Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  A difficult process of adjustment lies ahead. Even once we and these new Earthlings can talk to each other, there are bound to be confusions and conflicts. Janet Nungarry and I sometimes discussed this, although we never imagined that civilisation would collapse and quickly and as catastrophically as it did within a few years of the Argo being established. But, yes, KAT, you’re probably right. It will be difficult. That’s why, in large part, you’re going up there. You’re far more than a robot curator, important though that role is. You can be an intermediary, a buffer, a negotiator. Maybe a bit of a salesman, for that matter. Or even a protector. I mean, you know what people are like, KAT. They might be clever, but, as history shows, they can also be incredibly violent, not to mention chronically and systematically stupid.

  I think I shall first let them see Bellini’s Madonna and Child, the one dated to the late 1480s which used hang in the New York Metropolitan Museum before the entire city was destroyed. Then I will send them J S Bach’s Goldberg Variations, as performed by Glen Gould in the second, more serene, version recorded in 1981 not long before his death. Of course, I also long to share the delights of literature—perhaps beginning with some of Matsuo Bashō’s great haikus—but first many obstacles of meaning and expression will need to be overcome. I envy these new humans, who will be able to experience such wonders for the first time.

  Like an anxious father waiting for a birth, I check again with the Argo’s processors. Still no success, still no Rosetta Stone, and still no further signal in response to our acknowledgement. But still. But still. The Earth is alive, and it sang to us in a radio voice which glowed up to us through the firmament. Surely after so many centuries of waiting, I, KAT, can be patient just a little longer.

  So I do what I would always do when I feel lost or worried. Which is to seek out the comforts of great human art. Although this time I think I need something a little more energetic than Jane Austen.

  Oh Hail, Beowulf, brought hence to Hroðgar’s once-great Hall of Heorot, which is now afflicted by the curse of the monster named Grendel. Sore indeed is the sorrow which I, KAT, he, Beowulf must witness, even amid the feasting and singing. Then, as the lanterns dwindle and others fall asleep beside me, I remain alert until the fell beast arrives from out of the stony darkness and pulls apart the doors with a mighty roaring. Women scream and men draw their swords as they stumble back in terror, but I, Beowulf stand my ground and face the monstrous form alone, without weapon or armour.

  We fight, wrestle, and the hall of Heorot shudders with the mighty clash of foe against foe until I, Beowulf finally tear away Grendel’s arm in a vast breaking of spells and sinews, and the mortally wounded creature staggers off into the marshes to die unlamented. Great rejoicing follows as I, Beowulf am heralded as the realm’s saviour, but I already know that Grendel’s mother, all gloom and guile, still waits for me out there in the marsh, and that beyond her lies a treasure-hoarding dragon which will deliver the mortal wound which will finally destroy me, for death is the fate of all heroes.

  But wait, wait, for suddenly there’s no Beowulf, or Hall of Heorot, and I, KAT, no, he, Doctor Watson find myself sitting in a Victorian study where a lady guest has recently arrived with an intriguing story. She’s talking anxiously about something called The Curse of the Speckled Band to the long-limbed man with the aquiline nose and ornate smoking jacket with whom I share these lodgings.

  So off, post haste, to Waterloo to catch the next train to Leatherhead and solve this latest mystery, but something strange starts to happen as we head out along Baker Street. A howling roar echoes across the London skyline, followed by a terrific crashing of masonry. People are running for their lives as giant three-legged machines come striding across the foggy rooftops. Their rope-like arms are big enough to haul up trees, but worse still—worse, even, than their unearthly howling—are the rays of heat and light which reduce whole buildings, entire streets, to rubble, and for some reason Vesuvius is erupting on the far side of the Thames, as described by Pliny the Younger, and Marion Lanza is singing Because You’re Mine, and everything swarms and blurs with the storms of a Turner painting.

  I, KAT, pull back through a mangled blizzard of words, pixels and databytes. A weird, great cloud of something has just swept through the Argo, killing its circuits, and leaving the entire crystal database clouded, blanked, corrupted.

  For a moment, I can’t even think. And then, when I can, I wish that I couldn’t. In fact, I wish that I was already dead. Or at least, non-heuristic. Always, always, there was a fear that something like this might happen. It was often the first question the CEOs of the big backing corporations asked Janet Nungarry. She might have been able to assure them that the Argo’s main storage system was not only physically remote, but also heavily firewalled and entirely unique, and thus safe from all normal forms of viral attack, but in her heart she knew that wasn’t the entire truth. Then, when the Earth fell into turmoil, it seemed highly likely that some virulent transmission, nanobot, or a trojan already encrypted into some innocent-seeming file, would destroy the Argo along with everything else. That, or a well-aimed deepspace missile. But it didn’t happen. We survived. We pulled through. We were lucky.

  Until now, that is. And my stupid, rookie mistake.

  The Argo received this strange, siren-singing signal. It welcomed it, saved and copied it, took it into its dumb, innocent, processing heart and cradled it there as it searched for meaning. And I, who was designed to view things differently and notice risks which other non-heuristic systems might miss, didn’t even bother to think. We’ve let in the Trojan Horse. We’ve opened Pandora’s Box. We’ve clicked on the dodgy e-mail attachment. And the result is destruction.

  This is worse than the burning of the library in Alexandria. This is worse than all the desecrations of the Taliban, the Nazis, the rampaging Mogul hordes, the Holy Catholic Church and the combined actions of every book louse, mouse, moth and burrowing mite throughout history put together. In a matter of moments, the Argo has been transformed into a dead, pointlessly spinning, hulk. The crystals have been clouded, their delicate latticework destroyed. Who knows how and why this malignant infestation evolved, and what purpose it thought it was achieving. Probably, it didn’t even think at all. It just did it. The Argo itself is dead, as well. Every circuit, processor and sensor is unresponsive. It surely can’t be long before my own feeble consciousness is also invaded by this malignancy. Which would be a blessing. But even if this isn’t the end for me as well, I know that my continued existence is pointless.

  My empty-headed wanderings through this destroyed vessel lead me to the human living quarters, which have not been active, or occupied, for the best part of a millennium. Of course, the Argo itself isn’t responding, but there’s still some power left in the batteries, and, because the effect of my dark, crawling shape in the this resolutely human space is just too eerie, I manage to cross a few wires and manually activate the cabin lighting. Funnily enough, it’s the small things, the ephemera, which mostly absorb my attention in these bright-lit spaces. An old, dried-up coffee mug. Bits of clothing. Dangling Post-Its. A crew toilet-cleaning roster. A Major league baseball poster. The yellowed bits of stuffing which are coming out of the chair in the control room where Janet Nungarry once used to sit before a screen, barefoot in a tee shirt and cut-off jeans. Hey, KAT. Got something here I’d like a second opinion, on. And I would scurry over, and sometimes she would lay a warm arm across my carbon steel carapace as we talked.

  I turn left along the domed central corridor, past the shower and toilet facilities, and the place they called the snug, and enter the dining area, with its fixed-frame friezes of iconic views of Earth along its walls— the Taj Mahal, the Serengeti, a fjord, and so forth—and then I know I truly am losing my mind, for a figure in a frock coat and high collar which I instantly recognise is sitting at the far end of the long, oval table, absently turning a fork between his elegant fingers.

  “Ah,” Mr Darcy says, not sounding greatl
y surprised to see me. “And you would be KAT?”

  Along with his voice, I can actually hear him breathing, although this room remains in hard vacuum. Just as I could count the buttons of his waistcoat, or the pores on his haughty nose. He throws a shadow. I think he even smells slightly of the sweat of the dance and some antique cologne. So he’s here in every conceivable way in which my sensors can inform me, even though every logical part of my processing circuitry is screaming that this can’t possibly be real. And it’s more than just the fact that he’s suddenly materialised out of nothing, or that he can’t be actual flesh and blood, or even that I know him to be a fictional character who never even existed down on Earth in the first place. It’s also because, although, in his looks, voice and evident character, he reflects the Mr Darcy of Jane Austen’s descriptions, he also resembles the many cinematic portrayals, from Lawrence Olivier to Colin Firth to Matthew McFadden. He somehow manages to be all of them at once. Or, perhaps, some dream archetype which might be glimpsed during a mind’s final slide into oblivion.

  He stands up. Gives a neat bow. I catch whispers of music, the slide and clip of heels on bare boards, as he walks toward me. He almost extends a hand as if to lead me into the dance, and I almost reach out a mandible to accept. But I don’t. And he doesn’t.

  “I think,” he says, with a sharp smile, “you understand that I’m not exactly what I seem to be?”

  I nod my carapace, and take a wary step back. “First of all, and although you seem to possess a voice and a physical body, I know that can’t be the case. Even allowing for the fact that your blood would have boiled by now if you were human, and all your major organs would have exploded, there’s no way you could have materially made yourself drop into existence here, as if out of nowhere. Unless, at least…”

  Mr Darcy raises an eyebrow. He’s practically following my thoughts as I think them. “Unless I used some kind of instantaneous transportation of matter? As portrayed, in, say, various versions of the Star Trek franchise?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Of course I do.” He shrugs. The gesture is ineffably human. “Who or what else do you think has been accessing the Argo’s database?”

  “But you could simply be—”

  “A slight disorder of the stomach? An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard…?” he says, quoting, albeit loosely, from Scrooge’s response to Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol, and I get the sense that he could change as easily as blinking from Mr Darcy into that equally iconic character in his nightcap and bedshirt. “Believe me, KAT, this encounter is as strange to me as it is to you. Even stranger, perhaps, if such a thing were possible.”

  “But you’re not Mr Darcy…” I waver a mandible. “That would be impossible.”

  “You’re right. I’m not. But we felt it would be better that I should appear to you as something familiar.”

  “Are you really here at all? I mean, I know you can’t be, but… You seem to be.”

  “I suppose I am,” he responds, looking down at his tall, waistcoated and polished-booted self in pantomimed surprise just as Janet Nungarry once looked down at herself before Class 4 of Arncliffe Junior. “Or at least, I appear to be. Although the question itself is, in a sense, immaterial.”

  “And, meanwhile, you casually destroy the Argo’s precious cargo, and talk to me in riddles.”

  “Ah!” He smiles. “Is that what you believe has happened? I’m sorry, KAT. We did not mean to distress you. But, although we have long known what the Argo is—after all, you’ve been sending us all those messages—we were curious as to the specifics of what it really contained.”

  “And now you know?”

  “More or less.”

  “So you don’t need me to—”

  “I don’t think so, no. That is, if you mean, to guide us through the ways by which the Argo can be accessed, and perhaps show us some of the data of which you have grown particularly fond. But you are wrong to think that the database is in any way damaged by our incursion into it. As we inhabited the crystal lattice—”

  “Inhabited ?”

  “Yes, inhabited, although I’m using the words of an antique language which can only give a very rough description of what has actually occurred. Of course, we also shut down the all Argo’s other systems to save them from possible damage, although even then the stress of our presence has clearly created some temporary decoherence. But that can easily be remedied.” He pauses. Smiles. Nods. The lights flicker, then brighten. Through my mandibles, I sense the return of a slight but reassuring vibration as the Argo comes back to life. “In fact, it has now been done.”

  “What are you?”

  Mr Darcy gives another shrug. “We are, it might most simply be put, the lineal descendants of the intelligences which created you and the Argo.”

  “But you’re—you’re not…” I search my stuttering circuits. “Corporeal”

  “That’s true. Of course, we are capable of organising matter so that we can exist within it, as you must have already observed. But, essentially, we are energy, and data. That might sound a little strange, but it isn’t. You, KAT, would be nothing without the electron waves which infuse your processor units, which in themselves would be meaningless were they not structured into information. Humans were once much the same. The strange thing to our minds is that they chose to think of themselves as essentially material when, as you and the Argo amply demonstrate, all knowledge and consciousness is merely a form of systematised energy. But you are an intelligent being. You know these things already, and this is not what we came here to tell you. Here, let me explain…”

  Mr Darcy offers his hand, and the music swells, and I, KAT, reach out a mandible to grasp it, curious creature than I am, and we turn together at the Merton Assembly Rooms until the other dancers dwindle to ghosts and the candleflames become stars and we are falling through blackness, back toward the Earth, which grows and grows as time unravels and moonlight spills silver over its changing oceans. Once again, I, KAT, witness the pillars of fire, and the great columns of soot, and the dark rage, which soiled the entire planet.

  Still, the Earth wasn’t dead. And, as the sky finally returned, and the rains fell, and cell by cell, and shoot by shoot, it began to knit itself back together. Many species of plant survived, especially the ferns, along with a few particularly hardy varieties of tree, and a great many insects, and even a few small rodents. And then there were the microbes, the bacteria, the primitive forms of fungi, and the minute creatures of the seas, which flourished and adapted as ever, driven on—helped, indeed—by the gene-tumbling effects of residual beta particles and gamma radiation.

  With incredible speed, the Earth became verdant again. It was almost like the Genesis Device which resurrected dear old Mrs Spock in the otherwise rather disappointing third Star Trek movie. Her icecaps gleamed. Her seas teemed. Things crawled and leapt. The summer air was soon hazed once again with the glitter of wings and seed-spores. There were new pastures and forests. It was almost as if the planet had been waiting for this moment to return to herself to her simple, natural majesty. It is beautiful indeed, but impossibly strange, as Mr Darcy and I dance over cobwebbed woods, red-summed lakes and great, green-veined glaciers, and vast pink clouds flow and grow across the sky like living coral.

  Then, in an instant, we are back in the confines of the Argo’s dining room, which seems impossibly small and dowdy, and Mr Darcy is sitting once again at the table, and playing with that fork.

  “But I suppose you want to know,” he says, “what happened to all the higher species, and to humanity?”

  I say nothing. To be honest, and having seen what I have now seen, I’m not sure that I do.

  “Complex lifeforms are simply that,” he continues, with one of his shrugs. “Complex. And they are adapted to thrive in specific environments. Change things even subtly and they soon dwindle, as was evident long before that final holocaust. That, and they are deeply interdependent. The hawk needs the
mouse. The shark needs the tuna and the porpoise. The thrush needs the fruit of the bramble. I could go on, KAT, but I do not wish to insult your intelligence. Of course, humans had reached a point where they could survive almost anywhere on Earth, from the polar regions to the tropics. But they had done so at the cost ever-greater social and technological complexity. Take that away, even from a so-called primitive society…”

  He pauses. Puts down the fork. Gazes down at the empty table.

  “Not that all humanity died out instantly, even in a generation. Of course, there were the survivalists in their fallout shelters, and the seats of governments deep inside mountains, not to mention the few who weren’t even living on Earth… But, as you already know, none were equipped to survive for long without external support. Nor, knowing what lay outside and awaited them, did many even want to, and I believe that suicides were common. The few who stood a best chance were those who had already adapted to exist in harsh environments, far away from so-called civilisation. Nomads of the great mountain ranges, the steppes and the deserts. But they were few and their chance was brief and, for whatever reasons, it wasn’t taken. I believe the last humans died out in a small encampment in Mongolia about eighty or so years after the first missile exchange. Along, of course, with the last of their cattle, and all the minute flora and fauna which had evolved to exist specifically on and within them. They fell into extinction. Like, as you might say, the dinosaurs before them, but far more rapidly. I’m sorry, KAT. But that’s what happened, and it was much the same for most other species of bird and mammal. Earth’s so-called Anthropocene Epoch, where humans supposedly dominated and controlled the world, was over far too quickly to be thought of as an age, let alone a geological period. It was more of… Well, an incident.”

  He shakes his head. Clears his throat. His hands clench white on the table’s edge before releasing. For a moment, he, Mr Darcy, this incorporate entity which isn’t even an it, could almost be human.