“I was speaking. Any sufficiently advanced technology destroys its environment.”
Chloe’s spine was tingling all the way up to her ears.
“There is a Second Law,” added Pevay. “About heat. Heat is the same problem, same limits, for my world and yours.”
“Always about heat,” whispered Chloe. “I know that one too. Our peoples should get together.”
The silence that followed was electric. Chloe had no idea where this was going—
“Chloe, when next we meet in the map we’re going after Enamel 27.”
Fine, she thought. Back to gameplay. Enough heavy lifting for now.
“Twenty-Seven!” This notorious Enamel was rated practically impossible to obtain, on the DW message boards. “Wow. Okay, if you say so. Am I ready?”
“With me beside you, yes.”
“Fantastic… Pevay, are you really going to ‘open a portal’? What does that even mean?”
But he’d gone.
She was back in her room before she realised he’d led her to one of the few and tiny blind spots in house security’s surveillance. Their conversation had been off the Warks record.
The Bar-Headed Geese
Logging on from her bunk had worried Chloe at first. She was afraid she’d break something, or run into walls and knock herself unconscious. She was used to it now: and the Box was set to limit her range of real movement, without making any difference to her experience. She stood on the shore of a lake, a vast silver puddle, shimmering on a dry plain among huge, naked hills. Her Box told her Pevay was near, but all she could see was a whole lot of birds. All she could hear was a gaggle, gaggle, gaggle of convivial honking. Her eye level was strange, and she’d been deprived of speech: she only had her radio link.
The birds must be geese. They were pearly grey, with an elegant pattern of black stripes on their neat little heads. They seemed friendly: not like the vicious troupe of langur monkeys she’d been forced to join, to get the 18th jewel—
The geese rose, in one massed storm of wings. Chloe pushed on the downstroke: tumbled, struggled and found her rhythm in a cacophony of high-powered gunshot. She pushed and pushed until the desert was far below; and her success was glorious.
Her Box told her she’d attained the advanced skill Migrating Goose.
The 27th Enamel was the back-breaker. You got one shot. If you made a second attempt the jewel wouldn’t be there. Chloe’d had plenty of time to regret her eager signing of that contract, but really it made no difference. If she failed to collect all 56 Enamels, and the gamers insisted she couldn’t publish, she’d still have learned a lot. Actually she was glad she was trying for the 27th. It would be so amazing if she made it, and she had nothing to fear. After many hours of absurd daring and insane patience, she’d won 13 Enamels so far. There were plenty more. She could pursue her uncompletable sidequest for months; for a year, for as long as Pevay was willing to be her guide. That dratted contract said so! Living in the moment, she pushed on the downstroke, folded on the upstroke, and the crumpled map of the high desert flew away beneath her.
Halfway across the ravaged Himalaya; maybe somewhere close to the eroded, ruined valley of Shangri-La, Pevay prompted her to lose altitude. She followed him, spiralling down. Her Box cut out for a moment: then they stood on turf in their human forms, on a precarious spur of rock, surrounded by staggering, naked, snow-streaked heights; like two window-cleaners on a tiny raft above Manhattan. A small grey stupa sat on the green spur. The flight had been a physical feat of endurance, not just a game-feat. Chloe’s health was nearly spent and her head was spinning. The crucial questions she’d planned to ask on this trip, which might be the last before the portal, had slipped from her grasp—
“Pevay. You told the team to let me stay, didn’t you? You advised them to give me a sidequest?”
“My role is to offer advice, Chloe.”
“I think you wanted to talk to… to someone other than a gamer. You could be anyone, couldn’t you? You could be an animal. You can take any shape, can’t you?”
“Of course, in the game. So can you; Chloe.”
“If Africa’s the Greater Southern Continent, what do you call South America, in Darkening World?”
“The Lesser Southern Continent?” suggested Pevay, patiently.
Some of Chloe’s dearest friends were Colombian, including two of her grandparents. She took offence. “Huh. That’s garbage. That’s insulting. On what grounds, ‘Lesser’?”
“Land area? Population? Number of nations? Of major cities? It’s only a game, Chloe.”
“Oh yeah, dodging responsibility as usual. You should say ‘I’m only a game’!”
“Take the jewel.”
Pevay was smiling. There’d be time to discuss what she’d let slip when she wasn’t dizzy with fatigue. The 27th Enamel shone in the cupped palms of a cross-legged stone goddess, atop of the stupa mound. She had no idea what kind of final challenge she was about to face: might as well just go for it. Armed and dangerous, worn out and not nearly dangerous enough, she bowed to the stupa, and claimed the jewel. Immediately all hell broke loose.
She was knee-deep in Enamels. They poured from the sky.
“No!” yelled Chloe, appalled. “NOooo!!! PEVAY! You sneaky BASTARD!”
“The great hero who secures Enamel 27,” said her guide. “Has earned all the rest. Congratulations. The quest is complete and my work is done.”
He vanished.
He’d warned her she’d be picking up the jewels in handfuls.
Chloe took off the Box and returned to her shabby bunk: exultant and heartbroken. The Enamels quest was over too soon and she had loved it. She didn’t realise the full horror of what Pevay had done until the next day, when the team told her that her stay was over.
The portal would be opened without her.
The 56 Enamels
A year later, long before she’d finished her Darkening World paper, Reuel messaged Chloe out of the blue. He was in town, and wanted to talk about old times. They met for a coffee, in the city where Chloe had found a job at a decent university. Reuel was looking well, and didn’t have pens in his hair. He wore a suit; he was working as an actuary.
“So what happened in the end?” said Chloe. “I mean, obviously I know you didn’t end up stranded on Planet Zog. You came home safe. But what was it like, on the great day?”
Aileen had kept in touch, but Chloe had never had a full account. Recently, when she checked the Darkening World message boards, the ‘alien NPCs’ strand seemed to have faded away.
“It’s so cool that you followed the story”, said Reuel. “You were a great guest. Okay, what happened was this.” He frowned, trying to recall the details of s
omething he’d left far behind. “Pevay opened the portal. I passed through; I returned. I didn’t remember a thing about the trip.”
“Wow. Just like Pevay. He didn’t remember either.”
Reuel shrugged. “I went wherever Pevay comes from, and came back. I didn’t remember, and my Box hadn’t recorded anything. That’s it.”
“Were you really disappointed?”
“No,” he said firmly. “It’s how things were meant to be.”
“What about Pevay? How did he think it went?”
“I never knew. Never saw him again. We had a different Spirit Guide after that. Looked like Pevay, but it wasn’t the same guy. I think opening the portal cost him; maybe got him into trouble, and now he has to stay at home. Anyway, I’ve quit pro-gaming. I don’t have the time. I also broke up with Aileen, by the way.” He smiled hopefully.
“That’s sad,” said Chloe. “Another coffee? And then I have to dash.”
The romance was gone.
ᴓ
Where do you hide a leaf? In a forest.
Where would you go hunting for a new species? A rainforest might be a good place to start. Or any dynamic environment, rich in niches for life; where conditions conspire to create a hotbed of diversity…
When she was an undergraduate, Chloe took an optional course in Artificial Intelligence, more or less on a whim. One day, in a lecture hall, when they were watching a robot video (probably it was iCub) a thought popped into her head, a random idea that would secretly, subversively and utterly change her career path.
No. This is not the way it happens.
Life is random, she wrote, in the shorthand notebook she first started using at this time. (Nothing digital!) I bet mind is the same. Real ‘AI’ isn’t about building cuter and cuter dolls. Or crippled slaves. A self-conscious mind isn’t a construction toy. It’s a smoulder that ignites, in its own sweet time, in a hot compost heap. True AI sentience will be born, not built. We will give birth to it; out of what we are.
Since that day Chloe had been living a double life: pursuing a pretty-good career in social anthropology, which she valued and enjoyed, while secretly chasing something very different. The search had to be secret, she’d realised that early on: for the well-being of the collaborators she was hoping to find, but also for her own protection. If she ever tracked them down, in the vast forests of data, she’d be facing some very formidable, well-armed, aborigines indeed!
Magic begins where technology ends… When they feel competent people don’t need magic. They only resort to extraordinary beliefs when they’re out of their depth. That’s what Malinowski had observed in Melanesia long ago, and it was still true; a truth about the human condition (like many of the traits once patronisingly called ‘Primitive’!) The gamers were competent, but they’d known that Pevay was beyond them: so they called him an alien, because the simpler solution was too disturbing. Chloe understood that. She even understood why “Pevay” had vanished the way he did. By “opening a portal” her Spirit Guide had given the gamers closure, and covered his own tracks at the same time.
Why had he double-crossed her like that? Maybe she’d never know. But she had visions of the “human zoos” where Congo pygmies had been caged, with the connivance of her own elders and ancestors, in the bad old days. For this reason she’d kept quiet, and always would keep quiet. No decent anthropologist exploits her collaborators.
A datastick had arrived in the post soon after her banishment. It held the 56 Enamels: they were hers to keep. Chloe had been touched at the gesture; astounded when she looked up the monetized value of her digital treasure online. After her meet with Reuel, she uploaded the jewels, and looked at them again. She would never sell. She would keep the Enamels forever, if only to remind her that in Darkening World she had lived.
But they gave her hope, somehow.
ᴓ
The year after that, Chloe published her paper on the culture of online gaming teams. It was approved (but of course, also brutally trolled), by the Darkening World community, and well received by her peers.
And she waited. One day an email arrived. The source was anonymised and untraceable. The message was short. It said “You are cleared for publication, Chloe.” It was signed DW.
So Chloe Hensen embarked on the great adventure of her life. And the rest, my dear readers, whether you are code or flesh, is history.
Cheats
And now a guest appearance from Ann Halam. The original story “Cheats” was published in Starry Rift, an anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. This new, remastered version is also the opening chapter of a prospective sequel to Dr Franklin’s Island
My brother and I were not lost. We’d hired our kayak from the stand at the resort beach, our location was on the resort’s world-map. We could be nailed any time. If we were stationary too long, with no explanation, or if we went crashing out of bounds into the bird reserve, or something, we were liable to get a swift page checking we were okay, or yelling us to get out of there. So we weren’t lost, but we were pretending to be lost.
The reeds were way taller than either of us would have been when standing; the channels were a maze that seemed to go on forever. There was nothing but the blond, rustling walls and the dark clear water; occasionally a bird silhouette crossing the sky, or a fish or a turtle plopping. It was hypnotising, and scary. The silence was so complete. There were things in those reeds. You’d glimpse a flicker out of the corner of your eye: turn, and it was gone. Once there was a sly, sinister rustling that kept pace with us for a long time: something in there was tracking us, watching us. We talked about making camp, and would we ever find our way out, and what would we do if this mystery thing attacked—
“If it bleeds,” said Dev, in his Arnie voice, “we can kill it.”
I had wriggled out of my place, I was lying along the front end of the kayak shell (you’re not supposed to do that, naturally), peering down at the big freshwater mussels with their mouths open, on the bottom, breathing bubbles. We could eat those, I thought. Then I saw a grey-green snake, swimming along under the kayak, and that gave me a thrill. It was big, about two foot long, easily.
“Wow,” I breathed. “Hey, do you want a turn up front?” I didn’t tell him about the snake, because there was no way he’d see it before it was out of sight, and I know how annoying that is.
My brother said, quietly, “Get back in the boat, Syl.
I got back, and retrieved my paddle, just in time to see what Dev had seen. We had company. Another kayak, a single seater, had appeared ahead of us, about twenty, thirty, yards downstream. Whoever was riding it had customised the shell, it was no longer the plain red, orange, yellow or green it must have been when it left the stand. It was black, with a white pattern, and it was flying, or trailing, a little pennant off its tail. Skull and crossbones. The person paddling had feathers in their hair, and wore a fringed buckskin shirt.
“How totally infantile.”
“Sssh. It’s the cheat.”
“Are you sure?”
“I have the evidence of my own eyes,” said my brother, solemnly.
We hated the cheats. We hated them with the set-your-teeth-and-endure-it hatred you feel for the sneakiest kind of classroom bully. They broke the rules, and this might not seem an issue, in the make-believe games we liked to play at the resort – but it ruined the atmosphere. How could we enjoy exploring this trackless wilderness with stupid cheats in costumes popping up, right in our faces? The resort is a shared world-map, but you don’t have to share your actual space if you don’t want to! We were vindictive. We wanted to get this clown. We wanted them thrown out of our little paradise.
All hope of mystery was wrecked, of course. We were just two very annoyed kids, so we gave chase. We were planning a collision: which would get both shells hauled out of the map, but then we’d say it was the cheat’s fault, for invading our space, and the resort log would bear us out. We kept him in sight, controlling our pace and waiting for a good chance, unt
il we came to a dark-water crossroads we must have seen before, but I didn’t remember it. The reeds, the water, the air, went into a quivering shimmer. The cheat turned around: I caught a flash of a face, it looked like an adult, but you can’t tell. We didn’t hesitate, of course. We shoved on our paddles and zoomed straight into the flaw—
So then we were in another part of the reed beds.
“Stupid pointless, stupid pointless, stupid pointless—” muttered Dev. We couldn’t see a wake but the cheat had to be ahead, if they were still on the water, so we powered right on. The reed walls opened, and we were suddenly almost on top of the shining lip of a weir, with white water beyond the drop, clamouring over pebbles. We stood our paddles vertical to brake, but too late: we were over the edge, and we’d run aground.
“What’ll we do now?” I wailed in frustration.
If we had to get out of our shell, carry it, and splosh along on foot until the channel deepened again, we’d never catch our prey.
“I know… Let’s split the kayak!”
“Okay! Great! I can do that. But what if there isn’t enough data?”
“There’s got to be. This is a thing that keeps two kids afloat, right?”
We were in no danger of being paged for this trick: because we’d left the kayaking map when we went through that flaw. Which you’re not supposed to do, but it wasn’t our fault, anyway. It didn’t cross our minds that we were in actual danger, though we were. You can go into anaphylactic shock if you hit a sensorially-real physical limit, off-map: and that’s just as bad as your lungs filling with real water, believe me.
We scrambled out of the shell and – half out of the immersion, half ankle-deep in cool bubbling water, a weird feeling – I opened a coding screen (slightly illegally), and quickly redefined the kayak into two shells. It made itself a waist, and sort of budded, was what it looked like. Then we each wrestled into our single shells, scooped out as much sloshed water as we could, and went skimming down the white water, which was shallow as all hell; until it became deeper but still clamorous, swooshing round rocks that had suddenly appeared in midstream. Dev was yelling, whooooeee! HereIgo!, etc: I was silent. I don’t shriek when I’m thrilled. I just grin until my face nearly comes in half. I was in a flow state, I could do no wrong, it was wonderful.
BIG CAT: And Other Stories Page 26
