He and Bob hadn’t travelled in space or time, though the means and implications of their journey were no less perplexing. They were inside a computer game: specifically, a 1996 first-person shooter called Starfire.
When Bob said the planet’s name, it was like he’d keyed a decryption code into Ross’s brain, causing all of the scrambled data to instantly resolve into coherence. All of the information had been there in front of him, but none of these discrete elements could reveal their true nature until he could see them as part of the whole.
That sense of familiarity, of comfort, of positive associations: he understood it now. This place with the gloomy subterranean walkways, the booming artillery cannon, the impossibly purple sky, was a place he knew, a place he associated with happy memories.
Christmas ’96, his first real PC, trading up from a Commodore Amiga: a two-hundred-megahertz processor with Pentium MMX technology and a CD-ROM drive. No more floppy-swappy for him.
Mum and Dad had pushed the boat out, partly in response to encouragement from his maths teacher, and partly due to guilt at the effect their increasingly bitter arguments were having on him. They were trying to make things better, and that Christmas Ross allowed himself to believe it was working. Eilidh and Megan were both home from uni for a couple of weeks, and it just felt special. Family meals, long afternoons lounging on the living-room carpet watching videos, and for Ross, staying up into the small hours battling the Gralaks in software-rendered but nonetheless gloriously immersive first-person 3D.
Shit, did that mean he had died and this was a kind of afterlife after all? A personal heaven that he had subconsciously chosen in his teen years, which would ironically turn out to be hell for an adult?
No, because that sense of comfort wasn’t purely about the good times, was it? The world of Graxis had been a place of retreat in the ensuing months when his parents started fighting again, a world he could escape to when he didn’t want to deal with the reality that was around him.
So did that mean he had gone all Buffy S6E17? Had he freaked out at the news of Carol’s pregnancy, and his mind retreated into this place while in reality his body was rocking like a Romanian orphan in a corner of the office?
Unlikely, he decided. Her pregnancy was a shock, but he had to give himself some credit. Besides, if he was to retreat into the world of a game, whether in death or insanity, surely it wouldn’t be Starfire. It wasn’t some seminal experience or all-time favourite. That accolade would go to Serious Sam for undiluted pleasure, or maybe online Quake 2 on the strength of the sheer number of hours played.
No, this wasn’t in his head. This was all around him, inescapably real: from the dust on his feet to the heat on his skin to the smell of burning fuel on the breeze. That was why he had recognised this place and yet not been quite conscious of doing so, instead experiencing merely a confusing sense of familiarity. It was Alive1, the opening level of Starfire, he could see that now, but it looked different rendered in steel, stone, sunlight and fire rather than shaders, brushes, sprites and pixels.
He recalled getting his first graphics-acceleration card in the summer of ’97, a 3dfx Voodoo 1. It had cost him all of his birthday money and Saturday-job savings, leaving him with no cash to buy any new games, but that didn’t matter. Seeing the likes of Starfire and Quake go from software-rendered blobby brownness to shimmering, Glide-polished environments was like playing them for the first time. The familiar dungeons, hangars, halls and bases looked completely different as a result of their rendering upgrade.
Whenever a game came out showcasing a new graphics engine, one of the first things the custom-map enthusiasts did was remake their old favourites. He had seen Entryway from Doom II, Ziggurat Vertigo from Quake, The Edge from Quake 2 and Alive1 from Starfire rendered again and again, and though they were all recreating the same places, the maps didn’t just look different, they felt different. The proportions would change, the new textures and lighting affecting your perception of architecture and layout, even though the basic geometry was identical. If you hadn’t known which level you were loading, you might be wandering around a while before you realised it was an update of a classic.
That’s what had happened here, except the scale of the upgrade was unimaginable. It was inescapably real, and yet equally inescapably a late-Nineties shooter. That was why he’d felt there was something familiar about his frustration in not being able to pick up the better guns from the enemies lying dead on the floor. The game gave you a crappy blaster pistol to kick off with, but didn’t let you lift anything from the foes you had taken down. Instead it drip-fed you better and better weapons as you worked your way through the maps.
That was why the soldiers were utterly useless too: blundering into the line of fire, taking no evasive action, failing to coordinate attacks to take advantage of their numbers. The AI was shit back then, though that wasn’t the reason for the Gralaks never firing in aggressive, sustained patterns. That aspect was by design, so that a single player could successfully wage a solo campaign against their entire army. Hence the artillery cannon making mincemeat of the invasion force: in the story, the space marines were all but wiped out, leaving the player to be the lone hero and take on the Gralaks entirely by himself.
However, it wasn’t just the ‘Actual Reality’ rendering that had clouded Ross’s recognition. It was the fact that he wasn’t the lone hero.
He hadn’t started out in the wreckage of a crashed landing pod as his shipmates were gunned down all around him, gripping his blaster and vowing revenge. He was an enemy grunt. He was what would normally be described as an NPC: a non-playing character. That was why he couldn’t open any crates, and why he couldn’t interact with the hologram that he now recognised as a health power-up. In Starfire, indeed in every one of those shooters, the enemies were completely oblivious to all the useful stuff that was just lying about the place, whether it was health, armour, weapons or ammo. Ross could see it though, which made him and Bob different from the NPCs, but the fact that he could plonk himself in the middle of the thing all day without effect just served to underline the fact that it wasn’t there for his benefit.
He was not the hero. He was not the player.
He knew who was, though: the card collector. When he died, the game was restored to its opening state because the player had restarted the map.
He was inside Starfire, but there was no escape key, no menu and no option to quit (Are you sure? Yes/No). Stranger still, there was someone out there playing the fucking thing.
Research and Development
Ross could not have felt more like a dick if he had been gene-spliced with George Osborne and dressed in a six-foot foam-rubber penis costume. He sat at his desk and stared blankly at the monitor, unable to focus, waiting in vain for his mind to come back online. It was as though someone had detonated a logic bomb in his memory core; or perhaps more like his brain was undergoing a coordinated denial-of-service attack, overwhelmed by response requests so that it couldn’t process any information.
He fought to concentrate on one question amid the storm of imponderables. Why didn’t she tell him? Why was he learning something as earth-shattering as this third- or maybe fourth-hand? She had told her sister, and clearly not in any kind of firewalled confidence, given that the information had made it to his place of work before he did. Was this the ultimate female test of male attentiveness: that if you can’t work this one out from the available clues, you don’t deserve to know?
Kind of, he deduced. Because the main reason Carol hadn’t told him was that as long as he didn’t know, she still had all her options open, such as the option to have nothing more to do with him. Everything became more complicated once he was party to the information, but while he was too oblivious to even notice, well, what did that say about his credentials?
Through the hurt, confusion and downright embarrassment, the most compelling emotion he felt was a desire to be with her right then. He wanted to offer his apologies and his vows of su
pport, but more fundamentally he had a greater need to simply hold her than he had ever endured.
He had seldom felt so isolated and helpless in his life. Carol was the first person he turned to when he needed to unburden himself, when he needed reassurance, when he had great news to share. A few minutes ago he had been daft enough to believe he could do without all of that, but now he could see the true scale of his delusion.
He had to speak to her. He wasn’t going to be able to function properly until he did so.
He phoned, but got no answer. That figured. After what happened at the weekend, she was unlikely to be taking his calls for a while. Things had changed, though. They absolutely needed to talk. Maybe he should send a text, let her know he was aware of the situation now. How did you phrase something like that, though?
Heard u r pregnant. omg.
Maybe not. He tried calling again, tried not to think of Rita Mae Brown’s definition of insanity. Still no answer. It wasn’t even diverting to the message service. She really had all interrupts locked out.
He physically didn’t know what to do with himself, because he could think of no action he could take right then that would move him forward from this predicament. There was no point in making the dramatic gesture of walking out and going straight to see her, because she would be in court right then, and besides, he had no idea what he would say to her. Just the thought of facing her prompted the awareness that he didn’t even know what he wanted to happen, what he would consider a satisfactory resolution.
He couldn’t think about it, literally couldn’t think about it while this mental DoS attack was still in full flow. He needed time to pass. He had to occupy himself. Work: that was the answer. Work. It was the only thing he could make sense of at that moment, and as Zac’s Rohypnol-laced words had underlined, he had a mountain of it to get through, particularly with there still being no sign of the Sandman returning to duties.
He felt a sudden anger over Alex’s disappearing act, a feeling that was just as quickly supplanted by guilt at having made no attempt to get in touch with him and make sure the guy was okay. The last time he had shown up was Wednesday, but Ross had been out of the office visiting one of the hospitals participating in the test programme. Diane, the department’s network mage, said she had seen Alex at his desk first thing that day, but he must have gone home early, because he wasn’t there in the afternoon. He had been due to let Solderburn scan him for the mapping trials programme later that morning, and it was joked that he had bailed in panic rather than throw himself at the mercy of the idiosyncratic chief engineer and his experimental prototype.
Alex hadn’t phoned in sick; or at least if he had, nobody thought to mention it to Ross. The Sandman had seemed a little low of late, right enough, definitely out of sorts. Ross hoped the guy hadn’t had some kind of breakdown. Poor sod was divorced from a woman who had treated him so appallingly you’d have thought he must have murdered her entire family in another life and she had married him out of vengeance.
I’ll give him a call now, Ross thought, trying not to admit that some part of him was hoping that an act of solicitous human contact would score him some much-needed karma points with regard to Carol at some point calling him.
Alex’s mobile diverted to his landline, triggered his answering machine.
Arse trumpets.
Okay. He had tried. That was one less thing to feel bad about.
He would make sure there was nothing in his inbox requiring an urgent response, then lose himself in work for a few hours. Maybe take a walk at lunchtime, see if the smell of fresh diesel fumes in his lungs and the inspiring views of the skip-hire depots could help him find clarity.
He reflexively deleted a couple of emails flagged High Priority, which was the Neurosphere suits’ inadvertently helpful way of letting you know the denoted message was a pointless circular full of management-speak and could therefore be discarded unopened. That just left the message from Solderburn.
From: Jay Solomon
Sent: Monday, 07:34
To: Ross Baker
Subject: Mapping trials for latest build
Hey buddy.
I was copied into that shitogram from the Zacbot. Sucks dude. Extreme lossage. Anyways, given your presentation’s been flushed, I figure you’ve got a window this morning, and I’m doing the zombie fandango here: I need fresh brains and I heard you got them to spare.
Fix me up?
S
That was Solderburn for you. Speed empathy, then fast-forward to the point. Actually, by Solderburn’s standards, this was him really reaching out: there was a ‘sucks dude’ and an ‘extreme lossage’. Ross snorted at the suggestion the cancellation of his meeting suddenly meant he had a whole load of free time on his hands, but given where his head was at, it struck him that taking twenty minutes out to lie down in a state of complete isolation would be time well spent.
He fired off a reply, saying he’d be there in five.
Solderburn’s lair was signposted as the ‘Research and Development Lab’ on the link corridor at the rear of the main building, presumably because they couldn’t find a notice that said ‘Keep Out – Condemned’. Its separation from the rest of the premises in what was anyway the most far-flung outpost of the corporation would provide the first hint to a newcomer that Jay Solomon was the madman in Neurosphere’s attic. This impression was only underlined by the fact that the door to the link corridor was locked half the time, so you either had to walk around the outside of the building or get the keys from Billy the security guard. Ross would have opted for the former even if it was minus fifteen outside and blizzard conditions. In precisely the same way that a brief exchange with Agnes could give you a spoonful of sunshine to brighten up your day, any encounter with Billy made you feel like he had shat in your pocket, depositing a little lump of his own unpleasantness that adhered to you for a long time after.
The R&D lab gave the impression that Solderburn had set out to create an environment that contradicted every preconception the word ‘laboratory’ connotes in the average human mind. It resembled what you might get if you combined the assembly line at an upscale electronics manufacturer, the display floor at a DIY store, the contents of two car boot sales and the decor of a late-Nineties frat house – then bombed it. The only reason it hadn’t fallen foul of health and safety legislation was that no health and safety officer had been brave enough to inspect it; or, if so, they had never made it back out again.
‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’ Ross had said the first time Solderburn gave him a tour.
‘I was going for Alice Cooper stage-set meets Doom 3. But, like, you know, late in Doom 3, when everything’s been blown to shit?’
‘The Delta Labs?’ Ross had suggested, establishing his gaming credentials. ‘Oh, you definitely got there.’
Solderburn was like a cross between an ageing hippy and an overfed teenager: his dress sense and personal-hygiene ethos coming from the former; his emotional maturity and interpersonal skills from the latter. He looked like the kind of guy who could have a million dollars in the bank but still be living in his mother’s basement. Indeed he might well have been but for the confluence of circumstances that had caused him to wash up in an industrial estate in Stirling in his late forties after a lifetime in California.
The lauded Berkeley and Cal-Tech graduate had enjoyed a chequered career, with seemingly concerted efforts at pissing his talents up against the wall being intermittently interrupted by brief moments of brilliance. It would be easy to paint it as a familiar tale of wasted talent, but in the short time Ross had known Solderburn, he had come to understand that you couldn’t separate the genius from the flake; nor say whether his creative efforts caused him to flake out or whether sustained flakiness was an inextricable part of the creative process. Unfortunately drugs had also proven a major part of his creative process, and when he notched up one possession bust too many, Neurosphere’s higher-ups had to insulate themselves from the fallout.<
br />
‘It wasn’t that I made a lot of enemies,’ he told Ross. ‘I just didn’t make enough friends. Gotta watch for that, dude.’
Nonetheless, he still did have some friends at Neurosphere, or at least admirers. They couldn’t keep him, but they did not want to lose him, just in case he came up with something game-changing and they no longer had first call on the results. They told him they would continue to fund his work, but only if he agreed to ship out to a far-flung outpost of their empire and lie low for a while; telling him, like they told Ross about these premises, that it was only temporary.
On this particular morning, Neurosphere’s equivalent of the first Mrs Rochester was dressed in a pair of dark grey (as in formerly beige) cargo pants and a horrifically bright yellow t-shirt bearing the legend ‘FUCK YOUR CAKE’ in three rows of red capitals. Ross reckoned it was a good bet he had slept in it, and just as likely slept in the lab.
Solderburn favoured cargo pants because they sported a multiplicity of pouches and pockets into which he could stuff tools, memory sticks, pens, torches, pieces of circuit board, lengths of cable, cartons of juice and a seemingly self-replenishing supply of caramel wafers. (Actually, the term ‘favoured’ suggested he had exercised some kind of option with regard to his trousers, when in truth Ross couldn’t remember seeing him wear another pair.)
He was chewing on cold pizza as he picked his way carefully through the debris to greet his visitor, Ross not wishing to contemplate how many hours or even days it had been since that pizza was warm.
‘Ross, dude, good to see you. Shame about the circs,’ he said, offering a fist for Ross to punch. It was a gesture of solidarity which Ross did his best to meet but managed only a cursory reciprocation, involuntarily giving a heads-up that all was not well. Notwithstanding that such exchanges tended to make him acutely aware of not being the kind of guy who could punch fists with other men, Ross could normally mask his awkwardness enough to manage a decent dig. Today, however, his sense of self was rather depleted.
Bedlam Page 7