The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [105]
Wordlessly she nodded, inwardly marvelling at her composure as Harry said, ‘Compression one … ’
The long corridor and the cylindrical sky of criss-cross dataflows froze, cracked and swirled down into dark nothingness …
… and swirled up and remade itself in lush forest colours, which was appropriate since they seemed to have been dearchived into a strange zone of glittering, glowing trees. Huge towering trees whose branches sprouted blooms that received curving lines of sparkling data from the massive helix that spiralled past overhead.
‘The public multi-discipline precinct at Copernicus University on Luna,’ said Harry, who then pointed. ‘There, a trio of nullors.’
They looked like ruby caltrops scribing unfathomable trajectories above and among the stylised trees, spinning as they did so. Suddenly a mesh of faint lines sprang up around Julia and Harry.
‘That’s the miragers at work,’ he said. ‘We’ve just become a mixed-media doctorate dissertation on interspecies cultural influences, complete with pseudo-AI response analyser.’ Harry chuckled. ‘Our next waypoint is a Glowatchers club on Plunder-world, one of Earth’s pleasure orbitals – its owner runs a black server on which I have an account.’
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
From conscious awareness to compressed data then through the transvector to decompress back to conscious awareness. And found herself standing on a wide circular platform surrounded by a pearly grey radiance. She was alone, but she still had the trench-coat image. Feeling the stirrings of anxiety, Julia walked over to the edge and caught sight of a few other similar platforms lower down, all resting on thin stalks. Far below lay multicoloured clusters of light, citylike but not a city.
‘Harry?’ she said out loud. ‘Are you there? Can you hear me?’
There was no reply.
Have I been deceived? she wondered. Played like a fool?
A thin beam of light came on, trained on her from above. Immediately her left palm began to itch and when she opened her hand a voice in her ear said, ‘Alert from Mirager v3.7 – exterior scan in progress, please choose profile mask from list or close fist to activate default.’
On her glowing palm were four choices: a Mandarin–Piraseri B dictionary and tutor; the complete works of Hieronymus Beethoven, audio, video, Glowmo and Kabukisoft; full plans of Earthsphere Phantom-class heavy interceptor, encryption level cognitive; or interactive Gomedran funeral ceremony, Family Kyzec of the Clan Amarg (default). She quickly chose the second and a fine, flexing web appeared around her. The thin beam of light began to pulse, slowly at first then faster and faster, giving the platform a strobe-lit appearance.
Without warning the platform turned into a tube down which she plummeted. There were several abrupt changes in direction, signified by the way the flickering blur flowed. It ended when she came to a sudden halt in a huge dark hall whose only source of light was the log fire blazing in a wide and ornate hearth. There was a large, low table covered in a half-assembled jigsaw and two high-backed easy chairs. In one sat Harry, who smiled and gave an ironic wave.
‘Sorry about that … unexpected diversion,’ he said, gesturing her towards the other chair. ‘There was a temporary security filter engaged when we arrived – it let me through but you were flagged and shunted into an isolation lobby prior to scrutiny. As soon as the data-holding subsystem posted up the Gomedran funeral ceremony I had you transferred.’
‘Why was I filtered out?’ she said. ‘And where are we?’
‘Well, a fractalised sentience like you occupies a lot of file space and it was that sheer size which tipped them off.’ He glanced around him. ‘And this place is part of the memblock that comes with my account, dressed up to suit my antiquated fancy.’
Julia settled into the chair, picking up vague sensations of comfort as well as a pseudo-warmth from the fire.
‘Delays put me on edge,’ she said. ‘I hate being