The Complex

by Michael Walters

  Crown, BAR, Crown.

  She looked up the central cylinder to see how close she was to the jackpot. NUDGE was flashing. She could just make out another crown. Three away. She pressed the central button and the crown came down once, twice. One away from the jackpot, the buttons went dim before flashing silently in a pattern she knew meant the game was over. It was the only machine working in the whole arcade. Stupid game. She kicked the base. All the lights went off as if the power had been cut.

  She went to the rear doors and looked along the pier. There was a thick bank of black cloud on the horizon. She shook the handles as hard as she could and battered the glass with her small fists.

  ‘Daddy!’ she shouted.

  ‘He left you here.’

  Gabrielle spun around. A girl’s voice. ‘Hello?’ Gabrielle said. There was no one she could see.

  ‘He’s not coming back.’

  The voice was tantalisingly out of sight. Gabrielle started to search the arcade. There was no one behind the basketball game or the shooting game – just power sockets and wires covered with thick curls of dust.

  There, by the air hockey table. A figure in the shadows. A girl. Her hair was black, matted and long, past her shoulders. She was taller than Gabrielle and very pale, though her face still wasn’t clear. She wore a plain long-sleeved knee-length black dress. Her large white hands were sticking awkwardly out of the narrow sleeves.

  Gabrielle took a step closer. She had to see the girl’s face even though her stomach was in fearful knots, and anyway, there was nowhere to run.

  ‘I know you,’ Gabrielle said.

  ‘What did you do wrong?’ the girl said.

  Gabrielle felt even more uneasy. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You did. You must have.’

  ‘I’m a good girl!’ Gabrielle shouted, the words out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  The other girl stepped towards the air hockey table. Now Gabrielle could see her face. Her head was wrapped in dirty, frayed bandages. Only her eyes and mouth were visible. ‘And I’m the bad girl?’

  There was a charge in the air. Gabrielle wasn’t afraid. ‘He’s my father.’

  ‘He’s my father,’ the girl echoed, mocking, then spat out her next words. ‘You’re a bad apple. Rotten. I can smell you from here. You’re disgusting. Like sick. Like maggots.’ The girl began to make retching sounds.

  ‘Stop,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Please.’

  ‘That’s why he’s not coming back.’

  ‘He is!’ Gabrielle felt the air around her crackle, a build-up of energy.

  ‘You’re just shit to him. He flushed you away.’

  ‘No!’

  Gabrielle clenched her fists. Before she could move, she staggered from a blow to the side of her head. Her vision blurred. She was by the shooting game. Her head throbbed. She looked up. The girl hadn’t moved.

  Another blow, this time to her ribs, sent a bolt of white pain through her chest.

  ‘He’s gone,’ the girl said.

  Gabrielle’s shin exploded next.

  ‘Gone for ever.’

  Instinct made Gabrielle roll left and the air by her face whooshed as something narrowly missed her. Gabrielle scuttled on all fours towards the pool tables near the front doors.

  Her favourite slot machine chimed again. She peeked at it. All the lights and buttons were flashing.

  There were fingers on her leg. Gabrielle screamed. The girl’s bandaged face was near hers, and there was a repulsive smell, like pus. Gabrielle put her hands out to push her away. A hand on her arm squeezed hard and Gabrielle squealed. It burnt.

  Something fell from Gabrielle’s pocket. She remembered her chess piece, the knight. She reached for it, but it wasn’t the knight. It was a bullet casing. She grabbed it. The pain in her arm ceased. The girl had fallen back and was using the air hockey table to pull herself to her feet. The girl’s bandage had a fast-growing red stain.

  ‘No!’ Gabrielle shouted. ‘I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry!’

  The girl crumpled to the floor. Gabrielle was crying. She had done something terrible. She deserved to be here. The other girl was right.

  Wiping her eyes on the back of her arm she looked around. Her favourite machine was flashing like crazy. She went to it and pressed NUDGE.

  Crown, crown, crown.

  The machine switched itself off. The arcade was silent.

  No. That wasn’t fair. Where was her jackpot? She kicked the machine with her toe, then again, a karate kick with the bottom of her foot, as hard as she could. It rocked back.

  The doors to the pier blew open in a crash of wood and broken glass. The wind howled in and she felt its cold fingers on her legs and arms. She could smell salty fresh air. She ran to the door, jumping over the shards of glass on the floor and onto the pier’s wooden boards. Black clouds were tumbling towards her from the horizon.

  On the pier, walking away from her, was a figure in a black coat.

  ‘Daddy!’ she yelled.

  The wind was against her, so he would never hear.

  She ran after him as fast as she could, a small force in the face of the approaching storm. Beneath the pier, through the slats, the water foamed and crashed. The figure was walking quickly and would soon be at the pier end. She put her head down and gave it her all, not wasting her breath on calling. Her chest was tightening, her lungs were burning, her legs began to wobble. When she looked up, she wasn’t far from the figure, who had reached the pier end. But there was another child holding his hand.

  ‘Daddy!’

  It was the other girl, she knew it. The other girl was spoiling everything. The water was sizzling beneath her as if it was being boiled away and she could see sand.

  She ran into the back of the black-coated figure and held on tight. She felt a hand in her hair.

  ‘Gabrielle.’ A female voice. ‘Sweetheart.’

  It wasn’t possible. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Don’t ask questions. Put this on.’

  Her mother pulled something from her inside pocket and placed it on Gabrielle’s head. Gabrielle could feel the gaze of the other girl but refused to look at her. Instead she took in her mother’s face. She was radiant.

  The wind had lessened but there was a louder roar coming from the sea. Gabrielle pressed herself against her mother and let her smooth the object on her hair. A fish slapped onto the pier next to them, still alive and thrashing its tail. The air was full of spray. Gabrielle looked up and saw the crest of a wave above them, heading for the cliffs, a vertical wall of glistening black sea coming at them like a high-speed train.

  ‘Take a breath,’ her mother said.

  Something clicked down over Gabrielle’s eyes.

  Then Gabrielle was hovering in grey, silent space. The pier was still vivid in her mind, the love on her mother’s face making her heart feel full. What a dream. She moved her legs and her arms, reaching out in all directions in a starfish shape. She wasn’t awake yet.

  ‘Are you okay?’ a female voice said.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘A simulator.’

  Gabrielle looked down at herself. She was wearing loose grey trousers and a white t-shirt. Her thoughts had a fuzzy quality.

  ‘I’m awake?’

  ‘Well, we are communicating. But you’re not awake. I’m working on that.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Oh, wait.’ There was a pause. ‘Is that better?’ The voice was now female. Familiar but emotionless. ‘It’s Fleur.’ A pause. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Gabrielle said irritably. She felt retrospective sympathy for her father. ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Oh. Good. That’s good.’

  Pieces of light began to move around her, blocks that stretched into pipes, pipes that connected and filled with colour and
became walls, floor and ceiling. Then, like someone had flicked a switch, she was in a plush hotel corridor.

  ‘I’ve been having some problems,’ Fleur said. ‘The headset isn’t working as it’s supposed to.’

  ‘Just take the damn thing off!’

  ‘It’s not that simple. I can’t wake you. You’re in some sort of coma.’ Fleur’s voice was emotionless. ‘I’m trying to find you an exit.’

  Two people came out of a set of doors at the end of the corridor – a man and woman. They were dressed for dinner.

  ‘There are people in here,’ Gabrielle said. ‘What do I do?’

  ‘They are part of the simulation. Bots. You have to go past them and into a room on the right.’

  ‘And then I’ll wake up?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  Gabrielle walked down the corridor towards the couple who were sitting on a chaise longue against the wall. The man’s head was on the woman’s shoulder. He looked drunk. Gabrielle was impressed. They both looked completely real.

  ‘This is amazing, Fleur.’

  ‘Keep going,’ Fleur said.

  ‘How—’

  ‘Please. Just keep going.’

  Gabrielle wondered what it was like for Fleur, watching somewhere. She jumped in the air, testing gravity. Normal. Everything felt normal. If anything, she felt a little more energised, a little calmer. It was relaxing. She felt a long way from reality.

  ‘Faster, Gabrielle.’

  ‘Why?’

  Fleur didn’t reply. Gabrielle didn’t feel any urgency. The couple didn’t move and the doors they had come out of had closed. The woman was wearing a long red dress, to her ankles, but split to just above her knee, with red, sequinned flat shoes. She had on long, red gloves to above her elbow. The man was wearing a dinner suit, but with bare feet. Now that she was next to them, she could see his eyes were covered with a bandage, like he was recovering from surgery.

  ‘Hello,’ Gabrielle said to the woman.

  The woman looked at her, her eyes flashing blue before fading to dark brown. Her face took on a very realistic look of sadness.

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ the woman said.

  ‘Oh. It’s okay. Really.’

  ‘Everyone is through there.’ The woman pointed with a red-gloved finger at the double doors.

  ‘Thank you.’ Gabrielle looked at the man more carefully. ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He does this. He’s fine.’

  Gabrielle looked at the woman’s shoes, then bent down to touch them. The sequins were jagged, and one came off as her finger brushed it.

  ‘What are you doing, dear?’ the woman said. ‘Do you like shoes?’

  Gabrielle looked up at her face, which was horsey and long. Her lips were painted red, to match her dress.

  ‘You are just so real,’ Gabrielle said, holding the sequin up for them both to look at.

  The woman yawned. Her teeth were stained red, her tongue too.

  ‘Gabrielle, please move.’ Fleur’s voice was neutral.

  The woman was looking at Gabrielle as carefully as Gabrielle was looking at her.

  ‘She sounds like she’s crying,’ the woman said, standing up and easing the man’s head gently onto the chair seat. His arm slipped off his chest. Either he was unconscious or dead. ‘You’d better go through.’

  The woman walked, elegantly, to the double doors, easing one open. Her hair was black and tangled, one of the clips stuck in a wave that had come free. She theatrically put a red-gloved finger on her lips. As Gabrielle passed, the woman put a hand on her back to guide her through the door, which closed behind her. She had time to see the steps down before it all went dark. She waited for her eyes to adjust. There was a faint murmur of voices.

  ‘Fleur?’ Gabrielle whispered as quietly as she could. There was no answer. ‘Fleur?’

  The murmur below went quiet. Her eyes were not adjusting at all, so she tried to find the doors again. She reached with her hands and took a step, then another, unsure what she was walking on. The doors weren’t there. She felt with her foot for the steps she had seen, afraid she had lost her bearings entirely and was about to fall down them. Her foot flailed around without making contact with anything. She crouched to touch the floor. There was nothing. She put her hands on her face, pressing her fingers into her cheeks, but she couldn’t see them.

  ‘Fleur!’

  The panic she had been trying to ignore arrived. If she was in a coma, this might be all there was for the rest of her life. The thought of time stretching ahead like that, and her like this, was too much. Her chest hurt, like a band was being pulled tight around it, and the pain got worse with each breath until she couldn’t breathe at all. There was an enormous pressure on her whole body.

  ‘Is she dead?’ A male voice.

  There were two figures looking down at her. She couldn’t make out their faces. It was the woman with the red gloves and her blind male friend. No. It was her parents, concerned, and she was a girl again, in bed with a fever. That wasn’t right either. Gabrielle desperately tried to bring them into focus.

  Two of the sculptures from the garden loomed over her, studying her intently.

  She pulled a breath in to scream and felt a blow across her face.

  Fleur’s voice shouted: ‘Wake up!’

  Leo: Clubhouse

  Leo was raking through the folders in the core operating system one more time. He didn’t know what he was looking for, perhaps some clue to the source of his misery. Dinner had been disastrous. It was safer where he was, away from living things. Screens didn’t talk back. Computers didn’t launch kamikaze missions against windows. Gaby’s utter disconnection astounded him. And Art was revelling in it all, a ringmaster to the chaos. Typing commands into the terminal gave him a sense of order. Here, he was in charge.

  The crystals were no longer on his mind, which felt like a harbinger of something. He missed their constant comforting presence, like background music. They had been a companion to his week. Instead, fragments of images kept coming to him – memories of his mother, who he rarely thought about these days, and of the house he grew up in before she died. He wasn’t one for melancholy, but he couldn’t shake it off.

  His fingers moved him from directory to directory. There. At last, something different, a link to a server he must have missed, although how he had missed it, he had no idea. Its root directory was full of media files, dozens of them, each with a randomised string of characters and numbers for a name. He chose one from the middle of the list.

  A video opened in the middle of his terminal screen. There was a room with a king-size bed and a woman lying on it. She was wearing a black trouser suit, but had taken her shoes off, and seemed to be sleeping. Her hair was straight and brown, with an expensive cut to it. The room was still. He speeded the video up, looking for changes. Nothing. Just a woman sleeping.

  He tried another file. Another bedroom, again a woman on a king-size bed, though he couldn’t tell if it was the same woman. The picture quality was poor. This one was wearing a green evening dress and lay on her back. Her hair was black and in a tight bob. There were instructions on a sign near the light switch, so he knew it was a hotel room. A window must have been open because a net curtain fluttered on the left of the image. Hotels didn’t have cameras in their rooms. Someone had set this up.

  It was only on opening the third file that he realised the audio was off. Grunting at his own ineptness, he clicked the volume control.

  ‘And where are you now?’ Art’s voice.

  The woman mumbled something indistinct.

  Leo tried to think how he could work out the location of the server. It wasn’t in the rack in front of him. Without grid, it had to be somewhere in the house.

  ‘Look more closely,’ Art said.

  ‘There’s nothing there.’ Ga
brielle.

  It was Gabrielle lying on a bed in a hotel room with Art. He took a deep breath in and felt his heart beating fast. He closed the file. It was too much to process. Looking at the directory list, he could see it was created in February. That was two months ago. He ordered the files by date – two in November, three in December, six in January, fifteen in February, when they suddenly stopped.

  So many hotel rooms, and right under his nose. A lump of anger, mixed with disbelief, formed in his chest. Art was filming Gabrielle in hotel rooms. Gabrielle was going to hotel rooms with Art. Whatever it was – drugs, sex, both – he wanted nothing more to do with it.

  They were ridiculing him. Art might even have put the link to the files there for him to find. At that thought, Leo stood abruptly, and the back of his legs knocked his chair over. He stood over the keyboard and put all the media files on an empty screen in the terminal rack, his fingers pounding the keys, then lifted the screen out, taking it with him to the kitchen.

  He ignored Polly, who was sitting at the kitchen table, reading. She would try to talk him down.

  ‘Leo?’

  He finally had evidence of his wife’s disdain. He sensed a way out. He wasn’t the villain. This wasn’t his doing.

  He didn’t pause at the bedroom door and went straight in, turning the light on, closing the door so Stefan wouldn’t hear.

  ‘Gabrielle,’ he said in a hard whisper.

  When she didn’t move, he went to her side of the bed. She was lying in the same position as in the videos, on her back, eyes closed. He shook her by the shoulders. She didn’t stir. He put his fingers to her cheek and moved her head. Her skin felt plasticky. He put his hand on her throat to check her pulse. She was alive, but clearly out of it.

  He would leave her a gift. He tucked the screen under the sheet, by her arm, and left her to her drugged dreams.

  In the kitchen, Polly had stood up from the table and was stretching her arms above her head. He blinked stupidly at her breasts. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He wanted to get away from the house. What was dead was dead. Outside by the pool it was darker than he was used to, the crystals invisible. He felt Polly take his hand and squeeze it. They crossed the lawn, climbed the bank and walked behind the tennis court. He was confident no one could see them. Art would be butchering the stag with whatever hellish equipment he had. That Mercedes must be like a mobile abattoir. Stefan was with Fleur.