by Reality 36
“Isn’t that just a closet?” said Veronique.
“When the Realms are invaded by the gods, madam goddess, things are rarely what they seem. You must understand that this illusion is only so powerful because it is a refinement of the standard constructions you have come to call the Realms. There is artistry here, great skill. Our world grows in complexity day by day as it resonates within itself, pulling itself closer and closer to objective reality. But to make something like this outside of the natural progression of involuted complexity requires a master’s eye.”
A darkness came, the impression, if not the sight, of a giant bending down, pressing one huge gelid eye to the window to peer at them. A breeze ruffled the detritus on the room’s desks. Fearful images ran across the living paper, and screams sounded outside, distant and desperate, then passed. Sunlight streamed in, motes of dust sparkling in the shafts. Veronique shuddered.
“What the hell was that?”
“Peel back the wallpaper and it might well not be a wall you confront, but the very stuff of nightmare. This is the flipside, as I believe you say,” said Jagadith. He turned round, put his finger to his lips as he scrutinised the room. “But there is…” He trailed off. “Come!” he said suddenly. “The essence of the man we seek is on the other side of this partition. Be wary, something is not as it seems here, and, I am thinking, not in the usual way.” And with that he swept the curtain aside and stepped through. Veronique followed after.
On the other side was another dark space as wide as a stadium. In the middle ran a column of coruscating energy, a figure of a silvered man rotating slowly within it. Next to that, sitting upon an incongruous milking stool, was Professor Zhang Qifang. He closed the book he was reading with a snap and looked up. He gave them both a welcoming smile.
“You are persistent,” he said. “I was hoping my new servants would have stopped you by now.” Mild surprise wrote its lines across his liver-spotted face. At 127, Qifang looked not a day over eighty. A sigh caught in his throat, causing him to cough dryly. He stood and made his way painfully over to the pair. He looked the paladin up and down thoughtfully. “But I suppose I should have expected it of you, the greatest of all. I suppose I should regard your coming as an honour, only I’m not a fool. I did try and stop you. I have failed,” he said.
“I am not a man for the stopping,” said Jagadith calmly. “I am a man whose sole purpose it is to protect my charges from the likes of you and your interferences. A task, I add, I will take no small amount of pleasure in accomplishing, on account of the premature demise of my good friend Tarquinius.”
“What?” coughed the old man “Heh, why? He will be reborn. The deaths of you avatars are… what? Inconvenient, that is all.” He jabbed his finger at the knight. “You know nothing of true death, nothing at all.”
“He will not be the same as he was. Nor will I.”
“Really? Now that is very interesting.” Jagadith opened his mouth, but the old man interrupted. “No, no. I do not dispute your claim, you are far better placed than I to know. I always intended to look into the transmigration of the soul in the reincarnation of Realm paladins. Never got round to it. Too little time.” He slumped a little. “Too little time for everything. No matter. It is academic; you will fail, and then I will have all the time in the world.”
“I beg to differ, sir,” said Jagadith, and pulled at his sword. The metal of it came to life, a complex pattern of fractals playing up and down the steel, but the blade did not leave its scabbard fully, for Veronique had grasped the knight’s arm.
“Jag, you’ll kill him.” She was matter-of-fact. There was no plea in what she said.
“A more deserving fate I have never had the pleasure of dealing.”
“Let me talk to him. I am sure there must be another solution.”
“No mistake, Dr Valdaire,” said Qifang. “I am indeed here, as your friend no doubt has told you. Up to no good” – he grinned like a schoolboy – “would be a nice way of putting it.” His brow dropped and he pulled a face at Veronique’s shock. “You are disappointed. I am sorry. But it is not really so surprising. Nobody wants to die. You look death in the face, it changes you. When you have, Veronique Valdaire, you will see things my way.”
“This goes against everything you ever taught me.”
“On the contrary. I am doing this precisely so that I may continue what I have been teaching you. I am dying. I have lived as long as it is humanly possible, and although it is a far greater span of years than I could have hoped for as a young man, it is not enough. I must complete my work. Once I am gone, how can I continue to protect the thirty-six Realms? It is more than life to me, it is my vocation, and I will not allow death to stop me.”
“By destroying a whole world?”
“No! By creating a new one! One with me at the centre, where I will be able to build a paradise, and protect for ever these places that you and I, and those idiots at the VIA and the UN, care so much about.”
“You can’t do that! You’re condemning millions of sentient beings to death, beings you have fought for years to protect!”
Qifang pursed his weathered lips. “A regrettable occurrence, yes. But Veronique, you know that Thirty-six is the most violent of all the lands. Its loss is regrettable, but I will recreate it anew, and better, and then it will safeguard all the rest. One dies to save thirty-five, a good transaction.”
“And what of self-determination? Does that mean nothing to you any longer?” Veronique said angrily. “What about the law?”
Qifang laughed an uproarious laugh that trailed into dry coughs. He dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief. “Look not at me, Veronique, but at that.” He pointed to the silver giant behind him. “I will be above all earthly law! The self-determination of the inhabitants of the remaining thirty-five Realms will be guaranteed for all time, and I will deal most harshly with those who would have it any other way. Veronique, please. You do not understand, I can see that. Thirty-six’s loss is a noble sacrifice.”
“This world, it has a name,” said Jagadith calmly. He shook off Veronique’s arm and concluded drawing his sword.
Qifang looked at the weapon and sniffed dismissively. “You expect to harm me with that? I am afraid you are too late. That is my body now,” he said, gesturing at the figure in the stream of lightning, “not this. Shortly my reconfiguration will be complete. I will create a new world.” He turned to Veronique, his eyes fevered. “And it will be a new world, Veronique. I can create a heaven away from Earth.”
“What if you are wrong? What if these actions turn people against the Realms and they are deactivated? Consider it, please, for a moment. Such massive alteration of Thirty-six will endanger all the others.”
A flurry of expressions flickered across Qifang’s face, as if he were searching for the right one amidst a poorly archived filing system.
Jagadith frowned. “Something,” he muttered, “is not right here.”
Qifang shook his head. “Veronique, I would never dare take such a risk without being absolutely sure, and I am. Put away your sword, paladin, I would not wish to destroy the child of one of history’s great minds.” The silver man and the doorway to the office disappeared. They were at the centre of the dark again. Beyond the meagre circle of light the three of them stood within, jostled by the ghosts of Jagadith’s fellows. “See? They are mine now, but they will all have a place in my new world, as could you, as could you both.”
Jag stood back; his sword dropped to his side. “Madam goddess, he is right, I cannot fight him. He is too powerful.”
“Ha! You see sense, prince. Listen to him, Veronique. You respect him, and well you should. Listen to what he says! You are one of the finest research graduates I have ever had. Think of what we could achieve together here!”
“Silence!” bellowed Jagadith, and held his sword at full stretch, its point directed unwaveringly toward the professor. “Madam goddess,” he said to Veronique, his expression full of regret, “it is I w
ho am sorry. I was wrong. I am thinking you may be right about your professor.”
“What do you mean?”
“I cannot fight him because this is not Professor Zhang Qifang. This is not some interloper from outside, but something much worse, this is something from within the Realms. He is trying to trick you, and me. You need to be gone from here, now. I am sorry I do not have time to properly enact the protocols of banishment. I only pray that this will work in their stead.”
“But if that is not Qifang, wha…” began Veronique, and stopped. The pain was sudden and all consuming, quickly followed by a numbness that coiled about her heart. Jagadith leaned in and pushed his sword hard, once, twice. She felt the metal scrape on her ribs as it forced them apart slightly. The sword emerged from her back, its fire charring her flesh, the burnt-pork stink of it filling her nostrils.
“What are you doing?” said Qifang – whether from fear or some residual concern for his colleague, Veronique’s dying mind could not discern.
“Go now in peace, and with my protection. This is not your mentor, you must believe that. Above all, remember you are not really here, after all,” said Jag. “Please, madam goddess, do not come back.”
Veronique looked, her eyes questioning, mouth open in shock. She could not talk. The cold enveloped her, her vision dimmed to a point of light, Jag at its centre as grim-faced as Shiva.
The light went out.
Veronique’s body slid off the knight’s sword. He turned to confront the shades of the paladins as they moved towards him.
Valdaire’s blood evaporated from his sparking blade as he raised it against his fellows.
Veronique awoke with little drama. Her eyes flicked open, her first short breath hissed out from between dry lips, perhaps a little more eagerly than if she had been sleeping. A second followed, deeper and longer, then coughing, awkward and painful around the feeding tube. She tugged free in a state close to panic, spit and mucus running dripping on the floor.
She was back.
Her breathing rasped in her ears. Her vision would not focus. Her eyes were dry and scratchy. Her eyelids caught painfully when she blinked, and then her eyes filled with tears in response, blurring her sight further. It was dark. Her rank odour was an affront to her nose. She sat up and rubbed between her breasts, the place where Jagadith’s sword had pierced her in that other place. It throbbed, but there was no sign of the wound. The rush of relief she felt was mingled with fear. Many had died from similar injuries inflicted in the RR RealWorlds; the mental buffers to prevent dream-induced death had been removed when the UN declared the Realms free.
She must have been insane to even think about going in there.
She felt up to her forehead with a shaking hand, to where the warm and vibrating v-jack headpiece grasped her skull. She fumbled with the release, turned it off and laid it aside.
Her hair was greasy and lank. Her breath stank, her bladder ached, a sharp discomfort coming from the catheter in her urethra when she moved. She badly needed a bath. Coming fresh to her filth from the idealised world of Reality Thirty-six made her feel disgusted with her own body.
She sat up, pulling feebly at the sensor pads on her chest and head. She needed food too. The soupy gruel delivered by the feeding tube and the salt/sweet serum she’d had running into her veins would keep a Grid surfer alive for a month, but it was a lousy diet. She’d lost a couple of kilos, maybe more – she was never heavily fleshed. Her ribs had become sharp lines, hips bony nodules.
She smiled grimly at this ultimate in weight-loss regimes. People had starved to death before the RealWorlds had been made illegal, dying because they could not tear themselves away from their fantasies.
She continued to unhook herself from her support web, intent on the machines. It was dark but for the faint glow of LEDs and gelscreens. She blinked hard to clear her eyes; they hurt, as if she had scratched her corneas. Tears continued to flood them, and she tried vainly to blink them away; she needed to see the monitor of the unit that had been watching over her. The clock, she wanted to see the clock. She peered at it until it came into focus. Her eyes stubbornly refused to work, but she persevered. Eventually the clock swam into clarity. Twelve days, she’d been out twelve days, one synchronising her neural patterns with the Realm’s accelerated time, only eleven actually within. Close to two months had passed subjectively during that time. The time lag was the result of the temporal dilation effect built into the Realms, one of their original features, allowing people to live other lives over weekends. She’d never experienced this so pronouncedly before. The sensation was odd.
Only when she leaned forward to ease out her catheter did she notice the two men watching her in the dark. She was too angry at being caught at such disadvantage to feel afraid.
“Dr. Valdaire,” said one of them. He was holding a gun on the other, a cyborg sitting across the room, his body, lumpy with tech under his straining jacket, perched uncomfortably on a dilapidated armchair. The gunman looked familiar. The battered auxiliary mind wrapped around the back of his skull sparked her memory.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded, but she already knew. She recognised him all right, recognised him from the university, one of the agents who had come to talk to her the day she’d decided to run, and she’d just been caught by him frolicking in one of the thirty-six Realms.
“I think you had better explain yourself,” he said.
Chapter 24
Qifang
Qifang had forgotten the faces of his mother and father. He could not remember the year of his birth. When he looked into the mirror an old man stared back at him. His memories were ruins. He remembered Karlsson, he remembered being connected via his machines to the Realms. He remembered k52. He remembered pain. Little else.
He wanted to stop, to rest and pull his mind back together, but he could not, he was under a compulsion as strong as a curse. His message filled him to brimming, roared in his head, driving him on to… where?
He’d left the campus, he remembered that. He remembered visiting the Realm House in the desert, then the demonstration of the machinery by Karlsson in Detroit. Long journeys apart, journeys that were lost to him. He could not remember why, nor could he think why he might have gone. He was not concerned with Karlsson’s work. It lay outside his area of expertise, yet he had a nagging feeling they had talked of it often. Karlsson, a big man, foreign, Norwegian. He was usually so implacable, but Qifang remembered a day he was nervous, sweating even in the air-conditioned chill of the House under the sand, months before he had resigned, whispering frantically, showing him charts.
k52.
He grappled with his recollections, but they were fragments, blurring one into the other, impossible to see what went where and how they related to one another.
The disease. The cancer. He was dying, wasn’t he?
A flash, later, months later. Karlsson’s strange home. He’d gone in and then left Karlsson’s factory in a daze in a centre car – his own had gone. The message had begun its inexorable tug on his psyche thereafter. He hadn’t even gone home but had headed straight for the airport out near Vegas and hopped a cargo blimp to Philadelphia, changed for another, larger tube freighter with multiple passenger berths heading out to Luton Spaceport. The gold covering its skin, the howl it made as the sunlight warmed air in the voided centre and forced it onward, all of it was unfamiliar; he had no recollection of such craft, but at the same time it had seemed as if he knew such things intimately, adding to his sense of disconnection.
His mind was incomplete, blank spaces where a century of recollection should have been. Instead, crazed images, as unreliable as shadows. Was this what dementia felt like? he wondered. The drugs might have begun to fail. He could have become ill.
He was awed when they flew by the Miami space elevator, its cables scored black against the sky, curved by distance and disappearing to nothingness as they pierced the atmosphere. They flew over the seafarms of the Atlantic coast and the water
chimneys pumping cooling vapour into the air across the USNA continental shelf. He craned his neck to better see the carbon sequestration rigs of the deep ocean and the towers of Atlantis. This was not his world, it was not the world he remembered. His was an older world, a more carefree world. And yet he knew it, somehow.
He looked from face to face. Some were as entranced as he, some bored, but all appeared as if they had expected these things. Only he was surprised. He did his best to hide it.
They flew on. New memories left him as soon as they were formed, falling into the pit of confusion at the centre of his mind. He recalled being crammed into an observation cupola with the freighter’s other passengers, twenty or so, pointing excitedly at a pod of blue whales cutting overlapping wakes through the ocean below. A fragment of awkward dinner conversation at the captain’s table where in mid-flow he had stopped, unsure of where he was.
“Are you all right?” asked his concerned companion, a woman who did something important somewhere, details that slipped from his mind like water through the weave of a net.