“What are you two going to do?”
Sylveste reached for the vodka glass and took a discreet sip. “Haven’t you guessed yet? This room isn’t just for your benefit. We inhabit it as well, except that we inhabit a simulated version in the matrix. And not just this room, but the rest of the base; just as it always was—except now we have it all to ourselves.”
“Is that all?”
“No… not quite.”
And then Pascale moved to his side and he put an arm around her waist and the two of them turned towards the slatted window; towards the red-drenched alien sunset, the arid landscape of Resurgam stretching away, lifeless.
And then it changed.
It began at the horizon; a sweeping wave of transformation which raced towards them with the speed of an oncoming day. Clouds burst into the sky, vast as empires; now the sky was bluer, even though the sun was still sinking towards dusk. And the landscape was no longer arid, but erupting into tumultuous greenery, a verdant tidal wave. She could see lakes, and trees, alien trees, and now roads, winding between egglike houses, clustered into hamlets and, on the horizon, a larger community, rising towards a single slender spire. She stared into the distance, and stared, struck dumb by the immensity of what she was seeing, which was an entire world returned to life, and—perhaps it was a trick of the eye; she would never know—she thought she saw them moving between the houses, moving with the speed of birds, but never leaving the ground; never reaching the air.
“Everything that they ever were,” Pascale said, “or most of it, at any rate, is stored in the matrix. This isn’t some archaeological reconstruction, Khouri. This is Resurgam, as they inhabit it now. Brought into being by sheer force of will, by those who survived. It’s a whole world, down to the smallest detail.”
Khouri looked around the room, and now she understood. “And you’re going to study it, aren’t you?”
“Not just study it,” Sylveste said, draining a little more of his vodka. “But live in it. Until it bores us, which—I suspect—won’t be any time now.”
And then she left them, in their study, to resume whatever deep and meaningful conversation they had put in abeyance while they entertained her.
She finished climbing the stairwell, stepping once more onto the surface of Hades. The crust was still aglow with red fire, still alive with computation. Now that she had been here for long enough to attune her senses, she realised that, all along, the crust had been drumming beneath her feet, as if a titanic engine were roaring in a basement. That, she supposed, was not far from the truth. It was an engine of simulation.
She thought of Sylveste and Pascale, commencing another day’s exploration of their fabulous new world. In the time since she had left them, years might have passed for them. That seemed to matter very little. She had the suspicion that they would only choose death when all else had ceased to hold their fascination. Which, as Sylveste had said, was not going to happen any time soon.
She turned on the suit communicator.
“Ilia… can you hear me? Shit; this is stupid, but they said you might still be alive.”
There was nothing but static. Hopes crushed, she looked around at the searing plain and wondered what she was meant to do next.
Then: “Khouri, is that you? What business have you got still being alive?”
There was something very odd about her voice. It kept speeding up and slowing down, like she was drunk, but too ominously regular for that.
“I could ask you the same thing. Last thing I remember is the shuttle going belly-up. You telling me you’re still out there, drifting?”
“Better than that,” Volyova said, voice whooshing up and down the spectrum. “I’m aboard a shuttle; do you hear that? I’m aboard a shuttle.”
“How the—”
“The ship sent it. The Infinity.” For once, Volyova sounded breathless with excitement; as if this was something she had been desperately anxious to tell someone. “I thought it was going to kill me. That’s all I was waiting for; that final attack. But it didn’t come. Instead, the ship sent out a shuttle for me.”
“This doesn’t make any sense. Sun Stealer should still be running it; should still be trying to finish us off…”
“No,” Volyova said, still with the same tone of childish delight, “no; it makes perfect sense—provided what I did worked, which I think it must have—”
“What did you do, Ilia?”
“I—um—let the Captain warm.”
“You did what?”
“Yes; it was rather a terminal approach to the problem. But I thought if one parasite was trying to gain control of the ship, the surest way to fight it was by unleashing an even more potent one.” Volyova paused, as if awaiting Khouri’s confirmation that this had indeed been a sensible thing to do. When none came, she continued, “This was barely a day ago—do you know what that means? The plague must have transformed a substantial mass of the ship in only a few hours! The speed of the transformation must have been incredible; centimetres a second!”
“Are you sure it was wise?”
“Khouri, it’s probably the least wise thing I’ve ever done in my life. But it does seem to have worked. At the very least, we’ve swapped one megalomaniac for another—but this one doesn’t seem quite so dedicated to our destruction.”
“I guess that’s a step in the right direction. Where are you now? Have you been back aboard yet?”
“Hardly. No, I’ve spent the last few hours searching for you. Where the hell are you, Khouri? I can’t seem to get a meaningful fix on your location.”
“You don’t really want to know.”
“Well, we’ll see. But I want you aboard this ship as soon as possible. I’m not going back into the lighthugger alone, in case you had any doubts. I don’t think it’s going to look quite the way we remembered it. You—uh—can reach me, can’t you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Khouri did what she had been told she should do, when she wanted to leave the surface of Hades. It made very little sense, but Pascale had been quite insistent—she had said it was a message that the matrix would understand; one that would cause it to project its bubble of lowfield gravity into space; a bottle in which she could ride to safety.
She spread arms wide, as if she had wings; as if she could fly.
The red ground—fluctuating, shimmering as ever—dropped smoothly away.