He turned towards the Sandman, unable to formulate a response. Everything that went into constructing his sense of self told him that what Alex was saying had to be wrong, yet it was the only way in which everything that had happened to him made sense.
‘You can make your heaven here, but it isn’t an afterlife. You’re not dead because you were never alive in the organic sense. None of us were. You are a facsimile of Ross Baker’s mind, a snapshot that was taken on the last normal day you remember.’
‘How do you know this?’ Juno breathed, close to tears.
‘I pieced it together. Took me a while, but eventually I figured it out. It’s the explanation that fits the most data and isn’t contradicted by any of it. The time lapses were the key.’
‘Time lapses?’ Ross asked, but Juno was ahead of him.
‘Like me and Joe,’ she said, her voice distant and numb. ‘I was in the old world two years more than him before coming here: I was with him the whole time, yet he has no memory of that period.’
‘That’s it. To your husband it didn’t happen, because he is a snapshot of Joe’s mind taken two years before the snapshot that is you.’
‘Solderburn’s scanner,’ Ross mumbled.
‘The Simulacron,’ Alex confirmed. ‘We were working on a system that would let us create computerised models based on brain scans. Solderburn’s new machine must have recorded a lot more than anyone anticipated, and at some point in the future, we developed the technology to interpret and synthesise the data.’
‘In the future? But I was scanned by the prototype, and my research plans for decoding models were nowhere near coming up with something like this. Besides, if we’re all scans, why do most people remember just going to bed at home?’
‘The last part, I’m not sure. My latest memory is the same as yours: lying down inside Solderburn’s chamber. As to your other question, it’s the time issue again. I’m guessing there was a gap between Solderburn carrying out the test scans and the technology to interpret them being developed. Essentially it’s a matter of the scan sitting dormant on a hard drive until it gets incorporated into a synthesis model and then uploaded to a virtual environment. That’s why although I was among the first to get here, I found myself inside games that weren’t due for release until years into my future.’
‘But I was scanned less than a week after you were. Why am I turning up late to the party, and how long has the party been running, for that matter?’
‘There’s no way of knowing how time here relates to time in the real world, but for whatever reason, you were never uploaded until now. After I came here, at first there was a trickle of new arrivals, then a deluge, and then somebody shut off the tap. No idea why, but one day the new arrivals just stopped coming. As far as I’m aware, you and this guy Bob are the first new uploads in a very long time. Apart from the Integrity,’ he added, a look of regret darkening his expression.
‘If I’m just a digital copy of myself, shouldn’t I have perfect recall of everything I know, instantly accessible like any other computer file?’
‘It doesn’t work like that. We aren’t merely copies of our memories, we’re copies of our minds. Not merely what we thought, but how we thought. So just like before, something might trigger complete recall of a name or a detail that you couldn’t remember yesterday.’
‘But isn’t what’s happening here being written to purely digital memory?’
‘Yes, but the architecture is the same as your old, organic systems.’
Ross searched desperately for more questions, as though any holes he could find in Alex’s theory might be his salvation. Yet even as he asked, he was aware of having already been prepared to accept the same explanation when he came up with his own ancestor-simulation hypothesis. In both scenarios, he had never visited the ‘real’ world, never had a body, never had a brain, so why was Alex’s version harder to take?
Partly it was envy. In the ancestor-simulation scenario, there was only one Ross Baker, and only an illusion of the real world to feel cut adrift from. In short, you don’t miss what you never had. Whereas in Alex’s scenario, there was a real world, and a real Ross Baker still living in it: one who still had Carol, and the baby, and a future. However, the main reason for his instinctive resistance was that in the hacked ancestor-simulation scenario, there remained the possibility of a way back. Alex’s version offered no such hope.
His principles were now his enemies, but just because reality was pissing him about didn’t mean it would be a constructive course of action to go in the huff with it. Parsimony. Occam’s Razor. The explanation that makes the fewest assumptions is usually the correct one. Every assumption in Alex’s explanation was repeated and multiplied in the alternative. What was more likely: that Solderburn’s machine had created a digital copy of the human mind, or that Ross’s and everyone else’s minds had always been mere digital entities within a simulated universe; and that this simulated universe, governed consistently by laws that we had come to understand as nature, had been fundamentally altered by a machine that was essentially a minute subroutine inside it?
Juno looked as though it was only the armour that was holding her up.
‘You okay there?’ he asked her.
‘I feel sick. But how can I feel sick when I’ve never had a stomach? And I feel lost – far more lost than when I first got here.’
‘You did have a stomach,’ the Sandman said. ‘What’s crucial here is that this doesn’t change who we are. If a man paints a masterpiece then loses his arm in an accident, he no longer has the hand that held the brush, but that doesn’t mean he’s no longer the man who created the picture. Organic consciousness or digital consciousness, you’re defined by the software, not the machine that’s running it.’
This last remark resonated like a bell buoy in the fog, offering guidance through the gloom, and Ross recognised that it sounded so reassuring because its chime was familiar. This was what he had come to understand on Graxis when he’d been told that his memories were just a virus intended to debilitate the Gralak soldiery.
‘This doesn’t change who we are,’ the Sandman repeated. ‘And if you’ve any doubts about that, ask yourself: now that you’ve learned you’re a digital copy, does it hurt any less to be cut off from your family? Now that you’re aware everyone you’ve met here is also a digital copy, do you feel any less connection to the people you know? The people you’ve lost?’
Ross thought of a sunny day at Blair Drummond Safari Park long ago, of Christmases at Mum’s with his sisters and their kids around the dinner table. He felt his eyes filling up, a lump in his throat obstructing a verbal answer rendered redundant by all the ways his face was already expressing it.
There was no going back. That was why it hurt. For better or for worse, this was his world now.
‘Hell if you make it, heaven if you want it to be,’ Juno affirmed hoarsely.
‘Wise words,’ said the Sandman.
‘I heard it more starkly framed, too,’ stated Ross: ‘Here is all there is.’
‘Who said that?’
‘The Integrity agent who tortured me. At least now I know he wasn’t lying. Kind of puts an interesting spin on the risk/benefit equation. I don’t fancy living out my existence trapped in one single gameworld as the Integrity are demanding, but if they’re right about what’s causing the corruption, it would be literally better than nothing.’
‘Now you’re getting it,’ said the Sandman.
‘It’s devastating though,’ Ross said. ‘I can certainly see why the Originals kept it back from the general population. So why are you telling it to us?’
Juno’s attitude of defeat suddenly altered, becoming animate with alert caution, like an animal that’s just sniffed a predator on the breeze.
‘Because we ain’t gonna be allowed to pass it on,’ she said, looking up the hill beyond the house, then accusatorily towards the Sandman.
Ross glanced towards where her gaze had briefly fixed upon the u
pper slope. He saw a black half-track vehicle cresting the summit, a small deployment of black-clad troops marching at its flanks. Ross turned back towards the Sandman but his attention was drawn past him, down to the horseshoe bay, where he could now see an aircraft down on the beach, some troop-carrier hulk like a big black beetle, tiny black figures scurrying busily around it.
‘You ratted us out?’ Ross asked, incredulous.
‘I had no choice,’ the Sandman retorted. ‘You idiots brought them here. They came pouring into my world a matter of seconds after you both arrived. Turns out you’re a very wanted man. I had to cut a deal to protect what’s mine.’
‘You went Lando on us?’
‘This is all there is, you just said it yourself, and the corruption is real. I don’t like the way the Integrity go about their business but I’ve come to understand that they’re a necessary evil. Just as the Diasporadoes are a well-meaning but misguided threat. Closing down the transits isn’t too high a price to pay for survival. It’s a big enough place: everybody should be able to find a world they like and get comfortable, at least until we can stabilise the corruption.’
‘And where will we be getting comfortable?’ Juno asked.
‘I’ve been given assurances. Your custody won’t be forever.’
Ross glanced back and forth, from the half-track proceeding slowly down the slope to the aircraft and the landing force on the shore below.
‘They came via space,’ Juno said, her voice dry and woozy, but that was far from the most disturbing development they witnessed.
Ross noticed that most of the tiny black figures on the sand were streaming towards, not out of, the troop carrier, executing an evacuation. They were running from what looked like a pillar at the edge of the sea, a black cylinder like a Greek or Roman column standing three times the height of a man. As the last of them piled up a ramp into the troop carrier, even from this far up on the hillside Ross could sense a powerful vibration and the column began to rotate, burrowing itself into the sand.
Their host’s previously perfect brow began to develop a furrow, as though out of sympathy with the beach.
The column dug deeper and deeper, spinning ever faster as it did so, before the sand covered it over and it was gone. The aircraft took off vertically and headed out over the water, where Ross knew there was nothing but the end of this world.
All was still again, and for a moment the beach looked as though the troop carrier and the column had never been there. Then, from the same spot, there came what looked like wisps of smoke, curling up and forming a grey haze. At first the haze rose where the pillar had been, like a vapid ghost of its predecessor, then it swiftly began to spread.
The Sandman stared uncomprehending for a moment, but Ross and Juno had both seen it before. On Calastria.
‘The corruption,’ he breathed. ‘The Integrity are causing it.’
He turned to look at the two of them, wearing the aghast expression of someone who hadn’t been genuinely shocked for an extremely long time.
‘They’re destroying my world.’
‘Yeah, I feel you, man,’ Juno replied. ‘If you can’t trust a bunch of psycho-ass sadistic power-mad fascists, honestly, who the fuck can you trust?’
Ross heard a familiar thumping from somewhere in the distance and felt the ground tremble a little beneath his feet. He looked across the valley and saw the bullfrog hopping into sight at the top of the hillside opposite, as much a symbol of the power the Sandman wielded as the divine hand that had picked him up and dropped him a few minutes ago. His attention was drawn by the observation that, unlike its previous leisurely meanderings, it appeared to be in quite a hurry. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t in a hurry any more, albeit some parts of it were moving even faster than before; they just weren’t attached to the parts they had been previously.
Ross had seen something fly over the brow of the hill and make for the bullfrog, proportionally about the size of a mosquito. Then there was a thoroughly disproportionate response as the amphibian exploded, its legs slumping down on to the hillside like a burst water balloon while its top half sprayed and splattered across the lower slope in a messy arc of red, pink and green half a mile wide. If any of them had a freezer, the local villagers would be sorted for frog meat for about a decade.
The Sandman watched his creature’s demise with numb incredulity.
‘Bawbag,’ he said.
Ross wondered whether he was blaming someone specifically until he realised from the alliteration that it must have been the bullfrog’s name.
He looked for the source of the missile, and saw an entire division of Integrity troops coming over the brow of the slope on the far side, behind not one but four tanks of the kind Ross had seen in the war-torn rubble of Death or Glory.
‘I’m not so sure it’s me these guys are here to huckle,’ he said.
‘Copy that,’ said Juno. ‘So, given the deal’s off,’ she asked the Sandman, ‘I take it you won’t mind if we try getting the fuck outta here?’
He eyed the menacing advance that was marching thigh-high through over-sized froggy viscera, desolation gradually over-coming disbelief as his dominant expression. Then self-pity changed to something else, closer to regret or even penitence.
‘The nearest transit is in the next valley,’ he said. ‘It’s in a mausoleum halfway down the slope. If you can get past that lot, you’re free and clear.’
Ross took a fresh look at the half-track and its infantry escort.
‘You think we can take them?’ he asked Juno.
‘Attacking uphill, against an armoured vehicle and superior numbers enjoying an elevated angle of fire? Shit, why not give us a challenge?’
The Sandman’s eyes blanked briefly, a look Ross was coming to recognise as HUD-stare. He waved his right hand and gestured to the side of the vineyard, where two creatures were suddenly called into existence.
‘Brilliant,’ Ross said as he and Juno surveyed their mounts. ‘More fucking horses. How about a hover-bike?’
‘Rules of the gameworld,’ the Sandman explained. ‘You can only piss with the cock you’ve got.’
‘Some god you are,’ he muttered under his breath as he climbed up on to the saddle.
Gameworld rules worked two ways, however. Ross, who had never ridden a horse in the old world, found that he had control of this one like he was a champion jockey, and at the pace it boasted, his steed would have romped the Grand National carrying John Candy.
He galloped in erratic zigzags to make himself a less predictable target for the Integrity snipers who had dug in and were taking laser-blast pot-shots from further up the slope. The fact that they weren’t restricted to the low-fi options of Black & White’s bronze-age technology reminded him that his own pissing options were not limited to merely the one cock either.
A quick root through his inventory showed him that he still had a couple of Panzerfaust warheads to play with. He called one to hand and aimed for the half-track, taking a few moments to anticipate the rise and fall of his horse’s gallop before pulling the trigger.
The rocket-propelled grenade flew over the snipers’ heads and straight for its target, engulfing the half-track in a ball of fire. This stopped its progress down the hill, but several more troops poured from the flaming wreckage and began aiming concerted volleys at the two mounts.
Ross and Juno were both thrown to the turf as each of their horses was felled. He found himself face-down in knee-high grass, less mobile but not such an easy mark. He switched to his machine-gun and found a target, the strangely shimmering black of the Integrity snipers making them easy to spot against the green of the hillside. Another came running over the brow to replace his fallen comrade, and Ross dropped him before he could draw. Emboldened, he climbed first to his knees then fully upright, cutting down the enemy infantry as he charged up the slope, Juno also firing accurately and mercilessly at his side with her plasma gun.
The bastards didn’t like it toe to toe, that much was
obvious. They still loosed off a few volleys for Ross and Juno to dodge, but their firing was needlessly sporadic; a conspicuous lack of aggression that reminded him of the Gralaks. Perhaps these were Integrity AI drones. If so, they should have toggled the buggers to a harder skill setting, because this was almost too easy.
As he gained the brow of the hill, he realised he was wrong. It wasn’t almost too easy: it was precisely too easy. Waiting down the slope on the other side was a huge squadron of infantry, the casualties respawning to replenish their numbers from a portable pod, all awaiting the command of a new class of Integrity agent Ross had never seen before. He looked like an Integrity build of the ubersoldat from Return to Castle Wolfenstein: a towering super-warrior wrought from fluid plastic and tempered steel, carrying what in anyone else’s hands would have been a cannon, but in his was merely a rifle.
Before Ross could call out a warning to Juno to turn back, the rifle spat a gobbet of black from its gleaming maw, and speech was no longer an option.
Only screaming.
He was knocked to the ground and sent tumbling several yards back down the slope in a maelstrom of pain and terrifying disorientation that felt less like the world was swirling around him than that his individual molecules were all spinning at high speed and threatening to fly apart. He endured the same electrocution agony as when he was being tortured in the cell, the same violation of his psyche, but instead of it coming on the licking tongues of a whip, it passed right through him like a wave, enveloping him like a blanket and exploding from within him like a bomb.
He was quite sure that according to the protocols of any gameworld, it ought to have killed him and invoked a respawn, but he feared this device was independent of all such rules. It didn’t come from within any game. It came from somewhere else entirely.
Ross tried to right himself but he wasn’t even sure what way he was facing. He could see Juno, or at least a shape he knew to be Juno, lying on the grass nearby, hit by a blast from the same weapon. He tried to move his arms, but it was as though they were an inventory item and he had forgotten how to equip them for use. Drunkenly he looked through his HUD for a weapon, his dazed logic suggesting that holding a rifle would automatically bring his arms up in front of him, so that at least he’d know where they were.
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