Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller

by LK Chapman

  2007

  Chapter 22

  I searched the streets for a while after leaving Carl and the others in the bar, my anger at what Carl had said to me about Lily completely overshadowed by concern for her safety. I wished I’d never made her go to the stupid party. I should have just made up some excuse for her and if they thought it was weird that I kept doing that then to hell with them.

  The thing was, I didn’t know whether making an excuse would have been the right thing to do. Was it better for her to stay away from social situations and feel isolated, or to go to them and suffer but actually be around other people? It had to be better for her to see her friends, surely? Even if she couldn’t really talk to them properly anymore.

  The streets were full of people out having a good time, the pavements packed and noisy and chaotic, every second making me more sure that Lily was in danger. I searched up and down the high street, wondering whether she was trying to walk home or whether she’d just found somewhere to sit for a while. But she was nowhere, not on the benches, not leaning against a wall anywhere, not walking up and down the street. I tried to phone her several times but she usually ignored it and the couple of times she did answer she just hung on the end of the line in silence.

  Just as I was becoming frantic and desperate in my efforts to find her, stopping people on the street and asking if they’d seen her, I noticed a figure slumped in a shop doorway, legs curled up under her body and her face in her hands as she cried.

  I ran over to her and knelt down at her side.

  ‘What are you up to, Lily?’ I asked as lightly as I could, ‘this doesn’t look like much fun.’

  She didn’t look up but when I touched her shoulder she shuffled away from me, pressing her freezing body against the glass door of the shop.

  ‘I’ve got your coat,’ I said, ‘do you want it?’

  I draped it over her shoulders and she quickly pulled it around her, thrusting her arms into the sleeves and shivering into the thick fabric.

  ‘Cold,’ she said.

  I looked round at the people passing us and was glad to see that the majority of them were paying us no attention. It was a Friday night and nobody was really that surprised to see a girl crying in the street.

  ‘This isn’t very sensible, is it?’ I said gently, ‘hanging around out here on your own. What if someone had hurt you?’

  She looked round at me then, her face all fire and hatred.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘people can do what they want to me. I really don’t care.’

  She started to cry more heavily and I sat down beside her.

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Lily. It’s horrible and it’s not even true. I think you’d care a lot if you were hurt. I certainly would.’

  ‘I’ll be dead soon anyway with any luck,’ Lily said, ‘if someone wants to help me on my way, they’d be doing me a favour.’

  I drew in a deep breath and let it out shakily. Why the fuck did she say things like that? She was making herself cry by saying it, breaking her own heart by talking about how she wanted people to harm her, and yet she seemed compelled to say it, like she wanted to just keep piling on the pain and making herself suffer.

  ‘How about I take you home?’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you like that?’ I stroked her hair and she didn’t push me away. ‘A nice warm bed to snuggle up in,’ I said softly, ‘that would be better than a shop doorway, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t want to go home.’

  ‘Well, come back to mine then. Everyone else is still out; it’ll just be the two of us.’

  I kissed her hair. ‘In fact, we could always take advantage of having the house to ourselves. If you wanted to.’

  I almost held my breath as I waited for her reaction. I knew it was risky, trying to talk to her about sex when she felt so low, but sometimes it worked. It often seemed to make her happy, reminding her how I felt about her, how attractive I found her. But tonight it didn’t work, and when she looked round at me her expression was strange, hard to read.

  ‘I... I’ll try,’ she said. She looked down at her lap. ‘But I find it... difficult.’

  I tried to lift her chin but she wouldn’t let me.

  ‘Difficult?’ I asked.

  ‘Sex,’ she whispered, with a furtive glance out at the street, ‘I can’t... it doesn’t feel right anymore. You do things to me and it doesn’t make me... it doesn’t make me feel...’

  I closed my eyes for a second. I already knew, deep down.

  ‘It doesn’t make you feel any pleasure?’ I asked quietly.

  She nodded, burying her face in her hands as if she’d admitted to something incredibly shameful.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t love you,’ she said quietly, ‘because I do, so much. And it’s not that I don’t feel anything, sometimes I do. But it’s confusing. I... I’m not like a woman anymore. My body doesn’t... work.’

  Her words were so sad, so hopeless, that I hugged her close, pressing her against me so hard it almost hurt. ‘It’s because you’re not well, Lily,’ I said, ‘you know that, don’t you? When you’re better things will change, things will go back how they were.’

  ‘No,’ Lily said, ‘I’m dead, Nick. I’m just dead. You deserve better.’

  For a long time I just held her. I didn’t care about people seeing us; I didn’t care about anything apart from trying to help Lily, trying to make her understand.

  ‘I’m bad,’ Lily said, ‘I’m bad for you. I’m bad for everybody. I spoilt Carl’s party and now I can’t even give you what you want when we get home. I don’t deserve for you to walk me back.’

  She started undoing her coat. ‘I don’t even deserve for you to have brought me this,’ she said as she reached the last button. ‘You should have left me here to freeze to death.’

  ‘No Lily,’ I said, pulling her coat back around her. ‘Come on. Let’s go now.’ I took her hand and practically dragged her to her feet, but she just sagged against me lifelessly.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to walk. I can sleep here. I want to sleep here. This is where I belong, out here in the cold and the dirt and the rain. It’s like me, Nick, don’t you see? That’s what I am.’

  She wasn’t making much sense, so I just pulled her along in the direction of home.

  ‘I want to fall through the cracks,’ she said, ‘I want to be where the badness can’t get at me. Where my badness can’t get at the world.’

  I didn’t want to engage with it. I didn’t really understand her, but getting her to explain would only make it worse. But for the rest of the walk I did try to challenge her assertion she was “bad”. I tried to ask her what she thought “bad” actually was.

  ‘Am I bad?’ I asked her when we finally reached my house and I unlocked the front door. ‘Because I’m sure I’ve done much worse stuff than you have, so if you’re bad, I must be... well, pretty awful.’

  ‘You’re not bad,’ Lily said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’m the bad one. I make your life bad too. I made you leave all your friends tonight and I spoilt it for everybody.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ I said as we stepped inside. I pushed the front door closed behind us and flicked on the light switch. Lily’s makeup was smudged and her face white and tired. It was like the only thing animating her was her pain. ‘It’s probably just as well I left when I did,’ I continued, ‘Carl was starting to act like a dick.’

  ‘He hates me,’ Lily said.

  ‘He doesn’t hate you,’ I said automatically, but I remembered the conversation he’d had with me as I left. How he’d suddenly turned on me like that. He could be a bit like that, unpredictable, stubborn, argumentative. He rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. But generally he and I had got along just fine.

  I steered Lily down the hall towards my bedroom and she lay down on my bed without even taking her coat off.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘just explain to me what you think makes
you bad, that makes you feel all this guilt. What is it you think you’ve done?’

  Lily covered her face with her hands.

  ‘There must be something,’ I said, ‘what is it that makes you feel like this?’

  When Lily spoke, it was through her fingers and I could only just make out the words.

  ‘I must have done something or why am I being punished?’ she said, ‘if only bad people go to hell, why am I in hell now? I must have done something. I try to work out what it was, but I can’t, but I think it must be something terribly bad, there must be something deeply flawed in me if I’ve done something bad enough to warrant this punishment but I don’t even know what it is. I must be doing awful things all the time and not even realising because to me they seem normal.’

  I watched in shock as she dissolved into fresh tears. I had never in my life heard anything so painfully irrational.

  ‘Has everyone who’s ill done something wrong?’ I asked her, ‘do they all deserve it?’

  ‘No!’ she said, ‘of course not. Is that what you thought I meant? That’s not what I said, is it? Or maybe it was. You see how awful I am, so selfish, so disgusting. I think nasty things all the time about other people. Things I don’t mean, that I don’t even really believe, but they’re horrible things and they’re in my head.’

  She pressed her hands to both sides of her head, as if she could squeeze all the terrible thoughts out of it.

  ‘Lily this has got to stop,’ I said, ‘you’re not well, you need to talk to people about it. There’s a counselling service here at uni isn’t there? Or you could tell Sophie, surely? She’d understand.’

  ‘If she cared, she’d have asked me about it.’

  ‘Well, what about your parents then? They’d be-’

  ‘No!’ Lily said, ‘not my parents. Not my parents. I never want them to know about this, never.’

  ‘But Lily-’

  ‘No!’ she said, her voice high and angry. ‘You’re not helping me. You’re saying such stupid things. You never understand, you don’t even try. Just leave me alone.’

  With that, she pulled out the pillow from underneath her head and pressed it down over her face.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said. I tried to pull the pillow out of her hands, but she pressed it even harder over her nose and mouth. I didn’t panic- it wasn’t like she was actually going to lay there and suffocate herself- but when she did this kind of stuff it just showed me that she was thinking about suicide, and I didn’t like it at all.

  ‘Lily, all this could be sorted out if you let somebody help you. I know you don’t want to tell people you’re depressed, but if you did I think things would be a lot better. Surely you can see that, can’t you?’

  Suddenly, Lily let go of the pillow and tried to hand it to me.

  ‘You do it,’ she said sweetly. ‘Please?’

  I didn’t want to get drawn in. I knew that sometimes her relationship with me almost exacerbated her illness because she’d say things that hurt me, then feel guilty about them, then get upset, then hurt me more. I tried sometimes to ignore things she said that I didn’t like, but that was usually a disaster, she’d just say things that were more and more extreme until she got a reaction. I didn’t want to make things worse, but this wasn’t just her illness, it was my life too. She was my life and she wanted to take herself away from me.

  ‘Do what?’ I asked her, looking at the pillow in her outstretched arms. ‘You want me to suffocate you?’

  ‘It would be better for everybody,’ she said.

  ‘No it wouldn’t!’ I said, ‘it wouldn’t be better for anybody. It certainly wouldn’t be better for me.’

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘won’t you just consider it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘and I don’t know what you think the point is in asking me things like that. I would never do that to you and I don’t think you really want me to, either.’

  She stopped pushing the pillow towards me and hugged it to her chest while a couple of fat tears spilled from her eyes.

  ‘That’s how I know you don’t love me,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean? I asked, ‘I love you more than anything.’

  ‘So then why do you want me to suffer?’

  ‘Lily-’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I’m all wrong inside. It’s like, when there’s something wrong with animals they put them down, don’t they? It’s the kindest thing to do. I’m not going to get any better, this is what I’m like now.’

  She threw the pillow aside and sat up to take my hands in hers. She was very calm now, very businesslike. It was as if I was the one being irrational and she was explaining the situation to me.

  ‘I’m in so much pain, Nick. I’m hurting all the time. I just want to discuss this properly. I want to die. But I’m scared of being on my own. Maybe I could do it and you could just stay with me while I go, so that I’m with somebody who loves me. Couldn’t you do that for me?’

  ‘I don’t want you to die,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. She ran her fingers through my hair and kissed my forehead. ‘But you don’t want me to be in pain like this do you?’

  ‘You’re going to get better,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not now. Not anymore. Ending my life isn’t a question of if, now, it’s when.’

  I couldn’t bear it. The way she was saying all this stuff like it was so normal, so logical, and for probably the first time in my adult life, I started to cry.

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ I said, ‘please Lily, you have to promise me you won’t take your life. Promise me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  2013

  Dailytoday online

  Twelve year old girl in videogame rape outrage

  10th June 2013

  Controversy has followed videogame craze Affrayed ever since its release in May this year, but the most recent additions to the game’s content have horrified critics and players alike, none more so than mother of three Melissa Mans, who in the early evening on Sunday 9th June was sickened when her daughter described to her what had just happened in the online game. “She was crying so much I couldn’t understand her to begin with,” Melissa told us, “but eventually I realised that her character in Affrayed had been taken somewhere and raped by several male characters. I was so shocked I could barely speak. I felt sick. I can’t understand how this has happened.”

  As a massively multiplayer online game, Affrayed is played by thousands worldwide, but on Sunday the game was updated to allow players to commit shocking acts of sexual violence against each other. Already criticised for promoting gang violence and allowing players to indulge gratuitously in casual sex, the game now allows groups of players to trap and rape other players, usually when they have been taken as hostages from rival gangs. While there are some examples of skilled players fighting off their attackers and escaping this ordeal, most do not manage to do so, and once captured a player has little choice but to watch as their character is repeatedly assaulted.

  DAWN Industries, the company who developed Affrayed, have consistently refused to give statements defending the inclusion of sexual violence in their game, leading many critics, worried parents, and anti-videogame activists to draw their own conclusions. Agnes Thorpe, founder of the group Fighting Videogame Violence (FVGV), said of the game’s developers:

  “I cannot imagine what they were thinking when they included this content. Affrayed is a very sad, destructive game, trivialising sexual violence and showing a disturbing level of insensitivity to the real life victims of such crimes.”

  Before the release of Affrayed, DAWN Industries was almost unknown. As a tiny independent company consisting of only two individuals, developers Nick Winterbourne and Daniel Avery must have done extremely well out of Affrayed and its controversy, yet their actions have gained them few friends amongst gamers and other developers. Says Jayden Hesketh of IndieHit.com, a website dedicated to reviewing and promoti
ng the work of companies like DAWN:

  “The latest changes to Affrayed are entirely unnecessary and do nothing to enhance the experience. As far as I am concerned this type of violence has no place in this game or any other and I have lost a lot of respect for the guys at DAWN Industries for including it.”

  While the evidence on links between videogame and real world violence is still inconclusive, it is hard to predict what impact the content of Affrayed will have on its players, many of them children. Says Professor of Psychology at Eastport University, Douglas Furth:

  “In a variety of studies, playing violent videogames has been shown to have a short term impact on aggressive behaviour, yet links between playing violent videogames and real world violence are currently unclear.”

  However, as Agnes Thorpe of FVGV puts it:

  “A game that so casually depicts cruel and mindless acts of violence makes me feel very uneasy about the role of videogames in our society. In particular, these new developments in Affrayed are taking videogames in a dark new direction that worries me enormously. Even if the game is nothing more than a way for people to let off steam, as some argue, it deeply saddens me to think that there are people out there who enjoy watching themselves rape a defenceless woman and feel they need to do so to unwind.”

  More entertainment stories

  Published by Dailytoday online

  Chapter 23

  ‘People think we’re scum,’ Dan said, his words neatly summing up the outrage we’d been suffering in the time since Affrayed had received its latest update.

  ‘Yep,’ I said. I barely looked up from where I sat at my desk reading the latest posts on the DAWN Industries forum.

  ‘Do you seriously think we can just sit tight and wait for this to blow over?’ he asked me, ‘because we look guilty. The longer we don’t say anything the more people are going to talk shit about us-’

  ‘I know, Dan,’ I said wearily. The pressure had been seriously getting to him all day. It was getting to all of us. ‘Hey, check this one out,’ I said as I spotted a particularly colourful and barely coherent remark, ‘I think you’ll find it eloquent, educated and witty.’