by Reality 36
Choi was a rich man in a tower full of rich men. He lived and worked in the penthouse areas, three floors down from the summit. The very top was populated by giant servers where the rich could enjoy top-range VR entertainment pre- and postmortem. A lot of pimsims lived in them. The poor called it “Top Heaven”. Winged shapes flitted around the spire. Highly modified winged humans, the lower classes said, the angels of Top Heaven. In reality they were surveillance drones. Richards sweated under the oppressive heat of human-managed data systems, monitoring the city’s population. Big Brother lived up top, not gods of any stripe.
Richards walked through crowded arcades and parks, past temples grown from gengineered trees. No one paid the android he wore a second glance as he plodded his way on, which was good, because it was slow and weak. His route took him up stairs and elevators, past spun diamond windows as large as lakes, through sculpted residential districts blended with terraced gardens and microhabitats, water gurgling from one ripple-lipped mirror pond to another. Where necessary, his way was opened by a phony People’s Dynasty AllPassequivalent that he’d first rigged up four years ago. He’d skimmed some hot software off the PD government site that kept it up to date. It was bizarre stuff: sometimes it behaved as if it were as aware as near-I, and spat invective at him in some odd machine code dialect he barely understood. But it was thoroughly cracked, and the data it provided hadn’t failed him yet. On level 372, he used it to break a maintenance seal and ascended a staple-rung ladder up an endless service duct.
Before he emerged from the service duct near Choi’s offices, he cracked the computer and inserted purchase details, delivery date and so on for his borrowed android sheath. He was now part of the staff. He peeked into Choi’s diary; it was an hour after his weekly board meeting. As Richards had expected, Choi was alone.
He climbed into the offices via another hatch, convincing security it had never been opened.
Richards went towards the business’s substantial kitchens, sourced the kitchen input, and presented a fake order for tea. He walked in as bold as brass. One of the staff handed him a tray with a pot of tea on it. As he left, the cook staff were wondering aloud who’d bought such a cheap piece of shit to serve Tony Choi. They unaniminously agreed they were glad it was none of them.
The guards at Choi’s teak double doors did not pay him any attention as he stopped there and waited. He was just a drone going about his business.
The doors slid open.
Richards stepped into Choi’s office with eleven minutes to spare. Not much time, but he didn’t need much time.
Choi looked up from a sheet of calligraphy. He looked somehow old and sleekly fat, well groomed in an understated, obviously expensive mode; French suit and Indonesian shoes. He looked like a million other People’s businessmen and ‘crats, except that there was an indefinable otherness to him, past cartographies were etched upon his soul.
His healthtech-smooth face creased in a frown. “I ordered no tea,” he said.
“Hello, Tony,” said Richards, setting the tray down. “How are you doing?”
Chapter 16
The 36th Realm
Time and effort led Veronique, Jagadith and Tarquinius out of the swamp and to the foot of the hemispherical hill. Everything about it was gargantuan, a five-hundred-metre high dome of polished rock, the dimples in it twenty metres across and five deep in the centre. High above, the lowermost branches of the monkey puzzle tree hung a little way out over the swamp, its oversized, triangular needle-scales huge even from their distant perspective.
“It will be a task to climb this,” said Jagadith.
“A task for me, you mean,” grumbled Tarquinius. “I don’t see either of you carrying mountaineering equipment.”
Tarquinius rumbled deep in his chest, and gave out a short metallic cough. “You had better remain here. I will let down a rope when I attain the summit.”
Jag slid off the mount’s back, and lifted a hand up to the scowling anthropologist. “I am not totally incapable,” she said.
“As you wish.” He dropped his hand. He disliked dealing with educated women. They were so much trouble. He sighed in a way calculated to let the doctor know this. He could feel her glowering at his back. “Can we attempt the expulsion now?”
Veronique wasn’t rising to the bait. “How are you going to climb that?” she said. “It’s like glass.”
“Indeed it is, madam divinity.” Tarquinius stood up on his hind paws, pressed the soft metal pads of his forepaws against the cool stone. His claws popped from their sockets, long and gleaming as knives. “Number threes should suffice for the task at hand,” he muttered. There was a series of clicks, and his claws turned to one side and pulled back into his feet. A new series came forth, threaded like drills, exquisitely moulded diamonds at their tips. “This will take a while, Jag. Let me take you up thirty or forty feet, and you may rest in one of these dimples out of harm’s way.”
“I am not keen on wasting time, dear friend, but so be it.”
Tarquinius’s claws began to spin. He held them for a moment above the rock’s smooth surface, flexed his stubby leonine fingers and then thrust the first set of drills into the rock. There was a whine, sparks flew and Tarquinius’s claws sank smoothly into the stone. He placed his second forepaw higher than the first, pushing his nails deep in, then hauled his back feet off the ground. One of these he pulled as high as he could, then forced the claws on that foot into the basalt. He then retracted his forepaws and, standing on his back foot, repeated the process. When he reached a sufficient height he stopped by one of the dimples and lifted his tail. A cable dropped down. Jag put his foot into a loop at the bottom, and bade Veronique do likewise. When they were secured, the rope ran smoothly up, pulled by a winch inside the lion. As soon as they were parallel to the dimple, Jag hung from Tarquinius’ foot and hacked out a series of footholes with his sword. Then he worked his way into the centre. His sword flared bright as he turned it up to its maximum power setting, and he deftly sliced out a chunk of the dimple, creating a flat platform that he and Veronique might sit upon. He let it cool for what Veronique felt was an interminable ten minutes, as she swung over nothing. A nothing made of nothing, she thought, how philosophically interesting that would be, if I weren’t so fucking terrified. Jag helped Veronique over, and they sat. Tarquinius retracted the rope fully and resumed his ascent.
“Will he be long?” asked Veronique, glad to be off the rope.
“The ascent is a long and hard one, most assuredly,” affirmed the paladin. “But worry not, madam goddess. My steed is an excellent climber.”
“I wasn’t worried about him,” she said. “Now what?”
“We rest.”
Several hours passed. Veronique looked out at the stinking vista before her. The knight spent much of the time deep in a trance. Veronique was astounded when she realised he was floating five centimetres in the air, then for some reason profoundly disturbed by it. It gave her the horrible feeling that reality here was spongy, and that it might at any moment warp into something new, with her not necessarily a part of it. She looked away. When alert the knight was little inclined to talk to her, so she was left to her own thoughts, and these ran along the lines of:
Why did Qifang drag me into this unholy mess?
How do I get out of this unholy mess?
Just how real is this place?
Just how real does that make me?
The thoughts went round and round her head, worrying her deeply. She tried to sleep, but could not, so worried on some more.
None of this made sense. The paladins set to protect this reality believed Qifang was responsible for the changes being wrought here. She hadn’t known what to expect when she arrived, but she thought she might have met with Qifang quickly. That he hadn’t been there when she entered the Realm troubled her. It was possible that Qifang had lured her in with the data he’d left her, that in actuality he was responsible for the resources drain. But to what end? The only s
cenario she could come up with on that score was that he had some kind of wooing in mind, which frankly made her feel a little ill.
It couldn’t be true. Qifang was man who had argued passionately for the rights of new life, whatever form it took: digital, hybrid, AI, cyborg or other. She remembered the first time she’d seen him, at a guerilla Neukind rights flash rally in Toronto. He’d been small, distant, a man tiny on the stage of the run-down Air Canada centre. She’d taken Chloe. She’d never agreed with slavery for the machines.
AIs were not tools, he said, they were not playthings for man to do with as he chose. Through his creations, mankind had the collective responsibilities of new parents. The days when desperate adults had a dozen children to help them make their way in the world were long gone, he argued. “We would never send a flesh and blood child up a chimney. We shudder when we think of the children of the Victorian era picking up threads in the dark spaces between unshielded machinery. We balk at the thought of twentieth-century sweatshops. Why treat the Neukind any different? Why should we slaughter them for sport? Force them to forever serve us? Send them alone to the ends of the universe? We are their progenitors. They may well outlive us all, and the surest form of immortality is for those who come after us to remember us fondly. Let not the human race be consigned to the fairy tales of the future, to become the ogres of tomorrow. Let us be good to our new children that they may pay their respects to us when we are no longer here.”
His words were powerful. The cataclysm of the tip was receding into memory, wars were fizzling out as cold war took its place. The world was a place where people could cautiously feel comfortable in their outrage at their ancestors’ mistakes.
Zhang Qifang had won a lot of supporters with his talk of children. He had seen the Neukind – AI, pimsims, post-humans, simulants, uplifted animals and so forth – as the true future.
He’d often said to her, later, when they had got to know each other, “Mankind has begun to save the planet from his mistakes, but it might already be too late to save itself.” She’d shared his pessimism, at least some of the time; she’d seen plenty in her service time to vindicate Qifang’s opinion.
She’d left the army and turned inwards; studying the thirtysix Realms fit that well. When the games had been running, the Realms had appalled her; whole civilisations of thinking creatures conjured into existence so humans could go and let the old beast out a little, practising war, rape, torture and other outrages. As a student, she’d joined others and protested their existence, Qifang their hero on his last great crusade. Then the UN’s declaration had gone out; the Reality Realms were immoral and a social hazard. The doors were closed, the worlds had gone feral and that was that; they had been shut off fifteen years ago and new VR of the same intensity forbidden. The digital inhabitants of the thirty-six Realms had been the last of the Neukind to have been granted rights. It had been a difficult victory, but Zhang Qifang’s support had swayed it. Sentient beings should not be created only to be killed for sport. Peace for Orcs, Rights for Elves. It sounded stupid when Jaffy said it that way; he’d meant it to.
Watching from outside had not given Valdaire a true picture of what it was like to immerse oneself fully in the Reality Realms. Being here was a visceral experience, accentuated to be even more real than real life. The world was so much cleaner, so much more vivid. She found it hard to believe that her body was elsewhere, sat in a chair in a cabin in the woods, slack-mouthed and plugged in. She held up her hand and examined it. It was better than real, stronger, cleaner of line and free of blemishes; it was an idealised version of her hand. It was not hard to see now how people had become dependent on the RWRR experience, not hard at all.
She sat and hugged her knees and bit her lip and looked out across to the jungle. Perhaps she’d followed him too easily, for the wrong reasons. She had always wanted to see the worlds at first hand. She’d just never allowed herself. She admitted when she applied that that’s why she studied them – she’d had to, the psych profiling would have winkled out the truth in the end. But that she’d been strong enough never to plug in was what had got her the job.
Maybe that’s why Qifang’d given her the viewing codes months ago. He was supposed to hold them for each researcher, but he’d said she needed to know everything. She was no longer sure of his motives.
She swallowed. Perhaps, perhaps if she just changed things a little. Just once, just to see what it was like. She’d resisted the temptation hard ever since she dropped into the Realms, maybe if she tried, she might understand better.
She looked over her shoulder. Jag was cross-legged, breathing deeply, lost in some inner world of his own. The act of creation of one world was never the creation of only one world, as each created so many more, the inner worlds of the minds of those inhabiting it leading on to the eventual creation of worlds like this in an endless cycle. All she’d do would be to take a more active part in that. She closed her eyes. She’d make something innocuous, something that already existed here, something small and harmless. She breathed deeply, imitating the man behind her. She pictured the creature in her mind, a Jexbu it was called. She’d seen it when she had been studying an island tribe on the far side of this Realm, a band of fish people created to provide foes for dungeon-bashing armchair adventurers.
The Jexbu was an eight-limbed thing, six of which were wings the colour of sapphires. She could see it in her mind’s eye. Through the faded 3D of the mechanical turk workstation display it had taken her breath away. To see one in front of her would be wonderful.
She opened her eyes. Nothing. She took a deep breath, feeling a mixture of failure and relief. It was for the best.
There was the barest flicker of light, and the air rippled as if distorted, like a bulls-eye glass. A jexbu hung, frozen for a moment, before suddenly coming to life, beating its wings in pairs and fluttering away. The gentle wake from its wings stirred her fringe. Veronique was spellbound – it was beautiful, far more beautiful than the image she’d seen. Veronique could have been a woman of great feeling, but she’d learned that the world wasn’t a great place for emotional people, so she sat on her heart tightly. Maybe it was being in the Realm, maybe it was the thought that people could create something as beautiful as that by thinking of it, but her defences trembled. Tears pricked at her eyes.
“Madam goddess,” came Jagadith’s reproachful voice. “Please be not doing such things. It is a slippery path to follow, you could soon be suffering from delusions of divine grandeur, and Tarqinius and I will have no choice but to set you free from our Realm, safely or by the sword.” He tapped the blade across his knee. “Let us hope it does not come to that,” he said warningly. He stood up, brushing some of the dried mud from his coat of plates. “Besides, your villainy may well have alerted your erstwhile teacher to our presence. Please be restraining yourself.”
“I… I am sorry… I didn’t mean…” She didn’t know what to say. What had she been thinking?
Tarquinius’ rope dropped over the lip of the dimple, saving her from Jagadith’s disapproval.
“Aha! It appears Tarquinius has reached the summit. If you please, goddess, grasp the stirrup this time.”
She did so, and the rope dragged them to the top, she and Jag holding the loop at the end of the rope and pushing themselves clear of the smooth rock with their feet.
Tarquinius threaded his way between the dimples of the summit toward the trunk of the monkey puzzle tree at the centre of the rock. The sun was sinking low in the sky again. Where the giant limbs of the tree allowed, its rays struck reds and golds of lustrous hue from the polished basalt, catching upon the tiny crystals that made up the whole, shattering it into a million small worlds of coloured fire.
“It appears our god favours sunsets,” Tarquinius commented.
The tree was so vast that the minds of the travellers found it difficult to perceive it as a tree. Sometime the tree looked like a tree, until a giddy shift of perspective turned it into a ragged mountain, paint
ed a variety of sinister greens. Out by the edge of the rockdome only the most adventurous fronds quested out above their heads, but as they worked their way inwards, the tree’s limbs filled the sky, developing into a latticework of enormous, scaled leaves, the tree changing from a mountain to a dragon, breathing with the wind.
“This is anomalous!” roared Tarquinius. “Anomalous!”
Jag turned round and gave Veronique a stern look. “Do you see now? This is not the work of the man you describe. Can you not see that he has changed? I fear your professor has gone mad. This has gone beyond a mere case of expulsion. We will have to kill him.”
Chapter 17
Hong Kong
“Richards, is that you? What the devil are you doing here? Have you gone mad?” Choi’s eyes bulged so much Richards almost laughed, for Choi was a gentlemen of the utmost seriousness and would not have enjoyed how comical he looked. He sat there blinking slowly, like all his motion. Choi moved like a glacier. His hand hung in the air, and a large spot of ink dropped from his brush, marring his calligraphy.