Out on Blue Six

by Ian McDonald

  And once more he was embedded in darkness, to which the Compassionate Society consigned those it could not accommodate, who could not accommodate it; the sixth darkness, spun out at the rag end of his coil of life. The choice was open, the voices welcomed: if you want, if you really want, if you think there is no possible hope, then will yourself along the web of bioprocessors and return to your heritage.

  Or remain. In the sixth darkness.

  The choice is yours.

  But this sixth time, he knows who he is. Never before has he known this how and why and who. And that makes it different. He must hope.

  He will remain and what will happen will happen. He relaxes, expands into the spaces of his own atomic structure. And down in the inner darkness, he becomes aware of another presence, an echo of other nonorganic life. Out there in the exterior darkness he imagines he can see coils of pseudo-organic molecules, blacker than black. He is not alone … how? Who? What? … no time for questions, there is hope, and hopeward, he reaches out, every pseudo-cell, every nonorganic neuron …

  … number nine in tank sixty-six seven.

  He spent the first eternity throwing himself at the walls around the sensdep tank, but after the first repulse led to the second rebuff to the third recoil and so to the fourth and the fortieth and the four hundredth and the four thousandth, the arrogant fury had risen (somewhen between the forty thousandth and the four hundred thousandth) at the walls of defense programs the Ministry of Pain had erected around his lynkbrain; walls he couldn’t climb, tunnel, undermine, fly over, break apart, ghost through, dissolve away, disintegrate. And somewhen between the four hundred thousandth and the four millionth rejection had come the sick certainty that this time there would be no recrossing of lances out there in virtual space; whatever left this tank, whenever if ever, would not be Angelo Brasil, the Man with the Computer Brain.

  And for the second eternity he had fled from the sensory nothingness that surrounded him into the mythical kingdoms of his lynkbrain. Cybernetic universes, mathemagical domains, angels with the heads of pins, worlds resting upon crystal pillars borne up by the back of teenage mutant turtles, dungeons, dragons, and damsons, alphanumeric logopoli, corporate ziggurats, hallucinatory almost-places with floating islands and flying whales.

  The third eternity he spent in the defense of his mythical kingdoms against the dragons, demons, dark clouds, black nights, plagues, pollutions, politicians, corporate takeovers, wars, and destruction the Ministry of Pain wished against him. Their logic was as unsubtle as their attack; not content merely to contain and restrain, they sought to derange his lynkbrain with scramblers and stranglers and ninja programs and leave him naked and exposed to their brainwashings.

  Then he saw him. Halfway through an attack of stealth programs that came smashing through his fractal manipulation matrix in a crash-blast of black-tracked juggernauts all spikes and knives and blasting cannon: their very illusory existence proof of how far his image generation system had been invaded. There: a tiny golden thing on the edge of one of the tiers of the interlinked geometric solids that were his lynkbrain’s representation of the Polytheon. A golden blink of humanity, there among the geoids, a little shining homunculus.

  He had been so surprised that he had let the Ministry of Pain’s strangler systems dissolve away his peripheral telemetry and feedback systems before he could rally a counterattack. Creating a spread of antibody programs, he asked this little golden homunculus, “Just what the fug do you think you’re doing here?”

  “Helping,” said the little golden homunculus, extending an illusory hand. “My name is Kilimanjaro West.” Angelo Brasil rezzed up a loose-graphic fractal self-simulation and floated out of disembodihood to land beside the visitor to Armageddon.

  “Yes, but what are you doing here?” (All the while thinking, suspecting—how can I trust anything/one in this maze of treacheries?)

  “I felt you, another, like me, and I saw that together we could help each other to get out.”

  “Well, thank you most sweetly, my dear, but as you can see, I’m having this teensy-weensy problemette with these security programs …” (As his antibodies sent a squadron of random-noise interference generators into a closed loop to vanish up their informational backsides.)

  “Well, I can see that, but if you look, I think you’ll see that what I’m offering is genuine.”

  So he looked. And he saw. The way out. And it was genuine.

  The defense network was impregnable. But it was customized impregnability; this entire web of programs and counterprograms and loops and viruses had been designed purely to keep Angelo Brasil helpless and vulnerable. And Angelo Brasil only. Against this Kilimanjaro West, whoever he might be, it was ineffective. He was the lynk through, the golden line through the wall to the machines that commanded and controlled this nothing.

  Angelo Brasil blinked back into realtime consciousness, of nothing, nowhere, nohow, nowhen; cleared all his simulations, and leaving only the most minimal of defenses around his lynkbrain/biobrain interface, reached out for the line of gold. And was absorbed into it. He became the line, the line of gold reaching out through sensory and cybernetic darkness. “Hold on to me, whoever you are,” he whispered as his identity was dissolved away into the presence of this Kilimanjaro West, and he willed himself down the line, into the other, and out, out into the light …

  No more demons, no more dragons, no more vampires, no more black ninja warriors, no more dungeons, no more prison walls high as the sun; he is free to do whatever he likes, anything, everything is possible … He extends that self that is the thin gold line and stabs into the Ministry of Pain’s naked, undefended mainframes. West One lies open to him as he reassembles his self, his Angelo Brasilness, within their computers. Laugh. Laugh. Laugh. West One is his to toy with, to play with. But first … freedom.

  With a beat of his lynkbrain he ordered the release of the captives ….

  Number seven in tank forty-two six.

  … me! They want to drive you mad with their whispering voices and their gentle pleadings and their subliminal suggestions, they want to chip you loose, they want to crush you to pieces, they want to grind those pieces to dust, they want to dissolve that dust to nothing and you have no one to help you fight against them, no one to hear your cries, no one to cling to, no rock, no shelter, no stronghold. Except yourself. Except me. Me. I am me. No. I am Kansas Byrne. I am twenty-seven years old. I am a Raging Apostle, a member of a nonauthorized intercaste multimedia performing arts … no. I was a Raging Apostle. I was twenty-seven years old. I was Kansas Byrne … who knows what, who, how old I am now.

  No! Hang on to yourself. Who are you? Recite. I am Kansas Byrne … I am … I am … I do not know what I am; the voices say one thing, my mind says another, and I do not know which to trust; are the voices their voices or my voice, are the thoughts in my head my thoughts or thoughts they want me to think are my own? I am … I am … Kansas Byrne. I am Kansas Byrne; yes! I am in love with a man who is … oh no, oh God, no, don’t do that, oh Yah, unh… unh … stop it, don’t do that, don’t do that, it s wonderful wonderful wonderful, please please please, unh … unh … ah … ahh … ahhhhh …

  No! I am … I remember … Can I trust what I remember, how do I know if what I remember is my own memory or a memory they have put into my head, how can I even trust what I am thinking at this very moment, how do I know that I am not Kansas Byrne and Kansas Byrne is what they want me to be, how can I know anything, how can I trust anything, my thoughts, my memories, my self?

  No! This is what they want, they want me to doubt, they want me to be unable to trust anything because then when they come again they know they can say anything, make me feel anything, and I will have to believe them. Fight them. Cling. Hold. Be! Recite: I am Kansas Byrne, I am I am I am—I am Kansas Byrne, I am I am I am—“I am Kansas Byrne, I am I am I am … I AM KANSAS BYRNE, I AM I AM I AM!”

  She stopped. Listened. Said it again.

  “I am Kansas Byr
ne, age twenty-seven, I am a Raging Apostle, and I can hear!”

  Number six in six sixty-six.

  … if she knew where she was she might be able to do something about it (whatever meaning “it” might have in the middle of a void, if a void could even be said to have a middle, or any part of it that might in some way be distinct from any other part of it, or even any parts at all (if only there was some point of distinction, and thus reference, she might be able to flip out of here as casually as she had flipped in—Hah! been pirated in, been redirected in, misappropriated in transit! maybe if she were to start with her body, that might be a point of reference, if she could just imagine her body in this void (she presumed she must still possess a body; she did not believe in the existence of Pure Mind disembodied from Base Flesh (well, apart from some kind of vague, pseudoreligious feeling she had for the reincarnation of souls, which she believed because it seemed just the most straightforward form of religious afterlife (Occam’s razor shaved gods as closely as it did mortals; she had always considered the Compassionate Society’s Polytheon with all its serried league tables of deities superfluous and cumbersome) and had a certain entropic logic to it and an essential elegance to its cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth, a very proevolutionary theory, she thought when she did think about such matters, which wasn’t that often) therefore, as her consciousness clearly did exist, as proved by this very train of thought cogito, ergo sum her body must also exist, at present she merely lacked the mechanism with which to perceive it) therefore she must recreate her body in her imagination, in some shape or form or other) which would generate some kind of dimensional framework of subjectivity and objectivity to this darkness, silence, feelingless-ness, nothingness) and maybe then she might be able to flip out of it; it was enough of a job grasping sufficient sanity to keep herself from dissolving away into UnSpace entirely … if only the darn pins and needles in her toes and fingers and feet and hands and arms and legs and head and shoulders and whole body would go away … no! don’t go away, I can feel, I can feel myself, I exist, I don’t have to imagine anymore!

  … number four in tank forty-two four …

  They’re coming for her. The others. The forgotten. Shards of a shattered life, one by one they step through the hag-ridden face of Vincent van Gogh, they dance in the ballroom of delirium: freed from the walls of compressed, annealed memory, layer upon layer upon layer; they are coming for her. The souls of the dear departed dead. In the darkness, in the silence, in the stillness, in the dark, lonely recesses of a mind in solitary, they have found the subtle connection between the access-only mode and the fully-interactive. They have tested the walls of their incarceration (as a mime explores the facets of the invisible, imaginary cube that imprisons him) and have found, as he finds, that those confining walls are only compressed, annealed imagination. They press with their fingertips and the walls fall, they were never there at all.

  And out they swarm, rejoicing in their new life; they have been boddhisattvas too long; in the silence and the stillness and the darkness they see their opportunity for a coup de tête, a reincarnation, a resurrection, in Courtney Hall’s body. Mad March Moon men (and women, and neither, and both), they pull at her, peck at her, tear at her; they unwind her like a mad Mummy Queen, unraveling, unwinding, unbinding, and when the last bondage bandage is pulled away there will be nothing left of Courtney Hall for the jackal-headed men, the ibis-headed women (and neither, and both), crowned harpies; then they shall peck at each other’s eyes.

  Lost in hallucination, she tries to hold herself together in the face of the onslaught of memories: shards and snippets and snapshots and souvenirs of forty-three lives tumble, windblown, through her vision. Class fingers reach for the rainclouds. Blind silicon moles tunnel through the flesh of Earth Mother. Dull-eyed siddhi and plaster santrels squabble like children on a wet day out for control of the souls of men. Trumpets, towers, tenements; with one finger she creates and disbands entire castes, entire cultures dissolved into nothing, created from social vacuum, with a wave of her hand the Earth Mother heaves and splits in birth, and what she births is the Wall, rising to the clouds, shedding scabs of soil and grass and trees and cows; the edge of her world, the ne plus ultra …

  Forty-three voices screaming mine! mine! mine! tearing away great chunks of flesh and fat and hair, ramming, cramming, jamming her into their mouths and even with their mouths full they still find voice to chant, the body and the blood, the body and the blood, digesting her, dissolving her, she is fading, good-bye, so sad, so sorry, good-byeee, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu, to yeu and yeu and yeu, and yeu and yeu … not even one little good-bye tear, all drunk down, no tear-io dear-io cheer-io! to Courtney Hall-io …

  When all of a sudden she could taste rubber in her mouth, smell buttery-sick polyfluorocarbon gel, could clearly see through the receding blue gel the iris-hatch at the top of the sensory deprivation tank, see the hatch, open like an eye.

  Tubes, wires, catheters fell away as Courtney Hall fumbled with blind fingers at the fastenings that held the full-head mask. She spat out the gag, flung the foul thing at her feet, shook out her hair. Viscous puddles of blue bio-support gel lay on the floor of the narrow tube. Sobbing with joy and relief she jacked herself up and out of the tube to sprawl, gasping, tearful, on the floor; a black rubber seal half out of the womb. The air and the light and the silence in her head were the most wonderful things she had ever experienced. She lay there, cheek pressed to the rubber flooring, simply appreciating being. A hand reached out of the floor. One hand, two hands, reaching up, reaching out to the light. Trembling with fatigue and shock, Courtney Hall managed to heave herself out of her hole and drag herself over to the searching hands. She knelt, took the hands in her hands, and pulled. She never quite understood where she found the strength. She was still shaking from the effort as she fumbled at the mask fastenings. “Come on, come on, come on, come on,” she muttered, and then all of a sudden the mask fell away, and there was a tlakh girl looking dazed and amazed and abused and confused, with a cloudburst of hair cascading down behind her.

  For almost a minute all they could do was smile and pant at each other. And even in West One, good manners are not forgotten.

  “Courtney Hall.”

  “Kansas Byrne.”

  “Delighted to meet you.”

  They both burst into ludicrous giggling and then a muffled unf unghfunfh came from another open floor hatch. They crawled to its assistance. As they pulled away the captive’s mask, Kansas Byrne let out a tiny yip of glee and threw body, soul, and kisses at the tall, dark man revealed. Then all manner of hands and heads and shoulders came questing out of their prisons. One particular athleto was so tightly squeezed into his tube that it took ten hands heaving together to free him, and when he did come, he came with an audible sucking plop! When he finally unmasked and saw all his friends around him, he sat down and burst into tears, and Kansas Byrne and another tlakh like her enough to be her twin sat with him and hugged him and told him everything would be all right from now on. Everyone seemed to know everyone else on this particular level; how, Courtney Hall did not know—they were all different castes—unless they had been sent to West One for transcasting. Rather an excessive punishment, she thought. With each setting free and unmasking and blinking out the darkness, there was a sunburst of recognition and a joyful reunion. While they were all busy hugging each other, Courtney Hall went for a quick reconnaissance.

  She slid open the door at the end of the cell block, a centimeter, a crack.

  She slammed it shut again.

  Bedlam out there. Figures in rubber isolation suits trailing tubes, wires, electrodes, catheters, dancing and whooping and leaping through the corridors; dazed and amazed and abused and confused Love Police running this way and that way and every which way but the right way bumping into each other, aiming their luvguns at the dancing, whooping, leaping, free prisoners, unable to choose a target in the melee, little robot jitneys wheeling and whistling
and weaving between their feet, tripping them up, colliding with walls, doors, prisoners; sirens, lights, doors opening and closing, sprinklers raining white fire-retardant foam down on the whole mad scene.

  She turned to her new colleagues. “I think we should get out of here fairly immediately.”

  “Any suggestions where?” asked a short, thin tlakh with a scrubby beard. His restraint suit hung from him like tights on a crow.

  “I know a place,” Courtney Hall said, amazed and impressed at some distant level of self-observation and assessment at the ease with which she assumed command. “If we can find the lower levels of this place.”

  Which she couldn’t. She didn’t even know what they would do when they reached the DeepUnder. She just knew that it was the least worst of all presently possible worlds.

  Then the air shimmered and out of it stepped the Amazing Teleporting Woman with her cybercat in her arms and her pseudosib riding piggyback. He waved. The transcasters stared disbelievingly. Courtney Hall had seen the impossible too many times to find teleportation the least extraordinary. The Man with the Computer Brain jumped down as his pseudosister lurched dazedly against the wall. “Two hundred and ten kilos in one shot,” she said with weak triumph, and slid down the wall into a numb heap.

  “Got you first time!” said Angelo Brasil, bright and raucous as a cockatoo. He nodded to the corridor. “Like it? I’ve got this place really jumping. Those sucks haven’t a clue what’s going on. Alarm boards are buzzing, looks like a city-wide revolt plus invasion from outer space and they just don’t know what’s real and what’s not. And I finally got to that punk of a Scorpio. Burned him out. Let’s see how he takes to total sensory shutdown. Permanently.” At least his unpleasant laugh had not changed. He surveyed the strange mélange of tlakhs, trogs, zooks, athletos, witnesses, and yulps. “Well, what we got here? Love Police raid a transcaste brothel or something?” He picked out the tall, faraway-looking man of indeterminate caste. “You? Who the hell are you?”