Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

He shook his head in admiration.

“They were building castles in the air, but they made them real.” He shook his head again. “Do you know how long I have waited to talk to somebody about this?”

“I can guess. I don’t think I can truly appreciate what it really must have been like.”

“No, I don’t think you could. Anyway. I went in there and plugged in the laptop. Filled it with the program that is the seed of a new factory and then got back on the flier. Went back to Louisiana Station. Back into our world. You know, you sit in a hotel room on Louisiana Station and look out at red Martian plains littered with rocks and you see Mons Olympus rising up over the horizon. Close the blinds and you could be anywhere. You could be back here on Earth. You sit in a room with the same bed and pastel prints and minibar serving filthy vanilla-flavored whisky.”

He sighed and looked down at the simple white jumpsuit that he had found himself wearing. He suddenly realized that it didn’t have a zipper or any other way to take it off. Whoever was controlling this simulation was making a subtle point.

“Anyway, that’s it. That’s how I got the VNM off Mars. I’d have thought you could have figured that out for yourself.”

Red spoke up.-They probably did. It’s an old interrogator’s trick. Start with the easy questions. Get the subject talking.

Mary smiled at him. “We had some ideas. We just wanted to know for sure. What about the other two questions? Are you going to answer those?”

“I don’t know,” said Constantine.

– You’re not. Grey’s tone was low and final.

Constantine shivered. It hadn’t occurred to him, until that point, that he might not have a choice in his actions. Grey had already demonstrated that he could take over control of his body.

“I’m not sure I will be able to,” he added, too softly for Mary to hear.

Mary had already risen to her feet. “We thought you might not be cooperative. Come on. We’re going to try and change your mind.”

She led him out of the bar. They walked side by side across the large flagstones of the fourth level. The moon was banded by thickening streamers of cloud, giving the impression of being behind a set of Venetian blinds.

“See the moon?” asked Mary.

Before Constantine could answer her, the bands of cloud widened, blocking out the moon completely. They quickly narrowed again, but now the moon had gone. In its place was a hole to somewhere else. Through it, a great eye looked down at Constantine. A blue eye; it blinked twice. Long curling eyelashes swept up and down, down and up.

“Everything you do is being watched. This world has been constructed entirely for you. It can look like this…” She waved a hand around, indicating the Source, the bar they had just left and the nearby concert hall. She took hold of Constantine’s arm and swiftly guided him to a grey door set in the wall of the concert hall, one of the many exits used to empty the building quickly once the entertainment had finished.

She stood Constantine before the door and looked the other way.

“Or it can look like this,” she continued.

The door swung open. Constantine looked through it into Hell. He saw flames. A demon was staring out at Constantine. It held a book tightly gripped in its twelve hooked hands. Constantine saw his name clearly inscribed on the front. The demon was standing by a strange machine made out of stainless steel, all blades and needles and with someone strapped inside it… The door suddenly swung closed.

Mary turned to face him, her face pale. “It’s an idle threat, Constantine. It costs too much running the simulation that keeps us all in here. The processing power could be put to better, more profitable uses. You, me, Marion and…the other one. We’re all personalities trapped in this bottle. They’ll just turn us off if we don’t deliver.”

Mary shivered and looked up to the great eye, staring down from the hole where the moon had been. A look of defiance crossed her face.

“I don’t care, Constantine. I’m telling you the truth now. You don’t know what it’s like. You’re more honest than we are. You didn’t volunteer to come in here. The real me, the one out there in the real world, has sentenced a copy of herself to oblivion for the sake of a bonus of a few hundred credits. What does that tell you about human beings, Constantine? Would you do that to yourself? I bet you would.”

She began to shake; she looked as if she was about to start crying.

“I don’t know what to say, Constantine. I don’t know what to tell you. This is the deal: you tell us what we want to know and we keep the simulation going. That way, you have a life; we have a life. You don’t tell us, and I don’t know what will happen. Maybe it will be what you saw through that door. Personally, I think they’ll just turn us off. Why throw good money after bad?”

“How can I trust you?” asked Constantine.

“You can’t. But what other choice do you have?”

“I don’t know. I need to think.”

Mary nodded. “I bet you do. Well, here’s something else to think about. Why are you protecting DIANA? Do you know they’ve already launched three attacks on this computer, the one in which we now reside? The third one almost succeeded. They got a worm into the system that would have wiped the entire simulation if we hadn’t found it in time. For DIANA, the best way to keep secret what you know is to destroy you.”

Constantine opened his mouth to argue, but he couldn’t find the words. What Mary said made sense. He didn’t want it to be so, but it made sense. What would he do if he was outside and not trapped in here?

And that was the point. He was outside. The real Constantine was out there somewhere. And Constantine, now shuddering violently in the warm night air, knew exactly what he would be thinking:

At all costs the project must be protected.

Somehow I must wipe out the copy of my personality.

The ship reinserted itselfinto normal space. Herb braced himself for the attack…

Nothing happened.

Gradually he relaxed. Herb felt like an old-fashioned wind-up toy. The tension would slowly build up inside him, hunching his shoulders, bunching his fists, restricting his breathing, until he noticed it was happening. Then it took a conscious effort to relax; release his pent-up breath in one huge sigh; force himself to breathe more slowly. And that would appear to work for a while, but all the time the tension was rebuilding, his body slowly winding itself up again.

It was happening already as Herb scanned the viewing areas.

Where were they? Where was the attack? Nothing. Only empty sky.

Robert coughed. He was about to perform one of his little distractions; Herb just knew it.

“The thing about warp drive, superluminal drive, faster-than-light drive,” said Robert, “is that once you make the jump, you can’t be tracked.”

Herb was not impressed. He had been expecting better than this.

“Well, yes. Everyone knows you can’t track someone making a warp jump,” he said.

Robert grinned. “And they’re right. But what many people don’t realize-and it’s partly because they don’t take the trouble to think about the problem, and partly because the AIs keep quiet about it-is that you can still usually make a pretty good guess at a ship’s position.”

“How?” Herb’s stomach was tightening with uncertainty.

Where were they? Robert scanned the viewing field in the floor again and frowned. “The Enemy Domain saw us insert ourselves into warp at a certain point. There is a certain range of speeds at which we can travel using a warp drive, so that gives the Enemy a minimum and maximum distance that we can have traveled. Think of two concentric bubbles expanding outward from our starting point. As the outer bubble sweeps through a system, they will go on alert. After the inner bubble has trailed through later on, they stand down.