Bedlam (24 page)

‘That didn’t break us up. It was the fact that Joe was fucking insipid pornalike bimbos as though he was trying out for Team
USA in the insipid-pornalike-bimbo-fucking Olympics that broke us up.’

Ross was struggling to think of any kind of response to this, especially with Juno’s eyes blazing into him like he might be
held responsible by proxy as the only male in sight. She wasn’t done, either.

‘We got a phrase here: “Hell if you make it, heaven if you want it to be.” Well, before we ran into each other again, that
priapic fuck-monkey had decided heaven was a John Holmes movie. Big reunion lasted pretty much until he started
suggesting
how I might prefer to look. Round these parts that implies a bit more than saying “how about you try on this new negligee”;
you hear what I’m saying?’

Juno’s rant would have been intimidating enough on its own, but as the aforementioned only male in sight, and having already
been insta-gibbed merely for effect, Ross was fucking terrified.

It must have shown. She looked at the blank ground and emitted a self-conscious laugh.

‘Sorry. Bit of an over-share. I’m feeling kind of raw, fair to say. Look, I hope you find your girl. I’m just saying you gotta
be prepared for her not being who you remember. You say you just got here: well she could have been here as long as me. She
could be somebody else entirely now, and given our issues measuring time in this place, you better be ready to deal with the
possibility that she could have
literally
seen more cock-ends than weekends.’

She caught herself once more, eyes burning into her whipping boy as she unloaded on him. This time, however, it looked like
she either didn’t think she owed anyone an apology or was still too pissed-off to offer one.

‘How about you shoot me again?’ Ross suggested acerbically.

‘Why, you think that would make me feel better?’

‘No. But when you did it before, I felt better than I do now.’

Juno shrugged, still simmering.

‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ she justified.

‘Fuck you.’

They stood there in silence for a while, neither looking at the other, the only sound or movement coming from the lapping
of the waves.

Eventually she spoke.

‘I’m gonna leave you to it,’ she said quietly, awkwardly. ‘Wait for my orders. You should use the time: maybe build a house
or try out some facial editing.’

‘Aye. You should try some facial editing too: maybe crack your face and make your arse jealous.’

Ross sat slumped on a sofa in the huge, glass-walled front room of his beach house, staring out over the sands, the jetty
and the black waters towards the dark horizon.

Juno had never said how long she’d be, which Ross understood to be a moot consideration in light of her remark regarding the
absence of a frame of reference for the passing of time. Understandably, he was trying not to think too much about the rest
of that particular sentence.

You can have anything, she had said, shape the world any way you want. Well, how about a clock or a calendar? Out of curiosity
he had begun looking through the sub-menus associated with his private world, and happened across the variable settings controlling
solar and seasonal cycles. That, he realised, was the problem: you could have a clock and a calendar, but it would only apply
locally, and what’s more, you could change it at any time. Gameworld rules: you could set permanent day, permanent night,
or the passing of a month, the passing of a
season
in the real-time equivalent of an hour.

How did people make appointments round here?

‘Yeah, Jim, I’ll see you at, er, not sure o’clock, on the, er, somethingth of fuck-knows, okay?’

‘Aye, and don’t be late.’

Marooned on his flat and blank personal island, he had little alternative but to experiment with his new toolkit. He watched
a cursor float in his field of view, guided by movements of his fingers, its appearance changing as he toggled through its
various modes. He could raise the landscape, shape the terrain, choose grass, rock, sand, woodland or water, and it would
be instantly real. He could pick up the sand and let it run through his fingers,
dip his toes in the stream, smell the scent of the trees. Every last grain, every last drop, every last airborne particle
had to be an individual piece of code, ultimately just information. Had that always secretly been true of what he’d considered
the real world? And as far as the mind was concerned, did it matter whether that information was analogue or digital, filtered
through the senses and couriered along nerves, or fed direct to the brain?

He took a handful of water and drank. He wasn’t thirsty: he just wanted to see what would happen. It was crisp and fresh on
the palate, a cold sensation running down his throat. Did this mean he would have to pee? He’d better think about creating
a toilet just in case.

He discovered that he could shape objects from memory, merely by concentrating on his recalled mental image of them. This
could apply to something as small and basic as a table or as large and complex as an entire house. In the latter case, of
course, the image tended to be sketchy in places, but he was then able to add finer detail on a piecemeal basis.

He wondered what it said that after a period of messing around and learning the basics, the first project he truly committed
to building was not a futuristic dream-pad or a fantasy castle but a replica of his childhood home. He couldn’t get it quite
right, though. The outside started off okay, but became grotesquely skewed as he worked on refining the interior. Some rooms
were massively bigger than others; some extremely dense in their detail while others were sparse. His old bedroom was getting
on for the size of a tennis court, though the reality had been about sixteen feet by nine. It had been so many things in his
mind: battleground, football pitch, rock-show stage, ocean, starship bridge. The room his older sisters had shared was tiny
by comparison: it had been physically much bigger than his in real life, but the one in his memory was a cluttered cloister
that he was only ever allowed to glimpse before being booted out and having the door closed on him.

His construction both creeped him out and made him sad. Even though he could wander around it, he felt less connection to
it than he might to an old photograph. After a while it just started to embarrass him, so he erased it and copy-pasted a Californian
beach house, adding a pier that extended out over
the gently lapping black water. It was the kind of place he occasionally fantasised about living in because it seemed not
only sumptuously opulent, but so removed from the lifestyle he’d always known. It wasn’t just
a
Californian beach house: it was as though the essence of a hundred Californian beach houses had been distilled and then used
to create this place.

And now he was sitting outside it, with nothing to do but wait. He knew he could be sitting there, on hold until Juno’s return,
for a very long time, same as he could be stuck here in this alternate domain forever.

There had been worse waits, however; harder unknowings. The time when his mum was battling breast cancer had been full of
them. Sometimes those waits were mere hours, other times months, but in either case it had felt like normal life was in suspension,
even as it went on around them, even as they lived it.

There had been intense, exhilarating and tantalising uncertainties too. Like when he finally plucked up the bottle to ask
Carol out, and her phone rang on vibrate just as he was saying the words.

He had got as far as ‘I was wondering whether maybe …’ when her eyes had glanced instinctively at the screen.

‘I’m really sorry, I need to take this,’ she had said; then, even worse, as it was work-related and confidential, she had
walked away from the table and right out of the coffee shop.

He had sat there analysing the preceding few seconds as though they were the Zapruder footage. The fact she had looked at
the phone: did that mean she knew what was coming and was hoping to see a call she could ignore? Had it actually
been
a call she could ignore, but having sussed what was coming she was pretending it was work so that she could quietly derail
it and they could both pretend it never happened?

Round and round he went, until eventually she came back in, smiling apologetically.

‘Sorry. That was important. Well, it wasn’t important, but it was important that I answer it, if you know what I mean.’

‘That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.’

‘So where were we?’ she asked.

Now she could change the subject, and, just as easily, so could
he, chickening out with no harm done and a mutual conspiracy in place to forget what almost happened.

But then she took it out of his hands.

‘You were wondering whether maybe …’ she prompted.

Sitting outside his off-the-peg beach house was more like Purgatory, except Purgatory was meant to be heaven’s anteroom. What
lay in wait for Ross was frustratingly more indeterminate.

He was being presented with infinite possibilities yet he couldn’t think of one he’d like to choose right now that was more
appealing than going home. None of them seemed to have any purpose. If you don’t need to earn and you don’t need to eat and
you don’t need to stay healthy and you
can’t
propagate the species, what’s the point of your existence? Just as weekends become meaningless when you’re unemployed, so
a world of play loses its lustre when it isn’t framed by work.

Christ. Just the thought of the word ‘weekend’ made him wince, and would continue to do so for a long time. Cheers, Juno.

He could battle in Middle-earth, explore planetscapes and star systems, journey through past and future civilisations, win
wars, fight crime, race supercars, live out endless fantasies, and yet none of it held the same appeal as getting back to
his old life. No, that wasn’t true, because it wouldn’t be his old life. It would be different.

He realised everything he had ever done was driven by work. University, house-officer jobs, a training number, then the drive
towards medical research opportunities in neurology when he realised his enthusiasms lay away from the clinical. It had all
seemed so imperative, so much so that in all that time he’d seldom thought about what
else
his life might hold, what else he might want to do with himself.

No more.

He’d tell Neurosphere their power charade was over, and the relationship between them was going to be different from now on.
They needed him more than he needed them, so they’d better lube up, and be very nice to him if they wanted a reacharound.
He wouldn’t live for his job any more. He’d live for Carol and the baby. Work–life balance. Regular hours, a grown-up relationship,
responsibilities, a family: that was what he wanted.

Or was he kidding himself? Was that desire just immeasurably pitiful, not to mention cowardly? Did he want to go back to such
a comparatively limited existence purely because it was the one he’d always known?

Perhaps.

Didn’t he have a responsibility here too? Solderburn was being held in some no-doubt-hellish prison fortress, the agonies
of which Ross could only too vividly recall. The Integrity were trying to control the whole gameverse and condemn its entire
population to a pot-luck eternity of being trapped in the limited world of any given game. Wasn’t it selfish to be thinking
only of escaping this place and abandoning everyone else here to their fate?

Perhaps.

It was all moot, though. There was no going back.

He gazed into the night sky, wondering about the people who might be on each of those little dots, every one of them another
island world. Had they all gone through what he was experiencing now, mourning the life they no longer had before coming to
terms with their new one and embracing its possibilities? Were there people out there he already knew? Was Carol out there
somewhere? His mum? His sisters? Would he make new friends, forge new relationships and gradually feel the old ties, old wounds
fade into memory?

As he gazed and pondered, he observed that one of the lights in the distance was larger than the others, and wondered why
he hadn’t noticed this before. Then he realised that it was because it hadn’t
been
larger before, and with every second it was getting larger still.

It was moving, coming closer. As it grew it transformed from a point of light into an object, lines and shape gradually becoming
defined against the black background.

It was an aircraft, and it was headed his way.

It appeared to be travelling slowly at first, until he realised that this was an effect of his head-on perspective and the
sheer distance it was covering. In fact by the time it was close enough for him to appreciate just how fast it was travelling,
it had already started to decelerate. Wings began extending from either side as it descended, twisting to forty-five degrees
almost like a large
seabird coming down to settle on the waves. It was quiet, just the low thrum of a power source and the occasional hiss and
squeal of servos audible as it made its majestic final approach. Ross was expecting it to splash down with a bump and a spray,
but instead it came to rest a foot above the water. It hovered with a gentle bob like it was being repelled by a magnet and
its bulk was yet to steady completely.

A gangway rolled forth from the fuselage, connecting it to the jetty, and out stepped Juno. Despite everything, he had to
admit he was pleased to see her.

‘So,’ she said, ‘you ever take a ride in a spaceship before?’

The air temperature was cooler inside the vessel, the last of Ross’s bespoke evening warmth shut out with the hum of the power
source when the entry hatch sealed. There was still a vibration faintly audible in the interior, but it was quieter than any
vehicle Ross had ever travelled inside. He got an impression of near-absolute efficiency, no mechanism in the craft being
so profligate as to waste energy by unnecessarily emitting any sound.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been ordered to take you to Silent Hill.’

‘Aye, that sounds a cosy place for a pow-wow.’

‘It’s secure.’

‘If homicidal geometric abstract nightmares make you feel secure, yeah.’

‘Look, I didn’t choose the destination. I just deliver the package.’

The ship accelerated at a rate that should have flattened Ross against the back of his seat with the g-force. Instead his
only physical reaction was his stomach lurching with excitement in response to seeing the water and the archipelago of the
Beyonderland shoot past at impossible speed. Inside, the ride was a majestic glide, so smooth you could have walked round
serving drinks.

‘Just so we’re clear on the relationship,’ he said, ‘am I your prisoner?’

‘You never were. You just woulda had a hard time going anyplace once I put you on your little island. So, technically, you
were marooned rather than imprisoned. It’s not for me to stop you going where you want; just that we’re skittish about
people we’ve never seen before trying to sneak in the back door to the Beyonderland. If the Integrity gets the whip hand,
that’s where we’ll fall back to for our final stand.’

Ross wondered whether her choice of the phrase ‘whip hand’ had been deliberate. She was certainly dropping any ambiguity over
being part of the resistance.

‘Does that mean I can have my weapons back?’

‘Not while you could potentially hi-jack my ass.’

‘Couldn’t I just ask you to drop me off and then go my own way? Start looking for Carol?’

‘You could, but you might find it easier if you made some friends.’

‘True enough. After I did so well with you, maybe I’m on a roll.’

Juno let out what might optimistically be interpreted as a chuckle.

‘Yeah. Really rolled out the red carpet, didn’t I?’

‘You didn’t owe me anything,’ he acknowledged. ‘But I’m relieved, if I dare say it, that you seem to be in a wee bit less
scary frame of mind at the moment?’

His voice quietened towards the end, emphasising that this was just a tentative suggestion and please don’t bite – or shoot
– my head off if it’s out of line.

‘I’m feeling a little better,’ she said neutrally. ‘Did a little soul-searching after I left. Realised I was taking out my
frustrations on the wrong person, so I took them out on the right one instead.’

‘Joe? What did you do to him?’

‘I stole his spaceship,’ she said matter-of-factly, the insouciant tone only serving to illustrate how much pleasure she was
concealing by it.

‘I volunteered to bring you in,’ she added. ‘Somebody else is on backdoor watch.’

‘You just couldn’t deny that special chemistry between us?’

‘No, I realised you were my ticket. I’m doing my bit for the resistance but nobody ever tells me shit. I figure if I’m the
one who delivers you to the higher-ups, I get to upgrade my clearance.’

Juno made a minor adjustment to the two-handed yoke, climbing ever steeper, ever faster. They passed into the darkness,
the lights of islands briefly blinking out, then more appeared, and suddenly beneath the ship there was more water. This happened
again and again, faster and faster, the Beyonderland comprising a vast
millefeuille
through which they were rising more and more rapidly until the multiplicity of tiers became a blur.

‘How come they’re so interested in me?’ Ross asked. ‘Why did you call it in?’

‘Firstly, you were claiming to be a recent arrival. The only newcomers to show up in a very long time have been our friends
in black, so naturally anyone else making their debut is going to pique suspicion. Secondly, you said you had seen Solderburn;
more than that, you said you knew him in the old world.’

‘What’s so special about Solderburn?’

‘For one thing, he’s been MIA for about half of forever. But mainly it’s because he’s one of the Originals.’

Ross recalled her previous use of this description and realised he’d misinterpreted it.

‘They’re kind of the elders of this place. They were the first ones here, but most of them have dropped off the radar to stay
free of our new playmates. It became pretty clear that the Integrity were targeting the Originals because they were essentially
both the architects and pioneers of free travel between gameworlds. Solderburn’s disappearance goes way back before the advent
of the Integrity, but the other Originals have gone underground as a direct result of their arrival.’

The blur of tiers ceased as the ship shot through what must be the uppermost of them, heading into blackness.

‘So we’re flying to Silent Hill? How does that work? Why aren’t we using a warp transit?’

Ross tried not to make the question sound like he was wondering how Juno could have forgotten that she had the option. She
had thawed a little but he reckoned she wouldn’t have much tolerance for him in any way annoying her, especially in the confined
space of a cockpit.

‘This is the quickest route. We’ll warp to Silent Hill from Calastria, but to get to Calastria purely by warp transits, we’d
have to go via five other worlds, and in most of those the distance between the point of entry and the next transit we’d need
is
pretty huge. You know how big Graxis is, right? We’re talking journeys three and four times that. Sure, there’s vehicles,
even aircraft, but on some worlds there’s also armies of NPCs to negotiate, not to mention Integrity.’

‘But how can we get to another
game
by spaceship?’

‘You gotta understand that this whole realm effectively exists in two forms: what we perceive and interact with, and the true
nature of its fabric, which is digital. I ain’t telling you there’s no Santa Claus if I say this is all code, am I?’

‘No, I got that part way back. Little fuzzy on how I can be inside it, but I gather so is everybody else.’

‘And do you understand how computers store information? Random-access memory?’

Ross could almost feel a surge of power being diverted to his dickish-behaviour restraint systems in order to hold back the
vast well of smug and self-important twattery that such a question had the potential to unleash. His safeguards condensed
a statement outlining his biog, qualifications, academic honours, publications and entire CV into three words.

‘Fair to say.’

‘Well that’s better than I’d claim, so forgive me if my terms of reference are a little blurry. But as I understand it, data
gets written to random memory locations, meaning consecutive pieces of code won’t be at adjacent addresses: they could be
any distance apart. So on a hard drive with a ton of games written to it, the RAM address for, say, a wall in
Starfire
might be right next to that of a floor in a completely different game. Conversely, the RAM address for a chair in
Starfire
could be massively distant from the address for the floor it’s standing on.’

‘The spatial distance between places is something we perceive, but it’s illusory?’ Ross suggested. ‘In truth, we’re always
moving between billions of addresses?’

‘Except the spatial distance isn’t entirely an illusion. There
is
a spatial relationship between objects, and a navigable spatial relationship between all the worlds. You can traverse both
the spatial and the digital.’

‘So, essentially, warping is using the digital juxtapositions to take a shortcut through the spatial.’

‘You got it. But sometimes the spatial route is quicker. So we
can fly from the Beyonderland and make our way to Calastria entirely along the spatial plane.’

‘Does that mean anyone with a ship could land on my island?’

‘No. As you said, it’s like vampires: nobody can cross the threshold without an invitation. They can land up close, can even
dock with that little jetty you built, but until they’ve got permission to come ashore, that spatial relationship
is
an illusion, because they’re never setting foot on your turf.’

‘Well, that’s reassuring. I’d hate someone to break in while I’m gone and steal all the nothing that I own.’

Ross watched worlds go past through the ship’s windows, just tiny dots with vast distances between them. He recalled the endlessness
when he had keyed in a noclip cheat then risen up through a map and just kept climbing. You could go on and on until the world
of the game was just a speck, but that was only the game’s 3D engine keeping the map in geometric perspective. What was this
space that all these gameworlds could simultaneously occupy? It had to have physics, rules. Even the fact you could fly through
it, the very fact that it
was
space, meant it had to have protocols. Somebody must have assigned them. And if it was all so vast and so complicatedly getting
on with itself, what were the chances that a noob like him was going to find a way out of it where everyone else had failed?

He realised he’d better start learning how to adapt, get some pointers about making a life here.

‘So how do you occupy yourself, when you’re not escorting strays like me across the empty wastes?’

‘Mostly I walk. I explore. Every city, every forest, every dungeon, every cave, every world. I keep looking.’

Ross nodded. He didn’t need to ask what for. He just wondered how long this had been her life, and whether she even knew.

He cast an eye over the console panel in front of Juno, taking in the controls, dials, screens and read-outs.

‘What you after?’ Juno asked.

‘I was going to ask how long till we get there, but then I remembered it would be pointless. Nobody here knows what the time
is.’

‘That ain’t strictly true. How could we organise anything otherwise? There’s a clock on your tablet that shows universal
time. It doesn’t display by default, so maybe you didn’t see it yet.’

She instructed him quickly on how to bring it up. It read two days, fourteen hours and twelve minutes.

‘When I say universal time, I just mean it’s a program set to run independently of local settings, calibrated the same on
all tablets.’

‘Does this read-out state how long I’ve been here?’

‘It doesn’t necessarily relate to real time. It’s just a mutual standard.’

‘So how long does yours say you’ve been here?’

‘It doesn’t show how long you’ve been here, only how long since you activated the tablet.’

‘And how long is that, in your case?’

‘That’s a personal question, honey. You don’t ask a lady her age.’

She offered him a knowing smile but he could tell there was something else beneath it. She was hiding behind conventions of
politeness, but he didn’t get to press the matter, as Juno’s attention was sharply turned to something she had spotted on
one of the monitor panels.

It was a screen that had been blank and, Ross assumed, off or redundant, but now there was a white dot blipping just inside
the edge of it.

‘Is that another ship?’ he asked.

‘Yup,’ she replied, not taking her eyes off the controls. She couldn’t have said much less, but her tone and manner were enough
to convey that she was on edge. A keyboard layout appeared in the black sheen of the console and she typed in some commands,
then manually altered their course using the yoke.

‘Should I be worried?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to ascertain. We were on course for a convergence before I made a correction. If they correct their
course to renew the convergence, then yes, you should be worried.’

‘The Integrity?’

She shook her head.

‘Integrity don’t know about this: about the space routes.’

Ross was incredulous.

‘How could they not?’

‘Same way an ant don’t know there’s a world beyond the ant farm, even when it can see through the glass. It’s right in front
of them but they don’t understand what it means. It’s only a matter of time before they get there, though.’

‘But isn’t the Integrity made up of people who have lived here same as you, with the same knowledge?’

‘No. They’re not just a recent phenomenon, they’re recent arrivals. At first some folks thought they might be a kind of NPC,
accidentally generated by one of the gameworlds, but they’re too smart for that to be true. They’re sentient, self-aware and
adaptable, but they’re incomers, so they’ve got some catching-up to do.’

‘So who’s in the other ship? Or rather, who are you hoping
isn’t
in the other ship?’

She gave him a stony look, advance warning not to say anything stupid.

‘Pirates.’

He failed.

‘Seriously?’

‘No, humorously. They’re fun pirates, like at a children’s birthday party.’

Her tone indicated last-warning irritability.

‘What can they do?’

‘Blow us out of the sky if we don’t give them what they want.’

‘And what do they want? We don’t have anything.’

‘One: they don’t know that. We could have all kinds of cargo. And two: at the very least they know they’ll get inventory contents.
Out here, people in transit are likely to be carrying items that hold value in hundreds of worlds: weapons, ammo, supplies,
food, health, currency, even experience points from RPG worlds. Everything’s a potentially tradable commodity.’

‘But why? They could have any kind of lifestyle or experience they want here, couldn’t they?’

‘Every world has its own rules, but the one constant is that, wherever you are, the more stuff you got, the easier it is to
get along. So in one sense they’re just cheats. You can be whatever you like in the gameverse, and some people like to be
assholes. You give them a universe of unlimited possibilities and they just become unlimited assholes.’