Reality 36 (44 page)

  "You did the right thing," said Richards. Then: "Er, should that door be there?"

  "Door? Door?" Hughie spun on his heel. "No," he said in surprise.

  The door was bland, a four-panel door of a design centuries old, the door to a pantry or a bedroom or a kitchen in any one of a million houses. Only this door stood in the darkness of a dead virtual world, unsupported by a wall. A door on its own that should not have been anywhere, let alone there.

  The door flew open with a bang.

  "Uh-oh," said Richards. "I don't like the look of that."

  Hughie opened his mouth. Whatever he had to say remained unsaid. A stream of violent energies surged forth from the space beyond the door, spearing Hughie like a fish.

  "I say," he said looking at Richards dazedly. "I feel rather queer." The stream stopped at his body. Hughie went limp, hung as if he had been pinned to the darkness.

  It was a datastream, a datastream of such bandwidth Richards boggled at it, a datastream so fat it could only have been generated by a machine capable of conjuring whole worlds from numbers.

  It stank of k52's gridsig.

  Richards grimaced as he dipped his hand into the wash of energy, accessing the content conveyed therein. Subversion commands, Trojans, gatecrashers, phages programmed to kill, lesser near-Is by their thousands… punched right through Hughie, perhaps the most powerful AI on the planet. Hughie was a conduit back to his base unit, a base unit linked to several hundred of the other most powerful AIs on the planet, a multi-stranded group consciousness, the core of one of the world's most powerful states.

  The datastream bore an army.

  "Fucking hell!" said Richards, and held his hat down hard.

  Around the door, a certain brand of reality began to spread, obscene and fungus-like, across the void until so recently occupied by the Thirty-sixth Realm.

  Richards had seconds before he was noticed. He dithered between getting the hell out of there and running for the door.

  "Fuck it," he said, rubbing his hands together. "I've already died this week. It wasn't so bad."

  He sprinted for the door and, when he got close, dived into the energy stream and swam as hard as he could.

  His hat flew off. It went to nothing in the dark.

  Richards vanished through the door.

Chapter 30

The Realm House

Otto could not sleep; his dreams had returned with greater force now his mind found itself unoccupied again. He stood on the forward balcony of the heavy lifter's gondola, a space wedged between the multiple beam emitters and projectile cannons that festooned the airship's solid sections. In the clouds, surrounded by very large guns, Otto felt a species of peace.

  Above his head the horizontal teardrop of the balloon dominated the sky, massive turbofans at the rear; lifters were far too heavy to employ the solar jets of the passenger airships, hence the name. The airship was stationary, moored to a mast on a VIA airfield a few kilometres from the Realm House. Much of the Realm House lay beneath the sand, a loaf-shaped dome prickly with termite cooling towers all that was evident above ground. To the far side of it were low foamcrete buildings accommodating the research teams stationed on the base. A substantial guardhouse straddled four lanes of hardtop that took a thirty-degree dive under the ground once past it, but that was out of sight; all Otto could see was the peculiar cooling hill of the House. A ring of armoured vehicles and a prefabbed double security fence bristling with weapons cut through the House's black skirt of car parks, National Guard installed by the VIA the day before.

  Otto rubbed at his electoos. His hair was getting long and he could no longer feel them, another thing that needed seeing to. The repairs and surgery had gone well. His scars itched with accelerated healing. The doctors and technicians had done better than their best, and had managed to fix much of the damage, including his leg. However, Otto's shoulder remained beyond the equipment on the lifter and the doctor had reiterated his opinion that Otto need to see a cybernetics specialist and get the whole shoulder replaced. The carbon plastics bonded into the bone, carried there originally by chemically loaded calcium, had become patchy over the course of numerous traumas and subsequent repairs. His scapula had deformed because of it. That was the cause of the pain. He rotated it as he thought about it and winced. It was a grave fault, a hardware and a software failure whose flaws had lain dormant in him from the beginning. He was getting old, and his cybernetics were ageing less well than he was, mistakes of the drawing board decades past coming to fruition like so many mechanical cancers. When he'd been altered, he'd been promised a long life of vitality, superior to that of unenhanced men; another lie, one to go with his dreams and the Bergstrom syndrome that had taken his wife and his friend. He could expect more malfunctions in the future, the doctor had warned him.

  Ekbaum had said that before to him too, not long ago. Otto had ignored him, out of bullheadedness, and fear. Now with the ever-present throb in his back he could not. He should slow down.

  He thought again about retiring.

  Otto had avoided the meetings of the last few days. The fate of the Realms was not his to decide, and he had little interest in the matter. He had also avoided talking to Valdaire about it on the few occasions he had seen her. It was clear she was very angry with whatever had been decided.

  He wanted to go back to the Londons, but he had to hang on until the fake Qifang was dealt with and the Thirty-seventh Realm deactivated. The first part of that had fallen to Richards and Hughie, and should be done soon. He'd heard the VIA were going to decommission the servers carrying the dead space of the ruined Realms tomorrow. That was why Valdaire had been angry, not that it meant much to him. When it was done he could pay the extravagant fee to catch a stratoliner back home to Europe. The green taxes alone were crippling, tripled because he'd taken the flight out here on a strat too. Richards could pay for it. He had no patience for a two-day transatlantic dirigible flight, not after all this.

  His MT crackled.

  "Richards," thought Otto. "Are we done here?"

  "Otto! Can't talk!" Richards' voice was what Otto always described as "breathless", a state not brought on by lack of breath, for Richards had none of that to be lacking, but a curious halting way of speaking his partner had when running too much data at once. It was a mode of speech peppered with a tiresome number of exclamation marks, and rarely heralded good news. "It was a trap! Hughie has been suborned!" thought Richards. "k52! Running for the Thirty-seventh Realm! I'm going in! Can't explain! Report with Chloe! Can't talk! Otto! Tell them to shut the servers down, shut them all down!"

  "All the Realms?"

  "All of them! Y…"

  The connection was broken.

  Movement caught Otto's eye and he looked toward the House. The lights on the security cordon flickered. The noise of engines powering up and down erratically broke the night's tranquility. Otto watched several vehicles jerkily moving backwards and forwards. Two ran into each other, the clang of their collision delayed by distance. Shouts followed.

  Otto turned up his light amplification and image magnification. He saw men leap from their machines, drop equipment, throw their helmets to one side and roll on the floor in agony; some, those not of the VIA and less well-equipped, stood jabbing at the buttons of unresponsive devices, bafflement on their faces.

  Gunfire shouted out as the vehicles and autonomous weaponry of the cordon turned on the soldiers. Installations bloomed quick flowers of orange flame. The last shreds of peace fled.

  Others joined Otto at the balcony, Valdaire among them. "What's going on?" she asked, rubbing wakefulness into her face. Alarms sounded as the airship came to life.

  "A massacre," said Otto. "The machines have turned on the troops. Richards and Hughie have failed. k52 has usurped Hughie's court. It looks like he's used it to break into the VIA, turn their own equipment against them to protect the Realm House."

  "He knows we're going to try and shut him down," said Valdaire.

  "Of course," said Otto. "It is the most logical course of action."

  "The heavy lifter, shouldn't we get off?"

  "No," said Otto. "My adjutant tells me the Four inside took itself offline at the first sign of trouble. Those vehicles down there, they have only simple brains, little independent thought, easily compromised."

  The airship's docking clamps fell away from the tower, and it rapidly ascended, emergency water ballast streaming from its sides. Fire streaked up from the ground. Gatling cannons, mini-missile pods and metal storm racks of the airship brought down the projectiles before they could hit. The craft's formidable offensive arsenal followed, pounding tanks into pieces, but the heavy lifter was outnumbered and outgunned. Otto could feel the pressure of aggressive AIs through his mentaug, trying to get at the Four pilot. It was retreating.

  "Come on," he said. "Richards left a message with Chloe."

  Then the sky filled with fire, as the lifter ponderously fled its assailants.

  "It's war," said Valdaire quietly.

  "War?" said Otto. "It always is."

RICHARDS & KLEIN WILL RETURN IN 2012 in OMEGA POINT

Extras

Timeline of the events leading up to Reality 36

2039
First permanent base on the Moon. Many more bases on other solar bodies follow.

2040
First interstellar probe launched.

2044
The First Great Inundation of London. Flooding becomes a regular event in the capital. Floods are commonplace right across the UK.

2052
A financial crash precipitated by the failure of ecological services in multiple biospheres wipes trillions off the world's stock exchanges and plunges the global economy into widespread recession. The 'Eco Deficit' depression lasts for twenty years. Traditional models of centralised manufacture begin to come apart under the tertiary effects of the Information Age. Great unrest in the recently unified pan-Islamic state of the Caliphate sees moderate government established in Bagdad.

2065
Otto is born.

2067
The Ice Sheet Tip, a mass melting of the Greenlandic ice sheet, occurs decades prior to most predictions. Over the next thirty years, sea levels rapidly rise around the world, inundating numerous major cities and causing a flood of refugees. The UN steps in to create a climate control consensus. The powers of both the UN and regional federated power blocs increase, but are opposed by multinational corporations and national governments.

The North Atlantic Drift is undone by the input of fresh water. Over the next fifty years, Western Europe's climate becomes akin to that of 20th Century Japan; sweltering summers and freezing winters.

Mass population movement, which comes to be called The Second Great Migration, is in full swing.

2069
First true AI created. Heralded as strong AI, it is anything but. In some ways Class Ones are as clever as human beings, in others much, much dumber. The Singularity fails to happen, although later models are successively more intelligent. In December, Novoflu, or 'Christmas Flu', sweeps round the globe. Population growth had begun to stabilise around 8 billion owing to increased prosperity in certain parts of the world, and ecological collapse in others. It now begins to fall quickly. One billion people die worldwide over a three year period. Later epidemics are less severe, but millions succumb to it annually on a three-five yearly cycle hereafter.

2074
Honour, Otto's future wife, is born.

2078
Continuing research into animal sentience and the advent of uplifted animals, genetically engineered humans, AI and human/machine hybrids leads to the EU Directive on nonhuman citizens being enacted.

2080
The South Bank of London is partially abandoned. New Lodnon is planned.

2085
The Med and Atlantic walls, strings of floating fortresses, are begun to stem the flow of refugees from the southern hemisphere. Neo-communism takes root in South America. Africa is a basket case.

Otto joins the army and begins the lengthy process of cyborgisation.

2097
Civil war begins in Brasil, the last true democracy in South America.

2098
The Med and Atlantic walls finished. The Second Great Migration is halted.

Otto leaves the army and begins a new career as a freelance security consultant. During this time he works with Buchwald and Lehmann in Africa.

2100
First true Martian city set up by NASA and allied corporate enterprises. Honour reluctantly agrees to a cranial implant.

2101
Construction of New London reaches halfway point.

2104
Richards and the other Fives are created. The Class Fives are the first to possess full self-awareness. The Five Crisis hits. Many Fives go mad. All Fives recalled. Most are destroyed, many commit suicide. Large parts of the world's computer network is brought down, plunging the Earth into a week-long information blackout. Chaos reigns, but is restored by the actions of several sane Fives.

In the aftermath, the ageing Internet 2 is replaced by the hardier Grid. Only 76 of the initial run of 1,200 Fives are judged sane and allowed to remain active. Court proceedings in their favour are an important factor in the Neukind Rights movement. AIs are outlawed and hunted down across China by the People's Dynasty Government.

2107
Under AI management, the Martian conglomerate undergoes full merger. Newly established 'Marsform' begins terraformation of the red planet with USNA blessing.

2110
Honour dies of Bergstrom syndrome. First interstellar probe images arrive.

2113
Zhang Qifang gives speech calling for full rights to nonhumans sentients in Naples, January 18.