He swallowed.
“We erased your memories from the torture, about five minutes after you looked at the exit point but before we pulled you out,” Francis Kowalski said, observing him with the attentiveness of a physician. “Still, you may feel some residue. Tell me this, Ben. Would you like to dispense some revenge? For your workshop? For your father?”
“Wait,” Ben said. “I have an important question first. So you, Academia, do hate the Church, and yet you did this work for them, or at least provided the platform for it?”
“But they’re enemies of the Ethereals!” Francis Kowalski raised his hands, fingers spread. “Besides, Academia is all peppered with religious people, see. A scientist doesn’t always mean an atheist. Or a lover of technology.”
“Best if we prepare the equipment while we talk,” Tranh said. He stepped up to the snooker table, flipped it and, to Ben’s surprise, there was an illegal Web access crèche underneath, with straps for arms and legs and two small sonolights on flexible silver cords, meant to automatically position themselves in front of your eyes.
“Wait, are you going to send me to the Web now?” Ben asked. He was genuinely surprised.
“You’re in the company of a DC. The cycle you were in isn’t over yet, and we’ll modify the markup of each sleep cycle to follow this one the way it’ll subjectively feel minus one. Basically speaking, this REAPR entity won’t even notice you were gone.”
“Yes!” Kowalski said. “Yes, it’s a weakness of Digital Citizens. You see, Ben, the dreams we dream aren’t continuous, they need to be reseeded once in a while, your brain zapped with electricity to erase what remains of an old seed, then plant a refreshed seed in a stimulated brain. In a DC though, everything is cycle-based. If we load a new cycle into a digital mind, and it’s numbered like an old cycle, then lo and behold, the data gets rewritten, and our DC may never notice it! It all happens like a seamless time travel of your time’s minutes to the Dreamweb past. But this is actually only the time of every DC who can see you, the timestamp on you. See?”
“So you keep working with Pan Asians despite the fact you don’t like them,” Ben said, staring at the old druid scientist and his teacup.
“Well, by now, we had nothing, Academia had no real power. We couldn’t even help your father, we didn’t have money to pay for the procedure, and our human lawyer was powerless to help you with the insurance money. We failed you. Yet these people… you’ll see what they can do. A revenge for all of us! Something that gives us — you! — power to change the course of history. And you’ll hit the Ethereals hard. For your girl. For your father. Now you tell me: is it worth it, working with them?”
“You want me to lie to Mister Reaper?” Ben asked. He looked at the two small sonolights on two flexible cords, and a wave of sickness caught up with him again. Erased memories? Torture?
“What happened to my girl?” he asked, feeling tired and dumb.
“This REARP demon will tell you everything!” Tranh told him, shaking Ben by the shoulders. “We can grab this dark man like we captured the Baron. You see? And if you help us, he will be yours! You will use him the way you want. Okay? All we want is this man gone.”
“Use him?” Now Ben was dumbstruck even more. “Use him how?”
“Well, you see,” Francis Kowalski said. “We can focus on you like you’re the beacon, and then shift you to a different dimension. There’s a mechanism once created to let Web visitors see their digitized form from a side, learn how one would look as a digital copy, talk to themselves. This was considered inhumane then, killing a copy in the end of the session that is, and the feature was disabled, and yet the loophole remains.”
“Then we take this ball of reality around you, and we crosswire it to Reaper’s digital imagination,” Tranh continued. “He’s a DC so it will work, his mind will keep up the illusion of the world around you two, all the processing power we need is right there in his virtual head. And this way, you see, a Creep becomes isolated from the Web, self-contained inside his own little ball of reality you two are now locked in. And we can take this reality bubble and treat it like a thing, a piece of code, put it on any kind of memory stick, even this very thing I have on my keyring.”
He pulled out an old battered keyring with an old xenon flashlight of forbidden plastic dangling from it, a Chinese antiquity of the early 2030s, and a sixteen terabyte mnemonic drive looking like a small non-descript black tooth.
“You mean we catch him like a genie,” Ben said, “Put him inside a magic lamp.”
“I am not familiar with the legend but yes, this is how it may be done,” Tranh said. “But there is bad news, too.”
“Which is?”
“They won’t be able to pull you out,” Francis Kowalski said. “You’ll have to find a way out yourself. You will have to wake up using your will, not this otherwise useful gadget.”
He pointed at the weird illegal crèche on the other side of an old snooker table.
“Once they isolate your surroundings and let James Reaper’s mind run them,” Kowalski said. “This little world becomes your personal torture device.”
Chapter 11: No Escape
James Reaper slapped me on a shoulder. And I, I coughed and splashed my hot coffee. Mr. Reaper’s cold eyes stared into mine. He went on:
“These spy games though, they’re not your games, Benjamin. In these, you’re nothing. You will never win a spy game.”
I coughed harder. Poison?
“Not poison, Benjamin. Something to make you talk.”
I stared at a poster behind his back. It depicted…
Well, it should have been the Moon, I remembered it was the Moon. But now the poster was different. It was some pig character in a circle, captioned That’s All, Folks! I had no idea what it meant except for one thing: I could no longer wake up all that easy. And things were going to get much worse, very soon. A powerful sense of déjà vu struck me, and I just sat there in my office chair, unable to think at all.
“You see, Benjamin,” Mr. Reaper went on. “For someone like me, someone being an inherent part of the Dreamweb, it’s quite easy to fool the Web. Do you at least know why it’s called the Dreamweb, this place?”
I shook my head. Vertigo passed, and I was surprised to find out I didn’t feel poisoned anymore. In fact, I felt quite refreshed. Yet the bout of déjà vu told me the worst kind of white searing pain was still to come.
Mr. Reaper went to a fridge in the corner, opened its creaky door, and then returned with a bowl of grapes. He placed it on the table, fixed its position a little bit, all correctness and precision, like he was going to play snooker with it.
“You can do strange things when you explore and exploit, Benjamin,” he said. “When you examine, explore and exploit in an effective way, like only a digital creation can.”
He plucked a few grapes from the bowl and placed them around it in a semicircle.
“See, Benjamin, what the Web really is?” Mr. Reaper asked me then. “Not a common huge bubble of reality — no power in the world would be enough to process a homogenous chunk of reality that big. So the Dreamweb is more like this cheese, or a fizzy drink, a huge number of little personal reality bubbles, all of them interconnected by perception yet each housing a separate little world, each world a part of a domain. American, European, Pan Asian, and smaller ones. So these personal realities we find ourselves in are sort of like grapes, each of them a little bubble kept in sync with the others. You don’t dream one big common dream. The Web is in fact this bubbling cauldron of separate yet interconnected dreams. And we, the poor shades of your bygone relatives, are boiling in this cauldron alive, which is sad but true, like they used to say in my world, or pure alpha stuff, like they say in yours. I hate your world, Benjamin. I cannot control it, I’m powerless to run it while I’m trapped in here, and I hate it. I hate it because it used to be mine, and now it’s not.”
I didn’t like the way he looked at me at all
. I nearly forgot we fooled him and sent me back in time, the subjective time within my personal dream, clean from his truth serum, which timed out and evaporated according to its global timer.
“Do you know voodoo exists here in Clockworld?” Mr. Reaper asked, and picked up a grape. He squeezed it all of a sudden, and I gasped. I swear I felt my eyeball squeezed. I sat upright then, and brought my hands up, my eye watering and tears running down my cheek. The creature calling himself Mr. Reaper merely smiled and said:
“It’s all based on parallel experiences; let’s just say it’s not the first time all of this has happened to you.”
Did he know? It was incredible, but this man seemed to know everything.
“Yes, as a child, you received an electric shock for your birthday present. Do you remember this, Benjamin? Doesn’t matter. Your medical card says this, which means the neurons I need to recreate this feeling are all there, and all I have to do is shift the origin in the center of one of your eyeballs. I am a thrill device of sorts. James Reaper, your personal rollercoaster. Each emotion of yours, I can exploit. Each feeling in you, I can recreate. But I’m a DC who knows voodoo. So I simply use this grape as a controller, and deliver what I must.”
He squeezed the second grape, and the juice ran down his fingers. I did feel an electric shock piercing my left eyeball, a pulling feeling with a jolt of searing pain following it, and my tears — or maybe the eye itself — were streaming down my cheek again. All of a sudden, I saw another place.
I saw my father on an automated gurney, being wheeled in an unknown direction, then loaded into a black hovertruck. He looked pale and shriveled. He looked dead.
“An interesting memory, and I’m glad you shared it with me,” James Reaper’s warm and attentive voice said. My vision was all lopsided, tears blurring half of it. Mr. Reaper asked: “Did you know prophetic visions exist in Clockworld? Except, of course, you have to be a martyr, in the desert, all alone, lost… and blind.”
He grabbed and squeezed another grape, and the familiar searing pain shot through my other eyeball. I felt it pop right in the eye socket, and I saw darkness at first, crickets singing, but then I realized I was looking down at Daphne sleeping in our desert camp. I saw her from way above, circling in the sky as a bird, and morning light was still feeble, but I heard this unmistakable terrible sound. A hiss of sand, an entire chorus of sources, incoming from at least three directions.
As Daphne woke up and sprung to her feet, holding her useless wind-up thumper like a weapon, I could see three giant sandworms converging on her location, and the tiny figures of their riders — Spiders of the Crescent, about twenty of them per worm, every single one of the Spiders fully armed.
I saw them surround my girl, and then the vision faded.
My face felt like my eyes had been ripped from it and replaced by hot coals.
“This is voodoo,” Mr. Reaper said. “And the next attraction, ladies and gentlemen, will be called what I call ‘the blinding light of truth’. It’s interesting what one can do to a regular human being in the Web, being digital, being a part of it.”
He reached out, patted my knee, then handed me my coffee.
“Relax and enjoy the show,” he told me. “Why relax? Because you should conserve your effort, Benjamin. We have already beaten you at home. We control everything you hold dear, and you remain oblivious. I control your WORLD ITSELF now, or didn’t you notice? This is the Web, you see. In here, I AM GOD.”
As he spoke, my vision blurred again, and I saw Tranh’s face for a moment, huge like a planet, and then it was as if someone dabbed my eyes with a wet cloth, and I felt fine again, my vision clear.
“Or a demigod at least!” James Reaper flashed me another perfect smile of his. “What you don’t understand, Ben, is this is official. I am officially called your handler, and you’re merely one of the troublemakers I have to monitor. Your Web presence is a curious thing, I admit it. Your actions, they mess with Providence itself. You think you bring order, but you bring chaos to the Dreamweb, my friend. You endanger the lives of certain foolish DCs I am responsible for. Don’t get me wrong, for us, the Ethereals, you’re but a gnat buzzing around our collective face, and yet I’ve been told to remove you from here.”
“You didn’t notice anything weird just happen, Mr. Reaper?” I asked him then.
“I squeezed your eyes out and let you see the truth,” the answer was. “Do you see it, Ben? Whatever you planned with your dear friends from Academia, it already failed. And you won’t make me into a villain, no matter how hard you try.”
“So you’re with the good guys then.”
“Oh, Ben!” Mr. Reaper shook his head. “You think I’m enjoying this perhaps? Do you know what you are to me? You are a key influence marked by Providence. I want to show you something before you’re finally despawned and banned from here for at least a month, to give us some time to repair all the damage you’ve done.”
I kept throwing small looks aside, and the man in the suit sitting on the table took it for a sign of nervousness, so he went on.
“Yes, Benjamin, you think you bring order into this world? You think you help your friends, break all the rules, try to turn the tides of virtual history, or even big Mother History herself, don’t you? A romantic hero in love with a spy lady, united with the forces of good, fighting forces of evil, do you understand how primitive and blind you really are? You’re worse than a crusader, Ben. You’re a cyberterrorist to say the least, and a public enemy to say the worst. You must end. How will you end? Where are you staring when I’m talking to you, Benjamin?”
“At this Manhattan replica thing,” I admitted. “It’s magnificent. I think you did a very good job. Except, perhaps, your imagination is not too powerful.”
And then I looked straight into his eyes, and flashed Mr. Reaper a bitter smile.
They still had my girlfriend, my love, Daphne.
All by itself, it meant my agreement, my cooperation with the Ethereals, wasn’t over. Their people held my girl hostage.
Their people? A revelation suddenly struck me.
“Mister Reaper,” I said, still looking at the man. “You Ethereals control the Church of the New Faith and Whatever, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer. James Reaper was staring at the replica of Manhattan that wasn’t there before, and it was clear he knew it. The thing was bold and truly magnificent. It replaced the assistant’s desk in the corner — it was a big oaken table now, and it held the entire island cast in plastic and glued cardboard, totally retro and cutely analog, not even 3D-printed. The city looked exquisitely realistic though, and little towers of painted cardboard were lit up from the inside with tiny LED lights, which also served as streetlights, and small plastic cars of many colors were parked under the streetlights here and there, crowding these immobile streets in their frozen beauty. Even the minute headlights and rear lights of these immobile little cars were glowing! This model looked pretty to an engineer’s eye: it was a precisely recreated tiny Manhattan of the 1990s, and I suddenly realized this was most likely the place the real James Reaper had memorized quite well.
“But the Church people are supposed to be your enemies,” I told him as he sat as frozen as this cardboard city. “They hold the Baron hostage. They control the Assassins. They have my girl now, too. Thanks to you. Because of you.”
The man in the suit looked at me, his eyes clouded and lost in thought. We sat in silence for a while, listening to the river of NYC traffic blaring behind the office windows.
“Wait, they have the Baron? This cannot be,” I muttered. “The Baron is an Ethereal, so they cannot be responsible for his kidnapping, if you fellows have him in your pocket.”
He didn’t respond.
“Unless… Unless they don’t have him, right? Maybe the Church people wanted to play you, to use the Baron as leverage, so they revolted against you at first. But then someone stole Baron Plunkett from them?”
“They never had him,” Mr. Reaper mouthed almost without a sound. “The bastards forgot who owns them, this you’ve got right. But then we reminded these honorable shepherds they are technically our sheep. Asians, though… Damn Chinese . . . they always wanted to find some kind of weapon that would disrupt our Project 9, and this is just…”
“Project 9?” I asked. “You mean this voodoo magic?”
“I mean infinity plus one,” James Reaper responded. He jumped to the floor and walked up to the highlighted miniature replica of the city behind the window. He said: “I mean immortality for all humans, Benjamin. In the best possible form, information at the hands of powerful new gods, the gods who used to be sons of men, yet were reborn and now are able to lead humanity a million times better than any living human possibly could. You are twice lost descendants of a lost generation, Benjamin. You are unable to dream for yourselves. You call your place ‘Wakeworld’ and you hate it. You are no longer fit to represent humanity.”
“So you must come instead,” I replied, “musn’t you? Elite DCs wearing android bodies, a bunch of winners of some rat race in a much harsher kind of world, where people had to fight and betray each other all the time.”
All of a sudden, Mr. Reaper brought up a hand. He did it so fast he made me wince. I expected a karate punch delivered straight into my nose, but he merely clicked his fingers in front of my eyes.
“You’re right!” he said. “And this is BEST for us as human beings. BEST. The strongest leaders possible ARE US. And I am speaking for every Ethereal there is. The Web is the Ultimate God, and we are demi-gods. This is why we control Faith so easily. We promise a real paradise, for everyone, and we provide it. How — this is rather unimportant, don’t you think?”
“So treachery is okay?” I asked.
“There’s no treachery, there’s just diplomacy,” the answer was.
“Fine,” I said, and then nodded at the replica of the city. “Was this the best you can do? I mean your mind alone, with no other Eths to help you out…”
Enter the Clockworld Page 28