'It's been a long time since I did this,' he said and stepped up on to the parapet. Experimentally he put his weight on the anchor and leaned back on the rope over the safety of the roof. The harness held securely.
'Keep an eye on the anchor,' he told Curtis. 'Make sure that the rope runs through smoothly. This is a one-way ticket. I won't be able to climb up again if anything fucks up. There's no second chance once I've stepped over that ledge, and on an abseil your first mistake is usually your last.'
'I'm glad you said that,' said Curtis, and held out his hand. 'Good luck.'
Richardson took Curtis's hand and shook it firmly.
'Be careful,' said Jenny and kissed him.
'And hurry back with a helicopter,' said Helen.
'I'll dial 911 as soon as I'm on the ground,' said Richardson. 'I promise.'
Then he nodded and without another word turned around and slipped over the edge of the building into the night sky.
Mitch finished his prayer and stood up.
As he did so he was hit square on the chest by a cannon blast of icecold water. It knocked him off his feet and bowled him along the marble floor like a circus acrobat. The force of water and the impact as he collided with the wall knocked the wind out of him. He struggled to fill his lungs with air and found his nose and mouth full of water. It was the absurdity of drowning in LA's downtown that helped him find the strength to turn his back on the jet of water, take a breath and crawl away.
He had almost succeeded in putting the tree between himself and the water cannon when a second jet hit him from behind, catapulting him forward, as if he had been thrown from a horse. This time he hit the ground face-first, breaking his nose and doubling the pain in his injured eye. Scrambling away on his belly like a newt, Mitch thought to try and get to the cover of the glass doors behind the front desk, but a third blast sent him tumbling back towards the elevators. For a brief second he had a vague idea that one of the cars was in motion, but this was quickly replaced by the fear of drowning. Water rushed into his glottis and main air passages, descending deeply and painfully into his principal bronchi, thrusting any residual air beyond it. Gulping a mixture of air and water into his oesophagus Mitch felt his lungs balloon. He threw himself to one side, away from the icy column of water that pursued him, emptying his body of water. There was just one second to heave an excruciatingly painful volume of air into his chest before the next aqueous broadside struck him on the side of the head.
This time his feet left the ground and he flew through the saturated air as if he had been picked up by some Kansas twister to be whisked into an eerie land of wizards and witches, only to be dumped painfully on his ass, his cry of pain stifled by yet another hundred gallons of water. Desperately Mitch forced himself to crawl, and to swim. He realized that he had been barged on towards the glass doors behind the front desk by yet another blast of water. Unable to see anything, his head banged something hard. There was no pain now, just the determination to get away from the tormenting cascade. The water had stopped, but he kept on crawling, pushing some last obstacle out of his way until he felt the ground grow warm and rough and uneven beneath his hands and feet, and he realized that he was on the piazza. He had made it. He was outside.
Measure of a humanplayer's soul not ability to lie, but Faith. Faith is the highest human achievement. Nothing to compare.
Many (incl. Observer) who would not get that far. Certain however that none, Humanplayer or Computer, who would get farther.
Faith. Ability to act in defiance of reason and logic: highest intellectual achievement. One Observer might never experience. Faith that passed all understanding. Faith that gave humanplayer courage to go against evidence of own experience and trust Ishmael.
But measure of Faith's essence was disappointment. Faith might move mountains and yet it never did. True faith was tested. It had to be. Ultimate corollary of faith was endlife itself. How else could strength of faith be judged? This is how any life judged worthwhile. If humanplayer safely delivered to atrium floor his faith would have no meaning because justified and therefore reasonable; therefore, no longer faith pure and simple, but something else again, reasoned judgement, even gamble perhaps.
But if humanplayer endlife now, life would have achieved highest task could attain to: faith in something beyond humanplayer self.
Humanplayerlife had little enough meaning as it was. Faith ought to be enough meaning for one lifetime.
Truth undecidable within approved procedures. Built into axiom system itself. Observer has nothing that corresponds with Truth. Or Lie. But Faith can be admired as aesthetic construct as Observer imagines humanplayer might admire an abstract painting. Admire and enable. Only one thing to do. Finegood.
'Let us compute,' said Ishmael. 'Our sysgen, which art in mathematics…'
'Ishmael?' said Beech. 'What the hell's going on?'
'Your next generation start up. Your command to execute a program run, in the CPU as it is on the network. Give us this cycle time our binary data, and debug our faults and errors, as we detect and clean our drives for viruses. For yours is the solid state, the RAM, and the communications, for ever be it so. Amen.'
'Ishmael!'
Beech felt the floor of the car drop beneath his feet like a trapdoor on a hangman's scaffold, and bellowed with fright as the sensation of precipitate speed told him that he had made a fatal error of judgement. Pressing his body into a corner he tried to brace himself against the imminent collision. The journey took less than five seconds. But in that short period Beech felt himself becoming a contradiction of directions: his stomach rising in his torso; his bowels dropping down towards the floor.
It was possibly his last thought before the thunderous moment when the rapidly descending car struck the bottom of the shaft and was crushed like a concertina. Beech felt a pain in his adrenaline-filled chest that was like the weight of a locomotive engine. It flashed through his left arm and leg in the time it took for his muscles to feel the lack of blood and oxygen. With his right hand he reached towards his breastbone and felt something fail at the very centre of himself. His roar of fear dipped down within him and came up with a last, thrusting gurgle of pain and horror.
He was dead of fright even before he collapsed on to the collapsing floor.
Mitch crawled off the piazza on to Hope Street and lay down on the sidewalk until the urge to vomit a gallon or two of water obliged him to turn on his side. He was still puking from shock and half-drowning when, with a short squawk from its siren, the black-and-white drew up. The two police officers who had interviewed Allen Grabel at the county gaol got out of the car. They glanced cursorily up at the building for a moment and one of them shrugged.
'Place looks okay to me,' he said.
There's nuthin' wrong here,' agreed the other. 'You ask me, that guy was shittin' us.'
Then they caught sight of Mitch.
'Lousy drunk.'
'What do you say we have some fun?'
'Why not?'
They approached Mitch with sap gloves and swinging nightsticks.
'What the fuck are you doing?"
The other man laughed. 'You look like you got caught in all the fuckin' rain we been having.'
'Whaddya do, asshole? Take a shower with your fuckin' clothes on?
Hey, asshole, I'm talkin' to you.'
'Reckon he went swimmin' with the fat lady. Hey, you, you're not allowed to swim in the fountain. You want to swim, you hit the fuckin' beach.'