Bedlam (21 page)

Ross strode purposefully towards the dorter, now confident that nobody was going to look at him twice. An NPC shouted to him
in French, which he ignored, pretending not to hear amid the din. It was nonetheless a warning that he hadn’t chosen the ideal
disguise given the extent of his school-learned French, as the ability to ask the location of the
Syndicat d’Initiative
probably wasn’t going to cut it if some Francophone Integrity officer decided he wanted a word.

He was within yards of his goal when he heard a sound that stopped him dead, the very air around him rippling with movement.
Ross turned back once more, and was horrified to see Cuddles hovering at the bell-tower, those huge wings thrashing
to hold its nightmarish form at the required altitude. Tentacles, claws, suckers and tongues whipped at the cyborg, but Solderburn’s
choice of position was further vindicated, as none of the appendages could quite get close enough, the creature’s head and
neck too big to fit through any of the arches. It looked big enough to simply demolish the whole thing with a lash of its
tail or even a particularly phlegmy gob, but, once again, the local rules kept Solderburn’s sanctuary intact.

Ross allowed himself a smile and turned away again. Solderburn would be all right.

Then he heard a sound like a thousand steel gauntlets being dragged down a thousand metal blackboards, and in its vibration,
deep within himself, he felt an echo of the violating horror he’d endured from the tongues of the black scourge. It had come
from the mega-tank, a new turret having emerged upon its back like a pustule, at the centre of which shone a grey beam. It
wasn’t light, though; more like an absence of it.

Ross looked back towards its target. He saw the top of the bell-tower briefly transformed into a wireframe outline then completely
disappear, leaving Solderburn standing upon an open platform. Cuddles struck almost in the same moment, the feelers and tentacles
whipping around him before the wireframe outline had even faded from Ross’s retinas.

At that moment, sheer instinct took over, deferring horror and grief though Ross could sense the magnitude of both. There
was absolute clarity, ambiguity casting no clouds. He understood fundamentally that Solderburn had been taken. He understood
fundamentally that there was nothing he could do right then to change that. And most of all he understood that he had to escape.

The HUD came up almost by reflex, switching him without deliberation to the zombie version of his French Resistance skin.
Nobody would ask him any questions this way, or wonder where he was going. He staggered the last few paces to the dormitory
entrance, deliberately catching himself on the frame a few times to convey that authentic ‘NPC failing to negotiate a doorway’
look, then slipped inside.

Like Solderburn had said, there was a stained-glass window at the gable end, above a small altar. Every other window in the
place was broken and the draughty hall denuded of furniture,
but fortunately, the Integrity had failed to wonder why not a single stray bullet had damaged the big pane at the end depicting
Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers.

Ross hopped on to the altar and jumped, bracing himself instinctively for impact and hoping belatedly that he hadn’t missed
another stained-glass window elsewhere in the room, otherwise he would end up crashing through on to the grass outside. Instead
he dropped into a dark chamber the width of the gable end, evidently a false wall with a second, identical St Christopher
window lodged in the real one.

His HUD came up again unbidden, a Mobius icon blinking insistently in the centre. He took an exploratory step to his right,
upon which the blinking slowed, then two corrective steps left, resulting in a doubling of the frequency. One more step to
his left and half a step forward caused the icon to glow unremittingly and the ants to begin moving. When he looked down he
saw that the square foot of floor he was standing on was now superimposed with the same animated logo as appeared on his HUD.

He tried jumping up and down on the spot but nothing happened. Crossing the last transit from
Starfire
to here had been a matter of falling through a hole, but so far he could see no aperture and no doorway. However, the HUD
resembled the multiplayer interface he’d used to reach the training arena, so perhaps it was waiting for some form of input.

From outside, he could hear the beating of giant wings and the sounds of frantic orders being barked as the Integrity discovered
they’d been had.

Not a moment too soon, a single word appeared beneath the Escher image:

Fuck yeah.

There was no drop this time, and no gradual coming into focus of his surroundings. It was like a light being switched on,
an immediate awareness of being somewhere new, but what he saw was no less disturbing than what he’d found in the last world.
He feared for a moment that he was in space, conscious of blackness either side. He was standing on what looked like green
plastic, a path stretching ahead of him in a perfectly straight line. It felt substantial enough underfoot, but less reassuring
was the fact that it appeared to be barely two feet wide. Instinctively he put out his arms for balance, which was when he
discovered that the surrounding blackness was the opposite of space. It was like a force-field, or maybe just a glass wall.

Up ahead he could see a staircase made of transparent plastic, climbing ultimately out of sight beneath an arch, and above
the staircase there was a ledge, another narrow platform this time made of red brick. Somewhere up ahead he could hear machinery,
a busy ticking, whirring and squeaking like some huge clockwork device that Wallace and Gromit might have knocked together.

He became aware of movement behind the transparent staircase, a blue shape coming closer, and as it did, the sound grew louder.
Refracted as it was through the zigzag plastic, Ross couldn’t make out much detail, only that it was at least his height and
rhythmically pumping in a blur of what could as easily be limbs or pistons. Either way, he was glad the staircase was there
to provide a barrier, as it wasn’t like he could sidestep the thing.

This assessment of his options prompted him to look behind,
something he achieved a lot faster than he was expecting or was indeed comfortable with. Instead of physically pivoting to
execute an about-turn, he found himself facing the opposite direction the instant he thought it. There was no sense of movement;
rather it was like blinking and suddenly seeing the rear view; but strangely this
absence
of movement prompted something similar to motion sickness, like his body was confused by his eyes telling him something new
without the usual corresponding effort.

Perhaps appropriately, the new view wasn’t
worth
any effort, showing as it did a brick wall at the end of another few yards of green plastic path. The clockwork sound grew
still louder, prompting Ross to execute another not-turn in time to see the shape penetrate the staircase like it was a hologram.

‘Bloody hell.’

There was a six-foot Swiss-army knife heading straight for him, blades, corkscrews and things-for-getting-stones-out-of-horse’s-hooves
pumping like the arms and legs of an infuriated Showsec concert steward who’s just seen someone enjoying himself and is making
a beeline to intervene.

Ross looked behind again, just in case he’d missed a possible holographic aspect to the brick wall hemming him in, or a conveniently
breakable grate in the green plastic floor. Could he reach the platform above? It looked too high, but one thing he ought
to have learned by now was that every new world had its own rules, and even its own physics. Ross bent his knees and jumped,
sending his feet easily six or seven feet off the ground, and his head through the overhead platform as though it wasn’t there.
He grasped at it with his hands as he began to descend, but it was like trying to grip clouds. He came back down on to the
green plastic and turned to see the Swiss-army knife bearing down, only a few feet away. Instinct took over and he leapt again,
soaring in an arc over the clockwork abomination, his feet clearing its top by about six inches.

He felt a rush as he sailed through the air, a mixture of excitement and relief that was familiar enough for him to have worked
out what was going on by the time his feet had touched the ground.

‘I’ve gone 2D,’ he said, partly to test whether he could still speak.

He looked himself up and down, and found that his assertion
was not strictly true. He was still the same shape as when he’d warped out of the abbey: he hadn’t gone two-dimensional, but
he was now most definitely in a two-dimensional world, in which typically you could only move up or down and left or right;
or in his case, up and down or forwards and backwards.

He was in a platform game, and he even knew which one.

You should prepare yourself for things getting a bit weird from here on in
, Solderburn had said.

No shit. He was in
Jet Set Willy
, a ZX Spectrum game from 1984.

This area was the Top Landing, and he knew from memory that it would lead to the main stairway, at the foot of which a left
turn would take him east through the kitchens and the cold store, through the back door and ultimately out over the beach
to the yacht, which in a later revamp of the game would set sail for still more levels.

Jet Set Willy
was probably the first computer game that Ross had a well-formed memory of playing; or more accurately, not so much of playing
as of watching someone else play and waiting excitedly for another short-lived and incompetent shot. He must have seen video
game cabinets in holiday bars and amusement arcades before then, but it was in his big cousin Graham’s bedroom in the late
Eighties, at the age of six or seven, that he first saw such a world of imagination rendered on somebody’s portable telly.
There were no CDs or even floppy disks involved: it was loaded using a cassette recorder connected to the little black box
with the rubber keyboard.

Ross had been at Eilidh’s house last year, playing the helpful techy uncle by installing a hefty real-time strategy game for
his nephew Calder. Having clocked the size of the file, it had amused him to calculate how long Graham’s cassette deck would
have taken to load
Empire: Total War
given that it took roughly ten minutes to load
Jet Set Willy
. He worked it out at roughly six years.

He recalled that long-ago winter afternoon, while his mum and Auntie Margo drank tea downstairs: being drawn into a colourful,
strange and slightly creepy world, as Graham guided this little character around a seemingly endless sprawl of rooms, each
full of both spectacle and danger. There were angry chefs waving wooden spoons, monstrous furniture, mutant telephones,
demonic floating heads and, of course, spinning razor blades and patrolling Swiss-army knives.

Graham lived in Dundee, and they didn’t visit there very often, so that hour or so was all he saw of that or any other game
for some time. Consequently, it grew in his mind, misremembered as something far more detailed and technically advanced. He
was sure he recalled roars from the demonic heads and the ring of mutant telephones, when in fact the only sounds were the
trilling that accompanied Willy’s jumps, the chime as he collected items, and the constant tinny rendition of ‘If I Were a
Rich Man’ that played permanently throughout.

He discovered this for himself when, as a student, he got a Spectrum emulator for his PC and finally had unfettered access
to Jet Set Willy’s mansion. It was his first taste of gaming nostalgia, and though the reality couldn’t compete with his memories,
he could still see why it had captivated his young mind. It was arguably the first ever non-linear gameworld environment,
and though it looked primitive compared to what he was playing by the late Nineties, it was the freedom to explore it offered
that continued to inspire him; the possibility that every doorway, archway and gap could lead to somewhere new.

He opted to go right at the foot of the stairs. This would take him through the ballroom and ultimately to the game’s eastern
extremity, The Off Licence, but he didn’t have a particular goal in mind. There were sixty ‘rooms’, at least one more of which
had to conceal a warp transit, so the best way to find it was to start at one end and methodically work his way through the
place.

He headed through the ballroom, watching the floating heads bounce up and down for a few seconds to get his timing right before
passing between them. He was seeing them in profile rather than face-on. The heads looked like fairground automatons, huge
coloured fibreglass hulks with hinged moving parts painted garishly in bright pink and sky blue. They had texture and solidity:
they appeared to be real objects, but that was the extent to which this world was enhanced. It was not rendered as a real
world, but in Perspex and plastic, cartoonish and sketchy. Its inhabitants, if he could call them that, were not AI entities,
not NPCs, even primitive ones. Everything here was like clockwork, cold objects set in motion but given no anima.

He reached out and touched one, feeling a tiny jolt and seeing a flash before his eyes as the view altered slightly. He found
himself standing a few yards back, transported there without moving. He deduced with mild surprise that he had effectively
‘died’ and been warped back to his point of entry into the room, in this case only a very short distance away.

Those were the rules: you couldn’t touch anything apart from the bottles and glasses that it was Willy’s contrite and hungover
task to collect before his housekeeper would let him go to bed. The merest contact with any other object was fatal, which
was why Cousin Graham and, later, Ross on his emulator had hacked it to receive infinite lives.

How in the name of the wee man could he remember that? How could that precise nugget of code simply pop into his head, when
he couldn’t have thought of it in almost fifteen years?

No matter, what seemed more pertinent was that
finite
lives might be a blessing in this place if he didn’t find a way out. If freedom to explore was what had inspired him about
games, then what the Integrity were set upon was the antithesis of this. It would surely create a multiplicity of discrete
hells, shutting people eternally in one realm from which they could never escape, not even through death. Bad enough if you
were in a place of permanent war, but it was horrifying to imagine getting stuck here for all time, surrounded by soulless
automata, mindlessly repeating the same things over and over again. It would be like spending eternity in church, or on
Eastenders
.

He called up the HUD and observed some activity on the Mobius icon, a flickering pulse of colour that grew or diminished dependent
upon his direction. Clearly there was a ‘getting warmer, getting colder’ effect to the thing, which he could use to home in
on the transit. The pulse was faint even at its strongest point, in Ballroom West, which told him his destination lay several
levels above.

Despite being so full of moving objects, there was nonetheless
a cold stillness about the place as he journeyed through it: no movement other than the rhythmic oscillations, no sound other
than the hiss, whir and squeak of clockwork. That was why he reacted so instantly when he sensed a movement and a sound that
was non-rhythmic, non-clockwork. He looked up and saw another human figure hopping from a ledge on to a short platform that
was floating static and unsupported. It was a woman. She wasn’t dressed in space marine fatigues any more, but there was the
same punkish customisation about her, and even from the flattened perspective of standing forty feet below, Ross could recognise
her face.

Iris.

The ledge and platform were in the same ‘room’ but the layout of the mansion meant that Ross would have to negotiate five
or six others before he reached that point. She was only forty feet away from him vertically, but had a head start of maybe
half an hour, and anyway seemed more fluid and confident in her movement than he had thus far mastered.

It was pointless to attempt pursuit and, he realised, quite possibly unwise. He had thought of calling out when he first saw
her, but thought better of it. He had already been given cause to wonder whether she had deliberately led him into an ambush
on Graxis, and in following her subsequent trail he had found himself in the hands of the Integrity. What were the odds she
would be laying another trap for him if she knew he was still on her heels?

It took another hour, the Mobius icon getting brighter and its pulse more frequent as he drew closer to what he ought to have
realised all along would be his inevitable destination: the Watch Tower, at the very top of the house.

‘One rider was approaching,’ he sang to himself, as he stood on the edge of a pit full of spikes beneath a swinging rope in
the room entitled, quite legendarily, We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg. Ross took a running jump and grabbed the rope, shinning
his way up towards a blue-glowing gap in the otherwise black ceiling. As he neared the top, the icon shone in an unbroken
glow and the ants began to cycle around the strip, signalling that the transit was open, but to where he could not possibly
know.

‘Please not
Skool Daze
,’ he muttered. ‘I really couldn’t handle that.’