The van lifted off the ground, carried skyward on a pillar of fire. It twisted over and came crashing back down, blocking the road. Alarms went off round the entire block, car lights blazed on and engines revved, the vehicles banging into each other as they came online and tried to remove themselves from the danger.
Back in the room Otto said, "Now our car."
Out the back of the motel, the groundcar's windows went black. Broadcasting fake Gridsigs for Lehmann, Otto, Valdaire and Chures, it reversed out of its parking bay and headed off at high speed. Otto smiled as Chloe picked up a trio of airbikes lifting off and heading in pursuit.
"Do we go now?" asked Valdaire. She felt sick. She hadn't liked blasting the van; there were men inside. She'd killed many, she supposed, back in the war days, Otto was right about that, but he'd also been wrong; it had just been button pushing, easily dealt with if she didn't think about it. She'd never really squared it with her conscience. If she thought about it, it brought her too close to the men who scarred her hands, so she didn't. Maybe that made her worse than the cyborg. He clearly was bothered by it.
"Wait," said Otto. "Is the area clear?"
"Yes," said Valdaire.
"Then detonate the others."
Valdaire checked them quickly for human occupants. None. A street's worth of cars, dancing round each other as their onboard systems communicated and attempted to bring order to their escape, exploded one after the other.
"That will do it," said Otto.
Sirens.
"OK," Otto said, and ushered Valdaire out of the room. Chloe invaded the building's survnet sensors as they hurried to a side door in the building, scrubbing their presence from the recordings. "We're leaving now."
The noise of emergency vehicles, police and machines filled the night, lights sparkling in the rain. What little Gridwidth remained was clamped down, swamped by the informational traffic of AI and human emergency services.
Lehmann and Chures joined them on the street.
"Messy," said the VIA agent. "But effective."
"Kaplinski will not dare to make a move now," said Otto, looking up at the rooftops. "He's still watching. We need to lose ourselves, quickly."
CHAPTER 8
On the island it was as if the Terror had never happened nor ever would. Birds sang, plants rustled in the breeze and the sun shone, framed by a rag of blue sky that wavered uncertainly in the void. Richards marvelled at it, wandering round, prodding the ground with a stick. "This is a data artefact," he said to Bear. "One of those little bits that gets left behind when files are overwritten. I never thought I'd be standing on one, nor that I'd find one quite so… lush."
The island dwindled. With regularity pieces fell away into the void, tinkling as they went to nothing. A wall of black vapours streamed from its edges. Discomfited by this, Bear and Richards made their way inwards. There, at the heart, they found a glade around a spring from where they could not see the void, and felt a little safer.
"Good day," said an old man in the clearing.
"All right there," said Bear. "You got any cigarettes?"
Richards sat on a stump as the man handed the bear a soggy roll-up.
"Ah! A fag!" said Bear. "Thanks. If they were mine, I wouldn't go handing them out willy-nilly, none left anywhere now." Bear talked quietly. "Silly tramp."
"You should be a bit more respectful," said Richards mischievously. Surviving death had lightened his mood. "Did you never listen to the stories you had to tell your owner?"
"Don't talk to me about that little bastard. A decade and a half in a box, remember?" said Bear. The tramp lit his cigarette. "Watch the fur," grumbled Bear, "my manufacturers skimped on the flame retardant."
"This world has something of the fairytale about it," said Richards, "and in fairytales you should always help out strange old men in woods."
"The boy speaks truth!" muttered the old man. "It's often the way, often the way." His chuckle tailed off into a racking smoker's cough. Richards and Bear waited till he'd hawked up a handful of brown phlegm. "Sadly for you I'm not a fairy. The name's Lucas, although I was once Lord of Fendool, the capital of the outer realms of Hyberboroon."
"Ah," said Richards, pleased at this proof of his theory. "One of the Reality Realm RealWorld games. Number three, I think."
"What happened?" said Bear, sniffing at the tramp suspiciously.
"I do not know. One moment I was lord of all I surveyed, next darkness, and then…"
"The Flower King," said Bear and the tramp together. Bear gave Richards a meaningful look. "See?"
"Yes. Exactly. Ever since then I've been rather down on my luck."
"Aren't we all?" said Bear, and blew an extravagant smoke plume.
Richards watched the toy and the tramp smoke. No one had smoked in decades. "Who would build something like this, and why?" he wondered aloud. "And why is k52 trying to destroy it? It still doesn't make any sense."
"I've no idea," said the bear. "I'm just a bear, and I'm following orders."
• • • •
The black had a physicality to it, a presence that lurked outside the circle of sunlight. Despite this, Richards took to standing by the edge, watching fragments of Optimizja float by as he thought. A stand of wheat, a scarecrow in the centre with a face fit for tragedy; an ancient waystone; the corner of a kitchen; a pub table; a half-dead chestnut full of rooks, roots exposed to the nothing. Particles of the dead kingdom that held a resonance so strong it caressed the corners of their island like the wake from a boat as they passed, and that is why Richards supposed they persisted.
All were much smaller than their refuge, and all were dissipating. At first they passed several every day, then one or two, then none.
Night came and went normally on the island, as if the little kingdom of Optimizja were still whole and they could not quite see the rest of it, and they became used to moonlight and sunshine from orbs they could not always see. Days passed. Nothing happened. Richards made a long list of all the things he hated about being almost human: sleeping, itching, sneezing, being smelly, being hungry, being sad, being frightened and all the other things he could pretend to experience at home but could always turn off. Shitting came right at the top of his least favourites. He hated the process; it made his stomach crawl, which in itself was damn revolting. With limited access to water he felt he could never get his ridiculous human arse clean, and became self-conscious there was a lingering smell of shit on him.
There was little for them to do but sleep and eat the island's abundant supply of inquisitive grey squirrels. These soon grew less abundant and inquisitive, and the island fell silent.
Richards was tired but not sleeping. Like so much else, he found sleep an annoying imposition, and avoided it until his eyes were drooping, even though to do so made him feel irritable. He spent more time at the edge of the island, away from the bear and the tramp, who spent their time swapping improbably dirty stories. His limited grasp of the underlying architecture of the rogue realm, which he'd come to refer to as Reality 37, slackened, and he became despondent. He tried yoga, meditation, more sleep deprivation, anything he knew of that humans used to get inside their own heads, searching for the faint Gridsigs of his lost brothers and sister, but they remained elusive, and Richards was stuck in his made-up head with no one but himself for company. Days passed.
A note sounded strong and sad in Richards' isolated mind. His eyes snapped open. Richards leapt up and fell over about as fast, for he'd fallen asleep in the lotus position and his feet had gone numb. He swore the worst way he could in as many languages as he could remember, rubbed the life back into his limbs and tried again. He spun round and round, stopping at that quadrant of the compass where the note sang strongest. A Gridsig. Excited, Richards squinted into the dark, straining his eyes. Nothing.