Atlas Alone Page 9

  It turns into a litany: a gruesome cataloging of all of the deaths that touched my life, no matter how insignificantly. All of the residents I ever noticed in the original version of this building, or the ones I subsequently lived in, or other victims in the hot-housing center, or work colleagues from the network. Hundreds of them.

  I try not to care. Some I can barely remember, their faces just vaguely familiar. Some were bullies. Some were tedious, boring people and I’m glad I’ll never have to suffer their dull conversation or entertain their mediocre ideas at work ever again. But it isn’t enough to armor myself against all feelings, no matter how much I pride myself upon my ability to switch off that emotional bollocks whenever I need to.

  It’s the anger I can’t shut out. These are just an infinitesimal fraction of the dead we left behind on Earth. All those lives, snuffed out in moments, just because some fucker in power—undoubtedly on this ship—didn’t want anyone to follow us. That must be the reason why they did it. It just doesn’t make any sense otherwise.

  It could be a woman who ordered it, of course, or a nonbinary person, but in my mind it’s a man, at the head of a table in a room full of men. White, middle-aged men, so terrified of not being the most powerful people on Earth that their fear stalked them onto this ship and made them destroy any other culture that might dare to challenge their vision on the new planet.

  Three floors down I have to stop and lean against the wall, covering my face with my free hand and trying to breathe as steadily as I can for a while. I don’t want to cry. Fuck tears! Fuck that weakness!

  How could I have thought that just finding out who did this would be enough? I don’t just want their names; I want their bloody hearts in my hand after I’ve ripped them from their bodies, smiling at them as I did it. There’s no such thing as justice to be found in any system that exists on this ship, which they will no doubt have power over. I have to make my own justice; I have to find them and make sure they pay for what they did, with their own blood. And I will sleep well afterward.

  And it won’t just be for my satisfaction, or some bullshit karmic rebalancing; it will be to protect the people who got to our destination long before us, led by a woman of Korean heritage who was always careful to talk about finding God without any mention of a specific religion. Surely that will stick in their craw just as much as the risk of anyone chasing us there? Yeah, this is a better purpose than just giving us a name to curse, a face to blame, some release valve for our grief. Names are just the beginning, and their deaths will be the only acceptable end to this.

  And it feels better, this focus, this determination after months of drifting. My motivation renewed, I crack on with looking for the logo. I’ll beat this game; then I’ll know I can cut it on the leet server and that will help me find out more about Brace and whether he was involved.

  I finally find the logo on the tiepin of a young black man on the fifth floor. I’m not impressed with this game design. I had to get all the way to the top to find the logo, then come all the way back down again to find it on something else. And the tiepin is tiny too!

  Looking at the man’s face, I struggle to place him. All I can remember is his being involved in something technical at the network when I started my first job there. He was nice enough, into sport, and left a couple of months later for another job. JeeMuh . . . how the hell did the designer find him to replicate? Employment records?

  No, stop thinking about that! I pull the tiepin free. It’s enameled metal as far as I can tell, the logo faithfully reproduced with the same colors. I turn it over, hoping for some sort of code that can help me predict the next numbers or letters, but it’s plain. Perhaps it’s chipped though.

  Back I go, all the way to the nineteenth floor. This will help me to achieve my goal, I tell myself. JeeMuh, I hope he wasn’t lying about that. Once I’m on the leet server with him, assuming I find out his identity, I will have a new goal: kick his arse at as many games as I possibly can, and then laugh right in his stupid face.

  At least this time I can ignore the bodies. But it’s too late now anyway. I seethe as I march up, the rage making my breath shorten. What about the people who didn’t die? What about the poor sods trying to survive a nuclear winter now, while I’m here, playing stupid games when I really should be hunting down those responsible?

  But then I’m at the security pad and the lure of getting through the locked door is enough to distract me. I hold the tiepin up to the screen, press it against the plasglass and the picture of the logo on the screen. Nothing happens.

  “Shit,” I say, pressing my forehead against the screen and banging gently against it. “What am I missing?”

  I put the pin through my T-shirt, push the clip onto the back of it and then feel something brush against my leg. I nearly cry out, but it’s only Bobby Bear.

  “Hi, Dee Dee,” he says brightly. “Would you like some help with that little pin?”

  I chuckle. This is so damn old-school in the midst of what must be the most advanced neural chip mining I’ve ever seen. “Yeah, Bobby, I would.”

  “The pin is a key, designed to be used in concert with your neural chip. I can help to trick the AI into thinking you have permission to wear it, so it will sync with you, but to do that, I need access to your neural chip. Is that okay?”

  I shrug. “Sure.”

  An icon appears in my vision. That’s better, something I can work with at last. It’s the logo, only three-dimensional, the little globe spinning around. “Bobby, what does CSA stand for?”

  “The Christian States of America,” he says. “Look at the screen now and tell me if it has worked.”

  Won’t he know if it has? I do as he asks, and now the string of random characters has been replaced by a sentence: “We walk in God’s light.”

  “I can read it now. But I still don’t know how to open the door.”

  Bobby Bear tilts his head to the side, considering me. “Oh, Dee Dee. You’ve got lazy! You have to do the work, not an APA.”

  It stings because it’s true. I’m used to running through games, simply chucking any sort of mental puzzle at my APA, who only needs a bit of direction. That’s what it’s specced for, after all. That, and data analysis. I’ve been doing both for so long now, I barely think about how it does things. I’ve been reduced to the role of conductor of an orchestra of one, playing whatever tune I like at the mere wave of my hand.

  “Right,” I say, focusing on the task to get away from the shameful realization that I wouldn’t last two minutes on the leet server, and not just because of my body’s limitations. “So there’s a religious group involved here. Great. I know nothing about hard-core religious shit.” I look at Bobby Bear. “Do you have all the data you used to have—I mean the default stuff?” When he nods, I grin. “You’ve got all the major religious texts stored, right?”

  “Yes,” Bobby Bear says. “You used to ask questions about them. Don’t you remember?”

  “No. Okay, call up the Bible then . . .”

  “Which version would you like to explore?”

  Oh bollocks. I didn’t think about that. “Whatever the most popular version of it was in North America just before we left. Just the straight Bible, not one of those ones with study notes all over it.”

  “The most popular Bible in circulation was the King James Version.”

  “That one then. Is there anything about opening doors? Or . . .” I look back at the door. It’s not just about that though, is it? “No . . . about gaining access to someone important.”

  “Proverbs 18:16: ‘A man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men.’”

  I look at the door and then tentatively push against it. Still locked. Then I repeat the verse myself and there is a clunk from the internal lock. I smirk. Let’s finish this.

  7

  I WAS EXPECTING a corridor, like on all the other fl
oors of this building, with doors to apartments running down both sides. The occasional potted plant, maybe, that looks good at a distance but is plastic close-up. Not this.

  It’s a single apartment, taking up the whole of the top floor by the look of it, and there’s a party going on just out of sight. I can hear piano music tinkling away, some fancy affair with the murmur of conversation and occasional laughter. There are no signs of violence. Confused, I take a step farther into a huge lobby, my shoes making a crisp tapping sound as I walk. I look down to see the shiny black brogues I used to love to wear with my tux clicking against the polished marble tiles. I’m wearing the tux too, my favorite cummerbund made of the most ridiculous iridescent material, which looks like someone wove it out of rainbows and stardust. It matches my equally ridiculous bow tie.

  I wore this to an awards ceremony in Paris three years ago. I didn’t want to go but had no say in the matter and spent most of the evening stuck at a table with a bunch of horrendously dull people. Their astounding lack of social charm and storytelling skills could make the tale of a trip through piranha-infested waters in a leaky boat seem boring. I was up for an award in an industry I didn’t care about, for a job I was forced to do and hadn’t chosen to take in the first place. Thinking there was no chance I would win, I’d downed half a bottle of champagne before my name was read out. It wasn’t nerves; it was the fact that I’d never tasted real champagne before. Carl, snob that he was, always drank red wine, which did nothing for me, and anyway, I didn’t have the heart to drink something I was indifferent to when I knew how many hours he’d prolonged his contract to pay for it.

  There was no speech to read, as I hadn’t bothered to write one. It was hard enough standing up, with that real champagne doing very real things to my body. By the time I’d reached the podium, my APA had temporarily shut down notifications on my media feeds, as so many messages of congratulations were flooding in at once, and MyPhys had started to undo the champagne’s work. With each step up the little stairs at the edge of the stage I was feeling more sober and horribly aware of the giant cock-up I was about to commit.

  I can remember a moment of awful clarity, as MyPhys artificially flushed out the last traces of drunkenness, which I hadn’t instructed it to do. At no point since hearing my name did I tell it to clean me up quick.

  Someone else had.

  As I shook the hand of the presenter and took the heavy piece of crystal, all the icons usually in my visual field faded out. I was cut off from making any sort of contact with anyone else. Even though it confused me, the sheer social pressure of having someone shake my hand and then gesture to the podium to signal it was time for me to make my speech kept me moving to the right spot to set the award down and look out over the room as the applause died down.

  All I could see was wealth. Half-eaten plates of food made by artisans, left abandoned as if it were junk from a street printer. I hadn’t left a speck of food on my plate and had eaten the dessert rejected by the man sitting next to me. “The ganache here is nothing compared to my own chef’s,” he’d said. “I wouldn’t bother.” When I’d asked if I could have it—my pride not getting in the way of a good meal since I’d known what it was like to experience real hunger—he’d looked utterly appalled. I just grinned, took the plate and tucked in.

  None of the people I looked down at from that podium had ever experienced anything like I had. I could see it written all over them without any need to check what their publicly available profiles said. Their privilege was written in the way they treated the serving staff with utter disdain, the ease with which they sat at tables covered in porcelain crockery and silver cutlery and didn’t give any of it a second glance. None of them had had to depend upon their APA to run an Augmented Reality guide during the meal to show them which bloody fork to use for each course. They were too confident, too unimpressed by it all, to be someone like me.

  And I hated them. I was going to tell them some truths, I decided. I was going to tell them what their industry was really like. I even took a breath to say it, to speak the words that would have given me at least three black marks and possibly a prosecution, to tell them that I was owned by the network and all of the work that they were acknowledging with this award was effectively forced labor.

  But then a sentence appeared across their expectant faces, the text too large for me to ignore. “This is such an honor, thank you.”

  I knew then that my boss, my handler, my jailer, was sending that message to me to read out as the beginning of my speech. He knew I hadn’t thought I’d win. He’d been watching and waiting to step in if I did.

  I had no intention of reading that bastard’s words out. I grabbed the award again, fully intending to hold it up as I spoke my own words, but then I saw a little blue dot floating over the ballroom floor. The one burned into my brain by the Machine, the one the woman in those electric blue shoes used to “realign my values.”

  “This is such an honor, thank you!” I said, as if I meant it, as if it would stop the pain that I still believed would inevitably follow if I hesitated further. And I read every word of it, thanking my boss for his guidance, his support of my career, expounding upon how I could never have got this far without his faith in me. The audience thought the tears were of happiness. That I was so authentic. I spent the rest of that evening hiding in a service corridor in the bowels of the hotel, shaking, trying not to think of electric blue shoes. And when I went back to the office, that same boss gathered everyone together so they could applaud me, saying how moved he was by that damn speech. He put the award on the shelf in the entrance lobby, with the others won by employees, so every morning I could look at it and “feel proud,” he said. All it meant was that every morning I had something to look at to make me hate him just that little bit more. But no one would have ever known I felt that way. The same training—or should I say conditioning—that made it impossible for me to resist when the blue dot was invoked made it easy for me to hide my feelings. They trained me to hide what I thought and felt, and the whole time they thought they were removing those feelings altogether. Like all things put under threat, my emotions simply went underground.

  Why the fuck am I wearing a tux that I left in a hotel along with a note saying that it could be given to anyone who wanted it? And the hammer is gone! Fuck! I hate this game so much.

  I turn to see that the door has closed behind me and that Bobby Bear has followed me in. “My hammer has gone,” I say to him. “This is a shit game. No narrative flow, no environmental consistency. I need to find another weapon. A decent one.”

  “Are you sure about that?” my bear asks.

  I frown at him. Is this some sort of in-game assistance? “Kam said there was someone causing trouble on the top floor . . . it’s the last place to go in the building and the most obvious place for the boss fight.”

  “I don’t mean do you need one. I mean: do you need to find one? Haven’t you already got the most dangerous weapon there is?”

  Just as I’m about to ask him what the hell he is talking about, a memory surfaces, nothing more than an impression of being in my bedroom when I was small, cuddling Bear. There was rain, on the window, yes, that was it, and I couldn’t go out to the park and I was grumpy about it, in the way that only children with the happiest lives can be.

  I can’t remember the conversation well, but I do remember him talking to me about something in the world that was bad. I was small, so it was probably something stupid like an ice cream flavor or—

  No . . . it wasn’t something stupid at all. It was the fact that some children didn’t have parents and that was why my parents were working with someone to . . . to make it better in some way. It must have been that they were getting ready for some fund-raiser, yes, that makes sense. And I was moaning about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to go with them and Bear was reasoning it out with me.

  “I do . . . I remember something . . .�
� I say to him. “About how horrible the world was and . . . and something about bad people.” Even as I speak, more of it comes back to me, with such clarity I start to wonder whether Bear is making me remember somehow. Is that even possible?

  “Yes, we talked about bad people and what we can do about them. Do you remember what I told you?”

  And then I see it, clear as day in my head. “You told me that my father said in a speech that we were the best weapons against bad people.” I frown at Bobby Bear. “But that was . . . figurative. Some bollocks to make rich people feel good about giving money they didn’t need to Dad’s favorite charities.”

  He just looks at me. Slowly, one of his little fur eyebrows rises. “C’mon, Dee Dee. Do I need to tell you everything?”

  “Am I the weapon here?”

  “You can be,” he replies. “But it’s a big responsibility. And there could be serious consequences. Are you sure you want to accept those?”

  The way he talks to me makes me feel like a little girl again. Everything he says feels like it’s designed to push me along, to make me figure things out, think carefully. Just like he always did. “Yeah, course I do! I’m not here to have a cup of tea with the big bad, am I?”

  “All right then, if it’s really what you want.” Bobby Bear’s right paw touches my hand. I feel a slight tingle, which swiftly fades.

  “Is that it?” I flex my fingers. “Can I shoot lasers out of them now or something?”

  “You’ll know what to do when the time is right.”

  Clichéd, but judging by the rest of this game, it’s the only explanation I’ll get, so I take in my surroundings. Aside from a huge silk rug, there are planters with huge ferns and more exotic plants sprouting from them and a console table that looks like it’s made out of pure crystal. Nothing that could be used as a weapon, so hopefully whatever he did to my hand will work.

  An honest-to-God butler walks past with a tray of canapés, ignoring me. Hang on. I came in here expecting a fight, a huge, dramatic confrontation with the big bad. Not a bloody soiree.