‘What is this place?’ he asked quietly.
‘The locals call it England’s Green and Pleasant Land.’
‘It looks like John Major’s vision of a country that never existed. Who are the locals? The 1922 Committee?’
‘You know how everything in these worlds is massively enhanced from the original games? Not just the surroundings, but the NPCs?’
‘Yes. Like everything’s been ported to a more advanced game engine.’
‘Well, whatever it is, it didn’t just affect games. There was a program, a little app called the Daily Mail Headline Generator.’
‘I remember it. What, are you telling me it became self-aware?’
‘No. I didn’t know anything about the Daily Mail before I got here, but I now know it’s like a print equivalent of Fox News, and self-aware is not an expression that would ever apply to either. But the app did become enhanced, and developed AI. It infected a copy of The Sims and began building its perfect world. The problem was, the program wasn’t in on the joke.’
‘It didn’t realise it was set up as a satire. And it built all this?’
‘No, what it built initially was a mess, but some people clearly liked what it was trying to do, and got together to realise their collective vision.’
As they proceeded beyond the village green, Ross got a close-up view of what a vision it was. They came to a busy civic square, where some kind of public spectacle had drawn a far larger crowd than the nearby smack of leather on willow. It was here that Ross got to see what some of the less sartorially decorous costumes were for. There was a teenager in ripped jeans and a Sex Pistols t-shirt suspended from a metal beam by chains around his wrists, his manacled feet barely touching the ground. He was screaming out in pain as a bloke built like a rugby prop-forward in village bobby uniform laid into his back with a birch, every stroke cheered by the spectators. A video screen next to the whipping post showed footage of the transgressor spray-painting a wall and then being apprehended in the act by his punisher, a panel to one side of the screen detailing his crime and the number of strokes like it was the league tables on a sports bulletin.
This was only the support act, however. On the other side of the whipping post there was a gallows, and beside it another adjacent video screen advertised a programme of executions, a scrolling marquee at the bottom of the monitor listing the names of the condemned along with their crimes. These invariably consisted of murder, terrorism, paedophilia or all three.
The first of the rope-dancers was being marched out as Iris ushered Ross up a side-street away from the square. Ross caught a glimpse of a hideously caricatured Muslim being led towards the gallows, glowering defiantly as he climbed the steps.
‘How can you murder somebody here?’ he asked.
‘You can’t, and he didn’t. The criminals are all NPCs. These ass-wipes would rather live in a world where criminals are caught and punished than a world in which there is no crime. Except, of course, there is no crime: only an illusion of it, and it’s an illusion they find bizarrely comforting.’
‘So that’s why they have so much security at their houses, even though nobody is ever going to break in?’
‘It’s an insane pantomime. You gotta ask yourself: what kind of sad-acts don’t feel right unless they’ve got something to be afraid of and somebody to look down on.’
‘Daily Mail readers would be the answer to that one.’
As they headed out of town, Ross’s eye was drawn by a shop window that he was astonished to discover was an estate agent. It was full of pictures of the local properties, beneath which animated digital counters showed their values going up in sterling, the dials spinning like a gas meter in January.
‘But there’s no money here, is there?’ he asked.
‘No, but if the fact that nobody wants to buy and nobody wants to sell doesn’t make a difference, why should the absence of a currency system?’
‘This takes the art of kidding yourself to a whole new level. Actually, the very idea that anybody other than these nutters would want to live here makes the whole concept of a property market even more ridiculous.’
‘Oh no, no, no,’ she corrected him. ‘People are desperate to get in here, as you’re about to see.’
‘Why, where are we heading?’
‘To the coast. We’re taking a ship.’
‘We have to sail to the transit?’
‘A spaceship. It’s the only way to reach the Citadel. I mean, there are transits there, but they’re permanently monitored and guarded.’
Ross wondered how she could just happen to know there was such a thing as a spaceship available on a closed-border enclave entirely sympathetic to the Integrity. It took just a moment for the answer to sink in.
‘You’ve been to the Citadel before. It’s your ship.’
‘Not the Citadel itself,’ she corrected. ‘But yeah, I’ve been to the Integrity’s home-world. I’m not going in blind here, are you nuts? How do you think I got my sources?’
Ross looked blank by way of reply.
Iris glanced around to make sure nobody was in sight, then very briefly transformed into an Integrity agent, shimmering in black for a fraction of a second before resuming her knitting-pattern advert look.
‘Same as everywhere else, soon as you touch down you get the default threads.’
And suddenly Ross saw how they might just pull this off.
They made their way along a pleasantly winding coast road, the undulating landscape around them like something out of Thomas the Tank Engine. He could smell the grass and the sea air, yet the artificiality of this place was more pervasive than the most far-fetched of the fantasy realms he’d explored.
‘You say you’ve got Integrity sources. Just how much do you know about what’s going on? On the outside, I mean.’
She looked instantly uncomfortable.
‘There are things I could tell you, but most of them wouldn’t be helpful for you to know.’
‘I’m a scientist. I’ve never been a subscriber to the philosophy that ignorance is bliss or that it’s ever folly to be wise. Is this about Neurosphere? Do you know anything about me? About after the time of my scan?’
‘That’s precisely the kind of thing that comes into the “not helpful for you to know” category.’
‘Why?’
‘Because anything that happened after your scan is not you any more.’
‘Do you know who I am, or was, out there?’
‘Your name is Ross Baker,’ she answered. ‘I know that much. And I know you were involved in the development of the technology that allowed Neurosphere to create total-fidelity scans of people’s minds.’
She sounded like she was reading from a crib-sheet, or more likely editing her speech as she went, cautious about what she considered it wise to reveal.
‘Yeah, that much I had pieced together myself,’ he said impatiently. ‘Can you give me just a wee peek at what was on the next page? How far in the future are we talking between my scan with the prototype and this technology going public?’
‘Your own account of the process – or at least, Ross Baker’s account – was that normally recording and playback technology are developed in symbiosis, but in this case it was like Solderburn had recorded a digital 3D IMAX movie when you thought he was creating a cave painting. The more you developed means of decoding the data, the more complex you discovered even the earliest scans to be. Every advance you made in reading the scans showed deeper levels of detail to what had actually been recorded.’
It was vertiginous to hear what sounded authentically like the kind of analogy he’d use being quoted back to him when he had never actually said it, but not so much that he missed a further implication of Iris’s words.
‘A quote like that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d just pick up from eavesdropping on the Integrity,’ he told her.
‘No. This was real-world stuff. My own scan came a few years later than yours.’
; ‘A few years? So do you know anything else about me? Did I have … I mean, was Ross Baker a … a father?’
The jury was out for a while on whether she would tell him, as though she had to carefully evaluate whether he could handle it. She looked a little sad, like she knew this could only hurt him but that she understood he needed to know regardless.
‘He had two kids,’ she said. ‘One boy, one girl. I think the girl was the older of them, but I’m not sure. Scott and Jennifer were their names. Are their names.’
Jennifer. His mother’s name. Scott: Carol’s dad.
He could feel tears. He wanted to collapse on the spot but he kept walking, trying to hide the impact from Iris, as it felt too private, too personal, for someone else to witness. This was a new kind of pain, one the human psyche was not equipped to process, whether it was running on digital or organic hardware.
Ross rubbed at his eyes, clearing the mist. What had looked like a grey haze in the middle distance revealed itself as a fence, about ten feet high with three lines of barbed wire stretched between the retorts.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m all messed up here over a family I never had.’
‘Don’t apologise. Missing people you’ve never met can’t be an easy thing to deal with. But missing the ones you knew well is worse. That’s why Neurosphere’s most profitable implementation of the new technology wasn’t medical, though clearly the benefits in that field were revolutionary.’
‘What else did they use it for?’
‘To create scans of people’s minds in order that their loved ones could still interact with a version of them after their deaths. Of course, like us, it isn’t really them: just a perfect synthesised copy, with all their memories, emotions and personality intact.’
‘A memento mori,’ Ross said. ‘Like a brain in a box as opposed to an urn on the mantelpiece.’
‘Yeah. Instead of saying “Grandma would have loved this”, at your kid’s birthday party, digital Grandma can watch the festivities and wish junior many happy returns.’
‘Or, rather than a one-way conversation with your husband over his headstone …’ he suggested, quickly grasping what a comfort this might be.
‘Exactly. That’s why it’s huge.’
‘But if it’s huge, why don’t people in this place know about it? If they’d signed up to have one of these mind-copies made, surely they’d put two and two together when they wound up in a simulated universe?’
‘They don’t know because they were scanned before the tech went public. Everybody here was assumed to be a cave-painting: they were scanned by the new technology prior to anyone realising what had actually been created: test scans from the prototype, then clinical trials.’
Clinical trials. Like they’d been doing before with the NS4000. Ross thought of Melita, admitted to hospital after her car accident.
‘So how come you know about it, if everyone here is a test-scan?’
‘I didn’t say everyone here was a test-scan. I said everyone here was scanned before the tech went public.’
Ross got it.
‘You worked for Neurosphere.’
The smell of the sea was becoming stronger as they followed the road, barbed wire and quietly buzzing electrified mesh now flanking them to the left. They crested another spur in the Camberwick Green landscape and Ross finally got to see what the fence was for.
‘See, I told you people were desperate to get in,’ said Iris. ‘Of course, they’re only as desperate as they’re programmed to be.’
There were dozens of NPCs milling miserably around a group of grim low-rise buildings, showcasing the wide spectrum of ethnic skins and costumes Ross had seen on his HUD. It was a detention centre for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
Further down towards the coast he could see some more untermensch unfortunates being apprehended at gunpoint from where they’d been hiding in the back of a lorry, though it wasn’t apparent where the lorry was supposed to have arrived from.
‘They get detained here for processing,’ Iris explained. ‘In practice this means they are declared illegal then deported.’
‘To where?’
‘A little island off the coast. Once they get there they climb right back on to more trucks which are taken by ferry to the port, then drive down here so they can be caught all over again.’
‘Are the border guards NPCs too?’
‘Are you kidding me? Border patrol is a more popular pastime here than golf, cricket and fox-hunting combined.’
Ross looked at the hopeless, defeated expressions of the NPCs behind the wire and wondered why he felt more than just disdain for the denizens of this green unpleasant land. He was about to temper his disapproval by reasoning that they weren’t hurting anybody, but that, he realised, was the rub.
The usual reassurance that the NPCs were only computer files was thrown into confusion by the understanding that so was he, and it begged the uncomfortable question as to what was the difference. Was he man to their animal: more advanced, more complex but still ultimately just a different species, a more sophisticated variant of the same root? Or would a digital scan of an animal’s mind be something infinitely more complex than an NPC?
The big question was: did they feel? They weren’t human beings: they were computer programs designed to mimic human beings. They showed pain, misery, anger, happiness, desire, but were they entities experiencing digitally synthesised emotions, or were they empty avatars programmed to display responses appropriate to stimuli? Were they, like him, not just artificial intelligence, but digital consciousness?
It made him wonder about those memento mori scans too. How would it feel to be looking through a video feed at the real world outside, a world you could never enter, at loved ones you could never touch? What did they do the rest of the time? If they were given a world like this as their hamster wheel, with other scans to interact with, wouldn’t they grow apart from those on the outside? Or were they only switched on when they were needed, and if so, wouldn’t that be painful, would it breed resentment?
There were a thousand questions dotted about a whole new unfolding ethical landscape, but ultimately it came down to one fundamental issue: just because it was running on hardware rather than meatware, shouldn’t a digital consciousness still have human rights?
Ross would admit he might be biased due to having a dog in this fight, but he was strongly of the opinion that the answer was yes.
They diverted from the main road about a quarter of a mile after the detention centre, taking a winding footpath down towards the coast. The headland stretched out to sea to their right, rising to form chalk cliffs so white that Ross could almost hear Vera Lynn. A couple of miles out he could see an island slightly shrouded in the blue haze of afternoon sunshine. It looked an inviting day for a sail, if he didn’t have a suicidal prison-fortress assault to be getting on with.
In a secluded cove tucked away at the foot of the escarpment, a compact cabin cruiser bobbed where it was tied up at a jetty.
‘That’s your spaceship?’ he asked.
‘Technically space-boat, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? It’ll get us there, that’s the main thing. Appearances count for nothing out in the big black.’
‘I know the rules,’ he told her. ‘Every craft gets the same number of points to spend on speed, armour and weapons. Size doesn’t matter.’
‘In our case I’d say it does: the smaller the better.’
Ross climbed into the passenger seat and, upon Iris’s instruction, buckled up in case things got choppy. He guessed she didn’t only mean maritime conditions.
‘The main port and marina are just around this headland,’ she said, gently opening up the throttle. ‘I don’t want to attract any undue attention, so we’ll sail to the far side of that island and take off from there.’
‘Is that the island the asylum seekers shuttle back and forth from?’
‘No, that one’s way out of sight of land. The l
ocals like to know they’re deporting them far over the sea. I don’t know what this little one is for. Pleasure cruise destination maybe.’
They headed straight towards the island, the white cliffs a hundred yards or so to starboard. Ross got the impression the cruiser could really shift if she let it, but Iris kept a steady pace, aware that a show of haste might be conspicuous. Ross was happy enough for her to take her time, given the ultimate destination. He knew that there was no option to let this chalice pass his lips, but he wasn’t in a hurry to slug it down.
The cruiser was roughly a mile from the island when it came around the headland and into sight of the marina. To his surprise, there were no boats in it. To his and Iris’s combined greater surprise and no little alarm, this was because the boats were all at sea, and all heading the same way.
‘The hell is this?’ she asked. ‘So much for slipping away quietly. Looks like we’ve sailed into a regatta.’
There were dozens of little vessels, from speed launches to fishing boats, spread out across the width of the bay, as far as the eye could see.
‘A regatta?’ Ross said. ‘More like …’
He cut himself off as he realised it wasn’t ‘more like’. It was trying to be exactly like …
He took out a monocular scope he’d picked up in one of the Halo worlds and looked towards the beach that the flotilla was rapidly approaching. He could see dozens of identical NPC soldiers in British World War Two uniform, some standing on the sands, others already wading into the waves.
‘More like what?’ Iris asked.
‘Dunkirk.’
Iris slowed down and peeled gently away to port, letting the flotilla sail past, still intent on proceeding quietly around to the far side of the island. The first vessels made landfall and were swamped by grateful Tommies, helped aboard by the heroic mariners of Operation Daily Mail.
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