Rod Rees - The Demi-Monde - Winter

‘You met Heydrich?’ asked the General.

Ella nodded distractedly. She didn’t feel like talking. Meeting close up and personal with such pure, undiluted evil had really taken the wind out of her sails. She felt empty… weak… vulnerable.

‘Reini was at his despicably racist best,’ observed the Professor. The Professor was sitting in a chair stationed as far away from the General as the room’s architecture would allow: it was obvious that they disliked one another. The frisson of their mutual loathing infected the atmosphere of the room.

‘Is Heydrich typical of the Dupes you’ve used to populate the Demi-Monde?’ asked Ella quietly. That there were more like Heydrich made her flesh creep.

The General shook his head vigorously. ‘Thankfully, no. Heydrich is what we classify as a Singularity. These, the ultimate class of high-performing psychopath, are very rare: we see only a dozen or so of them in a century. That’s why we only seeded twenty into the Demi-Monde, four in each Sector. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on the way you look at it – two of them are already dead: Henry Tudor and Ivan Grozny were assassinated by Heydrich when he staged a coup to take over two Sectors of the Demi-Monde. A shame really, I thought Henry was one of the more interesting of the Professor’s PreLived creations. He was the only one with anything approximating to a sense of humour.’

Hand shaking, Ella picked up her cup of coffee and took a drink, hoping the caffeine would bring her out of her funk. What sort of maniac, Ella wondered, thought these games up? She put the cup firmly back down on its saucer. ‘Okay, so I’ve met Heydrich. The question is: so what? What has all this to do with me? Let’s cut to the chase, shall we, General?’ Now all she wanted to do was put as many miles of interstate between her and the Demi-Monde as was humanly possible.

Screw the million bucks.

No amount of money would persuade her to come anywhere near Heydrich again.

The General glanced nervously at Ella; he was obviously discomfited by her discomfort. ‘As I’ve explained to you, the Demi-Monde is not a predictable simulation… it’s a heuristic program, that teaches itself. As soon as it was switched on four years ago it was independent, free of its creator’s control, free to develop anarchically. Suffice it to say, Miss Thomas, that how the Demi-Monde operated post-initiation – or post-OutSet as it is called technically – came as something of a surprise to all of us. We had designed the Demi-Monde to be a very hostile environment for our neoFights, to be a perfect replication of an Asymmetric Warfare Environment. What no one expected was that it would be a life-threatening environment.’

Now that was a phrase that made Ella’s eyes widen. ‘Look… I really don’t understand all this “life-threatening” mumbo. I thought you told me that the Demi-Monde is only a computer game… that it’s only a simulation. Surely if the shit hits the fan in a computer simulation you still have the ultimate power. You can always pull the plug.’

‘We had the ultimate power, Miss Thomas,’ said the General quietly. He turned to the Captain. ‘I think, Captain, it might be useful if I give Miss Thomas a little more background to the Demi-Monde.’

The Captain illuminated a screen at the side of the General’s office to show what appeared to be the picture of a crudely drawn dartboard. ‘This is a map of the Demi-Monde. It is, as you can see, a circular world stretching thirty miles across, which is home to thirty million NowLive Dupes. Each of these Dupes is, thanks to the colossal processing power of ABBA, a discrete, unique and independent individual who thinks, acts and interacts just like their Real World doppelganger would think and act if placed in a similar environment.’

‘I’m having a problem with the word “think”. Are you saying that these Dupes of yours have some form of intelligence?’

The Captain smiled in a condescending way that Ella found hugely irritating. ‘It’s only ersatz intelligence, but to neoFights operating in the Demi-Monde it does appear that the Dupes have the capacity to think and behave independently. And DemiMondians don’t just interact with neoFights, they interact with each other.’ He took a deep breath, then continued his dissertation. ‘The Demi-Monde was planned from the OutSet to be a world that was intrinsically unstable and discordant, as only in this way could we be sure to provoke the type of war conditions we needed for our training. To do this we designed in a number of “Areas of Tension”: the notable ones being race, religion and population density.’

Ella found all this a little depressing. The USA had spent the last two hundred years trying to overcome the problems created by its citizens being drawn from different racial backgrounds and having different religious beliefs, and here was the US Military studying how to exacerbate these differences in order to provoke war.

The Captain used a laser-pen to indicate five segments of the map that radiated out from the centre of the circular world like slices of cake. ‘There are five equally sized Sectors in the Demi-Monde: the Rookeries, the Coven, Rodina, the Quartier Chaud and NoirVille. Each of the Sectors is racially and religiously distinct. To the north we have the Rookeries. This Sector is populated by people of Anglo-Saxon descent – an equal mix of Americans, of English and of Germans – who speak English and have an ascetic religion…’

‘Ascetic?’ asked Ella.

‘It’s a religion built on the denial of pleasure called UnFunDaMentalism, a creed that your friend Heydrich has made his own. However Aleister Crowley, the black magician who was so famous in the first half of the twentieth century, is the religious leader we placed in the Rookeries so there’s little wonder that UnFunDaMentalism has become suffused with aspects of the occult.’ He gave Ella a glance to check that she was following everything he was saying. ‘To the west of the Rookeries is Rodina. This Sector is largely Slavic in ethnicity: it’s a mix of Russians, Poles and Ukrainians. They speak Russian in Rodina and they follow – followed – an avowedly atheistic creed called RaTionalism which looks, as the name suggests, for rational explanations of the creation, the purpose and the oddities of the Demi-Monde and rejects supernatural interpretations. Since Heydrich’s coup RaTionalism has become an underground religion: UnFunDaMentalism is now the only official religion in the ForthRight.’

‘The ForthRight?’

‘The name Heydrich gave post-coup to the state that unifies Rodina and the Rookeries, the state he now controls.’

‘That’s a pretty ballsy thing for Heydrich to have done.’

A nod from the Captain. ‘But then Heydrich’s a pretty ballsy sort of guy and he was helped by a Russian?-Singularity called Lavrentii Beria.’

‘In real life he was head of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD,’ added the Professor helpfully. ‘A really nasty piece of work.’

‘Thank you, Professor,’ said the Captain testily. ‘Heydrich and Beria staged a revolution, assassinated the leaders of the two Sectors – Rodina and the Rookeries…’

‘Henry Tudor and Ivan Grozny,’ murmured the Professor.

‘… purged their political rivals and took over. The whole revolution is called the Time of Trouble, or as it’s more simply referred to in the ForthRight: the Troubles.’

The Captain moved his pointer around the rim of the DemiMonde. ‘Clockwise from the Rookeries we come to the Quartier Chaud where the inhabitants are of Mediterranean stock – mainly French, Italian, Venetian and Spanish – and where they all speak French. The Chaudians, as those who live in the Quartier are called, have a staunchly hedonistic outlook, they believe the pursuit of pleasure is the primary duty of mankind. Their religion is called ImPuritanism.’