by Jule Owen
He looks back at the bookshelves and spies something he hadn’t noticed. It’s his book – the one Mr Lestrange was reading when he discovered the beebot, a book with his name on the spine. He goes to the shelf to fetch The Book of Mathew Erlang. Next to his book is another, with Clara’s name. There is also a book of Hoshi Mori, a book of Soren Erlang, a book of Ju Chen.
This is some kind of joke, he thinks. Opening his book, he pauses. Do I want to know? But this is crazy! It’s not real. No one knows what’s going to happen.
He skims through the contents of The Book of Mathew Erlang: ‘Birth.’ ‘Early Life.’ ‘Education.’ ‘Soren Erlang.’ ‘Hoshi Mori.’ ‘Elgol.’ ‘Ju Chen.’ ‘Clara Barculo.’ ‘Silverwood.’ ‘Eva Aslanova.’ ‘Yinglong.’ ‘Hathaway.’ ‘Death.’ ‘The Bach Society.’
Staring for a moment at the second to last chapter title, he goes to page 827. It begins:
On the fourteenth of February 2091, Mathew Erlang delivered his second public lecture concerning Project Yinglong in the auditorium at Silverwood University. It was the greatest day of his career and the last day of his life.
The chapter is long; he’s impatient and hurriedly, clumsily flips through to the end. His hands are shaking.
Stupid, he says to himself. Not real. Not real.
In spite of the fact that Erlang modelled the Yinglong on downloads of his own brain patterns, he perversely neglected to record his own DNA and so it was irretrievably lost . . .
The book literally flies from his hand and slams into the wall. He scrambles to his feet.
That did not happen.
Adrenaline is pumping round his body. Although gripped by cold terror, his rational mind knows he must have somehow lost control of his muscles and thrown the book. He takes a few steps towards it and bends to pick it up.
It moves away from him.
He is at the front door before he knows what has happened, yanking at the lock and the handle. But it is shut firm.
Who locks a door from the inside?
“Mr Lestrange?!” he says, louder again.
The silence in the house swallows his words. The empty, still rooms now seems sinister.
Through the kitchen to the conservatory, picking his way through the hanging bits of blind, he finds the conservatory door and rattles the handle.
Locked as well.
He considers trying to climb through the hole above him, fetches a chair from the kitchen and stands on it, but standing on tiptoes he only just brushes the roof with his fingertips.
He gets down.
It occurs to him to try the Nexus. Perhaps if he logs on to the house network, he might unlock the doors, or summon Mr Lestrange. His Lenz returns a message of:
No networks found.
This is impossible in London. The signal from the house should be available, but he can’t even see it, meaning he can’t call Gen Lacey and he can’t even call his mother.
Going through the kitchen drawers to look for the key to the back patio door, he finds cutlery, plates – all gleaming, clean, and new like everything else in the house. He opens the cupboards and the fridge for good measure. There is food, what you would expect for a single man, but there’s nothing going off, nothing mouldy, nothing half-opened. And he realises he hasn’t met a HomeAngel in the house. He goes back into the hallway.
“Mr Lestrange?”
It’s pointless.
The library door looms beside him, but he doesn’t want to go back in there.
There’s only the Darkroom.
He pushes open the door.
On one of the chairs there’s a naked, coverless skullcap. Reasoning that if he connects to Mr Lestrange’s holophone, he’ll be able to get a Nexus connection to get help, he puts the skullcap on, half expecting to be rejected by the authentication system.
Then he’s standing in a long white corridor.
The doors, ceiling, and floor are all white. There is no obvious source of light, but it’s blindingly bright. Turning 360° to see where he came from, there’s nothing but a corridor stretching on, apparently endlessly, and door after door as white as the floor, walls, and ceiling. The door nearest him is locked. So is the next one and the one after that. He tries them all.
Standing in the corridor, he tries to quell the rising panic.
It’s a game, probably a puzzle. I’ve played similar. There’s always an exit from virtual worlds.
Perhaps you have to open two door handles at the same time. Perhaps only the twentieth door you try opens. He tries both of these strategies to no avail.
Think, Mathew. Think.
If he keeps walking, the corridor might bend at some point, or end with an opening door.
Perhaps an object or a menu will appear to tell me what to do next.
Up ahead he notices something that appears to have materialised out of nowhere, something hanging on a wall, a smudge of yellow, the only coloured object in the monotonous white, and he quickens his pace to investigate.
And there it is!
On a peg on the wall, a parachute hangs by one of its shoulder straps, along with some old-fashioned motorcycle goggles. Is he meant to put them on? He studies the door in front of him. As he turns the handle and leans his weight in, he doesn’t expect it to open.
But it does.
Losing his balance, he falls forwards. The instinctive part of his brain responds before he even knows what he’s seeing.
It tries to pull him back.
For one wonderful, timeless, elegant moment he teeters on the edge of the doorframe, the self-preserving animal part of him trying to manipulate muscles to do miraculous things, to fight gravity and pull him back towards the corridor. But it doesn’t work. Gravity wins, and he is falling forward.
As he does, he raises his eyes, and in that unforgettable second he sees the impossible.
Unfolding before him is a landscape so vast it fades at the horizon. A forest, a canopy of trees stretching away in all directions, a muddy brown river shining in the sun, snaking sleepily through the trees. He is thousands of feet above all of this. Or he was.
Now he is falling.
18 Four Days
DAY EIGHT: Thursday, 16 June 2472, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Siberia, Russia
Pain. Sharp, piercing pain. Something is biting him, and he wakes suddenly. It is light. He checks his Lenz for the time, but the time’s not there. He has no clock. It feels like he has been asleep only a short while. The sun is blazing bright. He feels the pain again. There’s an ant on his hand. Shaking his wrist, frantically, he knocks it off and examines his skin. There’s a red welt, which he sucks and then spits. There are things crawling on him. Sitting, he sees a line of large red ants marching across his legs, clambering over his ankles, sniffing at him. With disgust, he whacks at them with strands of the vine rope he brought up with him the night before.
He rubs sleep from his eyes and recalls his journey here; the long white corridor, the long fall from the sky over the forest, the astonishing view, the plunge into the deep lake. His lungs are still sore from almost drowning. His skin is burnt from lying in the sun to dry. He has cuts and bruises from trying to climb this tree. He has never played a game as real as this in his life.
Shuffling to the edge of his tree house, he peers out. Between gaps in the foliage, the river bubbles away. Carefully, he slides down the trunk, cursing at his screaming feet; he grasps his walking pole from where he’d left it propped against the tree, and goes to the water for a drink. The river is wide and deep here. It runs flat and steady. Branches and leaves are carried along in the swim, washed from the riverbanks by the storm. His stomach rumbles, empty and churning with hunger.
Last night, as he gathered leaves in the rain, he spied something like bananas. Going back to the plant he broke the leaves from, sure enough, a few feet above his head are small, dull yellow bunches. He yanks on a branch and breaks off a fistful. On the ground, legs crossed, he snaps a fruit away and peels it. It’s not the best banana h
e’s ever eaten, but it is edible. He bolts the rest hungrily and then goes back to the tree and gathers some more bunches. Grabbing some strips of the bark he used to bind the leaves the night before, he strings the bananas together and hangs them across his shoulder.
He’s no longer hungry or thirsty, and he’s slept some, but he’s tired. Between the gaps in the canopy above him, blue sky. The river is gushing along at his side. The forest is alive with noise. Gripping his stick in his hand, he sets off.
After walking for hours without event, preoccupied by the pain in his feet, he is sitting at the side of the river, eating. The sun is high in a bright blue sky, but there’s also the moon hanging over the forest, huge and low. As he stares at it, he hears a distinct snap.
Something is moving along the bank on the other side. Mathew’s eyes rake along the forest edge, staring into the dark places between the leaves.
It takes him a while, but eventually he sees it. A pair of almond-shaped, green cat’s eyes.
The animal comes further into the daylight. It’s not a breed he recognises. It’s the size of a large dog, powerfully built, with muscular shoulders. Big enough to fell a cow, a horse . . . a human. It is staring right at him. Brazenly. Not at all afraid. There is no doubt at all where it places itself in the food chain in this particular encounter. Its tail flicks ever so slightly. It yawns. It licks its lips. Mathew has never felt like prey before, but he does now and finds the experience extraordinary. He is frozen.
You have to move, he says to himself.
The cat goes to the water’s edge.
It can swim!
But the cat stops at the water. It paces back and forth, sizing the river. It shies away from it. Then it sits and rages in frustration. Its teeth are formidable.
Slowly, Mathew stands. The cat stands, too. Mathew backs into the forest and walks away. Behind him the cat is growling and, he imagines, cursing, on the other side of the river.
It can’t cross, he tells himself. It can’t reach me.
If he goes further into the forest, he has no idea how he’ll get water. Besides, the river offers a direction. The forest is nothing but confusion, and he might wander around in circles in there for the rest of his life. Even if he doesn’t know where he’s going to end up, having a definite path forward is better than standing still.
He decides to carry on, trusting that the cat can’t cross the river but conscious now of each twig snapping beneath his feet.
He stops when the sun is starting to get low and finds a good tree with vines hanging down, like the one he slept in the night before. The humidity in the air is intensifying; he can sense the rain coming. Gathering banana leaves and bunches of fruit, he hauls the lot into his tree. He has time to gather more comfortable bedding and to make the roof of his tree house good and waterproof before the rain starts.
Safely in his small bedroom, he takes off his shoes and socks. His feet are white and wrinkled with the constant dampness, and red and oozing on top where his boots have rubbed his sunburn raw. He dries the white parts with some of the forest moss he managed to gather for his bed but daren’t touch the red parts. He takes off his top and his trousers to dry. Sweat clings to him. He stinks. I need a bath, he thinks. The last thing passing through his mind before he falls into a deep dreamless sleep is I hope the cat can’t climb trees.
Friday, 17 June 2472, Siberia
In the morning, life seems better. He has slept in; he doesn’t know how long, but through the leaves he can see the sun blazing high in the sky.
When he gets down from his tree, the cat is nowhere to be seen. A few feet away there’s a bend in the river where the water filters off and slows into a shallow pool. Wading in, he washes himself and his clothes and hangs them on sticks to dry in the sun while he eats his breakfast. A sunny rock provides a place to dry his sodden boots and he opens the fronts, pulling at the laces. He tosses the banana skins into the swim of the river.
As he eats he tries the Nexus and the Blackweb once more, booting Charybdis. He thinks about Clara and wonders if she’s wondering why he hasn’t called. He thinks about his mother and what she must have thought when she came home and he was missing. She must have called the police by now. Someone will search Mr Lestrange’s house, and they will find him. But then he realises, although he’s in Lestrange’s house, he’s in a game and time passes differently in games. Perhaps in the game, his mother still hasn’t come home from work.
He wants something other than bananas now, fairly badly. Wondering what else in the forest is edible, he packs moss on the top of his wounded feet in his socks and boots and laces them, wincing as he tightens.
Less and less focused on finding the door back to reality, more focused on the cat, he carries on.
He senses it. He’s sure it’s nearby, on the other side of the thin strip of water. His mind cycles feverishly through ways to get away from it – climbing trees, running further into the forest. Occasionally, as he walks along, he comes across felled trees, their thick trunks lying across his path, so he has to clamber over them. It crosses his mind that if he rolls one of the smaller trees into the water, he might ride on it like a boat down the river and away from the cat. He casts around for the right kind of tree.
Hours later, he thinks he’s found one. It’s a little way from the water’s edge, but he guesses it won’t be too hard to drag it. He wedges his stick under it, to help dislodge it from the undergrowth. It takes the next couple of hours to snap off twigs and branches. His hands are cut and sore when he stops to wash and drink in the late afternoon. He glances at the sky. The big low moon is still his companion, but it’s obscured by gathering clouds, and he realises he needs to prepare for the night. Hunting about, he finds a tree to climb and banana leaves, but no bananas, which unnerves him. Up in his tree, wedged between thick branches at the top of the bowl, unable to lie down, he listens to the night and falls asleep hungry.
Saturday, 18 June 2472, Siberia
When he wakes, he lies for a few minutes wondering how many hours in his real life amount to hours in this virtual world. He’s trying to work out if his hunger is real-world hunger or if, as is often the case in these games, he has only been playing a few hours and his rumbling stomach is a trick of the VR.
Now he’s sleeping as long as his body needs, distrusting the sunlight. The nights seem very short.
Sitting in his treehouse, he examines his hands, arms, and feet. They’re sore, really painful. It’s a remarkable simulation. It’s reassuring that, back in real life, Mr Lestrange is sure to discover him in his Darkroom soon and end the game.
He climbs down; the tree trunk boat is where he left it.
When he goes down to the river to drink, he scans for the cat and concludes it’s moved on, at least for now. He’s torn about whether he should keep walking and leave the tree trunk boat where it is or finish it and make his escape while he can.
Hunger drives him further into the forest in search of breakfast, and he finds another banana tree. After he’s eaten, he loads a bark rope with bananas and hangs it over his shoulder. On his hunt he finds berries, nuts, and fungus but has no idea what is edible and what is poisonous, so he daren’t eat them. After breakfast, he becomes preoccupied by the idea that there might be fish in the river. Some of the rivers on the Elgol estate have been repopulated with salmon and trout. This place is wild enough not to have been overfished. Indeed, as it’s just a game, and the forest is crawling with life, it follows that the river would be full of fish. Perhaps he could fashion a fishing rod from a sapling and use some of the abundant forest insects as bait. But he lacks the skill to build a fire in this damp place and, even if he caught something, the thought of raw fish makes his stomach churn. His grandmother would be ashamed of him.
If he gets killed in the game, he imagines, as in all games he’ll be ejected, back into cold, hard reality – or in this particular case, gentle, safe reality. Perhaps, then, he should get himself killed. Incredible as this world is, it�
�s frustrating and he’s growing tired of it. With that thought in his mind, he heads back to his tree trunk boat.
Having loosened the trunk some more with his walking stick, he makes a long rope with the bark strips, ties it around one end of the tree and pulls, stopping periodically to clear the route of stones, branches, and plants.
After forty minutes of hard work, he manages to drag the trunk to the edge of the riverbank and pushes it in with a great splash, then jumps in after it, just managing to catch hold of the slippery bark as the trunk is turned and grabbed by the river.
It catches the flow and starts to travel down sideways. Mathew gets behind it, throws his arms and his chest over the top, hauls himself up and hugs the wet wood to him, in the still fast centre of the river now. The riverbed is far from the reach of his feet. The force of the water pushes him and the tree on, and they gather momentum. Then, as the river bends, it suddenly narrows, and the tree gets jammed between the bank and a rock. He hauls himself along the trunk, the current rushing beneath him, dragging at his legs.
When it’s shallow enough for him to touch the rocky river bottom with his feet, he stands and pushes at the wedged tree. It won’t move. In front of the tree, on the bank, branches and other debris have got tangled against a jutting rock. His tree is caught on this mess. Reaching across the trunk, he manages to clear away the debris and push the front of the log to face down the river. Taking a firm hold as the log-boat starts to move again, he uses the momentum to drag himself chest-first along the top. Lying face-down, he precariously manages to balance and he thinks that when he stops again, he’ll try to find two smaller logs to tie to the trunk with bark rope, to form a raft.
