At one point, the corridor turned into a metal walkway suspended over a chamber with the appearance and approximate dimensions of a drained swimming pool. Four black boxes stood spaced along its bottom, each the size of an upended coffin. Frost glittered on their shiny sides, and K8 slowed to take a look.
“What are they?” She leaned over the railing. She thought they might be computer servers of some kind. Thick power cables and a variety of coloured data leads plugged into ports on the deck. The air in the chamber felt itchy with static.
“Engines.” One of the Neanderthals poked her between the shoulder blades. “Now, move.”
Reluctantly, she let them shepherd her onwards, until they reached an armoured door plated entirely in brass.
“Wait.”
K8 crossed her arms.“Why? What’s—?”
“Shush.” The Neanderthal tapped a thick finger against his temple. “Am talking to Leader.”
All three of them were motionless for a few seconds, just long enough for K8 to start feeling fidgety, before the vocal one gave a grunt and motioned at the door.
“You can go in now.”
“In here?” She eyed the door dubiously, remembering Lila’s fear of the Gestalt Leader, and the bruise on the girl’s cheek.
The Neanderthal gave her an insistent shove.
“Leader will see you now.”
k8 puShed open the brass door and stepped through into warmth and steam, and an overpowering greenhouse smell of dank compost and ripe vegetation. Trees stood in large pots, seemingly placed at random, with vines and creepers trailing between them. Smaller pots held ferns and sprays of bamboo, and butterflies flickered hither and thither like animated scraps of colourful cloth. Reed mats covered the floor, strewn with fallen leaves and, from somewhere nearby, she heard the lazy trickle of a fountain.
Pushing through the dangling branches, she emerged onto a wooden veranda. Surrounded by trees on three sides, the veranda looked forward, through the blunt nose of the airship’s prow, which was transparent, having been constructed from thick panes of glass.
“Ah, there you are.” The Leader sat at a wrought iron patio table, one leg crossed over the other, and a china teacup halfway to his lips. Looking at him, K8 felt herself go cold inside and, for a second, stopped breathing.
“You—” She couldn’t get the words out. “You’re—” The Leader placed his cup and saucer on the table. Black monkey hair stuck out from his white cuffs. A furry tail snaked from the back of his sharply creased trousers.
“Please,” he said, “have a seat. Can I offer you something to drink?”
Feeling suddenly faint, K8 tottered forward and sat on the closest of the three iron chairs set around the table.
“No,” she said. “No, thank you.”
“As you wish.” He brushed his knee with fastidious fingers, and straightened his posture. “Now, you may be wondering why I wanted to touch base with you?”
K8 took a deep breath. She couldn’t stop staring.
“I was wondering, aye.”
The monkey glanced at his fingernails, and then interlaced his fingers. “I believe that you and I have an acquaintance in common.”
“The Skipper?”
“If by that you mean the primate going by the ridiculous moniker of ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’, then yes.”
“What about him?”
The Leader smiled. His teeth were impossibly white. “I’ve just been negotiating with him. He’s a bit rough at the edges, but I think he’s got definite potential. If we could find a way to optimise his temper management, and thereby redirect his physicality towards more profitable goals, he and I could collaborate together very well.”
“He’d rather die.”
“Yes, his lively exchange of views with Mister Reynolds rather gave me that impression. Still, nobody’s perfect.”
He picked up his teacup between leathery fingers and K8 fidgeted in her chair. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. He looked so much like the Skipper, yet spoke and acted so, so differently.
Glancing back into the ersatz jungle, she said, “Those black boxes…”
His single eye looked at her over the rim of his cup.
“The engines.”
“Are they what moves you between parallels?”
He took a sip of tea, rolled it around the inside of his cheeks, and swallowed.
“Indeed they do. I call them my ‘probability engines’, but I won’t bore you with their technical specifications.” He put the cup back onto the table and wiped his palms on a white silk handkerchief from his top pocket. “Suffice to say, moving between worlds takes a lot of power, both in terms of energy input and in the amount of processing power needed to make the requisite calculations.”
“What do they run on?”
The Leader dabbed his lips, and pushed the hankie back into his jacket. “They draw power from the airship’s fusion plant.”
“You have fusion?” The idea sent a shiver the length of her spine. In her world, fusion had been one of a number of advances that always seemed to be about ten years away, forever on the horizon— like cheap space travel or a cure for AIDs—but never quite materialising. The idea that the inhabitants of another world had found a way to make it work, and a way make it portable, filled her with unease, and an unreasonable stab of jealousy. And then, for the first time, she began to understand the reality of her situation. Wherever she was, she surely wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
“How else could we generate enough energy to rip a hole between worlds?” The Leader uncrossed his legs. “But enough questions. There’ll be plenty of time later, after you’ve been inducted into our fellowship. In the meantime, I have some enquiries of my own.”
K8’s unease blossomed into alarm. She had no intention of joining his ‘fellowship’. Her heart beat so hard she was sure he could hear it, and she spoke to cover the noise.
“You know,” she said, “you’re the first member of the Gestalt I’ve met who says ‘I’ instead of ‘we’.”
The monkey gave an airy wave. “Well, I am the leader.”
“No, it’s more than that.” K8 swallowed. “You’re not fully connected, are you?”
In one fluid motion, the monkey rose to his feet. He stood over her, drawn up to his full height, clutching his lapels.
“Every society needs to be governed.”
Any moment now, K8 was sure he’d order some thugs to drag her away, to be converted into one of his white-suited drones. She spoke to stall him. “But I thought the Gestalt were supposed to be a democracy?”
The Leader gave a snort. “Whatever gave you that idea, child? Just because they have their minds webbed together, that doesn’t mean they’re capable of self-determination. Mob rule never works; it just brings everything down to the level of the lowest common denominator. You need someone set apart from the herd, someone with vision, who knows what’s best and can take the tough decisions.” “And that’s you, I suppose?”
“If you like.” He huffed a breath in through his cavernous nose. “Think of it in terms of an ant colony. Every member of the colony has his or her place and task and, to outsiders, the whole thing appears to move with a common will and purpose. But, behind the scenes, there’s always a superior being pulling the strings.”
K8 forced a smile.
“So, you’re the queen, are you?”
His yellow eye frowned down at her and, for the first time, she caught a glimpse of the incisors behind his smile.
“That isn’t the phrasing I would have chosen,” he said quietly. Then, abruptly, he turned and walked over to the bamboo rail at the edge of the veranda, where he stood looking out through the airship’s glass nose cone. Unsure what to do, K8 remained seated. Had she touched a nerve, or was this just his way of changing the subject? When uncomfortable or bored with a conversation, Ack-Ack Macaque had a tendency to get up and walk out; maybe his doppelganger shared that characteristic; or maybe he just heard things in his head to which she h
ad no access.
Without any real sense of hope, she said, “What do I have to say to get you to let me out of here?”
The Leader didn’t turn around. He gripped the bamboo rail and kept his eye on the sky and clouds.
“They made him a cartoon character.”
K8 blinked.
“Who, the Skipper?”
The Leader lowered his head, looking down at the landscape below.
“They created an intelligent monkey, and then plugged him into a video game.” He drummed his fingers. “They never gave him a chance.”
“He’s doing all right.”
“All right?” He turned to face her. “All that talent, and what is he? He’s a pilot on an airship. An airship, and it’s not even his.” He held his hands behind his back, gripping his left wrist with his right hand. “Do you know how many vessels I have at my command?”
K8 shrugged, but the Leader ignored her. The question had been rhetorical.
“I was created in a lab,” he said, “the same way as your friend. Like him, I was a simple macaque raised to sentience by the addition of artificial neurons, created by scientists trying to devise a new kind of weapons guidance system. But we became very different monkeys. When they’d finished with me, they didn’t plug me into a video game. They didn’t turn me into ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’. Instead, they gave me to a different team, on a different floor. That’s where our timelines diverged. I was given to a team studying direct mind-to-mind communication.” He held out his hand, inspecting his tidy, clipped nails. “They already had plans to spread their work beyond the confines of the laboratory. Within a month, I was part of the team. Within two months, I was running it.” He looked at her as if peering, like a disappointed professor, over a pair of invisible spectacles. “We broke out of the lab and seized our first warship. And then, within six months, we’d acquired enough weapons and personnel to forcibly convert the remaining human population to our cause. Since then, we’ve spread ourselves to a dozen worlds, and assimilated them all.”
K8 felt her ears burning, her cheeks growing hot. “But... why? Why would you do that?”
The Leader sniffed.
“Progress, child.”
“Progress?” She slammed her palms on the table, rattling the china tea set. “Turning everybody into mindless drones is ‘progress’?”
The monkey shook his coiffured head.
“Au contraire, child. Mindlessness is the last thing I’m trying to achieve. Quite the reverse, in fact.” He lifted an elegant cigarette holder from the table; lit the cigarette in it with a white platinum lighter. “How do you think I came here? How do you think I developed the means to cross dimensions, to achieve—” He waved the cigarette holder in a circle that encompassed the jungle, the forward window, and the entire airship in which they were held. “— all of this?”
K8 shook her head. She didn’t want to know but, somehow, couldn’t stop listening.
The Leader’s eye narrowed.
“Have you ever heard of ‘parallel computing’?”
“Yes, of course.” K8 frowned. It was a way of breaking large problems down into smaller ones, and then solving all those small ones simultaneously using multiple processing elements— whether within the same machine, or across a network of distributed computers. “Oh!”
He saw her understanding, and gave a nod.
“Yes, I created the largest virtual computer ever devised, running on the cranial wetware of seven billion people. Then I spread it to another world, and another.” He took a drag of the cigarette and blew a thin line of lazy smoke from the side of his mouth. “And with all that at my disposal, I can solve anything: war, starvation... mortality.” He mashed the half-smoked cigarette into an ashtray, and laid the holder aside. “Compared to that, what has your monkey achieved?”
K8 blinked at him.
“Hey,” she said, nettled. “He saved the world.”
The Leader looked down his nose at her, and his face curdled with disgust.
“He should be ruling it.” He smacked a fist to his breast. “Look at me. I started out the same way he did, and I’ve conquered world after world.”
“Well, maybe he doesn’t have your lust for power.”
“Nonsense.” The Leader turned back to the sky beyond the windows. “Everybody wants dominion over his or her fellow beings. Everybody secretly wants to be the top of the heap, king of the hill. Everybody wants to rule the world. The question is whether or not they have the balls to take it.”
K8 twisted her mouth into a sceptical sneer.
“And you do?”
The monkey laughed, and his tail twitched.
“Of course. I know what I want to achieve, and I’m prepared to take proactive steps to actuate that outcome. That’s why, as soon as we make the transfer to your timeline, I’m going to launch all the missiles we have. No negotiation, no time wasting, just decisive action.” He clamped the cigarette holder between his teeth. “In order to give our virus time to work, we need to throw the enemy into disarray. So, as soon as we appear, we strike.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
SOMEBODY ELSE'S APOCALYPSE
VICTORIA VALOIS LAY on her bunk, unable to sleep. The Tereshkova would arrive over the outskirts of London within the hour, but Paul had persuaded her to try to rest. She’d been awake for almost two days straight, and there was a limit to the amount of fatigue for which her gelware could compensate. But, try as she might, she couldn’t relax. How could she, knowing what they were about to face?
She rubbed her eyes, and then ran her hand back, across her bare scalp, to the pillow.
How had she found herself in this situation again? Since saving the world last year with AckAck Macaque and Prince Merovech, she’d kept as far from politics as she could, done her damnedest to stay away from international disputes and diplomatic intrigues. Cocooned within the safety of her gondola, she’d all but fallen off the grid. And yet here she was again, sailing into the crucible, ready once more to throw herself into battle against superior forces in order to avert apocalypse. Why did it have to be her? Who’d appointed her world saviour? She wasn’t anything special, merely a braindamaged ex-journalist with a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All she’d wanted had been a nice, juicy mystery to alleviate the boredom.
She should have known better.
Irritably, she rolled onto her side, and found herself looking at her desk, and the window beyond. How could she sleep in daylight?
If she wanted to, she supposed she could slip into command mode and use her gelware to force her body to sleep—but that was something she’d never tried, and she didn’t like the idea of artificially snuffing out her consciousness. It was a line she was reluctant to cross. Sleeping tablets were one thing, but she balked at the notion of turning off a switch in her brain in order to put herself under. The idea made her feel like a machine; and besides, what if she botched the instructions? She’d rather be shaky and exhausted than risk permanently shutting off the very gelware processors that kept her alive.
But maybe dying would be preferable to becoming one of the Gestalt?
She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to share her skull with the thoughts of others; to have the echoing spaces of her mind filled with the ceaseless din of other voices; to submit her will to that of the majority and become little more than a synapse in something else’s brain; a walking, talking logic gate in an unknowably vast super-organism. The idea filled her with revulsion. She already felt like a halfhuman cyborg; she wouldn’t live as a zombie in somebody else’s apocalypse. If the worst happened, and conversion became inevitable, she’d turn her gelware off and slide into unknowing, insensate oblivion.
Or perhaps, she thought grimly, she’d ask Paul to blow the skyliner’s engines.
Would that even work?
Each of the Tereshkova’s fifteen impellers drew its power from its own nuclear electric engine. If she asked him, could he find some w
ay to detonate them all simultaneously, destroying the airship and all on board? Could he, in effect, turn the old skyliner into a flying bomb? Victoria didn’t know enough about the physics involved, but she made a mental note to find out. Who knew what she might be called upon to do, and what she might be expected to sacrifice, in the coming hours?
For a few minutes more, she lay and listened to the familiar sounds of the gondola. She heard the wind buffeting against the walls; the flex and creak of the hull; and the almost subliminal hum of the motors. She heard people moving around in the corridors, opening and closing doors; the occasional scrape of a chair or shoe on the metal deck; and the clang and rattle of pans in the kitchen. It all sounded so peaceful and comforting that she could hardly bring herself to believe that it might soon be destroyed; that this flight might be the Tereshkova’s last.
With a sigh, she climbed off the bunk and walked over to the window. With luck, Merovech would be able to scramble enough planes to deal with the airships over Commonwealth territories; but what about the rest of the world? How many airships would it take to conquer the globe?
Paul’s voice came over the intercom speakers.
“Vic?”
She blew out a long breath, and massaged her forehead with her fingertips.
“What do you want?”
“We’ve got a problem.”
Victoria raised her eyes to the heavens. Another one? “Please God, what now?”
“Can you let me in?”
For a second, she didn’t understand what he meant. Then, with a sigh, she crossed to the cabin door and pulled it open. The remote control car waited in the corridor. She stood aside to let it in.
The car sped to the centre of the room and slithered to a halt on the Persian rug. Paul’s hologram rose from its projectors. He’d altered his look again, and now appeared to be wearing a droopy khaki bush hat, a white t-shirt, and crisp urban camouflage combat trousers. Silver dog tags hung around his neck, and his clear frameless spectacles had transformed into mirror shades with round, purple-tinted lenses.
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