In the event, the option to flee was moot. They were there in just less than three minutes, perhaps because so many units were already mobilised and on their way to other possible locations within the area.
The reception didn’t disappoint. The first herald that the barbarians were at the gate was an electro-hermetic pulse, throwing an invisible bubble around the beach house. The pulse instantly truncated and contained all transmissions in and out of its radius, cutting off all forms of communication more sophisticated than smoke signals and shouting. That meant he knew they’d sent a Retiarius. He could sense the ground tremble with the weight of the vehicles even before they came into plain sight. As well as the Retiarius, there were two Essedarii in the vanguard, four Andabatae outriders and three Secatore units, each typically comprising six servo-assisted muscle-bound Oedipal casualties.
The ATF had sent less hardware to Waco. All this for little old me? Guys, you shouldn’t have.
The trembling of the ground under the treads and tracks found an echo inside him. As he heard the crunch of heavy boots on the gravel, he’d have to confess a moment of doubt at the wisdom of the path he’d chosen. He was laying himself down before the weapons and tank-treads of Neurosphere’s corporate militia in order to protect a bunch of people he would never meet, and who would know nothing of his sacrifice. Some would call it altruism, others madness, especially those who wouldn’t call them people at all.
This was everything Ross believed in, however, and it was such thoughts and deeds that meant he was human, regardless of what his body happened to be made of.
He heard the whir of the tormenta charging, mounted on one of the Essedarii. In about two seconds its precision-directed vacuum blast would pop out the front door from its frame like a champagne cork. Ross guessed these guys never bothered to knock, or even give the handle a try: it wasn’t even locked.
He stepped away from the walls and windows, assuming a gesture of surrender. It was out of his hands now: these ones anyway.
The front door flew out into the forecourt, spinning like a playing card flicked by a massive wrist. On the coast of southern California, the Secatores stormed unbidden into Ross’s beach house. Somewhere else entirely, another incursion had been effected, into a metaphorical locked basement. The moment Neurosphere thought the rebellion was over was the moment this war had just begun.
He wished himself luck.
Foreign Lands
He could see the architecture of the level towering before him, from the passageways leading into Rage-Quit Hollow to the underside of the lava pools at the Cavern of Many Reloads. As real as it had looked, as real as it had surely felt, he had stepped outside its world and disengaged with its reality, just the same as the first time he had engaged the console and keyed in ‘noclip’ on his first PC then ghosted through the outside walls.
What did it say about the simulation argument if the simulation was glitched? Though perhaps it was merely Starfire that was glitched, and while the super-advanced simulation engine could enhance the maps, it would leave their layout intact, including the flaws. Problem was, Ross didn’t remember such a flaw, and that was speaking as someone who had spent a lot of time hiding out in that little cave.
As he stepped a little further out to get a wider view, he noticed that there was something drawn on the inside of the outermost edge of the cave wall, just where it didn’t quite overlap. It looked like a spray-painted stencil of a figure of eight, but when he scrutinised it he saw that it was M. C. Escher’s Mobius strip: a woven helix around which ants were processing, their path impossibly taking them both outside and inside the twisted band.
Level designers often hid little signatures and in-jokes somewhere upon their creations, but they were usually in places you were meant to reach: Easter eggs such as the recurring ‘Dopefish’, hidden as rewards for those who explored every last inch of every map. However, when you reached those things, you were never in any doubt as to what they were or why they were there. They were like shrines, usually furnished with weapons or power-ups as incentives to seek them out.
The Mobius strip was etched somewhere you were never meant to be, tucked away discreetly and picked out in matt grey upon brown rock, something you were unlikely to see unless you were looking for it.
Ross would never have noticed it if he hadn’t explored this far looking for Iris, and it seemed safe to assume that she had exited through here too. But to where? All he could see was the dark grey nothingness that the map was floating in: a dark grey nothingness that he was walking upon unsupported by any form of ground. Perhaps she used it as a shortcut or at least a hidden route to some other part of the landscape. He stepped back further still, which was when he saw that the map stretched way beyond the caverns and tunnels he had just traversed. He could see the underside of what must be the hidden base, and beyond that the lower levels of the Gralak power-plant installation where he had first woken up in a cell.
The entire environment of Starfire was one huge seamless construction, like a sandbox game. That explained the lack of a loading transference when he passed between what he thought were discrete maps: they were in fact all one place. This was also, presumably, how Iris had made it inside the big-gun installation ahead of him. She could be anywhere now.
He glanced again into the grey nothing, the shapeless eternity stretching away from the world of Starfire, wondering if he might see an archipelago of further islands: the multiplayer maps, or even the expansion packs. That was when he noticed movement in front of him, like the twinkling of a star. At first he thought it might be an object in the far distance, but then he realised it was instead merely small, the absence of any other objects denying him reference for perspective.
It was another Mobius strip.
He began walking towards it, heading further out into and upon nothingness. He could feel solidity beneath his feet, as though a level designer had built a walkway in wireframe then forgotten to fill it.
As he drew nearer he could see that the Mobius was not a two-dimensional stencil, but a holographic object, upon which, this time, the ants were animated. It was spinning in mid-air, solid and yet slightly transparent. A power-up of some kind.
Ross increased his pace, striding eagerly towards it, which was when the nothingness beneath his feet suddenly ceased to feel solid and sharply commenced feeling like nothingness.
Ross fell, seeing the world of Starfire accelerate upwards away from him. Then he felt a sensation akin to respawn, except in reverse. Instead of the world around him dissolving and flying apart, it was as though it began in a state of chaotic flux and lurchingly resolved into shape. In this case a messy and rubble-strewn shape that was coming towards him at 9.81ms2.
He didn’t feel an impact. The ground came up at him so fast that he couldn’t make out more than a blur, before everything went white. He enjoyed a brief moment of oblivion that mercifully kicked in just as he was about to hit the deck, then his vision came back into focus.
He picked himself up into a sitting position and took in his surroundings.
His first thoughts were of his childhood bedroom, but only because that was where he had come to learn the term ‘bomb site’ from the mouth of his mother. He kind of wished he could show her this by way of retrospective comeback, as an upended bucket of Stickle Bricks and half a dozen Dinky toys didn’t really compare with the scene before his eyes. Clearly there had been a massive explosion. He was sitting amid piles of bricks, slates, torn girders, splintered roof beams and steel pillars with lumps of concrete around their bases like uprooted trees. He could see the entire lintel of a building lying on its side like a giant geometric sculpture, thigh-high sections of wall depicting the former layout of what had stood here.
He could feel a light rain, and gazed up into dark skies above. It didn’t look like night, just a thoroughly miserable dusk. Rain was good, though. Dusk was good too. It never rained on Graxis. It was always hot and always day. He never thought he’d be so pleased to
feel the cold. This was Earth, and if it was this miserable, it had to be Scotland. He was home. On the downside, his place of work appeared to have been blown up, but he could deal with that.
Had it been Solderburn’s machine? Surely not: there was no way Ross would have survived, being so close, unless perhaps the isolation cladding had protected him from the blast. It could have been a gas leak, he supposed. Either way, he was back to the coma/dream explanation for what had happened, some sanctuary of the mind he had retreated into as his consciousness blanked out the trauma. Then, with a rush of near-euphoric relief, he realised that he could stop looking for explanations: it didn’t matter now, because it was over.
Until, that is, something began bothering him about the rubble.
It was all a bit low-fi. He would concede that such was the nature of rubble to be in a disordered state, but it was still a big ask for entropy to have managed this much so swiftly.
There were no computers. No broken monitor screens, no hard-drive arrays, no cables, no circuit boards, no overdriven stereo speakers, none of Solderburn’s antique amplifiers, and, conspicuously, no cannibalised scanner parts. In fact, the only thing in the vicinity boasting any electronic components was …
‘Oh in the name of …’
It was a subsidiary worry that it had taken him so long to notice his ongoing condition. He had caught a long look at himself as he sat up, but the metalwork and dead-looking skin had ceased to register immediately as wrong. He was becoming used to it. It was starting to look and feel normal.
Ross climbed to his feet and picked his way across the treacherous ground. He appeared to be in the ruins of a factory or warehouse. Somewhere in the middle-distance he could hear small-arms fire. Lovely: more people shooting at him. He wondered who they’d be this time. There was no way to ascertain this from his current position, as he was isolated in what was effectively a pit, hemmed in on all sides by debris. He had no idea where this was, he realised, Scotland not having a monopoly on rotten weather. And, more disturbingly, he didn’t even know what era it was either.
He had to scale a tangle of twisted metal to extricate himself from the pit, which was when he began to get his bearings. There were burned-out or near-flattened ruins on every side, the latter confusingly boasting an abundance of surviving thigh-high sections of brickwork surrounded by very little in the way of collapsed wall. It was as though someone had come along and thoughtfully cleared it all up, which was very civic-minded of them but maybe a bit premature given that the bombing and mass-destruction programme didn’t appear to be concluded.
Beyond one such midget’s maze of a waste ground he could see a building that was relatively intact, and from its architecture he deduced that he was most definitely not in Stirling. It was a hôtel de ville, with most of its windows boarded up or shot out and dozens of sandbags piled around its perimeter.
He heard voices nearby, the crunch of hurried boots on rubble, cobbles and dust. The voices were German.
Ross hit the ground, crouching behind one of the obliging multiplicity of low walls as the patrol passed nearby. He risked a glance, popping his head up tentatively for a fraction of a second, enough to identify the uniforms and, from that, a good deal more.
Nazis.
Ross indulged in no hysterical wibbling about having travelled in time. This was another game, but this time he would not be enjoying the reassurance of the familiar, as it wasn’t one he knew. He had wondered for a moment whether this place might be Return to Castle Wolfenstein given the Actual Reality treatment, but it was all these bloody dwarf-walls that told him otherwise. This wasn’t some old-school classic, chiming in emotionally confusing resonance with his personal past, so he could scratch all that psycho-babble stuff too. This was a high-end modern ‘cover-shooter’: a game in which the combat consisted mainly of crouching behind conveniently placed thigh-high walls and occasionally popping up to fire at similarly entrenched enemies. They were developed principally for games consoles, to compensate for how unsuited their control systems were to the run-and-gun tactics that made PC first-person shooters so much fun. As the console market began to dwarf its computer counterpart, developers followed the money and altered the genre to remove the elements that were problematic for those playing on an Xbox or Playstation. Chief among those elements was the run-and-gun aspect, but they had removed the fun part too, just in case that was also causing cross-platform compatibility issues.
Ross stayed down, gripping his space-marine-issue double-barrelled shotgun and waiting for the Nazi troops to pass into their appropriated HQ. He was not engaging these guys if he could possibly avoid it.
Once they were safely out of sight, he began scurrying amid the bombed-out buildings, concerned with putting distance between himself and the hôtel de ville but, beyond that, lost as to where he ought to head. He had no idea what his objectives should be, no prior knowledge of the overall picture to nudge him in the right direction. He was also, rather dishearteningly, burdened with the awareness that reaching the end and defeating the big boss was unlikely to be rewarded by a return to his normal life. If he could step outside of Starfire, then his fate had never lain along the path of its story, and the same would apply here.
He heard voices from somewhere to his left, speaking in alarmed but hushed tones, then had to dive for safety as a volley of bullets was loosed in his direction. The voices hadn’t sounded German, but he doubted the local game protocols would dictate that language had any effect on the velocity of hot lead.
A quick heads-up over the covering wall allowed him to glimpse a little enclave in a panicky ferment, like flies buzzing up and away from a dog turd because he’d walked past. He saw several figures in contemporary civilian garb and at least two American GIs. He ducked down again, holding his position while he racked his brains for how he might communicate that he wasn’t a threat, all the while dogged by the lingering question of whether it mattered.
He heard a thud alongside him, and looked to his right to see an object nestling against a downed telegraph pole. Ross stared at it for a moment like it was something that didn’t belong in this picture, his confusion crucially delaying both his recognition that it was a grenade and his subsequent efforts to get away from the thing.
It exploded with a very loud but surprisingly short blast, as though the sound was swallowed by the rainy skies. Said skies had less of an appetite for the blast wave and the shrapnel, leaving all the more of both for Ross to enjoy. He was thrown to the ground, temporarily deafened, a hundred small shards embedded in his armour, several dozen impaled in his flesh and his insides feeling like he’d been strapped to the PA at a System of a Down gig.
On top of the pain he also had to endure the discomfort of self-reproach as he realised his stupidity. The combat-AI here was at least a decade more advanced than the level he’d been previously dealing with. You couldn’t just nip back out of sight and wait there indefinitely, your enemies drumming their finger-nails while you decided upon your next move. These buggers came and flushed you out, which not only meant that they lobbed grenades at you: it meant that they followed up too. Thus, despite his pain, he couldn’t lie there in the dirt: he had to stay mobile.
Ross scrambled on his hands and knees as suppressing fire continued zipping over his head, making for a shell of a building that at least offered walls higher than three feet. Bullets bit into the plaster as he made it through the doorway, quickly scanning his surroundings and attempting to parse the information.
Christ, he wished he’d played one of these things. Contrary to Carol’s complaints, he barely spent more than a couple of hours a week on gaming these days, and those rationed sessions tended to be spent revisiting old favourites. The most modern game he’d played in years was Team Fortress 2, and only because it was the latest incarnation of a mod that could trace its origins directly back to the original Quake.
There was no health in this place. WTF? Who put an entire abandoned building in a game – a two-storey b
uilding at that – without dropping a few medkits about the place at the very least?
Desperation helped him climb the rickety and partially crumbled staircase, the pain dulling to facilitate his efforts. In fact, it seemed to be dulling in general. Curious (among other things to see whether it still worked), he summoned the tablet with a flick of the wrist. It displayed that he no longer had a health count, but a vertical bar instead, and the bar was gradually climbing.
Of course: the modern cover-shooter featured self-replenishing health, because walking over a power-up was deemed unrealistic; unlike, presumably, recovering from a gunshot wound to the face by sitting quietly out of the way for a few moments.
He heard movement outside and looked through a hole in the wall where a window and its frame might once have sat. His pursuers were converging on the building from various directions. A tired part of him wanted to complain that it wasn’t fair. He hadn’t done anything to them: hadn’t fired any shots, hadn’t even called them names. Why were they so ruthlessly adamant that he had to be destroyed?
Then, one more time, he remembered that his current wardrobe favoured Caterpillar, and not the clothing division. To the men hunting him down, he must look like some Nazi occult abomination, ironically not a kick in the arse off the horrors from Wolfenstein.
He would concede that there was a logic to all of this, of sorts: one he needed to deduce and abide by. He had escaped from the world of Starfire, but evidently it wasn’t only one game that had been accessed – or indeed absorbed – by the greater simulation. If he could find himself in Starfire, then he could find himself in a World War Two cover-shooter. But what he didn’t understand was how he could find himself in a World War Two cover-shooter and still be a fucking cyborg. Shouldn’t he be some suave French Resistance agent, a hard-bitten US Army veteran, a moustachioed and plummy-voiced British commando, or even a German stormtrooper?
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