Bedlam (30 page)

The bullfrog came to a stop on the lower slopes of the mountain, outside a charming but inescapably modest farmhouse, where
it gently set them down to rest on the grass. Ross had been expecting something like the Pantheon, or a palace to rival the
sights of Pulchritupolis. Even the beach house he’d given himself in the Beyonderland was bigger and more impressive. The
same couldn’t be said for the view however, which was just a wee bit more striking than an endless black ocean. A beauteous
valley rolled out below, green meadowland and golden crop fields stretching from the sparkling azure bay at one end to the
mystical forest at the other.

There was a beauteous sight in the other direction too. A woman was walking around from a vineyard at the side of the house,
blonde hair swept back in long flowing tresses, resplendent in a diaphanous white shift dress. Ross thought she looked every
bit the wife of a god. However, if this was the case, then the other women Ross subsequently began to spot around the premises
would have to be described as looking, respectively, every bit the titian, raven and brunette
other
wives of a god; the skanky street-slut of a god; the teenage jailbait nymphette of a god; and the leather-bound S&M dungeon
mistress of a god.

He glanced briefly towards Juno to check her reading of the situation and could see that this probably wasn’t going to go
well.

A male figure emerged from the house, looking relaxed, handsome, healthy, and undeniably rather god-like, if in a rather hackneyed
comic-book way. He also looked unmistakably familiar, everything that was different about him paradoxically serving to underline
what was the same: that essence Juno had talked about.

The most striking difference in this respect wasn’t just down to the cosmetic changes he had effected in giving himself an
idealised face, body and flowing head of hair. It was the
brightness about him, the happiness and optimism replacing the hunted look and crushed confidence that coloured his expression
back in the office.

‘Sandman?’ Ross enquired, reckoning it was polite to seek confirmation from his host.

‘Ross, or should I say Bedlam. It’s been so long. It’s wonderful to see you. And you must be Juno. Your timing’s perfect.’

He gestured towards a rustic wooden table on a terrace in front of the farmhouse, laden with roast joints and fowls, freshly
baked bread, cheeses, cured meats, bottles of wine and flagons of ale. Salad did not appear to be an option, but then again,
neither was heart disease, cholesterol or weight gain.

‘You’re looking well,’ Ross said.

‘Not bad for my age anyway,’ he replied, sitting down at a bench. ‘You’re looking spry yourself. How are you?’

‘Transformed. And not in a good way. A few days ago I lay down in the Simulacron prototype back in Stirling, and now I’m here.
I ended up in the clutches of the Integrity until Solderburn got me out, but they ended up capturing him instead.’

‘So I heard. Won’t you both take a seat?’

‘We didn’t come here to eat, Alex.’

‘Please, it’s Sandman here. You both must be hungry.’

‘I am. And what I really want is soggy chips from the staff canteen, or even one of those manky attempts at curry they sometimes
pass off.’

‘Weird what you miss, huh?’ Sandman replied, seriously not getting it. ‘If you give me a while I can probably synthesise an
approximation of—’

‘His girlfriend’s pregnant,’ Juno interjected. ‘He needs to get back to her. I need to get back to my daughter. We came here
because we’re tired of the mushroom treatment: being left in the dark and fed on shit. Solderburn was rumoured to have found
a way out. What do you know about it?’

Sandman shook his head apologetically and tore a chicken leg from a richly browned bird.

‘I know there
is
no way out. It was just a rumour that grew in the void. I don’t know where Solderburn went for so long; he could have gone
nowhere, just lived anonymously without all the hassle. I’m sorry. I’ve been here longer than just about
anybody else: hence the term Original. That means I’ve looked longer for the same things as you, so I know what can and can’t
be found. The old world is gone, and one thing I know better than most is that accepting that fact is the key to finding happiness
here.’

Ross looked around at the Sandman’s happiness: at his malleable fairytale world, his groaning but calorie-free table and his
NPC harem of what were literally fuck-toys. In the old world, his bitch of an ex-wife had driven over him in a freight train,
so this might be understandable, but it was still pretty fucking sad.

‘No offence, mate, but I don’t think you were looking for quite the same things as me. Leaving the old world was no great
loss to you. You love it here. You’re in heaven.’

‘I
found
heaven, and not right away. I made it heaven. You can too. You’ve seen what’s possible in this place. There is nothing in
the old world that you can’t have here, only better.’

‘Can I see my baby when it’s born?’ Ross replied. ‘My sisters’ kids? Can Juno see her daughter? Guy I met on Graxis called
Bob, an accountant from Leicester: can he see his family again?’

The Sandman nodded understandingly, putting down the remains of the chicken leg.

‘These are painful wounds, but there’s nothing we can do about them other than pick up the pieces and build new lives here.
And right now we have to look to
preserving
those lives. We’re facing the greatest threat this place has ever known. Look what happened to Calastria. Worlds are corrupting.
Getting to the bottom of that is far more important than pursuing some pointless quest.’

‘I don’t give a fuck about the corruption,’ Ross yelled, raging in the face of the Sandman’s detachment. ‘I don’t care if
this whole damned dimension disappears up its own digital dung-hole. I want to know how I got here and I want to know how
I leave. Basic principles must still apply. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If there is a way into
somewhere, there must be a way out. You remember back in Stirling we once talked about Bostrom’s simulation argument? Well
that’s what I think this is: an ancestor simulation, except it’s been hacked, and the “real world” simulated environment has
bled
into gameworld simulated environments. So even if what we knew as reality was always a simulation, there must be a way back
to
that
simulation, because—’

Ross’s rant was halted by the appearance of a god-like hand above him, which picked him up and dangled him in the air.

‘You don’t give a fuck about the corruption?’ the Sandman asked. ‘Okay, let’s see if we can extract one or two.’

The hand dropped him again, and he plummeted about ten feet to the ground, where he was relieved to discover that falling-damage
protocols had not been invoked.

The Sandman stood up, his demeanour still calm but giving off an unmissable last-warning vibe.

‘When I say you can’t go back,’ he stated, ‘you’re misunderstanding. You think that it just means we haven’t found the way
yet. It’s like when people fail to grasp how it’s impossible to go north of the North Pole, or how you can’t talk about the
time before the big bang because time itself was created in the big bang. The old world, the real world, is still getting
on with itself somewhere, but the reason you can’t go
back
is because technically you can’t return to somewhere you’ve never been.’

Ross fixed him with a cautious stare, climbing unsteadily back to his feet. He had learned of late to rule out nothing on
grounds of plausibility.

‘Is this the part where you tell me that my brain is being deceived by a simulation while in the real world the oblivious
Ross Baker’s body is being used as a battery?’

‘No. I’ve no idea what Ross Baker’s brain and body are up to right now, because this is the part where I tell you that
you
aren’t Ross Baker, and that you’ve never
had
a brain or a body. You’re existing here inside a world of computer programs because you
are
a computer program. You’re a digital copy of the real Ross Baker’s mind.’

‘A repeal of the Act is not beyond the realm of possibility,’ Michaels told Stoneworth. ‘Once this development programme is
underway, rather than keep it top secret, I’d recommend you guys leak it. Yeah, there’ll be an initial backlash, but we can
use that moment to restart the debate and swing the pendulum our way. You guys can bring pressure at the political level,
and we can hire lobbyists and PR, spin the angle that the horse has already bolted.’

Michaels could see his vitals in real time, but it was hardly necessary. The Department of Defense guy was practically drooling
and they were just talking hypotheticals. If this was sex, then Stoneworth was close to premature ejaculation with the girl
only having undone a couple of buttons on her blouse.

Michaels had insisted they have the meeting here at Neurosphere, face to face. He had cited concerns over the security of
comms lines, given what was at stake for both the company and the DoD if anybody found out what they were discussing. The
real reason, of course, was that he wanted home-court advantage. Stoneworth wasn’t here to negotiate – yet – but Michaels
wanted to find out as much as he could about how the guy was thinking ahead of the day they would deal.

‘Man, the things we could do,’ said Stoneworth. ‘The things we could have been doing already, but for that goddamn law.’

‘You’re preaching to the choir here, Major. I’ve been tantalised by the possibilities for a lot longer than anybody else.
I mean, can you imagine the implications for reducing stress, and stress-related violence, if everybody could have a copy
of somebody they’re pissed at?’

‘Their boss, their co-worker,’ Stoneworth suggested, running
with it. ‘Yeah. Beat the shit out of that guy, blow him up a few times, make yourself feel better.’

Better yet, Michaels thought, if you
are
the boss, get copies of your employees: that way you can suss how they think, how far you can push them, and what they’d
settle for when it came time to talk pay and conditions. But why share that idea with anyone else quite yet?

‘Exactly,’ he agreed. ‘Then nobody needs to get hurt in real life.’

‘A lot fewer American soldiers would be getting hurt too,’ Stoneworth stated, his tone suddenly more sombre. ‘Once we can
run infinite combat simulations with DCs, we’ll have a tactical advantage in advance of every operation. I can’t think of
any single development that would have a more significant effect on force depletion.’

Jesus. Michaels could tell from his read-outs that the guy was making a play here. Yeah, sure thing, buddy: just appeal to
my patriotism and I’ll knock a zero off the price. Dick.

‘To say nothing of what you could learn from prisoners,’ Michaels suggested, dangling another possibility more likely to
add
a zero. ‘You’ll have infinite subjects on whom to practise interrogation methods, and you don’t need to worry about the mess
if you push things too far.’

‘Yeah, but we still can’t act on intelligence obtained under duress,’ Stoneworth reminded him.

‘You wouldn’t need to lay a finger on anybody. You could interrogate copies.’

And as that particular penny dropped, the Major’s feedback numbers superimposed on Michaels’ vision looked like a slot-machine
paying out the jackpot.

He leaned forward in his chair, his eagerness unconsciously manifest in his body language.

‘So how close are we to doing business?’ Stoneworth asked.

‘We’re in touching distance.’

‘What about internal opposition? You suggested that there might be …’

‘Yeah, there’s been an attempt to throw a spanner in the works from precisely whom we anticipated. I saw it coming a mile
out.’

‘So you had a counter-measure?’

‘Let’s just say I’ve put somebody in there who knows how to close a deal.’

Ross felt time stand still for a moment, and in that moment was all the more aware of everything that he was sensing: the
grass beneath his toes, the light breeze on his cheek and the smells that it carried. It all seemed even more real, even more
nuanced and detailed than before.

He looked to Juno. She was staring back, her agonised shock mirroring his own. He saw the same helplessness reflected in her
face, the same extreme of hollow despair.

He turned towards the Sandman, unable to formulate a response. Everything that went into constructing his sense of self told
him that what Alex was saying had to be wrong, yet it was the only way in which everything that had happened to him made sense.

‘You can make your heaven here, but it isn’t an afterlife. You’re not dead because you were never alive in the organic sense.
None of us were. You are a facsimile of Ross Baker’s mind, a snapshot that was taken on the last normal day you remember.’

‘How do you know this?’ Juno breathed, close to tears.

‘I pieced it together. Took me a while, but eventually I figured it out. It’s the explanation that fits the most data and
isn’t contradicted by any of it. The time lapses were the key.’

‘Time lapses?’ Ross asked, but Juno was ahead of him.

‘Like me and Joe,’ she said, her voice distant and numb. ‘I was in the old world two years more than him before coming here:
I was with him the whole time, yet he has no memory of that period.’

‘That’s it. To your husband it didn’t happen, because he is a snapshot of Joe’s mind taken two years before the snapshot that
is you.’

‘Solderburn’s scanner,’ Ross mumbled.

‘The Simulacron,’ Alex confirmed. ‘We were working on a system that would let us create computerised models based on brain
scans. Solderburn’s new machine must have recorded a lot more than anyone anticipated, and at some point in the future, we
developed the technology to interpret and synthesise the data.’

‘In the future? But I was scanned by the prototype, and my research plans for decoding models were nowhere near coming up
with something like this. Besides, if we’re all scans, why do most people remember just going to bed at home?’

‘The last part, I’m not sure. My latest memory is the same as yours: lying down inside Solderburn’s chamber. As to your other
question, it’s the time issue again. I’m guessing there was a gap between Solderburn carrying out the test scans and the technology
to interpret them being developed. Essentially it’s a matter of the scan sitting dormant on a hard drive until it gets incorporated
into a synthesis model and then uploaded to a virtual environment. That’s why although I was among the first to get here,
I found myself inside games that weren’t due for release until years into my future.’

‘But I was scanned less than a week after you were. Why am I turning up late to the party, and how long has the party been
running, for that matter?’

‘There’s no way of knowing how time here relates to time in the real world, but for whatever reason, you were never uploaded
until now. After I came here, at first there was a trickle of new arrivals, then a deluge, and then somebody shut off the
tap. No idea why, but one day the new arrivals just stopped coming. As far as I’m aware, you and this guy Bob are the first
new uploads in a very long time. Apart from the Integrity,’ he added, a look of regret darkening his expression.

‘If I’m just a digital copy of myself, shouldn’t I have perfect recall of everything I know, instantly accessible like any
other computer file?’

‘It doesn’t work like that. We aren’t merely copies of our memories, we’re copies of our minds. Not merely what we thought,
but
how
we thought. So just like before, something might trigger complete recall of a name or a detail that you couldn’t remember
yesterday.’

‘But isn’t what’s happening here being written to purely digital memory?’

‘Yes, but the architecture is the same as your old, organic systems.’

Ross searched desperately for more questions, as though any holes he could find in Alex’s theory might be his salvation. Yet
even as he asked, he was aware of having already been prepared to accept the same explanation when he came up with his own
ancestor-simulation hypothesis. In both scenarios, he had never visited the ‘real’ world, never had a body, never had a brain,
so why was Alex’s version harder to take?

Partly it was envy. In the ancestor-simulation scenario, there was only one Ross Baker, and only an illusion of the real world
to feel cut adrift from. In short, you don’t miss what you never had. Whereas in Alex’s scenario, there
was
a real world, and a real Ross Baker still living in it: one who still had Carol, and the baby, and a future. However, the
main reason for his instinctive resistance was that in the hacked ancestor-simulation scenario, there remained the possibility
of a way back. Alex’s version offered no such hope.

His principles were now his enemies, but just because reality was pissing him about didn’t mean it would be a constructive
course of action to go in the huff with it. Parsimony. Occam’s Razor. The explanation that makes the fewest assumptions is
usually the correct one. Every assumption in Alex’s explanation was repeated and multiplied in the alternative. What was more
likely: that Solderburn’s machine had created a digital copy of the human mind, or that Ross’s and everyone else’s minds had
always been mere digital entities within a simulated universe; and that this simulated universe, governed consistently by
laws that we had come to understand as nature, had been fundamentally altered by a machine that was essentially a minute subroutine
inside it?

Juno looked as though it was only the armour that was holding her up.

‘You okay there?’ he asked her.

‘I feel sick. But how can I feel sick when I’ve never had a stomach? And I feel lost – far more lost than when I first got
here.’

‘You did have a stomach,’ the Sandman said. ‘What’s crucial here is that this doesn’t change who we are. If a man paints a
masterpiece then loses his arm in an accident, he no longer has the hand that held the brush, but that doesn’t mean he’s no
longer the man who created the picture. Organic consciousness or digital consciousness, you’re defined by the software, not
the machine that’s running it.’

This last remark resonated like a bell buoy in the fog, offering guidance through the gloom, and Ross recognised that it sounded
so reassuring because its chime was familiar. This was what he had come to understand on Graxis when he’d been told that his
memories were just a virus intended to debilitate the Gralak soldiery.

‘This doesn’t change who we are,’ the Sandman repeated. ‘And if you’ve any doubts about that, ask yourself: now that you’ve
learned you’re a digital copy, does it hurt any less to be cut off from your family? Now that you’re aware everyone you’ve
met here is also a digital copy, do you feel any less connection to the people you know? The people you’ve lost?’

Ross thought of a sunny day at Blair Drummond Safari Park long ago, of Christmases at Mum’s with his sisters and their kids
around the dinner table. He felt his eyes filling up, a lump in his throat obstructing a verbal answer rendered redundant
by all the ways his face was already expressing it.

There was no going back. That was why it hurt. For better or for worse, this was his world now.

‘Hell if you make it, heaven if you want it to be,’ Juno affirmed hoarsely.

‘Wise words,’ said the Sandman.

‘I heard it more starkly framed, too,’ stated Ross: ‘Here is all there is.’

‘Who said that?’

‘The Integrity agent who tortured me. At least now I know he wasn’t lying. Kind of puts an interesting spin on the risk/benefit
equation. I don’t fancy living out my existence trapped in one single gameworld as the Integrity are demanding, but if they’re
right about what’s causing the corruption, it would be literally better than nothing.’

‘Now you’re getting it,’ said the Sandman.

‘It’s devastating though,’ Ross said. ‘I can certainly see why the Originals kept it back from the general population. So
why are you telling it to us?’

Juno’s attitude of defeat suddenly altered, becoming animate with alert caution, like an animal that’s just sniffed a predator
on the breeze.

‘Because we ain’t gonna be allowed to pass it on,’ she said, looking up the hill beyond the house, then accusatorily towards
the Sandman.

Ross glanced towards where her gaze had briefly fixed upon the upper slope. He saw a black half-track vehicle cresting the
summit, a small deployment of black-clad troops marching at its flanks. Ross turned back towards the Sandman but his attention
was drawn past him, down to the horseshoe bay, where he could now see an aircraft down on the beach, some troop-carrier hulk
like a big black beetle, tiny black figures scurrying busily around it.

‘You ratted us out?’ Ross asked, incredulous.

‘I had no choice,’ the Sandman retorted. ‘You idiots brought them here. They came pouring into my world a matter of seconds
after you both arrived. Turns out you’re a very wanted man. I had to cut a deal to protect what’s mine.’

‘You went Lando on us?’

‘This is all there is, you just said it yourself, and the corruption is real. I don’t like the way the Integrity go about
their business but I’ve come to understand that they’re a necessary evil. Just as the Diasporadoes are a well-meaning but
misguided threat. Closing down the transits isn’t too high a price to pay for survival. It’s a big enough place: everybody
should be able to find a world they like and get comfortable, at least until we can stabilise the corruption.’

‘And where will
we
be getting comfortable?’ Juno asked.

‘I’ve been given assurances. Your custody won’t be forever.’

Ross glanced back and forth, from the half-track proceeding slowly down the slope to the aircraft and the landing force on
the shore below.

‘They came via space,’ Juno said, her voice dry and woozy, but that was far from the most disturbing development they witnessed.

Ross noticed that most of the tiny black figures on the sand were streaming towards, not out of, the troop carrier, executing
an evacuation. They were running from what looked like a pillar at the edge of the sea, a black cylinder like a Greek or Roman
column standing three times the height of a man. As the last of them piled up a ramp into the troop carrier, even from this
far up on the hillside Ross could sense a powerful vibration and the column began to rotate, burrowing itself into the sand.

Their host’s previously perfect brow began to develop a furrow, as though out of sympathy with the beach.

The column dug deeper and deeper, spinning ever faster as it did so, before the sand covered it over and it was gone. The
aircraft took off vertically and headed out over the water, where Ross knew there was nothing but the end of this world.

All was still again, and for a moment the beach looked as though the troop carrier and the column had never been there. Then,
from the same spot, there came what looked like wisps of smoke, curling up and forming a grey haze. At first the haze rose
where the pillar had been, like a vapid ghost of its predecessor, then it swiftly began to spread.

The Sandman stared uncomprehending for a moment, but Ross and Juno had both seen it before. On Calastria.

‘The corruption,’ he breathed. ‘The Integrity are causing it.’

He turned to look at the two of them, wearing the aghast expression of someone who hadn’t been genuinely shocked for an extremely
long time.

‘They’re destroying my world.’

‘Yeah, I feel you, man,’ Juno replied. ‘If you can’t trust a bunch of psycho-ass sadistic power-mad fascists, honestly, who
the fuck
can
you trust?’

Ross heard a familiar thumping from somewhere in the distance and felt the ground tremble a little beneath his feet. He looked
across the valley and saw the bullfrog hopping into sight at the top of the hillside opposite, as much a symbol of the power
the Sandman wielded as the divine hand that had picked him up and dropped him a few minutes ago. His attention was drawn by
the observation that, unlike its previous leisurely meanderings, it appeared to be in quite a hurry. Then all of a sudden
it
wasn’t in a hurry any more, albeit some parts of it were moving even faster than before; they just weren’t attached to the
parts they had been previously.

Ross had seen something fly over the brow of the hill and make for the bullfrog, proportionally about the size of a mosquito.
Then there was a thoroughly disproportionate response as the amphibian exploded, its legs slumping down on to the hillside
like a burst water balloon while its top half sprayed and splattered across the lower slope in a messy arc of red, pink and
green half a mile wide. If any of them had a freezer, the local villagers would be sorted for frog meat for about a decade.

The Sandman watched his creature’s demise with numb incredulity.

‘Bawbag,’ he said.

Ross wondered whether he was blaming someone specifically until he realised from the alliteration that it must have been the
bullfrog’s name.

He looked for the source of the missile, and saw an entire division of Integrity troops coming over the brow of the slope
on the far side, behind not one but four tanks of the kind Ross had seen in the war-torn rubble of
Death or Glory
.

‘I’m not so sure it’s me these guys are here to huckle,’ he said.

‘Copy that,’ said Juno. ‘So, given the deal’s off,’ she asked the Sandman, ‘I take it you won’t mind if we try getting the
fuck outta here?’

He eyed the menacing advance that was marching thigh-high through over-sized froggy viscera, desolation gradually over-coming
disbelief as his dominant expression. Then self-pity changed to something else, closer to regret or even penitence.

‘The nearest transit is in the next valley,’ he said. ‘It’s in a mausoleum halfway down the slope. If you can get past that
lot, you’re free and clear.’