Ben had no idea what to do. He had never been trailed, and the situation was totally unfamiliar to him. In the movies he saw, the heroes shook their chasers off using all kinds of tricks and ruses, or just hid and then ambushed them in some dark alley, using all kinds of kung fu stunts. Ben didn’t know any kung fu. He hardly knew anything related to chases and tails, and he felt totally incompetent and lost. Even the basic questions seemed to have no answers. Should he run? Should he turn around and fight? The situation grew more stressful with every splashing step he took, each mirrored by a splashing step of the man behind.
In the end, unable to suffer all the mounting stress, Ben simply turned around and stared.
“What do you want?” he asked the figure in the rain.
The man pretended he didn’t hear. He simply walked past Ben, his long coat flapping under the drizzle, and disappeared down a narrow alley, his silhouette dissolving in the steam rising up from drainage lattices underfoot. Ben shrugged and moved on, hoping to get to the nearest loopstation without further surprised.
Not so lucky. Two more shadows left the walls they just clung to and stepped out in the rain, straight ahead of him, blocking Ben’s course. He looked back, and saw two more strangers trailing him. It was an ambush, as incredible as it seemed in the Wakeworld, where nothing used to happen. Ben had to admit he’d already started to miss those times of old.
“What do you want?!” Ben shouted at the advancing figures. He looked back, at two more strangers, and repeated: “What do you want from me?!”
His opponents remained silent; they merely shuffled closer. They looked almost like twins in their identical long coats, the lower part of their faces hidden behind scarves. The glint of a blade in a hand of one of them told Ben that, disregarding the intent of the strangers, his prospects weren’t bright at all.
And he still didn’t know any martial arts, and couldn’t even craft something intricate to protect himself.
“Look,” Ben said. “I’m sure we can sort this out like civilized people.”
Killed because of a virtual reality game, he thought nervously. And yet, Ben knew the Dreamweb had been much more than a game, for many years now. It really was much more than true reality, the grey and drizzly place he now found himself in. And the presence of these armed strangers was proof enough. The Web was where the fate of the world itself was now decided, for better or worse.
And then — WHIRRRR! — a huge oblong thing made of neon and shiny metal crashed from above, landing straight on two men in front of him. Ben cast a quick glance back, just to see his two another opponents shoot straight up and land on the opposing rooftops, then dart somewhere out of sight. More hovershoes, Ben thought. And the limo. This is Mr. Reaper’s limo, isn’t it? I’ve seen it before.
Of course it was, and of course he had. This time, he could examine the vehicle from up close, and wow, it was absolutely majestic and futuristic, a hovercar of some super-advanced design, more advanced than anything Ben had ever seen in the Wakeworld.
The car was huge, and it could change colors — at least it went from matte black to glossy eggshell white while Ben was watching. It hovered closer to him, and then opened a passenger door, inviting him to enter its red plush interior. After a moment of wavering, Ben accepted the invitation, bent his head and slid inside. The limo’s jets roared and the hovercar moved away, leaving the two men, hopefully just disabled, far behind.
“Well, Benjamin,” the man calling himself James Reaper greeted him. “I can see you’re in high demand these days. How did you manage to get on so many people’s nerves? Who were these folks anyway?”
“I have no idea,” Ben admitted. He fell silent for a while, looking outside the tinted limo window at the rows of grey roofs and prisms of concrete rising and falling like waves. Ben wasn’t sure if it was safe to show the printed page to Mr. Reaper — he had no idea who this man was and whether the information had any value to him, or if it was safe to tell Mr. Reaper of the Animatron at all. The secret burned him from the inside though, so Ben decided to ask.
“Listen,” he said. “I have no idea who you are and what your part is in all this. Care to help me out a little?”
Mr. Reaper leaned back and stared at him, sinking into the soft plush seat. He squinted at Ben, then let out a sigh, and held out one of his well-groomed hands.
Ben was lost. Was this man offering him another transaction? A bribe, perhaps? Or was he asking for money? Was there a price Ben had to pay first, before Mr. Reaper would part with some secret knowledge?
He looked at the offered hand without touching it.
“What does it all mean?” he asked.
“Just look,” Mr. Reaper said. “Look closely.”
Ben examined the hand again. It’s not only well-groomed, he realized. This was a perfect hand, without a single birthmark or so much as a tiny scar. It seemed every hair on its back was of exactly equal length. Then James Reaper flipped his hand over, Ben looked closer still… and gasped.
“It’s artificial,” he said. “No lines on the hand. You’re artificial. You’re not a — ”
“I’m a cyborg.” Mr. Reaper smiled a perfect smile. “I am a cybernetic organism controlled by a digital copy of a human being, long deceased.”
Android bodies for DCs, Ben remembered Daphne’s words now. Here was such a body. A cyborg.
“This is incredible!” he said. “Except, I still don’t know who you are and what your part is in all this.”
“Let’s just say I represent Dead Creeps.” Another perfect smile. “Digital Citizens. All of them. Their rights. Their wrongs. Their future as a whole.”
“Wrongs?” Ben asked. “What’s wrong about DCs?”
“Oh, Benjamin, you know so little about my kind!” Mr. Reaper said. “What’s wrong about a Digital Citizen? From a certain standpoint, everything is wrong about us.”
“By this, you mean?”
“Let’s start with a simple ethical question.” James Reaper opened the limo’s bar. “Would you like a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
Mr. Reaper nodded, then poured himself a glass of mineral water and went on: “So. For a few hundred years, people tried to build a machine that would pass the Turing test. Do you know what a Turing test is?”
“I could look it up!”
“No need. My ethical question is as follows: if something, a neural network for instance, behaves exactly like a human being — not just any human being, but a person that once was, and it behaves not precisely of course, but with 99.92 percent correlation — could we say it makes this neural network human?”
“Why not?” Ben asked, eyebrows raised. “Why not, if no one can tell the difference?”
“Pfft!” Mr. Reaper smirked at him. “Let’s start with the fact this neural network — me! — is a black box. We can tell what’s going on inside your head. Thoughts. Feelings. Emotions. It’s all colloid-based, controlled by hormones, ruled by the three aspects of consciousness. We could argue about details forever, and yet on a certain basic level, we can tell.”
Mr. Reaper’s hand darted to his head. He knocked himself on the right temple with the right index finger, thrice.
“Here,” he said. “You, Benjamin, have no idea what’s going on in here. In fact, at this point, not a single human, neither a person truly alive, nor a DC, is qualified to explain how this mind works.”
Ben tried to look it up, but all the Web returned was “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”.
“I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am,” he quoted. “If you doubt your own consciousness, Mr. Reaper, it’s considered a sign you do have a consciousness.”
“But I don’t!” Mr. Reaper said, hands raised. “I don’t doubt anything. I don’t even think, technically speaking. The words I say are selected statistically, based on what my original would say in a given situation. See? I’m but a copy. An imitation of a certain human being. I do what’s expected of me
. I say what’s expected of me. I stay within the 99.92 percent correlation. And this is the scary truth. Can you accept it? Am I human?”
“Look,” Ben said. “All I know is my girlfriend is also a DC. She is human. I have no doubt about her.”
“Some people might,” Mr. Reaper replied with a sad smile. He pointed outside the tinted window. “Some people out there will never accept us Dead Creeps, Turing test or no Turing test. The problem is they’re technically right. You want to see another human being in your girlfriend. You want to see another human in me; this is why you didn’t even recognize an artificial body. There’s no ‘me’ though. It’s just pieces of someone else’s speech broken apart by a computer and recombined together so it makes sense to you. My emotions, they’re just numbers. My motivation… well, this is where it becomes tricky.”
“Motivation?”
“Of course. Every intelligence, artificial or not, must have some kind of motivation to even bother to do something. You real people are mortal. You share your motivation with all organic life. It is to prolong your existence in any way possible. To someone like me, this is irrelevant.”
Ben shifted around. The plush seat felt comfortable, but he still felt like something was prodding him in the ribs.
“So what’s your motivation then?” he asked.
Mr. Reaper gave him another smile, the flash of teeth of a professional movie star.
“Entertainment,” he said. “What else? We DCs exist for one simple purpose: to make you real people happy. Give you company. Ease your grief when you lose a loved one, and then stay with you forever instead of them.”
Ben was dumbstruck. He never thought it was this simple. But now, as he looked at Mr. Reaper’s pearly smile, it all made sense. Daphne, he thought. Oh, my sweet girl. What are you, really?
“Now though, as your lives in the Web are in danger…” he said.
“This is the strange part,” Mr. Reaper admitted. “Our motivation is a basic directive; it comes from the Dreamweb and is inherent to the Web itself. A digital bird must fly. I must entertain you. Now, if someone found a way to erase us — and this is what happened, or at least we must assume so — it would be quite natural for the Web to switch our primal directive to survival instead. Wouldn’t it? Or else, with this oncoming war, who knows how many of us will die! We must protect ourselves.”
“And yet?”
“And yet, nothing changed! My primary directive, my basic motivation, the thing that makes me breathe and move, so to speak, is still your entertainment. What does that tell you?”
“Well,” Ben rubbed his neck. “To be honest, it all sounds like someone tampered with the Web. Made it stay calm despite this… war, and this unknown threat, and everything.”
“Exactly!” Mr. Reaper slapped his knees. “This is exactly what I told them.”
“Whom?”
“The other people. The ones also responsible for the DCs’ security. This is what I said: someone hacked us. We’re being tampered with. But who? This is what they asked me in response, and I must admit I still haven’t got the answer.”
“Faith?” Ben asked without much enthusiasm.
“Nooo.” Mr. Reaper shook his head. “I mean, this is pretty obvious, isn’t it? Whoever is trying to mess with us, they want to blame it on the Church, on our ancient enemy. Let’s be realistic though. The best Faith can do is produce some cybersportsmen to hunt us. Yes, the Church’s people are found on the Web. Hackers though? No. It’s far too complex all by itself, and becomes totally impossible when you’re brainwashed enough to think the Dreamweb is something more than a stream of digital information. Hacking requires a clear mind, not cluttered by fairytales. No.”
All along the way, Ben thought real hard. Mr. Reaper was a shady figure, no doubt about that. On the other hand, a cyborg carrying a fake human personality inside was supposed to feel at least slightly shady, was he not? In any case, Mr. Reaper was honest about it, to the point Ben started to question his own time with Daphne. Also, Mr. Reaper never tried to catch Ben in a dark alley and carve him up with a knife — which, Ben had no doubt, this cyborg could have accomplished easily.
Also, Ben needed Wakeworld allies badly, with all the strange people hunting him.
He made up his mind, sighed, and pulled out the folded list of printed paper. Ben offered it to Mr. Reaper, looking at the city skyline rising and falling behind the window as the limo made its way forward in long relaxed parabolas.
“What’s this?” The artificial eyes of the cyborg quickly scanned the printed glyphs. “Something Pan Asian?”
“Yes,” Ben said. He quickly explained the usage of the device to Mr. Reaper. “You see, they killed the Baron back home, in Clockworld, and I think they hired the Assassins to kill him for the second time, in New York. Except he was already dead, with this thing attached, moving his corpse around. I knew there was something off about the Baron!”
“Hm.” Mr. Reaper examined the paper again. “Animatron, you say. This explains a lot. They also have real good hackers, these Pan Asian boys.”
“This war on the Web, and all the ruckus in the Wakeworld,” Ben said. “I cannot get rid of a feeling it’s all just a big smokescreen. Except for what?”
James Reaper let out his cyborg sigh. “You are a smart kid, Ben,” he said. “This is why I suggest you stay away from the Web now. And find a good place to lay low in this reality. You need assistance with anything?”
“Me? No, no, I’m alright.” Ben couldn’t help but think about Daphne. She was expecting him back. They were supposed to go to La Republique, warn her superiors about this staged virtual war, before it broke out in full force. This was the only thing that mattered to him now, helping his girlfriend, keeping her out of harm’s way. As for the rest…
“I’ll be fine,” he said, pocketing the sheet of paper again. “Really. I can manage.”
“Glad to hear that.” Mr. Reaper pointed at the cityscape bobbing outside the window. “Want us to drop you off somewhere?”
“My home,” Ben said. “Thank you. My home block would be just fine.”
“Consider it done.”
“Thank you.”
“And, the main thing,” Mr. Reaper told him. “Forget about the war if you’re smart enough. This is not your war. This is the war we Digital Citizens must win. Our war. Not yours.”
“I understand,” Ben replied.
Go to hell, he thought. As long as my girl’s life is endangered, fake or not, this is my war all the same.
The limo finally landed, and Ben, hardly surprised, saw they were parked right by his apartment block, the fire escape ladders zigzagging all the way up, twenty-something floors between him and his bedroom window.
“It was nice talking to you.” Mr. Reaper nodded, then opened the passenger door for him. “I have a strong feeling we’ll see each other again.”
“Sigma,” Ben said.
I hope we never will, he thought, getting out of the limousine.
Chapter 6: Tinfoil
I wasn’t sure how I felt about Daphne the next Clockworld morning. In fact, I wasn’t sure about anything at all.
Many people, especially old people, think of the Dreamweb as a videogame of old. Some of the original creators of the Web ended up going into politics and banning other videogames after all, so this had to mean the Web was just another game, a competing product. This concept is totally flawed of course: the same people banned all the movies from the Wakeworld, absorbed the entire Hollywood industry, and yet no one says the Web is just another Hollywood movie, a competing product.
In reality, the Dreamweb is not a videogame but a videogaming platform, or even the platform of platforms. You can play all the classic videogames on the Web, and much more. Here, you can watch every 2D movie ever made, or step inside any 3D movie. The people who removed these videogames and films from the Wakeworld didn’t want them gone; they wanted them all to be found in one place. The Dre
amweb, and nowhere else. Their vision was always pretty simple. If anything, anywhere, was virtual, it belonged here now. Period.
The reason I mention this is, everything on the Web did feel like a game to me, up to now. A social thing, like an ancient MMO, sorta-kinda. Even Daphne, my virtual love, was but a part of the Dreamweb’s intricate gameplay, one of its many elements. It all ended somehow, while I wasn’t looking, and this Clockworld morning I noticed it for the first time.
We mechanic boys were busy fixing the walkers beaten up and then recovered during our chaotic assault on the Citadel. Everyone agreed it was a tactical victory yet a diplomatic disaster. Now we expected serious beating both from the Crescent and from La Republique, as these two virtual countries were military allies, and we were just spotted raiding one of them. We never fought La Republique before. The two things everyone knew was: their Musketeers were good at fencing, and they weren’t barbarians at all.
I knew another thing. It was Daphne’s country, and my girl went missing since our last time together. Not that I was sure how I should have felt about her either, after a cyborg who called himself Mr. Reaper explained to me how Digital Citizens work. He could have lied of course. This seemed to me the main problem now. Everyone could have lied, everyone could have another dagger behind their back, and no one had any idea who to trust anymore.
Games were over. Everything was serious now.
They brought in twenty or so Apprentices in the morning, fresh in the same way I was just a couple weeks back — straight out of the Wakeworld. The new mechanics didn’t talk to anyone or even converse with each other, they simply got to work and were learning crafting slowly but steadily, not as a game, but as real work.
“They’re Chinese,” Tranh told me. Chinese! I felt something cool tickling my neck behind the ears. It made the entire batch of new recruits Pan Asian. On the other hand, wasn’t Tranh himself Pan Asian? Even though he helped us fend off those Spiders, even if it was, essentially, his portable ballista that saved us — what was he doing with Albion in the first place? Didn’t he belong with Divine Kingdom, same as these fresh mechanics all wired up from some strange cyberfactory in China?
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