| |
DAY TEN: Wednesday, 1 December 2055, London, England
“Eva Aslanova!” he shouts. “Eva, if you can hear me, I badly need a door!”
A roaring column of furnace-hot flame blasts the tree for five, ten, fifteen, twenty seconds – leaves, bark, branches, and trunk all igniting and burning ferociously. Mathew, scrabbling and clinging precariously to the higher branches, feels the heat blast towards him, toasting the soles of his dangling feet. The tree slumps and gives beneath him. He’s falling. Then somehow he’s on his feet. Yet another in a series of near-death experiences survived, he knows, only due to the fact that in this world his body is an avatar. Presumably, Eva doesn’t see the need to programme into his virtual self the means to die a hundred horrible different ways, mostly by fire. She thinks his project childish. She wouldn’t have put that much effort into it.
Or so he hopes.
He gets up from the scorched and smouldering earth beside the tree and gives himself a moment to glance back.
Two dragons, as tall as London double-decker buses, shift on their feet, flex their claws, flick their long, serpent-like tails ridged with spikes and plates. The power of a tail-swipe brings another tree crashing to the ground. It gets skewered by a cluster of spines, and the dragon thrashes its tail around until the tree, now uprooted and spraying earth and rocks and bird’s nests, is pulled loose.
They are trashing Eva’s world.
The larger dragon belches, and smoke billows out of her enormous nostrils. The male yawns, displaying a mouth full of splinter-sharp white teeth the size of large bottles and the blue tongue Mathew had been particularly proud of when he’d designed them.
They have grown enormously. They are huge. And now, completely oblivious to the fact that he created them in the first place, they think he is dinner, and they are very hungry.
He is fairly sure that he can’t die in Eva’s world, but just in case, he runs.
He is dodging trees as he goes, stumbling over tree roots. A hot blast of air funnels past him with such force that it blows him sideways. He dares not stop to look, but as he steadies himself, the rough bark of a redwood scraping the skin on the palm of his hand, out of his peripheral vision he catches the image of a red glowing cindered tree crumbling into a pile of charcoal and ash.
Up ahead, on the crest of a small bank, is an unusually large trunk, the width of several men standing shoulder to shoulder. In front of the tree he sees a young woman with very straight, thin, white-blonde hair and paper-white skin. She’s small anyway, but she seems tiny, dwarfed by the giant conifer. Behind her is a door.
“Eva!” he gasps, lurching forward.
He scrambles up the bank, yanking at saplings to pull himself up, his feet slipping on the loose earth and stones. His leg muscles are burning.
“Thank god!” he wheezes, bent over double before her, grasping his knees.
She grabs him, pulls him inside the tree, and shuts the door.
He’s back in his Darkroom. The blackened bare walls and floor seem less real than the forest. He sits down heavily in the chair behind him, still catching his breath. In a large armchair in front of him, Eva is curled up in her pyjamas.
“You do realise it’s four hours ahead here?” she says. “Bedtime. You were lucky you caught me. I was just brushing my teeth. Fifteen minutes later, I’d have been asleep.”
“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble with your dad?”
“No, no, don’t worry. He’s not here. Off again on his travels, immortalising the story of our great and glorious army to anyone who will listen.”
“St Petersburg again?”
“St Petersburg is done and dusted. Not sure where this time. He wouldn’t say. No doubt, we’ll see it all on the news soon enough.”
“You’re sure you’re safe talking to me like this?”
“As safe as anyone is these days.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“Best I can do. Look, Mathew, I think we need to talk about these dragons.”
“It’s not turning out quite as I’d planned.”
“Yes, well, that’s what’s confusing me. How did you plan it, exactly?”
“I’m not sure I did that much, to be honest. Beyond getting them into a world where they could evolve.”
“But in your programming, what did evolution consist of exactly? Growing endlessly larger?”
“They are quite big, aren’t they? They should stop, though. I made them what I thought was dragon size.”
“Which is? Forgive me, I’ve never seen a dragon.”
“Oh, you must have, in films.”
“I don’t watch those kinds of films.”
“About twice the size of a large dinosaur.”
“Right. Why did you do that?”
“Because I could?”
“What I mean is, what are you trying to achieve with this project?”
“I was just trying to make dragons, using the new genetic coding programme I had. And I wanted them to be able to interact with their environment and evolve their behaviour over time.”
“You succeeded. Congratulations. So we can close the server down then?”
“No. They were meant to breed.”
“They can breed?”
“Yes.”
“You want more of those things crawling about in that virtual earth of yours?”
“Obviously, I don’t now, but when I coded them, I did.”
“Wow. I don’t wish to put a downer on things, but a few more of those things and you won’t have much virtual earth left.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It seems a bit . . .”
“What?”
“Pointless . . .”
“I know.”
“You can still code them, can’t you?”
“I’m not sure. I packaged them. Doesn’t that seal off the creation?”
“Just go back to the source code, amend, repackage, and then redeploy.”
“Won’t that overwrite them?”
“Yes.”
“It will kill them.”
“They’re not alive, Mathew. Besides, they are fairly unpleasant, destructive creatures the way they are.”
“I suppose.”
“Why don’t you have a think about how you might make their behaviour a bit more interesting, rather than just predatory and destructive?”
“Such as?”
“For instance, if I was interested in creating fauna-type programmes rather than creating worlds, I wouldn’t be interested in making stupid animals. I would see if I could make a mind more interesting and better than a human mind.”
“But the best and brightest scientists alive aren’t able to do that.”
“So?”
“So how on earth am I meant to do it?”
“Mathew, I thought you and I were training to be the next generation of the best and brightest scientists.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Shouldn’t we be cleverer than the last generation? Shouldn’t we be able to do things they can’t? Shouldn’t we at least be trying to do those things?”
“I’d never thought of it like that.”
“My father is always saying that the West is degenerate, and your schools and universities aren’t a patch on ours. I’m always arguing with him that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Please don’t let him be right. Look, why don’t you at least try and concentrate on improving the dragons’ minds and behaviour? Give them some higher reasoning, a personality, even? You must have done some personality-typing courses?”
“Yes, but I hated them.”
“There’s a surprise. Anyway, what do I know? They’re your dragons, and it’s your world, for however long it takes them to burn everything to a cinder. Next time you decide to go in there, can you make sure you check the time difference, though?” Eva yawns. “You wouldn’t want to be toasted while I’m asleep. It could be an uncomfortable eight hours. I’m off to bed. Night, Mathew.”
“Night, Eva. And thanks,” he says, but the armchair has gone.
For L.S.