End of the Century (63 page)

M
ISS
B
ONAVENTURE RUSHED TO
B
LANK'S SIDE
as he lay bleeding on the floor, his skin pale, his lips bloodless. “Blank!”

Coughing, Blank struggled to sit, holding his insides in with both hands. “Must…get back…to York Place…” he managed, with difficulty.

“You're in a bad way, friend,” Taylor said, leaning over with his hands on his knees. “I think we maybe ought to call a doctor.”

Blank bit his lip and managed to shake his head fractionally from side to side. “Won't…die…” He coughed, a sick wet sound rattling in his lungs. “Unless…my head is removed…or central nervous system completely pulverized…I can still recover. But only…if you get me back…to my flat.”

“You heard the man,” Dulac said, sheathing his blue sword in the scabbard that hung from his Sam Browne belt. The bleeding from his shoulder seemed to have slowed, if not stopped entirely. He snatched up the crystal from the ground and tucked it into the pocket of his frock coat, and then leaned down and picked up Blank effortlessly like a child, one arm under his knees and the other around his shoulders. “Now,” he said to Miss Bonaventure, “where's his flat, anyway?”

Commandeering a four-wheeled growler carriage, Dulac whipped the horses to a foaming frenzy and drove through the afternoon traffic, north across the Thames and towards Marylebone. Miss Bonaventure cradled Blank's head in her lap, while Taylor used his coat to try to staunch the flow of blood from Blank's gaping wound.

“Blank,” Miss Bonaventure said, leaning in close and whispering in his ear, so low only he could hear, “this isn't fun anymore. Let me take you somewhere you can get help. A doctor, a hospital, anywhere. I can have you there in an instant.”

Blank opened his eyes and managed a weak smile as his gaze met hers. “No, my dear. I'm quite aware…of your…skills in this regard…but I assure you…I'll be fine.” He sputtered, and Miss Bonaventure wiped the pink foam from the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief. “I need…the locked room…at the top of the stairs.”

“Then I can open a door there right now,” Miss Bonaventure said, and raised the arm with the silver bracelet in front of her.

“No,” Blank said. “Might startle…Dulac away…and I have questions yet…for him.”

Miss Bonaventure sighed discontentedly. “Have it your way,” she said, pouting slightly. “But I swear, Blank, if your eyes start rolling back in your head and I hear anything that even
sounds
like a death rattle, I'll have you to a doctor as quick as you can say Bob's your uncle, and I don't care
what
you say.”

“Who's Bob?” Taylor asked.

Blank managed a laugh, and immediately regretted it.

Dulac carried Blank up the stairs of Number 31, York Place, with Miss Bonaventure leading the way, turning on the lights. Taylor followed behind, looking around with a confused expression.

At the top of the stairs, they came to a sturdy locked door.

“In…there,” Blank said.

“Where's the key?” Dulac asked.

Blank shook his head. “There's…no key. Put me down.”

Dulac did as he was asked. Blank, holding Taylor's blood-sodden jacket to his stomach with one hand, staggered forward and laid his other hand palm down against the door, just above the knob.

With an audible click, the knob turned and the door swung inwards on its hinges.

“I'll be damned,” Miss Bonaventure said, eyes wide. “A biometric scanner.”

The corners of Blank's mouth tugged up in a smile. “Why, Miss Bonaventure.” Leaning heavily on the doorjamb, he staggered into the darkened room. “I'm impressed.”

Miss Bonaventure and the others followed Blank into the room, and her fingers found the light switch on the wall. Electric lights in brass stanchions flared to life along the walls, revealing a portrait gallery.

“Which one of these is Dorian Gray?” Miss Bonaventure joked, as Blank made his slow and steady way to the well-upholstered chair positioned at the center of the floor.

“All of them, I suppose,” Blank said, easing himself down onto the seat. “And none.” He closed his eyes for a moment, willing the room to stop spinning around him. “Oscar only ever saw the one that Whistler was painting”—he pointed with a languid hand towards the most recent portrait, which depicted Blank in modern evening dress, with a red orchid in his lapel—“but when things went sour between us it…and my locked room…inspired him to write his damned story.”

Taylor and Dulac walked along the walls, looking up at the portraits. They all appeared to be of the same man, though they had clearly been painted by a dozen different artists, in different times and places.

“This one I know!” Dulac said, pausing before the Rembrandt, which depicted a dashing young man in the dress of an early seventeenth-century gentleman, his hand resting lightly on the hilt of the rapier at his side, a large feather in his wide-brimmed hat. Dulac turned to face Blank. “I
thought
your face a familiar one.”

Blank smiled slightly, his eyes half-lidded. “As did I on seeing yours, Monsieur Gilead. But we'll have to wait…a moment…to reminisce about old times…I'm afraid.”

Then Blank closed his eyes, found the still place within him, and the world fell away.

When he opened them again, he was once more within the School of Thought.

Of course, Blank had not really gone anywhere, neither in body nor in mind. He still sat in the chair within the portrait gallery at the top of the York Place house, the walls and ceiling impregnated with circuitry that amplified the communication with Omega.

The eyes that opened were not eyes, and were not his own. These were thoughts generated long after his own body was dust, which would later be implanted back into his mind in the guise of true memory.

Omega could locate Blank wherever he went, implanting memories directly into his mind. When these unpacked, he would recall conversing directly with Omega in the unimaginably distant future. But if Blank needed to initiate contact with Omega, as he did now, he needed to do so from here.

The body that Blank now wore wasn't his body, any more than the thoughts he was thinking were his own. This was an emulated body and mind, existing in a simulated virtual environment conjured up by complicated circuits and magnetic fields in a vast cloud of electrons and positrons. There was a real world, somewhere beyond this illusion, but Blank knew it resembled not at all any world known by living man.

The nearest galaxies receded beyond the horizon untold trillions of years before, and the mass of the Milky Way galaxy was entirely in stars that had long before exploded and collapsed into black holes and neutron stars, or in brown dwarfs and dead cinders that never attained nuclear fusion, or in stars that withered into white dwarfs. What energy that remained was generated by proton decay and collisions between elemental particles. This was the heat death of the universe first predicted by Hermann von Helmholtz.

This cloud of elemental particles, a vast mind thinking slow and deep thoughts, was Omega. The machine-child descendant of man, Omega had long before forgotten its origins, having lost the thread that led from the first
organic life to itself. Trillions of years before, before the stars began one by one to go out, Omega embarked upon a plan to rediscover its ancestors and secure its present and future. It began by creating endless simulations, modeling every possible culture that could have created its antecedents. It knew that organic life had been based on carbon and that it had stored its genetic record in complex strings of simple sugars. From there, it was a matter of ease to simulate all possible carbon-based life-forms that could be coded by such sugars. From there, it had generated emulations of all logically possible individuals and arranged these individuals in all possible combinations of societies and civilizations in all possible inhabitable environments.

Having created models of all possible worlds, of all possible lives, Omega began to grow bored with its game. It considered its options while the stars burned down around it, and then hit upon a new game to play. It would work out which of its simulated worlds and emulated lives was the true history of the universe.

The methods Omega employed were many, but a key tactic was a search through time itself.

Its simulations had established that organic consciousness was the result of quantum state reductions within cytoskeletal microtubules in the brain. Since, at the quantum level, the classical past and classical future were not globally distinguishable, and since entangled quantum particles enabled communication of a sort on a nonlocal basis, it merely remained to test all of the particles at hand to see if any were entangled with organic minds in the deep past. If a resonance could be found between one of the emulated minds and an organic mind, elsewhere and elsewhen, then Omega reasoned that the emulated mind was an accurate representation of a being who actually lived.

Having established contact with these resonant minds, Omega discovered that it was able to do far more than simply locate them. It could
communicate
with them. By manipulating the half of the tangled pair that it held in the deep future, it could affect the functioning of the organic mind which incorporated the pair's other half in the distant past. It could create and implant new memories, and through careful means could read the memories the organic mind had generated on its own.

It was at this point that Omega struck upon its final and most vital game.

The past was largely unknown, huge gaps or lacunae in the historical record. But the future was a certainty. In time, the last of the stars would be gone and all that would remain in the universe would be black holes of various masses, rapidly evaporating to nothing. In time, even the protons would have all decayed, and all that would remain in the universe would be a collection of neutrinos, positrons, electrons, and photons of enormous wavelength. The universe would be cold and dead, and with it, Omega itself.

There was some cause for hope, though. There were other universes, whether orthogonal to the space-time Omega inhabited or beyond the cosmic horizon. It might be possible to reach one of these through means or mechanisms unknown to Omega. Or it might be possible to create whole new universes within black holes, the event horizon containing an entirely new big bang. But this, too, was beyond Omega's reach. It was possible, though, that some mind in the forgotten past had discovered a means that for whatever reason had not appeared in Omega's emulations. It was even possible that in the distant past someone had encountered an artifact from some
other
universe, a relic from some space-time previous to or apart from Omega's own. And, failing this, with sufficient time Omega might be able to discover these means and mechanisms from first principles. But time was running out. Though some vigintillion years remained before the ultimate heat death of the universe, Omega's thoughts became much slower as the universe cooled, and it was only a matter of a few trillion trillion years before it would be unable to continue.