Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  It was Red who took control.—For Heaven’s sake, act naturally. The Grey personality must be some sort of failsafe system. We’ve always suspected as much.

  Blue was incensed.—It took over control of the body. That’s impossible!

  —Obviously not impossible, replied Red.—Now keep quiet.

  Constantine had ignored them. He was too shaken by his recent possession. He felt both dizzy and incredibly tired. He fell asleep listening to the bickering of the other personalities.

  Now that he wanted their company, they were sleeping. He sighed, rolled out of bed, and went to inspect the minibar.

  The only whisky available was the flavored stuff they sold to teenagers. He selected a can of cola instead, popped the seal and, the container chilling in his hand, began to stroll around the room. The carpet felt soft beneath his feet, the air was hotel temperature. It was a cliché: Constantine had spent two years now traveling the world, staying in what might as well have been the same hotel room. It all added to the artificiality of his situation. He needed to step out of this stereotypical room and touch the real world, but what was the real world to someone like Constantine? To so many people alive at the start of the twenty-second century, the real world was a commodity like any other, sold shrink-wrapped, dated, and best befored. Whether it was freshly baked bread, imitation grit of the millstone baked inside it, or a weekend in a country house with a trout river running through the grounds, the real world had to have authenticity added before it could be sold. Constantine often suspected that the truth was that the real world in fact consisted of hotel rooms just like this one, and that everything else was just a 24-bit imitation of its former self.

  He signaled for the window leading out onto the balcony to open. The floor-length vertical blinds parted for him, and he stepped out into the cold night. He shivered, wondering for a moment if he should go back inside to pull on a robe but rejected the idea. The cold night air felt real. He gripped the plasticized metal handrail and looked out over the city cascading down beneath him in a series of wide terraces, its lights strings of illuminated pearls criss-crossing the dark streets and buildings. Constantine’s thin body glowed palely in the moonlight. Looking down, his large stomach, overhanging his spindly legs, was glowing like a pale moon itself. He used to take time to keep himself in shape, but over the past five years the pressure of work had become too much. Blue veins shone along his white legs, the sparse hairs that had grown on his upper body through his teens and twenties had been joined over the past few years by a forest of others sprouting from his nipples or covering his sunken chest. Constantine began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. He had stepped out here to try to regain his grip on reality. What could be more real than his joke of a body as it approached middle age? The laughter died on his lips as he looked out into the night.

  A skyscraper was spinning across the sleeping city toward him.

  He stared in disbelief.

  It was coming closer: the tower he had seen yesterday morning, just before boarding the flier. The tower with no base, a long, thin needle formed of a structure with art deco steel walls twisting around rose-petal windows, spinning slowly on its axis as it moved toward him. It cast no shadow on the silent city below, Constantine noticed, watching as it passed over a cluster of lights at the heart of the second level. A late-night party. Could they see it? Would they believe their drunken eyes if they did?

  It didn’t exist. That was the most likely answer. Constantine had finally cracked. A tiny orange flier skimming down from the center to the first level passed the tower without pause. That confirmed it: he must be imagining it.

  He wished his sleeping personalities would wake up.

  The tower’s spin seemed to be slowing as it approached him. Now Constantine could see inside, actually look through the windows of the mirage. It was a hotel: that seemed obvious. He could see bedrooms, beds covered with white linen, some of them holding sleeping guests. The tower was now only thirty meters away. It loomed up into the night above him, blocking the half moon. Below the tower he could quite clearly see the streets of the second level.

  The tower’s rotation had slowed to a crawl. Something was sliding into view around the steel and rose curve of the walls. A balcony. On it stood a figure. It was looking straight at Constantine as it slowly rotated to meet him.

  Twenty meters away, ten meters. Five, four, three, two…

  The tower glided smoothly to a halt bringing the figure face-to-face with Constantine.

  It was Jay Apple.

  “Good morning, Constantine,” she said.

  “Good morning. Have I gone mad?”

  Jay just shrugged.

  “Not yet,” she replied. “I’ve come to give you a warning. You are not currently standing on the balcony of a hotel in Stonebreak, as you may have been led to believe. In fact, you are a personality construct, running on a computer located in Germany. Your mindset has been captured by a rival corporation. They are running it in a simulation of the real world in the hope that you will reveal the details of the Mars project.”

  Constantine frowned. He gazed at Jay’s pale hand on the balcony rail. He could see the short white nails, the tiny scratch on the first joint of the forefinger of her left hand. He looked at the balcony rail itself, noting how it was formed of intertwining strips of metal in shades of grey that curled off to form leaves and stylized representations of flowers. One of the leaves had been caught by something and bent out of shape.

  It all seemed so real, so convincing. If it weren’t for the fact that the building itself was floating several hundred meters above the ground, he wouldn’t have believed Jay’s words.

  “When did this happen?”

  Jay shrugged again.

  “We don’t know. We are hoping to figure it out with your help. Have you noticed anything odd recently?”

  Constantine gave a bitter laugh. “I’ve been seeing gaps beneath the sky. I see holes in alleyways and office blocks full of people staring at each other. Strangers introduce themselves to me and take me for midnight walks through the city. People seem to freeze in mid action while a second body around them carries on moving. Now I am speaking to a young woman standing on the balcony of a floating building. Yes. I guess you could say that things have been odd recently.”

  He shook his head and tilted his head in thought.

  “Okay. Things really started acting odd about three weeks ago. Do you think that’s when they got me?”

  “Possibly. It’s something to work on.”

  Constantine suddenly felt very cold. He remembered that he was naked in the middle of the freezing night.

  “Can we go back inside?” he asked.

  “No!” Jay held out her hand. “Stay close to me. They don’t know I’m here. We can only speak safely if you’re close to this balcony.”

  Constantine was suddenly suspicious. “How? That’s a good point. If I’m a computer simulation, how can you speak to me at all? Surely they will know you’re here. Why should I listen to what you say?”

  Jay rolled her eyes in frustration. “Listen, get this into your head. I’m the only person in here who’s on your side. Now, I’ve got a message for one of your personalities. Are they listening?”

  “They’re asleep.”

  —I’m awake, said White.

  Constantine made no response. White never really slept. Savant personalities were a little different, he knew. Maybe it would do him good to keep this a secret for the moment.

  “What about Grey? Is he there?” asked Jay.

  “I see you’ve been fully briefed. In that case, you’ll realize that I never know anything about what Grey is up to.”

  “Fine. Listen, this is a message from the real Constantine. I saw him just a few hours ago before I got in here. He said ‘GHX LPN SSD SAS EFF LKF.’”

  —Probably an authentication code, said White.

  “What? Can I have that again?”

  “No need. Grey will have pi
cked it up. It’ll vouch for my credentials.”

  Constantine paused, but Grey maintained its habitual silence. Constantine tentatively took this to be a positive sign and withheld further judgment for the moment.

  “So, how did you get in here, then? How come you haven’t been detected?”

  Jay gave a little smile and looked down at her feet. She wriggled her tanned brown toes on the cool marble of the balcony and then allowed her gaze to travel up the long dark side of the tower above her. She finally spoke.

  “The program that runs this simulation is full of bugs. Not surprising when we’re talking about something so complex. All programs contain memory leaks: objects get created but not destroyed. Like when you get a bit of a picture left behind on a computer display after you move things around?”

  Constantine nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  “Good,” said Jay. “That’s why you sometimes see two of things, or why the scenery doesn’t always hang together like it should.”

  She jerked her head in the direction of the tower behind her.

  “This is an object that didn’t get destroyed. The program doesn’t even know it’s here. There are no pointers to it; only termination of the program itself will lead to its resources being returned to the heap. A DIANA tempest device managed to locate the object and then effect a transference of my personality construct into it. Basically, this is my little island of friendly consciousness in a sea of hostility.”

  “Oh,” Constantine said. He had temporarily forgotten the cold. Jay’s words washed over him. Something she had mentioned earlier was just beginning to sink into his awareness. He licked his lips and whispered hoarsely.

  “Something you said. You said the real Constantine passed on a message to give to me.”

  Jay said nothing. She simply fixed her dark gaze on Constantine and waited for him to work it out for himself.

  Constantine looked back at her. She was very thin, he suddenly realized. Big, dark eyes with a slightly desperate “love me” expression. Maybe the cool, irreverent talk he had heard yesterday in the meeting was just an act. Or maybe the computer simulation hadn’t got her quite right. He was evading the subject at hand and knew it. If what Jay had told him was true, he wasn’t the real Constantine. The real Constantine was out there somewhere, sleeping in the real Stonebreak, visiting the real DIANA Arcology. What had happened at the real meeting yesterday? Had they discussed the project there? Maybe even come to some conclusion?

  Would he see his wife again?

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Jay shook her head slowly. “We don’t know. We’re working on a way to get you out of here, but it will take time. The best thing you can do, to be honest, is to act normally. The resources required to generate this virtual world are significant. If they think that you’ve caught on, well…”

  Constantine was suddenly incredibly cold again.

  “I need to go inside,” he said.

  “It’s probably just as well that you do. If we stay talking too long, it will arouse suspicion.”

  “Aren’t they suspicious at the moment? Can’t they see me?”

  “Not when you’re within range of this tower. There is a ghost signal emanating from here, making it look as if you’re just standing on the balcony.”

  “I don’t really understand any of that. Are you coming back?”

  “I will.”

  Constantine nodded again. Something suddenly occurred to him. “You’re just as much a prisoner in here as I am, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll see you when I can,” Jay said.

  The tower was already slowly spinning, taking her back out of his virtual life. Constantine gazed after her, lost and alone.

  He awoke to find a yellow stripe of sunlight streaking his body, looking like an exclamation mark. His room was fresh and clean and smelled of hot coffee and freshly baked croissants. He felt surprisingly healthy and positive, ready to take on anything. That was when the memory of the previous night settled upon him. Blue was already awake.

  —Fresh coffee? Good idea.

  Constantine rolled out of bed and began to pour coffee into a curiously shaped cup.

  “Where were you last night?” he muttered.

  —Sleeping, said Red.

  —White has filled us in with all the details, said Blue.

  Constantine sipped his coffee. It was a little too bitter this morning, the grounds seeming to settle on his tongue. If this was a computer simulation, it was an extremely good one. The attention to detail was incredible.

  Red spoke up.

  —We don’t think it would be a good idea for you to speak to us about last night. If what Jay said was true, they’ll be able to monitor you subvocalizing. You can’t afford to let them know you suspect. If you agree with us, scratch your leg.

  “Spare me your spy games, Red. It’s too early.”

  There was a pause. Constantine took a croissant and started to butter it. He knew that Red would be examining his last sentence to see if he had given anything away.

  —Okay, said Red.—Maybe we are being too mysterious, but we can’t afford to take any chances.

  “Do you think it’s true?” asked Constantine.

  —Will you stop it? Okay. We think it is. Grey is saying nothing, as usual. We are assuming that he is hovering around in the background somewhere. White keeps announcing the authentication code, just in case he didn’t hear it. We’re guessing that if there were something wrong, he’d say so. As he hasn’t, we’ll carry on as normal.

  —It does seem the safest course of action, said Blue. All we have to do is keep quiet about the final destination of the Martian construction. That’s what we’ve been doing so far anyway. If Jay had suggested we do anything counter to our normal course of action, then we would have had to discuss things further. As it is, we’ll just carry on as we were.

  Constantine nodded and took a bite of the croissant. It tasted delicious.

  “Okay. I agree. What are we doing this morning?”

  —Nothing. The second meeting isn’t scheduled until late this afternoon, remember? said Red.—It seems pretty obvious that whoever has caught us already knows an awful lot of things that were supposed to be top secret. You just had to look around the people in that meeting yesterday to deduce what they already know. They knew that the plan involves the hyperdrive—

  —Warp drive, interrupted Blue.

  —The warp drive, continued Red testily,—plus it has something to do with the AIs. Most importantly, they have figured out that Mars is involved. The big question is: what don’t they know? There must be something, otherwise they wouldn’t have us in here.

  —Agreed, said Blue.—Our problem will be going along with them sufficiently so as to not raise their suspicions, while simultaneously not giving anything away.

  —We have got one advantage, of course, said Red.—Grey. They probably don’t know about him, or what he is capable of.

  —Pretty much the same as us, then, said Blue.

  The quorum never met in the same place twice. The level of paranoia among the group could never be high enough, not when you considered what they were conceivably fighting. Constantine appreciated the irony of their second meeting place. They were in the balcony of a concert hall, looking down to the stage where the black-and-white-clad musicians of an orchestra were tuning up. Glancing around the room, he could not recall ever seeing such sensitive recording equipment before. There were devices here that could record the noise made by the Brownian motion of dust in the moisture of his eyes. The whole room was strung with directional microphones that could build up a sound picture of the local environment that was almost perfect in its reproduction. It was the ideal place to hold a meeting where secrecy was paramount.

  Marion Lee had been waiting for the signal to show that the microphones were switched on. As the signal was given, she relaxed and began the meeting.

  “Good afternoon, everyone. Let us begin.”


  She coughed, then continued in a quiet voice. “People have long suspected a hidden intelligence guiding our development, an AI immeasurably more powerful than the others. Some people believed it first emerged in the early twenty-first century.”

  Gillian Karajan nodded in agreement.

  “References in the entertainments from the period would confirm that. However, you cannot take that in any way as proof of the Watcher’s existence. If you examine the historical context, you’ll see that these rumors would be inevitable. Look at the people living at the time. Only the younger generations would have lived out their life under constant surveillance, whether by cameras or phone tracking or even computer modeling. Remember, at that time, there were many who had reached adulthood before even the Internet came into existence. Increased levels of surveillance would have been very obvious to that society.”

  The five of them were spread over two rows of seats, making conversation difficult. They leaned toward Gillian to better hear what was being said. Below them, a flutist practiced the same passage over and over again.

  Gillian continued speaking confidently. She seemed to have quickly come to terms with her enforced exile from the Oort cloud. Maybe she understood the need for it. Or maybe there was some more sinister reason. Maybe it was just bad programming.

  “…the tension generated by the interactions between the older and younger members of that society are unknown today. Nobody alive today has grown up with a true understanding of the word ‘privacy.’ Back then, they still had some concept, one fed and fanned by elderly relatives. Is it any wonder that people then began to see conspiracies where none existed? Is it any wonder the myth of the Watcher arose?”

  Jay grinned. “So, you don’t believe in the stories then, Gillian?”

  Gillian looked annoyed. “Listen, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think that I’m correct in saying that I know more about AIs and their history than anyone else here. If I were to believe or disbelieve the stories, it would be based on something more than a general paranoia that they are out to get us.”