Bedlam (25 page)

The monitor flashed, accompanied by a discordant chime that was never going to be used on an ice-cream van. There was a line
drawn on the screen between the other ship’s position and a newly projected convergence.

‘Shit,’ breathed Juno. ‘They’re coming. Gonna try and throw a net over us.’

‘You mean like a tractor beam?’

‘No, I mean literally a net, so they can force-dock or just hold us where they want us.

‘What kind of defences have we got? Shields? Lasers? Photon torpedoes?’ he suggested hopefully.

Juno’s stern look said no. ‘In every gameworld, if you got a ray-gun, there need to be protocols that dictate what damage
the ray-gun does. We’re between worlds. Out here, the protocols are very basic. They just govern movement in three dimensions:
basic spatial physics. Unfortunately one of those basics is the principle that two objects can’t occupy the same space, so
out here it’s seriously old-school. No tractor beams, no lasers, no explosives: just down and dirty ballistic hardware.’

‘Cannonballs?’

‘Cannonballs from distance, then harpoons, grapples and claws for pulling your ship apart. If your ship gets destroyed, you’ll
be left floating out here, with no propulsion.’

‘Can’t you suicide and respawn?’

‘No spawn points in range. You know that weird sensation when you die, where everything’s dissolved? You’ll be left in that
state until a ship with an on-board spawn point passes close enough, which given the scale of space …’

Juno punched in some more data and gave the yoke a sharp turn, keeping her eyes on the display that was projecting convergence.
Ross could see she had radically changed the angle of vector, which meant only one thing.

‘Can we outrun them?’

Juno held up a hand, her gaze still locked on the monitor. Silence filled the cockpit for a long few moments. Then the display
refreshed itself, erasing the line, and Juno seemed to relax just a little.

‘It would appear so. They’re heavy. Not fast enough for direct pursuit. Must have been hoping they could get closer before
their intentions became clear. Need to keep a lookout though, in case they try to flank us with a shot.’

Another few moments passed, only marginally less tense than those that had preceded them. No ordnance issued from the other
ship.

‘Looks like they’re not risking it. Would take a hell of a lucky pop to hit us from this distance. We’d have time enough to
make evasive manoeuvres. Of course, a salvo aimed at five or six projected positions would improve their chances, but they’d
still be gambling a lot of ammunition at long odds.’

‘So, panic over?’ Ross said optimistically.

‘For now. Best stay sharp, though. They don’t always hunt alone.’

‘You got it. Where are the controls for our cannon?’

‘We don’t have one. Why do you think I was so worried?’

‘We don’t
have
one? Why not?’

‘Whatever bells and whistles you might trick out your ship with in any given gameworld, once you cross the line into the big
black, they no longer apply. So when you’re equipping a ship for out here, you only have three attributes you can assign:
speed, armour and weaponry, and you gotta prioritise according to your needs. Every ship has the same complement of points
to spread around, so if you want a tough hide and a big gun, you’re gonna be slow.’

‘Whereas we’re fast but we can’t hit back?’

‘Very fast with a little armour. I prefer to be able to manoeuvre my way out of trouble.’

‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly as well?’

‘Risk/benefit equation, kiddo. You don’t encounter pirates very often, and when you do it’s more advisable to run away than
go toe to toe.’

He couldn’t argue with the logic, as it was the same as had served him well since primary school.

As they made their descent, Ross could see the world of Calastria take shape, growing from a small white blob into a blurred
blooming of colour, from smudge to doodle to map to recognisable landscape. It was surrounded by a ring of dark blue ocean,
within which there were different shades of green covering meadows, forests and plains, the reddish-brown of mountain ranges,
blue-black lakes and rivers, and a huge, nebulous grey haze covering about a third of the island.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Cloud, I guess. Rainforest maybe. There can be totally conflicting climate zones side by side,’ Juno offered.

Juno had told him Calastria was the world-environment for a role-playing game called
The Exalted
, though nobody referred to it by that name any more. Similarly, she advised him that people would better understand him if
he referred to Graxis rather than
Starfire
, but this wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, as clearly the plethora of warfare shooters offered multiple incarnations of the same
places.

He remembered seeing conceptual art for the world of Calastria on a gaming site.
The Exalted
was the next in the
Sacred Reign
series of RPGs, though according to the article, the projected release date was still at least eighteen months off.

Solderburn did say he’d been in sequels to games that weren’t due for years, and what made this even stranger was the fact
that, according to Juno, Solderburn was one of ‘the Originals’, the elders of the gameverse. Given how cagey she had become
regarding what it read on her own personal odometer, how long might Solderburn have been here? It melted Ross’s head trying
to think about this. It wasn’t simply that time here didn’t have
a consistent frame of reference: time here didn’t appear to make any bloody sense at all.

Juno guided the ship in low towards the ring of sea that surrounded the land. Too low, in Ross’s judgement, as unless she
flattened out her angle of approach they were going to hit the water nose-first. He refrained from saying anything, at least
for another few seconds, until he felt compelled to observe that crashing into the drink was starting to look unavoidable.

‘That’s the plan,’ Juno reassured him, moments before the ship cut through the surface of the waves with no greater sense
of impact than someone throwing a bucket of water at a car windscreen. The vessel continued its progress in a steady glide,
powering through the hazy gloom. Ross saw shoals of fish shoot past the windows, and much larger shapes moving deeper in the
murk.

‘We have to come in unseen,’ Juno explained. ‘This is not a world where you’re supposed to show up in a spaceship. If you’re
landing in some sci-fi metropolis, nobody’s gonna be suspicious of where you started your journey, but if the Integrity have
eyes here, it’s gonna start their wheels turning in ways we really can’t afford to encourage. This would be a good time to
consider your wardrobe too.’

Ross looked at his options. He found that a new line in medieval attire had appeared in his inventory, and that Juno had restored
his weapons. He chose an outfit that wasn’t going to make him look too much like he was about to star in panto, and was about
to ask Juno how he looked, only to be rendered speechless by how she did.

She had changed into some goddess of war, her armour sculpted around her to convey what he could only interpret as a formidable,
aggressive femininity. It shone in steel, all sleek lines and sharp edges, unmistakably female but equally unmistakably not
a costume intended to please or even consider male eyes. She looked intimidatingly bad-ass in a way that was quite simply
not available to the grubbier sex.

‘Told you I had some flavours,’ she said. ‘You like?’

Ross just gaped, and possibly trembled a little.

‘You, er, made that yourself?’

‘Yeah. That’s what pisses me off about this place. You could
be any incarnation of womanhood you can think of – so why do so many choose to conform to some fifteen-year-old dork’s idea
of it? Even in a world like Calastria, they’ll still choose an appearance that’s defined by sexuality. Do they think the guys
try to look sexy when they’re suiting up to fight dragons?’

‘Er, not so much,’ Ross agreed, but her last remark had inadvertently channelled his inner fifteen-year-old dork. ‘There’s
going to be dragons?’ he asked.

Juno found a secluded cove where they could come ashore unseen. She left the ship submerged, guiding it back down under the
surface by remote. Satisfied that it was not visible and that their landing had not been witnessed, she led Ross up a winding
stairway carved into the rock, then they proceeded around the headland.

As he walked the cliff-top path, lush woodland to his right, Ross made a startling realisation.

‘I’m hungry,’ he announced, with a mixture of astonishment and delight.

‘You would be. It’s the protocols. Calastria is a place where you need to feed yourself. You can grow food, you can hunt,
or you can trade goods and go into taverns. The food here’s great, though not so much if you’re a vegetarian.’

‘Do people still object to eating animals even when they’re digital?’

‘Not in general, but it happens: a zealot’s a zealot. I wasn’t sure where you stood.’

‘Right now I could eat a farmer’s arse through a hedge.’

‘Meat
and
greens. See, that’s a balanced diet right there.’

Ross heard a scurrying close by and looked to the trees. He saw a wild boar stop to sniff the air. It took a look back at
him and then trotted off, unhurried. He only realised he had frozen to the spot when he felt Juno’s hand on his arm.

‘Don’t worry, it won’t bother you. This whole place has been modified to make it effectively a vacation resort. The protocols
have been tweaked so that there’s no dragons burning villages to the ground and no bloodthirsty tyrant NPCs wreaking havoc
and plunging the place into war. Actually, there are still dragons, but they stick to their territory. If you want to go hunt
one, or
even just go look at them, you need to go on a long trek north into the mountains, kind of a safari. It’ll take you maybe
a week to get there.’

‘So how far is it to the transit point? Are we talking days?’

‘I landed as close as I dared. It’s on the other side of the nearest town.’

It took them around two hours, according to Ross’s new-found universal clock. He got his first glimpse as they neared the
edge of the forest, seeing boats tied up at piers in front of rows of wooden houses. Then, as they came around the headland,
he saw more and more of it revealed, stretching much further up the hillside than he would have imagined. When Juno said ‘town’
he had interpreted it as ‘village’, given the context, but this was a coastal settlement the size of Largs.

As they made their way down from the cliff-top and into town, Ross was struck by how pleasant it looked and smelled. It was
picturesque without looking fairytale, and everything was very clean, like he was in the medieval section of a well-maintained
theme park. The comparison extended to the scent of meat wafting on the breeze, except this smelled more enticingly like roast
boar than hot dog.

Ross followed his nose to the door of a tavern, wondering distantly whether you could get jaked on digital ale.

‘Do you mind?’ he asked Juno, checking it was okay to make a pit-stop.

‘No, you gotta eat. You’ll need this, though,’ she added, producing a bag of coins.

They wandered into the dim but cosy interior, where what light there was came from a crackling fire in the grate and candles
melting messily in the necks of bottles. Ross saw seven or eight fellow diners seated on stools and benches, talking quietly
in dark corners. They cast an interested eye as he came in but soon went back to their meals and conversations. He heard one
of them grumble something about taking an arrow to the knee.

Ross sat at a round and thick wooden table, like a cartwheel with a tree trunk through it, his arrival noted from behind the
bar by a blonde female in a revealing dress who looked like the illustrated encyclopaedia entry for ‘buxom wench’. She skipped
forth cheerily a few moments later, bringing two plates of carved meat without having been asked.

She leaned over as she placed the dishes down on the table, and Ross utterly failed not to avail himself of a lingering look
at her bounteous cleavage, the pneumatic plenitude of which suggested that in this incarnation of the Middle Ages, the invention
of the balconette push-up bra had evidently come before gunpowder. He realised he was getting a virtual semi, which posed
several questions he didn’t feel philosophically equipped to wrestle with. If you were in a relationship in the old world,
did it count as cheating if you had sex here with someone else? If you shagged someone but they were only an NPC, was that
technically just a wank?

He quieted his thoughts with a mouthful of roast boar. It tasted as deliciously satisfying as the water he’d sipped in the
Beyonderland, the sensation of swallowing it as real as the effects of the serving wench upon his libido. She returned with
two flagons of ale and Ross reprised his failure not to grab an eyeful. When he looked up again, he found Juno staring back
at him with a look of pronounced consternation.

He felt himself blush for a moment before realising that his ogling the waitress wasn’t what was troubling her; indeed he
wasn’t even sure she had noticed. Her attention was fixed upon other matters. She resumed looking back and forth around the
room, clearly frustrated in a search for something. He wondered if it was the mustard.

‘Looking for somebody?’ Ross asked.

‘No. I’m looking for
any
body. There’s no one here.’

Ross paused for a second, contemplating whether the protocols meant he was seeing things she couldn’t.

‘What are you talking about? Who do you think brought the food? Who do you think’s sitting eating all that stuff over there?’

‘NPCs,’ she answered. ‘I mean there’s no
real
people. I haven’t seen a single one since we landed. I’ve also lost all off-world comms. Something ain’t right.’

Juno put a couple of coins down on the table and stuffed a slice of meat into a hunk of bread.

‘We’re having these to go,’ she said to the waitress, who seemed utterly oblivious.

Juno headed outside and along the street at a stride just short of a run, looking agitatedly back and forth at the houses
either side.

‘There’s usually hundreds of people here,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna ask one of these NPCs. They have a very limited understanding
of what’s going on within their own minute frame of reference, but if you filter out all the scripted shit, you can usually
work out something from what they’re telling you.’

She went up to a grey-bearded old man in a robe. He looked like some kind of village elder or a leftover stray from a Grateful
Dead tour.

‘Did something happen here?’ Juno asked. ‘Something monumental? Where did everybody go?’

‘These are grave times indeed,’ he replied. ‘Goromar forges dark plans in the north.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
: if you wish for peace, prepare for war. The sacred reign of the Wardens is at an end.’

‘Shit,’ she replied, with considerably less gravitas but just as much portent.

‘What?’ Ross asked. ‘I didn’t follow. Something about dark plans.’

‘No, it’s meaningless. It’s pure script: script from the very beginning of the game in its original form, before it was modified.
It’s like nobody ever came here.’

Ross thought he heard a noise in the distance, a beating of the air that had very horrible associations since his encounter
with Cuddles.

‘Does this mean we better get tooled up?’ he asked, scanning the skies.

‘No. I think it’s just the story that’s reset itself in the NPCs’ minds. If the whole world was reset, then someone would
have started a fight with you back at the tavern. So no wars and no dragon attacks. The protocols won’t allow it.’

‘Do you think somebody should tell them?’ Ross asked.

‘Tell who?’

‘Those dragons,’ he replied, pointing to the four winged beasts that were approaching from the north, their silhouettes picked
out against a grey haze that covered the entire breadth of the horizon.

Juno produced a pair of high-tech binoculars and stood transfixed by whatever she was looking at.

‘Oh my God.’

Ross searched in vain for a similar item, then remembered he had a sniper scope on one of his rifles. He held it to his eye
and scanned the landscape to the north. It wasn’t just dragons that were headed their way: wolves, boar, deer and mystical-looking
animals were stampeding down the hillsides, pouring out of the woods like they were ablaze. This was not the dragons’ doing,
however, for the dragons weren’t attacking: they were fleeing. Every creature that could move was running or flying for its
life from the encroaching grey haze, and when Ross angled his scope to focus on where the haze met the ground he could see
why.

‘It’s the corruption,’ Juno said. ‘This whole world’s breaking down, dissolving away into nothing.’

Ross took in the speed at which the corruption was advancing and considered how long it had taken them to walk from the ship
to here. They weren’t going to make it back in time.

Juno took off across the road and disappeared around the back of a house. Ross had made to follow but was told to stay where
he was in a tone that wasn’t to be argued with.

A few moments later Juno reappeared, on horseback. She stopped to let him climb aboard, then kicked her mount into a gallop,
Ross clinging on to her waist like he’d hitched a ride at the Isle of Man TT. She guided the horse uphill around the outskirts
of the town, slaloming livestock, dogs and oblivious-looking NPCs. The fleeing creatures must have been programmed with certain
base instincts to which they were now responding, but the non-playing characters were guided entirely by branching scripts,
in which there was no behavioural contingency for sudden dissolution of their entire world.