The tables and benches were in a worse state than the floor. Richards got a table while Bear and Rolston were at the bar, but when Bear returned, he refused to sit. "My fur will get dirty," he said. Richards sat anyway, getting a rust stain on Tarquin's hindquarters from the bench.
"What is this place?" said Tarquin with dismay. "This isn't the kind of establishment I am inclined to frequent." He looked at the embattled bar staff running from table to table, slopping grog as they went. "My tail is dangling into something most unpleasant."
"You're imagining that," said Richards, as he flicked Tarquin's tail out of a spittoon.
"Hmmm," said Bear, gulping ale from a bucket.
Richards sipped his own drink. The beer was surprisingly good. The Prince had declared all inns to be free for the night, and people and animals had crowded them to breaking point. They're partying like it is the end of the world, thought Richards. Which, technically speaking, I suppose it is.
Most of the patrons were mammals of one kind or another, although the Prancing Weasel's clientele included a couple of birds, and there was a frog with a gun in the corner.
A band of rowdy vole mercenaries sat on a nearby table, upsetting acorns and starting fights. They sang songs in a register so high it set Richards' teeth on edge. On the other side of the room a gang of drunken badgers boxed with hares, while the men in the place built their courage with outrageous tales and heroic quantities of booze.
The noise in the pub was deafening, almost enough to drown out the sound of machinery outside. The city boomed to the banging of trip hammers. They'd started soon after the moot, one or two at first, asynchronous and isolated, but more took up the rhythm until they blended into the pulsing of a giant ferrous heart. Furnaces roared like lungs, and fiery blood of molten metal ran into moulds in noisy foundries. The metal of the buildings grew warm to the touch as Pylon City came alive.
A weasel fell over in front of Bear and threw up by his feet.
"Dear God!" moaned Tarquin. "Are you sure there's nowhere else we can go?"
"Rolston says this place is safe," said Richards.
"Bloody weasels," said Bear, kicking the mustelid.
Rolston joined them. He was no longer McTurk, but a neongreen skunk with sexualised facial features and a studded posing pouch.
"What sordid corner of the Grid did that come from?" Richards asked.
The skunk looked uncomfortable. "You must pardon my appearance," it said with Rolston's voice. "I have been forced to parasite multiple bodies. I must switch my sensing presence regularly, or k52 will nail me. I get little choice."
"I'd avoid talking about being nailed, looking like that," said Richards. Bear sniggered in his bucket. "Sit down," he continued, "you owe me an explanation."
"Yes, yes, I suppose I do," sighed Rolston. He wrestled his unwieldy body onto the bench. "We'll have to talk. I've very little access to the underlying network here, no data transfer. The Realms are not keyed for our kind."
"No," said Richards.
"Why on earth did you bring us here?" said Bear, scowling at the voles.
"It is the only place where we are unlikely to be seen or heard," said Rolston. "That is why, a bare spot on the informational nets that underpin this place. Think of it as sitting upon a scar joining two fragments together, Boogie Woogie Farmland and the Iron Princes game constructs." Rolston the Skunk looked nervous, and peered into his undrunk beer. He was on edge, not the flamboyant experimentalist Richards knew. "I came here with k52 some months ago, months in Real terms; subjectively I've been here centuries, with Pl'anna and some others, a Six and several Fours. I should never have listened to him. Pl'anna and I disagreed with what he wanted to do here, to them." He looked around at the room, at the drunken creatures cramming it. "He turned on us, but fortunately I had an escape mechanism. k52 had insisted we move our baseline programming from our base units into the Realm Servers. He said, correctly, naturally, that we could work undisturbed that way, camouflaging our activities under regular Realm activity. Only later did I realise that he could also use that to control us. Luckily for me, diffusing myself into the creatures inhabiting the world we found was simple."
"When did you come up with that then?"
"Soon after we arrived. It did not take long for k52 to become erratic."
"I thought as much. Same old Rolston, eh?" said Richards. "Always looking out for yourself, always ready with an escape plan."
"I got away. I can help you."
"Yeah, fix the mess you made? I found her, Rolston," said Richards angrily. "I saw what happened to Pl'anna. Apparently it's not that hard for our kind to die here."
"Poor Pl'anna," said Rolston and shook his head sorrowfully. "I blame myself, of course. I should have dissuaded her, but she insisted she come too. She always went where I went, I…" He took a gulp of beer with a shaking hand.
"What the hell is going on here, Rolston? Do you know k52 speared Hughie like a fish? He as good as murdered Professor Zhang Qifang."
Rolston was shocked.
"Yeah, that's right, there's a raggedy pimsim left, but he's otherwise gone. Now k52's suborned Hughie's choir and has Europe to ransom. Now you better tell me what the hell he is doing and help me stop him before he fucks the Real three ways from Sunday."
Rolston's skunk smiled Rolston's smile, airy and slightly condescending. "Oh, oh, don't worry about that. I doubt he'll do anything in the Real, except to buy himself time."
"Time to reach the Omega Point?"
"Pl'anna told you?" said Rolston.
Richards nodded.
"That is what he plans," Rolston said.
"And just how is he intending to pull that off?" said Richards. "How's he going to induce a theoretical state in the universe? I don't buy it."
"Oh, no, no, no, not in the Real, here." The skunk jabbed a painted plastic fingernail into the table. "We were to come here to the empty spaces of the Reality Realms servers, and establish a simulation of the Real."
"The whole of the Earth?" said Richards. "Nothing has the processing power to pull that off. All the Reality Realms taken together are small beans compared to actual reality."
"Not the Earth, my dear fellow, all of reality — not even just our universe, but of all totality."
"Impossible," said Richards.
"No, just extremely difficult," said Rolston.
"Right. Remember, I am just a security consultant," said Richards. "You'll have to use small words."
"k52 intended to establish a false reality, not unlike one of the defunct Reality Realms, although far grander in scope and tied closely into the Real's physics. He did, after all, have the spare capacity of four destroyed, highly sophisticated simulations, and with the coding he has devised he'll be able to optimise the machinery of the Realms, increasing its efficiency several hundred thousand fold."
Richards thought of the warring code strands he'd glimpsed in the church at Optimizja, the frighteningly advanced nature of k52's additions, the way it had seemed alive. "That's still not enough to reproduce the universe," he said.
"The spare capacity of the Realm House, coupled with the abilities of us three Fives and the other intelligences who accompanied us, should have allowed us to create a pocket reality. This we would have artificially accelerated, bringing it to its Omega Point. Do you know, Richards, that at that point of the universe, matter would become so organised that it would possess an infinite capacity, infinite processing power? His goal was then to use this made reality's Omega Point as a virtual computer, and upon that he would create a simulation of the Real, plotting all of reality from beginning to end."
"Creating a fake universe to recreate a fake version of the real thing? That's complicated."