Bedlam (11 page)

He was aiming the gesture at the sky, as though offering it to
the gods, when he realised that no matter where he was, the player’s viewpoint was still that from the card collector’s helmet.

A line of text then appeared before his eyes, eyes that like the rest of his body this time remained free to go where they
wished.

You got it, Ross thought. Pity you didn’t go into the multi-player settings and amend the default name. Who the hell are you?
And how can somebody be running scripts and cheat codes but not know it’s T for talk?

The card collector gave him a wave with his right hand.

With a measure of embarrassment, Ross very belatedly deduced what all that aggressive taunting had really been about the first
time they crossed paths. The card collector had flipped him the bird, thrust his crotch and given him the ‘come ahead’ stance.
Ross understood now that the player had been randomly pressing gesture keys, trying to find the one for a friendly wave in
order to convey his intentions. He had even hit it at one point, but perhaps in his frantic efforts failed to note which key
had prompted the desired effect, and at the time Ross had interpreted it as deeply sarcastic.

The card collector had been trying to hail him all along. This meant that even before his rescue of the prisoners, the player
knew Ross wasn’t a Gralak.

Finally, a chance to get some answers. The problem was how to ask the questions. Ross took the end of the rocket launcher
and began scratching in the dust:
How do I get out of here?

He looked up to make sure the player could make out the writing. The card collector stood there unmoving. A good sign, Ross
reckoned: hands on keyboard, rather than controlling movement.

A minute or so passed with still no movement and still no text. It was going to be a long response. He just hoped he could
read it all before it vanished. Shit, if only he could tell the guy to break it up into short lines.

A minute or so became five, maybe ten. Ross waved his arms in front of the card collector, then pointed again at the message.

Okay, not maybe ten; easily ten.

No. Please, no.

But Ross knew what he was looking at.

AFK: away from keyboard. The player wasn’t there any more.

Fuck. Piss. Bollocks.

He really shouldn’t have got his hopes up. The way things were going since getting up this morning – Christ, was it even morning?
– chances were the person he imagined might be his saviour was actually some ten-year-old kid who’d just been told to get
off the computer because Daddy needed it to look up porn.

Looked like he’d have to take his chances with the space marines after all, but at least he’d be tooled up from now on.

He walked across to the bobbing, spinning arsenals, starting with the GTF and working his way down that familiar array. He
could remember the keybinds for each one, starting with 0 for the GTF, 9 for the proton cannon, 8 for the plasma rifle … Each
hologram he stepped into caused the device he was holding to transform, and it was only as he reached the last that it occurred
to him to ponder how one switched back to the preceding, more powerful weapon without the use of a keyboard.

The word ‘Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!’ echoed all around the canyon, still reverberating as he clutched the crappy single-barrelled
shotgun and trudged off huffily towards the hidden base.

The first indication something was wrong had been the sight of Zac Michaels in the R&D building, an area of Neurosphere’s
vast California campus that Ross wasn’t sure the oily bastard could have found on the map. Michaels so seldom ventured beyond
the glass towers of the central HQ building that Ross could go weeks at a time without seeing him in person, a state of affairs
that he knew both parties considered satisfactory. He’d turned up with a small but elite delegation of personnel, including
chief programmer Venkat Amritraj, whom Zac was grooming for Ross’s position whenever he finally retired or whenever the CEO
could engineer some other means of getting him out of the door.

They had swept in and cleared the entire third floor without giving anybody any notice, never mind the courtesy of an explanation.
They posted Andabatae units on the doors, the faceless sentinels preventing Ross from even being able to ask the intruders
what they were doing commandeering a facility he was nominally in charge of. Ross had called security and been told all he
needed to know in just three words: Special Projects Division.

SPD was Zac Michaels’ contemptuously transparent way of bypassing Ross’s jurisdiction: a research and development team that
was completely unaccountable to the head of Research and Development. It might strike most people – and perhaps most shareholders
– as a pointless duplication of efforts and waste of resources, but anything that marginalised Ross was worth every cent as
far as Zac was concerned. If SPD developed something independently of his department, then Ross had no say over its future,
and the more projects that was true of, the closer Zac could nudge him towards the door.

Ross had just shrugged his shoulders, left them to it and gone off to grab some lunch. He was past getting steamed up about
Zac’s little power games. He could see them for what they were: retaliatory strikes launched long after the battle that really
mattered was lost. It was probably the only battle with Michaels Ross could ever claim to have won, but perhaps that had made
it all the harder for the boss man to take. Zac liked to believe that he was always bound for the top of Neurosphere’s corporate
ladder, no matter what route it took. Thus, down through the decades since their Stirling days, it had always chafed with
him that his rise was widely perceived by others as being on the back of Ross’s success.

Ross hadn’t given SPD’s territorial pissing much more thought until he got back from lunch and tried to check the error logs
from the build he’d been working on that morning. That was when he found he couldn’t access his own monitoring systems.

His first thought was that it could it be a maintenance outage, but the rest of the company systems were online, and he was
able to access other areas of the network. He tried a second time, and once more his login credentials were refused.

He sent a query up the chain and a few moments later a message appeared in his field of vision.

‘Security update,’ it stated. ‘Administration of these systems has been reallocated. If you require access, please contact
Special Projects Division.’

Who will tell me to fuck off like they did on the third floor an hour ago, he thought.

Ross got busy, making use of a few backdoors he had set up for precisely this sort of eventuality. More than anything else,
he now wanted to know specifically what they were denying him access to.

It took him about twenty minutes to uncover what he needed. What he found was not good.

He learned that six weeks ago SPD had requisitioned all archive material pertaining to the development of the early Simulacron
system. This was going back decades; it was practically archaeology. What could possibly be interesting them about redundant
simulation models that had been superseded a hundred times since?

Then he realised there was only one possible answer.

Cirrus Nine.

His guilty secret. His Faustian price. His portrait of Dorian Gray.

His responsibility.

Frantically he searched deeper into the logs to try and build up a picture of what they had been delving into. He discovered
that three weeks ago they had made several fresh uploads, and earlier today they had shut down all monitoring, placing it
in isolation: no communications in or out. It had been ticking over quietly all this time in its own secret, separate corner
of the cloud. Somehow Michaels had remembered it, and realised the same thing as had just occurred to Ross. It was pre-Act:
everything in it was unregistered. Right now the DC legislation didn’t cover it.

To Michaels, it was a gold mine, though, as with any other gold mine, extraction was not a straightforward process. That was
why SPD were trying their hand at a little reverse engineering.

The one thing Ross didn’t get was why they had locked him out of the sectors monitoring his new build. That, as far as he
could see, had nothing to do with this. What was he missing?

Then, through the glass, he saw the Secatores marching down the corridor, and at the same moment several company communiqués
buzzed angrily into his field.

He had just been served.

The messages informed him that he was in multiple violations of Neurosphere employee code 774: unauthorised access to protected
system sectors. The millisecond his hack was detected, the documentation had been automatically generated and despatched,
informing him that all his access privileges were suspended pending investigation of the incident. Not only would he be unable
to so much as check his messages, he would be barred from setting foot inside any Neurosphere premises.

As he got to his feet and gestured that he’d come quietly, he conducted his own little internal inquiry, angry and confused
about being caught. Had he been careless? Neglected to cover his tracks? No. That intrusion shouldn’t have been detectable
unless …

Unless they were specifically monitoring for a particular type of traffic emanating from this location. That was why they’d
locked him out of his new build as well as the ancient Simulacron data. It was to pique his curiosity and tempt him to run
a hack. Michaels had set a trap, and he’d walked right into it.

Fuck.

Cirrus Nine was wide open, defenceless, and he had just been taken out of the equation. He had lived with this secret guilt
for decades, but if by further consequence he had facilitated Michaels’ atrocity, he’d never forgive himself. He had to do
something and, weighing one guilt against another, he knew what that must be.

Ross knew there was only one course of action that had any hope of success. There was one person who could pull this off.

He wasn’t going to be happy about it.

Nor was he going to be asked: Ross wasn’t going to give him the choice. But then, that was why they were his responsibility,
why he owed them this.
None of them
had been given a choice.

‘I signed up the day after they burned Toronto, man. This is my third tour. I was part of the landing force that was first
into Epsilon Colony. Quarter of a million people taken, but what they did to the ones they couldn’t use … I’ll never forget
what I saw that day. Never. Shit like that stays with you your whole life, but it makes you stronger too. Some signed up because
they wanna open a can of whup-ass on the Gralaks, but I ain’t here for payback. Freedom, man. Democracy. We’re here to liberate
Graxis, make sure something like Epsilon never happens again. It’s all about duty, man. I got a duty to this here flag that’s
on my uniform, because it stands for something I believe in with all my heart.’

The marines were doing Ross’s head in. He’d only been inside the base an hour but he was already making plans for a lone campaign.
If there were answers to be found by completing the game, he’d do it solo, same as always. The problem was he couldn’t get
out of the hidden base except by going back the way he came. There was, just where he expected to find it, a big airlocked,
super-secure passageway leading out in the direction of the Gralaks’ gigantic artillery battery, but it was locked and he
couldn’t get anybody to open it for him. Whenever he asked, they just stared at him like he was nuts and explained how dangerous
it was beyond the walls, stressing that the door was airlocked and super-secure for a reason.

Eventually he remembered that the door didn’t open until it was triggered by an event in the game: the base’s embattled commander,
Lieutenant Hawk, sending out the solitary hero on a suicide mission to take down the big gun. There were two obstacles to
this. The first was that leading this assault was a task
assigned to the player, not to some rogue Gralak who was never in the script. And the second, perhaps even more problematic,
was that it turned out that Lieutenant Hawk led the ill-judged escort mission just outside the base and was wiped out in the
ensuing unpleasantness. With the player still standing outside, invulnerable in godmode and quite possibly doing his homework
or watching Nostalgia Critic videos on YouTube, there was little imminent chance of Hawk being resurrected by a reload.

Consequently Ross was stuck here in jarhead hell, unable to proceed either in the game or in his quest to get out of it. He
certainly wasn’t going to get any information from this shower. He could converse with them, so in that respect their AI was
decades more advanced than in the original
Starfire
, but they were totally in character. They knew nothing beyond the realm of the game, and their worldview was as cheesy as
it was anachronistic. They kept telling him about the Gralaks’ destruction of Toronto, something he remembered from the back
story in the thirty-two-page manual that came along with the CD in an unnecessarily large glossy cardboard box. It was as
close as the game’s developers could bring themselves to depicting a massive terrorist attack on American soil. Something
bad could happen to Earth, but it wouldn’t happen to America. And despite it not happening to America, the Yanks would be
the ones who dutifully came to the rescue: defeating the tyrants, overthrowing their regime and leaving instant stability
and prosperity in their wake, like they always did.

It was the distant future and yet the late Nineties at the same time. He chastised himself for an unworthy desire to ask whether
any of them had been to the World Trade Center recently.

It was a big relief when he was told to suit up for some action, as it meant no more talking. As well as having to swallow
down a nauseating mix of machismo and apple pie, it had been incumbent upon Ross to improvise some intel regarding his inadvertent
infiltration of the Gralaks’ operations. He had never been a good liar, so he felt cringey about every word that came out
of his mouth, even though he was only talking bollocks about a bunch of mindless NPCs to an equally uncritical audience of
other mindless NPCs. Bedlam, the self-conscious cyborg: it could be a new internet meme.

‘It’s time we got a look at what you can do,’ said the base’s commanding officer, Sergeant Steel.

(So far that was a Steel, a Stone, a Raven, a Hawk, a Blade and a Bolt. He wondered why Digital Excess never went the whole
way and had a Sergeant Rock Hardcock or a Lieutenant Rod Throbber. Perhaps 3D Realms had already copyrighted them.)

Sergeant Steel held out a small device towards him, too compact to be any kind of gun. Ross was reluctant to accept it in
case it replaced the shotgun he’d been stuck with, but perhaps it counted as an inventory item instead. Notwithstanding the
fact that he didn’t know how to access his inventory either, he tentatively extended his left hand, palm up, for Steel to
place the object on to.

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t accurately answer that question, but I can tell you what it does. It opens a portal to a place we call the training
arena. This device and the facility it accesses use technology that we are nowhere near to comprehending. We think it was
built by the card collectors: that’s what the Gralaks call them. You know who I’m talking about?’

‘Card collectors – plural?’

‘Yeah. We don’t know who they are, but when one of them blows through here, it’s a bad day to be a Gralak. We assume this
uses some kind of teleportation technology, because the places you reach via these portals are not in this base. They may
not even be on this planet. It’s been suggested the arena might just be a simulation, but it feels mighty real to me.’

‘I know the feeling,’ Ross muttered.

‘In the training arena, we have the same powers as the card collectors: we can use their weapons, we can repair damage like
magic, and when we die, we just come back.’

It looked like a small data tablet or a mobile phone in that it was operated via a touch-screen, but it differed in that there
was no backing. Ross didn’t appreciate this until he was holding it, as the device had been refracting the grey-green of Steel’s
fatigues. Now he could see that it was like a screen without any visible means of projection or processing: no LEDs, no circuits,
just a rectangular piece of transparent material.

As soon as he touched it, it came to life, a menu of options appearing, awaiting his navigation. He was about to start geeking
out, then reminded himself that it was not future technology any more than were the forces that caused the weapons and health
power-ups to levitate. It was just a piece of code, a pretty front-end on an in-game interface.

‘Looks pretty cool, don’t it?’ said Steel, observing Ross’s approving smile.

‘Yes,’ Ross agreed, as it was easier than explaining what he was really smiling at.

The menu was so familiar, he hadn’t just grinned; he’d almost laughed.

It was the deathmatch maps: the multiplayer menu, complete with configurable game types: free-for-all, duel, team DM, CTF.

Wait. How could there be AI entities from the single-player game entering the multiplayer deathmatch mode?

‘So you want me to go in there and fight … who? Some marines?’

‘No. From what I heard, that wouldn’t be much of a challenge for you. Got an opponent you might find more taxing. Choose a
place and we’ll see you on the other side.’

Duel, then: one on one. Choose a place? No-brainer: The Edge of Sanity. Claustrophenia was a smaller, tighter map, ideal for
duel mode, but The Edge of Sanity was the quintessential
Starfire
DM venue, its environs as familiar to Ross as any house he’d lived in.

He pressed the transparent tablet to confirm his selection, then saw a matrix of light beams project from it, forming a proportional
rectangle a few feet in front. It shimmered and swam, clearly a doorway of some kind, but an opaque one, revealing nothing
of what lay beyond. As he moved towards it, the angle of the beams emanating from the device became correspondingly obtuse,
as though the tablet was not projecting the doorway, but being drawn into it.

He didn’t have to step through it: the moment the tablet became flush with the portal, he experienced an accelerated version
of the sensations that followed his killing the card collector. He was aware of everything swirling and dissolving into white
light, then the spectrum split again and he was standing somewhere else.

Unlike before, he was still in possession of the objects he’d been holding, and the tablet in his left hand was now showing
the classic in-game stats read-out. It showed his score at zero, a countdown to match-start and a list of players in spectator
mode, headed by Sergeant Steel. Ross didn’t know where they were viewing from: perhaps their own tablets. They wouldn’t be
here physically, but then chances were neither was he. He had merely been transferred from one simulated location to another.
But if that was the case, why hadn’t he felt a similar transition when he entered the hidden base? In the original game, it
was a new level, a different map, triggered when you dropped down inside the big drainage sluice; yet, he belatedly realised,
he had experienced no break in continuity.

The countdown had fifty-five seconds to run. He was still the only active player in the arena, but he guessed the sergeant
would soon change that, so he’d better ready up. He had to stash the tablet somewhere, but there were no pockets in these
trendy metal jeans. He dropped his left hand to his side, and the mere gesture of pulling it from his line of vision caused
it to vanish. In a panic that it had just gone the way of his evaporated arsenal, he held his hand up again, and was relieved
to see the tablet reappear. When it did, it bore a message from the sergeant.

But his name had already blinked up on the updated stats read-out. Ross guessed he was supposed to be worried, but he knew
exactly what he was up against:

The Reaper.

He was a data construct, a piece of AI code, but he was practically family. He had been Ross’s sparring partner for hours
and hours in his teens, the tutor who taught him the rudiments of deathmatch in a bedroom in Stirling.

The Reaper was a bot: an offline multiplayer opponent that was not part of the original release of
Starfire
, but written by a fan: one of countless modifications that were testament to the game’s popularity among hackers. This particular
mod was hugely popular among two constituencies: those who were pinging so far from the nearest multiplayer server that taking
on live opponents was like playing postal chess; and Brits.

Yes, Ross reflected, BT probably hoped we’d all cast those days from our minds now that we were used to our 24/7 broad-band
connections, but he would neither forget nor forgive. In fact, he thought it should be on the curriculum at business school
as an object lesson in long-term vision being obscured by short-term greed:

If he was being honest, Ross would have to admit that his enduring bitterness on the subject was more than a little tinged
with guilt. It was his initial late-night forays into online
Quake
and
Starfire
that accounted for an all-time-record phone bill that precipitated the argument between his parents that signalled the beginning
of the end. It started with his dad losing it at Ross, Mum wading in to protect him, and then it became about everything else.
It got uglier and more bitter with every thrust and parry, so many things said that could not be unsaid, the crossing of lines
from which both parties understood their relationship could not recover.

Deep down, Ross knew it wasn’t his fault. Deep down he knew that the snow was already piled up and waiting, but it hurt like
hell to know that he had been the one whose shout caused the avalanche. If it hadn’t been the phone bill, it would have been
something else, he could see that now, but not when he was ringside for the last days of their marriage.

It wasn’t BT’s fault either, but they were still cunts.

In the times that followed, his internet use was strictly self-rationed. He would check his emails only a couple of times
a day, and cache a load of web pages for offline reading later. And for deathmatch, salvation came on the
PC Magazine
cover disk, with its ‘multiplayer maps and mods extravaganza’. There was the Reaper for
Starfire
, and equivalents for most other shooters too.

He and the bots duked it out night after night, a basic training that served him well when his student days came along and,
with them, easier net access, a burgeoning variety of servers and eventually clan leagues. No matter where he went, the battle-grounds
remained the same. From his fractured family home to his halls of residence, to his first shared flat, when the work was done
and the books tidied away, those places were always waiting for him: Scorn, Claustrophenia, The Abandoned Base, Skywalk, The
Warehouse, Stronghold Opposition, and, of course, The Edge of Sanity.