“What, telescope, electromagnetic emissions, and so on?”
“Yup. Which is all very well, but it doesn’t tell us much. We need to be a bit clever. So what I did was, I made a copy of our personalities while you were sleeping on your ship, then I fired them on a narrow beam toward the Necropolis. I was banking on the fact that there must be some processing spaces remaining on this planet that could contain them. As always, I was right.”
Herb nodded as he digested that information. “So I’m not really me, is that what you’re saying? I’m just a personality construct? The real you and me are still sitting on board my ship, planning our attack on the Domain.”
“Oh, you’re the real you,” Johnston said. “You’re just not the one sitting on your ship anymore.”
Herb felt sick. “How could you do this? What have you done to me? I don’t care if I’m a personality construct; I still feel real. Who gave you the right to do this to me?”
The emotion drained from Johnston’s face. He gazed at Herb with an empty expression. “You gave me the right, Herb, when you agreed to help me on this mission. Don’t you remember?”
Herb held Johnston’s gaze for a moment. Silence. Then Herb swallowed and looked away. “Yeah. Whatever. So that’s why the most important thing we have to do is to get back to ourselves. Do you have any idea how?”
“I have a few ideas up my sleeve.”
“How will we know if we’ve succeeded?”
“The you and I who are here at the moment won’t know. If the you and I on your spaceship are hearing these words, it means we succeeded.”
Herb said nothing. A nasty idea had just occurred to him.
“So, what happens to us then, when we’ve finished our mission? Do we just die? Or do we spend the rest of our lives here wandering around the processors of the Necropolis?”
“When you’ve finished your work for me, how you then choose to live your life is up to you. As long as there is something to process the idea of you, you will think that you think, and therefore, you am what you am.”
They finally came to the foot of the cable. Silver-grey and perfectly smooth, Herb could see himself dimly reflected in the dull sheen of its metal. The cable disappeared into the tile floor, giving no hint of the tremendous tension trapped beneath the ground.
Johnston ran an apparent hand over the cable’s surface.
“I can’t feel anything,” he said. “That means the VNM that made up this cable must have been functioning correctly. There is no room for any margin of error in a space elevator.”
He turned to explain to Herb. “We’re taking advantage of the fact that the VNM that was the seed for the Necropolis couldn’t suicide properly. The building block machines still have their senses and processing spaces intact. We’re using them now to give us life.”
“I guessed as much,” Herb lied.
“Sure. Come on, there’re no clues here. Let’s take the scenic route into space. We’re going to try to get on board one of those ships and steal a little slice of processing time from its brain. We’re going to take on a life in a computer’s dreams. Isn’t that poetic?”
There were rooms and walkways built into the outer skin of the space elevator.
“Imagine having a corner office in this place!”
“You wouldn’t be able to breathe,” Johnston pointed out. “The windows don’t fit properly.”
“You know what I mean,” Herb said.
From the streets, Herb remembered, the space elevator looked like a very tall skyscraper. Get up close and you might not even realize that there was anything odd about it. From where they were now standing, looking out of a wide picture window just a few hundred meters above the ground, it was almost possible to believe they were looking out over an Earth city. Almost possible, thought Herb. Only if he didn’t look up to see the stacks and stacks of silent spaceships floating high above. Only if he didn’t look down too carefully to see the way the buildings below had stretched and deformed. Only if he didn’t look at those long metal creepers running in every direction, tangling high above the streets and choking the narrow roads. One particularly thin and elegant tower standing almost directly before Herb seemed to have been a favorite target. It was so wrapped around with creepers that it looked as if it had been strangled and was now being dragged to the ground.
And through it all, the yellow-and-black-striped metal bees hummed back and forth.
“Those yellow pod things. What are they doing?” asked Herb.
“I don’t know,” said Johnston. “They’re too big to be just observation pods. There must be some pretty powerful equipment stuck inside them. Maybe we’ll find out up there. Come on.”
The journey into space took longer than Herb might have guessed: Johnston couldn’t seem to jump them more than a couple of floors at a time.
“There’s no clear line of sight up to the top,” he explained, as he and Herb stood several thousand meters up the building, frustrated again at how few floors they had jumped.
Their journey became one of flickering movement as their consciousness appeared on one floor just long enough for Johnston to find a path to the next. Herb watched the Necropolis recede below them as they slowly climbed to the stars, the elongated towers of the city falling away as the pair of them rose to meet the layers of spaceships that hung above.
The outer limits of the Necropolis began to resolve themselves. The city appeared to have spread itself over a considerable part of the planet’s surface before the ongoing decay in the integrity of the reproductive machines finally set in. The bounds of the Necropolis were ragged, the towers out there having stretched themselves too high before collapsing under their own weight. The city didn’t so much come to an end as fade into the surrounding countryside. Herb shivered and wondered what it would be like to wander through those forsaken lands.
Johnston was his only unmoving point of reference. He stood next to Herb, his face set in quiet concentration as they traveled upwards. Behind him the room appeared to flicker: sometimes it grew larger, sometimes smaller. Occasionally the windows vanished, cracked and blown out into the thinning air. At one point they traveled in darkness for a good five minutes, and Herb guessed that they had reached the limit of the space intended to be occupied by humans, but then the habitable rooms resumed, this time much larger and with a faint air of half-formed opulence around them. It was a shame that the Necropolis had failed, reflected Herb, then he thought about what Johnston had hinted at earlier. There must be hundreds of failed cities like this, scattered throughout the Enemy Domain. How many cities had been built successfully?
Not for the first time, Herb shivered at the thought of what he had agreed to fight.
They had risen so high Herb could now make out the curve of the planet. They were approaching the first layer of spaceships, spread out above them like checkers on a board, vanishing into the distance in all directions, silver-grey and almost disk-shaped except for a love-heart indentation. They rose through the first layer and continued, past a second and a third, climbing into the night.
The flickering movement suddenly stopped.
“I need a rest,” Johnston muttered. He removed his hat and took a white handkerchief from his breast pocket. He mopped his forehead with it and then carefully replaced his hat, tilting it at a jaunty angle. Herb wandered to the window for a better view of his surroundings. Looking down through the crystal lattice of spaceships, he could see the ball of the planet, far below. He felt a wave of dizziness as he realized that if he fell out of the window now, he would probably miss the planet as he went down. The thought was ridiculous.