Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

For that matter, why hadn’t Constantine’s own hidden protectors done that for him straightaway? Was Mary somehow affecting the routines? The thoughts were driven from his mind as he heard her sigh.

She was staring at the building immediately to her left with a despairing expression. Constantine gazed at it in surprise. It was the DIANA building: his own company. Mary sighed again and continued walking.

“That’s who I work for,” she said.

Constantine said nothing.

Around the corner two rectangular towers faced each other across a broad plaza. The facade of each was divided up into square windows, giving the buildings a retro, late-twentieth-century feel. A bright yellow light shone from every window, lighting up the plaza below. A single person stood in each window, looking out across the plaza at the person standing in the window opposite. Thousands of people, standing in absolute silence, gazing into another’s eyes. People in grey suits, in red dresses, in white bikinis. Old men in candy-striped blazers and young girls holding balloons, all standing in their individual squares of light staring, staring, staring. Constantine felt mad, shrieking panic scrambling around in his stomach at the thought of walking out there, across the plaza, in front of all those eyes.

“No…” he murmured, his mouth suddenly dry.

Mary gazed at him from under furrowed brows. “What’s the matter?” she asked, glancing around the street.

Constantine turned back to the two towers, but all the people had vanished. Another hallucination?

“Nothing.”

“You’re working too hard.”

“I know.”

“Is it worth it?” Mary said. “Is it really worth it? Don’t you just want to give up and do something else?”

Constantine didn’t answer. Mary was speaking to herself.

The far end of the business quarter came quite suddenly. Another tall glass wall rose into the heavens behind the low-rent, low-rise buildings at the back of the third level. Another elevator took them up to the top of the fourth and final level, where they proceeded through more wide streets, this time paved with large grey slabs of mock stone.

“This is where Stonebreak has its law courts and libraries, its mock parliaments and theaters. We’re not going to look at them, they’re far too dull.”

The pair trudged past earnest-looking buildings of grey stone, adorned with columns and engraved with Greek or Latin mottoes.

Mary snorted in disgust.

“This is where their imagination ran out. We’re walking nearly a kilometer above the Nullarbor plain and the best they could come up with are these imitation Roman dumps. Fucking architects. I work for a company that devised a structure that weighs millions of tons, has a diameter of nearly nine kilometers and a volume of thirty cubic kilometers. A structure that stands in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. And what do they choose to decorate it with? Bad copies of bad copies of the bloody Parthenon. Two and a half thousand years of continuous advancement in human technology since the Greeks built the bloody original, and they still can’t think of anything to improve on it.”

Constantine was smiling now. The streets they walked were lightly scattered with other tourists, some of them looking at Mary to see what she was shouting about, but most of them looking away in disgust at her language. Mary continued, oblivious to the stares.

“I mean, why couldn’t they just leave those buildings in the form that they grew? Surely the fact that Stonebreak is is enough. It doesn’t have to pretend to be anything else.”

“I quite agree,” said Constantine. “But didn’t you say earlier that Stonebreak is obsolete? I thought the VNM look was passй?”

“Oh, shut up,” Mary replied without anger. “Come on. We’re almost at the Source.”

Nearly forty years ago, the CEO of the Australia Southeast Asian coalition had walked across the flat scrubland of the Nullarbor plain to a point marked by a cross lightly scraped into the dry earth. Four dull grey machines were already set on the soil at the north, south, east, and west ends of the cross. She had crouched down and placed a fifth, silver machine, no bigger than her hand, in the faint depression scooped at the center of the cross, and then turned to smile at the assembled press and VIPs who stood one hundred meters back, behind the fluttering plastic ribbon that encircled the location that was destined to be the Source. The heaps of junk metal and other raw materials needed for the VNMs to work upon had been placed well out of sight of the spectators. They would have spoiled the effect, ruined the magic.

The sky had been a deep, deep blue, the sun a yellow glare, low in the sky, too bright to look at directly. The CEO turned to smile and pose for pictures. She was wishing she had worn a thicker suit. Okay, so they had deliberately scheduled the activation ceremony for early morning when it was cooler, but the Nullarbor plain was meant to be hot , for fuck’s sake. She had to clench her teeth tightly to stop them chattering as she smiled.

Eventually, the photo call was over, and she could head back between the sparse bushes, the reddish sand scratching at her soft blue leather shoes, and enter the presentation area. Someone handed her a glass of thin champagne and she took it with a smile. “Get me a fucking cup of hot fucking coffee,” she muttered under her breath.

She held up the glass and smiled brightly. “Good morning. Today, we can all feel privileged to be attending this incredible and historic event. Today, we can look back over five thousand years of human history, and reach out with the finest sieve imaginable, and garner the very best of human achievement, bringing it together here in humankind’s mightiest achievement to date. Using the very latest in self-replicating technology, we…”

The crowd stirred: she was losing them. Fuck the speechwriters, what did they know? She hadn’t got to her present position by rehashing other people’s words. She did what she knew best and went with her instincts.

“Ah, to hell with it,” she said. “You know what this is about. Let’s build a city.”

She raised her glass and took a sip. Out on the arid soil the machines began to stir. The assembled crowd drank their thin champagne and looked on at the unfolding scene: five cylinders scratching in the sand. How could the start of something so momentous appear so dull? It didn’t seem right at all.

Soon they began to drift away, bored when they realized nothing much was going to happen out there. As they did so, the engineers and the workforce moved in. The sun rose further into the empty sky, beating down harshly on the minuscule activity below. Minuscule activity at the moment, maybe, but growing all the time as the machines began to reproduce.

A huge metal tree marked the Source. Pastel lights moved back and forth over it, dramatically picking out its colossal shape in the clear night. The trunk was composed of five thick strands twisting around and in and out of each other to form a thick plait. Four of the strands were a dull grey; the fifth, bright silver. The trunk itself emerged from the flagged ground and rose forty or fifty meters into the air before untwisting itself to spread its five branches high over Constantine and Mary’s heads. These five branches then each split successively into two and four and then eight strands, blossoming into a huge, feathery, treelike effect.

The harsh white stars twinkled at them through the sharp outer branches. Constantine was so taken by the sight, he felt as if he had forgotten to breathe.

“It’s like something out of a fairy tale,” he whispered.