Bedlam (31 page)

Ross took a fresh look at the half-track and its infantry escort.

‘You think we can take them?’ he asked Juno.

‘Attacking uphill, against an armoured vehicle and superior numbers enjoying an elevated angle of fire? Shit, why not give
us a challenge?’

The Sandman’s eyes blanked briefly, a look Ross was coming
to recognise as HUD-stare. He waved his right hand and gestured to the side of the vineyard, where two creatures were suddenly
called into existence.

‘Brilliant,’ Ross said as he and Juno surveyed their mounts. ‘More fucking horses. How about a hover-bike?’

‘Rules of the gameworld,’ the Sandman explained. ‘You can only piss with the cock you’ve got.’

‘Some god you are,’ he muttered under his breath as he climbed up on to the saddle.

Gameworld rules worked two ways, however. Ross, who had never ridden a horse in the old world, found that he had control of
this one like he was a champion jockey, and at the pace it boasted, his steed would have romped the Grand National carrying
John Candy.

He galloped in erratic zigzags to make himself a less predictable target for the Integrity snipers who had dug in and were
taking laser-blast pot-shots from further up the slope. The fact that they weren’t restricted to the low-fi options of
Black & White
’s bronze-age technology reminded him that his own pissing options were not limited to merely the one cock either.

A quick root through his inventory showed him that he still had a couple of Panzerfaust warheads to play with. He called one
to hand and aimed for the half-track, taking a few moments to anticipate the rise and fall of his horse’s gallop before pulling
the trigger.

The rocket-propelled grenade flew over the snipers’ heads and straight for its target, engulfing the half-track in a ball
of fire. This stopped its progress down the hill, but several more troops poured from the flaming wreckage and began aiming
concerted volleys at the two mounts.

Ross and Juno were both thrown to the turf as each of their horses was felled. He found himself face-down in knee-high grass,
less mobile but not such an easy mark. He switched to his machine-gun and found a target, the strangely shimmering black of
the Integrity snipers making them easy to spot against the green of the hillside. Another came running over the brow to replace
his fallen comrade, and Ross dropped him before he could draw. Emboldened, he climbed first to his knees then fully upright,
cutting down the enemy infantry as he charged up the
slope, Juno also firing accurately and mercilessly at his side with her plasma gun.

The bastards didn’t like it toe to toe, that much was obvious. They still loosed off a few volleys for Ross and Juno to dodge,
but their firing was needlessly sporadic; a conspicuous lack of aggression that reminded him of the Gralaks. Perhaps these
were Integrity AI drones. If so, they should have toggled the buggers to a harder skill setting, because this was almost too
easy.

As he gained the brow of the hill, he realised he was wrong. It wasn’t almost too easy: it was precisely too easy. Waiting
down the slope on the other side was a huge squadron of infantry, the casualties respawning to replenish their numbers from
a portable pod, all awaiting the command of a new class of Integrity agent Ross had never seen before. He looked like an Integrity
build of the ubersoldat from
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
: a towering super-warrior wrought from fluid plastic and tempered steel, carrying what in anyone else’s hands would have
been a cannon, but in his was merely a rifle.

Before Ross could call out a warning to Juno to turn back, the rifle spat a gobbet of black from its gleaming maw, and speech
was no longer an option.

Only screaming.

He was knocked to the ground and sent tumbling several yards back down the slope in a maelstrom of pain and terrifying disorientation
that felt less like the world was swirling around him than that his individual molecules were all spinning at high speed and
threatening to fly apart. He endured the same electrocution agony as when he was being tortured in the cell, the same violation
of his psyche, but instead of it coming on the licking tongues of a whip, it passed right through him like a wave, enveloping
him like a blanket and exploding from within him like a bomb.

He was quite sure that according to the protocols of any gameworld, it ought to have killed him and invoked a respawn, but
he feared this device was independent of all such rules. It didn’t come from within any game. It came from somewhere else
entirely.

Ross tried to right himself but he wasn’t even sure what way he was facing. He could see Juno, or at least a shape he knew
to be Juno, lying on the grass nearby, hit by a blast from the same weapon. He tried to move his arms, but it was as though
they were an inventory item and he had forgotten how to equip them for use. Drunkenly he looked through his HUD for a weapon,
his dazed logic suggesting that holding a rifle would automatically bring his arms up in front of him, so that at least he’d
know where they were.

There was nothing there. His inventory was blank. Weapons, costumes, power-ups, accessories: they had all been erased. All
he had were the clothes on his back, not even any shoes.

But it got worse. He could feel a familiar disturbance in the air, and hear the sound of huge, powerful wing-beats.

‘Oh fucksocks.’

There was a nerve-rending shriek also, shaking the air with its shrill vibrato, but not like he remembered. Some instinct
in Ross gave him the motor skills to pull himself into a cowering ball, yet, despite his horror, he couldn’t help but look
at the monster as it descended. That was when he saw that it wasn’t what he feared. Instead he watched the Sandman descend
upon the back of a winged beast that looked like what you might get if a pteranodon shagged a giant raven and the resulting
eggs were left to incubate in a vat of toxic waste.

‘How’s my pissing with this cock?’ he shouted, as the flying mutant unleashed a deluge of orange fluid from somewhere between
its legs, the liquid cutting down the Integrity ubersoldat and several of his troops like a water-cannon.

The creature alighted on the grass with a thump, the Sandman gesturing to the still-reeling Ross and Juno to climb aboard
as quickly as possible. Walking was like trying to use tweezers in a mirror, but they supported each other on to their unlikely
saviour’s back, albeit in an ungainly tangle that was probably as mutually obstructive as it was helpful.

The creature took to the air once more, Ross clinging on tight to clumps of feathers as it climbed steeply with beats of its
mighty wings.

‘There’s another transit further down the valley, in the forest,’ the Sandman told them. ‘It’s at the centre of a shrine.
It’ll take you to Jerusalem.’

The winged mutant banked sharply to escape blasts from the
respawned ubersoldat’s evil, soul-goring gun, then soared above the plain, where in an impressive feat of multi-tasking the
Sandman was taking on the Integrity’s ground forces. Ross saw a huge god-like hand hovering above the meadows, dropping entire
rows of houses on top of the advancing troops, while hundreds of NPC villagers engaged the invaders, launching fireballs from
catapults, their archers firing a hail of arrows.

Ross wondered how all of this activity might be affecting the Sandman’s steering and navigation, but they were holding a straight
course along the edge of the mountain, heading for the forest. Behind them, towards the sea, Ross could see the grey haze
rising beyond the mountain as the corruption grew and spread.

Just as on the other side of the mountain, the Integrity had a portable spawn-pod from which its resurrected troops were spilling
again like popcorn. Orchestrating his efforts from his HUD, the Sandman piled more buildings upon those already laid down,
deciding that
ob
struction would be more effective than
de
struction when the dead were popping back up again so close to where they’d died.

That was when the tanks opened fire. No missiles, no lasers, no artillery. They just erased the buildings, like Ross had witnessed
at the monastery. Then, with this impediment removed, they turned their weapons on the NPCs and erased them too.

The god-like hand swooped down and made a grab for one of the tanks, its fingers big enough to flick the thing into the sea,
but instead of picking it up, they passed right through it like it wasn’t there. Within the protocols of the gameworld, they
were an object that couldn’t be lifted.

In that moment, everyone who witnessed it understood that it meant certain defeat. The Sandman might be a god here, but whatever
the Integrity were, his powers didn’t apply to them.

Ross glanced downwards. There were now trees beneath them, though the mutant raven seemed to be skirting the edge of the forest,
still holding the same course. He hoped this meant the huge NPC knew where it was going, but he suspected it just meant that
the Sandman’s attention was focused upon the battle on the plain, where the hand tried again, grabbing for another tank.

Juno shouted a warning and Ross looked around immediately. Cresting the hill on a thermal, gathering deadly speed as it soared
above the treetops, flew the ghastly abomination that had taken Solderburn.

The Sandman, immersed in concentration elsewhere, reacted only a fraction of a second after Ross, but the delay was critical.
The two winged horrors collided, Cuddles blindsiding the raven with shuddering impact. Ross was knocked clear off the raven’s
back, his fists clutching huge feathers as he tumbled through the air, while above him the creatures gouged and tore at each
other, cries echoing across the valley.

He was aware of a shape falling alongside him. He could only catch brief glimpses as he spun towards the ground, but the glimpses
were enough. It was Juno. She was dead. There was a hole the size of a tree-trunk punched clean through her, armour and all,
by one of the maenad’s claws or spikes.

He smashed through roughly forty feet of branches and hit the ground with a disorienting but fortunately damage-free thump.
He took a moment to stop his head spinning and climb to his feet, finding himself a few yards from the perimeter of a system
of concentric stone circles. The Mobius icon told him the transit was at the centre.

He heard a horrific combined roar and shriek from above, one part war-cry and the other part death-scream. A few moments later
the mutant raven hit the forest floor in two huge bloody pieces, while Cuddles flew off clutching its prey among its arms,
suckers and tentacles.

It was a one-way transit. He materialised in mid-air, falling towards a conveniently placed hay cart, where he landed in the
welcoming embrace of a generously cushioning pile of straw. Jerusalem, Sandman had said, and Ross identified it as twelfth
century, not from any profound historical knowledge but from the manner of his fortuitously soft landing, which told him this
was
Assassin’s Creed
.

He felt the heat right away. The Sandman’s world had been bathed in the gentle warmth of an English autumn, whereas this was
fierce, a constant prompt to seek the sanctuary of shade.

Ross ran on soft feet from the cart’s location in a quiet yard along a dark and narrow alley into a bright and noisy public
square. He scanned the crowd, expecting to see Integrity soldiers closing in from anywhere, and looked up for a possible escape
route. At first he saw only a chaotically ramshackle skyline, but when he concentrated for a moment he could make out figures
shinning poles, skirting ledges and sliding along ropes. It was like the world’s biggest soft-play area. Thus the way to stay
truly covert was to remain anonymous within the crowds on the street. It was a world built for stealth and climbing, but in
practice only the NPCs didn’t realise that the easiest way to spot your quarry was to look up.

He crossed the square towards the shaded side and sought the refuge of a bustling coffee house, where he sat down at a table
deep in the cool gloom of the interior but with a clear view of the door. His nose had been full of spices since the moment
he hit the square; cinnamon, cardamom and cumin carried bounteously on the warm air. In here, their traces were still detectable,
but largely overwhelmed by strong coffee and an unmistakable scent of hash.

He didn’t think he was hungry, but when the landlord put down a plate of dates and sticky sweetmeats, he found himself compelled
to tuck in. You
could
eat here, he deduced: you just didn’t need to. If there was a food-energy protocol invoked, then, given the physical exertions
people came here to enjoy, they’d have to spend as much time stuffing their faces as scaling buildings.

The rules of the world dictated that he wasn’t required to eat or drink, but something more primal in him needed to, the same
instinct that had driven him to come in here to seek rest and shelter. He had escaped the Integrity and the corruption, but
the Sandman’s revelation and what had happened since was something he couldn’t outrun, and now that he had stopped to catch
his breath, it was crashing in upon him like waves.

Juno. Christ. Where might she be now? He couldn’t help but recall how he had convinced her to take him to the Sandman.
Sounds like I got nothing to lose
, she had said. Now she was most probably in the Integrity’s hands, trying to deal with the knowledge not only that she’d
never see her daughter again, but that she’d never actually seen her before.

The word headfuck seemed insufficient, not to mention in-accurate. He had never had a head; never had a fuck, for that matter.

He’d never had a life.

He was not a human being. He had never been one. He had never visited the real world. He had never lived in Stirling, never
worked at Neurosphere.

He had never met Carol. He might find a version of her in this world, but it could be a version of her from a few years in
the future, as had happened to Juno and Joe. She might hate him by now. Maybe she lost the baby, maybe she had a termination,
maybe she moved on to someone else.

Ross watched the coffee dregs swirl at the bottom of the cup, gritty and dark, a level of detail and authenticity that nobody
at Ubisoft ever programmed. He was aware that the drink didn’t physically exist and, even more acutely, that neither did he,
but that didn’t change the fact that it had been a bloody good cup
of coffee: black as night, sweet as honey, hot as hell. He had tasted it once before, he realised, on holiday in Turkey. Did
his own memories feed back upon themselves to enhance his perceptions here? Would someone who had only ever drunk lattes from
Starbucks see, smell and taste something different if the bustling tavern owner served them the same cup?

His memories, he realised, were still his. Every molecule in the human body was replaced every seven years, so the physical
matter that was processing his thoughts and memories had already been switched out several times. Memories were just code,
and it didn’t matter whether the system processing them was digital or organic.

This was his life now: his realm, his world, his universe. He had to accept it. He had to embrace it.

He had to lose Ross Baker and truly become Bedlam.