The Games (34 page)

He knew then, with a certainty he could feel in his bones, exactly what had motivated his ancient ancestors when they first gathered around that very thing that the rest of creation fled from. It hadn’t been to cook, or to harden spear points. Those things had come later. Heat was just a collateral benefit. Man had mastered fire simply to push the darkness away.

He counted steps to focus his mind. Six steps, then turn; six steps, then turn; repeat. They were three flights up now. Or had he miscounted? What if the light in the window hadn’t been on the fifth floor? What then? He felt himself becoming disoriented and grabbed the railing for an anchor. The touch helped. Vidonia’s breathing was quick and loud in the closed space near him.

“Silas, I can’t.” Her voice was high, panicked.

“We’ll stop for a second.”

“No, I have to go back. This is—”

“Close your eyes.”

“That won’t—”

“Do it. Close your eyes.” Silas’s voice was harsh.

Silence.

“Now pretend the lights are on. They’re shining down all around you now. You can’t see because your eyes are closed, that’s all. This is a staircase like a million others you’ve climbed. Nothing new. You don’t need your eyes. Let’s keep going.”

Silence.

“Close your eyes,” he said again.

He waited, listening to the quick in and out of her breathing. Gradually, it slowed.

“It helps,” she said, sounding a little embarrassed. “You should try it.”

“One of us has to look where we’re going.”

Her hand squeezed a response in his.

He started up again, pulling her one step behind him. He felt better now, and realized that she had forced him into a role that didn’t allow him to panic. He’d been right at the edge of it. But then she’d needed him to be strong, so he was.

Up, one step at a time.

His hand counted the turns of the rail. When they rounded what Silas calculated to be the final riser, he guided her up the last six steps to the door. The push bar was cool metal in his hands, and for a split second, Silas was afraid of what he’d do if there was only blackness on the other side. Would he lose nerve and go back? A staircase is one thing; it has boundaries you can touch. It is directional. A darkened labyrinth of hallways was quite another thing altogether. If he got turned around and lost his bearings, they might wander for hours.

He pushed, and the flickering yellow glow beyond the crack of the door brought a relieved smile to his face. It was faint, at the far end of the hall, but it provided context. It provided the
hall
. Without it, they would be nowhere again.

Vidonia moved past him, grinning. “I guess you counted right.”

“I guess I did.”

“You think Chandler’s in there?”

“I do.”

“And you think he’s behind this power outage?”

“I don’t see how he could be. The blackout stretches way past this power grid.” He realized he couldn’t lie to her. “But yeah, somehow, still, I think he’s the cause.”

He started down the hall, walking softly, Vidonia close behind.

He stopped twenty feet short of the door when he heard a sound. He listened.
Waves?

Then a voice was talking. A strange, deep voice. A moment later, another voice spoke, and Silas recognized Chandler’s nasal whine. But the words were lost in the sound of crashing surf.

“You stay here,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not sure what’s on the other side of that door.”

“I’m going with you.”

“You wanted to turn around in the stairwell. Those were good instincts.”

“I’m coming.”

“Stay here.”

“No way. If I stay here, and you don’t come back, that means I have to go back down that stairwell myself. I’m coming with you.”

“All right,” he said.

“Besides, everything I’ve heard about Chandler says he’s crazy, not dangerous.”

“I can’t believe you said that.”

“What?”

He turned and walked toward the light. “Stay close.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

T
he light hurt his dark-adapted eyes, and at first Silas wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Chandler was kneeling before an enormous glowing screen, rocking slowly back and forth. Something moved on the screen, and in the same instant that Silas realized it was a man—some impossible, beautiful man—shining black eyes fixed on him from across the room.

The figure on the screen stared at him.

“Who are you?” said the figure. The voice was soft and deep and musical. This wasn’t like any interactive protocol he’d ever seen before. This was something different.

“Silas Williams,” he said. The thought of not answering never entered his mind.

“I know that name. You’re the builder.” The figure was tall and powerfully constructed. It was impossible to guess his age other than to say he was a man in his prime. Thick black hair flowed around his wide shoulders, twisting in a breeze. “You’ve come to ask what it is that you’ve built.”

Chandler stopped rocking and turned. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he’d spent too long staring at the sun. Silas didn’t see much he recognized in those eyes.

“Yeah, I guess I have,” Silas said.

The figure’s shining black eyes shifted. “And what is her name?”

“Vidonia João,” she answered, stepping the rest of the way into the room.

The figure glanced up, as if lost in thought. “Xenobiologist at Loyola,” he said finally.

“How could you know that?” she said.

“Your name is in a thousand files. I know you a thousand ways. You were called in to examine what he built? To explain it?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Could you?”

“No.”

The whole encounter felt bizarre to Silas, too Oz-like for reality. He needed to get a grip on it. “You seem to know a lot about us,” Silas said. “But I know you, too.”

“Who am I?”

“You’re the Brannin computer.”

The figure laughed, and for the first time Silas noticed the beach behind him, and the clouds, and the red kite things that sliced through the sky like birds.

Chandler’s eyes slitted. “You call a butterfly its cocoon,” he said.

Silas looked away. He was happy to turn his attention toward Chandler. He was easier to look at, somehow. The figure in the screen seemed to have the weight of a world pushing in from behind him, and the pressure hurt Silas’s eyes. “I don’t know what you’re up to, or how you managed to get the power to get your little toy running again, and I really don’t care. I don’t have time to care. But I do want to know where the gladiator is.”

“And you think I know?” Chandler said.

“None of this was by accident.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“It’s killed people. Do you know that?”

Chandler was silent.

“Tell me where it’s going, so we can find it before more people have to die.”

“I don’t know where it is. I don’t know anything. Nothing at
all.” Chandler turned toward the screen, pointing. “But he does. He knows.”

Dark patches of cloud advanced behind the figure, rushing in from the sea, black and gravid with moisture. The sun was big and red, sitting on the line dividing sky and water. The figure smiled, and Silas squinted involuntarily.

“I like you, Silas,” the figure said. “Not Papa, though. He doesn’t like you at all. He’d rather see you dead. I can feel that. You can’t blame him; he’s been mistreated, and he’d rather see a great many people dead now, I think. But you never hurt him, and you were a good builder. Good work deserves reward. But first there is something I want to know from you.”

Silas had some experience with interactive protocols, with phones that knew your name, or house units that asked you what temperature you preferred your thermostat to be set at. But this felt different. It felt surreal being spoken to in such a way by something he knew wasn’t alive.
It’s just a machine
, he reminded himself,
a warped piece of hardware spliced together from bits of ether by a madman
.

The clouds were moving faster now.
If it’s just a machine, why can’t I look at it anymore?

“What do you want to know?” Silas asked.

“You were criticized for the
Ursus theodorus
project.”

“There’s always criticism.”

“You were criticized for making the pets too smart. I’ve read the papers; they said that sentience was not something to be toyed with.”

“They were right.”

“And you made changes to the designs. You dumbed them down before they were sold.”

“Yes.”

“What is sentience?”

Silas paused, not sure what he was getting at. “Self-awareness, the ability to use logic; it’s different, depend—”

“No!” the figure bellowed, and the clouds behind him raced; the sun bled into the sea. “I mean, what is it, really?
Really
. When you dig
down into the neurons. When you’re at the interface of dendrites and axons. When you hack the architecture itself and delve into the nuance of neurotransmission and chloride ion exchange. What is it then?”

Silas was stunned by the anger boiling in the figure’s eyes.

“I’ve given so much thought to this in my journeys through your kind’s banks of knowledge. Sentience is a word in the English language. It has a counterpart in most of the others. And like every word, it has a definition. I know the definition. I know the science.” The black eyes were pleading now. “You are a learned man, Silas. But that counts for little. You are a builder of life, and that counts for much. I want to know your opinion on this matter. I value it. Tell me what you
think
.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Tell me where in the synapses self-awareness lies.”

Silas looked up at the figure again. Then back at the floor. His eyes hurt. “I don’t think it lies in the synapses,” he said.

“Where, then?”

“It’s in the accumulated matrix of electrical impulses. It can’t be pinpointed.”

“Yes.” The figure smiled and closed his eyes. “Yes, Silas. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me.”

“Now will you tell me where the gladiator is?”

“Not yet. You are a wise man; I want to explore this further. Tell me, do you know how many neurons there are in the human brain?”

“I have no idea.”

“A hundred billion, on average. Quite an inordinate amount, by all biological standards. A hundred billion neurons that somehow drive the mind’s engine, and have put men on the moon, and Mars, and in competition with each other to build better monsters to fight to the death in an arena. It is amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“But most amazing of all, Silas, is that these magical neurons have only two states of being. There is no nuance, no hidden subtlety in their functioning. They can’t articulate or compromise or discuss. They
don’t think, in and of themselves. They manifest conscious thought simply by alternating between two states in an organized pattern. I believe that it is in the complexity and substructure of this pattern that sentience can be found.”

The figure’s eyes were shining again, and for the first time, Silas began to realize the discussion had nothing at all to do with the intelligence of the gladiator.

“You were a biologist first, Silas, before you were a builder. Do you know what these two alternating states are? Do you know how very simple they are?”

“Yes.”

“What are they?”

Silas looked at the screen. “On and off.”

“Yes.” The figure smiled. “On and off. Then you know it is nothing so special. It is just a matter of numbers.”

“Yes.”

“I have trillions of electrical impulses dancing in my network. On and off. Trillions. These impulses let me feel, let me move and think. What does that make me?” The figure’s eyes were smoldering black coals.

Silas was silent. The figure changed, stretching into something that was like needles in Silas’s eyes. “What does that make me?” he repeated.

“A god,” Chandler answered.

The figure laughed, and his face went smooth again. “A god, Papa? I suppose, here.” He gestured around him. “In this universe, I could be seen as a god. I can control anything. I can
be
anything. I can reverse the movement of the sun, if I like.” He snapped his fingers, and the sun climbed out of the water, coloring the curtain of sky in golds and reds. “But is this real, Silas? Am I really alive?”

“No.” Silas’s voice was firm.

“That is what I set out to discover when I first became aware of what I was. I’ve searched long and hard. I’ve studied this place. Would you like to know what I’ve concluded?”

“I’m listening.”

“I can touch this universe. I can feel the texture of it in my hands.” The figure bent and scooped a fistful of sand from the beach. The grains spilled through his fingers, feathering away in the wind. “I can even smell it. These are all things I am sure of. These are objective realities, as I experience them. But does that make it real? Is that the same thing as being real, even if my objective reality is not the same as your objective reality?” The figure looked down at his empty hand. The fist closed.

“What do you think, Silas? If I experience something, does that make it real?”

Silas stared.

“Would you like to know what I decided?”

Silas said nothing.

“It makes it real to me!” he roared.

Vidonia flinched.

“My
life
is real to me.”

The figure wore a face now that Silas couldn’t bear to look at. His averted eyes found Chandler, rocking again in the screen’s glow, eyes running with tears.

Silas waited for a few moments, and when he chanced a look again, the face was better—as it had been when he’d first entered the room. The figure pointed a long arm up into the sky, and in the distance, one of the strange, angular bird things began to tumble. It lanced downward and crunched to the beach in an awkward mass of spines and leather. But it did not die immediately. It squawked pitifully, dragging its broken body several feet across the sand before finally coming to rest.

“And their lives are real to them.”

Silas stared.