Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller

by LK Chapman

  Networked

  L K Chapman

  Copyright 2014 LK Chapman

  Cover by Ashley Chapman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner- except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters in Networked are fictitious and bear no intentional resemblance to persons known to me, living or dead.

  This book is also available as a paperback.

  For my husband, Ashley

  You always believe in me

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Connect with LK Chapman

  Too Good for this World

  Anything for Him

  2013

  Chapter 1

  It was around one in the morning on the sixteenth of February that the two years worth of work Dan and I had poured into Affrayed was taken away from us.

  I wasn’t too sure what was happening to start with; all that registered with me was that the code I’d just written was riddled with a mass of errors so numerous I could hardly be bothered to read them. Instead, I sat back in my chair, sighed and closed my eyes to rest them from the glare of the monitors. I was exhausted and I knew that what I’d just written was almost laughably awful. I would have been more surprised if the damn thing had managed to run.

  ‘What’s up?’ Dan asked me.

  I didn’t open my eyes. They felt dry and itchy and it must have been about twelve hours since I’d had a proper break.

  ‘I think I’m going to call it a night,’ I said eventually. ‘This is driving me mad.’

  Dan laughed. ‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ he said, ‘I swear I’ve actually managed to make things worse than they were before I started today.’

  I rubbed my eyes and looked round at him. I wasn’t too sure what he’d actually been doing the whole time since he’d shown up at the flat, but he’d barely moved from where he sat slumped on the sofa, the glow from his laptop making his face a ghostly bluish-white in the semi-darkness.

  ‘Maybe you should stop too,’ I said.

  ‘Nah,’ Dan said, ‘it’s early for me. You should get some sleep though. You look like hell.’

  I laughed, though to be honest, Dan didn’t look much better himself. Not that he ever exactly looked healthy. He ate a lot of crap but not much in the way of proper meals and when I looked at him it made me think of how you get these people who are skinny on the outside and “fat” on the inside, because their diets are so bad that they still end up getting heart attacks or whatever. Dan was skinny as anything. Even his face was sharp and angular, accentuated further by his short, very neat, dark hair and rectangular glasses.

  I was about to turn my computer off when the enormous list of errors caught my attention again. There really were a lot. All I’d done was tweak a few things to try and fix a relatively minor bug and while I knew I hadn’t exactly made a great job of it, there was no way it was as bad as all this.

  ‘What is it?’ Dan said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘See what you make of it.’

  Dan shifted his laptop off his lap and came to stand beside me, drumming his fingers against the desk while he cast his eyes over the huge list of errors.

  ‘Yep,’ he said when he’d finished reading, ‘looks like a total nightmare.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but look at all this.’ I pointed at a whole cluster of similar errors. ‘It’s like a load of the files are missing.’

  Dan read the error messages, his head cocked slightly to one side, a little line between his eyebrows. He didn’t know a great deal about coding, but he knew enough to know what he was looking at.

  ‘So, what are you saying?’ he said, ‘they’re not missing, are they? You must have changed the file names or something.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ I said. ‘I haven’t touched any of that stuff.’

  Dan looked at me as though he thought I was losing it. ‘Seriously, you should just get some sleep mate,’ he said, ‘go and join Lily. She seemed kind of down earlier. I’m alright on my own.’

  ‘Lily went to bed hours ago,’ I said, ‘she’ll be fast asleep by now.’

  I said it more harshly than I intended, but I wasn’t really thinking about Lily, or Dan. The more I looked at the errors, the more sure I became that something was wrong. In the end, I closed everything I was working on and opened up the folder where all my work was supposed to be.

  ‘That’s not enough,’ Dan said when he saw the contents of the folder. Then he pointed urgently at the screen. ‘One of them just disappeared!’ he said, ‘right there, I swear, it just-’

  I watched where he was pointing and another file vanished. Then another, then another. They were vanishing faster than I could keep track of them and in total confusion I closed the window, as if not being able to see the files disappear would stop it from happening.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dan said, ‘open it again!’

  I was so baffled by the whole thing that for a moment or two I seemed unable to do anything, but once I’d got my head together enough to try to reopen it, I simply couldn’t. There weren’t even any folders for Affrayed anymore. As far as I could see, every single scrap of work I’d ever done on the game was gone.

  Dan ran over to his laptop and from the way he started saying, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ it was pretty obvious that the same thing that had happened to my code was now happening to all his work on the game art, and although I rushed over to try to help, there was nothing I could do.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Dan said, ‘what the hell is happening?’

  I tried to think. Everything on my computer seemed completely normal and untouched apart from my work on Affrayed. How could whatever it was that was doing this be so targeted? Why had it gone straight for the game on both my computer and Dan’s laptop? I tried to make sense of it but Dan was driving me mad, he just kept trying to find his work over and over again, going about it with a kind of determined obsessiveness; repeatedly closing eve
rything down, then opening it all up again and getting increasingly upset every time he saw it still wasn’t there.

  ‘Dan, please, stop doing that,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s happened but we’ve got backups. All we’ve lost is what we’ve been working on tonight and by the sound of it that might not be a bad thing.’

  Dan stopped his searching for a moment, and then his face lit up. ‘My computer,’ he said, ‘I’ll call Robyn and get her to check it’s alright.’

  ‘It’s half one in the morning,’ I said.

  Dan had already got his phone out, ‘it’s fine,’ he said, ‘she’ll be up.’

  ‘Well, presumably everything was fine when you left the house earlier,’ I said, ‘and if no one’s turned your computer on...’

  Dan looked torn by indecision. ‘I’ve got to know,’ he said finally, ‘I just want to know my work is safe, somewhere.’

  I left him to call his sister and turned my attention to my own backups of Affrayed. I had quite a few and I was pretty rigorous about having lots of copies of everything. At any rate, I took far more care over it than Dan did. His approach to most things in life was at best random and at worst utterly chaotic.

  First of all I looked at my laptop, but it was hard to concentrate as Dan was talking in a very loud, clear voice, and from the frustrated expression on his face I guessed that Robyn must have been drinking.

  ‘Dan, is this really the best time to-’

  He held up his hand at me. ‘No, Robyn,’ he said with an exaggerated patience that told me he was getting angry, ‘that’s the stuff for DreamChase. I’m working on Affrayed now.’

  I turned away from him and focussed my attention on finding Affrayed on my own laptop, but no matter how much I wanted to see it there, to see the game was safe, that everything was normal, that certainly wasn’t what I found. There wasn’t even a minute or two of the files disappearing like there had been on my computer. This time the files were just gone, like they’d been wiped the second I turned it on.

  In the background, I could hear Dan desperately trying to make sense of what Robyn was telling him.

  ‘Have you opened it?’ he said, ‘Robyn? Have you found all the Affrayed stuff? For God’s sake, how many people are there? Robyn!’

  ‘Tell her to turn it off,’ I said to him. ‘Tell her to turn it off, now.’

  Dan started to rub his forehead as if he couldn’t cope with the pressure of taking in what everybody was saying to him.

  ‘What? Why?’ he said with a puzzled frown.

  ‘It’s not on my laptop, either,’ I said. ‘It must have gone as soon as I turned it on.’

  But I’d lost his attention as he focussed on Robyn again. I could hear all the background noise down the phone even from where I was standing. It sounded like Robyn had thrown a full on house party.

  All of a sudden, the colour drained from Dan’s face and he staggered over to the sofa and sat down heavily on the arm.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. No.’

  He looked up at me, his eyes black and intense behind his glasses.

  ‘You’ve still got other backups, haven’t you? With some of my stuff on as well?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Well, check them then.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘I don’t know whether I should-’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said, ‘just check them.’ He cradled his head in his hands and his panic was infectious. I found myself feverishly checking the last few places Affrayed was supposed to be, hoping to find some remnant of over two years hard work, but there was nothing. Every place Affrayed should be was either blank or corrupted.

  ‘What have you done?’ Dan said when he realised. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I haven’t done anything!’ I said.

  ‘You must have done. It was fine earlier. It was fine an hour ago. Until you started messing with things it-’

  ‘This has nothing to do with what I was doing tonight!’ I said, ‘what the hell is it you think I’ve done? I couldn’t make this happen even if I wanted to.’

  Dan was on his feet now, desperate for someone to blame.

  ‘You’re the one who wrecked all the back-ups,’ he said.

  I stared at him. ‘Are you actually being serious?’ I said, ‘you made me check them all, I knew it wasn’t a good idea-’

  ‘Well, why did you do it then?’

  I was so angry with him that I barely knew what to say, but then the door to the living room opened and Lily burst in. She ran straight over to where Dan and I stood arguing next to my desk and she tried to pull me away like she thought we were going to start fighting or something.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, her eyes huge with fear, ‘why are you shouting at each other? Nick, what’s going on?’

  Chapter 2

  Both of us stared at Lily, temporarily silenced. She looked small and lost, orangey eyes bright with emotion and her chestnut curls tumbling in two long curtains right down to her waist. She’d clearly been woken up by our argument and was still dressed in cream pyjamas covered all over with a pattern of pink roses, her bare feet in a pair of oversized fluffy slippers.

  My immediate impulse was to remove her from the situation, so I put my arm round her and tried to steer her back towards the door.

  ‘It’s okay, Lily,’ I said, ‘just go back to bed.’

  Lily looked round over her shoulder at Dan and tried to push me away from her.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked me. ‘I don’t understand. You’re frightening me.’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said quickly, ‘it’s nothing to worry about,’

  Lily succeeded in getting away from me and she stood with her eyes flicking between the two of us.

  ‘Stop trying to lie to me,’ she said, ‘I know something’s happened, why won’t you tell me what it is?’

  She looked quite fierce all of a sudden and I realised it was stupid to expect her to leave us to it, but I didn’t want to tell her about it like this. I wanted her to go back to bed, go back to sleep, or even better to have never woken up in the first place.

  As it turned out, I didn’t need to find the words to tell her because Dan did it for me.

  ‘We’ve lost all our work on Affrayed,’ he said.

  ‘Dan, for God’s sake-’ I said.

  ‘Well we have, haven’t we?’ he said, ‘she’s going to find out sooner or later.’

  ‘You can’t have done,’ Lily said, her eyes wide with shock, ‘Nick, what’s he talking about?’

  ‘It’s true,’ I said quietly, ‘something’s happened to-’

  Lily was shaking her head vigorously. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you. This is some sort of joke.’

  ‘It’s not a joke,’ I said.

  Her eyes searched my face. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘how could it have gone? What’s happened to it?’

  I watched her helplessly, unable to explain. What had happened was so terrible it was like it wouldn’t even fit in my head, my mind skipped around all over the place, the loss of the game excruciatingly painful one second then almost forgotten the next as I went into some sort of denial. I could barely begin to find the words.

  ‘I’ll sort it out,’ I said without thinking, ‘there has to be a way. I’ll get it back, I’ll redo it. It’s fine. It’s all fine.’

  ‘I thought you said it was gone. I thought you said it was all lost?’

  Lily looked across at Dan, who was perched on the end of my desk, his head in his hands, rocking backwards and forwards. As if he felt her eyes on him, he sat up abruptly, face full of despair.

  ‘What are we going to do Nick?’ he said. ‘I can’t do the work again. I just... I can’t. It’ll break me. It’ll fucking break me.’

  Both of them were staring at me, desperate for an answer, and my inability to provide one began to make me angry.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ I said. ‘What can we do? Without th
e game we’re finished. All of it. It’s over. Maybe it’s just as fucking well.’

  I stormed out, but Lily followed me into the bedroom, her eyes brimming over with tears.

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ she said. ‘Tell me you don’t mean it.’

  She tried to grab hold of my arm but I shook her away and sat down on the edge of the bed, while she stood awkwardly in front of me, twisting her hair round her fingers.

  ‘How did this happen?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was it a virus or something?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything you can-’

  ‘Lily, I don’t know, okay? I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but there’s no way I’m re-doing all that work. Absolutely no way.’

  Lily sat down beside me and tentatively reached out to place her hand on my leg.

  ‘I know it feels that way now, but you could do it again, couldn’t you? It would be quicker second time round, surely, and I’d help you as much as I could-’

  ‘How could you possibly help me?’ I said.

  Lily snatched her hand away from me and her voice broke a little as she spoke. ‘The same way I always do, supporting and encouraging you, listening to you talking about Affrayed every hour of every day, not complaining when you never come to bed the same time as me, finding the money to pay the rent and the bills and-’

  I was finding it hard to listen to her. In my head all I had was memories of the work I’d done on Affrayed, all the complicated problems I’d ironed out, all the time I’d spent getting tiny little details in the game to be exactly the way I’d wanted them. I couldn’t imagine having even the tiniest amount of enthusiasm or motivation to do it again for a second time, all the excitement would be gone from the process and everything I did would be painful and grudging.

  ‘I can’t do all that programming again,’ I said, ‘I actually can’t. It’ll be... harrowing.’

  Lily lifted up the hem of her pyjama top to wipe her eyes with it.

  ‘More harrowing than giving up on Affrayed and your business?’ she asked. ‘DAWN Industries is your life and making games is the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do.’