by Gavin Smith
‘Where are we and where are the all the stars?’ Vic asked. Scab ignored him.
There was something wrong with the blackness. Vic couldn’t shake the feeling that the infinity of space was somehow closing in on him. He didn’t like the way space seemed to move in the periphery of his multifaceted vision. He didn’t like the feeling that somehow space was squirming.
‘Is that a monastery?’ Vic might as well have been talking to himself. He was receiving the image from the Basilisk’s sensors straight into his neunonics. It showed an ancient-looking habitat built into an asteroid. It had the look of a Church habitat but a very old one. A search of his neunonics found nothing that matched it.
The sensors showed indications of life but no weapon locks from defensive systems. That wasn’t right. Vic couldn’t think of another habitat that had no defensive systems.
‘I don’t want to go there,’ Vic said firmly and crossed all four of his arms. ‘I mean—’ he started.
‘Can you not want to go there silently?’ Scab demanded, turning on Vic. This made Vic even more nervous as Scab seemed a little on edge.
The familiar clang of docking was followed by a grinding noise as the ancient docking arm tried to make a seal.
‘Maybe we’ll just be sucked out into space when we open the airlock,’ Vic said hopefully, but the docking arm finally made its seal. Scab ’faced opening instructions to the Basilisk and after decontamination procedures the wall opened. Vic didn’t like what he saw. It was difficult to tell their race or sex, but they were probably human or feline, as they were wearing voluminous red-hooded robes that covered their features.
Between the two red-clad monks was an ornate cylinder floating on an AG drive. The cylinder was a nano-fabricated tank designed to look like wood, brass and glass. A thick black fluid swirled around inside another clear liquid, seemingly with a life of its own.
It was with dawning horror that Vic realised what these people were.
‘This is a heretical cult!’ he cried, only to be ignored yet again. Were these his real employers? Surely they were too poor for the sort of resources that Scab had been throwing at this thing.
‘Night draws in,’ one of the monks said. Human, male, working hard to impart as little emotion as possible.
‘We have little time,’ the other said. Vic couldn’t be sure of its race, let alone gender.
‘I need a message delivering,’ Scab told them. ‘Tell him that we’re going to need a diversion.’
The monks nodded. Vic was coming to the conclusion that if he could work out a way to commit suicide without being cloned by Scab, it might be easier than this insanity.
The chimera reared on its cloven-hoofed rear legs, striking out with its claws as it surged forward, opening rents of red in the sculpted flesh of the tank-bred biomechanoid it was fighting. There was cheering from the various boxes grown out of the root-like wood that formed the arena.
Zabilla Haq turned away from the arena, distaste written all over her face. The bloodshed did not bother her. The biomechanoid was unimpressive in its modernity; she liked the classical elegance of the three-headed chimera, but then it had taken her a great deal of time and effort to grow it. Adapting and splicing pre-Loss genetic material from a goat, lion and snake had been the easy part. The dragon head had been difficult. It had meant the creation of an entirely new template, as she had not been prepared simply to modify an existing lizard template. Instead, using reptile DNA as a guide, she had written her own code. She was pleased with the result. The difficult part had been making the three heads co-operate while retaining a degree of individual function.
The chimera butted the biomechanoid and horns tore more flesh. The lion head ripped another chunk of meat away as the staggering biomechanoid tried to bring its weapon gauntlet to bear. The hooded serpent tail darted over the chimera’s body; fangs pierced mottled armour, and venom emptied into the biomechanoid’s flesh. The chimera all but climbed up its opponent, using its claws, rearing high. Despite being the creature’s creator, Zabilla couldn’t help but admire the haughty and proud set to the creature’s draconic middle head.
‘I like it,’ Gilbert Scoular said, sounding like he meant the opposite. ‘But it’s not terribly original, is it?’ the fat, ostentatiously dressed, self-proclaimed genetic artist said from his chaise longue. He was heavily made up, sweating and being fanned by a licensed and chipped morlock servant that, it was whispered, he had grown himself and used as a sex toy. ‘Good thing you didn’t give it wings after all. I shouldn’t like to see one of those nesting in the upper branches.’
Her inability to get it to fly had proved extremely frustrating. Scoular’s attempts at biological espionage must have revealed this. Nearly every utterance was a passive-aggressive attack. Zabilla was too good at the Game to show a response, though her grip on the wine glass tightened. She felt her consort Dracup tense next to her. He was working his way towards a second name in the eyes of the Absolute and not as used to the constant barbed attacks of life in society as she was. He was reaching across his emerald-green, handsomely cut, knee-length padded silk tunic for the bone blade sheathed at his hip. He would scar Scoular’s fat face and then call him out.
She stopped him with a glance, hoping that Scoular hadn’t noticed her paramour’s rashness. More to the point, she hoped that the Absolute wasn’t tuned into her own experiential headware at the moment. Though that was likely, as they were now in the semi-final round of the hastily called audition for a chance to run the Absolute’s secret ‘grand project’. Calling the artist out in a duel would be tantamount to admitting that Scoular was not only a better genetic designer but witty enough to elicit a physical response with mere words. He wasn’t. Dracup, on the other hand, had held her as she had cried tears of frustration when she was unable to make the creature fly.
‘As ever, I bow to your greater knowledge of such things,’ Zabilla said. She left the fact that her unoriginal creature was tearing apart his own creation unsaid. ‘After all, you are the artist; I am a mere biophysicist. My studies mean that my interest can never be anything more than amateur.’
‘Whereas your armoured spider with weapon-tipped limbs is an inspired idea,’ Dracup told Scoular dryly. Better, Zabilla thought. A little too obvious but better than drawing a blade.
Their faces were bathed in a warm but less than comforting red glow.
‘Oh, a hard-tech cheat. How . . . special,’ Scoular said.
Getting the dragon’s head to breathe fire naturally had been very difficult. The crowd went wild. The bloodshed didn’t bother her, but she found the cheering of the crowd a trifle gauche. Under her distaste she was trying not to smile. Scoular could not have failed to know that the flame was an application of biotech. His comment was so petty that Dracup even ignored the easy opportunity to challenge him to a duel.
The chimera paced around the sand of the arena, parts of which were on fire now. Firefighting drones remained hovering above on their AG motors. Zabilla uncharitably hoped that the dragon’s fire had caught some of the bystanders. The arachnid biomechanoid was burning and badly damaged, trying to stand on limbs that were being consumed.
‘No voice to your creature’s suffering?’ Zabilla asked.
Scoular said nothing. He had been overconfident. He had spied on her and created a creature to win. There was no pain reaction because he hadn’t thought he would need one. Like many who played, he understood the pleasure part of the Game, he didn’t understand the pain. It was not just about indulging appetites.
‘I hear the heads found two dead wiped pieces,’ Carinne Serano, Scoular’s fashionable arm-piece, said. She was trying, somewhat desperately in Zabilla’s opinion, to ease the conversation away from her financial paramour’s humiliation.
The wiped pieces were once people, actual players of the Game. They had been taken and all trace of their identities, from distinguishing features to personalities and memories, had been nano-virally destroyed before they were killed. It
was one of the most horrific deaths a player could experience. All their triumphs would count for nothing as they were reduced to their original vat-grown templates.
Despite the fact that everyone playing the Game was sculpted with the same basic features, a template designed to reflect the Absolute’s original beauteous form before he ascended, Zabilla always found herself surprised by how much that template could differ from person to person.
Carinne, for example, was petite and pretty, while she herself was tall and striking. They both had high cheekbones, sharp features and narrow angular faces, yet Zabilla could look commanding and at times cruelly beautiful, whereas Carinne looked insipid to Zabilla’s eyes.
The same was true of Dracup and Scoular. Scoular’s obese body proudly bore the ravages of his excesses in the same way the Rakshasa bore their scars. Scoular was obese to the point where he had to use expensive miniaturised AG motors to help support his layers of fat so that he could move more easily. Whereas Dracup was whip-thin and looked like a weapon poised to strike, or some sort of not-so-patient predatory insect – but in an attractive way, Zabilla thought.
‘It’s an outrage,’ Dracup said, not without feeling. ‘It’ll be morlock rights activists. I hear they’re campaigning for sight now. It’s as if they think they have the right to as many senses as we do. I mean, what do they need them for beneath the Black Leaves? Sight would be a hindrance in the dark.’
The chimera charged through flame. Horns gouged vat-grown flesh and teeth sank into the same. The charge turned the wounded, burning, multi-limbed biomechanoid onto its back. Zabilla found herself liking the warmth of the flames on her face. She found herself liking the colour red.
‘They’re basically the same as us, you know? The morlocks, I mean,’ Scoular said somewhat distractedly as the chimera feasted upon his creation. ‘It’ll be outside forces. If it wasn’t, then the Absolute would know.’
Dracup was trying to mask his contempt for Scoular and said nothing. Zabilla watched the dragon and lion bury their heads up to their necks in the dead biomechanoid. The lion head appeared again, red, and roared.
Can you feel that, Absolute? Zabilla wondered. ‘It’s part of the Game,’ she said quietly, still transfixed by the gory display playing out on the arena floor.
Even Dracup looked shocked.
‘The Absolute said that he would never wipe players,’ Carinne stammered.
‘It’s heresy to even suggest so!’ Scoular all but shouted. Zabilla was sure that there was a degree of triumph in his voice. He didn’t understand pain and he didn’t understand daring. Zabilla allowed herself a small smile before turning to face them both.
‘What’s heresy? To suggest that the Absolute can’t change the rules of his own game or to suggest that for some reason the Absolute would have to inform you both first?’ she demanded, allowing just a hint of anger into her voice. She saw their doubt and fear, the insecurity that came from realising that the rules were not as they had thought. None of them wanted to face up to this possibility. Scoular glanced back down into the arena, his creation now just a feast for the victorious vat-grown myth.
‘Of course, you realise there’s a lot more to it than winning the battle, don’t you?’ he asked Zabilla, who nodded. ‘Elegance of design, aesthetics, things that a mere copy can’t allow for. It’s about impressing the Absolute with the skill of your design.’
‘As I said,’ Zabilla was smiling, ‘I am a mere amateur.’
He didn’t understand the Game. Scoular was right: it wasn’t about winning the fight, but it wasn’t about impressing either. It was about sensation. The bit of her design that would win the audition wasn’t the creature’s ability to vanquish its foes or the elegance and potency of the design. She would win because of the sophistication of the experiential biofeedbackware that would allow the Absolute to experience every moment of the fight from the chimera’s perspective. The taste of flesh, the feeling of breathing fire, the animalistic triumph at the kill: the Absolute drank sensation. Scoular knew that on one level but he made the mistake of thinking that the Absolute was just a bigger and much more powerful version of himself. He would never understand the simplicity of the thirst for pure sensation.
‘You should let me kill him,’ Dracup said as they made their way along a gnarled narrow branch, grown into a walkway, towards the air jetty. They were in the upper branches so the sides of the walkway had been grown into handsome abstract patterns.
‘According to you, I should let you kill everyone. Have you ever thought that you haven’t yet earned your second name because, in the unlikely event that the Absolute focuses on you, he is party to these feelings? Subtlety, my dear, subtlety and sensation.’
‘The Absolute enjoys violence,’ Dracup said with a certainty that only the young could have. He was right. The early parts of Game history, immediately after the terraforming, were basically an orgy of violence. Despite the elegance and sophistication of the terraforming design, the roots of the arboreal arcologies were soaked in blood. Bodies had hung from some of the branches like particularly fecund fruit.
Zabilla sighed and looked out at the massive arcology trees reaching up to pierce the atmosphere. All of them were studded with dots of bioluminescence. Each dot was a window. Game had been an experiment in Seeder-derived, nano-technological terraforming. Game’s size, its 0.75G, geological stability and the abundant energy of a large, nearby main-sequence G-type star had all pointed towards the viability of growing starscraper arcologies. The wish to harness solar energy suggested to the nano-architects that trees grown from an engineered wood-analogous substance would be both practical and aesthetically pleasing.
The roots grew deep into the planet to provide stability. The roots sought out Game’s natural resources and harnessed its geothermal energy. Leaf structures in the upper branches harnessed solar energy. The black leaves in the lower sectors harnessed infrared energy from both above and from heat escaping below. The biotech machinery that provided for the needs of the inhabitants – sewage and sanitation, water recycling, food creation, etcetera – was housed in the darkness below the black leaves. The vat-grown, blind subhuman morlock servitors oversaw this machinery. Other servitor creatures, designed to look like attractive birds or small arboreal mammals, saw to maintenance and sanitation requirements in the upper branches.
The upper branches divided the light from the artificial moons into competing beams that shone through the membranous translucent energy-gathering leaf canopy. Game’s moistness meant that mist was often present, further refracting the artificial moonlight. The effect was atmospheric and to Zabilla pleasantly eerie. She saw one of the larger avian servitors take off and flap through the misty night air. Dracup came and leaned on the rail of the walkway, looking at Zabilla intensely even as she stared out into the forest of city-sized trees.
‘The Absolute enjoys originality; violence can be a short cut. If you were to duel Scoular or assassinate him, both of which are beneath you, then you would need to do so in an original way.’ Even to Dracup she would not admit how she had distilled her views of what the Absolute wanted down to pure sensation – after all, he was another player. She had no doubt that the Absolute enjoyed good gamesmanship, but he/she/it must have seen it all now in the thousands of years of Game’s existence.
‘I . . . I am trying to learn,’ he said haltingly.
She turned to look at him. ‘There’s nothing attractive to either the Absolute or myself about weakness, do you understand?’
Dracup nodded. Like everything in the Game, she felt like she was playing out a scene, but she had worked hard enough for the Absolute this night. She wanted something for herself just now. Do you hear that, Absolute? Ride me if you will, but I need to let go. Maybe this is what he wanted, less artifice, more feeling. No, she didn’t want to think like that.
It was bad form to reward an underling with something he wanted after he had disappointed you. The problem came when you wanted the same thing. Zabilla gr
abbed the back of Dracup’s head and pulled him closer into her, exchanging a long kiss that became more urgent as it went on. She felt his hands sliding her skirt up and she jumped up onto him, wrapping her long legs around his waist.
With a thought, the baroque luxury G-car rose into view at the end of the jetty. It bobbed slightly on the four ball-mounted AG motors at each of its corners before docking. With another thought, the doors to the car split open. Another thought turned the plush interior red like her thoughts in the arena.
Dracup carried her, mostly blind, mouths meshed together, to the G-car, falling onto the soft carpet. The door closed behind them as the G-car took off, the AI pilot banking the vehicle towards Zabilla’s abode.
Zabilla wriggled out from underneath. Dracup’s hand snagged her underwear and dragged it down. She pushed herself onto one of the seats, spreading her legs, hunger written over her normally emotionless face. This was for her, to forget herself, the Game, the Absolute, the audition. This was for her only. Later she would test the limits of the heightened nerve endings she’d had grown in Dracup. Later she would feed the Absolute, later she would play the Game, lose herself in it, but not now.
In a distant chamber something started to pay attention to one of its favourites. Again.
The ride home had been sublime – dangerous but sublime. She had let herself go when her Game play was about control. She knew that many were good at feeding the Absolute sensation with abandon. Zabilla had always found the need to work at it.
When they arrived home they had worked at it, each little act designed to maximise either pain or pleasure, the whole thing designed as a beacon for the Absolute. She thought she had felt it in her experiential ware but the scientist in her knew that was her imagination. The Absolute was a silent ghost in their pain and pleasure centres. If people knew when the Absolute was present, then the heads would not be as effective as they were at rooting out the anti-social losers who played against the Game itself.