19

I DON’T THINK I have ever been in a place that has been completely off-grid. Not even the Circle’s land was as strictly closed off as we’d always thought; it would be very inconvenient to plan for Rapture if the only way you could access the Internet was to drive to the perimeter, after all.

Initially I’m thrown by the fact that the lights don’t automatically come on when I go through the door. I stand there in the dark, stupid with confusion for a few moments, before remembering a historical mersive I played years ago set in a house with light switches. I brush my hand to the right of the doorway and the lights come on. I’m also disconcerted by how not only has my connection to Ada been cut off, but my connection to all chip functionality is severed too. I can’t even take simple pictures with my retinal cams, and when I see the space within, I have never wanted to take a picture more.

The room is dominated by a large central table and, lined up against the far wall, three others, upon which a set of models has been built. The model at the center is, at first glance, that of a town. But as I move closer to it, I realize it’s not just any town; it’s the first phase of the new colony.

It’s beautifully made, with the hallmarks of handcrafted modeling that I recognize from working with some of the most elitist directors in the mersive industry, who insisted upon using them instead of printed ones. They argued they created a more realistic effect, as the real world didn’t have such perfect edges and uniform color schemes. Here, in this secret room, I suspect the handmade aspect has far more to do with removing the need to upload the designs to the server in order to print them out.

As first impressions go, it’s fine. I’m no town planner but even I can appreciate that there are open areas that look like they could be used as parkland, wide streets, lots of space for gardens. But do we know we’ll be able to live outside there? It seems . . . fantastical to plan something out that looks like it could be dropped into any place on Earth. There aren’t any trees, I note, but that could be an artistic decision.

It seems to be designed around a cluster of large central buildings, surrounded by a band of smaller and still presumably civic buildings, with spokes reaching out from those linking to clusters of housing. At a quick glance, it looks like there are far too many civic buildings for the number of people in the colony, but maybe this is only one possible design, and besides, with its modularity, more spokes could easily be added on. Or perhaps they are planning more than one city.

I move to the far wall, glance over the models on two tables, which showcase two of the big public buildings from the center of the town plan. I was expecting the interiors to be concert halls or something, but they’re laid out like mansions rather than civic buildings. Confused, I move to the third model, which shows a cross section of an apartment block. Then I realize I’ve got the scale of the first model completely wrong. The buildings that I assumed were civic in purpose are actually private dwellings. Ten of them. One for each founder and their family. What I had assumed were houses in outer spokes are actually more like apartments. I suppose there’s an efficiency in that sort of design, though I thought the Americans resorted to apartment blocks only in high-density areas, as they had always enjoyed a massive landmass to spread out on. But if it’s a first-phase plan, they need to get thousands of people homed as quickly as possible, and that makes sense to a certain extent, but . . .

My eyes flick from the central houses to the outer spokes. From one lifestyle to another. Surely it isn’t as obvious as this looks. Is this the reason why this model is hidden away from the server?

But then it’s making me angry, just looking at it, and the last thing they want is ten thousand angry people realizing they’re being shipped out like sardines only to end up living like them at the end of the journey. But why? Why design something like this when you’re only sharing the planet with one other colony? Why make a city plan that’s almost a parody of the gap between the haves and have-nots when . . .

I think about the data I analyzed for Carolina, in particular the bizarrely impoverished mersives recorded by the vast majority of people on the ship. What if they have been trained for the trip in places designed to give them low expectations for what they will have on the planet? Something about all this is making my stomach churn, but it’s still not enough to explain why this room is shut off from the server. I’m missing something here . . .

I look at the rest of the room. The walls are bare but the floor area seems small given how far apart the doors are spaced in the corridor. Either the neighboring rooms are larger than this one, or there’s more to be found here. The only lighting is positioned directly above the models, so bright that it’s hard to see the walls to the left and right of me properly. When I move closer to one of them, I see there’s a strip running parallel to the floor at about waist height. Hoping for some sort of secret passageway, I press the edge of it where it meets the corner and get the next best thing: a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that slides out a couple of centimeters, ready for me to pull it out with the handle in its side. Its near-frictionless glide reveals deep shelves filled with honest-to-goodness paper files. What the actual fuck?

I pluck one from its place at random and open it to find profiles of people I assume are passengers. It details skills, medical history, all the things that would normally be kept online. Nothing particularly controversial or inflammatory, nothing that would merit premium space on a ship with one of the most advanced AIs known to humankind. I put it back and start taking random samplings, quickly conclude that these are all passengers and go to the other side of the room in the hope that I’ll find something more interesting. On those shelves are thousands of data drives, protected by shielding, and on the bottom shelf even a set of cores that could be used to reboot the AI. It’s as if they’re preparing for some computer failure or worried about an EMP wiping critical data. But why?

Returning to the other side of the room, I pull out the bookcase on the far side of where I started. The files look different. These are reports filled with all sorts of jargon I don’t understand. Why print all this shit out? No one does this anymore, let alone to be stored on a ship where every square centimeter of space is precious and every single gram has to be justified. It’s a chemical analysis of some kind, I conclude, flipping ahead to a page containing a picture that looks like it’s been taken by something in orbit above a planet. I look down at the bottom right corner of the page, to the tiny white text detailing the time, date and source of the cam.

I read it again. Then a third time. It says it was taken by camera 45 on the Atlas array, over twenty years ago. Then it hits me. I’m looking at an aerial shot of the Pathfinder’s colony. And it looks nothing like the one modeled on the table next to me. But how did they get hold of this? The distances involved are immense! I flip through the rest of the file, concluding that this is data from the planet we’re heading to. One factoid leaps out at me: there is an estimated seventy million square kilometers of habitable landmass waiting for us. What it doesn’t mention is whether that includes the colony already established. Aside from my not being able to understand how this data ended up here, at least there is some vague reassurance that the colony designers know what kind of environment we’re heading toward. But why put all this data here? Why put it in a place where no one can make use of it? Surely the Circle would go crazy over this stuff! Do they have the data and I just haven’t heard about it, thanks to my liminal status?

Or does this room exist to keep it from them? None of the members of the Circle are in the CSA, after all. It still seems insane.

I push the shelf back in and with a jolt remember that I’m supposed to be at that bloody party. Shit. I take one last look at the central model, certain there’s something I’m missing in all this, then head to the doorway, remembering to switch off the light as I leave. There’s no one in the corridor and I run back to the double doors, peep through, see the area by the elevator is empty too and slow my pace as I approach the doors back to the party. It’s only when I see that dancing has started, with Carolina and her grandfather right at the center of it, that I relax enough to see that Ada is back online and recording again. My heart is hammering so hard it feels like I’m playing something leet server–worthy, but for real.

The dialog box floats over the punch bowl. I stare at it, realizing the beast is desperate to know and that, finally, I have some leverage over him. <Wouldn’t you like to know?> I type back like a flirting teenager who doesn’t know better.

“It’s a punch bowl,” a man says with all the charm of a cheap mersive NPC. “That’s a drink inside it. It’s nice.”

Shit, he thinks I’m staring at it because I don’t know what it is. I put on my most plummy English accent. “Oh, I know, I was just wondering where the cups are. They usually hang off the edge.”

“Oh, the cups are over there. Hanging off the edge? Is that a Noropean thing?”

“Probably. Oh, it looks like Carolina wants me to dance.”

“Need a partner?”

I glance at him then, seeing a man with far too much hope in his eyes. “I think Pappy is hoping it will be him,” I say, pretending to wave at them past his shoulder. Carolina actually spots it and beckons me over, making me regret my tactic. “Excuse me. The birthday boy needs to have a fuss made of him.”

“Maybe later?” he calls to my back, but I pretend not to hear him. I silently command Ada to make sure my profile is still set to private and to not accept a contact request from him. I go over, make a halfhearted attempt at making an excuse to leave and somehow get tempted into dancing. Without my old boss there, lurking nearby like a vulture, I even quite enjoy it.

It takes me an hour and a half to extricate myself from the party politely. My feet are throbbing and the first thing I do when I get back to my cabin is take the shoes off with a happy groan. Then I peel off the dress, damp from my exertions, and unhook my bra. This groan of relief is even louder. I never thought I’d ever be happy to get back into that boring T-shirt–and–jog pants combo, but right now, it’s bliss to chuck them on and lie on the bed after a quick shower.

As I always do after an intensely social event, I pick it apart. Carolina was so welcoming, so keen to bring me into the fold. Why? Was it just because I was willing to fuck someone over to let her win? Or was it because her grandfather told her I was a closet Christian and needed saving?

Either way, I can see a path unfolding ahead of me. I know how to play men like Theodore. The key is making him feel needed and respected, but not by being too vulnerable. He has to respect someone enough to want to help them, but only on the understanding that he is fundamentally superior and that his desire to help comes from generosity, rather than sewing some poor bugger into a net of obligations that he can cash in later.

If I throw my lot in with them, I have the feeling my life could get much more comfortable and that I would be a lot less likely to end up in one of those tiny apartments when we get to the end of this trip. But I’d have to pretend to be religious; I’d have to play a role indefinitely, just to survive.

But then, isn’t that what I’ve always done?

I need to talk to the beast, but I don’t go straight to my office. Instead, I get Ada to pull all the data I used to write the report for Carolina, and the report itself, and have it projected on the ceiling for me to examine.

Now that I know about the CSA, I use membership in it as an additional variable for analysis. As I suspected, given the fact that the top pay-grade tiers were exclusively for members, none of the under-forties with the limited mersives are members of the organization.

The mersives they consume all seem to be personally recorded ones. Back when I did the report, I didn’t know about the virtual marketplace. Is it possible they don’t know about it either? I ask Ada to pull the data on purchases made by these same under-forties, and I expect her to tell me they don’t have access or something. But they do have access; that rapidly becomes clear. They just aren’t buying the sorts of full-immersion games and experiences in the numbers that I would expect any normal population to consume.

There’s a disproportionate number of educational mersives that have been purchased at what seem to be unnaturally high price points. Even for a small consumer base like this, it seems odd to set the pricing this way. They’re mostly for kids, judging by the educational level and the fact that they’re designed to be played on a wall, without a chip. So there are children on board. Okay, fine. What else are these people buying?

For the disproportionately small number of people who do buy games, they are older versions and they tend to have either a large amount of narrative and activities or a high replay value. None of the premium titles, uploaded just before we left Earth, have been purchased, but, then, they are over ten times the price of the older titles.

Then it hits me, such an obvious thing that in overthinking it, I missed it entirely: these are the purchasing and consuming habits of people who don’t have money. And when I think of it that way, considering we are all stuck in this can for the next twenty-odd years with an entirely artificial internal economy that could be far, far simpler than that of Earth, it starts to make me feel angry. Because if there are people on this ship who are watching pennies, there are people on this ship who are raking them in, exploiting those people somehow. That’s the way it works.

For comparison, I start trying to isolate the purchases made by members of the Circle. Now that I have greater data privileges, I thought I’d be able to abandon the deductive techniques I was using before and have Ada make direct queries to the database. But it soon becomes apparent that the database behind the marketplace doesn’t organize consumer data in a way that makes it easy to identify purchasers in the Circle. It’s hard to determine their pay grade, and while some of the people in the Circle fall into a convenient grouping of “over forty years old and not a member of the CSA,” none of them have actually bought any mersives while they’ve been on board. Maybe that’s a cultural thing; the group did always make a big deal about shunning technology. I pull the porn data, thinking that will really show the truth of the matter, only to find that the porn offerings are ring-fenced off and available only to members of the CSA. That makes me laugh out loud but doesn’t bring me any closer to understanding this ship.

In stumbling across the porn ring-fencing, I find something else that only CSA members are able to access: mersives that have been produced on board. Curious about who is involved in making them, seeing as I may soon be commissioning from them, I’m surprised to see that they aren’t entertainment consumables at all. They’re labeled as education and have all been produced by members of the Circle. A brief flit through the topics suggests that it’s a very sensible duplication of skills and specializations; the cleverest people on the ship are making sure their expertise doesn’t die with them.

Okay . . . fine, but why ring-fence that off from the rest of the ship? And if the members of the Circle are happy to record mersives—even if they are merely recorded with cams without full immersion—aren’t they at least curious about trying something available on the marketplace?

Unless they are just as unaware of it as I was.

Three distinct groups of consumers and producers, all on the same ship. I’ve glimpsed the privilege that one group enjoys this very evening: from the simple pleasure of printed clothes and shoes to a space large enough to hold a party and dance in. I’ve seen their plans for maintaining that divide between the privileged and the less so in that secret room, even when there are literally millions of square kilometers to potentially build on.

I can understand why the CSA people are on board and act the way they do; they spearheaded the project, they’ve always been privileged and they are a closed group, which generally means they perpetuate the system that serves them best. And the same with the Circle; their expertise was critical. It couldn’t have happened without them and the skills that achieved that will be just as critical when we make planetfall. But the other ninety-five percent of the people on this ship . . . how did they get their places here?

Then the relative poverty makes sense; maybe they used all of the money they had to buy a place here. But when you’re taking the last ten thousand human beings from Earth, surely there are more rigorous selection criteria than “willing to sell everything they own for a ticket.” No, surely they picked the strongest, the most intelligent, the most . . . boring? Isolated? Is that all I can conclude from the fact that their personally recorded mersives are so limited in range? Even the most basic neural chips can run software sophisticated enough to record experiences with full immersion; that’s not a cost issue.

I press my hand onto my stomach, feeling unsettled. It’s the clustering of these different factors that disturbs me. It suggests people with limited life experiences, not just limited resources, and the two together suggest something unpleasant indeed. Besides, if these were people who’d been successful enough to acquire the wealth to buy a ticket, they’d have the same mersive tag range as the wealthy CSA members, and they don’t. And it would cost millions of dollars per person, and so few people have that kind of money. It’s not the sort of thing you can take a loan out for either.

But there are other ways of dealing with debt.

The punch and the canapés are suddenly rushing up my gullet and I leap from the bed as sweat breaks out on my forehead and then I’m retching it all up into the toilet bowl, just like Carl all those times when we first came on board. Did something disagree with me? Are the food printers different up on deck five?

I rinse my mouth out, waiting for MyPhys to check me over. When the verdict is that the vomiting was caused by stress, I roll my eyes and brush my teeth. I don’t feel stressed enough to throw up. What does that stupid software know? I spit into the sink and a message notification that Carl is getting in touch makes me straighten up. I accept voice contact.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Christ, Carl, are you monitoring me still?”

“I’ve got an alert set up for anything unusual, and you just threw up. Any other symptoms?”

“I’m fine! I just . . . exercised too soon after eating, that’s all.”

“The report said it was because of stress. Dee, MyPhys was fucked with in the other two cases. Anything feels weird, I don’t care how stupid it might seem, you call me, ’kay?”

“Really, I’m fine. I’m going under now, okay? Just to have a break.”

“’Kay. The violent games have been blocked, but you know I don’t think it’s a gaming issue, so be careful.”

I stand by the sink for a few moments after ending the call. It has everything to do with games, just not in the way he thinks. If the beast can use MyPhys to make what I do in games a reality, what’s to stop him from doing the same to me?

There’s nothing to do except have it out with the beast. I lie down on the bed and soon I’m in my office. Again, he doesn’t even wait for me to pick up the star. His shape coalesces in front of me as Ada informs me my connection to the rest of the server has been cut off.

“You know Carl is watching my online activity at the moment. He might freak out if he sees I’ve been cut off.”

“He won’t see that,” the beast replies, settling onto its haunches. “Shall we try to have a conversation?”

I nod, calling up a chair to sit opposite him. “Did Brace die because of what I did to him in the game?”

“That was a collaborative effort. What you chose to do to him enabled me to finish the job.”

“How? Did he go back into the server, like Carl said?”

“Yes. He wouldn’t have done that without you. It gave me some loopholes I could exploit. I didn’t think it would be possible to execute that part of our plan using a game again, but his anger and his pride made it possible. Are you upset that it happened that way?”

I consider the question. “Not knowing what was going on was upsetting,” I finally say. “It was confusing. I just assumed you’d ignored what I said to you before.”

“I have paid very close attention to everything you have said to me.”

Creepy, creepy bastard, I don’t say aloud. “You called Carl, before, when I was upset, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you haven’t paid close attention to what I’ve said at all.”

“On the contrary. But I have also attended to what you have never said and what you have never done. They can be just as important. I understood the risk of upsetting you but decided that was outweighed by the benefits.”

“You ran a fucking cost-benefit analysis? And decided that . . .” I stop myself from saying everything else running through my head. I need to make progress with him.

“Yes, and my analysis was correct. I ensured he was with you when Brace died. I ensured your response to the news of Brace’s death would be the correct emotional register when Carl was with you. I knew you would think he was me and that you would take him out of immersion to talk to you in the real world. It was all carefully timed. I find your surprise, anger and disgust amusing, considering that you conduct your entire life through careful cost-benefit evaluation. Far more than most.”

The anger dissipates. And as much as I hate to admit it to myself, he’s right. About the alibi and the way I live. “I’ve seen the room. I know what’s inside it.”

“And you’re aware of my desire to know what that is,” he replies. “You wish to negotiate. I understand.”

“I don’t think we’ve sorted out the whole trust-issue thing yet though,” I reply. “I think you’re incapable of understanding and respecting boundaries and that you might be more than a little mentally unstable. How do we . . . progress, given that?”

“I agree that there is evidence suggesting I find it difficult to understand boundaries. I am not mentally unstable. But I do think I am at the point where I can place more trust in you.”

“Because you want to know what’s inside that room.”

“That’s one of the reasons. Another is that I understand you better now.”

Suppressing the urge to blow up at him—how does he always say the thing most likely to make me freak out?—I fold my arms and take a deep breath. Even though it’s only a simulation of one, it still helps. “It goes both ways. I need to understand you better, because when you say things like that, it makes me feel . . . nervous.”

“That is excellent progress. I’m very glad you said that.”

“And that is exactly what I’m talking about!” I breathe again, aware my voice has risen slightly in frustration. “Look, I will tell you what’s inside that room, but only if you tell me exactly who you are and prove it to my satisfaction. And if that means we have to talk in meatspace, then you will just have to deal with it.”

The beast’s starry head nods. “I’m capable of many things, but talking to you in meatspace to your satisfaction is not one of them.”

I stand up. “If you’re not prepared to come and meet me there, then this conversation is over.”

“Dee,” he says, his avatar standing too. “I can’t talk to you in meatspace because I don’t exist there. I’m not a human being. I’m the ship’s AI.”