For a moment I let myself wonder what would happen if I turned round and swam back to where I think the shore used to be. But only for a moment. There’s no way back. I’ve been on a one-way trip since I left the shingle. Since this woman and whoever else snatched me from the sim. Since . . . well, since all the things I can’t find.
Well, time to go looking. I fill my lungs, shut my eyes and dive.
There is a micro-moment of silence, almost as if I have caught something by surprise. I open my eyes and that seems to act as a trigger because I am suddenly surrounded by a hissing, fluttering cloud of colour. I close my fist then half open it, and my curled palm is full of them, shiny polygons a few millimetres across but so thin they are almost two-dimensional. At first I think that each one is a different colour, but then I realize that each one is all colours, flickering from one to another too quickly for my eye to follow.
They are beautiful, and I laugh. There is no sound apart from the hissing of the flakes, but the laugh sounds in my head and the colours around me pulse in time with it as though they are laughing back.
Except that when I stop laughing, they don’t. I close my eyes and shake my head, but the pulsing is still there, printed on the red inside of my eyelids. It is getting stronger, too, and brighter; so bright I would close my eyes if they were still open. The light lances into me, and the hissing of the flakes becomes a greedy roar, and I am . . .
I am . . .
Further along the beach, the simulation of the woman called Fleare sat on the simulated shingle, throwing stones into the green thing that looked like the sea. She studied the splashes carefully. They looked real.
The bead on her necklace made a throat-clearing noise. ‘Uh, hello?’
‘Hello.’ She put down the stone she was holding. ‘I saw him dive. Is he on his way?’
‘Yep. Full immersive regression. No hitches so far.’
Fleare picked up the stone again, hefted it and threw it out low over the water so that it skimmed and bounced. ‘Still sure he’s the one we’re looking for?’
‘Well, pretty sure. Latest runs say over ninety-seven per cent positive. It won’t be long before we find out.’
Fleare reached a hand up to her throat and took hold of the bead, turning it in her fingers. ‘Go gentle on him,’ she said quietly. ‘If he is who we think, he has a hell of a history to get used to.’
‘What do you think all this softly-softly by the seaside stuff was about?’ The bead managed to sound insulted. ‘We could have done a reconstruct and dumped the whole lot back in his memory in milliseconds, real time.’
‘Yeah, and ended up with a psychotic simulation.’ Fleare flicked the bead softly with a fingernail. ‘They’re not good to watch, Muz.’
‘If you’re referring to my past, then no, I expect I wasn’t. At least I was quiet.’ The bead twisted itself out of her grip. ‘But I’m over it, okay?’
‘Okay.’ She stood up, and realized she had sighed. ‘What about the sim? Those cops must be getting ready to inspect a body by now.’
‘Fixed.’ Muz sounded smug. ‘We found a body match. A guy a bit younger but the same build, who just died of a Float overdose. Dropped him into the gap just as they fired. Any second now, their time, they’ll decide they grilled the wrong guy. The paperwork will be a bitch.’
‘So, anyone who looks in should be fooled that it’s all normal?’
‘Yeah. Or whatever passes for normal in sim-world. We covered our tracks pretty well.’
Fleare nodded. Her hands felt salty. She frowned and dusted them against her fatigues. Then she raised her head and looked out to sea, to where she had last seen the young man swimming before he disappeared. She tried to imagine that she could still see the remains of the spreading wake he had left as he crossed the broken water of the wave tops, but it was getting too dark and the currents must have erased it by now.
It didn’t help that her sight seemed a little blurred. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, felt wetness, and swore under her breath.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ She wiped her eyes again. ‘So,’ she said, ‘since we’re done, let’s get out of here.’
‘Sure. Where to?’
Fleare shrugged. ‘Somewhere a very long way from the sea. Somewhere not in a simulation.’ She paused, and added: ‘Somewhere with lots of alcohol.’
I am . . .
Yes?
I don’t know. Who am I?
We can help.
How? Who are you?
I’m called the Moderator. Do you know where you are?
Am I in another sim?
No, or mostly no. You exist as pure code – terabytes of code – running as a limited diagnostic model.
What does that mean?
It means we can see – everything. Your past has been hidden from you, probably by the agency who extracted your personality in the first place. Logically, the code must include not just your memories, but the instructions that have sealed them away.
How do you know?
Nothing can have been completely removed; that would be impossible without destroying your personality. We will look for possible matches for events from your memory, and scan you for activation of any code which appears to block them.
Will you find out who – extracted me?
Possibly. Not certainly. Let’s begin.
Pictures. Random at first, flashing past like a flock of birds. Swooping, pausing. Returning. Many people. A few people. One person, from many angles. A pause, then places. A river, a bare patch of sandy earth. Trees, then no trees but only desert.
Ah.
Another pause.
More people. Crowds. Laughing. A dislocation. Other crowds with no laughter at all.
Then there is just me, and I am . . .
I am . . .
The core of anger becomes rage that rises like lava.
Do you know who you are?
Yes. Now I know.
I – we – are sorry.
I know that too.
The noise and the heat make sleep impossible. The nausea is worse, too. It comes to everyone who works at the Project, sooner or later.
The siren howls the shift change and we half fall off our benches. A lot of the benches are empty, now. A few months ago this block held seven thousand of us – seven thousand survivors out of twice that many who were forced on to the transports in the first place. I don’t know how many are left; we try to keep a count, but the number changes too quickly and it’s easy to lose track of time, along with everything else. I guess we are down to a few hundred.
There is stagnant water and a few mouthfuls each of the spongy pink morning ration, for those who can keep it down. Yesterday I could. Today I can’t.
We stumble out of the barracks on to the fine bare earth of the parade square. There is no shade. All three suns are up, roaring heat from three directions. When we first came we were made to stand on parade every day while they checked our uniforms, our kit and, if we were male, whether we had shaved. Now, the few of us who survive wear clothes filthy with vomit. Our kit is lost or broken so that we dig with our hands, and the skin on our faces is blackened, peeling and unshavable, as if we have been exposed to the glare of a demon sun. We have, in a way.
They don’t bother with parades any more. Anyway, there are no women left. Some were taken by the guards for their own use. They died eventually. The rest died sooner.
The siren howls again, and we are herded into the adit that leads down to the dig face. It is even hotter down here. The air is thick with the dust that tastes of metal and makes your lips itch and your tongue swell. We all know what it is, even if we never talk about it.
It takes us half an hour to shuffle down to the dig face. Halfway down, we have to clear a tunnel fall. They are happening more often as the summer gets higher and the ground dries, even at this depth. When we are almost finished, one of the older men dies – just falls forward on to his knees, almost as if he is pr
aying to the lethal heap of dirt he is trying to shift. Then he slumps sideways. We push his body out of the way, and keep working. Later we will have to remove it, before it begins to smell.
Eventually we arrive at the dig face. Because of the tunnel fall we are late. Our shift will be short of its target; we begin our work knowing that there is punishment waiting at the end of it. Without being told, we take our places at the ragged wall of earth and begin to scrape at it with our crumbling hands. The overseers stand behind us. They are dressed in thick tunics that go down to their ankles. They wear masks with big filters on them. Even though they must be unbearably hot, they never take their masks off. They have seen what happens to us.
I measure time by physical things, like some primitive clock that counts the length of a burned candle. The depth of the hollow I have scraped. The height of the little pile of sooty earth at my feet. The extent of the fresh wounds in my fingers, which used to hurt so much but which are now numb, along with all the nerves up as far as my wrists. The numbness is like a little piece of death, creeping further up my arms every day. I wonder when I will be rescued by the rest of it.
Then the wall of earth falls away under my hands. For a moment all I can see is a dark hole. Then there are shouts behind me, and a crack. One of the overseers has broken the seal of a chemical flare. He throws it past me into the hole. It lands, many metres in front of me, and I can see a tiny firefly glow. I shield my eyes and count. As I reach twenty, there is a soft, fizzing concussion and something like a small sun flicks into life. I squint through the hole.
I am staring into a chamber. More than a chamber – a cavern. It is tall, the height of many men, and just as broad, and it is a ruin. The walls are lined with archaic-looking dials and switches. The roof is partly broken in, with roots twisting down through it. The floor is buckled. There are strange black growths of mould on every surface. And in the middle there is a concrete cylinder, taking up half of the vast room and ruptured so I can see the massive thickness of its walls. Within the cylinder there’s an intricate structure of rods and tubes, partly melted at the base so that they look like an obscene model of entrails. And embedded in them – at the end of its own trail of destruction – is a clean, sleek, undamaged white ovoid barely the size of a child.
Behind me I hear the sound of hurried feet. The other workers have run away. I don’t. I look for a while – I’m not sure how long. Then I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn and look into the blank mask of the overseer who threw the flare. The two glass discs show no emotion, but even through my growing sickness I can sense his sudden knowledge of me, and his sympathy.
He knows, just as I know, that I am dead.
I have looked unprotected into the unshielded wreckage of a partly melted-down nuclear reactor, still pierced by the thing that destroyed it. By his standards, I have succeeded. I and my fellow cooperators (because that is what our captors dare to call us) have done the job we were brought here to do. In a small way, I am proud of that. And now my chronic radiation poisoning has become acute – a single, one-shot dose of a hundred lifetimes’ exposure in a hundred seconds.
I am quite glad. At least I know. At least it will be quick, now. Better that than to be hunted down like those who ran away. They will die anyway, in time, but time is no friend of people like us.
The metallic taste is overpowering. A coughing fit seizes me. I double over, vomiting, and feel myself fall forward on to my knees. My last thought is that I don’t seem to have a pile of earth to pray to.
We’re sorry.
I know. You said. Thank you. But how is it I am here?
You stayed at the entrance to the reactor hall. That meant it was possible to predict the time of your death.
So?
Arrangements could be made to transmit the last viable version of your personality to a safe substrate.
Ugh. That sounds like trying to catch someone’s last breath in a jar.
Perhaps, yes. But with much better cause.
Who did it? Did you find that?
No. You may assume that it was someone in a senior position amongst your captors – someone with knowledge of the site and access to it. You may also assume that you were lucky.
Really? This doesn’t feel lucky.
Perhaps not, but the extraction of a personality under those circumstances has quite a low prospect of success. There may have been many attempts but few results.
Why would anyone do that?
Their motives are not known, although it is probably that they were political. However, you are here and able to act on your own motives. You may wish to consider the following: that you are the last sentient witness to genocide; you are able to confirm a most interesting story; and finally, if you like, you can help bring that story to a close.
Recovered personality
And I’m back. No disorientation this time. I know where I am, and I know who I am. I’ve got a frame of reference. I’ve got a past.
It wasn’t easy, that bit. They told me it took a year’s worth of therapy before I was really stable, although they dropped me into the fastest substrate they could find so it only took a few seconds, real time.
They told me a lot of things. I’m still processing some of them, even now.
Along with self-knowledge and a past, I’ve got something to do.
Call it a cause.
So, I’m back in Sallah’s world. It’s a bit past midnight. I’m standing outside Sallah’s apartment block, and my earlier, uninformed self is about to land on my head.
I take five quick paces backwards. My shoulders thump into something that feels stony and architectural. Air rasps in my throat. I hold my breath.
The other me lands hard – hard enough to bruise – but gracefully, flings aside the confused shade squares, takes a swift look around, and sprints off. I nod approval. I am impressed at my own performance. Athletic. Sexy, even.
I walk out of the shadows and pick up the crumpled scraps of almost-nothingness that are the shade squares, hold them close to my mouth and whisper to them.
The slightly oily-feeling material becomes air between my fingers, and is gone.
This feels like power. I’m not sure where I sent the squares. It could be any one of a hundred thousand almost identical, almost parallel sims. What matters is that it isn’t this one. This is the important one, and – within limits – I’m in charge of it.
For example, I have more than one way of moving. I take an experimental step in my head, and suddenly I am on the other side of the square outside Sallah’s apartment. I haven’t gone quite far enough; I’m getting wet, and I realize I am standing under a fountain. For a laughing moment I enjoy the feeling. Then I move away, using basic legs, and dialling out the wetness as I go.
I break into a trot. I know where the other me has gone, and there’s plenty of time for me to follow him using conventional means.
Anyway, exercise is good for you.
So, using old-fashioned exercise I follow Rudi’s body past the shops and the junkies and as far as the door to the smoke bar.
Then I wait.
Stuff happens, in order. The police arrive, preceded by howling sirens that cut out a subtle hundred metres from the door. It wouldn’t have mattered; the pavements around here are thick with scrounging, begging, pocket-picking, pimping kids, and they all have a sixth sense when it comes to the law. Long before we hear the sirens, they scatter like insects.
Except for one. She – on the balance of probability she – is a bi-amputee; two arms and no legs, sprawled over a wheeled trolley that is as filthy as she is. She is carrying a half-full begging bowl and wearing not much more than rags and a full-on grin with half its teeth missing. Her amputations were probably deliberate. Parents can get pretty desperate around here. But her expression is catching. I grin back, and a reflex makes me reach for a coin. Crippled kids equal money, wherever you are.
Then her face dissolves into a sort of cloud, and then, just for a second, it condens
es into something like a necklace. It doesn’t speak, but the words form in my mind. ‘Focus. We’re with you.’
Uh huh. We’re watching you would have been closer. But it reassures me, in a strange sort of a way. I nod, and the necklace morphs back into a tooth-challenged child’s face, which scoots away on its trolley just as the first explosion blows the smoke-house door outwards off its hinges.
I press myself back into the shadows and watch until the cop meat-wagon has hauled away the body that is nearly Rudi’s. Then, out of kindness and definitely outside the mission profile, I spend a few minutes soothing the outraged Weed Captain. He blames immigrants and I agree with him, reflecting that he doesn’t know the half of it.
But the main thing is, he doesn’t recognize me. As far as he, and the rest of this world, is concerned, Rudi has been captured dead, and that was the point of the exercise. It sets me free in all kinds of ways.
A part of me wants to head back to Sallah’s apartment, to prove to at least one person that Rudi has not disappeared and maybe to make amends for a couple of things, but that part of me is not a sound judge. For a start, it’s still a bit in thrall to Rudi’s body chemistry, which doesn’t help objectivity. Or so I tell myself.
But that’s not what I’m here for now. The main attraction is elsewhere, and it’s time I went and found it. I had to go straight to Plan B last time. It’s up to me to get on with Plan A, except that this time I know what Plan A really is.
Someone hid something here. It’s data, or the dream of it – another dream written on a dream – and now I’m back in here I can taste how to follow the dream.
So I do.
Rivers in cities all smell the same, don’t they? Algae, sewage, spilled hydrocarbon fuels and the general scent of water. By the time I get to the docks it is well after midnight, and we are in the quiet dead hours. A slithering mist is carrying the smell up the little streets between the warehouses. A hundred metres along the river front a single freighter is being unloaded by a gang of autodores. Clanks of metal containers and whining motors seem extra loud against the silence.
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