River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  Just as its creators were largely unconcerned with their own bodies—being content even at the best of times to dress them carelessly and feed them negligently, but when a project due date loomed, likely to ignore the demands of sleep and hygiene almost entirely—the Nemesis program was largely detached from the matrix in which it operated, the Grail Project (or, as those few who knew the whole truth called it, Otherland). Unlike the majority of inhabitants of that particular binary universe, which had been grown from artificial life templates to mimic the actions of living creatures, Nemesis was designed to mimic real-world organisms only insofar as it was necessary for smooth movement and inconspicuous surveillance, but it did not consider itself a part of the environment any more than a bird of prey considered itself part of the branches on which it occasionally came to rest.

  Moreover, a hardwired obsession with the being of things rather than their seeming directed it, an impulse quite different from that which had been built into the other aggregations of code that imitated life throughout the network. Nemesis was a hunter, and although lately its need to hunt in the most efficient manner had brought it to contemplate certain changes in its mode of operation, it still could no more act as the normal artificial life objects within the Grail Project could act than it could spring free into the open air beyond the electronic universe.

  Nemesis occupied its own reality. It had no body, and hence no bodily concerns, even when the cloud of values that accompanied it changed to create a new and convincing organism-imitation inside a simulation. But the mimicry of life was only for the benefit of observers—Nemesis itself was not in or of the simulations. It moved through them, above them, over them. It propagated through numerical space like a coherent fog, and was no more aware that it was simulating an endless array of bodies that would appear realistic to VR-abetted human sensory organs than rain could be aware it was wet.

  Since the code-switch had been thrown, since the first command had, like lightning above Castle Frankenstein, brought it to its approximation of life, Nemesis had pursued its intractable needs in the linear fashion its creators had designed—search for anomalies, determine greatest/nearest anomaly, move toward it and examine for points of comparison, then, inevitably, move on, the quest still unsatisfied. But the whirling chaos of information that was the Otherland network, the sea of shifting values that humans, although they had created it, could scarcely comprehend, was not entirely what Nemesis had been programmed for. In fact, the difference between the conceptual map of Otherland which Nemesis had been given and the Otherland through which it moved were so different that the program had come close to being paralyzed in its very first moments by this simple and most basic paradox: If the search is for anomalies, and everything is anomalous, then the starting point is also the ending point.

  But without knowing it, the fallible meat intelligences of the Telemorphix J-Team had given their creation more flexibility than they intended. In the ganglionic mesh of subroutines, the drive to hunt, to move forward, found the necessary distinctions that would allow it to treat Otherland as an undiscovered country, which thus freed it from its reliance on the original conception. It would find the pattern of this new, anomalous version of the matrix, and then look for anomalies to that pattern.

  With this flexibility, however, came newer and greater complexity, and the realization that even after bypassing the initial problem, the task as constituted could not be completed. The smaller anomalies of the system, the kind which Nemesis had been created to examine, were too many: Nemesis as originally constituted could not inspect and consider them all as fast as new ones arose.

  But it was not an impossible disparity. The J-Team, those deities that Nemesis could not imagine, and hence could not worship or even fear, had only failed in their estimates by a smallish factor. Thus, if some degradation of perception could be allowed without spoiling the ultimate success of its hunt, Nemesis could divide itself for greater coverage. Although the program had no perception of an “I,” a controlling intelligence at the center of itself—a convenient illusion that its creators universally shared—it nevertheless operated as a central control point, a processing nexus. Subdividing that control point would reduce its capacities in each subordinate unit, but would allow faster processing of the gross inspections.

  There was another factor arguing for subdivision as well, a strange thing which had come to the Nemesis program’s notice and sparked its cold interest. During its timeless hours of movement and inspection, as it floated on the number-winds and learned from their shape and force, it had become aware of something else, something so far from the conceptual map of the environment it had originally been given as to briefly constitute a new danger to the Nemesis program’s logical integrity.

  Somewhere—another metaphor that meant nothing to the program, since information space had no recourse to physical distance or direction, except to simulate them for humans—somewhere on the distant edge of Otherland, things were . . . different.

  Nemesis did not know how they were different, any more than it knew how something in a universe without spatial distance could be far away, but it knew that both things were true. And, for the first time, Nemesis felt a pull that could not entirely be explained by its programming. It was another anomaly, of course, something the human creators had not known of or even suspected, but this anomaly was of such a different order to those which drew the program’s hunting attention that it should most likely have gone unnoticed, as something which does not move at all is invisible to certain predators. But something about this distant “place,” where things were different, where the currents of numerate existence moved in a new and—to Nemesis—incomprehensible way, had caught its attention, and now had become the closest thing to an obsession that a soulless, lifeless piece of code could entertain.

  So, of the many subordinate versions of itself it would create, while committing a kind of suicide-by-diminishment of its central self, Nemesis had decided it would designate one carefully-constructed subself to go in search of this Greater Anomaly, to fare outward on the currents of information toward that unimaginably distant no-place, and—if it could—to bring back something resembling Truth.

  Nemesis did not think. It did not live. And only someone who did not understand the limits of simple code, the chill purity of numbers, would dare to suggest that it might dream.

  CHAPTER 14

  Games In The Shadows

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: Pheromones Join List of Controlled Substances

  (visual: ants head-to-head, rubbing feelers)

  VO: The same chemicals insects use to transmit information, and which human retailers have apparently been using to influence customers to buy, and even to convince them to avoid competitors’ products, will be much more strictly regulated according to the UN’s new guidelines, despite protests from the US, French, and Chinese governments.

  (visual: Rausha at lectern in front of UN logo)

  Victor Rausha of the UN’s Department of Consumer Protection announced the regulatory changes.

  RAUSHA: “It’s been a long, uphill battle against some very powerful lobbies, but consumers—citizens—must have the right to make up their minds without subliminal prompting of any sort, and olfactory cueing is known to be particularly powerful. If food retailers are allowed to make their customers hungry, then what is to stop police forcing citizens to be obedient, or governments forcing them to be grateful? Where does it stop?”

  * * *

  “CODE Delphi. Start here.

  “I used to love the rain. If there is anything I miss because I have lived so long in my home beneath the ground, it is the feeling of rain on my skin.

  “Lightning, too—that bright slash in the sky, as though for a moment the universe of matter had been torn open to reveal the transcendent light of eternity. If there is anything I miss because of the way I am, it is the sight of G
od’s magnificent face peering through a crack in the universe.”

  “My name is Martine Desroubins. I can no longer continue my journal by normal methods, as I will explain, so I am subvocalizing these entries into . . . into nothingness, for all I know . . . in the hope that someday, somehow, I will be able to retrieve them. I have no idea what sort of system underlies the Otherland network, or the extent of its memory—it may be that these words will indeed be lost forever, just as if I had shouted them into a high wind. But I have made a ritual of these summations, these self-reflections, for too many years to stop now.

  “Perhaps someone else will pull these words out of the matrix someday, years from now, when all the things that concern me now, that frighten me so, will be past history. What will you think, person from the future? Will the things I say even make sense? You do not know me. In fact, even though I have kept this journal all my adult life, sometimes I still find myself listening to the thoughts of a stranger.

  “Am I speaking to the future, then, or like all the madwomen of history, am I only mumbling to myself, alone in a vast personal darkness?

  “There is no answer, of course.”

  “There have been times before this when I have gone days without keeping this journal—weeks even, during illnesses—but never has the empty time hidden changes as astonishing as what I have experienced since I last set out my thoughts. I do not know where to begin. I simply do not know. Everything is different now.

  “In a way, it is wonderful that I can even take up my journal once more. For a time, I feared I would not think coherently again, but as the days—or the illusion of days—go by in this place, I am finding it a little easier to suffer the stunning wash of input that is Otherland, or as its creators call it, the Grail Project. My physical skills, too, have improved somewhat, but I am still childlishly clumsy and confused by the world around me, still almost as helpless as when I first lost my sight twenty-eight years ago. That was a terrible time, and I had sworn never to be so helpless again. God makes a point of calling one’s bluff, it seems. I cannot say that I approve of His sense of humor.

  “But I am not a child any more. I wept then, wept every night, and begged Him to give me back my sight—give me back the world, for that is what it seemed I had lost. He did not help me, and neither did my fretting, ineffectual parents. Helping was beyond their power. I do not know whether it was beyond His.”

  “It is strange to think of my mother and father, after so long. It is stranger still to think that they are still alive, and at this moment are living perhaps less than a hundred kilometers from my physical body. The distance between us was already so great, even before I crossed over into this inexplicable Otherland—this imaginary universe, this toy of monstrous children.

  “My parents meant no harm. There are worse summations you can make of people’s lives, but that is small comfort. They loved me—they still do, I am sure, and my separation from them probably causes them great pain—but they did not protect me. That is hard to forgive, especially when the damage was so great.

  “My mother Genevieve was an engineer. So was my father Marc. Neither of them got on well with other people; both felt more comfortable with the certainties of numbers and schematics. They found each other like two timid forest creatures and, recognizing a shared outlook, decided to hide from the darkness together. But you cannot hide from darkness—the more lights, the more shadows they make. I remember this well from the time when there was still light for me.

  “We scarcely went out. What I remember is sitting in front of the wallscreen every evening, watching one of the science fiction shows they loved so much. Always linear dramas—interactives did not interest them. They interacted with their work and each other and, marginally, with me. That was quite enough commitment to the world outside their own heads. As the wallscreen flickered, I colored in coloring books, or read, or played with building toys, and my parents sat on the overstuffed couch behind me smoking hashish—’discreetly’ is how they once phrased it—and chattering to each other about some silly scientific mistake or piece of illogic in one of their beloved shows. If it was one they had seen before, they would discuss the mistake again just as cheerfully and exhaustively as they had the first time they had spotted it. Sometimes I wanted to scream at them to be quiet, to stop talking nonsense.

  “They both worked at home, of course, most of their contact with colleagues coming through the net. That had undoubtedly been one of the most important things for them about their chosen profession. If it had not been for my school, I might never have left the house at all.

  “My parents’ lack of engagement with the outside world, at first largely a bemused disinterest, began to sour over the years. My mother in particular became more and more fearful of all the hours when I was out of her sight, as though I were some daring child astronaut who had left our safe spaceship home, and the quiet streets of the Toulouse suburbs were an alien landscape full of monsters. She wanted me back on board as soon as school was over. By the time I was seven years old, if there had really been such a science-fiction thing as a teleport machine to bring me instantaneously from my classroom back to the living room, she would have bought one, no matter how expensive.

  “In the early part of my childhood, when they were both working, they might even have been able to afford such a device if it had existed . . . but things went wrong. My father’s casual cheeriness was a mask over a kind of stunned helplessness in the face of any complication. One unpleasant executive hired in above him eventually drove him from a company he had helped found, and he was forced to settle for a lower-paying job. My mother’s job vanished through no fault of her own—the company lost its contract with AEE, the European Space Agency, and her entire division was eliminated—but she found it almost impossible to go out and look for a new one. She made excuses and stayed home, living more and more on the net. My parents clung to their house in the quiet suburbs, but as months went by, they found it very expensive. The stoned discussions sometimes grew tense and accusatory. They sold their expensive processing station to a friend and replaced it with a cheap, second-hand model made somewhere in West Africa. They stopped buying new things. We ate cheaply, too—my mother made soup by the gallon, grumbling like a princess forced to be a scullery maid. Even now, I equate the scent of boiling vegetables with unhappiness and quiet rage.

  “I was eight when the offer came—old enough to know that things were wrong at home without having the slightest ability to change anything. A friend of my father’s suggested that my mother might be able to find work at a certain research company. She wasn’t interested—nothing except a very bad fire would have driven her out of the house at that point, I think, and I am not sure even of that—but my father followed up, thinking perhaps he could find some extra part-time work there.

  “That did not happen, although he went through several interviews and got to know one of the project managers fairly well. This woman, who I honestly think was trying to do my father a favor, mentioned that although they did not need any more engineers at present, they did need test subjects for a particular project, and the company funding the research paid very well.

  “My father volunteered. She informed him that he did not fit their requirements, but from what she could see on his application form, his eight-year-old daughter did. It was an experiment in sensory development, funded by the Clinsor Group, Swiss-based specialists in medical technologies. Was he interested?

  “To his credit, my father Marc did not instantly say yes, although the amount being offered was nearly as much as his wages for a year. He came home in a rather disturbed mood. He and my mother carried on whispered discussions all through the evening’s linear dramas and louder ones after they had put me to bed. I discovered later that although neither of them were firmly for or against the idea, the shifting disagreement spawned by the offer brought them closer to separation than anything else in thei
r marriage. How typical of them—even when they were having the worst argument of their lives, they did not know what they wanted.

  “Three nights later, after a few calls for reassurance to the pseudo-academic organization being paid to perform the study—I do not exaggerate or insult here, since there were few universities left even then who did not owe their souls to corporate sponsorship—my parents had convinced themselves it would be all for the good. I think, in their strange and unsocialized way, they had even begun to believe that something important might come out of it for me personally, something more than simply money for the family—that some hidden aptitude of mine would emerge in the testing, and I would prove to be an even more exceptional child than they believed me to be.

  “They were right in one sense—it did change my life forever.

  “I remember my mother coming into my room. I had left early and gone to bed with a book because their strange, almost . . . somnambulistic, that is the word—their somnambulistic squabbling of the preceding days had made me nervous, and I looked up guiltily when she came in, as though I had been caught doing something wrong. The paint-thinner smell of hashish clung to her ragged jumper. She was a little dopey, as she often was by that time of the night, and for a moment, as she tried to think of how she wanted to explain the news to me, her slow inarticulacy frightened me. She seemed something not quite human—an animal, or some kind of alien doppelganger from one of the netshows that had run as background through my childhood.

  “As she explained their decision I grew even more frightened. I was going to stay by myself for just a little while, she told me, and help some people with an experiment. Nice men and women—strangers, was what she really meant—were going to take care of me. It would help my family, and it would be interesting. All the other girls and boys in my school would be jealous of me when I came back.