Atlas Alone

by Emma Newman

  He’s just dumped files that could provide motive for the murder into my chip. Is he planning to frame me? That doesn’t fit either; if I were going to do that, I wouldn’t come and have a conversation with the victim. But maybe he just works differently from me.

  Unless it’s actually some sort of childish attempt to make Carl jealous and spur him to finally make a move? Again, it doesn’t ring true. Surely Travis grew out of that crap a long time before we ended up on this ship.

  I doubt that conversation had anything to do with who is shagging whom or who wants to, and everything to do with the murder. Travis can’t know that I killed Myerson. If he did, he’d be throwing me to the dogs right now, to protect himself. He was just making sure I knew the one who died was responsible for the war. And who the others were too.

  Or . . . he could have been testing me . . . wanting to see if I could keep quiet about what really happened . . . because he is the hacker behind all of this.

  I’m on my feet, a surge of adrenaline ripping through my chest, getting me ready to run with nowhere to go. It falls into place, so easily; he obviously has the right skill set, given the way he so casually hacked into that satellite to watch Earth. He must be shady; he was married to the head of one of the most powerful rival corporations to the US gov-corp and yet somehow still got a place on board . . . In the last conversation with that weirdo gamer I expressed my doubts about whether Myerson really did deserve that death and then later the very same day Travis walks in, gives me not only a confirmation but also the other two people involved and evidence . . .

  It’s too much of a coincidence. But I need to be sure. “Ada, where is Travis now and what is he doing?”

  “Travis Gabor is at the end of the corridor to the left of your cabin. He has been stationary for the past twenty-one seconds. He is in conversation with Geena Wilkinson.”

  “And her position verifies that?”

  “Yes. I verified the data before responding because I know how to do my job.”

  I swear this APA is getting more rude by the day. Still, I can’t stop myself opening the door so I can listen for their voices. I hear his low rumble easily enough, and then a woman’s laugh. Is he flirting with her? Probably. I close the door again and lie down on the bed.

  “Ada, if he stops talking to Geena, tell me right away, okay? Watch him really closely until I tell you to stop.”

  “I only have permission to report on any publicly available data.”

  “Can you tell me if he immerses?”

  “I can inform you if he changes his public profile status to ‘unavailable.’”

  “That’ll have to do. I need to go to my office.”

  Soon enough I am standing on that dark gray slate once more, the stars above me, aside from one that is still resting on the floor where it was left. I run over, grab it and say, “Come and talk to me, right now!”

  I look up at the sky, waiting. “Ada, is he still talking to Geena?”

  “Yes. She is checking her calendar. I think they are making a date.”

  “Can you . . . see that?”

  “I am simply monitoring her public profile. She is quite open about which apps she is using. She is still talking to Travis. It is speculation.”

  The stars are moving above me. “And now?”

  “I will tell you when they are no longer together.”

  He could be doing this while talking to Geena; puppeting the beast without immersion is entirely possible. I need to have a conversation, say something he has to concentrate on.

  The stars are coalescing into the same shape as before. I’m ready for it this time, folding my arms, imagining Travis behind the disguise.

  “Hello,” the beast’s voice says. “I told you you’d contact me.”

  “I need to talk to you about Carlos Moreno and Travis Gabor.”

  “If you wish. I’d much rather talk about getting you the evidence you need to persuade you that we should work together.”

  “Ada? Is he—”

  “Yes,” Ada replies, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say she sounded irritated. “Travis is still in conversation with Geena Wilkinson.”

  “Did you know that Travis Gabor knows who gave the order? And that Myerson was in on it?”

  “Yes. He’s had that information for over a month but hasn’t done anything about it. He’s a cowardly man. Happy to hack and make deals but not put himself at risk.”

  “What sort of deals?”

  “The one that got him a place on this ship, for one. Paying off your debt for another.”

  “Wait, what? He . . .”

  The beast nods. “He paid off the debt against you so you were free to join the crew. Presumably he knew the US gov-corp would never pay any money for you.”

  “For my time and services,” I say sharply. “Not for me.”

  The beast shrugs. “You are, of course, free to frame your previous slavery in any way you wish.”

  I push down a retort that would reveal far too much about how that old wound still stings. “How do you know Travis paid the debt?”

  “He and Carlos Moreno discussed it during a game they played together.”

  I try to imagine Travis and Carl chatting between shooting stuff. It doesn’t sound like the sort of conversation that would be natural in a game. “What . . . when they were waiting for another wave of mooks to kill?”

  “No. When they were building a chicken coop together in the Grow Your Farm mersive.”

  I can’t help but smile at that. Carl played that one to death about five years ago, constantly badgering me to come and play it with him. Not even the promise that I could customize the monsters in the woods was enough to tempt me. The fact that he’s played it with Travis tells me all I need to know about how Carl feels about him. He would only ask those he trusts the most to play that with him. It’s like a comfort blanket to him, the game he hides from his public profile, still too proud to admit to the wider world that he plays anything other than shooters and racing games. There’s a softer side to him, one that he rarely shares, one that he rarely permits himself to indulge, even.

  This is a complex conversation to have in real time while simultaneously flirting with someone. “You’re not Travis, are you?”

  “No. Though given the files that he has just sent to you, I can understand why you would think that.”

  “Oh for the love of . . .” It’s getting harder to hold back the anger. “Just . . .”

  “Now that you know that I am not actually Travis Gabor, would you like to discuss Carlos Moreno? Are you concerned about the investigation?”

  “Well, obviously.”

  “I can only repeat my earlier reassurance. He will not be able to find any evidence of my data manipulation. Why haven’t you opened the files Travis sent to you? I thought you wanted evidence.”

  “Travis Gabor has stopped talking to Geena Wilkinson,” Ada says in my head. “She has closed her calendar app and is walking away from him. Travis is now approaching Gabriel Moreno’s cabin. Would you like me to continue to monitor his movements?”

  “Are you scared he’s trying to trick you?” the beast says. “It’s understandable. You do have trust issues.”

  “And you’re not helping with those!” I yell at it.

  “No,” I think to Ada. “It’s fine.”

  The star beast doesn’t say anything for a moment, as if my words have actually had an impact. “Have my actions been part of the reason why you won’t work with me?”

  I laugh. “You know, for someone who is so leet, you are really fucking slow on the uptake.”

  “I shall consider this carefully.”

  The stars dissipate and return to the virtual heavens; the one in my hand remains though, so I put it down on the slate and tell Ada to make me a chair.

  I’m fairly cert
ain now that whoever it is behind the stars, it’s not Travis. Which means Travis’s most likely motivation for that weird conversation was either to trap me in an alibi or to line me up as a potential alternative suspect in case he gets fingered by an overzealous AI and Carl believes it. Either way, I’m going to listen to these comms files and see if they’re as convincing as he seems to believe they are.

  There are two files, held in a protected cache.

  “I have checked them,” Ada says preemptively. “They’re just audio files.”

  The file names are merely time stamps, matching the first day we came aboard. I play the earlier one.

  “Confirm green light for Judgment. Repeat: confirm green light for Judgment. All systems are go.” I recognize the voice. It’s Myerson’s.

  “Judgment is cleared hot, repeat, Judgment is cleared hot.” A male voice. Commander Brace’s, perhaps?

  “Acknowledged. Judgment has been served.”

  The file ends. “Ada, can you confirm that the first voice in that file was Lieutenant Commander Myerson?”

  “Confirmed.”

  “And was the second voice Commander Brace?”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Judgment” is certainly a plausible name for what they did, given the use of “Rapture” and the religious leanings of the CSA.

  I select the second file. This time, Brace speaks first, but now in a whisper.

  “Judgment is a confirmed success.”

  “We may not be on an official military vessel, Commander, but I swear, if you speak to me about classified operations on a fucking chat channel again, I will throw you in the brig,” a woman’s voice says.

  The file ends. “Ada, was that woman the captain?”

  “Confirmed.”

  Programs that can mimic voices perfectly were around decades before I was born, but there’s something about this that rings true. Is it just that I want to believe I’ve found the information I’ve been looking for? “Ada, can you call up Captain Ashby’s public profile for me? Text is fine.”

  There’s very little on it, unsurprisingly enough, but I do learn that she had a long career in the military and is proud of several campaigns in which she “defended US gov-corp assets” in a variety of foreign theaters. Most of those involved the defense of a water supply and “acquisition of new sources,” which means she was one of the people involved in securing the source of the Kootenay River, the first of many border disputes between North America and Canada before the latter was absorbed by the US gov-corp in a bloodless corporate acquisition after the civil war.

  Then I notice she has something in the “favorite quote” section: 2 Corinthians 5:10. I point at it. “Ada, what’s that?”

  “A Bible verse. In the King James Version, it is: ‘Second Corinthians 5:10: For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.’”

  I lean back, take a couple of deep breaths and try telling myself that one bloody Bible quote does not a zealot make. But actions do. I need to find a way to confirm she gave the order.

  Thinking back to all the military mersives I’ve ever watched or played in, I recall that the order a captain gives is not always one they would have chosen themselves. In war it’s different, but this was a peacetime decision, the first act of a very short war. It isn’t the officer at the head of the army who decides to move their troops to another place to strike the first blow. It’s the politicians or the royalty.

  “Ada, have any of the founders of the CSA who are on board held any political positions of power?”

  “Yes.” Knowing my personal preferences, Ada provides the information as text that appears in the air in front of me. I scan a long list of positions on various gov-corp committees and boards. All high up. Makes sense.

  Shit, do I need to kill all of these people too?

  At least I have names now, and the means to find out more about them. The thought is enough to keep the despair at bay.

  “There is a verbal contact request from Carolina Johnson,” Ada tells me.

  “Okay, connect.”

  “Hi, this is Carolina,” a bright American voice says unnecessarily. “Can I run something by you?”

  “Hi,” I reply, my English-Noropean accent sounding flat in comparison. “Go ahead.”

  “So, I was wondering how you’d feel about trying out the leet server.”

  “I’m not sure I meet all the criteria yet.”

  “Oh, they’re just guidelines, mostly to stop people thinking they can handle it when they can’t. But I have the feeling you can.”

  There is something conspiratorial in her tone, something tempting. “Let me send you over what my APA thinks,” I say and instruct Ada to send over my scores on the list of criteria I reviewed before.

  “Close enough,” Carolina says after a few moments. “You got a couple of hours free? You’d really be helping me out.”

  “Sure,” I say, knowing she is a good person to keep happy. “Where shall I meet you?”

  A notification detailing a new mersive invitation pops up. “Eat something light, make sure you’re hydrated and don’t take any stims or painkillers before you come. It’ll probably be violent. You okay with that?”

  “Yeah. See you in . . . ten minutes?”

  “Awesome!”

  The call ends and I look at the invite. No game details, just a place for Ada to find the loading room for whatever we’ll be playing. I have a moment of doubt. Shouldn’t I be keeping tabs on Carl and making sure I don’t get caught? But there’s no way I can actually do that, and besides, going off to game with someone is a perfectly legit thing for me to do. I need to act normal after all. And if Carl is watching me, for whatever reason, buggering off to play a game would seem like the most natural thing for me to do. It would even be a relief for him. I’d be acting more normally than I have in months. What better way to hide the fact I’ve killed someone in the real world than to go to kill someone imaginary?

  13

  ADA PUTS THE door to the loading room into a new wall a few meters away, to give me a chance to get my bearings before I go in. When I look down, I find I’m wearing the same clothes as I am in the real world, which jars me, ironically. “Am I going to play in my jogging gear?”

  “Your clothes will be reskinned at time-in,” Ada says.

  I take a moment to prepare myself, to fix a friendly smile in place and be the upbeat, capable woman I know Carolina will be hoping for. I open the door and walk into a room that looks like an executive office that could have been in any one of the London skyscrapers I worked in over my career. There’s no desk though, just a couple of stylish chairs that are positioned by the window to make the most of the view over the Thames. It’s in a different place than the weird apartment scene in that game, but I can’t help but recall it. An echo of the shock of discovering Myerson had actually died in that game ripples through me. I try to push it from my mind as the door opens and Carolina walks in, dressed in jog pants and T-shirt like I am.

  “Hi!” She walks toward me, her hand outstretched, and I shake it as I return her smile. “It’s so good to meet you!”

  “You too,” I say.

  “Take a seat,” she says, gesturing to the chairs, and I do so, feeling oddly like I’m about to be interviewed. “So, thank you for coming.”

  She smiles as she talks, eyes sparkling. She doesn’t look like she’s in her fifties, but then lots of people look some indefinable age these days, somewhere between thirty and sixty. She appears to be at the lower end of that, her brown hair cropped in an asymmetric bob with purple streaks that weren’t in her profile picture. She has brown eyes, full lips, and her smile is warm and friendly. But there’s something false about her too, or perhaps it’s more a tension in the way she sits. Then I
realize she is building up to asking me something. And that she’s worried about what I’ll say.

  “I’ve always been curious about leet servers,” I say. “Thanks for the invite!”

  “You never played in one back home?” When I shake my head, she looks worried. “Oh . . . Okay.”

  “So, what’s this about?” I keep my tone cheery and light.

  “There’s this tournament thing going on . . .”

  “Someone’s dropped out and you need me to take their place?”

  She nods. “It’s the semifinal and . . . well, I really don’t wanna lose my chance of winning, just because Kara Channing doesn’t know how to warm up properly.” At my puzzled expression, she adds, “My teammate. She pulled her hamstring yesterday and only just told me about it.”

  “I don’t really do team games. How many of you are there?”

  “Oh, only two per team. It’s problem solving, mostly. The solutions can be anything from finding the next letter in a sequence through swimming underwater, to getting a thing within a certain time limit. Every level is different. This is the semi, as I said, so it’s gonna be tough.” The cheeriness falters. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea . . .”

  “When I say I don’t do team games, I mean things like basketball. Puzzlers are no problem.”

  She brightens. “So, the thing with the tournament is that the levels are randomly generated by the AI, to make it fair. Everything we need to play we get in the level.”

  “Is this a multiroom-type thing, or a single space that changes or . . .”

  “Oh, the levels are set in a sandbox environment. The challenges are always in keeping with the setting. So the last one we played was set in medieval times, like, with knights and all. One of the challenges was to fight each other in full plate. That was tough. And then there was a decoding puzzle straight after, all based on heraldry. It’s fun but it’s the real deal. When you get hit, you feel it.”

  “But you don’t get hurt in the real world?”

  “No, but your brain thinks you will be. And if someone hacks your hand off in there, you see it, you feel it, just like if it was for real. The AI has extended MyPhys privileges. It will make you feel stuff far more than in a normal mersive. It gets pretty intense. I’ve had a teammate pass out on me when I was hurt in a knife fight. I dropped him from my team pretty damn quick after that. And people freeze up, freak out . . . lots of people don’t realize how intense it is until they’re in game.”