The Age of Scorpio

22

A Long Time After the Loss





Vic knew that there was no reason for the beacon to be all the way out here. It wasn’t on any navigational chart. The information as to its whereabouts had recently been added to the nav systems by Scab. Vic liked nothing about this, but then he hadn’t liked anything for some time now.

The bridge drive made a cut in Red Space. The Basilisk emerged into blackness.

‘Where are we and where are the all the stars?’ Vic asked. Scab ignored him.

There was something wrong with the blackness. Vic couldn’t shake the feeling that the infinity of space was somehow closing in on him. He didn’t like the way space seemed to move in the periphery of his multifaceted vision. He didn’t like the feeling that somehow space was squirming.

‘Is that a monastery?’ Vic might as well have been talking to himself. He was receiving the image from the Basilisk’s sensors straight into his neunonics. It showed an ancient-looking habitat built into an asteroid. It had the look of a Church habitat but a very old one. A search of his neunonics found nothing that matched it.

The sensors showed indications of life but no weapon locks from defensive systems. That wasn’t right. Vic couldn’t think of another habitat that had no defensive systems.

‘I don’t want to go there,’ Vic said firmly and crossed all four of his arms. ‘I mean—’ he started.

‘Can you not want to go there silently?’ Scab demanded, turning on Vic. This made Vic even more nervous as Scab seemed a little on edge.

The familiar clang of docking was followed by a grinding noise as the ancient docking arm tried to make a seal.

‘Maybe we’ll just be sucked out into space when we open the airlock,’ Vic said hopefully, but the docking arm finally made its seal. Scab ’faced opening instructions to the Basilisk and after decontamination procedures the wall opened. Vic didn’t like what he saw. It was difficult to tell their race or sex, but they were probably human or feline, as they were wearing voluminous red-hooded robes that covered their features.

Between the two red-clad monks was an ornate cylinder floating on an AG drive. The cylinder was a nano-fabricated tank designed to look like wood, brass and glass. A thick black fluid swirled around inside another clear liquid, seemingly with a life of its own.

It was with dawning horror that Vic realised what these people were.

‘This is a heretical cult!’ he cried, only to be ignored yet again. Were these his real employers? Surely they were too poor for the sort of resources that Scab had been throwing at this thing.

‘Night draws in,’ one of the monks said. Human, male, working hard to impart as little emotion as possible.

‘We have little time,’ the other said. Vic couldn’t be sure of its race, let alone gender.

‘I need a message delivering,’ Scab told them. ‘Tell him that we’re going to need a diversion.’

The monks nodded. Vic was coming to the conclusion that if he could work out a way to commit suicide without being cloned by Scab, it might be easier than this insanity.

The chimera reared on its cloven-hoofed rear legs, striking out with its claws as it surged forward, opening rents of red in the sculpted flesh of the tank-bred biomechanoid it was fighting. There was cheering from the various boxes grown out of the root-like wood that formed the arena.

Zabilla Haq turned away from the arena, distaste written all over her face. The bloodshed did not bother her. The biomechanoid was unimpressive in its modernity; she liked the classical elegance of the three-headed chimera, but then it had taken her a great deal of time and effort to grow it. Adapting and splicing pre-Loss genetic material from a goat, lion and snake had been the easy part. The dragon head had been difficult. It had meant the creation of an entirely new template, as she had not been prepared simply to modify an existing lizard template. Instead, using reptile DNA as a guide, she had written her own code. She was pleased with the result. The difficult part had been making the three heads co-operate while retaining a degree of individual function.

The chimera butted the biomechanoid and horns tore more flesh. The lion head ripped another chunk of meat away as the staggering biomechanoid tried to bring its weapon gauntlet to bear. The hooded serpent tail darted over the chimera’s body; fangs pierced mottled armour, and venom emptied into the biomechanoid’s flesh. The chimera all but climbed up its opponent, using its claws, rearing high. Despite being the creature’s creator, Zabilla couldn’t help but admire the haughty and proud set to the creature’s draconic middle head.

‘I like it,’ Gilbert Scoular said, sounding like he meant the opposite. ‘But it’s not terribly original, is it?’ the fat, ostentatiously dressed, self-proclaimed genetic artist said from his chaise longue. He was heavily made up, sweating and being fanned by a licensed and chipped morlock servant that, it was whispered, he had grown himself and used as a sex toy. ‘Good thing you didn’t give it wings after all. I shouldn’t like to see one of those nesting in the upper branches.’

Her inability to get it to fly had proved extremely frustrating. Scoular’s attempts at biological espionage must have revealed this. Nearly every utterance was a passive-aggressive attack. Zabilla was too good at the Game to show a response, though her grip on the wine glass tightened. She felt her consort Dracup tense next to her. He was working his way towards a second name in the eyes of the Absolute and not as used to the constant barbed attacks of life in society as she was. He was reaching across his emerald-green, handsomely cut, knee-length padded silk tunic for the bone blade sheathed at his hip. He would scar Scoular’s fat face and then call him out.

She stopped him with a glance, hoping that Scoular hadn’t noticed her paramour’s rashness. More to the point, she hoped that the Absolute wasn’t tuned into her own experiential headware at the moment. Though that was likely, as they were now in the semi-final round of the hastily called audition for a chance to run the Absolute’s secret ‘grand project’. Calling the artist out in a duel would be tantamount to admitting that Scoular was not only a better genetic designer but witty enough to elicit a physical response with mere words. He wasn’t. Dracup, on the other hand, had held her as she had cried tears of frustration when she was unable to make the creature fly.

‘As ever, I bow to your greater knowledge of such things,’ Zabilla said. She left the fact that her unoriginal creature was tearing apart his own creation unsaid. ‘After all, you are the artist; I am a mere biophysicist. My studies mean that my interest can never be anything more than amateur.’

‘Whereas your armoured spider with weapon-tipped limbs is an inspired idea,’ Dracup told Scoular dryly. Better, Zabilla thought. A little too obvious but better than drawing a blade.

Their faces were bathed in a warm but less than comforting red glow.

‘Oh, a hard-tech cheat. How . . . special,’ Scoular said.

Getting the dragon’s head to breathe fire naturally had been very difficult. The crowd went wild. The bloodshed didn’t bother her, but she found the cheering of the crowd a trifle gauche. Under her distaste she was trying not to smile. Scoular could not have failed to know that the flame was an application of biotech. His comment was so petty that Dracup even ignored the easy opportunity to challenge him to a duel.

The chimera paced around the sand of the arena, parts of which were on fire now. Firefighting drones remained hovering above on their AG motors. Zabilla uncharitably hoped that the dragon’s fire had caught some of the bystanders. The arachnid biomechanoid was burning and badly damaged, trying to stand on limbs that were being consumed.

‘No voice to your creature’s suffering?’ Zabilla asked.

Scoular said nothing. He had been overconfident. He had spied on her and created a creature to win. There was no pain reaction because he hadn’t thought he would need one. Like many who played, he understood the pleasure part of the Game, he didn’t understand the pain. It was not just about indulging appetites.

‘I hear the heads found two dead wiped pieces,’ Carinne Serano, Scoular’s fashionable arm-piece, said. She was trying, somewhat desperately in Zabilla’s opinion, to ease the conversation away from her financial paramour’s humiliation.

The wiped pieces were once people, actual players of the Game. They had been taken and all trace of their identities, from distinguishing features to personalities and memories, had been nano-virally destroyed before they were killed. It was one of the most horrific deaths a player could experience. All their triumphs would count for nothing as they were reduced to their original vat-grown templates.

Despite the fact that everyone playing the Game was sculpted with the same basic features, a template designed to reflect the Absolute’s original beauteous form before he ascended, Zabilla always found herself surprised by how much that template could differ from person to person.

Carinne, for example, was petite and pretty, while she herself was tall and striking. They both had high cheekbones, sharp features and narrow angular faces, yet Zabilla could look commanding and at times cruelly beautiful, whereas Carinne looked insipid to Zabilla’s eyes.

The same was true of Dracup and Scoular. Scoular’s obese body proudly bore the ravages of his excesses in the same way the Rakshasa bore their scars. Scoular was obese to the point where he had to use expensive miniaturised AG motors to help support his layers of fat so that he could move more easily. Whereas Dracup was whip-thin and looked like a weapon poised to strike, or some sort of not-so-patient predatory insect – but in an attractive way, Zabilla thought.

‘It’s an outrage,’ Dracup said, not without feeling. ‘It’ll be morlock rights activists. I hear they’re campaigning for sight now. It’s as if they think they have the right to as many senses as we do. I mean, what do they need them for beneath the Black Leaves? Sight would be a hindrance in the dark.’

The chimera charged through flame. Horns gouged vat-grown flesh and teeth sank into the same. The charge turned the wounded, burning, multi-limbed biomechanoid onto its back. Zabilla found herself liking the warmth of the flames on her face. She found herself liking the colour red.

‘They’re basically the same as us, you know? The morlocks, I mean,’ Scoular said somewhat distractedly as the chimera feasted upon his creation. ‘It’ll be outside forces. If it wasn’t, then the Absolute would know.’

Dracup was trying to mask his contempt for Scoular and said nothing. Zabilla watched the dragon and lion bury their heads up to their necks in the dead biomechanoid. The lion head appeared again, red, and roared.

Can you feel that, Absolute? Zabilla wondered. ‘It’s part of the Game,’ she said quietly, still transfixed by the gory display playing out on the arena floor.

Even Dracup looked shocked.

‘The Absolute said that he would never wipe players,’ Carinne stammered.

‘It’s heresy to even suggest so!’ Scoular all but shouted. Zabilla was sure that there was a degree of triumph in his voice. He didn’t understand pain and he didn’t understand daring. Zabilla allowed herself a small smile before turning to face them both.

‘What’s heresy? To suggest that the Absolute can’t change the rules of his own game or to suggest that for some reason the Absolute would have to inform you both first?’ she demanded, allowing just a hint of anger into her voice. She saw their doubt and fear, the insecurity that came from realising that the rules were not as they had thought. None of them wanted to face up to this possibility. Scoular glanced back down into the arena, his creation now just a feast for the victorious vat-grown myth.

‘Of course, you realise there’s a lot more to it than winning the battle, don’t you?’ he asked Zabilla, who nodded. ‘Elegance of design, aesthetics, things that a mere copy can’t allow for. It’s about impressing the Absolute with the skill of your design.’

‘As I said,’ Zabilla was smiling, ‘I am a mere amateur.’

He didn’t understand the Game. Scoular was right: it wasn’t about winning the fight, but it wasn’t about impressing either. It was about sensation. The bit of her design that would win the audition wasn’t the creature’s ability to vanquish its foes or the elegance and potency of the design. She would win because of the sophistication of the experiential biofeedbackware that would allow the Absolute to experience every moment of the fight from the chimera’s perspective. The taste of flesh, the feeling of breathing fire, the animalistic triumph at the kill: the Absolute drank sensation. Scoular knew that on one level but he made the mistake of thinking that the Absolute was just a bigger and much more powerful version of himself. He would never understand the simplicity of the thirst for pure sensation.

‘You should let me kill him,’ Dracup said as they made their way along a gnarled narrow branch, grown into a walkway, towards the air jetty. They were in the upper branches so the sides of the walkway had been grown into handsome abstract patterns.

‘According to you, I should let you kill everyone. Have you ever thought that you haven’t yet earned your second name because, in the unlikely event that the Absolute focuses on you, he is party to these feelings? Subtlety, my dear, subtlety and sensation.’

‘The Absolute enjoys violence,’ Dracup said with a certainty that only the young could have. He was right. The early parts of Game history, immediately after the terraforming, were basically an orgy of violence. Despite the elegance and sophistication of the terraforming design, the roots of the arboreal arcologies were soaked in blood. Bodies had hung from some of the branches like particularly fecund fruit.

Zabilla sighed and looked out at the massive arcology trees reaching up to pierce the atmosphere. All of them were studded with dots of bioluminescence. Each dot was a window. Game had been an experiment in Seeder-derived, nano-technological terraforming. Game’s size, its 0.75G, geological stability and the abundant energy of a large, nearby main-sequence G-type star had all pointed towards the viability of growing starscraper arcologies. The wish to harness solar energy suggested to the nano-architects that trees grown from an engineered wood-analogous substance would be both practical and aesthetically pleasing.

The roots grew deep into the planet to provide stability. The roots sought out Game’s natural resources and harnessed its geothermal energy. Leaf structures in the upper branches harnessed solar energy. The black leaves in the lower sectors harnessed infrared energy from both above and from heat escaping below. The biotech machinery that provided for the needs of the inhabitants – sewage and sanitation, water recycling, food creation, etcetera – was housed in the darkness below the black leaves. The vat-grown, blind subhuman morlock servitors oversaw this machinery. Other servitor creatures, designed to look like attractive birds or small arboreal mammals, saw to maintenance and sanitation requirements in the upper branches.

The upper branches divided the light from the artificial moons into competing beams that shone through the membranous translucent energy-gathering leaf canopy. Game’s moistness meant that mist was often present, further refracting the artificial moonlight. The effect was atmospheric and to Zabilla pleasantly eerie. She saw one of the larger avian servitors take off and flap through the misty night air. Dracup came and leaned on the rail of the walkway, looking at Zabilla intensely even as she stared out into the forest of city-sized trees.

‘The Absolute enjoys originality; violence can be a short cut. If you were to duel Scoular or assassinate him, both of which are beneath you, then you would need to do so in an original way.’ Even to Dracup she would not admit how she had distilled her views of what the Absolute wanted down to pure sensation – after all, he was another player. She had no doubt that the Absolute enjoyed good gamesmanship, but he/she/it must have seen it all now in the thousands of years of Game’s existence.

‘I . . . I am trying to learn,’ he said haltingly.

She turned to look at him. ‘There’s nothing attractive to either the Absolute or myself about weakness, do you understand?’

Dracup nodded. Like everything in the Game, she felt like she was playing out a scene, but she had worked hard enough for the Absolute this night. She wanted something for herself just now. Do you hear that, Absolute? Ride me if you will, but I need to let go. Maybe this is what he wanted, less artifice, more feeling. No, she didn’t want to think like that.

It was bad form to reward an underling with something he wanted after he had disappointed you. The problem came when you wanted the same thing. Zabilla grabbed the back of Dracup’s head and pulled him closer into her, exchanging a long kiss that became more urgent as it went on. She felt his hands sliding her skirt up and she jumped up onto him, wrapping her long legs around his waist.

With a thought, the baroque luxury G-car rose into view at the end of the jetty. It bobbed slightly on the four ball-mounted AG motors at each of its corners before docking. With another thought, the doors to the car split open. Another thought turned the plush interior red like her thoughts in the arena.

Dracup carried her, mostly blind, mouths meshed together, to the G-car, falling onto the soft carpet. The door closed behind them as the G-car took off, the AI pilot banking the vehicle towards Zabilla’s abode.

Zabilla wriggled out from underneath. Dracup’s hand snagged her underwear and dragged it down. She pushed herself onto one of the seats, spreading her legs, hunger written over her normally emotionless face. This was for her, to forget herself, the Game, the Absolute, the audition. This was for her only. Later she would test the limits of the heightened nerve endings she’d had grown in Dracup. Later she would feed the Absolute, later she would play the Game, lose herself in it, but not now.

In a distant chamber something started to pay attention to one of its favourites. Again.

The ride home had been sublime – dangerous but sublime. She had let herself go when her Game play was about control. She knew that many were good at feeding the Absolute sensation with abandon. Zabilla had always found the need to work at it.

When they arrived home they had worked at it, each little act designed to maximise either pain or pleasure, the whole thing designed as a beacon for the Absolute. She thought she had felt it in her experiential ware but the scientist in her knew that was her imagination. The Absolute was a silent ghost in their pain and pleasure centres. If people knew when the Absolute was present, then the heads would not be as effective as they were at rooting out the anti-social losers who played against the Game itself.

Like most players she’d had her rebellious phase when she had been a student. She had sworn that she was never going to play the Game, engage with it, never earn her second name, and like everyone she found herself inexorably drawn into it. Then she found that she understood it, found that she was good at it. Now she realised that rejection of the Game was just an excuse that losers made.

Zabilla had studied biophysics, specialising in Seeder biotech, how it interacted with Quantum phenomena and how it applied to Red Space and exotic entanglement. Though she had to be careful studying Red Space applications because anything that even remotely looked like research into bridge technology was heretical. The Church audited her research on a regular basis and she had received more than one censure. On one occasion a line of research she believed had been encouraged by the Absolute his/her/itself had resulted in a threat of excommunication. It was a serious threat. She had wondered why the Church felt they needed the Seeders as a religion. Progenitors they might have been, but their time was gone, and now they had the Game and the Absolute. The Absolute had the powers of a god, and after victory in the Art Wars the Absolute even had god-like killer angels to do his/her/its bidding.

Zabilla’s apartment was a handsomely appointed three-storey nook high enough for her to make out stars through the canopy of bioengineered leaves. The bottom level was her lab, steel and glass, the wood grown around it and redesigned to be non-porous and support a sterile surface. The upper two storeys were open plan, a catwalk running around the top floor. Through the large window opening in the wall she could see the light-speckled shadows of the other trees. The bed was on a raised plinth that grew from the floor and the wall. A small waterfall and pool provided a water feature/bath/shower combination. Discreet sound-dampening projectors took care of the constant noise of water.

They experimented. They gave her apartment’s sound-dampening properties a run for its money as they pushed Dracup’s heightened nerve endings to their limits. Afterwards, exhausted, Zabilla had to carry Dracup up the wooden steps to her bed. She laid him down trying to decide how she felt about him. Was he anything more than just a handsome, if severe, game piece? More to the point, what was she to him? A lover? A mentor? A stepping-stone to a better thing for an ambitious player? If so, then he was a much cleverer player than she had so far given him credit for. When she was younger it had been easier to differentiate between Zabilla the person and Zabilla the player.

She looked down at him. He looked peaceful, more innocent, when asleep. She wondered if that was the only time they could be themselves. It wasn’t the first time she had thought this. But dreams contained sensation as well. Even when they slept they were not alone. There was something in the back of her mind. Some sense of disgust at this violation of her sleeping mind, an alien feeling that she hadn’t felt in so long. She tried to suppress it. She had no idea why she was feeling this way. Not when she was so close to winning the audition.

She released a potent anti-anxiety drug into her bloodstream, then a less potent sedative. She had time to climb into bed and roll next to Dracup, feel his warmth, before fatigue and the sedative overwhelmed her and took her where she could be herself.

It was like a sting, a tiny pinprick but it felt deep. She shouldn’t have felt it, but she was a light sleeper and had paranoia routines written into her neunonics. Even then she probably wouldn’t have felt it if it hadn’t been for her heightened nerve endings. She had forgotten to send a chemical signal to dull them before she fell asleep.

She sat up in bed feeling vulnerable and frightened, dragging the sheets around her. She hadn’t felt like this since she was a child. Where was all the fear coming from? she asked herself.

Almost immediately she turned to look at Dracup. He was deeply asleep in a way that was difficult to fake. She confirmed this with physiological readings provided by the medical applications of her nano-screen. Her first thought had been that Dracup was playing some kind of gambit.

She checked her internal systems. There was nothing as far as she could tell, no biological or nano-agent. She checked her nano-screen and the apartment’s security systems. Neither of the systems had detected any kind of foreign presence in the room.

Zabilla was beginning to convince herself that she had been dreaming when the banging on the door started. She jumped and turned to stare at the closed aperture in the wood. Her security systems should have warned her the moment somebody turned into the corridor that led to the door to her apartment. The fact they hadn’t meant that they had been overridden. That and the sound, that particular knock, the sound from a thousand immersions and a million newscasts, meant that it was the heads outside.

Feed from the door sensors to her neunonics confirmed this. Outside, two of the powerful automatons with the enlarged smiling face of the Absolute, pre-ascension, were waiting at her door. The grin on their massive faces looked more obscene and frightening to her now than ever before.

The knock came again. Her mind raced. What had she done? Had Scoular managed to frame her? A bold and clever move if he had, but it had better be watertight or else she would destroy him. Then she thought back to her feeling of disgust, of violation from having the Absolute see inside her mind. She had committed treason. She had gone from being a player to being a loser. The thoughts had come unbidden! It was so unfair.

‘What?’ Dracup sat up, quickly going from rudely woken to completely alert. He turned to look at her. There was no fear in his expression; instead there was a questioning look on his face. It was just short of accusation.

The knock came again. They never knocked more than three times. Now they would override the apartment’s security. The aperture opened. Zabilla’s neunonics told her that Dracup had sent the command. She couldn’t shake the feeling of teeth closing in around her.

The two heavily armoured automatons stepped into the apartment, looking up at the bed. They looked like walking statues, their faces twisted, agonised somehow, sinisterly clownish parodies of the pre-ascension Absolute.

‘Can I help you?’ Dracup asked.

Zabilla wondered when he had become assertive. She controlled the fear. She put on her Game face, quite literally. ‘What do you want and why are you disturbing me at this hour?’ she demanded.

Dracup turned to look at her, raising an eyebrow. On the other hand it was the question of a completely innocent person.

Neither of the heads said anything. Zabilla had pulled her nano-screen in as the heads expanded theirs. There was sparring at a nano-level as their nanites interrogated hers and Dracup’s.

‘What just happened?’ the voice, modulated for psychological impact, asked. She wasn’t sure which of them had spoken.

‘Explain yourself,’ she told the heads.

‘For a moment there was something not of the Game in here,’ the voice answered. She felt coldness creeping through her. The pinprick. The strange thing was that she thought she had heard something that she had never heard before from a head. It sounded like it was unsure of itself.

‘Well, have you found anything?’ she asked.

‘Why were you reviewing your physiological readings and security systems?’ the voice asked, suspicious now. Dracup turned to look at her. He looked suspicious as well.

‘I thought I felt something. A pinprick, but it was nothing, a dream or some half-waking sensation, nothing more. What made you think there was something else here?’

‘It came from the Absolute,’ the voice said.

So the Absolute had been monitoring her as she slept. Again the cold clammy feeling of violation rose inside her. She tried to force it down. Both the heads seemed to be staring at her with the dead black holes in their mask-like faces where eyes should have been.

‘Perhaps the Absolute only felt what I felt?’ she said.

‘Have you found anything?’ Dracup asked impatiently.

‘No,’ the voice answered.

‘Will you be taking any further action?’

There was a pause.

‘Not at the moment.’

The heads turned and left the apartment, the aperture door shutting behind them. Dracup gave her that questioning look again. She wanted to talk to him, to hold him, to take comfort from him, but this would only leave her more vulnerable, and her paranoia, one of the most important qualities of the professional player, would not allow her to show that weakness.

The massive chamber was arched like a Seeder cathedral. The wood had been grown into detailed ornamental patterns. Parts of it were friezes showing the history and mythology of the Game and the Absolute. It showed the Absolute’s journey from a world of toil to the world of leisure and pleasure that was the Game. In which you didn’t have to work unless you chose to. All you had to do was play the most involving game that had ever been created.

The hall had been grown out of the main trunk, its back wall a series of stained-glass windows. Sun shone through, illuminating the dust motes and larger nanite clusters in the air. Zabilla stood next to Dracup, her installation, her gift, in front of her in a covered glass box about the size of a large cupboard. Scoular was to her right, with Carinne and a similar covered box in front of him. He didn’t look confident; in fact, he looked ill.

Zabilla recognised most of the crowd. They were the top players from the arcology within the fields of genetics, biology and biophysics, as well as a number of art critics.

Shallow stairs led to a raised area in front of the stained-glass windows. On that platform stood the avatar, an automaton with an idealised body of brass complete with suitably intimidating phallus. Its face was a mask of beaten platinum and gold. The Absolute as a pre-Loss God. The sun made the polished metal gleam and sparkle to the point where it was difficult to look directly at the automaton. It was like a genuine religious experience, Zabilla thought. All her doubts of last night were forgotten. The avatars were direct representatives of the Absolute, and this one was here to judge the final part of the audition.

The avatar’s musical tones were still ringing around the hall from its opening address. There had been polite applause, then all eyes turned to Scoular, who was sweating heavily, and Zabilla. She tried to suppress her awe as the avatar turned its imperious gaze on them. She bowed slightly and held out a hand towards Scoular. It would, of course, appear like the gracious gesture of someone allowing their opponent to go first. It was not; it was calculated. She wanted the impact of going last. Scoular probably would have done the same thing, but he looked too sweaty, sick and nervous. When he realised what she’d done, he glared at her.

With as much of a flourish as he could manage, Scoular tore off the sheet covering the glass box. The glass box then disintegrated in front of their eyes, allowing a better look at its contents.

Lying in a nutrient bath were what looked like the torsos of a male and female human, though sex was difficult to tell because they were completely fused together. The semi-human chimerical organism almost rippled against itself in never-ending, distinctly sexual gyrations. Pleasure seemed to be written in a series of artistic blushes on its skin.

There was a degree of art to it, Zabilla had to admit, particularly the blushes and the suggestion of different genders, but at the end of the day it was little more than a pleasure generator. She wasn’t even annoyed that Scoular had upped its output by using heightened nerve endings gained from his espionage directed at her own research.

There was hushed conversation among the crowd. Zabilla felt her contempt for them. Nobody wanted to be the first to compliment or criticise; they wanted to see what others would do first. They lacked boldness, which was why they would never be truly great players.

She looked down as if politely trying to hide a smile. Dracup was less subtle. She gave them time to take in Scoular’s work. He was looking sicker by the moment, particularly as applause seemed less than forthcoming.

Finally, after she felt expectations had been raised enough, she nodded to Dracup, who without a flourish removed the sheet as Zabilla’s glass box began to disintegrate.

The most difficult thing had been to combine the scream with musical tones to make something beautiful out of agony.

Like Scoular’s design, it was little more than head and torso. There was to be nothing that was unnecessary. Like Scoular’s design, it utilised her heightened nerve-ending biotechnology. Other than skin and mouth it had no sensory organs, but those were the only two it needed. Its body existed only as a conduit for pain and music. A metal clamp fused with its spine held it up. In the nutrient bath opposite it was a tree. Purposefully designed to look like an arcology tree, its branches moved like tendrils. Its leaves were monomolecular razors that dug into the musically screaming torso’s flesh.

People stared at it. Genuinely moved by the beauty of the music of her creation’s screams, Zabilla allowed a tear to run down her cheek. Dracup, who had tears streaming down his, would later tell her that many in the audience were similarly moved.

The sound of metal clanging against metal over and over again caught everyone’s attention. Zabilla looked up to see the avatar, seemingly staring at her with the unmoving mask of its face, applauding with its large brass hands.

‘This is mere pornography!’ Scoular disgraced himself by shouting. His voice sounded weak and was barely heard as applause broke out around the hall. Scoular sank to his knees. Nobody noticed. Carinne went to him, trying to help him up, but even with the tiny AG motors that helped support his fat he was too heavy for her. ‘What’ve you done?’ he screamed at Zabilla.

She turned to look at him. I introduced a very new, very subtle, very difficult to detect and trace, very deadly and particularly well-timed virus into your system when we shook hands earlier, she didn’t tell him. She hoped the smile communicated it all. His public execution for little more than opposing her and having poor taste was part of the audition as far as she was concerned.

Scoular collapsed onto the wooden floor. His last living act was to meat-hack Carrine, activate the upmarket combat abilities that all good consorts had written into their neunonics and augmentations, and send her after Zabilla.

Which was what Dracup had been waiting for. He interposed himself between Zabilla and Carinne and moved forward to meet the other consort. Carinne’s face was a contorted mask of hate and anger. There had obviously been a powerful emotional element to the hack. Carinne suddenly crouched, her leg swinging out to sweep Dracup’s. Dracup flipped back. Carinne was already back up, advancing on him, drawing her own bone knife. Dracup landed on his hands and kicked up from the ground, surprising Carinne. The blow caught the other consort just under her sternum. There was an audible crack as Carinne was lifted off the ground by the force of the blow. She staggered as she landed but immediately started towards Zabilla again.

There were shocked gasps from the crowd as Dracup threw his bone knife. Carinne blocked the flying blade at the last moment with her own, sending Dracup’s blade skittering across the floor. Thinking him unarmed, she went to finish the job, but Dracup had used the minute distraction of the flying blade to close with Carinne. He grabbed the elbow and wrist of her blade arm and twisted the knife round. Before Carinne had a chance to resist, her own blade was stabbed up through her mouth and into her brain, where it released its deadly payload of neurotoxin. Carinne shook; blood frothed from her mouth, and she tumbled to the ground.

Dracup smoothed down his tunic and retrieved his blade.

Zabilla found it hard not to smile. She tried to control her face as she heard the sound of metal footsteps resonating off wood. She turned to look at the gleaming avatar.

‘Will you come with me, please?’

To call this vehicle a G-car was to do it a disservice, Zabilla thought; it was like a luxurious flying fortress. The inverted cauldron shapes of AG motors ran up either side of the vehicle. The destination, however, took her by surprise.

They sank beneath the Black Leaves into the roots. She needed her augments to see into the outside, where darkness prevailed. She saw the huge machinery of the roots and was even able to make out a degree of movement as the root structure steadied the arcologies they supported.

As they got closer to the roots themselves, she started to make out the morlock servitors maintaining the machinery. They lived in squalor in tiny shanty towns made out of what they could scavenge from the waste of the world above the black-leaf canopy. She saw morlocks in cast-off finery clambering over mountains of once-fine furniture, ornamentation, artwork and other bits and pieces of assembler detritus from the world above. Rubbish that people had for one reason or another never got around to disassembling. Dracup was unable to conceal his distaste. Zabilla was less sure it was the morlocks’ own fault.

All through the journey the avatar had said nothing, and Zabilla, wanting to show poise and calm, had also remained silent.

They sank into the planet itself. Spiralling slowly around massive roots that dug into crust and then mantle. Finally they flew through a network of airlock-like heavily armoured doors that shut behind them one after another.

The luxury G-car landed in a huge open space. There were other more utilitarian and military vehicles present. The structure might have been the first construction that Zabilla had ever seen that was not made of wood. She had to search her neunonics to find references to nano-bonded reinforced concrete.

Still without saying anything, the avatar, now looking as ostentatious and out of place as Zabilla felt, led her through a heavily defended series of chambers to a very secure laboratory, which, unlike her own laboratory, seemed to be all substance and no style.

Lying on a metal table in the centre of the lab, surrounded by very visible sensors of every conceivable type and a ring of automated weapon systems, was a strange, roughly coffin-shaped cocoon structure made of a white substance that Zabilla did not recognise.

‘Congratulations. You have got the job,’ the avatar said.