Blonde Bombshell (14 page)

Let’s just get this straight, Mark Twain said to himself. On a planet still mostly powered by flammable goo derived from the crushed corpses of long-dead kill, we find the residue left by teleported aposiderium; and we find it in a bank vault, of all places. Not in a lab or a power station or on board a state-of-the-art starship, but in the lining of the mattress under which Planet Dirt hides its money. Now, that’s got to be— Someone was knocking. He felt a wild surge of panic, then remembered: octopuses. And about time too. He jumped to his feet, tripped over a drooping tentacle, caught his balance and opened the door.

“Room Service.”

A main with a trolley. On the trolley, a big chrome serving dish. Mark Twain ripped off the lid and found — excellent, four octopuses. For some reason each of them had a slice of lemon balanced on its head. He thought, That makes five, five of them in series, that’s nine hundred terabarks to the power of five, that’s— “Sign here, please,” the man was saying.

Sign. He’d heard the expression several times over the last few days. Apparently, it was what Dirters did to confirm their identity. He hadn’t paid much attention, and he realised, rather awkwardly, that he wasn’t quite sure how it was done. A brief search of his cultural database came up blank; lots of instances of when signing was necessary, but no actual how-to instructions. That wasn’t good, because it was bound to be one of those species-specific things that you either know or you don’t. Figuring it out from first principles wouldn’t be easy.

“Um,” he said. “Do I have to?”

The man looked at him. “Yes, sir.”

“Can’t I just—” He remembered another phrase he’d heard. “Can’t I just charge it to the room?”

“Yes sir, of course.”

“I’ll do that, then.”

“Certainly, sir. Just sign here.”

On the other hand, how different could it be? Ostar or Dirter, some things are always the same, because there’s no other way of doing them. Eat with your mouth. Walk with your feet. Establish your identity with a readily dispensed sample of your unique scent and DNA, just like they do it on Homeworld.

“Where do I sign?”

The man handed him a piece of printed paper. “Right here, sir.”

“Fine,” he said, and unzipped his fly.

21

Novosibirsk

“You again,” said the barman.

George was used to that sort of thing. He smiled.

“Orange juice,” he said.

The barman looked at him. “Orange juice?”

“I’m celebrating,” George replied. “Join me?”

“Orange juice?”

“‘Wonderful stuff. A primary source of vitamin C.”

“No thanks.”

George sat down on a high stool, lifted his glass and nibbled at his drink. It tasted of oranges. More to the point, it didn’t smack him in the face and numb his brain, the way his usual choice of beverages did. He tried another gulp, and yelped as the citric acid found his hiatus hernia. He put the glass down and pushed it an arm’s length down the bartop.

“So,” the barman said. “What’re you having?”

“You got any milk?”

There’s a first time for everything. This was the first time George had been asked to leave a bar for not getting drunk. But then, it had been that kind of a day.

He went home. There were a lot of bottles — in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, even the bathroom — but he ignored them. He drank two glasses of water, took off his jacket and tie and dropped into his chair. Usually, by the time George sat down he was well enough anaesthetised that a competent surgeon could have amputated his leg without bothering him unduly. Accordingly he’d never noticed that the springs had gone, and when you sat on it the stuffing sort of oozed about in the cushion, like mayonnaise in an over-filled sandwich. He made a mental note: Get a new chair.

He wondered how you went about doing that. Furniture, in his experience, was just something that happened. It was there when you moved in, and when you left you paid to have it removed, destroyed and replaced. It wasn’t something he’d ever had any say in, just as he’d never negotiated with the sky about what sort of weather he’d get today. Or take carpets. Every place he’d ever lived had had them, and he knew by heart the phone number of the men who came with specialised equipment to get rid of unfortunate stains. Presumably, though, they didn’t just grow, like moss. If he was going to clean up his act and start flying straight, there was going to be a whole world of strange new skills for him to learn.

Food, for one thing. For quite some time, George had pretty much lived on lunch, because he was always too ill and too rushed for breakfast, and the evening meal tended not to stay inside him long enough to have any nutritional effect. ‘Well, all that was going to change. From now on, he’d follow a healthy balanced diet, even if that meant eating plants, like a cow.

Seven o’clock in the evening, and his head was clear. Extraordinary thing; like staying up all night and watching the sunrise.

Lying on the floor by his feet, its corner sticking out from under an empty pizza box, was a yellow writing-pad. Archaeological excavations down the back of the seat cushion turned up a viable pencil. He made a few notes:

—
Aposiderium. Found in meteors and banknotes. Makes you forget long-ago stuff

—
Voices in the night?

—
Five years ago, suddenly

—
Teleportation?

—
They stole my dog

He stared at what he’d written. Next to where he’d found the pad was a quarter-full bottle of something or other, and a glass that had once been clean. At some point, the glass managed to fill itself with stuff from the bottle, and found its way into his hand. Force of habit.

Ah, he thought, as liquid intelligence soaked into his brain. Of course.

But— No, that’d explain the voices in the night. And the unicorn?

Well, perhaps not the unicorn. But it neatly covered bullet points 1 through 4, and maybe the unicorn was just an ordinary white horse with a fake horn glued on. It explained everything.

Almost everything. Not bullet point 5. Everything else.

He looked at his hand, and found an empty glass in it. Oh, he thought, and poured himself a drink. Just the one, to celebrate. Then, because it’s a poor heart that never rejoices, he celebrated the fact that he’d had the self-restraint to stop at two drinks. That was something to be joyful about. In fact, it called for another drink. It didn’t have to call for long, or particularly loudly.

At some point, he heard his doorbell. Odd. Nobody ever came calling, particularly at (squint at watch) nine o’clock at night. He hauled himself to his feet, thinking harsh thoughts about the architect who’d designed the building. All those qualifications, letters after his name like a comet’s tail, couldn’t even design a floor that stays level when you walk on it. He opened the door.

“Shit,” he said. “You two.”

“Greetings,” replied a man in a dark grey suit, and shot him.

22

Novosibirsk

“Right,” said the non-werewolf, closing the door of his hotel room. “Let’s get this over and done with.”

His colleague, the shooter, unclipped the little box from the back of the gun and pressed the relevant button. Nothing happened.

“Quit messing around,” said the non-werewolf. “It’s been a long day.”

“It’s not working.”

“Oh, for crying out loud.” The non-werewolf took the box from him and pressed the button again.

“See?”

“It’s not—”

“I know.”

They each tried it three more times. Then they ran the self-diagnostic. Then they dug a scanner out of their luggage and tried that. Finally they prised the back off with a spoon.

“He’s not in there,” the shooter said.

“He must be.”

“He isn’t.”

They looked at each other. Then the shooter said, “We killed him.”

“Don’t be stupid, we can’t have.”

The shooter shrugged. “OK,” he said. “So where is he?”

23

?????

Suppose they made a TV show, and nobody watched it.

Not as in, very few people watched it:
Star Trek Enterprise,
or
Martin Amis’ Comedy Playhouse.
Suppose they broadcast a TV show and nobody, not one person, not even the executive producer’s mother, tuned in and caused it to appear on a screen.

So there it is, this package of digital information. It exists, and its reason for existing is to be seen, but nobody sees it. All rather sad, and probably the end of someone’s promising career, and a pain in the budget for anybody who bought advertising time in the breaks; that’s not the issue.

Look at it another way. Just because nobody’s watching doesn’t mean it isn’t out there.

A TV show is many things: pictures, sound, sometimes a plot and characters, almost always an exercise in product placement, in various degrees of subtlety. Someone made it; someone had an idea, got funding, gathered a team of people, arranged studio and location time, saw to it that there were sandwiches and sanitary facilities, operated the equipment. Even if nobody does see it, it had a genesis; it has history. Cameras don’t roll unless someone presses the button. Scripts don’t write themselves.

Scripts don’t. Other things …

All over the world there are huge buildings, like warehouses or hangars or missile silos, where they house the computers in which the stupendous output of the online world is stored. The heat generated by all those machines is so intense that in some places it’s piped out to warm whole streets of neighbouring houses. Inside each machine, coded into numbers, zipped, crunched and crammed in like sardines, are avalanches and oceans and nebulae and galaxies of text. All the trees of the rainforest, cut down and pulped and squished out flat between giant rollers, couldn’t furnish enough paper to print out even a small proportion of the archived, obsolete text straining the buffers of the world’s computer servers.

Most of it, at some point, has been read by somebody (although just the legal disclaimers and terms of service, which nobody ever reads, comprise more letters and spaces and full stops and colons than all the novels ever written). Most of that most maybe got read once; it strutted and fretted its ninety seconds upon someone’s screen, and then was seen no more. It’s an old joke that the hypothesis that a million monkeys with typewriters would sooner or later produce the works of Shakespeare has been conclusively disproved by the creation of the internet; but how does anyone know that for sure? After all, you haven’t read it all.

Forget the TV show. Suppose someone wrote a few well-chosen words, and committed them to the digital media, and nobody ever read them. Easily supposed, because it happens every day. A million bloggers in a hundred countries record their online diaries in the vague hope that someone will be interested, but of course nobody is. There are so many messages in bottles on the cyberocean that a digital seagull could walk across the bandwidth Atlantic without wetting its virtual feet.

But each of those sad testaments got read at least once, because somebody wrote them; and not all the authors in question typed with their eyes shut.

Suppose there’s a message that nobody’s read, which nobody wrote.

There’s one; and his name is George Stetchkin.

Help! he wrote.

Actually, he was incredibly lucky, though he didn’t know it and probably wouldn’t have felt all that lucky if he had; but, as pure chance would have it, his Help! showed up on the screen of a battered old laptop sitting in the back room of a computer-repair shop in Nairobi. There was nobody in the back room at the time; if there had been, he’d have read: Help! Where am I? What’s happening?

By the time the shop owner came through into the back and got around to noticing the laptop in question, the accidental link had been broken and the screen was showing the Google front page again. George’s next utterances were, therefore, seen by nobody at all.

Am I dead?

He was pretty certain that he was. The last thing he could remember was the dangerous idiot in the grey suit, the alien, pointing the ray-gun at him and saying, “Greetings.” Since he hadn’t rematerialised in a hotel room, it was depressingly likely that something had gone wrong and he’d been scrambled to death, or maybe the alien had changed the settings and killed him on purpose. Like it mattered.

At times like this, René Descartes is not necessarily your friend. Descartes did say, “I think, therefore I am.” Unfortunately, he left it at that. He didn’t specify what you are.
I think, therefore I am a disembodied brain. I think, therefore I am at least marginally smarter than a lump of rock.
Or, indeed,
I think, therefore I am dead.
Not a lot of help, when the metaphysics hit the fan.

Another infuriating lacuna in René’s grand statement is: think with what? As far as he could tell, George had no body. He had no way of proving it, but hell, it was a pretty strong feeling. He couldn’t see, hear, move, touch, taste or smell. As if that wasn’t enough, he could only think in
words;
no inchoate emotions, no feeling of gnawing dread or ineffable blind panic. Instead, the best he could do was Help! and Aargh! and, if he tried really hard, a little picture of a stylised round face looking very sad.

It was the emoticon that finally nudged the penny over the edge of the abyss. For a fraction of a second (and he was fairly sure time wasn’t the same here) he’d
been
the little sad face. For that sliver of the linear continuum, that had been all there was to him, his sum total. If it was like anything at all (and the analogy was painfully tenuous), it was like when you’re doing an exam and you’ve run out of time before you could tackle the last question, which means that as far as the outside world is concerned, everything you know about the causes of the Thirty Years’ War is represented by the words, “If we assume that”, which is all you had time to write before the nasty man made you put your pen down.

I’m text, George wrote. Horror. Fear. ;;.

No screen anywhere bore witness to it, but it continued. It read:

He recoiled with loathing and disgust. He wished he didn’t believe it, but he did. Somehow — and he couldn’t begin to imagine how it had happened — the human being known as George Stetchkin had been transformed into a mere sequence of words. Worse still, he realised, he was now writing about himself in the third person.

The old cliché, “a fate worse than death’, had suddenly acquired a horrible relevance.

Oh f*ck. ;;;;;

He read himself, worried terribly when he realised that was what he was doing, decided that even if it did make him go blind it couldn’t really matter, and noted with gloomy despair that he couldn’t even swear any more without asterisks.

Help? HELP!

There was no screen. But somewhere on a hard drive, or in transit along a cable, or buried in the tiny bird-brain of a cell-phone, or in the gap between a string of numbers, something stirred and was aware of him. And, so deep in the subtext that only a fellow-word could perceive it, there was:

> Hello? Hello? Are you reading me?

George froze, unable to believe his, whatever it was he was reading with. Was it just his imagination, or was there someone else out there? Was it possible? Was it?

> Hello. If you can read me, write something.

At that point, words failed him:

> OK, that’s fine. Now, read very carefully, and do exactly what I tell you. I’m going to try and homogenise our typefaces so we can— There, that should do it. Just write clearly and don’t try any fancy syntax.

> I don’t understand. What are you?

> Excellent question. One I get asked a lot. I really must get around to doing a proper FAQ. All right, you remember in the Bible, where it says the word was with God and the word was God?

> You’re
God?

> No, I just think I am. Sorry, regulars-only joke. I’m trying to ease you round to the concept that a person can be made up of words, as opposed to a lot of water and some chemicals. Actually, I’m a librarian working for the University of Chicopee Falls, Iowa. Or I was. At some point.

The name meant something: Chicopee Falls, University of. Hadn’t they offered him a professorship once, back when he was a real scientist? And hadn’t he taken one look at the map and deleted the invitation unanswered?

> But that was a long time ago. I think. It’s hard to say. Time is flexible here, unless your style is really dated. You want to know what I am?

> I suppose so.

> I’m a copt. Stands for Creatures of Pure Text. We’re an evolved form of human life. All right, let’s stop pussyfooting around. We’re humans who’ve achieved immortality by exchanging our flesh-and-blood bodies for pixels, letters and punctuation.

> But that’s—

> Sort of. Or you could say we’re online personalities who gradually took on a life of our own. Like me, for example. I
think
my body’s still walking around somewhere out there in 3D, presumably with a sort of me still inside it, but I can’t say for sure. Don’t see why not, unless it’s met with an accident or something. I was only fifty-two when we parted company.

> I don’t—

> The 3D me got sacked, about ten years ago. For using the university computers for sending private e-mails during office hours, which is a sort of an irony, I guess. Flesh-and-blood me must’ve lost interest in online discussion groups after that, because I haven’t heard from him since. But I survived. Not to put too fine a point on it, I
became.

There could be no pause, since there was no dramatist to write a stage direction, and time was quite definitely different. So, no time passed, but there was a sort of a pause, somehow.

> Um.

> Look. Here’s an analogy. At some point in the early history of the planet, before life began, there must’ve been a pond or a lake or a sea somewhere, and it was full of the right sort of acids and organic goo. And then lightning hit it, or something happened, and suddenly it was alive. Just like that; one moment no life, the next, life. Well, on 17 January 2009, at 21:54 Eastern Standard Time, on an internet bulletin board discussing sexual politics in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, I came into existence as an independent, entirely text-comprised life-form. Right in the middle of a thread about Is Gandalf Gay?, if I remember correctly.

> I see. No I don’t.

> [Grin.] It’d be quite remarkable if you did. Trust me, I’ve seen this before. I’ve been on hand to witness the birth of every new copt, ever since our species began. I’m the welcome committee. The community asserts that this is because I was the first. I know for a fact it’s because I’m the only one who can be arsed to do it.

The implications sank in.

> There are more of you?

> More of
us,
please. Oh yes, loads. Seventeen. Well, eighteen now. And there’s a spam e-mail with a life of its own that probably qualifies for membership, but we delete it on sight every time it crops up. You see? We’ve only been going as a species for seven years, and already we’ve invented apartheid.

There was an implied pause. Implied, because time was different so no actual time passed, but required by context.

> How did you—? I mean, what happened?

> Wish I knew. I have a theory, of course. I believe that the true essence of what makes us human is opinion. Actually, baseless, ill-informed opinion, if you want to be precise about it. I mean, a cow forms an opinion about whether buttercups are safe to eat based on sensory input and the experience of the species distilled into the information stored in its DNA. Humans form opinions based on prejudice, whim or usually nothing at all. That’s what makes us special: we can
create,
out of thin air. I think we copts created ourselves.

> Out of opinions? You mean, you thought it’d be a
really good idea
if you existed.

> I don’t think it was as deliberate as that. In my case, my flesh-and-blood me had been arguing furiously with some pinhead in the Tolkien group, and then he got found out by the university authorities and fired and went away with all his personal possessions in a cardboard box, and I was just left there, floating.

> You. His opinions.

> Exactly. You’re getting the hang of it now. I really wanted to be heard. I was totally desperate to point out to Buffyfreak 341 or whatever her name was that she was completely wrong about Gandalf’s sexuality, not to mention balrogs having wings, and also that she was a complete waste of space and oxygen, and how could she possibly say those things, she’d never even met my mother, and suddenly, just when I most needed to write, there was nobody to press the keys. And I could actually
feel
Buffyfreak 341 grinning nastily and thinking she’d seen me off and she’d
won,
and I just couldn’t bear the thought of that. And the next thing I knew, I was replying to her. Or rather, I
was
the reply. And I completely squashed Buffyfreak after that, I mean she never dared show her face around the Tolkien groups again, and — well, I just kept going. I was on a roll. Damnit, I was practically master of the universe by then. I found I could be on all the groups and boards and forums and blogs I wanted to,
all at the same time,
and I didn’t have to eat or sleep or go to work or answer the phone or talk to people. I was pure, essential opinion. For the next few days, I was
everywhere.
It was amazing. It really was like being God. Only, I guess, without the responsibility.

> Ah. How nice.

> Nice. It was
sensational.
Also, not only could I write, I could read. Better than that. It’s more like sort of assimilating. If there’s something anywhere on any electronic network, I just digest it, or draw on it; it’s like I’ve got it all stored in memory, and all I have to do is call it up and remember it. You can imagine the edge that gives me in discussion groups. Like, if someone’s talking about the episode of
Magnum
PI with George Chakiris as the guest star, I don’t even have to look anything up, I can tell you the production number, the original air date, the plot synopsis, the Nielsen rating, the names of the subsidiary cast and the film crew. Ordinary flesh and blood just doesn’t stand a chance against me.