Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“Where else, on a world like this? They will come.”

“How? Will they swim here?”

He grinned, his face gleaming with the spray.

She stepped closer to the edge, peering out at the churning sea. But there was no sign of the swimming citizens.

Suddenly I was standing in the open air.

I was on a plain. The ground was scrubby and pocked by pits, some like the holes you leave when you dig out a tree stump, some bigger than that. The sky was a lid of cloud, washed-out gray-white, that seemed to suck all the color out of the landscape. There was a breeze on my face, and I could taste and smell salt, overlaid with a fouler stench of bad eggs, marsh gas maybe. But your senses are always dull in a VR; nobody wants to pay good money for a bad smell, no matter how authentic.

Before me was some kind of industrial plant. It was a collection of squat concrete blocks crenellated by aluminium ducts and fans. A massive, rusting pipeline stalked away on spindly trestles across the landscape. The whole setup was surrounded by a chain-link fence at least twice my height; it looked to be backed up by an electrical barrier. There was no activity, nobody about; the concrete was stained, the buildings looked abandoned. Standing there, a ghost in the landscape, the buildings made me queasy just to look at them, though at first I couldn’t figure why.

This was Siberia, the tundra, and it was spring. The landscape stretched to my left and right, and I had a sense of space, of immensity. This strip of tundra, between the sea to the north and the forests to the south, stretched a third of the way around the pole of the planet. But it was a petrolandscape, littered by oily lakes, pipelines, and rusting derricks.

Because of that breeze, I thought I must be near the sea. Looking away from the factory, I could see a line of iron gray, an ocean horizon. It made sense. This was the Yamal Peninsula, in the northwest of Siberia, maybe five hundred kilometers northeast of the Urals. Here, I had checked, the Arctic Ocean was known as the Kara Sea. Or I could be looking at the vast gulf at the mouth of the Ob River, a huge waterway that drained a continent. There was some kind of activity nearer the shore, low structures I couldn’t make out, people moving urgently around. Was that where Tom was working? I was ashamed that I didn’t know.

I hadn’t approved of him coming to as unstable a part of the world as this, and had hoped that my frosty silence would have deterred him from going. It didn’t. And now the result of my stubbornness was that he was hurt, somewhere in this depressing, worn-out landscape, and I had no idea how he had been injured or how badly, or even where he was.

In a VR projection you were stuck in the presence of your transceiver drone, which the service provider drops in the destination you ask for. Possibly this industrial plant was the nearest location logged in the provider’s database. It had been the time taken to fly my drone from Moscow that accounted for the delay before the link was established. But I saw no activity within the site. There was nobody here, nobody to ask about Tom.

Then I saw that one of those big concrete cubes was leaning. That immense building was tilted maybe ten degrees out of true, and one towering wall was cracked from top to bottom, yielding to the strain. The ground at the base of the tipping building looked as if it had melted, and was piled up in big static ripples, like warm chocolate. Further out, I saw, that pipeline dipped out of its line, too. That was why I felt faintly nauseous. The vast tilting had disturbed my sense of the vertical, already tenuous in my VR state. It was a strange sight, a surreal drunkenness. I imagined the whole plant slowly sinking out of sight, those immense concrete walls cracking and spilling their toxic contents, until the brown earth closed over the ruined buildings like a welcoming sea.

A helicopter flapped overhead, painted bright blue, UN colors. It flew so low it came on me suddenly, making me duck. It was heading toward that township near the coast.

I turned away from the plant and began to walk that way. As I walked the system glitched. The view around me would freeze and shatter into blocks, before reforming again, and I suffered a few strange smells and sounds, a bell-like ringing, and sharp smells of cinnamon or almond: VR synesthesia, bugs in the works. It was a sharp reminder that I wasn’t really here; this was only a phone call with special effects.

I didn’t grow up with immersive VRs. I could never get used to the pale washed-out sensation of the immersion, or the slight mismatch between the impulse to move and the motion itself, and I always imagined I could feel an itch at the top of my spine where data was pouring into my nervous system.

I was restricted to a walking pace, for such were the health and safety rules of the service. In theory you could fly around like Superman, and some people did, but nine out of ten threw up in the process. Cautious, I followed the rules of the game, but it seemed to take me an inordinately long time to tramp across that wounded landscape in search of my son. My anxiety built. It was unreal enough that I felt like I was trapped in a dream, unable to hurry, unable to run. I didn’t want to be here, dealing with this, a faulty VR projection in this awful, desolate, dreamlike place, where buildings melted into the ground.

It was at that low moment that I saw her: a slim figure, a pale dot of a face, a flash of strawberry-blond hair.

She was standing in my path, but ahead of me, perhaps as much as half a kilometer away. She was calling something, and pointing toward the coastal village. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I tried to focus on her, but when I stared straight at her she seemed to disappear, to melt into shadows and clouds; I saw her clearly only when I wasn’t looking at her.

Phantoms weren’t so unusual in VR worlds. Often the system would wipe over something it was not expecting to see, editing it out of its reality altogether. Or, other times, the system would show you something that wasn’t really there, a construct of badly imaged shadows and highlights, an interpretation of objects it couldn’t recognize. She could be an artifact of the visual processing system.

She wasn’t an artifact, though, I knew that deep in my gut. This was Morag. Even in here, in VR reality, she wouldn’t let me alone. But I didn’t have time for this, not now.

I continued to stalk across the landscape. Morag didn’t come any closer, but nor did she walk away from me. She just retreated, her movement subtle, mysterious. “Go away!” I shouted. “I’m here for Tom, not you!” I dropped my head and stared at my VR feet as they padded across the broken ground.

When I looked up again, she had gone.

At last I approached the little township. The place was small, maybe a dozen buildings in all, set out in a rough grid pattern. A few cars were parked on the rutted tracks, big battered four-wheel-drives with minuscule engine compartments that looked like early hydrogen burners, 2020s vintage. No pod-bus service here, I thought.

There were plenty of people around. Some of them moved purposefully between the buildings, talking rapidly in a language I didn’t understand. Others were gathered in little huddles, some of them weeping. They all seemed squat, small, round, and were dressed in heavy coats and boots — bright Day-Glo artificial fabrics, not the seal fur or whatever that I had been expecting. They looked to be a mix of races, some round-faced Asiatic, others more obviously European, even blond and blue-eyed. I vaguely knew that Siberia had been used as a vast slave labor camp by the Soviets in the last century; perhaps some of this mixed population were descended from prisoners or exiles.