The Elias Anomaly

Twenty Six

Robert Bloch, so it appeared, lived in a small, sleepy English village. One that rejoiced in a large five sided green at its centre. To one side of the green was a post office. It operated out of a quaint little half-timber cottage.

There were a few bots out today in the simulated sunshine. A bot family played with a junior cricket set on the side of the green near to a fenced off field. The field dipped for a short while before soaring upwards. The landscape forming a pleasantly rounded hill on the horizon. More houses were grouped around the village green. Joseph believed he could see a few shops on a road up ahead.

"Mr. Elias," said another new voice behind him. "I take it you're lousy with booby traps."

Joseph turned around so that he could see the source of all his problems. Inconveniently enough that source was also responsible for his existence. Robert Bloch wore a short, dark-haired, fair-skinned man. The man in turn wore square glasses with thick black rims. Reasonably intense, not very tall.

"I've been sent to contain you," Joseph said. He was pretty sure that Simon could be monitoring him now. He hoped his language use came across sufficiently euphemistic for the viewers at home.

"You are an unexpected thing," Bloch said. "As in you were meant to be a subroutine, a toy, a plaything for my amusement. Then you received an injection of unknown code and, here you are. Or, more intriguingly, out there you are, in the world. You know I want to learn how to do that."

"I know that's the only reason why I'm not erased already," Joseph said.

"So, what's your plan?" Bloch said. "What weapons has the boy genius cobbled together for you?"

Joseph pulled up the code analyser and the anchor Simon had coded.

"Cute," Bloch said. "I know you're watching Simon. Watch this."

The analyser and anchor disappeared. A beep sounded in Joseph's ear.

"Not fast enough!" Bloch cried out. "You are nowhere near fast enough to pull Elias out of this plex with your toys. The arrogance of the young."

"So what now?" Joseph asked.

"Now I rip your heart out," Bloch said. He moved in the blink of an eye to stand right beside Joseph. Bloch's hand snaked out, plunging into Joseph's chest.

"Excuse the hammy visual metaphor," Bloch said. "It will only hurt for-"

Bloch stopped talking, his face slumped, all malevolence replaced with an equally eerie nothingness. It was as if Bloch had died. Bloch's avatar went grey and started to glitch. Little sparks and visual pops crawled over the monochrome skin.

"Gahhhh!" Bloch cried out, ripping his hand away from Joseph and staggering backwards. "What is that? That is not one of Simon's toys. That even stung a bit. Someone's poisoned the chalice."

"I have other friends," Joseph said. He didn't know what he was doing but he figured it was worth a try. He plunged his own hand into Bloch's chest. After all what was good for the goose could be good for the... No, it was no good aphorisms, like reality, broke down in artificial space.

Nevertheless Joseph's instinctive move paid off. His hand plunged into Bloch's avatar and Joseph's view altered.

The plex didn't look real any more. Joseph knew that it wasn't real, of course. Now it looked like it was made in its entirety out of some kind of building material. Joseph felt he could change this place, mould it into new configurations. He could feel his own mastery and power growing by the second.

Then the moment was over and Joseph was hurled backwards. He was trust violently away from Bloch's avatar. Joseph's mind twitched and he stopped falling. Floating in mid-air he righted himself to see that Bloch had disappeared.

Joseph spun in mid-air, trying to catch sight of Bloch again. The avatar was nowhere to be seen. One of the bots came towards Joseph, an old man walking a dog.

"No personal point of presence if that's how you're going to behave," the old man said. Joseph knew, somehow, that Bloch was talking through the old man. He wasn't possessing the bot.

"You can't hurt what you can't find," the dog said. Bloch was showing off, which meant he was arrogant. Maybe Bloch didn't know how much Joseph had taken from him.

Joseph erased everything from reality that wasn't him and Bloch. Everything went black apart from two white models that resembled crash-test dummies. The two proto-avatars floated in the endless void. Joseph pressed his advantage and plunged his hand once more into Bloch's chest.

This time he felt a little of what he believed to be Bloch's essence. At first it was hot, painful, angry, twisted. Everything was silent . The conceptual framework that made up Bloch was loud on a visceral level. It shook Joseph until he believed he might come apart at the seams. Beyond all the sound and fury was something else. Something sharply angular, definitely unpleasant. Joseph gripped tight to this thing, this core shape, Bloch's kernel?

Joseph didn't know exactly what metaphorical level he was operating on now. This thing that he held was a shape in three dimensions. It felt a little like some kind of metal-cast desk ornament. All straight beams and acute angles, slippery like polished stainless steel. Was that code? A core module? Or was it something far more abstract? Was it Bloch's soul? The only thing Joseph's fingers could detect was that it was hollow in the middle. That kind of made sense.

"Now I've got you!" Bloch screamed in triumph. "No exits, Joseph."

Joseph believed he had closed his eyes. An attempt to shut out the pain of coming so close to the centre of Bloch. Only now did he understand the darkness enveloping him was not under his control.

"What?" Joseph said. "What's going on?"

It was a question he had asked too many times in the last few days. His words resolved into communicated meaning via whatever transmission medium. Only then did the exhaustion hit. Joseph Elias was not a creature with the capacity to understand all this. No way to unpick what he was or where he was or what he was doing or why.

The world had changed around him, around every sentient being. He was the pivot on which it turned. Like the fulcrum for the lever that moved the world he didn't understand what he was for. He couldn't see clearly how he could have such impact. Sometimes you weren't supposed to grasp the shape of your destiny. You were supposed to live it, shut up and not ask any questions. Not because questions were not allowed. More because the answer to the question "What's going on?" would not bring any relief whatsoever. In which case, it was probably better off not being asked.

"It's time to erase my mistake," Bloch crowed with triumph. "I've scanned all of your code. I don't need to understand what's different. You won't be able to operate if I just delete all the bits I find that I recognise. Whatever made you special will be in whatever's left."

Joseph was no engineer but even he knew there were problems with that approach. He was past arguing. If oblivion was going to come it would be sweet relief now. No more revelations, no more levels to reality. No more surreptitious sentient beings or adolescent government stooges. Just nothing. It appeared this was a better alternative than hellish complexity. That appeared to be the only other state of existence on offer.

Joseph stopped fighting and waited for the end to come.

And then, he was lying on a couch in unimaginative faux-heaven. He was not in the mood for any of this any more, his head throbbed. He may not have died but he was still exhausted. He allowed his conscious mind to slip into the black hole that it had circled for so long.