Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

But she wasn’t in South Street. She wasn’t part of the endless grind of days without purpose. Her friends might be argumentative and bad-tempered, but at least she had friends and she was walking for a reason. The South Street Eva would have just taken the first opportunity to lie down and die. It was what that Eva had secretively worked toward for months.

But not this one.

This Eva wanted to live.

The end was drawing near.

They climbed the long road into the hills, Eva occasionally turning to check Nicolas’ progress. He remained in sight for quite some time, an obstinate figure in orange marching into and out of view between the choking rhododendrons-and then he was gone.

Their climb was a long, hard drag. Yellow stones skidded and skittered beneath their feet; they kicked them, watched them bounce over the raised edge of the road to fall into the wide ditches on either side.

“It’s a quarry road,” Katie explained.

“How do you know?” asked Eva, but there was no reply.

The hills began to play games with them. They would climb in silence, putting their all into one last effort to reach the top of an incline, expecting finally to reach the road’s summit, only to see a gentle dip and then the road resuming its ascent further on.

“Not again.”

Eva thought she heard the whisper as they reached their third virtual summit. It sounded like Alison’s voice.

The pylons to their left marched steadily closer. As they climbed higher she thought she saw a second set of pylons off to her right. They appeared to come marching out of the next valley along.

“They’re heading to the same place as we are,” she muttered to herself.

“What’s that?” asked Alison suspiciously, and Eva jumped. She hadn’t realized that Alison was walking so close. She had been watching Eva as she looked at the pylons, an odd expression on her face. It was almost as if Alison had been caught out.

Eventually they reached the real head of the valley, from which the road descended to a natural bowl among the wooded hills. Below them they could just make out a space that had been cleared.

“A quarry,” said Katie. “I knew it.” She looked at Alison, but Alison just looked away, as if embarrassed.

“It’s very big for a quarry,” Eva replied. “Look at all those buildings.”

The second set of pylons now marched clearly over a hill to their right and picked its way down a steep slope to converge with the lines of the first set. Eva looked up at the sun. It was halfway down the sky, heading toward evening. The earlier heat had vanished. Eva knew that when they stopped walking they would feel cold. Her skin already felt cool to the touch.

The stone road sliced its way through a deep cutting in the hills and they walked in the shade for a while. Looking up, Eva could see an old grey pylon perched immediately on the cutting’s edge, thick brown branches of rhododendrons wrapped around its legs and spilling out over the lip of the earth. Higher up, cables looped down from the heavy brown ceramic disks anchored to the pylon’s arms. They were humming.

“It’s live,” Eva whispered, suddenly halting. “I don’t like this, Alison. I think we should go back.”

Alison turned to her impatiently. “What? After we’ve come all this way? Don’t be silly.”

Eva looked on down the road. At the far end of the cutting, a few hundred meters ahead of them, stretched a rusty chain-link fence. The road ran through a rusty gate set in the center of the fence. The gate was propped open invitingly. Eva felt a shiver of fear. The gate looked like a trap, waiting to be sprung. Involuntarily, she took a step backward.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It feels all wrong. We shouldn’t go in there.”

“What? Should we just turn around and go back then?” The other Alison was coming back. The nasty, bad-tempered Alison. And as she did, Katie was becoming more and more nervous and shy.

“So? Are you really saying we should go back?” Alison laughed nastily.

Eva took a deep breath and forced herself to speak calmly. “Yes. There’s obviously nothing for us here. No food or water. We can’t stay here.”

“Of course we can,” Alison said derisively. She shook her head and turned away, stamping down the road a little, kicking stones before her as she did so. She took a deep breath, kicked another stone so hard that it bounced from the scrubby walls of the cutting, and then suddenly turned and walked quickly back up to Eva. She wore a nasty smile.

“You haven’t figured it out, have you?”

“Figured what out?” Eva felt a shiver of fear. She could guess.

Alison laughed.

“Katie has. She’s not stupid. Are you, Katie?”

“No,” Katie muttered.

“No. I never thought you were, either, Eva. Don’t you realize? You’ve been tricked. All that nonsense with me tossing the coin and none of you ever thinking to check which way it was really landing. I’ve been leading you here all along. The Watcher wants to meet you.”

She laughed again, and her voice echoed from the walls of the cutting, reverberating up into the sky to be lost in the late afternoon hills. Alison resumed her march back down the road toward the invitingly open gates.

After a moment’s hesitation, Katie began to follow.

After another moment, Eva did too.

There was nowhere else to go.

Constantine walked into the hotel lobby,the green bottle containing the message gripped tightly in his hand.

A blue-suited receptionist met him as he crossed the floor toward the elevators, a company smile on her lips.

“Your guest is waiting for you in the Uluru Bar, Mr. D’Roza.”

His guest? Constantine hid his surprise.

“Thank you,” he said.

“And would you like me to dispose of your bottle, sir?”

The receptionist took the bottle from him. Constantine watched as she carried it off and dropped it in a bin behind the reception desk.

– It’s all a simulation, remember, said White.-There is nothing back there, behind the desk. The object will have been destroyed. Its resources restored to the heap. Now that the message has left the simulation, it will have some way of getting into the outside world.

– Fascinating, said Blue sarcastically.-Now, who do you think is waiting for us in the Uluru Bar?

– I’ve no idea. Have you got any suggestions, or are you just going to be sarcastic?

– No. Sorry.

There was a dark pause.

– I don’t like this. It’s not part of the script.

They rode the external elevator to the Uluru Bar, a dark glass-and-steel corner of the hotel where it was nearly impossible to tell what was real and what was a reflection. Booths and open seating areas were formed out of cuboids arranged at random orientations to each other, making navigation of the bar difficult without a waiter. Constantine was led to a table that seemingly hovered over nothing. Only the faint reflection of its steel legs in the glass floor indicated that he was not experiencing another fault in the simulation. The woman already seated there was hidden by shadow: the bar had been designed with just such an effect in mind.

Now she leaned forward. “Hello, Constantine.”

“Hello, Marion,” he replied. “Should you be here?”

– Be very, very careful, said a voice.

It was Grey. Constantine felt a little shiver of apprehension.

– This is it.

Marion smiled worriedly. She leaned closer and the strain was evident in her face.

“Oh, Constantine, I don’t know. We’re so close to the end, and I’m so worried. Tomorrow’s meeting is the last. We have to make the decision then.”

A waiter appeared, hovering a discreet distance away.