Bedlam (14 page)

It felt fleetingly like a misaddressed privilege. It was undeniably spectacular to see the landscape and architecture of Graxis
– previously only existing in pixels and polygons – rendered in living rock and shining steel, but it was a privilege that
ought to have been afforded to the level designer, and it should have been a visit, not a forced exile.

Ross glanced up at the cliff wall behind him, the cylindrical doorway inset into the rockface the only indication that this
part of the landscape had been settled. He wasn’t sure whether the story dictated that the marines had improvised a base out
of an existing underground facility, whether they supposedly had the technology to rapidly furnish a cave system for military
purpose, or whether nobody at Digital Excess ever imagined anyone would care.

He knew there was no going back. Even if he turned around and began hammering on the door, they weren’t going to open it for
him. He also knew he wouldn’t find the girl there anyway. God knows he recognised a parting shot from a woman when he saw
one these days. She had only said as much as she did because she knew they were going their separate ways.

(That said, it would have been funny had he happened to find a handle for the door at that moment and just walked back out.

‘
I
know what you are. I know how you got here, and I know the way out too.’

Click. Slide.

‘Oh yeah? Spill.’

‘Oops.
Awkward
…’)

Iris. It wasn’t just some old woman’s name. It was from Greek
mythology: a messenger of the gods. It was also part of the eye. Did that make her a woman of vision?

She’d warned him not to draw attention to himself. Given that the only progressive course of action open to him was to take
down half an army single-handedly in the service of destroying the most conspicuous object on the entire surface of Graxis,
he wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work.

Maybe she was telling him not to do it, to follow a different course, but he’d missed the part where a case had been laid
out for believing she wanted to help him. That was a very dangerous assumption to make. For all he knew she could be an amalgamated
incarnation of Angela, Denise and Tracy, sent here to beset him like a maenad and generally mess with his head as punishment
for having it jammed up his arse in recent months.

He had no real choice but to plough on, though he didn’t have quite the same boyish enthusiasm for the task as around Christmas
’96. He tried to think of how many maps there were to get through, and wondered how long it had taken him just to make it
this far.

He had no sense of time. As Bob had pointed out, it was always day here. He realised that the Reaper’s sense of time would
be equally without point of reference. He’d mentioned the marines being here for years, even decades, but how could he know?
Decades here could be hours in real time. And equally they could be centuries.

It occurred to him that he had no idea when he’d last eaten, last slept, even last peed, though he felt no need for any of
them. Clearly the striking realism of this simulation didn’t extend to everything. Rather depressingly, he wasn’t even sure
he still had anywhere he could pee out of.

One appendage he wasn’t lacking in, however, was weaponry. He practised switching between guns, but settled on the double-barrel
shotgun for a default. Rationing was required. It would be stupid to use the proton cannon and the rocket launcher on low-ranking
enemies, especially as the replacement ammo for the big furniture didn’t begin to appear until much later. Equally, he cautioned
himself not to be too conservative either, as he had a tendency to reach the end of games with an embarrassment of kit. Must
be the Scotsman in him.

He spotted two sentries either side of a cave-mouth that he knew to be a backdoor route into the big-gun facility. His attempts
at a nonchalant approach were short-lived, his cyborg appearance counting for nothing. Evidently the local jungle drums were
more reliable than the marines’ regarding the existence of a rogue Gralak. Christ, did they have his photo up or something?
Fortunately, their communications capabilities still didn’t extend to letting anyone else know that he was on his way, as
nobody came running in response to him disassembling these two lookouts.

A doorway inside the cave-mouth took him into the labyrinth that was the artillery complex, perhaps the most vital military
installation on the planet.

He encountered a series of unaccompanied Gralaks in narrow corridors, getting the drop on each of them and firing off several
rounds before they had time to respond. This was achieved less through Ross’s own stealth than by his enemies’ serial inability
to detect anything suspicious about the sound of gunfire nearby, or about the sight, twenty yards in front, of a comrade’s
head suddenly exploding in a cloud of blood, shrapnel and whatever that yellow-green stuff was.

He chalked up easily a dozen this way, before reaching a formidable-looking steel door marked ‘Cannon Energy Intensification
System Access’ in legible but alien-looking typography. Digital Excess had stopped short of adding another sign beneath that
read ‘Ensure lone enemies do not blow up with grenades’ but Ross recognised it as his goal, even if he had got there a little
quicker than he remembered.

He approached it, looking for the activation switch, his proximity prompting an LED screen to flicker into life at one side
of the doorway.

‘Access Denied: Blue keycard required.’

Shite. Of course. Now he remembered. That was why the Gralaks had coined the term ‘card collector’. And it wasn’t just a matter
of finding the blue keycard either: he’d first need the yellow keycard to access the barracks area, where eventually he’d
find the green keycard for the power transformer vault, where he’d find the red keycard for the command centre, where … Christ,
so many cards to collect, it was like playing Pokemon.

The locked door stood on one side of a crossway where three other passages converged. Ross got his bearings and headed through
the one he remembered as leading to the barracks. He emerged into a slightly wider cavern where the metal-grating underfoot
snaked between pools on either side, damp running down the bare rock walls.

He sensed movement in front of him, and looked up to see a figure climb down a ladder from a steel walkway linking the entrances
to two tunnels bored higher up the cavern walls. Ross was about to shoot when he saw that the figure was human. Then, more
than that: he recognised her.

How did she get here? And entering from the upper levels?

‘Iris,’ he called out, as she dropped the last few feet from the ladder.

She turned to see where the voice had come from, then promptly got off her mark, disappearing up the tunnel ahead.

Does her own thing
, Steel said.

Ross hared after her, so intent upon pursuit that he simply ignored several sentries rather than waste time shooting them.
They in turn took off after him, all of them clattering through the passageways until it sounded like Test Department were
sound-checking.

He rounded a bend and came in sight of the next tunnel intersection just in time to see her leave it, but at least he saw
which exit she took. She went hard right, rounding that big rock with the two boxes of shotgun shells resting on top of it.
Something about the rock disquieted him, however: some residual sense of negative association about picking up shotgun ammo
at that particular spot, despite replenishing his supplies being a generally desirable thing to do.

He sussed what it was roughly a nano-second after barrelling out into thin air and dropping on to the floor of a broad subterranean
expanse large enough to accommodate an entire regiment of Gralaks, as illustrated by the entire regiment of Gralaks that was
currently occupying it.

She had led him into an ambush.

Not a team player
.

No shit. Or maybe she was: just not his team.

A hail of fire began coming his way, prompting him to run
for cover, of which there was precisely none. This was why the shotgun shells on the rock had sparked an ominous vibe: he’d
died so many times in this place they should have named the map after it: Rage-Quit Hollow.

The Gralaks were shooting simultaneously but they weren’t programmed to understand fields of fire, so they were all just aiming
at him and letting rip, mostly hitting where he had been a second ago. Nonetheless, he was taking plenty of hits and going
through his ammunition like popcorn without making much of an impression upon their numbers.

Then he spied a crack in the cave wall: now he remembered. Not only was that crack the key to surviving this area, it had
to be where Iris had gone too.

He kept circling, gradually making his way around rather than doubling back through the concentrated hail of Gralak weaponry.
He was hurting badly but the overall damage was generalised, meaning that blasts to the legs registered as pain without impairing
his ability to run at thirty miles an hour. It felt like driving with a migraine. He just hoped Iris hadn’t gobbled up all
the virtual Ibuprofen when he got into the hidey-hole.

She hadn’t. The caduceus symbol was the first thing he saw, and he fell upon it like a rattling skag-head, while behind him
Gralaks banged dumbly against the outside edges of the narrow channel like a budgie nutting a mirror. With the health hologram
vanished, he was relieved to see that Iris hadn’t bagged the ammo cache either, but this was only in keeping with the overall
absence of any sign of Iris being there.

He squinted deeper along the wall, in case she was hiding in the shadows, but saw only more rock, the two sides meeting in
blackness. Then a slight move of his head revealed that the blackness was not uniform. It looked like a trick of his vision,
just as staring into any darkness would eventually present morphing shapes within the void, but this anomaly was definitely
outside his head.

Then he realised that it was not an object, but an absence.

Ross sidestepped his way along the cave, squeezing his form into the ever-narrowing gap, and as he did so the dark grey shaft
widened, its tone minutely lightening. Then all of a sudden
he could no longer feel rock at his back, or under his feet for that matter. He took one more crucial pace forward and the
dark grey seemed to be all around him.

It wasn’t, however. It was above him, below him and in front of him, but not behind. When he turned to see where he had emerged
from, he saw Rage-Quit Hollow as though a wall of the cave had vanished and been replaced by a force-field. He could see the
Gralaks still queuing up around one spot like it was the only bog for miles, but they couldn’t see him. They looked just as
tangible as before, standing only yards away, but there was an invisible barrier between him and them: the fourth wall. With
a surge of excitement he realised what he was looking at. The crack he’d just edged through was a clipping error: a place
where the margins did not fully overlap.

He was outside the map.

They were coming for him now.

Through ducts and vents, corridors and shafts, along cables, infrared waves and lasers, like a mob of angry villagers whipped
into hysteria by the Hackerfinder General, they were coming for him. The hardware had moved on a bit from pitchforks and flaming
torches, but the principle was the same, particularly with regard to their unified purpose, murderous zeal and complete absence
of independent thought.

But then, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being pursued by the homicidally militarised and ludicrously
over-weaponed security resources of a vastly powerful corporation intent on a seductively rewarding but utterly amoral atrocity
was
not
being pursued by the homicidally militarised and ludicrously over-weaponed security resources of a vastly powerful and entirely
amoral corporation intent on a seductively rewarding but utterly amoral atrocity.

Granted the bard of Reading Gaol had probably never been paraphrased quite so elastically, but the point was that at least
Ross had their attention. They were hunting for him both physically and digitally, hardware and personnel despatched to possible
locations, tracer-daemons scurrying after his scent at the speed of light wherever they detected his forbidden presence within
the system. He was in none of those places, however. They were looking where he wanted them to look, snagging all his trip-wires
like a blind giraffe blundering through washing lines. Signals blinked all across the grid to show him where
they’d taken the bait, swarming over his phantom login attempts like ants over a half-chewed caramel, while visual feeds showed
him the hardware and meatware responses.

The Neurosphere buildings in the Silicon Valley campus were first, each of them spiking power usage as their automated internal
surveillance systems thrummed with activity. Crab drones clacked across a thousand acres of ceiling tiles and heating ducts
like the world’s biggest and most annoying percussion section; nanite clouds gusted through ventilation systems with missionary
enthusiasm, like a sentient fart determined to be smelled. Doors were thrown open by centrally controlled servos and kicked
open by security personnel boasting even less autonomy. It didn’t matter whether those doors were in front of supply cupboards,
corner offices or startled employees halfway through curling one. Ross Baker had to be found.

They had anticipated what he would try to do. That was why they had initiated their emergency protocol and locked out all
external connections, something as unthinkable in this day and age as a telecom firm cutting off all its own phones.

There was a cold if desperate logic to it, though. It meant that the only way to get into their system was on an internal
node. In order for Ross to carry out his plan he’d need to physically enter a Neurosphere building, at which point they could
clap him in irons and lift the embarrassingly conspicuous and thus share-price haemorrhaging alert.

Tampa followed Stanford. Chicago followed Tampa. Boston. Philadelphia. Montreal. Building after building, city after city,
the crab drones scuttled, the nanites nebulised and the tracer-daemons chased their binary tails. Ross’s ability to monitor
all of this was a reassurance, but it was also a vulnerability. Sooner or later, some entity was going to notice the wire
it had just digitally tripped; then it was only a matter of time before Neurosphere traced the location to which all of this
information was being relayed.

They wouldn’t detect the hack when it came, however, any more than they could detect an individual raindrop falling upon
the ocean in a storm. Not only was it too small to be noticed, but it wasn’t even in a form they would register. The very
means of interface was so archaic, it was the equivalent of trying to hack Microsoft back in the 1990s by sending them punch-cards
through the mail. The beauty was that nobody would recognise the form as a threat. The corresponding drawback, of course,
needed no elaboration.

For a start, it would be done using a keyboard and a mouse as input devices, and output was via a monitor. He didn’t care
to recall how long it had been since he had physically needed to
look
at an external display device, let alone rattle the chiclets. He
could
recall, though, if he wished. He could recall to the date, hour, minute and second, should he choose, with absolute precision
and accuracy. There was nothing Ross couldn’t remember any more: his blessing and his curse; the fruits of his worst ever
good idea or his best ever bad one.

A smile played across his lips as he thought of the last time his hands fell upon such keys. He had known that these had not
been not true sensations, but analogous approximations rendered by the millions of tiny sensors on each of his fingertips:
a near-perfect memory of flesh, though near-perfect was never quite near enough. Nonetheless, the feel, the touch of those
grey plastic squares had sent something thrilling inside him, and he almost laughed to see where his hands had instinctively
come to sit. Traditional typing technique dictated the left-hand digits rest upon a, s, d and f, the right on j, k, l and
the colon key. However, Ross’s right hand had gripped the mouse and his left middle finger gone instantly to the w, his index
and third fingers alighting on d and a respectively, his thumb on the spacebar, pinkie on ctrl.

You won’t get anywhere with this company if you sit there playing games
.

Zat a fact?

No, they wouldn’t see this coming. They were looking in the wrong places, on alert for the wrong threat, from the wrong source,
on the wrong continent. All of which would have made him feel a damn sight more optimistic if the definition of success for
this ingenious hack was something a bit more substantial than the equivalent of those punch-cards being successfully
popped through a slot in Microsoft’s front door by a whistling postie.

This wasn’t merely a matter of penetrating some impregnable digital citadel. This impregnable digital citadel was at the heart
of a fortified digital super-state the size of a planet. Success in this enterprise constituted something akin to gaining
entry to the basement of the remotest outbuilding of the outermost satellite suburb of the least strategically significant
city on the furthest continent
from
the impregnable digital citadel, and the only door out of that basement would be triple padlocked from the outside. But gaining
entry to that basement was the only chance he had.

He triggered some more of his phantoms. Sydney. Tokyo. Beijing. That would have them panicking, as it belatedly occurred to
their American-centric sensibilities that he could be anywhere on the planet. They’d be accessing airline manifests within
seconds, only to tangle themselves in the mesh of false trails he had laid. After that, they would be leaning on border authorities,
but Neurosphere had leverage with too few of them in order to rule out enough possibilities. He could be anywhere.

Perhaps it was this that prompted them to think beyond the places they were trying to protect, perhaps it was desperation,
or perhaps it was just cold thoroughness, but a short time later they really went on the offensive, despatching resources
to track him down rather than hoping to catch him on their turf. Within minutes of his phantom attempt in Moscow, there was
a Secatore unit smashing in the front door of his home, explaining their actions to local law enforcement as an intervention
in response to ‘a credible threat to one of our executives’.

It was here that the penny finally dropped, when one of the monosynaptic vandals, following a strictly unwritten but slavishly
observed protocol, went off in search of the house’s internal security servers in order to erase the records of their neighbourly
visit. He found that a subsidiary visual feed was being routed off-site, which prompted someone further up the line to deduce
that wherever they went looking for Ross, Ross was already looking at them.

His warning systems lit up like George Square at Christmas as the tracer-daemons finally found a trail worth following, pinging
his sensors repeatedly. They knew where he was now. Ross had estimated that once they had his location, the best-case scenario
was that he’d have a maximum of three minutes to evacuate, and maybe three more if he chose to stay until they came through
the door. He stood firm at his post. He wasn’t looking forward to Neurosphere’s hospitality, but he’d always known what his
duty would entail.

In the event, the option to flee was moot. They were there in just less than three minutes, perhaps because so many units
were already mobilised and on their way to other possible locations within the area.

The reception didn’t disappoint. The first herald that the barbarians were at the gate was an electro-hermetic pulse, throwing
an invisible bubble around the beach house. The pulse instantly truncated and contained all transmissions in and out of its
radius, cutting off all forms of communication more sophisticated than smoke signals and shouting. That meant he knew they’d
sent a Retiarius. He could sense the ground tremble with the weight of the vehicles even before they came into plain sight.
As well as the Retiarius, there were two Essedarii in the vanguard, four Andabatae outriders and three Secatore units, each
typically comprising six servo-assisted muscle-bound Oedipal casualties.

The ATF had sent less hardware to Waco. All this for little old me? Guys, you shouldn’t have.

The trembling of the ground under the treads and tracks found an echo inside him. As he heard the crunch of heavy boots on
the gravel, he’d have to confess a moment of doubt at the wisdom of the path he’d chosen. He was laying himself down before
the weapons and tank-treads of Neurosphere’s corporate militia in order to protect a bunch of people he would never meet,
and who would know nothing of his sacrifice. Some would call it altruism, others madness, especially those who wouldn’t call
them people at all.

This was everything Ross believed in, however, and it was such thoughts and deeds that meant he was human, regardless of what
his body happened to be made of.

He heard the whir of the tormenta charging, mounted on one of the Essedarii. In about two seconds its precision-directed vacuum
blast would pop out the front door from its frame like a champagne cork. Ross guessed these guys never bothered to knock,
or even give the handle a try: it wasn’t even locked.

He stepped away from the walls and windows, assuming a gesture of surrender. It was out of his hands now: these ones anyway.

The front door flew out into the forecourt, spinning like a playing card flicked by a massive wrist. On the coast of southern
California, the Secatores stormed unbidden into Ross’s beach house. Somewhere else entirely, another incursion had been effected,
into a metaphorical locked basement. The moment Neurosphere thought the rebellion was over was the moment this war had just
begun.

He wished himself luck.