by Guy Haley
He went out of the scullery and kitchen, back into the corridor. He looked at the other door. His arm pulsed and he swayed. He was gripped by a sense of deep foreboding and made to hurry, but no sooner had the thought formed in his head than he was gripped with a nameless dread, and he had to force himself on, his legs fighting him every step of the way. It seemed to take forever to get to the door, and he hesitated before putting his hand to the catch. A deep cold emanated from the door, and it shrank back from him as he reached for it.
He grasped the handle, lifted and turned.
The door flew open. All the air in the corridor blasted toward the opening. Richards fell forward, managing to cling to the doorframe before he toppled down the stairs on the other side, five mossy stone steps descending to a turn, the cellar beyond awash with sickly light.
"Get out!" a voice bellowed. "Get out!"
An invisible hand shoved him hard in the chest, sending him sprawling onto the flags. The door slammed and the wind ceased, the intense feeling of fear going with it.
"Christ," he said, "I hope I don't end up having to go down there." He struggled up, nearly fainting as pain shot up and down his ruined arm. He felt nauseous, and had to wait for a full five minutes before he felt well enough to stand.
Only one door remained on the ground floor, back in the entrance hall. Richards picked his way round fallen mouldings and puddled water to it, in the corner by the fireplace that dominated the hall. Unlike the others, no decay tarnished it, and the colour of its mahogany was rich and red. Brass was expertly inlaid round the hinges and handle. It was a handsome door, a warm door. Richards pushed it open, and immediately recoiled from what he saw inside.
A dining room, long and dark, the candles that illuminated it struggling to push the shadows back into black flock wallpaper. It was cleaner than the rest of the house, free of time's cruelties. Clean, except the long table in the middle.
Blood soaked the linen tablecloth. Two gory ruins that had once been people, though Richards could tell that only by a single severed hand half-open on the floor. Around the corpses were mottled things, white skin marbled with purple veins. Their clawed feet dug through the cloth into the wood where they squatted on the table. Useless wings hung from their shoulder blades, quivering as their heads jerked from side to side as they tore at the corpses.
They looked up from their bloody meal, these wan guests with their pinched faces. Red muzzles hissed out their hatred. Richards slammed the door.
He backed away, eyes on the wood, but nothing came out. He went to the foot of the stairs. Up them he walked, and turned onto the grey floorboards of a landing. It was long as a street, at odds with the external geometry of the house. There were many doors in both directions, but one at the very end made him stop.
A child's bedroom door, white, a little battered and grubbied by the application of crayons, damaged motile stickers playing scenes of princesses and ponies across its middle, a ripped YamaYama motif at the top, disembodied rabbity hands waving slowly back and forth. Richards mustered his strength and walked as fast as he was able, faster as he approached, ignoring the urgent pleas coming from the other rooms. By the time he reached it he was striding forward, and he barely slowed as he grasped the handle, twisted it and flung open the door.
The room inside was clean and perfect, the room of a young girl whose mother cared for her. Bright sunshine beat on a cascade of terracotta roofs stepping down in huddles to peer at a blue sea; hot, but in the room it was cool. Muslin curtains stirred in a light breeze. A door leading to a balcony stood open, a rectangle of warmth extending from outside across the wooden floor, framing toys in gold, draping another doorway of light across the room's narrow bed.
A man sat on the bed, in the centre of the light from the balcony. He stirred as Richards closed the door, and turned to face the AI.
"Giacomo Vellini, I presume," said Richards.
The man looked at him blankly, face sorrowful yet empty. He frowned. "Who are you?"
"I am the Class Five AI Richards," said Richards.
"Are you? Oh." The man turned back to the daylight, then back as if he'd remembered something important. "I can't find her. I can't get out."
Richards walked around the bed slowly to stand by the balcony door. "Who can't you find, Waldo?"
"My sister, Marita."
"Queen Isabella?"
A ghost of life came into the face of Waldo. "Yes, that's right, Isabella. She used to play at queens as a little girl. She always wanted to be Queen Isabella."
"The Spanish one?"
Waldo nodded and smiled dreamily. "Yes, the Spanish one."
"What happened to you, Waldo? Can you remember?"
Waldo shook his head. "I had something to tell her, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I couldn't find her. I don't know. I'm sorry, I get confused."
"This door here, is this the way out?"
Waldo nodded. "But I can't go through." He frowned. "Why?"
Richards was filled with sympathy; he knew why. He'd seen this before. Waldo was a ghost in the machine, an imprint of a living mind left when its owner had died, a fragmented one at that. He saw that the light extended right around Waldo uninterrupted. He had no shadow. That made a lot of sense.
"I don't think you can go back that way, Waldo," he said. Richards crouched low and looked up into the man's face. Waldo was, had been, thirty-five, but he looked boyish; he carried a little too much fat and it smoothed his features. He looked lost. "But do you mind if I try?" said Richards gently.
Waldo looked at him as if he'd not seen him before, then his face cleared. "Yes, yes, of course."
Richards turned to the door. That was as good as a permission, from a human user in a Reality Realm.
He was free.
His mind rapidly reconfigured itself, bursting from his human avatar and layering itself into the complexities of the ragtag Reality 37. He felt the world being torn apart, like the tugs of stitches coming from a healed wound, k52's ravenous, alien code rewriting it into something new, something unrealised, the germ of a possibility.
He peered into it and almost laughed at k52's audacity. He had to talk to Otto. Now.
His perception of the virtuality dissolved into the roar and tumult of the System Wide Grid. The balcony door became a portal, a hole punched secret and secure through the walls surrounding the supposedly inviolate RealWorld Reality Realms; Waldo's back door. He pushed part of himself through it. Tendrils of fact reached out to him, linking him node by node to all corners of human civilisation, from the depths of the deepest terrestrial desert right out to the colony on Titan.
He stepped towards the door. It burned brighter.
"Please!" Waldo spoke, and the room vied in Richards' perceptions with the glorious howl of information space. Richards turned back, felt himself draw in a little, back into the shape and concerns of a man.
"Please," said Waldo. "My sister…"
Richards nodded. He reset his fedora firmly on his head and, with a deep breath of relief, stepped back into the world.
Otto was the last in the room housing the mortal remains of Giacomo Vellini, a real dead end.
Something in the wall of machines crackled.
Something crackled back.
A swift chatter of machine noise bounced back and forth. A panel slid upwards, revealing the slender array of a naked holoemitter, stripped of casing.
It flickered blue light, and painted Otto's partner onto the air.
"Hiya, Otto!" said Richards in that half-smug, mischievous manner he had. "There you are."
"Richards?"
"The one and only," said the hologram, and bowed. "And boy, have we got ourselves into a right old pickle this time." Richards wore his usual simulated human form, but it looked worn and tired, more real somehow. His suit was gone, a rough uniform in its place. His macintosh was shredded, one sleeve wet with blood, the arm within held crooked against the AI's chest.
"What happened to you?" asked Ott
o.
"I got a new hat," said Richards. "Look, I don't have much time. I've snuck out of Waldo's back door, but k52 will notice soon."
Commander Guan burst into the room, two of his troopers at his back, sidearms raised. They began shouting furiously at once and pointed their guns at the hologram emitter.
"Sheesh! I surrender," said Richards and raised his good arm.
Otto shouted back at the Chinese, placing himself between their guns and Waldo's equipment. "This is my partner! Stand down, stand down!"
"He is an artificial intelligence and an enemy of the People's Republic of China!" responded Guan. He pulled his own gun and levelled it at Otto's forehead.
"Get out of the way, Klein."
"Just make me," he growled.
Richards bellowed in Mandarin. The men turned to look at him. "That's better. I'm not here, this really is just an image projection, not even a full sensing presence. I've got piss-all ability to do anything here, so there's no problem there, is there? It's just a telephone call."
Guan looked at the AI with an intense mix of fear and hatred.
"Seriously, I'll be out of here as soon as I can. I just need to talk to my partner."
"He's been inside the renegade Realm, Guan. Whatever he has to tell me will be of the greatest importance," said Otto. "Or do you want to go back to your superiors as the world is falling down around their ears and tell them it was your fault?"
Guan stared. He barked something, and all three Dragon Fire warriors raised their guns and covered important parts of the machinery in the room.
"You have one minute," said Guan.
"Are you in, um, China, Otto?"
"You can't tell?"
"Things have been complicated. I've no idea where I am, or what day of the week it is."
"Sinosiberia," said Otto.
"Ah," said Richards. "I better get out of here before their attack ware latches onto me."
"Waldo's dead," said Otto. "We were going to use him to get you out."
"I appreciate that, and I know he's dead. There's an echo of him in here."
"Poor bastard," said Otto.
"Maybe, but if there weren't it would have been game over a while ago. I think I can stop k52, but you must not let them destroy the Realm House, you got that?"
"With Waldo dead, they are going to blow up the Realm servers," said Otto.
"Stop them. Do whatever it takes. They using nukes?"
Otto nodded.
"Idiots. Don't let them do it. I think I've got it all figured out, I'll explain everything when I get out, OK?"
"Sure."
"Good." Richards looked round the bunker room, caught sight of Waldo and wrinkled his nose. "Say, is his sister here?"
"Yes," said Otto. "Dirty and skinny, but she's alive."
Richards' hologram grinned. "That's all I need to know. See you soon, partner."
The emitter winked out and he disappeared.
Guan's men raked Waldo's cabinets with gunfire, destroying them and closing the backdoor to the Realms. Guan fixed Otto with flinty eyes.
"They will have my head for this," he said, his singsong growl rendered as powerless English.
With great reluctance, Richards pulled back into the sealed spaces of the Realms. He shut the door and watched it dissolve as its physical components were shattered. Unusual to have something ephemeral and material so closely linked, but it was the only way Waldo could get in and out undetected. Richards sighed as he scoured the remnants of it from the Grid. He had no choice. It could have been an escape route for him if his plan did not work out, but by the same reasoning it could have been an escape route for k52; if the sly bastard had another base unit out in the Real he could be free for years.
Richards could not risk that.
He felt himself contract back into his unwanted avatar. Its biological unpleasantness, its pain and malfunctions pulled themselves over him like a shroud.
Waldo blinked at him. "Who are you? You're not my sister."
"Come on, old son," said Richards, "it's time to go home."
Waldo stood and attempted to walk through the door onto the sunlit balcony. His expression turned to one of puzzlement when he could not. The room was failing, parts of it crackling to nothing, strips of the virtuality peeling down like old wallpaper.
"Not that way," said Richards. He put his hand upon the door leading back into the house. "This way."
CHAPTER 22
The End of the World
Richards' eyes snapped open and he sat up on the altar. The chains binding him fell away. He flexed his hand. There was a stiffness to his arm, but the wound had healed white and smooth, a runway for old pain.
Hog recoiled.
"How? How? Hog's work undone!"
Richards looked up at the sweating swine. "You asked me what manner of beast you are. You are no beast, you are Rolston. You are not Hog. Sorry."
"I, I am Hog, Hog!" Hog beat his chest with his hands and held them up to the shocked audience of mooks.
"You are Rolston." Richards slipped off the altar. "I'm sorry, man, but it's true. This place did a number on you, just like it did to poor Pl'anna."
"Seize him!" Hog's mooks wavered. "Seize him!" he roared. The mooks made for Richards. He held up his hand and they froze.
"Nope, no seizing today." Richards breathed deep as his mind infiltrated the construct of Reality 37. He was fully layered into it now. Still unable to effect large-scale change, he was, however, far from defenceless. He reached out. Not much of Waldo's creation remained now, and what was left was reducing all the quicker now the door to the Grid and his own machineries were gone.
"k52 should be here any moment," said Richards to his friends. "This will all be over soon. Hey, Waldo, you can come out now."
A gasp went round the mooks as a man appeared at the heart of the temple.
"The Flower King! The Flower King is here!" The news rippled round the amphitheatre from mook and man alike. Those who could fell to their knees, Bear's fur soaking up the gore of Hog's feast.
There was a rumble and the ground shook. Rocks fell from the wall and bounced into the audience of mooks, crushing many.
A slow clapping sounded around the amphitheatre.
"Speak of the devil," said Richards.
A figure stepped from the head of the staircase and into the amphitheatre, a figure of writhing shadow, armoured in night.
"Hog, dear Hog, at this very last, I come for thee."
"But our pact!" roared Hog. "My mooks, my mountain, we would remain, an eternal bastion of pain!"
"I see you do not honour your bargains, Lord of the Swine. You promised me the queen and I see no queen. Why should I honour my side of our business? I believe you said something very similar earlier this evening." Penumbra walked across the arena floor; his skin still writhed with shadow, but his features were more solid than before, features that were a dead ringer for Waldo. "You are a fool, Hog. And now you will die. And when you are dead, this world will be gone, a fitting punishment."
"Is that so?" said Hog. "Then why can I see a future? For him!" He pointed at a pirate. "There is a break in his line, but there will be no proper death for him today. He will pass on ten years hence, rich and drunk, full of wine and syphilis, dead in the arms of his doxy. And him!" he said, pointing out another. "He persists, a proud man with many sons. No death for him! He will go into the long sleep loved and mourned. Only worms and flowers will feast on him." Hog swung his head round, searching the crowd, his snout snuffling as he sniffed out the futures of those present. "And him," he said, his beady eye resting upon Piccolo. "He shall be your undoing."
"You attempt to buy more life, fly-lord." The Penumbra loosened his sword in its scabbard and drew the flickering tongue of darkness out. "That cannot be. There can be no future for anyone here. That is why you see nothing of yourself, Lord Hog, for there is simply nothing left to see." He held his sword in the air, its darkness sucking in the light, and addressed all prese
nt. "I made this place! I made this place for you all, and what did you do? You cast down the queen I set above you, and made the world a ruin. As I made you, so I unmake you. That is your punishment, that is the judgement of Penumbra! Haemites! Trollmen! Things of the deep dark corners! Advance!"