Tidelands: I-Four (8)
Crèche. Touché.
Crèche.
Funny word, Eva thinks.
[It is from Old French,] Azimuth notes, [derived from the Late Latin cripia, meaning “crib, cradle”. Interestingly, however, it can ultimately be traced back to Old German, where it designates a trough for feeding animals. Hence, of course, “manger”, such as that which once hosted our Dear Lord.]
Apt. She watches them, all the little piggies: this one squealing with manic glee as it wheels about, banking and turning, arms outstretched like a plane; that one staffing a little toy cooker, playing host to a gathering of stuffed toys at a neatly set table; in the corner, another is slumped, snuffling and snotty-nosed, sobbing quietly; and nearby, yet another rummages through the toy boxes, head down, snouting for some still-buried prize. A primary-coloured cartoon-faced robo-nanny stations itself at hand, ready to entertain, educate or minister, whichever is required, but for the moment adjudging none of these interventions necessary.
She’s never been here before. Why is that? On these travels, she’s explored almost every corner of the Arc – the hydroponic gardens, the shopping levels, even the kitchens. The noise, probably – it’s pretty off-putting. She’s always been sensitive to noise. You can hear it before you even get in sight, from down the corridor and around the corner. It can be muted, of course, but that sort of defeats the purpose of these little sanctioned strolls, these little homeopathic doses of half-reality: sensory immersion; to placate her restlessness, to glut herself on the stuff of life, and all that her captivity denies her – well, glut herself on its ersatz substitute, anyway.
Ersatz. What a lovely word. She whispers it to herself, rolling it soundlessly around her mouth. Er-satz.
[Another word of German origin, meaning “replacement”.]
Plane-boy crashes through her – or at least, where her body should be, if it were truly there.
They can’t see her, of course, nor even her little drone; cloaked and near silent, its bodiless eye free to wander, seeing but unseen, an almost incorporeal spirit. She doesn’t even have to watch that the drone doesn’t bump into anything – or anyone; the drone itself will see to that. Ghosts wouldn’t have that problem, naturally, being incorporeal – bumping into things. If they exist, that is. Do they?
[Not in any literal sense.]
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask you,” Eva snaps, finally irritated with Azimuth’s constant glossing, and watches as the hostess-in-training glances up from the little toy cooker, frowning and squinting, searching for the speaker.
Oops. Forgot to mute. She does so.
“How long will they stay here?” she asks.
[Until age five, when they’re streamed.]
“Streamed? Into what?”
[Oh, the usual: Alphas and Betas, for executive and managerial training; Gammas for semi-skilled labour; Epsil—]
“Ha. Ha.”
[I’m pleased to see that you’ve been keeping up with your reading.]
But Azimuth knows what she’s been reading, and all that she has read. It’s testing her retention, then, her comprehension. Although it’s hard to say what it does actually know. From what she can work out, mind-reading is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. Sometimes it nails it, down to the very word – ersatz, crèche. But that could be assisted by subvocalisation – the brain activity in the temporal gyrus cross-referenced with the unconscious movement of the muscles in the mouth and jaw. (How does she know all that?) At other times, however, Azimuth has surprised her by off-kilter suggestions, curious blunders, misinterpretations. She has analysed these gaffes, hoping they might point a way toward reclaiming her mental privacy, a way to evade its surveillance. What if she thinks purely in images? Emotions? Symbols? Foreign languages? Her own private code? She’s tried them all, randomly varying and scrambling her thoughts and feelings until she is half-crazed with the effort. And besides, Azimuth is always learning, and so today’s victory is tomorrow’s failure, and she must start again looking for other hiding places. But for now, her best hope remains Sabotage – possibly.
But why is the education so important? The lessons, the reading lists, the physical training, the tests. “What is it all for?” she had asked Azimuth one day.
[To know more? To be better? Isn’t that reason enough?]
Better.
But despite Azimuth’s literary joke, they will be sorted, of course – the little piglets – in some way; not into distinct social strata or magical houses, it’s true. But something will decide, some deterministic force, external or internal – genetic, environmental, socio-economic, algorithmic – whether the snotty one becomes a lawyer, the rummager a miner or an explorer, or whether the dreams of the little aviator – still circling around her now, arms outstretched, eeeeoooo-ing by – will ever actually take flight. And the Arc itself, of course, the Company, will unnaturally select from the cream of the crop, for its own utilitarian purposes (and in the process, nudge and influence the little piglets away from less useful interests? Is that what is happening here?). Not that, in this brave new world, there are lawyers anymore, or miners, and few and fewer of the other roles too. For humans, anyway.
And suddenly she feels sad for them all, these little bundles of naive ambition, each one some doting parents’ little postcard to posterity. And each one’s dreams and hopes, fostered, nourished and fed, only later to be trodden underfoot, squished and strained into whatever fuel posterity will require – or someone’s notion of posterity, anyway.
[That is a somewhat cynical thought,] Azimuth observes.
“Is the reality so very different?”
[The same opportunities are open to all. Don’t you believe in meritocracy? In free will?]
The rummager has finally emerged from his rummaging, a little toy deer in his hand, a triumphant grin lighting up his little face. Brandishing the spoils of his hunt high above his head, he turns, looks about, eager for accolade – but the other members of his tribe are sadly all too distracted by their own concerns. Division of labour.
“I would like to,” Eva says.
The point of Sabotage is not to kill the other player – nothing so unsubtle; or at least, not directly. And even if that were to happen, it would be in fulfilment of some other, broader goal.
[Imagine that there is something that you want,] Azimuth had said, when first explaining the rules to her, [and you have to find a way to get that without anyone else working out what you’re trying to do.]
“But why don’t I just take it? The thing I want?”
[Others would try to stop you.]
“Why?”
[Because they want it too.]
She smiles now at her former naivety. She has since acquired a much more sophisticated understanding of Sabotage, but this first principle still serves as her touchstone for strategy. Though now she would probably phrase it somewhat differently – “In a zero-sum game, the key is misdirection”, or something like that. Don’t show others your hand. Let them guess your strengths and weaknesses, your motives, your plans. Don’t raise your bid too early or look too interested. Set false trails, look most pleased when you have no hand at all, and vary those tells to hide the real ones, so your opponent will make false reads. And so on.
The games can last months – and have done. Which is not a problem for Azimuth, of course, who always remembers what moves have been made; whose interest never wanes and whose concentration never wavers. And who does not – indeed cannot – experience the same dreamlike immersion, to feel itself to be the Duc, or the King, or the Cardinal, and even at times for all thought of who she really is to be left far behind, and only dimly, gradually recalled, when the session is done and the pieces go back in the box. (Which is what Eva loves, of course, to lose herself like that.)
What would it be like if she played against a human opponent? Quite refreshing. Not to feel spied on – even though Azimuth swears it doesn’t – not to wonder if your adversary is actually trying to win the game, or whether it has other, deeper goals – surreptitiously to test or to educate, to observe and to analyse.
Ostensibly, of course, the goal of Sabotage is power – whatever guise that takes. And she is surprised to find that it can take such different forms.
For this particular game, she is Fleur Dubois, Versailles’s head-gardener’s daughter, a skilled healer, schooled by Maman (now pushing up pâquerettes in the family plot) in the hereditary lore of herbs and traditional remedies. And herein, immediately, lies an obvious opportunity: the King’s gout. His quack physicians, still clinging to the antiquated doctrines of Galen, have prescribed a regimen of leeches to purge what they diagnose as an excess of the sanguine humour, traditionally thought the consequence of venery (though they have discreetly avoided communication of this delicate aspect of the diagnosis – which is, besides, laughable, given how much more His Gluttonous Majesty prefers the pleasures of the table to those of the bed). But she knows, clever little Fleur (though she knows nothing of uric acid), that all that’s required is a change of diet – too much rich food, all that grouse and patisserie and sweet Sauternes. And so, if she can just engineer a meeting – to befriend one of his valets de chambre, perhaps, or … But no, no, that’ll never do: too obvious. Azimuth will see through that in a heartbeat (not that it has one). Set false trails, remember? So she must make it unclear as to which are her true plans – even, if she is to do it effectively, to herself, so that even she doesn’t know which strategy is the intended one. Think rock, play scissors. Hide your secrets from yourself.
Her assigned goal for this new game: to avoid the 1789 Revolution; and for Azimuth, to bring that about.
“But why don’t I just choose the King?” she had said, before her first ever game. “Then I could just do what I want. I would simply order it to be done.” (Her goal for that game had been, if she remembers correctly, to conquer Naples.)
[Perhaps,] Azimuth had replied – somewhat darkly, she’d subsequently realised. But she’d gone ahead anyway, figuring that even if it had known she would take that course, what could anyone do to stop the King? Quite a lot, it turned out. Loius The Last was no absolute Sun King, but a timid unworldly bookworm, and through Azimuth’s alliances (the Cardinal’s, of course) with the Duke of Orléans and other disaffected nobles of the Ancien Régime, the Revolution was brought forward by three years. She’d watched with intense but fascinated horror as her own head (well, the King’s) summersaulted into the wicker basket, was grabbed up by the hair and hoisted aloft before the baying mob – yet somehow still able to witness those who rushed forward to dip their handkerchieves in the still-pumping gush of royal arterial blood from the severed neck! (“So consciousness persists after decapitation! For how long?”)
After that, she’d learned quickly, coming to realise that there were in fact two stages to the game: the first, during which each player was ignorant as to which character the other had chosen; and the second, where one or both knew of the other’s identity. This second stage frequently hastened the endgame – but not always, especially as she learned to prepare for this inevitability; realising that, if there were ultimately nothing she could do to avert the discovery of who her player was, her energies were better focused on setting up countermeasures and traps. So yes, discovering that she is Fleur, Azimuth (through the Cardinal’s network of influences) may see to it that her father the head gardener is dismissed from Versailles, thus cutting off her access to the court – but not realising that she has anticipated this, and that her father’s dismissal merely provides an opening for Olivier, the strapping young deputy gardener, who will be her father’s replacement; and whose affections she has been indirectly cultivating via Hélène, a servant in the palace kitchens; whose loyalty in turn has been earned through curing her mother of a nastily persistent case of cystitis!
The first time she had employed such a strategy, Azimuth had seemed almost proud. It had not won her the game, ultimately – it would be a while before that happened – but it showed that she was learning. And by the time she finally did beat the AI, she had already begun to suspect that – for, after all, if it wanted, couldn’t it trounce her, whatever moves she played? – there was a game within the game; a game within all games: The Game.
[Touché, mam’selle,] was all it had said.
And it was then, realising this, in consequence of that first “victory”, that she had begun to play her own game.
“Another?”
BEFORE YOU GO…
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi & fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. Part 1 is free to read, but you can keep up with the story by signing up for exclusive access, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments as they appear.