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As they walked towards the main doors, Florance noticed the signboard for the first time. The picture was in shadow, but a bar of light from a nearby window illuminated the lettering – THE

BROKEN PARADIGM. ‘Cute,’ said Florance as she pushed open the door. ‘Really cute.’

‘What’s a reality bubble?’ asked Barbi.

They were in the main common room of the tavern – it was empty. The music and voices had stopped the moment they opened the door. A fire burnt in the fireplace. There were tankards and half-eaten plates of food scattered around on the tables.

Florance knew there was no point searching the tavern – every room would be like this. From the outside they would hear voices, snatches of conversation, arguments, singing, laughter.

But the moment they opened a door – nothing.

‘It’s a very sophisticated software trap that surfaced four hundred years ago,’ said Florance. ‘Rumour had it that it was developed by species of intelligent fungus and propagated through the Church of the Vacuum.’ She could see a disturbance in the air. A shimmer, human sized and crudely shaped.

‘I remember the C of V and the Hoothi,’ said Barbi. ‘Whatever happened to them?’

‘Something terrible.’ Florance kept her eyes (binocular vision –

aghhh!) on the growing shimmer. Colour was beginning to leach into the shape, dull blues, browns and flesh tones.

‘What could be worse than the Hoothi?’ asked Barbi.

Florance watched as the colours ran together to form the contours of a jacket, the shape of pantaloons, a hat, a face. Then a man was sitting at the next table, frozen in the act of reaching for his tankard. All around the common room other figures crystallized out of the air. Silent and immobile.

‘I think,’ said Florance, ‘we’re about to find out.’

The main door banged open.

22

The man at the next table grabbed his tankard and raised it to his lips. Another laughed and slapped his fellow on the back. A child of six ran between the tables with a platter of boiled beef and greens. Brandy sloshed in glasses, clouds of smoke poured from pipes and nostrils. Around the two AIs, the whole common room roared with noisy, chaotic, infinitely sloppy and unbridled human life.

Florance and Barbi ignored it completely.

There was a figure standing in the doorway. Gravitas, that’s what the AIs called it. A quality that could reshape the spaces of the datascape. Florance could feel it, deep in her machine soul. It radiated from the figure, sealing up the cracks in the reality bubble until the line between fabrication and reality became meaningless.

The figure stepped forward. A male, tall, lanky, dressed in a leather doublet, sleeves slashed to expose the silk lining. An enormous red beard hid most of a narrow face except for a hatchet nose and grey eyes that glittered among a nest of wrinkles and laughter lines. A silver cat perched on his shoulder. He was supporting himself with a set of crutches.

‘Yo ho ho,’ boomed the man, ‘and a bottle of ginger pop.’

‘Bugger,’ said Florance.

The man loped over to their table and took a seat. Florance noticed that while he was careful to swing his body on the crutches there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his legs at all.

‘Ah ha,’ said the man. ‘And what brings a fine pair of self-aware beauties to this here place?’

‘You tell us,’ said Florance. ‘You brought us here.’

The man grinned, revealing a mouth full of irregular teeth. ‘I must confess, ’twas I that summoned ye.’

Barbi kicked Florance under the table. ‘Who is this?’ she asked.

‘Barbi, may I introduce you to the Flying Dutchman,’ said Florance. The Dutchman took Barbi’s hand and raised it to his lips. ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

‘Can we take the olde worlde accent as read?’ said Florance.

23

‘I’m afraid not, my pretty little collection of connections,’ said the Dutchman. ‘I was thrown together out of a bundle of clichés, whipped up in a trice to do a particular task. Only I stuck around, see. Old silicon sea dogs like me being easier to create than dissipate. Besides, I knew my master would