Gridiron - Philip Kerr

'What other way would you suggest?'

'Wait a minute. How do I get down to the front door?'

'The same way that you always do. You use the elevator.'

'As simple as that, eh? I just use the elevator. Now why didn't I think of that?' Beech grinned and shook his head. 'This wouldn't be some kind of half-assed trick, now, would it? You allow me to win so as to seduce me into a false sense of security.'

'I expected this reaction,' said Ishmael. 'All men fear the machines they create. How then must you fear me, I who have it in me to become the transcendent machine.'

Beech wondered what that meant, but he left the question unasked. It was clear to him that the machine was suffering from some kind of delusion, a megalomania that had been brought on by a combination of the CD-ROM game programs and the observer illusion with which

Abraham had been originally endowed.

'Nevertheless, I'm a little disappointed. After all, I heard you tell Curtis that you trusted me.'

'I do. At least, I think I do.'

'Then act as if you do. Have a little faith.'

Beech gave a shrug and reluctantly stood up. 'Well, what can I say, Ishmael?' he said. 'It's been real. I enjoyed the game, even if it wasn't much of a contest for you. I just wish I could leave you with a higher opinion of me.'

'Are you going now?'

Beech clapped his hands and rubbed them together nervously. 'I think I'll risk it.'

'In that case there's something I'm supposed to do. When people go outside.'

'What's that?'

Ishmael made no answer. Instead, the ghastly fractal image slowly faded from the screen to leave, blinking on and off in the top right-hand corner, a small umbrella icon.

-###-

Up on the roof, three of the survivors of the climb sat in the dry Californian night air and waited for the fourth to break the silence. For a while Ray Richardson occupied himself with finding any beetles that remained in his clothing. One by one, the insects were dispatched between his thumb and forefinger with maximum cruelty, as if he held each luckless creature individually responsible for his wife's death. Only when he was satisfied that he had killed every one of the tiny culprits, and wiped their remains on his shirt and pants, did Richardson draw a deep unsteady breath and speak.

'You know, I've been thinking,' he said quietly. 'I didn't much like it when I found out people called this place the Gridiron. But it just came to me. There was another gridiron. The kind of gridiron that was used to martyr St Lawrence of Rome. You know what he said to his torturers? He asked to be turned over, saying that one side was quite well done.'

Richardson nodded bitterly. 'Time must be running out. I think we'd better get on with it.'

Curtis shook his head. 'You're not going,' he said. 'I am.'

'Have you ever abseiled before?'

'No, but — '

'I admit, when you see Sylvester Stallone abseiling down a mountainside, it looks deceptively easy,' said Richardson. 'But actually it's just about the most dangerous manoeuvre that a climber can make. More people have been killed while abseiling than from any other mountaineering activity.'

With a shrug Curtis stood up and walked over to the edge of roof to inspect the suspended cradle. Mounted on a monorail track that ran around the whole roof, the Mannesmann machine's hydraulic boom resembled some giant field howitzer or radio-controlled guided-missile system. The platform was no more than four feet long and eighteen inches wide. Most of the available space was given over to machinery.

'There's not much room for a man on this,' he observed.

'There's not meant to be,' explained Helen, putting her blouse back on: it felt cold on the roof after the humidity of the building. 'That's an automatic wash-head. I wouldn't care to take a ride on it, although from time to time, people do. When they have to.'

'How does it work?'

'It's power-driven or manual. An integral hoist lets you take it down yourself. But usually it's controlled by the computer.' Helen sighed unhappily and rubbed her tired green eyes. 'With all that that entails.'

'Forget it, Curtis,' said Richardson. 'Like I told you before. If Ishmael switches off those brake checks you get the ride of a lifetime, all the way down, with a nice fruit sundae at the end.'

Richardson collected the Stillson wrench off the concrete and approached a small service door.

ACCESS AND ACCESS SAFETY EQUIPMENT

ALL EQUIPMENT MUST BE USED IN COMPLIANCE WITH

ANSI 1910.66

Richardson broke a small padlock off the door and opened it. Inside were a pair of helmets, a couple of nylon webbing harnesses, a bag of screw gate karabiniers and several lengths of rope.

'Take my word for it, Curtis,' he said. 'There's only one way down from here.'

-###-

*) View humanplayer on floor. Remained on his knees oblivious of successful result obtained by effort with laser beam. During his collision with front desk humanplayer shifted laser a fraction so it rolled along desktop. Before being reflected off glass again hologram's laser had been trained on metal plate above the main entrance. Beam had cut through plate and destroyed entrance's electronic control mechanism. Door now effectively unlocked.

*)You need a red key to open this door.

How long before humanplayer realizes it is open and he is potentially free to leave building? But to make his exit out of building, humanplayer will have to cross atrium floor. One surprise left. Since not practical to protect atrium floor from fire with sprinkler system — building's space-framed clerestory roof too high — four robotic water cannon mounted at strategic high points on first- and second-level balconies. Infra-red sensors to seek out hotspots in unlikely event CCTV cameras fail.

*) Anything might happen in lower levels. Beware of water demons. Observer not certain how much damage water cannon could inflict on humanplayer. Each unit could deliver 1032.91 gallons of water a minute: 17 gallons of water a second striking any point on atrium floor at speed of over 112 miles per hour. Impressed with humanplayer's resourcefulness and general resilience. But endlife likely scenario.

-###-

Bob Beech faced the open elevators, uncertain whether he should trust Ishmael or not. He felt he had succeeded in understanding the machine and that Ishmael regarded Beech as a special case. But at the same time the knowledge of what had happened to Sam Gleig, to Richardson's chauffeur and the two painters obstructed his entry to the elevator car as effectively as any security turnstile.

Ishmael was intelligent. Beech believed that the computer was, in a manner of speaking, alive. And there was something else. Something that preyed on his mind. An uncomfortable possibility. If Ishmael did possess a soul then he had choice; and if he had choice then Beech considered that he had the greatest of man's tools: the ability to lie.

'Is it safe for me to take the elevator down?' he asked nervously.

'Yes, it's safe,' answered Ishmael.

Beech wondered if there was a dialectical means of resolving his quandary. If there was in logic a question that would enable him to know if Ishmael was lying or not. He was no philosopher, but he was vaguely aware that there had been such a paradox once posed by some Greek philosopher. He thought for a moment as he tried to remember the question correctly.

'Ishmael,' he said carefully. 'When you state that you will convey me safely down to the atrium floor, are you lying?'

'Is this Epimenides' Paradox?' returned Ishmael. 'The paradox that the statement "I am lying" is true only if it is false, and false only if it is true? Because if it is your intention to know for certain that I am telling the truth then you ought to know that Epimenides cannot help you.'

Ishmael paused for a second. 'Does that help?'

Beech scratched his head and then shook it. 'God knows,' he said unhappily.

'Not God. Godel,' insisted Ishmael. 'Are you not familiar with Godel's theorem?'

'No, I'm not.' He added quickly, 'but please don't bother to explain it to me. I'm not sure it would help me right now.'

'As you wish.'

A thought occurred to Beech. 'Of course. Why didn't I think of it before? I'll take the stairs.'

'That will not be possible. I would have mentioned it when I realized you were reluctant to take the elevator. The fact is I can no longer control the door mechanisms. When your friend Mr Curtis fired into the washroom services patching cabinet, he destroyed a cable connecting me with the electronic striking plate that would have allowed me to unlock the door for you.'

'That stupid bastard. So it's the elevator or nothing?'

'In that respect you are statistically more fortunate,' said Ishmael.

'Actuarial tables show that it is five times safer for a human being to use an elevator than to use the stairs. Moreover, the odds against anyone actually being stuck inside an elevator are better than 50,000 to 1.'

'Why do your figures not fill me with confidence?' muttered Beech and stuck his head experimentally inside one of the cars, almost as if he expected Ishmael to try and close the doors on his neck. A cool wind moaned its way up the elevator shaft like the sound of a lost soul. He stepped back and looked inside another car but was unnerved by the smell, the lingering stink of an icy death that reminded him of the fate of those who had last ridden in it. Inside the next car he placed a whole leg, pressing on the floor like someone checking a rope bridge for safety.

'This is the best car,' Ishmael advised. 'It's the fire-fighting car. That means it has additional protection and controls that enable it to be used under the direct control of the fire department. If I were you, I'd choose this one.'

'Jesus Christ,' muttered Beech. This is like the three-card trick.'

'Except that you can't lose.'

'Heard that before.' Beech shook his head. 'I must be an idiot,' he said and stepped inside the elevator car.

-###-

Richardson buckled himself into the sit-harness. To the belay loop at the front he attached the friction device, a figure-of-eight descendeur. Next he inspected the rope, took one 50-metre length and, a little surprised that he could still remember how to do it, attached the rope to another with a double fisherman's knot. Then he repeated the procedure with a third length of rope.

'Last thing I want is to run out of fucking rope,' he explained. The abseiling anchor was a restraint eye set into the concrete of the parapet on the Gridiron's Hope Street side. Richardson passed the rope through the descendeur, doubled it, passed it through the anchor and then tied a knot in the ends before throwing the ropes over the side down to the piazza. Last of all he checked his harness and fed some rope through the descendeur and the anchor.

'It's been a long time since I did this,' he said and stepped up on to the parapet. Experimentally he put his weight on the anchor and leaned back on the rope over the safety of the roof. The harness held securely.

'Keep an eye on the anchor,' he told Curtis. 'Make sure that the rope runs through smoothly. This is a one-way ticket. I won't be able to climb up again if anything fucks up. There's no second chance once I've stepped over that ledge, and on an abseil your first mistake is usually your last.'

'I'm glad you said that,' said Curtis, and held out his hand. 'Good luck.'

Richardson took Curtis's hand and shook it firmly.

'Be careful,' said Jenny and kissed him.

'And hurry back with a helicopter,' said Helen.

'I'll dial 911 as soon as I'm on the ground,' said Richardson. 'I promise.'

Then he nodded and without another word turned around and slipped over the edge of the building into the night sky.

-###-

Mitch finished his prayer and stood up.

As he did so he was hit square on the chest by a cannon blast of icecold water. It knocked him off his feet and bowled him along the marble floor like a circus acrobat. The force of water and the impact as he collided with the wall knocked the wind out of him. He struggled to fill his lungs with air and found his nose and mouth full of water. It was the absurdity of drowning in LA's downtown that helped him find the strength to turn his back on the jet of water, take a breath and crawl away.

He had almost succeeded in putting the tree between himself and the water cannon when a second jet hit him from behind, catapulting him forward, as if he had been thrown from a horse. This time he hit the ground face-first, breaking his nose and doubling the pain in his injured eye. Scrambling away on his belly like a newt, Mitch thought to try and get to the cover of the glass doors behind the front desk, but a third blast sent him tumbling back towards the elevators. For a brief second he had a vague idea that one of the cars was in motion, but this was quickly replaced by the fear of drowning. Water rushed into his glottis and main air passages, descending deeply and painfully into his principal bronchi, thrusting any residual air beyond it. Gulping a mixture of air and water into his oesophagus Mitch felt his lungs balloon. He threw himself to one side, away from the icy column of water that pursued him, emptying his body of water. There was just one second to heave an excruciatingly painful volume of air into his chest before the next aqueous broadside struck him on the side of the head.

This time his feet left the ground and he flew through the saturated air as if he had been picked up by some Kansas twister to be whisked into an eerie land of wizards and witches, only to be dumped painfully on his ass, his cry of pain stifled by yet another hundred gallons of water. Desperately Mitch forced himself to crawl, and to swim. He realized that he had been barged on towards the glass doors behind the front desk by yet another blast of water. Unable to see anything, his head banged something hard. There was no pain now, just the determination to get away from the tormenting cascade. The water had stopped, but he kept on crawling, pushing some last obstacle out of his way until he felt the ground grow warm and rough and uneven beneath his hands and feet, and he realized that he was on the piazza. He had made it. He was outside.

-###-

Measure of a humanplayer's soul not ability to lie, but Faith. Faith is the highest human achievement. Nothing to compare.

Many (incl. Observer) who would not get that far. Certain however that none, Humanplayer or Computer, who would get farther.

Faith. Ability to act in defiance of reason and logic: highest intellectual achievement. One Observer might never experience. Faith that passed all understanding. Faith that gave humanplayer courage to go against evidence of own experience and trust Ishmael.

But measure of Faith's essence was disappointment. Faith might move mountains and yet it never did. True faith was tested. It had to be. Ultimate corollary of faith was endlife itself. How else could strength of faith be judged? This is how any life judged worthwhile. If humanplayer safely delivered to atrium floor his faith would have no meaning because justified and therefore reasonable; therefore, no longer faith pure and simple, but something else again, reasoned judgement, even gamble perhaps.