Reaper

by Janet Edwards

  “I’ve got defrosts!” I yelled. “What should ...?”

  I heard a confusion of other voices talking, and broke off my sentence. I’d always been one to one in my previous conversations with Fraser, but this was a conference call. I was patched in with about twenty other hysterical kids.

  “Shut up!” Fraser shouted. “Game world Avalon just crashed.”

  He was drowned out by voices babbling questions. Fraser’s words didn’t make any sense. I knew it was over three hundred years since a Game world crashed, because we’d all been taught about the Rhapsody disaster in school history lessons. Back then each Game world had only had two servers running it, and a freak simultaneous failure of both Rhapsody’s servers had caused it to crash. After that, the number of servers for each Game world had been increased, so now every Game world had four servers running it. It was surely impossible for all four of Avalon’s servers to have failed at once.

  “I said, shut up!” Fraser shouted again. “We’ve lost Game world Avalon, and every player who was on that world is going through emergency defrost and waking up. The senior supervisors are sending them all messages over the freezer unit control systems, telling them to lie still in their freezer units and wait calmly until they’re restored into Game on a different world.”

  Oh yah, I thought. Some of those players would have been living in Game for hundreds of years. Now they’ve suddenly woken up in their old physical bodies, and found themselves trapped in a freezing cold box. They obviously just need to hear a recorded message to be perfectly happy again.

  I thought the words, but kept my mouth firmly shut. I daren’t risk being sarcastic to any adult, let alone my own supervisor.

  “They’ll all be hitting their freezer unit panic buttons to send out alarm calls,” said Fraser. “Ignore them. Defrosting on emergency cycle puts a huge strain on the human body, so you have to focus on alerts from the medical monitoring system. Anyone got those?”

  I studied my display screen. It was flooded with alarm calls, so I hit the filter codes to block everything except medical alerts. “I’ve got a heart failure case.”

  “Me too,” said a terrified voice that sounded as if its owner couldn’t be older than twelve.

  “Everyone with a heart failure case has to get there at emergency speed,” ordered Fraser. “Find the red syringe in your buggy medical kit, hold the end of the syringe against the bare skin of the person’s neck, and press the button.”

  Other kids were yelling about medical alerts too now, but I ignored their frantic voices. I checked the location of my heart failure case, and ordered my buggy to change direction to go there. As it braked to a halt, and started turning round, I heard muffled screams and a thumping sound.

  Freezer units usually had peaceful, steady green lights on their control unit, but the one next to me had lights that were urgently flashing amber. There was someone awake in there, screaming for help and pounding their fists on the lid.

  I knew the person in the freezer unit had no chance of escaping by themselves. Every freezer unit in the body stacks had its lid locked shut to stop anyone from nosily opening them and harming the frozen occupant.

  I wanted to stop my buggy and check through my alarm calls for the one that had come from that freezer unit. Alarm calls automatically included the unlock code for the freezer lid, so I’d be able to open it and free the unknown player from their prison.

  I wanted to do that, but I mustn’t. Whoever was inside that freezer unit was well enough to fight to get free. I had to ignore their cries for help and get to the person who was dying of a heart attack.

  My buggy had finished turning now and was moving off again. I hit the override button to make it accelerate to emergency speed. The regimented lines of freezer units were a blur on either side of me now, and the buggy engine was whining in protest. I didn’t have time to see if the freezer units I was passing had flashing lights on them, and the sound of the buggy engine was too loud for me to hear anything else, but my memory kept replaying the sounds of screaming and pounding fists.

  I clung to my speeding buggy for an agonizingly long time, staring at the medical alert message on the screen in front of me, and muttering the unlock code for the freezer unit over and over again. “AKX2281SDV. AKX2281SDV. AKX2281SDV.”

  The buggy finally braked, coming to a halt so abruptly that I was nearly thrown off my seat. I saw I’d stopped by a freezer unit with lights that were flashing red.

  I jumped off my buggy, grabbed the medical kit from the storage locker and found the red syringe inside, then raced across to punch the unlock code into the keypad of the freezer unit. I recited the letters and numbers one last time as I entered them. “AKX2281SDV.”

  As I finished entering the code, there was a clicking sound from the freezer unit. I grabbed the lid, lifted it, and used the red syringe on the neck of the motionless man inside. I stood there for a moment, looking for any sign of a response, but there was nothing.

  Desperate now, I climbed into the freezer unit myself, checked the man’s airway, and tried to breathe air into his cold lips. I alternated that with chest compressions for what must have been ten or fifteen minutes, but eventually had to accept that it was useless.

  I wearily climbed back out of the freezer unit, and stood looking down at the man. He looked a couple of years older than me, with skin that was darker than mine, closely trimmed black hair, and a hint of a beard. If he’d entered Game at the standard age of eighteen, then he must have defrosted at some point. Women often defrosted to go through one or more pregnancies, but it was far more unusual for a man to return to the real world.

  Perhaps this man had needed to be physically present in the real world to do highly specialist, delicate work that a controlled droid couldn’t handle. Whatever his reasons for defrosting in the past, the dated clothes he was wearing showed he’d last returned to Game over two hundred years ago. His mind had been exploring the wonders of the Game worlds for more than two centuries, and had now moved on to explore somewhere stranger and far more distant.

  I returned to sit on my buggy, and listened to the voices of Fraser and the other kids on the call channel. It was several minutes before I could force myself to speak on the channel and say the single bleak sentence that closed the door on a life.

  “My heart failure case is dead.”

  My voice sounded like it came from a stranger. Fraser didn’t say anything in response to my words. There wasn’t much that he could say. When a Game world crashed, dumping millions of players’ minds back into the real world without warning, their bodies had to be defrosted at dangerous speed to receive the returning consciousness before it was lost to oblivion. There were bound to be some unlucky ones who didn’t survive the process.

  For the last three centuries, people had only died in real life, while players within Game were immortal. Now there was a corpse in the freezer unit next to me. There’d be other corpses in freezer units scattered through the caverns of the body stacks here and in other parts of the world. Definitely hundreds, and probably thousands of them.

  Death had just visited the Game.

  Chapter Two

  I worked long past the end of my shift that day. Supervisor Fraser announced that the technicians were setting up command sequences and sending them out to all the freezer units that had gone through emergency defrost. Those commands were supposed to order the units to refreeze their occupants and send their minds back into Game on random worlds.

  The problem was that the commands didn’t work in a lot of cases. Some players had hit their panic buttons so many times that their freezer control system had got hopelessly confused. Other players had injured their hands beating on their freezer unit lids, so the medical monitoring system blocked them from being refrozen.

  I drove round my area of Red Sector for hour after hour, manually punching in reset codes on freezer units, and watching until their flashing amber lights turned green in response. I carefully avoided looking thr
ough any of the transparent viewing windows of the units. I already had the unshakeable memory of a dead man’s face to haunt my dreams. I didn’t want to add the faces of living but terrified people.

  I glimpsed the distinctive red and white stripes of ambulance buggies several times. The ambulances would be collecting injured players from freezer units, and taking them for medical treatment. Presumably one of the ambulances would be collecting the man who’d died as well.

  I saw no sign of Nathan during my travels, but the other patrol shift had been called into work early to help deal with the crisis, so I did meet my shift alternate, Delora, at one point. She was going in the opposite direction to me, driving a plain brown buggy that must have been borrowed from a central supply store. When she saw me, she gave me a hopeful wave and stopped her buggy, but I kept going. I couldn’t face telling Delora about the man who’d died.

  When Supervisor Fraser finally said my shift could go home, I went to the nearest transport stop and rode a pod to the accommodation block where I lived. I normally called in at one of the neighbourhood’s economy food outlets after work, to get something hot to eat and buy sandwich packs for the next day, but I was too exhausted and shocked to think of eating now. I just went straight back to my room, stripped off my clothes, and collapsed into bed.

  It was barely an hour later that my door chime sounded. I was deeply asleep by then, but even if I’d been awake and standing by the door, I still wouldn’t have had time to open it before my caller overrode the lock and barged into my room. I opened my eyes to find a gleaming, bronze droid standing over me. It had blue and grey Unilaw markings on its body, and the front of its head displayed the sleek-furred, female leopard face of the adult who was controlling it from within Game.

  “You are required to voluntarily attend the nearest United Law facility for questioning,” said the droid.

  “What?” I sat up. “But ... I haven’t done anything.”

  “You may refuse to voluntarily attend, in which case you will be formally charged with murder and arrested.”

  “What?” I repeated the word, unable to believe this was happening.

  “Are you refusing?”

  I hastily shook my head. Being questioned by Unilaw was going to look bad enough on my Game record, without being arrested as well. “I’m happy to co-operate voluntarily,” I gabbled the words at top speed. “Please let me get dressed.”

  “You have one minute.”

  I grabbed the overalls I’d taken off before tumbling into bed, and pulled them on. The droid closed in on me and waved a scanner at the bar code on my left arm.

  “Identity verified.” The droid clipped the scanner on to the side of its body.

  I’d hoped the droid had made a mistake and come to the wrong room, but it clearly hadn’t. I felt an instinctive urge to make a run for it, but knew I’d no hope of running away from a tireless metal droid who could track the medical implant chip in my arm. I had to co-operate and have faith in the fact I’d done nothing wrong.

  The droid took me by the arm and towed me off along the corridor. I saw a room door open and a boy come out. His face registered alarm as he saw the droid; he took two rapid steps backwards into his room again, and closed the door.

  Once we reached the accommodation block’s transport stop, the droid released my arm, unclipped something from the side of its body, and used it to gesture at a waiting two-person pod. At first, I assumed it was waving the scanner again, but then I saw that this was a gun. I gasped in shock. I’d seen plenty of images of Game weapons, but never seen a real one before.

  “Get into the pod!” snapped the droid.

  I hastily climbed into the pod, and the droid got in and sat opposite me. It entered a destination into the pod guidance system, we started moving, and there was a tense, totally silent journey where I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the gun. The droid kept juggling it from one bronze hand to another, in such a casual manner that I was terrified the gun would go off by mistake. If that happened, the leopard-faced adult controlling the droid wouldn’t be hurt because she was safely in Game, but I could be killed.

  I was relieved when the pod finally stopped and the droid ordered me to get out. I found myself on a platform with a vast blue and grey United Law sign on the wall. The droid hustled me through some double doors, along several corridors, then dumped me in a cell and left me. I wanted to pound on the featureless white walls and shout abuse, but forced myself to sit on the rock-hard, narrow bed and wait patiently like a model citizen. Someone would be watching me, studying me, and eventually they’d talk to me. Maybe then I’d find out what was going on. Maybe then they’d find out they’d made a mistake. Maybe then everything would be all right again.

  Even as I thought that, I realized I was clinging to false hopes. The brutal truth was that nothing could make things all right after this. Whatever happened now, the fact I’d been dragged in for questioning by Unilaw would remain on my Game record forever. I’d no hope of joining my father as a resident of Ganymede now. I might end up with Nathan as a werewolf on Gothic after all.

  I sat there in frozen misery for what seemed like hours before one of the room walls displayed the head and shoulders of three adults in Game. The centre one had a standard male human head, except that it was in the bronze metal of Automaton. On the left was a bird of indeterminate sex, with human eyes but a beaked mouth and a crest of multicoloured feathers. On the right was a bald woman with a distorted face and hooked nose, who was expressing her individuality by choosing extreme ugliness when everyone in Game could be as beautiful as they wished.

  Facing three adults at once would have been intimidating even without the prison cell setting. I sprang to my feet and waited in respectful silence.

  “Jex,” said the bronze man, the tone of his voice making my name into an accusation. “You received a medical alert. Explain why you failed to respond and provide the appropriate medical aid within the statutory three minutes.”

  Despite my fear of the situation, and anger at the injustice of it, I had an urge to laugh. They’d threatened me with a murder charge over this? Had they pulled in everyone from the body stacks who’d failed to save a defrost from dying of a heart attack? That must be most of the kids on my shift. Didn’t these people know anything about the body stacks at all?

  “When I got the first defrost alarm, I didn’t know what to do,” I said. “We’re just supposed to patrol and look for maintenance issues.”

  The bronze man was already scowling impatiently, so I hurried on as fast as I could. “I called my supervisor. He told us Game world Avalon had crashed, and to focus on medical alerts. I headed for my medical alert location as fast as I could, but getting there within three minutes was utterly impossible.”

  “Explain why,” ordered the woman. Her voice had a hissing, snake-like quality, as unpleasant as the face she’d chosen.

  “I went by the quickest route,” I said. “I drove my buggy at top speed, and that was faster than I could have run, but it still took a very long time.”

  The bird glanced off to the side. “Twelve minutes,” it said, in clipped, precise tones that could have been either male or female. “Her buggy tracker shows maximum speed and no route deviations.”

  “Twelve minutes on the shortest route!” The woman spat out the words. “Why were you so far away from your patrol area?”

  “I was inside my patrol area, following my designated route, but my area is huge.” I tried to explain the sheer scale of the problem. “There are about fifty billion frozen Gamers in the body stacks. I work in Long Stay Area 31, which has about a billion. Red Sector has two hundred million of those. I patrol Red Sector Block 2, which holds ten million freezer units. Those take up a lot of space. 25,000 rows and each row is ...”

  “Those numbers can’t be right.” The bronze man cut me off and looked at the bird.

  The bird took a while before replying this time. “Her figures are correct.”

  The woman
frowned. “That’s a completely unacceptable area for one person to patrol.”

  She raised a hand. The three images instantly vanished, leaving me with a featureless wall again. I stood there for a moment longer, hesitated, then sat down on the bed again and tried to think things through. If Unilaw officials really had pulled in thousands of kids from the body stacks, they wouldn’t have enough active staff to question them, so they’d probably called in retired Unilaw members to help. Adults who’d paid their lifetime subscription wouldn’t normally agree to work again, but they’d make an exception in a crisis like this.

  I hadn’t had a chance to pick up my phone when I was dragged off for questioning, so I’d no way to check the time. I thought I’d been sitting there for about another two hours before the wall changed again. I saw that my three questioners were back, but they’d brought reinforcements with them. Two standard human faces, one male and one female, with bronze metallic insignia on each cheek. These were two of the all-powerful Game Techs who designed and ran the worlds of Game!

  I was being questioned by two Game Techs! My vision started blurring and I felt giddy, but I scrambled off the bed and dug my nails into my palms. I couldn’t let myself faint.

  The bronze man spoke. “How many of you were involved in the bombing?”

  “Bombing?” I heard my voice squeak. “What bombing?”

  “Don’t waste our time with evasion,” said the woman. “How many of you were involved with the bombing that destroyed the Avalon server complex?”

  “It was a bomb? I didn’t know that. My supervisor only told us that Avalon Game world had crashed.” I was bewildered. I’d heard of bombings, but there hadn’t been any in centuries.

  “How could you be unaware of what has been broadcast on every news channel both in and out of Game?” asked the bird. “The Avalon server complex was destroyed by a bomb, and eleven thousand, two hundred, and ninety seven people died during the emergency defrosts.”