London is apocalypse spooky. Dark empty streets. Traffic lights blinking at ghosts. Barely a scatter of lights in the buildings close by. The thunder of the coupe echoes from their facades.
I travel further east.
London becomes a maze and the cop’s advice to drive on the left evaporates in a one-way system that has me going around in at least one complete orbit. I have the V8 canoe in second gear now and use the clutch like it’s an automatic. I can handle up-for-first and down-for-second but that’s all, because too much is unspooling in my head right now. ALT-LDN2 and Olivia and— emerging from my sleep stripped memory like a ticking bomb —my cascade analysis with Lilly runs like a movie in my head.
“A cascade? The causal anomalies are growing over time, producing instabilities, some sort of chain reaction. Lilly, if we assume that, what does the data look like over time?”
“Give me a moment.” Lilly replies and goes away for more than that.
“Assuming the chain reaction model and extrapolating: if the event initiated twenty years ago, as reported evidence would support, the slope suggests you have several years before the anomalies disrupt vital structure. If the event initiated twenty-nine hours, seventeen minutes, and fifty-six seconds ago—as you insist, then life-giving processes would be degraded in about a week.”
That conversation had been submerged in the chaos that followed, but it has always been there ticking away its countdown. I have been in London two, three days maybe, I really don’t know anymore. That conversation was just two nights ago.
Entropy, error, corroding the fabric of reality until what? No one knows. No one has been here before. But everything depends on cause and effect. The thoughts I am having now depend on synapses firing in the right order, depend on the continuity of the networks in my brain. Without that continuity what happens to thought? What happens to physics when causality blurs? Unwanted images of the human race reduced to insensate zombies crawling through a crumbling reality spikes me harder than those of pits of smouldering rags.
I need to get to Skeleton Man.
I need to warn him before he starts another rewrite gunfight with the Brahmin.
And Olivia? I need to get Skeleton Man to rescue her. But it’s no damn use because I’m lost in this church-grey maze. I pull up by the side of the road and call Skeleton Man.
Where are you? His charred voice clipped, urgent.
I look around but there’s no street sign, just the canyon of London office buildings with shops on the ground floor. Then in the rear-view mirror I see a big dome with a steeple on top.
St Paul’s. Alright. It’ll take a while, Spade’s at Posh Billy’s.
He’s with Olivia—is she OK?
She’s in some sort of coma. I’ll tell Charles to stay in the house with her.
A coma!
Eyes open but she’s not home. The house AI is working on her.
Ed, you have to get her out.
Can’t, She’s wired into the AI. Heads like a porcupine, Spade’s words not mine.
Oh god!
Look, it doesn’t matter, Hollywood.
Fuck that! Of course it matters!
Think, girl, think. Lady Hembry—I got her and everything changed. If we get the rest of the bastards it’ll all snap back. Your Eyetie girl will be safe back home and none of this will have happened.
Ed, it’s not that simple.
Course it is. The Brahmin in the future are sending them their orders. We kill all of them and that’s it, the feedback’s cut.
Ed no! There’s a bigger problem.
Christ, isn’t there always with you. Go on then, chuck your spanner in.
All the changes—they’re increasing the entropy. It’s starting to affect causality.
How do you mean?
I told you, it’s been happening over and over again. But every rewrite isn’t perfect, it can’t be. The errors are building up. We need to hit the core as soon as possible.
But that means we’ll be stuck with what we’ve got. We’ve got to take them out to do the reset first.
Ed, we don’t have a choice. Lilly modelled it. Reality is coming apart in a week. Maybe days.
What?
Every time there is a rewrite error creep in, it’s impossible not introduce some…
What, the universe suffers from wear and tear? The old bastard is laughing at me, hacks of ragged sound harsh with decades of smoking
Ed for FUCKS sake!
Look Hollywood, you are pushing your luck. I want my town back the way it was. I want my London, geddit! No Pattern Mafia , no Brahmin, no bloody Yankee nutters screwing with reality. And I am GOING TO GET IT. I’m going to get them all in one room and I am going to turn the bastards to smoke. GOT IT!
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. I remember the first time I ever met Skeleton Man. He looked weird, a dried out stick of a man with his stupid parrot crest of hair. Weird—and terrifying—with a coldness that sucked the warmth out of the Bear. And that flint-edged madness was back, cutting with every word.
Ed, what if you are wrong? What if you kill them all and that’s the change that starts the collapse?
I don’t care any more Hollywood. I want to finish this. I don’t care how.
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If you are new to the Brahmin Blues the story starts here …