Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  Ira paused. ‘I’m afraid Professor Tamar isn’t invited.’

  Mark rocked back, stunned. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because there’s only room for one physicist, and that slot is already filled by our top scientist on Depleted Zone dynamics – Doctor Ataro. You hired her, I believe.’

  ‘Zoe knows about the Depleted Zone,’ said Mark.

  Zoe looked pained.

  ‘Not as much as Doctor Ataro,’ said Ira. ‘We both know that Zoe’s been with you this entire time, studying ember-warp. When was the last time she even visited the Zone, Mark?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Mark.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Ira. ‘The Academy already approved the decision.’

  ‘I’m not flying without my wife!’ Mark shouted.

  ‘Then don’t fly,’ said Ira.

  An uncomfortable silence descended. Mark’s gaze locked on Zoe’s brown eyes.

  ‘I’ll leave you now,’ said Ira. ‘You can use the network to register your choice. We’re shielded here.’

  He downed the rest of his drink, offered them both a pre-IPSO-era Galatean salute and sauntered out of the lounge without looking back.

  Mark and Zoe watched each other for several long seconds. Her face bore the familiar, hooded look he associated with angry calculation. They both knew they were being manipulated.

  ‘I’m not going,’ he said. ‘Fuck them.’

  ‘Go,’ said Zoe. ‘You won’t be happy unless you do.’

  ‘No. I won’t leave you.’

  Zoe scowled. ‘Okay, two points. First, those bastards have finally found a wedge to drive between us—’

  ‘I don’t see this as a wedge—’ Mark started.

  She cut him off. ‘Don’t kid yourself. This mission has been burning a hole in you for the last fifteen years, Mark. Barely a day passes when you don’t talk about it. It’ll kill you if you don’t go. If you care about this marriage, you’ll let them dick you over this one time and get that red-hot wire out of your soul. Because otherwise I’ll have to live with the person who spends the rest of their life wondering what would have happened if they’d gone. And I don’t want that.

  ‘Second point. Let’s be honest about what this mission means. This is your crusade, Mark. This is your chance to follow in your parents’ footsteps and end a war with a single act. Not your natural mum and dad, but your super-parents: Will and Rachel. The ones you never stopped obsessing over.’

  Mark’s eyes went wide. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been trying to finish this fight. Some part of you still believes that the reason why we ever had to go to war at all is because you weren’t on top of your shit. Because you were too self-centred to act in time and somehow not as good as they were.’

  Mark threw up his hands. ‘This has never been about me! You heard Ira – there are genuine strategic gains—’

  ‘Which are completely beside the point!’ said Zoe. Her expression became pained. ‘Look, Mark, there’s no criticism of you here. We’re losing the war. You’ve been defined by this goddamned fight the whole time we’ve been married and it’s slowly crushing you. Maybe this is how you heal. I don’t think you can go on without at least trying.’

  ‘But I might not come back!’ Mark shouted.

  They both understood the threat profile on the Backspace run. It made normal missions look like trips to the park. Zoe’s face melted into gentleness. She reached out and touched his face.

  ‘Oh, honey,’ she said. ‘That’s always true. Every time we go out.’

  ‘But I don’t want to do that without you.’ Tears filled his eyes.

  ‘No, but this is still war,’ she said. ‘And we’re both officers. We know how this works. If you don’t go, they’ll probably kidnap you and shove you aboard anyway. Either that or you’ll wake up and find they’ve taken me. You should be glad this is something you want. We’re talking about the Academy here, Mark. They stop at nothing.’

  Mark finally clued in that he didn’t have a choice, and that Zoe needed to turn that disaster into a win for her to keep going.

  ‘We had a good run,’ she added, her voice cracking. ‘They left us alone for years while we did our part. Ira gave us that. He let us have a ship and a whole life together. And we’ll have another one. Just as soon as you get back.’

  His insides twisted.

  ‘I’ll wait for you,’ she said. Her lip quivered.

  Mark grabbed hold of her and didn’t let go for a long time.

  3: MOTION

  3.1: WILL

  Will found the gravesite less than a kilometre up the tunnel. On one side of the stream, surrounded by thick clusters of poppies, lay two long rows of shallow, rectangular pits. He could see bodies in there, smeared with greasy white soil and layered over with filmy mould. However, nothing appeared to be rotting. Rather, he had the unnerving sense from the pale, twitching bulbs in those holes that bodies were growing instead, flesh and fungus involved in some kind of obscene symbiosis.

  This, he realised, must have been exactly what had happened to him that morning. He’d been extruded straight out of the ground dressed in a rough approximation of the garments he’d been wearing when Snakepit first dissolved him.

  Now that he thought about it, Elsa’s remarks had implied as much. This gravesite wasn’t a place of rest so much as a recycling station for clones. Will’s thread would check out, leaving his tissues to be adapted and used by whatever clone showed up next. Will glanced down at his hands with new respect and a little disgust.

  With lingering trepidation, he climbed into one of the pits and lay down, settling against the damp, sucking mud. Beyond the soft walls of the enclosure he could see the luminous chandeliers swaying gently far above. He shut his eyes, reached for his home node, and this time let the feeling come.

  As before, he saw himself on the threshold of that vast, forbidding chamber crammed with ghosts. It loomed inside him, visceral and intense. Will forced himself to concentrate on being there and took a step forward.

  What had looked portentous and mystical before now snapped into focus. The figures around him gained solidity and colour. Far from feeling sinister, the great space he stood in now appeared to be nothing more than an old-fashioned train station – perhaps a little quirky and Gothic in style, but certainly nothing to be afraid of. The grey stone arches were clean and brightly lit. Through high windows, Will could make out an Earthlike sky. The smell of baked goods reached him. He glanced around and saw a refreshment stall to his left, offering croissants.

  All around, versions of himself bearing different physical alterations strode about the black-and-white-tiled floor, popping in and out of existence like soap bubbles. None of them paid him the slightest attention. And on the walls, those great orange banners he’d seen before no longer displayed alien runes. Somehow, those same symbols had been translated into plain English. They said things like Local Data, The History and Search Corridors. Will found one labelled Mesh Routes to Other Loci and guessed it was what he wanted. Pretending a certainty he didn’t feel, he set off in that direction, adding himself to one of the streams of busy pedestrians weaving through the space.

  As he walked, Will noticed that this virtual environment felt a lot less plastic than those he remembered from his previous life. It didn’t feel like he was suspending a physical reality to inhabit this place, and he could guess why. He suspected that back in the gravesite, his body would be dissolving into the muck, just like the others. He’d become a thread, a strand of processing hosted somewhere in Snakepit’s distributed organic computing matrix – a digital dream.

  He shivered as another memory returned to him with the blunt certainty of a dropped rock. This was how he’d been able to watch himself die from a distance. His normal roboteering talents had played no part in the experience. Will had become a thread before his mind had died.

  Physically dying here did not necessar
ily translate into the end of life. No wonder Elsa had worried that he’d be killed and then arrested. He’d blanked the remark at the time as another piece of weirdness, but suddenly it made sense. As did Tars and Ronno’s abrupt leap to murderous action. They weren’t seeking to terminate him but to force him to this place, presumably under their control.

  So what else was he missing? If he’d become a thread in his last life, what had happened afterwards? How had he lost his memory? Will frowned, furious at his own inability to unpick his past, until a passive vid playing on a nearby wall-panel caught his attention. He slowed to stare, unable to draw his gaze away.

  On the screen, he saw a version of himself wearing a ludicrous military uniform in orange and black, adorned with enormous medals. He sprawled on a golden swivel-throne, his hair a tangled mess like someone fresh out of bed. A silver baseball bat lay across his lap. But for his eyes, the clone resembled a parody of a tinpot dictator out of Earth’s past. His haunted gaze, however, suggested that something altogether less funny was going on.

  Behind him lay a replica of the IPSO senate chamber where Will had endured so many infuriating meetings with Earth’s politicians. Instead of senators in the ranked seats, Will saw smashed mannequins dressed in House robes. Their heads and arms littered the floor.

  ‘… so that’s great, too,’ the clone was saying, staring intently at the top of his bat. ‘I’ve barely had to rise to full awareness once this month, so fewer headaches. And without wanting to give away too much, we’re down to five major Cancers. I have my eye on all of them, so you can expect more major interventions in the next few weeks. My apologies in advance for breaking your shit. Glitches are also down. Economy’s looking good, so well done to all my citizen-selves. And I love what people are doing with that mermaid thing.’

  Will realised that he had to be watching Balance, the all-powerful god Elsa had warned him about. He didn’t look particularly dangerous, but he didn’t look well, either.

  ‘The Photurians have backed off,’ Balance went on. ‘Which is a relief, because I finally finished cleaning up all the shit they broke last time. And our defence research is really coming along, so big thanks to every part of me who’s involved with that.’ He paused. ‘But still, it sucks in here, guys. You really need to figure out why we can’t go and clean up the galaxy yet, because I’m getting a little stir-crazy, okay? Otherwise I’m going to have to do another identity reset, and none of us wants that.’ Balance glanced around at the chamber with wide, unblinking eyes, an expression of electric loathing flashing across his features. ‘Okay, that’s enough. Balance out.’

  The video message displayed a brief title page before starting afresh. ‘This month’s message from our illustrious Meta.’

  Will hurried onwards, more worried than ever by the world he’d woken up in.

  Beyond the archway for Other Loci lay a much larger space. A long, Gothic interior telescoped into the distance like the nave of an infinite cathedral. Its floor was crammed with a jumble of small, brightly coloured pavilions except for a central channel filled with bustling people. The locals appeared to be using the space as a cross between an exposition centre and a pedestrian underpass. Most of the Wills ignored the pavilion displays. One or two hung around outside the little structures, engaged in conversation, but for the most part the tents sat there like abandoned follies.

  Will set off, following the main flow of pedestrian traffic, but couldn’t help glancing at the distractions. The first thing he noticed was that many of the pavilions featured impossible doorways to other spaces. These weren’t surprising in a virtual setting. However, most of the locations belonged to his former life. He saw doors into starship cabins and meeting rooms he recognised. He saw metaphor spaces he’d built to model facets of ship function. He even made out the irradiated mesohull chambers of the Ariel Two – the sort of place he’d never risk visiting with his own body, but which he’d been to many times behind the eyes of robots.

  If this hall hosted a convention of some kind, then the theme was apparently Will’s own past. No wonder Elsa had known him so well. The next feature of the market to catch his eye were slogans advertising businesses hanging over some of the pavilion doorways.

  ‘Experience Romance!’ one promised.

  That in isolation wasn’t so peculiar until Will noticed that it was sandwiched between two others, one offering Paranoia, the other Schadenfreude. After that, he began to pay closer attention.

  Moreau Body Mods caught his eye. ‘All genders. All subspecies. Free consulting.’

  A particularly popular stand bearing the name Mental Massage offered identity reshaping. ‘Who do you want to be?’ their logo enquired. ‘Nobody leaves us normal! Packages from as low as two-branch-ninety-nine!’ A large holographic copy of Will’s own head hovered over the doorway, winking obscenely.

  Will fought down a shiver of unease. From that point onwards, the more he saw, the less comfortable he felt. His head started to swim from the barrage of newness so he walked faster, focusing his gaze on the distance until he reached an intersection where four halls met.

  A simple signpost stood there with nothing written on it. He stared, confused, until he noticed that the Wills flowing past him were quietly announcing place names as they passed.

  ‘Endurance.’

  ‘Voss Lake.’

  ‘Purplewater.’

  ‘Markstown.’

  ‘Mettaburg,’ said Will experimentally. The signpost acquired words, with his destination marked to the left. He exhaled in relief and followed it, only to be confronted with an identical intersection a kilometre further on.

  As he navigated hall after hall, Will began to get a sense of the scale of the Willworld’s virtual environment. It was enormous. And not once did the crowds thin out. His copies kept pouring in from some entryway or another. He was traversing a virtual metropolis of unprecedented proportions. Only Earth’s great cities supported such crowds.

  That eased his mind to some extent, as he was surely lost to his pursuers by now. On the other hand, he began to feel an ugly kind of social pressure. He was surrounded on all sides by entities that believed themselves to be him – talking like him, acting like him, wearing his face.

  In a world full of copies, the only thing that apparently marked him out as unique was that he wasn’t in on the joke. Despite Elsa’s brief explanation, Will still had only the vaguest inkling of what was going on. He failed to see how a society this warped had managed to hold together for a single day, let alone forty years.

  Will’s bewilderment slowly melted into tedium. And from tedium it condensed into anger. He was a roboteer, for crying out loud. Couldn’t someone just give him a memory dump? Everything here, though, appeared to be for sale, and Will still had no idea what these people used for money.

  After almost three hours of walking, Will’s exit finally appeared. By that point, he was sweating into his virtual ship-suit and fuming. He paused for a moment to rest and wondered why any virtual transport system would use such a profoundly inefficient metaphor for getting about.

  Beyond the Mettaburg archway, Will found himself in another arrivals hall depressingly similar to the one he’d left. Even the café looked the same. The only difference lay in the density of traffic. This station hummed with bodies. The concourse ahead of him labelled Arrivals was barely visible above the throng and someone jostled him with every other step. Will felt ready to scream.

  As he trudged towards the exit, he caught sight of another sign, just like the one he’d seen at his point of departure. The History, it read. Will stopped. By now it was clear that the history in question could only be his own. If he wanted to know what had happened to him, wasn’t this exactly the place to look? Elsa had told him to make his way directly to the Mettaburg exit and avoid distractions, but he’d been walking for hours already and was sick of feeling ignorant. Was he really going to wait around for one of these pseudo-copies to fill him in? The prospect of finding out for himself w
as incredibly appealing. It surely wouldn’t take long to discover the shape of his past. He’d have one quick look and leave. How much of a risk could that honestly be?

  Elsa’s words about Balance came back to him: He’ll seek you out if he can, and he has the power of a whole world behind him. Will shook his head. Balance just looked like another clone. Crazier and lonelier, perhaps, but not terrifying. And he was nothing here if not anonymous. That was so obvious, it hurt. So long as he kept his mouth shut he was just another identical body. Will set his jaw and struck off in the direction of The History.

  Beyond the next arch, he was pleased to find himself at the top of a cylindrical space like the interior of an enormous tower. A peaked roof of steel and glass arched overhead while a helical ramp with marked doorways descended into the gloom. Variformed clones wandered around it as if exploring a museum. Several wrought-iron elevators clinging to the ramp offered speedy trips up and down the shaft. The whole space had a gratifyingly obvious layout. Time was vertically arranged, with the most recent memories at the top.

  His mood faltered when he headed for the closest history door and noticed the explanatory plaque placed beside it.

  Will Kuno-Monet descends to Snakepit with Andromeda Ng-Ludik.

  He scowled. How could the most recent moment in The History be something he already remembered? Will strode through the arch anyway and found himself traversing a dark corridor lined with portals into moments from his fateful trek down to the planet that had swallowed him.

  On the other side of each arch, five-minute chunks of his memories played on repeat like passive virts. Wills of various colours, shapes and sizes wandered around inside them, peering at the vegetation or examining Ann’s face as she led him down his first tunnel.

  Will marched straight for the last arch. It showed him carrying Ann’s body into the alcove she’d located to keep them safe from the Rumfoord League soldiers pursuing them.