Atlas Alone Page 22

  I try to think of something I can ask him, something only he would know the answer to, but I can’t think of anything the beast wouldn’t know. “Can we talk in meatspace?”

  He looks as shocked as he should. “Okay, I’ll see you on the other side.”

  Carl is knocking on my cabin door before I have even lifted my head from the pillow. I feel leaden with exhaustion; my legs simply won’t move even when I tell them to. “Come in,” I call.

  He darts in, closes the door and rushes to my side, gathering up one of my hands in his. “I’m back,” he says, and I know it was him in my office. “Shit, Dee, what happened? You look shattered.”

  My throat is sore, like I was really crying, but my face is dry. Maybe this is what Carolina meant about needing time to decompress. It feels like I’ve run a marathon with a heavy pack on my back.

  Carl squeezes my hand. He’s waiting for me to answer and I’m still trying to work out how I feel. Coming up after such an intensely emotional collapse is jarring in the extreme, and I still can’t remember asking him to come to me. I only asked him to speak to me here to check that it was really him back there. Now what do I say?

  He’s looking at me with those big brown eyes of his, the ones that have been trained to see things most people miss. I need to be as truthful as I can be with him; otherwise he’ll start poking around, looking for a reason for me to be upset a day after a man was murdered. “I just played a game on the leet server.”

  He frowns slightly. “They’ve got one on the ship?”

  “Yeah. I was invited to take someone’s place at the last minute for this tournament thing.” I pause, worrying that I’m saying too much. But my participation in that game wasn’t protected by an NDA, and the only one I’ve signed is to do with the details of my salary and benefits and all that crap. Shit, I haven’t told him I have a job now.

  “And what was it like only doing what you can in the real world?”

  “Weird. And it feels like shit when you come up from it,” I reply, finally shifting my legs so I can lie on my side. “Can you get me some water?”

  He goes off to the bathroom and I force myself to sit up and swing my legs off the bed. I realize I’m shaking when I reach out to take the glass he brings to me. He notices too, giving me a concerned look that makes me feel wretched before he sits back down next to me. “Was it something that happened in the game?”

  I nod. “It was set in London, back in the thirties, the day the riots broke out.” He remains silent, waiting to hear something that explains the mess I’m in. “It was . . . really intense. I grew up there. My . . .”

  “I won’t tell anyone, Dee, I swear it.”

  “My mum died on that day.” I can’t look at him as I say it.

  I feel his hand on my shoulder. “And it brought it all back?”

  “No!” I shrug his hand off me, appalled that he thinks I’m the kind of person who could be reduced to a blubbering mess just because it reminded me of something. I’m not that sort of person! I’m not like one of the men I used to work with who used to cry every time a particular song came on because it was his grandmother’s favorite. That sentimental, weak bullshit has never been anything I’ve ever had to deal with.

  “Then what was it?”

  I down the water and put the glass on the floor by my foot. There’s a notification of a message from Carolina but I ignore it. That can wait. “Nothing, really. I’m fine.”

  “Dee, don’t do this. Don’t shut me out. Are you worried I’ll think you’re crap or something? ’Cos I don’t. I was relieved when I got your message. I’ve been waiting for it for years.”

  “Eh?” I twist to look at him.

  “How many times have I cried on your shoulder since we met? Dozens? How many times have you?” He waits for a reply that doesn’t come. “One, Dee. Today was the first time. I mean, I know you’re tough, but . . . it was a relief to know you’re human after all.”

  “Was there any doubt?”

  He shrugs. “I knew bad shit must have happened to you; otherwise you wouldn’t have ended up in the container with me that day we were sold to the hot-housers. I just figured you dealt with it all differently and that it must work for you. Maybe ‘human’ is the wrong word.”

  But then again, maybe it isn’t, I think. I’ve had less of an emotional life than most of the NPCs I’ve shot. No, that’s not true. They’ve performed more emotionality than I’ve ever experienced. But he’s still looking at me, expectant. “The game . . .” I falter.

  “Go on,” he says softly.

  And I want to. For the first time in my life I feel a need to unburden myself, as if that one moment of weakness in my office has washed away the seawall, and now there’s no hard definition between me and the emotional storm surge battering at my shore. I look at him and see only compassion in his eyes, and such a desperate hope that he will make me feel better.

  No. I can’t believe that. This is not the time to put our friendship to the test. The hope in his eyes is that he’ll finally see a weakness he can exploit in the future; I just know it. I take a deep breath as I look back at the floor, feeling more in control again.

  “Dee . . . whatever it is, I won’t judge you.”

  And this is what you get for showing some emotion: the guilt trap. If I don’t tell him something, he’ll feel hurt. And if he feels hurt, he’ll be less likely to be on my side if he digs up something about Myerson. I can’t tell him the truth, as he’ll want to know whom I was talking to in the office before he got there. Surely it’s safe to tell him about the game in the broadest strokes? I was playing it with three other people, and no one died in the real world. But I don’t want to tell him about the flat; that’s too weird. I cover my hesitation with a rub of my eyes with these shaking hands of mine. “The game was pretty intense. It . . . it went to some dark places.”

  “What do you mean? Stuff to do with your mum?”

  “No . . .” And then I remember a focus group I ran after a test audience played through a mersive designed to help people to understand what it’s like to run a hospital during a mass casualty incident. The company I worked for had been commissioned by a university, hoping that a full-immersion game would help their students understand the pressures they’d be put under in emergency medicine. Fifty percent of the students in the test audience dropped out of their course the day after they played it, and we were almost sued. One particular student comes to mind . . . “It was a spy game. We had to get to the McGuffin before the other team did. It was like a race to solve different puzzles . . . the details aren’t important. There . . .” I make myself think about that emptiness inside me again, call back just enough of that dreadful terror to make my throat clog again. “There was a bit where we had to find another agent to give us the next bit of the plot and . . . and I decided it would be better to delay the other team, rather than race them to the next challenge.”

  He puts his arm around me again. “It’s okay, Dee. I’m here.”

  Good, this is working. I make no effort to stop the shivering; I feel so cold and tired that it’s really not hard to let my voice tremble. “I pretended to be the spy the other team were looking for. I . . . I waited until one of them got close and I stabbed him.” I cover my face and lean forward, as if I am too ashamed to let myself be seen. “I keep thinking about it. I mean, I’ve stabbed like ten million mooks, right? But they weren’t real. And in the debriefing room afterward, the player was so angry. And I made out it was no big deal just so he wouldn’t be in my face anymore, and then I went to my office, just to have a moment alone, you know, and it hit me. I hurt him. I knew he would feel pain and I . . . I didn’t care. I thought it was just a game, no big deal, but then when I thought about it, I . . . I decided it was better to cause someone else real pain than lose a game. What kind of person am I?”

  “Was this at the end of the game?”
<
br />   “No . . . about the middle. After that we had to run around London with the riots going on and . . .” My voice genuinely cracks then as I remember the sirens. “It was just like . . . like that day.”

  “Dee . . . I think it was more that than the other player getting in your face.”

  “Yeah, but Brace had a point.”

  “Don’t . . . don’t you think you might be freaked-out about the day though? I mean . . . if it was when your mum died.”

  “No, it wasn’t that!” I almost yell at him and he pulls away. I glance at him, worried I’ve upset him, but he just looks full of sadness and pity and I just want to push him away from me and run out the door.

  “It’s not something to be ashamed of. That was something the therapist made me appreciate. We’ve been taught to feel ashamed of any vulnerability, Dee. It’s what the hot-housers did to us. We couldn’t show any of our feelings, remember?”

  I make myself look away again, wanting to make him think that I am struggling to take a difficult truth on board when really, I’m struggling not to just throw him out of my cabin. I didn’t ask for him to come to me! There’s no way I would have done that. That damn beast must have done it and now I have to—

  “Maybe you should talk to Cameron too. That’s the therapist. Ze is really nice. It wasn’t anything like as bad as I thought it would be.”

  “No, I’m fine. Really. It was just a bit too intense and . . . and I’m sorry I called you like that.”

  He sighs. “I’m sorry you feel that way about it. Look, I—” He stops, holds up a hand in that way he does when a message comes in that he can’t just ignore.

  I go into the bathroom and blow my nose on some toilet paper. A glance in the mirror confirms I look just as bad as I feel. I rinse my face with tepid water in the hope it will make me feel better, but like all the times I’ve done this in the past, it doesn’t do as much as I hoped it would.

  When I go back into the main cabin, Carl is staring into the middle distance, lips pressed tight together, shoulders high with tension. Then he blinks the message away and stands, looking right at me. “Dee, did you say the name of the other player was Brace?”

  “Yeah, Commander Will Brace. He was on the other team.” My heart begins to thrum in my throat. “Why?”

  “He’s dead. Just been found in his cabin.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Tell me what you did to him in the game.”

  I take a step back before I even realize I have and that fact alone scares me into better vigilance. I need to think very, very carefully. Fuck! Why did I even mention that fucking game? “He was fine afterward! I spoke to him! We all did! I didn’t kill him, Carl!”

  All the softness is gone from his eyes. “Tell me what you did in the game, Dee.”

  “I . . . I got a glass bottle and smashed it against a granite countertop and I waited until he was close—he was trying to hurt me!—and I stabbed his side.” I make the movement with my hand, to show him the angle. “I think I did it twice? He screamed . . . there was lots of blood but . . .” I lean back against the bathroom door, hand over my mouth. “But I checked with Carolina. Like, three times before we timed-in, I checked that whatever we did in the game just felt real; it wasn’t supposed to do anything in the real world.”

  “Carolina who?”

  “Johnson. Carolina Johnson. She spoke to him too, in the debriefing room. And there was another guy . . . Jon, I think his name was. We all talked about the level together and Brace was there and talking—well, shouting—and you can ask them!”

  He merely nods. No expression, no indication of whether he believes me or not. Shit, this is him in full-on professional investigator mode. “You need to stay here until I come back and speak with you. Your communications with any of the people you’ve just mentioned will be monitored for the duration of this investigation.”

  “It was just a game, Carl, a stupid fucking game and I checked first. Ask Carolina!”

  “I will. I won’t be long.”

  He leaves and Ada informs me that a “do not disturb” notice has been placed on my cabin.

  I’m still shaking, this time for a different reason. I should have known it would happen. I should have been more careful. But I wanted to hurt Brace, and I wanted to kill him, and to the beast there is no difference between what I want and do to people in games and what I want to do to them in the real world. That he would make this happen with other people playing the game with me is . . . obscenely stupid. Did he think it would obfuscate my role in Brace’s death? Fuck! Why did I tell Carl about the game in the first place?

  I rub my hands over my face, trying to work some blood back into my cheeks and lips to stop them from tingling. Maybe volunteering the information before we learned of the death will work in my favor.

  Maybe I just need to tell him the truth.

  I shrug off that stupid idea and remember the message I received but didn’t open. Carl said my comms would be monitored, but Carolina has nothing to do with Brace’s death, and nothing to do with me and the beast. I dismiss a brief concern that they may be one and the same and open it, expecting it to be her telling me that Brace has died. The actual contents are no less confusing.

  Hey Dee,

  Thanks again for the awesome game. Brace is still angry; he won’t talk to me, even in private, but he’ll come round. Jocks don’t like losing. Don’t worry about it.

  There’s a party tonight that I’d like you to come to. It’s gonna be nice, like on Earth, and my grandfather is going to be there and I want you to meet him. We only have them once every few months and it’s good to remind ourselves how to socialize in the real world, right? I can send some clothes over, if you don’t mind wearing a dress? It’s that kind of party. I have shoes you can borrow too. I’m guessing you only have the basic crew kit. Let me know.

  Carolina

  She could’t have known Brace was dead when she sent this, but surely she knows now? I close the message without replying. I need to see what Carl does next.

 

  I stare at the dialog box floating over the floor, knowing from the way it looks that it’s from the beast and that Ada will have no idea it’s open. But will Carl know? Surely the beast wouldn’t send it if the authorities could pick it up? Fuck, I have no idea what is safe or not anymore. I swipe it away, not wanting to take the risk. More than anything else right now I feel tired. Hollow. I can’t even muster the energy to be frightened of what Carl will conclude.

  Letting my upper body fall backward until I’m lying half on the bed, half off, I try to remember what I’ve said to Carl about the game, but it’s like my thoughts are shrouded in fog. There’s a flash of the moment I pulled the bottle from Brace’s side, that awful sucking sound, then a memory of stabbing my hand into Myerson’s gut, how warm and wet it felt. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, rubbing them until a small explosion of white dots chases away the images. If Carl comes back and takes me to the brig, I won’t fight it. I’m too tired, and what is there to fight for? What kind of life is this to try to cling to?

  I don’t know how long I lie there, but when there’s a knock on the door my body finds a new reserve of adrenaline. “Come in,” I say, sitting back up, ignoring the ache down my spine as I do so.

  Carl walks in and closes the door behind him again. He looks tired too. “He died after going back into the game,” he says, staying by the door, still cold as hell. “He came up for eleven minutes after he left the debriefing room where you all spoke to him. Then he used his command privileges to reload the level and go back in. Apparently that’s against the rules of the server. It looks like he replayed the scene with you, with some . . . changes, and then went into shock and died.”

  “What, like that other guy did?”

  He nods. “It looks like his MyPhys
malfunctioned in a similar way to Myerson’s. You’re off the hook, Dee, but I may well need to ask you more questions as the investigation progresses.”

  “You said he replayed it but with differences. Did you watch it, like when we watched Myerson’s game?”

  “Yeah. I think Brace had some anger issues. It wasn’t nice, Dee.”

  “I was in the replay?” His nod and grim expression suggest it was violent toward me. “And I stabbed him in it?” He nods again. “So how do you know it wasn’t me?”

  “Because it happened when I was with you in your office. I was literally holding you in my arms when the copy of you was stabbing him.”

  Does that mean I didn’t kill him? I won’t know until I talk to the beast, and I have no desire to do that. I have no idea whether it would tell me the truth anyway. The not knowing is infuriating though; I don’t know whether to feel a quiet satisfaction that another one on my kill list is dead by my hand, or whether I’ve missed my chance. Then I realize that either way, I made that bastard hurt. Even if my actions didn’t kill him, I do have that at least.

  “And besides,” Carl continues, “he did far worse to you afterward when he replayed that level, and you’re fine now. You do feel fine, don’t you? No unexplained pain? No shock?”

  “I’m aching a bit.”

  “I’ve asked Atlas 2 to run a full diagnostic on your MyPhys installation, and the same for the other two players as well. And I’ve recommended that immersive gaming for anything rated as violent or stressful be shut down until I get to the bottom of this. Myerson wasn’t playing on the leet server, so it’s a global recommendation. I’m just waiting for official sign-off.”

  “Okay. Are private mersives and nonviolent games still okay?”

  “Yeah. To be honest, Dee, I think it’s a MyPhys thing, rather than anything to do with the gaming. But we can’t shut down everyone’s MyPhys and so we have to take some precautions. Just be really careful, okay?”