Machina Obscurum Page 5

  They couldn’t have been more ready.

  On the sixth of June, 2120, one hundred and thirty-seven pENT executive officers sat in the top room of the tallest tower in North America. Surrounded on all sides by paper-thin membrane video screens and live-feed holo-generators, men and women in black suits held their breaths as a clock ticked down to zero-hour. If In worked, they knew Permanent Entertainment would become the most powerful company in the world. But if it didn’t, if the system crashed or users died, pENT execs knew their vast investment of money and capital would have been all for nothing, and their careers would be ruined.

  Three…two…one.

  The crimson digits hanging in the air ticked toward zero.

  When the moment arrived, hundreds of thousands of users simultaneous jacked into In.

  The execs paled. But the system held.

  In was in.

  If ever pENT had doubted their work, on that night they knew otherwise. Every In chair in every sardine house in every city had been bought and filled. Servers lit up with the countless impulses of users’ imaginations, but sped along none the slower, working at less than one percent of total capacity. Body-sensory jacks invented especially for In ensured that users’ muscles still fired, breather chairs prevented bedsores, while streams of nutrients pumped in via feed tubes, all working as flawlessly as pENT had hoped.

  The next morning, whole cities remained quiet.

  Fewer than one percent of users had un-jacked overnight.

  A week later, more than ninety-seven percent were still plugged in. It was the beginning of something beautiful.

  And of something terrible.

  Within a few weeks of In going online, the debate began. The world’s remaining politicians, though long marginalized to a fraction of their previous power, thrummed with conversations about In. Was it immoral that so many users had yet to un-jack, that men and women with families had gone missing by the tens of thousands to pursue lives of pleasure and fantasy? Would the system eventually fail, releasing countless users back into reality, their minds forever ruined by an addiction to a world other than the real?

  To counter such concerns, some leaders trumpeted, “This is at last the great release we’ve sought. The prison of our ordinary consciousness is broken. We’re all free.”

  But others called In the ‘Great Lie,’ and railed against it with vicious determination.

  And so the argument raged.

  Whatever the debate, and no matter its legitimacy, pENT’s sights were set on larger prize than a few hundred thousand people. In the second month after In’s takeoff, automaton factories fired up in earnest. The factories turned out breather chairs and body-sensory jacks by the million. In pENT’s underground facilities, robots machined and programmed impossibly powerful servers, which were shipped within days to hubs worldwide, connected to nuclear-powered energy sources, and switched on with the intent of never, ever being switched off.

  By the time the debate deepened, half the world’s politicians had either plugged into In themselves or given up the fight against it. Those who opposed jacking in waged their wars of words upon deaf ears, empty rooms, and membrane video screens no one cared to watch.

  By the year 2126, nine-hundred million people had permanently hooked into In.

  By 2142, supported by pENT automatons working shifts that never ended, the number of In users reached eight billion.

  In was no longer simply a fantasy.

  In was everything.

  It became reality, and much more than simple entertainment. With their bodies protected in every way, users spent months jacked into In, then years, and after a time they stopped un-jacking entirely. pENT uploaded the libraries of every nation into the system, every book, magazine, scientific journal, and archaic text. With advanced streaming methods users were able to consume everything humanity had spoken or written in the last hundred years. Even the least intelligent people swallowed so much knowledge as to become ten times as educated as any human who had ever lived before them. With such knowledge their imaginations grew, their fantasies increased exponentially, and the reasons for un-jacking became nil.

  By 2151, ninety-nine percent of humanity was permanently jacked-in. Cities were silent but for the hum of servers and the rare incoming march of automatons. The robots once created to replace human labor became caretakers for oceans of their eternally dreaming masters. The world of the physical fell away into nothing.

  The world of the mind had won.

  Still, ninety-nine percent was not one-hundred percent, and in the far corners of the sleeping world, millions of humans lived free of In. Some had never dared jack-in. Others had jacked-in briefly, but somehow resisted the temptation to fall into forever-long fantasies. These rare sects of society became known derogatorily as Outs. The Ins assumed the Outs were unimaginative, radical, and in the worst cases, heretical. ‘Why would anyone not want to be In?’ they roared. ‘There’s nothing left in the regular world. Not for us. Not for them.’

  For many years, the Outs existed on the fringes of the sleeping In world. They kept all the technologies humanity had mastered, but strove no further. Even when In scientists streamed messages back into the physical world, hoping to invite, educate, and beguile, the Outs discarded the lessons. The Ins with their exponential capacity for learning clawed at the very boundaries of physics, mastering the sciences behind gravity, quantum mechanics, and even time. But the Outs wanted no part of it. Their lives had become easy enough without In, and with the world so quiet around them, the Outs earned such peace and prosperity that no civilization before them had attained.

  And none since.

  In 2162, the Outs gathered in the great city that had once been known as Venice. The Pope and his clergy were gone now, having flocked to the ether in search of God, and the pale streets and dark canals had long gone silent. In a tower high above the sleeping city, the most rebellious of the Outs held conclave.

  “Unless we put an end to In, those who live in fantasy will eventually destroy us,” reasoned an Out leader. “Whether by misunderstanding, jealousy, or sheer boredom, they’ll want us gone.”

  To his surprise, his remarks were met with cheers.

  “They’ll want to secure eternity locked away in their minds!” cried one Out woman, a politician from the old days.

  “Yes,” agreed another, “And we’re all that’s left. If we’re gone, no one will ever unplug them. Humanity will die.”

  “No!” still another shouted. “They’ve got new machines. Haven’t you seen? They breed in their minds. The automatons fertilize their women while their bodies sleep. They’ve children who’ve never known anything but In. They’ve babies who’ve seen nothing in their lives but the world that isn’t.”

  “Grotesque!” screamed a number of Outs.

  “Disgusting!”

  “It must end!”

  Even in the darkest corners of their minds, pENT engineers had never foreseen the day when the un-jacked masses would rebel. The world of fantasy had been at first good business, then an unprecedented success, and finally a glorious ascension they assumed all of humanity would embrace. That anyone would ever grow to hate their beautiful creation, they never fathomed.

  And such was their mistake.

  When a band of Out partisans burned an In tower to the ground with two-thousand people still jacked-in inside it, the In world barely blinked. They had no idea what had really happened. The Outs had smashed two dozen guardian automatons and clipped every single body sensory jack in the building. Surviving Ins were so consumed by their separate worlds and endless hoarding of knowledge, entertainment, and sex that even when a thousand of their number vanished, they registered almost nothing. They assumed the vanished Ins had wandered off to a new fantasy or scientific revelation, and that they’d soon be back.

  But three weeks later, when a fringe Out group orchestrated the nuclear detonation of an entire sleeping city, the Ins caught on. Darkness grew in their hearts. In an ima
gined place deep within their minds, they gathered to plot their revenge.

  Their thoughts turned to violence.

  Within hours, they acted.

  Without leaving their fantasy worlds, the Ins reprogrammed thousands of automatons to return to their factories and retrofit themselves with terrifying new weapons. The advances made by the billions of dreaming were more than the Outs were prepared for. Four days after the nuclear attack, automatons arrived in Out cities armed with lasers capable of carving buildings in half, flechette rifles that spewed out thousands of explosive particulates, and gravity-distortion devices that hurled people, vehicles, and houses miles into the air before letting them tumble helplessly back to Earth.

  The Ins’ revenge took the lives of tens of thousands.

  Out cities burned.

  A war began.

  For every city the Ins’ automatons laid waste to, the Outs paid them back in spades. And because of the automaton armies the Ins employed to fight their proxy war, the Outs forgot such things as mercy. Bombs were laid in the hearts of jacked-in towers, and thousands of dreaming men, women, and children turned to ash. Factories were leveled using hundred-year old ordinance, and servers torn apart by the hundreds. For each one life taken by In automatons, the Outs severed the jacks of scores of Ins. In the most pernicious of the Outs’ attacks, two hundred men cut the servers of some eight-hundred Ins, waited outside an apartment for the un-jacked to wander into the streets, and bludgeoned them all to death.

  Neither side was righteous.

  The Outs felt abandoned. The Ins felt betrayed.

  But before long, the Ins gained the upper hand.

  The turn of the tide began when an In man, Gerrard De Napoli, un-jacked himself in the Old World city of Paris. For twenty years, Gerrard had fashioned imaginary worlds in which war never ended. He knew every tactic of every battle since the medieval days of England’s occupation of Scotland, and had relived them all a hundred times as the general of each side. He was, for lack of an equal, the most accomplished military strategist to ever have lived. It mattered none that he’d never been in a real-world battle. In had trained him far better than any soldiering, any amount of eons spent warring in the physical world.

  After making himself a stronghold in the heart of Paris, Gerrard quickly established a connection to every pENT server worldwide. He ordered that the greatest minds created by In be un-jacked and delivered under automaton escort to him. Within a week, several hundred of the smartest humans ever to live were at his side, plotting the end of the Out rebellion. Some were willing. Others were not. But with his huge stature and inelegant forcefulness, Gerrard made them all listen. It was easy for him communicate, considering that after years of being jacked-in, everyone in the room spoke every language in the world.

  “We can’t fight as we’ve done in the past,” he lectured them. “The Outs are burning our fields while we sleep, reprogramming our bots to poison us while we dream, and taking advantage of our unwillingness to wake up. We outnumber them a thousand to one, and they’re using it against us. They know most of us would rather take our chances and stay jacked-in than un-jack and fight a battle street-to-street.

  “But that all changes now.”

  “How?” argued Thiago Enici, an astrophysicist so thin he looked skeletal. “They’re scattered everywhere. We don’t have enough automatons. And every time they capture one of our weapons, they assume it into their arsenal.”

  “He’s right,” said the masterful psychologist, Sara Von Berlitz. Sara was known to everyone in the room as the Mind Mistress, for her In world was a galactic-scale replica of a human brain. She knew the purpose of every neuron, and she understood what everyone would think before they thought it. “Attrition will be the end of us,” Sara grinned a soulless grin. “But what Gerrard is saying, I believe, is that we should not work for the destruction of the Outs, but rather their removal.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?” Thiago grimaced.

  “Not at all,” said Sara. “But I’ll let Gerrard explain. He’ll be less insulting than I would.”

  Gerrard steepled his fingers. Sara had been right, of course. She’d known what he’d been planning all along.

  Forty three years of In had been more than enough. With most of humanity having limitless access to knowledge and the infinite ability to test and retest every scientific theory, the technological leaps had been vast. The gravity weapons deployed against the Outs were but a fraction of what the Ins had learned. They had mastered chemistry and unlocked the dark secrets of quantum mechanics, but more importantly they had invented higher forms of deep space travel. And although they had yet to test any of their new interstellar devices in the real world, it mattered little. Inside In, scientists had simulated millions of journeys into the cosmos.

  “And it’s time we put our brains to work,” boomed Gerrard De Napoli. “The Outs know how this ends. They know we’ll destroy them. They know their future holds only running, hiding, and dying.”

  “But they’ll take thousands of us with them.” Thiago Enici flexed his skinny fingers. “It could be any of us who dies next. Me…them…or even you.”

  Gerrard raised his chin, and Thiago fell silent.

  “Exactly my point, Ser Enici. No matter how many weapons we forge, how many Out cities we raze, they’ll get their victories. They’ll kill twenty here, and two thousand there. But we’ve a way to stop it all.”

  “A cease-fire?” Thiago looked incredulous.

  “Of sorts,” said Gerrard. “We offer them a deal. They’ll resist the notion at first. They’ll suspect a trap. But they’ll come around. Earth is ours now, and they know it. The only option they have is to leave.”

  “But where?” asked someone in the crowd.

  “Does it matter?” Gerrard rolled his neck. “No. Not really. But if you ask every scientist here, they’ll say the most likely candidate is Jupiter.”

  “We’re sending them into Jupiter?” Thiago glowered.

  “Not into it. Around it. It’s not a trap, as you’ve supposed. We’re not going to kill them. We’ll make them a ship…a perfect one. Jupiter’s hydrogen will fuel the micro-fusion reactors forever. We’ve done the tests. We know the answers. We’ll make it elegant, beautiful, and powerful. And then we’ll send them on their merry way. They’ll have food forever. They’ll have technology beyond their wildest dreams. But most importantly, they’ll be gone. No more bombs laid in In towers. No more slaughters of the sleeping.”

  “You’re a military strategist,” Thiago argued. “No one here expected you to fight the Outs like this.”

  Gerrard looked proud of himself. “Wars are won in the mind,” he said. “What happens on the battlefield is decided long before any soldier puts his boots on the ground.”

  “And if they refuse?” Thiago asked what everyone else in the room wanted to know.

  “Then we’ll lose a few hundred thousand,” Sara Von Berlitz stepped forward again. “And they’ll lose everyone. It’s a moral option, Thiago. What’s the phrase they used to use? The Outs will have to take it…or leave it.”

  PREVIEW CHAPTER OF

  Chad J. Shonk

  T he fountains of Roma were only ever wet when it rained.

  That chilly April morning, I reached Piazza della Repubblica after a fifteen-minute walk from home. I shivered and pulled my jacket, long-since unrecognizable as the army kit it once was, tighter around my body. Time and wear and abuse had stripped the drab coat down to its bare wool, leaving just one adornment: a small patch over my right breast, an archaic golden parachute flanked by sky blue angel wings. The only visible evidence of my life before. The rest, the scars and wounds and memories, I kept well hidden.

  The piazza was a roundabout with two lanes, the outer for pedestrians and the inner for mechanized traffic, encircling a three-hundred-year-old fountain. The nymphs of the sculpture surrounded, on four sides, the likeness of some ancient god wrestling a dragon. There should have been water spouting meter
s into the air from the serpent’s maw. The fairies’ stone flesh should have been dark with moisture. They all should have been adrift in an idyllic lagoon. But they were dry as dust and had been for close to fifty years. When the planes had stopped flying, at the beginning of The Great Crunch, the tourists stopped coming. The city turned off the water soon after. It was hard to justify spending money on the pretty things when no one was coming to see them. I could imagine what it would have been like in the old times, to turn every corner and hear the sound of gently running water.

  But the nymphs and their master sat decaying and neglected, blanketed with green moss and brown, sickly barnacles. Their empty concrete basin was now a home for nesting pigeons as well as spinners, icers and junkpunks, all cadging for enough coin to buy the day's fix of hypnometh or the new opiate known on the street as Dragoon.

  The inner loop of the plaza was flush with bicycles, e-carts and the occasional horse-drawn wagon. Pedestrians traveled every which way in efficient chaos. I found a roughly defined northbound channel in the foot traffic and merged into its flow.

  Occasionally a man or woman would cast me a second glance. I did not look like them. Their skin ranged from Venetian white to Sicilian olive. Mine was like rich caramel, which meant I was supposed to be in Pakitown. There were no laws keeping me there, but the denizens of The Esquilino ghetto rarely left. I lived there and hated it, so I ignored its boundaries every time I got the chance, and it was well worth enduring a quizzical look or two. In this neighborhood, they weren’t used to seeing someone like me not wearing the uniform of a cleaner.

  But the stares from the Legionnaires put me on edge. I passed two pairs of them on my short walk. Their bulky chrome body armor and ever-drawn plasma carbines made everyone nervous. They were the oppressive right hand of Dario Villano's government and always on the lookout for anyone who threatened the peace and status quo of the Neo-Caesar's city.