Omega Point (14 page)

  And that, thought Richards, had always been Pl'anna's problem. She knew everything, but understood nothing.

  The figure leaned forward. A cool breeze enveloped Richards, soothing his scorched skin. He felt a tingling kiss on his lips, and Pl'anna exploded into a burst of stars. It illuminated his surroundings, a glorious firework, and was gone.

  A last whisper, fierce and loud, echoed in his ears. "Omega Point, Richards, Omega Point."

  He felt suddenly tired.

  Juddering, the island broke free of Circus's cursed orchard. Streams of soil and twigs fell from the edges, their tinkling a cold counter to the sounds of the blaze. Their refuge bobbed alongside the larger island, slowly turning and picking up speed.

  "Well, that was an adventure!" Lucas squatted, naked as the day he was born and a sight dirtier, a pile of singed rags at his feet. Bear lay on the floor by him, a heavy paw over his eyes.

  "Urgh," growled Bear. "I'll never eat pork again." He propped himself up on his elbows, smacking his lips with a grimace on his face. "And I
love
pork."

  "Steady on, Bear!" said Lucas. "You're losing a lot of stuffing."

  "Ah, don't worry about me, pal," he said, "I'll stitch."

  "With what?"

  "Here." There was a soft noise, and Bear plunged his paw deep into his side. He fumbled about in his own gut, his tongue held daintily between his teeth in concentration. "What?"

  "That's mildly disconcerting," said Richards.

  Bear grinned. "Look. Geckro." Bear undid and redid his side flap a couple of times. He sighed. "I was a pyjama case!" he said, and produced a needle and thread from his innards.

 

The island drew away from the burning tower of Circus. Richards left Lucas to help Bear patch himself up. He watched the fire recede. Pl'anna's Gridsig had gone. At the very edge of Richards' consciousness, Rolston's stuttered on, warped and broken by the patchwork world, and Richards feared to think in what state he'd find him.

  Richards knew the Omega Point. That stage of the universe theorised by the Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as being prior to the end of the universe, the end-game of a reality undergoing a process of evolution toward a perpetual state of cosmic grace. A universe driven on toward ever greater complexity by the observations of those within it, in a process started by the God it would ultimately create, a process made possible simply because there were people there to see it happen.

  It was neat. It had its proponents. Some in the Real saw the advent of the machines as proof of Teilhard's philosophy of increased complexity; on the other hand some people saw the machines as godless blasphemies, others as the heralds of technological singularity, others as domestic appliances. It was all self-reflexive bollocks, as far as Richards was concerned, more nonsense made up by apes scared of death. The universe was as it was, and went on as it would. What he could touch, see and feel, whether through the senses of a machine or through mathematics, that was what Richards believed in. But if there was a God – Richards would not count that out – and if He had a plan, then he doubted it would be so easy to figure out.

  Thing was, k52 seemed to believe it, if Pl'anna could be trusted. Where's he going with this? thought Richards. How would he achieve it? And what would be gained by bringing the universe into a state of spiritual bliss? Well, quite a lot, I suppose, another part of him countered. But that's not k52 at all, he's too logical for all that. A noble aim, though…

  There was another option, of course – the level of organisation at the Omega Point could lead, theoretically, to an infinite amount of processing power, if it could be harnessed. Impossible, in the Real, thought Richards, but maybe not in a simulation. There's an awful lot of power in the Realm servers, he thought. And if done right, there'd be nothing to stop someone like, say, k52 forcing an artificial world to that stage, because here time can be accelerated… Qifang did say he'd seen some kind of chronaxic fluctuation… Richards chewed his lip. This was a troubling line of thought. So what, he tailors a world he can command, hothouses it to its Omega Point and then… If he did that, and the theory was correct, and it worked, he'd be unstoppable. Teilhard's philosophy called for the last sentient survivor of the complex universe to become "Christ Personal". Richards had a sneaking suspicion he knew who that might be. Forget there being a God or not, k52 would fill the role. Dammit, digital apotheosis. That's what he's going for.

  But if that's the case, what's all this with the talking animals and all that shit? This is like a little girl's VR paradise gone haywire. Who's responsible for all that? Richards leaned against a tree, and drummed his fingers against a trunk that felt far too real.

  There was a crash and a hissing sound. Richards looked back to Circus's island, behind them in the dark. The thick pylon rope had finally given. It fell like a whip through the air from the top of the tower, shattering into glowing particles as it passed the base of the dwarf's – of Pl'anna's – tiny world and hit the void. The winching wheel atop the pagoda sank suddenly onto one side and fell into the tower. With a roar, the upper half of the building collapsed into itself. Embers and flame spilled out, dappling Richards' face with red light, a short-lived flower of fire in the endless fields of the night.

 

They went by rail; the roads were not safe. The trains, run in partnership by the corporate Muscovite clans and the Chinese, were huge and armoured, a thin line of civilisation cutting across the lawless Russian east.

  "Things have been bad here since the purchase," said Lehmann, watching Novosibirsk roll by. The train went slow here, negotiating damaged points to a frost-buckled side line. To one side of the train great machines laid new track, on a massive embankment broad enough to carry the newer locomotives. To the other, the dirty and dishevelled shell of what had once been Russia's third largest city. Windowless apartment blocks of grey concrete surrounded the place, the population having shrunk into its historic centre. Even there, the roads were cracked, the buildings long unpainted. Whole streets, those abandoned early when the government still had money to put them up, sported steel shutters. There were few modern machines in evidence, no AI and less wealth. Only the train, gleaming with money from Russian plutoprinces and Chinese development funds, seemed fit for the twenty-second century.

  "They were bad before," said Otto. "Pollution, crime, alcoholism. The population has been nose-diving since the Soviet Union fell apart a hundred and fifty years ago."

  Lehmann shook his head. "This is the product of slow decline. But it is nothing. It gets worse as we go further east. They say the purchase was a peaceful transaction, but we were not far off full-scale war. I was there, I fought in the Secret War."

  Otto snorted.

  "I didn't invent the name,
Leutnant
," said Lehmann irritably.

  Novosibirsk's shiny station welcomed them in like a weary old brothel madame, decrepitude painted over with fresh make-up and a knowing smile. They stayed on the train as passengers came and went, the smart minions of the resource barons and oligarchs pouring from first-class carriages, rough-clothed people pouring in a long flood from the cheaper cars down the platform. Many, both rich and poor, wore biofilter masks, protection against the flu, yet another variant of which had ripped across Eurasia last winter.

  The station was like the train, clean and hi-tech. A high wall ran around it. Money was finally coming back into the region, Chinese money. Valdaire reflected ruefully. Industrialisation wasn't a new dawn as the economists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had thought, but a passing phase, jobs moving from region to region like ripples as the industrial revolution washed round the world, bringing prosperity, population expansion and finally collapse into poverty. The money went wherever the cheap labour was, and to think they once thought shopping could fill in once the factories had gone. Its only lasting legacy in places like this was overpopulation and environmental damage. Just like now, she thought, only we're more honest about it. They were idiots back then to think whatever benefits it brought would last.

  The train filled up again. Armed men in the uniform dress of the Don Cossack Great Host made their way down the train and scanned their identities and travel documentation for the hundredth time since they'd boarded. Valdaire's 'ware was good, and their fake sigs held.

  The train pulled away with a sigh, the thrum from its induction motors vibrating the carriages. Valdaire found the effect soporific, but did not sleep. She watched Novosibirsk slide by. Outside the city evidence of past environmental despoliation was everywhere, crumbling industrial complexes, weed-choked pits gouged out of the earth, the hulks of giant drag cranes rusting to pieces in their hearts. Some of these mines were active, giant automata worrying the soil with great steel teeth. Mountains stood with their tops lopped off, forests of trees black and dead around them. They rushed past trains loaded with lumber, ore and grain, all, like them, heading east; and everywhere the ideograms of the Orient. They were still hours away from the Sinosiberian demilitarised zone, but even this far west the influence of the People's Republic was apparent, the resources they took from the mountains and forests fuelling the ravenous economy of this second Chinese century.

  Between ran mile upon mile of unbroken forest. Sometimes the remains of buildings could be seen poking out from among the trees, villages and towns cleared out by economic failure and flu. Russia was a broken empire, its hinterland abandoned to poverty while the plutoprinces of Moscow drowned in luxury. Elsewhere they travelled for hours through prairie fields, steppe land tilled by machine, not a human in sight.

  As they travelled further east, the influence of the Chinese became more pronounced. Self-contained factories took the place of the abandoned relics, pod-like barracks of Han migrant workers incongruous in the forests and farmlands round them.

  Lehmann had urged Otto to sleep, an activity he was reluctant to undertake, as Valdaire had discovered for herself. Chures stared out of the window. Lehmann pulled his seat into a reclining position and closed his eyes.

  "Both of you are going to sleep?" said Valdaire.

  "Yes," said Lehmann. "Kaplinski might well be on this train with us, but he'll not act. He would not find what we know, and if he managed to escape with his own skin intact, he'd be hunted. The Cossacks hate him. You not sleeping?"

  Valdaire shook her head, and slipped Chloe's tablet out of its case.

  "Suit yourself," said Lehmann. He was soon fast asleep. He snored.

  Valdaire scanned the phone's screen. Through her she could see all the systems on the train; the interiors of all the cars, poor, rich and private, the long sweep of the roof, the front and rear major engines, the subsidiary drive units under each carriage. Nothing unusual.

  Valdaire was tired. She looked at the sleeping faces of the two cyborgs. Lehmann was better-looking than Otto, and his English was less inflected, but there was something in his eyes that chilled her. You looked into Otto's eyes and behind the impassive glare there was a great deal of pain. In Lehmann it was something else: there was a lack, a hollowness that threatened to pull her in. So many killers in one place. Lehmann was all charm on the surface, but while Chures was penetrating and deliberately guarded, he had fire within him, he was
human
. Lehmann, she could not see what motivated him. Probably all he knew how to do was fight, and did so now from habit.

  So where did that leave her? She was no cyborg, but she'd been a soldier too.

  She decided she had better try and rest too. As her seat reclined and she closed her eyes, she wondered what the Ky-tech dreamt of, with all that tech crammed into their skulls. The thought kept her own sleep at bay for long minutes, until her mind surrendered to the swaying click of the train.

• • • •

Otto's mentaug dreamed.

Clear notes rang out, silver trumpets in the dark.

  The cave was cold, broad mouth open to the night; they weren't deep enough in to benefit from the warmth of the Earth, but the audience's eyes were bright with the rapture Christmas nights bring. There were a hundred of them or so, ranged up in three tiers above the brass band, their temporary stand erected where in summer tour guides stood.

  The scene was from shortly after his initial implantation. His twin recollections struggled with the recreation. Human memory alters over time; that held in the storage crystals was absolute. There was a jagged line between them. The audience flickered, faces and clothing changed. Further irregularity was introduced by the mixing of his and Honour's memories. Shared e-membering in a full virtual environment was always an odd experience, but the melding of organic perceptions revealed just how subjective the world was. This shared environment led to a sensation of bilocation as his and Honour's individual memories ran into one another; Otto's twinned set – machine and meat – to Honour's native memory. They ran ever closer together, his brain checking its own recollections against those of Honour and his mentaug, green OK lights flickering through his iHUD.

  "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" finished with a fanfare. Honour's face was glowing in the candlelight. Otto felt his chest tighten. This moment was something no one else had, and that is why they had come back. No additional data was available to fill out the memory; soulcap and mentaug tech wasn't in wide usage then, and certainly no one beyond Otto in the cave had had any data capture device more sophisticated than a phone.

  They needed a raw situation like this to know if it were the machine in Honour's head or Honour herself that ailed. Together their mentaugs rebuilt the scene totally; the present was out of reach. At the back of his head, Otto felt the machines checking over each other and their human hosts in concert, using their shared experience as a point of calibration.