Then it stopped, next to an unpleasantly shaky metal bridge with a chasm of city streets yawning underneath. Susan killed the truck’s engine and opened the cabin door, then looked at Ben.
“What?” she asked. “Can’t handle some heights? Come on. I can’t just drive my truck around up here, we’ll have to walk.”
“O-okay,” Ben replied, trying the walkway in front of him with his foot. It seemed firm enough, even though the distance between its see-through mesh and the next object underfoot — something dirty and concrete — was immense. Ben dragged his father forward, trying to keep Susan’s back in sight, and hardly looked at the surroundings until he suddenly stepped into a greenhouse.
This must have been the tower’s topmost floors, Ben realized, now completely replaced with metal walkways hung up on metal chains, and new floors, most likely wide shallow boxes of artificial wood filled with earth and turned into hanging gardens filled with greenery. Some of them, Ben saw, were full of small plants, perhaps tomatoes and eggplants, while the others were big enough to hold symmetrical rows of dwarfish GMO apple trees and plum trees, blooming despite the winter outside, because the glass of the huge tower’s windows this high remained intact, and its insides were warm enough for all this agriculture to flourish.
Many people were clattering back and forth down the walkways, passing buckets of water along and spraying the plants, their manual sprinklers made of old bicycle pumps. Some worked on the wooden platforms, weeding and trimming their hanging gardens. Some of them waved at Susan, and she waved back. Nearly all of the people they encountered were as aged as the building itself.
“What’s this?” Ben asked, trying to catch up with Susan and not lose his father in the process.
“Academia,” she replied without looking back. “Wait ‘til we’ll find the Doc, he’ll tell you everything.”
“The Doc?” Ben asked. “I hope this fellow’s a real doctor.”
“He is,” Susan said. “He’s also the leader of this small installation. Each of us is many things.”
“Who are us?” Ben asked.
“Us,” she replied, “are the people who don’t want to have anything in common with them.”
“And them are the people who secretly control everyone.”
“Except for us.”
“So if you won’t have anything in common with them, it means you don’t want to control anyone?”
“Exactly,” Susan said. “And this is why we have to resort to picking up stray dogs and roadkill, like the two of you — people who will be so happy we helped them they’ll help us of their own will, for free, without any obligations, no strings attached.”
“So you’re the ones who started this revolution?”
“This?” She kept staring at him for a while, as if not believing his naiveté. “No, don’t get me wrong, I like the weather. Ha ha. I like the music, I’m happy to dance. Oh, we Academia will benefit greatly from this revolution. But that’s weather and music. We don’t run ‘em. We don’t get to choose what’s spinning out there. We have zero involvement so far.”
“But this may change?” Ben asked.
“With you two?” Susan nodded at him and his father. “Dream on. Then again, may someone like you affect the course of things? Perhaps. You’re already bearing one mark — and the most important mark, the mark of the old lady Destiny Slash Fate, who made you the only real person who saw this digital person, Baron Edward Plunkett, erased. The so-called virtual assassination of the last aristocrat alive.”
“You don’t believe DCs are alive?” Ben felt alarmed with her at once. Susan was a paranoid. She wore a tinfoil hat for crying out loud.
“We Academia,” she replied, “have a few predictions on what all of this may be.”
Susan threw her head left and right as if encompassing all possible reality around them.
“And the theory I support,” she said, “says there’s only us, the living breathing humans. And there’s a single computer entity, which I see as a giant invisible leech of sorts, a supreme parasite we humans created for ourselves. A big Queen Mother, their ultimate hivemind. Everything else is her creations, the worlds, the creatures in them. Everything you encounter while you’re in the so-called Web is her in different incarnations, many faces of the same being.”
“Which being?” Ben asked, his head swooning a little.
“Some call her the Web,” Susan said, then looked at Ben, scoffing. “Some call her Daphne, for all I care. There’s no her. It’s a thing. A program. An artificial intelligence, something we created by accident, same as how poor Mother Nature once created us. We were her demise; the Web is going to kill us. And absorb us. Weave our minds into itself.”
“And then what, a world populated with robots alo — ” Ben started.
“Like those Terminator movies perhaps?” Susan looked at him with a grimace again.
“Well.” Ben held her stare now. “You know what? This is just a mad theory. It’s just one of the theories you have.”
“It’s just we have slightly better AI programmers than her on board,” a new voice sounded. “And they know this anthropomorphic feminized villain thing is ridiculous.”
Ben looked up. A tall grey-bearded man with Scandinavian features; in fact looking like a Scandinavian god, or maybe Pagan, like a Druid — Ben had nowhere to look it up now. The fact is, the fellow wore gardening clothes and was watering plants like everybody else — seems like it was sort of a global chore here. On spotting Susan and Ben with his father in tow, the Norseman Druid waved to them when they got near, pointed Ben the way, then stepped up and grabbed his father.
“You know Francis Kowalski?” Susan nodded at the guy. “He made the news, didn’t he?”
“Susan, no one here ever watches the news,” the Druid Kowalski said. “I was — ”
“Oh I know you,” Ben recognized him finally. “You are the man, right? That Nobel Prize award, you’re the scientist fellow who rejected it and said after that he had seen what an AI scientist could do, so he would leave science to computers and only…”
“Do it for fun,” Kowalski finished for him. “Yes, and what you see is pretty much a club of people like me. We were, many of us, those whose knowledge and effort were used to build this world we live in. We are the people who felt we must embrace what we had done, and monitor it, and look for a way out of this thing we created.”
“Way out?” Ben said. “So we are in trouble after all?”
Francis Kowalski the Nobel fellow gave him a wise wizard’s smile.
“We are always in trouble, the humans,” he said, “or never in trouble. Depending on if you’re a pessimist or an optimist. Let’s just say the escalation you see in both worlds is the result of two things: a small friction between them, and a huge web — in all senses — of diplomacy and intrigue. Everyone became too invested in this friction element when the Baron disappeared, and so it grew, and now there’s smoke and even fire, so to speak. How far will this go — this is what we’d like to know now, but we can only guess.”
“Are DCs alive or not?” Ben asked him.
They stopped at a giant hand-operated metal wheel with carts attached to it — a crude elevator device, yet handmade, constructed here by these strange people. Academia? Whatever they called themselves, Ben realized it was best not to cross them.
“Now Ben, let me tell you I’ve been studying you for a while.” Francis Kowalski smiled at him and pulled a lever, making the big wheel spin and their cart climb up.
It’s a bulldozer scoop, Ben suddenly realized. We’re riding in a bulldozer scoop made into a cabin. Wow.
Studying me? he thought then.
“What do you mean, studying me?” he asked.
“I learned what can be learned online about you,” Kowalski said, “without violating your privacy. So, my questions may sound cruel but you’ll have to bear with me. Do we have a deal?”
“Okay,” Ben said, th
ough he didn’t like the cruel part at all.
“Was your mother ever digitized, Ben?” the first question was.
“Ummmm,” Ben said. How come it’s this fellow’s business, anyway? He said: “No, she never was.”
“Do you ever imagine her?” Kowalski asked him next.
“Excuse me?”
“Do you ever imagine her, as in, standing by your side, talking to you, giving you advice?”
“Ummm, yes,” Ben said. “But then, I mean, everyone does that?”
“Then, the next question,” Kowalski said. “If there was a technology which gives this elusive dream a solid digital flesh, and if the technology was proven to be medically beneficent — a salve to cure a soul, really — then would it be an ethical thing for us modern humans to do, to forfeit it? To deny the population access to it? Or will we claim, like Susan here suggests, that the technology is not beneficial? And base our claims on what, guesswork and philosophical interpretations of the role of visual interactive entertainment?”
“Must I answer all this?” Ben asked.
“If there are people who say your memories of your mother are not real, Ben, and these people want to slice those memories out of you, will you take their side?”
“Well, since you put it like that.” Ben shrugged. “I think the real things are those we carry in us. The rest is just scenery, right? No matter which reality it belongs to. This division is like, in people’s minds. So what you mean is it’s me who decides if Daphne is real or not. And I say yes, she is. And I must help her.”
“And we’ll have to live with your choice, all of us,” Kowalski said. “Because these are matters of the heart. This kind of choice may only belong to you.”
They walked up the final flight of stairs bolted to a wall, and found themselves under the very roof of the giant hollow business tower. It was a lot like being inside a tangle of giant and crazy rigging of some ancient ship, a Christmas ship from a nuts 2D cartoon: there was lots of hanging neon, and tree houses made of cheap pseudoplastic or more expensive artificial redwood built into a mass of real living grapevine teeming with little grapes, and there were hanging walkways, some of them metallic, some of them made completely out of sturdy nets, and sometimes there was a flight of metal stairs fixed to a wall, a staircase leading from nowhere to nowhere.
They passed about four of these staircases before they hit a final stretch of hung pseudowooden steps and entered the central giant treehouse of this weird formation, a settlement clinging to the insides of a hollow skyscraper. The central part of this hanging village was made out of six cargo containers of different brands and colors placed like petals in a giant flower and welded to form one superstructure.
“It all doesn’t count as a floor, take special note,” the Francis Kowalski character told Ben as they entered. Inside, the metal flower was lit brightly by neon and Chinese lanterns of colored paper, and the walls were decorated neatly enough to forget where you were and think of a classy studio instead. These were the insides of their town hall, Ben instantly realized from the amount of busts and potted plants and bookcases filled with old-fashioned touchpad devices, most of them with pre-uploaded Monopoly or IdleBingoCraft.
“Take your father over there, and I’ll tend to him personally.” Kowalski showed them to a room with a sturdy pseudo-oaken dining table for twenty people, a bit old-fashioned obviously, Ben noticed, for this quantity of people dining together in the Wakeworld was beyond ridiculous, actually impossible.
“Dad, would you stomach twenty people eating something at once?” Ben asked. The old man didn’t reply. In fact, the old Harry looked and moved exactly like a ragdoll from the Web, and there was no way for Ben to tell if his father even remained alive.
“Hey, who told you that you’d be staying around, kid?” Susan stepped forward. Something in her posture, Ben didn’t like at all. She added: “You’ll be coming with me now. You’ve got things to do for us, too.”
Ben looked at the frail figure of his father spread across the massive table, then shrugged.
“Okay,” he said. “Sad thing I don’t know if I should digitize him or not. He never made up his mind.”
“He’ll live,” Susan said. “I used to work as a barmaid, so I’ve seen worse. They lived, yours will live, too.”
“Oh well, this sounds encouraging,” Ben replied. Susan merely shrugged, and the two of them moved on through the cool if a bit dusty interior of this gargantuan metal chandelier made of shipping containers, “And why is…”
“Zero floors,” Susan replied, as if reading his mind. “It’s a building with zero floors. It requires no maintenance, and costs zero to maintain as no robots are being dispatched here. Yet the construction drones sent to check it out always return claiming the building remains in use, and is kept in good shape, and totally required for the wellbeing of the city. This is how we stay off the grid, by being a perfect zero-floor apartment block,” Susan said. “Here, you know our secret now. Happy? Now you help us out, and we take care of your old man, okay? Off we go.”
And off they went.
It was quite a strange place, and the longer Ben stared at it, the stranger it looked. He could swear he saw a system here, as if the entire formation inside the hollow business tower was a small town with streets and highways and all. Ben could swear he saw a hung-up playground for little kids, and tree-house analogues of a cinema and a grocery store.
“A cinema,” Ben said. “So they do break the law in here.”
“We do, except in a different way,” Susan said. “We show ancient 2D educational stuff. The stuff that helps you to thrive on the Web if not in the real world. Enough of it to make you a king of some barbaric tribe without spending a bitpound.”
“So you go into the Web,” Ben said.
“Oh, we have people who do that, yes,” she replied. “Not myself, but we have a few. If you manage to help us today, you’ll see for yourself.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“You will work with Spark,” Susan said. “It’s the name of our handyman, Spark. You’ll help him fix and launch a diesel generator.”
Spark turned out to be a geeky bespectacled guy hung with all kinds of equipment, of which about a half was electrician’s stuff, and the other half that of a steeplejack.
“Here’s the diesel generator fellow,” Susan introduced them. “This is Spark.”
“Name’s Ben,” Ben said, and then gulped. “I hope we won’t need to climb though. All these heights make me sick.”
Spark smiled, showing a mouthful of big teeth, then offered Ben a hand. “No need to climb,” he said and pointed to a hanging shed made out of an old hoverbus carcass. “The baby’s right in there.”
Susan waved them goodbye, and Spark led Ben towards the metal shed. Inside, there was indeed a small diesel generator, wired up to a couple microfusion reactors.
“All we need here is to get these two babies running,” Spark explained. “No way to power up the place with this old thing alone, yeah?”
“But you only need to spark them up once.” Ben nodded at the microfusion units. “And they’ll keep working for, like, thousands of years, right?”
“True that,” Spark said, picking on his teeth with a fingernail. “Except we want to kill them now and then, in an irregular pattern, lest we leave a persistent fusion signature, and the city authorities learn there’s life up here, and that it lives in comfort without paying for it.”
“So you back them up with a diesel genie,” Ben said. “And kill them whenever you like, knowing you’ve got electricity to power them up anytime.”
“Exactly. The problem is, this diesel contraption broke down recently, and I’m your electrician man, not good with combustion. They tell me you’re the one to handle it?”
“Well, let’s see,” Ben said, kneeling by the small generator. “First of all, it’s out of fuel. You’ve got diesel fuel around here?”
�
��Oh, plenty of it!” Spark shook his head like it was nothing at all. “Plus, I’ve got a few burn-out babies like this one, something you could scavenge any parts you need from.”
“Nice,” Ben said. “Well then. Let’s get to work?”
They were done by the evening, and the little thing actually worked, and, right as dusk fell, the weird settlement clinging to the insides of a hollow skyscraper lit up with all its electric splendor, and soon they heard music playing from the main lodge.
“What can I say?” Spark grinned at him, big-toothed, spectacles gleaming. “You’re a magician, man.”
“When do I get to see my father?”
“Oh, your old man’s fine,” Spark said, tapping on the ancient communicator clipped to his ear. “They detoxed him, he’s sleeping now. And so we need to be. Yeah?”
Ben merely looked at him.
“You and your girlfriend have unfinished business on the Web, right? I’m to take you there, instruct you some. You kicked too many hornets’ nests in there, you know. Finish what you started.”
“Man,” Ben said. “I’m despawned. Dead until next Friday. I cannot access the Dreamweb.”
Spark waved his hand. “Technicalities, my friend,” he said. “More and more technicalities. I’ll get you in, and bring your girl back from her digital oblivion, and you’ll do whatever you were going to do in there, whatever ruffled someone’s feathers up there so much. So, how does that sound?”
Ben hesitated.
Daphne, he thought. To see her again, let her know everyone’s safe… except for Diego.
“Can you do something for Diego, for my ex-employee?” he asked.
“I’ll be on it once I’m done with you two. Let’s go?”
“Okay,” Ben said, feeling helpless and useless after a night of thrills and a day of hard work.
“Yay!” Spark offered him a high five. “Go Academia!”
And they went all the way down, to the basement of the office tower, where two illegal Web access crèches were hidden under a layer of concrete rubble.
Chapter 9: Necromancy
Enter the Clockworld Page 22