Experiment With Destiny (20 page)

He closed the door on the outside world and turned the key in its lock. For a minute or two he stood and savoured the stillness of the large and empty house. It would be hours before his mother returned and longer still before his father ventured home. He would not be disturbed for some time…long enough to have a whole new adventure.

Adventure.

Escape.

He reached into his jacket pocket and slid out the plastic Game-On carrier, carefully withdrawing the disc and its plastic case as though it might snap in his hot fingers. He gazed at the graphics on the cover: a dark foreboding tower rising from a steamy jungle; a beautiful Asian princess and an armour plated warlord with glowing red eyes and a twin-bladed light-sabre.

‘Goginan,’ he read for the tenth time that day, ‘Escape from an island prison, steal a stealth low-level attack craft and find the tower fortress of Goginan. Your mission is to slay the tyrant king Uberoth and rescue Princess Ashera, liberating her people.’ It was a fairly typical and clichéd plot but the reviews he’d read raved about the detail and realism of its graphics, particularly the obligatory sex scene with Princess Ashera.

In his other pocket he found his Givenchy wallet. The press-seal compartment contained four Dream Weaver capsules. That should be enough for an afternoon’s entertainment. He emptied them onto his palm and threw them down his throat in one swift movement. Then he began to strip.

Fergus stood, naked, before the mainframe. He loaded the game and ran through the obligatory system checks before finally clicking on the game’s extensive options list. He confirmed immortality mode to ensure his adventure wouldn’t end prematurely. It didn’t mean his character couldn’t be killed, rather that he would simply regenerate on the spot, enabling him to continue from the point of death instead of returning to the start. He selected the ‘high pain threshold’ setting. It was the next best thing to dying. He chose ‘random hazard’ to make things more challenging. There was nothing more tedious than regenerating to encounter precisely the same life-threatening scenario time after time. Finally he activated the Sexual Intercourse mode options, unique to the 14+ versions of role-playing games.

“Let’s see…orientation, heterosexual male, of course.” Fergus had never been tempted to try the homosexual or female orientations in SI mode. Presumably Princess Ashera became Prince Ashera? He’d have to find out one day, experience life from the other side. “Full vaginal penetration…oral…anal…moderate S&M…watersports? Mmm…no watersports today, thank you.”

Completing the pre-programme routine, he slipped a hygiene cap over his foreskin and mounted the ladder to the immersion platform. There, he donned the VR Mask and breathing unit and lowered himself excitedly into the warm, welcoming liquid. It tingled against his skin as he descended: feet, legs, buttocks, stomach, chest, shoulders, neck and finally face. Now it was time to wait.

Fergus assumed the ‘floating face down’ position recommended by the manual – arms and legs hanging loosely by his sides, head dropped forward, his slight frame supported by the density of the blue-green liquid. Inside the mask the mainframe began the count-in. Alternating red, yellow and blue lights danced in front of his eyes. The opening title sequence began to play.

‘Goginan,’ it began, swooping vistas rushing by, accompanied by an industrial metal score. He was sure as hell going to enjoy this one.

* * *

Droplets of rain clung to the tendrils that dangled from the moss-coated cave mouth. Outside, the downpour pattered and splashed the deep foliage that crept away along the forest floor. The cave was nestled into the abrupt face of an outcrop, but low enough to be protected from the worst of the torrential rainfall.

              Fergus crouched beside the embers of a small fire. He turned his head from the sound of the storm and cast a fresh branch into the smouldering chaos. He listened to it spit and crackle as it succumbed to the caress of the flames. He’d found the cave after crossing the beach toward the headland where the Port Eynon-like village had nestled. It had faded in the mist but left a chill inside him that reminded him of home.

             
The chill was soon blown aside by a cool but tropical wind. The storm arrived and he only just managed to clamber across the final dunes and sprint across the grassy downs before finding the cover of the forest as the elements erupted.

             
In the solace of the cave, against the dull and distant thunder, Fergus tried to forget the unsettling intrusion and return his thoughts to the quest. He flexed his hands within the leather of the flying gloves. Peeling one away he reached down and touched the floor of the cave. The soil was soft and damp, as he would have expected. He rolled it between his fingers, savouring the texture of each grain. Then he blinked as the smoke stung his eyes. Everything was fine. Everything was back on track.

             
He remembered the fortress, the dark tower rising from the rainforest. It must have been a mile or so away when his aircraft plunged into the sea. It would be impossible to see the tower from within the heavy rain-soaked canopy of leaves, even after the storm cleared and the night passed. He couldn’t risk an approach from the open downs. The enemy would be watching…waiting. He would have to climb the outcrop in the morning to get his bearings.

             
Outside, a bough cracked and splintered, showering shards of singed wood across the undergrowth. Then there was a dull thud as the main branch, sheared from its perch by lighting, struck the unrelenting earth. His ears strained against the monotonous splash of the rain but he heard nothing more. He shrugged off the disturbance. The forest was full of sounds. It was unlikely any of them would bring him harm. For now, the storm was a common enemy.

             
The cave danced with the shapes and shadows of firelight. The rain hummed a constant backdrop and the thunder rolled its relentless drums to the whistle of the wind. Fergus smiled, the flames flickering in his dark eyes. A song swelled in his chest and his mouth filled with a voice like velvet. He could not remember whether this expression was part of the programme or simply his reaction to the stimuli, but he sang all the same.

“The sea is a place for dreamers,

Cold reality washed upon the shore.

The waves crash the barren sand,

But I’m not stranded any more.

The salty breeze lifts me higher

To the calling of the birds.

The ocean melts below, like wax,

In an epitaph of forgotten words.

We’re far away people…we’re ancient hearts.

We’re only the lonely…dreamers in the stars.

I sifted through your tears one day

And caught a glimpse of your eye.

White and grey, the clouds whispered

Like wind on a listless sky.

Silence, beautiful, is lifted

By the song of immortal souls.

A heavenly nation sings

With tongues of frosted gold.

We’re far away people…we’re ancient hearts.

We’re only the lonely…dreamers in the stars.”

             
His voice fell silent and the last note rang clear in the cool air. It lingered awhile then faded like vapour into the night. His voice was more beautiful than he remembered.

             
“There will be an end to all songs,” he said, solemnly. He wondered where the words had come from…and what they meant. It had to be his character, a part of the game. He wouldn’t say something like that.

             
The darkness in the cave was suddenly like a physical presence. Fergus sensed it and prickled with unease. Outside the wind was howling. The temperature seemed to be falling sharply. “Not again,” he whispered. The firelight twisted and contorted into grotesque caricatures of faces, though he could not describe them as human. They spoke with voices that hissed at him in accusation. He listened, shaking.

             
“Minstrel, your words are lies. Your song is ended. You will die.” The sequence of lights: red, yellow, blue. Reality encroaching.

             
Just as suddenly the faces were gone.

             
The flames played against the shadows. He could hear the rain and the thunder again and the wind had abated to a low moan.

             
“What did you mean?” he asked aloud. There was no answer.

             
Fergus stood alone with the darkness of his soul. Staring into the abyss and feeling the fear of facing himself, he wondered if he should press ‘escape’ and end the game. It was getting too heavy. There was too much happening in here, too much interference that he could not distinguish from the programme. It was happening more frequently now – twice in this game alone – and getting stronger every time. Was it time to quit?

             
“No. I just need some sleep,” he said to an empty chamber. Fergus slept.

* * *

              Fergus had travelled far beneath the bleached moonlight that stained the starlit heavens. The rain had stopped and the dark brooding sky began to give way to the pale gleam that peeped through cracks in the thick canopy and ushered him briskly along a narrow silky trail through the tangled forest.

             
He had slept a troubled sleep, constantly buffeted in his galleon of rest by the fears that perpetually stalked him. He dreamt of a smouldering eye, an omniscient presence, watching him, studying him and conspiring against him…then woke in fright, his cry strange in the forest air. He dreamed of when he was a boy, awoken in the silent night to find his bed adrift on an endless sea of shallow waves, dancing with moonbeams. He looked up to see the moon impaled on soft willowy clouds. The pallid orb swept toward him and became an eye again…and he screamed. Finally he was an infant, born onto a cold stone slab in a gush of blood and fluid. Everything around him was hostile confusion…a bright, aggressive surgery white light loomed above his head. The eye. He woke again, screaming, and ran.

             
He ran through the dying embers of the fire, through the streams of rainwater and dripping fronds, tripping along the undergrowth into the darkness.

             
It felt as if he’d been running all night. Finally he reached the edge of daylight. He stopped, his lungs heaving for breath, sweat trickling into his open mouth. After a few moments he stepped forward again and stumbled. He felt his body rolling, bouncing down a steep slope. Sharp edges of rocks and rough, gnarled roots caught and jabbed at him as he tumbled. Finally the motion stopped. He had reached the bottom.

             
He sat up. There was a bright light staring down at him, too low to be the moon. He remembered the eye and gasped. He stood, slowly, feeling the pain of his scrapes and bruises, the ache of his joints. “I am immortal,” he reminded himself as he summoned the courage to continue toward the light.

             
The undergrowth ripped aside reluctantly as he made slow progress, half walking and half falling through the difficult terrain. Suddenly he broke through. The forest ended abruptly and he was swaying on the edge of a wide grassy clearing, drenched in the blaze of a 1,000-watt beam.

             
His strength failed and he crumpled to the sodden earth.

              Time slipped by but he could not tell how long he had lain there. His senses were drowned with fatigue and pain. Above him, the heavens had turned from midnight blue to azure and the stars had faded to the first traces of crimson skyline. Moments of delirium passed and Fergus slowly lifted his head.

             
At first all he could see was the blinding pure white light. His vision gradually cleared and he began to make out the detail of a wire fence, hung with vicious barbs. Beyond the fence, the dark stone towers pushed their sinister shapes like giant fists against the sky. He remembered the fortress.

             
“Goginan!” he wheezed.

             
This was the beast he had come to destroy. It was all part of the game. He had arrived! He summoned every ounce of will power and all his remaining strength to push himself from the ground and lunge forward in faltering steps toward the fence.

             
A stream of blue fire raged around his body…crackling and hissing with a terrifying energy. He screamed as his limbs twisted and jolted in pain beyond belief. He smelled burning fat and stared in horror as the flesh of his arms blistered and charred. He wanted to reach up and end the agony by ripping off his VR Mask…stop the game…too…much…pain…

             
“I am immortal!” he screamed with the last breath of his sizzling lungs.

             
The blue blaze expired. Fergus slumped to the ground…oblivious to the hidden eyes that observed him from within the fortress.

* * *

XI

FERGUS was on the top deck of an antiquated bus as it rumbled and rattled through the streets of Cardiff. It was raining. It always rained but it was more apparent from the smudged outlook of public transport than through the polished windscreen of his BMW Roadster. With his car temporarily off the road he could have summoned a cab, or even caught a Monorail, but he’d decided to catch the bus out of a sense of adventure that he now realised had been somewhat misguided. Glimpsing life as one of the common people was all very noble but the public transport experience had proved a deeply unpleasant one. Life here was as grey as the clouds that seemed to hang forever in the cold skies above their heads. This was not adventure. He longed for the warm, comfortable isolation of his car.

              The bus halted. He tutted to himself. It had only been a minute since it pulled away from the last stop. He heard the doors hiss open below and felt the rush of cold air rush beneath his seat. Fergus wiped the condensation from his window and peered down. There was a line of damp, dreary people waiting to board, their faces long and dull. One of them looked like his mother…or rather, as his mother would look if she didn’t shop exclusively in designer outlets. His mother would never catch a bus. She rarely caught the Monorail and, even then, insisted on first class.

             
He stared long and hard at the woman and saw the age lining her face like a badly drawn monochrome portrait. Is that what his mother looked like? What did she look like? He tried to visualise her face but his memory only offered up disjointed shards. He couldn’t picture her clearly. He couldn’t remember. He tried to focus on situations and events featuring his mother, but the threads tangled their way into places he’d rather avoid…memories he’d prefer to leave buried. Instead, he tried to picture his father.

             
His father…a director with the board of the Community Monorail Shuttle network…a man of note, a man of substance, a man of decisions, a man of enterprise. But his father was a stranger, rarely glimpsed. Fleeting visits to the family home, interview clips on the evening news, snapshots in the local newspaper. What did he look like, stripped of such contexts? Fergus could not remember. Who were his parents? Parents make you what you are…but who are they?

             
Was it like this for his peers? It wasn’t something they discussed between lectures in the campus restaurant or student bar. What reaction would he prompt with the question: “Can you remember what your parents look like?” What response would he draw by asking his associates to describe their forebears? Did it even matter? So long as they kept the allowance rolling in, paid the course fees and ensured the material comforts, who really cared?

             
The bus finally pulled away, the whine of its electric motor irritating his teeth. The journey was becoming increasingly irksome and Fergus wished he’d taken a cab. He glanced around to see a ticket inspector emerging from the stairwell, his mud brown uniform glittering with officious badges. Fergus groaned and began sifting the paper debris at his feet for the ticket he’d discarded no sooner than he sat down. What was the point? The fare was so cheap, who would bother to try and defraud the system?

             
“Tickets please,” boomed the voice in his ear.

             
“It’s one of these down…” Fergus stared up in horror. “…here…”

             
Beneath the peaked cap, the inspector had no face. His head was a single, giant eyeball glaring down in accusation.

* * *

Fergus screamed. The noise, and the pain in his chest, awoke him. For an instant he was adrift in the insipid blue-green liquid of his VR Tank. His mask was off and he was glancing around in panic. Hundreds of disembodied eyes clung like barnacles to the reinforced glass of the tank, watching him float in silent panic in the soft cool chemical mix. Then, there was a blinding light, like those he remembered burning on the edge of daylight behind the barbed fence.

              Fergus awoke inside the fortress.

             
He was strapped to a cold steel slab. He was naked but for a pair of leather briefs that clutched his groin a little too closely for comfort. The dark, strange room smelled of damp. Chains clinked in the stale draught that brushed his face. It was like a medieval dungeon, he thought, though one constructed largely of steel and plastic. It was a painstaking forgery, even down to the roughly hewn stone walls and the blood and excrement smeared floor slabs. Perhaps, he considered with an involuntary shudder, those were not imitations.

             
At first he assumed he was alone. He listened intently for other sounds beyond his prison, for signs of life within the fortress. All he could hear was the rattle of chains, the drip of water and breathing…his…and someone else’s. He wasn’t alone. There was another presence among the shadows. A burden of fear began to descend upon his prone body. It was unlike any other fear he’d experienced within the confines of his artificial reality conjurer. He suddenly found the urge to reach up and rip away the mask, to end the nightmare. His arms refused to budge within the straps that held them.

             
“It’s only in my head!” he snapped at himself. “It’s just imaginary.” His voice reverberated through the dismal chamber. “I don’t want to quit yet. Not yet. This is the best it’s been! The most real…” In the corner of his eye he caught the essence of a shadow detach itself from the darkness and slink across the fetid flagstones. It appeared tall and shapeless. It was not so much dark as the complete absence of light…as though it was a living, moving doorway into another terrifying world. Now, more than ever, Fergus wanted to free his arms.

             
He watched it approach, his scrambled brain trying to remember if this creature had been described in the programme’s user guide. He’d skim-read the booklet in the store before paying. It was hard to recall…he might easily have missed any reference. Even if he’d read about this apparition would he be able to summon the detail now he was inside the game? The important thing was to quickly establish if it’s classified a friend or foe? Suddenly, in the place he might have expected its head to be, two burning red embers appeared, glowing with unbound malevolence. Fergus knew the answer instantly.

             
“Who are you?” he shouted, the terror in his voice was real. The eyes, if that’s what they were, burned cruelly within the outline of void. The stale draught was becoming a chill wind. Fergus was aware of the cold brushing against his vulnerable and exposed goose-pimpled flesh.

             
“I am.”

             
The words roared like a jet engine, yet they echoed with hollowness as though they ushered from another distant world. Fergus remembered the cave, the fire and the song. He fought the panic in his throat.

             
“I’m not afraid of you!” he lied defiantly. “You’re just part of the programme. I can stop this if I really want to. I can make you go away!” His voice lacked conviction.

             
There was a sound like a deep, bellied laugh, only much more horrible and sinister. It reminded him of the scary movies he used to watch on the Horror Channel late at night when his mother and father were out partying: images of hooded figures, grey flesh and razor fingers. Was this all part of the game or another flashback, an intrusion? He guessed the Dream Weaver would be really kicking in around now.

             
“I am,” the voice repeated. The darkness encroached. “You…” the shadow stretched toward him, “…are part of the programme.” He felt the fear flooding through him and tried to visualise pulling the VR mask from his face. Nothing happened. His numb arms remained jammed against the cold steel. “You have already lost your hold on reality. Your mind is no longer your own.” There were other sounds pinned behind that rushing voice: children laughing, water dripping, the wind howling. “You have journeyed to the edge of sanity and stared into the abyss of madness once too often. You have tested the boundaries too many times. The borders have blurred and you have now entered a forbidden realm. You…are…mine!”

             
The laughing returned, no longer deep but rasping, screeching and clawing. Fergus choked for breath as the air became a stench of death. He felt the slab beneath him tremble and lift. A violent gust of wind whipped his face and he was suddenly hurtling toward the pages of an open book. Letters peeled away from the yellow, aged paper and threw themselves at him like dead leaves in an autumn gale. There were thousands of them and they were suffocating him.

             
“No!” he shouted. “No!”

* * *

Fergus was adrift on an ocean of light. He watched the universe unfold, the vastness filling him with dread. He saw shapes and elements flash before him, like the riders of apocalypse on their charge to destruction. There were spiral stairways of unconnected stones drifting past, their destinations uncertain. Then he watched as a large familiar building took shape from the ether. A railway station, its grand Victorian brick waiting rooms and platforms looming like an unanchored monument against the ever-changing colours of the neon sky. Wisps of cloud seemed to breeze through its structure, bricks vanishing and reappearing like the patterned lights of a Christmas tree. Fergus saw men dressed in funereal black, tall hats and long tailcoats, emerge along the fluctuating platform. He heard the sound of a sombre pipe organ throbbing mournfully, and the anguished beating of wings against the vacuum sky. An old steam locomotive chugged into the station and drew to a steamy halt. There was a clattering of doors. The men began loading coffins into the wooden carriages. Coffins…hundreds stacked high along the platform. Fergus read the locomotive’s nameplate – ‘The Last Train To Eternity’.

             
“Some deaths take forever,” he whispered the memory inside his head.

* * *

The body armour felt warm and light against his skin. There was a hard, reassuring grip in his gloved hand, that of a laser gun. He hunted through the gothic fortress with the stealth of one trained in such arts. He knew the mutant guards of Goginan were unable to see him coming against the shadows of the dark tower as he stalked and killed them, one by one, with calculating simplicity.

             
Fergus was searching for the dungeon levels. He was searching for the prisoner princess. He negotiated the labyrinth of ill-lit tunnels and stairwells with unexpected ease, slicing down the mutants with short, sharp bursts of laser light as they stumbled clumsily across his path. He did not stop to question how he knew his way, or how he could slay them so efficiently. He did not ask himself why nobody found the trail of fresh corpses left in his wake and raised the alarm. He was in control again and that’s all that mattered. The dark shape, the roaring voice, the ghostly train were forgotten – glitches in the programme amplified by the drugs pumping through his system. All that mattered now was the game. It was game on.

             
He was descending sharply. The air was becoming colder and staler. There was an unpleasant odour to the lower reaches of the fortress but he pressed on. There was a maiden to find and to rescue, and little time left. As he dropped down the stairs, two by two, he tried to imagine what she would look like, how she would taste when she pressed her grateful lips to his, and how her welcoming body would feel as he claimed his prize and entered her, entwined on the forest floor after a breathless escape. His loins stirred with the thought. It would be love at first sight. It always was. He’d never been disappointed. Better than the real thing: all the sensations, all the excitement, all of the satisfaction…but none of the insecurities, the complications or the rejections. Fergus scored every time. It doesn’t get better than that.

             
He caught himself at the foot of the stairwell, alerted by the clank of dull armour in the darkness below. He watched another mutant emerge from the darkness and pressed himself against the cold, damp stone wall and waited as it began its ascent to certain death. Its twisted features barely had time to register the shock of mortality when the laser bit silently into its chest, effortlessly slicing through flesh and steel alike. The creature’s blood bubbled onto the floor and it toppled toward him.

             
Fergus caught the dead weight and eased it gently to rest before leaping the final steps into the corridor. There, in the flicker of torchlight, he found himself in a wide chamber, like a junction, with a choice of four shadowy corridors leading away in opposite directions. He instinctively knew which one to choose.

* * *

When he found her she was whispering prayers of comfort softly to herself in the empty silence of her dank cell. Alone, crouched against the terrors of the fortress, she waited for him. Her long white cotton gown was smudged with the filth of the dungeon and her pale flesh bore the smears of its grime. Even the long golden locks that fell away in pretty ringlets behind her hinted at better times. Her dark eyes stared, unblinking, into the gloom. Princess Ashera had clearly experienced unspeakable cruelty at the hands of the tyrant Uberoth here in the bowels of Goginan. It was just as Fergus anticipated.