Better Angels (54 page)

—the present is inevitable—

A flash of something, a place where bands and orchestras played all day and into the night, where singers sang, poets spoke in their exaggerated rhythms, performance artists slipped swiftly from medium to message, strolling entertainers, joyboys, and gleegirls staged short absurd guerrilla theatre pieces then vanished like smoke only to appear elsewhere unannounced (and sometimes unwanted), where a thousand joyous virtuals hung in the air, created just for a day, for a world that no longer was.

The flash disappeared. The multitudes of Michael Dalke drew themselves up into a gray creature rising from a turbulent gray pool: a grotesque head and face, twisted shoulders and arms and torso, bowed legs and splayed feet. In shape remotely like a large man, the nightmare figure came stealing through the darkness, past the gray bogs and marshes, past the moldflats and slimefens, making its smoke-silent way to the south, toward the only human structure in sight, a technical compound surrounded by electrical fencing.

As the creature of gray and night approached, the main power in the compound abruptly guttered like a candle and went dead, megawatts of power sucked out of the very air. Darkness and the creature fell upon the sentries unawares, tearing them limb from limb, eviscerating them, snapping and breaking and sucking clean their flesh and bones in an instant. Hazy memories of the deaths of the Mongrel Clones and Dr. Schwarzbrucke flashed through the creature in its multitudes. Amid the blood and blackness and screams of men and women, some managed to strike at the attacker with laser batons or shoot bullets or flares into it, but these had no discernible effect. The nightthing took its way with them and, when it was done, moved on toward the compound, leaving behind it a score of corpses and a security tech (woman half-mad from having witnessed the deaths of so many of her comrades) clutching a fletchette-gun and screaming “Nightsake! Nightsake!” again and again.

The nightthing had no idea what the woman meant by the word. What was it she was saying? “Night’s ache”? “Night’s sake”? “Night’s egg?” “Night forsaken”? No matter. It was a good name. The colony-organism, shaped into quasi-human form and set into action by forces it could not comprehend, made its way through the compound, leaving blood-steaming and gore-adorned walls and furniture and machinery in its wake.

At last it came and stood before the largest building in the compound, its central pyramid. Before the building floated a skysign, a slowly-rotating triangular pyramid imprinted on every face with a black and gold logo: three stylized bees, one at each corner of an equaliteral triangle, fleeing a stylized ravenous animal’s head (at once boar and wolf and bear) at the center of the triangle. Beneath the logo, on every face of the pyramid, was the word Cyberpomp. The nightsake reached up and smashed down the floating sign without a thought.

Approaching the wide doorsill of the building, the creature caused the great metal doors to burst inward with barely a touch. The nightsake itself rushed into the hall, its eyes glittering like those of a wild staring nocturnal animal caught in a flash of light against the darkness. It surveyed the room full of men and women asleep in their body armor, particularly the almost twinned male and female sleeping on a raised dais near the center of the hall.

The nightsake pounced upon a young warrior, tearing him to pieces despite all armor, bit through his bones and gulped his torn flesh before the youth had a chance to wake or utter a sound. Swiftly the monstrous thing had devoured him completely and just as swiftly turned to leap upon its next victim, the male warrior on the dais who still lay stretched out motionless on his sleeping mat.

But as the nightsake swept its clawlike hands toward him, the intended victim slipped up onto one elbow and with a long-familiar motion and grip caught a clawed hand as it was coming down and clenched it hard, unbalancing the nightsake’s momentum.

“I need to borrow you,” said the intended victim calmly to the nightsake (and to Mike Dalke’s mind dispersed throughout it). “All of you.”

The nightsake saw the face of Jiro Yamaguchi before it and let out an unearthly howl of surprise. Despite which, the woman on the dais still slept.

Jiro’s consciousness did not so much split or bifurcate then as come to occupy more than one universe simultaneously—the nanotechnized greyworld, and the world of human dreams and minds. Much nearer the surface of the game, several of the players on Jiro’s list had called for a share-game and were functioning for the first time as a team. For the dream-tormented Jhana Meniskos, Jiro saw, this “team” manifested itself as a silvery translucent orb, a soap bubble blown from mercury metal adrift upon a couch of sunset-fired cloud. In the bubble, etherealized human faces were cut in bas-relief from the virtual sky and tinted that sky’s same silvery-blue hue. All eyes of Jhana’s teammates turned forward toward one vision.

In the virtual space around and before her appeared the LOGOS the voice-over spoke of: an immense cybernetic data construct, a shape of thought almost beautiful beyond thought, a shining global village-on-the-hill rising from the flatland gridspace of the Plains of Euclid, a cybertopia stretching onward and onward, mathematical kingdom of orderly orchestrated bustling, as if the greatest symphony of most glorious music ever played had been flash-frozen in the form of a City of Light, celestial harmony transubstantiated in an instant into the radiant architecture of a Neon New Jerusalem.

Hyperreal, surreal, ethereally unreal, there was something disturbingly “too ordered” about the cool perfection of this City of LOGOS. For all its too godly cleanliness, however, it was not nearly as disturbing as the CHAOS. The inhumanly perfect order of the LOGOS did not go on forever. In innumerable regions the dark matter of CHAOS appeared, fluid as ocean waves and dry as desert dunes, thing of all shapes and no shape of all things, Illusion and Error breaking through and turning to disarray the clear lines of the Plains, battering discordantly against the harmony of the Shining City, drowning and choking out and covering in obscurity the structures of light, as if some great Earthly city were falling to ruin beneath the waves of a final flood, or sinking abandoned into the desert of time.

The silver orb, the mercury-metal soap bubble Jhana and her fellow players were contained in, burst dissolvingly. With the vast computing power of the LOGOS behind them, fully integrated with that power, they moved like a tall soft wall of driving sunlit wind against the uncreating dimness.

As it tumbled backwards in the greyworld, the nightsake grabbed at Jiro with its other clawed hand but caught only air. Jiro sprang to his feet, grappling with the nightmonster, clutching it fast and close-in so that its metal-shining claws and horrible teeth could not be brought fatally to bear against him.

The nightsake forgot its bloody errand and, like an animal caught in the cruel grip of a leg-hold trap, was now intent only on escaping back to the gray swamp from which it had come. Jiro, however, would not let go. As he and the nightsake struggled through the hall, smashing over furniture and crashing against walls, the horrible noise of their battle rang throughout the building. The rest of the Cyberpomp warriors awoke in alarm, grabbing on helmets and taking up weapons. The fury of the two fighters was so great that to the rest of the group in the building it seemed the place must come crashing down on them any moment.

At the other surface of the game, Jhana Meniskos, Lakshmi Ngubo, Seiji Yamaguchi, Atsuko Cortland, Lev Korchnoi, and Marissa Correa encountered the dark chaotic tide with almost a physical sensation of impact. Jhana felt as if she had plummeted like a hurtling meteor into a vast ocean of gray tapioca static, cold and dark and viscous. She did not have time to think, for the darkling sea seemed inhabited by the sharks and eels of long-repressed memories, ancient sins—her own and others not her own.

She sensed something waiting at the heart of the CHAOS, a sleeping dragon on a treasure hoard, a Minotaur in the center of a maze, a night prowler compounded of every creature that had ever lived and died, a hybrid beastly-intelligent thing of horns, claws, teeth and tentacles, slit cat’s eyes and adder fangs dripping the milky poisonous rheum of death, a universe of death horrifyingly personal in its enormous impersonality

Jhana wondered what she was getting so frightened about. She thought she must be projecting her own problems onto the chaotic gray swirling stuff. She reminded herself that, for all its phenomenal graphics, excellent tactiles and full sensorium feed, Building The Ruins was only a game, after all.

That so much effort had been put into something that was “just a game” was disturbing in itself, however.

In the greyworld, Jiro’s helpers at last could do nothing but stand and watch at the ready as their leader struggled and battle-sweated furiously with the monster in his grip. Jiro himself was deathly silent, even as the nightsake howled and shrieked in a symphony of pain. As Jiro’s comrades stood and watched, an incredible series of changes overcame the nightsake. The creature began to alter in shape: it became a great rare hunting cat, an endangered monkey, a tree, an immense jungle snake, a wading bird, an airbike—almost as if it were running through a reportoire of all the shapes and forms the gray goo had swamped.

The creature’s protean changes began to come blindingly fast, but through them all Jiro silently maintained his bearhug, and his implacable grip on the nightsake. With the help of the games players throughout the infosphere, a deep part of himself was somewhere else, moving like bear or beekeeper deep into his opponent’s hive mind.

The communication biomechs flowing out of Jiro’s battlesweat—virtualized versions of those that had helped him jump out of the coldbox—bridged their way into the nanorganismal make-up of the nightsake. With help at many levels, he hacked into the nightsake’s massmind. The gray goo from which the nightsake arose had stored in virtual form everything it had absorbed, kept a morphogenetic germ or kernel of every structure it had overrun. Desperate, the nightsake’s response to that hacking was its shapeshifting, expanding each germ to full field, blowing up each kernel into its actual form—or at least as close to true form as the creature could manage.

In the more public levels of the game, more fascinated than afraid, Jhana moved onward with the others, as if through corridors and chambers of a flooded maze, while behind her the sharks and eels followed, swimming to their own slow silent dark rhythms. Her movement and that of the others felt “upstream”, seemed to push back the chaotic flux, to recreate what that dark flux had blotted out.

Jhana found herself just beneath the surface of a glassy stream, looking up through a drowned Ophelia’s eyes into a lawless sky of flawless blue. Impelled and compelled to break through the surface tension of the water, she sent ripples rebounding in every direction, new beauty settling into place as the scene calmed. The others rose from the stream with her. Moving forward, they drove the cloudy tide of the sky back before them, a beautiful new world establishing itself around and behind them like a rapidly evolving computer animation or fractal graphic, scene after scene solidifying as they pressed on, cragged peaks mounting up to snag the sky, encircling in their broken bowl an Alpine meadow and small city so idyllic it seemed a caricature of itself.

In the deep place where virtuality and dream met and became one, the soul-flying Jiro at first thought the nightsake’s myriad forms in the greyworldwere merely chaff and decoys and camouflage, intended to prevent him from reaching his goal—multiple masks and curtains to veil and disguise the identity of the operator behind all the nightsake’s actions. The further he hacked into the creature’s hive mind, however, the more convinced Jiro became that the manifold transformations were also forms of a dark and toxic personal evil which he was absorbing into himself. He was extracting arsenic from the hive mind’s honey, sucking the poison out of the system. Yet that same poison worked in him to draw out his own poison, a vesicant drawing up the madnesses and imbalances that had once afflicted him so that they might be broken open at the surface and purged.

In both its hive mind and its exteriorized self, the nightsake began to take on human forms, shifting back and forth among them. Almost despite himself, Jiro recognized the human faces from not only his opponent’s life, but from his own.The faces and forms shifted and morphed, trinities of men and women, women and men, three yet one, one yet three. Competing lovers. Brothers and mothers. Behind those trinities Jiro heard the words of the guilty surviving brothers, Seiji Yamaguchi and Ray Dalke, heard them say in bleak and brooding voices You come to me in dreams and I tell you you’re dead. We talk and argue about it. I sleep and you’re alive. I wake up and you’re dead. Why should any go on living, go on sleeping, when you are dead?

Jiro’s self and the multitudes that went to make up Mike Dalke, both distributed throughout the infosphere and beyond, were far more deeply and more fully exchanging information than either could have anticipated. Jiro thought again of the shamanic drawings of the Desana, with their anaconda/rainbow boa dragon pairs dwelling in the fissure between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Jiro and the nightsake he fought shared both good and ill—Jiro playing interpretive, oneness-of-things, left hemisphere LOGOS to the nightsake’s literal, thingness-of-ones, right hemisphere CHAOS. Yet only if each was also enfolded in the other could there be balance.

In the realms at that other surface of the game, Jhana saw that the regions she and her companions were helping the LOGOS recover now seemed better somehow—more beautiful because less sterile, less rigidly perfect than those regions of the LOGOS that had never been touched by the CHAOS. Whether from taint of contact with the CHAOS, or from touch of diverse human consciousness, or from whatever cause, the element of randomness and unpredictability had been introduced into all the recreated regions so that they were now more truly beautiful than all those undisturbed realms of perfect order. No, they had not put “dirt” into virtual reality: it was more like “soil”, or even “soul”.