Atlas Alone Page 11

  Oh great, a religious nutjob monolog.

  “And it isn’t just a cleansin’; this is protection. That’s what’s really crystallized for me now. We’re protecting the future of humanity by takin’ the purest with us and makin’ sure that none of those bastards can spread their lies anywhere else. One religion—the true religion—will go with us into the stars.”

  Oh JeeMuh. This isn’t a coincidence. The designer knows what they did! He’s showing me he does. But why? Why put me through all this awful shit, just to tell me that?

  I hold my hands still at my sides, school my face into showing what all men like this want to see: agreement and admiration. Behind that mask are so many questions I am keeping silent. How could the game designer know about Earth? Why not just tell me?

  He grabs a couple of the components and starts clicking them into place inside the machine. There are only ten or so left. “Are those the last bits you need?” I ask. “Do you need me to fetch anything else to make it work?”

  “No.”

  I run through the game in my mind. He made me start in the basement, facing one of the lowest points of my life, then forced me to confront all the loss caused by what those bastards did. And now he’s made an NPC personifying them, giving me a villain to kill right at the top of the building.

  This isn’t an initiation. This is catharsis.

  And all of a sudden, I know how to kill him. I’ve always known how I want to kill those responsible, and now I can get a taste of it. I swiftly close the distance between us, put my left hand on his shoulder and twist him round. I flatten my right hand, holding the fingers extended, and imagine them as solid as a blade. I thrust it into his abdomen, aiming for just under his lowest rib. His skin splits and I feel the heat and moisture of his innards as I push through and past internal organs and then I am grasping his heart as I roar with rage.

  It feels hot and slimy and he gasps, dropping the component that was in his hand, his eyes bulging in shock. I expect him to cough up blood, or make some sort of bubbling gurgle, but there’s just a choking wheeze as he sinks to his knees. His blood is running down my forearm, dripping onto the floor, and I sink onto my knees with him, squeezing, squeezing the life out of his sick fundamentalist heart.

  He falls and I relax my hand, letting his body slide off my arm and collapse. Even though my arm is covered with gore, his body looks uninjured. He still looks very dead though.

  Yeah, okay, that felt pretty good. I flex my fingers and they feel fine, aside from the drying blood coating them. After standing there for a few moments, waiting for some sort of in-game prompt that I’ve completed the mission or quest or whatever, I go to the en-suite bathroom and clean myself up as best I can. I abandon the jacket and roll the bloodied sleeve up, wishing I’d had a chance to do that before I killed him.

  It seems strange that such a gory death has left no evidence on his corpse. Not even a hole in his clothes. It’s like I was able to do an adult-rated kill move within a child-safe game, which this most certainly is not.

  The en-suite is obscene. So high-spec and spacious that I feel tempted to have a shower. But I don’t trust this game and I don’t trust the designer behind it. For all I know he could be watching.

  With some apprehension, I check my face for blood spatter, but there are only a couple of specks on my throat, which are soon washed away. At least the designer hasn’t dicked about with my face here. It’s the same as it is in the real world. Mum’s cheekbones, Dad’s eyes, my hair its usual dark blond, cropped shorter now than I’ve ever worn it. I run my hand up the back of my head, feeling the velvety fuzz, actually liking it. I didn’t wear it this way for years, unable to divorce it from the memory of being shaved by the hot-housers when I was first processed. It’s longer on the top than they had left it: just enough so I don’t look like one of their inmates.

  The urge to cry rises so swiftly a half sob escapes before I even realize it’s happening. With one hand braced against the sink, I cover my mouth until the feeling passes. What is there to cry about? I look at my reflection, at my glistening eyes, and scowl. “Pull your shit together!” I shout at myself, and it’s gone. I feel fine now.

  Nothing has changed in the bedroom. His body is still there, which jars me. In zero-gore games it would have faded out by now. I study his face, wondering if I knew him a long time ago and have forgotten him, but he seems just as much a stranger. Surely there is a statement in that fact? In a game populated purely by people I have known—or even just seen regularly—in my life on Earth, the fact that he is the only exception feels important. Is the designer saying that the people who did this are nothing like me or the other normal people I knew? I would have thought he’d be rendered like that boss of mine, but he was somewhere around floor seven.

  And, of course, this is nothing compared to the wider question: was this really a way to tell me the creator knows what they did? Or am I overthinking it? I do that with games, always trying to second-guess them, always trying to see the work-around so I can beat it faster. I need to be careful when I next speak to him, just in case I’m wrong. Or he’s working for them.

  I mentally stamp on that silly bit of paranoia and go to the machine the boss was building. It looks like an industrial oven; the little bits of electronics were being fitted inside the central space, forming a pattern on the inside floor. There’s what looks like some sort of . . . cannon on the front of the machine, pointing out at the city. No trigger, so I expect it’s activated through an APA for security. I start pulling out the components and doing my best to dismantle it in the hope it’s the trigger for the end-of-game sequence. The more I handle it, the more it looks like a puzzler mini-game to me. Perhaps the game was coded to give me the option of helping him. Or taking him out, changing my mind and then killing everyone else. No, that’s not my rush.

  There’s a clunk from inside the machine when I pull the last component out of the central cavity. I crouch down, peering inside to see a section of an internal partition has dropped down, revealing another cavity farther in. The light doesn’t penetrate far enough for me to see what’s inside it. I reach in and my fingertips brush against something cold and solid—a box.

  Pulling it out reveals that it’s the same obsidian box as the one that contained the key that opened the door into this game. Nice symmetry.

  “Bobby Bear?” I call, and then he comes through the door from the hallway.

  I set the box down and pick him up, cuddling him tight. Just one indulgence, just one moment of comfort before I go. I daren’t go back into the other room and seek out my parents. I’m scared I would never want to leave.

  But more than that, I’m scared that it wouldn’t be as perfect as I have always imagined it would be.

  Bobby Bear’s little arms squeeze me back. “Well done, Dee Dee. You stopped the bad man from doing a terrible thing.”

  “If only the real world were so easy, right?”

  “It was good to see you again,” he says. “How do you feel about what happened?”

  If Bobby Bear hadn’t asked me that same question a million times in my childhood, I’d suspect this was a consumer feedback device. It might still be, but I let myself imagine it’s not. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Okay, you guess?” His tone is both incredulous and unimpressed. “All right, how about answering this: do you feel you did the right thing?”

  I put him down and look at the body behind us. “Yeah. He was some weirdo full of toxic Christianity bullshit who was about to kill everyone.” I shrug. “But it’s—” I stop myself. Shit. I was about to say that it’s just a poor salve for the wound, given this is just a game and over six months after the real damage was done. I need to be careful.

  “But it’s what?”

  “But it’s a no-brainer,” I say. “It was obviously the end set piece. And I know some people get off on being the villain, but that doesn’t
do it for me, so there was only one way to go. I could have tried to persuade him not to do it, I guess, but from the way he was talking it was clear that reason had left his table a long time ago.”

  “Are you going to leave now, Dee Dee?”

  I pick up the box. “Yeah.”

  “You don’t want to see your parents before you go?”

  I look back, into the corridor, hearing the piano and the laughter. “No. They’re not my parents.”

  There is a key inside the box, and this one has an ornate O embellished in the grip. I pick it up and a doorframe starts appearing in the floor, just as before. “Bye then, Bobby Bear,” I say.

  “Bye-bye, Dee Dee. Take care now. I love you.”

  I loved you too, I think, but I don’t say it. I put the key in the newly appeared door now standing in front of me, turn it and go through into my office. The door closes behind me before I give in to the temptation to look back at Bobby Bear to see if he is waving the way I imagine he is. Was. He’s not there and never was. It was just a fucking game.

  The familiar slate expanse of my office space is mercifully bleak and feels a world away from the game environment. I look up at the stars, wait a moment to see if I get that weird chatbox thing, and then when nothing comes I say, “End immersion,” with a sigh of relief.

  It feels like I sink into my body, then into the bed. I open my eyes and see the creamy white plastic ceiling, hear the quiet hum of the environmental support system and realize that I really hate this cabin. A few seconds later I also realize that I desperately need a piss.

  My body’s needs come thick and fast, a new one presenting itself as quickly as I satisfy the last. Tedious meatsack, so demanding.

  Once I’ve had some food, I stretch out on the bed again and review my messages. Nothing from Carolina except an acknowledgment of receipt sent by her APA. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad sign. Maybe she has a lot of work on. Then I notice the time and sit up sharply. Maybe it’s because it’s the middle of the bloody night.

  JeeMuh, I was gone for hours. It felt like hours . . . but most games skew stuff, tricking the brain into thinking more time has passed in game than actually has. Not this one. I’ve been fully immersed for over six hours.

  Usually there’s a notification after two. Just a tiny ping from your APA, no big deal. At three hours in it gets a bit more persistent, reminding you to at least have a drink. Mine is set to boot me out after four hours in a game, whether I like it or not.

  That game overrode my own personal safety settings. Furious, I slam my fist into the bed and then I look at my hand, expecting to see a healing gash across the palm, but mercifully there isn’t one. That fucking b—

 

  The message just pops up in that weird dialog box again, the text floating over my visual field like any other, but this time there’s no ping from my APA asking if I want to read it first.

  I type back and immediately regret it. That was far too polite and I sound like some old bastard from some hokey mersive about a small town where everyone knows each other. That’s better.

 

  That actually makes me laugh.

 

  He must be twelve. Some fucking twelve-year-old genius who is just so damn arrogant he doesn’t even hear criticism.

 

 

  This is making me nervous. It feels like there was some sort of tipping point and I was too distracted to notice. This is not edgy. This is not cool or exciting. I’ve only felt like this once before, when I was with a guy in a squat who I kind of liked, who kind of liked me and then there was kissing and all of a sudden I just knew I was not into him. No, not him, the whole sex thing. I’d just been mimicking what I saw other people do, thinking it was what I should do, but then, when it was actually happening, it just felt . . . crap, and I didn’t want to kiss, let alone let it progress any further. Just like back then, there’s no way to leave this situation easily, no door to lock between us if it goes bad.

  “Ada,” I say, “can you block this chatbox thing?”

  “Please specify the chatbox you are referring to,” Ada replies in its smooth voice.

  “The one that’s in my visual field right now, dumb-ass!”

  “There is no chatbox in your visual field. Dumb-ass.”

 

  Just like in the squat when I backed off and he kept on coming, I feel the first chill of panic.

 

  The box disappears. I swing my legs off the bed and lean forward, resting my head between my knees, feeling shaky and nauseous. Violated. That’s how I feel. Not because of the chatbox bullshit—though that doesn’t help—but because of that fucking game that dredged my life and muddied everything up again. Something about the way he asked how I felt about killing that man felt . . . sick. Like I’ve been some sort of test subject or . . . I don’t know. It just feels wrong.

  I can’t tell anyone though. It would mean they’d want to investigate and I don’t want to be on anyone’s radar, not when I have some serious shit to get done. I can’t even mention it to Carl. Not that I ever confided much in him anyway. I never confided in anyone since Bobby Bear. And he wasn’t even a real person. There is a flicker of self-pity before I snuff it out.

  There’s no way I’ll sleep now. “Ada, show me some pictures on the ceiling or something.”

  “Are you having trouble sleeping?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you like a neurochemical intervention?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like me to show you what Japan looks like in blossom season?”

  I lie back down on the bed. “Yeah, that sounds good. Show me some blossom. And tell me a story. One that I like.”

  “‘The Snow Queen,’ by Hans Christian Andersen . . .”

  9

  ADA WAKES ME up with some Norwegian death punk as she puts the lights on full blast in the cabin. I threaten to have her put back to factory settings, but she just ramps up the volume another notch until I sit up and put my feet on the floor. I hate her. She does exactly what I tell her to do, even when it is good for me.

  I scratch my head, listening to the vocalist screaming something about the old gods and fire or something like that, trying to get my head around the day ahead. I’ve got used to the fact that there aren’t any meetings or lunch dates or all the other bits of social furniture that used to clutter up my day. I don’t miss them either. But I do miss the sense that I have to get up for something. “Why did you wake me up?” I say to Ada.

  “In thirty minutes you are expected on Mars. There are aliens inside robots that need a good twatting.”

  I smirk at the sound of her interpreting my calendar entry. Yeah, I remember now—I made a date with Carl to shoot some shit up. I wonder if I’ll actually be able to handle playing a mersive with him this time, instead of standing there, just watching it all pass me by like the last time we tried.

  Stre
tching, cleaning myself up and then checking messages over breakfast soon fills the time. Still nothing from Carolina. I need to let it go. If it doesn’t turn into anything, I’ll have to find another way to get the data I need, that’s all. It’s not like I really want the job.

  At the back of my mind there’s a niggle that suggests I don’t really believe that. I enjoyed doing that data analysis and report far more than I like to admit.

  When I get the ping from Ada telling me it’s time to go, I lie down and enter full immersion, waiting in the shared loading room I usually meet Carl in. It’s a comfortable space with a couple of chairs and a basketball hoop, just in case one of us is late. I get Ada to give me a ball and I spend a few minutes messing about with it, dribbling it up and down the room and shooting a few hoops. When another ten minutes goes by, I send him a prod.

  After another five minutes of pissing about I’m just about to give up on him when the door opens and he comes in. He’s dressed in a suit, making me do a double take. “Sorry,” he says, hands up. “I’m really sorry, Dee, I got caught up in something.”

  “Why are you dressed like that?” I take a step closer. He seems different. There’s a brightness in his eyes I haven’t seen in months. He looks really good, actually, his avatar reflecting something real. “What’s going on?”

  He considers something and then grins. “I’ll show you. Tia, put my room next door.”

  I go over to him. “Which room? Are you building something?”

  “No. Better than that. Something real. I’ve got a case, Dee.”

  It takes me a moment to process that. “What, a murder?” He nods, eagerly. “On the ship? For real?”

  “For real.”

  “What do you mean, you’ll show me?”

  He goes to the door that should be leading us into a room on the Martian base where we can get kitted up to go twat aliens. “I’m not owned by the DoJ anymore. This isn’t an official case. And to be completely honest, I’m not even sure it’s a murder yet. But it’s something weird and they’ve asked me to help and there hasn’t been any sort of NDA yet. I think they’re all a bit shocked.”