Chapter 79: The World Between Worlds

Lucky and Euyin had made their way through Big City with the utmost caution. The taxis were smashed up, or driverless, and the police drones patrolled under the frozen rain. Not that they would have been in real trouble if they’d been caught, but the police were there to hassle them: they would have been detained, interrogated, perhaps insulted or humiliated under the hypocritical pretext of some mischievous role-playing game, but they would have been released, for they had earned-at least in Euyin’s case-the sublime right to spend their free time in this shithole.

Real control AIs would have spotted them immediately and teleported them to a workplace-no, truly, they were free to be in a perpetual “hunt for laughs” in which they were unwilling rabbits.

Here they were before the Computer Science University of Big City, ordinarily a beautiful place: a rectangular building with a few refined towers, metaphorical sculptures about information and the LE network, gardens haunted by mechanical animals ... the doors had been blocked with a concrete slab, and the windows nailed over with wooden barricades. They went around it: under the rain, the lawn had turned to mud. They pulled at the wooden planks, removed two, broke a pane, went inside.

You couldn’t see a thing in there, but Euyin knew the way. He took Lucky’s hand and guided him, without switching on a light, just one hand on the wall, toward a security door. A service staircase, going down. Three, four flights. A long corridor of darkness, not even an old flickering lamp. He counted the doors... “Thirty-one,” he murmured. He knocked on the wooden panel.

“Password?” asked a voice.

“As if you needed a damn password to know who’s at your door.”

The door swung inward. They went in.

The room was comfortable. It was lit, and above all: warm. Lucky felt as if he were coming back to life. It was an outfitted underground office, half devoted to a library, gaming devices, a modern kitchen and abundant food; a bed under a small individual planetarium. Some exercise equipment. On the other side, a large standing desk for an operator and an old-style terminal dating back almost a thousand years. Numerous keyboards with actual keys, and simulators of electronic components allowing their assembly. And in front of these terminals, turning around, a Xeno, obviously: oh, everything about him looked like a man-a custom hectomorphic body and imposing stature-but from his neck sprang blue feathers and his head was that of a bird, an eagle, blue-and-white plumage.

“Holy hell, a Xeno,” said Lucky, before grabbing an apple lying on a desk. “Sorry, mate, I’m starving.”

“You see that, Nemo, he took you for a Xeno,” Euyin snickered, sinking into an armchair.