snap,’ he said with a self-satisfied chomp. ‘But that’s only part of the magic that is the Demi-Monde. All Dupes active in the Demi-Monde are modelled on real people: they are what we call the NowLive. ABBA simply dipped into DNA and other databases around the world and modelled the Dupes from the composite data it gleaned from them.’
‘These Dupes, your NowLive, are real people?’
‘Modelled on real people, Miss Thomas. But we’ve gone further than that. We wanted the enemy leaders our neoFights would face to be as accurate as possible. Our research has shown us that the warlords who lead enemy forces in Asymmetric Warfare Environments tend to be psychotics… madmen… fanatics, the type of charismatic lunatics we in the military call Singularities. To make the Demi-Monde’s cyber-milieu ultra-realistic we needed to have enemy leaders who replicated the cunning and the callousness of these Singularities. So we had ABBA select appropriate individuals from history, model them and then seed them into the Demi-Monde. These PreLived Singularities look, think and act just like their Real World equivalents did, and as their Real World equivalents were horrible, horrible people, so are their Dupes.’
‘Lemme get this right,’ said Ella carefully, ‘the people you fight in this Demi-Monde game…’
‘Simulation.’
‘Game, simulation, whatever. The people you fight in the Demi-Monde are modelled on real people, but you’ve also introduced some characters from history.’
‘Correct.’
‘For instance…’
‘The ones you are probably most familiar with are Henry VIII, Maximilien Robespierre and Ivan the Terrible.’
‘Oh, c’mon. That’s impossible. No computer can recreate dead people.’
‘ABBA can,’ said the General flatly.
Ella laughed. ‘Nuts. I don’t believe it.’
‘Your incredulity is understandable, Miss Thomas. So perhaps, before we go much further with our discussions, we should give you a taste of the Demi-Monde, we should show you just how lifelike it really is.’
4
The Demi-Monde: 40th Day of Winter, 1004
RaTionalism is an avowedly and uncompromisingly atheistic creed developed by the renegade Rodina thinker and ardent Royalist Karl Marx, which strives by a process of Dialectic ImMaterialism to secure logical explanations regarding the Three Great Dilemmas: the Creation, the Confinement, and the Purpose of the Demi-Monde. RaTionalism denies all supernatural interpretations with respect to the Three Great Dilemmas. Though it remains a popular creed within the so-called ‘Scientific Community’ (notably Future Historians and preScientists), RaTionalism is now outlawed throughout the ForthRight and dismissed as the nonsensical and perverse belief system it is by most Demi-Mondians.
– Religions of the Demi-Monde: Otto Weininger, University of Berlin Publications
‘Itta gettin’ much awful late, Miss Trixiebell. Message from your father wassa that you should be home by the soonest time…’
Trixie ignored Luigi’s entreaties, ignored his ludicrous Roman accent that made him sound as though he would, at any moment, try to sell her an ice cream. Trixie hated to be hurried by slaves… she hated to be hurried by anyone. Once Trixie Dashwood started something, nothing, but nothing would stop her finishing. Trixie Dashwood was famous for her resolute spirit. Or her pig-headedness, as her governess preferred to call it.
Trixie waved impatiently to Luigi to begin. The huge Slave-Guard removed his thick, fur-lined gauntlets, spat on his callused hands, took a firm grip on the handle of his pickaxe, shuffled his feet until they were shoulder-width apart and swung.
The crash as the steel of the pickaxe head met the Mantleite floor made Trixie flinch back. Instinctively she raised her arm over her eyes to protect them from flying stone chips.
But there weren’t any.
‘Nor-thing,’ said Luigi dolefully.
Trixie looked down at the spot where the pickaxe had struck the Mantle. Luigi was right, there was ‘nor-thing’ to be seen there: not a scratch, not a chip, not a mark of any kind.
Ridiculous!
Stamping her foot in frustration, Trixie slapped the slave hard across his face. ‘You’re useless, Luigi, absolutely useless. If you don’t shape up I’ll have to sell you!’
Despite the enormous difference in their relative size, the huge Italian shrank back from the girl’s fury. No one wanted to be near Lady Trixiebell Dashwood when she was in one of her fits of pique.
Trixie threw down her gloves, grabbed the pickaxe out of Luigi’s hand, gave him the lantern she had been holding, and steadied herself to swing the axe. It was obvious to her that Luigi, big and powerful though he was, was so blood-starved that he couldn’t wield the pickaxe with enough force to trouble the Mantle-ite.
Useless bloodless Quartier Chaudians.
Why couldn’t she have a Chink Slave-Guard like all the other girls at the Academy? After all, an Eyetie was only one step up from a Shade. Shades… ugh!
With a resolute set to her mouth – usually a precursor to one of her famous tantrums – Trixie swung the pickaxe. Though physically best described as small and thin – ‘svelte’ as her governess preferred to call her – Trixie was a very determined young woman – ‘girl’ as her governess preferred to call her – and hence was able to bring the point of the pickaxe down on the Mantle with considerable force. Indeed, the axe struck with so much force that the jarring impact sent vibrations juddering up the handle, out along her arms, across her shoulders, to finally set her teeth dancing.
Hardly noticing the pain, Trixie tossed the pickaxe to one side and dropped to her knees, ignoring the damage done to her very expensive silk stockings – smuggled in from Paris – her gaze searching for the impact point. There wasn’t one: the pickaxe hadn’t even scratched the surface of the Mantle. Perfect and pristine it lay before her, glowing with its characteristic green sheen.
Damn and double-damn.
Disappointed though she was, the RaTionalist in Trixie told her that she shouldn’t be surprised by the outcome of her little experiment. Her findings were at one with the results from all the other tests conducted on the Mantle by RaTionalist scientists in every corner of the Demi-Monde.
Trixie corrected herself: the Demi-Monde, being circular, didn’t have any corners.
Corners or no, the point was that no matter where on the Demi-Monde they tried, Ratty scientists found it impossible to dent, chip or even scar the Mantle. Perplexed and bemused, Trixie slumped down on her pert bottom and pondered. Just what was the Mantle made out of if it could shrug off a blow as hard as the one she’d just administered? What was this mysterious substance, Mantle-ite?
Whatever it was, Mantle-ite was harder, tougher, more impervious than any rock that had been discovered anywhere in the Demi-Monde. It was harder, tougher and more impervious even than steel. And being harder, tougher and more impervious than anything known to man – or woman – meant that the Mantle – the crust that covered the Demi-Monde once the top coating of thirty feet of soil had been cleared away – wasn’t natural.
But being unnatural didn’t mean – as the UnFunDaMentalists would have it – that it was supernatural. There was nothing magical about the Mantle: it was just unexplained. The Mantle might not be Demi-Mondian-made, but it had certainly been made and that ruled out the involvement of gods, Spirits, Daemons and all the other silly entities that UnFunnies believed inhabited the Spirit World.
Find the explanation – the RaTional explanation – to this conundrum, Trixie knew, and she would go a long way towards solving the question that had bedevilled thinkers in the DemiMonde since time immemorial: how had the Demi-Monde been created? And finding the answer to that would help solve the even more perplexing puzzle as to why the Demi-Monde had been created.
But if her delving had been unproductive regarding discovering the composition of the Mantle, it had been very fruitful in other ways. The runes she’d found embossed into the Mantle had been a real find, and that they
