Creation Machine

by Andrew Bannister

  Jezerey pulled a face. ‘Listen to the girl. It wasn’t me rolling around howling the other day.’ She put down her carisak. ‘I’m worried about you. Okay. But I’m not going to get anywhere by sitting in this floating wildlife park, staring at you and snivelling.’ She palmed the contact that began the airlock sequence, and picked up the carisak. ‘I know some people who might be able to help. I’m going to ask around.’

  The airlock pinged. Jezerey slapped Fleare on the shoulder. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ Then she wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh, dear holy crap. What is that?’

  An appalling blast of foetid air had rolled out of the airlock. Fleare grinned. ‘I think it’s your ride.’

  ‘Fabulous.’ Jezerey hefted the carisak. ‘Well, as I said, I’ll be in touch, if I don’t asphyxiate.’ She walked into the airlock and turned round. ‘Take care of yourself, girl. The older I get, the less sure I am anyone else will do it for you.’

  Fleare raised her eyebrows, but by the time she had opened her mouth the airlock had ground round into the closed position, and she could hear the air cycle hissing.

  The air still smelled revolting. She pinched her nose and headed back to the habitat areas.

  Muz joined her at the oasis. ‘All okay?’

  ‘Yeah. Not luxurious, maybe.’ Fleare sat down on a log. She studied her hands. They looked a little wrinkled and a couple of her nails had ragged edges, she supposed from where she had clawed at the mud. The broad grey band sat neatly at the base of her middle finger, its weight tugging slightly. She fiddled with it for a moment. Then she came to a decision. She pulled. It baulked briefly at her knuckle before slipping off. She held it up, and took a breath.

  ‘Muz,’ she said slowly, ‘I think this might be important.’

  Privateer Orbiter, Catastrophe Curve

  THE OLD ORBITER trudged along the edge of the Catastrophe Curve, keeping more or less in the sensory shadow of the Trash Belt. Fleare was spending some time going through news sites, using a screener that the ship seemed to be able to synthesize out of vines and stuff in a blurry process her eyes couldn’t follow.

  She wasn’t enjoying it.

  It still seemed to be true. The gene match was confirmed. Now whole articles were springing up about Kelk’s background. She had known about the mil stuff, obviously – the columnists were calling him ‘part of the defeated communist insurgency’, apart from a couple who preferred ‘freedom fighter’ – but she hadn’t known about the rest of it. Some of it made her eyes widen.

  Kelk had been orphaned at the age of four. His parents had been killed or enslaved, but probably killed anyway, by the Fortunate during one of their forays into the outer Cordern. The infant Kelk had survived for seventeen days in the wreckage of their settlement by foraging in garbage dumps and burned-out houses.

  No wonder he never talked about it.

  There was more, including a lot of speculation about who had killed him. Most people seemed to be assuming generic gang activity. Tail End was keeping quiet in public, but behind the scenes they were obviously going nuts at Catastrophe, accusing them of state-sponsored terrorism. The border was locked down and some lawyers had been hired.

  Fleare was wanted for questioning. Jez wasn’t, which presumably meant she would have an uninterrupted journey home. Muz wasn’t mentioned.

  She glanced towards the edge of the oasis. ‘Muz? Have you seen this?’

  ‘Just a minute.’ Kelk’s grey ring lay on a flat-topped rock with Muz floating above it. He had formed a fat, slightly diffuse toroid, which every now and then extended a translucent frond to caress the ring. Sometimes patterns flickered across his surface. Fleare didn’t recognize them. She shook her head and waited.

  ‘There; done, for the moment.’ The last frond withdrew, and the toroid collapsed back into a shiny sphere with an almost audible snap. It bobbed up to Fleare’s face level. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Did you know all this stuff about Kelk?’ She gestured at the screener.

  The sphere made a show of floating over to the screen. ‘That? Well, yes, now, but that’s only because I’ve become a bit of a data sponge since . . . well, you know. But I didn’t know it at the time, which is more important.’

  Fleare nodded. ‘Neither did I. No wonder he joined up.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Muz?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Why did you join?’

  ‘Oh, right. One of the difficult ones.’ The sphere bonked gently against the screen, which flicked off. ‘Does being a dumb, easily influenced kid count? If it comes to that, why did you join?’

  She felt her face twist into a sour grin. ‘Shall we say it together?’

  ‘Okay. Count of three.’ They counted in unison. ‘One, two, three . . . Daddy.’

  Fleare pulled a face. ‘Yeah, Daddy. Or everything he stood for, and everything he did. I mean, I saw some of the things he was about, and I swore I was going to be about the opposite. It wasn’t just an average rebellion. I saw what the Heg’ would look like, if he had his way, and Soc O was the opposite.’ Then something occurred to her. ‘Muz? Do you ever laugh? I mean, you used to, before . . .’

  ‘Before I was irradiated to death? Right.’ The sphere flared blue-white and narrowed to a painfully bright point for a second. Fleare shielded her eyes; when she uncovered them the sphere was back. ‘Sorry. That was close to a tantrum. Laugh? I guess. I don’t think I remember.’ It bobbed over to where the ring lay on its rock. ‘Now, I found out some things. Ready?’

  She sat up straight. It seemed a safer subject. ‘Ready.’

  ‘Good. First, you were right. This is important, or at least I think it is.’ The sphere described a distracted orbit round the ring. ‘It’s data.’

  Fleare stood up, walked over to the rock and stared at the ring. ‘Some kind of storage?’

  The sphere waggled from side to side: head-shake. ‘No. It is data. How do I describe this? There is nothing about this ring, really nothing at all, that is not built around data. It’s the slightest possible physical structure, with bits of data sticking out from every molecule. Everywhere I look I find more.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fleare leaned in close and peered at the ring. ‘Have you seen anything like it before?’

  ‘No way. And I’m a geek, remember?’

  ‘Mmm. Does it mean anything?’

  ‘I guess. I don’t recognize the format for the moment, and it’s so dense there’s nowhere to start. Just a big mush.’

  Fleare went on staring. The ring was plain grey, but if she moved her head around so that the light fell on it differently she could see something slightly granular about the surface, like particles of smoke. If she strained her eyes, the smoke seemed to swirl, as if it was racing round the circumference of the ring.

  She blinked and looked away. ‘Okay,’ she said to Muz. ‘Don’t let me stop you.’

  ‘Oh. Sure.’ Muz floated down to the ring again and extended tendrils. She watched for a moment.

  The swirling had stopped. It didn’t start again.

  She shrugged to herself, stood up and wandered over to the edge of the little oasis. The top of a rocky outcrop had been carved into a wide, subtly curved stone couch. She settled on to it, stretching out. It was far more comfortable than it looked, and she was tired. She closed her eyes.

  As she drifted off, she realized that she knew far more about Kelk’s background than Muz’s. And when she thought about it, Muz still hadn’t told her why he’d joined up.

  She made a mental note to ask him again. Maybe she could make him laugh at the same time.

  Then she slept. When she awoke it was dark; the Orbiter imposed appropriate day and night cycles on each of its habitats. Her ears were full of the busy not-quite-silence made by a lot of very small creatures moving around carefully.

  She sat up, and shivered a little. The air was cool, and there was a hint of condensed dampness on the stone couch. Something had woken her, but she didn’t know what. For a few moments she felt as if she was sitti
ng in some kind of sensory-deprivation machine. Then light flickered at the edge of her vision. She turned towards it, lost it, and then found it again.

  It was an ephemeral, multicoloured glow. Even against the surrounding darkness it was still dim, and sometimes it faded almost completely. She couldn’t tell the size of the source; it could have been a fingernail in front of her face, or a city a hundred klicks away.

  She got up from the couch and felt her way towards the light. She quickly realized it was small and near, and following that came the thought that it was in the centre of the oasis. Things moved and crackled and crunched beneath her feet, and then she was there, looking down at the flat stone where Muz had examined the ring.

  The ring was still there. It was the source of the glow. She frowned through the darkness, looking around. ‘Muz?’

  ‘Here.’ The voice came from close to her right.

  ‘Have you seen this?’

  ‘Yes.’ Something settled on her shoulder. She jumped slightly, then reached up. Her hand passed through something granular, and softly yielding. So that’s what his cloud feels like, she thought. She let her hand fall to her side. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sensed, rather than felt, the cloud moving away. After a few seconds the outline of the ring blurred slightly like a light seen through fog, and she guessed that Muz had gathered around it. ‘It could be anything,’ he said. ‘A welcome, an alarm? No idea. It started when I cracked the data.’

  Fleare blinked. ‘What? You mean you know what’s on that thing?’

  ‘Oh yes. That’s why I woke you.’ There was a soft melodic beeping sound from the direction of the cloud and Fleare realized that this was what had roused her.

  She rubbed her eyes. ‘So what is it?’

  Muz shrank back into a sphere and settled on to her palm. He felt slightly warm to the touch, and she wondered if that was deliberate. When he spoke, he vibrated a little. ‘Well, it is still mostly mush, or stuff I can’t decipher that certainly looks like mush. But I think that’s deliberate. There’s a pattern to it, kind of fractal – and when you drill in, I mean really far down, there are packets of real data hiding in the pattern. Hidden almost in plain sight, only you have to be looking pretty hard.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘A lot.’ The sphere rolled around for a moment, as if it was trying to get comfortable. ‘Have you heard of a planet called Silthx?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Not surprised. It was never famous in the first place and it’s not much of a planet now. Used to be nice, though.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, most recently, the Fortunate. They invaded. There wasn’t much else known; they do a good job of suppressing news in their own sphere. Until now, anyway, because that’s part of what’s on here. A complete record, by the looks of it. And it’s huge, Fleare. They enslaved the entire, I mean the entire population of a medium-sized planet. Killed most of them within five years.’

  Fleare’s mouth felt dry. She cleared her throat and found enough moisture to speak. ‘How many?’

  ‘Dead? Looks like a round billion. It would be unprecedented, if it didn’t make you suspect that the Fortunate might have done it before.’

  ‘A billion people?’ Fleare felt numb. It was too big a number to process. She shook her head. ‘And after all that they kept a record of it?’

  ‘No, they didn’t. But somebody did. Someone pretty close to the top recorded this, off her, his or its own bat, and somehow got it out and stored it in a sim. The one Kelk was talking about?’

  ‘I remember.’ She looked towards her palm; the little sphere was a shadow in the dim light thrown by the glow from the ring. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Revenge? Money? Blackmail? Politics, likely enough. Reasons. They must have been good ones. It was an epic risk for whoever did it.’

  ‘Mm.’ Fleare stared at nothing for a moment. ‘You said most recently. Was there something before?’

  ‘Oh yes. More interesting, too. Remember what happened to Nipple?’

  ‘More interesting?’ She frowned. ‘Yeah, Nipple. Something hit it. Pump Trees and things.’ Lots of things, she thought. Oh, so many things. ‘So?’

  ‘Something similar happened to Silthx. About a millennium ago. Wiped out a nuke plant, caused about a hundred deaths straight off and a few thousand extra cancers. It put the locals off nuclear power. They never repaired the plant; they turned it into a memorial to the dead. Quite moving, really.’

  ‘I suppose. And I take it the Fortunate desecrated the memorial?’

  ‘Oh yes. In the worst way.’ The sphere sprang up from her hand, quickly enough to make her jump. At the same time, she registered that there had been no reaction against her palm. Muz was presumably not at home to classic mechanics. She made a note to ask him how he worked, one day.

  ‘They set up a forced labour camp,’ he said. ‘They made unprotected prisoners dig out the reactor, and the – thing, with their bare hands. It was still as radioactive as hell, of course. Average life expectancy was about four weeks. It took most of a year. They got through seven thousand bodies.’

  ‘Shit.’ Fleare said the word softly, through almost-closed teeth. ‘That’s all on that ring, is it?’

  ‘Yeah. Documentary, still images, some 2-D vid. Most of it has a stolen look, if you know what I mean. Unofficial.’

  She nodded. ‘I can see why it’s interesting.’

  ‘Oh, all that’s just back story. The really interesting part is that the Fortunate got their thing, whatever it was, and hauled it away to somewhere very secret. That fact is on here, although the location isn’t, but so is one more thing.’ Muz drifted slowly over to the ring, and hovered above it so that it lit him from below ‘A bit of the code on here suggests – only suggests, mind – that a few of the people from the death camp may still exist in possibly recoverable form, somewhere in one of the sims.’

  ‘Really? Why would the Fortunate save their own victims?’

  ‘I agree, it would be weird if they had, but I don’t think it was them. I don’t think they could unless they had some high-grade help and there’s no sign of that.’

  Fleare stood up. ‘Are you going to suggest that we go in and look for these people?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes.’ The sphere gave an embarrassed-looking wobble. ‘There’s a bit more, if it helps.’

  Fleare rolled her eyes. ‘Try me. It might.’

  ‘Okay. No promises, but I think we are only seeing a part of the story. There are two missing bits: what is the thing, and where did it end up?’

  Fleare nodded slowly. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If it turns out to be important, fair enough. But how would we know?’

  ‘Know what? If it’s important? Well, we don’t. But we can guess. Two things. First, whatever it was, that thing was important enough to dig out and take away. We know the Fortunate don’t waste time on trivia. Ergo, it wasn’t trivia. And second, back to Nipple again. These ancient fragments are big news. Creating a brand-new ecosystem that lasts fifty thousand years and counting? And that was probably just a fragment, not a complete artefact.’ He rose from the ring, floated back over to Fleare and settled in her outstretched palm. ‘It could be that the Fortunate think they’ve got their blood-soaked hands on something really lethal. And there’s just a small chance they’re right.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fleare fought the urge to close her hand around the sphere. Something about it made her want to heft it.

  Her left leg was hurting; had been hurting for a while, an insistent, gently sinister ache that had begun in her ankle and had made its way, day by day, up past her knee and as far as her hip. This morning the ghost of the same pain had appeared in her other leg.

  She had waited for a message from Jezerey but when it had come, just yesterday, it had been terse, a text-format message sent encrypted. That had seemed needless. ‘Sorry, girl, no luck yet. Still working on it. Take care and keep yourself safe.�
�� The yourself had been emphasized.

  She bit her lip, and wondered if her leg would still hurt when she was in the sim. ‘So,’ she said, ‘how do we go in?’

  Fragment recovered from Archive, unknown

  I don’t know how long I’ve been here. It’s one of a very long list of things I don’t know. Sometimes, when I’m not in a simulation, I try to make a list of the things I do know. I never get past the fact that I am a simulation myself. I assume I have a body somewhere.

  They – good question; I don’t know, it’s on the list – drop me into other simulations sometimes. I don’t know why they do, but I’m good at it. Not just being in a simulation; working out what I’m supposed to do. There’s always some kind of task. Sometimes I think they’re making me practise for something.

  Whatever. I guess it’s a way of killing time. And here comes another.

  . . . and with no transition at all there is a table beneath my elbows, an unused plate and cutlery between my forearms, an upright chair back behind me and a firm seat beneath me, and a voice says:

  ‘Rudi? Are you okay?’

  . . . so apparently I am Rudi. I turn towards – her – and nod and smile. I don’t want to speak yet but she seems okay with that and she smiles back and says:

  ‘I just thought you looked a bit weird for a second, that’s all.’

  . . . and she smiles again and rests a hand on my thigh and my – male, definitely male – body responds as if it has had plenty of practice, but, social obligations, I lay a hand on hers and use my face to signal ‘later’ and it works because she smiles and removes her hand.

  Food smells from lots of different dishes, and the sound of many quiet voices. A restaurant, then. A waitress pushes a floating tray up to us and starts filling plates. My meal is some sort of flesh, bluish-pink and raw-looking, with green sprigs arranged round it like a beard, and a little jug of sharp-smelling yellow sauce. She has the same, only smaller, and she pushes the jug away. The waitress says, ‘Enjoy your meal, Council Memberess Demaril and sir’ and shoves the tray away and I sense it is time to start speaking so I look up at her and smile.