Anything but Ordinary (26 page)

‘What, you mean like “Truth, Justice and the American Way?’ said Tamar and went off into peals of derisive laughter.   

Despite himself, Denny grinned. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. Then he sighed. ‘I just mean that … maybe people – humans – are better off not knowing this stuff. I mean look at this place.  If people knew …’ He gestured futilely.’

We don’t need to
believe
in stuff,’ said Tamar. ‘We know the
truth
.’

‘Maybe that’s what I mean. Maybe we aren’t supposed to know this much about it all. Maybe we aren’t supposed to know how it all really works.  Maybe humans are supposed to have an unsubstantiated faith in the unseen and the intangible. Maybe we need that. The reality is a bit of a disappointment.’

‘Stop saying “maybe”. The word is starting to lose all meaning,’ was all Tamar could come up with after this diatribe. 

Denny nodded. She was not human; she did not understand. But then again, he was not entirely human himself anymore. 

‘The
search
for the truth is the important thing to most people,’ she said suddenly, proving him entirely wrong. She
did
understand – at least partly. ‘But let’s face it,’ she continued. ‘We aren’t most people.’

‘So, how long do we have to wait?’ said Denny abruptly changing the subject. 

‘Wait?’ said Tamar. ‘We don’t have to wait at all. Just ask.’

‘God?’ said Denny tentatively, feeling a fool for the second time that day. Talking to no one can have that effect.  

‘Yes?’ came a sing song voice out of nowhere.

‘Am
I
a disappointment?’ said Tamar suddenly.

‘What?’ no of course not. Where did that come from?’

‘I
was
the intangible, the unseen, a mere focus of belief – until you actually
met
me.’ 

‘That’s different. Look is this the right time for this conversation?’

‘I just wanted to know. It’s all right. Go on.’

Denny shook his head.  ‘Er … God?’

‘Yes,’ said the voice patiently, and Denny had the impression that it could go on doing this all day. 

‘Set up interface,’ said Denny and crossed his fingers. 

‘Initialising,’ said the voice of God.  This was what Denny had hoped. The security here was a joke in some ways. Because Tamar had an access card for central control, mainframe assumed that they were authorised users. Apparently, it had not occurred to the programmers that an access card might be stolen, and no security protocols had been put in place against this eventuality. Once you were in, you were in. No more questions were asked. Not even a password. Denny would have been ashamed to have been the author of such a weak programme. 

‘Choose interface mode,’ said “God.” 

Denny hesitated.

‘Choose interface mode,’ repeated the voice.

Denny gave Tamar a panicked look. ‘I don’t know what that means,’ he admitted. 

But the system was far too patient and helpful for its own good. ‘Modes for interface are: keyboard, manual interface, voice control interface, automatic interface. Please choose interface mode,’ the song-song voice rang out. 

‘Automatic interface,’ said Denny rashly.

The point of establishing an interface was to search the database for the files they wanted in order to save time later. Knowing the file numbers would be a big advantage – one that had been somewhat lacking in previous adventures, where they had been forced to use the tiger tail approach in searching for files,*
and wasted a lot of time.  Once this was done Denny would use the interface to shut down the system from the inside.  No viruses needed.
He
would be the virus.

*[
So called, by hunters, because it refers to the process of finding a tiger by wandering around until you step on its tail. Then you
know
you’ve found it.
]

He had known that he would have to “get inside” mainframe in order to accomplish this and once inside, he would (hopefully) be able to find the shutdown command used to make mainframe to shut down and reboot. What he had not bargained on, was how literal this operation would be. 

Before Tamar’s horrified eyes, Denny literally dissolved into millions of particles of light. If you had the eyesight to see it, and Tamar did, you could see the data stream.  The particles were actually tiny pieces of binary code. Then he vanished. 

It was a bit like seeing a nanobe swarm disintegrate. Of course, all human beings were nothing more than a swarm of cells and in here, in mainframe, a swarm of data. But it was still horrifying to see it separate like that. 

‘Denny?’

‘Yes, I’m here.’ It was Denny’s voice and yet it was not. 

‘Where are you?’

‘Can’t you see me? I’m right here. Oh, hang on a minute.’ he sounded perfectly calm which was a relief. 

A three dimensional image of Denny appeared before her eyes. It was pretty convincing.  To the casual eye, it might have seemed as if Denny had simply rematerialised. It was made up of data, just as the real Denny was inside mainframe.  But, looking closely, it was possible to see that it was no more than a holographic image, swirling data patterns. The real Denny was far away. 

‘Are you all right?’

The image managed a wooden smile. ‘I’m fine, really. I’m inside.’

‘You
are
mainframe?’

‘No, I’m more like … like a ghost in the machine, but I can see
everything
from here.
Do
anything!’ the slightly mechanical voice sounded excited. ‘I never knew. I never expected
this
. To be
inside
mainframe, I can control the universe from here if I want. And, Oh God, it’s so beautiful. To see the whole universe as data. To know everything. I know
everything
Tamar,
everything
!  Ask me anything.’

‘Don’t let it go to your head,’ said Tamar dryly. 

‘Killjoy,’ said Denny laughing. But Tamar was relieved. That was her Denny all right. Apparently not even becoming instant ruler of the universe could disturb his equilibrium for long. 

Denny was more awed by the incredible power of mainframe itself  than he was impressed by his own ascent into omnipotence.  Now this –
this
was something to believe in. 

The saying goes “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” but Denny was not the corruptible type.  Self-effacing all his life, he had taken to power, apparently with the same calm equanimity with which he seemed to accept everything from blistering disaster to falling in love, but actually, underneath it all, with a kind of wondering disbelief,  and with the certainty that he did not deserve it and that, if he abused it, it would disappear as mysteriously as it had appeared.

It never occurred to him that true power is earned and that he had earned this power too, which seemed as if it had simply fallen into his lap. Earned it through years of blood, sweat and tears; that the steps that had led him here had also trained him to handle this kind of power without losing his head.  That, through the earning, he had acquired not only power, but self-control.

 A self-control that was now second nature to Denny. Without ever thinking about it consciously, he had never really considered his power as his own, to wilfully wield as he chose. 

He certainly did not consider this new power (which he did not even realise he had earned and fully deserved) as his own. The idea of abusing it would never even occur to him.  He felt blessed but undeserving – as he always had. 

 ‘I found something.’ Denny’s voice broke through the reverie that she had fallen into. She had been sitting on a cloud, just waiting, for about half an hour. 

‘What?’ she could tell it was not the files he was supposed to be looking for.

‘Us – our files I mean.’

‘Oh!’ She was shocked.  Somehow, she had not thought of this. 

‘Thing is, I could …’ he seemed to hesitate.  ‘That ordinary life you wanted? You can have it. I mean if you want to. Just say the word.’

‘You’re
kidding
.’

‘Do I
look
like I’m kidding?’

Tamar looked at the hologram of Denny, with its unresponsive features and decided not to go there.  ‘Will… would we still be together?’

‘If that’s what you want. I can rewrite them any way you like. And it wouldn’t be like that time that Askphrit futzed with our destinies. There wouldn’t be any alternative lives out there. It would just be the way it is. The way it had always been.’

‘You know I always wondered about that.’ said Tamar with skilful evasion.  ‘I mean, Askphrit changed our destinies. He could have made them anything he wanted surely. So why did he … I mean why were we still together, even in his messed up version? You’d think he’d have separated us. You know, divide and conquer and all that. I mean he really hated us.’

‘I don’t know, maybe it didn’t occur to him, or maybe he couldn’t. Perhaps you can’t fight destiny that way. Maybe we were meant to be together. Yeah, I’d like to think that.’

 ‘You soppy sod,’ she said nevertheless sounding pleased. 

‘You know what I think, though.’ she continued, referring back to the question in hand before he could ask again.  ‘I think that in some way, we would
know
. If we
were
ordinary people we’d always feel like something was wrong, something was missing. But we wouldn’t know what it was. That would be terrible. We’d probably spend our whole lives feeling vaguely unsatisfied, without ever knowing why. That would be just awful.’ She let out a sigh.  ‘It might
seem
like a good idea, but we have to face the facts …
I
have to face the facts.  You and I, we
aren’t
ordinary Denny. We aren’t
meant
to be ordinary. We aren’t meant to
have
an ordinary life. No, don’t change it. I don’t want to always be wondering who I really am.’

‘Been there, done that,’ agreed Denny with a tinny laugh.  ‘Admit it. You don’t really
want
to be ordinary,’ he added astutely. 

‘No, I suppose I don’t. Do you?’

‘Me?’ Denny sounded surprised. ‘I never did.’

‘But you would have done it anyway,’ Tamar realised, ‘for me.’

‘You might do something about the reporters, though,’ she said lightly. ‘As long as you’re in there, you know – whatever.’

 ‘Anything but ordinary,’ said Denny, after another interminable wait. ‘Agreed?’

‘Yes.’ said Tamar, slightly wrong footed. Hadn’t they settled this?

‘We’d rather be
dead
than be ordinary, right?’

‘Right,’ said Tamar uncertainly. She was not at all sure, now that she thought about it that there was all that much difference between “ordinary” and “dead”.

‘Good,’ he said gleefully.  ‘After all, if I
were
ordinary. I couldn’t do
this
!’ 

And the universe switched off. 

‘Should have had a drum roll,’ he said to the ensuing darkness. 

~ Chapter Nineteen ~

I
n the beginning, there was the word, and the word was “startup”.

The word blinked in the darkness at Denny as main power was restored.

Where did mainframe draw its power from? Denny wondered. It had never occurred to him before to wonder about this. But in the stillness and darkness of a dead universe, Denny was finally aware of something else, something bigger out there. It never ends, he realised. There’s always something else, something further out. Mainframe was only a small component in a much larger system. The thought was strangely comforting.  Particularly in light of what he had just done. The magnitude of which was just beginning to hit him. 

‘Talk about the end of the world,’ he thought with a terrified awe. Then, for the first time in a long, long time, Denny did what he had never thought to do again, since he had met Tamar. He panicked. 

‘What the hell have I done? We’ve really gone too far this time.’

‘Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod!’

Time is not linear, nor is it circular. Time is like a great sea. All of time moves within the confines of mainframe as the sea moves within the seabed. Parts of it escape to lap upon the shores, and within its confines, it flows in all directions. But the most part of it remains within the confines set for it.  You can dive into the sea at any point, as long as you have a jumping off place (otherwise known as file access)

This is what Denny had learned from mainframe.

But from the moment he had hit the shutdown command, time had ceased to exist. He had been linked to mainframe and then he had been suddenly disconnected as the power died.  And now, he was lost in a vast sea of nothing at all. The void – the
real
void – not the dead spaces between data, like the spaces between the walls in houses, where they had shoved David/Vidar to think about his crimes.  Nor was it like the emptiness inside a disused file. A file was a solid thing; it existed, and beyond its confines, life went on. The emptiness was only inside. But here, there was no “here” and there never had been. It had no confines, infinite space, infinite nothing, forever and never, everywhere and nowhere.

No wonder Denny was panicking.  He knew now that he, everyone, and everything else had always been linked to the mainframe. He felt as if he had been cut adrift. He was floating free from reality. Even death was not so final.  

He forced himself to calm down. There had to be
something
out there. He faced the proof of this:

STARTUP>

It blinked impassively at him, which made him feel better. A link back to reality. 

He made the connection; he would never know how, with no physical body, he was able to touch the words, but the moment he did, he felt the life force of the universe flow back. The words changed.

BOOT OPTIONS>

BRING SYSTEMS ONLINE MANUALLY (SAFE MODE)

There were no other options; it must be because he had hit the shutdown command without saving the system.  But that had been the point hadn’t it? He had been right the first time. This
was
going to take a hundred years.