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Road cleaners crawled along the roads, sucking up dirt, spraying water and scrubbing, a low hum of gratitude filling the air as they gloried in this greatest of tasks, the momentary holding back of entropy.
She remembered her father waking every morning, and walking to the green and sitting there, with the others, the air of quiet desperation making them immobile. Waiting. Waiting for a man to come in a pickup truck and offer them a labourer’s job,
“For us, it is unimaginable, to exist as a pure digital entity, to not know physicality. And yet, at the same time, we seek to escape our physical existence, to achieve heaven, knowing it does not exist, that it must be built, the world fixed and patched
Conversation flowing around him, traders closing for the day or opening for the night, the market changing faces, never shutting, people sleeping under their stands or having dinner, and from the food stalls the smells of frying fish, of chilli in vinegar, of soy and garlic frying, of cumin and turmeric and the fine purple powder of sumac, so called because it looks like a blush.
He loved the smell of this place, this city. The smell of the sea to the west, that wild scent of salt and open water, seaweed and tar, of suntan lotion and people. Loved the smell of cold conditioned air leaking out of windows, of basil when you rubbed it between your fingers, loved the smell of shawarma rising from street level with its heady mix of spices, loved the smell of vanished orange groves from far beyond the urban blocks of Tel Aviv or Jaffa.
Emaciated Saviour:
eality,” said the robo-priest, “is a thin and fragile thing.”
“Consensus reality is like a cloth,” it started again. The congregation listened, there was the sound of dry rustling in the small, dark church, the smell of metal and pine resin. “It is made of many individual strands, each of which is a reality upon itself, a self-encoded world. We each have our own reality, a world made by our senses and our minds. The tapestry of consensus reality is therefore a group effort. It requires enough of us to agree on what reality is. To determine the shape of the tapestry, if you will.”
“Our maker who art in the zero point field, hallowed be thy nine billion names . . .”
Vladimir Chong could not see, for his gaze was turned, terribly, inside himself.
The humans had found a way to stimulate the brain’s pleasure centres with a low current of electricity. Sometimes R. Patch-It longed for Body, for sensation. The humans were sensation-addicts.
Space was full of questions, life was a sentence always ending in an ellipsis or a question mark. You couldn’t answer everything. You could only believe there were answers at all.
Love was dangerous. Love was a dark drug and it was addictive and, for a long time, forbidden to him. He was, paradoxically, both all past and without a past. Once he had a name, a body. Once he was alive.
!
He was a sleek death machine in those days, but that didn’t stop the backwash. That’s what they called it. The backwash was the flow of thoughts and emotions stemming from who you once were, the human you had been, the one they took off the battlefield and cyborged, the dead thing you were before they made you robotnik. Dead man’s memories, you weren’t supposed to have them, but sometimes. .
After that last battle they had patched him up and upgraded him, and sent him out again, and then again, and then again. There was always one last battle, one final war. Then for a long time there weren’t any more engagements and they stayed on the base, waiting, mainlining faith because it kept you from going all heretic
Sometimes you needed to believe you could believe, sometimes you had to figure heaven could come from another human being and not just in a pill. Sometimes.
It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives, by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes the master. A circle is completed. And so on.
We were technically, and clinically, dead. We had few memories, if any, of what we once were. But those we had, we kept hold of, jealously. Hints to our old identity. The memory of feet in the rain. The smell of pine resin. A hug from a newborn baby whose name we no longer knew.
The human side of him was coming to the fore, since he had met her. Even memories, sometimes, from when he was a man, and alive. Unwelcome memories, of the sort that, before, drove him to faith.
Some exploded unexpectedly, to the delight of children down below, showering the world with fragments of light, or sweet, white spun sugar, or dreams that burrowed into one’s node and woke them, days or months later, hugging themselves from a happy memory they could no longer quite recall.
Rain fell. Of that, at least, there is no doubt. People died like plants. I mean, silently. We studied water for a long time. Diligently. Its molecules tinkled in the glass. We spun them into dust. We broke light through them. We bred tadpoles. People grew, like red flowers Like roses or opium poppies. I mean, beautifully. Rain fell. There was something miraculous about it. I mean, water falling from the sky. All those complex molecules Giving birth to bodies of water Giving birth to Puddles.
Rumours of singularities swallowing players, of the Wu Expedition going too deep, going into the very archaeological layers of the gamesworlds, down past the GoA and into ancient, forgotten levels, and finally to the mythical place called Pacmandu. . . .
Tea was served in small glasses, hot and sweet, served black, not in the manner of the barbarous Anglos;
No one wanted the police to be truly sentient; and so they compromised, with crude mechanicals, who humans found, somehow, more reassuring.
“I wake up slowly but I am still dreaming, and I know I am sharing my body with countless Others, all watching through my eyes, and I feel their fascination, when I move my fingers or curl my lip, but it is a detached sort of interest, the way they would look at any other math problem. They’re not like us, Ruth. You can’t share with a mind this different. You can be on, or off. But you can’t be both.”
Religion intoxicated Ruth, but only for a while. Infatuation fades. In the drug she found no truth that couldn’t be found in the GoA or other virtualities. Was heaven real? Or was it yet another construct, another virtuality within the Conversation’s distributed networks of networks, the drug merely a trigger?
The toktok blong narawan. The Conversation of Others.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves housed the rarest of pulps from across the worlds. They were evolutionary dead ends: not unlike Achimwene himself.
Their shadows on the moon moved in a chiaroscuro of darkness and light.
A man wakes in the night and finds his lover gone. He follows her. Where does she go? Read one way this is a tale of everyday life, of love curdled, of quiet desperation. Read another and it is a detective story, the mystery of the lover’s disappearance needing to be solved, the hidden meanings of mystery put together.
Their stories had entwined, but they had different trajectories, different conclusions.
But I found her, he thought. And all the thoughts were locked inside him; they had no way out; and so it was in silence that they made their slow way home.
He was not afraid of death. He could remember death. His father, Weiwei, had died at home. Vlad could remember it several ways. He could remember his father’s own dying moment—broken sentences forming in the brain, the touch of the pillow hurting strangely, the look in his boy’s eyes, a sense of wonder filling him, momentarily, then blackness, a slow encroachment that swallowed whatever last sentence he had meant to speak.
beautiful engineering. It began with an enormous climb, rising to half a kilometre above the ground. Then the drop.
Boris was in the ur-space. In the nulliverse. A profound darkness had settled over Boris. He floated in a space that had no dimensions, no Conversation. He flailed and fought but there was nothing to fight against. Where was he? What was he? Light gradually resolved. He found himself floating in solar space. There were stars everywhere. Ahead of him, rising before his eyes like an enormous mirage, was Saturn. The planet rose ahead like a magnificent flying saucer from an old film. The rings shone like diamonds. Boris heard a sound that wasn’t sound. Suddenly the Conversation washed over him, a
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Family wasn’t like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a “nuclear family”: it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relativesby-marriage and otherwise—it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going into the Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you, wherever you go.
