Bedlam (27 page)

Melita led them a short distance along the pavement to where a stairwell descended into an underground parking lot. They found
her vehicle stationary but hovering in a bay two tiers below ground level. Ross quickly ascertained that it couldn’t actually
fly: the rules of this world allowed for vehicles to have any appearance you cared to design, which included the appearance
of floating on air. He mentioned a cheat from
Grand Theft Auto
that rendered a car completely invisible, allowing your character to tool around town in a sitting position. Melita said
that was possible here but cautioned ‘good luck finding it again’, adding that, unlike in
GTA
, you couldn’t just walk up and help yourself to any car.

‘Not any more, anyway,’ Juno added, as Melita guided the hover-car up a ramp at the rear of the pyramid and into traffic.
Juno was sitting in the back seat, letting Ross ride shotgun so that he could see the sights.

‘Pulchritupolis started off as a criminal driving game,’ Melita explained. ‘Like
GTA
but set in the far future. A lot of us wanted to settle here, so we had to make some changes. You’ll notice very few NPCs,
in fact none that aren’t performing a useful and strictly non-violent function. First thing that had to go was all the crime
lords and gang-bangers. I think we’d all just had one too many brunches ruined by a burning car smashing through the restaurant
and killing everybody.’

‘Buildings didn’t used to be so pretty either,’ Juno said. It sounded like an in-joke, one that made Melita blush a little.

‘The buildings were always pretty,’ Melita argued. ‘That’s why so many of us wanted to live here. But what Juno is alluding
to is that there’s been a lot of improvements. That’s what I do mostly: I’m an architect.’

‘She’s selling herself short,’ Juno said. ‘Melita’s one of the best architects in the gameverse. There’s a waiting list for
a consultation. You can see her work in a hundred worlds.’

Ross looked up at the massive-scale fusion of the futuristic and the classical that the road system wound around. The size
and ambition of the buildings was breathtaking, yet none of it might be described as outrageous or even over-the-top; audacious
maybe, but never over-extended or trying too hard.

‘Were you an architect … you know … back in …?’ Ross asked almost apologetically.

‘Hell no,’ she laughed as she took a ramp up to join a motorway spur that ran level with roughly the tenth floors of the adjacent
buildings. ‘I was an elementary school teacher, in San Diego. All those years of study, training and experience and I end
up in a place where my skill set is totally redundant.’

‘So what got you interested in designing buildings? Did you discover a knack for it in the Beyonderland?’

‘It goes back further than that, to when I went to Scotland on vacation. Hired a car and drove all over the Highlands.’

It was the first time he’d heard his native land mentioned in what felt like an age. He was almost embarrassed to admit it
caused a mild stirring of pride at the thought of it leaving a life-changing impression on a foreign visitor.

‘The castles really had an impact then?’ he asked.

‘A little. But not as big an impact as the drunk asshole who smashed into me on Skye and put me in hospital. I had spinal
injuries, so they couldn’t move me. Spent four months in traction with nothing to do but read and watch TV. You have
a lot
of property shows in your country, you know that?’

Ross thought of how Carol was always able to switch to one whenever he left the room for five minutes, regardless of the hour
of day or night.

‘No shit.’

‘I became seriously addicted. The idea of designing spaces and structures just awakened something in me.’

‘Did you follow it up when you got out of hospital?’

‘I never got out. Went to sleep one night and …’

‘I see.’

‘I spent a lot of time in driving gameworlds, self-prescribed
therapy for the effects of my accident. This place was my favourite, but I had a few ideas for how it might be improved.’

‘There are plenty of trained architects in the gameverse,’ Juno said. ‘Some of them are pretty good, some of them suck. The
latter can’t get past the fact that the old rules don’t apply: imagination doesn’t need to be reined in by pragmatism or compromise
or budget – just by good taste and sound judgment. Melita can envisage things in a way that they would need to kinda untrain
themselves to do.’

‘By the same token,’ Melita added, ‘when those two latter elements are missing, the lack of the restraints Juno mentioned
can lead to some spectacularly hideous results.’

Having once been an avid reader of
Cranky Steve’s Haunted Whorehouse
, a web reviews repository for excruciatingly awful custom maps, Ross was happy to take her word for it.

‘So have there been a lot of changes to other worlds?’ he asked.

‘Oh yeah. Some of them are unrecognisable from their original state. There are others that are relatively untouched in terms
of physical design, but there’s no game-story content left, usually because people want to live there and the NPCs drive them
loco. And on some worlds, an even more radical level of customisation has taken place—’

‘But let’s not get into that,’ Juno interrupted, trying to sound breezy but failing to disguise a ‘not in front of the children’
message underpinning her intervention.

‘How did you change them?’ Ross asked, recalling his futile attempts to make even a dent in a wall of rock back on Graxis.

‘It was the Originals,’ Melita answered. ‘They had powers, abilities that the rest of us didn’t. I don’t understand what they
did, but the Originals lifted some kind of barriers that allowed us to alter our worlds. I heard it said that they had “opened
up the sea-bars”. I think this was in reference to how we could then change the level of the land, and expand into where there
used to be water or even just space, but it allowed us to alter much more than that.’

‘When you say we …?’

‘Oh, I see. No, I don’t mean anybody and everybody. The power to make changes to the sea-bars is entrusted to individuals
only temporarily, and only to carry out alterations that have been agreed and approved by vote.’

‘Ah,’ said Ross. ‘So there’s politics?’

‘Absolutely. Every bit as messy and complicated as back in the old world.’

As they approached a shimmeringly azure lake, Melita’s car descended from the motorway via a sharply curving ramp, and she
didn’t accelerate again once the road had flattened out. Ross guessed they must be imminently reaching their destination,
and did a double-take when he looked out the driver’s side and saw what he took to be Melita’s house.

He would confess he’d been expecting something quite palatial, not to mention bigger. By the standards of what he had already
seen of Pulchritupolis, it was a pretty modest dwelling, particularly given Melita’s apparently exalted status. Nonetheless,
it was still a beautiful dwelling, enhanced by its waterfront location, but what had given him a jolt was its similarity to
the pad he had copy-pasted back in the Beyonderland.

The houses weren’t identical, however. Everything here was just a little more refined, a little more perfect, like he had
got the basic floor model and this was the deluxe. Or more like Melita’s was the Platonic ideal of ‘Californian beach house’
and his was just the shadow on the cave wall.

‘This is your place?’ he asked, just to be sure, as the hover-car cruised into a palm-lined driveway.

‘Bedlam here replicated this for his first crib in the Beyonderland,’ Juno informed her, enjoying his discomfort like a nine-year-old
telling her classmate that Ross fancied her.

‘Oh, thanks,’ Melita said, seemingly oblivious to Juno’s more mischievous intentions. ‘When I designed it, I tried to combine
the elements I liked about all the beach houses I used to see when I was growing up. Juno thinks it’s chintzy. I don’t care.
When I was a kid I used to dream about living in one, and that never went away.’

‘Not so sure about your new garden ornament,’ Juno said archly.

Ross looked across the lushly verdant lawns and saw a male figure standing like a statue, arms folded in a gesture that could
have been contemplation, implacability or just impatience. He
was tall and strappingly athletic, a Nordic hero of a figure with flowing blond hair and piercing blue eyes set in a face
etched by hard wind and fierce battle, and in the futuristic get-up he was sporting he looked like something Freddie Mercury
might have gone to bed and dreamed about after an evening watching box sets of
Spartacus
and
Star Wars
.

‘Oh … yes,’ Melita said apologetically. ‘He came running when he heard about Calastria. Good guy to have by your side if things
get messy, but … well, he is what he is.’

‘Who is he?’ Ross asked, as it seemed nobody was going to tell him before they got out of the car.

‘An asshole,’ Juno said unhelpfully, though her disdain did give Ross a glimmer of optimism that he was about to encounter
an ally. If this guy was someone else that Juno found annoying, then maybe he was okay.

‘But he’s our asshole,’ said Melita. ‘His name is Skullhammer,’ she added, which kind of told Ross all he needed to know.

Skullhammer surveyed Ross briefly with suspicion bordering on hostility as he approached the house, but mostly kept his eyes
looking out towards the road. He seemed dissatisfied by whatever he had seen or not seen, reluctant to come inside.

Melita’s beach house – or technically lake house – looked genuinely lived in, a real dwelling complete with the clutter that
went with day-to-day existence, as opposed to a clinical space for a game to take place in or some coldly elegant item of
eye-candy designed to show off a graphics engine. Ross could smell coffee and potpourri. Throw in the scent of bread baking
and he’d have thought she was trying to flog the place.

There was even a TV, or at least a video screen of some kind, taking up most of one wall. It was showing the situation down-town
at the plaza, a text marquee scrolling across at the bottom with the latest updates.

‘This is a disaster,’ Skullhammer said, referring to the events on screen. ‘I came as soon as I heard that this was where
most of the refugees ended up.’

His accent was English and somewhat theatrical, having a particular flavour of artifice about it that Ross couldn’t quite
nail. He spoke like somebody accustomed to being the most important person in the room. Ross wondered what his status
was within the resistance, as he had still felt no need to introduce himself or ask who Ross was.

‘Where were you?’ Juno asked. Ross could tell she was making an effort to be polite. He wondered if this was her being deferential
or whether she was genuinely seeking information.

‘I was in Fortune City,’ said Skullhammer. ‘Setting up a spoof. Ravenwind stayed, overseeing the final touches.’

‘What’s a spoof?’ asked Ross.

Skullhammer looked at him like he’d farted.

‘It’s a fake transit,’ Melita explained. ‘The Integrity think they’re shutting down a link between
Dead Rising 2
and the Lego Racers Islands, but it’s just a decoy.’

‘Good work,’ Juno said.

Skullhammer grimaced, shaking his head a little.

‘We’re just sticking our thumbs in the dyke. They’re shutting down more and more transits every day, and they’re only going
to scale up their efforts after this. They’ll have massive popular support as word spreads about Calastria.’

‘No kidding,’ Melita agreed. ‘People are gonna be scared, and scared people will accept the harshest measures if they think
it will keep them safe.’

‘I hate to be the one pointing out the elephant in the room,’ said Juno, ‘but having just been ringside, I can assure you
there’s a damn good reason people are scared. The corruption ain’t a campfire story any more; it’s real, and we gotta consider
whether the whole game just changed.’

‘Bullshit,’ Skullhammer spat dismissively. ‘We now know the corruption isn’t a phantom threat, but we still don’t got proof
that traffic between worlds is what’s causing it. We don’t know what caused Calastria to corrupt, and those Integrity lamers
are scrambling around for information themselves.’

Ross took in Skullhammer’s absurdly masculine appearance as he homed in on the mismatch between speech and voice.
Don’t got proof
.
Integrity lamers
. The accent wasn’t his. He deduced that it wasn’t just skins and models you could change here, and Skullhammer must have
gone for one that sounded more in character for the persona he was inhabiting. Ross also deduced that the old-world Skullhammer
was not merely less god-like
and battle-weathered in his appearance, but considerably younger too.

In that moment Ross found himself feeling terribly sorry for him. The guy could have been sixteen when he got here. Ross remembered
how lost and useless he’d felt at that age, and he’d only had to cope with life in Stirling.

Skullhammer gestured to the screen, like he was giving a lecture.

‘It was just on the news feed that they’re calling for anyone who was there to hand themselves in for interview and testing.
They’re putting on a big show of being calm and reasonable at the moment but they’re throwing the word “contamination” around.
So pretty soon the phrase “urging people to hand themselves in for their own safety” is gonna become “urging people to rat
out their neighbours in case this is contagious”.’

‘Having recently experienced their hospitality, the last people I’d want giving me a physical are those psychos,’ said Ross.
‘I’m in no hurry to deliver myself into their custody again.’

‘Oh yes, I heard,’ said Melita. ‘And you saw Solderburn.’

She said this with an ambiguity Ross couldn’t read: excited, even awestruck, and yet there was an air of depressed resignation
in her tone too. Perhaps it was because she also knew Solderburn had been taken. All this time waiting for a fabled wanderer’s
return and he gets huckled by the bad guys the second he puts his head back around the door.