Bedlam (12 page)

And now he was standing in it, actually standing: he could see his feet, his whole body, not just a first-person perspective
with a modified 120-degree field of view. Staircases, lifts, platforms, walkways, courtyards, passageways, pools: places to
hide, places to snipe, broad sweeps for running and gunning, hidden shortcuts for wounded retreats. This place was so deeply
etched in his memory, it was difficult to believe that he had never truly been here before. But as he took in its sights,
he was further compelled to wonder how he could really be here now.

Once again, he had found himself in a virtual place that had a direct emotional connection to a troubled part of his past.
Once again he had to ask himself whether this was a projection, and contemplate the possibilities that entailed. Then, once
again, he thought of Bob, whose very presence surely militated against a solipsistic explanation.

Bob was a guy who knew nothing about gaming, yet he had ended up in the same place, all the more baffled than Ross about where
he was. Reciprocally, Ross was non-religious, with no belief in an afterlife, which for Bob undermined the idea that this
was his individual hell. Put simply, they didn’t belong in each other’s ‘personal-projection’ scenarios. But, a nagging voice
asked, wouldn’t those scenarios throw in somebody who so precisely didn’t belong in order to make you accept them as real?

Ross told the nagging voice to shut the fuck up. He was as fragile and insecure as anybody else, but he’d never been particularly
egotistical, which was why it just didn’t fly that this was all about him. Even when Kamnor was winding him up about the prophecy,
he had been unable to accept the idea because he didn’t believe that any world revolved around the fate of one individual.

No. Ross had been raised on
Scooby Doo
. His abiding philosophy had always been that there was a rational explanation for everything, so it would be a pitiful surrender
if he despaired of finding a scientific and logical basis for all this.

He could hear the Reaper before he saw him: the signature sound of him picking up armour in a dank little passage that led
to the central courtyard. Ross had habitually positioned himself at the top of one of the lift shafts, a vantage point with
a view of all routes of entry.

As soon as the Reaper emerged, the bot began firing up at
Ross with a machine-gun. The bout hadn’t started yet, but the Reaper wasn’t programmed to make any distinction in his conduct
between warm-up and the real deal, and there had never been much scope for exchanging pre-match pleasantries with an entity
whose only means of expression was shooting. Here, however, it ought to be different, as he’d never conversed with the Gralaks
or marines before either.

From a distance – and from a distance was the only perspective you tended to get – the Reaper resembled a cyborg, but this
was a result of being so heavily armoured. He was human in form beneath the cladding, albeit in an even more exaggerated ideal
of masculinity than the toughest, most cigar-chomping marine NPC. His formidably muscled arms were thicker than Ross’s thighs,
and his designer-stubbled jaw line was so sharp that if you punched it you might not merely break your fingers but sever them
completely. He was also so pronouncedly Caucasian that he made Duke Nukem look like a rasta.

Ross called out to him, but was answered only with gunfire. Remembering that he now had another means of contact, he activated
the tablet and typed a message.

Ross had to hand it to him: from a Stirling bedroom to wherever the hell this place was, the Reaper still had a knack for
keeping it exciting by making you want to kill him.

The countdown reached zero and he felt the dissolving sensation before reappearing in a random spot on the map. He didn’t
get his bearings as instantly as in the past, but he soon worked out where he was and retained a perfect memory of the layout.

Two things felt very different. First was the sensation of speed. He recalled reading that the ‘always run’ movement within
multiplayer was the equivalent of thirty miles per hour, which doesn’t feel like much if you’re on the bus to work, but is
really quite something when your metal-clad legs are pumping away beneath your waist. The second was that running at thirty
miles per hour along the edge of a fifty-foot precipice is a lot more terrifying when you can actually feel the ground beneath
your feet.

He was grateful to be able to brake just as impressively as he could accelerate, and stopped at the brink of a sheer face
where the platform suddenly fell away. He previously wouldn’t have thought twice before leaping off unless his health was
critical, as a puny five per cent damage hit was the only consequence to consider. Right then, the thought of blithely hopping
into the void seemed no more sensible than diving off of the Wallace Monument. He could, as stated, feel the ground beneath
his feet, and if he stepped off it, he would feel another bit of ground shortly afterwards, and that second bit of ground
would hurt a very great deal.

But an even worse thought, as he eyed the grenade launcher bobbing impossibly at the bottom of the drop, was that he wasn’t
looking forward to finding out what it really felt like to have his insides melted by a proton cannon.

One thing that hadn’t changed since he last ‘stood’ there and contemplated this view was that standing there and contemplating
the view was not a rewarding thing to do. There were no approaching footsteps to warn him before the first shot struck, and
it was fired from as much as two hundred yards away, so prominent, visible and accommodatingly static a target had he made
of himself. Suddenly the view was inverted and he was tumbling through the air, fatally face-planting after the briefest of
flights.

As he respawned once more, moments after the ground unmercifully struck, so did inspiration.

He had felt no pain. He had no idea what he’d even been shot with, only that the impact had knocked him over the edge and
that, presumably, it was not the weapon-strike that killed him, as he had been aware of the fall. He had been conscious
of tumbling through the air, and had experienced a sense of impact, but no pain.

He remembered what Sergeant Steel had said, with regard to the marines having the same powers as the card collectors while
they were in this place.

‘It’s been suggested the arena might just be a simulation, but it feels mighty real to me.’

Substrate independence. The simulation argument.

In 2003, Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom published a paper in
Philosophy Quarterly
that in the following years did the rounds among computer geeks, neurologists, SF anoraks and online gamers. (Admittedly
these were constituencies that wouldn’t normally be perusing that kind of periodical, but if you were to draw a Venn diagram,
Ross would be at the point where they all intersected.)

It stated that one of the following propositions must be true:

One: The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically
mature is negligibly small.

Two: Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours.

Three: You are almost certainly in a simulation.

In short, the argument suggested that if the human race survived long enough, in its endeavours to understand itself, it would
surely develop ‘ancestor simulations’: hyper-realistic virtual reality environments in which the minds inhabiting these worlds
were themselves part of the simulation. Such advanced civilisations would have at their disposal enormous computing resources,
so by devoting even a small fraction of that processing power they would be able to implement billions of ancestor simulations,
each containing billions of minds. Therefore, the vast probability would be that you are in one of those billions of simulations
rather than the single original reality that spawned them.

Perhaps the training arena was in fact a simulation within the greater simulation that was
Starfire
. So what if this hyper-real version of
Starfire
was itself a simulation within an ancestor simulation? What if Solderburn’s Simulacron prototype had inadvertently hacked
the ancestor simulation from within and
re-routed Ross’s ‘mind’ into the virtual reality of an old game somewhere on that teetering bank of hard drives he had the
scanner hooked up to?

That might explain why the game had enjoyed such an extreme upgrade, as it would have been effectively ported to the super-advanced
ancestor simulation’s engine, which was merely as ‘real’ as those within it could possibly know reality to be. If they were
constructs, then they would have nothing beyond the simulation to compare it to and, like the NPCs in the original
Starfire
, wouldn’t know that its walls looked nothing like real walls, its ground nothing like ground. This could be a crap simulation
engine but how would anyone know the difference if they’d never known true reality?

The bottom line was that the world of
Starfire
would look, sound, smell, taste and feel as real as the world Ross had left behind. The NPCs would look, sound, smell, taste
and feel like real people too. However, their behaviour would be limited by their original
Starfire
protocols, just as the protocols of the training arena meant that they didn’t feel pain here, and death was not the end.

But why then outside the arena was death not the end for Bob and (he assumed, though was not in a hurry to test) for himself?
And what would happen to the Reaper if he went outside? Ross desperately needed to talk to him, and that meant he had to 0wn
him first.

He glanced at the tablet. The duel was first to ten frags, and currently the scores read:

Not even zero. It had been the fall that killed him, and that counted as a suicide, racking him up a negative mark. But with
no pain to worry about, he was sure he could turn it around. He knew the map and he knew his opponent.

He made for the rocket launcher, picking it up just as he heard the tell-tale sound of an elevator platform ascending. He
knew where the Reaper would emerge, and ran to head him off. They
both entered the crate-strewn hangar at the same time, Ross unleashing his first rocket. Before he could pull the trigger
to launch a second, he had been cut to ribbons by the Reaper’s chaingun and respawned somewhere else, weapon-free and now
two frags behind.

Within a matter of minutes the deficit was nine, Reaper leading by eight frags to minus one. No matter what weapon Ross grabbed,
he was barely able to deliver any damage before he found himself messily gibbed, and with the Reaper never having died, the
bot always had the full range of weapons at his disposal.

Then Ross got doubly lucky when he picked up the Invincibility rune and a few seconds later heard the splash of the Reaper
entering one of the pools. The power-up gave him thirty seconds of being indestructible before it expired, which was long
enough to reach the electrovolt gun and undertake the normally suicidal combination of leaping into the drink and pulling
the trigger. It scored him a frag and got his score back to zero, but even more importantly, it cleaned the Reaper out of
kit. Now Ross just had to get to one of the big guns first and he could start to dominate.

He made it to the proton cannon in a few seconds, then encountered the Reaper holding only the basic machine-gun. The basic
machine-gun turned out to be enough.

WTF?

He had a horrible thought: had the Reaper’s skill levels been given an extreme upgrade too?

No, he realised. He was just playing like a llama, making all the mistakes he always did when it had been a long time since
his last game. He’d even caught himself running past armour to get to a good weapon: utter noob behaviour.

Deathmatch rule number one: it’s not about scoring kills, it’s about staying alive. If you stay alive, you don’t lose weapons,
don’t lose points and don’t lose matches.

Ross concentrated on keeping both his armour and his health topped up, and ceased seeking out the Reaper, instead waiting
for his opponent to come into
his
line of fire. He also stopped trying to face off toe to toe: getting in his attacks then haring away again before he suffered
too much damage in return.

He survived several minutes without taking that final tenth frag. He didn’t score any either, but that would come. He had
to be patient, resisting the temptation to stay in the fight too long when it seemed that surely one more hit on the Reaper
would earn him a kill. And then, finally, two things he’d been waiting for happened at once.

Ross had hit the Reaper with a proton blast and reckoned he could get off one more before the retaliatory hail of bullets
did too much damage. He was pulling the trigger for this second shot when he unintentionally stepped into a newly spawned
machine-gun, causing the weapon he’d been holding to transform. In his panicked desperation, some hard-wired part of his memory
imagined pressing E on a keyboard: the letter he’d bound as a shortcut to switch to the proton cannon. In response to this
thought, the machine-gun transformed back into the previous weapon and the resulting blast splattered the Reaper into chunks.

After that, things really turned around. Able to switch between all the guns in his arsenal, he could vary his attacks according
to the circumstances, but most decisively, he remembered death-match rule number two: winning is about controlling the resources.
Every time the Reaper died, he was back to square one, while Ross set about making sure that whenever his opponent went to
pick up a weapon, he had already got there first.