Bedlam (34 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m all messed up here over a family I never had.’

‘Don’t apologise. Missing people you’ve never met can’t be an easy thing to deal with. But missing the ones you knew well
is worse. That’s why Neurosphere’s most profitable implementation of the new technology wasn’t medical, though clearly the
benefits in that field were revolutionary.’

‘What else did they use it for?’

‘To create scans of people’s minds in order that their loved ones could still interact with a version of them after their
deaths. Of course, like us, it isn’t really them: just a perfect synthesised copy, with all their memories, emotions and personality
intact.’

‘A memento mori,’ Ross said. ‘Like a brain in a box as opposed to an urn on the mantelpiece.’

‘Yeah. Instead of saying “Grandma would have loved this”, at your kid’s birthday party, digital Grandma can watch the festivities
and wish junior many happy returns.’

‘Or, rather than a one-way conversation with your husband over his headstone …’ he suggested, quickly grasping what a comfort
this might be.

‘Exactly. That’s why it’s huge.’

‘But if it’s huge, why don’t people in this place know about it? If they’d signed up to have one of these mind-copies made,
surely they’d put two and two together when they wound up in a simulated universe?’

‘They don’t know because they were scanned before the tech went public. Everybody here was assumed to be a cave-painting:
they were scanned by the new technology prior to anyone realising what had actually been created: test scans from the prototype,
then clinical trials.’

Clinical trials. Like they’d been doing before with the NS4000. Ross thought of Melita, admitted to hospital after her car
accident.

‘So how come you know about it, if everyone here is a test-scan?’

‘I didn’t say
everyone
here was a test-scan. I said everyone here was scanned before the tech went public.’

Ross got it.

‘You worked for Neurosphere.’

The smell of the sea was becoming stronger as they followed the road, barbed wire and quietly buzzing electrified mesh now
flanking them to the left. They crested another spur in the
Camberwick Green
landscape and Ross finally got to see what the fence was for.

‘See, I told you people were desperate to get in,’ said Iris. ‘Of course, they’re only as desperate as they’re programmed
to be.’

There were dozens of NPCs milling miserably around a group of grim low-rise buildings, showcasing the wide spectrum of ethnic
skins and costumes Ross had seen on his HUD. It was a detention centre for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

Further down towards the coast he could see some more
untermensch
unfortunates being apprehended at gunpoint from where they’d been hiding in the back of a lorry, though it wasn’t apparent
where the lorry was supposed to have arrived from.

‘They get detained here for processing,’ Iris explained. ‘In practice this means they are declared illegal then deported.’

‘To where?’

‘A little island off the coast. Once they get there they climb right back on to more trucks which are taken by ferry to the
port, then drive down here so they can be caught all over again.’

‘Are the border guards NPCs too?’

‘Are you kidding me? Border patrol is a more popular pastime here than golf, cricket and fox-hunting combined.’

Ross looked at the hopeless, defeated expressions of the NPCs behind the wire and wondered why he felt more than just disdain
for the denizens of this green unpleasant land. He was about to temper his disapproval by reasoning that they weren’t hurting
anybody, but that, he realised, was the rub.

The usual reassurance that the NPCs were only computer files was thrown into confusion by the understanding that so was he,
and it begged the uncomfortable question as to what was the difference. Was he man to their animal: more advanced, more complex
but still ultimately just a different species, a more sophisticated variant of the same root? Or would a digital scan of an
animal’s mind be something infinitely more complex than an NPC?

The big question was: did they feel? They weren’t human beings: they were computer programs designed to mimic human beings.
They showed pain, misery, anger, happiness, desire, but were they entities experiencing digitally synthesised emotions, or
were they empty avatars programmed to display responses appropriate to stimuli? Were they, like him, not just artificial intelligence,
but digital consciousness?

It made him wonder about those memento mori scans too. How would it feel to be looking through a video feed at the real world
outside, a world you could never enter, at loved ones you could never touch? What did they do the rest of the time? If they
were given a world like this as their hamster wheel, with other scans to interact with, wouldn’t they grow apart from those
on the outside? Or were they only switched on when they were needed, and if so, wouldn’t that be painful, would it breed resentment?

There were a thousand questions dotted about a whole new unfolding ethical landscape, but ultimately it came down to one fundamental
issue: just because it was running on hardware rather than meatware, shouldn’t a digital consciousness still have human rights?

Ross would admit he might be biased due to having a dog in this fight, but he was strongly of the opinion that the answer
was yes.

They diverted from the main road about a quarter of a mile after the detention centre, taking a winding footpath down towards
the coast. The headland stretched out to sea to their right, rising to form chalk cliffs so white that Ross could almost hear
Vera Lynn. A couple of miles out he could see an island slightly shrouded in the blue haze of afternoon sunshine. It looked
an inviting day for a sail, if he didn’t have a suicidal prison-fortress assault to be getting on with.

In a secluded cove tucked away at the foot of the escarpment, a compact cabin cruiser bobbed where it was tied up at a jetty.

‘That’s your spaceship?’ he asked.

‘Technically space-boat, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? It’ll get us there, that’s the main thing.
Appearances count for nothing out in the big black.’

‘I know the rules,’ he told her. ‘Every craft gets the same number of points to spend on speed, armour and weapons. Size doesn’t
matter.’

‘In our case I’d say it does: the smaller the better.’

Ross climbed into the passenger seat and, upon Iris’s instruction, buckled up in case things got choppy. He guessed she didn’t
only mean maritime conditions.

‘The main port and marina are just around this headland,’ she said, gently opening up the throttle. ‘I don’t want to attract
any undue attention, so we’ll sail to the far side of that island and take off from there.’

‘Is that the island the asylum seekers shuttle back and forth from?’

‘No, that one’s way out of sight of land. The locals like to know they’re deporting them far over the sea. I don’t know what
this little one is for. Pleasure cruise destination maybe.’

They headed straight towards the island, the white cliffs a hundred yards or so to starboard. Ross got the impression the
cruiser could really shift if she let it, but Iris kept a steady pace, aware that a show of haste might be conspicuous. Ross
was happy enough for her to take her time, given the ultimate destination. He knew that there was no option to let this chalice
pass his lips, but he wasn’t in a hurry to slug it down.

The cruiser was roughly a mile from the island when it came around the headland and into sight of the marina. To his surprise,
there were no boats in it. To his and Iris’s combined greater surprise and no little alarm, this was because the boats were
all at sea, and all heading the same way.

‘The hell is this?’ she asked. ‘So much for slipping away quietly. Looks like we’ve sailed into a regatta.’

There were dozens of little vessels, from speed launches to fishing boats, spread out across the width of the bay, as far
as the eye could see.

‘A regatta?’ Ross said. ‘More like …’

He cut himself off as he realised it wasn’t ‘more like’. It was trying to be
exactly
like …

He took out a monocular scope he’d picked up in one of the
Halo
worlds and looked towards the beach that the flotilla was rapidly approaching. He could see dozens of identical NPC soldiers
in British World War Two uniform, some standing on the sands, others already wading into the waves.

‘More like what?’ Iris asked.

‘Dunkirk.’

Iris slowed down and peeled gently away to port, letting the flotilla sail past, still intent on proceeding quietly around
to the far side of the island. The first vessels made landfall and were swamped by grateful Tommies, helped aboard by the
heroic mariners of Operation
Daily Mail
.

‘Our finest hour,’ Ross deadpanned. ‘They’re having a re-enactment.’

There was a sound of gunfire which prompted Iris to produce a pair of binoculars and look to the beach. German soldiers were
there now too, being mown down by armed members of the evacuation fleet.

‘I confess I’m not a keen student of the period,’ she said, ‘but
nothing I read about Operation Dynamo mentioned the captains of the little ships machine-gunning the evil foe.’

‘No, but I think the biggest piece of revisionism at play here is the fact that the
Daily Mail
was actually pro-Hitler and vocally supported the Nazis. Obviously this was a very long time ago and things are different
now. The paper has moved a lot further to the right since then.’

Iris steered the cruiser around the island then on towards the horizon. Having set her course, she turned around in her seat
and checked back with her binoculars.

‘What you looking for?’

‘Making sure we’re not seen taking off. You should have a look too. Good to have an extra pair of eyes.’

‘If you’re worried about the Integrity finding out about flight between worlds, I’m afraid that spaceship has sailed. I saw
a bunch of them fly away in a troop carrier during the raid that bagged the Sandman.’

‘Well, that’s a cheery thought as we fly off towards their home-world.’

‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’

‘It was only ever a matter of time,’ she conceded. ‘And I guess that’s all the more reason to make sure nobody reports to
the Integrity that there’s a vessel headed straight for their airspace.’

Ross scoped back and forth across the little island and beyond.

‘Looks clear to me,’ he reported. ‘What about you?’

‘Shiny,’ she replied.

Ross shifted restlessly in the little cabin, with literally nothing to distract him outside its windows. The vessel had undergone
a few minor transformations once it was out in the void, but essentially he was flying through space in a speedboat, with
only marginally more room around him than had he been in the passenger seat of Carol’s Audi TT.

That was where he had first kissed her.

He hadn’t meant for it to happen like that. He was planning to choose his moment; not because he wanted to play it cool, but
because he didn’t want to blow anything by appearing impatient for a physical element. She’d been dropping him off at his
house after they’d been to the cinema together. They’d both hated the movie, but liked the way each other hated it. In that
respect, he was happy that this second date had been redeemed. He wanted to leave on the right note, get out of the car with
both of them smiling, both of them looking forward to doing this again. But she laughed so much at the last thing he said
and they looked at each other just a little too long … and it happened, and it was exquisite.

He couldn’t afford to think about that, though. He had to put it all from his mind. But the more he tried, the more Carol
kept slipping back in. He was aware he would find only further torment and confusion there but he couldn’t help thinking about
her, and about the version of himself that had walked out of the scanning machine and gone back to work.

What had happened? All those things he had resolved in his head: had he put them into practice? Presumably, because they’d
had not just one kid, but two. How many years had passed out there? What ages were they? Where did they live? He wondered
about daft little details, like what kind of décor Carol would have insisted upon for their living room.

He missed her. He ached to talk to her, to share what had happened out there in the real world. Above all, he wanted to see
the kids. They said you didn’t miss what you never had, but the game had seriously changed since that phrase was coined.

Was what he was enduring worse than the pain felt by Bob back on Graxis? Probably not. Bob was missing something that had
become a fundamental part of him, something he couldn’t imagine life without. Ross was missing a life he’d never led, like
an old man’s regrets. But unlike that old man, this life had been lived,
was being
lived, yet he wouldn’t get to experience any of it. He wouldn’t get to hold his children, to play with them, hear them laugh,
comfort them when they cried, or a million other things he never knew the value of when he stepped into that scanner.

If there was any comfort, it was that he must have made Carol happy. There was a version of himself out there that was what
he’d aspired to be; a version out there that had put right all the things he’d been screwing up.

Way to go, man. Proud of you, he thought, trying to be magnanimous. You’re a better man than I.

And a lucky bastard.

Ross stared dead ahead as the ship hummed lightly with power and motion. He was looking for anything that might resemble even
a dot, but he could see only blackness.

‘I’m trying very hard not to ask: “Are we nearly there yet?”’

‘Appreciate it.’

‘You said that last place was the nearest world to where we’re going?’ he asked.

‘It’s the furthest distance between any two worlds, truly the furthest known extremity of the gameverse.’

‘I take it nobody has explored beyond it?’

‘Pointless. There’s nothing beyond it: just endless space created by repeating subroutines.’

Ross understood. It was just like when you noclipped out of any game. You could keep going forever, but you’d never reach
anything, and you’d have to come all the way back or quit out.

‘You’d best settle in and get comfortable,’ said Iris. ‘It’s a long way yet.’

‘Yeah, I’ll put my head back and turn on the radio, listen to some tunes.’

‘Actually, you could if you want to. There’s a music interface on board.’

She pressed a button and music began to play over an unseen but extremely high-fidelity sound system. It was
New Song
by Howard Jones, a track to which Ross had a sufficient emotional connection for him to wonder whether it was a set-up. It
had been a huge favourite of his mum’s, which was why it inveigled its way into
his
heart too, assisted by a confused interpretation of the lyrics. He had probably heard it several times growing up but paid
it very little heed until the advent of his interest in computer games caused his ears to prick up at the feather-haired Howard
singing about being ‘lasered down by the Doom crew’. Ross had laboured under this misapprehension for a while before later
discovering that the track hailed from 1983, that ‘lasered’ was actually ‘laden’ and that the capped-up D was only in his
imagination.

For all that, it stuck with him even more, and he couldn’t hear it without picturing his mum in their old kitchen, singing
along to a mix-tape as she made a pot of soup.

‘Is this
your
choice?’ he asked inquisitively.

‘No, actually, it’s yours. There’s almost limitless music accessible in the gameverse, so this gizmo taps into your memory
and creates a playlist of what it thinks you want to hear. I normally set it to random, because otherwise it can be a little
too much like musical psychoanalysis. Then I forget it’s on random and wonder what it says about my state of mind that I’m
listening to ‘Pervert’ by Nerf Herder.

The electro-pop synth notes gave way to a more insistent beeping he didn’t remember, not even from the twelve-inch remix.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, but even as he spoke he recognised the graphic display to which Iris was now paying rapt attention.

‘Convergence alarm.’

‘I can’t see anything,’ Ross reported, looking to starboard from where the monitor indicated another ship was approaching.

‘Probably small, like us. Moving a little slower though, so most likely packing heat.’

Iris made a course correction, and only seconds later the convergence warning sounded again.

‘Who would pirates be hoping to catch flying way out here?’ Ross asked.

‘Way out here, it won’t be pirates. Someone back on Little England must have seen us and phoned the Neighbourhood Watch.’

Iris made another alteration to their course, which at present speed ought to avert the convergence, albeit at the expense
of taking a longer route to their destination. No sooner had she done so than the alarm sounded again, beeping and flashing
more insistently this time. They were no longer being invisibly flanked from starboard, however: this line of convergence
was now coming from the bow, and the projected point of intersection was far closer.

‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

The first craft had been playing sheepdog: guiding them right into the path of a bigger, closer threat.

‘I still can’t see anything,’ said Ross, as panic began to take hold.

‘That’s because it’s black on black.’

Ross stared ahead into the void, trying to make out any kind of shape beyond the prow. When finally he saw movement, it was
too fast to be a ship. It was zooming towards them at hundreds of feet per second, giving them no time to manoeuvre.

‘Incoming!’ Iris shouted, but the torpedo hit before Ross could even brace himself for impact.

He felt all of the speedboat’s puny fragility as it was struck, killing all of their forward momentum and buffeting them like
a moth in a hurricane. No matter what he tried to tell himself about the rules that applied here, the reality was that he
was out in space in a vessel he’d have been dubious about taking too far off the Clyde coast.

He saw it now, the Integrity ship: a ghostly shape only visible as it bounced back light from inside his own craft. It was
the size of a naval destroyer, at least a hundred metres long and thirty high, bearing down on them at a steady clip; no need
for hurry as they were the ones who had been speeding towards it.

A second torpedo impacted from starboard, fired by the
smaller Integrity vessel. Ross watched various instruments flash erratically, many of them blinking their last and fading
to black.

‘We’re down to emergency distribution,’ said Iris. ‘That means everything we’ve got left is being diverted towards simply
holding us together. We’re dead in the water and we’ve got about two minutes before we break up.’

‘How long before they can fire again?’

‘There’s a sub-distribution within the weapon attributes: power of torpedo or speed of recharge. But it really doesn’t matter
how you arrange the numbers, they add up to the same thing: we’re borked.’

One of the screens on the dashboard flashed back into life, a pulsing symbol in the centre of it.

‘What’s that?’ Ross asked.

‘They’re sending us a warp invite, asking us to call up our HUDs and beam aboard to surrender. Makes no difference: at this
distance, if they blow us out of the sky, we’ll force-spawn aboard their ship anyway. It’s over, Bedlam.’

‘Actually, I’m thinking of changing my moniker to Albatross.’

He watched another couple of instruments cease blinking as the power drained, all the juice going towards the doomed task
of preventing the vessel from coming to pieces. Adding insult to injury, the convergence warning came online again, in what
Ross considered a pointlessly power-sapping act of redundancy.

However, a glance at the screen showed him that it wasn’t redundant: it was reading a new convergence.

The huge black Integrity destroyer had detected it too, and was altering its course in a hurry, its diversion pulling it away
from spawn range, and with nowhere to respawn, an eternity of feeling like rising vomit in an endless throat awaited them
after the speedboat imploded.

‘What is that?’ he asked, pointing to the new blip on the radar.

‘I don’t know,’ Iris replied. ‘But nothing bigger than a torpedo is supposed to move that fast out here.’

Ross turned around and looked behind. He caught a glimpse of something, but the form itself was lost in a dazzle of illumination,
much as the shape of a car is obliterated from the retina on a dark night by it suddenly turning on its headlamps full beam.

‘Aren’t laser weapons not supposed to happen out here either?’ he asked.

He made out the true shape of the Integrity destroyer for a fraction of a second before it was ripped apart by a blaze of
energy, the plasma weapons delivering a quite devastating payload of damage in a matter of moments. The outriding sheepdog
ship was nippier in its attempts to flee, but in the twinkling of an eye, it was space-dust too.

When the lasers stopped firing, Ross was finally able to get a good look at their source, and laughed out loud as surprise
collided with the relief he was already feeling. Whoever had come to their rescue had done so in a detail-perfect replica
of the
Liberator
from
Blake’s 7
.

‘We’re getting a new warp invite,’ Iris reported. ‘I’m leaning towards thinking we should accept.’

‘It would simply be impolite not to.’