‘They want her to breach,’ I said, glancing over at Pagan and Morag and wishing they would hurry up.
‘Good. I want to meet this woman,’ Balor said.
‘Won’t your shark be jealous?’ I asked.
‘Magantu is very understanding,’ Balor said seriously.
‘And would have trouble swimming this high,’ Gregor said. We really weren’t taking our imminent deaths seriously enough.
‘The good news is she doesn’t strike me as the sort of person Rolleston can push around,’ I said as Cat’s icon came back to life. She didn’t look happy.
‘You need to come out now,’ she said.
‘The people who’re pushing you to breach are going to get a lot of your people killed before you get us. You know that and there’s no need for it,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I know that, but I’ve been given some very compelling reasons to come in and get you,’ she said. As a commander, and she struck me as an ex-NCO not an officer, I could tell she didn’t want to come in here. I wondered what she’d been told. Had she been told that we had an alien virus and an alien? Had she been told that we were in league with Them? ‘Is it true that Balor is in there with you?’ she asked.
I saw Morag and then Pagan come out of their trances, blinking and looking around. Buck and Gibby began to play. It was a slow and faintly sinister piece.
‘Yeah,’ I told her. ‘He’s our hostage.’ My comms icon presumably transmitted the smile on my face. Well, I was smiling until I saw Balor glaring at me.
‘Look, you know they’ll never let you broadcast, yeah?’ she said. I looked over at Morag, who gave me the thumbs up.
‘Too late,’ I told Cat. ‘You’ll want to see this.’
I switched on my net feed.
26
What did it look like? Everyone in known space must’ve seen it by now. If they didn’t see it when it happened, and you pretty much had to be in a coma to miss it, then they would have seen vizzes. What the vizzes couldn’t capture was that it looked different to all of us. The software that translated its net-born image to our minds translated it differently for each of the millions of people seeing or experiencing it. In other words it was personal for all of us.
The feed that Morag sent me seemed to be from outside the net construct of the Spoke. The virtual representation of the Spoke looked like a tall fairy-tale tower made from partially solidified water, the whole thing flowing like a waterfall. The studio looked like a pre-fall art deco cinema made from neon liquid. The liquid motif was shared with many of the businesses in the virtual Spoke. Its outgoing broadcasts were represented by fast-moving neon streams of the same liquid. Pagan hung in mid-air, level with the broadcast node. He was surrounded by what looked like air disturbances, his hair blowing in an invisible wind. He held his staff over his head; his eyes rolled back and the lightning of aggressive information exchange played around the staff. He shouted and babbled in some ancient pagan glossolalia as he cast his programs preparing the way for God.
We watched as Black Annis walked through Pagan’s storm. The Spoke’s defence programs, manifesting themselves as water spirits, were buffeted out of the way by the storm or raked by Annis until they became puddles. High above Pagan and Annis I could see the Spoke’s hired guns descending clothed in various water-borne mythological icons. I watched as they were blown and buffeted by Pagan’s storm, their own attacks swept aside by the defensive software in the storm.
The cinema’s walls of water parted for Annis. She was holding what looked to me like an old-fashioned jack-in-the-box. I could see her blue-skinned clawed hands winding it up as she strode into the lobby of the cinema construct and laid the box down on the consensual floor.
Pagan finished his incantation and let out a primal-sounding scream. He slammed his staff down; it seemed to rupture the very air in an explosion of lightning, illuminating the invisible air spirits of the Spoke’s more subtle defence programs, sending them tumbling down. From the base of Pagan’s staff a rupture of lightning coursed through the air towards the cinema into the tower of water. Annis bathed in the pale light of neon and lightning and stepped back from the jack-in-the-box as Pagan’s lightning, the activation code, reached it.
I watched the jack-in-the-box bulge and crack. I saw impossibly bright light beneath the cracks and rents in the bulging box. And here’s the thing that doesn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t in the net; I was just watching, but I somehow felt it. Just like everyone else. Or maybe it was just everyone else I was feeling, because at some level or another we are connected to the communications infrastructure of our race. I saw the jack-in-the-box finally rupture and burst. It was like the amorphous mass of tentacles and pseudopods that I’d seen in my dream of the initial attack on Them. Except these weren’t black, they were formed of bright white light and all colours and were beautiful. The tentacles shot out everywhere, faster and more numerous than my mind could understand, in every possible direction and some directions I suspected weren’t possible.
I could hear Morag and Pagan laughing and then Pagan was crying. I wasn’t sure if it was in the net or in here with me. They were sending me more feeds from the net, vizzes from all over the information shadow-world. I saw images of God surging down every highway, road, street, alleyway, passage and into every site and net construct. I saw the shocked expressions on some of the better-rendered icons. Shock turned to either panic or awe. I guess it depended on how they wanted to look at God. I watched the informational reflection of our world light brightly up.
Then came the response. Every kind of probe, analytical program, communications program and of course the inevitable attack programs. From lone panicking icons to concerted government and corporate attacks. It was natural, I guess. After all, these people had a lot to lose and they had just had the depths of their systems violated. Now every secret they had was common knowledge. It still looked somehow petty and vicious to me. Like insects stinging a mountain. It was only then I wondered if business as we knew it could continue, or government or society. I guess the attack programs were used in self-defence, but somehow they looked ignorant and brutish. I was beginning to think I’d spent too much time around Pagan and I was becoming a believer.
And then Mudge’s grinning, drunk, high features appeared on every visual display screen, from monocle heads-up displays to giant hologramatic displays projected into the sky. From apartment viz screens to the huge screens on the side of advertising zeppelins. His image would be glowing out of the screens attached to the side of Big Neon Voodoo’s trucks. Somehow I knew that Papa Neon was dancing on the top of one of his lorries. Mudge was made a giant on the side of all the Spokes, his features looking out over savanna, ocean, jungle and mountains. From slum bedsits to upscale Ginzas, from corporate office walls to the fortress mansions of the super rich, from inside classrooms to inside governments. It was reaching the orbitals now and soon the Moon, then Mars, then the Belt and ever outward. Beggar, criminal, soldier, labourer, wage slave, corporate, officer, executive, minister, presidents: all of them were seeing Mudge’s grinning face. He was the harbinger of God, or even the other way around. I started laughing but it quickly turned into a hacking bloody cough.
In my mind’s eye I could see the ranger and his girlfriend in their flat just off the Ferry Road. McShit and his Twists watching this on the Rigs. The refugees from the Avenues, the quiet family that ran Fosterton, Rivid in his sled somewhere, crowds of silent pirates in Times Square, Crawling Town becoming motionless except for Papa Neon’s dance, and everyone in this Spoke from High Atlantis in orbit to the Mag Lev stations deep in the crust of our world.