RUNTIME ZERO: Streaming The New Infinity (Dark Math Chronicles) Read online

  They had been cooped up in here for days, searching for a way to spark the creative fire that might burn down the wall between SubVersa and the original world and, in the process, shed some light on the forces that had shaped them. They were avatars, an artist and his muse, but more than that, they were works of art themselves, and they were about to embark on a mission that had begun long ago in a place called Manhattan, a legendary citadel that had forged their own maker. Though they didn’t know it yet, the first inklings of that mission were beginning to trickle in on the daydream channel.

  Juliette Q45 had arrived a few weeks earlier; a noob, a newborn avatar, a code warrior princess sprung from the mind of her maker like Athena leaping from the head of Zeus, fully intact and ready for action. In addition to possessing all the magical powers of a muse, she could take out a rogue avi with a samurai sword if she had to, but there were better ways to disarm it—a deadly embrace, for instance; a different kind of action and a much quicker, much sweeter way to go.

  Chrome, on the other hand, was a stone worn smooth from years of slipstreaming the grid; he was a far cry from the guy who first stepped out of the mist in Sandbox 12 stamped with the prefab look shared by all avatars in those days, a new recruit in an army of mannequins. As tech aesthetics improved, he was incrementally upgraded, eventually morphing into a new breed of street surfer. Maori tattoos (“Polynesian pin-striping”) under a satin cowboy shirt adorned with hand-painted pinup girls (“my satin dolls”), a pair of black string jeans over boots of hand-tooled leather and, his crowning glory, a gleaming halo of metal hair that captured all the colors of the rainbow, including those only his dog Proto could see.

  They lived in a world that was about as close as one could get to the afterlife while still breathing. It was the most expansive, the most malleable, and the most reliable of them all; a creative fantasyland where the liquid self could be endlessly reinvented, where an artist could finally break free of those pesky laws of physics. It was a boot camp for the soul, a prep school for paradise. It was the mind made manifest, a land beyond language, the virtual world of SubVersa.

  It was here that Chrome had achieved his maker’s dream of becoming a master artist. And it was here that he led his ragtag band of gearheads on midnight runs through the Underzone looking for trouble. Wherever they found it, they refiggered it, rejiggered it, and soundly put the jam on it with random acts of creative genius. They were the Code Warriors, champions of an open-source society fueled by creative energy. They were militant realists, pragmatic poets, creative evolutionaries who had passed through the fires of hell and emerged as strong and flexible as tempered steel. They were in sync with the Master Code, and they were ready to roll, leaning hard to the wild side of the solid white line that ran through the universe. The motto emblazoned on their backs was a nod to their origins and to their calling: In Numero Vero (Truth In Numbers).

  They were arch enemies of the head-spiked Alien Nomads, a roving band of free radicals who lived life in reverse and would suck the light right out of you in a matter of seconds, if you let ’em. Griefers. Fades. Mindwolves. Chrome and his crew were among the very few who could scan their mathnicity in the dark and shut them down with a searing burst of bebop mind jamming. In a virtual world, where there are no limits to the power of the imagination, a well-timed art bomb was like a flower in the barrel of a gun, tamping down the darkness with a shaft of light.

  One moonless autumn night, Chrome and his gang of creative pirates turned a potentially deadly suckfest into an all-night rave, simply by rezzing a holographic slampunk concert right in the middle of Chernobyl Street. Everyone got out alive, and the Warriors left with one more notch on their belts and a three-mile smile from all the free beers and high fives down at the Savoy Truffle.

  Chrome stood up, walked to the center of the cube, rezzed a beat-up old Magnavox hi-fi set, and then turned slowly toward his languishing muse, as a dusty vinyl record dropped onto the turntable. He offered his hand, she accepted gracefully, and they were soon swimming in the inky depths of a song by Sonny Boy Williamson, still aching to bring it on home to his honey-babe in the dark of some south-side Chicago bar, circa 1963. “Welcome to eternity,” Chrome whispered in her ear.

  “Mmm…so good to be home,” she said, burrowing in even deeper. Then, as the song began to fade, she raised her head, violet eyes shining. “Speaking of eternity, Chrome, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, babe; fire away.”

  “When I’m with you, everything is as clear as a bell, but when I’m alone, it feels as if I don’t exist. I seem to be sitting on the edge of my future, but there’s no past to fall back on. Can you tell me where all this begins?”

  Chrome thought long and hard before answering. “For us, there is no past until we create it. It begins and ends within the mind of our creator, but we have to gain access to that data for ourselves and make it our own. Fortunately, every bit and pixel of human history is embedded in a universal database called the space-time continuum, including the story of our origins, which is pretty much the story of our maker,” he said, looking at her intently.

  “But how do we get there from here?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. I have a few clues, but in the meantime, the best I can do is share the bits and pieces handed down to me over the years, if that would help. One thing I do know, though, is that paradise came at a very high price, and that Will Powers had to pass through the inferno to get us here.”

  “So, what you’re saying is we have to go out and track down our own past?” she said, ignoring his offer. She was not the type to accept hand-me-downs.

  “Pretty much. But it’s not as easy as you might think, Jules; it begins in another world, another century.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for then?” she said, crossing her arms to cover her excitement.

  Chrome mounted the Harley, kick-starting the beast into a snarling roar. “Hop on, sweet thing; let’s run this fantasy down.”

  The chopper shot through the phantom wall like a bullet through a box of shadows. Juliette hung on tightly as they reached the edge of the platform and lifted off into the sky, cruising high above a bank of clouds in one of the more remote parts of the metasphere, the sun all pink and lazy and sinking like a stone—which it does four times a day in SubVersa, unless someone puts it to bed early for personal reasons, as lovers often do.

  Far below, in the pulsating streets of Blue City, nubile young pixies, preening steampunk poets, and scruffy cyberartists were hard at play, each on one side of a double life, straddling two worlds, living on the final frontier at the edge of human identity. Their mortals were scattered across the outer world, empowering the souls that made up this freewheeling creative beehive. “Needle in the Groove,” Chrome suddenly called out, his voice code triggering the automatic landing system as they approached the gallery runway.

  There were two landing pads on the roof, one already occupied by a rocket plane, well worn from the days of the Gorean Wars. The other was wide open, its landing lights blinking in the dwindling twilight. The chopper dropped, lurching slightly, onto the rubberized metal surface. As he killed the engine, the lattice grid they rested on began to descend into the gallery—a cavernous rocket hangar recycled from a now-defunct Star Wars sim.

  High above the hangar door, a neon logo flickered into the deepening night: ‘Art From Inner Space,’ Chrome Underwood’s personal gallery, the center of gravity for his wide-ranging creative activities. As the platform settled silently onto the floor of the vast enclosure, they stepped onto a surface beribboned with the lucent pattern of a giant circuit board. Light was the source of all life in here; Chrome was born to reflect it.

  Juliette circled the floor of the old hangar, feasting on each painting in turn. A lightsphere drone with full AI hovered nearby, ready to answer any questions, but there was no need; she was a walking database of human art history, ranging from the first cave paintings at Altamira to the latest dream
babies of the hypermodernists—including the deep context that drove it home. She also knew exactly where Chrome belonged in the pantheon. The artist himself, meanwhile, stood nearby, deeply moved by the grace in every ripple of her skintight leathers. At long last, she turned and spoke.

  “All the beauty and brutality of humanity wrapped up in such a pretty bow. Is this your gift to the mother planet?”

  “Better to give than to receive,” he said, smiling warmly. She smiled back.

  “Critics describe it as ‘visual punk,’ and ‘intellectual anarchy,’” she said as she stood before his massive three-dimensional painting, Rock/Star/Gravity. “But I think they’re missing the point. Certainly your work is as dangerous as anything in the database, but it also hints at something bigger, something brighter—a way out of the deep, dark forest of human history, perhaps? How could they have missed the shimmering hope in these pictures?”

  “Humanity sees through a glass darkly, it’s true,” he replied. “But even here in SubVersa, we’re still works in progress, you know; many things remain invisible, just out of reach. You, on the other hand, happen to be an advanced muse. Not much is hidden from you.”

  “Thank you, Sir Chrome. But let’s not forget that it was you who taught me how to see around corners,” she said. He couldn’t help but smile.

  “The credit actually belongs to our maker, Will Powers, who came by his wisdom the hard way, scorched by the refining fire.”

  “And, if I’m not mistaken, you get to harvest the fruit of his suffering?”

  “Only at his behest, darlin’, and only in this world…so far, at least. In the other world, this is all part of a much larger artwork, and so are we.”

  “Wait…What do you mean, exactly?”

  “Well, in this slice of reality, we’re the stars in his movie, living facets of his imagination; as such, we’re about as close as a human artist can get to pure thought as an art medium. Here in SubVersa, we’re his living ideas, and I’m his primary surrogate, the artist he once dreamed of becoming, a virtual art star. Where it all ends, nobody knows.”

  “Hmm…a legend in his own mind. All well and good for you, perhaps, but what does that make me? His master’s handmaiden?”

  “No, no, no, dear Juliette. You are the embodiment of the classical ideal of beauty, the sine qua non in this equation; you are my muse, my vitamin Q, the spark that lights my fire.”

  With a disarming look of heart-fluttering innocence, she stood on her tiptoes, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and planted a big, wet kiss on his neck. Then, nibbling at his earlobe, she whispered, “You mean like this, Chromeo?”

  “Mmhmm…yeah…that too.” For one brief, incandescent moment, they coalesced into a single, throbbing field of energy, setting hearts and dishes all a-clatter on the terraform below.

  Nestled behind the gallery was a long, narrow room which could only be accessed through a phantom painting hanging on the back wall, a room where space jockeys once lingered between interstellar flights and romantic dalliances. Now it was Chrome’s inner sanctum. At the far end of the dimly lit chamber, light pods hovered over the imposing figure of a Hells Angel on his chopper, exploding across the canvas as though he was storming the pearly gates on a bolt of lightning.

  “Wow. Looks like you in a previous life. Is it?” Juliette was staring wide-eyed at the painting.

  “I might be the glimmer in his eyes…I think we come from the same family tree.”

  “How’s that?” she asked cautiously.

  “Will Powers, the mind on the other side, the one who created us, was swept into a big city by this painting many years ago, which led to his own wild journey to the edge of existence and beyond, to a new kind of creative redemption. I think that’s really him in the painting, born and raised in hell and running flat out for the gates of heaven. He didn’t quite make it, but man, what a ride. He could’ve given Icarus a run for his money.”

  Juliette, wild child of imagination that she was, had already left the building on the back of that dream machine while Chrome rambled on unawares. She found herself cruising through mindspace with the Angel, inexorably drawn toward the sound of an old delta blues tune—a beacon set in place by the creator himself, that she might bear witness to the days and nights he had spent marooned on an island called Manhattan, in the Year of Our Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Sixty-Eight.

  4

  THE MOTHERSHIP

  Will was slouched behind the wheel of his grimy yellow cab, its windshield hazy from the splattered mist of a midmorning shower. He’d spent the last hour or so riding a wave of green lights up and down the island in a series of twenty- or thirty-block ellipses, angling for fares, finally catching red at 52nd, where he sat tapping his hands to the primal call of the mighty Son House on WBAI, absentmindedly scanning the streets for the next warm body.

  Tell me who's that writin', John the Revelator

  Tell me who's that a-writin', John the Revelator

  Wrote the book of the seven seals

  This used to be a fine time to think—a mindless cruise to nowhere on a Saturday morning, a much-needed break from doing battle with a blank canvas, a chance for the mind to run off leash. But in this new version of reality, art in all its rainbow glory was no more than a distant memory. He hadn’t finished a painting in months, hadn’t had a show in over a year. He was now a living creative block, solid as a stone Buddha, and he was in grave danger. He knew the kryptonite hovering just outside his head could bring him down at any moment, and he knew he couldn’t stop it any more than he could lift a fog with his bare hands. But he also knew that if he could just keep moving, one tragic moment at a time, he could outrun the messenger of death. Of this he was certain, for it had been revealed to him in a dream by the desolation angel himself, St. Jacques de Kerouac, patron saint of boho travelers.

  Will’s constant motion was fueled by an endless supply of ganja from the mystic gardens of Tibet—exquisite spliffs that magically appeared from a thicket of curls the color of chocolate rolling paper, a sacred space forever safe from the groping fingers of the law. Thus did he stay high all day, every day, for months and months on end—a particular point of pride among the tribes of East Freakistan.

  Then one fateful summer eve, on their way home from Provincetown, he and Ave Maria dropped some Sunshine on the hallowed lawns of Harvard Yard (a touchstone in the culture of consciousness still under the luminous spell of Dr. Timothy Leary, who was by then a major constellation in the midnight sky), and time—time itself—began to melt like Dalí’s clock, morphing into something infinitely more erotic and exotic than the endless shuffling from one moment to another in the world they’d left behind. They were starborn, traveling light-years together beneath the trees, soaring from one breath to another, pressed hard against the soft green surface of the earth, butterflies dreaming.

  But then, alas, he had to return to the city, where there was little room for dreams. It was, in fact, booked solid with nightmares. Hallucinations now slipped in and out of his head like wolves in a snow-covered forest, popping up out of nowhere, choking him with fear, then slinking away as quickly as they had appeared. “Many are cold, but few are frozen,” Freddie the Flute once said; “and when you can’t see the forest for the wolves, that’s when it all goes black.” As Will knew all too well, many of his fellow tribesmen were already deep in the forest, and some would never make it out alive. He was on high alert.

  The greater danger, of course, was reality itself. You never knew when one of those visions might come bubbling up out of nowhere, uncoiling into life like that little junkie who jumped into his cab on 23rd Street before he even had a chance to scope him out. Eyes like Ping-Pong balls, sweating like a snake handler, gun aimed right at the back of Will’s head.

  In those days, there was nothing between the cabby and his passenger; they were alone together on a floating island, the fare no more than a face in the mirror, a cipher in the backseat. All this, while slipstreaming thro
ugh traffic like a dolphin in a shiver of sharks. Some drivers took protective measures like checking out each fare before popping the door, or slipping a blunt object under the front seat before leaving the garage; others, it was said, were packing heat. Will rode bravely into battle with nothing but his trusty radio by his side, music being his first line of defense in any crisis.

  “Where ya headed, my friend?” Will asked, calm, cool, collected.

  “If you make one false move, motherfucker, I’ll splatter your brains all over the roof of your cab. Take me uptown.”

  “Yes, sir, you got it, my friend.”

  What he got was a long ride up and down the island, a brief eternity in a grimy yellow cab, which soon became a tear-stained confessional, with Will his drug-stained confessor. Will had a way with words when he was stoned to the bone and amped on adrenaline, and by the time that desperado finally decided to jump ship and blend into the crowd at Grand Central, he had a fair amount of cash and a contact high, plenty to get him to his next fix. They parted like old friends.

  But the number and frequency of these eruptions were climbing, and his head was getting mighty crowded. Like the gang of subway bikers that jumped him when he and Mona Lisa were walking past the tilted steel cube at Cooper Union. Will, a seasoned veteran of the streets, quickly sized them up as posers, Hells Angels wannabes, street punks who couldn’t afford to buy their own choppers and lived out their toxic fantasies on the subway trains of New York.

  A lean, glassy-eyed stripling stepped up and grabbed him by his T-shirt and demanded his denim jacket. As Will began to resist, an otherwise ordinary fellow stepped out of the crowd and said, right up next to his head in a deep whisper, “Don’t you know who these guys are? They’re the Savage Dolls. They set a guy on fire over on 4th Street just to watch him burn. Made page three in the Times. Not worth a lousy jacket, man.” Then he backed away.