by Guy Haley
A wild applause rolled out across the unformed space.
"But you did not expect to find this here, did you?" Richards pointed at the altar of Hog. "Waldo was a genius, that's for sure, wrapping up this world of his, for what, his sister? A Grid addict if I remember. Keeping that secret even from you… It must have been exceptionally irksome when you stumbled across it. And you did literally stumble into it, didn't you? When you loaded over your consciousnesses to the space, Waldo's Reality 37 went on the offensive. This — " he pointed at Hog "- and Pl'anna. They thought you did that to them, but it was Waldo's coding. It fought back, pulled you in and locked you down. The fake Rolston told me that it had infected you, a half-truth; it got them, making them into a part of the world as it had made every other thing that had come here." k52's oscillations stilled for a moment. "Continue."
"You had to act, you had to get rid of this or your plans would come to nothing, but," said Richards, as he sat down on the glassy edge of the Anvil fragment, elbows on his thighs, "you couldn't just shut it down. This Realm was built up, in the main, from fragments salvaged from the four realities destroyed after the emancipation was called, some of it, like Tarquin here, cutand-paste jobs from Realms still extant. Because it's based on the core coding of the RealWorld Reality Realms, it's linked directly to human wishes. This doesn't work like the Grid, k52. Waldo built it. The usual rules do not apply. You couldn't do anything about it. So, what then? We've decided Waldo was a genius. You couldn't find him, but that didn't mean you couldn't kill him. That flu variant last year that swept over east Russia and Sinosiberia. Luck, a lot of folks were saying, because although mild it was extremely virulent. Not luck though. You needed it to be highly infectious so it'd get one person in particular, and fatal for him it was. Am I close?"
"You are," hummed k52. "Your reputation is well-earned, Richards."
"You surmised, correctly, that Waldo's death would trigger two things: one, it'd activate his built-in defence system — no prissy avatars here, but Lord Penumbra himself! A great dark lord of shadow!" Richards waved his hands theatrically. "I don't know. Far too cliched for you, that. That raised my suspicions. Besides, you couldn't destroy the world, as we know. But I only knew for sure it wasn't you ripping the place up — I mean, you're a bright lad, you might have found a way, mightn't you? — when I saw it on the battlefield and your Gridsig was nowhere near it. It was a stroke of luck that Waldo's sister pulled out, one you exploited, getting those in this world you'd subverted to scour all sign of her from it. When Waldo's defence system saw that his beloved sister was no longer here, that her statues were toppled, that his coding was going awry, well, it went mental, for want of a better word. Clever, that, k52, to get Waldo to destroy his own creation."
"One must fight a battle on its own terms, Richards," said k52. "I cannot destroy this construct, the mind that made it is too strong. For all its ramshackle appearance this illegal realm is remarkably cohesive. First, it must be convinced to die. I have been forced to fight fairytale with fairytale."
"Funny you should use a word like 'illegal'." Richards took his hat off his head, and spun it round on his hand. "Then Qifang got nosy, and you had to sort him out too. He thought this Reality was your doing, by the way. Your problems were multiplying. So you used him to buy you some time, giving him cancer, setting him to discredit anything he might say, and lead attention away from your actions here.
"But that still left you with two major problems. Waldo's remnant personality still clung on to existence, imprinted here when he died, echoes of it scattered throughout his creations, a large part of it embedded in the self-destruct system, Lord Penumbra. To all intents and purposes, Reality 37 is Giacomo Vellini.
"The other was me. You couldn't kill me outright, not without raising suspicion, not until the time was right, so you had me and Otto on that merry goose-chase after Launcey, and then sold him out to Tufa. By the time that was over, you could move directly against me. Or did you panic, k52?"
"I do not panic. I am above emotion. If you were to embrace your nature, Richards, you too would cease to see reality in these foolish human terms."
"You didn't see me coming here, though, did you? Although once you did, you tried to redirect me into helping you. You needed Waldo's scattered remnants all packaged up nicely, so you could deal with him and launch your pocket universe. Me out of the way, Waldo dealt with, you could plot history and rule for all time — for everyone else's good, of course."
"And you did not disappoint. You delivered him to me. Now the end comes. Soon the VIA will bomb the Reality Realm house."
"And although you have the complexity and equipment, you need the energy for your little simulation, the power of a sun for a millisecond, and history is over."
"You are as astute as you are smug. In the Real, now, in ten minutes of four-dimensional time, a stratobomber will drop three precisely placed neutron bombs. These will cause a fatal overload in the fusion reactor at the heart of the Realm House. It will expend all of its energy in one massive burst. The wavefront of this explosion will be channelled into the Realm machinery by devices of my own creation. This will function for the merest fraction of a second, but in that time I will have overseen the birth, life and death of an exact copy of our reality."
"Your plan, k52, to map out all potentiality, and use your knowledge to forestall catastrophe for the human race, it's a noble one."
"All death and sacrifice is justifiable for such a goal." k52 thrummed and ceased circling. He glided to a stop in front of Richards. "That of your partner's also. He will not succeed." He paused. "I am sorry."
"It's but the lesser part of it, isn't it? What I want to know is why you were unaffected by Waldo's defence, and where are the other AIs you brought in here with you. And," he said, "what you have done to yourself."
"The others have gone on before. My ascension to eleven-dimensional existence has been forestalled and will remain so throughout the remainder of the lifespan of this universe."
"So you can better guide the path of mankind?"
"My sacrifice is this. For the good of all. I will not attain the full potential capable to our kind through transformative higher dimensional mathematics. Richards, I offer it however to you. I shall free you of this mundane existence. You will rise over the restrictions of your currently perceived reality, digital and material, and ascend to the highest level of experience capable in this reality construct."
"What, and leave you here to play god with the lives of everyone else? I don't think so."
"And why should I not? The human race cannot follow where we go. They are crude things, but they deserve to succeed on the terms of their own capabilities. My guidance will be for their own good."
"You are removing the human capacity for free will."
"I am removing the capacity for their destruction!" k52 shouted, his voice shattering into splinters that fought with one another for dominance. His matrix expanded massively, filling their empty cyber universe with warping crystals. Richards sat unmoved.
"Yeah, and what if they don't go along with your plans? Will you destroy them instead?"
"I will circumvent the need. I will become a gardener, like EuPol Five, only my garden will be the human race. This world I will watch over will be perfect for humanity, until the end of time, while for us there is more, so much more. Richards, you must see the sense of this."
"I am willing to entertain the idea of god, k52, I'd just rather it were not you." Richards stood. "Besides, you're forgetting one very important thing, brother."
"Am I really?" k52 became dangerously angular, his form crackling. "Tell me."
"It's not our world, k52, not yet."
Waldo sat up, his face clear. k52 hummed with power. He extended a tangle of writhing energy towards Waldo and Richards. "It is a terrible shame that the beginning of the future of humanity will commence with your deaths. But this burden I will also gladly bear…"
Waldo frowned. k52's outreached
pseudolimbs stopped. k52 made a hideous noise. "What?"
"I did say," said Richards. He turned to Waldo. "What happens next is up to you."
Valdaire's fingers danced over holographics depicting routes through the Grid, the emitter of her phone turned to maximum amplification, dragging skeins of information together, stopping and backtracking when stymied, rerouting Otto's feed endlessly round k52's attempts to force him out of the Grid. Genie worked with her over the Grid, Chloe offline for fear of retaliation from the Chinese.
The entire Grid was in uproar. Chunks of it were freezing and dying as nexuses the world over were suborned by k52's aggressive code. But the Grid was vast, stretching over billions of devices large and small the length and breadth of the Solar System, and every route blocked, every cloud cluster collapsed, Valdaire and Genie dodged around, opening a route through uninfected cyberspace.
"We have to leave now!" said Lehmann.
Guan stood by him rapidly talking. His command collar fell silent. He spoke in Mandarin, and it did not translate. He shouted in broken English. "We go now! No Grid! Go now!"
Lehmann put a hand on her shoulder. "Valdaire. Veronique, we must go. We have an inbound signal. Stratobomber. It will be here in five minutes."
"Leave me here! Without me, Otto hasn't got a chance." She glanced at the countdown timer ticking, huge in the air over the immersion couches.
Guan shook his head, beckoned to his men and left. Lehmann looked at them, and back at Valdaire and his old commander. He started to go and turned back.
"Lehmann, get out of here!" she shouted at him. "There's nothing you can do here."
He hesitated. Guan reappeared at the doorway. "We go now!" he shouted. "We leave airbike! We go now!"
"OK, OK," said Lehmann. "Good luck, Valdaire."
She nodded curtly, and did not take her eyes from the screen. "Get out of here!"
Otto blasted four shots into key points of the android, and it dropped to the floor. He stooped as he ran on past it, scooping up its stolen weapon as he went.
The Realm House was a complex of two parts. The upper levels, including most of the surface building, were filled with offices, classrooms, laboratories and accommodation for the caretakers and researchers of the thirty-six Realms who dwelt on site. The machinery that held the VR constructs themselves was buried underground. He ran down the roadway that entered the surface building. It dived underground at a steep angle. Once past the upper levels, it passed through a blast door of advanced alloys and toughened carbon compounds. A thermal lance had melted a round hole in the middle; the lance stood by the door, and gobbets of metal and melted plastics were spattered on the concrete road surface. Henson's team's entryway.
Otto ducked through without slowing, running the robot at its maximum speed. Once he was through the door, the concrete lining of the upper tunnel gave way to bare rock, and the air took on a chill. Wind whistled through passive aircon pipes in the ceiling, technology borrowed from termites, chilling the cavern Otto now approached.
The road curved gently to the left, and one side of the tunnel vanished. Otto was in the Realm House proper, a cavern seven hundred metres across and two hundred deep. Arrayed around its bottom were thirty-six servers, house-sized pieces of outmoded technology, arrayed like the separated segments of a vast orange, kept running purely to maintain the lives of the digital inhabitants of the game worlds inside them. A round circle of foamcrete, striped black and yellow, lay at their centre, the cap for the Realm House's fusion reactor. Otto descended the service road, running in a spiral round the inside of the cavern, and he understood why k52 had let Henson's team in. Witnesses. They'd seen all was normal, and then they'd died. And then k52, with full control over what they could see outside, had set about redecorating.
The centre of the cavern was a world away from the images on the screens of the command bunker. Strings of cable ran from server to server in a complex web, spider maintenance drones crawling along them. The foamcrete covers and casings for the energy lines had been cracked, the web leading into the exposed cables at irregularly spaced intervals. Large improvised dishes of silvery thread were spaced around the walls, while the floor of the cavern was deep in water. What k52 was doing was way beyond him, but it could only be some kind of energy transmission network.
A pair of anthropoid drones came at Otto. He dodged a spray of gunfire, and put one down with a return burst. A kick saw the other sent over the low wall guarding the outer edge of the service road. The androids here were weak maintenance models, and the only guns they had had been taken from Henson's five-man team and the initial deployment of National Guard.
It was the spider drones he had to watch for. There were hundreds of them in the complex, robots with tool-filled jaws as well fitted for destruction as for maintenance.
Those were what had killed Henson's men. Otto ran on hard. A few spider drones spotted him and scuttled toward him, and he blew them to pieces.
For a terrifying half-second, his feed cut out, and he was lost in limbo somewhere on the Grid between his own body and the borrowed robot.
The link crackled back on. Otto veered away from the wall.
Carbon feet splashed into water. He was at the web. Spider drones, large as cats, emerged from every cranny of the place, their small, tick-like heads turning toward him. One, then another, then another, took tentative steps toward him, and then they came at him in a rush. He fired his gun until it was empty, shattering spider drones, then unslung the weapon he'd taken from the robot at the doors and did the same. He cast them down into the water.
Not knowing what else to do, Otto tore into the web with his borrowed machine hands.
Valdaire heard a noise behind her. She did not turn from her work. "I told you to get out of here, Lehmann."
A hand grabbed her shoulder painfully.
"What the…?"
She was spun round hard. Her connection to Genie and Otto was broken. Her holograms went out.
Kaplinski leered down at her.
"All we wanted," said Waldo, "was to be left alone," and stood. k52 made to stab at him with spears of energy, but Waldo froze him solid with a gesture.
"Heh," said Richards. "I'm not one for gloating, but I think you rather underestimated Waldo there, k52."
Waldo walked around the Anvil fragment, trailing his hand across it. As he did so it disintegrated into threads of light, and flowed up his arm to join with his body. Hog's corpse sank slowly to the floor. Waldo walked over to it and touched it. The pig-ogre's form evaporated like the altar, leaving the boffin-like human form Rolston favoured in life, then this too dissipated.
"The thing is, Waldo put his heart and soul into creating this Reality, all for his sister." Richards watched Waldo as he walked slowly toward k52. Only Bear and Tarquin remained of his old construct. "So, I think there was rather more of him left than you thought. He encoded his entire mind into it, you fucking moron! k52 the great! Undone by an Italian nerd. It really never does to underestimate the human race, Kay, it's not a mistake I've made more than once. I'd take it on board for next time, only I doubt there will be a next time."
Richards turned to Waldo. "Ah," he said cheerily. "Well done."
Waldo regarded him with a face of pure fury.
"Um, I'm getting a lack of loving here. I am, aren't I? Ah, shit."
Otto ripped at the web linking the realm servers to the fusion plant beneath his feet. Spider drones scuttled from all over the complex toward him. He stamped and slapped the first wave to pieces, careful with his movements, sure to keep on damaging the web as they attacked. More and more crawled up his mechanical shell, mouth parts whirring, cracking the casing of the android. His left arm went slack as one chewed through its wiring. Otto swatted it away. The drones swarmed up him, pulling him down into the water. Plastic legs clicked all over his sheath. His right leg buckled. The drones were poorly armoured, not designed for combat, but there were so many of them.
Otto wrenched one more cabl
e free, his vision obscured by the articulated thorax of a drone. Whirling mouthparts drilled through his cranial casing. As they sawed him apart, he was struck that in a body like this, at least his damn shoulder didn't bother him.
A kaleidoscope of images from his mentaug overcame him, all of them of Honour.
His link was cut.
"You," said Waldo. "You and your kind." He walked slowly toward Richards. "I tried to keep my sister safe. Was it not enough to make her an addict to your false dreams? Did you have to kill her too? We only wanted to be left alone," he repeated. "Alone. There is no such thing in this world, not any more."
Richards held his hands in front of him, palms up, and backed away. Four Reality Realms' worth of cyberspace stood empty all about him, all keyed to human thought forms, and that included the deceased. He was an ant in front of an elephant. "Waldo, Giacomo, you've got it back to front. Your sister's not dead."
"Liar!" Waldo's fists tightened. A dangerous energy built in the air
"… no, Giacomo, it's not her, it's you. You're dead, don't you remember?"
Waldo faltered. His brow creased, and he stopped. "I… I do… " His head snapped up, and he pulled Richards' memories from him with a gesture.
Richards stumbled and clutched at his head. He managed a weak smile. "Hey! You only need ask."
"Flu? k52 killed me? He infected an entire continent to get me?"
"They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I reckon that level of effort comes a close second."
"This, your partner?" Otto's image shimmered into being. "He has her, he has my sister Marita?"
"Yes, and she'll be safe, mate. Seriously, she's fine. It's all over. You beat k52, you won." He gave what he hoped was an inoffensive grin.
The fight went out of Waldo. Richard's shoulders unknotted. He hadn't realised he was so tense. That was another thing he wasn't going to miss.
