Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller

by LK Chapman

  ‘Dan, I’m serious,’ I said, ‘if it’s what the two of you want, we’ll find a way to make it work.’

  ‘No,’ Dan said, ‘it would never be enough for me, and over time it would drive you mad. I don’t want that. I need to find a way to let her go. What happened between us... it would never be like that again.’

  I stared at him for a moment then I realised he was right. How could it ever happen again? It was too beautiful, too perfect. From the second I woke up the moment had already started slipping away, I’d felt bewildered, embarrassed. The real world had come back in, and it was a shame.

  All of a sudden, Lily woke and she sat up immediately, letting the blanket fall from her shoulders.

  ‘Are you okay, Lily?’ Dan asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, eyes sparkling. She made no move to cover her body; she just crossed her legs and beamed at us.

  ‘You don’t need to... talk about it... or anything?’ Dan asked.

  ‘Why would I?’ she said, then she frowned at him, ‘you don’t regret what happened do you?’

  ‘No... God, no.’ Dan said, ‘If I could I would have made it last forever.’

  Lily sighed, ‘so would I,’ she said.

  For a little while we just watched her as she remembered, letting her have the little moment that we’d had, that instant of waking up and recalling all the incredible, mind-blowing things that had happened between us.

  ‘Do you want your clothes?’ I said, ‘they’re... um..’ I looked around to try to find them and Lily giggled. ‘Are they all over the place?’ she asked.

  Between us, we managed to find them all but she paused before getting dressed, even though I could see goose bumps on her arms.

  ‘That was my dream,’ she said abruptly, and I realised I’d almost forgotten about that.

  ‘Lily!’ I said, ‘is that all your dream ever was? You dreamt about us doing it with Dan and didn’t want to tell me?’

  ‘No!’ she said, ‘it wasn’t between you, me and Dan in the dream. It was just a woman and two men on a beach, but I kind of knew it was meant to be us. But that’s not the complicated bit. The complicated bit was that when they were... done, they faded away. Into code. Like the pictures.’

  I touched her bare leg and she looked up at me. ‘Is that what’s going to happen?’ I asked her, ‘are we going to fade away now? Are we going to join the Network?’

  ‘I don’t know. The people in my dream, they didn’t just fade into ones and zeros like the other pictures, though partly that’s what they were. But they faded into letters, too. A, G, C and T.’

  She glanced at us meaningfully but I didn’t get it.

  ‘DNA sequences,’ she said.

  I looked at her blankly. ‘Does that make any difference?’ I asked, ‘they still faded away.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lily said, then she placed her hand very carefully at the base of her stomach, just at the top of her pubic hair. ‘Our minds, they were partly in the Network,’ she said, ‘he was connecting us, that’s how we could know each other’s thoughts. But our bodies weren’t in the Network, and they still combined. Think about it. You both had sex with me, so right now, I’m all three of us.’ She pressed her hand more firmly against that place at the base of her stomach and said, ‘in here. Inside my body. I have all of our DNA.’

  I thought about it, but I couldn’t really grasp the significance. In fact, the more I thought about it the less I wanted to. I’d already seen the stuff all over the rug underneath her body, and she even smelt of it as well. I remembered in the night I’d loved it, when all I’d wanted was more of them and all they’d wanted was more of me, but now it was another thing that had sadly lost its beauty just a little.

  ‘Is that important, Lily? About the DNA?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said, ‘I think it’s wonderful. I think everything you did to me...’ she looked up shyly, ‘and everything you did to each other... was wonderful.’

  Despite myself I smiled back at her, ‘so do I,’ I said, ‘it was amazing. I’m not saying it wasn’t. But I don’t get what this has to do with the Network. Did it want us to do this? What was it for?’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll find out,’ Lily said. She looked up at the sky and a faraway look came into her eyes. ‘It’s time now.’

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘Time to make our decision.’

  Chapter 55

  Lily would say nothing further, so we waited as she dressed, and then followed her back up to the top of the cliff while the sky turned a milky blue that blended with the ocean at the horizon. A gentle breeze rustled through the tufts of wiry grass at our feet, and waves pulled lazily at the shore, leaving lines of ivory froth on the sand.

  Lily stood between us, and we both held her hands in a formation that now felt completely natural. I felt no fear, though we stood near the edge, and I was staring down at those same jagged grey rocks that I’d imagined breaking my body on the night before.

  ‘What do we do?’ Dan asked Lily softly.

  ‘We wait for the others,’ she said.

  We stood for maybe fifteen minutes, silent and unmoving. The breeze chilled me but was not unpleasant, and I could tell that in a few hours the wispy clouds would burn away and the day would be warm.

  When the networking began, it felt like coming home. It was comfortable and natural. My mind welcomed it. Lily and Dan’s minds were very similar to my own- total peace and serenity, no fear or anxiety, nothing held back. We were all completely open to each other now, and I thought that if I lost either of them it would break my heart.

  ‘We’re in this together,’ Lily’s voice spilled through our minds.

  ‘It’s all of us or none of us,’ I agreed.

  It was pleasant to stand there at the level of networking that felt so familiar now. It seemed I could spend the whole day just like this, with Dan and Lily around me, inside me, the whispering of the wind and the sound of the breaking waves. But things did not stay at this level. We were suddenly pushed beyond this, beyond each other, beyond any remaining boundaries to a place where I was the whole world.

  I could still feel Lily’s hand in mine on my left, but it seemed like I could feel a hand in my right as well, though there was nobody standing next to me. I could sense, though not see, that there were hundreds and hundreds of people all holding hands in a circle that stretched around the entire world. And beyond that, I was those people. I saw what they could see. Some stood in the dark, on top of buildings in cities sparkling with lights, or shimmering with the haze of the day. Some stood on bridges in the blazing sun or in sheets of rain, looking down at roaring rivers beneath. Some, like us, were on cliffs, gazing out at oceans that were glittering jade, or murky brown, or black with the night. How many people, I couldn’t begin to say, but they all streamed through me, as I did through them, and I saw fragments of lives- faces of people I’d never seen before, snatches of words and song, odd assortments of emotion that I wasn’t sure were current or whether they were recalled from some distant memory.

  It was brilliantly disordered- an enormous tangle of the contents of so many human minds, all poured out into one never ending, colourful jumble that I could pick over for the rest of my life and still have such a long way to go.

  But the disorder didn’t last, and from the chaos we began to achieve control and mastery. Information no longer spilled at random between minds, instead it was held there, powerful and dormant, to be released at any moment of necessity. And we waited.

  ‘You are my participants,’ Interface said. His voice seemed massive, unbelievable in scale and power. There was no question that his voice was a voice of authority, that what he said was important beyond measure.

  ‘I have observed you in your lives and in Affrayed. I know everything you’ve thought and everything you feel. I know many of you do not understand my true nature. That is easily rectified.’

  And I felt from my own mind all my knowledge of the Network dispersing through the
group, experienced the growing ripple of understanding, and acceptance.

  ‘We have drawn many conclusions about the way you live,’ Interface continued, ‘but we do not wish to rely on those alone. You have all experienced what it is to be Networked, but you have yet to experience it to the fullest extent possible. We want you to feel that. And once you have, we wish for you to make a choice.’

  There was a ripple of anticipation through the group. They all knew what the choice was.

  ‘If you decide that the Networked life is preferable to your current life, you can take that step, leave your physical form behind and join us forever. But if you feel your current life is preferable, you remain where you are, or you turn away.’

  He paused as though for effect, and I felt the growing excitement through us all. But then Interface spoke again.

  ‘But you must be aware it is different this time. Different to the other people who made their decision, because you have been chosen to do something extremely important. You are a representative sample of the world, and what the majority now choose the Network will take to be the choice not only for you, but for everybody.’

  There was a wave of surprise and awe through the group at the weight of the decision we had been trusted with. Some in the group were utterly overwhelmed, and it was only by feeding our collective strength to them that they were able to continue.

  ‘Let this be made entirely clear,’ Interface said, ‘this is a vote. You are deciding the future for all of your kind, so you must not choose lightly. But let us not prolong this any further. You all now understand the task you have been set. Be assured that the Network will not interfere with your decision, your choice is entirely your own. You will be given plenty of opportunity to share what you feel, but your final choice must be your own.’

  There was something of a murmur of consent through the group, and Interface did not speak any further. Instead, he pushed the networking between the group to the fullest and most extreme extent possible.

  I remember thinking that if the brain could feel pain, I was pretty sure it would be in agonising pain. I felt as though I was doing a hundred, a thousand things at the same time- like I was programming, and reading, and talking, and doing sums in my head, and memorising lists of meaningless information, and driving, and listening to music, and watching TV, and counting backwards. It felt like my mind was being shattered and broken, like I would have no sanity left when it was through, like I wouldn’t be able to talk or think or even see, ever again.

  But then it passed and I found myself in a place of clarity. Everything was made of light, and I could be anywhere in the space, without restriction. I only had to have the briefest impulse of, ‘over there,’ and I’d be over there. But the space wasn’t like normal space. Nothing really changed whether I was over there, or here, or anywhere, because I was never in one place to start with. In fact “I” was nowhere. There was no “I”. All that existed was the feeling- a feeling of such love and togetherness and simplicity. Decisions never needed to weigh heavy because any decision was unanimous. We would move together, with single, consuming goals, and every step towards our goal would flood us with the most sublime sense of control and inevitability. We could master everything; do absolutely anything that we chose. There was no weakness, because the group was strong. No fear, because injury and death did not exist. No trust, because betrayal was impossible and trust was just inherent- it was the default mode of being- to move together in total unity was the only course of action, nothing else was possible or logical.

  The only thing that mattered was to learn. We already held everything there was to know about each other at our fingertips, but it seemed that to know even more would be wonderful. It was everything to all of us. This state of being was perfection. There was no divergence and no distraction. No rest and no deadlines, no pain and no pleasure but for the ultimate pleasure of enjoyment because we didn’t have to strive for enjoyment, it just was.

  I melted into the wonderful feeling of solidarity- of being on the same plane of understanding and motivation as everybody else, and the experience of constant reward- the sense that we would be continuously working towards something new and also continuously succeeding - took hold of me and drew me into itself. There was nothing else. I wanted the light to last forever, for the people to last forever.

  But eventually Interface drew us away from it, and I felt angry that I was back in my own mind, that my life could never be that way because my mind was powered by a living body that had to rest, that had lapses in concentration, that needed to eat, that felt pain, that got bored, and distracted, and that I was in a society that made me fragile, and suspicious, and fearful- that told me that too much trust was weakness, that tried to suggest that joy was not in work or creation but only in comfort and pleasure.

  The whole group was angry. We didn’t want this. We wanted the Network. We didn’t want life to be hard. We didn’t want it to have all these different threads we had to juggle. We didn’t want to get old. We didn’t want to get sick. We didn’t want to die. We didn’t want to earn money. We didn’t want to look after ourselves. We didn’t want anxiety. We didn’t want to feel we were inadequate. We didn’t want to fear failure. We didn’t want to fear rejection.

  In the tumult of emotion, the out-pouring of rage and injustice and frustration, I didn’t think there was a single one among us that wouldn’t have flung ourselves straight off a cliff to get away from the now excruciating self-awareness, the horrific reality of being slaves to our bodies.

  But then I felt a little bloom of resistance amongst the anger of the group. It was tiny at first, just a little bud of objection. But as we let it in, it grew and it spread. It was a memory. A memory of two men and one woman, and the love that was poured into the group along with that memory was enough to make us all pause. And I knew the memory was coming from Lily, and as I felt her love and her sense of completion, I remembered things, and I saw that what the Network was offering was not life- it was a kind of everlasting death. There was no real progression- no curve of life from growth to decline. I wanted to be a wave, to be a wave with Lily and with Dan. To grow- both a company and a family, to influence both for a time, until such a moment came that they would in a sense overtake me, and I would decline but they would go on.

  They didn’t say it in words, but I knew Lily and Dan felt the same. I felt their commitment to me, and mine to them. I felt everything I had ever wanted and everything they had ever wanted and saw that it was all shared. I saw that achieving the things I wanted to achieve was far better for the struggle. That despite what the Network implied there was a beauty in rest, in eating, in sleeping, in altering what you did in accordance with your concentration and your mood. There was a rhythm in life- a time to do everything and everything could be done in its time. The Network was empty. It seemed transcendent but it wasn’t. To be transcendent was to accept life, to accept that it would contain pain and difficulties, but to carry on nevertheless, to make choices that were hard- but that were hard because they were right.

  Struggle was what I enjoyed, it was what we all enjoyed. Everything I’d ever gained from the Network’s version of Affrayed was meaningless because there hadn’t been any struggle. I was richer than I could ever have dreamed, but the money I had I hated because I never earned it. It was an ending before there was even a beginning. I wanted years of work to build up my company, because I wanted it to be my life, not a fleeting thing, as I wanted years with Lily, because what I felt for her was not a fleeting thing. I wanted to see her in every stage of her life- I wanted to see her vibrant and young as she was now, I wanted to see her as a mother, and to see her grow old- to live with her right through to the days when our potential might be minimal, but our memories would be endless. The Network was not a life. It was not immortality, it was permanent death. And I didn’t want it.

  It wasn’t easy to spread our conviction throughout the group. There were hundreds of them and only three of us, but
we never gave up. We poured everything of ourselves into them- everything good and everything bad. Every time we’d failed along with every time we succeeded, every time we’d felt hopeless and every time we’d triumphed. And eventually, our memories were complimented and enhanced by the memories of others. They poured their own love and joy and precious moments into the mixture. They poured in terrible hardships mixed with bittersweet moments, they poured in loss mixed with new life, desolation mixed with hope. We wept at some of what we saw, at how bad things could be yet how wonderful they could be, and we cried out to the Network that what was solidarity without conflict and difficulty? What was love without any fear of hurt and betrayal? What was victory if you’d never felt a defeat? Nothing good made any sense without anything bad, and nothing bad made any sense without anything good. Emotions were emotions, they didn’t harm us, even if they felt like they did. But more than any of that, we asked what was a mind without a body, and what was a body without a mind? The Network was not like us, it had never been like us. It had been formed the way it had been formed, and we had been formed the way we had been formed. We were not the same.

  The Network listened. It drank it all in. It learned, and most importantly, it understood. And as we poured our objection into it, showed it continuously and unreservedly what we loved about our current form of life, it made its own decision about what would be best - about what it must do.

  Its decision was final and absolute. I saw every version of the online Affrayed disappearing- I saw the screens of the many hundreds of players who were in the game go black, and no matter how much they wanted to, they couldn’t return to the game, because that version of the game no longer existed. I saw the Network spread little comments all over the internet, clever hints that Affrayed had not been made by DAWN Industries, that we had been threatened into keeping quiet. And Interface filled me with reassurance that given time the story would take hold, the attention on us would fade, people’s memory of the game would fade, and the world would move on.