by David Nell
In an upper corner of the bathroom is a small window. I pop it open, put one foot on the tub to try to climb out of it. Somehow I squeeze out and stumble down into the backyard. I hear voices from inside the house. Perched against the outer wall I hear one of them entering the bathroom.
Footsteps come closer to the window. Before he can get a chance to peek out, I start running.
"There," he yells out.
I run down the slope leading to the city. A quick glance back reveals two black shapes getting out of Vera's house and into a black car. The engine revs.
"Get a cab to meet us somewhere," I gasp through ragged breath. Descartes acknowledges.
Over a hedge fence and into someone else's backyard. I hear the car swerve in the street.
"Scratch that," I say. "We're going by subway. Crowds. Witnesses."
Descartes maps out the fastest route to a subway station, slaps it in a corner of my eye.
I rush through the backyard, careful not to wake anybody up. Past the garage, over the driveway and out on the street on the other side. Two yellow circles sweep the ground then the car surges out the corner, turning my way.
Sunny Hills station is two blocks north, near a public school. I run across the street. My left foot catches on the curb and I trip. Flat on my face. The car edges closer. I push myself up, break into a run. I can feel light on my back.
My elbows are skinned. God how it burns. Warm blood drips down my chin.
I take a sharp right turn, jump over another house's fence. My predator drives further down then makes a right, too. The engine's too silent. It whispers. Nobody will be awake to hear the car run me over.
This yard has a pool. It's empty now. An open mouth. I circle round it, then over the fence and into another row of streetlamp blue.
"One row to go," Descartes says.
I remember to take deep breaths. Haven't used my muscles in so long it feels like tendon will rip from bone any minute now. Each step hurts, but I run, adrenaline numbing the pain away.
Again the lights, followed by the car. It comes from my left.
I burn with strength. Across the street, I swing myself over another fence, through a yard. A dog growls, barks out loud, but I'm out of there before it leaves the kennel.
There it is. To my right the ground opens up, stairs leading down to Sunny Hills station. I take five steps at a time down into the stale air of the subway tunnels.
I hear the car pull over. Two doors open and are quickly slammed shut.
The station's pristine. I guess the rich never take the train so there's nobody to filthy up the place.
A booming voice announces a train's about the leave. I go through the turnstile, Descartes exchanges bank account info and it charges me for the ride. Down some more stairs. A pocket of hot air hits me right in the face.
The train's slick silver doors are closing.
"Hold it," I yell out to a middle-aged woman inside the train.
She springs up, waves her hand before the door's sensor. Two big steps and I slide in just in time. I can't believe my luck.
The train starts rolling. A soft voice announces the name of the station next in line.
My heart's about to spring out of my chest.
Two black suits run down the stairs, but then the train picks up speed and Sunny Hills station becomes a blur.
All I see through the windows now is my bloodied reflection and corny ads on the tunnel walls.
Scratching a Save the Planet decal off the pole absent-mindedly, I try to put things in perspective. Could the ones chasing me be responsible for Miranda Holly's death? If so, how are they responsible for it?
The motherly voice from the speaker says the name of the station in different languages. It's my stop.
People on handles lean sideways as the train decelerates. It grinds to a halt and they straighten up. The doors swing open. A big portion shuffles out. I remain inside.
It's no stretch to assume the assholes know my address. It'd be wiser to stay away awhile. Lay low someplace until I figure out what's what.
I ride almost to the end of the route. On the penultimate station I get off. It looks desolate, depressing. Paper bags strewn over the floor, walls graffitied, thrash cans full to the brim. I climb up the stairs, hoping for fresh air.
The neighborhood is rough but I have a friend here. More of an acquaintance really. I've helped him out of deep shit once and I know he knows he owes me.
Blood has caked in my nostrils, its metallic smell going wherever I go.
Up the stairs and onto the street. There's no blue street light here. No houses, no backyards, no pools either. Only brown, bricked buildings row after row in a grid of poverty.
I walk the sidewalk in silence. I'm tired, muscles burning, in dire need for sleep.
The sun's about to come out. In the distance I can see its first rays glimmer on skyscrapers.
Miranda wasn't insane. She didn't suffer a worse than usual bout of depression and melted her brain. Something drove her to suicide. Perhaps those two assholes might know more about that.
I turn into a bleak side street. There's a Styrofoam cup with a grinning rooster giving the thumbs up discarded on the tarmac, one side of it melted away by scorching daylight. I kick it and it rolls in a semicircle.
A grip on my shoulder from behind. I'm spun around.
"Hello." Black suit and tie. Neatly trimmed beard. A perfect smile, dimples in his cheeks.
"You," I gasp.
He lifts his other arm, sprays my face.
I stagger, fall back. Someone catches me from behind.
I lie on the ground, gazing at the blue black sky. Two blurry faces lean over me.
Everything goes dark.
Two smears appear, quickly coming into focus. The shapes move. One approaches me. Blinding light flashes from my left, then from my right side. I squeeze my eyes shut, try to remember where I am.
"This'll wake you up."
A little prick on my shoulder. A cold sensation spreads from it to the rest of my body. Excitement runs through my veins, my heart pumps harder, jolting me out of stupor.
I'm tilted back in a comfortable padded recliner. My legs are stretched out but tied at the feet with plastic straps. My arms are velcroed to the armrests. A brown seatbelt is fastened around my torso and the chair's back to insure complete immobility.
"The fuck is this?"
One of the two men is leaning against a cabinet, arms crossed, his face showing unmistakable signs of fatigue.
"It's for our protection," he says.
The other is going through a box of stuff and I see him replacing a flashlight and putting the box in the lowest drawer of the cabinet.
"You bugged my system," I tell him.
"We had to. Sorry." He's not smiling anymore. Nor is he in grimy olive overalls.
The room is small and sterile. Feels like they emptied someone's office on a short notice to make space for me.
"What you gonna do now, torture me?"
Both of them cringe.
"Nobody's gonna torture anybody," says the bastard who corrupted my systems. Well at least this explains how he paid for that dentist.
They both seem unwilling to talk much, as if they're waiting for something. Or someone. Maybe an order for how to dispense with me.
I realize now why I haven't been able to dig out any new info all this time. Ever since that fake repair job the networks were turned against me, preventing me from finding clues. I remember the VR glitches with Jessica Bates. They must've tampered with the interview. Filtered her answers.
"What the hell is going on here?" I holler out. Waiting is driving me insane. I jerk my hands up and down. The straps hold out.
My repairman leans over me, looks me in the eyes.
"This is not what you think. You're not a hostage." There's genuine regret in his eyes.
"Oh sorry, I suppose I must've sprayed myself with narcotics, dragged my own ass over here and strapped myself to this c
hair. Yeah, I'm no hostage."
I spit in his face. "You can shove that condescending tone up your ass."
He wipes it, straightens up and goes back to his friend with arms crossed.
The door swings open and a much shorter and plumper man walks in. He nods at my two kidnappers. He places a briefcase on the table next to me, opens it with a click.
"We'll need to examine you for dangerous technology," he says. "We don't want you to go ballistic on our asses." He laughs, the tufts of hair that still remain on his balding head bob up and down.
He pulls a lamp out of the briefcase, puts it on one of the armrests. A bunch of cables go out of it and into his briefcase, which I now realize has an embedded computer.
"You couldn't do this while I was out?"
The one leaning on the cabinet says, "That would be illegal. We wanted you awake for everything so you couldn't claim before a judge that your well-being was in any way endangered."
The lamp shoots squares of light at different parts of my body and its operator mumbles to himself, peering in his briefcase.
"Trust me, if I go before a judge I think I might mention the kidnapping first." I tug at the restrains again.
"That's for your and the public's safety. Besides, we wanted to politely invite you in but you ran away. We though you'd developed some crazy conspiracy crap."
The lamp stops flashing. Shorty tells them I'm clean, folds his lamp, replaces it, shuts his briefcase and strolls out the door.
"Okay then," says my fake repairman, "let's untie you and take you to him. He'll explain everything."
We're walking along a small corridor. Both men accompany me. There are no restraints. No handcuffs. They know I can't run away. They know I no longer want to. My curiosity piqued, I'm not even considering escape.
The corridor's crooked, gently sloping downwards.
There's no echo. Our footsteps sound muffled. We don't talk. I cast occasional sidelong glances at them but their faces are blank, telling me nothing.
The corridor ends with an elevator. The chromium doors part, revealing two soldiers inside.
We step in.
My stomach turns over itself. I try to count out the seconds to gauge how deep underground we're going but I quickly lose track.
We step out into a carpeted hallway flanked by office doors. Ferns grow out of pots. The walls are painted white. There's a water dispenser, too.
One of my captors knocks on a door.
"Come in." A faint voice from inside.
A carousel of holographs swirls in the center of the room. He's standing in the middle of it, orchestrating their movement. He punches the air and a smoky string of numbers disappears. Drags his hand across and two separate sets of decimals merge. The halo of numbers shines bright; they permutate, tumble through the air like moths.
I realize I've seen this man before. Not in the flesh but in my workroom. I've seen his narrow face and messy hair hanging there like his own projections do now.
He drops his hands. Obeying his movement, the holograms die down.
He walks up to me, hand outstretched.
"Hi," he says. "Peter Casey. Welcome to Paradise City headquarters."
He gestures at a swivelling chair. Reluctantly, I sit down.
"You may leave us alone," he says, and my captors obey, filing out of the room.
His face is like an inverted triangle, prominent forehead but barely any room for his mouth. He's thin, frail, hair in desperate need of a comb. Unlike his employees he's not wearing a suit or tie or any formal attire whatsoever, but a black and white checkered wool vest and a plain white shit underneath it, its open collar slightly askew.
He looks like a cartoon character.
"Coffee?"
"Please."
He puts a plastic cup under the espresso machine's nozzle, switches it on.
"I suppose you'd like to learn what's happed to Mrs. Holly?"
"It's what I'm paid for," I say.
He chuckles, sits down on a chair a bit taller than mine.
The machine hums for a moment, then fills my cup up with delicious black coffee, drop by drop.
"You think there's foul play here, don't you? I can see it in your eyes." He leans over his desk, peers into my face. "Afraid you'll be disappointed when you learn the truth."
He scoops up my cup, puts it on the desk before me and places another one under the nozzle.
"Let me be the judge of that," I say, breathing in the beautiful aroma. I take a sip, burning the roof of my mouth. The bitter taste loosens me up and I make myself comfortable in my chair.
He gets his cup. Takes a sip.
His fingers form a steeple. A few dots pop out of nowhere. More numbers. He follows their dance with his gaze. We sit in silence a while and I get the impression he's waiting for me to start asking questions.
"So tell me," I say, "what did Miranda Holly do for this company exactly?"
He snaps his fingers and the numbers blink out of existence.
"She was a programmer." He's absent-minded. I can't shake off the feeling that I'm conversing with someone who isn't exactly here.
"I know that," I say. "But she stumbled onto something here, didn't she?"
He claps his hands. A bunch of documents materialize before us.
"You see, when I first began work on Paradise City I got all sorts of lunatics on the phone demanding they be let in. To be the first of the Immortals would be a privilege and a middle finger to the other rich bastards that didn't make the first cut. In effect, that's how we financed the project in the first place. Upfront investment by twenty rich businessmen with a fear of death to make you wonder about the kind of lives they've led," he says, watching the floating images.
"One of the preconditions on my part was that they sign a waver allowing me to conduct scientific research with their uploaded minds. Nothing compromising, obviously, but research nonetheless, with the goal of furthering the field."
He pushes his palm and the documents float my way. I ping Descartes to read them to me but he's not responding – they must've switched him off. My eyes glaze over the contract, and despite the thick legalese I see that what Peter Casey's saying is true.
"Okay, but what has this to do with Miranda Holly?"
He snaps his fingers again and the documents are replaced by rectangular floating screens, windows into other worlds.
In one a person's lounging in a hammock, drinking cocktails. The one next to it opens up to a bright blue sky and a man riding a dragon amidst clouds. Yet another shows a family, chatting idly over dinner.
"This is Paradise City," I gasp as I realize I'm spying on the first human minds residing entirely inside computers.
"Paradise Cities," he corrects me calmly. "The original software has been bought and is currently running on other supercomputers too: two in Europe, two in China, one in Japan."
He takes another sip of his coffee. "What Miranda Holly worked on was an update of the graphics engine. What she discovered were functions in the code pertaining to my research. She figured the program was malicious, that the poor residents aren't safe. She contacted her supervisor who in turn contacted us. We then brought her in for a chat."
He rubs his forehead with two fingers.
"I showed her the contracts and documents to prove what we're doing is legal, but she wanted to know more. She swore she'd go public unless I explain the experiments behind what she referred to as 'mind-mangling program code'," he says. "So I did. I showed her my experiments."
He pokes the air with his fingers and the Paradise City windows collect to one side, making room for an emergent fog of numbers.
"When we dealt with the first upload we applied a compression algorithm to groups of neurons, effectively porting them to computer chips. We're not simulating every single neuron and glial cell separately but abstracting the way they behave through simple mathematics. Action potential, chemical build-up within the cytoplasm, synaptic firings and all that biology is tu
rned to numbers which represent it."
I try to follow his words, nodding apprehensively.
"There's nothing more obvious that this," he says, and pauses to drain the last drops of coffee into his mouth.
A swing of the arm and a cloud of numbers forms between the two of us. All windows to the different instances of Paradise City dissolve but one – a couple frolicking in the grass beneath an oak tree.
"What you see here," he says, pointing at the cloud, "is what you see here." He points at the window depicting the couple at sunset.
Buzzing like flies, the numbers are a constant blur of ones and zeros, changing according to the actions of the simulation they represent.
I ask, naively, "Is that...the code to Paradise City?"
His thin lips stretch into a smile. "It's a numeric representation, yes."
Taking a deep breath, he says, "Now, I've always wanted to hold the world in my hands, test out a few hypotheses I've held since childhood. And the Paradise City framework is built with that in mind – a perfect simulation of our world down to the quantum level, to be manipulated as desired."
"What hypotheses?" His words and manner of speaking do nothing to abate my first impression of him as a deranged person draped in a lab coat.
"Observe," he says.
Peter does a weird finger gesture and the numbers come into focus. Over the rim of my paper cup I see they're no longer in motion. The screen into Paradise City is now a picture.
"Let's review the last five minutes of simulation." Like with an old videotape he rewinds the movements of the two residents, and I see them get up from the grass, the man sit back down on a stool, pick his paint-brush up, the woman peer at the canvas he's painting on, rub his shoulders, then depart from the scene altogether, leaving him all alone with the landscape.
The numbers are also changing, I suspect backtracking into the previous states of the simulation.
This makes me uncomfortable. I fidget in my seat. "Can they feel that?"
He ignores my question.
"Understand that I can't rewind too far back – keeping all passed states in memory would require a storage device the size of the Earth. Instead, Paradise City's been programmed to keep a finite number of states in memory, something which would translate to roughly five minutes of our own time."
