Bedlam (32 page)

She had never quite got used to the dying and respawning thing. Sometimes it was a convenient route out of a situation or
merely the quickest way to get from one end of a world to another, but it just felt wrong. It was like that feeling people
described as someone walking over your grave, but to the power of ten. However, it was a breeze compared to warp transit.
Moving between worlds she could just about handle, but something about the instant transition left her feeling as though she’d
just woken up from a drug haze or a coma and didn’t know how many days she’d missed.

Actually, truth be told it was always worse when this place was the destination, so maybe it wasn’t the warp itself that was
the problem, but the jolt from vibrancy, colour and hubbub to this monochrome monastery. It seemed all the more stark for
the contrast being so sudden, like someone had cut the power while you were watching a movie. The sounds in her ears shut
off without echo and not even the smells in her nose lingered past the instant she materialised here.

She glanced at the floor beneath her, clean and black, the matt texture preventing reflection as if it would grudge passing
back the light. You’d expect to see some grass, some dirt, if you’d just walked through a door from a bucolic idyll, but nothing
adhered from the world she’d left.

She had spawned in the familiar spot and begun walking the geometrically precise corridors, taking perhaps her tenth new route
through the place. Lurgo, Ankou’s snivelling functionary, had remarked to her recently that she really ought to opt for a
spawn point closer to the boss’s chambers, but she explained that she always forgot again when she was out in the worlds.
Nevertheless, it was good to see some deference being shown these days, both from Lurgo and from the clone-drones who patrolled
the place. Things had come a long way since the trial-by-combat credential checks. The only time she had endured any hassle
after that was when she forgot to change back to her own face after clearing out that resistance cell in San Andreas. She
had killed about eight guys before she worked out what was wrong.

Awkward.

They were okay about it. She had worn a hundred faces around these worlds, so it was inevitable that she’d show up in the
wrong one at some point. Everyone was just grateful it had happened here, so no cover was blown.

She found Ankou exactly as she always did, standing in the centre of his operations room surrounded by the dozens of feeds
that stared down from a tessellation of screens, like a concave inversion of a fly’s compound eye. One monitor was gazing
down from on high above a battery of retention grids, thousands upon thousands of hexagonal black cells, ready and waiting.
Their time was almost at hand. On another she could see the corruption eating up the last of the god-gameworld where they’d
taken their most recent Original scalp.

She couldn’t help but marvel that Ankou never seemed to leave this place, never took advantage of what was out there, especially
given that it wouldn’t be out there much longer. Okay, the guy had a job to do, but there were sights to be seen, fun to be
had – and if you were utterly amoral, the possibilities were only limited by your imagination.

Perhaps that was the problem: Ankou didn’t really have an imagination. It made him perfect for this task, immune to the intoxications
of such an environment, but it also made him vulnerable in ways that he would, by the very definition of his weakness, never
be able to anticipate.

But then, that was what he had her for, wasn’t it?

‘You have news,’ he said.

From his blank intonation it was difficult to tell whether this was a question or a statement, though in truth it made no
difference, because if it was a question, then both parties knew the answer had better be in the affirmative, otherwise what
the hell was anyone doing disturbing him? It was, in fact, difficult to
tell much about his emotional response to anything. His face was black-on-black, and that was when he chose to show it to
you. There were times when it remained fluid and semi-formed, the effect of which was to make most people all the more anxious
to please him, in the hope that some rapid display of affirmation would grant them reassurance.

This didn’t wash with her, however. The power balance here was delicate, and she never wanted him to forget that he needed
her more than the other way around.

‘The Sandman is in custody,’ she reported, keeping her tone matter-of-fact, making sure she sounded neither eager for approval
nor in any way surprised by her progress. ‘I have also deployed several units to the Aperture Science complex and expect to
apprehend Sleepflower within the hour.’

‘Sleepflower,’ he repeated. ‘I must confess there were times when I thought she would never be tracked down.’

‘Since the operation on Pulchritupolis it’s been a chain reaction. Every resistance cell we mop up, we let at least one fugitive
get away so that they can lead us to the next one. The Originals are falling like dominoes.’

‘You are quite inspiringly duplicitous. Are you absolutely sure you’re not me?’

‘If you’re looking to flatter yourself, the very fact that you can afford me should suffice.’

‘
Touché
. And sincerely, kudos. I’ve started thinking of this little stratagem of yours as Operation Gift That Keeps On Giving.’

‘Unfortunately nothing lasts forever,’ she admitted. ‘The price for us taking down the Sandman was that Bedlam now knows the
truth about what he is.’

‘Our useful idiot. I’ve almost grown fond of him.’

‘He’s no longer useful, and perhaps not such an idiot either. Fortunately he still has no idea who the double agent is.’

Ankou glanced at the compound of screens, his windows upon a multiplicity of worlds, on one of which Bedlam now walked incognito.

‘What is he doing?’ he asked her.

‘Pursuing a pointless quest for answers. It’s time we brought him in. There’s no upside to leaving him free to wander out
there.’

‘True enough. He’ll just be drifting aimlessly.’

‘Unless he gets help,’ she reminded him. ‘After all, there is still one extremely dangerous rogue element out there.’

In the personal biopic running in his head, this was the self-discovery montage bit in which he wandered, silent and contemplative,
while Michael MacLennan played on the soundtrack, singing about how the wolves were chasing. He passed from world to world,
his transits unobserved, his presence inconspicuous. He let his Mobius strip guide him. It took him to the great public conduits
between games, huge tunnels, rents and ruptures in the walls of this reality: once-open borders, now guarded and controlled
by troopers in that creepily shimmering black. He would walk right past them, seemingly going about his business, indistinguishable
from any other inhabitant or indeed NPC, and he would follow the pulsatile icon to the occult portals known only to those
who could be trusted to keep them secret.

He disguised himself upon entering each new world, and gradually this action became a matter of reflex, as did the brandishing
of only appropriate and contextual hardware, despite the arsenal he was steadily amassing. Where he could avoid conflict he
took the discreet option, and when the mood seized him, he honed his skills, but he only fought in character, and took a few
dives when he feared his growing prowess might attract attention.

He built up a map of the connections he had used, just following the daisy chain of where each transit took him, feeling like
Mr Benn as a change of clothes was the only clue as to what might await him when he walked through the next door. He saw games
he recognised and games he didn’t, in the latter’s case sometimes due to radical remodelling. The renovation job that had
been done on
Painkiller
to make it a trendy Bohemian
hang-out was, frankly, a travesty, but on the other hand, the altered-gravity theme park that had been created from
Prey
was considerably more fun to spend time in than the game itself had ever been.

He visited two versions of the planet Stroggos, both the
Quake 2
and
Quake 4
vintages. They were each rendered equally real, but seemed completely different places, from small properties of the light
and the colours it painted, to variations in the architecture and iconography. This was as it should be, he realised: it was
two different visions, even if they were imaginings of the same fictional location. The NPCs were different too. The
Quake
2 Stroggs shared a surprisingly bawdy sense of humour and were unsettlingly polite to each other in conversation, while their
Quake
4 successors were a grumpy shower with a taste for industrial metal that could grate after your seventh straight hour of
listening to Rammstein.

And somewhere in the midst of it all, he remembered that this was what he used to enjoy. Down the years, the worlds of these
games had been a place of solitude where he could retreat, where he could be alone but not lonely, losing himself in a realm
that fused other people’s imaginations with his own. Somewhere in the midst of it all, he stopped feeling sorry for himself,
focusing his thoughts less on what he had lost and more on what had been given to him.

He recalled the emotional ties he had to some of these games: the friends they’d been in painful straits, the down-time they’d
offered when work was threatening to make Ross a dull boy, the inspiration they’d provided as Scottish rain lashed the windows
outside, and the occasions when there had simply been nowhere else he’d rather be.

There were worse places to spend eternity. Then he thought of the Sandman and his sad little world, lonely as only a god could
be.

He stood on a balcony overlooking the Nineties designer sleaze of
Duke Nukem
’s Hollywood, the LA twilight creating a magenta backdrop for the riot of neon on the walls. There was a mouth-watering smell
of California-Mexican food on the breeze: chimi-changas, refried beans and turkey mole, so close and warm on the nose that
he could almost taste the margaritas that would go
with it all.
True Lies
was playing at the movie theatre across the road, Mötley Crüe blasting out from a bar as both NPCs and civilians dressed
in hair-metal garb strutted along the boulevard. Every guy was a rock god or an action hero; every girl a ‘cleavagey slut-bomb’,
to quote a fellow computer geek.

It was a party town, built for hedonism. Paradise if you were in the mood, but he could see it getting old very fast, and
there was the problem.

What if, as was looking increasingly unavoidable, the Integrity prevailed and shut down all the transits? He would have to
make sure he was somewhere he could live with long-term when the wheel stopped turning. Eventually it was going to become
a pretty high-stakes game of stick or twist, with the penalty for one move too many being that he might find himself on
Barbie World
when the doors closed forever.

But that was not the worst that could happen.

His thoughts came back to a conversation with Juno, and something that had bothered him about it since they had witnessed
that terrible weapon being deployed in the sands of the horseshoe bay.

If they wipe out all the Originals
, she had said,
or imprison them in that fortress world of theirs, then that’s the ball game
.

But what
is
the ball game?

Ross had previously thought they were just using the corruption as a convenient threat to get people to fall in line, but
now that he knew the Integrity were actually causing it, he realised that what scared him most was that he didn’t understand
their goal. If the Integrity got what they wanted and everybody was all walled off in their separate wee worlds, what was
in it for them?

Cui bono
, as Carol liked to say.

Who benefits?

When he suddenly saw the answer, he felt more tiny, powerless and terrified than ever in his life, and realised that the reason
he hadn’t seen it immediately was because it was so utterly enormous. It was like standing in the mouth of a cave and examining
a strangely uniform outcrop of jagged rocks, then realising that the rocks were teeth and that this wasn’t the mouth of a
cave.

There was something at work here that nobody understood. He’d be sleepwalking into oblivion if he didn’t endeavour to find
out what it was.

It was the purposeful stride that first marked her out: the look of quietly going about her business would have been perfectly
inconspicuous anywhere but here, where nobody had any business to be going about, and nothing was done quietly. Then, having
been drawn to the sight of a figure who had rendered herself more noticeable by trying not to be noticed, closer scrutiny
picked out a more specific distinction. She wouldn’t have looked out of place at any of the bars or clubs around here, but
her appearance was just a little too individualistic to blend in entirely. She had a punky panache that set her apart from
the hair-metal hordes, more Road Warrior than rock goddess, but a goddess by name, certainly.

Iris.

He knew where she was headed. There was a transit hidden in a secret room at the back of a diner down an alley less than a
block away. This time, he’d have the edge, and she wouldn’t see him coming.

Ross stayed above her, moving along balconies and ledges, able to stay out of sight because he didn’t need to keep eyes on
the target. He was able to choose his spot, and when he got the drop on her, he selected his weapon carefully too. No point
threatening to blast her with anything that would just cause her to respawn half a mile away and allow her to make her escape.
Instead he drew a bead on her with a locally acquired ice-ray cannon, and made sure she knew what she was looking at. One
squeeze on the trigger and she would be stuck fast to the spot.

‘Freeze,’ he said instinctively, after which a little part of him died inside as this new nadir of lameness sunk in.

Iris looked startled for just a moment before reverting to her default demeanour of vaguely pissed-off.

‘I’m glad to see you took my advice and learned not to draw so much attention to yourself.’

‘I’m learning lots of things. Like
what I am
,’ he reminded her.

‘Yeah, that’s gotta be a tough one. How you coping?’

‘I’m processing it. At quite a high rate of cycles per second as it turns out. You lied to me. You told me there was a way
back to the real world. But how can there be a way back to somewhere neither of us has ever been?’

‘I didn’t say there was a way back. I said there was a way
out
.’

Ross was holding the ice-cannon, but he felt like the one who had just been frozen.

‘Out? To where?’

‘I can’t tell you. I can only take you.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Why can’t you tell me? Have you been there?’

‘No. I’m trying to
get
there. That’s the part that’s complicated.’

Ross stifled a scream of exasperation.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m Iris.’

‘No, I mean—’

‘You don’t
know
what you mean. Are you asking who I’m a copy of on the outside? The answer is I’m nobody you’ve ever met. Are you asking
whether I’m with the Integrity, or with the Diasporadoes? Well, I’ve got sources in both camps, but a foot in neither. The
answer is I’m with me. The answer is I’m Iris, and I’m trying to get out of here because I suspect someone on the outside
is gearing up to type “Format C”.’

Ross put his gun away. He knew she wasn’t going to make a run for it, as both were now acutely aware that the other wasn’t
the enemy.

‘Where do I fit into this?’ he asked. ‘On Graxis, why did you seek me out to warn me to stay inconspicuous?’

‘You were a new arrival, and therefore, like the Integrity, a part of whatever struggle is going on out in the real world.
An oblivious part, clearly, but somebody was playing a card in that game when they put you here.’

‘So why did you keep running away from me after that?’

‘Because I knew the Integrity would be all over you like a rash. I was keeping out of your way because I could see what was
going to happen to anyone who stayed too long in your orbit. The Diasporadoes were drawn to you like moths to a flame, and
they got burned, along with two Originals.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I already told you: I’ve got sources in both camps, but a foot in neither, which is the safest place to be. I can tell you
this much, though: the Diasporadoes have been compromised.’

‘No shit, Sherlock. I got sold out by the Sandman, one of the precious Originals that the Diasporadoes are so desperate to
protect.’

‘I heard about that, but I’m not talking about the Sandman here. He just cut a deal because you brought trouble to his door.
I’m saying the resistance had been infiltrated well before that by a double agent who has been feeding information to the
Integrity.’

This hit Ross like a fist to the gut, yet even as he reeled he felt like he deserved the blow for not seeing it coming. Of
course they’d been compromised. They were cautious beyond the point of paranoid and yet the Integrity kept showing up to crash
the party. Skullhammer’s fears had been justified: he’d just been wrong about the traitor.

‘Who is it?’

‘I’m afraid that’s the best-kept secret in the gameverse, and so far I only know the runner-up.’

That was the terrible, deadly beauty of it, Ross realised: it could be anyone. He’d been warned enough times that in this
world, anybody could be something other than they appeared, and there was no way of finding out. Christ, it could be Skullhammer,
firing off accusations as a double bluff.

No.

To his horror he suddenly saw that Cuddles the maenad might have inadvertently done him a favour.

There was one person who had been with him all along, who had intercepted him before he could make contact with anyone else
in the resistance: someone who had expressed disgruntlement about her lot in the movement, complaining how nobody told her
anything, of wanting traction with the higher-ups. She didn’t even
need
to be disenchanted – her whole story could be a lie. She could have infiltrated from the ground level, not attracting undue
attention, ideally placed to make her move when the order came or the opportunity arose.

Or the Integrity could simply have abducted the real Juno and put a doppelganger in her place. There was just no way of
knowing, which was what made it corrosive even to think about it.

‘So what’s the second best-kept secret?’ he asked.

‘I already told you that too: the location of the emergency exit. Don’t you pay any attention?’

‘I was paying attention when you said it was complicated. I’m guessing there’s a catch.’

‘Yeah, just a little one: it takes an Original to open it. But as it appears we have common cause, maybe you could help me
with that, unless you’d rather just wait around for the magnetic heads to come.’

‘The Originals are all in hiding. Deeper than ever, I shouldn’t wonder. I don’t know where any of them are.’

‘You know where
two
of them are.’

Ross thought she was having a cheap dig about the fact that he had been involved in both abductions. Then he realised that
she intended something far worse.

‘You up for staging a prison break?’ Iris asked.

‘From an impregnable fortress at the heart of the Integrity’s purpose-built home-world? Yeah, I’ll just save them the bother
of capturing me by delivering myself to their jail.’

‘Who says it’s impregnable?’

‘At the last count? Everybody.’

‘And how many of them have ever tried? At the last count: nobody. That’s why they won’t see it coming.’

‘They won’t need to. How much notice would they require in order to respond effectively to an assault by the two of us? Five
seconds maybe? Three?’

Iris was shaking her head in a manner that suggested this wasn’t an idea she had just pulled out of her arse.

‘I’ve been studying the Integrity for a long time, and I’ve got some inside information too. They’re at the top of the food
chain, and as a result they’re complacent. They built a fortified home-world, but they’re not geared up for defending it,
because, quite simply, they don’t expect to be attacked. It’s a staging post for their offensives. And by the same principle,
the thing about their prison is that the security’s all geared towards stopping anybody getting out. They don’t believe anyone
would be crazy enough to break
in
.’