by T. A. Pratt
“Mr. Dalton,” a henchman said. “Your guest is here.” They stepped back, standing on either side of the door.
The chair swiveled. The man sitting in it (with his elbows on the armrests, and his forefingers steepled together, even) was identical to the henchman, though he wore a different T-shirt, ragged khaki shorts, and bulging red-tinted WWII-style aviator goggles. “Have a seat,” he said. “I’m Dalton.”
“I gathered that,” Marla said, and sat in one of the mismatched chairs on her side of the desk. B sat down, too.
Rondeau wandered over to the pinball machine. “Sweet!” he said. “It doesn’t even need quarters!” He started to play.
Dalton frowned.
“Don’t mind him,” Marla said. “He’s got the attention span of a canary. I’m Marla, by the way.”
“I know who you are,” he said. “An out-of-towner. Also the last person seen with Finch before he died.”
“I do have that distinction. And you’re the local technomancer. Can’t say I ever saw the appeal of this stuff, but then, that’s why I’m not a silicon mage.”
“Silicon?” Dalton said. “Please. I’ve got nothing but diamond processors here. They run faster without over-heating.”
“I can’t tell you how fascinating that is,” Marla said. “But we’ve got better things to talk about.”
“True,” he said. “Like why you killed Finch, and what you did with the Cornerstone.”
“How did someone as stupid as you get into a position of power?” Marla said, genuinely astonished. Beside her, B winced.
“Hey, B!” Rondeau said. “Come here! They’ve got the Area 51 arcade game! Let’s shoot some aliens!”
“Go on,” Marla said. “Have fun.”
B muttered something gratefully and went to join Rondeau.
Dalton leaned forward. “I don’t think you understand who you’re dealing with. It’s my job to find out what happened to Finch, and to mete out punishment.”
“Listen, diamond-boy, I didn’t kill Finch. We made an arrangement. He was going to do me a favor, and I was going to do him a favor. Before we could do anything, though, we got ambushed by a lunatic named Mutex and his amazing dancing killing frogs. He’s the one who killed Papa Bear and stole the Cornerstone.”
Dalton tapped a few keys on one of the keyboards in front of him. “Oh-kay,” he said after a moment. “You’re on the level.”
Marla glanced around. “I don’t sense a truth-circle.”
“What, with chalk and burning herbs?” Dalton snorted. “Please. This room is wired with sensors so delicate they’d make a CIA operative weep with envy, and I’ve developed a system that actually works as a lie detector, not like that polygraph bullshit that only really pegs stress. I know you’re telling the truth. But I’m not happy to hear it. Mutex? I thought he was long gone. He tried to get a meeting with me, and I let one of my mirrors talk to him. It wasn’t—”
“Mirrors?” Marla said, thinking of enchanted looking-glasses.
He gestured toward the door, where the henchmen still stood. “Them. My mirror-selves.”
Marla twisted around and looked at them. Their clothes had changed, and now they wore what Dalton wore. “They’re not homunculi?”
“Ha. Vat-grown clones, on a psychic link party-line with me? Please.”
If he says, “What? Please” one more time, Marla thought, I’m going to choke him with a computer cable.
“I don’t have time for retro technologies like that,” Dalton went on. “My mirrors are me, duplicated, running on a thirty-minute refresh rate. Every half hour I get a ping from them, and they get updated to whatever my present state is—so their clothes change to match mine, they know what I know, everything.”
“And this is done with computers?” Marla said.
“Sure. Computers and what we call, for want of a better word, sorcery. Everything in the world is information, Marla. Me, you, this desk.” He thumped the desktop with his fist. “And information can be manipulated and reconfigured endlessly. When you break it down, everything’s made of math and emptiness.”
“Maybe there’s something to technomancy, after all,” Marla said thoughtfully. There’d only been one prominent silicon mage in her city, and Marla had flung him off a rooftop for interfering with her fiscal policies by trying to steal several million in city funds.
“Technomancy is the key to everything,” Dalton said. “You’re like a savage digging in the dirt with a stick compared to me. So was Finch, and so’s every other sorcerer in this city. See, they don’t get it.” There was a certain light in his eyes now, an almost evangelical excitement. Marla had seen it in necromancers talking about bones, and in pyromancers talking about the cleansing power of flames. “Are you familiar with Nick Bostrom’s simulation theory?”
“I’m afraid not,” Marla said, sitting back more comfortably in her chair. She had a feeling this might take a little while.
“He’s a philosophy professor at Oxford. He makes an argument that it’s quite likely we’re all actually simulations of long-dead people, running in an emulated environment created by our own technologically advanced descendants.”
“Ah,” Marla said.
He sighed. “I’m trying to tell you something important,” he said.
“Is it about Mutex?” she asked.
“Potentially,” he said. “Here’s the core of Bostrom’s argument. First, you have to begin from the premise that it will someday be possible to re-create a human mind in a nonorganic environment. That is, to make a computer that operates in a manner indistinguishable from a human mind, to create consciousness in a machine.”
Marla had talked to her friend Langford, the biomancer, enough to know that such things were maybe theoretically possible, though the technology was a long way off, so she nodded. “All right.”
“Then ask yourself whether humans are likely to ever achieve that technology. I think it’s obvious that we will, unless we cause ourselves to become extinct first, which seems doubtful, frankly. The tenacity of cockroaches is nothing compared to that of humans.”
Marla twirled her finger in a hurry-up motion.
“The final question is this: do you believe that such advanced people would never, ever run sophisticated computer simulations of their own ancestors?”
“I wouldn’t say never,” she said. “People dress up in Civil War uniforms and pretend to shoot one another in fields, so I guess running a computer simulation of our ancestors isn’t so different.”
“Then you must agree that, in all likelihood, we are actually simulations living inside a computer. We’re completely unaware that we’re simulations, truly sentient and conscious, but actually running on some unimaginably complex computer system sometime in our own subjective far future. It’s simple probability. If our descendants can create such simulations, then there’s no reason to assume they would do so on a small scale, or for only one era. There might even be multiple versions of the same ‘world’ being simulated in dozens or scores or hundreds of computers, with slight variations. The odds are good that there are far more simulated minds running on computers than there are organic consciousnesses running on their original brains—and, so, probability tells us that, in all likelihood, we are simulations. It’s not a new idea—science fiction writers have played with it for decades—but Bostrom’s paper was one of the first attempts to treat it rigorously and take it seriously. You’ll have to give me your e-mail address, Marla, I’ll send you a link to the preprint.”
“I think Rondeau might have e-mail,” she said.
“I’ve got an AOL account,” Rondeau said, in a helpful tone, without looking up from his arcade game.
Dalton looked at them as if they were exotic insects.
“So we’re all living in a computer,” Marla said. “Who cares? If we’ll never know, and we can’t tell the difference, why does it matter? It’s like the free-will debate—for practical purposes, it doesn’t matter. You have to live as if you have
free will anyway, or else you just sit around until you die of starvation.”
“But it does matter,” Dalton said. “Bostrom thinks it matters because of the philosophical and theological implications, but it matters to us, to people like you and me, Marla. Because we’re sorcerers. We do things that violate the known laws of the universe all the time. And do you know why? Because we’re not in nature. We’re in a computer program, and the rules of the physical universe don’t apply. That’s why I can instantiate duplicates of myself, using something we choose to call sympathetic magic, with the help of some very fast computers.”
“Huh,” Marla said. “I’ve heard stupider theories for how magic works.”
“But the real implications are even more vast. Because we’re running on a computer, and I know computers.” He cracked his knuckles. “There’s not a box in the world that I can’t take over, not a system on Earth or in Heaven that I can’t crack and own. And one of these days, I’m going to figure out how to own the box we’re all running on, and that’s the day I become god.”
Ah, Marla thought. A new variation on the basic megalomaniacal sorcerer model. “And what about the people who are running the simulation? Why won’t they just unplug you when you start to misbehave?”
“I doubt they’re unaware of my efforts. I wouldn’t be, in their position. They’re watching me. Maybe someday they’ll choose to show themselves. It would be trivial for them to do so. If nothing else, I’m sure they’ll want to talk to me directly once I wrest control of this simulation from them. Maybe they’ll upload my consciousness out of the simulation, into their physical world. Maybe I’ll figure out how to upload myself. The possibilities are pretty much endless.”
“And this has what to do with Mutex?”
He looked at her blankly for a moment, and she suppressed the urge to crack him across the face and smash the lenses of those goggles. She was on a timetable here, and her problems were a hell of a lot more pressing than Dalton’s plan to own the box of the universe.
“Oh, right,” Dalton said. “Bostrom talks about the impact of the simulation theory on theology. If the person running this particular simulation is, say, a fundamentalist Christian, then it’s very possible that, in the afterlife, evildoers will burn in Hell—Hell being, in this case, just another simulation. Heaven could be similar. If we’re just digital emulations, then there’s no reason to discount the notion of the afterlife. Now, personally, I tend to think that fundamentalists of all stripes are a dying breed, and that they won’t be around in several subjective centuries, which is probably when our simulation got started.”
Marla found that idea even more doubtful than his original premise—fundamentalism was here to stay, in one form or another—but she didn’t object.
“Of course, it is possible that someone might run a simulation within a given religious framework for experimental purposes, or even just for fun. Put people in a world where fundamentalist Christianity is true, or Zoroastrianism, or Voudon, or Hinduism—”
“Or all that crazy Aztec shit,” Marla said. “That’s what you’re getting at, in your incredibly long-winded way, isn’t it?”
Dalton frowned. “Yeah. Basically. Mutex tried to make contact with all the sorcerers in the city, and he told all of us the same thing, when he got the chance. He said the universe is running down. The old gods are starting to get hungry again. The wheels and axles of the universe are greased with blood, and the tremendous stockpile of blood the Aztecs built up with their hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices is dwindling. He says that if we don’t start up the old ways again, the universe is going to grind to a halt, the stars will stand still in their orbits, and everyone and everything will suffer and die. It seems pretty far-fetched to me, but it’s not impossible that he’s right, if those are the parameters the programmer of this simulation set down, you know? Maybe everything in this universe really does run on an engine of blood.”
Marla found Mutex’s philosophy marginally more believable than Dalton’s, but that was mostly because of Dalton’s smug assurance that he was right—he was, in a way, something of a religious fundamentalist himself. She had no doubt that Mutex’s gods had once been real, perhaps sustained by the belief of their worshippers. The notion that gods were kept alive by their believers was a popular theory of theology in her circles, since it explained why exorcisms, Voudon, Kabalistic magic, and other mutually incompatible magical systems all more or less worked. Or, maybe, there had been powerful people or creatures or other sorts of beings that chose to be worshipped as gods by Mutex’s forebears, or just fell into the godly gig as a matter of luck and stumble. At any rate, she thought his theory about the universe grinding to a halt for want of blood sacrifice was probably bullshit, and she’d continue to think that unless and until he converted a whole lot of people to his way of thinking, in which case she’d start to worry about it becoming true. But Mutex believed it. She said as much aloud: “Mutex thinks he’s a hero. He’s the only one who can save the universe. By doing…what, exactly?”
Dalton spread his hands. “I’m not sure. He wanted access to the Cornerstone—which he got, from what you’ve told me. He told the other sorcerers he met with that he wanted to use the Cornerstone to awaken the sleeping gods and give them their due in blood. That doesn’t sound good, but as for what it means, specifically, I couldn’t tell you.”
She thought of the dead frog in her bag, and of the stolen statue of Tlaltecuhtli, the primordial froglike earth-monster. It wasn’t a big leap to imagine that Mutex was planning to awaken the sleeping spirit of Tlaltecuhtli. What would such a ritual require, apart from the Cornerstone?
“Anyway,” Dalton said, “whatever he’s planning, he wants to use the heart’s blood of dead sorcerers to do it.”
“What?” she said, suddenly interested again.
“I’m not Finch’s direct successor,” Dalton said. “The strega Umbaldo was. She was found a couple of hours ago, surrounded by poison dart frogs, with her heart cut out. After her death, the mantle passed to me. My mirror-selves investigated her body—frog poison doesn’t do shit to them, of course—and they found flecks of obsidian in the wound. Mutex is taking hearts. I don’t know if the heart’s blood of a sorcerer is more potent, or if he’s just killing us because he’s pissed at us, or—”
“He’s killing you because you’re dangerous, probably,” Marla said. “The sorcerers are the only ones who can possibly stop him, after all.”
“And you’re all full of fear,” B said. “You’re all terrified, and he wants hearts filled with fear. Teyolia. The life force that feeds the gods and controls the universe. It’s stronger when you’re afraid.”
Marla turned around in her chair and looked at him. She had almost forgotten B was there. Rondeau was trying to shush him, but Marla said, “Did you have another dream last night?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I found a sybil to interpret it. I had to give her my autograph as payment, but I didn’t sign my real name. She said it didn’t matter, but I think she was disappointed.”
He’d found a sybil. Just happened to find one. Maybe he really was more than a second-rate seer. “What are the sorcerers afraid of?” she asked.
B didn’t hesitate. “The same thing you are. They’re afraid of losing control.”
Marla didn’t react. It was a fair cop, but she didn’t need to let it show, especially not in front of Dalton.
“Hey,” Dalton said. “Weren’t you in that bad sci-fi movie with Dolph Lundgren? You played his surly teenage son?”
“That wasn’t me,” B said. “I think that was River Phoenix. But it’s okay. I get that a lot.”
“River Phoenix is dead,” Dalton said, matter-of-factly. “He overdosed years and years ago.”
“It’s a nasty way to go,” B said.
“Not as nasty as having your heart scooped out by a crazed Aztec warrior-priest, and that’s true whether the world is real or a simulation.” Marla laced her fingers together in front of
her. Finally, they might be able to get down to business. “What’s your plan of action, and how can I help? I’m a guest in your city, after all.”
Dalton shook his head, as if astonished at her audacity. “I wouldn’t call you a guest, Mason. In fact, it’s probably best for everyone if you go back to your own city. Let us take care of things here. Mutex is more dangerous than we’d expected, but we’ll track him down. You have bigger problems. I’m sure you know you’ve already made a rather significant enemy. The ruler of Chinatown has put a price on your head. I don’t care—I’m as rich as I’ll ever need to be—but there are other people who might want to collect that reward.”
“You’ll have to put me in touch with a good bookie,” Rondeau called, still apparently engrossed in shotgunning video-game aliens. “I might be able to get decent odds betting on Marla, since nobody in this town knows her. You know, back home, they won’t even take bets on the people who try to kill her? It’s a bummer. That used to be easy money.”
“What he means to say is, don’t worry about me. I can protect my own head. It’s Mutex I’m concerned with.” And the Cornerstone. Mostly the Cornerstone. But Mutex had killed her friend, and for Lao Tsung’s memory—and because it coincided with her other goals—Marla would make sure he was stopped.
“I can’t make you leave,” Dalton said. “Well, I could, but it’s not worth the effort. As for Mutex, he’ll be caught. We might have trouble finding the Cornerstone, but once we capture Mutex and dissolve whatever safeguards he’s created, we should be able to find it by divination. There are lots of built-in safeguards against that, since the Cornerstone isn’t something we want apprentices and cantrippers to find, but I know a few techniques that should work. Once we get the big rock back…well, I can’t promise to honor whatever agreement you had with Finch, but we can discuss things, and maybe reach an agreement. We’ll have to investigate first, and find out what, if anything, Mutex did with the stone, see if any damage was done, but after that, perhaps you can make use of it, under supervised conditions, for a suitable price. It might be a while, but I’ll be serving out the rest of Finch’s term, so I’ll be in charge for a few years.”
