Upload

by McClelland, Mark

  Raymond looked about at the straight tree trunks, branchless for the first eighty feet or so, wishing he had made them climbable. He was mentally exhausted from the insane series of events leading to his upload, and he wanted to arrange himself carefully on thick tree branches and fall asleep, as Robinson Crusoe did his first night on the island. His thoughts drifted to his days in the Joliet Home, where his primary caregiver sometimes read to him when he was young. Those days felt precious to him in a way they never had before. In hindsight, they seemed so safe and simple. If he hadn't been relocated to the Canal Street Home, where would he be now? Would he have eventually adjusted to life in Joliet, made friends, turned out normal?

  "I drove a blade through a man's arm. An FBI agent, but he was just a guy doing his job. And Bob... if he hadn't wised up and run for the door, I would have killed him."

  He suddenly remembered hearing Janet's voice as consciousness faded, and the feeling that her words didn't make sense. What was it she had said? He remembered her saying "we". And something about being grateful. And "pioneer"? Was it really her voice that had said these things? It didn't make sense that she would say "we". Who could the "we" have been? Bob had said something about agent Michaels, and telling the FBI to stay away. Maybe it was Janet's voice, but it wasn't really Janet—the same trick Raymond used to drive Bob out of the lab. Could Bob have hijacked the Janet persona? That didn't seem likely. What about Michaels—he could have done it. But why? And why would the FBI listen if Bob told them to stay away? What authority did Bob have over the FBI? "Pioneer?" That seemed like a Bob word. Why would Bob tell the FBI to stay away in the first place? Had he suspected Raymond would try to upload, and he wanted to see if it might work?

  They were one step ahead of me, and I bet they captured my mental data before it made it out of the lab. But I'm in Nurania... how would they have gotten hold of Nurania? They would have to know about the bunker. The satellite footage must not have been cleaned up in time. The feds traced me to the motor home, unraveled the Svensson link, and seized my hardware at the bunker.

  He looked around him, expecting to catch a glimpse of someone hiding behind a tree. "What is this?" he asked in a loud voice. "Did you bring me to life to get a confession out of me?"

  There was no answer.

  Or maybe Bob cut a deal with the feds. If the upload worked, maybe they would give him the green light to continue his research. In some government lab. That would explain why they kicked Brody off the case—they didn't want her to blow the whistle on their shady deal.

  "What do you want from me?" called out Raymond, and promptly felt silly for doing so. He was jumping to conclusions. It was just as likely—probably more so—that he had goofed something up and was stuck with the consequences. But Janet's words did seem weird... could he have been dreaming as the derms pushed him over the edge? In the past few days, paranoia seemed to have gotten the better of him. His judgement, it seemed, was not to be trusted.

  I was bleeding ready to kill Bob!

  "I need sleep. When was the last time I got a decent night's sleep?"

  He sat down, arms folded across his knees, and tried to ignore the discomfort of his seating arrangement. He took a deep breath and sighed. Had he really thrown away whatever chances he might have had with Anya for this? Maybe he could have convinced her to give him the time he needed to open up, to get used to having someone in his life. It had felt so good to spill everything to her in his goodbye message. What if he could have done that without having to run away?

  I didn't throw away my chance with her. I never had a chance. I screwed things up before we even met, and it was stupid to even try to have a relationship. I should be in jail now, for all the shit I did. In jail, locked away. Instead I'm here... and at least here I have a decent chance of finding a way out.

  He lay on his back, with the thought of sleeping. But his mind was restless, and he started thinking of the giant spiders and centipedes he had created for his jungle ecosystems. He found himself in a world of his own dark, mischievous inspirations, turned inside out. Desire for novelty had informed many of his decisions as he had gone about inventing Nurania. Novelty, without straying too far from the familiar. Even though he had never actually intended Nurania for public consumption, he had often imagined some hapless Net wanderer straying in. He recalled his own satisfaction at creating lush, beautiful environments that would lull the unwitting visitor into a state of trustful appreciation, only to be shocked by an unexpected encounter with a frog-tongued giant ladybug, scorpion-tailed squirrel, or acid-spitting sloth. Now all that clever child's play would be the stuff of nightmares—there was no way he could sleep here.

  For lack of anything better to do, he stood up and started to walk. Gravity, or rather the simulation of gravity, carried him absent-mindedly down the slight grade of the jungle floor.

  This is my world.

  But the notion provided no solace. This was a foreign world. For the first time ever, he recognized his arrogance in thinking of this as a world of his creation. From his mind had sprung the basic ideas of Nurania, but the vast majority of the world's details were computer-generated, many of them details he had never even noticed. This world had fit his abstract imaginings, but a trillion other worlds would have fit just as well, their subtle differences escaping his gross human capacity for understanding.

  He stopped and felt the bark of a golber tree. He was pleased at least to know the name of the tree. But he did not know this particular tree. Its bark, nearly black, was covered with an intricate pattern of overlapping hexagonal bark scales. He ran the palm of his hand over the rough surface. There were a few golber trees that he did know, in areas special to him, but there were millions he did not know, and never could know.

  A true god, with transcendent knowledge, would know them all.

  His feet carried him further down the gentle slope, the pricking pain in his soles a welcome, present intensity in a state of existence that he didn't understand.

  A deep rumbling sounded from somewhere in front of him. The trees around him wavered as from an earthquake, and a groundswell put him off balance. Afraid he might fall, he got down low. Ripples of reverberation shook the entire jungle around him, and branches fell as the trees abraded each other up in the canopy layer.

  An earthquake?

  It was a feeling he had never associated with Nurania.

  From somewhere in the distance, ahead of him, there came the resounding sound of a colossal explosion. He looked up. Off to his right, a patch of sky suggested the presence of a clearing in the jungle canopy, a chance to see out. He broke into a run, wanting to see the source of the explosion. The patch proved to be further away than his initial perception would have suggested. Winded, he slowed to a fast walk, then quickened his pace again, to a jog. He had a strong sense that the break was too high up for him to actually be able to see anything, but a vague hope led him onward, haphazardly navigating uneven ground and leaping over fallen trees. Lesser explosions could be heard in the distance, and the ground continued to rumble beneath his feet.

  As he neared the opening in the jungle canopy, something off to his right attracted his attention. There was something on the ground, next to a tree. A sense of déjà vu came over him—he had been here before, or had imagined being here. The hole in the canopy seemed familiar, and he suddenly recognized the long elliptical shape of the item on the ground. It was an airboard. He slowed to a walk, looking around him. There was something about this place. He felt as if he had walked into an old dream. He moved toward the airboard, drawn to it. The dream started to come into clarity. He had imagined a place like this, a jungle—himself, slipping through the broad leaves of blood trees to land his airboard. He had imagined it, but had he ever actually done it?

  The airboard lay amid low soft green ferns, nosed into the thick jungle topsoil. He seized it and pulled it out of the ground, ready to be angry at its failure to operate. But as soon as he righted it, parallel with the gentle slop
e of the hillside, it pulled downward into a stable hover, several inches off the ground. He reluctantly stepped his right foot onto it, expecting the worst, but it didn't budge. He shifted his weight slowly onto his right leg, rising onto the board, and arrived at a standing position without problem.

  "This is better," he declared.

  He squatted down, grabbed the sides of the board with either hand, and leaned forward. The board reacted to his shifting weight as expected, moving forward over the ground. He pulled up and leaned to the left, the board rising and turning with him. Glancing down over the edge, he saw the ground twenty feet or so beneath him. He curved gently around a tree and continued to climb, headed for the break in the canopy. He tried hard not to think about how high he was flying—a concern he had never had when visiting Nurania in a v-chamber.

  Upon clearing the treetops, he carefully pulled the board to a hovering stop. A light breeze blew, and the air felt less humid at this height. In the distance, he saw the source of the explosions, and in the same moment he recognized where he was: he was near the southern edge of the Faralon mountain range, and to the north, beyond Mount Lidral, Mount Hawthorn had blown its top and was spewing fiery orange lava into the sky. A great cloud of ash and dust was already spreading to the east. The shaft of red-hot geologic gore surged higher and stronger. An unfathomably large chunk of rock broke away, hurtled through the air, and dropped to the ground near the base of the mountain. A plume of earth rose up from where the rock cratered. Red-hot rocks and lava rained down in the distance, and Raymond could see smoke rising where forest fires must be burning. Never had he seen such destruction on Nurania.

  "This is hell."

  Chapter 14

  Nurania was not the only world Raymond had ever built. As a child, he created many v-worlds, deleting them and starting over, again and again, refining his vision and his skills through trial and error. With a single command, an entire world could be erased. Typically, this was done without remorse: Raymond the creator was not pleased with what he had created, so he would smudge it out of existence and start over. But as time went by and he became more invested in his creations, he started to take out his disappointment and frustration on his hapless digital worlds. Like an artist slashing his canvas, he would rise above a continent, unleash a meteor shower on it, and watch it go up in flames. Or he would stop time, introduce a surreal mile-thick layer of liquid nitrogen into the upper atmosphere, then unstop time and watch the vast icy devastation. As the technology available to him improved, his worlds grew richer and more lifelike, and their ultimate destruction more terrible. With one v-world in particular, Biloxia—an island city of gentle, semi-intelligent cat people—he grew bored, ran out of ideas for ways to improve it, and introduced an airborne flesh-eating virus. He then walked in god-mode among the Biloxians, watching as they turned to one another for help, frightened by the first gruesome signs of the illness. The virus progressed rapidly, and the mayhem and suffering that ensued provided none of the twisted amusement that Raymond sought. He was struck by the expressions of surprise and aimless accusation on the faces of his creatures. These memories never faded, and his relationship to his digital creations was forever changed.

  Nurania never experienced such petulant wrath. It was sacrosanct. From the start, he had moved cautiously, with an eye for the permanence of his actions. Now, as he squatted on his airboard watching rivers of lava run into the jungle northeast of Mount Lidral, he imagined unsuspecting animals caught in the maze of fire that spread through the trees, and his eyes filled with tears.

  "This can't be happening. How can this be happening? What twisted nightmare is this?"

  He sat down on his board, his legs dangling over either side, and looked to the sky.

  "Who's the god of this world?"

  Perhaps there was no god; perhaps he had inadvertently thrown himself to chance, trapped in a godless world on a server isolated from reality prime, completely unknown.

  He slumped way forward, his elbows on the board, and let his head hang. What had happened to his world, and how was it no longer his? Something had gone terribly wrong, and he had no access to the mechanisms at play.

  He looked over the edge of the board. The uppermost branches of the tree beneath him were about ten feet away, and the ground was probably a hundred feet below that. If he were to roll off and let himself fall, he would surely suffer physical damage sufficient to kill him. But would he actually die? What would happen to his mind? Would he simply be kicked from Nurania, returned to the void from which he had entered? Without trying it, there was no way to know. There was no one he could ask. There could be no stories of what had happened to others, for none had come before him. Likewise, if he did try it, there was no one else who could benefit from the knowledge gained by this life-endangering experiment.

  Perhaps the world itself contains some clue as to what's gone wrong.

  Now that he knew where he was, he also knew he wasn't all that far from where he had planned to enter Nurania after his time in Home Base. Maybe an hour or two by airboard. Perhaps, if he went there, he would find some indication of why he had not entered where he had expected to.

  Remaining seated, he took the airboard out of hover mode, swung it to the right, and headed southeast. He cruised over the treetops, picking up speed as he went. He thought about standing. He wanted to stand. He wanted the familiar thrill of this test of balance. But when he was in a v-chamber, in god mode, there was no real danger. Now, the dangers might be grave.

  He grabbed the sides of the board and lifted his knees up underneath him. It was a simple move, one he would normally execute without thinking. But now it made him feel a bit woozy, especially with the pain in his right wrist, and he instinctively pulled back, slowing the board.

  "Oh please," he muttered, appalled at his trepidation.

  Ignoring the pain in his wrist, he grabbed the board again and swung his feet beneath him, moving with the frustration-breaking resolve that blinds one to risk. Feeling steady, he released his grasp and started to stand. He caught sight of the foliage below, and the image of slipping off and smacking into a tree trunk demolished his confidence—he lurched left to catch his balance, then shifted right, stepping an inch wider with his right foot to improve his stability. He bent his knees to lower his body weight, but vertigo had already set in. He inadvertently tipped forward, looked straight down, then rocked up on his toes and threw his weight back. This quickly became a cycle of forward and backward adjustments, and he knew from experience that he had to get down fast. He turned to face forward and dropped down, his legs slipping over either side, and his sit-bones hit the board hard.

  He let out a sigh of relief, then fell forward on the board, disgusted with himself.

  "I should've just let myself fucking fall."

  But even as these words came from his mouth, hope of figuring out what was going on flashed through his mind again. He owed himself at least the chance of figuring this place out.

  "What if I actually did die, and this is some sort of punishment, but if I can figure it out I get to go free? Okay, that's ridiculous. But even I deserve some scrap of hope, right?"

  Right?

  His thoughts drifted over the truly bad things he had done in his life, and there were a few new items on the list. Spiking a man's arm to the ground, for example, and inflicting the trauma of his apparent death on Anya.

  "Okay, maybe I don't deserve hope, but the fact is I have it. If there's something to be figured out here, I can do it."

  o-------------------------------o

  Where he had failed at balance he made up with sheer speed. Transitions from jungle to swampland to cane fields flashed beneath him, his trajectory a roller coaster ride of downs and ups as he skimmed above the terrain at nearly a hundred miles per hour. The feel of the sun and the wind against his skin was enough to take his mind off everything else for an hour or so. He would open his eyes just the tiniest bit to check his position, make whatever small adjus
tment was necessary, then close his eyes again. He knew he had reached the Lomordian tributary when he saw the green stones that lined the stream's bottom, stones carried out of the Sai Ro foothills to the southwest. He dropped down and slowed to fifteen or twenty miles per hour, until he was so low he could drag his toes through the cool water. The stream twisted its way through the sub-tropical forest, and Raymond followed its path with zeal, shifting side-to-side through the turns.

  The waterway grew wider and started to straighten; he was nearing the point at which it joined with the Soravia. That was where he had planned to enter Nurania from Home Base. He rose a few feet higher and sped up, anxious to reach his destination. He noticed giant boulders in the forest to either side and knew he was close. Soon he saw the familiar plateau of cobalt-blue rock ahead. The forest abruptly stopped where the blue cliff rose from the ground, and the stream disappeared into a tunnel in the rock face—a tunnel he knew, both by design and by experience, to be just tall enough to allow him to fly through it.

  To prepare for his entrance into the tunnel, he lay down on his belly and shifted forward until his chin hung over the rounded edge of his board. He slowed to a near standstill, so slow that the stream was actually flowing past him, and stretched down to touch his forehead to the water—his way of measuring the perfect height. He then lifted his head, looked forward, and pushed the board faster, careful not to rise even an inch higher. The wall of rock loomed taller and taller above him as he approached. Without craning his neck, he could no longer see the sky. His heart started to race in anticipation of the thrill.