Jericho nodded. In the bigger branches of Cyber Planet, which were visited by the more affluent customers, there were tanks filled with cooking salt solution, in which you floated weightlessly, dressed in a sensor skin. Your eyes were protected by 3D glasses, you breathed through tiny tubes that you were barely aware of. Conditions in which you experienced virtuality in such a way that reality afterwards seemed shabby, artificial and irritating.
‘A tiny little injection,’ the woman continued, ‘into the corners of your eyes. It paralyse the lids. The eyes are moistened, but you cannot any more close them. You have to watch everything. C’est pour les masochistes.’
It’s far worse having to listen to everything, Jericho thought. For instance, your ridiculous accent. He wondered how he knew the woman. She must have come from some film or other.
‘Where are we actually going, Yoyo?’ he asked, even though he had guessed. This connection was a wormhole: it led out of the monitored world of cybernetic Shanghai into a region that was probably unknown to the Internet Police. Lights darted past, a crazy flickering. The sphere started to turn. Jericho looked between his feet through the transparent floor and saw an end to the shaft, except that it seemed to be widening.
‘Yo Yo?’ She laughed a tinkling laugh. ‘I am not Yo Yo. Le violà!’
A moment later they were floating under a pulsating starry sky. Rotating slowly before their eyes was a shimmering structure that looked like a spiral galaxy and yet could have been something completely different. It seemed to Jericho like something alive. He leaned forward, but they spent only a few seconds in this majestic continuum before shooting into the middle of a conduit of light.
And floated again.
This time he knew they had reached their goal.
‘Impressed?’ asked the woman.
Jericho said nothing. Miles below them stretched a boundless blue-green ocean. Tiny clouds drifted close above the surface, their backs sprinkled with pink and orange. The sphere sank towards something big that drifted high above the clouds, something with a mountain and wooded slopes, waterfalls, meadows and beaches. Jericho glimpsed swarms of flying creatures. Colossal beasts grazed on the banks of a glittering river, which snaked around the volcanic peak and flowed into the sea—
No, not flowed.
Fell!
In a great banner of foam the water plunged over the edge of the flying island and scattered into the bluish green of the ocean. The closer they came, the more it looked to Jericho like a gigantic UFO. He threw his head back and saw two suns shining in the sky, one emitting a white light, the other bathed in a strange, turquoise aura. Their vehicle fell faster, braked and followed the course of the river. Jericho caught a swift glimpse of the enormous animals – they weren’t like anything he had ever seen before. Then they darted off over gently undulating fields, beyond which the terrain fell to a snow-white beach.
‘You will be picked up once more,’ said the Frenchwoman, with a little wave. The sphere disappeared, as did she, and Jericho found himself squatting in the sand.
‘I’m here,’ said Yoyo.
He raised his head and saw her coming towards him, barefoot, her slender body swathed in a short, shiny tunic. Her avatar was the perfect depiction of her, which somehow relieved him. After that fanciful copy of Irma la Douce he’d worried—
That was it! The Frenchwoman had reminded him of a character in a film, and now he knew at last who it was. She was the perfect re-creation of Shirley MacLaine in her role as Irma la Douce. An ancient flick, sixty or seventy years old. That Jericho knew it at all was down to his passion for twentieth-century cinema.
Yoyo looked at him in silence for a while. Then she said, ‘Is it true about Grand Cherokee?’
‘What?’
‘That you killed him.’
Jericho shook his head.
‘It’s only true that he’s dead. Kenny killed him.’
‘Kenny?’
‘The man who murdered your friends too.’
‘I don’t know if I can trust you.’
She came up to him and fixed him with her dark eyes. ‘You saved me in the steelworks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, or does it?’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Not necessarily.’
She nodded. ‘Let’s walk for a while.’
Jericho looked around. He didn’t know what to make of it all. Filigree creatures were landing a little way off, neither birds nor insects. They reminded him of flying plants, if anything. He tore his eyes away and together they strolled along the beach.
‘We came across the ocean when we were looking around the net for safe hiding-places,’ Yoyo explained. ‘Pure chance. Perhaps we should have moved here with the control centre straight away, but I wasn’t entirely sure if we’d really be undisturbed here.’
‘So you didn’t program this world?’ asked Jericho.
‘The island, yes. Everything else was here. Ocean, sky and clouds, weird animals in the water, which sometimes come right close to the surface. The two suns go up and down, slightly out of sync. There’s also land. So far we’ve only seen some in the distance.’
‘Someone must have made all this.’
‘You think so?’
‘There’s a server with the data stored on it.’
‘We haven’t been able to identify it so far. I’m inclined to think there’s a whole network involved.’
‘Possibly a government network,’ Jericho speculated.
‘Hardly.’
‘How can you be sure of that? I mean, what’s going on here? In whose interest is it to create a world like this? For what purpose?’
‘An end in itself, perhaps.’ She shrugged. ‘Nobody today is capable of grasping Second Life as a whole. Over the past few years tools have been produced in vast numbers, and they’re constantly being modified. Everyone builds his own world. Most of it’s rubbish, some of it’s incredibly brilliant. You can get in here, not there. In general they adhere to the rule that everyone can see what other people see, but I’m not sure even that’s true. In some regions they have completely alien algorithms.’
Jericho had stepped close to the edge. Where water should have played on the beach, the strand fell vertiginously away. Far below them the light of the suns scattered on the rippled surface of the ocean.
‘You mean, this world was made by bots?’
‘I’m not the sort of idiot who makes a new religion out of disk space.’ Yoyo stepped up next to him. ‘But what I think is that artificial intelligence is starting to penetrate the web in a way that its creators couldn’t have imagined. Computers are creating computers. Second Life has reached a stage whereby it’s developing out of its own impulses. Adaptation and selection, you understand? No one can say when that started, and no one has any idea where it’s going to end. What’s happening is the consistent continuation of evolution with other means. Cybernetic Darwinism.’
‘How did you get here?’
‘What I said. Chance. We were looking for a bugproof corner. I thought it was hopelessly old-fashioned, squatting like migrant workers in the Andromeda or the steelworks, where Cypol could walk through the door at any time. Okay, they can kick in your door on the net as well. If you encrypt, you’re finished, you might as well just invite them to arrest you. We communicated via blogs, with data distortion and anonymisation. But even that didn’t do it. So I thought, let’s move to Second Life. There they can go searching for you like mad, but they don’t know what they’re looking for. All their ontologies and taxonomies don’t work here.’
Jericho nodded. Second Life was an ideal hiding-place, if you wanted to escape State surveillance. Virtual worlds were far more complicated in their construction and more difficult to control than simple blogs or chat-rooms. There was a difference between putting textual building blocks in a suspicious context and drawing conclusions about conspiracies and dodgy attitudes from the gestures, facial expressions, appearance and environments of virtual people. In Second Life everything and everyone can be code, whether friend or foe.