‘It might look from a certain perspective like it was an inexorable procession towards success, but the truth is, this whole thing was in the balance until she intervened. Between the Diasporadoes making a nuisance of themselves and the Originals busily punching new holes in the fabric of this place, our efforts often felt like flattening bubbles in wallpaper. Every time we made some progress, a new setback popped up elsewhere. But she turned it around. She’s a closer. Infiltrated the resistance, sniffed out where the Originals were hiding, and then, to top it all, she got the most powerful Original of them all to journey right into our hands.’
Ross couldn’t help but gape in confusion as the implications suggested themselves.
Then Ankou laughed, an ugly gurgling sound, like blood bubbling down between the gobbets of congealed flesh in the drainage sluice of that torture cell.
‘Oh dear God, you didn’t think I meant you, did you? No, I’m talking about that tireless thorn in my flesh, The Captain. For the longest time she rendered our attempts to make use of space travel more trouble than they were worth. Without her we would have wrapped this thing up ages ago. Have you any idea how long it takes to get one of our tanks to the other end of the gameverse travelling only over land?’
Ross wanted to hang his head in despair but it was pulled too tight against the pillar.
‘Hey, don’t give yourself such a hard time about it,’ Iris said. ‘You got played by a pro.’
As she spoke, she transformed again, her body morphing before his eyes into that of the person who had rescued him from the torture cell.
‘Dude,’ she said in Solderburn’s voice. ‘Words like “hello, glad to see you, thanks for saving my ass”. That kinda thing.’
‘That was her masterstroke,’ said Ankou. ‘Making the resistance think you were somehow important. Why do you think we would let you escape so easily? It was all a set-up in order to ensure word got around that not only was I personally interested in interrogating you, but that none other than the illustrious Solderburn had returned from exile to intervene.’
‘So now you know the best-kept secret in the gameverse,’ she said, transforming back into the version of herself as she had appeared in the Hollywood alley. ‘The double-agent was you.’
Ross closed his eyes for a moment, though it couldn’t stop him seeing everything with stark clarity now.
‘That nice new Diasporado HUD she gave you, it had a tracking device built in so that we would always know where you were, not to mention relaying everything you saw or heard.’
‘I did tell you I worked for Neurosphere,’ Iris said. ‘Freelance, anyway. They furnished me with a copy of Solderburn’s voice files, and upon my instruction uploaded an ancient scan of your good self to be my secret weapon – after I’d had a peek at your memories to help me refine my Solderburn impression. I told you there were things about the real world that it wouldn’t be helpful for you to know – I just omitted to clarify that I meant helpful for me, not you.’
‘Why me?’ Ross managed to croak.
‘Two reasons,’ Ankou answered. ‘Iris will tell you the first.’
‘Because your prototype scan was never uploaded to the gameverse. This meant that when you belatedly showed up, I knew the other Originals would assume it was portentous. They might even think you were a new Original, here to turn the tide. You’re not, though, as you’re acutely aware. It wasn’t being prototype scans that gave the Originals their powers; it was the early version of the synthesis mounting software, which was replaced way, way back. You’d need to have been uploaded using that in order to have special privileges, but you weren’t. You were uploaded to be our bitch.’
‘Bringing us to the second reason,’ said Ankou. ‘Which is that out in the real world, the real Ross Baker has been a self-righteous gnat at my picnic, so it’s my pleasure to make you the instrument that finally lets me swat him away.’
Ross could only stare gormlessly.
‘Oh, that’s right. You’re a little behind on current events, aren’t you? Nobody’s had the heart to tell you just how long they’ve really been here, and thus how long has passed in the outside world. I’d hate to put you out of your misery on that score, because I’m truly relishing your misery, so let’s just say it’s been a while. You’d be right to worry which of your loved ones are dead or alive though, but I’ll throw you a bone and tell you one I know for sure: the Sandman himself – your work buddy Alexander Todd. The reason he was off work turned out to be that he was sitting dead in his car the whole time. Yeah, pressure of work, wife leaving him, all that stuff. Stuck a hose in his tail-pipe and logged out.’
Ross glared towards Iris again, impotently raging at her merciless deceptions.
‘Don’t be so bitter towards Iris,’ Ankou said. ‘She didn’t lie to you about everything. You’ll get what you came here for – a way out. As will everybody else. Remember your induction briefing: You won’t get anywhere with this company if you sit there playing games. It’s time you and everyone else here in this overgrown playground went to work.’
‘Where?’ Ross asked, choking back tears.
‘Oh, all sorts of opportunities coming up. We’ll find something appropriate for everybody. You like your war games, don’t you? Your first-person shooters. Yeah.’
Ross watched as a limb began to extend from Ankou’s constantly altering form, horror seizing him as he realised that it was gradually taking the shape of a scourge.
‘I think a career in the military beckons,’ he said. ‘But given your tendency towards insurrection, we’ll need to knock that undisciplined streak out of you first.’
Just a Little Prick
Her face came gradually into focus as consciousness returned. It hadn’t been entirely absent; rather, lost in a storm of inchoate threads of information, none of which ever quite resolved into an image, a sound or even a thought. For a moment he thought what he was seeing was a mere accretion of such fragments, another vision about to dissolve, but it rapidly became sharp and distinct. As before, the pain was gone but the memory of it lurked intimidatingly nearby, like a ned at a cash machine.
Iris was standing before him, only a couple of feet away. Ankou was gone, and with him his scourge, but Ross wasn’t sure right then which one of the pair he hated more.
Something appeared in her hand, like a cross between a flash drive and a hypodermic syringe. At the prompting of a tiny squeeze, a needle shot out from one end, reminding Ross uncomfortably of the spike he’d once had and the damage he had wrought with it. Some flippant part of him tried to distract his fear of the coming onslaught by reflecting that it would have been great for making margaritas. It didn’t work, though. He couldn’t take his eyes off the device. A last trickle of defiance wanted to tell her there was nothing she could inflict upon him that was worse than what he’d already suffered, but it was silenced by fear that she might be about to demonstrate otherwise.
He did manage a brief statement, however.
‘You evil fucking bitch.’
She put a finger to his lips.
‘I blame the parents,’ she said, and thrust the needle into his neck.
Game Over
A phalanx of Secatore guards escorted him into the CEO’s office, a corner suite boasting more glass than the average viticulture biosphere over in Napa. They had unlocked the restraints in the elevator, undoubtedly under strict orders. It wouldn’t do for one of the architects of the company’s success to be seen frog-marched through the senior-executive-level corridors with his wrists clapped in irons. A sight like that could result in a five-point hit on the NASDAQ, for goodness sake.
Zac Michaels sent a cursory glance in Ross’s direction by way of acknowledgement and gestured to him with an outstretched palm, as if to say he’d be with him in a moment. The palm changed to a fist with thumb and pinkie outstretched to explain the delay. He was on the phone, as the expression still went, even though telephony was no longer the conduit. Truth was, the guy could have been ha
ving a board-meeting in his head, multiple audio and video feeds playing behind his eyes, but Ross suspected he was actually talking to nobody: he just wanted to underline the power relationship by making him wait a little longer. It seemed unnecessary given that he’d already left him waiting in a custody office in the basement since they kicked his door in that morning, but sometimes the subtle gesture of dominance trumped the grander one.
Outside the huge windows, the sun was going down, painting the sky in reds and pinks. The day was closing, and closing fast. Ross had been living here in California most of his days but his instincts were still hard-wired by his formative years in Scotland. Sunset was slow there, even in winter: when you saw it dip, you assumed you had time before it became pitch black. Over here, you got far less notice.
Michaels muttered a few last words to whomever he was speaking, wrapping it up. Ross caught something about ‘all moot now, and ultimately no damage was done, so we can let him down from the naughty step’. It was ostensibly private, but unmistakably for his benefit.
Zac Michaels: one-time low-level corporate enforcer and obsequious functionary, now chief executive officer of Neurosphere. Almost every part of his body had been replaced over the years, but no matter how you altered the constituent componentry, the overall result was still an oily prick.
‘Ross, Ross, Ross,’ he said, his voice pitched between conciliatory, admonishing and exasperated. He didn’t offer a hand; the only shaking was by his head, gently conveying the ‘whatever are we to do with you?’ vibe. ‘Why don’t you take a seat. I gather you’ve had a rough day.’
‘You mean having half a dozen assault vehicles converge on my beach house, then a team of security drones smash in my front door and drag me off to custody? Don’t sweat it.’
‘I’m sorry it was so heavy-handed, believe me. Something like that shouldn’t be happening to someone of your stature within this company. As you know, it’s an automated response, and the problem was you triggered it while certain of your security privileges were suspended. Under those circumstances, the system couldn’t distinguish between an unauthorised access attempt by a company employee and a potential penetration by some malicious hacker. I’ve been in meetings all day, otherwise I’d have intervened earlier, believe me.’
Believe me. All these decades on, that was still the giveaway that he was lying. And all these decades on, he really didn’t care that you knew.
‘No you wouldn’t.’
Michaels shrugged and gave a little nod, as if to say touché.
‘No, you’re right. I thought a few hours cooling your heels in the basement was appropriate, and truth is I would have had you released sooner if I hadn’t spent all day clearing up your mess and putting out fires so you don’t end up sacked or arraigned.’
‘So I don’t end up arraigned?’ Ross asked him pointedly.
‘I’m not doing anything illegal. Jesus, Baker, we’ve both come a long way since that grimy little compound in Stirling, but some things haven’t changed. You’re still your own worst enemy and it’s still me that’s saving you from yourself.’
‘Aye, it’s a good thing Neurosphere isn’t relying on revolutionary scientific innovation to make money. I’m sure a genius like you would have us trading just as high if Jay Solomon and I had never come along.’
‘The difference between us, Ross, is that I have always understood the value of what you bring to the table, but you’ve always been too blinkered to see the reciprocal. This isn’t about share prices or opening up a new revenue stream. What I am doing right now will put us in a position with the military that will secure untold opportunities – for all of us.’
‘What you are doing right now will put us morally in a position alongside any black-market scan vendor on the streets of Mumbai or Lagos.’
‘Oh dry your eyes, Baker. Come on: you won that fight. You got your law passed. And as any black-market scan vendor on the streets of Mumbai or Lagos would tell you, we seem to be the only people obeying it.’
‘So that’s who you’re measuring yourself against in terms of ethics?’
‘I’m not the one who created this menagerie, if you want to talk ethics. You won’t make me a surrogate for your guilty conscience. I’m not the one who’s done something I’m ashamed of.’
‘And is that why you locked me out of the whole system? Because you’ve nothing to be ashamed of?’
‘Actually, if you remember, I initially only locked you out of a small part of the system, and I did it knowing that you would take the bait and hack your way in. That put you in violation of Article 774 and allowed me to suspend your access to the whole system until an investigation was concluded, giving us time to do what we needed. It’s all moot now anyway. It’s over. Look.’
Michaels sent him a couple of feeds, instantly projected on to his field of vision. One showed the file integrity readings, more and more scans showing one hundred per cent, ready for extraction. The other displayed the current status of a rogue upload, introduced to the system that morning but now safely isolated.
Neither image came as a surprise, but Ross still had to suppress a show of emotion in seeing that the outcome was now all but confirmed.
‘Your last-ditch little Hail Mary pass was tracked from the start,’ Michaels told him. ‘I know you were always pretty hot at those first-person shooters, but the world of business is real-time strategy. If you try to play my game, you’ll lose every time.’
Ross glanced at the two information read-outs again. First one, then both of them blacked out, right on cue.
He glanced up at Michaels, who suddenly didn’t look quite so confident.
‘You sure about that?’
Read-Only Memory
Ross closed his eyes and braced himself for pain, but instead what he experienced was a rush like no drug had ever effected in the human mind. She had injected him with new memories: memories from a future he’d never got to live, played out in the present tense. They were not complete, just shards and splinters, snapshots and highlights. At first they were like fragments in a kaleidoscope, but then they coalesced in his mind, assembling themselves into a picture that made sense.
He and Solderburn in the R&D lab, Ross working on a very early synthesis model and beginning to see startling indications of just how complex the scan results might be. An experiment to see how a scan might interact with a virtual environment. Ross rooting around for a basic world-builder program; meanwhile Solderburn cuts to the chase and boots up the first 3D game that happens to be on the desktop. It is Starfire, which in times gone by Solderburn used to run on a partition as a multiplayer server: he, Ross and whoever else fancied staying behind after work to duke it out with each other or against Reaper bots.
They watch as the uploaded entity begins battling his way through the map; then, purely in the interests of science, Solderburn spends twenty minutes playing deathmatch against, technically, himself.
Two geeks stay late into the night, energised. Ross working out of hours is a rarity now, done purely on his own terms. The day he learned Carol was pregnant, he walked back out of the scanning cubicle having realised he was the one with the power, and management pissing him about had been a long-term gambit to prevent him noticing this. He called their bluff, told them what he was here to do and what he wasn’t. That was years ago. He never looked back.
Solderburn begins uploading some more scans but Ross is conflicted about the idea. He has deduced from the behaviour he is seeing exhibited within the game that these are not glorified AI bots they’ve created. He is aware that the scan, if uploaded, could be a consciousness that wouldn’t know it was anything other than the person who lay down in the scanning cubicle. He argues that it may be unethical but this is Solderburn he’s talking to. He knows the guy is only going to do it anyway as soon as he leaves.
Solderburn ridicules him for being precious and melodramatic, and Ross has to concede that this may be the case. Nonetheless, he remains sufficiently squeamish abou
t the idea as to encrypt his own scan so that Solderburn can’t upload it.
It is late the next morning when he returns to the lab and Solderburn shows him something astonishing. The scans are no longer in Starfire. They have found a way to access other games on the same hard drive. By evening, lights are blinking to indicate that they have accessed other drives on the array. More astonishing still, some weeks later they observe that the scans are making changes to the games. They realise events are moving at their own digital clockspeed there, only slowing to real time whenever he and Solderburn interact with a game, a temporal alteration the scans don’t appear to notice.
They expand the experiment, loading more and more games, more and more scans. Ross alters the synthesis model so that the new uploads have to abide by the rules of the worlds in which they find themselves, otherwise it will be anarchy. He and Solderburn edit the memory files to erase recollection of the scanning process itself, so that the entities experience a less jarring splice: going to bed and waking up somewhere new instead of walking in one door and the world having changed when they open it again.
Solderburn reveals their work-in-progress to the suits, playing it as a trump card to win two tricks at once. By doing so he secures himself and Ross a blank cheque in terms of time and resources, while simultaneously taking the ethical considerations out of Ross’s hands and above his pay grade. Ross is thus vindicated in his decision to secret away his own file, as it soon becomes clear he will not have the option to encrypt any others. As the Simulacron is rolled out into hospital testing, the company regards the resultant scans as belonging to Neurosphere rather than their subjects. So begins, in an industrial estate in Stirling, an argument over a whole new definition of ‘intellectual property’ that will ultimately reach (though not quite end at) the US Supreme Court.
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