a moment before scuttling to the platform edge and dropping down onto the tracks. It rapidly headed off down a dark tunnel.
“What the hell?” Herb danced back across the platform in panic.
Johnston couldn’t stop laughing “Just VNMs. Construction robots! If only you could see your face.” He gasped for breath. “They can’t commit suicide, remember? They don’t know what to do when they’ve finished their work. These tunnels must be choked with them.”
He straightened up and wiped a tear from his eye. “They gave me a bit of a start, too, I must admit. But you. Your face.” A thought suddenly occurred to him and he giggled. “Can you imagine what would happen if the Enemy Domain sent colonists here now? Can you imagine them coming down here to catch a train?”
“That isn’t funny.”
“Ah. I suppose not.”
Johnston seemed to gain some self-control. He turned left then right, sniffing the air for a moment.
“This way, I guess,” he said, pointing down one tunnel.
Herb looked horrified. “What? With all those robots scuttling back and forth?”
Johnston shook his head. “I told you before. We’re not really here. We just needed to find a clear path. The train tracks should be conductive enough. If not…Well, I guess we’ll never find out about it.”
“Just a minute…” said Herb, but it was already too late. They were no longer in the station.
Johnston got it right the first time.
“Not that that should be any surprise,” he said, looking around the basement of the space elevator. Herb felt his knees give way. The space he was standing in was just too big. He felt like a microbe, looking up into the bell of an enormous trumpet. The tiled floor seemed to vanish as it approached the distant, inward-curving walls. Long cables ran down from the seeming infinity above to burrow themselves into the floor all around them. There was a hollowness to the air, a feeling of resonance stilled and of themselves standing in the low-density part of the wave. If the space elevator was a trumpet, the mouthpiece must be out in space. Herb felt delirious: the hollowness that he felt was the sound blown by the emptiness above.
He reeled a little. He wasn’t thinking straight and he knew it. His mind couldn’t grasp the sheer size of the room.
“This is part of the Enemy Domain?” whispered Herb, eyes wide. He swallowed.
“What?” said Johnston, taking in Herb’s awestruck expression. “Oh, this is nothing. We almost built space elevators like this in Earth space. They’d have been bigger than this, too. The EA didn’t allow them, though. There is tremendous stress on one of these things. If they snap…” He paused, looking thoughtful. “The question is why the Enemy Domain thought it was needed…Anyway, come on. We’ll ride that cable up to the top.”
Whistling tunelessly, Johnston shuffled toward the cable he had just indicated. Herb followed him, looking upward. He felt ridiculously exposed, as if people were watching from above, ready to drop something down on him.
They walked in silence for a while. The cable was farther away than it looked: the sheer size of their surroundings confused the eye.
“Hey, Johnston. Why can’t you just jump us there?” he called.
“Because,” said Johnston. “Anyway. I want you to get some idea of the scale of this thing.”
“Bollocks,” Herb muttered under his breath. “You just didn’t think of it.”
“Yes I did. And stop whispering to yourself. I have excellent hearing.”
“You bloody well would, wouldn’t you? Mr. Perfect. What’s going on here, anyway? What do you mean when you say we’re not really here?”
Johnston sighed hugely. “You mean you
Herb wasn’t going to respond to such an obvious attempt at goading him. “You’ve already done this bit. Just tell me.”
Johnston shrugged. “I suppose I have,” he said. “Okay. Think about it. We don’t want the Enemy Domain to know we’re spying on it, do we? No. So that means we have to observe it by passive means wherever possible.”
“What, telescope, electromagnetic emissions, and so on?”
“Yup. Which is all very well, but it doesn’t tell us much. We need to be a bit clever. So what I did was, I made a copy of our personalities while you were sleeping on your ship, then I fired them on a narrow beam toward the Necropolis. I was banking on the fact that there must be some processing spaces remaining on this planet that could contain them. As always, I was right.”
Herb nodded as he digested that information. “So I’m not really me, is that what you’re saying? I’m just a personality construct? The real you and me are still sitting on board my ship, planning our attack on the Domain.”
“Oh, you’re the real you,” Johnston said. “You’re just not the one sitting on your ship anymore.”
Herb felt sick. “How could you do this? What have you done to me? I don’t care if I’m a personality construct; I still feel real. Who gave you the right to do this to me?”
The emotion drained from Johnston’s face. He gazed at Herb with an empty expression. “
Herb held Johnston’s gaze for a moment. Silence. Then Herb swallowed and looked away. “Yeah. Whatever. So that’s why the most important thing we have to do is to get back to ourselves. Do you have any idea how?”
“I have a few ideas up my sleeve.”
“How will we know if we’ve succeeded?”
“The you and I who are here at the moment won’t know. If the you and I on your spaceship are hearing these words, it means we succeeded.”
Herb said nothing. A nasty idea had just occurred to him.
“So, what happens to us then, when we’ve finished our mission? Do we just die? Or do we spend the rest of our lives here wandering around the processors of the Necropolis?”
“When you’ve finished your work for me, how you then choose to live your life is up to you. As long as there is something to process the idea of you, you will think that you think, and therefore, you am what you am.”
They finally came to the foot of the cable. Silver-grey and perfectly smooth, Herb could see himself dimly reflected in the dull sheen of its metal. The cable disappeared into the tile floor, giving no hint of the tremendous tension trapped beneath the ground.
Johnston ran an apparent hand over the cable’s surface.
“I can’t feel anything,” he said. “That means the VNM that made up this cable must have been functioning correctly. There is no room for any margin of error in a space elevator.”
He turned to explain to Herb. “We’re taking advantage of the fact that the VNM that was the seed for the Necropolis couldn’t suicide properly. The building block machines still have their senses and processing spaces intact. We’re using them now to give us life.”
“I guessed as much,” Herb lied.
“Sure. Come on, there’re no clues here. Let’s take the scenic route into space. We’re going to try to get on board one of those ships and steal a little slice of processing time from its brain. We’re going to take on a life in a computer’s dreams. Isn’t that poetic?”
There were rooms and walkways built into the outer skin of the space elevator.
“Imagine having a corner office in this place!”
“You wouldn’t be able to breathe,” Johnston pointed out. “The windows don’t fit properly.”
“You know what I mean,” Herb said.
From the streets, Herb remembered, the space elevator looked like a very tall skyscraper. Get up close and you might not even realize that there was anything odd about it. From where they were now standing, looking out of a wide picture window just a few hundred meters above the ground, it was almost possible to believe they were looking out over an Earth city.
