Fleare nodded to herself. No shit, she thought. The bastard must be really pissed at me.
Jez was still speaking. ‘Oh, and one more thing? There’s a trace on the clipper. I’ll know where you are. So if you do anything really stupid, at least one person will be laughing.’ Jez paused again. ‘Look, you know what I mean. I’m no good at being serious. Take care of yourself, and think twice before you talk to anyone. Really, Fleare, anyone at all. Bye.’
The audio cut out. Fleare sat down on one of the non-projecting couches and stared at nothing for a while. When she looked up Muz was back. He was hanging in the air in front of her, swaying slightly from side to side. She frowned. ‘Why are you swinging?’
‘Huh? I didn’t realize I was. Distracted, I guess. What did Jez say?’
Fleare thought quickly. ‘She apologized for the furniture.’
‘Only that?’
She flashed him a sour grin. ‘That, and girl talk.’ She braced herself against the pain that was to come and stood up; her legs twinged. It seemed a little worse. ‘So, what’s this holiday resort planet called?’
‘The one where everyone’s gathering? Traspise.’
‘Yeah. Right. There. Let’s go.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know! To get in the way, I guess.’ She looked at him seriously. ‘You don’t have to come.’
‘I am coming, though.’
She nodded. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome. Leaving in ten minutes.’ He floated off.
Fleare waited until he was out of sight, and then sat down again carefully. She was trying to work out why she had included Muz in the category of ‘everybody’ that Jez thought she shouldn’t talk to. She was still trying without success when the clipper jumped slightly and the couch adjusted itself subtly around her. They were off.
She knew where. She had no idea what, but she was now a hundred per cent certain about why.
Recovered personality
The view is astonishing. I turn to the guy in the robes, who is apparently called Theo. He seems to think that’s funny, for some reason. ‘How high are we, did you say?’
‘Above the plains? Two kilometres.’
Two kilometres. Not two real kilometres, of course. I haven’t got a body to be real with, and neither, I am finding out, has Theo. When I said he was like me I had no idea how accurate I was.
We materialized, although that is utterly the wrong word, in something that feels like a cross between an observation platform, a spaceship bridge and the waiting room of a brothel. It’s a circular room with a narrow band of windows, which I think really are windows rather than screens, round the edge. The windows look out over a broad sweep of icy, misty desert which laps at the base of the mountain range we seem to be at the top of.
It is stunning. It’s also a very long way down. The primitive part of me that hasn’t understood this whole simulation business hopes the windows are made of something really strong.
I sit back on the fur-covered couch – that’s the brothel bit – and ask, ‘What happened?’
It’s a broad-brush kind of a question but Theo understands. ‘I shut down the sim.’ He shrugs, and waits.
Some people make you want to shudder. Simulation; the name is deceptive. Something artificial, something pretend. But that’s not right. Sims started out like that, but they didn’t stay like that. Processing power, speed, smart coding, all came together to the point where the intricacy of a life within a sim began to approach that of a life in the real world. And one day, inevitably, the curves crossed.
That was the day sim development was made illegal, but lots of things are illegal. It’s great for profit margins. So no one can be quite sure how much further things have gone, but while there is plenty of cash to build big server farms the simple answer will be further.
So shutting down a sim is the same as genocide, only mostly a lot quicker.
My face gives me away. Theo looks at me and shakes his head. ‘Please,’ he says. ‘I set the thing up. Don’t you think I can shut it down? And I kept the record. I could start it up again any time I liked.’
‘You set it up?’ This is getting beyond me. ‘Why?’
‘Would you believe, because I was bored? Anyway, I needed a place to stay.’
I raise my eyebrows and gesture round at the circular bachelor pad. He laughs. ‘This isn’t exactly mine. It more sort of is me.’
Now it’s my turn to shake my head. He looks at me and grins. ‘Okay, I’ll explain.’ He sits down on the furry couch a little way round from me, looks thoughtful for a moment, and then waves his hand at the floor in front of him. A section of it bulges upwards and grows into a low table covered in bottles and flasks and a big, ornate water pipe with two mouthpieces. He picks one up and holds it out towards me. ‘Smoke?’
I hesitate, and he waggles the mouthpiece. Coils of bluish smoke wisp out. ‘Go on. It’s probably good for you.’ He frowns slightly. ‘I’m sure I read that somewhere.’
I take the pipe. ‘Bad for you,’ I say. ‘It’s bad for you. Where have you been for the last fifty thousand years?’
‘Exactly! That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’ He picks up the other mouthpiece, sits back, takes a long pull that makes the water pipe bubble and talks through a stream of thick, sweet-smelling smoke. ‘Although it’s a bit more than fifty thousand years. I’m sort of original, you see.’ He looks at me, then down at his robes, and shakes his head. ‘Not the way you’re thinking, although I might be that as well. I meant more as in – origin.’ I must still look blank. He blows more smoke and adds: ‘You know? Like beginning?’
It feels as if a void the size of a gravity well has opened beneath me. I swallow. ‘Go on,’ I say.
He is silent for a moment. Then he looks straight at me. ‘I know what happened to you. You were born on Silthx. Your family were imprisoned by the Fortunate after the invasion. You were sent to a labour camp. You excavated – something.’ More smoke. He seems to need it. ‘Did anyone ever tell you what it was?’
‘Not exactly. Some kind of old artefact. Maybe powerful. Why?’
‘Powerful isn’t the half of it.’ He shakes his head. ‘What you, what they found was something very, very old, but that doesn’t matter because it’s pretty well immortal. It’s old enough to remember the creation of the Spin.’ He sighs. ‘To have taken part in it, in fact.’
Now it’s my turn to reach for a smoke. I don’t know if it will work, but I feel I need something. The smoke is thick and sweet, with a sharp sensation on my tongue like pins and needles. It is harsh on my palate. I cough, but it feels good. My voice is husky, though. So’s my brain, right now. ‘Creation? But that was, what . . .’
I trail off, and he nods again. ‘About a quarter of a million years ago. Yeah. I remember.’
‘You remember?’
‘Yes. I was there too.’ He falls silent. For a while so do I, but there’s something I want to ask. ‘You know what happened to me,’ I said. ‘What about . . . other people?’
‘By other people, do you mean your family?’
I nod.
‘All dead. I’m sorry.’
It shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, what am I? Not exactly alive. But still I feel my eyes stinging. I can see he has noticed. I don’t want him to. I look away. ‘So, this creation machine thing.’
‘Yes.’ He laughs quietly, although I’m not sure why. ‘This Creation Machine, then, to give it a name. It’s just a piece of construction equipment, really. But when you think that it was constructing planetary systems, you can understand the sort of forces it could throw about. Possibly still could, if it wanted to. If it was able to.’
I stare into nothing for a moment. I am imagining this simple white ovoid, hanging in space, balancing the forces of – what? White fire and blue fire and angry, dirty red fire, and planets forming and crashing.
I realize that my heart is pounding. I breathe deeply. ‘And the Fortunate have got it.’
>
‘Yes.’
‘Can they use it?’
He shakes his head slightly. ‘Not yet. Not on their own. It’s not the kind of thing you just use. It can’t be coerced.’
‘That’s a relief.’ Then the words sink in. ‘What do you mean, not yet?’
‘It might be tricked. Deceived. And news has leaked out. People know they’ve got it, including some clever people. It’s not a stable situation.’ He stands up. ‘You’re part of the news. You’re a witness. That’s why you were rescued and dropped into a supporting role in an obscure sim. Someone in the Fortunate wanted a record, and so did I. So I helped.’
The fog in my brain is getting worse. I put down the mouthpiece and stand up, relieved to find that I can remain upright. Walking works too, so I stroll over to those windows and look out and, inevitably, down. There’s a lot of down to look at. At the edge of my vision, smeared and blurred by mist, there are plains. Above them, foothills, with buildings growing out of them in rising circles. Then the angle of the windows restricts the view, but we are obviously in some sort of tower.
I stare down until I feel I have mastered the distance. Then I turn back to Theo, who is waiting with an amused expression lifting the corners of his beard. ‘So who are you, and why do you give a shit?’
The beard twists some more. ‘I deserved that. Sorry. I’ve spent a quarter of a million years making my own entertainment. I think I’ve forgotten about people.’ He walks over to join me. ‘This,’ and he gestures around at the view, ‘is a representation of a planet, a moon really, called Obel. No one’s ever heard of it.’ He looks at me enquiringly.
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ I say obediently.
‘Thank you.’ He turns back to the window and sighs. ‘Back when I had a body I was, how can I put this, involved in the construction phase – the creation – too. And when it was all done I decided to stay. I built this place, right on the edge of things.’
‘You built this tower thing?’
He shakes his head. ‘No. I built this place. All of it. The moon, the plains, everything. I made it look like a dying ecosystem, right from the beginning.’ He grins. ‘Only the most interesting people come to the end of a world, you know. I had a lot of great company. Some weird stuff, of course.’ He stares into nothing for a moment, and I have the feeling of intruding on memories. Then he seems to shake himself. ‘One of the weirder sets of inhabitants was a bunch of pretend monks, and one day they brought a prisoner.’ He looks at me sideways. ‘You met her, by a beach.’
He means the young woman with the old eyes, of course. ‘Her? You saw that?’
He tilts a hand from side to side. ‘Not so much saw. A part of me was there.’
I frown at him. ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘You said you’d been in the other sim for a long time.’
He grins. ‘I had. And on the beach, for a while. And here, too, a small part of me, keeping the fires burning.’ He looks around and sighs a little. ‘Home sweet home. Part of me has always been here. Built in, you might say. That’s what I meant when I said it was me.’ He breaks off and fiddles with the pipe for a moment. ‘She’s in trouble. The woman you met on the beach. Not that it’s your problem.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ I say it a little angrily, on the off-chance that helps it to be true. The anger gives me momentum. ‘So, where are we going with this?’
He looks surprised. ‘Well, first we need to dump some information back into reality. It’s what people think will be encoded on that chip, and we needn’t make their lives difficult by telling them they’re wrong. Whatever; we’ll make the news of Silthx, the Creation Machine, everything, public. It seems only fair. I don’t want to try to pick winners. Then I’m going to the Cordern, before those Fortunate maniacs do something regrettable.’ He pauses, and adds, ‘Or even if they do. Remember I said things had leaked out? Vultures are gathering. There’s a fleet, or rather several fleets, gathering around the edge of the Cordern, and they’re all tooled up and trembling to shoot. Each other, partly, but I wouldn’t like to be the Fortunate.’
‘And me?’ The anger is lasting quite well.
‘Yes, well. Your options are getting thin too.’ He collapses back into the couch. It makes a fuff noise. ‘I’m sorry to be so blunt – but when I go, when I leave this place, it ends. This sim, and the real bit. I’m what animates it.’ His hands sweep across nothing, palms flat. ‘Finito. Cloud of dust, puff of smoke, gone. No more moon. So you can’t stay here.’
‘So where can I go?’ The answer is beginning to come into focus, and he confirms it. ‘Well, not backwards,’ he says. ‘That sim is gone, and the bit on the beach was only temporary. Forwards, I guess.’
I put the pipe down, and reach out for the first glass that comes my way. The nearest bottle opens easily, and pouring is second nature. I drink.
When my vision has cleared I put the empty glass down hard, making the table rattle. ‘That means going with you, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’ He reaches out a hand. ‘For what it’s worth, I have the best of motives.’
I look down at the hand, and then up at his face. ‘Yeah, right,’ I say.
‘No, really.’ He looks at me, and for the first time I see something vulnerable. ‘What you call the Creation Machine? It’s a friend of mine.’
‘What about me? What happens if I take your hand?’
‘To you? Whatever you want, in a way. Whatever you want badly enough.’ He looks away. ‘You can’t maintain your current state for ever. Outside the framework of a sim, you’re a bundle of code hanging together by itself. You can do it for a while, but in the end you’ll probably start to disperse. How long that takes is up to you.’
I nod. ‘So, I stay here and get obliterated. I go with you and dissolve. Can I find another sim?’
‘Yeah, if you really want. But you’ll always be a bit of a ghost. Or worse, some kind of virus.’ He looks up at me again. ‘You’re better than that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh, I know you better than you know yourself.’ He should sound smug, but somehow he doesn’t. I search his face, and he sighs. ‘I know your name, for example. Shall I say it?’
I feel as though time has stopped. Ghost, he said. Well, that’s over as of now. I nod again, just once, and he says it.
I look at him for a while longer, while the memories dance in my head. The ones they gave me back after the beach, and all the others that they didn’t. They sing a song like a finger round a wet glass. As my sight starts to blur I reach out and take his hand, and reality begins to dissolve.
Fuck it. Here we go again.
Traspise Approach
FLEARE SURPRISED HERSELF by sleeping through most of the journey. She awoke to silence, which presumably meant either that they had arrived, or that they had stopped before they arrived. She took a couple of breaths, rose cautiously from the couch and glanced around for some sort of display. She found a retro-looking flat panel suspended towards what she assumed was the front of the cabin. She looked at it, blinked, and froze.
The background, yeah, that was definitely the safe place to start. It was starscape, with a pretty blue-green-white planet roughly centred. It almost looked as if it had rings; she looked closer and realized that it was surrounded at a discreet distance by spacecraft.
She could ignore the foreground no longer. It was Muz. Not Muz as beads, or Muz as a cloud of nano-stuff, or even Muz as a shiny sphere. Just Muz the male, as she had first seen him, dressed in slightly faded mil fatigues with a crooked corporal’s badge.
No, that wasn’t right. Not quite as she had first seen him. His face was older. There were lines around his eyes that looked more like pain than laughter, and his hair was actually touched with grey. His eyes were watching her.
She stared at him for a long time. Then, when she felt able, she said: ‘Okay. What’s going on?’
‘Hi, Fleare.’ He smiled. ‘This is, and isn’t, me. It’s an interactive message.’
&
nbsp; ‘Oh really?’ She shook her head. ‘You must have got the idea that I like being confused. And upset. Wrong, Muz, so very wrong. This is . . . shit. Where are you? What is going on?’
‘I’m sorry.’ His smile collapsed, and he looked tired. ‘Look, I’m going to be saying that a lot. But I’ll mean it every time. I’m sort of on Traspise, in a virtual sense. I don’t exist as anything physical any more.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s easier if you let me tell it, all right?’
‘Easier for who? What is this, Muz, are you dumping me or something?’ She wanted to ball her fists, but her hands were tired and anyway this – thing – was beyond her attack.
‘Easier for both of us. And I’m not dumping you. I’m sort of dumping reality, I guess. Sorry.’ Muz spread his arms and smiled. ‘See? I told you. Well, first, this is happening because I did hear what Jez said.’
‘You listened in? Muz, no, whatever you are, thing, that was fucking private!’
‘Look, I’ll save up all the sorries, all right? But I’ve got stuff to tell you, Fleare. Will you listen? Please?’
She realized that she was grinding her teeth. She forced herself to stop, not because she cared about her teeth any more but in case the thing noticed. She made herself take several slow, even breaths. Then she said, ‘All right. I’ll listen. But not for long.’
‘It won’t take long. Right. First, do you remember a theme park, when you were fifteen?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah. So what?’
‘Outside, afterwards? When you threw up? Remember the guy who tried to help you?’ He shook his head. ‘The one you gave a false ident to?’
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