Solderburn scrutinised him for a moment.
‘Hey, no offence, bro, but you look like you don’t know if you need a dump or a haircut. The suits shit-canning your proposal really gronked you out, huh?’
‘Little bit,’ Ross replied, relieved to let him follow the wrong scent.
‘Let me see if I can’t clear your head then. Watch your step, by the way. I’m pretty sure I saw movement in here a little while ago. I’m kinda hoping it was a rat, because otherwise it means I might have called forth something from another dimension, and I’m not sure I could handle that shit on a Monday morning.’
Ross considered how his own Monday morning was going so far. Inter-dimensional entities were a piece of piss by comparison.
Solderburn led him across a cluttered expanse of floor towards where three semi-cannibalised scanners sat side by side, cables tangled together in a morass of wiring that looked like a visual representation of a firewall. On the other side of this firewall was a teeteringly unstable-looking millefeuille of hard drives, motherboards and heat sinks; a customised construction intended to rapidly process and store data.
‘I’m starting to see why the Sandman bailed rather than take his chances with this thing,’ said Ross, using Alex’s nickname.
‘Sandman didn’t bail,’ Solderburn replied, curiosity in his tone.
‘Just what I heard.’
‘No, he was here, man, Wednesday morning. Dude was looking a little peaky but that was before I scanned him. I told him to report any side effects.’
‘So you’re saying your machine scanned Alex and nobody’s seen him since,’ Ross suggested, hamming up his tone.
‘I saw him since. Saw him walk out the door.’
‘I only have your word for that.’
‘I swear the process is completely painless. For me, anyway.’
Ross cast a wary eye over the arrangement, which looked like something out of a government safety film regarding the dangers of electricity.
‘I don’t even know which one I’m supposed to lie down on.’
‘Oh, no, the actual scanner-bed is through there now,’ Solderburn indicated, pointing to a door.
‘What, in the old cleaner’s cupboard?’
‘I made some reconfigurations. I needed to create a chamber that’s electromagnetically isolated, so that the scanning process doesn’t fry my equipment.’
‘What if it fries my brain?’
‘Then at least all my kit will still work.’
‘Well, that’s the main thing, I suppose.’
Solderburn opened the door and gestured to Ross to step inside.
‘Go right on through, sir,’ he said. ‘Looks like you’re in the barrel today.’
It was certainly no longer a cleaning cupboard. Gone were the crumbling grey plaster and the shelves of detergent. Instead it had been converted into a clinically white cell, so incongruous in Solderburn’s lab that the doorway could have been a portal into a room in a completely different building. Upon first glance the walls and ceiling looked like they had been finished in a uniform gloss sheen, but close up Ross could see that all of the surfaces, including the floor, were lined with some kind of reflective panelling.
‘You want me to take my shoes off?’ he asked, concerned about stepping on to the immaculate surface in his outdoor footwear.
‘No, long as there’s no metal in them. Which reminds me: gotta take off your watch and your belt too.’
‘No bother.’
Ross removed the items and handed them to Solderburn, who popped them into a bowl that may or may not have had a rinse-out since last containing breakfast cereal.
The scanner-bed took up most of the floor space, just a few inches of clearance either side and at the foot end, the head being tight to the wall. Instead of the familiar arch at the top, there were three twin-railed tracks at different heights and angles, upon each of which was mounted a single scanning head.
‘You break it, you bought it,’ Solderburn said as Ross lay gingerly down on the bed, slowly sliding his head into position beneath the hardware.
Solderburn withdrew and closed the door, which all but disappeared from view now that it was flush with the walls. Ross could make out the lines where it met the frame, but they were virtually indistinguishable from the gutters between tiling panels. The sound insulation was also comprehensive, the resonance in the tiny chamber altering immediately the door was closed. He could hear nothing at all from outside, his own breathing and the movement of his clothes suddenly amplified by the effect of having no ambient noise to interfere with them.
The sense of isolation was somehow calming and unsettling at the same time, like a form of seductive oblivion.
It was broken by Solderburn’s voice coming in over a hidden speaker.
‘All right, I’m just about good to go here. It’s worth mentioning that you should probably try not to move too much, otherwise the lasers might sever your spine, but that hardly ever happens, so don’t sweat it. Nah, seriously, dude, this is gonna take maybe a half-hour and I can’t talk to you during that time because I can’t send any signals in during the process, so close your eyes and chill. If you get freaked or nauseous, just bang on the door and I’ll let you out. Otherwise just relax and I’ll see you on the other side.’
Once More with Feeling
Bob was crouched at the rim of the escarpment, scanning his environment along the barrel of his laser rifle, his movements sharp and nervy. Multiple identical reincarnations had evidently granted no immunity to the development of what Vietnam veterans called the thousand-yard stare.
‘Do you play video games at all?’ Ross asked him. ‘You know: first-person shooters?’
Bob looked around at him with confusion and some irritation, then seemed to understand. Wrongly, as it turned out.
‘Oh, you mean like Call of Warfare and Battlefield Duty and what have you,’ he said, which mis-namings Ross took as a no. ‘Are you saying I’d have been better prepared? Fair comment, I suppose, though I’m learning fast through the real thing. No, the only thing I’ve played is golf on the Wii. Bought the console for the girls. Oh, God, the girls.’
He looked like he was about to cry, which on a face like his would be a sight to see.
‘I miss them so much, and Gemma, their mum. They must be as scared about whatever’s happened to me as I am about them. Laura is a born worrier at the best of times – such a considerate little girl – and the younger one, Wendy, just clamps on to me like a limpet when I come home at night.’
Now there really were tears. How the hell could there be tears? By the same token, how the hell could NPCs have names, personalities, values and even politics?
It didn’t matter right now. What was more pertinent was that Ross clearly couldn’t tell Bob what he had deduced. The guy had no frame of reference to understand it, and was holding on by his fingernails as it was. Bob had come to terms as best he could with the idea of being on some other planet, so telling him that he was actually inside a video game would either tip him over the edge or make him think Ross was the one plunging like Wile E. Coyote, head-down into insanity canyon.
‘We’ll get home,’ Ross said, hoping he sounded more convincing to Bob than he did to himself. ‘As you said, if there was a way for us to get here, there has to be a way back.’
Bob’s eyes widened with a manic resolve.
‘The space marines,’ he said excitedly. ‘They’re Americans. If they got here, they can get us home. Unless it’s a one-way mission,’ he added, with equally manic despair. ‘I saw a TV documentary once that said it would take centuries, even in a super-advanced spaceship, to reach the nearest star system hosting a potentially life-supporting planet. Oh, God, does that mean my family could have died hundreds of years ago?’
‘Don’t think that way,’ Ross chivvied, racking his brains for some plausibly sciencey-sounding bullshit to shore up Bob’s optimism. ‘I heard one of the aliens talking about sub-space technology. They could
be using a means of travel that transcends dimensional space, able to jump light years in a second.’
‘But what about the marines’ own technology? That’s got to be from far into Earth’s future.’
‘Listen, we don’t know anything about this place, so there’s no point making any assumptions.’
‘You’re right,’ Bob said, nodding frantically. ‘You’re right. I’ve got to keep it together. I owe it to Gemma, Laura and Wendy. I must never lose hope. I’ve got to be strong. They’re what’s going to get me through this. I’ll be strong for them and I’ll draw strength from them.’
Bob seemed to fill with determination right before Ross’s eyes. It was an inspiring sight: witnessing someone galvanise himself with love, steeling himself to withstand anything through his feelings for his wife and daughters. So it was with a thoroughly crass sense of timing that a grenade happened to bounce its way to Bob’s feet at that very moment and blew him to bits.
Bob absorbed most of the blast, with Ross only sustaining a minor whack to one of his armoured chest-plates and a temporary blinding by dust, smoke and a spray of wet matter. This last was both resultant of the chest blow and the explanation for why it was minor: one of Bob’s hands had been blown off and impacted at high speed, splattering in a radius of clammy yuck that took in most of Ross’s face.
Ross recovered from the shock in time to see a space marine charge forward, following up his grenade, a machine-gun in his hands. He wondered why the marine hadn’t fired while he was reeling from the blast, then remembered that the marine NPCs’ combat-AI was arguably even more shit than the Gralaks’, given that their role at this point was to obligingly get themselves slaughtered.
Ross helped him fulfil his purpose with a single pulse from his rifle. He knew now that the marines were not his enemy, but he didn’t really have the option to explain that to his wild-eyed assailant. Besides, he had just spotted where the largest part of Bob had landed and he wanted a quick word before he died. It would be difficult to give the guy his full attention while a battle-crazed but incompetent space marine was peppering his metal arse with implausibly intermittent bursts of machine-gun fire, and it would be fair to say that the inconvenience of peremptorily ending up in a completely different part of the map was not the thing that was worrying Ross most about getting killed. He would have to confess to a nagging worry that Bob might be mistaken or deluded about the whole coming-back-to-life thing. Plus it hurt.
Bob, or what was left of him, wasn’t troubled by such doubts. His expression was one of irritation and embarrassment. His head and torso were lying against a big rock, looking a lot like an action figure Ross had owned as a kid, after Megan got hold of it during her ‘battlefield surgery’ phase; one she had arguably never grown out of. She was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon now. He hadn’t seen her in months, and it suddenly occurred to him that he might never do so again.
‘Sorry about this,’ Bob said, rolling his eyes in self-reproach. It was like he’d shat himself or something.
‘Can’t be helped,’ suggested Ross.
‘I’ve not got long, and once I’m gone, don’t wait for me to catch up. But if you make contact with the Americans first, make sure they know about me too.’
‘Definitely,’ Ross said. ‘If either one of us finds a way out of here, we come back for the other. I’ll get you back to your family: that’s a promise.’
Uncomfortable as he was with such rituals, Ross nonetheless felt this was probably the kind of moment when it was appropriate for them to grip each other’s fists. Unfortunately, as Bob didn’t have one, it was moot. Then a second or so later it was even mooter, Bob having snuffed it.
His body faded and disappeared: classic Starfire style. It was so that your computer didn’t get bogged down with needlessly drawing dozens of dead Gralaks during big fights. In Starfire 2, the Gralaks were smarter but less plentiful, so when they died they lay there and visibly rotted, a feature Ross was grateful not to see implemented here given that this Actual Reality version included smell.
Ross felt suddenly very bereft at Bob’s absence. He had only known the guy a few minutes, and under any normal circumstances, there was every chance he’d have considered him a boring two-point-two-kids suburban stereotypical twat, but given that he was the person Ross currently had most in common with in the entire universe, it would be underselling it to say he had felt a bit of a connection.
He had also been genuinely moved by Bob’s love for his family. It had made Ross feel that he, too, couldn’t give in to despair while he had a responsibility to Carol and their unborn child, as well as a responsibility to help this man get back home. Putting aside the thought that this cast him in the role of the nobly self-sacrificing unmarried guy who in the audience’s eyes is expendable to the greater cause of the family man, he gripped his gun and ventured onwards.
In truth, Ross had gone along with what Bob was saying in order to keep him on an even keel. He personally felt there was little point in trying to contact the Americans. They were just blundering NPCs and their spaceships didn’t come from anywhere: they just spawned in the sky and got shot down by the giant boabby-shaped blaster.
Then he remembered his own bullshit, offered to Bob to offset his panic: we don’t know anything about this place, so there’s no point making any assumptions. This was Starfire for sure, but Starfire made real. The way home, the way out of whatever this was, could be to get on one of their ships. It might equally require battling through every level and defeating the final boss, but either way, the primary step was to play nice with the space marines.
Initiating this was going to be problematic, as illustrated by what had just happened to Bob. It was kind of difficult to get close enough to have a conversation without being shot first. If only there was some other way of demonstrating – non-verbally and unequivocally – that he was on their side.
Then he heard a voice call out aggressively to him from amid the smoke ahead.
‘Recruit! Where in a swamp-slug’s suppurating ring-piece have you been?’ it demanded.
Ross stiffened to attention and saluted. He managed to prevent the spike from shooting out too, a feat that he found easier than keeping the delight off his face as a plan formed in his mind.
‘Reporting for duty, Sergeant Gortoss, sir.’
‘About bloody time. Got just the job for you.’
Ross ascended to the rim of the next blast-crater, where this time he was considerably less appalled to see the same two space marines quivering on their knees under the guard of Sergeant Zorlak and his unit. Now he knew why they alone were being held captive while their shipmates were being gibbed left, right and centre. The inconsistency was to facilitate a scripted set-piece.
‘Get a bloody move on. These bastards aren’t going to kill themselves you know.’
‘Absolutely, sir,’ Ross replied, while Gortoss muttered to Zorlak about this thumb-sucking toddler having traded his rattle for a blaster.
‘Would you like me to execute them for you, Sergeant Gortoss, sir?’ Ross asked brightly.
‘No, I’d like you to suck their cocks.’
‘That’s a very unorthodox last request, sir. I’m told it is Gaian tradition to permit condemned men merely a final cigarette.’
Gortoss turned to Zorlak with a despairing look, as if to say: See what I’m saddled with?
‘Just bloody execute them. I want to see if you’re worth a shit, because if you’re not made of the right stuff, I can’t afford any baggage out here.’
‘It would be my pleasure, sir. Far more so than the suggested cock-sucking. But I have to inform you that my rifle has been malfunctioning, and request that I may borrow yours.’
Gortoss handed over his weapon with impatient bad grace. He had enjoyed this more the last time when he suspected the recruit didn’t have the stomach for the kill. It was going to end much the same way, though.
‘Thank you, sir. I will now show you what you are made of.’
&
nbsp; ‘I said what you’re ma—’ Gortoss began to correct him, only for Ross to correct Gortoss by disembowelling him with his spike while simultaneously blowing Zorlak’s head off with the rifle.
The rest of Rapier and Cutlass squads didn’t fare any better than before, Ross taking them down far faster than the card collector had managed, despite having less firepower. Clearly a noob, whoever he was. This was a Nineties shooter, for God’s sake: all it took was a bit of circle-strafing.
He did take a hit in the midst of it though, which felt rather different from seeing a brief flash of white on the screen and his health meter depleting. More like the searing agony he remembered when he’d electrocuted himself at uni attempting to make a self-guiding vacuum-cleaner for the electronics club’s robotics competition. Then, as now, there was sudden, paralysing pain, a noise in his head like somebody trying to drill their way out of it, and a horrible burning odour that became all the more disgusting once he realised it was his own flesh.
As the last of the corpses melted into nothingness, he wondered why Bob (he hoped) kept respawning, while the Gralak NPCs stayed dead unless the level was restarted. Same as his and Bob’s ability to see the power-ups, he guessed. The pair of them had Gralak bodies, but they were something different, something more. Their very presence was altering the game, in fact. Gralak grunts going rogue and helping out the space marines wasn’t in the script. So what else might he be able to change?
He returned to the two captured marines, both of them looking up at him with even greater gormless confusion than friendly NPCs normally did when they were waiting for your action to drive the story. Then he realised that this was because they still weren’t sure of his intentions: for all they knew it could have been an internecine feud rather than an act of outright mutiny.
He had to put them straight, and he had to give it the right ring of authentically macho bollocks so that they would grasp the situation quickly.
Bedlam Page 8
