4.3
Where are you?
The Cove, Taiji, Japan
Chinapat sat alone on the long sandy beach, facing the sea and the Dolphin Shepherd, anchored in the harbor. Small skiffs ferried ice from the ship to the shore. The cranes on the ship loaded ice onto skiffs. The clear sea surrounding the ship boiled with dolphins, jumping and diving, swimming alongside the skiffs and guiding them to docks that dotted the shore.
Seven started to run as she saw him in the distance. His large head and broad shoulders were unmistakable against an almond sky. She sprinted the last thirty meters, feeling the warm sand between her toes. Shockley’s scarf trailed behind her until at last it fell from her, leaving a long silk wound in the sand. Reaching Chinapat, she fell on her knees next to him.
He took her hand, not taking his eyes off the Dolphin Shepherd and the skiffs.
“I told you it was a trap,” he said.
“The Sim felt so real,” she said. “The ice, the cold. Shockley. The scarf.”
He turned his head, looking at her eyes for a moment and then behind her. “But it was real.” The scarf had turned into a scarlet red river in the sand, gurgling as it flowed toward the sea. Baby dolphins dropped one by one, as if from an assembly line, into the sea. They both watched as the cove teamed with dolphins.
“The scarf was from you,” she said. “You trusted me.”
He shrugged. Chinapat had never thought of giving another person a cheat code for release from virtual prison reality. He had only one. Once it had been used, that was the end of it. There was no second code. If things went wrong now, he’d remain in a limbo with no hope of escape. It wasn’t necessary to tell Seven the obvious consequences of his decision to help her.
“We are going back home?” she asked. Chinapat smiled, knowing that her idea of home was far away from the dolphin world.
He nodded his head. “We’re not finished. Tonight we sail for Bangkok on the Dolphin Shepherd. This time we can’t make any stupid mistakes. We play by the rules.”
“But I played by the noir subset of rules,” she said, a tone of anger creeping into her voice. “It is permissible.”
Seven was a literalist. And she believed in free will. Bangkok, the epicenter of noir, had enticed her to take any contract and take any risk. She’d ignored that the underlying source code for intelligence and purity perimeter violations established a deterministic but chaotic system not bound by entropy. But the old assumptions died hard. Bottom line was that no free will patches could be deployed to destroy predetermined outcomes. Emerging intelligent systems and water source purity were jointly linked and encoded with a level-eight firewall, which even the best cheat codes couldn’t breach. They returned to Bangkok, not as observers, but as partisans taking their place inside a deterministic noir world where their mission had already been predetermined.
Once Seven reviewed and uploaded the operative conditions, she’d understand that her feelings of pain, pleasure and emotions were real. Her problem arose from the perception of freedom and liberty, which felt also overwhelmingly real. In fact they were illusions in the system where the fundamental unreality was hidden at the quantum level. These mental conditions were bought and sold through administrator level cheat codes. Seven believed freedom and liberty were a natural right. It was a common mistake.
The question in Chinapat’s mind was whether she’d learnt her lesson.
Chinapat would find out the answer in Bangkok on a stormy night when the Japanese mafia came to greet the arrival of the Dolphin Shepherd at the Port of Klong Toey. They stood under umbrellas in the rain waiting for the ship. Armed men with swords and guns would take a stand, one consistent with their huge appetite for dolphin meat. Icebergs, no matter how pure, were no substitute for that sensation of pleasure.
“What do they expect?” Seven asked as the Dolphin Shepherd left the cove.
“They will offer you another contract,” said Chinapat.
“Am I free to accept their offer?” she asked.
Shockley joined them on the foredeck. He handed Seven a glass of pure iceberg water. “Ten thousand years ago, this water froze into ice. Today it is water again. When was it free? As ice? As water?”
“Water just is. How can water or ice be free?” She looked troubled. “Am I free to upload to home base?”
Shockley turned to Chinapat. “She is free to drink the iceberg water. Ten thousand years a sip. Once you’ve swallowed and digested the water time, you can phase back. Meanwhile, you’ll have another offer to consider.”
5.0 Where are you?
Chinapat: Cross-check Highway, Chon Buri Province 28480, ALPHA 16 Vector
Where are you?
Seven: Meet you at Login node loading hydrogen atoms to emit microwaves at the frequency “091-centimetre line” sequencing OMEGA 7:33-39 router
5.1
Where are you?
Highway No. 41 between Kms 6 and 7, Muang District
Several hours had passed since the Dolphin Shepherd had docked at the Port of Klong Toey, and Chinapat guided Seven through a scrub of Japanese gangsters in their black suits and ties. The gangsters blocked their path, wielding swords and guns, threatening and shouting, demanding and gesturing. Shockley watched as Chinapat found the keys for the Honda 500 motorcycle. Seven sat on the back and Chinapat slowly found a path through the gangsters. Twenty minutes later, Chinapat pulled behind a gray-bronze van. They were on the way to Chon Buri.
“That’s the van,” said Seven.
Chinapat followed behind at a safe distance and at Kilometer 6 pulled ahead and cut in front of the van. The driver honked angrily and tried to pass him. As Chinapat pulled alongside, Seven had extended her arms, both hands clutched together, pointing a .38 Smith and Wesson at the driver. She waved for him to pull to the curb. The driver said something to the passenger in the seat next to him and, before Kilometer 7 was reached, pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.
Seven kept the gun pointed at the men in the van.
“Get out of the van. Hands up,” said Chinapat.
“Do you know who our patron is?” asked the van driver.
“Shut up and open the back,” said Chinapat.
The driver clutched his fists and stepped forward, arm cocked and ready to swing.
Seven fired a round over his head. “He said open the fucking van.”
When the door opened, inside the modified van were three large dolphins.
Just as Shockley had said, in the back two female Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins and one male lay under a green plastic sheet. Chinapat pulled the sheet away, exposing the pregnant female on a rubber mattress. The dolphins from the cove at Taiji had passed along the kidnapping alert minutes after the gang caught the dolphins in the sea near Trang. The kidnappers were on their way to deliver the dolphins to a powerful person in Chon Buri province.
The police arrived minutes after Seven phoned. They looked at the dolphins as the men in the van watched.
“Do you know who our patron is?” the driver asked one of the cops.