Reaper

by Janet Edwards

I laughed. “No, in fact I found you much more attractive than Nathan. You weren’t just bright; you had a sense of humour too. When you suggested us meeting up after I entered Game, I only hesitated because I thought you’d have forgotten all about me by then. If you’d asked me for a date in real life instead, I’d have said no because I’m not planning any romantic attachments until I’m in Game, but I’d have been tempted.”

  Hawk looked ridiculously pleased. “I expect you’re just being nice, but thanks anyway.”

  “I’m not just being nice. If you were truly Michael, I’d happily agree to meet up with you once I was in Game, have a few dates and see if that turned into a relationship between us. The problem is that you’re Hawk.”

  “Stop right there.” Hawk sat up and stared at me. “You mean you don’t have a problem with me being Michael, you have a problem with me being Hawk? But why? I had the impression you admired Hawk.”

  I groaned. “I did. I mean, I do. The way I gushed about you being my all time hero when we first met must have made that perfectly obvious. I had a crush on you, had your picture on my wall, had fantasies about you stepping out of the picture and ...”

  I waved my hands. “That was fine when it was just a fantasy, but there are big problems when it comes to getting involved with you in reality. You’re a legendary Founder Player, while I haven’t even entered Game yet. Even when I do enter Game, I’ll be wearing the bronze bracelet of a player in their first year, and you’ll be wearing diamond. There’s also the key detail that you’re four hundred years older than me.”

  “Rubbish,” said Hawk. “I can’t be more than a few weeks older than you.”

  I sighed. “I meant that you were four hundred years older than me chronologically and emotionally, not physically.”

  “But that isn’t really true. Time spent in Game doesn’t touch you the way that real life does. You ...”

  Hawk broke off his sentence because the voice of surveillance was speaking again. “Can you turn our eyes and ears back on please? Tomath’s message on his personal diary has been removed and replaced with instructions to contact you with a location and time.”

  Hawk grabbed his phone again and clicked the button. “Surveillance, did you get any more information this time?”

  “Nothing except that the access was done by the same automated process as before,” said surveillance.

  “The bomber clearly wants to take control of this situation by sending us to a place of their own choosing,” said Hawk.

  I had about five seconds to feel sorry for whoever had worked to make every detail of this room so convincing when the bomber would never see it, then my phone buzzed for an incoming call. Hawk nodded at me and I answered the call.

  Tomath’s face appeared on my phone screen. He gave me a resentful look. “You’ve got thirty minutes to get to the meeting point.” He gabbled a string of numbers before ending the call.

  “That location is a new dormitory that will be opening next week,” said surveillance. “You’ve barely got time to reach it using a standard pod, but you could save time by using the high-speed carriage.”

  “If we’re being sent to this location,” said Hawk, “we have to assume the bomber already has spy eyes there, and could be watching the nearest transport stops too. We can’t risk being seen stepping out of a luxury carriage.”

  He paused for a moment. “You’d better move the carriage to somewhere close by in case we need it urgently, but Jex and I will do our travelling in a standard pod. Make sure there aren’t any Unilaw droids anywhere near the meeting point. I’ll try to plant a few spy eyes when I get there, but if I can’t then you’ll have to wait for us to call you with an update.”

  “Understood,” said surveillance.

  Hawk and I hurried out of the door, and started running to the nearest transport stop.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hawk followed me into a two-person pod, and sat opposite me. He clutched the arms of his seat nervously as it started accelerating. “I feel a lot more vulnerable now that I’m back in a human body. Why don’t these things have seat safety restraints in case of an accident?”

  “Standard pods don’t go very fast,” I said.

  He sniffed the air. “It smells as if someone has been sick in here recently.”

  I glanced at a suspicious stain on the floor. “I think someone has.”

  Hawk sighed and clicked the button on his phone. “We can continue our earlier conversation now, though this is the least romantic setting I’ve ever seen. As I was trying to say, the four hundred year chronological difference between us doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” I said. “So does the vast list of girls you’ve dated during those four hundred years.”

  He laughed, and although he looked like a skinny kid, his laughter was pure Hawk. “Would you like to know the truth about me and my past relationships with girls?”

  “Yah. No.” I waved my hands indecisively. “I know you must have had thousands of relationships in Game, but I don’t want to listen to all the gory details. I should though, because hearing it will be good for me, make it absolutely clear that ... Yah, tell me about them.”

  “Thousands of relationships! Me? You’re going to be surprised.” Hawk was frowning now. “Being here with you, in my old physical body, is amazing. The past is alive again. I’m the real me, Michael, talking to a girl, but she’s listening this time instead of ridiculing me. She actually prefers Michael to Hawk the Unvanquished. I can be myself, be open and frank about everything. It’s been such a very, very long time since I could do that with anyone.”

  “Surely you can be yourself with the other Founder Players.”

  He smiled. “Oh yes, my relationship with other members of the family is very different, but it’s also very complicated. Life on Celestius is nothing like the rest of Game. The family established their own rules during the first ten years. There are eight hundred and fifty male Founder Players, and only seventy-nine female, so Michael never stood a chance with any of the women. As for the men ... It’s not just that there’s a lot of long running rivalries, the Founder Players are a strange group of people.”

  I blinked. “After four hundred years in Game, I suppose ...”

  “No, no. We were a weird bunch to start with.” Hawk’s words were spilling out eagerly now, as if they’d been pent up inside him for centuries. “When I was a kid, I played games, but those games were like ... Well, with some you saw your character on a screen, and made it move around. With others, it was a bit like controlling a droid from Game, but far more primitive.”

  He gave a reminiscent smile. “They weren’t bad in their way, but then the Game started, and comparing that to old style games was like comparing the sun to the light of a single candle. The Game Company froze your body and took your consciousness into the world of the Game. You weren’t a spectator any longer, but genuinely part of events. Obviously there was only one Game world back then.”

  I tried to imagine Game without the multitude of worlds like Ganymede, Avalon, Coral, and Starlight.

  “People were scared to try it,” said Hawk. “There were a host of horror stories about what could go wrong. Experts warned of possible tissue damage in freezer units, or data corruption scrambling your brains.”

  “We studied this in school,” I said. “The Founder Players were the brave heroes who led the way and made the Game possible.”

  Hawk laughed. “Brave heroes. Hah! The truth is that we were a mixture of social misfits, people who were terminally ill, and obsessive gamers. If you couldn’t cope with the real world, or if you were dying, or if you couldn’t resist the lure of a game that was far more advanced than any other. Those were the ones who entered the Game. Those were your Founder Players.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Everyone knew that some of the Founder Players were a little eccentric, but their illustrious rank entitled them to behave however they wished.

  “I belonged to two out of those t
hree categories,” said Hawk. “I was an obsessive gamer who had problems coping with real life people. My parents kept saying I should get out more.”

  He sighed. “I did try that at one point. I gave up my games, joined the real world, even had a girlfriend for three weeks, but then she dumped me in the most appalling way possible. She was the one who said I had the sex appeal of a decomposing slug, but let’s give a merciful burial to the rest of the awful details.”

  He paused. “Funny how much it still hurts remembering what happened back then. I took refuge in my gaming again, and tried to forget that Susanna had ever existed.”

  I listened, fascinated and unbelieving, trying to fit the boy he was describing together with the legendary Hawk and the competent Michael to make an understandable whole.

  “Then the Game Company started advertising for people to sign up and play the trial period of the Game,” said Hawk. “They’d made a huge investment and were desperate to prove the horror stories weren’t true and the Game was safe. They were offering the chance to play for every hour of every day, physically escaping reality, and they were offering it free! For someone like me, who’d dropped out of school, had no qualifications, no social skills, and no job, it was an irresistible offer.”

  Hawk shook his head. “When I think of the way you had to start work at ten years old, and care for yourself ... I was so immature in comparison. I ignored my parents’ objections and contacted the Game Company. They were hesitant because I was under eighteen, but all the candidates had to be flown to America and go through a month of physical and mental tests before entering the Game. That meant I’d just make the legal age limit in time, so they let me be one of the first one thousand players.”

  I was puzzled. “But there are only nine hundred and twenty-nine Founder Players.”

  “There were exactly a thousand of us to start with,” said Hawk, “and just over a hundred reserve candidates on the waiting list. When the big day came, and we had to sign the documents and step into those freezer units, a lot of us changed their minds. The healthy ones with more to lose. The Game Company pulled in all the reserve candidates as well, but they still ended up well short of their target of a thousand players for the trial.”

  Hawk pulled a face. “I had a last minute fit of nerves myself, but I was even more scared of the real world than I was of being frozen, so I ended up inside my freezer unit. At the start of Game, everything was chaotic, but then things gradually settled down. Once the ten year trial period was over, and their test subjects were shown to be still rational, or at least as rational as they were to start with, the Game got permission to open commercially. The Game Techs created four new Game worlds, Starlight, Camelot, Ariel, and Elven, and then we got masses of people joining Game.”

  I nodded. “The ones who call themselves the First Wave.”

  “That’s right. The Game Techs realized the Founder Players would have trouble coping with all the new arrivals, so they revamped the original test world and gave it to us as Celestius. It was our refuge from the torrent of strangers entering the Game, a place where our incompetence at interacting with people, and our little ... peculiarities ... could be safely hidden from other players.”

  He paused. “I think the uncomfortable feeling in my throat is because I’m thirsty. Is there anything to drink here?”

  “Sorry, this isn’t a luxury carriage.”

  Hawk sighed. “Well, that was when the myths started. The Founder Players had a special world of our own, we wore special diamond bracelets, so that meant we were special as well. When we ventured out into the other worlds, we found we had a mystique. People looked at us and didn’t see the pathetic reality but the illustrious Founder Players of their imagination. Anything strange we did was instantly forgiven. I’d withdrawn from the whole issue of relationships until then, I was just one of a whole mob of rejected excess men on Celestius, but on the other worlds ...”

  Hawk grinned. “I was a legend, and the girls didn’t laugh at a legend.”

  I forced myself to grin as well, though I knew where this was going and I didn’t like it. “You just had to smile and they threw themselves at you?”

  He gave a rueful laugh. “Something like that. I’d no idea how to cope with it, so I ran away to spend the next few years hiding on Celestius. By then the major problem with Game was becoming horribly clear. It hadn’t been detected during the trial, because any issues were blamed on the unusual nature of the test subjects, but the mass entry to Game made it obvious.”

  I frowned. “We weren’t taught about any major problem in school. What was wrong, and how did the Game Techs fix it?”

  “They never found a way to fix it,” said Hawk. “You know that people who enter Game as children never develop into proper adulthood?”

  “Yah. Everyone knows that you can’t progress through adolescence without a real body.”

  “Well, the Game Company keeps it as quiet as possible, but the adolescence issue is part of a much wider problem. When you enter Game, your body is frozen and kept unchanged, but so is your mind. Your consciousness experiences events in Game, just as you would in the real world, but they don’t affect you in the same way. What would change and mature you in the real world, leaves your core characteristics untouched in Game. You can learn new things, you can make new friends and enemies, but your personality stays the same. Kind, spiteful, wise or foolish. Whatever you are when you enter Game, you’re stuck with it.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to understand what he was saying. “This is because you don’t have a real body?”

  “I think it’s partly that,” said Hawk, “and partly that Game stores the basic parameters of your personality. Whatever happens in Game, however much you try to change yourself, you can’t. It’s like pulling at a piece of elastic. It stretches for a moment, and you think you’re getting somewhere, but then it snaps back to its original length.”

  I shook my head. “Why doesn’t anyone talk about this?”

  “As I said, the Game Company tries to keep it quiet, and for many people it isn’t really a problem. After everything you’ve had to cope with in the real world, Jex, you’ve done your growing up, so this issue shouldn’t trouble you very much.”

  “Is this why my mother keeps avoiding unpleasant things?” I asked. “That was her way of dealing with them when she entered Game, so it’s impossible for her to change?”

  “Probably. As I said, most people aren’t affected much. It’s been a huge issue for me though, because I entered Game with a lot of problems. Once I understood I could never change while I stayed in Game, I considered leaving to give myself a chance to grow up properly.”

  He waved his hands. “The problem was that my parents had been killed in an accident during the trial period of Game, and I couldn’t face going back to the real world without them. I delayed, and delayed, and every year that passed made it more difficult to think of leaving Game. Finally, I accepted I would never leave. I was forever frozen in time as the socially inept Michael.”

  “But you aren’t socially inept,” I said. “I was awed by the way you dealt with your admiring fans.”

  “That wasn’t Michael dealing with them though. When I accepted I could never leave Game, could never change who I was, I came up with my alternative solution. I started acting the part of Hawk the Unvanquished. He was the hero the First Wave newcomers wanted me to be. He was the hero I wanted me to be.”

  He shrugged. “So I adopted my Hawk persona, left Celestius to explore the four new worlds of Game, and went through what the family still refer to as Michael’s girl phase. There weren’t thousands of them, more like twenty. Only Tasha went anywhere near counting as a relationship though. I thought she genuinely cared for me and I was part of a real couple at last, but she kept trying to talk me into taking her to Celestius.”

  “But only the Founder Players can enter Celestius,” I said.

  “At first, we were allowed to take our partners there wit
h us. I didn’t want to take Tasha to Celestius though. She only knew me as Hawk the Unvanquished, and I was scared the other Founder Players would tell her about Michael and I’d lose her. We had a dozen arguments about it and eventually ...”

  This time there was a very long pause before Hawk spoke again. “Well, eventually it sunk into my stupid head that Tasha was only sleeping with me because she wanted to get to Celestius. We had a final huge argument, and she marched off and joined the girls waiting in line for a night in Caesar’s castle. He had a constant string of girlfriends back then. Still does, for that matter.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Some of the other Founder Players were having similar problems,” said Hawk. “After a few years of having to step in to deal with the trouble it caused, the Game Techs stopped us taking partners to Celestius, but I was totally disillusioned about the girl thing long before that. Whenever I was with a girl, I was acting the part of the legendary Hawk, hiding the real Michael inside me. There’s no way for me to explain how bad that felt. It wasn’t just that I could never relax. I felt like a helpless passenger in my own body, watching an imaginary person live my life.”

  He laughed bitterly. “The last straw was when my real life girlfriend showed up in Game. She’d totally changed her appearance, so I hadn’t a clue this was the same Susanna until she told me, and then my Hawk act instantly fell apart. I was totally Michael again, remembering what had happened between us, and terrified she’d say those humiliating things again. I screamed for Game world transfer home to Celestius, and hid in my castle for weeks.”

  He shuddered. “Obviously Susanna is still in Game. I have the Game Techs trained to warn me whenever she requests Game world transfer to a world that I’m visiting, so I can run away again.”

  I blinked. “You’re still scared of her after four centuries?”

  “I entered Game totally petrified of meeting Susanna again, so I’m still totally petrified. The Game Techs indulge my cowardice over Susanna. I’m one of their pets, you see. A Founder Player who attracts attention by doing heroic things in Game, rather than being a public embarrassment. Most of the time at least. I make a complete fool of myself now and then, but the Game Techs do their best to hush it up, and the player population seems to conspire to keep it quiet as well. I suppose people like having flawless, noble heroes, so they busily polish any dirty marks off the image of the legend.”