Bedlam

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘It was a half-assed pursuit,’ Juno opined. ‘Perfunctory even. They didn’t even fire any shots. I’m thinking we ain’t the biggest game in town today.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Ross, the juggernaut having finally passed. ‘I think that is.’

  On the other side of the road was a huge plaza, its corners accommodating four towering stone obelisks between which laser barriers had been erected, parallel lines of transparent red light like a huge ribbon around the public square. It wasn’t quite so public today, though: the Integrity were present in force, and being corralled inside the lasers were at least a hundred people.

  From the outside, and admittedly at a distance, the situation appeared to be calm and controlled, but the flow of pedestrians towards the plaza indicated that the locals were very concerned to know what was going on. The detainees were standing around, looking understandably agitated, but there was no visible unrest. The Integrity, for their part, looked more like a relief operation than an occupying force. Their agents were walking around talking calmly to people, recording notes on tablets, listening rather than barking out orders. There were no guns on display, and Ross wondered whether the laser barrier was about keeping the onlookers out rather than the detainees in. The only hardware visible was being operated by three agents toting hand-held parabolic dishes, like miniature satellite receivers or listening devices. They were standing at roughly equal distances, forming an equilateral triangle on the edges of the plaza. It was like they were scanning for something. Ross heard the word ‘quarantine’ muttered by several passers-by.

  The other word on everybody’s lips was ‘corruption’.

  ‘Damn it,’ Juno muttered. ‘Never seen any Integrity in Pulchritupolis before. I was hoping we might make contact with my friend, Melita, but with so much black swarming around, she could have blown town, or at the very least changed face and gone to ground.’

  ‘Yeah, but she could change it right back when she found you,’ said a female voice from nearby. She sounded Hispanic, her tones mellifluous and reassuring.

  Ross turned to his right and saw a blonde who so perfectly illustrated Juno’s barb about a fifteen-year-old dork’s idea of womanhood that he had initially taken her for an NPC. Right before his eyes her face transformed. Ross didn’t know whether it was the work of an expert designer, a refinement of the old her or a perfect likeness, but it certainly wasn’t an off-the-peg approximation of classical good looks. There was a sharpness to her features that might almost be harsh if she wasn’t smiling.

  Her hair became instantly dark and her height reduced, while the pink billowing dress she had been falling out of morphed into a neatly fitting white jumpsuit. In order to continue blending in, her wardrobe selection was still Seventies sci-fi, but she had evidently opted for the Battlestar Galactica end of the range.

  ‘Melita!’ Juno confirmed, reaching out to embrace her friend. ‘It’s great to see you.’

  There was true warmth there, Ross observed. It was reassuring to learn that Juno didn’t hate everybody, but on the downside it meant he could no longer use that as the explanation for why she was so down on him.

  ‘And it’s a big relief to see you,’ Melita replied. ‘I came as soon as I got the message. I was sincerely hoping you weren’t among that crowd in the plaza, but it was getting to the stage I’d have settled for that over the alternative.’

  ‘It was touch and go,’ Juno admitted.

  ‘But I’m forgetting myself,’ Melita said, turning to Ross. ‘You must be Bedlam.’

  He was glad Melita had taken the initiative on introductions, as he suspected Juno would have just gone on acting like he wasn’t there. He offered her a hand to shake by way of affirmation but was starting to feel self-conscious about responding to the name. His old online moniker had helped galvanise him in the battle zones of Graxis but it was becoming an ever-poorer fit the further he explored the gameverse, and he was beginning to wish he could apply for a change to something more universally appropriate. Right now Gormless Spare Wheel would be about right.

  ‘So what’s the deal with the laser cordon?’ Juno asked.

  ‘People started coming through yesterday, bringing reports that Calastria was corrupting. Most of us were sceptical initially; it wouldn’t be the first time folks got hysterical and overreacted since the threat of corruption gained currency.’

  ‘I’m guessing what began as a trickle soon became a flood,’ said Juno. ‘Because the corruption is real. By the time we got there, everybody else had bailed. Nobody left but NPCs.’

  ‘I assume plenty ended up in Silent Hill and the Minecraft archipelago, but the biggest transit out of Calastria leads here, so they started pouring through the tunnel in serious numbers about eighteen hours ago, universal time. At first they just dispersed, like you’d expect, but then word must have got out to the Integrity.’

  ‘And they showed up quick-smart so they could tell everybody “We told you so”,’ suggested Juno.

  ‘Not so quick: maybe about eight hours ago, and even then it took them a while to decide what to do. They put men at the main crossing and began escorting the arrivals into the plaza. They say it’s for debriefing, but I notice they haven’t let anybody go yet. The concern is that anyone who was there might be affected by the corruption; that they could cause it to spread or might start to suffer after-effects. Everybody’s pretty spooked. The corruption was just a rumour before this: now it’s a confirmed reality.’

  The Sea-bars

  Melita led them a short distance along the pavement to where a stairwell descended into an underground parking lot. They found her vehicle stationary but hovering in a bay two tiers below ground level. Ross quickly ascertained that it couldn’t actually fly: the rules of this world allowed for vehicles to have any appearance you cared to design, which included the appearance of floating on air. He mentioned a cheat from Grand Theft Auto that rendered a car completely invisible, allowing your character to tool around town in a sitting position. Melita said that was possible here but cautioned ‘good luck finding it again’, adding that, unlike in GTA, you couldn’t just walk up and help yourself to any car.

  ‘Not any more, anyway,’ Juno added, as Melita guided the hover-car up a ramp at the rear of the pyramid and into traffic. Juno was sitting in the back seat, letting Ross ride shotgun so that he could see the sights.

  ‘Pulchritupolis started off as a criminal driving game,’ Melita explained. ‘Like GTA but set in the far future. A lot of us wanted to settle here, so we had to make some changes. You’ll notice very few NPCs, in fact none that aren’t performing a useful and strictly non-violent function. First thing that had to go was all the crime lords and gang-bangers. I think we’d all just had one too many brunches ruined by a burning car smashing through the restaurant and killing everybody.’

  ‘Buildings didn’t used to be so pretty either,’ Juno said. It sounded like an in-joke, one that made Melita blush a little.

  ‘The buildings were always pretty,’ Melita argued. ‘That’s why so many of us wanted to live here. But what Juno is alluding to is that there’s been a lot of improvements. That’s what I do mostly: I’m an architect.’

  ‘She’s selling herself short,’ Juno said. ‘Melita’s one of the best architects in the gameverse. There’s a waiting list for a consultation. You can see her work in a hundred worlds.’

  Ross looked up at the massive-scale fusion of the futuristic and the classical that the road system wound around. The size and ambition of the buildings was breathtaking, yet none of it might be described as outrageous or even over-the-top; audacious maybe, but never over-extended or trying too hard.

  ‘Were you an architect … you know … back in …?’ Ross asked almost apologetically.

  ‘Hell no,’ she laughed as she took a ramp up to join a motorway spur that ran level with roughly the tenth floors of the adjacent buildings. ‘I was an elementary school teacher, in San Diego. All those years of study, training and experience and I end up in
a place where my skill set is totally redundant.’

  ‘So what got you interested in designing buildings? Did you discover a knack for it in the Beyonderland?’

  ‘It goes back further than that, to when I went to Scotland on vacation. Hired a car and drove all over the Highlands.’

  It was the first time he’d heard his native land mentioned in what felt like an age. He was almost embarrassed to admit it caused a mild stirring of pride at the thought of it leaving a life-changing impression on a foreign visitor.

  ‘The castles really had an impact then?’ he asked.

  ‘A little. But not as big an impact as the drunk asshole who smashed into me on Skye and put me in hospital. I had spinal injuries, so they couldn’t move me. Spent four months in traction with nothing to do but read and watch TV. You have a lot of property shows in your country, you know that?’

  Ross thought of how Carol was always able to switch to one whenever he left the room for five minutes, regardless of the hour of day or night.

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘I became seriously addicted. The idea of designing spaces and structures just awakened something in me.’

  ‘Did you follow it up when you got out of hospital?’

  ‘I never got out. Went to sleep one night and …’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I spent a lot of time in driving gameworlds, self-prescribed therapy for the effects of my accident. This place was my favourite, but I had a few ideas for how it might be improved.’

  ‘There are plenty of trained architects in the gameverse,’ Juno said. ‘Some of them are pretty good, some of them suck. The latter can’t get past the fact that the old rules don’t apply: imagination doesn’t need to be reined in by pragmatism or compromise or budget – just by good taste and sound judgment. Melita can envisage things in a way that they would need to kinda untrain themselves to do.’

  ‘By the same token,’ Melita added, ‘when those two latter elements are missing, the lack of the restraints Juno mentioned can lead to some spectacularly hideous results.’

  Having once been an avid reader of Cranky Steve’s Haunted Whorehouse, a web reviews repository for excruciatingly awful custom maps, Ross was happy to take her word for it.

  ‘So have there been a lot of changes to other worlds?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. Some of them are unrecognisable from their original state. There are others that are relatively untouched in terms of physical design, but there’s no game-story content left, usually because people want to live there and the NPCs drive them loco. And on some worlds, an even more radical level of customisation has taken place—’

  ‘But let’s not get into that,’ Juno interrupted, trying to sound breezy but failing to disguise a ‘not in front of the children’ message underpinning her intervention.

  ‘How did you change them?’ Ross asked, recalling his futile attempts to make even a dent in a wall of rock back on Graxis.

  ‘It was the Originals,’ Melita answered. ‘They had powers, abilities that the rest of us didn’t. I don’t understand what they did, but the Originals lifted some kind of barriers that allowed us to alter our worlds. I heard it said that they had “opened up the sea-bars”. I think this was in reference to how we could then change the level of the land, and expand into where there used to be water or even just space, but it allowed us to alter much more than that.’

  ‘When you say we …?’

  ‘Oh, I see. No, I don’t mean anybody and everybody. The power to make changes to the sea-bars is entrusted to individuals only temporarily, and only to carry out alterations that have been agreed and approved by vote.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ross. ‘So there’s politics?’

  ‘Absolutely. Every bit as messy and complicated as back in the old world.’

  As they approached a shimmeringly azure lake, Melita’s car descended from the motorway via a sharply curving ramp, and she didn’t accelerate again once the road had flattened out. Ross guessed they must be imminently reaching their destination, and did a double-take when he looked out the driver’s side and saw what he took to be Melita’s house.

  He would confess he’d been expecting something quite palatial, not to mention bigger. By the standards of what he had already seen of Pulchritupolis, it was a pretty modest dwelling, particularly given Melita’s apparently exalted status. Nonetheless, it was still a beautiful dwelling, enhanced by its waterfront location, but what had given him a jolt was its similarity to the pad he had copy-pasted back in the Beyonderland.

  The houses weren’t identical, however. Everything here was just a little more refined, a little more perfect, like he had got the basic floor model and this was the deluxe. Or more like Melita’s was the Platonic ideal of ‘Californian beach house’ and his was just the shadow on the cave wall.

  ‘This is your place?’ he asked, just to be sure, as the hover-car cruised into a palm-lined driveway.

  ‘Bedlam here replicated this for his first crib in the Beyonderland,’ Juno informed her, enjoying his discomfort like a nine-year-old telling her classmate that Ross fancied her.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ Melita said, seemingly oblivious to Juno’s more mischievous intentions. ‘When I designed it, I tried to combine the elements I liked about all the beach houses I used to see when I was growing up. Juno thinks it’s chintzy. I don’t care. When I was a kid I used to dream about living in one, and that never went away.’

  ‘Not so sure about your new garden ornament,’ Juno said archly.

  Ross looked across the lushly verdant lawns and saw a male figure standing like a statue, arms folded in a gesture that could have been contemplation, implacability or just impatience. He was tall and strappingly athletic, a Nordic hero of a figure with flowing blond hair and piercing blue eyes set in a face etched by hard wind and fierce battle, and in the futuristic get-up he was sporting he looked like something Freddie Mercury might have gone to bed and dreamed about after an evening watching box sets of Spartacus and Star Wars.

  ‘Oh … yes,’ Melita said apologetically. ‘He came running when he heard about Calastria. Good guy to have by your side if things get messy, but … well, he is what he is.’

  ‘Who is he?’ Ross asked, as it seemed nobody was going to tell him before they got out of the car.

  ‘An asshole,’ Juno said unhelpfully, though her disdain did give Ross a glimmer of optimism that he was about to encounter an ally. If this guy was someone else that Juno found annoying, then maybe he was okay.

  ‘But he’s our asshole,’ said Melita. ‘His name is Skullhammer,’ she added, which kind of told Ross all he needed to know.

  Skullhammer surveyed Ross briefly with suspicion bordering on hostility as he approached the house, but mostly kept his eyes looking out towards the road. He seemed dissatisfied by whatever he had seen or not seen, reluctant to come inside.

  Melita’s beach house – or technically lake house – looked genuinely lived in, a real dwelling complete with the clutter that went with day-to-day existence, as opposed to a clinical space for a game to take place in or some coldly elegant item of eye-candy designed to show off a graphics engine. Ross could smell coffee and potpourri. Throw in the scent of bread baking and he’d have thought she was trying to flog the place.

  There was even a TV, or at least a video screen of some kind, taking up most of one wall. It was showing the situation down-town at the plaza, a text marquee scrolling across at the bottom with the latest updates.

  ‘This is a disaster,’ Skullhammer said, referring to the events on screen. ‘I came as soon as I heard that this was where most of the refugees ended up.’

  His accent was English and somewhat theatrical, having a particular flavour of artifice about it that Ross couldn’t quite nail. He spoke like somebody accustomed to being the most important person in the room. Ross wondered what his status was within the resistance, as he had still felt no need to introduce himself or ask who Ross was.

  ‘Where were you?’ Juno asked. R
oss could tell she was making an effort to be polite. He wondered if this was her being deferential or whether she was genuinely seeking information.

  ‘I was in Fortune City,’ said Skullhammer. ‘Setting up a spoof. Ravenwind stayed, overseeing the final touches.’

  ‘What’s a spoof?’ asked Ross.

  Skullhammer looked at him like he’d farted.

  ‘It’s a fake transit,’ Melita explained. ‘The Integrity think they’re shutting down a link between Dead Rising 2 and the Lego Racers Islands, but it’s just a decoy.’

  ‘Good work,’ Juno said.

  Skullhammer grimaced, shaking his head a little.

  ‘We’re just sticking our thumbs in the dyke. They’re shutting down more and more transits every day, and they’re only going to scale up their efforts after this. They’ll have massive popular support as word spreads about Calastria.’

  ‘No kidding,’ Melita agreed. ‘People are gonna be scared, and scared people will accept the harshest measures if they think it will keep them safe.’

  ‘I hate to be the one pointing out the elephant in the room,’ said Juno, ‘but having just been ringside, I can assure you there’s a damn good reason people are scared. The corruption ain’t a campfire story any more; it’s real, and we gotta consider whether the whole game just changed.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Skullhammer spat dismissively. ‘We now know the corruption isn’t a phantom threat, but we still don’t got proof that traffic between worlds is what’s causing it. We don’t know what caused Calastria to corrupt, and those Integrity lamers are scrambling around for information themselves.’

  Ross took in Skullhammer’s absurdly masculine appearance as he homed in on the mismatch between speech and voice. Don’t got proof. Integrity lamers. The accent wasn’t his. He deduced that it wasn’t just skins and models you could change here, and Skullhammer must have gone for one that sounded more in character for the persona he was inhabiting. Ross also deduced that the old-world Skullhammer was not merely less god-like and battle-weathered in his appearance, but considerably younger too.