He was in a platform game, and he even knew which one.
You should prepare yourself for things getting a bit weird from here on in, Solderburn had said.
No shit. He was in Jet Set Willy, a ZX Spectrum game from 1984.
This area was the Top Landing, and he knew from memory that it would lead to the main stairway, at the foot of which a left turn would take him east through the kitchens and the cold store, through the back door and ultimately out over the beach to the yacht, which in a later revamp of the game would set sail for still more levels.
Jet Set Willy was probably the first computer game that Ross had a well-formed memory of playing; or more accurately, not so much of playing as of watching someone else play and waiting excitedly for another short-lived and incompetent shot. He must have seen video game cabinets in holiday bars and amusement arcades before then, but it was in his big cousin Graham’s bedroom in the late Eighties, at the age of six or seven, that he first saw such a world of imagination rendered on somebody’s portable telly. There were no CDs or even floppy disks involved: it was loaded using a cassette recorder connected to the little black box with the rubber keyboard.
Ross had been at Eilidh’s house last year, playing the helpful techy uncle by installing a hefty real-time strategy game for his nephew Calder. Having clocked the size of the file, it had amused him to calculate how long Graham’s cassette deck would have taken to load Empire: Total War given that it took roughly ten minutes to load Jet Set Willy. He worked it out at roughly six years.
He recalled that long-ago winter afternoon, while his mum and Auntie Margo drank tea downstairs: being drawn into a colourful, strange and slightly creepy world, as Graham guided this little character around a seemingly endless sprawl of rooms, each full of both spectacle and danger. There were angry chefs waving wooden spoons, monstrous furniture, mutant telephones, demonic floating heads and, of course, spinning razor blades and patrolling Swiss-army knives.
Graham lived in Dundee, and they didn’t visit there very often, so that hour or so was all he saw of that or any other game for some time. Consequently, it grew in his mind, misremembered as something far more detailed and technically advanced. He was sure he recalled roars from the demonic heads and the ring of mutant telephones, when in fact the only sounds were the trilling that accompanied Willy’s jumps, the chime as he collected items, and the constant tinny rendition of ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ that played permanently throughout.
He discovered this for himself when, as a student, he got a Spectrum emulator for his PC and finally had unfettered access to Jet Set Willy’s mansion. It was his first taste of gaming nostalgia, and though the reality couldn’t compete with his memories, he could still see why it had captivated his young mind. It was arguably the first ever non-linear gameworld environment, and though it looked primitive compared to what he was playing by the late Nineties, it was the freedom to explore it offered that continued to inspire him; the possibility that every doorway, archway and gap could lead to somewhere new.
He opted to go right at the foot of the stairs. This would take him through the ballroom and ultimately to the game’s eastern extremity, The Off Licence, but he didn’t have a particular goal in mind. There were sixty ‘rooms’, at least one more of which had to conceal a warp transit, so the best way to find it was to start at one end and methodically work his way through the place.
He headed through the ballroom, watching the floating heads bounce up and down for a few seconds to get his timing right before passing between them. He was seeing them in profile rather than face-on. The heads looked like fairground automatons, huge coloured fibreglass hulks with hinged moving parts painted garishly in bright pink and sky blue. They had texture and solidity: they appeared to be real objects, but that was the extent to which this world was enhanced. It was not rendered as a real world, but in Perspex and plastic, cartoonish and sketchy. Its inhabitants, if he could call them that, were not AI entities, not NPCs, even primitive ones. Everything here was like clockwork, cold objects set in motion but given no anima.
He reached out and touched one, feeling a tiny jolt and seeing a flash before his eyes as the view altered slightly. He found himself standing a few yards back, transported there without moving. He deduced with mild surprise that he had effectively ‘died’ and been warped back to his point of entry into the room, in this case only a very short distance away.
Those were the rules: you couldn’t touch anything apart from the bottles and glasses that it was Willy’s contrite and hungover task to collect before his housekeeper would let him go to bed. The merest contact with any other object was fatal, which was why Cousin Graham and, later, Ross on his emulator had hacked it to receive infinite lives.
99 REM POKEs after here
100 Poke 35899,0
How in the name of the wee man could he remember that? How could that precise nugget of code simply pop into his head, when he couldn’t have thought of it in almost fifteen years?
No matter, what seemed more pertinent was that finite lives might be a blessing in this place if he didn’t find a way out. If freedom to explore was what had inspired him about games, then what the Integrity were set upon was the antithesis of this. It would surely create a multiplicity of discrete hells, shutting people eternally in one realm from which they could never escape, not even through death. Bad enough if you were in a place of permanent war, but it was horrifying to imagine getting stuck here for all time, surrounded by soulless automata, mindlessly repeating the same things over and over again. It would be like spending eternity in church, or on Eastenders.
He called up the HUD and observed some activity on the Mobius icon, a flickering pulse of colour that grew or diminished dependent upon his direction. Clearly there was a ‘getting warmer, getting colder’ effect to the thing, which he could use to home in on the transit. The pulse was faint even at its strongest point, in Ballroom West, which told him his destination lay several levels above.
Despite being so full of moving objects, there was nonetheless a cold stillness about the place as he journeyed through it: no movement other than the rhythmic oscillations, no sound other than the hiss, whir and squeak of clockwork. That was why he reacted so instantly when he sensed a movement and a sound that was non-rhythmic, non-clockwork. He looked up and saw another human figure hopping from a ledge on to a short platform that was floating static and unsupported. It was a woman. She wasn’t dressed in space marine fatigues any more, but there was the same punkish customisation about her, and even from the flattened perspective of standing forty feet below, Ross could recognise her face.
Iris.
The ledge and platform were in the same ‘room’ but the layout of the mansion meant that Ross would have to negotiate five or six others before he reached that point. She was only forty feet away from him vertically, but had a head start of maybe half an hour, and anyway seemed more fluid and confident in her movement than he had thus far mastered.
It was pointless to attempt pursuit and, he realised, quite possibly unwise. He had thought of calling out when he first saw her, but thought better of it. He had already been given cause to wonder whether she had deliberately led him into an ambush on Graxis, and in following her subsequent trail he had found himself in the hands of the Integrity. What were the odds she would be laying another trap for him if she knew he was still on her heels?
It took another hour, the Mobius icon getting brighter and its pulse more frequent as he drew closer to what he ought to have realised all along would be his inevitable destination: the Watch Tower, at the very top of the house.
‘One rider was approaching,’ he sang to himself, as he stood on the edge of a pit full of spikes beneath a swinging rope in the room entitled, quite legendarily, We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg. Ross took a running jump and grabbed the rope, shinning his way up towards a blue-glowing gap in the otherwise black ceiling. As he neared the top, the icon shone in an unbroken glow and the ants began to cycle aroun
d the strip, signalling that the transit was open, but to where he could not possibly know.
‘Please not Skool Daze,’ he muttered. ‘I really couldn’t handle that.’
Et in Arcadia ego …
There were a number of things in life that Ross had come to take for granted, to an extent that only became apparent when they were suddenly taken away. Internet access, for instance, electricity during a power cut, hot water and central heating when the boiler went on the fritz. He never thought another of them would be a third dimension.
He had got his wish in as much as the next world was not Skool Daze. Instead, it turned out to be Pac-Man. He was trading the vertical axis for the ability to move in four horizontal directions, so it was still 2D, but then so was most of his perambulation back in the real world. In practice it was a bitch finding his way around the blue neon maze from a first-person perspective, but his progress was at least unhindered by ghosts, as it turned out an M4 machine-gun was just as effective as power pills at making the buggers scatter.
He found the transit and warped out. How retro might this thing get, he wondered: Galaxian? Pong? Computer Space?
This time there was a more pronounced feeling of dissolution and resolve, surely heralding a jump to a far more complex environment, but according to his eyes, very little had changed. He was standing in another narrow channel, its black walls only definable by thin blue strips delineating a black floor and black ceiling. A glance to the rear confirmed that the Pac-Man maze was no longer at his back, the blue strips angling at forty-five degrees and forming an X shape to denote that the way was barred.
Ross turned left at the end of the channel, where the passage widened: not by much but enough to confirm something as welcome as it was important. He was back in glorious 3D, albeit none of those dimensions were being offered in expansive quantity. He jumped in the air and sidestepped a few times; cat-swinging would still be precluded, but there was enough lateral clearance to walk two-abreast, and that suddenly felt like a decadent luxury.
Less pleasingly, he could see another neon X where the floor and ceiling borders criss-crossed about ten yards directly ahead. He turned around to check whether he might have missed a right-turn option back at the junction, at which moment the walls immediately behind him began to change shape. The blue rails gradually transformed from two sets of vertically receding parallels to one horizontal line above and one below: from a passage to a wall. He reached a hand out to check, in case it was some kind of perspective illusion, but it was solid. He was trapped, and soon he could see that that wasn’t the worst of it.
Slots opened on either side along the corridor, from which slowly prodded the perforated muzzles of armour-piercing rifles and the multiple rotary barrels of mini-guns, and just in case that didn’t drive the point home, a vertical array of laser beams began projecting from the ceiling, moving slowly towards him like an extremely high-tech egg slicer.
In his panic to deduce where he was, he searched the HUD for clues, looking first for any new skins or outfits defaulted to his inventory. There was nothing. It then occurred to him that he was still holding the M4, so he dropped it to the floor. The lasers kept approaching, now only five yards away, a high keening warning that the mini-guns were powering up.
Instinctively he stepped backwards, which was when the kill kit also began to withdraw in response: the lasers blinked off like they’d never been there, the heavy weaponry disappearing behind instantly seamless panels. Then a tentative exploratory pace forward brought all the claws back out again.
‘Nadgers.’
There was no way out of this place, apart from via painful death and a respawn into the unknown. Right then that wasn’t a leap of faith he was in a hurry to take.
He tried inching forward on his knees, then attempted to proceed at ceiling-level by spanning the passage with his hands on one wall and his feet on the other. Both tactics resulted in guns and laser beams, though at least the latter let him feel a bit like Tom Cruise for a couple of seconds.
It also prompted an additional response that wasn’t automated.
‘All right, already, I’ll be right with you,’ said a voice, digitally distorted to give it no identity: no sex, no age, no accent. ‘Just give me a goddamn minute, okay?’
He guessed the distortion was also supposed to shed nuance and emotion, but it was still hard to miss that whoever had spoken was sounding weary and pissed off, which was just what you wanted when they had you trapped in a murderware selection box.
Ross looked around stupidly, as though it might have an obvious source. Perhaps some instinct told him to look for any clue as to who was monitoring him; or even how. He heard nothing more for a few minutes, throughout which he stayed behind the trigger point as a gesture of cooperation.
Then, without the prompt of him moving, the guns and lasers sprung back into action, causing him to dive to the floor and brace himself.
‘Sorry,’ said the digitised voice. ‘Wrong button.’
The weapons withdrew and he climbed shakily to his feet. He started at further movement to his right, around thigh level, but was relieved to see only what looked like a shelf or a drawer slide open towards him.
‘Place your weapons in the tray,’ he was commanded.
He picked up the machine-gun from the floor and gently laid it down inside the drawer, then stood back with his arms compliantly and non-threateningly by his sides.
The automated guns sprang out once again.
‘All your weapons,’ the voice stressed. ‘I’ve already scanned your inventory so I know what you’re packing, dipshit.’
Ross toggled through his cache rapidly, slightly embarrassed at his attempted deception and, more so, his stupidity. He was the one who was new here, after all. Dipshit was too kind.
As soon as he had deposited the last of his weapons, the drawer disappeared back into the wall, then, ahead of him, the blue X morphed itself into a short passage leading to a doorway, beyond which he could see a pale glow. It shone like moonlight, silhouetting the figure of a woman in the middle distance.
He moved swiftly towards the exit, pausing on the threshold for just a moment like he did at ticket barriers and automatic sliding doors, not entirely trusting that they wouldn’t suddenly smash together like the jaws of a trap.
When he stepped out of the neon-bordered passage, Ross found himself on a wooden boardwalk connecting a series of jetties, beneath which water shimmered and sparkled under the light of stars. The water looked cold, black, placid and deep, at once beautiful but starkly uninviting. He watched his step, as there were no barriers, and water rules were something one had to be wary of in games: some let the foulest murky depths provide a vital conduit, while in others it represented instant death for reasons the developers didn’t always bother to make clear.
‘That’s far enough,’ the woman said, her accent American, voice wearily authoritative.
She was standing near the end of the jetty directly ahead, watching him carefully down the barrel of the kind of weapon you only got towards the end of a game. Ross guessed one twitch of her trigger-finger would be all it took for him to be instagibbed.
He would place her in her late forties, maybe even early fifties, of African-American ethnicity, the combination of which was rare enough in video games as to virtually guarantee she wasn’t an NPC. She was clad in a practical-looking purple flight suit, her hair pulled back by a headband. She looked dressed for action, perhaps the pilot of some craft, but Ross couldn’t see any vessels on the water or at any of the jetties.
He glanced around. The place was eerily quiet and still, like something from a dream, or a stage-set for some minimalist two-hander. In this context he couldn’t help but wonder whether the woman was in some way symbolic.
‘Are you the guardian of this place?’ he asked, unable to avoid sounding as though he was in a sub-Tolkien RPG.
She looked at him like he was a pillock and rather impolitely failed to suppress a laugh.
>
‘No, honey, that’s the guardian of this place.’
She was looking behind him, indicating the long, squat, black-walled construction from which he had just emerged, standing on a jetty of its own abutting the wooden walkway.
‘That and this big stupid dick substitute I’m holding. But either way, die here and you respawn in a secure chamber, the only way out of which is a one-way warp transit to a place very far away, with indestructible monsters and pain protocols like you wouldn’t believe.’
At this Ross held up his hands just a little higher, further emphasising that he was no longer packing and posed no threat.
‘I hear you,’ he said.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
Ross recalled Solderburn’s warning not to go pissing information about, and decided against revealing his real-world name. The one he had given himself here was the only one that could possibly have any currency, but as far as he was aware, other than NPCs, the only people it would mean anything to were Iris, Bob and the Integrity.
‘My name is Bedlam.’
‘Never heard of you,’ she said dismissively. ‘What were you doing in the badlands? That back-channel you just took isn’t a path many people stumble upon by accident. That’s why you have to knock on the door and wait for somebody to let you in. It’s only Integrity and NPCs out there these days, and you don’t seem like an NPC.’
‘I’m neither. I’m just lost, and my friend got captured. I started off in Starfire and found my way out of there into this World War Two …’
‘What do you mean, you started off? Started off doing what? That ain’t vacation territory these days.’
‘I mean started off as in those are the only places I’ve been. One minute I’m helping trial some new equipment at work and the next I’m a cyborg.’
Bedlam Page 21
