Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  The god artist began to work at noon, on a day as cloudless and as clear as childhood. He stood calmly on the Neve Sha’anan pedestrian street, standing opposite the enormous main doors of Central Station.

  His hands moved before him in a complicated pattern, like a weather hacker manipulating the seen and the unseen. His lips moved as he worked, issuing silent commands. R. Brother Patch-It, the robo-priest, came out just then and stood in silence by a fruit and vegetable stand, and watched.

  “I didn’t know Eliezer was back in town,” he said to Mr. Chow, Isobel’s father, who shrugged.

  “He never left,” Mr. Chow said, and bit into an apple.

  The god artist moved his hands in the physicality, and those who were noded watched as he reached deep into the digitality, into the world of mara, that which is both real and unreal.

  The god artist gestured and worlds came into being. Code mated with code; mutated; separated; joined and rejoined and split and evolved, rapid evolutionary cycles running in the virtuality, on the vast hidden engines at the Cores. Intelligences were born, like flowers. Then, when these makeshift Breeding Grounds began to run autonomously, the god artist began to build the physical body of the god.

  More people came, and watched. It had been years since Eliezer was seen in public, though his gods have appeared, like hidden presents, throughout the streets of Central Station.

  Ibrahim and his boy came by on their cart, the patient horse drawing it slowly. They stopped and, with the help of a couple of four-armed Martian Re-Born, unloaded the cart before the god artist.

  Eliezer worked, and as he worked he spoke, and his words travelled far. Two memcordists in the audience broadcast the moment to their followers, across Earth and the solar system. Ismail and Kranki stood together and watched and seemed to flicker in and out of existence as they followed the newly forming god in and out of the unreal.

  The god artist chose metal, and wood, and adaptoplant tech, forming and growing a structure before the great doors of Central Station. And as he worked he spoke, singing, and the words reached across air and uncounted audio channels.

  And he sang, putting music to the words of a forgotten Lior Tirosh poem:

  Rain fell.

  Of that, at least, there is no doubt.

  People died like plants.

  I mean, silently.

  We studied water for a long time.

  Diligently.

  Its molecules tinkled in the glass.

  We spun them into dust.

  We broke light through them.

  We bred tadpoles.

  People grew, like red flowers

  Like roses or opium poppies.

  I mean, beautifully.

  Rain fell.

  There was something miraculous about it.

  I mean, water falling from the sky.

  All those complex molecules

  Giving birth to bodies of water

  Giving birth to

  Puddles.

  In the Guilds of Ashkelon, Captain Isobel Chow hesitated with her hand on the warp drive controls. A whisper in her ears seemed to draw out words. Something miraculous. Gamesworld warp space like a phantasmagorical three-dimensional display. Gamesworlds were powerful virtualities, the progenitors of primitive MMORPGs, running in real-time on the deep Cores of computing hardware co-inhabited by Others, and scattered throughout the solar system. They were home to untold billions of both networked humans and native digital intelligences and autonomous systems.

  It would take time to arrive in the Delta Quadrant (which was hosted on an off-world server somewhere; time-lag would be a problem). She could log out, leave a simulacra running in her place as she surfaced into the physicality of Universe-One. The words seemed to whisper in her ear, of love and loss, and she remembered Motl, the anger, somehow, draining away from her. The display screens around her in the vast control room of the starship displayed hyperspace and in it rose, suddenly, a dark shape, and Isobel’s second-in-command, Tesh, giant and six-armed and daikaiju-derived (Isobel never knew who or what he was in the physicality), gave an alarmed grunt. It was a hovering dark mass, a cuboid thing, like a gamesworld singularity.

  “What is it?” Tesh said, and there was awe in his voice.

  Giving birth, the voice seemed to say. Isobel swallowed. “A god,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen one,” Tesh said, and Isobel said, “No, they’re rare.”

  “Carmel?”

  He found her in Achimwene’s bookshop. Achimwene wasn’t there. Carmel let Boris in. There was a dreamy look in her eyes. Her body was thin like a boy’s. “I dreamed I was human,” she said.

  “I have it,” Boris said. He showed her the syringe. “Crucifixation.”

  “How will it help?”

  “I don’t know that it will.”

  She laughed, suddenly. “You just like to penetrate me with needles,” she said.

  “I’m trying to help,” he said. The aug pulsed on his neck. She reached out and touched it, with just the tips of her fingers. “Then do it,” she said. Almost indifferent. She presented her thin naked arm to him. “Do it.”

  He pressed the syringe into her arm. She sighed, and her breath was soft and smelled of cardamom seeds. He helped her into a chair, where she drooped—“I can see it,” she said. “It’s—”

  Carmel was floating on a sea of white light. If space is an ocean, a Solwota Blong Star, then this was ur-space, devoid of stars or darkness or the abyss. She felt herself afloat and the world rose around her, but the details were hazy, as if it had not been quite properly rendered yet. She could see the old streets of Central Station, and humans, crudely detailed, standing around. She could see herself, a violet smudge, and Boris, standing above her like a badly etched villain from a Martian Hardboiled romance, the needle raised like a sacrificial weapon in one hand.

  The outline of the space port rose before her then, white lines of light marking the gigantic structure, dense clumps here and there hiding the dense code cores of Others. And something rose before Carmel, before the space port, a black cuboid thing that sucked in light and data like a vampire, and she was drawn to it, she floated through the white light towards that dark singularity, unable to escape—

  “Guard us from the Blight and from the Worm, and from the attention of Others.” Mama Jones knelt by the small shrine on the Green. “And give us the courage to make our own path in the world, St. Cohen.”

  She straightened and looked to the space port. She could feel the forming god there, on the pedestrian street, sense its disturbance travelling through the invisible networks, echoes of it pinging everywhere, hitting her node. She was not comfortable. Not with Boris and his strange tie to the strigoi girl. And not with Eliezer, showing up again, meddling. Others were behind it, she could tell. The digitals in their digital realm: most of them had little to do with humanity, with the physical world. They ran on the deep Cores, protected by the military might of Clan Ayodhya, and as long as their physical existence was kept in order they—did—not—meddle.

  Usually.

  But then there were the children.

  Miriam wasn’t stupid. She knew the boy was odd. She knew Kranki had come out of the birthing clinics different. That he was not like other children elsewhere.

  She didn’t know why. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. He was not of her womb but he was her child. He deserved his childhood.

  She did not like Eliezer meddling. She did not like gods. It had taken humankind long enough to make a faith it could live with. To have your gods living side by side to you was something else, something, almost, sacrilegious.

  She lit the stick of incense carefully and walked away, to see what all the fuss was about.

  “Can we go around it?” Isobel said.

  “It’s a singularity,” Tesh said.

  “Go through it,” Isobel decided. Tesh looked alarmed.

  “ Through it?” he said. “Do you remember what happened to the Wu Expedition?”

>   Isobel shrugged, uncomfortable. “They disappeared?” she said.

  “Yes,” Tesh said. “Disappeared exploring the Berezhinsky Singularity in Sigma Quadrant.”

  “But Tesh, think of the rewards!” Isobel said. Gamesworld singularities were rare; beyond rare. They could be anything: the opening into a whole new quadrant of the gamesworld, or a journey to its past, or a shortcut to a distant quadrant or even, sometimes, a gateway into one of the other gamesworlds altogether.

  But there was also the danger.

  Real-world brain death, going full Mother Hitton, the drooling idiot body pulled out of the cooling pod, gibbering and spitting, the mind burned out, the body carrying on, on instinct. Rumours of singularities swallowing players, of the Wu Expedition going too deep, going into the very archaeological layers of the gamesworlds, down past the GoA and into ancient, forgotten levels, and finally to the mythical place called Pacmandu. . . .

  “Hit it,” Isobel said.

  Tesh said, “No.”

  Isobel’s mouth curled in a cruel smile. “You dare disobey me?”

  “Fuck it, Isobel, this isn’t a game!”

  But she wasn’t listening. A wild spirit had taken hold of her. She felt drunk, powerful. The black cuboid hovered in the giant screens, rotating. Blocking them. She put her hand, palm down, fingers splayed, on the control unit. Felt the thrum of the Nine-Tailed Cat underneath her. Through her. She rejoiced in the power. She sent a silent command and it travelled into the mind of the ship and it accelerated—

  Through gamesworld hyperspace psychedelia, the black cuboid opening like a portal, a worm burrowing through space and time, elongating, the starship shooting through it, inside it, a bullet from a gun punctuating gamesworld space-time—

  Tesh screaming, the crew frozen, and Isobel was laughing, invisible hands tearing at her mind, reaching from beyond urspace, untangling her, and she was breaking apart, into atoms and quarks, until a note sounded, a solitary musical note, like a bell being hit, precisely, and a voice said, “Isobel,” and she said, “Motl?”—but the word was just sounds, and the sense of it eluded her.

  Floating in the white light, the world seemed far away. It was not unlike feeding. When Carmel sank her teeth into the soft flesh of a man or a woman, the planktonese in her saliva entered their blood stream and sought out their nodal filaments, and she drew nourishment from that, terabytes and petabytes of memories, dreams, recall perfect and imperfect, knowledge, a sort of being. She had been human but she had been changed, she was part-Other, and it seemed to her then that she felt them, flittering close by, watching her, these strange, alien intelligences in the invisible machines that were all around her, that surrounded and engulfed the world.

  There!

  She rose above Central Station, below her a sharp, clear cuboid blackness, a thing defined in both the physical and the virtual. She hovered above it, it suspended her. On Level Three of Central Station she saw a shape that was, like herself, both real and virtual. A robotnik, she thought, seeing that stiff gait, that way of moving

  An ident tag, bobbing at the edge of her consciousness: Motl.

  Forgetting him easily, she turned away. The . . . thing down below fascinated her. It called to her and repulsed her simultaneously. She wondered how long the hit of the drug would last. What had Boris given her? she thought, uneasily. But the thoughts, slippery as fish, would not stay, and her mind was a brook, connecting to a vast river. She flowed like water.

  Motl pushed past the startled human operator, a local boy, a Chong or a Chow or a Cohen, Motl couldn’t quite remember at that point. The boy said, “Hey, wait, what are you—” but Motl ignored him and ripped open an empty pod.

  “Motl, man! You can’t—”

  Motl stuck his hands into the delicate membrane of the pod. Cables moved like fronds there. Motl had seen Isobel’s body: gamers needed that extra bit of immediacy, of access. Isobel’s sockets dotted her body, like buttons on a suit. Motl had held his breath when he first saw her naked. His metal fingers traced the outline connecting every delicate socket hole. It formed a virtual mesh around her body that, once she was inside a pod, covered her completely. “Let me be,” he said to the boy; and he hooked himself in.

  With each season a new god appeared in the streets and alleyways of Central Station. They appeared without pomp and without ceremony; they appeared, almost, on the sly.

  Not this one.

  This one slowly took shape, out of scrap metal and old, ageless plastic. It grew out of adaptoplant seeds that saw organic shapes form with impossible speed and sprout upwards, this modern, living, networked statue rising before the doors of the space port. Eliezer the god artist worked with hands and mind, and as he worked he sang.

  Word spread. A group of Na Nachs from Tel Aviv, that city of the Jews, came, and began to dance around the sculpture to the beat of a bass drum, shaking their black-clad heads, their long, curly peyes moving as they joyfully hummed and sang their sacred mantra, Na Nach Nachma Nachman Me’uman, over and over, and the robo-priest, R. Brother Patch-It, who stood nearby, was startled to join them, dancing awkwardly, metal body shining in the light of the setting sun.

  Tea was served in small glasses, hot and sweet, served black, not in the manner of the barbarous Anglos; and Miriam met Boris under the awnings of a fruit juice seller. “Carmel is in the god,” he said; and he said no more. Miriam sighed, and but she let it go. Sometimes she wished Boris was the same long-limbed, awkward boy she had known, when things had been less complicated. But that was long ago; and the woman she had become knew relationships were seldom simple.

  The god artist worked, and the god took shape under his calloused hands, a thing as abstract as any religion. It rose out of the ground, larger than any other god seen before in the station, and its vibrations and its power could be felt by all in the digitality.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” a policeman said. “What do we have here, then?”—or something to that effect, based on the obsolete protocols of long-dead narrative writers. No one wanted the police to be truly sentient; and so they compromised, with crude mechanicals, who humans found, somehow, more reassuring. The policeman’s light went on and off. A small siren, like a growl, rose in its plastic belly. “You can’t build this thing here, mate,” it said. “Trans-city ordnance—” and it recited a long string of numbers that meant nothing to anyone; not even to itself.

  “I don’t know what you hope to achieve,” Miriam said. An argument was breaking out between the police-bots and some of the spectators. There was a smell of incense in the air. The Na Nachs danced and their beat grew stronger. The robo-priest, coming out of a seeming trance, went and stood beside Miriam, its face placid. “Miriam,” it said, politely. “Boris.”

  “I think she’s here for a reason,” Boris said, after a perfunctory nod to the robo-priest. “I think the Others let her in. I think it’s to do with the children. I don’t know, Miriam. I think they used me, when I was working in the birthing labs. I think they changed the codes, the foetuses, for their own purposes. And I think they need Carmel.”

  It was one of his longest speeches. Miriam said, “What for?”

  “To activate new sequences,” Boris said. Hesitated. “The children are not, not entirely—”

  “Human?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s human?” Miriam said—demanded. “They’re children, Boris. For all that you birthed them, for all the designer care and the fluids and getting your hands dirty, you never understood that. They’re children, first and foremost. And for all that you brought them into the world, you were never a parent.”

  “Miriam—”

  “No,” she said, flaring. “Don’t take that tone, Boris. Not with me.”

  The robo-priest looked between them, and tactfully moved away. The argument between the police-bots and the spectators was growing more heated. Old man Eliezer, oblivious, kept chanting, and building.

  Carmel fell into the black cuboid.

 
; She woke up gasping for air, thinking for a moment she was back in the small room in Central Station, and that the drug had worn off.

  But the view around her was nothing like Central Station’s.

  For a moment, she panicked.

  Three suns rose in the sky above. The clash of colours was intense, blues and greens and reds transfused the world, and on the horizon she could see stars, and a black hole ringed by habitats.

  She was standing high above the port, looking down at the impossible city. Aliens thronged the streets. Hovercars and flying humans filled the sky. Transport ships immense like moons rose in nearby space.

  Orlov Port, Delta Quadrant, Guilds of Ashkelon universe.

  That black hole visible by the nebula of galactic dust and habitats around it was a gamesworld singularity, a wormhole jump impossible in the real world. Carmel knew the sight of it, intimately.

  She had earned the money to escape home by working in Orlov Port, a girly-girl like St. C’Mell, but she had not been back since.

  It was dangerous to be strigoi and enter the gamesworlds.

  But the scent of data was everywhere. Her new senses felt overwhelmed by it.

  She had not experienced this before the change. Then, a base human, she saw things as they were presented, a sensory matrix fed into the sleeping form in the surf-pod. As strigoi, though. . . .

  As strigoi she felt the world around her. It was filled with the toktok blong narawan, the Conversation of Others. Sys-Gods, they were called in the GoA. She could see the numerical pattern of the suns’ interlacing rays, feel the pull of that singularity on the horizon, the mathematical equations that controlled gravity, the graphic vectors of moving, impossible ships. Her mouth filled with saliva. Raw data, and humans masquerading as aliens, Others masquerading as humans, were all around her.

  What was she doing here?

  She vaguely remembered a room, a man standing over her with a needle in his hand. But it was fading, lost in the data overload.

  She wanted to get out. But the hunger was in her and, almost without conscious decision, she found herself moving, away from the large panoramic window, down the escalators, down to street level, a gamesworld imitation of the space port her body was currently inhabiting back in Universe-One. Outside, the light of suns warmed her face. A tentacle-fetishist rubbed against her as it passed. Port Orlov was a mercantile centre, a hundred guilds both large and small intersected here, you could hire out on a ship here, pirates, privateers, navy, military, exploration, there were treasures out in the GoA: ancient, vanished races, mysterious ruins, planetary systems no one’d ever seen, peopled only by NPCs.