by Teri Terry
The void is as always: a limitless space. Darkness that becomes lighter as eyes adjust, lit by whistling silver static that rushes in all directions. Strange winds that whip my hair around. I breathe in deep, reach back to hold my hair and find it is tied. I have a strange sense of familiarity and belonging.
‘You’re calm,’ Hex says.
‘Am I?’
‘It usually freaks people out the first time.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Follow the yellow brick road,’ he says, and gestures. I look down at our feet and see there are vague outlined rectangles, linked together. We walk along it a few moments until we reach another door, one that looks much like the new one to the void in my hallway.
‘Here we are!’ Hex opens it, peeks in and waves to whoever is there. ‘This is where I say goodbye. Wait here at the end of the day and I’ll come get you and take you back.’
‘I can follow the yellow brick road quite all right by myself, you know.’
‘Sure. Of course you can. I’ll see you then.’
I roll my eyes, step through, and there is Marina.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Have you been waiting for me?’
‘Yes. I was about to raise the alarm that you were lost in the void! Then I thought maybe you and Hex wanted to get lost together for a while.’ She smirks.
‘No, thanks.’
She raises an eyebrow.
‘Seriously! He’s a mate. He’s dating my friend. At least, I think he still is.’ Mental note: visit Melrose at first opportunity. ‘How’d you get here?’
‘Easy. Plugged in, and here I was. I volunteered to wait for you.’ She looks aggrieved.
‘You know you don’t have to keep doing things for me. I won’t tell anyone about the flying thing.’
‘I know. I wanted to.’ And she smiles.
‘Thank you. So what do we do now?’
‘Pick a door, check things out, come back and do it again.’
I look around properly now. We’re in a strange sort of room, full of doors. It looks ordinary enough, but when you focus closer you see that the sides curve up from where we stand. There are doors everywhere: all sides, floors, ceiling. The room is deceptive; bigger than it looks at first, as everywhere I look the doors seem to multiply.
‘What are the options? Go for random, or what?’
‘If you walk up to one, it reveals itself. Kind of like a flasher.’
I’m intrigued. We walk up to a door together: an image appears on it. Snow. Ice. ‘Brrrrr. Next?’ I say.
A circus.
Then a cocktail party – maybe later?
‘If all VeeDubs can be accessed from here, it can’t just be random,’ I say. ‘If you wanted to find somewhere in particular, there’d have to be a way to find it or you’d be here for years.’
‘Good point.’
I concentrate on Gecko’s waterfall world: I can’t stop myself. Probably a very bad idea to go down that particular memory lane. My eyes skip across the room, and there. One of the doors is brighter than the others. It’s on the floor. I walk backwards, away from it; Marina makes a funny face, then does the same. And the room is like a giant hamster wheel. It revolves as we walk, until the bright door is in front of us. With a vision of pool and waterfall on its surface.
‘Nice,’ Marina says. ‘Shall we?’
With all sorts of reasons to say no, I nod, and she opens the door.
Like before, it’s hot, and we’re in instant swimsuits. Marina dives in the pool. I follow, but she swims underwater so fast I can’t keep up. She doesn’t surface, and I lose sight of her. Just when I start to get worried, something taps on my shoulder from behind. I spin around and there she is, laughing. Marina, but not Marina. Her hair is longer, greener, and her eyes also, but that isn’t the surprising part. She’s got a long shimmering tail that she slaps lazily on the surface of the water, a beautiful half girl, half fish. She’s a mermaid.
‘That is so cool. How do you do it?’
She shrugs. ‘It’s code, but it’s kind of my thing. I can do it without thinking now.’
‘Can you breathe underwater too?’
She nods, plunges under and swims circles around me, jumps up again.
‘But you’ll need legs for the waterfall,’ I say, and I climb out of the pool, up the steps alongside the waterfall. I reach the top, and dive down.
‘That does look like fun!’ Marina half frowns like she is concentrating really hard, then climbs out of the pool and onto the steps. She has legs again but they’ve got shimmery scales on them, like she couldn’t be bothered with a complete change. She dives down from the top and changes to tail halfway down the waterfall, swims underwater to the other side of the pool and back again.
‘I wish I could do that.’
‘It’s not the most useful skill. God knows what they’ll have me doing here. Sorry,’ she adds, hastily, like she just realised who she said that to: the one intern with no skills, useful or otherwise.
‘I don’t understand why they’ve brought me here. I can’t do stuff. I’ll probably end up serving dinner.’
She tilts her head to one side. ‘I think there’s more to you than meets the eye.’
‘Huh. How would you know?’
‘Why would you be here otherwise? But if you don’t want to end up serving dinner, you should get an Implant. Why haven’t you got one?’
I stare back at her, and for once, I haven’t got an answer that makes any sense. All that stuff from Nanna about avoiding plugging in and not getting an Implant – was it part of her delusions? Maybe it’s time to leave them behind. They didn’t do Nanna any good. ‘It’s kind of a long story. I was a Refuser at school.’
‘So you don’t really know what you could do here if you had an Implant. You might be an awesome Hacker, if you tried. Maybe PareCo has somehow sussed that out, and that’s why you’re here.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Listen to me; I’m good at picking things up about people. Like you and Hex.’
‘There is no me and Hex. He’s a friend.’
‘There is definitely some intensity in the way he looks at you.’
I shake my head. ‘No way. Not interested, can’t happen. Don’t want to go there and even if I did, wouldn’t do that to my friend. He’s hers.’ But despite my words, there is an uneasy feeling inside that says Marina is right. Something is different with Hex. OK, I kind of stared at him a little, but I was just trying to suss out what it was. No matter how confusing it felt last night, I really, really hope he hasn’t gone all dough-brained on me. I want to keep my friends, both him and Melrose. I don’t have that many of them.
We swim for a while longer, and I think about what she said. Hex has advantages over Gecko: he’s here. He’s not, generally, bonkers, and I’ve never noticed him kidnapping anyone. But the eyes that haunt me aren’t his. They’re Gecko’s.
When Marina surfaces again, I call her over. ‘Shall we go, try another door?’ I say, suddenly impatient to leave this place and my thoughts behind.
‘Sure.’
We climb out of the pool, Marina more slowly as she has to morph from tail back to legs. While she does that I wish my hair dry and gorgeous like the last time, and – hey presto! – it is.
Marina is startled. ‘How’d you do that?’
I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Can’t you?’
She pulls a face. ‘No. There you go, I know what you’ll be!’
‘What?’
‘Chief hairdresser.’
We go back to the Gateway, and it’s Marina’s turn to pick a world. She concentrates on Atlantis, one she’s visited before, but can’t find the door. She describes it and I soon find it. She gives me a strange look. ‘Another thing you can do that I can’t.’<
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We hang out in the underwater kingdom for a while, and then head back to the Gateway: it’s time for dinner. Marina goes ahead while I wait for Hex.
But all that stuff she said about him has made me uneasy, and then annoyed. I do not need help walking out a door and down a clearly defined path: this is stupid.
I don’t need to even go down the path, do I? Back in the PIP I reach to unplug.
When I emerge, everyone from my group is already there, waiting for the straggler. We’re told we can come back to plug in after dinner, stay until tomorrow morning if we want to. Then we’ll move on to something else. But I’m too tired to be hungry; weary to my bones. I head for my room.
33
‘I hear you skipped dinner, and didn’t plug in with the rest of the interns last night.’ Dr Rafferty smiles back at me, giant-sized on my interface screen. He’s not in a white coat now, he’s in a tunic similar to mine, and something hits me that should have done a long time ago. He’s still here: he works here. He doesn’t work for HealthCo, does he? He probably never did. He’s PareCo, through and through.
I shrug. ‘They didn’t say we had to; they just said we could.’
‘Yet the rest of them did. I’m worried about you, Luna.’
‘Oh?’
‘Without an Implant, you can’t keep up with the others. This is a competition, make no mistake about that. You are all competing for the best places. Don’t get left behind.’
‘But they’re all Hackers. How can I possibly compete with them in virtual?’
‘How do you know what you could do if you had an Implant? And that’s not all. With an Implant you could be in constant contact with your family back home, whenever you want. Think about it, Luna.’
His face fades away from my interface wall, and the island view comes back again. It was locked on no calls, so he has the ability to override that. Which basically means he can appear on the wall of my bedroom whenever he wants.
Nice.
And now he’s openly promoting getting an Implant. He hasn’t done that before, though I’d wondered how long it would be before someone raised it in this place. But is there really any reason not to any more? And I could be in contact with my family, too.
Everything inside screams no, don’t do it. But whether that is reasonable or is from years of resistance and fear, I don’t know.
I meet the others in the meeting room, ANDs already swallowed and more in my pockets. I’m last in.
Marina frowns. ‘Are you all right? I tried your interface last night when you didn’t come to dinner, but it was blocked.’
‘Sorry. I switched it off so I could sleep. I wasn’t feeling that great,’ I say, kind of a lie and kind of the truth.
‘Hex asked where you were at dinner; he seemed really worried about you. Asked whether you got back OK from the void. Weren’t you supposed to wait for him?’
Guilt registers inside. But before I can come up with anything to say about it, the Beamer is back.
‘Today we begin the next phase: boundaries. We want you to push boundaries, do things you can’t do. Things you are afraid of. To make it interesting, we’re having a little competition. Two groups, with leaders I will choose.’ She points at a tall girl, Sparky, whose skin is so dark that she’s chosen to have her Hacker tattoos in white instead of black so they can be seen. Then she chooses one of the boys, Blood. I wonder what his Hacker name means, then decide I probably don’t want to know. ‘Team leaders, you will take turns picking your teams. Blood, you begin.’
He picks someone, then it is Sparky’s turn. They continue, back and forth, until the room is down to just me and one boy. It’s Sparky’s pick; Marina is on her team, and judging by the blank looks on their faces they’re having an Implant conversation. Sparky finally says, ‘Luna,’ and then winces: was there an Implant backlash from her team? Our team, that is, and if me being on it isn’t bad enough, there are seven of them and six of us.
‘We’re taking you to test-run a new world that is under development. It’s great fun; kind of urban warfare in a ruined city!’
Marina and I exchange glances. Not my idea of great fun, and judging by her eyes, not hers, either.
‘So today one group are hunters, the other are hunted. You can use any means at your disposal in the world to achieve a kill, and you can code any changes in the world to assist you that you can, and use any weapons you find or create.’
I stare at her. A kill? We’re going to kill each other?
Blood raises a hand. ‘Which group is which?’
Beamer beams. Flips a coin. ‘Call it?’ she says to Sparky.
‘Heads!’ she says.
It flies through the air, lands. Tails. The sense of dread deep in my gut that started with the word kill deepens.
‘Your choice,’ Beamer says to Blood.
‘We’ll hunt.’ He smiles, but there is no warmth in thin lips pulled across teeth.
‘Hunted, you get a head start: meet in Sparky’s hallway. Quickly friend anyone you need to in order to get them in. The door to world 5691 will be there. Sixty minutes later the hunters will be allowed in at the opposite side of the city. Escape code will return any kills automatically to a virtual meeting place where they are to wait for the others. The team with the most left standing after twenty-four hours wins. Any questions?’
I have a load of questions. Like what will the Hunters do to us when they catch us? What does being killed virtually actually feel like? What does any means necessary really mean – guns, knives, explosives, ritual eviscerations? But none of them are questions I’m prepared to ask out loud, not when everyone else stays silent. Not when most of their faces are like they’ve been asked to a party, not a fight to the death.
Beamer takes out two timers, and gives one to Blood and one to Sparky. ‘The sixty minute countdown has begun.’ Beamer glances at me. ‘To make things a level playing field, all Implant communications will be blocked as soon as you plug in. Away you go!’
I plug in fast. With the speed, the neural net isn’t soft like yesterday – it slams in and makes my head spin.
Sparky’s friend invite is already in my hallway. I hit accept and her door appears; I rush through. Even with hurrying I’m still the last one there. Not used to non-Implant aided discussion, they’re all talking at once.
Sparky raises a hand. ‘To summarise for Luna, we feel there are two possible game strategies: separate and hide, or combine and defend. Let’s get out there now, and see what’s what before we decide. Come on.’ Sparky opens the door to VeeDub 5691. It actually has in development scrawled across it. We step through.
Purple sky? Nice. There is a haze of smoke hanging in the air, with an odd smell. Bombed-out buildings mix with still standing structures in various stages of falling down. It’s hot and humid, and beads of sweat instantly form and trickle down my back. We’re on a hill, the door behind us. I feel to the side of the door. It looks to my eyes like the city carries on, but when I touch it, no. There is a barrier. This place has edges.
Below us the ruined city is bisected by a wide river. Even from here the water looks and smells evil: is it polluted, poisoned? The air makes me cough. There is one bridge across the river. A hill on the other side.
‘Bet that’s where they’ll appear,’ a boy says, pointing at the other hill.
Sparky glances at the stopwatch. ‘In fifty-four minutes.’
‘There are lots of hiding places. They could take forever going through buildings looking for us if we separate,’ he says.
‘Boring. We should destroy the bridge and defend the river,’ Sparky suggests.
Eyes turn to her. ‘Can you do that?’ Marina asks.
She nods. ‘Yep. Easy. Let’s vote: who wants to destroy the bridge?’
Five hands go up, including mine. Anything tha
t has us hiding on our own scares me more.
We hurry down the city streets as a group. It’s slow going with debris and bombed-out vehicles to get around. With all the lovely places and things they could make in a VeeDub, why this? Why a fake war zone? I don’t get it. Sparky stops at a burnt-out car near the bridge, rips something out of the engine. She and another boy do some weird Hacker thing and start pulling wires and charges out of stone, running them to bridge supports.
‘Ready,’ Sparky says. ‘Has anyone got a watch?’ One is volunteered. Another weird Hacker thing and she’s changed it into a timer. ‘Let’s make sure they know who did this. I’ve set it on a delay for when they arrive in five minutes. Come on; let’s get out of here.’
‘No, wait!’ I say, an idea forming, and Sparky hesitates.
‘What is it?’
‘They’ll expect us to hide, to defend. If they see the bridge explode, they’ll know we destroyed it, and expect us to be over here.’
‘And?’
‘Why don’t we go to the other side of the bridge? They won’t expect that.’
‘But then we’ll be on the same side as the hunters,’ Marina says. ‘Four minutes left. We need to run one way or the other soon.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Sparky says. ‘Luna is right. They’ll use all their efforts to get across the river. They won’t expect us to be on the same side. How about instead of sitting back and hiding or defending, we hunt the hunters?’
Startled looks are exchanged.
‘Three minutes,’ Marina says.
‘Let’s do it! Run!’ We follow Sparky over the bridge at full speed, and dive behind a burnt-out building.
‘Twenty seconds,’ Marina says.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Stop the countdown! Wait until they’re on the bridge.’
Sparky does something frantic in the air with her hands, then smiles. ‘Good idea. But without enough time to reset it, I’ve disabled the timer. I’ll need to have the bridge in sight to set it off now. Somewhere they won’t see me. There’s not enough cover around here.’
Marina points: a few streets up the hill. ‘There’s a clock tower. How about up there?’