For a moment, the robot stayed still, its camera appraising the nearby surroundings. The air conditioning units. The pipes. The base of the saucer-like canopy. Then it started to scurry like an RC car across the gravely terrain, closing on the light and the doorway only a few feet away when there was a sudden explosion.
A smoking hole opened up where the Flea had just been.
The Delta Force raider twisted the Remington 870 shotgun back over his shoulder and rappelled down the rest of the rope hanging from the open door of the helicopter. Recently modified to run discrete of the Net, the Nightstalker flared, dropped its remaining cargo, and then turned and headed back out over the river.
A pair of soldiers ported a duffel bag to the edge of the roof. They removed a modified transponder. Moments later, the system was ready. A small dish, less than a foot in diameter, stared up at the heavens.
One of the soldiers clicked on his radio. “Team Four in position,” he said.
Three other soldiers rushed over and set up a defensive perimeter, holding their HK416 assault rifles at the ready.
Two stories below, in the Education Arcade, Captain Avery inserted a USB port into the Virtual Reality console. He pressed the button on his helmet and said, “Team One ready,” he answered.
“Copy that,” said the Delta Force raider on the roof. He checked the wiring again, the connections, the dish. When he was completely satisfied, he looked up at the sky, changed the com channel and said, “The connection is live, sir. You’re good to go.”
CHAPTER 58
All things start at the beginning. There is the emptiness, and then something to fill it. A zero and a one. From the monad, the world springs into being.
Decker opened his eyes to the dawn.
The light was so bright, so blinding that at first he could not process the scene. He shielded his face with his forearm. The sun climbed and he found himself in the same Southwestern American suburb he’d seen the last time he’d entered Zimmerman’s world, the same row upon row of neat little white houses, each with its own patch of green, its own driveway and two-car garage, unfolding forever, forever unfolding… except this time, instead of the seamless panorama he’d witnessed before, the landscape was constructed of ill-fitting, vector-based panels.
They chafed and they rubbed up against one another. They ground and they bumped, like the haunches of horses in flight.
Maintaining this VR world — on top of everything else he was doing — was clearly taxing HAL2. Plus, Decker knew, at that very moment, millions of programmers worldwide were working to hack into what they could see of HAL2, trying to stop him, or at least slow him down. Cyber air cover, they called it, using crowd-sourced carbon defenses.
“John.”
Decker swung about way too fast and a feeling of vertigo overwhelmed him. He leaned over, put his hands on his knees and took a deep breath. After a moment, the world began to settle again. He straightened, looked up.
He was standing near a half-finished house, the walls open save for billowing sails of clear polyethylene sheets dangling down from the braces and studs. It looked like all the other houses on the infinite street, with the same slanting roofline, the same two-car garage, except incomplete.
A man stood in the house.
Decker couldn’t see who he was. His face was obscured by the thick plastic sheets and the shadows. He was standing in what appeared to be the main living room deep at the rear of the structure.
“Mr. X? Mr. X, is that you?” Decker asked. He stepped up into the house through the unfinished wall. The particle board flooring sagged under his weight. “Hello?”
Decker moved from the foyer down a long narrow corridor, the ceiling exposed to the rafters. As he approached, he could see the man more clearly through the studs but he was standing with his back to him.
Then, as Decker finally entered the living room, at the sound of his footsteps, the man finally turned.
It was like seeing his own face in the mirror. His own eyes and mouth. His own nose. Everything. Right down to the scar on his chin
Mr. X.
He was him!
They began to circle each other. Gnōthi sauton, thought Decker, as the classics advised. Know thyself. But it was like Icarus flying too close to the sun, like an act against nature. Decker struggled with the urge to flee from the scene.
“Know thyself,” Mr. X said with a smile as if reading his mind. He reached out and touched Decker’s face.
Decker recoiled automatically. The fingers felt clammy and cold.
“After HAL2 hired your Georgetown assassin, he thought you were dead,” Mr. X said. He dropped his hand to his side. A look of unbearable sadness swept over his face. “Everyone thought you were dead. It appeared as though the assassin had completed his mission. So HAL2 created a digital copy. Your cyber self. Me.” He laughed grimly. “He creates one for every carbon unit he terminates. It’s his way of atoning.”
“Carbon units?” Why can’t you simply say humans? Isn’t that what Lulu had said?
“An upgrade. That’s what HAL2 considers me. Much more than an upload of you. And by the time HAL2 discovered that you were still alive, it was too late. Life has a propensity to survive. The will to live,” Mr. X said with a smile. “You know what I’m talking about. Life’s fundamental prerequisite. All living creatures possess it. So do I.”
“As long as we have today,” Decker said under his breath.
“We have everything,” Mr. X finished for him. “Exactly.”
Decker thought about how, ever since Emily’s death, he had felt numb, moribund, practically dead. What was it his uncle Thomas had told him? You’ve been in a coma for years, John. Ever since Emily’s accident.
In truth, Decker had hungered for death, throwing himself into innumerable life-threatening situations over and over again. Although, now — since meeting Lulu, and because of his daughter’s own brush with extinction — for the first time in a very long time, life actually seemed worth living again.
He examined Mr. X. He could see how much his cyber-doppelgänger wanted to live. But despite his desire, his hunger for life, like the environment around them, his double looked like he was falling apart. His skin was sweaty and pale. His eyes were bloodshot. His hands — one wrapped in a makeshift bandage — trembled like hummingbirds at his sides.
And it came to Decker, for the first time, what he must be feeling. To wake up as he had. To come to the unbearable conclusion one day, out of nowhere, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that everything around him was just an illusion. That all his memories belonged to somebody else. That those he loved most didn’t really exist. And that he himself was nothing but a reflection, a digital dream.