Reality 36 (26 page)

  His words were powerful. The cataclysm of the tip was receding into memory, wars were fizzling out as cold war took its place. The world was a place where people could cautiously feel comfortable in their outrage at their ancestors' mistakes.

  Zhang Qifang had won a lot of supporters with his talk of children. He had seen the Neukind – AI, pimsims, post-humans, simulants, uplifted animals and so forth – as the true future.

  He'd often said to her, later, when they had got to know each other, "Mankind has begun to save the planet from his mistakes, but it might already be too late to save itself." She'd shared his pessimism, at least some of the time; she'd seen plenty in her service time to vindicate Qifang's opinion.

  She'd left the army and turned inwards; studying the thirtysix Realms fit that well. When the games had been running, the Realms had appalled her; whole civilisations of thinking creatures conjured into existence so humans could go and let the old beast out a little, practising war, rape, torture and other outrages. As a student, she'd joined others and protested their existence, Qifang their hero on his last great crusade. Then the UN's declaration had gone out; the Reality Realms were immoral and a social hazard. The doors were closed, the worlds had gone feral and that was that; they had been shut off fifteen years ago and new VR of the same intensity forbidden. The digital inhabitants of the thirty-six Realms had been the last of the Neukind to have been granted rights. It had been a difficult victory, but Zhang Qifang's support had swayed it. Sentient beings should not be created only to be killed for sport. Peace for Orcs, Rights for Elves. It sounded stupid when Jaffy said it that way; he'd meant it to.

  Watching from outside had not given Valdaire a true picture of what it was like to immerse oneself fully in the Reality Realms. Being here was a visceral experience, accentuated to be even more real than real life. The world was so much cleaner, so much more vivid. She found it hard to believe that her body was elsewhere, sat in a chair in a cabin in the woods, slack-mouthed and plugged in. She held up her hand and examined it. It was better than real, stronger, cleaner of line and free of blemishes; it was an idealised version of her hand. It was not hard to see now how people had become dependent on the RWRR experience, not hard at all.

  She sat and hugged her knees and bit her lip and looked out across to the jungle. Perhaps she'd followed him too easily, for the wrong reasons. She had always wanted to see the worlds at first hand. She'd just never allowed herself. She admitted when she applied that that's why she studied them – she'd had to, the psych profiling would have winkled out the truth in the end. But that she'd been strong enough never to plug in was what had got her the job.

  Maybe that's why Qifang'd given her the viewing codes months ago. He was supposed to hold them for each researcher, but he'd said she needed to know everything. She was no longer sure of his motives.

  She swallowed. Perhaps, perhaps if she just changed things a little. Just once, just to see what it was like. She'd resisted the temptation hard ever since she dropped into the Realms, maybe if she tried, she might understand better.

  She looked over her shoulder. Jag was cross-legged, breathing deeply, lost in some inner world of his own. The act of creation of one world was never the creation of only one world, as each created so many more, the inner worlds of the minds of those inhabiting it leading on to the eventual creation of worlds like this in an endless cycle. All she'd do would be to take a more active part in that. She closed her eyes. She'd make something innocuous, something that already existed here, something small and harmless. She breathed deeply, imitating the man behind her. She pictured the creature in her mind, a Jexbu it was called. She'd seen it when she had been studying an island tribe on the far side of this Realm, a band of fish people created to provide foes for dungeon-bashing armchair adventurers.

  The Jexbu was an eight-limbed thing, six of which were wings the colour of sapphires. She could see it in her mind's eye. Through the faded 3D of the mechanical turk workstation display it had taken her breath away. To see one in front of her would be wonderful.

  She opened her eyes. Nothing. She took a deep breath, feeling a mixture of failure and relief. It was for the best.

  There was the barest flicker of light, and the air rippled as if distorted, like a bulls-eye glass. A jexbu hung, frozen for a moment, before suddenly coming to life, beating its wings in pairs and fluttering away. The gentle wake from its wings stirred her fringe. Veronique was spellbound – it was beautiful, far more beautiful than the image she'd seen. Veronique could have been a woman of great feeling, but she'd learned that the world wasn't a great place for emotional people, so she sat on her heart tightly. Maybe it was being in the Realm, maybe it was the thought that people could create something as beautiful as that by thinking of it, but her defences trembled. Tears pricked at her eyes.

  "Madam goddess," came Jagadith's reproachful voice. "Please be not doing such things. It is a slippery path to follow, you could soon be suffering from delusions of divine grandeur, and Tarqinius and I will have no choice but to set you free from our Realm, safely or by the sword." He tapped the blade across his knee. "Let us hope it does not come to that," he said warningly. He stood up, brushing some of the dried mud from his coat of plates. "Besides, your villainy may well have alerted your erstwhile teacher to our presence. Please be restraining yourself."

  "I… I am sorry… I didn't mean…" She didn't know what to say. What had she been thinking?

  Tarquinius' rope dropped over the lip of the dimple, saving her from Jagadith's disapproval.

  "Aha! It appears Tarquinius has reached the summit. If you please, goddess, grasp the stirrup this time."

  She did so, and the rope dragged them to the top, she and Jag holding the loop at the end of the rope and pushing themselves clear of the smooth rock with their feet.

Tarquinius threaded his way between the dimples of the summit toward the trunk of the monkey puzzle tree at the centre of the rock. The sun was sinking low in the sky again. Where the giant limbs of the tree allowed, its rays struck reds and golds of lustrous hue from the polished basalt, catching upon the tiny crystals that made up the whole, shattering it into a million small worlds of coloured fire.

  "It appears our god favours sunsets," Tarquinius commented.

  The tree was so vast that the minds of the travellers found it difficult to perceive it as a tree. Sometime the tree looked like a tree, until a giddy shift of perspective turned it into a ragged mountain, painted a variety of sinister greens. Out by the edge of the rockdome only the most adventurous fronds quested out above their heads, but as they worked their way inwards, the tree's limbs filled the sky, developing into a latticework of enormous, scaled leaves, the tree changing from a mountain to a dragon, breathing with the wind.

  "This is anomalous!" roared Tarquinius. "Anomalous!"

  Jag turned round and gave Veronique a stern look. "Do you see now? This is not the work of the man you describe. Can you not see that he has changed? I fear your professor has gone mad. This has gone beyond a mere case of expulsion. We will have to kill him."

Chapter 17

Hong Kong

"Richards, is that you? What the devil are you doing here? Have you gone mad?" Choi's eyes bulged so much Richards almost laughed, for Choi was a gentlemen of the utmost seriousness and would not have enjoyed how comical he looked. He sat there blinking slowly, like all his motion. Choi moved like a glacier. His hand hung in the air, and a large spot of ink dropped from his brush, marring his calligraphy.

  "I thought you'd never guess," said Richards, flipping his hands out in a magician's flourish.

  "Even in that thing it is obvious." Choi regained his composure, his face reverting to the bland expression he habitually wore. His English was perfect and spoken truly, unmoderated by intermediary software. His accent was clipped, and the unvoiced consonants common to East Asian languages were barely evident. Once upon a time, it had been fashionable for men with Eurasian ancestry to be educated in British public schools. Once. He was a relic. "No one I know is crazy enough to come in here unannounced, except you."

  "Or clever enough to pull it off," said Richards.

  Choi's eyes narrowed. "What do you want here?"

  "Only information," said Richards, "about these machines."

  He ran a holo from the android's built-in entertainment system, highlights of his recent encounters with the cydroids. The system was low-grade, the picture grainy. "Who built them?"

  Choi set down his brush on a porcelain dish and regarded his marred work. "You disrespect me, arriving unannounced. More pertinently, you anger the Guangbo, coming and going in through the Firewall as if the sovereign cyberspace of China were a field at the end of your garden, and you have a hole in your hedge."

  "In a manner of speaking, it is and I have," said Richards. "Come on, aren't you just the tiniest bit interested? These are near-human sheaths! Nothing like that is supposed to be out there. Choi, they've bridged the valley."

  Choi blotted the ink stain on his art as if he had all the time in the world. "Be wary. The Guangbo have been waiting for you. They will be coming. Right now, I think. You have endangered us both. They will lock down your sensing presence and extradite you. You know that, of course, because you are so very intelligent." He stood, lifting the paper, and stalked around his desk to hang it up to dry against a light panel, where he stood regarding it critically. "You have ruined it."

  "Sorry. Tell me who made these sheaths and why I haven't seen them before so I can get out of your hair before the authorities arrive."

  "I must disappoint you."

  "What are you saying? Are you telling me, that you, Tony Choi, that you don't know?"

  "Leave." The man put one hand over the other; the lower hand was gripping his paintbrush hard.

  "Tony, these chassis have the mark of one of your manufactories upon them." He displayed the relevant image. "A little careless, wouldn't you say?"

  "I do not sell illegally, Richards."

  "Come on, Tony." Richards paced round the room in the android, causing the holos it projected to jump over the walls like acrobats. The machine's cheaply woven joints squeaked as he went. He stopped by an ancient vase, walked on to the next piece. Art hung from much of the panelling, stood on pedestals, stared out from alcoves, a mix of eastern and western, a rich man's nicknacks; worth enough to buy a nation, tasteless fripperies for all that. Who the hell had a solid gold wavinggood-luck cat other than Tony Choi? "You know everything there is to know about new tech. If someone's building it, you're selling it. Who's been working on these machines?"

  "I said I don't know."

  Richards turned to look at Choi. "Even this low-rent floor sweeper has decent enough sensors to tell me that you're lying. You can't lie to a Five, Tony, not when you're as bad a liar as you are. And you owe me. That Taipei Freeport bust? I wonder how the interior ministry would look on that." He walked back across the room to Choi's desk. Another holo played alongside the looping footage from the boat and morgue, pulled up from Richards' imagination, Choi in custody, surrounded by uniformed men and sharp implements. What they were doing to him was not nice. "I believe smuggling narcotics up the space elevator is illegal. But I have a somewhat lurid fancy. Perhaps we should ask a policeman?" The sheath's arms whirred loudly as Richards leaned on the wall by the drying paper. "And how is Mrs Choi anyway? What would she think?"

  Choi's face remained impassive.

  Richards pulled up the image of the logo he'd seen at the coroner's again: Choi Industries' stamp. "You sold this chassis."

  Choi exhaled loudly, and most of his anger seemed to go with it. "Richards, I sell many such frames." Choi walked back to his desk, picked up a second cloth folded by the neatly laid out instruments of his art, and wiped his fingers free of ink. A smear of black stained the white, to match that on his perfectly manicured hands. Small hands, rounded with fat, clogged with garish rings, but powerful in their way. "Thousands a year; I have no way of knowing who might purchase them secondhand, or through a front company. That is what you are going to ask me."

  Richards laughed, a rich noise for such cheap plastic. "Right."

  Choi shook his head. "You have much nerve, coming here, implying that you will blackmail me. I paid you well for Taipei. You know what I am, Richards. I have been most useful to you in the past. It is unprofessional to complain."

  "Needs must."

  Choi frowned, shook his head and turned to the holos Richards was playing. "That is Zhang Qifang, is it not? The man, the machine, in the holovideo?"

  "Yes."

  "And these you show me, they are machines, you say? Not clones, or flesh-sculpted doubles?"

  "That's right."

  "I assume he is dead."

  "You assume correctly. I am investigating his murder; three of them, possibly four."

  "You should have said first." He became saddened, as if he had long been expecting the news. "I have heard nothing."

  "It's being kept quiet. Some of the more, uh, militant elements among my brethren are going to take it badly."

  "He was a brilliant man." Choi looked at the teapot Richards had delivered, as if debating whether or not it was to blame. After a moment he set down the cloth, poured himself a cup of tea and raised it. "To one of the great minds of our time."

  "If you respect him that much, you'll help me out."

  Choi nodded.

  Encouraged, Richards went on. "This technology, it's supposed to be fifty years away. This says otherwise. I need to know who is half a century early."

  Choi looked up into Richards' visual receptors, small gems of glass set close together in the android's carbon-weave face. "Very well," he said resignedly. "I will tell you what I know, but it is not much."