Armageddon Heights (a thriller)

by D. M. Mitchell

‘Everything,’ she returned. ‘Bear with me. So everyone thought CSL were out of the picture. Business as usual. But something stank to high heaven about the murder. It came to light that CSL were having secret talks with Jeremy Lindegaard, with his daughter acting as the intermediary. Some kind of settlement was in the air, an extraordinary meeting of the top brass at Lindegaard Software was called and it was pretty clear Jeremy Lindegaard had something important to announce at it. He never got that far. He was gunned down at the gates of his brother’s house.’

  Wade shrugged. ‘Maybe CSL were pissed off, didn’t like what he was going to announce,’ he said. ‘I know such extremists. They start off with small, minor violent acts, vandalism, beatings, intimidation, and when nobody still wants to listen to their ranting they throw aggressive tantrums, with devastating effect.’

  ‘What if I told you I had proof that CSL might be innocent?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t fucking care! I just want out of here!’ He let out a long, heartfelt sigh. ‘Christ, this is madness,’ he said. ‘Lady, if I’m drugged up with this tremethelene stuff, give me the bloody antidote, wake me up, do whatever you have to, but I can’t stay here any longer…’

  ‘You have to listen,’ she demanded. ‘It’s important. So Lindegaard Software, now headed by Jeremy’s brother Dale Lindegaard, got on with business as usual, like I said. But CSL didn’t die. It rose from the ashes. Only this time with a new leader called Charlie Sharland, and as an underground organisation with a subtly different focus. Sharland found the expertise to develop software that allowed them to enter Armageddon Heights illegally, literally borrowing avatars and equipment for their own use, something Lindegaard Software thought impossible – the only entry into the Heights, they thought, was through their own heavily protected systems. Their first thought was that if an outsider had the ability to synthesise tremethelene, scale their software firewalls and wander the Heights at will then others would follow. Their profits would be significantly undermined by illegal use and their market dominance threatened by competitors.

  ‘So Lindegaard created ever more sophisticated firewalls to prevent unauthorised access; they also designed systems for spotting and tracking unauthorised incursions. But CSL managed to outwit them at every turn, because of a mole they had placed within the heart of Lindegaard Software who provided them with vital information on developments and upgrades, and helping to hide CSL incursions into the Heights.’

  ‘I don’t get it. So what are CSL doing there – here – anyhow? Playing games?’ Wade asked. ‘Hardly likely to aid their cause, is it?’

  ‘It’s a very risky business, because they don’t have expiration inhibitors…’

  ‘Expiration inhibitors?’

  ‘You can’t have gamers getting shot through the heart in the Heights and dying in real life, so there’s a failsafe in place called an expiration inhibitor. They suffer some pain, but wake up automatically. For CSL that’s not the case. The expiration inhibitor has proved very difficult to replicate, because Lindegaard changes its settings too regularly to be mimicked. So when CSL members go into the Heights they run the risk of dying for real. If their avatar gets killed, they die with it. So, no, they’re not playing games, far from it.’

  ‘What are they doing, exactly?’

  ‘They have a very small team that regularly go in, no more than three trusted people, four including Sharland himself. I’m one of them. The aim is to target known or suspected Sentients from the weak but erratic traces they leave in cyberspace, their aim being to rescue them and take them to safety.’

  He laughed hollowly. ‘Safety? Here?’

  ‘The game has been going on for so long, expanding all the time, with new environments being created every year – like I said, the virtual land is now equivalent to the size of Canada – there are now certain sections that are no longer used, have gotten forgotten, left behind, like the hidden and fragmented data on a computer hard drive that just sits there, idle, never even noticed. CSL located one of these off-the-radar dead zones and that’s where we take the Sentients. We’ve secured these with firewalls that effectively make them invisible to all but us. Within this data dead zone we are able to hide the Sentients until we can get their right as living human beings fully recognised. It’s actually quite a decent place, by Armageddon Heights’ standards. We call it Erewhon, after the novel by Samuel Butler.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘That figures. Erewhon is a fictional place, an anagram of nowhere.’

  ‘Great, so you’re headed nowhere…’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘So let me get this story straight – you’re a CSL operative using a borrowed avatar and you’re here to rescue some kind of Sentient and take it to this place called Erewhon.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s right, except it’s not an “it”.’

  ‘Say I believe that, I still don’t see what that has to do with me.’

  ‘It has everything to do with you, Sam. You’re the Sentient I’m here to rescue…’ she said.

  29

  Butterfly-Weak

  There was a thin film of sweat on Adrian Levoir’s forehead, giving his skin the appearance of plastic. He had a headache coming on, the pain sitting behind his eyes and threatening to erupt into a full-blown migraine. And he was exhausted. But as he stared at the computer screen the tiredness fell quickly away, and his mouth hung open. The three men who shared his cramped windowless room, their desks crammed full of electronic gadgetry, stared at him expectantly.

  ‘We’ve got it,’ Levoir chimed triumphantly, rising from his seat. The last few pieces of data from the damaged hard drives had been deciphered, and it was up there on the screen for him to see. ‘We’ve got it!’ he repeated. ‘Well done, well done!’ he praised his small team. He hit print and went over to the printer, snapping the sheet of paper out of the machine’s jaws as soon as it spat it out. He read the text, although he’d read it already twice over on the screen, hardly believing what he saw. He felt a small glow of satisfaction as he lifted a phone. ‘Mr Villiers, I have it. I have Cobalt’s identity and where you’ll find Charlie Sharland.’

  Villiers’ response was measured, unhurried. ‘Bring it up for me,’ he said.

  Adrian Levoir was escorted from the room where he’d laboured for many long hours, and at one point thought he’d never be able to achieve it, but with his team of experts brought in by Villiers, they’d managed it. He was feeling very pleased with himself. But when he reached the door, the burly security guard at his side ushering him out before him, he caught a glance from his new-found colleagues. It unnerved him. Was that sorrow on their faces? No, not sorrow. Pity, perhaps.

  His face steeled. Or it could be jealousy. After all, he was the one who’d get the credit. He was the one destined to capitalise on the work by being offered a lucrative and exalted position within the organisation Villiers worked for. To hell with Lindegaard. He was headed nowhere fast working for Lindegaard Software, with years ahead of him as Napier’s lackey at the very best. Now he had a chance to really prove himself and improve his career prospects. And if that meant overlooking the murder he witnessed then so be it. In this world it’s all about looking after yourself, he thought, the two men now headed towards a lift that carried them swiftly up a few flights.

  He’d still no idea where the hell he was. It looked to be some kind of corporate building, but empty of people, the few doors that were open revealing a large expanse of bare cream walls, a sea of carpet and little else. A brief glimpse through one of the windows told him he was still in London somewhere. But the guard hurried him on so that he didn’t have time to take in any great detail of exactly where. But for now that didn’t matter, he thought as he clutched the piece of paper to his chest as if it were a precious object. One day soon he’d have a suite of similar rooms all to himself.

  The guard knocked at a plain mahogany door on which was a brass name plate awaiting the engraving of its occupant’s
name. They entered on Villiers’ command, and Levoir marched confidently up to the slender man who was standing by the window looking out, hands behind his back. The first time he’d met Dale Lindegaard he was doing the same. Was Villiers aping his master? Levoir heard the door close behind him, and he turned to see Jungius turn the key in the lock and stand before the door, arms folded. A shiver of fear trickled through Levoir, but he shrugged it away and continued to approach Villiers.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said, holding out the paper.

  But Villiers didn’t turn immediately. He let Levoir stand there, looking and feeling faintly foolish. At length he turned round and held out his hand. ‘Let me see it,’ he said, and Levoir proudly handed it over.

  ‘You’ll never believe it…’ he said.

  Villiers held up his hand to silence Levoir, and the man’s lips clamped shut. Villiers read the document, a thin smile breaking the severity of his expression. ‘Well, well, well…’ he said. ‘Now isn’t that a turn up for the books?’ He looked sharply up at Levoir. ‘Is that everything? No more info on the hard drives?’

  Levoir shook his head. ‘We’ve extracted everything we can. The rest is lost. But that’s more than enough. You’ve got everything you wanted, and more.’

  Villiers agreed with a gentle nod. ‘Well done, Adrian. I knew you could do it.’

  Levoir’s smug grin dropped. ‘Now it’s time for your part of the deal.’

  ‘You’re certain there’s nothing more can be gleaned from the hard drives?’ said Villiers. ‘Every last piece of information sucked out of them?’

  ‘I told you. It’s a miracle I managed to get what I did out of that mess. What’s wrong, is that still not good enough for you?’ His tone revealed his underlying dislike of the man before him despite his best efforts to submerge them.

  Villiers looked up from the piece of paper, his eyelids rising almost sleepily as he regarded Levoir. ‘Yes, of course, my part of the deal.’ He nodded. A thin, insubstantial affair that might easily be mistaken for a nervous twitch.

  It was too late Levoir realised the full meaning of the movement. He turned on his heel, or tried to, for Jungius had silently swept across the carpet and wrapped a thin wire around his neck, yanking him backwards. Levoir’s hands went instinctively to the garrotte, one of his fingers becoming trapped beneath it as he sought to tear it away. But Jungius’ grip was iron-tight, and he gave a sharp tug on the wire and it sliced through the tip of Levoir’s finger, bone and all. Levoir screamed when the pain and terror cascaded in on him, but it was cut short as the wire sliced through the flesh of his neck and into the artery beneath, a scarlet gush of blood falling hot onto his hands. And beyond the mist of agony, the knowledge that his life was being drained from him filled his mind with black horror. He kicked and thrashed, but his protestations soon fell butterfly-weak and stopped altogether. The last thing he saw before oblivion folded over him was Villiers’ ghostly face swimming in a lake of darkness.

  Jungius let Levoir’s body slip to the floor, the wire still embedded deep inside his neck, the blood flowing out more slowly as the beating of Levoir’s heart came to a stop.

  ‘Get the team in to clean this mess up,’ Villiers ordered, sidestepping the body without looking at it. ‘And then come with me. We have a rat to catch before it deserts the sinking ship.’

  30

  Bad Blood

  ‘I’m a character in a fucking game? Are you serious?’

  ‘OK, so I know how extreme it sounds…’

  ‘You bet!’ said Samuel Wade.

  It was a typical reaction, Keegan thought. She’d seen it so many times before. But here in Samuel Wade she had been witnessing something quite different. Unique.

  ‘Your mind is screaming for you to disbelieve it, I’m aware of that,’ she said. ‘But there are also parts of it that are telling you it’s got to be true. Your life has been something of a cliché, has it not? I mean, look at how you met your wife – attractive nurse ministering to the needs of a damaged ex-soldier, you fall in love, get married. Cliché. That’s because you started out as a character in a small and almost insignificant part of this screwed-up game called Armageddon Heights. The place is filled with the unimaginable, the bizarre, the insane, and all because it can be. It can be anything the designers want it to be. A coach load of passengers on a bus transported through space and time? Easy. Why? To create yet another exciting challenge for gamers to encounter and overcome on their way to whatever score they need to progress to the next level of complexity. A coach full of fearful passengers being held at gunpoint by a suspected murderer on the verge of insanity over the loss of his murdered wife and daughter. The passengers have to be rescued from the gunman. Gunfights, hostages, a rescue mission, the bonesnappers making things harder – you’re right, it’s the stuff of a movie. Or a game. But the scenario was never more than a small-scale affair, nothing really in the grand scale of the Heights, like a ripple on the sea. Something to pass the time for gamers on the way to bigger things.

  ‘That’s why your recollections are so fragmented. You were given only what you needed to operate as a character, so too were all your fellow passengers. But they were never going to be the memories of a full life, only snippets, enough for a character to operate smoothly. Memories were originally programmed into characters to make them more believable, to allow them to interact with the environments designed for them. Memories started out as little more than simple data – tantamount to a basic robot being programmed to be able to ‘remember’ how to do simple tasks. But the software Melissa Lindegaard developed became so sophisticated that it went beyond simple data files with which to instruct a character to behave in a certain way. It allowed them to have deeper personalities, to have motivations, to exhibit emotions, to become far more human-like than ever before. All within a defined programmed parameter, of course. But what wasn’t allowed for was the progression in some characters from programming to sentience. Why this happens in some but not all characters is still a mystery. But that’s what happened to a great deal of them. It happened to you.

  ‘You became sentient some time ago, not all at once; it was a gradual process, an awakening, you might say. But you started to develop your own mind. Think about it, I’m betting you occasionally thought you’d seen all this before. That’s because, quite simply, you have, countless times. I’m right, aren’t I? You have thought that.’

  He said yes, begrudgingly. ‘I couldn’t understand why…’ he said, his voice now becoming faint.

  ‘And as a result you finally went off-piste, beyond the shackles of your programming. You fought the urge to shoot the man called Hartshorn, remember? And you had the urge to do so not because he was an arsehole – designed to be that way, I’m afraid – but because in the game laid out for you, you killed him and a number of the others. Shot them dead, held the rest as hostages as your mind went into total meltdown.’

  He shook his head. ‘But I feel so damned real!’ he said.

  He felt the touch of her hand soft on his arm. ‘That’s because you are, Wade. You’re as real as me. You think, feel, touch, smell – you’re human. That’s what CSL have been fighting for. It’s why I’m here now, risking my neck.’

  ‘How can goddamn pixels be real?’ he said, his anger starting to bubble to the surface again.

  ‘You’re real, Wade,’ she said determinedly. ‘And not only that, I’m fast realising you’re special, even among Sentients.’

  ‘Oh yeah? How special? Can I fly, too?’ he snorted derisively.

  ‘Just by interacting with you it appears you encourage sentience in other characters. I saw it with my own eyes – well, through an avatar’s eyes – but I didn’t want to believe it. I saw how emotional the other passengers were getting and their strong feelings towards you – it shouldn’t happen unless they, too, were becoming sentient. That’s why I was so cold towards them in the beginning; to me they were still characters in a game, and you were the target. But trying to get at you
made me blind to the others. Christ, I’ve even seen subtle changes in Cain’s character during his interaction with you…’

  The mention of Cain made Wade stiffen. ‘Okay, tell me this. Why is Cain the spitting image of John Travers, the man who killed…?’ He stuttered into silence. The images of his murdered wife and child were branded into his mind. So could he actually believe they weren’t real, that his deep anguish over their supposed non-existent murder wasn’t real either? He groaned with the effort of dealing with his emotions – emotions by rights, according to Keegan, he shouldn’t have.

  ‘Because Armageddon Heights relies heavily upon character archetypes,’ Keegan explained. ‘There are millions of characters, and it’s difficult to design each one to be different, so, partly because of cost-cutting and partly through necessity, the same physical design for a character will pop up all over the Heights, though ordinarily you’re not likely to see them bump into each other. Your memory of John Travers is based upon the same character archetype as Cain, as indeed Cain is replicated elsewhere in the Heights, except appearing in a different role, obviously. I hate to say it, but you’re not original in looks, and neither is the avatar I’m occupying right now. There are many more of us out there. But you are original in the fact that you’re sentient. That makes you fundamentally different.’

  ‘If that’s supposed to make me feel better about myself and what you’re telling me, it isn’t working,’ he said. ‘Right, say all this is true. Prove it. Step out of the game, disappear in a puff of smoke or whatever it is you do when the game’s over.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as that. The company uses a Big Data system at their New Mexico headquarters to analyse all parameters of the game every ninety seconds, checking for anomalies. An unauthorised incursion initially shows up as a signal, a blip in the system – not very strong, because we’ve been working on trying to keep that first sighting as invisible as possible. Once in, the CSL operative can be shielded. It’s a delicate cat-and-mouse game, Lindegaard developing ever more complex systems to spot us, and CSL developing software to counter it. It has to be a pretty special person who can spot our incursions these days through all the analytical chatter that is thrown up. But they continue to do it, and we continue to sidestep it if we can. That’s why we have to drop into the Heights at no less that a fifty-mile radius of where the target is and hope we get to it before Lindegaard’s Sentinels do. So, to cut a long story short, I’m not going to give up and go back to square one after coming this close to getting you. Anyhow, Lindegaard will know you’re here by now due to the data anomalies thrown up by you crossing over the edges of your programmed border and into Cain’s Territory.’