Rainbow Bridge (47 page)

Fiorinda scratched her toes, and wondered if the armchair had fleas. She was remembering a different bohemian dump, more flash than grunge; but funky… The basement of the Snake Eyes house in Lambeth, HQ of rock rebellion. I was sixteen and I’d just met them. Ax Preston picking guitar, in the pauses of the conversation. Singing, singing single notes, that I knew were talking to me—

Thoughts like this rise, when you’re about to go over the top.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can do practically anything in the datasphere, arrow of time no object, without going within a million miles of critical. But it would be a fuck of a job and if I started trying not to make mistakes I would fall in and drown—’

‘So you have to get into a Flow State, does that feel excellent?’

‘Yes it does, I’m there now. But I wouldn’t do this often. I wouldn’t make a habit of this if it were legal and decent, because it would drive me nuts. I don’t want to be nuts, I’ve tried it, it isn’t nice—’

Allie roused out of her frozen daze, and spoke calmly. ‘Cack.’

He looked round. ‘What?’

‘Leave Fio alone. She’s concentrating.’

Sage was finding out as much as he could about the situation at the remote site, live. He could trust what could be inferred about the data, could tell that ‘virtual Dilip’ hadn’t been copied for instance (now there’s a nasty thought). But it’s perilous to infer physical conditions from the digital activity of some place you’ve never seen. Peaceful isolation could be a server stuck away in a broom cupboard, or it could be some buzzing party central, where ‘Virtual Dilip’ was kept on show, in a cage of impenetrable firewalls. It didn’t move around; that was all he was sure of. But what
was
this isolated signal? A b-loc signal is a
facet
of a human consciousness, logically
not separate
from the original; or from any manifestation of itself. ‘Virtual Dilip’ was a paradox: but theoretically, marginally, Sage could examine the brainstate of the fragment at Ground Zero, through the entangled fragment he had collected from Lance Buckley’s recording; using the DK signature from his cache for reference. Allie had asked him what’s it like, and he had told her,

—like reconstructing a minor Hittite dialect, from a broken sliver of clay and a dictionary based a much richer language. Like astrophysics. (We have no
proof
that DK made that fatal call, though we all believe it now.) A tower of inference built on pure speculation, theory in search of an experiment—

Maybe not very comforting, and he felt bad about that. But he was not in a comforting mood. All he could do to keep up the backchat; he knew the crew found it reassuring. They were monitoring the security patrols, and they took him off-line irregularly, for a millisecond or so, when the iterations reached levels they didn’t like. Fiorinda is backstop, we don’t use her unless we must… About every nine and a half seconds, every thirteen or so seconds, and there was another, shorter cycle that kicked in not-quite-randomly. What shall we call this, neurophysical necromancy?

‘Okay, I’m done, best I can. Still active, and pronounced clear.’

‘What does “active” mean?’ asked Allie.

The geeks had changed gear. Sage was leaving his board, the moment was upon her. She imagined DK rescued, a living ghost, living out his days in peace. What would that be like? Like talking to a hologram?

‘It’s difficult to grasp,’ said Peter, seriously. ‘There’s no
Dilip
in the material present, so it’s a facet without origin. Active like a virtual movie avatar, kept the way
they
are; on standby. You can’t switch them off or they disintegrate.’

‘I couldn’t get a great deal.’ Sage turned his white-out blind eyes on her: Allie flinched. ‘Ah, sorry just about to take them out.’ He tipped the lenses onto his palm, dumped them in a tiny autoclave and came to sit by Cack on the sofa. ‘We won’t be landing in anybody’s lap or squabbling with furniture; an’ if there’s an exotic trap waiting to catch virtual invaders such as us, I didn’t spot it.’

‘Sage
is he alive
? Is it him? Is part of him still alive, somehow?’

George was frowning at Sage’s immix construct, reduced to code on a regular screen. He and the boss exchanged a steady look.

‘It’s time you got moving,’ said George.

‘Better if you don’t think like that, Allie,’ said Sage.

The Cumbrian b-loc sets had been programmed to match the pair that had been in the Few’s possession. Fiorinda and Allie kept their heads still, while the geeks made final adjustments. ‘Let me remind you,’ said Sage, donning his own set, ‘this has to be a short trip. You and I, Allie, won’t be able to get around. We don’t have a live path, we’re loc’d to the shade, I mean what remains of DK: standard b-loc footprint. If we move away from him, more than about a metre, two at max, we’ll loc’ out. The nine-seconds cycle is harmless, we’re too strange for it to spot. The thirteen-second probes are blunt instruments, they don’t care what we look like. We can survive two of them, we’ll loc’ in at the start of that cycle. It’ll seem longer, but that will be the limit. After that we’re playing chicken.’

He looked down at his sleeping daughter.

‘Last call. Are you still up for this, Allie?’

‘Don’t
do that
!’ she wailed. ‘Yes I am up for this.’

‘Sorry,’ said the boss, unperturbed. ‘My brat?’

Fiorinda smiled, spookily calm. ‘I’m ready.’

Support crew voices were suddenly talking in Allie’s head. V
₂
will return the call she missed, the day the Insanitude siege was broken. V
₁
and V
₃
are slaved to her, V
₂
never to be alone at the remote site… The Vs were the brain’s visual centres, because the visual cortex is God, but they’d somehow also become vintage nuclear submarines. V
₁
, or Vanguard, was Fiorinda. Sage was V
₂
, Vigilant, making Allie Victorious. Just the kind of name the commandos
would
give to the weakest link, but it didn’t wound her. She was far away, trying to think herself back to that moment, the unexpected, lost, hinge-moment, on which
everything
depended—

DK…?

Is that you…? Where are you…?

She didn’t remember getting the earbead ping, and failing to respond. The b-loc sets had been hidden in a bedroll. Nobody had seen Dilip root one out and take it with him on his firewatch. They’d been expecting an assault, on that last day: they hadn’t known it would end the siege. She remembered a sudden uproar, a surge of panic sweeping through the non-combatant havens, deep inside the palace. Dora and Felice stuffing Toots into a pet-carrier, and calling frantically for Ghost, the Snake Eyes’ other cat, who hadn’t been seen in days. Chez, Chip and Ver grabbing things, the children passive with terror; Rob yelling at the senior Babes,
fuck the cat
,
come on!
The smell of fire, the gusts of heat. She remembered realising that Dilip must be dead, but did not know where this knowledge had overtaken her. When we were running with the faithful barmies, no idea where they were taking us? When we
saw
the firestorm that everyone was screaming about—

I’m in the departure lounge
.

They were in a dark room. Glowing red and green dots, like standby lights, hung suspended, dimly revealing a rectangular space, not huge; nearly square. In the centre, right in front of them, a pale polished block around two metres long, maybe a metre high; immediately suggesting an altar or a tomb. Hardware towers, giant servers or just filing cabinets, emerged from their hiding. The room was walled with them. There was a door, no windows. At waist-height, around three of the hardware walls, objects were laid on counters; most of them quite small; difficult to make out.

‘The exotic trap was in the nine-second cycle,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Dunno how, but I’ve blocked it.’

‘Ouch, sorry—’

‘But where is DK?’ whispered Allie.

Three seconds had passed.

‘He’s here,’ Fiorinda stared around, ‘He’s right here! But
where
?’

They could all feel the contact, the mental penumbra of a b-loc call—

The pale block, the funereal aura of this place, the nature of their mission, had them imagining Dilip’s ghost honourably entombed. Enshrined as a hero by the noble enemy; for Chinese reasons that they didn’t understand. Then they saw a shadow hovering over the catafalque, and realised the tomb was a big flatbed scanner, like the flatbeds they’d seen in Hollywood when they were making
Rivermead
. This version had no second housing for the controls, and the dome was almost invisible. But it was there, and the shade was firing up inside: reacting to their presence. Allie gasped and clutched at her head, felt the grip back at the home site and almost loc’d out. The shadow had become a human body, the head and neck contorted, eyeless, noseless, the limbs and trunk seared, shards of textile burned into the red and black meat. A headset was fused to the black-blistered scalp, the forearms fixed, hands like claws, as if reaching to pull it off.

There he is. There’s Dilip, where he has been all this time. Allie recovered first. ‘Thank God, he’s
dead
! He was always dead, we’ve been agonising over nothing, all we have to do is pull the plug. How do we pull the plug!’

Eight seconds had passed.

‘We’ve got to pull the plug!’ cried Allie again, but Sage and Fiorinda weren’t responding. She understood, blunderingly but fast, that there was worse to come—

The shade had heard her voice, it stirred and woke.

It was Dilip alive, a living image laid over the burned shell: his hair drawn back from the face they knew, his great eyes alight with recognition. They saw what Dian’s father had seen,
a slender male figure in very closely fitting dark clothes: an impression of someone enduring, or taking on, great pain
.

But the apparition was looking at them.

‘Ah!’ breathed the shade. ‘Did the Insanitude fall?’

They could not speak. Ten seconds had passed.

‘Have I been like this long? It’s hard to know, I have no memory. I don’t think I talked. I was conscious when they interrogated me. They had to vivisect, because if they shut me down I’m gone.’ It drew a deep breath, into vanished lungs. ‘You haven’t come to get me out, have you?’

‘No,’ said Sage.

But the shade had forgotten the question. It was fixed on Allie. It raised the burned shell’s blackened hand; Fiorinda and Sage saw it realise it could not touch her.

‘I wanted to say goodbye. I had the b-loc. I had always taken it with me when I had to leave you, those scary days, so I’d be able to say goodbye—’

‘Goodbye,’ echoed Allie, speaking to the long dead. No tears, but her knees were giving way, she couldn’t feel the floor and she’d forgotten why.

‘I called you but the fire came through so fast, I wasn’t thinking, I never meant you to see this hideous thing—’

‘
Don’t,
’ she whispered. ‘
Don’t
—’

‘I lived too long in the departure lounge. I’m glad you came and found me.’ It forgot her. Dilip the free spirit, party animal, enduring great pain undaunted, smiled at Sage and the rock and roll brat. ‘My lord, my oceanic Fiorinda, is Ax okay?’

‘Ax is doing fine.’

‘Tell me one thing, are we winning?’

‘
Yes,
’ said Sage.

‘I don’t know where the controls are. You won’t leave me like this?’

Twenty seconds.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I won’t.’ The countdown stopped. Time was away somewhere. She sliced her hand through the top of the dome—which did not shatter, it rose like dew and vanished in the air—sprang up onto the scanner bed and seemed to take the shade by the shoulders. She kissed Dilip gently, and drew back. Sage and Allie, on either side, held his burned claws. He was thistledown, the way a b-loc virtual ghost always feels: there is no sensation, but your brain is puzzled.

Fiorinda pulled off the fused headset.

Allie and the ghost both disappeared. Allie was safe at the home site.

Dilip’s shade was just gone.

‘That was a cheap round,’ said Fiorinda, still crouched on the rim tomb, the ethereal laserdome beside her whole, but empty. ‘I know what it looked like, and felt like, but what happened was all software. You found him by geekery, you could have hacked the off-switch by geekery; just would have taken longer.’ She grinned, and shook herself. ‘They’ll never know I was here. Net damage to the fabric of reality
derisory
, only now I remember why this is a very dangerous drug.’

She jumped down from her perch. ‘What
is
this place? What else are they keeping in here? Shall we look at the grave goods?’

To Sage’s eyes she glittered as if her blood had turned to light. He shook his head. ‘Got to go, babe. Twenty-six seconds, realtime. I’m gonna get caught.’

‘Come on, live a little.’ She held out her hand, shining. Sage barely hesitated: he joined her where the countdown couldn’t hurt him. (back in the first-floor room he watched the contents of those servers zipping into Reich custody: cheap round for us, expensive for the tourists, but enough is enough, I’m about to pull you out, my brat—)

They grinned at each other, dropped the handclasp and walked around.

‘We’re inside one of Ax’s upturned boats,’ said Fiorinda.

‘Most likely. What d’you think
shū
means, exactly? In this context?’

The Chinese character was embossed on the sides of the catafalque; in large relief up on the towers, and button-sized on every winking control panel.

‘Text?’ she suggested. ‘Books, recorded knowledge?’

The objects on the counters were English Countercultural or forbidden tech artefacts. A magic crystal sitting on its barkcloth bag. A book of spells from the twentieth century; with fairies on the cover. Sage lifted a box-fresh b-loc headset;
Adiabatic of Cambridge
scrolled on the case. First-generation, a little clunky, but popular to the end, as near to a mass-market product as b-loc ever had.
Adiabatic
was supposed to have been comprehensively trashed and burned, when the English went crazy after the Insanitude fell, and smashed all the futuristic science. ‘You start to wonder—’ he murmured, and shook his head. Nah, forget it, we’ll never know what really happened.
What really happened
is a concept that the Chinese have erased.