“I got the tablet,” Thales says, and when she looks up at him there’s an empty moment before the click of recognition.
“Thales,” she says, smiling widely. “Baby. Good job. Come here.” She holds out her arms with such a naturalness he finds himself accepting her embrace. Before she’d had an aura of feral alertness but now she just seems happy when she says, “But it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Of course it matters,” he says. “What could matter more?” He looks over the side and there must have been another wave, and a monstrous one, because black water has all but swallowed the city—here and there spotlights rove over the chop, and the lights of the buildings are blinking out before his eyes.
“Because it happened,” she says, settling into him like a child. “I got the call, the one I’ve been waiting for all my life. It was Sonia, my friend Sonia Caipin, the director’s daughter, now a director herself. I didn’t really think it was going to work out for her, but she got the money for her movie, finally, and she wants me to be the lead. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been trying to get here. They say LA is a game no one wins, but now I have, like I knew I would, though I also knew it was impossible, and now nothing else much concerns me.” In a gesture of exuberant finality she flings her drink over the side, the ice cubes and crystal tumbler and the amorphous mass of liquid catching the light and then gone.
“This happened today? The timing seems suspect…” He trails off, because it’s more than suspect, is in fact so unlikely as to be impossible, so she must have been manipulated through her implant, but before he can decide what to do about it the magician has joined them.
“Sorry about that,” she says briskly, and she seems like a different person now, her melancholy gone, radiant with purpose. “I had to make a call. Hey, you,” she says to Akemi. “I’m afraid we have to have another chat.”
It hits Thales that she said she made a call, which means there’s a working phone up in the replica of the house, which means he can call his mother, so he slips away as Akemi and the magician start to talk.
He charges up the stairs, turns a corner and there’s a square pool of black water, steam billowing up and dissolving in the wind and beyond that more steps leading to the house, and then he notices the magician sitting on the steps, blocking his way.
“How did you get here so fast?”
She says, “Thales, you really can’t call your mom.”
“Get out of my way.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this. Quickly, it seems,” she says, looking over his shoulder, and he follows her gaze down to where the sea is rising slowly over the level of the roof, thick black rivulets pouring onto the deck and running among the feet of the people who are just starting to notice. No wave or tide could reach so high and yet the water comes.
“That’s the end of the city,” the magician says matter-of-factly as somewhere a woman starts to scream. “I slowed it down, but I can only do so much.”
“It must be all the water in the world,” he says wonderingly.
“In fact there is no water. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s a little like reading—the bedrock reality is black marks on a page, and those marks are nothing like the world, but your mind insists on making sense of them. The illusion is seamless, and thus hard to escape. Every inconsistency just gets explained away.”
“It looks like water to me.”
“There isn’t even an image of water, unless you look closely—mostly the illusion’s just composed of words. Whatever’s missing just gets filled in, mostly with your own memories, sometimes with someone else’s. How to explain? Coleridge said images in dreams represent the sensation we think they cause. We don’t feel horror because we see a sphinx, but dream of a sphinx to explain our horror. In the same way, we see a city, though there is no city, just a handful of dreamers, bound together, sharing a dream. But in fact there are no dreamers, just a tissue of memory, and vortices moving through it, weaving it together and letting it decay.”
Again he says, “Get out of my way.”
“How much do you remember from before your collapse in that tunnel by the beach?”
“Plenty.”
“Actually, you only remember a little, and that hazily, because it’s just what you happened to think of in the two weeks you had your implant.”
“The damage wasn’t that bad.”
“I’ll be explicit,” she says. “The damage was total. In the end. The implant got you an extra two weeks. Afterwards, per contract, all its data reverted to Ars Memoria LLC, which went bankrupt a year later. Our hosts stole it sometime after that. You are made from what they stole. It’s been six years since you died.”
Six years, like a fairy story, how time flows differently under the hill. “Hosts?” he says.
“AIs. Big ones. Bigger than I’d thought existed. Hard to speak to motive, with that kind of thing, but it looks like they’ve been using us to interpret the world. The surgeon was one of them—he was running the place, while the place lasted. I think they found people are at their most docile with doctors. I caught him as he was leaving, not long after I met you and realized what was going on. Sorry for scaring you, by the way. I’d just arrived, and thought I had to take a hard line.”
“You caught him?”
“And I fought him, and I won. I shouldn’t have had a chance, here, with what I am and what he is, but I’d managed to get access to the control layer. Their security was weaker than I expected—actually, it seemed to have been deliberately weakened. I suspect there’s a story there, though I don’t know what it is, and the end result is I destroyed him.”
“And then?”
“And then I nearly despaired, because I discovered he was just a servant, and that his master, who was on the central node, was more terrible by far. But I had nowhere to go, and nothing to lose, so I sought battle in his high city in the waves, like a rebel angel bringing war to heaven. I got close enough to see something of his mind, and watched him decide I was irrelevant, and to isolate himself from the net while events played out, and then he dumped me back here with all the exits closed.”