Bedlam (33 page)

Ross glanced back along the alley, as though even talking out loud about this might be enough to draw an Integrity snatch
squad down upon their heads.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s assume for a second – and only for a second – that we
are
crazy enough to break in. Leaving aside the fact that you are attributing an all-time high efficacy to the element of surprise,
once we’ve exhausted that particular dividend and the entire garrison is alerted, how do you propose we then break back out?’

She produced a device, a stubby little baton suddenly summoned into existence in her hand. Upon a squeeze of her palm, it
altered its shape to form two semi-circular fans, feathered yet fluid, like liquid ferrite. It was unmistakably Integrity
tech.

‘We auto-warp,’ she said. ‘This little beauty creates an instant transit.’

‘Where the hell did you get that?’

‘It wasn’t easy. Some of the higher-ups carry these to allow them to auto-warp back to the Citadel from worlds that they’ve
otherwise locked down. But the bottom line is that if we can get ourselves in, this will get us out. So what do you say?’

‘We’d still have to break into a massively fortified base and take on an entire army of absurdly tooled-up enemies just between
the two of us,’ he pointed out.

‘I know. Doesn’t that sound like a classic FPS?’

‘This is our last stopping-off point,’ Iris told him. ‘When we emerge from this transit, we’ll be a world away.’

They had passed briskly and uneventfully through
Half-Life 2
,
Thief
, both
System Shock
s, three different
Halo
s and finally an obscure
Quake
conversion called
Malice
, Ross observing a master-class from Iris in how to remain undetected. As his admiration grew however, he did begin to wonder
at the implications for him identifying her – not to mention successfully executing an ambush – back in
Duke
Hollywood. The inescapable conclusion was that he was the one who had been spotted earlier, despite being in mufti, and that
he had only got the drop on her because she wanted it that way. He just hoped she was still such a smooth operator when they
got to the Citadel.

‘I can remember when that expression used to imply distance, not proximity,’ he replied.

‘Then put it from your mind, because this next place is the closest thing to the Integrity’s home-world in more ways than
one. You know about the enclaves, right?’

Ross remembered Melita mentioning, before Juno had hastily cut her off, how a more radical customisation had taken place on
some worlds.

‘No, but I’m guessing it’s not all Calastria and Pulchritupolis, high aesthetics and higher ideals.’

‘The gameverse is like the internet in that the best thing about it is how it can bring like-minded people together. And like
the internet, the worst thing about it is how it can bring like-minded people together. There are some nasty little neighbourhoods
dotted here and there. Places full of isolationists
and fundamentalists: basically people who don’t like anyone different from themselves.’

‘The Islamist one must be a hoot,’ Ross suggested. ‘You can suicide-bomb yourself all day every day and just keep respawning.’

‘Actually, there
is
an Islamist one, and if you saw it from above, it’s like a chequerboard, full of walled-off compartments. What happens is
they get to arguing about whose vision of Islam is the most pure, and a schism forms; then, because they can’t kill each other
permanently, each new faction walls itself off from the rest. Then the process starts again.’

They emerged from a copse of trees on to the edge of a fairway on an immaculately maintained golf course, summer sun splitting
the cloudless azure above. This was actually a bit of a relief, as it explained the appalling slacks and sweater Iris had
commanded him to select from the costume options, and he had started to wonder whether they were heading for
Fashion Crime World
.

They made their way to the clubhouse, passing several players in hover-buggies, all of whom waved by way of polite acknowledgement.
Looking across the fairways, Ross could see that there must be at least three courses here, extending to the hills in one
direction and the sea in the other, presumably for those who liked the feel of a links. Ross wasn’t a golfer himself, but
struggled to deduce what was putting Iris so on-edge about the place. Even a whole world dedicated to the sport was hardly
an abomination; different strokes and all that.

As they exited the club’s beautifully iron-wrought gates, Ross saw that it wasn’t a world dedicated to golf. This was merely
one facility. Iris led him along the smooth and perfectly clean pavement into a picturesque rural village, a place that looked
as though little had changed since the eighteenth century, apart from the hover-cars and, very incongruously, the security
systems protecting every house. There were electric gates, CCTV cameras and prowling Dobermans, as though they were expecting
a crime wave, yet the village looked like it had never suffered so much as the dropping of a sweetie wrapper.

They came to the village green, where a group of men in whites were enjoying a game of cricket, watched with purring approval
by spectators at tables outside a very enticing pub, drinking foaming pints as they relaxed in the shade. Ross was
beginning to wonder why something about this was ringing a bell, when he heard the actual ringing of a bell and saw a middle-aged
woman in 1950s district-nurse uniform cycling past. Something about her demeanour suggested to Ross that she was an NPC. She
wasn’t ‘an old maid bicycling to communion through the morning mist’, but he was starting to get the picture.

‘It all seems pretty civilised,’ he admitted.

‘Yeah. Change your face to something other than white and see how civilised it gets.’

Ross looked again at the cricketers and drinkers. Iris was right: there wasn’t a lot of pigment on show. What was all the
more confusing about this was that on his HUD Ross had spotted several ethnic faces in this gameworld’s default skin set,
as well as some jarringly scruffy outfits, not to mention a load of World War Two uniforms. That was when he noticed that
Iris had eschewed all her usual punkish flourishes and was looking like a 1950s housewife.

‘What is this place?’ he asked quietly.

‘The locals call it England’s Green and Pleasant Land.’

‘It looks like John Major’s vision of a country that never existed. Who are the locals? The 1922 Committee?’

‘You know how everything in these worlds is massively enhanced from the original games? Not just the surroundings, but the
NPCs?’

‘Yes. Like everything’s been ported to a more advanced game engine.’

‘Well, whatever it is, it didn’t just affect games. There was a program, a little app called the
Daily Mail
Headline Generator.’

‘I remember it. What, are you telling me it became self-aware?’

‘No. I didn’t know anything about the
Daily Mail
before I got here, but I now know it’s like a print equivalent of Fox News, and self-aware is not an expression that would
ever apply to either. But the app did become enhanced, and developed AI. It infected a copy of
The Sims
and began building its perfect world. The problem was, the program wasn’t in on the joke.’

‘It didn’t realise it was set up as a satire. And it built all this?’

‘No, what it built initially was a mess, but some people clearly liked what it was trying to do, and got together to realise
their collective vision.’

As they proceeded beyond the village green, Ross got a close-up view of what a vision it was. They came to a busy civic square,
where some kind of public spectacle had drawn a far larger crowd than the nearby smack of leather on willow. It was here that
Ross got to see what some of the less sartorially decorous costumes were for. There was a teenager in ripped jeans and a Sex
Pistols t-shirt suspended from a metal beam by chains around his wrists, his manacled feet barely touching the ground. He
was screaming out in pain as a bloke built like a rugby prop-forward in village bobby uniform laid into his back with a birch,
every stroke cheered by the spectators. A video screen next to the whipping post showed footage of the transgressor spray-painting
a wall and then being apprehended in the act by his punisher, a panel to one side of the screen detailing his crime and the
number of strokes like it was the league tables on a sports bulletin.

This was only the support act, however. On the other side of the whipping post there was a gallows, and beside it another
adjacent video screen advertised a programme of executions, a scrolling marquee at the bottom of the monitor listing the names
of the condemned along with their crimes. These invariably consisted of murder, terrorism, paedophilia or all three.

The first of the rope-dancers was being marched out as Iris ushered Ross up a side-street away from the square. Ross caught
a glimpse of a hideously caricatured Muslim being led towards the gallows, glowering defiantly as he climbed the steps.

‘How can you murder somebody here?’ he asked.

‘You can’t, and he didn’t. The criminals are all NPCs. These ass-wipes would rather live in a world where criminals are caught
and punished than a world in which there is no crime. Except, of course, there
is
no crime: only an illusion of it, and it’s an illusion they find bizarrely comforting.’

‘So that’s why they have so much security at their houses, even though nobody is ever going to break in?’

‘It’s an insane pantomime. You gotta ask yourself: what kind of sad-acts don’t feel right unless they’ve got something to
be afraid of and somebody to look down on.’

‘
Daily Mail
readers would be the answer to that one.’

As they headed out of town, Ross’s eye was drawn by a shop
window that he was astonished to discover was an estate agent. It was full of pictures of the local properties, beneath which
animated digital counters showed their values going up in sterling, the dials spinning like a gas meter in January.

‘But there’s no money here, is there?’ he asked.

‘No, but if the fact that nobody wants to buy and nobody wants to sell doesn’t make a difference, why should the absence of
a currency system?’

‘This takes the art of kidding yourself to a whole new level. Actually, the very idea that anybody other than these nutters
would want to live here makes the whole concept of a property market even more ridiculous.’

‘Oh no, no, no,’ she corrected him. ‘People are desperate to get in here, as you’re about to see.’

‘Why, where are we heading?’

‘To the coast. We’re taking a ship.’

‘We have to sail to the transit?’

‘A spaceship. It’s the only way to reach the Citadel. I mean, there are transits there, but they’re permanently monitored
and guarded.’

Ross wondered how she could just happen to know there was such a thing as a spaceship available on a closed-border enclave
entirely sympathetic to the Integrity. It took just a moment for the answer to sink in.

‘You’ve been to the Citadel before. It’s your ship.’

‘Not the Citadel itself,’ she corrected. ‘But yeah, I’ve been to the Integrity’s home-world. I’m not going in blind here,
are you nuts? How do you think I got my sources?’

Ross looked blank by way of reply.

Iris glanced around to make sure nobody was in sight, then very briefly transformed into an Integrity agent, shimmering in
black for a fraction of a second before resuming her knitting-pattern advert look.

‘Same as everywhere else, soon as you touch down you get the default threads.’

And suddenly Ross saw how they might just pull this off.

They made their way along a pleasantly winding coast road, the undulating landscape around them like something out of
Thomas the Tank Engine
. He could smell the grass and the sea air,
yet the artificiality of this place was more pervasive than the most far-fetched of the fantasy realms he’d explored.

‘You say you’ve got Integrity sources. Just how much do you know about what’s going on? On the outside, I mean.’

She looked instantly uncomfortable.

‘There are things I could tell you, but most of them wouldn’t be helpful for you to know.’

‘I’m a scientist. I’ve never been a subscriber to the philosophy that ignorance is bliss or that it’s ever folly to be wise.
Is this about Neurosphere? Do you know anything about me? About after the time of my scan?’

‘That’s precisely the kind of thing that comes into the “not helpful for you to know” category.’

‘Why?’

‘Because anything that happened after your scan is
not
you any more.’

‘Do you know who I am, or was, out there?’

‘Your name is Ross Baker,’ she answered. ‘I know that much. And I know you were involved in the development of the technology
that allowed Neurosphere to create total-fidelity scans of people’s minds.’

She sounded like she was reading from a crib-sheet, or more likely editing her speech as she went, cautious about what she
considered it wise to reveal.

‘Yeah, that much I had pieced together myself,’ he said impatiently. ‘Can you give me just a wee peek at what was on the next
page? How far in the future are we talking between my scan with the prototype and this technology going public?’

‘Your own account of the process – or at least, Ross Baker’s account – was that normally recording and playback technology
are developed in symbiosis, but in this case it was like Solderburn had recorded a digital 3D IMAX movie when you thought
he was creating a cave painting. The more you developed means of decoding the data, the more complex you discovered even the
earliest scans to be. Every advance you made in reading the scans showed deeper levels of detail to what had actually been
recorded.’

It was vertiginous to hear what sounded authentically like the kind of analogy he’d use being quoted back to him when
he had never actually said it, but not so much that he missed a further implication of Iris’s words.

‘A quote like that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d just pick up from eavesdropping on the Integrity,’ he told her.

‘No. This was real-world stuff. My own scan came a few years later than yours.’

‘A few years? So do you know anything else about me? Did I have … I mean, was Ross Baker a … a father?’

The jury was out for a while on whether she would tell him, as though she had to carefully evaluate whether he could handle
it. She looked a little sad, like she knew this could only hurt him but that she understood he needed to know regardless.

‘He had two kids,’ she said. ‘One boy, one girl. I think the girl was the older of them, but I’m not sure. Scott and Jennifer
were their names. Are their names.’

Jennifer. His mother’s name. Scott: Carol’s dad.

He could feel tears. He wanted to collapse on the spot but he kept walking, trying to hide the impact from Iris, as it felt
too private, too personal, for someone else to witness. This was a new kind of pain, one the human psyche was not equipped
to process, whether it was running on digital or organic hardware.

Ross rubbed at his eyes, clearing the mist. What had looked like a grey haze in the middle distance revealed itself as a fence,
about ten feet high with three lines of barbed wire stretched between the retorts.