This Virtual Night

by C. S. Friedman

  Leaning back in his chair, he rubbed his eyes with a weary hand. He hadn’t slept well since Ron’s visit, and was starting to pay the price. Now and then he would catch himself dozing off as a particularly tedious section of code scrolled before his eyes. How often should he review the same sections? He couldn’t stop searching, because Tridac wouldn’t stop searching. The megacorp had to find some flaw in the code that they could blame for the event on Harmony, so they could make a show of “fixing the problem.” And if they couldn’t find any code that had been tampered with, they might well manufacture some. A sacrificial lamb would have to be chosen. Someone who could be discovered, blamed, and punished, so the Ainniq Guild was satisfied the matter had been dealt with. Never mind whether that person was really guilty or not. Micah had no doubt that Tridac would frame an innocent coder if that would get them off the Guild’s shit list. Terran corporations were ruthlessly pragmatic.

  They were also ruthlessly Terran.

  Stretching out his arms in front of him, he gazed at the brown stripes and whorls that ran down their length, contrasting against his otherwise pale skin. Normally he kept his sleeves rolled down, hiding most of his markings from view. The ones on the sides of his face weren’t as easily hidden, but he had a collection of exotic headsets that drew attention away from them, and maybe people who were ignorant of his Variation would think the markings were nothing more than makeup. He hated having to worry about such things—indeed, he had been assured by his superiors that there was no need to worry—but so many Terrans distrusted Variants that it seemed the wisest course.

  Which made him an ideal scapegoat.

  Focus, Micah.

  Someone was logging his power usage; he’d discovered it while changing the settings on his apartment’s climate control. He couldn’t even guess why someone would want to do that, but the timing made it suspect. He’d also discovered that his immediate superior was reviewing his work files—not exactly a crime, but not business-as-usual either. Sometimes when he left his office he had the sense that someone was watching him, though he could never catch anyone actually doing it. Was that paranoia, or something real?

  Focus on the work. . . .

  If the terrorists had really been running Dragonslayer they wouldn’t even have seen the real life support center, much less been able to interact with it. So how could they have set off an explosion there? Not to mention, the virt was supposed to go into sleep mode as soon as a player entered a restricted area. It shouldn’t have been running at all in that location. But Dobson had a record of the two guys inloading the final quest segment right before the explosion. So they were definitely playing in a restricted area. How was that even possible? The longer he searched for answers, the more questions he seemed to have.

  With a weary sigh he leaned forward on the desk, resting his head in his hands. He must be missing something. Some vital clue that would make all these conflicting elements come together. But it wasn’t in the game code. He was convinced of that.

  A sudden knock on the door startled him. “What?” The proximity sensor should have alerted him that someone was approaching. Had he been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard it? “Who is it?” He waited for the door to relay a response, but there was none. Great. He was going to have to check the settings again. Why couldn’t the damn thing just work like it was supposed to? He started to get up—

  Suddenly the door gave way with explosive force, and two men in chitinous black armor rushed him. For a moment he was frozen in place, too stunned to respond, then he stumbled backward, trying to get away from them. As he did he grabbed the chair and shoved it in front of him, hoping to slow them down a bit. It was all he could think to do. Desperately he looked around the room for something he could use in self-defense—anything! But though the far wall was hung with dozens of weapons—display models from his game—they were too far out of reach.

  Then one of the men yanked the chair out of the way while the other slammed into Micah, shoulder first, driving him into the desk. Equipment crashed noisily to the floor as the first man grabbed him by the arm, twisting it behind his back so hard that the pain was blinding. The other grabbed him by the hair, and together they began to drag him across the room. He struggled wildly, like a beast in a trap, but to no avail. They were stronger than he was and faster than he was, and they were clearly trained for this kind of confrontation. All he was trained to do was sit behind a desk and design imaginary fistfights.

  He opened his mouth to scream for help, but then he saw the red Tridac insignia on one man’s collar, and the sound froze in his throat. They had come for him. That’s what this was. Tridac was going to accuse him of altering Dragonslayer. Who would help him if that were the case? No one who lived on this station, that was for sure. He was at the mercy of corporate justice now.

  They dragged him out into the hallway, only it wasn’t a hallway anymore: it was a mouth now, armed with glistening fangs above and below, and the floor was its tongue. The men clearly meant to feed him to it—

  He woke up.

  Shaken, he raised his head from the table. His headset was askew, and he pushed it back into position. The desk was still in place. All his equipment was still on it. His heart was pounding so hard he felt as if a rib were about to snap, but his arm no longer hurt.

  SYSTEMIC STRESS DETECTED, his wellseeker informed him. RED ZONE. ACTION? He drew in a deep breath, then visualized the icon that would release a bit of sedative into his veins.

  A dream. That’s all it was. A fucking dream.

  His friends had advised him not to take this job, he remembered. Terran corporations don’t operate by Common Law. If anything goes wrong out there, you’ll have no legal protection. But Dobson Games had made it clear that station residence was a condition of employment. For security, they’d claimed. In the end he had chosen to accept the risk in order to work with some of the best designers in the virtual immersion industry. Not to mention gain access to Dobson’s state-of-the-art equipment for his own research. Given some of the ideas he wanted to explore, that was no small thing.

  Now all that was at risk.

  He visualized the symbol that would connect him to the station’s innernet. Menu icons scrolled into his field of vision, and he looked for the one that would open the master archives. He needed to review Corporate Law so he knew exactly what his rights were. Could Tridac really send thugs after him, like they’d done in his dream? Or was he protected by due process, as he would be on the waystation? He needed to know, if for no other purpose than to banish his nightmares.

  He found the icon. He started to activate it—

  And stopped.

  If he accessed those files, he realized suddenly, he would leave behind a data trail. What if whoever was spying on him checked his innernet activity? They would know he had been researching his rights. Would an innocent man do that?

  He took his headset off. The menu icons faded from his vision.

  I have to get away from here.

  * * *

  The docking ring was crowded as always, its private facilities teeming with uniformed stewards waiting to fawn over traveling executives, its public spaces just plain damn crowded. In the lobby of Public Transportation Center Five, row after row of people sat in the waiting area, most of them leaning back in their chairs as if asleep, their eyes flickering back and forth beneath half-closed lids as they focused on the digitized vista of their choice. All of them were terramorphs, of course, identical in shape to Earth’s first spacefarers. In Terran parlance, “they looked human.” No matter how long Micah worked on Tridac Station, he never got used to the eerie uniformity of its population.

  He wandered up to the registration desk with what he intended to be a casual saunter, though it lost some panache in the lo-G setting. In truth his heart was pounding, and if any of the security cams focused on him were taking biological readings, they would
detect it. Or maybe a real person was watching him. There were so many people here that anything was possible.

  Just pretend you’re not worried. This is a normal booking. A weekend’s jaunt.

  The clerk was a woman with a corona of blazing red hair. Ruddy freckles suggested her coloring was natural. “Can I help you, Micah Bello?”

  Startled, he realized she must have run a facial recognition check as he’d approached her station. Of course. That was just part of her job, and of no significance whatsoever. “I’d like to book a pod to Harmony.”

  “Singler, doubler, or multi?”

  “Singler.”

  “For how long?”

  “Just the weekend.”

  Her gaze turned inward as she accessed the necessary files. If Micah’s wellseeker notifications had still been active they would probably be blazing all the symptoms of his anxiety across his visual field, but the system had gotten so annoying that he’d finally put it into sleep mode. I’ll have to detect my own stress, he thought dryly. Just like an Earth primitive.

  The woman’s brow furrowed. “I see you’ve already booked a singler on the fifteenth. Do you want to reschedule that?”

  “No. I’ll still need that. Today is just to meet up with an old friend who’s passing through the node.” Even to his own ears that didn’t sound convincing, so he added, “The fifteenth is for a convention on Harmony. Ethan Hephaestus will be presenting a paper on stimulus overload in immersion coding. . . .” Now he was talking too much. It didn’t sound natural. He shut up.

  He’d figured that if Tridac thought he intended to flee the station they might take action to prevent it. By booking a later flight he was assuring them there was no rush. Now, hopefully, they would not be paying as close attention to his movements, and if he could move quickly enough—unexpectedly enough—he might get off this benighted station before anyone realized what he intended.

  “I have an MKJ47 available,” the woman said, then added apologetically, “It’s the budget model.”

  “That’s fine. That’s fine. Bill it to my account.” Oops. What if someone was watching that account? Should he have paid cash? Too late now. God, I really suck at this spy stuff.

  The MKJ47 lent new meaning to the phrase “budget model.” Its narrow entrance was just big enough for him to squeeze through, and inside the pod there was barely enough room for the evac equipment, a piss station, and a single chair that had seen better days. All of it was sized for Earth humans, and none of it looked adjustable. Leave it to the Terrans to produce a vehicle no one but a Terran could fly.

  He stowed his bag in a small chamber under the seat and strapped himself in, then watched as the pod went through its automated pre-flight routine. His registered flight plan appeared on the forward display monitor, a smooth arc from Tridac to Harmony, just far enough from the median route to avoid most other traffic. Five hours of travel time in all. What few manual controls the pod had were on an emergency panel folded away into the ceiling; Micah pulled it down briefly to familiarize himself with their layout, then locked the panel back in place. In all his years he’d never needed to steer a pod himself and hoped he would never have to.

  Then the outer door closed, the inner door did likewise, and a faint hiss could be heard as environmental controls took over. The main display flashed confirmation that all systems were functioning properly, and then, with stomach-lurching abruptness, the pod jerked free of its mooring, and headed toward the launch queue. Not exactly the smoothest exit, but he didn’t care. As long as he was moving in the right direction he was happy.

  He set the viewscreen to give him a 360 view of surrounding space. If anyone on Tridac wanted to keep him from leaving they’d have to make their move soon. But no one approached the ship, and soon enough his MKJ47 was at the head of the line. And then . . . launch. The blackness of space folded around the tiny singler and the mooring lights of the station swiftly faded behind him. One hundred miles out. Two. He was so on edge that he had to remind himself to breathe. Three hundred miles—

  LEAVING TRIDAC CORPORATE TERRITORY, the viewscreen proclaimed. ENTERING COMMON LAW SPACE. ETA HARMONY STATION: 4.95 E-HOURS.

  With a sigh he expelled his last tortured breath. He’d made it! Whatever happened now, it would happen under Common Law. He had rights again.

  Mentally exhausted, he leaned back into the padded chair and shut his eyes for a moment, drinking in the solitude. Then he called up a design file to work on. Not his sensory research, of course. Those files were safely tucked away in his brainware in read-only format; he would have to outload them to another system to do any real editing. Instead he called up the setting files for his current project and started reviewing the visual elements in his Viking mead hall virt. It was relaxing to focus on the mundane facets of his job: adding more smoke to the fire, repositioning snowdrifts, tweaking the phase of Earth’s moon until it shed just the right amount of light on the outdoor scenes. He decided to go with a full moon, and wondered if he should alter the gravity profile to reflect its presence. Earth’s moon was powerful enough to shift whole oceans, so surely it had some effect on human beings.

  How frightening it must have been for Earth’s primitives, knowing themselves at the mercy of nature! Their gravity was dictated by ancient rocks hurtling through space rather than the ordered science of man-made stations; their world wracked by wind-storms and rain-storms and dust-storms and ice-storms and fires. He loved natural planetary settings for their emotive potential, but God knows he would never want to live in one.

  ALERT

  The warning appeared in his field of vision, a jarring incongruity in his Viking longhouse. He paused his work and looked at the display screen. MANDATORY COURSE ADJUSTMENT, the pod was telling him. PLEASE CONFIRM.

  “Data,” he ordered.

  A tri-D map appeared in front of the screen, with Tridac Station at one end of the display and Harmony Station at the other. Between them a webwork of fine lines stretched across the starscape, some connecting the two stations, some heading offscreen to unseen destinations. Each line represented the registered flight plan of a ship currently in transit, and there were so many of them along the main route that it was a miracle none of those ships ever collided. But their passage was a delicate dance, perfectly orchestrated by the ships’ autopilots, in constant communication with one another. No two ships would ever cross the same point at the same time.

  But: INTERSECTION IMMINENT, his pod was warning him. Two of the lines were highlighted. One, in red, he recognized as his own flight plan; the other, in blue, was coming from Harmony. The ships themselves were still many miles apart, but Micah’s autopilot had projected both flight paths and determined they would intersect if someone did not adjust his course. A green line appeared on the screen, indicating the detour it was recommending. That would add twelve minutes to Micah’s flight, but if the alternative was colliding with another vehicle, what choice did he have? The other ship was a larger vessel, and would expect Micah to get out of its way. The hierarchical dance of autopilot travel.

  “Fine,” he said. “Confirmed.”

  The green line turned red as his original course disappeared from the screen. Good enough. He turned his attention back to the virt, studying the array of foods laid out for feasting. It was all pretty basic. Maybe he should add something seasonal for the history buffs to notice. He sent out a query for information on seasonal foods in the Viking era, then cursed himself for being an idiot. Of course there was no response. They’d left Tridac’s innernet behind and weren’t within range of the outernet yet.

  ALERT. MANDATORY COURSE ADJUSTMENT. PLEASE CONFIRM.

  “Say what?” he muttered. “We did that already.”

  But it was a different ship this time. This one was farther away than the first, but apparently Micah’s autopilot was convinced that it, too, was a navigational threat. This time the detour would cost him se
venteen minutes. But what choice did he have? Short of taking control of the pod and flying it himself, this was the only way to get where he was going. “Confirmed,” he growled.

  This time he didn’t go right back to work. He ordered the pod to keep the transit display active, and he watched as the web shifted and pulsed, strands rearranging themselves like fairy filaments in a breeze.

  ALERT. MANDATORY COURSE ADJUSTMENT. PLEASE CONFIRM.

  Damn it to hell! Not another one!

  Was this because he was flying an MKJ47, a ship so pitifully small that everyone in outspace expected him to just get out of their way? The proposed new flight path was a full seven degrees off course, which would turn him away from Harmony altogether. That was unacceptable.

  He called up data on the new ship. The owner was unknown. The call sign was one he didn’t recognize.

  CONFIRM NEW FLIGHT PLAN, the autopilot pressed.

  He turned on the comm. “ACKER502A-85, this is MKJ47-9A. Your current trajectory conflicts with our registered flight plan. Over.”

  No answer.

  “ACKER502A-85, please adjust your course. Over.”

  Still no response.

  CONFIRM NEW FLIGHT PLAN, the pod insisted.

  “Yeah,” he muttered, because there was no other choice. “Confirmed.”

  This time the adjustment was sharp enough that his body was pressed sideways against the safety harness for a moment. He was going to have to find a safe path around this last asshole before he could head toward Harmony again. He ordered the autopilot to display his options.

  ALERT. MANDATORY COURSE ADJUSTMENT. PLEASE CONFIRM.

  He stared at the display in disbelief. Apparently the first ship had shifted course. Right into his new flight path. What the hell was going on?

  Maybe they were playing traffic games, competing to see who could force the greatest change to Micah’s course from the greatest distance. He’d never played that game himself but he knew that there were people who did, usually spoiled brats who had the keycodes to their family’s vehicle and way too much time on their hands. For a moment he considered putting his pod on manual and seeing how these guys dealt with a good old-fashioned game of chicken, but better sense prevailed. This was a vehicle designed for dull, uneventful, automatic transportation, and he could well discover in the midst of maneuvering that he had overestimated its capacity to dodge obstacles.