by Guy Haley
Chapter 18
Colorado
Otto gridded the area on a map, did it the old way, asking place to place. Photo; "Have you seen this woman?" Frowns, shakes of the head, no recognition. On to the next drugstore, the next truckstop, the next one-street town, everything face-to-face. He drove roads that led from from verdant peaks to humid lowlands that remained deserts only in name. Temperatures went from hot to hotter as he went up then down, again and again, over the wrinkles of the Rockies. He didn't know how to dress; the climate control of the groundcar struggled. The terrain was too treacherous for turbofan aircars, dangerous thermals came off the mountains, too many storms blew in off the distant Pacific. The only aircraft Otto saw were fixed wings, blimps and quaint rotary copters far off, navigation lights flashing against the angry skies, hurrying against the threat of the weather. The local radio carried crash stories in every county.
He stopped at a charge station high in the mountains, isolated on the road, trees for company. The valley where the charge station stood was precipitous and shaded for much of the day, so its solar cells glinted brash in the afternoon sunlight on the slopes above, thick cables curving lazily from pylon to pylon down to the cabin-store by the carriageway.
Otto pulled up, the wheels of the groundcar crunching on forecourt gravel. The whisper of the engine died off, then nothing but birdsong and the wind in the trees. He yawned. He rotated his shoulder and grimaced. The pain was insistent. He had his healthtech dull it to a low discomfort.
The air was clean, damp with the morning rain; sharp with old pines and the quick sap of the broadleaves challenging them. For a moment, he relaxed. Nature calmed him, the smell of the green and the rain and the rustle of growing things, not a machine in sight.
He could sleep here. He probably should.
He scooped the photograph off the dashboard, and got out.
"Her, yeah, sure, came in about a month back. Bought a lot of sugar." The attendant was oily, greasy hair, grubby rock T-shirt whose logo had stopped working. There were a number of run-down vehicles out back. This guy was a one-man show, mechanic and till attendant in one. There were no traces of anyone else. A loner.
"Sugar?"
"Yeah, sugar. You know, for your coffee. And two big bags of salt."
"Are you sure?"
"Salt, like that," he pointed to a row of sacks. "Yes. I'm sure," he said defensively. "Not many people like her come up here. Salt's for the hunters, some like to preserve their kills the old way."
"Quirkies."
"Sorry?"
"Quirkies. Those trying to live pre-industrial lives."
"Right, quirkies, huh? That what you call them in…"
"Europe."
"Yeah. OK. They're kind of like that, like your quirkies. I sell them that amount, and more; of salt, I mean. But not women like her, not usually. She was a city lady, all right. Say, where're you from?" He smiled. "Europe's a big place."
"I am German."
"And…" – a wave round Otto's body.
"I am a cyborg."
"Military, huh?"
"Ex."
"I was service myself, once, long time ago. US Army." The attendant stood a little taller. "But you guys, man. I seen some things but cyborgs rocketing in? That beats it all."
"We do not use that insertion method in our army," said Otto flatly. The attendant was not to be discouraged.
"Hell, but we're all on the same side. You in Brazil?"
"Yes."
"Hell of a place."
Otto tapped the photograph. The creased paper used the kinetic energy to run through four seconds of footage, Valdaire dolled up, wineglass in hand, laughing, a happy night out. "Her. Do you know where I can find her?"
"Lot of cabins round here, lots of off-the-Grid types." The attendant jutted his chin out the window and hooked his thumbs into his belt. "Hey, man, you want to be careful, there's some serious crazies up here. Some of them been waiting for the end of the world for fifty years, their folks a hundred years before them."
Otto nodded. Maybe they wouldn't have to wait long. He was in the mood for a fight. "I can take care of myself."
"Yeah, I s'pose so."
"If you were her, where would you go to avoid such encounters?"
The man ran his fingers through his dirty beard. "Let me think… You know, I'm sure she said she was heading out Flagstaff way."
In that case she was probably going the opposite direction. "What lies in the opposite direction?" he asked.
"Not much till you hit Phoenix if you head off route 17. Payson and Showlow if you follow 270 to the east through the parks."
"Anything near here? To the west, up in the forest?"
"Nothing. The lake, the falls down there in the valley," he shrugged. "Nothing. Just trees and nature, man, the way I like it, y'know?"
Otto did not speak. His lack of warmth was bothering the attendant. His smile faded. "You're hiding something," he asked.
"What?" said the attendant. His cheeks coloured.
"What did she do?"
"Hey, man! She came in, she bought stuff, she paid, she left. No biggy."
Otto pressured the man to let him see the store records. He resisted. The AllPass swung it. "A cop," the man muttered, cowed and unfriendly. Otto pulled his files; the attendant had a record, not the first ex-soldier to have run-ins with the law.
Valdaire was not on the store logs. Her smartcard or phone had presented a false identity at the behest of the blocker, one that would have been changed immediately the transaction had been completed and smothered with false leads. A faint trace, no good, dead end.
Still Otto's near-I adjutant indicated the man was prevaricating: high heartrate, pheromones off, perspiration up, pupils too big. Not an outright lie, a lie of omission. "What else?" demanded Otto.
The attendant backed away for a moment, looked like he was considering reaching for something, a weapon maybe, then looked into Otto's stony face and thought better of it. The man's eyes darted left to right. "Look, man, I watched her, OK? Just for a while. I didn't mean no harm by it. She left her car here and went for a walk in the woods, stretching her legs or somesuch. I only watched. No women come up here. Not ever. A guy gets lonely. Thought I might ask her for a date, down at the local dance. She said she liked to dance when she saw the poster there" – he pointed past Otto's head. Otto did not move his gaze from the man – "but I ain't got the nerve, city lady like that."
"Where did she go?"
"There's a path here, a local beauty spot, goes down to the falls. It's why I'm here, passing trade, you know? She went there, came back. I didn't watch her the whole time. I ain't got the nerve." He looked ashamed.
Otto stared down at the man, motionless. He reached into his sports jacket for his wallet. The attendant managed to control his flinch.
"Thank you." Otto picked up his picture, paid for the car's charge, added some vat-grown jerky and a couple of chocolate bars to his bill. He disliked American candy – it was all sugar, no cocoa in the chocolate – but he needed to eat something, and there was precious little else in the station. These people ate shit. "I am going to the falls. Do not follow me." He stymied all further attempts at small talk, upsetting the attendant's attempts to cover up for his lapse in bravery, and left.
Otto thought carefully before he tied himself back into the Grid. Chloe had to be here. It was worth the risk. He activated his mentaug's full capabilities and reluctantly booted up his augmented reality overlay. With annoyance he swatted a dozen adverts from the air and spent three minutes updating his filters. The path to the waterfall was signposted clearly on the AR, about 300 metres down the road from the station. He followed the blinking directionals to a series of steps down from the road. Wooden sills packed with earth, they were well-maintained, hemmed in with split log railings. Evidently a popular spot. The slope was steep. Otto walked down the steps, scanning the woods as he went. He was alone, nothing but birds in these woods. The splash of the falls be
came audible about halfway down. Otto went to the bottom and stood on the oval viewing platform by the riverside. The mountain was faulted, a knife-mark slash picked out with ferns and mosses growing in the damp air. The river was small, a child could have jumped it; but the falls were high, a drop of fifteen metres or so to a brown-black plunge pool fringed with more mossy rocks. The opposite bank was steeper than the slope he'd come down, almost a cliff. He doubted Valdaire would have crossed the river to climb that. She'd have tried for somewhere less visible and more accessible. He turned and walked back up the steps. He stopped at one or two likely looking places, his nearI running tracking software, but it had been raining heavily all the previous day, and any genetic trace of Valdaire that might have remained had long since washed away.
He walked on, stopped again where the slope levelled off a little. There, what could be a footprint, a mark in the lee of a tree within easy grasping distance of the trail. The steps curved off away from the direction the footprint pointed. This could be it.
Otto grasped the railing, positioned himself so he was looking past the print. He steeled himself, and began to activate Richards' software.
Technically, no AI was allowed to make a copy of itself. Artificial intelligences had been granted the right to life on a par with that of a human on one condition, that they lived as humans – unique, a single entity, mortal. Such a stricture made it easier to apply the law to them; there were no struggles with who was really who. The law had not proven hard to enforce. The higher AIs' Gridsigs were exceptionally strong and could be hidden for a time, but duplication set up unique wave patterns that were easily intercepted. Batteries of lesser machines run by the VIA and similar authorities constantly scanned the Grid for infringements. No one wanted a repeat of the Five crisis, the remaining Fives included.
AIs could split themselves into a variety of subsidiary minds, but these were unstable, prone to distraction and difficult to interface with. They, too, were illegal, mostly because an AI that broke itself into parts stood a good chance of driving itself insane as its mind attempted to reconcile multiple subjective experiences of one event. Watching such things from multiple viewpoints they could handle, but thinking of them as multiple experiences was dangerous. Turned out the universe wasn't as concrete as people thought.
Richards did not always play by the rules.
Otto was off-Grid. Richards could not aid Otto directly without revealing the German's location. That did not mean that he could not aid Otto indirectly.
Richards had shaved off the merest sliver of himself, small enough to remain unnoticed, bright enough to help. Boxed in by task-specific programming and near-I adjuncts, detached from Richards' information stream, it was not properly aware, and Richards had what tiny thinking part it possessed sleeping in case it got ideas above its station.
"I'll be having weird dreams for a few weeks after this," Richards had said when they'd last spoken. "But it will allow you to see. You'll be able to sense my scales like I do. If you're close enough to it physically, you should be able to find the phone, so get yourself close as you can, and plug in."
He could only risk connecting up like this once or twice, because it was, as Richards had succinctly put it, dropping the PI act for the moment, "really fucking dangerous for meat minds to go raw on the Grid".
Otto drew a deep breath. He didn't think he was going to get much closer than he was now.
Otto, through this small part of Richards, would be able to feel the scales, also part of Richards. But to do that he'd have to see the world the way that Richards did. That's what was going to give Otto the mother of all migraines. If his head didn't pop.
He procrastinated for a minute. "Verdammt," said Otto, and activated the software.
The universe exploded out of the back of his head as Otto was joined to the Richards-sliver through his mentaug. The AR overlay vanished in a swirl of colour, and his near-I valet flickered out, a candle in a firestorm. Otto's perception of the Real receded and ceased.
Otto was lost in a howling maelstrom of information. His mind stretched as he attempted to accommodate even a fraction of it. He was blind, deaf and dumb, but other, stranger senses unfurled themselves at exponentially increasing rates as his awareness spread itself over the Grid.
With an effort of will, Otto stopped and reeled his mind back in, before he disassociated forever and was lost. The Grid was too big and there was not enough of him to embrace it all. His mind would smear itself across the virtual world until it was so dispersed as to be non-existent. He pulled his sense of being back into a shape that approximated his perception of himself. Struggling against the tempest, he moved forward. Ahead, shivering in a haze of knowledge, flashed a pair of ideograms representing the pair of Richards' scales that had tagged Chloe. A vortex of disinformation blurred them, but they were there. Otto dragged himself toward their location. There was a thundering in the ether about him, a howl of numbers. Before his ego shattered into atoms, he pulled the plug.
A cursor blinked. A checklist scrolled out below it. Icons filled a space, and a sense, not of words exactly, but of pure meaning, informed: "Cyborg unit 977/321-a1. Leutnant Otto Franz Klein. Incept date 13th May 2102. Reboot. Online. Near-I adjutant model 47 'Tiberius'. Reboot. Online. Systems operating at seventy-eight percent of optimal. Warning, maintenance required."
Otto's native senses returned shortly after. For once he was spared the mentaug's merciless reminiscences. The scent of loam and ferns filled his nostrils. Birds sang somewhere. He rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. He spat soil and twigs from his mouth. He sat up and rubbed his head, dislodging more earth from his hair. His head throbbed. His visual systems cycled through the spectrum as they recalibrated themselves. This, very aggressively, did not help his headache.
"Arrrr," he said, which did not help either.
He'd moved. He was on his hands and knees, covered in mud and plant material, fifty metres into the forest, out of sight of the walkway down to the falls. He turned, and looked behind him. His head reeled with vertigo as he knelt and began to dig.
Less than thirty centimetres down he came across a geckolock plastic bag. He unzipped it and pulled out a phone. It was small, slate-grey. Very businesslike, though a large animated flower decal on the top with the near-I's name glittering within its petals undid the effect.
Sentimental, he thought.
He flipped up the lid and pressed the "on" switch. The phone remained inactive, both top and lower screens inert, the same grey as the case.
"Wake up, Chloe," he said. "I know you can hear me." He'd been speaking to machines all of his life, yet out here in the woods talking to the phone felt faintly obscene. "Tell me where I can find Veronique Valdaire."
Chloe said nothing.
Chapter 19
The 36th Realm
Toward the tree the light of day disappeared to be replaced by a blue gloaming. The sun must have gone down by the time they finally reached the trunk, or so Jag surmised, but the dim blue light remained, shed from nowhere.
The trunk was on an incomprehensible scale. They found themselves looking at a series of stepped, triangular plates of bark, built up to make the skin of the plant like a world-sized pineapple, with cracks as big as caverns in between.
"I don't understand," said Veronique, her voice a hush in the arboreal silence, "why a monkey puzzle tree?"
"I believe the good professor is joshing with us, asking that we play Jacks upon his beanstalk," said Jagadith. Both were whispering. The tree intimidated them.
"No, he is also letting us know we are beneath him, presenting us with a vegetable to perplex an ape," added Tarquinius, his voice loud and unafraid, "condescending bastard."
"Did I not mention that I have a doctorate?" said Veronique icily. "My point is that it is out of character. Professor Qifang would never have spoken down to someone so, or used such a crass visual metaphor."
"I am thinking you may be in for a shock," said Jagadith. "You will fin
d his character much changed. Godhood has a terrible karmic influence upon a man's soul."
"Don't be surprised if he starts maniacally ranting either," added Tarquinius. "They always do that."
"Quite," said Sir Jagadith.
As activated by Jagadith's voice, a man stepped out from behind one of the oversized plates of bark. He came one freakishly long leg first, foot placed delicately, to land pointed toes first. A white gloved hand followed, fingers waggling, to grasp the edge of the bark, then another, then a smarming face dripping with oleaginous scorn appeared. His body came next, extracting itself from the crack with the slippery rush of a fatal confession.
The man stood there before them, suddenly revealed. He was impossibly thin, clad in Edwardian black, long coattails flapping, shining black shoes covered by white spats, torso covered by a striped black and yellow waistcoat of a kind once favoured by gentlemen's gentlemen. His gloves had three brass buttons upon them that served no real purpose, aesthetic or otherwise. His hair was plastered to his scalp with macassar oil, parted to reveal a luminous scalp. He had a moustache so thin and heavily waxed it appeared painted on. His face actually was painted, bright white, with two rosy spots stamped onto each cheek. His eyes were mad, his capering wild. He had the demeanour of a maitre d' who regarded himself as so far above the others' station one needed a metaphorical radio telescope just to see him. He had an outrageous French accent to match.
