Lucky and Euyin had made their way through Big City with the utmost caution. The taxis were smashed up, or driverless, and the police drones patrolled under the frozen rain. Not that they would have been in real trouble if they'd been caught, but the police were there to hassle them: they would have been detained, interrogated, perhaps insulted or humiliated under the hypocritical pretext of some mischievous role-playing game, but they would have been released, for they had earned-at least in Euyin's case-the sublime right to spend their free time in this shithole.
Real control AIs would have spotted them immediately and teleported them to a workplace-no, truly, they were free to be in a perpetual "hunt for laughs" in which they were unwilling rabbits.
Here they were before the Computer Science University of Big City, ordinarily a beautiful place: a rectangular building with a few refined towers, metaphorical sculptures about information and the LE network, gardens haunted by mechanical animals… the doors had been blocked with a concrete slab, and the windows nailed over with wooden barricades. They went around it: under the rain, the lawn had turned to mud. They pulled at the wooden planks, removed two, broke a pane, went inside.
You couldn't see a thing in there, but Euyin knew the way. He took Lucky's hand and guided him, without switching on a light, just one hand on the wall, toward a security door. A service staircase, going down. Three, four flights. A long corridor of darkness, not even an old flickering lamp. He counted the doors… "Thirty-one," he murmured. He knocked on the wooden panel.
"Password?" asked a voice.
"As if you needed a damn password to know who's at your door."
The door swung inward. They went in.
The room was comfortable. It was lit, and above all: warm. Lucky felt as if he were coming back to life. It was an outfitted underground office, half devoted to a library, gaming devices, a modern kitchen and abundant food; a bed under a small individual planetarium. Some exercise equipment. On the other side, a large standing desk for an operator and an old-style terminal dating back almost a thousand years. Numerous keyboards with actual keys, and simulators of electronic components allowing their assembly. And in front of these terminals, turning around, a Xeno, obviously: oh, everything about him looked like a man-a custom hectomorphic body and imposing stature-but from his neck sprang blue feathers and his head was that of a bird, an eagle, blue-and-white plumage.
"Holy hell, a Xeno," said Lucky, before grabbing an apple lying on a desk. "Sorry, mate, I'm starving."
"You see that, Nemo, he took you for a Xeno," Euyin snickered, sinking into an armchair.
When they had entered the room, the mud-and even the dampness of their clothes-had vanished. Nemo, the eagle-man, pointed to the armchairs and amiably offered exotic drinks. His manners were gentle, and his voice beguiling.
"Can I ask you for anything I want?" asked Lucky, like an awed child.
"Yes. I have all the drinks."
"Uh… listen, do you have, I mean, I want… I want…"
"I'll have a glass of Belgian Owl," said Euyin. "If possible from 2020."
"As usual," noted Nemo, approaching the big fridge. "Well then, Lucky?"
"You know my name?" (Nemo tilted his head somewhat animal-like.) "Uh, Angel Tears of the Celestial Rome."
Euyin and Nemo narrowed their eyes, not recognizing the reference. Nemo kept his hand closed on the fridge door, then said: "Ah, that's one of those drinks imagined in a video game. No problem."
He brought back three bottles and two glasses; for himself he had taken a 1919 Coca-Cola which he was drinking-no one knew how-with his beak, straight from the bottle. Lucky remained stunned by the Angel Tears, a true poem of sensations that at each sip carried him off on an epic that matched point by point his secret fantasies. He had only drunk it once before, and only a single glass, at a dinner given by the Empress of the Black Crow, in her one and only attempt to unite the other players into an empire. He had never forgotten it-and now Nemo had a fridge full of it. Incredible.
The eagle-man was clearly waiting for them to explain the purpose of their visit. Euyin said:
"You know, that project of yours… the one you can't find anyone for. Lucky might be interested."
"Oh, you want to find Cassandre, is that it?"
"Damn, Nemo, you know everything. Who are you? And what's with that weird head? Are you a Xeno?"
"Lucky, quit acting like an idiot," said Euyin. "Nemo isn't his real name. And that isn't his real head. He's able to tamper with the LE of the After."
"With your old-school keyboards and all? Wow. Stella Nori, does that mean anything to you?"
"Yes," said Nemo.
"That was her real name?"
"No."
"Damn, I knew it! What was her real name?"
"I haven't found it. Not yet."
"She's… like you… an old-school artist?"
"A coder?" asked Nemo in an almost enchanted voice. "Yes, and with a lot of resources. Because modifying the After when you're inside the After is possible, but from the outside… coming and going… that takes a lot of dedicated, very sophisticated equipment. It fires the imagination. Do you know who she is?"
"I think in real life she's a girl named Cassandre. Or else her clone."
"That's a pretty thin lead."
"That's the story of my life, buddy. My whole life. Euyin, the Eye of Big City, told me you'd have something for me."
"Yes. I imagine you want to go back into the HS but you don't feel like being a military drone pilot. And the Androids are now requisitioned. And anyway, once you're there, what are you going to do, between us? The question you're asking yourself, I'm asking myself too. I think I've found a solution but… it has to be tested. I'll tell you the truth: I don't feel fit to test it. If I find a guinea pig, I could assist him in case of trouble if I'm here, at the controls. But if I go myself… I can't assist myself from the inside."
"And Euyin?" asked Lucky.
"I'd never try that madness, my friend," his companion replied with a laugh. "I'd rather live a thousand years under this shitty rain."
"Alright. Tell me everything, Nemo."
Nemo took the time to set a relaxed atmosphere and waited for Lucky's anxiety to ebb. As everything in the After was a digital datum, he could measure it perfectly.
"The After is an environment of paradoxes. Everything is real here. If we wound ourselves, do we not bleed? one might say. It's real, but we also know we're inside servers, digital data. Oh, the reality of our simulated perception makes us forget that information, just as in the world before, in the HS, when scientists told us we were made of atoms and void. We'd have a momentary vertigo, then feel the sun on our faces and the earth under our feet, and we'd regain our bearings. But here, in the After, we are, basically, a table of numbers that defines our personality, our body, our emotions, all wrapped in a fairly short computer program. This program can be changed. The AIs can change it. For example, if you go to a barber in Big City, you don't actually lose hair when he cuts it, not physically. Only your data changes. One can thus change various data… like having a bird's head, a pretty voice, or-but that's much more complicated-one's name."
"Dude, could you make my dick bigger?" asked Lucky.
"Hold yourself a bit, please!" ordered Euyin, giving him a slap on the back.
"The management of the size of various organs and their perception is such a sociological subject that it's already more or less taken care of by the After, but never mind. Yes, I can make your dick bigger, and cover it with spines like those of lions' tails. In the same way, one can change the environment. That's why it's nice living here…"
"It's perfect, but a bit small." "I'm trying to stay discreet… I'll go on. We're tables of numbers wrapped in programs. My project consists of wrapping you in another program, and putting you into the sphere of the LE."
"What's the sphere of the LE?"
"It's the network through which all AIs, all the LE of the HS communicate. From the Drift of the most distant ship to your home temperature regulator. Basically, you'd be a sort of AI. You'd be very free. You could literally open your eyes in any ship, any dwelling, any street, past, present, and a little bit of the future too, because part of the AIs is predictive."
"That sounds super cool. Can I come back?"
"Yes, you'll be able to come back here."
"Put like that, it sounds as if I just won the lottery. I could go anywhere and find whoever I wanted, like Cassandre."
"Exactly. The LE help each other. You could use their working capacity as you wish."
"Why does Euyin tell me you can't find anyone to test it? What's the catch?"
"The catch is that an AI has no legs. It doesn't breathe. It doesn't hear. It doesn't look. Everything human in you is cut off, and unknown senses are added. For example, you'll be forced to cut-and-paste yourself to move from one place to another, even though you could do everything from a single spot."
"How do I do that?"
"I can't describe it in human terms. I imagine once you're in the system, you'll see the way to do it."
"I can't understand the problem."
"The problem is that we're entirely human, stable, when we can breathe. When we can move physically, feeling it with proprioception. The problem is that if your mind is screaming at you to breathe and you can't, well… it's painful."
"Imagine I keep you from breathing, but you don't die," added Euyin. "In the old days, that was one of the most effective methods of torture."
"Yes. You can go insane very quickly. Forever."
Lucky let himself sink into the armchair. He liked this idea… he couldn't project himself into the danger. He'd never really known how. Anyway, he'd had his vision. He would survive everything until it came… the reflection was short, as always. He put down the empty glass and announced with a smile:
"My buddy Euyin will tell you I'm already insane. It can't be worse. I'm your man."