Even at a distance he could see the consternation on her face.
‘Hang on: you’re saying you’re new here? You only just arrived?’
‘Yes, exactly,’ he said, gushing in his relief at being understood.
‘Bullshit,’ she said, raising the gun as though readying to fire. ‘All right, now I know you’re Integrity.’
‘I’m not, I swear,’ he insisted, waving his outstretched hands in a panic so wussy as to surely convey his desperation. ‘I’m telling the truth. The Integrity tortured me and my friend helped break me out, but then Solderburn got captured and I managed to escape to—’
‘Excuse me, did you say Solderburn?’ she asked, lowering the weapon slightly.
‘Yes.’
‘As in, the Original?’
‘Well, he’s the only one I’ve ever met.’
‘And you’re saying you just got here, but he’s your friend? How does that figure?’
‘Well, when I say friend, I mean principally colleague. We’ve worked together for years.’
‘And when did you last … work with him?’
‘I don’t know how long it’s been. A couple of days maybe? He was the last person I saw before I, you know, came here.’
She was looking at him with increased intensity, but the barrel of her rifle was at least starting to dip.
‘I gotta make some calls,’ she said.
Ross expected her to produce some form of device but instead she held her pose, the gun still pointed roughly towards him. Her eyes remained locked upon him too, but her expression seemed a little blank, as though her mind was partly elsewhere. He was reminded a little of the card collector when whoever was controlling him was busy off-screen, but he wasn’t about to put her vigilance to the test.
After a while her head moved slightly, signalling that she was giving him her full attention. Unfortunately, this still included training the weapon on him, so whatever word had come down was not entirely friendly.
‘Okay. I’ve been ordered to keep you isolated until they can figure out what to do.’
Ross stole an anxious glance back towards the kill-box.
‘No, no. Gonna stick you someplace where I don’t have to babysit. Come this way,’ she gestured, or rather commanded, given that the gesture had been made with the gun.
‘Did they say anything else about me? And who are they?’ Ross enquired, before his question suggested its own answer. ‘Are you … a Diasporado?’ he asked, his voice dropping conspiratorially despite there being nobody else around.
‘Are you a spy?’
He was about to answer in the negative until he realised her reply was not a question, just a means of explaining how daft he was to think she’d answer his.
‘Can you tell me your name, at least?’
She paused, looking at him with a disdain that suggested she grudged him not only this much information, but the effort it took to speak it.
‘It’s Juno.’
Jetties stretched out to his left and right in a seemingly endless array, and in front the water extended to the black horizon, above which a dilute galaxy of stars hung low across the sky, like a skimmed Milky Way.
‘Where are we going? What is this: a pier?’
‘A gateway,’ she replied. ‘To what we call the Beyonderland. When I say “what we call”, that is of course assuming you ain’t some Integrity fuckwad just pretending to be a gormless noob.’
‘I can assure you, I am a noob, and the gormlessness is genuine. And where is this Beyonderland?’
He was going to ask whether you got there by boat but reckoned chances were high the answer would only make him look like a twat, and as she already didn’t strike him as somebody to whom a stranger was just a friend she hadn’t met yet, he thought he’d best avoid further irritating her.
‘You’re looking at it,’ she replied, indicating the sky and thus vindicating his reticence. ‘Those aren’t stars: more like planets, or maybe just islands. The Beyonderland is an archipelago of individual tiny worlds.’
‘How do you get there? By … spaceship?’ he ventured.
‘By invitation. Take a look at your tablet.’
Ross called up his HUD. He found a whole new menu heading entitled Beyonderland, and upon selecting it found that the topmost section, Invitations, was flashing.
‘It’s from you,’ he acknowledged.
‘You can warp to anywhere in the Beyonderland, as long as you’ve got an invite from the host.’
‘So are we going to where you “live”? Your home?’
‘In your fuckin’ dreams, Beavis. I’m taking you to your own private holding cell. I’m gonna hand over the keys and tell you what day they collect the trash, then I’m gonna get the fuck outta there and hope they decide you’re somebody else’s problem.’
‘They have bin collections here?’
‘Figure of speech, dipshit. Come on.’
Other People
A few seconds later, Ross was standing next to Juno on an island of grey surrounded by the same shimmering dark water, which looked even more foreboding for the way it clearly delineated the ends of this miniature world. The surface underfoot looked like linoleum but felt like tiles, a grid of pinstriped dark grey lines stretching out in transecting parallels across the lighter grey of the uniformly flat ground. He could make out other worlds against the black sky, though they had no definition, just dots in the distance.
‘Welcome to your world,’ said Juno, with more than a trace of weary sarcasm.
Ross was starting to wonder what he had pulled her away from, by turning up in that kill-box, for her to be so enduringly arsey with him.
He frowned.
‘It’s a bit Spartan. I like the atmosphere of chilly gloom, though. Is that an automatic response feature to match the vibe you’re giving off, or is it always like this?’
Juno opened her mouth to answer, then stopped, catching up to the fact that he was having a dig. She nodded, as though acknowledging something to herself.
‘Yeah, that’s funny. Know what else is funny? This.’
With which she unleashed a volley from the rifle.
Ross felt a brief explosion of pain and light and then the now-familiar sensation of resolution as he respawned on exactly the same spot.
‘What the fuck was that for?’
‘Three things. Second was so you realise you ain’t going nowhere if you suicide; and the third was to remind you to be polite to the lady who’s holding the gun.’
‘What was the first?’
‘Already told you: it’s funny.’
‘Well if you shoot me another few times, will it lighten your mood to a huff?’
‘You want we should give it a try?’
‘Don’t do me any favours.’
She looked him up and down for a few seconds and gave a long sigh.
‘I’m sorry,’ she eventually said, with a statutory minimum of sincerity and just as much warmth, like she knew an apology was appropriate but wanted him to know it didn’t mean she was any less likely to shoot him again.
‘And in answer to your question, it isn’t always as gloomy as this, unless you want it to be. Everything here is up to you. You can have permanent daylight, permanent night, a cycle of sunrise and sunset at whatever speed you wish. You can choose the weather, have seasons, a climate. It’s your own private realm, your own personal sanctuary. You can’t get out though, because I disabled two-way warp, but on the plus side, nobody gets in unless you invite them.’
‘Like vampires,’ Ross suggested.
He tested the ground with a stamp of his foot. It seemed utterly solid, like bedrock.
‘So can I make it a bit more homely?’
‘Oh yeah. You can build your dream house and cover the walls with tits and race-cars. Knock yourself out. This place is a blank slate for your imagination,’ she said, evidently quoting, going by the acid tinge to her exaggeratedly cheesy enthusiasm. ‘Course, not everybody wants that, because n
ot everybody has an imagination. You can have a world straight off the peg: environment and structures all pre-built and ready to go. You can browse other people’s work and just replicate it, or choose from templates. Your HUD will superimpose how it would appear from whatever perspective you’re looking.’
Ross scanned through the multiplicity of new sub-menus and auxiliary inventories, which appeared to comprise a hybrid of a level-design suite, photo-editing software and a god-game toolbox.
‘This looks like it could turn into a full-time occupation,’ he said, speaking from experience. Creating custom maps had proven a dangerous addiction not only as a medical student, but even as a supposedly adult doctor who had professional commitments and the wherewithal to have a life. Indeed, looking back at his house-officer years, there was a chicken-and-egg conundrum worth pondering: had he gone such long periods without a girlfriend because of the proportion of his limited free time he spent constructing virtual environments, or had he he spent such a proportion of his limited free time constructing virtual environments because he didn’t have a girlfriend?
‘Everything you need to build your own little corner of heaven, huh?’ Juno suggested.
‘Well, not exactly. If it was heaven I’d have someone to share it with.’
‘Yeah,’ she replied, looking into the distance and lingering over the word. It was like she was acknowledging what he was saying, but it was clear she didn’t want to go there with him.
‘Everybody’s different,’ she went on. ‘Most people spend the majority of their time in other worlds, big, busy places, but everybody needs a retreat. Sometimes you want to be alone.’
And not have your sulky me-time interrupted by being on-call for the kill-box, Ross guessed.
‘So this would be my own private fortress of solitude,’ he suggested.
‘And you don’t even need to sign anything,’ Juno said. Her tone was wry but Ross could tell there was finally a little thaw on her breeze. ‘Could use a woman’s touch,’ she added, ‘or indeed any kind of touch. But like I said, you can have it whatever way you want. You can have yourself whatever way you want too, whether that’s to design some new duds or to give yourself a whole new face. While you’re in this place you can be both seamstress and surgeon.’
Ross scanned the corresponding editing tools, letting him alter existing physical models and skins as well as creating new ones from scratch.
‘This would explain why Solderburn was looking so healthy,’ he admitted. ‘I mean, he was still unmistakably Solderburn, but kind of idealised. Slimmer, for one thing; younger, more chiselled.’
‘Everybody has a little work done. First thing is usually a horizontal one-eighty flip.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Take a look in a mirror,’ she suggested, conjuring one into the air. Having grown used to the facial implants of his cyborg self, Ross didn’t see much wrong with the likeness that greeted him. There was, however, something odd about it that he couldn’t quite place.
‘What you’re seeing right now probably more resembles how you looked in photographs than the face that used to look back when you were shaving. The default vision of ourselves that we start off with in this place is constructed from our memories of how we looked in the old world, where we mostly saw mirror images. So if you had a scar on one side of your face …’
Ross put his right hand to his left cheek, touching the little trio of freckles that looked a bit like Orion’s belt. He used to mention it to people and they’d never get it, and now he understood why: from anyone else’s perspective, they were slanted at the wrong angle.
‘Course, there are people here who were blind in the old world, but they can see here. When they first show up, they have very strange conceptual versions of heads and faces, like walking Picasso paintings: the image they had of themselves and the image they had of the human face in general, based on touch and imagination.’
Ross tried to picture the grotesque homunculi that this process might have conjured. Poor bastards must have ended up looking like Kelvin MacKenzie.
‘Do you get any based on sheer self-delusion?’
‘How would we know?’
‘Fair point.’
Ross browsed the controls. He could see his own head in a rotatable 3D model, various automatic shortcuts available as well as the in-depth manual adjustment options.
‘A one-eighty flip, you say?’ he stated, selecting an instant process. ‘Like this?’
In a single beat, his face was altered so that the freckles did once again line up like Orion’s belt. He felt immediately more comfortable for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom.
‘Yep,’ Juno agreed. ‘That one you can do at the touch of a button; or at the internally visualised touch of a button leastways. Anything more complex, you can try your hand or get an appointment with an expert.’
‘And you can create anything you want? A new face every day if you feel like it?’
‘If you feel like it, sure, but in practice people tend not to. Not only is it real confusing for the folks you know, but it messes with your sense of self if you keep seeing somebody different whenever you look in a mirror. You’ll find that even though somebody might refine their appearance, idealise it, they still tend to keep some essence of how they looked.
‘Obviously you can go incognito any time you want, though there are worlds where you have to register a skin and stick to it. You’ll get kicked out if you’re caught breaking the rules. It’s about respecting people’s choices: there’s a whole universe out there for wearing masks in, so people go to certain places because they want a guarantee that what you see is what you get.’
Ross took in Juno’s face for a moment. She was what was often described as ‘a handsome woman’, meaning that her face was pleasing to the eye but not in a way that would be considered classically attractive: something altogether more elegant than ‘sexy’; to be admired rather than lusted after. In a world where she could have any face she wanted, it begged a question: one she had seen coming way off when she caught him staring.
‘Let me guess,’ she said witheringly. ‘You’re wondering why, if I can alter my appearance, I look like a forty-eight-year-old woman and not some adolescent cover-girl?’
‘Well, I, er, I mean, I think you look very …’ he spluttered.
‘It’s a fair question. Maybe in the real world I was an adolescent cover-girl, and here I just want to be something else.’
She let him simmer on this one for a moment, then continued.
‘No, truth is this is pretty much the old me. I got a few different flavours of it, but the essence is the same. Like plenty of others, I prefer to look as much as possible like my original self, because it would make it easier for anyone I knew to recognise me.’
‘You were looking for somebody,’ Ross deduced, immediately racing ahead to wonder who else he might find here. ‘Somebody from the …’
He didn’t know what term was polite, unsure whether ‘real world’ constituted some kind of faux pas, like an elderly relative referring to a Chinese takeaway as ‘a chinky’.
‘The old world,’ Juno said. ‘My daughter, Miranda.’
He didn’t need to ask how the search had gone. The look of hurt, uncertainty and lingering anger told him all he had to know.
‘You never found her.’
‘It’s the great and bitter irony of this place: a whole universe built from games, yet there are no kids in it. Apart from overgrown ones. There’s nobody here who was under sixteen when they arrived. Miranda was fourteen.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No use you apologising: it ain’t your fault. But if I ever get my hands on the asshole who put me here …’
She sighed, blinking away what looked like a tear.
‘Course, I’d need to wait in line. The whole gameverse is full of folks separated from the people they loved: mothers and fathers who never got to see their children again; husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends.�
��
Ross listened with a growing dread, one that it turned out he wasn’t doing a good job of disguising. He guessed no amount of facial self-editing would manage that trick.
‘Hate to be the one who broke it to you,’ she said. ‘Are you a father?’
‘I just found out my girlfriend is pregnant. That’s why I have to find a way out of here.’
‘Well, long as I’m doling out the bad news, I might as well hit you with that one too …’
Ross was about to protest, remembering Iris’s words outside the airlock. Then he saw the truth in Juno’s face, and measured it against how much reason he had to place trust in anything Iris had said. Juno had searched desperately and exhaustively for her daughter, but the further unspoken implication was that she had also searched desperately and exhaustively for a way out.
‘Jesus,’ he said, staring into the dark sky and fighting against tears.
Juno let him take this in for a few moments, then slung the gun around her back and gave his shoulder a grudging and slightly awkward squeeze.
‘Hey, chin up. Don’t go cutting your wrists,’ Juno said.
‘Why, because I’ll only respawn?’
‘Well, that and the fact that people do still find each other. You found Solderburn, unless you were lying about that.’
‘No, I wasn’t,’ he said, grasping this sliver of hope. ‘You’re saying Carol could be here too? And my family?’
‘It’s possible. I found my husband, Joe.’
‘You did? Miranda’s father?’
‘No, I was never married to him. That was ancient history. So was Joe, I guess. Before we found each other again, we’d been apart a lot longer than we’d ever been together in the old world.’
‘What do you remember about that?’ Ross asked. ‘The last thing before you came here, I mean?’
‘I went to bed. That’s all. Same as ‘most everybody.’
‘Your husband too? The same night?’
‘No. That’s where it gets kinda weird. Yeah, he went to bed and woke up in a video game, like everybody else, but the last things he remembered from the old world happened nearly two years before I came here. And let me be clear, he was with me during those two years; not like he disappeared. We lived our lives, went to work, had Christmases, vacations. But he’s got no memory of that time: none.’
Bedlam Page 22
