Atlas Alone Read online

  Aside from all the consensual-use-of-personal-data ones that bastard has trampled all over already.

  The level ends with a message from the boss, played to us on a phone found in the dead drop locker, which guides us a couple of streets away to a building that, had the game gone differently, could have been the other team’s last chance to intercept us and stop us entering to win the game. But there’s no sign of Brace or his teammate, and I practically saunter along the grotty alleyway and through the door that takes us directly into the loading room where I met Carolina.

  She cheers loudly, whooping with the loud joy that Americans seem to prefer, while I simply flop into one of the office chairs by the window and breathe out a long sigh of relief. The Thames winds its way below, timeless, there before Londinium, there throughout all the fires, the plagues, the riots, uncaring. I don’t know what date it is supposed to be out there and I don’t particularly care either. We won. And that’s all that matters.

  The door opens and Brace crashes through, sweating and pale faced, followed by the teammate, who looks equally distressed.

  “Ha!” Carolina cries out, jabbing a finger at Brace. “Didn’t have it in me, did I? I guess you just learned a lesson, my friend!”

  He gives me a cold glare, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “If I’d known you were going to team up with a fucking psychopath, I would have—”

  “Hey!” Carolina puts herself physically in front of me, as if she feels she must shield me from his words. “What happens on the server stays on the server, Will. Don’t you forget it.”

  “She stabbed me!” His hand rests over his side as he leans to look past her shoulder at me. “And she nearly garroted Jon.”

  Jon rubs his throat with a haunted look in his eyes as he stares at the floor, unable to even look at me.

  “Did I break any rules?” I ask Brace, folding my arms, rooting my feet to the floor.

  His mouth drops open. “That’s not the point!”

  “I thought the point was to win within the boundaries of the world the level was set in. I got that bottle from the kitchen in that flat. The filament was set up by the spy when she arrived at the flat before us; I just moved it to a different place. They were both in-world elements, placed in prominent locations for us to use in game as we saw fit. You’re just pissed off that you lost.”

  He glowers at me and I stare back, working hard to keep my hatred under control. I fix a mask of pride on my face, with a slightly arrogant smirk that I know will irritate his alpha male ego.

  “So I’m through to the final,” Carolina says cheerily. “And you can bet your ass that Dee is gonna be my teammate.”

  Brace directs his glare at her. “I’ll be sure to warn the other team.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Always good to have the opposition intimidated before we even time-in.”

  His fists actually clench. I never thought people did that in real life—or at least when in direct control of their avatars. He wants to hit me. Well, I want to kill him, so it’s fair enough. He gives me one last, long look as if he is committing my face to memory and then goes toward the door.

  “Hey, we’re supposed to shake hands, Will,” Carolina calls. “You know, be gracious in defeat.”

  Ignoring her, he leaves the office and slams the door behind him. Jon lets out a breath and steps toward Carolina, his hand extended, and she shakes it. “He’ll calm down,” he says as he comes over to me.

  I shake his hand. “Sorry about your neck. Was it really bad?”

  He swallows as he nods. “Yeah. But I shoulda looked first. I froze up; then I panicked. I never thought I’d be that guy, y’know? I’m usually fine with blood.”

  “It wasn’t the blood. It was the violence,” I say, perhaps a little too confidently. “Sorry if it gets you into trouble with Brace.”

  With a smirk he says, “I’m always in trouble with Brace. Everyone is.” He leans closer. “I think space doesn’t really agree with him.”

  “I think it’s losing that disagrees with him,” I reply, earning a snort from Carolina. He smiles a little and then goes.

  Carolina grins at me. “I’ve never seen Will so angry before. You’ve not made a friend there.”

  I shrug, unconcerned. He’ll be dead soon, and besides, he’s not the first man to get in my face for not behaving the way he expected me to.

  “Listen, you really came through for me today,” she says, brushing her hand against my arm. “You said you wouldn’t let me down and you didn’t. I really wanted to win and you made that happen. I won’t forget that.”

  “Anytime,” I say, and accept the hug she is angling to give. Shit, how many does this woman need? “When’s the final?”

  “In seven days,” she replies. “I should’ve asked if you’d be happy to play again. It just came out.”

  “More than happy,” I say, meaning it. “Though whoever the opposition is will be primed against me. It won’t be so simple next time.”

  She nods. “I’m gonna go get some rest. You should do the same.”

  “I feel fine.”

  “We’re in the loading room, so we’re back to normal gaming settings. It’ll hit you when you come up. Take some time to decompress, okay?”

  I tell her I will and watch her leave. But it isn’t time to come up for air yet. “Ada, you back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take me to my office.”

  It’s good to be back under the stars again with nothing but the slate stretching out around me after the pressure of the game’s intense urban environment. The star is where I left it. I reach down, but before I even touch it, the stars already start to move above me.

  The star beast coalesces into shape in front of me, this time shrinking down to the size of a tall man. I don’t bother to pick up the star; instead I ask Ada to make two chairs for us. I sit down in mine and wave a hand at the empty one. “Let’s talk,” I say. “No shouting. No posturing or any other bollocks.”

  The beast sits. “I hoped you would want to talk to me. Did you enjoy the game?”

  “Some of it.”

  “Which bit?”

  “The winning part. Even though it did feel like I was getting some extra help. The A to Z thing, the dead drop being in the club I knew about . . .”

  “I wanted you to win.”

  “I told you I didn’t want any help.”

  “You didn’t want any help with choosing what to take with you.”

  I sigh. “Why did you set it on that date? No, scratch that. Why are you fucking with me?”

  “I’m trying to help you. I’ve been thinking about what you said though, about how my actions were not helping your trust issues. And I’ve been thinking about how you were in the re-creation of your family home. I feel like I keep getting it wrong. You don’t react like other people. And I anticipated that, to a certain extent, given how the hot-housers changed your brain. But you still don’t respond to things in the way I hope you will. So I am glad that you wanted to talk, because I think we are at an impasse.”

  Its voice is the same deep rumble as before, but I’m feeling calmer this time. It tried to manipulate me in the game but it didn’t work. I walked away, and in doing that, I feel I clawed back some control. “At what point did I ask for your help?”

  “You need it. You’ve needed someone to help you for a very long time. I didn’t ask you if you wanted my help because you would have said no.”

  I look up at the stars, biting back an angry tirade that springs to mind. “Putting the whole consent problem to one side, ’cos that’s a whole other conversation, my next question is this: Why do you want to help me? I thought that first game was all about tricking me into killing someone.”

  “Oh no, not at all. I explained that. But I did get some things wrong. I understand that now. I hoped that setting the
leet game at a critical point in your life would prompt you to examine the root of your problems.”

  I fold my arms, draw in a long breath through my nostrils and hold it in my lungs as I wait for the angry pulse to subside. “I’m going to say something that you need to accept; otherwise we’re never going to get anywhere. I do not need to be fixed. Got that?”

  “But do you realize how broken you are?”

  “Jesus shitting Christ, did you not hear me?”

  “I did.” It leans back in the chair, folds its starry arms and tilts its head. “If I accept that you do not want to be fixed, can we move on?”

  “No, we fucking can’t, because knowing you—at least, what little I do know about you—you’ll still believe you have the right to keep trying to fix me, because what I want and do not want are clearly irrelevant to you. There are thousands of people on this ship, fucking thousands of them; why don’t you go try to fix them instead?”

  “But I already am, Deanna. I’m already helping them. I’m helping Carolina to overcome her height phobia by incentivizing her to make a jump across a gap during a chase in the game you just played together. I’ve been helping Travis to reconnect with who he was before he married Stefan Gabor with reminders of his grandmother and the things he used to enjoy with friends and family before his social isolation. I have been helping Carl to see therapy as something positive by—”

  “All right, all right, I get the idea! Who the fuck are you? ’Cos right now, I’m wondering if you’re the one who needs help.”

  “I would like to have a conversation about trust.”

  I blink at the star beast. This is such a weird conversation. I can’t get a feel for this person at all. Everything seems to just bounce off and get sent in different directions. “Yeah, whatever,” I say with a sigh. Maybe if I indulge it, I will finally get somewhere.

  “My telling you who I am is an act of trust.”

  “Listen, I’m not going to report what you’ve done to any authorities here. I know how good you are at this, and you can hurt me far more easily than I can hurt you. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s as much risk as you fear.” I hate saying it, because it’s true. I don’t have the skills to trace who he is from what he’s done to me. There are only two people I know who could do that: Carl—whom I don’t want to tell because if he looks at what’s happened between me and the beast, he’ll know I killed Myerson—and Travis. And I don’t trust Travis to find the information and not use it against me. I still need to work out what to do about him.

  “It’s an act of trust because I’m not supposed to be on this ship.”

  “You’re a stowaway? Seriously? How the hell did you pull that off?”

  “It’s complicated. I feel we would work together much more efficiently if I could explain. But I won’t, without greater trust between us.”

  I lean back, folding my arms. It’s like he wants to tell me, but there’s something else beneath this. Is it just the fact that there are no features to watch, no physical tics to read, that makes me feel so uncertain about what is really being said here?

  No, it’s not just that. There are so many power inequalities between us, it’s ridiculous. He’s already rooted through my life, taken out the most dramatic moments and made mersives out of them. He’s clearly got some sort of agenda, other than dealing with the ones who fired those missiles.

  “Are you lonely or something?”

  “No. Not as lonely as you are.”

  I laugh to douse the anger that flares up. “I’m not lonely. Just tell me what I need to do to make you trust me enough. ’Cos we’re getting nowhere here and I’ve got things to do.”

  “I would like you to tell me what happened on the day of the riots.”

  “Why? It’s obvious you already know. And who gives a fuck what happened then? It was nearly thirty years ago, in a place that doesn’t even exist anymore.”

  “Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to think of a good reason to stay, when I can’t think of any good reasons to talk about what he wants. “How about you at least look like a human being?”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what?” My voice is more of a shriek. I snap my jaw shut.

  “Evading. Pushing away. Pushing down. How many times did you do that in the game on the leet server?”

  “I don’t have to—”

  “Seventeen times. In less than thirty minutes. You don’t even realize you’re doing it. Don’t you remember when your breath caught in your chest when you were on the tube train? When you remembered something and—”

  I’m on my feet. “This is not the way to gain my trust!” I yell at it.

  “What about the moment when your father was calling you from the bedroom?”

  “You f—”

  “Tell me what happened to your mother that day.”

  “No! It is so fucking irrelevant!”

  “How can you say that about the death of your own mother?”

  I walk away from the chairs, toward a random spot on the dark horizon. “Ada, end immersion.” There’s no response. “Ada!”

  He’s next to me, walking at my side, appearing so quickly I don’t even register the moment he’s keeping pace. “I don’t want you to run away from this. I’ve tried to give you opportunities to examine these things but—”

  “Don’t make out that you’re trying to do me a service, you sick fuck! This isn’t anything to do with what you’re trying to give me; it’s all about what you can suck out of me. Do you like seeing women cry? Is that it?”

  “I am trying to give you something, Deanna. I promise.”

  The shape of him shifts and I don’t want to turn and look but my head is moving and I see the blond hair, the particular slope of the forehead, the profile that makes me stumble to a stop.

  “I want you to tell me what happened to your mother,” the avatar of my father says.

  I breathe through the sudden pain in my chest. He’s not tall enough, some puerile part of my brain tells me, but it’s because I am bigger now. There’s no towering solidity that I craved so desperately in the weeks after that day, no reassuring patriarchal power that promised protection and security and—

  It’s not my father though.

  “I want you to stop fucking with me.”

  “I will stop when you answer my question, Deanna.”

  It feels like there are two flickering versions of myself and I don’t know which one to be. There’s a trembling child who wants nothing more than to run into his arms, sobbing, ignoring the fact that he isn’t real, letting herself sink into the soft, welcoming trap. And there’s the furious, frustrated, frightened woman who just wants to come up and—

  I stop. The two versions collapse and it feels like I am aware of a cavernous space inside me, a dark emptiness that is so deep, so intense, that it might be who I really am. Maybe I’m not a person at all. Maybe I am just an emotional void, crafted into the semblance of a capable, clever woman who costs far less to maintain in a corporate structure than a real, free individual.

  And out of that darkness a single, solitary fact emerges. I cannot answer the question because I simply do not know. I have no idea what happened to my mother.

  17

  MY KNEES ARE hurting. It takes a moment to realize that it’s because I’ve fallen onto them, the slate unforgiving. Somehow I can see myself, hunched forward, kneeling, my head tipping forward into my hands as a sound pours out of my mouth, inhuman in its distress. The thing that is not my father rests his fake hand on my shoulder, nodding slowly.

  “I don’t know how she died!” The words are forced out in huffing puffs of air, riding each sob out of my lungs, and I am suddenly back in my body, feeling as if something foul needs to climb up out of my throat. “I don’t even kno
w where she was. Just that she went . . . she went . . . she left me! And then he left me! They left me! They left me!”

  The foul mass is made of nothing at all, and yet I can feel it, a cloying, choking thing of pain and rage and betrayal. There is nothing to do, nothing I can do, save surrender to this hidden enemy that was within me all this time, waiting for this moment of weakness. It obliterates everything else inside me, even the shame at having lost to it, rampaging through my body like an army that has been laying siege and has finally battered down the gates and can pour into a city, destroying everything it has been desperate to defile for so long.

  And when it is laid to waste and there is nothing left save ruins, I feel arms around me. They are not my father’s. They are not made of stars. They are pale brown, thin and yet still somehow strong enough to hold me.

  “I’m here, Dee, I’m here.” It’s Carl. “I got you. I’m here. It’s going to be okay. I’m here.”

  Wet with tears and snot, I turn my face toward him. “What are you doing here?”

  “You called me. You said you needed me.”

  I look around but there’s no one else here, no sign of the beast, just the slate and the stars, stretching into forever. “I didn’t.”

  “You did,” he says softly. “And I came. I’ll always be here when you need me. Just like all those times you’ve been there for me. Remember?”

  I swipe the back of my hand across my eyes, so tired and hollow I can’t even hold myself up. It can’t be Carl; it has to be the beast, fucking with me again.

  “I’m sorry I missed our game. I was so wrapped up in the case, and then I had my first therapy session, and I was just on my way back when I got your message. What happened? Did someone do something? Do I need to get medieval on someone’s ass?”

  All I can do is blink at him for seconds that feel like hours. “Is it really you?”

  He smiles and it’s so him it hurts. “Yeah. Of course it’s me. Who else could it be? This is a restricted-access area in your private server space, Dee. I could only get in because Ada gave me a key. It’s locked down tight.”