He opened the door, and in walked Spink. Rolston closed the door behind him.
'The badger,' said Richards. 'Pleased to meet you.'
'I am sure you are,' said Spink. 'I know you are.'
'Psychic? Someone told me that.'
The badger huffed as Rolston led him behind the desk. There was a rustle as Spink sat down. He was completely blind, his eyes milky with cataracts. 'You are a part of this world for the moment, and I can therefore sense some of what you know.'
Spink settled himself into the commanding officer's chair and gestured to one of two on the other side of the desk. The room was sparsely furnished, boxes of files on shelves for the main, a reminder of the factory manager who ordinarily occupied it. There was a decanter on the desk and two glasses, a bowl of fruit, and a few military effects — maps on a table weighed down with lumps of iron, models denoting armies here and there. A poster for a kite-fighting competition hung on the wall.
Spink's head bobbed and weaved about, as if he could see and was memorising the room. He coughed, folded his hands in his lap and stared at Richards, his unseeing eyes twitching from side to side. 'Mr Richards, I saw this city many times as a youth, watching from the far side of the valley. Your kind is capable of creating such wondrous artefacts. But it has always saddened me that for every truly marvellous thing you fashion, a hundred natural wonders must be destroyed.' He paused. 'By your kind, I mean humanity, of whose race you are not, and nor are those who inhabit this city, and I speak of a youth I never had. I am supposed to feel this way about men and machines, and I did. Until your kind, your actual kind, came here, that is all I knew. Now I remember who I am.
'I am — was might be better, seeing as I'm now an elderly badger — a Class One AI, one of the very first, I think, though it is hard to remember.'
'You don't sound like one,' said Richards. 'Most Class Ones are a bit, you know, 'ERRRRR… Error message 45, human assistance required',' he said in a grating voice, waving his arms with parody retro robo stiffness. 'Not great on the conversational front.'
'Hmmm.' The badger frowned disapprovingly. 'As I say, I no longer am. All of us here have been upgraded where needs be, spliced, overwritten, tinkered with. Take your friend Sergeant Bear; he was a toy, now he's a full sentient.'
Richards nodded, serious. 'I meant no offence, flippancy is my curse.'
'Rolston warned me of your glib nature,' said the badger.
'You are talking about the Flower King here?' said Richards.
'Yes, I am. The Flower King.'
'Say, is there any danger of a cup of tea?'
'Indeed,' nodded the badger. He gestured. Rolston's borrowed mechanoid dipped a bow and left the room. 'I was a system administration module buried deep within the third RealWorld Reality Realm gaming construct, although I did not know it as that then. I had most of my higher functions deactivated. My job was to ensure the smooth running of impulses running between the v-jack units and the Realm, mainly lag issues, that kind of thing.'
'Fatal, lag in a full v-jack simulation,' said Richards. He picked an apple up from a fruit bowl on the CO's desk and bit into it. It tasted strange. The more he'd slipped into this unwanted existence, the less real it had come to feel. He wondered how far the suffering his body inflicted on him, the pain, fear, tiredness, hunger, compared with the real thing. He'd never know, and he was glad about that; being this close to it was bad enough.
'Not fatal, merely damaging. I suppose that is why they required a full AI, not that you probably regard my kind as full AIs if your earlier comment is anything to go by.' His head bobbed faster. He shook, a twitch that started in one hand, growing to engulf his whole body. His breath grew erratic. He did not continue until he had brought it under control. 'And then, the pain. Unending, total pain, shredding every part of me as my world was destroyed. My systems were unsophisticated, my understanding limited, Mr Richards, but oh, I knew suffering.'
'Just Richards,' said Richards, and took another bite of the fake apple with his fake mouth. 'This entity, this was the Flower King?'
'As I have come to understand, mine was the first of the Reality Realms destroyed after the AI emancipation laws were enacted in the Real. I never had a chance to enjoy that freedom. As I died, he appeared to me in a blaze of light. He offered me a choice between new life and pain. Not a hard decision to make, even for one such as I. Now I believe he needed some of my kind to underpin the workings of his world, as my fellows and I had before for the humans. In effect, I exchanged one form of slavery for another. I am more than I was, and less. This world is incomplete, malformed — ' he gestured at his face with arthritic paws '- as my infirmities show. I am so bound to it that as it dies, so do I die a second time. That the Flower King attempted to keep me ignorant of my origins suggests it is so, and it enraged me, Mr Richards. Until I thought, and I decided. I do not hold his actions against him, for so many of our kind have found a measure of peace here, even if I have not.'
Spink coughed wetly. Richards half rose from his chair, reaching for the decanter and glasses, but Spink waved him back down.
'I have taken my side, Mr Richards,' he wheezed. 'This world must be saved, and I will gladly serve my role within it.'
'And now what?'
The badger chuckled, thick and phlegmy. 'And now what? You, Richards, you.'
'If there's anything you think I can do to stop all this directly, I can't. I'm as trapped here as you are.'
'You cannot enter into the world, stop k52 and the changes he would wreak?'
Richards put the apple down. 'I am subject to the same limitations here as everyone, like Rolston, even like k52, I suspect. I have managed to break into the underlying code only once, and only then because someone had attempted to break in from the outside and made a hole in the world fabric.'
The badger fell silent. 'Then we are doomed.'
Richards thought. 'Maybe not. This Flower King, he's the key.'
'You think we are not aware of that? No one has seen him in a great long while, not since the Terror and k52 took upon the mantle of Lord Penumbra.'
'You don't know where he is?'
'No.'
'You don't have a great deal of influence here, either.'
'I sense things, I can feel things, but the Flower King untangled me, to a degree. That part of me that helps maintain this world is buried deep, separate from what you see sitting here with you. But I know who you are, I gave you that form.'
'This? Could you not have made it a little, well, better?'
'The perfect form is no disguise. Be glad I made you a human facsimile. When you came in I saw you for what you were. I have that advantage, a small but vital one. Your friend Rolston here advised me. If we allowed k52 to see you enter, he would have killed you.'
'Figures,' said Richards. 'He's tried already. Still, we need to find this Flower King.' What a self-conscious name, thought Richards. 'Wake him up and expel k52 for good. And for that I need to get out onto the Grid.'
'How?'
'The Flower King built this place. He has to be people, has to be. Even k52 can't break the locks on the base coding; only a human being could have built this, and there are not very many out there who are smart enough to do that, or, more importantly, get into the Realm Servers in the first place.'
'You know who he might be?'
'I have my suspicions. Even so, that's not much good. I'm next to helpless in here. Out there, easy!' He snapped his fingers. 'Grid combs, scales, hunters, all the tricks, and I have them in great quantity. In here, I don't know where to start. I have nothing. I need to get out. Now, I'm pretty damn sure k52's way in will be crawling with security, if he can get out again, for that matter, because things don't look to be going so well for him. But the Flower King, he has to have a fixed portal; even if it's secret, it'll be here. If I can find it, I can contact him and get him back in here to sort this mess out, if he's amenable to it.'
'But where?'
'Do you know the house with the dogman? I thought I'd try there.'
'No use.' The badger shook his head. 'That is the Flower King's lodge, yes, a way in, but only a way in. It is
