“When did this happen?”
Jay shrugged again.
“We don’t know. We are hoping to figure it out with your help. Have you noticed anything odd recently?”
Constantine gave a bitter laugh. “I’ve been seeing gaps beneath the sky. I see holes in alleyways and office blocks full of people staring at each other. Strangers introduce themselves to me and take me for midnight walks through the city. People seem to freeze in mid action while a second body around them carries on moving. Now I am speaking to a young woman standing on the balcony of a floating building. Yes. I guess you could say that things have been odd recently.”
He shook his head and tilted his head in thought.
“Okay. Things really started acting odd about three weeks ago. Do you think that’s when they got me?”
“Possibly. It’s something to work on.”
Constantine suddenly felt very cold. He remembered that he was naked in the middle of the freezing night.
“Can we go back inside?” he asked.
“No!” Jay held out her hand. “Stay close to me. They don’t know I’m here. We can only speak safely if you’re close to this balcony.”
Constantine was suddenly suspicious. “How? That’s a good point. If I’m a computer simulation, how can you speak to me at all? Surely they will
know
you’re here. Why should I listen to what you say?”
Jay rolled her eyes in frustration. “Listen, get this into your head. I’m the only person in here who’s on your side. Now, I’ve got a message for one of your personalities. Are they listening?”
“They’re asleep.”
—I’m awake, said White.
Constantine made no response. White never really slept. Savant personalities were a little different, he knew. Maybe it would do him good to keep this a secret for the moment.
“What about Grey? Is he there?” asked Jay.
“I see you’ve been fully briefed. In that case, you’ll realize that I never know
anything
about what Grey is up to.”
“Fine. Listen, this is a message from the real Constantine. I saw him just a few hours ago before I got in here. He said ‘GHX LPN SSD SAS EFF LKF.’”
—Probably an authentication code, said White.
“What? Can I have that again?”
“No need. Grey will have picked it up. It’ll vouch for my credentials.”
Constantine paused, but Grey maintained its habitual silence. Constantine tentatively took this to be a positive sign and withheld further judgment for the moment.
“So, how did you get in here, then? How come you haven’t been detected?”
Jay gave a little smile and looked down at her feet. She wriggled her tanned brown toes on the cool marble of the balcony and then allowed her gaze to travel up the long dark side of the tower above her. She finally spoke.
“The program that runs this simulation is full of bugs. Not surprising when we’re talking about something so complex. All programs contain memory leaks: objects get created but not destroyed. Like when you get a bit of a picture left behind on a computer display after you move things around?”
Constantine nodded. “I know what you mean.”
“Good,” said Jay. “That’s why you sometimes see two of things, or why the scenery doesn’t always hang together like it should.”
She jerked her head in the direction of the tower behind her.
“This is an object that didn’t get destroyed. The program doesn’t even know it’s here. There are no pointers to it; only termination of the program itself will lead to its resources being returned to the heap. A DIANA tempest device managed to locate the object and then effect a transference of my personality construct into it. Basically, this is my little island of friendly consciousness in a sea of hostility.”
“Oh,” Constantine said. He had temporarily forgotten the cold. Jay’s words washed over him. Something she had mentioned earlier was just beginning to sink into his awareness. He licked his lips and whispered hoarsely.
“Something you said. You said the real Constantine passed on a message to give to me.”
Jay said nothing. She simply fixed her dark gaze on Constantine and waited for him to work it out for himself.
Constantine looked back at her. She was very thin, he suddenly realized. Big, dark eyes with a slightly desperate “love me” expression. Maybe the cool, irreverent talk he had heard yesterday in the meeting was just an act. Or maybe the computer simulation hadn’t got her quite right. He was evading the subject at hand and knew it. If what Jay had told him was true, he wasn’t the real Constantine. The real Constantine was out there somewhere, sleeping in the real Stonebreak, visiting the real DIANA Arcology. What had happened at the real meeting yesterday? Had they discussed the project there? Maybe even come to some conclusion?
Would he see his wife again?
“What’s going to happen to me?”
Jay shook her head slowly. “We don’t know. We’re working on a way to get you out of here, but it will take time. The best thing you can do, to be honest, is to act normally. The resources required to generate this virtual world are significant. If they think that you’ve caught on, well…”
Constantine was suddenly incredibly cold again.
“I need to go inside,” he said.
“It’s probably just as well that you do. If we stay talking too long, it will arouse suspicion.”
“Aren’t they suspicious at the moment? Can’t they see me?”
“Not when you’re within range of this tower. There is a ghost signal emanating from here, making it look as if you’re just standing on the balcony.”
“I don’t really understand any of that. Are you coming back?”
“I will.”
Constantine nodded again. Something suddenly occurred to him. “You’re just as much a prisoner in here as I am, aren’t you?”
“I’ll see you when I can,” Jay said.
The tower was already slowly spinning, taking her back out of his virtual life. Constantine gazed after her, lost and alone.
He awoke to find a yellow stripe of sunlight streaking his body, looking like an exclamation mark. His room was fresh and clean and smelled of hot coffee and freshly baked croissants. He felt surprisingly healthy and positive, ready to take on anything. That was when the memory of the previous night settled upon him. Blue was already awake.
—Fresh coffee? Good idea.
Constantine rolled out of bed and began to pour coffee into a curiously shaped cup.
“Where were you last night?” he muttered.
—Sleeping, said Red.
—White has filled us in with all the details, said Blue.
Constantine sipped his coffee. It was a little too bitter this morning, the grounds seeming to settle on his tongue. If this was a computer simulation, it was an extremely good one. The attention to detail was incredible.
Red spoke up.
—We don’t think it would be a good idea for you to speak to us about last night. If what Jay said was true, they’ll be able to monitor you subvocalizing. You can’t afford to let them know you suspect. If you agree with us, scratch your leg.
“Spare me your spy games, Red. It’s too early.”
There was a pause. Constantine took a croissant and started to butter it. He knew that Red would be examining his last sentence to see if he had given anything away.
—Okay, said Red.—Maybe we are being too mysterious, but we can’t afford to take any chances.
“Do you think it’s true?” asked Constantine.
—Will you stop it? Okay. We think it is. Grey is saying nothing, as usual. We are assuming that he is hovering around in the background somewhere. White keeps announcing the authentication code, just in case he didn’t hear it. We’re guessing that if there were something wrong, he’d say so. As he hasn’t, we’ll carry on as normal.
—It does seem the safest course of action, said Blue. All we have to do is keep quiet about the final destination of the Martian construction. That’s what we’ve been doing so far anyway. If Jay had suggested we do anything counter to our normal course of action, then we would have had to discuss things further. As it is, we’ll just carry on as we were.
Constantine nodded and took a bite of the croissant. It tasted delicious.
“Okay. I agree. What are we doing this morning?”
—Nothing. The second meeting isn’t scheduled until late this afternoon, remember? said Red.—It seems pretty obvious that whoever has caught us already knows an awful lot of things that were supposed to be top secret. You just had to look around the people in that meeting yesterday to deduce what they already know. They knew that the plan involves the hyperdrive—
—Warp drive, interrupted Blue.
—The warp drive, continued Red testily,—plus it has something to do with the AIs. Most importantly, they have figured out that Mars is involved. The big question is: what don’t they know? There must be something, otherwise they wouldn’t have us in here.
—Agreed, said Blue.—Our problem will be going along with them sufficiently so as to not raise their suspicions, while simultaneously not giving anything away.
—We have got one advantage, of course, said Red.—Grey. They probably don’t know about him, or what he is capable of.
—Pretty much the same as us, then, said Blue.
The quorum never met in the same place twice. The level of paranoia among the group could never be high enough, not when you considered what they were conceivably fighting. Constantine appreciated the irony of their second meeting place. They were in the balcony of a concert hall, looking down to the stage where the black-and-white-clad musicians of an orchestra were tuning up. Glancing around the room, he could not recall ever seeing such sensitive recording equipment before. There were devices here that could record the noise made by the Brownian motion of dust in the moisture of his eyes. The whole room was strung with directional microphones that could build up a sound picture of the local environment that was almost perfect in its reproduction. It was the ideal place to hold a meeting where secrecy was paramount.
Marion Lee had been waiting for the signal to show that the microphones were switched on. As the signal was given, she relaxed and began the meeting.
“Good afternoon, everyone. Let us begin.”
She coughed, then continued in a quiet voice. “People have long suspected a hidden intelligence guiding our development, an AI immeasurably more powerful than the others. Some people believed it first emerged in the early twenty-first century.”
Gillian Karajan nodded in agreement.
“References in the entertainments from the period would confirm that. However, you cannot take that in any way as proof of the Watcher’s existence. If you examine the historical context, you’ll see that these rumors would be inevitable. Look at the people living at the time. Only the younger generations would have lived out their life under constant surveillance, whether by cameras or phone tracking or even computer modeling. Remember, at that time, there were many who had reached adulthood before even the Internet came into existence. Increased levels of surveillance would have been very obvious to that society.”
The five of them were spread over two rows of seats, making conversation difficult. They leaned toward Gillian to better hear what was being said. Below them, a flutist practiced the same passage over and over again.
Gillian continued speaking confidently. She seemed to have quickly come to terms with her enforced exile from the Oort cloud. Maybe she understood the need for it. Or maybe there was some more sinister reason. Maybe it was just bad programming.
“…the tension generated by the interactions between the older and younger members of that society are unknown today. Nobody alive today has grown up with a true understanding of the word ‘privacy.’ Back then, they still had some concept, one fed and fanned by elderly relatives. Is it any wonder that people then began to see conspiracies where none existed? Is it any wonder the myth of the Watcher arose?”
Jay grinned. “So, you don’t believe in the stories then, Gillian?”
Gillian looked annoyed. “Listen, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think that I’m correct in saying that I know more about AIs and their history than anyone else here. If I were to believe or disbelieve the stories, it would be based on something more than a general paranoia that
they
are out to get us.”
There was an embarrassed silence until Masaharu spoke up gently to defuse the situation.
“I agree with Gillian, however from the opposite direction. Human beings have always sought to abdicate responsibility for their own actions. They have handed responsibility for their deeds to their sensei, to their leaders, or to a higher power. I see this yearning for a mysterious all-powerful AI that controls humanity’s actions and seeks to lead them on the path to enlightenment as nothing more than a manifestation of that same desire.”
Gillian nodded in approval
“However,” continued Masaharu, causing Gillian to glance suspiciously in his direction, “however, this is just my opinion. We cannot base our actions on the opinions of one person. We must act and plan as if the Watcher
is
real. This we have already agreed upon.”
“Good,” said Marion. “I’m sorry, Gillian, but we are treading over old ground here. It has already been established that, for the purposes of this project, we must assume that the Watcher is real. Just as we’ve had to assume that the Watcher did not exist until at least 2030.”
Constantine felt a little flicker of surprise that they knew this fact. He began to wonder at the need for himself to be imprisoned within this simulation at all. Surely if they knew this they could deduce the rest?
He looked around the room and wondered again if what he had been told was true. Was he really inside a computer? It all looked so real. He watched a woman un-peeling an old-fashioned chocolate bar, carelessly dropping the strips of foil on the floor before her. She was idly watching the activity below her as she placed piece after sticky piece in her mouth. Again, Constantine wondered at the programming that must have gone into the scene before him. The attention to detail was evident all around him. If he glanced up at the ceiling, he could see the looping patterns formed by the shielded wires as they led to the directional microphones. Someone had twisted blue duct tape around the one directly above him to aid in its identification. Who would have thought a simulation could go to that level of detail? Or was it a simulation? Grey should know, but Grey wasn’t speaking.