Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [91]
A thrumming sound started to come up out of the ground, melding with the noise of the truck to cancel out and add to the silence. It felt as if the truck were slipping into some slippery channel carved in air, the bumps from the rocky ground only turbulence. The trees were getting ever closer, Vinaldi’s rictus of concentration tighter, when Ghuaji dropped the rope and started running, just as I saw the cat come hurtling back up the other way. It had seen what it had found, and wanted no part of it.
But Ghuaji kept running, and I screamed at Vinaldi to go faster, and the truck now hurtled down the slope toward trees only ten yards away. For an instant the interior of the truck looked like the inside of a tree trunk, all the surfaces mottled and lined, and I knew it was really about to happen.
“Oh, Jesus,” Vinaldi said. He knew it too.
“Look away,” I said urgently. “Took away from me and away from him. Head for the biggest tree then look away.”
In that last instant before I turned my head I saw a huge tree trunk in front of us, Ghuaji now sprinting toward it, injuries forgotten. The tree was three feet across, a pillar of blackness, but now it was not a thing at all. In the darkness of its body I could see shadows of beyond, the tree now merely a gap in the impermeable space around it. Through the gap I could see the shape of other trees, trees which stood in a different forest in a different place.
Then I yanked my head to the side so I couldn’t see either Vinaldi or Ghuaji, and watched the other gaps running past, jumbled and swirled as the truck crunched over boulders and fell after Ghuaji toward somewhere else.
Vinaldi shouted at the last moment, as if trying to make the truck change course through words alone. By then it was too late.
The truck hit the tree head-on and went through.
At first they said it was the Internet, as it was called back then. They said the traffic on the network had gotten too dense, that this virtual world had grown too heavy and that all the man with the cat did was discover it had begun. They said all this, but it wasn’t true.
Yes, the Internet snow crashed two weeks before The Gap was discovered, and they never worked out why. True, they had to switch to the alternative Matrix which was already in place, and the old net never worked again.
But The Gap was always there, waiting.
Then they said computer code was at fault, the little lines of syntax we’d thought were perfect and inviolate, simple instructions to simple beings, the chips in the wild inside, flowering up through meaning into function. We’d believed the languages we’d created were protected from ambiguity, but there was seepage from day one. The same sentence in English said with two different inflections creates slightly different meanings: turned out we hadn’t appreciated the difference situation made to code, because we didn’t really understand the way computers think. All the unspoken half-meanings we missed, the sly words, hidden implications; all of these, it was said, added up to something and went somewhere else and created another place.
They thought they’d finally gotten to the bottom of it when they stopped the writing of collapsing code, a language based on the way the human mind itself was shaped. When written with perfect syntax it would collapse in on itself, creating software with just one line, a line whose meaning was opaque even to the person who had written the original. The writing process became like a childhood, lost and unreachable. The software would work, and work marvelously, but there was always the fear that something else, something unintended, had been sealed in with the instructions. Especially after computers themselves were given the job of writing the code. They were better at it, much better than us, but their motivations were sometimes uncertain, and after the code was sealed it was impossible to tell what was in there. Perhaps things were being said that we couldn