by Reality 36
The monkey who had dropped his cymbals squawked and charged, knuckling along the ground in a charge, shoulder held forward.
“Tarquinius! Move!” The lion’s head swung round as he moved to take in the charging ape; too late. It barrelled into Tarquinius’ flank, spinning the lion round like a cat kicked by a horse. He writhed through the air, landing crouched and snarling. Somehow, both Jag and Veronique kept their seats, though they were winded in the tumble. Tarquinius backed away from the three apes, keeping his back to the tree’s vast trunk. He moved unevenly.
“Dear sainted ones!” exclaimed Jag. “They have dented you with their tussling!”
“Never mind that! Keep on eye on those blasted monkeys.”
The three apes formed a loose semicircle in front of them, two banging their cymbals, the ape that charged them running backwards and forwards, hooting and slapping the floor with murderous plastic hands.
“Tarquinius, we must act soon, they attempt to herd us into a trap. The fourth creature is above us.”
“I know. My senses are beginning to come back online. It intends to jump soon.”
“I am ready.”
“As am I. Hold tightly now, madam goddess.”
“Let’s take the one on the left.”
“Agreed.”At some invisible signal, the fourth monkey leapt from above. Tarquin jumped forward. The displaying monkey tried to grapple them, but the lion sailed straight over its head. It squawked with rage. As Tarquin hit the floor to one side of the left-most monkey, Jag neatly decapitated it with his crackling sword. For a moment the three-metre ape tottered, sparks spewing from its ruined neck, then, with one last bash of its cymbals, it pitched forward to fizzle upon the floor.
“There, one down,” Jag said, but as he did so he grimaced, rotating his sword arm; the blow had badly jarred it. The three remaining monkeys howled in indignation, bashing their cymbals and smashing their fists into the tree. Then, as one, they turned to face them. Their eyes glowed red, their lips curled. Snarls escaped their synthetic voice boxes.
“Now what? I do not see an easy way out of this,” said Tarquinius.
“Perhaps we will be safe if they do not work out that if they charge us all at once they wi…”
The monkeys dropped their cymbals and came knuckling along the floor in a line. Tarquinius ran, bounding up a low rise, then turned to face them, roaring in defiance. One monkey stumbled, hands clasped over its ears. Tarquinius fired a salvo of rocketry into its prone body, setting its fur ablaze. Veronique screamed for a weapon. Jag sang a war-song in a language of a long-dead people. One monkey hurled itself over the head of the other, carrying both Jag and Veronique to the floor. The other slammed into Tarquinius with the force of a steam train, the two rolling on the floor in a tangle of mechanical limbs. Jagadith, grasped it by the torso, one arm pulled to popping by the laughing ape. Tarquinius, scrabbling free and rearing up, rained blows onto the unyielding head of his assailant with paws the size of manhole covers.
Veronique cursed her lack of a gun, forgetting she could create one merely by thinking of it. Jag screamed as his arm came out of the socket, his world washed red. The next thing he saw, the monkey lay dead at his feet, his sword protruding from its chest, black smoke boiling out round its hilt.
“Are you alright? God, I thought he was going to kill you!” said Veronique, running to the knight’s aid.
“I believe that was his intention… Aiee!” shouted Jag, halfway to a scream. His breath became shallow, he clutched his side and looked, ashen-faced, to the woman. “Careful, madam goddess, my arm has come from its socket.” He winced. “Now, now where is Tarquinius? We must be on our way.”
“He’s there…” Veronique pointed, hand shaking. The mighty lion lay on his side, head stretched out. He was dented in several places, the plates round his vulnerable underbelly buckled in. Thin green mist steamed out from rents in his body. Next to him was the fourth monkey, curled in a foetal position, pedalling itself frantically round and round on the ground, increasingly fast, until it stopped with a whiff of burning and a bang.
“Tarquinius!” Jagadith rushed over to his supine steed.
“Jag… aaahhhhhhh…. dith,” Tarquinius’ voice was almost inaudible. His mouth was ajar, unmoving; his multi-purpose tongue lolled.
“Oh, noblest friend! You cannot die, I will not allow it.”
“Complete… the… mission…”
“Rest, my friend! Rest! I will slay this god, then you and I will go away, until the world needs us once more. Be still, I will return.”
But Tarquinius did not reply, and, as Jagadith looked on, the green glow of his eyes, undimmed for millennia, flickered and died. Jagadith stood for a long time, his tears falling silently onto the metal of the lion, before he would allow Veronique to help him mend his shoulder. Veronique had some medical training, and forced it back into place on the first try. After a couple of experimental swings with his sword, Jag set off to the tree’s trunk.
“I, I could try to bring him back…” offered Veronique.
“Do not even attempt it! The world here is too unstable, see, come here.” He strode back to Veronique, grabbed her roughly by the wrist and dragged her over to the monkey he had dispatched. “Look at the smoke.”
She looked. She squinted. “It looks like smoke,” she said.
“Look harder.”
She looked harder. The smoke was composed not of gasses and particles of soot, but of thousands of numbers, flowing upwards to disappear. She stood up sharply. “That’s not supposed to happen. I’ve never read of anything like that.”
“The world is trying to adapt,” said Jagadith, “and it is breaking down. The professor is altering it too much and too quickly. It should be smoke, but that is our world’s interpretation of your professor’s interpretation of what he imagines should function in our world as smoke as our world sees what he sees it becoming, if you understand me.”
“No,” admitted Veronique.
“If you would be trying to utilise your godly powers here, madam,” continued Jagadith, “this third level of interference could well unravel the universe about our ears. Your professor is bending the whole fabric of reality, for what purpose I know not, but it is imperative I stop him! More than our world is at stake, I think. Quickly,” he said impatiently, gesturing at the tree. “Time is short. Tarquinius and I are one, and a half cannot last long without the other. We must act swiftly or all will be lost.”
“You are going to die?” said Veronique.
“Yes, madam goddess,” said Jag, “I am going to die. Maybe not as you would understand it. But I am not going to do it before I have completed my task.” His perfect features were set like stone. “Professor Zhang Qifang will pay.”
Chapter 20
Arizona
The sky glowed with the predawn, black shading to blues as the stars winked out. Otto dozed, allowing his near-I to take the strain of monitoring the car’s brain, but not for long. Not being hijacked by huntware and driven to his death over one of the many precipitous drops this part of the world boasted was worth the price of a little sleep.
As the sun rolled out from behind the mountains, he roused himself, shutting off his melatonin production, already artificially depressed, to mimic a normal waking pattern. The closer he kept his circadian rhythms to normal operation, the less lousy he felt. He upped his cortisol levels. Immediately he felt more focused. Otto’s ability to moderate his biochemistry was a standard feature in Ky-tech personnel. He used it infrequently, and then for short periods. After a few days, physical wear set in as the body’s systems remained unrefreshed. Psychosis would occur after a few weeks. If he were too reliant on it, production of his neurotransmitters could be permanently compromised in a similar way to what happened to heavy MDMA users, only worse. He’d seen it happen to others, ex-soldiers like him addicted to the fast burn of life lived 24/7, or too frightened of the mentaug’s dreams to sleep.
Right now, he wanted coffee. U
sing the biochem-moderator always made him crave the stuff, though it was supposed to have no effect on him. More medical bullshit. He called up the car’s map from its internal memory and searched for restaurants. Since his brief reconnection to the Grid at the falls, his near-I had been only tenuously connected to the network in order to track the interference signals of Valdaire’s cheater programmes. He was running his tracking of Valdaire through several double-blind service providers and then observed by himself only obliquely. Still he kept the car to banked data, like the map, and he had it display on the windscreen, not in his iHUD.
For a rare few hours he’d been free of the noise of the Grid, the targeted advertising, messaging, news updates and calls that filled the heads of all but the most resolutely anti-Grid citizen. He enjoyed the disconnection; he was not like some people, going to pieces when their uplinks malfunctioned or their phone hit its pre-ordained obsolescence date. But now he was reluctantly part of the world again, and it gave him a headache.
“You won’t hurt Veronique, will you?” said Valdaire’s phone.
Progess. Otto yawned. “So you are speaking to me now?” he said, knowing full well it had been observing him for the last day. He had decided against having his own valet force it open. The likes of Richards were pool-evolved, millions of variants hothoused to force favourable traits, the best of each generation blended, a new wave bred from them, and the process repeated until personality and purpose arose. By contrast, evolved near-Is like Chloe were defined as “weak”, made from a single, programmed source, and in Chloe’s case heavily modded. Valdaire was good at her work and Chloe far exceeded most near-I specs, but years of tinkering might have made it fragile. Crack it badly, he’d lose everything. “I will not harm her. I am trying to find her so I can help her.”
“I love her.”
Otto nodded. “I am trying to help.”
In the meantime Otto’s near-I fed him AR directions to Valdaire, tracked off the Grid cheater mirages Richards had unravelled. They were uncertain, jumping about as his lock on broke and then was re-established, his oblique link to the Grid multiplying the effect, but he was on the right track – the signal he’d found off the back of Richards’ frequency estimates was leading him steadily south-southeast. The modulated pulse of Valdaire’s cheater weakened and strengthened as it switched up and down the levels of the Grid. Visible, but unlocatable. Chloe had to talk. Best take it slow.
Otto curled his lip. They were coming up to a rest stop. Time for a break. He had his near-I check for data-tagging on his Gridsig, or the emanations of machines that might be watching in the Real or online. Negative. There was always a chance of old-fashioned eyes doing old-fashioned watching, but he’d been careful. And he was hungry. “Car, stop here,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir,” said the car in a smooth voice complementary to the whispered rumble of the tyres on the tarmac. Thousands of AI-sped man-hours had probably gone into working out that touch. Cars and coffee blenders were getting smarter than some of his clients. There was a danger he was getting sloppy in the way that he dealt with them because of it. He had to watch that.
The car pulled up at a collection of wooden buildings: smart miniature charge station, restaurant and gift shop, the exteriors constructed rustically from whole logs; picturesque, and economical – there were tax breaks for using carbon neutral resources.
“What are you doing?” asked Chloe. “Why are we stopping?”
“Breakfast,” said Otto.
“As of this moment, you do not require breakfast.”
“I am hungry.”
“Your nutritional needs dictate that you do not require breakfast,” she insisted, businesslike.
He looked down at the passenger seat, where Chloe poked out of a bag. “You’d know? It is my stomach, not yours.”
“Veronique provided me with efficient dietary and exercise software. I can calculate your optimum nutrient and calorie intake by estimation of your body weight and activity levels. I am highly accurate.”
“I am hungry, be silent,” he said. He preferred to eat to gain the energy he needed; he could plug himself in, but that made him feel like an appliance. He needed a damn sight more food than Chloe could guess at.
“It appears your stomach has been modified,” said Chloe. “Although I am unfamiliar with your cybernetic physiology, I surmise that your systems provide for efficient nutrient recycling. If you are hungry, and do not wish to recharge by electrocal means, might I suggest you sate your psychological needs to eat and attempt to extract energy from some of the freely available organics by the roadside? You could eat them in the car,” she said helpfully. “And it contains roughage.”
“I had ham and eggs in mind,” growled Otto.
Chloe was quiet, then blurted, “You said you would help Veronique.”
Otto glanced at the phone. Chloe was all over the place, unstable. Too many apps and mods for a near-I to handle. Someone like Valdaire should know better. “I will. But if you are not going to tell me where she is, I cannot help her, so I got to eat breakfast instead.”
“Get to eat,” said the phone, “in this instance.”
“Get to eat,” he said, under his breath. He knew that. Damn, he was tired. “I am going to eat ham and eggs. And coffee, I need coffee.”
“You do not require coffee!” Chloe’s voice became shrill.
Otto shrugged. “Maybe I do not need coffee, but I want coffee, so I am going to get coffee. You can sit on the table while I eat my ham and my eggs and drink my coffee and think about telling me where Veronique is. You should hurry, I do not think Veronique has much time.”
“But…”
“I am hungry.” Otto scooped the phone up. The car anticipated his intention and swung back the door. He got out.
The restaurant was a small affair, a forty-seater or so, one of many Otto had passed catering for tourists, this one standing at the head of a mountain trail heading off into the forested wildernesses of the parks southeast of Flagstaff. A large car park, hidden by the buildings and a fold in the land from the road, stood behind it. A small ranger’s office and toilets were at the top, a large wooden board carved with hiking routes next to it. The car park was half full, both of groundcars and, as they were close to the edge of the mountains, the more robust kind of aircar. A couple of tour buses occupied the far end of the lot.
The bus passengers were crammed into the diner, a real mom and pop affair in the 1950s revival mode popular back in the 2090s: high-walled booths, red vinyl seats, wood panelling and faded postcards, cakes in perspex boxes, local memorabilia and antiques hanging from the ceiling. It was hard to tell if any of the bric-à-brac was genuine – artefacts like these were often not; you could buy the fab patterns for them for virtually nothing. Ancient still photographs of grinning fishermen holding up extinct monsters by the gills crammed the walls, groundcars as ugly as primitive idols behind them; pictures out of a faded century, distorted further by the lens of another now fast receding in time. All Otto’s life he’d lived through retreads of times from before his own time; the world was stuck in a loop, the advent of the Information Age proving conclusively there was nothing new under the sun. The Grid kills creativity, he thought. People don’t get to forget any more.
The diner’s kitchen was visible through a hole cut through the wall, where a short-order cook worked with a battered android on a hotplate as big as a billiard table. The air was thick with human breath and cooking smells, the windows steamed up against the cool mountain air outside, where autumn made an early foray. The diner strived for homeyness, and almost succeeded. Otto felt himself unwind a little.
“Hiya honey, you want a window seat?” The waitress was ages older than Otto, her hair tinted and chopped so as to appear three decades younger than her skin. It was bunched like a child’s, framing a wrinkled, non-modified face. Her pink gingham uniform made her look like a geriatric doll. The effect was ugly, but Otto had seen worse in the mirror.
Otto’s
near-I shut off the cheater tracker for a moment and used its scrap of covert bandwidth to run a tactical analysis of the restaurant. Reticules blinked up in Otto’s iHUD as it checked off each face, all full human, only a couple of uplinks, no threat from any. No records on the system beyond one or two parking tickets, one minor insurance fraud, a public order infringement and a couple of ancient drug busts. “No,” said Otto, “I would like to sit there.” He indicated an empty booth wedged by a large cast-iron stove.
“Gee, where are you…”
“I am German. Before you ask, I am also a cyborg, ex-military.”
The woman’s head wobbled, a tiny motion. Her good cheer disappeared.
Otto immediately regretted his terseness. American culture was predicated on crude but brittle decorum. He wasn’t so good at that. “I am sorry,” he said. “I look different. I become weary repeating myself. I have come far.”
“Well, people would be interested, honey.” The waitress’s professional bovine smile crept back. “We don’t get many other than your regular folk up here, one or two maybe with a little work done, but nothing like you.”