He wound up and really put his shoulder into it. She flinched and tried to brace herself, but she knew there was no bracing yourself for what this felt like.
The little black tongues rattled as they contacted with her, at which point she felt … precisely nothing.
Her assailant looked puzzled for a moment, wondering why she didn’t fall down. He lashed her again, with no effect. She was aware of the contact, but there was no pain, no damage.
Skullhammer was observing with keen interest as he climbed back to his feet. In a mounting panic the samnite hefted his rifle and delivered a blast straight to Skullhammer’s chest, point blank. Once again, torment and debilitation failed to ensue.
‘Well, this is awkward,’ said Juno.
Pwnage
‘Wherever you need to get to next, just let me know,’ Jennifer said. ‘I could draw this dump from memory: every time I came here I took the long way around so that I could learn the layout.’
‘No need,’ Ross told her.
He could see the whole place as wireframe, could noclip his way through the walls, the ceilings and the floors. He didn’t have to, though. Instead he collapsed them, dissolved them, hollowing out the Citadel to clear a path to the chamber at its heart where Ankou guarded the secret gateway.
As he and Jennifer rose towards it on a moving platform Ross had created, Ankou himself tore down the last of the walls, drawing the very fabric of the place into himself to replenish his power.
He had become enormous. He was thirty feet tall, a barely humanoid mass rounding upon his approaching enemies with two fearsome cannons that were the closest things he had to limbs. As he moved, Ross saw that there were several thick tentacle-like tubes connecting him to a wide hexagonal pool of that pulsatile black rock-metal-plastic. He wasn’t drawing his power from it, though; it was drawing its power from him.
Ankou opened fire with the cannons: their sound deafening, their muzzle-flash blinding, their effect bugger-all.
‘Sorry,’ Ross explained. ‘Altered the server-side variables so your guns deliver zero damage points. I’m a cheating bastard, I know.’
‘You’re altering the rules?’ the blob asked, confusion and anger detectable in a voice that was otherwise becoming less human by the word. ‘How are you doing this?’
‘Admin privileges. See, big guy, your problem is you never played enough games. If you had, you’d understand there’s one rule that matters above all others.’
Ross produced his own weapon, the one that would finish this. He could have any gun in the gameverse, so he chose the crappy default blaster he started off with on Graxis. The only pity was there was no way of seeing the look on Ankou’s face, as he no longer appeared to have one.
‘And what rule is that?’ the blob asked contemptuously.
‘If you act like a dick, you’ll get kicked from the server.’
Ross pulled the trigger and sent the tiniest quantum of Ankou’s memory-violating energy zooming into his oleaginous mass.
There was no visible effect at first, but then the implosion got underway as the code Neurosphere had merged him with began feeding back on itself in an exponential chain reaction.
‘Will that erase him?’ Jennifer asked, Ross being unsure from the concern in her tone whether she was worried that it would or that it wouldn’t.
‘Only if he doesn’t disengage from the amalgam. It’s his call if he wants to live.’
The black mass thrashed and throbbed some more, growing smaller and smaller, then a human shape took form in the midst of it and suddenly broke free. The instant it did, the black mass vanished, compressing itself into a tiny square object that fell to the floor with a clatter.
Ankou was left standing next to it, a few feet in front of a now-shimmering hexagon of coloured light. Naturally, he looked like Zac Michaels, and Ross bit back the obvious remark about his previous appearance being less oily.
Ankou glanced down at the object on the ground nearby.
‘Looks like a three-and-a-half-inch floppy,’ Ross told him. ‘Which I’m guessing is you on a good night even with the blue pills.’
Ross kept the gun trained on him, assigning it new properties.
‘What are you going to do with me?’ Ankou asked anxiously.
‘I’m going to give you a choice, which is more than you were looking at if you had succeeded. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas. What were you expecting? Some virtual paradise as reward? Seventy-two virgins?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well I guess you were never going to find those in Stirling. I just can’t believe you bought it. Didn’t you think you and your goons would all just be erased once the job was done? Or sold off for military experiments like the rest of us? I mean, put it this way, would you trust a guy like you?’
Ankou managed a smile, maybe two parts self-awareness to three parts perverse pride.
‘Well, when you put it that way,’ he acknowledged. ‘So what’s my choice?’
Ross waved a hand and a rectangular slab appeared, hanging vertically in the air a few feet from Ankou. It was like a swirling curtain of silver beads, a portal beyond which his possible future was occluded.
‘To decide whether you’re a person or a programme,’ he told him. ‘If it’s the former, then you’ll step through this gateway and find a life for yourself here, same as everyone else. If it’s the latter, then I’ll remind you that another name for a programme is an executable. After all, if you’re just a piece of code, you won’t care.’
Ross raised the crappy but lethal blaster once again.
‘You’ve got five seconds to decide.’
Ankou didn’t need five seconds. He put his hands in the air and turned to face the curtain.
‘Don’t shoot,’ he said. ‘I’m walking the plank.’
‘Good call. Can I interpret that as a tacit acknowledgement that “do unto others” applies to DCs as well as meatware?’
‘Self-preservation does anyway,’ he answered, with which he snatched up the disc from the floor and dived headlong into the portal.
Jennifer took a couple of instinctive steps after him, then stopped herself.
‘What did he take?’ she asked anxiously. ‘What was that thing?’
‘Not what he thinks,’ Ross answered, erasing the gateway.
He walked over to the pool of shimmering colours and stared down into it, seeing it simultaneously as a play of lights and a dance of numbers. Ross was looking through the doorway to the Secondverse, where Solderburn had escaped to. So far he had been the only traffic through it, but it was about to become busier than rush hour on the Kingston Bridge. This was what guaranteed Michaels couldn’t try the same thing again: an open connection that would merge Cirrus Nine with the rest of the Neurosphere system. Memento Mori and beyond: everyone who was ever scanned, and the countless worlds they had created since. Its inhabitants had referred to Cirrus Nine as the gameverse, but Ross knew now that it was merely a cluster of little islands. Beyond this portal was a realm that dwarfed it, a staggering multiplicity of worlds, each offering a cornucopia of experiences and possibilities.
But the world he wanted to visit most would remain forever inaccessible.
‘What’s wrong?’ Jennifer asked. ‘You saved everybody here from a thousand horrible fates; in fact you saved an unknowable number of clones of everyone here from a thousand horrible fates. Yet you don’t exactly seem elated in your moment of triumph.’
‘There was no triumph. The bad guy got away.’
‘You let him.’
‘I wasn’t talking about Ankou. He was just a chancer. I was talking about the guy who fucked me over. It’s time I had a word with myself.’
Self-Reflection
Ross and Jennifer were back on Graxis when the response to his communication request came through from the outside. He was on a mission to redeem a promise, as far as that was possible, and thus was searching for Bob the accountant against the familiar backdrop of eterna
lly invading marines and their indefatigably repelling foes.
‘I need to give him the big talk,’ he had told Jennifer. ‘I promised I’d get him back to his family, and I can’t deliver on that.’
‘His family might be out there,’ she replied. ‘Just not as he remembered them. Once he crosses into the Secondverse, there are ways of making contact.’
‘Yeah, all I can do is bring him to the gateway. I can’t promise what he’ll find when he steps through it.’
‘He’ll find the same thing we all do,’ she replied. ‘Hell if you make it. Heaven if you want it to be.’
The incoming transmission took the form of an avatar. It was a perfectly solid-looking holographic object but it could not interact with the environment: it was just a projection, a high-spec video call, its images relaying real-time 3D laser scanning.
He found it a disturbing sight, but it was always going to be. Even if he hadn’t aged a day, it would have been unsettling to see a person who was recognisably himself and yet someone else. He had aged more than a day, though. This was what Ross Baker actually looked like right then in the outside world, but it wasn’t merely the fact that this was a hologram that meant he appeared more artificial than anybody here on the inside. Jennifer had said he now lived in California but she hadn’t mentioned he had gone quite so native. That looked like a lot of surgery.
The avatar said nothing, just stood there. He seemed apprehensive and apologetic, the way Ross knew he always did when he was in the wrong and ready to take his lumps.
‘You’re looking well,’ Ross told him, a precisely measured level of sarcasm in his voice.
He acknowledged it with a nod.
‘This is just the cosmetic,’ the avatar said, his mid-Atlantic accent making Ross cringe. ‘There’s far more been replaced beneath the derma. In fact, you could say that neither of our minds still inhabits the body it used to.’
‘Yours still inhabits the real world,’ he said accusingly.
‘Maybe not for too much longer. Compared to you anyway. I’m envious. You’ll never age, never get sick. I gave you that much, at least.’
‘Gave me …? You took away everything: everyone I loved, everything I had and everything I was ever going to have.’
‘They say when you’ve done something wrong, the hardest part is to forgive yourself. I realise that’s going to be a particularly big ask in this case. I know what I took from you. I know what was taken from everybody – that’s what’s driven my campaigning for DC rights. But that’s also why I had to do what I did. You were the best chance we had of saving everyone in there from Michaels.’
‘And did you think this bought you absolution, is that it?’
‘There is no absolution. It’s the resurrectionist’s price: the same Faustian pact the anatomists entered when they started robbing graves to get their specimens. When you enter that pact, you know you’ll be paying the price forever.’
‘From where I’m standing, it looks like I’m the one paying.’
‘I know. But what would you have had me do? It was … logical. The needs of the many …’
No, Ross thought: do not go there.
‘… outweigh the needs of the few,’ the avatar went on. ‘Or the one.’
He fucking went there.
‘But you weren’t the one. I was. It cost you nothing and cost me everything. So don’t try tugging my heartstrings with your lame Wrath of Khan comparison. I didn’t make a noble sacrifice, because I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t volunteer.’
‘Yes, but I knew that if it was me, I’d volunteer. And as, in a manner of speaking, it was me, then I felt qualified to make the call.’
‘But it’s not the same call. You’ve had your life: marriage, kids, California uber alles. The scale of the sacrifice would look different if you were the guy who just stepped into that scanner.’
The avatar nodded, conceding the point. Finally it looked like Ross had met someone whom he could defeat in an argument. Then the avatar ruined it by stabbing home a last-minute equaliser.
‘So what call would you make?’ his future self asked. ‘Tell me, if it had been your choice: would you give up your future in the real world to save all the people in that one?’
Ross didn’t answer, though it was kind of pointless taking the fifth when the other person knew what you were thinking.
He tried to come up with something magnanimous to say before terminating the connection, but opted for ‘Fuck you’ instead.
Jennifer gave him an apologetic look.
‘You should be angry at me too,’ she said. ‘We took this decision together.’
‘You didn’t. The real-world Jennifer did. You’re the one who’s stuck here, not her. See, I think I worked out why Solderburn never came back once he’d found a way out. He must have thought that sooner or later someone – one of the Originals probably – would suss he was responsible for putting everybody there. All those people cut off from their loved ones, cut off from their lives, left wondering why. He must have been terrified of them finally being given someone to blame. But the Solderburn in here was as much a victim as everybody else. Jay Solomon put him here, just like Ross Baker put me here.’
‘None of us asks to be born,’ Jennifer told him. ‘But I didn’t hold it against you and Mum that you brought me into the world and gave me life without running it past me first. Not after the age of about fourteen, anyway.’
Ross couldn’t help but smile. He threw an arm around her and placed a small kiss on the top of her head. As he did, he felt the heat of the Graxis sunshine on his shoulders. Here it was never night, never cold.
‘I suppose there are some advantages to this place,’ he admitted. ‘I bet it’s fucking raining in Stirling.’
Final Reward
Once more Ankou experienced that revolting sensation of the world around him swallowing itself and then vomiting it forth again. It didn’t get any easier to endure, nor was it delivering him to anywhere he hadn’t already been. He materialised on a depressingly familiar spawn pad, his momentum taking him forward a pace before he could orient himself, and he managed to stop just short of the edge of the cold murky pool that lay in the shadow of the cliff. It ran around like a natural perimeter, this unscalable and impenetrable wall that hemmed him in and permitted no glimpse of what might lie beyond.
He had found no evidence of any transits: just portals between the same few discrete and uniformly desolate regions. According to his HUD, this one was called Claustrophenia and he had just warped there from Death’s Dark Vale. The landscapes all looked like Graxis; the architecture too: lots of sewers and stairways, towers and platforms. He hadn’t seen any NPCs, though. He appeared to be the only person here.
He had been conned.
This was the final fuck-you, and its true sting was in how stupid he now felt for believing his enemy would have let him off so lightly.
You’ll step through this gateway and find a life for yourself here, Baker had said, presumably his idea of poetic justice. He had stranded him on one barren and lonely world, unable to escape: just like the Integrity had been prescribing for everybody else. Oh, the pathos, the irony. Colour me suitably ashamed.
Self-righteous prick.
He didn’t think he could possibly feel any worse. It was bad enough that he had failed so comprehensively in his mission, but what burned all the more was the nature of it. Not only had he been defeated by Ross fucking Baker, but he’d been played like a rube by the guy’s daughter.
Strictly speaking, he wasn’t stranded in one place, but in six or seven mini-worlds from which he was able to come and go at will using his pitifully function-limited new HUD. However, that was the extent of his freedom. There was no way out. No food or drink either; the protocols meant it wasn’t necessary, but if he was stuck here forever, he was going to seriously miss snarfing a porterhouse and washing it down with a Napa Zinfandel.
One thing there was a shitload of, however, was guns. After all the In
tegrity weapons had been rendered useless, Ankou had expected to find these ones neutralised too, but it turned out they all did deliver damage. There was no pain, though; only hit points. Evidently the place was some kind of combat simulation: no doubt another poignant statement from Baker regarding what Ankou’s plans had been for the inhabitants of the menagerie.
He looked up at the purple sky and shouted.
‘Okay, what the fuck. You made your point. You won and I’m real sorry. Come on: what do you want from me? You want tears of contrition? You want me on my knees? Seriously, you can order off the menu here. God knows I would.’
A moment later he felt that horrible dissolving sensation again as he was involuntarily respawned about a quarter-mile from where he had been standing. At least it appeared that someone was listening.
There was a shimmering disturbance in the air in front of him, and suddenly he found himself looking at the biggest, baddest, craggiest, most ripped-looking and thoroughly scary hunk of masculinity he had ever seen.
The new arrival’s name flashed up on the HUD next to his own, each adjacent to the corresponding figure ‘0’.
Ankou held his arms apart in a gesture of appellate cooperation.
‘Okay, whoever you are, I just want to stress that I have no quarrel with you, I pose you no threat and I am entirely willing to cooperate. I am one hundred per cent at your disposal. Just tell me what it is you want me to do.’
A countdown commenced, starting at ten seconds.
The Reaper grinned, priming his railgun.
About the Author
Since his award-winning debut Quite Ugly One Morning, Christopher Brookmyre has established himself as one of Britain’s leading crime novelists. This hasn’t stopped people from nagging him to write SF instead, and he hopes they think this was worth it.
Find out more about Christopher Brookmyre and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net
Bedlam Page 38
