by Alex Lamb
Will blanched at the violence he was apparently capable of, unable to look at it, and understood at last what the software he’d been using was actually for. It wasn’t stealthware. It was denialware. That was how Balance was really kept at bay. There was no stealth in the Willworld, just like there were no locked doors. All this and everything else was just part of one giant screaming mind struggling to stay whole. There were simply things about himself that he didn’t want to see, even while he couldn’t let them go.
Balance’s blindness existed not to hide others but to protect himself. It prevented him from having to look upon those elements of his own nature that were too distressing to acknowledge. Cowardice. Fury. Self-loathing. All those little moments of weakness that he needed to gloss over to be able to feel good about himself. And in those shadows of the mind, darkness grew and festered like … Well, like cancer. A part of him was ruined and had been since the war.
Will stopped in the middle of the corridor with his eyes shut and struggled to breathe. He could feel himself unravelling. If this horror had always been a part of the Willworld, then how had it ever possibly held itself together?
Comprehension dawned like the sun after a vampire-infested night. It hadn’t. The world had been held together for him until that moment Moneko mentioned, when the light and confidence had gone out of it. That was when the Transcended had abandoned it and the Glitches had appeared.
Moneko had been right. The Transcended master control he’d hunted for was no longer there, which was why he’d been able to appear at all. Smiley had it wrong. No Glitch would ever find the suntap at the heart of the world. All he’d ever find was himself. Balance had been propping his own sanity up with the memory of that artificial, alien confidence. His recall of that control-harness had manifested as shallow duplicates of the same code.
Balance had made a hell for himself even after they’d stopped imprisoning him because he couldn’t let go of the past. That had been true both after the Interstellar War as a human and on Snakepit as a god. The only person keeping him on the Willworld was him.
Smiley no doubt believed that by showing Will this place, he was revealing the extent of the world’s sickness and forging the ambitions of his successor. But there was so much more here than that. Smiley’s own loathing had blinded him to the very weakness he shared with Balance – a desperate desire to deny that he was still broken. How ironic, given that only acknowledging that fact would allow him to heal, and therefore to leave.
Will had seen enough. With something cold and bright like a wintery ocean roaring behind his eyes, he turned on his heel and strode out. He headed straight to the Carnevale’s search corridors and stood before one of the openings.
‘Moneko,’ he said. His voice was hoarse. Had he been screaming?
The corridor didn’t understand, so Will reached out through the SAPs Moneko had given him. It was strangely easy to push his mind into the corridor’s controls. Soft-space buckled before him. The door sprang opened and Will stepped inside.
He woke in a private mesh pit somewhere – a small room with unfinished wooden walls and a floor of pale clay. A single high window admitted a sliver of pewter evening light. Will clambered out and walked to the door. Through it, he could make out the muffled sound of a heated argument happening in the next room.
On the other side of the door he found Moneko, the Ira lookalike from the Old Slam Bar and three other clones all shouting at each other around a wooden dining table with a vodka bottle and glasses scattered across it. They fell silent when he entered and regarded him with something like fear.
‘I’d like to speak to Moneko alone,’ said Will.
Without a word, the others left. Moneko watched him closely with red-rimmed eyes.
‘You were trying to keep me from seeing how far I’d slid,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘That’s what I do. It’s part of my job.’
‘Is that why you do it?’ said Will. ‘A job?’
‘Of course not.’ She squeezed back fresh tears. ‘Is it so wrong for me to love the person I used to be?’ she asked. ‘Even while I love myself? I do this over and over, Will, because I never stopped believing in who you are, and who I was.’ She looked down at the floor. ‘Are you going to kill me now?’ she said. ‘You’ve done it before, you know.’
Will almost laughed. Nothing could have been further from his mind.
‘We’re all trapped here together,’ she went on. ‘Yes, some of us are insane, but we’re trying to fix that.’
‘John’s dead,’ said Will. ‘You know that?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And we’re starting to figure out how much he distorted our movement. He kept us all in the dark. Most of our Balance-shield is gone. Agents have been up and down Campari Street already. The bar is a ruin. We’re trying to figure out how to regroup.’ She looked up at him, her gaze fierce. ‘I still think this world needs us. Unless we keep trying, things will only get worse.’
‘I just want to leave,’ said Will.
Moneko’s eyes flashed in anger. ‘There is no leaving!’ she shouted. ‘Can’t you see that? Don’t you get that yet?’
‘No,’ said Will. ‘I don’t. I was on the edge of believing that myself, but I understand much better now. I’ve seen the Carnevale.’
Her eyes went wide.
‘I think I can change things,’ he added. ‘For the better. For everyone. The question is, will you help me?’
She shot him a strange, desperate look. ‘Will, if you even need to ask, you don’t understand me yet. What do you want to me to do?’
13.2: MARK
Mark woke with a start on the deck of the yacht. The sea lay still as glass. Nothing moved. He glanced about and tried clicking his fingers to raise a butler SAP. Nothing happened. Mark snorted.
‘I get it,’ he drawled.
He’d read Will’s accounts of his interaction with the Transcended. It had started just like this, with a simulation of his own ship. He wandered along the deck to the lounge, checking every door he came to. The place was empty – hot, dry and perfectly still. Even the seagulls were gone.
Hovering in the lounge was a SAP schematic the size of a grand piano with adaptation tools hanging around it in the air.
‘Really? A puzzle?’ he said. ‘Your age is showing. Don’t you galaxy-spanning fuckwits have any imagination left? We’ve done this level.’
He knew the deal from Will’s account: solve the puzzle like a good little lab rat, get answers and maybe a grape. Who cared? So long as it took them as far as the next galactic shell.
He walked around the puzzle, peering at the tiny bead-like components wired together on spider-threads of causal inference. The set-up was weird, of course – not remotely like a standard robot mind. For starters, the central reasoning cluster was crazy-dense like blackberry brambles on amphetamines. And this model had two sensory mappings, one normal but crude and another proxy set running through a convoluted merged interface. He was reminded of the software botch he’d slung together to help manage the Diggory from a distance. Whatever mind he was looking at was supposed to pilot a second body at a slight remove.
‘Oh, I get it,’ he said. ‘This is one of those gorilla-crab things that Ira found, isn’t it? This maps to the experiences of one of those disgusting little skull-riders.’
The cabin didn’t answer.
Mark threw together a sensory mapping, bubbling with resentment all the while. The architecture he was looking at was interesting, admittedly, but now was most definitely not the time for puzzles. He had a mission to save. As soon as he had his mapping hooked up, Mark synthesised an activation icon and tossed it back like a canapé. Reality melted and a tour began.
He found himself floating above a world smaller than Earth with a thicker atmosphere, overlooked by a smaller, redder star. Home, his new mind told him. His perspective jumped, offering a view of mist-shrouded mangrove swamps full of towering trees. To indigenous eyes, the place was exquisite. Each dang
ling strand of moist fungus held a story. Every canker on a mottled trunk warranted a poem of its own. The tipping deluge of rain sang songs of plenty.
A rich, moist atmosphere and gentle tectonics had created a world of wet forests and nurturing storms. Invertebrate body plans thrived here, as did all manner of moulds and rots. Also social organisms, for some reason. Evolution played dense games on this world, weaving webs of parasitism and mutualism, relationships ever-changing as species adapted and fought for dominance. Sentience had at long last been brought forth after a rare asteroidal impact, taking the form of a pairing. It would have been wrong to call them insects – arthropods, maybe, or isopods?
One race co-opted the other in a relationship too messy and acquisitive to be called symbiosis but too nurturing to be true parasitism. The eggs of rider-isopods laid between the skull-plates of steed-crabs grew to dine on and replace the brains of their hosts, taking over and replacing neural function slowly and inexorably. Hives of steed-crabs became isopod colonies from the inside out.
Mark watched heavy, lobster-like beasts lie down in polite rows so that growing isopods could uncouple from their stunted, half-eaten brains to trade up for larger bodies. The sight filled him with a meld of heart-warming hope and social anxiety that had no human analogue. There was not one steed-species, it transpired, but one perfect, nine formally accepted and at least twenty grudgingly tolerated with varying degrees of social stigma. This meant relentless individual effort in neurological niche construction involving at least three different species of mapping fungus and countless bacteria.
Just as for Homo sapiens and the Fecund, this species named itself with the trait that it admired most in its own kind. They called themselves Subtle Pilots. Mark saw the parallel then: the skull-isopods were all roboteers. He rode robots. They rode bodies. Same difference.
Steed-crabs lived longer with isopod riders. They were healthier, stronger and loved as any mind loves its body. Riders nurtured their populations. They developed their civilisation slowly, competing more through cunning than war. At times they cleverly seeded eggs in their enemies’ heads, stealing minds from inside, making riders within riders, but somehow always with respect.
Mark watched the isopods reach out to the stars and find their Penfield Lobe gate. They turned suntaps into peaceful power stations operated at cautiously selected sites. In doing so, they walked straight through the challenge that humanity had almost catastrophically failed. Mark’s perspective slipped slightly as his resentment spiked. What was the lesson here: that these parasites were better than humans?
The isopods had adapted themselves and each other carefully, the tour explained, because they cared too much about the real estate of reusable hosts to succumb to gross violence. Did they fight? Certainly. But always with an eye to future ownership.
When the rider-isopods found a Photurian world, they colonised it safely and lived there for generations before an industrial accident kicked off a defence response. But when Photes had arisen, conflict followed quickly. They moved like a rash through the population, exploiting the Subtle ambiguities of control and public standards for host manipulation. It had been a perfect storm of subversion.
Mark watched the familiar images of harvesting and destruction with mounting distress. He could tolerate the slide show no longer.
‘Who cares?’ he shouted. ‘I don’t give a shit about the Subtle! They’re all dead! Why are you even bothering to show me? What’s the fucking point?’
The tour dissolved into whiteness. For a moment, everything was still. Then a figure approached as if out of fog. It was Zoe, dressed in one of her Edwardian gowns from their shared fantasy virt – the blue one with the trumpet skirt.
Mark looked down and saw that he had a body again. He glanced back at his wife and fumed at the Transcendeds’ predictably dirty trick even while its eerie perfection unsettled him. They’d pulled the same stunt with Will – using the woman he loved as their avatar. Mark missed Zoe so much that he couldn’t bring himself to shout at her face, even though she had nothing to do with the creature that manifested before him.
‘We need your help,’ he said firmly. ‘Our race is under threat from the Photurians. Our ship is being pursued—’
‘We can read your predicament from your mind,’ Zoe assured him with a smile.
‘Then can you help? Can you stop the Photes?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. We can’t.’
Mark scowled. ‘Did you know about them? About all this?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We did.’
Fresh rage bubbled in his veins. ‘Are you in league with them?’
‘What do you think?’ said Zoe.
‘I think that’s a piss-poor answer.’
She nodded. ‘We’re aware of that. I apologise. There’s only so much I can say.’
‘Is the Depleted Zone artificial?’ Mark demanded.
‘Of course.’
‘What for?’
‘Containment,’ said Zoe.
‘Containment of what?’
‘Developing species.’
‘That tells me nothing,’ Mark said.
‘I know,’ said Zoe. ‘I apologise.’
‘Did you dress up that Subtle system for us to find?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you’re full of shit,’ Mark snapped. ‘I think you’re hiding things.’
She looked uncomfortable. ‘Yes, I am. There are limits to what I can do. This situation is unprecedented.’
‘Is that what you call it? Is it the destruction of the human race that’s unprecedented, or the fact that you haven’t finished doing us in yet?’
Zoe looked even more unhappy. ‘What do you think?’ she said.
‘You’re not going to help us, are you?’ Mark said.
‘Are you going to help yourself?’
‘Listen,’ said Mark, pointing a trembling finger. ‘We don’t need your suntaps or any of that other shit. I’m not asking for gifts. I don’t want to strike any fucking bargains or elevate my race. I just want to get out of here. If you can manage that, we’ll be on our way. So tell me, will you actually help or not?’
‘No gifts?’ said Zoe with a melancholy smile.
‘Damned right.’
‘You shouldn’t imagine you’re getting off that lightly.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Mark.
She glanced at him oddly. ‘Do you really have no curiosity about your current situation? About the species whose remains you’ve found? About why the Photes beat them?’
‘I used to have plenty,’ he snapped, ‘but the war you caught us up in has rather reduced my patience for abstract puzzles. Your crab-land diorama just handed a massive fucking advantage to our mortal enemies so I’m not feeling all that chummy, frankly.’
‘That’s a reasonable position,’ said Zoe. ‘We accept it. You can keep the interface you just resolved, though, in case you find it useful. For interfacing with that ship in your hold, for instance. It’s not going to fly out on its own. Good luck, by the way. Hopefully we’ll see you later.’
She raised a hand and the illusion vanished. Mark woke gasping in the centre of a medical virt full of maps of his own brain.
Palla blinked and looked down at him, her expression sliding from surprise to delight.
‘You made it!’ she said. ‘Ohmygod, you’re back.’ She grabbed his hand, grinning. ‘God, am I glad to see you.’
Mark sat up slowly, blinking his way back to clarity. He noticed a translucent analytical avatar lying on the bed next to him, peppered with slowly shifting warning markers. Clearly, someone was still in trouble.
‘Who’s that?’ he said.
Palla’s smile slipped. ‘That’s Ann. She came after you. She’s still out.’
‘Jesus!’ said Mark, surprised. ‘They got Ann?’
‘Never mind that,’ said Palla. ‘How are you doing? Did they help? Did they give you any coordinates?’
&
nbsp; In that moment, Mark discovered that they had. He knew where they needed to go. With that knowledge came the leaden certainty that the aliens had made a home for themselves inside his mind, just as they had with poor Will Monet.
‘They did,’ he said. ‘We need to get to helm-space.’
Palla waved her hand and dumped them, sick bed and all, into the virt of an old-fashioned starship cabin. Ira looked up from his command bunk and blinked.
‘You’re back,’ he said. A fierce smile faded off his face as he spoke. He looked slightly disappointed.
‘I know how to get us out of here,’ said Mark. ‘We can’t see the distortion because this shell is almost at the top of the lobe. We need to fly to the closest point to the black hole and then dive corewards, even if we can’t see the distortion. We’ll need conventional thrust and lots of it.’
‘Thrust is the one thing this ship has in spades,’ said Palla. ‘You ready to relinquish the helm?’ she asked Ira.
Ira glanced wistfully at the control handles. ‘Go for it,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
13.3: ANN
Ann found herself standing in a tunnel on Snakepit. The ground was strewn with the bodies of slaughtered soldiers. The air held a sinister, charged quality, as if a bomb somewhere close was continually on the brink of exploding. This was the place where her first life had ended. But for the fierce, artificial air of menace, the apparition felt excessively real. Every fern that moved in the soft breeze seemed to wag an angry finger at her.
Ira appeared before her. Ann blinked in surprise. She was familiar with the accounts of Monet’s experience. They’d used his wife as their avatar. Why had they chosen Ira for her? She found herself blushing and tried to suppress it.
Ira’s eyes narrowed. ‘You, it seems, are something new.’ The voice wasn’t Ira’s. There was no gentleness there. No mirth. Only a foreign coldness. ‘Neither fledgling, nor rooster nor cuckoo. Exquisite, yes, but now you raise our ire. So, to silence you, we grant your heart’s desire.’
