousers and boots. He could leave the armor inside the Inn since the city was a Peaceful Zone, but he took his sword with him. Without its weight at his side, he felt naked. He passed a hand over his long auburn hair and tied it in a loose knot, then went outside.
The inn was just front of the center square of the city: a park with exotic and carefully maintained gardens. If you were to look at them from above, you would realize they formed the Rune of Tranquility. Courtesy of the Arcane College, whose members sometimes worked as architects to finance their adventuring expeditions.
Kastor walked slowly in the polished stone road of the park, letting the soft magic of the place pass all over him, and through him. Couples sat on benches of steel and copper. You could find in the streets humans and elves, dwarfs, byrdens and reptilkin. Kastor even saw one golem who held hands with a young magician in a bench nearby.
It was good, he thought. Life in the city. Maybe one day he could try and settle down for a couple of years. Work a craft. But now… how could he leave his adventuring group? They would get destroyed without him to parry the attacks of their enemies. Tandria was a warlock and Mikel was a rogue, they knew how to flank a monster or turn it into stone, not to charge head-first into the fray, raining blows upon them.
And so many sights yet to see! Ansuz was ancient and full of secrets, and sometimes it felt to him like it was secretly growing bigger: He heard of new cities almost every month; and the year before, a new continent was discovered. With his friends, he planned to explore it soon, when they got the adequate gear for the dangerous trip.
There was a reptilkin Shopkeeper near a pond, selling refreshments. Kastor was a bit thirsty, so he went to him, checking his purse for some spare change. When he came near, the Shopkeeper’s expression lighted up just like they always did when an adventurer came near.
“I greet you, master Kastor Rivan. I sell refreshments. Would you like to take a look at my wares?” He said in his almost inflectionless voice.
“No, just give me a beer,” ordered Kastor. The Vendor took out a small wooden mug from a small box at his feet and gave it to him after the adventurer paid with a couple of copper coins.
He drank it with eagerness. The beer was cold, at the perfect temperature, just like every drink sold by the Vendors. It was a local brew, light and with a hint of citrus, but not enough to be overbearing. Even potions were spiced with perfect taste when bought from a Shopkeeper. When compared to the mud-like concoctions Tandria cooked from herbs found in the road, they were a real treat instead of emergency medicine.
Kastor stepped away from the man and sipped his beer by the pond. The water looked like a silver mirror under the Eyes of the Night, and he saw himself reflected on it… No, that wasn’t true. For a second, Kastor thought that someone else’s face took
the place of his own, a pale middle-aged man with unkempt facial hair, and fat, like the shopkeepers of central cities of the Realm. But no, a blink and he saw himself as always, square jaw, auburn hair, and deep green eyes.
“Perhaps an illusionist is nearby,” he thought, “that or there’s a spell in the pond itself.” He paid it no mind.
Most of the other adventurers nearby had fallen asleep on the benches of the park. Some would remain there for a couple of days, resting, until they suddenly jerked back to life. Kastor preferred the Inn for those long rests.
Nights and days were short on Ansuz. The sun would rise in less than an hour, and the night sky was already coloring a deep purple, fighting back the black. Kastor thought of returning to the Inn. See if Tandria or Mikel had woken up from their sleep; then the screaming started.
Kastor turned towards the alley at a corner of the park. A faint scream, but he had been an adventurer for years, and he had a trained ear. He threw out the empty mug and started running.
Gulaz Anh was a Peaceful Zone. Neither violence nor danger could attack the adventurers inside its walls. You could have duels, of course, but those happened in special buildings and you had to be willing.
Still, he had heard a scream.
He sprinted at full speed, not even breaking a sweat. He left the park behind. He had heard no more noise since those few, panicked yells. If it was the same illusionist from before, the fat trickster by the pond, he better be willing to duel him, Kastor decided. He stepped into the alley. Instinct made him try to draw his sword, but he couldn’t do that inside a Peaceful Zone. Instead, he balled his hands into fists —not that it would help either; and called out:
“Who lives? Is everything right?”
Silence. No, something that wanted to sound like silence, but couldn’t quite manage it. An ambush? Kastor had run into a few of those in his career, but never inside a city. Perhaps it was a mistake. Sometimes the spells that set the rules of cities and some wilderness temples, failed briefly or missed a monster. Tandria had explained all to him once, but he didn’t quite get it. Kastor was no mage. He knew he should be fine, but he moved cautiously anyways, ready for anything.
