by Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep- The Best New Science Fiction from Sweden (retail) (epub)
"It's safe. Come," she says.
"It's not safe. And we don't know the way back."
"Actually I do."
She takes me through dark alleyways and damp basements, through wide open streets and across rooftops. We see a few visitors but they don't pay any attention to us. Their singing haunts me as we run, our footsteps never once hitting the same beat. She's a professional, at least as good as I am.
The Event Sector shifts around us continuously. Houses come and go. Streets blink in and out of existence. One time I even think I see a forest and people in green camouflage clothing, then it's gone.
Sometimes she stops and listens to something. I can't figure out what. Maybe she's hearing voices in her head. A few times she pulls up a map from her coat pocket. It's one of mine. I briefly wonder how the hell she got it out of one of my rigged boxes. Then I look at her again, and understand that if she can lead us back to the city in this shifting landscape, then one of my silly traps wouldn't be a problem for her.
Finally, we reach the Hole. I notice because my leg stops hurting. The wound is suddenly calm.
"Do you know a good place to talk?" she asks. "Somewhere we won't be disturbed."
I nod. I know several, but the one I'm thinking of serves whiskey, and I really need whiskey right now.
Sergei, the Russian barman, shows us into the back room, usually reserved for illegal card games and meetings between local mobsters. He's let me use it before, and knows the drill.
"There is drink over there," he says and points to a worn wooden cupboard. I find a half empty bottle of single malt inside. A rare commodity these days, but I'm not complaining. Sergei leaves, closing the door behind him. With the door closed, the sound of the outside is gone. All we hear is the low hum of our anti-beat-machines.
She puts the tape recorder on the table. Switches sides on the tape. Sets it to record.
"So we remember," she says. "I guess you have a lot of questions."
"I do. Quite a few. The most important one is, if you find your way around the Event Sector like that, why did you even bother to send me in there?"
"Because it has to be you."
"It has to be me, why?"
"You have to be the one to find it. It's the way it was meant to be written."
At this I fall silent. How do you respond to something like that, except maybe quietly leave the room before more insanity spews from her mouth? The thing is, when she said it, it didn't feel insane. It felt true. And most importantly, it felt sane. I downed my drink and poured a new one. Downed that one too.
"When you say written, what do you mean exactly?" I ask.
She leans back on the chair and smiles at me. Not a condescending smile. A warm smile. She takes out a pack of cigarettes from her purse. Shakes it, takes out two. Offers me one. I accept it. She lights hers.
"Is it okay if I ask the questions for a while? I think it would be enlightening."
I nod and lean closer. She puts the lighter to the tip of my cigarette. I breathe in, let the smoke into my lungs. It's a very familiar feeling.
"Okay," she says. "Haven't you ever wondered why all you know of the world is the city, the Hole and the Event Sector?"
"That's not true. I know a lot about the world."
"Such as?"
There is nothing. A foggy blank nothing. When I try to think of anything but the city I know, my mind slips like it's on ice.
"What lies to the west, past the city borders?" she asks. "To the south?"
"There is a river to the north." It's all I can say. It's all I know.
"And to the east is the Event Sector. But beyond that? Does it go on forever? You know it doesn't. You've traced the borders. I know you have. You've told me."
"That's not true. I haven't even been this far into the Event Sector."
"Oh, you have. Several times. You just don't remember." She pauses. Takes a long drag on her cigarette. "Doesn't it feel like you sometimes just repeat the same motions over and over? Have the same conversations again and again? Like you have no choice but to act out the scenes you were destined to play, like some mediocre actor on a stage with no audience. Haven't you ever wondered why you have so many maps of the Event Sector, in so many different places? They are left there for you, traces of past stories, for you to keep filling in."
And when she says it, I know it is true. I remember talking to her. At my desk in my office. Through thick bars in a city jail. In an alley outside a downtown bar. The same conversation, over and over. Some words change, but the meaning never does. It's always about her and the object she asks me to get for her. And I do. Or at least I try to. I can't remember ever succeeding. But I do it, time and time again, because I would do anything for her to smile at me.
Like she does now.
"I like it when you smile," I say.
"I like it when you like it," she says and smiles even wider.
"I started remembering things," she says. "Things I hadn't experienced yet. First it was in dreams. I saw you. I saw us. Then as time went by, more and more details were filled in. I felt like I was losing my mind. At first it only talked to me when I was sleeping, but now I hear it all the time. Even now it speaks to me."
"It? What does it say? And what is it?"
"I think it's the world. It's everything here. Everything around us."
"Oh, you've got to be kidding. I never figured you for a religious crazy person."
"It's not like that." She lights another cigarette. Her hands are trembling. "It's the world. It's the story. Our story. It's trying to finish it. I think that's what it wants. In my dreams, it has told me things. You and me, it's all about us. I give you a mission, and you accomplish it. At least, that's what's supposed to happen. But it never does. Something goes wrong, and it all starts over again, slightly differently."
I lean back, close my eyes. This is a bit much to take in.
"The people on the tape," I say. "They were talking about some kind of computer that created stories."
"I know. I've heard it too. I think it's part of the past, something that once happened, and it – the world – is letting us hear it. To understand."
"But why? It's not doing any fucking good, is it? I feel like I'm going insane!"
She shakes her head. "You're not the one going insane. I think the world is. It needs to finish the story, and something isn't letting it."
"Something what?"
"The Swedish counter-virus. I know you heard them talk about it on the recording."
"But we can't do anything about it. I don't even know what it is."
"We can. It has never been able to complete the story. It has to. It's what it lives for. It's failed so many times. And every time it fails, it wipes the old story from its memory and starts over. But we're always there. You and me. The world is losing its mind. The counter-virus is trying to stop it. And the only thing it can do is to portion off parts of itself into us. That's why we remember. That's why it gave us the tape, to make it easier to do so."
She puts out her cigarette and places the drive on the table. "I sent you to find this, because it told me to. It's its brain. On it are stored the parts they tried to delete. With it we can run the program again and maybe this time it will be able to generate the end. So we all can rest. And find out what is supposed to happen to us. We have to do it now. The world is unraveling. You saw it in the Sector. As for me, every time it's reset, I feel worse. I guess you do too."
I think of the pain in my leg. The wound. The thing in there. It's definitely getting worse. I shake my head at this. Then I smile. And start to laugh. The absurdity of the situation is just too much. I can't stop. "You sent me into the Event Sector to steal the world's brain?"
She smiles again. "When you say it like that, it does sound a bit crazy."
In the end, it's as simple as it's anti-climactic. We ask Sergei for one of his old battered desktop machines, yank it open and plug the hard drive into it. Then we wait for things to happen. Non
e of us has used a computer before. I wasn't aware of that until she told me. I assumed it was one of those things I just knew how to do. Turns out I hadn't ever switched one on. My memories were playing tricks on me again.
The monitor, a dust-covered CRT screen, stays dark and dead for over half an hour before it wakes up. Then the following line is displayed in the top left corner, in shimmering green letters:
> run generator -noir -250p -reset (Y/N)?
She types Y and presses the return key.
"Now we wait," she says.
But we don't wait for long until things go bad. My leg starts hurting like it's about to fall off. Something's screaming. I can feel it moving, trying to break free.
"What the hell is that?" she says, visibly upset and scared.
I press my teeth together. I hold my breath. It really hurts. Worse than ever before. The cloth tears, revealing what's beneath it. A face. My face. A hand. Fingers digging themselves out of my body. The mouth is gasping for air.
I've always known it's there. But it doesn't fit with what's real, so I've never looked at it. Now I know why it's there. The body, a Siamese twin from another genre, is digging itself out of me. The whole head is out now and parts of the body. I can see it's wearing torn medieval clothing. It's a part of me that also wants to exist. There is no place for it here, in my world.
She stands back. Shocked.
"Jesus Christ, is that ...?" She falls silent.
"It's been there since one of my earlier Event Sector jaunts," I say through clenched teeth. "Ran into some visitors. Things got confusing. Then I don't remember what happened. I woke up in my bed and it was there."
I hit the thing with closed fists. I hammer at it. Again and again. Trying to get it to go back inside. The pain is killing me. The face screams at us. Narrative dissonance found! Continuity breach! Stockholm-AV-base eradication attempt ongoing!
"It's a visitor. A counter-virus. It must sense what is going on. It's trying to stop it."
"Can we please stop talking and try to get it out?" I scream, panicked.
"I don't know what to do!" The malformed thing grabs hold of her arm. It screams. I scream. She screams. The sound of our voices coalesce and form clouds of torn-apart letters in the air around us. Circling us, like birds of prey waiting to strike.
And then the CRT screen blinks. Once. Twice.
And then: darkness.
It stays dark for a long time. I can feel myself floating inside it, a disembodied thought with nowhere to go. The pain and my malformed twin are gone, along with everything else.
She is gone too, though the pain of losing her is with me. A sense of longing so deep nothing else matters. I need to find her again. I need to be with her. We need to reach the end together.
The light shines in through the window blinds. Sharp spears into the soothing darkness. I hear car horns honking outside. Somebody yelling loudly, selling today's newspaper. Sounds and lights forcing me awake. I was dreaming and I don't want to forget about what. About something important. Something horrifying, but important.
I don't want to, but I open my eyes. Somebody's knocking on the door.
I'm in my office, in my chair. My back hurts. My head hurts worse. I must have passed out here again last night. My mouth tastes like something died in it. Memories are hazy, but the empty bottle of Jack on the desk tells me at least part of the story. Still, traces of the dream stick, like flies on a dead dog. There was something ...
Bang bang. Whoever's on the other side of that door sure is persistent.
I find my pack of smokes. There is one left. Thank God for small mercies. I light it, and stand up. Have a coughing fit. I'm a miserable son of a bitch. In desperate need of a case.
"Alright, alright," I say while stumbling toward the door. I open it and there she is.
She is beautiful. Much more so than my usual clientele of washed-out actors and doped-up has-beens. She's thirty-ish. Tall. Red hair. Red lipstick. Black dress.
"You the P.I?" Her voice is smooth. Like honey and a sweet promise.
I nod.
"Have a seat," I say and point her toward one of the chairs next to my desk. "What can I do for you?"
"I have this problem," she says. "There is something I need you to get for me, and I don't know quite where it is."
"Shouldn't be a problem. Finding things is what I do."
"I know. That's why I came to you."
She smiles and triggers a reminiscence. Of what I'm not quite sure, but it doesn't feel awful. It's like I know her from somewhere. As I walk toward my chair, my foot bumps into something. Some weird kind of recording device. I'm sure I haven't seen it before, but it feels familiar. Like something out of a dream.
"So, will you help me?" she asks. And when she smiles at me like that, I know I will.
I put the device in a desk drawer. I'll take a look at it later. I get up and walk over to the window. I pull the blinds open. I look out. The streets are full of people. There are cars everywhere. I'm filled with an unexpected sense of feeling at home, of being where I should be. This is my city and those are my people.
The sun is warm against my face. The dream that seemed so important a few moments ago, recedes into nothingness. Whatever it was about, it's not important anymore. The headache is gone. It's a beautiful day. I turn toward my client. Her eyes are beautiful.
"Of course I will," I say.
"Vegatropolis – City of the Beautiful" – Ingrid Remvall
21st of November 2550
11:15 p.m.
"Please, Maxine. Let's get out of here."
My friend looked at me and smiled. "No way! We just got here."
I pulled the short dress over my knees for something like the hundredth time. All I wanted was a pair of adaptive jeans and a holographic retro shirt. My favorite shifted between a big, red, blinking robotic eye and the text I'll be back. However, for this party Maxine had forced me to wear a tight, shimmering emo-dress. It was as pitch black as my emotions.
I had used Maxine's makeup-spray and I guess it did some good. The smoky black enhanced my pale, gray eyes and my skin was glowing. Just enough to make me blend in as one of the least pretty in the room with my brownish, Maxine called it mousy, uncolored hair in a slick ponytail.
I looked around at the crowd and tried to forget about my uncomfortable stiletto heels. Shiny faces, shiny clothes and shiny eyes; drugs were free at this party. We would both turn eighteen soon so the drinks were legal, but the drugs that were inhaled through rainbow colored masks were not.
Maxine grabbed a cucumber jelly-shot, threw it back and licked a luminous drop from her purple lips. "Relax, Vega. Have some fun!"
"Any moment now they are going to realize that we are not one of them and that we have just crashed this party."
Maxine snapped. "Speak for yourself! This is where I belong."
I couldn't argue with that. Maxine was unfortunate to be born in the poor districts outside of Vegatropolis. Her dad cleaned one of the big corporate offices in the city and her mum controlled a machine packing toothbrush pills in a factory outside of town.
But Maxine, yes, she was another story. She looked absolutely fantastic. Not just fantastic like the kids that have enough money to modify their appearance, she was born that way. She had red hair tumbling down to her waist, curly and as wild as her temper. Her skin was golden with freckles covering her small button nose and rosy cheeks that gave a perfect contrast to her pale brown cattish eyes.
Her looks alone wouldn't have given her the possibility to blend in with this crowd. They could spot an outsider a mile away. However, Maxine had a talent above and beyond her great looks and charm. So, we got away with it.
All the credits she earned from working extra hours at a café went to acquiring fabric. She transformed this fabric into outfits that could have come out of any high-class, digital store in a shopping mall, like this dress of mine.
The loud beat of music pumped around me and the overwhelming smell
of sweet shots and cinnamon cigarettes was the same, but something had changed. The club was packed with at least a hundred people, but they were all silent.
The Royals had arrived.
Maxine grabbed hold of my arm so hard I squeaked. I would definitely have a big bruise there tomorrow.
The Royals were not real royals. Not like in the old days when kings and queens ruled the world. But these were the Royals of Vegatropolis, the royals of the 25th century. They were the children of the power elite that ruled the gaming industry, TV networks, drugs and everything else that mattered in this city.
Another thing that made them different from the royals of ancient times was that they were not human, although though they looked like they were. The power elite did not want kids with defects like ugliness or sub par intelligence. A lot of things could be modified after birth, but why take the risk of getting something that was not altogether perfect?
A scientist and artist who called himself Picasso had created the first AAI – Advanced Artificial Intelligence. After this the AI had went from plastic looking humanoids to something actually looking like us. This was twenty years ago. Picasso's next step was the AAIGP; Advanced Artificial Intelligence Goes Perfect. The "people" now entering the room were his best work ever.
They looked like us and oh so much better.
Lancelot was the first to enter and oh my, did he enter. He looked like a Viking prince stepping off his boat after a successful raid. He pulled back his golden hair, just brushing his shoulders, while he narrowed his icy blue eyes. Lancelot had the body of a football player combined with the grace of a gymnast.
I closed my mouth and felt dreadfully embarrassed that something made of plastic and metal could have this effect on me.
Right behind him, arm in arm, came the girls. Sorry, the queens. Like yin and yang. Black haired Lucy was a tall and strong Asian girl with a face that could start a war. Beside her came fair-haired Gwyneth with a body that could start a world war. Like always she looked bored and chewed on her full lips. If I did that I looked like an idiot, but Gwyneth, well ... she just had it all.