Recursion a-1

by Tony Ballantyne

  “Oh, you’re the real you,” Johnston said. “You’re just not the one sitting on your ship anymore.”

  Herb felt sick. “How could you do this? What have you done to me? I don’t care if I’m a personality construct; I still feel real. Who gave you the right to do this to me?”

  The emotion drained from Johnston’s face. He gazed at Herb with an empty expression. “You gave me the right, Herb, when you agreed to help me on this mission. Don’t you remember?”

  Herb held Johnston’s gaze for a moment. Silence. Then Herb swallowed and looked away. “Yeah. Whatever. So that’s why the most important thing we have to do is to get back to ourselves. Do you have any idea how?”

  “I have a few ideas up my sleeve.”

  “How will we know if we’ve succeeded?”

  “The you and I who are here at the moment won’t know. If the you and I on your spaceship are hearing these words, it means we succeeded.”

  Herb said nothing. A nasty idea had just occurred to him.

  “So, what happens to us then, when we’ve finished our mission? Do we just die? Or do we spend the rest of our lives here wandering around the processors of the Necropolis?”

  “When you’ve finished your work for me, how you then choose to live your life is up to you. As long as there is something to process the idea of you, you will think that you think, and therefore, you am what you am.”

  They finally came to the foot of the cable. Silver-grey and perfectly smooth, Herb could see himself dimly reflected in the dull sheen of its metal. The cable disappeared into the tile floor, giving no hint of the tremendous tension trapped beneath the ground.

  Johnston ran an apparent hand over the cable’s surface.

  “I can’t feel anything,” he said. “That means the VNM that made up this cable must have been functioning correctly. There is no room for any margin of error in a space elevator.”

  He turned to explain to Herb. “We’re taking advantage of the fact that the VNM that was the seed for the Necropolis couldn’t suicide properly. The building block machines still have their senses and processing spaces intact. We’re using them now to give us life.”

  “I guessed as much,” Herb lied.

  “Sure. Come on, there’re no clues here. Let’s take the scenic route into space. We’re going to try to get on board one of those ships and steal a little slice of processing time from its brain. We’re going to take on a life in a computer’s dreams. Isn’t that poetic?”

  There were rooms and walkways built into the outer skin of the space elevator.

  “Imagine having a corner office in this place!”

  “You wouldn’t be able to breathe,” Johnston pointed out. “The windows don’t fit properly.”

  “You know what I mean,” Herb said.

  From the streets, Herb remembered, the space elevator looked like a very tall skyscraper. Get up close and you might not even realize that there was anything odd about it. From where they were now standing, looking out of a wide picture window just a few hundred meters above the ground, it was almost possible to believe they were looking out over an Earth city. Almost possible, thought Herb. Only if he didn’t look up to see the stacks and stacks of silent spaceships floating high above. Only if he didn’t look down too carefully to see the way the buildings below had stretched and deformed. Only if he didn’t look at those long metal creepers running in every direction, tangling high above the streets and choking the narrow roads. One particularly thin and elegant tower standing almost directly before Herb seemed to have been a favorite target. It was so wrapped around with creepers that it looked as if it had been strangled and was now being dragged to the ground.

  And through it all, the yellow-and-black-striped metal bees hummed back and forth.

  “Those yellow pod things. What are they doing?” asked Herb.

  “I don’t know,” said Johnston. “They’re too big to be just observation pods. There must be some pretty powerful equipment stuck inside them. Maybe we’ll find out up there. Come on.”

  The journey into space took longer than Herb might have guessed: Johnston couldn’t seem to jump them more than a couple of floors at a time.

  “There’s no clear line of sight up to the top,” he explained, as he and Herb stood several thousand meters up the building, frustrated again at how few floors they had jumped.

  Their journey became one of flickering movement as their consciousness appeared on one floor just long enough for Johnston to find a path to the next. Herb watched the Necropolis recede below them as they slowly climbed to the stars, the elongated towers of the city falling away as the pair of them rose to meet the layers of spaceships that hung above.

  The outer limits of the Necropolis began to resolve themselves. The city appeared to have spread itself over a considerable part of the planet’s surface before the ongoing decay in the integrity of the reproductive machines finally set in. The bounds of the Necropolis were ragged, the towers out there having stretched themselves too high before collapsing under their own weight. The city didn’t so much come to an end as fade into the surrounding countryside. Herb shivered and wondered what it would be like to wander through those forsaken lands.

  Johnston was his only unmoving point of reference. He stood next to Herb, his face set in quiet concentration as they traveled upwards. Behind him the room appeared to flicker: sometimes it grew larger, sometimes smaller. Occasionally the windows vanished, cracked and blown out into the thinning air. At one point they traveled in darkness for a good five minutes, and Herb guessed that they had reached the limit of the space intended to be occupied by humans, but then the habitable rooms resumed, this time much larger and with a faint air of half-formed opulence around them. It was a shame that the Necropolis had failed, reflected Herb, then he thought about what Johnston had hinted at earlier. There must be hundreds of failed cities like this, scattered throughout the Enemy Domain. How many cities had been built successfully?

  Not for the first time, Herb shivered at the thought of what he had agreed to fight.

  They had risen so high Herb could now make out the curve of the planet. They were approaching the first layer of spaceships, spread out above them like checkers on a board, vanishing into the distance in all directions, silver-grey and almost disk-shaped except for a love-heart indentation. They rose through the first layer and continued, past a second and a third, climbing into the night.

  The flickering movement suddenly stopped.

  “I need a rest,” Johnston muttered. He removed his hat and took a white handkerchief from his breast pocket. He mopped his forehead with it and then carefully replaced his hat, tilting it at a jaunty angle. Herb wandered to the window for a better view of his surroundings. Looking down through the crystal lattice of spaceships, he could see the ball of the planet, far below. He felt a wave of dizziness as he realized that if he fell out of the window now, he would probably miss the planet as he went down. The thought was ridiculous.

  Johnston was refolding his handkerchief. “We can’t go on any further by this route,” he said. “We’re now approaching the end point of the elevator; beyond here everything was constructed from perfectly functioning VNM stock. It had to be, otherwise it wouldn’t have held together.”

  He gave a deep sigh and pushed the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Whew. I’m rather hungry. It’s amazing what conditioned responses can do to you. Anyway. We’re going to have to make a jump into the unknown. I’m guessing that the end of the elevator is not that far above us. It will probably be in geosynchronous orbit with the base. I’m hoping that a docking station was completed, possibly even using the same VNM that later seeded the planet below. There must be something there that could host us.”

  “And if there isn’t?” asked Herb.

  “Then we’ll never know about it. Our consciousness will just fade from here, and the Herb and Robert back home will never know what we have learned.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not to
worry. I beamed our consciousnesses to other points in the Enemy Domain, too. There’s another pair of us in the Necropolis. One set should get back at least.”

  Herb frowned. “It will still be like dying to us, though, surely?”

  “Ah. Don’t worry about that. Are you ready?”

  Herb gripped Johnston by the sleeve.

  “Hang on. Let’s talk this over.”

  “No time. Let’s go.”

  They jumped…

  eva 2: 2051

  High above Eva, the lime leaves fluttered gently against the deep blue of the afternoon sky. Flickering pale green and yellow hearts formed a vaulted ceiling over the quiet cathedral-like space between the dark trunks. The air was rich with the smell of soil and summer rain; it insinuated its way into Eva’s body, filling her with its heady presence. She had kicked off her shoes to walk around the clearing, feeling the darkness of the earth between her toes. Eva, held apart from it for so long in the grey headache of South Street, was reconnecting with life.

  A voice whispered: “Eva.”

  She started and twisted around, trying to see who had spoken. The voice had sounded in her ear, but there was no one there. The space between the trees was a vessel filled with woodland silence, a silence that was now leaking away.

  Eva could see Alison, Katie, and Nicolas approaching across the overgrown green lawn that lapped the treeline. They were obviously looking for her. Nicolas spotted Eva first and pointed her out to the others. The three came crashing into her retreat.

  “Hello, Eva, I thought we’d find you here.” Alison was on a high, every word packed with a jangling, desperate energy. Katie gave a nervous twitch and quickly turned her head in the other direction. Nicolas stared at her breasts.

  “Hello, Eva,” he said. “We’re going to sneak into Pontybodkyn. Are you coming?”

  “I can’t. I’ve got a counseling session in an hour.” Eva was glad for the excuse not to go, but Alison wasn’t going to be deflected so easily.

  “Skip it,” she said, too loudly, snapping her fingers dismissively. “No one will care. The staff will be pleased to get an extra half-hour’s break.”

  “No. I want to go.”

  Nicolas directed a knowing smile at her breasts.

  “You’ve only been here two weeks, haven’t you? You’ll soon find out. Nobody really cares about counseling here. The staff only do it because it’s their job; we only go because it gives us someone to talk to.”

  “Well, I’d like to talk to someone.”

  “Come to Pontybodkyn and talk with us. At least we won’t be spending all afternoon trying to convince you there’s something wrong with you.”

  Eva ran a hand through her grey hair, tucking it behind her ears. She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. “There is something wrong with me. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Ah,” said Alison, smiling slightly hysterically. “But where you’re going wrong is expecting them to make you better.” She gave an exaggerated sigh and spun around on her heels. The shafts of sunlight flickered over her body. “Oh, this is boring! Come on, Nicolas; come on, Katie. Leave her. We don’t want little miss goody two shoes spoiling our trip.”

  “That’s not true…” began Nicolas.

  “I said, come on.”

  She skipped off across the clearing toward the belt of trees that screened the Center from the main road. Katie shuffled along behind her, head down, hands clasped tightly before her. Nicolas tore his gaze from Eva’s breasts long enough to give an apologetic smile and shrug, then turned and ran to catch up with Alison.

  Eva watched them go, then resumed pacing on the soft leaf mold, gazing up at the cathedral roof of leaves. Silence drifted down the shafts of greenish light that filled the space within the trees and Eva began to relax again. Peace and calm and a chance to forget the outside world and to feel that it had forgotten her. Alison was wrong, thought Eva, who had never imagined they could make her better. She just liked having someone to talk to. She simply didn’t think that there was anything wrong with her that could be cured here at the Center.

  “Eva. You can’t see me, but I’m here. I know you can hear me. I need to talk to you.”

  Apart from the voices, of course. Maybe they could stop her hearing the voices.

  Doctor Cevier’s office was large and bare. The high ceiling and wide floor space dwarfed his plastic desk. A few framed pictures and certificates were marooned on the cheerless orange walls. Two shaped plastic chairs sat by a low coffee table set with a tray holding two steaming cups from the vending machine. Five cakes were set out on a plate. Eva took one seat, Doctor Cevier the other. He was a well-built man in his early thirties, his thinning hair looking damp and smelling faintly of shower gel. Doctor Cevier always looked as if he had just left the gym. He tapped his ultra-slim executive model console to set it recording and then relaxed in his chair.

  “Well, Eva. Two weeks now. How do you feel?”

  “Tired.”

  “That’s not surprising. How much sleep are you getting? In an average day, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Fifteen hours?”

  Doctor Cevier tapped at his console.

  “More like eighteen, according to this. Why do you think that is?”

  “What is there to get up for?”

  Doctor Cevier said nothing in reply. Instead he picked up one of the cups and took a sip.

  “Mmm. Delicious. How do they manage it? Every cup tastes different. Aren’t you going to try some?”

  Eva stared at the other cup and said nothing. Through the wide window she could see out across the ragged lawns to the circle of limes. Their leaves rippled and danced in the sunlight.

  “I’m sorry?” Eva said.

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Doctor Cevier. “Tell me, how are you settling in here? Do you feel comfortable?”

  “I suppose so. When are you going to let me go?”

  Doctor Cevier took another sip of his drink. “Wonderful. You really should try some. It will help you relax.”

  “How? Is it drugged?”

  Doctor Cevier laughed a little and tapped at his console again. Eva looked around the empty office. If this were her room, she thought, she would buy some rugs and hang them from the walls, arrange standard lamps and statues around the edge of the room and throw mats and carpets on the floor. Anything to break the dull monotony of the surroundings. Anything that would make the room look less like a waiting room and more like an office, even a bookcase, filled with cheap second-hand books. Doctor Cevier wasn’t speaking now; he gazed at Eva with a half amused expression. Eva ignored him. She looked across at the plastic desk and wondered if Doctor Cevier ever sat behind it. The few books and papers that lay on its surface were facing in her direction.

  “Have you given any thought yet on how you got here?”

  “No,” Eva said.

  “You were very lucky, you know. They thought you were dead when the train pulled into Marseilles.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Well, there you go,” repeated Doctor Cevier, “as you say. Two doctors pronounced you dead, as did a Diagnostics Expert System at the Marseilles Area Hospital. And those things are never wrong.”

  “Except in my case.”

  “Except in your case. They pulled you back from the dead, Eva. I’ve read the report. Not my field, you understand, but still pretty convincing. If it wasn’t for the fact you’d probably disagree with me, I’d tell you to your face that you were dead.”

  “No one can be right all of the time.”

  “Very true. You know, at some point we’re going to have to go over what happened that day. But not today.” He tapped at his console again. “This isn’t the first time you’ve been in here, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe we can talk about your brother sometime.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not, indeed?” Doctor Cevier picked up his cup and finished his drink. Eva pointedly left hers untouched.


  The rest of the session passed in silence. Doctor Cevier was waiting for Eva to speak. Eva wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. The worst thing was, she didn’t really know why. She knew that he was here to help her; she had even looked forward to this meeting. Now that it had arrived, she felt a sudden surge of obstinacy. Maybe it was the realization that Doctor Cevier represented just another branch of Social Care. He may have a big desk, he may have his doctorate, but he was just the same as those people back in South Street who used to poke their noses into her business. They didn’t really care about curing her, they just wanted the warm glow of validation one got from helping others, whether they wanted helping or not. It was the mention of her brother that had made her realize all this. How dare he mention her brother?

  When her time was up, Eva rose from her seat and walked to the door.

  “Eva?”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Doctor Cevier.

  Eva took a bath. It was something about the Center: things that she used to accomplish in a few minutes in the outside world could fill up a whole day here. You could spend an hour making a cup of tea; you could spend two hours deciding whether or not to have a biscuit with it.

  The bathroom didn’t have a lock on the door. Every so often a nurse would come in to look for a towel or to check that the water was warm enough. Eva gave them a wry look as they smiled apologetically at her. She had taken four months planning her suicide attempt. She was hardly likely to try anything in the bathroom, was she?

  The sound of Alison, Nicolas, and Katie returning caused a bit of a stir. She heard Alison’s voice first, slurred and indignant.

  “So what if we’re drunk? It’s a free country, isn’t it?”

  Eva walked into the corridor to find Alison squaring up to Nurse Dyer. The nurse was small; she had to tilt her head back to gaze into Alison’s eyes, yet she stood her ground without heat or concern.

  “No, Alison,” she said gently, “it’s not a free country. Not for you anymore. Anyway, didn’t you stop to think about poor Katie? Didn’t you think about her feelings, having to mix with all those strangers?”