Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Chloe wanted to laugh, to jump up and down and wave her arms; or possibly just run away and quit this whole idea. But her sponsor was smiling encouragingly.

  “Tell us about yourself, Chloe Hensen. Who are you?”

  “I’m a hunter.” she said. “That’s my trade.”

  “Really.” The crossbow woman sounded as if she doubted it. “And how are you aligned?”

  “I’m not. I travel alone, seeking what fascinates me. I hunt the white wolf on the tundra and the jaguar in the rainforest, and I desire not to kill, but to know.”

  Someone chuckled. “That’s a problem. Darkening World is a war game, girly. Didn’t you realise?” It was the other woman in the group, the short, sturdy redhead: breaching etiquette.

  “I’m not a pacifist. I’ll fight. But killing is not my purpose. I wish to share your path for a while, and I commit to serving faithfully as a comrade, in peace and war. But I pursue my own cause. That is the way of my kind.”

  “Stay where you are,” said her sponsor. “We need to speak privately. We’ll be back.”

  Six of them withdrew into the trees that lined the shore. One pair of eyes, one shadowy figure remained: Chloe was under guard. The watcher didn’t move or speak; she thought she’d better not speak to him, either. She looked away, toward the glimmer of the breakers: controlling her intense curiosity. There shouldn’t be a seventh person, besides herself. There were only six guys in the game house team–

  They reappeared and sat in a circle round her: Reuel, Lete, Matt, Kardish, Sol and Beat. (She must get their game names and real names properly sorted out). Silently they raised their hands in a ritual gesture, open palms cupping either side of their heads, like the hear-no-evil monkey protecting itself from scandal. Chloe’s sponsor gestured for her to do the same.

  She removed her headset, in unison with the others, and the potent illusion vanished. No shore, no weapons, no fancy dress, no synaesthetics. Chloe and the Darkening World team – recognisable but less imposing – sat around a table in a large, tidy kitchen: the Meeting Boxes piled like a heap of skulls in front of them.

  “Okay,” said Reuel, the “manager” of this game house, who was also her sponsor. “This is what we’ve got. You can stay, but you’re on probation. We haven’t made up our minds.”

  “Is she always going to talk like that?” asked the woman with the long black hair, of nobody in particular. (She was Lete the Whisperer, the group’s shaman. Also known as Josie Nicks, one of DW’s renowned rogue programmers).

  “Give her a break,” said Reuel. “She was getting in character. What’s wrong with that?”

  Reuel was tall and lanky, with glowing skin like polished mahogany and fine, strong features. He’d be very attractive, Chloe thought, were it not for his geeky habit of keeping a pen, or two or three, stuck in his springy hair. Red, green and blue feathers, or beads: okay, but pens looked like a neurological quirk. The nerd who mistook his hair for a shirt pocket.

  He was Reuel in the game too. Convenience must be a high priority.

  “Who wants bedtime tea?” Sol, with the far-receded hairline, whose game name she didn’t recall, jumped up and busied about, setting mugs by the kettle. “Name your poisons! For the record, Chloe, I was in favour.” He winked at her. “You’re cute. And pleasantly screwy.”

  Reuel scowled. “Keep your paws off, Bear Man.”

  “I don’t like the idea,” grumbled Beat, the redhead. “I don’t care if she’s a jumped-up social scientist or a dirty, lying media-hound. Fine, she stays a day or two. Then we take her stuff, throw her out, and make sure we strip her brain of all data first.”

  Sol beamed. “Aileen’s the mercurial type. She’ll be your greatest fan by morning.”

  Jun, whose game identity was Kardish the Assassin, and Markus of the Wasteland (real name Matt Warks) dropped their chosen teabags into their personal mugs and stood together watching the kettle boil, without a word.

  Thankfully Chloe’s bunk was a single bedroom, so she could write up her notes without hiding in the bathroom. She was eager to record her first impressions. The many-layered, feedback-looped reality of that meeting. Seven people sitting in a kitchen, Boxes on their heads, typing their dialogue. Seven corresponding avatars in post-apocalyptic fancy-dress speaking that dialogue, on the dark lonely shore. A third layer where the plasticity of human consciousness, combined with a fabulously detailed 3D video-montage, created a sensory illusion that the first two layers were one. A fourth layer of exchanges, in a sidebar on the helmet screens (which Chloe knew was there, but as a stranger, she couldn’t see it); that might include live comments from the other side of the world. And the mysterious seventh, who maybe had a human controller somewhere; or maybe not. That’s evolution for you. It’s an engine of complexity, not succession.

  Chloe had got involved in video-gaming (other than as a casual user) on a fieldwork trip to Honduras. She was living with the urban poor, studying their cultural innovations, in statistically the most deadly violent country in the world – outside of active warzones. Everyone in “her” community was obsessed with an open source online role-playing game called Copan. Everyone played. Grandmothers tinkered with the programming: of course Chloe had to join in. While documenting this vital, absorbing cultural sandbox she’d become fascinated by the role of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) – and the simple trick, common to all video games, that allows “the game” to participate in itself.

  A video game is a world where there’s always somebody who knows your business. In a nuclear-disaster wasteland or a candy-coloured flowery meadow; on board an ominously deserted space freighter or in the back room of a dangerous dive in Post-Apocalypse City, without fail you’re going to meet someone who says something like Hi, you must be looking for the Great Amulet of Power so you can get into the Haunted Fall Out Shelter! I can help! Typically, you’ll then be given fiendishly puzzling instructions, but fortunately you are not alone. A higher-order NPC will provide advice and interpretation.

  In any big modern game the complex NPCs were driven by sophisticated AI algorithms, enriched by feedback from real humans. Players might choose them as challenging opponents, or empathic allies, in preference to human partners. But Chloe wasn’t so interested in imaginary friends (or imaginary enemies!) She wanted to study the mediators – the NPCs “whose” role was to explain the game.

  She’d told her Copan friends what she was looking for, and they had recommended she get in touch with Darkening World.

  Darkening World (DW) was a small to medium Post-Apocalyptic Type, Massive Multiuser Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with a big footprint for its subscriber-numbers. There were televised tournaments; there was gambling in which (allegedly) serious money changed hands. Pro-players stayed together in teams, honing their physical and mental skills. They sometimes lived together, which made a convenient set-up for studying their culture. But the game house tradition wasn’t unique to DW, and that wasn’t why Chloe was here. Her Copan friends had told her about the internet myth that some of Darkening World’s NPCs were sentient aliens. The idea had grown on her – until she’d just had to find out what the hell this meant.

  Reuel and his team were hardcore. They didn’t merely believe that aliens were accessing the DW environment (through the many dimensions of the information universe). They knew it. Reuel’s “Spirit Guide”, his NPC partner in the game, was an alien.

  Elbows on her desk, chin on her fists, Chloe reviewed her shorthand notes. (Nothing digital that might be compromising! This house was the most wired-up, saturated, Wi-Fi location she’d ever entered!). She liked Reuel, her sponsor. He was a nice guy, and sexy despite those pens. Was she putting him in a false position? She had not lied. She’d told him she was interested in Darkening World’s NPCs; that she knew about his beliefs, and that she had an open mind. Was this true enough to be okay?

  One thing she was sure of. People who believe in barbarians, find barbarians. If she came to this situation looking for crazy, st
upid deluded neo-primitives: crazy, stupid deluded neo-primitives was all that she would find–

  But what a thrill it had been to arrive on that beach! Like Malinowski in Melanesia, long ago: “alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight . . .” And then screwing up completely, she recalled with a grin, when I tried to speak the language. In Honduras she’d often felt like a Gap Year kid, embarrassed by the kindness of people whose lives were so compromised. In the unreal world of this game she could play, without shame, at the romance of being an old-school adventurer, seeking ancient cultural truths among dangerous “natives”.

  Although of course she’d be doing real work too.

  But what if the “natives” decided she wasn’t playing fair? Gamers could be rough. There was that time, in World of Warcraft, when a funeral for a player who’d died in the real world was savagely ambushed. Mourners slaughtered, and a video of the atrocity posted online–

  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.

  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 do 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. “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 by her new housemates? They will challenge me, she thought. They have a belief that they know is unbelievable, and whatever I say they think I’m planning to make them look like fools. I’ll need to win their trust.

  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 blind, dumb, 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,” broke in the redhead. “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 you’re 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 scr
eamed 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 the first 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. 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 merely that the compliments 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.