Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (14 page)

i mean, dzang! those old scanners turned the first version of kansas into a nightmare, ruined alice’s wonderland and pooh corner—remember pigzilla?—and a bunch of other stuff besides. didn’t those fenhead bastards ever hear of innocent childlike wonder?

that’s a joke, case you didn’t know. sort of.

“Tell me a bit about Omby Amby,” said Orlando as he and the Glass Cat walked down the main street, past clean, bright tinfringe lawns and polished mailboxes, toward the Shop, the unofficial city hall of the Works. “Did he have family? Friends—or more importantly, enemies? What did he like to do?”

The Cat shook her head. “No family, but I didn’t know him very well—to be honest, we do not travel in the same circles. If you’ll remember, I am intimate with many of the leading citizens of Kansas and was present to see several of them come to life—like Scraps the Patchwork Girl, for instance. The Policeman with Green Whiskers…well, he was a policeman. A civil servant. You would have to ask around in the workingman’s taverns in Emerald.”

“Taverns?” That didn’t sound very much like the Oz that L. Frank Baum had written about, and it didn’t sound like it belonged in this rebooted version of Kansas either. “There are taverns here?”

“Of course,” said the Cat. “Where else can that sort of people drink ginger beer, play darts, and generally be loud and not half as amusing as they think they are?”

“Ah,” said Orlando. “Ginger beer.”

“Although,” said the Cat with a little frown of disdain, “I hear that nowadays the younger men are drinking sarsaparilla instead. Straight out of the barrel!”

“Goodness,” said Orlando, trying not to smile. “These places sound desperate and dangerous.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the Cat said. “My superior intellect doesn’t permit me to visit such low establishments.”

Tinman was in the barnlike building known as the Shop, standing beside a large drafting table, surrounded by tin toys of various descriptions—a bear on a ball, a monkey with cymbals, a car with an expressive, smiling face. Tinman stared as Orlando explained why he had come, his brightly polished face devoid of any discernible emotion, although his eyebrows had been welded on in such a way that he always seemed surprised, an effect amplified somewhat by the gaping grill of his mouth, as though he were perpetually hearing news as unusual as Orlando’s. Tinman was less human than the drawings in the ancient books, but still a great deal friendlier-looking than the thing that had ruled the Works before the restart, a creature more like a greasy piston with crude arms and legs than anything with thoughts and feelings.

As Orlando finished his recitation of the facts to date, the tin toys standing around the table began to make quiet ratcheting noises and move in place.

“My friends here are upset by your news,” Tinman said tonelessly. “As am I. Poor Omby Amby! He was kind to everybody. He lived to help, and although he was a soldier, he would not have hurt a flea.” He paused for a moment. “Nor would he flee from hurt, evidently.”

The other tin creatures gave little whirring laughs. “Very clever,” the rolling bear said. “Your workings are as droll as ever, Tinman.”

“But now my heart shames me for making light at such a time,” he replied, though Orlando could see no evidence of it on his inscrutable metal face. “What has Scarecrow said? Will he draft another policeman? The whiskered fellow was very useful dealing with small problems and matters of everyday…friction.” It was impossible to tell if Tinman was making another joke or talking about something of particular concern to folk whose internal workings were composed of oiled gears. The tin toys began to whisper among themselves, a noise not much louder or different than the sound of their clockwork, until the monkey became excited and clapped his cymbals together with a loud crash, which startled the Glass Cat so badly that she jumped off the table.

“Careful,” said Orlando.

“You are right,” said the Cat. “Scarecrow was right, too—there are too many hard edges around here for me.”

Tinman swiveled his head toward her. “What does that mean, Glass Cat? Has Scarecrow said something unkind about the Works? That would be very disappointing.”

“No, no,” said the Cat. “Only that he told me I must be careful when I am visiting you here. That all this metal is a threat to my delicate, beautiful glass body.”

“Nonsense,” said Tinman. “No more so than the brick sidewalks of Emerald or the stone-scattered paths of Forest.
It is too bad to hear my old friend speak about my part of Kansas that way.”

Orlando was going to say something conciliatory but instead found himself wondering what was going on behind Tinman’s shiny face. Was this exchange really as innocent as it seemed, or had the rivalry, treachery, and ultimately destructive conflict that had ruined the previous version already started again between the leading characters of this simworld?

Orlando asked about Omby Amby’s last mission.

“Yes, he took a message to Lion for me,” said Tinman.

“And you wanted Lion to let you use some of the Forest land?”

Tinman gave the closest thing he could to a shrug, a brief up-and-down pump of his shoulders. “He has a great deal, and there is much of it going to waste, but here in the Works, we are cramped between Emerald on one side and Lion’s domain on the other, with nowhere to grow.”

Lebensraum
, Orlando thought.
Isn’t that what the Nazis called it?
Out loud he said, “Was there anything else to your message? Anything besides the request to use some of his land?”

“I can remember nothing else,” said Tinman. “Now if you will excuse me, my associates and I must discuss an addition to one of our factories. We would like to complete it during the dry season. Many of our laborers are Henrys and Emilys, and unlike my own people, they do not enjoy working in bad weather.”

“Of course,” said Orlando. “We’ll find our own way out.”

As he led the Glass Cat from the Shop, he considered what Tinman had said. On the surface all was as Orlando would have expected, so why did he feel as though
something just as important—perhaps many important things—had gone unsaid?

just checked in on tinman. he’s still a little weird, but he always was, even in the nicest versions. something about that voice—like a robot with a bucket over its head. can we just redo the way he talks? that’s probably most of the problem with the simulation right there—that voice is utterly creepy. if sims can dream, I bet he’s giving the others nightmares.

Is this whole world just doomed to go wrong?
Orlando wondered.
Maybe the whole network? Something in the original programming that keeps tipping it back toward chaos? Or am I seeing ghosts where there aren’t any? Maybe Omby Amby just…tripped or something. And his head fell off. Shit, this is Oz, more or less. Stuff like that happens in Oz all the time.

But unless he could prove it, it didn’t solve the current problem. “I guess we’re off to see the Wizard,” he told the Cat.

The Wizard, known in the present version of the simworld as Senator Wizard of Kansas, lived in a stately white house on top of a hill between Emerald and Forest, overlooking the city. He was semiretired, leaving the business of governing mostly to Scarecrow and the others.

Orlando had discovered Oz early, first in various vids, then later in the books themselves. For a very sick child who spent most of his short life in bed, the Land of Oz had been the best childhood dream, a place where even someone as prematurely aged as little Orlando would have been just different, not a freak.

Another big part of its appeal: nobody died in Oz.

It was not surprising he had a soft spot for this place, but Orlando had also seen the horror that could be produced here firsthand, and knew that leaving its sims to such a fate would be far more cruel than simply pulling the plug.

A riddle like this was so much more difficult to solve than something like the endless train robbery, which Kunohara and whatever programmers had signed his penalties-worse-than-death nondisclosure agreement could solve just by fixing a few command lines. This Kansas thing was a people problem, at least so far. They might just be code, too, but every single bloodless algorithm had been through the black box of the Otherland network’s strange origin, had been effected by its living operating system and its many Grail Brotherhood manipulators, and had evolved and changed even since Kansas had been restarted. They were nearly as complex as real human beings, and although he knew it wasn’t that simple, Orlando couldn’t stop thinking of them that way. Shutting down the previous version of Oz had been a mercy killing, and it might come to the same thing this time, but it was a lot harder to think about euthanizing a patient who was smiling and happy and enjoying being alive.

“Princess Langwidere of Ev once told me,” the Cat said suddenly, “that if everyone had brains like mine, the world would be a less boring place.”

Orlando had only the vaguest recollection of Langwidere, a minor royal who lived somewhere on the fringes of Oz, or in this case, obviously, sim-Kansas. “Ah? Did she?”

“She most certainly did. She said that at least it was something to see, interesting enough to make her look away from her mirror every now and then.”

“She sounds charming.”

“She is. Most regal and discerning. When I visited, she took special trouble to show me her lovely things, her whole collection. She understands my true uniqueness.” They had reached the front porch of the Wizard’s big white house. The Cat vaulted up and waited for Orlando to open the door. “It is a shame there aren’t more people of her…and my…quality.”

The Cat was a useful informant, but she wasn’t his favorite sim by any means.

The Wizard came down the stairs as they entered the cluttered front parlor.

“Orlando!” he said with obvious pleasure. “Come in, young man, come in! A privilege to see your shining visage—and you, too, Glass Cat! You are even shinier! Hmmm, there was something I wanted to ask you, but I can’t think of it just now. Anyway, come in, both of you. May I offer you some lemonade?”