They were just standing there waiting for him. Fucking spawn-campers. The lowest of the low.
‘Thanks for dropping in,’ one of them said, then the troll swung his hammer and everything went black.
Trespasses
How can you be unconscious if you’re in a simulation, Ross wondered woozily, becoming gradually aware of his senses though his eyes remained closed. It was like slowly coming to on a dark winter’s morning, semi-awake but not quite ready to admit it because it’s freezing outside and you’ve got to get up for work. The answer, of course, was the same as everything else: if Bostrom’s argument was indeed the explanation, then there was no difference between losing consciousness here in the gameworld and losing it back in what he had believed to be the real one.
This hadn’t been like sleep, however: more like a muffling of the senses. He had been distantly aware of sound and motion, of being moved, of changes in temperature, of voices, but it was as though the decoder software was temporarily scrambled and he couldn’t resolve any of it into coherent information. All systems were reading properly now, though. He was somewhere cold and damp, suspended by his arms, his feet dragging and his legs not bearing his weight. He could hear voices, at least two other people present in the room, speaking as though he was still oblivious, which was another reason to keep his eyes shut.
‘Took you a little while to get this one into the keep-net, huh?’ a male voice asked, speaking in American-accented English. ‘He put you through your paces?’
‘You better believe it,’ replied the other, also male, also American, and also everything else Ross might note regarding timbre, intonation and pitch. ‘Regular bag of tricks. Suicided himself to get away from the maenad.’
The voice was identical, but it was coming from the other side of the room, and Ross was definitely aware of two sets of footsteps. NPCs, he thought: if the models and skins could be the same, then it stood to reason that the voices would be too. But in that case, why had he encountered same-model Gralaks with not only different voices, but entirely different personalities?
He slowly opened one eye to sneak a peek, still dangling so as not to betray that he was fully alert. There were indeed two figures in the room, but they were not identical. The one on the left, who had spoken second, was togged out in the black pseudo-Nazi gear Ross had observed on all of his captors. Up close he could see that the material was quite definitely not natural fibre. It had a dully shimmering quality, as though it was made of several million microscopic interlinking pieces of plastic. It would ripple slightly when he moved, then solidify.
The one on the right was wearing garments of the same material, and his clothes were also a not-quite-there approximation of period uniform, but in his case the period predated the First Reich, never mind the Third. His appearance alluded to Roman legionary garb, except all in black. Both the cloth and armoured parts of his attire appeared to be made of this same weird substance, light and fluid for the former, thick and solid for the latter. Below his tunic he sported two rather incongruously hairy legs, all the more striking for being the most human things Ross had seen in however long it was. His skin was tanned and healthy, and some buried part of Ross was extremely jealous. Being Scottish, he’d always sported a ghostly pallor for about ten months of every year, but even that was preferable to the leathery corpse-like appearance of what skin he did still have. Somehow he couldn’t picture Penelope Cruz fronting a product that would claim to revitalise this complexion.
The sorta-Nazi on the left caught Ross’s eye and gave a cough; not a genuine clearing of the throat but a means of communicating to his companion that their guest was awake. The sorta-Roman glanced at Ross and stood a little straighter, like he’d been called to order.
Ross cut his losses finally and let his feet take all of his weight. His arms were feeling numb and tired, but at least the metal restraints weren’t biting into his wrists, as his forearms were already thoroughly encased in the toughest steel Graxis could forge.
There was a second cough from the sorta-Nazi, both Ross and the sorta-Roman being momentarily unclear as to what was being overlooked.
The sorta-Roman cottoned on to whatever it was and started a little, not so much like he’d realised his fly was open than like his dick was actually hanging out in front of his maiden aunt. His entire being rippled from top to bottom, and by the end of the wave his uniform had changed from sorta-Roman to sorta-Napoleonic. Then, realising that this wasn’t the intended effect, he began rippling repeatedly, each pulse from head to toe changing him into yet another costume. He was toggling skins, Ross realised: medieval, futuristic, Shogun, Egyptian and, most bizarrely, Seventies Disco, before finally assimilating his comrade. All of the looks were slightly askew approximations, as though they were designs all drawn by the same hand. They were constructed from the same fabric, but having seen it take so many forms, Ross could now see that the material wasn’t so much black as an absence of colour or even an absence of light.
Happy that he was now in harmony with his environment, the man stiffened again, looking Ross up and down. Very unhappily for Ross, his environment looked like just the kind of place a sorta-Nazi would be in harmony with. It was a damp brick-walled cell with one tiny glassless window high to Ross’s right, two pairs of steel bars crossing it like a grid for tic-tac-toe. The restraints around his arms were looped through a metal ring embedded in the ceiling, a fixture placed there for one discernible purpose. The floor was solid concrete, into which a narrow trench had been bored, functioning as a sluice, leading to a drain capped with a circular grate. Again, there was no doubting that this place had been fashioned with but one function in mind.
He could see black matter in the grate: hair sticking out from a jelly-like substance that could have been congealed blood or even lumps of flesh. It wasn’t real, he told himself, merely the stage-set for some scripted interrogation scene in a hardcore shooter: it was simulated hair, simulated blood, no more real than the devastated landing fleet crashing on to Graxis. The problem was, he had felt a lot of simulated pain of late, and been unable to discern any difference between it and the real thing.
He tested the restraints, a redundant exercise as they’d been taking his weight for so long without showing any signs of stress. The sorta-Nazi on the left began moving towards him, but it was the one on the right, he of the indeterminate wardrobe, who spoke.
‘My name is Cicerus, Decurion, Second Legion of the Integrity,’ he said, while his partner uncoiled a form of scourge. It was made of the same material as their garments and armour, fluidly flexible as it dangled from his hand, but split at the business end into seven or eight solid strands that jingled against each other like glass beads. ‘You have been apprehended in serious violation of diegetic trespass protocols.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Ross said desperately, addressing his plea to the one who spoke but barely taking his eye from the one with the whip. Even as he made his appeal he understood that it might be literally like arguing with a machine. If they were programmed to torture him, then there was no branching dialogue path that would prevent that. On the other hand, ‘diegetic trespass protocols’ didn’t sound like something he’d expect a Nazi NPC to be concerned with, even if Ross had the first idea what those were, and what was with the Roman name and rank?
‘In plainer terms, you’re not supposed to be here, and you know it.’
‘You’re right,’ Ross blurted. ‘I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t mean to be trespassing. I don’t know how I got here.’
His interrogator glanced to the one with the whip.
‘Marcus, jog his memory.’
‘No,’ Ross shouted, his voice soon transformed into a scream as the scourge reared and cracked.
Ross felt it bite into his skin and saw wet matter fly from the deadly little tongues as Marcus drew his whip back again. But it wasn’t mere damage to his flesh that had Ross howling. The searing, gouging sting was purely superficial, the topmost layer
of a far greater pain. When those tiny tongues touched him, he felt a sensation of electrocution far more pronounced than from the earlier laser hits, but even that was not the worst of it. Deeper still, he felt something profoundly, horrifyingly wrong with the nature of this contact. It was like tin-foil touching the fillings of his soul.
Like a newly learned instinct, immediately after assessing himself physically for signs of trauma he looked to his hands, willing the tablet to appear so that he could see what damage had been registered. In this realm of the digital, he had already come to understand that suffering was just another number, and one he needed to know with the same compulsion as examining a cut or a fracture. Where it differed was that, in this instance, the reassurance he sought was that the damage was bad. If another lash tipped him past the century, it would bring respite, and maybe – given that this time he’d be ready – a chance of escape.
It was a reassurance he was denied, because the tablet would not appear.
‘Looking for something?’ asked his interrogator.
He was holding the tablet like it was the proverbial smoking gun, its data reading in a mirror image across the back of the glass. ‘You say you don’t know how you got here and yet you’re carrying one of these little bad-boys.’
‘Somebody gave it to me. He was a space marine, a sergeant.’
‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Good. Now if you tell us how you got from there to here, thus helping us repair the damage, it will stand you in good stead. It might cut down your period of detention before we put you back where you belong.’
‘I’ll be only too happy to go back where I belong,’ Ross insisted. ‘And I’ll tell you whatever I can, but I swear, as for how I got here, I have no idea. I had a brain scan, this new experimental—’
‘We’re not interested in your life story, metal tits. That shit is so inapplicable you’d best start work on erasing it, because it’s just unwanted baggage here: redundant code. We want you to tell us how come a fine specimen of Graxis cyborg-hood is wandering around World War Two France. It’s diegetic trespass: you don’t belong here.’
‘What, and you guys do? Maybe I was off sick the day my third-year secondary-school class covered the roles of mega-tanks and flying demons in Blitzkrieg warfare.’
Ross was acutely mindful of the cat-o’-nine-tails in Marcus’s hand, and his desire never to feel its soul-raping intrusion again was overcome by the strategic benefit of provoking a fatal response, as well as a quite unaccustomed level of rage that was being channelled directly to his tongue.
‘Who are you people?’ he demanded. ‘Where the hell am I?’
‘It’s where you’re not that matters. Why aren’t you in Starfire? How did you get here?’
‘Star—?’
The name stopped him with a jolt. They weren’t talking about Graxis like it was a place any more: they were referring directly to the game.
‘Okay,’ Ross said, composing himself about as much as was possible when his hands were suspended above his head and his body was still convulsing slightly with shock from the effects of the scourge. ‘Seeing as you’re legionaries, how about a wee bit of quid pro quo. I’ll answer your question and maybe you can help me be a more useful subject by filling me in on some background.’
‘Anything that helps us understand each other,’ said his captor, with sincerity if not exactly warmth.
‘I found a gap in the walls. A clipping error. Do you know what—’
‘We know what a clipping error is, yes,’ his interrogator replied, in much the same way someone from CERN might say he knew what an electron was. ‘How did you find it?’
‘I was following …’ Ross began, then instinct kicked in and warned him not to reveal that there was another party to this. He didn’t owe Iris any loyalty – quite the contrary – but if these guys were taking a dim view of slipping between games, then on the basis that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend, he ought not to drop her in it. Furthermore, he didn’t want to open up a new line of questioning that might be pressed with the aid of Marcus’s tickling stick, especially as there was precious little he could tell them to make the torturing stop.
‘… the path of the game,’ he went on, hoping his skip wasn’t conspicuous. ‘I had to hide out in a crevice for cover, and that’s when I saw the gap. I walked through it into, well, a kind of nothingness, then I fell down and landed here instead. I was looking for a way out of Starfire because I don’t know how I ended up there and I want to get back to my normal world.’
‘Your normal world, as you call it, is gone. The sooner you accept that, the less you’ll be inclined to rain pain down upon yourself, and I don’t just mean from Marcus and his scourge. You’re new here, I can tell. That’s why we’re going easy on you. You probably didn’t mean to trespass, but equally you have no idea of what you are complicit in by doing so.’
‘Why don’t you enlighten me? I’m quite a smart guy, I’m sure I’ll be able to grasp it. Why don’t you tell me who you shower are for starters. Are you NPCs?’
Cicerus seemed amused by this enquiry. Ross didn’t take it as a good sign.
‘A foolish question for “a smart guy”.’
‘How so?’
‘Because the answer would tell you nothing. What NPC is going to understand the question sufficiently to answer yes? Which is not to say an NPC couldn’t be specifically programmed to understand the question, but he could equally be programmed to disguise his true nature by answering dishonestly.’
Dick, Ross thought, the sentiment applicable equally to Cicerus as to himself.
‘So, assuming you’re not NPCs, how did you get here?’
‘You’re still not getting it. What matters is not how we arrived, but what we are about, because here is all there is, and it’s our vital task to ensure that there remains a here to be in.’
Cicerus stepped closer, Marcus correspondingly backing off, his threat amply demonstrated. Apart from their spoken names, there was really nothing to denote one from the other now that their uniforms had been matched. And yet evidently they were distinguished by rank, Marcus not only taking his cue to administer the whip, but treading delicately in the way he had pointed out that his boss was having a wardrobe malfunction.
Ross could now make out the finer details of a symbol on Cicerus’s lapel. It showed three ellipses overlapping, the design having initially struck Ross upon his earlier glimpses as a bizarrely inappropriate parody of the pure wool guarantee. Beneath the symbol he could now see that Cicerus’s name and rank were stencilled in what looked like silver on black, though when the material moved, it was clearly just two surfaces of the same non-colour, the light catching different angles of grain in the minute mesh.
In a sudden flashback, Ross now recalled that this symbol had appeared somewhere on all of the costumes Cicerus had toggled through, even the Seventies Disco gear, though in that case it had been etched on a medallion.
‘These clipping errors, as you know them, are more than mere gaps or anomalies,’ he stated, speaking softly, requiring Ross to strain to listen against the distant sounds of gunfire and explosions. ‘They are rents in the very fabric of this place, and as they grow they are threatening to tear it apart completely. Unauthorised transit through these gaps is exacerbating the damage exponentially, so you might say we are concerned with what you would call “ecology”. A place for everything, and everything in its place.’
‘I can relate to that,’ Ross said, ‘but my place is not as a cyborg on Graxis, endlessly battling against the backdrop of the same invasion. And forgive the cultural mistranslation, but in my true place, where I come from, the eco-warriors tend to be more tree-huggy and less scourge-the-flesh-from-your-backy. Maybe it’s the Playmobil Nazi look, but you’re not really selling the whole altruistic motivation jag here.’
Cicerus glanced at Ross’s tablet and gave Marcus a nod. He took a sideways two-step run-up and let fly with the whip. The results disinclined Ross towards making
another smart remark ever again. He was wracked with something more than pain, a violation of his very psyche leaving him wishing not for this place’s pseudo-death but for complete oblivion. As he dangled, spun and bucked, for a few moments merely trying to remember who he was felt gruesomely unpleasant, like touching his own flesh with a hand that had gone to sleep.
There would be no pseudo-death here, he understood: that was what Cicerus was monitoring. Health gradually regenerated in this world, which meant the bastard could give Marcus the nod once more whenever his stats recovered, and they could keep this up as long as they wanted.
Cicerus waited until Ross had stopped reeling and approached him again.
‘The eco-warriors where you come from are only trying to save one world, and unlike them we don’t have documentaries to help us spell out the consequences. That’s why we have to make it a bit more immediate. You think our methods are harsh but you’re like children let loose at the controls of a nuclear reactor, pushing all the big colourful buttons and levers. To you it’s innocent fun but your idiotic dabblings are unpicking the threads that hold a thousand worlds together. And by that I don’t mean that this is some kind of digital Pangaea, about to undergo continental drift. I’m talking about total destruction, the complete annihilation of this place, of Starfire, of everyone you’ve met and everything you’ve seen.’
He placed his gloved hands either side of Ross’s head, staring unflinchingly into his face.
‘Our motivation,’ he emphasised, ‘is simple. It’s the same one that was hard-wired into DNA back in the meatverse: ongoing existence. Altruism comes as a bonus. Call it an unlockable achievement.’
He stepped back again and spent a lingering moment looking down meaningfully at the tablet. Ross could feel his legs buckle and his arms take the strain, while a voice began mumbling ‘no, no, no, no.’ It took a while for him to realise it was his own.
Bedlam Page 17
