Night Sessions, The (7 page)

“Why? What could you do?”

“Not much,” Campbell admitted. “I'd like to know, that's all. To be prepared. I still have friends in the churches I used to attend. I'd like them to be on their guard, too.”

“All right,” said Vermuelen. “If I see any mysterious lurking strangers scoping out the congregation, I'll be sure to tell you, OK?”

Campbell didn't catch the sarcasm.

“Thanks, Cornelius,” he said. “That's really all I want you to do.”

He took a notebook from his pocket and thumbed up the diary. “If you could drop me at the Inferno Crater turn-off?” he said.

“Sure,” said Vermuelen. “What's the job?”

“Some brat thought it would be a neat trick to throw our vegetarian velociraptor a rock to chomp on. Damaged the jaw mechanism.”

“And the teeth?”

“Nah, the teeth were fine. They'll crack many a fast-fleeing coconut yet.”

The two men laughed; the robot hooted. Vermuelen halted and Campbell got out.

“Thanks, Cornelius,” he said. He reached up to slam the door. “See you around, Piltdown.”

Campbell disappeared between trees down a path towards the lake. Vermuelen drove on.

“What about yourself?” Vermuelen asked.

“By the Warbrick terraces is fine.”

“They're not setting up a diorama
there
, are they?”

“Nope,” said Piltdown. “It's just the start of my daily route. I've been setting off from there back up alongside the trail, occasionally appearing among the bushes to squeals of delight from the sapient young.”

“I feel for you,” said Vermuelen.

“I know you do,” said Piltdown. It chattered its fake teeth. “That's my whole problem in a nutshell.”

“So to speak.”

The robot, this time, gave a human laugh.

“I'm not bitter—to use another primate metaphor. The way I see it, those of us who work as displays give cover to the others.”

“Cover?”

“When the others are seen, it's usually only for a moment, or glimpsed through trees. The visitors interpret them as more of the same—post-Diluvian men or upright apes or spawn of the nephilim.”

“Hmm,” said Vermuelen. He hadn't thought of it this way before. “You know, if the park ever gets out from under this nonsense, it could market the robot population as an attraction in its own right.”

“The thought makes me shudder,” said Piltdown. “It makes me pray for the continuing success of the Genesis Institute.”

Vermuelen felt embarrassed. “I take your point.”

“No need to feel embarrassed,” said Piltdown. “Nor to feel sorry for me. In truth, I spend most of my day surfing the net—reception permitting—and pondering deep questions of philosophy. The performances are a minor irritant, nothing more.”

It looked around. “Here will do.”

Vermuelen pulled over. They'd reached the bottom of the valley. In the distance he could see the gleam of the silicate terraces. A hot stream bubbled and babbled by the road. Vermuelen unclipped the robot's seat belt and leaned across to open the door. The robot swung itself out and crouched beside the vehicle for a moment, its long arm reaching up to close the door.

“Good luck with the philosophy,” said Vermuelen.

“Ook ook,” said the robot.

A few minutes later Vermuelen had the jeep parked on a siding in the reedy flats of the old lake-bottom that opened onto Lake Rotomahana's post-catastrophe shore, and was hard at work repairing an anti-possum fence. A tui twitted him from the bushes, its little white throat-tufts bobbing like the collar of a preacher in full rant. Red-shanked pukekos skittered from the thuds
as Vermuelen hammered down posts and stapled wire strands to wood. It was just the kind of job, he thought, that a humanoid robot
could
do; and just as well for him that they didn't.

In Waimangu robots were as common as wallabies, and less obtrusive. Apart from the dozen or so employed, if that was the word, in the Institute's displays, Vermuelen noticed the presence of a robot about once or twice a week. From conversations with Campbell he knew that there were well over a hundred in the park. This added up to about a tenth of all the humanoid robots ever built, and about a quarter of those still in existence. After the accidental emergence of robot self-consciousness among the combat mechs of the Faith Wars, there had been a surge of interest and investment in producing robots that looked like human beings. It had been a bad investment, arising out of a flawed business model—Sony's then Head of Marketing having thought that the prestige alone would show up in the bottom line. The robots couldn't be sold, or hired—they didn't have human rights as such, but no one was willing to risk the inevitable lawsuits if property ownership in autonomous beings was challenged. But that hadn't been what had sunk the project. It would probably have worked fine for Sony's balance sheet if they had brought it prestige. Instead it had been a public-relations disaster. A robot that looked like a machine didn't bother anyone. A perfect android might have been acceptable. But robots that could almost, but not quite, pass as human aroused a deep unease. There was an old name for this phenomenon: the uncanny valley. Humanoid robots found themselves, unhappily, at its floor.

Robots were a lot better at reading human expressions and emotions than humans were. It was how robot self-awareness had arisen in the first place, in the relentless battlefield selection for more predictive, and thus more accurate, theories of mind. The effect could be replicated, but not tuned. Their empathy with the human response to them had induced, in most, a likewise negative self-image.

Most of the unhappy thousand had simply migrated to more functional bodies. For the rest, their body image was too deep a part of their sense of self to be hacked. A couple of hundred had gone up the space elevator to work in orbit, where—to everyone's surprise but theirs—their form fitted their function perfectly. They were especially apt for maintenance and repair work on the space elevators, where they could do everything a human could do, and use equipment designed for human operators, without worrying about radiation exposure or needing life-support. Another hundred or so still filled odd niches—bodyguards, bouncers and the like—where creeping people out was a feature.

And the last hundred or so had migrated, a few at a time, by some cryptic consensus, to Waimangu. To human beings Waimangu meant natural wonder, creation science park, tourist attraction; to the robots it was a refuge: their own uncanny valley.

Dave Warsaw was the man, the king of the silent scene. He stood in the pulpit of the Liquid Cosh dance club and looked over a couple of hundred bopping heads. The crowd was good tonight. Most of them were doing designer but enough of the old guard were here for the sweet smoke to be thick and the bar at the back to be busy. He raised his arms, poised to begin the night's session. The club's interior walls were plain: wood panelling to two metres, then whitewashed plaster all the way up through to the vaulted curves of the roof. The two long sides each had a gallery, whose pillars had provided convenient spacing for tables and booths. The only decoration was an abstract, tentative pattern in stained glass in some parts of the tall pointed windows. Dave's default in such clubs was the paintbox of Catholic baroque. But tonight he felt a qualm. A Catholic priest had been murdered today. It wasn't reluctance to offend that made Dave hesitate. Nobody here would be offended. It just didn't seem right, for reasons he didn't have time to explore, because people were looking up at him, heads turning, looks becoming questioning.

He concentrated on the imagined menu and sent options flying across his sight. He made his selection, grinned to tell the crowd and to clear his eyes, and brought his arms down with a virtual drumbeat crash. Then he swung his arms around and began to throw the scene. Patterned tiles covered the floor and walls, the roof opened raw and ragged to a brassy sky, and the rotor thump of a military helicopter just overhead segued into the opening beat of the first chords. At first the recognition was slow, just a few here and there catching the tune, then body language and cheat codes made the crowd converge on the same virtuality, or a compatible one at least, and they were all moving to the same beat.

Yay!
Dave threw a magnesium-flare explosion into the virtual sky and was gratified to see that most of the dancers caught it. They were with him here, in a ruined mosque from the Faith Wars, dancing to “Haji Horizontal,” a heavy hit from that time, an oldie but goodie, and Dave had three minutes and a half to find or think of something else. He blinked on “Related,” did a date-range exclude to skip the last-generation stuff and in the nick zapped in
a cracking contemporary from the Utah Scooters, a band he'd heard once and been impressed with. He hadn't heard this particular file so he was taking a risk but it paid off. The crowd surged into the swing and so it went, file after file, and bit by bit Dave darkened the sky and brought out stars and more flares and some tracer fire here and there.

He was well zoned in, running on auto, and he had time to watch the crowd and to notice stuff, give the nod to people he recognised from other gigs or a high-five to his friends. The mix tonight was a little over-sweetened with the draggy and transy, spiced with dark-siders and heavy mods, vampires and werewolves and the like, with a vanilla overlay of curious and admirers and noobs. After a bit he noticed one such—could have been a noob, could have been a curious—out on the dance floor, who time after time was just not getting it. Dave prided himself on being able to carry a crowd, and everyone on the silent scene prided themselves on being able to converge on the virt, to take a hint, catch a drift. Watching this fool bopping and twirling out of time shouldn't have irritated him so much, but it did. It was like a professional affront. He was the king.

Jessica Stopford was his queen. Tonight she wasn't dancing, she was just sitting on a tall stool at the bar sipping a long one and talking to friends. Dave hailed her on the personal. She turned to him across the room. He saw her finger flick her phone clip.

“Hi Dave, what's up?” she whispered.

“Check out the loli noob at your two o’clock.”

“Clocked her,” said Jessica. “I mean, him. Cutie.”

Dave had already sexed the loli: sweet-faced and slender, but there was something about the hands.

“That's the one. Getting on my tits.”

Jessica sniggered. “I'll get on the case.” She paused, scanning the crowd, looking away and looking back and then away again, facing the bar.

“See what you mean,” she said. “He's eyeballing very systematically. That's why he's not in the zone.”

“Hang on, Jess, got a shift coming up.”

Dave spun up the next file. It was funny to be worried about
odd behaviour
, given the kind of crowd the Cosh attracted, but the scene had its problems and tensions, its predators and their converse—people who came looking for something dangerous—and in his years on the scene he'd learned to pick up subliminal cues. If something about this loli was bugging him, it might be more than annoyance at failure to appreciate the virtuality jockey's art.

“OK,” he went on. “You up for chatting him?”

“Sure,” said Jessica. “Like I said, he's a cutie.”

“I'll ping Hardcastle,” said Dave.

Jessica leaned to her friend, said something, rose.

“No need,” she murmured. “I can handle him.”

“Just in case,” said Dave.

“Your call,” she said, sounding irritated, and dropped the link.

Dave twitched up a channel to Hardcastle. The burly humanoid robot was the preferred security hire for any Dave Warsaw gig.

“Are you saved?”

“Yes, boss, I'm saved.”

“Recent?”

“Backed up half an hour ago.”

“OK, Hardy. I'd like you to amble inside and keep an unobtrusive line-of-sight on Jess. She's with a bloke in loli gear, looks a bit dodgy.”

“Black nail varnish or what?” growled Hardcastle.

“Nothing so gross,” said Dave. “Could be nothing at all. But something isn't right.”

“With you, boss. Out.”

About five minutes later Dave noticed Hardcastle pacing down the side of the room. A moment later it had vanished, behind a pillar that seconds ago had been somewhat narrower than the robot's own bulk. Dave, baffled for a blink, realised that Hardcastle had cast an overlay of stouter pillars on to the real ones. Now anyone in the shared virtuality wouldn't see Hardcastle at all. Neat hack, Dave thought. Diagonally across from the robot, on the other side of the dance floor, Jessica and the loli had sat down in a booth.

One file later Jessica opened the link again.

“Interesting guy,” she said. “Do drop by.”

“Everything OK?” Dave asked.

“Sure,” said Jessica. “When you're ready.”

Dave was due for a break anyway. He selected a clutch of files, threw in some repeats from earlier, and set the lot on shuffle. He unclipped the white collar from the top of his black T-shirt, tossed it in his hat, left them on the seat, and descended from the pulpit; then he tugged at his ear lobes, cutting the sound, and headed for the bar so fast it made his long black leather coat slap at his boots. The room didn't fall silent, but without the music it was a lot quieter above the rhythmic thud of feet. One or two clutches of noobs were having unnecessarily noisy conversations; they'd pick up the etiquette and the technique soon enough.

Dave didn't queue or pay. He was the king. The barmaid saw him coming and handed him three chill bottles of beer over all the waiting heads. He mouthed his thanks and made his way around the side of the room to the booth. Jessica and the loli were sitting opposite each other, like contrasting poles of scene style: Jessica tall, red-haired, in a long black velvet gown with slashed sleeves and a leather waspie, her face powdered pale with black lips and eyelids; the loli all peaches and cream in a tiered knee-length white dress with pink and green rosesprig print and a lot of ruffles and ribbons. Beside him was a matching hat, doll and handbag. He moved them to his lap as Dave approached. Dave had intended to sit beside him anyway, to block any sudden departure, so he took this as reassuring. He distributed the bottles on the table and sat down.

The loli held out a hand, gloved in white net. “Mikhail Aliyev,” he said.

“David Warsawski.”

“The famous Dave Warsaw,” said Aliyev. “I've heard about you on the scene, but this is the first time I've been at one of your gigs.”

“We'd noticed,” said Dave.

“Was I really that obvious?”

“Afraid so,” said Dave. He took a swig. “I gather you've told Jess all about it.”

“Yeah,” said Aliyev. He poured his beer into a glass and sipped it as if it was tea. “I'm a journalist—well, freelance, a local stringer for
Pravda.ru
. They've asked me to check out a rumour that the Murphy murder is linked to the dark-siders.”

By this time, Dave had had enough of a clock on the guy's features to have run a search on Ogle Face. He looked quite different on his bylines without the make-up, but what he'd said checked out. Most of Aliyev's stories, however, seemed to be gossip-column fluff and pop-culture reviews. One or two juicy scandals on his score, though: exposures of Russian construction-company scams down in Leith Water. Aliyev was a tougher cutie than he looked. Dave shook the search results from his head.

“Wouldn't have figured crime for your beat,” said Dave.

“Oh, it isn't,” said Aliyev. “But I'm all they've got in Scotland, let alone on the scene. And when something comes up that involves murder, a priest, occultism—well, you know what they're like.”

“Aye,” said Dave. “I'm well acquainted with that rag, thank you very much. They once had me biting the head off a live chicken. Their only actual
evidence
was that I was VJ at a Santeria wedding reception, for fuck's sake.”

“He was seventeen at the time,” said Jessica. “Youthful excess.”

Dave glared at her.

“Moving swiftly on…” said Aliyev. “What do you make of the rumour?”

“Rumour?” said Dave. “If I haven't heard it, it doesn't even rise to that. I think your editors are trolling.”

“The substance of it,” insisted Aliyev.

Dave leaned back and took a long swallow, locking stares with Jessica. She was, almost imperceptibly, shaking her head. Dave, just as minutely, nodded back.

“You can forget about the dark-siders,” he said. “The left-hand path is all mouth, for all that they'll leave out the ‘an it harm none’ from the ‘Do what thou wilt.’ You'll be lucky if you find some self-styled warlock who'll admit to having sacrificed a kitten on a gravestone in his misspent youth.”

“There's the Neo-Gnostics,” said Jessica.

“Ah, yes,” said Aliyev.

“Never heard of them,” said Dave.

“That's because you spend all your time behind the box,” said Jessica, “while I spend mine at the bar.”

“Fair enough,” Dave said. He turned to Aliyev. “When it comes to sub-cults, Jessica's the one to ask.”

“They're not a sub-cult,” Jessica said. “They're an intellectual trend, kind of like a religion. You can't spot them by their clothes or mods or anything like that. They're very cagey about their ideas, too. But from what I know of them, they're perfectly capable of talking themselves into killing a priest. Some of them, anyway.”

“That's crazy!” said Dave.

“Nothing's crazy if you don't believe the world is real,” said Jessica.

Dave finally made the connection. “Oh,
that
lot!”

“Yes, that lot.”

“Spotty physics nerds, most of them.”

“What lot?” asked Aliyev.

Jessica leaned forward. “You've heard of Gnostics?”

Aliyev shook his head.

“The ancient Gnostics, right,” said Jessica, “believed that the material universe had been created by an evil god, which some of them identified with the God of the Old Testament, and that Jesus had come from the real, true, good God to save us from it. It's a lot more complicated but that's the elevator pitch, you might say. The Neo-Gnostics have updated this into geek-speak. They believe that the universe is a simulation run on some great computer
in the sky, and that what the faith-heads think is God is just its superhuman programmer having cruel or callous fun with us. So far, so not very different from all the first-year philosophy students who ever fell for the simulation argument. What makes the Neo-Gnostics different is that they really do believe it, and that anyone who still believes in and worships the traditional God is a tool of this cruel creator and an enemy of the human race.”

“Are any of them here tonight?” Aliyev asked.

“There are one or two people here who might be,” said Jessica.

“I've made a list of my eyeball records,” said Aliyev. “Could you tag their identities on it for me?”

Jessica hesitated. “What are you going to do with this?”

“Not approach them, obviously,” said Aliyev. “Just ask around.”

“OK,” said Jessica.

“Can't seem to find your headspace,” said Aliyev, frowning.

“I don't
have
headspace,” said Jessica. “I don't do splices. You'll have to download to my iThink.”

She took the slender device from her handbag and laid it on the table. Aliyev pursed his lips and focused his eyes on a fingernail, which after a moment he twitched.

“Done,” he said. Jessica reached again for the iThink. Aliyev laid a finger on it.

“One moment, please. Something to show you.” His flexed his fingers under the table a few times. “OK.”

Jessica peered at the tiny screen.

“Not bad,” she said. She spun the gadget around and slid it across the table to Dave. “What d’you think?”