Creation Machine (30 page)

Then her face dissolves into a sort of cloud, and then, just for a second, it condenses into something like a necklace. It doesn’t speak, but the words form in my mind. ‘Focus. We’re with you.’

Uh huh.
We’re watching you
would have been closer. But it reassures me, in a strange sort of a way. I nod, and the necklace morphs back into a tooth-challenged child’s face, which scoots away on its trolley just as the first explosion blows the smoke-house door outwards off its hinges.

I press myself back into the shadows and watch until the cop meat-wagon has hauled away the body that is nearly Rudi’s. Then, out of kindness and definitely outside the mission profile, I spend a few minutes soothing the outraged Weed Captain. He blames immigrants and I agree with him, reflecting that he doesn’t know the half of it.

But the main thing is, he doesn’t recognize me. As far as he, and the rest of this world, is concerned, Rudi has been captured dead, and
that
was the point of the exercise. It sets me free in all kinds of ways.

A part of me wants to head back to Sallah’s apartment, to prove to at least one person that Rudi has not disappeared and maybe to make amends for a couple of things, but that part of me is not a sound judge. For a start, it’s still a bit in thrall to Rudi’s body chemistry, which doesn’t help objectivity. Or so I tell myself.

But that’s not what I’m here for now. The main attraction is elsewhere, and it’s time I went and found it. I had to go straight to Plan B last time. It’s up to me to get on with Plan A, except that this time I know what Plan A really is.

Someone hid something here. It’s data, or the dream of it – another dream written on a dream – and now I’m back in here I can taste how to follow the dream.

So I do.

Rivers in cities all smell the same, don’t they? Algae, sewage, spilled hydrocarbon fuels and the general scent of water. By the time I get to the docks it is well after midnight, and we are in the quiet dead hours. A slithering mist is carrying the smell up the little streets between the warehouses. A hundred metres along the river front a single freighter is being unloaded by a gang of autodores. Clanks of metal containers and whining motors seem extra loud against the silence.

The warehouse is one of a long line, and it is surrounded by some serious technology. It is secured and locked down and monitored and generally out of bounds. I’d be impressed, if I wasn’t busy being even more impressed by the way it just doesn’t show at all. It just looks like anyone’s warehouse.

I don’t need to be right next door to it to do the next bit. Close enough is good enough, so I walk past slowly and continue a little way upriver until I find a bollard the right height to sit on. Then I close my eyes and think.

It feels a bit like uploading into Rudi, but more focused and at the same time more diffuse. Focused, because the system I am entering is made of simple sharp things like metal and electrons rather than the squishy electro-bio-chemical mush of a brain. Diffuse, because the connections go everywhere in a million directions at once.

First I check that my target is there. It is, and I allow myself a moment of relief. Then it’s time to plan my entry. I go slowly. No security system likes being subverted, and this one has many ways of putting a serious kink in my life if it notices me. But after a while I find my way.

I am making a space – a me-shaped hole in the system’s mindset that goes all the way from the warehouse door to the place where the target is. I sidle through the virtual map of the place, thinking my way from risk to risk until I am there.

It takes a long time, and when I finally open my eyes I am damp with sweat. I glance up and down the river; the autodores have gone and the freighter is dark, and riding high and empty. There’s no one around at all.

I stand up, stretch, and wander back along the river front to the warehouse. The entrance I need is round the side, up an alley that smells of river plus something else, a powerful, rank, waxy smell. It’s not long before I almost trip over the source. He is asleep, or unconscious, curled up on his side in a pool of piss next to a splash of dried vomit. He is wearing what looks like a robe, in coarse grey-brown material. The brown might be dirt, or it might be worse. I step over him carefully, and then I’m at the door.

I stand in front of it, checking my mental map of the course I have plotted into the building. Then I reach out, lift the flap that covers the contact box on the wall, and tap the code.

There is an old-fashioned sounding
click
, and the door opens. I’m in.

Warehouses are the same everywhere too. The model never changes. Stuff stacked up, with paths between the stuff so you can get to it. This one uses travelling overhead grabs, each with four steel pincers in two sets of two. They’re still at the moment. It’s a bit like walking under a forest of dead fingers. That’s not a good thought, so I kill it and move on.

My route would look bizarre if anyone was there to do the looking. It’s not straight; security and surveillance systems are never quite uniform, and my virtual tunnel through the defences twists around to take the line of least resistance. But it gets me there. After a long walk that covers only a short distance I fetch up in front of a section of racking full of boxes that look exactly like all the others.

But they only
look
like the others, because the others are made of metal or timber or foamplas. These are made of energy. It’s a sheet of field, like a shade square only much, much stronger. This is the real protection. This is the bit they rely on after all the concealment and the surveillance have been overcome. You could drop a battlefield nuke on this place and not breach those fields. Happily that isn’t going to stop me. I reach out my hand.

It stops.

I frown. My fingers should have floated through the field, but instead they are pressing against something hard. I run my hand over it. It
is
a field, or at least it feels like one – the oily there-and-not-there-ness, the slight warmth. I push harder, but it just makes my fingers hurt.

Then I hear the laugh. I turn, and look into the face of the man I last saw curled up outside next to a streak of vomit. He grins. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘but you should have seen your face.’

I tense automatically, but then force myself to relax. There’s no point wasting energy, and besides, I already know that the solution here isn’t going to be physical. Looking round him, I can see that this man is standing at the end of his own tunnel through the security system, which looks more direct than mine. He’s wearing a long robe made of rough brown cloth. A hood hangs loosely down his back, and below the robe his feet are wrapped in crude sandals. His face might be middle-aged, and he has a dark, trimmed beard. As a bonus, he doesn’t smell any more, and all this means he definitely doesn’t belong here. That makes him like me.

‘Hello,’ I say.

He nods. ‘Hello.’ Then he holds out a hand. ‘Look what I found.’ He uncurls his fingers and I look. A data chip, the old-fashioned sort that you use when you really want to know where your data is.

He’s got there first. I look up from his hand and meet his eyes. ‘So?’

‘I expect you think you know what this is?’

‘Think? Yes.’ I shrug. ‘But I don’t know what you are.’

‘No, you don’t.’ He doesn’t seem about to tell me. ‘Listen, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but this is blank. Meaningless.’ He shrugs and smiles. ‘It only had one function. Bait.’

‘Bait?’ I think back to the beach, which now seems a lifetime ago, where I met the simulation of the woman with the young smile and the old eyes.

‘Yeah. It worked, too. You’re here, and it’s good to see you. It feels like a long time since I hauled you out of your body.’

‘That was you?’ I’ll find the time to be angry soon. Meanwhile I’m having trouble keeping up.

‘Yes. On behalf of someone who thought he was being very clever, but yes, it was me.’ Then he smiles, and holds out his hand. ‘Team?’

‘Only if I know who you are.’

He laughs again. ‘Very good. Okay, here goes. I’m the only guy who can get you out of here.’

I give him a long look. Eventually I say, ‘I can get out of here by myself. Like I got in here.’

He shakes his head. ‘No, you can’t. Sorry. Try if you like. I’ll wait.’

His self-confidence is getting annoying. I should have two ways out. First, the local physical one, of retracing my drunkard’s-walk path back out of the warehouse. Second, the big red button option of downloading straight out of the sim, period. Only, when I look, the path I so carefully made for myself has gone missing, and when I check for the route back into raw code and away, there’s nothing. It’s as if the file is missing.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You got me.’
For the moment
, I add to myself. Then curiosity gets the better of me. ‘That shouldn’t have been possible. How did you do it?’

‘I know this place very well.’ He swings an arm round vaguely. ‘I’ve been here a long time.’

There’s something about the way he says ‘long’ that makes me look at him again. He meets my look with eyes that suddenly seem very old. ‘It’s time to go. Coming?’

‘Is there any other way?’

‘No.’ He shakes his head emphatically. ‘You won’t be able to stay. It’s starting. There’s not long to go. You’d better follow me.’

‘What’s starting?’ But he has already turned and headed off down the path he has made. I shrug, and get ready to follow him. Then I pause. Now I’ve noticed it too. It’s like a coarsening of my senses, as if everything is reaching me in lower definition. Pixel fringes appear at the edges of things, and even the white noise of the silence in the warehouse is starting to sound mushy and indistinct.

For a second I’m baffled. Then I realize, and my stomach flips. The whole fucking sim’s shutting down.

If I’m still in here when it goes, I shut down too. Permanently. Those are the rules – if your brain dies in a sim then it dies everywhere, and those rules apply to me the same as everyone else.

Panic fires my legs. I sprint down a tunnel that already looks like a mosaic. Ahead of me, the other guy is moving fast, swinging and jinking. He knows the way. I can hardly see the corridor any more, so I take a deep breath and start mimicking his moves as if I’m following him through a minefield. I’m not sure what happens if I step outside the path right now, and I really don’t want to find out.

He turns and waits for me at the edge of what used to be the warehouse, but which is now just a rough-edged blur in a limited palette of grey-scale. He reaches out a hand. ‘Grab this.’

I’m not going to argue, and to be honest I could do with something to hang on to. I grab the hand, and he nods. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘We’re off.’

The last drop of colour and definition drains from the world around me, and I have a moment to wonder if this is what oblivion feels like.

Then there is – a discontinuity. I’m not sure how long, just that for an interval my senses . . . weren’t.

Then everything is different.

Server Farm Atrium, Catastrophe Curve

‘FLEARE!’

She could ignore the voice, but something was prodding her. It was a distinct, unnerving thump-thump against her shoulder that definitely had nothing to do with the dream she had been having. There had been a beach . . . she tried to turn over, and felt herself roll over a hard lip and begin to fall.

‘Whoa!’ Something caught her, and she was lowered gently to the ground. She opened her eyes, and saw Muz, still in necklace form. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Hello.’ She rubbed herself where the hard thing had dug in. She looked up and saw that it had been the edge of a couch that had a lot in common with a stretcher. It wasn’t a good comparison. She looked away. ‘Thanks for catching me.’

‘No problem. Can you sit up?’

She tried. ‘Yeah. Ow.’ Her hip ached. So, she realized, did the rest of her leg. Both legs, and quite a lot. Not all the hard lip, then. She resisted the urge to massage her thighs by knotting her fingers above her head in a knuckle-cracking stretch. ‘So, everything okay? That was a bit abrupt.’

‘I know. Sorry. Things are happening; I thought you’d like to see. Well,
ought
to see, really.’

‘Uh huh?’ Fleare rubbed her forehead. ‘I just woke up. Start gently.’

‘Okay. Well, the news is easiest, and it helps to explain everything else. This came out ten minutes ago. I’m going to put it on screen; you might want to shield your eyes until they adapt.’

Fleare nodded, and screwed her eyes half shut as the silver-grey smoke of a screen expanded to a rectangle in front of her. An image grew out of the blur, and she froze. It was her father, immobilized in the act of making some point, his hands spread in front of him, his eyebrows raised and, she noted, his eyes keenly focused and quite, quite dead. It was like looking into a pair of black holes.

She stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘What the fuck’s
he
doing?’

‘Good question. I’m not sure.’ Muz paused. ‘But we know what he’s
saying
, and that’s interesting enough. Oh, by the way, he is Speaker on Foreign Affairs as of twelve hours ago.’

‘Is he?’ Fleare shook her head. ‘Not President of the Universe? Must be quite a disappointment.’

‘Shh. Listen.’

The image sprang into life.

‘. . . purely a temporary measure. The population can be assured that everything is being done to deflect any threat . . .’

‘Yes, threat. You see, no one in the Government – whatever is
meant
by Government at the moment, but that’s another question – has anything useful to say about exactly what threat is being deflected.’

‘Well, obviously we can only disclose so much in a public forum . . .’

‘Of course. But what we have here, Speaker, is essentially martial law. Surely you have some justification for that?’

Fleare’s father leaned back in his seat and grinned. ‘If I may say so, the scrutiny you are able to subject me to would be impossible under true martial law.’