She was here under false pretences. How do people habituated to extreme, unreal physical violence punish betrayal?
Like a player whose avatar, whose eye; whose I stands on the brink of a dreadful abyss, about to step onto the miniscule tightrope that crosses it, Chloe was truly frightened.
ᴓ
She was summoned to breakfast by a clear chime and a sexless disembodied voice. The gamer she’d liked least, on a very cursory assessment, was alone in the kitchen.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Warks, you’re Chloe. Don’t ever call me Matt, you don’t know me. You ready for your initiation?”
“Of course.”
“Get yourself rationed up.” He sat and watched; his big soft arms folded, while Chloe, trying to look cool about it, wrangled an unfamiliar coffee machine, identified food sources, and put together cereal, milk, toast, butter, honey…
“You know that’s a two-way screen in your room, don’t you? Like Orwell.”
“Oh, wow,” said Chloe. “Thank God I just didn’t happen to stand in front of it naked!”
“Hey, set your visibility to whatever level you like. The controls are intuitive.”
“Thanks.” Chloe gave him her best bright-student gaze of inquiry. “Now what happens?”
“Finish your toast, go back to your room. Review your costume, armour and weaponry options, which you’ll find pretty basic. Unless maybe you’ve brought some DW grey-market collateral you plan to install? On the sly?”
She shook her head earnestly. “Not me!”
Warks smirked. “Yeah, I know. I’m house security. I’ve deep-scanned your devices, and checked behind your eyes and between your ears also: you’re clean. Make your choices, don’t be too ambitious, and we’ll be waiting in the Rumpus Room.”
He then vanished. Literally.
Chloe wished she’d spotted she was talking to a hologram, and hoped she’d managed not to look startled. She wondered if Matt, er, Warks’s bullying was him getting in character, or was she being officially hazed?
They’re going to challenge me, she thought. They have a belief that they know is unbelievable, and whatever I say they’ll think I’m planning to make them look like fools. I’ll need to win their trust.
ᴓ
The Rumpus Room was in the basement. The hardware was out of sight, except for a different set of Boxes, and a carton of well-worn foam batons. The gamers sat around a table again: long and squared this time, not circular. A wonderful, paper-architecture 3D map covered almost the whole surface. It was beautiful and detailed: a city at the heart of a knot of sprawling roads; a wasteland that spread around it over low hills: complete with debased housing, derelict industrial tract; scuzzy tangled woodland—
“We need to correct your ideas,” said Josie Nicks, the black-haired woman. “I’m Lete in there, called the Whisperer, I’m a shaman. This is not a ‘Post Apocalyptic’ game. Or a ‘Futuristic Dystopia’. Darkening World is set now. It’s fictional, but completely realistic.”
But you have zombies, thought Chloe. Luckily she remembered in time that modern ‘zombies’ had started life, so to speak, as a satirical trope about brain-dead consumerism, and kept her mouth shut.
“Second thing,” said Sol, the gamer with no hair in front, and a skinny pigtail down his back. “They call me Artos, it means The Bear. You know we have a karma system?”
“Er, yeah. Players can choose to be good or evil, and each has its advantages?”
“Wrong. In DW we have reality-karma. Choose to be good, you get no reward—”
“Okay, I do remember, it was in your wiki. But I thought if you choose good every time, and you complete the game, you can come back with godlike powers?”
“I was speaking. Choose good: no reward. Choose evil, be better off, but you’ve degraded the Q, the quality of life, for the whole game. Keep that up and get rich and powerful: but you’ll do real damage. Everyone feels the hurt, they’ll know it was you, and you’ll be hated.”
“Thanks for warning me about that.”
“The godlike power is a joke. Never happens. Play again, you start naked again. If you ever actually complete this game, please tell someone. It’ll be a first.”
“In battle, you’re okay,” Lete reassured her. “Anything goes, total immunity—”
“Another thing,” the redhead broke in. “I’m Aileen, as you know: Beat when you meet me in there. You can’t be unaligned. In battle you can be Military, Non-Com or Frag. You’re automatically Frag; it means outcasts, dead to our past lives, because you’re on our team. We mend trouble, but we sell our swords. Everyone in the Frag has an origin story, and you need to sort that out.”
“You can adapt your real world background,” suggested Reuel, “Since you’re not a gamer. It’ll be easier to remember.”
“There is no kill limit—” said Jun, aka Kardish the Assassin, suddenly.
Chloe waited, but apparently that was it. The team’s official murderer must be the laconic type. Which made sense, if you thought about it.
“Non-battlefield estates are Corporate, Political and Media,” resumed Sol. “They merge into each other, and infiltrate everybody. They’re hated as inveterate traitors, but courted as sources of supply. So tell us. Who paid your wages, Chloe?”
Seven pairs of eyes studied her implacably. Darkening World attracted all shades of politics, but this ‘Frag’ house, Chloe knew, was solidly anti-Establishment. Clearly they’d been digging into her CV. “Okay, er, Corporate and Political.” A flush of unease rose in her cheeks, she looked at the table to hide it. “But not directly—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” groaned Warks. “When you meet me in there call me Markus, noob… You guys sound as if you’ve swallowed a handbook. You don’t need to know all that, Chloe. Kill whatever moves, if you can, that’s the entire rules. It’s only a game.”
“Just don’t kill me,” advised Reuel, wryly. “As I’m only friend.”
Warks thumped the beautiful map, crushing a suburb. “Let’s GO!”
Chloe knew what to expect. She’d trained for this. You don the padding on your limbs and body. Box on your head, baton in hand and you’re in a different world. The illusion that you are ‘in the map’ is extraordinary. A Battle Box does things to your sense of space and balance, as well as to your sensory perceptions. You see the enemy; you see your team-mates: you can speak to them; they can speak to you. The rest is too much to take in, but you get instructions on your sidebar from the team leader and then, let battle be joined—
It was overwhelming. Karma issues didn’t arise, they had no chance to arise, there was only one law. Kill everything that moves and doesn’t have a green glowing outline (the green glow of her housemates)—
Who she was fighting or why, she had no idea—
HEY! HEY! CHLOE!
Everything went black, then grey. She felt no pain: she must be dead. She stood in the Rumpus Room, empty-handed, a pounding in her ears. The gamers were staring at her. Someone must have taken the Box off her head: she didn’t remember.
She screamed at them, panting in fury—
“Anyone who says it’s only a game right now! Will get killed, killed, KILLED!”
“Hayzoos!” exclaimed Warks. “What a sicko! Shame that wasn’t live!”
The others looked at him, and stared at Chloe, and shook their heads.
“Maybe…” suggested Aileen, slowly. “Maybe that sidequest—?”
ᴓ
Chloe stayed in her room, exhausted, for the rest of the day. Two hours (by the Game Clock) of rampageous, extreme unreal violence had wiped her out. Her notes on the session were shamefully sparse. When she emerged, summoned for ‘evening chow’ by that sexless voice, she was greeted as she entered the kitchen with an ironic cheer.
“The mighty sicko packs a mean battle-axe!”
At least sicko (or psycho) was a positive term; according to her DW glossary.
“Many big strong guys, first time, come out shaking after they
see just one head sliced off. DW’s neural hook-up is that good. Are you sure you never played before?”
“Never.” Chloe hung her head, well aware she was being hazed again. “I’ve never been on a battlefield like that. I’ve only slain a few zombies, and er, other monsters—”
“You took to it like a natural,” said Reuel. “Congratulations.”
But there was a strange vibe, and it wasn’t only the compliments that rang hollow. The gamers had been discussing her future, and the outcome didn’t feel good.
The Skate And The South Wind
Next morning the chime-voice directed her to go to Reuel’s office after breakfast. Nobody was about. She ate alone, feeling ritually excluded, in the wired-up and Wi-Fi saturated kitchen: surrounded by invisible beings who watched her every move, and who would punish or reward her according to their own secret rules. An abject victim of the tech-media magical worldview she crept to the manager’s office, as cowed as if somebody had pointed a bone at her. The door was shut; she knocked. A voice she didn’t know invited her to enter.
Reuel was not present. A young man with blue, metallic skin, wearing only a kilt of iridescent feathers, plus an assortment of amulets and weapons, sat by her sponsor’s desk. His eyes were a striking shade of purple, his lips plum-coloured and beautifully full. His hair, braided with more feathers, was the shimmering emerald of a peacock’s tail. He was smiling calmly, and he was slightly transparent.
“Oh,” she said. “Who are you?”
Three particularly fine feathers adorned his brow: blue, red and grass-green.
“I am Reuel’s friend, Pevay. You are Chloe. I am to be your Spirit Guide.”
“That’s great,” said Chloe, looking at the fine feathers. “Thanks.”
“You’re wondering how I can be seen ‘in the real world’? It’s simple. The house is wified for DW holos.” Pevay spread his gleaming hands. “I am in the game right here.”
“I’m not getting thrown out?”
“Having proved yourself in battle, you are detailed to seek the legendary 56 Enamels; a task few have attempted. These are jewels, highly prized, said by some to possess magical powers. I could tell you their history, Chloe.”
The hologram person waited, impassive, until she realised she had to cue him.
“I’d love to know. Please tell.”
“They were cut from the heart of the Great Meteorite by an ancient people, whose skills are lost. Each of the 56 has a story, which you will learn in time, Chloe.”
This time she recognised the prompt. “Okay. Where are they now?”
“Scattered over the world-map. Do you accept the quest, Chloe?”
Chloe hadn’t emphasised her interest in the ‘aliens’ story. She’d talked about sharing the whole game house experience. But she wasn’t sure she believed her luck. I’m looking at Reuel, she thought. The whole secret is that Reuel likes to dress up in NPC drag, and he’s going to keep me busy on a sidequest so I can’t ruin the team’s gameplay. Then she remembered the seventh shadowy character, at the meeting on the shore.
Her heart leapt and her spine tingled.
“I accept. But I don’t yet know if I’m staying, and it sounds like this could take forever?”
“Not so. I know all the cheats.” Pevay grinned. His teeth were silvery white, and pointed. He had a lot of them. “With me by your side you’ll be picking them up in handfuls.”
ᴓ
She went down to the Rumpus Room alone. The basement was poorly lit, drably decorated and smelled of old sweat. Thick cork flooring swallowed her footsteps. Her return to anthropology’s Eden had morphed into a frat-house horror movie, or (looking on the bright side) a sub-standard episode of Buffy. The map was gone. The Battle Boxes lay on the table, all personalised except for one. Glaring headlamp eyes, a Day of the Dead Mexican Skull. A Jabba the Hutt toad, a Giger Alien with Hello Kitty ears. A dinosaur crest, and a spike from which trailed a lady’s (rather grubby) crimson samite sleeve.
Invisible beings watched her; elders or ancestors. Scared and thrilled, the initiate donned the padding, lifted the unadorned Box and settled it on her head. She tried not to make these actions look solemn and hieratic, but probably failed—
She stood in an alley between high dark dirty walls. She heard traffic. As the synaesthetics bedded in, she could even smell the filthy litter. Pevay was beside her in his scanty peacock regalia: looking as if he’d been cut and pasted onto the darkness.
Who are you, really? she wondered. Reuel? Or some other gamer in NPC drag, messing with Reuel and his friends?
But she would ask no questions that implied disbelief; not yet, anyway. Chloe sought not to spoil the fun.
“Are you ready, Chloe?”
“Yes.”
“Good. All cities in the Darkening World are hostile to the Frag except one, which you won’t visit for a long time. To pass through them unseen you need to learn what’s called the Leopard Skill, in the Greater Southern Continent where your people were formed. Here we call it fox-walking. You have observed urban foxes?”
“Er, no.”
“You’ll soon pick it up. Follow me.”
To her relief, fox-walking was a game skill she’d met before. She leapt up absurdly high walls and scampered along impossibly narrow gutters, liberated by the certainty that she couldn’t break her neck, or even sprain an ankle. Crouching on rooftops she stared down at CGI crowds of citizens, rushing about. The city was stuffed with people, who apparently all had frenetically busy night-lives. She was delighted when she made it to the top of a seventy-storey tower: though not too clear how this helped them to ‘cross the city unseen’.
Her Box sidebar told her she’d acquired a new skill.
Pevay was waiting by a tall metal gantry. The glitzy lights and displays that had painted even the zenith of the night sky were fading. Mountains took shape on the horizon. “That’s where we’re going,” he said. “Meteorite Peak is the highest summit.”
“How do we get there?” She hoped he’d say learn to fly.
“Swiftly and in luxury; most of the way. But now we take the zip-wire.”
ᴓ
The Jet-Lift Terminal was heaving with beautiful people, even at dawn. Chloe stared, admiring the sheen and glow of wealth: until one of them suddenly stared back. A klaxon blared, armed guards appeared. Chloe was grabbed, and thrown out of the building.
Apparently her guide didn’t have a cheat for idiotic human reflexes. It took her a while to reach the departure lounge, where he was waiting at the gate. A woman in uniform demanded her travel documents. Chloe didn’t know what to do, and Pevay offered no suggestions.
“Guards!” shrieked the woman. Pevay reached over and drew her towards him. He seemed to kiss her on the mouth. She shrivelled, fell to the red carpet and disappeared.
Hey, thought Chloe, slightly creeped out. What happened to fictional but completely realistic? But she hurried after her guide, while the armed-security figures just stood there.
“Was I supposed to have obtained the papers?”
ᴓ
The “swiftly and in luxury” Jet Lift took them to a viewpoint café near the summit of Meteorite Peak. They stole climbing gear, evaded more guards and set out across the screes. Far below, the beautiful people swarmed over their designer-snowfield resort. The cold was biting.
Chloe reached for her weapons, but found herself equipping camouflage instead.
“I didn’t know I was slaved to you,” she grumbled.
“Not always, but I’m detailed to keep you away from combat. Your enthusiasm is excessive.”
They reached the foot of a near-vertical face of shattered, reddish rock, booby-trapped with a slick of ice. “This stage,” said Pevay “requires the advanced skill Snow Leopard. You’ll soon pick it up, just follow me.”
The correct hand and footholds were warm to the touch: she should have been fine. But she hadn’t thought to consume rations or equip extra clothing and the cold had been draining her health. She felt weak, and slipped often: wasting more health. When she reached the ledge where Pevay was waiting, and saw the taller cliff above them, she nearly cried. She was finished.
“You missed a trick,” said Pevay, sternly. “Remember the lesson.” He gave her a tablet from one of his amulet-boxes, and they climbed on.
The ascent was exhilarating, terrifying; mesmeric. She watched her guide lead the final pitch, and could almost follow the tiny clues that revealed the route – found by trial and error if you saw only the rock: obvious if you were immune to the game’s illusions.
High above the clouds they reached a rent in the cliff face; one last traverse and Chloe stepped into a cave. A chunk of different rock stood in a niche, adorned with tattered prayer flags and faded sacred paintings; a radiant jewel embedded in its surface—
“A shard of the meteorite,” said Pevay. “The ancient people fired their first Enamel here without detaching it from the matrix. Take it, Chloe.”
The jewel lay in her hand, shining with a thousand colours.
“You have won the first Enamel. Save your game, Chloe!”
No, she thought. I’ll do better. She replaced the prize, stepped backwards, and fell.
She stood with her guide again, in the icy wind, at the foot of the crag: an attack-helicopter squadron clattering across the sky behind them.
“Are you crazy?” yelled Pevay, above the din. “You just blew the whole thing!”
“You helped me when I went wrong and I’m grateful, but I want to do it right.”
He seemed at a loss for words, but she thought he was pleased.
“Save your rations. I’ll give you another rocket fuel pill.”
BIG CAT: And Other Stories Page 24
