Atlas Alone

by Emma Newman

  “Did they still use cash back then?”

  “Shit no,” I say, but then I spot another plastic card on the bottom shelf. “But they did still use these,” I say, grabbing the credit card and checking my name is on it. “I just hope it works.”

  “You sure you want to take the matches?” Carolina asks and I look down at them in my palm.

  Why did I grab these? I didn’t even think about it. Was it because of that damn game?

  No. It’s because the electricity went out soon after the riots began and I don’t want to be in the dark. But it might be daytime. The temptation to ask the beast for help is difficult to resist. I put them back on the shelf and instead pick up a small book on the top shelf. A London A to Z, dog-eared and slightly water damaged, but still usable. “I’ll take this instead.”

  “Okay. You ready?”

  I nod.

  She goes back to the table, taps the notice, and the light illuminating the cupboard goes off. A green Exit sign above a door on the far side of the room is switched on. We both head toward it.

  “There might be a delay when we step through,” Carolina says. “The game may hold us in an elevator or something to make sure we time-in at exactly the same time as the other team, okay? If they’re ready, we’ll just go straight through.”

  “Understood.”

  “We need to keep calm, keep communicating.” She reaches for the door handle.

  “We need to win,” I add, and she fires a wicked grin at me as she opens the door.

  14

  WE MUST HAVE taken longer than the other team; the door opens straight out onto the street we selected on the map. It’s sunny and hot, which fits with my memory of the time. As one of our neighbors put it back then: the English never riot in winter. The heat haze rising from the tarmac makes the hire place across the road shimmer.

  “Wish I picked the water,” Carolina mutters. “But at least we have pockets.”

  I look down to see I’m wearing dark gray army combat trousers covered in pockets, and a black vest top. My boots are reassuringly stout with chunky gripped soles and it feels like I’m wearing thick socks under them. I’ll be hot but hopefully I won’t get blisters. We both pat our own combats down, locating the items we chose to bring in with us. “What’s this?” I say, pulling out a rogue piece of paper, only to see Carolina doing the same.

  “This is what we need to decode,” she says as we both look at the strings of numbers. “I’ll handle this; you check out the transportation.”

  “Can you ride motorbikes?”

  “In other games,” she says, “but I don’t know what they’re like in this setting.”

  “We’re in the same boat, then,” I say, keeping my tone light. What I don’t tell her is that I’ve ridden a motorbike from this period, one that I stole, and that I was bloody good at both the riding and the stealing part. I don’t want to go into details and I would rather exceed her expectations than build them up.

  She follows me across the road to the hire place, a small building with an uninspiring frontage and a picture of a motorbike next to a sign that reads “Green Park Hire.” It looks better kept than when I came here in the real world all those years ago. I glance at the side gate’s electronic lock and it looks intact. No matter. I intend to pay for the use of a bike this time.

  There’s a reception-cum-waiting room with a couple of plastic chairs, one of which Carolina sits down on, pulling out her notepad and pen to start working on the code right away. I go over to the young man behind the desk and ten minutes later he calls me out the back to show me round the bike. I can’t stop grinning when I climb on and get a feel for the revs. I miss the throaty, raw power of the combustion engine.

  I go back inside to collect Carolina once the hire assistant is happy I know my way round the bike.

  She looks up at me, frowning. “I’ve cracked the cipher but the answer makes no sense.”

  Checking that the assistant is happily distracted with his tablet, I sit next to her, resting the two helmets I’ve also hired on the floor next to me. “What does it say?”

  She reads aloud from her notepad in a hushed voice. “‘Phyllis would say that in the fourth edition of two thousand and one, the street is like a French garden, first of the east, the second house from the left, right at the top.’ It doesn’t mean anything to me, even though I’m sure I’ve decoded it right. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have got any words at all.”

  “It’s like a cryptic crossword,” I say. “My dad used to do those. This is a message to give us a location, right? So second house from the left may mean exactly that, with the rest of it telling us which street that house would be on.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Phyllis is a weird name . . . it rings a bell though. Can’t put my finger on it right now. Fourth edition . . . maybe that could be a book?”

  “A map book!” Carolina blurts out, excited.

  “The London A to Z! Phyllis Pearson published the first one in the 1930s. Shit, I knew it was familiar! The first documersive I made was about the history of mapping London and there was a whole section about her!” I open the larger pocket halfway down my right leg to fish out the small A to Z I tucked in there, wondering if the game ties the first code to one of the starter items picked; otherwise it’s one hell of a coincidence.

  Opening the front cover, I spot “Edition 4 2001” in tiny print at the bottom right-hand corner of the first page. “This is the fourth edition, published in 2001!” I have to fight to keep my voice from squeaking with excitement.

  “Oh my God!” Carolina yelps. “Okay, okay, okay, so . . . ‘the street is like a French garden’ and ‘first of the east’ are the only other bits of the message.”

  “Maybe there’s a garden named after somewhere in France . . . or a garden square . . . Or a road called French Garden or . . .” I drift off as I spot the computer on the assistant’s desk. I rush over to him. “Excuse me. Would it be possible to use your Internet? Our . . . phones are borked.”

  “If you don’t mind typing,” he says, gesturing at the grimy keyboard. “The boss is too stingy to get one of those fancy projector keyboards. Not that it would work with this ancient piece of shit.”

  He moves aside and I look at the screen, thrown by how alien the interface looks. “Errr, how do I call up the Internet? It’s been a long time since I’ve used one of these.”

  Grabbing the mouse—a mouse! JeeMuh!—he clicks a couple of times and a browser appears. “What’re you looking for?”

  “A street called French Garden in London?”

  He types and the sound of his fingers striking the keys throws me back to my grandfather’s study and that old machine he still had to physically type his thoughts into. The sound of my grandmother playing the piano in the next room, the smell of a roast dinner cooking—actually cooking for hours—making my tiny stomach rumble.

  “There you go. Looks like it’s a fruit and veg importer at Covent Garden. Want me to write down the address?”

  I frown at the Web site on the screen. That doesn’t look like a good location for a safe house. “I don’t think that’s it. Can you put the browser back on?”

  He quirks an eyebrow at me and I feel like a crappy time traveler failing to embrace the temporal lingo. I watch what he does more carefully and then ask if I can do the next search myself. He shrugs and gets out of the chair. I type in “French garden” and look at the results.

  “First of the east” could also mean East 1, or rather E1, the postal code area critical for navigating the index of an A to Z. I go back, trying “French garden E1,” and a result comes back for a “French Place,” but it doesn’t feel right. Why specify that particular edition of the London A to Z?

  Abandoning the screen, I look back at the small map book. I look for a French Garden but only find French Place, E1.

  “Oh,
hang about, are you after that posh new restaurant that opened?” the young man says. “Le Jardin? Isn’t that French for ‘garden’? Maybe you got your wires crossed.”

  I flick through the index and there’s no Jardin Street but there is a Jardine Road, E1. “Yes!” I jump to my feet. “Thanks!” I say to him and he beams.

  Carolina is on her feet too. “You got it?”

  “It says the street is like a French garden. It’s the word for ‘garden’ in French but with an e on the end! In E1—first of the east. And look at it. Out of the way, by the river . . . must be flats, given it said ‘right at the top.’ Let’s go!”

  “Are you sure? That’s a hell of a leap.”

  I give her one of the helmets I hired. “It feels right to me.” And it does. I don’t know why. “Ready to go?”

  We go outside and she hesitates at the sight of the bike. “I forgot what old-fashioned bikes are like.”

  “I got this one so you can sit behind me. My helmet has satnav built in. We’ll be fine.”

  She’s staring at the traffic and when she sees another biker weaving their way around the cars, she frowns. “Not as much protection with a bike. Why don’t we hire a car?”

  I put on my helmet, wait for it to adjust itself, realize it won’t and then buckle up the strap. “This will be faster. Trust me.”

  I straddle the bike and press the button to sync it with the helmet. JeeMuh, I’d forgotten just how tedious life was before APAs. Reluctantly, she puts on her helmet and then sits behind me. There’s a little beep as her helmet syncs with mine and the comms channel opens. “Ready?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but don’t go—”

  I open the throttle and zip out into a small gap between two cars, earning a beep of the horn for my trouble. I laugh and accelerate, feeling her grip on my hips tighten. I can’t go above thirty miles an hour here anyway, though that does feel faster on the back of a bike than I recall. Having bare arms and no protective clothing does make me extra cautious, but I’m not willing to lose the first challenge because I’m scared of a little road rash that won’t be there when I jack out.

  Weaving in and out of the traffic, swearing at pedestrians—it’s like being home again. Not that I ever rode a bike like this legally. It just feels so good, so real, with the added piquancy of racing other people to our goal. I can’t help but grin to myself as I ride, occasionally laughing when Carolina squeaks and tightens her grip when we take corners faster than she likes. The way to our destination is given by a generic female voice through the speakers built into my helmet, an occasional arrow projected onto the visor to guide me through tricky junctions. As much as I want to break the speed limit and literally cut corners, I keep within the rules of the road. The last thing I want is to be pulled over by some police officer.

  We get there in just under twenty minutes and I pull up at the end of the street. There are several large apartment blocks, the sort that would be cheap and pretty undesirable in any other location. Here, still close enough to the center of London to command insane prices, they are obviously considered high-end, judging by the cars parked outside them. I take a moment to appreciate how old-fashioned the hybrids among them look and turn off the engine. “There’s a chance they beat us here; we should park and go in carefully.”

  Carolina nods, removing her helmet to reveal hair dampened by sweat. I park the bike in a free space in the next road along, just to be on the safe side, and then we both jog back to Jardine Road, find the second block from the left and go to the door. “The message said ‘house,’ not ‘apartment block,’” Carolina says as we scan the list of properties next to their respective door buzzers.

  “We’ll know if we’re wrong soon enough,” I say and point to the top of the list. “Look, it’s a penthouse at the top. And the communal door hasn’t been shut properly.” I push it open tentatively, noticing a small stone roll from the doorframe, which prevented its full closure. “We can go straight up there and look. I don’t think the other team would have made it so easy for us to check it out.”

  “Or they could be waiting inside for us.” I raise an eyebrow at her. She laughs at herself. “Okay, come on, then.”

  The entrance lobby is plain and functional, no concierge desk, just a dozen large postal boxes for parcel deliveries and a fake plant in the corner. It smells of floor polish and I can hear the low whirring of the drone working its way down the corridor even before I see it. Stairs run up on the right-hand side and there’s a sign with an arrow pointing toward an elevator. This building is only four stories high though, so I point to the stairs as I ensure the door clicks shut behind us.

  We take the steps two at a time, our footfalls cushioned by the noise-suppressing vinyl that covers them. There are two apartments per floor, all the doors are closed, nothing on the landings outside of them. There’s no noise at all, no music, no shouting, no nosy neighbors either, thankfully. On the top floor there is only one door, and on the door handle there is a smear of blood.

  We both stop at the sight of it. “The briefing said she was injured,” Carolina whispers, and I nod.

  I push the handle down with just the tip of my finger, right on the edge, so I don’t leave a mark in the blood. The door opens. I wasn’t expecting that. Pushing it open slowly, I see a drop of blood on the cream carpet just inside the hallway, then another farther on. There’s a narrow console table, which looks like it’s made of real oak, with a vase of fake lilies set on top. The walls are painted cream and it’s flooded with sunlight from a tall, narrow window at the far end of the hallway that looks like it runs almost the width of the building. Paintings of flowers, all in the same bland, creamy palette, fill the expanse of wall between three doors off on the left and two off on the right.

  The door into the building was left open; this one into the penthouse was unlocked . . . It seems far too easy. Which means it’s probably a trap. I step inside and then stand on tiptoes, the hairs on the back of my neck rising as some part of my brain alerts me to something just below my conscious awareness. I move my head slowly from side to side, changing the angle, enabling me to spot what looks like a thin line of sunlight stretched across the hallway at the height of my neck.

  I can’t help but grin. All those years of playing dungeon-crawling mersives have paid off, but instead of a trip wire, this is a monofilament that used to feature in the news feeds with gory tales of people almost being decapitated by gangs using them to steal motorbikes. I reach back to hold up a hand to Carolina as I check for others. There seems to be only one. Keeping my eye fixed on the place where it joins to the doorframe of a room on my right, I carefully take a couple of steps farther in, rest my hand on the frame below the wire and slowly run my fingertips upward until I feel a small plastic disk. I prize it off the frame, leaning back as I do so, ready for it to zip across the hall as the wire is sucked back in to wind around the internal spool before hitting the opposite doorframe with a tiny tapping sound, remaining held against the other disk still stuck in place.

  “Whoa,” Carolina whispers. “Good spot!”

  The blood droplets trail down the right-hand side of the hall and appear to go into a room at the far end on the right. I move to the first door on the left, refusing to let the blood trick me into heading straight for the most obvious room. The door is open and leads into a huge kitchen, a product of the days before domestic food printers really took off. There’s a highly polished granite work top, more cupboards than anyone could ever possibly need and a large breakfast bar with a used glass and a dirty plate and cutlery for one still resting on it. There is a large window letting in loads of light, with thin voile drapes drawn shut to blur out the view of the apartment block across the road.

  There’s no injured agent though.

  “What happens if she is already dead?” I whisper to Carolina.

  “She’s a critical NPC,” she whispers back, “so she’ll either
re-gen after a time penalty—say, ten minutes or so—or another NPC will arrive here and get the information to us a different way. Whichever maintains in-game realism the best.”

  “She won’t just leave the info in a note?”

  Carolina shakes her head. “It’s part of the reward of getting to her first, and for the other team the time delay is the penalty for being too slow. Let’s keep looking.”

  It seems far too linear to me, and hardly good game design, but then I remember that this is designed to pit one team against another first, and be a good game second. I still think it could be better though. “What if one of us is killed by a trap?”

  “You get pushed out to the loading room and have to wait ten minutes before you can come back in.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Ten minutes can make all the difference,” she replies. “Trust me.”

  We check a dining room and what looks like a guest bedroom before crossing the hallway to the first door on the right, Carolina also ignoring the obvious blood trail. The doorway opens into a huge living room that overlooks the Thames, with a gaming corner, complete with vintage VR headset and safety area zoned off from the rest of the room, a huge screen on the far wall and a reading nook filled with books and an old-fashioned high-backed leather chair. A woman with cropped black hair and dark brown skin is sunk low in it, dressed in a sports bra and combats similar to the ones we’re wearing. What I assume is her T-shirt is pressed against her side, the gray fabric beneath her hand soaked with blood. She stares at us silently.

  “We got the message, and we decoded it,” Carolina says, stepping forward. “We need to know the dead drop location and where you’ve hidden the defector.”

  “I need to know you’re legit,” she croaks. “I need to know if the boss sent you. Tell me what was on his desk and I’ll tell you what you need to know.”