Experiment With Destiny

by Carr, Stephen

A stream of blue fire raged around his body…crackling and hissing with a terrifying energy. He screamed as his limbs twisted and jolted in pain beyond belief. He smelled burning fat and stared in horror as the flesh of his arms blistered and charred. He wanted to reach up and end the agony by ripping off his VR Mask…stop the game…too…much…pain…

  “I am immortal!” he screamed with the last breath of his sizzling lungs.

  The blue blaze expired. Fergus slumped to the ground…oblivious to the hidden eyes that observed him from within the fortress.

  *

  XI

  FERGUS was on the top deck of an antiquated bus as it rumbled and rattled through the streets of Cardiff. It was raining. It always rained but it was more apparent from the smudged outlook of public transport than through the polished windscreen of his BMW Roadster. With his car temporarily off the road he could have summoned a cab, or even caught a Monorail, but he’d decided to catch the bus out of a sense of adventure that he now realised had been somewhat misguided. Glimpsing life as one of the common people was all very noble but the public transport experience had proved a deeply unpleasant one. Life here was as grey as the clouds that seemed to hang forever in the cold skies above their heads. This was not adventure. He longed for the warm, comfortable isolation of his car.

  The bus halted. He tutted to himself. It had only been a minute since it pulled away from the last stop. He heard the doors hiss open below and felt the rush of cold air rush beneath his seat. Fergus wiped the condensation from his window and peered down. There was a line of damp, dreary people waiting to board, their faces long and dull. One of them looked like his mother…or rather, as his mother would look if she didn’t shop exclusively in designer outlets. His mother would never catch a bus. She rarely caught the Monorail and, even then, insisted on first class.

  He stared long and hard at the woman and saw the age lining her face like a badly drawn monochrome portrait. Is that what his mother looked like? What did she look like? He tried to visualise her face but his memory only offered up disjointed shards. He couldn’t picture her clearly. He couldn’t remember. He tried to focus on situations and events featuring his mother, but the threads tangled their way into places he’d rather avoid…memories he’d prefer to leave buried. Instead, he tried to picture his father.

  His father…a director with the board of the Community Monorail Shuttle network…a man of note, a man of substance, a man of decisions, a man of enterprise. But his father was a stranger, rarely glimpsed. Fleeting visits to the family home, interview clips on the evening news, snapshots in the local newspaper. What did he look like, stripped of such contexts? Fergus could not remember. Who were his parents? Parents make you what you are…but who are they?

  Was it like this for his peers? It wasn’t something they discussed between lectures in the campus restaurant or student bar. What reaction would he prompt with the question: “Can you remember what your parents look like?” What response would he draw by asking his associates to describe their forebears? Did it even matter? So long as they kept the allowance rolling in, paid the course fees and ensured the material comforts, who really cared?

  The bus finally pulled away, the whine of its electric motor irritating his teeth. The journey was becoming increasingly irksome and Fergus wished he’d taken a cab. He glanced around to see a ticket inspector emerging from the stairwell, his mud brown uniform glittering with officious badges. Fergus groaned and began sifting the paper debris at his feet for the ticket he’d discarded no sooner than he sat down. What was the point? The fare was so cheap, who would bother to try and defraud the system?

  “Tickets please,” boomed the voice in his ear.

  “It’s one of these down…” Fergus stared up in horror. “…here…”

  Beneath the peaked cap, the inspector had no face. His head was a single, giant eyeball glaring down in accusation.

  *

  Fergus screamed. The noise, and the pain in his chest, awoke him. For an instant he was adrift in the insipid blue-green liquid of his VR Tank. His mask was off and he was glancing around in panic. Hundreds of disembodied eyes clung like barnacles to the reinforced glass of the tank, watching him float in silent panic in the soft cool chemical mix. Then, there was a blinding light, like those he remembered burning on the edge of daylight behind the barbed fence.

  Fergus awoke inside the fortress.

  He was strapped to a cold steel slab. He was naked but for a pair of leather briefs that clutched his groin a little too closely for comfort. The dark, strange room smelled of damp. Chains clinked in the stale draught that brushed his face. It was like a medieval dungeon, he thought, though one constructed largely of steel and plastic. It was a painstaking forgery, even down to the roughly hewn stone walls and the blood and excrement smeared floor slabs. Perhaps, he considered with an involuntary shudder, those were not imitations.

  At first he assumed he was alone. He listened intently for other sounds beyond his prison, for signs of life within the fortress. All he could hear was the rattle of chains, the drip of water and breathing…his…and someone else’s. He wasn’t alone. There was another presence among the shadows. A burden of fear began to descend upon his prone body. It was unlike any other fear he’d experienced within the confines of his artificial reality conjurer. He suddenly found the urge to reach up and rip away the mask, to end the nightmare. His arms refused to budge within the straps that held them.

  “It’s only in my head!” he snapped at himself. “It’s just imaginary.” His voice reverberated through the dismal chamber. “I don’t want to quit yet. Not yet. This is the best it’s been! The most real…” In the corner of his eye he caught the essence of a shadow detach itself from the darkness and slink across the fetid flagstones. It appeared tall and shapeless. It was not so much dark as the complete absence of light…as though it was a living, moving doorway into another terrifying world. Now, more than ever, Fergus wanted to free his arms.

  He watched it approach, his scrambled brain trying to remember if this creature had been described in the programme’s user guide. He’d skim-read the booklet in the store before paying. It was hard to recall…he might easily have missed any reference. Even if he’d read about this apparition would he be able to summon the detail now he was inside the game? The important thing was to quickly establish if it’s classified a friend or foe? Suddenly, in the place he might have expected its head to be, two burning red embers appeared, glowing with unbound malevolence. Fergus knew the answer instantly.

  “Who are you?” he shouted, the terror in his voice was real. The eyes, if that’s what they were, burned cruelly within the outline of void. The stale draught was becoming a chill wind. Fergus was aware of the cold brushing against his vulnerable and exposed goose-pimpled flesh.

  “I am.”

  The words roared like a jet engine, yet they echoed with hollowness as though they ushered from another distant world. Fergus remembered the cave, the fire and the song. He fought the panic in his throat.

  “I’m not afraid of you!” he lied defiantly. “You’re just part of the programme. I can stop this if I really want to. I can make you go away!” His voice lacked conviction.

  There was a sound like a deep, bellied laugh, only much more horrible and sinister. It reminded him of the scary movies he used to watch on the Horror Channel late at night when his mother and father were out partying: images of hooded figures, grey flesh and razor fingers. Was this all part of the game or another flashback, an intrusion? He guessed the Dream Weaver would be really kicking in around now.

  “I am,” the voice repeated. The darkness encroached. “You…” the shadow stretched toward him, “…are part of the programme.” He felt the fear flooding through him and tried to visualise pulling the VR mask from his face. Nothing happened. His numb arms remained jammed against the cold steel. “You have already lost your hold on reality. Your mind is no longer your own.” There were other sounds pinned behind that rushing voice: children
laughing, water dripping, the wind howling. “You have journeyed to the edge of sanity and stared into the abyss of madness once too often. You have tested the boundaries too many times. The borders have blurred and you have now entered a forbidden realm. You…are…mine!”

  The laughing returned, no longer deep but rasping, screeching and clawing. Fergus choked for breath as the air became a stench of death. He felt the slab beneath him tremble and lift. A violent gust of wind whipped his face and he was suddenly hurtling toward the pages of an open book. Letters peeled away from the yellow, aged paper and threw themselves at him like dead leaves in an autumn gale. There were thousands of them and they were suffocating him.

  “No!” he shouted. “No!”

  *

  Fergus was adrift on an ocean of light. He watched the universe unfold, the vastness filling him with dread. He saw shapes and elements flash before him, like the riders of apocalypse on their charge to destruction. There were spiral stairways of unconnected stones drifting past, their destinations uncertain. Then he watched as a large familiar building took shape from the ether. A railway station, its grand Victorian brick waiting rooms and platforms looming like an unanchored monument against the ever-changing colours of the neon sky. Wisps of cloud seemed to breeze through its structure, bricks vanishing and reappearing like the patterned lights of a Christmas tree. Fergus saw men dressed in funereal black, tall hats and long tailcoats, emerge along the fluctuating platform. He heard the sound of a sombre pipe organ throbbing mournfully, and the anguished beating of wings against the vacuum sky. An old steam locomotive chugged into the station and drew to a steamy halt. There was a clattering of doors. The men began loading coffins into the wooden carriages. Coffins…hundreds stacked high along the platform. Fergus read the locomotive’s nameplate – ‘The Last Train To Eternity’.

  “Some deaths take forever,” he whispered the memory inside his head.

  *

  The body armour felt warm and light against his skin. There was a hard, reassuring grip in his gloved hand, that of a laser gun. He hunted through the gothic fortress with the stealth of one trained in such arts. He knew the mutant guards of Goginan were unable to see him coming against the shadows of the dark tower as he stalked and killed them, one by one, with calculating simplicity.

  Fergus was searching for the dungeon levels. He was searching for the prisoner princess. He negotiated the labyrinth of ill-lit tunnels and stairwells with unexpected ease, slicing down the mutants with short, sharp bursts of laser light as they stumbled clumsily across his path. He did not stop to question how he knew his way, or how he could slay them so efficiently. He did not ask himself why nobody found the trail of fresh corpses left in his wake and raised the alarm. He was in control again and that’s all that mattered. The dark shape, the roaring voice, the ghostly train were forgotten – glitches in the programme amplified by the drugs pumping through his system. All that mattered now was the game. It was game on.

  He was descending sharply. The air was becoming colder and staler. There was an unpleasant odour to the lower reaches of the fortress but he pressed on. There was a maiden to find and to rescue, and little time left. As he dropped down the stairs, two by two, he tried to imagine what she would look like, how she would taste when she pressed her grateful lips to his, and how her welcoming body would feel as he claimed his prize and entered her, entwined on the forest floor after a breathless escape. His loins stirred with the thought. It would be love at first sight. It always was. He’d never been disappointed. Better than the real thing: all the sensations, all the excitement, all of the satisfaction…but none of the insecurities, the complications or the rejections. Fergus scored every time. It doesn’t get better than that.

  He caught himself at the foot of the stairwell, alerted by the clank of dull armour in the darkness below. He watched another mutant emerge from the darkness and pressed himself against the cold, damp stone wall and waited as it began its ascent to certain death. Its twisted features barely had time to register the shock of mortality when the laser bit silently into its chest, effortlessly slicing through flesh and steel alike. The creature’s blood bubbled onto the floor and it toppled toward him.

  Fergus caught the dead weight and eased it gently to rest before leaping the final steps into the corridor. There, in the flicker of torchlight, he found himself in a wide chamber, like a junction, with a choice of four shadowy corridors leading away in opposite directions. He instinctively knew which one to choose.

  *

  When he found her she was whispering prayers of comfort softly to herself in the empty silence of her dank cell. Alone, crouched against the terrors of the fortress, she waited for him. Her long white cotton gown was smudged with the filth of the dungeon and her pale flesh bore the smears of its grime. Even the long golden locks that fell away in pretty ringlets behind her hinted at better times. Her dark eyes stared, unblinking, into the gloom. Princess Ashera had clearly experienced unspeakable cruelty at the hands of the tyrant Uberoth here in the bowels of Goginan. It was just as Fergus anticipated.

  Princess Ashera had not yet seen him. He studied her through the dripping black iron bars of the tiny hatch in the heavy wooden door to her dank cell. She was small, fragile and beautiful. Her delicate feet were bare against the filthy flagstones, her slender fingers pressed together in supplication to her red lips. The smoothness of her feminine shoulders and the swell of her breasts rose elegantly from the weathered material of her gown. She seemed to be crouching, hardly daring to touch either wall or floor. It was hardly surprising. The walls appeared to ooze with the same foul fluid that trickled down the bars through which he peered and the flagstones were scattered with the rotting debris of uneaten meals. She would be so glad to see him.

  “Pssssst!” She looked up, her eyes startled in the half-light. Fergus smiled at her. “I’ve come to get you out of here!” he hissed through the narrow hatch, careful not to make contact with the bars. There was no discernible reaction. Princess Ashera was clearly in shock. Fergus sighed. “No time to waste. Keep well back from the door!”

  He aimed the laser. It hissed and crackled as its bright beam burned along the narrow gap between the wall and the door, severing the bolts that secured it in place. When he was sure they had all been cut he reached out and tugged at the bars for all he was worth. It swung open with an archaic groan and yielded its captive. He held out his hands to her, expecting her to leap up and rush to greet her brave rescuer with all the passionate gratitude of her programming.

  Instead, she remained cowed and crouched against the filth of her cell, staring up at him with no hint of welcome or relief. “Come! There’s not much time. We must go!” he urged, trying to suppress the irritation in his voice. Why was the programme behaving like this? Suddenly she smiled. Not a warm, reassuring smile, but the hollow twisted grin of an asylum inmate.

  “I have a poem for you,” she spoke softly, matter-of-factly, her voice betraying nothing of the exotic faraway accent he had expected.

  “Not now! There’s no time!” he insisted urgently and stepped toward her, reaching down and clasping her hand to pull her away from this foul prison. Fergus should stick to the format even if she did not!

  “There’s always time. Time is merely the fabric of our world. It can be stretched and shrunk to suit. This poem is important, you must hear…”

  At that moment the lanterns, mounted at long intervals along the corridor to the cell, flickered and died, the shadows in between them gobbling up the fragile light they offered. In the darkness he felt her hand slip from his grasp…felt himself tumbling backward into the corridor…heard the door groan again as it slammed firmly closed, the bolts he had just sheared clicking impossibly into place again. Then he sensed the chilling wind against his face. He was falling into a lightless abyss.

  *

  Our computerised children slumber,

  No electric smile on their interface.

  No laughter…no tears…no anger.
<
br />   Their sun is cold and white,

  White, as neutral as their dormant minds,

  White, as the death of all we made.

  Our forests are empty and silent.

  A silence as lonely as the raped earth,

  A silence has hollow as our childhood dreams.

  Our streets and highways are safe…at last…

  Obsolete as the poisoned skies our fathers breathed,

  Obsolete as the poisoned seas our fathers sailed.

  Everything lies broken.

  Cobwebs of lifeless steel.

  Catacombs of concrete.

  Wheel within wheel.

  A pyre of shattered dreams light the fall,

  A shroud of endless silence covers all.

  Imprisoned in our final cage,

  White elephant has lost its rage.

  The woman’s voice faded to the hush of the breeze. Fergus was lying on his king-size bed, his naked body dripping with sweat. His mother peered down at him, he remembered her face, contours of familiarity…though still hazy.

  “Mum?” His voice sounded weak.

  She smiled and stroked his brow, her bright red lips parted slowly and, after what seemed an age, he heard her voice.

  “We found you in that thing…” she gestured toward the tank. “You were hyperventilating! We had to pull you out.” He caress soothed him. “It was frightening, Fergus, like you were living a nightmare…not playing a game. I’m sure that can’t be right…can’t be good for you…if it does that!”

  He shook his head, feeling woozy. “No, mum. It wasn’t the game, or the tank. It was the drugs…I won’t do the drugs again with it, I swear! Freaked me right out!”

  “Drugs!” She looked horrified. “Drugs?”

  Fergus lifted his head from the pillow. It felt heavy, as though he was suffering with the giddy onset of flu. “I’m sorry mum! Don’t tell dad. Please!” He took her hand and squeezed it tightly. “I’ll never take them again. I’ve learned my lesson. Just don’t tell him! Please…I promise!”