Tidelands: I-Two (4)
Sabotage.
Eva pushes her muesli around the bowl as she stares out the window.
“Am I well enough today?” eventually she asks.
[Perhaps not today,] Azimuth replies.
She nods, sadly but compliantly, her bottom lip protruding, playful-petulant, a disappointed half-inch.
[We could take the drone for a spin?] the AI suggests. She pulls a face. [Or perhaps there is something else you would like to do instead?]
A matador has appeared off to her left, brandishing his cape with a superior flourish before the bull that materialises over by the bookshelves, scraping the wood-tiled floor with its right fore-hoof.
[Work on your Spanish?]
She sighs and redirects her gaze back out the window.
[Or Kendo, perhaps?]
The matador morphs now into a man in white, wide-sleeved Keikogi and pleated Hakama, his face masked behind a protective cage, feet planted in fighting stance as he raises his long bamboo shinai high above his head. The bull, comically nonplussed, adopts a quizzical look.
She returns to her muesli.
[Or would you like to play a game?]
In addition to the one they are already playing, that is – The Game – the one they are always playing.
Will she ever fool them she is well enough? It’s been so long since she was last allowed out alone – hasn’t it? Not, of course, that she’s ever really alone. But asking in itself is a thing they want her to want, a sign of her “getting better” – even though, deep down, she knows she never can be “well enough”, never in their eyes be truly “better”, because their “well enough”, their “better”, is not hers. She doesn’t know why she thinks this. There is nothing, no memory, fact or incident she can point to in support of this assertion. It’s just something she knows.
[Rock-paper-scissors?] the AI persists.
Ah, Azimuth knows she used to love this. Simple, quick-fire, addictive, devious. What had soured her on it? Not that Azimuth always wins – it doesn’t. But that in itself had become suspicious. If it knows what she’s thinking, can register the nerve impulses before her hand has even begun to form the shape, why doesn’t it always win? Are her strategies working? Training herself to think of paper while playing rock, to think of rock while playing scissors. If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. That’s from somewhere, isn’t it? A quote? And doesn’t the fact that Azimuth is now quiet, not its usual footnoting know-it-all self, informing her of who said it, where and when, suggest that it is aware of her cunning strategy, and doesn’t want to alert her to the fact? But in not saying anything, it also does that – unless these are just thoughts it cannot read.
Whatever the case, there is always the suspicion that all her devious ploys are only fooling herself, that Azimuth is merely playing her, making her believe that her strategy is paying off. And what end does it have in doing that?
This is also The Game.
[What about Sabotage?] the AI suggests.
And manifesting now before her, that long oval face, that slender nose, that slightly too-strong Habsburg chin; the dress, the avant-garde of eighteenth century couture, of finest powder-blue silk; and the hair – a lovely whimsical touch, this – a battleship in full sail, those sails now bellied out by unfelt gusts of wind.
She allows her face to brighten into a shy, half-suppressed grin.
“OK,” she says. “But you must promise to play fair. It’s no fun if you peek.”
[Mam’selle! The very idea!]
Is Azimuth hoping she will choose the Queen? Planting the suggestion? Hmm, not very subtle. But that would be a hard piece to play well. Better someone off the radar, someone with more room to manoeuvre. This time, she settles on the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. Azimuth will choose the Cardinal, of course. Always the Cardinal, the éminence grise. Why is that? In all the games they’ve played, it has never not chosen him. Does it do this as a form of self-handicap? To give her a fighting chance? Or is it a subtler form of test, and one time she will see the pattern broken? Another game of bluff and double bluff, triple and quadruple; an infinity of bluffs, nested one inside the other like those little Russian dolls . . .
In the history of their playing Sabotage, she has been everyone – from king to courtier, cook to courtesan. Some are real, historical persons, others are fictional, a tweaked homage to someone-who-once-was-or-someday-might-have-been – like her Duc, like Azimuth’s Cardinal, like Marie Antoinette. But it’s incredible. The variety of it, the possibilities. So many people to be! Now the political schemer and maker of backroom alliances; now the poisoner and hooded assassin; now the agent of erotic allure, of pillow-talk and blackmail – she loves them all, relishes the sheer otherness of them – other memories, personal histories, other sexes and ages, predilections and peccadilloes, other hearts and minds.
Once, she even chose the Cardinal, just to see what Azimuth would do. But eventually it turned out that it had simply chosen another Cardinal – she hadn’t realised you could do that; that there could be two of anything. For her, they were all unique – one gardener, one Queen, one Duc. But there were variations that she hadn’t noticed before – female assassins, male courtesans. Had these variations been there all along? Or had Azimuth simply changed the game because she’d chosen the Cardinal too? And she can’t now remember if before had been different. But she has learnt long ago not to trust her memories – why is that? She can’t remember that either. It is another thing she just knows.
She could simply ask Azimuth, of course – whether it had changed the rules of Sabotage – but she has long since stopped trusting it as well.
[You have assumed this to be a Platonic reality,] the AI had observed, when that game with the two cardinals had resolved, and proceeded to use it as a teaching moment, to explain about universals and particulars, about Forms, substances and properties, about other things she wasn’t but tried to pretend to be interested in (though it must know it bored her). When all she really wanted was to be other people, to be somewhere else, to be free to go outside – truly outside. Outside of herself, and her little gilded cage. But maybe she never really has. Maybe “outside” is just another simulation, a trick, a false memory; just another move in The Game.
She has not chosen the Cardinal since.
But she likes the Duc, and has been him many times. Likes his wit, his superior intellect, the cynical wisdom that sees beneath people’s outsides, beneath the social façade and into the murky depths of human motive, their self-deceits, their rationalisations. When she feels flighty, hopeful, she will choose someone else – the courtesan, perhaps, or the stablehand; when angry or reckless, the mercenary or the general. But today, feeling somewhat cynical and apathetic, she chooses the Duc.
It’s ironic, though. The only way she can be herself is to be other people; her only “freedom” to think her own thoughts, to feel and desire that which is not monitored, judged or prescribed, is to adopt the thoughts, feelings and desires of others, and where to monitor those things would be to peek, to cheat.
But obviously, she cannot play Sabotage all the time – which is why she needs the stone, the sunlight. She must pretend to be persuaded; must think rock while playing scissors. For if she were to ask too often, Azimuth might become suspicious; might start to surmise that she had some other purpose in playing; might realise that – as she still so dearly hopes is true – she may have found a blindspot.
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.