by Reality 36
Chapter 6
Qifang
The message clamoured in Qifang’s mind, drowning out the world. He gripped his head and screwed his eyes shut. It would not be silent.
The alleyway stank. His feet skidded on things he didn’t want to think about. His breath laboured; he was dismayed at his own feebleness. He’d taken the vitalics and anti-gerontics, used them since they were first available. A longer healthspan, that’s what they promised. They’d done their job – only months ago he’d been as nimble at one hundred and twenty seven as he had been at fifty – but Zhifang cursed them just the same. Who else could he blame for his frailty? Time paid no heed to the complaints of old men.
His blood pounded hard, his heart and joints ached. A metallic tang filled his mouth.
He stumbled on. His mind was cloudy, words and thoughts hard to formulate, his memories hazy and broken. His mind was a mosaic of itself, put together by a well-meaning fool who’d smashed the original to pieces in error.
One of the last things he recalled clearly was heading down to the RealWorld Reality Realm House in the desert, driving down the ramp into its subterranean fastnesses, parking. Then, what? Detroit? Karlsson? He couldn’t remember if that came before or afterwards. There’d been a flash, a fleeting image of himself over and over, then a tilting sensation as the floor fell from under his feet. No impact. Next he knew, there was some snakehead bellowing at him in Hakka to get out of the truck, get out, get out! He wasn’t sure which city he was in, which country. He’d walked through weed-wracked farmland and young forest, until this dire warren, full of people from everywhere. They were driving on the left. Was he in Japan? His vision was too blurred, too jumpy to furnish him with more than the broadest detail, the world indistinct, soft. All except his message, bright and hard in his mind as a diamond, demanding that it be delivered.
The men in their anonymous suits of charcoal grey found him, and chased him. He’d given one the slip, a frantic tumble into an alleyway, a lucky blow with an elbow. His assailant had been a man, nothing more than that, and he’d gone down. Something sharp had found his guts by way of return.
Their struggle and the pursuit raised not so much as an eyebrow as he floundered through the crowds. English, they were speaking English, but what dialect he could not tell. He’d been in exile for so long, and yet he still could not tell English variants apart. If he got out of this, the third thing he resolved to do after taking a tub of vitalics and a hot bath was improve his English. He’d download it if he had to.
A shudder passed through some organ within, and its presence consciously felt for the first instance in a lifetime as it reached the point of failure. Something tore. He coughed and doubled over, sinking to his knees in the unspeakable rubbish. One hand pressed up against the wall, his lungs burned. Thick slime dripped from his lips. His breath hiccoughed in his throat, he couldn’t draw enough in to sustain himself. This is the end, he thought. Now I am going to die. This dismayed the message more than him. His last thought was that he could not remember what the message was about. It amused him, and he died with a smile on his lips.
As he sank into the muck, shouts came from the alley mouth over the traffic noise, echoing off the prefabbed foamcrete walls either side.
By the time they got to him, he had already gone.
They stripped the body, cut it open, cracked the brainpan and scoured the inside. When they were finished, they dumped what was left in the deepest tidal part of the Thames marsh, then resumed their hunt for Zhang Qifang.
Chapter 7
Valdaire
Chloe had gone. Veronique’s life companion needed the informational cloud for memory storage, hierarchical organisations of informational relationships, and heuristics. The core of Chloe’s persona existed within the phone, but even that had multiple back-ups spread around the Grid. Only the higher AIs could truly separate themselves from the Grid, and then only sometimes, and then only just. The machines on the System Wide Grid were as inseparable from it as fungal mycelia under a forest floor, and that tangle included Chloe’s mind, a direct link to Valdaire.
Of course, it was also this interconnectedness that would allow Veronique into the Reality Realms.
Veronique had considered severing Chloe’s connection fully, but she’d had to do this twice in the past, and Chloe was never the same. Once Veronique’d got away from the city, when she neared the shack, she’d hidden Chloe instead.
Chloe was the closest thing she had to a sister; she was worth the risk.
Veronique had had to look hard for the old pirate hideout. It was well hidden, the cabin blending into the trees, the road to it choked with the gengineered weed barrier they’d sown round the perimeter – an act of ecological folly, looking at the way it had spread. She’d been shocked to see how much of a wreck it had become. It looked like no one had been there for a decade, when the place was a clubhouse for the Salt Lake U Radicals, putting out unlicensed software and media broadcasts on to the Grid. Once it had been a pretty clapboard mountain cabin, beaten up when they’d taken it over, a legacy from Jaffy’s great aunt, but they’d fixed it up.
That was a long time ago. The paint had flaked away, and rot had set in. A determined renovation would save it, but that would never happen. She was on restoration land, human habitation forbidden, a part of the Three Uncle Sams’ efforts to salvage the biosphere. She was surprised it hadn’t been torn down.
She landed and concealed the aircar as best she could, tucking it behind the house under the portico, where trees would keep it out of sight of overhead surveillance. She covered over the hood with pine branches, poor camouflage, but if someone were close enough to see it, they’d have already found her.
She went round the front, stepping carefully over the veranda’s rotten boards, and approached the door. She’d always kept the key on her keyring. She never asked herself why, too painful to admit.
The door was unlocked, sticking and wobbling when she pushed. She wondered who had been here last, and why they’d not locked the door. There were five of them with keys, the core of an ever-shifting larger group. It could have been Jaffy.
She did a quick scout round. The cabin’s five rooms were musty, one bedroom had a fearsome patch of mould spreading out to engulf it from one corner, water stains marked the floor where shingles had slipped, and the stairs to the big mezzanine in the den grumbled under her weight. Dust lay thick, leaves had blown under the front door, creating drifts in the corners. There were signs that animals had sheltered there. True decrepitude was a few winters away.
When she’d last been here the house had been full of life. She’d left in a hurry when she found Jaffy with the other girl. She never thought she’d come back.
She found coffee in a jar in the kitchen, way past its best. She smiled when she saw that, thought of Jaffy’s insistence that there always be coffee on hand. He was absolutely dependent on it, and became unpleasant if denied it, in a funny, spiky way that made her laugh. She wondered where he was now. She could find out, if she wanted to, but discovering he was some corporate sell-out with two kids and an over-mortgaged house would diminish him; she didn’t think that would feel right.
She put the coffee back, blew cobwebs out of the old kettle and rinsed it clean with water from the jerrycan she had brought with her in the aircar. Then she made herself some tea with the supplies she’d bought in an out-of-the-way charge station. She had work to do.
She unloaded the car, acquired fraudulently, like everything else she had. She unpacked four home aerial security drones, semi-adaptable chameleonics that could ape the appearance of tree limbs, the kind of thing rich suburbanites had patrolling their gardens. She assembled them, set them to a mid-level of aggression and let them loose in the woods to find their own positions. The man in the store had assured her that they were intelligent enough to do that. They were sliver guns, air weapons armed with water-soluble darts of a powerful tranquilliser. She didn’t want to add murder to her crimes.
Next came the dangerous part, making the nutrient feed that would keep her alive while she was in the Realms. She mixed salt and sugar together, adding to it a bundle of nutrient cubes used by Iron Man runners and other extreme endurance athletes. It was a poor approximation of the fluid Realms questers had once used to keep them alive, but the real deal needed a medical licence these days.
Her hands were shaking. She was nervous, and she had every right to be. One guy out of their department had taken to unsanctioned joyriding through the Realms a few years before her time. He’d never been seen again, or so they said. They’d fragged him so completely he’d been snipped out of pictures. At first she thought it was all bullshit until she’d asked one of the other faculty members about it. The look that had come into his eyes was a door slammed in her face. What happened to outside hackers was bad enough, but inside jobs were shown no mercy.
Night fell, and the cabin became unwelcoming, her there alone with only the complaints of settling wood for company.
She put together the feeding machine, components made on public fabbers and adapted shop-bought hydroponics gear. Like the mixture she poured into it, it was a bad copy of the original equipment. She tested it carefully until she was satisfied that it would keep her alive. She’d no desire to end up as a shrivelled cadaver, an idiot smile on her face, like those she’d seen in the archive footage back from the day before reality-grade Gridsims were banned.
She avoided looking at the box containing the v-jack, imagined it as a copper scorpion waiting to squat down on her head and steal her mind away.
Next, the technical part she was comfortable with. She needed to secure a Gridpipe out to the Realm servers. There were only a few ways of doing this, all of them previously detected, which was how she knew about them. Her access codes were good for viewing the Realms, and with a little work should get her in.
Without a good pipe, it would be impossible. She was counting on the satellite still being up there, waiting to take her feed and bounce her off the world’s open servers and into the Realms. A technique called The Waldo effect, from the usename of the guy who had discovered it, who took it himself from the Where’s Waldo? books. He’d crafted a key, worked out his tortuous route. Figured he’d never get caught. He had been.
Before she’d buried Chloe, Veronique had taken her copy of that key off the phone.
She went outside, the chirrup of insects busy all about her. It was getting cool, this time of year. Up the hill she went, past tall trees she’d last known as saplings. She got to the enclosure. The dishes were still back here, then.
The dishes were mostly junk. She looked at them in silence beneath the stars, unnerved at how quickly nature could turn technology into trash. She plugged in her new phone. A few worked, and the most promising of these she got up to the minimum recommended bandwidth for Realm penetration that she’d read about in a fifty-year old game manual, from back when the Grid was still the internet and new tech was spawning all kinds of homebrew batshit antics. She spent a sweaty and uncomfortable hour up a tree hacking branches before she could track the dish back and forth across the sky, looking on her new phone for the satellite, the one she’d read about in an underground ‘zine. Paper; the kids were using it, there was no digital trail in samizdat. Technology had gone full circle.
She found what she was looking for, an ex-NASA sat running on a plutonium reactor that had been there for sixty years, existence still denied, its power source political poison. It was supposed to have been electronically killed, but the comms equipment was ancient when Veronique was young, and hacking it was easy. Running the right software, it could hook up with pretty much any server on the planet and give her an untraceable ride.
With luck, if Waldo’s technique still worked and she got in past the security wall, once she was in the Realms her presence would go unremarked, just another part of the endless, trillions-per-second calculations the machines made to keep the Realms alive. And getting in was possible. There had been thirty-six Realms once, before the hackers and idiots had got into them, wiping four out playing god. They’d all been caught eventually, but they, unlike her, did not have the advantage of semi-legitimacy. And then there was Waldo; what he’d done had never been made public, but she knew.
If not, well then, her brain would be fried.
Her codes were good. She kept telling herself that all the way down the hill. Her codes were good.
She told herself it again later as she took her anti-diuretics, and when she pushed the catheter in – that was no fun – and again as she did her final checks, making sure her feeding tubes and monitoring equipment were working as they should, set up under the one dry patch of ceiling.
She checked again. She was procrastinating. With a shudder, she leaned over to the coffee table and opened the v-jack box. She stared at its bulky electromagnet housings, designed to sit right over the brain’s sensory centres, the largest over the pineal gland.
A few minutes went before she actually put it on. Another few before she activated it.
The v-jack grew warm, the cabin receded into nothingness and she found herself in an intermediary place. The entrance halls that had once occupied it to welcome in gamers were gone; the plain wall of the Realms’ boundary, adorned with multiple warning messages, stretched before her. She activated the add-ons she’d scraped from ancient hacker sites encysted in the Grid, old forums long closed, teaching the gamers of years ago how to cheat. She’d needed a gun, other gear to help her survive. Reality Thirty-six was violent. The potentialities of her gear hovered by her, objects that should not exist in the world she was going to. She’d have an advantage; it better be enough. Waldo’s key glittered in her mind. This was it.
She pressed on the wall with her hands. She pushed through, piercing the membrane like an insect’s leg breaking the meniscus on water. Waldo’s key engaged, turning her viewing codes into full access rights. A terrifying moment, then it was over. The wall parted, the warnings changed to green, echoes of audio welcomes for yesterday’s thrill seekers rasped out through years of data erosion, the ghost of deleted virtuality gates appearing before her. She closed her eyes, and stepped through into the forbidden territory of RealWorld’s Reality Realm Thirty-six.
Chapter 8
Hughie
Richards waited twenty minutes in Hughie’s hall. Twenty minutes was an eternity to an AI. EuPol Central did this because he did not like being called Hughie, which Richards unfailingly did. He did it because he did not like Richards’ attitude, which arose mostly because Richards insisted on calling him Hughie; but most of all he did it because he liked to make people wait.
“Richards,” said Hughie, testy as usual.
“Hey, Hughie, how’re you doing?” said Richards.
“Don’t call me Hughie,” Hughie said, more testily. The air in the hall grew colder. “What do you want?”
Richards looked round Hughie’s hall with a wry smile. Hughie believed he was Very Important, and wanted everyone to know how Very Important he was. As a case in point, Richards wasn’t really in Hughie’s hall. The actual hall was deep under Geneva. Richards was online, in his usual attire of trenchcoat, hat and rumpled face. There was nothing so twee about Hughie, no costumes delineating his character, no snug virtualities of antique drawing rooms or wild ocean shores for a visitor to relax in, just an exact rendition of the vast, utilitarian space he dwelled in within reality, surrounded by hundreds of lesser AIs, connected to each other and to Hughie by snaking bundles of fibre optics encased in ultramatt black carbons. Fours, Sixes and Threes in serried ranks according to grade, twelve Sevens clustered round Hughie’s base unit, his apostles. The noise of the machines filled the space with a quiet rustling, like the sound of termites devouring a house at night.
Hughie’s hall was a concrete cathedral to tomorrow. It was a pharaonic morgue full of the sarcophagi of the immortal god king and his sycophants. It was a monument to the power of the number. It was cold. It was creepy.
It was the home of a monumentally arrogant cock.
Hughie’s voice resonated round the room, the main force of it concentrated on the audience platform where he received his offline guests. Or rather, in this case, on the exact Grid copy of the audience platform where he received his offline guests. Every visitor – every supplicant, thought Richards – got the same treatment, no matter who they were. Whether they breathed the air of the Real or the imaginary air of the Grid or no air at all, Hughie looked down on each and every sentient being with the same unprejudiced scorn.
Richards did not take Hughie seriously, and that drove Hughie to distraction. Richards greatly enjoyed that, which did little to endear Richards to the EuPol Five.
Richards flung out his hands and shouted up to the roof, his own voice tiny in the space Hughie pompously filled, fighting over the relentless sound of data being masticated. “Come on, Hughie, do we have to speak here, let me into the garden! You’re a busy guy, sure, I get it. You’re an important guy! You made your point, but is this any way to greet a friend?”