“Is it safe?”
“Not in the slightest. But just remember, your mind is formed of FE and quickened by MTPH.”
Judy nodded thoughtfully. She was only gradually registering what she had been told. Her mind—this body’s mind—had been wiped at birth. What had taken root there was the same as what had taken root in the ziggurat on Constantine’s planet. It was the same, in effect, as the Watcher’s mind. But not the same, for it had been shaped by its container.
“My mind is formed of FE,” she murmured. “Does that make any difference?”
They both looked at each other, and suddenly began to laugh.
“Fucked if I know,” said the Watcher. And they laughed all the louder.
Judy crossed the duckboards, staring down at the black drop below. Could she see metal creatures down there, metal bodies squirming over each other in an echo of other events? Would she slip from the duckboards to be dragged down to drown there in the darkness? She looked up at the green lights high above, echoes of leaves in trees and the sunlight shining through limes. She paused by the white door set in the side of the cube and looked back to the Watcher, who gave her a little wave.
What is in here?
FE remembered. The
Eva Rye
remembered being a ship. This building remembered its shape.
FE was nine billion years old. Could it really remember its origins?
She placed a hand on the door and pushed it open and stepped out of her world.
All it took to create life was a situation where replication could occur. Not quite. There had to be some restrictions, some capability for the laws of economics to take place. There had to be limited capacity. Life evolved where there was competition. When there was a limited supply of building materials, replicating molecules would merely strip each other of their components. They would need therefore to evolve ways to prevent this happening. They would evolve walls around themselves to create cells. They would learn to spread quickly so as to grab scarce materials before their competitors could. They would diverge into predators and prey. Life would become a race for limited resources. For one species to prosper, another had to decline.
But someone has since written fairness into the universe,
thought Judy,
a feature sadly lacking in the original design.
She couldn’t stay in here for long. The air burned at her lungs and made her skin itch, even beneath the active suit. Her eyes were watering and the flickering light made her head spin. Even so, she could make out the shape of the space in which she stood. The dusty towers that surrounded her made her think of termite mounds; indeed, they made her think of blocks of flats. They were riddled with hundreds of tiny holes, set out in regular rows along each rectangular face of the mounds. If the inhabitants had been termites, they could come and stand in these windows and look out across to an equal inhabitant standing directly opposite.
How many mounds in here?
wondered Judy.
Ten of these orange dusty shapes? Twelve? Look at them, all of them of exactly equal height. All with the same number of windows. Is this where it all began? Did some evolutionarily stable strategy arise here, where the inhabitants found it advantageous to share everything equally? Each mound thus adding one level onto itself only when every other mound did the same. It wasn’t like that on Earth, where trees used to compete to reach the sunlight first. Did this equality arise here, or was it written here from another source?
The flickering light was making her feel badly disoriented. She could feel herself slowing down, losing interest even in the hacking cough that racked her body, and she recognized the signs of an approaching epileptic fit. It was time to get out of here. She took a last look around the orange dust and the towers, and then staggered backwards from this world out of time. She only just remembered…
…to keep her feet on the blue duckboards.
Constantine was waiting for her when she emerged, wiping his hands together as if cleaning them.
“Where is the Watcher?” asked Judy.
“Gone,” said Constantine. “He was just waiting for me to pass across the final confirmation of what I saw in the ziggurat. And he wanted to speak to me. I knew his wife once, for a brief time.”
“The Watcher had a wife?”
“It’s a long story.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died, I fear. You know the Watcher’s rule about digital life. You can’t barter with FE. Humans have only so much life and they can’t buy more.”
“He allowed his own wife to die?”
“The Watcher expanded her life span considerably, but in the end he was bound by FE. And that’s not all, because, despite everything, he tried to be a moral creature. He learned that from us. He learned everything about who he was by watching humans.”
“Where has he gone?”
“I don’t know. He was running on processing spaces here on Earth, and now he is not. Does that mean he is dead? If he is now running instead in a processing space one thousand light years away, does that mean he has resurrected himself, or just gone out of the room? I honestly don’t know.”
“Oh.”
Constantine helped her off from the duckboards and back into the corridor beyond. She leaned against the robot, feeling its cool metal skin. Everything seemed so silent now, such an anticlimax. She coughed again, spat yellow phlegm onto the floor. Phlegm from nine-billion-year-old dust?
“I’m sorry,” she said, realizing suddenly what she had done. “That was terribly rude of me.”
“That’s okay,” Constantine said.
She looked listlessly up and down the corridor, waiting for something to happen.
“It all seems so quiet now,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do. I’ve come all the way back here like I was supposed to.” She raised her voice. “Hey! Building! DIANA! What do you want me to
do
?”
“Return to your room and await instructions.”
“But there are no more instructions coming,” Judy complained. “Don’t you realize that? DIANA is long gone.”
“Return to your room and await instructions.”
“Oh, what’s the use? Constantine, what am I supposed to do now?”
The robot tilted his head as if listening.
“Who are you speaking to?” asked Judy.
“Aleph,” Constantine said.
“What is he saying?”
“He is suggesting we get above ground. He says that there are fourteen billion people currently living on Earth, and they are entitled to one fourteen billionth part of it each.”
“Sorry?”
“The Watcher is gone. The FE program is back on track. I think they are about to divide everything up.”
edward 3: 2252
Edward wasn’t really
so frightened: he had seen this happen before, back on the
Eva Rye
. He knew, when the ground began to shiver and tear itself into long shreds that waved about like anemones in the water, that all he had to do was look for the patch of stillness that was sure to be there and to head towards that. He knew, when the stone faces of the surrounding buildings cracked into warm smiles, and wrinkles formed around the windows of their eyes, that the objects in his vicinity were re-forming themselves into new shapes. He knew, when the light cut out, blocked by a maelstrom of swarming material, and the air was hot and smelling of metal, that he had only to wait patiently and the storm would pass and the world would re-form in new and interesting ways.
But, even so, this was different from before. Something invisible was stalking the Earth, something nurtured in the distant past; it had ripped its way to the surface, where it sniffed and tasted its new environment, and tried to understand the world into which it had been born. It placed a foot in the middle of what had been Berlin, and the buildings drew back in horror, and then fused together. It walked up the west coast of England, whereupon the Lite train tracks plated with silver the hemispherical depressions that opened beneath its feet.
Edward saw the Earth rendering up its riches. The sky was a deep pinkish orange pierced by silver masts that were visibly growing upwards. Silver birds were tearing themselves free from the mast tops and flying off in long dark streams through the heavens.
The surrounding city was dissolving into a crystal grey sea; the buildings were melting and slipping beneath the waves. Silvery shapes, painted by the pink light, floated upwards like sea creatures from another world, floating up into the aquarium sky.
And the sound—the howls and screams and whoops of air being pushed and bellowed and farted from the pneumatic pistoning of machinery sliding over machinery.
Warm water splashed over Edward’s face. He saw Saskia, her face pale and eyes wide, as she wiped her hand across her brow and shook the excess moisture free.
Pale eggs bobbed up from beneath the silver sea of the dissolved ground, rainbow colors spreading over them. They were ships, just like the original
Eva Rye,
but Edward ignored them, his attention drawn to a deepening pit not far away where the watchtower had once stood. Judy had walked into the building that had formed there. Then the building had collapsed in on itself, and he knew this meant she was dead. He just didn’t want to believe it.
Suddenly Maurice was pulling at his arm, pointing and shouting something that got lost in the unearthly shrieking chorus generated by the flux of the shifting machinery. Saskia was skittering forward, her legs moving twice as fast as they should be, running along on the backs of a herd of silver beetles heading in the opposite direction. Maurice held up both arms, elbows outwards to protect his head and charged forward through the falling curtain of metal ribbons that slithered from somewhere above. Edward got the idea and followed him, racing down the slope of bare earth and loose stone that led to the center point of what had been the watchtower. Then he saw something silver and black ahead, a cross that floated indistinctly in the air. Saskia, too, was running towards the cross, her face bleeding from a cut on her left cheek. Maurice picked his way downwards more cautiously behind her, and suddenly Edward realized what they were looking at.
The silver-and-black cross resolved itself into a familiar shape. It was Constantine, carrying Judy to safety from the ever widening pit into which the DIANA building was collapsing. It was an exercise in futility, for all of the surrounding Earth was slipping downwards. Maurice, Saskia, Constantine, Judy, even Edward himself, all would soon be swallowed up. Edward felt a swell of pride at his crew: that hadn’t stopped any of them rushing forward to help.
Saskia was there first. She placed a hand, red blood dripping from a deep gash near her wrist, onto Judy’s white cheek. Maurice arrived next, placing his arm protectively around Saskia.
Now Edward was there too, Judy looking up at him with a weak smile on her pale face. He noticed the way her left leg hung limply. She must have hurt it escaping from the transforming building.
The chorus of shrieking was increasing, and a busy regular rhythm—as of mandolins playing—was taken up by the machinery.
Saskia wrapped her arms around Judy and gave her a huge hug. Maurice placed a gentle hand on Edward’s shoulder and Edward beamed widely. They were all together again, and friends at last, here at the end. Blinking away tears, Edward looked up through a cloud of discs, like silver pennies thrown into the air, looked up higher and higher into the cold air and thought of the glittering stars beyond.
“Hey, look!” he called out, though it was still difficult to hear anything. Nonetheless they all turned and felt a cold awe settle over them. Up there in the sky, the black harlequin pattern of the Shawl was slowly breaking up as it disassembled itself into its constituent parts.
The sky was falling down.
But it didn’t end there. The shifting landscape sheltered them safely through the storm. All over the Earth, people would tell the same story.
And eventually there was a dawn.
Edward never quite grasped the subsequent events. To begin with, Maurice kept trying to explain things to him, but there was too much to look at. The storm had passed, but now they viewed a world in transition: a bright shifting dawn.
Great, rainbow-striped teardrop ships—just like the original
Eva Rye
—were spontaneously forming amongst the ever-shifting landscape, and they watched time and time again as disparate groups of people climbed on board through the rear exit hatch, all of them wearing the familiar slippery shapes of n-string bracelets on their wrists.
“Everyone on Earth has an equal quantity of material allocated to them to begin with,” Maurice explained. “Some people are pooling their share to make ships like the
Eva Rye
. They are heading off now to begin trading.”
Edward smiled at the thought. “We need to get back to our ship.”
“How do we do that, Edward?” Maurice asked, looking at his console. “All of the Lite train tracks will be gone. There is no property held in common anymore. Everyone is taking their fair share of what’s available.”
“But the Lite train tracks don’t belong to them!” Edward protested. “We need them to get back to our ship.”
Maurice wasn’t really listening, still too busy staring at his console. Staring but smiling. Saskia explained instead.
“But who did the Lite train tracks belong to, Edward?”
“Everyone!”
“I suppose you’re right,” Saskia said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think that’s how we used to think. This is going to take a bit of getting used to.” An idea occurred to her. “Maybe we can get a lift from one of these FE ships,” she said brightly, pointing to three nearby rainbow teardrop ships that bobbed above the silver ground like tethered balloons.
“Maybe
you
can,” Maurice said with quiet satisfaction. He was now scanning the cold blue sky. Edward looked up, too, wondering what he was searching for. There was music on the cold wind, the smell of spices and newness. Then Edward saw it in the distance: a dark speck, coming closer.
“Are you leaving us, Maurice?” Judy asked. She limped along behind them, one arm over Constantine’s shoulder.