Avalon

by Rusty Coats

  Rita blurted a stream of profanity involving Cassady and large proctology tools.

  He blinked at Monk, struggling in his grip. "The Neuromantics have been secretive about many things, Jack, but we have been quite candid about one point: This is a Crusade. And in Crusades, people are sacrificed."

  "A high price for real estate."

  "Your parents loved it enough to sacrifice their lives," he said offhandedly. "And you must have had some attachment to Avalon as well -- otherwise you'd have never written Icarus." He rolled his shoulders. "The Neuromantic agenda sweeps several millennia into the future, Jack. Our campaign has only begun. Our influence over the rest of humanity will grow, until eventually we're seen as global caretakers, providing food and shelter and even some charade of meaning to these servile masses. And one day, when the world is completely dependent on Neuromantic food and warmed solely by Neuromantic power, we will pull the plug and watch humanity stumble backward into barbarism. While we stretch out our fingers to the stars."

  He gave Monk's body a playful shake. "We are on our voyage now. Our ship has left port more than a year ahead of schedule, and our necessary haste has created several inconveniences -- such as yourself and this poor fool." He slammed Monk against the portal wall. "But in the scope of history, this is minor. When we finally obtain the ability to upload individual consciousness, we'll possess the power of eternal life."

  I thought about the ROM that had hung around my sister's neck, the cross she wore to remind her of why she'd left civilization to live in Marigolde. The disc contained the only copy of my mother's source code to upload consciousness, a code she'd hidden when Cassady's agenda became clear. Now I possessed the only copy of that magic. But after seven years, her dark apprentice had nearly picked all the locks.

  "And when will that happen?"

  "Soon," he said. "Your mother was brilliant, Jack. It's taken almost a decade to duplicate her work. She may have destroyed her records, but she couldn't erase the knowledge that it was possible. And once you realize something can be done, you know that, within due time, it will be done."

  "And then?"

  "And then we will live forever in this city, gods in every sense of the word."

  I smiled like a Sons of David terrorist. "Until Merlin is destroyed."

  "Merlin is God here." His chrome eyes brightened. "And thanks to the Sysops, who created an omnipotent operating system, and the ability to imbed consciousness into Merlin's matrix, I will soon possess the digital equivalent to the Rosetta Stone."

  Rita exhaled a jagged breath. "He can't."

  "The Sysops never gave Merlin consciousness," Cassady said. "I'll remedy that by uploading my own. Then God's name will be mine."

  Cassady's madness opened before me, revealing the petals he'd arranged inside while showing the world the mask of a gentle doctor in the trenches of our latest plague. All his Echo Wharf sermons about how society was on the verge of a leap much larger than the discovery of fire now peeled away to reveal Cassady's insane dream: That one day, he would personally yank God from the throne and claim the crown for himself, towering over everyone -- even the Neuromantics.

  His lifetime achievement, Janak said. Even the Southpaw underestimated him.

  I curled my lip, wishing I'd used the heater on him when I stole the ROM of his autopsy on McFee, wishing I'd stopped him when I'd had the chance.

  "Yes," I hissed. "But what have you done for the species lately?"

  He stepped forward. "You're smarter than your mother. You can see the sense in what we're doing. The past hundred years saw civilization teeter toward a new Dark Age. The Depression, the nuclear wars, the Z-10 pandemic? Who do you think held this world together? The United Nations? Please. Only the Neuromantics --"

  "Shut up, Freud," I snapped. "If I wanted to hear hot air about undying altruism, I'd download one of Nathan Zamora's commercials."

  His face became sharp with angles, all of them pointing down. "On second thought, maybe you're not smarter. At least your mother figured out that I am Zamora."

  The angles of his face blurred as his features morphed, changing shape until the benevolent face of Nathan Zamora smiled back at me, as pious as ever. And as phony. Because with a blink, the features morphed again, and Zamora's telegenic face -- the source of inspiration for almost a decade -- was gone, replaced by Dr. Paul Cassady.

  "Hocus pocus."

  "Now," Cassady said, beating Monk against the wall like a gavel, "in my estimation, you and I have run out of uses for each other, save one thing: The traitor's encryption program. The one you have modified to bring a modicum of grief into my life." He stretched out his empty palm. "I want it."

  I shook my head. "You've gotten too much of what you want already, Freud."

  "Number one," he said, "stop calling me Freud. And number two, if you don't upload that annoying program to my batch files, I'll send a neural tapeworm so large through this man's eyes that it will liquefy his pupils."

  Monk's online body stopped struggling against Cassady's grip and for a moment I thought the old tailor had fainted in his datasuit. But instead, Monk said, "Just try, ya loudmouthed cock-sock, and we'll see how far I can shove it up your ass."

  Cassady puckered his lips as if appreciating a bargain in Haggletown. "Quite a companion, Jack. I'd recognize Charles Monk's spicy tongue anywhere." Then he slammed his elbow down on Monk's thigh. Monk screamed. "How's the leg, Charlie?"

  Monk gripped a leg that, one reality away, had been plagued by a birth defect. Now he held it in genuine pain, testament to the Neuromantic retrofit. In the Tomorrow Crusade, Merlin wouldn't save you from a broken neck.

  "Let’s have that program, Jack. Or you can watch Charlie turn into bacon."

  He had me and he knew it. I didn't know which depot Monk was using, so Rita couldn't pick the locks in his datasuit and yank him out of Avalon. There were hundreds of beaker booths in the city, thousands in the country, and by the time Rita scanned them all, Monk would be on a slab. I could still key Mohican, phase out and save my skin. But Monk was trapped.

  "I thought you had to be a dragon for that."

  "Do you honestly think I would give Janak a weapon I didn’t possess?" He shook his head. "Janak was a career killer and a flawless double-agent. In other words, I was confident that someday he would turn that gun on me."

  "Even though you created the bullets?"

  "Especially since I created it," he said. "Eventually, he and the Neuromantics would have given me the same treatment you received from the United Nations for creating Icarus." He smiled paternally. "Society fears men of genius, Jack."

  When the datacops burst into Echo Wharf with stun rifles and nylon handcuffs, Cassady had pointed at Lucky No. 7 and said, "Yes, that's Jack Denys, sir, right there." Only a week before, he had stood on a cocktail table, spilling Ephedria and barking about how I was nothing short of a colonial hero because Icarus had replicated more than six billion times and had the United Nations on the run.

  Now he held Monk in a death-grip, demanding Mohican so he could eliminate the only flaw in Merlin's omnipotence, the only thing that would keep Cassady from being the deity of Avalon. Because as long as Mohican existed, Cassady's dream would remain unclaimed. You can't be God if pagans sneak behind your back. You --

  Icarus. Mohican. Yes.

  I called up the Options dashboard and chose the Mensa uplink. When the prompt flashed Active, the infrareds tracked my eyes as I snagged Mohican from the bar and dragged it to the operating screen for emergency surgery. The Mensa provided the tools for me to puncture Mohican's lid and suture a new first chapter to the cloak.

  "Please don't make me do anything so melodramatic as a show of force," Cassady said. "I'm sure you realize I'm serious."

  Rita's microphone hissed, asking what I was doing, then giggled when she recognized the code. The commands would transmit Mohican to each uplink station and, once the cloak wove itself into the fabric of the depot's communications software, it would reprod
uce at the speed of light to every WPA depot on the planet.

  It was the same program I'd used eight years ago.

  Cassady grabbed Monk's head and stared into the tailor's dark eyes, squeezing his temples like an accordion. "All right, Jack. Demonstration time."

  I stapled the last block of code in place. There was no time to scrub the program for bugs, so I shoved it into the data pipe and hit Execute.

  "All right, doc," I said as Mohican soared away. "You win."

  Cassady's released Monk and let him fall in a heap. The doc crossed his arms and jiggled his head, working out the kinks in his silver ponytail.

  "Just look how civilized you can be."

  I shrugged. "Good upbringing."

  "Quite so."

  An odometer appeared in my subscreen as Mohican surged across the frontier. The digits grew exponentially. Like Icarus, this encryption program gained speed with each replication. Within seconds Mohican had set up camp in a hundred uplink stations.

  But it still hadn't found Monk, because the tailor's body sat in the Library portal. Sagging against the wall, his fingers jerked spastically and his lips mumbled nonsense.

  "Keeemphlo nok," he dribbled. "Bline mot."

  Cassady ordered Merlin to open a dialogue box between us. A blank screen peeled itself out of midair and the doc tapped a block of coordinates. "This is my personal Mensa in the Neuromantic Building.” The sans-serif code for his uplink station glowed against the dark wall. “Send the encryption program to this address."

  "Why bother, doc? You can't program a do-loop, let alone crack my codes."

  "Come on," Rita said, coaxing Mohican to replicate faster. "Come on."

  "True," he said. "But as Merlin, I will."

  I stepped forward, scowling. And stalling. "Have you ever earned anything in your life? Or have you stolen so long that it feels like a job?"

  "I have earned the means to kill Charlie and you with a wink. Now give me that cloak."

  The odometer clicked past three hundred and my sweat was beginning to fog up the goggles. I could hear Rita comb her hair nervously with her fingernails. Monk mumbled and twiddled his thumbs.

  "Coming up," I said. I opened a link to my palmtop and scanned over the antique codes I kept there, selected an ancient cipher called Enigma and zipped it to Freud’s Mensa. The screen blinked, scanning for authenticity, then gave a thumbs up. I wondered if Freud would ever figure out his ransom was paid in Nazi code.

  "Thank you," he said. His lips tightened in a sad smile. "I suppose I'll miss you. Life in Avalon just won't be the same without you lurking around."

  I shrugged. It was the only eulogy I deserved.

  "Of course..." he said slowly, "you could join us, Jack. For obvious reasons, the Neuromantics need a good encryption writer. And as the world's last privacy hack, you could probably negotiate a high rank in the Party."

  He nodded, impressed with his shrewdness. "Yes! With my position, I could get your application processed. You'll be a full member of the Crusade."

  The counter zoomed past seven hundred.

  "Freud, do me a favor. Don't ever insult me like that again."

  He threw up his hands, disgusted. "Why do I even bother talking to a relic?"

  "Maybe," Monk drawled, standing up, his body towering straight and sure, "it's because ya like hearin' your lips flap."

  Cassady's jaw dropped at the tailor's gall, but Monk closed it with a punch that echoed across the Library basin. Freud's body slammed against the wall like a splash of hot paraffin, a gust of rage howling from his mouth.

  Monk turned to me, winked and said, "Run."

  Before Cassady could scramble to his feet, Monk's body faded to transparency, dissolving pixel by pixel, eclipsing. And as Mohican hit its stride in the source code powering his immersion in Avalon, Monk disappeared.

  Cassady's head jerked to me, fists clenched at his sides, then back at the empty space that had once been filled by Monk's online body. Freud knew the old tailor was still there, cloaked by the encryption program and beyond his control.

  "Hocus pocus yourself," I said. But I was speaking to a blank wall.

  Doc Cassady had vanished into the labyrinth of my parents' Library.

  AVALON XXXII: City of Light

  I didn't need a geological survey of the sphere to show how many psychological landmines the doctor could have buried here. But I sprinted into the Library anyway, chasing Cassady into the maze of digitized treasures.

  Mohican had reproduced twenty-six hundred times.

  The portal opened to the great lobby, an orb that defied the magnitude of its possessions by appearing empty, as if the Library was only a hollow pearl. In its center hovered a holographic model of Avalon, a digital time capsule that contained the history of Construction and the biographies of WPA members who'd built the city. It floated alone, just as it had when my father programmed it there.

  The hallways were here, of course. But visionary designer Jann Turnquist had hidden the labyrinth that could lead you through the looking glass, an architectural style both proud and modest. You could open a gateway to your topic from anywhere in the lobby by speaking its name, and the Library would boost your online body into an interwoven catalog of film, audio, text and interactives, whether your subject was Aztec sports or zwieback toast.

  And right now, Cassady's body was stepping into one.

  A dark aperture yawned from the center of the lobby like a revolving door to the next dimension. He tipped his head in farewell and stepped into the black hole. His body vaporized as the Library teleported his digital body into his topic.

  I dove across the lobby, trailing after him as the gateway closed, not knowing where it led, and felt my feet clear the lip as the aperture slid shut.

  When I hit the ground, I was at the base of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  Rita piped in, "What's this?"

  I stood up and glanced around quickly. I was on the bank of the Euphrates, staring up at King Nebuchadnezzar II's brick terrace. The orange sun dappled the shrubs my father had uploaded, a surround-model he'd built from drawings of the lush words of Herodotus. The glazed brick plateaus echoed the sound of the water being raised by programmed slaves, working under the countenance of immense golden statues. Like the other models, the details were accurate and vivid, down the throaty sound of water sloshing overhead. My mother hadn't been the only talent in the family, and I recognized the handiwork. This was the first immersion model Taylor Denys constructed for the Project.

  "I didn't think any of this survived," Rita said. "Wrecking Ball was supposed to have chewed all this to mush."

  "Not all of it," I said, looking for Freud in Mesopotamia. "Only sixty-eight percent."

  But as I scanned left, Rita and I saw that the image had been altered from my father's design. It didn't take a genius to know who'd whittled the sculpture on the terrace, where a stone carving of my mother was being sodomized by a Minotaur.

  Cassady had been busy, all right. Busy defecating in my parents' graveyard.

  I thought I'd lost him, but then glanced down at the subscreen. Two pegs flashed on the grid, one of them moving east on the chariot run. I looked up and saw Cassady's ponytail bounce as he barked another destination to the Library database.

  A portal opened beside a chain pump pulling water from the Euphrates and Cassady stepped inside. I hurdled the stone benches beneath the pornographic statue and jumped, following him through the wormhole.

  And landed in the kitchen of our Campus apartment.

  "Wait," Rita said as my body slid across a black linoleum floor. "I recognize this place from the old WPA brochures. It's --"

  "Gretchen's sixteenth birthday," I said, standing up. The frozen image of my sister leaned over a raspberry chocolate cake. Monk had a half-head of hair and a beard. My eighteen-year-old eyes were bloodshot from an Ephedria hangover.

  My parents had been stripped naked and painted yellow.

  "I don't get it," Rita said. "Ho
w did this get in the Library?"

  "It didn't." Merlin threw the switch and the animation started. Gretchen exhaled and the candles went out, all but two, just like it had when we'd filmed this. "Cassady uploaded these from ROM album Van Meter stole from my apartment."

  My parents jiggled like spastic marionette dolls, drooling.

  "These are my home movies."

  I glanced up and saw him step into another portal where the hydrogen 'fridge once stood. The green peg in the subscreen winked, halfway in transit. I stepped through the Sweet 16 Gretch written in frosting and jumped into the tunnel.

  The dark tube stretched out as I tumbled after Cassady, making the subscreen glow brighter. The image on the grid nailed my attention on the scanner.

  There were six dots on the screen now. Cassady, me, and then, several clicks behind us, four others.

  "You getting this?" I asked Rita, toggling the subscreen with the infrared sensors. The Library portal went into a spiral and my body rolled down through the gateway.

  "I'm thinking Cassady called in the cavalry," she said over the headset. The pegs pulsed on the screen, moving at a parallel speed, just a few digital leaps behind me. "They're probably setting you up for a trap. You want to unplug?"

  "No. I want Cassady."

  "Then hurry."

  The directions shifted, rotating on an unseen axis. North became west. Up became down. Then the lights came up.

  We were standing on the balcony of the Avalon Opera House, surrounded by hundreds of virtual bodies. It was the Opera’s opening night, and the performance of Peri's "Dafne" had drawn a packed house of Project members and Campus brats. Opening night was booked for WPA families, a private gig for the hardhats. Not even President Geddes knew we'd done this.

  Cassady stood on the first row of the balcony, his back against the brass rail, staring at the alcove. The other bodies sat, watching the Renaissance opera as they had eight years ago, clapping hands connected somewhere to data gloves. All but two.