Omega point

CHAPTER 2

Richards came online and wished he hadn't.

"Ouch," he said. "Ooh, ouch, that really, really hurts." He raised his hands to his face, but the movement tripped off a wave of nausea that nearly did for him, so he let them fall back onto the smooth, cold floor where he lay, eyes screwed shut, his senses spinning in precisely the opposite direction to his stomach. It was a most uncomfortable sensation. Once he'd gathered his thoughts, he decided to turn his pseudo-biological feeds off, take the meat out of his machine and run off pure numbers, so to speak.

When he found he could not was when he pulled himself together enough to sit up. The effort of it made him whimper, and he threw up all down his front. He sat there, quivering. It was indescribably revolting. As a Class Five, and a curious one at that, he was open enough to most physical sensations, but there were limits.

He looked down at himself. Legs, arms, the usual, if you were one of the real people, very different to his usual. He poked at his thigh experimentally. It felt like flesh. He looked at his hand; it was flesh. He groaned, the wash of pain from his head making him instantly regret it. "k52's idea of a joke," he said.

He'd been in simulations of the human body before; practically every day, in fact, because that's how he liked to relax in his virtual office, and how he liked to deal with people and other numbers on the Grid. When out and about in the Real the robotic carriages he rode were invariably anthropomorphic, but all these masks had something extra, or lacked something fundamental, sometimes both. Virtual or real, they were that little bit more and that little bit less than human. More importantly, they were all under his complete control.

This one was not. This one felt alarmingly like actual meat. He tried to reach to snag at the world's underlying code, but he might as well have been trying to telepathically communicate with a goldfish — nothing but deafening silence. This body he wore — this body he was, for it felt as if he and it were one, a feeling he had never had before — filled the place where the clickety thrum of the Grid ordinarily lived with weird little sounds, the shush-roar of circulation, the creak of joints as he shifted, the slither of wet, curled things in his abdomen. He began to feel ill again. Presently, he was.

"How do they stand it?" he groaned. He staggered up. He stood grasping his knees and gaping reflexively, saliva and bile dripping from his mouth. He made a few pathetic sounds and he surprised himself by feeling better, although it was long seconds before he could summon the will to wipe his chin and stand erect.

He took in his surroundings through eyes that only grudgingly focused.

The first thing he noticed was that there were no doors.

He was in the chilly hall of a stately home, flash with Victorian new money. A wide marble staircase swept up to a vulgar balcony, its banister fashioned from woods long since enthusiastically furnitured into extinction in the Real. Horrid touches caught his eye — panting gargoyles, tapestries of pale, rangy men with thinning hair and piercing eyes, stuffed animals possessed of far too much life. To his right a tree trunk smouldering in the fireplace provided the only light; something nasty, obscured in soot, decorated the fireback. A broad archway led out of the hallway to his left, polished black and white diamond marble floor tiles disappearing into the dark.

As for the doorways, there were the door jambs, framing familiar spaces with wood, but when it came to there being an actual door, the walls were plain as bone.

"This is interesting," muttered Richards, and reached to push back his fedora, as was his habit when he was thinking. His hand came away when it found the hat missing, and he remembered it had gone to nothing when he'd dived into the Gridpipe leading here, the rogue k52's shanghaied cyber-realm.

Richards was not terribly surprised when he discovered he could not make a new hat. A mirror caught his eye. He walked over to it. There was just enough light to make himself out. He was in a copy of the simulated body he normally wore in virtspaces: middling height, mid-forties — twenty more years than his actual age — brown hair with the beginnings of a widow's peak. He had the face of a gumshoe, tired and worn out on too much whisky and too many worthless women; brown trenchcoat of a gumshoe; threadbare suit of a gumshoe — now wet with vomit; red tie of a gumshoe. Richards liked mid-twentieth-century detective stories; he was a security consultant and a security consultant was a kind of detective, so he styled himself after their fashion. It was all play; he was far more than that.

He missed his hat. And this body felt far too real. And he stank of sick.

"Bollocks," he said.

A squeaking of shoes approached from the left-hand archway. A figure dressed in full butler's regalia appeared and made its stiff-backed way into the entrance hall. Its head was the last thing to resolve itself from the shadows. The head of a dog.

Grizzled black hair covered the dog's head. Sharp ears twitched alertly on the crown. The muzzle was long, the bastard offspring of auntie's Scottie dog and the big bad wolf. Red eyes smouldered. Dog-headed man was a misnomer; it was more like a dog in the shape of a man, a man-shaped dog, thought Richards. He found it strangely disturbing, a feeling he couldn't shake.

"Good evening, sir," said the man-dog. It sniffed distastefully at Richards' disarray.

"Nice outfit," said Richards.

The man with the dog's head inspected itself, looking in turn at its frock coat, well-tailored trousers with a light pinstripe, charcoal waistcoat, pocket watch and shoes.

They look uncomfortable, thought Richards, but what the hell kind of feet did a man with a dog's head have anyway?

"It is the uniform of my office, nothing more," said the dog. "This is my master's house."

"Yeah, well. It's natty," said Richards.

The dog stared at him levelly, panting lightly. His breath smelled superficially of mint but it covered meat, drool and things left best uneaten. "Might I ask what you are doing in my master's house?"

"Beats the shit out of me," said Richards.

"There is," said the dog, clasping its hands behind its back and flexing its spine, "no need for language like that. This is my master's house."

"And your master would not approve?"

The dog looked from side to side, ears twitching independently of one another, listening to something Richards could not hear.

"Nice place he has here. No doors."

The dog looked at the bare walls framed by wood as if it were news to him. "It is my master's house," said the dog. "I guard the entryway. It is my master's house. Good evening, sir."

"Right. You're not very bright. Let me see, limited responses… Hmmm. You're on a loop, aren't you? Hey! Hey!" Richards snapped his fingers. "Where is your master?"

The dog quirked its head. Suddenly it was standing right in front of Richards. "This is my master's house. Might I ask what you are doing, doing here in my master's house?"

"We've done this bit before," said Richards. He turned away to examine his options, but the dog was in front of him wherever he looked.

"I am afraid I must ask you to leave." The dog shifted again. Another flicker; it became huge, clothes ripped, clawed hands dripping blood. "This is my master's house. Might I ask what you are doing, doing here in my master's house?"

"I'll be leaving," said Richards, but he could not move.

"Get out, I say, get out, get ooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut!" The dog's voice broke into a howl and it threw its head back. The howl increased in volume until the ornaments rattled. Richards screwed his eyes shut against the torrent of dog breath and spittle.

Dying is becoming an annoying habit of mine, he thought. But he didn't die.

The howl abruptly stopped. The temperature dropped, and he was confronted with a sense of openness.

"Outside? I'm outside," Richards said, and cracked open an eye.

He was outside. Score one for the great detective, he thought.

A knocker clinked on its plate as if a door had been slammed, although it was attached to a bricked-in space where a door wasn't. It was a lonely noise, rapidly swallowed by the night. The outside lantern, a baroque thing held aloft by a grimacing centaur, went out, rolling up its tongue of light.

"k52, what the hell are you playing at?" said Richards. He sighed as his eyes adjusted themselves to the dark; stupid human eyes with poor night vision. Ornamental woods gone wild surrounded the house. Wind rustled through trees silhouetted against a starless sky, black marbled purple and blue, a pregnant moon hanging large, its light casting the landscape in stark monochrome.

A loud crack came from the woods. Richards wasn't sure if he should feel afraid or not, but he did; he could not disengage himself from his fear. Being at the mercy of his emotions was new to him. He decided to play it safe and get back in, to break the dog-man's limited programme and find out what the hell was going on. He half-expected k52 to burst from the trees, and that would be trouble.

The house was massive but not large, its solidity giving it a weight far beyond that of its dimensions, and Richards went round it in no time at all. A cruel iron fence kept him at a distance. The stone was so dark it sucked in what little light there was, so he couldn't make much out. He looked back to the woods. The trees rattled, branches beckoning him.

Richards grasped the fence and heaved himself astride it. He fell awkwardly. His trailing leg snagged, cloth and flesh tore with equal ease on an iron barb, and he landed gracelessly on a flowerbed full of trash.

"Shit!" he hissed. He scrambled up again. His leg throbbed dully. He probed the wound. "Ouch," he said. His fingers glistened black in the moonlight. "This is far too realistic."

Blood dripped down Richards' leg as he limped to the wall and felt along it for a door. As inside, so outside: no windows or doors. The frames were there, but the spaces between were as unseeing as skin healed over empty eye sockets. He reached a space where the moon shone unimpeded by trees and looked harder. A nightmare scene was coaxed from the shadows, painted where window glass should be. A ghastly face with too many teeth, flaking eyes fixed on his. Night drew in closer, hunting. Sibilant promises came from the windows. Richards caught the odd word.

"That's not very nice," he said.

He went round the house again inside its skirt of iron. He swore and grumbled as his feet encountered hard rocks and unmentionable softness. All the windows were the same, daubed with horror. When he was sure there was no way in, he scrambled back over the railings, more carefully than before.

An owl shrieked. Too loud, too close.

"Woods it is after all," he said. He was trying to feel brave. Richards felt fear ordinarily all right, but not in the way that men did, and not for the same reasons. When he did feel fear as men do, he did it because he wanted to, and it was fake; it could be deactivated. This could not. This was people fear, glandular fear. He glanced behind him, enjoying the novelty of ungovernable emotion even as it quickened his heart and impelled him to hurry down the drive. The crunch of gravel underfoot made him wince. A gust of wind tickled the trees. Dead rhododendron leaves rustled in the understorey; a sterile, woody scent carried from them.

He made sure he kept to the middle of the road, away from the fringes of the woods, just in case.

Richards turned from looking behind himself just in time to walk into a musty barrier, as solid as a brick wall, in a dirty fur coat.

Richards spat hair from his mouth and looked up, and up.

Heavy paws dangled like mallets from long arms. Close-set eyes burned cold in a face as long as a wet Wednesday. Teeth glinted in the moonlight. A tiny Roman centurion's helmet sat atop a blockish head. A damp, heavy smell hit Richards like a billiard ball in a sock.

"A bear," said Richards, savouring the cocktail of mild surprise and terror his new body furnished him with.

"Damn right," said the bear. It jabbed a dagger-long claw at Richards' face. "By all rights I should eat you, sunshine."

"I'd rather you didn't," said Richards.

The bear didn't. "It's your lucky day. No devouring of prisoners," it said. "Regulations."

"Oh, good," said Richards.

"But hey!" The bear smiled a forest of teeth and held up a claw. "I can do this." The bear punched him full in the face, and Richards found the stars the sky was missing.