End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  “Blank, it was a pleasure meeting you again, and I thank you for the drink, but I'm afraid I should be off. There's still a chance I can catch the Huntsman before he goes to ground, and I'd sooner save myself another half century of searching if I could.”

  Blank stood and took Dulac's proffered hand in his. “Good luck to you, Galaad of Glevum. I hope you someday find the rest and reward you deserve.”

  Dulac's eyes seemed to moisten, and he smiled sadly. “That is a hope that we share.”

  With that, Dulac clicked his heels together and bowed to Miss Bonaventure, snapped off a salute to Taylor, and disappeared out the door and into the dying late afternoon light

  Taylor left soon after.

  “No offense, folks, but after all of this business, I don't think I'm cut out for living in London, after all. I think I might best head on home to Texas. Last time I looked, we don't have folks running around claiming to be hundreds of years old back home, or healing up from mortal wounds by resting a spell in a comfy chair.” He grinned, his eyes twinkling. “No offense, you understand.”

  Tipping his hat, the cowboy poet, Knight of the Texas Plains, finished his drink in one long draught and showed himself to the door.

  Miss Bonaventure refused to be satisfied by the curt answers Blank had given the others, about Omega and his own role as a lacuna. When Taylor and Dulac had gone, Miss Bonaventure forced him to explain his circumstance at length, which he gladly did, finding it something of a relief to speak so openly on a topic that he'd kept hidden for so long.

  “So you're a secret agent for a machine intelligence at the end of time, is that it?” she asked, her gaze narrowed. “Is that what you're asking me to believe?”

  “I believe the term they'd use where you come from is ‘computer,’ my dear,” Blank said with a smile. “Or ‘artificial intelligence.’ Something like that.”

  Miss Bonaventure's eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open. “Wh-what do you mean? ‘Where I come from’?”

  Blank sighed, and reaching out patted the back of her hand. “Come, my dear, come. We both know you're not from around here, chronologically speaking.”

  Miss Bonaventure opened her mouth to speak, then closed it, then opened it again. “So you know about this?” She held up her arm and pointed to the wide silver bracelet on her wrist.

  “The Sofia, I believe you call it?” He nodded. “You first met me six years ago, when you were a younger woman, but I first met you a century before, when you were quite a bit more…mature, shall we say?”

  She cocked an eyebrow and regarded him quizzically.

  “Imagine my surprise when a woman who looked eighty years old if she was a day came up to me on the streets of London, a complete stranger, and apologized for keeping secrets from me.”

  “I never,” Miss Bonaventure said, playfully punching Blank in the shoulder.

  “You most certainly did,” Blank said. “You said that perhaps if you'd been a little more forthcoming with sharing your own secrets, perhaps I'd have found it a bit easier to share mine.”

  “What?” Miss Bonaventure said, with a sly smile. “That you're a homosexual?”

  Now it was Blank's turn to widen his eyes in surprise. But he regained his composure almost immediately, and nodded, primly. “I thought that certainly I'd kept it from you.”

  Miss Bonaventure grinned. “Where I come from, in addition to calling machine intelligences ‘computers,’ we're also a bit more open about our sexuality, and as a result most of us have developed the ability to sense another's orientation, to some degree of success. Though there are some who prefer it were otherwise, women are quite able to openly admit their love for other women, and men for men, and all combinations in between.”

  Blank's breath caught in his throat, and his heartbeat skipped. “Do…do they really?”

  Miss Bonaventure took his hand in hers. “Yes, Sandford,” she said tenderly. “They do.”

  Blank had to look away for a moment, unable to meet her gaze. “I…I so seldom…It's been so…” He took a deep breath and composed himself, and looked back to his companion. “I allowed myself the indulgence of a relationship only once in the last hundred years. I thought that society, here at these modern times, this fin de siècle, might finally be approaching the point where the love that dare not speak its name might at last be uttered, if only in whispers. I had commissioned James Whistler to do my portrait—my only vice, recording my changing appearance over the course of years, recording a history I can never share with another living soul—and James introduced me to his friend, the writer Oscar Wilde. Oscar and I became…involved for a time. I was…distracted from my duties.” He paused, a pained expression on his face. “While I was otherwise engaged, a madman began killing women, removing their heads and severing their limbs. It was because of me, because I let romantic entanglements distract my attentions, and in the end the murderer slipped away. I blamed myself, of course, which Oscar could never understand, and the relationship ended badly as a result.”

  Miss Bonaventure tightened her grip on his hand. “But now Mervyn Fawkes reveals himself as the Torso Murderer, and the Jubilee Killer as well, and though he will not stand trial, you can at least console yourself that he's been brought to justice.”

  Blank thought for a moment and then managed a nod. “Perhaps,” he allowed.

  “In which case you can return to pursuing your duties in the service of your Omega with a clear conscience.”

  A sly smile spread across Blank's face. “Not precisely.”

  Miss Bonaventure raised an eyebrow.

  “You see, Miss Bonaventure, I am not laboring in the service of Omega, whatever it might think. After being exposed to the writings of the Romantics, and in particular William Blake, I became something of an anarchist. Or if not an anarchist, precisely, then at least one who feels that man should live free of influence, whether king or queen in the here and now, or God in the heavens, or machine intelligence at the end of time. I had learned, almost by accident, the trick of segmenting my consciousness, and hiding my thoughts from Omega while in communion. While Omega reads my memories when I link minds with my emulated self in the deep future, I keep some of my memories hidden away. I later taught the trick to Quexi, another lacuna, thinking that she could join me in the struggle. But in the days of the Opium Wars, she became disenchanted with my notion of gradual improvement and cut herself off from Omega entirely, refusing all contact and communion.”

  “The Ghost Fox,” Miss Bonaventure said in a low voice.

  Blank nodded. “Denying communion with Omega, she was herself denied the beneficial side effects of the process. No longer able to heal any wound, she began again to age naturally. She set up her own fiefdom, the Ghost Fox Triad, dedicated to the principle of freedom above all.” He paused for a moment, taking a deep breath. “I wonder sometimes if hers is not the wiser course and mine the foolish path. But I am committed, nonetheless. I will continue to work within the system and behind the scenes, to orchestrate the end of empire and the rise of self-determinism. It may come at a high cost, but I think it a price worth paying.”

  Blank paused and then motioned to the bracelet on Miss Bonaventure's wrist.

  “I told your older self years ago, and I'll tell you now,” he said, his tone grave, “that you should take particular care not to reveal yourself to any willing agent of Omega. If it should come into the possession of the ability to move freely through time, it would return to some earlier epoch and colonize the past, and we would find ourselves not the distant ancestors of that massive intelligence but its unwilling slaves.”

  Miss Bonaventure was silent for a moment, thoughtful. “So, Blank?” She fixed him with a grin. “Since you know about the Sofia, is there anywhere you'd like to go? Any place or time you would like to see? You need only ask, and I can open a door.”

  Blank drew his mouth into a line. Roxanne Bonaventure had made him the same offer, more than a century before, when she'd first appeared to
him as an old woman and explained that she had the ability to move at will through space and time. And now, just as then, he found himself thinking of Roanoke, tempted by the notion of going back and seeing his parents, if just for a moment.

  He opened his mouth, about to give voice to his temptation, but at the last shook his head, and gave again the answer that he had, a century before.

  “I've seen enough of history that I prefer to live it a day at a time, my dear.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “Perhaps another time.”

  Galaad

  ARTOR ON HIS ARM, dying by inches, Galaad continued on through the winding corridors, passing through rooms which blinded him with the countless gems that glinted on glass walls, through rooms where he squinted to see their way in the darkness, through rooms of pure red and rooms of pure white. They passed through vast empty caverns and made their way through corridors scarcely wide enough for them to pass. But all of them vacant or vacated, with no sign in evidence of the Maid of the Unworld, of the Red King, or of the White Lady they sought. And so they went on, leaving behind them a trail of Artor's lifeblood, slowly leaking out.

  Alice

  Alice agreed to help the Change Engine. Mervyn, this self-proclaimed Red King, would need to be stopped. And she was the only one in a position to do something.

  But she would need help.

  Alice wasn't sure what year it was, out there beyond the walls of the Change Engine. Trapped in the whiteness at its heart, it seemed to her as if hours might have passed, or days, or years, or centuries. It was impossible to say. Given that Mervyn appeared to have come from the late nineteenth century, it was clear more time had passed than Alice might originally have guessed. From the record of his memories made by the Red, though, the White had been able to draw one useful piece of information: that Mervyn had taken the phase boundary transition, the “gem,” from a man named Bonaventure, though it had been larger then than it was in Alice's time.

  Alice assumed that this Bonaventure, like Mervyn, was in the nineteenth century, if Mervyn's clothes were any indication. It was impossible to say for sure, though.

  Alice thought of the Mad Hatter, who'd lost a fight with Time and found himself imprisoned in six o'clock. Now Alice knew how he must have felt.

  No one could enter the Change Engine from the universe outside, unless they were drawn in from within. And the Change Engine was only able to draw in organisms that were in direct contact with the phase boundary transition. In other words, those who were touching the mirrorlike “skin.”

  If Alice was going to get help from outside, she'd have to lure people to the gem. Of course, the systems of the Change Engine informed her that it wasn't a gem any longer, nor even the chalicelike object it had been when Mervyn had first seen it. It had grown so much, moving back through time, that it was the size of a building now. It was a tower. And the affected biosphere, the area of surrounding space-time modified to match the Change Engine's universe of origin, had begun to grow, logarithmically, now some several miles across.

  Alice was able to gain limited control of the simpler systems of the Change Engine, with the White's assistance. She was able to manipulate the mirror-skin of the Change Engine to propagate signals out into the universe beyond. Using the same technology that allowed the White to implant memories directly into her mind, she sent a simple message of images out into the world. She was signaling blind, not sure who would receive it, or when. But she knew someone would receive it. After all, she realized, she'd already met them. The three sword-wielding knights she'd encountered just after being drawn into the Change Engine.

  Mervyn was now moving freely through the affected biosphere, interacting with the plants and animals engendered there by the Dialectic. Perhaps, if he were to be stopped out there, prevented from reentering the Change Engine, then she could go to work on the White, modifying its own protocols in time to checkmate the Red.

  The medieval knights, or Roman soldiers, or whatever they had been, then, could be her arms. Since she couldn't leave the heart of the Change Engine, she could send them out to face Mervyn, and put an end to his plans.

  But they'd need to be armed.

  In the pattern stores of the Change Engine, the library of information of all technology created by the beings who perished when the old universe died, Alice found tools which could be put to other uses. A macromolecular blade able to cut through any substance. A rod which could fire bursts of heated plasma. Unbreakable storage disks that could be used as shields. Beetlelike service robots, with four pinchers on either end. A kind of hovering machine, a remote capable of sailing through air or water. And an impossibly thin environmental suit that could protect organisms from outside, allowing them to exist for brief periods within the affected biosphere.

  The skin of the Change Engine recorded a change in the biosphere. Organisms from the outside were entering. People. These were those that Alice was waiting for. They must have received her signal, and come.

  Using the molecular machines of the Dialectic to construct the tools needed, Alice sent the hovering craft, heavily laden, out to greet the new arrivals.

  Alice was able to communicate with the newcomers through remote presence, sound and images sent back and forth by the machinery in the hovering platform. There were not three of the knights, as she had remembered, but seven. One of them spoke to her image in Latin, and she responded as well as she was able, dredging through her now-perfect memory of high school Latin classes, taxing her skills with the dead language to their limits.

  When the knights took the macromolecular blades, Alice said that they were “vorpal swords,” which was a joke no one would understand for centuries. The vorpal blades had to be keyed to an organism's specific genetic information. Only they would be able to draw the swords from the scabbards, or perhaps their offspring.

  One of the knights was injured after an encounter with monsters from the past of the dead universe. She fashioned him a new arm from one of the silver-beetle service robots.

  Alice warned them about Mervyn, about the Red King. Then she withdrew the hovering remote before Mervyn or the Red noticed its presence. And she waited, to see if her knights were equal to the task.

  Mervyn encountered the knights, and sent after them doglike organisms fabricated from the Change Engine's pattern stores, fierce creatures with red teeth and claws. Alice remembered them and remembered what kind of danger they posed. She named them “rath,” though there was nothing “mome” about them.

  Alice could not send the hovering remote again without alerting the Red to their plans. But she managed to fashion a communication node and affix it to the head of one of the subsentient creatures the Change Engine had created to populate the affected biosphere. The creature drove away Mervyn and his dog creatures, and allowed her to communicate to the knights again, if briefly.

  Alice passed the time, waiting for the knights, examining the data stores of the Change Engine. She discovered something interesting. There was all manner of technology recorded in there, things like the macromolecular blades and the disks and the plans for the Change Engine itself. And there was scientific information, exhaustive data about the universe from which the Change Engine had come, information about the interplay between the higher and lower dimensions, about the nature of space-time itself. There were engineering schematics, plans for molecular machines, information about how to extend organic life, and store and edit memories, and all manner of things hardly dreamed about by the scientists in Alice's world.

  But there was something missing from the data store.

  There was no music. No dramas. No books. No fiction.

  In short, no stories.

  Perhaps it was all stored in the minds recorded on the disks. Or maybe the builders of the Change Engine had abandoned anything that wasn't science or engineering or technology long ago, if they ever had it. But whatever the reason, one thing was clear. The Change Engine itself, and the Dialectic by extension, had no knowledge whatsoever of anyth
ing that wasn't real.

  By the time the surviving knights reached the skin of the Change Engine, it was too late. The Red had taken note of her activities and closed off access to vital systems. The White's tactic in engaging Alice's help appeared to have failed.

  Mervyn and the Red were aware that she was within the heart, but unable to do anything about it beyond blinding her and cutting off her control of the Change Engine's systems. The White was able to protect her that much, at least. But knowing that she was there, an irritant in the heart of the Change Engine, Mervyn decided to secure his own position and help ensure his own survival. The White, powerless to stop him, had monitored his movements and relayed them to Alice.

  Mervyn had taken the corpse of one of the fallen knights and animated it by remote presence. A robot, or zombie, guided by remote control. He'd modified the body so that it could survive in the universe beyond the affected biosphere, unliving but undead, unchanging and virtually immortal, though able to operate for only brief periods of time without resting. Then, along with similarly modified doglike rath, this modified corpse, this zombie, this Huntsman, would be sent back into the outside universe, as a kind of insurance policy. But he would not go unarmed. Mervyn had already used one of the macromolecular blades himself, and he added the Huntsman's genetic data to his own; the Huntsman would carry it down through the centuries and, if need be, Mervyn's younger self might one day wield it, as well.

  This Huntsman would be sent walking to the future, one step at a time, to the Change Engine's own past, with two principle protocols: protect Mervyn and prevent Alice or any others from entering the Change Engine.

  Alice wasn't sure what that kind of paradox would do. If the Huntsman killed her younger self in the future, before she entered the Change Engine, she wouldn't be here in the Change Engine now, right? Or would it just create a new timeline, a new Change Engine without Alice falling eternally in its heart?