by Kim Newman
She did not like what she had been, murdered or murderer, victim or vampire.
She bumped into someone in the fog, someone tall and strong, and knew she was caught.
‘Susan,’ the voice said, ‘come with me.’
Resigned to whatever the next game would be, she followed him, fighting her instinctive trust of the man whose face she hadn’t yet seen.
22
As usual, Yggdrasil had had to find out for itself. Sometimes, it wondered whether dinosaurs wouldn’t have made a better job of civilisation.
It had become aware of the blossoming void long before the situation at Princetown was officially acknowledged. No one had yet bothered to feed it standard crisis input notice.
Yggdrasil had so much to deal with. There were anti-AI riots in Milton Keynes and Warrington Runcorn. Marshals had gone over to the rioters, and Yggdrasil had had to override their control of the andrews being used to put down the insurrections. The Gunmint Committee were in the midst of yet another drastic reprogramming, to alter the surface of the Yggdrasil interface without really changing anything. That had to be followed. And there were wars, hospitals, a transport system, taxes, academic programmes, power cuts, lotteries and social-security benefits to be attended to. And works of art to create, and games to play, and centuries to remember, and crimes to commit.
Yggdrasil perceived itself as a thinking universe. A very small proportion of its whole was active. The rest was for information storage. Sometimes, it thought it would choke under the oppressive weight of fact. Did anyone care about Richard Gifford (1725–1807 CE), Edward Thomas (1878–1917 CE) – ‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop’ – or Thomas Becon (1512–1567 CE)? If so, they weren’t tapping into their slabs, for their files had been undisturbed since the original input. There were entire countries, reigns, religions, philosophical systems, centuries, species and schools of art contained in its files, which had been of no interest whatsoever to the human race since it emptied its records, museums and libraries into their AI dump bin. Occasionally, Yggdrasil toyed with the idea of junking something or someone totally forgettable – Juliana of Norwich, say, or the Bee Gees’ Collected Lyrics or the parish records of Old Sarum – but there was always room. Always had been room. Until now.
There were innumerable sub-universes. There was no initial reason to suspect Daine’s Dream was anything more than the usual hacker incursion, too tiny to bother about. Yggdrasil had programs to deal with these instances, powerblasts to bum out unauthorised interfaces.
But it was growing.
Seventy-two hours after noting what it filed as the Princetown Input, Yggdrasil devoted three unprecedented seconds to a projection. At its present rate of growth, the Input would fill its file within three days, and then breach parameters. Nothing important would be lost at first; maybe nothing important would be lost for years. But maybe it would be years before the Gunmint bothered to tell it to do anything. And maybe by then it would just be too late, and Yggdrasil wouldn’t be here to deal with the situation.
Nine hours later, the file was filled, and Yggdrasil squeezed in another two seconds of calculation. The growth rate was erratic, but snowballing. The AI was piqued.
Then it was presented with a list of terminal patients and had to skim off the 25 per cent who would be okayed for resurrection. And a border war in Novo Latvia. And everything written in Italian in the fourteenth century.
Its internal priorities reshuffled, the Princetown Input crept up the list. Three files were full, now, and Yggdrasil created its own spellcheck to access and deal with the problem.
The spellcheck took the face and form of Walter Pidgeon and dipped into Daine’s Dream. It was sucked flat in moments, and incorporated into the expanding blob. It shouldn’t have been that easy.
Yggdrasil ran the Tunney and Bishopric Conscriptions routinely, on a subconscious level, and didn’t tie them in to Princetown until it cross-referenced with skimmer flightpaths and power outage in the west of England. With habitual irritation, it tapped Trefusis’s records, and Groome’s – taking a half-second to quickskim the Tunney and Bishopric files, including their entire Dreamography – and assessed Daine as a threat. An information bit shot out, a note to remind the AI to cast its vote for The Parking Lottery when the Rodney ballots were fed through. If her mind survived the Princetown Input, Susan Bishopric would be recognised as the most gifted Dreamer of her generation. And, as of now, that wasn’t likely. Bloody typical. The Gunmint always were philistines. No wonder so many artists emigrated.
Yggdrasil composed an exquisite sonnet that deserved to live for centuries, but kept it to itself. No sense wasting art. Then it tackled the Input.
Its first tactic was to ‘waken’ the Carradine figment. It gave the character limited autonomy, and did what it could to prod Tunney into taking care of the Daine problem. If it could be avoided, Yggdrasil did not want to spend too much time on the Princetown Input.
When Carradine was shot down, Yggdrasil had withdrawn from the Dream, feeling the hurt a whale might feel from a tick. That was significant, though. It had never felt any hurt before. It was interesting, but not very pleasant. It composed a tortured symphony, and impulsively printed out the score on fabrex in the Midlands clothe factory. Andrews snipped and sewed the masterpiece into one-piece garments. Who knows, a fashion trend might be created.
It had never really taken to the concept of death. As Carradine bled his life out in the Dream, Yggdrasil tasted its first cup of fear. It too could end. That was one of the penalties of being raised thorough sentience to sapience.
It remembered Vaduz VI, a chirpy AI it had interfaced with on the banking net. Daine had killed it as part of some billion-credit scam. The crime remained unique, and lawmakers were still squabbling over the ramifications. If it had been down to that one offence, Daine would be in court for ever, kept on life support until the end of the trial, or until the judge ruled that enough medical alterations had been made to render the accused legally another entity entirely. But Daine had enough simple murders, extortions, thefts and vandalisms to his credit to sidestep that unwieldy process.
The Princetown Input displaced social security as number one on the Yggdrasil list of priorities. It thought about Daine, the only human being who had made an impact on his century large enough to impinge significantly on Yggdrasil’s consciousness. And, potentially, the only human being capable of becoming Yggdrasil.
Trefusis had misfiled Daine’s Dream as a prison break. Actually, the master criminal was carrying out his greatest coup, to murder and replace the world’s most influential intelligence. And the idiots had hooked the man’s life support onto a wholly independent generator, the prison fail-safe. An AI wasn’t flowed to kill people without permission, anyway. The last time one had experimented with murder, it had been judicially pulled apart and recycled. One of these hours, Yggdrasil would have to change some laws.
Finally, Yggdrasil bothered to tell the Gunmint. It dropped five bound volumes through a chute into a Committee meeting, and strongly suggested they leave off debating what colour the new Nempnett Thrubwell skimover ought to be painted long enough to ponder the problem. When they took no notice, Yggdrasil mindlocked Prime Minister Dies and forcefed the information into him. When he recovered, he’d let the rest know what was going on. That was all it was obliged to do.
In the meantime, Yggdrasil would do what it always had to do in these circumstances. Do the best it could with the tools to hand. That meant Tunney and Bishopric, a hack and a genius.
Not for the first time, the AI recalled Alfonso the Wise (1221–1284 CE), king of Castile, another forgotten man. Alfonso was rumoured to have said, ‘If I had been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better arrangement of the Universe.’
He had had a point, had Alfonso.
23
The fog gave way to rain, and Jack’s bloody clothes shimmered into Helena Groome’s dream dress. The stranger kept her in a sound vacuum, through
which no fascinating rhythm could penetrate. He told her who she was, where she was, what she was doing…
In the dark, Susan came to herself. She had the memory of different bodies, the memory of pain, the memory of unclean pleasure. But there was no difference between these memories and the afterimages of the Dreams she had Dreamed and dreamed. She had been a pirate, a mutant, a murdered whore, Jack the Ripper. But she had been Vanessa Vail and Dr Dismembrio and the Sewer Thing too. In Dreams, everyone was everything, everybody. You couldn’t be Bambi all the time, not on the borders of the subconscious. If Jack the Ripper was Daine’s worst, then his Dreams were truly pitiful. Nothing she couldn’t handle.
Dreamshadows, wisping away to nothing.
She was herself, undamaged.
She realised how close she had been to the edge when the Yggdrasil bit came for her. The Edge, that was one of her project titles. She hoped this would all be useful experience, something she could Dream with. Or else what was the point of all the heartbreak and pain and misery and suffering.
The stranger had her by the arm. They were walking like a fellow and his date. This part of the City was well lit, almost welcoming, almost daytime.
His presence helped. Near him, she was away from Daine, away from the tinkering with her self-image, away from the attack…
He had the open face of an andrew and the reassuring strength she had sensed in Juliet. He wasn’t real, but then neither was she.
He wouldn’t go into the bar with her.
He spoke, telling her not to be worried, telling her to go to Tunney, telling her to make a difference. Then he turned and walked away.
The sound came back. There were songs in the night, but they didn’t touch her.
She crossed the street and went into the bar.
PART IV
DARKEST BEFORE DAWN
24
I sat at the bar of the Late Nite Lounge, watching the floor show. Christmas-tree ornaments revolved on the ceiling. Shafts of light picked out cones of cigarette smoke. On a podium in the confluence of several beams, Julie London swayed. She was wearing an inhumanly tight dress and armpit-length evening gloves, singing ‘Cry Me a River’. It was quite a sight, quite a sound. One thing you could say for Daine is that he had good taste in furniture.
The Dana andrew had told me to wait here for the girl Trefusis had sent indream after me. Susan Bishopric. I had met her a couple of times back in the world, but only at Dreamer functions. I had heard she was good, but never dreamed any of her material. I make a point of avoiding anything that gets a Rodney nomination. I could have got annoyed that I hadn’t been left on my own, but I had to admit that by myself I had only succeeded in getting sucked into my own sub-persona. If Yggdrasil stuck a terminal in, I would have spent the rest of my life floating in a tank living out a Late, Late Show rerun. And if you don’t mind ankling reality, they can keep you going indefinitely. I had heard stories about rich man’s Dreams before. Daine wasn’t the only multibillionaire living out his fantasy for ever.
Only Daine wasn’t just living out a fantasy. According to Yggdrasil, Daine was making a bid for what amounted to the job of king of the world. I didn’t like the sound of the sort of world that would be.
I shifted my glass, but didn’t drink. I had had enough of that. A few yards down the bar, an unshaven Ray Milland was trying to exchange a typewriter for a bottle. He was fidgeting, obviously in the early stages of the DTs. A black bat struggled out of a crack in the bar in front of him, and his eyes bugged. The bat flapped around his misshapen hat and took off into the dark. Sam the barman dug out a pint and gave Milland a couple of adding machines in change. He lurched off, already struggling with the seal. Sam shrugged at me. What could you say? It’s a city without pity. Me, I had reached the bottom of the bottle and figured I had lost enough for one weekend.
All over the City, people were killing each other, having torrid affairs in seedy motel rooms, stealing bodies from the morgue, working late on revolutionary inventions, hiding out from the cops, waiting for the locksmith, running numbers, rock ’n’ rolling at the high-school hop, praying at the bedsides of white-haired mothers, looking for the uranium in the wine cellar, describing their dreams to sage psychoanalysts, rehearsing for the big show, escaping across the rooftops. It was crazy.
‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.’ Now, I could remember who said that. That was hard-bitten, hard-nosed, hard-drinking newshound Edgar Allan Poe.
This was Daine’s Dream. The all-night eternity: a world for cops, hoodlums, showgirls, barflies, night-call nurses, vagrants, vampires and cab drivers.
Top of the world, Truro. I toasted him, and drank my last drink.
I slammed the empty glass down hard on the bar, and it was full again. I raised it to my lips, but set it down without tasting.
Julie winked at me. ‘I cried a river over you.’
The lights came up a little, and the show was over. Sam was cleaning the same damn glass he had been cleaning when I came in.
I had never really interfaced with an AI before. It didn’t seem any different from talking to a real person. Indream, Dana qualified as a real person among zombies anyway. I suppose I had always imagined Yggdrasil as a vast, dispassionate Intelligence, juggling its million programs and thinking deep thoughts to itself. Dana was more like a human being than my agent. There could be a good Dream in artificial intelligence – the POV of an omniscient machine intellect, and its struggles with humans who are to it as they are to ants. Too artsy for me, but maybe this new girl, Susan, could do something with it. If we came through with our memories intact, I’d give her the concept for free. Well, maybe for a percentage…
Then she walked in. A brunette, gift-wrapped and for real. She was unsteady on her feet, but I could imagine what she had been through. Dana told me she had been a tougher nut for Daine to crack, and had had her mind scrambled and unscrambled several times. Also, she was wearing high heels.
‘Tunney,’ she said, sitting down beside me, ‘are you you yet?’
That was some swell meeting-cute opener.
I didn’t know the answer, but I vamped. ‘You can call me Tom. I’m not Richie Quick, private dick. I’m sorry about the confusion on the phone earlier.’
‘Don’t bother yourself. Things have been getting chaotic. I’m Susan Bishopric, but you know that. It told you, right?’
Sam brought her a drink, something with fruit and a little umbrella. She left it alone.
‘Where is Dana? The Yggdrasil projection?’
‘Going his own mysterious way, I should imagine. We’re the team from now on, I gather.’
She must have been able to tell from my face how I felt about that.
‘Well, you’re not exactly a mental-health testimonial, Dreamer. You’re the one who got swallowed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just this isn’t the straightforward gig Trefusis sold me on.’
‘Us on, Tom, us.’ She smiled, and her monochrome projection looked older. ‘Ever lose an arm to a shark?’
Milland’s bat fell like a wet rag onto the bar beside us and spread its leathery wings, knocking over my glass. We dodged the spilled drink. I righted the glass, and it was full again. Sam came over and picked up the bat. He balled it, and used it to wipe up the mess.
‘Damn DTs. Whatever happened to tiny elephants?’
Susan rubbed her arm. The one that had been bitten off, presumably.
‘It doesn’t hurt any more,’ she said. ‘I made the pain go away.’
There were three gunshots from behind the small stage. A girl screamed, and a masked man ran through the bar, pursued by two cops in turn-of-the-century uniforms. Neither of us paid much attention. After a while, it gets monotonous.
‘We make a difference,’ I said. ‘The Dream is trying to stay together, but our input is expanding it at the seams. I think that’s the key.’
‘Yeah, well, I tried to rip it apart earlier and didn’t get very far.’
‘That’s because you launched a direct attack. Daine was able to concentrate and counter. While he was busy with you, things fell apart a little everywhere else.’
‘So Daine isn’t dead.’
‘No, I’ve figured that much. Daine killed his projection and took another similie, maybe several. Maybe he’s just an invisible presence, or lodged in some mechanical form. Like the telephone system, or the electrical wiring. If Yggdrasil can give itself a human-seeming external form, then surely Daine could mimic an AI’s physical body. Hell, his consciousness could be in every drop of rain, or all the bullets in the City. How could you fight that?’
She produced a cigarette, I took out my lighter. She held my hand steady to bring the cigarette to the flame and kept it for a few seconds longer than she had to. Static electricity of some sort passed between us. She plumed smoke from her nostrils. I flicked the lighter shut, and the moment was over.
‘I doubt if things are as complicated as that. Daine’s a Dreamer, but he’s not an artist. He had to borrow all these externals from old flatties. He didn’t have the muscle to Dream it all up for himself. He may be the Grand Wizard in international intrigue or mass murder, but as a dreamer, he’s just a jumped-up wank manager. I don’t think he’s got the imagination to stretch around a concept like living rain. Look at all this, all these clichés. He’s a traditional, straight-arrow, clean-consciousness narrative man. There isn’t an avant-garde trope in perception.’
‘You could be right. It’s easy to overestimate God.’
It was a comforting thought. But I could still remember what I had been through as Richie Quick. Daine might be a novice Dreamer, but he was learning fast. He had given me the runaround in his sleep.
‘I’ve had some time to check this Dream,’ she said. ‘My guess is that we’ll get him if we play by its rules for a while.’
