Reality 36 (25 page)

  The country had been totally shafted during the Five crisis. The Reign of the Ghost Emperor, they called it. Nothing brighter than a warehouse management system running off barcodes was consequently allowed in from outside. No one even knew if the Chinese had AIs of their own. If machines like Richards existed, they kept themselves to themselves. Free roaming artificial intelligences were not welcome.

  But the wall, for all the special effects, was simply a set of protocols. Nothing was perfect, protocols could be broken. Richards knew a way in.

  Virtual real estate was at a premium all along the length of the Wall. Grid artists had sculpted a landscape to front onto it that was as beautiful as it was weird. Virtual windows opened onto it from people's homes in the Real, virtual offices sat by virtual brooks by its feet, virtual towns dreamt in its flickering shadow.

  Richards swam back and forth in the air, logging thousands of impressions of the underlying Grid structure until he found what he was looking for. Under a meadow populated by giant rabbits and Grid-interfaced living rooms, he snagged an illegal carrier signal. Why kids risked their lives swapping movies like this baffled Richards. The movies were freely available on the inside, and China, with its own huge film industry centred on Shanghai and Hong Kong, was a stickler for copyright.

  He set his tour group down amid the rugs and mega-lagomorphs, and set to work.

  The connection was a tightbeam carrier signal bounced off a commsat by some budding young programmer. Hidden in verbal telecoms traffic, a number of the latest hit holos were being quietly transferred off a Swiss paysite onto the personal computer of – Richards checked the usename – "Northern Bandit", disguised as a dull conversation between a nagging mother and a worn-out émigré daughter. Richards sat by it, tested it for stability, then insinuated a sensing presence into the datastream. Northern Bandit was going to be very upset to discover "Donkey Cock A-Go-Go" was an empty file.

  Brilliant, thought Richards. Sneaking in to the most hostile anti-AI state on the planet disguised as porn. You couldn't make it up.

  Once inside China's virtual borders, Richards checked the tightbeam. He slowed the data transfer down to give himself some extra time, but not so much as to arouse Northern Bandit's suspicion, only enough to mimic the delays you got on the Grid at times of high traffic. He reckoned on forty-five minutes, real time.

  Richards transferred himself across the country's cyberspace as a variety of search requests. He had to split himself like a cheese string to do so. As he'd be running this in real time, the end reassembled somewhere near to Tony Choi, there was bound to be some data dropout, but it was the only way to be safe. If they got a lock on to his sensing presence, they could force a secure pipe back to his base unit and trap him indefinitely through a kind of extra-Real extradition.

  Some of the things the teeming citizens of China were searching for made his eyebrows rise, although most of it was to do with eating. He hadn't known that half this stuff was edible.

  After a few minutes of groping about with the frayed end of his sensing presence, Richards found his way into Tower Thirty-six, Hong Kong, where Tony Choi's company had its base of operations. A couple more, and he had a sheath. He reintegrated the sensing presence to a point where he had enough bandwidth to operate without annoying lag. He let the rest of himself flap in the current.

  Camera eyes opened, he looked down at bright red plastic hands. Left and right were three ranks of machines like the one he possessed. All were empty, unridden, their hardware capable of supporting only the feeblest of near-I independent of the Grid. He was in the stockroom of an android dealership. Provided he kept within range of strong Grid flow, controlling one should be child's play.

  He was in.

Tower Thirty-six was an "Eyrie" class arcology, sealed until halfway up its height. Access to this particular type was from the air alone. It was a rich man's conceit, isolating the building from the others. Taller and thinner than their New London counterparts, the arcos of Hong Kong extended far into Kowloon bay, the sea a maze of canals and lagoons supporting kelp farms, ports, leisure facilities and artificial marine habitats. There'd been shanty towns down there once, after the 2067 ice sheet tip, but those days were gone. The poor had been relocated into the arcologies, the Sinosiberian territories and the re-greening projects on the mainland. The Chinese were trying hard to live by the harmonic principles of Tao again. What had worked quite well for three thousand years was being re-employed by the People's Dynasty government today. They preferred it if you didn't bring the last 150 years of industrial excess up. They were so ashamed of it they kind of shot you if you did.

  Choi was a rich man in a tower full of rich men. He lived and worked in the penthouse areas, three floors down from the summit. The very top was populated by giant servers where the rich could enjoy top-range VR entertainment pre- and postmortem. A lot of pimsims lived in them. The poor called it "Top Heaven". Winged shapes flitted around the spire. Highly modified winged humans, the lower classes said, the angels of Top Heaven. In reality they were surveillance drones. Richards sweated under the oppressive heat of human-managed data systems, monitoring the city's population. Big Brother lived up top, not gods of any stripe.

  Richards walked through crowded arcades and parks, past temples grown from gengineered trees. No one paid the android he wore a second glance as he plodded his way on, which was good, because it was slow and weak. His route took him up stairs and elevators, past spun diamond windows as large as lakes, through sculpted residential districts blended with terraced gardens and microhabitats, water gurgling from one ripple-lipped mirror pond to another. Where necessary, his way was opened by a phony People's Dynasty AllPassequivalent that he'd first rigged up four years ago. He'd skimmed some hot software off the PD government site that kept it up to date. It was bizarre stuff: sometimes it behaved as if it were as aware as near-I, and spat invective at him in some odd machine code dialect he barely understood. But it was thoroughly cracked, and the data it provided hadn't failed him yet. On level 372, he used it to break a maintenance seal and ascended a staple-rung ladder up an endless service duct.

  Before he emerged from the service duct near Choi's offices, he cracked the computer and inserted purchase details, delivery date and so on for his borrowed android sheath. He was now part of the staff. He peeked into Choi's diary; it was an hour after his weekly board meeting. As Richards had expected, Choi was alone.

  He climbed into the offices via another hatch, convincing security it had never been opened.

  Richards went towards the business's substantial kitchens, sourced the kitchen input, and presented a fake order for tea. He walked in as bold as brass. One of the staff handed him a tray with a pot of tea on it. As he left, the cook staff were wondering aloud who'd bought such a cheap piece of shit to serve Tony Choi. They unaniminously agreed they were glad it was none of them.

  The guards at Choi's teak double doors did not pay him any attention as he stopped there and waited. He was just a drone going about his business.

  The doors slid open.

  Richards stepped into Choi's office with eleven minutes to spare. Not much time, but he didn't need much time.

  Choi looked up from a sheet of calligraphy. He looked somehow old and sleekly fat, well groomed in an understated, obviously expensive mode; French suit and Indonesian shoes. He looked like a million other People's businessmen and 'crats, except that there was an indefinable otherness to him, past cartographies were etched upon his soul.

  His healthtech-smooth face creased in a frown. "I ordered no tea," he said.

  "Hello, Tony," said Richards, setting the tray down. "How are you doing?"

Chapter 16

The 36th Realm

Time and effort led Veronique, Jagadith and Tarquinius out of the swamp and to the foot of the hemispherical hill. Everything about it was gargantuan, a five-hundred-metre high dome of polished rock, the dimples in it twenty metres across and five deep in the centre. High above, the lowermost branches of the monkey puzzle tree hung a little way out over the swamp, its oversized, triangular needle-scales huge even from their distant perspective.

  "It will be a task to climb this," said Jagadith.

  "A task for me, you mean," grumbled Tarquinius. "I don't see either of you carrying mountaineering equipment."

  Tarquinius rumbled deep in his chest, and gave out a short metallic cough. "You had better remain here. I will let down a rope when I attain the summit."

  Jag slid off the mount's back, and lifted a hand up to the scowling anthropologist. "I am not totally incapable," she said.

  "As you wish." He dropped his hand. He disliked dealing with educated women. They were so much trouble. He sighed in a way calculated to let the doctor know this. He could feel her glowering at his back. "Can we attempt the expulsion now?"

  Veronique wasn't rising to the bait. "How are you going to climb that?" she said. "It's like glass."

  "Indeed it is, madam divinity." Tarquinius stood up on his hind paws, pressed the soft metal pads of his forepaws against the cool stone. His claws popped from their sockets, long and gleaming as knives. "Number threes should suffice for the task at hand," he muttered. There was a series of clicks, and his claws turned to one side and pulled back into his feet. A new series came forth, threaded like drills, exquisitely moulded diamonds at their tips. "This will take a while, Jag. Let me take you up thirty or forty feet, and you may rest in one of these dimples out of harm's way."

  "I am not keen on wasting time, dear friend, but so be it."

  Tarquinius's claws began to spin. He held them for a moment above the rock's smooth surface, flexed his stubby leonine fingers and then thrust the first set of drills into the rock. There was a whine, sparks flew and Tarquinius's claws sank smoothly into the stone. He placed his second forepaw higher than the first, pushing his nails deep in, then hauled his back feet off the ground. One of these he pulled as high as he could, then forced the claws on that foot into the basalt. He then retracted his forepaws and, standing on his back foot, repeated the process. When he reached a sufficient height he stopped by one of the dimples and lifted his tail. A cable dropped down. Jag put his foot into a loop at the bottom, and bade Veronique do likewise. When they were secured, the rope ran smoothly up, pulled by a winch inside the lion. As soon as they were parallel to the dimple, Jag hung from Tarquinius' foot and hacked out a series of footholes with his sword. Then he worked his way into the centre. His sword flared bright as he turned it up to its maximum power setting, and he deftly sliced out a chunk of the dimple, creating a flat platform that he and Veronique might sit upon. He let it cool for what Veronique felt was an interminable ten minutes, as she swung over nothing.
A nothing made of nothing,
she thought
, how philosophically interesting that would be, if I weren't so fucking terrified.
Jag helped Veronique over, and they sat. Tarquinius retracted the rope fully and resumed his ascent.

  "Will he be long?" asked Veronique, glad to be off the rope.

  "The ascent is a long and hard one, most assuredly," affirmed the paladin. "But worry not, madam goddess. My steed is an excellent climber."

  "I wasn't worried about him," she said. "Now what?"

  "We rest."

Several hours passed. Veronique looked out at the stinking vista before her. The knight spent much of the time deep in a trance. Veronique was astounded when she realised he was floating five centimetres in the air, then for some reason profoundly disturbed by it. It gave her the horrible feeling that reality here was spongy, and that it might at any moment warp into something new, with her not necessarily a part of it. She looked away. When alert the knight was little inclined to talk to her, so she was left to her own thoughts, and these ran along the lines of:

Why did Qifang drag me into this unholy mess?

How do I get out of this unholy mess?

Just how real is this place?

Just how real does that make me?

  The thoughts went round and round her head, worrying her deeply. She tried to sleep, but could not, so worried on some more.

  None of this made sense. The paladins set to protect this reality believed Qifang was responsible for the changes being wrought here. She hadn't known what to expect when she arrived, but she thought she might have met with Qifang quickly. That he hadn't been there when she entered the Realm troubled her. It was possible that Qifang had lured her in with the data he'd left her, that in actuality he was responsible for the resources drain. But to what end? The only scenario she could come up with on that score was that he had some kind of wooing in mind, which frankly made her feel a little ill.

  It couldn't be true. Qifang was man who had argued passionately for the rights of new life, whatever form it took: digital, hybrid, AI, cyborg or other. She remembered the first time she'd seen him, at a guerilla Neukind rights flash rally in Toronto. He'd been small, distant, a man tiny on the stage of the run-down Air Canada centre. She'd taken Chloe. She'd never agreed with slavery for the machines.

  AIs were not tools, he said, they were not playthings for man to do with as he chose. Through his creations, mankind had the collective responsibilities of new parents. The days when desperate adults had a dozen children to help them make their way in the world were long gone, he argued. "We would never send a flesh and blood child up a chimney. We shudder when we think of the children of the Victorian era picking up threads in the dark spaces between unshielded machinery. We balk at the thought of twentieth-century sweatshops. Why treat the Neukind any different? Why should we slaughter them for sport? Force them to forever serve us? Send them alone to the ends of the universe? We are their progenitors. They may well outlive us all, and the surest form of immortality is for those who come after us to remember us fondly. Let not the human race be consigned to the fairy tales of the future, to become the ogres of tomorrow. Let us be good to our new children that they may pay their respects to us when we are no longer here."