Omega point

CHAPTER 21

Richards was elsewhere. He felt woozy, and yet more alive than he had felt for some time. He corrected himself: while in his copied human body he had been closer to alive than he'd ever been before. What he felt was more like himself.

He was back at the start of the game.

The house sat on the hill like a squat, eyeless demon. The wood around it had burned back to nothing. A few trees remained as contorted black fingers, a few rhododendrons as deformed ribcages, all else fine ash. The path of quartz skulls leading to the door was covered in a layer of soot. A thin gruel of rain fell, hissing as it hit the ground. It smelt of rotten eggs, and burnt the skin.

Background code crackled through the blasted landscape around Richards, giving flashes of insight to the AI that were gone before he could process them. He could hear the roar of the Grid proper. The ground rumbled, and he looked down at his feet. The path flickered and became transparent, and when it did so he saw the whole of the renegade Reality 37 laid out beneath him in schematic form, twin streams of code warring: k52's silver and aggressive, that comprising the ragged and patched Realm a wounding green. For a moment he felt his true terrifying size and importance; he felt at that precise instant he could step away from this place, back to the safety of the Real and his base unit. Back to being Richards, Class Five AI, away from the sham human he was forced to be here.

And then it was gone, and he was a shabby man dying of blood loss in a finished world. His arm hung by his side. His clothes were soaked red. He felt faint to look at it, and the faintness did not pass. He did not have much time.

He pulled the belt from his macintosh, and tied it as tight as he could about his elbow with his good hand and teeth. His body shook. The blood slowed to a trickle.

The house had changed. Where before there were no windows, now there were black glazed holes that looked down upon Richards with rapacious need. The front door was in place, shut tight.

The sky had been swallowed by the Terror. It spun with strange calm over the house, long streamers of black and grey spiralling from its centre. Through it, in migraine-inducing strobes, Richards could see the firewall separating the Realms from the wider Grid, beyond that the Grid itself.

It felt like the last place in the world.

The ground shook with such violence that Richards staggered. A hideous moan came from the sky. It was several seconds before calm returned.

He took a deep breath, and walked to the front door. He lifted his hand only for it to open noiselessly before he touched it.

He stepped within.

The hallway was a mouldering ruin, finery marred by an allencompassing film of mould. Rats had made their nests in the arms of the collapsing leather sofas by the fireplace, the pictures were a mess of violently coloured fungi, the chandelier lay shattered on the floor. Rippled light danced around the walls, though there was no source for it. It was freezing, but Richards shivered from more than the cold. A blast of wind blew down the hallway, shrieking as it went out the door, knocking his hat awry with clammy fingers. Richards hesitated before proceeding any further, leaning against a filthy wall as his strength leaked from his arm. The front door creaked out a warning and slammed, a coffin-lid bang.

"He's somewhere here," said Richards under his breath. "But where?"

He went to a padded door under the left archway, opposite the fireplace, the kind found in gentlemen's clubs, padded with brass buttons and crimson leather. The brass was tarnished, the leather cracked and flaking. It smelt of old wrongs and broken promises.

Richards pushed at the damp leather. The door squeaked open.

He went within. A fire burned in the grate; a quick thing, its tongues probing the edges of its confinement, searching for a way out. Velvet wallpaper had covered the walls, and bookcases lined them. But now the former hung ragged as skin from a corpse, and the latter's leaded glass was cracked and sagged outward. Piles of papers and books, black with damp, lay scattered about the floor. The air was rich with imperial decay.

In front of the fire stood an overstuffed sofa, its back draped with an antimacassar of ancient vintage. Upon the sofa, book open upon its lap, sat a skeleton in reading cap and smoking jacket. Richards approached it quietly. It was long dead.

Despite the dampness of the room it was stiflingly hot. Richards hurriedly glanced about, searching by the dancing light of the fire. All the books were on the floor; the cases were empty. Richards picked one up and it disintegrated into mush, smearing his fingers with lost knowledge.

He closed the door with a click behind him and returned to the hallway. A burst of maniacal laughter sounded from somewhere in the bowels of the house.

Richards sighed, and considered what he would do next. Water dripped steadily from the ceiling: plash, plash, plash. The house groaned. Another wave of faintness passed over him. He forced himself on. There were two more doors on the ground floor, both under the stairwell balcony at the rear of the room. He picked the left.

This door opened upon a more modest part of the house: a stone-flagged corridor with two further doorways. One, at the far end, was sealed by a door of heavy, studded wood; the other, halfway down the lefthand wall, was empty, and it was here he went first. He went down a low step into a dusty scullery, two stone sinks against the wall adorned with brass taps, otherwise empty. A further door opened out into a large kitchen. A big fireplace occupied one wall, filled by a flaking range, a long pine table in front of it. In the far corner a door led outside, ivy creeping around its edges. A broken stoppered jar lay in a pile of salt in front of a smoky window. Two closets were built into the wall, and a large press stood against another. All were mouldering and devoid of content.

He went out of the scullery and kitchen, back into the corridor. He looked at the other door. His arm pulsed and he swayed. He was gripped by a sense of deep foreboding and made to hurry, but no sooner had the thought formed in his head than he was gripped with a nameless dread, and he had to force himself on, his legs fighting him every step of the way. It seemed to take forever to get to the door, and he hesitated before putting his hand to the catch. A deep cold emanated from the door, and it shrank back from him as he reached for it.

He grasped the handle, lifted and turned.

The door flew open. All the air in the corridor blasted toward the opening. Richards fell forward, managing to cling to the doorframe before he toppled down the stairs on the other side, five mossy stone steps descending to a turn, the cellar beyond awash with sickly light.

"Get out!" a voice bellowed. "Get out!"

An invisible hand shoved him hard in the chest, sending him sprawling onto the flags. The door slammed and the wind ceased, the intense feeling of fear going with it.

"Christ," he said, "I hope I don't end up having to go down there." He struggled up, nearly fainting as pain shot up and down his ruined arm. He felt nauseous, and had to wait for a full five minutes before he felt well enough to stand.

Only one door remained on the ground floor, back in the entrance hall. Richards picked his way round fallen mouldings and puddled water to it, in the corner by the fireplace that dominated the hall. Unlike the others, no decay tarnished it, and the colour of its mahogany was rich and red. Brass was expertly inlaid round the hinges and handle. It was a handsome door, a warm door. Richards pushed it open, and immediately recoiled from what he saw inside.

A dining room, long and dark, the candles that illuminated it struggling to push the shadows back into black flock wallpaper. It was cleaner than the rest of the house, free of time's cruelties. Clean, except the long table in the middle.

Blood soaked the linen tablecloth. Two gory ruins that had once been people, though Richards could tell that only by a single severed hand half-open on the floor. Around the corpses were mottled things, white skin marbled with purple veins. Their clawed feet dug through the cloth into the wood where they squatted on the table. Useless wings hung from their shoulder blades, quivering as their heads jerked from side to side as they tore at the corpses.

They looked up from their bloody meal, these wan guests with their pinched faces. Red muzzles hissed out their hatred. Richards slammed the door.

He backed away, eyes on the wood, but nothing came out. He went to the foot of the stairs. Up them he walked, and turned onto the grey floorboards of a landing. It was long as a street, at odds with the external geometry of the house. There were many doors in both directions, but one at the very end made him stop.

A child's bedroom door, white, a little battered and grubbied by the application of crayons, damaged motile stickers playing scenes of princesses and ponies across its middle, a ripped YamaYama motif at the top, disembodied rabbity hands waving slowly back and forth. Richards mustered his strength and walked as fast as he was able, faster as he approached, ignoring the urgent pleas coming from the other rooms. By the time he reached it he was striding forward, and he barely slowed as he grasped the handle, twisted it and flung open the door.

The room inside was clean and perfect, the room of a young girl whose mother cared for her. Bright sunshine beat on a cascade of terracotta roofs stepping down in huddles to peer at a blue sea; hot, but in the room it was cool. Muslin curtains stirred in a light breeze. A door leading to a balcony stood open, a rectangle of warmth extending from outside across the wooden floor, framing toys in gold, draping another doorway of light across the room's narrow bed.

A man sat on the bed, in the centre of the light from the balcony. He stirred as Richards closed the door, and turned to face the AI.

"Giacomo Vellini, I presume," said Richards.

The man looked at him blankly, face sorrowful yet empty. He frowned. "Who are you?"

"I am the Class Five AI Richards," said Richards.

"Are you? Oh." The man turned back to the daylight, then back as if he'd remembered something important. "I can't find her. I can't get out."

Richards walked around the bed slowly to stand by the balcony door. "Who can't you find, Waldo?"

"My sister, Marita."

"Queen Isabella?"

A ghost of life came into the face of Waldo. "Yes, that's right, Isabella. She used to play at queens as a little girl. She always wanted to be Queen Isabella."

"The Spanish one?"

Waldo nodded and smiled dreamily. "Yes, the Spanish one."

"What happened to you, Waldo? Can you remember?"

Waldo shook his head. "I had something to tell her, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I couldn't find her. I don't know. I'm sorry, I get confused."

"This door here, is this the way out?"

Waldo nodded. "But I can't go through." He frowned. "Why?"

Richards was filled with sympathy; he knew why. He'd seen this before. Waldo was a ghost in the machine, an imprint of a living mind left when its owner had died, a fragmented one at that. He saw that the light extended right around Waldo uninterrupted. He had no shadow. That made a lot of sense.

"I don't think you can go back that way, Waldo," he said. Richards crouched low and looked up into the man's face. Waldo was, had been, thirty-five, but he looked boyish; he carried a little too much fat and it smoothed his features. He looked lost. "But do you mind if I try?" said Richards gently.

Waldo looked at him as if he'd not seen him before, then his face cleared. "Yes, yes, of course."

Richards turned to the door. That was as good as a permission, from a human user in a Reality Realm.

He was free.

His mind rapidly reconfigured itself, bursting from his human avatar and layering itself into the complexities of the ragtag Reality 37. He felt the world being torn apart, like the tugs of stitches coming from a healed wound, k52's ravenous, alien code rewriting it into something new, something unrealised, the germ of a possibility.

He peered into it and almost laughed at k52's audacity. He had to talk to Otto. Now.

His perception of the virtuality dissolved into the roar and tumult of the System Wide Grid. The balcony door became a portal, a hole punched secret and secure through the walls surrounding the supposedly inviolate RealWorld Reality Realms; Waldo's back door. He pushed part of himself through it. Tendrils of fact reached out to him, linking him node by node to all corners of human civilisation, from the depths of the deepest terrestrial desert right out to the colony on Titan.

He stepped towards the door. It burned brighter.

"Please!" Waldo spoke, and the room vied in Richards' perceptions with the glorious howl of information space. Richards turned back, felt himself draw in a little, back into the shape and concerns of a man.

"Please," said Waldo. "My sister…"

Richards nodded. He reset his fedora firmly on his head and, with a deep breath of relief, stepped back into the world.

Otto was the last in the room housing the mortal remains of Giacomo Vellini, a real dead end.

Something in the wall of machines crackled.

Something crackled back.

A swift chatter of machine noise bounced back and forth. A panel slid upwards, revealing the slender array of a naked holoemitter, stripped of casing.

It flickered blue light, and painted Otto's partner onto the air.

"Hiya, Otto!" said Richards in that half-smug, mischievous manner he had. "There you are."

"Richards?"

"The one and only," said the hologram, and bowed. "And boy, have we got ourselves into a right old pickle this time." Richards wore his usual simulated human form, but it looked worn and tired, more real somehow. His suit was gone, a rough uniform in its place. His macintosh was shredded, one sleeve wet with blood, the arm within held crooked against the AI's chest.

"What happened to you?" asked Otto.

"I got a new hat," said Richards. "Look, I don't have much time. I've snuck out of Waldo's back door, but k52 will notice soon."

Commander Guan burst into the room, two of his troopers at his back, sidearms raised. They began shouting furiously at once and pointed their guns at the hologram emitter.

"Sheesh! I surrender," said Richards and raised his good arm.

Otto shouted back at the Chinese, placing himself between their guns and Waldo's equipment. "This is my partner! Stand down, stand down!"

"He is an artificial intelligence and an enemy of the People's Republic of China!" responded Guan. He pulled his own gun and levelled it at Otto's forehead.

"Get out of the way, Klein."

"Just make me," he growled.

Richards bellowed in Mandarin. The men turned to look at him. "That's better. I'm not here, this really is just an image projection, not even a full sensing presence. I've got piss-all ability to do anything here, so there's no problem there, is there? It's just a telephone call."

Guan looked at the AI with an intense mix of fear and hatred.

"Seriously, I'll be out of here as soon as I can. I just need to talk to my partner."

"He's been inside the renegade Realm, Guan. Whatever he has to tell me will be of the greatest importance," said Otto. "Or do you want to go back to your superiors as the world is falling down around their ears and tell them it was your fault?"

Guan stared. He barked something, and all three Dragon Fire warriors raised their guns and covered important parts of the machinery in the room.

"You have one minute," said Guan.

"Are you in, um, China, Otto?"

"You can't tell?"

"Things have been complicated. I've no idea where I am, or what day of the week it is."

"Sinosiberia," said Otto.

"Ah," said Richards. "I better get out of here before their attack ware latches onto me."

"Waldo's dead," said Otto. "We were going to use him to get you out."

"I appreciate that, and I know he's dead. There's an echo of him in here."

"Poor bastard," said Otto.

"Maybe, but if there weren't it would have been game over a while ago. I think I can stop k52, but you must not let them destroy the Realm House, you got that?"

"With Waldo dead, they are going to blow up the Realm servers," said Otto.

"Stop them. Do whatever it takes. They using nukes?"

Otto nodded.

"Idiots. Don't let them do it. I think I've got it all figured out, I'll explain everything when I get out, OK?"

"Sure."

"Good." Richards looked round the bunker room, caught sight of Waldo and wrinkled his nose. "Say, is his sister here?"

"Yes," said Otto. "Dirty and skinny, but she's alive."

Richards' hologram grinned. "That's all I need to know. See you soon, partner."

The emitter winked out and he disappeared.

Guan's men raked Waldo's cabinets with gunfire, destroying them and closing the backdoor to the Realms. Guan fixed Otto with flinty eyes.

"They will have my head for this," he said, his singsong growl rendered as powerless English.

With great reluctance, Richards pulled back into the sealed spaces of the Realms. He shut the door and watched it dissolve as its physical components were shattered. Unusual to have something ephemeral and material so closely linked, but it was the only way Waldo could get in and out undetected. Richards sighed as he scoured the remnants of it from the Grid. He had no choice. It could have been an escape route for him if his plan did not work out, but by the same reasoning it could have been an escape route for k52; if the sly bastard had another base unit out in the Real he could be free for years.

Richards could not risk that.

He felt himself contract back into his unwanted avatar. Its biological unpleasantness, its pain and malfunctions pulled themselves over him like a shroud.

Waldo blinked at him. "Who are you? You're not my sister."

"Come on, old son," said Richards, "it's time to go home."

Waldo stood and attempted to walk through the door onto the sunlit balcony. His expression turned to one of puzzlement when he could not. The room was failing, parts of it crackling to nothing, strips of the virtuality peeling down like old wallpaper.

"Not that way," said Richards. He put his hand upon the door leading back into the house. "This way."