Lockstep

Eight

TOBY AND PETER HAD built a world together.

It hadn’t been fun.

If you were the right kind of rich, and living on Earth, you could afford those things the rich needed: gated communities, 24/7 security bots, and human bodyguards who came with their own microarmies of hand-sized flying guns and gnat-shaped spies. You could move through the world in your own little bubble of safety this way—if you were the right kind of rich.

The McGonigals weren’t that kind of rich.

Dad had made his fortune in salvage—the deep-sea kind. His company hunted down methane clathrates and CO2 sinks in ocean trenches, and converted their carbon to less volatile forms. Nobody wanted a repeat of the Big Belch, when the Arctic oceans had vomited up millions of years’ worth of greenhouse gases in just a few short decades, undoing two generations’ work in reducing CO2 emissions. Temperatures had shot up to intolerable levels after the belch, small consolation that the frantic international effort to build orbital sunshades had finally kick-started an offworld civilization.

Dad called himself a lowly greenhouse gas exterminator, but he’d made enough doing it to approach the threshold of being noticed by the truly wealthy. Mom was a garbage designer; it was her genius at optimizing the wastes of one industrial process so that you could sell them as inputs to another that had ultimately made possible the colonizing of Sedna. Nobody else could have built the superefficient resource management system that was the key to the colony’s success. Toby’s parents had skills that were perfect for settlers taking on a hostile environment at the edge of the solar system. But they had never planned to go there.

If Dad had become just wealthy enough to be noticed by the more condescending of the trillionaires, he’d also become just wealthy enough to be noticed by those who preyed on them.

So one bright spring day, Toby came home to find the front door of their mansion smashed in. The nanny was dead on the kitchen floor. Toby spent a long time staring at the blood matted in her long blond hair, how it stuck to the tiles, until he suddenly realized that Peter was missing.

All he could clearly remember now was that he’d run through the house, shouting Peter’s name. Later, policemen and detectives had shown up—lots of them. Mom and Dad were there, and Evayne, too. Evayne had tightly clutched her plush toys, peering over their heads as they (minor robots as they were) also peered around. The toys had known something was wrong, and they’d gone into trauma-counseling mode as soon as the police arrived. Evayne had spent the next month listening to their soothing voices and talking to them, and with that and the right kind of pills, she’d come out of the whole thing just fine.

For Toby, the only thing that kept him from screaming himself awake at night was full participation in the investigation. He had to know everything that was being done, had to go with Dad to the police station to hear the latest updates. He learned all about the kidnapper culture that had developed out of the unholy marriage of interplanetary organized crime and a highly polarized society where you were either rich and independent, or destitute and indentured.

He remembered whole days of the search, entire conversations with his parents and with Evayne. But like the kidnapping itself, he could barely recall the day Peter had come home.

The kidnappers were dead. Peter had seen them go down in a spray of gunfire. By the time that had happened, he’d been with them long enough that he’d started to bond with them, or so the psychiatrists said. Even though his captors promised to kill him if his parents didn’t pay the ransom, Peter had begun to trust them, even grudgingly agree with their claim that they were justified in kidnapping him. The husband-and-wife team was poor, after all—deeply and irrevocably poor. There was no hope for them ever climbing out of that by legal means. Society was at fault here, not them, Peter insisted.

The kidnappers hadn’t told Peter that they’d killed the nanny. Toby remembered the moment in the interview room when Peter found out. He’d been sitting there defiant, tears in his eyes, after screaming insults at the detectives. They’d murdered his friends, he accused. They were the monsters here.

“How can you say that?” the lead detective had burst out. “They killed Maria Teresa.”

Peter had just blinked at him.

“Your nanny,” the detective said. “They killed your nanny when they took you.”

“Stop it, he’s only eight years old,” Dad said.

It was too late. Toby could see it in Peter’s eyes, like a sudden crumbling. He’d gotten very quiet after that.

The quiet stretched for days, then weeks. Psychiatrists came and went. Mom and Dad had been distraught during the kidnapping, but now that it was over, a deeper despair seemed to be settling on them. Peter no longer smiled, and so neither did they.

Evayne was okay. She had her trauma-counselor toys. They tried these on Peter, and they helped a little. But nothing really worked, and Toby knew it even if Mom and Dad didn’t. Somebody had to do something for Peter, and whatever it was, it would have to be just as huge as the kidnapping itself had been.

It took him four months of hard work before he was ready to bring Peter in. Toby had pressed Dad to buy him the very best sim-building software. Its distant ancestors had been a whole raft of game engines, 3-D modeling programs, and moviemaking packages. You could build entire universes with this stuff. But Toby had decided to start small.

“It’s the house,” Peter said. It was his first visit to Toby’s world. For weeks he’d been practically climbing the walls from impatient curiosity. He’d known Toby was up to something, but his older brother wouldn’t say what. Now he’d finally donned the link glasses (he wasn’t old enough for direct implants) and had flipped into the virtual world Toby had made—and here was the very last thing he’d expected to find there.

They’d sold the house, of course. There was no going back to that place for any of them—and yet Toby had recreated it, in as perfect detail as he could remember. It sat alone on a gray plane under an equally gray sky. He and Peter were also standing on that plane, about thirty meters from the house.

“Why’d you do that?” Peter whined. “Why is that here?”

“Don’t worry, we’re not going in,” Toby told him. He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You and I are going to build something.”

“What?” Peter was still staring at the house, eyes wide.

“We,” said Toby, “are going to build a world around this house. It’s going to be a world where nothing bad could ever happen in this place. It’s not going to be the world we’ve got now. It’s going to be the world we wish we had.”

Despite all his efforts, he hadn’t thought this would work. Truth be told, he’d built the virtual house mostly to work through his own bad memories. Toby fully expected Peter to rip off the interface and not speak to him for the remainder of the week.

Instead, Peter said, “We need a wall.”

“Maybe,” Toby admitted grudgingly. “But what if we built a world where we didn’t need a wall?”

Peter had looked at him, startled. Toby knew he had him hooked.

So Consensus was born.

TOBY’S FIRST RUN WITH Nissa and Casson netted him enough money to live for three days. He spent the time looking for more work and exploring the town. He felt vaguely guilty at avoiding Corva and her friends, but he also felt inexplicably angry at them, like it was their fault that he had to feel guilty at all. It was confusing.

He’d lucked out and discovered a little bed-and-breakfast in the midlevels of the continent. It was a house, of sorts, reminiscent of the dwellings he’d seen once on the island of Santorini, before the family had left Earth. Narrow lanes and stairways led up the steepening curve of the sphere where apartments and condominiums piled up overtop one another. The bed-and-breakfast was at the end of a flight of steps that rose between two high walls. There was a little landing, and opposite the notch that led to the steps was a doorway surrounded by tangled vines. The proprietors looked like a pair of young, fit newlyweds—but they assured Toby they were both in their eighties, having immigrated to the lockstep from the inner solar system some six thousand (real) years before. They had led him to a very nice bedroom that looked out on the storm-ridden sky, told him supper would be at six, and left him and Orpheus alone.

He knew he should be learning more about the lockstep civilization, but where could he start other than with his brother and sister? Yet he had only to glimpse a photo or video of Peter or Evayne as grown-ups and his heart started to thump painfully. It was impossible to look at them. He didn’t want to know they were real. So instead of broadening his knowledge of the year 14,000, he plotted how he was going to get to Destrier, where his mother waited for him.

Nothing would be easier than to announce his presence to the world. He should just get it over with, but his mouth turned dry at the very thought of telling somebody who he was. It wasn’t the idea of suddenly being famous or important that terrified him, nor was it the possibility that Peter and Evayne didn’t want him around for some reason. It was the prospect of actually being reunited with them—or, really, the colorless middle-aged versions who’d replaced the incandescent children he knew as Evayne and Peter.

Luckily, he had Orpheus. He and the denner were getting to know each other. Orpheus was very catlike, and he’d obviously made his choice where Toby was concerned. He’d romp away to investigate some bush or staircase winding down the terraced interior of the city sphere, and when he disappeared from sight Toby would be seized with a sudden terrible anxiety that he wouldn’t come back. But he always did—often with some pretty girl oohing and aahing after him.

“Orph, are you trying to set me up?” he’d muttered after one of these encounters. Orpheus had sent him an enigmatic stare, then flounced away again.

The denner’s own interface wasn’t keyed to verbal commands or gestures. It read Orpheus’s pupil dilation, stance and other attentional factors, as well as pheromones and major motions. It tracked his circadian rhythms and energy use, and then translated all that it saw into terms Toby could understand. He knew when Orpheus was hungry—well, that was easy. But he could also piggyback on the denner’s reactions to the people around them. Orpheus would scan the crowd with a quick twitch of his head, and then tags would blossom over the heads of everybody in sight: green for those people Orph thought were trustworthy, red for those who weren’t. Other colors appeared, too, standing for assessments Orpheus had made but that Toby couldn’t now (and maybe never would) understand.

He’d been talking to Orpheus all along, but after a couple of days with the interface Toby realized he was no longer saying things half rhetorically, the way you did to pets. He’d stopped assuming that Orpheus didn’t understand him, because it was becoming very plain that the denner did—just not in the way a human would. Orph saw the context of Toby’s speech, things like whether he was talking because he was nervous or socially cued by the situation he was in; his emotional state; even, broadly, what it was he was trying to get out of speaking. All without understanding a single word. And the glyphs and icons that twirled around Orpheus’s head like pain stars over a cartoon character told Toby as much about him.

And so yes, it became obvious that when Orpheus dragged yet another girl out from behind some bush or shop door, he really was trying to set Toby up.

Now, even though he couldn’t bear to open the books about his family or watch the many movies, Toby felt he was finally ready to explore the world he and Peter had built.

“THANKS FOR COMING.” JAYSIR stood outside Toby’s door, his bot—really less of a bot, more of a mobile contraption—taking up much of the hall behind him.

Noticing this, Toby poked his head out the door to look around. “My landlady doesn’t like visitors. Particularly bots.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have said to meet here, then.” Jaysir stood waiting until Toby moved aside, then came in and plunked himself in the room’s only armchair. This left Toby the bed to sit on. Orpheus slunk as far from the cargo bot as he could get, while Toby rehearsed the things he wanted to ask Jaysir.

“Where is it?” Jaysir leaned forward eagerly. “You said you’d let me read it.”

“Did you tell Corva where I’m staying?”

“No … but I might have, if I’d seen her this morning. She’s not hunting you down or anything, you know.”

“Of course not, I didn’t mean—well, it’s just that…” Toby decided to quit while he was behind. “Anyway, I’m glad you came by.” Toby brought out the data block and held it up.

Jaysir leaned forward to examine it without touching it. “Where’d you get it? Brought it with you on that little ship?”

“They had it. The people Ammond and Persea were meeting with on Auriga.”

Jaysir’s eyes met Toby’s. “You should have told me that right off.”

“Why? It was buried in the brain of a twentier—an old mining bot. Ammond’s friends used the bot to see if I was who I said I was. Got me to wake it up.”

“Wait, what? Explain!”

Uncomfortable with Jaysir’s suddenly intense attention, Toby recounted the events in the underwater house on Auriga. Jaysir had him go through the sequence in detail twice. Then he sat back, thinking.

“It never struck you as odd that they tested your identity with the bot?”

Toby shook his head. “Why would it? The twentier was probably the only thing they could get that dated back to my time on Sedna. How else would they verify my ID?”

Jaysir snorted. “By telling you to command any bed anywhere on any lockstep world!” He waved at the one Toby was sitting on. “That one, for instance. Haven’t you even tried to wake one up, reset its clock?”

“You told me not to.” He had that feeling of things moving too fast for him again. “Why? Because it’s a Cicada Corp bed, like—”

“—Like every other legal hibernation bed in the seventy thousand worlds. Which means you should be able to command it: start it up, shut it down, change its schedule to whatever you want. You sure you never tried?”

“No…”

“Good.”

Toby got off the bed and knelt beside it. It looked like a standard pedestal bed, but the base had a label on it with some kind of iridescent insect shape. A cicada, dimwit, he told himself. There were various hatches and ports in the bottom, too.

“There’re other locksteps, right?” he asked. “Do they use these?”

“Well, not these. Not McGonigal beds. Those are locked to our frequency. And using other beds in our lockstep is … well, not strictly illegal, but they make it damned inconvenient if you try.”

Jaysir knelt next to him. “You don’t have an interface for this, do you?”

“You mean in my glasses? No…”

“Well, that’s part of the mystery, I suppose. But these things do have voice activation, too. Anyway, it’s a good thing you haven’t tried it.”

“So you said. But why?” Toby got up, and this time he took the armchair.

Jaysir didn’t seem to notice. “Why do you think those people who had you used the twentier to test you? And why do you think they did the test in that house, in an underwater room?”

“Well, I…” Auriga had been such a strange and exotic place, it had never occurred to Toby that meeting in the dockside house would be considered in any way unusual there.

“The bot wasn’t connected to the Cicada Corp network, not then, and maybe not ever. It predated it. But it didn’t predate your biocryptography. And the house was shielded, at least by the water and maybe by other countermeasures. It was a safe place to test you.”

“Why safe? Safe from what?”

“Think about it. What would happen if you commanded the bed you’re sitting on?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them.”

“They’re all networked, Toby. The first thing it would do would be announce to the rest of the network that Toby Wyatt McGonigal had just switched it on! Don’t you think that little piece of information might just be … important to some people?”

“You mean they … that Peter and Evayne would find out where I was?”

“Exactly.”

“All this time I could have contacted them just by saying ‘hi’ to any old bed?”

“Which is the last thing you should be doing right now, trust me.”

Toby crossed his arms. “Didn’t we talk about whether I trust you? And the answer was…”

“Okay, okay!” Jaysir hopped up and down on the bed, looking agitated. “Just—just wait. Wait until you know more about what’s going on. Please. If not for me, then for you.”

Toby glowered at him, but somehow knowing that contact with his family was literally a word away made him feel safer—and willing, for the moment, to hear Jaysir out.

“So this is actually a hibernation bed?” It looked perfectly ordinary, until you examined the base.

“Stuff comes out of the hatches when you’re asleep,” said Jaysir absently. “You know, same way a space suit builds itself onto you. The bed’ll build its cocoon on you and not even wake you up.”

Toby remembered Ammond telling him that the nanotech and artificial organs that managed hibernation had been perfected over thousands of years. Now, though, he realized that while it might have been refined over aeons, probably every version had been commissioned and paid for by one client: the eternal Cicada Corp.

As far as the many civilizations on Earth and the other nonhibernating planets were concerned, the McGonigals had always been here. They predated the posthuman artificial life-forms; they’d inhabited these spaces before, during, and after the settling of all the nearby star systems.

Jaysir was right about one thing: he didn’t know nearly enough about anything yet. It was hugely tempting to interrogate Jaysir now, but he didn’t even know where to start, and how could he trust anything Jay might tell him? He’d have to investigate Lockstep 360/1 by himself—just as he’d already begun to do by striking out on his own.

“Jay, am I right in thinking that this”—he nodded at the bed—“is the most reliable investment in the galaxy?”

“Hmm? Oh, of course! Stable over thousands of years, and the McGonigals make sure that they own or otherwise control the lockstep technology everywhere, no matter how many strange mutations of culture and biology it gets passed through.” Jaysir laughed. “They can do this because they have the time.”

“Then what about the denners?”

“Come on, when you’re talkin’ thousands of years, and thousands of worlds and cultures, something’s gonna slip through the cracks. There are other empires with their own rules, and there’re … things out there so powerful they can completely ignore the McGonigals. There’s even better hibernation technology that sometimes finds its way back into the lockstep, in forms the McGonigals can’t control. Denners are a great example of that. They came from Barsoom, their ancestors were cats whose genes were altered so they could tolerate ice age conditions. They could probably have survived on the prehuman Mars, if there’d been anything for them to eat. All they need to do the job of the cicada beds is a neural implant to improve their internal clock and an upgrade on their synthorgans to project heat for waking a companion. You could theoretically modify a human to contain all the tech and not use a bed at all—but the beds can detect that kind of mod, and it’s illegal. You’d have to never use a bed again if you got modded that way, and that’s just not practical. But the denners—they give you the option.

“Anyway, lemme see that data block.”

Toby moved it away. “First of all, what are you going to do with it? What if it’s got stuff on it you could, well, sell? Or blackmail me with?”

Jaysir squinted at him. “Do you even know what a maker is?”

“Uh, yeah.” Jay had told him a bit about them when they’d first met, and since then, Toby had looked it up on the public net. Makers valued personal autonomy over everything else. The maker ethos was to build everything you used and not to rely on money at all. Makers might own bots—even lots of them—but they tried to be their own microeconomies and microecologies. Toby wouldn’t have been surprised if it turned out that Jaysir’s walking contraption made food for him as well as serving as a mobile hibernatorium. Of anyone he was likely to meet, a maker was probably the least likely to want to steal something from him.

“I want to look at the firmware and design,” Jay continued. “Maybe I can use it. I don’t care about the data! But it’s really old and probably incompatible with modern systems. Same with your glasses, so hand ’em over too if you want them to work properly. Yes yes, don’t be so reluctant! Why would I use a subtle ploy to track you or bug your stuff if we could have just knocked you on the head back on Auriga?”

Warily, Toby handed over the frames.

Jaysir folded his legs under him and put the block and the glasses on the bedcover. Then he waved over his bot, which began efficiently laying out various small instruments and tools in a half circle around him.

He started with the glasses. At first Toby tried asking him some of the other questions he’d been accumulating, but Jaysir just shrugged them off—he was concentrating. So with nothing else to do, Toby had to just sit back and watch.

After about half an hour Jaysir flipped the glasses back to Toby. “Try ’em now.” He slid them on and tapped the arm to wake them up.

Tags bloomed into view everywhere: hovering (apparently) in the bed itself, in the walls and beyond, where he glimpsed a ghostly half-visible map of the city and continent beyond. The mundane tags he’d seen through the tourist glasses were still visible, but now there was so much more as well. Jaysir’s bot was festooned with tags and labels, as was Jaysir himself—social media hooks, mostly, in his case. Even the chairs had virtual labels that indicated who owned them, where they were, and warned of prosecution if they were taken off-site or damaged.

“Oh!” said Toby, trying to look around at everything at once. His former sense of the lockstep world being strangely unsophisticated was quite wiped way: the whole place was alive in the virtual realm. This really should have come as no surprise; Toby had grown up with virtual and augmented realities and had been missing them since he awoke here. Still, so much was strange in the locksteps. The missing virtual layer had just been one more difference.

“Better, no?” Jaysir was attaching fine wires to the data block, so he couldn’t see the expression on Toby’s face, which Toby figured was probably a good thing.

Only a minute or two later, Jaysir hissed, “Yeess! I got it!” Even as he said these words, a virtual menu was coalescing above the block. “Data, data, you got data, Toby.”

It was a confusing muddle, though. Toby saw dozens of giant backup files, each indicated by a translucent safe icon (complete with a little combination dial). Knowing twentiers as he did, he supposed these would contain endless video of the thing digging—digging trenches, digging holes, digging in trenches and holes. But there were other files, too.

He sucked in a breath. “It can’t be!”

Jaysir had gotten to his feet. He turned and frowned. “What? You recognize something?”

“Some of these files … they’re game saves.”

“Games?” Jay shook his head. “Some games are on there?”

“Not just some games, Jay. The game.

“These are versions of Consensus.”

TOBY HAD ISSUED HIS brother a challenge: imagine, then build a world where he could be safe. The first thing Peter made with the Consensus tools was a cathedral of weapons, whose every brick contained a loaded gun barrel and every pillar, a bundle of blades ready to leap out and strike. It was munitions all the way down, and walls and locked doors, too, with roving sentry tanks and swarming drones and trapdoors. It was a magnificent hymn to paranoia, this cathedral, and outside its walls nothing grew: Peter had annihilated nature in this universe, just in case.

Toby had anticipated something like this, so he’d set the metarules by which they’d have to operate. So as Peter was excitedly giving him a tour through the place, it came as no surprise when one of the sentry tanks failed to recognize Peter as the owner and blew them both to smithereens with one blast of its ion cannon.

It was more than a year before Toby was able to suggest (and Peter was able to hear), “Why don’t you just build a world where nobody would have any reason to attack you?”

This had never occurred to Peter. In fact, it had never occurred to him that violence might have reasons.

Sometimes Toby had despaired of the lesson ever taking hold. But the revelation that there were Consensus gameworlds stored in the twentier’s data block had him thinking a lot about the game. He hadn’t yet summoned the courage to open any of them—they were from the years just after Toby’s disappearance, and he was half afraid of what might be in them. This didn’t prevent Toby from seeing Consensus everywhere he went, though. As he and Orpheus strolled the rich upper levels of the city, he found himself staring around in amazement—and pride. The streets and stairs of the continent were nothing like Peter’s paranoid cathedral, but now that he’d realized who this world’s creator was, Toby could see his brother’s hand in everything.

Two days after Jay’s visit, he was taking one of these strolls in the richer upper levels of the continent when suddenly Orpheus stuck his nose in the air, then took off. A virtual flag over his head signified he’d recognized something or somebody. In seconds he’d scrambled up a drainpipe and was running along the edge of a roof.

“Don’t mind me,” Toby shouted after him. “I’ll just keep walking here, where it’s slow.”

Orpheus had his own maps of the city. To Toby, a chair was for sitting on, a table was for sitting at, and a potted plant was for looking at. Orpheus might consider sitting on all three, so they all had the affordance of “sitability” to him. It was the same with the tops of walls, with some of the narrow gaps between buildings; with banisters and tree limbs. To Orpheus, roof cornices were little balconies and drainpipes were subways.

Toby was still getting used to this fact of denner life. It had been this way all along, not just for denners but also for cats and dogs. Humans had just never had the ability to see them the way animals did. Orpheus’s interface gave Toby that ability.

None of which helped him catch up to the denner. He jogged off in the direction he thought Orpheus had gone and, rounding a corner, nearly toppled over the young woman who was kneeling on the sidewalk and scratching Orpheus’s chin.

“Whoa!” He stumbled and stopped.

She stood up, smiling.

“Oh,” he said stupidly. “Hello.”

“Hello again,” she said. “I never got a chance to thank you the other day.”

“Thank me? Do I know…” This was the girl he’d saved from being hit by one of the pilgrims during that miniature riot. “Oh,” he said. “Yes.”

Orpheus looked from Toby to the young lady, then back. He did it again.

“I was happy to help,” he said. “What … was that all about?”

“My friends and I were just trying to exercise our right to free speech.” She stuck out her hand for him to shake. “I’m Kirstana.”

“T-Toby.” He’d been using an alias, but in the moment he completely forget to give it.

She knelt again to scritch Orpheus’s ears. “I think your denner likes me. What’s his name?”

“Orpheus. Yeah, he does seem to have latched on to you.” Toby scowled at the denner, but Orpheus blithely ignored him.

Kirstana put three fingers on the ground and leaned a bit, looking up askance at Toby. “What about you? You came out of the prep station, were you planning on going on pilgrimage?”

“No no,” he said. “I was just touring around and walked into the middle of things.”

“Touring, huh? Following the tags in those awful city guides?” She waggled her fingers next to her eyes. Toby’s touched the tourist glasses, which must be a dead giveaway. He grinned sheepishly, though he didn’t know why he should be embarrassed.

“They’re hardly a substitute for a real local guide,” she continued.

“Well, I don’t know anybody here.”

“You know me.”

Toby opened his mouth, then closed it. He’d never had this kind of a conversation with a girl—woman, for she was few years older than him. Was she flirting? Or just being friendly? He had no idea, just as he had no idea how old she thought he was.

“Well,” he said. “I, um—”

The moment dragged.

Suddenly Orpheus leaped up, claws extended, and scrambled up Toby to perch on his shoulder. “Ow, ow!” He batted at the creature. Kirstana laughed.

“I could use a guide, sure,” said Toby.

Orpheus purred loudly in his ear.

“You, I’ll talk to later,” he muttered.