I looked around, wondering if I could find something that could sever the vine now that I had made my way to safety. This place was like no city I had ever been to in the real world. Vast buildings loomed sleek and spotless as high as the eye could see. The streets were literally paved with gold, as were the sidewalks. It seemed completely uninhabited. I knelt down and felt the edge of the curb. It wasn’t sharp, but it was more precise than its stone counterpart in reality would have been. I sat down near it and began sawing the vine back and forth across it, as close as I could get it to my hip. I was relieved to find that it didn’t seem to have nerves, and that the sawing didn’t hurt.
It took longer than I would have liked, and I kept checking my progress, watching the white slash in the vine grow deeper as I sawed. Finally, I was able to break it away, and it swung like some hellish umbilicus from the lamp post. I decided that I did not like this place, that there was something wrong about its garish, charmless immensity. The city was much bigger than it looked from the desperate deathpoint of the sinking EgoCone. I started wandering the streets.
This was going to be much more difficult than I thought. In Mission Creep’s mind, the psychic talisman all but bit you in the ass. It was the only thing that seemed to have vitality and color. Here, everything was maximally opulent, and there was no telling how long it could take to find something that would declare itself as particularly important.
Walking the empty, shining streets, I saw that this place was incapacitated by its own conspicuous consumption. The wheels of the parked and empty luxury cars were made of black marble. This was a world where mundanities like tire pressure and people could not exist. I looked up at a street sign, shielding my eyes against a hazy, none-too-bright sun that was still at exactly the right angle to inconvenience me. I looked at the sign in disbelief. It carried a series of backwards non-letters and hieroglyphic symbols. What the hell was this?
I thought back to my training. Mission Creep’s mind was disorienting, but you were able to track him through it. It was not hard to piece together the fragments of memory, the stages and transitions of his personal evolution. I decided to have a closer look at the buildings. For all their grandeur, they were repeated according to a simple pattern. There were maybe ten different types of building in the whole city, arranged in a fractal wave. This place wasn’t zoned out like a real city; it was an artificial construct, a hologram that got hazier as you broke it apart. The signs on the cloned buildings were almost as useless as the ones on the street—the only legible word was ‘GILD’, which was always written in gold in capital letters.
I thought I saw movement beyond the shaded reflective windows in a building across the street. I made my way towards it.
5
It was a bank, by the look of it. There were no legible signs or tellers, but the layout reminded me of First Provisian Bank, where I had been rejected for a number of loans during my simpler life as an Outlaw-Journalist. The tiles of the floor made a black and white zigzag pattern that reminded me of the Dry Men Lodge. A fish tank on the far wall drew my eye, and I made my way to it.
What was so terrifying about those fish? Nothing should have bothered me about them. They were not frightening in the way that something like Eye-Jaw-Kull was frightening. They were no bigger than ordinary goldfish, but there was something profoundly wrong. I let my eyes settle to the bottom of the tank. It was filled with diamonds, which caught and reflected the light from the chandelier. Even the water in the tank glittered.
But the fish were obviously bogus. They were cheap imitations made from pixels. They were two-dimensional representations of fish, swimming in a predictable pattern, blinking this way and that in a pre-programmed sequence. I shook off a chill. I knew this feeling; the cold caress on the back of my neck. It happens when something is wrong and I know it, but can’t put it into words. I used to deal in words, and when I can’t phrase the problem, something in the world is out of joint. I’ve talked my way out of a thousand tight spots, on smuggler ships and in the trenches of war zones, in back alleys and secret lodges and rigged sporting events. Pathological. I tried. There was something pathological about this mind, this thought realm where the money and diamonds are real but the living things are just lifeless sprites.
There was no way that these fish were the movement I had noticed. They were just a screen saver. I followed the wall to a narrow corridor, which opened up into a bank vault. I heard a quiet plinking and muttering coming from within. I poked my head around the corner. Stacks of bills, coins, and bars of gold were appearing and disappearing. It looked like a time-lapse film of one of Gild’s condo complexes being built, set on an endless loop, except that all the structures were made of money. A human figure was kneeling by the stacks, attempting in vain to count them. I tiptoed up behind him. I still couldn’t hear what he was saying. Touching his shoulder, I spun him gently towards me, and recoiled.
Whatever it was, it was not a person. Perhaps one could be generous and call it some sort of animatronic device. Its eyes were rattling, unblinking balls, blank and without focus. Its hair was a plastic mass, its mouth an unmoving white scar. Money spilled from its jointless fingers. “Million? Billion? Multi-Million? Trillion? Gazillion?” I pushed it down and pulled the vault shut before I knew what I was doing. I had no doubt that it was still counting the money, that it had forgotten me already.
From the outside, the bank looked like a skyscraper, but there were no stairs or elevators that I could find. Fake fish, empty cubicles, a money-counting automaton. Would all the figments here be like the money-counter? I hoped not, but it was out of my hands. If I was right about the whole city being a repeating pattern of less than a dozen buildings, I might be able to go about this more efficiently than I thought. The first step had to be to check each type of building. If they were duplicates, maybe finding the talisman would be fast, a matter of exploring the entire city by casing each type of building.
The next one was familiar to me—it was Plutocrat’s Palace, Gild’s old casino. In reality it would not be sitting here next to a respectable bank, but this was not reality. I figured that this was as good a place to check next as any. I reached for the golden column of the door handle and pulled it open, but it pulled itself shut. There was a slight tremor, and then I was knocked down by an earthquake. The entire building was collapsing. I scrambled to my feet, shielding my head with my hands as I ran.
There was no need to worry. The building wasn’t falling, it was disappearing into a pit. I watched as floor after floor of Plutocrat’s palace vanished into the ground, until the Plutocrat statue at the zenith was itself submerged. There was nothing but a void, an enormous hole bigger than a building. I was stunned to see that what I had taken for gold paving on the streets was actually a seam of gold that went down at least five hundred feet. Beyond that there was only darkness.
My mind struggled to process this weird and unnerving development. If this kind of thing could just happen here, then I could not consider myself safe as I explored the buildings. What had happened? My mind tried to trawl back over recent developments in the news that might give me some insight into Gild’s mind. I had not been following current events as closely as I once had. I hadn’t voted for Gild. I took it as an obvious given that someone who could run a casino as deliciously depraved as Plutocrat’s Palace should not be placed in charge of a hegemonic global force like the nation of Provisia. My countrymen had disagreed.
Could that be what I was witnessing? Was his history with his casino somehow incompatible with the new public image that he was working to carve out for himself? There were no illusions about what the casino had been. He had greased palms, sped his way through the arduous licensing process, and lobbied hard for bailout money when it looked like he would have the rare ignominy of bankrupting an institution where the house always wins. He had attracted the crowd that casinos always attract; hustlers, money-launderers, fixers, and thugs. How short the public memory can be.
Th
at was when it hit me. This had been covered in my training. What I was seeing was a memory sinkhole, an unconscious submersion of a part of yourself that no longer fit. It was a problem, so it was gone. Not alarming, except that there was no way to tell how frequent an occurrence this was in the mind of President Gilbert Gild, or what would happen to me if I was inside a building that was chalked for oblivion.
I went to an octagonal structure, more squat and wide than the others but just as ornate and imposing. I was startled to find that the entire building was a single room, with glass cases lining every wall, and converging and branching out into a central atrium. The inside of the building was like a gigantic snowflake, made entirely of cases for every kind of trophy.
There were sports trophies won by teams that he owned; rows of Provisian World Series rings. There were shelves of honorary degrees. The heads and antler racks of endangered animals that he had hunted were displayed, a victory dance of taxidermy. The next corridor had innumerable crystalline business awards. I was startled to encounter a wall of trophy wives and girlfriends. They were more realistic than the animatronic money man I had encountered, but they weren’t human. I decided that they had to be wax sculptures. The measurements of their bodies were carved into little golden plaques at their feet, the only legible alphanumeric writing I had found anywhere in the city other than the word ‘GILD.’
The Gods know I haven’t always been good to women, or to people in general for that matter. But something was profoundly wrong about this place. The building wasn’t structured like a snowflake; it was a poison crystal, a necrophilious toxin that reduced everything to a trophy to be catalogued and shelved. None of these could be the talisman.
6
I sat on the golden curb with my head in my hands, longing for a cigarette, a drink, or some dope. I didn’t dare try another casino building. I figured I just had to keep working my way through the options, to learn what I could. I forced myself to my feet. Looking back towards the spot where Plutocrat’s palace used to be, I saw that the memory sinkhole was filling with a white and slimy substance. The rift in Gild’s subconscious had little trouble healing itself.
I decided I would try the big white building next. It looked like a luxury apartment complex, the sort that Gild owned all over Archland and Plenty Burrows. Walking up to it, I found that this place had some of the same unnatural anomalies I had seen in the bank. The fountain was a mockery of the idea of fountains. Touching the streams spit fourth by cherubim, I found that they felt like water but they didn’t act like water. My hand stopped being wet right after I touched it. The water didn’t change course or flow around my hand or leave it dripping. The grass was not even AstroTurf; it was pixelated like the fish, blowing in a repetitive, imaginary wind.
I approached the door, but then turned and spun. A sound was coming from behind me, growing as it approached. I started walking away from the complex and towards the noise. The streets and alleys between the extravagant buildings were still empty, but I heard it clearly--cheering. But something was wrong about it. Like so much else here, it looked good on the surface, and it took patience to wait for the problem to emerge like a stereogram image. Then I had it. The cheer was being repeated. It wasn’t like a steady chant that one would hear at a rally, where the repetition was intentional. Instead, the exuberant sounds of random joy and victory were being replayed over and over again.
Turning, I found myself in the midst of a cheering mass of animatronic dummies. They were all virtually identical to the one I had encountered in the bank, with lazy variations to suggest different ages and professions. The female ones just had longer hair blobs. They were marching lockstep somewhere, generating the monotonous facsimile of a cheer. They weren’t fast, but marching with them was difficult because they were not at all self-aware. I kept finding myself crushed between two of them, so I shoved one over experimentally. His head shattered against the golden sidewalk, a burst of ceramic shards, copper wires and computer chips spilling from the opening. He kept moving, his legs tripping a few other marchers, who almost fell.
I found myself wishing that I had more experience exploring the unconscious. It would be helpful to know how unusual all this was. However alarming it was to visit parts of Mission Creep’s mind, it was populated by memories, human cares and recollections of people. Was it possible that Gild’s mind was uninhabited? That there was no room here for anything living, let alone human?
The march abruptly ceased, the artificial cheer along with it. All of them were standing quiet, at attention, an army of toys. I shoved and forced my way closer to the front.
At first, I thought that I was looking at some sort of vehicle. It was the size of a bus, and it had the same gleam and polish that all the cars here seemed to share. But as my eyes followed it upward, I saw that it was connected to something. It wasn’t a bus at all, but an armored foot.
“Hear me, fellow Provisians! We have work to do.” It boomed. It didn’t sound anything like the real Gild, but there was no doubt that that was who it was supposed to be. Sometimes in The Black Paladin, my favorite show as a kid, the main character would hear advice by communing with his dead father. The voice of the father always carried boundless wisdom and authority that made your knees quake when you heard it. That was how this Giant Gild sounded.
I craned my neck to try to see his head, but it was obscured by cloud cover. “The moment of Crisis is at hand! The Kargivians have revealed their ineptitude. They cannot govern themselves. They cannot resolve their internal conflicts. They cannot guarantee our safety amid their chaos.” I laughed, in spite of myself. Did President Gild think that this was really the way he spoke? With purpose, clarity, anaphora, economy of language? There was a fire escape attached to one of the repeated buildings nearby, and I scrambled up it to try to get a better look.
He was wearing a helm like a knight, capped with a monarch’s crown. His face might have looked somewhat like the real Gild’s face, but it was hard to get a good look at it. It far outshone what passed for the sun in this place, and it hurt my eyes. He was holding an enormous golden scepter above his head. “My fellow Provisians, I will march to Gild Citadel! I will raise this scepter! I will strike the Gild War Gong, and our righteous crusade will commence!”
I was on top of one of the smaller buildings. I watched as Gild began making his way towards the acidic purple ocean. It looked like the Gild Citadel sat at one of the corners of his ego, rather than at the center as I had feared. But it could not be denied that I was in great trouble. The gong was the talisman. Beating the gong would represent the decision to go to war with Kargivia, and in this place a single step made by Gild was worth five minutes of my fastest sprint.
Perhaps I could hotwire a car and speed to the building ahead of him? No, the cars were just props like everything else. Even if I beat him to the foot of the building, I might get there to find that the front door didn’t open, or there was no elevator, or that there was only one floor that didn’t lead to the top.
Straining my eyes, I could see where he was headed. It was a unique building, not one that had been cloned across the fractal cityscape. It was almost as tall as the Giant Gild, with a sleek concave indent near the entrance as if it had been touched by the thumb of one of the Gods and planted there for all time. My body trembled. I was gripped by terror at the prospect of failure. There would be war, perhaps the biggest one since Provisia was founded. What would happen to me? Did the Dry Men have bunkers for this sort of crisis?
But I was not myself; I was faking these concerns. I wasn’t worried about me, in that moment. However disgusting and pathetic it was, I didn’t want to be responsible for the world’s destruction. I couldn’t let it end like this, even if for once no one would be around to blame me for it. I had to try something.
I thought back to the last moment I had been absolutely desperate, which had been perhaps an hour ago, on the burning funeral pyre of the EgoCone. My body had done something that I didn’t know it could do
—it had shot a vine to lift me to where I needed to go. Could I do it again? I closed my eyes. I thought about what happened when you were in a dream and you realized where you were. Sometimes the nature of the dream became pliable, and you could shape it to your will. I brought the heels of my palms together, aiming my hands towards the Gild Citadel. I prayed.
I found myself soaring through the air. I had snared a high spire, or possibly the nose of a satellite dish, and the vines were retracting, pulling me to the top of the building like a rapid zip line. I sped over crowds of fake people and fleets of imaginary cars and rows of identical buildings. I thought that I wanted to scream out in terror, but then I realized that it was not terror that I felt at all—it was exhilaration. Perhaps this was the sort of thing I had been searching for all along, and narcotics were just a cheap stopgap measure to try to fill the hole I felt in myself.
The vines shrunk back into my wrists, depositing me tumbling onto the high rooftop of the citadel. The wind whipped around me, lashing through my egonaut suit and pounding every inch of my body. The roof itself seemed shaky, like a child’s block tower that had been stacked too high. I saw that I must have snared a satellite that was perched near a railing. Something was suspended on the other side of the rooftop. It was a huge circular gong, its metal surface trembling in the wind. I sprinted towards it. I could see the Giant Gild stalking towards the gong, the vassal automatons following in his wake. There wasn’t much time. This thing was going to be close.
The gong was held in the air, suspended by an arch. A heavy cable held the gong in the air between the walls of its frame. Coming up behind it, I saw that a huge screw the size of my fist secured the gong to the cable. Without that screw, it would fall off the building onto the heads of the dumb, adoring masses below. Getting rid of it was going to be quite a challenge. The rail of the building didn’t cover the gong—the front of it was exposed so that Gild could hit it. That left the back. I started shimmying up the side of the frame.
Fables of Failure Page 18
