Perfect State

  “I . . . What are you doing?”

  “This is what we’re here for, isn’t it?” she asked, pulling her arm out of one of the dress’s shoulder straps. “So the Wode will damn well leave us alone? Propagate the species, so the wheel can go around and around.”

  “Here, in the rain?”

  “Sure. It doesn’t have to be pretty; it just has to happen. We have sex in this little digital box, and the Wode will harvest our genes and splice together a new child. I’ll let you pick the kid’s initial trope. I’d probably end up choosing something downright horrible for them, just to be interesting.”

  The dress came down around her bust, and she wore nothing underneath. She caught a glimpse of my surprised face as she reached back to pull the zipper down farther; it was stuck in the middle of her back. “What? Is female nudity new to you?”

  “New? I had a harem at one point, Sophie.”

  “How unexpected,” she said. “Men.” Her cheeks grew flush, though. “Misogynistic, horrible, brutish.”

  “You’re thinking about how your youthful feminist self would react to you sleeping with a man who kept a harem.”

  “Of course I am,” she said. “So long as I’m horrified by what I’m doing, I must be on the right track. Can you help me with this damn zipper? The rain . . .”

  I walked over to help. I felt hot, despite the rain. I brushed my hand on her bare shoulder as I took the zipper. My heat and hers, mingling.

  Lords, I realized. I haven’t wanted a woman this badly in years. Decades.

  “I wish we could do something about this rain,” she said. “It is going to get distracting.”

  “Back in my State, I’m very close to being able to control the weather. I’ll be all-powerful, once I’ve figured that out.”

  “They’ll find something else for you to hunt,” she said. “They always do. It—”

  The entire city shook.

  I froze, the zipper worked most of the way down Sophie’s back. The city thumped again. The rain started falling more strongly for a moment, in a sudden unnatural way, as if someone had turned a shower on. It left the two of us soaked.

  A third thump came, softer than the others. “That’s not natural,” Sophie said, turning, half naked, water streaming down her body. “What . . .”

  Something loomed out beyond the darkened city skyline. Eyes burned red in a head as tall as the buildings. It lumbered through the darkness, blockish, skin reflecting the occasional ripple of lightning in the clouds above.

  I groaned. “You remember I mentioned my nemesis?”

  “Yeah. You still owe me half a story about that, I believe.”

  “Well, he’s been promising me a new robot,” I said, hurrying along the rooftop toward the place closest to the machine. It was still distant, but pushed its way between buildings, walking directly toward us. Each step thumped.

  “Wow,” Sophie said, joining me, holding her dress from completely falling off. “I don’t think people are supposed to be able to invade Communal States.” She was still mostly nude. I found the sight of her wet in the rain, and the death machine in the other direction, strangely appealing in a similar sort of way.

  I feel young again, I realized. Like before the unification.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I . . .”

  “Breasts later, giant robot now. This nemesis of yours, he’s good at hacking?”

  I forced myself to look up at her face. “Too good.”

  “Yeah,” she said, pulling up her dress, now soaked through. “If he can hack a Communal State . . . Well, we’ve got two choices. We can either dodge him long enough for the Wode to come down on him for flagrant violation of borders, or we can just make our way to a different Communal State and get to business there. I’m inclined toward the latter.”

  “No,” I said, listening to the thumps. Screaming had begun on the streets. “People are dying. I’m not going to leave that thing here and count on the Wode to stop it.”

  “Really. You’re going to take on that? How?”

  “I’ll find a way,” I said, striding toward the steps.

  “You fantasy men are such boy scouts,” she said, trailing after me. “Wait, let me get this damn dress on. Being Liveborn won’t keep me from being arrested for indecency in this State.”

  I waited by the stairs, shifting from one foot to the other as she pulled the dress the rest of the way up. Getting down from this building was going to be slow. “I should have seen this coming,” I said as she entered the stairwell. “I lost contact with my chancellor earlier. I’ll bet Melhi cut him off somehow.”

  We started down the stairwell. I didn’t trust that box that was suspended from wires, not with Melhi hacking the State.

  “Cut off your mental links, eh,” she said. “Dangerous. That should have warned you.”

  “I was distracted.”

  “So let’s go back to your State,” she said. “I could probably stomach the singing trees and the elves long enough to get laid.”

  “I’m not leaving,” I said, still running down the steps. “He’ll tear the city apart to find me.”

  “Why? What on earth did you do to him?”

  I looked back at her. “I’m not sure.”

  “What?”

  “Come on. I’ll explain what I know as we walk down the steps. Remember how I’d visited that Border State? Well, I went into the village to meet him. . . .”

  I went into the village to meet him, and a steel man walked from one of the huts.

  I’d created golems from the bones of the dead before, animating them with power from the Aurora. Metal, however, had proven useless as a material for me. So I was very interested as this being strode out into the sunlight. The natives leveled spears at it nervously. Chief Let-mere had warned me that the first time this creature had come to the valley, it had killed dozens of people from another village before retreating.

  It had no eyes or mouth, just a flat burnished face of bronze, almost like a mask. The rest of it was human shaped, but made of pure silvery steel.

  It turned an eyeless gaze upon me. “Ah,” it said. The voice was a metallic buzz, distinctly inhuman. “You are the one I am to fight for this place¸ then?”

  “Who are you?” I asked, motioning for Shale to stand down. The bodyguard had drawn his weapon and stepped forward. “You are a being of metal?”

  “I am Liveborn like you,” Melhi said, looking me up and down. “This is merely one of the forms I use. You are from a Fantasy State? Do they really expect this to be a challenge? My robotic legions would barely require a few hours to annihilate the—”

  I turned and started walking away.

  I can’t say for certain what made me do it, but more and more, I think it was the sheer convenience of it all. A perfect location for a war, where my State wouldn’t be in danger? A place with ideal tactical positions spelled out for me? Resources to help whoever managed to seize the State first, but three—instead of two—Liveborn involved, to encourage alliances?

  The fakeness of it all was like a slap to my face. There we were—two absolute lords of entire worlds—and we’d been maneuvered to stand facing one another so we could mouth off? Like warriors boasting of past accomplishments to impress a tavern wench?

  In that brief moment, my excitement for sparring another of my kind vanished, though it would return as Melhi later made attempts to invade my State. We’d go on to battle in other Border States, and I must admit I found those contests interesting.

  But that day, I finally saw how things really were. This was an arena, and we were a pair of dogs thrown in to see which would blood the other first. I wanted nothing to do with it.

  So I walked away.

  “What is this?” Chief Let-mere asked me as I passed.

  “You’ll have to make an alliance with the metal being, chief,” I said, waving my hand. “I’m not interested.”

  “But—”

  “Afraid, little emperor?” the metal be
ing called after me.

  “Yes,” I said, turning back, though it wasn’t him I was afraid of. It was the frailty of my ego, perhaps. I could pretend, I had to pretend, so long as I was in my own State. Traveling to another, particularly one as contrived as this . . . no, that I could not do. Not yet.

  “It’s yours,” I said. “Unless the third Liveborn has already been alerted. You can fight them. Dance for the Wode. Be their little puppet. Not me.”

  “I’m no puppet!” the robotic shell shouted. “Hear me, fantasy man? I am no puppet!”

  “I’m pretty sure,” I said, puffing as I descended to the next landing, “that he was offended I wouldn’t fight him. I let him have the Border State, and he just pillaged it—stole their resources, murdered most of the people there. I had to reopen my side and send aid to recover the remaining natives.

  “About ten years later, he attacked another Border State near me, and that time my conscience wouldn’t let me ignore him. We’ve been sparring off and on ever since. Twenty years now, thirty since our first meeting. Lately he’s even started to invade my State, though his robots never work properly there.”

  “Huh,” Sophie said. We were nearly to the bottom of the stairs. “You realize that fighting him here is madness.”

  I said nothing.

  “His robots will work in this State,” she said, voice echoing in the stairwell. “Maltese has wristwatch phones and things that the real world didn’t have during the equivalent era. Those science fiction seeds will be something your friend can expand upon, fool the program into letting his machines function. I’d bet anything that that machine will be dangerous, truly dangerous. The Wode’s fail-safes won’t apply to it.”

  I nodded, reaching the third floor. Only a little ways to go.

  “So tell me why we’re still planning to fight?” Sophie demanded from just behind. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Look,” I said, spinning on her. “I’m doing this because I have to know, all right? If what we’ve been talking about is true, and if everything before now has been done with a safety net set up . . . then I don’t know, can’t know, who I am. Facing another Liveborn here is a way that I can.”

  She paused in the stairwell, water pooling on the step at her feet. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I sure as hell am. Wait here. I’ll lead him someplace less populated.”

  “Wait here?” she asked, following me as I turned back down the steps. “Wait here? I’m not one of your soft-headed fantasy maidens with the chain mail undies, Mr. Emperor. I’ve ruled a world too, I’ll have you know, and I didn’t need absolute dictatorial power to do it. I—”

  “Fine. Can you fight?”

  “Not well.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “Hack.”

  That would be useful. “What can you do?”

  “I can make guns work here. Obviously.”

  “We need something more,” I said. “Can you make my magic function?”

  “That’s a big-time hack, kiddo,” she said. “This is a very non-magical State. Like I said, even the robot is far more natural than magic would be.”

  “Yes, but can you do it?”

  “I can try, I suppose. Let’s get to where the robot first entered the State.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “It shouldn’t,” she said, rounding a banister behind me, our shoes snapping on the uncovered stone. “Technically, this is all code, and there’s no such thing as proximity. But the nature of the system is such that if we’re close to the entry point, we’re ‘close’ to where your friend broke through the State’s defenses. The fabric will be weak there, and odds are that he didn’t cover his tracks very well. Sloppy coding will make it easier for me to piggyback a few other hacks.”

  “Okay.”

  “I might as well be speaking to a caveman, eh?”

  “Fantastical does not mean primitive.”

  “Uh-huh. And have you ever actually seen a computer?”

  I could imagine them. Glowing light, energy—like lightning—flashing as it gave power to the machine.

  “I’ll keep this simple,” she said. “If I can get your magic to work, it will have to happen where the robot broke in. Then you can summon your talking horse or whatever and fly over to blast that overcompensatory machine with your magical rainbows.”

  We finally reached the ground floor, and I pushed out onto the rain-slicked street. Sophie followed. I started jogging toward the robot, but she dashed to the side, heading to one of the self-driving vehicles. There were a lot of them parked and unoccupied there.

  Feeling foolish, I dashed back after her. We got in, and she made the thing growl. It trembled like an animal coming awake.

  “So it is alive,” I said.

  “Sure, just keep thinking that, kiddo,” she said, shaking some of the rain from her hair. She made the vehicle move. Quickly.

  I yelled and hung on to whatever handholds I could. We tore down the street, far faster than a horse could have galloped. But we also had—in my opinion—far less control. “Things in these States are so uncivilized!”

  “Uncivilized?” she shouted.

  “The handgun that destroyed the chain, now this. There’s no elegance, just brute force. Watch out for those people! Lords!”

  She pushed us around a corner at a ridiculous speed. A good horse would never have let us get this far out of control, and my flying chariots were wonderfully precise. We skirted to the side of the robot, which was crunching its way through the city, still moving toward the building where we’d been dining. It didn’t see us passing.

  He can’t track me directly, I thought. Something must have tipped him off to where I was.

  Well, with the dinner reservation—and my face on the approved list to get in—I probably hadn’t been difficult to track. I pulled the handgun from its pocket inside my coat. “Can you make this work?”

  “I don’t know that I want to be anywhere near you firing one of those,” she said.

  “I’m not going to point it at your head, Sophie,” I said dryly. “Make it work.”

  She reached over, touching it with her finger. I had a chance to regret distracting her as we almost plowed through a group of people fleeing the robot, but she turned the vehicle just in time.

  “Done,” she said, removing her finger. “It is reloaded and fires real bullets now. A simple hack.”

  “Yeah, well, someone noticed anyway,” I said.

  The robot had turned its massive, red-eyed head our direction. This was by far the largest one Melhi had ever sent after me.

  “Damn,” she said. “Your friend is probably monitoring this State for irregularities. Anything I do will alert him.”

  I pushed my hand against the glass window on my side of the metal carriage. “Can I . . .”

  “Lever on the door,” she said. “Turn it.”

  The glass moved down as I turned the lever. Ingenious. I leaned out and pointed the handgun toward the robot, then took three shots in quick succession, my mental boosts kicking in on the first, slowing time for me.

  Sure enough, the creature started to trudge after us, its eyes tracking our movements. Firing my weapon let it locate me; the weapons weren’t supposed to fire real bullets in this State, so shooting made a mark on the State’s fabric.

  “What was that for?” Sophie demanded.

  “I want it following us.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Because if it’s coming back this way, it’s moving through the region it already passed, doing less damage,” I said. “Besides, I’ll need it close if I’m going to defeat it.”

  I fired a few more times, making certain the robot was going to keep following. Indeed, it picked up its pace. I gulped, ducking back into the vehicle. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this . . . but do these vehicles go any faster?”

  They did, apparently. Sophie grinned. I held on for dear life.

  “T
here,” Sophie said.

  Ahead of us—hanging about ten feet above the road and surrounded by city debris—was a shimmering to the air, a mother-of-pearl incandescence that obviously didn’t fit. It reminded me of the Grand Aurora, though it was shaped like a very large version of the portal I’d come through to get here.

  Sophie stopped the vehicle. Or, well, she stopped driving it—but the vehicle didn’t totally stop. It slid across the ground sideways and slammed into a building. The jerking halt almost made me throw up.

  “You are insane,” I said.

  “I thought we’d established that,” she replied, crawling woozily from the metal carriage, but still grinning.

  I followed her out on shaking feet. The robot was approaching faster than I’d anticipated, and unfortunately this area wasn’t evacuating as quickly as I’d hoped. There were families here, cowering in the wreckage of buildings, despite the rain and the dangers. A weeping girl, no more than four, asked her mother again and again why the ground was shaking.

  They have to live in a world that knows only darkness, I thought. So that Liveborn can have a place to come play.

  I stumbled away from them, following Sophie toward the rift.

  “Give me your hand,” she said as we reached the shimmering.

  I gave it to her, and she held on tightly as she went down on one knee, eyes closed.

  I felt a tingling.

  “I can’t change your code directly,” she said. “I don’t dare.”

  “I have code?”

  “Worried? I thought you felt Simulated Entities were equal to Liveborn.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said Machineborn were people, and that killing them was wrong. Liveborn are absolutely more important.”

  “Nice you have your own place in things straight.”

  “Well, I am a God-Emperor. Why did you say I have code?”

  “Relax. We all have code notations around our core selves; like footnotes added to a textbook by someone studying for exams.”

  “What’s a textbook?” I said. Then, after a moment, “What’s an exam?”

  “Don’t distract me. Hmm . . . yes. I can’t rewrite your magic without risking frying your mind entirely.”