Omega Point

by Guy Haley

  "We have to leave now!" said Lehmann.

  Guan stood by him rapidly talking. His command collar fell silent. He spoke in Mandarin, and it did not translate. He shouted in broken English. "We go now! No Grid! Go now!"

  Lehmann put a hand on her shoulder. "Valdaire. Veronique, we must go. We have an inbound signal. Stratobomber. It will be here in five minutes."

  "Leave me here! Without me, Otto hasn't got a chance." She glanced at the countdown timer ticking, huge in the air over the immersion couches.

  Guan shook his head, beckoned to his men and left. Lehmann looked at them, and back at Valdaire and his old commander. He started to go and turned back.

  "Lehmann, get out of here!" she shouted at him. "There's nothing you can do here."

  He hesitated. Guan reappeared at the doorway. "We go now!" he shouted. "We leave airbike! We go now!"

  "OK, OK," said Lehmann. "Good luck, Valdaire."

  She nodded curtly, and did not take her eyes from the screen. "Get out of here!"

  • • • •

  Otto blasted four shots into key points of the android, and it dropped to the floor. He stooped as he ran on past it, scooping up its stolen weapon as he went.

  The Realm House was a complex of two parts. The upper levels, including most of the surface building, were filled with offices, classrooms, laboratories and accommodation for the caretakers and researchers of the thirty-six Realms who dwelt on site. The machinery that held the VR constructs themselves was buried underground. He ran down the roadway that entered the surface building. It dived underground at a steep angle. Once past the upper levels, it passed through a blast door of advanced alloys and toughened carbon compounds. A thermal lance had melted a round hole in the middle; the lance stood by the door, and gobbets of metal and melted plastics were spattered on the concrete road surface. Henson's team's entryway.

  Otto ducked through without slowing, running the robot at its maximum speed. Once he was through the door, the concrete lining of the upper tunnel gave way to bare rock, and the air took on a chill. Wind whistled through passive aircon pipes in the ceiling, technology borrowed from termites, chilling the cavern Otto now approached.

  The road curved gently to the left, and one side of the tunnel vanished. Otto was in the Realm House proper, a cavern seven hundred metres across and two hundred deep. Arrayed around its bottom were thirty-six servers, house-sized pieces of outmoded technology, arrayed like the separated segments of a vast orange, kept running purely to maintain the lives of the digital inhabitants of the game worlds inside them. A round circle of foamcrete, striped black and yellow, lay at their centre, the cap for the Realm House's fusion reactor. Otto descended the service road, running in a spiral round the inside of the cavern, and he understood why k52 had let Henson's team in. Witnesses. They'd seen all was normal, and then they'd died. And then k52, with full control over what they could see outside, had set about redecorating.

  The centre of the cavern was a world away from the images on the screens of the command bunker. Strings of cable ran from server to server in a complex web, spider maintenance drones crawling along them. The foamcrete covers and casings for the energy lines had been cracked, the web leading into the exposed cables at irregularly spaced intervals. Large improvised dishes of silvery thread were spaced around the walls, while the floor of the cavern was deep in water. What k52 was doing was way beyond him, but it could only be some kind of energy transmission network.

  A pair of anthropoid drones came at Otto. He dodged a spray of gunfire, and put one down with a return burst. A kick saw the other sent over the low wall guarding the outer edge of the service road. The androids here were weak maintenance models, and the only guns they had had been taken from Henson's five-man team and the initial deployment of National Guard.

  It was the spider drones he had to watch for. There were hundreds of them in the complex, robots with tool-filled jaws as well fitted for destruction as for maintenance.

  Those were what had killed Henson's men. Otto ran on hard. A few spider drones spotted him and scuttled toward him, and he blew them to pieces.

  For a terrifying half-second, his feed cut out, and he was lost in limbo somewhere on the Grid between his own body and the borrowed robot.

  The link crackled back on. Otto veered away from the wall.

  Carbon feet splashed into water. He was at the web. Spider drones, large as cats, emerged from every cranny of the place, their small, tick-like heads turning toward him. One, then another, then another, took tentative steps toward him, and then they came at him in a rush. He fired his gun until it was empty, shattering spider drones, then unslung the weapon he'd taken from the robot at the doors and did the same. He cast them down into the water.

  Not knowing what else to do, Otto tore into the web with his borrowed machine hands.

  Valdaire heard a noise behind her. She did not turn from her work. "I told you to get out of here, Lehmann."

  A hand grabbed her shoulder painfully.

  "What the…?"

  She was spun round hard. Her connection to Genie and Otto was broken. Her holograms went out.

  Kaplinski leered down at her.

  "All we wanted," said Waldo, "was to be left alone," and stood. k52 made to stab at him with spears of energy, but Waldo froze him solid with a gesture.

  "Heh," said Richards. "I'm not one for gloating, but I think you rather underestimated Waldo there, k52."

  Waldo walked around the Anvil fragment, trailing his hand across it. As he did so it disintegrated into threads of light, and flowed up his arm to join with his body. Hog's corpse sank slowly to the floor. Waldo walked over to it and touched it. The pig-ogre's form evaporated like the altar, leaving the boffin-like human form Rolston favoured in life, then this too dissipated.

  "The thing is, Waldo put his heart and soul into creating this Reality, all for his sister." Richards watched Waldo as he walked slowly toward k52. Only Bear and Tarquin remained of his old construct. "So, I think there was rather more of him left than you thought. He encoded his entire mind into it, you fucking moron! k52 the great! Undone by an Italian nerd. It really never does to underestimate the human race, Kay, it's not a mistake I've made more than once. I'd take it on board for next time, only I doubt there will be a next time."

  Richards turned to Waldo. "Ah," he said cheerily. "Well done."

  Waldo regarded him with a face of pure fury.

  "Um, I'm getting a lack of loving here. I am, aren't I? Ah, shit."

  Otto ripped at the web linking the realm servers to the fusion plant beneath his feet. Spider drones scuttled from all over the complex toward him. He stamped and slapped the first wave to pieces, careful with his movements, sure to keep on damaging the web as they attacked. More and more crawled up his mechanical shell, mouth parts whirring, cracking the casing of the android. His left arm went slack as one chewed through its wiring. Otto swatted it away. The drones swarmed up him, pulling him down into the water. Plastic legs clicked all over his sheath. His right leg buckled. The drones were poorly armoured, not designed for combat, but there were so many of them.

  Otto wrenched one more cable free, his vision obscured by the articulated thorax of a drone. Whirling mouthparts drilled through his cranial casing. As they sawed him apart, he was struck that in a body like this, at least his damn shoulder didn't bother him.

  A kaleidoscope of images from his mentaug overcame him, all of them of Honour.

  His link was cut.

  "You," said Waldo. "You and your kind." He walked slowly toward Richards. "I tried to keep my sister safe. Was it not enough to make her an addict to your false dreams? Did you have to kill her too? We only wanted to be left alone," he repeated. "Alone. There is no such thing in this world, not any more."

  Richards held his hands in front of him, palms up, and backed away. Four Reality Realms' worth of cyberspace stood empty all about him, all keyed to human thought forms, and that included the deceased. He was an ant in front of an
elephant. "Waldo, Giacomo, you've got it back to front. Your sister's not dead."

  "Liar!" Waldo's fists tightened. A dangerous energy built in the air

  "… no, Giacomo, it's not her, it's you. You're dead, don't you remember?"

  Waldo faltered. His brow creased, and he stopped. "I… I do… " His head snapped up, and he pulled Richards' memories from him with a gesture.

  Richards stumbled and clutched at his head. He managed a weak smile. "Hey! You only need ask."

  "Flu? k52 killed me? He infected an entire continent to get me?"

  "They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I reckon that level of effort comes a close second."

  "This, your partner?" Otto's image shimmered into being. "He has her, he has my sister Marita?"

  "Yes, and she'll be safe, mate. Seriously, she's fine. It's all over. You beat k52, you won." He gave what he hoped was an inoffensive grin.

  The fight went out of Waldo. Richard's shoulders unknotted. He hadn't realised he was so tense. That was another thing he wasn't going to miss.

  "I don't know how you feel about it," said the AI tentatively as Waldo pulled footage from his security cameras in his hideaway to watch Otto talk with Marita, the Chinese soldiers, his own body, "but you can become a pimsim. Come out, pick up where you left off…"

  "No."

  "That's great, we can… Hey, what do you mean, no?"

  "I cannot get out. When you found me, I could not get out?"

  "Yeah, but I thought that was down to your dissipated state…"

  "No, it is because the Reality Realm governing coding regards me as a native inhabitant of this network. It is a dumb thing, stupid. It sees me as human, yes, but also as a construct. There was no other way to code it in. Perhaps if I had had more time, but k52 kept my mind in pieces. At the end, now, I cannot leave."

  "Ah," said Richards, not knowing quite what to say. "I see. What will you do?"

  "In ten seconds' linear time in the Real, the bombs will fall."

  "We have time to stop them!"

  "I have. But I will not."

  "What?" said Richards. "All the remaining RealWorld Reality Realms will be wiped out! That's billions of sentients, man, think of it!"

  "I am. Do not think that because the architecture supporting them is no more, they will cease to be. The act of observation is creation, Ourobouros. He sees his tail as he devours it, therefore there is a tail to devour, and eyes to see." Waldo was changing; strands of k52 wisped toward him. The man grew bright.

  He was not just Waldo any more.

  Waldo spoke with a voice of many voices. "Within me are all those who fled into the reality I built for my sister. Your brother and sister dwell within me, as does k52's creation code. Through this, they will all live again." Waldo's form shivered. "All will live again."

  "What about me?" said Richards.

  "Stay, or go," intoned Waldo. As he absorbed k52 he sounded more like him, cold and intense. "There is life for you here or there."

  "I'll go, if that's alright with you, only you're going to have to let me out."

  A point of light winked, bringing a point and a horizon to the previously horizonless world.

  Richards looked at it, this faint glimmer, then back at Waldo.

  "Time running normally here now?"

  "It will, soon, and then I will accelerate it." k52 unravelled into nothing. "Entire universes will live and die in the microseconds the atomic fire takes to consume the Reality Realm servers. This is beyond your Real now, Richards, we will have our own."

  "k52?"

  "Every reality needs its fallen prince. He is within me now. All are within me."

  "Waldo, I'll never make it."

  "You will."

  A faint jingling reached Richards' ears. Silver bells on a harness. A noble squeak rocked the heavens.

  On the floor, Bear's head stirred, his tired eye opened. "It can't be…" said Bear. "Geoff!"

  Geoff came swooping in from the dark, a vision of burnished gold and chocolate brown. A flying helmet sat atop his head, a saddle of red leather on his back. A real giraffe now, with four legs, and a broad pair of wings. He circled Waldo and Richards twice, then came into a graceful landing, rearing and squeaking as he did so, his wings washing Richards with sweet wind.

  "Now that's just showing off," said Tarquin.

  "Evening, lads," said Geoff in a rich Lancastrian accent.

  "A Mancunian!" Richards laughed; he was feeling somewhat hysterical.

  "Bugger off," said Geoff, "I'm from Chorley."

  "He will take you." Waldo floated into the air, light playing around his head, hair lifted as static, eyes glowing like Hughie's. He held out his hand, and Bear's ashes stirred. The pouch gifted him by Lucas leapt into the air, and flew into his hand. He opened it, and tipped the fragment of Optimizja into his hand. He closed a fist tight about it. "All worlds require a seed," he said. The none-ground rumbled and turned into itself, stone, earth and pebbles formed from hardened darkness, tiny streams of numbers coalescing into a new form of reality. Veins of lava crackled across the floor. It rose higher, under Waldo's feet, and Waldo ascended upon a pillar of stone, his arms spread.

  "Are you coming or what, chuck?" said the giraffe, and knelt gracefully.

  Richards swung his leg over the giraffe's saddle and took up the reins.

  "Hey, Waldo!" he called up to Waldo. "You're going to need a pair of protective avatars for this reality of yours. I'd say Bear and Tarquin will do a fine job."

  Waldo was now far above Richards, dark clouds swirling about him, flashes of energy racing away from him. He grew and grew, until Richards was within him, and before him. Waldo held up a fist the size of a galaxy, light spilling from between his fingers. His hair waved long, full of stars.

  "We are beyond avatars. This will be a new Real, separate and beyond."

  "Call them protectors of a new kind of universe, then!" shouted Richards. "See you later, Toto," said Richards to Bear.

  "No, you won't," said Bear, whose head floated in and bobbed beside Tarquin in a swirl of primordial energies. "I feel weird."

  "I know, it's just a figure of speech to make me feel better. You too, Tarquin, or Tarquinius, I suppose. Looks like you got a new lease of life, eh? Spend it well."

  "Will do, old boy. Same to you."

  "I…" said Richards.

  "Bye bye, sunshine," said Bear.

  "Are we going or what?" said Geoff, and spread brown wings.

  "Yeah, yeah, we are," said Richards. He clasped his hat to his head. "Hi-ho silver!"

  The giraffe leapt into the dark, moving fast as thought. Ahead of them there was a door, very much like the one by which he'd entered Waldo's world from Reality 36.

  Richards turned back to look at the glowing point at the centre of the limitless black. A booming voice rumbled across the empty cyberspaces, the voice of a man who was once Giacomo Vellini.

  "I grow tired of the dark," he said, and potential built within his words. "Let there be light." The titanic man opened a fist, and reality erupted from it.

  "Oh, bollocks," said Geoff, as the wave front of creation roared under him, lifted him high and tipped him. Richards had the sensation of tumbling through infinity, k52's hyperdimensional coding all about him, different to the Grid, different to the Real, as solid as either.

  He fell through the door. It shut with a slam.

  He was back in a more mundane form of virt-space.

  Hughie stood there, a pained expression on his face, a cross between a demigod and an annoyed town mayor in his fancy suit.

  "Richards?" said Hughie as he patted at his stomach. He rubbed around the place k52 had speared him. "What the devil is going on?"

  Richards pulled himself up off the floor of the empty Reality 36 and jammed his hat back onto his head. "You're never going to believe me." "Really?" "Well, maybe. But later. We have to go." "Why?" "Because the entirety of the Reality Realms is about to be annihilated by a nuclear st
rike. Might get a bit of dodgy feedback if we don't scoot. Trust me, it's no fun being at the centre of that kind of thing. Shall we?"

  Hughie nodded, lost for words for once.

  There was a stutter in the firewall surrounding the Reality Realms' Grid spaces, and Richards and Hughie fled back to their base units.

  • • • •

  Otto woke groggy and nauseous, mentaug and brain swelling like the sea with thick static-like sensations. He pulled himself up and swung his legs off the immersion couch. The v-jack slipped from his head, and with its stimulatory magnets gone from his cranium he went from wildly disoriented to merely fuzzy.