Agnosis – Ch. 5

<– Chapter 4 / Chapter 6 –>

Dorian blinked, felt himself listing unaccountably to the left. Blinked again. Drew a breath to steady himself. Spatial patterns emerged, normalized, achieved stability with only a flash of dodecahedron brush over. The incipient urge to be both dizzy and nauseous at once faded before it had properly begun to register in his cortical mass.

He was inside the bubble, but he wasn’t happy about it. This was most certainly not what he had expected to find.

They stood at the edge of a circular drive, Dorian and Ryoku-Amara, on a strip of concrete sidewalk. He peered up at a wide blue sky dappled with puffy white clouds. The sun shone bright and yellow overhead with the fierce heat of a young star. An unpleasantly thick atmosphere magnified the warmth he felt on his face to a suffocating intensity. The air about them seemed to droop, still and hot, under its own damp weight. When he closed his eyes, the pounding sun left spots on the back sides of his eyelids like tiny solar eclipses. It was a miserable heat. Stultifying. The humidity must be almost one hundred percent.

He turned about slowly and took stock of his surroundings. The bleached drive, an asphalt parking lot, little islands of greenery between the rows of empty spaces. A short way beyond, the land rose up in an artificial berm, and somewhere between the far end of the lot and the crown of the hill created by the berm, he could hear the gurgle of a stream, though he could not see it. Past the lot, the stream and the hill, a mist had fallen, impenetrable to the eye. The edge of the code horizon. Before them loomed a massive limestone structure, smooth lined and shimmering in the summer heat.

The building was complex, all corners and elbows sprouting at unlikely junctions; a sprawl of hulking, slate-roofed wings and improbably peaked ancillary structures that declared itself with the stolid solidity of stone. High above the riotous foothills of irregular arches and colorfully tiled rooftops below climbed a square tower with sagging pinions atop its battlements. But the face that presented itself to Dorian and Amara was maybe three stories tall, the walls pale and flat, their otherwise plain surfaces marked at irregular intervals by narrow, clouded windows that gazed down like blind and rheumy eyes.

As renders went, it was skillfully done, but curious in its chaotic rococo style. Part modern gothic, part neo-traditionalist amalgamation, the structure looked like it had been hastily cobbled together from a dozen different materials and as many different architectural designes. Unlike most Strand interpretations, its encoded form suggested no function that he could perceive, no single theme that illuminated the intention (political, nostalgic, satirical or otherwise) of its Maker.

Off to the side, a brick path wound through a small garden that consisted mostly of a low and lichenous undergrowth that Dorian recognized neither neither bush nor moss, but something indeterminately in between. It was a pale olive green and attractive in its own way, if wholly superfluous. Laid out among rugged stones, there were also flowers, white petalled and green stalked, almost like the ladyslips that grew in the mountains about Sonali, but clearly alien in origin. He could hear birds here and there squawking and arguing from their perches inside tall, green-needled trees. Mighty trees, with boles so large he wouldn’t have been able to put his arms around them, and a tough, brown bark that appeared unpleasantly abrasive.

But other than the birds, the place was silent. All about them was the suffocating mist, a truncation of the virtual world that gave the environment an eerie feel and an almost claustrophobic delineation, despite the brightness of the day. There were no scents either, no pungency of growing things, no chocolate sting of turbine exhaust. Just an emptiness where odor should have been.

The silence, the vague feeling of oppression, the sensory disconnect—the space had the feel of death about it, like it was a home to phantoms and nothing more.

“Where are we?” Amara whispered, and her voice bore a flat, nerveless quality in this strange air, almost devoid of resonance. “If it’s a famous landmark, I don’t recognize it.”

Dorian didn’t either. He scanned the environment for a signpost, anything that seemed to spangle as his eyes passed over it, looking for the metadata directory. There was nothing. He stepped over to the small garden beside a glass encased entry portico and squinted at the carefully manicured plants. He stooped to touch them. The leaves were rough and scratchy, tethered to thin, reedy stems. No signifier windows opened. No expository voiceover described them. They simply were, without any explanation as to their representational symbolism.

Dorian turned away. Amara remained where he had left her, opening and closing her eyelids with careful, exaggerated movements. “I’m getting nothing,” she said after a time.

“You can’t access the Strand from here,” Dorian explained. “I decided not to attach this port to the ex-connex nodes. It’s running completely in its own foam.”

“It isn’t a very interactive environment.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be.”

She craned her neck and gazed up at the building that towered over them. “It’s big, though.”

“It is that.”

“Good detail in the stonework. You can even see the pitting in the blocks, rainwater staining along the drainage system. The weather is immersive, if not exactly to my taste. Effective shadowing, but the sky seems a little off. That shade of blue is almost cartoonish, isn’t it?”

“You’re one to talk,” Dorian said.

“A service directory would have been nice.”

“I don’t think it was rendered with visitors in mind.”

“Nobody goes to this much trouble with the intention of keeping it to themselves, John.”

“Maybe.”

He started toward the portico, but stopped, and stood for several seconds, chewing his lip and scowling.

“What’s bothering you?” Amara asked.

For the first time since they’d arrived, Dorian looked at her. Her dark hair fell from her shoulders, straight and black. She studied him with her large brown eyes, and her nostrils quivered as she inhaled. She wore a blue plaid skirt, too short, but not exaggeratedly so. She was disturbingly, invitingly curved out here in the open air and the glowing sunlight.

He realized suddenly that she’d asked him a question, and no rose colored question marks had sprung from her forehead in typical manga fashion. No Cthulhoid Angles That Should Not Be. No limpid, gibbous-moon ocular cavities that took up half the real estate of her face.

“Did you edit your avatar?” Dorian asked.

“No.” Amara furrowed her brow. “Was I supposed to?”

He didn’t answer her. Rather, he studied his hands, his arms. He looked at his feet, even lifted one leg and peered at the bottom of his shoes. It didn’t tell him anything useful, only confirmed that his avatar was the same as it had always been–a streaming triDvid render of his literal self. No bells or whistles, no faddish statements, just John Dorian playing himself in the movie of virtual life. He’d picked it because it was just dull enough to be unique.

But Amara–Ryoku–was rendering all wrong. Rounded, solid, human.

“There’s something weird with this foam,” he said at least. “Maybe a seenop integration error, or a mistranslation in the residual operating script that was used to load this bubble. God only knows what version was running inside this port when it was closed down.”

He ran a quick bubble diagnostic, but the results told him nothing that he didn’t already know. The waveform was still stable as far as he could tell, and the string dynamics were vibrating at a predictable rate and in proper Turlian Arcs, exactly as they had been before he and Amara had geeked in. The foam was structurally sound, even if it was stubbornly unmalleable.

He wasn’t even sure that this apparent glitch was a bad thing. He’d never been much of an anime fan.

“What should we do?” Amara glanced warily back over her shoulder. There was nothing there, but Dorian understood the gesture. He didn’t like standing out here in the open any more than she did. He didn’t like the curious empty feel of this place. “This is just plain creepy.”

“We go in,” he said.

As a precaution, he retrieved a masking script from his load-cache and executed it into the environment. The mask shimmered about him like a swarm of sentient glitter, dappling in the sun. It wasn’t much, and he didn’t know how it would interact with this kludgy environment, but it should obscure some of his id characteristics and keep him from being easily tracked by system tracers. If they’d been on the Strand, he would have passed the script on to Amara.

Instead, he said, “Stick close to me.”

Maybe the combination of dual sysids and trace obstruction would at least provide some protection from hostile apps.

Dorian walked to a revolving door beneath the yawning portco, and Amara followed, almost treading on his heels. He gave the door a peremptory shove, and it spun readily enough on its axis. With a final look over his shoulder, he shrugged and pushed ahead. If there were any encryption locks on the portal, his standard keysets satisfied them, which led him to suspect that there wasn’t security on the door at all. He found this somehow less than encouraging.

The door opened onto a low-ceilinged antechamber with marvelous paneling, a marble floor of aqua and maroon flagstones and square columns of a rich, dark wood. The ceiling was divided by sturdy and decorative rafters interspersed with white tile. Dorian stepped out into the center of the room where the ceiling opened up into a high, arched flume. An ironwrought chandelier dangled from a great height on a chain the size of his wrist. The air was cool inside, almost chilly, but it remained devoid of recognizable scent, and his footsteps on the flagstones echoed hauntingly in the open space. Directly in front of him was a broad hardwood counter and behind it, a wall of turned metal hooks, each one marked with a number. On each hook hung a set of keys. To the left was a limestone staircase that climbed three meters into the air, made a right turn, then went on to the second floor. About the antechamber were strewn delicate pieces of furniture–soft padded couches, wingbacked smoking chairs, the occasional faux-Georgian coffee table. Against the window casings to the right, with a nice view of the flower garden, crowded more chairs and small, round tables printed on the top with chessboard patterns in crimson and cream.

There were no people. The entry hall was completely empty.

“It’s a hotel,” Amara said beside him. “Isn’t it? All those keys.”

She was right, Dorian supposed. The arrivals counter, the key pegs, the bank of ancient public triDvid comms. It looked like the lobby of an upscale hotel. He took a few steps forward, leaned against the counter and peered back into the generic office space hidden behind a discreet door that had been left ajar. The desks were empty, their furnishings spartan, as though they’d never seen much use. The carpet was a dull, institutional green, spotted here and there with plastic mats so the rolling chairs wouldn’t score the rug. He read the labels on the pegboard below the sets of keys. Frangipani Room, Commons, Solarium. Persimmon Room, Tudor Room, Whittenberger Auditorium. Alumni Hall, Georgian Room, Computing Lab.

The names meant nothing to him, but he made his way around the end of the counter and pushed through a low, swinging door on the far side. He went back to the peg board to get a closer look at it and considered the rows upon rows of keys with a tilt of his head. Experimentally, he reached out for the set nearest to him. The label said University Club. As his hand passed over the peg, a metadata menu scrolled up in the corner of his visual field.

Index:

Lecture notes (chronological by subject)

Draft Manuscripts

Manuscript Edits

Galleys

Educational records (all levels)

Embarrassing Undergrad Experiences

National Association of Quantum Physics Educators Speeches

Clyve Nellis

2272 FCBA Basketball Championship

Dorian stepped back and sucked in a sharp breath. He automatically withdrew his hand, and the menu vanished.

“What was that?” Amara came up to the counter and stood on the other side, hugging her elbows against the cool air. “I thought I saw a menu.”

He reached out again, this time for another peg, and a new menu appeared. When he pulled away, the window receded, just as before. He made several more tests, all with the same results, each set of keys triggering a brief index menu of topics. Some had simple topics–people, places, events. Others were more obscure, or merely contextually arcane: KEN PF Stiles 2272 PPG/FG%/A:TO, Plex particle irregs, Scioli vox.

“It’s like a filing cabinet of some sort,” Amara said. “Or maybe a key table from a dimensional model database?”

Dorian drew away from the pegs, leaving the keys in place. “Lets head upstairs.”

He met up with her again on the other side of the counter and they moved over to the staircase. At the foot of the stair, Dorian put his hand on her arm.

They both stopped, and Amara pointed at the wall.

“Was that there before? I didn’t notice it as we came in.”

It was a sign. A black arrow, scribbled with a felt pen on standard lined notebook paper. It most certainly had not been there before.

“I think someone knows we’re here,” Dorian said.

“Do we follow it?” A note of trepidation crept into her voice.

He thought about the size of the building, the row upon row of jutting peaks, the hundreds of thousands of square feet it implied. “I don’t see that we have much of a choice. We could spend weeks exploring the complexity of this render and still not find anything of value on our own.”

“It’s better than breaking and entering. I mean, a sign like that constitutes something of an invitation, right?”

Or a trap, Dorian thought, but he didn’t say so aloud. As a precaution, he uncached another script, a virulent quik-kill troll that would (theoretically) repel most moderate code vipers. It rendered as a compact Goddard MatterKast .45. He snugged it into his belt with the safety off.

At the top of the stairs they found a grand lounge with a wide, arched ceiling and empty leather couches scattered about over a red floral print carpet. There was no sound but the slight echo of their own footfalls and the mechanical shug of circulated air. No golemechs, no AI scripts, no presence at all, either friendly or hostile. A plaque on the wall to the left, beside the elevators, told them they had reached the Mezzanine Level. Below it was another hand drawn sign with an arrow that pointed beyond the lounge to a white and black checkered hallway. Dorian and Amara exchanged a wary look, but in the absence of anything constructive to offer, he only shrugged, and they went on to the hallway.

The passage was brightly lit, the walls constructed of a generic white façade of imitation marble. Here and there were doors, closed and anonymous except for plastic faceplates beside the lintels, but even those were uninformative. Just room numbers. A short way down the passage, however, they came to a set of double glass doors. The room beyond was obscured by floor length curtains, but an embossed panel to the side announced this to be the Frangipani Room. Recognizing the name, Dorian tried the knob, but it was locked.

He turned back to Amara, and between them, on the floor, there appeared suddenly, inexplicably and counter-intuitively yet another sign, another arrow. The page had been stuck there with a ragged bit of masking tape. Amara saw it and put a hand over her mouth.

“At least he has a sense of humor,” she said.

But Dorian frowned. He jiggled the handle on the door again, in the process launching a standard set of decryption loaders. The door didn’t budge. He told Amara to wait for him, then dashed back the way they had come. He returned a few moments later with a set of keys from the pegboard downstairs. When she saw them, Amara frowned in disapproval.

“What?” he asked.

“I imagine he keeps the doors locked for a reason.”

“Then he shouldn’t leave his security keys in the lobby.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little rude?”

Dorian put the key into the lock. “I don’t really care if he thinks it’s rude or not. He didn’t have any ethical problem with snooping around in my datascape, so he shouldn’t object if I return the favor.”

If Amara saw any further difference, she didn’t say so. She just crossed her arms over her chest and waited for him.

Dorian sighed. “I have an idea, okay? I just want to check this out. I’m not going to take anything.”

He turned the key and the lock clicked. He tucked the keyring into his pocket and put his hand on the comforting grip of the Goddard. Slowly, he pushed the door open. Inside, he found a large and cluttered room. It felt damp and grimy and had the moldy look of long neglect. As the door swung open, dim soffet lights hummed to life from recessed fixtures in the ceiling, creating wavering yellow pools in the shadows. Dorian took a tentative step forward, then stopped. The room was piled floor to ceiling with what largely seemed to be crap. Stacks of loose leafed paper, old fashioned photo albums, an indecipherable painting here and there that hung on the wall, slightly askew. In one corner, beneath a cone of light, sat an old wooden desk. On top of it was a battered and ancient Vortex M800 Multithread Terminal. The monitor screen showed the signature blue and green logon prompt screen. Dorian stared at it and whistled. There hadn’t been a working Vortex M800 in the real universe in over sixty years.

Oddities: A low dais against the far wall, backed by heavy velvet curtains. An elevated walkway that encircled a dirt encrusted hardwood floor, largely impassable because of the teetering columns of detritus that lined the walls. Gilt chandeliers. It occurred to him that this was rather lofty brik-a-brak for a crap storage vault.

Perhaps incongruous was a better word.

Dorian stepped back across the threshold, closed and locked the door behind him.

The menu beneath the Frangipani Room peg had said: Obsolete tech expertise, Mrs. Eckman’s Art Class (Freshman Year), General Indistinct Childhood Mems, Other Useless Crap (Lots—begin sorting at your peril).

“Let’s go,” he said. “I learned what I needed to know.”

“I’m glad it’s so clear to you,” Amara replied pointedly.

Dorian led her on down the hallway. There were more signs now, the arrows drawn with bolder strokes. He suspected that they’d start encountering neon markers soon, with flashing bulbs and sonorous mechanical trumpets, if they didn’t pick up the pace.

As they went along, he explained. “It was the menus on the pegboard. That’s not a classic user directory, but it is the sort of file commenting you see in most code structures. Most programmers leave themselves notes inside their text to explain what a module is designed to do inside the broader program logic.”

“Documentation,” Amara said, nodding.

“That’s what we call it, certainly. Most program documentation is worthless to anyone except the programmer. The menus that opened on the pegboard are what we call Yellow Note technology–quick topical marginalia that isn’t intended for users in general, just truncated reminders about what you were planning on doing in that bit of logic.”

They came to an intersection. The hallway dead-ended in a glass storefront display window filled with sweatshirted mannequins, old fashioned textbook displays and assorted point-of-purchase consumables arranged in interesting and attractive poses. A new hall curved off to the right, heading in the same general direction they had been traveling, but it was dark, as though the power in that direction had failed. To the left was another staircase, this one a narrow set of stone steps. In the middle, another closed and presumably locked doorway that would, in realtime, act as the entrance to the University Book Store (as the sign above it read). In case there was any doubt, another arrow had attached itself to the wall by the stairs, angled so that it pointed upward.

“It’s a memory palace,” Dorian went on as they climbed the stairs. “In ancient times, back on Earth, before there were books and libraries and infotainment pods or even a literate class to use those things, popular entertainment came in the form epic dramatic poems recited by itinerant minstrels and poets. Most of these guys were illiterate themselves—they were like newswire trebek’s, I guess–so the traditional lays were taught to them orally, repeated over and over from master to student until the kid had committed the whole thing to memory. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of lines of verse that had to be memorized and delivered by rote on demand. Not just one poem, but dozens, maybe hundreds. There were no reference manuals, no texts to study to refresh their memories.” He tapped the side of his head. “They kept it all up here in organizational structures the Roman writers called memory palaces. Ars memoria, the art of remembering. Essentially, these were structures—sometimes real, sometimes imaginary–the student fabricated in his mind and filled with layer upon layer of architectural, design and decorating details. The palaces would become marvelously baroque, endlessly and precisely detailed, so that each object they stored there was mnemonically associated with an idea or a trigger that referenced items to be remembered. Augustine of Hippo claimed to have had a friend he called Simplicius who could recite the complete Aeneid using this technique. Backwards.”

“Like their own accessible foam,” Amara said.

“Right, except they had no concept of personal foam. They had to actually store all the data they wanted to instantly retrieve in their own synaptic matrix. By imagining themselves strolling through their memory palace, they could access anything they had pre-determined was worth remembering. It was like a wetware database index.”

The next level looked much like the one they had just left behind. To the right roamed a long and rather dull looking hall. There was another entrance to the book store on the left, and immediately ahead of them, a hallway that skirted the store front and wound on through the building. They went forward, following a manic plaster of arrows.

“So you’re saying that this is Raville’s memory palace?” Amara asked, her voice tinged with wonder. “This huge building?”

“I’m saying it started as a memory palace. The memory palace technique allowed Raville to keep his mental space logically organized in upload. I mean, that’s what the upload process is supposed to do. It takes a fundamentally incoherent pattern and imposes order on it. The imposition of an alien index on the neural matrix isn’t just to ease cross-platform decoding, it’s one of the primary mechanisms employed to insure package consciousness suppression. The Schrödinger waveforms used for storage are selected or manipulated because of their mathematical proclivity for organizing into coherent patterns that will replicate the individual being scanned and uploaded. The data inside the waveforms consequently wants to be organized in a specific way. The package load process maintains the perfect balance between data yearning to organize into coherency and data collapsing into entropy.”

“And since Raville already had an organizational index…”

“The balance was disrupted toward organization. It could have just as easily backfired, and the conflict in the indices tilted the balance the other way, toward decoherency, but I suspect it was a calculated risk.”

“Right before he went into zap for the first time? That’s a pretty big risk, don’t you think?”

Dorian wasn’t certain exactly what he was thinking at this point, only that the direction of those thoughts seemed to be wending in a pretty sinister general direction.

Amara suddenly squeezed his arm, dragging him to a halt. “John, what if his mental index didn’t win out? Or at least didn’t win out completely? What if this isn’t Michael Raville at all, just a sort of–”

“Flawed simulacrum?” Dorian finished for her. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t know that it makes any difference. Even if he translated accurately from package to foam, this isn’t the man we know from the newswires as Michael Raville. As far as he’s concerned, he’s the man who invented the form of zap technology that mainly allowed manufacturers to ease their consciences after unbridled decades of Third World labor exploitation. Everything else that zap has become was someone else’s vision, someone else’s accomplishment. The files that I extracted from this port indicate that he’s kept a pretty close eye on himself over the years, but that isn’t the same thing as being the person he became. We can’t take anything we think we know about the contemporary Michael Raville for granted.”

“Or,” Amara said in a low voice, “the overwrites really could have made him insane.”

“Yes, that too.”

She glanced at the gun poking out above his belt. “I don’t suppose you’ve got another one of those?”

“Not in a form I could pass to you off the Strand.” Dorian squeezed her shoulder. “He won’t be able to follow you if you have to flip out. Just don’t let him touch you, and don’t accept anything he tries to pass to you. Okay?”

Amara nodded her understanding, but it was an uncertain gesture, and Dorian noted that she made more of an effort to stick close to him.

Though he did not say so, what concerned him most of all was what had bothered him initially about this rendered environment. The level of cognitive organization that had preserved Raville’s burgeoning consciousness was also, he suspected, what gave him the power to flatten the display of Amara’s avatar. If he could set the basic architecture’s parameters, who could say what else Raville might be capable of in his own tailored environment? There was no guarantee that Dorian’s system-dependent scripts would provide any protection for them at all, not if Raville had made himself a god inside this bubble of foam.

Guided by signs, they passed the Georgian Room, a stained glass entryway that led to the Tudor Room, then the hallway made a jog to the left, and they spilled into a brightly lit and cavernous space. Golden sunlight shafted through tall windows on the north wall. Fake marble gave way to great blocks of grey stone, wall and ceiling. The floor was a chaotic pattern of red and blue flagstones polished to a high gloss. More couches here, lined in neat rows, and all empty once again. Across the room, through the bay window set in the south wall, they could see a broad sidewalk running along a paved road, and a summer green lawn beyond. Then nothing, just the haze of code death. Opposite the door they had come through, and a bit to the left, there was another doorway, and Dorian hurried toward it.

The air was warmer here, and as Dorian passed through the chamber, he noticed an alcove beneath a succession of stone archways off to his right. The brief lounge was filled with a cozy collection of padded sofas and high backed chairs, and beyond, a log fire roared merrily in the depths of a rustic and impressive stone fireplace. In one of the chairs oblique to the fire, a man sat alone, staring into the flames, his fingertips pressed together in front of his chin. As they crossed his field of vision, the man lifted his head expectantly and looked directly at them.

Dorian, seeing him at last, stumbled awkwardly to a halt.

“You must be the man who killed my dog,” said Michael Raville, smiling, as he rose to his feet.

<– Chapter 4 / Chapter 6 –>