‘I go up six or seven times a year for a refresh. It’s like a little holiday, visiting Refuge. That’s a habitat high above the Rust Belt, safe from any plague spore. And then I have the scan and my last two or three months of experience are assimilated by the simulation of me which is already running. I don’t think of her as a copy of me any more. She’s more like an older and wiser sister who knows everything which has ever happened to me — as if she’s been looking over my shoulder my whole life.’
‘It must be very reassuring,’ I said, ‘to know that even if you die, you won’t really be dying at all; just dispensing with one mode of existence. Except none of you even die physically, do you?’
‘That might have been true before the plague. It isn’t now.’
I thought back to what Zebra had said. ‘What about you? You’re not a hermetic, obviously. Were you one of the immortals who were born with genes for extreme longevity?’
‘Mine weren’t the worst you could inherit, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But not the best, either,’ I said. ‘Which means you were probably still reliant on machines in your blood and cells to keep correcting nature’s little mistakes. Am I right?’
‘It doesn’t take a massive deductive leap.’
‘And those machines? What happened to them after the plague?’ I looked down as we passed over a suspended railway line, one of the quadrilaterally symmetric steam locomotives sliding through the night with a string of carriages behind it, bound for some remote district of the city. ‘Did you have them self-destruct, before plague spore reached them? I gather that’s what most of your kind had to do.’
‘What business is it of yours?’
‘I’m just wondering whether you’re a Dream Fuel user, that’s all.’
But Chanterelle did not answer me directly. ‘I was born in 2339. I’m one hundred and seventy-eight standard years old. I’ve seen wonders you can’t even imagine, terrors that would make you shrivel. I’ve played at being God, explored the parameters of that game, and then moved beyond it, like a child discarding a simplistic plaything. I’ve seen this city shift and change a thousand times, becoming ever more beautiful — ever more radiant — with each transformation, and I’ve seen it change into something vile and dark and poisonous, and I’ll still be here when it claws its way back to the light, whether that’s a century or a thousand years from now. Do you think I would discard immortality that easily, or confine myself to a ridiculous metal box like some cowering child?’ Behind her cat’s-eye mask, her own vertically pupilled eyes flared ecstatically. ‘God, no. I’ve drunk from that fire, and it’s a thirst you never quench. Can you grasp the thrill that it is to walk in the Mulch, amidst so much strangeness, unprotected, knowing that the machines are still inside me? It’s a savage thrill; like firewalking or swimming with sharks.’
‘Is that why you play the Game as well? Because it’s another savage thrill?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you used to be more bored than you remember. That’s why you play, isn’t it? That’s what I gathered from Waverly. By the time the plague hit, you and your friends had exhausted every legal experience society could offer you, every experience that could possibly be staged or simulated, every game or adventure or intellectual challenge.’ I looked at her, daring her to contradict me. ‘But it was never enough, was it? You were never testing your own mortality. Never confronting it. You could leave the system, of course — plenty of danger and excitement and potential glory out there — but if you did that, you’d be leaving behind the support system of your friends; the culture in which you grew up.’
‘There’s more to it than that,’ Chanterelle said, seemingly willing to volunteer information when she thought I was misjudging her and her kind. ‘Some of us did leave the system. But those that did knew what they were throwing away. They could never be scanned again. Their simulations could never be updated. Eventually they would diverge so far from the living copy that there would be no compatibility.’
I nodded. ‘So they needed something much closer to home. Something like the Game. A way to test themselves — to push themselves to the edge, and invoke a little danger, but in a controlled manner.’
‘And it was good. When the plague came, and we could do what we chose, we began to remember what it felt like to live.’
‘Except that you had to kill to do it.’
There was not even a flinch. ‘No one who hadn’t earned it.’
She believed it, too.
As we continued our flight across the city I asked more questions, trying to discover how much Chanterelle knew about Dream Fuel. I’d made a vow to Zebra that I’d help her avenge her sister’s death, and that meant finding out as much as possible about the substance and its supplier, the mysterious Gideon. Chanterelle was clearly a Dream Fuel user, but it quickly became apparent that she didn’t know anything more about the drug than any of the other people I’d spoken to.
‘Let me get a few things straight in my head,’ I said. ‘Was there any mention of Dream Fuel before the plague?’
‘No,’ Chanterelle said. ‘I mean, it’s sometimes difficult to remember what it was like before, but I’m sure Dream Fuel only emerged in the last seven years.’
‘Then whatever it is might just have some connection with the plague, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Look, whatever Dream Fuel is, it protects you against the plague, allows you to walk in the Mulch with all those machines floating inside you. That suggests to me that there might be an intimate relationship between the two; that Fuel recognises the plague and can neutralise it without harming the host. That can’t be accidental.’
Chanterelle shrugged. ‘Then someone must have engineered it.’
‘Which would make it another kind of nanomachinery, wouldn’t it?’ I shook my head. ‘Sorry, but I don’t believe anyone could have engineered something that useful; not here and now.’
‘You can’t guess at the kind of resources Gideon has.’
‘No, I can’t. But you can tell me what you know about him, and we can work from there.’
‘Why are you so interested?’
‘A promise I made to someone.’
‘Then I’ll have to disappoint you. I don’t know anything about Gideon, and I don’t know anyone who does. You’d need to talk to someone closer to the line of supply, I think.’
‘You don’t even know where he operates from, where his production labs are?’
‘Somewhere in the city, that’s all.’
‘You’re sure of that? The first time I encountered Dream Fuel was…’ I trailed off, not wanting to tell her too much about how I’d been revived in Hospice Idlewild. ‘Not on Yellowstone.’
‘I can’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that it isn’t manufactured in the Canopy.’
‘Which leaves the Mulch?’
‘I suppose so.’ She squinted, the vertical pupils of her eyes becoming thin slivers. ‘Who are you, anyway?’
‘Now that,’ I said, ‘would take rather too long to explain. But I’m sure you’ve guessed the essentials.’
She nodded at the controls. ‘We can’t circle for ever.’
‘Then take us to the Canopy. Somewhere public, not too far from Escher Heights.’
‘What?’
I showed Chanterelle the place name Dominika had given me, hoping that my ignorance of the nature of the address — whether it constituted a domicile or a whole district — was not too obvious.
‘I’m not sure I know that place.’
‘My, but my finger is growing tense. Rack your memory, Chanterelle. Failing that, there has to be map somewhere in this thing. Why don’t you look it up?’
Grudgingly she did as I asked. I hadn’t known about the existence of a map of the Canopy, but I figured such a thing had to exist, even if it was buried deep in the processor of the cable-car.
‘I remember it now,’ she said. The map glowing on the console looked like an enlargement of the synaptic connections in part of the human brain, labelled in eye-hurting Canasian script. ‘But I don’t know that district too well. The plague took on strange forms there. It’s different — not like the rest of the Canopy, and some of us don’t like it.’
‘No one’s asking you to. Just take me there.’
