Fantastic Metropolis

LB: You sound so disapproving. What the hell’s the difference, if that’s how I manage to keep the lid on? Look, in business we all speak of game-plans, don’t we? What kind of reality do we attribute to “reality” when that’s the leading metaphor we model it with?

DR. PROSS: Your point is well taken, Lester. We can only approach reality through some sort of model. But there is a difference between the conscious use of a metaphor—“all the world’s a stage,” for example—and its complete acceptance on the literal plane. Your reduction of what you do to a “game” can have dangerous consequences if you take your metaphor too literally.

Pross was closing in on him. How much of the office could Pross take in holographically from the edge of the 3V cabinet? Could he scan that wall, the bins? The bastard was a spy, he was sure. The corporate cyberspy supreme! What was it Pross had said?... That it shouldn’t be taking this long, this process of orientation to his new Personal Past? That his “resistance” to full psychoprosthesis was caused by certain residual organic-memory complexes? He was exactly right. On target, the old wall-eyed sonuvabitch! And to hasten the erosion of those protoplasmic minskies, they were stepping up the paperwork, feeding him these tekdecks of unnecessary documents that could be assimilated only if he doubled his normal Pill dosage.

Lester sat straight up in his chair, resisting with all his power of will the plunge through dark waters that landed him in one or another of those “residual organic-memory complexes” that confirmed him in his true identity. It was splendid to know that he still could know who he was, but the danger of such knowledge lay in its power to distract him from coolly playing the Game. To think straight about his future “moves,” he had to remain in command of all his intellectual resources as head of Memini, the role he had to succeed in if he were ever to go on to college. He knew that most of his teachers and administrators hated him, so it was logical that they had loaded the dice of the Memini-game against him, that they had turned his refusal to help DUSA [Democratic Union of Southeast Asia] into an international crisis designed to cause him to fail—since they would try to turn any action he took against him.

Who was it used to say to him, “Don’t worry, if you don’t graduate, it won’t be the end of the world”? Mophead, no doubt, his old Chemistry prof—one of those snag-brained ex-teachers of his who had been planted, barely disguised, on the Memini Executive Council. Well, if they were bent on having him fail, then he would “take out” everything with him. If they’d tipped the scales against him, it would give him a delicious satisfaction to use his power as head of Memini to destroy the entire “world.”

Reading his thumb, his desk drawer slid open. He glanced at the geological maps and the plain-paper sheets he had covered with detailed calculations. Nothing had been disturbed. He had been selective in his studies lately, working hard at geophysics—to determine how much focussed solar power would be needed, and in what range of frequencies it would have to be tuned, to crack the Antarctic ice sheet and drown the “world” in virtual tidal revenge that he wished he could take out directly on his teachers. Failing that, he could at least screw up Meminet, that Frankenstein Monster of theirs that the whole stinking gang of them were using as a means to screw him.

In fact, he thought, in only two more days he should have finished programming the entire sequence of events that would climax in the Grand Gurgle, a scenario that he would be able to unleash from his private pocket computer whose codes not Meminet, not even his personal secretary, could decipher. The whole vast complex of ISEC solar arrays was now almost completely in place above the Southern ice sheet, poised, ready to go. Hundreds of billions of virtual BTUs to be narrowcast down upon Antarctica. Within forty-eight hours of his order, the catastrophic collapse of West Antarctica would begin. Four hundred thousand cubic kilometers of ice translate into a global sea-level rise of over three feet. The disintegration of the Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves would initiate the irreversible deglaciation of the entire zone, 3.4 million km3 of the cold stuff, initially raising all sea-levels by at least twenty feet. And then into the ocean would pour the pent-up fury of East Antarctica, twenty-six million cubic Ks of ice that would eventually raise the world’s oceans by another two hundred feet!

This, so far, he had managed to put in place without arousing any concrete suspicions in Meminet. He was going to fry Meminet’s brains! Given Meminet’s very own game-logic, any act that destroyed civilization must, at the very least, short-circuit Meminet itself.

Memini will be available in hardcover from Prime Books in November 2003.