Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One Read online

  “Oh, for a simpler age!” In the old days they just put ads on your screen. Now they took over part of your brain. It was all… insidious. Could Greenslade have been threatening to go public with this?

  The Moderator shook its head. “It’s all in the User Agreement, I assure you. Quite legal.”

  “Hold on,” McHaffey said, not liking the whole mind-reading business at all. “You’re not saying I’m… I’m part of you…”

  It smiled. “The mind-sharing is somewhat more intimate with my donors, naturally. Admittedly, you’re more impulsive than the ideal donor, but selection is limited at present.”

  Lord. Between gestalt brain-borrowers, simulated paradises, and walking, talking dolls, how was a person meant to cope with the world? At least Tail had the right idea. With the loss of his bacon tree he’d decided to take a nap until McHaffey fixed the reality trouble.

  “Not everything unfamiliar is sinister,” the Moderator suggested.

  There was certainly something sinister about that doll of Greenslade’s. No, not sinister, really. More pathetic, once the creepiness of it faded with time. The way it couldn’t move properly, but was almost trying to communicate something.

  “How many data streams are coming through my game transponder?”

  “It’s not a...” the Moderator started to say when McHaffey glowered, as only an annoyed constable with the backing of Apostolic Succession can glower. “Three.”

  “Me. Tail. Show me what the other one is seeing right now.”

  Turning to face the same direction as McHaffey, the Moderator called into existence a large oval window with a 3D view of… Vancouver. A familiar view.

  “That’s my kitchen window. That doll is looking out my window, and sending the data through the transponder. Where’s it ending up?”

  For a few moments the Moderator looked thoughtful. “A location in the Alpha Zone. How strange.”

  “Take me there.”

  It required a mere instant to reposition them. Whatever McHaffey’s vague anticipations had been about the nature of the testing area, they certainly hadn’t come close to the reality. He was in Greenslade’s elevator, going up.

  Beside him, the Moderator shifted uneasily. “Regrettably, I have no permission to affect the Alpha Zone simulations,” it said.

  “Terrific.” There was one consolation: McHaffey’s mind had outfitted him in his ordinary police gear, with body armour, truncheon, and pistol. It made him wonder if that wasn’t the role he was, at heart, most comfortable with. At least, until he felt the pinch of his dog collar.

  Eleven, twelve, chime, and the doors drew apart onto a corridor darker than, but much like, the real one. Where the mural had been, there was only blank wall, as if the simulation wasn’t quite completed yet. Tail’s growl brought McHaffey’s mind back into focus enough to recognize that something else was out of place. A blacker shape crouched in the shadows by Greenslade’s door was stirring, unfolding itself, and stepping out into the half-light of the corridor. It was met by a deep, warning woof from Tail. Since the Moderator politely extended an arm to allow McHaffey to go first, he sidled out of the lift staying close to the near wall, and slid his truncheon from its belt-loop at the same time, while Tail advanced next to him, bristling. The leathery-skinned thing by the door inclined its low forehead this way and that, then set about chewing on its long claws with peg-like teeth.

  It was Tambunting. The thing’s broad nose, twice the size of any human’s, and its dour expression only confirmed the impression. He’d been turned into a gargoyle.

  All three edged around the creature cautiously, though it showed no signs of hostility. It even waggled its talons so encouragingly toward Greenslade’s door that McHaffey tried the handle. To his surprise, it opened easily.

  So that’s where the tree went, he thought. Not a poplar now. He took each descending stair slower than the last, so preoccupied with the state of the room that his forward momentum was ebbing away. His last step crackled through dry twigs until it reached floor, where his sole stuck, feeling like it had pressed into fresh tar. All around the room were drifts of broken sticks, covering the furniture and lending the place something of the atmosphere of an especially unkempt crow’s nest. In the middle, where there should have been eggs, was a great tangled and leafless hawthorn tree growing from out of the floor, with an iridescent blue-green peacock squatting atop it. The bird spread the broad fan of its tail at McHaffey, which might have been very pretty had the dozens of feather-spots not been human eyes that rolled and blinked.

  “I have a feeling the police recruit’s manual didn’t cover this situation,” McHaffey said. “What is this?” he asked the Moderator.

  “Something the alpha testers created? I don’t sense any connection to players. Only something unusual, that I’ve only felt with one other player.”

  No help there. Probably the Moderator’s dim memory of Greenslade’s last appearance. Whatever it was, it looked like no suicide note or crime scene that McHaffey had ever witnessed. He decided on a direct approach.

  “I found Greenslade’s body,” he said, addressing the bird for lack of a more sensible suspect. “Tell me anything you know about her.”

  Somewhat to his surprise, the peacock seemed to listen to him. It ruffled its tail and launched itself into the air. As it glided gracefully towards the floor, the gaudy, blobby bird stretched and blurred, becoming...

  By the time its feet touched the floor it was a tall woman, tightly clothed in glistening peacock feathers. She spent just long enough looking smug at McHaffey’s astonishment for him to realize that he knew her face. Greenslade. She laughed.

  “I appreciate your concern, constable. But as you can see, I’m not dead.”

  McHaffey glanced to the Moderator. It looked hopeful after seeing Greenslade but shrugged, as if to say that this was a matter best left to competent legal authorities. Or to a human. Tail kept his eye on the bird-woman, but didn’t offer any advice either, except a comment on Greenslade’s housekeeping in the form of some suspicious snuffling of the ooze underfoot.

  “I take it you’re claiming to be Meaghan Greenslade?” he asked.

  “That organic mess back in the other world is regrettable, but I’m sure someone will take care of it,” she said. “I created this world, and I intend to live here. Forever.”

  “You discovered the Almatis technique,” said McHaffey, causing Greenslade to turn her eyes sharply onto him from where she’d been contemplating the tree.

  “So you know of it.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Almatis Corp. collapsed quite suddenly, as I recall, and several directors disappeared. I don’t suppose that involved you in some way?”

  “Possibly. I also take it you’re claiming Greenslade’s death was… suicide?”

  The bird-woman swept a hand down her feathered body. “It’s a debatable issue,” she said.

  He looked to the Moderator again for advice.

  “She is an avatar of some kind,” it said, smirking with suppressed pleasure. Or giddiness from Greenslade’s presence.

  “Yes, Omega,” Greenslade said. When McHaffey looked puzzled, she added “That’s what I call him. The Greek numeral for eight hundred. You should visit more often,” she said, to the Moderator again. “I have a lot of changes in mind that I need to discuss with you.” Then, turning back to McHaffey, “If you’re done investigating, or whatever you’re doing, Omega will show you out.”

  Was he finished? How could he tell it was really Greenslade – perform a Turing test on her? And could she be allowed to just slough off her body like an out-of-style dress, to take up another one in a simulation? What would the company say? Or was the avatar a fake, planted by a murderer? And what on earth was she doing posing as a peacock on top of a thorn tree?

  McHaffey took a stroll about the room to grasp for clues. Aside from the squalor, it wasn’t much different from the real apartment. As he got closer to Greenslade, he found himself wondering if she were growing
the feathers rather than wearing them. Her eyebrows, questioningly arched, were feathered too.

  “Tell me about the puppet,” he said, “the one with the top hat.”

  And why a dead tree, he thought. He toyed with a twig, pondering whether the bark was green underneath, getting pricked by a long thorn in the process.

  “Puppet?” Greenslade said, a little nervously. “That thing. It’s only a stupid toy, from some movie. You can toss it out, along with the corpse.”

  McHaffey grimaced at the drop of blood welling out of his finger, noticing for the first time that the simulation included pain. Annoyed, he snapped off the offending twig.

  The tree shrieked, the scream dying away into a whimper, as though he’d broken off its finger. Blood poured from the severed branch. A reflex made him look to Greenslade for an explanation; instead of giving him one she leapt forward and offered him a hard shove into the hawthorn. The tree screamed, and McHaffey screamed too, pierced through the clothes and flesh by a hundred barbs. He hardly knew what was happening next, through the agony and the noise. From where he was writhing, impaled on thorns like a shrike’s supper, McHaffey could only watch events unfold. Tail, snarling, had sunk his teeth into Greenslade’s leg and the two were struggling barely more than an arm’s breadth away.

  Two forest-green panthers materialized out of thin air to fall onto the bird-woman, knocking her to the ground, where they pinioned her with fangs like daggers. McHaffey gave up trying to extricate himself and simply watched as a masked samurai in armour, bristling with swords and horns, appeared next. And all the while a voice had been muttering beneath the din, saying something he could only now make out, with the racket dying down. “…stop. Make her stop… Make her stop...” It was the tree. He could see enough branches piled nearby to be reminded of the vast kindling heap the room had become; he knew the floor’s sticky coating to be gore, and for a moment he was sick with the sheer inventory of suffering it all represented.

  He was brought back to the present by the warrior’s odd dance. Seemingly chasing a fly, the samurai made little grabs at the air, glancing this way and that between snatches. On the fifth, or sixth, the samurai seemed content and, drawing a sword, sliced the air. Once satisfied with the mime performance, the samurai turned to McHaffey and removed the grotesque mask. A lovely Japanese girl looked at him from under the curly helmet, with concern.

  “I’m afraid I’ve been tailing you. You always get into such interesting trouble, McHaffey,” she said.

  “Er,” McHaffey began, eyes flashing the length and breadth of the samurai girl in search of a mental handhold.

  “Oh, this?” She indicated the get-up. “It’s a hobby.”

  When McHaffey’s face remained screwed up in bafflement, in addition to exquisite pain, understanding lit up her face at last.

  “Of course. This is me from fifty years ago, or so. What do you think?”

  “Tetsuyama.”

  She lifted McHaffey out of the hawthorn and onto Greenslade’s couch, where she joined him and considered the squirming bird-woman, now merely grimacing at her panther captors.

  “Araxi and Jo,” Tetsuyama explained, twitching her sword toward the cats. They both looked up at hearing their names and shifted to brace Greenslade with paws that were changing into hands, the feline shapes metamorphosing into fur-clad human bodies. “Felt you were here,” Araxi said, “through the Moderator.” Beside them the tree continued its grim muttering.

  “And this?” McHaffey asked, making little grabs at the air and regretting it when his injured hands ached in protest.

  Tetsuyama watched his performance and removed her helmet, releasing a wave of glossy black hair that fell to the scaled sode sticking out from either shoulder. “Ah, you see I was severing the last link between them,” she said, indicating Greenslade and the tree.

  “I don’t see. What link?”

  “I mean, they had diverged too much to recombine, but hadn’t fully separated. Like conjoined twins.”

  “Twins!” McHaffey said, jumping to his feet to regard the bird-woman and the tree, as if some resemblance might prove the claim. The Moderator was approaching the pair too, its stricken look changing back to awestruck fascination. The bird-Greenslade stirred with indignation.

  “That’s no twin,” she said, “It’s a growth, an offshoot. It’s an artefact of the transference. It’s demented. It killed my body!”

  “Is that why you’ve been torturing it all this time?” McHaffey asked.

  “I haven’t! It’s only a pseudo-avatar, with a few defective bits of my personality.”

  When McHaffey continued to look impassive, she added “It can only speak when you break branches. Go ahead. Try.”

  Then she wants something from it, he thought. McHaffey addressed the tree, without effect. With a wince, he snapped a twig. A dribble of blood dripped out. The tree groaned.

  “It’s true,” the tree said. “I’m nothing. Only worthless, corrupt data.”

  McHaffey asked the Moderator’s opinion once more. “The tree does seem like the bird. They’re both… like him,” it said, pointing to Jo Creely, who was still restraining the Greenslade-bird with his furred arms.

  “Full-digital sentients?” Creely suggested, startling McHaffey with the aptness of the reply. The Moderator nodded assent. Not since before the Almatis incident had Creely been able to string words together in any kind of sensible conversation. Here he was… as normal as he’d ever been.

  The hawthorn had lapsed back into a seemingly depressed silence. Getting its side of the story wasn’t going to be easy, considering the process. Lord knew, sometimes he felt the same way himself: useless, and any communication a torture.

  “There’s no other way to talk with it?” he asked, looking in turn to everyone in the room. There wasn’t.

  Gritting his teeth, McHaffey snapped off another twig and drove the thorn through his palm in the same motion. Even knowing there was no real wound, it still stabbed like a knife.

  “What does she – the bird-woman – want from you, and why won’t you give it?”

  “System knowledge,” the tree moaned. “Programming. I got it all. She mustn’t have it. She’d abuse, pervert this place, she…” and the tree trailed off into silence.

  Another branch, and another spine through his hand.

  “What would she do if she had your knowledge?” he asked.

  “Look around you. What do you think?”

  Standing in the midst of a room full of blood and pain wrought by the bird-woman, he had to admit it was a foolish question. “Did you control the puppet?” he added quickly.

  “Yes, I…”

  McHaffey grimaced and pushed another broken branch’s thorn into his palm.

  “Are you Meaghan?” he said.

  The tree was silent for so long he checked the stick for blood.

  “I… I suppose so,” she said at last.

  What a mess, McHaffey thought, drawing out the barb. One dead body and two lost souls. The bird one wrestled herself upright.

  “You’ve got no jurisdiction here,” she told McHaffey. “I committed no crime.”

  Getting a bit fed up with her, McHaffey folded his arms resolutely.

  “Under the law, you’re not even a person. You’re intellectual property of Transparadisium. If I chose to delete you, I don’t think they’d have a problem with it.”

  “That’d be murder!” said the bird-Greenslade.

  He was inclined to agree. He brushed back his hair, leaving a long smear of blood across his forehead.

  “Moderator?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “If I ask you to manipulate things here, what can you do?”

  “With your level of access? Anything.”

  Even in an avatar body, McHaffey felt a headache coming on.

  “You said you couldn’t affect the Alpha Zone.”

  “On my own. I can act as your proxy, however.”

  Wearily, McHaffey shook his hea
d. “How many of your eight hundred parts are currently lawyers?” he asked. “Never mind,” he added, when the Moderator looked on the verge of enumerating the membership of its mind. “Remove all permissions of the bird-Greenslade to affect anything in Transparadisium.”

  “No!” she said, wrestling more desperately against Araxi and Jo.

  “She can exist, and interact with players, but cannot change anything, or create, or destroy, or harm anything. And shut down the Alpha Test Zone. Eliminate it.”

  “No!” she repeated, screeching almost like the bird she imitated. “You’ve no right!” The bird-Greenslade twisted out of Jo’s grip, elbowed Araxi in the face, and sprang into the air, transforming as she went. Araxi merely clutched a fistful of tail feathers before the peacock thrashed to the window and swooped away. Even as she did, the room was dissolving into a dark void, leaving only the people, and the tree. McHaffey turned to it, or her.

  “And you,” he said. What to do with a half-person made of expertise, self-loathing, sacrifice, and hopelessness? “I think you should join the Moderator. Omega.” He had no idea what part of the tree was her ears, so he whispered close to a twig. “I only have a rough idea of what really happened here, and what you’ve suffered, but I know you’ve suffered enough. Whatever you’ve done, or think you’ve done, or failed to do, you’re forgiven.”

  McHaffey straightened up and called over the Moderator, who approached with something like reverence.

  “It would be an honour, G-slade, to have you join me,” it said, and reached hesitantly to touch the hawthorn.

  Nothing happened.

  Arguing would mean snapping off more pieces of Meaghan, and McHaffey hardly had the stomach for it, even without sharing the pain literally. But he could imagine what she was thinking. That no-one could really feel honoured by anything she did, or was. She’d failed, fallen apart, lost herself. Even her opus magnum, Transparadisium, was unfinished.

  “This is your world,” he told her. “These people wouldn’t be here if it didn’t mean something to them. Omega wouldn’t welcome you if you didn’t mean something to them. Even if you do nothing else worthwhile, you can at least please them by letting them try to help you.”