by Jule Owen
“My parents are both in town supervising some group project work, and I have virtual school. I’m being lazy. I’ll get dressed in a bit. I do feel at a disadvantage, though. When are you going to fix the beebot so I have video on my end?”
“Working on it,” he lies.
“I was going to call you.”
“Sure.”
“No, for real I was. I wanted to ask you if you would come to Gen’s later this afternoon to watch me play when I have my lesson. I’ve cleared it with Gen. I told her you are a Bach fan.”
“Yes. I’d like to. Thanks.”
“Great. What are you up to today?”
“Oh, you know. School.”
“What are you studying? I probably shouldn’t ask. I won’t understand it.”
“Quantum computing and security.”
“I knew I wouldn’t understand it.”
“I’m not sure I do, either, to be honest. My head’s all over the place today.”
“Why, has something happened? You sound a bit strange. Are you okay?”
“I have a cracking headache. And I had peculiar dreams. Something weird happened last night . . .”
“Oh, hold on, Mat! Sorry . . . my supervisor is calling me. I have to go. See you at four? Let’s talk then, alright?”
“Absolutely. Keep your security guard on a leash, though.”
“I promise no one will wrestle you to the ground and point a gun to your head.”
“Good. Later then.”
“Wish me luck with my mathematics course.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks. Bye!”
So he did send the beebot to Clara.
31 The Dream Scenario
In the Darkroom, he pulls on the skullcap, summons the location of Eva’s virtual world, and logs in.
He is standing at the gate. Checking the bricks, he finds the key, takes the knife from the belt now tied around his waist, cuts his finger, and draws gamma on the door with his blood. The lock appears, and he turns the key in the lock and walks into the forest clearing.
The empty crates are still there. There’s smoke coming from the chimney in the hunting lodge, and he walks down the hill in the clearing between the trees. Everything is beautifully rendered – he even smells pine needles and senses the soft ground underfoot – but it’s not like Lestrange’s world. Not even close. He experiences a strange sense of disappointment, of loss.
The dragons have long since left the area. He knows he can summon a menu to jump to their location in order to observe them, but he doesn’t.
There’s snow on the mountains, but it’s a warm, sunny day. Spring. Wildflowers grow on the meadow. The deciduous trees growing amongst the conifers have new green leaves. Birdsong comes at him from all directions. There’s the sound of a rushing river somewhere close, which reminds him of the river in Siberia.
How much was in the game, and how much did I dream?
Perhaps it was all a dream. The jungle may be a transmogrification of Eva’s virtual-world forest, made tropical because he was hot and sweating in the night.
A twig snaps behind him. He jumps and turns quickly – sudden, irrational fear pulsing through him.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you,” Eva says, walking towards him. “I saw you’d entered the world and decided to come for a chat.”
“Is your dad still in St Petersburg?” Mathew asks, normally enough, although his heart is beating fast.
“Yes, thank god.”
And the jungle was in Russia.
“Are you okay? You seem distracted.”
“I had a strange, vivid dream, and it’s been bugging me all morning.”
“You’ve probably been cooped up too much in your house. Too much virtual reality, not enough reality. I’d go for a walk if I were you. In the real world.”
He nods. “You’re probably right, but we’ve been under All-Day Curfew since the Thames flooded.”
“Try doing some meditation. I do it when I’m not in touch with myself.”
“You meditate?”
“Yes. Why is that surprising?”
He shakes his head. “No reason.”
Eva says, “Do you want to check in with your dragons? I’ve tracked them. They’re somewhere above Chukotka. They’re having fun melting snow. They’re going to cause global warming all by themselves.”
“Chukotka… Did you mention that name before?”
Eva thought. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”
A bolt of pain strikes in his head. He winces.
“Wow. You know you shouldn’t be in the Darkroom if you’re not well. You should go and lie down.”
“I’m fine,” he says. “What is this place, this Chukotka?”
“It’s a region in Russia. In Siberia. My model will be of the whole world when I’ve finished it. I’m still geo-forming. I started with the bits closest to home. I’ve completed Russia now, and I’m halfway through China.”
“What are you going to do with your world model when you’ve finished?”
“My main project is to run different climate scenarios. There’ll be a world where humans never existed, a version with human-made climate change analogous to our own, then iterations where humans, or the climate impact of humans, suddenly disappear at various points in time. This scenario is of a 5-degree Celsius temperature rise compared to the beginning of the century – pretty much like we have now, which is why there’s forest rather than tundra. Of course, I’ve left out all the oil wells.”
“And what do you think it’ll be like in three or four hundred years?”
“The point of the experiment is to discover that exactly. But millions of years ago, when carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were high, palm trees were growing in Antarctica. We’re heading for a similar level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. So under that scenario this would be a tropical jungle. Crazy, isn’t it?”
“Are you sure you haven’t told this to me before?”
“I may have. I’ve no idea. Come on, I have some eggnog in the cabin. You have to try it. It will be like we’re actually drinking.”
After lunch he goes back to his room to check on the MUUT search. There’s a list of results, and he starts scrolling through them when an advert for technical support pops up. He accepts and waits.
“Hello, I’m Ship of Fools. You’re Conjurer. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledge Ship of Fools.”
“How are you, Conjurer?”
“Good, thank you,” Mathew lies.
“Good, good. I wanted to alert you. You’re leaving a trail around you as bright as an elephant’s paint fight.
“Wow. Okay. I didn’t realise.”
“I assumed as much. Suggest you shut the search down. I’ll help you.”
Mathew terminates his MUUT search.
“Have you moved on from Ithaca?”
Ithaca? Mathew searches his tired, sore brain. He means Lestrange!
“No. This is related.”
“What do you want to know exactly?”
“Whether there are any full-immersion virtual reality projects in prototype?”
“And the military connection?”
“I’ve no idea, to be honest. Yesterday I think I got shut in Ithaca’s house. I logged in to his Darkroom and experienced a VR so real I couldn’t tell it from this world.”
“You think you got locked in his house?”
“I got locked in.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“What was this full immersion like?”
“Like I said, so real it was indistinguishable from this world. Is it even possible?”
“I don’t know. It must be if you experienced it. If you did.”
“I did. But technically, do you know of any companies or any projects producing this technology? Because I thought we were years from being able to do these things.”
“There are lots of experiments. Of course, all sorts of gov
ernments and corporations are working on VR technology, but there’s nothing commercially available, and I’m not sure any of the technology is complete. How did you access the world?”
“From a Darkroom seat.”
“And did you wear anything else? Use any other equipment, drink anything, or inject anything?”
“I put on a skullcap and logged in.”
“Just a skullcap? You used nothing else?”
“No.”
“It isn’t possible. Your body would have to be crawling with nanobots, repressing all the signals from this world and replacing them with information from the virtual world. A skullcap won’t do it. You’d need to be in a lab or something.”
Mathew’s vision clouds, and a static speck appears in his left eye. His head explodes in pain.
“Thanks for your help. I have to go.”
“Okay. Don’t do any more wild searches, though. Let me know if you want help searching for anything. This is crazy shit, and I think you may be a little bit bonkers yourself, but it’s also pretty damn cool. Okay if I send you another ad? I have some friends investigating Ithaca’s network.”
“Yes,” Mathew manages, but he’s hardly able to think or speak.
He teeters to his bed, collapses, and immediately falls asleep.
In his dream, he’s back in Mr Lestrange’s library, sitting in an old armchair. Borodin and Mr Lestrange are standing on either side of him. They are all staring at the table, at two books laid open. Lestrange is leafing through the pages.
“It’s not what we expected, Borodin. Who would have predicted it?”
“It was pure laziness on our part. We are too easily distracted, too complacent. We are all guilty of too much play. All of us. This is what comes of never being challenged.”
“Guilty of too much play! What a strange idea. But what is to be done?”
They both focus on Mathew. Borodin places his huge hand on the top of Mathew’s head. “We can’t go delving around too much inside here. If we remove what we don’t want, we may accidentally delete what we want to keep.”
“So true, so true. Such a simple structure, but there’s so much that could go wrong. It’s so fragile!”
“We have to be careful with it. He’s had headaches all day.”
“I agree. We agree. We all agree. Now we’re involved, we have to be careful. So then, the dream scenario?”
“It’ll have to do.”
“It’s the best option.”
“We all agree.”
When he wakes, he feels lighter, refreshed. His headache has gone, and he experiences a flush of well-being and optimism. Remembering that he’s going to see Clara, he’s happy and checks the time. It’s nearly four o’clock.
When Clara’s car turns up, he’s standing in the window waiting. He waves and then goes down the stairs and into the porch.
Cold rain is driving down the street. He momentarily steps back to keep dry. The guard eyes him warily but shuts the door to the car and does not comment. Clara doesn’t speak but she smiles at him and he smiles back. The rain is in her eyes. As she walks up the path, he makes a dash for it.
Gen Lacey comes to her front door, and Mathew, Clara and Gen huddle inside, shutting the door against the weather.
“Hello, Mathew! I hear you’re a Bach fan,” Gen says.
“An amateur one, but willing to learn.”
“Any friend of Bach is a friend of ours,” Gen says cheerily. “Don’t you think, Clara?”
“Absolutely.”
“This is a teaching session, not a concert, so I hope you won’t be too bored.”
“Not at all. I think it’ll be fascinating,” Mathew says.
Gen leads the way into her front room. “I did make some tea, and I have some cake. Help yourself while Clara and I get started,” Gen says.
Mathew sits down on the sofa. Clara takes her seat at the piano.
Gen says to him, “How is O’Malley?”
“He’s fine. . . . Why?”
Gen frowns. “You and I spent part of last night hunting high and low for him.”
“Yes. . . . Yes! Thanks for your help . . .”
“No problem at all. Anyway, all’s well that ends well. I’m glad he’s okay.”
“Yes. Me, too,” he says.
Gen turns to Clara. “Right, shall we try Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C minor?”
“Sure,” Clara says, grinning at Mathew.
Mathew smiles back, but his eyes are drawn momentarily away from her face by something glinting. She has pinned the beebot to her collar. She raises an eyebrow at him quizzically, responding to the strange expression on his face. Gen wonders if Mathew is going to be a distraction. In fact, he sits patiently, absorbed, listening as she begins to play.
He’s remembering the beebot and how he flew it down Mr Lestrange’s chimney into his front room and the books, his book, The Book of Mathew Erlang.
Since the headache cleared, his mind, if anything, feels sharper than it has in months. But when he tries to recall the events of the past few days, it’s like he’s attempting to conjure a particularly vivid dream that evaporates on waking. Dissolving sequences of images he experienced as concrete reality seem bizarre on reflection, when he can remember them, leaving behind a strong residue of feeling – but most of it is maddeningly just out of reach. He knows some of the fragments are real. What else has he forgotten?
As he sits, a message comes in directly via Charybdis. He opens it and reads:
This message responds to signals in your Lenz registering as you read and eating the words as you go.
These words immediately fracture and disappear.
This comes to you from your friend in technical support. Further investigation finds your virtual reality experience unique given current state of technical capability. No known project in existence that could do what you described, but will keep looking. Could be something highly classified.
On the other matter, my friends say Ithaca’s network is impenetrable. This is extraordinary.
Simultaneously had a slow, deep MUUT search running. Found this in the British Library archives, of all places. Seems to have been judiciously wiped from all other locations. It regards Ithaca. Enjoy.
The Times, London, Monday, April 11, 2038
Soho Easter Miracle As Stabbed Man Comes Back from the Dead
Paramedics are claiming it as an Easter miracle. A man they found slumped in a doorway in Kemps Court in Soho last night “came back from the dead.” London Ambulance Service veteran Martin McInnery told reporters that when they arrived at the scene, they found forty-five-year-old August Lestrange, a Reader in History at King’s College London, lying in a large pool of his own blood, after a vicious knife attack by an unknown assailant.
“There was no pulse,” McInnery, who has served as a paramedic for fourteen years, told us. “It was clear from what he was lying in that he had bled out, and we concluded he was beyond resuscitation. We put him in a body bag, zipped him up, loaded him into the ambulance, and called through to the morgue to expect us.
“He was such a certain gonner that we shut him in the back and went into the front part of the vehicle. Neither of us like riding with the dead. I was the one to open the back of the truck to take the trolley out when we arrived. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw him sitting up on the stretcher.”
Mr Lestrange is said to be recovering at home. He declined to be interviewed.
“Mathew, are you okay?” It’s Gen’s voice. She is bending over him, her hand on his back.
He realises that as he was reading, the music stopped. Clara is standing. She has her jacket over her arm, ready to leave. Mathew scrambles to his feet.
“Yes! Yes, sorry.”
“You were miles away,” Gen says.
“Must have been my sublime playing,” says Clara.
“It was lovely.”
She raises an eyebrow. “My car is here. Do you want to walk me out?”
“Sure.”
/>
They leave Gen on her step. Clara’s guard stands stiffly by the open car door, eyeing Mathew.
Clara says, “You’re really not okay, are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“You seemed fine when you arrived. Did something happen while I was playing?”
Mathew smiles to reassure her. “No. Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
She squints at him sceptically but gets into the car. “Speak later?” she says.
He nods. The guard slams her door shut, gets in himself, and they drive away.
Mathew turns to his own house. Instinctively, he glances at the bay window of number 21 as he passes through the gate and walks along the short path. The message has been deleted, but the date is burnt into his memory.
Monday, April 11, 2038. The year before I was born.
No one is at the bay window, but Mathew knows for sure now. He’s being watched.
END OF BOOK ONE
Book Two
Silverwood
1 The Best and Brightest Scientists
DAY ELEVEN: Thursday, 2 December 2055, London, England
“Eva Aslanova!” he shouts. “Eva, if you can hear me, I badly need a door!”
A roaring column of furnace-hot flame blasts the tree for five, ten, fifteen, twenty seconds – leaves, bark, branches, and trunk all igniting and burning ferociously. Mathew, scrabbling and clinging precariously to the higher branches, feels the heat blast towards him, toasting the soles of his dangling feet. The tree slumps and gives beneath him. He’s falling. Then somehow he’s on his feet. Yet another in a series of near-death experiences survived, he knows, only due to the fact that in this world his body is an avatar. Presumably, Eva doesn’t see the need to program into him the means to die a hundred horrible different ways, mostly by fire. She thinks his project childish. She wouldn’t have put that much effort into it.
