Bedlam (38 page)

‘Which was what?’

‘At nine o’clock this morning, my dad was to commence a second decoy hack from his beach house in California, while I simultaneously
uploaded his prototype scan: you. That’s why you were late to the party, as you put it.’

‘You were the player.’

‘The what?’

‘On Graxis. Someone activated console commands to help me out.’

‘That would have been real-world Jennifer, yes, sitting at a keyboard in Stirling. Because I uploaded you directly into
Starfire
, you defaulted to the role of enemy grunt, so I was supposed to input some codes to free you from the constraining protocols,
let you pick up marine weapons and stuff. I take it I got it right.’

‘Eventually. Real-world you is shit at
Starfire
.’

‘I failed to mis-spend my youth. Maybe if my dad hadn’t been such an asshole slave-driver about my school work, I’d have had
more time for retro-gaming.’

‘What about Bob the accountant?’

‘Bob the … Oh, the other guy. Unfortunately, when you dug into the archives to retrieve your original scan, an incompatibility
between old and new file-tagging systems meant the tags were cut off at seven characters. There were two named ‘bakerro’:
yours and a guy named Robert Baker, who was presumably already in here. Poor sonofabitch is gonna run into himself eventually,
and won’t that be a fun moment. We had no way of knowing which file was which, so I brought them both when I flew to Scotland.
It was fifty-fifty, but I guess real-world me uploaded the wrong one first.’

‘It’s never fifty-fifty with these things. Murphy’s Law dictates otherwise.’

‘That’s why I left nothing else to chance. It was pure strategy after that. Michaels threw a blanket over the menagerie, but
that meant
he
didn’t know what was going on inside either. I used my codes to infiltrate the Integrity and convinced Ankou that I had been
sent by Michaels to speed things up.’

This was where Ross felt the relief and euphoria begin to wear off. A father’s love made him proud of his child’s achievements,
but it was also his duty to point out failings along the way.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Your strategy involved winning Ankou’s trust by wiping out all resistance, rounding up his most powerful
adversaries and then delivering me to a super-secure prison at the heart of a fortress completely surrounded by the massed
ranks of the Integrity. For someone claiming to leave nothing to chance, have you spotted any flaws in your grand plan?’

She looked at him with an expression in which he could see her as a two-year-old laying down the law to her idiot dad.

‘First of all, it’s
our
plan: we cooked it up between us. Second, haven’t you asked yourself why Ankou would build such a mega-fortress out here
on the edge of nowhere?’

‘You said it was so that nobody could escape.’

‘I was lying, remember? Ankou was eavesdropping on every word we shared. You don’t need a place like this to hold scans awaiting
extraction. In fact, the retention grids are on another world altogether: tens of thousands of little cells all laid out on
a plain. Once you’re locked inside one of those, your integrity is one hundred per cent and you can be copied or extracted
when the guys on the outside are ready to use you. So let’s try again, shall we? What’s the fortress here to protect?’

Of course.

‘The way out of here.’

‘Even in character, I wasn’t lying about that. Nor was I lying when I said it takes an Original to open it. In mythology,
Ankou was a soul-collector. But do you know who Iris was?’

‘A messenger of the gods.’

‘And the
daughter
of a god.’

She touched the side of his head with the other end of the hypodermic device, and his HUD altered. Lines of data scrolled
before his eyes, and as well as a host of new tools and icons, there was a command prompt.

‘Something else I misled Ankou about: you are a prototype scan, uploaded with the original synthesis protocols which
only you
still had on file. Not only are you an Original, but your real-world self gave you a few extra admin privileges too. I had
to keep this suppressed until now, even from you, in case you accidentally gave the game away too soon.’

He didn’t need to ask what the game was.

‘You convinced Ankou to open his doors and let me walk right into the heart of the one place he should have been keeping me
furthest away from.’

‘No offence, Dad, you’re a good gamer, but there’s no chance you could have battled your way to the heart of the Citadel otherwise.
Despite how secure it is, Ankou isn’t holding any of the Originals here, because it would be too dangerous for him. That’s
why the retention grids are on a completely different world. Soon as they get hold of The Captain, they’ll ship her right
out too. So letting you walk in here is like giving Dracula the keys to a blood bank.’

‘But isn’t Ankou able to hear all this, or did you disable the relay?’

‘I could have, but I want him to hear it.’

‘You
want
him to …? Why?’

‘Because I want him to experience the maximum anger and then the maximum fear as he realises, with laser-calibrated precision,
just how fucked he is.’

Through his new HUD, when Ross looked at the world around him, he now saw two versions. There was the solid reality as perceived
by his synthesised consciousness, and there was a version composed of values, attributes, variables, protocols:
code
. He could see every line. He could see all of the worlds, all of the connections between them, every rule, every subroutine.

Jennifer was right: this was already over. And the reason Ankou was doomed wasn’t just that Ross could access the code. All
of the Originals could access the code. They could all read it, they could all amend it, but it was
his
code. It was his future self who had devised it, but it was like reading his own thoughts, his own logic, his own structures
and connections. It made perfect sense to him, and he instinctively knew what all of it did: from values affecting the world
he stood on right now, to protocols governing the very fabric of the gameverse.

In the beginning
, he thought,
there was the command line
…

He didn’t have to open the cell door to know that there were forty-eight samnites storming into the detention blocks right
then, despatched by Ankou in growing alarm and packing those memory-violating rifles. They might as well be packing Nerf guns.
He changed the damage values on their weapons to zero, an effect that would instantly apply on all worlds where they were
deployed. At the speed of thought, he sited spawn points inside all of the locked cells, handed Jennifer a GraxiTron Flow
gun and suggested she bid them all GTF.

He heard voices raised to screams as the panic really began to take hold.

‘Cry some more,’ he told them.

It wasn’t just the samnites who started pinging into the cells
either. Ross demagnetised the planetary surface and reset the weapon systems on the
Manta-Ray
– as well as those of her crew – to maximum butt-hurt.

Inside and outside the Citadel, the Integrity were soon having their arses handed to them. It was so satisfying that it was
a temptation to spring them from the cells just so he could watch them get mantelpieced all over again. He resisted though:
there would be plenty of fun still to come: from
Unreal
to Pulchritupolis, from Graxis to Vice City.

Juno felt the eruption of agony cease as suddenly as it had begun, the maenad inflicting ludicrously over-amped damage levels
in a fraction of a second and killing her instantaneously. As always, there was an echo of the pain in the moment she respawned
but no more actual hurt.

Only dread.

She could see several Integrity troops in her peripheral vision, but her focus was pulled to two things directly in front
of her. One was the amphibious armoured vehicle on the edge of the swamp, its rear doors thrown open above a short ramp, beyond
which a row of cells stretched into darkness. It was a mobile prison, designed to contain the captives until the Integrity
were ready to transport them to that bleak and hopeless grid.

The other principal draw upon her attention was a samnite wielding a many-tongued scourge, which delivered the same soul-gouging
brutality as the rifles. She sussed his role immediately. He would lash every respawned Diasporado with that thing to render
them insensible, and to prevent would-be fugitives from entering a desperate cycle of running, being gunned down, respawning
and running again, kind of like a kid skipping around in a circle while his mom tries to spank him.

Skullhammer was already on the floor, reeling from the blow. He had died moments before Juno, having valiantly but fruitlessly
flung himself in front of her as the maenad swooped.

Juno cringed at the sight of the scourge and held her hands up in surrender, trying to convey that she would come quietly,
but she could tell that this fucker liked his work.

He wound up and really put his shoulder into it. She flinched
and tried to brace herself, but she knew there was no bracing yourself for what this felt like.

The little black tongues rattled as they contacted with her, at which point she felt … precisely nothing.

Her assailant looked puzzled for a moment, wondering why she didn’t fall down. He lashed her again, with no effect. She was
aware of the contact, but there was no pain, no damage.

Skullhammer was observing with keen interest as he climbed back to his feet. In a mounting panic the samnite hefted his rifle
and delivered a blast straight to Skullhammer’s chest, point blank. Once again, torment and debilitation failed to ensue.

‘Well, this is awkward,’ said Juno.

‘Wherever you need to get to next, just let me know,’ Jennifer said. ‘I could draw this dump from memory: every time I came
here I took the long way around so that I could learn the layout.’

‘No need,’ Ross told her.

He could see the whole place as wireframe, could noclip his way through the walls, the ceilings and the floors. He didn’t
have to, though. Instead he collapsed them, dissolved them, hollowing out the Citadel to clear a path to the chamber at its
heart where Ankou guarded the secret gateway.

As he and Jennifer rose towards it on a moving platform Ross had created, Ankou himself tore down the last of the walls, drawing
the very fabric of the place into himself to replenish his power.

He had become enormous. He was thirty feet tall, a barely humanoid mass rounding upon his approaching enemies with two fearsome
cannons that were the closest things he had to limbs. As he moved, Ross saw that there were several thick tentacle-like tubes
connecting him to a wide hexagonal pool of that pulsatile black rock-metal-plastic. He wasn’t drawing his power from it, though;
it was drawing its power from him.

Ankou opened fire with the cannons: their sound deafening, their muzzle-flash blinding, their effect bugger-all.

‘Sorry,’ Ross explained. ‘Altered the server-side variables so your guns deliver zero damage points. I’m a cheating bastard,
I know.’

‘You’re altering the rules?’ the blob asked, confusion and anger detectable in a voice that was otherwise becoming less human
by the word. ‘How are you doing this?’

‘Admin privileges. See, big guy, your problem is you never
played enough games. If you had, you’d understand there’s one rule that matters above all others.’

Ross produced his own weapon, the one that would finish this. He could have any gun in the gameverse, so he chose the crappy
default blaster he started off with on Graxis. The only pity was there was no way of seeing the look on Ankou’s face, as he
no longer appeared to have one.

‘And what rule is that?’ the blob asked contemptuously.

‘If you act like a dick, you’ll get kicked from the server.’

Ross pulled the trigger and sent the tiniest quantum of Ankou’s memory-violating energy zooming into his oleaginous mass.

There was no visible effect at first, but then the implosion got underway as the code Neurosphere had merged him with began
feeding back on itself in an exponential chain reaction.

‘Will that erase him?’ Jennifer asked, Ross being unsure from the concern in her tone whether she was worried that it would
or that it wouldn’t.

‘Only if he doesn’t disengage from the amalgam. It’s his call if he wants to live.’

The black mass thrashed and throbbed some more, growing smaller and smaller, then a human shape took form in the midst of
it and suddenly broke free. The instant it did, the black mass vanished, compressing itself into a tiny square object that
fell to the floor with a clatter.

Ankou was left standing next to it, a few feet in front of a now-shimmering hexagon of coloured light. Naturally, he looked
like Zac Michaels, and Ross bit back the obvious remark about his previous appearance being less oily.

Ankou glanced down at the object on the ground nearby.

‘Looks like a three-and-a-half-inch floppy,’ Ross told him. ‘Which I’m guessing is you on a good night even
with
the blue pills.’

Ross kept the gun trained on him, assigning it new properties.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ Ankou asked anxiously.

‘I’m going to give you a choice, which is more than you were looking at if you had succeeded. Talk about turkeys voting for
Christmas. What were you expecting? Some virtual paradise as reward? Seventy-two virgins?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well I guess you were never going to find those in Stirling. I just can’t believe you bought it. Didn’t you think you and
your goons would all just be erased once the job was done? Or sold off for military experiments like the rest of us? I mean,
put it this way, would
you
trust a guy like you?’

Ankou managed a smile, maybe two parts self-awareness to three parts perverse pride.

‘Well, when you put it that way,’ he acknowledged. ‘So what’s my choice?’

Ross waved a hand and a rectangular slab appeared, hanging vertically in the air a few feet from Ankou. It was like a swirling
curtain of silver beads, a portal beyond which his possible future was occluded.

‘To decide whether you’re a person or a programme,’ he told him. ‘If it’s the former, then you’ll step through this gateway
and find a life for yourself here, same as everyone else. If it’s the latter, then I’ll remind you that another name for a
programme is an
executable
. After all, if you’re just a piece of code, you won’t care.’

Ross raised the crappy but lethal blaster once again.

‘You’ve got five seconds to decide.’

Ankou didn’t need five seconds. He put his hands in the air and turned to face the curtain.

‘Don’t shoot,’ he said. ‘I’m walking the plank.’

‘Good call. Can I interpret that as a tacit acknowledgement that “do unto others” applies to DCs as well as meatware?’

‘Self-preservation does anyway,’ he answered, with which he snatched up the disc from the floor and dived headlong into the
portal.

Jennifer took a couple of instinctive steps after him, then stopped herself.

‘What did he take?’ she asked anxiously. ‘What was that thing?’

‘Not what he thinks,’ Ross answered, erasing the gateway.

He walked over to the pool of shimmering colours and stared down into it, seeing it simultaneously as a play of lights and
a dance of numbers. Ross was looking through the doorway to the Secondverse, where Solderburn had escaped to. So far he had
been the only traffic through it, but it was about to become
busier than rush hour on the Kingston Bridge. This was what guaranteed Michaels couldn’t try the same thing again: an open
connection that would merge Cirrus Nine with the rest of the Neurosphere system. Memento Mori and beyond: everyone who was
ever scanned, and the countless worlds they had created since. Its inhabitants had referred to Cirrus Nine as the gameverse,
but Ross knew now that it was merely a cluster of little islands. Beyond this portal was a realm that dwarfed it, a staggering
multiplicity of worlds, each offering a cornucopia of experiences and possibilities.

But the world he wanted to visit most would remain forever inaccessible.

‘What’s wrong?’ Jennifer asked. ‘You saved everybody here from a thousand horrible fates; in fact you saved an unknowable
number of clones of everyone here from a thousand horrible fates. Yet you don’t exactly seem elated in your moment of triumph.’

‘There was no triumph. The bad guy got away.’

‘You
let
him.’

‘I wasn’t talking about Ankou. He was just a chancer. I was talking about the guy who fucked me over. It’s time I had a word
with myself.’