The Demi-Monde: Winter (8 page)

‘The docks? Are you mad, girl? The docks are one of the most dangerous districts in the Rookeries.’

‘I had Luigi …’ she began, but her father wasn’t in the mood to listen to excuses.

‘This madcap escapade is at one with the irresponsible, the downright unacceptable behaviour of a young woman oblivious to and careless of the responsibilities of her rank. Spirits damn it, girl, you are the daughter of a commissar, not some mindless dolly-mop!’

Trixie flinched back from her father’s fury. She was used to being told off by her governess but not by her father. He had always encouraged her to think for herself, he had always indulged her misdemeanours. Her father took a long sip from a glass filled, she fervently hoped, with port wine.

Pray to ABBA it isn’t blood.

Whatever it was, it settled him. When he addressed her he seemed more composed. ‘I had a visit from Vice-Leader Beria this morning.’

Trixie’s eyes widened in amazement and her guts churned in horror.

‘He has a file on you.’

Trixie felt as though she was going to faint. Her senses swam. She slumped back into the couch, drained of strength and energy. Trickles of horror rippled over her skin. If the Checkya had found out she was conducting an unlicensed archaeological dig …

‘I thought that piece of news might bring you to your senses.’

‘But … but … but …’

Oh, for Spirits’ sake, Trixie, get a hold of yourself!

‘A file?’

‘Yes, a very thick file: a very thick file containing some very nasty jottings about the activities of a very silly girl.’

‘But why? Why did he show it to you?’

‘Trixie, don’t be so naïve. Beria wishes to coerce you into doing a job for him.’

Trixie swallowed hard. Beria was famous – infamous – for liking young girls. She would kill herself before she let that debauched piece of shit touch her.

Her father obviously understood the foul thoughts Beria’s name had conjured in her mind. ‘It’s not like that, Trixie. Showing me the file was Beria’s not-so-subtle way of making me appreciate the consequences of your not cooperating with him. Believe me, he will never touch a hair of your head … not whilst I’m alive, that is. No, they’ve captured a Daemon, a Grade One Daemon.’

Trixie’s mouth fell open. She almost laughed. Daemons were inventions used to frighten children into being good, monsters evoked by Crowley to keep the hoi polloi cowed and submissive. No one – well, no one educated or with a spark of intelligence – believed in Daemons.

‘A Daemon? What, a real Daemon? But they’re just figments of fantasy.’

‘Apparently not. And this one isn’t just a common-or-garden-variety Daemon, this one’s sentient. This one has a memory of the Spirit World.’

‘How did they catch it?’ It was a stupid question: as far as Trixie was concerned Daemons didn’t exist, so how could they be captured? It must all be twaddle.

‘I don’t know the details but it seems that Crowley used his magic to lure it from the Spirit World. We’ll know more tonight. Crowley is delivering her …’

‘Her?’

‘Yes, it’s a female Daemon, a she-devil, a succubus. Apparently the Daemon has taken the outward form of a girl of about your age. As I was saying, Crowley is delivering her here tonight.’

‘I’m sorry, father, I’m having a little difficulty with this. I mean … Daemons don’t really exist … it isn’t RaTional.’

Comrade Commissar Dashwood slammed his fist onto his desk so hard that he made both an ink-pot and Trixie jump. ‘Are you so monumentally foolish, Trixie, that you can use the word “RaTional” so openly? Have you listened to nothing I’ve said? The Checkya have a file on you: they think you’re a protoRaTionalist, a potential HerEtical. By the Spirits, Beria even insinuated that you might be a Suffer-O-Gette.’

Shiver and shake time.

‘You must be careful now, Trixie. One more slip and it’s the Lubyanka for you … for us. And don’t think I’ll be able to save you: all of the Dashwood family will be travelling in the same tumbrel. Have you no idea just how evil these people are? Have you forgotten the fate of your friend Lillibeth?’

Trixie shuddered: she still had nightmares about what had happened during the Cleansing, the night when Heydrich and his henchmen had simultaneously assassinated King Henry and Tsar Ivan and seized power in the ForthRight, when they had rounded up all of the Royalists and their families and shot them as Counter-Revolutionaries. She still remembered the screams of the Marlboroughs – who had been dining with them that night – when the Checkya had come to arrest them, had dragged them outside and thrown them into the black, windowless steamers.

She remembered going to the Academy the next day and no one having the courage to ask where Lillibeth Marlborough was. Lillibeth Marlborough: Trixie’s best friend. Overnight Lillibeth became a nonNix: someone never to be mentioned again, someone it was better never to think of again. Even the daguerreotypes showing the school teams that Lillibeth had captained had been removed. And when Trixie had protested they had Censured her.

‘I haven’t forgotten, father, I’ll never forget.’ A tear trickled down Trixie’s cheek.

‘Don’t cry, Trixie. Crying isn’t going to bring Lillibeth or any of them back. What we’ve got to concentrate on is surviving in this crazed world.’

‘So what does Beria want of me?’

‘Apparently Crowley is unwilling to hand the Daemon over to the Checkya for interrogation, which I think is quite sensible of the chap. Crowley might be as mad as a bag of bolts but even he knows that once inside the Lubyanka the chances of getting anything sensible out of the creature, Daemon or not, are negligible. Under torture, people … Daemons are liable to say anything. So Beria has suggested a more softly-softly approach: seduction rather than rape, so to speak.’

‘That must be a novelty for Beria,’ observed Trixie wryly.

‘Indeed. Beria’s suggestion is that the creature is held under house arrest where it is given an opportunity to commune with a like spirit … that’s “spirit” with a small “s”.’

‘Here?’

A nod from Trixie’s father.

‘Me?’

Another nod.

‘But why me?’

‘Beria has cast his eye over all the daughters of senior Party officials …’

I bet he has.

‘… who are roughly the same age as the form taken by this Daemon. He was, so he says, looking for someone of high intelligence, strong character and who is loyal to the Party. Apparently you scored two out of three. He had you evaluated at Mrs Albemarle’s last social by an odious man named Captain Dabrowski.’

That slimy Polish bastard.

‘Was he the man you hit, Trixie?’

‘Yes, father. He was overly familiar with me.’

‘Bravo. Perhaps you should have hit him harder. Next time perhaps. Well, beaten or not, Dabrowski has recommended you to Beria. It seems the Captain was quite taken by my little Trixie.’

‘So what do I have to do?’

‘This Daemon, who calls itself Norma Williams, will be brought here to live with us. The house will be guarded, of course, but every effort will be made to make this guarding as unobtrusive as possible. The idea is that you and the Daemon will … bond, and gradually over a couple of weeks you will find out the truth about it and the Spirit World.’

‘I don’t know if I like the idea of bonding with a Daemon,’ admitted Trixie. ‘What does this thing look like? Does it have horns and a tail? They always draw Daemons with horns and a tail on the covers of penny dreadfuls.’

‘No horns and no tail, or so I am told. Apparently it looks and acts just like a normal young woman.’

‘Very well: I don’t suppose I have any option in the matter, do I?’

‘ None whatsoever,’ was her father’s bleak answer.

The Memories of Dupes: each Dupe is provided with an appropriate and fully functional memory of his or her life as a Demi-Mondian prior to the OutSet of the Demi-Monde plus a realistically flawed ancestral memory.

– The Demi-Monde® Product Description Manual: 14 June 2013

Ella was back in the General’s office in the company of the Captain, the Professor and, of course, the General. She was glad of the company: the meeting with Heydrich had shaken her, had frightened her. More … it had scared the shit out of her. Heydrich might have been just a virtually rendered Dupe but there had been something disturbingly real about him. No computer-programmed entity could walk into a room and dominate it like that: it wasn’t natural. She shivered: the thought of being involved in anything that required her meeting or interacting with that madman again most certainly did not appeal at all. Not even for a million bucks …

‘You met Heydrich?’ asked the General.

Ella nodded distractedly. She didn’t feel like talking. Meeting close up and personal with such pure, undiluted evil had really taken the wind out of her sails. She felt empty … weak … vulnerable.

‘Reini was at his despicably racist best,’ observed the Professor. The Professor was sitting in a chair stationed as far away from the General as the room’s architecture would allow: it was obvious that they disliked one another. The frisson of their mutual loathing infected the atmosphere of the room.

‘Is Heydrich typical of the Dupes you’ve used to populate the Demi-Monde?’ asked Ella quietly. That there were more like Heydrich made her flesh creep.

The General shook his head vigorously. ‘Thankfully, no. Heydrich is what we classify as a Singularity. These, the ultimate class of high-performing psychopath, are very rare: we see only a dozen or so of them in a century. That’s why we only seeded twenty into the Demi-Monde, four in each Sector. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on the way you look at it – two of them are already dead: Henry Tudor and Ivan Grozny were assassinated by Heydrich when he staged a coup to take over two Sectors of the Demi-Monde. A shame really, I thought Henry was one of the more interesting of the Professor’s PreLived creations. He was the only one with anything approximating to a sense of humour.’

Hand shaking, Ella picked up her cup of coffee and took a drink, hoping the caffeine would bring her out of her funk. What sort of maniac, Ella wondered, thought these games up? She put the cup firmly back down on its saucer. ‘Okay, so I’ve met Heydrich. The question is: so what? What has all this to do with me? Let’s cut to the chase, shall we, General?’ Now all she wanted to do was put as many miles of interstate between her and the Demi-Monde as was humanly possible.

Screw the million bucks.

No amount of money would persuade her to come anywhere near Heydrich again.

The General glanced nervously at Ella; he was obviously
discomfited by her discomfort. ‘As I’ve explained to you, the Demi-Monde is not a predictable simulation … it’s a heuristic program, that teaches itself. As soon as it was switched on four years ago it was independent, free of its creator’s control, free to develop anarchically. Suffice it to say, Miss Thomas, that how the Demi-Monde operated post-initiation – or post-OutSet as it is called technically – came as something of a surprise to all of us. We had designed the Demi-Monde to be a very hostile environment for our neoFights, to be a perfect replication of an Asymmetric Warfare Environment. What no one expected was that it would be a life-threatening environment.’

Now that was a phrase that made Ella’s eyes widen. ‘Look … I really don’t understand all this “life-threatening” mumbo. I thought you told me that the Demi-Monde is only a computer game … that it’s only a simulation. Surely if the shit hits the fan in a computer simulation you still have the ultimate power. You can always pull the plug.’

‘We had the ultimate power, Miss Thomas,’ said the General quietly. He turned to the Captain. ‘I think, Captain, it might be useful if I give Miss Thomas a little more background to the Demi-Monde.’

The Captain illuminated a screen at the side of the General’s office to show what appeared to be the picture of a crudely drawn dartboard. ‘This is a map of the Demi-Monde. It is, as you can see, a circular world stretching thirty miles across, which is home to thirty million NowLive Dupes. Each of these Dupes is, thanks to the colossal processing power of ABBA, a discrete, unique and independent individual who thinks, acts and interacts just like their Real World doppelgänger would think and act if placed in a similar environment.’

‘I’m having a problem with the word “think”. Are you saying that these Dupes of yours have some form of intelligence?’

The Captain smiled in a condescending way that Ella found hugely irritating. ‘It’s only ersatz intelligence, but to neoFights operating in the Demi-Monde it does appear that the Dupes have the capacity to think and behave independently. And DemiMondians don’t just interact with neoFights, they interact with each other.’ He took a deep breath, then continued his dissertation. ‘The Demi-Monde was planned from the OutSet to be a world that was intrinsically unstable and discordant, as only in this way could we be sure to provoke the type of war conditions we needed for our training. To do this we designed in a number of “Areas of Tension”: the notable ones being race, religion and population density.’

Ella found all this a little depressing. The USA had spent the last two hundred years trying to overcome the problems created by its citizens being drawn from different racial backgrounds and having different religious beliefs, and here was the US Military studying how to exacerbate these differences in order to provoke war.

The Captain used a laser-pen to indicate five segments of the map that radiated out from the centre of the circular world like slices of cake. ‘There are five equally sized Sectors in the Demi-Monde: the Rookeries, the Coven, Rodina, the Quartier Chaud and NoirVille. Each of the Sectors is racially and religiously distinct. To the north we have the Rookeries. This Sector is populated by people of Anglo-Saxon descent – an equal mix of Americans, of English and of Germans – who speak English and have an ascetic religion …’

‘Ascetic?’ asked Ella.

‘It’s a religion built on the denial of pleasure called UnFunDaMentalism, a creed that your friend Heydrich has made his own. However Aleister Crowley, the black magician who was so famous in the first half of the twentieth century,
is the religious leader we placed in the Rookeries so there’s little wonder that UnFunDaMentalism has become suffused with aspects of the occult.’ He gave Ella a glance to check that she was following everything he was saying. ‘To the west of the Rookeries is Rodina. This Sector is largely Slavic in ethnicity: it’s a mix of Russians, Poles and Ukrainians. They speak Russian in Rodina and they follow – followed – an avowedly atheistic creed called RaTionalism which looks, as the name suggests, for rational explanations of the creation, the purpose and the oddities of the Demi-Monde and rejects supernatural interpretations. Since Heydrich’s coup RaTionalism has become an underground religion: UnFunDaMentalism is now the only official religion in the ForthRight.’