Bedlam (6 page)

Kudos to Death, He had brought it home in about ninety seconds, tops.

On the plus side, the second obstacle had at least negated the first. He had several identical rifles to choose from, none
of them fused to their previous owners this time.

Ross got down low and crawled cautiously through the
now-even-narrower channel, occasionally risking a glimpse over the pile of blood- and unidentified-yellow-green-fluid-spattered
limbs, heads, legs and torsos. He spotted the card collector, his back to Ross as he scurried away, heading out into the disasterscape.

Ross considered it safe to get to his feet, and hastened after his prey, zigzagging between rocks, wreckage and crates for
cover. What the hell were these boxes made of, he wondered? Everything else that had fallen from above was in bits, but the
crates were unscathed and unopened. He briefly tried prising the top off one, but got nowhere and abandoned the attempt, as
his priority was pursuit.

Having got a bead on where the collector appeared to be heading, he veered left, intending to come around and flank him a
little further ahead: take him by surprise and he could get the bastard to talk before matters descended into another shooting
match.

Ross took up position beneath the head of a rocky spur and waited to make his move. Another thirty yards and they would converge,
the collector seemingly oblivious to being stalked as he continued on a course that would take him right into Ross’s path.
But just as he readied himself to spring, Ross felt his legs taken from beneath him and he was dragged into a narrow crevice
in the rock.

‘Stay down,’ his attacker told him with urgency and concern.

He was another cyborg, resembling Ross in terms of the dead-flesh/steel-and-glass balance, and similar also in wearing a hunted
and confused look upon his circuitry-adorned face.

‘You don’t want to get into a fight with that one,’ he went on.

‘I’m not afraid of him,’ Ross insisted with frustration, pinned down as he was by his would-be rescuer’s weight.

‘That’s not the issue, believe me.’

‘Well it’s moot now,’ Ross added huffily.

His captor got off of him and scrambled nimbly to the lip of the escarpment to check.

‘Yes, I’m relieved to say that it is,’ he reported. ‘He’s gone. Come here, though. This way. I need you to take a look at
something.’

Ross hauled himself out of the crevice and up the slope with heavy limbs and bad grace.

‘So what is it you wanted me to … oh.’

There was an object hovering impossibly in the air in front of him, spinning in place on the vertical axis. The object was
disc-shaped, its rim of red stone encircling a golden caduceus. It was four feet in diameter, beautifully crafted, gleamingly
polished, and it wasn’t there.

It passed through Ross’s outstretched fingers, then he stepped into the centre of where it ought to be, watching it continue
to spin around him. It was some super-advanced perfect hologram, but what the hell purpose it served was anybody’s guess.
The guy who had grabbed him seemed very excited by it, anyway, or at least excited that Ross was aware of it.

‘You can see it?’ he asked breathlessly.

‘Of course I can see it. I can’t touch it, but that’s because it’s some kind of 3D projection.’

‘I knew you’d be able to see it. The others can’t. I knew you weren’t one of them from the way you were running.’

Ross eyed the guy’s shoulder, taking in a symbol that looked like a scimitar.

‘So, what unit are you with?’ he asked wearily.

‘Accounts,’ came the reply, equally tetchy.

‘There’s an
accounts
unit? What do you audit: body-part distribution?’

‘No, not here. In Leicester. I work for Barret Finch Home Furnishings. We make curtains and sofa covers. That’s why I got
hold of you: I’m not from here, and I’m guessing you’re not either.’

Ross gaped, staring blankly for a moment, unable to respond. He felt relieved that there was another human here in the same
boat but simultaneously depressed because it seemed to confirm that this was really happening.

‘My name is Bob. I’m a bloody accountant, not an alien stormtrooper. I went to my bed one night and woke up here. I’ve a wife
and two daughters in Nottingham and I need to get home.’

‘My name’s Ross,’ he mumbled uncertainly. ‘I’m from Stirling. Or I think I am. I heard there’s this virus …’

‘Talking to a big bloke called Kamnor, were you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s bollocks. Kamnor’s a political animal and a pragmatist, so he came up with an explanation expedient to their needs.
He just told you that to keep you onside and quell any possible unrest, but he doesn’t know any more than we do.’

‘Or maybe he does and he’s hiding the truth,’ Ross suggested, using present tense to skirt around the tricky issue of Kamnor’s
recurring deaths. ‘What if our memories are actually those of people recycled by them and turned into cyborgs?’

‘Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that I know I’m not one of them. And recycled when? I don’t know about you, but when
I went to sleep that last night on Earth, the furthest anyone had been to was the moon, and we certainly weren’t at war with
any alien civilisations.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Days. I’m not sure exactly, because there’s no night. It’s always daytime. I haven’t slept. Don’t feel the need to either.’

The artillery cannon boomed again and the exhaust port of a landing craft thudded into the ground only about twenty yards
away.

‘I’m impressed you’ve lasted that long without getting killed,’ Ross told him.

‘Are you kidding? I’ve been killed about a dozen times,’ Bob replied, desperation in his sallow, reanimated face. ‘But I don’t
stay dead. I just keep coming back, into this bloody nightmare, this permanent battle.’

Ross felt something lock into place inside his mind, a first connection potentially leading to a truly horrifying thought,
and given how his horror scale had been recalibrated recently, that was saying something. All the previous horror had been
leavened by making no sense, but this notion, deranged as it was, had a whiff of the logical and thus – being the really scary
part –
binding
about it.

‘That’s why I stopped you from engaging the one they call the card collector. If he hits you with that gun of his, it doesn’t
bloody tickle, let me tell you. Searing agony and then whoosh: you suddenly find yourself all in one piece again in some random
part of the landscape. But if you kill
him
, time warps back. I don’t know how or why, but it’s true: everything returns to how it was and starts all over again.’

‘I’d noticed,’ Ross confessed, another piece clicking into place in that disturbingly logical chain.

‘Oh, that was you, last time, was it? You killed him? Well, you’ll understand: whether you killed him the next time or he
killed you, I knew I’d have a devil of a time finding you again afterwards. I was starting to think that this might be hell,
that maybe I had died in my sleep, but once I saw there was somebody else here like me, I realised we both must be alive:
this must be real. And if it’s real, then however we got here, there must be a way back too.’

‘What is this place?’ Ross asked with a hollow dread that the answer wasn’t going to be entirely a surprise. ‘I mean, do you
know what this planet is called?’

‘Yes,’ Bob replied. ‘Its name is Graxis. I’d never heard of it before.’

Ah, thought Ross, who
had
heard of it. That being ‘Ah’, as in: ‘My brain is imploding with the enormity of this but at least I finally know what I’m
dealing with.’

Graxis: a planet on the outer rim of the Andromeda galaxy, where the dominant race had built a technology that combined advanced
robotics with bio-scavenging. They had raided first their own world’s native species and then the species of other planets
in order to sustain and augment themselves. They saw all other life-forms as raw material, and felt no more remorse about
harvesting humans for spare parts than humans would about turning oil into plastic. That, however, wasn’t the aspect that
had precipitated Ross’s hollow dread. There was something much more troubling about Graxis’s nature.

The outer rim of any galaxy is too remote from the black hole at the centre for there to be a sufficiency of the higher elements
necessary to create and sustain organic life. Life had evolved on Graxis though, and for one important reason: that whoever
wrote the CD-booklet blurb for Digital Excess Software had known jack-shit about astronomy.

He and Bob hadn’t travelled in space or time, though the means and implications of their journey were no less perplexing.
They were inside a computer game: specifically, a 1996 first-person shooter called
Starfire
.

When Bob said the planet’s name, it was like he’d keyed a
decryption code into Ross’s brain, causing all of the scrambled data to instantly resolve into coherence. All of the information
had been there in front of him, but none of these discrete elements could reveal their true nature until he could see them
as part of the whole.

That sense of familiarity, of comfort, of positive associations: he understood it now. This place with the gloomy subterranean
walkways, the booming artillery cannon, the impossibly purple sky, was a place he knew, a place he associated with happy memories.

Christmas ’96, his first real PC, trading up from a Commodore Amiga: a two-hundred-megahertz processor with Pentium MMX technology
and a CD-ROM drive. No more floppy-swappy for him.

Mum and Dad had pushed the boat out, partly in response to encouragement from his maths teacher, and partly due to guilt at
the effect their increasingly bitter arguments were having on him. They were trying to make things better, and that Christmas
Ross allowed himself to believe it was working. Eilidh and Megan were both home from uni for a couple of weeks, and it just
felt special. Family meals, long afternoons lounging on the living-room carpet watching videos, and for Ross, staying up into
the small hours battling the Gralaks in software-rendered but nonetheless gloriously immersive first-person 3D.

Shit, did that mean he had died and this was a kind of afterlife after all? A personal heaven that he had subconsciously chosen
in his teen years, which would ironically turn out to be hell for an adult?

No, because that sense of comfort wasn’t purely about the good times, was it? The world of Graxis had been a place of retreat
in the ensuing months when his parents started fighting again, a world he could escape to when he didn’t want to deal with
the reality that was around him.

So did that mean he had gone all
Buffy
S6E17? Had he freaked out at the news of Carol’s pregnancy, and his mind retreated into this place while in reality his body
was rocking like a Romanian orphan in a corner of the office?

Unlikely, he decided. Her pregnancy was a shock, but he had to give himself
some
credit. Besides, if he was to retreat into the
world of a game, whether in death or insanity, surely it wouldn’t be
Starfire
. It wasn’t some seminal experience or all-time favourite. That accolade would go to
Serious Sam
for undiluted pleasure, or maybe online
Quake 2
on the strength of the sheer number of hours played.

No, this wasn’t in his head. This was all around him, inescapably real: from the dust on his feet to the heat on his skin
to the smell of burning fuel on the breeze. That was why he had recognised this place and yet not been quite conscious of
doing so, instead experiencing merely a confusing sense of familiarity. It was Alive1, the opening level of
Starfire
, he could see that now, but it looked different rendered in steel, stone, sunlight and fire rather than shaders, brushes,
sprites and pixels.

He recalled getting his first graphics-acceleration card in the summer of ’97, a 3dfx Voodoo 1. It had cost him all of his
birthday money and Saturday-job savings, leaving him with no cash to buy any new games, but that didn’t matter. Seeing the
likes of
Starfire
and
Quake
go from software-rendered blobby brownness to shimmering, Glide-polished environments was like playing them for the first
time. The familiar dungeons, hangars, halls and bases looked completely different as a result of their rendering upgrade.

Whenever a game came out showcasing a new graphics engine, one of the first things the custom-map enthusiasts did was remake
their old favourites. He had seen Entryway from
Doom II
, Ziggurat Vertigo from
Quake
, The Edge from
Quake 2
and Alive1 from
Starfire
rendered again and again, and though they were all recreating the same places, the maps didn’t just look different, they
felt
different. The proportions would change, the new textures and lighting affecting your perception of architecture and layout,
even though the basic geometry was identical. If you hadn’t known which level you were loading, you might be wandering around
a while before you realised it was an update of a classic.

That’s what had happened here, except the scale of the upgrade was unimaginable. It was inescapably real, and yet equally
inescapably a late-Nineties shooter. That was why he’d felt there was something familiar about his frustration in not being
able to pick up the better guns from the enemies lying
dead on the floor. The game gave you a crappy blaster pistol to kick off with, but didn’t let you lift anything from the foes
you had taken down. Instead it drip-fed you better and better weapons as you worked your way through the maps.

That was why the soldiers were utterly useless too: blundering into the line of fire, taking no evasive action, failing to
coordinate attacks to take advantage of their numbers. The AI was shit back then, though that wasn’t the reason for the Gralaks
never firing in aggressive, sustained patterns. That aspect was by design, so that a single player could successfully wage
a solo campaign against their entire army. Hence the artillery cannon making mincemeat of the invasion force: in the story,
the space marines were all but wiped out, leaving the player to be the lone hero and take on the Gralaks entirely by himself.