by Robin Sloan
Here, Jack Zapp paused and leveled his eyes at me. Brown eyes.
“I can sense something about you, Miss Nineteen. You understand my situation in a way that Miss Scheme does not.”
“I think I do,” I said, nodding.
“And we both find this place rather congenial, don’t we?”
The street was empty. I’d just noticed. Jerusalem’s banal bustle had broken down. Where did everybody go? Had the Sermon on the Mount started somewhere?
Two stars fell out of the sky.
UNESCAPED
They were angels, half-transparent like Mary’s escort, but not so taciturn. They streaked down out of the blue bowl and hit the ground like paratroopers, bright wings ballooned out behind them. These were assault angels.
There were no words and no warnings. They just began to hack at Jack Zapp, making bits of textured polygon fly and stick to the street and the stone walls. Little triangular flecks of suit and skin.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Stop!”
Jack Zapp was bent over and their flaming swords were falling across his back. These angels were programs like Mary, I could tell. It was code vs. ghost, and I was rooting for the ghost. He reached up to grab at one of the angel’s robes. It cut off his hand.
I was at the edge of the street, pressed up against a wall, half-hidden in shadows; I’d fled without realizing it.
Scheme was standing firm. She took a step forward. The angels turned, paused just a moment—then descended on her. The air was crosshatched with pale fire. She fell, and I saw blood, pure bright red, #FF0000 red.
“Scheme?” I whispered, then shouted, as if to wake her: “Scheme!” I wasn’t used to shouting, and I wasn’t used to being on my own, and I wasn’t used to Scheme being anything less than omnipotent. Everything about this was terrifying. I thought about logging out.
Then there was someone else in the street. The angels swiveled, slowly, to face a looming centurion with dark brown skin and cartoon-scale muscles. But he worked as swiftly as they did; he took a single galloping step forward and pushed his sword through the nearest angel’s body. It exploded in a spray of see-through pieces, like a popped balloon.
You’re not supposed to be able to do that in World of Jesus.
The centurion took another giant stride and pulled his sword across the second angel’s body. Another explosion; the pieces fell like confetti.
The centurion’s chest rose and fell in measured simulations of breath. He was truly gigantic. He had a crimson cape and a circular shield marked with a double eagle, but both looked comically small attached to his bulk. He spoke.
“Are you okay, Hu?”
The voice. It was Scheme!
“Those angels just attacked us out of nowhere,” I said. “They—where’s Jack Zapp?”
There was just a smear of texture in the street where he’d been.
“He got banned,” Scheme said. “Brutally. World of Jesus strikes without remorse if it decides you’re a bot.”
I looked up at the centurion, then down at Scheme’s other body, swimming in a small lake of Nintendo-red blood. “How did you…”
“That wasn’t me. It was Yung-fa in Guangdong. Just a precaution—against Jack Zapp, actually. Maybe I was wrong about him.”
“That sword…”
“Unescaped code. Very rare,” she said, sliding it back into its sheath, “and very expensive. Where was Jack Zapp taking us?”
“The Pool of Siloam. I think it’s this way.” I stepped out away from the wall, back into the sunlight, and pointed down the slope of the street. Scheme’s centurion looked me up and down.
“Nice dress,” she said. It now had a stain of triangles splashed across the skirt. “Although it's not how I imagine you.”
“You think of me as male?”
“Not exactly,” Scheme said. Her centurion smiled. Giant white teeth. She turned and set off down the street in huge loping strides.
She called back to me: “In my imagination, you’re a cat.”
THE POOL OF SILOAM
The Pool of Siloam was a wide rectangle of dark green water that rippled and reflected the sun in little curls of white fire. Broad, shallow steps led up from the pool into a sprawling terrace that was jam-packed with carts and tents and people all shouting and haggling.
I followed close behind Scheme’s centurion. There, near the pool, tucked under the shade of an olive tree—it was obviously our destination.
We knew that, in World of Jesus, Fadi Azer inhabited a character also named Fadi. What we did not know was that, in World of Jesus, Fadi’s character also sold falafel. The cart’s wooden sign said FALAFEL KING. Wow.
“Excuse me,” Scheme said to the cart’s attendant. He was the default character; he looked completely generic, like a hundred people we’d passed on the way here. Same face, same clothes.
“We’re looking for Fadi.”
“That is me,” the default character said. “I am Fadi. You want some falafel?”
Well.
“You’re Fadi,” Scheme repeated, “from the falafel shop in Fog City.”
“We are supposed to be role-playing,” Fadi frowned, and glanced around, as if there might be role-playing police patrolling the terrace. But then, in spite of himself, he smiled. “You know my shop? You are a customer?”
“I visited two days ago,” Scheme said. “I’m Annabel Scheme, the investigator.”
“Yes, of course! I am happy to see you,” Fadi said. He seemed unfazed by Scheme’s new skin. “I was worried about you after the police came. I did not know you played World of Jesus. You should have told me! I serve the Falafel King there, I serve the Falafel King here. You have not been getting falafel in Jerusalem from someone else, have you?”
“Fadi, where are you right now?”
“Easy. We are at the Pool of Siloam, great place to sell falafel, because—”
“No, I mean really—in the real world—where are you?”
“At the shop,” Fadi said. His voice was suddenly crackly, like a transmission from far away. “At my computer. It is a very good computer; Jad helped me build it, and I purchased a very fast—”
“Fadi,” Scheme interrupted, “I want you to really think, and be honest: Are you sure that’s where you are right now?”
He hesitated.
“No.” There was more static in his voice. “I am not sure of that.”
“So you’re not sure where you are,” Scheme said.
“No.”
There was a silence. I wished I could still whisper in Scheme’s ear, because I wanted to say: He’s dead, isn’t he.
“Well, listen,” Scheme said. “I’ll take two falafel.”
Fadi brightened and ran through a well-rendered simulation of falafel preparation. The oil actually bubbled and spat, and little bits of 3D chickpea floated to the surface.
“What’s the last thing you can remember doing,” Scheme asked, carefully casual, “back in Fog City?”
“Yesterday, I talk to Jad,” Fadi said. His voice was clearer now. “He is going to get me into the Grail-mail beta program, pretty cool. The man with the mustache stop by, doesn't say much, like always. Police come to the shop. Order some falafel, ask me some questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Oh, do I know this girl, such-and-such, brown hair.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, of course! Jenny from the building. Too skinny. Should eat more falafel.”
“What then?”
“Nothing. I close up, come here for a while. Then sleep, then I open the shop again, start mixing the falafel. Then, a big order! A delivery order. Biggest delivery ever.”
“Who ordered it? Where did you go?”
“Ha, where else? Only one place to go in Fog City!” Fadi beamed a smile at us. “Big delivery for Grail.”
Soon after that, the World of Jesus faded to black and the falafel shop’s back room appeared again through Scheme’s earrings. I turned my head to look a
round. Nothing happened. Then I remembered I couldn’t do that here.
“Fadi’s dead,” Scheme said, and it came out like a sigh. She stood up and rubbed her eyes, then switched off the monitor. His humble nest here in the back of the restaurant suddenly felt haunted.
Maybe he’s not dead, Scheme. Maybe he’s just...
Well, I couldn’t think of any alternatives.
Scheme shook her head. “I’ve never actually seen this before, but it makes sense. For the dead, these games are the perfect environment. They’re familiar. They disguise certain... differences. They probably don’t resist the way the real world does.”
What about Jack Zapp—is he okay?
“Well. Still dead. But otherwise, I imagine so. It’s just a game.”
I felt sad. Both because Fadi was dead and because we’d left World of Jesus. Looking through Scheme’s earrings, everything was just the way it had been before: splintered, flickering, overexposed. Ugh. I shut off the feed and thought of the Jerusalem sky.
“We’re going to Grail,” Scheme said, with a hard edge in her voice.
I brought the feed back up in time to see her walk out through the falafel shop’s sliding door, out into the swirling gray.
THE SHARD
Here’s the official story, straight from the Grail intranet: To choose the location for the Shard, Grail analyzed a century’s worth of climate data to pinpoint the single sunniest spot in downtown San Francisco. They put the building together like a Lego set—built it from a palette of just ten different tiny parts. The parts were made of steel and carbon and they could be snapped together in a hundred different ways. They were manufactured in China, and they came into the city by the boatload. The Shard went up, brick by brick, like the pyramids.
Then Grail wrapped the crenelated mass in smooth, curving crystalline panels. The panels gathered and conducted sunlight, then beamed it into the core of the building, where it became electricity. The electricity flowed down into motors that spun giant cylinders of solid gray bismuth—the Shard’s flywheel batteries. They were pure engineering elegance: they stored energy and fed it back into the Shard, and they served as gyroscopic counterweights to protect the building from earthquakes. In theory—and of course Grail modeled this—San Francisco could tip up like the deck of a sinking ship and the Shard would stay standing, pointed at the sky.
But now the sun didn’t shine on the Shard. The building still ran; Grailers came and went, and lights twinkled red, yellow, green and blue up and down its height. Where did the power come from? Were the flywheels still spinning? Was there a backup line to PG&E? A small nuclear reactor? The intranet did not specify.
Whatever it was, the Shard was an oasis of light and stability in the swirling weirdness of Fog City. It was the calm eye in the center of the storm. At least that’s how it seemed.
Standing there in the ground-floor lobby was like standing on the bulls-eye of a giant dart board, and people all over the world were flinging their questions and hopes and fears at you. They were projected in rainbow-colored letters two feet tall, racing across screens that covered the full curve of the back wall:
WHO WAS THE PRESIDENT IN 1997
WHO WAS PAUL KLEE
WHO WILL I MARRY
HOW TO KISS
HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR DNA
WHAT IS A GOOD CREDIT SCORE
WHAT IS A BANANA BOX
WHAT IS LOVE
WHAT IS THE BEST ELECTRIC CAR
WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF GOAT FLU
WHAT DO MEN WANT
WHY DID CHINA BAN COMPUTERS
WHY DOES MY EYE TWITCH
WHY DO WE DREAM
It felt like home. Behind it all, chiseled into a slab of jet-black carbon, was Grail’s mission statement:
TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD'S DREAMS AND DESIRES AND MAKE THEM A REALITY
The girl at the front desk was obviously playing a video game.
“Welcome to Grail,” she said, shuffling windows on her screen. “How can I, uh. How can I help you.” Apparently they didn’t get many visitors here.
Scheme pulled a wide laminated card out of her pocket. It had her picture on it. “Annabel Scheme. Licensed search investigator. Following up on an anomaly.”
The girl looked blank. Her jumpsuit only had three merit badges. One of them was a bright-yellow smiley face.
“You have to scan that,” Scheme said, nudging the card closer. The girl’s mouth made a shape like oh and she waved the card across the surface of the desk. It made a soft plink.
“Wow,” she said, looking at her screen, “you’ve been here a lot.”
Scheme nodded. “You guys have a lot of problems.”
“So, go ahead. The search anomaly team is on the—”
“Thirteenth floor,” Scheme said. “I know.”
In the elevator, Scheme did not press the button for the thirteenth floor. Instead she pressed the button marked B6. That was the floor to which Fadi had made his biggest-ever delivery. It was the Shard’s deepest basement.
How often do you come here, Scheme?
“Less often now,” she said. “And as little as possible. I’m trying to stay away. But it’s like a magnet.”
I’d heard that before.
The elevator doors swished open and Scheme stepped out into a space so wide-open it seemed for a moment we were back out on the street. The floor stretched out like a football field. Harsh light, not intended for humans, glared down from a low ceiling.
It was a giant grid of trash. Plastic dumpsters on knobby black wheels were lined up in a yawning matrix. Hundreds of them. They were bright primary colors, and they made a spectrum. Closest to the elevator were a dozen rows of red dumpsters, each one overflowing with paper and cardboard. Orange was next, full of glass, green and brown and clear. My camera-eyes couldn’t tell what the rest of the rainbow held.
Overhead, there was a series of tubes that poked down, ran just below the ceiling, merged and split and finally opened up, one tube above each dumpster. Every few seconds, there was a rattling over-ture and a piece of trash shot out, perfectly sorted: a crumpled box, a half-empty cup, an old hard drive trailing wires.
The Shard definitely separated its recyclables.
“Guhhh,” Scheme groaned. Her hand flew up to her face. “Smells terrible. It’s—this whole floor is trash.”
There were narrow channels between the dumpsters, and Scheme edged deeper into the matrix. Yellow was electronics. The dumpsters were full of burnt-out circuit boards and hard drives and cooling fans. I saw a whole Grail server chassis. Eep.
Green was compost. There were half-empty smoothies and unraveled sushi rolls, blobs of pudding and splashes of pea soup. Lots of pea soup. Nobody liked the pea soup.
Scheme stalked down the row of green dumpsters, reaching up on tip-toe and peeking into each one in turn. The full diversity of organic matter was on display here, presented in every state of decomposition. I took notes in case Scheme later exhibited an allergic reaction or showed signs of salmonella.
And there, in a long dumpster at the very end of the row, were two huge plates piled high with falafel, hummus, and green-black tabbouleh. They were wrapped tight with transparent plastic. I was afraid the next thing I’d see would be Fadi’s stiff reaching fingers or his cold unblinking eyes. But it was just the plates. They hadn’t come down a tube; they had been set here, neatly, by human hands.
“What happened to you?” Scheme murmured. She poked at the plastic wrap with a finger. “Where did you go?”
Back in the elevator, I expected her to take us back to the lobby. Instead, she pushed the button for the forty-seventh floor.
Where are we going, Scheme?
“To see an old friend,” she said.
SEBDEX
The elevator had walls of glass, and above ground it ran along the outer surface of the Shard. I watched the rest of Fog City fade from outline to suggestion to—nothing. Dimensionless gray. Scheme’s fa
ce was reflected in the glass, lit up evenly like a 3D model. Her mouth was set tight.
The elevator chirped as it passed each floor. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Chirp, chirp chirp. Twenty-three.
“That was my floor.”
What?
“When I worked here,” Scheme said. “I got off at the twenty-third floor every day.”
What did you do?
“Not much. Design, supposedly. Mostly I got mad about things and took long lunch breaks.”
That’s hard to imagine.
“I was a different person,” she said. “You should have seen how I dressed. It was embarrassing.”
Chirp. Forty-seven. The doors swished open. Scheme stepped out into a small, shadowed antechamber.
There was data projected on the walls, just as in the lobby, but here it was more than just queries. There was a real-time accounting of Grail’s income, penny by micropenny. There was a map of the Shard, floor by floor, with rainbow dots migrating like ants. There was a giant corporate to-do list, with items blinking off and on every millisecond. Hey—I used to read that to-do list.
There was also a receptionist, a skinny kid with a long nose who looked up as the elevator doors opened, and then looked down again immediately. I recognized him. It was Jad, the Grailer from Fadi’s shop.
“You,” Scheme said. “You work for him?”
“Sebdex is expecting you,” Jad said evenly, looking down at his own lap. The circles under his eyes looked even deeper and darker in the low light; the effect was skeletal.
“Of course he is,” Scheme said. She swooped in close, and Jad lurched back. In a low hiss, she said: “Piece of advice. Quit.”