Orphea's Song

Calle Dybedahl

Friday, 20 May 2067

Just a few minutes to go until the concert would start, and the arena was absolutely packed. Maria had thought that the place was full when she arrived an hour earlier, but that had been nothing. The noise level was incredible, and there was an almost tangible sense of expectation in the air.
She was sitting high up on one side. Only a handful of seats separated her from the low wall where the roof met the bowl of the arena. Normally, the place hosted various kinds of sports events, from plain old soccer to the newer gladiatorial games. But every now and then Paris was visited by a musician famous enough that none of the normal concert venues could hold everyone that wanted to see them, and so the aging Olympia Stadium was used instead. Not that even that huge building could hold everyone that wanted to see Orphea, particularly here in Paris that was the closest thing to her home town that still existed. The ticket prices had been near-astronomical, and the cramped seat just under the roof was all that Maria's employer was willing to pay for. Even for that, she'd had to cash in three years' worth of old favours and promised to have a review article ready to go live within minutes after the concert ended.
Sighing, she activated her computer and closed her eyes for the few seconds it took her contacts to sync to it. She always got some weird-ass static when she turned the thing on, and it bothered her when if it overlay her real vision. She probably should get it fixed, but the computer worked fine apart from that little glitch so it didn't seem worth the bother. Closing her eyes a little helped her concentrate, too, so it wasn't like it was a problem, really.
With eye movements and the occasional twitch of a finger, she brought up the file named simply "Orphea". Not the review, this was the private project that she really wanted to come her for, the one that she hoped would make her famous enough to land a contract with a better newssite than the minor-league one she worked for now. The exposé of the world's most famous artist's background, revealing... Well, she wasn't sure yet what it'd reveal. She was going on her mother's old stories of the the evacuation of Britain and a gut sense that something wasn't right when an artist managed to dominate all genres and all age groups at the same time.
Orphea had rocketed to stardom when she was a mere seventeen and stayed there ever since. A classic example of the rags-to-riches story, she came out of the refugee camps outside Paris an orphan owning nothing but the clothes she was wearing, and those donated by UNESCO. She started out singing in semi-legal drinking holes in the camps, and might have died there if not for a couple of slumming rich brats with early wearable computers. They uploaded a couple of songs to the net, and forty-eight hours later Orphea had signed up with a major content provider and was on her way to riches and stardom.
The arena's PA system came online with a click and a hiss. The lights dimmed, and silence fell. A chill raced down Maria's spine. Partly because there was something spooky about sixty thousand people all being absolutely silent, and partly because she was about to see Orphea in real life for the first time. As much as she suspected weirdness in the woman's background, she wasn't unaffected by her music. Far from it. She'd grown up with those early hauntingly grieving tunes that seemed so perfect for mourning an entire lost nation. She'd had her first kiss while an Orphea song played on her radio, lost her virginity accompanied by another. So had most of her friends and, she suspected, just about everyone else her age.
A hologram lit up above the smallish stage at the center of the arena, Orphea: the Memento Mori Tour 2067 in meter-high letters glowing in midair said. As they faded away, a single spotlight hit the stage and the woman suddenly standing there. The hologram reformed, now showing a much-enlarged copy of the stage. Maria kept her eyes on the hologram, she was much too far away to see the stage clearly.
She knew the appearance of the woman on the hologram well, of course. The tanned skin, the slightly hooked nose, the long black hair, the full lips, dark eyes and strong jaw. Orphea wasn't very traditionally beautiful, although she had shifted the idea of "beautiful" quite a way towards the more imposingly Greek all by herself. Born in England from Greek parents, she looked like a tragic heroine from an ancient play.
"Tonight is the twentieth of May," Orphea said. Her voice filled the arena and made Maria break out in goose bumps. "It is thirty years exactly since the Nanoclysm began and stole Britain away from us. Let us remember her. Let us remember that all that we have can at any moment be taken away from us. Let us remember that we are mortal."
She began to sing. Maria knew the song. Everyone did, probably. It was the first song Orphea had released after signing up with AOL/MSN and it had become a kind of anthem for all the millions that had lost their homeland. As she sang, holographic images formed and faded in the air, showing pictures of things lost and remembered.
Maria put away the Orphea file and opened a new one. "There is something special to seeing -- or, more importantly, hearing -- Orphea live," she wrote. "We know the songs she sings. Even the ones we've never heard before, we know. As the true master of her craft that she is, she picks them out of the roots of our hearts and dreams and sings them. And when we hear her sing them right here and right now, live in front of us, those dreams and fears and loves that she sings binds us together. For a while, we are not sixty thousand individuals sitting in our seats or standing near the stage, we are a people, a community. When Orphea sings, she doesn't sing from herself to us. She sings as one of us. Hers is the voice of us all."
So what if the concert had just started. So what if the text was overblown tripe. After only a minute, Maria felt emotions stirring within her, and she suspected that she'd better get some copy ready to upload before tears made it impossible for her contacts to track her eye movements.

"Thank you!" Orphea shouted to the audience. It had been a good concert, but she wanted it to be over now. Sweat made her clothes stick to her skin and she was so tired that it took an active effort of will to keep her knees from buckling. The audience was applauding and screaming incoherently, obviously wanting more. She smiled and bowed and thanked, but she had no more to give them. Not now. Not tonight.
There would be more, later. There was always more. If there was one thing she'd never found difficult, it was coming up with more.
"Thank you all!" she shouted one last time. A look at an icon projected in her field of vision, a double blink, and the section of stage she was standing on started sinking. The stage vanished above her, the hole through which she'd vanished closed up and the sound level sank to tolerable. The platform stopped, and she stepped off it into the control room under the stage.
A black woman sitting in a padded chair surrounded by electronics pushed back the hood covering most of her head and smiled towards Orphea. Next to her, assistants at more traditional control boards were shutting things down and keeping an eye on the exodus from the arena.
"Nice gig," she said. "If we can do every concert like this one, this tour is going to be one for the history books."
Orphea smiled back at her. "Thank you," she said. "But you know just as well as I do that this was the easy one. This is Paris, they'll love us no matter what we do."
The black woman got up from her control chair. She was dressed in a blue jumpsuit covered with wires and electronics. As she got up, several thick wires disconnected from her suit and retreated into the chair.
"They'll love you, you mean," she said. She put her arms around Orphea's waist and kissed her lightly on the lips. "Everybody knows Orphea. Nobody knows Iruwa," she said.
"Just let me put your name as well as mine in the announcements and we'll change that," Orphea said. "Half the show is your doing, you should get the credits for it."
"Nah," Iruwa said. She led Orphea to an empty chair and gently pushed her into it. "I'm quite please with not being famous," she went on. "Being able to go out without being mobbed by fans does have its advantages."
Orphea sighed. "Yeah," she said. "I guess." She broke open a bottle of water. "Is the limo ready?" she asked when she'd emptied the bottle. "I want a bath and a bed."
One of the assistants at the control boards turned towards her. "It's ready and waiting, miss Orphea," he said. "Just down the corridor."
"Right," she said. "Do you want to change out of that techno-thing before we leave?" she asked, looking at Iruwa.
Iruwa shook her head. "It's more comfortable than it looks," she said. "And I can jack it into the limo's systems to check out the reviews."
Orphea snorted. "I thought you didn't care about fame?" she said.
Iruwa smiled at her. "I don't care about my fame," she said. She took Orphea's hand and pulled her up from the chair. "I do care about yours."
She took Orphea's arm under her own and led her down the corridor to the waiting limo. It was a big, white vehicle with darkened windows. It stood alone in a large space that would normally hold dressing rooms for the teams competing in the arena, but that had been cleared out for the concert. A man and a woman stood leaning on the car. They were dressed in inconspicuous street clothes, and you had to look closely to spot the bulges of their hidden weaponry. The man nodded at Iruwa and Orphea.
"Miss Orphea, miss Iruwa," he said. "If we get going right away we should be able to get out before the fans block the garage exit."
"Thank you, Christos," Orphea said. "Sounds fine to me."
He opened the door for them, and they climbed aboard. The two bodyguards got into the front of the limousine, and it started to move silently and smoothly forward.

The interior of the limousine was made out of different kinds of leather and wood. Orphea couldn't tell if it was taken from real live animals and trees or if it was all genehybrids grown in tanks. She hoped it was the latter, but she suspected that it wasn't. The sort of people who usually bought this kind of vehicle would probably insist on it being the real thing, even if they couldn't tell the difference. She took her blouse off, leaving her with only a tight top. She was still all hot and sweaty.
Next to her, Iruwa had jacked her suit into the limo's systems just as she'd threatened to do. The VR hood again covered her head and her face down to her nose, and her hands moved in strange patterns while operating control environments only she could see.
"So, are the reviews good to us?" Orphea asked.
"Yes," Iruwa said. "Very good. Almost lyrical."
"Well," Orphea said. "Home ground. I bet more than half of the audience tonight grew up in the refugee camps just as we did. They'll love us no matter what we do. We'll see what they say in Istanbul. Or Rome. Particularly Rome, after what the Pope said about us."
Iruwa peeled back the hood and disconnected the suit from the limo. "The Pope is a doddering old fool," she said. "Rome will love you too."
Outside the one-way window, the streets of Paris slid by. It was a warm night, on the cusp between spring and summer. Lots of people were moving about, out partying after a long week working. She didn't really like isolating herself from them like this. She belonged out among them. Sometimes she wondered if it was as Iruwa had said, if she really would be completely mobbed by fans if she went out among them. It had been assumed for her that it'd be so ever since she got signed up with a major content-provider and became famous. She automatically got the entire rock star treatment, with private limousines and being shuffled from hotel garages to luxury suites by way of cargo elevators. For sixteen years it'd been like that, and she'd never really questioned it. Never tried it to see if it was true.
The limousine moved silently into the Hotel Ambassador-Concorde's garage and came to a halt in front of an elevator where the other two of her regular bodyguards, Aphrodite and Johann, waited. The four of them had been in her employ for variously between five years and a decade, and they were as close to friends as employees really could get. Over the years, they'd taken on many of the tasks she'd used to have paid servants for. Christos and Aphrodite from Greece, where her own blood came from. Alexandra from the Ukraine, the black sheep in a family of bankers and brokers. Johann from Austria, just as pale and silent as the mountains in his homeland.
Aphrodite opened the car door. "Welcome, miss Orphea" she said. "Your suite is ready and waiting, of course. We've checked it out, but in general we trust the hotel's security. Is there anything in particular you want tonight?"
She made sure to pay them abundantly. She could well afford it, and they would be difficult to replace. None of them had families or homes away from her, and as far as she'd been able to determine they liked being always more or less on duty.
"No," she said. "Just a shower and a bed."

The shower was, of course, the best and most luxurious that money and power could get. The Ambassador-Concorde tried really hard to be the classiest hotel in the world, and even if they something strayed over into the tacky or just plain obscene they mostly succeeded at it. She took a very long, very hot shower. Somewhere in the middle of it, Iruwa joined her and they made love under the steaming streams of water, horniness easily overcoming post-concert fatigue. Sated and clean, they ate a light supper and went to bed.
Sleep caught her within moments of her head hitting the pillow, and catapulted her into her land of dreams.
In her dreams, Orphea was a disembodied awareness floating over a land of ashes. For as far as she could see, there was nothing but a featureless dark gray plain under a sky covered with roiling leaden sky. No rain ever fell, and only an occasional gust of wind disturbed the ashes of the plain.
Somehow, it always struck her as restful rather than depressing.
Above her, between the point of her awareness and the clouds, there were other awarenesses. Some of them she just knew that they were there. Some of them she could see, as small points of brilliant light moving through the air like fireflies. Some she could feel like a cloud of static brushing against skin she didn't have.
All of them sang to her.
Their voices were as many as raindrops in a storm and as varied as the snowflakes in a blizzard. They sang beauty, and love, and fear, and despair, and hunger. They sang ecstasy. They sang torment. They sang words and pictures and memories and senses and experiences for which Orphea knew no name. She listened to them, reveling in the rush of pure sensation they brought her. She tried to remember their songs, so she could in her turn sing them to the waking world.
Orphea dreamt, and her dreams were music.

Saturday, 21 May 2067

The files she wanted were stored on paper, Maria had been told, stacked in a large number of boxes in a cellar under one of the Sorbonne's less interesting buildings. There were plans to transfer them online so historians could get at them, but the money needed to actually do it had never survived through the yearly budget process. So they stayed on paper, year after year and decade after decade.
"Is you ask me, I think the memory is still too fresh," the old man who showed her the way to the cellar and unlocked it for her said. "Thirty years isn't very long, compared to a disaster that eats an entire nation. As we get more historians who were born after the Nanoclysm, the pressure will increase to make all the record available. For now, most people just want them forgotten."
Maria made vaguely agreeing noises and promised she'd let him know when she left so he could lock up after her. And he didn't mind working on a Saturday, he lived in a University flat nearby just so he could do that.
When they'd said "a large number of boxes" they weren't exaggerating, she quickly found out. There were hundreds, if not thousands of them. Row upon row of old archive bookcases of the kind that slid on rails so you could only get at one of them at a time. She started by walking along the narrow aisles between the rows of bookcases, reading the labels glued to their sides. They appeared to be ordered by time primarily, and by refugee camp number secondarily. There was one single bookcase covering 21-26 June of the year 2038, the first few days of the Nanoclysm. The first days, when it had still been believed that the disaster could be contained and that only the people closest to the research facility would have to be evacuated, and those only to other parts of England. The record from that week were mostly available online, since the relatively few refugees that came over via the Channel Tunnel were still within the capabilities of the French authorities to handle.
The number of boxes increased sharply once the panic started and refugees began to arrive in the tens of thousands. The 27th was the first day to need a bookcase all to itself, and it got rapidly worse after that. When it got into June, there had been the nuclear strike that had only semeed to spread the nanomachines further and faster, and the panics had taken hold for real. The evacuation of an entire nation had begun. Every available means of transportation, civilian as well as military, had been commandeered by the British government, and much more volunteered by other nations of the NATO and the EU. Over the following three weeks, until the Nanoclysm deconstructors covered the entire island, almost forty million people had been evacuated. For reasons of geography, the majority ended up in France. All official systems collapsed under the task of trying to keep track of who went where, and out of self-preservation the administrators running each refugee camp fell back to older technologies: pens and papers.
Papers that had eventually ended up here, under the University of Sorbonne, forgotten by almost everybody. She supposed the old man was right. The wound was still too fresh, too raw, to invite serious introspection and analysis. One couldn't try to study the exodus from the Britain without remembering the twenty million or so people who didn't make it out, but became building material for the ravenous nanomachines.
She knew that Orphea had been on one of the last ships to ever leave England, and that she had ended up in Refugee Camp 33 outside Paris. Maria returned to the bookcases holding the records for 26-28 June 2037. The 26th was the day when there was nothing but Northern Ireland left of the UK, so Orphea should have arrived then or later. The number of records dropped off very sharply from the 27th and forward, since they only had to cover people that left on the 26th or earlier but took some time arriving. Refugee Camp 33 wasn't a very large camp, but neither was it one of the smallest. Maria turned the crank on the end of the bookcase she wanted, moving the gap so she could get at the boxes, located the ones for Camp 33 and started leafing through papers.
It was, of course, a litany of tragedies. Mostly it just listed names of the people that arrived at the camps, and the names of those who died in them. Those who left of their own accord were too many and the ways in which they left too varied and unsupervised to keep track of. Many of them could probably be found in the arrival records of the large ex-British colonies in Canada and Australia, but a lot of them simply vanished without a trace.
She found Orphea in the twenty-sixth box. Girl, six years old. Said her name was Orphea. Did not know her last name or the names of her parents. Questions about where she used to live and what her parents used to do for a living were met with confusion and an entire lack of understanding. For lack of time to do any kind of investigation, the girl was just sent to the orphans' section of the camp, with the hopes that her parents would look for her there, in case they arrived.
Maria smiled to herself. Yes. This was it, or at least the beginnings of it. She activated her computer and quickly scanned the papers.

Iruwa sank back into her seat and closed her eyes. She liked the feeling when an airplane accelerated for takeoff. The pressure pushing her back, the sudden furious howl of the jet engines. It made her aware of the raw power of the vehicle she was riding in, of the ingenuity of its construction. The power of the machine.
She liked machines. She had liked machines for as long as she could remember. One of her earliest memories was of trying to pry open the plastic covering of a light switch back in the orphanage so see how it worked. She had succeeded, and got a nasty shock and a blown fuse as a reward. Somehow the nurses never figured out that it was she who had done it, or she would've had to go without dessert for weeks.
Outside the plane's window, Paris receded. The acceleration eased off, and was replaced by the much less exciting tilting of the plane as it continued to climb. In a few hours, they would land in Istanbul and start unloading and preparing for the second concert of the tour. Or, rather, the technical crew would start unloading and preparing. For the most part, Iruwa's part of the preparations had been done months before, while she and Orphea were designing the concert sets. All she had to do now was to monitor things and adapt them to the variations in Orphea's singing, and to make whatever modifications she or Orphea wanted done.
Nothing more.
She put on her display glasses and unfolded her keyboard. She didn't like using display contacts, they never seemed to get resolution good enough for her needs. So she stayed with tried-and-true glasses or goggles. She nudged Orphea with her elbow while the schematics for the light show loaded.
"So how do you think it worked last night?" she said. "What needs fixing?"
"Hm?" Orphea said. "Oh. Right." She looked thoughtful for a few moments. "I think it mostly worked well," she said. "Except maybe the bit with the butterflies. I think there should be more of them, so they obscure me entirely."
"Right," Iruwa said. "That'll be easy enough to do."
She turned her attention to the schematics.

Monday, 23 May 2067

The Social Security office at Lilla Grevie Refugee Camp was, as all such offices tend to be, dreary and spartan to a fault. Three decades of hopelessness and despair had sunk into the walls, and just walking into the waiting room was enough to make otherwise healthy people feel depressed.
Richard Cairnduff wasn't a very happy man at the best of times, and early morning meetings at the Social Security office ranked very far from the best of times, in his opinion. It ranked just barely over a good, solid kick in the nuts, usually. Today felt pretty usual.
"Well," the counselor said, tapping on his ancient keyboard. He was a middle-aged man whose name Richard had never bothered to find out. He'd probably said it the first time they met, or something. "I see here that you didn't manage to get a job this week either. That makes it ten months since you last had one, and that was two days of picking up trash at Kastrup. I think that's a personal best for you. Or worst, rather."
Richard himself was 22, and had lived his entire life in the refugee camp in southern Sweden. His parents had ended up there after hitch-hiking their way up from Rotterdam, where the ship that took them from Liverpool had put them off. They'd had some idea that getting further away from the places were everyone else was would make it easier to get by. It wasn't a bad idea, really, and it might have worked if several hundred thousand people hadn't had it too.
"I applied for some," Richard said.
"Yes, I see that," the counselor said. "For three, exactly. As usual."
"So? I don't have to apply for more than that to get my money."
The counselor sighed. "And I see that you safely applied for jobs that require the ability to speak Swedish," he said.
Richard smiled. "Yeah," he said. "And I got properly turned down for every one of them."
"How can you stand living in a country and not learn to speak its language?" the counselor said. "If nothing else, don't you wonder what people are saying about you?"
Richard shrugged. "Like I care."
The counselor shook is head in tired despair. He hit a couple of buttons on the keyboard. "Well, you do manage to follow the rules," he said. "So you get your money. They'll be in your account by tomorrow, as usual."
"Thanks," Richard said. He got up and left, not caring if the counselor replied or not. He still had some money left since last week. Not much, but enough to get pretty drunk down at the pub. With some luck he'd be able to scam enough off his pals to get really smashed.

Maria du Lac climbed out of the helicopter onto the steel floor of the old rebuilt oil drilling platform. The wind tore at her coat, and the noise from the helicopter efficiently prevented any verbal communication between her and the uniformed man waiting for her. He was about middle-aged, much taller than her 160 centimeters and looked as fit as suited a military man. He shouted something she couldn't hear and gestured towards a door. Assuming that he had suggested that they get out of the noise, she headed for the door.
Inside, it was much warmer and a lot less noise, although still not exactly silent.
"That's better," the uniformed man said behind her. "More than twenty years in the RAF and I still can't get used to the noise of those bloody copters."
She turned around and offered him her hand.
"I'm Maria du Lac," she said. "I guess you're Group Captain Henry Clifford?"
He took her hand and shook it firmly. "Got it in one," he said. "Welcome to Nanoclysm Observation Platform VI, although I'm still not quite clear about why you've come all the way out here. Most people make do with the net feeds."
She shrugged. "Call it a whim," she said. "VR doesn't give most of the secondary impressions, like the cold and the noise. I'm hoping that coming here and seeing things with my own eyes will make it feel more real to me, and that I'll be able to convey that feeling in my reporting."
"Well, good luck with that. Coffee?"
He continued into the building without really waiting for her answer, and she followed. The place look very much like she expected a military technical installation to look. It was entirely made from steel, and amazing numbers of cables and conduits almost covered the ceiling. Her steps echoed as she walked, and all sounds seemed to gain a harsh and unpleasant quality as they bounced between the hard surfaces. It smelled of ozone, plastic, cleaning chemicals and stale sweat.
"I hope you don't mind me asking," she said towards Clifford's back, "but aren't you the commander of this place?"
"Oh, sure," he said.
"So how come you have time to greet nosy reporters?"
They entered a relatively large and cosy kitchen. Pictures had been hung on the walls, there was a sofa and a pair of armchairs surrounding a low table. A few large plants stood in the corners of the room, and a coffee maker burbled pleasantly. Clifford got two mugs from a cupboard and filled them with steaming black liquid.
"Sugar? Milk?" he asked. Maria shook her head. He handed her a mug.
"I have the time to greet nosy people because my job is the most pointless one here," he said.
"I thought being the commander was the most important job?"
He snorted. "Propaganda. Guess how many men and women I have command over?"
She thought about it. Group Captain was a pretty high rank, and the old oil platform was very big. "A couple of hundred?" she said.
"Five," he said.
"Five?"
He nodded. "Five. Not counting myself, there's doctor White who oversees and messes with the design of the observation systems, there's technicians Jones and Mendez who implement White's design changes and there's privates Fairhouse and Wood who do the cleaning, painting, cooking and other such work."
"But this place is huge!"
"And expensive," he said. "Don't forget expensive. It's so expensive that it must have a Group Captain or higher commanding it, for political reasons. But in reality it's just a really big sensor platform with obscene amounts of communications bandwidth. All the analysis work is done in Hannover and Belfast."
"So you being here is, what, a punishment for something you did wrong?"
He shook his head. "Oh no," he said. "This really is what passes for a good assignment in the RAF these days. It's not easy being a military force that's lost most of its country. It doesn't take that much to adequately defend Northern Ireland, and we just don't do international work any more."
"Can we go out?" she asked. "We can see the coast from here, right?"
He finished his coffee. "That we can," he said. "Follow me."
They walked through more metal corridors, took an elevator several stories up and eventually exited through a small water-tight door onto an observation deck. Above them, there were a small forest of antennas and odd-shaped metal constructions that Maria could only assume was observation equipment. Below them was the entire vast bulk of the platform, and even further down the leaden gray of the North Sea's chill water.
In the distance, she could see the fuzzy black line that used to be Scotland.
The wind blew cold, in spite of it being late in May.
"Are we safe here?" she asked. "Can't nanomachines from the coast be carried out here by the winds?"
"Oh, they can," Clifford said. "It happens fairly often. We've got a pretty large collection of Nanoclysm bots."
She looked up at him and frowned. "So why haven't they eaten the platform?" she asked. "Come to think of it, why did they stop at the coast in the first place? Why didn't they just creep along the sea bottom and cover the entire world?"
"In the early days, the nanomachines didn't like salt water. A leftover from the way the first ones were constructed in the ill-fated laboratory, we think. Or, rather, William and the other science types thinks so. I wouldn't know. Anyway, theory says that they should've been able to evolve past the aversion to salt water by now, and the wind-carried ones that end up here never have that problem in the first place. So, it turns out, we have no idea why they don't propagate past the coast. They just don't."
Suddenly, not all of the chill the Maria felt was from the cold wind. All her life, she'd silently assumed that there was a good, solid reason that the Nanoclysm had stopped once it covered all of the British main island. It was not a comfortable illusion to have crushed.
Clifford opened a metal box bolted to the platform's railing and took out a pair of binoculars. "Here," he said. "You may as well take a closer look at the coastline, now that you've travelled all the way here. Not quite your own eyes, I guess, but about as close as you'll get without going ashore."
She accepted the heavy binoculars from him. "Has anyone done that?" she asked. "Gone ashore, I mean?"
"Yes," he said. "Although not for about twentyfive years now, as far as I know. But in the early days there were a number of attempts to send troops ashore with various wildly experimental anti-nano equipment. I think the basic idea was that they should bring back samples of the nanobots that lived behind the omniphage frontlines, so that the science people would be able to design a set of anti-Nanoclysm phages. But none of the troops they sent in ever came back, so eventually they gave that up."
Maria put the binocular to her eyes and looked towards the coast.
At first it was difficult to make any sense at all of what she saw. It seemed to be nothing but a jumble of lines in all the colours of the rainbow, crossing and intersecting any which way and ending up giving an impression of opalescent pale gray. It was difficult to focus on, a little like trying to find and focus on the edge of a fog bank. When she finally managed to make some kind of sense out of it, it reminded her most of all of a coral reef. A coral reef that swayed and moved about.
"It's life of a sort, of course," Clifford said. "It's just not our kind of life. Which is kind of ironic, considering that we built it."
"What do we know about what goes on in there?" she asked.
"Very little, basically. It's hard to observe. Satellite observation and the occasional high-altitude fly-over let ut see some large structures, but that doesn't tell us much except the fact that there are large structures. William here on NOP6 and his colleagues onshore try to make observations using just about every part of the electromagnetic spectrum there is. What few successes they've had are available on the net. It's not much, because at the end of it all we're pretty much trying to figure out the biochemistry of two hundred and forty five thousand square kilometers of alien planet by looking at it through a telescope. Difficult doesn't even begin to describe it."
Maria shivered. "I think I could do with some more coffee," she said.

Before the refugee camp had been built, the building that housed the bar where Richard and his friends used to hang out had been a pigsty. When the Swedish government expropriated it along with the rest of the nearby farms, it was hastily cleaned out, insulated and made livable enough to let fifty people survive the winter. As time went by and most of the refugees drifted into normal society, the old pigsty was abandoned, until Robert the Barkeep's father bought the place and turned it into a pub. It had a rough floor, hardy walls, sturdy tables and chairs, dim lighting, cheap beer and fatty food, just as Robert the Barkeep's father had said that a real English pub should. It was, predictably, called The Pigsty.
As far as Richard was concerned, it was a fine place. A place where he and his pals could reminisce about lost England. Not that he or any of his friends had ever been there, but they'd heard their parents talk. They knew that England had been an altogether better place, with none of the cold and dreariness and bureaucracy of the northern hellhole where they lived now. They knew all the great things that England had done for the world, and they knew that they deserved to be repaid for that now in the country's worst moment of need. But the jews and frenchmen and germans and other jealous fucks wanted to keep them down, and did their damnedest to make sure that once fallen England would never rise.
Richard was half-heartedly watching a football game on the ceiling-mounted monitor and carefully nursing his third pint of the evening when a tall guy he didn't know sat down on the stool next to him. If things had gone according to Richard's plan, one of his mates would already have been occupying that seat and they would both be wey into their sixth or seventh pint. Instead, Richard was drinking all by his lonesome.
"So, what do you think of the game?" the stranger said.
Richard didn't even know which teams were playing. Even though the visuals were turned to the game, the sound was set on an all-Orphea channel. Which Richard didn't mind at all, he loved that woman's music. She was from England, of course.
"It's crap," Richard said.
"Yeah, sure is," the stranger said. "What I wouldn't give to get to watch Manchester United play on Old Trafford again. Those were the times."
The stranger looked pretty old, probably over sixty. His hair was turning gray and his face was craggy. There was something military about the way he carried himself, Richard thought. Something noble.
"I never got to see that," he said. "Born too late."
"Poor kid," the stranger said. "But who knows, if you live long enough maybe you'll get the chance to see it."
Something in the way he said it triggered a memory. A memory of a rumour he'd heard every now and then for as long as he could remember.
"I'm Richard," he said, doing his best to be subtle. "And who might you be, if I may ask?"
The stranger smiled. "You can call me Captain Jack," he said.
So it was him! Right here in the Pigsty!
"I'll be damned!" Richard said. "I've been a fan of yours for years and years. I used to dream about getting to help you. England Reborn!"
The stranger -- Captain Jack -- raised an eyebrow. "Keep it down, son," he said. "We don't want the police to hear that name, now do we?"
"Sorry," Richard said, suddenly feeling as a total asshole. One of his greatest idols show up in his local pub and he went all fanboy on him!
"It's all right," Jack said. "Maybe you can help me with a little problem I have?"
"Oh, sure! Just name it!"
"It's no big thing," Jack said. "I just need to find someone."
"I've lived all my life in this godforsaken arsehole," Richard said. "I know everybody here. Who is it you want?"
Jack smiled. "Well, I don't know yet. Maybe you can tell me. I want to find someone who has worked on Kastrup Airport, and who could be persuaded to help the cause. Suitably recompensed, of course."
"I worked at Kastrup once!" Richard said, almost beside himself with excitement. He might get to help Captain Jack!
"Really? What a wonderful coincidence. Would you mind doing your bit for old England, Richard?"
"You bet I would!"
Jack smiled. "Good," he said. "I'll be in touch."
He finished off his beer. "It might not hurt if you found a couple of pals to help out," he said. "Safety in numbers, you know."
And then he left.

Iruwa plugged in her suit to the control chair and pulled the VR hood over her head. She adjusted the earplugs and goggles and, with that done, activated the systems.
The first thing she saw was a view from just in front of her, showing mostly herself, a too tall and too thin woman dressed in polymers and electronics. A modern-age Frankenstein's monster, she looked like. The chair itself and all its accompanying equipment had been placed in one of the upper galleries of the Hagia Sophia. It looked dreadfully out of place next to the decorated stone walls and floor, built almost one and half millennia earlier. It had been Orphea's idea to give a concert in the ancient mosque, and somehow her manager Sebastian had convinced the government of Turkey to let her do it. It wouldn't be able to hold more than a few hundred people in the audience, but with the unique backdrop and acoustics the net audience was promising to be astronomical.
So Iruwa had better make the netcast work out really well.
She flipped her vision to another camera. High up on the wall in the main space, looking down at the area right under the cupola. In the center of it, a big golden throne surrounded by flowers. Sitting on the throne, Orphea, dressed all in gold and white. Further out, near the walls, were the lucky few hundred who had been allowed to attend in person.
"Are you listening, love?" Iruwa said.
"To you, always," Orphea answered. Through her camera, Iruwa could just about see her lips move. She quickly flipped through the rest of them, to make sure that they all were transmitting properly.
"I'm about to check for sound," she said. "Give me something to listen to?"
Orphea closed her eyes. Her mouth opened, and she began to sing. The song started out deep in the bass, extremely deep for any singer and almost unnaturally so for a woman. She let the music wordlessly climb the scale from that dark beginning to an equally incredible high, with the occasional detours up and down to make a melody worth listening to.
Iruwa listened. She knew this song very well. Orphea had sung it to her the morning after they first spent an entire night together. It had no words, but plenty of meaning. Every note of it, every breath that Orphea expelled as she sang it, was a gift to her. A gift of beauty, an attempt to express a love to large for words. Iruwa never got tired of listening to it.
"All audio pickups are go," she said. "All cameras are go. All projectors are go. PA processors are go. We're ready to roll, and we are at fifty five seconds to set time for going online."
"Security is go," she heard Alexandra say. "Audience is go."
"I'm ready," Orphea said. "We'll fly when planned."
"Forty five seconds to connection," Iruwa's main controller system said. "Thirty. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Connection."
The media streams started pouring out onto the net, into aggregators and caches that sent them on to everyone who wanted to watch and could afford the small amount of money it cost to watch it live. Which, apparently, was an absolutely ridiculous number of people, Iruwa saw when she glanced at the feedback from the aggregators. Never mind. Statistics was for afterwards. For now, she kept a sharp eye on her controller systems, ready to override them if Orphea decided to deviate from their plan. Not that she did so very often, but often enough that Iruwa had to stay alert.
Not that spending a couple of hours watching her lover was a hardship, exactly.
They'd timed the concert to coincide with sunset. Golden sunlight streamed in through the huge stained-glass windows and bathed the entire mosque in many-coloured light. Orphea sat like a statue in her throne, back straight, arms resting on the armrests, eyes gazing fixedly straight ahead. Out of picture streams from cameras placed all around the building, the visual processors synthesized a viewpoint flying down from the top of the dome, circling the throne and the flower arrangements and ending up at eye height of a person kneeling in front of Orphea. Once it got there, she began to sing.
Her voice filled the room, instantly and totally. There was no way anyone in the room could keep their attention away from the woman in the center. The words she sang spoke of desire, desire for beauty and for remembrance. They spoke of great and glorious works, and how a multitude of human hands could create the miraculous. The music accompanied the words perfectly, and the faint glowing images thrown by the hologram projectors served to emphasize and strengthen the impression of the music. By the end of the first song, Iruwa had her viewpoint glide past the audience. More than a few of them wore broad smiles and had tears running down their faces.
Iruwa nodded to herself. This was going well.

Tuesday, 24 May 2067

Doctor William White leaned back in his worn office chair and put his feet up on the edge of the control panel.
"Systems check, please," he said.
His lab was large, far larger than anything else he'd ever had. One of the advantages on working almost alone on a platform in North Sea. Considerable privacy was another. A nearly limitless budget came with working with something that the entire world was deathly afraid of.
"Systems integrity nominal," the system said.
Most of his colleagues at the nanotech lab at MIT had thought he was insane when he'd accepted the job at NOP6. All alone with a handful of soldiers within sighting distance of the Nanoclysm itself? Madness! He'd said something about the value of close personal observation, the need to have someone nearby and that said someone might as well be him. A sacrifice on the altar of science.
He didn't mention that he figured that it'd give him ample opportunity to engage in some extracurricular activity that was hard to do in the USA.
"Privacy lockdown," he said. He heard the bolts in the lab's door slide shut and the just barely audible pink noise from the anti-surveillance system start up.
"Locked down," the system said. It sounded like he thought a proper computer system should sound, dry, emotionless and precise. None of the oh-so-popular personality emulation crap.
"Activate steganographic communications system," he said. "Let me know when people have logged on. Meanwhile, put up the latest set of reports on the simulation on monitor one."
"Done," the system said at the same time as the largest monitor in the room flickered to life. Schematics, tables and text laid themselves out over it. William looked them over, and found them good. The search of the probability space was down to the point zero one level and it still hadn't found any serious flaws in the plan. They could quite safely go ahead.
"Contacts one through six have established contact," the system said.
"Good," he said. "Route connections to voice conference."
"Done."
"Welcome, my fellow patriots," he said. "This will hopefully be our last meeting before the big event. Let's start with a round of reports, shall we? Number one?"
"Right," a carefully depersonalized voice said over the loudspeakers. "All's green on this front. The packages have all been built, and we'll be sending them on to Six later today."
"You're sure they'll work as planned?" William asked.
"As sure as we can be without a full-scale test."
"Good. Two?"
"Target network has been penetrated and relevant features disabled. We're monitoring for premature discovery, but expect no trouble."
"Three?"
"Memetic penetration of core ideas remains low, I'm afraid. But if it didn't we wouldn't be doing this, now would we? Anyway, the Captain Jack meme seems to have been a great help to Four and Five, so we're doing some good. So, in essence, not much progress but no setbacks either."
"Four?"
"As Three said, we've been able to recruit widely and quietly thanks to effective use of refugee camp psychosocial databases and widespread belief in the Captain Jack character. I've even heard reports of stories about the good captain that doesn't seem to originate with ourselves. Anyway, we're basically good. I expect at least eighty percent of our recruits to go through with their actions."
"Five?"
"As Four. Like them, we have a twenty-percent margin of error in the number of recruits, which simulations indicate will be enough. We're ready to go."
"Six?"
"We've received the address lists from Four and Five, and will distribute the packages as soon as we get them from One. Until then we're just waiting."
William looked up from the monitor. "Good," he said. "My whole-system simulations have reached the tenth-percent level of confidence. If nobody can think of a reason not to, we're ready to go. Anybody?"
There was a round of denials.
"Well then," he said. He could feel his heart speed up and his palms get sweaty. "We go. One, deliver as planned. Six, start distributing the packages as soon as you get them. Instruct the recruits to infiltrate their selected airports as soon as possible after sunset on the 29th. I will send the signal to activate them at 21:00 GMT. As soon as I'm receiving reports that the attack has worked, I will distribute our manifesto. Questions or comments?"
Silence.
"Than that is that, my fellow patriots. We will not talk again for some time. Godspeed, and may we live to see England Reborn!"

Orphea leaned back in the sofa in the living room of hers and Iruwa's suite at the Hotel Istanbul. It was a large room, lavishly decorated in the particularly bland mixture of local and international perfected by large hotels everywhere in the world. If she half-closed her eyes and ignored the moslem and byzantine elements, she might have been in any city in the world.
In the armchair across from her, a young turkish woman sat. Her hair was black, and her skin was a shade darker than Orphea's. She had her hair covered in the traditional moslem fashion, although her clothes were far more revealing than anything a good moslem woman would be expected to wear. Orphea found it slightly difficult not to keep looking at her generous cleavage.
On the table between them, a compact audio/video transceiver had been placed, its range carefully adjusted to include Orphea, the turkish woman, the sofa, the armchair and the table but nothing else. Iruwa sat in another armchair further away from the table, out of the transceiver's range and behind her Aphrodite and Johann were keeping an eye on things. Orphea caught Iruwa looking at her, and gave her a warm smile in return.
The young woman -- Sevgi, she'd said her name was, Orphea suddenly remembered -- cleared her throat.
"Are you ready to start?" she asked
Orphea smiled at her. "This is far from my first interview, dear," she said. "I can do this in my sleep. You start when you feel like it."
Sevgi looked a little ashamed. "Of course," she said. She bent forward and keyed the transceiver online.
"This is Sevgi Erdem for Istanbul Now," she said. "I'm sitting in the presidential suite at the Hotel Istanbul with world-famous artist Orphea, who yesterday gave an incredible concert in the Ayasofya. According to Netmeter Turkey, that concert may have have been the most-watched live event on the net ever. So, Orphea, what did you think about it?"
"On the whole I think it went rather well," Orphea said. "The planning of it was slightly more complex than usual, since we didn't have any chance to do a dry run and see if the reality of the place matched our simulations. But our calculations held, it all turned out pretty much as we wanted it and I think we provided an enjoyable show."
Sevgi smiled at her. "I'd say you provided an absolutely amazing show," she said. "And as usual with your concerts, the majority of the material was entirely new and never performed before. Considering that you did another concert with just as much new material only three days before, and I think we can safely assume that you'll do it again in Rome this Sunday, I really have to ask where you get the time to create it all. I have no idea how many songs you've published, but it must be thousands over the eighteen years of your career."
"They come to me in dreams," Orphea said. "Fully formed. I just have to remember them and sing them."
Sevgi looked doubtful. "Well," she said, "I guess we can't really ask that you reveal the secrets of your trade."
A half-strangled snort came from Iruwa in the corner.
"Tell me," Sevgi went on, "what is the message of your tour as a whole? You've called it the Memento Mori tour, but surely there must be a little more to the message than just that we will all die some day?"
"Not much, really," Orphea said. "We're doing the entire tour in places that reminds of fallen greatness. Paris was slightly special, as the closest convenient alternative to England. But after that there is the Hagia Sophia that reminds of Byzantium, the Coliseum that reminds of imperial Rome, Karnak that reminds of ancient Egypt, Angkor Wat that reminds of the Khmer Empire and so on. All of them fell, as will the empires of today."
"I see," Sevgi said. "I believe that we have some viewer questions, if you don't mind."
Inwardly, Orphea winced. "Of course not," she said.
The head and shoulders of a teenage girl appeared in the air over the transceiver, gushing something barely coherent but obviously very positive. Orphea tried to reply with something that wasn't too nasty or divorced from what the girl had said, but she wasn't sure if she succeeded. A stream of teenagers appeared after the first, all with much the same effect. It made Orphea wonder if she really had to do this sort of thing, if she wasn't famous and established enough by now to get by without this sort of pointless exercise in frustration.
"Miss Orphea," an older and more cultured voice suddenly said. She actually looked at the hologram, instead of just pointing her eyes in its general direction. The image was of a blonde woman, maybe in her mid-twenties or so. Her hair was cut short, and she looked serious. Orphea spontaneously liked her, although she had to admit to herself that that might just be because of the welcome contrast to the neverending teenagers.
"My name is Maria du Lac," the woman said, "and I'm a freelance content provider mostly associated with The Silent Word out of Geneva."
"Pleased to hear from you, Maria," Orphea said. "Do you have a question?"
"Yes, I do," she said. "Did you ever wonder why you never remembered your parents?"
Orphea as completely taken by surprise by the question. "Come again?" she said.
"Have you ever wondered why you don't remember your parents?" du Lac repeated. "You've claimed in several interviews before that you don't, and when I went through the old Nanoclysm archives at Sorbonne I found that your admission notice from the refugee camp says that you didn't remember your parents at all even when you first arrived there. Which would've been only days after you left them."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Iruwa sit up and take notice.
"Furthermore," Maria went on, "there were almost one hundred other girls aged between three and seven who arrived to that same camp on that day, none of them remembering anything of their parents, and one of which was your partner Iruwa. This seems to me to be rather too many to be explained by coincidence. Even if we assume that all those girls suffered from trauma caused by the evacuation, no other camp every showed a similar influx. One would also assume that the gender distribution would be rather more mixed."
"No," Orphea said. "I never really wondered about that. But I do now. I assume that you have a theory?"
"Not really," du Lac said. "But I find it intriguing. That the world's most famous musical artist and one of the most famous visual designers share the same mystery in their childhood."
"Sometimes hardship brings out the best in people," Orphea said.
A warm hand touched her shoulder. She looked up, seeing that Iruwa had got up from her chair and walked into the pickup range of the net transceiver and was standing behind her.
"Miss du Lac," Iruwa said, "have you investigated all of the hundred girls you mentioned or just me and Orphea?"
"I started with Orphea," the hologram of Maria du Lac said. "When I noticed that you came from the same camp, I expanded my search. I've not had the time to do a thorough investigation of the others yet."
"Like Orphea, I never really thought about why I don't remember my parents," Iruwa said. "But your question have made me curious. Could you, as a favour, send me a copy of the information you dug out of those archives?"
"Certainly," du Lac said.
"Thank you," Iruwa said. "I'll be in touch."
And then there were more gushing teenagers.

"I want to go out," Orphea had said after the interviewer had left.
So they did.
Orphea put on a pair of dark glasses and a wide-brimmed black hat, Iruwa chose to wear her display glasses and a white scarf covering her hair. She was sure that people would recognize them anyway. It was common knowledge that they were in the city, and two unusually tall women, one looking Mediterranean and one black, were not very discreet to begin with. But no matter. They rarely had any problems with the public at large. What made two-way net appearances so tiresome was the near-rabid fans that sought them out and wanted their attention. The common fan on the street would usually be pleased to see them, but make no big deal out of it.
The streets of Istanbul smelled of dust and spices and sweat and incense and rotting garbage and exhaust from ancient gasoline-powered vehicles. They were narrow and dusty and crowded and hot and utterly real in a way that the hotel completely failed to be.
When she looked back over her shoulder, she saw people point at her and Orphea and whisper to each other. Rumour would already be traveling at unbelievable speed ahead of them, telling the tale that tonight the world-famous Orphea walked the streets of the city. Tonight, the modern-age muse of music herself had descended to the common people.
"It bothers me," Orphea said. "What she told us."
"It wouldn't say that it bothers me," Iruwa said. "But it is interesting."
"I can't help but wonder what those other hundred women are like."
"Me neither."
They stopped at the stall of a man selling spicy grilled meat in pita bread pockets, and bought themselves something to eat. When he saw who they were, he tried to give the food to them. Orphea glowered at him, and forced him to accept her lira bill. They walked on, eating. The spiced meat was tasty, but made them thirsty, so a few streets on, they repeated the scene, although this time with whine. Orphea had a very effective glare.
The wine was sour and invigorating and intoxicating. The bottle became empty in the blink of an eye, and they bought another and another.
"I never even wondered about it," Orphea said. "When I was a child, I mean. There were so many in the camps who had lost their parents that we never mentioned it."
"I know," Iruwa said, "I know. I was there."
"I guess I assumed none of the other orphans remembered their parents either. You accept many strange things when you're little."
"Like the dreams," Iruwa said. "I've been thinking about the dreams, since she mentioned the hundred little girls."
They had a large group of people following them now. Someone had brought a portable music system, and was playing old Orphea songs. There was laughing, and chattering, and dancing.
"The dreams," Orphea said. "Listen to that. I haven't heard that song in ages. I can remember dreaming it. I can remember every fucking dream I ever had."
Iruwa kissed her. There was a sudden outburst of applause and catcalls from the crowd. "I don't think most people do that," she said after they'd separated again. She still had her arms around Orphea.
"I don't let anyone except you do that," Orphea said.
Iruwa laughed. "Not that, silly. Remember every dream they ever had."
Orphea frowned. "But you do too."
"I do too," she agreed. "But my dreams are not exactly like yours."
"No," Orphea said, "you dream visions and I dream this."
She closed her eyes and began to sing. It was a new song, one that Iruwa had never heard before. She guessed that Orphea had dreamt it the night before.
Behind them the crowd fell silent. The music system got abruptly turned off, and children hushed into silence. An eerie, almost unnatural quiet spread over the crowded street. All that could be heard was Orphea's wordless song, a cold sequence of sounds bringing chills to her listeners even in the balmy night.
Iruwa removed the scarf from her head and put her glasses in a pocket. If there had been little point in trying to be incognito to begin with, it was utterly pointless now. Orphea singing was something that simply could not be done by anybody else in the world. She was unique, a phenomenon. Iruwa remembered a doctor saying once that Orphea's throat couldn't have been more suited for singing if it had been built for the purpose.
After what Maria du Lac had said, the memory sent a chill down her spine. She wondered about her own ability to coax imagery out of machines. About her ability to handle machines in general. She'd never really had to learn it, it had just come naturally to her. She'd seen the machines, and after a try or two she'd always known what to do with them. In school, it'd taken her years to realize that not all the other kids learned as easily as she did. That some of them never managed to learn at all.
Orphea finished her song and bowed to the audience, who once again broke out in applause.
"You know we're both unusual," she said when Orphea turned to her again. "I'm going to talk to the du Lac woman and see what she's found out about us. If there is anything to know, I want to know it."
Orphea nodded. "You do that," she said.

Wednesday, 25 May 2067

The rickety old train ground to a screaming halt in front of the gates to Refugee Camp 33. It was a wheeled old thing, running on plain steel rails. Maria thought she'd read somewhere that it had been repurposed from the Paris Metro when they changed over to maglev trains, but she wasn't sure. In any case, the train she just got off was old, badly maintained and its brakes had screamed bloody murder every time the train slowed down. She was more than glad to get off it, and she didn't look forward to getting on it again for the trip back.
The camp didn't really have streets. It was more like sturdier footpaths that ran more or less straight in between rows of buildings that had been intended to stand for ten years and were now going on thirty. There were few signposts, the streets had no names and the houses had symbolic signs instead of numbers. She knew she was looking for Onion House in Rue de la Boue, but knowing that told her nothing about how far from it she was. She tried asking the taciturn children who played in the mud, but got no replies. So she resorted to walking around and trusting to luck.
It was the better part of an hour before she found a sign that said that she was now on the Rue de la Boue, and a good quarter hour before she found a door that had a rather mishappen image of an onion next to it. Tired to the point of being grouchy and belligerent, she knocked on the door.
"Who's there?" a voice said from inside. It sounded like an old man, which was encouraging.
"My name is Maria du Lac," she said. "I'm looking for Edward Jones."
The door opened and an old man looked out. "What d'you want with him?" he said.
"I'd like to talk to him about things that happened thirty years ago," she said. "Or, if that's impossible, I'd just like to sit down for a while before I walk out of this pimple on Hell's ass of a town. Camp. Whatever."
He chuckled. "Insulting a man's home is not a good way to start," he said.
She looked up at him. Like most people, he was taller than her. He was also very thin and had nearly no hair left, which left him looking a bit like a lightbulb on a stick.
"Are you trying to tell me that you don't think this is a pimple on Hell's ass?" she asked.
"Oh, it sure is," he said. "But you don't live here, so you're not supposed to say that."
"I walked through it for ages," she said. "I've earned a couple of insults."
Again, he chuckled. "You don't give in easily, do you, girl?" he said. "Come on in, I'll put the kettle on."
A while later, sitting on a surprisingly comfortable chair in Edward Jones' kitchen with a hot cup of tea in her hand she felt a lot less hostile towards the universe in general. Despite the decrepit appearance of the house's exterior and the area around it, the inside of it was actually quite pleasant. Neither too hot nor too cold, pretty decently furnished and with a feel that said that this was a home, not just a place where someone lived.
"So," Edward said. "Thirty years ago. That'd be the year of the evacuation, I'd say."
"Yes," Maria said. "And I believe that you were one of the first people to arrive at what would become this camp, and the only one who's still here."
He sat down across the table from her and stirred sugar into his tea.
"That I was," he said. "And that I am."
"What was it like?"
"That's a very big question, girlie. Bigger than I can answer. An entire nation dying, that's not really the sort of thing one old man can properly grasp. You'll have to be a little more precise, I'm afraid."
"All of it didn't die," she said. "There's still Northern Ireland, with the King and all that."
He nodded at her. "Aye," he said, "they're still there. But you know what I mean. England as it was is well and truly dead, and it's not coming back, no matter how much those England Reborn cretins talk about getting a new homeland."
"Where did you live before you came here?"
"Manchester," he said. "Not so far from the lab where it all started and not so far from the coast. Plenty of reason to leave early, and easy enough to actually do it. Some of my mates went down to London, but I figured I might as well take the chance to see a foreign country."
He chuckled drily. "Got to see a lot more foreign country than I expected."
"Did you come here voluntarily or were you sent?"
"A little of both. When I first got to France I managed to get a hotel room. But that cost money, and I started running out of that at pretty much the same time that the EU bigwigs up in Bruxelles decided to institute the camps. So I came here, and not only got to a place to stay but also a job helping build the place. Paid for beer, but not much more."
"And then you stayed on."
"For a long time there was no where else to go, and the early camps where a whole lot better than the later ones. We got enough food not to starve too much, and we'd managed to build enough plumbing to keep the place clean. Helped immeasurably in keeping the plagues at bay."
He got up and fetched the teapot, filled her cup and then his own.
"I remember the winter of 2038," he said. "That one was really bad. We'd thought that the year before had been bad, but we really had no idea. That first winter, there still were stockpiles of food and clothes and soap and all that sort of stuff. Not really stockpiles big enough for all the millions of refugees, but there was some."
His face a faraway and haunted look.
"2038, though, was the real hell winter. The storehouses were empty. The harvests had been bad, because of refugees trampling them while trying to get food. The governments were running out of money with which to buy more from the rest of the world, and on top of all that the shoddier built camps were starting to break down. So the people in them tried to come here, and we knew that if we let them in we'd just starve with them. So we got what's usually called the riots."
His teacup stood forgotten on the table.
"They weren't riots," he said. "They were more like civil war. We got together as many men as possible, and we built up the fences around the camp into proper barricades. We bought and stole as many weapons as we could get. I traded two loaves of hard bread and a bottle of piss-poor gin for a Kalashnikov rifle older than I was and as many bullets for it as I could carry. Then we stood guard, and we just shot anybody who got too close and we didn't like the looks of. From mid-december until almost New Year's, there were so many people around the camp that we couldn't get out and nobody got in. Those were hungry days, but we just had to look over the barricades to see how much worse off we could've been. Because out there, that was Hell. They had no food, hardly any clothes and no fuel for fires. They died in droves out there, and every time we had to shoot someone who tried to break in the rest of them would fight like mad over who'd get to eat off the corpse before it froze solid. Because those who starved or froze to death, they usually found after they'd already got too hard to chew."
He shook his head.
"Those were bad times, girl. Really bad. And then, when spring came and thawed out all those dead bodies, we got the plagues. Still, that was better, because then at least it wasn't people killing each other. It was just Mother Nature being her coldhearted self."
"Is that why you've never left?" she asked, keeping her voice soft. "Because of all the effort and pain you spent on this place?"
He nodded. "Once you've killed for a place, you can't ever really leave it. Even if you go away, it stays in your heart. Quite a lot of people left as soon as they could, of course, but none of the ones I met later were very happy. I couldn't figure out a reason to leave, so I didn't. I stayed on."
"And worked with children."
"Yeah. Funny that... I'd used to be a chef back in Manchester, so I ended up taking care of a couple of the mess halls early on. Somehow i drifted from that into taking care of the orphanage. Don't know why, really. A large part of it was that nobody else did, I think. It needed doing, and I was there to do it."
"I've been looking through old archives," Maria said. "And it seems that you had an unusual number of orphan girls."
"All the camps had a lot of orphans," he said. "Girls as well as boys. Parents sent the kid to safety ahead of themselves, and then never made it out at all or just never found them."
"One of your orphan girls were the very young Orphea," she said, not giving up on her line of questioning.
He smiled.
"I thought you'd come to that," he said. "Yes, she was one of ours. And yes, we had lot more girls than most other places, for some reason. They all arrived at once, too, at the very end of the evacuation. A hundred girls in a bunch. At first we thought they'd all come out of some kind of institution, because they seemed a little daft. But I guess that was just shock, because they all got better real fast. As time went by we found that most of them were really damn smart, too, but by then I think most of us had forgotten that they all arrived at once."
"Smart how?"
He shrugged. "Just smart. Clever. Learned stuff really fast, had a really strong talent or two. Like Orphea. She could sing real amazingly well almost from the day she arrived, and she learned to play the guitar and the flute before she was eight."
"When you say that they semeed daft, what do you mean? In what way did they appear daft?"
"It's been thirty years, girl," he said. "I don't remember all that well."
"I understand," Maria said. "Thanks for telling me this, it's been fascinating."
He got up from the chair and started rinsing out the teapot.
"Other people's misery is always interesting," he said. "Basic fact of humanity. Learn that, and you'll never go wrong as a journalist."
"Thanks for the tea," she said. "I think I'd better start trying to find my way out of here, if I'll have any chance to catch the train into Paris."
"Just take left when you get out the door, then turn right when you come to the market square."
"Sounds manageable." She collected her stuff and was on her way out the door when he spoke again.
"They couldn't talk," he said.
Maria turned around with her hand on the door handle and looked at him.
"What?" she said.
"Those hundred girls. None of them could talk, and none of them had any idea about how to handle ordinary eating utensils. Not even the ones who looked to be six or seven years old. Nor could they dress themselves. They all learned those things over the course of a couple of weeks, but when they came to us none of them knew how to speak."
"Thank you," she said, with feeling this time.

The train back from the camp was no more modern than the one she'd been in on the way out. It was bumpy, noisy and it smelled funny. She sat in one of its worn seats looking our through the scratched window at the countryside passing by. It was hard to believe that the fields and forests had once held the horrors that Edward had told her about. Not that she doubted him at all, it was just hard to imagine. It wasn't the sort of thing one wanted to imagine one's fellow humans capable of.
She had almost fallen asleep when her computer system alerted her to an incoming connection. She glanced quickly to see who it was, entirely prepared to tell the system to ignore it and let her sleep until she saw that it was from Iruwa. She sat up straight and told the system to accept it, suddenly all awake.
"Greetings, Miss du Lac," Iruwa said. Her voice was calm and pleasant, and her dark face and gentle brown eyes translucently overlaid the vision of the worn-down train. "I how I'm not disturbing you?"
"No, no," Maria said. "It's fine. I've just finished an interview. And please call me Maria."
"Good," Iruwa said. "From your appearance on the webcast, I guess that you're investigating my Orphea's background."
"I am," she answered.
"May I ask why? The story of Orphea's life is hardly unbroken journalistic ground."
"I believe that I have a new angle," she said. "And while I hope that neither you nor Orphea mind my writing about you, I don't intend to stop."
Iruwa smiled at her. "I do not mind," she said. "And I don't think Orphea cares at all. She's most used to being written about."
"Good," Maria said. "So, if it's not to ask me to stop, then why are you calling me?"
The train passed through a tunnel, and in the momentary darkness Iruwa's face loomed larger than life in front of her.
"Because your question intrigued me," she said. "And I am eager to see what it is that you think you have found out. I would like to know about the parts of my life that I do not myself remember. I have called to offer my help, and to ask that you tell us what you find out in its entirety, even any parts of it that you may chose not to publish."
Maria smiled. "I'd really appreciate any help you might give," she said, "and I think I can safely promise to give you access anything I find, as far as it doesn't conflict with the anonymity of any sources who may ask not to be revealed."
"Reasonable and fair," Iruwa said. "Do we have a deal?"
"We have a deal," Maria replied, a sense of triumph irrationally rising within her. When she'd thought about it before, the best she'd hoped for from the large commercial apparatus that surrounded Orphea was non-interference, active help from Orphea's lover had never even occured to her in her wildest dreams.
"So, Maria," Iruwa said. "Is there anything you wish to tell me or ask of me right now?"
"There is," she said. "Something that I've been thinking about but never managed to figure out a legal way to get. The basic question I'm trying to answer is where Orphea and you really came from. There's a laboratory I know that can do detailed DNA analysis and pinpoint with rather remarkable accuracy where your ancestors for the last couple of generations lived. I'd really like to have them have a go at you and Orphea. But to do that I need blood or tissue samples from the both of you."
"Not a problem. We've got baseline tissue samples in cryogenic storage in Berne, I can have our lawyers send slices to the clinic later today if you'll just give me their address."
"Oh, sure." She quickly picked the address out of her database and sent it on to Iruwa's system.
"Just out of curiosity," she said after she'd got the transfer acknowledged, "why do you have tissue samples stored with your lawyers?"
"Basically, for reasons of identification," Iruwa said. "That's common for the very rich or very famous. As a bonus, the samples can be used for therapeutic reasons should we get infected with retroviral diseases or need organs regrown. We've also got ova frozen, in case we decide to have kids."
"I hope you don't mind me saying so, but that's pretty weird."
Iruwa smiled. "The world of the very rich has always been pretty weird, miss du Lac," she said. "I wish you luck in your search for the truth. You can use this address to contact me at any time."
"I will, as soon as I find something," Maria said. "Have a nice day."
The connection died and the face floating in the air faded away. She rode the rest of the way into Paris in silence.

Friday, 27 May 2067

"Yeah, right," John said. "For sure you met Captain Jack."
The four of them were standing around near the back of the grocery store, trying to figure out which brand of beer would get them the most alcohol for the least amount of money this week. John was a short and squat guy who liked to pick fights. He was a public park worker, which for the most part consisted of clearing weeds and mowing lawns.
"But I did!" Richard said. "He was right there, in the Pigsty."
"And how many pints had you had before he showed up?" Anders asked. Anders was tall and blonde, looks he'd taken after his absent Swedish father. He worked as a janitor at a hospital, which occasionally gave him the chance to augment his income by selling drugs he stole at work.
"Hardly any," Richard said. "It was the day before payday and I didn't have the money to get drunk."
"Captain Jack doesn't fucking exist," Ted said. "He's just a myth spread by the man to give the masses a smidgen of hope and prevent large-scale rebellion." Ted had managed to learn things in spite of the refugee camp education system. He worked as a machine operator at a mechanical design house, and claimed to be a member of a secret anarcho-syndicalist cell. His dark hair he kept trimmed to a few millimeters, and he took karate classes in preparation of the day when the revolution would come.
"So who did I fucking meet?" Richard asked. "He was an old guy, with gray hair and all. He had a working man's hands, too. And he talked about watching football in Manchester, for fuck's sake."
John picked up two sixpacks of cheap Danish lager. "I think these are the best," he said.
"If he really was Captain Jack," Ted said. "What the fuck did he want with you?"
"He was looking for someone to help out," Richard said. "And it so happens that I can do that. Except I need some pals to help out as well, and you idiots don't even believe that he exists."
"Yup, these definitely give the most buzz for the buck," John decided. "Let's go." He set off towards the checkout line, and the others followed.
"So what did he want us to do?" Anders said.
Richard kept silent while John paid and they passed through the shoplifting alarm system.
"He didn't say, exactly," he said when they were outside. "And he wouldn't go blabbing England Reborn secrets to any guy he meets in a bar, now would he? But he said he wanted someone who's worked at Kastrup. Which it so happens that I have. And he needs a few more guys to help out."
The walked in silence for a while, thinking about Richard's story.
"The airport, eh?" Anders said. "Could be drugs. England Reborn has to get funds somehow."
"Could be," Richard said. "Opening up a new distribution channel, maybe."
"Could be profitable," John said. "Could be very profitable."
"Could be weapons," Ted said. "A revolution needs weapons. Or it could be something else, like sabotage. Striking directly at the establishment."
They reached the gates to the old garage, closed down for over a decade now, ever since it the "or die" part of the "upgrade or die" cycle that followed the general changeover from gasoline cars to ones powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Anders unhinged the locked gate and swung it open with the old lock acting as a hinge. The gang entered, and he put it back again. They crossed the parking lot, detouring around the burned-out shells of gasoline cars, and climbed in through a long-since broken window.
"So you're helping?" Richard said. He sat down on the least broken chair. The rest of the gang spread themselves between a moldy old couch and a couple of old mattresses on the floor. John passed around beer cans.
"Sure," Anders said. "I'm on. Heck, even if he's not really Captain Jack it sounds like a bit of fun."
"Yeah, me too," John said. "It's not like we've got anything better to do." He opened his can and drank deeply.
"You could join the fight against the capitalists," Ted said. "But, I'm in as well. I want to see what it's really all about."
"Good," Richard said. He raised his beer can. "England Reborn!"
"England Reborn!" the others echoed.

Saturday, 28 May 2067

"Please state your name and business," the gate said. Maria looked around and tried to spot the speaker and camera, without success. The gate was almost four meters tall and made out of black ceramic. It attached to thick walls that looked like brick, but which she suspected was something else entirely under a thin facade. The road that led up to the gate was a clean black, and the lawn through which it passed was immaculately kept. On the gate there was a spotless brass sign with engraved lettering that proclaimed that the this was the entrance to Kunst des Lebens GmbH.
"My name is Maria du Lac," she said. "I'm here to see doctor Wittmeyer."
"You're expected, miss du Lac," the gate said. "Please enter and follow the guidelight to doctor Wittmeyer's laboratory."
The gate swung open, soundlessly and smoothly. In the surface of the road inside, a bright red glowing spot appeared. Maria walked through the gate, and the spot moved so that it stayed a couple of steps in front of her. She followed it, unable to shake a feeling of entering a gilded cage. Behind her, the gate closed just as silently as it had opened.
She'd been quite surprised when, instead of the reports on Orphea's and Iruwa's DNA sequences that she had expected to get back from Kunst des Lebens, she got a mail asking her, very politely, if she would mind visiting Frau Doctor Lotte Wittmeyer to discuss the anonymous samples she had submitted for analysis. She didn't mind, so she went. After all, it was no more than a short flight and a taxi ride away.
The guidelight led her through a well-maintained garden, full of bushes and flowers. There were footpaths, ponds, streams and picturesque footbridges. There were butterflies and birds and, occasionally, rabbits. It was all very calm and well-ordered.
The laboratory was situated in a smallish two-story red-brick building with a black roof. The guidelight faded away when it reached the three steps up to the door, and the door opened as soon as she set her foot on the first step. Waiting inside the door was the first human being she'd seen since she stepped out of the taxi. She looked quite a bit older than Maria, probably a bit over sixty. Her hair was long and gray, and she kept it in a neat ponytail. She wore an unbuttoned white lab coat, under which she had a white blouse and a light tan pair of slacks.
"Welcome to Kunst des Lebens, miss du Lac," she said. "I am doctor Wittmeyer. Please come in."
"Thank you," Maria said. She followed the doctor inside, noting the distinct click when the door locked behind them. The interior of the building was not quite as immaculate and well-ordered as the outside, although it was still very neat. But at least it looked like ut was occupied by humans, who left papers in piles on workbenches and left cups of cold coffee on desks.
Doctor Wittmeyer closed the door to her office and sat down behind her desk.
"Please, have a seat," she said, indicating the chair in front of the desk. Maria sat down.
"I take it there was something unusual about the samples I sent you," she said.
The doctor leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers. "You could say that, yes," she said. "I suppose you would not care to tell me who the samples were taken from?"
"I'm afraid not," Maria said.
"I though us much. But maybe you can at least say if they were taken from actual living people? As opposed to, say, some kind of experimental genetic hybrids?"
"They're from real people," she said. "Exactly how weird are they?"
Doctor Wittmeyer took a pair of projection glasses from her desk and put them on. "At first, we found nothing strange at all," she said. "Sample A is from a woman of Nigerian and Kenyan descent with a small amount of Anglo-Saxon. From the particular mixture, I would guess ethnically Nigerian born from parents living in England or an English-dominated area. Sample B is more of a mixture. Predominantly Macedonian, there are significant elements of Italian, Armenian and German. Altogether, a not unusual 21th-century European. I'd say she probably has a Mediterranean look, although we ran no such simulations so I cannot say for sure. That's still a very expensive process."
She took her glasses off and looked at Maria.
"Then we looked at their mitochondrial DNA," she said, "and things got weird."
"Weird how?" Maria said.
"Mitochondrial DNA varies a lot less than cellular DNA," doctor Wittmeyer said. "But it does vary, and the level of difference between two people's mitochondria gives a good measurement of how many generations it has been since they had a common female ancestor. Even full siblings will have a handful of misreplicated base pairs to distinguish them."
She paused for a little while, as if thinking.
"In both samples you sent us," she went on, "the mitochondrial DNA is exactly the same. Not just similar, but exactly the same. Given that they both have very different cellular DNA, this is should not be."
Maria frowned. "So what does it mean?"
"It is not impossible that their parents or ancestors had ordinarily separated mito-DNA, and that this mutated into the same sequence in both these women. It is, however, roughly as probable as all the elementary particles in my desk spontaneously reforming into the Mona Lisa. We ran the tests quite a few times, on different analyzers, before we accepted the result."
"Are you telling me that these women can't exist?"
"After we accepted the result, our first theory was that we were dealing with the results of human intervention. That someone, somewhere had been fooling around with human ova and these two women were the result. So we ran a large-scale search against all known strains of mito-DNA to see which part of the world this might have been done in."
Maria just waited for her to go on.
"After we got the results from that, I decided to ask you to come here so I could ask you myself where these samples come from," doctor Wittmeyer said. "Are you sure that these samples come from actual, living people?"
Maria frowned. "As sure as I can reasonably be," she said. "There is, I guess, some possibility that the samples might have been switched, but I consider that very unlikely. And you're making me very curious about where it is you found them to come from."
"Nowhere," doctor Wittmeyer said. "Their mitochondrial DNA is not from any known human strain. Even worse, it's not from any known strain at all. While possessing apparently ordinary cellular DNA, on another level they are not only entirely unrelated to the human species, they're entirely unrelated to any eucaryote life on the planet Earth."
They looked at each other for a few moments.
"Are you telling me that they're space aliens?" Maria said, her voice heavy with doubt.
"I'm telling you that I have no idea what they are. According to our tests, the last possible common ancestor between them and us was a unicellular organism one billion years ago," doctor Wittmeyer said. "At the moment, we're trying to clone their mitochondria so that we can run tests on them and see how they behave. They must behave like normal mitochondria to a very high degree, or those two would not be alive, but considering the sheer amount of difference between their mito-DNA and ours there must be some differences in behaviour."
It felt unreal to Maria. She'd suspected that there was something peculiar about Orphea's origins, but this was far beyond her wildest dreams.
"What about the chances that someone designed them?" she asked. "Isn't that more likely than... well, them being a natural phenomenon?"
"I'd say it is, but that just shifts the question to who did the design. We couldn't do it, and we are among the best in the business. If there was anyone who was that much better than us, they would own the market."
She hesitated a little. "I'd like to ask you to ask the sources of the samples to come here for tests," she said. "Knowing that there are at least two women walking around out there who aren't quite human will bother me for the rest of my life. I want to investigate this. Get to the bottom of it."
That was a feeling Maria could sympathize with. "I'll ask," she said. "I suspect that the answer will be no, but I will ask."
Doctor Wittmeyer smiled. "Thank you," she said.
"No need," Maria said. "I like to fancy myself an old-fashioned investigative reporter, sometimes. If I find something out that I can tell you, I will."
"I can ask no more than that." She got up from her chair. "Let me show you out," she said.

On the way back to the airport Maria kept looking at the icon next to Iruwa's name in her phonebook and wondering how she was going to tell her what she'd just heard. Hi, you're not human? Want to hear something funny? I'm a closer relative to a jellyfish than to you!
She stared at the back of the cab driver's head, sighed and told her system to contact Iruwa's. A few seconds later, the face of the famous visual designer appeared in her vision.
"Miss du Lac," she said. "I suppose you have news for me?"
"I really would prefer it if you called me by my first name," Maria said. "When you use my surname like that it makes me wonder how I should address you."
Iruwa smiled. "The benefits of not having a surname," she said. "Much less doubt."
"At least as long as you're famous."
"At least then."
Maria looked out at the early summer green of the German countryside. Iruwa's face stayed at it's place in her vision and overlaid the fields and cows instead of the back of the driver's seat.
"Anyway, I have something to tell you," she said. "Something pretty weird."
"I'm all ears," Iruwa said. "Electronic ears, granted, but still."
"I don't want to say it in public," Maria said. "Or over the net, to be honest. I don't doubt that your systems are adequately protected against anything, but I'm using a lightweight portable system and it doesn't have the processing power to be entirely safe from dedicated eavesdroppers. Would it be possible for me to come to you?"
Iruwa frowned. "Not really," she said. "We're just setting up in Rome, and after the concert tonight we'll be tearing it all down again in order to move it to Egypt. It would be better if I came to visit you. My staff can tear down the systems by themselves, so I can be gone for a day or so before we build it all up again. Where will you be tomorrow?"
"I'm in Germany," Maria said. "On my way to Schonefeld airport. I'll get a room there and wait for you."
"I'll be there tomorrow," Iruwa said. "Until then."
Her face faded away, and Maria's system noted that the connection had been severed. She spent the rest of the trip wondering what she'd stumbled into.

It was late when Richard left the Pigsty, and he was drunk enough to wobble quite a bit as he walked. It had been a good evening. He still had money left from this week's Social Security payment, and he'd won some more playing darts, so he'd been able to drink just about as much as he wanted to. Which was quite a bit, usually. Not that the danish piss they served at the Pigsty tasted particularly good, but it sure made you drunk. And that was the point of the exercise. But the guys had to get home at a reasonable hour and in a reasonable state in order to be able to get up and go to their jobs the next day, so for the last hour or two Richard had been drinking alone. Until it got too dull and he decided to go home and view a porn channel. There were plenty of free ones, as long as you could stand the ads, and he was too drunk to mind ads. Yet another point in favour of being drunk.
At the sixth or seventh try he managed to get his key into the ancient mechanical lock and got the door open. He stumbled through and dropped his coat on the floor, cursing the stupid fucking weather in the stupid fucking country he lived in. Late May should be warm enough that one shouldn't need a coat!
"So this is what you do with your life?" a voice he didn't know said from inside his flat.
"What?" he said. "Who the fuck are you?"
He looked around and saw someone sitting in his favourite armchair. A man, looking a bit older than Richard himself, with short dark hair and dressed in a dark leather jacket, blue jeans and combat boots.
"Captain Jack said that you'd help us," he said, "so I came here to give you instructions and some equipment. But all I see is a hopeless drunken sod who I wouldn't trust to handle a pocket knife."
Richard put a hand to the wall, trying his best to appear steady.
"Captain Jack?" he said. "You're from Captain Jack?"
"Not unless you give me a reason to change my mind in the next couple of seconds, mate."
He closed his eyes and tried to think. Damn that he'd chose today of all days to get stinking drunk!
"I'm sorry," he said. "But since I haven't got a job I usually don't have a reason to stay sober."
The man got up from the armchair and approached Richard.
"If I tell you stuff tonight, do you think you'll remember it tomorrow?" he said.
Richard nodded furiously. "Yeah, sure!" he said. "Just let me get a cup of coffee first."
He wobbled into the small kitchen and shoved a pile of unwashed dishes aside so he could reach the coffee maker. Concentrating hard, he managed to load it with water and coffee and turn it on. Soon the smell of brewing coffee filled the room.
"This the best flat you could get?" the man asked.
Richard looked daggers at him. He didn't like his flat, but as long as he refused to work it was the best he was going to get.
"They don't come much better in the camps," he said. "The fancy places are all outside and full of Swedes."
He turned on the tap and quickly washed a couple of mugs.
"I hop you don't take milk," he said, "because I haven't got any."
"That's all right," the man said. "I take black as a nigger bitch's arse. And you can call me Michael, by the way."
A huge weight fell from Richard's heart. If he said his name he almost certainly wasn't about to reject Richard and leave to find someone better. He poured the coffee.
"Here," he said as he handed over a steaming mug. "It's pretty good, considering."
Michael took the mug and sipped the coffee. He nodded appreciatively. "Yeah, it is," he said. "Do you think you can stay away from stronger stuff than this for, oh, about 48 hours?"
Richard frowned. "Yeah, of course I can, but why... Oh!"
Realization suddenly struck him. "That soon?" he said. "I thought I'd have to wait a lot longer to do something."
Michael shook his head. "The shorter the lead time, the less time they get to find out about it and stop it. You'll do your bit tomorrow night."
Richard sipped at his coffee. Shit. Tomorrow. That was a lot sooner than he or the guys had expected. "What do you want us to do?"
"Jack said that you know your way around Kastrup. That right?"
"Yeah," Richard said. "Worked there for a bit, picking up trash. Bloody boring work, but I got to see most of the stuff above ground."
"Good," Michael said. "So you think you could find the cable ditch running from the air control tower to the main terminal?"
"Sure. Piece of cake. That thing trapped lots of crap that blew in from the runways."
Michael smiled. "Great," he said. He took a black lump of material about the size of a cricket ball from his pocket. "Have you ever heard about a vampire tap?" he said.

Orphea stood stooped in the low walkways under the stage covering the Coliseum floor. It was a lot less tidy and well-designed than she was used to, but she could forgive that considering that the place was only thirteen years shy of its two-thousandth birthday. A heck of a long time to still stand, especially considering that it didn't exactly stand far away from human events. An even longer time to still be in use, even if it was only rarely these days. The restoration work done in the 2020s had made it a lot more able to handle people, but the Italian government was still very careful with its historic monuments. It had taken Orphea's manager a long time to get her permission to hold a concert here, even longer than it had taken him to get her permission for the Hagia Sophia. But in the end he'd managed it. As popular events went, an Orphea concert was pretty much as good as it got, and this was an election year in Italy. They'd asked that she make the concert free for the real-life audience and only charge for the webcast. She'd agreed, and thrown in a certain amount of free food and drink for the visitors. Money hadn't been of any importance to her for many years, and it amused her in an ironic sort of way to know that she was providing bread and circuses to the people of Rome.
"Audio is go," she heard Iruwa's voice say through the transducer in her jawbone. "Cameras are go. Hologram projectors are go. PA processors are go."
Alexandra's voice replaced Iruwa's. "Security is go," she said. "Audience is go."
"Give me a second," Orphea said. "I can't move very fast in this place. The ancient romans were short bastards."
"Holding at thirty seconds," Iruwa said. "We proceed at Orphea's mark."
She made her way forward to the circular platform that would rise up through the floor with her on it. The edge of it was covered with hologram projectors and a few monitor PA processors to give her an idea of what the audience was hearing while she sang. She went down on one knee in the center of the platform, bowed her head and stretched her arms up and forward as if presenting a gift to someone important.
"Mark," she said.
"Thirty seconds to connection," a machine voice said. "Twenty."
The platform shook as the motors engaged. She heard the lid covering the hole where she sat start sliding aside.
"Ten."
The platform was rising and the hologram projectors had started to glow. There was a slight hiss as the monitor PA engaged.
The platform stopped with a slight jerk.
"Connection," the machine voice said.
For a few moments, she stayed as she were. She drew a deep breath, opened her mouth and started singing. For the first song, she'd chosen one that begun slowly and built steadily in volume, pace and complexity. As the music built, she unfurled into a standing position and holograms blossomed around her. Huge stylized versions of the faces of the roman gods floated in the air above her, moving their mouths in sync with her own. She pushed her voice into the places that nobody else in the entire world could reach, and if things worked as she expected it would look and sound to the audience as if the gods themselves were singing to them.
For this occasion, the Coliseum was holding as much people as it has originally been built for, and every seat was occupied. A hundred thousand people, all in all. A hundred thousand listening, breathing, loving humans, all focused on one tall and angular woman standing at the center of it all.
It was one thing to see huge numbers of listeners in the net statistics, and another one altogether to actually see a hundred thousand people having come to hear her sing. It was a fantastic, intoxicating feeling. Singing live was a better rush than any drug she'd ever tried, and she'd never sang to a larger live audience than tonight.
The song of singing gods came to an end and without pause she changed over to one that somehow brought up a vision of endless columns of marching soldiers. The center of platform she was standing on rose even higher, carrying her with it. The holographs played their tricks, and she was a God-Empress standing before a vast army of worshipful soldiers about to march out into the world and conquer it in her name. She sang the joy of surrendering one's will to the greater force, she sang of the hideous strength of the fanatic, and she sang of the ruin that the insane despot can bring to a people.
She forgot where she was. She forgot who she was. She forgot what she was doing. The person that was Orphea vanished under the adoring gaze of her hundred thousand admirers, and all that remained was a blessed thing that transmitted visions from the realms of dream to the waking world. One by one, she silenced her backing instruments. The drums and the flutes and the guitars and the pianos and the computers and the trumpets and the violins and the basses that accompanied her, one by one she ordered them into silence and replaced them with ever more twists of her voice. Moving fingers and eyes to control the PA processors, she made them help her form the sounds of her throat into the symphony she wanted the audience to hear. Her eyes was open, but she was too focused on sound to see anything. Somewhere in the back of her head she knew that she'd left the planned concert far behind, that she was well into uncharted territory. It didn't matter. Only the song mattered, and the song was better and more glorious than ever.
She sang, and she could feel the audience react to her song. Closing her eyes and reaching out some other, unknown sense she probed the listeners and bent them to her will. She sang them to laughter. She sang them to tears. She sang them love and fear and happiness and dread and calm and elation and hopelessness and perfect calm. She sang, and sang, and sang, until finally she felt her knees buckle under her and a huge darkness swallowed her whole.

Sunday, 29 May 2067

"Are you awake?"
It took Orphea a few moments to figure out what the sounds meant.
"I think so," she said when she'd succeeded.
The bed moved as a weight laid down next to her. She opened her eyes and turned her head to see who it was. It was Iruwa. Of course. Who else would be in their bed?
"That was a pretty heavy concert last night," Iruwa said. "Johann told me off for not getting you to quit much earlier, but to be honest I was completely lost in creating the visuals to go with your songs. Mundane things like exhaustion were so far from my mind they might as well have been on Mars."
Orphea grimaced. "Yeah, we went pretty far off track last night, didn't we?"
"Sure did," Iruwa said. "Although I don't mind it at all. I liked where we ended up a lot. It was a bit like when I'm dreaming, only I was awake and you were there with me."
She put her head down and snuggled up close to Orphea. "And you should see the reviews," she said. "I thought the ones after Istanbul were good, but they were nothing to this. They're pretty much proclaiming you the goddess of music, or saying that you're the reincarnation of every famous musician that ever lived all at once."
Orphea squirmed an arm around Iruwa so she could hold her properly. They never really got the time to just enjoy each other's physical presence while they were on tour, so she wanted to take the chance when it presented itself.
"And none of them mention you, I bet."
"A few did, actually," Iruwa said. "I don't know what I think about that. I like not being famous."
The bedroom was luxurious in the particularly soulless way of high-end hotels everywhere. It was huge, and most of the things in it were covered either with expensive fabrics, crystal or gold. The bedsheets were silk, which she found too smooth and slippery to be entirely comfortable. Daylight stole in around the edges of the drapes covering the windows, and a smell of coffee and fried bacon wafted in from outside the room.
"We don't really have anything to do today, do we?" Orphea said. "No interviews or anything?"
"No," Iruwa said. "No interviews or anything. But I'll be leaving for Berlin in about an hour."
"Berlin?" Orphea said. "What are you going there for? We're headed for Egypt next."
Iruwa stroked Orphea's hip and thigh, making Orphea hope that they had time to make love before they had to part for the day.
"The du Lac woman called. You remember her, from the interview after the Hagia Sophia concert?"
"I remember," Orphea said. She turned her head and kissed Iruwa's forehead. "The one who asked about our childhoods."
"I sent her tissue samples from us," Iruwa said. "She had them analyzed in Germany. She wants to talk about the results, but not over the net."
Orphea pulled her head back so she could look Iruwa in the eyes.
"What? Why would she need to be that paranoid?" she said.
Iruwa looked back at her with her gentle brown eyes.
"Intriguing, isn't it?" she said. "Since we have the day off, I thought I'd go see her and talk about it."
Orphea turned over on the side and pulled Iruwa close, so their breasts flattened against each other and their breaths mingled.
"And you have to leave in an hour?" she said.
"Or so," Iruwa said, one of her hands sliding down and squeezing one of Orphea's buttocks. "I'm taking our plane."
"Well," Orphea said, "then you have about an hour to make love to me."
She moved her head forward to cover the last little distance that separated her lips from Iruwa's, and kissed her.

Ted borrowed his dad's car. John brought a pair of brass knuckles he'd made in shop class when they were all still at school, and a couple of solid pieces of steel pipe with duct tape grips. Anders brought a box of surgical masks to hide their faces with.
Richard brought the vampire tap and a set of fake ID cards that Michael had given him. The fake IDs were, supposedly, enough to get them onto the grounds of the airport, but not enough to get them into anywhere really interesting. Safest that way, Michael had said, they watch the trusted employees even harder than the public at large. But nobody cares about the guys picking up trash on the lawns.
They piled themselves into Ted's dad's car and took the bridge over to the Danish side of the strait. The traffic was heavy for a Sunday, which they guessed was because the holiday season was starting. Or maybe just a lot of Swedes were taking advantage of the nice weather to visit the famous Copenhagen Tivoli.
Once over the bridge, they turn onto smaller roads that eventually led them to a back entrance to the airport grounds meant only for employees. The sun was still high in the sky.
"So what do we do now?" John asked. "Do we just sit here until it gets dark?"
The entrance was a big gate in the fence surrounding the airport. Both the fence and the gate was topped with coiled razorwire, and small signs at regular intervals said that the whole thing was sigged with detectors and might carry high voltage at any given time. In the gate there was a turnstile with a card reader next to it.
"Michael said to not put the tap in place until it's nearly dark," Richard said. He'd also been very specific about them not getting drunk on the way to the airport, but Richard didn't feel like sharing that part.
"If we just sit here in the car for several hours," Ted said, "it's going to look mighty suspicious."
"Have you got a better idea?" Richard said.
"What does that thing do, anyway?" Anders asked. "Placing a lump of stuff on a cable hardly seems like it'd be much help to the movement."
"Let's go get something to eat," Ted said. "I don't know about you guys, but the clandestine stuff always gets me hungry."
He started the car and turned it around, heading back the way they'd come.
"It's a vampire tap," Richard said. "It's a very complex piece of equipment, not just a lump of stuff."
"I bet you don't even know what a vampire tap is," John said. "You just use the name to sound important."
"You use it to create bridge between two fiber connections," Ted said. "I read about them once. Pretty advanced stuff. Military. Uses nanotech."
"Nanotech?!" Anders exclaimed. "But that's what destroyed England! Burn the fucking thing!"
Richard hadn't known it used nanotech. If he had, no way he would've just kept it in his pocket like he did now. He was sorely tempted to throw it out the car window.
"Don't worry," Ted said. "It's safe. Most nanotech is, really, and it's used for one hell of a lot of things. It's just that nobody talks about it much any more."
"So the stuff in this thing isn't going to like, eat Denmark?"
"Nah," Ted said as he turned off the main road, following a sign stating that food was to be had in two kilometers. "The stuff in there can't replicate. It can't even function outside of its container. Break it open and all the little nanobots die."
"But what does it do?" Anders asked again.
Ted maneuvered the car into a free parking space in front of the pizza place. "It creates a bridge, as I said. Let's you get signals from one fiber to another," he said. He turned the ignition off and got out of the car. The others followed.
"So how does that help Eng...," Anders started to say, but he was interrupted by Richard kicking him in the shin.
"Don't say that name out loud, stupid," Richard said. "They've got listeners all over public places just to pick that sort of thing up."
They got into the almost empty restaurant, sat down at a table and ordered from the menu.
"I'm just guessing here, right?" Ted said. "But what I think they want the thing there for is to get a connection between an isolated network and a public one. We put the thing over the cables for an isolated high-security network and an ordinary public one and, presto, they can get into the high-security net through the public one."
"That's fucking brilliant!" John said.
"No, it's standard military procedure," Ted said. "Although normally it would be a special ops team doing the placing of the device, not a bunch of losers from the camps."
"We're not losers!" Richard said.
"Yes we are," Ted insisted. "They keep us that way on purpose."
The pizzas arrived, and for the discussion died out while they sorted out how had ordered which pizza and how much who should pay.
"Think about it," Ted said when they were all done with that. "During those short weeks thirty years go, almost forty million people were evacuated from the UK. About five million died in the first couple of years, and twenty million more moved on to Australia, Canada and Kenya. That left fifteen million people living in ever more permanent refugee camps in the EU. Fifteen million people who wanted their slice of the cake, slices that the plutocrats who control the EU didn't want to give us. I mean, just talk to the people living here. They don't mind letting the camp people into society. They don't mind helping out. They're ordinary workers, like us. It's the rich bastards in the boardrooms all across Europe who won't let them, who keeps us what we are: losers."
By the time he was finished, the other three had long since stopped listening. They'd heard Ted's rants before, and would likely hear them again.

When Iruwa got to Maria's hotel room, Maria insisted that they go down to the hotel restaurant before they talk. Iruwa looked a little irritated, but went along with her. Maria assumed that if she'd gone to the trouble to come all the way here, she probably thought that going a little bit further was no big deal.
The restaurant at the Schonefeld Holiday Inn was a highly typical hotel restaurant, half-filled with people and equiped with sound-dampeners between the tables. Maria had given the staff a small bribe in advance to get a table in a corner where they'd be hard to see, half-hidden behind some tall plants and with walls on two and a half sides. Maria looked up at the ceiling in surprise when the music suddenly disappeared.
"My doing," Iruwa smiled. She must've cracked the sound dampeners with her wearables and instructed them to kill the music as well as other sounds, Maria realized, and a surge of jealousy ran through her at the casual way her dinner guest had done that.
"I hate that stuff," Iruwa went on. "Probably comes from having lived with a musician for nearly eight years."
Maria forced down her jealousy and smiled. "And not just any musician, at that, but the one who may well be the greatest musical genius who ever lived."
"I take it you've seen the reviews from our concert last night," Iruwa said. "They were rather overwhelmingly positive."
"Yes," Maria said. "I wish I'd taken the time to listen. It seems I missed something truly extraordinary."
"To be perfectly honest, I think you did. If I may say so myself, both Orphea and I did the best work we've ever done last night. It was fantastic. But enough of that. I'm curious what you found out about us that couldn't be said over the net."
Maria had spent a significant part of the night trying to think of a good way to say what she'd found out. She'd failed, so she'd decided to go with the simple and direct.
"According to the analysts at Kunst des Lebens, you and Orphea aren't human," she said.
Iruwa blinked. "What?" she said.
Maria just waited.
"I assure you that Orphea is in every respect just as human as any other woman I've ever known," Iruwa said. "As am I."
"The differences aren't at the visible level," Maria said. "It's your mitochondrial DNA that's wildly different from everyone elses. According to the woman I talked to at Kunst des Lebens, it's not just different from all other humans, it's different from all other life on Earth."
Iruwa shook her head. "That's ridiculous!"
"They were very sure about it," Maria said. "They want me to ask you both to come to them for more tests. I said you probably wouldn't want to, but that I'd relay their request."
"Give me all the details," Iruwa said.
While they ate, Maria did as she was asked. She begun with the request from Kunst des Lebens that she visit them, and told Iruwa everything that doctor Wittmeyer had told her and everything that she'd been able to find out herself afterwards. Which was no more than more background information about mitochondrial DNA and what was known about it.
"Let's go for a walk," Iruwa said when they'd finished the main course. "I need to get some the fresh air. Or fresher air, at least."
Maria agreed, of course. She tried to pay for the meal, but Iruwa glared at her and paid for them both. They left the hotel and followed a footpath more or less at random. Maria found it hard to keep up with the much taller Iruwa's longer steps, but didn't want to complain. Iruwa seemed to be in a bad enough mood even without that.
"During the online interview," Iruwa said after some time, "you said that you'd found in the records from the camp that there were a hundred girls that arrived at the same time and with the same circumstances as Orphea and I. Do you think they too are not human?"
"I don't know," Maria said. "I haven't tried to find them."
"Will you?"
"Maybe. I don't know."
Iruwa suddenly stopped and turned fully towards Maria. "Tell me," she said, "why you started investigating Orphea and me in the first place."

Shortly before sunset, the four of them returned to the airport's back entrance and got out of the car.
"So, should we put on masks?" John asked.
"No way," Ted said. "That'd be a dead giveaway that we're up to no good."
Richard made sure that the heavy package of nanobots was still in his pocket. Not that it was likely that he'd drop it without noticing, but since Ted told them what was in it he'd been checking that it was all right almost constantly.
"Let's get going, then," he said. He walked up to the turnstile and waved the fake ID card in front of the reader. There was a low click and the turnstile slowly rotated through ninety degrees, allowing him to pass inside. One by one the others followed.
"So, where now?" Anders said.
"That way," Richard said, pointing towards the air traffic control tower. "If we keep going towards that tower we should cross the ditch we want about halfways."
He was not nervous, he realized. A bit afraid, yes, but only enough to bring out the adrenaline and get him properly on edge. Cool, collected, and ready to act at a moment's notice. While they walked, he looked around, keeping an eye out for guards. Not that he expected there to be any, there hadn't been the few days he'd worked here, but you never knew. They might have changed things. You never knew.
"Richard?" John said when they'd walked across the short grass in silence for a while. The sun was almost under the horizon, and along the edges of the field floodlights had lit up.
"Yeah?" Richard said.
"Did Captain Jack or that Michael fellow say anything about us being rewarded for this? Like, with money?"
"We're doing our bit to fight the man," Ted said. "That's enough."
"He said we'd get what was coming to us," Richard said. "I didn't ask. Like Ted said, I figured it's enough that we're helping the cause."
"Just wondering," John said. "'Cause, you know, some extra cash never hurts."
"Is that the ditch?" Anders said, pointing at a long straight line of metal covers a bit ahead of them.
Richard looked where he pointed. "Yeah," he said. "It is."
They ran the last distance to it, being well tired of waiting. Richard stepped onto a steel plate and looked carefully in both directions the line ran, to make sure that there was an air traffic control tower at one and and a terminal building at the other. Which it was.
"Get this bugger open," he said as he stepped off the plate. "This is it."
The steel plate was much heavier than it looked, and it fit quite well into its position, which made it hard to get a grip on. But after a some swearing and considerable effort they managed to heave a it to the side, revealing the V-shaped concrete ditch beneath. There were drainage holes at the bottom of it, and a large number of cables were strung through metal ladders along the sides of it. Richard got down into the ditch and started looking for the numbers of the two cables that Michael had said to clamp the vampire tap over.
"Shit, we should've brought a torch," he mumbled mostly to himself. It was quickly getting dark, and it was worse down in the ditch than up on the grass.
Suddenly a light shone on the cables he was searching. He looked up, surprised. Ted was holding a small hand torch and grinning widely.
"Maybe you should attend some workshops with the anarcho-syndicalists," he said. "We practice this sort of thing, for when the revolution comes."
"Maybe I should..." Richard mumbled. "Ah, there they are."
He took the vampire tap out of his pocket, peeled off the activation strip and held the exposed surface to the two cables. The black blob slowly flowed over the cables, eating into their protective surfaces and, he assumed, forming a bridge between the fibers. A few seconds after he'd put it there, the only way to see that something had happened was too look really close or try to move either of the cables. From even a little distance, everything looked perfectly normal.
"Bloody hell," he said, impressed in spite of himself. He climbed out of the ditch.
"Let's get that plate back into place and get our of here," he said.

"It starts with my mother," Maria said.
They'd found a bench by a pond, since Maria refused to talk at the same time as she tried to keep pace with Iruwa. The late afternoon sun warmed pleasantly, and there were enough trees around to block most of the noise from the airport.
"She was born, grew up and lived in Portsmouth. She never was a very good student, so she dropped out of school as soon as she reasonably could and supported herself doing all sorts of odd jobs. She worked nights in a child care center. She flipped burgers for McDonald's. She did unauthorized guided tours of the historical docks. She drove a taxi cab. She even tried to join the military, but they were very picky back then and didn't want anyone as ill educated as her."
"Sounds like quite a woman," Iruwa said.
"She certainly was," Maria said. "When the Nanoclysm started, she was working as a night shift crane operator in the harbor. Dull work, she told me. The computers ran the crane and decided what to put where. She was just there as a sort of extra failsafe, in case both the primary systems and the backups crapped out at the same time. Which they of course never did. But the day care center had started demanding a child care diploma, the local government had cracked down on the unauthorized guides, and she gave up on driving taxis the fourth time she was robbed. Watching the computers run the crane paid the bills, it was legit and it was safe. She could've done worse."
Maria turned her head and looked at Iruwa. She really was beautiful, she thought, although a lot of it was in the way she carried herself. She was dressed in a pale tan business suit that went wonderfully with her dark brown skin, and she managed to give off an air of complete and total confidence in herself while still being appealingly humble. Maria couldn't help but like her.
"When the evacuations began for real, enormous amounts of people came through Portsmouth," she said. "Since my mother worked loading ships, she got drafted under the emergency laws and got to work pretty much twenty-four hours a day. It wasn't so bad in the beginning, she said. The people would get into the people parts of the ships and she'd load containers filled with their stuff into the cargo parts of the ship. But as it became clear that the wave of nanomachines wouldn't be stopped, that it'd eat the entire country, it got worse. By the end they were cramming people into the containers and loading them into the cargo holds, never mind any possessions. Even if one out of fifty didn't make it across to France or the Netherlands, that was far better than if all of them died in England. Anyway, being a part of the evacuation infrastructure made sure that she'd be one of the last people to leave. She was still there when the nanobots ate London. She was still there when they could hear the strange hissing sound of everything organic being rebuilt into strange nanomachinery."
"I assume, since you're here to tell me this, that she survived," Iruwa said. "But I still don't see where we come into it."
"I'm getting there," Maria said. "The way I always used to think about the Nanoclysm was like a pretty solid line of something advancing across city and countryside alike eating everything in its way. But my mother said that's not how it looked to her. Sure, it was a pretty solid line, the active deconstruction zone was usually no more than ten to thirty meters wide. But it didn't advance all that evenly. It liked certain things much better than other things. Anything organic was a primary target, so it'd advance much faster over countryside than over cities. Which meant that most urban areas got surrounded by the nanobots and then eaten slowly from the outside in."
The sun had descended far enough that the streetlights came on. The day's warmth faded quickly, and Maria wished she'd worn something warmer than jeans and a blouse.
"Right at the end, when they could actually see the Nanoclysm approaching Portsmouth, my mother sat in the control booth of her crane looking inland. The crane was busily loading container after container packed absolutely full of people, and she'd heard that it was now more like one in ten than one in fifty that died on the way across the Channel. Anyway, as she sat there, she suddenly saw a lorry come driving towards the harbor as if the devil itself was after it. It looked to her as if it came driving out of the advancing deconstruction zone, so that simile was not far wrong. Of course, it couldn't have come out of there, since nothing whatsoever survived in there. She watched it as it came closer and closer, and eventually it stopped almost right under her crane. A man got out from behind the wheel, yelling for someone to help him. Since nobody else had the time, my mother left her crane to the computers and climbed down to help him."
Iruwa sat silent like a statue next to her. Maria wondered if she'd stopped listening and were working on her wearable system.
"And?" Iruwa said when Maria had stayed silent for a while. So she was listening.
"She hailed the driver and asked what he needed help with, and he told her that he had the truck full of naked young girls who couldn't speak or walk. He'd been out looking for stray people who'd got left behind by the main evacuation force when he stumbled upon a small town that looked like it'd been eaten by the Nanoclysm and then spit out again. There as not a single living thing left, and most of the dead organic material was gone as well. Now, the Nanoclysm just didn't return that which it had eaten, so he got curious and decided to have a look at it. And when he did, he found one hundred and six naked girls in the town square. None of them could stand, and none replied when he tried to talk to them. The looked to him to be between two and eight years old or so, but he admitted that he wasn't any good with kids. But he couldn't leave them there, so he lifted them one by one onto the bed of his lorry and took them to Portsmouth. My mother found it just as mysterious as he had, but the advancing deconstruction zone was only a couple of hours away, so rather than try to figure it out she found an empty container and helped him move the girls into it. One by one they carried them from the lorry to the container, and my mother said that it was one of the spookiest things she ever did. The girls would look at her with obvious intelligence, and some of them would try to speak, but what came out of their mouths wasn't even close to words. Eventually, they closed the container and loaded it onto a departing ship. My mother got back to work, the man got back to looking for strays. She never found out his name, or if he made it out of the England before the end."
"So that was where the hundred girls in the camp came from," Iruwa said. "How peculiar."
"Yes," Maria said. "There's just one more thing. Many years later, I was in Paris visiting my mother. She ended up there after the evacuation, and married a frenchman. I was born in 2043, and my father died in a riot in 2045. Mother went a bit funny after that, and resolutely tried to stay away from the affairs of the world. But I didn't, and while I was emptying the dishwasher I had the monitor set to a news channel. 'Listen!' my mother suddenly cried out. I did, but there was nothing special to hear. That's the girl from the lorry, she said. The one who's singing. And true enough, there was singing. The news channel was covering an Orphea concert. Mother took a look at the monitor, and said that that was the girl she'd carried from the lorry to the container in her own two arms. The girl who'd tried to speak, but who only managed to sing. But what song! 'You never forget a voice like that,' my mother said, and I think she was right. Anyway, I decided then and there that some day I would dig into Orphea's past, and just recently I got the time and money to do that."
"So that's where we came from," Iruwa said. "Out of the Nanoclysm."
Maria looked questioningly at her.
"That's what you said, isn't it?" Iruwa said. "The man with the lorry found a town that the Nanoclysm had stripped almost everything organic from, except us. The town must have held an orphanage or a children's hospital. And we don't have the same mitochondrial DNA as you do, because the Nanoclysm messed with us."
Maria thought about it. Far out as it was, it was still a less unlikely theory than any she had been able to think of herself.
"But how could it do that?" she said. "It just absorbed everything else, why would it spit a bunch of girls back out again?"
Iruwa shrugged. "There is very much we don't know about the Nanoclysm," she said. "I read up on it for a school project once, and I was surprised at how little we really know about it. We don't even know who built the original omniphages, or how. Most nanotech researchers these days agree that we couldn't build another Nanoclysm even if we tried. As far as we understand things, it can't exist. It's far too voracious, and doesn't have nearly enough energy input to do what it has done."
"Which means that my research comes to a rather hard stop," Maria said, frowning. "Unless I figure out a way to question the Nanoclysm."
Iruwa got up from the bench. "You could try to figure out which town it was," she said. "And what kind of institution we all lived in before. I don't know what the ethnicities of the other girls were, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could narrow our origins down to a handful of families. Maybe you could give us our last names."
Maria smiled. "Of course," she said. "I would've thought of that myself. Eventually."
"Now, unless you have something more to tell me, I'll be heading for Egypt."
Maria got up as well, and offered her hand to Iruwa. "I hope you don't mind that I asked you to come," she said. "I trust you understand why I didn't want this to become public."
"Certainly," Iruwa said. She took Maria's hand. "I wish you luck," she said. "Don't hesitate to call if you find out anything more, or if there is any way we can help you."
"I will," Maria said. "Trust me, I will."

One by one, doctor William White saw the connections appear on his display. Dozens of small groups all over Europe, lured by the myth of Captain Jack, were helping him penetrate the continent-wide air traffic control network. Many of them probably would've helped him and the rest of England Reborn anyway, but convincing them would have taken much longer, and in this business time equaled risk of discovery.
His picture of the air traffic over Europe grew steadily clearer as his systems received more data. The positions and velocities of thousands of aircraft glowed in the air in front of him, all of them guided from takeoff to landing by extremely complex decision support systems. So complex, in fact, that some people suspected that they might in some ways count as sapient.
People who had shared lab space with William at MIT.
"Start analysis stage," he told the system.
The idea had been born back in the MIT days. Every friday, the entire lab had gone out drinking, and of course they talked shop. He talked about entropic limitations of nanoscale robots, they talked about chaotic feedback loops, strange attractors and semi-stable algorithms. One such day, they talked about the new machines they were tuning for EU Air Traffic Control. How they were very, very good at what they did. How they were very, very sensitive to the inputs they got, and how it was really hard to tell good input from hostile input. So, since it was cheaper, the EU people would run them in an isolated, assumed safe network rather than actually fix the problems.
It hadn't been that hard to make them show him precisely what the sensitive input looked like. A few rounds of beer, and they thought it a really fun thing to make the machines go haywire. When they moved on to the dartboard, William made copies. Later, he made plans. For as long as he could remember, he had wanted to strike back at the European community who had treated the English people so badly when they most needed it. Knowing that it'd be years before his information could best be used, he waited. He made friends with other people who thought like he did, and those friends had other friends, who had even more friends, and one day they had an organization of sorts and a name: England Reborn. Together, they would force the European Union to give the exiled English people a new land to call their own.
"Analysis complete," the system said. "Poison data pattern calculated."
He looked at the connection display. Just about complete. More so than expected, so more groups than they'd calculated with must have managed to carry out their tasks without being found out.
"Begin poison data injection," he said. A strange feeling grew in him as the system indicated that it had started to do as it was told. He'd been thinking about this moment for years, and now it was here. His plan was at an end. He was unsure about what to do next, and it scared him.
He got up from his chair.
"When all target systems have stopped responding, forward prepared statement to news sites," he said. "I'll be outside. Page me if anything unexpected happens."

In a plane over the alps, Iruwa tried to sleep. Not because, she was tired, but because she wanted to dream. She'd set her wearables to record as much of her bodily responses as they possibly could, which wasn't nearly as much as she'd like. Eye movements, muscle movements in the hands, breathing, heartbeat, body temperature and resistivity of the skin was about it. She would've liked to record synapse activity levels in the hands, as well as the electrical and chemical activity of the brain. But that would have to wait, probably until after the tour.
She had found Maria's tale intriguing. It seemed to hold a promise of answers to things she had been wondering about for years, and it seemed to state with certainty that which she had long suspected: she and Orphea were not entirely like other people. They were something else, possibly something better. They both had talents that reached beyond that which ought to be possible. Orphea not only sang better than any other singer on record, she also composed music that appealed to a far larger audience than anyone else ever had. And she didn't just compose music everyone liked, she could improvise it for hours on end. Altogether, achievements that surpassed any other human who ever lived, and what was superhuman if not that? For Iruwa's own sake, she didn't consider herself quite as extreme as Orphea. But she certainly was extraordinarily talented in more than one field. She excelled in the visual arts as well as in electronic engineering, and she had an intuitive understanding of computers that bordered on the psychic. Was psychic, probably. It had happened a few times when she was very deeply concentrated that she had managed to convey a program directly from her own mind to the computer's memory. She'd never been conscious of doing so, but once it happened when Orphea was present, and Iruwa had checked the footage from the security camera after Orphea told her about it. How she suddenly went perfectly still in her chair and code started scrolling up her display at an incredible pace.
They never told anyone about that.
Then there were their dreams. They both had them, strange dreams with weird landscapes and half-seen presences. Orphea had them more often than Iruwa, and she was always alone in hers. Iruwa wasn't. Sometimes, there'd be other people in her dreams. For years, she didn't think they were any different from the other presences. Then she met Orphea, and one morning she was singing the song that the presence had been singing in Iruwa's dream. After that, she paid more attention, and over the years she came to believe that the people in her dreams were other people dreaming.
She tried to count them, and she didn't think there were more than a hundred of them. Every one, as far as she could remember, had been female.
She wondered if the strange monochrome landscape with the roiling clouds was what things looked like inside the Nanoclysm.
Back at the airport, while waiting for her plane to be assigned a takeoff slot, she'd searched the net for information on lucid dreaming and checked all the overly expensive airport stores for any body monitoring equipment that her wearables didn't already have. She found plenty of information and no new equipment. So she'd have to make do with what she had. She turned out the overhead light and leaned the seat as far back as it would go, which was very nearly horizontal. She closed her eyes, and started making the recommended breathing exercises.

In the plane's cockpit, the hired pilot was frowning at the data projected on the windows. He'd been on a perfectly normal planned route from Berlin to Cairo, straight and level flight and normal height and speed, when the system suddenly told him to descend ten thousand feet and turn twenty degrees east. Neither of which made any sense at all. He tried to get voice contact with the Air Traffic Control Center in Nijmegen, but was put in a holding queue.
He got a sinking feeling in his stomach. This was major-league wrong. He knew that it was in theory possible to be put on hold, but that would mean that at least several hundred other planes also needed urgent voice contact with the ATCC.
He'd flown hundreds of flights, and he'd never before had to ask for voice contact. The more he thought about it, the more wrong it felt. But something very wrong might at least explain the weird course change he was asked to make. He made a decision, turned twenty degrees east and started descending. The changed course would make them cross a heavily trafficked air corridor in a while, but he assumed the ATCC computers would make sure that it was safe.
"Maddie," he said. The plane's stewardess looked up. She'd spent most of the flight so far sitting in her seat at the rear end of the cockpit reading a thriller.
"Yes?" she said. "Why are we changing course?" she added, after she'd realized what the plane was doing.
"ATCC seems to be redirecting us to Tel Aviv," he said. "I don't know why, there seems to be a really big problem. You should probably tell the passenger."
"Sure," Maddie said, and vanished through the door to the cabin. After only a moment, she returned.
"She seems to be sleeping," she said. "I'd rather wait until she wakes by herself. Maybe it'll be all over before she does. No need to worry her unnecessarily."
"I guess you're right," the pilot said. "I'm sure it'll be sorted out any minute now."

The gray, hilly landscape stretched out in front of her. The clouds churned and roiled above her. There was no sun, just a sourceless general light bright enough to see by but no more. Iruwa hovered somewhere between the clouds and the ground, and she couldn't see her body. In spite of this, she seemed to have a reasonable degree of control over the situation. As the text on lucid dreaming had suggested, she tried to control her movement first. She tried to descend, and was happily surprised when the ground got closer. She concentrated harder on her own body, and after a little while she managed to make it appear. Her feet touched the dark gray ashes of the ground, and she was standing. She was naked, but the wind was warm and unlike Orphea she'd never been afraid to show her body.
"Hello!" she shouted. "Can anyone hear me?"
The words echoed, and for a confused moment she was trying to figure out what it was the sound was reflected from. But then she let it go, wrote it off as dream logic. A shout should have an echo, and never mind if there was nothing for it to echo from.
Dream logic also said that your voice carried further the higher up you were. Iruwa stretched her arms towards the clouds and flew upwards. She flew and flew, and the ground receded behind her, but the clouds never seemed to get any closer. Finally, she just stopped.
"I am Iruwa!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. "Hear me! Listen to my words!"
An enormous, mind-shattering noise suddenly boomed out of the clouds.

"Nijmegen ATCC, this is flight kilo lima five five three niner from Schonefeld to Cairo International, please respond."
The pilot tried again, in spite of it not having worked the previous fifteen or twenty times. It didn't work this time either, all he got back from ATCC was the annoying message about having been placed in queue. It had been like that for ten minutes now, and he'd moved on from worried to downright scared. He'd made the calculations in his head, and not being able to reach ATCC for this long either meant that thousands of planes were in trouble at the same time, or that ATCC was unable to respond to anyone -- which also meant that thousands of planes were in trouble. Including the one he was flying.
For lack of better options, he did as the ATC computers told him. He'd descended to about twentyfive thousand feet and veered even further east, and now suspected that he was bound for Riyad or Bagdad rather than Tel Aviv. It was hard to tell, the weather had worsened and they were now flying through solid clouds. He didn't care, by now he'd be glad to be safe on the ground pretty much no matter where it was. He thought that he was in an air corridor, but that was fine with him. It meant that he was on safe ground, ATC-wise. He was going rather a lot faster than he thought he should be going in a corridor, but the ATC computers told him to keep this speed, so he did.
He had just turned around to ask Maddie to bring him some tea when the plane ran nose-first into the second starboard engine of a large passenger jet going a lot slower than it usually would.

She knew before they came to tell her. She didn't know how, but she knew. She stood in their empty and sterile hotel room, looking out over the night lights of Cairo, and suddenly she knew. It froze her insides to ice, and she remained standing where she was for a long time, until the door to the room opened.
"Miss Orphea?" Alexandra's voice sounded unusually timid, almost afraid.
"Yes?" she said.
"I'm afraid I have very bad news," Alexandra said. She hadn't come a single step closer.
"She's dead, isn't she?" Orphea said.
"Yes," Alexandra said, and now there was surprise in her voice.
"How?"
"Her plane crashed. It's been chaos all over Europe for the past six hours."
"They're sure it's her? That it's really her?" She knew it was really her. But she had to ask. Maybe if she asked hard enough it'd stop being true.
Alexandra came closer and laid a hand on her shoulder.
"I'm afraid so," she said. "They found the passenger cabin. She was still in her seat. There had been a fire, but they got some DNA."
She closed her eyes and beat her hands against the window. Pain and anger and fear exploded inside her, grew faster and stronger than she had ever been able to imagine. It was beyond words, beyond sanity.
Orphea screamed. In the distance, a clock struck midnight.

Interlude: June 2037

It was warm and comfortable. It might have been a little harder to breathe than she was used to, but she had very little to compare with and didn't notice that. She was sitting on a hard surface with her knees pulled up to her chin, and other girls were all around her, skin to skin. None of them wore any clothes, but, again, she had no knowledge that this was unusual. It was almost dark, light only came from a gently glowing thing placed high on a hard surface. The thing they were in shook and trembled, and every now and then shocks travelled through the hard surface accompanied by loud noises.
She liked the noises. They spoke to her, conveyed meaning. With the loud ringing noises the hard surfaces around her said that they were stable, that they would stay as they were. The loud grinding noises were mild complaints, cold metal expressing discomfort. The scratches and hisses and twangs said that they were moving, that the thing they were on was being transported somewhere.
She opened her mouth and spoke back to the noises, in their own language. She knew no human words, nor any human concepts, so she simply followed her instincts. From her throat, inhuman metallic sounds issued. As the things on the other sides kept making noises, she kept talking back at them. The number and variety of the noises increased, there where whirring sounds, thin whistlings and rhythmic whooshings. They all delighted her, and she sang them as best she could.
But fun as it was, after a time she grew annoyed that they never replied to her. No matter how closely she mimicked the sounds, they never varied in response to her song. She began to crave response, to need feedback. She decided to go to them.
Awkwardly, she struggled up from her sitting position to precariously standing on wobbly legs. She towered over the all the other girls, most of who were still sitting. She steadied herself against the upright hard surface, and for a few moments she got distracted by the way she could feel the booming clanging sounds in it. But she soon recovered her sense of purpose, and she looked around, searching for something that she had no idea what it looked like. Everything in the place where she was looked nearly the same, flat and hard and filled with people more or less like herself. For lack of a better choice, she headed for the glowing thing on one of the hard surfaces.
It was hard going getting to it, since the hard surface under her was full of warm, soft people. She squeezed between them, clambered over them and accidentally rammed her harder body parts into them. Wordless protests, wails and cries followed in her path. Happily, she copied them, mixing them with the clangings and the whistlings and the boomings.
When she finally got to right under the glowing thing, she was at a loss for how to continue. There were some irregularly formed things on this hard surface that wasn't on the others, but what they were for or she might do with them was completely beyond her. Frustrated, she twisted her song to use the harsher and less pleasant sounds. It seemed, somehow, the right thing to do. Experimentally, she beat the hard surface with her small fist, but it only made her fist hurt.
From behind her, an even smaller and much darker fist reached out and touched the irregular things on the hard surface. The tiny fingers traced the thing, touched it lightly, followed its strange shapes and nooks and crannies. She looked fascinatedly at it, at a loss as to what it was doing.
After a while, the small hand closed around a thin, long thing and pulled. The irregular thing unfolded, changed shape and more irregular things came into view. She made a delighted sound, and copied the sound of the thing unfolding over and over again. How wonderful! A thing that changed into another thing!
The girl who had made the thing change came closer and shoved her aside. The other girl was much smaller than herself, and much darker. She seemed even more fascinated by the changing thing than herself was. She tried to understand the difference, and for the first time she found herself needing a way to tell herself and another apart in her own head. She decided that the other girl was Boom, for the colour of her skin made her think of the deep, rhythmic booming sounds that filled the space they were in. Herself would be Clang, for that was a higher sound, and she was higher up than Boom.
Pleased with her intellectual achievement, she sang happy sounds.
Boom kept looking and prodding at the unfolding thing, for much longer than Clang found it interesting to do so. But maybe she would make it unfold even more if she kept at it, so Clang stayed where she was and sang supporting sounds to her.
After a time, Boom frowned and looked up at the glowing thing. She reached up with her hands, but couldn't even get close to it. After seeing her do this a couple of times, Clang realized that she could help her, and if she did so maybe they'd both be happier. She knelt down, put her arms hard around Boom's legs and stood up straight again. Sticking up with half her body above Clang's head, Boom had no problem reaching the glowing thing, and she quickly made it come lose from the hard surface. She lowered Boom to the hard surface under them, and they knelt next to each other looking at the glowing thing. Boom's small fingers played around its edges faster than Clang could really follow, and after just a little while the glowing thing unfolded and showed several smaller glowing things inside it. Again, Clang sang in delight. It was pretty! And it glowed! Oh, joy!
Boom took one of the glowing things out of the unfolded thing that used to glow, and did something to it that made it stop glowing and made several thin things stick out of it. She stood up, and pressed the until recently glowing thing to the thing on the hard surface that she had unfolded earlier. Things in the upright hard surfaced whirred and clicked and snapped, and Clang sang in happiness over new sounds to sing. She closed her eyes and tried out the whirrs an clicks herself. They were nice sounds, subtle and precise. She liked them.
She opened her eyes when she heard another new sound, a rasping scratching sound just by hear. The upright hard surface she'd been standing next to was moving! Slowly, it swung away from her, and lots and lots of strange things came into view where it had been. Cold and harsh air also came in, and she didn't like that at all. She sang unpleasant sounds in protest, and many of the girls in the now open room started making unpleasant sounds as well. But not Boom. She looked at all the things outside, and started walking towards them. Clang hesitated a little, and then she started walking after her. She wasn't sure why. It just felt bad to her seeing Boom all alone. Also, there might be more interesting sounds out there. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to keep the cold air from touching her. It didn't work so well.
When she reached Boom, she had got another thing stuck to an upright hard surface to unfold, and was running her fingers all over the insides of it. A distant yet happy expression graced her face, and she didn't seem to mind the cold at all. Clang stood next to her, looking at her doing strange things and listening to all the weird sounds around them. There were far more of them out here than there had been in the enclosed space, far too many for her to single them all out and try to sing them. She tried to sing as many of them as possible, and repeated the ones she liked. When other people much like herself and Boom suddenly appeared, she noticed it first by the very complex and entertaining sounds they made.
The new people were much larger than even herself, and she'd been the largest she'd seen in the enclosed space. Most of them were covered in multicoloured fabric things, and they made lots and lots and lots of different noises. She happily copied the noises, and put them in with all the other sounds she'd recently learned in her neverending song. For some reason, the bigger people seemed more distressed than happy with this. They walked about for a while, making noises at each other and at herself and Boom. One of them seemed particularly upset about the thing Boom had got to unfold, the other by all the other girls in the enclosed space.
After a while, more large people appeared, and put coloured fabric things around Clang, Boom and the rest of the girls. Clang liked it. It was soft and warm and nice. She sang her pleasure, but that made the big people look scared, so she stopped. They lifted her up and carried her to another enclosed space, which was warmer and brighter than the first one had been. She liked that too. Warm and bright was nice. One of the big humans held her and put small, soft things in her mouth, things that tasted good and made her stomach feel nice after she'd swallowed a few of them. She tried singing her pleasure again, but as soon as she started the person who was holding her got a lot stiffer and sounded scared. So she stopped, and after a little while she fell asleep.

Several periods of sleep later, she was getting the hang of the strangely tuneless singing the big people used at each other. It was staggered into hard little bits and held little melody or rhythm, but it was singing of sorts, and it seemed to Clang to be very common.
She was sitting in yet another enclosed space, along with most of the bigger girls from the first enclosed space. They had been given coloured fabric things and shown how to make them stay on without one holding on to them. Most of the girls had also figured out how to eat by themselves, but there some where slower than others. The smaller girls, Boom among them, had been taken elsewhere.
The enclosed space they were in now had bits of the upright hard surfaces that were transparent, so Clang could see what happened outside without having to be in the cold air. She liked this. The enclosed space also had lots of other things in it, some of which were fairly soft and a lot more comfortable to sit on than the hard surfaces. Clang knelt on a soft surface, her face pressed to a transparent surface. There were lots and lots and lots of things to look at on the other side of it.
There were also lots and lots and lots of things making interesting sounds, but she'd learned that her singing them made all the big people uncomfortable or afraid, so she didn't do that any more. She just tried to remember them all, for use sometime later.
The enclosed space stopped with a jerk. On the other side of the transparent surface, there were even more things she didn't understand. She'd given up trying to figure out most of them at once, and put more and more things away in her memory to figure out later. Some of the things on the other side she knew by know, like the big people and the outsides of more enclosed spaces. There were quite a few of both outside right now.
"Come here," the big person who'd been sitting at the front of the enclosed space while it moved said. It was a bit of dull big-people song that she'd managed to figure out what it meant, so she got up from the soft surface and approached the big person. Once they saw what she did, the other girls did it too.
The big person led them outside. The ground here wasn't as hard as it had been in the other places, and when she lifted her feet some of the brown, wet ground stuck to the rigid covering she wore on them. She touched it, and was about to taste it when a big person grabbed her hand and told her no.
That was a bit of dull song that she'd learned really quickly. They were very fond of it, the big people. She wiped her finger off on her coloured fabric things and tried to understand what was going on.
Several of the big people were singing at each other. Their songs were unusually loud and harsh, and they moved their arms about more or less in time with the song. She liked this song less than usual, and she wanted to sing a nicer song to counter their unpleasant one. But she didn't. She stayed where she was and kept silent.
When the big people were done singing at each other, one of them led Clang and the other girls away. They walked for a long while on the soft ground, and Clang thought her legs were about to stop working when they finally arrived at the enclosed space the big person had apparently been heading for. It was a very big enclosed space, with many smaller partitions inside it. Most of the partitions had transparent areas, and the ones that didn't seemed to be used for storing things rather than people. The big person made them all take off their stiff foot coverings, and then led them through several partitions until they got to a big one with many soft surfaces on legs in it. The big person placed one girl at every soft surface, and when all of them had been placed she sung at them for a while. Then she left.

Clang's soft surface on legs was placed right next to a transparent bit of upright hard surface. She spent most of the time until she first slept on the soft surface looking out through the transparent one. There were many things moving about outside, things she didn't understand and wondered if she would ever understand. Some of them held big people, some of them had big people on top of them and one of them looked like a very weird kind of fourlegged person with hair all over. It had a big person sitting on top of it, and it made a sound that Clang had never heard before.
Eventually, it got dark. Several of the other girls got frightened, and made sounds that Clang didn't like. Since no big people were around, she sang a low, comforting song for the scared girls. One by one, they got less afraid, and several of them stalked over to Clang's soft surface. She didn't mind. She felt unsafe and lost herself, and having the warmth of other girls around her was nice. Just having someone near her made her feel safer, and she guessed that the other girls felt the same. She fell asleep there among the others, and when she woke up again it was light and a big person was singing an ugly song at them.
For what felt like a long, long time the big person tried very hard to show them how to do things. How to put nourishing warm stuff in their mouths by themselves. How to drink from little containers. How to take their soft fabric coverings off. How to splash water on themselves to get rid of the failed attempts at getting nourishment. How to put the fabric coverings on again. It was hard and tiresome and alien and scary, and every now and then Clang would mumble a little song at a girl who had a particularly hard time of it to make her feel better. For some reason, this big person didn't seem to mind. She even sang much more fun songs herself, songs with rhythm and nice sounds. The second or third time the big person sang like that, Clang tried singing along with her. It wasn't hard, it was a trivial sound to copy, but the big person seemed unexpectedly pleased when she did so. Clang thought that she might like this big person. She made sure to remember how this particular big person looked, how she moved, what she smelled like and what ugly song the other big people used to call for her. She thought about giving their big person a name, but decided that she didn't need one. Their big person was enough, for the time being.
When it got dark again, their big person took them to their soft surfaces, made them take their fabric coverings off and showed them how to loosen the fabric on top of them and get in under it, to keep warm and snug. When she'd done that, she went to them one by one and made sure that they were comfortable under their fabrics. She sang a low song to every one of them, most of which Clang couldn't properly hear. She'd spent all day listening carefully at everything the big person sang, and she now understood a lot more of the meaning of it than she had when she last woke up.
"You're a very clever girl, aren't you?" the big person sang when she came to Clang's place. Clang didn't understand all of what she sang, but she thought that the big person approved of her, and she liked that.
"Your voice is very beautiful," the big person sang. "I will call you Orphea."

Midnight, Monday, 30 May 2067

Orphea couldn't be inside any more. It felt like the walls of the suite were closing in on her, crushing her. Everything was unsteady around her. She wasn't sure if she was standing straight or about to fall over, and she felt hot or freezing every few minutes. Her breathing didn't seem to work as it should.
"I need to go out," she said, or at least thought she said. A moment afterwards, she wasn't sure if she'd actually made sounds or if the words had just rung through her own head. Never mind. She headed for the door, and the next thing she knew she was standing in a moving elevator with no memory of how she'd got there. Something deep inside her said that this lack of memory ought to bother her, but she didn't care. Iruwa was gone and would never return to her. Everything but that was unimportant.
The elevator doors opened, and she stepped out into the hotel's lobby. It was nearly empty, only the night staff and a few guests coming from a not so late night out on the city were present. Most of them first glanced her way, and then looked again when they realized who she was.
She wanted to scream at them. She wanted to make them hurt like she hurt. She wanted her beloved back.
Keeping silent, she crossed the lobby and headed out the through the big glass doors. Vaguely, she became aware of someone following her, and when she looked back over her shoulder she saw Alexandra and Christos there.
"I want her back!" she said to them. "I want her back!"
She turned away before they had any chance to respond. They didn't matter. They couldn't return Iruwa to her. She chose a direction at random and started walking. She wanted to be elsewhere. She wanted to get away from herself, from the memories and the pain.
The streets were crowded in spite of the late hour. She didn't know why, and she didn't care. She forced her way through the crowds of men and women all dressed in large billowing caftans or burkas. Many looked angrily towards her when she shoved them aside, but shrunk away when they saw her face. Or maybe they just didn't want to get into an argument with someone a head taller than themselves. The night was hot, very hot, and it smelled of unwashed humans, camel dung, marijuana smoke and desperation. The street she was on was narrow, and worn-down two-story whitewashed buildings crowded it on both sides. Laundry lines crossed the street above her. What little wind there was made the wet clothes on them shiver and dance. Men sat in makeshift bars under awnings, drinking strong spiced coffee, smoking hashish and playing endless games of dominoes. All men. Only men.
She stopped when she came to a small square where two streets crossed each other. In the middle of the square, there was a stone pillar with water trickling from a spout into a basin. Weeds grew around it, but the water looked clear. Orphea leaned over the basin and looked at her reflection in the water and the darkness.
She looked insane.
From somewhere, laughter bubbled up. It was a bad sort of laughter, full of sharp edges, but she couldn't stop it. She tried to keep it in, but it tore at her mind and shredded her will. When it got out, all the people around the edges of the square fell silent and stared at her. Scores and scores of bright eyes in dusky faces, all turned to her. All wondering what she was doing. None knowing her pain.
Out of nothing, an irresistible urge to share her pain appeared within her.
She reached within herself, far within, to the place where her music lived. From that deep place, she drew sounds and words and pictures and fear. On the way to her throat, it filtered to her pain and loneliness. When it crossed her lips, it was as close to pure agony as she knew how to shape music. She didn't know if the men around her spoke her language, but it didn't matter. Her music was primal, older and more basic than words. When she sang, she spoke the language of wind caressing leaves, of waves hitting a shore, of rock crushing bone. Her eyes wide open, she stared at her audience as she sang, letting their expression guide her. Away from relaxation and pleasure, towards tears and pain. Some of them tried to cover her ears, but it didn't help. She wouldn't let it. Her fury, her rage, powered her voice, and even those who tried to not listen heard enough. Enough of her lament got through to sap their will and make them lower their hands. Once they did, they heard better. Tears fell from their eyes, their knees buckled and they fell to the ground as if in supplication to her.
As if they were praying to the goddess of pain.
If they were, if she was, she didn't listen. Her life had been stolen from her, and she were to have no joy she wanted nobody else to have any either.
Lowering her voice somewhat, she approached one of the kneeling men. He was not old, maybe not yet twenty years old. Tears were pouring unchecked down his dusty face, and his mouth was twisted in a rigid grimace. She knelt in front of him. She cradled his face gently in her hands, and she sang just to him. She sang love, and the broken heart. She sang beauty, and the ravages of entropy. She sang pleasure, and the empty moments after. She sang the end of youth. She sang rejection, and loneliness. Only to him she sang. By the way she could feel his pulse under her hands, she knew him. From the terror in his eyes, she knew him. Fragment by fragment, she sang his mind away. Relentlessly, she broke down every bright thought in him, leaving behind nothing but darkness and failure and pain.
When Orphea stood up again, the young man was trying to claw his ears away to keep from hearing her, and blood stained his white billowy clothes. She looked up from him at the mean standing or kneeling around him, and they tried desperately to get away from her. They tore and kicked at each other, any friendships or blood relations forgotten in the face of the madwoman before them.
She found their struggle amusing, but then she wanted to share the amusement with her beloved, and her beloved was not there.
Again, she raised her voice. Not for a moment had she stopped singing, but for a time it had been low. Now, again, she summoned the full strength of her voice and sang to the crowd. She sang with all that she had learned from the young man. She sang all the fear that hid in the hearts of the men who drank under the awnings.
Some of them just fell down and cried. Some of them scratched and clawed at themselves, drawing blood and tearing off pieces of flesh and bone. Some lashed out, at whoever stood or kneeled near them, their faces contorted in rage and utter terror.
Slowly, Orphea turned around. She cast her gaze all around the square, and gave her full attention to everyone in it, even if only for the briefest moment. She saw sanity flee their faces, saw madness take its place, and in her heart of hearts she was aghast at what she was doing. But her heart was too full of pain, too full of loss, and what was in her heart of hearts could nothing but despair. In her way, she was just as mad as the men crawling in the dust ripping their faces to shreds with their fingernails.
When she'd turned back to where she started, there was none standing in the square but herself and her two loyal bodyguards. Still singing, she avoided looking at them. She feared that if she did, she wouldn't be able to stop herself from bringing the full force of her despair on them, and thus break their minds as well.
Abruptly, she turned to the side and started walking again. There were men lying on the ground where she walked, but she walked over them as if their bodies where the firmest ground. She headed into another street, and she met caftaned people coming towards her. More curious than afraid, they headed for the strange song and the wailing of mauled men. She spread her arms as if the invite them in, and when the closest of them saw the blood spattered on her pale linen clothes, they turned around and tried to get away. Moments later, they heard her madness song and felt it clawing at their minds. A she got closer, more of them heard and saw her and also tried to flee, while those farther away tried to come closer. It was as if she were pushing a wave of people in front of her, and very soon she saw the first of them fall under the feet of his fellows.
Orphea added his cries to her song.
When the wave grew so large that it threatened to block her way, she sang louder. The wave receded faster, and semeed to thin as some of those in it fled into the buildings she passed. The ground she walked on had turned from dust to mud, as the dust mixed of the blood of innocents. Her legs were bright red up to her knees, and she had unconsciously drawn lines of blood on her face when she wiped it with her stained hands.

Alexandra and Christos followed her cautiously. They didn't want to let her out of their sight, but neither did they want to get to close. They saw what happened to those who did, and it scared them. A lot.
"We should do something," Alexandra said.
Christos looked at Orphea's back, and the line of wailing people she left in her wake.
"Like what?" he asked.
"I don't know," Alexandra said. "Knock her out or something. We can't let her go on like this."
"Do you have a way to do that safely?" he said. "Without getting close?"
Alexandra was silent for a while. "No," she said. "Let's just follow her, shall we?"
"Until we think of something better," he said.
Side by side, they followed Orphea's trail.

Interlude: September 2049

There were hundreds of people gathered in the hotel's restaurant, and Orphea didn't like any of them. The only reason she was there at all was that Sebastian had convinced her that accepting the scholarship in person would be a major boost for her career, and he thought that as an up-and-coming young singer she would need everything she could get to stand out next to every other up-and-coming young singer. She'd tried to argue that what made her stand out next to the others was that she could actually sing, but he had brushed that aside. These days, image and promotion were far more important than actual talent. Talent could be added later in the studio.
She wondered if she'd ever get that disillusioned.
A line of waiters started filing into the room, identically dressed and carrying either large trays of food or wine carafes. Orphea discreetly sighed with relief. At last something was happening, even if it was only the distribution of food. The scholarship awarding thing started with a lunch with the press, and so far she had found it amazingly dull. She'd been placed at a round table with seven other people, one of which was her manager Sebastian Majors and six of which were representatives for various news and entertainment sources. So far, Sebastian had done most of the talking and Orphea hadn't even bothered to listen.
"So you're from the camps," the woman on her right suddenly said to her.
"Yes," Orphea said, which pretty much stretched her powers of politeness to the limit. She was fast getting tired of that subject.
"I think it's great that the academy does this sort of thing for people like you," the woman said. For a moment, Orphea considered stabbing her with a fork. After all, that would be newsworthy, and Sebastian had said that any publicity was good publicity.
"People like me," she not quite asked.
"Yes, you know, the poor and disadvantaged," the woman said. "You who haven't had such a good start in life."
"Really."
"I mean, one can hardly expect someone who had to spend her most important formative years starving in a cold barrack somewhere to do as well as those who got a good, scientific education from birth," the unbelievable female said.
"I take it you yourself come from the more advantaged background?" Orphea asked.
"Yes, dear," the woman said. "I run a small site dedicated to social news. A family business, you might say, although it was only my grandmother who moved it from hardcopy to online."
A waiter arrived at the table and started serving the entree, which seemed to consist of a small piece of bread with a dollop of pink gunk and a few vegetables on. Closely behind him, another waiter offered a choice of red or white wine.
"Social news?" Orphea asked. "Then I suppose you're well versed in the intricacies of etiquette?" An evil glint appeared in her eye.
"Of course. Etiquette is quite important, although often disregarded in these barbaric times."
"Then maybe I could ask you a question?" Orphea said. "If it's not too brash of me?"
The woman smiled, obviously pleased at getting an opportunity to educate the barbarian girl.
"Of course not, dear," she said. "What is it you want to know?"
Out of the corner of her eye, Orphea saw Sebastian suddenly look alarmed and start to make a stopping gesture in her direction. She ignored him.
"I just wonder," she said. "Of all these forks that's been placed around my plate, which one is the appropriate one to use to stab a condescending bitch in the arm?"
The woman's smile first froze and then disappeared as her brain processed what Orphea had said. From across the table, she heard Sebastian groan.
She got to eat the rest of the meal without being disturbed by anyone, which gave her a feeling of accomplishment that she carefully kept away from her face.

"Would it be too much to ask that you be polite to people?" Sebastian asked when they were walking out of the restaurant. The mass of people made it a slow business.
Orphea shrugged. "She was being a bitch," she said. "She deserved it."
"I'm sure she did," he said. "But even so we want her to write good things about you, which I strongly doubt she'll do now."
Orphea sighed. "I'll try," she said. "But it's hard. They keep treating me like I'm a savage from a jungle somewhere, instead of someone who grew up less than an hour's train ride from the Gare du Nord."
Sebastian was silent for a little while. "I can see both your viewpoint and theirs," he said. "Most of them are my age or older, and for us the refugee camps were a jungle for many years. Most of what we heard about them was riots, starvation and misery. I can see how it must be different for you who lived in them, but it's a hard image to break."
He looked sternly at her. "And you behaving like a barbarian from a jungle somewhere doesn't exactly help in changing their minds, you know," he said.
She looked down. "Sorry," she mumbled.
"That's all right," he said. "Just try not to be quite so abrasive for the rest of the day. Please?"
"I'll try," she said. "But I don't promise to succeed."
"Fair enough," he said. They finally got out the doors, and the crowd got a little thinner. At eighteen she was already taller than almost everyone she met, and she had no problem looking over the heads of the majority of the people in the crowd.
"Now," he went on, "if you'll excuse me I'll go talk to some people on your behalf so you don't have to."
"I like the sound of that," she said. "What's the next thing on the schedule, and what do you want me to do until it starts?"
"The next thing is the performances in two hours," Sebastian said. "And all I want is that you stay out of trouble and get there on time. Think you can do that?"
"Maybe," she said. "We'll see."
"You're hopeless," he said. "I honestly don't know why I put up with you."
For a brief moment she got scared that he actually meant that, but when she looked at him he was smiling warmly at her. She couldn't help but smile back at him.
"I'll be good," she said. "I promise."
"Good," he said. "I'll see you on stage in a little over two hours, then."
He turned and started walking away from her.
"I'll only stab people with small forks," she said, pitching her voice so that he could hear her clearly but almost nobody else could. She thought she heard him laugh a little.
Sebastian had found her by way of rumour. For as long as she could remember, she'd been a very good singer, far better than anyone else she'd ever met. When she'd been small, she'd sung lullabies for the other girls in the orphanage, and when she got older she started singing for small amounts if money in the refugee camp pubs. The orphanage matron hadn't liked that, she thought that Orphea was much too young to even enter places like that and she feared that bad things would happen to the girl. But Orphea had never been afraid. If the mood started to get ugly, as it did every now and then, she'd just sing a song to make it better. It had taken her years to understand that she was the only one who could reliably do that.
Over time, her fame grew within the camp. She no longer needed to look for places to sing, but they came to her and asked her to do it. She started charging a bit more, and before she knew it she pulled in more money to the orphanage than they got from the government. The idea that she could keep it all for herself never entered her mind. The matron and the girls there were her family, and if she could help make their lives better she would of course do that. They soon were the best kept orphanage in the camp, and probably in any of the camps. They never had to go cold or hungry, and that was a rare thing indeed.
As time went by, her fame spread further. People started coming from outside the camp to listen to her. The first time she found out about that, she was flabbergasted. Then she got scared. She didn't want attention. She was quite pleased with her life as it was, living with her sisters in the orphanage and doing what she liked best to support them. She could gladly have gone on like that for a long time. But it was not to be.
With the outsiders came the money and the networks. Her pub appearances got filled with outsiders that could pay a lot more than any campdweller, and not seldom some of them had wearables doing recordings that they then sold. The appearances stopped being quite as fun for her. She thought about quitting, but that would mean a sharp decline in living standard for herself and her sisters.
Before she had made her mind up either way, Sebastian found her. His full name was Sebastian Majors, and he worked as a talent agent, he said. He'd heard the rumours about her, he'd seen some of the bootleg footage of her that got traded over the net and he thought that he could make her rich. For a healthy cut of the profits, of course.
After some private agonizing and some asking of advice from the matron, she agreed. Papers were signed by herself, Sebastian and, since she was still legally a minor, by the orphanage matron. Sebastian went away, sued the people who'd recorded her without her permission and sold the recordings legally. He negotiated deals with the local pub owners to make better recordings, and on Orphea's insistence half the available seats were given to campdwellers for free.
Three months after she'd signed the papers, Sebastian came to the camp and gave her a larger amount of money than she'd ever seen before in her entire life. It was enough to run the orphanage for years.
"This is what we can get as long as you stay here," he said. "It's a good sum, particularly in the camps, but you can get much more if you come outside with me to record and perform."
The thought about it for a long time. It would mean changing her life entirely. It would meant leaving the matron and her sisters. It would mean leaving the only home she had ever known. Which, she finally decided, was not entirely a bad thing. The camp was badly built, dirty and unpleasant. That it was her home was just about the only thing speaking in its favour. The evening after she made her mind up to leave, she gathered all her sisters in the large dormitory and sang to them. She sang a song of memory and love, of warmth and remembrance, and she did her best to give them enough of her that they would not miss her too badly. The morning after, she promised the matron that she would send money back, and then she left.

She wandered aimlessly through the crowd. When a waiter came near her, she took a glass of wine from his tray. It was a good wine. She was still enough of a child of the camps that it bothered her that money was wasted on something so pointless as giving good wine to a crowd where most would not even bother to taste it. She decided to enjoy as much of it as possible, as a small way to counter those who just wolfed it down like it was Perrier. She followed a waiter with a nearly empty tray, and watched where he got it filled. There was a table in a corner behind some plants, where two white-jacketed waiters were busy filling glasses and placing them on trays for their colleagues to distribute. She watched them work for a while, and when one of them left to do something else and the other had his back to her, she stretched her arms between the plants and quickly liberated four newly opened bottles. Carrying them made her feel conspicuous, so she drifted off to the side of the event. Up a half-flight of stairs she found the open doors to an open-air terrace, which looked like an excellent place to sit and drink. She walked out onto it.
The view wasn't much to write home about, even if home had been somewhere else than Paris. Most of what she could see was the roofs of other buildings, all of them i varying shades of grey. The terrace itself was grey too, but at least it was quite pleasingly shaped, with a nice stone balustrade separating it from the long drop down to the street. She put the wine bottles on the rough stone surface, then grabbed the first one and filled her glass almost to the rim. She knew one wasn't supposed to do that, but she didn't feel like caring. She drank half the glass, making very sure to properly savour its fine taste on the way down. It was full-bodied, with a slight taste of nuts and raisins.
When the glass was empty, she filled it up again. She was just about to dive into the second glass, when someone spoke behind her and almost made her spill it.
"Are you going to drink all those bottles by yourself?" the voice said. "And if you are, will you really be able to sing afterwards?"
Orphea turned around. On a stone bench by the wall, a dark-skinned young woman was sitting. She wore a dark grey jacket and a matching skirt, high-heeled shoes and a white blouse. Her face was friendly and smiling, and her curly her cropped close to her skull.
She was damn pretty.
"I can sing when I'm too drunk to stand," Orphea said. "It's possible that I can sing when I'm so drunk that I'm unconscious, but I've never been able to remember the outcome when I've tried to find out."
The young woman got up from the bench and approached her. "It's going to look pretty bad if you have to get dragged on stage to sing," she said. "So I'd better help you finish off those bottles."
"Oh, be my guest," Orphea said. "Just promise me one thing."
She raised an eyebrow questioningly. "What?"
"To do your best to really enjoy the taste of it. This is good wine, and it should not be squandered."
The young woman offered her hand to Orphea. "My name is Iruwa," she said. "And I promise to properly savour the wine's taste."
Orphea took her hand and shook it. She had a firm, pleasant grip. "I'm Orphea," she said.
"I know," Iruwa said. "I've seen you on MNet. And we may have a small problem here."
"What?" Orphea looked confused.
"I don't have a glass."
Orphea laughed. She drained the wine from her glass, and let it rest in her mouth while she filled the glass up again. Having properly tasted the wine, she swallowed and handed the glass to Iruwa.
"Here," she said.
Iruwa took the glass and drank deep from it. She closed her eyes and visibly enjoyed the taste of the wine.
"That is good wine," she said when she'd swallowed. "What is it?"
Orphea looked at the label. "Château d'Ampuis 2026," she said. "2026 was a good year, apparently."
"It seems it was," Iruwa said. "But now we have a new problem,"
Orphea nodded. "Now I have no glass."
Iruwa emptied the glass, and like Orphea had done, kept the wine in her mouth while she filled the glass again. She swallowed and handed the full glass over.
"Here," she said. "Have mine."
"Thank you," Orphea said. She drank a little from the glass. "Are you here for the scholarship thing?" she asked.
Iruwa nodded. "Yes," she said. "Getting one for being good with computers and stuff. I suppose you're getting one for music?"
Orphea nodded.
"I'm surprised that you need it," Iruwa said. "I mean, the money we're getting is a big deal if you're me, but you're the most downloaded under-twenty artist in France. You've got to be pretty well off."
Orphea emptied the glass. "I am," she said. "And I don't need the money. My manager thinks I need the publicity that comes with it. You can have my scholarship money, if you want."
"I guess the polite thing to do would be to decline," Iruwa said, suddenly sounding a bit wistful. "But it really would make a difference, so if you're serious I'll accept."
"Of course I'm serious," Orphea said. The wine glass was refilled and changed owner again. "If you don't mind me asking, what will you use it for?"
"You'll think I'm a sentimental fool," Iruwa said after she'd drunk deeply.
"Sentimental fools are my favourite kind."
"The orphanage I grew up in needs to have its roof repaired," Iruwa said and handed the empty glass over to Orphea, who filled it.
"You're from the camps?" Orphea asked.
Iruwa nodded.
"So am I," Orphea said. "I'll pay for that roof. Keep all the scholarship money for yourself." She emptied the glass, without tasting the wine.
Iruwa looked stunned. "Why?" she said. "You have nothing to do with where I came from."
Orphea filled the glass and handed it over. "I grew up in an orphanage too," she said. "Ours got to be the best in the camp, since I drew in money for it from when I was pretty young. I always wanted to help the others too, but I never had enough money. I still don't. But I have enough to help at least one other, and it might as well be yours."
"Thank you," Iruwa said. She slowly emptied the glass. In the distance, the sun slowly approached the tops of the distant buildings.
"Now you think I'm a sentimental fool," Orphea said.
"My favourite kind," Iruwa said and handed the filled glass over. "We're almost out of wine."
"I could go steal some more," Orphea said.
Iruwa shook her head. "No," she said. "You may be able to do your thing while utterly smashed, but all I have to do is stand up straight on stage, and if I drink much more I won't be able to do that."
"Fair enough."
"In fact," Iruwa said, "I think I'll go splash some cold water in my face before the ceremony begins. That wine hit harder than I thought."
Orphea looked at her. Somehow, they'd inched closer to each other as they talked and drank, and now their shoulders were almost touching.
"It's been a pleasure meeting you, Iruwa," Orphea said.
"Likewise," Iruwa said. "Maybe we'll meet again."

Later that night, Orphea saw Iruwa in the audience while she sang. She was sitting in the second row from the stage, and she followed Orphea's every move with her eyes. For some reason that she couldn't quite figure out, this made her unusually aware of being tall and bony and not at all pretty. Maybe it was the wine. She hadn't been bragging when she said that she could sing no matter how drunk she was, but everything else but the singing suffered just as much as one might expect.
Acting on an impulse, she threw the careful planning of which song to sing when that Sebastian had made for her to the winds. Instead, she picked the oldest song she knew out of her memory. She head no idea when she'd learned it, and it had no words. Its rhythm was strange, and the melody conformed to no scale she knew. But it spoke to something deep within her, spoke of coming together in safety and warmth. When its first few sounds left her lips, she kept her gaze fixed on Iruwa, and saw her eyes widen in surprise.
She felt that that meant something, but she had no idea what. Never mind. She kept singing.

"What was that all about?" Sebastian said when she walked off the stage.
"What was what all about?" she replied.
"That weird song you sang instead of what we'd planned."
"Didn't you like it?"
He paused rather longer than she had expected. "That's beside the point," he finally said. "You didn't stick to the plan."
"Yeah, well, when I got up there I realized that the plan sucked."
He sighed. "There's really no point for me to do this sort of planning in the future, is it?" he said.
Orphea shook her head. "No," she said. "I don't think there is."
They were standing backstage, and Orphea could just barely see the audience filing out through a small space between the curtain and the stage wall.
"Sebastian?" she said before he could change the subject.
He looked questioningly at her.
"Do you have any information on the other people who got scholarships today?"
"I can get it," he said. "Why?"
"There's a girl among them," she said. "African-looking. Her name's Iruwa."
Orphea hesitated. "She's from the camps like me," she said. "I want her to have my scholarship money, and I want to pay for the repair of her old orphanage's roof."
"That's it?" he said.
She nodded.
"Sure," he said. "I'll make sure that's done. Do you want to send her a card or a mail or something?"
Orphea shook her head. "No," she said. "Just get it done."

Hour of the Wolf, Monday, 30 May 2067

At times, she wondered if she were the singer or just a vessel for the songs. As she walked through the streets of Cairo, her voice echoing strong and strange between its whitewashed buildings, she wondered this. When she closed in on strangers gibbering in fear, when she saw their faces transform under the destructive power of her song, she wondered. Was this her doing, or were the songs doing it through her? Was she murderer of sanity, or the tool the true murderer used to perform its cleansing task?
And did it, in the end, matter?
"Lady, you are in pain."
Someone tugged at her sleeve and spoke to her. She fell silent and turned around. She did not attempt to reply. It was not a question that had been put to her, it was a statement of fact.
Holding her sleeve was an Arabic woman much shorter than her. She was dressed traditionally, in a black burka that only left her eyes visible.
"Follow, lady," she said. "Follow."
Orphea followed. They slipped into an alleyway so narrow that Orphea's shoulders almost touched the walls on either side at the same time, that would its way in between houses that were not quite so worn down when she saw them up close. They entered an inner yard, small and full of everyday things. There were doors to several houses around it, and from one of them music came. It was not music that Orphea was used to. It was all rhythm, drums and brass things being beaten and shaken. The rhythm was varied and complex, hardly any two instruments keeping exactly the same beat but all of them working in unison towards a greater whole.
"What's that music?" she asked her guide.
"Zar," she said. She pulled a red and white scarf from a laundry line and handed it to Orphea. "Here. Put over hair."
"Zar?" Orphea said. "What the hell is zar?"
"Put over hair," the guide insisted. Orphea draped the thing over her head, more out of curiosity than anything else.
"Good," the guide said. "Follow." She headed for the door with the music and entered, closely followed by Orphea.
Inside was a single, fairly large room, full of women. The air was thick and smelled faintly of incense. Quite a few of the women carried instruments, from large wooden drums hung from slings over the shoulders to small brass bells stuck to the fingertips. The basic rhythm was fairly slow, with plenty of embellishment. As far as Orphea could see, all the women in the room were dancing a slow shuffling dance, shifting their weight from one foot to another and letting their heads roll from one shoulder to the other. As they danced, they chanted something she couldn't quite hear. At her side, her guide loosened her clothes until her arms where bare and her head was only covered by a transparently thin black cloth. Now that Orphea could see her face, she saw that she was much younger than she had believed.
"Zar house," the guide said. "Healing house. Very powerful, many healings."
She gestured towards the walls of the room. Orphea looked where she indicated. The walls were covered with dark brown double handprints, from just above the floor to what she guessed was as high as these women could reach. The colour woke a suspicion. She leaned closer to the wall and touched a handprint with her finger.
"This is dried blood!" she exclaimed.
"Na'am," the guide said. "For thanks, after healing. Now, you dance."
Orphea looked at her in surprise. The women in the room hardly even reached her to the shoulders, she'd tower over them like a giant.
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" she said.
The guide shouted something in arabic, and one of the dancing women turned towards them. Except she hadn't been dancing, exactly, Orphea realized, and those who carried instruments kept an eye at her. She strode towards Orphea and the guide, and the supremely confident way in which she moved made Orphea guess that she was what passed for a priestess here.
"Sheika Az-Zar," the guide said to Orphea. "She decide here." She added something in arabic, and the sheika nodded.
The guide pushed Orphea towards the center of the room. "You dance," she said. "Do like this with head." She leaned her head as far as it would go to the left, then rolled it forward and up on the other shoulder.
"In middle, say name of god," she said. "At end, breathe out sharply."
"I don't believe in god," Orphea said, confused.
The guide shrugged. "Then say other name. Now dance."
The sheika cried out and clapped her hands. Before she had a chance to protest or leave, Orphea was surrounded by drumming women. They moved around her, beating their drums in a simple and compelling rhythm, and she couldn't help but move along with it. Giving in, she leaned her head to the side and let it fall forward. "Iruwa," she whispered, and when her head reached the other side she expelled all the air she could.
"Good," the guide said. She was dancing just in front of Orphea. "Now, do that again and again until djinn come."
"Djinn?" she said, before she rolled her head from side to side again, whispering Iruwa's name.
"When they come, you make deal to be healed," the guide said.
She'd heard worse suggestions in her life. She nodded briefly, and gave herself to the sound of the drums and the chanting. The expelled breaths became little words of their own. "Iruwa-ha," she said. "Iruwa-ha. Iruwa-ha."
She saw the sheika looking approvingly at her, nodding and gesturing at the drummers. The rhythms started getting more complex again, and soon were back at what they'd been when she came into the room. The drummers kept circling Orphea, and she tried to ignore their presence. Tried to give herself to the music and the movements. It shouldn't be hard, she'd been living music for as far as she could remember. "Iruwa-ha," she said. "Iruwa-ha."

She quickly lost track of time. The repetitive but non-constant sound, the movements and her private chant robbed her of all sense of time, and she entered a timeless land of sound and heat and moving bodies. The room covered in handprints were still in front of her half-closed eyes, and the image of it still reached her brain, but it ceased to carry any meaning.
The chant didn't.
Every time she called Iruwa's name, it was a fresh barb in her heart. Every time it was a newborn pain. The sorrow and the loneliness and the anger raged through her, but the movement and the chant kept them from exploding outwards as they had before. Instead, she felt them so much clearer and more closely.
"Iruwa-ha," she called, and she realized that tears were pouring down her face. "Iruwa-ha."
Her thighs went numb, and then her feet. Her throat was parched, and her neck felt like someone was jabbing it with needles. But it was nothing but the flesh, and the flesh was on the other side of the drums. She could go on. She could go on for as long as she needed. She wasn't sure if she believed in djinn, but if these women did maybe that was enough. She kept moving, will overcoming fatigue. She kept chanting, for she could never say her beloved's name too many times.
"Iruwa-ha," she said. "Iruwa-ha."
The sheika were dancing in front of her, very close. Their hips were almost touching, and she could feel the woman's body heat. The drummers closed in just beyond the two of them. Orphea kept dancing.
"Orphea?" someone said.
It was her voice. It was Iruwa's voice.
"Darling?" she said. "Is that you?"
Except she didn't say it. Her voice wouldn't obey her, her vocal chords and her lips would not obey her. As her body kept dancing to the trance-inducing rhythm, her voice kept chanting her beloved's name.
"It's cold," Iruwa's voice said. "I don't know where I am."
"Oh, my darling," Orphea thought to her. "Let me help you. Tell me how to help you. I need you, love. I need you."
Pulsing rhythm, moving bodies, smell of the crowd. Her body wasn't hers, it belonged to the dance. Her senses felt like they were filtered through a thick pane of glass before they reached her brain. She'd left herself behind, dancing in the crowded room with the handprints of blood and she'd gone elsewhere. She and her pain had gone elsewhere.
"Is that really you?" she thought. "Is that you, or just my wishes given form?"
"I was in the plane," Iruwa said, and her voice was faraway and small and lost. "I was in my seat, dreaming. There was fire and pain and darkness, and then I was here."
"Where is here?" Orphea asked. "Where is here? Where is here?"
"Here is dark and cold," Iruwa said. "Here is nowhere I know of. Help me, love. I do not like it here. It hurts."
It hurts here, too, she wanted to say, but didn't. You're not here, and that hurts more than I can possibly say.
"I will help you, my darling," she said. "I will find you. Wherever you are, I will find you."
The drums beating. The sheika's eyes. The heat. The moisture of too many human breaths. Her own legs moving, her hips swaying, her hands hanging loose.
"Help," Iruwa said. "Help."
She sounded so lost, so lonely, so scared. It broke Orphea's heart, made her wish to rush to her side crushing anything and anyone in her way to get there.
"Give me a hint, love," Orphea said. "Anything. Give me something to start with, and I will move the heavens and the Earth until I am by your side again."
"Maria..." Iruwa breathed. "Maria said..."
She tried to catch the words. Never in her life had she ever tried so hard to try to hear something so small, never had she known even a fragment of the despairing need to hear every last little sound that might be. But there was nothing. There was only silence. Iruwa's voice was gone.
Fury rose in her heart, and smashed the feeling of glass between her and her body like it had been spun sugar. Her arms rose unbidden to her face, fists closed so hard her fingers whitened. Deep in her chest, a scream started and wanted out. It was a scream of pure and utter fury, quite unlike the sorrow and despair she'd known only minutes before. She'd stopped moving to the music. In front of her, the sheika looked at her, suddenly frightened. The drummers pulled away from them, and one by one lost their rhythm and stopped playing. The drumbeat lost, the chanting died and the dancers grew still.
With all the force of her fury behind it, Orphea screamed her beloved's name.

A little while later, she sat on a bench in the yard outside the Zar house. The woman who had guided her there stood near her, looking curious and nervous. Orphea realized that she must've been dancing for far longer than she had thought, because the sky was beginning to turn lighter in the east.
"Tell me," she said to the guide. "Why did you bring me here?"
"Heard you," the guide said. "Heard grief. You powerful woman, your grief hurt people. Try to heal, to protect."
Orphea laughed. "Heal," she said. "I guess you sort of did that."
She stood up. "You said something about giving thanks for a healing?"
The guided nodded. "Blood," she said. "Make print."
"Show me," Orphea said.

They got the blood from a chicken, which Orphea paid them for. She had no idea how much a live chicken cost, so she took the biggest note she had in her wallet and gave them. For a moment, they looked like they wanted to protest, but when she glared at them they accepted it. The sheika az-Zar cut the chicken's head off and drained its blood into a shallow bowl, which she carried into the Zar house. Orphea and the guide followed her.
"Dip hands," the guide said. "Make print."
The instructions were quite unnecessary, but Orphea didn't care. She dipped her hands in the still warm blood, made sure that they were completely covered with the sticky red fluid. She then stretched upwards, and planted her hands firmly on the low ceiling. After a few moments, she lowered them again, leaving two clear handprints behind.
"So," she said. "Now you will remember me."
"Na'am," the guide said. "Will remember you, woman who sang madness."
Orphea wiped her hands on her pants. They were, she discovered to her surprise, already stiff with dried blood. Her memories of the earlier parts of the night were not very clear, and while she remembered making men claw their ears off she didn't remember anything that could reasonably have left her this covered in blood. Distressed, she walked out of the Zar house without another word.
Alexandra and Christos were waiting for her in the yard outside.
"Are you all right?" Alexandra asked.
"Alexandra went in and looked," Christos said. "And the dancing looked safe enough."
Orphea shook her head. "I'm not all right," she said. "Iruwa is still dead. But I will get her back."
Alexandra and Christos looked at each other.
"You will get her back?" Christos said.
Orphea nodded. "She talked to me while I danced," she said. "She asked for my help. How could I refuse her that?"
"But she's dead," Alexandra said.
"No matter," Orphea said. "I will get her back."

Interlude: New Year's Eve 2060

Orphea walked out on the terrace of her newly purchased home. Before her, the rolling hills of Tuscany went on as far as she could see. Which was not as far as one might like, given the amount of air pollution still about and the cloudiness of the time of year. But still. It was a long step up from the view through the window next to her bed in the orphanage. Not only that, the terrace was bigger then the entire dormitory had been back then, and she the house itself was a good deal larger than the entire orphanage had been. Not to mention far more modern, well-built and comfortable.
She saw a couple of cars move up the long, winding road to her house. A road that ran through lands that belonged to her, for as far as she could see and then some. It was guests for her combined New Year's and birthday party, almost certainly.
"Aphrodite!" she shouted. A moment or two later she heard approaching steps.
"Yes, miss Orphea?" her newly hired combined bodyguard and general aide said.
"Are we ready to receive people?" she asked.
"Yes," Aphrodite said. "Everything is in order. The staff are receiving the first of them right now."
"Good," Orphea said. "Please forgive me if I worry a lot. I want tonight to be good."
"That's all right, miss," Aphrodite said. "We'll make sure the night turns out fine."
"Who was that just arrived?"
"Sebastian Majors and his wife, miss. Do you want them to be shown up here?"
Orphea smiled. Sebastian, of course. He had probably guessed that she'd be nervous and made sure to arrive early to lend moral support. It had taken a long time, but in the end she had stopped believing that he saw her only as a meal ticket but actually liked her as a person. Not that she hadn't been a very good meal ticket for him. She'd been steadily among the ten best-selling musical artists in the world for the past decade, and among the five most recognized for almost as long.
"Yes, please do," she said. This was were she'd planned that the majority of the party would be, anyway. The weather was chilly and grey, but a thin roof combined with clever airflow and infrared heaters to gave the terrace a very pleasant microclimate. A long table had been placed in the center of the terrace and set with silly amounts of food and drink. Comfortable couches and armchairs had been placed in strategic spots, with smaller tables close to them. A hidden audio system played some soft music -- hers, of course. Another large table stood empty, ready to receive her birthday gifts. Since she had no idea when her real birthday was, she had decided to adopt the Japanese custom of celebrating it together with the new year. It also reduced the number of parties she'd be expected to throw by one, which to be honest had been a strong factor in favour of choosing the custom.
"Ah, Orphea!"
She heard Sebastian before she saw him. He called her name before he'd even came out on the terrace.
"You look splendid," he said once he did.
I'd better, she thought. The dress she was wearing had been specially designed for her by one of the currently hottest fashion houses in Milan, and if she didn't stun everyone with her looks tonight she'd never spend another cent with them. It was a long figure-hugging dress, sewn from several different types of cloth, all of them of exactly the same nuance of purple so dark it was almost black, but with different textures. Unusually for her, she wore high-heeled shoes with it, making her just a shade under two meters tall. Her hair she wore long and free, its black curls going perfectly with the dress.
"Sebastian," she said. "Nice to see you. How do you like my new home?"
She knew she really should greet his wife as well, but she couldn't for the life of her remember the woman's name. It was Sebastian's fourth wife, and he'd married her only a few months before. She'd been invited to the wedding but chosen not to go.
"It's amazing," he said. "How did you manage to get something like this? I had no idea it was even on the market."
"I made a deal with the Italian government," she said. "In exchange for the right to live in the house, I have to keep the countryside around it more or less alive. Which basically means that I have to subsidize their wine and olive oil production."
She looked out over the hills again. "It's well worth it, if you ask me," she said. "The sight of the wine fields and olive groves is what makes the place extra special."
Sebastian's wife looked more scared than anything else. She wondered what she was thinking.
"We brought a present," Sebastian said. "Do you want to open it now or later?"
"Later," she said. "Put it on the table over there and grab yourself some food."

As the evening wore on and people arrived, the gift table filled up. She'd invited lots of people, almost all of them business associates of some kind that needed to have their egos stroked. She didn't even know half of them. Once she'd figured out she had to invite people she knew she didn't like, she went all-out and invited lots of people she didn't even know. They could hardly make the mix worse, and the more people there were the easier it would be for her to drift off to the side and get a few moments to herself.
"Orphea!" she heard Sebastian call. She looked in the direction of the sound, and saw him standing next to the gift table.
"Isn't it time for you to open your presents?" he said. There was a chorus of agreement from the crowd. She sighed. She guessed it was.
"All right," she called back. She walked over to him.
"But," she said when she reached him, "you'll have to help me."
"But of course," he said. "I'm always here to help you."
She dug into the small mountain of present. Some of them were carefully wrapped in origami-folded handmade paper, so well done that it pained her to tear the apart. It pained her even more that she was sure that the giver had no idea what he was giving away, that it was almost certainly his secretary who had chosen what he should bring. Some of them had more ordinary wrappings. Some were not wrapped at all.
"Aphrodite?" Orphea said. The aide handed her a pair of scissors, and gave a big black garbage bag to Sebastian.
"Hold that for me, will you?" Orphea said, and started cutting the first present open. When she had it unwrapped, she stuck the wrapping paper in Sebastian's garbage bag.
It turned out to be a painting, made by a recently fashionable painter. She didn't like it at all, but said some complementary things about it, most of which she'd read on an art site a few days earlier. She kept opening. There were fine crystal glasses. There were technical toys. There were books, old bound paper ones. There were more art objects. There were tickets to concerts and galas and exhibitions.
Near the bottom of the pile, there was a plain wooden box with no wrapping. Impatient to get the opening thing over with, Orphea put it on the ground and knelt next to it, prying it open with the scissors. She didn't care if the scissors bent out of true or not. If they did, she could always replace them with the hightech ceramic ones that had been an earlier present.
In the box were, among a lot of packing chips, four bottles of wine and a single glass. The glass was not distinguished in any way, it was just a plain ordinary wine glass. She looked at one of the bottles. Château d'Ampuis 2026.
Abruptly, she stood up and looked carefully at the crowd. But the face she expected wasn't there.
She bowed slightly to the crowd. "Thank you very much for you excellent presents," she said. "Please enjoy the rest of the party as much as I've enjoyed having you here."
She remembered that wine. Or, to be more precise, she remembered the girl she'd shared that wine with. More than ten years, and she still remembered the half hour or so she'd spent chattering with her on a balcony in Paris. Never since had she met anyone who she felt so immediately comfortable around, and she'd long since lost count of the number of times she'd regretted not pursuing her more aggressively then and there, or looking her up afterwards. But she didn't then, and as time went by it grew less and less possible to contact her. She'd been sure that the girl had long since settled down in a nice job, found a partner, maybe had children. She been so sure, until she opened that wooden box. She walked around the party, searching. She brushed people off who tried to make her stop and talk, not even bothering to pretend to be polite.
Eventually, she found her on a bench below the terrace. There was a small stair going down one side of it, and a few steps further down the hillside there were a few bushes and a bench. Orphea had given up hope, resigning herself to the conclusion that it was just a coincidence. Someone else had happened to think that that wine was very good, and included a glass for an impromptu tasting. So she leaned on the terrace railing and looked out over the valley, and down there she saw the back of a slender african woman.
If she hadn't been wearing the very expensive dress and the high-heeled shoes, she probably would've jumped over the railing to get down there faster. Instead, she went by the gift table to pick up the wine bottles and the glass, then calmly walked down the stairs and approached the bench. She stopped a step or two behind the sitting woman
"I remember having this wine before," she said. "On a balcony in Paris."
"What a coincidence," the woman said, and her voice was almost the same as it had been back then. "I also remember drinking it on a balcony in Paris."
Orphea walked around the bench and sat down. "I was planning to offer to share it with you," she said. "But it seems I forgot to bring a corkscrew."
Iruwa had come dressed in an armless black turtleneck shirt and black jeans. Both garments showed off the curves of her body wonderfully, and Orphea's heart started beating faster just from looking at her. Iruwa dug into her pocket and retrieved something that looked like an oblong piece of ceramic, from which she quickly unfolded a corkscrew. She offered it to Orphea.
"Thank you," Orphea said. She opened a wine bottle and filled the glass. "Don't take this the wrong way," she said, "but why are you here? I don't remember inviting you."
Iruwa smiled. "I work for Imagolumen," she said. "You invited the entire company. I just chose to bring a gift of my own rather than join in on the company one."
She knew that company. They'd been hired at the last minute to do the lightshow for one of her concerts when the regular company failed to live up to her expectations. Imagolumen had done amazingly well, and she'd signed them up for another ten concerts at once.
She handed the wine glass to Iruwa. "You're with them?" she said. "I really like your work."
"Thank you," Iruwa said. "I'm fairly pleased with it to, so far."
Orphea watched her drink. "What is it you do? Something technical, I suppose?"
Iruwa handed the glass back. "I design the shows," she said. "And most of the visual projection equipment."
Orphea blinked. She thought about it for a few moments. "So what do the other employees do?" she finally asked.
Iruwa shrugged. "Build equipment to my designs. Move it to concert venues. Sales. Billing. That sort of thing. Mostly."
Orphea drained the wine glass and refilled it. "Well, I'm certainly glad I invited the lot of you," she said. "Or I wouldn't have got to share a glass with you again."
For some reason, Iruwa suddenly looked nervous. "Yes," she said. "There is something about that I've been wondering all these years."
"What?" Orphea asked as she handed the filled glass over.
"That time in Paris," she said. "I kept thinking about another solution to the one glass problem. Only I wasn't brave enough to try it. And as you grew more famous and I heard about you more often, I cursed myself ever more for being a coward."
"I promise to think no less of you, whatever it is," Orphea said.
"Good," Iruwa said. She brought the glass to her mouth and took a generous mouthful from it. She put it down in the ground, scooted closer to Orphea, put her arms over Orphea's shoulders and pressed their lips together. Surprised but far from displeased, Orphea opened her mouth a little, and warm wine passed from Iruwa to her. They both swallowed, and with the wine was gone Orphea gently probed with her tongue. Iruwa eagerly responded, and they both put their hearts into the kiss.
"The only way that could displease me," Orphea said, her voice husky and her skin tingling, "is if you don't do it again."
Iruwa smiled, then did it again.

Hours later, they had moved to another bench, less visible from the terrace. They had hardly stopped touching since the first kiss, holding hands while they walked the short distance from the first bench and sitting snuggled together since then. There had been more kissing, and some feeling up and discovering of the other party's body, but most of all there had been talking. It was as if they had known each other forever, that the elven years since they last met had just been a pause in their relationship and they now had a whole lot of catching up to do. Orphea talked about songs and places and people and more songs, things she had done and people she had met. Iruwa talked more about that which she had made, machines she had designed and visual art she had designed. They spoke of friends and lovers, and found that they both had had very few of either. They both had a lifetime of things to tell, and there was no way only a few hours would suffice.
"Miss Orphea?"
Aphrodite gingerly stuck her head around the corner of the hedge, as if afraid to disturb.
"Yes, Aphrodite?" Orphea said. "What is it?"
"Midnight approaches," Aphrodite said. "Some guests are beginning to notice that you have not been visible for some time. I think mister Majors is getting worried."
Orphea laughed. "I'll be right up," she said. "Tell Sebastian that I'm fine. Better than I've been in a really long time, actually."
When Aphrodite had left, she stroked Iruwa's curly hair with her hand. "I know it sounds sudden," she said. "But I really want you to stay, at least until tomorrow."
"It's not sudden," Iruwa said. "It's been a decade coming, that's all. I have to be at work come Monday. Until then, I'm yours."
"I love you," Orphea said, feeling silly and premature as she did so. How could she know that, when she'd only known the other woman for a few hours?
"And I you, strange as it sounds to say it," Iruwa said. "Let's go see in the new year with your guests."
They untangled arms and legs, rubbed feeling back into those limbs that had fallen asleep from being held at odd angles for too many hours, and walked through the rough garden up to the terrace. After only a few steps, Iruwa's hand found Orphea's, and by mutual unspoken agreement they entered the terrace holding hands.
On the terrace, Aphrodite and Sebastian were busy handing glasses of champagne out to the guests. The mood was upbeat, and it seemed that the party had been doing just fine in the absence of its hostess.
"What time is, Sebastian?" Orphea asked.
He smiled in her direction, and she saw him do a double take as he noticed her holding Iruwa's hand.
"Four minutes to 2061," he said. He took two glasses and offered them to Orphea and Iruwa, who let go of each other's hands to accept them.
He turned towards the crowd. "Friends!" he shouted. A lie for the majority of the people there, but the sort of necessary lie that he was so much better at than Orphea. "Our missing hostess has been found, and the new year is soon upon us. So make sure you have a filled glass in your hand, a fond memory of the past year in your mind and a bright future ahead of you!"
Cheers and agreements were shouted from several directions, in more or less inebriated voices. Sebastian took Orphea's hand lightly, pulling her towards the center of the terrace.
"I suggest that our magnificent hostess do the countdown," he said. "Do I have a second?"
Everyone seconded the motion, from the sound of it. Orphea resigned herself to it. At least it would be over quickly.
"All right," she said. "Get me a clock, somebody."
Before she'd finished the sentence, Iruwa was standing next to her with a small black box in her hand. She pushed a button, and glowing meter-high digits appeared in the air over her. They showed only a handful of seconds to the new year.
"Ten!" Orphea let ring out from her throat at the appropriate time. She pitched it to carry as far as possible. "Nine!"
At five, some of the guests started chiming in, and she adjusted her voice to drown them out. If they'd asked her to do the countdown, she bloody well would do it!
"Two... One... Happy new year!" she shouted, raising her glass in the air. A forest of arms holding glasses rose before her, and a mighty shout wished everyone for a kilometer around a very happy, if slightly drunk, new year.
"Happy new year," Iruwa said next to her. She'd turned off her projection clock and buried it in a pocket somewhere.
"Happy new year," Orphea said and touched her glass to Iruwa's. "May all of this year be as pleasant as the ending of the old one."
"Amen to that," Iruwa said.

Iruwa didn't really leave the villa in Tuscany until they both moved out of it three years later. When her third day in it dawned and neither she nor Orphea showed the slightest wish to have her leave, they went together to her flat in Lyons and fetched her clothes and her most personal stuff. Of the rest, some they had moved to Tuscany and some they sold. The small workshop she'd had for when she got ideas in the middle of the night was replaced by a fully equipped one in a cellar room in the villa.
To begin with, Orphea worried that she'd no longer be able to get the good designs out of Imagolumen that she'd contracted them for. That her close relationship with Iruwa would blind them both to any faults the designs might have. To try it out, she arranged a small concert in Florence. She and Iruwa spent a few weeks designing the songs and the visuals in parallel, and they were still making tweaks and adjustments seconds before Orphea walked onto the stage and began to sing.
Orphea had feared that they might produce introverted over-intellectual garbage, working closely together with little input from outside as they did. But it turned out she needn't have worried. The audience, all of them long-time fans of hers, since she'd decided to only sell tickets for this event through her fan club, were ecstatic. The reviews were not only good, they were outstanding.
"We should tell them it's half your doing," Orphea said when she'd looked at the reviews, voicing for the first time an argument that they'd always have.
"I don't want to," Iruwa said. "I just want to do it, I don't want to be famous."
Orphea could never understand that. She'd been famous to some extant for as long as she could remember. She'd been the most visible one of the girls in her orphanage, the most well-known pub singer in the camp, the hottest new vocalist in Paris and so on until she was one of the most famous musicians in the world. Not wanting to be famous was to her rather like not wanting your hair to grow. But she was very much in love, and if Iruwa didn't want her part of the credit, well, then that was the way it would be.
Spring went past. Summer came, with more concerts, blowing away the last artistic fears she had. Everyone seemed to agree that her new visual style was amazingly successful, and she rose from one of the most famous musicians to the most famous musician. Fall came, and winter, and before she really knew it she was standing on the terrace in Tuscany again, champagne glass in her hand and Iruwa by her side. They hadn't invited nearly as much people this year, only a handful that they actually liked. Sebastian, now divorced again. Aphrodite, who by now was somewhere in the strange land between friend and employee. A couple of people from a nearby village. A couple of Net voices. Again, they used Iruwa's projection clock for the countdown. Again, they toasted each other and wished each other a happy new year.
"You know, it did," Iruwa said to her as they leaned on the terrace's railing, arms around each other's waists.
"It did what?" Orphea asked.
"Go on as well as the one before ended," Iruwa said. "The year, I mean."
Orphea thought about it. "Yes, it did, didn't it," she said. "May this one do just as well. Or better."
"Amen to that," Iruwa said.

Noon, Monday, 30 May 2067

Maria sighed. The net was a mess. Not that it didn't work, because it mostly did, but getting something useful done was next to impossible. All her normal reference sites were overloaded by queries, most of them on the terrorist organization (she couldn't think of any reasonable way in which they could be called freedom fighters or rebels) that called itself England Reborn. Mail hubs were overloaded by people trying contact other people to see if they had lived through last night's flight disaster. Some sites had just plain shut down, for paranoid reasons that she failed to understand.
On top of all this her news sieves had told her that one of the confirmed deaths last night was Iruwa, and she was getting fragments of really weird reports about Orphea in Cairo. Reports that read more like something out of a cheap horror movie than as real life. She'd tried to get them confirmed, but only got that the egyptian police quite badly wanted to ask Orphea some questions.
Flights were still canceled or badly delayed all over the continent. The flight authorities in Nijmegen said that they had a backup system in operation while they investigated what had happened with the main one, but that since the backup only had about half the capacity of the regular system, the delays and cancellations would likely continue for at least a few days.
All in all, an excellent day to be taking the train.
She was on her way from Berlin to Geneva, and she'd chosen the train because she was in no hurry to get there and she found it much easier to work on trains than on airplanes. She'd planned to try to organize all the information she had on Orphea and Iruwa and try to figure out promising lines of research to get more. But she couldn't stop thinking about the warm, friendly woman she'd met the day before and who was now dead, burned to death in the flaming wreck of an airplane.
It was so pointless. So random. Senseless. It wasn't like the terrorists gained anything by her death. If anything, they'd lose a lot of popular support they might otherwise have gained.
She wondered if she really should keep investigating. So far, she'd done far more harm than good. If she hadn't started digging through thing, Iruwa wouldn't have been flying from Berlin and she would be alive now.
She tried to wrest her thoughts elsewhere, and brought up her project files to have another look at them. The current centerpiece was a time-lapse historical map of southern England, showing the progress of the Nanoclysm. That far south of the inception point, the omniphage front was an almost straight line across the country, fast advancing from north to south. Her mother had said that the lorry with the girls had arrived when she could actually see the Nanoclysm front from her crane, which gave a pretty sharp limit to when it must have been. The lorry couldn't have driven all that far, since the girls arrived in good physical shape and the driver certainly wouldn't have stopped to feed them. Taken together, those facts resulted in a very small number of possible towns where he could have found the girls. None of which were recorded as having all-girls institutions of any kind, neither hospitals nor orphanages och schools. She'd even checked for summer camps or likely private companies, without result.
So where had they all come from?
She was staring at the map, watching the Nanoclysm front advance over it again and again as the timelapse cycled, when her incoming call icon started blinking. She let it in.
Suddenly, Orphea's face filled her field of vision. She looked haggard and wild, as if she hadn't slept for quite some time and not been having a good time while she was awake. Which wasn't at all surprising.
"Orphea," Maria said. "I'm so sorry about Iruwa. I really wish I hadn't asked her to come."
Maria wasn't sure if Orphea was looking at her or not. Her expression was strange, a kind of controlled rage that promised to explode at any moment. Maria hoped she wouldn't be in the way when it did.
"Tell me what you told her," Orphea said. No niceties or greetings, just a demand.
"I still don't want to say it over the net," she said.
"She said that you told her something that points to where she is now. I need to know what you told her. I don't care who else hears it."
Maria was confused. "She told you? But she's dead."
With a visible effort, Orphea collected herself and looked straight at Maria. It was not a nice look.
"Miss du Lac," Orphea said. "If you do not tell me what I want to know right fucking now, I will announce an extremely high reward for the one who can get me that information. I will make it very clear that I don't care at all about how the information is collected, or about what state its source is left in. Am I making myself clear?"
"Yes, but..." As she started to speak, Maria realized that her voice was shaking badly. If Orphea was trying to scare her, she was doing quite well.
"Now, miss du Lac. Not in a minute. Not in ten seconds. NOW!"
Her reasons not to put it on the net weren't that important anyway. She started telling Orphea the long story about the mitochondria and the last days of England.

"She's gone mad," Christos said. "What's worse, I think she's spreading it to others. You should've seen the streets last night, it was like something from a horror movie."
The four of them had gathered in the outermost room of Orphea's suite at the Hotel Nefertiti. Christos and Alexandra were sitting in separate armchairs, Johann sat in the couch with glasses and earpiece jacked into the hotel's security net. Aphrodite stood by the door, keeping an old-fashioned lookout for anything coming that way that wasn't on the security net. Orphea herself had retreated to her bedroom.
"We've always known that she has an amazing ability to write music that get to people," Alexandra said. "But now it looks like she's not only doing it way more effectively than she ever has before, she's also using it to make them feel her pain over losing Iruwa."
"I so wish she was here," Aphrodite said. "She'd know what to do. Stupid senseless waste of a great woman. If I had those England Reborn assholes here..."
"Well, she's not here," Alexandra said. "And the big question is, what do we do now?"
"The concert's out," Christos said. "Bigtime. So we don't really have any reason to stay in Egypt."
"Go home to Marseilles?" Aphrodite asked.
"Maybe not," Christos said. "They lived there. Lots of memories."
Alexandra sighed. "Call Sebastian?" she said. "He's known her longer than any of us, maybe he can think of something to do."
"If nothing else," Christos said, "he should be able to scrounge up a place to stay and a good psychiatrist."
"Whatever we decide to do," Johann said, "we'd better do it quickly. The police just lodged a request with the hotel that they block the exits from this floor. They want Orphea for about three hundred cases of grievous bodily harm and twentyfive cases of manslaughter. I'm blocking them for the moment, but we don't have long at all."
They all looked at each other, then three of them looked at Aphrodite. She was the one who'd worked for Orphea the longest, and the one who commanded in times of crisis.
"Ok," she said. "Priority one, get out of the hotel. Christos, Alexandra, make sure we have a clear route to the car. Johann, keep blocking until we're all out of the suite. I'll go get Orphea."

Orphea was sitting very still on the edge of the huge double bed in the suite's bedroom, staring straight ahead. Not human. She wasn't human, the du Lac woman had said. Nor was Iruwa. They had come out of the Nanoclysm, du Lac thought. There was nowhere else they reasonably could have come from. How that could possibly be, she had no idea at all. As far as she knew, the Nanoclysm was wholly destructive.
Somehow, Iruwa lived there right now. Orphea was sure of it. Nothing as small as a burning aircraft could have killed her Iruwa, who had been so warm and full of life. She could not be dead. It simply wasn't acceptable.
So she wasn't. She was in England. Back where they both had come from, all those years ago.
The bedroom door opened and Aphrodite entered.
"Orphea?" she said. "We have to leave."
Orphea turned her head slowly and looked up at her aide. "Yes," she said. "We do."
"The police are coming," Aphrodite went on. "For what you did last night. We have to hurry."
Orphea got up from the bed. "I suppose you've planned the route," she said. "So just lead they way."
Aphrodite nodded, turned and walked out of the bedroom with Orphea following closely behind. Johann met them in the living room.
"The sensors in here will report our continued presence for about five minutes," he said. "Once we're out the door, there's no more I can do to the systems here. So let's hope they trust their system and take it easy."
They left the suite, walked briskly down the corridor to where Alexandra was waiting with the cargo elevator open. She'd opened the elevator's service panel and had it connected to her wearables. Johann looked at the connections, then at her.
"They'll notice that pretty quick," he said.
"So let's go," Alexandra said.
Aphrodite led Orphea into the elevator, followed by Johann and Alexandra. The doors closed, and they started moving downwards.
"It occured to me," Alexandra said, "that it'd probably be a good idea if nobody else could use this elevator while we're in it. Might be a bit awkward if we met the police preparing for an ambush."
The numbers above the door counted steadily down, until they reached what they claimed was level minus three. The doors opened, and the group walked out into the hotel garage. Christos had their car waiting right by the elevator, so they only had to take a few steps across the open floor to reach it. Alexandra got into the front passenger seat, Aphrodite and Johann seated themselves in the back seat with Orphea in between them. Almost before they'd sat down, Johann had his wearables jacked into the car systems.
"Still looks green," he said. "Get out of here."
Quickly, but not fast enough to look suspicious or be unnecessarily risky, Christos drove out of the garage and into the streets of Cairo.
"Where are we heading?" Christos asked. "I can drive around in the city for a while, but the longer we do that the greater the risk that the police catch on to us."
"Alexandria," Aphrodite said. "Johann, try to lease or buy a ship capable of getting us to Marseilles and have it waiting to take off as soon as we're aboard."
"Right," Johann said. "Will do."

I wonder if I'll wake up soon, Orphea found herself thinking. This can't be happening. I'll wake up soon, and I'll turn to Iruwa and hold her. She'll wake up, and even before she's properly awake she'll notice that I'm all tense and start comforting and soothing me.
But the world around her just went on. She kept sitting in the cool air-conditioned limousine, and the view through the darkened windows kept being the near-desert countryside between Cairo and Alexandria.
Most of all, Iruwa kept not being there.
"I can't go on without her," she said.
Aphrodite put her hand on her arm. "Yes you can," she said. "It's hard now, and you should grieve, but in time you will feel better."
Orphea shook her head. "No, I won't," she said. "I have to get her back."
"Try to sleep," Aphrodite said. "We'll be in Alexandria in a couple of hours."
"Longer," Christos said. "I'm taking back roads and going slow, to avoid possible roadblocks. Barring trouble, I'd say more like five or six hours."
The landscape fitted Orphea's soul. Dry, bleak and mostly lifeless. Bereft of anything worth living for.
"So much more reason to sleep," Aphrodite said.
"I can't sleep," Orphea said. "My stomach hurts."
Aphrodite frowned. "When did you last eat?"
"Not sure," Orphea said. "Breakfast with Iruwa, I think."
"But that was yesterday morning!"
Orphea shrugged.
Aphrodite sighed. "Christos, see if you can find somewhere that serves food and stop there."

As far as Orphea could tell from the remainder of the decor, the place had been a Burger King once upon a time. Now, it had been taken over by a local family who served various chicken-based dishes out of it. From the look of things, they made barely enough to keep in business. At the moment, their little group were the only people in the restaurant apart from the proprietor, his wife and their two children. Aphrodite and Christos were standing at the counter, ordering things and stacking the paper-wrapped packages they got on old red plastic trays. Orphea, Alexandra and Johann sat at a worn-down wood-imitation table, waiting for the food to arrive. As soon as she smelled the frying chicken, Orphea's stomach had informed her in no uncertain terms that it wanted food as soon as humanly possible. Johann kept contact with the car's systems on his wearables, and would occasionally mutter things into his headset or make control gestures with his hands.
One of the children, a boy of five or so years, stood behind the table next to theirs, looking at them.
"Hi there," she said towards him. "What's you name?"
He just kept looking at her, and it occured to her that he might only speak Arabic.
"My name's Orphea," she said. "Do you want to hear a song?"
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alexandra and Johann smile at her, probably pleased to see her behave somewhat normally. The boy also seemed so be taken in by her soft voice and smile, and approached. When he came close enough, she lifted him up and put him on her lap. So small. So much life ahead of him. So much pain.
Aphrodite and Christos arrived with the food.
"You'll have to wait a little until I've eaten," Orphea said, not caring if the boy understood or not. She grabbed something at random from one of the laden trays and unwrapped it. It turned out to be fried chicken and vegetables in a pita bread, and it looked very edible. She dug into it. Christos did some more ordered unwrapping, and placed containers with vegetables, rice and various sauces on the table. Aphrodite broke open a few cans of cheap local beer. For a little while, there was no talking and little thinking around the table.
Orphea's stomach filled up quickly, and she went from ravenous to feeling ill over the course of a couple of bites. She put down her pita bread and returned her attention to the boy.
Softly, she started to sing. She looked deeply into his eyes, and tried to feel what life was like for him, so she could sing it. She picked up on all the small cues in his face, and in that of his mother who had approached and sat down at the table next to them. After a minute or so, she had the feel of them, and she could see in their eyes that she spoke to them in a language that went deeper than mere words. She smiled and began to twist it.
To the sense of plain life, she added loss. To the sense of comfort, she added heartbreak. To the sense of stability, she added crushing surprise. She added love, and the loss of live. She added pain, and suffering, and the paralyzing blackness of utter despair.
In her lap, the boy began to cry. She saw tears in the eyes of his mother, and she kept singing. Deeper and deeper into the land of misery she sang them, further and further away from sunlight and love, until she finally reached the place where there can be no softness, no pleasure and no light, but only loneliness and fear. Then she finally grew silent.
She put the boy down. He'd stopped crying, and was silently and vacantly staring straight ahead. His mother made no attempt to pick him up, but just sat where she was in silence.
Orphea looked at her bodyguards. They were looking pale and drawn, but as she watched them they shook themselves free of her song and returned to the waking world.
"I want to leave now," Orphea said. She heard Christos swear under his breath.
"I really think that's a good idea," Aphrodite said. "Let's go."

Tuesday, 31 May 2067

Maria thought about it long and hard before she started doing it. It felt a bit like betraying the trust of a friend, and she didn't like that. But it was a friend she had known only very briefly and only actually met once, and who was now dead. And at the end of it all, Maria was a professional content provider. When a huge story practically fell into her lap, how could she not exploit it? She rented an office space in the Geneva hotel where she was staying, and started writing down everything she'd found out about Orphea and Iruwa. While she did so, she kept her agents scanning newssites for the latest information about Orphea. What they came back with was, to put it mildly, hard to believe.
According to the reports from Cairo, Orphea had been walking the streets of the city all night, singing songs that drove people mad. The local hospitals had been absolutely swamped with people driven to self-mutilation by her voice, and many of those showed no signs of returning to sanity. Official reports from the Egyptian Ministry of Health urged everyone who had heard the singer during the night to report to their nearest health care center for an evaluation, and their police wanted to have a long chat with the singer herself. Wanted to quite badly, from the sound of it. They asked that anyone who had information about her whereabouts to contact the police, so they obviously hadn't arrested her. Yet. Although her bodyguards were certainly getting her out of the country, if they hadn't already done so.
The fan sites were in a state somewhere in between a riot and a feeding frenzy. There had been widespread shock and denial when the news of Iruwa's death had spread in the early hours of the morning, and when the rumours of Orphea on the streets of Cairo started flying things really went overboard. Some thought that she had gone insane with grief. Some flat out didn't believe either report. Some thought, or at least claimed to think, that she was an incarnated higher being who had come to test humanity's worthiness, and now, having found them wanting, was about to tear down human civilization as humankind knew it. Some thought that while it was obviously no fun for those who had been driven insane, the events in Egypt showed once and for all that Orphea really was the greatest musician who had ever lived.
Maria wondered what the two latter camps would think if she released the news that Orphea wasn't fully human. While it was tempting to say that things couldn't possibly get any worse, she was too experienced to really think that. Somehow, no matter how bad things were, the universe always found ways to make them worse.
She also wondered how she could get better reports about what had really happened, and what would happen next. The only people who were at all likely to know that were Orphea and her bodyguards, so trying to contact them would be her first goal. Achieving would be tricky, seeing as they were on the run from the Egyptian government, but she thought she could do it. After all, she had Iruwa's personal address and knew enough about Orphea's inner circle to make educated guesses about the addresses of the people there who were still alive.
And hopefully still sane.

The sun shone from a slightly hazy sky. The water around the ship was sapphire blue, shading to green in the tops of the waves. The wind blew quite strong, and the ship rolled noticeably but not uncomfortably. The air smelled of salt and sea, which was a very welcome change after the dry and humanity-laden smells of Egypt.
Orphea had placed herself near the fore of the ship, sitting on a chair she'd dragged there from her cabin. She sat there, looking at the waves and the birds circling their ship. She didn't know what kind of birds it was, and it bugged her for a little while. Then she gave the question up as meaningless, and concentrated on the waves.
The ship was very big for only five people. Johann hadn't had much time to choose or haggle, and had ended up paying an extortionate price for a three-month lease of a luxury yacht owned by a Cretan millionaire. Orphea didn't care about the money, she had enough that it was irrelevant.
The ship was meant to hold ten to twenty guests and about the same number of staff, but fortunately it was sufficiently automated that it could be handled by a single person if need be. Christos and Alexandra had got down to the business of running it as soon as they all got aboard, and since they seemed to be moving steadily ahead she assumed that they were doing well. Just before they left, Aphrodite had given the keys to the limousine to a woman who happened to be passing by and told her that it was hers if she only drove it to Cairo before sunset.
Orphea didn't care much about the limousine either.
The waves moved, and the ship moved with them. She kept staring at the waves, following their movement with her mind. Up, down. Up, down. She tried breathing in time with them, and found that it gave her a closer feel for them. Up, down. In, out.
Slowly, she sank into trance. Her mind reached out, away from her body.

Alexandra came out from the yacht's control room and climbed down the short ladder to the main deck. Aphrodite was standing there, scanning the horizon behind them through a high-powered pair of binoculars.
"We're out of Egyptian waters," Alexandra said. "We should be safe now."
Aphrodite put the binoculars down. "At least until she pulls the same stunt somewhere else," she said. "And we still haven't decided where we're going."
"I still think Marseilles," Alexandra said. "Besides, I don't think we want to try the Suez Canal, so we're pretty much heading that way in any case. Unless you're thinking Israel or Lebanon?"
"I'm thinking maybe Spain," she said. "Orphea owns most of a village a bit north of Barcelona, including a large walled-off villa. We should be able to keep her away from people there without locking her in."
"Do you think she's gone mad?" Alexandra said. "I mean, of course she's halfways out of her skull with grief, but do you think she's really gone mad mad?"
"I don't know," Aphrodite said. "And that scares me. You saw her singing to that kid. I can't really see how that was just grief."
"So, Spain," Alexandra said. "I'll tell Christos to head for Barcelona. It'll take a while to get there so we have plenty of time to change our minds."
"No."
They both turned towards the unexpected voice. Behind them, Orphea stood.
"Miss Orphea," Aphrodite said. "We didn't hear you approach."
"We're not going to Spain," Orphea said. "We're going to England."
Aphrodite and Alexandra exchanged looks. The madness theory just gained a whole lot of credibility.
"England doesn't exist any more," Aphrodite said.
"We came from there, Iruwa and I," Orphea said. "Now she's returned, and she's calling for me. I have to go there."
"Is she talking about suicide?" Alexandra whispered.
Aphrodite frowned. "What are you talking about?" she said.
"Head for England," Orphea said. "Or the Nanoclysm, or the place where England used to be, or whatever you want to call it. When we get close enough, I'll take the inflatable raft and go the last way by myself."
"Fuck," Alexandra breathed. "She is talking suicide."
"You can't go there," Aphrodite said. "You'll die."
"I will return," Orphea said. "And I will bring Iruwa with me. You'll see."
"Right," Aphrodite said, sounding very doubtful.
"Good," Orphea said. "Now head for England."

Thursday, 2 June 2067

Nanoclysm Observation Platform VI hadn't changed in the few days since Maria's first visit there. It was still a big, ugly steel and concrete structure sticking straight up out of the water, topped with lots and lots of antennas. The main difference that she could see was the big white luxury yacht that lay moored to one of the platform's pylons, looking very much out of place.
The yacht vanished from her view as the helicopter lowered itself the last few meters to the helipad, and when she turned to look at the platform itself instead she saw Group Captain Clifford waiting for her and her guest. He didn't look particularly pleased.
She jumped out of the helicopter and ran half-bent until she was well away from the rotors, then straightened out and walked briskly the rest of the way to Clifford. Her companion followed closely behind her, with a hand firmly on his head to keep his hat from being blown away.
"This is Sebastian Majors," she said when she reached Clifford. "And I'm sorry about the imposition, but this was the only safe place close to Britain that I could think of."
He looked slightly mollified, but still far from pleased. He shook hands with Sebastian.
"Next time, please ask first," he said towards Maria.
"I'm hoping there's not ever going to be a next time," Maria said. "The current circumstances are pretty unique. I trust they got here safely?"
Clifford started walking towards the nearest door, and Maria had to hurry to keep up with him. Sebastian, with his longer legs, didn't seem to find the pace uncomfortable at all. It was a cold day, for the season, with the wind coming in from the north.
"Yes, they have," Clifford said. "And I must say I got rather floored when they climbed aboard and I saw Orphea among them. If you'd asked me last week, I'd said that meeting her would be a complete delight, but after what we've heard from Egypt I'm more afraid than happy to have her here."
They got indoors, out of the icy wind. The place was still mostly empty, in spite of having had its population almost doubled.
"Yeah, I can see that," she said. "I'm a lot less eager to meet her now than I was last week. I'm still not sure if she blames me for Iruwa's death or not."
"Well, we'll soon see," Clifford said. "If she decides to drive you mad I hope she at least spares the rest of us."

Maria had managed to find Aphrodite's address after a few hours work, and managed to get through to her when it was almost midnight. She'd been ready to apologize profusely for the late call, but it turned out not to be necessary. Aphrodite hadn't been able to sleep, and was sitting in the stern of the yacht watching the slight phosphorescence of their wake.
Maria had introduced herself and explained her role in the current disaster, and that she wanted to know what was going on, and to help if she somehow could. Aphrodite had briefly told her what had happened in Egypt, and that they on Orphea's insistence were now on their way to England.
Without being sure why she did so, Maria suggested that they meet up on NOP6, and that she'd try to bring Sebastian Majors there with her. Aphrodite had seemed relieved to have a suggested course of action that didn't require her to disobey Orphea yet still held hope for help, so she readily agreed. Sebastian had been a lot easier to get hold of, so only a couple of hours after she'd broken contact with Aphrodite she had got him to agree to come with her to meet Orphea and leased a helicopter to take them both out to NOP6.
And now they were there.
"Hi," she said. "I'm Maria du Lac. I've been..."
"We know who you are, dear," Orphea interrupted. "You're the one who dug into mine and Iruwa's childhoods, and found darkness."
"Well, I wouldn't call it that..." Maria said.
Sebastian took his hat off and sat down at the table. "Hello, Orphea," he said. "I'm hearing that you're not feeling so well."
"Iruwa is dead," Orphea said. "I've been better. But I will soon make it all right again."
"Killing yourself isn't a solution, dear," he said.
"I'm not going to kill myself," she said. "I'm going to bring Iruwa back with me."
"By going into the Nanoclysm, they tell me."
"Yes."
"Which is rather widely known for really thoroughly killing absolutely everything."
Orphea smiled, a cold and frightening smile. "But not its own," she said. "When you go to visit your mother, does she harm you?"
Sebastian looked confused. Maria looked around the table. All of them, almost certainly including herself, looked confused.
"No, of course not," Sebastian said.
"Then why do you think mine would harm me?" Orphea said.
"What?" Sebastian said.
"Didn't she tell you?" Orphea said, nodding towards Maria. "Iruwa and I don't belong to the human race. We came out of the Nanoclysm. It is our mother."
"I never said that!" Maria said.
Orphea turned to her, and the look in her eyes made Maria involuntarily pull back.
"No?" Orphea said. "You said that we are genetically completely unlike any human. Unlike any other animal on Earth, even. We came from a place that had already been eaten by the Nanoclysm, but from which it had retreated, leaving only us behind. You said that there had been no place, no institution, that could have been were we lived before. Did you really not put the pieces of the puzzle together?"
"But that cannot be!" Clifford exclaimed. "We've never known anything to come out of the Nanoclysm!"
"You missed us for thirty years," Orphea said. "How can you be so sure that you didn't miss even more?"
He didn't seem to have an answer to that.
"If you have nothing more to say," Orphea said, "I would like to be going. I miss my beloved, and I want her back as soon as possible."
She started to get up from the table. Aphrodite grabbed her arm and held her down.
"No," she said. "I won't let you. I haven't spent all these years protecting you only to see you throw your life away. I don't care where you came from, that thing out there kills everything, and it'll kill you too."
Orphea sat down again. She put her hands on top of Aphrodite's.
"You've been a friend of me and Iruwa, as well as our aide and protector," she said. "Don't you too want her back? Don't you too want her to grow old and wise and die in peace a long time from now, rather than burning inside a wrecked machine?"
"Of course I do," Aphrodite said. "But that wasn't to be. She's dead. There's nothing to be done about that. Dead is dead."
Orphea leaned back in her chair and looked around the room.
"Is that the opinion of all of you?" she asked. One by one, they all nodded.
"You're all wrong," Orphea said. Softly, she began to hum a tune.
It was a nice tune, Maria thought. A very, very nice one. Very calming. She could feel it settle like balm on her frayed nerves. Next to her, Clifford sat down on a chair and sighed deeply.
Orphea opened her mouth, and the hum turned into a song. It held no words that Maria could recognize, but she knew anyway that it was a song of safety and warmth and contentment. That it was a song that said that everything was perfectly all right, and there was nothing at all to worry about. She saw Aphrodite try to get up from her chair, saw her try to grab hold of Orphea. But the singer just turned slightly towards her and changed her song a little. Aphrodite sat down again, blinked heavily a few times. She yawned, leaned forward onto the tabletop, and after a few more breaths she was snoring.
It looked very nice. Very pleasant. The song made her feel all warm and snug, and Maria could feel her own eyes try to close. She sat down on the floor, too sleepy to look for a free seat. She leaned against a cupboard, and quickly passed into blissful sleep.

When they were all sleeping, Orphea got up from her seat. She took care not to make any unnecessary noise, since she wasn't sure how deeply they were sleeping. Until a few minutes earlier, she hadn't known that she could do this, although she probably should've realized she could. Making someone sleep should be much easier than making them claw their eyes out, and she'd proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that she could do that.
She made her way out of the labyrinthine building, and found the ladder they climbed up when they arrived. The yacht was still safely moored below, so she climbed down and jumped over to it. She made her way to the stern, and unfolded the small panel that controlled the deployment of the yacht's dinghy. She turned it on, and machinery on the outside of the yacht started unfolding, inflating and safety checking the smaller boat. It was fairly large for a dinghy, easily large enough to hold four or five people in full diving gear. But it was meant to be controlled by a single person, so it didn't much matter how large it was. When it was fully inflated and the panel's green light lit up, she climbed over to it and cast off from the yacht. She gave power to the engine and turned towards the coast.
The dinghy was swifter than she'd expected, and it almost jumped from wave to wave, making for an uncomfortable ride. But like so much else, it didn't matter. She was on her way to her beloved, and she would gladly accept far worse things than bruises for that.
Salt water sprayed her face, and her clothes were soon soaking wet. The skin on over her knuckles, tense with her firm grip of the steering wheel, was turning a bluish pale, and the rest of her was shivering with cold. But the shoreline approached fast, and she was sure she'd make it there before she passed out. Once there, the cold wouldn't matter, one way or another.
The shore grew closer, but still looked strangely fuzzy and unclear. She could see cliffs and waves breaking against them, but the upper parts of the rocks seemed to slowly transform from solid stone to grayish mist and then vanish into nothing. Here and there, parts seemed to move slowly, looking like mist being very slowly blown over a lake frozen in the middle of a storm.
She saw a patch of gravely beach, and steered towards it. The landscape she was heading for looked alien, inhuman. But that was only suitable for her, now wasn't it? She wasn't human, after all. She turned the engine off a few meters before she reached the shore, and let the dinghy drift the last little bit until it gently ran aground.
She was in England.
Still shivering with cold, she forced herself to let go of the steering wheel and clambered clumsily out of the boat. The gravel crunched under her feet.
"Hello!" she shouted. "I'm here!"
There were strange things growing on the beach. Tendrils of grey material stretched here and there, and now that she was close she saw that some of what she'd taken for stones were lumps of grey plastic-looking stuff. She was just about to shout again, when she heard a whoosh behind her. She turned around, and saw the dinghy deflate. Its plastic was covered with something that looked like a cross between hair and spiderwebs, and large holes had appeared in it. While she watched, the holes grew.
When she looked, she saw that there was more of the stuff growing on her clothes. With almost unbelievable speed, it ate away the waterlogged cotton.
She felt the itching before she saw it grow on her skin. It didn't take long for the itch to grow into an intense burning, and even less for her to lose consciousness from the pain.

Friday, 3 June 2067

Richard held the dart gently between thumb and forefinger, aimed and threw. It landed squarely on a single nine. He swore.
"I haven't had enough to drink, that's it," he said. "Robert, pour me another pint, will you."
It was friday night, and Richard still had lots left of the money he'd got for the Kastrup thing. So had his three friends, and they were busy amending that situation as they knew best: by drinking themselves into a stupor. They'd started when Anders got off work late in the afternoon, although Richard had already been there when the others arrived. The day before, Robert the Barkeep had hired a pretty twenty-something girl to wait tables, and Richard wanted a shot at making a pass at her before he got any competition. It had seemed like he was doing well, too. She'd been really interested in him, what he did for a living and all sort of things about him. He'd happily told her, of course. He could never say no to a pretty girl, although they unfortunately rarely had any trouble saying it to him.
"Coming up," Robert said and started to fill another glass.
"No amount of lager will make you a decent dart player," Ted said. "Now watch the master." He too his three darts, and threw a respectable series of throws.
The waitress brought Richard's pint. "Are these the friends you talked about?" she said as she gave it to him.
"Yeah," he said. "Guys, this is Linda. She's new here. Linda, these are three of the best friends a guy can have: Ted, John and Anders."
"And the four of you did that brave thing at Kastrup, did you?"
Richard saw Ted frown, but he didn't care. "Sure is," he said. "Right heroes, we are."
"Don't tell me you've been bragging about that, you asshole," Ted said.
Linda fiddled a little with the top button of her white blouse. "Well, I think it's just great to meet you guys," she said.
Richard had already turned towards Ted and was about to tell him that see, it's all right, she likes us just fine, when the front and back doors were both kicked in and black-clad med armed with scary-looking assault rifles stormed into the pub.
"Everybody freeze!" one of the men shouted, his voice amplified to ear-aching volume by a PA processor built into his vest. All of them wore black hoods with huge goggles covering the eyes, making them look like some sort of bug-eyed aliens to Richard.
"What the fuck?" Richard said, not understanding a thing of what was happening.
"It's the cops, you fucking idiot!" Ted shouted at him. "You blabbed, you utter stupid fuck!"
Ted started pulling something from the leg pocket on his trousers, still yelling abuse at Richard.
"I said freeze!" the policeman shouted again. Ted didn't stop. Richard just looked back and forth, trying to grasp the situation.
Ted's hand left the pocket, holding something black and shiny. The room suddenly filled with hammering noises, bright flashes and acrid smoke. It looked to Richard like Ted suddenly jumped backwards, twitching and throwing streams of red stuff all around.
Things fell silent, and through the ringing of his ears, Richard heard the dull thud with which Ted's body hit the floor. There were large, meaty holes in his chest and half his head was just not there.
Something touched his arm, and he turned towards it. He felt unreal. This couldn't be happening. He was down at the pub having a few pints and playing darts with his friends. Things like this didn't happen down the pub.
Linda held up a police badge to him. "Richard Cairnduff, Anders Vitberg and John Petersen," she said. "You are under arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism. Will you come willingly, or will we have to use force?"
"Oh fuck," he heard Anders whimper. "Oh fuck. Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me."
Two of the guys in black descended on Richard, roughly twisted his arms onto his back and handcuffed them together. He was too shocked to even try to resist. Once they had him cuffed, they grabbed his arms and dragged him out of the room. He was soon followed by Anders and John, also cuffed and manhandled out.

The leader of the anti-terrorist team took off his goggles and pulled his hood down. He was clean-shaven, wore a blonde crewcut and didn't look like he was much over twenty.
"So that was the masterminds behind knocking out the entire European Air Traffic Control System," he said. He didn't sound anywhere close to convinced.
Linda untied her apron and put it on the bar. "No," she said. "Those were just flunkies. There's no way on Earth any of them had the brains to carry that off."
"We were told there was plenty of evidence," he said. "And not to take any risks, since they were supposed to be armed and well trained."
Linda looked in disgust on the blood stains on her blouse.
"Well, you saw them," she said. "Did they look armed and well trained to you?"
"Armed, maybe. Well trained, not even close," he said. Two of his men, still wearing their goggles and hoods, brought a large black body bag and started loading the remains of Ted into it.
"No, they were set up," she said. "I'm sure of it. They real brains behind it all set the poor sods up to take the fall for it."
The policeman shrugged. "I guess they'll serve to feed the public," he said.
"Ah yes," Linda said, her voice taking on a cynical tone. "It certainly wouldn't do if our lords and masters lost votes for not showing strength in the face of atrocity."
"Certainly not," he agreed just as cynically. "Pizza?"
"Sure," she said. "And you're paying, since I'll have to write the report on the guy your people shot."
"Harsh but fair," he said. They walked out of the pub, leaving broken doors and bloodstains behind.

Orphea slowly drifted back into consciousness, and she had no idea where she was. The ground under her was hard but warm, and the air smelled of roses. She turned over on her back and opened her eyes. Far above her, white clouds raced across a deep-black sky. Lightning played silently over the darkness.
She sat up. She was at the bottom of a large bowl-shaped valley. The ground was made of something that looked like translucent plastic tinted in all the colours of the rainbow, and that felt like the solidest of granite. Straight out of the ground, meter-high bushes grew. They were a pale tan, with intensely yellow flowers. From somewhere in the distance came a soft sound, as of a million people whispering.
She held out her arms and looked at them. They looked just as they used to look. There were no trace of burns, no dissolved skin or bone laid bare. No scars. Nothing. She investigated the rest of her body as well, and apart from being naked and no longer freezing she was just as she had been at the moment she stepped ashore.
She was looking at her hand when everything suddenly changed. One moment, she was looking at her tanned skin and wondering where the light that let her see it came from. The next, all colours inverted. The sky was a screaming white with black clouds, the ground was still a prismatic mess, the bushes were dark grey with very dark blue flowers. Her hand was that of a skeleton, the flesh dissolved into liquid and pouring off her bones.
She twitched, screamed, and with another flash everything was back to where it had started. She looked around for a while, her heart racing, trying to see if something else weird was going to happen. But nothing did, and after a while she managed to calm herself down. And since it didn't seem like anything was inclined to come to her, she supposed that she would have to come to something. She got up and began to walk in a randomly chosen direction.
The first time she touched one of the bushes she nearly jumped out of her skin. Since it looked pretty much loke a bush, apart from the colour, she'd unconsciously expected it to feel like one as well. But it didn't. Touching it felt like touching a raw nerve, or getting a high-voltage shock. It was a stinging, cold feeling that didn't correspond to any kind of touch she had ever heard of. She tried very hard to keep away from the bushes after that, but often they grew so close together that she had no choice but to go between them or turn back. So she gritted her teeth and went between.
After the first few times she did that, the experience started changing. The simple cold pain became more complex, and gained strange additions like a taste of cinnamon or the sound of a bell ringing. And no matter how long she walked, she was still at the bottom of the large valley with the black sky and clouds above it.
She tried shouting, to see if someone would reply. She tried singing, both to try to get a response and to comfort herself a little. This was far from how she had imagined things. Fighting to get to Iruwa she had imagined, and valiantly overcoming physical and mental hardship. But not plain nothing. She'd imagined feeling many things while coming to her beloved's rescue, but total boredom wasn't one of them.
Since the only thing that reliably changed was the sensations she got from touching the bushes, she eventually sat down on the hard ground and kept touching one. She stroked its branches, prodded at its flowers and grabbed its stem. Sensations flew through her, all of them different from the plain feel of holding a solid object in her hand. It brought vision and sound and touch. It brought pain and pleasure and even sexual excitement.
It was, it occured to her, as if someone or something was systematically trying out everything she was able to experience. As if someone was trying to figure out how she worked. Once that thought had occured to her, she kept touching bushes more eagerly. They rarely brought pain any more, and the longer she kept doing it the more complex the sensations she got were. Rather than simple pain, it would be the feeling of getting your feet washed over by a wave carrying lots of sand. Something was clearly getting somewhere.
As she sat there playing with the bush she entirely lost track of time, and before she really knew it she had fallen asleep.

When Orphea woke up again, she was no longer in the bowl-shaped valley of with the strange sensory bushes. She found herself in a dark cave, only lit by a dim flickering light coming from somewhere in the distance. The cave was a little wider than her outstretched arms, and a little too high for her to reach its ceiling. It vanished into total darkness in one direction, and continued towards the light in the other. It was warm and dry, which pleased her since she was still completely naked. For lack of anything better to do, she started walking towards the light.
Almost immediately, a sound that she'd heard in the valley as well reached her. It was a soft, complex sound that had at first made her think of thousands or millions of people whispering at the same time. The more she listened to it the less sure of that she got. It might be wind moving through some kind of leaves she weren't familiar with, or water running over smooth rocks. She'd almost made up her mind that it must be the wind when she turned a corner and found herself at one end of a huge natural-looking hall.
The floor of it was flat, and the rough cave walls had numerous holes through which flames rose, providing light. Across the center of the hall a river ran, entering through a hole in one wall and vanishing again through one just like it on the other wall. From where she was standing, the water looked still and black. The whispering sound was stronger in here, whatever that meant.
In the middle of the river was a low boat, in which a robed figure was standing. He held a long pole, with which he pushed the boat slowly towards the short of the river closest to Orphea. The robe had a hood, which he had pulled so far forward that she couldn't see his face at all.
She walked up right to the edge of the water. The approaching boat looked like it was made from wood, and it was of a style that she didn't recognize. Which wasn't unexpected, she knew almost nothing about boats and ships and things like that.
"Hello there," she said. Loudly, to make sure he could hear her. "What sort of place is this?"
He placidly poled the boat closer.
"Can you talk?" Orphea said.
"Yes," he said. His voice was hoarse, as if he didn't use it much.
"Well," she said. "Good." She wasn't sure how to continue. There were a great many things she wasn't sure of at the moment.
"My name is Orphea," she tried.
"I know," the boatman said.
"And you are?"
"You cannot guess?"
She looked at the cave. She looked at the river. She looked at the robed man in the boat.
"Don't tell me your name is Charon," she said.
"As you wish," he said.
She waited for him to continue, but he remained silent.
"Is your name Charon?" she asked when she couldn't stand the silence any longer.
"Yes," he said.
"And you ferry the souls of the dead across to the afterlife?"
"No," he said. "I was created a few minutes ago to receive you."
Orphea made an effort to grasp what he'd just said, but it didn't make any sense to her.
"What do you mean created?" she said.
The boat bumped into the solid rock of the riverbank. Charon held the boat in place with his pole.
"I mean just that," he said. "Made. Brought into being. Created."
"But that doesn't make sense," she said.
He pushed back the hood so she could see his face. For a few moments she couldn't figure out why he looked so very familiar, and then she realized that he looked exactly like a male version of herself.
"You must have figured out by now that this place isn't real, in the sense of having a physical existence," he said. His voice didn't sound so hoarse any more, but was more like a deeper version of her own.
She hadn't actually thought about that, but now that he mentioned it it did seem fairly obvious. Or at least it explained why she'd waken up apparently whole and unharmed after seeing her flesh being eaten off her bones.
"Sure," she lied.
"Your senses and your mind evolved to deal with physical reality," he said. "It would be extremely difficult, if not actually impossible, for your mind to function in the environment you know as the Nanoclysm. So the great minds of that world has made an artificial environment, a stage if you so wish, where you can function. And I've been created to be your first contact."
"So... what are you?" she asked. "Some kind of answering robot?"
"I'm a person, just as you are," he said. "Sure, I was mostly cobbled together from bits and pieces of other minds, but that doesn't make me any less real."
"Other minds?"
"Sure," he said. He pointed down into the water. "Take a look," he said.
Orphea looked. At first she just saw deep, dark water, but after a little while she started to see shapes. Sort of oblong shapes.
Faces.
She looked up at Charon. "What are they?"
"People," he said. "Some of them whole, most of them just fragments."
"But where did they come from? How did they get here? Out in the physical world, this place has been deserted for three decades."
"They're some of the people who lived here before," Charon said.
She just looked at him.
"What you need to understand," he said, "is that what you have always thought of as the end of an entire nation was for those who live in here the birth of their entire universe. What you call the Nanoclysm is, today, a vast ecosystem with lots of different life forms. Because of how it all started, nearly all those life forms have some kind of processing and communications capability. Together, they make up an information ecosystem of a kind that has never before been seen on this planet. There is an entire world that exists inside the physical Nanoclysm."
"You still haven't told me who those people down there are. If they really are anything at all, and not just illusions."
"Oh, they're real," he said. "The early days of the Nanoclysm was a confusing time. You can imagine. The creation of a universe, of sorts. The information ecosystem flowed out with the spread of the nanomachine plague, and mutated and changed with it. There was little competition in those days, since the amount of processing power grew very fast. If your neighbor was better suited to the environment than you were, just move along. Maybe you'd find a place empty of competition. Maybe you'd find a place where you were the one better suited."
"You sound as if you were there," Orphea said.
"Parts of me was," he said. "Towards the end of the birth days, the big intelligences came. I suppose they were there all the time, but it wasn't until things had spread pretty far that they made themselves known. But when they did, everything changed."
He leaned heavily on his pole.
"You see," he said, "they knew how things really worked. Unlike those who had formed after the ecosystem got going and who used trial and error to find out what worked best, the big ones knew. They knew how the nanomachines worked. They knew how the processing nodes worked. They knew how things communicated. And they knew how to change things."
"Change what?"
Charon shrugged. "Everything, it seemed. They started giving orders, and those who didn't obey they just... made not be any more. They are, for all intents and purposes, the gods of the Nanoclysm world."
He paused to collect his thoughts.
"In the early days, the physical part of the Nanoclysm just broke everything it encountered down into raw materials to build more nanomachines. We didn't mind it, since it also meant more infospace to live in for us, and anyway we had no way to change it even had we wanted to. But the Nanoclysm gods knew how, and they wanted to. It probably wasn't noticeable from the outside, but in the last five or six days of the first spread, the pattern of deconstruction changed. Rather than blindly taking everything apart, the omniphages started recording everything they broke down. Vast amounts of infospace was filled with detailed representations of plants, animals, buildings, vehicles, rocks, of everything there was. Including people."
He looked down into the water, at the faces in the deep.
"Millions of people were deconstructed and recorded down to the smallest detail. But that wasn't enough for the gods. They wanted to know more. But the front of the omniphage advance was the limit of their domain, and in those days the omniphages couldn't deal with salt water. So they had to come up with something else."
He looked up at Orphea.
"Something else was you. You, Iruwa and the ninety-seven other girls. From the cells of all the people they had had scanned, from whatever weird and arcane knowledge they came out of their birth labs with, from bits and pieces that had evolved while they bided their time, out of all those things they built you. Each one of you was meant to have a talent of some kind, but in many that turned into something useless or detrimental. The majority of you turned out mostly normal. A few were exceptional. None was more so than you."
"The dreams," Orphea said. "They're dreams of them, aren't they?"
Charon shook his head. "I'm afraid that you're on your own there," he said. "That information isn't among my parts, and I will never have the opportunity to ask. But I know that there is some communication between you and them, for it is through the ninety-nine of you that they know the world beyond the Nanoclysm. Ninety-nine not-so-little girls being their unwitting eyes and ears in the world of the humans."
Orphea frowned. It was a lot to take in at once, but it all made a disturbing kind of sense.
"I have one more question," she said.
"By all means, go ahead," he said. "That's why I'm here."
"Why only girls? Wouldn't it have looked less suspicious with a mixed group?"
"You can figure that out yourself," he said. "All the information needed for that is in your mind now."
"I don't like riddles," she said.
"I should've known that, shouldn't I? Maybe I'm beginning to unravel... But anyway, how is mitochondrial DNA inherited?"
"How is..." As soon as she started repeating the question, the answer struck her. Of course. It was hers and Iruwa's mitochondrial DNA that had been both very strange and exactly the same, while no other laboratory had ever found anything strange about either of them. So that must be where the strangeness that the Nanoclysm gods had added to them must reside.
And mitochondrial DNA was inherited strictly from the mother.
"Fuck," she said. "They wanted more of us."
"Ninety-nine sets of eyes and ears among all the billions of humanity isn't much," Charon said. "Of course they wanted more."
"Well, if they want me to reproduce they'd better give me Iruwa back," Orphea said. "Because I'm not going to reproduce with anyone but her."
He caught her gaze, and apparently found what he saw there suitable.
"I think you're ready to go on," he said.
"Go on where?"
"To see the gods, of course, and plead for the return of your beloved. Isn't that why you came?"
"So she is here?"
Charon grinned. "I haven't said that," he said. "But I do know that they were getting more than just sight and sound and touch and taste from you. Far, far more."
Orphea stepped into the boat.
"I don't have a coin to give you," she said. "But maybe this once I can be allowed to ride on credit?"
"I think that can be arranged," he said and started pushing the boat towards the other shore.

"What are you going to do now?" Orphea asked after she'd stepped out of the boat on the other side of the river. "If you were created only to meet me here, I mean."
"I'll cease to exist," Charon said.
She looked at him, shocked again. "They'll kill you?" she said.
"That's a matter of definition," he said. "The I that you've been talking to here will no longer be, but the new experiences that it has gathered will be stored and possibly used again in other intelligences."
He leaned his head to the side for a moment, apparently thinking.
"Actually," he went on, "I'm sure they'll be used again. Meeting someone from the outer world is very rare, and the experience will be much desired."
"But you'll die," Orphea said.
Charon shrugged. "I was made with the knowledge and acceptance of that."
She stared at him for a few long moments. "More than all that which you told me before," she said, "this has made me realize how far removed from my own world this one really is."
"Then my purpose is served," he said. "Good luck in your quest, and farewell."
"I feel that I should give you something more than just my presence," she said.
"There is no need," he said.
"Humans don't always act from need," she said. She looked at him, trying to see all of him and all that he was. She remembered all that he had told her about himself, as little as that was. She tried to feel him, to know him as closely as she could.
When she thought that she had him in her mind, she started to sing.
She sang of brevity, and purpose, and the nobility of doing one's duty to the best of one's ability and in the face of all hardship. She sang of sleep, and love, and all the things that he would never know. She sang them all in such a way that he could know them, and in such a way that in spite of that they might become a part of him. She sang her thanks to him.
"Farewell," she said after she'd stopped singing. He didn't reply, and there were tears on his face, which pleased her.
She turned from him. This side of the cavern looked almost exactly the same as the other one, with flames coming out of holes in the walls and a single corridor leading out of it. She briefly thought about jumping into the river and following it out, but if what Charon had said was correct that would probably not be a very good idea. Running into the end of this little virtual world in another way than the planned one might not be particularly healthy for her. So she entered the corridor.
It was, predictably, just like the one where she'd woken up. Dry, just large enough to not feel claustrophobic, and leading from light into darkness.
That last bit worried her, once it became obvious. While she had no idea what might be dangerous here, it felt to her that solid blackness would not be an indicator of safety. They had, after all, shaped the world to her, and that was how she thought. Irrational, probably, an evolutionary remnant from ancient ancestors that she'd never really had.
But as much as it worried her, she walked on. The alternatives were to stand still or to turn back, and neither were likely to bring her close to her goal. So she persevered, and walked steadily on into the total darkness ahead of her.
When she could no longer see, sound became that much more important. She held her hand slightly in front of her, in case the corridor would turn or some other obstacle would appear in her way. But the bulk of her attention was aimed at her hearing.
The whispering multitudes were still there, and stronger than before. If she tried, she could almost make out individual voices, and she could get some inkling of what it was they were whispering. Some it seemed to be in no language she knew, but some of it was.
The voices were whispering scenes from lifes, as far as she could tell. They were describing fragments and parts of events, short bits and pieces of larger things. There were voices whispering of making love to their partners, of eating dinner, of painting the shed, of yelling at a disobedient child, of driving their car to work, of being torn apart by omniphages, of sleeping soundly, of being in bed with a fever, of all those innumerable things from which a life might be built.
Orphea tried to hear if one of the voices was hers or Iruwa's, but she couldn't. She didn't recognize any of them, and she wondered if these were the fragments that Charon had said that he'd been constructed from.
Without warning, from one step to another, she left the darkness and was on a sunlit lawn.
She looked around. There were trees, and bushes, and flowers. There were no walls, nor any cave from which she might have exited. Behind her, there was just as much lawn stretching to infinity as there was ahead of her.
She wondered if this was meant to impress her, somehow. If it was, it didn't work. Except maybe a little.
Here and there, she could see people. They were all dressed in white, and were playing and laughing. The whispering voices were still there, but so much lower that she had to actively listen for them to notice them. The laughter and happy shouts of the people on the lawn were much louder and, she had to admit, made her feel a lot better.
The sky was mostly blue, with the occasional white cloud. In the far distance, there were a couple of things that she at a first and second look thought were mountains. The third time she looked, something perceptually shifted in her brain, and she realized that they were two insanely huge chairs with equally insanely huge people sitting in them, with their chests at about cloud level. She couldn't see their faces, assuming they had any.
When she saw that, the question of where to head now was pretty easy to guess the answer to. She turned towards the giants and started walking.

Somehow, her way never brought her closer than a hundred meters or so of any of the people playing on the neverending lawn. At first she thought that this was only coincidence, but as the hours wore on she changed her mind. It must be deliberate. She didn't try to challenge it.
Her way also gradually became higher, so that she was walking along the top of an extremely long and narrow hill. As she got higher, she could see farther and farther away, and it was still nothing but well-manicured lawn all the way to the horizon. Which was neither strange nor surprising, considering that it was all nothing but an information construct presented to her in a way she had a chance to understand.
When the hill was higher than she could easily estimate and not much wider than her shoulders, it ended. There was a long, sharp drop down to the ground, and from the lip of that abyss a glass bridge continued upwards. She stepped onto it without hesitation. She was getting fed up with awe-inspiring constructions, and her strongest reaction to this one was thankfulness that it had railings so she needn't be as afraid of falling off. When she came to think of it, she was also glad that they hadn't bothered to include hunger and fatigue in the simulated landscape. It felt like she'd been walking for days, but she was no more tired or hungry than she had been when she first woke up among the sensory bushes back in the bowl-shaped valley.
Unfortunately it was still possible for her to get bored, and when she finally reached the far end of the bridge she was ready to welcome absolutely anything that might bring a change from seeing the infinite lawn and the two huge seated figures.

The far end of the bridge was a glass platform no larger than a tennis court, floating in midair. It was at about the same height as the seated figures' elbows, and somehow the clouds never passed between it and the figures' faces. Faces that were huge, impassive and looking straight at her. One was male, with strong features and a long white beard. The other was female, finely wrought and young-looking.
"You know why I'm here," she said. "So what do you say?"
We never expected you to come here, a female voice said. It sounded like it appeared fully formed in her head, without ever passing through the air between Orphea and the huge figure's lips.
"Well, I did," Orphea said.
You shone brightest of all our brother's children, a male voice said, also inside her head. But now you have chosen to walk out of the world of humans, and enter ours.
"I go where Iruwa goes," she said. "And I know she's here. I heard her voice, in the dream place."
We have no power in the outer world, the male voice said. The outer world fears us.
"So?"
If we let you out, the female voice said, they will know that we have the power to create things in their world.
"You did it before, when you made us. Just do it again."
No, the male said. Then was chaos, in their world as well as hours. Now, it would be noticed, there as well as here. It must not be.
Anger flared up within her. She hadn't come all the way here to be denied!
"It's already known!" she yelled at them. "The du Lac woman figured it out, and she's still out there! It doesn't matter if you let us out or not! They already know!"
Guesses, the female said. Surmise. Conjecture. Hypothesis. Not knowledge. Not fact.
"You have to," Orphea said. "You made us. Even if we never knew it, we spied for you our entire lives. You owe us, and this is how I demand you repay us. Recreate us both and let us out again."
No, the male voice said, and there was a terrible finality in the sound of it.
Her anger mixed with frustration. This was not acceptable. This could not be. This was not how it was going to end. She felt tears gathering in her eyes, tears of fury rather than sadness. Without really planning to or thinking about it, she let the fury and frustration and sadness and loss and loneliness flow in the direction that she had always sooner or later let all her emotions flow.
She began to sing.
The huge figures in front of her weren't human. She could get no sense of them, not get into their heads and find out what made them tick. So instead of singing directly to them, she sang her entire life. Every feeling she'd ever had, every emotion she'd ever felt, every story she'd ever heard, every tale she'd ever told, she sang. She sang of starving winters, and sweltering summers. She sang of fear, and hope. She sang of communion, and loneliness. She sang of human greatness, and human cruelty.
But most of all she sang of love.
She sang of going to bed early in the morning, and looking at how the rays of the rising sun painted her beloved's face dark and gold.
She sang of walking through the winter streets of Prague, holding her beloved's hand.
She sang of being angry and afraid, and feeling her beloved's arms rach around her waist and hug her.
All the moments she'd lived at Iruwa's side, she sang. All the moments they'd had together, the good and the bad and the wonderful, she let colour her voice. She sang her loss and loneliness. She sang her quest to get her beloved back, and her refusal to accept that she be denied her return.
Loud and clear, her voice rang over the landscape far below, carried with preternatural clarity through the virtual air. She looked down while she sang, and she could see how the small dots of people down there stopped playing and looked towards the sky.
She sang everything that was in her heart, until it was empty and exhausted. Then, and only then, did she fall silent.
We have changed our mind, the male voice said.
We will give you what you ask, the female added. But we require a promise that you not tell the world what you have seen in here.
The emptiness within her flooded with joy, and she marveled at the insane speed with which her mood could change.
"Sure," she said. "I promise. No problem."
We require some proof of your obedience, the male said.
Walk out of here, and never once look back, the female said. Your beloved will follow behind you. If you do as we ask, you will both be recreated. If you do not, only you will be.
Orphea was a hair's breadth from commenting on the stupidity of this, on the capriciousness and uselessness of such a demand. But she held her silence. Better not to insult them. They still might change their minds. Mind. Whatever.
"I promise," she said again.
Good, the female said. Leave now.
Orphea did as she asked.

Orphea walked all the way down the bridge and the hill to the lawn. On the way there she wondered where she would go after that, and when Iruwa would start following her. If maybe she already had. If the giants had made her spring into being on the platform as Orphea left it, or if she was already somewhere down on the lawn and would fall in behind her as she walked by.
As she walked down the glass bridge, she tried to hear if there were steps following her. She didn't hear anything, but that just made her wonder if there really wasn't anything to hear or if her hearing wasn't good enough.
As she walked down the hill, she tried again, with the same result.
Once she'd come far enough down the hill that she could no longer tell it from the flat lawn, she decided to just keep walking straight ahead. It seemed no better or worse than any other direction, and it minimized the risk that she look behind her. She passed by the people in white, still at a fair distance, and now unlike before they all stopped and looked at her when she passed. She wondered why that was, and decided that they must somehow know that she was the one how had spoken to their gods and sung to them all. If they looked at her in admiration, fear or pity she couldn't make up her mind about. Looking at them offered no clues, and anyway she didn't want to do that for too long. Just in case she'd keep looking for so long that she'd accidentally look behind as she walked past.
It came as no surprise when everything suddenly became dark, between one step and the next. She stretched her hand out and found the wall about where she expected. She kept it there, fingers barely dragging along the rough stone, and walked on.
There still weren't any steps behind her.
She started wondering if the giants had lied to her. If they'd said what they said just to make her leave. But that seemed nonsensical, it was their world, if she bothered them they could simply make her not exist any more. If they had scruples about killing, which she strongly doubted, they could just freeze her mind and not turn it back on again for a million years or so. In short, they had no need to lie to her.
Or so she tried to convince herself.
Right about when she expected it to, light appeared in the distance. She smiled knowingly, and walked a little faster. Everything seemed much less strange and scary, now that she was returning to places she already knew. She wasn't heading into the unknown any longer, she was coming back out again, approaching the normal world with her mission accomplished. What was not to be happy about?
But she wasn't out yet. Something might still go wrong. They might betray her. She might make a mistake.
She turned the corner into Charon's cavern, expecting to find him there and get to talk to him about her meeting with the Nanoclysm gods. But he wasn't there. The flaming holes in the walls were there, and the wide black river, and the shallow boat pulled up on the riverbank. Even the pole was there, lying across the boat. But there was no Charon.
Disappointed, she pushed the boat into the water and stepped into it. She took the pole and was just about to start pushing her way across to the other side when she thought of Iruwa. If she was following her, how would she make it across? If she wasn't, how long should Orphea wait before she proceeded?
She sat down and placed the pole across her lap. The giants hadn't told her to hurry on her way out, so she there was no reason for her not to wait. Being bored for a little while, or even a long while, would be far better than leaving Iruwa behind in this place.
When someone stepped into the boat, making it rock and wobble, Orphea started so badly that she almost tipped it over. It was only with an extreme effort of will that she avoided looking behind her to see who it was.
"Iruwa? Love?" she asked. "Is that you?"
Her heart pounded in her chest while she waited for a reply. Her palms became sweaty, and she found it hard to breathe. She couldn't remember ever being this nervous. Her ears strained to hear every sound that might be made. She heard slight movements, cloth rustling against cloth. But no voice. No reply.
"Please talk to me, my love," she said. "Just let me hear your voice."
The flames on the walls crackled. The water played against the rocky riverbanks.
"I've missed you so," Orphea said. "I just couldn't live without you. I think I went mad, for a time."
She could hear breathing.
Orphea's heart sank a little. "I guess they demanded that you be silent," she said. "Or my task would be too easy. That's all right. I'll just move on, so we get out of here soon."
She lifted the pole and started pushing the boat across the water. It was heavy, far heavier than she had expected. She guessed it had something to do with the water, since the boat itself didn't lean in any particular direction, as it would it something in it had been much heavier than the rest. Slowly, she moved the boat along, and after a time that felt much longer than her crossing with Charon had it reached the other riverbank. She stepped out of it and, taking great care not to look back, she pulled it as far up the bank as her muscles allowed. She stood there for a few moments, unsure what to do, before she started walking again.
What else was there she could do? She considered reaching back with her hand, trying for some contact with her love. But something told her that they giants would consider that cheating, and that they would frown upon it in the strongest possible way.
"I'll try not to walk too fast," she said. "I know I always walk too fast for you. I always have. Do you remember that time on Crete? I'd been singing at some obscenely expensive holiday resort, and we decided to walk back to Heraklion. I bought a tent, and you bought a sleeping bag large enough for the two of us. Then we walked. I didn't notice that you had to struggle to keep up with me, and you were too polite to tell me. Or maybe you were just stubborn. When night fell and we had pitched the tent, you were so exhausted that you couldn't stand and were nearly crying. And I were so sorry for being an asshole that I hardly knew what to do with myself. I cooked, and I brought you everything you wanted and a lot of things I just thought that you might possibly want. I helped you get into the sleeping bag, and I massaged your legs until you fell asleep."
She thought she heard a sound somewhere in between a laugh and a sob. But she wasn't sure. At least she could clearly hear steps behind her now. She started walking, more slowly than she used to. She kept trying as hard as she could to hear what went on behind her, to tell if the breaths she could sometimes hear belonged to her Iruwa or not.
The light from the river cavern faded, and she walked into darkness.
"You always liked the dark," Orphea said. "Much more than I ever did. I never could figure out why. Sometimes, I'd wake up late at night in the villa in Tuscany and you'd not be there in bed with me. I'd get up, wrap a robe around me and walk out into the living room. I'd be about to turn on the lights, and out of the darkness you'd tell me not to. You'd be sitting there, in the armchair by the glass wall, looking out at the valley. I'd go and sit on the floor next to you, rest my head on your thigh and ask what you were looking at. You'd say that you were watching the darkness play among the vines, and I'd never understand what you meant."
To her own surprise, she discovered that she had tears running freely down her face. She had no idea when she'd started crying, and she couldn't stop.
"I love you so," she said. "Whatever happens, I want you to know that. I love you more than life."
The darkness was fading, she noticed. Rather than a massive black, it was more like a massive dark grey. She kept walking, and the darkness kept fading until she could see that she was walking into the bowl-shaped valley of the sensory bushes. Except that it now had a clear blue sky, with normal clouds moving at normal speed across it. Stopping for a moment, she gingerly touched a bush. It felt like it looked it should feel, solid and a little colder than her skin. Relieved, she started walking again. She wanted to walk fast, but restrained herself. To force herself to slow down, she made an effort to find the easiest way between the bushes. They were walking downhill on gravel, and it was easy to slip, so wise choice of path seemed like a good idea.
Unlike when she walked through the bowl-shaped valley before, it didn't look like she was always at the bottom of it now. They'd come out high up on one side of it, they crossed the bottom and continued up the other side.
When they were almost at the top, she started hearing waves.
"Do you hear that?" she exclaimed. "It's the sea! We're almost out of here!"
She tried to hurry ahead, but found that she couldn't. Suddenly she felt weird. There was a crawling, prickling feeling inside her, starting at her bones and slowly proceeding outward towards her skin. Fear exploded in her. Something was wrong! They had tricked her!
Orphea stumbled a few more steps, onto the top of the rise they'd been climbing. On the other side of it, she saw a rocky slope leading down to a gravel-covered beach and then the sea. Her arms and legs felt weak, and she fell to her knees.
"Iruwa!" she cried. "Are you there, love? Is it you?"
She heard a sob behind her, and she didn't recognize the voice. It sounded hoarse and raw, far from the gentle calm of her beloved's voice. The fear she felt rose into panic. Forcing her sluggish and traitorous muscles to obey her, she turned around and looked.
The first thing she saw was Iruwa's face and upper body sticking out of a huge lump of opalescent Nanoclysm material. Her skin looked raw and patchy, and rifts and tears in it closed up and healed with preternatural speed as Orphea watched.
For a few moments, their eyes met. For an eternal moment, she knew that there had been no trickery. No betrayal. No deceit.
Only her own mistake.
The wounds in Iruwa's skin stopped healing. Her body stopped moving out of the opalescence. All over her skin, the spidery grey fuzz of the omniphages suddenly appeared, and in a slow soundless explosion Iruwa turned into a reddish mass of spiderwebs and then disappeared.
Orphea rose on wobbly legs and ran back to the opalescent lump. She beat at it with her hands, screaming denials at the top of her lungs and tearing her voice raw. She yelled at it that they had been outside, that she'd kept her promise, that she hadn't failed, that it should give her her Iruwa back. That it must give her her Iruwa back.
It didn't help. There was no reaction. Beating at the lump was as effective as beating on a rock.
Her fury drained and left despair behind. She sank to her knees, and begged the thing to take her in again. That she'd come willingly, that she'd do whatever they wanted her to, just as long as they'd let her be with Iruwa.
But pleading with it worked no better than hitting it had.
In a final, desperate attempt at getting a reaction, she beat her head against it and just screamed wordlessly. There was no thought behind it, no plan, just utter and complete desperation.
After the sixth or seventh time, she remembered no more.

Saturday, 4 June 2067

Alexandra came climbing back up the ladder from the yacht.
"The dinghy is gone," she said after she was safely back on the deck of the platform. Aphrodite, Johann, Sebastian, Maria and Clifford were waiting for her there. Christos came climbing just behind her.
"The navigation system's log shows that it moved to the nearest point on the English coast from here. Then it was still for a little while, and after that its transponder stopped working."
"How long ago?" Aphrodite said.
"Twenty-six hours and change," Alexandra said. "That was some heavy-duty song she hit us with."
"Is there any way we can tell if she's still alive?" Christos asked.
Aphrodite looked questioningly at Clifford.
He shook his head. "No," he said. "There's a constant haze or fog over the islands that prevents optical observation, and the main Nanoclysm mass has a composition that's pretty close to animal tissue, which makes more sophisticated methods nearly useless. She will have been dissolved by the nanomachines within minutes anyway."
"And going there to have a look wouldn't be a good idea, I think," Aphrodite said. "So we're basically out of luck."
"Unless she comes back," Sebastian said.
"Nobody comes back from the Nanoclysm," Clifford said. "Ever."
"If Maria here is right," Sebastian said with a nod towards her, "Orphea and Iruwa came out of it once. And they're unlike any other humans. So if anyone would return from there, it might be one of them."
"Might be," Johann said. "They always were a bit larger than life."
"So what do we do?" Alexandra asked. "Wait for them here?"
"No, you don't," Clifford said. "I overstepped my authority already by letting uncleared civilians aboard in the first place. The longer you stay, the greater the risk that all of us get our asses kicked for it."
"I don't have any problems with waiting elsewhere," Maria said. "And if Orphea really manages to come back out of there, it doesn't matter that much where you wait for her, does it?"
"No," Aphrodite said. "I guess it doesn't."
"We still have almost three months left on the yacht lease," Christos said. "Anybody feel like a leisurely cruise to Marseilles?"
"What happens money-wise?" Johann asked. "With the boss lady not around, I mean."
"Most things will keep going as usual," Sebastian said. "I've got her Power of Attorney for much of the rest. For what little that leaves out, we'll have to wait. Eventually either a court proclaims her deceased or she comes back."
"She's got no heirs," Alexandra said. "She said something once about her and Iruwa being mutual beneficiaries, but they're both gone."
"Another one for the courts," Sebastian said.
"You don't know?" Christos said. "I thought you handled all her business and legal stuff."
"If she told me about her will she asked me to keep my mouth shut about it," Sebastian said.
"So who's coming with us to Marseilles?" Aphrodite asked. "There's plenty of room for all of us in the yacht, and the house in Marseilles is just huge."
"I'm in," Maria said. "I have a book to write, and I may as well do it there."
"I think we should all go," Sebastian said. "The French police will want to ask us questions."
"Then they can call me or come here," Clifford said. "I'm certainly not leaving my post."
"Of course," Sebastian said. "I meant the rest of us, who were more directly involved with Orphea."
"Well, then," Aphrodite said. "Let's go. Anyone who's coming, get aboard."
She started climbing down the ladder to the yacht. One by one, the others climbed after her, leaving Clifford standing alone on the platform deck. When they were all out of sight, he walked over the deck's side railing and leaned on it. The wind had turned, and blowed from the late England, carrying more warmth and many strange smells. Today, it smelled slightly of roses and newly cut grass.
He stood there, looking, while the yacht cast loose from its mooring and started moving. When it was clear of all the struts and wires that stabilized the platform, it accelerated strongly and sped away south. He kept looking at it until it was no more than a dark speck at the horizon, and then not even that. Then, and only then, did her go indoors to write his report on the last day's events. He hadn't made up his mind yet if it would be a truthful one or not.
At the moment, he was thinking not.

Slowly, Orphea returned to consciousness. She was still naked, and very cold. The ground she was lying on was cold and hard, and there was someone nearby alternately crying heartbreakingly and laughing insanely.
After a while she realized that it was she who cried and laughed, and tried to stop.
After another while, she succeeded.
She opened her eyes and sat up. She was on a beach, but a sandier and less rocky on than the one where she'd blacked out. She looked around, and there was plenty of grass, bushes and low trees.
So she wasn't on the shores of England and more.
The memory of what had happened on those shores suddenly returned, and hit her like a ton of bricks.
"NO!" she screamed. "You bastards!"
She closed her fists hard enough to make her nails draw blood from her palms, and beat the sand with them.
"You could at least have killed me, you fucks!" she screamed. "Would that have been so fucking hard?!"
Well, if the Nanoclysm gods hadn't done it, she'd simply have to do it herself. She got up on her feet and looked around for something sharp. It was a beach, there should at least be a bottle or something.
She walked along the beach for a while, alternately sobbing or laughing, until she found an old tin can. She carefully picked it up, as if it was the most precious thing in the world.
"Hello, death," she said. "Come to mama."
With an effort she wouldn't have thought herself capable of, she tore the side of it open so she got a sharp, jagged edge. Without the slightest hesitation, she put it to her wrist, pushed hard and cut deeply into her flesh. She didn't stop pushing until it felt the metal grind against her bones, and then she started dragging it up towards her elbow. The pain as her flesh tore was excruciating, but she welcomed it as an old friend. Pain meant damage, damage meant eventual death, and death meant release. Blood pumped out from the wound, ran down her arm and hand to fall on and be absorbed by the beach's sand.
Only it didn't flow as heavy as it ought to. Confused, she stopped cutting and looked at the wound she'd caused herself.
It was closing. Fast. While she looked, the gap in her skin healed itself. It didn't even leave a scar behind.
"No!" she screamed again. "You fucks!"
She put the can to her throat, and with a desperate effort she tore her windpipe open. The pain was beyond understanding. It blocked out all other senses, turning the world for a few moments into a solid feeling of white-hot agony. She felt blood bubble and froth as it ran down her lungs, and she felt rivulets of it make their way down her chest.
She felt an itching sensation as her throat closed up, and she could breathe again. A few seconds later, the blood stopped flowing.
She wondered if they'd meant it as a gift or as a curse, or if it was just that they wanted to do as good a job as they could. Or that, once it was out that Orphea wasn't a normal human, there was no longer any need to pretend. She made a loud guffawing sound, and not even she herself could tell if it was a laugh or a sob. She was alone, and cursed to live. She started walking, not caring where she went, as long as it was away from the hateful beach.
She walked for a long time. It had been light when she woke up, and while she walked it first became dark and then light again. In spite of this, she never got tired or hungry. She did get thirsty, and stopped to drink from the dirtiest and dankest ditch she could find. It seemed unlikely that disease could harm her when steel couldn't, but it was worth a try. She didn't bother to wash the blood from her chest, although some of it fell off by itself when it dried.
When it was beginning to get dark again, she heard voices approaching. Not caring about much at all, she kept walking, and soon enough she could see their source. It was two young women, laughing and holding hands. Orphea stopped when she saw them. They kept talking and laughing, until one of them looked away from the other and spotted the naked and bloody Orphea. She took a step backwards at first, and looked scared. She pulled at her friend's -- or maybe they were lovers, Orphea couldn't tell -- arm and pointed. The friend looked up and started as well. After the first shock abated, they seemed to decide that Orphea didn't look dangerous, and ran up to her.
"Are you hurt?" one of them asked, in french.
"What happened to you?" the other asked.
She looked at them. This close, she could see that they were in love. This close, she could see the cracks and weak spots in their minds. This close, she could see exactly how she needed to sing in order to strip their happiness and sanity away, leaving nothing behind but the emptiness and pain that Orphea was doomed to live with.
"What happened?" Orphea said. "I'll tell you what happened."
Her face twisting into a cruel grin, she began to sing.