“That’s all I can or will tell you, for now. Good luck—or should I say, good hunting?”
That smile lingered as the message ended. Mei-Ling commanded the holodisplay off, then looked around at her fellow attendees at this most unusual party.
“Lakshmi Ngubo tells me,” she said, “that the Topological Voyeur Killer has apparently been sending infobursts not only against his murder targets but also at a number of targets in interplanetary space. Most frequently these bursts are focused toward Comet Hsiu-Johansen.”
She called a large real-time image of the comet into holo-display.
“This comet has demonstrated a number of orbital irregularities,” Mei-Ling continued, “According to Lakshmi, it seems to be able to very significantly alter its trajectory in non-ballistic fashion. To a growing number of astronomers and astrophysicists contacted by Interpol, this behavior strongly suggests that this comet is in fact not of natural origin.”
She paused as a murmur moved through the crowd again.
“Interpol maintains connections with a number or paranormal experts,” Mei-Ling said, a bit awkwardly, for this hit rather close to home. “Future readers and backtime scanners in particular. What the future readers—among them my old maze-chatspace acquaintance and new face-friend here, Marissa Correa—what they tell us correlates well with our other sources. From them, from what we have learned from Manqué, and from recent discussions with Lakshmi concerning the TV killer’s targeted infobursts, Robert and I have concluded that this comet is in all probability a disguised device. We believe it has been sent into solar system space by whatever extrasolar intelligence it is that the infosphere killer is already in contact with.”
The murmur now had in it a strong undercurrent of shock.
“Is there any way to determine the composition of the comet with certainty?” asked a red-bearded man. “X-ray it or something like that?”
Mei-Ling nodded and called up a three dimensional graphic of solar system space with spacecraft locations marked on it.
“Astronaut Service Guard is already attempting to probe it with a number of sensors,” she replied. “Also, as you see in this mapspace, the asteroid research ship Swallowtail is the spacecraft currently nearest the comet. It will be turning its sensor arrays on Hsiu-Johansen in a few hours, when it makes its nearest approach.”
The woman with the phalanx of indigenes around her spoke up again.
“These infobursts,” she said. “Is it possible to access one of them?”
Seiji smiled at her.
“Way ahead of you, Jacinta,” he said. “With the advice of Aleister McBruce long-distance from Earth, and the help of some of his friends in Communications, we’ve downloaded one into a ‘safe’ LogiBox. One that’s disconnected from all other habitat systems—”
Seiji nodded toward Jhana, who took out a remote controller and pressed a stud. The sheets of water flowing over the altar stone of the fountain fell away to nothing. The top of the slab slid back, revealing the flashing console of the LogiBox within.
“I used one of the ‘Boxes that Jiro’s construct came out of,” Seiji explained. “We’d entombed three of the Boxes here, then built the fountain around them. Sort of a shrine to Jiro. I didn’t think I’d ever use it this way, but there you have it. We downloaded the infoburst to that operational Box about three hours ago. Took up almost all its considerable memory.”
“Judging from that,” Lakshmi put in, “I think it’s safe to say each infoburst is far from being random data. It in fact seems to be a complex programming node, an emulation that functions as a ‘virtual machine’ once it’s actually mounted on a system.”
Everyone gazed into the Box inside the altar stone, then looked to Seiji. He glanced in turn at Jhana, who stood with her lips pressed firmly together.
“Shall we activate it?” he asked. Jhana nodded, and pressed another button on the controller.
A whir sounded for an instant, then light shot out of the Box. Before their eyes there burned up a Greek key’s squared meander, rapidly bending around into the circle of the classical labyrinth, then rotating beyond that into a complex three-dimensional virtual maze shaped like a sparking, dark-light, black-gold spherical brain—a convoluted, close-to-complete sphere, a labyrinth and mandala and mitochondrion and plasma globe all at once—and something more, for it gave the impression of continuing to evolve and complexify through dimensions just out of sight.
That at least was what most of them might agree they saw. The thing itself seemed almost as finite as the “ooh!”s and “ah!”s that greeted it, but its associations and interpretations were infinite.
Roger Cortland saw a great black-gold bush or tree, spherical with roots and branches light and dark, dense with an infinitude of fine branchings above and below. The golden color of its branches shone so bright it seemed aflame, a pointillist tree of fire, aswarm with flashes of moving light, like fireflies or swarms of bright bees. He realized he had seen it before, during the Light: the Arc Hive, the model of the fractal branching cosmos, all the continua of the plenum evolving and multiplying and complexifying.
Jacinta Larkin saw an image of Allesseh, the allone wherewhen, black hole and mirror-sphere and crystal ball and glittering memory bank, the not-knot gate between time and eternity, between space and infinity.
Mei-Ling looked at it and saw an image of what had appeared in the sky over Sedona, what had appeared on Manqué’s ’jector saver and over the heads of the monastics at Sedona, and the world at the Light—only now wrapped around into a sphere scale-infinite, yet bounded.
For just an instant, Seiji and Jhana and Lakshmi looked at it and thought they saw Jiro Yamaguchi’s face.
“It’s accessible,” Seiji said, examining readouts from the ‘Box. “Top-end graphics, thorough tactiles, full sensorium feed. We have enough virtuality eye-glove circlets for everybody.”
Into the crowd, in blocks of five, Seiji and Jhana passed out lightweight wearable virtuality units. Everyone distributed the eye-screened circlets and lightweight sensory gloves among themselves. Mei-Ling was oddly reminded of airline personnel handing out similar gear for in-flight interactives. The main differences here seemed to be in the gear’s strong sub-voc connection to microphone and public address gear, apparently so that the participants would hear each other. She saw too that it possessed powerful biosignal sensors (EOG, EMG, EEG), as well as links to response templates for electronic thought recognition patterns.
When all and everyone was in readiness, Jhana and Seiji logged them in.
Mei-Ling found herself abruptly floating, as if in a slow, oceanic blizzard, or inside a snowglobe adrift in low gravity. For a moment she wondered if HOME 2’s rotation had come to an abrupt stop—but no, it was simulation. She was moving against an “ocean current,” through a three-dimensional whitenoise sea, floating underwater through thick marine snow. Through Atlantean corridors and chambers of a maze flooded by this disorienting, unclear, anxiety-making stuff, somehow cold and dark and viscous, she made her way. In brief flashes the imagery would clear. At those instants she sensed strange bleak creatures of the strange bleak sea, moving dimly around her. A tangible chill moved down her spine.
“We’ve been here before,” she heard Jhana say. “The darkling sea. The hints of sharks and eels. That sense of repressed memories, old sins. Of something waiting, a sleeping dragon on a treasure hoard, a Minotaur in the center of a maze....”
“This is adapted from the CHAOS part of the Building The Ruins game,” Lakshmi said, sounding very puzzled. “I feel like I’m caught in a time loop. Why should we be interacting with the infoburst this way?”
Mei-Ling, however, was fascinated as she moved with all the others. She listened to the scattered chatter from a few. Like most of the first-timers, she felt little inclined to speak and much more inclined to listen.
“History repeating itself,” she heard Seiji speculate.
“Not exactly,” Jhana said. “More like Time expressing
fractal self-similarity, across different scales.”
Mei-Ling didn’t quite know how that might apply here, but it was an intriguing idea nonetheless. Her movement and that of the others still seemed “upstream” somehow, pushing back the gray-white, swirling, tactile static, the marine snow in the maze. She could see a lightening up ahead, though. As she grew closer, she saw that it rippled slightly, like the curtain or sheet of water that had flowed off the edge of the altar-stone fountain. She had the sensation that she was looking out into the world of dry land from behind a waterfall.
“This is different from last time,” Mei-Ling heard Jhana say as they all began coming through the rippling curtain. Just how different became immediately apparent, even to the newcomers, as they were greeted by an enormously bouncy 3D Jester or Fool, iconic but with a human face, brown-bearded, framed in long, dark, prematurely gray-streaked haired.
“Once upon a snake of time,” said the Fool, his words not only spoken but also scrolling in text across the perfect blue sky, “that eats its tale like always in the future. When same as always Art like Science is the whore of Power. Then troubled gods played chess against unbeatable machinery—as he said. Chess for the highest of stakes they played, once, some time, in some tale-eaten future.”
The Fool, dressed in a motley made of the flags of all nations, shook his cockscombed head and laughed. Mei-Ling noticed that in his right hand he bore a stick to which was attached an inflated spherical bladder or balloon, decorated to resemble the Earth as viewed from cislunar space. The spherical thing also flickered at moments, becoming at instants the round, electric organelle labyrinth they’d seen at the start of this journey. The one on the stick seemed dented on one side, however. The Fool also had the annoying habit of substituting it for his head, from time to time.
“Now then, let us begin,” said the Fool. “Ah, but only now is now. Past and future are both then. Past is back then, Future is front then. Someday we will have understood this, but no time at the moment, no future, no past, only the moving Now. Empty space, all matter only uncreate void nothingness with a spin, universe of one piece without end, amen.”
The Fool made to leave, but instead turned and said, “Nothing, that is, until through pain a smile is smiled that hopes and threatens to crack the universe in two, and so starts all the clocks ticking in a different world!”
Abruptly the Fool disappeared. What an eccentric performance, Mei-Ling thought, echoing a line she had heard in an old movie somewhere. Now that the Fool had disappeared, she could see more clearly the virtual place they were all inhabiting: a small, snowbound, state-of-the-art amusement complex, under a broad neon sky sign that flashed DREAMLAND. The place stood silent, nestled in a long mountain valley blanketed in winter, doomed to be shut down and shut in under the glaring white days and blue nights of mountain December.
Finger-walking toward the silent gates of the park, Mei-Ling found herself astonished by the level of the detail. The “snow” crunched under their “feet.” The first hints of blue crept into the “holes” their feet made in the snow as the shadows grew long. The “winds” could be heard here and there, rustling, mustering for battle to reclaim the territory lost to the sun during the day. She imagined she could here sun-thaw trickles freezing back to their sources, could see icicle pennants lengthening and stiffening under the early rising moon.
Oddly, she found that all of their virtual bodies here, their “mannequins,” really did look like mannequins—genderless, generic-faced, far less detailed than their surroundings. From time to time their heads would disappear for just a flash into that same round electric organelle labyrinth, then blink back into faces again. Strange, she thought, that the representations of real-time humans should be the least realistic representations here.
Together she and the others climbed over the stiles into the deserted amusement park, without incident. “What ride do you think the Fool is riding?” she heard the mannequin that must be Seiji ask.
The park immediately exploded with light, noise, motion. Calliopes groaned, robot carny barkers droned, public address systems intoned. Slabs of snow slid from the sloping roof of the merry-go-round as it began to whirl. Bars of ice crashed down from the spokes of the Ferris wheel as it started to turn. Riderless roller coasters ratcheted up rails coated with ice that cracked and snapped and crashed down into the webwork of beams and girders. Skyrides soared heavenward. Snow cascaded from shuttling monorails and tube trains, glass broke, engines spluttered and choked. The Amusement Machine called Dreamland had come flashingly, bangingly, roaringly, screamingly on.
“Sorry I asked,” Seiji muttered.
“Look for something that moves like a maze,” said a voice Mei-Ling recognized as Marissa Correa’s. Mei-Ling was surprised to find she had been thinking exactly the same thing. “Something with spirals, gyres, waves—”
“This is an amusement park,” said a male voice Mei-Ling didn’t recognize. “Almost everything has those, or does that—”
“Then we’ll just have to find the right one,” Jhana said.
As they moved down the midway, the sounds of space battle blasted from a large pleasure dome nearby. From another dome came the hiss and roar of titanic struggle between ancient saurians. Out of red-minareted tents scimitar-wielding jihadin clashed steel, slashed flesh, and spurted blood with their heavily armored crusader opponents in unholy war. A mechanical pterodactyl soared overhead, yawping out unearthly screeches. Helicopters rose in pursuit and fired on the screaming reptile. Enormous alien creatures, winged and insectoid, spewed deadly ray-blasts into the Dreamland grounds.
“Great holojections!” a male voice said from a mannequin further along the midway. “Even better than the real thing!”
“What’s not real?” said Atsuko Cortland above the noise. “Business as usual, in a world entertaining itself to death. How are we supposed to find anything in all this madness?”
Through all the noise, Mei-Ling thought she heard something—a voice pertinent to all of them.
“Listen,” she said to her virtual companions. Her mannequin self side-stepped a scaly slit-eyed beastie squirming from a green-fumed sewer. “Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?” the mannequin Robert asked. Mei-Ling turned and saw her companion skirt a pile of treasures surmounted by a sleeping but increasingly restless guardian dragon. The scene stood foregrounded on the snow like words upon a white page.
“Listen!”
Robert and the others listened, though none of them were sure what they were supposed to be listening for. To Robert’s immediate right a Wild West scene had appeared: cowboy crashing through a plate glass SALOON window, sound of breaking bottles and furniture smashing in a bar fight inside. In the alley between the livery stables and the saloon, Lawman and Blackhat were shooting it out. To his immediate left, heavily armored tanks burned orange and black in fields of golden wheat during the first summer of Operation Barbarossa. Other soldiers from the last century’s second world war moved through dense jungle, flame-throwing their way forward, not coincidentally searing the flesh from enemies manning machine gun nests.
Through the roar of battle and conflict, terror and adventure, they began to hear it.
“Welcome! Welcome! New! Today!” droned a carnie barker’s voice—and the printed caption scrolled up once more. “Come to the Gyre, come what may! See that madcap Fool perform a deed of daring-do! See him ride the Enormous! Stupendous! Phantasmagorical! Rotating! Hugh! Manatee! Gyre!”
Robert’s mannequin moved toward Mei-Ling’s point of view.
“Is that it?” his mannequin asked. “Sounds like that Fool’s voice.”
“The Möbius Gyre!” the barker’s voice continued. “The Fractal Gyre! The Dreamland Gyre! The Mondrian Mitochondrion! The Palindrome Ribosome! Welcome! Welcome—”
“Right,” Mei-Ling replied. “Riding the Gyre—a spiral, as Marissa said.”
“Where do you think the voice is coming from?” Seiji asked, his mannequin
moving up beside them.
“Up ahead, somewhere along this promenade,” Mei-Ling said, after looking about her a moment. She wondered briefly how it was she had become the group’s impromptu leader. From her familiarity with infocrime? Her profile-knowledge of the topological voyeur, the parallel killer? “The stock footage in that direction seems to be warped toward more personal imagery. Probably obsessive memories. That would fit the scan key on the infosphere killer—”
Her words were drowned out by a ratcheting up of the noise level. As they proceeded along the promenade, their footsteps’ crunching upon the snow was now completely inaudible under the flood of other synthetic sounds. To their left, a returning war hero in an open car rode through a blizzard of ticker tape. A pretty young woman with bits of confetti in her ample exposed cleavage ran out of the crowd and threw her arms around him. “You can command the tank my father keeps in the basement—anytime!” She smiled, he smiled, she let go as the car and the motorcade moved on. Scorned, she drew a gun from her purse and blew off the back of his head.
Then came Marilyn, honey blond, long lashed, pearly white, ruby red, perfectly shaped. Lush long sufferings on stilettos sharp. Poised above the ventilator shaft, dress billowing, soft mothwings, flying too close to the hot lights. Shaftwind prodding and probing her to Hollywood Smile for the camera men and their leering paunches. Tiger moth, surrounded by them, caged in their light cold with excess of heat. Tiger eyes of camera lenses. From the cameras leap the tigers, stalking her, ripping her, tearing her. Flash flash flash. Flesh flesh flesh. Smile smile smile.
“Let’s turn here,” Mei-Ling said. “I think we’ve been in this part of the psychodrama long enough.”
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