Trixie shuddered: she still had nightmares about what had happened during the Cleansing, the night when Heydrich and his henchmen had simultaneously assassinated King Henry and Tsar Ivan and seized power in the ForthRight, when they had rounded up all of the Royalists and their families and shot them as Counter- Revolutionaries. She still remembered the screams of the Marlboroughs – who had been dining with them that night – when the Checkya had come to arrest them, had dragged them outside and thrown them into the black, windowless steamers.
She remembered going to the Academy the next day and no one having the courage to ask where Lillibeth Marlborough was. Lillibeth Marlborough: Trixie’s best friend. Overnight Lillibeth became a nonNix: someone never to be mentioned again, someone it was better never to think of again. Even the daguerreotypes showing the school teams that Lillibeth had captained had been removed. And when Trixie had protested they had Censured her.
‘I haven’t forgotten, father, I’ll never forget.’ A tear trickled down Trixie’s cheek.
‘Don’t cry, Trixie. Crying isn’t going to bring Lillibeth or any of them back. What we’ve got to concentrate on is surviving in this crazed world.’
‘So what does Beria want of me?’
‘Apparently Crowley is unwilling to hand the Daemon over to the Checkya for interrogation, which I think is quite sensible of the chap. Crowley might be as mad as a bag of bolts but even he knows that once inside the Lubyanka the chances of getting anything sensible out of the creature, Daemon or not, are negligible. Under torture, people
… Daemons are liable to say anything. So Beria has suggested a more softly-softly approach: seduction rather than rape, so to speak.’
‘That must be a novelty for Beria,’ observed Trixie wryly.
‘Indeed. Beria’s suggestion is that the creature is held under house arrest where it is given an opportunity to commune with a like spirit… that’s “spirit” with a small “s”.’
‘Here?’
A nod from Trixie’s father.
‘Me?’
Another nod.
‘But why me?’
‘Beria has cast his eye over all the daughters of senior Party officials…’
I bet he has.
‘… who are roughly the same age as the form taken by this Daemon. He was, so he says, looking for someone of high intelligence, strong character and who is loyal to the Party. Apparently you scored two out of three. He had you evaluated at Mrs Albemarle’s last social by an odious man named Captain Dabrowski.’
That slimy Polish bastard.
‘Was he the man you hit, Trixie?’
‘Yes, father. He was overly familiar with me.’
‘Bravo. Perhaps you should have hit him harder. Next time perhaps. Well, beaten or not, Dabrowski has recommended you to Beria. It seems the Captain was quite taken by my little Trixie.’
‘So what do I have to do?’
‘This Daemon, who calls itself Norma Williams, will be brought here to live with us. The house will be guarded, of course, but every effort will be made to make this guarding as unobtrusive as possible. The idea is that you and the Daemon will… bond, and gradually over a couple of weeks you will find out the truth about it and the Spirit World.’
‘I don’t know if I like the idea of bonding with a Daemon,’ admitted Trixie. ‘What does this thing look like? Does it have horns and a tail? They always draw Daemons with horns and a tail on the covers of penny dreadfuls.’
‘No horns and no tail, or so I am told. Apparently it looks and acts just like a normal young woman.’
‘Very well: I don’t suppose I have any option in the matter, do
I?’
‘ None whatsoever,’ was her father’s bleak answer.
7
The Real World: 12 June 2018
The Memories of Dupes: each Dupe is provided with an appropriate and fully functional memory of his or her life as a Demi-Mondian prior to the OutSet of the Demi-Monde plus a realistically flawed ancestral memory.
– The Demi-Monde® Product Description Manual: 14 June 2013
Ella was back in the General’s office in the company of the Captain, the Professor and, of course, the General. She was glad of the company: the meeting with Heydrich had shaken her, had frightened her. More… it had scared the shit out of her. Heydrich might have been just a virtually rendered Dupe but there had been something disturbingly real about him. No computer-programmed entity could walk into a room and dominate it like that: it wasn’t natural. She shivered: the thought of being involved in anything that required her meeting or interacting with that madman again most certainly did not appeal at all. Not even for a million bucks…
‘You met Heydrich?’ asked the General.
Ella nodded distractedly. She didn’t feel like talking. Meeting close up and personal with such pure, undiluted evil had really taken the wind out of her sails. She felt empty… weak… vulnerable.
‘Reini was at his despicably racist best,’ observed the Professor. The Professor was sitting in a chair stationed as far away from the General as the room’s architecture would allow: it was obvious that they disliked one another. The frisson of their mutual loathing infected the atmosphere of the room.
‘Is Heydrich typical of the Dupes you’ve used to populate the Demi-Monde?’ asked Ella quietly. That there were more like Heydrich made her flesh creep.
The General shook his head vigorously. ‘Thankfully, no. Heydrich is what we classify as a Singularity. These, the ultimate class of high-performing psychopath, are very rare: we see only a dozen or so of them in a century. That’s why we only seeded twenty into the Demi-Monde, four in each Sector. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on the way you look at it – two of them are already dead: Henry Tudor and Ivan Grozny were assassinated by Heydrich when he staged a coup to take over two Sectors of the Demi-Monde. A shame really, I thought Henry was one of the more interesting of the Professor’s PreLived creations. He was the only one with anything approximating to a sense of humour.’
Hand shaking, Ella picked up her cup of coffee and took a drink, hoping the caffeine would bring her out of her funk. What sort of maniac, Ella wondered, thought these games up? She put the cup firmly back down on its saucer. ‘Okay, so I’ve met Heydrich. The question is: so what? What has all this to do with me? Let’s cut to the chase, shall we, General?’ Now all she wanted to do was put as many miles of interstate between her and the Demi-Monde as was humanly possible.
Screw the million bucks.
No amount of money would persuade her to come anywhere near Heydrich again.
The General glanced nervously at Ella; he was obviously discomfited by her discomfort. ‘As I’ve explained to you, the Demi-Monde is not a predictable simulation… it’s a heuristic program, that teaches itself. As soon as it was switched on four years ago it was independent, free of its creator’s control, free to develop anarchically. Suffice it to say, Miss Thomas, that how the Demi-Monde operated post-initiation – or post-OutSet as it is called technically – came as something of a surprise to all of us. We had designed the Demi-Monde to be a very hostile environment for our neoFights, to be a perfect replication of an Asymmetric Warfare Environment. What no one expected was that it would be a life-threatening environment.’
Now that was a phrase that made Ella’s eyes widen. ‘Look… I really don’t understand all this “life-
