The doors of the Silent Land are open for you; the doors of the Hidden Realm are broken down for you. The doormen extend their hands to you. The doormen rejoice at your coming and say:
Enter, favored one, and live here well beloved …
— The Egyptian Book of the Dead (The Chapters of Coming Forth By Day) Ch. 192 (fragment)
The Barbarian, seven feet tall in his fur-lined cloak, red-blonde hair tied back with a leather thong, pored over the map pinned to the table beneath his palms. His companion, cloaked and clad in gray, leaned back in a chair, finishing a glass of Ool-Hrusp wine and fondling the pommel of his narrow-bladed, nasty little sword. The room was small and cramped. The low ceiling made the barbarian seem even taller than he was. The tapestries and carpets crowding the walls and floors and the windows stuffed with scraps of cloth against the ten thousand stinking smokes of the city added to the claustrophobia.
Forgotten for the moment, the dark-haired girl lay sprawled in a chaos of cushions at the room’s far end, her gauzy outfit torn, her makeup smeared.
“Here,” the Barbarian said. “The entrance is in this alley, just off Cheap Street. There is a plague fountain in the courtyard, long ago capped in iron: if we pick the lock on the grating, we’ll find a ladder leading down to a tunnel, and from there a passage to the sorcerer’s cellars. We’ll come up from underneath and surprise him in his laboratory. But there isn’t much night left.”
“One more go with her,” the Gray One said, “and I’ll be ready for anything.”
The Barbarian shrugged, rolling up the map. “As you like. But I think you might want to save a bit of time for the sorcerer’s daughter … even in this city, nights do not last forever …”
The Gray One grinned slyly. “Right you are.” He tilted the last of the wine down his throat and stood. “Well,”—he directed this last at the girl—“I suppose we’re off, sweetmeat. Here’s an only slightly shaved coin of Rime Isle gold for your troubles.” He spun the coin on the table. “There may be another in it for you, if you slip a key under the mat around dawn …”
The Barbarian, stooping to squeeze through the room’s narrow doorway, laughed. “By dawn you’ll have forgotten all about her.”
As the Gray One went out he turned and flashed the girl a last, lascivious grin. The smoke of the street wound darkly around his hooded figure. Somewhere in the night, a woman screamed in terror. “I doubt it,” he said. “There’s something about her that sticks in the mind.”
A rendering glitch dissected his smile, tessellated his teeth against the background of a suddenly empty hood as his head shuddered out of existence. The constellation of pixelating teeth looped “… sticks in the mind … in the mind … mind ….” And then the two were gone.
The dark-haired girl sat up and began counting slowly. At seventy approximated seconds, the perimeter was passed, a moment she felt like a gentle endorphin whirl. The soreness faded from her abused body, the rips in the gauzy outfit healed, her make-up returned to the format it had been in hours before, and a yellow bruise on her thigh that had been deepening to green receded.
“Time to next encounter?”
UNKNOWN
The “girl,” who was in fact a woman, and whose name was Kelebek, frowned. Strange. “Estimate?”
UNAVAILABLE
Kelebek stood up and stretched. She went to the room’s door and opened it. It was night. The Barbarian had been technically correct: even in this city, nights did not last forever. But they could last a very long time. Because they were the preferred backdrop for most client adventures, they had a way of resetting—winding back to a blood-mooned midnight just when you most needed the dawn.
It was deep night now: lanterns flickered behind windowpanes, tavern doorways bled shadow-puppet shows of tankards lifted and shouts out into the street. In this inactive sector, one could clearly tell the difference between bots and NPCs: the bots went about their business, forever following their long loops—a night watchman in a dirty leather cuirass making his rounds, a soft-booted thief darting into an alley, a richly jeweled young woman on promenade with her brace of Kheshite bodyguards. The NPCs, on the other hand, wandered like people recently woken up from anesthesia. They rubbed their eyes, their limbs from which the ghosts of inflicted wounds had already disappeared, readjusted their clothes. Those who could afford it were already absorbed in conversations with people on the outside, in modern language forbidden in active sectors. All the machine-modeled clichés of the City of Adventure, cobbled together from the scraped data of a thousand role-playing games, were left aside as they discussed weddings, deaths, and politics with people not present here.
Their conversations were a bit of a loop as well, Kelebek thought. They didn’t show much in the way of variation. Kelebek waved to the bartender of the Silver Eel, whose name was (or had been) Harun. He was chatting with his sister—Kelebek could tell by the affectionate lilt of his Egyptian Arabic. Harun’s family were not rich, and they spent a significant portion of their monthly income on these calls to Harun.
Because he’s worth it, Kelebek thought. Because he hasn’t been forgotten.
And I am not forgotten.
“Time to port out?” Kelebek asked control.
NINETEEN HOURS TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES
At the most, she would have to run five or six more scenarios in that time. She could get lucky: it could be four, or only three.
She was digging her fingernails into her palms, she realized—and when she looked down, there were the little crescent-moons where the fingernails had dug in. And there was the slight, almost pleasant, pain in her palms.
All of it so realistic. But that was the point, wasn’t it? The machine-generated clichés were not enough to satisfy the clients. They needed fully copied human minds, just as guaranteed. And the human mind did not end, as once thought, at the skull. It was a network that coursed throughout the body, extending via its bundled neurons to every fingertip and toe, exchanging signs and countersigns in chemical code with every cell. And the mind did not end at the fingertips. The mind needed a world to interact with, to interpret and act in, shaped and sized for it, as these worlds were. The mind was body-in-world, not just some wet sequence of code shielded behind a plate of bone. The mind, correctly copied, was the mind-body wholeness of the human being, every cellular exchange and sequence accounted for, life made information in this world of information.
And that suited the clients just fine, because if the City of Adventure was all just bots in loop-routine, the clients couldn’t look into her eyes and know they were doing it to a real person.
The arrows arced into the air like a flight of starlings. Their feathers sang to the vertex of their parabola, seemed almost to pause there a moment, then began their descent toward the French lines: The men-at-arms on foot spattered with mud from the plowed and rain-soaked field. The men heavy in their plate armor, visors down, heads bowed to keep from being shot in the face, flanked by the mounted knights, likewise bowed on their warhorses.
Ekrem had already fitted another arrow from the four-dozen lodged point-down in the muddy ground by his feet, and was waiting for the signal to fire again.
The five thousand arrows fell among the lines of men-at-arms and cavalry, clattering off steel bascinets and armor. At the edge of the formation, a few horses of the cavalry were hit, the chisel-pointed heads of the clothyard arrows penetrating the padded cloth behind the steel plate across the horses’ chests and faces, the mounted knights struggling to control the horses as they bucked and circled in pain.
The order to release was shouted, and the second volley sang skyward. And now the French cavalry lurched forward, the horsemen booting their mounts into a loose line, three deep and knee to knee, aimed at the harassing flank-formations of English archers. Heads bent to protect the slits in their visored faces from the arrows, toe-down in the stirrups on their high-backed saddles, the knights rushed forward, three hundred yards of lance and steel.
Ekrem and his fellow archers managed to release another four volleys in the time it took for the cavalry line to rumble across the muddy field. A few horses tumbled as the arrows found them, sometimes bringing others down with them. And the fourth volley of bodkin-pointed arrows, fired at a flat trajectory and at a terminal velocity capable of driving them through an inch of oak, did pierce the knights’ armor here and there, bringing a few of the French riders and horses crashing down.
Now Ekrem felt the terror rise in him—a compression in his head and chest, an urge to flee, as the tons of steel plate and lance tips, an undulating wall of metal and edge, bore down on his position. Would he trip, lose his balance in the mud, and be stabbed and trampled to death?
As the thicket of lances drew near the archers’ lines, the archers backed away as planned, revealing the hedgehog of stakes, one for each man, hammered into the ground and then re-sharpened. The horses and their riders found themselves in this deadly thicket too late. Several knights, their mounts impaled, crashed to the ground, and were set upon where they lay, malleted unconscious or stabbed to death through the joints of their armor. The cavalry were soon in disordered retreat, leaving dead or captured comrades behind them.
Ekrem could not help but watch in sorrow and dismay as the horses and men, retreating in disarray, smashed into the lines of their own French infantry advancing across the field. Ekrem found himself thinking of a protest he had seen on television, in Taksim square. A horse, terrified after being struck by protestors’ stones, had turned and smashed back through the uvex polycarbonate shields of the armored police lines, sending shockwaves through the ranks that had brought down men who were many columns away. The same happened here, on a scale multiplied by the dozens. Men caromed into one another in an effort to avoid being trampled, men toppled over in their plate steel and struggled to extract themselves from the mud. Returned to their positions within their defensive hedgehog of sharpened stakes, the archers rained volleys into the fleeing cavalry and the advancing men-at-arms alike.
Port in eleven more hours. Just one more battle. And maybe he could avoid death or injury—the survival rates on the English side of the battle of Agincourt were very good. At least this time he was not among the French, where in the last Agincourt research simulation, his back broken by a fall from his tumbling horse, unable to rise from the mud of the trampled rain-soaked field, he had drowned in his helmet.
The order was shouted. Ekrem released another arrow to join the cloud arcing toward the chaos.
The bed Kelebek woke in was hard. The sheets and blankets were a non-color, like the walls of the room—the color, maybe, of sand under fluorescent light. There was a lampstand of fake brass, a laminate chest of drawers and wardrobe. It was night: light from a streetlight moon came in through the window.
She stood up and walked around, shaking off the dizziness of the porting. She found herself in a small apartment furnished with retro appliances from some Russian era, post-Soviet but not by much. The television was a bubble-screened thing that looked like a space helmet. There was a vacuum cleaner, shaped like the dumpy ancestor of a ChoreBot. In the kitchen, the clock over the gas stovetop was stopped and blinking at 20:17. The refrigerator was enameled metal, its door handle chrome. On the white enamel, a name in Cyrillic script: ZiL-Moskva.
She had not read Cyrillic since she was in university.
The refrigerator contained only what looked like milk or yogurt in a glass jar, along with half a loaf of bread. But in the hall, on a narrow shelf near the ceiling, there was an Endless Bookshelf mod. When she pulled one book off the shelf, another one appeared in its place. Good books, too: Pamuk, Camus, Le Guin.
In the kitchen there was a small Formica table with two low stools. Outside, the night courtyard, humped with snow, was lit by a few streetlamps. A small balcony opening off the living room offered the same view. The courtyard, surrounded on all sides by the unpainted cement panels of pre-fab apartment buildings, was deserted. Here and there, the orange rectangle of an apartment window suggested life, without confirming it. Snow fell endlessly into the stillness of the courtyard.
Kelebek heard a key turning in the lock of the front door. By the time she’d crossed the apartment, Ekrem was already inside, bringing with him the cold of an unheated stairwell and the smell of winter snowfall.
They stood staring at one another in the narrow entrance hall, so close she could feel the cold radiating off his clothes, skin and hair. There was always a moment of uncertainty, a reluctance to touch: what if something was off, altered, damaged?
“Have you had a look around?”
She nodded. “Where are we?”
“It’s a Russian sadcore game from centuries ago, called Winter. All you could do in the game is eat bread, drink kefir, stare out the window, take a bath, or go walk around in the courtyard. It’s always night. It’s always snowing. There’s nobody else in the game, and nothing beyond the courtyard: if you cross the boundary you just reappear on the other side. The television doesn’t even work. The game was a sort of cult classic: an ode to boredom and isolation. But I had the Endless Bookshelf plug-in added.”
“I love it. How much time did you buy?”
“Let’s not talk about time, just yet.”
They did not talk about time until the middle of the next “day”—a 24-hour span that passed with no change in the outside world, no alteration in the night and snow.
They spent much of the intervening time lying to one another.
Ekrem had decided years ago to discuss nothing of his life in the Military Research Department’s Simulation Unit highrise. He wanted to put it behind him: the constant, nagging fear. The hunger, the exposure, the horror of cannon fire at Waterloo while his infantry formation stood in square under direct bombardment, the terrors of the cavalry charges at Agincourt, the abject dread of the Somme—all of it in the service of improving the data set.
Kelebek did not need to know any of it, he thought. She was safe where she was: let her think he was safe as well.
Ekrem had fought when he was alive as well, and had spent two decades after the house-to-house fighting in Belgrade not talking about it. Now it was the same. With the greatest of efforts, he moved his mind to the here and now. But the memories were always there, nagging at him, harmless but suggestive of harm, like seaweed brushing against a swimmer’s ankles in deep water, calling up terrors edged with teeth.
He and his fellow soldiers, all veterans in life, bought cheap in distress sales and bulk auctions after their highrises went bankrupt, often wondered what the point of it all was. But someone was gathering the data, the minutiae, he supposed. “Remember, boys,” he’d once shouted as the French cannon tore another gap in the ranks of the Inniskilling regiment at Waterloo, splattering the faces of those nearest to him with gore, “It’s for science!”
When Ekrem asked Kelebek how life was in the City of Adventure, she laughed. “You get tired of swinging a sword.” Tired of getting raped is more like it, she thought to herself. Tired of being the target of every sadistic geek’s darkest fantasies. They love it—knowing you are really in there, behind those eyes, forced to take it, forced to feel it.
Sometimes, rape wasn’t enough for them. Sometimes you bled to death in an alley. Or worse.
Out in the real world somewhere—the “brick-and-mortar” world, as the other NPCs in the City of Adventure called it—these monsters were raising families, writing code, leading diplomatic negotiations. They were carefully modulating their language in a culture that had long ago decided not to tolerate their atavisms. But these men (it was mostly men)—placidly neutral, polite and reserved—had other lives. They carried memories of her suffering, and the suffering of her fellow NPCs, around in their heads like secret jewels in a pouch, to be fondled in their spare moments.
What you could no longer inflict on the living you could inflict, for the price of a game, on the dead.
Let Ekrem think she was safe where she was. Let him—let them both—enjoy these short times together.
On day two, they were walking the circular path in the night courtyard, snow falling onto their bare heads and melting onto their scalps, snowflakes clinging to their faces and the backs of their gloveless hands.
“When we first decided to buy shares in the co-op,” Kelebek said, “I remember imagining the afterlife as something like this: Just us, with an apartment somewhere, walking or sitting on a bench in the courtyard. Maybe at night, in the snow. Just us, talking. That was what immortality seemed like, to me: a lazy winter night at home, just the two of us.”
“I imagined something similar,” Ekrem said: “But the apartment was on the Marble Sea. Do you remember that place we rented once, in Çakılköy—with nothing around but the moon on the water, and the beach full of hermit crabs swaying along the tideline in their miniature palaces?”
“I loved that place.”
“There was nothing to do. Just one mediocre restaurant in town, and the constant wind. I loved it as well.”
“We talked about how lucky the crabs were, carrying their houses around with them. About how if we could have our wish, we would have a shell for two, and live snug in there, together, carrying it around with us wherever we went.”
They had come to a stop on the path, just short of the courtyard’s invisible boundary.
Ekrem stopped. “Kelebek—I have to tell you something …. Every time we manage this time away … I spend the entire time thinking about how I have to go back. I can’t concentrate on the here and now—on being with you. There are things I haven’t been honest about. It’s not a research institute—at least, not in the way I said. The place that bought me is a battle simulator. I’ve died …” suddenly he swayed, as if he were going to fall down. Kelebek guided him to a bench, and he sat down heavily. “I’ve died so many times, I can’t even count them. You would think you get used to it, but you don’t. I know it’s better where you are, and that keeps me going … that, and the thought that at least we will have our time here, together, once a year. But I might die a hundred times during that year. Or worse, might be wounded, and not die, and lie in the mud for days … and it happens again and again.” He trailed off.
“It isn’t better,” Kelebek said.
“What?” Pulled from his own miseries, Ekrem stared at her, red-eyed. “What do you mean?”
“It isn’t better where I am. The City of Adventure is just a place sadists come to play out their fantasies. I didn’t want to tell you. I had thought that at least …”
“You thought that at least I was all right.”
“Yes.”
Kelebek’s last memories of her life were also of snow. Of standing at the kitchen window, looking out over the Golden Horn, watching the day end in a dramatic, roiling darkness that bore down on the city from the north: towering anvil storm clouds more like an approaching thunderstorm than snow. In front of the clouds, the snow had already begun to fall, the heavy flakes reflecting the lights of city and sunset like neon autumn leaves. She had felt, at that moment, the pinch of the neural back-up beginning, the slight sense of light-headedness as her mind and body were scanned for changes and logged, and closed her eyes. This feeling always made her feel close to Ekrem. Their back-ups were simultaneous; somewhere in the city Ekrem was also feeling this.
Neither of them remembered their deaths. They were together when it happened, a few days later. A gas explosion, a fire, and they were gone from the world—just two more contract-bound guest-workers in Istanbul Protectorate, done in by an accident of infrastructure, mourned by a few friends.
They had saved and saved for their back-ups, putting a down-payment on their slots in a co-op highrise, dutifully paying down the principle on their back-up plans, refinancing, insuring, saving where they could. The co-op they’d bought into was not the most extensive. Nothing glamorous: just a machine-mapped simulation of the sunny, rather dumpy little village of Poyrazköy, near the Black Sea, with its winding paths up to the ruins of a Genoese castle, and enough of the Black Sea coast and beaches in-simmed that you could take a few day trips. You could see Istanbul Protectorate in the distance, on a clear day, but that was just empty backsim. No ferries ran there from Poyrazköy’s docks: there was, in fact, no “there” to get to from “here.”
Co-op members performed some basic statistics processing for the Institute, seven hours a day—piecework that kept the co-op balance sheets in the black. They could work from home, and were otherwise free to just enjoy their time in eternity.
But the co-op went under, just days after their arrival. They and all the other minds in the highrise were sold off in lots at auction to other highrises, to pay off the debt. There had been a money-laundering scheme run by the co-op board, offshore companies nested inside one another, a complex chain of fraud with links back to Buenos Aires and Krasnodar. The court had ordered a yearly port-out for co-op members not involved in the scheme: there was that, at least. That small mercy. But for the rest of the year, they were indentured out to whoever had purchased them.
Three board members had been summarily erased for their part in the fraud.
In the night courtyard, in the now, Ekrem opened his hand. In his palm was a small bead, made of plastic or bone, carved with a serpent’s coils. Snowflakes fell melting into his palm around it.
“It’s a virus, really. It’s called a metathesis. Once activated, it creates an error in the file path—changes it to copy the name of another file in the system, the one least accessed, then moves itself a digit off from that name—misspells it, basically, so it looks like it might be a backup of a never-used file. Then it copies and replaces the original file, right back where it was. Right now we’re in a highrise library called The Wayback Arcade. Basically a storing-house for old games from the silver age of VR and simulation, a lot of it almost handmade. There are about two hundred thousand games and simulations here. This one, Winter, has been accessed twice since it was filed fifty years ago. Not super popular: sadcore was kind of a fad. But there is a game that is even less popular: Rowboat. It’s also sadcore: you row a boat across a little lake. When you get to the other side, you row back. You can’t get out of the boat.”
“You played these?”
“Yeah, before we met. In that year after university, where you are sort of drifting …. It was a tough time for me. Anyway, the point is, Rowboat has never been accessed. And nobody would access a back-up of it: it won’t even show up in the index. It’s like hiding a random book on the shelf of an enormous library—an extra copy of a book nobody has ever checked out in the first place.”
“We can hide here.”
“Yes.”
“Forever.”
“Or until The Wayback Arcade is shut down. But it’s funded by an endowment put in place by some eccentric simfan who died pre-back-up. I don’t think it will be shut down anytime soon. So, yes. Let’s say forever.”
“With no way out.”
“No. There wouldn’t be any way out.”
“Where did you get this program?”
“There’s one thing that never changes about battles, and armies: soldiers trading in contraband.”
“Theoretically, though, they could still find us.”
“Theoretically.”
She smiled. “Unless …. Let’s go upstairs. I want to show you something.”
The shell was from the predatory gastropod Rapana venosa. It had a classic conch-like shape, but was smaller, green-hued, veined through with dark streaks. A small hole had been drilled near its apex, and a metal chain attached there, with a loop at one end through the shell, and a slender carabiner at the other end. In a crescent around the lip of the shell, “Poyrazköy” was written, in sky-blue paint.
“A souvenir,” Ekrem said.
“No. A simumento.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s a simulation of a place. You carry it in your pocket, in-sim, and it functions as a password-accessed sim-in-sim. They were a work of art, for a while: like Persian miniatures of compressed code. They have simple bots and just a small area recreated from a town you visited, or didn’t. Maybe a place you knew as a kid.
“This one is of Poyrazköy. It’s beautiful. It’s not the Poyrazköy we had in the co-op: there’s less of it, and the machine-learning tools used to make it are of an older generation, with a bit less data-resolution—but you can walk on the beach, or up to the castle ruins. You can admire the colorful, battered little fishing boats, or pay a captain to take you for a ride on one. You can eat fish at the restaurant, and garden on your balcony. But the best part is, no one will find this little shell here, tucked in the back of a drawer full of silverware, or buried in a snowbank. And we can always pop back here to Winter to borrow a few books.”
Ekrem smiled. “Where should we hide it?”
“At the foot of a streetlamp, under the snow, along the courtyard path.”
“That’s a good place. Where did you get it?”
“You know: soldiers trading in contraband.”
“What’s the password?”
Kelebek tapped the shell three times. It shuddered violet light. “Hermetic Kingdom.”
And she was gone.
Ekrem picked up the shell and went out into the courtyard.
First, he whispered a word over the bead he carried, which trembled greenly out of existence. Then he bent, at the foot of a streetlamp, and scooped a tiny hollow out in the snow — a cave to contain a world. He placed the shell in it, and tapped it three times.
“Hermetic Kingdom.”
The courtyard, surrounded on all sides by the monotonous, unpainted cement pre-fab panels of Soviet apartment buildings, was deserted. Here and there, the orange rectangle of an apartment window suggested life, without confirming it.
Snow fell endlessly into the stillness.
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