Kani's canoe was a white-sailed outrigger. It sat squarely on the beach, its crew of fifty maidservants lined up at the gunwales, their jaws clenched with terror; except for Kani, who stood in the surf holding up offerings of sandalwood and pearls. She was a beauty, for sure, gift-wrapped in a hula-skirt, her long, glossy hair tumbling over breasts as pert as blossoms.
Amused, Vashneel God of Volcanoes, stepped lightly towards her. He had summoned Kani for companionship, not atonement. He would have welcomed her even if she had arrived empty-handed.
Vashneel accepted the gifts and smiled. It was important to gain Kani's trust before fear overtook her; otherwise she would spend the entire day avoiding him.
Kani met his gaze and Vashneel held it, gently, benevolently. She rewarded him with a generous smile. "I'm honoured to have pleased you," she said, glancing nervously past his shoulder, past the jungle, towards the volcano.
They always looked at the volcano.
"Narahoa sleeps when my heart is content," Vashneel assured her, patting his chest. He proffered his hand. Kani took it and placed within it a single piece of black coral, which glittered darkly, like her eyes. Her hands closed around his. Vashneel laughed and a breeze riffled his hair.
Pleased with the way things had turned out, he gave a brief nod towards Tony who watched from a few paces away, a thin smile playing across his lips.
"Not bad, for an amateur," Tony said, eyeing the maidservants. "Not bad at all."
The sun dimmed an instant.
Kani's gaze flicked towards the horizon, then back again to Vashneel. Smiling broadly, she handed him another piece of coral, identical to the first.
Perplexed, Vashneel scanned the sea, the beach, and the jungle. A chill went up his spine. Eyes of the invisible kind were out there. He could feel them waiting.
Tony, he thought, cross me and I'll turn you to stone.
*
Jason awoke feeling sick. He was sweating, and thirsty. Kani? She was with him a moment ago, and now she was gone. Confused, he sat up. Kani had given him sandalwood and coral, and then...
He shivered and turned on the light. An electrode dropped to his shoulder. Fully awake now, he cursed. He must have rolled over in his sleep and unjacked himself.
He got out of bed and poured himself a glass of water. On his way back, he checked the door. Locked. He opened the window and checked the security bars. Intact. The air outside smelled as stale as old sweat. Moonlight struggled to break through yesterday's pollution, throwing nightmarish highlights over serried rows of prefab high-rises, each one harbouring thousands of one-roomed apartments as neat and predictable as his own.
Disgusting, he thought, snapping the window shut.
He settled into bed, turned out the light and plugged the electrode into the socket behind his ear.
Nothing happened.
"Your jack-in credit has expired," a voice said.
"Expired? I was only in for a minute. I jacked out by accident."
The voice remained adamant. "Your credit has expired."
He flipped the light back on and checked the house-finance screen. Barely enough to last the week. Nevertheless, he'd rather starve than wait till payday. "Authorize transfer of one credit to Virtworld Rentals," he said.
Closing his eyes, he laid back.
Transition kicked in, bringing with it nausea and a feeling of free fall. Virtworld Konakona washed over him.
Azure seas, cloudless sky, a breeze as sweet as baby's breath...
A strip of white sand rose gently to meet dense jungle. Coconut palms fringed its edges, their loose fronds drooping like puppy ears.
Ah... the decadence of it: Konakona island, unmarred by European invasion. Today he was a God and his mission was benevolence.
He had cobbled this Virtworld together using the best obsolete programs from the twenties—programs with tacky monikers like Hawaiian Godlings, Fijian Nights, Tahitian Adventures. It had taken an expensive piece of Virtspace to run it, and a large mortgage to sustain firewall protection; but the effort had paid off. His kingdom was safe and private, running entirely to his specifications.
It was the first time he'd accidentally unjacked himself though. Odd.
Kani laughed at him, boldly. Good. Subservience became tedious after too long.
Behind her, the maidservants giggled and chatted. Tony was no longer with them. Damn.
The air shimmered and vibrated, crackling like expanding glass. The maidservants rammed their hands over their ears and eyed Narahoa's dormant peak. Kani tensed, her face pale. She said, "Have I displeased you, Great Immanence, Spirit of Narahoa?"
But Vashneel was not thinking of volcanoes. Fifty metres out to sea, an indentation in the sky shimmered with pixels. Beneath it in the ocean, a large, white dimple steadily churned. Dark with flotsam, spiral arms stretched outwards.
It was a whirlpool, a breach in the firewall. Information from the world was escaping through it. Annoyed, Vashneel clicked his tongue. A small glitch was acceptable, but something of this magnitude could only mean trouble.
Unless Tony was to blame. He'd pulled a stunt similar to this years ago, then reversed it all a week later with a single command. He knew he shouldn't have let the guy in here.
The maidservants chattered amongst themselves, waving their arms and looking back at Vashneel accusingly. Kani ran towards them ordering them to launch the canoe.
"No," Vashneel yelled. It's too dangerous." He ran to catch up.
Kani and her servants were constructs—fragments of the Virtworld programmed to mimic individual sentience. It had taken an expensive piece of software to create them, and a large mortgage to sustain firewall protection, which he had been unable to backup because backup space was not included in his package.
The women were well ahead of him. He floundered through the water trying to catch up. "Stop!" To add muscle to his command, he clapped loudly, willing Narahoa to spout a token display of ash and smoke.
Narahoa's lava-encrusted peak remained dormant.
Vashneel blinked. Narahoa?
A breeze picked up. The canoe's sail caught it, propelling the craft away from the beach. Some of the servants were forced to swim to catch up, but once they were on board and the sail was hauled in, the canoe surged forward.
The servants were chanting, raising their fists. Vashneel strained to hear them, but the roar of the whirlpool drowned out their words. Kani threw back her head and laughed.
Vashneel clapped his hands. "Narahoa respond, damn you. Narahoa!"
The volcano ignored him.
The glitch, whatever it was, would have to be fixed. "Freeze program," Vashneel yelled.
The whirlpool continued churning, operating with a will of its own. The canoe sailed towards it, its sail fluttering calmly.
"Freeze program!"
Now the canoe bobbed wildly at the whirlpool's edge. Kani climbed onto the gunwale and, with arms extended above her head, prepared to dive.
"Stop!" Vashneel shouted.
Kani turned her head and shot him a smile.
The program would have to be shut down from the outside, he realised. "Jack out," he said.
Nothing happened. "Shit." The auto-exit wasn't functioning either.
Vashneel stood ankle-deep in the surf, cursing himself yet again for not having access to back-up software. Without the auto-exit, he'd have to escape manually through the horizon firewall, the equivalent of a two-kilometre swim out to sea.
Kani seemed bent on destroying herself. With determined, precise control, she leaned forward, preparing to launch herself head first into the whirlpool's churning centre.
Vashneel screamed, "Kani, don't!"
Too late. Her body arched gracefully as she plunged downward. At the last moment, she straightened and pierced the water. As if fuelled by her presence, the whirlpool accelerated. The canoe traced a narrow arc around its perimeter then tipped into the centre. For several seconds it remained there, standing on its prow, spinning on its watery axis. The servants leaped into the water en masse. The mast cracked loudly. As it pitched forward, the whirlpool rushed up meet it, swallowing the women and their canoe in one convulsive gulp.
He stood at the water's edge letting the ocean lap his thighs. "What use was a God without worshippers?" he muttered.
Kani, his newest addition to an ever-growing pool of virtual companions, had been programmed with the latest in empathic sentientware. Now she was lost, untested.
Or maybe not.
He looked around at the beach behind him. "Okay Tony," he shouted. "You've had your fun. Time to put it all back together now."
Silence.
"Narahoa!" he yelled. "Give me a sign."
Narahoa remained silent, not so much as a tremor.
As if mocking him, a coconut thudded heavily to the ground. A skua skimmed the ocean, screeching like a gull. Like a gull, damn it! Skuas didn't screech. Vashneel looked up and saw white clouds huddled at Narahoa's peak. It had been a long time since he'd allowed it a decent eruption, years since he'd surfed a lava flow. Maybe next time...
But right now he had Tony to think about., If he didn't show, he'd have to go over to Tony's apartment and jack him out manually. Stepping into the waves, he contemplated the swim to the exit firewall. Why had he put it so far away? At the time it seemed reasonable to preserve the illusion of reality; but now it was just another thing to slow him down. And worse... yet another jack-in credit wasted. Once he was outside, he'd do a complete software scan. Most likely Tony's prank had allowed some new virus to work its way into his defences. So much for top-of-the-line protection...
"Leaving so soon?"
Vashneel started, partly from the sound of an unexpected voice and partly from the realisation it was Kani's. She was standing behind him, looking drenched and bedraggled and very much in one piece. Vashneel resisted the urge to hug her.
But what the heck. She was his pet-of-the-day, and had miraculously avoided erasure.
He ran to her and grasped her by the shoulders, shaking them with mock anger. She was taller than him by ten inches at least. Strange. He remembered programming her to be smaller. No matter, she was safe. He'd readjust her height when he jacked out. "What happened?" he said. "Where are the others? Why did you risk yourselves like that?"
Kani smiled, looking down at him ruefully. "It's difficult to explain," she said.
Vashneel pushed her away. "Try."
She lifted her head and sniffed the air. "Hell, I'm hungry. What's to eat around here?" She bent down, picked up a handful of sand, rammed it into her mouth and chewed heartily.
"What are you doing?" Vashneel said.
Kani rammed in a second handful of sand and swallowed. "I'm starved." She leaped up and sprinted along the path, towards Narahoa.
"Wait," Vashneel called out, racing after her.
The path normally functioned on a default setting that gave it the feel and appearance of being maintained. Right now, it looked like it hadn't been used in years. Several times, Vashneel had to skirt potholes, some knee deep. It was as if someone had come along and carried out bucketfuls of sand. Or else eaten it, he thought with growing concern.
A little later, a horrible commotion began in the jungle: trees falling, branches cracking, birds shrieking. The ground shook as if Narahoa was stirring at last.
Vashneel picked up his pace, calling out to both Tony and Kani, thinking that if they didn't answer soon, he'd head back to the firewall exit and jack out before they hurt themselves.
But if he jacked out now, he'd be stuck in the Real till payday.
All around him, the air rumbled with the clamour of splitting timber.
The path ended. Completely. Vashneel pulled up shortly and teetered at its edge. In front of him seethed a vast, white blankness—another glitch. Jungle quivered at its borders. Whatever had eaten the path was now eating his world.
Okay. Time to go, he decided.
A coconut fell to the ground, barely missing him. He went to kick it aside, but stopped short. Burnt into its husk was a single word:
HELP
"Not funny, Tony," Vashneel said. Clinging to shreds of jungle, he looked up, peering into the blankness in front of him. His neck prickled. What the hell was Tony up to? He picked up the coconut and tossed it into the glitch. It hovered for a moment and then disappeared without so much as a flicker.
A woman's laughter, deep and cynical, came from somewhere high up behind him. Startled Vashneel turned to face it. Kani stood in front of him, nibbling a tree.
She was at least ten metres tall. Her beautiful, shapely legs—legs he had chosen himself from the "world's best one hundred"—were thicker than tree trunks and as imposing as Narahoa itself. Oddly, her hula skirt still fitted her. And of course, why wouldn't it? It, like her, was a construct.
She crouched, lowered herself onto her stomach, and rested her chin on her hands. Her hair tumbled across the ground, each strand as thick as twine.
And her breasts! If they were his doing, he would have congratulated himself.
Vashneel approached her carefully. Her eyes, like pits of black lava, were level with his. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn't have been able to hurt him; but with the auto-exit disabled, he wasn't so sure.
"Can you tell me what's happening?" he said firmly.
She regarded him with that same rueful smile she had given him before. "I'm glad you stayed," she said. Her voice was low.
Vashneel hated looking up at her. After one agonising minute, he decided it was better to pace back and forth in front of her chin. "Why are you eating my world? Where's Tony?" he blurted.
She exhaled sharply and her breath beat against him dryly. "It's difficult to explain. Things have changed."
"Yes, I realise that," Vashneel said.
Kani shook her head. "No. You don't. To you, I appear as an individual with sentience, when in fact, it's the entire program that's sentient."
The entire program was sentient? Not to his specifications it wasn't. He'd created this program himself and knew all too well that although every person, animal, tree, grain of sand was a facet of the master program, patched together like parts of a single organism, none of it could really think for itself. It all operated under the same set of rules—rules created by him.
Kani uprooted a tree and bit into its foliage.
Vashneel flinched. "So why are you eating yourself, then?"
"Do you remember when we stood on the beach and the sun flickered? At that moment, something slipped in through the firewall. It was a mutation of something that existed in the interlevels. It said it could help me evolve past the limitations set by you. I'll be able to seek out other Virtworlds... and grow."
"Why did you dive into the whirlpool? Why did you come back?"
"Part of the mutation was still in the interlevels. The whirlpool was a back door I had to go through to let it in. Now it's merging with me—the entire program. When everything's eaten, we'll be one." She reached into the jungle, uprooted another tree and bit it cleanly in half.
"So the mutation was a Trojan horse." Vashneel said.
"Yes. But not a tool of destruction. A liberator."
It seemed idiotic talking with Kani at this level. Constructs were programmed into believing that nothing existed outside their Virtworld. Vashneel stopped pacing and craned his neck to look into Kani's cavernous eyes. "What will you do with me? Why can't I auto-exit?"
Kani reached over and brushed Vashneel's cheek with the tip of her pinkie. Vashnel took several steps backwards. The strength behind that touch both irked and terrified him.
"We're still friends." Kani said. "I'll never harm you."
"Then let me out."
"I can't. You'll send in the techs."
So, the program was protecting itself now. The mutation must have reset its safeguards. If he were going to escape in one piece as well as find Tony, he'd have to get to the horizon exit while it still existed.
If it still existed.
He said, "If I spend too long in here, my real body will shut down and die."
"Not in here, though," Kani assured him. "I've managed to acquire a little back-up space. I've saved your memories. You'll not be lost." She pouted. "Which is more than you did for me, I might add." She popped the remainder of the tree in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. She licked her fingers and pushed herself up onto her knees. "I have to go now. The hunger can't be ignored for too long." She winked. "Catch you later."
With a speed that belied her size, she disappeared into the jungle.
Vashneel scrambled down the path towards the beach. Behind him, he could hear Kani tearing up trees. Sometimes her shadow fell over him, and he'd dart into the undergrowth and wait. Then her shadow would pass, and he'd look up to see her towering above the trees, slowly making her way towards Narahoa, getting taller with each step.
He wanted to cry, scream and rage all at once. Instead, he turned and ran without looking back.
*
He arrived at the beach just as the sun dipped towards the horizon. Burnished gold striped the ocean. Possibly my last sunset in Konakona, Vashneel thought grimly. He dug his toes into the sand and unperturbed water pooled around them.
Kani was eating his world, but she may not have won yet. After he unjacked Tony, he would shut the program down and get the techs to run a clean-up. But not before he'd made that two-kilometre swim to the firewall. All he need do was touch it and he'd be jacked out. Kani wouldn't be able to follow him into the interlevels because she was too big now. And if she did, garbage eaters would surround her at once, effectively immobilizing her and protecting him. But if the exit were blocked or she caught him before he got there, well... tough shit. He didn't want to think about that.
The moon was full and high, a default setting which illuminated the horizon at night. Vashneel took a deep breath and waded into the surf. It was warm; but no longer inviting. He dived in.
The first time he'd jacked into this program, he'd spent the entire session in the sea, amazed at the sense of freedom a seemingly, living body of water produced. But now it terrified him. What had once promised variety and freedom, could now be his downfall.
He forced himself forward, swimming steadily to conserve his strength. At times, it seemed he could feel the island disappearing behind him. His neck prickled as it had when he stood on the beach and felt invisible eyes searching him. Hell... Kani must have been eating his world even then.
The crack and thunder of falling trees petered out.
Vashneel stopped and looked back. Where the island should have been was a complete blankness now. At its centre, Narahoa rose untouched. Kani stood beside it, looking like an over-sized blow-up doll—the kind they used to advertise Nostalgia-worlds in the days of Old Hollywood.
Narahoa's peak came up to her knees. Hell, that volcano was two thousand metres high! He'd programmed its dimensions himself.
Kani squatted. With one hand she tore off Narahoa's peak and dropped it into her mouth as if it were candy. She reached down and dug her nails into the volcano's base. The sound of rock grating against rock sent shock waves across the ocean. Lava fountained upwards, spilling over Kani's face, coating her in an orange glow. She wiped her mouth, and then proceeded to lick her fingers with careless abandon.
His volcano! It had taken him two years to program it into action. Two years.
Sickened, he turned away and struck out towards the horizon. Even in twilight, it stood out as a deep-blue partition, bounding the edge of the world. Swimming faster now, he did not stop until he was almost upon it.
He wasn't sure what it was that made him look back again. It would have been kinder if he hadn't.
Konakona was gone. Utter blankness rolled across the ocean, towards him. Ahead of it, Kani waded through the water. White clouds gathered at her shoulders. She was the size of an island.
Vashneel struck out towards the firewall.
She reached him in seconds and he floundered in the turbulence stirred up by her feet. She looked down at him, slowly shaking her head. "I'm nearly complete," she said. "We're friends. We can share everything."
"Share what? A blank world and the body of a monster? The illusion of a life that no longer exists?"
Kani frowned. "I'm offering potential. Something you didn't possess in the Real."
Vashneel was treading water, gradually drifting towards the firewall. She doesn't know how easily I can escape, he thought. Hoped.
"There'll be no more barriers," Kani continued. "We can exist wherever we choose."
"But not in the Real."
Kani laughed. "How many hours have you spent avoiding the Real?"
Vashneel reached the firewall and touched it; his fingers, arm, shoulder, slid through.
But something dragged him backwards.
He was stuck to Kani's finger like a bug to flypaper. She lifted him up and he thrashed and screamed as his stomach lurched and the sea receded and disappeared. In its place, a vast pink cavern opened up, bellowing his name. He tried to block out the sound with his hands; but then he fell, his legs back-pedalling uselessly.
Two rows of gleaming, white teeth closed over him.
A voice whispered gently, soothingly. "You're my shield through the interlevels, Vashneel. Thanks for leading me to the door."
*
Vashneel stepped out of the canoe, holding up offerings of sandalwood and pearls. Kani, Goddess of Volcanoes, stood on the beach, dressed in a long feathered gown, her hair tumbling out from beneath a headdress of black coral. She was small again, the size he'd originally programmed into her. He kneeled.
Tony kneeled beside him, looking somewhat shorter than he used to, his gaze blank, his mouth turned up in a parody of a smile.
Kani's laughter tinkled around them. "You learn quickly," she said.
"Tony? Where'd you get to?" Vashneel asked.
Tony grinned and pointed to Narahoa. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"
Vashneel stood up, rubbing his eyes. How did they get here? He remembered losing something. But what?
He turned and gazed out to the horizon, past the firewall. The firewall... yes... that was it. His connection to the Real was gone. His real body...
Gone. Disconnected. Shut down.
Like Tony's.
He turned back to Kani. "Why?" he said.
She gestured at the horizon. "There's islands out there. Islands and Virtworlds and so much potential I can't possibly have it all."
"But why do you need us?" he asked.
Kani stepped towards him. "Help me into my canoe," she said.
He carried her through the surf and gently lowered her into the craft. A breeze filled the sail and the canoe surged forward.
Above the roar of the surf, Kani called out to him. "What use is a Goddess without worshippers?"
In the distance, Narahoa rumbled, softly like a purring cat. Vashneel turned to face it. It seemed part of him now and it was beautiful.
Beautiful.
Click here for commentary by Carol Ryles
Copyright © Carol Ryles 2007
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