by G. D. Penman
Even if nothing changed, he still predicted a steady advance over the Brotherhood, and all of the guilds up ahead of Iron Riot had already worked themselves into stalemates with the later Archdukes. It was the perfect meritocracy – everyone got as far as their competence allowed, then stalled out forever until they improved themselves.
For some of the other guilds that meant grinding up levels against lesser enemies until they could overpower the mechanics of a boss, while for others it meant learning the fights and the lore of the game well enough to beat the Archdukes at a disadvantage.
A vending-machine dinner saw to his physical needs, and the phone streaming the latest conspiracy theories and game commentary from other Strata players saw to his mental ones. Using the Neural Interface Headset always left him feeling oddly neutral. He wasn’t sore from lying still for hours at a time, but he wasn’t rested either. It was like his body was just in stasis while he was away. He’d wondered briefly what would happen if he logged into Strata while he needed the toilet, but he decided to cut that line of inquiry short before he wet the bed as part of an experiment.
Eventually, about 1 am, he lay down to go to sleep and ordered the lights to turn off. Then he lay there some more. Waiting. It took a while for him to realize what was wrong. It was too quiet. Apart from the hum of the air conditioning and the gentle creak of the mattress there was no sign that there was anyone else in the world. No screaming argument in the apartment on the other side of a paper-thin wall. No distant rhythmic thumping of dancing, sex and washing machines on the other floors. Just silence.
If his ears were capable of pricking up on this body, that was what the silence would be doing to him. Even the little window looking out over the city let in no noise. He was used to sleeping amidst a warren of living bodies, not in comfort and peace. It was making him nervous. That and the stupendously bad idea he was planning on going through with in the morning.
He waited another hour before exhaustion finally took him under.
The dream had stopped being a surprise. He didn’t talk about it, and tried his best not to even remember what happened. Lindsay would lose her mind if she heard about it. She’d actually taken the health-and-safety spiel about dreams being a warning sign of the NIH messing up your brain to heart.
Martin knew better. He’d dreamed about every game he’d ever played. The fact that this one was a bit more intense was just because his feelings about Strata were more intense.
The green eye stared up at him from down in the darkness, burning brighter than any cat’s eye, brighter than the sun, down there in so much darkness. But even as he felt it burning into his retinas he couldn’t look away.
Come to me.
He started falling, down into the dark. It didn’t feel like gravity hauling him down. It felt like he was being swallowed. Like darkness was swallowing him whole. Deeper and deeper. The darkness started to seep inside him, eating away at the margins, making him less and less human. More and more Strata’s.
Live for me. Die for me. Live again.
The eye was filling up Martin’s whole world. The dark forgotten and this living light crawling up like wisps from the sun’s corona. Flares of green living fire reaching out toward him. Tendrils stretching to their limits.
They were close enough that he could feel the gentle heat radiating from the green light when his alarm started beeping and he jerked upright in the hotel room. He felt like he hadn’t slept at all. That didn’t matter. He didn’t really need to sleep anymore. The longer he played Strata, the less tired his time in the game seemed to make him. Soon, he’d be able to play all the time without having to worry about his body passing out on him.
For now, the few hours of sleep that he managed before his pounding heart woke him up from the nightmares would have to do. He’d even started scheduling around them. With his computer and NIH stored away in the tech safe, Martin was ready to start his day. The room was his until tomorrow morning, in case there were any hiccups in the day’s mission and he needed to stay out later than anticipated. He took one last look at its relative luxury, then headed down the rusted stairs into the streets.
Suburbia had mostly been swallowed up over the last few years as land value climbed and city populations continued to boom. Even out here, in what had clearly once been a white picket-fence neighborhood, there were converted shipping container apartments stacked onto what had once been lawns. Further into town the bare metal would still have been on display, while out here they buried them for insulation and aesthetics. Flowers grew on the roofs of many a family, blocking the street view of the old-style houses set further back from the cracked tarmac.
Edwin Klimpt’s address did not have a letter attached to its number. He was not under a hillock, he had one of the real houses, the relics of the middle-class life that used to be everywhere. Martin walked rather than taking a taxi, and while he’d consulted his phone’s map before heading out, there wasn’t a chance he was going to risk punching in Klimpt’s house number the way he usually would have with any new address. Whoever was hiding the man was so tech savvy it looked like magic, and Martin had no way to counter that, nor did he plan to try. His phone was off, locked up in the hotel safe. House numbers had been spray-painted onto the pavement to help couriers make their deliveries, and Martin counted his way along them with a scrap of paper in his hand for when instinct made him glance down to refresh his memory.
When the house came into sight it was like Martin was peering through a portal into the past. Lilies grew in rows alongside the path up to the door, a full-sized apple tree stood out in the middle of the lawn and, most galling of all, there was a garage attached to the side of the whitewashed house, big enough for a real old-fashioned car. Whatever else was going on with Klimpt, the guy was clearly richer than anybody Martin had ever met in his life.
Martin pushed that thought aside, along with all the other anxieties about his plan. If he could walk up to an Archduke of Strata and punch it in the face, he could face some rich old guy. His fear here wasn’t helping to keep him sharp, it was a holdover from the real dangerous situations he’d faced in Strata. It wasn’t like anything bad could happen. This was the real world, there were no monsters waiting to pounce out of the shadows.
The gravel crunched under his feet, and for the first time in his life Martin could smell flowers instead of the omnipresent reek of the city. The grass was real and long enough to sway when a breeze blew through it. Long enough for Martin to see that there were different kinds in the same patch, topped with different seeds or tips. He hadn’t even known there was more than one kind of grass before today.
If he hesitated now, this would all have been for nothing. This trip had been a real sacrifice in terms of resources, and if it didn’t pay off he’d have lost not only this day’s gaming, but also cut to practically nothing the weeks of gaming time in his margin for error before he had to go out and find a new job to pay rent. He knocked on the door before he had a chance to second guess himself.
Edwin Klimpt opened the door. He was in his fifties or sixties. His balding head still showed wisps of white around the sides, and his long jowls were salt and peppered with stubble. Behind his glasses, his eyes were a watery blue. “Yes?”
“Edwin Klimpt?”
People move all the time, shifting to make themselves more comfortable, blinking, breathing. Klimpt stopped doing all those things. He froze. “I’m sorry, son, I think you have the wrong address.”
“You’re Edwin Klimpt? The inventor of the Neural Interface?”
Klimpt was shaking his head, eyes bulging. He spoke again, louder and clearer. “I am sorry. You have the wrong address. There is nobody of that name here, son.”
“I just need to ask you a few questions, Mr Klimpt. I’m a big fan of your work, I’ve been playing your game, and I just really wanted to meet the…” Martin was cut off by Klimpt’s tobacco-yellowed fingers clamping over his mouth. Klimpt leaned in and hissed, “Not here,” then steppe
d back to practically shout: “Sorry, son, I think you’re looking for the next street over. Have a nice day now.”
The door slammed unceremoniously in Martin’s face, and he couldn’t help but feel like nobody had taught him how to deal with this encounter mechanic. The guy was clearly Edwin Klimpt or he wouldn’t have freaked out so much, so what was going on with all the theatre? It wasn’t like Martin was going to disappear now that he’d found the man. He stood on the doorstep for a long moment, trying to puzzle things through, before the automatic door of the garage swung up with a rumbling groan. It stopped when it was open to the height of Martin’s waist, but it was enough. He dropped to all fours and scurried inside.
This was more like it. The outside of the house might have looked like something out of a silicon-age painting, but in this part all Martin’s mad-scientist fantasies came true. There were workbenches strewn with parts so complex that they defied even Martin’s pretty extensive knowledge of electronics, white boards covered in formulae and diagrams that seemed to run the breadth of the known sciences, and, at the center of it all, Klimpt himself, pulling the ripcord on what had started out life as a lawn mower, but was now encased in a bronze-colored sphere and more complex machinery and tangled wiring than you could shake a soldering iron at. “You got a pacemaker, kid?”
“What?” Martin was so lost. “No?”
“Good, because I’ve got to tell you, kid, if you did…” He yanked on the cord again and again as the machine hummed louder and louder. “This would hurt.”
There was a muffled crumping sound from inside the sphere, and all the hair on Martin’s body stood on end for a moment. The garage door stopped its downward motion. The lightbulb overhead exploded in a shower of sparks. Klimpt cursed. “Shit, forgot to turn out the light.”
In the dark, there was a brief fumbling sound then one of the lamps clicked on, illuminating the old man’s wild-looking face. “I knew you’d find me eventually. No matter what the Masters did, it was only a matter of time until one of you was smart enough to work it out. Nothing comes from nowhere. Even old Isaac Newton knew that.”
Martin’s hair crackled under his hands as he tried to smooth it down. “What did you just do?”
“That little gadget?” Klimpt gave it a half-hearted kick. “Can’t have them listening in on us, can we? Not when you came all this way and we’ve got so little time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Their response time, kid. From wherever they’ve squirreled away their little jackboot thugs to here, I’ve tested it out. We’ve got seven minutes to talk, then they’ll be here to grab you. So really, we’ve got about five, since you couldn’t help but say their damn trigger words on my doorstep.”
Martin’s heart was already pounding, but this kicked it into overdrive. “The Masters are watching you?”
“Not like we made it hard for them. Every bit of tech in the world is watching and listening.” Klimpt coughed out a laugh. “All it took was somebody with a head for coding to break in and – poof, omniscience. But that isn’t what you’re here to ask about, and you’ve only got four minutes left.”
All of Martin’s worst paranoia coming out of somebody else’s mouth. If he didn’t have time, he needed to go faster. “The NIH. You invented it?”
“It was a device for inducing medical comas.” Klimpt lifted an odd-looking NIH off one of the workbenches. Exposed wiring covered its surface, and the contact points were rubberized instead of carefully padded. A working prototype. All the evidence Martin needed to believe that this was the inventor. “To help the body heal itself without resorting to tranquilizers. They took it from me, kid, once they saw what it could do. They paid me off and hid me here and made my whole life vanish.”
Klimpt slipped the NIH on his head, but it wasn’t plugged into anything. If this guy was the genius he claimed to be, Martin could forgive a little eccentricity. “Who took it from you? The people that made the game?”
“The Masters.” Klimpt spat the word. “That’s what they call themselves, as if the place belonged to them. They’re nothing but colonizers.”
The old man was digging through the equipment on the floor, shuffling things around and making a racket that Martin had to yell to be heard over. “What does that even mean?”
“We haven’t got the time to dig into this right now. Go read Karl Jung. The collective unconscious. That’s where they built their dungeon. Where they played their game. The most important place in human history and they built a theme park on top of it.” Klimpt seemed to have found what he was looking for, a compact device about the size of a cooler box, made out of the same bright-colored plastic, partially melted where the mechanical parts were fused through the side of the casing.
“What are you trying to say?” Martin was reeling, desperate for anything to hold onto in all this madness. “Strata is a real place?”
“Everything is real, kid. Anything you see or feel is as real as anything else. They built their game in the realest place of all. The place where we all connect. It could have been an ansible. It could have let us explore the secrets of the universe.” Klimpt had plugged in his cooler box and now was standing with his heels hard against it. He then paced forward three carefully measured steps as he spoke. “They had to monetize it, fast, before their shareholders pulled support. So they put structure in the chaos. They built floors. They built walls. They built rules and limitations. The NIH they’ve got you using, they’re shackles, to keep you on the path they want you walking.”
He was standing too close to Martin now, trying to meet his eyes. Martin sidled further into the garage to avoid it, looking down into the plastic box in puzzlement. It wasn’t anywhere near as complicated as the other inventions he’d seen so far. There was a motor, probably cannibalized from the lawnmower, and what looked like a pair of cleaver blades soldered onto the axles protruding from it on the side of the box closest to Klimpt set to spin around, mincing whatever you threw in like some sort of waste disposal.
The old man was putting the device on his head now, still facing away from Martin, but demanding his attention. “This was the original. The real deal, without limitations. With this, you can be who you really are, see what is really out there. Infinite choice, infinite everything. They couldn’t stand for that. They had to make it smaller. Easier for them to wrap their heads around. They lobotomized themselves so that the universe could seem like a simpler place.”
Martin came back around the front of the man when it was clear he wasn’t going to turn back. Klimpt’s eyes were shut. “I don’t have the time to tell you everything. You need to know everything. About the first crusade, the testers, the Masters’ cult. You need to understand what the font really is. There is so much I have to tell you, but there is no time.”
His watch started beeping. Time was up. The cooler box started to whir and screech as if on cue, and Klimpt had to shout to be heard. “Listen to me, kid, things are about to get wild around here. You need to run like hell or they’ll pin it all on you. Come and find me.” He reached up to the NIH on his head and pushed a battery pack into place. The whole thing lit up and hummed. “Come find me in Strata and I can tell you all the rest you need to know. I’ll be outside their walls, I’ll help you all I can, but I don’t make the rules in there. Just come find me.”
His eyes rolled up into his head as the NIH kicked in and his body stiffened from the neck down as his muscles locked into place, like sleep paralysis. Martin didn’t realize what was happening until Klimpt’s body toppled backward. By the time he was reaching out to catch the man Klimpt had already fallen back, his head lined up perfectly with the cooler box, his neck with the blades.
Blood sprayed up the walls of the garage, arterial squirts dousing the whiteboards and worktops. After doing its job, the motor burned out in a plume of greasy smoke and fell silent. The only thing Martin could hear in the silence that followed was the high-pitched whine in his ears.
A dead man was lying ju
st a few feet away from him. Blood was everywhere. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real. He had to get away from it. Now.
He rolled under the gap beneath the door and started walking away. Not running – people remembered a runner. The slap of shoes on tarmac echoed. Panic screamed at him to run, but his brain overruled it. He’d passed through his life invisible, ignored by everybody. He just had to go on being invisible for a little bit longer. He kept listening for the sound of sirens. He had to keep his gaze locked on the ground so he didn’t look around constantly. He could make it through this. He just needed to walk and think. He had to think his way around the problem.
His biometrics were all over Klimpt’s house. Fingerprints on the ground in the garage. His face saved to the house computer. As much as it turned his stomach, Martin pulled up the layout of the crime scene in his mind. He had left fingerprints and DNA on the floor of the garage, but hadn’t touched anything else. The house’s recording equipment would have shown him coming in and leaving at the time of Klimpt’s death, tying him to the crime, but only if they investigated it as a crime. It wasn’t a murder. The inventor with his suicide box, that was a narrative that made sense. The only component that didn’t fit was his visit.
Very deliberately, Martin slowed his pace again. This was suburbia, he didn’t need to move so fast to get out of people’s way. When realization hit him, he nearly tripped over his own feet. There was no record of his visit. Klimpt’s little EMP machine would have wiped the short-term memory of the house as well as killing the recording. The old man had a plan to keep Martin out of jail all along. It was just a shame he hadn’t filled Martin in on any of that plan. How the hell was Martin meant to meet him in the game if he was dead? Did the old man plant himself as an NPC back when he was still involved in the development? Did he think that just because he was plugged into Strata when his body died his mind was going to survive? None of what he’d said or done made any sense. Martin had more questions now than he’d started out with. The trip hadn’t just been a waste of time, it had been a dead end, in the worst possible sense. His only lead to the creators of the game was now cut off.