The Shadow Maker

by Robert Sims

  ‘Don’t be so formal,’ Lola complained. ‘What do you think this afternoon was - research?’

  As she lay in bed, Rita recalled the encounters of the day with a sense of bemusement. The warm attention of one academic, Byron Huxley, stood in stark contrast to the hostility of another, Dr Phillip Roxby. Their personalities, along with their characters, were poles apart. Then there was Josh Barrett, computer whiz and pot-head, in a category all of his own. Unfortunately for him, he’d be working through the night again in the paranoid company of his colleagues at Xanthus. Rita had added to Josh’s stress levels, of course - but at least she’d cooked him an omelette.

  It was five a.m., but the fluorescent strip lighting still gleamed along the first floor of the Xanthus building. The three members of the core team pulled off their visors and gloves and looked at each other with tense, caffeine-fuelled stares. The work was almost done.

  They’d been button-mashing non-stop through the night, hardly pausing to eat, stretch or urinate, as they ran the final diagnostics on the complex programming and subroutines of the game. The visuals, sound design and artificial intelligence all stood up to the test, whether it was played on a PC, a game console or virtual accessories. From a technical point of view it was a state-of-the-art package - high performance, interactive and fully explorable. On top of that - like an algorithmic gateway - it opened up another dimension in video gaming. Wired into the product was a Xanthus-designed system of autostereographics - in effect a new generation of realism. When hooked up to VR it delivered natural 3-D

  perspectives and rich, fully fleshed-out imagery, immersing the player in an alternative world. Context became environment. Storyline turned into experience. In other words, the game felt real.

  All three knew they’d created something special. Reams of printout surrounded them after a last trace for bugs - but the logic, syntax and run-time were all sufficiently error-free. The software was ready to be released.

  Josh Barrett clicked the bones in his neck and got up.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said flatly.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Flynn. As system administrator the final call was his, and he wasn’t ready to make it.

  ‘I’ve had enough!’ said Maynard, throwing down his visor and kicking petulantly at the piles of paper. ‘I don’t care what you say.

  My brain’s fried and I’m going home.’

  Flynn scowled at him. ‘That’s right. Go back to your teddy bears and comics. Run home to Mummy.’

  Maynard snatched up a handful of discs and hurled them at Flynn, who ducked just in time as they went scything through the air to clatter across the office.

  ‘Drongo,’ Flynn commented, straightening up.

  ‘Go piss up a rope,’ said Maynard, pulling on his jacket and getting tangled in the sleeves as he did so. ‘And don’t expect me back today. I’m having a sleepin.’

  He stomped off without a backward glance, still wrestling with his sleeves. For good measure he kicked over a chair. A moment later the door banged behind him.

  ‘He’s got a point,’ said Josh. ‘We should be celebrating, not fighting. The job’s done. We’ve cracked it.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Flynn snapped, sitting hunched on a swivel chair. ‘But the buck stops with me on this. I want to do a final walk-through in the lab. Gonna join me?’

  Josh shook his head. ‘Give it a rest. You’ll burn yourself out.

  We’re overtired already.’ He picked up his canvas bag and slung it over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to smoke a joint, crash out and forget the game. You ought to do the same.’

  Unlike his two colleagues, Flynn couldn’t stop working. Although egocentric and volatile, professionally he was a perfectionist, as brilliant and creative with software design as he was emotionally erratic. Through willpower, ability and an intolerance of failure, he’d advanced through university and postgraduate research to become a bit player in a global industry. That’s where he was now - in charge of Barbie’s wet software dream. Game on.

  Though Barbie was obviously a flake when it came to technology, he had stumbled onto something unique when he’d bought Xanthus Software. The struggling firm had devised an innovation that increased the sensory impact of virtual reality. Technologically it was a breakthrough. In marketing terms, it was a potential goldmine. It was new and it was hot. All it needed was a game to be designed around it. The challenge was one reason why Flynn had agreed to develop it - the other being the extremely high salary. There was also the kudos. While Barbie stood to reap huge financial rewards, Flynn would make his name in the hi-tech marketplace. The success of the game would launch his reputation. His future would be guaranteed and he would be able to pick and choose between offers from international corporations. The possibilities were stunning.

  So too, of course, were the penalties of failure. And with competition so intense, one miscalculation could make all the difference.

  In this city alone there were ten other video gaming outfits. Some of the biggest had set up shop in Melbourne - Atari, Infinite Interactive, THQ. The prize was a slice of a worldwide business worth $30 billion the previous year - over $10 billion more than the box office total pulled in by the whole of the movie industry around the planet. When the stakes were so high, just one error -

  software, timing, contractual - could sink a deal. Then someone else would snatch the breakthrough, and Barbie’s dreams of hitting the jackpot would be flushed down the commercial toilet, along with Flynn’s shot at personal glory and a hefty success bonus. He could kiss goodbye to his job, his salary, his expensive apartment.

  It would be back to postgrad research at the university - a prospect that made him shudder. That’s why he went on working - alone, determined, beyond tiredness, his brain wired on ambition.

  He went down to the basement, let himself into the VR lab and stood for a moment on the concrete floor amid a jumble of cables, piping, screens and computer decks. It was like an electronic dungeon, a dim, subterranean level - very appropriate considering the game’s content. When he’d powered up the studio, he loaded the latest version of the program, stripped off his clothes and pulled on a lightweight bodysuit studded with sensors. Then he strapped himself into a metal frame, slipped on a pair of gloves, adjusted his headset and logged on to the game.

  For a moment he stood in total blackness, suspended between two universes - the real and the hyper-real. In a strange way, the more Flynn visited the latter, the less respect he felt for the former.

  It was like taking a psychedelic drug. The real world began to look dull and clumsy while the virtual realm became more vivid and addictive. The effect didn’t bother him. After all, this was the future, the new frontier. As the twenty-first century unfolded, more and more people would choose to inhabit virtual reality as they escaped the drudgery of daily existence. The buzz of gameplay would become the stimulant of the masses.

  In the pure blackness a control pad illuminated in front of him.

  He reached out with a virtual finger and touched a virtual button.

  The audiovisuals clicked into life. It was intense and it was exhilarating.

  Flynn could congratulate himself. The end result of so much hard work was worth the effort.

  He could take much of the credit for the logic and architecture of the game, but he’d been ably assisted by Maynard and Josh, and a whole team of software engineers, 3-D graphics artists, background modellers, visual FX programmers, audio mixers, AI specialists and virtual environment designers. Barbie himself had also played a key role in the overall construction. He’d come up with the original idea and insisted on viewing each stage of its development like an overseer. More often than not his presence was irritating, but he knew what he wanted. And here, at last, they’d delivered it - a game of gods, heroes and monsters - Barbie’s hard-core vision of the Underworld.

  That’s where you started - deep underground in the Kingdom of Hades. The aim was to climb to freedom. You did that
by slaying monsters at each level, acquiring new powers, recruiting allies from among the damned or the deities, and - if you made it all the way - attaining divinity on the slopes of Mount Olympus. Barbie seemed to see it as a personal metaphor. To Flynn and his colleagues the interpretation was more basic. In single-player mode it was an epic quest in the sword and sorcery genre, combining mythic themes, gladiator sports and primal fantasies. When played against others online it turned into a team-combat race. On top of the startling realism of the experience, there were other selling points. It was a first-person shooter fully explorable in real-time 3-D, where players could follow branching storylines, enhance their fighting skills and create customised avatars to help in the ascent. There was also its freedom of choice. Gamers could tackle each new challenge in any way they wanted because there was no single or right tactic to get results. With its glossy visuals and realistic death animations, it was destined to join the top rank of hack’n’slash adventures, automatically getting an adult rating for its blood, violence and erotic imagery.

  Flynn took a deep breath to prime himself for action.

  He was ready to enter the Underworld.

  He reached out to the virtual control pad and pressed Start.

  With a vertiginous rush he was transported into the wild, alien landscape of the game. He found himself on a narrow ledge deep below the surface of the earth, where naked nymphs were shackled to rocks. Against the cliff face moved the shadows of demonic guards. Overhead towered a precipice, criss-crossed by steep paths leading to the Palace of Hades. The jagged surfaces were lit by the crimson glow of lava and burning sulphur. At his feet yawned the dark chasm of the abyss.

  Wielding his sword, he upended a guard and cut his head off, black blood oozing from the convulsing torso, then he turned in time to face clusters of spawning demons. He hacked through them as he fought his way along the ledge - limbs, wings, claws and entrails spraying in all directions. When he reached an upward path cut in the rock he escaped to the next level.

  He pressed the Oracle button. It triggered the voice of a god:

  ‘I am Ares, god of war. To see the light, you must destroy your enemies.’

  Each level produced confrontations with hideous creatures -

  Gorgons, Harpies, Minotaurs, Furies wreathed in snakes. By sum mon ing heroes to his cause the beasts were dismembered in a flurry of swipes and bone-cracking duels. More insidious were the seductive enemies who plugged directly into the pleasure node -

  bare-breasted enchantresses, photo-realistic Sirens with soft-textured flesh. These too were dispatched with a cacophony of thuds.

  The whole pantheon of classical terror flashed past him in lurid detail as he fought his way higher and higher. Finally, as he burst into the daylight, the splendour of an ancient paradise opened around him - forests, groves, waterfalls, meadows filled with wildflowers - the Elysian Fields stretching towards the luminous presence of Mount Olympus. He stood still for a moment, his feet on the grass, his face glowing in the beams of virtual sunlight, but there was nothing he could think of to worry about.

  He pressed Stop.

  It was done, finished.

  As he pulled off the visor, peeled off the bodysuit and stepped back into the real world, his head was still buzzing with apocalyptic images. The sleek, virtual carnage of the death match would stay with him for hours, like a hypnotic high - just as it would with hordes of tech-heads and gamers, once it hit the shops. What a mind-fuck.

  He looked at the wall clock. It was after dawn, but his work was done. Like the others, he could pack up and go home. Try to switch his brain off. Chill out. There was just one thing left to do: phone Barbie and tell him his designer heaven-and-hell was up and running.

  Rita woke from a good night’s sleep to the pleasant memory of Professor Byron Huxley paying court to her against a backdrop of the ivy-clad barracks and the rumble of commuter traffic. She was singing to herself as she showered and towelled off, before focusing her thoughts on the encounter ahead. It was one that promised to be challenging, as well as potentially risky, so she needed to be on her game. She dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, its jacket and skirt tailored to hug her curves, and a thin cream cashmere top. She swept back her hair and sprayed her neck with Ysatis perfume. Now she felt ready, alert and psyched up for the prospect of bearding an alpha male in his lair: Martin Barbie in his TV studio.

  Rita stood at the rear of the studio, among the props and the cables, while Barbie recorded his continuity links for the evening edition of Gold Rush. As she watched him she couldn’t help feeling a sense of excitement. Maybe it was just the environment - the adrenalin-driven ethos of the media with its arc lights and boom mikes. There was a pervasive tension in the air, people functioning under constant hype. But maybe it was more than that. Rita had been in TV studios before and they’d left her cold, with their artificial sets, plastic people and fake emotions. This time, though, watching Barbie in action, she felt the pull of something different. This man, this celebrity, was perhaps the most plastic of them all, yet he was also a challenge, being a media star with a perfect image and a highly marketable face. But did he have dark secrets to hide? She had a strong feeling he was implicated in a nasty crime and had organised a cover-up.

  Martin Barbie might be the pin-up of the masses, but for Rita he was a suspect in a crime hunt.

  She had to admit that he was good at what he did. Relaxed, witty and personable, he was a sophisticate who wore his black dinner jacket and bow tie like a second skin. He could have been born to live in front of the camera. Equally impressive was his attitude between takes. The abrasiveness of his production staff didn’t rub off on him. He was clearly a man with tremendous self-control.

  In her own case, her self-control was more than a strategy for social success, it also kept a lid on her demons of chaos. So what were Barbie’s demons? What was his secret torment?

  A little frisson of anticipation went through her at the prospect of delving into his psyche, but she needed to remain detached. She hadn’t even met the man and already her feelings were aroused.

  Something else. It wasn’t just his professional skills that she was admiring. She noticed that he was well-built, but not muscular. He moved well, almost fluidly at times. And once, when he smiled off-camera at the make-up girl, there was something wicked and appealing in it. The man had sexual magnetism. It was undeniable.

  At last the recording session was over. Barbie got up off his studio sofa as a technical assistant unplugged him and reeled in the wires.

  Rubbing his neck muscles, he began to walk off the set, before a slim young man in tight denim with a clipboard stopped him and spoke into his ear, pointing at Rita.

  Barbie changed course and walked towards her. When he reached her he flashed a professional smile.

  ‘I’m told you want to speak to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, watching him carefully. ‘It’s about Kelly Grattan.’

  There was a momentary flicker, but Barbie recovered quickly and started loosening his bow tie. ‘And your name is?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Marita Van Hassel.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting the police here. Was it you who called my private secretary?’

  ‘Yes. She said you had a full schedule, so I thought I’d try to catch you on the off-chance.’

  Barbie nodded slowly then suddenly lost his stern look. ‘And so you have. Well done.’ He extended a hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Detective Sergeant Marita Van Hassel.’

  As they shook hands a little charge of electricity went through her skin.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘It’s all the static around here. I don’t think we’re falling in love.’ That smile again. Soft and wicked.

  ‘No chance of that,’ she said smoothly. ‘I need lightning bolts.

  And thunder.’

  As soon as she said it, she realised she was playing with him.

  From the look in his eyes, he liked it.

  ‘I’ve got to
say you don’t look like a plain-clothes cop,’ said Barbie.

  ‘What do I look like?’

  ‘You could pass for a model - and I’m not trying to flatter you.

  I know what I’m talking about. My wife’s a model.’

  ‘So I’ve read - and seen. Women’s magazines can’t get enough of her - and you.’ Now who was using flattery?

  Barbie gave a polite laugh and gestured towards the studio door.

  ‘We can talk in my dressing room.’ He turned to the make-up girl.

  ‘I’ll clean myself up, Candy. I don’t want to be disturbed.’

  They walked down a broad linoleum corridor to a room with his name on the door. He ushered her in and offered her a chair.

  As Rita sat down, she crossed her legs and the hem of her skirt rode up her thigh. She caught his look as he turned and seated himself in front of the brightly lit mirror to remove his make-up.

  ‘Kelly Grattan,’ she said abruptly. ‘Why did you pay her off ?’

  For a split second it seemed like his hand trembled as he held a cotton pad to his cheek, but then it steadied and he continued wiping off the powder.

  ‘That’s a strange way to put it,’ he said.

  Rita leant forward in her chair. ‘How much did you give her?’

  ‘The figure’s confidential. But you’d be right to assume it’s substantial.’

  ‘Enough to keep her out of the country for a long time.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s the point.’ A bead of sweat had risen on his temple and he brushed it away. ‘It was a business transaction. What she does with the money is up to her.’

  Despite his coolness, Rita could sense his discomfort. ‘You call it a transaction. A transaction for what?’

  ‘I don’t see what you’re driving at,’ he said, then hesitated before continuing. ‘The transaction - to give it a name - was her severance pay. The early termination of her contract. As you may know, my software firm is on the brink of an extremely important and sensitive deal. For personal reasons, Kelly needed to leave the company.