The Age of Scorpio (52 page)

Zabilla sighed and looked out at the massive arcology trees reaching up to pierce the atmosphere. All of them were studded with dots of bioluminescence. Each dot was a window. Game had been an experiment in Seeder-derived, nano-technological terraforming. Game’s size, its 0.75G, geological stability and the abundant energy of a large, nearby main-sequence G-type star had all pointed towards the viability of growing starscraper arcologies. The wish to harness solar energy suggested to the nano-architects that trees grown from an engineered wood-analogous substance would be both practical and aesthetically pleasing.

The roots grew deep into the planet to provide stability. The roots sought out Game’s natural resources and harnessed its geothermal energy. Leaf structures in the upper branches harnessed solar energy. The black leaves in the lower sectors harnessed infrared energy from both above and from heat escaping below. The biotech machinery that provided for the needs of the inhabitants – sewage and sanitation, water recycling, food creation, etcetera – was housed in the darkness below the black leaves. The vat-grown, blind subhuman morlock servitors oversaw this machinery. Other servitor creatures, designed to look like attractive birds or small arboreal mammals, saw to maintenance and sanitation requirements in the upper branches.

The upper branches divided the light from the artificial moons into competing beams that shone through the membranous translucent energy-gathering leaf canopy. Game’s moistness meant that mist was often present, further refracting the artificial moonlight. The effect was atmospheric and to Zabilla pleasantly eerie. She saw one of the larger avian servitors take off and flap through the misty night air. Dracup came and leaned on the rail of the walkway, looking at Zabilla intensely even as she stared out into the forest of city-sized trees.

‘The Absolute enjoys originality; violence can be a short cut. If you were to duel Scoular or assassinate him, both of which are beneath you, then you would need to do so in an original way.’ Even to Dracup she would not admit how she had distilled her views of what the Absolute wanted down to pure sensation – after all, he was another player. She had no doubt that the Absolute enjoyed good gamesmanship, but he/she/it must have seen it all now in the thousands of years of Game’s existence.

‘I . . . I am trying to learn,’ he said haltingly.

She turned to look at him. ‘There’s nothing attractive to either the Absolute or myself about weakness, do you understand?’

Dracup nodded. Like everything in the Game, she felt like she was playing out a scene, but she had worked hard enough for the Absolute this night. She wanted something for herself just now
. Do you hear that, Absolute? Ride me if you will, but I need to let go. Maybe this is what he wanted, less artifice, more feeling.
No, she didn’t want to think like that.

It was bad form to reward an underling with something he wanted after he had disappointed you. The problem came when you wanted the same thing. Zabilla grabbed the back of Dracup’s head and pulled him closer into her, exchanging a long kiss that became more urgent as it went on. She felt his hands sliding her skirt up and she jumped up onto him, wrapping her long legs around his waist.

With a thought, the baroque luxury G-car rose into view at the end of the jetty. It bobbed slightly on the four ball-mounted AG motors at each of its corners before docking. With another thought, the doors to the car split open. Another thought turned the plush interior red like her thoughts in the arena.

Dracup carried her, mostly blind, mouths meshed together, to the G-car, falling onto the soft carpet. The door closed behind them as the G-car took off, the AI pilot banking the vehicle towards Zabilla’s abode.

Zabilla wriggled out from underneath. Dracup’s hand snagged her underwear and dragged it down. She pushed herself onto one of the seats, spreading her legs, hunger written over her normally emotionless face. This was for her, to forget herself, the Game, the Absolute, the audition. This was for her only. Later she would test the limits of the heightened nerve endings she’d had grown in Dracup. Later she would feed the Absolute, later she would play the Game, lose herself in it, but not now.

In a distant chamber something started to pay attention to one of its favourites. Again.

The ride home had been sublime – dangerous but sublime. She had let herself go when her Game play was about control. She knew that many were good at feeding the Absolute sensation with abandon. Zabilla had always found the need to work at it.

When they arrived home they had worked at it, each little act designed to maximise either pain or pleasure, the whole thing designed as a beacon for the Absolute. She thought she had felt it in her experiential ware but the scientist in her knew that was her imagination. The Absolute was a silent ghost in their pain and pleasure centres. If people knew when the Absolute was present, then the heads would not be as effective as they were at rooting out the anti-social losers who played against the Game itself.

Like most players she’d had her rebellious phase when she had been a student. She had sworn that she was never going to play the Game, engage with it, never earn her second name, and like everyone she found herself inexorably drawn into it. Then she found that she understood it, found that she was good at it. Now she realised that rejection of the Game was just an excuse that losers made.

Zabilla had studied biophysics, specialising in Seeder biotech, how it interacted with Quantum phenomena and how it applied to Red Space and exotic entanglement. Though she had to be careful studying Red Space applications because anything that even remotely looked like research into bridge technology was heretical. The Church audited her research on a regular basis and she had received more than one censure. On one occasion a line of research she believed had been encouraged by the Absolute his/her/itself had resulted in a threat of excommunication. It was a serious threat. She had wondered why the Church felt they needed the Seeders as a religion. Progenitors they might have been, but their time was gone, and now they had the Game and the Absolute. The Absolute had the powers of a god, and after victory in the Art Wars the Absolute even had god-like killer angels to do his/her/its bidding.

Zabilla’s apartment was a handsomely appointed three-storey nook high enough for her to make out stars through the canopy of bioengineered leaves. The bottom level was her lab, steel and glass, the wood grown around it and redesigned to be non-porous and support a sterile surface. The upper two storeys were open plan, a catwalk running around the top floor. Through the large window opening in the wall she could see the light-speckled shadows of the other trees. The bed was on a raised plinth that grew from the floor and the wall. A small waterfall and pool provided a water feature/bath/shower combination. Discreet sound-dampening projectors took care of the constant noise of water.

They experimented. They gave her apartment’s sound-dampening properties a run for its money as they pushed Dracup’s heightened nerve endings to their limits. Afterwards, exhausted, Zabilla had to carry Dracup up the wooden steps to her bed. She laid him down trying to decide how she felt about him. Was he anything more than just a handsome, if severe, game piece? More to the point, what was she to him? A lover? A mentor? A stepping-stone to a better thing for an ambitious player? If so, then he was a much cleverer player than she had so far given him credit for. When she was younger it had been easier to differentiate between Zabilla the person and Zabilla the player.

She looked down at him. He looked peaceful, more innocent, when asleep. She wondered if that was the only time they could be themselves. It wasn’t the first time she had thought this. But dreams contained sensation as well. Even when they slept they were not alone. There was something in the back of her mind. Some sense of disgust at this violation of her sleeping mind, an alien feeling that she hadn’t felt in so long. She tried to suppress it. She had no idea why she was feeling this way. Not when she was so close to winning the audition.

She released a potent anti-anxiety drug into her bloodstream, then a less potent sedative. She had time to climb into bed and roll next to Dracup, feel his warmth, before fatigue and the sedative overwhelmed her and took her where she could be herself.

It was like a sting, a tiny pinprick but it felt deep. She shouldn’t have felt it, but she was a light sleeper and had paranoia routines written into her neunonics. Even then she probably wouldn’t have felt it if it hadn’t been for her heightened nerve endings. She had forgotten to send a chemical signal to dull them before she fell asleep.

She sat up in bed feeling vulnerable and frightened, dragging the sheets around her. She hadn’t felt like this since she was a child.
Where was all the fear coming from?
she asked herself.

Almost immediately she turned to look at Dracup. He was deeply asleep in a way that was difficult to fake. She confirmed this with physiological readings provided by the medical applications of her nano-screen. Her first thought had been that Dracup was playing some kind of gambit.

She checked her internal systems. There was nothing as far as she could tell, no biological or nano-agent. She checked her nano-screen and the apartment’s security systems. Neither of the systems had detected any kind of foreign presence in the room.

Zabilla was beginning to convince herself that she had been dreaming when the banging on the door started. She jumped and turned to stare at the closed aperture in the wood. Her security systems should have warned her the moment somebody turned into the corridor that led to the door to her apartment. The fact they hadn’t meant that they had been overridden. That and the sound, that particular knock, the sound from a thousand immersions and a million newscasts, meant that it was the heads outside.

Feed from the door sensors to her neunonics confirmed this. Outside, two of the powerful automatons with the enlarged smiling face of the Absolute, pre-ascension, were waiting at her door. The grin on their massive faces looked more obscene and frightening to her now than ever before.

The knock came again. Her mind raced. What had she done? Had Scoular managed to frame her? A bold and clever move if he had, but it had better be watertight or else she would destroy him. Then she thought back to her feeling of disgust, of violation from having the Absolute see inside her mind. She had committed treason. She had gone from being a player to being a loser. The thoughts had come unbidden! It was so unfair.

‘What?’ Dracup sat up, quickly going from rudely woken to completely alert. He turned to look at her. There was no fear in his expression; instead there was a questioning look on his face. It was just short of accusation.

The knock came again. They never knocked more than three times. Now they would override the apartment’s security. The aperture opened. Zabilla’s neunonics told her that Dracup had sent the command. She couldn’t shake the feeling of teeth closing in around her.

The two heavily armoured automatons stepped into the apartment, looking up at the bed. They looked like walking statues, their faces twisted, agonised somehow, sinisterly clownish parodies of the pre-ascension Absolute.

‘Can I help you?’ Dracup asked.

Zabilla wondered when he had become assertive. She controlled the fear. She put on her Game face, quite literally. ‘What do you want and why are you disturbing me at this hour?’ she demanded.

Dracup turned to look at her, raising an eyebrow. On the other hand it was the question of a completely innocent person.

Neither of the heads said anything. Zabilla had pulled her nano-screen in as the heads expanded theirs. There was sparring at a nano-level as their nanites interrogated hers and Dracup’s.

‘What just happened?’ the voice, modulated for psychological impact, asked. She wasn’t sure which of them had spoken.

‘Explain yourself,’ she told the heads.

‘For a moment there was something not of the Game in here,’ the voice answered. She felt coldness creeping through her. The pinprick. The strange thing was that she thought she had heard something that she had never heard before from a head. It sounded like it was unsure of itself.

‘Well, have you found anything?’ she asked.

‘Why were you reviewing your physiological readings and security systems?’ the voice asked, suspicious now. Dracup turned to look at her. He looked suspicious as well.

‘I thought I felt something. A pinprick, but it was nothing, a dream or some half-waking sensation, nothing more. What made you think there was something else here?’

‘It came from the Absolute,’ the voice said.

So the Absolute had been monitoring her as she slept. Again the cold clammy feeling of violation rose inside her. She tried to force it down. Both the heads seemed to be staring at her with the dead black holes in their mask-like faces where eyes should have been.

‘Perhaps the Absolute only felt what I felt?’ she said.

‘Have you found anything?’ Dracup asked impatiently.

‘No,’ the voice answered.

‘Will you be taking any further action?’

There was a pause.

‘Not at the moment.’

The heads turned and left the apartment, the aperture door shutting behind them. Dracup gave her that questioning look again. She wanted to talk to him, to hold him, to take comfort from him, but this would only leave her more vulnerable, and her paranoia, one of the most important qualities of the professional player, would not allow her to show that weakness.

The massive chamber was arched like a Seeder cathedral. The wood had been grown into detailed ornamental patterns. Parts of it were friezes showing the history and mythology of the Game and the Absolute. It showed the Absolute’s journey from a world of toil to the world of leisure and pleasure that was the Game. In which you didn’t have to work unless you chose to. All you had to do was play the most involving game that had ever been created.

The hall had been grown out of the main trunk, its back wall a series of stained-glass windows. Sun shone through, illuminating the dust motes and larger nanite clusters in the air. Zabilla stood next to Dracup, her installation, her gift, in front of her in a covered glass box about the size of a large cupboard. Scoular was to her right, with Carinne and a similar covered box in front of him. He didn’t look confident; in fact, he looked ill.