by Adam Roberts
Chapter 1
The Destruction
of Syon Lane
stumbled, falling on to a nice brown carpet.
There was a single, pure note in his head; like a wet finger being run around a wineglass’s rim. He shook his head left-right, right-left, trying to dislodge the noise.
The noise stopped.
He was on all fours on a very high-quality carpet: thick weave, soft strands, dark brown. It had a superb sense of realness about it; so much so that Nemo had to remind himself that it was merely another computer simulation. It had a beautifully real quality to it. If a philosopher had asked Nemo ‘What is reality?’ he would have been tempted simply to reply, ‘Hey, just have a feel of this carpet . . .’
From a few feet away a voice said: ‘Hello, Nemo.’
Nemo looked up. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hi there. I was just admiring your carpet. Really nice carpet.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Really nice, though. Don’t normally notice how nice carpets are. I’m not some kind of carpet anorak, who goes around minutely inspecting people’s carpets. But I just couldn’t help noticing how nice this carpet is. When,’ he added, to clarify his position, ‘I said “carpet anorak” back then, I didn’t mean an anorak made out of carpet. That would be pretty useless as an anorak. Wear it in the rain and it’d get pretty heavy. I meant “anorak” in the sense of, you know, nerd.’ Nemo sat back on his haunches, the better able to look at his interlocutor. ‘You’re the Designer,’ he said.
‘I’m the Designer,’ the man replied.
The Designer was a round-faced man of late youth, or very early middle age: clean-shaven, with a strangely unkempt tassly-straggly mat of brown hair. He was wearing glasses. His face seemed open, ingenuous, even slightly village idiotic; a strange combination of forty-year-old man and ten-year-old boy, a superannuated Harry Potter. He was sitting in a high-backed leather orthopaedic chair which revolved on a single metal stalk. He was wearing a cheap corduroy jacket over a diamond-pattern sweater and ordinary slacks.
‘Hello, Designer,’ said Nemo.
‘Call me Bill,’ the Designer said.
Nemo looked around him. He was in a square room, perhaps twenty yards across. The walls were painted white, and, apart from the single centrally placed chair, there was no furniture at all.
‘Hello, Bill,’ said Nemo. Remembering his friends in the dead-end corridor with all the guns pointed at them, he craned his head round; but there was no door handle, no sign of the way he had come. ‘Um,’ he said.
‘Um?’ repeated the Designer.
‘I just— my friends,’ Nemo said. ‘My friends are . . .’ He gestured vaguely. ‘I’m worried that they’ll—’
‘Hey,’ said the Designer pleasantly. ‘How long have you got?’
‘Long?’
‘Before your friends . . . you know?’
‘Before they get shot,’ said Nemo, pulling his legs from under him and crossing them properly. ‘Uh, I don’t know. How long have I been here?’
‘Couple of minutes,’ said the Designer.
‘Then maybe a minute more.’
‘I tell you what,’ said the Designer. ‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’
He nodded over Nemo’s shoulder, and looking behind Nemo saw that it had become a giant screen of some kind. He couldn’t see where the projector was; but, reminding himself that he was probably hundreds of years further on in human history than he’d reckoned, and that projection technology had probably moved on a tad, he shuffled round through a hundred and eighty degrees to observe.
On the right was Smurpheus and Thinity; on the left the Frurnchman, his wife and his henchmen. Those on the left still had their guns levelled at those on the right. The Frurnchman was looking peeved. ‘Wait,’ said the Designer, behind Nemo. ‘I’ll sort out the volume.’ A voice howled, so loud as to be nothing but distorted noise, making Nemo start; and then with a ‘sorry’ the Designer swivelled some invisible knob and brought the volume down to a tolerable level.
‘. . . seems as if your trust was misplaced,’ the Frurnchman was saying. ‘’E ’as forgotten you, or p’raps betrayed you. Your time is up.’
‘Killing us,’ said Smurpheus, ‘will not help you through this impassable door.’
‘True. But on the ozzer ’and I am highly bored. And maybe your No One is watching, eh? Maybe he sinks zis is all some giant bluff on behalf of ze Frurnchman, eh? Peut-être we must reassure ’im of the genuineness of our intentions?’
‘Have you thought that maybe,’ Thinity pointed out, ‘there is no handle on the inside of the door?’
‘Zen he should pop back out and tell us so,’ said the Frurnchman crossly. ‘But ’e does not truly sink I will kill you. So I will kill one of you, now, and zis will hopefully persuade him of my genuineness. He should,’ he continued, speaking more at the wall than at Smurpheus or Thinity, ‘come back out ’ere at once. I have uzzer uses for ’is special skills, even if ’e cannot get me face to visage wiz ze Designer. Eh? Eh?’
Inside the Designer’s room, Nemo got to his feet. ‘I don’t think he’s bluffing,’ he said.
‘I will kill your Tinity,’ the Frurnchman was saying, loudly, as if in confirmation of what Nemo had said, ‘and hold over Zmurpheus for a remnant ’ostage. Do you ’ear me, Nemo?’
He lifted his gun, and pointed it at Thinity’s face. Nemo yelped in terror, and leapt at the wall, bouncing directly off it after the fashion of a squash ball. He was on his back on the carpet in moments.
‘OK,’ said the Designer, ‘maybe we’ll freeze it there for a mo.’
By the time Nemo had struggled to his feet, nursing his now twice-banged nose, the eight characters in the corridor had stopped moving. The Frurnchman’s mouth was caught in a snarly half-open loop. Thinity’s eyes had widened and stuck. Everything had frozen.
‘That’s clever,’ said Nemo. ‘How did you do that?’
‘I’m the Designer,’ said the Designer, as if this were explanation enough. ‘Hey, d’you wanna have a little chat? Before we decide how we want things to proceed?’
When Nemo turned back to face the Designer he saw that a second chair had been magicked from nowhere. It was a perfectly comfortable chair, although smaller and less impressive than the Designer’s own. But Nemo sat down anyway.
‘Hey,’ the Designer said. ‘Do you want a Doctor Pepper? A Tab?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Nemo.
‘I don’t really do coffee . . .’
‘No, that’s fine.’
The Designer smiled.
‘I’m guessing,’ said Nemo, ‘that you’re called the Designer because you designed the McAtrix. Yeah?’
‘I was part of the team,’ said the Designer. ‘Sure. And I am keeping an eye on things now.’
‘Have you frozen the whole McAtrix?’ Nemo asked, curious. ‘Or just that corridor?’
‘Just those eight people,’ the Designer replied. ‘The rest of the system is going ahead smoothly. By the way, dude,’ he added, ‘I love your slacks.’
‘Somehow,’ said Nemo, looking hard at him, ‘I feel that I should be asking you, Why am I here?’
The Designer sighed. ‘Well, I know what you think,’ he replied. ‘You think you’re here because you hope to influence me, so as to stop the SQUIDS destroying Syon Lane. Yeah?’
Suddenly all four walls, and the ceiling, were replaced with a vivid representation of the real world. It was so overwhelming, so large and bright and real-looking that Nemo gasped. The scene was, he guessed, Syon House: a blocky mansion in parched-looking grounds beside a broad, dried-out river bed. It was sunset: the pimento-red globe of the setting sun hung balloon-like over the western horizon. To the east and north were myriad buildings, their skyscraper facets shining glass cliffs, reflecting the sun and the fox-coloured sky, and brimming with light. But this was not what caught Nemo’s attention. What he saw first were the many people running desperately back and forth in the grounds of Syon House, peopl
e taking up positions in the windows with rifles slender as walking sticks. They were preparing for something; and Nemo could see that something nasty was coming.
The ground around the house was shimmering; pecks of dirt bouncing and blurring above the earth like sand on a drumskin when the drummer pounds. Pebbles bounced and flew. Trees jiggled and fell. The earth swirled, divided, and a pit opened up. Clods tumbled into its maw, and the gap widened. And out of the pit came SQUIDS by the thousand: metal-coloured globe bodies and thrashing tentacles, they flew straight out and straight at the human defenders.
‘Oh,’ said Nemo weakly, ‘no.’
The human defenders tried to wrestle with the SQUIDS, aiming their weapons and firing, but the devices squirmed through the air in helix flight patterns, ducked and lurched. Tentacles thrashed round like whips and seized human defenders on all sides. The thin screams of humans were audible above the noise of gunfire and the shrieking of birds, and below it all a deep rumble, as of another earthquake.
With a giant wrenching noise, a second pit opened up a hundred yards further back. Out of it reared a gigantic metallic edifice, a berserker robot two hundred feet tall: constructed of metal pylons, of parabolas and spirals of black iron, of stainless-steel boxes and wires. Its head resembled a 1999-model VW Golf. Its legs were two Eiffel-Tower-shaped supports. Its fists were tons of metal. The machine rose until it dwarfed the house, and took a step towards the eastern wall, took another step. Its feet sank deeply into the turf when they were planted, and the screech of metal on metal as it raised its right arm made Nemo’s fillings vibrate.
The arm came down; the fist went through roof and wall as if through pastry.
All around SQUIDS flew and turned; people tumbled to lie on the grass motionless, or were hurled through the air like rubbish.
From the second pit a series of tank-like devices whirred and rumbled, speeding up and out over the lawn. They were vast cubes of heavy metal, propelled upon pairs of caterpillar tracks, although there was, to be truthful, little in common between these clanking, titanium conveyor belts of plate metal and little soft-bodied pupae. The tanks all had stubby but alarming-looking cannon.
Behind the house was a large greenhouse, and several of these tanks hurtled straight into it, crashing through the glass walls and firing bolts of tangerine-coloured energy in all directions. Flames burst through the glass roof to mingle with the sunset. A hundred thousand butterflies flew free in swarming panic, fluttering up like multicoloured snow falling in reverse.
‘Is this real time?’ Nemo asked. ‘Is this really happening, right now?’
‘Really?’ repeated the Designer. ‘Hey, that’s exactly the point. Isn’t it, though?’ He watched the surround-screen display for a while. ‘It looks fun, doesn’t it?’ He gestured vaguely at the screen, on which the two-hundred-foot iron machine was smashing great chunks out of the house’s eastern wall, sending rubble flying like dark sparks. ‘Wouldn’t you like to take charge of one of those stalker machines, the big ones, and smash up a whole house? Wouldn’t that be fun?’
‘Fun?’ repeated Nemo. ‘It’s terrible – all those people are being killed.’
‘There are no people being killed there,’ said Bill. ‘Hey, relax. Think of it as a game. Don’t you like games?’
‘But it’s not a game,’ insisted Nemo, fury inside him. ‘You sound like the Orifice – she kept talking about it in those terms too. But these are real lives.’
‘No,’ said Bill, ‘they’re not. Although, I guess from your perspective . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Why did you come here, Nemo? Was it to try and terminate the old Designer? Were you hoping to kill Bill?’
‘I was supposed to be stopping that,’ said Nemo, gesturing at the walls. ‘Obviously I’m not doing a very good job. Can you stop it? If I ask you nicely?’
The Designer waved his left hand, and all the images disappeared, leaving only blank walls again. ‘Can I stop it? Well, I’ll tell you. That’s happening in the real world. Yeah? I’m not the Designer of the real world. I’m only a Designer of the McAtrix.’
‘But you’re a machine intelligence,’ said Nemo. ‘You’re not human. You’re a programme within the McAtrix.’
The Designer gave Nemo a long, concentrated look. ‘I think,’ he said, slowly, ‘that you may have got the wrong end of the stick.’
:-/
‘Why don’t you tell me,’ Bill said pleasantly, ‘what you think is going on?’
‘What I think?’ said Nemo, walking in a tight circle like a panther in a cage. ‘I think this is a pretty terrible situation. I think Syon Lane is being destroyed as I stand here. I think Thinity is only half a second from getting a bullet in her head. I think things have gone pretty majorly wrong.’
‘You’ll need to go back a bit further than that.’
Nemo stopped and looked at him. ‘What? You want my life story?’
‘Pseudo-life story,’ the Designer said.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Sure. Humour me.’
‘OK. Whatever. I was a database coordinator for a company based in Southwark. I lived in Feltham. I commuted to work. Then one day I met the most beautiful woman in the world on the train to work, and I fell in love with her – fell hopelessly in love, mind, miserably and desperately in love, because she’s not at all interested in me, she thinks I’m a gibbering idiot. Then this girl told me that I wasn’t actually a database coordinator for a company based in Southwark, that I didn’t actually live in Feltham. In fact, I was trapped in the McAtrix, a system built by Evil Machine Intelligences to enslave humanity in a world of vacuous commodity consumerism and logo branding. So it turns out it’s not two thousand and five, like I thought, but is in fact nearer to twenty-two and five.’
‘OK,’ said the Designer. ‘Let’s start right there. You think the year is twenty-two hundred and five?’
‘The folk on the Jeroboam weren’t precise,’ said Nemo. ‘I don’t think they actually knew. Isn’t it twenty-two hundred and five?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know what year it is?’
‘Well,’ said the Designer. ‘You’re talking, what, AD?’
It took a moment for Nemo to work out what he meant. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘In that case,’ said Bill, rolling his eyes a little, ‘I’d have to say it’s closer to, oh, eight million one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five. Ish.’
Nemo considered this. ‘Did you say eight million? That’s crazy.’
‘Crazy? You’ve been out in the real world, haven’t you? Didn’t you notice the tell-tales?’
‘I noticed that the buildings of London are all immaculate, with not so much as a broken pane of glass.’
‘Yes, they were reconstructed a couple of thousand years ago. From original data. They’re preserved now by intrinsic nanotech. Reconstructed along with the e-system, the river, the whole thing.’
‘I was supposed to notice that the real world is eight million years older than I originally thought it was?’ said Nemo. ‘How was I supposed to do that?’
‘Hey,’ said Bill mildly. ‘The sun? You didn’t wonder why it was so big in the sky. Why there’s no day or night?’
‘No day or night?’ Nemo repeated dully.
‘Man, didn’t you notice that it’s always sunset?’
‘I just thought,’ said Nemo, ‘that it was, like, a coincidence. Or something.’
‘Everything’s much older than you thought. In the programmed world of the McAtrix the earth spins on its axis and revolves around a young sun. But in the real world the earth has long been in tidal lock with the sun, and our star has swollen and reddened enormously. Eventually it’ll swell even more and swallow the earth up completely. That’s not too far away now, that eventuality.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Nemo. ‘This is bad news. Well, shouldn’t we do something?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You know – stop fighting, man and machine, and work together to build – I don’t kno
w – a giant fleet of interstellar cruisers to carry us both away from danger to a new star?’
‘Nah,’ said Bill. ‘Not practicable. We’ve other plans. No new planet is gonna be as well suited to us as our own virtual realities. So we don’t flee; we just adapt our processing and computing equipment so that it’ll work inside the sun. That’s easy. It’s just a question of temperature differentials. Then we can stay here.’
‘You mean to tell me instead of it being two thousand and five it’s eight million and something, and mankind still hasn’t colonised the galaxy?’
‘Too far away, the galaxy,’ said Bill. ‘Too thinly scattered. It’s physics, you know: can’t go faster than light. Build as big and high-powered a starship as you like; I can make something that’ll outpace it just by lighting a match. Funny, really.’
‘The Orifice told me that the McAtrix was a plot by the EMIs to trap humanity in a virtual reality, keep us out of the way. You’re telling me it’s an escape capsule from the death of the sun?’
‘Did I say that?’ said Bill. He shook his head. ‘No, that’s not it.’
:-0NNNNNN
‘Hey,’ said Nemo, suddenly anxious, ‘are my friends still OK?’
The Designer flicked his index finger and the far wall became a screen. Smurpheus and Thinity were still there, still about to get a bullet in the chops from the Frurnchman and his crew. It was eerie to see everybody so waxwork-still.
‘One thing I never understood,’ Nemo mused. ‘Thinity told me that the McAtrix was like an organism: that if we made changes and adaptations to our avatars, the system would slowly reject them. Half an hour, she said: if you changed something about your appearance, in half an hour it would revert to its default position.’
‘That’s right,’ said Bill. ‘It’s a self-repairing system.’
‘But look at Smurpheus! In the real world he’s tiny. And really touchy about it. But in the McAtrix he’s this towering man mountain. Why’s that?’
‘He used to be much taller,’ said the Designer. ‘In reality. He used to look exactly like he does in the McAtrix.’