In front of him was one of the city’s vast gates. It lay open. He found himself looking at the statue of a huge brass horseman. Du Bois assumed it was one of the city’s guardians. Beyond that he could see the rows of tombs. If the Circle’s intelligence had been correct then there were four hundred of them, all of them different, and all of them massive. They dwarfed the tombs of the pharaohs, each an external reflection of the mind resting – or imprisoned – inside. Some were grandiose and beautiful, some warped and hideous, others alien and difficult to look at. Du Bois knew that inside each of the tombs was an AI. Either one of those created by the alien Lloigor, their machines, or one created by human reverse engineering of L-tech.
Beyond the tombs were the spires, domes, and minarets of the city. Plants and trees grew on everything, water cascaded between the levels and everywhere he looked was life. It was more alive in many ways than the real world.
The walls stretched out on either side of them. Tall and metallic, a straight high wall above what looked like a curved buttress that ran the length of it. Interspersed along the wall were numerous huge gates, each the size of the one that du Bois was standing before now. Above each gate, in ancient Greek, were engraved the words:
Here was a people who, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion;
And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust.
Death hath destroyed them and disunited them, and in the dust they have lost what they amassed.
Du Bois assumed the inscription was here for his benefit. He heard stumbling steps behind him and someone sat down hard. He turned round to see Beth on the ground just behind him, staring at the city. It looked like she was trying to speak. Both of them had appeared unarmed, dressed in what they had been wearing.
‘I know what you said,’ she finally managed, wonder and panic warring in her voice. ‘But give me a minute here. A few weeks ago I was in a prison in the normal world, okay?’
Du Bois reached down to help her up. She was still staring at the city.
‘What is this place?’ she asked. Du Bois glanced behind him. There was a figure, minuscule against the huge gate, walking towards them.
‘This is a simulation,’ du Bois told her. ‘It’s not real.’
‘Like virtual reality?’ Beth asked. Du Bois nodded. ‘It seems so real; fantastical, but real.’
‘You experience the real world through your mind interpreting the information from your senses. All we have done is remove the requirement for senses. Experientially there is no difference,’ the figure said as he approached them. It was the same voice they had heard in the Harrier. The man was about six and a half feet tall, dark brown skin, obviously of African descent. The loose robe he wore covered the smooth dome of his belly. By his frame, he looked as though he had once been powerful but was now going to seed. His head was shorn of hair and he had strips of what looked like polished copper embedded in the skin. His eyes were the colour of mercury.
‘The mind knows the difference,’ du Bois said.
‘Have people become less deluded? Less prepared to believe what they are told just because it suits their worldview, regardless of the evidence?’ the man asked.
‘Kind of irrelevant now,’ Beth said.
There was a fleeting look of sadness on the man’s face but something about it seemed artificial.
‘The mind knows the lie,’ du Bois repeated stubbornly.
‘Which lie?’ the man asked. ‘I think you should taste my cooking before you rush to judgement on such a thing. But I am remiss. I am Azmodeus, a bound servant of Solomon, peace be upon him. Welcome to the City of Brass.’
Du Bois felt Beth looking at him. ‘These are your enemies?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ du Bois told her.
‘No,’ Azmodeus said. ‘Your enemy and ours are the same. You call him Mr Brown.’
‘He is a facilitator, nothing more. He handles operations.’
‘There is no Circle, he is the Circle, and I think you know that. The old woman knew, even though he had rewritten her mind, as he does to all his slaves. That was why she left.’
‘She did not join you, though, did she? A gilded cage is still a cage.’
Azmodeus smiled expansively and raised his arms, quicksilver eyes sparkling in the reflected sunlight. ‘How can you call this a prison?’ he cried. ‘Treat me as your enemy if you wish. Hamad always liked you, and I called him a friend. Come, let us walk on the walls.’ Azmodeus turned and led them to a platform in the shadow of the huge gate’s mighty mechanism. They stepped onto the reddish metal and the platform started to rise. Beth was staring at the city. The complex interplay of buildings, canals, gardens, entire urban fields and orchards played out in front of them. Flat, with no horizon, it looked like a continent-sized city.
‘I—’ du Bois started. ‘I respected Hamad. Under different circumstances …’
‘He helped you, you know? Helped you track down Silas Scab.’
Du Bois frowned. That was an old name he had not thought of in a while. ‘That was more than two hundred and fifty years ago.’ He remembered the chalet he had taken the torch to in the Swiss Alps.
‘Not the father, the son,’ Azmodeus said, but again there was something artificial about the sadness in his voice. ‘This was just over two weeks ago. It was another bloodline infused with the tech. A bad one.’
The missing time! He had come to in a car park in Birmingham. He had lost six weeks.
The platform reached the top of the wall and they walked out onto battlements the width of a motorway that went on and on towards the distant mountains.
‘There’s no ugliness here,’ Beth said, looking at the city. Du Bois could make out birds and other larger winged creatures in the air over the city’s majestic spires. There were huge ornate pleasure barges on the canal.
‘Should there be?’ Azmodeus asked.
Beth turned to look up at him. ‘Yes, I think there has to be, sometimes. This is your way of surviving?’
Azmodeus just nodded.
‘Hiding,’ du Bois said.
‘If it was as simple as one of you looking for an answer in the real world, and the other in here, why did you have to fight?’ Beth asked.
‘What an excellent question,’ du Bois muttered. Again there was sadness on Azmodeus’s face as he turned and looked out over the city.
‘We have tried to save as much of it as we can. The knowledge of humanity. Your knowledge,’ he pointed out. ‘Before they were destroyed we recorded the library at Alexandria, at Alamut as well, and many others …’
‘We took two different approaches. We could have co-operated,’ du Bois said. ‘These are the people that poisoned the crèches, burned the information we needed for the evacuation,’ he told Beth.
‘Religion, philosophy, capitalism, all of them, at some level, start as systems designed to help their adherents, tools for you to use. How quickly they become divisive, turn against you, or rather you turn them against yourselves.’
‘I’m not in the mood for a philosophical discussion,’ du Bois spat.
‘Is he telling the truth? You’ve doomed us?’ Beth asked. ‘Why?’
‘This is humanity’s ark,’ Azmodeus told them.
‘This is a recording,’ Beth said.
‘What is more important? What is human? The animal or the emergent consciousness?’
‘Both,’ Beth and du Bois said.
‘Obviously we disagree,’ Azmodeus said.
‘But then why not just disagree, why fuck up this evacuation?’ Beth demanded. ‘This is just the powerful making decisions for the rest of us based on their own messed up … fucking ideas!’
‘It was not an evacuation, it was the spreading of a disease.’ Again there was sadness in his voice.
‘In your opinion!’ Beth snapped, but Azmodeus shook his head ponderously.
‘You’ve known there was something wrong for some time haven’t you?’ he asked du B
ois and yes, he had felt it, a kind of ache, a sickening realisation. So many signs that he had tried to ignore for so long, even before Hawksmoor’s experiments. He saw the serpent’s face, Hamad, the old woman. All of them had tried to tell him. Mr Brown’s features swam in his memory, always indistinct, hard to remember, a shade. ‘Loyalty is a virtue but it is not required when all of you have been betrayed.’ Azmodeus was reaching for him.
Beth moved, she reached for weapons she did not have in here, and then delivered a roundhouse kick to Azmodeus that looked like it could have felled a tree. She might as well have been kicking the wall. She bounced off him.
Du Bois staggered as copper lightning played across his features. He sat down hard. He visualised new software architecture growing within his neuralware. It looked like it was made of brass.
‘We can reveal what was hidden, we cannot return what has been taken,’ Azmodeus told him. The memory edit he had done himself in a street in Bloomsbury was undone. Yottabytes of information cascaded through his mind. Souls. Scientists, scholars, engineers, architects, philosophers, doctors, artists, poets, recorded by technology masquerading as magic over more than a thousand years. His face was wet. He could cry here.
Azmodeus turned from him and looked out over the city, folding his arms behind his back.
Beth knelt by him. ‘Du Bois?’ she asked softly.
‘I don’t understand—’ he started.
‘Yes you do,’ Azmodeus said quietly. ‘There is no room for the likes of these in Mr Brown’s world. He will continue his work, redesigning humanity and anyone else he encounters. Make them slaves to their own indolence, their own ignorance. Make it so they will not co-operate with each other, so they will turn against themselves rather than act in their own collective best interest. So he can manipulate them. So there will be no resistance to his will.’
‘Was Mr Brown the one you were talking to at my house?’ Beth asked. Du Bois could only nod numbly. ‘What does he want?’
‘We do not know. He may just be insane. The eldest among us, older even than Solomon – peace be upon him – believe he once touched something even more ancient than the Seeders, though younger than the Lloigor, and that shattered his mind. We believe that he is in a great deal of pain, but for all we know his thought patterns are now too different to our own for there to be understanding.’
‘Is this the same thing that drove the Seeders mad?’ du Bois asked. He was not sure he wished to hear the answer.
‘He was the conduit for that. It is destruction, utter destruction in denial of the laws of physics. It is the thing that your sister called with her blood, Miss Luckwicke.’
‘She always was a handful,’ Beth said weakly. ‘Can he be stopped?’
Azmodeus laughed. ‘Would you save the world? I have always enjoyed hubris,’ he said.
Du Bois could tell that Beth felt she was being mocked and wasn’t enjoying the experience.
‘We thought we had. We thought we had trapped him here on Earth, a danger in itself. This is why we murdered babies and our Ifreet burned the future. We attacked the Circle. We tried to cut the bloodline. We killed knowledge. It is considered a great crime here.’ Again it looked like Azmodeus was wrestling with a great sadness at the destruction wrought during their attack on the Circle.
‘But you could fight him?’ Beth said, desperation in her voice.
‘You are the last contact we will have with the outside world. We did what we could, now—’
‘You hide!’ Beth spat.
Azmodeus turned to look at her, the flash of anger somehow more genuine than the sadness had been. It was only there for a moment. ‘Perhaps. We must do what we can to assure our survival.’
‘Where is this place?’ Beth asked. ‘I mean you’ve got to have … I don’t know, servers or something.’ The words sounded unfamiliar coming from Beth.
‘We are diffuse. We exist deep beneath the Earth, in Atlantic trenches, a circle of stones in Iceland, an abandoned city in Jordan, the ruins of the snake kingdom in Cambodia …’
‘The diffuse part I believe,’ du Bois muttered, wiping the tears from his face as he ran diagnostics on the foreign software that had been uploaded into him. Now he knew how Beth had felt in Old Portsmouth. He climbed unsteadily to his feet. ‘He would never answer that truthfully.’
Azmodeus smiled indulgently.
‘This might sound like a stupid question, but are you connected to the internet?’ Beth asked.
‘They were the internet a long time before there was one,’ du Bois said.
‘When these Seeders attacked it, could you have stopped it?’ she asked.
Azmodeus’s face was very serious now. ‘Not and have been assured of success. Not without risk to this.’ His hand swept out over the city.
‘Cowards,’ Beth spat. She turned to du Bois. ‘I want to leave.’
‘As I said, this is your ark. You can stay here if you wish,’ Azmodeus told them.
Du Bois laughed. ‘I have been a puppet for so long, but I can see the strings now. You want to make sure we go after the DAYP. Get Natalie’s genetic data from them.’
‘And destroy it,’ Azmodeus said.
‘But that can be used—’ Beth started.
‘What did the Circle order you to do with the souls in your head?’ Azmodeus demanded.
‘Destroy them,’ du Bois said.
‘And you didn’t, because you know we are right.’
‘No, I didn’t because it was the wrong thing to do. There’s a difference.’
‘Give us the souls. We will keep them safe,’ Azmodeus said.
Du Bois wasn’t sure why, but he turned to look at Beth. She looked deep in thought.
‘You can take a copy, can’t you?’ she finally asked. Azmodeus looked less than pleased. ‘What fucking difference does it make if you’re just going to lock yourselves in here?’ she demanded.
‘Yes,’ he finally admitted.
Beth looked over at du Bois.
‘I’m not sure I trust my own judgement any more.’
She looked less than pleased at this response. ‘You take a copy. You also take a copy of two other souls inside his phone, but just a copy. They are fractured, they might have been damaged …’
‘By the Seeder attack?’ Azmodeus asked. Beth nodded. ‘We cannot risk contamination …’
‘Listen, arsehole, you just said you might have won going toe-to-toe with those things. I’m sure you can manage the dodgy souls of two fucking students, okay? You heal them. Then you give them the best lives your little computer game can manage. Do you understand me?’
‘Do not speak to me—’ Azmodeus started.
‘Do you want the souls or not?’ du Bois snapped.
‘We’re not going to risk—’
‘Can you even remember what it’s like to be human?’ Beth demanded. ‘There’s fucking risk involved.’
‘It’s not human,’ du Bois said. Beth frowned and concentrated for a moment.
‘Azmodeus, the demon that Solomon controlled with his magic ring,’ Beth said. ‘Isn’t that a myth, though?’
‘He’s either a Lloigor AI, or more likely a reverse-engineered human creation using the L-tech. Aren’t you?’ du Bois said. He glanced at the tombs.
‘Oh no, Mr du Bois, I am one of the Lloigor AIs. Though I am a child of another mind and born after the birth of your universe.’
‘If he ever inhabited a human body,’ du Bois nodded towards the AI, ‘then he possessed it through the tech.’ Azmodeus grinned. ‘But there are rules. So we will have your agreement and we will have your oath.’ The grin went away.
Beth was staring at it. ‘It’s an alien computer?’ she asked.
‘Dataform, but yes.’ And then to Azmodeus: ‘What did you do to my head?’
‘We were always more masters of the L-tech than the S. We have upgraded your neuralware. It should protect you from direct control by your erstwhile employers, and help against any attacks. We also upgraded the s
ystems in your aircraft. It should help hide you. Your best defence, however, remains that they have other things to worry about, but I still think you should stay with us.’
Both Beth and du Bois shook their heads.
‘Where can I find the Do As You Please clan?’ du Bois said tightly.
Azmodeus concentrated for a moment. ‘Right now, we do not know.’ Du Bois was aware of receiving information direct to his neuralware. He was less than pleased about this. ‘They were based in Boston.’ Du Bois checked the information. It looked like it contained a lot of information on the DAYP, including an address. ‘I think you should know that Hamad believed that it was Nethercott, the one who calls himself Inflictor Doorstep for reasons we cannot fathom, who released Silas Scab from his oubliette.’
Du Bois frowned. Azmodeus was referring to things he could not remember but had apparently been involved in. The picture of an insecure little boy, who had used the tech to burn out his humanity and dress himself as a demon, appeared in his mind’s eye. Du Bois couldn’t help but think that the DAYP were perfectly suited for this age.
‘What are you going to do?’ Azmodeus asked.
‘Fight,’ Beth told him.
He knew it was a woman despite the apparent heaviness of the boots falling on the stone stairs. He knew she could have been quiet if she had wanted to, just as he could have fought if he had wanted to, but he was old and he didn’t want to live in this world any longer. This was better than any of the alternatives he could think of. He couldn’t quite bring himself to regret his life of fear and hiding. He brought to mind all the humans he had known. In many ways the humans were the Seeders’ most flawed creation, and most interesting.
The Beauty of Destruction Page 17