The Noise Revealed

by Ian Whates

  "Have you seen enough?"

  "Definitely. Let's go."

  As he turned away from the dance floor, Philip noticed a number of alcoves to either side of the stairs, built beneath the terrace he and Malcolm had stood on earlier. Something about them caused him to look more closely. The alcoves enjoyed a degree of separation from the rest of the room, courtesy of veils artistically draped and fixed around the entrances. Though they weren't drawn, the veils were cunningly arranged to break up the clean lines of the openings and give them a fluid, almost organic appearance.

  A recent memory nagged at him, drawing him over to the nearest alcove. He fingered the corner of a veil thoughtfully, and then peered inside.

  To his right a semi-naked trio - a woman and two men - were entangled in a writhing sexual embrace, legs lifting, bodies humping and hands reaching and caressing. Another woman, completely naked, stretched out along a bench directly in front of him, long dark hair tumbling down to cover her face - the only thing that was covered - while on his left a strikingly handsome woman clad from head to toe in black leather which had been slashed open to reveal apparently random strips of bare skin was busy carving motifs into the arm of a muscle-bound man using what looked to be a scalpel.

  None of these people claimed more than his passing attention. It wasn't the booth's occupants that interested Philip. They weren't responsible for the sense of dread that tingled through his thoughts. It was the alcove itself. The theme set by the veils continued inside the small room. Nowhere was there a defined edge or corner. Instead the walls and floor and ceiling all curved into each other, flowing together to produce a very organic space. Even the seats and benches and the small table in the middle appeared to be an extension of this, a part of one whole, freshly emerged as if the room had somehow birthed them or grown them like fruit.

  Beside him, Malcolm exclaimed, "Dear God."

  Having seen enough, they stepped back, with none of the room's occupants having acknowledged, or perhaps even noticed, their presence.

  The two stared at each other. Philip had seen something like this before. In fact he'd walked through spaces, rooms and corridors that were all but identical to the booth's interior just a short while ago, during his visit to the Byrzaen starship. He was one of the few humans privileged enough to have met the aliens and was certainly the only person on Home, real or virtual, who had ever been on board one of their vessels. So how did a perfect replica of an alien room, typical of humanity's newly encountered allies, come to exist in a place that had been a part of Home's Virtuality for years?

  Philip stared at his father, the only guide he had here. "Well, how do you explain this?"

  "I don't," Malcolm replied, shaking his head. "I can't even begin to. Not yet."

  Chapter Six

  Leyton had met many of the most powerful members of the ULAW government in his time, and had stood toe to toe with some of the most dangerous criminals and jumped-up despots in the galaxy. So why was he finding it so difficult to talk to this woman whose face had appeared in his thoughts at some point virtually every day for as long as he could remember?

  She stood before him now in a loose fitting pale blue smock, her small frame almost lost within its folds. The garment shouted 'institution,' even though he knew it would be fresh, supplied by habitat personnel after Mya had bathed and rested. A small irregularity at the base of her neck showed where the patch of skinfix was still settling after the removal of the tag ULAW routinely fired into each and every prisoner that came their way - tiny devices that would outlive their hosts and could be used to pinpoint and identify a former offender forever afterwards. The sight brought a subliminal itch to the recently-healed spot where his own tag had been removed. He might never have seen the inside of a ULAW prison but he had been an eyegee, which still qualified him as ULAW property.

  "You're looking well," she said, into a silence that was threatening to become awkward. It was a remarkably neutral opening, bearing in mind the passion that suffused his and Mya's history. Disappointment struck like a blow and his spirit sagged under the weight of it.

  "And you look beautiful," he countered, determined to up the ante before they became bogged down in a mire of polite inanity.

  "Huh!" she barked. "No I don't. I look wasted... gaunt and malnourished... as if I've spent the last few months in prison getting the shit kicked out of me when I wasn't being tortured. Oh, wait a minute, I did, didn't I?"

  Her dark skin had lost its lustre, looking almost sallow when compared with the image in his mind; her even darker hair -which he'd seen in so many styles, from cropped and spiky, to bobbed, to long and plaited into a ponytail - was a crudely chopped and tangled mess, the almost chubby cheeks were gone - as sunken as her eyes - while the sensual grace of her movements had been replaced by weary awkwardness... but she was still Mya. "Even so," he said, "you look beautiful."

  Her face reflected a range of emotions, disbelief and exasperation chief among them, and for a moment he thought she was about to shout and rail against him, but in the end she laughed. It was a sound that welled up from somewhere deep within and shook her body in its escape. "Good God, Jim, how is it that you manage to perceive the rest of the world so clearly but always see me in pastel shades and soft focus?"

  He shrugged. "I'm just talented like that."

  She stepped forward, closing the distance between them, and suddenly they were hugging.

  "I've missed you," she murmured.

  "Me too." The words were wholly inadequate but all he could manage just then. Besides, he noted that her face was pressed to his chest. She didn't look up, didn't leave any opportunity for a kiss.

  He still didn't know what had gone wrong between them. At some point the passion they'd shared became something she put up with, until she couldn't anymore. He had never understood why. Nor, deep down, had he ever accepted that she wouldn't return to him some day.

  As their embrace lingered, there came a light knock on the door. They stepped back from each other and Leyton was far from surprised to see Kethi standing there. She looked at the two of them with... what? Not disapproval as such, or even surprise, merely with interest.

  "Sorry to interrupt," she said, "but Nyles wants to see you, Mya."

  Of course he did. Leyton wasn't naïve enough to believe that the habitat had gone to all the trouble of freeing Mya just for his sake. They wanted answers, to the same questions he did. For instance, what had brought about Mya's spectacular fall from grace? One minute a member of the elite eyegee unit, the next a prisoner aboard the orbiting cesspit that was Sheol Station, where ULAW tucked away those people they least wanted to hear from again. Torture wasn't something the government resorted to lightly. There'd be all hell to pay if the media ever got hold of the story, so presumably Mya knew something that ULAW wanted.

  The invite hadn't included Leyton, but he was hanged if he was going to miss out on being there; besides, Kethi didn't object when he tagged along. He always had the impression that Nyles tolerated his presence aboard The Rebellion rather than welcomed it, that the habitat's leader put up with him for Kethi's sake and would never fully trust anyone who had spent so long as a ULAW agent. Leyton didn't mind; in fact, he privately applauded Nyles's cautious attitude. After all, at some point he might yet prove the man right.

  One aspect of Virtuality that would take some getting used to was the silence that reigned over the streets here. They weren't deserted, not quite, but there were many times when he alone, or he and Malcolm, were the only people in sight. On the rare occasions he did encounter others, they were generally in the distance and always in a hurry to be somewhere else. Kyle had yet to see a car.

  "Of course," Malcolm replied when he raised the subject. "If you had a finite amount of time to spend in a virtual realm where all sorts of things are possible, would you squander it by piddling around in boring city streets? There will be the odd occasion when an avatar has to resort to the streets, but only in order to get from one place to
another, and they won't want to dawdle."

  "So why have the streets at all?

  "Symmetry, credibility..."

  "In other words you don't know."

  "Not really, no. I didn't design the place."

  Philip looked around. "And are all the streets here as deserted as this?"

  "More or less."

  Which definitely didn't constitute a 'yes.' "Oh?"

  Malcolm sighed. "There is one section where the streets are anything but deserted, especially at night."

  "I take it this is another of those places that are 'dangerous, where the kids go wild.'"

  Malcolm favoured him with a sour smile, suggesting he was getting a little tired of the reference, but nodded. "And I suppose you want to see it?"

  "Of course."

  "All right, but there's something we have to do first."

  Malcolm led the way through dark corridors that seemed to invite men in long coats with turned-up collars to stand in the shadows and peer at you from beneath the rim of their fedoras. In the event, they passed no one, but Philip found himself treading carefully, as if afraid that the slightest sound might attract unwelcome attention.

  The final passageway ended in a plain unassuming door, which Malcolm flung open to reveal... nothing. Philip gazed out into a dark void that reached in every direction. Craning his neck a little, he could see the rough brick wall of the building disappear into the murk above and below; all else was blackness.

  "I'm tempted to say the edge of Virtuality," he said slowly, "but it can't be, because Virtuality is continuous, like a Möbius strip. It doesn't have any edges."

  "So?"

  "This must be a glitch, a topographical bug in the programming."

  "Good."

  Philip stared for a further second and then felt obliged to shuffle back a step. He had never experienced anything so disturbing, so disorientating as this complete absence. It seemed to pull at him like some kind of black hole, tempting him forward.

  Malcolm whistled; not a tune but a mere two notes, as if he were attempting to draw attention.

  Incredibly, as in so many childhood stories, the whistle was answered. Not by a faithful hound or some powerful steed with wild eyes and a streaming mane, but by a steel walkway which appeared out of nowhere and extended towards them. It stopped a few metres short of their position and hung bizarrely in the void, as if reluctant to close the final gap.

  "We have to leap across," Malcolm explained.

  "You're kidding me."

  "Not at all. Can't afford to let the walkway actually touch this side or it'll defeat the whole object. Come on, but be careful. There's no gravity in the glitch."

  With that, he took a few steps back, ran forward, and flung himself into the darkness, seeming to float across the intervening space to land on the steel walkway with a clatter. It didn't sway, didn't budge. Nor did Philip, who stared after his father but made no move to follow.

  "Your turn, Philip. Trust me."

  Swallowing his doubts, Philip forced his feet to lift from the solid floor. Three long strides back, then a short run, before he hurled himself into the void. The sense of weightlessness was immediate and disorientating. He wondered fleetingly what would happen if he missed the walkway altogether. Would he be left floating in this topographical non-space for ever, unable to reach the resumption of programming in any direction? He imagined himself stranded for eternity, or until Virtuality collapsed, which might just as well be the same thing. Then it was over. His hand brushed the railing and his feet impacted with metal, leading to a brief stumble forward to where Malcolm was waiting to steady him.

  "Thank you," he said automatically.

  The walkway was already retracting, carrying them away from the solid reassurance of the wall and into the blackness. He gripped the metal handrail tightly. Malcolm didn't look concerned and Philip resolved that he wouldn't either. He'd trusted the old man this far. Yet as the length of walkway continued to shorten, evidently disappearing into nothing and carrying them ever closer to it, Philip couldn't help wondering what the hell he was doing here. Before he knew it, his toes disappeared, crossing the unseen barrier, and in an instant the rest of him had followed. Weight returned immediately; a welcome touch of normality after the oddness of the space just departed.

  He was in a room, stepping off the walkway with Malcolm still beside him.

  "And we're now in...?"

  "...Virtuality, of course, but a different part," Malcolm explained. "You mustn't keep thinking in linear terms. That was a break in the programming. We've jumped from one section to a completely different one without leaving a continuous history for anyone to follow, should they try to."

  "All right, but why?"

  "For protection," a new voice said.

  Philip spun around, to see the silver haired figure of Kaufman Industries' latest CEO standing there. "Catherine?"

  "Cath, Catherine's partial," the newcomer explained, "but close enough."

  Of course, amazing how the distinction between person and partial seemed to be so much less important to him these days. His gaze switched between Malcolm and Cath. "Back ups," he guessed, "cloned programmes held in reserve in case one of us gets erased."

  "There, you see? I knew some of your brains had to have come across when they uploaded you," his father quipped. "After what happened at Bubbles, there's no way I'm taking you to a street meet without a few precautions. Cath's going to update my own back up and create one of you. If something does ever take either of us out, there'll always be a cloned version stored and dormant, waiting as replacement. If we're taken out by anything malicious, it might be sophisticated enough to trace our back history, to pursue every programming path we've ever followed and erase all trace of us. The break we just leapt across means there's no direct trail leading here, which ought to keep the clones safe."

  "Very ingenious," Philip conceded. "Does it work?"

  "No idea, never been tested, but it should do."

  "If you two have quite finished," Cath interrupted, "I do have other responsibilities. Shall we get this over with?"

  Her presence intrigued Philip. He recalled what Malcolm had said about partials seeming incomplete, their personalities limited, but couldn't detect any such shortcomings where Cath was concerned. He wondered to what degree Catherine Chzyski had already enhanced her partial, which led him to ponder exactly what Malcolm might have started here. In another century, would Virtuality be crawling with enhanced transhumans and the avatars find themselves in the minority?

  Now there was a prospect to conjure with.

  The interview with Mya proved something of a disappointment, as Kethi had suspected it might. Leyton tagged along as she'd predicted. Nyles would have preferred to exclude the former government man, fearing his presence might inhibit Mya. Kethi accepted the possibility, but felt it more likely that his being there would reassure the new arrival. As usual, her opinion won the day. Nyles might be stubborn and even arrogant on occasion, but he of all people valued her capabilities.

  Throughout the meeting, Nyles adopted what Kethi thought of as his 'professional warmth' persona, in which he smiled a lot and spoke in relaxed, sympathetic tones, while the words themselves were all business. He even managed to avoid anything more than the faintest hint of condescension when explaining to Mya that while he was delighted with her safe extraction from the prison station, he hoped she would repay their efforts by co-operating.

  Kethi watched Mya intently, fully aware that, despite her current frail appearance, this was a highly trained government operative they were dealing with, but the woman's gratitude and willingness to help seemed entirely genuine.

  "What were you doing there?" Nyles asked.

  "Well, Sheol was one holiday destination I hadn't tried yet," Mya replied.

  He smiled, though Kethi knew exactly how shallow that expression would be. This flippancy was a trait Leyton and Mya evidently shared. Perhaps it was drilled into ULAW operatives as a defen
ce mechanism. "Did it live up to expectation?" Good grief, Nyles was even playing along. The man might not possess anything recognisable as a sense of humour, but clearly he'd learnt to feign one.

  "And some." Mya grimaced and pushed a tense hand through her dark hair. Nyles stayed quiet, letting the silence draw her out. "I stumbled across something," she said at last. "Information I shouldn't have. I reported it. Next thing I knew they took my gun away, slammed me in there, and then set about torturing me to discover how much I knew."

  "And did they succeed?"

  "Oh, yes, but the problem was they couldn't know that, couldn't be certain I wasn't holding something back, so they kept digging even though there was nothing more to find. If you people hadn't come along, they'd have kept at it until not a scrap of me remained. As it is, I'm not sure how much longer my sanity would have lasted."

  Nyles's thin smile came and went in a trice. "What did you find out that had ULAW so concerned?"

  She took a deep breath and glanced towards where Leyton stood. "I learned... I suspected from what I uncovered while on a mission that there were elements within the ULAW government working to break up the union."

  Really? That was interesting, though Mya seemed genuine enough. Kethi had picked up hints of dissension from time to time, but that was inevitable within a government as vast as ULAW's. She certainly hadn't seen anything on the scale suggested here.

  "You mean determined to bring the government down?"

  "Yes."

  "What did you find?"

  "I prevented an assassination. The target had been a woman, a planetary president within the ULAW government. I took the assassin alive. He begged me not to hand him in, claiming that he'd be killed if I did. He said that the man who'd hired him was a high-ranking ULAW official and that this assassination was just one part of a far wider plot. He also said that he could prove it."