Creation Machine

by Andrew Bannister

  She raises an eyebrow. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not used to thinking of you as Ms Demaril, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not used to hearing you being called sir,’ she says. ‘Let’s stick to being Sallah and Rudi, shall we?’

  And I look into the eyes of the important-sounding woman who I now know is called Sallah Demaril and my right hand finds a glass of something and I raise it and say, ‘Let’s’, and she raises her glass too and we clink, and then drink, and I wait for her to start eating and then I join in.

  The flesh is chewy but tastes okay, sweet and a bit bland. The green stuff is bitter. The sauce helps.

  We talk as we eat and I piece it together. I’m good at that, like I said. Rudi’s full name is Rudimans bin’ Haffs, and this meal is a celebration because it is half a year since he and Council Memberess Sallah Cato Demaril had their first, epic fuck in the back of a blacked-out cab. Until now she has kept the relationship hidden, because he is the wrong age, the wrong caste and the wrong colour and she is an ambitious junior minister in a government that cares about these things. A lot. But now things have got to the point where she is ready to rethink that.

  Rudi, meanwhile, has been playing a long game. I can see it in the sim; they show me that kind of thing. His set piece comes tonight, and it’s up to me to play it out. Simulated realities have to be internally consistent. You can only have one set of rules at once.

  While we eat I watch Sallah, as much as I can without making it obvious. She’s standard human, from the outside. They don’t like mods here. This is a conservative middle-tech planet. Middle income, middle pollution, a lot more than middle inequality. That was probably the reason it was simmed in the first place. Comfortable academics love studying inequality. The academics are probably all long dead now but the sim is still trotting along. And now someone’s found a use for it.

  Sallah has thin straight eyebrows over grey eyes, with only the wrinkles at the corners admitting to the midway point of decade number five. She is obviously proud of her cheekbones, brought out with the faintest blur of darker tone. Conservatively dressed, only she would probably call it suitable: close-fitting jacket, buttoned to the top, with long sleeves and a full collar that reaches halfway up her neck.

  As I look, Rudi’s beautifully simulated biochemistry makes itself felt. I remember he gets off on the stiffness of her dress, the contrast between the formal clothes and the woman they cover. I let myself catch a bit of his excitement. It helps with playing the part.

  We finish the meal with tiny dishes of something that is mostly sour cream – they like their sour flavours here – and huge glasses of pale tea, and then there is a silence, long and loaded and full of eye contact being made and broken and made again, until she says: ‘Are you ready to go?’ And I give the only possible answer and she waves for the cheque.

  It floats up on its own tray. I watch her as she leaves money – real paper money, it’s in fashion again here, if you can afford to own any.

  I follow her to the exit, gaze roving over her hips. She has a lithe fullness that comes with well-managed ageing, and the close-fitting material does that trick of revealing as it hides. More biochemistry happens. This time I keep my distance from it.

  As we leave I sense people’s eyes on us, recognizing her and scoping me, and I realize this evening is a big deal for her. She has gone public. Some timing.

  We flag down a cab, none of your high-tech stuff but a real honest-to-fuck pedicab with real pedals and a proper slave to push them, and squeak back through a warm evening full of night-time city smells to an apartment block behind a security gate. Touch-pad entry to the ground-level foyer; no visible staff but several discreet weapons pods on the ceiling and that’s just what they want you to see. A flying eye whirs round a corner and hovers briefly in front of her and longer in front of me. It’s too close so I want to swat it, but I don’t. Play the game. It won’t hurt you, sweetheart. It just wants to look. When it has finished, it dips in the air like a nod, and flits off back to wherever. I let go my breath, and realize I must have been holding it. Too tense.

  We walk into an elevator and say nothing all the way to the top.

  The elevator doors open on to a big terrace. It’s shaded by big squares of something like silk, so fine you can hardly see it, floating about independently just above our heads. One of them begins to track us across the terrace, but Sallah waves it away.

  ‘It’s not raining,’ she says.

  The shade square floats off and parks itself somewhere out of sight. I’m impressed. They only thought of field technology a few years ago here, and it’s still pretty expensive.

  The main door to the apartment is on the other side of the terrace. As we get to it a pair of flying eyes scoot towards us. They’re a bit bigger than the one downstairs. Big enough for grown-up weapons. Too late to worry now.

  Sallah’s eyes follow mine towards them. She sighs a bit. ‘I can’t get rid of them out here,’ she says. ‘They’re part of my security contract.’ She pauses, then looks up at me. ‘They don’t go inside, though, so . . .’

  I nod. ‘So?’

  She smiles, and opens the door. The flying eyes part to let us through. The door closes behind us and suddenly there is no space between us, none at all, and my nose and mouth and hands are full of the smell and taste and feel of her and even though a tiny part of me is screaming ‘Hold back!’ I can’t because for some reason I can’t tell the difference between me and the remnants of Rudi any more and I don’t care.

  Without letting go of each other we stumble across the apartment shedding clothes as we go, and by the time we get to her chamber we are naked and I can see her, I can see her breasts and the tight little mat of hair at the base of her belly and I run my hands down her, and we collapse together and I am gone.

  When I wake the first thing I know is comfort, that pure animal feeling that comes from recent sex and the smell and feel of your mate next to you. It’s dark, I’m warm and my body hurts a bit in all the right places. It’s fun remembering why.

  Then there is a sickening moment when I realize what it means and the next thing I know is fear, because most of what I am remembering was not supposed to happen. I have no idea, no idea at all, how long I slept.

  Oh dear holy shit, what have I done?

  I lie dead still while my mind races and I try to get my heart rate back to normal. After a few dozen breaths we’re getting there and I risk moving an arm, sliding it out from under the covers like a snake. Halfway out the cover sinks to fill the hole. Sallah moves a bit and moans and I freeze, but it’s okay, she’s still asleep, and the arm comes out into fresh air and I can see Rudi’s cheap chrono which, thank you, glows in the dark.

  I’ve been asleep for two hours. Oh crap.

  Another dozen breaths while I do the maths. It’s outside the plan but – more maths – it might be okay. If everything else goes to spec. If I don’t fuck up.

  If I’m lucky.

  Time to go. I slide away from Sallah and stand up, letting the cover settle back oh so slowly. A waft of expelled air smells of her and for a crazy moment I am ready to lie down again. Then I’m back in control. I squeeze my eyes shut for half a minute to get some night sight. Then I prowl round the apartment, picking up my clothes. Two minutes later I am dressed, and now it’s time for the important stuff. I shut my eyes again, remembering the simulation. Eyes open. Go.

  Out of the main room. Down a short corridor. Duck under a tell-tale beam, turn to the right, step over another beam and into the study. No alarms so far, but we’ll soon fix that.

  The study’s cluttered. No surprise there. Step carefully round the junk on the floor, swing past the desk and stop in front of the old-style bookshelves, apparently filled from end to end with genuine old-style books because Sallah is a bit of a collector. Count four shelves down and four books in. My guts hurt with the tension. Pause for as long as I dare to calm things down. Take hold of book. Pull.

  The pro
jected image of the bookshelves fuzzes out and suddenly I am standing on the threshold of Sallah’s real office, twice the size of the study. The old oak desk is against the wall where it ought to be, covered in terminals, screens, data stores and even keyboards, as if Sallah has never heard about less being more. But none of it matters, because the real point of the exercise is . . .

  . . . my foot goes through a tell-tale beam. It’s hidden low, under the edge of the desk. No way you’d notice it, unless you knew it was there.

  Like I did.

  The lights brighten, and half a dozen camera patches swivel towards me. Suddenly Rudi’s face is seriously famous, and suddenly I am on two separate deadlines. Rudi’s, because this was the purpose of his game, and mine, because now I know where his game actually ends and I don’t want to be there when it does.

  I run. I have twenty-five seconds before the house goes into lock-down – twenty-five, because that’s how long the building management system thinks it would take Sallah to get to a terminal and cancel the alarm, if she was going to. After that, everything is in secure mode. No doors, no elevators. No way out.

  Ten seconds sees me out of the apartment and on to the terrace. Far too long. Thirteen, and I am near the elevator. No chance – I could get in but I’d never get out again. Fifteen seconds, and we’re into Plan B. I never liked Plan B.

  I run past the elevator door and round a corner, and there they are. The shade squares.

  No time for relief. I reach up with both hands.

  Field mesh is weird stuff. I know it’s not real but it feels it. It’s like trying to grab an oily film on water and it takes a couple of goes before I’ve got the middle of a square in each hand.

  Eighteen seconds. No choice left. Run.

  I reach the parapet in four big strides, tighten my hold on the squares, gather a mouthful of saliva, launch myself out over the edge – and fall like a stone.

  The squares have gone limp. With a small part of my mind I notice my bowels emptying. Rudi doesn’t like that but I haven’t time to help. I’m busy watching.

  Sallah’s block has thirty floors. Halfway down there is a restaurant terrace that sticks out just a bit further than the rest. It’s my landmark. If I act too soon then there’ll be time for Security to catch up with me. Too late, and there won’t be much left to catch.

  The terrace flicks past. I spit up towards the squares, as hard as I can, and hope they’re as smart as they’re supposed to be.

  For an aching millisecond nothing happens. Then both shade squares spread and harden into storm mode and the upward force nearly breaks my grip but not quite because I was ready for it.

  We hit the ground hard enough to bruise but not hard enough to do serious damage, and I add another apology to the thousands I’m going to owe Rudi by the time this is over.

  I catch my breath. Then I run.

  On the way I take stock. So far so reasonable. The simulated Sallah is thoroughly compromised, which was the idea. This simulated world has been nudged on to a new path for the delight of some voyeur somewhere. Coming back to the practical, I badly need a change of clothes, but Rudi’s wardrobe has a couple of issues. First, it is thirty blocks away, almost an hour on foot. Far too long for the owner of a face which will get very famous, very fast, just as soon as the news hits the public screens. Second, it is in what’s about to be the most watched apartment on the planet.

  Third, we both have an appointment somewhere else. Rudi’s remaining time is ticking down and so is mine.

  The city is on a grid layout. Picture an aerial map. The streets run up and down, left to right. Sallah’s apartment building is just below the centre of the map. Below it, parks and parliaments; above it, commercial, the shitty but necessary business of swapping lots of money for lots of stuff, or the other way round. And above that, the other sort of commercial. The human sort.

  I head up the map, past a couple of blocks of shiny shop fronts. The ones they put in the tourist brochures, but only after they edit out the junkies and the baby whores. They call it Spillage, here – a nasty intrusion on the public life of the city, by all the human refuse that makes the private life of the city possible. Under the awning of an up-market clothing store I step over a pair of outstretched legs. Their owner doesn’t move. She might be twelve or thirteen but it’s hard to tell through the bruises and the make-up. As I step over her I notice the syringe sticking out of one of her skinny thighs. It’s empty. So’s she, I guess.

  I find time to hope that my nudge does some good.

  A few blocks more, and we’ve left the nice places behind for good. Warehouses, narrow streets, little workshops that never stop working, and bigger ones that spew chemicals and acrid-smelling smoke across the pavement. I step sideways to avoid a spreading puddle of something purple that seems to dissolve concrete, then throw myself sharply against a wall as a truck grinds by. The wheels swish through the puddle we just avoided, splashing the purple stuff against the wall. It steams. I watch it for a second then move on. Like I said, we have an appointment.

  The smoke den doesn’t advertise itself. Just a door in a wall. Anyone who needs to know it’s there, knows. I knock and wait, counting under my breath. I’ve reached ten by the time a thin, nervous-looking boy opens the door. Ten is good. Ten means everything is okay. Twenty would have meant we have a problem. Immediate would have been run like fuck.

  I push past the boy. It’s dark inside, and the air smells of sharply sweet smoke with undertones of sweat and alcohol. Drowsy conversations stop as I enter, and then start again as the door closes. A few people glance at me with unfocused eyes.

  The Weed Captain is standing behind the bar that divides the long room into two. The surface in front of him is covered with little flat tubes. They’re mouthpieces that plug into the coiled manifolds of smoke pipes that run round the walls – people get stoned here on an industrial scale. He looks at me, his eyebrows raised. I nod, and he waves me through the lift-up of the bar and into one of the private stalls behind. He watches me sit down. ‘Wait here.’ His voice is a spluttering hiss that comes from a puckered hole in his neck, because smoking is very bad for you. He turns and leaves, drawing the curtain over the entrance of the stall.

  I wait, doing my best to keep calm. It’s not easy. I’m crazy with adrenalin and exhaustion. I work on my breathing, getting it gradually down to some kind of even keel, focusing my eyes on a spot of dirt on the filthy curtain. After a few minutes my heart rate is something like normal.

  Then the curtain moves. Not much. Just a tiny sway, and then stops, as if it had been caught by a draught. One that hadn’t been there before. At the same moment, I realize that I can’t hear anyone talking. Then there is a new sound, of a faint pock followed by an edgy rumbling noise. As if someone had bowled something underarm and it was rolling towards me. Something small but heavy. Something made of metal.

  I throw myself up and backwards as hard as I can. The thin partition splinters and I am rolling head over heels through into the very back of the bar. I crash over empty barrels, bump into a line of bales of weed stacked waist-high, throw myself over it and crouch down on the floor, hands over my head.

  For a second there is silence. Then there is a hiss, an orange flash and a noise like a lot of angry fireworks, and I realize that the rolling thing was a mini-cluster. Nasty and illegal. I hunker down as much as possible and hope like hell it isn’t heat-seeking.

  The bales shake as the tiny warheads thump into them. Someone screams and then stops. The firework noise peaks and fades out, and plaster dust flutters down on to the backs of my hands.

  There is the sound of feet, getting closer, and I realize I’m running out of time. Correction. Have run out. Somehow I fucked up, and it feels like treachery but I have to go.

  I say a quick, silent, utterly inadequate ‘sorry’ to Rudi for getting him into this. Then I do the thing inside my mind, which I can’t describe except to say that it feels like this, to snap myself out of here.

&
nbsp; Nothing happens.

  I try again.

  Still nothing. Still here.

  More feet, coming closer, and a crash as someone shoves some wreckage aside. I’ve got seconds, and no options at all. I have to make the sim work for me.

  I reach deep into the controls of the body I am inhabiting, going far too fucking fast but there’s no time to be gentle, and I find the place I’m looking for.

  There.

  Rudi’s body shuts down. No heartbeat. No breathing. Muscles lax (and a bit more shit eases out, and I find time to be pleased with the artistic touch). Eyes open because I need them, but staring like death. He’s got about a minute like this before his brain starts dying. And at the moment, I wouldn’t like to guess what happens to me when his brain dies.

  One minute. I wait, and hope desperately that my stupid idea works. That they scan for life signs soon, and that the fact of an apparently dead body stops them from doing anything in a hurry. Just as long as it buys me time.

  The feet stop. Ten seconds gone. Twenty. Thirty. Time enough for a scan, more than enough. What . . .?

  Then I hear an intake of breath and a click-hum, and realize that it hasn’t worked, because that is the sound of an energy weapon going live. I’m about to fry.

  And then, with no warning at all, the world twists and I am somewhere else, lying on a hard white floor, still in apparently Rudi’s body, and a woman’s voice says quietly:

  ‘Got them.’

  I have time to think ‘What?’, before someone seizes my upper arm.

  I convulse, wrenching my shoulder up and around so that my arm is pulled out of the grip. Then I am up on my feet and running.

  Then the world blurs for a moment and suddenly I am running the opposite way and someone in front of me is reaching out. I swerve round them, twisting my shoulders to stay clear, and the world does it again and I am on the floor where I started. I yell and thrash but then something buzzes against my arm and everything fades out.