Chapter 52


He disconnected in a shower of sparks, felt a terrifying weight, and fell hard on his side. Alone in the dark, he was wrapped inside organic plastic, but still connected to the air supply. He struggled and tore through the flimsy mesh and stubborn fibers, finally breaking free. Dim shapes around him, an empty cocoon, a shadow in a tube. He was the virus here.
  He already felt nostalgic for the game. Remembering his high-risk arrival, he realized he had to do it all over in reverse.
  After activating his optics, he climbed a movable framework onto a steel walkway. Following Ertorn's instructions, he spent the next five hours in an empty break room, sleeping in a chair. Twice he woke up with no idea where he was. Finally he walked to the nearest exit, and pressed the last gold button.
  A web of hair-thin tentacles dropped down and lifted him up. Rising through a hole in the roof, he emerged in a rock field buried in dawn shadows. The cold felt like a simulation. A vertol blinked over the distant hills. He took a pill, and was instantly wide awake.
  Through heavy interference, he checked the status screen: "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED". The assault force claimed they were currently pinned down by tiny robots they couldn't even see. They were punching holes in the walls and cutting cables, while awaiting reinforcements. Rick had expected them to retreat hours ago. The mission goals included minimum violence. The Prophets' main weakness was that they weren't programmed to lie.
  He lost the connection again, but Rick no longer worried about the attack robots. If he saw one, he would kick it. They could not have prepared for this situation. If the Prophets had been less ambitious, they could have designed something simpler but far more lethal. The micron forcefield was a dead-end project. It sensed every tiny wrinkle in the terrain, but couldn't change it.
  He heard tones as he turned his head. "Follow that sound," Ertorn said. "When it stops, drop down."
  He began to jog. The long shadow of a convex-concave wall kept up with him as he approached a lush atrium surrounded by reflecting windows. The building curved in many directions.
  Without Ertorn's help he would never have found the entrance. He pushed through the glass curtain. An immense floor tilted ahead. He began to jog under the floating ceiling, an interior world wider than the horizon. There were slopes and ramps, sunken meeting zones, plants and sculptures. Strange appliances reflected each other, seeming to move as he did, waiting to be touched.
  He didn't notice the people who got up after he had passed. Within a few minutes the floor was repopulated, the crisis forgotten.
  Finally, the room ran out, and he emerged under a pink sky with evenly spaced clouds. Another unsolicited simulation.
  The next five seconds were the most intense of the mission. From 2055 onward, the earth would be systematically dismantled, and replaced with something more important. There were no lifeforms by 2080, and very few permanent shapes. The valley was packed with crystal foam, light beams, living smoke. Plasma robots didn't need homes or streets. A hypersonic train flashed under a chemical sky, gone in a glance, the track disassembling before his eyes. This was the age of forcefields, minds and manipulators made of energy imbalances. The planet was being converted into ever shrinking machines, dust and static, a new chaos. Soon, there would be no recognizable patterns anywhere. Success or failure would be meaningless outside the system, where the number of rules exceeded the number of components.
  "Unstable interface," Ertorn said. "Shutting down." His compromised helmet screen flickered.
  The illusion vanished so fast he almost fell into another. For a few seconds, Rick didn't know who he was.
  He remembered a mandatory training week, years ago in Antarctica. Twenty UN officers had hiked over a white ridge across a frozen ocean, near the center of the Southern Hemisphere. Without a cloud in the sky, the ice valleys were among the brightest places on Earth. The slow circling sun, the frozen air, and the crunch of powdered glass had emptied his mind. He could keep crossing timezones indefinitely.
  Their Apache survival instructor had been composed to the point of neutrality, content to let his charges make mistakes. If necessary, he could live in a pipe for weeks at a time. One drill had involved building an ice pyramid with laser torches and saline.
  The exercises hadn't made him stronger or smarter, but Rick learned courage was a form of concentration. Focus on this minute. If necessary, his mind could keep going until he died. He observed his surroundings as if mildly stoned.
  The journey between some places was a long one. An ancient saying said: "you can't get there from here." High above him the wind moved at 200 kph, and there were four thousand kilometers of molten rock and iron under his feet. Rick relaxed for the first time since Heidelberg. Time to go home.
  A blue helmet turreted over a wall, and he emerged into full daylight for the first time. He would cross the Prophet community in plain sight, as an inspector should, outlined on footbridges and low hilltops. Their cart tracks extended far into the surrounding exurbs. Soon the other inspectors would arrive, and attempt to return the world to an earlier state, or a default mode. He didn't think they would succeed, but would help them try.
  Ertorn had updated the map, the nearest waypoint sixty meters ahead. The curving hills made it hard to stay on course. Unseen drones circled high above. Tina was watching. Looking around for a roadblock or a trap, he bent down and retrieved a rifle hidden under a compost pile, in case discipline broke down. He carried it in a sleeve sling.
  Soon, he noticed the first errors. Buildings were in the wrong place, or weren't mapped at all. He passed a row of cubes with crumbling facades that were probably design features. Stacked together buildings leaned in many directions, covered with wormlike tubes.
  He knew for a fact he had escaped the simulation, but the Prophets might only be pretending to be defeated.
  The most important transitions were rarely planned, but almost always anticipated. He remembered how Max Donitz had refused to support his investigation, the insults and passive interference. He realized Donitz had wanted him to get mad. The Starters were too unpredictable. Millipol had needed a UN agent who broke the rules, to attack them from an unexpected direction. That would be him, but they hadn't expected him to find Player-0 first.
  The desert survived in narrow strips across the landscape, rocky roads to nowhere. Bizarre cacti and agave trees formed lonely outposts, isolated from their manicured surroundings. Salt floated in the ocean breeze.
  "Stop!" Ertorn shouted. A door slammed, and Rick crouched so fast his feet left the ground, but he landed upright. Almost in slow-motion, his gun barrel swept past a pale face and discharged twice. Before he understood what had happened, it had happened again. He counted four gunshots as he fell on his back. The sound itself seemed crumpled.
  His helmet screen showed an abstract composition, blood and shadows. The two individuals on the pavement looked like they had been dead forever. One civilian wore a pajama-toga with sandals, the other some type of firefighting/civil defense outfit. They held unidentified instruments large enough to be weapons.
  The shock rattled his teeth, as he tried to send video to the Back Room. Rick hated them both. He had seen too many mistakes to be surprised by his own. Violence was usually the result of incompetence, but it also served a purpose, or it wouldn't exist, and mankind might not exist. He already knew he would not accept responsibility for this error. There was only so much shit he could put up with.
  As he stood up, the silence seemed like an alarm. All the Prophets were connected, so they had to know where he was.
  He thought he heard Tina's voice and stopped. It came from a nearby loudspeaker, of all places. What could she possibly have to say?
  "Repeat: Run to the shallow valley ahead, and lie down behind the long wall. Some idiot launched a nuclear missile from Mount Kapo, Hawaii." The Planetoid Modification Laboratory. "Arrival in four point five minutes. Run to the shallow valley ahead . . ."
  A Mammot M. He had worried about this type of emergency so many times the reality was almost a letdown. She read range numbers as he ran. The ground seemed to shake, but he felt detached, all his problems merging into one.
  "Looks like a big one. Four megatons, two kilometers, three percent. Hold on to any roots or vines, and bury your face in the sand," she said.
  Climbing over the wall, he turned and saw a star in the sky, the missile decelerating before reentry. It split in two, one point quickly flashing out. A bright light in his eye was only the rising sun, but he felt its fire. There had to be a solution. He needed to know his future legacy, good or bad. The point turned bright red. He was still watching when he turned into his own shadow.

  Like the blind people who had supposedly asked "What was that light?" at the moment of the first nuclear explosion, the truth was a greater shock than death itself. (Ertorn should not have fit inside his backpack.)
  Some spy satellites had telescopes with kilometer-wide virtual mirrors. They only carried a small, carefully shaped fragment of the mirror, but it had the same resolving power as the real thing. To gather enough light, the observation target had to be illuminated with a laser, which explained the bright flash he had just seen.
  Waking up was hard. Leaning against the wall, Rick stop moving. It was time to admit that everything that had happened to him was fake. His whole life was fictional. Even so, he considered all his options, anything to help the mission while he still could, no matter how hopeless.
  His name was not Rick Parkland but Tim Boollian, a ten year member of the Prophets, grade ST-14. There was no missile, and no one had died yet. This was a Prophet simulation of the most likely UN attack, expected sometime tonight. To play his role, Tim had been forced to forget who he was. A very old trick, that worked every time. His imagination had been assisted by Deep Insight, the latest LS simulations, and interactive effects placed in his path.
  Tim had first manipulated reality ten years ago, while infiltrating the Starters. No one else had the mental skills. He felt he could live forever, slipping between identities. Even Sergey Rubech had unknowingly tried to recruit him. He was Player-0.
  He removed his helmet, and returned to analog reality. Jogging through the Prophet compound had been exhausting. He was furious about the way the exercise had ended. Walking downhill, he performed motion/memory tests, punching at imaginary targets, doing calculations and reciting lists. His memory was slightly delayed, as if someone else was with him.
  The hiking trail led into the forest, where it was cooler. Looking up in the stillness, he watched the tree canopy slide against the sky. In the gloom, he became himself again.
  He didn't have a backpack, of course. Ertorn had been too realistic, even for a Prophet game. As sure as the fact that he was now fully aware, a real AI had somehow infiltrated the simulation. Someone had used soft radio to trick him. Ertorn was an old enemy, a UN prisoner. To defeat the Prophets, the UN only needed to understand them. The laser flash from the spy satellite meant outsiders had to be involved, probably to end his hypnotic state.
  He realized he was the traitor. Parts of his personality had always opposed each other, and his mind had made a final, forbidden leap. He had allowed the UN to plant a long-wave transponder inside his body, and had smuggled Ertorn into the simulation himself.
  It felt like freezing. Tim was the third ranked Prophet, with zero thought-errors, no Class-3 demerits or false dogmas. Totally adaptable, he would fit in anywhere, but could never leave the group. Perhaps the UN had offered him a chance to replace Knil.
  "This is Rick Parkland calling myself," said a voice in his head. "I surrender."
  "I don't know what you're talking about," Tim replied.
  "We're negotiating." Rick sounded like he was sitting down. "I see you're fully awake. In the past hour, my bosses have been talking to your bosses. If we can persuade Knil to surrender, you can go home again."
  Their conversation took place in an imaginary universe, where anything might happen. "Go on," Tim said."
  "Millipol wants to control progress, which is impossible," Rick said. "Even if we're all forced to think alike, someone will invent an antimatter factory, a mind virus, a cheap method to randomize DNA."
  "Do we need more central control, or less?" Tim asked. The UN had to be paying a high price for every word. How often had they spoken?
  "Rival groups will have to balance each other. Yesterday, the Council of Governments Executive Committee, meeting in secret, decided to allow the Starters to explore the Singularity, in return for their cooperation. If they can remove themselves from UN protection, anyone can. We'll probably keep Article One - unlimited inspections - but lose Article Two - freedom of location. This will inevitably lead to slavery, and much worse," Rick continued. "Mankind's successors will spread through space, and into ever more elaborate simulations. Some groups will oppress their members in horrific ways, without hope or recourse. The Prophets will probably form a totalitarian state, and try to maintain contact with everyone else." Rick wondered how often he would repeat this conversation.
  "What makes the UN think you can even keep Article One?" Tim asked. He felt sudden panic, and forced himself to concentrate.
  "We can be ruthless. We'll need your help with that. If the Prophets turn over all their illegal research and agree to cooperate fully, we will drop all criminal charges. Your group can become a formal branch of Millipol. Our lawyers are standing by."
  He opened a channel. Looking for precedents, the legal team was ready to entertain any notion. The surrender terms were thirty pages of simulated wisdom. When it was all over, the UN would once again control all the secrets. Tim could benefit either way.
  "You're right," he said resignedly, perhaps with an early trace of enthusiasm. "It's the only rational solution. Tell me exactly what to do."
  Tim listened while his mind slowly rebuilt itself. Delaying this process could lead to new insights. He called it the Gray Zone, where all facts were equal. No biases or wishful thinking.
  He left the trail to avoid a security patrol, entering the fern shadows of a restored Pleistocene coastal preserve. Something leapt up with a shriek and vanished. Rick probably considered him a suicide risk.
  Tim prepared for his imminent meeting with Knil. It would have to be in person, to prevent interference or eavesdropping. The first minute would be the most dangerous, even though Knil would appear perfectly calm. Any violence would be sudden and quite unavoidable.
  Tim couldn't distinguish the leaves from the spots before his eyes. Apparently, it wasn't dawn after all. He listened to the insect roar, no longer mankind's greatest enemy.
  Surrounded by otherworldly plants, on a carpet of moss, he felt a new weight, like standing in a downdraft. An actual presence. Knil couldn't have arrived yet. The camera on his shoulder moved, and finally Tim remembered.
  More than a billion people were watching him right now on the Resistance network, live history in the making. Plenty of witnesses. He felt their attention, like the world's biggest traffic jam, a state of permanent change.
  Had he been asked to describe mankind in one word, Tim would have emphasized what most people did every day, the common mental state of commuters, overtime slaves, and house-spouses; what people did to stay the same: the Forgetting.
  He waited in the clearing for Knil to materialize. There were a few more surprises as his memory returned. Twice, he heard breaking branches, but the Prophet leader never showed himself.