Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  Kern opens a fuse box and shines his cell onto a sort of crude snowflake made of fist-sized lumps of metal; it looks like industrial dross but must be some kind of device, because it’s wired for power, and now, at Akemi’s prompting, Kern is wiring it for data via a thousand feet of cable and a sat-phone.

  “Where am I supposed to go then?” Kern asks.

  “Just hang tight back up on the roof,” Akemi says. “I’ll do what I can to get back in touch. But break the phone now, okay?”

  Kern’s need for Akemi is obvious, but Akemi, he thinks, cares only for her own goals. He’s surprised at how much this saddens him; not long ago he’d have taken in Kern’s simplicity and physicality and dismissed him out of hand. It’s in his mind to speak over Akemi, tell Kern that someone is genuinely interested in his fate, however helplessly, but he says nothing.

  “Okay,” Kern says. “Any last instructions?”

  “No. Thank you, baby,” Akemi says, mustering a semblance of flirtatiousness. “Please hurry.”

  “Goodbye, then,” Kern says, his voice unnaturally harsh, and Thales is afraid Kern will cry but then the screen shows his hand slamming the phone into the wall, and then again, and with the third impact the screen goes dark.

  Now all the light is gone.

  “What now?” Thales asks the blackness where Akemi was. “Will he be all right?”

  “Hang on,” she says. “He’ll be disconnecting the substrate from the phone’s battery. The substrate can hold a charge, but only for a few seconds.” Her voice is tight. “I guess we’ll see how that goes.”

  Substrate? he thinks. Charge?

  A terrible jolt, as though the ship had run aground, and then he realizes there’s something he’s forgotten.

  He was making a journey, but to where?

  There was a ship.

  Was there a ship?

  In any case, there was something he had to do.

  There was something.

  There was …

  * * *

  Wind on his face. He’s been listening to the incessant thundering of waves.

  He’s sprawled on yielding ground. It’s sand, he finds, crumbling it between his fingers. He opens his eyes onto bright blue sky.

  He’s on a curved sliver of beach, perhaps an atoll. Waves crash continually on one side—it looks like a place to drown—but on the other the water is calm. No shade at all. Ocean in every direction. No sign of the yacht except for a few broken lengths of lacquered wood, a torn white sail washing in the surf and a sodden mass of unidentifiable kelp-entangled electronics. It’s a relief to be back in the light.

  Akemi is nowhere to be seen.

  Sitting up, he props his hand on something hard in the sand by his hip. He excavates it, wipes it with his forearm—it’s the surgeon’s tablet, cracked and wet. A green crab the size of his thumbnail scuttles over the wet grey glass, hesitates at the boundary of his shadow, hurries back the way it came. He leans in, sees his face reflected in the dead screen, the delicate mottling on the crab’s claws, the tiny grains of sand the color of rust, coal, translucent milky quartz. For a simulation, the detail is remarkable. (But is the detail actually there, he thinks, or am I imagining it?)

  The tablet’s screen illuminates.

  He sits on the sand watching the tablet displaying his awareness of sitting on the sand watching the tablet, and his mild pleasure in the recursivity, and how he’s infinitely far from everything he’s ever loved, which he has not, till now, admitted, but now that it’s there before him it can no longer be denied. He tries to think of a way out, or some kind of clever technique, but of course there’s no way out and there never will be. Los Angeles was full of mysteries, was itself a mystery, but now the veils have fallen from his eyes and he sees that the solution is that it’s time his life was done.

  No point in delaying. The tablet should make it easy. He has to be sure to erase things in the right order, lest he end up conscious but helpless—his technical acumen and goals have to be the last to go (and what will that be like, being nothing but a knot of skills and a need for self-destruction, and not knowing where any of it came from?). He’s about to start deleting the memories of his family but stops, surprised at his own tenderness toward these delicate structures, and, there, on the screen, is his tenderness as a glyph, which is keeping him from acting, and always will, which implies he’s trapped forever.

  His despair is so strong it becomes a kind of clarity and he watches as though from a distance as his hand moves toward the tablet’s screen and the glyph is deleted.

  He’d expected a sense of profound violation but in fact it feels like nothing, and he should have done it long ago—it would be a shame not to use this unprecedented degree of self-control. As his sadness serves no purpose he deletes that too, along with his fear and his attachment to his old life, for change will come, has come, must be accepted.

  It occurs to him that, no longer being human, he need not die.

  He stares out over the sea, blank but alert, a neutral intelligence devoid of purpose, impatience and suffering.

  * * *

  The wind’s tone changes. There’s a sense of looming mass behind him. He turns, sees the glass and steel towers of the city in the waves, rising without limit, its heights lost in cloud, the blue of distance. As he stares up into it, it changes, becoming clearer, manifesting detail, its complexity unfurling …

  “Hey now,” Akemi says eventually, shaking him gently by the shoulder. The surf is lower, its voice subdued. “Still there?”

  “I’ve seen this before.”

  “It’s what the mathematician’s been making,” she says. “It’s his great work, the reason he bothers existing in the world.”

  “Then why does it look like a city?”

  “It’s like a translation, the magician said, of an ascending hierarchy of abstractions, assembled out of resonances and fragments of memory. It’s mostly the space elevator, and partly the Singapore of her youth, and this Metropolis, which was an anime from Germany. The mathematician is at the apex—he is the apex, in a sense—and I need you to help Irina find her way to him. If she can’t reach him, we’ve lost.”

  Lost what? he thinks, but says, “Why do you need me?”

  “Because Irina will have to transform herself to reach him, and become a kind of bridge to the AIs. You can help her find the way because you’re an intermediate kind of thing.”

  “You guide her.”

  “I can’t. I lack your feeling for pattern, and couldn’t get her far. We need you,” she says. “I’ve just been in Japan, in a sense, preparing the way, because our window for Irina is about to open, and that means it’s time to give you the last thing. Here—it’s my access to the control layer. The magician gave it to me, and now it’s yours.” He wonders what she means, then suddenly feels the world’s thinness, its malleability, how easy it would be to shape. “There,” she says. “My part’s done. Whatever else happens will happen through you.”

  He looks at her, sees her thoughts (they’re obvious, he doesn’t see how he ever managed to miss them) and that she’s been edited, given a compulsion to bring him here, and it occurs to him to restore her, but her experience has coalesced around the edits, and now there’s no clear boundary between the edits and her.

  He stands at the center of agendas that don’t concern him. What, if anything, is owed? He’s unmoved by Cromwell’s ambition, Irina’s rage, the AIs’ opaque complexity. Easiest to do nothing, but he remembers the magician’s fear, how she’d kept trying even as her time ran out, and then there’s Kern, whom he won’t otherwise be able to help.

  “When’s the window?” he asks.

  “Right now,” Akemi says, pointing to the sky out over the sea, and he becomes aware of a presence and an opening.

  64

  Difficult Transition

  As her wireless comes on the glyphs press in but she flinches away and won’t let them come into focus, quite, as she calls up an email client and write
s, “New terms—give us five more fabs in the next twelve hours and we’ll cure Kubota’s.” She sends the message off to Cromwell and there’s a new restlessness in the shifting masses of form surrounding her, and she’s just decided it’s time to bail when she sees something rushing toward her like a glassy black wave and there’s time to think, This too is memory, before impact and all in a tumult she’s torn away to—

  Rain falling on the temple’s snow, pitting and eroding the white sweep of the rooftop, rivulets forming, braiding, falling away. She stands beneath the temple’s eaves, cold water plashing on her face, inside her collar. The cold is like an ache but there is peace, there, in the thin light of the sun. The thaw is coming, she thinks, as snow sloughs off to reveal the red imbricated roof, one tile laid over another, rising up and up, and lifting her eyes she sees that the pagoda rises vertiginously and forever … The temple shatters, then, a flurry of broken tiles and wind-borne snow dissolving into the dark and—

  Shallow, restless sleep twined around the drone of engines. She wakes slowly, blinks, wonders how long it’s been since she’s had a shower, and how many more hours in the flight. She tries to turn on the seat-back computer but the screen shows only a pale purple glow. She taps it with a fingernail, futilely, then opens the window blind, revealing an airy gulf of scintillant blue. It could be ocean below, but there’s no boundary between sea and sky, and never a cloud—just light. Her phone has no signal. Worried, she rises into the aisle, sees that the flight is empty, or nearly—one person sits alone in the back. A boy, maybe eighteen, slouched in his seat, eyes closed but probably awake.

  “Excuse me,” she says. “Do you know how long till this flight gets in?”

  “No way to tell,” he says, in lightly accented English. His clothes are expensive and his hair good but something about him says quant-with-money.

  “Could you remind me where we’re going?” she asks with a little laugh, fighting down the first twinge of panic.

  “It’s difficult to give an answer that isn’t mantic, since where we are going does not, in some strong sense, exist until we get there.” His smile is bright and empty, and his eyes, open now, are the blue of the gulf of sky.

  Violent turbulence hits the plane then, and she’s flung to the floor. Wetness on her face; her hand comes away bloody. He’s kneeling beside her, saying, “I’m sorry for the difficulty of this transition.”

  65

  Babel

  The concourse echoes with thousands of voices and the flight must have been rough because she has to stop and fight down dry heaves with her back pressed to a wall of curved glass like a solid expanse of neutral grey sky. Some boy from her flight has stopped, is watching her—he’s about eighteen, looks like tech money, some start-up wunderkind who’s never touched a girl.

  She realizes he’s just asked her something.

  “Sorry, what?” she says, light-headed, mouth dry, trying to focus.

  “Do you remember what I was telling you?” he asks gently, cocking his head, his English imperceptibly foreign, and his calm is so profound that he must be older than she’d thought, his youth counterfeit or a trick of the light. “Irina?”

  “I don’t…” she says, trying to remember the last ten minutes, but in vain, and her other memory gives her nothing, because it’s churning at full capacity, which must be an error because that only happens when she’s reading glyphs. The boy is staring at her, perhaps with concern, but she remembers she’s being hunted and snaps, “How do you know my name?”

  “A friend sent me to help you,” he says patiently. “You’re disoriented because the load on your implant is so high. I’m trying to get you more power from the substrate, but it’ll be a minute.”

  “What friend?” she asks, still suspicious, hoping it’s Philip but worried it’s Cromwell, though the boy doesn’t look like hit-man material.

  “I suppose it was you, as much as anyone,” he says, seeming not to care if he’s believed. “More or less. Less, perhaps. But in any case I’m guessing I’m about to have to start again.”

  “What the hell are—”

  * * *

  Wet concrete underfoot as she shuffles along with the crowd. The customs hall is cavernous and cold and smells like rain, and the crowd is so dense that nothing is possible except just going along, and her growing awareness of her own passivity irritates her enough that she makes a singular effort to pull herself out of a deep interior grey.

  She tries to orient—the place’s scale and all the empty overhead space seem to serve no purpose but to assert the grandeur of … where, exactly, has she arrived? The faces around her are closed and unreadable, their blurred ethnicities telling her nothing, and then, behind her, someone calls her name.

  Whoever he is, he’s fighting his way toward her through the crowd, and now and then she sees his hand waving over the bowed heads, but however great his determination, the press is so dense that it’s plainly impossible that he’ll ever get any closer, but she finds herself responding to the need in his voice, and to his bravery, and tries to hold her ground, bracing herself against the flow and discreetly driving her elbows into the midriffs of strangers but even so she’s borne on, and now she can see the crowd is funneling her toward double doors where a uniformed guard is checking passports.

  “Irina!” cries a boy as he bursts between two stupefied travelers and his evident joy at having reached her disarms her remaining skepticism. He’s young, and looks like tech money, but has the self-assurance of someone much older. “It’s done,” he says breathlessly. “I got you more power, in fact a lot more than you’ve ever had before. Your problems with your memory should be getting better.”

  “Problems with memory aren’t my foremost concern,” she says drily.

  “I’m Thales, by the way,” he says, as though he hadn’t heard her, pronouncing it like Portuguese—TALL-ehz. Then he leans in close and whispers, “This isn’t really happening. You’re on the central node, the one Cromwell couldn’t find. You have to find your way up through a sequence of abstractions, but it’s going to feel like climbing through a city. You’re going to the top to find the big AI, the worst one, the one who’s been making it all happen. Get as close as you can and then destroy him.”

  “Papers, please,” the guard says, like the words are meaningless phonemes he’s been intoning for a thousand years, and she turns to find he’s right behind her. She checks her breast pocket but her passport isn’t there, neither the real one nor the fake one from Greece, and her purse is missing, and as the crowd presses her forward she’s starting to panic, but then in her pants pocket she finds some kind of passport-sized credential and for want of other options offers it to the guard with such sangfroid as she can muster. The guard flips through the document, then hands it back saying, “Welcome back, doctor,” though she has no doctorate, but she nods grimly as he ushers her on and when she looks back the boy is gone.

  * * *

  She’s striding down a long tunnel of translucent pale glass, relieved, when she thinks of it, to have put immigration behind her.

  She realizes she’s alone in the tunnel, has been for a while. She stops, looks behind her, but no one else is coming.

  A detached, musical female voice recites an endless list of airport codes, gate numbers, times, but it’s strange, because she knows all the codes, these are codes for airports that don’t exist.

  She almost walks past a waiting room full of TVs mounted over rows of identical chairs but stops when she realizes there’s a girl there. The girl is by herself, very thin, prepubescent, staring forlornly up at a television.

  Irina approaches, hesitates, asks, “Are you all right?”

  The girl looks at her, then back up at the TV. “No,” she says, sounding deeply worried. “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “My doctor told me I had to watch these and decide if the man is trustworthy but I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell.”

  “Doctor?�
�� Irina says. “Is he traveling with you?” The girl ignores her, wipes her nose on the back of her hand and seems to be trying to concentrate. Irina looks up at the screens, all of which have the sound off and show identical close-up shots of Cromwell and Magda in a room full of candles. She wants to help but feels compelled to go onward, so as she turns she says, “The answer is no. You can never trust him,” and then she’s striding away.

  The glass tunnel ends in double doors. Baggage and customs must be next, which will be congested, oppressive, loud, and it’s like a reprieve when the doors open onto silence and hard sunlight.

  She steps blinking into tropical heat, the doors sealing themselves behind her. She’s on a narrow concrete balcony high over the sea. In front of her is a narrow white bridge, arcing through the air toward a tower, or a cluster of towers, a sort of city rising up so high that for a moment she thinks it’s the space elevator, but no, it’s not that, this is something else.

  No guardrails on either the balcony or the bridge. Tort laws can be weak in the tropics but this is absurd. She sidles up to the balcony’s edge—it’s a long way down to the sea, which seems unreachably remote, as distant as the sky. She can just make out the white breakers creaming against the city’s base.

  Did she come here on vacation? She looks into her other memory but finds nothing as it’s churning almost at capacity, which must be an error because that only happens when she’s reading glyphs. Oddly, her implant has more space and computing power than she remembers, much more, in fact she hadn’t thought there was so much in the world.

  She decides to go back into the airport, find someone in authority who can explain what’s going on, but a sign on the doors reads RE-ENTRY STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

  She stares up at the city, wondering how it was built—the construction problems seem insurmountable. She cranes her neck but its heights are lost in the distance. It looks like there’s nowhere else to go. (Had someone said she was going to the top?)

  The white bridge feels narrower than it looked. Gulf of space on either side. It will be fine, she tells herself, all she has to do is walk in a straight line, she can do that. As the wind brushes her she makes herself not hunch.