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  “An AWE?”

  “An Asymmetric Warfare Environment. To play the Demi-Monde you have to be hardwired into it and the hardwiring creates a full sensory bypass: you believe you are in the Demi-Monde. For those in the Demi-Monde it is the only perceivable reality: neoFights—military trainees—are utterly enveloped in the simulation.”

  “That sounds scary.”

  “It is and it’s meant to be. It’s also vitally important if the training paradigm is to be as realistic as possible. AWEs are scary so the simulation of them has to be scary. With conventional computer simulations the player always knows that what they are involved in is just a game, they know that if they get uncomfortable with what’s happening in the simulation all they have to do is press ‘pause.’ This isn’t an option for Demi-Monde players.”

  The general took a sip of his coffee as he gathered his thoughts. “But this isn’t the only remarkable thing about the Demi-Monde. The U.S. military has employed computer simulations for training purposes before, but the problem with modeling Asymmetric Warfare Environments is that they are so unpredictable, so chaotic, so nonlinear as to make modeling them almost impossible. Contrarily, the very act of programming AWEs means that we impose rules on the simulations and hence make cyber-representations of AWEs predictable. It’s a catch-22 situation: we need a computer program to replicate the anarchy of an Asymmetric Warfare Environment but the very act of programming makes it unanarchic.”

  Unanarchic? Is that a word?

  “The solution, Miss Thomas, was to make the Demi-Monde program heuristic.”

  “Heuristic?” asked Ella cautiously.

  This is getting to be, like, Big Words 101.

  “It means ‘self-taught’: we provided the initial programming to get the Demi-Monde up and running, we defined the basics of the cyber-milieu and the formatting modality of the simulation, but after that the computer did its own thing. The computer changed—optimized—the function and the actions of the Dupes who populate the simulation to make their performance more arbitrary and, hence, more realistic. What this means is that from a simulation point of view immediately the Demi-Monde was activated how it performed and developed was out of our hands. The Demi-Monde is an unpredictable environment, which is perfect when describing an AWE.”

  “Look, I’m no nerd,” admitted Ella, “but this sounds kinda freaky. And aren’t you gonna have to use a pretty big computer?”

  “The Demi-Monde is the first program to be run by ParaDigm CyberResearch’s ABBA class of quantum computers.”

  “ABBA?”

  “ABBA is a computer developed by the British. It is the most powerful computer ever devised. It has an almost unlimited processing power . . . enough to simulate sentience in each of the thirty million Dupes that populate the Demi-Monde.”

  “Thirty million? That’s one hell of a lot of Dupes.” Ella might not have been a fan of computer games but she knew enough to realize that even the biggest and the best only ever had a handful of cyber-characters interacting at any one time.

  The general put a piece of gum in his mouth. “That’s ABBA for you: it can handle thirty million Dupes at a snap,” he said with a self-satisfied chomp. “But that’s only part of the magic that is the Demi-Monde. All Dupes active in the Demi-Monde are modeled on real people: they are what we call the NowLive. ABBA simply dipped into DNA and other databases around the world and modeled the Dupes from the composite data it gleaned from them.”

  “These Dupes, your NowLive, are real people?”

  “Modeled on real people, Miss Thomas. But we’ve gone further than that. We wanted the enemy leaders our neoFights would face to be as accurate as possible. Our research has shown us that the warlords who lead enemy forces in Asymmetric Warfare Environments tend to be psychotics . . . madmen . . . fanatics, the type of charismatic lunatics we in the military call Singularities. To make the Demi-Monde’s cyber-milieu ultra-realistic we needed to have enemy leaders who replicated the cunning and the callousness of these Singularities. So we had ABBA select appropriate individuals from history, model them and then seed them into the Demi-Monde. These PreLived Singularities look, think and act just like their Real World equivalents did, and as their Real World equivalents were horrible, horrible people, so are their Dupes.”

  “Lemme get this right,” said Ella carefully, “the people you fight in this Demi-Monde game—”

  “Simulation.”

  “Game, simulation, whatever. The people you fight in the Demi-Monde are modeled on real people, but you’ve also introduced some characters from history.”

  “Correct.”

  “For instance . . .”

  “The ones you are probably most familiar with are Henry the Eighth, Maximilien Robespierre and Ivan the Terrible.”

  “Oh, c’mon. That’s impossible. No computer can re-create dead people.”

  “ABBA can,” said the general flatly.

  Ella laughed. “Nuts. I don’t believe it.”

  “Your incredulity is understandable, Miss Thomas. So perhaps, before we go much further with our discussions, we should give you a taste of the Demi-Monde, we should show you just how lifelike it really is.”

  Chapter 4

  The Demi-Monde: 40th Day of Winter, 1004

  RaTionalism is an avowedly and uncompromisingly atheistic creed developed by the renegade Rodina thinker and ardent Royalist Karl Marx, which strives by a process of Dialectic ImMaterialism to secure logical explanations regarding the Three Great Dilemmas: the Creation, the Confinement, and the Purpose of the Demi-Monde. RaTionalism denies all supernatural interpretations with respect to the Three Great Dilemmas. Though it remains a popular creed within the so-called Scientific Community (notably Future Historians and preScientists), RaTionalism is now outlawed throughout the ForthRight and dismissed as the nonsensical and perverse belief system it is by most Demi-Mondians.

  —RELIGIONS OF THE DEMI-MONDE, OTTO WEININGER, UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN PUBLICATIONS

  Itta gettin’ much awful late, Miss Trixiebell. Message from your father wassa that you should be home by the soonest time . . .”

  Trixie ignored Luigi’s entreaties, ignored his ludicrous Roman accent that made him sound as though he would, at any moment, try to sell her an ice cream. Trixie hated to be hurried by slaves . . . she hated to be hurried by anyone. Once Trixie Dashwood started something, nothing, but nothing, would stop her finishing. Trixie Dashwood was famous for her resolute spirit. Or her pigheadedness, as her governess preferred to call it.

  Trixie waved impatiently to Luigi to begin. The huge Slave-Guard removed his thick, fur-lined gauntlets, spat on his callused hands, took a firm grip on the handle of his pickaxe, shuffled his feet until they were shoulder-width apart and swung.

  The crash as the steel of the pickaxe head met the Mantle-ite floor made Trixie flinch back. Instinctively she raised her arm over her eyes to protect them from flying stone chips.

  But there weren’t any.

  “Nor-thing,” said Luigi dolefully.

  Trixie looked down at the spot where the pickaxe had struck the Mantle. Luigi was right, there was “nor-thing” to be seen there: not a scratch, not a chip, not a mark of any kind.

  Ridiculous!

  Stamping her foot in frustration, Trixie slapped the slave hard across his face. “You’re useless, Luigi, absolutely useless. If you don’t shape up I’ll have to sell you!”

  Despite the enormous difference in their relative size, the huge Italian shrank back from the girl’s fury. No one wanted to be near Lady Trixiebell Dashwood when she was in one of her fits of pique.

  Trixie threw down her gloves, grabbed the pickaxe out of Luigi’s hand, gave him the lantern she had been holding and steadied herself to swing the axe. It was obvious to her that Luigi, big and powerful though he was, was so blood-starved that he couldn’t wield the pickaxe with enough force to trouble the Mantle-ite.

  Useless bloodless Quartier Chaudians.

  Why can’t I have a Chink Slave-
Guard like all the other girls at the Academy? After all, an Eyetie is only one step up from a Shade. Shades . . . ugh!

  With a resolute set to her mouth—usually a precursor to one of her famous tantrums—Trixie swung the pickaxe. Though physically best described as small and thin (“svelte,” as her governess preferred to call her) Trixie was a very determined young woman (“girl,” as her governess preferred to call her) and hence was able to bring the point of the pickaxe down on the Mantle with considerable force. Indeed, the axe struck with so much force that the jarring impact sent vibrations juddering up the handle, out along her arms, across her shoulders, to finally set her teeth dancing.

  Hardly noticing the pain, Trixie tossed the pickaxe to one side and dropped to her knees, ignoring the damage done to her very expensive silk stockings—smuggled in from Paris—her gaze searching for the impact point. There wasn’t one: the pickaxe hadn’t even scratched the surface of the Mantle. Perfect and pristine it lay before her, glowing with its characteristic green sheen.

  Damn and double-damn.

  Disappointed though she was, the RaTionalist in Trixie told her that she shouldn’t be surprised by the outcome of her little experiment. Her findings were at one with the results from all the other tests conducted on the Mantle by RaTionalist scientists in every corner of the Demi-Monde.

  Trixie corrected herself: the Demi-Monde, being circular, didn’t have any corners.

  Corners or no, the point was that no matter where on the Demi-Monde they tried, Ratty scientists found it impossible to dent, chip or even scar the Mantle. Perplexed and bemused, Trixie slumped down on her pert bottom and pondered. Just what was the Mantle made out of if it could shrug off a blow as hard as the one she’d just administered? What was this mysterious substance, Mantle-ite?

  Whatever it was, Mantle-ite was harder, tougher, more impervious than any rock that had been discovered anywhere in the Demi-Monde. It was harder, tougher and more impervious even than steel. And being harder, tougher and more impervious than anything known to man—or woman—meant that the Mantle, the crust that covered the Demi-Monde once the top coating of thirty feet of soil had been cleared away, wasn’t natural.

  But being unnatural didn’t mean—as the UnFunDaMentalists would have it—that it was supernatural. There was nothing magical about the Mantle; it was just unexplained. The Mantle might not be Demi-Mondian-made, but it had certainly been made, and that ruled out the involvement of gods, Spirits, Daemons and all the other silly entities that UnFunnies believed inhabited the Spirit World.

  Find the explanation—the RaTional explanation—to this conundrum, Trixie knew, and she would go a long way toward solving the question that had bedeviled thinkers in the Demi-Monde since time immemorial: how had the Demi-Monde been created? And finding the answer to that would help solve the even more perplexing puzzle as to why the Demi-Monde had been created.

  But if her delving had been unproductive regarding discovering the composition of the Mantle, it had been very fruitful in other ways. The runes she’d found embossed into the Mantle had been a real find, and that they were rendered in Younger Pre-Folk meant she had a chance of understanding them. Not even the great Michel de Nostredame had managed to decipher Pre-Folk A.

  She took her notebook out of the breast pocket of her pinafore and after carefully measuring the runic inscriptions made a sketch of them. The irritating thing was that whilst uncovering the runes was quite a coup, with this being an illegal dig she would have to keep the discovery secret. Respectable women in the ForthRight were not expected to engage in intellectual activities, especially those prohibited by the Ministry of Psychic Affairs. And if they found anything interesting in the course of these prohibited intellectual activities then, of course, respectable women couldn’t publish.

  And what she had discovered was interesting. According to UnFunDaMentalism, the fact that runes were seen on the Mantle throughout the Demi-Monde indicated that the Demi-Monde had once been ruled by a Master Race of pure-blooded—Aryan-blooded—Anglo-Slavic godlings known as the Pre-Folk. So to have found runes so close to the Boundary was an amazing discovery. It suggested that once, long, long ago, there had been no Boundary Layer, that the Pre-Folk had lived in what was now the Great Beyond, the land beyond the Demi-Monde.

  Sketches complete, Trixie scribbled down a brief summary of the tests she had conducted. Tomorrow she’d hire one of the steam-driven drop-hammers she’d seen being used to break rocks at the docks, get it hauled to the site, erected down here in her excavation pit, and then she’d see just how tough the Mantle really was.

  But she’d have to be careful. To be caught using a steam hammer to smash a way through the Mantle would create a real scandal, one even her father wouldn’t have enough influence to cover up.

  And as for her governess . . .

  No, she didn’t even want to think of the hissy fit Governess Margaret would throw if she was Censured again. Then Trixie really would be unmarriageable. No respectable man in the ForthRight—now there was a contradiction in terms—would marry a Ratty. No respectable man would come near her.

  Thrusting this unpleasant thought to the back of her mind, Trixie climbed to her feet and brushed the dirt off her knees. Her stockings were ruined but that wasn’t a concern; she would blame her maid for that. Better a slave got a whipping than her governess discovered that her one and only charge was a closet RaTionalist who was conducting secret and very illegal experiments designed to overturn the supposedly inviolate beliefs of UnFunDaMentalism. RaTionalists weren’t popular with the Party. Only dead RaTionalists were popular with the Party.

  Lost in her cogitations, Trixie leaned back against the Boundary Layer, feeling it yield just a little as she did so. She had had Luigi dig the pit in an abandoned warehouse owned by her father that butted hard up against the Boundary. Digging her excavation pit here gave her the opportunity simultaneously to examine both the Mantle and the Boundary Layer.

  The Boundary Layer.

  If the Mantle was a Mystery, then the ninety-four miles of Boundary Layer that circled the Demi-Monde was the Big Mystery, the Mystery at the heart of the enigma that was the Containment. More learned men (men, hah!) had studied the Boundary Layer than any other of the Phenomena in the Demi-Monde. And what had their studies revealed?

  Nothing.

  Oh, after much deliberation and head-scratching the Party in the shape of His Holiness Aleister Crowley had officially classified the Boundary as a Selectively Permeable Magical Membrane, but that was just a fancy way of saying that neither the Party nor Aleister Crowley had a clue what it really was. All they—or anybody else, for that matter—knew was that the Boundary Layer was the transparent wall that surrounded the Demi-Monde and prevented Man from moving into the Great Beyond.

  And as such the Boundary Layer was at the center of the schism that had divided the religions of the Demi-Monde and kept them at each other’s throats. Was, as the UnFunnies had it, the Boundary Layer there to keep nasty things like Daemons out, or, as Ratties believed, was its purpose to keep Demi-Mondians in? That, in a nutshell, was the dilemma that was the Containment, the key philosophical question that had bedeviled thinkers since time immemorial: was the Demi-Monde a sanctuary or a prison?

  Whatever the Boundary Layer’s purpose, it was a wall that the harder you pushed against it, the harder it pushed back. The only things that seemed to be able to traverse the Boundary Layer were light, air and the waters of the five Spoke Rivers.

  Nothing else.

  It was an invisible and impenetrable wall that extended thirty feet below ground level, where it made a seamless join with the Mantle and extended up . . . well, no one knew quite how far up into the sky the Boundary stretched. That daredevil Speke had ridden one of the new hydrogen balloons to an altitude of over six thousand feet and the Boundary had still been there, so it was anybody’s guess how high it really went.

  Trixie drew a hand lovingly over the surface of the Boundary, feeling it ripple slightly as
she did so. The thirty feet of topsoil of the Great Beyond was clearly seen through the Layer . . . so close and yet so very far away.

  The strange thing was that—as far as Trixie could tell—the nanoBites that inhabited the soil of the Great Beyond never got closer than twenty feet to the surface. That was why there were so many great trees in the forests of the Beyond: there weren’t any nanoBites nibbling at their roots. Not like here in the Demi-Monde’s Urban Band. There weren’t many trees in the Urban Band as the nanoBites came within five feet of the surface and made short work of their roots. Luigi had only been able to dig the pit because it was Winter and the nanoBites were hibernating.

  One day, Trixie was determined, she would penetrate the Boundary Layer and understand the mysteries of the Great Beyond. One day she would understand all the mysteries of the Demi-Monde. One day she would be the most famous of all RaTionalists.

  “It really gettin’ awful, awful late, Miss Trixie. We gotta be home real soon.”

  Luigi’s whining voice cut through Trixie’s reverie. With a sigh she dragged her fob watch out of her pocket.

  Dancing Daemons!

  “Why didn’t you tell me that was the time, Luigi?” Trixie demanded as she scrabbled up the ladder leading to the top of the pit. “You stupid, stupid man! If I’m late it will be your fault. I’ll have Governess Margaret tan the astral ether off your useless Eyetie arse!”

  Chapter 5

  The Real World: June 12, 2018

  An α-Class Singularity (a.k.a. Dark Charismatic, Hi-Level Psychotic) may be defined as an individual demonstrating such distorted and aberrational force of personality and such singularity of purpose that they have the ability and the inclination to wrest power from existing governments, to overturn the politico-social status quo and to irreparably change existing cultural, moral and religious mores.

  —THE DEMI-MONDE ® PRODUCT DESCRIPTION MANUAL, JUNE 14, 2013