Prophet Margin (21 page)

But it didn't go far towards solving the riddle of that one awkward little line.

"Be thou made as unto a child, in purity and simplicity unsullied."

In the morning of the next day, Abrocabe tracked down Jay "Biggie" Bolster, the former weapons industry CEO who had welcomed him and his wives to Splut Mundi. He found the rotund figure seated in meditation before the hovering Book, and plopped himself beside him. After a brief exchange of greetings, Abrocabe explained his perplexity.

"Ah," Bolster nodded, a quiet smile playing across his face. "Yes, the commandment. It's a tricky one, you're right."

"We've already screwed up the Boddah's masterpiece, right? I mean, just by being alive, we snecked it. That's in The Book. That's the whole point. H-how do we go back to scratch? I don't get it."

Bolster placed a companionable hand on his shoulder. "Perhaps," he said, "we should find somewhere a little quieter."

In a side atrium, well away from the crowd, Abrocabe sat with Bolster and chewed the inside of his lip.

"Most people," the chubby man smiled, "assume the text is allegorical. They come to this place at the prophet's call, they throw away their clothes, their ships, their lifestyles. They prepare for the sacrifice, which will take away everything they ever owned. As far as they understand it, they are becoming 'as children'".

Abrocabe scowled. "But-"

"But they're forgetting something rather important. Can you tell me what it is, Abrocabe?"

The gigazillionaire frowned, mind racing. Like a Sendrillian dart-wasp thudding into its prey, a ray of inspiration punctured his thoughts, lacking only for fireworks and choirs of angels in the strength of its revelation.

"Memories," he said.

"Exactly. How can there be a place for the faithful in the New Reality, if their minds are full of memories of wealth and iniquity?"

This was the first time Abrocabe had ever heard the word "iniquity" used in conversation. He was impressed. "W-what can we do?"

Infuriatingly, Bolster didn't seem worried. He tapped the back of his head and turned around.

"It's simple," he smiled, lowering his cassock-hood. "Radical cranial surgery."

Abrocabe's mouth hung open. A neat scar was plain to see beneath the boundary of Bolster's greying hair. "Only the most faithful are worthy," he said. "Only those who realise the truth: their memories must be purged."

"Th-the ones w-who...?"

"Yes. Only the ones like you."

WORDS FOR THE DEAD

#6 ZINGRATHEKK E-Z 256 (CITIZEN CLASS ARTIFICIAL BEING)

Ah, shit. It's coming right at us.

We're all about to die, if you believe in that sort of thing, and there's not a data-cluster's chance in a reboot paradigm that we can do anything about it. I mean, yeah, we've all been backed up and filed away, just like the manual recommends, but you've still got to go through it all. Still got to actually be killed in an actual calamitous disaster, with all the actual existential paradoxes that creates. And if the bozos in the ReShelling committee ever actually get around to finding you a new body - some hope - it's not the same
you
they resurrect, is it? I mean, how can it be? The real you, the original model, is gone for good. Shrapnel.

And the saddest thing of all is, right on the verge of obliteration, I can't stop thinking the same thing, over and over and over. And it's not exactly profound:

110101000101010011010100010101011111010101010100101011010100101110101010111010001010001011101010101111010001010100011001010101000000001010100001111101010101100011101011010101001010100101010001010001010101000010111010101011101001101000101010100110101010110111010001010110100001110101010101010100101011

You know what I mean?

Sneck, here it comes!

Boom
.

The McSonymishu© conglomerate, representing a complex merger between brand-icon and technological businesses, had been at the forefront of artificial intelligence since the HALpal "Real Imaginary Friend" fad. Since then the technology had improved several million times over, the bank accounts of the chairmen involved had swollen several trillion times over, and the merciless exploitation of mechs, androids, cyborgs and bonkmachines continued unabated.

Back on earth, the last rainforest was swatted aside to make way for a far more efficient OxyGenerator facility, the last humpback whale was digitised and stored on the Conserv-a-tron database and racial discrimination had been effectively obliterated by the arrival of mutantkind. Why discriminate against people with different coloured skin, the philosophy went, when everyone could cheerfully gang up on the lumpy freakazoids with toenails instead of teeth?

The upshot was that a lot of socially aware, eco-friendly, conservationally minded people with the burning desire to Save The World, Reduce Injustice and Go Down In History For Being Really Great, found themselves with nothing to complain about, nothing to protest against, and no downtrodden marginalized groups to fight for.

Enter the AI's.

A hundred years later, give or take, and thanks to the recently-renamed "MachinePeace" group, a quarter of all AI's had been officially granted CCAB status: they were citizens, they owned their own bodies and were due all the same civic rights as every other person. Given that they were also therefore eligible for paying taxes, and also had to insure their own bodies and fund software consultancy, engineer callout charges, emotional upgrades and general maintenance, they also tended to be very broke.

One hundred and thirty years after the McSonymishu
^TM
conglomeration, there were sixteen CCAB tax-havens scattered throughout the galaxy. The largest was AX1
¹¹
- a mobile spacestation housing thirteen million artificial personalities and their bodies. It became something of an icon: young AI's would chirrup in binary longing to their parental engine nodes about how they too, one day, would afford their place in the robotic nirvana that was AX1.

^{11. Citizens with rights they may have been, but imaginative in the field of nomenclature they weren't.}

All of which sentiment was efficiently blown to pieces on the day a rogue asteroid came spinning across the cosmos like a drunken Frisbee and obliterated AX1 in a riot of metal debri and dead tourists.

It wasn't pretty.

Cheez had got lucky on three highly significant counts.

First, on his very first day in the Kostadell Zol resort, he'd come across a woman so neurone-destroyingly drunk that she not only consented to a spot of clumsy nookie, but had actually referred to Cheez as a) good looking, b) funny, and c) smart. Anyone else might have regarded this as a) a bare-faced lie, b) evidence that she was up to something or, at the very least, c) signs of mental trauma. Cheez, unfortunately, tended only to think in a), b), c) terms when it suited his ego.

Secondly, thanks to the woman in question deciding abruptly to situate the aforementioned nookie in Cheez's hippybus, he had been in a relatively safe position, i.e. underground - when the asteroid's polarity went nutso and everything started falling upwards.

And thirdly, thanks to him being persuaded to remain within the car park, he escaped largely unharmed when the beach, the resort, the great oxygen dome around it and all the unfortunate tourists therein came into sudden and terminal contact with several million tonnes of robotic space station. The cargo bay doors had sealed the very instant the dome broke, preserving a cavernous bubble of breathable air underground.

Inside, the walls trembled and the rocky ceiling splintered; outside the resort was scraped away like manky wallpaper.

It was, all in all, a series of uncharacteristically lucky events.

There was a "but". Or three.

In the first instant, before the gravity disaster, the drunken nympho-woman had turned out to not be drunk. Or a nympho. Or, for that matter, a woman. Dewigged and exposed, the "individual" had clobbered Cheez over the head with an electrolysed handbag, nicked everything from the interior of the hippyvan, and legged it.

It was therefore in a state of mild concussion that Cheez encountered the second unforeseen misfortune, namely the complete and utter explosive destruction of his van, along with every other spacecraft and voidmodule parked in careful rows within the cavern. For the second time in quick succession he'd been rendered unconscious, and this time when he awoke the harsh light of reality had illuminated rather more than a burglarised van and a sore head.

"S-skreeming claretjobs, geez," as he'd muttered at the time.

He was on the ceiling, he'd seen, in the jagged remains of what had once been his vehicle, surrounded by smoking and mangled debris, with a piece of shrapnel stuck in his left buttock.

If this was a trip, he'd decided, he'd never smoke or swallow anything of dubious legality ever again.

It wasn't a trip.

Misfortune number three arrived in the form of an irritable Viking who stood on the ceiling roaring out orders, calling him unpleasant names every time he burst into tears or started hyperventilating, and generally shouting like a foghorn.

At the Viking's command, Cheez had been forced to stagger about in the wreckage, pulling out anything that looked remotely communicatorlike and juryrigging the universe's most pitiful SOS beacon. Given that his grasp of modern technology was only marginally more advanced than Wulf's, and that he had to compete with the residual effects of hallucinogenic delirium, this was a slow process.

And thus it was, with their work complete, and Wulf at the simmered-down point of having a reasonable conversation, that the lad was forced to endure a throwaway remark from the Norseman upon how incredibly lucky he'd been to survive.

It would be fair to say that Cheez had a minor psychotic episode, and Wulf thought it entirely humane when he dropped a medium-ish rock on the lad's head, plunging him mercifully into yet another dribble-flecked knockout.

"Thank der gods for
that
," he murmured.

On the floor above his head, Cheez's DIY masterpiece of communications engineering (essentially the salvaged comms-consoles of a dozen spacecraft that had been carefully fused, tangled, and in one case sellotaped together, with an assortment of leaky batteries and broadcast arrays) weakly beamed Wulf's highly personalised SOS in a haphazard variety of directions.

"Hope you are being listening, Johnny," Wulf muttered.

SIXTEEN

For just a short while, things had been looking up.

Comfortably enmeshed within the pilot's chair of the stricken Dilûu, Kid Knee had slipped happily into alcoholic oblivion, leaving Johnny and Roolán in peace. Once in a while Johnny would ask some seemingly innocent question of his young companion - like a child fiddling with a loose tooth. He was experiencing the disconcerting sensation of talking to a young version of himself. Oh, there were differences, sure enough: quite apart from anything their mutant "gifts" were worlds apart. More tellingly, Roolán had never seen the earth, had never experienced direct and universal prejudice, had never known the hatred of entire populations.

He had, though, just like Johnny, spent every moment of his young life in the sure and certain knowledge that his parents were ashamed of him, that he was the blot on their otherwise pristine lives, and that the world would be a much better place without him. As he wrote frantically on his pad of paper, describing his former life as a would-be mute on Shtzuth, detailing the relentless guilt-trips and the expectations that he should be grateful his parents them for their magnanimity, Johnny subtly realigned his perceptions of the boy.

He'd assumed the child was interested only in revenge. There had been a familiar fire in his eyes; a desire to hunt down the bastard that had so casually ordered the deaths of his parents. But it was more than that.

"Why does it matter to you that we catch Everyone?" he asked, keeping his voice casual. "Sounds to me like your parents weren't exactly saints. No offence."

A range of emotions had fluttered across the youth's face - the first hints of insult that quickly faded as he saw the truth in what Johnny said, then the unpleasant trickle of confusion, uncertainty, awkwardness. He didn't have an answer.

Johnny did. Revenge was just an excuse. A survival mechanism. Make it personal, the subconscious demanded. Make it exceptional. Just this once, be a killer.
Have your revenge
.

But it wouldn't just be once, because it wasn't the revenge that mattered. Roolán had taken a look at himself, just as Johnny had done, and discovered that the talent that he fostered, the aptitude he'd been born with - lay in destruction. Hiding behind the notion of "revenge" was just a convenient way of ignoring that fact, and wanting to be a Strontium Dog was just a convenient way of excusing it.

Johnny hadn't pressed the point. Roolán's troubled face was like looking at a holophoto of himself.

"Dilûu's doing okay," he said, changing the subject.

Roolán nodded absently.

The Dilûu was indeed coping admirably with the damage it had taken: besides a pronounced lopsidedness and the tendency to produce comedy noises every time its airbladders inflated, it had remained true to its course and gave no indication of dying. Even the Kid had stopped whining about "poor old Fido" before his inebriation set-in.

Below, swamps gave way to scraggly marsh forest like the last bedraggled scraps of hair on an obvious comb-over. Vague mountains - more like rocky hunchbacks than monoliths - rose on the horizon. And then, just as night was falling across the boring vista, a tiny pinprick of artificial light appeared in the foothills.

"Got him," Johnny said, squinting into the dark. Roolán reacted as though electrified, sitting bolt upright. The Kid continued to snore.

The light sharpened, dividing into several window-shaped points. Some sort of building or facility, Johnny guessed, and as the Dilûu sensed the end of its journey it pushed onwards with renewed vigour, farting hugely. Johnny began methodically checking through his equipment, arming his blaster, fingering the various cartridges and gadgets he'd purchased in the city. Roolán watched him with silent hunger, drinking it all in.