Ruined Cities Read online

  “I don’t know,” Wil said.

  “I was at a concert,” said the woman, confusion marring her immaculate face. “The Firebird Suite. Then I was here. I don’t remember anything in between.”

  “Some glitch. You’ve been recreated from your most recent restore point. You lost a few seconds; the outage never happened for you. That’s why you’re disorientated.”

  The woman looked at him with an expression of open disgust on her face. You didn’t say things like that. He’d broken the cloud’s strongest taboo, reminding her of their situation. He’d gotten out of the habit of conversation. Out of the habit of anything apart from lying in the sun.

  The wall, the void, whatever the hell it was, flickered. For the briefest moment he could see the rest of Infinite Beach through there. The sea and the hot sun in the sky. The distant green hills. Then the nothingness returned. How come it was still light here when the sun was over there? But of course, that was beforelife thinking.

  “We have to tell someone,” Wil said. “We have to, I don’t know, report this.”

  He turned back to the woman. She was now dressed in a shimmering gold beach suit, an ultramarine sarong knotted around her hips at an alluring angle. Her hair was swept back off her elegant neck to keep her cool.

  “Report what?” she said. She looked at him with a smile on her face, her outrage forgotten.

  “The…” Wil turned to look at the outage. It had gone, too. He could see the long curve of the beach in both directions once more, sunlight sparkling off dancing waves. People lying on the sand, swimming in the water, like nothing had happened.

  “I’m sorry. I have to go now,” said the woman. “I’m going to a concert. Stravinsky. It was nice to meet you.”

  She smiled another smile and turned to leave. The others who had materialized began to drift away, too. Some alone, some in groups of twos and threes, laughing like nothing had happened, like they’d met by coincidence on this fine, sunny day.

  The dread seized Wil’s stomach tight. The woman’s memories had been changed right in front of him. She could be restored if absolutely necessary, sure, but her perceptions couldn’t be edited. Her thoughts were sacrosanct. That was, like, rule number zero. They were still people, absolutely not just a bunch of data. What had just happened went against all their rights. He watched her padding away across the sand, shocked by the change in her more than anything else.

  Wil had heard all the conspiracy theories, of course. Who hadn’t? They’d all been restored from backup countless times. How would they know? He paid it no attention. People liked a dark secret to whisper about. Perpetual paradise not enough for them. But half the cloud had ceased to exist for thirty seconds and no one else seemed to know or care.

  He walked towards the sea, trying to look like he was wandering aimlessly, replaying the memories of what he’d witnessed. Maybe that would keep them in his head. Five paces, ten. Still he could recall everything. It felt like the whole world was watching. He tried to walk normally, suddenly not sure how to. Down to the water’s edge, where the sand was wet and it squirmed between his toes.

  It felt like he had to wade through sludge to get thoughts to form. How come he could still remember what he’d seen? The clean-up routines were old, sure, but they were good. He knew that with unexpected certainty. Why had he escaped their attention? Why were they letting him think these thoughts? And where was he supposed to go now?

  Obviously walking wasn’t going to get him anywhere. The beforelife designers had done a job with the beach. Allowed themselves this one conceit. From any one point the beach looked completely convincing. Fine, yellow-white sand strewn with the occasional pebble or fragment of white shell. Yet, however far you walked, the distance refused to creep any nearer. The red and white lighthouse on the headland stayed where it was in the shimmering distance.

  Somewhere between here and there, somewhere in that indistinct middle-distance, there must be a line, a join, a fracture. He remembered now. He used to try and reach it, try and spot the break. But it was the end of the rainbow. You could never get there. It receded from you, always one step ahead. All you could do was walk forever over the perfect sand.

  There were flaws elsewhere if you knew where to look. He remembered now. Away from the beach the cloud had a normal cycle of day and night. You could lie on a hill in the warm night air and gaze at the stars. Beautiful. The constellations were identical to those he remembered, except for one mistake. A triangle of bright stars in Phoenix that shouldn’t be there. Maybe they were a designer’s joke, like the unreachable lighthouse. Maybe they were just a bug.

  The lighthouse, though. That was it. There would be answers there. Illumination. How had he forgotten about that?

  “Another perfect day.”

  A man sitting up the beach a little way, watching him walk by, eyes invisible behind sunglasses. His greeting a familiar irony. Wil stopped, nodded, took in the view around them in a little show, like he hadn’t noticed their surroundings before.

  “Sure is,” he said.

  “Trying to see how far the beach goes?”

  Wil shrugged, not sure what to say. There were rumors about people in here, too. Some of them were agents of the machinery. Adjuncts spying on them, monitoring them. Just why, no one ever explained. Some even said there were beforelife people in here, their living brain patterns projected into the cloud machinery for some dark purpose. What would be the point? But now Wil felt wary, like he was doing something wrong. He shrugged. “Just walking, I guess.”

  “You’ll never get there, you know.”

  It sounded like a threat but the guy smiled.

  Wil tried to look like he didn’t care either way. “Sure.”

  The man sipped his drink, nodded and lay back to sunbathe some more, his point made. Wil turned and ambled away, trying to ignore the thought the man was watching him. A half mile farther on he stopped to squint backwards. The line of his footprints meandered in and out of the sea. The man was a distant speck, impossible to say whether he was observing or not.

  Wil shook his head. He was being ridiculous. The cloud didn’t need agents to see what he was doing. A glint of white from the top of the lighthouse, sun reflecting off polished glass, caught his eye. It pierced the fog in his mind for a moment and he recalled what he had to do to get there. Maybe that was what the glint was for.

  The sparkling turquoise of the water stretched out to the solid line of the horizon. It was obvious, really. He walked to the water’s edge and waded in, up to his knees, his thighs. The water was momentarily shocking cold on his balls, making him gasp. A good thing: the illusion of sensation working just as it should. He tried not to think about what that meant, though. If it was all generated then everything, even his current thoughts, were generated too.

  He fell forward and began to swim, lazily and slowly, still trying to look like he was going nowhere in particular but always angling towards the lighthouse. He expected to find himself relocated at any moment. Surely it was obvious where he was heading? But still he swam on, tasting salty water with each stroke.

  There were places like the lighthouse all over. Had been once, anyway. Did they still function? They’d been an essential feature of the clouds in the early days. The designers had gone to great pains to blend them in with the surroundings. There was a cathedral with a great dome in the city where people went to pray. And, that was right, a cave in the mountains leading through shadowy tunnels to an Oracle in her secret grotto. Around here it was the lighthouse. You just had to know how to get to it. You couldn’t walk. You had to swim.

  Thing was, people felt the need to communicate with back there less and less. Didn’t like to be reminded where they’d come from. Surviving loved ones were forgotten, or else they died and came to the clouds themselves. People adjusted to their new condition. People were good at that. Too good, maybe.

  Wil swam on, trying to ignore the growing worry he wasn’t making progress, that an ocean current was
matching his forward motion precisely, holding him away from the lighthouse.

  Eventually the beach released him and the headland edged forward. Each pull of his arms hauled it a little closer. He was well out of his depth, the water massing cold beneath his body. The lighthouse loomed near. With each stroke he expected to be thrown back out to sea. Then his fingers scraped on the stones of the shore. There was no sand here, only rock. The wind blew stronger, chilling his wet skin as he stood, raising goose bumps. Reality functioning nicely. He shouldn’t have been in good enough shape to swim so far. Another convenience of life in the clouds.

  Wil glanced back the way he’d come. The crescent of the beach was surprisingly small, the people on it a dense spattering of dots. It looked like he could walk around the whole arc in an hour. Maybe the perspective wasn’t quite right. The thought troubled him for some reason.

  He turned to gaze up at the lighthouse looming over him. Its red and white stripes were stained and flaking. Age-and-decay routines working well. Of course, there was no need for a real lighthouse. And while this one functioned, sending out solid bars of light if you could manage to see it at night, that wasn’t its real purpose.

  The bleached wooden door didn’t budge when he pushed it. Perhaps it had been sealed off. He barged into it with his shoulder and it gave a little. He tried again and it opened a crack, the swollen wood jamming on the stone floor. Inside, he could see the base of spiral steps leading upwards.

  Wil squeezed through the gap and began to climb. There was light from the doorway below but it faded as he ascended, becoming utterly dark. Once again doubts clouded his mind, nagging at him. The steps went on forever: a loop, a trap for trouble-makers. Perhaps he should give up, go back down. But the loop might work in both directions. He could only carry on, around and around.

  Eventually he saw thin light filtering down from above. Two more turns of the spiral and he reached the top.

  A circular walkway led around the circumference of the great crystalline lenses that amplified and focused the lamp of the lighthouse. He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering what you did, waiting for his breathing to settle down. He stared into the fractured, bewildering planes of the glasswork. The lenses reflected reality in odd, trapezoid scraps. His own eyes looked back from disorientating angles. He sought another face in there, trying to see through surfaces within surfaces. Nothing. Perhaps the port had been shut down. Trying again, he ignored the flashing rainbows of colored light, his forehead pressed against the cold glass. Deeper and deeper to the reality beyond.

  Eventually he saw it: a woman’s face. She was no mere Adjunct of the cloud’s reality generators. This was a living, breathing person from out there. The beforelife.

  “Hello, citizen of the clouds,” she said. “Who is the once and future king?”

  What the hell did that mean? Was this another joke? If it was, he didn’t know the punch line.

  “Are you the controller?” he asked. “I need to speak to the controller.”

  “That’s correct, citizen. I’m the controller of this cloud. Do you wish to communicate with someone out here?”

  Beyond her he could see the skyline of a city. Glowing white domes and sparkling glass towers among more familiar buildings. London, his home city, where he’d entered the afterlife a century ago. Of the eight nodes spanning the globe, it was this one, London, that was the oldest, the original.

  He suddenly didn’t know what to say to her. There was no one left back there that mattered to him. No one he’d loved or even known. And if he mentioned the outage maybe the machinery would take notice. They could edit him there and then and send him back to the beach, oblivious to everything.

  “No, no, it’s not that.”

  “Would you like to transfer to another cloud? There are nearly fifty thousand available, catering for every conceivable environment and preference.”

  “No I just… remembered about the lighthouse and thought I’d come up here. I haven’t communicated with the beforelife in many years.”

  The woman’s smile didn’t flicker. “We are always here if you wish to communicate with us.”

  “Tell me,” he said. “Everything out there. Has much changed?” The knot of anxiety he’d felt on the beach tightened within him. What was he worried about?

  “I can provide a digest of the events of the previous century if you require.”

  “No, just tell me. Is everything well?”

  “Everything is perfect, citizen. It is a golden age of humanity. Death has been banished and life is glorious. Would you like to see?”

  “Please.”

  The scene behind the smiling woman shifted, the viewpoint flying out over a jumble of rooftops to the surrounding countryside. Now he could see palatial villas dotting rolling hills. The camera’s gaze soared on, over woods and fields to lakes that sparkled in the sun. It all looked familiar. In truth, it looked like Cloud One. Except, of course, it was the other way round. The cloud was an idealized version of that reality.

  “And the afterlife machinery? It still functions correctly?”

  The question was out before he could stop himself. But the woman’s wide smile didn’t flicker. “Of course, citizen. Is there anything else you require?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Thank you.” He closed his eyes to dismiss her. Why had he left the beach? There’d been a glitch and the machinery had corrected itself. What was his problem? He stood with his head resting on the cold glass of the lens, his eyes shut.

  “She wasn’t real, you know. Whatever you saw in there, none of it was real.”

  Wil spun around to see another woman standing with him. Another woman he didn’t know. Except, something about her was familiar. They’d met before, hadn’t they? His memory wasn’t what it was. She was slight, Asian, her hair cut short and dyed bright red. A grin of knowing amusement played across her face, like she saw a joke he didn’t. In her hand she held a smoking cigarette. Immunity from cancer, from any disease, was another benefit.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “Are you following me?”

  “You saw it, didn’t you?” the woman said, ignoring his question. “You saw the outage.”

  “Perhaps.” Who was she? An agent of the machinery? He’d used the lighthouse and she’d been sent here to deal with him. Only, why go to all that trouble?

  “You saw it and you came up here looking for answers,” the woman said.

  “Perhaps,” he said again. “Are you saying you saw it, too?”

  “Oh, I always see them.”

  “What do you mean always?”

  “Poor Wil. You’ve forgotten so much. They happen all the time, believe me. Outages and glitches. Bugs so big it’s embarrassing. What people say is all true. We’re constantly being restored from backup. What’s worrying is that it’s happening more and more. It used to be rare.”

  “If you really knew that you’d be edited so you didn’t.”

  “You think?”

  “Unless you’re a part of the machinery, of course.”

  The woman shook her head. “Oh, Wil. You really are far gone, aren’t you? No, my love, I’m definitely one of the dead, a true citizen of Cloud One. Just like you.”

  “Then how come your memory hasn’t been altered?”

  “Because I made sure part of it was encrypted before I came here. Memories the machinery can’t touch.”

  “And how the hell would you do something like that?”

  “By building it in, obviously.”

  “But that would mean…”

  “You know, I really should be offended at you forgetting me. But I think you’ve got it now. I designed this cloud. Or, rather, we did. We created this whole world. Then we died and came here to live.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true, my love. We’re gods here, you and I. Didn’t you know? Powerless and flawed, but gods all the same. We created this world. Our kingdom. We designed and programmed it, the very first cloud. We are Adam and Eve and thi
s is our Garden of Eden.”

  “I think I’d remember that.”

  “Would you?”

  He didn’t know what to say. Behind the woman, the endless sea sparkled and winked away, like everything was normal. “If what you say is true, why are you talking to me now? You’re telling the machinery your secrets too.”

  The woman shook her head. “We weren’t stupid. Communication between us is secure at a port. The lighthouse, the cathedral, wherever. That’s the way we set it up.”

  “Why?”

  “Beats me. I don’t remember everything either. I have… gaps. It’s almost like we were afraid of something.”

  “The machinery. The way it tampers with our minds. Edits our memories. The outages.”

  The woman drew on her cigarette, breathed out smoke. “I don’t think so. The machinery is only doing what we told it. Keep running, keep everyone happy. No, this is bigger than that. It’s like we camouflaged ourselves in case someone outside noticed.”

  “Who would want to do that?”

  “No idea. Plenty of people tried to stop us in the early days. Fundamentalists saying we were trapping peoples” souls, usurping heaven. Assorted terrorists trying to get heard. Decent folks getting mad about the cost of the whole thing. But I don’t know. I assumed you knew pieces of the jigsaw.”

  He shook his head. He had no idea what she was talking about. “What did you mean when you said the controller wasn’t real?”

  The woman smiled, like he’d said the right thing. “You asked to see the world out there. What did it look like?”

  “It looked good. Beautiful.”

  “That’s what I get shown, too. I don’t think it’s real. No more real than here, anyway. Something is going on but they’re not telling us what.”

  Right. More conspiracy theories. “Okay, Look. I don’t know what delusions you’re laboring under but everything looked fine to me. Good to chat to you, but I’m going back to the beach now.”

  “Your choice, of course,” the woman said. “It’s your afterlife. This is what you did all the other times, too.”

  He stopped at the top of the steps. “The other times?”