‘Er, not so much,’ Ross agreed, but her last remark had inadvertently channelled his inner fifteen-year-old dork. ‘There’s going to be dragons?’ he asked.
Juno found a secluded cove where they could come ashore unseen. She left the ship submerged, guiding it back down under the surface by remote. Satisfied that it was not visible and that their landing had not been witnessed, she led Ross up a winding stairway carved into the rock, then they proceeded around the headland.
As he walked the cliff-top path, lush woodland to his right, Ross made a startling realisation.
‘I’m hungry,’ he announced, with a mixture of astonishment and delight.
‘You would be. It’s the protocols. Calastria is a place where you need to feed yourself. You can grow food, you can hunt, or you can trade goods and go into taverns. The food here’s great, though not so much if you’re a vegetarian.’
‘Do people still object to eating animals even when they’re digital?’
‘Not in general, but it happens: a zealot’s a zealot. I wasn’t sure where you stood.’
‘Right now I could eat a farmer’s arse through a hedge.’
‘Meat and greens. See, that’s a balanced diet right there.’
Ross heard a scurrying close by and looked to the trees. He saw a wild boar stop to sniff the air. It took a look back at him and then trotted off, unhurried. He only realised he had frozen to the spot when he felt Juno’s hand on his arm.
‘Don’t worry, it won’t bother you. This whole place has been modified to make it effectively a vacation resort. The protocols have been tweaked so that there’s no dragons burning villages to the ground and no bloodthirsty tyrant NPCs wreaking havoc and plunging the place into war. Actually, there are still dragons, but they stick to their territory. If you want to go hunt one, or even just go look at them, you need to go on a long trek north into the mountains, kind of a safari. It’ll take you maybe a week to get there.’
‘So how far is it to the transit point? Are we talking days?’
‘I landed as close as I dared. It’s on the other side of the nearest town.’
It took them around two hours, according to Ross’s new-found universal clock. He got his first glimpse as they neared the edge of the forest, seeing boats tied up at piers in front of rows of wooden houses. Then, as they came around the headland, he saw more and more of it revealed, stretching much further up the hillside than he would have imagined. When Juno said ‘town’ he had interpreted it as ‘village’, given the context, but this was a coastal settlement the size of Largs.
As they made their way down from the cliff-top and into town, Ross was struck by how pleasant it looked and smelled. It was picturesque without looking fairytale, and everything was very clean, like he was in the medieval section of a well-maintained theme park. The comparison extended to the scent of meat wafting on the breeze, except this smelled more enticingly like roast boar than hot dog.
Ross followed his nose to the door of a tavern, wondering distantly whether you could get jaked on digital ale.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked Juno, checking it was okay to make a pit-stop.
‘No, you gotta eat. You’ll need this, though,’ she added, producing a bag of coins.
They wandered into the dim but cosy interior, where what light there was came from a crackling fire in the grate and candles melting messily in the necks of bottles. Ross saw seven or eight fellow diners seated on stools and benches, talking quietly in dark corners. They cast an interested eye as he came in but soon went back to their meals and conversations. He heard one of them grumble something about taking an arrow to the knee.
Ross sat at a round and thick wooden table, like a cartwheel with a tree trunk through it, his arrival noted from behind the bar by a blonde female in a revealing dress who looked like the illustrated encyclopaedia entry for ‘buxom wench’. She skipped forth cheerily a few moments later, bringing two plates of carved meat without having been asked.
She leaned over as she placed the dishes down on the table, and Ross utterly failed not to avail himself of a lingering look at her bounteous cleavage, the pneumatic plenitude of which suggested that in this incarnation of the Middle Ages, the invention of the balconette push-up bra had evidently come before gunpowder. He realised he was getting a virtual semi, which posed several questions he didn’t feel philosophically equipped to wrestle with. If you were in a relationship in the old world, did it count as cheating if you had sex here with someone else? If you shagged someone but they were only an NPC, was that technically just a wank?
He quieted his thoughts with a mouthful of roast boar. It tasted as deliciously satisfying as the water he’d sipped in the Beyonderland, the sensation of swallowing it as real as the effects of the serving wench upon his libido. She returned with two flagons of ale and Ross reprised his failure not to grab an eyeful. When he looked up again, he found Juno staring back at him with a look of pronounced consternation.
He felt himself blush for a moment before realising that his ogling the waitress wasn’t what was troubling her; indeed he wasn’t even sure she had noticed. Her attention was fixed upon other matters. She resumed looking back and forth around the room, clearly frustrated in a search for something. He wondered if it was the mustard.
‘Looking for somebody?’ Ross asked.
‘No. I’m looking for anybody. There’s no one here.’
Ross paused for a second, contemplating whether the protocols meant he was seeing things she couldn’t.
‘What are you talking about? Who do you think brought the food? Who do you think’s sitting eating all that stuff over there?’
‘NPCs,’ she answered. ‘I mean there’s no real people. I haven’t seen a single one since we landed. I’ve also lost all off-world comms. Something ain’t right.’
Juno put a couple of coins down on the table and stuffed a slice of meat into a hunk of bread.
‘We’re having these to go,’ she said to the waitress, who seemed utterly oblivious.
Juno headed outside and along the street at a stride just short of a run, looking agitatedly back and forth at the houses either side.
‘There’s usually hundreds of people here,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna ask one of these NPCs. They have a very limited understanding of what’s going on within their own minute frame of reference, but if you filter out all the scripted shit, you can usually work out something from what they’re telling you.’
She went up to a grey-bearded old man in a robe. He looked like some kind of village elder or a leftover stray from a Grateful Dead tour.
‘Did something happen here?’ Juno asked. ‘Something monumental? Where did everybody go?’
‘These are grave times indeed,’ he replied. ‘Goromar forges dark plans in the north. Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you wish for peace, prepare for war. The sacred reign of the Wardens is at an end.’
‘Shit,’ she replied, with considerably less gravitas but just as much portent.
‘What?’ Ross asked. ‘I didn’t follow. Something about dark plans.’
‘No, it’s meaningless. It’s pure script: script from the very beginning of the game in its original form, before it was modified. It’s like nobody ever came here.’
Ross thought he heard a noise in the distance, a beating of the air that had very horrible associations since his encounter with Cuddles.
‘Does this mean we better get tooled up?’ he asked, scanning the skies.
‘No. I think it’s just the story that’s reset itself in the NPCs’ minds. If the whole world was reset, then someone would have started a fight with you back at the tavern. So no wars and no dragon attacks. The protocols won’t allow it.’
‘Do you think somebody should tell them?’ Ross asked.
‘Tell who?’
‘Those dragons,’ he replied, pointing to the four winged beasts that were approaching from the north, their silhouettes picked out against a grey haze that covered the entire breadth of the horizon.
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Juno produced a pair of high-tech binoculars and stood transfixed by whatever she was looking at.
‘Oh my God.’
Ross searched in vain for a similar item, then remembered he had a sniper scope on one of his rifles. He held it to his eye and scanned the landscape to the north. It wasn’t just dragons that were headed their way: wolves, boar, deer and mystical-looking animals were stampeding down the hillsides, pouring out of the woods like they were ablaze. This was not the dragons’ doing, however, for the dragons weren’t attacking: they were fleeing. Every creature that could move was running or flying for its life from the encroaching grey haze, and when Ross angled his scope to focus on where the haze met the ground he could see why.
‘It’s the corruption,’ Juno said. ‘This whole world’s breaking down, dissolving away into nothing.’
Ross took in the speed at which the corruption was advancing and considered how long it had taken them to walk from the ship to here. They weren’t going to make it back in time.
Juno took off across the road and disappeared around the back of a house. Ross had made to follow but was told to stay where he was in a tone that wasn’t to be argued with.
A few moments later Juno reappeared, on horseback. She stopped to let him climb aboard, then kicked her mount into a gallop, Ross clinging on to her waist like he’d hitched a ride at the Isle of Man TT. She guided the horse uphill around the outskirts of the town, slaloming livestock, dogs and oblivious-looking NPCs. The fleeing creatures must have been programmed with certain base instincts to which they were now responding, but the non-playing characters were guided entirely by branching scripts, in which there was no behavioural contingency for sudden dissolution of their entire world.
‘Is the transit far?’ Ross asked, wondering how much longer he could hang on, and feeling increasingly agitated by the fact that Juno appeared to be riding flat-out towards the corruption.
‘Too far,’ she replied. ‘Leastways, the one to Silent Hill is: it’s already behind the cloud. We’re gonna have to change our travel plans, take the nearest exit before it gets swallowed too.’
Ross called up his HUD, partly to get a fix on how far they were from safety, and could see the Mobius throbbing. They had to be close, but Juno wasn’t showing any sign of slowing, so presumably the transit wasn’t in any of the quite inordinate number of swordsmiths’ premises to their left as the horse climbed the slope. To their right was just scrubland, occasionally corralled off for grazing. Still the icon flashed brighter, the signal seemingly stronger than he’d ever witnessed, yet he couldn’t see where it might be coming from. Juno did say it was a ‘main crossing’, which was presumably a bigger deal than the cracks, fissures and trapdoors he’d slipped through so far.
Ross could see the corruption now with the naked eye, the grey haze swallowing buildings and trees less than a hundred yards away. He could hear it too, a rushing sound not caused by the corruption itself, but by the strain of thousands of materials as they were pulled apart, moments before disintegrating altogether.
Fortunately, no matter how sharp the gradient got, the horse never slowed, responding tirelessly every time Juno dug her heels into its flanks to urge it forward. Dragons swooped overhead, fighting to stay ahead of the cloud. Wolves and boar barrelled across the road, getting in the way. Ross leaned out as far as he dared and began picking them off with laser blasts to clear the path for their mount.
Suddenly the slope levelled out and Ross could see their goal across a plateau of scrub: it was a mine, the entrance shored up by wooden supports the size of railway sleepers where it disappeared into the hillside.
The rushing sound was becoming a roar. The cloud was towering to their left, rising hundreds of feet in the air. It may have been his imagination, but Ross felt as though it had a gravitational pull.
‘Come on,’ Juno urged the horse, tugging on the reins as she guided their mount towards the dark passage.
The sound of hooves was briefly lost against the roar of the corruption, then became louder again as the horse galloped into the mine shaft, Juno still urging their steed to proceed at full pelt into the blackness. The light around them dimmed rapidly, but before there was total darkness Ross felt the now-familiar dissolving sensation, and just hoped it was the effect of warp.
Quarantine
Light and colour snapped back into view with a wrench like a cinema projector coming on after a power-cut. They were still in a narrow dark passage, but rapidly approaching a mouth beyond which Ross could see bright sunshine and rapid movement.
The hoofbeats sounded more percussive, and a glance down revealed that the horse was now galloping on tarmac rather than earth. The walls either side were made of concrete, and there was considerably more distance between them: two car-widths, as it turned out. The horse emerged from the tunnel into daylight around twenty yards short of a junction, across which Ross could see traffic passing at a leisurely speed.
The traffic comprised vehicles like none Ross had ever seen in the old world: sleek and highly stylised boy-toy fantasy stuff, with customisation extending even to the wheels, as in whether to bother with them when you could glide on air. Beyond the cars rose vast and magnificent structures, super-scale buildings taking their inspiration from ancient civilisations – an architectural paradise where land and materials were no object.
Less pleasing to the eye was a makeshift roadblock before the junction: two large vehicles slung nose to nose across the road to halt anyone exiting from the tunnel. Two figures stood beside the cars, rifles slung around their shoulders.
Black cars. Black figures. Black rifles.
‘Fuckers are putting up roadblocks now?’
Juno spurred the horse onwards as the armed guards belatedly reacted to the sight of their approach. Ross felt his stomach heave as the animal leapt over their vehicles, briefly skittering its hooves across the bonnets before landing on the other side and continuing towards the junction.
Ross stole a glance back as Juno veered her mount left and slowed a little, trotting alongside the traffic while she waited for a gap. One of the Integrity guards was scrambling to get into his car, the other staying at his post but speaking animatedly into a communicator.
Juno saw her chance and the horse lurched across the lanes, leaping over a low crash barrier and landing on a grass verge in front of a Mayan-style pyramid draped on every terrace with enough planting to romp the Chelsea flower show. Next to the pyramid stood a court-like building in Roman style, every column the size of an office block. If it wasn’t for the cars being of roughly normal size he’d have thought the warping process had shrunk him, as these buildings made him feel like an ant.
Ross heard the gunning of an engine followed by the ugly sound of collision. He glanced back to see the Integrity car spinning from an impact, fishtailing for a few seconds on the near side of the junction before righting itself again. Juno banked sharply, racing across a manicured lawn and slaloming through a host of trees and topiary before guiding the horse along a narrow covered pathway down one side of the Roman mega-structure, scattering pedestrians left and right. There was no way of getting a car down there, and it looked like their pursuer knew that. The Integrity car didn’t follow, nor did he attempt to continue on foot. They had got away clean.
Juno brought the horse to a stop and told Ross to get down. He didn’t need to be asked twice. The ground felt wonderfully solid and unmoving under his feet, the sensation akin to the enhanced gravity you feel when you step off a trampoline.
‘Change,’ Juno said, and it sounded like a demand.
Ross was about to search his inventory for cash when he noticed her dress transform from the medieval battle-queen affair she’d been sporting into a flowing purple robe similar to those worn by several of the pedestrians they had almost trampled. He inferred from this that it was imperative they blend in. He checked out the new arrivals in his costume collection and opted for a blue version of the same unisex garment. Looking
at the architecture he realised it was probably supposed to be a hybrid of classical and futuristic, but the result made him feel like he was in Logan’s Run. He had no idea what game this was. It reminded him of Serious Sam in terms of the retro-classical buildings, but the vehicles zipping past on a network of conveniently broad roadways were more indicative of a sandbox driving game, like Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row.
‘Where are we?’
‘We’re on Pulchritupolis,’ she said neutrally, scanning her surroundings with suspicion.
‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’
‘Good in that I’ve got a friend here, but anywhere crawling with Integrity is bad.’
‘Do you know how to get to Silent Hill from this place?’
‘Yeah, but it’s a long way, and I think right now everybody is gonna want to take stock of what just happened. I’ve put a call out to say where we ended up. Need to wait and see if the plan has changed.’
Juno gave the horse a slap on its haunch and sent it trotting away along a tree-lined avenue towards the pyramid. Ross felt vaguely guilty about abandoning the creature, given the part it had just played in saving their lives. However, as far as the Integrity was concerned, Seabiscuit here was a bit of a smoking gun; plus in the interests of balance it should be factored in that their intervention had just saved its life too, so that was probably quits.
Juno led Ross back along the covered walkway, blending in with the throng. He scanned over the heads of the other pedestrians, looking out for Integrity agents as they approached the lawns adjacent to the road.
‘The car’s gone altogether,’ he reported, though his eyes were fixed firmly on a huge juggernaut that was trundling past, in case the pursuit vehicle was lurking out of sight behind. It was like a road-bound train, several articulated containers rolling along behind the cab.
Bedlam Page 25
