‘I know who you are. You’re Reinhard Heydrich. I’ve read about you.’
‘I am gratified that the exploits of my doppelganger in the Real World should still have resonance so long after my death. One does not wish one’s efforts in life to have no impact on history.’
‘Oh, you’re remembered all right: you’re remembered as one of the most evil, hateful men who has ever lived, as the perpetrator of the greatest crime ever committed against humanity, as the man who industrialised genocide. Yeah, history remembers you, Heydrich, remembers you as a mad, bad, psychotic mass murderer.’ A disturbing thought struck Norma. ‘But how do you know about having a doppelganger?’
Heydrich gave an arrogant smirk. ‘All in good time, Miss Williams, all in good time.’ He took a cigarette from the silver box set on Dashwood’s desk, tapped it absent-mindedly on a thumbnail and lit it using a gold lighter he tricked out of the top pocket of his uniform. For several seconds he smoked silently, as though cogitating on what to say next. Finally his attention returned to his guest. ‘I came here today because I wanted to see you for myself. You are a very remarkable young woman, Miss Williams, unique in fact. You are the first Daemon we have ever been able to draw from the so-called Real World into this, the Demi-Monde. All the other Daemons came here to play their sordid little war games but you are different. You were brought here to play a leading part in one of our games.’ He blew smoke idly towards the ceiling. ‘You, Miss Williams, are our hope for the Future.’
There was something about the way he spoke the last sentence that frightened Norma. Why, she wasn’t quite sure, but Heydrich gave the impression that he was laughing at her behind his hand, that he knew something that she didn’t. The feeling she had as he sat there smoking his cigarette and sipping his coffee was that he was toying with her.
‘And what future is that?’
‘A Future where the past is rerun, where mistakes of history are rectified and errors of judgement eliminated and where what should have been… is. A Future that will be reshaped and remodelled to match the template of that Aryan paradise envisaged by Adolf Hitler.’
‘Adolf Hitler?’ Norma tried to make her question sound as offhand as she could, but in truth she was really disturbed by a Dupe talking about a person who, as far as Norma knew, had never been recreated in the Demi- Monde.
‘Oh, come now, Miss Williams, let us not be coy or naive: we both know who Adolf Hitler is. The time for dissembling is over.’ He took a long, enjoyable drag of his cigarette. ‘You are wondering, perhaps, if I am feigning a knowledge of the Fuhrer, that I am on what Yanks like you so picturesquely call a fishing expedition. Perhaps you think that it is a name given to me inadvertently by one of the other Daemons we have captured and interrogated? But in this you would be mistaken. I knew the Fuhrer intimately and had the honour of serving him in many capacities, the final one being as Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. It was in the Czech lands that my life in the Real World was so prematurely brought to an end. Yes, I knew Adolf Hitler. He was a great man, if emotionally flawed.’
‘Hitler wasn’t a great man: he was a monster. He was mad as they come. He was a homicidal maniac.’
Heydrich gimleted Norma with a savage look. ‘I really am not accustomed to being contradicted, Miss Williams, especially by those who do not have the intellectual capacity to appreciate the profundity of the Fuhrer’s teachings.’
Now it was Norma’s turn to be silent, to take a few moments to cogitate, to wonder if, perhaps, this Dupe sitting in front of her really did have knowledge of what his ‘real self’ had been when he was alive. But surely, she thought, that was impossible. As she understood it, one of the immutable programming instructions ABBA had been given was that none of the Dupes populating the Demi-Monde would have any remembrance of what they were – or in the case of the PreLived Singularities, what they had been – in the Real World.
An awkward thought struck her: she was a Dupe and she had a remembrance of what she was in the Real World. It was all rather confusing and very, very disturbing.
Norma decided to play it cool. ‘Okay, so you’ve heard of Adolf Hitler. Big deal. Okay, so you think that lunatic was the best thing since the wheel. The question is: so what?’
‘An apposite question, Miss Williams, a very apposite question. And I understand from the disdainful manner in which it is posed that you have little appreciation of my talents. Indeed, if I were a normal man possessed of normal abilities and normal ambitions the answer to your question would be “not much”. It would matter not a fig that I have knowledge of the Real World denied my fellow Demi-Mondians. But I am not a normal man, Miss Williams, I am one of the Ubermenschen, one of the Supermen whose destiny it is to rule the world. I am the Messiah sent to re-establish the hegemony of the Master Race – the Aryans – and to purify the world of the contamination of the lesser races. I am charged by Fate to enact the Final Solution. And being an Ubermensch, I am a quirk of Nature, Miss Williams. Oh, I do not allude here simply to my genius and my skills as a leader but to the fact that uniquely in all of the Demi-Monde, I am the only one with memories of what the man on whom I am modelled achieved. I remember who and what I was.’
That shook Norma up. It was easy to dismiss the inhabitants of the Demi-Monde as just figments of ABBA’s fevered quantum imagination but not so easy when the bastards started to talk about having memories of their previous existence in the Real World. That the Dupe of Reinhard Heydrich should somehow be all-aware seemed to be a dangerous occurrence. The son of a bitch was bad enough when his malignant, Luciferian personality was confined to the Demi-Monde, but when it seemed suddenly to have become Real World-perceptive…
‘How do you know all this?’
Heydrich gave a nonchalant wave of his hand. ‘Who knows? It might be that my personality – my will – is simply too powerful for ABBA to contain.’
ABBA? The bastard knew about ABBA.
‘ABBA?’ she asked, hoping against hope that Heydrich was talking about the Demi-Mondian deity rather than the supercomputer running the simulation she was trapped in.
Heydrich carelessly flicked the ash from his cigarette onto the carpet. ‘Please, do not play the naif with me, Miss Williams. ABBA is the immensely powerful difference engine that designed and created the Demi-Monde as a playground for the American military to train their soldiers and to test their pathetic little theories about urban warfare.’
Jesus.
‘Okay, so if you know about ABBA then you must know that you’re just a computer glitch, a ghost in the machine. How does it feel, Heydrich, to be nothing more than a computer programmer’s wet dream? How does it feel to know you can be edited out with one click of a mouse?’
Heydrich shrugged. ‘There is no difference between how I felt when I was active in the Real World and how I feel here, in the Demi-Monde. Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. In both realities my existence hangs on the whim of Fate. What difference does it make if I am killed by the bullet of a Czech terrorist or the whim of a computer programmer? In both existences I would still be very much dead. But’ – he gave a chuckle – ‘here in the Demi-Monde, I am very much alive.’
‘That still brings me back to my original question: so what?’ Norma gave Heydrich a careless smile, as though what he was saying had little import. The last thing she wanted was this lunatic to appreciate how unsettled he was making her feel.
‘Your problem, Miss Williams, is that you are unable to understand or appreciate what it is like to taste power and have it snatched from you. I sit here agonised by the thought of “what if?”. What if those Czech terrorists hadn’t succeeded in assassinating me? What if I had been on hand to wrest the levers of power from Hitler when he faltered and his will crumbled? What if I had become Fuhrer?’
‘You would have been hanged with all the other Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, that’s what.’
‘Perhaps. But then, perhaps not.’
‘Unfortunately for you, Heydrich…’
‘You will address me by my title.’
‘And you can kiss my ass.’
There was a sour silence for a moment as the pair of them glared at one another. Finally Heydrich broke the silence. ‘No matter. Call me what you will. We are alone.’
‘Then I’ll tell you what you are: you’re a computer-drawn chimera. You’re a nothing, just a piece of digital doodling. And that being the case all of your psychotic “what if” scenarios will have to be played out here in the Demi-Monde. And you better enjoy it while you can because one day someone in the Real World is going to pull the plug on this shitty little world of yours.’
