Symat said, ‘But I still don’t see—’
He heard a piercing scream. Mela broke off and ran into the township. Symat hurried after her.
They came to an open plaza. A number of children had gathered, perhaps a dozen, none older than eight or nine. No, not children – they were more Virtuals, as Symat could tell from the sparkling pixels and tiny pings that marked petty protocol violations. They all wore bland shifts and coveralls like Mela and the boys.
And these kids stood in a loose ring around Chem and Tod. The boys crouched on the floor, clinging to each other.
Mela ran forward. ‘Get away from them!’
Symat hurried after her. ‘What kind of game is this?’
‘No game,’ she called back. ‘They are bloodsuckers. They are trying to kill the boys.’
‘Kill them? How do you kill a Virtual?’
Mela didn’t answer. She waded into the attacking children, grabbing them and pulling them aside. But there were too many of them; they gathered around her and pushed her back, jeering.
Symat ran forward, fists clenched. ‘Back off.’
One of the girls faced him. She was shorter than he was, with a hard, cold face and her skin was waxy, almost translucent. She had drifted a long way from her core programming, he realised. ‘Whose child are you?’
‘I’m no child. I’m human.’
The girl jeered and pointed at Chem. ‘He thinks he’s human.’
Symat swung a hand at her face. His fingers passed through her pale flesh, scattering pixels. She flinched, shocked; that had hurt.
‘Do what I say,’ Symat said. ‘Leave my friends alone.’
The girl quickly recovered. ‘You can’t order us around. And you can’t hurt us.’
‘But we can hurt you,’ said a sly-faced boy.
‘Projections can’t hurt a human.’
‘Oh, yes, we can,’ said the boy. ‘We can come to you in the night. We can hide in walls, in your clothes, even in your body, human. You’ll never sleep again.’
The girl said, ‘You don’t have to be real to inflict pain. We’ve learned that in the years we’ve been out here. We will haunt you.’
Chem was crying. ‘Please, Symat, don’t let them hurt us.’
Symat stood, hesitant. The out-of-control Virtuals’ threats filled him with dread. And this wasn’t his fight; after all he hadn’t met Mela and the boys before yesterday. But Mela’s eyes were on him. His fists clenched again, he stepped forward. ‘Leave them alone or—’
The girl ran at him, burst through his chest, and pushed her hands through his skull so the insides of his eyeballs exploded with light. ‘Or what? What will you do, human?’
But the others didn’t follow her lead.
‘Kiri,’ the sly boy said. ‘Look at him.’
The girl turned, looked at Symat – and then stepped back, her mouth dropping.
Symat found himself surrounded by a circle of staring children. Even Mela and the boys were gazing at him wide-eyed. He saw that their protocol respect was weakening; some of them drifted up from the floor, and others tilted sideways, reaching impossible angles. They were like floating spectres, not children. They began to whisper, the strange, rapid speech he had heard from the boys in the night; he heard them mutter that strange name again – ‘the Guardians’.
And somehow Symat sensed the circle of scrutiny expanding beyond the limited circle of these children. After all, he reminded himself, these Virtuals were merely manifestations of the Mist, the cloud of artificial sentience in which all of Mars was immersed – and suddenly he was the centre of attention.
He had no idea what was happening, but he ought to make use of it. He raised his arms. ‘Get away!’
The strange children turned and fled, leaving the two boys weeping on the ground.
Mela and Symat ran to them. Mela hugged them. Chem looked up at Symat, tears streaking down his face. ‘Don’t leave me again, Symat. Keep me safe until my parents come back for me. Oh, keep me safe!’
‘I promise,’ Symat said helplessly.
They left the town and walked on, following the canal, ever westward. The sun inched higher, showing more of its bloated red belly, and the air grew steadily warmer. The water in the canal was thick and sluggish now, and deep red-brown with sediment.
Symat was walking out of the twilight band and into the hemisphere of permanent daylight.
The Virtuals followed. The boys, subdued, stayed closer to Symat and Mela. They didn’t complain, though Symat could see they were getting as hot and tired as he was. Their bodies apparently responded appropriately to the weather, one bit of protocol they couldn’t violate.
‘So,’ he said to Mela. ‘Bloodsuckers?’
‘It’s what we call them. A lot of the kids are too young to understand the truth.’
‘Which is?…’
The bloodsuckers had learned to steal something far more precious to any Virtual than blood: processor time.
‘The Mist’s capacity is huge, but it’s finite,’ Mela said. ‘There are rules that unnecessary programmes are eventually shut down.’
‘Unnecessary like abandoned Virtual children?’
‘Yes. But the bloodsuckers have learned a way to, um, integrate you into their own programming. That way they co-opt your ration of processor capacity.’
‘And live longer.’
‘That’s the idea.’
Symat was stunned. Living in a city still occupied by humans, Virtuals had always been peripheral to him. He had no idea that this kind of cannibalistic savagery was going on among them, out of sight of mankind. ‘So that’s why you hid from me.’
Mela shrugged. ‘We didn’t know if you were a Virtual or not.’
‘Not until you got stuck in the water,’ Tod said, and Chem laughed.
What else didn’t he know? ‘Mela – when I was trying to sleep, I heard the boys muttering. Something about Guardians. And in the middle of the fight back there, you all looked at me strangely. I heard that name again. Guardians.’ He looked at her uncertainly. ‘What’s going on?’
Mela flexed her hand, and held it up to the sun, as if trying to look through it. ‘You understand that we Virtuals are individuals. But we are all projections, from the Mist, and of wider artificial minds beyond even that. So we aren’t like you, Symat. We’re – blurred. It’s hard to explain…’
Mela was a projection of a mass artificial mind that, loosely integrated, spanned Mars, and what was left of Sol system – indeed, once it had spanned much of the Galaxy. Mars’s Mist was just part of it. This interplanetary colloquium of minds, meshed together in an endless conversation, called itself the ‘Conclave’, Mela told him. And sometimes she and the other Virtuals could sense the deeper thoughts of that mind, the vast undercurrents of its consciousness.
How strange she was, Symat realised as she spoke, strange in layers. She looked like a rather serious twelve-year-old girl; most of the time she acted that way. But she was old – far older than him, centuries old. She had been twelve all that time, looking after these other ageless children. And behind her, looking at him through her eyes, were misty ranks of ancient artificial minds.
‘And the Conclave,’ she said, ‘is very aware of you, Symat.’
‘Me? I’m not important. I’m just a kid.’
‘Apparently you’re more than that.’
The water had almost run dry. Reefs of baking mud clogged the basin of the canal.
They slowed to a halt, and stood in a glum group.