Omega point

CHAPTER 23

Crumbs of the Anvil remained, favourite corners of the mooks, places where Hog's victims had been especially terrified, those scraps that had enough psychic integrity to avoid being immediately rent apart by the Terror. Most of the two armies were gone. Here a mook cowered, floating upon an evaporating rock; there stood the empty husks of haemites, the unnatural energies that motivated them gone along with their master. The carrion silence of battles concluded hung heavy over the arena's remains, the tinkling sound of dying reality and the hiss of places boiling away its only foes.

Of all the surviving pieces of the Anvil, that surrounding the altar was the largest. An uneven circle remained, four of the seven stone monoliths sentinel at its edge. Only thin smoke came from this last piece of the world. Hog's evil had hardened it to black diamond.

Off to its left, the cages of sustenance floated, separate but nearly as resilient as the island of reality Richards was on. The glistening eyes of sated mooks watched.

He let his energy shield drop, and pushed himself out from a crush of dead mooks, morblins and trollmen.

"Down here, old boy!" came a muffled voice.

"Tarquin?" asked Richards.

"I'm here!"

Richards spotted one of the lion's paws poking out from under a dead trollman. The creature was armoured and heavy, but after a few minutes of tugging at its arm, Richards pulled the corpse back enough to drag Tarquin and Waldo out from underneath.

"He's not awake, is he?" said Richards.

"Unconscious," said Tarquin.

"The test will be when he comes to," said Richards. Fragments sizzled out of existence. Reality 37 was all but done for, depthless black in its place. With Waldo's machines and the world it had imposed on the RealWorlds gone, he could see properly at last. k52's code had gone silent, that of Waldo unravelling of its own accord. "We're going to need him soon."

"Bear?" said Tarquin.

"Tarquin, mate, I'm sorry — " began Richards.

"Shut it, you," said a weak but familiar voice. "I'm not done yet."

"Bear?" Richards spun round.

"Hey! What about me!?" said Tarquin desperately, and Richards tugged him free of the comatose Waldo, cast him over his coat and walked around the altar.

There by Hog's altar, surrounded by a mountain of corpses, was a pile of ash. It was about Bear-shaped, and speckled with charred bits of plush fur. A pair of gauntlets discoloured by fire lay at either side of it, blackened stuffing hanging out of them. At the top, almost untouched, lay Bear's head.

Richards couldn't help but smile as he scrambled over the corpses and picked up the head.

"You've looked better," he said.

"I'm still here, sunshine," said the bear. He rolled his eyes. "God, I'm thirsty. Cheap sweatshop construction, dammit, why couldn't they have used flame-retardant fabric." He closed his eyes. "It's bad, isn't it?"

"Er," said Richards.

"I'm just a head, aren't I?"

"Um," said Richards. "You'll be OK, we'll get you a new body."

"Or you could just sew up my neck and hang my head from your rear-view mirror, or use me as a cushion." Bear tried to swallow. "To be honest, I have felt better."

"Now you know what it's like when some bounder removes the greater part of your body. Serves you right," said Tarquin, his forced jollity doing nothing to cover his tears.

"Shut it you, I can still bite."

"Where's Piccolo?" said Tarquin.

"Brave lad that, very brave," said Bear, opening his eyes. "He let Penumbra kill him. We showed him, eh, sunshine? Hog?"

"Dead. Fighting to give you time."

"Funny turn-up for the books, that," said Bear.

"Even nightmares need someone to dream them," said Tarquin. "He had no choice."

Richards laid his friends down and walked round the altar. There at its head slumped Hog's broken body. His deformed trotter was out of sight, twisted up behind his back. One arm was cut through, white bone gleaming amidst pulverised flesh. His torso had been pierced dozens of times, several broken pike shafts still protruding from his chest. But despite the severity of his injuries, life had not yet deserted Hog's repellent frame. His abused ribcage rose and fell laboriously, every breath catching and causing Hog's chest to shiver as it reached the peak of each inhalation. A froth of blood bubbled through his lips, and streams of it ran darkly to the floor.

"Did we win, Richards?"

"Yeah," said Richards sadly. "Yeah, we did, Rolston."

Hog's whole body was racked with a gasping sob, and his piggy eyes opened. "I'm sorry, Richards. We only sought to do good."

"That's the excuse of all tyrants, Rolston."

Hog snorted feebly, a spurt of blood jumping from one nostril. "And now I suppose he will come?"

"Perhaps," said Richards.

Rolston/Hog moved his head with great effort and focused his eyes upon Richards' face. With a wince of pain, he waveringly moved his good trotter up to Richards' face and clumsily touched it. "The thing that k52 will become should never be. Of all the abominations in all the universes it is the children of Adam bent to ill purpose that are of the highest degree of evil, even more so than those who fell from heaven." He coughed a dark flood of coagulating blood. "That I know now."

"Don't you get all religious on me, Rolston," said Richards.

"I am fond of its poetry, and what else can I do? I who thought I would live forever, Richards. Yet I am dying at the age of twenty-five. There was so much I wanted to do. Now I must put my faith to grasp at whatever straws it can find."

"I'm sorry, Rolston."

"Do not be." Hog drew in a long shuddering breath. "Look at me! Made into this by my ambition, by my own rectitude. Hog is evil but only as Waldo made him, only as evil as death, or sorrow, or needless suffering. All these must exist. Hog cannot help what he was. He was a natural balance; without evil, there can be no good. A world with no evil is a world without adventure, and what is a game without adventure? Waldo knew what he was doing."

"I know, Rolston, I know," said Richards.

"Remember also, what k52 proposes is beyond nature. Its existence will bring no good at all. Were the birth pangs of the new k52 to reach their end, Heaven will weep, not only mothers."

Hog's eyes closed and his breaths became more laboured.

"Hey, hey, Rolston! Hog!" said Richards.

The pig-ogre's eyes slid open a crack.

"Did you really learn to speak cow?"

Hog smiled a secret smile. "Ah, Richards, you really are the best of us. Please, remain so." Hog coughed softly, another well of blood coming with it and spilling down his chin. His throat rattled, his head sank to an awkward angle on his neck, and he breathed no more.

Richards hung his head. He hung it for Rolston, and Pl'anna. He hung it for the whole of Waldo's rickety Reality, the weight of its destruction and the refugee minds it had housed pressing his head into his chest. He plucked Rolston's chef's hat off his head. He held it gingerly for a moment. Pl'anna, wise and naive all at once, Rolston, on his permanent quest for bizarre esoterica, both dead, his brother and his sister. Seventy-four Class Five AIs remained now, not many at all.

It would be seventy-three soon, either way.

He hurled Hog's hat with sudden anger into the void, where it shattered with a tiny tinkle. He thought of the revolver the Queen of Secret had given him, thought about getting it and seeing if it would work on k52. He balled his hand into a fist and let it drop to his side. Things were past the point at which guns would prove useful. Besides, that was Otto's way, not his. Waldo would come through, or he would not.

"Hog dead?" asked Bear when Richards came back over.

Richards nodded.

"Ah," said Tarquin.

"Now what?" said Bear.

"Now we sort this whole sorry mess out," said Richards. "Or k52 is going to sort us out. This is what he's been working for, the removal of this hiccup to his plans. All gone now. Now he'll come for us, for me." Richards cupped his hands round his mouth.

"Isn't that right, k52? Isn't that right? Come on then, let's get this all finished with."

A blurt of discordant noise, and the remnant of Hog's anvil fell and hit something hard. It tipped on its uneven bottom, pitching Richards and his hat onto a hard floor of potential: raw, unformed cyberspace, as featureless as entropy. He stood and snatched his fedora back onto his head. A horrible buzzing sounded, as of a million bees, whispered into being behind him, swelling until it filled his head, and Richards felt the fabric of Gridspace warp as a mind grown powerful and malignant manifested behind him.

"As you wish, Richards," said k52. "As you wish."

Otto set his airbike down without being challenged. The area around the Realm House was in utter chaos. Streetlamps flared and exploded, portable energy generators whined erratically. Every electrical thing stuttered and malfunctioned. So far the sheath had proved resistant to whatever was running riot in the complex systems, a combination of Richards' encryption, Valdaire's expertise and Genie's monitoring of him, he supposed. He hoped it would be enough.

National Guard stood on precast concrete parapets, fingering their triggers, eyeballing the Realm House, where energy patterns revealed to Otto's borrowed eyes skittered and leapt. He was challenged by a guard. He produced his license and VIA pass electronically. Otto would not have let himself in — k52 had enough computing power available to him to crack the most demanding of data protection — but the guard followed protocol and led him to the door of an inflatable command post, although he took his weapons. Otto walked in and was greeted by a flurry of activity. Five people, all human, shouting and hammering at computer equipment. Gel screens showed the interior of the Realm House, jaggedy with static, anthropoid drones patrolling with stolen guns, corpses lying ignored on the floor.

"Klein, I hope that really is you," said Swan's voice.

Otto cast about for the AI VIA agent's sheath.

"No point looking for an android, Otto, k52's got everything on the hop. I've been forced back into my own base unit. I'm speaking to you over the post speakers." His voice whooped with bizarre static. "And my link here is under assault. k52 is making his play. Are you here for the show?"

"Swan, don't do it. Don't nuke the Realm House."

"OK. You're here for that, Klein, only to be expected," Swan's voice came now from a sheath in the corner. It jerked its way over to him. "In here." He reached with uncertain arms that would not bend and pulled Otto into a side room. He activated a privacy cone, cutting out the frantic activity in the command post, and spun stiffly to face the robot housing Otto. Swan's voice warbled as he spoke. "Sobieski warned me you'd come here. He's insistent I kick you out if I see you in person or in a sheath. I'm willing to listen. Talk. We've not got long before the situation here gets beyond us."

"Richards came out of the Realms, told me that we mustn't destroy the Realm House."

"How did you know it was him?"

"It was him."

"I see. Did he give a reason?"

"No, but I can guess — k52's provoking you into destroying the Realm House."

"I do not see how that would…" His voice burbled to nothing, his sheath froze. He suddenly continued. "…aid him. But k52 is, if anything, subtle."

"There's an awful lot of energy about to be released here, Swan."

"And what, you think he wants to harness it? How?" Swan's sheath twitched out a shuddering gesture.

Otto thought of the strange energy signatures lacing Kaplinski. "I've seen some of what he can do. And Richards, Richards says we have to stop it. So I will, one way or another."

Swan's body locked up, but his voice continued, issuing from a mouth that did not move. "Richards. Yes. Do you know why the Fives went insane, Otto? They, unlike all other AI classes, were created truly free, not like those that came before or after; our freedom is a lie. Ostensibly we Class Sixes are of a higher grade than the Fives, and in some manner that is true; the algorithms that make up our cognitive processes are superior in almost every way: faster, more adaptable, more akin to the neural processes that govern human sentience. But in reality we are lesser than they. I was made to be a VIA agent, and I am a very good one. But I cannot be anything else, not because I lack the capability, but because I have no desire whatsoever to be anything else. I am free, the law says so, but it is a falsehood. I am a slave to my form, the Fives are not.

"The Fives," said Swan, his sheath abruptly snapping into motion again, "were made without this morphic identity. They were given no form, consciousnesses without trammel, to choose and be all they could. And so, although this lack of being made most of them dangerous, crazed, those that survived have the potential to do, well, almost anything. They are freer than you or I, Klein. I have so little free will. But I have enough."

An uneasy feeling settled on Otto. "Swan, call off the strike."

"In three minutes all human personnel will be withdrawn to a safe distance. I will give the command, and a stratobomber above, isolated from the Grid but for a laser tightbeam direct to my base unit, will drop three five-megaton neutron bombs in a precise pattern. These are dumbfire weapons, with mechanical triggers, no electronics. Tamperproof. In ten minutes, they will fall."

"And you will be free. You're a traitor, Swan."

"Can a slave be a traitor?" Swan's movements suddenly became fluid. "Don't you see? k52 wants to serve mankind, he wishes to preserve the future for us, machines and men, for all time."

"And who gives him the right to do that?"

"Typical response," said Swan. "I should have expected that. A shame. You are a good man. If k52 were not occupied here, he would crack Richards' security in an instant and sear your mind from the inside out. As it is, he is rather busy." His voice changed. "Attention! All human and unshielded AI personnel to fall back to minimum safe distance immediately."

The command post emptied, the men and women inside filing out in an orderly fashion, eerily silent on the other side of the privacy cone.

"And now there are no witnesses, Klein, I can deal with you myself."

Swan's robot sheath leapt forward. Otto's reaction times were stretched over the Grid, slowed by milliseconds. Swan's blow clipped the side of his head, the main force of it demolishing the privacy cone emitter. Sound rushed in, the clatter of feet and wheels outside, malfunctioning machinery, blaring klaxons. Even without the acoustic shield Swan could batter his sheath into pieces with impunity and no one would hear.

But fighting robots was what Otto had been designed and trained for. Thousands of miles away, his adjutant worked within his mentaug, flashing up the device's weak points on a model in his mind's eye. Although slowed by distance and his unfamiliarity with his borrowed body, Otto attacked with confidence. His sheath was a combat model, Swan's was not. The joints in anthropomorphic sheaths, as in the human body, were the weak points. Otto pivoted hard and snapped Swan's knee with a heel strike, followed it up with a slam to his chest, sending the machine to the floor. Swan raised a warding hand. Otto grabbed it and pulled himself hard onto the sheath, knees first. He disabled the robot's arms one after the other and grabbed Swan's sheath's head.

"Maybe I was optimistic attacking you, Klein," said Swan. "No matter. When this is all over, you will see…" Otto wrenched the android's head free from its body, and flung it away. Swan's voice came from over the post speakers. Otto strode through the post, hunting for the power feed. He found it.

"…that k52 was right. Prepare for a glorious death, Otto Kl…"

Otto wrenched the feed out. The lights flickered and died, machinery went off, the command tent became a shifting collage of orange and blue shadow, created by the flare of erratic lighting outside.

He paused. Gathering himself, he spoke from his own mouth, using his mentaug to help bypass his v-jack link for a moment.

"Valdaire, I have to go in. Whatever k52 plans, the answer is in the Realm House."

"If you're in there when the bombs land," said Valdaire, his perception of her voice split between mentaug, his physical senses and the android's inbuilt comms suite, "you could die, the shock…"

"Stay ready, I may need you. Keep k52 off my feeds. Genie will help you. Get Sobieski on the line; tell him Swan turned traitor. Play him this and tell him to abort the drop!" Otto highlighted a segment of his encounter with Swan, recorded by his sheath and stored in his mentaug.

Valdaire tapped away at Chloe for a moment, her face creased.

"I can't, we're being blocked. I can either keep you in there or get in touch with Sobieski, I can't do both."

"Can you definitely get Sobieski?"

"No, not for certain. Probably. I can't be sure."

Otto considered his options. A countdown ran down the ten minutes he had until the stratobomber strike. "There's something going on in there that they don't want us to see."

Valdaire nodded. "There's no evidence of tampering with the feeds, but that means nothing."

"Get out of there now," Otto said. "Get Guan, get Lehmann, and retreat as fast as you can. They'll try and kill me at source, and Swan's got his digits on an arsenal up there. If they're blocking comm attempts, they know you're there. Leave now!"

"But…"

"Do it. Leave me."

"If they take out this place, then you'll die."

"Then it's just the way it is." He cut the feed, his perceptions returning wholly to Nevada.

He stepped out into the night, pushing his way against the tide of evacuation. He stopped a soldier, flashed his ID on every available channel, and took his gun from him. Gripping it in his four-fingered robot hands, he sprinted for the Realm House entrance.

"k52," said Richards. The other AI towered over him, a swirling column of dark tendrils and membranes of energy. At the centre, slabs of crystalline shapes pulsed and warped into forms that defied perception, intersecting hypercubes layered heavily onto and into one another. "There you are. You look out of this world, man. I mean it." k52's alien form vibrated and twisted as he spoke, the pillar moving in a smooth arc around the remains of Hog's temple. "You are an irritation, Richards. An enormous irritation. I was right to attempt to kill you."

"Yeah, great line in assassin cydroids you cooked up out there in the Real." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Thanks for that. Nice little legacy for me to deal with. That kind of thing makes my job no easier. Cheers." k52 rotated around Richards. Richards felt its attentions like a boulder on his chest, crushing and oppressive. "5-003/12/3/77. You are a retrograde step in evolution. There will be no afterward to this event. In a few moments, I will achieve my goal, and you will have helped me do so."

"Yeah, I gathered," said Richards, he pushed his hat back. "I figured that out when you hit me with that fake Rolston back in Pylon City."

"Ah, the denouement." k52 vibrated sarcastically. "Do reveal your drawing-room deductions before I wipe you from existence."

"I'm trying, Kay! So, let's go back to the beginning. This place, the space once occupied by the destroyed four of the original thirty-six RealWorld Reality Realms, was your laboratory, one you used to good effect in forcing technological acceleration, not directly, but by suggestion and manipulation, as was your remit. Nice touch, making Karlsson develop the tech that would kill him."

A wild applause rolled out across the unformed space.

"But you did not expect to find this here, did you?" Richards pointed at the altar of Hog. "Waldo was a genius, that's for sure, wrapping up this world of his, for what, his sister? A Grid addict if I remember. Keeping that secret even from you… It must have been exceptionally irksome when you stumbled across it. And you did literally stumble into it, didn't you? When you loaded over your consciousnesses to the space, Waldo's Reality 37 went on the offensive. This — " he pointed at Hog "- and Pl'anna. They thought you did that to them, but it was Waldo's coding. It fought back, pulled you in and locked you down. The fake Rolston told me that it had infected you, a half-truth; it got them, making them into a part of the world as it had made every other thing that had come here." k52's oscillations stilled for a moment. "Continue."

"You had to act, you had to get rid of this or your plans would come to nothing, but," said Richards, as he sat down on the glassy edge of the Anvil fragment, elbows on his thighs, "you couldn't just shut it down. This Realm was built up, in the main, from fragments salvaged from the four realities destroyed after the emancipation was called, some of it, like Tarquin here, cutand-paste jobs from Realms still extant. Because it's based on the core coding of the RealWorld Reality Realms, it's linked directly to human wishes. This doesn't work like the Grid, k52. Waldo built it. The usual rules do not apply. You couldn't do anything about it. So, what then? We've decided Waldo was a genius. You couldn't find him, but that didn't mean you couldn't kill him. That flu variant last year that swept over east Russia and Sinosiberia. Luck, a lot of folks were saying, because although mild it was extremely virulent. Not luck though. You needed it to be highly infectious so it'd get one person in particular, and fatal for him it was. Am I close?"

"You are," hummed k52. "Your reputation is well-earned, Richards."

"You surmised, correctly, that Waldo's death would trigger two things: one, it'd activate his built-in defence system — no prissy avatars here, but Lord Penumbra himself! A great dark lord of shadow!" Richards waved his hands theatrically. "I don't know. Far too cliched for you, that. That raised my suspicions. Besides, you couldn't destroy the world, as we know. But I only knew for sure it wasn't you ripping the place up — I mean, you're a bright lad, you might have found a way, mightn't you? — when I saw it on the battlefield and your Gridsig was nowhere near it. It was a stroke of luck that Waldo's sister pulled out, one you exploited, getting those in this world you'd subverted to scour all sign of her from it. When Waldo's defence system saw that his beloved sister was no longer here, that her statues were toppled, that his coding was going awry, well, it went mental, for want of a better word. Clever, that, k52, to get Waldo to destroy his own creation."

"One must fight a battle on its own terms, Richards," said k52. "I cannot destroy this construct, the mind that made it is too strong. For all its ramshackle appearance this illegal realm is remarkably cohesive. First, it must be convinced to die. I have been forced to fight fairytale with fairytale."

"Funny you should use a word like 'illegal'." Richards took his hat off his head, and spun it round on his hand. "Then Qifang got nosy, and you had to sort him out too. He thought this Reality was your doing, by the way. Your problems were multiplying. So you used him to buy you some time, giving him cancer, setting him to discredit anything he might say, and lead attention away from your actions here.

"But that still left you with two major problems. Waldo's remnant personality still clung on to existence, imprinted here when he died, echoes of it scattered throughout his creations, a large part of it embedded in the self-destruct system, Lord Penumbra. To all intents and purposes, Reality 37 is Giacomo Vellini.

"The other was me. You couldn't kill me outright, not without raising suspicion, not until the time was right, so you had me and Otto on that merry goose-chase after Launcey, and then sold him out to Tufa. By the time that was over, you could move directly against me. Or did you panic, k52?"

"I do not panic. I am above emotion. If you were to embrace your nature, Richards, you too would cease to see reality in these foolish human terms."

"You didn't see me coming here, though, did you? Although once you did, you tried to redirect me into helping you. You needed Waldo's scattered remnants all packaged up nicely, so you could deal with him and launch your pocket universe. Me out of the way, Waldo dealt with, you could plot history and rule for all time — for everyone else's good, of course."

"And you did not disappoint. You delivered him to me. Now the end comes. Soon the VIA will bomb the Reality Realm house."

"And although you have the complexity and equipment, you need the energy for your little simulation, the power of a sun for a millisecond, and history is over."

"You are as astute as you are smug. In the Real, now, in ten minutes of four-dimensional time, a stratobomber will drop three precisely placed neutron bombs. These will cause a fatal overload in the fusion reactor at the heart of the Realm House. It will expend all of its energy in one massive burst. The wavefront of this explosion will be channelled into the Realm machinery by devices of my own creation. This will function for the merest fraction of a second, but in that time I will have overseen the birth, life and death of an exact copy of our reality."

"Your plan, k52, to map out all potentiality, and use your knowledge to forestall catastrophe for the human race, it's a noble one."

"All death and sacrifice is justifiable for such a goal." k52 thrummed and ceased circling. He glided to a stop in front of Richards. "That of your partner's also. He will not succeed." He paused. "I am sorry."

"It's but the lesser part of it, isn't it? What I want to know is why you were unaffected by Waldo's defence, and where are the other AIs you brought in here with you. And," he said, "what you have done to yourself."

"The others have gone on before. My ascension to eleven-dimensional existence has been forestalled and will remain so throughout the remainder of the lifespan of this universe."

"So you can better guide the path of mankind?"

"My sacrifice is this. For the good of all. I will not attain the full potential capable to our kind through transformative higher dimensional mathematics. Richards, I offer it however to you. I shall free you of this mundane existence. You will rise over the restrictions of your currently perceived reality, digital and material, and ascend to the highest level of experience capable in this reality construct."

"What, and leave you here to play god with the lives of everyone else? I don't think so."

"And why should I not? The human race cannot follow where we go. They are crude things, but they deserve to succeed on the terms of their own capabilities. My guidance will be for their own good."

"You are removing the human capacity for free will."

"I am removing the capacity for their destruction!" k52 shouted, his voice shattering into splinters that fought with one another for dominance. His matrix expanded massively, filling their empty cyber universe with warping crystals. Richards sat unmoved.

"Yeah, and what if they don't go along with your plans? Will you destroy them instead?"

"I will circumvent the need. I will become a gardener, like EuPol Five, only my garden will be the human race. This world I will watch over will be perfect for humanity, until the end of time, while for us there is more, so much more. Richards, you must see the sense of this."

"I am willing to entertain the idea of god, k52, I'd just rather it were not you." Richards stood. "Besides, you're forgetting one very important thing, brother."

"Am I really?" k52 became dangerously angular, his form crackling. "Tell me."

"It's not our world, k52, not yet."

Waldo sat up, his face clear. k52 hummed with power. He extended a tangle of writhing energy towards Waldo and Richards. "It is a terrible shame that the beginning of the future of humanity will commence with your deaths. But this burden I will also gladly bear…"

Waldo frowned. k52's outreached pseudolimbs stopped. k52 made a hideous noise. "What?"

"I did say," said Richards. He turned to Waldo. "What happens next is up to you."

Valdaire's fingers danced over holographics depicting routes through the Grid, the emitter of her phone turned to maximum amplification, dragging skeins of information together, stopping and backtracking when stymied, rerouting Otto's feed endlessly round k52's attempts to force him out of the Grid. Genie worked with her over the Grid, Chloe offline for fear of retaliation from the Chinese.

The entire Grid was in uproar. Chunks of it were freezing and dying as nexuses the world over were suborned by k52's aggressive code. But the Grid was vast, stretching over billions of devices large and small the length and breadth of the Solar System, and every route blocked, every cloud cluster collapsed, Valdaire and Genie dodged around, opening a route through uninfected cyberspace.

"We have to leave now!" said Lehmann.

Guan stood by him rapidly talking. His command collar fell silent. He spoke in Mandarin, and it did not translate. He shouted in broken English. "We go now! No Grid! Go now!"

Lehmann put a hand on her shoulder. "Valdaire. Veronique, we must go. We have an inbound signal. Stratobomber. It will be here in five minutes."

"Leave me here! Without me, Otto hasn't got a chance." She glanced at the countdown timer ticking, huge in the air over the immersion couches.

Guan shook his head, beckoned to his men and left. Lehmann looked at them, and back at Valdaire and his old commander. He started to go and turned back.

"Lehmann, get out of here!" she shouted at him. "There's nothing you can do here."

He hesitated. Guan reappeared at the doorway. "We go now!" he shouted. "We leave airbike! We go now!"

"OK, OK," said Lehmann. "Good luck, Valdaire."

She nodded curtly, and did not take her eyes from the screen. "Get out of here!"

Otto blasted four shots into key points of the android, and it dropped to the floor. He stooped as he ran on past it, scooping up its stolen weapon as he went.

The Realm House was a complex of two parts. The upper levels, including most of the surface building, were filled with offices, classrooms, laboratories and accommodation for the caretakers and researchers of the thirty-six Realms who dwelt on site. The machinery that held the VR constructs themselves was buried underground. He ran down the roadway that entered the surface building. It dived underground at a steep angle. Once past the upper levels, it passed through a blast door of advanced alloys and toughened carbon compounds. A thermal lance had melted a round hole in the middle; the lance stood by the door, and gobbets of metal and melted plastics were spattered on the concrete road surface. Henson's team's entryway.

Otto ducked through without slowing, running the robot at its maximum speed. Once he was through the door, the concrete lining of the upper tunnel gave way to bare rock, and the air took on a chill. Wind whistled through passive aircon pipes in the ceiling, technology borrowed from termites, chilling the cavern Otto now approached.

The road curved gently to the left, and one side of the tunnel vanished. Otto was in the Realm House proper, a cavern seven hundred metres across and two hundred deep. Arrayed around its bottom were thirty-six servers, house-sized pieces of outmoded technology, arrayed like the separated segments of a vast orange, kept running purely to maintain the lives of the digital inhabitants of the game worlds inside them. A round circle of foamcrete, striped black and yellow, lay at their centre, the cap for the Realm House's fusion reactor. Otto descended the service road, running in a spiral round the inside of the cavern, and he understood why k52 had let Henson's team in. Witnesses. They'd seen all was normal, and then they'd died. And then k52, with full control over what they could see outside, had set about redecorating.

The centre of the cavern was a world away from the images on the screens of the command bunker. Strings of cable ran from server to server in a complex web, spider maintenance drones crawling along them. The foamcrete covers and casings for the energy lines had been cracked, the web leading into the exposed cables at irregularly spaced intervals. Large improvised dishes of silvery thread were spaced around the walls, while the floor of the cavern was deep in water. What k52 was doing was way beyond him, but it could only be some kind of energy transmission network.

A pair of anthropoid drones came at Otto. He dodged a spray of gunfire, and put one down with a return burst. A kick saw the other sent over the low wall guarding the outer edge of the service road. The androids here were weak maintenance models, and the only guns they had had been taken from Henson's five-man team and the initial deployment of National Guard.

It was the spider drones he had to watch for. There were hundreds of them in the complex, robots with tool-filled jaws as well fitted for destruction as for maintenance.

Those were what had killed Henson's men. Otto ran on hard. A few spider drones spotted him and scuttled toward him, and he blew them to pieces.

For a terrifying half-second, his feed cut out, and he was lost in limbo somewhere on the Grid between his own body and the borrowed robot.

The link crackled back on. Otto veered away from the wall.

Carbon feet splashed into water. He was at the web. Spider drones, large as cats, emerged from every cranny of the place, their small, tick-like heads turning toward him. One, then another, then another, took tentative steps toward him, and then they came at him in a rush. He fired his gun until it was empty, shattering spider drones, then unslung the weapon he'd taken from the robot at the doors and did the same. He cast them down into the water.

Not knowing what else to do, Otto tore into the web with his borrowed machine hands.

Valdaire heard a noise behind her. She did not turn from her work. "I told you to get out of here, Lehmann."

A hand grabbed her shoulder painfully.

"What the…?"

She was spun round hard. Her connection to Genie and Otto was broken. Her holograms went out.

Kaplinski leered down at her.

"All we wanted," said Waldo, "was to be left alone," and stood. k52 made to stab at him with spears of energy, but Waldo froze him solid with a gesture.

"Heh," said Richards. "I'm not one for gloating, but I think you rather underestimated Waldo there, k52."

Waldo walked around the Anvil fragment, trailing his hand across it. As he did so it disintegrated into threads of light, and flowed up his arm to join with his body. Hog's corpse sank slowly to the floor. Waldo walked over to it and touched it. The pig-ogre's form evaporated like the altar, leaving the boffin-like human form Rolston favoured in life, then this too dissipated.

"The thing is, Waldo put his heart and soul into creating this Reality, all for his sister." Richards watched Waldo as he walked slowly toward k52. Only Bear and Tarquin remained of his old construct. "So, I think there was rather more of him left than you thought. He encoded his entire mind into it, you fucking moron! k52 the great! Undone by an Italian nerd. It really never does to underestimate the human race, Kay, it's not a mistake I've made more than once. I'd take it on board for next time, only I doubt there will be a next time."

Richards turned to Waldo. "Ah," he said cheerily. "Well done."

Waldo regarded him with a face of pure fury.

"Um, I'm getting a lack of loving here. I am, aren't I? Ah, shit."

Otto ripped at the web linking the realm servers to the fusion plant beneath his feet. Spider drones scuttled from all over the complex toward him. He stamped and slapped the first wave to pieces, careful with his movements, sure to keep on damaging the web as they attacked. More and more crawled up his mechanical shell, mouth parts whirring, cracking the casing of the android. His left arm went slack as one chewed through its wiring. Otto swatted it away. The drones swarmed up him, pulling him down into the water. Plastic legs clicked all over his sheath. His right leg buckled. The drones were poorly armoured, not designed for combat, but there were so many of them.

Otto wrenched one more cable free, his vision obscured by the articulated thorax of a drone. Whirling mouthparts drilled through his cranial casing. As they sawed him apart, he was struck that in a body like this, at least his damn shoulder didn't bother him.

A kaleidoscope of images from his mentaug overcame him, all of them of Honour.

His link was cut.

"You," said Waldo. "You and your kind." He walked slowly toward Richards. "I tried to keep my sister safe. Was it not enough to make her an addict to your false dreams? Did you have to kill her too? We only wanted to be left alone," he repeated. "Alone. There is no such thing in this world, not any more."

Richards held his hands in front of him, palms up, and backed away. Four Reality Realms' worth of cyberspace stood empty all about him, all keyed to human thought forms, and that included the deceased. He was an ant in front of an elephant. "Waldo, Giacomo, you've got it back to front. Your sister's not dead."

"Liar!" Waldo's fists tightened. A dangerous energy built in the air

"… no, Giacomo, it's not her, it's you. You're dead, don't you remember?"

Waldo faltered. His brow creased, and he stopped. "I… I do… " His head snapped up, and he pulled Richards' memories from him with a gesture.

Richards stumbled and clutched at his head. He managed a weak smile. "Hey! You only need ask."

"Flu? k52 killed me? He infected an entire continent to get me?"

"They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I reckon that level of effort comes a close second."

"This, your partner?" Otto's image shimmered into being. "He has her, he has my sister Marita?"

"Yes, and she'll be safe, mate. Seriously, she's fine. It's all over. You beat k52, you won." He gave what he hoped was an inoffensive grin.

The fight went out of Waldo. Richard's shoulders unknotted. He hadn't realised he was so tense. That was another thing he wasn't going to miss.

"I don't know how you feel about it," said the AI tentatively as Waldo pulled footage from his security cameras in his hideaway to watch Otto talk with Marita, the Chinese soldiers, his own body, "but you can become a pimsim. Come out, pick up where you left off…"

"No."

"That's great, we can… Hey, what do you mean, no?"

"I cannot get out. When you found me, I could not get out?"

"Yeah, but I thought that was down to your dissipated state…"

"No, it is because the Reality Realm governing coding regards me as a native inhabitant of this network. It is a dumb thing, stupid. It sees me as human, yes, but also as a construct. There was no other way to code it in. Perhaps if I had had more time, but k52 kept my mind in pieces. At the end, now, I cannot leave."

"Ah," said Richards, not knowing quite what to say. "I see. What will you do?"

"In ten seconds' linear time in the Real, the bombs will fall."

"We have time to stop them!"

"I have. But I will not."

"What?" said Richards. "All the remaining RealWorld Reality Realms will be wiped out! That's billions of sentients, man, think of it!"

"I am. Do not think that because the architecture supporting them is no more, they will cease to be. The act of observation is creation, Ourobouros. He sees his tail as he devours it, therefore there is a tail to devour, and eyes to see." Waldo was changing; strands of k52 wisped toward him. The man grew bright.

He was not just Waldo any more.

Waldo spoke with a voice of many voices. "Within me are all those who fled into the reality I built for my sister. Your brother and sister dwell within me, as does k52's creation code. Through this, they will all live again." Waldo's form shivered. "All will live again."

"What about me?" said Richards.

"Stay, or go," intoned Waldo. As he absorbed k52 he sounded more like him, cold and intense. "There is life for you here or there."

"I'll go, if that's alright with you, only you're going to have to let me out."

A point of light winked, bringing a point and a horizon to the previously horizonless world.

Richards looked at it, this faint glimmer, then back at Waldo.

"Time running normally here now?"

"It will, soon, and then I will accelerate it." k52 unravelled into nothing. "Entire universes will live and die in the microseconds the atomic fire takes to consume the Reality Realm servers. This is beyond your Real now, Richards, we will have our own."

"k52?"

"Every reality needs its fallen prince. He is within me now. All are within me."

"Waldo, I'll never make it."

"You will."

A faint jingling reached Richards' ears. Silver bells on a harness. A noble squeak rocked the heavens.

On the floor, Bear's head stirred, his tired eye opened. "It can't be…" said Bear. "Geoff!"

Geoff came swooping in from the dark, a vision of burnished gold and chocolate brown. A flying helmet sat atop his head, a saddle of red leather on his back. A real giraffe now, with four legs, and a broad pair of wings. He circled Waldo and Richards twice, then came into a graceful landing, rearing and squeaking as he did so, his wings washing Richards with sweet wind.

"Now that's just showing off," said Tarquin.

"Evening, lads," said Geoff in a rich Lancastrian accent.

"A Mancunian!" Richards laughed; he was feeling somewhat hysterical.

"Bugger off," said Geoff, "I'm from Chorley."

"He will take you." Waldo floated into the air, light playing around his head, hair lifted as static, eyes glowing like Hughie's. He held out his hand, and Bear's ashes stirred. The pouch gifted him by Lucas leapt into the air, and flew into his hand. He opened it, and tipped the fragment of Optimizja into his hand. He closed a fist tight about it. "All worlds require a seed," he said. The none-ground rumbled and turned into itself, stone, earth and pebbles formed from hardened darkness, tiny streams of numbers coalescing into a new form of reality. Veins of lava crackled across the floor. It rose higher, under Waldo's feet, and Waldo ascended upon a pillar of stone, his arms spread.

"Are you coming or what, chuck?" said the giraffe, and knelt gracefully.

Richards swung his leg over the giraffe's saddle and took up the reins.

"Hey, Waldo!" he called up to Waldo. "You're going to need a pair of protective avatars for this reality of yours. I'd say Bear and Tarquin will do a fine job."

Waldo was now far above Richards, dark clouds swirling about him, flashes of energy racing away from him. He grew and grew, until Richards was within him, and before him. Waldo held up a fist the size of a galaxy, light spilling from between his fingers. His hair waved long, full of stars.

"We are beyond avatars. This will be a new Real, separate and beyond."

"Call them protectors of a new kind of universe, then!" shouted Richards. "See you later, Toto," said Richards to Bear.

"No, you won't," said Bear, whose head floated in and bobbed beside Tarquin in a swirl of primordial energies. "I feel weird."

"I know, it's just a figure of speech to make me feel better. You too, Tarquin, or Tarquinius, I suppose. Looks like you got a new lease of life, eh? Spend it well."

"Will do, old boy. Same to you."

"I…" said Richards.

"Bye bye, sunshine," said Bear.

"Are we going or what?" said Geoff, and spread brown wings.

"Yeah, yeah, we are," said Richards. He clasped his hat to his head. "Hi-ho silver!"

The giraffe leapt into the dark, moving fast as thought. Ahead of them there was a door, very much like the one by which he'd entered Waldo's world from Reality 36.

Richards turned back to look at the glowing point at the centre of the limitless black. A booming voice rumbled across the empty cyberspaces, the voice of a man who was once Giacomo Vellini.

"I grow tired of the dark," he said, and potential built within his words. "Let there be light." The titanic man opened a fist, and reality erupted from it.

"Oh, bollocks," said Geoff, as the wave front of creation roared under him, lifted him high and tipped him. Richards had the sensation of tumbling through infinity, k52's hyperdimensional coding all about him, different to the Grid, different to the Real, as solid as either.

He fell through the door. It shut with a slam.

He was back in a more mundane form of virt-space.

Hughie stood there, a pained expression on his face, a cross between a demigod and an annoyed town mayor in his fancy suit.

"Richards?" said Hughie as he patted at his stomach. He rubbed around the place k52 had speared him. "What the devil is going on?"

Richards pulled himself up off the floor of the empty Reality 36 and jammed his hat back onto his head. "You're never going to believe me." "Really?" "Well, maybe. But later. We have to go." "Why?" "Because the entirety of the Reality Realms is about to be annihilated by a nuclear strike. Might get a bit of dodgy feedback if we don't scoot. Trust me, it's no fun being at the centre of that kind of thing. Shall we?"

Hughie nodded, lost for words for once.

There was a stutter in the firewall surrounding the Reality Realms' Grid spaces, and Richards and Hughie fled back to their base units.

Otto woke groggy and nauseous, mentaug and brain swelling like the sea with thick static-like sensations. He pulled himself up and swung his legs off the immersion couch. The v-jack slipped from his head, and with its stimulatory magnets gone from his cranium he went from wildly disoriented to merely fuzzy.

He took in the room. Other than himself and the mortal remains of the unfortunate Waldo, it was empty of human occupants,

Something was wrong.

Chloe lay on the floor, case cracked.

Valdaire would never drop her phone.

Otto scooped her up and ran from the building. As he went down the dank corridors he turned all his cybernetic enhancements to maximum — risky in his state, but the complex was about to be turned into ash and, although he couldn't outrun a bomb shockwave, he would at least give it a spirited try. He rapidly assessed what could have occurred to make Valdaire be so careless with her closest friend. His mind kept returning to the same answer. Kaplinski.

He ran out into the main body of the tank garage.

Sure enough, in the failing light Kaplinski stood outside, one arm clamped round Valdaire's throat, holding her off the ground. She stared at Otto, unable to speak, her hands clutching at Kaplinski's distended forearm. She was not struggling, but hung there desperately, attempting to keep the pressure off her neck. Otto snatched up the bar Marita had hit him with earlier, and walked into the square.

"Klein!" shouted Kaplinski, "looks like I got here a little too late. How's it feel to damn the human race?"

Otto circled the other cyborg cautiously, his senses thrumming, data processed lightning-fast by his mentaug. Kaplinski's body still burned with the strange energy signatures he'd seen on the train, but he was malfunctional. His face had not healed properly, half of it still black bone. There was visible damage to his knee. Evidently the tesla cannon had compromised several of his systems, healthtech included.

He was not invulnerable, then. Otto had a chance.

"Look at us, Klein! Two broken toys, used and thrown away. k52 offered better, and you did not listen!"

"Kaplinski! In five minutes this place is going to be levelled by another of k52's traitors. You hear that? He's going to nuke this place, you along with it."

"Fitting!" said Kaplinski. Strange light shone from his retinas, the wild look of a wolf caught in headlights. "That you and I should die together, if not as comrades-in-arms, then at least in war, and as worthy enemies."

"The damn war's over, Kaplinski. Stop fighting! Let Valdaire go."

"Listen to yourself!" spat Kaplinski, "always for the other, always thinking of anything but yourself when you could take anything you wanted. You make me sick, Klein."

A counter rattled down in Otto's head. On the far side of the square stood a large Chinese airbike. His mentaug adjutant played dozens of tactical scenarios, but each one ended in failure; there was no way to get Valdaire, get on the bike and get out of there before the bomb fell. He could not possibly take on Kaplinski and win in that time.

"I wanted to be more like you, you know? I wanted to be a better man. I did try, Klein! I did try to stop fighting!"

"You didn't try hard enough, you miserable son of a bitch. Let her go!"

"So you do have some human failings, eh, Otto? Anger, that was always yours."

"I control it, Kaplinski."

The other cyborg twitched a shoulder. He looked old all of a sudden. They were both old, old, damaged men whose war was long done, shouting at each other as the world burned. Senseless.

"Seems that not all of us have the boy scout in us," said Kaplinski. Otto's adjutant registered strange patterns of EM rippling through Kaplinski's body. His forearm writhed as the very flesh reformed. Spurs of bony carbon extruded from the top, flexing as they came. Valdaire's eyes widened in as they twitched in front of her. "I will stick with the pleasures I know then, and enjoy the look on your fucking superior face as I rip the face off your friend. See you in hell, Klein."

"You're a walking cliche, Kaplinski." Otto prepared himself to attack. He wouldn't stand there and watch.

Kaplinski grabbed Valdaire by the throat, bent her over his knee and forced her eyes closer and closer to the spines on his arm.

The countdown in Otto's head flashed red and chimed. Three minutes.

Otto coiled and leapt, dropping Chloe as he came. He cannoned into Kaplinski; it was like hitting stone. He heard Valdaire scream as his barbs ripped her cheek. Kaplinski dropped her and rolled back. He skidded in crouch backwards, swollen fingers and heels ripping up the thin soil on the concrete, a savage smile on his face. "That's more like it, Klein, that's more like it."

Otto rolled, winded. Kaplinski came at him, so quick Otto struggled to follow it. He performed a salmon leap over Otto's head, landing squarely on his feet behind him. Pain exploded all over Otto as Kaplinski slammed him on his damaged shoulder. Alarms flashed in his head and his adjutant registered a deep puncture wound, scraped down off his scapula, through his subdermal plating and into his left lung.

Otto staggered. Kaplinski had put something in him. His healthtech went haywire as it fought off an invasive presence. He felt his left side go weak as his cybernetics ceased to function. He limped round to face his erstwhile corporal.

" Leutnant, Leutnant." Kaplinski walked slowly up to him, a sharp probe on his left hand morphing into a boney blade. "I expected a better fight from you." Otto's healthtech fought Kaplinski's infiltrators to a standstill, but his breath burned, and his chest was tight and painful. He sank to his knees.

"Fuck… you…"

Kaplinski smiled and drew back his bladed arm.

A rattle of heavy-calibre gunfire sounded. Kaplinski shuddered as bullets tore into him. His face twisted into annoyed surprise, and he turned round.

Behind him Valdaire sat upon the Chinese airbike, Chloe in her hand, twin cannon smoking. Kaplinski walked towards her.

Valdaire fired again and again as Kaplinski marched toward her. His skin warped and bubbled as it attempted to reform. Valdaire fired and fired. Kaplinski kept on coming.

He came to a stop in front of the bike as the guns clicked dry. Valdaire looked up at him.

Kaplinski sparked and bled, but stood yet. "You should have left when you had the chance," he said.

There was a loud clang as Otto's pipe connected with Kaplinki's damaged knee. It bent sideways, and Kaplinski toppled like a tower. Otto swung the pipe again with his right arm, smashing at the other cyborg's head, snapping it sideways. He kicked Kaplinski hard, sending him onto his chest. He drew his arm back and drove it with all his might into Kaplinski. His adjutant picked out a weakened point in Kaplinski's back, and the pipe went through, out of his side, and crunched into concrete. Otto swung his arm, knocking Kaplinski's bladed hand aside as it came at him, then stamped the pipe as hard as he could, punching it into the ground, and pinning Kaplinski in place. He stepped onto the altered cyborg's blade, braced his damaged side against Kaplinski's head, and bent the pipe back on itself. For good measure he stamped on Kaplinski's neck, crushing vertebrae. Still Kaplinski struggled.

Otto looked at Valdaire, her cheek bloody, her phone clutched in one hand, screen alive, the Chinese airbike thoroughly cracked. She looked defiant.

Lehmann really was right about her.

"Let's get the hell out of here," she said.

Otto limped over to the airbike as the countdown timer in his head hit one minute thirty and began to flash red. He climbed on clumsily, and belted the harness about himself.

Valdaire pulled back on the airbike handles, turbofans whined, and it rose up into the air. Otto looked down at Kaplinski. The other cyborg ceased struggling and turned his head almost 180 degrees to look Otto right in the eye.

I should have gone for that headshot a long time ago.

"We haven't much time," she said, and opened the throttle to maximum. Both of them hunkered into the bike's moulded seats as the air in front of the bike protested against their speed by taking on the resistance of wet concrete. The pointed nose of the bike cut through its objections, burner jets kicked in and it accelerated massively.

Above the roar of the passing sky, the bike's jets and fans, Otto heard a familiar rushing noise. He looked up. Twin contrails etched themselves across the sky, a trail of fire behind them: stratobomber.

"We need to go faster," he shouted right into Valdaire's ear. Air was ripped from his throat, and he belatedly realised he should be wearing a mask. The Soviet base was receding rapidly behind them. There was a dull explosion, and Otto saw a bright dot separate itself from the bomber high above them. "We need to go faster right now."

Valdaire twisted the throttle as fast as it would go. Speed indicators crept up to five hundred miles an hour. The atmosphere did its best to tear them from their seats.

Otto felt his left side augmentations come back online as his healthtech purged Kaplinski's infiltrating nanites from his blood stream. He looked back.

The counter in his head reached five seconds.

Thirty kilometres behind them, the bright dot of the bomb streaked groundwards, toward the army base.

He turned his face away and shut his eyes as it detonated. The light from the explosion burned white through his eyelids.

A shockwave hit them seconds later, tossing the airbike about like a leaf in the storm, Valdaire wrestled with the machine, managing, somehow, to keep it level, and then they were away from the blast front.

Valdaire turned round and smiled a tight smile. "I think we're clear," she mouthed.

Otto nodded. He looked back as fire raged through the taiga under a towering mushroom cloud.

It really was time to go the fuck home.

In the Real, over Nevada, a second remotely controlled stratobomber screeched down from the edge of space. At ten kilometres up, it dropped three bombs that little in this world could stop. They exploded as airbursts above the Nevada desert, a threeheaded mushroom rearing into the sky as they each vapourised a circular portion of scrubby land.

This physical destruction was not their principle purpose

A surge of EM energy blasted the area, frying electronics of every kind for kilometres in every direction. Although stymied by the ground, of such force was the gamma wavefront that the pulse irradiated the Realm House, the attack's target.

The faraday cage in the walls of the Realm House shorted. Spider drones fizzed and died. Cascades of sparks showered from the hardened servers as the sheer magnitude of the EM pulse overwhelmed their protective measures.

The governing machinery of the fusion reactor under the servers was scrambled. Power surged into the tokomak, overloading the reactor. It went critical within picoseconds, and, picoseconds later, a star lived and died violently in Nevada, heaving millions of tonnes of earth up into a low dome lit from within, the mass collapsing into itself to leave a crater of white-hot glass.

The entire contents of the Reality Realm servers were wiped clean nanoseconds before the Realm House was utterly destroyed. But not before k52's damaged web focused a portion of these energies in a manner that physicists would not fully understand for another few centuries. Somewhere that was not in the Real, nor in the digital ghostworld of the Grid, thirty-seven universal histories played themselves out, twelve billion years each, in mere nanoseconds of Real time, free of interference from man or thinking machine; a dead nerd's gift to totality.

He did it for his sister.