by Guy Haley
"There was only one fabber in the place," continued Chures. "I became fixated on those robots, spent an age getting the money together, to find that they weren't true robots at all, but clockworks that quickly broke.
"This man, he was like that; broken. His arm went out, grabbing at the sky, the other clutched at the screwdriver; he'd thrown me off, but it had stayed there. A froth of blood was on his lips. He flailed at us, so we scurried back, like mice, you know? Into the shade behind prefabbed shelters. The man fell to his knees, his eyes flat, blood pumping. He stared at me as if to ask why. I did not feel the need to answer.
"I had been aiming for the carotid artery, the way one of the older boys showed me. But I missed and only nicked it. I must have hit something vital, because he could not stand properly. The fat man took a long time to die. It was raining then, like it is now." He looked out of the window. "We watched as his life washed into the mud.
"Persephone, she was my sister. My parents were poor but they were not unsophisticated. My mother would have been a doctor if the war had not come, and my father, he loved stories, he told me so many. Persephone, like the daughter of Demeter, married off to Hades and whose six-month stay in the underworld every year caused Demeter's winter of grief to fall upon the world."
"What happened to them?" said Valdaire.
"Persephone died not long afterwards, killed by the haemorraghic fever. My mother died in a later epidemic. I was fourteen before I and my father left that place. He lives in Fresno now, but he no longer tells stories. The camp outside Puerto Penasco was dismantled in 2120. Nothing but fields there, those big round ones with the irrigation drip tracks." Chures put his empty bottle down, bent to the mini-fridge for another and opened it. "So, you ask why I wore the blend. Many people make the mistake of thinking I hate the machines. This is not so. In the camps I have seen the worst man has to offer, and later I learned of the mistakes that led to them. The machines can deliver us a better world, because they are good at forcing us to work together. We do not have a good record in this area; they are less selfish. But they must be subservient to us, not our masters. I am afraid not that they seek to rule us, but that they will, eventually, by default. That is why I behave the way I do. Man should have a hand in his own destiny.
"The Ky-tech are too close to machines. What they did to their minds was dangerous, and that is why Klein and his friend and that maniac Kaplinski are the last of a dying breed. Why do so many have phones, and not an internal link? I will tell you. It is not the fear of Bergstrom's, but because you know that to alter our minds makes us inhuman. Our humanity should stay in control, or we will cease to be human by small steps. I wore the blend so that I would know them better, not to become one of them, not like Klein."
The rain hammered down, mixed now with the ball-bearing rattle of hail bouncing off the pavements outside.
Valdaire spoke. "The world is full of horror. Every day brings more. I don't see the machines stopping it. They put up the walls, they turned their back on the south. They have stopped collapse by trapping half of the human race." Her voice was small but she was angry, not with him, not directly, not entirely; his story opened up the windows on some of her own past she'd rather forget. "Every one of us from the southern hemisphere has bad memories, Chures. What makes you different?"
"What makes me different? I could sit in Fresno, Valdaire, like my father, watching sports and brooding. I don't. What makes me different is that I choose to do something about it, senorita."
They sat in silence for a while, until the door connecting Chures' room to the other in their suite opened and Otto walked in. From the look of him, he still had not slept.
"We have a problem," he said.
Chures joined Lehmann on the roof while Otto remained with Valdaire and the phone.
"They are making no effort to hide themselves," said Chures, binoculars trained on a large van parked up the street.
"They are not," agreed Lehmann. "It's Kaplinski's way: he deals in fear. He's trying to frighten us — that and I don't think he wants to tackle me and Klein together."
Otto, keyed in to the conversation via his and Lehmann's Kytech machine telepathy, spoke to Lehmann. He has more than enough manpower to take us, Lehmann. He is waiting for us to figure out where Waldo is.
If it is important to him, it must be important to this k52 also. Which suggests we are on the right track; he could be a threat to them.
"He's playing games," said Lehmann out loud, although he whispered, for Kaplinski certainly would have directional mics pointed at his position. "Trying to make us run, lead him right to Waldo."
"What?" said Chures, party to only Lehmann's side of the exchange. Lehmann waved him to silence.
Yes, he is playing us, said Otto, his voice emotionless through the MT. Let's keep this short. Kaplinski might have access to our MT cipher.
Want me to put a cannon shot into that truck? I can take it easily from here, said Lehmann.
No. We're going to plan three as of now. Confirm.
Confirmed, said Chloe over the MT. The phone, modded and tinkered with by Valdaire since she was a child, pumped out a series of viral hunt and attack ware, swamping the local Grid. Already shaky from the events playing round Hughie's Choir, it took a big hit and slowed to a crawl as Valdaire's programmes reproduced rapidly and hit everything with Gridside ingress. Lehmann and Otto, shielded as they were, still felt the effects of one of Valdaire's presents, a worm tailored to disrupt cyborg interfacing protocols.
Another invaded the systems of the van, causing emergency venting of hydrogen from the fuel cell. Simultaneously, Chloe had all the lasers in the vehicle ignition system trip off together and focus in one spot rather than in their programmed depthvaried ignition sequence. There were many safeguards in fuel cell vehicles to prevent either thing ever happening. Valdaire's 'ware circumvented them all.
The van lifted off the ground, carried skyward on a pillar of fire. It twisted over and came crashing back down, blocking the road. Alarms went off round the entire block, car lights blazed on and engines revved, the vehicles banging into each other as they came online and tried to remove themselves from the danger.
Back in the room Otto said, "Now our car."
Out the back of the motel, the groundcar's windows went black. Broadcasting fake Gridsigs for Lehmann, Otto, Valdaire and Chures, it reversed out of its parking bay and headed off at high speed. Otto smiled as Chloe picked up a trio of airbikes lifting off and heading in pursuit.
"Do we go now?" asked Valdaire. She felt sick. She hadn't liked blasting the van; there were men inside. She'd killed many, she supposed, back in the war days, Otto was right about that, but he'd also been wrong; it had just been button pushing, easily dealt with if she didn't think about it. She'd never really squared it with her conscience. If she thought about it, it brought her too close to the men who scarred her hands, so she didn't. Maybe that made her worse than the cyborg. He clearly was bothered by it.
"Wait," said Otto. "Is the area clear?"
"Yes," said Valdaire.
"Then detonate the others."
Valdaire checked them quickly for human occupants. None. A street's worth of cars, dancing round each other as their onboard systems communicated and attempted to bring order to their escape, exploded one after the other.
"That will do it," said Otto.
Sirens.
"OK," Otto said, and ushered Valdaire out of the room. Chloe invaded the building's survnet sensors as they hurried to a side door in the building, scrubbing their presence from the recordings. "We're leaving now."
The noise of emergency vehicles, police and machines filled the night, lights sparkling in the rain. What little Gridwidth remained was clamped down, swamped by the informational traffic of AI and human emergency services.
Lehmann and Chures joined them on the street.
"Messy," said the VIA agent. "But effective."
"Kaplinski will not dare to make a move now," said Otto, lo
oking up at the rooftops. "He's still watching. We need to lose ourselves, quickly."
CHAPTER 8
Circus
On the island it was as if the Terror had never happened nor ever would. Birds sang, plants rustled in the breeze and the sun shone, framed by a rag of blue sky that wavered uncertainly in the void. Richards marvelled at it, wandering round, prodding the ground with a stick. "This is a data artefact," he said to Bear. "One of those little bits that gets left behind when files are overwritten. I never thought I'd be standing on one, nor that I'd find one quite so… lush."
The island dwindled. With regularity pieces fell away into the void, tinkling as they went to nothing. A wall of black vapours streamed from its edges. Discomfited by this, Bear and Richards made their way inwards. There, at the heart, they found a glade around a spring from where they could not see the void, and felt a little safer.
"Good day," said an old man in the clearing.
"All right there," said Bear. "You got any cigarettes?"
Richards sat on a stump as the man handed the bear a soggy roll-up.
"Ah! A fag!" said Bear. "Thanks. If they were mine, I wouldn't go handing them out willy-nilly, none left anywhere now." Bear talked quietly. "Silly tramp."
"You should be a bit more respectful," said Richards mischievously. Surviving death had lightened his mood. "Did you never listen to the stories you had to tell your owner?"
"Don't talk to me about that little bastard. A decade and a half in a box, remember?" said Bear. The tramp lit his cigarette. "Watch the fur," grumbled Bear, "my manufacturers skimped on the flame retardant."
"This world has something of the fairytale about it," said Richards, "and in fairytales you should always help out strange old men in woods."
"The boy speaks truth!" muttered the old man. "It's often the way, often the way." His chuckle tailed off into a racking smoker's cough. Richards and Bear waited till he'd hawked up a handful of brown phlegm. "Sadly for you I'm not a fairy. The name's Lucas, although I was once Lord of Fendool, the capital of the outer realms of Hyberboroon."
"Ah," said Richards, pleased at this proof of his theory. "One of the Reality Realm RealWorld games. Number three, I think."
"What happened?" said Bear, sniffing at the tramp suspiciously.
"I do not know. One moment I was lord of all I surveyed, next darkness, and then…"
"The Flower King," said Bear and the tramp together. Bear gave Richards a meaningful look. "See?"
"Yes. Exactly. Ever since then I've been rather down on my luck."
"Aren't we all?" said Bear, and blew an extravagant smoke plume.
Richards watched the toy and the tramp smoke. No one had smoked in decades. "Who would build something like this, and why?" he wondered aloud. "And why is k52 trying to destroy it? It still doesn't make any sense."
"I've no idea," said the bear. "I'm just a bear, and I'm following orders."
• • • •
The black had a physicality to it, a presence that lurked outside the circle of sunlight. Despite this, Richards took to standing by the edge, watching fragments of Optimizja float by as he thought. A stand of wheat, a scarecrow in the centre with a face fit for tragedy; an ancient waystone; the corner of a kitchen; a pub table; a half-dead chestnut full of rooks, roots exposed to the nothing. Particles of the dead kingdom that held a resonance so strong it caressed the corners of their island like the wake from a boat as they passed, and that is why Richards supposed they persisted.
All were much smaller than their refuge, and all were dissipating. At first they passed several every day, then one or two, then none.
Night came and went normally on the island, as if the little kingdom of Optimizja were still whole and they could not quite see the rest of it, and they became used to moonlight and sunshine from orbs they could not always see. Days passed. Nothing happened. Richards made a long list of all the things he hated about being almost human: sleeping, itching, sneezing, being smelly, being hungry, being sad, being frightened and all the other things he could pretend to experience at home but could always turn off. Shitting came right at the top of his least favourites. He hated the process; it made his stomach crawl, which in itself was damn revolting. With limited access to water he felt he could never get his ridiculous human arse clean, and became self-conscious there was a lingering smell of shit on him.
There was little for them to do but sleep and eat the island's abundant supply of inquisitive grey squirrels. These soon grew less abundant and inquisitive, and the island fell silent.
Richards was tired but not sleeping. Like so much else, he found sleep an annoying imposition, and avoided it until his eyes were drooping, even though to do so made him feel irritable. He spent more time at the edge of the island, away from the bear and the tramp, who spent their time swapping improbably dirty stories. His limited grasp of the underlying architecture of the rogue realm, which he'd come to refer to as Reality 37, slackened, and he became despondent. He tried yoga, meditation, more sleep deprivation, anything he knew of that humans used to get inside their own heads, searching for the faint Gridsigs of his lost brothers and sister, but they remained elusive, and Richards was stuck in his made-up head with no one but himself for company. Days passed.
A note sounded strong and sad in Richards' isolated mind. His eyes snapped open. Richards leapt up and fell over about as fast, for he'd fallen asleep in the lotus position and his feet had gone numb. He swore the worst way he could in as many languages as he could remember, rubbed the life back into his limbs and tried again. He spun round and round, stopping at that quadrant of the compass where the note sang strongest. A Gridsig. Excited, Richards squinted into the dark, straining his eyes. Nothing.
"Fucking people," he said, wishing for a robot body that didn't fart and sweat and that could see further than half a mile. "Fucking eyes."
He caught sight of a few twinkles of light far out in the dark, lights that grew brighter as another island hove into view like a pleasure steamer, silent and gaudy, bedecked with strings of coloured bulbs. The lights wound round a hill, following a path through an orchard to a pagoda at the top. On the roof of the structure was a device like a colliery wheel. A cable of gargantuan proportions ran up from inside the tower and over the wheel, hanging slackly horizontal as it disappeared off into the dark.
From there the Gridsig broadcast its unique song, obscured, tampered with and corrupt, undisguisable nonetheless.
"Pollyanna," he said.
On the larger island it was night also, and the bulbs cast motley shadows on the path as they stirred in the wind. A smell of food came with it.
Richards staggered as their island crashed into the other. It came free, snagged once again and came to a hard halt.
"Tsk," said Bear, joining Richards, "how tasteless. But check that out." He pointed to the wheel at the top. "That's a pylon station, that, a way back to Pylon City."
Richards looked at him, "And?"
"They're all over!" said Bear, waving his arms around. "All lead to Pylon City. It's what carries the network, and people too, you'll see."
"You're sharing this information with a prisoner?" said Richards.
Bear harrumphed and folded his massive arms. "I'm beginning to believe you're not some kind of spy, sunshine, everyone knows that. Come on!" he added, smacking his lips. "Something smells dee-licious!" His long snout twitched. His eyes became animated. "Pork. It's pork! Let's check it out. I'm sick of squirrel."
"I'll come too," said the tramp, appearing from a bush, rubbing his hands. "That food smells divine!"
The island had come to a rest by an ornate jetty jutting out over the nothing. Tatty paper lanterns illuminated it. No vapours rose from the edge of this island.
"Hey!" warned Richards. "There's a Five up there, and something is not right." But the bear and the tramp were not listening; they were already hurrying off the jetty where a pair of stone lions guarded a pair of iron gates, the bear's twitching nose high in th
e air.
"Halt!" said a bored voice. "State your business."
"What was that?" said the tramp.
"That," said Bear, pointing at the lions, "was them."
"They're stone, ignore them," said the tramp. "Come on, I'm starving."
"They're not stone," said Richards. Lions. One looked a hell of a lot like a non-robotic version of the Tarquinius avatar of Reality 36. A cut-and-paste job. And he thought that that was not the way an AI would have built this creation.
The lions' smooth grey skins shuttered between light and dark, abruptly turning into the rough yellow of lion pelt. They stretched and yawned, displaying fangs of dazzling ivory.
"Ahhhh," said the larger of the pair. "That's better. I do so loathe it when Circus keeps us petrified for too long. It is neglectful and cruel."
"Positively inhumane, Tarquin dear," said the other. A luxurious shiver ran the length of its body as it stretched. "If I had a phone I'd call the RSPCA."
"I'm not sure they cater for the likes of us, Clarence," said the other.
"Ahem," said Bear.
"Oh, do go away," said the first lion. "We really can't be bothered with visitors today. Come back tomorrow, yes. Tomorrow." Its skin flickered to grey and back. It shook out its mane.
"I'm on business of the Lord of Pylon City," said Bear. "Let us in, I need to make use of your pylon station. That's an order, by the way."
"Oh, really?" said Clarence. "Well, in that case, can they come in?"
"No, Clarence," said Tarquin, pacing around on his plinth. "No, they most assuredly cannot."
"Righty-ho," said Bear, and kicked open the gates. "Sod you then, I'm through trying to be polite. There's a way back to my boss and food to be had and I'm wanting to eat it."
"We could always eat you," said Clarence as Bear marched through the gate.
Bear jabbed a huge claw at it. "Yeah," he said, "and I could always eat you. What do you think of that, eh?"
"Tough talk, dearie. Though there are two of us and only one of you."
