Cassandra finally allowed Keri to go online after their visit to the space elevator, corps calling like a siren towards the end of their journey back. She knew the contents of the message that waited for her there the instant she entered, and it was almost enough to make her disconnect there and then. Cassandra would want to know.

Almost, but not quite.

She found out more about Babel, investigating its prehistoric roots and the various interpretations of the tale’s meaning, along with more information about space elevators in general as the earlier stored subroutine kicked in. She had been mistaken, it turned out. There was only one such structure, but it was a forked one like an upside down letter Y with a base in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Masses of information poured into her mind, filling her thoughts with swiftly-discarded facts about the compression/tension hybrid structure, the alternate forms that had been considered and finally discounted, the long-ago politics that had gone into its construction. It had taken decades, overheating and almost destroying what had been known then as the global economy, the very land on which it stood reclaimed from the ocean depths, yet even as the finishing touches were laid the world moved on.

Moved on, and left the Butchers behind.

She must have spent the better part of an hour connected, because when she finally was forced away as the connection timed out it was full dark and they had returned to the city. Cassandra looked frustrated with waiting.

"You sing when you're online, you know," said Cassandra, as Keri's eyelids flickered and she returned to the real world.

Keri knew.

'Singing' was an uncommon habit that occurred for some when they were linked in. The dispossessed body hummed to itself, far closer to a soft, undulating wail at the back of the throat than anything truly melodic. Like the crook-necked posture of the user, the exact autonomic reasons for this were unclear, but those who heard a singer often described a sense of uneasiness at the sound. It was one reason Keri had never really got close to anyone; few people had the stomach to be around a singer for any length of time.

She felt no resentment at this, though. It was just one of those things.

"Anisa left me a message," she said, ignoring Cassandra's comment. "At least, I think it was Anisa. The message was anonymised. It just said you would know where to meet them."

Cassandra nodded thoughtfully.

"Would I?" she said to herself. "Then I guess I do."

Keri waited.

"So..?" she said, after an uncomfortable pause. "Where do we go?"

"Oh, so you're coming?" said Cassandra, voice unsurprised but cutting. "You don't want to retreat into your own digital sanctuary?"

Keri sighed.

"I told you before, I need to know what's going on," she said.

"But does it matter? I mean, this whole world will cease to be important in a few days, won't it? You'll be able to live in your own private wonderland. Why worry?"

"Because there's a Butcher out there that might be hunting me, and it can apparently control the corps!" she said angrily. "Look, we don't have time for your fucking games, ok? So, where are we going?"

This outburst seemed to get Cassandra's attention. In fact, thought Keri, there seemed to be even a trace of respect in her eyes.

"Oh ho, found some claws, have we?" said Cassandra, smiling. "Fine, let's go. Open up your nav and put in these coordinates..."

They took a different car this time, a small silver runabout, though both were under no illusions that this switch would stop the Butcher if it were truly tracking them.

Cassandra led them both to another run-down area of the city, practically ruins. Not that they were decaying, not badly, but nevertheless ruins to Keri's mind. Nobody wanted to live in these cold, hard concrete buildings anymore, she knew, not when prefab constructs were so freely available and easy to maintain. Still, the area was clearly in use; MOF cubes sat atop many of the buildings, huge grey slabs within which masses of both hydrogen and carbon were sequestered. As Keri understood it, the former was used for producing power, and the latter a method of atmospheric purification. Or was it the other way around? It didn't matter; the air was clean and the lights were on.

Literally; it was the pit of night now, but they could see. LED strip lighting ran across the walls and floors all around.

The high-rise they entered was indistinguishable from the ones surrounding it, as far as Keri could see, but Cassandra headed unerringly into this one. She didn't wait, and Keri was forced into a jog to keep up.

They climbed flight after flight of stairs, a novel experience for Keri in a world where anything more than a single floor was always traversed via elevator. The first few floors of this building were abandoned from what little she could tell as they climbed.

She was unable to say how high they had climbed by the time the floors they passed began to show signs of life. The sound of voices echoed down the stairwell, but Cassandra didn't stop when she heard them, passing several flights without glancing towards the hallways down which some of the voices came.

At long last, just when Keri thought she may have no other option but to lose face and beg for a break, Cassandra ended their climb. Without warning she pushed her way through the door of whatever floor they were on and strode down the long corridor beyond.

The corridor walls were cracked with decaying paint, and curious lumps of ageing machinery lay scattered along it in various stages of disrepair. Keri spotted tech that must have been from the Butcher era or even earlier; she saw strange, curled lengths of wiring, weird contraptions of gears and cogs, and unidentifiable equipment with actual, physical keys and buttons from a time before gesture-recognition had become the norm.

Anisa was waiting for them in a room towards the end, along with Eu.

"Andreas?" said Cassandra, wasting no time for greetings.

Anisa shook her head, silent, and Cassandra swore. Keri stepped in.

The room they were in was small and smelled of unwashed bodies. A couple of sheets of memory foam had been thrown down to one side, cotton blankets lying crumpled atop them.[1] Anisa sat on a rickety-looking wire chair, swinging it upon its back legs, while Eu sat across from her on a similar one.

Apart from that the room held nothing save a stickscreen and a small window through which Keri could make out the city lights stretching into the distance, lines of illumination cutting through the darkness.

Cassandra collapsed onto one of the foam sheets.

“The last we saw he was heading the opposite way from us,” said Anisa. “Firing that ridiculous little toy of his over his shoulders at the… the…”

She hesitated.

“Butcher. That’s what it was,” sighed Cassandra.

She fell backwards and stretched out on the foam, eyes closed and hand to her temples as if massaging a headache. Anisa and Eu looked from her to Keri.

It took some time to fill everybody in on what had happened since they parted, Keri and Cassandra telling their part first.

Anisa and Eu, it turned out, hadn’t seen the Butcher after their first frantic sprint away from the crashed truck. They’d wandered the backstreets for a couple of hours afterwards before finally deciding they were safe. The hard part had been getting the Kingdom back.

“We ended up telling Inc-Man we’d crashed the truck trying to drive it manually,” Anisa explained.

Inc-Man was Incident Management, one of the few remaining human-staffed, low-automation sections of the new world order. A cross between the law-enforcement services and judiciary of old, it was concerned primarily with handling those events that needed human judgement. Much of modern life had been left to the machines, but not justice. This power remained firmly in the hands of those who had taken it.

Those who had the disposition to be attracted to Incident Management were rare, and those allowed in even rarer. A society where even Universal Basic Income was becoming increasingly obsolete meant few people desired any kind of job, and ever since it was realised that you really shouldn't trust someone who desired power for power's sake, applicants were forced through test after test of their mental faculties, a years-long process that simply didn't seem worth the effort for most people.

They were viewed as an odd breed, typified by the kind of do-good, honest kind of personality that drew a mixture of reluctant admiration and condescending pity from the more self-involved, cynical, normal population. Harmless, most people thought, and as the crime rate was close to non-existent in a world where everything and everyone was almost always under some kind of digital surveillance, mostly useless.

At least, that was what Keri knew them as from the spheres. She had little need to interact with such stiffs.

They were known as ink-men, and took pride in this label, adopting it both in name and uniform. They wore dark black with vivid, seemingly random blotches of white standing out in strong contrast across the material, as if balls of shining paint had been blasted at them.

"They must have loved that," said Cassandra, without opening her eyes. "Gave them something to do."

"Seemed like it. We went back to the truck with what felt like the whole station. Nothing there when we arrived; just the overturned truck, and the Kingdom lying next to it."

"No clues as to where it went," added Eu.

Eu dragged her seat across the floor closer to where Cassandra lay and took the hand already outstretched and waiting for her. The two held clasped hands together, a tender hold of comfort though who was comforting who was difficult to say. Keri followed this with her eyes and briefly wondered what the deal was with the two, before her thoughts turned back to the present situation.

"What is this place, anyway? Why did Cassandra know you would be here, and who are all these people in this building with us?" she asked, turning back to Anisa.

"This is where people like us come," replied Anisa. "This is a place for... for analogues, I suppose you'd say."

Keri blinked. What she'd just heard was ridiculous. There weren't that many analogues in the city. Hell, she didn't think there were that many on the continent.

Anisa must have been able to tell what she was thinking.

"There are more of us than you'd think. A lot more."

"But... how? Why? I'd have..."

"You'd have known?" interrupted the woman. "Did you want to know?"

"Well, I mean, yes, of course," Keri stammered.

"Don't be stupid, dear," said Eu, looking at her with an expression verging on sadness. "No, you didn't. And that's the glory of this modern world: no one ever has to know anything they don't want to!"

"But I'm sure someone would have said something in the spheres, if there were really all these people..."

Eu shook her head slowly.

"No, love, they wouldn't have. That's not how the spheres work. That's why we call you greenhouses; because you only let in information you want to let in, and keep it there nice and warm, whilst outside the world could be freezing to death for all you know."

"But how do they live? How do they survive?"

Keri felt the same rising agitation she had felt before, upon learning that the inhabitants of the Kingdom were disconnected.

"It's got a lot harder, it’s true," continued Eu. Anisa leaned back on her chair, happy to give up control of the conversation. "Used to be that we could get by quite comfortably, but now everything is part of that blasted Terminal. Everything's a five-dayer,[2] getting more and more difficult..."

"But we're not here to grumble about our lot," said Cassandra, squeezing the hand she held and smiling. "We do fine. It's what's coming next that worries us."

"The plans!" said Cassandra loudly, sitting up sharply in sudden remembrance. "Where..?"

Anisa held up a hand.

"Right here," she said, the data-sphere rolling across her palm. "It's amazing. Truly. I don't think we can process a tenth of what is stored on here, but what I do... well, there's never been a piece of tech like it. It's more complex than the Terminal and corps put together."

"What do you plan to do with it?" asked Keri.

There was an awkward silence.

"Well, then why did you steal it?" Keri pushed.

"Did we steal it?" mused Eu. "It's not like anyone owns it, is it? The Terminal designed it, and the Terminal was designed by machines which were designed by machines. In fact, you have to go back damn far to find anything humans had a real hand in creating. Machines can't own things. Not yet, anyway."

"Don't get us wrong," said Anisa, picking up where Eu left off. "We knew what we were doing was... a grey area as far as things go, but Jayme knew a guy who knew a guy who had access to the overwatch team, so we thought... why not? Why not find out if 90% of the population was really going to the rapture, leaving us poor unbelievers behind?"

"And?" said Keri.

Anisa looked mildly embarrassed.

"And... I don't know. Andreas was right. It's too complex. I can't understand most of what I'm looking at."

Keri felt exhaustion not so much creeping up on her as smack her in the back with a sack full of hammers and horse tranquillizer.

"So you don't know why there's a Butcher after this?" she said, struggling against eyelids that felt like they had lead weights attached to them.

Anisa shrugged.

"Not a clue."

They stared at the data-sphere.

[1] Bedding had remained true to its basic form for thousands of years, and was hardly likely to change now.

[2] A debilitating chore: a phrase from the barbaric times when people were forced to spend the vast majority of each week at ‘work,’ performing mindless repetitive tasks that sapped the body and soul. The physical and psychological damage of such a lifestyle was by now well-understood.