Transcendence (43 page)

The command truck’s gunhouse spun and the matched pair of EMMA-Bs swung upward. Nadir’s jaw loosened as he looked into the barrels like metallic pupils staring up at him.

“
Whatever you say. Fuck you, Boss,” he 3-verded, and shut down his commcard. This threat of death didn’t produce the normal sensations, those surges and poundings in his flesh, and therefore only drove him toward anger.

“
Where you going?” Paolo asked as Nadir shouldered his rifle and walked to the staircase. The boy kept following.

“
Good goddamned question,” Nadir responded, taking steps two at a time. “I don’t know what the crash is going on here. You want to come along? Why not. Shit.”

Nadir heard Paolo’s bootfalls on the stone behind him. The steps echoed again like wood. Nadir’s anger grew as if it had a life of its own, gnawing his insides, burrowing into his nerves. He reached the ground level. An image glanced across his mind, an image of him racing across the courtyard to Jhishra’s truck, snapping an armor-piercing magnet onto the gunhouse. . . .

“
That bastard, that mannequin,” he mumbled as his scuffed boots landed between stones, carrying him toward the unscripted enemies. Paolo said something behind him that he couldn’t hear.

The words vanished in the white noise of a screamer that had fallen undetected inside the walls. Everything went staticky white.

Something warm and wet trickled across Nadir’s forehead. Bits of sand and dirt fell like rain upon his face. A lull as loud as the clanging of an ultrasonic gong filled his mind. But Nadir had been involved in electronic combat before; he fumbled his stormshield loose at the rear of his helmet and stuck the integral earplugs into his ears. The rubber rebreather hose hung at his neck.

Disoriented for a few seconds, Nadir commed, “Put on your earplugs. Reboot your cards and run debug. Casualties!” One by one they responded, all of them. So the attack hadn’t yet begun in earnest. No one had been killed.

Slowly, the white noise faded and Nadir could see and hear the real sounds of combat. A few EMMAs
crack-thup
ped while enemy fire chewed at the fort like metal-mandibled hornets. Nadir regained his orientation and stood. The sleek shape of Jhishra’s truck curved only a meter from Nadir.

He smiled and was about to take a position when something enormous happened.

A crackling drew his attention. Nadir stood and turned to check on Paolo. The backdrop behind the boy seemed to quaver. The screamer had done something to the server’s transmitters.

“
Subbs, what’s happening?” Paolo asked.

“
You’ll see in a second,” Nadir said. He overlaid the server network landscape. A maze of neon tunnels linked the silver nodes of his men to the white-hot block of light which represented the computer itself. An array of dials and switches and buttons hung in the air around the server as Nadir moved his pov closer. Built-in blocks intended to keep out unauthorized people—
Like me
, he thought—flickered almost too fast to get past. Because Nadir possessed permissions and keys that allowed him to access most of the server, the security software needed to make many decisions about access, sometimes after already granting it. Nadir concentrated, focusing all the lust for truth and life that had pushed him out of Wolf Point so long ago. The flickering blocks were only almost too fast; his desire made him faster. He seized the first opportunity and rushed into the server, unconcerned for what it might do to him in self-defense.

“
Subbs?” Paolo sounded scared; Nadir couldn’t have that—not fear, not in Paolo.

“
We’re crashed,” he told the boy.

Nadir found the server transmitter’s power supply, reached out an ephemeral hand amid the clutter of virtual neon and silver, and switched the main sender off.

The interlocking channels of feed collapsed like a spiderweb hit by a blowtorch. All that remained were brief pulses as one man commed another using the server as a relay.

All shatters, all falls down, every last little bit of reality from stone to uniform. He steps beyond the bounds of his life into the place over the hill, the elsewhere of the mind he dared not believe existed.

Once, Nadir had a dream. He was walking through the Montana Badlands not far from his parents’ house in Wolf Point. Both his mother and his father walked beside him, each of them smiling the faint smile of content, a look neither had ever worn in his waking memory.

In this dream no one took feed. He had no headcard, his parents had no headcards; in fact, EarthCo citizenship had nothing to do with owning headcards, and young Nadir hadn’t even heard of such a thing as a tiny artificial intelligence living symbiotically in the fleshy, bloody, human brain.

No words were spoken for a long time. They walked past layer-cake cliffs of red and tan sandstone, lurid yellow sulfur veins, black coal drawn between as if by a stone pencil. They climbed a grey mudstone hill, sat at its grassy top, and opened a red-and-white checkered basket woven from colored plastics. Mother made sandwiches while Father uncorked a bottle of real wine and poured three water glasses half-full.

They smiled at one another once more and giggled as drops of wine made orange splotches on young Nadir’s linen shirt. They finished their sandwiches, drank down the wine, and Mother stood.

Then Father’s face fell slack and he turned away. Mother closed her eyes and opened her mouth. The rain-mauled butte suddenly crumbled as if eroded fast-motion for ten thousand years, its slopes sliding away in great vomits of soil that exposed bones from millions of years ago—bones turned to stone. The landslide finally reached Mother, and for only an instant she smiled again, this time an adult smile Nadir wouldn’t know for another decade. The grass at her feet fell to dust and the ground gave way as if sucked down an antique hourglass spout.

Nadir turned to his father for help, but the man had already vanished; a shoe of the Softsole type protruded from the valley below, a fleck of black amid the raging reds and oranges and pinks of desert cacti. The leg attached to the shoe had lost all its flesh and turned color. Nadir realized it had gone to stone, fossilized in the seconds the boy had been turned away. When he turned back to his mother, she, too, had vanished down the other side.

Nadir cried out, but no voice issued from his mouth. He screamed harder and harder, and presently his throat began to burn, his lips began to crack, and he tasted blood on his tongue. When he finally gave up for utter fatigue and collapsed, he realized the ground he lay upon was but a pinnacle of age-hardened sand, not more than half a meter round. The everpresent wind that was so familiar, always so welcome on hot summer days—this wind brushed the little pedestal where Nadir lay. Grain by grain, it rolled down the slopes. Bright as mica sometimes, dark as ground coal others. Helpless, hopeless, he cried. It wasn’t long before his ground had given way, and he rolled down the slope, past ancient riverbeds still waving their sandy bottoms in the current of time.

He woke, a preadolescent boy in a silent house near Wolf Point, at the edge of the Montana Badlands. Neglected sunlight bathed the bare white walls, pink in the predawn hour, setting dust and spiderwebs afire as if they were all that adorned the house. Mother and Father still slept. They always slept, Nadir thought. He snuck out of his bed, into coveralls, and outside.

He liked to run. He could run as fast as anyone in his virtual school, and faster than anyone in town, even the adults. Young Nadir ran across prickly fields where wheat was still the soil’s dream, where at places the carcass of the earth protruded through the brown dirt and shone sandstone browns. He ran so fast the wind whistled in his ears, a comforting sound. His belly burned from hunger, but that fire only drove him onward. When the sun erupted from the eastern horizon, where only torn Badlands terrain stood contrasted against the piercing yellow light, Nadir knew he had reached his destination.

He fell onto long prairie grass like carpet on a gentle hill, head-first and rolling like the heroes in the 3VRDs so he wouldn’t get hurt. There he lay, panting, until he quieted. As he tuned in to the sounds of this place he most loved of all places, he began to identify the voices of familiar birds, insects, even a toad. The hot wind dried his sweat. He rose, determined to prove that his Badlands, his welcoming place where he spent whole weekends sometimes—where he felt he had a family, even if they couldn’t have a conversation; but he had never known a family to do that, anyway . . . he was determined to prove his Badlands were not the ravenous pit from his dream.

Nadir picked edible flowers and cacti as he walked, found a spring he kept hidden yet marked beneath a flat stone that bore the imprint of a leaf dinosaurs may have heard crackling in the wind. When he reached the Badlands proper—the worn hills and sharp valleys, the barren stone and sand—he knelt and put his hands into the ground. The base of the slides were loose and soft, where the slopes had run down during the infrequent but hard spring rains.

His index fingers converged on a hard object, and he drew forth a tiny fossil vertebra of some long-vanished beast. This went into his chest pocket. He stood and walked, inspecting the ground as he went.

Soon, Nadir came across a brown bone as long as his thigh. A “femur,” his teacher had told him once when he had seen another. But this one was in one piece. He bent over and ran his fingertips along the worm-etched surface, so shiny though damaged. This had not belonged to a dinosaur but to a buffalo—just as extinct as its prehistoric cousins. He moved along.

A bird he couldn’t identify swooped past him, only its wings betraying its presence, like a breath in his ear. The creature’s chest glowed emerald, its back and wings shimmered black. Nadir grinned as he ducked the living projectile.

The wind began to pick up. It sang inhuman songs; rather, it played geological instruments as large as houses. Nadir strained his ears in an attempt to understand, but the meaning lingered at the edge of his consciousness. The breeze rose and fell, sessurated and howled, whined and babbled. Nadir had to squint to keep the clouds of dust out of his eyes, and averted his face.

He soon came upon another bone, this one longer than he was tall. A real dinosaur bone, bleaching in the sun. His heart sped, whether of excitement or fear he couldn’t tell. Then he saw a cluster of bones, ribs this time, each as narrow as a finger and some as long as a man’s.

Pebbles began to trickle down the hillside near him—he knew that, somehow, these could hurt him—so he stepped back a few paces and continued walking along the relatively flat ground. The music grew in volume, the wind increased its fury, the sand brushed more fiercely against his face; Nadir began to run in fear.

This had never happened before. Mornings that were so clear never built such a storm. He stumbled before long and found himself amid a cluster of boulders. Extinct river-tortoise shell fragments littered the ground, shiny brown on one side and dimpled on the other. He raised his head and saw dozens of bones, as well, whole skeletons of the reptiles. The boulders glistened as if wet, red in the diffuse sunlight.

Nadir rose and continued running, but everywhere he looked he saw bones, some fossilized and some just old like the buffalo’s. Once he thought he saw a human skeleton, gleaming brown as if it had turned to stone like a dinosaur. Then he tripped over another, and this one had eyes—eyes that tracked him as he ran, brown eyes with white bloodshot pupils.

“
Ohmygod,” he said, aloud, the first words he had heard since. . . . He couldn’t remember. It had been days. He ran.

At one point, young Nadir found a natural staircase in the mudstone and climbed this until he reached a hilltop. The wind buffeted him and once a flinging pebble glanced off his cheek, burning like an electric stove.

He cried out a non-word to the storm that had obliterated the countryside, his Badlands. Sand obscured everything but bones, bones bones bones gathered and clumped at the foot of the hillock like rubble, dead things, the detritus of 100 million years. All around him, all could see were the artifacts of life:
What is life but death?
he thought. Nothing living escapes death.

A pile of brown bones at the hill’s base began to bleach, or else the sand was blasting them clean.

“
Some fear death so much they encase themselves in padded tombs,” he called into the wind so loud he couldn’t tell where his voice ended and nature’s began. He wasn’t sure where he had heard these words before, but they felt right.

The bleached bones began to grow gristle.

“
Some step through life so cautiously that their feet seldom touch the hard stone of its surface.” Nadir had to consciously force himself from looking down at the bones, now clothing themselves in muscle and blood.

“
Some are so afraid of the odor of life that their lungs seldom fill with its sizzling air.” The wind rose in pitch, now singing like a thousand flutes and woodwind instruments carved from stone, ringing like steel. A waft of smoke snuck into his nostril, and the sky flashed blue then black then sandy again, as if his headcard had flicked on for school but he was out of server range.