“Why?” This was the only thing I managed to ask.
“For they were the original designers of Clockworld,” Mr. Reaper said. “Because the Dreamweb was designed with certain big data analysis in mind, and they merely used this world for what it was built.”
“So this children choir talking, it’s not the — ”
“The idiot god? Naaah!” the tiny voice in the lamp chuckled. “It’s even more stupid than our child god, Benjamin. It’s a basic AI whose only purpose is the analysis of huge amounts of data in order to create and maintain the big picture. It’s a conglomerate of many machines hosting the EU part of the Dreamweb, not the Web itself, and it’s far too small to be as wise as you suggest. Yet powerful enough to do many other things.”
The crystal platform I was standing on made it all the way up to the ceiling, and now I could see a large aperture in the marble vault, hidden from my eyes before by complex non-Euclidean geometry of the place. Our crystal chandelier of an elevator passed through a marble slab thick with pinkish veins and suddenly entered the top part of the pyramid, a tetrahedron with glass walls — or rather, walls of the same elegant-looking crystal-clear mineral, polished and cut the way it formed huge triangular windows fit in heavy cast-iron frames.
The entire tetrahedron was filled with golden radiance, its source the floor itself, each wall projecting a column of bright light outside, three thick columns forming an upturned contour of the pyramid up in the sky.
Then I looked at the stars and gasped.
For the galaxies and constellations overhead, when seen through this triangular crystal dome, were no longer meaningless: there were hairlines between them making thousands of relations and connections.
“Each VR core in the system, and the land it hosts, is represented by a single glowing singing sphere above,” James Reaper’s voice went on, “or, basically, a star. Planets and smaller objects, like moons or asteroids, allow breaking the picture down to groups and individuals.”
I could see a huge system above — and below, inside the glowing golden floor of crystal, some kind of black ink floating between the transparent slab and the golden glow, forming a huge map of the entire Clockworld, with all powers represented.
“You see, Ben, this place was a project with two goals. Providence, recite your primary objectives for us please,” Mr. Reaper said.
“SURVEILLANCE,” the children’s choir answered, little voices tinkling like crystal. “ANALYSIS. HEURISTIC PREDICTION MODEL.”
“This thing predicts what happens in Clockworld next?” I said.
“Much more than this. You see, Benjamin, the Web was built and sponsored by many people, world governments in particular, and each side wanted a slice of it. The Ministry of Media and Entertainment wanted to unify the entire showbiz under one roof. The Ministry of Education wanted the Dreamweb to teach kids about the things they ignored at school. And so on. There was a faction though, and I don’t need to name it — the people who wanted to build a machine predicting serious shifts in Eurasian societies. Don’t you see by now? These people were our founding fathers. They built Clockworld for one basic purpose: so it emulates Eurasian spirit, hyperbolizes the actual social tendencies, and… What’s your ultimate goal, Providence?”
“TO PROVIDE THOSE AUTHORIZED WITH THE FULL PICTURE OF THE ACTUAL COURSE OF EVENTS DEDUCED FIVE TO TEN DAYS PRIOR, WITH 99.92 PERCENT CORRELATION OF THE BASIC PROBABILITY MEDIAN.”
“You can’t mean — ” I started.
“This system uses the Clockworld’s big data to predict what will happen soon in the real world, Ben,” James Reaper said. “In the only world that matters. Thanks to Providence, we used to know the real world news a week before things actually happened. It worked back in the US, it had to work here, and it worked! But then, something went wrong.”
“The war,” I said. “Providence, show me the war!”
It seemed to me the stars overhead shifted, and clouds billowed underfoot. And then the light changed, the columns of refracted rainbow starlight painting the map on the golden floor in different colors, alive, moving and seeping into each other. The image was beautiful and breathtaking — and yet it told me nothing.
“So this is what Astrology is,” I said. “It’s how well you read output from this thing. And so you control everything, and rule the world.”
“Not really,” Mr. Reaper answered from inside the lamp. “To rule the world, kid, you need much more. This is only a crystal ball telling us the future, so to speak. To control the future, you also need power. You need influence. Financial presence, media presence. Even hitmen. Or thugs. Of course you need this and that if there’s a key figure who must be taken off board. This is the only way we can win.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “You said it no longer works, the whole thing? It seems to be working fine to me.”
“It doesn’t correlate!” James Reaper’s voice was tired now. “It no longer helps us control the real world, Ben. All worlds are a mess now, thanks to this so-called ‘revolution’. And it all happened because someone blinded us.”
“Someone who’s not Asian, and uses Divine Kingdom as a front, same as you Ethereals were using the Church?”
“Some unknown power,” he agreed. “But it’s damn powerful, this power, let me tell you. And we know nothing of it, still. Just gossip. Someone paid Asians to take out the crowd control countermeasures — who did this? No way to find out, even in this day and age! And it scares me, Ben. Whoever did this to us, he wants civilization gone.”
“Dunno, this thing seems to be working totally fine to me,” I said. ”Let’s see what we can do here. Providence?”
“YES?” the dissonant choir of children answered.
“What do you know about war?”
“WAR EQUALS NATURE,” the choir recited, like a classroom of kids repeating their lesson after their teacher. “BALANCE REGULATION DARWINIAN.”
“Oh, you want to talk philosophical matters with our Providence, be my guest,” the voice from the lamp said. “Benjamin, trust me, we no longer know what will happen in any of the worlds. Providence lost its prediction capabilities, and this is the only reason I’m showing the place to you now. It’s been less and less useful to us since the very first riots.”
“Balance?” I asked Providence. “What did you mean, balance?”
“BALANCE EQUALS ROOT,” the choir of children answered. “HAPPINESS MOTIVATION THREE.”
“Motivation?” I asked.
“MOTIVATION EQUALS ENTERTAINMENT,” the choir answered. “LEARN TEACH DARWINIAN.”
“Phew,” I told the oil lamp in my hand. “Does it always speak like that?”
“Mostly,” James Reaper’s voice answered. “Told you, this is a very basic AI. It wasn’t meant to speak, just analyze, plot, and display. It’s where Ethereals come in. Of our founding fathers, two people worked on this project, back when they were alive. The ultimate tool of control and regulation, now broken.”
“Still, we can stop the war,” I said, trying to figure out the map of Clockworld, shifting and doubling under my feet. “If only we had power to change things from here.”
“POWER EQUALS TOP,” the choir of children replied. “DOMINATION CONTROL DARWINIAN.”
“Hm,” I said. “You know, Mr. Reaper, this Providence thingy is right. Maybe we don’t need power at all! Maybe the power struggle is exactly the problem. And why does it always say ‘Darwinian’?”
“DARWINIAN EQUALS PERFECTION,” Providence echoed. “BORN KILL MISTAKE… FATHER… BEN… DAPHNE… LA REPUBLIQUE… VIVA.”
“What?” I could hardly believe what I just heard. “Did you just say my name?”
“THIS IS PROVIDENCE,” the answer was. “WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT.”
“Do you know where Daphne is?” I asked. “Providence! Tell me! Do you know what happened to her?”
“THIS IS PROVIDENCE,” the choir of children replied again. “WE THANK YOU F
OR YOUR VISIT.”
“It doesn’t want to talk to you anymore,” Mr. Reaper said, and chuckled. “We may as well wrap up here. You won’t make the old Providence speak another word.”
“Still, it was speaking about me and Daphne,” I said. “And La Republique! Maybe this is what Providence wants me to do, go to La Republique, talk to the French government, stop this war and restore the balance!”
“APPLY WATER FROM A SPECIFIC STATUE TO TELEPORT TO THE PLACE OF ITS ORIGIN,” the choir said.
“All you have to do is wash your face in that fountain below, the one with a bird holding a lily,” the voice from the lamp said. ”And voila! You’re in New Paris. But then, are you aware it’s a war zone now, and dying in it means despawning for a week or more?”
James Reaper didn’t know what his presence cost me. If I were to despawn, I’d respawn in his office instead, after a week or more. And if he were to despawn before or during that time, Mr. Reaper would escape into Clockworld, leaving me comatose and trapped in his cabinet, a little isolated bubble of reality, until my body died.
“I’ll risk it,” I said. Not that I liked my body that much, anyway.
The rest, I remember as a feverish nightmare.
So I ran towards the little French statue Mr. Reaper had so kindly pointed out to me, and splashed some cool water onto my face from the bowl underneath. The water was cool and perfume-scented. For a moment, my entire body felt overwhelmed by this perfume smell, and then I popped out. I rubbed my eyes and opened them again.
I was in New Paris, alright. I was in the back of some establishment, bent over a bathroom sink. I wiped my face dry with a piece of unbleached cloth faintly smelling of the same perfume, and walked back into the bistro.
The place was deserted and quiet, its big display windows smeared with bleach, the golden moths of dust dancing in the air, a gramophone behind the bar playing something totally ancient and French, like Zaz or Edith Piaf. A nice cobblestoned street outside, as much of it as I could see through all the bleach, was also vacant and static. Something felt wrong about this absolute calm. The silence, the quiet gramophone crackle — it was all somehow oppressive, overwhelming, like I just teleported here in the middle of nothing special, and it was a very wrong thing to do.
I took a step towards the exit, and the empty street behind the large display windows was suddenly lit with a blinding glare, then a burst of bright sunshine, and then — KABLAM! — the glass panes shattered, and bistro tables were all flying. They all smashed into the opposite wall and myself, caught somewhere in between, shell-shocked but not dead.
As the ringing in my ears subsided, the outside world came back in with a roar. The crystal silence was gone. Sirens were screaming in the street, and there were things burning, and people running. And then, as I made my way in between the remnants of the bistro interior and stepped out, I met a squad of marching bronze grasshoppers spewing blobs of corrosive purple liquid at fleeing locals.
The grasshoppers scanned me and ignored me — the Teutonic uniform saved my life! More bombs came in riding elegant parabolic trajectories. Gunpowder. The armies of the Crescent followed me here it seemed. But the grasshoppers, their hexagonal pieces of shifting armor recombining as they went… they were definitely Teutonic-made, they recognized me as one of theirs. And it all made no sense.
Then I saw a huge walking siege tank, and it all did make sense. Teutonia was invading La Republique.
Dead bodies everywhere. Or the goo that used to be dead bodies. A hundred or so people despawned, to be banned from the Web for a week at least. The ban of wartime. A serious casualty.
I lost my lamp somewhere. It didn’t matter yet, unless someone found it.
With the clattering grasshoppers gone, the first thing I did was remove my sandy and torn Teutonic uniform and loot some common French apparel from a dead civilian. I was terrified by the destruction I saw all around me, and wanted to do nothing with the invaders, even though I could have benefitted from keeping up with the masquerade.
Still, I ran out to the street dressed as a Frenchman, maneuvering between piles of broken masonry, listening to long cannonades in the distance. Lots of gunpowder was involved in this attack.
Another siege tank walked past me — an elephantine strider thing on long metal stilts, each of its huge moving legs equipped with a trio of small metal arms for defense. As the thing walked past, one of the arms picked up a dead body and tossed it my way, trying to hit me. I was no longer recognized as Teutonic. Good.
The stench of blood and burnt wood was immense and overwhelming in here, but at least I avoided the cloud of acrid gunpowder smoke hanging in front of the bistro’s destroyed façade.
I ran down the block, in the direction of the nearest siren. A big dark shadow slid through the smoke hanging above, and I heard triumphant voices from the windows across the street, shouting something in French.
“An airship!” I recognized it. A huge Republican airship entered the airspace of New Paris, which meant an entire flotilla was to follow shortly. And this meant the city would soon be secure, the raiders wiped out from above.
And then, a crackle of gunfire followed, and the ship above my head broke in two, then fell; a giant burning leviathan — BOOM! — raising a curtain of black smoke which hid the distant spires of the city from me.
And then, it seemed the entire firmament caught on fire, rockets and tracer rounds flashing like comets, black smoke billowing from below. More French airships slid into my view, confronted by Man-Kites — giant kites shaped like ancient square biplanes of red and green and orange cardboard, with faceted ornate wings and decorative hulls, dragon-shaped and fish-shaped. The air force of Divine Kingdom.
“So the Asians did attack,” I muttered. “And they’re allies with Teutonia.”
It was all like a feverish bad dream full of worst cases of déjà vu, all over.
“Hey you!” I heard a voice. A man half-dressed as a Guardsman of La Republique was stuffing a Montgolfier’s gondola full of people, and was waving me in. His burnt face was black like the sky above us. The whites of his eyes glaring madly, he shouted in my face: “Evacuation! Mayday! We’re taking people out of this hellhole! Climb in!”
And it was when they started dropping gas bombs.
I barely had time to wipe my face dry of this stranger’s spittle when these shiny cocoons started raining down from the sky in clusters, each shell hitting the pavement and cracking in two, releasing a cloud of noxious greenish gas. I saw townspeople hiding behind the windows here and there turn to panic. Previously safe, now doomed, they ran around trying to block the clouds of green gaseous death from getting to them. And they failed, succumbing to the gas and dying — all of them gone in less than a minute.
“Get in!” the man shouted in my face again. And then, in no time at all, I found myself inside the gondola, squeezed among other bodies, all of them sweaty and smelly, all covered with white plaster dust, big scared babies dabbed with powder. I remember us spiraling slowly up, higher and higher above the city, following the only evasive pattern available to us. A reverse vortex with varying radius.
We weren’t the only evac Montgolfier rising up. I saw two more not far from us, and a multitude far away, people trying to flee the city streets below us, a maze of death filled with clouds of green poison and acrid black smoke.
Those Man-Kites, the three huge swarms of them, were soon upon us. Still shocked and woozy, I watched another Montgolfier go down torn by bullets, no survivors to be expected. Then one more, blown up right in the air by a rocket, then another hit by thrown firebombs and machine gun fire from the Man-Kites — BOOM! KABAMM! — no survivors to be expected.
Then we were hit.
…
And then I woke up, feeling like what I just saw was very long in the past. I looked around me, and there was no Moon.
I jerked up from sleep, trying to focus my vision, and then I saw.
In fa
ct, I was seated across from the tired figure of someone who might have been a regular overworked employee in a plain governmental office. Except this was James Reaper, in the flesh.
Except the office was smoldering, wood popping and spraying hot embers in the air, small flames coming to life here and there all of a sudden; the air stale and hot, incredibly hot, and so filled with smoke I instantly wanted to cough my lungs out. Mr. Reaper’s clenched fists were red like two big lobsters.
James Reaper’s face looked sunburned and tanned, except it wasn’t. It was cooked. His eyebrows and hair gone, you could see the man had been slowly seasoning in this inferno for many days.
He looked at me and gave me a crooked smile — pearly, yet usual Mr. Reaper’s movie star charisma gone out of it. He probably read all my thoughts, because he told me:
“For two entire weeks you were banned. For two damn weeks. You could have died for real, you know. More than ten days in sonostasis is bad for your health, boy.”
I merely looked at him, scared. It had happened. We were both inside the lamp now. And its heat was still turned on. We were both being cooked now, except for him it was day fifteen, Wakeworld Standard Time, hell knows how long in his virtual static perception.
“You know the most terrible thing of all?” James Reaper asked me, his lips dry and cracked. He said: “This!”
Then he brought up his hand from under the table. It held a huge Desert Eagle semiautomatic pistol of matte gray metal, the words THE END engraved in gold on its thick hexagonal barrel.
“He left this for me, your Asian hacker,” the worn-out man in front of me said. “In the top drawer, here, he left this for me. A way to erase myself, no less.”
James Reaper looked pitiful compared to what he had been before. His hand trembled as he raised the gun and propped it against his temple.
“Boom!” Mr. Reaper said. “Another Ethereal, out of the way. May the Western world fall, for the sun shall rise in the East now, is this how it must have worked out?”
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “Everything will be fine now. I came back to help you.”
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