Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Basically net cities were nothing but colossal experimental labs in which no one thought twice of travelling by spaceship rather than by ship, as long as the Statue of Liberty stood where it belonged. The owners, meaning the countries in question, were opening another chapter in globalisation here, but above all they were remodelling the world of human beings in a peculiar way. Crime and terrorism did exist in the virtual New York, buildings were destroyed by data attack, avatars were sexually molested, there were muggings, break-ins, grievous bodily harm and rape, you could be imprisoned or exiled. There was only one thing that didn’t exist:

  Poverty.

  What was produced on the net was by no means an illustration of society. You could fall ill here. Hackers planted cyber-plagues and scattered viruses. You could have an accident or simply not feel so great, or become addicted to something. In times of ultra-thin sensor skins that you slipped into in order to feel the illusion of perfect graphics on your body as well, cyber-sex was a great source of income and expenditure. Compulsive gaming flourished, avatars suffered from morbid fears like claustrophobia, agoraphobia and arachnophobia. But far and wide there was no hint of overpopulation. The poor as a source of all evil had been identified and removed from human perception. Networked people could afford a Mumbai or a Rio de Janeiro that was constantly growing, with no impoverishment involved, because bits and bytes were an abundant resource. Even natural disasters had haunted the cybercities – anyone who lived in Tokyo expected an authentic little earthquake from time to time.

  But there were no slums.

  The representation of the world as it could be became the world itself, with all the light and shade of real existence – and demonstrated who was responsible for global abuse. Not capitalism, not the industrial societies that supposedly didn’t want to share. With empirical ruthlessness the virtual experiment identified the guilty as those who had the least. The army of the poor in Quyu, in the Brazilian favelas, the Turkish gecekondular, the megaslums of Mumbai and Nairobi, billions of people who lived on less than a dollar a day – in cyberspace they weren’t isolated and locked away, not exploited in the class-war, not the object of Third World summits, development aid, pangs of conscience and denial, they weren’t even hate objects.

  They simply didn’t exist.

  And suddenly everything worked smoothly. So where did the problem lie? Who was responsible for the lack of space, overexploitation, environmental pollution, since the virtual universe worked so wonderfully well without poverty? It was the poor. No point stressing the impossibility of comparing the two systems, the carbon-based and the hard-drive-based. With the naïve cynicism of the philosopher who sees overpopulation as the root of all human evil, and stops listening as soon as consequences are discussed, representatives of the net community pointed out that there were no poor here. Not because someone had cut funds, knocked down slums or even killed millions. They had simply never appeared. Second Life showed what the world looked like without them, and it certainly looked considerably better, honi soit qui mal y pense.

  Of course there were other things that didn’t exist in virtual Shanghai. There was no smog, for example, which always unsettled Jericho. Precisely because simulation took human visual habits into account, the lack of the permanent haze completely altered the overall impression.

  He looked around and waited.

  Avatars and bots of all kinds were on the move, many flying or floating along above the ground. Hardly anyone was walking. Walking in Second Life enjoyed a certain popularity, but more on short journeys. It was only in rurally programmed worlds that you encountered hikers, who could walk for hours. There was swiftly flowing traffic even above the highest buildings. Here too, the programmed Shanghai differed from the real one. On the net the vision of an air-propelled infrastructure had become reality.

  Noisy and gesticulating, a group of extraterrestrial immigrants was heading towards Shanghai Art Museum. Recently reptiloids from Canis Major had been turning up in increasing numbers. No one really had much idea who was in charge of them. They were considered mysterious and uncouth, but they did successful business with new technologies for heightening sensitivity. Cyber-Shanghai was entirely controlled by State security which, with a great deal of trouble and the use of a number of bots, kept the huge cybercities under control. Possibly the reptiloids were just a few tolerated hackers, but they might equally have been disguised officers from Cypol. By now extraterrestrials were staggering around all the net metropolises, which hugely extended the possibilities of trade. As a general rule, software companies lay behind these, taking into account the fact that virtual universes had to offer constantly new attractions. The astral light-forms from Aldebaran, for example, with which you could temporarily merge in order to enjoy unimagined sound experiences, had by now been unmasked as representatives of IBM.

  Jericho wondered what form Yoyo would appear in.

  After a minute or so he glimpsed an elegant, French-looking woman with big dark eyes and a black pageboy cut crossing the square towards him. She was wearing an emerald-green trouser suit and stilettos. To Jericho she looked like a character out of a Hollywood film from the sixties in which Frenchwomen looked the way American directors imagined them. Jericho, who had several identities in Second Life, had appeared as himself, so that the woman recognised him straight away. She stopped right in front of him, looked at him seriously and held out her open right hand.

  ‘Yoyo?’ he asked.

  She put her finger to her lips, took his hand and pulled him after her. She stopped by one of the flower stalls near the entrance to the metro, let go of his hand and opened a tiny handkerchief. The head of a lizard, the same emerald green as her outfit, peeped out from it. The creature’s golden eyes fastened on Jericho. Then the slender body darted upwards, landed on the ground at their feet and wriggled along the floral carpet, where it paused and looked round at them, as if to check that they were following it.

  A moment later a transparent sphere about three metres in diameter was floating closely above her. The lizard turned around and darted a forked tongue.

  ‘Just a moment,’ he said. ‘Before we—’

  The woman drew him to her and gave him a shove. The impetus propelled him straight into the inside of the sphere. He sank into a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before, as far as he remembered, or at least the sphere had looked completely empty from outside. She jumped after him, sat down beside him and crossed her legs. Jericho saw the lizard looking up at them through the transparent floor.

  Then it had disappeared. In its place an illuminated and apparently bottomless shaft had opened up.

  ‘’ave you a strong estomac?’ The woman smiled. She sounded so French that a real French person would have been horrified.

  Jericho shrugged. ‘Depends what—’

  ‘Good.’

  The sphere plunged down the shaft like a stone.

  The illusion was so real that all of Jericho’s skin, muscle and brain vessels suddenly contracted and adrenalin pumped violently into his bloodstream. His pulse and heartbeat quickened. For a moment he was actually glad not to have burdened his stomach with a generous breakfast.

  ‘Just shut you’ eyes if you don’t bear it,’ twittered his companion, as if he had complained about something. Jericho looked at her. She was still smiling, a mischievous smile, he thought.

  ‘Thanks, I like it.’

  The surprise effect had fled. From now on he could choose which standpoint to emphasise. That of sitting in a hotel room watching a well-made film, or actually experiencing all this. Had he been wearing a sensor skin the choice would have been difficult, almost impossible. The skins erased all distance from the artificial world, while he was wearing only glasses and gloves. The rest of his equipment had stayed in Xintiandi.

  ‘Some people ’ave an injection,’ the Frenchwoman said calmly. ‘’ave you been once in a tank?’

  Jericho nodded. In the bigger branches of Cyber Planet, which were visited
by the more affluent customers, there were tanks filled with cooking salt solution, in which you floated weightlessly, dressed in a sensor skin. Your eyes were protected by 3D glasses, you breathed through tiny tubes that you were barely aware of. Conditions in which you experienced virtuality in such a way that reality afterwards seemed shabby, artificial and irritating.

  ‘A tiny little injection,’ the woman continued, ‘into the corners of your eyes. It paralyse the lids. The eyes are moistened, but you cannot any more close them. You have to watch everything. C’est pour les masochistes.’

  It’s far worse having to listen to everything, Jericho thought. For instance, your ridiculous accent. He wondered how he knew the woman. She must have come from some film or other.

  ‘Where are we actually going, Yoyo?’ he asked, even though he had guessed. This connection was a wormhole: it led out of the monitored world of cybernetic Shanghai into a region that was probably unknown to the Internet Police. Lights darted past, a crazy flickering. The sphere started to turn. Jericho looked between his feet through the transparent floor and saw an end to the shaft, except that it seemed to be widening.

  ‘Yo Yo?’ She laughed a tinkling laugh. ‘I am not Yo Yo. Le violà!’

  A moment later they were floating under a pulsating starry sky. Rotating slowly before their eyes was a shimmering structure that looked like a spiral galaxy and yet could have been something completely different. It seemed to Jericho like something alive. He leaned forward, but they spent only a few seconds in this majestic continuum before shooting into the middle of a conduit of light.

  And floated again.

  This time he knew they had reached their goal.

  ‘Impressed?’ asked the woman.

  Jericho said nothing. Miles below them stretched a boundless blue-green ocean. Tiny clouds drifted close above the surface, their backs sprinkled with pink and orange. The sphere sank towards something big that drifted high above the clouds, something with a mountain and wooded slopes, waterfalls, meadows and beaches. Jericho glimpsed swarms of flying creatures. Colossal beasts grazed on the banks of a glittering river, which snaked around the volcanic peak and flowed into the sea—

  No, not flowed.

  Fell!

  In a great banner of foam the water plunged over the edge of the flying island and scattered into the bluish green of the ocean. The closer they came, the more it looked to Jericho like a gigantic UFO. He threw his head back and saw two suns shining in the sky, one emitting a white light, the other bathed in a strange, turquoise aura. Their vehicle fell faster, braked and followed the course of the river. Jericho caught a swift glimpse of the enormous animals – they weren’t like anything he had ever seen before. Then they darted off over gently undulating fields, beyond which the terrain fell to a snow-white beach.

  ‘You will be picked up once more,’ said the Frenchwoman, with a little wave. The sphere disappeared, as did she, and Jericho found himself squatting in the sand.

  ‘I’m here,’ said Yoyo.

  He raised his head and saw her coming towards him, barefoot, her slender body swathed in a short, shiny tunic. Her avatar was the perfect depiction of her, which somehow relieved him. After that fanciful copy of Irma la Douce he’d worried—

  That was it! The Frenchwoman had reminded him of a character in a film, and now he knew at last who it was. She was the perfect re-creation of Shirley MacLaine in her role as Irma la Douce. An ancient flick, sixty or seventy years old. That Jericho knew it at all was down to his passion for twentieth-century cinema.

  Yoyo looked at him in silence for a while. Then she said, ‘Is it true about Grand Cherokee?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you killed him.’

  Jericho shook his head.

  ‘It’s only true that he’s dead. Kenny killed him.’

  ‘Kenny?’

  ‘The man who murdered your friends too.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can trust you.’

  She came up to him and fixed him with her dark eyes. ‘You saved me in the steelworks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, or does it?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Not necessarily.’

  She nodded. ‘Let’s walk for a while.’

  Jericho looked around. He didn’t know what to make of it all. Filigree creatures were landing a little way off, neither birds nor insects. They reminded him of flying plants, if anything. He tore his eyes away and together they strolled along the beach.

  ‘We came across the ocean when we were looking around the net for safe hiding-places,’ Yoyo explained. ‘Pure chance. Perhaps we should have moved here with the control centre straight away, but I wasn’t entirely sure if we’d really be undisturbed here.’

  ‘So you didn’t program this world?’ asked Jericho.

  ‘The island, yes. Everything else was here. Ocean, sky and clouds, weird animals in the water, which sometimes come right close to the surface. The two suns go up and down, slightly out of sync. There’s also land. So far we’ve only seen some in the distance.’

  ‘Someone must have made all this.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘There’s a server with the data stored on it.’

  ‘We haven’t been able to identify it so far. I’m inclined to think there’s a whole network involved.’

  ‘Possibly a government network,’ Jericho speculated.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that? I mean, what’s going on here? In whose interest is it to create a world like this? For what purpose?’

  ‘An end in itself, perhaps.’ She shrugged. ‘Nobody today is capable of grasping Second Life as a whole. Over the past few years tools have been produced in vast numbers, and they’re constantly being modified. Everyone builds his own world. Most of it’s rubbish, some of it’s incredibly brilliant. You can get in here, not there. In general they adhere to the rule that everyone can see what other people see, but I’m not sure even that’s true. In some regions they have completely alien algorithms.’

  Jericho had stepped close to the edge. Where water should have played on the beach, the strand fell vertiginously away. Far below them the light of the suns scattered on the rippled surface of the ocean.

  ‘You mean, this world was made by bots?’

  ‘I’m not the sort of idiot who makes a new religion out of disk space.’ Yoyo stepped up next to him. ‘But what I think is that artificial intelligence is starting to penetrate the web in a way that its creators couldn’t have imagined. Computers are creating computers. Second Life has reached a stage whereby it’s developing out of its own impulses. Adaptation and selection, you understand? No one can say when that started, and no one has any idea where it’s going to end. What’s happening is the consistent continuation of evolution with other means. Cybernetic Darwinism.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘What I said. Chance. We were looking for a bugproof corner. I thought it was hopelessly old-fashioned, squatting like migrant workers in the Andromeda or the steelworks, where Cypol could walk through the door at any time. Okay, they can kick in your door on the net as well. If you encrypt, you’re finished, you might as well just invite them to arrest you. We communicated via blogs, with data distortion and anonymisation. But even that didn’t do it. So I thought, let’s move to Second Life. There they can go searching for you like mad, but they don’t know what they’re looking for. All their ontologies and taxonomies don’t work here.’

  Jericho nodded. Second Life was an ideal hiding-place, if you wanted to escape State surveillance. Virtual worlds were far more complicated in their construction and more difficult to control than simple blogs or chat-rooms. There was a difference between putting textual building blocks in a suspicious context and drawing conclusions about conspiracies and dodgy attitudes from the gestures, facial expressions, appearance and environments of virtual people. In Second Life everything and everyone can be code, whether friend or foe.

  It was only logical tha
t no single organisation in China had as many staff as the State internet surveillance authority. Cypol tried to penetrate every area of the virtual cosmos, and it was no more able to do that than the regular police were able to infiltrate the population in the real world. In spite of their massive apparatus they lacked the human staff required to keep countless millions of users under observation. Cypol relied on destabilisation. Not everyone in Second Life was a government agent by any means, but they could be: the sharp businesswoman, the friendly banker, the stripper, the willing sex partner, the alien and the winged dragon, the robot and the DJ, even a tree, a guitar or a whole building. As an additional consequence of chronic staff shortage, the government worked with great armies of bots, avatars that were guided not by human beings, but by machines pretending to be human beings.

  By now there were highly refined bot programs. Every now and again, in the course of his Second Life missions, Jericho allowed Diane to take virtual form, and she appeared as a tiny, fluttering elf, white, androgynous, with insect-like, black eyes and transparent dragonfly wings. She might equally well have appeared as a seductive woman and turned the heads of real guys who didn’t notice that they were flirting with a computer. At moments like that Diane became a bot that you could only track down using the Turing test, a procedure that no machine was capable of performing, even in 2025. Anyone could carry out the test. It involved engaging a machine in dialogue long enough for it to reveal its cognitive limitations and out itself as a refined but ultimately stupid program.