Hollow Moon (27 page)

“Oh my gosh!” cried Philyra. “They have the
Gods of
Avalon
game!”

Ravana smiled at the sight of Endymion staring at the row
of booths in disgust. It did not surprise her that game makers had resorted to
adapting tacky holovid shows for ideas. The irony was that
Gods of Avalon
was itself based upon a long-running teenage saga,
which in turn had followed a film franchise inspired by a successful run of
comic books; a series that had been adapted from a trilogy of novels loosely
based upon the original Arthurian myths and legends of the British Isles. It
seemed there really were no new stories to tell.

“They also have
The War of the Ring
,” Zotz suggested hopefully, pointing to a row of
booths decorated with Tolkien-inspired imagery. “And
Battlefield
Earth
.”

“Or even
Superhero Showdown
,” added Endymion, giving Zotz a sideways look.

“It all sounds rather violent,” Ravana murmured. There
was a small VR suite on the
Dandridge Cole
,
but it was an old design and the few games they had were rather sedate. “I’ve
had enough conflict for one day.”

Philyra was already dragging Bellona towards the
Gods
of Avalon
suite and excitedly explaining
the game to her. Endymion gave a resigned shrug and trotted after them.

“What about it?” Zotz asked Ravana, as they followed.
“It’s a fantasy game. Wizards and monsters, mysterious quests, that sort of
thing.”

“Knights in shining armour,” added Bellona.

Endymion grinned. “Damsels in distress.”

The young man operating the suite gave them the merest
glance as they approached. He was a tall, olive-skinned local who looked barely
older than Endymion. His bleary expression suggested he had been down in the
dim basement longer than was healthy.

“How much?” asked Endymion.

The man shrugged. “Are you staying at the Pampa Palace?”

Philyra nodded. “We arrived this morning.”

“Then it’s free,” he told them. “All inclusive. You
off-worlders?”

“From Ascension, Barnard’s Star,” replied Endymion.
“Why?”

“Different settings,” he said. “Locals use their implants
for the data feed.”

He directed them to the booths. His offhand demeanour
made it clear he was not there for the conversation. Ravana watched hesitantly
as her four companions slipped easily into the walker frames within, then
reluctantly followed suit.

Once inside, she examined the touch-screen display before
her and flicked through the pages of VR avatars until one caught her eye. The
holovid clip showed a fierce yet strikingly-beautiful raven-haired woman,
dressed in wild flowing robes of purple and black. Ravana was no expert on
Arthurian lore but judging by the strange, dance-like way the woman tended to
her smoking cauldron it seemed a fair assumption she was either some sort of
sorceress or a very eccentric cook.

“Morgan le Fay,” she murmured, making her selection. It
was the fact that the woman seemed to share her cave-like lair with a cat that
attracted her most.

Settling back into the walker frame, Ravana put on the VR
headset and lowered the visor across her eyes. She was familiar with the
submersion process and saw straight away that something was wrong, for the
black-and-white holding image was so out of focus it made her head hurt just to
look at it. She could make out four figures standing inside a grey stone hall,
but the picture was indistinct and fuzzy.

“Are you all ready?” asked the operator, sounding bored.

Ravana raised her hand to ask him to check her visor, but
he had not waited for a reply and had started the programme. The image before
her eyes subtly twisted into three dimensions, flooded with colour and suddenly
she was inside the virtual world.

She found herself in a large stone hall, standing next to
four others before a circular table. A candelabra high in the vaulted ceiling
dispelled the shadows with a cool flickering light. A row of brightly-painted
jousting shields, many dented and scratched, hung upon the walls between narrow
windows. Yet everything remained out of focus, leaving her with the impression
she was seeing the same view twice, superimposed but not quite aligned.
Thinking her headset was at fault, she experimented with closing one eye and
then the other but it made no difference. Her companions were also blurred but
she could see they were a black knight in armour, a squire in a ragged brown
tunic, an African priestess in a blue smock and a chiffon-clad princess in
medieval garb. Beyond the table, a fuzzy figure in regal robes entered the hall
and walked towards them.

“King Arthur himself!” exclaimed the knight, in
Endymion’s voice.

“Everything’s a blur,” Ravana complained. “Is anyone else
having problems?”

“Not me,” said Bellona, who was the African priestess.

“I’m fine,” purred Philyra, whom Ravana had already
guessed would be the princess.

“Call the operator,” suggested Zotz the squire.

Ravana gave the double hand-cross signal recognised by
all VR consoles and the disembodied touch-screen display of the booth appeared,
hanging in air before her. Reaching forward, she activated the communicator.

“Hello?” called Ravana. “I’m having problems.
Everything’s fuzzy.”

“One moment,” came the voice of the operator. “I’ll check
the system.”

On the other side of the circular table, the hazy blob
that was King Arthur sat down and produced a long object from within his robes.

“Travellers!” he boomed. “The kingdom of Camelot needs
your help!”

“A scroll,” whispered Zotz. “He is here to give us our
mission!”

“Thanks for the commentary,” muttered Ravana. “But I’m
blind, not deaf.”

Her headache was getting worse. She reached to call the
operator again, then stared as Zotz’s tunic started falling to rags around his
feet. Nearby, Philyra had become a grotesque caricature of a preening princess
in a plastic dress, all heavy make-up and leering smile.

“You cannot escape your destiny!” roared King Arthur.
“The Gods of Avalon await!”

“What’s happening?” Ravana asked, her voice wavering.

“Still checking,” replied the operator irritably.

Now Endymion’s armour dropped away to reveal the
brightly-coloured costume of a court jester. Bellona’s robes turned dirty and
grey as she took on the mantle of a down-trodden farmer’s wife, complete with a
couple of chickens clucking at her feet. King Arthur’s words had become a
metallic slur and a confused Ravana saw the king was losing his own fine attire
to expose a grey, featureless avatar, then a panel on his chest fell open to
reveal he was no more than an android. The screen on the disembodied booth
display hanging before her showed a trembling Morgan le Fay shooting sparks
from her fingertips. Ravana’s virtual countenance had taken on a definite green
tint and her eyes glowed like red-hot coals.

“Are you okay?” asked Zotz. Beneath his disintegrating
rags the squire wore the armour of the gallant red knight, Queen Guinevere’s
secret champion. “You look scary.”

“Everything’s going wrong!” moaned Ravana.

Startled, she realised the hall was starting to shrink.
The shields faded from the walls, while all around her the narrow windows were
being squeezed out of existence by the relentless incoming stones. She tried to
step towards Zotz but could not move.

“zz-deestiinyy-zz…!” rasped the robot king.

“It’s all a bit of fun!” laughed the jester. “Fun! Fun!
Fun!”

“What the hell!” cried the operator. “A double feedback
loop!”

Ravana whirled around in alarm as the walls of the hall
continued to close in on her. The grey stones grew ever larger until the words
Isa-Sastra
were revealed upon each one, then fell open
like the pages of a book.

Suddenly, cascades of black spiders poured out of the
openings, down the walls and across the floor. More and more spiders followed,
some as big as her hand. Her companions, the king and the table melted away and
she alone was left to face the hissing arachnid flood that seethed towards her.
Ravana clawed at her clothes in panic as she felt the spiders clambering up her
legs, up her body and arms, over her face and into her hair. The walls
continued to grind ever closer. Virtual reality or not, the horror was real. As
were her screams.

“Why didn’t you say you had an implant?” cried a voice.
“I’m pulling you out now!”

Ravana’s piercing shriek, a sound wrought from pure
terror, continued loud and strong. Suddenly, it was all over. The virtual world
disappeared from around her, leaving her hanging limply in the walker frame,
exhausted and sobbing uncontrollably. She barely felt the hands that reached
forward to carry her to safety.

Ravana peered over the edge of the sheets, her mind in
turmoil. Her cat lay curled next to her on the hotel room bed, chewing upon a
light bulb and doing its best to soothe her nerves with its electric purr. What
she had gone through in the
Gods of Avalon
game
had felt horrifyingly real, for her eyes had been opened to a twisted version
of her own imagination. Yet terrifying though her experience in the VR suite
was, a new and very real fear now gripped her. There was something in her head
that was not her.

“What the hell happened?” demanded Quirinus. He stood at
the end of her bed, facing a stout, middle-aged Asian man who happened to be
the hotel manager. Behind the manager stood the sheepish operator, while on the
bed itself was a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates, which the manager
had seen fit to bring by way of an apology.

“Is she okay?” asked Zotz, concerned. He and Miss Clymene
were standing by the connecting door leading to the suite next door. Behind
them, Ravana saw the anxious faces of Endymion, Bellona and Philyra. Quirinus
did not reply but instead motioned to Miss Clymene to take Zotz and the others
into the next room.

“A most unfortunate incident,” the manager said. “But I
can assure you that every one of my games room team are fully-certified
operatives. We will review our procedures to make sure this sort of thing does
not happen again.”

“They said they were off-worlders,” muttered the youth.
“How was I supposed to know she had an implant?”

As she heard the word again, Ravana shuddered and pulled
the sheets tight, increasingly frantic at the thought that there was something
lodged in her brain, something that had been there hidden and waiting all these
years. Quirinus glanced towards her and then quickly looked away, as if ashamed
at having concealed it from her for so long.

The double vision experienced within the game had been
caused by her long-dormant implant. It had tried to reconcile its direct link
with the VR suite with the data stream from her headset, but this had led her
mind to superimpose a nightmare-like interpretation upon the game itself. That
this had never happened to her before was purely because the only other VR
suite she had ever used, that on the
Dandridge Cole
, was so old it pre-dated implant technology.

“She didn’t know herself,” admitted Quirinus, looking
dejected. “I never told her.”

“Never seen a standard implant backfire like that
before,” the youth mumbled.

“How long have I had it?” whispered Ravana.

Her father still could not bring himself to look at her.

“Since you were four,” he said. “Children on Yuanshi had
to have implants by law; your mother and I were told it was as routine as
getting vaccinations. Back then we lived in downtown Lanka and didn’t have
access to any of the new and supposedly wonderful implant-controlled technology
that was becoming popular, so I assumed it had never been activated. As I
watched you growing up it became harder and harder to tell you about it.”

“I felt the pain of the
Platypus
,” murmured Ravana, watching as her cat slunk across
the bed to cautiously sniff the bouquet and chocolates. “Was that the implant?”

“I think so. Maybe also the cause of your headaches,”
Quirinus told her, then sighed. “It’s why I agreed to fly us here to Daode. I
was hoping to find a doctor who could tell us if there was anything wrong.”

Ravana sat up. “You brought me here to have a doctor look
inside my head?”

The hotel manager looked flustered. “If there is any way
the hotel can help…”

“You’ve already been most kind,” said Quirinus, with a
cursory nod. “I will let you know if we need anything else.”

The manager bowed, taking this as a cue to leave. No
sooner had he and the young man left the room when Ostara suddenly appeared at
the doorway, looking breathless.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” she exclaimed,
sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I need to tell you about Fenris!”

“Can it wait?” asked Quirinus. “Ravana has had a bit of a
shock.”

“Poor Ravana!” said Ostara. She gave her a sympathetic
smile. “What’s wrong?”

“I need my head examined,” Ravana replied gloomily.

“A wise precaution,” came a voice from the connecting
doorway. Quirinus and Ostara turned to see Fenris stepping into the room, his
expression suggesting he had been listening for a while. “It just so happens I
know of an old family friend of the Maharani’s, an excellent doctor who has a
practice right here in Hemakuta. I am sure he would be only too glad to help
put your fears to rest.”

“Don’t trust him,” Ostara warned Quirinus. “He…”

“I don’t plan to!” Quirinus retorted, interrupting her.

“We have had our disagreements in the past,” Fenris
acknowledged. “But this is about doing what is right for your daughter in her
hour of need.”