Bedlam (17 page)

How can you be unconscious if you’re in a simulation, Ross wondered woozily, becoming gradually aware of his senses though
his eyes remained closed. It was like slowly coming to on a dark winter’s morning, semi-awake but not quite ready to admit
it because it’s freezing outside and you’ve got to get up for work. The answer, of course, was the same as everything else:
if Bostrom’s argument was indeed the explanation, then there was no difference between losing consciousness here in the gameworld
and losing it back in what he had believed to be the real one.

This hadn’t been like sleep, however: more like a muffling of the senses. He had been distantly aware of sound and motion,
of being moved, of changes in temperature, of voices, but it was as though the decoder software was temporarily scrambled
and he couldn’t resolve any of it into coherent information. All systems were reading properly now, though. He was somewhere
cold and damp, suspended by his arms, his feet dragging and his legs not bearing his weight. He could hear voices, at least
two other people present in the room, speaking as though he was still oblivious, which was another reason to keep his eyes
shut.

‘Took you a little while to get this one into the keep-net, huh?’ a male voice asked, speaking in American-accented English.
‘He put you through your paces?’

‘You better believe it,’ replied the other, also male, also American, and also everything else Ross might note regarding timbre,
intonation and pitch. ‘Regular bag of tricks. Suicided himself to get away from the maenad.’

The voice was identical, but it was coming from the other side of the room, and Ross was definitely aware of two sets of
footsteps. NPCs, he thought: if the models and skins could be the same, then it stood to reason that the voices would be too.
But in that case, why had he encountered same-model Gralaks with not only different voices, but entirely different personalities?

He slowly opened one eye to sneak a peek, still dangling so as not to betray that he was fully alert. There were indeed two
figures in the room, but they were not identical. The one on the left, who had spoken second, was togged out in the black
pseudo-Nazi gear Ross had observed on all of his captors. Up close he could see that the material was quite definitely not
natural fibre. It had a dully shimmering quality, as though it was made of several million microscopic interlinking pieces
of plastic. It would ripple slightly when he moved, then solidify.

The one on the right was wearing garments of the same material, and his clothes were also a not-quite-there approximation
of period uniform, but in his case the period predated the First Reich, never mind the Third. His appearance alluded to Roman
legionary garb, except all in black. Both the cloth and armoured parts of his attire appeared to be made of this same weird
substance, light and fluid for the former, thick and solid for the latter. Below his tunic he sported two rather incongruously
hairy legs, all the more striking for being the most human things Ross had seen in however long it was. His skin was tanned
and healthy, and some buried part of Ross was extremely jealous. Being Scottish, he’d always sported a ghostly pallor for
about ten months of every year, but even that was preferable to the leathery corpse-like appearance of what skin he did still
have. Somehow he couldn’t picture Penelope Cruz fronting a product that would claim to revitalise
this
complexion.

The sorta-Nazi on the left caught Ross’s eye and gave a cough; not a genuine clearing of the throat but a means of communicating
to his companion that their guest was awake. The sorta-Roman glanced at Ross and stood a little straighter, like he’d been
called to order.

Ross cut his losses finally and let his feet take all of his weight. His arms were feeling numb and tired, but at least the
metal restraints weren’t biting into his wrists, as his forearms were already thoroughly encased in the toughest steel Graxis
could forge.

There was a second cough from the sorta-Nazi, both Ross and the sorta-Roman being momentarily unclear as to what was being
overlooked.

The sorta-Roman cottoned on to whatever it was and started a little, not so much like he’d realised his fly was open than
like his dick was actually hanging out in front of his maiden aunt. His entire being rippled from top to bottom, and by the
end of the wave his uniform had changed from sorta-Roman to sorta-Napoleonic. Then, realising that this wasn’t the intended
effect, he began rippling repeatedly, each pulse from head to toe changing him into yet another costume. He was toggling skins,
Ross realised: medieval, futuristic, Shogun, Egyptian and, most bizarrely, Seventies Disco, before finally assimilating his
comrade. All of the looks were slightly askew approximations, as though they were designs all drawn by the same hand. They
were constructed from the same fabric, but having seen it take so many forms, Ross could now see that the material wasn’t
so much black as an absence of colour or even an absence of light.

Happy that he was now in harmony with his environment, the man stiffened again, looking Ross up and down. Very unhappily for
Ross, his environment looked like just the kind of place a sorta-Nazi would be in harmony with. It was a damp brick-walled
cell with one tiny glassless window high to Ross’s right, two pairs of steel bars crossing it like a grid for tic-tac-toe.
The restraints around his arms were looped through a metal ring embedded in the ceiling, a fixture placed there for one discernible
purpose. The floor was solid concrete, into which a narrow trench had been bored, functioning as a sluice, leading to a drain
capped with a circular grate. Again, there was no doubting that this place had been fashioned with but one function in mind.

He could see black matter in the grate: hair sticking out from a jelly-like substance that could have been congealed blood
or even lumps of flesh. It wasn’t real, he told himself, merely the stage-set for some scripted interrogation scene in a hardcore
shooter: it was simulated hair, simulated blood, no more real than the devastated landing fleet crashing on to Graxis. The
problem was, he had felt a lot of simulated pain of late, and been unable to discern any difference between it and the real
thing.

He tested the restraints, a redundant exercise as they’d been taking his weight for so long without showing any signs of stress.
The sorta-Nazi on the left began moving towards him, but it was the one on the right, he of the indeterminate wardrobe, who
spoke.

‘My name is Cicerus, Decurion, Second Legion of the Integrity,’ he said, while his partner uncoiled a form of scourge. It
was made of the same material as their garments and armour, fluidly flexible as it dangled from his hand, but split at the
business end into seven or eight solid strands that jingled against each other like glass beads. ‘You have been apprehended
in serious violation of diegetic trespass protocols.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Ross said desperately, addressing his plea to the one who spoke but barely taking his eye from the one
with the whip. Even as he made his appeal he understood that it might be literally like arguing with a machine. If they were
programmed to torture him, then there was no branching dialogue path that would prevent that. On the other hand, ‘diegetic
trespass protocols’ didn’t sound like something he’d expect a Nazi NPC to be concerned with, even if Ross had the first idea
what those were, and what was with the Roman name and rank?

‘In plainer terms, you’re not supposed to be here, and you know it.’

‘You’re right,’ Ross blurted. ‘I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t mean to be trespassing. I don’t know how I got here.’

His interrogator glanced to the one with the whip.

‘Marcus, jog his memory.’

‘No,’ Ross shouted, his voice soon transformed into a scream as the scourge reared and cracked.

Ross felt it bite into his skin and saw wet matter fly from the deadly little tongues as Marcus drew his whip back again.
But it wasn’t mere damage to his flesh that had Ross howling. The searing, gouging sting was purely superficial, the topmost
layer of a far greater pain. When those tiny tongues touched him, he felt a sensation of electrocution far more pronounced
than from the earlier laser hits, but even that was not the worst of it. Deeper still, he felt something profoundly, horrifyingly
wrong with the nature of this contact. It was like tin-foil touching the fillings of his soul.

Like a newly learned instinct, immediately after assessing himself physically for signs of trauma he looked to his hands,
willing the tablet to appear so that he could see what damage had been registered. In this realm of the digital, he had already
come to understand that suffering was just another number, and one he needed to know with the same compulsion as examining
a cut or a fracture. Where it differed was that, in this instance, the reassurance he sought was that the damage was bad.
If another lash tipped him past the century, it would bring respite, and maybe – given that this time he’d be ready – a chance
of escape.

It was a reassurance he was denied, because the tablet would not appear.

‘Looking for something?’ asked his interrogator.

He was holding the tablet like it was the proverbial smoking gun, its data reading in a mirror image across the back of the
glass. ‘You say you don’t know how you got here and yet you’re carrying one of these little bad-boys.’

‘Somebody gave it to me. He was a space marine, a sergeant.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Good. Now if you tell us how you got from there to here, thus helping us repair the damage,
it will stand you in good stead. It might cut down your period of detention before we put you back where you belong.’

‘I’ll be only too happy to go back where I belong,’ Ross insisted. ‘And I’ll tell you whatever I can, but I swear, as for
how I got here, I have no idea. I had a brain scan, this new experimental—’

‘We’re not interested in your life story, metal tits. That shit is so inapplicable you’d best start work on erasing it, because
it’s just unwanted baggage here: redundant code. We want you to tell us how come a fine specimen of Graxis cyborg-hood is
wandering around World War Two France. It’s diegetic trespass: you don’t belong here.’

‘What, and you guys do? Maybe I was off sick the day my third-year secondary-school class covered the roles of mega-tanks
and flying demons in Blitzkrieg warfare.’

Ross was acutely mindful of the cat-o’-nine-tails in Marcus’s hand, and his desire never to feel its soul-raping intrusion
again was overcome by the strategic benefit of provoking a fatal response, as well as a quite unaccustomed level of rage that
was being channelled directly to his tongue.

‘Who are you people?’ he demanded. ‘Where the hell am I?’

‘It’s where you’re not that matters. Why aren’t you in
Starfire
? How did you get here?’

‘Star—?’

The name stopped him with a jolt. They weren’t talking about Graxis like it was a place any more: they were referring directly
to
the game
.

‘Okay,’ Ross said, composing himself about as much as was possible when his hands were suspended above his head and his body
was still convulsing slightly with shock from the effects of the scourge. ‘Seeing as you’re legionaries, how about a wee bit
of
quid pro quo
. I’ll answer your question and maybe you can help me be a more useful subject by filling me in on some background.’

‘Anything that helps us understand each other,’ said his captor, with sincerity if not exactly warmth.

‘I found a gap in the walls. A clipping error. Do you know what—’

‘We know what a clipping error is, yes,’ his interrogator replied, in much the same way someone from CERN might say he knew
what an electron was. ‘
How
did you find it?’

‘I was following …’ Ross began, then instinct kicked in and warned him not to reveal that there was another party to this.
He didn’t owe Iris any loyalty – quite the contrary – but if these guys were taking a dim view of slipping between games,
then on the basis that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend, he ought not to drop her in it. Furthermore, he didn’t want to
open up a new line of questioning that might be pressed with the aid of Marcus’s tickling stick, especially as there was precious
little he could tell them to make the torturing stop.

‘… the path of the game,’ he went on, hoping his skip wasn’t conspicuous. ‘I had to hide out in a crevice for cover, and that’s
when I saw the gap. I walked through it into, well, a kind of nothingness, then I fell down and landed here instead. I was
looking for a way out of
Starfire
because I don’t know how I ended up there and I want to get back to my normal world.’

‘Your normal world, as you call it, is gone. The sooner you accept that, the less you’ll be inclined to rain pain down upon
yourself, and I don’t just mean from Marcus and his scourge.
You’re new here, I can tell. That’s why we’re going easy on you. You probably didn’t mean to trespass, but equally you have
no idea of what you are complicit in by doing so.’

‘Why don’t you enlighten me? I’m quite a smart guy, I’m sure I’ll be able to grasp it. Why don’t you tell me who you shower
are for starters. Are you NPCs?’

Cicerus seemed amused by this enquiry. Ross didn’t take it as a good sign.

‘A foolish question for “a smart guy”.’

‘How so?’

‘Because the answer would tell you nothing. What NPC is going to understand the question sufficiently to answer yes? Which
is not to say an NPC couldn’t be specifically programmed to understand the question, but he could equally be programmed to
disguise his true nature by answering dishonestly.’

Dick, Ross thought, the sentiment applicable equally to Cicerus as to himself.

‘So, assuming you’re not NPCs, how did
you
get here?’

‘You’re still not getting it. What matters is not how we arrived, but what we are about, because
here
is all there is, and it’s our vital task to ensure that there remains a here to be in.’