by Tad Williams
He took a moment to issue some crucial messages and set a few small works in motion, then turned his attention to the slender black sapling that had sprung up at the edge of the sea of vegetation. Three vines had crept up its dark verticality, climbing to a surprising height. He knew what two of the creepers represented, but about the third, its livid, unnatural color and texture more like plastic piping than vegetable, he was less sure. Sorensen? It seemed odd the Garden would represent him in such a way. With foreboding, Sellars made a connection.
Like a phantom he listened in on Catur Ramsey's conversation with Olga and although he shared Ramsey's worry about her, and even debated cutting in to echo Ramsey's warning, the larger and more pressing issue of the data tap would not allow it. He did permit himself a brief moment of amusement at the identity of the third vine. Orlando Gardiner's software agent! What an idea—but a good one. Working together, somehow they had found a way to install the data tap. Sellars found himself admiring and liking Ramsey even more, and Olga, too. He wished he had more time to get to know them both. It was unfortunate that he was probably not going to be alive long enough to do so.
He quickly turned his attention to the data tap, accessing Beezle's captured visuals to carefully examine the linked array of knowledge engines that seemed to power the Grail network. Even without knowing their exact nature and location he had suspected what the software agent had now confirmed and had arranged with the people of TreeHouse, among other resources, to make sure he had the processing power to cope with the influx of data. He checked and then rechecked his already labored calculations. He whispered the prayer which had accompanied him at takeoff on every flight. He opened the tap.
The Garden exploded.
It was too much information—beyond imagining. The constraints of his Garden burst and dissolved, the models incapable of keeping up with the flow. Within a heartbeat his entire system was teetering on the brink of collapse. When that happened, he knew, everything would be lost. He would be trapped in the blackness of the Tandagore coma without even an online existence, or helpless before the next defensive cycle of the operating system. Everything would fail. Everything.
He fought, but the Garden was dying all around him, collapsing, reduced in microseconds to random, nonrepresentational bits. Before his inner eyes the intricate matrix of greenery devolved into abstract patterns of dark and light, flashing randomly, warping and seething like a nest of stars.
Then just as it seemed nothing worse could happen the alarm signals began. The operating system had launched another attack, trying to sever his connection to the Grail network.
No, he realized. It's reaching for me. For me. He felt the system's probe thrust past his crumbling defenses and into his mind. He was helpless before it.
Sellers screamed in shock and pain as it touched him, but there was no sound to be heard in that empty place of endlessly streaming data, no hope and no help—only the mindless throb of a universe being born.
Or a universe dying.
She didn't know how she had got back to the chair or why, but she was staring at her pad again. Only minutes had passed since she had opened her employer's locked storage but they seemed to have ground past as slowly as geological aeons. A tunnel of darkness surrounded her, narrowing her sight until all she could see was the screen, the terrible screen. On it a file called Nuba 27 was now playing. Dread was doing unspeakable things to a woman in what seemed to be a hotel room, the sunlight streaming in through the windows giving everything a stark, ghastly clarity.
Get up, Dulcie thought. Get up. But the tunnel around her hid everything except the screen. All she could see was the horrid, bright hotel light. Get up. She wasn't even sure if she was talking to the woman strapped to the plastic-draped bed or to herself.
A dull bonging sound intruded on her even duller thoughts. She realized she had turned off the sound on the file, a tiny mercy in an eternity of horror, because she had not been able to make herself listen anymore. The musical soundtrack had been even worse than the screaming. So if the sound on the file was turned off, what was making that noise?
A window opened up in the corner of the pad screen. In it, a figure in an overcoat stood in a doorway. For a moment she thought it was only some elaboration of the file's horrors, a second victim perhaps, her employer about to arrange some hideous duet of grunting and screeching, then she slowly came to understand that the doorway in the view-window was the loft's seen from the security camera over the door. It took another long time and more ringing from the doorbell, before she realized it was really happening. Right now.
Close your eyes, a voice urged her. Let it all go away. Never open them again. It's a nightmare.
But it wasn't a nightmare. She knew it wasn't, even though at this moment she knew very little else. One of her hands was clutching an empty coffee cup so hard her fingers had cramped, although she did not remember picking it up. She looked up through the tunneled swirl of darkness and saw Dread still lying on his coma bed, a million miles away.
The light of stars, she thought disjointedly. It takes years, it seems so cold when it gets here. But if you were close, it would burn you right up. . . .
The doorbell rang again.
He's going to kill me, she thought. Even if I run. Wherever I go, whatever I do. . . .
Get up, stupid! This last voice was very faint but something in its urgency cut through the fog in her head, the disassociated murk that was her only protection against pure shrieking animal terror. She clambered to her feet and almost fell down, bracing herself against the back of the chair until her legs were shaking a little less. The chair squeaked. She jerked her head in panic to look at Dread but he still lay unmoving, a god's effigy carved in dark wood. She stumbled to the stairs and went down them like a crippled woman. The doorbell sounded again but the speaker was upstairs; here on the bottom landing it was only a distant sound, like something sinking into the ocean.
I'll lie down here, she thought, after a while I won't even hear it.
Instead some inner compulsion made her reach out and thumb the security lock, then open the door. From up close she could see that the figure in the doorway was shorter than she was, although more heavyset. Dark curly hair, eyes narrowed in suspicion or annoyance. A woman.
A woman. . . . she thought. If it's a woman, I have to tell her something . . . warn her. . . . But she couldn't think. She couldn't remember. The darkness was very thick.
"Excuse me," the stranger said after a moment, her voice deep and firm. "Sorry to bother you on a Sunday. I'm looking for someone named Hunter."
"There's . . . no. . . ." Dulcie leaned on the doorframe for support. "There's no one here by that name." A part of her was glad. She could close the door now and walk back upstairs and pull the blackness over her like a blanket. But . . . Hunter? Why did that name sound familiar? Why did anything sound familiar, for that matter?
"Are you sure? I'm sorry, did I wake you up?" The woman was looking at her carefully, concern and something else in her expression. "Are you feeling all right?"
It came to her then, as if a memory from another country, even another lifetime. Hunter—that was the name on all the documents for the loft. She had seen it on Dread's system, thought it just a random pseudonym, but now. . . . "Oh, God," she said.
The woman stepped forward and took her arm—gently, but with a grip that suggested she could squeeze a lot harder if she wanted to. "Do you mind if we talk? My name is Skouros—I'm a police detective. I have a few questions." Her eyes flicked across the darkness behind Dulcie. "Can you step outside?"
Dulcie was caught, paralyzed, as if possessed by some slow seizure. "I . . . I can't. . . . He. . . ."
"Is there someone else home?"
It was a funny question, really—where was that place, after all? Otherland, they called it. Other. Somewhere? Nowhere? That was why Dulcie laughed. But when she heard herself it was not a good laugh. "No. he's . . . gone. . . ."
"Let's go up, then.
Is that all right with you?"
She could only nod. I'm a ghost, she thought, trying to remember what it had been like on the other side of the darkness. It doesn't matter—summoned or banished. I can't do anything about it.
As they went up the stairs the woman in the coat took something out of one of her pockets. For a moment Dulcie thought it was a gun, but it was only a little black-and-silver pad. The woman held it up to her mouth as though to speak into it, but Dulcie had suddenly remembered the files were still open on the screen of her own pad, open and running for anyone to see. Nuba 27. Those fingers wiggling, like something lost and drowning at the bottom of the ocean. . . . Even through the freeze she felt a rush of embarrassment, as though the scenes of horror were something of her own, something shameful, and as they reached the top of the landing she took the woman's hand.
"They're not mine," she explained. "I didn't know. I . . . he. . . ."
And as she turned, still clutching the woman's hand, she saw that the coma bed was empty.
"Just tell me. . . ." the woman began, but didn't finish. Air huffed out of her in a popping wheeze and she staggered forward, four or five steps across the loft floor, then fell down on her face. A huge knife stuck out of her back as though it had simply appeared there, a few inches of blade showing between the handle and the redness oozing out around the place where it had slashed through the overcoat. Dulcie could only stare at the woman, talking one moment, silent and motionless now. The blackness was coming back, closing in swift as wind-driven fog.
"Ah, sweetness, what have you been doing while Daddy was away?"
Dread stepped out of the shadow behind the loft door. He was wearing his white bathrobe, loosely tied. He walked past her, cat-silent on bare feet, and stood over the policewoman. Her eyes, Dulcie saw, were still open. A bubble of red spit was trembling at the corner of her mouth. Dread crouched down until he was only centimeters from the woman's face.
"I wish I had time to do you properly," he told her. "You must have worked hard to wind up at my door. But things are happening fast and I can't stop for games." He stood up, grinning, full of manic energy that lit him up like a Christmas tree. "And as for you, Dulcie, my pet, what have you been up to?" His gaze slid to her pad, still sitting on the chair, the screen flickering with violent motion, and his eyes opened just a little more—they were already as wide as someone on the downhill rush of a roller coaster. "Well, you have been a nosy little bitch, haven't you?"
Without realizing it she had been backing toward the small area of counter where she had set up the coffee makings. "I didn't . . . I don't . . . why. . . ?"
"Why? Well, that's the question, isn't it, sweetness? Why? Because I like to. Because I can."
She paused, her spine against the drawer, her fingers feeling for its handle. She had remembered what was in it. Something had finally jolted her back to life, a splash on her thoughts cold as ice water, and for the first time in an hour she could think. Oh, Jesus, keep him talking, she told herself. He's a monster, but he likes to talk.
"But why? You . . . you don't have to do it."
"Because I can get sex the legitimate way?" The smile lingered. He was high, high on something, high as the sky. "That's not what it's about. And sex—it's nothing. Not in comparison."
She was easing the drawer open, silently, slowly, afraid that her hammering pulse and trembling fingers would make her slip and pull it out too far, send it clattering to the floor. "What . . . what are you going to do to me?"
"Get rid of you. You know that I have to, love. But you've done good work for me so I'm going to make it quick. Terminations should be quick and humane, right? Isn't that what the business manuals all say? Besides, I'm very busy right now—very, very busy." He smiled; if she had not known now what was beneath the mask she would have sworn it was a true and kind thing. "And I can do without you now. I've got things under control. You should see what's going on with the network and your old friends! I hated to leave, even for a minute—things are very exciting there right now—but I believe in keeping an active relationship with my employees."
The drawer was open. She let out a little terrified sigh to mask the sound of her hand searching. There was no need to fake the terror, no need at all. He was watching her with mesmerizing intensity, his pupils big and black as the barrel of a. . . .
Gun. Where's the gun?
She swung around as quickly as she could, risking all, and pulled the drawer all the way out. It was empty.
"Looking for this?" he asked.
She turned back in time to see him pull it from the pocket of his bathrobe. The curling-iron barrel came up and pointed right between her eyes.
"I'm not an idiot, sweetness." Dread shook his head in mock-disappointment. "Oh, and you know what I said about quick. . . ?"
He let the barrel swing down from her face to her middle. Dulcie felt herself punched in the belly and flung backward even as she heard the loud, explosive crack. then she was on her side, trying to understand how so many things could stop working all at the same time. She wanted to make noise, to scream for help, but couldn't: something was crushing the air out of her, a huge fist squeezing her chest. Her hands had flown instinctively to her stomach. She looked down and saw blood welling between her fingers. When she lifted them away, it began to drip down to the floor where it formed a spreading pool. "I changed my mind," he said.
CHAPTER 41
Playing the Knight
NETFEED/NEWS: "Autostalking" Not Illegal, Court Rules
(visual: defendant Duncan's "Smiling Avenger" avatar)
VO: A UN regional court has ruled that there is nothing inherently illegal in a piece of gear that follows a user into virtual simulations and does harm to that user's simuloid unless it violates the laws pertaining to that node. Amanda Hoek, a seventeen-year-old South African schoolgirl, has been pursued online by a piece of code created by an ex-boyfriend and, in the words of her lawyer, "systematically stalked and assaulted numerous times."
(visual: Jens Verwoerd, Hoek's attorney)
VERWOERD: "This poor girl cannot use the net—vital to her schoolwork and her social life—without her online character being followed into every node by the defendant's avatar, a piece of code designed specifically to harass her. She has been insulted, attacked, and sexually assaulted numerous times, both verbally and through the tactors of the VR nodes, and yet this court seems to think this is nothing more than the horseplay of adolescents on the net. . . ."
Even as she swam and died in the glittering darkness Renie could not rid herself of the taste of fear—but it was someone else's fear.
Not someone, she thought, something. How can a thing, a machine made of code, be so frightened. . . !
The operating system had touched her and then pushed her away, had fled back into the recesses of itself, leaving her to drown in a sea of stars. It was a slow drowning—an ebbing away of consciousness, a fragmenting of the personality. She had felt something like it before when the system had been angry; then it had filled her with terror. Now she drifted, pulsing like a fading echo through the lonely lights, and knew that the operating system lived in a state of fear far worse than anything she could understand—a terror so complete and so alien that even its distant resonances could kill.
But does it make any difference? she wondered. Dying like this instead of dying from fright? She could feel herself letting go, coming apart, but it was all so gradual, so . . . unimportant. Freezing to death, they said, was a kind death. Body and mind disassociated, what had been painful chill came to seem like warmth, and at last sleep came like a friend. This must be a little like that.
But I don't want to go, she thought distantly, and even convinced herself a little. Even if it doesn't hurt. I don't want to cut the string.
Never to see Stephen again, or Martine and the others, Fredericks . . . and !Xabbu. . . . That was from his poem, wasn't it? Something about death—or was it just about string. . . ?
"There were people, so
me people
Who broke the string for me
And so
This place is now a sad place for me,
Because the string is broken."
She could almost hear him saying it, his soft voice, the slightly alien inflections hurrying the words at surprising moments, then slowing down to voice a single syllable like music. !Xabbu.
"The string broke for me,
And so
This place does not feel to me
As it used to feel,
Because the string is broken."
What had the unbroken string been? A life? A dream? The cord that held together the universe?
All of those things?
Now she could hear it as though he stood beside her, as he had stood through so many moments of anguish, a stalwart flame in all darknesses.
"This place feels as if it stood open before me
Empty
Because the string has broken
And so
This place is an unhappy place
Because the string is broken."
This place is an unhappy place, she repeated to herself. Because the string is broken. Because I am alone.
This place feels as if it stood open before me, she told the darkness as she drifted and disintegrated, mere flotsam left behind in the flight of a terrified child-thing.
Empty, something whispered to her across the flashing emptiness. Because the string has broken.
For a moment she floated, bemused, trying to remember what it was that had caught her fragmenting attention. A voice. A voice?
The operating system, she thought. It's come back for me. Whatever "back" means. Whatever "me," means. . . . It was growing harder and harder to think.
Because the string has broken.
The chant wafted to her through the void, but it was not a sound, it was both more and less. It was a spattering of tight like a distant explosion in vacuum space, a tiny pulse of heat at the bottom of a frozen, sluggish ocean. It was a whisper from a dream heard on the porch of wakefulness, an idea, a scent, a muffled heartbeat. It was. . . .
