Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  Constantine said nothing. For the moment the sky fitted perfectly down to the ground, and that was good enough for him.

  They stepped out from the elevator onto the third level. Here the buildings rose higher, built mainly of glass to allow maximum daylight inside them. The towers were not as tall as in other cities of the world and were spaced wider apart, set in groves of trees or gravel gardens, but nonetheless this area emanated the unmistakable feeling of power. Two women in security uniforms came walking toward them.

  “Good evening,” said one. “Up here for an evening stroll?”

  “That’s right, officer,” Mary said. “I’m taking my friend here to see the Source.”

  The security officer glanced at her partner as she smelled Mary’s breath and gave a minute shake of her head. She looked at Constantine.

  “The Source? First time in Stonebreak, sir? That’s an excellent place to visit, especially on a clear night. But it’s a long walk across the third level. You’d do better taking the under-city route. If you get back in the elevator and keep going down, it will take you to the I-station—”

  “That’s okay,” said Mary. “We’d prefer to walk.”

  The security officers glanced at each other again, then drew closer together, directly in front of Mary.

  “No. I think you misunderstood,” said the second officer. “I really would consider taking the elevator, if I were you.”

  A look of anger crossed Mary’s face and she took a step forward. Constantine put one hand on her shoulder to restrain her. He lowered his head and spoke in a bland, unremarkable voice, adjusted his posture in a certain way, did everything he could to make himself forgettable: a dull grey man in a dull grey suit.

  “Actually, officers, we would prefer to walk through the city. I will vouch for this woman.”

  There was a pause. Somewhere in a Stonebreak computer, a routine had just appeared. It created a new identity for Constantine and passed on clearance in that name to the officers. Its work done, the routine deleted itself.

  “Okay, off you go,” said the first officer, her head tilted as she listened to a voice speaking in her ear. Mary and Constantine, the man who wasn’t there, headed on into the business quarter.

  They walked through still streets between silent buildings. The business quarter had the air of a city of the dead: vast mausoleums lining wide thoroughfares that led through the night to nowhere. The brightly lit lobbies they passed seemed devoid of life: empty goldfish tanks, set out with toys but drained of water. Very occasionally they saw a security guard sitting at a desk, tapping at a console or watching a viewing field, but it was as if they were peering through a glass into a different world. Even Mary seemed subdued by her surroundings. She had hardly spoken since the episode with the two guards. Constantine wondered why they had intervened to stop her passing. How had a ghost been stopped by such simple security measures? Why hadn’t they been automatically distracted by a strange sound, a message, a change in their routine?

  For that matter, why hadn’t Constantine’s own hidden protectors done that for him straightaway? Was Mary somehow affecting the routines? The thoughts were driven from his mind as he heard her sigh.

  She was staring at the building immediately to her left with a despairing expression. Constantine gazed at it in surprise. It was the DIANA building: his own company. Mary sighed again and continued walking.

  “That’s who I work for,” she said.

  Constantine said nothing.

  Around the corner two rectangular towers faced each other across a broad plaza. The facade of each was divided up into square windows, giving the buildings a retro, late-twentieth-century feel. A bright yellow light shone from every window, lighting up the plaza below. A single person stood in each window, looking out across the plaza at the person standing in the window opposite. Thousands of people, standing in absolute silence, gazing into another’s eyes. People in grey suits, in red dresses, in white bikinis. Old men in candy-striped blazers and young girls holding balloons, all standing in their individual squares of light staring, staring, staring. Constantine felt mad, shrieking panic scrambling around in his stomach at the thought of walking out there, across the plaza, in front of all those eyes.

  “No…” he murmured, his mouth suddenly dry.

  Mary gazed at him from under furrowed brows. “What’s the matter?” she asked, glancing around the street.

  Constantine turned back to the two towers, but all the people had vanished. Another hallucination?

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re working too hard.”

  “I know.”

  “Is it worth it?” Mary said. “Is it really worth it? Don’t you just want to give up and do something else?”

  Constantine didn’t answer. Mary was speaking to herself.

  The far end of the business quarter came quite suddenly. Another tall glass wall rose into the heavens behind the low-rent, low-rise buildings at the back of the third level. Another elevator took them up to the top of the fourth and final level, where they proceeded through more wide streets, this time paved with large grey slabs of mock stone.

  “This is where Stonebreak has its law courts and libraries, its mock parliaments and theaters. We’re not going to look at them, they’re far too dull.”

  The pair trudged past earnest-looking buildings of grey stone, adorned with columns and engraved with Greek or Latin mottoes.

  Mary snorted in disgust.

  “This is where their imagination ran out. We’re walking nearly a kilometer above the Nullarbor plain and the best they could come up with are these imitation Roman dumps. Fucking architects. I work for a company that devised a structure that weighs millions of tons, has a diameter of nearly nine kilometers and a volume of thirty cubic kilometers. A structure that stands in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. And what do they choose to decorate it with? Bad copies of bad copies of the bloody Parthenon. Two and a half thousand years of continuous advancement in human technology since the Greeks built the bloody original, and they still can’t think of anything to improve on it.”

  Constantine was smiling now. The streets they walked were lightly scattered with other tourists, some of them looking at Mary to see what she was shouting about, but most of them looking away in disgust at her language. Mary continued, oblivious to the stares.

  “I mean, why couldn’t they just leave those buildings in the form that they grew? Surely the fact that Stonebreak is is enough. It doesn’t have to pretend to be anything else.”

  “I quite agree,” said Constantine. “But didn’t you say earlier that Stonebreak is obsolete? I thought the VNM look was passé?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Mary replied without anger. “Come on. We’re almost at the Source.”

  Nearly forty years ago, the CEO of the Australia Southeast Asian coalition had walked across the flat scrubland of the Nullarbor plain to a point marked by a cross lightly scraped into the dry earth. Four dull grey machines were already set on the soil at the north, south, east, and west ends of the cross. She had crouched down and placed a fifth, silver machine, no bigger than her hand, in the faint depression scooped at the center of the cross, and then turned to smile at the assembled press and VIPs who stood one hundred meters back, behind the fluttering plastic ribbon that encircled the location that was destined to be the Source. The heaps of junk metal and other raw materials needed for the VNMs to work upon had been placed well out of sight of the spectators. They would have spoiled the effect, ruined the magic.

  The sky had been a deep, deep blue, the sun a yellow glare, low in the sky, too bright to look at directly. The CEO turned to smile and pose for pictures. She was wishing she had worn a thicker suit. Okay, so they had deliberately scheduled the activation ceremony for early morning when it was cooler, but the Nullarbor plain was meant to be hot, for fuck’s sake. She had to clench her teeth tightly to stop them chattering as she smiled.

  Eventually, the photo call was over, and she c
ould head back between the sparse bushes, the reddish sand scratching at her soft blue leather shoes, and enter the presentation area. Someone handed her a glass of thin champagne and she took it with a smile. “Get me a fucking cup of hot fucking coffee,” she muttered under her breath.

  She held up the glass and smiled brightly. “Good morning. Today, we can all feel privileged to be attending this incredible and historic event. Today, we can look back over five thousand years of human history, and reach out with the finest sieve imaginable, and garner the very best of human achievement, bringing it together here in humankind’s mightiest achievement to date. Using the very latest in self-replicating technology, we…”

  The crowd stirred: she was losing them. Fuck the speechwriters, what did they know? She hadn’t got to her present position by rehashing other people’s words. She did what she knew best and went with her instincts.

  “Ah, to hell with it,” she said. “You know what this is about. Let’s build a city.”

  She raised her glass and took a sip. Out on the arid soil the machines began to stir. The assembled crowd drank their thin champagne and looked on at the unfolding scene: five cylinders scratching in the sand. How could the start of something so momentous appear so dull? It didn’t seem right at all.

  Soon they began to drift away, bored when they realized nothing much was going to happen out there. As they did so, the engineers and the workforce moved in. The sun rose further into the empty sky, beating down harshly on the minuscule activity below. Minuscule activity at the moment, maybe, but growing all the time as the machines began to reproduce.

  A huge metal tree marked the Source. Pastel lights moved back and forth over it, dramatically picking out its colossal shape in the clear night. The trunk was composed of five thick strands twisting around and in and out of each other to form a thick plait. Four of the strands were a dull grey; the fifth, bright silver. The trunk itself emerged from the flagged ground and rose forty or fifty meters into the air before untwisting itself to spread its five branches high over Constantine and Mary’s heads. These five branches then each split successively into two and four and then eight strands, blossoming into a huge, feathery, treelike effect.

  The harsh white stars twinkled at them through the sharp outer branches. Constantine was so taken by the sight, he felt as if he had forgotten to breathe.

  “It’s like something out of a fairy tale,” he whispered.

  Mary nodded dreamily, and Constantine continued. “We walk around this place and we think we know what it is, but it’s too big to hold in the mind. We need something like this to remind us what this place is all about. Thank you for bringing me here, Mary. Thank you.”

  Mary swayed slightly as she gazed upward into the air.

  “In memory of the five original VNMs that were used to construct Stonebreak,” she said. “I’ve heard that the fractal effect at the end of the branches was incredibly difficult to achieve back then.”

  Constantine merely nodded.

  “Don’t you notice anything odd about the branch directly above us?” asked Mary.

  He looked up to where searchlights flitted back and forth, causing the shadows cast by the metal twigs to dance like leaves blowing in the wind. He stared at the branch above him. It did look strange, now that Mary mentioned it. Not misshapen as such, not even melted…He searched for the right word.

  “It looks odd. It reminds me of something.”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, allowing him to think. When he didn’t continue, she began to explain softly.

  “The contract to build Stonebreak was too big for one company back then. It was awarded to five different concerns: Berliner Sibelius, Sho Heen, 113, Imagineers, and DIANA. Each of them contributed one of the VNMs that were needed to construct Stonebreak. This tree is a legacy of those five machines. That branch above us is the DIANA branch, and it’s breaking down. You can see how it’s crystallizing.”

  Constantine experienced a sudden flash of recognition on hearing Mary’s words. That’s what the branch reminded him of: an old piece of uneaten fudge, still the same shape, but slowly turning back into sugar.

  “I sometimes wonder if I’m the only person to have noticed that deterioration,” Mary said. “But I doubt it. One-fifth of Stonebreak is the result of the DIANA machine. So what if one-fifth of Stonebreak is similarly breaking down, deep down beneath the surface?”

  “Hell…” murmured Constantine.

  Mary continued: “And then I hear that DIANA is one of the agitators calling for Stonebreak to be pulled down. Of course they would be! Trying to hide their mistakes. So I put two and two together, and I think about what’s going to happen next. I head down to the station and I wait. And I wait and I wait. And then I see a ghost arrive with the best stealth routines of anyone I’ve ever seen.”

  Constantine said nothing.

  “You’ve come here because of this, haven’t you?” demanded Mary.

  Constantine remained silent. She gripped his arm.

  “Tell them, Constantine. Tell them that I know. I’ve been watching and gathering information all the while, ready to drop back into the game. I’ve been out here on my own for too long. Let them know that; I’m ready to do what’s required.”

  Constantine opened his mouth to speak, but was distracted. Three people wearing long grey overcoats had moved up to them so silently that Constantine hadn’t noticed their approach.

  “Good evening, Mr. Storey,” said one. “Sorry it took us so long to find you, but, well, you’re shielded by the best. Us.”

  Another took hold of Mary by the arm and firmly began to lead her away; Constantine couldn’t tell whether by a man or a woman; all he could make out was a smudge of a person. They must all be wearing some sort of baffling equipment, he realized.

  “Hey, leave her alone!” yelled Constantine. “I was speaking to her.”

  “Can’t take the risk, Mr. Storey. She’s drawing attention to you. That’s how our computers found you, by noting the dead spot that seemed to follow her around.”

  “But she’s a ghost too!”

  “Was a ghost. Was a ghost. Now she’s just an unemployed consumer, like so many others here.”

  “Unemployed? But she works for DIANA.” He hesitated. “At least, that’s what she told me.”

  “Not for ten years.”

  Constantine was half led, half bundled away from the Source. A grey flier rested lightly on the ground nearby. They steered him toward it.

  “But people ignore her. I’ve seen her move down the street and no one notices she’s there. She must be a ghost. What have you done to her?”

  The grey figures did not reply; they just bundled Constantine into the flier. As the door closed, there was a faint shimmer beside him and Constantine found himself sitting between two tall women with short-cropped hair.

  “Whew. It’s a relief to turn those baffles off. I start to feel as if I can’t breathe. Now, if Lee gets a move on in dumping that woman, we can soon get you back to the hotel and out of mischief, Mr. Storey.”

  Constantine watched the third grey figure hand Mary something, then turn and move quickly back toward the flier. Mary watched him go, then looked at the object in her hand. A bottle.

  As the flier rose into the air, Constantine watched her take a deep drink, then begin to head toward the buildings that lined the perimeter of the open space in which the Source sat. Late-night sightseers moved out of her way as she staggered past. The flier climbed until it was just higher than the surrounding buildings, still much lower than the branches of the Source, and then it began a long dive down toward the second level. Constantine caught a last glimpse of Mary moving through the sparse crowds. The passersby continued to pay no attention to her. An embarrassment, it was as if she wasn’t there.

  As if she were a ghost.

  Herb 2: 2210

  Herb gazed upward in awestruck silence. He had never seen so many spacecraft: layer upon layer of silver-grey disks, rising higher and
higher into the night sky. Stacks of silver pennies thrown into the air, the farthest seeming no bigger than the cold diamond stars that twinkled behind them.

  On an intellectual level, Herb had known that the sky was big, but those thousands upon thousands of ships floating above gave it a depth he had never seen before. A feeling of vertigo swept over him and he wanted to sit down on the soft, spongy road and hold on tight. Beside him, Robert Johnston stood gazing upward without any apparent concern.

  “Impressive, huh?” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. Very impressive. Where are we?”

  Herb felt giddy: a man who had suddenly become aware of the cathedral vaulting that held up the sky. Johnston smiled delightedly and leaned closer.

  “On a staging planet.” He placed one finger to his lips and whispered, “At the edge of the Enemy Domain, just beyond the wave of expansion.” His eyes slowly slid from left to right in an exaggerated survey of the twisted buildings that surrounded them. “I think we’re okay at the moment, though.”

  Herb curled his lip at Johnston’s play-acting and began to walk along the soft road, looking all around. Now that he was getting used to the wonder of the night sky above, he had time to pay attention to his immediate surroundings. Hideously warped and melted buildings hemmed them in from all directions, leaning over above them like trees in a forest. They had a stretched-out look about them; they seemed too tall and thin to remain standing. Shadowy and lopsided drooping windows formed eyes that looked down upon them, silently pondering their presence. The air was warm and smelled of machine oil; from every direction there was a gentle hum that almost sounded like voices.

  Everything about this place seemed wrong. Even the road felt strange beneath his feet; it seemed to bounce and give as he walked on it. Herb got the impression that at any moment it would suddenly wriggle and turn around on itself, a large black snake turning to see who was walking along its spine.