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Determined not to go back without a precise grid-coordinate reading of this place (an historic location as far as he was concerned) he removed the GPS receiver from his belt and turned it on. The Global Positioning System consisted of a number of satellites positioned above the earth — each one orbiting the globe twice daily — that transmitted precise time and position (latitude, longitude and altitude) information around the clock. The GPS receiver, listening to three or more satellites at once, picked up their signals to determine the user's position on Earth. By measuring the time interval between the transmission and the reception of a satellite signal, the GPS receiver could calculate the distance between the user and each satellite. It then calculated the position of the user by utilizing the distance measurements of at least four satellites in an algorithm computation. Thus, by using his GPS receiver, Michael could obtain a read-out of his precise location, accurate to a radius of 5mm. Now, after studying the liquid crystal display, he was able to mark on nis map exactly where this lake was located,
thus adding to his tund of knowledge about the Antarctic colony - Wilson's -olony — before it became known as Freedom Bay.
Satisfied, he repacked his rucksack and took a final look at the lake with its drifting blocks of pack ice and bizarrely shaped glaciers, all being carried slowly on the weak current to the narrow channel on the lake's southernmost perimeter, from where it would travel all the way to the South Atlantic, as Stanford's body had done. Then he turned around and headed back the way he had come, across the vast, glittering white plain, towards the mountain range where Freedom Bay was located.
As he made the journey home, bathed in brilliant sunlight yet feeling the bitter cold (minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, he noted from the barometer on his wristwatch), he saw flying saucers ascending and descending vertically from Freedom Bay, continuing their round-the-clock patrol of the skies beyond the force field, which covered an area of fifty miles' diameter around the colony and was only turned off when craft were entering or leaving. The saucers of the cyborgs could not break through that force field and so they rarely ventured near Freedom Bay, though they certainly visited the Antarctic regularly: having taken over the original research stations of the humans, they now used them for their own dubious purposes. Those saucers never bothered Freedom Bay's saucers, nor were they bothered by them, but they often flew over the mountain, outside the force field, and Brandenberg believed that they were constantly probing for a way to break in. Sooner or later, if not stopped, they would succeed; but Brandenberg was convinced that the time was not yet right for Freedom Bay to take successful action against them. He was convinced that those in Freedom Bay, though in constant danger of being recaptured, should not act until they were certain of winning.
Michael, being younger, lacked Brandenberg's patience and when he saw Freedom Bay's flying saucers ascending and descending vertically over the mountain, the only home he had ever known, he yearned to be in one of them and see what lay beyond Antarctica, in what was known as 'the World'. That world had been stolen from him by the cyborgs and he wanted it
back.
Even as he was thinking this, the laptop in his rucksack gave
out a repetitive, high-pitched beeping sound. This being an
indication of a rare incoming e-mail, Michael stopped walking,
slipped the rucksack off his shoulders and knelt in the snow. He
removed the laptop from the rucksack, turned it on, then hit the
key that brought up his e-mail window. When he saw that single
message on the screen, he could hardly believe his own eyes.
wilson is back.
Chapter Three
You cannot possibly know me because I do not know myself and I cannot even begin to explain it. I am the light and the resurrection, the beginning and end of all, and I exist where no laws can apply and where nothing can touch me.
I am here. I exist. This cannot be denied. They thought I was gone, but I have come back to haunt them and this is the record of my returning and of what I became. It was not what I had planned or even imagined but, clearly, given the trajectory of my work, it was inevitable.
Yet rebirth is a horror.
I swam out of the darkness of oblivion, a blank diskette waiting to be filled, not knowing who or what I was, as none of us
do. I was, of course, unique, as I had been before, but this time even more so than before because I was the first. I had planned myself, of course, ordaining what was to be, but when my instructions were carried out, when the experiment was successful, the other me, the one who lived even as I died, could not know what had happened. Like you and your kind, like all the ghosts of human history, I remembered nothing about my own beginning and I only gazed outwards. Given awareness of myself by what was out there, I began to fill the blank spaces.
In the beginning was the light, the unimaginable first dawning, but even that is now beyond my recollection and I find it frustrating. My initial memories are of childhood, as they must have been the first time, though my recollections of the first time were obliterated when that one died at long last. I had to learn of the first time, to be force-fed my own history, but that did not come until much later, when I was ready to face it. First I crawled, then I walked, just like the normal do, then I spoke and observed and started reasoning, though that time, too is lost to me. My first memories are of the water, the teeming depths of the
seabed the kind offish that normal children never see, vividly coloured, grotesque, in a jungle of rocks, plants and plankton, illuminated in beams of light. Those lights were artificial, though I wasn't to know that then, and they beamed into the bottom of the ocean from the walls of my home. Out there, beyond the windows held at bay by those immense plates of unbreakable glass, lay a world still largely unexplored and as alien as outer space.
My home was on the seabed. I was bom and bred there. I had no parents, but many looked after me and each taught me something. I was revered from the start cherished, held in awe, and never left alone for a second, because I, too, had my purpose. I recall the walls of the sea dome, gently curved, a white steel, punctuated with the panoramic windows that revealed the murky depths and with high consoles in which lights of many colours blinked repeatedly and computer screens, their windows overlapping glowed like square eyes. There were maps on the walls, though they were not maps of the surface of the Earth; they were maps of the seabed, each one covering a different area as we, those who lived in the dome, systematically explored that vast, ever-shifting, unknown world.
Thus I learnt at an early age that the great dome in which I lived, the only world I had known so far, was enclosed and constantly on the move.
My world, that great dome of steel and glass, had no sky, no greenery, no natural air; instead, it had floors and ceilings, curving corridors and many rooms, manufactured air and artificial light, a closed-circuit ecology. There were animals in that dome, used for research and for food; there were humans used only for experimentation (often headless, without limbs) and there were others who at first I thought were just like myself, albeit different in appearance, but "who I later learnt were not entirely human but only half so. They were, of course, cyborgs.
Yes, rebirth is a horror. Though there were other children, I was kept separate n them and made to understand that I was different. I ate and slept alone, no free time at all, and studied mostly with the aid of an interactive nnputer system, my tutors merely selecting the software and offering general
<*ance. These studies kept me engaged (even my games were educational) and t thought of having nothing to do never entered my head. My earliest memories
1 °J "working, of learning: nothing else was permitted. Though my elders seemed to revere me, even to fear me, they made me work night and day. They were my rod and my staff.
I had no parents and did not know what parents were; ergo, this situation seemed natural to me and I never felt lonely.
Sometimes, it is true, I experienced a fleeting sense of loss, a hollowness at my centre, as if part of me was missing, but invariably I shrugged the feeling off and returned to my work. My learning gave me my centre, my reason to be, and eventually nothing else really mattered. I thought my brain was my soul.
My world was the great dome and for years it was under water, but then I learnt that it was a gigantic submersible that could also take wing, though it did so but rarely.
On those rare occasions, the great dome would rise vertically, lifting off the sea bed, drifting up silently from darkness to light, first through striations that obliquely sliced the gloom, then into a dazzling explosion of sunlight as the sea, first dark green, then blue and foaming white, poured down the large windows, drummed against the metal walls, then turned into surging waves that eventually fell away, dropping out of sight, until the surface of the sea came back into view, this time as a vast sheet of blue far below, running out to the horizon, with the sky, either cloudy or bright, spread out all around us.
Then, when we were so high that we could see the curve of Earth, the sky would also change, turning into a whipping, spiralling tunnel of shimmering white light streaked with silvery blue, a vertiginous well of brightness that gave no
indication of which direction we were actually flying in: up, down or straight ahead. Then, abruptly, we would blast through the sky itself, a giant envelope tearing open to reveal a boundless, azure sea which would convulse and turn purple and then, just as abruptly, actually being the same sea, fill up with the burning radiance of a gigantic sun, even as the moon and stars also came out, now visible, with the sun, in an atmosphere so thin that even dust particles could not exist there. And seconds later (it always seemed that quick) we would be descending vertically over a different coastline, perhaps thousands of miles away, only to sink back into the sea, sinking down into the silent, eternal depths until we touched the seabed. And there we would remain for many months or, in some cases, years.
I have lived in the depths of many oceans and now I reach for the stars.
I was, of course, too young then to understand that we had been flying well beyond the sound barrier, over fifty miles up, on the very edge of space; just as I
was too young to know that to live on the seabed was not normal. Nevertheless, my blank diskette, my young brain, was still being crammed full of knowledge, with languages, mathematics, geography, world history, astronomy and, most of all with science, including aerodynamics, physics, biology, and computer technology. No literature. No art. Yet apart from that lack, I was, by my tenth year, as knowledgeable as the grown-ups who had taught me. A year later, with the aid of my computers, I began to outstrip them.
Now, as I write, in my fortieth year on Earth, I am so far ahead of my tutors that they seem like mere children. Now they fear me even more than they revere me. And that's as it should be.
In time you will fear me as well. But first you must find me. I am here. I exist. You simply have to accept who I am and how like me you are.
I will make sure you do.
Chapter Four
Gumshoe had to get out. This didn't happen often, but this evening he was feeling restless, as if he'd been flamed, and he needed air even more polluted than the air in his apartment. In fact, he needed action. He had been working for days now, breaking into the mainframe of a multinational pharmaceutical company on behalf of another multinational, stealing information and passing it on: the job had been more difficult than he had thought possible and had eaten up a lot of on-line time. Well protected with multiple passwords and a variety of traps for hackers and crackers, the mainframe had challenged Gumshoe's ingenuity for two days and most of three nights, driving him to a diet of home-delivery hamburgers, Chinese food, pizza pies, nonalcoholic drinks and cigarettes, all ordered up electronically as required, with him never having to go any farther than the front door downstairs. By the end of that lengthy period, when the mainframe had finally been broken into and the stolen data passed on electronically, Gumshoe's already cluttered room was dense with smoke and further messed up with cardboard takeaway cartons, styrofoam beakers and overflowing, foul-smelling ashtrays. To make matters worse, Gumshoe felt disorientated — nay, lohotomized — his brain consumed and drained by the bottomless pit of cyberspace, the glowing screen that sucked him in, surrounded him, eventually made him part of it, became
his only world, down there in that howling electronic well with the perns, the flame ghouls, the lurkers, the other hackers and crackers. Now moved by the inexplicable urge to feel human again, which in truth happened rarely, he decided to tidy up his dump and go out for some action.
After cleaning his teeth for the first time in a few days, he stripped off his working clothes (plain white T-shirt, blue denims and baggy underpants), stepped naked into the shower — which, not working properly, was freezing cold — then dried himself and put on his Speed Freak clothing: tight, balls-hugging underpants, a bullet-proof vest, jet-black net-to-ankle zip-up coveralls and a sleeveless tropical jacket with a lot of pockets containing money in cash form (the credit-card economy had given way to electronic cash transfers), cigarettes, methamphe-tamine-based chewing gum, a wide variety of other drugs in pill form and a pack of cards to be used for gambling or simply to while away the time should
nothing be happening. He put on a pair of black suede leather-soled boots, but as usual he eschewed the soft option of a helmet or other protective headgear. Finally, mindful of street crime, which was, these days, as bad as it could get, he strapped a Glock 19 semi-automatic handgun, conveniently small and light, to his waist, its holster positioned to the rear of his left side to enable him to cross-draw at speed.
Thus prepared, he filled a black plastic bag with all the cardboard containers, styrofoam cartons, unfinished hamburgers and pizzas and cigarette butts, then hauled it out of the room onto the landing.
After turning the keys in the three multiple locks on his
reinforced room door, he humped the plastic bag down the stairs and out of the building. It was late in the evening, which was warm this June day, and the few street lamps still working cast a baleful glow across the rubbish piled up on both sides of M Street. Though the city's infrastructure was steadily collapsing, neglected by the cyborgs, it still operated in certain areas and the rubbish was collected occasionally. Sometimes, however, it was so long between
collections that the rubbish would turn to putrescence and be covered with swarms of fat black flies.
That was the situation here and now: Gumshoe held his breath as he threw his rubbish bag on top of the others piled up on the sidewalk. Glad to be rid of it, he turned down the steps that led to the door of the basement. First using a confidential code number, then three more sets of keys, he let himself into the concrete-walled, gloomy basement where he kept his beloved motorcycle in a heavily padlocked and electrified steel-mesh cage. After turning off the electrical circuit, to avoid inadvertently giving himself a bad shock, he opened the four heavy padlocks, removed the immaculate silver-tanked Yamaha 400
from its protective cage, locked the cage again, then wheeled the motorcycle outside and humped it awkwardly up the steps to the sidewalk. He glanced left and right, always mindful of villains just like himself, then slung his leg over the saddle, started the motorcycle and burned off along M Street.
Crossing Wisconsin Avenue and continuing east in dense traffic, he was dazzled by the flashing bright lights of the noisy, neon-lit electronic games parlours, techno dance clubs and porno 'fun palaces' lining both sides of the road. Though the cyborgs had imposed a midnight curfew and were ruthless at enforcing it, they had shown supreme indifference to what human beings did for entertainment (the very concept was beyond them), so long as it was done before midnight. Indifferent, also, to everything but their own needs, the cyborgs had destroyed most import and export businesses by grounding all aircraft and stopping sea travel, had killed off the automobile, aircraft, shipping and computer industries as well as any other concerns that offered the chance of technological progress for humans, and had in general created unemployment on a scale never seen before in the United States. (And, according to Gumshoe's e-mail, things weren't much better elsewhere.) Perhaps in response to this, faced with no viable future, human beings, particularly the younger generation, had created an alternate world, based largely
cyberspace, which the cyborgs seemed to ignore, and had also thrown themselves wholeheartedly into every kind of hedonistic activity, including cybersex, virtual-reality adventures, 'real time' crime, heavy drinking and drug-taking, techno music and new forms of tribalism, as represented, in the case of Georgetown, by the growing number of motor-cycle-and-hot-rod gangs. At his tender young age, Gumshoe had never known a world without the cyborgs, so he was not to know that the electronic games parlours, techno dance clubs and porno fun palaces lining Wisconsin Avenue and M Street had once been more sedate bars and restaurants. What he didhnow was that the many kids of roughly his own age, now crowding the sidewalks and garishly neon-lit houses of pleasure, had a tendency to cram as much as they could into their evenings before the midnight curfew came into force, after which, if they were still on the streets, they would be in danger of being picked up by the cyborg watch patrols.
No one knew what happened to those picked up; the only known fact was that, once picked up, you would never be seen again.
And that's the buzz, Gumshoe thought as he took the bridge over Rock Creek and burned along
Pennsylvania Avenue, heading for Downtown. The buzz is running that risk.
Sweeping around Washington Circle and then continuing along Pennsylvania Avenue, he noticed how relatively empty the road was and was reminded that the better-off, the middle-aged, the kind still living in Foggy Bottom and clinging to their worthless fortunes, rarely ventured out at nights, being frightened not only of the cyborg patrols but also of the white teenage and ethnic Speed Freak gangs that swooped in most evenings from Anacostia or the north-east, defying the cyborgs, to rob, rape and kill. Studying the imposing government buildings as he burned past them, he noted that few lights were on inside them. This was yet another reminder that while the cyborgs had allowed a few, strictly necessary government administrators to remain in their jobs — mostly those dealing solely with the city's
