Bedlam (7 page)

However, it wasn’t just the ‘Actual Reality’ rendering that had clouded Ross’s recognition. It was the fact that
he
wasn’t the lone hero.

He hadn’t started out in the wreckage of a crashed landing pod as his shipmates were gunned down all around him, gripping
his blaster and vowing revenge. He was an enemy grunt. He was what would normally be described as an NPC: a non-playing character.
That was why he couldn’t open any crates, and why he couldn’t interact with the hologram that he now recognised as a health
power-up. In
Starfire
, indeed in every one of those shooters, the enemies were completely oblivious to all the useful stuff that was just lying
about the place, whether it was health, armour, weapons or ammo. Ross could see it though, which made him and Bob different
from the NPCs, but the fact that he could plonk himself in the middle of the thing all day without effect just served to underline
the fact that it wasn’t there for his benefit.

He was not the hero. He was not the player.

He knew who was, though: the card collector. When
he
died, the game was restored to its opening state because the player had restarted the map.

He was inside
Starfire
, but there was no escape key, no menu and no option to quit (Are you sure? Yes/No). Stranger still, there was someone out
there
playing
the fucking thing.

Ross could not have felt more like a dick if he had been gene-spliced with George Osborne and dressed in a six-foot foam-rubber
penis costume. He sat at his desk and stared blankly at the monitor, unable to focus, waiting in vain for his mind to come
back online. It was as though someone had detonated a logic bomb in his memory core; or perhaps more like his brain was undergoing
a coordinated denial-of-service attack, overwhelmed by response requests so that it couldn’t process any information.

He fought to concentrate on one question amid the storm of imponderables. Why didn’t she tell him? Why was he learning something
as earth-shattering as this third- or maybe fourth-hand? She had told her sister, and clearly not in any kind of firewalled
confidence, given that the information had made it to his place of work before he did. Was this the ultimate female test of
male attentiveness: that if you can’t work this one out from the available clues, you don’t deserve to know?

Kind of, he deduced. Because the main reason Carol hadn’t told him was that as long as he didn’t know, she still had all her
options open, such as the option to have nothing more to do with him. Everything became more complicated once he was party
to the information, but while he was too oblivious to even notice, well, what did that say about his credentials?

Through the hurt, confusion and downright embarrassment, the most compelling emotion he felt was a desire to be with her right
then. He wanted to offer his apologies and his vows of support, but more fundamentally he had a greater need to simply hold
her than he had ever endured.

He had seldom felt so isolated and helpless in his life. Carol was the first person he turned to when he needed to unburden
himself, when he needed reassurance, when he had great news to share. A few minutes ago he had been daft enough to believe
he could do without all of that, but now he could see the true scale of his delusion.

He had to speak to her. He wasn’t going to be able to function properly until he did so.

He phoned, but got no answer. That figured. After what happened at the weekend, she was unlikely to be taking his calls for
a while. Things had changed, though. They absolutely needed to talk. Maybe he should send a text, let her know he was aware
of the situation now. How did you phrase something like that, though?

Maybe not. He tried calling again, tried not to think of Rita Mae Brown’s definition of insanity. Still no answer. It wasn’t
even diverting to the message service. She really had all interrupts locked out.

He physically didn’t know what to do with himself, because he could think of no action he could take right then that would
move him forward from this predicament. There was no point in making the dramatic gesture of walking out and going straight
to see her, because she would be in court right then, and besides, he had no idea what he would say to her. Just the thought
of facing her prompted the awareness that he didn’t even know what he wanted to happen, what he would consider a satisfactory
resolution.

He couldn’t think about it, literally couldn’t think about it while this mental DoS attack was still in full flow. He needed
time to pass. He had to occupy himself. Work: that was the answer. Work. It was the only thing he could make sense of at that
moment, and as Zac’s Rohypnol-laced words had underlined, he had a mountain of it to get through, particularly with there
still being no sign of the Sandman returning to duties.

He felt a sudden anger over Alex’s disappearing act, a feeling
that was just as quickly supplanted by guilt at having made no attempt to get in touch with him and make sure the guy was
okay. The last time he had shown up was Wednesday, but Ross had been out of the office visiting one of the hospitals participating
in the test programme. Diane, the department’s network mage, said she had seen Alex at his desk first thing that day, but
he must have gone home early, because he wasn’t there in the afternoon. He had been due to let Solderburn scan him for the
mapping trials programme later that morning, and it was joked that he had bailed in panic rather than throw himself at the
mercy of the idiosyncratic chief engineer and his experimental prototype.

Alex hadn’t phoned in sick; or at least if he had, nobody thought to mention it to Ross. The Sandman had seemed a little low
of late, right enough, definitely out of sorts. Ross hoped the guy hadn’t had some kind of breakdown. Poor sod was divorced
from a woman who had treated him so appallingly you’d have thought he must have murdered her entire family in another life
and she had married him out of vengeance.

I’ll give him a call now, Ross thought, trying not to admit that some part of him was hoping that an act of solicitous human
contact would score him some much-needed karma points with regard to Carol at some point calling
him
.

Alex’s mobile diverted to his landline, triggered his answering machine.

Arse trumpets.

Okay. He had tried. That was one less thing to feel bad about.

He would make sure there was nothing in his inbox requiring an urgent response, then lose himself in work for a few hours.
Maybe take a walk at lunchtime, see if the smell of fresh diesel fumes in his lungs and the inspiring views of the skip-hire
depots could help him find clarity.

He reflexively deleted a couple of emails flagged High Priority, which was the Neurosphere suits’ inadvertently helpful way
of letting you know the denoted message was a pointless circular full of management-speak and could therefore be discarded
unopened. That just left the message from Solderburn.

That was Solderburn for you. Speed empathy, then fast-forward to the point. Actually, by Solderburn’s standards, this was
him really reaching out: there was a ‘sucks dude’
and
an ‘extreme lossage’. Ross snorted at the suggestion the cancellation of his meeting suddenly meant he had a whole load of
free time on his hands, but given where his head was at, it struck him that taking twenty minutes out to lie down in a state
of complete isolation would be time well spent.

He fired off a reply, saying he’d be there in five.

Solderburn’s lair was signposted as the ‘Research and Development Lab’ on the link corridor at the rear of the main building,
presumably because they couldn’t find a notice that said ‘Keep Out – Condemned’. Its separation from the rest of the premises
in what was anyway the most far-flung outpost of the corporation would provide the first hint to a newcomer that Jay Solomon
was the madman in Neurosphere’s attic. This impression was only underlined by the fact that the door to the link corridor
was locked half the time, so you either had to walk around the outside of the building or get the keys from Billy the security
guard. Ross would have opted for the former even if it was minus fifteen outside and blizzard conditions. In precisely the
same way that a brief exchange with Agnes could give you a spoonful of sunshine to brighten up your day, any encounter with
Billy made you feel like he had shat in your pocket, depositing a little lump of his own unpleasantness that adhered to you
for a long time after.

The R&D lab gave the impression that Solderburn had set out to create an environment that contradicted every preconception
the word ‘laboratory’ connotes in the average human mind. It resembled what you might get if you combined the assembly line
at an upscale electronics manufacturer, the display floor at a DIY store, the contents of two car boot sales and the decor
of a late-Nineties frat house – then bombed it. The only reason it hadn’t fallen foul of health and safety legislation was
that no health and safety officer had been brave enough to inspect it; or, if so, they had never made it back out again.

‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’ Ross had said the first time Solderburn gave him a tour.

‘I was going for Alice Cooper stage-set meets
Doom 3
. But, like, you know, late in
Doom 3
, when everything’s been blown to shit?’

‘The Delta Labs?’ Ross had suggested, establishing his gaming credentials. ‘Oh, you definitely got there.’

Solderburn was like a cross between an ageing hippy and an overfed teenager: his dress sense and personal-hygiene ethos coming
from the former; his emotional maturity and interpersonal skills from the latter. He looked like the kind of guy who could
have a million dollars in the bank but still be living in his mother’s basement. Indeed he might well have been but for the
confluence of circumstances that had caused him to wash up in an industrial estate in Stirling in his late forties after a
lifetime in California.

The lauded Berkeley and Cal-Tech graduate had enjoyed a chequered career, with seemingly concerted efforts at pissing his
talents up against the wall being intermittently interrupted by brief moments of brilliance. It would be easy to paint it
as a familiar tale of wasted talent, but in the short time Ross had known Solderburn, he had come to understand that you couldn’t
separate the genius from the flake; nor say whether his creative efforts caused him to flake out or whether sustained flakiness
was an inextricable part of the creative process. Unfortunately drugs had also proven a major part of his creative process,
and when he notched up one possession bust too many, Neurosphere’s higher-ups had to insulate themselves from the fallout.

‘It wasn’t that I made a lot of enemies,’ he told Ross. ‘I just didn’t make enough friends. Gotta watch for that, dude.’

Nonetheless, he still did have some friends at Neurosphere, or at least admirers. They couldn’t keep him, but they did not
want to lose him, just in case he came up with something game-changing and they no longer had first call on the results. They
told him they would continue to fund his work, but only if he agreed to ship out to a far-flung outpost of their empire and
lie low for a while; telling him, like they told Ross about these premises, that it was only temporary.

On this particular morning, Neurosphere’s equivalent of the first Mrs Rochester was dressed in a pair of dark grey (as in
formerly beige) cargo pants and a horrifically bright yellow t-shirt bearing the legend ‘FUCK YOUR CAKE’ in three rows of
red capitals. Ross reckoned it was a good bet he had slept in it, and just as likely slept in the lab.

Solderburn favoured cargo pants because they sported a multiplicity of pouches and pockets into which he could stuff tools,
memory sticks, pens, torches, pieces of circuit board, lengths of cable, cartons of juice and a seemingly self-replenishing
supply of caramel wafers. (Actually, the term ‘favoured’ suggested he had exercised some kind of option with regard to his
trousers, when in truth Ross couldn’t remember seeing him wear another pair.)

He was chewing on cold pizza as he picked his way carefully through the debris to greet his visitor, Ross not wishing to contemplate
how many hours or even days it had been since that pizza was warm.

‘Ross, dude, good to see you. Shame about the circs,’ he said, offering a fist for Ross to punch. It was a gesture of solidarity
which Ross did his best to meet but managed only a cursory reciprocation, involuntarily giving a heads-up that all was not
well. Notwithstanding that such exchanges tended to make him acutely aware of not being the kind of guy who could punch fists
with other men, Ross could normally mask his awkwardness enough to manage a decent dig. Today, however, his sense of self
was rather depleted.

Solderburn scrutinised him for a moment.

‘Hey, no offence, bro, but you look like you don’t know if you
need a dump or a haircut. The suits shit-canning your proposal really gronked you out, huh?’

‘Little bit,’ Ross replied, relieved to let him follow the wrong scent.

‘Let me see if I can’t clear your head then. Watch your step, by the way. I’m pretty sure I saw movement in here a little
while ago. I’m kinda hoping it was a rat, because otherwise it means I might have called forth something from another dimension,
and I’m not sure I could handle that shit on a Monday morning.’

Ross considered how his own Monday morning was going so far. Inter-dimensional entities were a piece of piss by comparison.

Solderburn led him across a cluttered expanse of floor towards where three semi-cannibalised scanners sat side by side, cables
tangled together in a morass of wiring that looked like a visual representation of a firewall. On the other side of this firewall
was a teeteringly unstable-looking
millefeuille
of hard drives, motherboards and heat sinks; a customised construction intended to rapidly process and store data.