Bedlam (2 page)

He had no idea what year it was, or even what century. Chances were everyone he ever knew was gone. There might be nothing
in the world he would recognise.

The big doorway opened obligingly as he approached, its two halves sliding diagonally apart to reveal another corridor, brighter
than he’d seen before. Light appeared to be flashing and shimmering beyond a curve up ahead, and with nobody to observe him,
he ran towards it.

‘Oh,’ he said.

The source of the flashing and shimmering on the far side of the passageway turned out to be a huge window opposite, easily
twelve feet high by twenty feet wide, through which Ross could see what was outside this building. He hadn’t thought he could
ever look into another pane of glass and see a more unsettling sight than the one that had met him only a few minutes ago
when he glimpsed his own reflection. Clearly it was not a day to be making assumptions.

The first thing he noticed was the sky, which was a shade of purple that he found disturbing. It wasn’t so much that there
was anything aesthetically displeasing about the colour itself; it was, to be fair, a quite regally luxuriant purple: deep,
textured and vibrant. It was more to do with his knowledge of astronomy and subsequent awareness that, normally, the sky he
looked up at owed its colour to the shorter wavelengths and greater proportion of blue photons in the type of light emitted
by the planet’s primary energy source. What was disturbing about this particular hue was not merely that it could not be any
sky on Earth, but that it could not be any sky beneath its sun.

Worse, its predominantly purple colouration wasn’t even the most distressing thing about the view through the window: that
distinction went to the fact that it was full of burning aircraft. There were dozens of them up there, possibly hundreds,
stretching out all the way to the horizon. It looked to be some kind of massive extraterrestrial expeditionary landing force,
and its efforts were proving successful in so far as landing was defined as reaching terra firma: all of the craft were certainly
managing that much. However, controlled descents executed without conflagration and completed by vessels comprising
fewer than a thousand flaming pieces were, quite literally, a lot thinner on the ground.

Ross felt that inrush again, that sense of energy being channelled very specifically to one source, then heard the great boom
once more, and this time he could see its source. It was a colossal artillery weapon, sited at least a mile away, but evidently
powered by the facility in which he was standing. Its twin muzzles were each the size of an oil tanker, jutting from a dome
bigger than St Paul’s Cathedral, and its effect on the invasion force was comparable to a howitzer trained on a flock of geese.
Each mighty blast devastated another host of unfortunate landing craft, sending debris spinning and hurtling towards the surface.

He had no sense of how long he had been standing there: it could have been thirty seconds and it could have been ten times
that. The spectacle was horrifyingly mesmeric, but the car-crash fascination was not purely vicarious. Everything Ross saw
had unthinkable consequences for himself. Instead of being merely lost in time, he now had no idea which planet he was even
on.

He could see buildings in the distance, only visible because they were so large. The architecture was unquestionably alien,
as was the very idea of building vast, isolated towers in an otherwise empty desert landscape. And still something inside
him felt like he belonged here, or at least that his environment was not as alien as it should have been.

‘It’s an awe-inspiring sight, isn’t it?’

When Ross heard the voice speak softly from only a few feet behind him, he deduced rather depressingly that he must no longer
have a digestive system, as this could be the only explanation for why he didn’t shit himself.

He turned around and found himself staring at another brutally haphazard melange of flesh and metal, one he decided was definitely
the estate model. The newcomer was a foot taller at least, and more heavily armoured, particularly around the head, leaving
his face looking like a lost little afterthought. He looked so imposingly heavy, Ross could imagine him simply crashing through
anything less than a reinforced floor, and couldn’t picture walls proving much of an impediment either. Wherever he wanted
to be, he was getting there, and whatever he wanted, Ross was giving him it.

‘Yes,’ Ross agreed meekly, amazed to hear his own voice still issuing from whatever he had become.

‘You could lose yourself in it,’ the big guy went on. His tone was surprisingly soft, perhaps one used to being listened to
without the need to raise it, but not as surprising as his accent, which was a precise if rather theatrical received pronunciation.
Clearly, as well as advanced technology, this planet also had some very posh schools.

‘Perhaps even forget what you were supposed to be doing. Such as joining up with your unit and getting on with fighting off
the invasion, what with there being a war on and all.’

His voice remained quiet but Ross could hear the sternest of warnings in his register. There was control there too, no expectation
of needing to ask twice. Very bizarrely, Ross was warming to him. Maybe it was the programming, same as whatever was making
him feel this place was familiar.

‘Yes, sorry, absolutely … er … sir,’ he remembered to add. ‘My unit, that’s right. Have to join up. On my way now, sir.’

‘That’s “Lieutenant Kamnor, sir”,’ he instructed.

‘Yes, sir, Lieutenant Kamnor, sir,’ Ross barked, eyes scanning either way along the corridor as he weighed his options regarding
which direction Kamnor expected him to walk in.

He turned and made to return to the staging area. Kamnor stopped him by placing a frighteningly heavy hand on his shoulder.

‘Are you all right, soldier?’ he asked, sounding genuinely concerned. ‘You seem a little disoriented. Do you know where your
unit even is?’

Ross decided he had nothing to lose.

‘I have no idea where
I
even am, sir. I don’t know how I got here. I have no memory of it. I’m not a soldier. I’m a scientific researcher in Stirling.
That’s Scotland, er, planet Earth, and this morning, that being an early twenty-first-century morning, I had a neuro-scan
as part of my work. I was still totally biodegradable; I mean, an entirely organic being. When I stepped out of the scanning
cell, I found myself here, looking like this.’

Kamnor’s face altered, concern changing to something between alarm and awe, and everything that it conveyed seemed
amplified by being the only recognisable piece of humanity amidst so much machine.

‘Blood of the fathers,’ he said, his voice falling to a gasp. ‘You’re telling me you were a different form, in another world?’

‘Yes sir, lieutenant, sir.’

‘Blood of the fathers. Then it truly is the prophecy.’

Kamnor beheld him with an entirely new regard, readable even in his alloy-armoured body language.

‘The prophecy?’ Ross enquired.

‘That one would come from a different world: a being who once took another form, but who would be reborn here as one of us,
to become the leader who rose in our time of need. That time is at hand,’ he added, gesturing to the astonishing scene through
the huge window, ‘for our world is under attack, and lo, you have been delivered to us this day.’

Ross half turned to once again take in the sky-shattering conflict in which he had just been told he was destined to play
a legendary role. A host of confused emotions vied for primacy in dictating how he should feel. Sick proved the winner. He
recalled hearing the line: ‘Some men are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them.’ He wondered if that also applied
to heroism. He had no combat training, no military strategy and tended to fold badly in even just verbal confrontations.

He was about to ask ‘Are you sure?’ but swallowed it back on the grounds that it wasn’t the most leaderly way to greet the
hand of destiny when it was extended to him. He settled for staring blankly like a tit, something he was getting pretty adept
at.

Then Kamnor’s face broke from solemnity into barking, aggressive laughter.

‘Just messing with you. Of course there’s no bloody prophecy. You’ve been hit by the virus, that’s all. Been finding chaps
in your condition for days.’

‘Virus?’ Ross asked, his relief at no longer having a planet’s fate thrust into his hands quickly diminished as he belatedly
appreciated how preferable it was to the role of cannon fodder.

‘Yes, sneaky buggers these Gaians. They hit us with a very nasty piece of malware in advance of their invasion force: part
binary code and part psychological warfare. Devilishly clever.
It gives the infected hosts all kinds of memories that aren’t really theirs. Makes you think you’re actually one of them:
a human, from Gaia, or as they call it, Earth. It uploads all kinds of vivid memories covering right up until what seems like
last night or even this morning. Like, for instance, that you’re a scientist from, where was it?’

‘Stirling,’ Ross said, his voice all but failing him.

‘See? It’s really detailed. Convinces you that you just arrived here, plucked from another life on
their
planet. But don’t worry, it wears off. It’s full of holes, so it breaks down: I mean, hell of a coincidence they all speak
the same language as us and even sound like us, eh? The virus auto-translates what they’re saying. Don’t worry, you’ll be
right as rain soon enough. We find that shooting a few of the bastards helps blow away the mist. So how about you catch up
to your unit and help them spread the spank?’

Ross … was his name even Ross? He now knew officially nothing for sure.

This couldn’t be true. These memories were his. They weren’t just vivid and detailed, they were the only ones he had. Surely
there would be some conflict going on in there if what Kamnor was saying was right. Yet as he stood before this terrifyingly
powerful mechanised warrior, it occurred to him to wonder why the lieutenant would be so patient and understanding even as
war raged on the other side of the hyper-reinforced window. Furthermore, there was that disarming sense of the familiar, even
of positive associations, ever-present since he’d arrived here. For the moment, he’d just have to run with it, see if the
mists really did blow away.

‘I don’t know what unit I’m with, lieutenant sir,’ he admitted.

Kamnor reached out a huge, steel-fingered hand and tapped the metal cladding that Ross used to think of as his upper arm.
There was a symbol etched there, a long thin sword.

‘You’re with Rapier squad. Mopping-up detail, under Sergeant Gortoss.’ He gestured along the corridor in the opposite direction
from where Ross had just come.

‘Turn left at the first pile of flaming debris and look for the most homicidally deranged bastard you can find. Ordinarily
he’d be in a maximum-security prison, but when there’s a war
on, he’s just the kind of chap you want inside the tent pissing out.’

‘Yes sir,’ said Ross, by which he meant: ‘Holy mother of fuck.’

‘You remember how to fire a weapon, don’t you?’

‘I’m sure it’ll come back,’ he replied, making to leave.

Kamnor stopped him again.

‘Well, before you go I would suggest you take a quick refresher on how to salute a superior officer.’

Kamnor saluted by way of example, sending his arm out straight, angled up thirty degrees from the horizontal, his metal fist
clenched tight.

Ross was inundated with unaccustomed feelings of gratitude, loyalty and pride, driving a determination to serve and please
this man. He had read about leaders whom soldiers would follow into battle, kill for, even die for, but never understood such
emotions until now.

He sent out his right arm as shown, his shoulder barely level with Kamnor’s breastplate, clenching his fist once it was fully
extended. As he brought his fingers tightly together, a long metal spike emerged at high speed from somewhere above his wrist,
shooting up into Kamnor’s mouth, through his palate and into his brain.

It was a tight call as to who was the more shocked, but Kamnor probably edged it, aided by the visual impact of blood and
an unidentified yellow-green fluid spurting in pulsatile gushes from his mouth. He bucked and squirmed but was too paralysed
to do anything else in response.

‘Oh Christ, I’m so sorry,’ Ross spluttered, trying to work out how to withdraw the spike back into his wrist. ‘I didn’t mean
it, I just …’

But Kamnor was way past listening. He fell to the floor, pulling Ross over with him, his arm still linked to Kamnor’s head
by the rogue shaft of steel. The blood subsided but the yellow-green fluid continued to hose, while one of Kamnor’s great
feet twitched spastically, clanking and scraping on the metal grate lining the floor.

Ross heard a hiss of pistons and saw the double door at the end of the corridor begin to separate.

‘Oh buggering arse flakes.’

Through the widening gap he could see six pairs of metal-clad legs making their way towards the passage. In about one second
they were going to spot this, and it wasn’t going to look good.

How did you get this bloody thing out?

A clench of his fist had extended it, he reasoned, but so far merely unclenching wasn’t having the corresponding effect.

He opened his hand instead, stretching out his fingers. This prompted an instant response. He felt something twang at the
end of the spike, like the spokes of an umbrella, then felt a sense of rotation and heard a soft, muffled whir.

The incoming troop made it through the doorway as the spike withdrew, liquidising Kamnor’s face and spraying Ross with the
resulting soup as though he had lobbed the poor guy’s head through a turbo propeller.

He turned to face them, the end-piece of the spike still spinning and sending blood, flesh and other matter arcing about the
corridor.

‘It’s not what it looks like,’ he offered.

The doors slid closed with a hydraulic hiss as Ross stepped aboard out of the blustery Stirling rain and headed for his seat,
shuffling laboriously along the aisle. He was barely awake. Safe mode: only loading the minimum components required to carry
out the very basic tasks involved in getting from his bed to his desk. The bus jostled him pleasantly as it moved off, the
feeling of warmth and the lulling rock of motion doing very little to encourage him into a sharper waking state. This was
less down to fatigue than reluctance. Never a good sign.

A sound file played in his head:

‘
Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system
…’

It was the opening of
Half-Life
, a woman’s soft voice over the PA of a futuristic subterranean monorail taking the physicist Gordon Freeman to work on what
would prove to be a cataclysmically fateful day.

Also not a good sign. Human memory wasn’t random-access. What the subconscious chose to retrieve seemingly unprompted was
seldom anything of the sort. If you looked deeply and honestly enough, you could usually trace the connection, and it would
tell you plenty about your true state of mind. This voice from the past was telling Ross something inescapably accurate about
the present.

The reason it was not a good sign was that this echo from
Half-Life
hadn’t been prompted by a reminiscence of playing the game. He was reminiscing about sitting on another bus fifteen years
ago, running the same soundtrack in his head as he
imagined being on his way into the Black Mesa complex instead of towards St Gerard’s Secondary. That childhood bus had been
a buffering period, eight minutes to retreat into fantasy before reluctantly engaging with the indignities, torpor and soul-stomping
banality of another day in school. He never wanted to get off, wished the journey was a hundred miles. He couldn’t wait to
get out of St Gerard’s. He was planning to go off to uni to study medicine, and once he’d qualified he would look forward
to every day’s work as both a challenge and an opportunity.

Yeah, that worked out well.

The bus was busy. Ross was squeezed in between a young mum with a toddler on her lap and an old man in an ancient raincoat
that was the only thing on the bus smelling worse – considerably worse – than the scrawny hound that accompanied him. Maybe
it was for this reason that the mutt decided to position itself at Ross’s feet rather than its master’s. It sat eye-level
with his crotch, at which it proceeded to stare longingly and with unbroken concentration, as though breakfast hadn’t quite
hit the spot and it was thinking Ross’s balls would be just the thing to fill a hole before elevenses.

On the other side, the young mum was so consumed by the text exchange she was carrying out with impressive one-handed dexterity
that she failed to notice that her daughter’s face appeared to be melting, presumably as an unforeseen chemical reaction to
the toxic-looking cheese string she had given her to eat. Liquid appeared to be seeping from a multiplicity of orifices, mucus
bubbling liberally over her top lip on its way to replenishing the layer she had smeared across both cheeks; the southern
reaches of her face were swimming in a yellow-tinged paste made up of two parts drool to one part semi-masticated cheddar;
and there was something seeping out of one of her ears that Ross really didn’t want to think about. Both of her little hands
were awash with a combination of these secretions, the resulting solution given a deeper texture by partially dissolving an
earlier sedimentary deposit of biscuit crumbs, and each bend, brake and acceleration of the bus seemed to bring her outstretched
fingers closer to Ross’s brand-new neoprene laptop cover.

To think that Carol said she wanted one of these things loose
in the house. She wouldn’t let him eat pizza on her new sofa in case he dripped grease on the upholstery: how would she cope
if there was a two-foot snot-goblin burying its face in her dry-clean-only trousers and wiping jam on the curtains?

Ross looked back and forth between the dog and the child, the latter still glistening with intent and the former continuing
to fixate upon his nads like there wasn’t anything else on this bus worth glancing at even for a second. Why didn’t the anorexic
mongrel solve both problems by sidling over and licking the self-emoliating rug-rat’s mitts, thus taking the edge off its
appetite and its eyes off his clackerbag?

Some days this bus journey could seriously test his ecological resolve. Today those principles concerning single-passenger
car commuting were in danger of being washed away in a tide of baby-gloop or swallowed down the throat of an underfed mutt.
So what did it say that he still considered it better to travel horribly than to arrive?

The view out of the bus windows, where it could be seen through dirt, rain and condensation, revealed the route to be taunting
him in a way he hadn’t previously noticed. It seemed that everyone was getting off to spend their day somewhere more interesting
than him. The bus trundled through the Digital Glen, an enclave of shiny twenty-first-century high-tech start-ups housed in
brand-new steel, glass and pine pagodas. It stopped outside the Hirakumico campus, the electronics manufacturer’s controversially
subsidised venture sprawling amid woodland, a man-made loch and the most fastidiously manicured lawns this side of Gleneagles.
It drove for several miles beneath the stern regard of Stirling Castle high on the crags, inspiration for a thousand boyhood
fantasies and a dozen teenhood custom maps. And then, to flick him a final two fingers, it stopped at the roundabout for a
few moments right under the sign for the safari park, the location he most associated with the simple carefree pleasures of
growing up. In his memory, it was always sunny there, no matter what the weather when they got into the car to set off; a
place where he played games and ate ice-cream with his sisters while barbecue smells blew on the breeze.

‘You’re not going there today, matey,’ it seemed to say. ‘No, you’re not going back there ever.’

Instead, it dumped him off at the gloomier end of the most despondently nondescript industrial estate in the west of Scotland,
and possibly the western hemisphere.

No underground lab, no monorails and lasers; and as for manicured verges, the only greenery on display was weeds and broken
Buckfast bottles. Just as the safari park was somewhere Ross remembered as being sunny even on the days it wasn’t, in his
mind this place was always shrouded in light drizzle, even when the sun was splitting the sky. If the Digital Glen’s architects
had designed their estate to be conducive to innovation and encouraging of forward-thinking in commerce, whoever sketched
this abomination out on the back of a bookie’s line must have intended it as an environment conducive to the industrial manufacture
of despair and the encouragement of worker suicide.

But it was okay, because these were only temporary premises. Or that was what they’d told him when they head-hunted him four
years ago. He’d been so intoxicated by his own optimism and the lure of possibilities that he misinterpreted their hosting
the interview in a hotel in Edinburgh as an indication that they wanted to impress him. Stage two was to fly him down to their
UK headquarters, a purpose-built manufacturing facility on the M4 corridor, where they gave him glossy corporate brochures
showing their expanding campus in Silicon Valley, CA. The buildings looked more opulent than anywhere Ross had ever been able
to afford to stay, so it would be fair to say that he made certain naïve assumptions about what kind of premises they might
have in mind for this new Scottish-based operation.

As Ross neared the pathway leading to the main entrance, he noticed Agnes Kirkwood approaching from the other direction at
the same time. Part of him wished he could hurry on inside without engaging her, but it was the part of him that he knew he
ought not to indulge. Agnes always wanted to chat; she was the kind of woman who, when she asked you how you were doing, actually
meant it. She had a good twenty-five years on him, and had the remarkable ability to make him feel much younger than he was
yet simultaneously boost his confidence by acting as though she thought he was the smartest guy in the firm.

Ross felt guilty for wishing he could sneak in without being
seen, even with the rain offering an excuse, and took it as an indication of just how bad he must be feeling if he feared
he wasn’t up to sharing a few moments of a Monday morning with one of the few people in the building who did genuinely put
the ‘pleasant’ into pleasantries. He wasn’t sure whether his reluctance was born of not being capable of false bonhomie or
whether he was self-conscious about confessing his misery to someone who had a lot more to complain about yet still managed
to remain sufficiently buoyant to keep everyone else afloat.

‘Morning, Doctor B,’ Agnes said, with a wee glint in her eye, like Ross was her favourite nephew.

‘Morning, Agnes. Good weekend?’

‘Quiet. Highlight was a
Space 1999
DVD marathon and a takeaway curry Saturday night.’

Agnes had a serious sci-fi habit, with a particular fondness for old-school British stuff, the cheesier the better. She loved
those Gerry Anderson shows, but Ross knew her true favourite was
Blake’s 7
.

‘How about you?’

‘Not the best, Agnes,’ he confessed, his guilt deciding that it would be patronising to lie. Pointless too, as Ross didn’t
have much of a poker face and Agnes was an adept interpreter of the snapshots people showed to her in passing. ‘Mostly work,
and consequently I think I’ve blown it forever with Carol.’

‘Aye, it’s hard to find a balance,’ she replied, ‘but the rule of thumb is that the job never loves you back. Chin up, though.
Nothing’s forever, especially a woman’s moods: take it from someone who knows. There’s still time to do the right thing by
her and sort it out.’

‘Problem is I’m coming around to thinking that doing the right thing would be to let her go and save her from me. I reckon
she’d be better off.’

‘Away and don’t talk mince,’ she told Ross with a grin that was both reproachful and reassuring. ‘If the lassie’s in the cream
puff because she doesn’t see you enough, then you’re not helping either one of you if you take yourself out of the picture
altogether.’

Agnes was in charge of component manufacturing, and would probably have been head of the division by now if her husband
Raymond hadn’t got sick. The cancer had eventually killed him a couple of years back, and now she was largely marking time
until her retirement. She’d told Ross that she and Raymond had been planning to buy a boat for their retirement, and spend
their time sailing the Scottish coastal waters. She claimed that she was still intending to do so, joking that she’d crew
it with strapping young men now that she was single.

Ross knew that neither aspect of this fantasy was any more likely than the other. Most of Agnes’s savings had been gobbled
up over the sustained course of Raymond’s gradual debilitation. Yet her eyes would sparkle with a combination of longing and
satisfaction when she talked about that boat, like it was a holiday that was already booked rather than a dream that, in Ross’s
estimation, would never happen.

Ross wondered whether this dream of the boat kept Agnes going, kept her so positive, or whether it was her innate positivity
that kept her believing the boat dream would work out. Whatever it was, Ross wished he had a bottle of it. As it was, he could
only get a teaspoon at a time during these brief exchanges, though even that much was enough to make him feel a wee bit better
this morning.

Ross made his way to his desk, where he was disappointed and moderately concerned to see that his machine was in screen-saver
mode, already booted up. Disappointed because he had first noticed that the monitor on the adjacent desk was switched on,
and he had wrongly interpreted this as a sign that his colleague Alex had returned to work after a couple of days AWOL. Moderately
concerned because the reason all the machines were running was that the suits must be undertaking one of their periodic compliance
searches to make sure there were no unauthorised files or programs on anybody’s systems.

The pretext was that this was a policy imposed by management in the US, where they were indemnifying themselves against lawsuits
from employees by making sure nobody could glance at a colleague’s monitor and get an eyeful of some 4Chan abomination. In
truth, it was just an excuse to snoop through your files when you weren’t there, looking for any kind of leverage that could
force your shoulder harder against the wheel.

There was always this default assumption on the part of
management that everyone in their employ was an inveterate skiver who needed the threat of permanent vigilance to keep them
hard at work. Ross couldn’t help but interpret this as the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

He gave his mouse a nudge to waken the screen and flipped open his laptop. His first task was to upload what he’d been working
on over the past few days and tidy his ideas into a form that would make sense to the suits. Solderburn was developing a prototype
scanner, the Simulacron, which potentially might be not merely the future of the company, but the future of neurological monitoring
entirely. However, Solderburn’s prototype would live or die on whether Ross could help him devise a means of decoding its
data and interpreting the results. It was able to render far more complex readings of human brain activity than anything else
in current usage, but, by its chief designer’s own admission, ‘It’s like we’ve created the most awesome new video camera,
but until we suss out how to make a new kind of TV to watch it on, nobody’s gonna be able to see shit.’ Ross’s task in this
analogy was to find a way of decoding the signal so that it would play back on the clunky old tellies they already had.