Reality Hack (2 page)

‘It’s gotta be a trick,’ Wallace said. ‘That’s not… physically possible.’

‘You’re the physicist,’ Jenna said. ‘You want to explain what you’re seeing if it’s not
possible?’

‘Some sort of… plasma…’ He reached out a hand, hesitated, and then pushed a finger into the ball of light. ‘Nothing. Can’t feel anything. It’s not hot… or solid. It’s just…’

‘Light,’ Lena finished for him. ‘I didn’t believe… I mean, I believed, but I never thought one of us… Oh wow.’

The only one who had not said anything was Spike, and when he did speak it was quiet and intense. ‘Hide it. Don’t let anyone else see you can do that.’ Frowning, Nisa cupped the ball of light in her hands, obscuring the glow. Spike nodded. ‘That site got pulled for a reason, by people powerful enough to make it and its owners vanish entirely. We
don’t
want to attract that kind of attention.’

‘Afraid the MIBs’ll come for us?’ Wallace said, grinning.

‘Yes,’ Spike said with such intensity that Wallace stopped grinning. ‘Them or something worse.’ He looked at Nisa. ‘I know there’s no point in saying you should stop now. We’ve proved it can be done, that’s what we wanted, but you’ll keep practising, I know you will. Just keep it out of sight, okay?’

The light in Nisa’s hands chose that moment to die. She unclasped her fingers. ‘Okay,’ she said and then plucked at the front of her top, eliciting a small sigh from Wallace. ‘Is it hot in here, or is it just me?’ she asked.

‘Just you,’ Jenna replied.

‘I think we can all agree that Nisa’s hot,’ Wallace confirmed and the tension in the group dissolved.

Lena still punched him in the arm again.

June 7
^th
.

Gun’s Kebabs prided itself on being open twenty-four hours a day, except on Sunday. Well, ‘prided itself’ was maybe not quite the right term, but you could buy mediocre food there at any hour of the day or night and if you wanted a burger at four in the morning you got served by Nisa.

She did midnight until seven in the morning when Mister Gun came down from the flat above the shop. There were never many customers, and a lot of those were stoned, but there were enough to pay Nisa’s wages, handle the extra utility bill, and make a little profit, so Gun kept opening at night. To Nisa, it was a job which let her do a lot of reading. Her one big complaint about it was the ‘uniform.’ She sat behind the counter in a short, gingham dress in white with a toothpaste-green check, and a stupid little hat which was supposed to keep her hair out of the food. She purposefully wore her clogs most nights so that she did not feel like a traitor to any sense of fashion she had.

For a Friday, it was quiet. Technically, for a Saturday morning it was quiet, but Nisa had, after over a year of working nights, begun to view the clock backward. Saturday would start at midday, when she was asleep. She had draped a blanket over the curtain rail in her bedroom and her curtains were never drawn back. Whatever, it was after two and no one had been in for over an hour. The stoners had not, apparently, got to the famished stage, or they had stocked up on munchable snacks beforehand. This did not bother Nisa in the least because watching someone count out the cost of their kebab with too much hot sauce in pennies was never the highlight of her night.

She detected movement in the corner of her eye and looked out through the glass frontage. A man was walking past the window, but it looked like he was going to keep on walking so she went back to her book. The buzzer going off in the back room came as something of a surprise. It was there to let anyone in the back know that the front door had been opened, so maybe the guy had had a sudden urge to eat. She looked up and…

He had to be the most beautiful human being she had ever seen, though if she had to work out exactly why she would have been hard-pressed to do so. He was young, certainly no older than she was, quite pale… Maybe that was it; with the dark hair and eyes, and the pale complexion, he had Goth written all over him and she did like that look. But this was Lord Byron Gothic. This was ‘Oh my God, let me kiss your feet, you beautiful creature of the night’ Gothic. And he was smiling at her.

She slipped off her stool and stepped up to the counter. He had said nothing, so she figured he was waiting for her. ‘C-can I do anything for you? I mean… Is there something you wanted?’

‘Yes,’ he said. His voice seemed to vibrate between her legs. One word and she felt like her knees were going to buckle.

‘Uh… We do burgers… kebabs… um…’ What the Hell else
was
on the menu?

‘I was thinking,’ the man said, ‘of something different.’

‘Oh? I-if it’s on the menu…’ She waved a hand vaguely over her shoulder at the board on the wall.

‘It’s not on the menu. It’s
standing in front of the menu.’

Nisa opened her mouth and tried to think of something to say, but her brain had gone numb. She watched as he walked out of her line of sight; her eyes were fixed on the window now. She heard the hatch at the side of the counter being opened and some part of her was thinking that customers were not allowed behind the counter, but saying that was proving impossible.

‘Beautiful,’ she heard him say from behind her. She felt his hands sliding her dress up over her hips. Shit! He was really going to… His fingers pushed her thong down her legs and, despite the fact that she did not want to, she stepped out of it and set her legs apart, waiting for him. He’s going to…
His tongue flicked over her labia, and she bit off a moan and tried to focus her mind on why she should be trying to stop him.

‘You want this, Nisa,’ he purred. He was standing again and he was behind her…

‘I want this,’ she said and even to her, her voice sounded like she was asleep. No!
She tilted her hips back toward him. No?

And then he was inside her. Thick and long: God he was big! Cool… His skin was cold. That did not seem to matter. There was a weird, burning sensation in the pit of her stomach that seemed to be growing. That did not matter either. She felt him stroking into her, over and over, and
that
was all that mattered. The burning sensation reached up through her body and she felt her heart stutter, and she thought she heard the door buzzer and a loud bang, but by then she had collapsed onto the counter and there was nothing but darkness.

Westminster.

There was a sound. It took Nisa a second or two to figure out what it was. Her brain felt fuzzy, dopy, kind of dim, like the one time she had tried weed and it had gone bad. A rhythmic beeping sound: a heart monitor. She was in a hospital? Why was she in a hospital? As her senses started to return, another question asserted itself with some force: why was she cuffed to the bed?

She opened her eyes and lifted her head, trying to get some idea of what was going on. The room was blank and white, and did not look exactly like a hospital room. To her right was a bank of equipment which included the beeping monitor as well as a couple of instruments she did not recognise. One of those showed a number, 11, in red numerals. Nothing in red was ever good. The bed was a typical sort of hospital one with a solid frame around it, and the restraints she could feel on her wrists and ankles were presumably attached to that. She could not be sure since she was covered to her neck in a white, cotton sheet with a pretty high thread count. On the other hand, she was fairly sure she was naked under it, which was not standard hospital procedure. And there was the man sitting in a chair beside one of two doors, which looked very solid, she noted, almost like a cell door. The other door was lighter, internal: a bathroom maybe.

The man in question looked like he was in his mid-twenties, maybe a little older. There was a hint about his face of something older, something a lot older, but she got the impression that that was too much experience rather than years. He was dressed in an open-necked sweater made of some sort of flannel, and dark jeans, and those obscured what looked like a fairly strong, powerful body. He kept himself fit; she could see muscles flexing as he turned the pages of the leather-bound book he was reading. His face was serious, hard, solid. High cheekbones above sunken cheeks and a solid jawline gave him a skull-like appearance softened by the black hair, wisps of which hung at the sides of his face. There was a slight widow’s peak and she thought she could see braids at the back when he turned his head, and she decided that his hair was an affectation designed to deny his basic conformity. He had gorgeous, blue eyes.

All that was taken in in a second and then the normal flow of time reasserted itself as he looked up at her.

‘You’re awake then?’ he said, his voice calm, unconcerned.

Nisa remembered that she was tied to the bed. ‘Who the fuck are you? Why the fuck am I tied down?’

He stood up and stepped toward the side of the bed. The light from the overheads caught gold lettering on the cover of his book and she read ‘Decanic Invocation.’ He put the book down beside one of the monitors and peered at her for a second.

‘What do you remember?’ he asked.

She opened her mouth to demand answers, not questions, but then the realisation hit her: her normally near-perfect memory was giving her next to nothing. What could she actually remember…?

‘I was at work,’ she said.

‘Gun’s Kebabs,’ he said, putting so much disgust into the two words that she felt obliged to defend the place.

‘Yeah, Gun’s Kebabs. It’s not that bad and it pays the bills.’

He stared at her. ‘Go on.’

‘It was quiet for a Friday and then… Then this guy walked in.
Really
attractive.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Uh… Dark. I can’t… I can’t remember much about him. It’s weird because I normally have a really good memory.’

‘And what did this man do?’

‘I asked if he wanted anything and he said… He said…’ Her brow knitted in concentration. ‘He said he wanted something different, not on the menu… And after that there’s nothing but a blur until I woke up. In bondage. It’s kinky, but I’d like out now.’

He coughed and then turned for the door. He did have braids, long, thin ones, capped with silver weights. ‘Someone will be in to remove the cuffs. You’re to stay in bed and rest until you’ve recovered fully.’

‘Why? What the fuck happened to me?’

‘Very apposite,’ he said, but she got nothing else as he opened the door and walked out. The locks which engaged when the door closed sounded very solid.

June 8
^th
.

There was no clock in the room, not even on the instruments, so Nisa had no idea how long she had been there. As promised, a woman in a short, white dress had appeared and undone the cuffs holding her to the bed. The woman had introduced herself as Sandra and she had politely, but firmly, told Nisa that she needed rest, and lots of it. There had been pills, and one of them had probably been a sedative because Nisa had gone out like a light, waking up when her stomach was trying to gnaw its way out of her body.

Sandra was standing beside the bed with a tray of food. ‘I’ve got soup and some crusty bread. You don’t get butter; it’s fattening. If you eat it all, you get dessert.’

Nisa looked at the food being put down in front of her. There was going to be no major issue with eating everything there. She was more worried about it not being enough. ‘There’s dessert?’ she asked.

‘Jelly,’ Sandra told her. ‘Green.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Yes. It’s chocolate mousse.’ Sandra turned and headed for the door.

‘That’s just as stereotyped,’ Nisa called after her, and started ripping up the bread.

Five minutes later, when she was scraping the last of the soup, a thick broth, up with the last of the bread, the man she had seen earlier walked in holding a folder and a small, plastic cup filled with something brown.

‘Aww, you play waiter too,’ Nisa said, grinning.

‘I see almost dying hasn’t killed your sense of humour,’ he said. He had an accent. American?

Nisa’s face straightened. ‘I almost
died
?!’

He put down the pot of mousse and then took a newspaper out of the folder, dropping it into her lap, which caused her sheet to shift down a couple of inches; the man seemed oblivious to the sudden display of nipples. It was a copy of the
London Evening Standard
and she checked the date. ‘It’s tomorrow already? I slept right through the day?’

‘You needed the sleep. Page three.’

She opened the paper and the article popped out at her along with a picture of the front of Gun’s Kebabs, the big front window shattered from some central impact point. Her eyes flicked over the print. ‘Gangland-style drive-by shooting? This isn’t the Lower East Side.’

‘That’s the official story. The man who came into your shop had gangland connections. Someone blew out the window and then shot him in the head. A very large calibre bullet, there wasn’t much left to identify him. The first bullet clipped you on the way through; you’re lucky to be alive.’ It was all delivered in a flat tone which gave her the distinct impression that what he was saying was all bull.

‘I don’t have a head injury. That’s not what really happened.’

‘No. The man you saw was a vampire. He attacked you. I put a forty-four Magnum round in his head while he was busy, but he got close to taking you out. Then I shot out the window and arranged the cover story, and had you transferred here.’

Nisa opened her mouth, and closed it. She was not going to say the first thing that sprang to mind because that was crazy.

‘And here is?’ she asked.

‘We’ll get to that. Hanson wants to talk to you later.’

‘Okay… You are?’

‘You can call me Kellog.’

‘Like the breakfast cereal?’

‘That has two Gs.’

‘Do you
ever
speak in anything other than a monotone?’

‘Yes,’ he replied flatly.

He was obviously waiting for her to ask the obvious question and, feeling self-conscious, she reached up to her throat.

‘The term “vampire” is used for any of several different Bugs which live off the energy of other programs. They don’t all bite necks.’