Do Not Question, Act Five: Do I Have to Climb Eighty Floors to Trigger the Final Battle, or Can I Skip It

This was the first time Anna — or rather, the body carrying Anna’s mind — had ever set foot in the city centre.

She didn’t get a chance to admire the rendering quality of this world, because the Vector headquarters tower was already filling her vision. It stood at the centre of the city, black as an enormous gravestone.

Normally its outer walls carried scrolling blue-and-white data, and the Vector logo at the top glowed at night like an eye that never closed. Now that eye was shut. Not a single light in the whole building, every pane of glass reflecting the grey sky.

The first thing Anna saw when she reached the foot of the tower wasn’t the entrance.

It was the heat.

At first she thought she was seeing things.

At some point a temporary scaffold had been built up the side of the tower. The metal frame climbed all the way to the upper floors, and at the top it faced the control room. Mounted on it was an enormous heating panel, red light bleeding out of it like an artificial sun, baking that sealed window without pause.

Anna stood there with her back going cold.

Solon wasn’t waiting seven days. He didn’t just want to trap Xia in there. He wanted to roast her to death.

The idea was so ridiculous that Anna wanted to laugh.

So much for the saviour. So much for the father of artificial intelligence. So much for the saint of post-war reconstruction. In the end his method of killing was as primitive as an upgraded medieval torture device.

But she couldn’t laugh, because Xia was behind that window.

Anna looked around.

There were guards at the main entrance, and security staff near the scaffold. There was no way in from the front.

But with Vector down for days, the whole city’s security systems were full of holes. Everything that used to run on automatic recognition, automatic locking and route prediction was now a body without a brain, capable only of a few sluggish mechanical motions.

Anna went round to the side of the building and climbed over a maintenance fence.

As she went over, her trouser leg caught on the metal edge, and she nearly went face first into the ground.

She lay on the concrete, vision blacking out with the pain, and her first thought was:

Perfect.

Heroine infiltrates enemy headquarters, gets stabbed in the back by her own trousers at the starting line.

The stunt coordinator on this dream isn’t up to much either. Please, can we hire Yuen Woo-ping?

She gritted her teeth, got up, turned on her phone torch, found a maintenance door that hadn’t closed properly and slipped inside.

The inside of the tower was pitch dark.

No lights, no lifts, no reception system, no ID verification chime. All the screens that used to be everywhere were dead, leaving panels of black glass set into the walls like dead eyes.

The control room was on the eightieth floor.

Anna stood at the stairwell door and looked up into the dark shaft of the stairs.

Eighty floors.

She said nothing for two seconds.

Then, with total sincerity, she swore inside her head. Shift!

Could this dream not have given its heroine a body with slightly better cardio? Somewhere far off she could almost hear Vector’s voice: didn’t you complain a few thousand words ago that PE could be abolished?

She was quiet for another two seconds.

Then she pretended she hadn’t heard, and started climbing.

One floor.

Two floors.

Ten floors.

Twenty floors.

The phone light swung around the narrow stairwell, and every step echoed heavily. She had to stop several times, hand braced against the wall, gasping, convinced she might die on the fifty-seventh floor and become the most ridiculous casualty of this story:

Not shot, not murdered in a conspiracy. Killed by stairs.

But every time she wanted to stop, she saw the way Xia had looked at her under the flyover.

“When you’ve made up your mind, get in touch.”

She hadn’t got in touch.

She’d just come.

She wasn’t sure that counted as better.

By the eightieth floor, Anna could barely stand.

She pushed the stairwell door open, and the corridor was as hot as a tunnel leading into a furnace. The closer she got to the control room, the hotter the air became; the walls were like iron plates left in the sun, and even breathing was hard.

At last she reached the heavy door.

It was black, with no handle and no manual release of any kind. Even with the whole building’s power cut, it stayed perfectly, seamlessly shut.

Anna hammered on it.

“Xia!”

Her voice echoed down the corridor.

She hit it again.

“Xia, are you in there?”

A few seconds later, a voice came from behind the door.

“Anna?”

Anna nearly burst into tears.

She was alive.

“You’re alive!” Anna pressed her hand flat against the door, and jerked it back a second later. “Ssss— you could fry an egg on this thing!”

The voice behind the door went tense immediately.

“Anna, why are you here? It’s dangerous!”

Anna was still panting, her forehead soaked.

“I think that’s my line! At least out here I’m only medium rare!”

There was a pause behind the door.

Xia clearly hadn’t expected her to still be making jokes at a time like this.

Anna put the back of her hand to her mouth and tried to steady her voice.

“Solon said Vector would be restored in seven days. I worked it out. He isn’t fixing the system in seven days. He’s waiting for you to die.”

Saying it out loud made something drop in her chest.

All the absurdity was gone. Nothing was left but cold facts.

“He wants you to die in there, then turn the power on, restart Vector, and call the whole thing a technical fault.” Anna’s jaw clenched. “Xia, I can’t let him do that.”

It was quiet behind the door for a long time — so long that Anna almost thought Xia had run out of strength.

Then she heard her say, softly:

“You’ve made up your mind?”

Anna closed her eyes.

She thought of the football pitch, the Life Reboot Club, the arguing, the voting, the clumsy rules, the ball they’d all kicked so badly it rolled everywhere.

“I have.”

She said.

“I’m going with you to see the new world.”

She paused, then added:

“Although, seriously, if the new world also involves eighty flights of stairs, I may reconsider.”

There was a very small laugh behind the door. “Even without Vector, we can make our own rules.” Anna said. “I’ve seen it. They’ve already started. It’s messy, it’s slow, and sometimes it looks like a group of people studying a washing machine like an ancient relic. But it’s theirs.”

She took a breath of the scalding air.

“So you can’t die here.”

Anna started looking for a gap in the door, a control panel, an emergency switch.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

The most advanced defence system in the world, with the power cut, turned out to be the sturdiest possible coffin. She threw her shoulder against the door and nearly cried from the pain. She grabbed at the edge and tried to pull, and couldn’t move it a millimetre.

“Anna,” Xia said from the other side. “Stand back from the door.”

“You can open it?”

“Yes.”

Xia’s voice was unbelievably calm.

“Then why didn’t you come out earlier?”

A pause.

“Because I hadn’t finished the transfer, and I couldn’t let Solon know I was still alive.”

Anna: ”…”

Great.

So the main achievement of climbing eighty floors was informing the other party that the plot could now proceed to the next stage.

She didn’t say it out loud.

She just stepped back a few paces and covered her ears.

A second later, the familiar hum started up.

This time the sound was lower, as if something were being forced awake deep inside the building. Fine blue light surfaced on the black panel of the door, and then the whole door gave a heavy unlocking sound.

A wave of heat rolled out.

Anna was driven back several steps, her phone light shaking in the rising air.

The control room looked like a metal cave that had been left in an oven. A lot of the equipment had warped, screens were cracked, the edges of the walls were scorched. The air was scalding, and even the light bent in it.

Xia walked out.

She had a silver data case in her arms.

Her clothes were marked with burns, the ends of her hair were curled, and her skin was the colour of metal heated red. That colour was cooling away bit by bit from her neck, her arms, her cheeks, like a block of hot iron turning back into pale human skin.

Anna looked at her and forgot to speak.

Xia lifted a hand and touched her own face, as if checking that her appearance was still intact.

“Did I frighten you?”

Anna opened her mouth. She looked at the fine crystalline glint that flickered at Xia’s neck, then at the data case.

She couldn’t keep lying to herself any longer.

Xia wasn’t an ordinary person. She might not be human at all.

Oddly, Anna wasn’t frightened by that. She mostly felt that her judgement over the past few days had been reasonably sound.

After all, from the moment a serving spoon turned into a needle, she should have known: in this world, the thing that least resembles a human isn’t necessarily the robot, and the thing that most resembles one isn’t necessarily a human.

Xia was about to say something when the whole building shuddered.

A second later, the lights came on.

Floor by floor, white light bloomed from the end of the corridor, like some sleeping beast opening its eyes again. Screens flickered back on one after another, the door systems restored, and the sound of lifts came up from far below.

Xia’s face changed.

“That’s bad.”

She grabbed Anna’s hand.

“They’ve turned the power on.”

Anna understood at once.

Solon must have assumed Xia was already dead. He’d finally run out of patience, or decided the heat had been enough, and had reconnected Vector to the grid.

The whole tower had come alive. Including the cameras.

Including the lifts.

Including the security systems.

Including all the people now on their way to the eightieth floor.

“Run!”

They threw themselves into the stairwell.

Two floors down, Anna’s legs began to file complaints. By the seventy-fifth floor, her body had escalated from complaints to strike action. By the seventy-second, she was seriously considering whether she could apply to be dragged.

Xia glanced at her.

“Sorry.”

“What are you apologising for?”

The next second, Xia simply hoisted her onto her back.

Anna: ”…”

She lay against Xia’s back, listening to footsteps flying past in the stairwell, feeling complicated about it.

A probable time traveller, probably human, was being carried to safety by a probably non-human artificial intelligence.

This dream had jumped genre again, from office satire to sci-fi action.

She herself still had no cardio.

“What is going on?” Anna gasped. “What’s in that case? How did you open the door? How are you alive after five days of being cooked? And why does your skin change colour like a roasted sweet potato?”

Xia’s step faltered.

“What sweet potato?”

“That’s not the point!”

“It’s a long story,” Xia said. “Put simply: we have to get Vector’s original data out. From now on the people of Zone 65 will have a chance to build a new order, and Vector won’t be Solon’s prisoner any more.”

“Zone 65?” Anna grabbed her shoulder. “Prisoner? What are you talking about?”

The sound of lift doors opening came from below.

And voices.

A lot of them.

Xia kept running down, talking fast but clearly.

“The world didn’t turn into one vast field of rubble after the war. Not entirely. The humans who survived established separate governed zones. The real Post-War Accord allows each zone to conceal its coordinates, to prevent large-scale war from breaking out again.”

Anna went blank.

“So it isn’t all ruins out there?”

“No,” Xia said. “What you think of as the whole world is one of 763 zones. This one is Zone 65.”

For a moment Anna couldn’t speak.

For days she’d felt like this world was an absurd dream, its setting laughably on the nose, its background as closed-off as a cheap film set.

And now someone was telling her: correct, you are in fact on a film set.

There are another 762 outside.

“This is a small zone. Low population, closed coordinates, and Solon has controlled the flow of information here for a long time,” Xia said. “Every reconstruction zone was assigned a super AI. Vector was never Solon’s. It was meant to serve all of Zone 65, not be rebuilt into his personal instrument of rule.”

Anna’s heart started to race.

“So post-war history is fake?”

“Edited,” Xia said. “The war was real. The trauma was real. The rebuilding was real. But Solon hid the existence of the other zones, sealed the full text of the Accord, and turned Vector into his private system.”

“And let everyone believe there was nothing out there but him and Vector.”

“Yes.”

Anna suddenly thought of the people in the bar cheering at Solon on the screen.

Of the genuine gratitude on their faces.

This was worse than a plain lie.

Because Solon hadn’t manufactured that faith out of nothing.

He had used real fear, a real disaster, a real rescue. And then, while the gratitude was still warm, he had cast it into a chain and hung it round everyone’s neck.

She suddenly didn’t feel like making jokes. Even though the speech Xia had just delivered really did sound like the clumsy expository chapter of a bad sci-fi novel, this part wasn’t funny.

They finally reached the ground floor.

The safety door swung open and the lobby was blindingly bright.

But what was waiting for them wasn’t the exit. It was a row of gun barrels.

Solon stood in the middle of the lobby.

He looked nothing like the gentle old man on television. His hair was a mess, his eyes bloodshot, the muscles in his face twitching with rage. The old-fashioned dignity that had once reassured everyone in Zone 65 had shattered completely, leaving only the mania of a man who has had everything he owns taken from him.

Xia set Anna down. The moment her feet touched the floor, dozens of armed personnel closed in around them.

Guns pointed at their chests, their foreheads, their legs. Xia put Anna behind her and held up the data case.

Solon’s eyes locked onto it.

“You monster,” he said hoarsely. “Put Vector down.”

Hearing the word “monster”, something cold and burning rose in Anna’s chest.

Xia had been locked in a room like a furnace for five days, and he was calling her a monster.

While he stood here with guns, with lies, with the sealed-off history of all of Zone 65.

Saviour.

What a title.

She’d recommend filing it alongside the heart-shaped rice as one of the zone’s two great works of black comedy.

“Solon.” Xia raised her voice slightly. “Vector is not your property. It belongs to all of Zone 65. You have no authority over it, and certainly no authority to use it for your own ends. Under the Accord, I am authorised to act for Zone 3 in removing Vector from Zone 65 for its protection.”

“Zone 3.”

Solon flinched as if the words physically hurt to hear.

“So it is that damned Shelley woman,” he said through his teeth. “She sent you, you monster.”

Xia didn’t move.

“You are not taking Vector anywhere!” Solon roared.

He raised a hand, and the guns steadied on them. But he didn’t give the order to fire, and Anna soon understood why.

He didn’t dare.

The data case was in Xia’s hands. Vector’s original data was in Xia’s hands.

That was his idol, his crown, his sceptre, the thing he used to hold all of Zone 65 in his palm.

He couldn’t bear to see it destroyed.

Then Solon’s gaze shifted to Anna, and the look made her back go cold.

He smiled slightly.

“You’re not afraid to die,” he said to Xia. “I know that. Monsters from Zone 3 aren’t afraid of these weapons.”

His eyes settled on Anna.

“But what about her?”

Anna’s body locked up.

“Even if you can force your way out, what happens to the woman behind you?” Solon said slowly. “She’ll be full of holes before she reaches the door.”

The lobby was quiet enough to hear the current in the wires.

Anna realised she had become the weak point.

She had come here to save Xia, and now she was the hostage.

Fine. This was ridiculous.

But it did match her established combat role in this dream: slowing everyone down, but with a positive attitude.

Except she couldn’t laugh this time, because the guns were real, and so was the fear.

She could feel her hands shaking and her legs going soft. Time traveller, dreamer, transplanted consciousness — whatever she was, a body’s instinct to survive doesn’t get any more sophisticated for it.

She was afraid.

Very afraid.

She looked at Solon, and it struck her that this fear shouldn’t be hers alone.

The people of Zone 65 had been afraid for nineteen years.

Afraid the war would come back, afraid order would collapse, afraid they couldn’t live without Vector. Solon had collected their fear and fed it to Vector, and Vector had produced rules, scores, prohibitions and gentle lies.

And now he wanted to use her fear to stop Xia.

Anna took a deep breath.

She leaned out from behind Xia and looked at Solon.

“Mr Solon.”

Her voice shook a little, but she kept going.

“Do you know what? You really are exactly the kind of villain who shows up in a dream.”

Solon frowned.

Xia blinked too.

Anna went on. “You say it’s all for humanity, and meanwhile you keep everyone in a cage you’ve decided is safe. The moment someone questions you, you call her dangerous. The moment someone wants to leave, you tell them it’s all ruins out there. The moment someone takes back something you never should have owned, you point guns at ordinary people.”

She paused.

“And your lines are really old-fashioned.”

Solon’s face turned truly ugly.

“Shut up.”

Anna very much wanted to shut up.

She was genuinely terrified. But she remembered the heart-shaped rice, and how the very first joke she made in her own head had dropped her score to zero.

She was already on zero.

So what was left to lose?

“You’re not a saviour,” Anna said. “You’re just a man who’s afraid people will find out the world is bigger than you told them.”

Solon’s eyes widened with fury.

Anna’s life might be short, and might in fact end right here, but that was without question the coolest thing she had ever said. It would have been even cooler if she hadn’t just been carried down seventy floors on someone’s back.

Xia turned her head slightly and looked at Anna.

Anna didn’t know what she was about to do, but she saw Xia’s eyes settle into something firm. Not anger. More like a system that had finally finished a calculation.

“Solon,” Xia said. “You seem to have forgotten.”

She held the data case close, her voice low and clear.

“Zone 3 is far more advanced than you are.”

A second later, Anna heard a very low hum.

Not the piercing whine from before.

Something more like an invisible detonation coming down from above, as if Xia’s positioning had finally found this building, and found Solon.

The lights in the lobby flickered once.

Then every electronic lock on every weapon in the room cracked at the same moment.

Before the armed personnel could react, the guns in their hands failed one after another, as if the souls had been pulled out of them.

Solon’s face changed.

“Fire!” he screamed. “Fire!”

No shots came.

Only silence.