Recursion

constantine 3: 2119

Three o’clock in the morning and Constantine lay awake in bed, one of the night’s forgotten insomniacs. Red, Blue, and White were sleeping; Grey had lapsed into its habitual silence, ignoring any of Constantine’s attempts to question it about what had happened the day before.

Constantine was trying to see through the haze that surrounded his memories of the meeting. Grey had done something in order to prevent him revealing…what? The memories were second-hand: a little gift-wrapped parcel waiting for him to open once Grey had handed control of the body back over to him. Had they set the project in motion? He couldn’t remember. He could still see the vague shape of the meeting room, but as if it were encased in thick ice. Blurred shapes moved within, but he could not see what they were doing or hear what they said.

He could vaguely recall the end of the meeting, of being marched into the elevator that rode up through the deadly red sea of VNMs and out onto the duckboards. The memories gained more detail at this point, as if the ice was melting. He remembered how it had felt to stand in the hot sun for what seemed an eternity until he saw the faint speck of the approaching flier on the horizon, the definition of his memories increasing as he regained control of his life. Only when the flier dipped down to hover by him had Grey finally let go. Constantine’s life came back into sharp focus as he settled himself into the air-conditioned compartment of the flier, a cool glass of water awaiting him. Red, Blue, and White were clamoring for his attention.

It was Red who took control.-For Heaven’s sake, act naturally. The Grey personality must be some sort of failsafe system. We’ve always suspected as much.

Blue was incensed.-It took over control of the body. That’s impossible!

– Obviously not impossible, replied Red.-Now keep quiet.

Constantine had ignored them. He was too shaken by his recent possession. He felt both dizzy and incredibly tired. He fell asleep listening to the bickering of the other personalities.

Now that he wanted their company, they were sleeping. He sighed, rolled out of bed, and went to inspect the minibar.

The only whisky available was the flavored stuff they sold to teenagers. He selected a can of cola instead, popped the seal and, the container chilling in his hand, began to stroll around the room. The carpet felt soft beneath his feet, the air was hotel temperature. It was a clichй: Constantine had spent two years now traveling the world, staying in what might as well have been the same hotel room. It all added to the artificiality of his situation. He needed to step out of this stereotypical room and touch the real world, but what was the real world to someone like Constantine? To so many people alive at the start of the twenty-second century, the real world was a commodity like any other, sold shrink-wrapped, dated, and best befored. Whether it was freshly baked bread, imitation grit of the millstone baked inside it, or a weekend in a country house with a trout river running through the grounds, the real world had to have authenticity added before it could be sold. Constantine often suspected that the truth was that the real world in fact consisted of hotel rooms just like this one, and that everything else was just a 24-bit imitation of its former self.

He signaled for the window leading out onto the balcony to open. The floor-length vertical blinds parted for him, and he stepped out into the cold night. He shivered, wondering for a moment if he should go back inside to pull on a robe but rejected the idea. The cold night air felt real. He gripped the plasticized metal handrail and looked out over the city cascading down beneath him in a series of wide terraces, its lights strings of illuminated pearls criss-crossing the dark streets and buildings. Constantine’s thin body glowed palely in the moonlight. Looking down, his large stomach, overhanging his spindly legs, was glowing like a pale moon itself. He used to take time to keep himself in shape, but over the past five years the pressure of work had become too much. Blue veins shone along his white legs, the sparse hairs that had grown on his upper body through his teens and twenties had been joined over the past few years by a forest of others sprouting from his nipples or covering his sunken chest. Constantine began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. He had stepped out here to try to regain his grip on reality. What could be more real than his joke of a body as it approached middle age? The laughter died on his lips as he looked out into the night.

A skyscraper was spinning across the sleeping city toward him.

He stared in disbelief.

It was coming closer: the tower he had seen yesterday morning, just before boarding the flier. The tower with no base, a long, thin needle formed of a structure with art deco steel walls twisting around rose-petal windows, spinning slowly on its axis as it moved toward him. It cast no shadow on the silent city below, Constantine noticed, watching as it passed over a cluster of lights at the heart of the second level. A late-night party. Could they see it? Would they believe their drunken eyes if they did?

It didn’t exist. That was the most likely answer. Constantine had finally cracked. A tiny orange flier skimming down from the center to the first level passed the tower without pause. That confirmed it: he must be imagining it.

He wished his sleeping personalities would wake up.

The tower’s spin seemed to be slowing as it approached him. Now Constantine could see inside, actually look through the windows of the mirage. It was a hotel: that seemed obvious. He could see bedrooms, beds covered with white linen, some of them holding sleeping guests. The tower was now only thirty meters away. It loomed up into the night above him, blocking the half moon. Below the tower he could quite clearly see the streets of the second level.

The tower’s rotation had slowed to a crawl. Something was sliding into view around the steel and rose curve of the walls. A balcony. On it stood a figure. It was looking straight at Constantine as it slowly rotated to meet him.

Twenty meters away, ten meters. Five, four, three, two…

The tower glided smoothly to a halt bringing the figure face-to-face with Constantine.

It was Jay Apple.

“Good morning, Constantine,” she said.

“Good morning. Have I gone mad?”

Jay just shrugged.

“Not yet,” she replied. “I’ve come to give you a warning. You are not currently standing on the balcony of a hotel in Stonebreak, as you may have been led to believe. In fact, you are a personality construct, running on a computer located in Germany. Your mindset has been captured by a rival corporation. They are running it in a simulation of the real world in the hope that you will reveal the details of the Mars project.”

Constantine frowned. He gazed at Jay’s pale hand on the balcony rail. He could see the short white nails, the tiny scratch on the first joint of the forefinger of her left hand. He looked at the balcony rail itself, noting how it was formed of intertwining strips of metal in shades of grey that curled off to form leaves and stylized representations of flowers. One of the leaves had been caught by something and bent out of shape.

It all seemed so real, so convincing. If it weren’t for the fact that the building itself was floating several hundred meters above the ground, he wouldn’t have believed Jay’s words.

“When did this happen?”

Jay shrugged again.

“We don’t know. We are hoping to figure it out with your help. Have you noticed anything odd recently?”

Constantine gave a bitter laugh. “I’ve been seeing gaps beneath the sky. I see holes in alleyways and office blocks full of people staring at each other. Strangers introduce themselves to me and take me for midnight walks through the city. People seem to freeze in mid action while a second body around them carries on moving. Now I am speaking to a young woman standing on the balcony of a floating building. Yes. I guess you could say that things have been odd recently.”

He shook his head and tilted his head in thought.

“Okay. Things really started acting odd about three weeks ago. Do you think that’s when they got me?”

“Possibly. It’s something to work on.”

Constantine suddenly felt very cold. He remembered that he was naked in the middle of the freezing night.

“Can we go back inside?” he asked.

“No!” Jay held out her hand. “Stay close to me. They don’t know I’m here. We can only speak safely if you’re close to this balcony.”

Constantine was suddenly suspicious. “How? That’s a good point. If I’m a computer simulation, how can you speak to me at all? Surely they will know you’re here. Why should I listen to what you say?”

Jay rolled her eyes in frustration. “Listen, get this into your head. I’m the only person in here who’s on your side. Now, I’ve got a message for one of your personalities. Are they listening?”

“They’re asleep.”

– I’m awake, said White.

Constantine made no response. White never really slept. Savant personalities were a little different, he knew. Maybe it would do him good to keep this a secret for the moment.

“What about Grey? Is he there?” asked Jay.

“I see you’ve been fully briefed. In that case, you’ll realize that I never know anything about what Grey is up to.”

“Fine. Listen, this is a message from the real Constantine. I saw him just a few hours ago before I got in here. He said ‘GHX LPN SSD SAS EFF LKF.’”

– Probably an authentication code, said White.

“What? Can I have that again?”

“No need. Grey will have picked it up. It’ll vouch for my credentials.”

Constantine paused, but Grey maintained its habitual silence. Constantine tentatively took this to be a positive sign and withheld further judgment for the moment.

“So, how did you get in here, then? How come you haven’t been detected?”

Jay gave a little smile and looked down at her feet. She wriggled her tanned brown toes on the cool marble of the balcony and then allowed her gaze to travel up the long dark side of the tower above her. She finally spoke.

“The program that runs this simulation is full of bugs. Not surprising when we’re talking about something so complex. All programs contain memory leaks: objects get created but not destroyed. Like when you get a bit of a picture left behind on a computer display after you move things around?”

Constantine nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“Good,” said Jay. “That’s why you sometimes see two of things, or why the scenery doesn’t always hang together like it should.”

She jerked her head in the direction of the tower behind her.

“This is an object that didn’t get destroyed. The program doesn’t even know it’s here. There are no pointers to it; only termination of the program itself will lead to its resources being returned to the heap. A DIANA tempest device managed to locate the object and then effect a transference of my personality construct into it. Basically, this is my little island of friendly consciousness in a sea of hostility.”

“Oh,” Constantine said. He had temporarily forgotten the cold. Jay’s words washed over him. Something she had mentioned earlier was just beginning to sink into his awareness. He licked his lips and whispered hoarsely.

“Something you said. You said the real Constantine passed on a message to give to me.”

Jay said nothing. She simply fixed her dark gaze on Constantine and waited for him to work it out for himself.

Constantine looked back at her. She was very thin, he suddenly realized. Big, dark eyes with a slightly desperate “love me” expression. Maybe the cool, irreverent talk he had heard yesterday in the meeting was just an act. Or maybe the computer simulation hadn’t got her quite right. He was evading the subject at hand and knew it. If what Jay had told him was true, he wasn’t the real Constantine. The real Constantine was out there somewhere, sleeping in the real Stonebreak, visiting the real DIANA Arcology. What had happened at the real meeting yesterday? Had they discussed the project there? Maybe even come to some conclusion?

Would he see his wife again?

“What’s going to happen to me?”

Jay shook her head slowly. “We don’t know. We’re working on a way to get you out of here, but it will take time. The best thing you can do, to be honest, is to act normally. The resources required to generate this virtual world are significant. If they think that you’ve caught on, well…”

Constantine was suddenly incredibly cold again.

“I need to go inside,” he said.

“It’s probably just as well that you do. If we stay talking too long, it will arouse suspicion.”

“Aren’t they suspicious at the moment? Can’t they see me?”

“Not when you’re within range of this tower. There is a ghost signal emanating from here, making it look as if you’re just standing on the balcony.”

“I don’t really understand any of that. Are you coming back?”

“I will.”

Constantine nodded again. Something suddenly occurred to him. “You’re just as much a prisoner in here as I am, aren’t you?”

“I’ll see you when I can,” Jay said.

The tower was already slowly spinning, taking her back out of his virtual life. Constantine gazed after her, lost and alone.

He awoke to find a yellow stripe of sunlight streaking his body, looking like an exclamation mark. His room was fresh and clean and smelled of hot coffee and freshly baked croissants. He felt surprisingly healthy and positive, ready to take on anything. That was when the memory of the previous night settled upon him. Blue was already awake.

– Fresh coffee? Good idea.

Constantine rolled out of bed and began to pour coffee into a curiously shaped cup.

“Where were you last night?” he muttered.

– Sleeping, said Red.

– White has filled us in with all the details, said Blue.

Constantine sipped his coffee. It was a little too bitter this morning, the grounds seeming to settle on his tongue. If this was a computer simulation, it was an extremely good one. The attention to detail was incredible.

Red spoke up.

– We don’t think it would be a good idea for you to speak to us about last night. If what Jay said was true, they’ll be able to monitor you subvocalizing. You can’t afford to let them know you suspect. If you agree with us, scratch your leg.

“Spare me your spy games, Red. It’s too early.”

There was a pause. Constantine took a croissant and started to butter it. He knew that Red would be examining his last sentence to see if he had given anything away.

– Okay, said Red.-Maybe we are being too mysterious, but we can’t afford to take any chances.

“Do you think it’s true?” asked Constantine.

– Will you stop it? Okay. We think it is. Grey is saying nothing, as usual. We are assuming that he is hovering around in the background somewhere. White keeps announcing the authentication code, just in case he didn’t hear it. We’re guessing that if there were something wrong, he’d say so. As he hasn’t, we’ll carry on as normal.

– It does seem the safest course of action, said Blue. All we have to do is keep quiet about the final destination of the Martian construction. That’s what we’ve been doing so far anyway. If Jay had suggested we do anything counter to our normal course of action, then we would have had to discuss things further. As it is, we’ll just carry on as we were.

Constantine nodded and took a bite of the croissant. It tasted delicious.

“Okay. I agree. What are we doing this morning?”

– Nothing. The second meeting isn’t scheduled until late this afternoon, remember? said Red.-It seems pretty obvious that whoever has caught us already knows an awful lot of things that were supposed to be top secret. You just had to look around the people in that meeting yesterday to deduce what they already know. They knew that the plan involves the hyperdrive-

– Warp drive, interrupted Blue.

– The warp drive, continued Red testily, — plus it has something to do with the AIs. Most importantly, they have figured out that Mars is involved. The big question is: what don’t they know? There must be something, otherwise they wouldn’t have us in here.

– Agreed, said Blue.-Our problem will be going along with them sufficiently so as to not raise their suspicions, while simultaneously not giving anything away.

– We have got one advantage, of course, said Red.-Grey. They probably don’t know about him, or what he is capable of.

– Pretty much the same as us, then, said Blue.

The quorum never met in the same place twice. The level of paranoia among the group could never be high enough, not when you considered what they were conceivably fighting. Constantine appreciated the irony of their second meeting place. They were in the balcony of a concert hall, looking down to the stage where the black-and-white-clad musicians of an orchestra were tuning up. Glancing around the room, he could not recall ever seeing such sensitive recording equipment before. There were devices here that could record the noise made by the Brownian motion of dust in the moisture of his eyes. The whole room was strung with directional microphones that could build up a sound picture of the local environment that was almost perfect in its reproduction. It was the ideal place to hold a meeting where secrecy was paramount.

Marion Lee had been waiting for the signal to show that the microphones were switched on. As the signal was given, she relaxed and began the meeting.

“Good afternoon, everyone. Let us begin.”

She coughed, then continued in a quiet voice. “People have long suspected a hidden intelligence guiding our development, an AI immeasurably more powerful than the others. Some people believed it first emerged in the early twenty-first century.”

Gillian Karajan nodded in agreement.

“References in the entertainments from the period would confirm that. However, you cannot take that in any way as proof of the Watcher’s existence. If you examine the historical context, you’ll see that these rumors would be inevitable. Look at the people living at the time. Only the younger generations would have lived out their life under constant surveillance, whether by cameras or phone tracking or even computer modeling. Remember, at that time, there were many who had reached adulthood before even the Internet came into existence. Increased levels of surveillance would have been very obvious to that society.”

The five of them were spread over two rows of seats, making conversation difficult. They leaned toward Gillian to better hear what was being said. Below them, a flutist practiced the same passage over and over again.

Gillian continued speaking confidently. She seemed to have quickly come to terms with her enforced exile from the Oort cloud. Maybe she understood the need for it. Or maybe there was some more sinister reason. Maybe it was just bad programming.

“…the tension generated by the interactions between the older and younger members of that society are unknown today. Nobody alive today has grown up with a true understanding of the word ‘privacy.’ Back then, they still had some concept, one fed and fanned by elderly relatives. Is it any wonder that people then began to see conspiracies where none existed? Is it any wonder the myth of the Watcher arose?”

Jay grinned. “So, you don’t believe in the stories then, Gillian?”

Gillian looked annoyed. “Listen, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think that I’m correct in saying that I know more about AIs and their history than anyone else here. If I were to believe or disbelieve the stories, it would be based on something more than a general paranoia that they are out to get us.”

There was an embarrassed silence until Masaharu spoke up gently to defuse the situation.

“I agree with Gillian, however from the opposite direction. Human beings have always sought to abdicate responsibility for their own actions. They have handed responsibility for their deeds to their sensei, to their leaders, or to a higher power. I see this yearning for a mysterious all-powerful AI that controls humanity’s actions and seeks to lead them on the path to enlightenment as nothing more than a manifestation of that same desire.”

Gillian nodded in approval

“However,” continued Masaharu, causing Gillian to glance suspiciously in his direction, “however, this is just my opinion. We cannot base our actions on the opinions of one person. We must act and plan as if the Watcher is real. This we have already agreed upon.”

“Good,” said Marion. “I’m sorry, Gillian, but we are treading over old ground here. It has already been established that, for the purposes of this project, we must assume that the Watcher is real. Just as we’ve had to assume that the Watcher did not exist until at least 2030.”

Constantine felt a little flicker of surprise that they knew this fact. He began to wonder at the need for himself to be imprisoned within this simulation at all. Surely if they knew this they could deduce the rest?

He looked around the room and wondered again if what he had been told was true. Was he really inside a computer? It all looked so real. He watched a woman un-peeling an old-fashioned chocolate bar, carelessly dropping the strips of foil on the floor before her. She was idly watching the activity below her as she placed piece after sticky piece in her mouth. Again, Constantine wondered at the programming that must have gone into the scene before him. The attention to detail was evident all around him. If he glanced up at the ceiling, he could see the looping patterns formed by the shielded wires as they led to the directional microphones. Someone had twisted blue duct tape around the one directly above him to aid in its identification. Who would have thought a simulation could go to that level of detail? Or was it a simulation? Grey should know, but Grey wasn’t speaking.

The only safe plan was to follow the course he had agreed upon with Red and Blue earlier: play along, but try to reveal nothing.

Jay was holding forth. This Jay seemed so much more confident than her equivalent on the floating balcony last night. That slightly lost look was missing here. Was it something the simulation couldn’t reproduce?

“We’ve got the expert here now, haven’t we? Why don’t we ask Gillian? Is 2030 a safe date to consider as a minimum point for the existence of the Watcher? Does anything in your work in the Oort cloud lead you to believe this to be incorrect?”

“It depends what level of AI we are talking about,” Gillian replied. “In the context of the discussion at hand, it seems reasonable. There are minimum levels of resources in terms of processing power and memory and so on required to establish an AI as we know it today. Those weren’t really available until 2030.”

“What about the Martian VNM?” Jay asked.

“Far too low. That system was first postulated in the 1980s. Okay, they couldn’t build it back then, but they could work out the parameters. The idea of dropping a hundred tons of materiel on Mars and allowing factories to build themselves was just too tempting. The actual design for the system wasn’t fully mapped until 2025. We have complete understanding of how it worked; there is no space in there for a modern AI to form.”

“Okay,” Jay said. “Then I’ll ask the one question that nobody here has ever answered to anyone’s satisfaction. If the Watcher does exist, where does it come from?”

Jay sat in the row in front of Constantine. She leaned back, tilting her head over the back of her seat so that she was looking at him upside down. Her black hair spilled down, revealing how painfully thin her face was. There was a wicked glint of fun in her eyes that had been softened in the Jay that had visited him last night. Constantine felt a sudden twisting in his stomach. Blue must have felt something, too. His voice suddenly filled Constantine’s head.

– Watch it! This could be it! This is what they are trying to find out!

– But we don’t know the answer, said Red, puzzled.

Constantine didn’t know what to say. To his relief and surprise, Gillian answered first.

“No one knows,” she said. “There are lots of theories. My favorite is that the AI was the result of an evolutionary process: lots of tiny AI applets constantly coming into existence and dying, but just enough of them surviving and linking up via the Internet to form a rudimentary neural net. Or maybe it was the result of computer evolution. There were a few projects trying to simulate that process at the start of the twenty-first century. It wouldn’t be impossible that one of them evolved intelligence.”

Jay interrupted. “I’ve seen estimates from those times, based on contemporaneous technology, that said it would take around three hundred years before artificial intelligence came about by those means.”

“Yes,” said Gillian patiently. “And other contemporary estimates predicted it would take ten years. Choose which one you want to believe in.”

“What do you think, Constantine?” asked Jay.

– Tell her that the estimates for the time taken for intelligence to evolve all depend upon your definition of intelligence, said Red quickly.

Constantine repeated Red’s words.

Jay nodded thoughtfully. Masaharu intervened with a soft, deliberate tone.

“That may be so, but it adds nothing to our discussion. However intelligence was measured back then, whether by Turing test or Lau’s conjecture, has no bearing on our discussion. This is the question we must ask ourselves again: is 2030 a safe cutoff date? Can we assume the Watcher did not exist until then?”

He paused. Constantine became uncomfortably aware that they were all looking at him.

– What should he say? asked Red.-He’s got to say something without alerting them to our understanding of the true situation!

– We may have some breathing space, said Blue.-Look at the stage.

Constantine’s gaze flickered down to where the first violinist had walked out to join the orchestra. The crowd that now filled the concert hall clapped politely. The volume of applause rose as the conductor followed her out. He nodded to the first oboe, who blew a note, and one by one the rest of the musicians joined in. Constantine always felt a little thrill at the sound of an orchestra tuning up.

There was a moment’s pause and then the sound of a trumpet. Dvorбk’s Eighth Symphony. Constantine smiled appreciatively. Dvorбk had been the son of a pork butcher. After composing this symphony, he had left his native Czechoslovakia to travel to the United States of America, where he had been appointed director of the National Conservatory of Music. During his free time, he would often walk to the railway station to watch the steam trains, or to the docks to watch the ships. What would he make of Constantine’s world, where people could travel through the solar system and cause great cities to be built from a few tiny machines? What would he make of the moon colonies, or people such as Gillian who had lived in the Oort cloud? What would he think of people sitting down to listen to his music in a concert hall where recording equipment was set up to blank out as much interior and exterior noise as possible in the quest for near perfect reproduction? A hall where the electronics formed the audio equivalent of a Faraday cage, so that a group of people could hold a secret meeting, secure in the knowledge that their conversation could not be recorded. Only the orchestra, now swelling in timbre as it developed the first theme, could be heard.

Constantine sat back. He could hear Blue humming snatches to himself as the music proceeded, occasionally pointing out items of interest.

– Now listen to this: this theme will be introduced again by the basses in the final movement.

– Never mind that, said Red. What are we going to do when this piece finishes? How long have we got, anyway?

– About thirty-six minutes, usually, replied Blue. I’d guess thirty-three if the conductor maintains this gain on the tempo all the way through.

– Yeah. Well. But what’s Constantine going to say? We’ve got problems. Is this what they’re after?

– I doubt it, said Blue.-Why go to the trouble of putting him in a simulation to ask a question they themselves have as much chance of working out as we do? How could anyone work out when the Watcher came into existence?

– Good point, said Red.

– I say that we just tell them we think 2030 is a safe cutoff date. If that’s the reason they trapped us in here, more fool them.

– Okay, said Red.-I concur. However, we are merely deferring the problem. We need to know what they are really trying to find out so we can avoid giving them the answer. If we follow our current path of divulging no information, they are bound to become suspicious.

– Fine, said Blue. How are we going to find that out? We can hardly ask them. “Erm, excuse me, Marion, what is it that we should be avoiding telling you. We don’t want to-”

– Come on, Blue. You can be funnier than that. No. We’ll have to get Constantine to ask the other Jay. The Night Jay.

Constantine had half closed his eyes, ostensibly to listen to the music, but really to pay closer attention to the conversation going on inside himself. The person in the seat behind shifted position, pressing their knees into Constantine’s chair back. Constantine straightened himself up, making himself more comfortable, and then pretended to yawn.

He covered his mouth while subvocalizing, “I’m not sure the Night Jay will have a method of contacting the outside world.”

– She’ll have to give it a try. What else can we do? answered Red.

– Fine. Back to the point at hand. What are we going to do when this concert ends? asked Blue.

– Make our excuses and leave. Constantine is going to have to pretend to be sick or something.

– Where’s Grey when we need him? Blue asked petulantly.

– Take his absence as an indication that we’re doing our job properly, answered Red.-He’d be bound to interrupt if we made a mistake.

– If he’s still there, answered Blue.-Hasn’t it struck you as odd that we still have an independent consciousness? We must be an incredible drain on the resources of the host machine.

Constantine felt a little shiver of excitement run up his back. The idea had already occurred to him, but he hadn’t mentioned it with good reason. He kept quiet for the moment and just listened to the pair of them arguing. He wondered if they would raise the corollary to that thought.

Red spoke up.

– The idea had occurred to me. It all depends how the capture was made, I suppose. It could be argued that we are part of Constantine’s mindset, albeit an artificially amplified part. Imagine a picture being taken, ostensibly of a flower, but capturing the image of a beetle crawling across a leaf in the same moment.

– And we’re the beetles? Thanks.

– You’re welcome. You understand the analogy. I’m not sure if it holds, but it is a theory, and a theory that is preferable to another that has occurred to me.

– What’s that?

– That we are not the original personality constructs. That we have been planted by the enemy to steer Constantine down the wrong path. I’m sure this has already occurred to you, Constantine?

Constantine grinned faintly despite himself. “Yes,” he muttered.

– So why give yourself away? asked Blue.

– You already know the answer to that, Blue.

– I know. Because the enemy knew that Constantine would figure out for himself the fact that we might be fakes, so by me raising the idea first, we gain credibility in his eyes. Well, I’ll tell you this, Constantine, I certainly feel real.

– Of course you do, answered Red, — but you may just have been programmed that way. You may be an AI designed to believe you are Blue, with only the slightest modification to twist you to the enemy’s purpose.

– Oh, I hate this. And all this doublethink is making me miss the concert…

– Well, it needed to be said. It may also explain why we’re not hearing from Grey. Maybe they’ve deactivated that personality after yesterday’s little exhibition.

“And maybe we are not in a computer simulation at all,” added Constantine, subvocalizing. “Maybe it’s just another bluff. Maybe the Watcher is trying to put us off.”

– That does sound plausible, said Blue.-Just listen to those clarinets. Nobody would deliberately simulate someone playing that badly, surely?

The concert ended and the meeting broke up in disarray, Constantine claiming that he needed to contemplate what had been said. Marion wasn’t happy. Only one more meeting was permitted. Constantine and Marion locked gazes for some time. Then the group was pulled apart by the random movement of the audience, Constantine joining a stream that swept him down the shallow carpeted stairs and out through a small door at the side of the hall. He walked in quiet contemplation, a ghost in the center of a colorful, chattering crowd discussing the concert.

They spilled out of the narrow doorway into the yellow evening. The disk of the sun could be seen across the empty plain, sinking beneath the horizon. The city of Stonebreak was slowing down, preparing for the transition to its night-time activities. Constantine slowed to a halt and allowed the crowd to divide itself and stream around him. A forgotten island in the middle of the homeward-bound traffic. The classical columns and entablatures of the concert hall stood behind him; before him lay the wide, flagged space of the fourth level.

– Look to your left, said Red.

Constantine did so. There was Mary Rye. She gazed at Constantine in blurred disbelief, then mumbled something.

– We penitents are all mixed up, translated Red, reading her lips.-What does that mean?

Constantine noted the bottle gripped firmly in her right hand. The hem of her green skirt was stained with something yellow. Constantine stepped toward her, but she shook her head, turned and began to lurch away in the other direction. She was quickly swallowed up by the remnants of the concert crowd.

“Mary!” called Constantine.

– She’s ignoring you, said Red.

“Thanks, Red,” muttered Constantine sarcastically. He began to run after her, pushing his way through the people. He couldn’t see her.

“Where’s she gone?” he muttered.

– Headed toward the elevators to the third level, answered Red.-Look to two o’clock.

Constantine saw her. She clutched her bottle as she scuttled across the flags, head low and shoulders hunched as if she was trying to make herself smaller. Constantine caught up with her and placed one hand on her shoulder.

“Mary,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

She turned to him, and her face was a picture of panic and fear.

“Go away, please,” she whispered. “They told me what they’d do if I tried to contact you again.” She waved the bottle in his face. “They gave me this when I promised not to speak to you.”

It was a good brand, noted Constantine. He felt a pang of real pity for this poor woman, driven further down the road to destruction by his supposed protectors. Mary turned and began to march away. There was a blur of movement and for a moment there were two Marys. One frozen before him, the other staggering toward the escalators. The pity inside Constantine evaporated instantly as he recognized what was happening. She wasn’t real. She was just part of the simulation in which he was trapped. He stepped forward, into the picture of Mary that remained smeared on the air before him, and the picture vanished as he moved within it. Poor old Mary. Just another object that wasn’t repainted properly.

Blue pointed it out as they waited their turn in the line for the elevators.

– I wonder why they’re running the Mary storyline for you? What are they trying to say?

Constantine walked all the way back to his hotel, stopping on the way for a meal in one of the cafes that seemed to appear suddenly as evenign fell. He ate sausages and sauerkraut with cold lager and then sat back with a large pot of coffee to listen to the conversation inside himself. Nobody was speaking. In the end he lost interest, paid the bill with his untraceable card and pushed his way back out into the warm night.

The floating building was parked outside his hotel. Its base hung only a couple of meters above the ground, the lit doorway of his hotel’s lobby shining through the gap. The top of the tower rose up into the night sky; there was a light shining from one of the windows in the higher floors. A dark figure seemed to move within, but Constantine couldn’t be sure. It was too far away to see clearly.

Jay was again leaning on her balcony, her arms folded on the rail as she watched Constantine approach.

He grinned up at her as he reached the base of the tower, reminded of Romeo and Juliet. Constantine rather liked this Jay. Her dark hair surrounded her thin face as she leaned over to look down at him and he noted again how much more vulnerable she looked in this incarnation.

“Hello.” Constantine smiled up at her.

“There’s something going on,” she replied, looking worried. “About three hours ago there was a rush of activity like I’ve never seen before.”

– When we saw Mary, suggested Red.

– Or when we were watching the concert. The time is too imprecise, said Blue.

– We need to know, continued Red.-You’ll have to ask her. We need to know what they’re after.

Constantine shook his head. He felt as if he was being nagged.

“I know, I know,” he muttered. He raised his voice.

“We need some help, Jay. We need to know what the enemy is trying to find out. We’re being tied in knots. We don’t know what to say or when to keep quiet. We need information.”

Jay shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer.”

“Very well. Ask DIANA. They must have some ideas.”

Jay slumped forward, elbows still resting on the railing. She looked thoroughly fed up.

“I can’t speak to DIANA.”

Constantine frowned. “I thought they were working on a way to get me out of here.”

Jay’s expression was a mixture of guilt and sadness. “Don’t you realize that the only reason that I can exist in this place is because I have no links with any other object inside the simulation?”

– Except us, said Red.

“Except me,” said Constantine.

Jay frowned. “I know that, and do you know what a risk it is, me just speaking to you now? You realize there are two personalities in here who will suffer if they catch you? There is no safe way to send out a message.”

Constantine felt chastened. He looked down at his feet for a moment. The tower cast no shadow here, he noticed; the moon lit up the entire pavement before him.

He sighed slowly. “I’m sorry, Jay, but we’re running a great risk speaking to those people in the quorum. Either we tell them the secret they’re trying to find out, or, worse, we say nothing and raise their suspicions that we’re holding something back.”

Jay said nothing. Her hands slid up her face and she began to fiddle with her earlobes in the manner of a little girl. She suddenly realized what she was doing and snatched her hands away, then stared up the side of the tower at the lit upper window.

Finally she spoke. “Okay. You’ve convinced me. We’ll have to take the risk. I don’t like it, but there you are. I’m going to try and send a message to the real world. I hope our steganography is good enough. Give me a minute.”

She turned and walked through the open door behind her into the tower. Constantine stood alone for a moment, a forgotten man beneath the night sky. The moonlight picked out the edges of the dark clouds high above with white highlights. Behind him was the brightly lit lobby of his own hotel. He wondered at the way its guests and staff didn’t notice the huge black tower floating just outside their door.

Jay walked back out onto the balcony, holding something in her hand.

“If they don’t pick this up the moment it leaves the vicinity of the tower, we should be okay. Heaven knows how they’ll get a message back, though. Catch it, we don’t want it to break.”

She tossed the object in Constantine’s direction. It tumbled end over end as it fell. There was a brief discontinuity just before it hit the ground when it seemed to shift in its position slightly to the left. The effect reminded him of a stone being dropped in water.

He dived for it too late. A bottle. It bounced on the ground, once, twice, but didn’t break. His heart pounding, he bent to pick it up. An empty green wine bottle, the space inside it twisted into significant forms.

A message in a bottle? Constantine straightened to look back at Jay but she had gone. The tower was already two hundred meters up and rising.

He suddenly felt incredibly lonely. Gripping the bottle tightly, he walked into his hotel.