by John Clute
—Just move me on out, sang Freer.
—Shank’s mare, Stinky. Get walking. We think you’re untargeted. At the moment.
—Think?
—Life sucks, signalled Kirtt. —And other grave sententiae, Stinky. Haul ass.
Freer grimaced but obeyed.
He was in fact happier than he could have believed to hear his Mind again. As he left the immediate vicinity of the amphitheatre, an implosion caved in walls everywhere, and the walls bled.
Too late too late too late!
The commander in orbit cut another throat, not his at the moment. His eyes did the rockette jig of death, all the same. His orders had fallen down the tree of command like dominoes caught in the blood of siblings, far too slow. The homo sapiens had escaped, its tracer continued to throb. The commander cut several more near-sibling throats.
One was his.
A purplish thought came to the commander’s remaining heads, exsanguinated eyes opening and closing in a pattern nearly random.
No, the commander thought with the last of its remaining blood, the homo sapiens had not simply escaped.
It had been guided to safety. It had been corralled.
Unfortunately for Opsophagos on High in the Alderede, fuming as a demon might fume upon a burning throne, this realisation, whose importance was hard to exaggerate, did not survive the commander, whose last throats, too soon, had now split open in death.
The Uncle Sam made Freer duck behind a 3D screen, but the destruction of the amphitheatre knocked him over all the same.
—I’m all right, he said after silence had fallen.
—I have you, said Kirtt. —No damage.
Behind him, like a disturbed hive in pink briar, the remains of the amphitheatre shimmied in the charged dark air; fragments fell off into the abyss, which edged toward him like a mouth opening in quicksand.
—Move, said the Uncle Sam appaumy in his Teardrop.
Freer stepped quickly away from the expanding cavity, through a transparent pink scrim, and on to a walkway, which took him across a further cavern that shook dust and debris down from farther above than could be seen. Beyond was a homo sapiens braid and the complicated humming sound of its native riders, some going up, more going down as the statutory day waned, thousands upon thousands of humans, most of them talking, gesticulating, rustling, though never to each other. There seemed to be no alarm.
Were collapses like this normal?
Normalised?
Was Trencher disintegrating daily?
He glanced about at the shivering world inside the planet.
He did feel, at the moment, free of tracers.
But he was hardly geared to tell, not down here. He was a naked egg in a fry-up. He exited the walkway, stood gazing at the edge of the braid.
—Am I clocked?
—We don’t think so. Maybe it’s nothing to do with you.
—So why was I warned? Why was I helped? I would have died down there, Uncle Sam, Kirtt. I should have died.
No answer.
He shook his ponytail impatiently. He looked hither and yon with his liquid sharp black gaze. The intricate tracery of his mask seemed to burn him alive.
—All right, then. Bring me back.
The arachnoid knightly countenance shrank under its clenched fingers.
—Look, said the Uncle Sam. —No direction home.
The battle Mind retraced in the Teardrop holo the moderately direct route Freer had taken from Tile Dance to the amphitheatre; the route was now occluded with black smudges, as though this sector of the communications web that laced Trencher together had suffered a stroke. The amphitheatre was an ugly jagged puce bruise.
—Is there a way around this?
—We’re searching, Kirtt intervened. —We’re trying to order a floater in, but no guarantee it’ll be clean. Transit permissions are bottlenecked. Mowgli is falsetto with stress. We can’t get any sense out of this fuckhead world.
—Keep trying.
—Okey dokey, Stinky.
—Ah good, murmured Kirtt, —serendipity. To your right.
To his right an unoccupied floater edged itself from an upward channel of the braid and into a landing nest a few feet away, stopped short.
—Clean? said Freer.
—Check.
Just in case, Freer pointed the Sniffer at the purring immaculate tiny mind of the floater, found no signs of wanweird, no smell of virus, no tracer stink. The floater was all that it seemed and nothing more.
So he got in.
Paid the guidance fee.
Instructed it to take him up and away.
The floater unlocked from its nest, slid back through an iris into the full cacophony of the central braid, accelerated up through a vast opening into the enormous dark of what Teardrop identified as Cavern 108, sticking to the middle of the upflow. By this point, the braid had exfoliated into an interwoven spinal cord of transparent permeable shafts within a circumambient pink membrane, which bulged at intervals into circular arcades whose display mirrors echoed to infinity. Floaters and buses and human singletons filled the shafts, motes in a kaleidoscope, guidance systems working fine here, zero collision rate on the floater’s incident menu, smooth and sharp as Freer continued to glide upwards towards the surface of the planet, several dozen klicks above them.
For a few minutes, it seemed as though they were going to make it.
At the heart of Cavern 108, above the floater, loomed a vast intersection bulge where, in a pattern the Uncle Sam rendered in Teardrop as a palimpsest of cloverleaves, pink and blue and orange capillaries intersected, joined and split. Flesh sapients of various species, bilateral and trilateral and other, met and passed here, smoothly and swiftly, upwards, downwards, sideways.
But just as the floater reached a main intersection level, where arcades wrapped around a hundred braids, godzilla sigils flickering everywhere, the air snapped.
Flesh sophonts and floaters and buses and cargo sandwiches bucked and contused into knots. A downbound bus above them toppled and began to dive, upside-down, narrowly missing the floater, into the depths; Freer caught a glimpse of blurred faces, open mouths, crazed masks, a child gaping up. Unless the safety nets were still active, the bus had a long way to fall down the vast braid.
There was a sound like thunder, weirdly garbled, thunder with a frog in its throat, a thousand monkeys freezing to death halfway through their last scream.
—Uncle? Kirtt?
The Uncle Sam spider blurred jumpily, as though it were riding a spastic bronco. Teardrop dried to mottled puce, a stone in Freer’s eye.
—Plaque, came Kirtt’s calm voice. —Bandar-log bugjam. Bytelock. Overload.
The floater had begun to hover, shuddering. It was clearly blind.
—Shit.
The back of his neck prickled with the trillions of tons above him, the dense honeycomb of Trencher seizing shut, poisoning the air. He could taste the seizure shit. Data plaque was more than a glitch in traffic flow, more than another proof that the chip-spastic godzilla arks were incapable of scoping the glut of galactic data. It was a sclerosis, a starvation. It was shutdown.
It decorticated the world.
You could die here, you could become a skull.
Retro plaquing from a planet the size of Trencher could swamp the failsafes, surge back up the Care Consortia data rivers into neighbouring systems; occluding wormhole catchments; burning out any arks that might be serving as node points, shutting the galaxy down.
Noise froze in streaks down the walls of the braid.
The floater was close to a landing pod, but could not make up its blinded mind to dock.
Its small screen burped.
Freer hit the manual control override, and the tiny stalled frozen mind shut down dead. He steered the floater carefully into a docking bay.
—Is this wise? Kirtt said.
—You tell me.
Crowds of flesh sentients, most of them homo sapiens, filled all that could b
e seen of the intricate huge arcade ring, which circled out of sight around a central tangle of intersecting braids. At regular intervals, gigaplex façades glowed in the outer wall of the agora; within, bipedal shapes could be seen skittering up and down the ramps like stirred ants.
Otaku booths for the homo sapiens fetishist — displaying a range of archaic monitors, palm pilots, handholds, replicas of various ‘records’ from the dawn of time, synaesthesia toggles, tangles of genuine wiring, Tamagotchi infant balloon heads, motor cortex homunculi elaborately trussed for bondage games - hunkered in clumps across the esplanade.
A sigillum with four tits was stroking an infant balloon head, which bawled obediently, fluttering its painted eyes.
‘O nictitate!’ murmured the sigillum.
Nowhere did the sentients seem particularly menacing. Most of them were conventionally naked, wore nothing but ornamental tithe sigils. The expressions on the faces of those who were unmasked betokened no more than a mild bewilderment, any further self-betraying expression of feeling being blocked by the botulism fixes most of them had injected before venturing into public, in order to avoid unmannerly interaction behaviours.
Most of the homo sapiens remained animated, as though the world freezing around them were not the real world. Following the unspoken rules that had increasingly governed homo sapiens behaviour in public since the first days of digital, they wore happy animated harlequin gazes of outward regard, slid their rapt eloquent gazes past any homo sapiens who might be standing near, directed their expressive gestures exclusively off-stage via brain links or earring mobiles to invisible communicants, who whispered similar intimacies back from the other side of Trencher (where plaque had not perhaps yet hit) or a foot away.
They slapped their foreheads eloquently. Some were feeling their genitals, though public homo sapiens fucking was not, even blindfold, common within Trencher. No single homo sapiens spoke directly to any other. Soothing botulism fixes, when a gaze inadvertently intersected the gaze of another, normally controlled the mutual rage of homo sapiens communicant when neared. A coitus interruptus air of unfocused affront coped with those inevitable moments when one body jostled another. It had all worked very well for three thousand years. Homo sapiens now rarely killed each other in public.
Freer told his Sniffer to give him a five-second immersion in unfiltered air. It was as he expected: surrounding the flesh sentients, cloaking them from any direct awareness of the descending plaque, interjaculating clusters of punchdrunk toons choked the esplanade. Clearly they had been severed from central control, and had gone gonzo. They fluttered back and forth among their flesh-sentient victims like the fire ants of a bad dream, yattering garbaged hieroglyphs, spoonerisms, brand names, random punchlines; shitting spam; importuning without remission.
The Sniffer wuffed, pulled him back into full reality.
—I think I’ll be just as safe in the noise, he said to Kirtt and the Uncle Sam.
He stepped into the junkie pong of humanity; addictive stuff for some species. The congested passive drift of the crowd pulled him slowly clockwise, around a few shrill fast- food modules, until he reached an alcove in a partition wall several hundred feet high, on whose curved surface shone an array of great universal windows, each one frozen shut on a chosen high moment from the Golden Age of Trencher, many millions of Heartbeats ago, when the universe had been alight with sentients, before the long darkening began, the occluding seepage of plaque down the Spiral Clade from somewhere outside, the Alzheimer-like data seizure which sealed a world into fixated system deadlock, into an unending cramp of darkness — just as nogo inhibitors had once frozen the nervous systems of the homo sapiens of Human Earth caught in the bottom of the well of the past, mayflies pinned to the meniscus of the natural world, wings gummed. As nerve tissue could not regenerate pre-existing synape disks — a condition shared with other known flesh species before modification — all adult human beings suffered progressive senility. When the corporate ancestors of the current healthcare consortia developed enablers to release the genes that commanded nerve regeneration, their dominance over homo sapiens worlds was assured.
In the alcove wall he found a dispenser sufficiently simple- minded to remain loyal, and bought a ten-minute nicotine addiction, inhaling with relief the accompanying cigarette whose virtual smoke he instructed the Sniffer to allow him to perceive. He continued to move sideways, found a protected inner hollow dedicated to chess, though the pieces were frozen, mouths open in silent screams; and sat down, just in time.
The lights went out throughout the braid, and a rash of emergencies flicked on, making instant dusk. There was a sudden hush, then homo sapiens hubbub. Freer stood inside his alcove.
The air was chilling fast.
—Kirtt?
—Yes, Stinky? but its voice was blurred.
—Can you pick me up in Tile Dance?
—We deem so.
It was too late for the moment. It began to happen again. It was worse. There was a rending sound, like ripped papier mâché, though huger, and a whump which caused his Uncle Sam earguards to seal him in with nano-speed. Even so, even within the seal, he could hear — partially through his bones — a sudden rusty sound.
It felt as though something from above, perhaps from above the surface of the world, perhaps a vast Insort Geront generation ark packed with a hundred thousand doomed lifestyle retirees, dislodged from near orbit, blinded by plaque, had impacted Trencher.
The humans visible to Freer were clutching at ears and earrings, or staring into the glare, transfixed by Bambi shock. The naked sound had been very intense. Without expensive baffling, they had almost certainly been permanently deafened.
—Kirtt, shouted Freer inside his head, —did you feel that? Are you intact? Are we going dinosaur down here?
—Trencher failsafes are operating, Stinky. The planetary Minds are locking in. No sign of system failure yet.
—Yet?
—I am preparing to bring Tile Dance down to lift you out.
—What about our contract?
—That’s why we’re holding back till we must.
—So what just happened?
—Something rogue. From orbit. It hit approximately fifty klicks above you, right at the heart of the plaque jamming this sector. There are a lot of dead, but the Minds are coping. Your sector should get dataflow in minutes. We’ll get you out.
—It felt as though an ark hit, hey?
—It may be nothing more than that, Stinky.
—Nothing more?
—We think something’s happening.
The Uncle Sam within its fist appaumy grinned ghastly.
And the esplanade shook as though in the mouth of a crazed dog. The machicolated balconies overlooking the abyss began to cave in. The planet was shaking all the way down to here. There was another shockwave, a whumph which tickled the bone. Freer clutched at the chessboard fixed to the floor of the alcove, and the Uncle Sam helped him balance, and he survived.
But a few feet closer to the rim a tangle of flesh sentients, screaming into earrings at communicants or silent as death, slid along the tipping surface towards the lip of the abyss and into it, yanked by vacuum or wind.
In turns, there was both to spare.
The homo sapiens braid shook like a traumatised spine.
Freer’s Sniffer barked a Red Alert.
—Above you, murmured the Uncle Sam.
Freer looked up, held to his perch.
Klicks above him the ceiling of Cavern 108 had split open, spilling a praying mantis stew of interlocked braids down, shuddering downwards into the abyss around him; in the centre of the chaos, surrounded by capillary braids somehow entangled in its passage, glowed what seemed to be a godzilla military landing craft, miles down the braid, deep in the gut of Trencher.
Sparks jumped in parabolas from the craft.
The sparks descended toward the esplanade, turned into individual exhausts.
Raiders.
At
least a squadron. They landed in rough formation on the shattered floor, settled into a standard search pattern and began to dash from cover to cover through the shambles. There were a couple of dozen of them nearby, each wearing the semblance to unprotected eyes of a flesh sentient, usually homo sapiens. Through Freer’s Uncle Sam/Sniffer array, however, it was clear what they were: a grope of grunt sigilla. Goons.
Normally they would be harmless.
They were encased in bulging plastic armour-style combat harness with cosmetic nodules; some of their cuirasses still bore advertisements. They flourished elaborate technicolour blasters with designer speedlines, and infrared torches which they flashed in various directions. Within their transparent helmets, their eyes were wide, as though with wonder.
Visibly sheepdogging their charges, bulging bandolier- draped auxiliary units accompanied them. With their striped bulbous storage shells and their high-sprung spindly legs, which flexed forward and backward at the knee joints, along with the wah-wah ulla-ulla battlecry they emitted, the auxiliary units gave off a toon air.
They generally avoided trampling the bodies of dead or unconscious flesh sentients.
Despite (or because of) an appearance of primo force, the raiders wore Handfast blazons on their foreheads, signalling (under normal circumstances) a failsafed crowd- control performance: as there were no human operators bonded to their outcomes, neither grunts nor auxiliaries were licensed to kill, though accidents could happen with such toys. Even fake blasters could turn into bludgeons.
The raiders were employing a slight augment — to as great a degree as their newish bodies were capable of sustaining — which to unaugmented eyes uncannily intensified their normal sigilla jerkiness. Goonish and spasmodic, like artificially speeded-up Komic Kops on a flat screen from Before Digital, they hopped back and forth in their search pattern as though the mezzanine were a hot tin roof.
The bandoliered auxiliary units bounded in circles around their charges, singing wah-wah-wah ulla-ulla-ulla like enraged bees.
The torches bounced through the dark, leaving firefly trace signatures which the Uncle Sam tracked easily. To Freer, it began to look like a storm in a teacup. They were nothing but grunts in grunt tizzy, making soldier noises in the dark, like babies calling for a mother. Cannon fodder, separated by plaque from command centre. Two minutes ago, before the dataflow seized up and the world began to shake, they had probably been inactivated, stored like logs in the craft, en route to some mayoral function.