Atlas Alone Page 17

  “You’re worried I can’t handle it,” I say. “Don’t be.”

  “But you’ve never played anything with this amount of physiological feedback . . .”

  “I’ve lived a lot,” I reply, looking her right in the eye, doing all I can to exude confidence. “I won’t let you down.”

  She stares at me a moment. “Okay . . .”

  I can see her resolve is wavering. Bringing in an unknown this late in the tournament is a big risk. I can understand her concern, but I don’t want to lose my chance to play. “I’m betting that if there was someone else suitable, they’d already be sitting in this chair, right?”

  She smirks and then nods.

  “So you have nothing to lose by giving me a chance. How long do we have before time-in?”

  “Ten minutes. We need to do some stretches and warm up; let’s do that while I bring you up to speed.”

  I follow her lead when it comes to the warm-up. She does similar things to my pre-run prep, just in a different order, and I need to make her feel like she is in charge here. It’s not just because she is my new boss; it’s more so she won’t change her mind about letting me play.

  “So, like I said, each level is a sandbox environment; if you can see it, you can interact with it, and it will behave like it would in the setting. All environments have been set on Earth so far, but the AI may spring something unexpected on us, so don’t rely on that.”

  “Can we really go anywhere and do anything, as long as it’s internally consistent with the setting?”

  She nods, changing position to stretch out her hamstrings. I note she is taking extra care of them. “Yeah. But we can only do what we can in the real world. So no flying, no summoning pet dragons—you know the drill.”

  “Are we racing against the other team?”

  “The format is different for each level.” Her eyes flick up and to the right. “Sometimes it’s a race of some kind; sometimes it a points-scoring thing and whoever gets the most points by time-out wins. We’ll get the briefing in just over two minutes’ time. That’s usually something like a letter, or an audio or video message from an NPC. Then we get five minutes to make loose plans and some other stuff that varies depending on the level. I try not to plan too much until we actually get there, to keep us responsive and adaptable. Sometimes people get something fixed in their head and when it doesn’t work out that way, it slows them down.”

  There is far more uncertainty than I’ve ever experienced before going into a mersive, with the exception of the weird one that bastard beast tricked me into playing. It’s strange. Usually I choose the genre, the difficulty level, the rules of engagement. I know whether I am going to need to slaughter dozens of zombies to move from the start to end points of a level, whether there will even be levels in the first place. I like the way this is making me nervous, the way it is pushing me to leap into something without knowing how it will end up—but unlike in that game run by that bastard, here I know there is a safety net.

  A flicker of worry cuts through my excitement. What if I kill someone in this game, like I did with Myerson?

  “So . . . just to put my mind at rest . . . if I hit another player in this game, they won’t wake up with a black eye, will they?”

  “They won’t—I promise!” After a couple more stretches, she starts doing a few kickboxing moves. Uncertain of whether she is trying to show off or not, I don’t try to emulate her, instead falling back on jogging on the spot, alternating with a few jumps and punches from an old routine I used to do.

  “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” I ask.

  “I’m best at math and logic puzzles and have pretty good endurance and stamina. Pretty flexible. Not so hot on upper-body strength. You?”

  I shrug. “All-rounder I suppose,” I say, aiming for nonchalant and slightly arrogant in the hope it will cover the fact that I have no idea. I’ve never thought of gaming skills in relation to my real-world skills before. I’m deadly with a good sniper rifle, but is that because I have the actual skill, or just because I know how to play certain games really well? “My hand-eye coordination is good,” I offer, seeing her uncertainty. “And I’m fit.” Then I start to really think about it. “I’m tough,” I add. “Mentally, I mean. I can make hard decisions and fast. It takes a lot to freak me out. And I’m good at looking at what resources are available and how best to use them to achieve a goal.”

  She looks happier. “Good. And you being Noropean means you’re probably twice as good as you’re able to admit, so we’ll be fine.” We both chuckle at that.

  “Is there a prize for the winner?”

  “Not officially,” she says, with the sort of smile that instantly tells me there is definitely a prize and it’s one she wants. Badly. “Kudos, mostly,” she adds, but I know she’s downplaying it. I don’t press her though. It won’t make any difference to how I approach this.

  I always want to win. Whether there’s a prize or not, regardless of whether it looks like winning to the others in the game. As long as I know what I want and know how to get it, that’s all that matters.

  “Are there any things we’re not allowed to do?”

  She looks up at the ceiling, considering the question. “Other than taking stims, no, not that I can think of. We’re cut off from the full functionality of our APAs, to prevent cheating, and the game takes a baseline MyPhys snapshot of your body at time-in, just in case there are any disputes. Opponents have the right to request that information, by the way. Are you okay with that?”

  I shrug. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “If you break the rules of the environment, there can be consequences. So let’s say we get dropped in a Victorian city and it’s quicker to kill an NPC guard than find another way into a building. If you do that and the body is discovered, the police can turn up. If they think the murderer is you, then they try to detain you. Generally it’s best not to do anything illegal, if it can be avoided, just so we don’t get slowed down by in-world penalties. Sometimes it’s hard to predict too; one of the teams got knocked out in the first round because they fired a gun in this safari park enclosure that caused a stampede and cut them off from the place they needed to get to before the other team.”

  “Can we find out about in-world rules before time-in?”

  She shakes her head. “No. That’s considered general knowledge. There are a few history nerds who are picked as partners for that very reason. We can’t communicate with our APAs, remember, so unless you ask an NPC, you may not have an answer. And NPCs can lie. Sometimes people are assigned on each side, depending on the level. In that medieval one each team had a castle, and all the staff there were loyal to that castle.”

  “Can we ask NPCs to fight for us?”

  “Yes. But sometimes that’s not the best option. We just have to wait and see where we get dropped in and make decisions as quick as we can. So, before we can play, you need to give consent to have those minor changes made to your MyPhys gaming settings and consent to have your APA locked out for the duration of the game.”

  The relevant files arrive, I get Ada to check them through and, when nothing untoward is flagged up, I give my digital signature and send it back to her.

  She looks away for a second, nods and then says, “Ah, here’s the brief.”

  She swipes a hand toward one of the walls and the dull corporate mural is replaced by a black screen displaying an unfamiliar generic logo. It’s swiftly replaced by a man dressed in an old-fashioned suit and tie, seated at a desk. “Looks like early to mid-twenty-first century,” Carolina mutters.

  The man is looking out at us but isn’t focused on me or Carolina, and I realize this is replicating the old-fashioned filming process used back then. Nowadays any announcement- or talking-head-style footage can be made to automatically focus on the viewer, even moving from one member of an audience to another, if that’s wh
at’s required. I’d forgotten how impersonal the generic, midrange stare of a person looking into an old-fashioned film camera is.

  “Good afternoon. This message will be brief as we have little time.”

  “Set in England,” Carolina says at the sound of his crisp accent. He sounds a little like the old radio presenters we did a mersive on a few years back. “Now I’m even more glad you’re on the team.”

  “Three hours ago, a military commander defected from an enemy foreign power. He has a flash drive filled with information and is ready to provide us with critical intelligence. However, the operation to bring him in for debriefing has been derailed by riots that have broken out in central London. The operative on the ground who was escorting him in has hidden the defector in a safe house but was separated from him three hours ago. She is injured and hiding in a different location. She has sent a coded message detailing where she is now.”

  Shit, are those the same riots as in the game I played that the beast made? They must be, given the time period we’re looking at. “So the first task is decoding that message,” I say, refocusing my thoughts on what we need to know to win. Carolina nods.

  “We know that two operatives from the commander’s country have pursued him to London and are searching the city for him now. We don’t know what intelligence they have, but we suspect they may have been involved with the injury to our operative, so it is possible they are tracking her down too.”

  “That must be the other team,” Carolina says confidently. “So it’s a race game: find the McGuffin before the other team.”

  “You need to find her, get the details on the safe house location and retrieve the flash drive and the commander before his own people find him. Obtaining the flash drive and getting it to the dead drop is the primary objective. Preventing the death of the commander is secondary. Good luck.”

  “He didn’t say where the dead drop is,” I say, frowning at the screen, which has now gone black.

  “That’ll be something the ground-operative NPC will give us,” Carolina says. “It means we can’t skip talking to her properly.”

  “Oh, right, to give it a linear structure. Cool. So, what now?”

  “We’ll go through that door,” she says, pointing at the one I entered through, “and we get five minutes to look at whatever is in there, make some plans and then we time-in. Once we go through that door, we lose access to our APAs until we either time-out or pull out of the game. If you don’t want to commit, there’s no bad feeling about it. I don’t want you to think that you have to because I’ve just become your boss.”

  “I’m in,” I say firmly.

  She takes the lead; I follow. This is her tournament, her reputation on the line, and feeling like she is in charge is going to help her. I resign myself to it, but I know that the moment I think she is doing something wrong, I’ll ignore her. This is why I don’t play team games. Shooting aliens on Mars with Carl is as close as I get to it, and that is more a shared world experience than a true co-op. We tried playing some puzzlers together and ended up pissing each other off so badly we had to stop before we came to blows. I need to do better on that front here, but I’m hoping the fact that it could really hurt if I don’t force myself to play cooperatively will be a better motivator.

  There is another room through the door instead of the corridor I was in before. It’s like an old-fashioned bunker from a Cold War mersive a colleague of mine was very proud of. I thought it was dull; he thought it was a revolutionary way to teach history. Like people hadn’t been doing that sort of thing for decades before.

  In the middle of the room there’s a table with a touchscreen set into the top of it, displaying a map of London. The table design is horribly familiar.

  “This is set in the 2030s,” I say. “If this room is part of the setting for the game itself, I mean.”

  She nods. “Yeah, it is. This is part of the prep, getting clues from this room on what we’re likely to face. Did you live in London back then?”

  My mouth is dry. The briefing mentioned riots. I nod. “Yeah, but I was just a kid. We had a touchscreen tabletop like this at home. It was the last touch interface we had before smart walls became standard.”

  “There’s a marker on the map,” she says and points at it. She frowns when nothing happens.

  “You need to tap the place on the table,” I say, reaching over to touch the marker.

  “Jeez, I forgot that,” she says, shamefaced. “Okay, so there’s going to be an adjustment period.”

  “Just assume that everything has a touch interface,” I say. “Neural chips weren’t ubiquitous back then. It was all either projections or smart screens, so touch is the default, okay?”

  The marker expands out to a little dialog box projected over that area of the map. “Last known location of Agent Alpha.”

  “So this is giving us the chance to decide where we start the game,” Carolina says. “Shit, I’ve never been to London.”

  “I grew up there,” I say, feeling the pressure building by the moment. “And I lived and worked there most of my life.”

  “Awesome!”

  The marker is just off Fetter Lane, near Temple. “That area is a warren,” I say. “Loads of dead spaces between buildings, lots of alleyways. Will we get the encoded message that the briefing mentioned here, or when we time-in?”

  “Time-in, I guess. He said she’d sent it. Where we time-in is up to us.”

  “There,” I say, pointing at Holborn Station. “It’s on two Underground lines and in jogging distance of a third. Oh, but wait . . . if the riots have started, the tube network will be shut down. Will the other team have that data too?”

  She nods. “We always start with the same information. It might be framed differently but we’ll need to solve the first puzzle and get to the agent before they do.”

  “Tell me who we’re playing against. Just in broad strokes.”

  “Errr . . . okay, so, one is a linguist and he’s very fit, likes art, terrible at math. The other is a sharpshooter, confident, good at fighting, but Brace is a military man through and through, so no surprise there.”

  Brace? My face is a mask in front of a mask. I keep my eyes fixed on the map, waiting for the initial thrill of hearing he is playing to subside. It’s no use whatsoever if I lose focus and we don’t even get a chance to interact. Besides, there’s no way I’ll be able to kill him in this game, not with other people playing, no matter how much I want to. “Something about this doesn’t feel right . . . why give the last known location when the first objective is to decode a message to find where she is now? The briefing said she was separated from the target three hours ago. This marker doesn’t tell us if she last checked in when she was with the commander, before or after. She could be anywhere; you can walk across central London in an hour. This marker is just a distraction. What we need to do is secure fast transportation . . . a motorbike. We’ll get the message, decode it, then get to her location much faster that way. There was a bike-hire place near Green Park back then; that’s pretty central. We should start there.”

  She grins at me. “Sounds great.”

  I put my hands together over the map and move them apart, bringing back memories of playing with projections on the wall of my bedroom and pushing them back down as swiftly as they return. Zooming in, I spot the road near Green Park Station that I’m looking for. “That’s where the hire place was. What about money? Do we start with that?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes we have to scavenge.” She taps the location twice and a new marker appears with the option to “select as starting point,” which she taps too.

  The map disappears, replaced by a notice saying, “Choose three items each to take with you,” and a large cupboard on the far wall is illuminated with a spotlight. “Awesome,” Carolina says with a grin. “I was hoping we’d get to choose a load-out.”

 
“We get weapons?”

  “Sometimes,” she repeats, heading over to the cupboard and opening it. She sighs. “And sometimes we don’t.”

  There are about thirty objects arranged over several shelves. A bottle of water, a torch, a box of matches and a pad of paper are the first things that leap out at me. “No tablets,” I say. “So we won’t be able to access the Internet unless we steal one.” I grab the matches.

  Carolina takes the small pad of paper and a chunky black pen. “I’ll need these to help with any math puzzles or code breaking. Water will be easy to find, right?”

  I nod, running my hand across the shelves beneath each item, forcing myself to consider each one. On the far right on the third shelf down there are two small pieces of flat, rectangular plastic. I pick one up and see that it’s a driving license with my picture and name on it. I grin. “We need to take these,” I say, swiping hers off the shelf and giving it to her. “We’ll need them to hire the bikes.”

  “Really?” She frowns at the rectangle. “Won’t they have a database that would take care of it?”

  That makes me hesitate. I can remember my parents having these though. Or was it my grandparents? I can definitely remember holding one, seeing a picture on it, knowing it unlocked the adult world in a way that I craved.

 

  It’s the same dialog box that’s popped up before, and I bristle, doing all I can to hide my irritation from Carolina. I think a response “no” but my connection to Ada isn’t there and the reply dialog box doesn’t appear. How the hell is that bastard contacting me without my connection to her?

 

  The dialog box disappears and I refocus on the license. “Identification can be useful for all sorts of things,” I say. “Especially given we won’t have phones or tablets or anything else we could use to prove who we are.”