S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11)

by Tanpepper, Saul

  Jessie shrugged. “I can’t explain that.”

  “And what about Kelly? Has he said anything to you about blackouts?”

  “No,” Jessie conceded.

  Eric stood up and went over to her. “Nobody is hacking implants, Jessie.”

  “Okay, maybe I’m wrong about the gaming gear. Maybe they have to be connected to a certain stream is all. That would explain my own episodes.”

  “Episodes, plural? What haven’t you been telling me?”

  She leaned her head against the glass and exhaled. A ghost of her breath formed and quickly disappeared. “Hartford wasn’t the first time it happened. There were at least two other times. The first was the day before the marriage filing. My Link was in the media console. I was watching Survivalist, except the vision I had was someone walking along the creek carrying a body. I couldn’t see who, but I was certain that body belonged to Mom. That’s why I wanted to search the trail for Reggie.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  “What, that I daydreamed someone kidnapped Mom? You were so adamant that she was just taking a little vacation from me! Anyway, what would you have told me if I said I was in someone else’s mind?”

  He frowned at her for a moment, then slowly nodded. “Okay.”

  “That vision stopped the moment you pinged me. I think it interrupted the hack when it switched streams. I think the firewall is blocking them, which is why my visions are different from Reggie’s.”

  “What about what happened in Hartford? You weren’t connected then.”

  “Yes, I was. They were trying to shut down the self-destruct mechanism.”

  Eric considered this for a moment. He still looked skeptical.

  “The second time was that day on the bus,” Jessie said. “I saw Mom in a dark room.” She frowned suddenly and turned her face to her brother. “There was carpet! Was she lying on a piece of green carpet?”

  Eric’s eyes widened in surprise. “It was a blanket. And, yes, it was green.”

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 45

  Kelly burst through the front doors of the hospital and hurried toward the elevator. An advertisement for The Game was playing on the television in the crowded lobby, and people were standing about, buzzing over it, pointing at the screen. Nobody knew for sure what the new twist might be that Arc had been touting for the past few days, though there seemed no end to the speculation. Kelly rolled his eyes as he passed, wondering how Arc could possibly think devoting so much of its attention to entertainment at a time like this was a good thing.

  He checked his Link. Jessie’s ping had arrived just as he’d sat down to play a board game with Kyle at home. She’d spoken to him in a monotone, as if she were in shock. And when she told him to meet her up in the intensive care unit of the hospital, he’d asked if it was Reggie.

  She just blinked a few times, until he was forced to ask her again.

  “Is that your ripped shirt?” she asked.

  He hadn’t understood the question at first, then realized she was staring at his collar. He pulled it away from his neck and nodded. “The one Avery tore, yeah. Why?”

  He saw Eric’s face come into view, his brows knitted intensely. “Are you missing a button?”

  Jessie had pushed Eric impatiently away and told him to hurry. Then she’d disconnected.

  Maybe it was some sort of psychic Doppler effect, the echo of his love speeding away from him, but that ping had scared the shit out of him for some reason. And Kyle had sensed it, too. “Don’t go,” he’d pleaded.

  “I have to go see Aunt Jessie.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be. Everything’s going to be alright.”

  But Kelly was terrified. Something bad had happened. He didn’t know what, but he felt certain that he was somehow to blame. The cliff which he’d imagined Jessie standing atop, the one which he’d been helpless to draw her away from, loomed large in his mind. She was falling.

  You drove her to it. You pushed her over.

  As he jostled his way to the elevator, panting from the exertion, a few people glanced over in his direction. But their eyes alit upon him for only a brief moment before turning away. It was as if they couldn’t see him at all, or didn’t want to see him. All his life he’d been invisible, and the only person who’d ever really seen him was fading away before his very eyes.

  He checked the lights over the door and saw that the car was on the second floor, heading up, so he turned around and elbowed his way out again. And again the people spared him only the most cursory of glances.

  He slammed into the stairwell and ran up all three flights, taking the stairs two and three at a time.

  Now he was soaking wet and his clothes were sticking to him. Sweat poured down his face. The stitch in his left side matched the burn of the still unhealed bite on his right.

  He found Eric at the reception desk, who quickly grabbed an arm and directed him to one of the rooms.

  “What happened?” he asked, horror dawning on his face when he saw who was in the bed. This was the event he’d been fearing. Their mother had suffered some terrible tragedy. And all he could feel was relief knowing he’d had nothing to do with it.

  “I found her over at the Evans place,” Eric said. There was a strange hardness in his eyes. He studied Kelly’s face, waiting for a response.

  “Ashley Evans?”

  “Her organs are in crisis,” Eric continued, reciting in the same sort of disconnected monotone that Jessie had used earlier.

  He’s in shock.

  So why did he feel as if he was being scrutinized?

  “She’s dehydrated,” Eric continued, still speaking in a clinically detached voice. “The doctors think she hasn’t had anything to drink in over a week.”

  Kelly bowed his head and squeezed his eyes closed for a moment. “Jesus. How did this happen? Why was she over there?”

  He could see the struggle in Eric’s eyes then. Slowly, his brother-in-law moved away from him to stand on the opposite side of the bed. He took a few breaths, then began to explain how he’d found her.

  “Reggie?” Kelly exclaimed. “I can’t believe he’d do this. Not to your mom. Not to anyone. I just can’t see why he would.”

  “Jessie believes he was being . . . manipulated.”

  Kelly frowned. He knew what it felt like to have his back up against the wall, to have little choice but to do what someone told him to do. But nothing would make him do something this horrible. And the same went for Reggie, too. “No,” he said again, shaking his head. “Not Reggie.”

  Eric tossed something small onto the bed, where it tumbled between his mother’s knees. Kelly squinted, then reached over and picked it up.

  “I found it inside the Evanses’s house. It’s a match to the one you’re missing on that shirt.”

  An image flashed through Kelly’s mind: Jessie reaching up and tugging at his collar the day he’d followed her from school into town.

  “I I don’t know how it got there.”

  Eric stared at him for a long time before going over to the door. He looked out of the room, then shut them in. “I need to know something, Kelly.”

  Kelly’s heart was racing.

  “That gear you got, did you ever experience anything . . . strange, while using it?”

  “Strange in what way?” Kelly asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Anything like what happened to Reggie. The blackouts. Have you had anything like that happen to you?”

  Kelly blinked in shock. He stumbled back a step, feeling his knees go weak. “Yes.”

  A change came over Eric then. His eyes widened and the hardness seemed to dissolve away like sugar in hot tea. “Shit,” he whispered. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  † † †

  Kelly felt an iron band encircle his heart. Please, god, tell me I had nothing to do with this. He collapsed into the chair. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “
The last words out of my mother’s mouth was that someone else brought her to the Evanses’s.”

  Kelly lowered his face to his hands.

  “And you don’t remember what you did or where you were either of the two times it happened?”

  “No,” Kelly sobbed.

  Eric began to pace, muttering to himself. “It’s just not possible. Micah’s dead.”

  “Micah?”

  “Jessie thinks he’s involved. She thinks he faked his conscription.”

  “But you don’t believe it,” Kelly said.

  “Do you?”

  Kelly pursed his lips and didn’t answer right away. “I’m worried about Jessie,” he said. “I think she may not be thinking straight.”

  Eric nodded in agreement. “You realize it’s the only theory that absolves you, don’t you?”

  Kelly nodded. “But there has to be another explanation.” He stood up and checked his Link. “Where did you say she went?”

  “Bathroom.” A look of worry crossed Eric’s face. “But that was over half an hour ago. Is it possible she went to see this doctor of yours, the one who gave you the gaming gear in the first place?”

  Is she somehow wrapped up in this? Kelly wondered. If Jessie had gone down to see her, then he needed to be there with her.

  “I’m pinging her,” Eric announced.

  The connection went through almost immediately, and when Jessie answered, he asked where she was. “Kelly’s here. The button’s his.”

  “Did you ask him about the gaming gear?”

  Eric nodded. “He said it happened twice. The second time was the afternoon you guys filed for your marriage documents.”

  “I knew it. See, Eric? It’s not their fault.”

  “What are you doing outside?” Kelly asked, glancing over Eric’s shoulder at the screen. “Where are you going?”

  “Just stay there with Mom. Both of you. I have something to do.”

  “Jessie, where are you going?” Eric demanded.

  She ignored him. “Let me talk with Kelly. I need to ask him about Micah.”

  “He’s dead!” Eric snapped. “You won’t find anything else at his place.”

  “Give me to Kelly I said.”

  “He couldn’t have done this.”

  “Damn it, Eric. Will you just listen to me for once? I’m not going to argue with you.”

  Eric reluctantly handed the Link over.

  “He’s not dead, Kel,” she said. “I know it for a fact.”

  Kelly sighed. “We both watched him get conscripted.”

  “Yeah, the three of us did. The same three that are getting screwed around with now. And no, Kelly, we may have watched something that looked like a conscription, but I’m telling you it was all a farce.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. It was too— I don’t know. There was definitely something weird about it.”

  “Based on what, Jess? A gut feeling? Wishful thinking?”

  “It wasn’t my first time, Eric. We watched a conscription when we were in Seattle. Remember?”

  Eric nodded. “The guy who stole your Link.”

  “There were a lot of similarities in the procedure, but a couple things were off. I didn’t realize it at the time.”

  “Off how?”

  “Do you remember, Kelly, right before the injection, the nurse had to leave the room?”

  Kelly shook his head, an embarrassed flush rising in his cheeks. “I’d stopped watching by then.”

  “There was something missing from the cart that she needed. She left those two attendants alone, the ones who brought Micah into the room.”

  “Those jokers? You think they could’ve pulled off a fake conscription?”

  “Not a chance. But they’re not the ones who did it. There was a third guy, an Arc engineer or something. He came in because of a problem with Micah’s Link, remember?”

  Kelly nodded. “Something about it blocking the network from querying his implant. They thought he didn’t have one at first.”

  “Blocking the network? Doesn’t that sound familiar? Like the firewall on my Link?”

  Eric turned and frowned at Kelly.

  “Yeah, I remember. They needed an x-ray to confirm the implant was present.”

  Jessie shushed him impatiently. “That third guy, he spent a lot of time up near Micah’s head, which is where the conscription machine was. Those attendants weren’t paying attention. He could’ve switched out the syringes without anyone noticing.”

  Kelly was quiet for a moment. Now he wished he hadn’t been too chickenshit to watch the conscription.

  “Okay, assuming he did — and I’m not saying I believe it — then where is he?” Eric asked. “Where’s Micah? His house is empty. And I searched through the Evans place and found no sign that anyone was staying there. How is he doing this?”

  Kelly could see behind her the house across the street. He watched as she unlocked the front door and let herself in.

  “He’s in Gameland,” she answered, the image jouncing as she hurried up the stairs to her room. “The other day when we were checking the gear, Kelly and I saw something inside the compound on Jayne’s Hill. It was him, I’m sure of it.”

  “We saw something,” Kelly said. “But it could’ve been anything— another Player, an Arc employee. Jessie, we’re worried about you. So, whatever you’re doing, you need to stop.”

  “I’m going to get him.”

  “How? Our Player’s dead.”

  “No your Player is dead. But not mine.”

  There was a moment of silence. “What are you talking about?” Kelly asked.

  “I’ve been sponsored.”

  “What? Since when? And by who?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Damn it, Jessie!” Eric shouted. “Stop right now! Let Arc deal with this. Let the police handle it. You need to think about—”

  “I have to stop him, Eric. It’s why he’s doing this. It’s why he used you guys to take Mom— and why he tried to use me. To get back at all of us. Micah won’t stop until somebody stops him first, or we’re all dead.”

  “Jessie,” Kelly begged.

  “I’ll ping you once I get there.”

  “What? Get where?” Eric demanded.

  “Jess? Damn it!” Kelly punched in the contact again. “She disconnected.”

  “Ping her back!”

  “I’m trying, but she’s not connecting.”

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 46

  The Arc technician had been telling her about the state-of-the-art VR setup when she heard the whisper: jessie

  “It comes complete with—”

  “Shh!” The harshness of her whisper cut him off like a scythe through dense grass. He gave her a puzzled look.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  “Hear what?”

  She cocked her head to the side, frowning. But the voice didn’t repeat itself.

  Several seconds passed with neither of them returning to the setup. The tech — she glanced at the tag on his ArcTech shirt and was reminded that his name was Tony — raised an eyebrow at her and fidgeted with the snaps on his uniform.

  He probably thinks I’m some kind of nutcase, Jessie thought to herself, hearing voices that aren’t there.

  Actually, considering the type of clientele he was probably used to dealing with — rich, spoiled, and in all likelihood, sociopathic — the way she was acting she’d probably fit right in with them.

  “Nothing,” she finally said, shaking her head as if to dislodge a fly. “It was nothing. I just thought I heard someone say something.”

  Tony-the-Tech cleared his throat and looked pointedly around the room at the unadorned sound-deadening walls. Even their voices seemed to be swallowed up by the material. There wasn’t even a trace of an echo. He checked the system’s mic in his ear, adjusting the volume. Shrugged.

  Jessie watched this with a mix of confusion and apprehension. She was afraid t
o tell him what she’d heard hadn’t come from the device he was speaking into. It hadn’t come from him. It hadn’t even come from outside of her own head.

  So, you are crazy.

  The idea no longer frightened her. Maybe she was.

  Except right now, she’d never felt more sane.

  What was most disturbing about hearing that voice was her certainty who it belonged to: someone she’d watched die inside Gameland.

  Maybe it’s your subconscious starting to chicken out.

  Half of her wished she could oblige. The other half knew it wasn’t an option.

  “Could be there’s a glitch with the equipment?” she found herself saying. “Or in The Game’s programming.”

  “Ha!” Tony barked in amusement. “Not likely. This gear is fresh out of the wrappers. And I happen to know that QC checked it a half dozen times since we got your specs. As far as the codex, it’s foolproof.”

  This, she happened to know, wasn’t true. The programming was full of holes— if you knew where and how to look for them.

  He proceeded to babble on about the care which had gone into the gear’s manufacture and customization for her planned entry into The Game, but she found herself drifting, only faintly aware of him as he proceeded with the checklist, making sure to note each step’s successful passing on the computer’s screen. She found herself straining to hear— not him, and not just with her ears, but beyond the limits of sound, beyond the limits of her consciousness even. But the whisper did not repeat itself.

  It was the first time his voice had come to her since returning, though it wasn’t the first voice she’d heard. The rest had been—

  strangers

  —too faint to recognize with any certainty.

  Before today, she’d tried to convince herself that it had just been her overwrought imagination, the consequence of a guilty conscience for all the terrible things she’d seen and done in the past few weeks — the people who had died or been lost because of her decisions when they were trapped inside the very same arcade she was about to break into a second time — but now she wasn’t so sure.

  The voice came again, once again whispering her name. Louder this time. Unmistakable.