by Adam Roberts
‘I really,’ said Nemo, his annoyance shifting into a kind of desperate pleading, ‘I really don’t understand. Can you just tell me what is going on? What are you, anyway?’
‘What am I?’ said the Orifice pleasantly. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think you’re the sort of person who’ll never answer a question with an answer when they can answer it with another question.’
She nodded at this. ‘And?’
‘I think you’re a program. Not a person, one of the EMIs.’
‘Nearly right,’ said the Orifice, still smiling. ‘I straddle the two worlds, if you like. I’m the link, the opening through which each can reach each.’
‘Right,’ said Nemo. After a pause, he added, ‘Which means?’
‘Which means that I can help you. Do you want to know how to defeat the EMIs, to preserve Syon Lane?’
‘Obviously,’ said Nemo. ‘Although—’
‘Although?’
‘Well, whilst I’m obviously keen to, you know, what you said. Help humanity win the war and all that. But at the same time—’
The Orifice smiled a Gioconda smile. Or, to be precise, it was a slightly more predatory expression. More anaconda than Gioconda. ‘What?’
‘Well, obviously it’d be a good thing if . . . defeating the EMIs and so on. But I can’t say that I’m really in this for military reasons. I’m more concerned with, well, you know.’
‘Thinity.’
‘Yes, Thinity.’
‘I see,’ said the Orifice benignly.
‘Only,’ said Nemo, hope spurting in his heart and giving his words a wheedling, slightly desperate edge, ‘only, if you meant what you said about wanting to help me . . .’
She was looking away. Kato, behind them both, was getting slowly to his feet. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can help you, Nemo. You are in love with Thinity. That is, in itself, a significant thing. Yet she does not love you. It is a dilemma. Only one person can solve this dilemma.’
‘Who? Who’s the one person?’
‘Why, the person who designed the McAtrix. The Designer. You must go and see him.’
‘And how will I find him?’
‘You need the device.’
‘Device?’ Nemo pressed. ‘What device?’
‘A device with which you can plot your path to the Designer,’ she replied simply. ‘The device of plot. This device is currently in the ownership of a very old, very powerful program called the Frurnchman. He has been inside the McAtrix for an awfully long time. Longer than any of us.’
‘And where does he live?’
‘In the EMI tower. Your friends know where that is. Once you have located the device, you will be able to confront the Designer.’
‘And that will win me Thinity?’
‘It could,’ she said. ‘Of course, it’s a zero sum thing. Thinity must die for Thinity to live. She must pass away for you to win her.’
‘Aoow,’ Nemo whined, high-pitched. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Is it another of your Macbethy prophecy things? Thinity must pass away for me to win Thinity – can’t you be more precise than that? Am I going to get her or not?’
‘Sorry kiddo,’ she said. She patted his knee.
‘I love her,’ Nemo blurted, tears surprising his eyes and growing sticky like runny eggs on his hot cheeks. ‘I really love her! I can’t bear it! I want her so much . . .’
But the Orifice was getting creakily to her feet. Kato had opened the fire escape and she was shuffling towards it. ‘Time for me to go. You can never see past the prophecies you don’t understand.’
‘Well of course you can’t,’ said Nemo, jumping to his feet and rubbing his face with the cuff of his jacket. ‘That goes without saying. Why not give me a prophecy I do understand? Then I could see past the prophecy and know what’s going to happen.’
The Orifice paused on the threshold of the open door and looked back at Nemo. ‘Next time you’re in the real world, take a good look.’
‘A good look at what?’ Nemo snapped in a crotchety-adolescent tone of voice, tears hemming his words.
‘I don’t know. The sky. The sun. Just take a good look around. The answers are there, if you look. It’s the obvious stuff, the stuff you’re not even noticing.’
And she stepped inside, and was gone.
(8-|)=[
The door clicked shut.
For long minutes Nemo simply stood, gathering himself. The crying thing had shaken him, and it took a while to retrieve his composure. After his breathing had returned to normal, and his eyes had cooled, Nemo realised that he didn’t know how to get out of the McAtrix. He had, he knew, to go back through the same node through which he had entered; but he had no idea where that was, in relation to his present location. ‘I should,’ he said, ‘have gone through the Mr Benn door with those two.’
But it was too late to worry about that now.
‘What to do?’ Nemo wondered aloud. He looked around for a phone, although he wasn’t sure whom he might call. There was a rustle in the air as the flock of pigeons that had been strutting around the yard bickered into flight; and through the mess and struggle of wings Nemo saw a gent striding purposefully towards him.
‘Mr Everyman,’ boomed the gent. ‘We meet again.’
‘Oh,’ said Nemo, his stomach fluttery, ‘oh blimey O’Reilly.’
‘You are an elusive individual, Mr Everyman. But I am nothing if not persistent.’
Nemo’s heart was staggering in his chest like a lamb’s first efforts at walking. He tried to steel himself. It’s OK, he thought. I’ve been uploaded with more than dance now. I can fight, albeit at a rudimentary level. The thing to do, he addressed himself, is to take the initiative. But this is a gent! he countered internally. I can’t fight a gent. I’ve only been uploaded with basic primary-level playground fighting. But, he insisted, this is a playground. As this internal dialogue batted back and forth across the lobes of his brain, Nemo stood indecisively biting his lip. Go on, go for him, said one internal voice. Run for it, counselled the other. Oh for crying out loud, came a third voice. Will you two stop arguing?
A pigeon flapped across the yard, nearly collided with the gent, lurched in midair and careered towards Nemo. He reflexly put up a hand to defend himself and the pigeon flapped spastically in front of his face, before swivelling in the air again and flying straight up with strong strokes. Nemo had a vivid afterimage of thrashing wings, of reptilian feet hanging in flight, of blank eyes, but also of the prism light tangled in the creature’s breast feathers.
‘Mr Everyman,’ the gent was saying. ‘This charade has gone on long enough. It is time to draw it to an end.’
Nemo made his decision.
He leapt forward and ran straight at the gent, screaming. ‘Yaaaaah!’ he cried. And saw a momentary look of surprise twist almost to fear on the gent’s face. Then Nemo shouldered into him, knocking him down. Nemo leapt over the supine gent and carried on running. He couldn’t help himself: now he was going ‘Woo!-woo!’ and running around the perimeter of the playground.
The gent got quickly to his feet.
Nemo forced himself to stop running, and to stop whooping. But his feet felt alive. He slow-shoe shuffled a couple of steps, and then began the beguine. ‘Yaah!’ he called again in derision.
‘You leave me no option,’ said the gent severely.
He reached up with both hands, took hold of the top of his top hat and pulled down. The barrel of the hat sank down, like a piston. The gent released it and it popped up again.
Nemo, tap-dancing on the spot, watching with interest.
There was a pop, and a sudden rush of wind, and a second, identical gent was standing next to the first. The only difference between this simulacrum and the original was a blue band around the top hat, upon which was written the legend ‘CTRL-P’. Nemo didn’t have time to wonder what this device signified, because both gents were pulling down the barrels of their hats and, with double pop and a larger swirl of air, two mo
re gents appeared.
The four turned themselves into eight.
The eight turned themselves into sixteen.
‘Wow,’ said Nemo, as the breeze died down again.
‘Mr Everyman,’ these sixteen gents said in unison. ‘Now it is time to give you a pasting.’
‘Pasting,’ said Nemo. ‘Oh.’
The original gent, the only one whose top hat was not adorned with a CTRL-P band, stepped to the front. He raised his arm. ‘On my command,’ he shouted, ‘we will bundle.’
The mass of gents tensed in readiness.
‘Bundle!’ yelled the first gent.
In an instant all the gents had leapt on top of Nemo. He was squashed to the ground under a heaving mass of bodies. It was, he reflected, only too accurate a symbol of his entire life. Everything was getting on top of him, both literally and metaphorically. Everything. His job was rubbish. His social life was nonexistent. Then Tori Amos got married to a sound engineer rather than to him (or even to no one, which would at least have allowed him still to dream). Then he discovered that his whole existence was an EMI-created sham, nothing more than a computer program. The upside there, of course, was that he had met Thinity: but – fate hurling elephant-sized chunks of misery down upon him from above – Thinity wanted nothing to do with him. And now he was being literally squashed to death by sixteen simulacra of police-program gents in top hats and frock coats. It was, he thought, bitterly ironic. Possibly ironic, if he’d been able to pinpoint what the irony was, precisely. Or, indeed, if he’d had a clear notion in his head of what irony was, exactly, and the ways it differed from sarcasm, metaphor and litotes.
He couldn’t breathe.
‘Mr Everyman,’ said sixteen identical gents simultaneously, above him and all around. ‘We are the force of inevitability, and we are about to squash you like a bug.’
‘Great,’ gasped Nemo with compressed lungs. Things could hardly get any worse. He was about to die an ignominious death. He would never see Thinity again. It was unbearable.
But then, miraculously, he felt the pressure ease from his squashed body. There was a clatter as the pile sagged, and the gents fell to the floor. But Nemo was getting to his feet, rising through the very bodies of his enemies. It was a strange thing: his viewpoint passed through a confusion of inner and outer, the black cloth of the gents’ clothing, the shadowy red and mauve of inner organs where blood pulsed and swirled, the dense ivory-coloured bars of bones, all panning down through Nemo’s vision as he stood up. The pile of gents was taller than he, so for one disorienting moment when he stood upright he was faced with a dark blur. He moved a little to the right, into a vaguely lit spongy something. The gent whose inner organs he was seeing moved his head and called out: a flutter of teeth glinted, the intestinal curl of tongue muscle vividly red in naked light, darkened almost at once as the gent closed his mouth again.
Nemo took two long strides and was free of the whole heap of gentness.
He looked behind him at the struggling heap of now infuriated gents. They were disentangling themselves, with some awkwardness, from one another and looking angrily around. Nemo didn’t stop. His invisibility had not lasted very long the last time he had achieved it, and there were no guarantees it would last any longer this time. He hurried round them and walked straight through a brick wall, his sight blurring brown before being dazzled by interior striplights. He was in a well-lit school corridor, and he ran hurriedly down this and through a closed double door. Rows of schoolchildren in their tiny desks were bending their attention upon a teacher, who was writing something in chalk upon a blackboard. Hurrying past, Nemo caught a glimpse of this inscription. It was ‘WE ARE ALL HUMAN’. It was, Nemo thought, a strange thing to write on a classroom blackboard. But he couldn’t loiter.
With a strobing flicker of dark and light Nemo passed through the exterior wall and on to a small patch of lawn. What should he do? Where to go? It was hopeless. This No One invisibility, walk-through-solid-objects business was good for avoiding gents, sure: but could he turn it off? How would he eat? If he gobbled a scone would it drop straight to the floor? How could he even pick it up to eat it?
He was just beginning to panic when he heard a deep-thrumming voice behind him. ‘Hello, Nemo.’ It was Smurpheus.
Chapter 3
The Frurnchman
‘It wasn’t easy to track you,’ Smurpheus told him as he led him back to the new portal he had created two blocks from the school. ‘The Orifice’s assistant led you many miles away from your original entry point. But luckily, even though the gents cannot see you, we can.’
‘They jumped on top of me,’ said Nemo, gasping. ‘Dozens of them. They pulled down on their hats, and somehow—’
‘Hats?’ queried Smurpheus. ‘They wear no hats. That is simply the shape and colour of the tops of their heads.’
This pulled Nemo up short. ‘You’re kidding,’ he said. ‘That’s pretty strange.’
‘It is how the Designer designed them. What you took for hats are in fact large buttons, to be depressed for the reason you saw. But there is no time to loiter here: we must return to the Jeroboam.’
Nemo picked up the phone and left the McAtrix.
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Nemo, getting up from the chair, ‘is how I don’t just fall through the floor. When I become the No One, I mean. It seems I can pass through everything else.’
‘Because of who you are,’ said Smurpheus, doing up his trousers and simultaneously slipping into one of his pompously vatic moods. ‘You are the No One. The McAtrix, built upon celebrity and consumption, does not recognise you; the hollow people, the hollow buildings—’
‘—the hollow Peugeots,’ Nemo interjected, nodding.
‘But the earth!’ Smurpheus boomed, ‘Is! Not! Hollow! It supports all life, even the pure No One life you have achieved. It supported life for millions before celebrity, logos and consumerism spread its plague through humanity.’
‘Right,’ said Nemo. ‘OK. Great. Fantastic. That makes it a lot clearer. Although I suppose, if I’m being honest,’ he began to add, as his natural urge to gabble started to kick in, ‘I can’t say I entirely follow the logic. If that were the case, I should surely sink through the pavement, you know? Go at least ankle deep. But I don’t, at all. It’s as if I’m the No One horizontally but not vertically.’
‘I have already explained,’ said Smurpheus, looking haughty.
‘But I’m just thinking about your explanation,’ said Nemo. ‘And I’m not sure it makes sense. The earth? The earth isn’t any more real than anywhere else inside the McAtrix, is it? I mean, it’s all false, all illusion.’
‘All right then, Mr I-suddenly-know-everything-about-the-McAtrix,’ snapped Smurpheus, giving up a good proportion of his gravitas in order the more effectively to express his annoyance. ‘How do you explain it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nemo defensively. ‘Maybe if I knew more about the rationale behind the whole No One thing. Is it something programmed? Because if so, it must be that whoever programmed it wants me to be able to pass through walls but not through the ground, or at least—’
Thinity had come into the room. Nemo’s words dried. He felt his face become a piece of sunset-based conceptual art.
‘Hi Nemo,’ she said, brightly.
Her words were like swords to him. ‘Hi,’ he mumbled in return, like a teenager. He turned his head away, as if her beauty were the glare of the sun and might damage his retinas.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nemo has encountered the Orifice,’ declared Smurpheus. ‘She has instructed us to seek the Frurnchman.’
‘He’s got a device,’ said Nemo, still looking at the wall. ‘Apparently.’
‘Using this device,’ boomed Smurpheus, ‘we can plot a path to the Designer himself.’
Thinity’s voice shifted into a more hushed, more awe-y tone. ‘The Designer? Nobody can access the Designer, surely. He is inaccessible.’
‘Nemo can,�
� said Smurpheus confidently.
‘This is so great,’ Thinity said. ‘If you can get to the Designer . . .’
‘. . . you can end this war,’ Smurpheus said. ‘Exactly.’
‘Victory!’ said Thinity.
‘I’ll do my best,’ Nemo mumbled. ‘But I don’t know how I’ll be able to end the war all by myself.’
‘If you can get us into the Designer’s office,’ said Smurpheus, ‘Thinity and I will . . . persuade him . . . to call off his SQUIDS. Now let us sleep, and gather our energies. When we awake, we will go back into the McAtrix – and end this war finally and for all time.’
The others settled into their cubbyholes; except for Tonkatoi, who was steering the train and keeping a lookout for SQUIDS. But Nemo, though he was tired, could not sleep. His head was racing faster than the submatrain in which he sat, staring through the windows.
The train rattled along the District Line, passing in and out of tunnels. Once again, the real sky was sunset red. It always seemed to be sunset in the real world, Nemo thought idly. Always a fat red sun sitting on the horizon. Always the sky apricot and plum and tomato, with orange clouds like rags. It was certainly beautiful. He wondered whether there was some time dilation effect of being inside the McAtrix that meant he always seemed to emerge at dusk.
But that wasn’t what his mind was truly concerned about. He could only think of Thinity, of how much he loved her, and how hopeless his love was. Some part of his mind offered optimism, like a faded bunch of flowers: Maybe, if you lead them to the Designer and they end the war . . . maybe she’ll be so impressed with you that . . . maybe she’ll be so grateful for what you’ve done that . . .
But he knew it didn’t work like that. Thinity simply didn’t feel anything for him. That was all there was to it. What was it the Orifice had said? Nemo would have to lose Thinity to gain Thinity. But he couldn’t work out what that meant in real terms. But the first part, the losing Thinity part, chimed real enough in his heart.