The Games

Chapter FIVE



The Brannin Institute was a single five-story glass-and-stone building nestled within an elaborate arrangement of low artificial hills. It was sixteen acres of some of the greenest, most expensive parkland in the world, an island of exquisiteness in the rising urbanized tide that was Southern California. A new supply of leafy climax growth was shipped in on special trucks every three or four years to keep up appearances. The trees were deciduous, mostly, drought-adapted and selected for hardiness, but for all their size and tenacity, they tended to choke and sputter out one by one in the hot, tainted air of Southern Cali.

The Brannin Institute’s single small parking lot—usually nearly empty—today was filled to capacity.

News that the Brannin was going online again was cause enough for media interest. But a tip that Silas Williams and Stephen Baskov were also going to be present gave the story a whole new level of juice—enough to draw reporters across the country on red-eye flights from places as far away as New York, Chicago, and Miami. They set their equipment up along the cement walkways in the hopes of shouting a question interesting enough to get someone to stop and answer. Rumors were flying. Long limousines and short, snappy sports cars were squeezed between official-looking sedans and news personnel minibuses.

No one seemed to know for sure why the computer was being brought back online. But they knew the cost, and they knew who was attending, and because of that, they knew it was important.


EVAN CHANDLER sauntered into the chamber. He glanced at the long row of digilog drives that squatted along the wall of the anteroom. Real-space technology seemed so archaic to him now; and as he watched a group of clean techs busily assembling the interface, he couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for them. So much, after all, was lost in the translation. There was so much they could never experience on this side of the boundary.

Above him, the scrubbers hummed the air clean of particulate from behind vents evenly spaced across the broad acoustical ceiling. VR laser-optics were notoriously susceptible to dust contamination. It was another thing Evan loved about being in V-space: the only contamination was what you brought inside your head.

A large view screen stood in the center of the room before an audience of empty folding chairs. It’s where they would watch him, where they would see what he would see. Or so they thought. He smiled to himself. Evan had a secret.

The drivers were downloading some thirty-six million kilobytes of queries into the plug booth’s data streamers. It was part of how the three precious minutes were being paid for. Corporations, economists, researchers—they all had their questions, and all had paid for the opportunity to use a fraction of the Brannin.

But those questions meant nothing to Evan. Their software would talk directly to his V-ware without ever manifesting the slightest visual cue. He had simply to concern himself with opening the computer’s memory caches and activating the deduction systems. He hadn’t bothered to tell them they were giving him two minutes and fifty-nine seconds more than he needed. Things moved much faster inside, after all.

He pulled a supersized bag of M&M’s from his pocket, looked around to see if anyone was watching, then reluctantly put it back. Too many eyes. They would raise hell if they caught him eating anything in a clean chamber. His stomach ached. He cast his eyes around for Baskov. The old SOB thought he knew every damned thing. But he didn’t. He didn’t know shit.


BASKOV WAS at the back of the room, talking to a tall, lean man in a corporate suit. The man’s introduction was conspicuous for its absence, and Evan certainly noticed how politely everyone treated him. They gave him a wide berth. Even Baskov seemed a little uncomfortable around him. Evan was happy to see the old gimp squirm a little. Served him right.

His stomach turned again. To hell with them. He walked over to one of the drives and turned his back to the technicians, pretending to inspect the cables. With a glance over his shoulder, he quickly opened the bag of candy and stuffed half the M&M’s into his mouth. His head bobbed up and down in quick jerking motions.

A woman in a dark gray jumper approached. “It’s time, Dr. Chandler,” she said. She had the kind of mouth that showed lots of teeth when she talked, and he noticed how straight and white they were. He liked teeth, and a lot of people around here seemed to have really good ones. He thought about asking her if they were hers or veneers, but if he spoke, she might smell the peanuts, so instead he pressed his lips together and followed her.

It didn’t take long to attach the probes and strap him into the booth. The cloth pinched a little at his crotch, but by shifting his weight, it was tolerable. The nice-teeth woman in the jumper lowered the faceplate, and his vision lost its reds. He caught Baskov’s critical eye in the crowd just before the visor opaqued. Well, to hell with him; he wasn’t going to ruin Evan’s day. The old gimp could glare all he wanted, but Evan would still have his two minutes and fifty-nine seconds. Almost an eternity.



FROM SOMEWHERE a buzzer sounded briefly. Then the noise from the crowded anteroom began to fade, as if he were receding from it.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Chandler opened his eyes to whiteness.

A flash like a snapped photograph, like lightning, like quick death, and then he saw it: a long, empty corridor. The corridor’s edges were broken only by a gathering of switches protruding from the wall in the distance. He walked. It was the ultimate clean room. No dust in here, he thought. He moved quickly to start the programs, curling his fingers around the switches and throwing them one by one as he came to them. Each switch activated a different part of the computer, waking it up in bits and pieces. He could hear the thrumming of the drives now.

Evan paused at the final switch, the one Baskov didn’t know about. This switch was very, very small, little more than a tiny white toggle, actually. No, it was smaller than that even. The more you looked at it, the smaller it got, receding from your inspection—an interesting sort of camouflage he’d developed. He squinted, feeling for what was barely there, and then he flicked it. The lights went out.

Time for a little privacy.

He chuckled, and the sound was booming and happy in his ears. It was the sound of a god laughing.

His body was firm and full of energy. His mind was clear. He swung his arms as he walked and whistled a tune he remembered from a vid-show he’d seen as a child. He was Hercules. He was an athlete, a sprinter. He was rage a thousand feet tall, with muscles that rippled as he walked. When he finally stepped from the confines of the corridor and out into the secret place, he paused and took a deep breath of the fresh, clean air. Sunlight filtered through the leafy canopy high above, casting a warm greenish glow on the floor of the forest.

The forest swayed.

“Pea?” he called loudly.

It’s what his mother had called him as a child when she tucked him in at night. It was one of the few things she’d given him that he’d been able to hold on to, that name, and it had seemed only right to pass it on.

“Pea?” he called again.

A name is important. It can stamp you for life, so one has to be careful. Naming someone carries with it a lot of responsibility. Pea Chandler. Named for his grandmother’s love. Born ten months ago. Father, Evan Chandler. Mother, unknown.

A giggle.

It was supposed to be the father unknown, not the mother.

Something moved.

“Papa?”

There was a rustle of leaves as a small arm parted the bushes at the edge of the clearing. The small dark-haired boy stepped into sight. Evan surged across the clearing and scooped the boy into his arms, hugging him wordlessly against his broad chest. He’d grown so much, lengthened out. Evan guessed him to be about four years old now. Has that much time passed in here?

“Papa, where have you been?”

“I’ve tried to come back, Pea. I thought of you every day.”

“It’s been so lonely.”

“I missed you, too.”

Evan carried the child out of the forest on his shoulders. When they came to the first dune of fine white sand, he paused and lowered the boy to his feet. Then, laughing together, they raced up and over the other side of the dune and across the tidal flat into the rolling surf of a warm inland sea.

“You’ve been busy,” Evan told the boy.

“All for you, Papa,” the boy said. “I made this all for you.”

“How did you know how?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You like building things?”

“Yes. This sea has kept me busy.”

“It’s truly beautiful.”

They ran in the waves, and Evan enjoyed the heat of the sun on his back as they played. He picked up the laughing child and tossed him into the water again and again. For a short while, Evan was able to pretend that there was nothing else, that this was his true life and the lonely fat man that existed in some other universe was merely a bad dream from which he had awakened.

The boy wiped the water from his eyes and found his feet somehow in the surge of waves. He stood, pulling back a little so Evan wouldn’t grab him up and toss him again. “There is so much I want to show you.” The boy’s eyes were black and piercing. “And so much I want to ask.”

The boy extended his arm, palm down, and the waves suddenly smoothed themselves out. In the space of a heartbeat, Evan found himself standing thigh-deep in a sea that was calm and flat—a single unbroken pane that stretched to the horizon. The only sound was the wind blowing in from offshore, but after another moment, that, too, quieted. He looked down at the boy.

“I’ve made life for the sea,” Pea said. “I call them fish.” The boy pointed.

In the distance, an imperfection formed on the flat surface, a ripple, small at first. But the ripple gradually grew into a wave. Evan looked back at the boy, feeling the first stirrings of unease.

“I couldn’t wait to show you,” the boy said.

The wave swelled as it moved toward them, across the flat sea. The sound of rushing water filled his ears. At a hundred yards out, Evan saw the shape. It was dark and huge, and it roiled wildly behind the growing white wall of froth. An enormous black fin appeared, thick and fleshy, and large as a man. The bulging tail flexed in the surf, and water splashed high into the air. The sea broke away as the thing fought into the shallows. It was a distorted monstrosity, low and flat, with a wide, gaping mouth filled with ragged teeth. Its eyes were white and sightless, extending from stalks at the sides of its head. It ground its belly deeper into the sand with each powerful thrust of its tail, getting closer. Forty yards now. The fleshy fins paddled at the surf, dragging the creature through the shallowing water.

“They keep changing over time. That’s something I didn’t expect,” Pea said.

Evan watched as the thing finally ground to a halt, still twenty yards out—a huge hump of flesh jutting above the water. The eyestalks swayed as the mouth worked open and closed.

“I’ve made life for the air,” Pea said. “I call them birds.” The boy pointed again.

Evan followed Pea’s outstretched arm upward into the brilliant blue sky. There, triangular forms pinwheeled in the air currents like shiny red kites, their long, thin tails trailing behind them in the wind. As Evan watched, one of the larger creatures swooped down onto a smaller one, enveloping it and severing its tail. The wounded animal screamed and, separated from its stabilizing tail, fell spiraling to the ground in the distance.

“I’ve made life for the land, too,” Pea said. “But I haven’t decided yet what to call them.” When Pea gestured toward the shore, the dunes themselves began to shift and sag. Something moved beneath them. Something big. Evan heard a sound like sandpaper on steel, a low, corrosive lumbering that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

As he watched, a thing writhed free from beneath the dune and struggled onto the beach. It was huge and pink and formless, with a maw at the front that opened and closed spasmodically against the hard, wet beach. There were no eyes, no obvious sense organs at all, just the single gaping feature at the front—an all-encompassing hunger, a mouth like the end of the world. In the seconds that Evan watched, its skin burned and blackened in the bright sunshine. Within a short time, it was dead.

“How do they live? What do they eat?” Evan asked.

“You’re so smart, Papa. They do have to eat. At first I made them to want to eat each other. But then soon I had only one of each type left, and those starved. I got tired of having to make them over and over again, so I made them able to remake themselves. That was how I realized how to keep them fed.”

“How?”

“They make babies that they eat.”

“What do you mean?”

“They eat their babies.”

“You have them eating each other’s babies?”

“No, they eat their own.”

Evan frowned.

“It keeps them happy,” the boy said.

“That’s all they eat, their babies?”

“Uh-huh.”

Evan looked down at the boy for a long moment. “Pea?”

“What?”

“That can’t be right. That sort of ecosystem defies physics, the conservation of matter and energy. If they eat only their own babies, and their babies come from them, then it’s a closed system.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” the boy said. “But it works. In fact, sometimes a baby gets away. That’s how the numbers grow. But even that isn’t always the same.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve noticed that over time, in later generations, the babies have gotten better and better at getting away. They’re born a little older now.”

“How can they be born older?”

“They’re better able to run or swim or fly when they’re born now. They’re born more mature. Not like before, when the adults would just gobble them up.”

“Why is it changing?”

“I don’t know. But the newer generations all have trouble catching their babies. Some of the adults make babies that are mostly too fast, and those adults starve quickly and die. Others make babies that are too slow, and those babies never get away. But it seems like there are fewer of that kind around now, for some reason.”

Evan could only stare at the child.

“The ones there are more of are the ones that catch their babies sometimes. But not all the time.”

Evan was at a loss for words. Darwinian evolution inside VR? He supposed it was possible. Even if it was a f*cked-up kind of Darwinian evolution that wasn’t constrained by physical laws.

“Why did you make them?” Evan asked.

“I don’t know. It seemed interesting.”

As good a reason as any, he supposed.

“Are you going to keep making more?”

“Maybe sometimes. It’s easier to let them make themselves. I just start them. Then they do the rest. There’s so much I’ve been doing. So much I want to show you. I’ve made everything for you.”

“I want to see it all.”

The pull came, then—sudden, familiar, unstoppable. It drove all other thoughts away.

There was still much Evan wanted to ask. He knelt down and hugged the boy. “Pea, they’re calling me.” The pull grew stronger.

“No, don’t go.”

“I have to.”

“When will you be back?”

“I’m not sure.”

“No! You can’t leave!”

“It’s not my choice.”

“I’m so alone,” Pea cried. “I need you.”

“I need you, too.”

“I get so scared. I don’t know what I might do.”

Evan was pulled up to his feet. “Neither do I,” he said into the darkness of his faceplate. “Neither do I.”


SILAS WATCHED Chandler’s body go into convulsions as the drives wound down to a soft electronic whir. The lights came on, and the room exploded into frenzied activity. A team of medics rushed the plug booth as the obese man broke free from his moorings and collapsed to the floor in a quaking avalanche of flesh and twitching sensor wires. They worked quickly to extricate him from his skin suit, cutting it away in big, gauzy swaths with their stainless-steel scissors. Someone shouted something about a defibrillator. To his left, Silas could see a tech he recognized from Helix shaking his head at the readout on his computer feed.

“What just happened?” Silas asked him.

“Not sure,” the man replied. “But that is one crazy son of a bitch.”

“What did he do?”

“Not him, it. I’m talking about the Brannin. It’s flawed.”

“What do you mean?” Silas asked.

“Look,” the man said, gesturing to the terminal that sat on the folding table in front of him. Silas looked over the man’s shoulder at the screen.

ACA CAC UAU AUG CUU CUC CUG GAU UUA CGC AGG UGG UAG UGA UAC CAC CAA AGG CGA UCG UUU UCA ACU ACC AUU CGG CGG AAA ACG GGA UUU GUG GUA GGG GGA CGU AUG AUA CCG CUA AAU UAU GAG AGU AUG GCA UAG GUU UAA AGA ACU AGA GAG GGU AGU CAC CUG UAG UUU UGA CGU ACG AUU UCG CGC CUC CCC UCC UGA GAG AUU GGG CGA CAG UCA CAG GUC UGC ACA CUA UGC CUC CUU CAG GCG CAC GAG UCU UUG CCA GAC GUC AUC CGU GGG GCA UGA AGA CUG CAU UGG UUU ACU GGG CAG CUG CGG GCA AAA UGA UUU UAA UUU GGA AAC GGG CAG CAG CAG GAA CCC CUA GUC GGG UGC AAU GGG GAC CAA CAA UAG UGA CAU CUG CAU CAU GAU AAG UUU CAU UAC GAG GGA CAU CAU CAA AUG GAC UGA UGA GUG UUG CUA CCG AGU UUU AAC GUG AAA GGG UAC AAU GGA UAG AAA ACH AGU ACG UAU GGG GGG AUG AAA GUG AGG ACG CCC CGC AGC CCC CGG GGG CCC CGG CAG AAA AGA AGC AGC AGC CCC CCG ACG AGC AGA

As Silas read, he tried to feel surprise. He wanted to feel like he hadn’t expected this. Somehow, if he could just conjure up a little shock, just a modicum of outrage, he could go on pretending that he really believed this whole thing had been the result of some sort of miscommunication.

“What about the other queries?” Silas asked.

“All answered, by the looks of it.”

“But not ours?”

The man scrolled down through several more screens. “Absolutely nothing. It’s the same code the Brannin gave us before. It accessed our file, but it didn’t answer the query. It just gave the code back to us.” The man swiveled around in his chair to face Silas. “I think we’ve been snubbed.”

Silas glanced across the room, and Baskov was staring over another young man’s shoulder into a similar computer feed. The scowl creased his face to the bone.