Constantine rubbed his hands unconsciously as he remembered the odd machine: crouching at the overlarge device, the strange feel of the antique plastic keys moving beneath his fingers as he painfully typed out instructions, the eerie glow of the viewing area on his face; the humming noise and the bizarre way that it blew warm air out of a vent in its side as it worked; the fact it needed a power source-what modern thinking machine needed power?
“It was a museum piece, Mary,” he said. “Priceless. They can’t make them anymore. You’d have to build a factory just to construct the processor. Too much effort. There’re only about ten of them left working now. When they all die, that will be it. The programs that ran on them will live on in emulators, but the original machines that made those programs live will be just so much metal and plastic. It’s…not sad exactly. I don’t know…The passing of something?”
He tilted his head to one side. “You know, that’s just like us, isn’t it? Minds without bodies. I never thought of that before.” There was another pause.
He sighed. “You know, this is nice in a way. Two years alone. It’s nice to speak to someone about things. What I’ve done. What I’ve seen. Have you ever been to Mars, Mary?”
She shook her head.
“It’s an odd place. A vision of what might have been. The future maybe, but not our future. A Buck Rogers future…” His voice trailed away as he remembered the events of a year ago. Flying up to the Martian factory mine. Its odd pyramidal shape seemed appropriate somehow on the red plain of the Martian desert. The soft voices of the flier’s pilot and of Louisiana Station control were the only sounds in the cabin as they approached the red-and-silver mass of the construction. They had skimmed over the tracks of two robot crawlers, low cylinders suspended from huge balloon tires that were trundling in a straight line from the base, headed who could know where. The mine drew closer. A jumble of steel and iron and rock. A miniature city built by and for machines.
Constantine jerked himself back to the present. “The AIs haven’t touched the place. It’s a preserved land, but what they’ve preserved there is our human past. The original project has been left to run unhindered. Everything there is a product of human ingenuity. It’s…” He shook his head.
“The…silence there, the intent…I can’t describe it. We developed Antarctica, we let AIs loose on the moon…I don’t know.”
Mary said nothing. The young man who had been serving behind the bar had finally left his place and was clearing used cups and litter onto a tray.
“I landed there and entered through a maintenance hatch. Can you imagine, those earthbound engineers, over a hundred years ago, designing a city that was to grow on another world? A city that only existed to them as lines of code, designed to be built in a place they could never visit. And while they wrote that program, they thought to include doors for future humans to enter the site, and access corridors and interface slots where they could plug in their laptops.”
He shook his head in admiration.
“They were building castles in the air, but they made them real.” He shook his head again. “Do you know how long I have waited to talk to somebody about this?”
“I can guess. I don’t think I can truly appreciate what it really must have been like.”
“No, I don’t think you could. Anyway. I went in there and plugged in the laptop. Filled it with the program that is the seed of a new factory and then got back on the flier. Went back to Louisiana Station. Back into our world. You know, you sit in a hotel room on Louisiana Station and look out at red Martian plains littered with rocks and you see Mons Olympus rising up over the horizon. Close the blinds and you could be anywhere. You could be back here on Earth. You sit in a room with the same bed and pastel prints and minibar serving filthy vanilla-flavored whisky.”
He sighed and looked down at the simple white jumpsuit that he had found himself wearing. He suddenly realized that it didn’t have a zipper or any other way to take it off. Whoever was controlling this simulation was making a subtle point.
“Anyway, that’s it. That’s how I got the VNM off Mars. I’d have thought you could have figured that out for yourself.”
Red spoke up.-They probably did. It’s an old interrogator’s trick. Start with the easy questions. Get the subject talking.
Mary smiled at him. “We had some ideas. We just wanted to know for sure. What about the other two questions? Are you going to answer those?”
“I don’t know,” said Constantine.
– You’re not. Grey’s tone was low and final.
Constantine shivered. It hadn’t occurred to him, until that point, that he might not have a choice in his actions. Grey had already demonstrated that he could take over control of his body.
“I’m not sure I will be able to,” he added, too softly for Mary to hear.
Mary had already risen to her feet. “We thought you might not be cooperative. Come on. We’re going to try and change your mind.”
She led him out of the bar. They walked side by side across the large flagstones of the fourth level. The moon was banded by thickening streamers of cloud, giving the impression of being behind a set of Venetian blinds.
“See the moon?” asked Mary.
Before Constantine could answer her, the bands of cloud widened, blocking out the moon completely. They quickly narrowed again, but now the moon had gone. In its place was a hole to somewhere else. Through it, a great eye looked down at Constantine. A blue eye; it blinked twice. Long curling eyelashes swept up and down, down and up.
“Everything you do is being watched. This world has been constructed entirely for you. It can look like this…” She waved a hand around, indicating the Source, the bar they had just left and the nearby concert hall. She took hold of Constantine’s arm and swiftly guided him to a grey door set in the wall of the concert hall, one of the many exits used to empty the building quickly once the entertainment had finished.
She stood Constantine before the door and looked the other way.
“Or it can look like this,” she continued.
The door swung open. Constantine looked through it into Hell. He saw flames. A demon was staring out at Constantine. It held a book tightly gripped in its twelve hooked hands. Constantine saw his name clearly inscribed on the front. The demon was standing by a strange machine made out of stainless steel, all blades and needles and with someone strapped inside it… The door suddenly swung closed.
Mary turned to face him, her face pale. “It’s an idle threat, Constantine. It costs too much running the simulation that keeps us all in here. The processing power could be put to better, more profitable uses. You, me, Marion and…the other one. We’re all personalities trapped in this bottle. They’ll just turn us off if we don’t deliver.”
Mary shivered and looked up to the great eye, staring down from the hole where the moon had been. A look of defiance crossed her face.
“I don’t care, Constantine. I’m telling you the truth now. You don’t know what it’s like. You’re more honest than we are. You didn’t volunteer to come in here. The real me, the one out there in the real world, has sentenced a copy of herself to oblivion for the sake of a bonus of a few hundred credits. What does that tell you about human beings, Constantine? Would you do that to yourself? I bet you would.”
She began to shake; she looked as if she was about to start crying.
“I don’t know what to say, Constantine. I don’t know what to tell you. This is the deaclass="underline" you tell us what we want to know and we keep the simulation going. That way, you have a life; we have a life. You don’t tell us, and I don’t know what will happen. Maybe it will be what you saw through that door. Personally, I think they’ll just turn us off. Why throw good money after bad?”