Recursion

“But it all backfired. They moved too soon. Now they’re left with this huge white elephant and they stand in awe and envy of those other organizations that stayed their hand. Now they look to Toronto and Lake Baikal and Atlantis and they wonder what to do next, but they’re worried. A deeper crisis is unfolding, one that goes to the heart of Stonebreak, one that must remain a secret…And then a ghost arrives…”

She looked knowingly at Constantine, who kept his face carefully blank, but all the time waves of relief were washing through him. She didn’t know. She didn’t realize that he was here on a far larger mission, one whose roots went back to long before the building of Stonebreak. The very thought of it made Constantine shiver. Sometimes he forgot for a few minutes the importance of his task, but the memory soon returned, weighing down upon him. No wonder he was stressed. No wonder he was seeing things. Or not, as the case may be.

“…but you’ve got to ask yourself, is it worth it?” she continued, oblivious to his thoughts. “I was involved in the building of this place, and what did it get me? A nervous breakdown.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re feeling the pressure too, aren’t you? No need to answer me. I can tell.”

Constantine said nothing. For the moment the sky fitted perfectly down to the ground, and that was good enough for him.

They stepped out from the elevator onto the third level. Here the buildings rose higher, built mainly of glass to allow maximum daylight inside them. The towers were not as tall as in other cities of the world and were spaced wider apart, set in groves of trees or gravel gardens, but nonetheless this area emanated the unmistakable feeling of power. Two women in security uniforms came walking toward them.

“Good evening,” said one. “Up here for an evening stroll?”

“That’s right, officer,” Mary said. “I’m taking my friend here to see the Source.”

The security officer glanced at her partner as she smelled Mary’s breath and gave a minute shake of her head. She looked at Constantine.

“The Source? First time in Stonebreak, sir? That’s an excellent place to visit, especially on a clear night. But it’s a long walk across the third level. You’d do better taking the under-city route. If you get back in the elevator and keep going down, it will take you to the I-station-”

“That’s okay,” said Mary. “We’d prefer to walk.”

The security officers glanced at each other again, then drew closer together, directly in front of Mary.

“No. I think you misunderstood,” said the second officer. “I really would consider taking the elevator, if I were you.”

A look of anger crossed Mary’s face and she took a step forward. Constantine put one hand on her shoulder to restrain her. He lowered his head and spoke in a bland, unremarkable voice, adjusted his posture in a certain way, did everything he could to make himself forgettable: a dull grey man in a dull grey suit.

“Actually, officers, we would prefer to walk through the city. I will vouch for this woman.”

There was a pause. Somewhere in a Stonebreak computer, a routine had just appeared. It created a new identity for Constantine and passed on clearance in that name to the officers. Its work done, the routine deleted itself.

“Okay, off you go,” said the first officer, her head tilted as she listened to a voice speaking in her ear. Mary and Constantine, the man who wasn’t there, headed on into the business quarter.

They walked through still streets between silent buildings. The business quarter had the air of a city of the dead: vast mausoleums lining wide thoroughfares that led through the night to nowhere. The brightly lit lobbies they passed seemed devoid of life: empty goldfish tanks, set out with toys but drained of water. Very occasionally they saw a security guard sitting at a desk, tapping at a console or watching a viewing field, but it was as if they were peering through a glass into a different world. Even Mary seemed subdued by her surroundings. She had hardly spoken since the episode with the two guards. Constantine wondered why they had intervened to stop her passing. How had a ghost been stopped by such simple security measures? Why hadn’t they been automatically distracted by a strange sound, a message, a change in their routine?

For that matter, why hadn’t Constantine’s own hidden protectors done that for him straightaway? Was Mary somehow affecting the routines? The thoughts were driven from his mind as he heard her sigh.

She was staring at the building immediately to her left with a despairing expression. Constantine gazed at it in surprise. It was the DIANA building: his own company. Mary sighed again and continued walking.

“That’s who I work for,” she said.

Constantine said nothing.

Around the corner two rectangular towers faced each other across a broad plaza. The facade of each was divided up into square windows, giving the buildings a retro, late-twentieth-century feel. A bright yellow light shone from every window, lighting up the plaza below. A single person stood in each window, looking out across the plaza at the person standing in the window opposite. Thousands of people, standing in absolute silence, gazing into another’s eyes. People in grey suits, in red dresses, in white bikinis. Old men in candy-striped blazers and young girls holding balloons, all standing in their individual squares of light staring, staring, staring. Constantine felt mad, shrieking panic scrambling around in his stomach at the thought of walking out there, across the plaza, in front of all those eyes.

“No…” he murmured, his mouth suddenly dry.

Mary gazed at him from under furrowed brows. “What’s the matter?” she asked, glancing around the street.

Constantine turned back to the two towers, but all the people had vanished. Another hallucination?

“Nothing.”

“You’re working too hard.”

“I know.”

“Is it worth it?” Mary said. “Is it really worth it? Don’t you just want to give up and do something else?”

Constantine didn’t answer. Mary was speaking to herself.

The far end of the business quarter came quite suddenly. Another tall glass wall rose into the heavens behind the low-rent, low-rise buildings at the back of the third level. Another elevator took them up to the top of the fourth and final level, where they proceeded through more wide streets, this time paved with large grey slabs of mock stone.

“This is where Stonebreak has its law courts and libraries, its mock parliaments and theaters. We’re not going to look at them, they’re far too dull.”

The pair trudged past earnest-looking buildings of grey stone, adorned with columns and engraved with Greek or Latin mottoes.

Mary snorted in disgust.

“This is where their imagination ran out. We’re walking nearly a kilometer above the Nullarbor plain and the best they could come up with are these imitation Roman dumps. Fucking architects. I work for a company that devised a structure that weighs millions of tons, has a diameter of nearly nine kilometers and a volume of thirty cubic kilometers. A structure that stands in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. And what do they choose to decorate it with? Bad copies of bad copies of the bloody Parthenon. Two and a half thousand years of continuous advancement in human technology since the Greeks built the bloody original, and they still can’t think of anything to improve on it.”

Constantine was smiling now. The streets they walked were lightly scattered with other tourists, some of them looking at Mary to see what she was shouting about, but most of them looking away in disgust at her language. Mary continued, oblivious to the stares.

“I mean, why couldn’t they just leave those buildings in the form that they grew? Surely the fact that Stonebreak is is enough. It doesn’t have to pretend to be anything else.”

“I quite agree,” said Constantine. “But didn’t you say earlier that Stonebreak is obsolete? I thought the VNM look was passй?”

“Oh, shut up,” Mary replied without anger. “Come on. We’re almost at the Source.”