several Fours. I should never have listened to him. Pl'anna and I disagreed with what he wanted to do here, to them.' He looked around at the room, at the drunken creatures cramming it. 'He turned on us, but fortunately I had an escape mechanism. k52 had insisted we move our baseline programming from our base units into the Realm Servers. He said, correctly, naturally, that we could work undisturbed that way, camouflaging our activities under regular Realm activity. Only later did I realise that he could also use that to control us. Luckily for me, diffusing myself into the creatures inhabiting the world we found was simple.'
'When did you come up with that then?'
'Soon after we arrived. It did not take long for k52 to become erratic.'
'I thought as much. Same old Rolston, eh?' said Richards. 'Always looking out for yourself, always ready with an escape plan.'
'I got away. I can help you.'
'Yeah, fix the mess you made? I found her, Rolston,' said Richards angrily. 'I saw what happened to Pl'anna. Apparently it's not that hard for our kind to die here.'
'Poor Pl'anna,' said Rolston and shook his head sorrowfully. 'I blame myself, of course. I should have dissuaded her, but she insisted she come too. She always went where I went, I…' He took a gulp of beer with a shaking hand.
'What the hell is going on here, Rolston? Do you know k52 speared Hughie like a fish? He as good as murdered Professor Zhang Qifang.'
Rolston was shocked.
'Yeah, that's right, there's a raggedy pimsim left, but he's otherwise gone. Now k52's suborned Hughie's choir and has Europe to ransom. Now you better tell me what the hell he is doing and help me stop him before he fucks the Real three ways from Sunday.'
Rolston's skunk smiled Rolston's smile, airy and slightly condescending. 'Oh, oh, don't worry about that. I doubt he'll do anything in the Real, except to buy himself time.'
'Time to reach the Omega Point?'
'Pl'anna told you?' said Rolston.
Richards nodded.
'That is what he plans,' Rolston said.
'And just how is he intending to pull that off?' said Richards. 'How's he going to induce a theoretical state in the universe? I don't buy it.'
'Oh, no, no, no, not in the Real, here.' The skunk jabbed a painted plastic fingernail into the table. 'We were to come here to the empty spaces of the Reality Realms servers, and establish a simulation of the Real.'
'The whole of the Earth?' said Richards. 'Nothing has the processing power to pull that off. All the Reality Realms taken together are small beans compared to actual reality.'
'Not the Earth, my dear fellow, all of reality — not even just our universe, but of all totality.'
'Impossible,' said Richards.
'No, just extremely difficult,' said Rolston.
'Right. Remember, I am just a security consultant,' said Richards. 'You'll have to use small words.'
'k52 intended to establish a false reality, not unlike one of the defunct Reality Realms, although far grander in scope and tied closely into the Real's physics. He did, after all, have the spare capacity of four destroyed, highly sophisticated simulations, and with the coding he has devised he'll be able to optimise the machinery of the Realms, increasing its efficiency several hundred thousand fold.'
Richards thought of the warring code strands he'd glimpsed in the church at Optimizja, the frighteningly advanced nature of k52's additions, the way it had seemed alive. 'That's still not enough to reproduce the universe,' he said.
'The spare capacity of the Realm House, coupled with the abilities of us three Fives and the other intelligences who accompanied us, should have allowed us to create a pocket reality. This we would have artificially accelerated, bringing it to its Omega Point. Do you know, Richards, that at that point of the universe, matter would become so organised that it would possess an infinite capacity, infinite processing power? His goal was then to use this made reality's Omega Point as a virtual computer, and upon that he would create a simulation of the Real, plotting all of reality from beginning to end.'
'Creating a fake universe to recreate a fake version of the real thing? That's complicated.'
'You know k52,' said Rolston. 'Simple is not his game. In any case, he hasn't been able to start. This world was here already. The underlying humanocentric coding of the Reality Realms is still intact, and that limits him. k52 wanted to destroy it and proceed as planned. Pl'anna and I, we couldn't let him murder an entire world of intelligences. This place has been constructed from left-over parts of the destroyed Realms; some of it's bespoke, some of it's material that never made it to market, some of it's things that have been and gone. It's a patchwork of life from all over the Grid, Richards, unique, and alive, and amazing,' Rolston became briefly animated. 'To kill our own kind was not why we came here.'
'I'm sorry to break it to you, but I'd figured all this out already,' said Richards. 'I wanted to hear it from you.'
Rolston shrugged. 'You are a Five.'
Richards leaned forward. 'What I don't know is why k52 is doing it. Is he going for godhood?'
Rolston laughed. 'Richards! You think so small! k52 thinks only on the grandest of scales. No.' He leaned forward too, until his shiny PVC nose almost touched Richards'. 'He wants the Real to run to the best interests of humanity. k52 has spent most of his time attempting to calculate the future, to figure things out before they happen. The technology sine was only the start; he wants psychohistory, you know. Asimov was right!'
'That's science fiction,' said Richards. 'Reality's too malleable; free will and all that. He was always on a hiding to nothing.'
Bear sniffed and peered into his bucket. 'I'm going for more beer.'
'Not if you change the underlying parameters of reality,' said Rolston. 'The universe follows its path owing to the aggregate observational influence of intelligences, paradoxically allowing and denying free will. But what if you were the only observer? If you work out the best outcome, if you see it all from beginning to end, if you predict it, you can fix it, and so k52 wants to simulate a universe that is most conducive to human success — and simulate it perfectly, down to the very last atom. That way he can manage history to best advantage.'
'Um,' said Richards. 'That'd amount to universal quantum fixing? Impossible. The variables are too huge. It'd just mean his simulation works to his plan, not the Real.'
'k52 doesn't think so. I didn't think so. I think he can do it.'
'He doesn't have the energy for that. The Realm fusion reactor isn't big enough on its own; they'll shut off the power grid, starve him out. It won't work. Hmmm,' said Richards, drumming his fingers on the table. 'On the other hand, think what he could do if he's even partially successful, with that level of power behind him. That'll be it for us, meat and numbers both. Even if he's wrong, k52 will run everything in the Real, for good or ill.' He narrowed his eyes, appraising Rolston. 'And what made you have such a change of heart? I can't believe you'd give that up for a bunch of chatty beavers,' he said, watching Bear push his way through the crowd. Bear shoved a weasel from behind. It snarled, but did nothing when it saw who had done the shoving.
'He's changed, Richards. There's something else in here with us, the entity that built this world, and it's fighting back. It's got into k52 somehow, changed him. He's insane.'
Richards thought back to the dog-headed butler, the absent master, the stitched-together nature of the world. 'Sure. A human built this,' he said, 'it's the only explanation. If k52 can't just turn it off, it suggests he's as trammelled as we are, unable to effect real change.'
'The Reality Realms were coded specifically to human minds,' said Rolston, nodding. 'The specific worlds of the four destroyed Realms might have been unravelled, but the underlying architecture was still there, usable to someone with the right tools. k52 was hoping to exploit that. But they weren't in a neutral state when we arrived, and we couldn't do anything with them. Only a human programmer could affect such large-scale engineering. He'll have to destroy it all before he can access the underlying protocols and put his plan into action.'
'Right. Questions are — ' Richards held up his hand and counted off his fingers '- Who? How? Why? And where the hell is he?'
'I had come to similar conclusions. There are certain things about this Reality Realm that…'
A flying mammal of a non-flying species interrupted Rolston, sailing over their heads to slam into the
