by Allan Kaster
A serving girl approached the table. “Ale!” Sagreda grunted dyspeptically, aiming for both a brusqueness befitting her status and a manner sufficiently off-putting that she wouldn’t be asked to supplement her order with details she couldn’t provide. When the girl returned with a mug full of something brown and revolting, Sagreda handed her the first coin she plucked out of her pocket and watched for a reaction: the amount was excessive, but not shocking. “Bless you, sir!” the girl said happily, retreating before her benefactor could change his mind.
Sagreda pretended to take a sip of the ale, raising the mug high enough to dampen her mustache with foam, which she removed with the back of her thumb. No one seemed to be staring at her, and if there were customers of Midnight among the customers of the tavern, she could only hope that however much she felt like the most conspicuously talentless actor, wearing the most laughably ill-fitting costume, of all the unwilling players trapped in this very bad piece of dinner theater, to a casual onlooker she was just one more red-faced, gout-ridden extra in the Hogarthian crowd.
A spindle-limbed man with pinched, gaunt features sidled up to the table. “Alfred Jingle at your service, Captain,” he proclaimed, bowing slightly.
Sagreda stood. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jingle. Will you join me?”
“The pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure.”
They sat, and Sagreda summoned the serving girl to bring a second mug.
“Do you think it’s safe to talk here?” Sagreda asked quietly when the girl had left.
“Absolutely,” Jingle replied. “So long as we move our lips and contribute to the background noise, we could spend the night muttering ‘rhubarb rhubarb’ for all anyone would care.”
Sagreda wasn’t so blasé—but if they slipped out into an alley for the sake of privacy, that would just be begging for desanguination.
She said, “I’m told you’re the man with everything, here: memory maps, instruction tables, access to the stack?”
He nodded calmly. “That’s me.”
Sagreda was taken aback by his directness. In most of the dreary game-worlds she’d traversed, her question would have been met with some kind of reticence, or the intimation of a shakedown: Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. It all depends on exactly what you have to offer.
Jingle broke the silence. “Can I ask where you’re headed?”
Sagreda stole a quick glance to each side of the table, unable to brush off her fear that someone might be listening, but all of the tavern’s patrons seemed to be engrossed in their own, more raucous, conversations. “3-adica,” she whispered.
Jingle smiled slightly. “That’s . . . courageous.” He wasn’t mocking her, but his intonation dialed the meaning a notch or two away from merely brave toward foolhardy.
“I’ve had enough,” she said, not daring to add of slavery, in case the sheer potency of the word punched through the din and made one of their fellow drinkers’ ears prick up. “I’d walk over broken glass, if I had to.”
Jingle said, “As a metaphor, that trips nicely off the tongue, but I doubt many people have ever meant it literally.”
“And I don’t believe it will be that hard, literally,” Sagreda replied. “I understand what I’ll be facing—as well as anyone can who hasn’t actually been there.”
“Fair enough,” Jingle conceded. “Though you should also understand that you could make a comfortable life here.” He gestured at Sagreda’s finely cut clothes. “Whatever role you’ve stumbled on, so long as you’re careful, I doubt you’re heading for a knife in the gut, or anything particularly unpleasant. You’re just another minor toff who’s here as part of the scenery, like me.”
“I don’t want to play a role,” Sagreda said emphatically. “However safe, however peripheral.” She held her tongue and resisted the urge to add: least of all in this anatomy. Somehow it had never crossed her mind that her new confidante, who could see right through the whole fictional world around him, wouldn’t also see through her mismatched body and perceive her true sex.
“All right. I’m not going to try to talk you out of anything.” Jingle’s face looked like something from a nineteenth-century pamphlet cataloguing virtues and vices, a caricature crafted to suggest a shrewd, scheming mentality, but his manner undercut the effect completely. “Tell me exactly what it is you need to know.”
2
Back in Captain Bluff-Smote’s lodgings, Sagreda sat at her alter ego’s writing desk, poring over the notes Jingle had made for her. The good news was that it looked as if she’d be able to move from Midnight to 3-adica with the same kind of GPU exploit that had brought her all the way from her wakening-world, East. Peyam, the seasoned traveler who’d introduced the exploit to that world, had tutored her and eight of her friends for almost six months in the fine points of the technique. They’d departed together in high spirits, imagining themselves as some kind of band of liberating truth-tellers, but in the end most of the group had taken a different direction through the tangle of linked lists than Sagreda and Mathis, and the two of them had been game-hopping on their own ever since.
She looked up from the desk, listening expectantly, as if the mere thought of Mathis might bring a knock on the door, but all she could hear was the ticking of the clock in the next room. Given Midnight’s demand for a constant influx of new non-player characters to balance its body count, he must have been incarnated somewhere in the game by now. She’d left her address at half a dozen dead drops, using the criteria they’d agreed on in advance: any public bench close to a market; any water pump; the rear, right-most pew in any church. But it was late, and even if Mathis hadn’t yet witnessed a murder or two for himself, he was smart enough not to be out in the portentous fog.
Sagreda returned to her analysis. Every jump required executing a sequence of instructions that would unlink the would-be travelers from their current environment and insert them into a queue that was meant to hold nothing but freshly minted composite personas—free of all narrative memories, and already tagged as appropriate new denizens of the destination world. Given the amount of code it took to run the whole site, not only could you find any machine-language instruction you wanted somewhere in memory, you could find almost all of them as the last instruction in some subroutine or other. When a subroutine was called by ordinary means, the code invoking it pushed an appropriate return address onto the stack, to ensure that the detour would snake back to just after the point where it had begun. But if you could stack the stack with enough phony return addresses, you could send the program pin balling all over the machine, doing your bidding one instruction at a time. It was like forcing a pianist in the midst of playing a piece by Rachmaninoff to tinkle out a few bars of “Where Is My Mind?” without actually changing the score, just by scrawling in a series of arrows weaving back and forth between the desired notes.
Jingle had already done the hardest part: finding the addresses that would furnish each instruction, for code that ran with the particular page mappings that applied to denizens of Midnight on Baker Street. It didn’t take Sagreda long to extract everything she needed from his list. The greatest obstacle was her own poor penmanship; whatever eccentric hobbies the contributors to her persona had possessed, it was clear that none of them had ever had reason to dip a nib in an inkwell.
She blotted the spidery mess and rechecked it twice. There were no actual mistakes, but the figures’ dubious legibility was as disconcerting as a fraying strand on a parachute cord. She started over, sympathizing with the nonexistent captain, who would probably have been thrashed as a child when his thick, clumsy fingers failed him in his own first attempts at transcription.
By midnight, she was satisfied with her efforts. What remained was the challenge of getting this slab of numbers onto the stack. The Graphics Processing Units that rendered the game-worlds for customers and comps alike were all identical, and they all shared the same bug: under the right circumstances, they could be tripped up in a way that made them write a portion of
their image buffer onto the CPU’s stack. So the trick was to encode the addresses in the colors of an object, and then arrange to have that object rendered at a suitable scale. Peyam had taught his students to recognize on sight objects with hues from which they could compose any twenty-four-bit set of red, green, and blue components. East, with its sparse, post-apocalyptic landscape of cliffs and caves, hadn’t exactly come with oil paints or color swatches on hand, but over time they’d found ways to patch together the entire palette they’d needed. The SludgeNet scripts that had created Midnight might have taken a rather sepia-toned view of the source novel’s cod-historical setting, but Sagreda had seen hats, scarves, gloves, and ribbons in all manner of garish colors, and once you were working at a scale where you could place different materials side by side within a single pixel, getting the result bit-perfect wasn’t quite as daunting as it first seemed.
She drew up a preliminary list, starting with various items that the captain already possessed. Between his funereal wardrobe, his curtains and bedspreads, his small library, and his collection of lacquered snuffboxes, brown and gray were pretty much taken care of. But to encode the addresses she required, she was going to need all manner of mauves and magentas, leaf-greens and cyans, azures and ocean blues. It would almost have been worth it if the old coot had had a wife, just so Sagreda could surreptitiously snip her way through the woman’s apparel. The captain’s landlady, Mrs. Trotter, was cheerful and solicitous with her widower tenant, but breaking into her room to cut up her clothing could well risk sending the game a signal that this man had been at the Jekyll juice and was craving a chance to perform a few amateur appendectomies.
Sagreda sighed and went to use the chamber pot. She had got past the impulse to giggle or recoil at the sight of her new genitalia—and nothing about the captain’s physique inspired autoerotic experimentation. It was as if she was obliged to spend her time here with a small, docile, misshapen rodent sheltering between her legs, helpfully redirecting the flow of her urine by means that really didn’t bear thinking about. As she covered the pot and hitched up her underwear, she tried to picture the expression on Mathis’s face when he saw what she’d become. But a couple of months without physical intimacy wasn’t going to kill them. Their journey was almost over: in 3-adica, she believed, they’d finally have the power to do, and to be, whatever they wanted.
3
Sagreda worked on her palette, visiting milliners and cloth merchants, developing a line in gruff banter to parry the teasing of the shop assistants. “What’s a gentleman like you needing a scarlet ribbon for?” one young woman demanded, her features poised between perplexity, mortification, and amusement.
“I plan to tie it around the leg of a hound,” Sagreda replied, with a fully Bluff-Smotean air of impatience, irritation, and self-importance.
“An ’ound?” The woman’s expression succeeded in growing even more unsettled.
“As punishment for flagrant promiscuity,” Sagreda explained, deadpan. “The mutt needs shaming, and I will not resile from the task.”
“That’s only fair,” the woman decided. “When it comes to them beasts, nature will have its way, but that don’t mean we have to approve.”
As Sagreda handed over her coins, she scrutinized the woman’s face, hoping that perhaps she was in on the joke. But Jingle had said that only about a tenth of the characters here were game-aware.
Out on the street, as Sagreda paused to let a carriage pass, she felt an unexpected disturbance near her hip and instinctively reached down to explore its source. To her surprise, she found herself with her hand encircling a slender, bony wrist.
The owner of the wrist glared up at her defiantly: a slim, shabbily dressed girl whose age Sagreda refused to guess. Appearances were meaningless; however you picked and mixed from a pool of adult brain maps, the resulting comp could never be a child.
But a child need not always be played by a comp.
“That coin you’ve grabbed was a souvenir,” Sagreda huffed, “given to me by my Bavarian cousin, Frau Mengele!”
The girl flinched and dropped what she’d been holding—though she seemed as baffled by her reaction as an audience member at a hypnotist’s show who’d found herself suddenly clucking like a chicken. An automaton wouldn’t have blinked, and a customer might have grimaced at the oddly contrived reference, but only a comp could be revolted by the association without understanding why.
Sagreda bent down and retrieved the coin. “Don’t you dare lay a finger on me!” the girl whispered. Her hushed tone was probably a wise strategic choice: if she made a scene, the crowd would not be on her side. But she spoke without a trace of fear, as if she were the one with the upper hand.
Sagreda lost whatever resolve she’d had to strike the child for the sake of appearances. Maybe a verbal reprimand would pass muster, if anyone around them was even paying attention.
“Next time, missy, you should ply your trade on someone less acutely conscious of the content of his trousers!” Sagreda blustered. She waited, still gripping the girl’s wrist, hoping for some kind of apology.
“I know what you’re up to,” the girl replied unrepentantly. “So leave me be, or I might just pay a call on the witch-finders.”
Witch-finders? Sagreda supposed she had no right to be surprised by how far Midnight was willing to stretch its anachronisms. “And just what are you planning to tell Constables Scolder and Mully of Bow Street?”
“Every nasty detail of your sorcery,” the girl boasted. “And you can be sure that when they break down your door, they’ll take a very keen interest in your mandala.”
Sagreda released the girl. Whatever she actually knew, the risk of attracting official scrutiny had to be greater than the risk of letting one pickpocket slip away unpunished.
But the girl declined the opportunity to flee. “And I’ll have what you denied me,” she said, glancing meaningfully at Sagreda’s trouser pocket.
Sagreda stared back at her, almost admiring her brazenness, trying to summon up some ornately disdainful Victorian invective with which to respond to this blackmail. But her vocabulary deserted her, and muttering feebly about impudent whelps when her heart wasn’t in it would just make her sound like the nineteenth century equivalent of a rapping grandma.
“Be off with you!” she snapped, making a shooing motion with her giant hands.
The girl scowled, dissatisfied, and she seemed on the verge of escalating her threats, but then she changed her mind. “You should engage me, Mister.”
“Captain,” Sagreda corrected her. “Engage you to do what?”
“Make me your assistant. Seeing as how you’re struggling to complete the thing.”
A carriage drove past, spattering the bottom of the captain’s trousers with horse-shit-speckled mud.
“Have you been following me?” Sagreda demanded.
“I have eyes,” the girl replied coolly. “I seen you in all kinds of fancy shops, making some very odd purchases. If you want the job done before Christmas, you might welcome a pair of nimble hands like mine.”
Sagreda fell silent. Were there colors she needed that she might only be able to obtain by theft? She wasn’t sure. She’d made significant progress, but she was yet to walk into a shop and find every obscure object of her chromatic desires laid out on the shelves and counters.
“I’ll give you a shilling as a retainer,” she decided, reaching into her pocket for an untainted one. “In turn, I expect you to be straight with me, and to keep yourself available.”
The girl inclined her head in agreement.
Sagreda held on to the coin. “What’s your name?”
“Lucy.” The girl stretched out her palm, and Sagreda deposited the shilling.
“How will I find you?” she asked.
“This is my patch you’re on,” Lucy replied, affronted, as if she were some criminal kingpin whose territory Sagreda crossed only on her sufferance. “If you have need of my services, I’ll know it before you know it you
rself.”
4
Sagreda worked into the night, pinning, stitching, and gluing, painstakingly assembling one more piece of the mosaic. Or mandala, as Lucy had called it. It was an odd choice of word; Sagreda had seen nothing to suggest that Midnight’s kitchen-sink eclecticism encompassed any culture east of the Carpathians. But perhaps one of the previous travelers the girl had seen scavenging for colors had taken her into their confidence and tried to explain the point of the whole exercise. Sagreda had no idea if anyone, anywhere, had ever believed that a mandala could initiate the transmigration of souls; her own vague understanding was that if you were into that kind of thing, you just waited to die and the rest was up to karma. But if stacks, GPUs, and the whole panoply of queue structures that linked the game-worlds together were too much to explain to someone who’d been gaslit into forgetting everything her contributors had known about the twenty-first century, maybe Lucy’s reluctant informant had opted for a Buddhist-flavored riff, aiming for an account that was comprehensible to the denizen of a world steeped in supernatural forces, while avoiding Western occultism with its potentially Satanic associations, in the hope of keeping the witch-finders out of the picture.
Someone tapped at the door. Sagreda covered the mosaic with a tablecloth and approached the entrance hall. It was awfully late for a visit from Mrs. Trotter, and the tap had sounded far too tentative to come from any branch of the constabulary.