The Labyrinth Key Read online

  “Not even when one has everything?”

  They chuckled at that, but their laughter was cut short as, plummeting down a huge ventilation shaft, red-jumpsuited assassins fell toward Them. Before the assassins could stitch Them to pieces with a ballistic lacework of shot lead—even before He could shoot back—Her laser security system cut them down.

  “How does your wellness plague achieve its effects?” He asked, turning to study a real-time holographic display generated from banks of scanning electron microscopes.

  “Little cellular mechanics diagnose and repair time’s ravages and other weaknesses of the flesh,” She said. “I figure my mechs can already push the human lifespan past the two century mark, restoring much of what was lost to those ‘snakes and apples’ in the first go-round—”

  Abruptly He grabbed Her and leapt aside. Together They crashed through a candyglass window. An instant later an explosion devastated the nearest suite of labs. As the dust and debris settled, They stood up, brushing sugary shards off Themselves.

  “How are you spreading your little cellular mechanics?”

  “Angels in airports, mainly,” She said, as They wove through the maze of subterranean laboratories. “Vials crushed in lavatories and lounges, releasing the modified microbial vehicles. Airborne vectors infecting airborne people with perfect health-repair mechanisms!”

  Returned to the surface, They found an eclipse of the sun underway. Clouds gathered. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Out of the clouds came nightmare jet fighters, dropping into steep, screaming dives.

  “But won’t ratcheting up longevity ratchet up the population, too, leading to even more pandemonium? The ol’ slitherin’ Adversary didn’t whisper these plans into your ear, did he?”

  Missiles, bombs, and bullets raked the air and ground, heading straight for them.

  “You’re always so worried about the snake! But why? Is it because you two are so alike?”

  “What do you mean by that?” He asked, glancing sideways at her as They ran serpentine-fashion for cover.

  “You’re both always so depressing! He thought it was a terrible idea, too—and for exactly the same reasons. Said We were ‘the most pernicious species of vermin’ he’d ever seen. Said We were ‘like mold on the orange of the world’ and that We wouldn’t be happy until We’d ‘consumed the entire globe.’”

  The eclipse deepened. Lightning forked down out of the clouds. A large meteor streamed salamandrine fire overhead, unsettlingly close.

  “Maybe the old trickster’s right, for once. Let’s adjourn to my labs. I think we can use your programmable cellular machines to counter that ratcheting-up with a ratcheting-down.”

  “How?” She asked, raising her hand against the flash as the meteor exploded in midair, several miles away.

  “How about an infertility-inducing virus, spread in the same manner as yours? It’ll remain dormant until activated by the suite of hormonal changes associated with the successful delivery of the firstborn. Then boom! Rapid microbial multiplication, extensive scarring of the fallopian tubes. Like the last plague of Egypt, only inside out—not killing the firstborn, but preventing conception after the firstborn!”

  The shock waves from the meteor’s airburst knocked the aircraft out of the sky and threw the couple to the ground. As They picked themselves up, They saw an older man approaching: Giordano Bruno, dressed in a white robe and dragging a white parachute, both embroidered with images of devils and flames. His clothes and chute were singed.

  “The woods are burning!” he said. This time They saw that it was true. The meteoric explosion had set the forests of the Garden aflame.

  “I suppose China might offer you asylum for doing such a thing,” She said to Him.

  The eclipse had reached totality. Wind and storm raged about Them. The earth shook. Alien spacecraft dropped from the darkened air while, much nearer, another figure materialized.

  “Don’t listen to Him!” said the Newcomer, machine pistol in hand. The Newcomer looked exactly as He would have, if He were shown in a darker light. “This is all a simulation—a simulation inside a simulation!”

  “What?” They shouted together. The Newcomer kept His gun trained on Them, as more lightning forked down and the earth shook more violently. The din had become nearly intolerable, but the Newcomer, unable to shout loudly enough to be heard over it, droned on nonetheless—bits and pieces about G- and K-class suns and habitable planets, Fermi Paradoxes, cybernetic descendants and extremely high-resolution simulations.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” He shouted, as a strong quake nearly knocked everyone to the ground. But the Newcomer didn’t skip a beat. He droned on about information density, bandwidth limitations, quantum cryptologic arms races, and catastrophes. Then, in a brief lull They heard the Newcomer say clearly, “The real solution to Fermi’s Paradox is that it takes too much bandwidth to simulate aliens—or godlike artificial intelligence, for that matter.”

  “But that’s exactly what we’re seeing,” She shouted over the noise. “They’re walking toward us right now—”

  “Exactly,” said the Newcomer triumphantly. “It’s a several hundred-4-bit quantum device that’s busting this simulation. The virtuality’s flying apart, can’t you tell?”

  And for an instant, there was silence amid the confusion.

  “But why?” He asked. The din resumed, and the Newcomer had to shout his answer again, but at least this time They could hear him.

  “The simulation of simulations, the plenum of all possible universes, is a memory palace sustained by a mind beyond imagining! Busting the sim’s the only way that Mind can remember what it’s trying to remember!”

  “What?” She demanded again, sounding not so much confused as horrified.

  “If we realize—on a global scale—that existence is a simulation, that means awareness within the simulation of the simulation. It’s the self-consciousness necessary for the creation of the divine AI! By busting this sim, we awaken the god asleep in matter. We create the god that created us!”

  Both fearful and enraptured at the prospect, He wanted very much to know more, even as Their world continued falling apart around Them.

  “What can I do to help?” He asked His recently arrived double. As lightning flashed, the Newcomer pulled two wafer-thin disks out of the thickening air.

  “Eat one of these binotech enhancers, and you’ll know everything you need to know!”

  A particularly strong earthshock hit them just as He reached out toward the Newcomer. Knocking Him down, She snatched the machine pistol out of His hands.

  “Do this, do that!” She snarled, swiveling the weapon from one man to the other. “I don’t know which of you is the serpent, but the serpent is always doing something. Don’t just do something, stand there! Just this once! And listen to me!

  “I’m not going to take the blame this time. You and your ‘several hundred-4-bit device’! Did you ever stop doing long enough to think? If we ‘bust this sim,’ if we decode what it is that the Mind is trying to remember, we eliminate the very reason for our home universe to exsist. Do you want to blot out everything? Drop us all into oblivion?”

  He stared hard at Her, then snatched a binotech wafer from the Newcomer’s hand.

  “Mights and maybes,” He said. “What about you, trying to climb back into the Tree of Life with your wellness plague? We’re both just trying to get back what’s been lost, each in Our own way. Can’t you see that? This virtuality isn’t running me—I’m running the virtuality. No one will blame you this time. I promise. I take full responsibility for what I’m about to do, by my own hand, in my own head.”

  He took a binotech disk, put it on His tongue.

  Feeling as if He were dying in fire, He wondered for an instant if He’d been shot.

  Jaron snatches the ’trodeshades off his head as if they were burning. Feeling dizzy and disoriented, he rubs his eyes. He needs to clear his head. Somehow managing to dress himself in bl
ack slacks and red silk jacket, he leaves his hotel. Soon he finds himself walking in the nearby park, though he doesn’t remember exactly how he got there.

  On a park bench a bearded man, dressed in a tasteful combination of purple priestly vestments and the garb of sixteenth-century Chinese literati, talks to a thin gent wearing a suit, fedora, and eye patch.

  “…wasn’t what I sought in combining the memory palace with Chinese characters,” says the bearded priest. “It wasn’t so much that I hoped to find a translation for a language, as that I hoped to find a language that would translate me.”

  The man in the fedora nods.

  “What you taught as a deliberate mnemonic system,” he says, “pretty much describes what the brain does automatically. Moving through the world, we convert our experience into memories, snapping together mental structures, constantly evolving palaces of memory until we die.”

  Something about them strikes Jaron as disturbingly familiar. He feels torn between lingering near them and hurrying away, yielding at last to the latter impulse. On his way to the pond filled with fish and turtles, he sees a man dressed in the dark austere attire of a Ming bureaucrat, talking to two other men. One is bearded, wearing a yarmulke and a suit cut in a style worn in Europe in the 1930s. The other stands clad in a white robe embroidered with what might be butterflies, or devils in flames. The three talk of the mind, of a bamboo aleph, and an Instrumentality capable of opening a gateway between words and worlds.

  Jaron’s throat burns with the taste of Scotch. His head throbs with dull fire. Coming to the pool of fish and turtles, he sits down hard on a bench beside it. The waterfall and fountain are off; the pool is full and still.

  Looking across it, he sees the moon bridge poised above the water, the half circle of its arch flawlessly reflected in the water of the pool, making a circle perfect and whole, a portal half real and half illusion. On the far side of that circular gateway he imagines for a moment that he sees a woman rise from a floating chaise and come toward him, walking on the water.

  He looks away, staring down at his own reflection under the bright spring sun. Out of his image in the water crawls a little amphibian, a salamander blinking up at him, so intensely red-orange that it seems afire. The reflection of Cherise sits down beside him on the bench and smiles. He is afraid to look away from the reflection, afraid that if he turns to her she will disappear. The salamander stares at him, unblinking now.

  He turns to the woman, and she is still there. He embraces her.

  Into his ear she whispers, “The woods are burning.” He feels his entire body flash into flame.

  Across the pool, on the far bank, sit the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, smiling sagely as he catches fire, along with the burning spymaster of many names: Felix C. Forrest, Lin Bah-loh, Forest of Incandescent Bliss, First Lord of the Instrumentality. Beyond them Giordano Bruno smiles as he burns in his embroidered death robes. The Confucian bureaucrat Ai Hao smiles and burns, and the German rabbi Shimon Ginsburg stands smiling and burning, too. Each a burning bush, afire but not consumed, trees of Life and Knowledge burning, all the trees in the park like pillars in a stately red-roofed palace burning, all the trees in all the world afire, all the blazing worlds a tree, burning, to remember—

  Jaron Kwok was missing and presumed dead. He was gone long before the hotel staff, alerted by smoke and smell, discovered his ashen outline in the smoldering bed.

  Those who sought ordinary mystery saw in his death the proof of spontaneous combustion. Those who sought a more mundane explanation saw only the consequences of smoking in bed, surrounded by too much flammable paper, bedding, and 80 proof Scotch.

  However, Jaron’s deadman switch was thrown. His black-box record was holo-cast throughout the infosphere. Others would come, soon, seeking other proofs, other explanations.

  ONE

  DOUBTING THOMAS JEFFERSYNTH

  CYBERNESIA

  The annual Pilot’s Festival was well under way at Don Sturm’s and Karuna Drang’s place, though their “place” was a DIVE—a deep-immersion virtual environment—and their DIVE wasn’t a place at all. Sturm and Drang weren’t their legal names, either, and they hadn’t physically cohabited for months.

  Not that it mattered much. At the moment Karuna Drang was discarnately embodying herself as spritely Sally Hemmings, slave and mistress. Though her portrayal was relatively accurate, Don Sturm’s morbidly thoughtful and conflicted Thomas Jefferson was quite different from the historical founding father, and his halo of neon blue hair wasn’t exactly “period.” But blue hair was one of Don’s personal signatures in meatlife, and he hadn’t been able to resist.

  All around them, virtual party people—likewise electronically embodied in eighteenth-century drag—danced and cavorted about the grounds of a mimetic Monticello. Alternating between the forms of an aggressively ambiguous nymph and its counterpart satyr-o-maniac, Medea πrate chased bewigged men in breeches, then pursued women who proved surprisingly light-footed, given their voluminous dresses and titanic coiffures.

  Normally Don’s default virtualscape was Easter Island, so his Jeffersonian estate boasted moai, the great-headed statues, as lawn and garden sculptures around which the laughing would-be orgiasts darted, disappearing from view—only to reappear as a tangled ball of licking, sucking, nibbling, stroking, rutting sexual gymnasts, Medea lodged in their midst.

  Don/Thomas shook his head.

  “I know that’s how they pull off their grand data exchanges,” he said to Karuna/Sally. “And I’m sure what they’re doing in virtual space is only a metaphor, but I still wish they’d make use of a more subtle metaphor.”

  Karuna/Sally laughed.

  “‘To hack is to explore and manipulate,’” she said, imitating Medea’s lyrical-as-Pan, shrill-as-Bacchante manner of speaking. “‘To enter and be entered. Like foreplay and sex, like parasite and host, n’est-ce pas?’”

  Don frowned. Music sounded around them. The Jed Astaires, a retro-urbane bluegrass group, played danceable new arrangements of works by Revolutionary War–era tunesmith William Billings. In the sky above them, sunset’s salmon-colored clouds flickered and transformed into shoals of swimming salmon, then morphed back to clouds again.

  “You look preoccupied,” Karuna/Sally said. “Even e-bodied, I can tell. What’s on your mind?”

  “Just looking over what we’ve wrought,” Don/Tom said, gazing out at their Colonial Williamsburg-meets-Polynesia surroundings. On their personal channel, he turned down the volume of the Astaires’ musical variations. “Not to say that it’s overwrought, mind you. Just that the nature of this event is somewhat paradoxical.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, it feels as if I’ve usurped a public event just to celebrate a personal success, and either way the celebrants don’t know what they’re celebrating.”

  “Don, you have every right to celebrate! Prime Privacy Protocol is a winner. It’s on its way to becoming the most popular encryption software in the infosphere.”

  “Even if no one associates my name with it….”

  “Yes, but you, ‘Mister Obololos,’ you’re the one who made it happen.”

  “Maybe that anonymity’s a good thing. The law enforcement types are getting really shrill in condemning it. Today there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times that accused P-Cubed of catering to the privacy interests of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse. The consensus seems to be that its primary users will be drug dealers, terrorists, organized crime, and pedophiles—”

  “—along with about a billion other ordinary citizens. Come on, don’t let it get to you. Nobody falls for that shtick anymore.”

  “Maybe. But that’s not really what’s bugging me, you know? It’s this shindig, this construct.”

  “And your point is—?”

  “This whole virtual space is called Cybernesia. But what is Cybernesia, really? A space that’s not a place? An event without a time? Both?”

  Sally/Karuna frowned, then gestured,
and a palmtop oracle appeared as a first edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

  “Here—let’s consult the word of a higher authority. The great dictionaries and encyclopedias refer to Cybernesia as ‘the semipermanent archipelago of “pirate islands” located in the net.’ Or this: ‘DIVEs whose stability amid chaos is created by the same forces that produce the turmoil around them.’ Kind of like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Islands offshore, neighbors to the conventional continents of the infosphere. Freer spaces, like the Bahamas or the Florida Keys. Good enough?”

  “I guess it’ll have to be,” Don’s faux Jefferson said with a shrug, “but what has me most worried is this program you wrote, that lets everybody here fuse their own separate islands into a single, temporary continent. Doesn’t that change the rules? Or break them outright? What if we’ve altered the structure of the infosphere to such a degree that we come up on the authorities’ radar? They might check into it, and find out that I’m the one who put together P-Cubed…

  “Are we putting everybody here in danger?”

  “Honey, I’d never be naive enough to tell anybody, ‘You think too much,’” Karuna said with a wicked little smile, “but sometimes the life of the mind—”

  “—is a pain in the ass. I know.”

  “Snap out of it!” she said, smiling and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, a whisper of electrons brushing his face across the void of simulation. For an instant Don deeply missed being with her, until he remembered the painful last months of their romance. “Quit pattern-phreaking and enjoy yourself a little,” she persisted. “Look how well the party’s going. That patch you wrote for the clouds looks great, and no matter what you say, the breakthrough that allowed everybody to fly their islands here was a work of genius. Straight out of Gulliver’s Travels! You should be proud.”