End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  “What? What do you mean, altered?” Alice looked down, and for the first time saw that her leather jacket was now bone white, as were her jeans. She held up her hands, and even her skin seemed bleached white. She reached up and tugged a lock of her hair in front of her eyes, now no longer dyed black, but blindingly white. “What…what did you do to me? Who are you?!”

  “Additional study is needed. The new sample is retrieved.”

  Then the voice was gone, and Alice was left alone. Falling through whiteness.

  Galaad

  The trio found themselves in a labyrinth of narrow, winding passages. At first, Galaad found them a pleasant change from the monotonous engulfing spaces of the corridors beyond, but when they had taken a dozen turns or more, each time finding themselves facing another turn and wall, the novelty quickly wore off.

  After stalking through the winding labyrinth for what seemed an eternity, they took a final turn and found themselves at the threshold of a massive chamber. The ceiling was so high as to be invisible from the floor, while the walls receded so far in every direction that they were only just visible. Galaad, who'd long since ceased trying to work out how so much space could be contained within the confining walls of the tower of glass, reeled at the sight of it.

  But the space was not empty. The floor of the enormous chamber was dominated by what appeared to be some sort of gwyddbwyll board, the floor demarked in an immense checkered grid, on which stood pieces of silver or glass, each as tall as a house. The pieces, to Galaad's astonishment, seemed to move of their own accord, sliding back and forth across the floor.

  So stunned was Galaad by the gwyddbwyll set that he momentarily failed to notice the two gargantuan figures hulked on either side. They were of such a scale, of such monstrous proportions, that it seemed as if they would not at first fit inside his mind, dominating so much of the view on either side of the board that they essentially disappeared from view. But in short order he came to realize that it wasn't that one side of the room had a red hue and the other side white, but that there crouched on either side of the massive board two monstrously large figures, one red and one white.

  They were dragons. Or not dragons, precisely, but that was the only word in Galaad's vocabulary that came close to encompassing them. They were enormous, immense, unimaginably large. Somewhere high above on either side was something suggesting a head, or even a face, regarding the movement on the board between them, while the movements of Artor, Pryder, and Galaad were completely beneath their notice.

  Pryder was for attacking the dragons, but Artor was quick to stay his hand. It would do no good, the High King insisted, having no more effect than a gnat attacking a mountain. Whatever these immense dragons were, it was beyond their ken, and on a scope far in excess of anything that mere men could affect. Better to continue on, and seek the Red King or the White Lady elsewhere.

  It took them some considerable time to skirt around the immense beings, but finally they came to another archway opposite that through which they'd exited the labyrinth, which led into still more twisting corridors. At Artor's insistence they quitted the giant chamber, leaving the dragons to contemplate their game, and their search continued.

  MISS BONAVENTURE RUSHED TO BLANK'S SIDE as he lay bleeding on the floor, his skin pale, his lips bloodless. “Blank!”

  Coughing, Blank struggled to sit, holding his insides in with both hands. “Must…get back…to York Place…” he managed, with difficulty.

  “You're in a bad way, friend,” Taylor said, leaning over with his hands on his knees. “I think we maybe ought to call a doctor.”

  Blank bit his lip and managed to shake his head fractionally from side to side. “Won't…die…” He coughed, a sick wet sound rattling in his lungs. “Unless…my head is removed…or central nervous system completely pulverized…I can still recover. But only…if you get me back…to my flat.”

  “You heard the man,” Dulac said, sheathing his blue sword in the scabbard that hung from his Sam Browne belt. The bleeding from his shoulder seemed to have slowed, if not stopped entirely. He snatched up the crystal from the ground and tucked it into the pocket of his frock coat, and then leaned down and picked up Blank effortlessly like a child, one arm under his knees and the other around his shoulders. “Now,” he said to Miss Bonaventure, “where's his flat, anyway?”

  Commandeering a four-wheeled growler carriage, Dulac whipped the horses to a foaming frenzy and drove through the afternoon traffic, north across the Thames and towards Marylebone. Miss Bonaventure cradled Blank's head in her lap, while Taylor used his coat to try to staunch the flow of blood from Blank's gaping wound.

  “Blank,” Miss Bonaventure said, leaning in close and whispering in his ear, so low only he could hear, “this isn't fun anymore. Let me take you somewhere you can get help. A doctor, a hospital, anywhere. I can have you there in an instant.”

  Blank opened his eyes and managed a weak smile as his gaze met hers. “No, my dear. I'm quite aware…of your…skills in this regard…but I assure you…I'll be fine.” He sputtered, and Miss Bonaventure wiped the pink foam from the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief. “I need…the locked room…at the top of the stairs.”

  “Then I can open a door there right now,” Miss Bonaventure said, and raised the arm with the silver bracelet in front of her.

  “No,” Blank said. “Might startle…Dulac away…and I have questions yet…for him.”

  Miss Bonaventure sighed discontentedly. “Have it your way,” she said, pouting slightly. “But I swear, Blank, if your eyes start rolling back in your head and I hear anything that even sounds like a death rattle, I'll have you to a doctor as quick as you can say Bob's your uncle, and I don't care what you say.”

  “Who's Bob?” Taylor asked.

  Blank managed a laugh, and immediately regretted it.

  Dulac carried Blank up the stairs of Number 31, York Place, with Miss Bonaventure leading the way, turning on the lights. Taylor followed behind, looking around with a confused expression.

  At the top of the stairs, they came to a sturdy locked door.

  “In…there,” Blank said.

  “Where's the key?” Dulac asked.

  Blank shook his head. “There's…no key. Put me down.”

  Dulac did as he was asked. Blank, holding Taylor's blood-sodden jacket to his stomach with one hand, staggered forward and laid his other hand palm down against the door, just above the knob.

  With an audible click, the knob turned and the door swung inwards on its hinges.

  “I'll be damned,” Miss Bonaventure said, eyes wide. “A biometric scanner.”

  The corners of Blank's mouth tugged up in a smile. “Why, Miss Bonaventure.” Leaning heavily on the doorjamb, he staggered into the darkened room. “I'm impressed.”

  Miss Bonaventure and the others followed Blank into the room, and her fingers found the light switch on the wall. Electric lights in brass stanchions flared to life along the walls, revealing a portrait gallery.

  “Which one of these is Dorian Gray?” Miss Bonaventure joked, as Blank made his slow and steady way to the well-upholstered chair positioned at the center of the floor.

  “All of them, I suppose,” Blank said, easing himself down onto the seat. “And none.” He closed his eyes for a moment, willing the room to stop spinning around him. “Oscar only ever saw the one that Whistler was painting”—he pointed with a languid hand towards the most recent portrait, which depicted Blank in modern evening dress, with a red orchid in his lapel—“but when things went sour between us it…and my locked room…inspired him to write his damned story.”

  Taylor and Dulac walked along the walls, looking up at the portraits. They all appeared to be of the same man, though they had clearly been painted by a dozen different artists, in different times and places.

  “This one I know!” Dulac said, pausing before the Rembrandt, which depicted a dashing young man in the dress of an early seventeenth-century gentleman, his hand resting light
ly on the hilt of the rapier at his side, a large feather in his wide-brimmed hat. Dulac turned to face Blank. “I thought your face a familiar one.”

  Blank smiled slightly, his eyes half-lidded. “As did I on seeing yours, Monsieur Gilead. But we'll have to wait…a moment…to reminisce about old times…I'm afraid.”

  Then Blank closed his eyes, found the still place within him, and the world fell away.

  When he opened them again, he was once more within the School of Thought.

  Of course, Blank had not really gone anywhere, neither in body nor in mind. He still sat in the chair within the portrait gallery at the top of the York Place house, the walls and ceiling impregnated with circuitry that amplified the communication with Omega.

  The eyes that opened were not eyes, and were not his own. These were thoughts generated long after his own body was dust, which would later be implanted back into his mind in the guise of true memory.

  Omega could locate Blank wherever he went, implanting memories directly into his mind. When these unpacked, he would recall conversing directly with Omega in the unimaginably distant future. But if Blank needed to initiate contact with Omega, as he did now, he needed to do so from here.

  The body that Blank now wore wasn't his body, any more than the thoughts he was thinking were his own. This was an emulated body and mind, existing in a simulated virtual environment conjured up by complicated circuits and magnetic fields in a vast cloud of electrons and positrons. There was a real world, somewhere beyond this illusion, but Blank knew it resembled not at all any world known by living man.

  The nearest galaxies receded beyond the horizon untold trillions of years before, and the mass of the Milky Way galaxy was entirely in stars that had long before exploded and collapsed into black holes and neutron stars, or in brown dwarfs and dead cinders that never attained nuclear fusion, or in stars that withered into white dwarfs. What energy that remained was generated by proton decay and collisions between elemental particles. This was the heat death of the universe first predicted by Hermann von Helmholtz.

  This cloud of elemental particles, a vast mind thinking slow and deep thoughts, was Omega. The machine-child descendant of man, Omega had long before forgotten its origins, having lost the thread that led from the first organic life to itself. Trillions of years before, before the stars began one by one to go out, Omega embarked upon a plan to rediscover its ancestors and secure its present and future. It began by creating endless simulations, modeling every possible culture that could have created its antecedents. It knew that organic life had been based on carbon and that it had stored its genetic record in complex strings of simple sugars. From there, it was a matter of ease to simulate all possible carbon-based life-forms that could be coded by such sugars. From there, it had generated emulations of all logically possible individuals and arranged these individuals in all possible combinations of societies and civilizations in all possible inhabitable environments.

  Having created models of all possible worlds, of all possible lives, Omega began to grow bored with its game. It considered its options while the stars burned down around it, and then hit upon a new game to play. It would work out which of its simulated worlds and emulated lives was the true history of the universe.

  The methods Omega employed were many, but a key tactic was a search through time itself.

  Its simulations had established that organic consciousness was the result of quantum state reductions within cytoskeletal microtubules in the brain. Since, at the quantum level, the classical past and classical future were not globally distinguishable, and since entangled quantum particles enabled communication of a sort on a nonlocal basis, it merely remained to test all of the particles at hand to see if any were entangled with organic minds in the deep past. If a resonance could be found between one of the emulated minds and an organic mind, elsewhere and elsewhen, then Omega reasoned that the emulated mind was an accurate representation of a being who actually lived.

  Having established contact with these resonant minds, Omega discovered that it was able to do far more than simply locate them. It could communicate with them. By manipulating the half of the tangled pair that it held in the deep future, it could affect the functioning of the organic mind which incorporated the pair's other half in the distant past. It could create and implant new memories, and through careful means could read the memories the organic mind had generated on its own.

  It was at this point that Omega struck upon its final and most vital game.

  The past was largely unknown, huge gaps or lacunae in the historical record. But the future was a certainty. In time, the last of the stars would be gone and all that would remain in the universe would be black holes of various masses, rapidly evaporating to nothing. In time, even the protons would have all decayed, and all that would remain in the universe would be a collection of neutrinos, positrons, electrons, and photons of enormous wavelength. The universe would be cold and dead, and with it, Omega itself.

  There was some cause for hope, though. There were other universes, whether orthogonal to the space-time Omega inhabited or beyond the cosmic horizon. It might be possible to reach one of these through means or mechanisms unknown to Omega. Or it might be possible to create whole new universes within black holes, the event horizon containing an entirely new big bang. But this, too, was beyond Omega's reach. It was possible, though, that some mind in the forgotten past had discovered a means that for whatever reason had not appeared in Omega's emulations. It was even possible that in the distant past someone had encountered an artifact from some other universe, a relic from some space-time previous to or apart from Omega's own. And, failing this, with sufficient time Omega might be able to discover these means and mechanisms from first principles. But time was running out. Though some vigintillion years remained before the ultimate heat death of the universe, Omega's thoughts became much slower as the universe cooled, and it was only a matter of a few trillion trillion years before it would be unable to continue.

  The minds that it had discovered, then, would become Omega's agents in the past. Working in these gaps in history, these lacunae, they would have two primary missions. First, to advance the course of civilization, wherever possible, so as to speed the birth of Omega itself; with an earlier creation and longer life, it might be possible that Omega could solve the problem of surviving the heat death of the universe in time. Second, to seek out any means of journeying to or creating another universe and identify any intrusions into our universe by another; but while such intrusions, though rare, could be found throughout history, none seemed to offer the exit that Omega sought.

  The emulations of these agents, these lacunae, were brought together in a single simulated environment to share intelligence and information wherever possible. This new simulated environment became known by the lacuna who occupied it as the School of Thought, and it was here that the emulated Sandford Blank found himself.

  The School of Thought was variable, infinitely mutable. Sometimes it was an endless plane stretching out to the horizon in every direction, with a black starless heaven arching overhead. Other times it was an impossibly immense, infinitely large library, every possible life of every possible person who might ever have lived encoded in the pages of the innumerable books upon its endless shelves. Still other times it was a featureless void, or a boundless ocean, or a trackless forest.

  On this occasion, the emulation of Sandford Blank found himself in a more pastoral setting. A stream gently burbled by a short distance away, and on the opposite shore rose a crystal dome supported by columns of white stone. The ground beneath Blank's emulated feet was soft, carpeted with lush green grass, and rose at a slight incline from the banks of the stream. And everywhere he looked were other lacunae, in the temple on the opposite shore, in small boats punting down the stream, in the gondolas of hot air balloons which drifted overhead, or seated on the hillocks that were scattered irregularly throughout the landscape.

  The emulations of all of the
lacunae coexisted in the School of Thought, though theirs was not an atemporal existence. Rather, all times were one, as the subtle mechanisms within Omega were constantly sending and receiving communications from all points in history. So it was that Blank found himself facing emulations of other lacunae, some of whom were long dead when Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee and some of whom would not be born for years, centuries, or millennia yet to come.

  Nearby where Blank stood were a collection of men and women seated in a rough circle on the small carpeted hillocks that rose from the ground. There was young Quexi, her smooth skin and luxurious hair white as ivory against her gray gown, her eyes glinting violet. Next to her was Michel Void in doublet and hose, and Niveus in the striped tunic of a senator of the Roman republic. A short distance off sat Iokanaan in his desert robes and Stillman Waters in his Carnaby Street suit.

  Blank crossed the short distance and found a seat amongst them, waiting for his audience with Omega.

  “You have that look again, Kongbai,” the young Quexi said. “Are you in communion with your past self?”

  Blank nodded. The emulated lacunae could feel the synchronization of communion as a strange twinge at the back of their minds, as new memories were uploaded from their organic counterparts and integrated into their virtual minds.

  “Yes,” Blank answered. “There's been a spot of bother, I'm afraid.”

  “Ah, you don't know the half of it, guv,” Stillman Waters said, lacing his hands behind his head, leaning back with a smirking grin. “I've nearly just had my bollocks handed to me by a Russian necromancer and assassin, and let me tell you, those bastards are no fun at all.”

  A side effect of the communion with Omega, besides the synchronization of memories across the vast reaches of time, was that the lacuna's organic mind entered a trancelike state and the body's autonomic processes came momentarily under Omega's influence. The various systems that regulate the body's healing and maintenance were engaged, and any damage due to entropy or injury, age or abuse, was corrected. With regular engagement with Omega, the aging process could be virtually arrested for a period of centuries, the lacuna's lifespan extended from three score and ten years to something nearer three or four hundred, barring catastrophe. In addition, the well-regulated muscles of the body performed at peak efficiency, giving the lacuna speed and strength unmatched by any but the most highly developed physical specimens.