Atlas Alone

by Emma Newman

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The command crew. Look . . . I always wanted to talk my cases through with you, but I didn’t dare risk it. It’s different here and I’ve only ever had Tia to bounce stuff off. Want to see what I do? You’ll have to sign an NDA, just a standard ‘I won’t tell anyone anything’ sort of thing, with a clause that will give Tia permission to block your APA while we’re in the room.”

  “If it’s not an official case, is the NDA just between us?” He nods. I can understand why he’s being cautious. I’ve always wondered how he deals with death and liars, and I can see how much he wants me to go with him to watch his process. He wants me to see him at his best after seeing him at his worst so much of late. “Okay. As long as I’m not going to get into trouble.”

  “It’s my private server space. And I trust you not to tell anyone or mention it in anything that can be found by someone else, but the NDA will protect you and me if this turns out to be really serious. If anyone goes digging in your files, all it will show is that you left this loading room and went to a private session in my space. Not what we’re doing there.”

  “Great, so they’ll think we were doing pr0n or something.”

  He smirks. “Since when would what people think bother you?”

  “Fair. Okay, yeah, I’ll come and see what you do. But one thing before we go; do you want me to just look quietly impressed, or do you want the whole fluttering-eyelashes, breathless-admiration thing?”

  His stern glare is filled with good humor. “You just can’t let a guy feel good about himself for five minutes?”

  “Oh, I probably could, but I reckon you can inflate your own ego all by yourself.” I prod him in the stomach. “I’m joking,” I add. “You know I only exist to make you look better.”

  He chuckles, shaking his head, and then opens the door.

  We walk into what looks like a cabin on this ship, given that it’s made of the same creamy white plastic, but twice the size of mine. The bed has been slept in, and there is a pile of clothes on the floor next to it, along with a pair of smart black boots. “I got a call this morning, early,” Carl says. “One of the command crew died in the night and they wanted me to check out the cause of death. Whenever there is even the tiniest bit of doubt about a death, we—” He stops himself. “I mean, the usual procedure is to send in a cam drone crew to photograph the scene without touching anything. Then Tia mocks it up into a 3-D render so I can look around.”

  “But isn’t the AI more qualified to look into that? I can understand if they want a human doctor to eyeball the results but . . .”

  “We can get data from MyPhys; that tells us a lot. Then there’s a pathologist, who can tell us more. They’re assisted by drones and AI, but they run the show. It’s a bit different here on the ship. There is a doctor who is also a qualified pathologist, and there’s a suitable lab. But they haven’t sent the body to hir yet. They’re not sure if they have to. That’s why they asked me to review the case.”

  “Because you know what foul play looks like?”

  “Yeah. And there is something weird about this death.”

  I follow him farther into the room, thinking of all the murder mystery mersives I’ve played in, aware that what I used to do for fun was the focus of his entire working life. “So if this was a game, I’d be looking for . . . signs of struggle. Evidence of someone else being here . . . but all of that would be after I knew how he died. Was he attacked?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Carl says, heading over to the bed. “He had a heart attack when he was lying here.”

  “And they’re worried that . . . what, he was scared to death? Poisoned?”

  “No. He was in his late thirties, super healthy, and playing a game at the time,” he says. “Full immersion, some spy thriller that he hadn’t played before, but he’d played similar titles and the MyPhys data shows he was pretty calm throughout. Where it gets weird is that the data shows that when he was playing there were no stress factors showing up at all; then he had a heart attack out of nowhere. And more than that, MyPhys didn’t deploy the usual fail-safes. He wasn’t pulled out of the game, for starters. The medical team wasn’t informed of an emergency and MyPhys didn’t do anything to try to stop the attack. I mean, ninety-five percent of cardiacs are detected before there are even any noticeable symptoms, and MyPhys always intervenes directly before it becomes life-threatening. The last time someone who was chipped died of a cardiac arrest was when those bootlegged snuff mersives were going round, decades ago. And that was not what he was playing.”

  A creeping sense of dread fills my gut, but I don’t show it. Like all those times in the Machine, I keep my own feelings as far away from anything I might show in my expressions or in my body as I can. I imagine my face as a mask in front of a mask, totally disconnected from anything real I might feel. “Weird,” I say. “So, who was this guy? Did he have any enemies who might know how to dick with MyPhys settings?”

  “He was an engineer, pretty high up, answered directly to the chief engineer. Tia, throw a pic of him on the wall, will you?”

  I ready myself, even as I am filled with doubts that it could possibly have anything to do with—

  The face of the man I killed in the game last night fills the blank wall opposite us. Oh JeeMuh, he’s the murder victim! I lock my expression down into one of vague interest, while beneath it confusion and panic bubble up within me. There’s no way what I did in the game could have anything to do with this, surely?

  I can’t show any of this; I can’t let Carl get even a sniff of these feelings. My face is a mask, in front of a mask. My face is a mask, in front—

  “Lieutenant Commander Joseph Myerson,” Carl says, as I silently recite my private mantra. “Well liked, excellent at his job, no known enemies. Of course, I haven’t had a chance to trawl through all of his files yet, and I’d be surprised if they let me, but as far as I can tell, someone hacked his chip and switched off the MyPhys fail-safes so that whatever happened to him in the game had a real-world impact on his heart.”

  “Is that even possible?” I don’t have to fake my disbelief.

  “Lots of people have tried it,” he says, coming over to stand next to me as I stare at the display. “But they’ve never done it well enough to escape an AI’s attention.”

  “That you know of,” I say, looking at him so I can push that man’s face out of my mind. “They may have been so good that no one ever found out.”

  He gives me a doubtful look. “No. I don’t think so. An anomaly like this would always be escalated up to people like me. I checked with Tia. No cases match this profile.”

  “But is the entire Internet with us on the ship?”

  “The US, European and Noropean MoJ case files are. Don’t ask me how they got hold of anything outside US jurisdiction. The US used to collaborate with both Europe and Norope, but they clearly hacked the fuck out of their servers before they left. Trust me—this is nothing like anything I’ve seen before.”

  “So . . . how do you approach something like this, if it’s not a known MO? They do still say ‘MO,’ don’t they?”

  “Yeah, we still use that, but mostly when we want to sound like we’re as cool as the detectives in the mersives.” He grins. “So, there are a few logical next steps. One is to take a look at his chip and all of the traffic to and from it. I’ve already isolated all of the data and have a copy saved in my private space, just in case whoever did this still has a back door. We might be able to find some trace of the hack—if it was one—and use that to find out who was behind it. It might also reveal that no hack took place at all, and that it was a malfunction. I don’t think that will be the case, but this is the stage where it’s important to keep an open mind.”

  “There are too many fail-safes,” I say. “Isn’t MyPhys automatically tied into the ship’s system? Like a deadman’s handle sort of thi
ng—if the chip stops reporting data or starts doing weird stuff, it trips a notification or something?”

  He nods. “Yeah, but only if there’s a break in the data, or a bizarre change. If there’s no change, nothing gets flagged up, and that’s what we have here. It didn’t change—didn’t do anything at all—even when he was dying of a coronary.”

  “What about the game?” I ask. It’s not just to give the impression of being engaged and curious—Christ knows I am both of those—I need to know whether I have to get a confession straight right now. No, what am I thinking? I was playing a game; I wasn’t trying to murder someone! I only would have if it had been one of the bastards who—

  Oh shit. He was one of the people involved! That must be why he was in the game—why he was the one person I didn’t recognize—because that fucking coder was giving me more than just catharsis.

  He was giving me the perfect way to murder someone.

  I go to the dead man’s desk to cover the fact that I have probably given away some sort of tiny clue about being freaked-out about something. I must not underestimate Carl. He was one of the best.

  “Yeah, the game is the other angle I’m already investigating. I’ve requested access to the relevant files on the server.”

  “Was he playing with anyone else, or was it a solo game?”

  “Solo. At least, that’s what the initial report said, but I’ll be digging deeper than that. I had a case, a couple of years ago, where a bloke was being blackmailed through a game. He thought he was playing alone, confessed some dodgy shit to what he thought was an NPC, but she was actually a hacker who’d compromised the gaming server. Bloody clever. She used the game to make the demands and collect the money. Nothing was flagged up in the system because it all looked like in-game purchases.”

  I think back to the conversation I had with that man, how strange it had sounded. Now I think about it, he sounded like a player. He thought I was an NPC. JeeMuh, Carl knows exactly what to look for! I’m so fucked.

  “Carl,” I begin, trying to work out whether to confess the murder first, or how I fell into the trap, when he holds up a hand.

  “Two secs, Dee, sorry.”

  His eyes glaze over as he attends to something I cannot see. I turn back to face the desk, keeping myself as calm as I would during a test in the hot-housing center, desperate to hide any responses they would deem unsuitable so I could avoid being put back into the Machine.

  A movement draws my attention. He has swiped something onto the wall. The bedroom from the game is displayed there, the victim standing next to the death machine thing, in his spy mersive costume. The image is currently frozen, the cam angle to his right, the view of London clear in the background. This has been re-created from the game I was playing? JeeMuh, has the whole thing been dug up?

  I need to tell Carl. He’ll listen. He’ll understand I didn’t mean to do it. He’s my best friend, my only friend! He won’t let me down.

  “Carl—”

  “I need to watch this, but if you want to leave, that’s totally fine. I don’t know what’s going to be in it, but it’s from the last two minutes of his life so it could be pretty nasty.”

  I should tell him, but the words just aren’t there. Instead, there’s the sure knowledge that even Carl will let me down, when I most need him. Every other person who ever had the chance betrayed me. Why should he be any different? I’ve never truly tested this friendship, and I can’t do it now with something this big, this dangerous. He didn’t leave me behind on Earth, but he didn’t know they were going to nuke it either. He brought me with him because I’ve always propped him up and he couldn’t bear the thought of me not being there for him. I have never needed him, and I can’t let myself see if he will be there for me when I do, not when it’s for something like this.

  Should I run away now? No. I need to know how bad it is. And I need to be here to defend myself, in those first moments when he knows it was me.

  “No shame in leaving,” Carl adds, thinking my hesitation is all about pride.

  “I’ll be okay. I’ve seen millions of people die in games.”

  The serious look lingers on his face. “Yeah, not real people though. But okay, you’re a grown-up. Play it, Tia.”

  “Come over here, then,” the dead man says on the wall. Fuck! That was just after he tried to shoot me!

  My face is a mask, in front of mask. My face is a—

  Someone wearing a tux walks into the right-hand side of the shot, and even though it’s a woman, it doesn’t look anything like me. I swallow, not letting myself sag with relief, not even letting myself breathe differently as I realize that this render must have been re-created from the data served to his chip, not mine. This is the game he was playing in, in which he thought I was an NPC. I didn’t look like me to him, then? Everything else looks exactly as I remember it.

  “I need to know you’re safe,” he says, and we watch the conversation play out exactly as it went. It’s like I was just skinned and voiced differently in his version of the game. Is there a chance I will actually get away with this?

  “Pfft, spy games,” I say derisively when I watch the badge being shown and his satisfaction that he was safe to talk. “They’ve never really lit my candle.”

  “Dee . . .” Carl says, shushing me in as many words.

  We both watch in silence as the conversation ends with my decision to kill him. In this version the hand—my hand—actually changes, becoming metallic at first; then the fingers sharpen and it morphs into a blade. The same grab of his shoulder to spin him round, the same driving the hand-blade thing up under his ribs.

  “Shit,” Carl mutters. “That’s brutal.”

  “We’ve done worse. Remember that game with the vampires and that demon thing with all the mouths?”

  His nose wrinkles as he recalls it. “Shit, yeah, that was grim. But that was just a game. We’re watching a man being murdered. For real.”

  I fall silent. It’s more than that for me. I’m watching myself commit a murder, while I’m standing next to one of Norope’s top criminal investigators. I’m watching that and hiding every single flicker of shock and excitement and horror I feel, using techniques forced upon me by the hot-housers, whom I hated more than anything else in this world. Those fucks who destroyed my life and made it into something they could package and sell for profit might well have given me everything I need to get away with murder. If I wasn’t hiding my nausea behind these neutral expressions I’m fixing on my face, I’d probably be laughing at the bitter irony of it all.

  The game footage stops a few seconds later, presumably when his heart stops in the real world. Carl swipes it away from the wall, deep in thought.

  “So . . . where do you go from here?” I ask.

  “The NPC there, that’s the one to focus on. Tia, how many people were playing full-immersion games at the same time as Joseph Myerson?”

  A woman I hadn’t noticed is standing in the corner. She’s got the generically attractive face of a female avatar, is wearing a three-piece pinstripe suit and has legs that go on forever. “Three thousand four hundred and fifty people were fully immersed during the time frame specified.”

  “I was one of them,” I say. He’s going to see my name on that list. If I don’t volunteer that information now, he’ll be suspicious.

  He frowns at me. “You don’t know what the time frame is, Dee.”

  “It was last night, right? I was under for, like . . . hours. Came up in the middle of the bloody night. Just got too caught up in stuff, you know?”

  “You’re not a suspect,” he says, like I am being ridiculous. “If you were a suspect, you wouldn’t be here with me now. I’ve already eliminated you.”

  “Oh yeah, I was just . . .” I was just nearly fucking up, that’s what I was doing. “Of course. You know me.”

  He nods. “That and the f
act you were asleep when he died and your name isn’t on this list. You might have been immersed a lot of last night, but not when this happened.” He smiles. “Tia would have highlighted your name if it was on here. But I’ll double-check if you’re worried. Tia? Was Dee immersed when Myerson died?”

  “No. Dee was in REM sleep during the time of death.”

  “I was dreaming? How the fuck does she know that?”

  “I’ve got a high-level clearance for the case. She’s just pulled your MyPhys data to see what your brain was doing. Chill, Dee. It’s all fine.”

  I laugh. At myself. At the fact that this is really not fine. “So, did people freak out around you a lot before?”

  He nods, relaxed. “Perfectly innocent people would blush, look away from me, develop twitches, all sorts of things when they realized who I was and why I was there. And then the actual murderers would be nonchalant as fuck. Not always, but yeah, normal, innocent people often got flustered.”

  “Well, lucky I was dreaming at the time. Now we don’t have to worry about it. So . . . do you have to check out what all those people were playing?”

  “Tia and I will eliminate people pretty damn quick. It’s not a very interesting process though, so there’s no point in you sticking around. I reckon I’ll have a list of suspects in about half an hour, then the perp in custody by lunchtime. Can we do Mars after that?”

  I fold my arms. “Are you yanking my chain?”

  His surprise seems genuine enough. “What? I’m serious. Ninety-eight . . . actually, Tia, was it ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of my cases that were solved in less than twenty-four hours?”

  “Ninety-eight point four percent.”

  He spreads his hands as if to say, “See? I really am that good.”