Bedlam (22 page)

There were a number of things in life that Ross had come to take for granted, to an extent that only became apparent when
they were suddenly taken away. Internet access, for instance, electricity during a power cut, hot water and central heating
when the boiler went on the fritz. He never thought another of them would be a third dimension.

He had got his wish in as much as the next world was not
Skool Daze
. Instead, it turned out to be
Pac-Man
. He was trading the vertical axis for the ability to move in four horizontal directions, so it was still 2D, but then so
was most of his perambulation back in the real world. In practice it was a bitch finding his way around the blue neon maze
from a first-person perspective, but his progress was at least unhindered by ghosts, as it turned out an M4 machine-gun was
just as effective as power pills at making the buggers scatter.

He found the transit and warped out. How retro might this thing get, he wondered:
Galaxian
?
Pong
?
Computer Space
?

This time there was a more pronounced feeling of dissolution and resolve, surely heralding a jump to a far more complex environment,
but according to his eyes, very little had changed. He was standing in another narrow channel, its black walls only definable
by thin blue strips delineating a black floor and black ceiling. A glance to the rear confirmed that the
Pac-Man
maze was no longer at his back, the blue strips angling at forty-five degrees and forming an X shape to denote that the way
was barred.

Ross turned left at the end of the channel, where the passage widened: not by much but enough to confirm something as welcome
as it was important. He was back in glorious 3D, albeit
none of those dimensions were being offered in expansive quantity. He jumped in the air and sidestepped a few times; cat-swinging
would still be precluded, but there was enough lateral clearance to walk two-abreast, and that suddenly felt like a decadent
luxury.

Less pleasingly, he could see another neon X where the floor and ceiling borders criss-crossed about ten yards directly ahead.
He turned around to check whether he might have missed a right-turn option back at the junction, at which moment the walls
immediately behind him began to change shape. The blue rails gradually transformed from two sets of vertically receding parallels
to one horizontal line above and one below: from a passage to a wall. He reached a hand out to check, in case it was some
kind of perspective illusion, but it was solid. He was trapped, and soon he could see that that wasn’t the worst of it.

Slots opened on either side along the corridor, from which slowly prodded the perforated muzzles of armour-piercing rifles
and the multiple rotary barrels of mini-guns, and just in case that didn’t drive the point home, a vertical array of laser
beams began projecting from the ceiling, moving slowly towards him like an extremely high-tech egg slicer.

In his panic to deduce where he was, he searched the HUD for clues, looking first for any new skins or outfits defaulted to
his inventory. There was nothing. It then occurred to him that he was still holding the M4, so he dropped it to the floor.
The lasers kept approaching, now only five yards away, a high keening warning that the mini-guns were powering up.

Instinctively he stepped backwards, which was when the kill kit also began to withdraw in response: the lasers blinked off
like they’d never been there, the heavy weaponry disappearing behind instantly seamless panels. Then a tentative exploratory
pace forward brought all the claws back out again.

‘Nadgers.’

There was no way out of this place, apart from via painful death and a respawn into the unknown. Right then that wasn’t a
leap of faith he was in a hurry to take.

He tried inching forward on his knees, then attempted to proceed at ceiling-level by spanning the passage with his hands
on one wall and his feet on the other. Both tactics resulted in guns and laser beams, though at least the latter let him feel
a bit like Tom Cruise for a couple of seconds.

It also prompted an additional response that wasn’t automated.

‘All right, already, I’ll be right with you,’ said a voice, digitally distorted to give it no identity: no sex, no age, no
accent. ‘Just give me a goddamn minute, okay?’

He guessed the distortion was also supposed to shed nuance and emotion, but it was still hard to miss that whoever had spoken
was sounding weary and pissed off, which was just what you wanted when they had you trapped in a murderware selection box.

Ross looked around stupidly, as though it might have an obvious source. Perhaps some instinct told him to look for any clue
as to who was monitoring him; or even
how
. He heard nothing more for a few minutes, throughout which he stayed behind the trigger point as a gesture of cooperation.

Then, without the prompt of him moving, the guns and lasers sprung back into action, causing him to dive to the floor and
brace himself.

‘Sorry,’ said the digitised voice. ‘Wrong button.’

The weapons withdrew and he climbed shakily to his feet. He started at further movement to his right, around thigh level,
but was relieved to see only what looked like a shelf or a drawer slide open towards him.

‘Place your weapons in the tray,’ he was commanded.

He picked up the machine-gun from the floor and gently laid it down inside the drawer, then stood back with his arms compliantly
and non-threateningly by his sides.

The automated guns sprang out once again.

‘
All
your weapons,’ the voice stressed. ‘I’ve already scanned your inventory so I know what you’re packing, dipshit.’

Ross toggled through his cache rapidly, slightly embarrassed at his attempted deception and, more so, his stupidity. He was
the one who was new here, after all. Dipshit was too kind.

As soon as he had deposited the last of his weapons, the drawer disappeared back into the wall, then, ahead of him, the blue
X morphed itself into a short passage leading to a doorway,
beyond which he could see a pale glow. It shone like moonlight, silhouetting the figure of a woman in the middle distance.

He moved swiftly towards the exit, pausing on the threshold for just a moment like he did at ticket barriers and automatic
sliding doors, not entirely trusting that they wouldn’t suddenly smash together like the jaws of a trap.

When he stepped out of the neon-bordered passage, Ross found himself on a wooden boardwalk connecting a series of jetties,
beneath which water shimmered and sparkled under the light of stars. The water looked cold, black, placid and deep, at once
beautiful but starkly uninviting. He watched his step, as there were no barriers, and water rules were something one had to
be wary of in games: some let the foulest murky depths provide a vital conduit, while in others it represented instant death
for reasons the developers didn’t always bother to make clear.

‘That’s far enough,’ the woman said, her accent American, voice wearily authoritative.

She was standing near the end of the jetty directly ahead, watching him carefully down the barrel of the kind of weapon you
only got towards the end of a game. Ross guessed one twitch of her trigger-finger would be all it took for him to be instagibbed.

He would place her in her late forties, maybe even early fifties, of African-American ethnicity, the combination of which
was rare enough in video games as to virtually guarantee she wasn’t an NPC. She was clad in a practical-looking purple flight
suit, her hair pulled back by a headband. She looked dressed for action, perhaps the pilot of some craft, but Ross couldn’t
see any vessels on the water or at any of the jetties.

He glanced around. The place was eerily quiet and still, like something from a dream, or a stage-set for some minimalist two-hander.
In this context he couldn’t help but wonder whether the woman was in some way symbolic.

‘Are you the guardian of this place?’ he asked, unable to avoid sounding as though he was in a sub-Tolkien RPG.

She looked at him like he was a pillock and rather impolitely failed to suppress a laugh.

‘No, honey,
that’s
the guardian of this place.’

She was looking behind him, indicating the long, squat, black-walled construction from which he had just emerged, standing
on a jetty of its own abutting the wooden walkway.

‘That and this big stupid dick substitute I’m holding. But either way, die here and you respawn in a secure chamber, the only
way out of which is a one-way warp transit to a place
very
far away, with indestructible monsters and pain protocols like you wouldn’t believe.’

At this Ross held up his hands just a little higher, further emphasising that he was no longer packing and posed no threat.

‘I hear you,’ he said.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

Ross recalled Solderburn’s warning not to go pissing information about, and decided against revealing his real-world name.
The one he had given himself here was the only one that could possibly have any currency, but as far as he was aware, other
than NPCs, the only people it would mean anything to were Iris, Bob and the Integrity.

‘My name is Bedlam.’

‘Never heard of you,’ she said dismissively. ‘What were you doing in the badlands? That back-channel you just took isn’t a
path many people stumble upon by accident. That’s why you have to knock on the door and wait for somebody to let you in. It’s
only Integrity and NPCs out there these days, and you don’t seem like an NPC.’

‘I’m neither. I’m just lost, and my friend got captured. I started off in
Starfire
and found my way out of there into this World War Two …’

‘What do you mean, you started off? Started off doing what? That ain’t vacation territory these days.’

‘I mean started off as in those are the only places I’ve been. One minute I’m helping trial some new equipment at work and
the next I’m a cyborg.’

Even at a distance he could see the consternation on her face.

‘Hang on: you’re saying you’re new here? You only just arrived?’

‘Yes, exactly,’ he said, gushing in his relief at being understood.

‘Bullshit,’ she said, raising the gun as though readying to fire. ‘All right, now I
know
you’re Integrity.’

‘I’m not, I swear,’ he insisted, waving his outstretched hands in a panic so wussy as to surely convey his desperation. ‘I’m
telling the truth. The Integrity tortured me and my friend helped break me out, but then Solderburn got captured and I managed
to escape to—’

‘Excuse me, did you say
Solderburn
?’ she asked, lowering the weapon slightly.

‘Yes.’

‘As in, the Original?’

‘Well, he’s the only one I’ve ever met.’

‘And you’re saying you just got here, but he’s your friend? How does that figure?’

‘Well, when I say friend, I mean principally colleague. We’ve worked together for years.’

‘And when did you last …
work
with him?’

‘I don’t know how long it’s been. A couple of days maybe? He was the last person I saw before I, you know, came here.’

She was looking at him with increased intensity, but the barrel of her rifle was at least starting to dip.

‘I gotta make some calls,’ she said.

Ross expected her to produce some form of device but instead she held her pose, the gun still pointed roughly towards him.
Her eyes remained locked upon him too, but her expression seemed a little blank, as though her mind was partly elsewhere.
He was reminded a little of the card collector when whoever was controlling him was busy off-screen, but he wasn’t about to
put her vigilance to the test.

After a while her head moved slightly, signalling that she was giving him her full attention. Unfortunately, this still included
training the weapon on him, so whatever word had come down was not entirely friendly.

‘Okay. I’ve been ordered to keep you isolated until they can figure out what to do.’

Ross stole an anxious glance back towards the kill-box.

‘No, no. Gonna stick you someplace where I don’t have to babysit. Come this way,’ she gestured, or rather commanded, given
that the gesture had been made with the gun.

‘Did they say anything else about me? And who are
they
?’ Ross enquired, before his question suggested its own answer. ‘Are
you … a Diasporado?’ he asked, his voice dropping conspiratorially despite there being nobody else around.

‘Are you a spy?’

He was about to answer in the negative until he realised her reply was not a question, just a means of explaining how daft
he was to think she’d answer his.

‘Can you tell me your name, at least?’

She paused, looking at him with a disdain that suggested she grudged him not only this much information, but the effort it
took to speak it.

‘It’s Juno.’

Jetties stretched out to his left and right in a seemingly endless array, and in front the water extended to the black horizon,
above which a dilute galaxy of stars hung low across the sky, like a skimmed Milky Way.

‘Where are we going? What is this: a pier?’

‘A gateway,’ she replied. ‘To what we call the Beyonderland. When I say “what we call”, that is of course assuming you ain’t
some Integrity fuckwad just pretending to be a gormless noob.’

‘I can assure you, I am a noob, and the gormlessness is genuine. And where is this Beyonderland?’

He was going to ask whether you got there by boat but reckoned chances were high the answer would only make him look like
a twat, and as she already didn’t strike him as somebody to whom a stranger was just a friend she hadn’t met yet, he thought
he’d best avoid further irritating her.

‘You’re looking at it,’ she replied, indicating the sky and thus vindicating his reticence. ‘Those aren’t stars: more like
planets, or maybe just islands. The Beyonderland is an archipelago of individual tiny worlds.’