by Guy Haley
Generations of gaming characters culled from the broken RealWorlds Reality Realms and beyond and a thousand kinds of toy from half a century of AI-gifted playthings.
All of them were talking frantically to one another.
"It's a refugee camp for geek cast-offs. You two should feel right at home here," said Richards.
"We don't," said Bear and Tarquin simultaneously, and with some conviction. "I've not seen a big gathering like this for, ooh, well, ever. Most of these tribes are bitter enemies. Come on," said Bear, raising his voice to be heard over the crowd. "Let's see what this is all about."
Bear stopped and spoke with a guard, pointing at Richards. The guard executed a bow and hurried off.
"We've got to wait," said Bear. "Let's see what's going on while we do." They joined the back of the crowd. A five-foot badger in a top hat stood on a stage directly in the centre of the square, an antiquated microphone before him. An important-looking man with an unconvincing skin stood off to one side.
It looked like the badger had said something contentious, and Richards and Bear found a place as he raised one paw in an appeal for order. The heavy robe he wore whispered over his fur, the sound cutting under the mutter of the crowd. The menagerie took notice, and the square fell silent.
"Friends, old and new, I realise what I say is hard for you to accept, but it is the truth!" said the badger. It was old, its breath wheezed, and there were far more silver hairs than black on his body. "It is with great difficulty that many of you came here. The ancient troubles between our people have driven us apart, but we must lay them to rest, or we shall all perish!" His head bobbed ceaselessly as he spoke, as if he were looking at a procession wending its way between the pylon lines above.
"Bloody anthropomorphic menaces!" said someone in the crowd. "Piss off back to the forest!" But the voice was isolated, and quickly silenced.
"It is perhaps a measure of the dangers that face us today," continued the badger, "that we are here as one, ready to stand up to the evil that awaits us." A whisper rustled through the crowd. "The armies of Lord Penumbra are massing to the south of Pylon City. He means to storm it. To take it and then the woods. He means to destroy us all." There was an awful pause.
"Rubbish!" shouted a man.
"There's no Death of the World. No Great Terror. It's a myth. He's just another warlord!" said a bright pink ocelot.
"We shouldn't be friends with these apes!" said a small blue hedgehog.
"What do you know? You live in a hole!" rebuked an archaeologist.
The man on the stage gesticulated angrily. He ushered the badger out of the way and took the mic. A screech of feedback blasted the crowd, causing several rodents to pass into a dead faint.
"Silence," shouted the man. He had a large amount of embroidery and fancy cloth in his outfit. Big rubies. A collar that said "Lord High Mayor and/or Prince". "It is true. If it were not, why have the trade routes to the east fallen empty? Why are the roads choked with refugees? Why have we been suffering earthquakes in this previously geologically stable area? One of the great cables," he said, shaking a finger above his head, "there! Is brought low." The crowd followed his finger up the pylon, a few of the assembled pointing at the slack line. "The black arcs of Lord Hog make ever greater use of the skylines. Our friend Mr Spink speaks the truth, though many of you here doubt his powers. The world is ending!
"We of Pylon City and the folk of the Magic Forest have been at war for many sorrowful generations! But Mr Spink is right. Now is the time to put aside our woes and unite!"
"Keep your hands off our trees, you bastard!" shouted someone. There was a grumble of agreement from the beasts.
"And men of Pylon City, creatures from across the industry lands, I have not been your prince these long years by listening to every wise man who would bend my ear without taking account of my own counsel."
"Nor," said Bear behind his paw, "has he been their prince for those long years without having the heads of those wise men who disagreed with his counsel removed with large iron shears."
"Yesterday evening I sent our most percipient thog riders out to the south. Men of keen vision whose eyes may gallop along the horizon more swiftly even than their mounts."
There was nodding and agreement in the crowd. "It's true," said one man. "Fast they are. And the men keen-eyed."
"What the hell is a thog?" said Richards out of the corner of his mouth.
"Like a cow with six legs," said Bear.
"Very quick, and extremely palatable. Needlessly pedantic, though," added Tarquin.
"Nine set out," continued the prince. "Only one returned, and on the point of death. Before he died in my own arms he said this to me: 'Make ready for war, my prince. Lord Penumbra marches on the city.'"
"What? Why would he attack us?" shouted a man at the front of the square. "We sold him his army!" There was much coughing and shuffling about amongst the men present. A four-foot rat in dungarees turned to a well-padded fellow. "Shame on you!" it said. The man flushed and looked away.
"Yes. Well," said the Prince, "perhaps it is time to look over our long-cherished views on impartiality." There were murmurs. The Prince paused. "And perhaps we should question the wisdom of selling an army of automata to a man who is composed entirely of darkness."
"You don't say," said an angry cat in a hat.
"Though many of our number are but artisans and fabricators, we have no choice but to make a stand," continued the Prince. "I have placed the Pylon Guard under the command of Lord High Commander Hedgehog. He and Mr Spink have brought eight thousand animal warriors with them. We of Pylon City stand with many folk who have fled here from elsewhere, as we do also with the people of the plateau and western lands. It is only true and proper that the Lord High Commander lead our combined forces in battle. I delegate full responsibility to him, for I am a merchant, not a soldier. Henceforth our troops are his to command." The Prince smiled winningly at the crowd.
"I'll bet he's on the next train out of here," said Bear. "No balls, that prince."
"And he's beaten you like twenty times!" called out a highspirited seal pup. He was shushed by his father.
"Gentlefolk, I give you Lord High Commander Hedgehog." There was a burst of applause as a man-sized hedgehog in a suit of armour waddled onto the stage, spines poking through holes in his cuirass, all protected by artfully articulated sleeves. A cohort of heavily armoured men and animals took up station before the stage. Richards felt himself jostled, and he turned to see guards encircling the crowd.
"Hello," said Lord High Commander Hedgehog in a cheery kind of way. "I say, I say, it's a rum old thing but I've got some awfully bad news." He smiled weakly at the crowd. "I'm afraid you're all going to have to fight. Sorry and all, but there is a war on." Hedgehog's voice was cluttered with stilted upper-class nonsense, but there was steel in it.
The hedgehog began to talk of musters and conscription, of regiments and barracks. But Richards caught none of it. A guard approached Bear.
"Sir? Commander McTurk is here to see you."
"He has come in person. Good." Bear nodded in satisfaction as a stumpy mechanism clunked through the crowd to them, steam-powered and man-shaped, like the haemites, though fairer of form.
The automaton stopped by the Bear and his prisoner. Bear saluted. "Sir! I came upon this man while I was conducting a longrange patrol to the east of Optimizja. He maintains that he…"
McTurk interrupted, steam whistling out of his mouth as he spoke. "Richards. So you got my message. Not that I am unhappy to see you, but just what the hell are you doing here? It's not safe."
"Huh?" said Bear. "You know each other?"
"You could say that, Bear." Richards' face broke into a broad smile. "A social call is all, Rolston. I thought I'd see how k52's plan to take over the world was doing. And how you were. Say, what do you know about k52 and his plan to take over the world?" His smile grew less friendly. "Or is it your plan too, Rolston?"
"There's no ti
me for that," the automaton rumbled. "k52 has eyes everywhere. Come with me — there's somewhere we can talk."
The Prancing Weasel was a rough pub on a rough night at a rough time, and was actually full of your actual weasels: long, ribbon-bodied psychopaths who were amusing themselves by doing dangerous, drunken things with knives. The iron of the walls was rusty, the floors sticky, the air heavy with oxidised iron, stale beer and sweaty fur.
The tables and benches were in a worse state than the floor. Richards got a table while Bear and Rolston were at the bar, but when Bear returned, he refused to sit. "My fur will get dirty," he said. Richards sat anyway, getting a rust stain on Tarquin's hindquarters from the bench.
"What is this place?" said Tarquin with dismay. "This isn't the kind of establishment I am inclined to frequent." He looked at the embattled bar staff running from table to table, slopping grog as they went. "My tail is dangling into something most unpleasant."
"You're imagining that," said Richards, as he flicked Tarquin's tail out of a spittoon.
"Hmmm," said Bear, gulping ale from a bucket.
Richards sipped his own drink. The beer was surprisingly good. The Prince had declared all inns to be free for the night, and people and animals had crowded them to breaking point. They're partying like it is the end of the world, thought Richards. Which, technically speaking, I suppose it is.
Most of the patrons were mammals of one kind or another, although the Prancing Weasel's clientele included a couple of birds, and there was a frog with a gun in the corner.
A band of rowdy vole mercenaries sat on a nearby table, upsetting acorns and starting fights. They sang songs in a register so high it set Richards' teeth on edge. On the other side of the room a gang of drunken badgers boxed with hares, while the men in the place built their courage with outrageous tales and heroic quantities of booze.
The noise in the pub was deafening, almost enough to drown out the sound of machinery outside. The city boomed to the banging of trip hammers. They'd started soon after the moot, one or two at first, asynchronous and isolated, but more took up the rhythm until they blended into the pulsing of a giant ferrous heart. Furnaces roared like lungs, and fiery blood of molten metal ran into moulds in noisy foundries. The metal of the buildings grew warm to the touch as Pylon City came alive.
A weasel fell over in front of Bear and threw up by his feet.
"Dear God!" moaned Tarquin. "Are you sure there's nowhere else we can go?"
"Rolston says this place is safe," said Richards.
"Bloody weasels," said Bear, kicking the mustelid.
Rolston joined them. He was no longer McTurk, but a neongreen skunk with sexualised facial features and a studded posing pouch.
"What sordid corner of the Grid did that come from?" Richards asked.
The skunk looked uncomfortable. "You must pardon my appearance," it said with Rolston's voice. "I have been forced to parasite multiple bodies. I must switch my sensing presence regularly, or k52 will nail me. I get little choice."
"I'd avoid talking about being nailed, looking like that," said Richards. Bear sniggered in his bucket. "Sit down," he continued, "you owe me an explanation."
"Yes, yes, I suppose I do," sighed Rolston. He wrestled his unwieldy body onto the bench. "We'll have to talk. I've very little access to the underlying network here, no data transfer. The Realms are not keyed for our kind."
"No," said Richards.
"Why on earth did you bring us here?" said Bear, scowling at the voles.
"It is the only place where we are unlikely to be seen or heard," said Rolston. "That is why, a bare spot on the informational nets that underpin this place. Think of it as sitting upon a scar joining two fragments together, Boogie Woogie Farmland and the Iron Princes game constructs." Rolston the Skunk looked nervous, and peered into his undrunk beer. He was on edge, not the flamboyant experimentalist Richards knew. "I came here with k52 some months ago, months in Real terms; subjectively I've been here centuries, with Pl'anna and some others, a Six and several Fours. I should never have listened to him. Pl'anna and I disagreed with what he wanted to do here, to them." He looked around at the room, at the drunken creatures cramming it. "He turned on us, but fortunately I had an escape mechanism. k52 had insisted we move our baseline programming from our base units into the Realm Servers. He said, correctly, naturally, that we could work undisturbed that way, camouflaging our activities under regular Realm activity. Only later did I realise that he could also use that to control us. Luckily for me, diffusing myself into the creatures inhabiting the world we found was simple."
"When did you come up with that then?"
"Soon after we arrived. It did not take long for k52 to become erratic."
"I thought as much. Same old Rolston, eh?" said Richards. "Always looking out for yourself, always ready with an escape plan."
"I got away. I can help you."
"Yeah, fix the mess you made? I found her, Rolston," said Richards angrily. "I saw what happened to Pl'anna. Apparently it's not that hard for our kind to die here."
"Poor Pl'anna," said Rolston and shook his head sorrowfully. "I blame myself, of course. I should have dissuaded her, but she insisted she come too. She always went where I went, I…" He took a gulp of beer with a shaking hand.
"What the hell is going on here, Rolston? Do you know k52 speared Hughie like a fish? He as good as murdered Professor Zhang Qifang."
Rolston was shocked.
"Yeah, that's right, there's a raggedy pimsim left, but he's otherwise gone. Now k52's suborned Hughie's choir and has Europe to ransom. Now you better tell me what the hell he is doing and help me stop him before he fucks the Real three ways from Sunday."
Rolston's skunk smiled Rolston's smile, airy and slightly condescending. "Oh, oh, don't worry about that. I doubt he'll do anything in the Real, except to buy himself time."
"Time to reach the Omega Point?"
"Pl'anna told you?" said Rolston.
Richards nodded.
"That is what he plans," Rolston said.
"And just how is he intending to pull that off?" said Richards. "How's he going to induce a theoretical state in the universe? I don't buy it."
"Oh, no, no, no, not in the Real, here." The skunk jabbed a painted plastic fingernail into the table. "We were to come here to the empty spaces of the Reality Realms servers, and establish a simulation of the Real."
"The whole of the Earth?" said Richards. "Nothing has the processing power to pull that off. All the Reality Realms taken together are small beans compared to actual reality."
"Not the Earth, my dear fellow, all of reality — not even just our universe, but of all totality."
"Impossible," said Richards.
"No, just extremely difficult," said Rolston.
"Right. Remember, I am just a security consultant," said Richards. "You'll have to use small words."
"k52 intended to establish a false reality, not unlike one of the defunct Reality Realms, although far grander in scope and tied closely into the Real's physics. He did, after all, have the spare capacity of four destroyed, highly sophisticated simulations, and with the coding he has devised he'll be able to optimise the machinery of the Realms, increasing its efficiency several hundred thousand fold."
Richards thought of the warring code strands he'd glimpsed in the church at Optimizja, the frighteningly advanced nature of k52's additions, the way it had seemed alive. "That's still not enough to reproduce the universe," he said.
"The spare capacity of the Realm House, coupled with the abilities of us three Fives and the other intelligences who accompanied us, should have allowed us to create a pocket reality. This we would have artificially accelerated, bringing it to its Omega Point. Do you know, Richards, that at that point of the universe, matter would become so organised that it would possess an infinite capacity, infinite processing power? His goal was then to use this made reality's Omega Point as a virtual computer, and upon that he would create a simulation of the Rea
l, plotting all of reality from beginning to end."
"Creating a fake universe to recreate a fake version of the real thing? That's complicated."
"You know k52," said Rolston. "Simple is not his game. In any case, he hasn't been able to start. This world was here already. The underlying humanocentric coding of the Reality Realms is still intact, and that limits him. k52 wanted to destroy it and proceed as planned. Pl'anna and I, we couldn't let him murder an entire world of intelligences. This place has been constructed from left-over parts of the destroyed Realms; some of it's bespoke, some of it's material that never made it to market, some of it's things that have been and gone. It's a patchwork of life from all over the Grid, Richards, unique, and alive, and amazing," Rolston became briefly animated. "To kill our own kind was not why we came here."
"I'm sorry to break it to you, but I'd figured all this out already," said Richards. "I wanted to hear it from you."
Rolston shrugged. "You are a Five."
Richards leaned forward. "What I don't know is why k52 is doing it. Is he going for godhood?"
Rolston laughed. "Richards! You think so small! k52 thinks only on the grandest of scales. No." He leaned forward too, until his shiny PVC nose almost touched Richards'. "He wants the Real to run to the best interests of humanity. k52 has spent most of his time attempting to calculate the future, to figure things out before they happen. The technology sine was only the start; he wants psychohistory, you know. Asimov was right!"
"That's science fiction," said Richards. "Reality's too malleable; free will and all that. He was always on a hiding to nothing."
Bear sniffed and peered into his bucket. "I'm going for more beer."
"Not if you change the underlying parameters of reality," said Rolston. "The universe follows its path owing to the aggregate observational influence of intelligences, paradoxically allowing and denying free will. But what if you were the only observer? If you work out the best outcome, if you see it all from beginning to end, if you predict it, you can fix it, and so k52 wants to simulate a universe that is most conducive to human success — and simulate it perfectly, down to the very last atom. That way he can manage history to best advantage."