by Toby Weston
Niato had actively cultivated the stereotype of eccentric hippy in interviews and articles. He hung out, barefooted and bare chested, with the few natives who had chosen to stay; mostly Polynesian fishermen, whose families had lived on the island for a thousand years.
‘I am a billionaire, dilettante, dreamer. Nothing to see here,’ he had seemed to say.
Then, in a virtually unanimous referendum, the remaining citizens of the island state of Bäna remade their country to form the Kingdom of New Atlantis.
Niato had been crowned. He had acquired a country. Shortly after, half a dozen other, mostly evacuated, island nations had accepted similar generous offers, and Niato suddenly controlled nearly two million square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. A year later, in a grand ceremony, the nobles and peers of the royal house were created. Sovereignty and stewardship of the oceans Niato granted to his second in succession, Blue, Margrave Caeruleum: author, activist, philosopher, dolphin.
In the years since, although immigration was heavily restricted, the population had slowly morphed, becoming a mix of eco, paleo and techno-philanthropist. A churning horde of young, bright-eyed volunteers on short-term visas added expertise and energy to the demographic.
Keith had first visited the island for a management offsite while he was still at BHJ. Back then, it had been a massive construction yard. The days and nights had been filled with drilling and blasting as Niato had begun the summoning of Atlantis from raw jungle. That visit didn’t stand out as a high point in Keith’s life; sick of the corporate grind, unable to listen to any more bullshit from his boss and lifelong frenemy, Ben Baphmet, he had decided to skive off. Fatefully meeting up with a surfer called Nick, who was also conducting a team-bonding exercise with his employees. Somehow, over the course of a day and night, Keith had managed to physically assault both his boss and this Nick—who, of course, had turned out to be King Niato. Unsurprisingly, he had been fired.
To Niato, who brought it up often, this was the origination of their entanglement. To Keith, it was a fucked-up weekend that had left him out of work and broke, with joining the Forward army as his only remaining option.
As the auto continued its climb, Keith noted how much had changed. A leafy flesh of living rainforest had grown over the scars of construction, which had stripped the island’s green back. Now, more than a decade later, the chaotic rush to build was winding down. Atlantis rebooted played to the mysterious lost utopia that Plato had first described two and a half thousand years ago: white sandstone, terracotta tiles, mysterious towers, lush vegetation, grottos serving chilled ambrosia—or, at least, Rakı and fish tacos.
Ten minutes later, the auto set down outside the palace. For the last minute, they had been catching confusing glimpses of great spans and cusps; gigantic, organic forms conjuring images of ancient, beached, sun-bleached carapaces. Now, above them soared a complex ensemble of sweeping calcified spires growing from the volcano’s rocky peak. It wasn’t Keith’s first visit, but it did still make an impression.
Inadequate associations tried their hand at description, perhaps a cathedral grown from coral, or fractal sculpture chiselled in limestone. More than anything, it looked like the result of a late-night absinthe-fuelled collusion between Walt Disney and Antoni Gaudi.
“Knocks you back a bit, doesn’t it?” said the ensign.
“It does that.”
A man approached. “I’ll take it from here, Ensign. We’re running late,” said the impressively moustached codger in ornate ceremonial armour. “Lieutenant Wilson? Follow me.”
“Yes, sir,” Keith said. They exchanged a salute. Keith winked to his chauffer and headed off, following the rotund distinguished Major who was striding up to the palace’s grand two-storey entrance portal.
Inside, the palace was a mass of columns, naked marble cherubs, and lush potted plants. Shafts of sunlight entered through slots in the vaulted ceiling, and overlaid the baroque space with a second geometry of slanting lines and glowing parallelograms. Velvet curtains screened off side chambers. Twin, curving staircases swept down from the mezzanine, where more rooms and alcoves were visible between the pillars of its pink marble balustrade. A thin smattering of men and women drifted amongst the palace’s vestibules and corridors. Some wore togas, others more standard street garb. Precise footsteps and fragments of discreet conversation—drifting and echoing through the chamber, amplified unpredictably by parabolic marble arches, dulled and filtered by leaves and sumptuous fabrics—only served to define the space’s hushed composure.
A dozen Atlantean knights stood conspicuously to attention in alcoves. Keith no longer sneered at the ceremonial uniforms of gold and white; instead, he had accepted that the ornate breastplates, sabres and functional, but bulky, retro ray guns were just another element in the narrative that Niato was composing. Rather than presenting himself to the world as the technocratic messiah that Keith was certain the King truly believed he was, and instead of wasting his time trying to communicate complex ideals and goals to a global audience starved of attention and steered by subliminal programming, Niato was mining the cultural subconscious; he was reflecting back people’s expectations of a king, hoping that, distracted and reassured, soothed by the familiarity of the story, they would not be disturbed by the utterly radical new reality he was constructing.
They left the grand hall and took a succession of doors, each smaller and less ostentatious than the last, until they were walking along a functional narrow corridor with none of the earlier baroque pretensions. The few people they passed were also mostly military, and gaudy ostentation became less common. Most, like Keith, wore functional uniforms: jumpsuits or shorts. Keith got the impression that tourists and visiting dignitaries didn’t penetrate here.
At another door, Keith’s Spex informed him that he had joined the palace’s enforced consensus and that he was no longer permitted to remove them. It didn’t matter, as Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality—Real Reality itself—all looked essentially identical through Spex—at least, they did to Keith, although some boorish nerds might still have insisted that Real Reality had a warmer, more analogue, feel…
***
The elevator drops so quickly that Keith’s stomach lurches and then catches as they decelerate at the bottom. When they exit the lift, Keith notices that the ceiling is lower. They pass through another set of heavy-duty doors. Pipes of various diameters run the corridor’s length, sharing the limited space with trays of colourful network cabling. They descend at a shallow angle. Exposed utilitarian strips provide harsh blue illumination. Side doors, notably few in number, slant away from the floor, leaning back, standing on wedge-shaped sills to compensate for the slope. At some point, the corridors have become tunnels. They must be well below the surface by now. Keith can’t glean much from his companion’s poker face.
At the end of the corridor is a monumental metal portal. It looks like a bank vault. They pause, standing in uncomfortable silence as the door completes its glacial journey. Watching the massive slab of grey metal hinging open—
—A schoolboy recollection of Dante flashes into Keith’s mind. Traversal of each antecedent portal has yielded ever-decreasing levels of human aesthetic concession. If the pattern holds, Keith pictures the next section as a darkened cavern, perhaps lit by tallow torches, filled with the ominous echoing sounds of dripping water and copulating Chiropterans; eventually, they must reach a lake of fire—
When the door has finally settled into its hemispherical recesses, they proceed, pushing open the more conventional double doors beyond. Keith is surprised when the hall turns out to be light and airy. The corridor is broad, with a wall of translucent vitreous brick on one side and what looks like raw rock on the other. Rooms are visible through the distortions of the glass. Each is accessed by an expensive-looking reclaimed timber door. The rooms are designated by etched glass name plates bearing a single word: Teak, Oak, Olive, Mahogany. Keith decides that these words match the woods used to make the doors and are p
robably also the names of the meeting rooms. A skylight runs the corridor’s length. This glimpse of blue space banishes any lingering claustrophobia. On closer inspection, however, there are too many suns; a succession of tiny, fiercely bright brilliances, shine out of the deep blue of a simulated tropical sky. The panels, Keith realises, are just very fancy lighting.
People in the rooms are refracted blurs, sitting or standing. A door opens and a man and woman in functional military dress walk out, talking animatedly to a third person who is rendered as a privacy placeholder; a grey, blocky humanoid avatar—a kid’s robot costume made of unadorned cardboard boxes.
Keith’s escort opens the door to ‘Ginkgo’ and stands aside to let Keith in. The room is large, with picture windows overlooking the city and the bay. These are either consensus-enforced overlays or wall screens; unable to remove his Spex for fear of prosecution, Keith is unable to tell which.
Niato looks up from a Companion as they enter. He smiles and stands. The escort bows, salutes to Keith, and excuses himself. Keith salutes back.
“Your Majesty,” Keith says, bowing his head—royalism is infectious.
“Keith. Take a seat. The others will be arriving in a few minutes. How are you?”
“Good, thanks. I began to worry on the way down that we were going to break through into a lake of fire or something...”
“We are a hundred and fifty metres down—still over a kilometre to the magma chamber, though.”
“Lava?”
“Magma. It’s like asteroid and meteor; it’s lava once it gets to the surface.”
“Right. I didn’t realise the volcano was still active.”
“It hasn’t erupted for six hundred years. We keep a close watch, though, but we’re not expecting any surprises.”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” says Keith. “You don’t expect surprises. That’s why they’re surprises.”
There is a pause. The two men have a mixed conversational track record. Niato’s idealistic fervour rubs Keith the wrong way, while Keith’s cynicism and frustrating lack of outrage at a broken world is a red flag to the evangelical King.
“Island life suiting you?” Niato asks mildly, changing the subject. “Do you think you’ve finally found somewhere to put down roots?”
“I’m getting there. Things are definitely looking better than a few years ago.”
Niato’s console chirps; a brief conversation follows, which is audible to Keith only as a jumble of mangled phonemes. It sounds like somebody speaking a foreign language, backwards.
“You like it here?” Niato asks, turning back to Keith.
“Sure.”
Chats with Niato can be taxing. The King likes to prod and pick; seemingly innocent questions can run off into conversational dead ends, terminating in sheer walls of uncomfortable logic, where the only chance of escape is an exhausting climb out over the rubble of your own character flaws. On previous occasions, Keith has resolved that the best strategy is not to provoke, but try to stay vague and pleasant.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” says Niato. “Enough food, nobody starving, people free.”
“You want me to thank you again. Is this an opportunity for a spot of royal brown nosing?” Keith asks—he seldom follows his own advice.
“Thank me for what?”
“No idea, you tell me… You’re needling for something, Nick.”
There is another pause.
“You know how difficult it is to constantly beat them back?” says Niato. “They hate me. The Forwards, your old boss and all his little psychopaths. I am a thorn. They want to tear me out.”
“Well, you have made a few enemies...”
“You think they are jealous that my private island is cooler than theirs?”
“Yeah, that… and the way you publicly call them psychopaths and rapists.”
Niato tips his head back. “That does annoy them. But that’s not it. They’re thick skinned. They deal with insults on a daily basis. The reason they hate me is that I spoil their game. By not stealing and generally shitting over everything, I let their flocks know that there is another way. That’s why they need to destroy me!”
Keith knows the argument.
“They divide and conquer,” the King continues. “Keep us mentally partitioned in belief spheres. Neat ontological worlds. They assign us identities and feed us their synthetic realities brewed up specifically to exploit our basest appetites. They force us into bubble universes and don’t let us see over the fences… People can cope with just about any hardship if they accept there is no other way...”
Keith interrupts, tying to add some levity. “But if they smell people puffing greener grass on the other side of the fence...” Just then, the door opens and the quip is ignored.
The newcomer greets the King informally, glances briefly at Keith, and sits. A little later, more people file in. There are a couple of casual salutes, but most just nod as they take their seats. People materialise at empty places. Many look curiously at Keith, wondering who the new guy is.
An old man with a white beard and robe materialises on the other side of the King. He is giving off subtle clues that nobody is home, and Keith assumes that this is an unoccupied avatar waiting for its pilot to arrive. But then the old man waves awkwardly at the other people around the table.
More people join in dribs and drabs until all the seats are occupied.
Niato had broken off from Keith when the others started appearing and is making small talk with the new arrivals. Most of the chatter around the table is private, unintelligible through the consensus’ enforced obfuscation. Dee comes in with Paulina, another female officer. Dee waves distractedly at Keith, apparently not surprised to see him.
Without warning, but with a deliberate shimmer, the tabletop transmutes. Its black glass top becomes a wavelet-rilled liquid surface; an ocean viewed from the window of a Xepplin or plane. Keith’s sense of touch reports that his arms are still resting on what feels like cold glass, but tiny ripples spread away from his wrists and hands every time he moves; it is disconcerting. His Companion’s stylus is an idling super tanker, which emits a concentric corona of waves. Looking closer, he can discern dolphins, both to scale, playing in the waves. He tries to focus on one…
—In a flash of motion, Keith is a dolphin; his head and chest bobbing above the water, while a dozen or so others are swimming around him. The sky at the horizon is a hazy white. Above the clouds, vague blue towering figures sit circling the disk of the water world, like Greek gods—
…returning abruptly, Keith lurches with surprise. Looking down—careful not to focus with anything which might be interpreted as ‘intent to zoom’—he can still see the tiny dolphin avatars swimming in their tabletop ocean. The glassy-eyed, emotionally absent avatar, with the white beard, must be one of those dolphins manifesting inexpertly into human space.
Niato’s comment about bubbles of synthetic reality resurfaces. The dolphins see him as a blue tube of muscle gliding through the water; he sees them as bearded bipeds seated at a table. They are confined to private ontologies, separate universes. The meeting itself is stretched between planes of existence. Reality is simultaneously both a room full of officers and a pod of cetaceans chattering in the open ocean.
In a moment of vertigo, Keith feels that reality has fallen away below him. He has no idea what this room—or its surrounding tunnels—actually looks like. He has an overwhelming urge to rip the Spex from his face and reassure himself that materiality exists; but professionalism asserts. Since he has entered the private section of the palace, consensus has mandated he keep them on—he has no wish to out himself as a sissy or invoke whatever mediaeval punishments await those who disobey. Instead, he adjusts his Spex, making space at the corners of his eyes. He strains, trying to catch some authentic unadulterated photons sneaking in around the sides of the lenses. There is nothing, only slivers of inky void. Vertigo is joined by claustrophobia as he realises they are all—at least, those
who are physically present—sitting in pitch blackness. Removing his Spex will not even help!
It’s all an illusion. There is no objective reality below. It is only bubbles drifting and merging, dividing and bursting…
“Are you alright, Keith?” Niato asks, looking at him curiously.
Dizziness passes.
“Sure, just a glitch with my Spex.”
They are sitting around a table, in a room cut from living rock, beneath the King’s palace, nestled on the volcanic peak of Bäna: the smoking mountain at the heart of the fabled Kingdom of New Atlantis—
“The Forwards are pruning us back. Our allies are being rounded up and, if we are not careful, we will be isolated. We have to protect the Kin.” Paulina, the commander who had entered with Dee, is speaking.
Keith feels eyes on him around the table. He wonders how he must have looked floundering between worlds.