Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  “So what’s the plan now?” said Sheriff Heath. We were in his den, a lead-lined Faraday-chambered, wooden-walled library-cum-office. The Sheriff had filled the walls with trophies from his youth: martial arts combat prizes, shooting prizes, the scalp of a Vegan Warrior, a fragment of the hull of a Galactic Corporation cruiser which he had once stolen and sold for scrap.

  Aretha kept darting strange looks at me. What was her problem? Why was she looking so worried? Did she fear for my safety?

  Or, perhaps, for my soul?

  I remembered how I’d felt when Claudio had been burned alive: guilt had rent me. Later I had purchased his corpse and instructed doctors at the hospital to revive him. But I’d been informed that the heat had melted Claudio’s skull, and there was a strong chance the brain was irretrievably damaged. Which meant that Claudio had sacrificed himself, for me.

  Why? We weren’t even friends. Just for the hell of it?

  “Hello? Are you in there?” Aretha was still staring at me.

  I realised I had been staring into space. This kind of abstraction was unlike me. Normally, I could think about very many subjects at the same time, whilst also talking, and analysing data from a thousand dragonfly cameras.

  But over the last few days, I had been employing the larger part of my consciousness in obsessive, silent analysis of my database, which now contained every iota of information there was to know about the anciens after I had leached the data from the spire.

  And thus, for every moment of every day, millions of facts swirled around my mind, like snakes, or like fog, or like – like nothing else, just like itself – suffocating me. And there were so many facts, and the data was tinged with such malevolence that, at times, I found it hard to – to –

  I refocused.

  “The plan now,” I said firmly, “is to remain deep undercover as long as I can. To learn the secrets, weaknesses and intentions of the anciens, and to ascertain how they murdered the medics and Version 43. Then, assuming we have just cause, which I am confident we will have by then, to kill them.”

  “Works for me,” said Macawley.

  “Kill them how?” asked Aretha.

  “I fail to see the point of that question.”

  “How do we kill them,” repeated Aretha, “if they have this infernal secret fucking weapon?”

  “I now see your purport. I’ll think of something.”

  “And why?” said the Sheriff. “Why did they kill my son?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “When I find out, I’ll tell you. The aim for the moment is to win their confidence. Befriend them.”

  The Sheriff nodded, reassured.

  “These meetings are dangerous,” said Aretha. “Every time you meet us, it’s another opportunity for them to suspect you. Why else would you be meeting a pair of cops, if not to plot betrayal?”

  “I can cover my tracks,” I said confidently.

  “How?”

  “I – have partial control of the Belladonna computer,” I reluctantly admitted. “I have authority to override its surveillance systems, and I have done so. That’s how I was able to plant the ‘deleted’ image of Tom Dunnigan dying. So they could find it. So I could be exposed as a liar. So I could then implement the second tier of subterfuge, the backup cover of General Durer. Thus validating my cover, for who would suspect me of telling two lies of such magnitude about my identity?”

  “Smart boy,” said the Sheriff.

  “Consequently,” I said, “I can easily cover my tracks. There will be no film footage of us together on the surveillance cameras. And if anyone does happen to see us together…” I morphed, and became a different person. “This is what they will see.”

  “This is fucking – eerie!” said Macawley, who had been watching all this as though it were a tennis game. “And cool, did I mention cool?!?”

  “No,” said Aretha.

  “Well, no guff, it’s mamafucking cool!!!”

  I shrugged. It didn’t, in fact, feel so very cool to me.

  “There’s someone,” I told them, “who I would like you to meet.”

  “Who’re your friends?” Filipa asked.

  “This is Aretha,” I said to her. “Sergeant Aretha Jones of the Bompasso PD. Aretha, this is Filipa Santiago.”

  “She’s a cop?” Filipa asked suspiciously.

  “What’s wrong with being a cop?” Aretha snapped.

  “Nothing,” Filipa sneered.

  “Yes she’s a cop. This is Sheriff Gordon Heath, he is also a law enforcement officer.”

  “Yeah, like I couldn’t guess that.”

  “And this is Macawley, she’s kind of, our mascot.”

  “Miaow.”

  “What are you guys drinking?”

  Filipa served us. Then she called a barmaid over to run the bar, and we retired to the back snug.

  The Sheriff beamed at Filipa to impress her with the fact he thought she was a good-looking woman, but to little avail.

  Aretha was more guarded. “Have I arrested you?”

  “Once or twice,” Filipa admitted.

  “Were you guilty?”

  “Hell yes.”

  “How do we know we can trust this woman?” said Macawley cautiously, and her face flickered anxiety.

  “You can trust me,” said Filipa, and she smiled, and Macawley basked in her smile.

  Then Filipa turned to me.

  “Why are you here?”

  “You were right,” I told her. “It’s the anciens. Everything you told me is right.”

  “I know,” said Filipa.

  “But how is that?” I asked, tensely.

  “Sorry, I’m not with you,” Filipa said cautiously.

  “How do you know so much?”

  “I told you,” she said calmly. “I keep my ear to the ground.”

  “That’s not credible,” I said firmly. “You’re a liar.”

  There was an ugly silence. But Filipa shrugged, unoffended.

  “I see things,” Filipa admitted, at last. “I see things that other people don’t see.” Filipa put her fingers in her mouth, and pretended to bite them. I winced. “The silver-haired man,” she whispered. And I felt a jolt.

  How could she possibly know about that?

  “What silver-haired man?” asked Aretha tersely.

  “You saw that?” I asked, awed.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  Filipa shook her head. “If I knew how, I couldn’t do it. The same way the anciens keep power.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “They have a gift. And so do I. My gift is – I have the power to see things that shouldn’t be seen. And, they – they know the secret of glamour.”

  “Glamour?”

  “It’s a form of magic,” Filipa said softly. “An enchantment.”

  “Magic?” I mocked.

  Macawley nodded at this, then frowned, then goggled her eyes.

  “Magic?” she said.

  “Hush, motormouth,” said the Sheriff, who was openly fascinated at my exchange with Filipa.

  “That’s what I said,” Filipa chastised us. “Magic. The anciens allure and seduce. That’s how they manage to stay concealed. That’s how they exert such astonishing control over this planet.”

  “There’s no such thing as magic,” I said. But my words were immediately contradicted by a thought: If you really believed that, why did you come here?

  “You don’t know that. Not for sure,” Filipa told me.

  “She’s got a point,” Aretha conceded.

  I thought about it. “What you say is true,” I conceded.

  “I know about glamour,” said the Sheriff. His grey moustache twitched. “I’ve seen men use it. Men more often than women, strangely enough, though some women have it like skies have stars. It’s a bitch of a thing.”

  The Sheriff’s candour opened the floodgates.

  “My mother,” offered Aretha, “used to sing in clubs. Fernando Gracias’s clubs. She told m
e she once saw Fernando with a girl, a young girl, fourteen at most. Pretty but not beautiful. And Fernando was obsessed with her. Devoted to her. The girl’s name was Lamia, an old-fashioned demon name. But she wasn’t a demon. She was an ancien. And she – she had glamour. That’s what she told my father, and he told me. But I just thought it meant – anyway, looking back on it, I think that’s why Fernando was so much in love with her. He murdered his wife, to be with Lamia. Then she laughed in his face and never came back. She wasn’t, you see,” said Aretha musing, “beautiful. But she had that – thing. The glamour thing.”

  “Sex appeal?” offered Macawley.

  “No, much more than that, much stranger,” replied Filipa. “It’s how they can do what they do, without being seen. Glamour can seduce, but it can also conceal.”

  “I’ve been a crooked cop for more years than I care to remember,” conceded Sheriff Heath. “And I never once thought about the anciens, or suspected them. So how could I be so dumb?”

  “More enchantment,” Filipa explained.

  “What is this ‘enchantment’ shit?” I raged. “We live in a scientific civilisation! They use hypnosis, maybe. Drugs. They manipulate the computer database. But don’t drag magic into this.”

  “Then how to you explain the deaths?” Filipa taunted. “The way the Sheriff’s son was killed? The way you were killed?”

  “That’s entirely different. It’s some kind of quantum weapon.”

  “I saw it,” said Aretha, awed. “I saw it! And I saw – nothing! Nothing. It was just – strange. Everything, strange. If that’s not magic, what is?”

  Filipa nodded. Then she raised her hand and waved her fingers.

  And suddenly her face vanished. Her beauty vanished. And what remained was a twisted contorted harridan’s face with eyes that stretched like smears. “Glamour,” she said. “Making people see what you want them to see.”

  She clicked her fingers and the “real” Filipa returned. “I didn’t,” she admitted, “do so good on the fifty-fifty.” Although she was beautiful again now, the hideous deformity of her face stayed with me as a searing memory. “Juan died outright,” Filipa continued, “and I survived, but I got fucked up, bad. It’s a miracle I’m alive. And my deformities were – and are – extraordinary. Beyond belief. But no one knows that. No one sees the real me.”

  I was lost for words. Filipa fixed me with a fierce stare; and I saw her eyes, but I also saw the nightmare reality that lay beneath the beautiful, comforting illusion.

  “If that’s not magic,” Filipa concluded, “what the hell is it?”

  “They trust me,” I told them all, a little while later, after a number of drinks had been consumed. “They think I am one of them.”

  “You must believe that you truly are,” said Filipa firmly, “or they will suspect you. You must be this man, this general. This Durer. Only your total faith in your own identity will convince them.”

  “I am General Durer,” I said. “I really am.” And I smiled and all present shuddered.

  “Just don’t go,” said the Sheriff, “fucking native on us.”

  Over the course of the following weeks, I became an intimate of the anciens. I studied them, and I marvelled at their effortless inhumanity.

  And I began to take control of the gangs of Lawless City, following their strict instructions.

  And, as I learned more and more about the real Belladonna, I found myself haunted by doubts and questions and memories.

  Blood and human flesh spattered the walls and ceilings. A screaming severed head swam in a pool of blood on the bed. And inside the mouth, which gaped unnaturally large, was a human heart, squeezed and squirted.

  I conjured up this holo of the crime scene on a regular basis, forcing myself to wallow in its horror. But even when the holo wasn’t manifest, I could still see the image in my memory.

  What or who, I wondered once again, could have done such a thing?

  I remembered the dead body of Version 43, broken up into pieces and reconstituted with pieces of sidewalk instead of limbs.

  It must surely, I had already theorised, be some kind of quantum teleportation effect: but how could anyone ever use that as a weapon?

  And “glamour”? What could explain glamour? What connected Filipa with the anciens? What strange powers were these?

  I scrolled through my database, picking on random items and facts and setting up insane search questions: “What is reality?” “Is magic possible?” “Is science real?”

  I took over the casinos; I threw out the management of the Houses of Pain and brought in my own people; I abolished the protection rackets and took a weekly tax from all the city businesses in return for my “support”. And as I did all this, with the larger part of my consciousness, I absorbed the entire history of science, from its earliest history in Babylonian and Greek times to the creation of cute-o, the quantum theory of everything. It left me puzzled and deeply uneasy.

  I thought about Khaos, the primeval state of the universe as postulated by cute-o. A universe of nothing, where no physical laws apply, where nothing is real, but where only probabilities and their attenuated cousins “possibilities” exist, or rather, don’t.

  I comprehended the theory; I fathomed the math. But as I puzzled at it, the mystery of it all began to overwhelm me.

  I was well aware of the paradox of our age: the fact that all of modern scientific civilisation is founded on the discoveries of a few scientists in the early twentieth century who devised a predictive mathematical system which makes no sense. A reality created by observation? Entities that can be in many places, all at the same time? Artefacts that are not real, that by indescribable means become real and create observable “reality”?

  Quantum physics, I knew, marked the moment when science became irrational: it is true because it works, but it cannot be understood.

  However, as I also knew, the theory of QTOE, aka “cute-o,” was intended to provide the answers to all these mysteries: it postulated a pre-universe in which quantum “reality” was the only reality. Where possibilities and virtualities roamed, like dinosaurs on ancient Earth, where “nothing” reigned supreme. A universe of Big If, that pre-dates the Big Bang. A universe of void that spawned the universe that we know, the universe of all things.

  But what is “nothing”? There is no such thing; “nothing” cannot exist, the equations of quantum physics do not allow it. So the “possibilities” that exist are in fact possible energies, virtual energies, emerging out of nothing and then vanishing again, without ever becoming “actual.” The equation that connects uncertainty of time with uncertainty of energy compels this.

  And so, when there is “nothing,” there is still an adherence to an uncertainty principle: that, uncertainty itself, is the fundamental spark of everything.

  And furthermore, I reflected, “emergence” exists too; the principle that allows, by random action, the simple to become complex.

  So when virtual possible energies interact, they become more complex virtual energies; they become more than possibilities, they become “probabilities”; hence they become proxy wave functions, the primary postulation of quantum physics.

  The more I thought about it, the more baffling it was.

  For this is how it really is: reality is an illusion. An object can exist in many places at the same time. Time can flow in any direction. Our commonsense notions of what is and is not possible are nonsense. All this has been known, and has been undeniable, for centuries.

  And cute-o is the only theory which attempts to create an imaginative model of how this crazy state of affairs came about. How a state of unreality slowly evolved out of “nothing,” through the actions of emergence, so that possibilities interacted and became actualities; until the moment when the “real” universe was born, with all its stars and nebulae and atoms.

  Cute-o was the first theory to provide an explanation for the fact that our supposed “reality” rests on the shifting unreality of quantum foam.
/>
  Cute-o tells us our reality evolved out of Khaos: and it therefore still contains within itself Khaos. And reality, therefore, is nothing but a random side-effect of quantum chaos.

  But ultimately, all this makes no sense! It’s just an attempted causal explanation for a theory that affronts logic, that defies our every concept of the real.

  Quantum physics is, in short, a theory that has nothing whatsoever to recommend it, aside from the fact that every single scrap of evidence shows it to be true.

  So if all this is true, I reflected, is magic, after all, so very unlikely? If mere possibilities can mate and breed, why mock the concept of the mystical, or even the divine?

  I found I was becoming obsessed by these philosophical concepts. I knew I had to clear my mind, and focus on the job ahead.

  But a slow unfolding terror was possessing me. The theory of quantum physics and its younger sibling cute-o had advanced human technology in astonishing ways.

  But the mystery at the heart of the quantum had never truly been explained. No theory could do justice to the sheer monstrous unlikeliness of what humanity had achieved in taming a herd of wild horses that were galloping into madness.

  But what the anciens had done went beyond even that familiar insanity. For they were making quantum effects occur at a macroscopic level. Just to allow that possibility meant there could never again be, literally and metaphorically, solid ground. So I—

  No!

  This way, madness lay.

  I voluntarily deleted the worst of my mental ramblings. I retained the core of my argument, but erased all my doubts and uncertainties about the reality of the real.

  And thus, I compelled myself to focus on my mission strategy.

  For I was preparing to wage war with the anciens. They were evil human beings. It was my job to arrest or execute evil human beings. Nothing could be simpler, or more—