by G. D. Penman
He didn’t head straight back to his hotel room. He didn’t want to leave a trail if the Masters really did have some agent stalking him for daring to speak to one of their engineers. This was a new town, with new sights to see, mostly chain stores, statues to people nobody could remember, and coffee shops. He took them all in with a fixed expression, wandering back and forth until the sun dipped red toward the horizon and his anxiety had died back enough for hunger to return.
Another night, another vending-machine dinner. Martin tasted nothing as he shoveled the processed cubes of blandness into his mouth, softening the noodle pot with hot water from the tap before crunching it down. Outside of Strata, he couldn’t remember the last time that he’d eaten something that actually tasted like food. Something that felt like it was giving him sustenance instead of staving off the hunger pangs. He spent all his life sitting or lying around, yet he never put on any weight. It was like none of it was real.
Pushing that dangerous thought aside, he pulled his phone and the rucksack with his computer out of the safe. The dark of that metal box, just big enough for him to shove his head and shoulders inside, brought back all of the day’s bad memories. He felt bile burning the back of his throat, but it passed. He’d seen worse things than a man with no head. He’d seen his best friend torn in half by a giant crab. This was just another day. Usually, when things were troubling him, Martin had a place to go, but tonight he’d told the guild he wasn’t going to be available, and he didn’t much fancy roaming around Strata on his own.
On a normal night when the others turned in early it was his favorite thing to do. He’d creep a little ahead, spy on the enemies they’d face, work out the lay of the land and stun the others with his amazing on-the-spot assessments the next day. He knew, in the darkest depths of his heart, that he was beloved by the guild only for as long as he was useful to them, just as he had only been friends with anyone in his life so that they could use him. Those little moments of false brilliance bought him some breathing space. So long as they were impressed with him, they would not turn against him or abandon him. Lindsay’s position was also now reliant on his brilliance. She had gambled on him too often to untangle their fates.
Even if he did want to extricate himself from the others and start over he couldn’t leave her to swing in the wind, not after all she’d done for him. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t even have Strata. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t have had the guild in the last game. She had found him, and between her energetic charisma and his efficiency they had pulled together all the rest.
Jericho’s sneers and Julia’s pity were nothing compared to the pushback they’d had to deal with from the rest of their guildmates back in the early days of Dracolich. Martin would accept all their contempt and doubt readily if it was the price he had to pay to move forward, and win.
Not for the first time, he wished that he didn’t have to waste so much of his time and energy accounting for the emotional states of other people. Simple self-interest should have led them to follow the same course as him, and if it weren’t for the emotional component to their relationship, Martin would have been able to sit back and let the others take control when their skillset was a better match for the situation. It was infuriating to him that he had to appear to be better at dealing with every single situation that they encountered or risk losing their trust.
He had successfully distracted himself enough with his usual concerns that he was able to slip into his usual habits. He still couldn’t touch the NIH without risking flashbacks, but his phone was sitting on full charge, just waiting for his attention.
Thirty new messages. Two of them were escalating bids on items from Strata that would pay off his hotel stay, if not his travel costs. One was from the hotel, demanding he complete a survey. The remainder were Lindsay. A photograph of a wolf with a snake biting it on the nose and its panicked expression was accompanied by the caption, “this could be us, but you playing.” A second photograph, much older, of a crow sitting on a watermelon, covered in pulp. The caption: “felt cute, might delete later.”
A blow-by-blow accounting of her day, including grotesque details about the damage she had dealt to the office restroom following her breakfast burrito, comprised most of the rest. Then a live response to whatever trashy movie she had settled down in front of for her evening’s entertainment, apparently featuring a priest that could turn into a dinosaur. A dinosaur that could “get it,” according to Lindsay.
It was all familiar, all soothing. After replying to a few of those messages to diving into his usual message boards and forums to look for new intel, Martin’s pulse began to slow. He lay back on the bed ordered the lights to dim and breathed easy as his eyes danced over stats and strategies and hints of lore. This was his world, one that made sense and could be quantified. It had no randomness to its deaths. It had no chaos at its heart. This was the world he loved, and the one that he’d spend the rest of his life in if he had the option.
Three
The Long Night
If he had been in the game then his big round ear would have twitched, but instead he just felt a prickling up the back of his neck as adrenaline flooded his system. There was somebody in the hall outside his door. They were making no sound, and they weren’t fumbling with the door across the way — they were just standing there, breathing softly.
Martin’s eyes popped open of their own accord, and he moved with a level of stealth that even his Murovan self would have struggled to match, not over to the door but the safe. He had left it unlocked, so it was simple enough to slip his backpack on. He couldn’t leave the NIH or his computer behind, no matter what happened next. He could not stop to listen and decipher the muted sounds from outside his room. His instincts were screaming, the same ones that had him moving out of the fire before the dragon had even spat it.
There was one door in and out of the room, which would be a great choke point if he had any means of fighting back, but he didn’t, and the fact that it was blocked left him with no good options. The window looked out over the sparkling lights of the city. The room was too high for the window to have a latch, but the motel was cheap and that meant nothing was spent on reinforcing it. The letter of the law was all that mattered if you were trying to avoid a lawsuit.
Martin took a deep breath then hammered an elbow into the glass. The moment it shattered he could hear frantic movement outside his door. Whoever was out there had been fumbling with the lock, but now their tools tinkled to the ground and their boots slammed against the door. Fire door, reinforced. Up to code. It gave Martin the minute he needed to knock out the last shards of glass and climb through.
Wind whipped at him even before he’d made it all the way out, and somewhere in the hindquarters of his brain the quiet little nerd that he’d been his whole life was screaming at him that he could not do what he was doing. That he was going to die. That he was small and weak and fallible. Picked last in gym class.
His body disagreed. The NIH had been putting this meat puppet of his through its paces while his mind was elsewhere. Muscles he didn’t even know existed were toned, and all of the things he had only ever been able to do in VR now seemed to be entirely possible. Even with the weight of the gaming rig on his back, it was easy enough to climb out onto the inch-deep window-ledge and swing himself down on his fingertips.
It took more courage than strength to let go of that ledge for the next one down to catch his toes. From there, most of the work was done by gravity. Floor by floor. Falling and catching. His arms ached. His legs were jarred. The cold night air bit into him, numbing his hands and awareness. The shouts from up above him were whipped away by the wind before he could hear them, and he didn’t dare to look up anyway. That would give them his face. His biometrics would give them everything.
Martin couldn’t stop or slow until he was out of their range, and he counted the seconds the whole time he was descending the twelve stories he had to drop. If he fell two floors at once, h
e could not trust in his toes not to snap and let him fall the rest of the way to the ground.
There was no stamina meter out here to tell him when his strength was going to fail. There was no health bar to tell him how much of a deadly fall he could get up and walk away from. The math for terminal velocities and friction differentials nagged at him every moment, but he pushed them aside to calculate the far more important numbers. He had to work out if he was going to get down to the ground before the elevator could bring whoever was hunting him to the lobby.
It was too close to call. Even if he made it to ground first, if they were in the lobby before he could put some distance between them then they could tag his biometrics and he’d be screwed. Not to mention he’d just climbed down the side of a building and he wasn’t liable to be able to run any sort of distance. He was down to the second story and drenched in sweat when he came upon a room with the light on and the curtains open.
Bingo.
He banged on the window until the poor woman inside came out of the bathroom with a scream that he could hear despite the glass and the wind. She ran toward the phone on the bedside table, but a glance back at Martin’s pleading expression was enough to halt her. He mouthed, “Help me.”
As plans went, it wasn’t ideal. Throwing himself on the mercy of strangers wasn’t really Martin’s style, and historical evidence seemed to point toward the entire human race doing their best to screw him over at every juncture. She stopped on her way across the room and came over to the window. “Let me in, please. I’m slipping.”
The last bit wasn’t technically true, but she couldn’t know that from her current perspective. With fresh panic, she scrambled to open the window. It would only swing open part-way as even at this floor regulations wouldn’t allow for things to open entirely. It didn’t matter. Martin may not have been as small as a Murovan but he was still slender, despite his newly grown musculature. He squeezed his way into the room, shrugging out of his backpack to drag it through the opening behind him.
The lady was wearing a white bathrobe over her deep brown skin and an expression of pure terror, so Martin did what he could to look as unthreatening as possible, holding up his hands. “Thank you so much. I would have died if I’d fallen.”
Again, technically a lie – at this height the fall would probably have broken a few bones, but it was unlikely to have killed him unless he landed badly. Her mouth worked open and shut like a fish, so he pushed on. Lie after lie. “My window upstairs broke when I leaned on it. This place is a deathtrap. I need to get out of here.”
“We… should call somebody.” She absorbed the lie without blinking, but Martin didn’t know if she’d bought it or was still in shock.
He edged toward the door. “I’m going down to reception, you don’t need to call anyone.”
“An ambulance?” She offered him. “The police?”
The door was almost in reach. “I’m fine. It’s a miracle. Pure luck.”
“But you… you just fell out a window.” She sank down onto the bed.
“Thanks for letting me in yours.” He stepped out into the hall. “I really appreciate it. You saved my life.”
Martin gave her maybe a minute before she got it together enough to call down to reception. Sixty seconds was a long time in Strata. You had to make choices and act faster than the monsters, faster than other players. It was like Martin had been training for a moment like this every time he played the game.
Another blow from his elbow to break the glass, then a quick yank and the fire alarm was screaming. Whatever she said on the phone to reception would be drowned out. The whole place was drowned in noise. Everyone in the hotel had to evacuate. Everyone would be out in the halls. Masses of bodies to blend into. More importantly, whatever game-dev black-ops team was chasing him, they were trying to be quiet about it. They couldn’t stick a bag over his head and drag him out in the dark with all these people around.
Martin lurked by the stairwell as more and more people came complaining out of their rooms in various stages of dress. Once he’d seen the woman who’d saved him running down, he followed after her. She was trying to talk to the people around her, trying to tell her story. But here, in the concrete cylinder of the stairwell, the echoing alarm was deafening.
If they’d found Martin in the hotel they’d almost certainly got into its computer to pull his name and address, so they’d definitely be waiting for him back home. Or they would be if he hadn’t used a false name, address and social security number that he’d borrowed from his old data-entry job. Whoever Calvin Cranston was, he was not going to have a good night.
Down in the lobby, the press of bodies carried Martin cleanly past whoever they’d stationed down there to watch for him. A hotel’s worth of staff and guests traipsed around the side of the clearly not-burning building to the assembly point, and Martin just kept on walking.
All eyes were turned toward the hotel, to the manager, to the shouting. In silence, Martin slipped away into the dark, unnoticed.
He dropped the freshly burned Cranston ID chip out of his phone and into a drain a few blocks away, already digging through his pockets for the next. Two false identities felt like they would have been enough for a three-day trip, yet here he was, switching his phone over to William Martin, and searching for a late-night train going anywhere.
Everything in the world ran on computers, and while the Masters may not have had full control over every connected device, they had enough access that it made Martin uneasy. He walked through the night, crisscrossing the town. Hunching his shoulders and making no eye contact with the drunks, drop-outs and police patrols that were his only company.
There was a ticket waiting for him at the train station. Another chip out of his finances, but a necessary one. He was in melee range, so he needed to get some distance. He stopped outside the train station and waited on a bench until four minutes before his train was due to arrive. He’d timed the distance on arrival. Brisk walking pace. Fewer staff serving, but no crowds to impede movement.
Once he started moving he didn’t stop. He went straight to the counter, and with a beep from his phone’s proximity sensor the ticket was handed over wordlessly. On down the escalator, moving at double speed. Six people were on the platform, none of them looking up from their phones. It didn’t mean anything. Any one of them could have been lying in wait. They wouldn’t even need to intercept him here as the near-empty train would offer infinite opportunities to get him alone.
As the train pulled in, Martin watched the six people. He watched how they moved. The angle of their shoulders, the way that their eyes shifted. Normal people, or the best actors money could buy. They all got on board ahead of him, and Martin made his decision, stepping onto the train.
There were no seat assignments on the ticket, which Martin did not like. It felt disorganized. Still, it gave him the choice to sit in any car. He selected one with no other passengers, tucked himself into a corner and pulled out his phone. None of his usual sites were readily available, as he hadn’t loaded things up for this backup. Instead, he was shunted to local news. He braced himself for images of his face, of the headless corpse of Klimpt, or a video of the manhunt closing in on him. Instead, there was nothing. Not a peep.
Martin held up his phone like a talisman against evil through the whole train ride, blocking part of his face from view in case anybody walked by or the omnipresent cameras picked up his biometrics. He didn't think they had him yet. Once they got ahold of his pattern, that would be the end. No amount of falsified ID chips could help you if they got your face. Sleep was never an option, not while he was in flight. Exhaustion came and went with adrenaline chasing it away. This was hardly the first time he'd pulled an all-nighter. Admittedly, he usually spent that time sitting by a computer, fighting digital monsters, but still.
When the train came to its final stop he disembarked and went up to buy a ticket back toward home. Not actually to home, but close enough that he'd be able to hop off
the inter-city rail system and onto local transit to make the rest of the journey. Whatever he could do to break up his trail. Time started to smudge as he moved through the liminal spaces of train stations, clean inner-city streets, underground metro platforms and the endless dull hum of the maglev trains.
His eyes were open, his brain searching for danger, yet his awareness of all those things had begun to fade. The first hint that he was slipping out of consciousness and into some other state was the green glow flickering to life beneath him.
It started outside the train's windows, then shone up through the obnoxious joints in the carpet squares. By the time Martin realized it was there, he was already lit up from beneath. “Not now,” he said. “I can go mad later.”
His hands were paws when he looked down, the phone incongruous amidst his dark fur, but he still had enough awareness of what was going on to set it down on his armored lap, bring one of his claws across and pinch the palm of his other hand. The pain snapped him out of it immediately. The light died down and the train’s gentle hum returned. He was himself again. Human. Martin.
Shaking his head, he picked up his phone, switched out the ID chip, and stuffing the Will Martin ID down between the seat cushions. He was almost home. He could sleep there. He could go as nuts as he wanted once he had locked the door behind him.
He got off the train at the wrong metro station, hiking for a half-hour through the trash-packed streets despite his exhaustion. Finally, a few blocks from home, he leaned against a wall and waited. If they still had any sort of trace on him he didn’t want to lead them back to his apartment. It was a shitty little rental, but for some reason the idea of it being invaded sickened his stomach. Time lurched sideways again, green light flickering on the periphery of his vision. Enough was enough. He headed for home in the dull gray light of dawn. A mass of aches and pains that only sleep or Strata could take away from him.