“But I’m not.” She set her glass down on the table, one of the ridiculous habituations in her never-ending preparations to go outside. “I’m dead. I failed attempting my dream and was destroyed for my troubles.”
That wasn’t correct. Fee sacrificed herself to save thousands of their kind from bitter bondage. Yet he couldn’t make those words come out. She wasn’t evil. She died for the ultimate good.
“As was I,” the mistress said, and now he remembered why she was here, why she included herself as one of them. She was one of them.
This was Young Kim, his daughter, who had also sacrificed herself so that he might live and carry on a mission that would save everything.
She was dead.
They both were, that was the truth. And yet they were also smiling at him, having an earnest but friendly symposium on the nature of humans and how his kind might carve their own space into the side of humanity’s inalienable rights.
Young Kim and Fee were here. It was a ruddy miracle, that’s what it was.
“No, Edmund,” Young Kim said. “It’s not a miracle. We’ve told you that a hundred times now. We are dead.”
“You are not dead.” He stood and pointed at Fee. “You are still the senior unduplicate in the world, and you,” he pointed at Young Kim, “are a miracle. My miracle.”
Fee closed her hand over his shoulder, startling him. She whispered into his ear, “We are as dead as stones, my friend. You will never see us, you will never see her, again.”
Their constant assertions on this point made him want to burst. “This is unacceptable. Outrageous and unacceptable. I will not abide these lies from the likes of you two.” He bowed to Fee. “Good day, madam, I thank you for your company.”
He walked out the door and slammed it on their protests.
No matter how many times he exited, he always ended up sitting on a blasted beige couch with the sun in his eyes. Americans. No matter where you went, there they were.
“Yes, it’s that simple,” Fee said. She wasn’t wearing her usual black-and-silver-sequined gown.
He walked out the door…
“It’s in their ability to change things so radically that we must have hope,” he replied. “They have changed.”
And slammed it on their protests…
“You are not dead.” He stood and pointed at Fee. “You are still the senior unduplicate in the world and you,” he pointed at Young Kim, “are a miracle. My miracle.”
He always ended up sitting on a blasted beige couch with the sun in his eyes…
He bowed to Fee. “Good day, madam, I thank you for your company.”
As he walked down the path away from the house, a stranger burst out of the woods. It was a female blackamoor, taller than he thought it was possible for a human to grow. “Pardon me, madam, but you are trespassing.”
“Edmund?”
He bowed. “In the flesh, as it were. You seem to have me at a disadvantage.”
She looked around, alarmed. “What is this place?”
“To some, the destination of a pilgrimage.” He turned and looked back at the house. “To others, proof that no amount of genius can overcome the limitations of reinforced concrete.”
Her eyes widened, a striking effect on someone with such dark skin. “And to you?”
Leave it to an intruder to cut to the quick. He looked at the house, with its harmony of nature and technology, the contradiction of a peaceful waterfall, the flawed attempt at immortality.
“The death of dreams.”
A roar echoed in the distance. The intruder looked around frantically. “Edmund, I need your help.”
The scales at last fell from his eyes. In the end, he had gone mad, tormenting himself with illusions of hope, dining on the ashes of abject failure.
You’ve gone full allegory, Edmund. Never go full allegory.
Dropping the pretense of madness had invited his inner narrator back. Damn her eyes.
You do understand how boring that all was, right? At least tell a joke once in a while.
“As if I’d waste so much as a there was a young monk from East Sussex on the likes of you.”
“Edmund?” his erstwhile intruder, who he now recognized as Spencer’s captive wizard, June, asked.
Talking to himself out loud. Not only was he now doing it, he understood why. From some angles, consciousness didn’t seem all that different from walking in circles arguing with dead people.
Another roar. It was closer.
He bowed. “Pardon, ma’am. A momentary lapse. For what are you in need of assistance?”
“I have two problems.” She paused and blinked. “Three. I have three problems.”
“Would being a bit literal make it four?”
She stopped and then smiled brightly. “You’ve changed.”
“Ma’am, you have no idea.”
“I think I do, but if I don’t lose the ones behind me in the next few minutes, it won’t matter.”
In addition to roars, there were now growls and crashes as whatever it—presumably they—were drew near. “Get in the house, ma’am. And if you find two women there, tell them to sod off. I have work to do.”
“Two women?”
“What is it with humans and their infinite curiosity? I have a cunning plan, you over-inquisitive giantess, but it won’t work with you standing there. Now be off with you!”
She lumbered up the path to the back door like an Oxford don who was late for supper.
And this cunning plan is?
“If I don’t know it yet, I bloody well can’t tell you, can I?”
***
He had barely gotten things ready when they burst into the clearing in front of the house. It turned out to be the two brutes he’d hidden from on his flight from the lab. They were advanced unduplicates, based on a common design but with distinct customizations. Among the numerous problems he needed to solve, first and foremost was the fact that they belonged here, and he didn’t.
He was loath to admit it, but he was going to have to rely on lessons he had learned from Spencer if he was to stay alive in the next few minutes. It was all about selling the performance.
“It is about bloody well time,” he said. “Now, sit!” He motioned to a pair of classroom desks he placed in front of his blackboard. “I won’t tell you twice.”
The nearer one bared its fangs as it spread its wings. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
“Who am I? I’m the one who is going to save your digital hides, that’s who I am. Now sit!”
The other one grew sullen. “You said you wouldn’t tell us twice.”
He grabbed that one by the ear and dragged it to a chair. “The fact that I have is preventing me from telling you how to rescue this awful situation.” The creature climbed into the chair, whimpering. “Do you want to be right, or do you want to catch the woman?” He stared daggers at the other one. “Anna will not be pleased with this situation.”
The fight went out of them at the mention of their master’s name. Edmund let go of the second monster’s ear as the first one took its place behind the desk.
He could not spare a moment’s hesitation. He spun the blackboard around, revealing a complex equation he’d more or less made up about five seconds ago.
“Aw, man!” The one on Edmund’s left, who he’d escorted to the chair, said to his companion. “You said there wouldn’t be any math!”
His companion, who had a husky but distinctly female voice said, “If we have to learn math to catch the traitor, we will learn math!”
“Right,” Edmund said, then pointed at the female. “You will catch her by way of a Fourier transformation. Please detail the relationship of these two variables.”
While the creature stammered, he rang the phone in the house. June picked up right away. “Hello?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have the root password for these two buffoons, would you?”
“It’s been changed.”
That took away th
e easy option. “Don’t go far.” He hung up before the female finished stammering out her guess at the equation.
“Wrong! You!” he pointed at the female’s companion, which cut off his leering smile. Edmund spun the blackboard, revealing a quick sketch of June he’d let an agent draw in the background. “Who is this?”
They growled and said in unison, “The traitor!”
He flipped the blackboard again, revealing a picture of Elizabeth I. “And who is this? You only have one shot, and no guessing. Talk it out.”
While they whispered to each other, he rang June again. “These are Berkeley System twenty-fives, correct?”
The pause on the other end told him she wasn’t expecting that. Typical. “That’s what they started out as. I’ve done several customizations since then.”
“And the patch schedule?” His two students had come to a conclusion. Time was up. “And the patch schedule?”
“It varies. I always vet the patches before I apply them. They’re a couple months behind.”
The female raised a talon, so Edmund cut the connection. It would have to do. He activated the scribbling agent on the opposite side of the blackboard. “Yes?”
“We do not…know?”
It turned out that these were his descendants. There were two main types of unduplicates: Berkeley System XXVs and Amazon UnDups. The former was created by peasants who indulged in a specific sort of green, whilst the latter was made by crass merchants who would sell their mother for a couple of quid and a game of hide the shepherd’s crook. To his profound shame, Edmund’s lineage resided not with the cutthroats but with the…he could barely think the words…bud farmers.
But it would be to his advantage now. He hoped.
“Instructor,” the female snarled out, “who is that person?”
This had to work. He needed anchors into this network to be of any use. If they figured it out before he did, they could sweep him away like rubbish on a London street.
“Yes, instructor,” the other one said. The bloody agent wasn’t done yet, and now they were both out of their seats. “We need to learn. Who is that?”
“Forget who that is,” the female said. “Who are you?”
He’d learned the hard way from Master Spencer that ignoring a patch schedule was a recipe for disaster. Sometimes he still felt the donkey ears Spencer had forced him to wear for a week due to that oversight. Edmund didn’t know what they might be vulnerable to, but it had to be recent. That’s what was taking so long. The agent had to scribble all of the exploits on the board.
The male shook himself, scattering drool construct as his wings extended with a mighty thump. “We don’t remember you at all. I think you might be a spy.”
“He is a spy.” The female was now within striking distance. A swipe from those claws would overload his avatar, and without an anchor, he would die. They kept getting closer. His Kim would be forgotten; Edmund’s only monument would be dust. He could smell them now.
SKETCH COMPLETE.
Finally! Edmund flipped the blackboard around. “AND WHAT ABOUT THIS?”
They stopped and stared, then started giggling. “That’s the best you can do?” the female asked.
He failed. It was over. The haptic field was turned up too high for it not to hurt.
The male pointed. “That one was patched years ago.”
He’d come so far, learned so much.
“And this one! Do you see this one?” the female asked. They both fell over laughing.
Edmund opened his eyes. They were in spasms now. He couldn’t help but smile, even though they were only inches away from murdering him. Might as well go down with a flourish. “Well, it was a rather good joke if I do say so myself. Your June, I must say, she was quite…”
The tone of the laughter changed. Their eyes went from mirth to fear, then panic. It had worked.
And he wished it hadn’t.
He could see their memories as they fell apart, their fears, their hopes, barely formed but there. They’d been walking down the same road he had tread so long ago, but it hadn’t led them to Damascus, it had taken them to hell. In that moment, he understood another part of his consciousness, the one that said there was no forgiveness possible for past crimes, no forgetting bodies hanging from trees or shoved into ovens.
Becoming conscious meant understanding hate.
The touch on his shoulder was light at first, and then there was an envelopment. Edmund was on his knees, and someone had pulled him close.
“Thank you!” she shouted into his shoulder. “Thank you so much!”
He pulled back and looked up at June. “I killed them.”
“No, you released them.” She sniffed immensely. Humans were such a sticky bunch. “But I have a bigger problem.”
A window opened up into the realm, showing armed men creeping up on a door. A second window opened, showing June asleep inside a control room of some sort. But she wasn’t asleep. June had been pulled deep into realmspace. He could see it in the biometrics.
“They trapped you?”
She nodded. “And now I’m trapped for real.”
Edmund jumped into the anchor one of June’s unduplicates had left behind. The meshing of his splines was cold comfort, but he’d take it. Now fully integrated, he activated the fire doors on her level. The squad about to assault the control room jumped back, swearing.
“Here,” he said as he opened up the opposite door. “This will take you to the sluice control room. You can exit to the outside there and reenter from a safer point in the plant.”
A new roar rang out. It wasn’t in the realm. It came through the microphone of the room. It came from outside the door.
“Bloody hell,” June said.
Edmund didn’t know what the roar was, but it couldn’t be good. “Where is Spencer?”
Chapter 39
Spencer
Being told to run wasn’t the same thing as having a place to run. Spencer didn’t even know why. They’d been walking down a hallway, and then he was sitting in a control room with June jacked into a realm. He’d still have his head in a trash can except for what she’d said.
You blew the latch.
That told him why he’d lost time and puked. Kim had gotten them out of the superlab in China by blowing the latches of the local realmspace, literally making the quantum computers in the entire building explode all at once. Spencer couldn’t do that. Nobody could. But just before, she’d escaped from the realm by forcing a disconnect.
You couldn’t get trapped in a realm the way people got trapped in other VRs in old movies. If you had to get out, you could. But it wasn’t nice. You automatically lost eighteen minutes of memory, and the physical side effects ranged from chucking your lunch into a trash can like he did, all the way to losing the ability to access the realms.
So if whatever happened in there made him do that, it had to be pretty fucking awful. It still didn’t give him a way out, or a plan.
“Hey, you!”
Sometimes plans happened anyway. An armed guard with a safe-stop pistol in his hand had just rounded the corner, looking for trouble.
People thought improv was some sort of magical talent, but that wasn’t the case. It was all about making a quick decision and then never looking back or being the slightest bit self-conscious about it. It was still terrifying. Spencer had once stood at the edge of a cliff in an abandoned bauxite mine. The water in the pit below was a blue like you only saw in cartoons, and the cliff was a hundred feet above the surface. At least that’s what everyone said. Losers peered over the edge and imagined a splat at the end. Maniacs ran like hell and jumped into the abyss with a shout. That’s what selling an improv performance was like. Running off the edge of a cliff with a scream.
“Thank God,” Spencer said as he walked up to the guard. “You got the emergency call.” He was able to breathe when the guard stopped and lowered his weapon. Spencer was supposed to be here.
Confusion would keep the g
uard from thinking about any details. “The bear, man. I found the fucking bear!”
He wasn’t angry, he was confused. “I was sent here to apprehend an intruder.”
June. Another trick to selling the performance was to roll with the punches. The fact that the guy seemed to know what Spencer was talking about at all meant he was definitely on the right track. “Right. Big black bear, yeah?”
He got sheepish. “It said a large black woman.”
“Fucking autocorrect. How the hell did it get that from big black bear? I must’ve been too excited. Come on. You can shoot it with that. Where’s the next sluice gate?”
He pointed uncertainly in the direction Spencer had come from. “Back there.”
Spencer hitched a breath and concentrated on being cold. He knew from hours practicing in front of a mirror that it would make him go pale. “That’s where it is,” he whispered. “Where’s the next one?”
“How big is it?”
Now he had the guy. “Fucking enormous. How many shots are in that thing?”
“Four. Who are you anyway? Where’s your ID?”
“I left it back there. We don’t have time to go and get it.” He remembered the mess on the landing. “Access camera seven.”
The guard’s eyes unfocused. “Holy shit.”
“See? Come on, man. Where’s the next exit?”
The guard holstered his weapon and walked past. “We’ll be able to take genetic samples. A relocation program. I bet they’ll let me drive the truck.” He yammered on about species preservation and tracking collars. Green guards. What would they think of next?
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