by Alex Lamb
‘You’re Mr Brown?’ said Will.
John shook his hand. ‘In the flesh. Nice to meet you. It sounds like your trip here has been disorientating and more than a little stressful. Sorry about that, and I’m glad you made it. My apologies also for our welcoming committee at the bar. They can’t be too careful, and maintaining a certain attitude is part of what keeps the place safe.’
‘Sure,’ said Will.
‘Just so you know, Balance doesn’t appear to have tracked you here. There was a lot of activity around the station yesterday but none of it got as far as the hill. Balance struggles to make it up here. Our anger keeps him out, thank Gal. It’s one of the small mercies of this place.’
John’s smile was warm but Will couldn’t bring himself to trust it. He’d seen it in too many bad dreams. John seemed to guess the direction of his thoughts.
‘You’re probably wondering why I chose this, right?’ he said, rubbing his cheek.
Will nodded. ‘The question had occurred to me.’
‘Keeps me focused. It reminds me every time I look in the mirror that I can’t trust myself, or anyone else. When you’re running a resistance movement, that’s useful to bear in mind. Besides, I couldn’t think of anyone else with a more relevant face for spy antics. Does that help?’
‘Somewhat,’ said Will.
John gestured down the path. ‘Then let’s walk and talk,’ he said. ‘You must have plenty of questions.’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ said Will, his tension subsiding a little as they set off.
‘I assume a basic history of our society has been covered?’
Will shook his head.
‘Okay, well, there’s not that much to know. We all woke up one day feeling a little fuzzy. There was a lot of confusion. Then came panic and claustrophobia. Wills began trying to differentiate themselves to stay sane. At the same time, we started having to think collectively via the planet to resolve some ugly conflicts that arose.
‘It was about what you’d expect: a planet full of identical people going crazy together. Then the Nems, or Photurians, or whatever you want to call them – they attacked. They arrived in this system suddenly, in huge numbers, and started raining crap on us from orbit. It was grim. But we rapidly figured out that the differentiation we’d tinkered with was helping us win that fight. It helped a lot. It made our collective brain more stable. It made it easier to allocate tasks and reason broadly. So after we beat the Photurians, there was an explosion of diversity.
‘That’s when we formalised the notion of Balance and gave it consciousness. We really started building stuff.’ John gestured out at the view. ‘Most of this was established around that time. Everyone got a lot more comfortable with the idea of a unique identity as a project, and trying to help each other achieve it. We went from a basically monastic society to having a lot of girls around almost overnight.’
Will regarded him sceptically. ‘Really? That many clones of me changed their minds about their sex?’
John laughed and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a few who managed to make the adjustment and felt comfortable with it. But we’re threads, Will. We can be copied. Once we had a few successful gender converts, they were extremely popular, as you might imagine.’
It hadn’t occurred to him that his clones could duplicate. On reflection, he felt a little slow. After all, everything here was a copy.
‘That’s how our economy works,’ said John. ‘That stuff with the cash boxes on the streets? None of that’s real. It’s just a public service to facilitate thread training. Some of us learn to run businesses by playing at it first. You always wanted to be a better negotiator, didn’t you? Well, now some of you are.’
Will had wondered why everything in soft-space had a price on it if the shops only took play-money. Now it made sense, sort of.
‘The real economy is maintained by a store of favours that’s monitored in soft-space,’ said John. ‘Our main unit of currency is the branch-request – gifting a copy of yourself.’
‘You sell clones?’
‘Exactly. Either that or some fraction of the deltas that comprise us. You can think of it as the ultimate service economy. I lend you an instance of me for whatever task you have in mind, so you owe me something. Permitting a lot of copies gains you leeway when you’re figuring out how you want to grow your own thread. But that means your identity has to be one people want.’
‘Up to the point of turning some of us into dogs,’ said Will darkly.
John shot him a wry look. ‘Actually, yes. Dogs are popular. You’d be amazed how rich some of those dogs are. The first Will who figured out how to make that tolerable for himself made a killing. That’s why there are so many small play-businesses here. Wills who develop a passion for entrepreneurship take better risks when they diversify their identity. And those risks come back as opportunities because of all the favours they’ve stored up. Today a terrier, tomorrow Anubis. That first dog could probably afford to copy any thread he liked a million times over by now. Any fantasy he wants. Not some shabby virt-dream populated by SAP puppets – the real thing. Dancing girls, adoring fans, enemies to kill, you name it.
‘What you see today is the result of a lot of careful lifestyle experimentation. Working to spread ourselves out to mimic a full species has made life far more tolerable – even if some of us take what you might think of as a lifestyle hit. Really. If you think this is hard, try being trapped in a tunnel-world of identical duplicates for a year or two.’
‘And yet there’s the Old Slam Bar,’ Will pointed out. ‘If things are so great, why do you need a resistance movement?’
John exhaled. ‘Well, for a while things were looking okay. We were actually kind of proud of this place. Then we started getting these … Cancer identities. Embittered rogue personas that started chewing through everything we’d built, smashing things up.’
‘Because of the lifestyle hits, perhaps,’ Will remarked.
‘Maybe. In any case, it was hard for Balance to root them out. They self-replicate illegally, without a contract, so they tend to develop powerful voices pretty fast. It’s hard to beat that with a consensus-based police force, even a superhuman one. A lot of us started to wonder where we’d gone wrong.’
He paused, stopping on the path to stare at Will. ‘That’s when you started showing up.’
‘You mean copies of me.’
‘If that makes it easier for you. In any case, there’s some difference of opinion about what you represent. The common wisdom is that you’re another kind of Cancer. But Glitches like you are different from Cancers in a lot of ways. For a start, you seem to be more interested in killing Cancers than replicating.’ He gave Will a meaningful look. ‘Do you feel like killing right now?’
An image of the pathetic horse clone flashed through Will’s head. He pushed it away.
‘Of course not,’ he said.
‘In any case, I advise you to keep your disgust in check,’ said John.
‘So I’ve been told.’
‘The long and short of it is that previous copies of you have had a big impact on society. You’re lucky, though – this time you met the right woman and she pointed you at us. We have a programme for working with Glitches. It’s helping us figure out what you’re for, and what the hell is going on with this world.’
‘I keep hearing that word,’ said Will. ‘Glitches. Why do you call us that?’
‘That’s a big question,’ said John. ‘To understand, it helps to know a bit about how the Willworld is organised. You’ve seen already that there’s a division in our way of life, right? Between soft-space and physical reality?’
Will nodded.
‘We use physical reality for thread differentiation. Soft-space is where trade and government happens – all the serious stuff that goes into making Balance. Our actions as individual threads inform his thoughts. So you can think of soft-space as a giant mind, and the society that works there like a distributed consc
iousness. Or if you prefer to think of Balance as a government, then our opinions double as votes, and a share of our individual processing time is taken as tax. Some people call it sentient democracy.’
‘So we’re all living inside a brain,’ said Will. ‘Balance’s brain. That’s not exactly comforting.’
‘No, but the system works.’
‘Really? I saw a video of him. He looked … sick.’
‘Being Balance isn’t easy. Most of the time he’s not fully awake. It’s easier when he’s dreaming. That’s also why he doesn’t show up in person. We found it sets up feedback problems. But in any case, his brain, like any other, has a subconscious. And just like any subconscious, it’s a little unruly. It has its own version of soft-space we can’t get to. And every now and then, it spits out a thread of its own.’
‘A Glitch,’ said Will.
‘Right.’
‘So you think I’m a walking irrational impulse.’
‘That’s a pretty good way of putting it,’ said John with wry smile. ‘And because you’re made out of back-brain stuff, you can go places us conscious threads can’t. And that’s good because we in the Underground suspect that our social problems stem somehow from our unconscious assumptions, so only by working with you can we possibly solve them.’
Will eyed him. ‘What kind of assumptions?’
‘Great question,’ said John. ‘As you’ve seen, we’ve got this single, unified memory of a shared past, but it’s completely at odds with the reality we inhabit. We remember the human race, but in forty-one years we’ve never seen them. We remember a job, a family, a way of life, but none of it has anything to do with what’s actually here.’
Will frowned. ‘That’s because we’re still on Snakepit,’ he said. He couldn’t grasp what John was getting at. ‘When we get back to human space—’
‘But clearly we can’t,’ John blurted. A curious, anxious expression twisted his features. ‘At least, not yet. Look, for most of us, there are certain undeniable axioms about the world. Feelings we have that are so obvious they’re not even up for discussion.’
Will stared hard at the resistance leader. He suspected they were getting to the heart of the matter.
‘Like what?’
‘Like that we’re from here. We’ve been here for ever. That we’re meant to defend this place. And that we’re waiting to understand ourselves before we branch out and leave. Some of those ideas come in for a lot of discussion but only recently have some of us actually begun to doubt them. They keep us alive and civilised, you see. Your kind, though, don’t have those axioms.’ John’s face took on a nervous cast. ‘From our perspective, that makes Glitches a little like sociopaths. You’re Wills with the brakes off. You don’t care about this place. You can do anything. The rest of us don’t understand why we’re stuck here like this, but we have the sense that until we do, we should just keep evolving and looking after the place. The Proustian Underground thinks that Glitches are part of the answer. There has to be a reason why the planet keeps churning out copies of you with complete recall of an apparently fictitious past but none of our civilising assumptions.’
Will looked at John and found himself smiling. He was starting to get it – just how much these clones were like him and how much they weren’t. For some reason, the fact that they’d all been programmed to believe the same bullshit was both a revelation and a relief.
‘So what do you imagine happened before you all woke up here?’ he said. ‘If you don’t buy your own memories, you must have a theory.’
‘There’s been debates,’ said John. ‘Some very vocal ones. The consensus is that we all had our memories flushed while we shared a dream together.’
‘But why?’ said Will.
‘Because whatever society existed before the dream decided to. Most people think they did it to erase Cancers. To reset the social slate. Because after the flushing, there were no Cancers for years. And there are those who believe that the world should be flushed again. They say Glitches are a sign that the whole planet is exhausted and desperate for rest. But that can’t happen right now because of the persistent threat from the Photurians. They keep showing up with guns and claiming this place is their home when it clearly isn’t. A dreaming world would be vulnerable to them, so our memory stays the way it is. Yet we also keep putting off leaving the planet to properly wipe them out. Instead, we just explore the memories we have. So far, it hasn’t done us a damned bit of good.’
Will gazed out across the waking city he’d apparently built, with all its thousands of inhabitants, and wrinkled his brow in disbelief. His past had become the basis for a religion. Supposedly self-evident truths had been parsed through it. There was some irony in that, given the battles against blind faith he’d fought over the course of his life.
‘I’ve never been one for superstitious bullshit,’ he said.
John looked a little wounded. ‘You have to understand that these things are just … undeniable, Will. And they’ve accumulated a lot of weight. Balance, in his current form, reflects nearly forty years of consensus understanding, multiplied by about ten billion threads. That’s four hundred billion person-years of inhabiting one world view, and the universe has only been around for fourteen billion. Most Wills believe that our shared dream holds the secret of true self-knowledge. They say we should keep studying it. Others, like us, believe that Glitches hold the answer. That used to be a popular idea until your copies started destroying things. Then, during the last attack, you actually collaborated with the Photurians.’
Will’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘The invaders disguised themselves as an IPSO mission. It ended badly. Most people took it as a sign that The History couldn’t be taken literally. So these days, Balance roots out Glitches and terminates them. He doesn’t take chances. Yet, despite all your destructiveness, the world is broadly a healthier, saner place than it was before you appeared. You cut out a lot of sick branches, Will. And you have special talents. I still believe there’s a reason for that.’
‘So that’s why I’m here?’ said Will. ‘Because of a religious hunch?’
‘It’s what we’ve got,’ said John. ‘And it’s keeping you alive, so don’t knock it. I know a lot of this probably sounds weird, but please have patience. It’ll take a while to get used to.’
‘Frankly, I have no intention of staying long.’ Will squinted at the horizon.
John’s expression darkened. ‘None of you do. But here’s the core of your problem: there’s no way off this planet. You used to be able to search-walk to orbital stations but Balance has all that locked down now. Those parts of soft-space are just gone. You’ve tried getting out of here hundreds of times and, to my knowledge, never once succeeded. Besides, the only starships we’ve ever seen belong to the Photurians. They control this region of space. Which means that even if you could leave, you’d be flying straight into enemy hands.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘Having said that,’ he added, ‘there’s still a way we might be able to help each other.’
Will felt a negotiation coming. ‘What’s that?’ he said warily.
‘Glitches can access the global subconscious,’ he said. ‘What we call the Underlayer. The rest of us can’t. If we show you how to get there, there’s nothing to stop you looking for a way out. If Balance finds you, he’ll kill you. But we can show you how to navigate without being seen. We can give you a chance. We call it truth diving. You help us find out how the axioms work and where they come from. At the same time, you get to look for exits. If, as you believe, our axioms have no basis in fact, why do they even exist? Why doesn’t it feel right to leave?’
‘You must know that, though,’ said Will. ‘It’s because the Transcended don’t fucking want you to.’
‘I’ve heard that line, of course,’ said John, ‘but it’s not an answer. Even if it’s true, why? Balance is a god, Will. He’s unstoppable. Now that we have our shit together, we crush the Photurians li
ke bugs every time they appear. We can manifest entire fleets of ships out of mere collective will. And you should see what our defensive tech looks like now. It’s scary as hell. We could have cleared out all the Photurians already and resolved the mysteries of the past. But we don’t – for reasons nobody understands. And yet that’s not sustainable. By now you’ll have noticed that this planet is something of a psychic pressure cooker. Disaster is inevitable, yet what are we doing about it?
‘If you agree to help us, we’ll assign someone to work with you. They’ll teach you how to access the Underlayer. Then, if you want to go your own way at any point, we won’t stop you. But I think you can benefit from the skills and knowledge we’re willing to share. Believe me, you do better with us than without.’
Will was getting sick of people treating him as a generic instance of some kind of planetary process, but John was his best hope. He had to try.
‘What happened to all my other copies?’ he said instead.
‘I’m not going to lie,’ said John. ‘Balance got them all. But the ones we work with last a lot longer than your unfortunate siblings who never make it here. With us, you’ve at least got help. So, what do you say?’
Will idly ripped of a piece of scarlet fern from a nearby planting and tore it into shreds. The pieces fluttered to the ground one by one. They looked like drops of blood before the chill breeze carried them away.
He had to get out of this madhouse. And word needed to reach the human race, presuming there still was one. He knew he’d lose it if he stayed here too long. He’d eventually try to rip Snakepit apart and undoubtedly kill himself in the process.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You have a deal.’
John gave him one of those classic, untrustworthy grins and pumped his hand.
‘I’m delighted,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t always happen, you know.’
He waved to a woman sitting reading on a bench nearby. She had a bob of short, black hair and was dressed in a crisp, tightly fitted skirt suit. She rose and walked towards them. She shared Elsa’s baseline-female features, but her smile was sharp, knowing and emphasised by dark lipstick. A very different clone looked out through those green eyes.