Omega Point (7 page)

  "You're lucky Kaplinski shot Kolosev first," said Chures.

  "Luck has nothing to do with it. He killed Kolosev because Kolosev knew something. If Oleg had known nothing he would have shot me first. Kaplinski is insane, but he is not stupid," said Otto.

  "What is his problem?" asked Valdaire.

  "All of the Ky-tech had neurosurgery," said Chures. "One of the things done as routine was an empathetic damper. It was supposed to stop PTSD in Ky-tech soldiers. It didn't work so well."

  "Because it turned you all into sociopaths?" said Valdaire to Otto.

  "You were in the army too, you know what it is like," said Otto. "They wanted to stop us feeling guilty for performing our duty."

  "I was behind a desk," said Valdaire.

  "You still killed people," said Otto, "even if you only pushed buttons. You know what it means to end a life; the feeling is the same if you can see them die or not." He ushered her through a broken glass door into the office block. Wind gusted through empty steel window frames, concrete walls streaked with moisture, ancient linoleum tiles flaked to fragments. "The conditioning was reversible: flick a switch after the war, be back to normal, even scrub the bad memories away. But it went too far with Kaplinski."

  "Turn left, up the stairs, first door on the left," sang Chloe.

  Otto went on. "Kaplinski did not take to renormalisation. He never felt anything but the urge to fight ever again. He got out of the hospital, killed half the damn security. I was ordered to hunt him down."

  "He got away," said Chures.

  "
Ja
, he got away," agreed Otto. "And now he is trying to kill me."

  
No sign of him,
said Lehmann over the MT
. The air bike is im
mobile, 50 kilometres away. I've called in the local EuPol.

  "This is it," said Chloe. They stopped in front of a door.

  Chures looked to Otto. He nodded. Both readied their guns.

  Chures silently counted down on his fingers. On three, Otto kicked the door in, his augmented legs sending the ancient wood to pieces. Chures darted into the room, covering all angles.

  "Holy…" said Valdaire.

  "Well, I did
tell
you," said Chloe smugly.

  The room was weatherproofed, its one window foamed up and ceiling repaired. Inside were six functioning v-jack set-ups, each worth a fortune, each highly illicit: couches, medical gear, nutrient tanks and hook-up. On every couch was a body, face contorted with pain.

  "They're all dead," said Chloe. "Bio-neural feedback."

  Otto checked the corpses one at a time; cold, stomachs bloated, dead long enough for rigor mortis to have come and gone, but not dead long. With the September heat outside, probably 50–70 hours, as he counted it, though he was no expert. Then his adjutant consulted the Grid and came back with a similar figure. Anything more precise would need tests. All were emaciated.

  The last was different. "This one's alive," said Otto.

  "I'll get the v-jack off him," said Valdaire. "See if I can pull him back into the Real."

  "It'll kill him," said Chures.

  "He's dead already," said Otto. "Pulse is weak, ECG erratic – look at him. He might be able to tell us something useful before he goes."

  "Klein is correct," said Chloe. "The subject is undergoing total neural disassociation. He has minutes of life left."

  "Who is he?" said Chures. He was checking the room carefully. He knocked some of the foam out off the window, allowing dusty sunlight into the room.

  "Unknown. He has no Grid signature, no ID chip," said Chloe.

  "Han Chinese," said Otto. He picked up a limp arm. His enhanced eyes picked out the traces of an erased judicial tattoo on his wrist. "Political exile." He let the arm drop.

  Valdaire removed the v-jack from the Han. She studied the medical unit attached to the wall, then pressed a few buttons. There was a hiss and a mixing wheel spun round. A gasp of air escaped the man's lips. His eyelids fluttered.

  He sighed something in Mandarin, so quietly Valdaire had to bend in to hear it.

  He smiled, said something else, and went limp.

  "What did he say?" said Chures.

  Chloe spoke. "He said he dreamed of golden fields, that is what he said. Veev, it is."

  Otto looked out the window at the corn. "That is to be expected."

  "He's dead," said Valdaire.

  "You said Kolosev knew something?" said Chures. "He's been trying to get into the Realms himself."

  "Unsuccessfully," said Valdaire.

  "He was looking for Waldo, and not on his own," said Otto. "This level of set-up is beyond Kolosev's means. Damn shame our only leads are dead."

  "Chloe will tell us why," said Valdaire.

  "You do not need to. Tell me, why has Kaplinski not destroyed this place with us in it?"

  "He's looking for Waldo too," said Chures.

  "
Ja
," said Otto. "And I would say that he paid for all this."

  "Then we frag the lot, and stay one step ahead of him," said Chures. "We've got Kolosev's data."

  "That could work," said Otto. "Or maybe Kaplinski couldn't get Kolosev to give the data up himself, and can not get at it remotely, and he is waiting for us to lead him right to Waldo instead."

 

Though the day promised rain, it held off. Soon Richards' human facsimile was sweating heavily and he was obliged to remove his macintosh. As his soreness receded, he began to take in the sensations his near-human form fed him, so much more entire than those he had experienced before. It was almost pleasant. Almost.

  It was slow going with Geoff. "He's just not balanced right for it," said Bear. "Being three-legged is a disadvantage overcome with difficulty by giraffes." He shook his head as another frustrated squeak reached them from the wheat. "I fear he'll never master life as a tripod."

  They rested awhile by a stone barn deep in the soughing corn. Bear leant against a huge chestnut tree and Richards sat with his back to a sundial. Geoff lay on the floor; it was easier for him.

  They napped in the sun, each lost in his own thoughts. As they readied to leave, Geoff conveyed his wishes that the others go on, via a series of tremulous squeaks.

  "We must stick together," said Bear.

  Geoff would not be swayed. After a long and urgent conversation between the two animals, Bear came to Richards.

  "Giraffes can be stubborn beasts, even those whose heads are full of wool," he said. "He's going to stay." Bear sniffed the air. "I'm sure he'll be fine. All I can smell down here is summer sleep and wheat." He yawned. Bear had a lot of teeth. "And look too," he said, gesturing upwards. "Look at the sky."

  "Yes?" said Richards. The sky was blue and pretty.

  "The sun!"

  Richards shielded his eyes. "It's hardly moved," he said.

  "I suspect night does not fall easily on these golden fields," said Bear.

  "That's rather poetic," said Richards.

  "I'm a poetic kind of bear," said Bear with a shrug.

  The day wore on, and the sun did not move from its noon. They stopped for lunch by a rare brook. Richards took the opportunity to wash his stinking clothes as Bear ground some wheat and made flatbread on a rock heated by a fire of straw.

  "My favourite," said Bear.

  "Really," said Richards, annoyed at his need to eat. It tasted foul, and the grit in it hurt his teeth.

  "It's free!" said Bear, grinning, though his smile was brittle.

  Without night, time became meaningless. Richards' eyes blurred with endless gold, and he welcomed clouds, however fleeting. What had been a fine feeling turned sour, and his brain throbbed. When they slept, they did so in the shade of trees that broke the expanse of wheat, or underneath tumbledown walls that cut across the land, doggedly running to nowhere. The light shone through Richards' eyelids, turning his dreams pink.

  "This is a land better suited to plants than men," said Bear, his voice roughened by thirst. It was all he said for quite some time. Pollen choked them.

  After what felt like several days, Bear stopped and pointed. "Look!" he said. "The sun has moved at last."

  Richards raised his sunburnt face to the sky. His body itched and his skin was tight. He was tired and hungry and thirsty. Humanity had worn thin.

  The sun was several degrees lower than it had been before.

  "Hmmm," murmured Bear, "this is most peculiar. The sun is setting, but it does not seem dependent on our passage through time, but more on our traversal of distance."

  "Right," said Richards. He badly wanted to lie down. "Well done."

  Bear waggled a paw with a rattle of beans. "I'm a curious kind of bear."

  They walked through sunset fields where the unripe wheat reached Richards' chest, then came to a place where a sooty twilight reigned, and the wheat stopped altogether.

  "I was afraid of this," said Bear. "I've been able to smell it for some time."

  Ahead of them lay an area of blackened land. Patches of stubble poked up through fine white ash. The air was acrid. Dust devils whirled, and the ground radiated a dangerous heat. The swollen sun melted away into tears of fire at the ruin of the world.

  An eerie howl sounded across the plain.

  "Hmm," said Bear. "Let's stop here."

  Richards, more tired than he thought possible, sank to his knees and was asleep before he hit the ground.

 

Day came as day does, the normal order of things holding sway at the edge of the wheat, and they continued onwards.

  Soon after, Richards and Bear found a village that had been sacked. A small place of twenty or so cottages whose blackened beams stood exposed to the sky, walls bowed, close to ruin or ruinous already, revealing tangles of bones inside. There was a broke-back church and a mill whose wheel lay smashed in the river. The crackle of dying fires and wisps of smoke still haunted the place.

  "I smell trouble," said Bear, "and it is trouble of the worst kind. We best be careful, sunshine." He fell to all fours and slunk across the river, a scowl on his face. Richards followed, the water warm and stinking, his trousers clinging unwelcomely to his legs.

  Bear crossed quickly, leaving Richards to scramble up its far bank alone. At the top, he came across a body, a brightly hued rabbity thing the size of a five-year-old.

  It couldn't have been killed more than a day ago, but it looked as if it had been dead for centuries. Its bright skin was a thin, dirt-lined parchment, eyes sunken in cavernous, glitterrimed sockets. Where Richards touched it, its flesh felt hard and brittle.

  "YamaYama," said Bear, coming to Richards' side. "Had a quick scout, there's lots of 'em dead, all like that, poor little blighters."

  "This is a YamaYama?" said Richards.

  "Toy of the year, 2102," said Bear. "Fully interactive, cute little beggars, bit like rabbits, but more soppy."

  Richards nodded. "I heard of them, although 2102 was a couple of years before I was born. I've had to interrogate one as a witness. Big learning capabilities, but then what doesn't possess heuristics in this day and age? There was a controversy: too close to true AI. Neukind rights people said they were alive, like me, or you. They were one of the examples the rights movement used."

  "Yeah, well, that didn't stop them being trashed in their millions when they went out of fashion," said Bear. "And I complain about my box in the attic."

  "Some of their minds got out onto the Grid and ended up here?" said Richards.

  "Mm-huh," said Bear. "Their collective was already up and running when I got pulled in. It was all going so well for them, and now look at this." A paw swept round the devastation. "Shocking."

  The YamaYama looked like he'd been sucked dry, his face an expression of agony that suggested he had been alive to suffer it.

  "What did it?" asked Richards.

  "Haemites," said Bear. "One of Penumbra's lot," and he shook his long head until his little helmet rattled.

  "Who is this Penumbra?"

  "I've said too much. Got to keep you fresh for the debrief. Forget it, if you're not shamming, that is." The bear squinted suspiciously. He wrinkled his nose. "Hey, can you hear that?"

  "What?" said Richards.

  "That."

  There was a ring of metal, then another.

  "Is that a swordfight?"

  Bear shrugged. "Mebbe. I'm going to check it out. You can stay here if you want."

  "Aren't I your prisoner?" said Richards.

  Bear grinned a daggered grin. "And where you going to go, sunshine?"

  They hurried to the far side of the village, toward the sound of mêlée.

  "Get back! Get back, I say!" Clang! Clang! "Avast! Avaunt! Begone!" Clang, clang, clang-clang.

  There was a tumult of steam whistles, a frantic scrabbling, and four figures came haring round the carcass of a smouldering house, stumbling to a stop of blades and curses twenty metres from Richards and Bear.

  One of them was a man, his face furrowed with concentration. He wore slashed velvet clothes of eye-watering purple, a goatee on his face. A large hat sat atop his sweat-damp hair, decorated with a long, bedraggled feather.

  "A cavalier!" whispered the Bear with some delight. "Or he looks not unlike one. He certainly fights with their panache. Let's watch," he said, and pulled Richards into the shelter of a ruined cottage.