Night Sessions, The (14 page)

Dave checked the day's space news, to discover he'd slept through a couple of soleta misalignments that had resulted in too brief, or too long, an eclipse over various parts of the Earth. Two of the small rocket engines on the circumference of one of the soletas had misfired; as all of the soletas required frequent nudges to correct for the effects of the solar wind, this had the potential for a serious problem. A team of four humanoid robots was investigating, hands-on.

That looked promising. Dave enlarged the news item, drilled into the links, and tried to find a feed from one of these robots’ eyeball cameras—a fairly standard feature these days, with cosmonauts and astronauts collecting micropayments every time someone linked into their helmet-camera or their contacts. He found a link, but when he blinked on it he encountered a security-level error. Normally he'd have regarded this as a challenge to hack. Today he didn't have time.

But the notion of the humanoid robots in space had caught his attention, and he launched a query for any that might be more accommodating. Within a couple of minutes, his trawl came back with a link to a robot working on the outside of the Atlantic Space Elevator. He chose the “Fly To:” option and sat back to enjoy the virtual ride. The pov rose smoothly up from where he sat, up above the streets of Newington. The rest of Edinburgh came into view below him, partly obscured by an up-to-the-minute image of a cloud over the city. He soared faster and faster, heading up and to the west and south, Ireland flashing past as a green patch in a blue sea, then Spain and the Azores far below and to his left, then the sky black above and the Atlantic blue below.

The elevator hove into view, a gold thread in the sunlight from its east. The pov zoomed closer and higher, focusing on a tiny figure toiling high above the atmosphere on the edge of the elevator. As the figure came closer the sight became uncanny: it looked exactly like a man in a boiler suit, working on the side of an enormous building. The scale of the structure was abruptly clear. Dave found himself looking up with a certain giddiness at the black cliff of buckytape above, just before the pov merged with the viewpoint from the robot's eyes.

Hands, ungloved, working in vacuum and microgravity on a piece of jointing that looked as banal as the brackets on scaffolding, with the Earth a curve of blue and white in the background. The robot gave no sign of noticing Dave's virtual presence—or that of anyone else who might, at this moment, be time-sharing its sight—but Dave knew that it would. Robots, humanoid robots anyway, had processing power to spare. There was a classic video clip of
a soccer match between eleven of the first—experimental—batch of humanoid robots and the championship-level team sponsored by Sony. Even with their physical capacities and reflexes stepped down to the human level, the robots had literally run rings around some of the best footballers in the world: to the robots, everything was happening in slow motion.

Dave recorded all he saw, already mentally rehearsing how it could be sampled, broken up and played back until it became a visual analogue of a driving drumbeat. At one point, much to his delight, a crawler climbed past, lit up like a railway carriage. Even the robot's eyes couldn't help following it as it headed up into space. Then the robot looked back at the work to hand. Just before Dave was sure he had quite enough, just as the hand reached for yet another piece of apparatus, the pov threw him out and he was left staring again at a security-level lockout view.

The Ogle Space “Fly To:” option, as if maliciously, reversed his experience of arrival, and gave him the visual sensation of falling off the elevator into space away and down, hurtling backwards to eventually land, shaking with vertigo, in the same old armchair. There was no actual impact, of course. It was all in his head, in his eyes. But his cold coffee spilled across his knees.

Aliyev and Jessica returned from their trawl of the charity and vintage shops about seven, with handfuls of plastic bags. Jessica had already replaced her T-shirt with a short black dress. The secret policeman disappeared into the bedroom and emerged wearing an antique black nylon slip over black drainpipe jeans and new black Kicker boots. His fresh make-up of black eyeliner and dark purple lipstick suited his fine, high-cheekboned features rather better than the loli style had. Slung over his shoulder was a rectangular black bag that had once—he claimed, to Dave's disbelief—been used to lug computers.

Aliyev posed in the living-room doorway, one hand on a hip, the other's thumb in his bra strap.

“Ready to kick Gnostic ass,” he said.

“Good man,” said Dave. He held up his iThink. “And I'm ready to give the punters their money's worth. It'll hold their attention, all right.”

“What's the show going to be about?” Jessica asked.

“Ah, that'd be telling,” said Dave. “Let's just say I've labelled it the Near-Earth Experience.”

“Intriguing,” said Aliyev, sounding bored already. “Do we have time to go and grab something to eat?”

“Sure,” said Dave. “What do you—”

Aliyev raised a hand. “Just a minute. Urgent call.”

His eyes glazed for a minute. His lips and larynx moved as he subvocalised, then he spoke out loud.

“Over to you, Dave. It's my boss at Greensides.”

Dave twitched his ear to take the call. Nothing came through on visual, just a quiet deep voice in his phone:

“Afternoon, Mr. Warsawski. You have a robot named Hardcastle on security at your gig tonight, yes?”

“As far as I know,” said Dave. “We have a standing arrangement with Hired Muscle. Hang on, I'll just check tonight's roster…yes, Hardcastle's coming on duty at nine.”

“Any idea where this machine…lives, if that's the word?”

“Its address? Not a clue. You could ask the agency, they handle all the admin.”

“We've already been onto Hired Muscle,” said the voice. “They don't have a physical address for Hardcastle. Very irregular, but they seem to think the law on these matters doesn't apply to robots.” A sigh. “Which, come to think of it, it may not. Apparently in their accounting they have the machine down as ‘Off-site Plant.’ Be that as it may. I want to warn you that Hardcastle may not turn up for duty tonight.”

“Is there some problem with Hardcastle?” Dave asked, incredulous.

“Yes, Mr. Warsawski, there is. Let's just say that the police would very much like to interview it, and if we see it on the way to work we'll intercept it. Please do not call Hired Muscle for a replacement or back-up before you're certain it's at least half an hour late. If the machine does turn up, don't act in any way out of the ordinary. Got that?”

“Clear enough,” said Dave. “Just one problem. No one can ‘act normal’ well enough to fool a robot. Now that you've told me, as soon as it sees me, it'll know something's up. It has—”

“A very sophisticated theory of mind. Yes, Mr. Warsawski, I know that. Trust me, in this case there may not be as much of a problem as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can't tell you yet. Now, hand me back to DC Aliyev, if you don't mind.”

Dave passed the connection back. Aliyev exchanged a few more remarks, then snapped out of the call. In the meantime Dave had brought Jessica up to speed.

“I can't believe Hardcastle's in trouble,” she said. She gave Aliyev a hard look. “What's all this about?”

“Possible involvement in the priest-murder case. And the bishop today.”

Jessica shouted, “Murder?” and Dave cried, “Bishop? What?”

“Check the
Evening News
,” said Aliyev, looking unwontedly grim.

They checked.

“What about tonight's operation?” Jessica asked.

“Still on,” said Aliyev.

Dave sat at the bar in Frankenstein's, the pub conveniently opposite the Carthaginian, drinking cranberry juice, keeping an eye on Jessica and Aliyev in the bar mirror, and keeping an ear on the private channel. The air was hot and thick. At three a.m. on a Saturday morning, the pub was heaving. After the silent-scene gig, the noise level was overpowering. Keeping track of the conversation was using up most of Dave's attention. This gave his face and demeanour a preoccupied and unwelcoming look.

Which was, as the geeks might say, a feature.

It was just as well that he'd decided to stay off alcohol, even beer, right through the gig. He'd got slightly whacked by sidestream weed-smoke, but he was used to that, and knew how to focus his mind to compensate, letting the cannabis undertow sort of
waft
his rationality along with it, yeah that was it, surf the wave, just go with it…then snap out of it. With the Near-Earth Experience, this risky mental trick had worked.

Hardcastle hadn't turned up. A call to Hired Muscle at 9:30 had established that they hadn't heard anything from the robot, and that they'd expected it to be there as usual. An offer of a replacement bouncer was made and accepted. The guy turned up by taxi twenty minutes later. He'd needed some hasty re-education on the door as to who counted as safe and respectable enough to let in.

Jessica and Aliyev had struck up this conversation, with the two guys Jessica had fingered as most likely to be serious Neo-Gnostics, a couple of hours ago over at the gig. The two guys had suggested coming here afterwards—it wasn't a pub that a self-respecting goth clubber or silent-scene devotee would normally be seen dead in—and had seemed surprised that Jessica and Aliyev had agreed. They weren't exactly spotty nerds—they were not bad-looking guys, actually, thin and intense in a passé addict-chic way—but they'd probably not had such rapt attention from such attractive women in their lives. (Aliyev had introduced himself as Michelle, and was acting a lot more feminine than he had the night before.)

The guys were both students, at Edinburgh University. Will was doing physics, Carl was doing philosophy. Between them they were doing Dave's
head in. The only good part of the conversation was that they were unlikely to overhear his eavesdropping. One of the tenets of Neo-Gnosticism (as Will had explained at some length) was that computer systems took the user a step closer to the dark domain of the GodPlayer, and that the use of computers should therefore be kept to a minimum. They eschewed the virtual.

“What I don't understand,” Jessica was saying, “is this. Supposing you're right. What could you actually do? I mean, we're talking about some entity that controls the universe, right? So, how exactly do you oppose him, or her, or it?”

“Oh, the GodPlayer doesn't control the universe,” said Will. “Only the simulation we're in.”

“That's a help,” said Jessica. “Not. Presumably within this simulation, the GodPlayer is all-knowing and all-powerful.”

“Can't be,” said Carl. “Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation.”

“Or this conversation is no threat whatsoever to him.”

“It isn't!” Will said. “Look, the GodPlayer isn't God. He isn't even in the same position in relation to the simulation as God is in relation to the real universe. Put it this way: a Laplacean Deity is one that knows the position and speed of every particle in the universe. A Cartesian Demon is an entity that feeds consistent false information to all the senses. Now, the same entity can't be a Laplacean Deity and a Cartesian Demon at the same time. And on top of that, it's absolutely basic information theory that the programmer of a simulation can't have complete knowledge of the simulation, because that complete knowledge would itself be another instance of the simulation, and—you see where this is going?”

“Oh, sure,” said Jessica. “I just don't see what it has to do with religion.”

“What we've figured out,” said Carl, “is that the major religions—at least, because we haven't got around to studying the minor ones—function as systems of deception that prevent their adherents from seeing the true nature of the world we live in, which they think is the universe. It keeps them spinning their wheels endlessly about how to reconcile the evils of the world with the goodness of God, instead of seeing the obvious, which is that this world was not in fact created by God. And given that God did create the world, by definition, then this world isn't real and was created by something much less than God. Conventional religion is almost as much a delusion as naturalism, which tries to convince us—and itself—that this gimcrack contrivance we're living in is somehow self-existent and, well,
natural
. What manifest pish!”

Jessica looked as if she was about to formulate a suitably crushing rebuff to this juvenile theodicy, not to say manifest pish, but was forestalled by
Aliyev, who'd evidently decided it was time to move on to more dangerous and less boring subjects.

“What,” he asked, “do you make of this sudden rash of dead clergymen we seem to be having?”

Dave had to admire his tone of callous flippancy and casual uninterest.

“Bloody Christians,” said Carl. “They've been killing each other for over two thousand years.”

“When they're not killing us,” Will added.

Dave, watching in the mirror, could see Jessica's eyebrows twitch. He knew well that sceptical glance.

“‘Us?’” she said. “Haven't heard of any Neo-Gnostic martyrs.”

“Not yet,” Carl said darkly. “But there were plenty of Gnostic martyrs, back in the Burning Times. You've heard of the slogan ‘Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out’? That was for the Cathars. They were our people—Gnostics. Whole cities massacred, an entire province of France laid waste by a crusade on the orders of the Papacy.”

“That was a long time ago,” Aliyev said.

“There are more recent—”

“Why do you think,” Jessica asked, “that it's Christians who killed the priest and the bishop? Seems more likely to be anti-Christians, no?”

“Well, don't look at us,” said Carl, sounding surly and suspicious. “We don't do violence. It'd be crazy, for one thing, as well as, you know, wrong. And the atheists, they're on top anyway. They don't need to kill anyone. Nah, it's Christian-on-Christian, all over again.”

“What kind of Christians kill other Christians?” Jessica asked.

“You have to ask?” Carl asked. They all laughed.

“Seems to me,” Jessica said, “that this Neo-Gnosticism stuff is all talk. OK, you don't do violence. Good. You don't do online propaganda. Fair enough. Your choice. So what the fuck, I idly wonder,
do
you do? Talk to gothgirls in pubs? Oooh, scary!”