Recursion (7 page)

“You can feel it, can’t you?” said Mary.

“What?”

“A sense of freedom. I can see it in your face. Everyone thinks that being a ghost means you can do what you want, whenever you want, but they don’t get it, do they? They don’t know what it’s like to be regularly exposed to indifference. Most people think it would be good to get out from under the noses of Social Care, but you miss it once it’s gone. What if you fall ill, and there’s no one there to see it? That’s when you regret the millions of credits worth of software constantly combing the world’s databases and removing each and every trace and reference to you. What if you were drunk and fell from this tram into the canal? There would be no record of your destination or your point of origin. Every computer sensor you’ve passed has been deliberately turned the other way as soon as they detected your bio signature. No one is waiting up for you somewhere because your employers want it that way, so no one would even know that you were splashing feebly in the water down there in an alcoholic haze.”

She sighed and leaned back in her chair.

“And that’s not the worst part, is it? It’s the loneliness.”

She wiped a fat hand across the corners of her eyes and sighed, then she sat up and forced a smile.

“Still. It could be worse. Maybe it’s not so bad for you. You’ve got the voices in your head for company, after all.”

“Voices?” Constantine forced a puzzled expression onto his face.

Mary put a hand to her mouth and raised one shoulder a little. “Oops. Sorry. Silly me. They’re supposed to be a secret, aren’t they? Pretend I didn’t say anything. Nothing about voices.”

She giggled and nudged him in the ribs.

“Still, I’ll tell you something. You want to be careful when those voices that don’t exist are speaking to you. Your whole face relaxes and it makes you look really stupid. I suppose they don’t think to control your expression. You should tell them that. Oh, sorry, I mean, if they really existed, you should.”

She giggled again, then sighed.

“I wish this tram would get a move on.”

They reached the inner perimeter of the second level. Just beyond the stone streets, a glass cliff rose into the sky, marking the border between the old and the new. Through this transparent wall Constantine could see the skeleton of the land: silver-grey bodies of VNMs in thick-plaited strands, rising in smooth curves and waves to support the next level up. The scene reminded Constantine of a mangrove swamp, a tangle of short-trunked trees with wide-spreading roots and intertwining branches, holding up the roof of the world. Staring at the greyish tangled trunks before him, Constantine had his first sudden inkling of the sheer size of Stonebreak, and the huge effort that had gone into its construction. He felt quite humbled.

Mary yawned loudly and began to scratch her side.

“They left the walls transparent so that people could see the roots of the city. Back then they were just showing off; now that VNMs build everything, it’s more of an embarrassment. The base is solid and there’s no room for the modification or organic growth that you get in modern arcologies. Stonebreak is lodged firmly in the past. It was defunct the day they built it. Some day they’re going to have to tear it down and start again.”

She gave a little sigh. “It can’t come soon enough for me. Come on, onwards and upwards.”

There were elevators set into the base of the soaring wall. Perfectly transparent, they rode its inside as invisible as a sheet of glass in water. As they ascended, Constantine looked out over Stonebreak: at the low-rise streets, light reflecting from the black water of the canals, and beyond that to the darkened outer area that held the expansive gardens and arboretums, the playing fields and farmland situated on the first level, and then, finally, to the empty wilderness of the Nullarbor plain.

He felt as if he was walking through a dream. The bustle of the I-station and the awakening nightlife of the second level seemed to belong to another world.

Am I drugged?
he suddenly asked the intelligences in his head.

There was a pause before they answered.

—I don’t think so, said Red.

Another, longer pause.

—No. I can’t see anything, but I know what you mean. Things seem strange.

—I agree. Go carefully.

From the fourth intelligence, as always, there came no word.

Mary took his arm and pointed to their left. Water was falling in a twisting tube down the inside of the wall, a liquid tornado, except moving with none of the violence and energy; instead, it seemed to splash and play like a merry stream. Hidden lights shone on the torrent, sending rainbows spinning and flashing and dancing around the inside of the glass walls in a fairy display.

“That’s the water that feeds the canals. It passes through the water features and fountains of the business quarter on its way from the evaporators at the center of Stonebreak. They say if the water flow ever ceased, we’d all be dead within twenty-four hours. They built this city on one of the most inhospitable terrains on Earth.”

She sighed. “I’ll tell you what, though. I like it. I like the way it looks. I think it’s pretty, you know? Everything else within the wall is about power and size and strength, but that waterfall, it’s just about making something for pleasure.”

Constantine frowned. “Oh, come on Mary, all of the second level looks nice. All those streets and canals. I’ve been in far worse places. Many people would like to live there, given the choice.”

Mary shook her head and laughed.

“Oh, Constantine. How can you be so naïve? Being a ghost, obviously a trusted man within your organization, you should be able to look more deeply into the reasons for things, and yet you accept this at face value? Stonebreak wasn’t about providing a nice environment to live and work, Stonebreak was all about telling the world that the Australian and Southeast Asian coalition had come of age and that they weren’t prepared to be fucked with. When they raised this arcology, they were taking out their big dicks and slamming them on the table, saying ‘Look at these! How about these for prime Australian beef, you fuckers.’”

Constantine smiled weakly at Mary’s imagery. The elevator slid to a halt and the doors opened, but Mary stayed where she was, warming to her theme.

“But it all backfired. They moved too soon. Now they’re left with this huge white elephant and they stand in awe and envy of those other organizations that stayed their hand. Now they look to Toronto and Lake Baikal and Atlantis and they wonder what to do next, but they’re worried. A deeper crisis is unfolding, one that goes to the heart of Stonebreak, one that must remain a secret…And then a ghost arrives…”

She looked knowingly at Constantine, who kept his face carefully blank, but all the time waves of relief were washing through him.
She didn’t know
. She didn’t realize that he was here on a far larger mission, one whose roots went back to long before the building of Stonebreak. The very thought of it made Constantine shiver. Sometimes he forgot for a few minutes the importance of his task, but the memory soon returned, weighing down upon him. No wonder he was stressed. No wonder he was seeing things. Or not, as the case may be.

“…but you’ve got to ask yourself, is it worth it?” she continued, oblivious to his thoughts. “I was involved in the building of this place, and what did it get me? A nervous breakdown.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re feeling the pressure too, aren’t you? No need to answer me. I can tell.”

Constantine said nothing. For the moment the sky fitted perfectly down to the ground, and that was good enough for him.

They stepped out from the elevator onto the third level. Here the buildings rose higher, built mainly of glass to allow maximum daylight inside them. The towers were not as tall as in other cities of the world and were spaced wider apart, set in groves of trees or gravel gardens, but nonetheless this area emanated the unmistakable feeling of power. Two women in security uniforms came walking toward them.

“Good evening,” said one. “Up here for an evening stroll?”

“That’s right, officer,” Mary said. “I’m taking my friend here to see the Source.”

The security officer glanced at her partner as she smelled Mary’s breath and gave a minute shake of her head. She looked at Constantine.

“The Source? First time in Stonebreak, sir? That’s an excellent place to visit, especially on a clear night. But it’s a long walk across the third level. You’d do better taking the under-city route. If you get back in the elevator and keep going down, it will take you to the I-station—”

“That’s okay,” said Mary. “We’d prefer to walk.”

The security officers glanced at each other again, then drew closer together, directly in front of Mary.

“No. I think you misunderstood,” said the second officer. “I really would consider taking the elevator, if I were you.”

A look of anger crossed Mary’s face and she took a step forward. Constantine put one hand on her shoulder to restrain her. He lowered his head and spoke in a bland, unremarkable voice, adjusted his posture in a certain way, did everything he could to make himself forgettable: a dull grey man in a dull grey suit.

“Actually, officers, we would prefer to
walk
through the city. I will vouch for this woman.”

There was a pause. Somewhere in a Stonebreak computer, a routine had just appeared. It created a new identity for Constantine and passed on clearance in that name to the officers. Its work done, the routine deleted itself.

“Okay, off you go,” said the first officer, her head tilted as she listened to a voice speaking in her ear. Mary and Constantine, the man who wasn’t there, headed on into the business quarter.

They walked through still streets between silent buildings. The business quarter had the air of a city of the dead: vast mausoleums lining wide thoroughfares that led through the night to nowhere. The brightly lit lobbies they passed seemed devoid of life: empty goldfish tanks, set out with toys but drained of water. Very occasionally they saw a security guard sitting at a desk, tapping at a console or watching a viewing field, but it was as if they were peering through a glass into a different world. Even Mary seemed subdued by her surroundings. She had hardly spoken since the episode with the two guards. Constantine wondered why they had intervened to stop her passing. How had a ghost been stopped by such simple security measures? Why hadn’t they been automatically distracted by a strange sound, a message, a change in their routine?

For that matter, why hadn’t Constantine’s own hidden protectors done that for him straightaway? Was Mary somehow affecting the routines? The thoughts were driven from his mind as he heard her sigh.

She was staring at the building immediately to her left with a despairing expression. Constantine gazed at it in surprise. It was the DIANA building: his own company. Mary sighed again and continued walking.

“That’s who I work for,” she said.

Constantine said nothing.

Around the corner two rectangular towers faced each other across a broad plaza. The facade of each was divided up into square windows, giving the buildings a retro, late-twentieth-century feel. A bright yellow light shone from every window, lighting up the plaza below. A single person stood in each window, looking out across the plaza at the person standing in the window opposite. Thousands of people, standing in absolute silence, gazing into another’s eyes. People in grey suits, in red dresses, in white bikinis. Old men in candy-striped blazers and young girls holding balloons, all standing in their individual squares of light staring, staring, staring. Constantine felt mad, shrieking panic scrambling around in his stomach at the thought of walking out there, across the plaza, in front of all those eyes.

“No…” he murmured, his mouth suddenly dry.

Mary gazed at him from under furrowed brows. “What’s the matter?” she asked, glancing around the street.

Constantine turned back to the two towers, but all the people had vanished. Another hallucination?

“Nothing.”

“You’re working too hard.”

“I know.”

“Is it worth it?” Mary said. “Is it really worth it? Don’t you just want to give up and do something else?”

Constantine didn’t answer. Mary was speaking to herself.

The far end of the business quarter came quite suddenly. Another tall glass wall rose into the heavens behind the low-rent, low-rise buildings at the back of the third level. Another elevator took them up to the top of the fourth and final level, where they proceeded through more wide streets, this time paved with large grey slabs of mock stone.

“This is where Stonebreak has its law courts and libraries, its mock parliaments and theaters. We’re not going to look at them, they’re far too dull.”

The pair trudged past earnest-looking buildings of grey stone, adorned with columns and engraved with Greek or Latin mottoes.

Mary snorted in disgust.

“This is where their imagination ran out. We’re walking nearly a kilometer above the Nullarbor plain and the best they could come up with are these imitation Roman dumps. Fucking architects. I work for a company that devised a structure that weighs millions of tons, has a diameter of nearly nine kilometers and a volume of thirty cubic kilometers. A structure that stands in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. And what do they choose to decorate it with? Bad copies of bad copies of the bloody Parthenon. Two and a half thousand years of continuous advancement in human technology since the Greeks built the bloody original, and they still can’t think of anything to improve on it.”