The airship looked like a glass tube lying on its side on a shelf that, no matter how broad it was, still seemed precarious. They were perched at the very top of this world’s atmosphere. The delicacy and mesmerizing detail of a starlit cloudscape lay below them, all the more hypnotic because the peaks and outflung arms of vapor appeared perfectly still. It was like the entire world was wintering over.
Toby had a flash of vision then, an image of himself curled up and as still as this for the past thirty years—no, more: motionless and waiting, for fourteen thousand …
Just for that one moment, he felt equal to this place, for the city was doing only what he’d already done. Then Shylif called his name and he had to turn away.
“This way.” He left Orpheus on the ship but made sure he was in his survival ball just in case. Then he followed space-suited human figures, and incongruously ordinary-looking bots, across the stillness of the platform and through a set of gigantic half-open doors. Apparently the city wasn’t worried about maintaining its internal atmosphere right now; he saw other open portals at intervals around the curve of the dark interior.
Here were city towers, houses and trees, all in a very different style from the ones in the Continent. “They’re sort of Mayan,” he commented.
“What’s Mayan?” asked Shylif.
“Before your time, I guess.” Thankfully, it was hard to make out details in the darkness; he didn’t really want to feel the oppressive gaze of all those empty windows on him. How many frozen human forms were curled up behind them, waiting out the years of what, to them, would feel like a single night?
That made him think of what Shylif had said earlier, about “wandering the halls of the dead, calling out to people who’ll never respond.” Jaysir said he had waited thirty years for his lost love to awaken again …
Chilled by the thought, Toby hurried after the others.
The fans of light cast by the bots’ headlamps were easy to follow, so he jogged after them across frosted, snow-drifted balconies and ramps. Soon he saw where they were going: an incongruous heap of crates lay half submerged in snow near a frozen fountain. Without ceremony, the bots began rooting through the boxes, tossing aside the ones that, presumably, weren’t owned by their masters.
“That’s it?” Toby watched the free-for-all in puzzlement. “We just pick ’em up and go home?”
Shylif laughed shortly. “You want it to be exciting?”
“Well … maybe not.”
“Anyway, it’s not like they’re not watching us.” He pointed, and Toby, looking where he indicated, experienced a sudden heart-stopping shock. Somebody was standing there, in the shadows. It wasn’t a bot, but a space-suited figure, human shaped. It stood as still as the icicles that hung above it like Damocles’s sword, its metal arms crossed, feet planted wide, faceplate blank and dark.
“Wh-who’s that?”
Shylif turned away. “A sentry, a keeper … call him what you want. This lockstep has them. They walk up and down the ramparts of the city, twenty years alone … If that one wanted us dead, we would never have made it this far.”
“You boys got a manifest?” Casson’s voice broke Toby out of his uneasy distraction.
“Yes,” said Shylif. He called up the list of crates he and Toby were to haul. There weren’t too many, but still, they’d have to make several trips. Toby cut a wide berth around the other bots, which were tumbling whatever they didn’t want into a broad debris field around the central mound of boxes. He quickly found the first of the crates, heaved it onto his shoulder, and began to make his way back to the airship.
It was on his third trip that he began to realize how weak he still was. He’d just come out of hibernation, after all—and not your normal, run-of-the-mill thirty-year sleep, either. That wry thought made him laugh, and drop his crate.
He was sitting on it when Shylif came by, toting a much bigger box. “Tired?”
“I’ll hire you to carry this one back, too.”
Shylif laughed but didn’t take him up on the offer. After hibernation, he was probably nearing the last of his strength, too. Toby took a deep breath and hoisted his box to follow.
This was a different lockstep from Peter’s. Shylif had said that there were a number of them here on Wallop—and why shouldn’t they be scattered throughout the universe? The name 270/2 described a timing ratio different from 360. Maybe they all ran on their own frequencies, and those might or might not ever sync up. Also, they might have been started at anytime during the past fourteen thousand years. Even a lockstep full of human beings just like himself might have a culture and traditions—not to mention language and technologies—thousands of years removed from Toby’s. The mere thought made his head whirl, but all he had to do was glance around to know it must be true.
He struggled under the weight of the last crate on his shoulder and barely registered Orpheus’s greeting when he reached the airship. The other bots all made it back with their cargoes, and Nissa cast off. Then she and Casson chattered on about the thieving habits of decadent locksteps as they turned the ship’s nose into a canyon of open black air and began the long dive back to the Continent. Fatigued as he was, Toby barely heard them.
Shylif sat with him in companionable silence as they sailed back to the raft of cities. Somehow this easy quiet made Toby decide to trust the older man in a way he’d never quite managed with talkative Ammond. When they reached the city spheres and docked, Toby was able to unload his share of crates himself and took payment on the spot from Shylif.
Once they were out of their suits and the dock was behind them, Shylif said, “Give me a call tomorrow. I’ll show you how to find bots that want to subcontract.”
Toby grinned. “Sounds good. And Shy, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Seriously, don’t let Corva know.” He rolled his eyes. “I’ll talk her around. But give me a few days.”
“Thanks.”
In a kind of daze, he walked out of the warehouse district and rode an escalator up into the city. Orpheus chittered and danced about, obviously glad to be back on what passed here for solid ground. Toby smiled vaguely at him, but his gaze kept drifting. He was thinking about how vastly different the locksteps might be and how strangely familiar this one seemed. The people, the buildings … it was all bizarre and alien, this bubble city and the civilization it cradled—but there remained that strange familiarity.
It hit him when a woman passed him wearing a completely recognizable outfit of tunic and leggings. He spun, staring at her as she receded, and then he swore, and laughed, and swore again.
He’d seen that apparel just a couple months ago. In fact, he’d helped to design it.
In creating Lockstep 360/1, his brother Peter hadn’t merely been inspired by the culture, customs and technologies of the gameworld he and Toby had created together.
Lockstep 360/1 was Consensus.
Eight
TOBY AND PETER HAD built a world together.
It hadn’t been fun.
If you were the right kind of rich, and living on Earth, you could afford those things the rich needed: gated communities, 24/7 security bots, and human bodyguards who came with their own microarmies of hand-sized flying guns and gnat-shaped spies. You could move through the world in your own little bubble of safety this way—if you were the right kind of rich.
The McGonigals weren’t that kind of rich.
Dad had made his fortune in salvage—the deep-sea kind. His company hunted down methane clathrates and CO2 sinks in ocean trenches, and converted their carbon to less volatile forms. Nobody wanted a repeat of the Big Belch, when the Arctic oceans had vomited up millions of years’ worth of greenhouse gases in just a few short decades, undoing two generations’ work in reducing CO2 emissions. Temperatures had shot up to intolerable levels after the belch, small consolation that the frantic international effort to build orbital sunshades had finally kick-started an offworld civilization.