He pressed the transparent tablet to confirm his selection, then saw a matrix of light beams project from it, forming a proportional rectangle a few feet in front. It shimmered and swam, clearly a doorway of some kind, but an opaque one, revealing nothing of what lay beyond. As he moved towards it, the angle of the beams emanating from the device became correspondingly obtuse, as though the tablet was not projecting the doorway, but being drawn into it.
He didn’t have to step through it: the moment the tablet became flush with the portal, he experienced an accelerated version of the sensations that followed his killing the card collector. He was aware of everything swirling and dissolving into white light, then the spectrum split again and he was standing somewhere else.
Unlike before, he was still in possession of the objects he’d been holding, and the tablet in his left hand was now showing the classic in-game stats read-out. It showed his score at zero, a countdown to match-start and a list of players in spectator mode, headed by Sergeant Steel. Ross didn’t know where they were viewing from: perhaps their own tablets. They wouldn’t be here physically, but then chances were neither was he. He had merely been transferred from one simulated location to another. But if that was the case, why hadn’t he felt a similar transition when he entered the hidden base? In the original game, it was a new level, a different map, triggered when you dropped down inside the big drainage sluice; yet, he belatedly realised, he had experienced no break in continuity.
The countdown had fifty-five seconds to run. He was still the only active player in the arena, but he guessed the sergeant would soon change that, so he’d better ready up. He had to stash the tablet somewhere, but there were no pockets in these trendy metal jeans. He dropped his left hand to his side, and the mere gesture of pulling it from his line of vision caused it to vanish. In a panic that it had just gone the way of his evaporated arsenal, he held his hand up again, and was relieved to see the tablet reappear. When it did, it bore a message from the sergeant.
Steel: You’re about to meet the card collectors’ sparring partner.
Steel: He lives in this place. He owns it. He rules it. That’s why we call him …
But his name had already blinked up on the updated stats read-out. Ross guessed he was supposed to be worried, but he knew exactly what he was up against:
The Reaper.
He was a data construct, a piece of AI code, but he was practically family. He had been Ross’s sparring partner for hours and hours in his teens, the tutor who taught him the rudiments of deathmatch in a bedroom in Stirling.
The Reaper was a bot: an offline multiplayer opponent that was not part of the original release of Starfire, but written by a fan: one of countless modifications that were testament to the game’s popularity among hackers. This particular mod was hugely popular among two constituencies: those who were pinging so far from the nearest multiplayer server that taking on live opponents was like playing postal chess; and Brits.
Yes, Ross reflected, BT probably hoped we’d all cast those days from our minds now that we were used to our 24/7 broad-band connections, but he would neither forget nor forgive. In fact, he thought it should be on the curriculum at business school as an object lesson in long-term vision being obscured by short-term greed:
It is the late Nineties. You are a massive telecommunications company enjoying a near monopoly in your native UK, where you own and control the telephone infrastructure. In these early days of burgeoning internet take-up, you have received a monumental windfall due to dial-up connection being the only option available to most users, a great many of whom have even installed a second phone line for this purpose. Do you:
A. Assist the spread of this new communications medium and nurture the growth of e-commerce by introducing a special pricing structure for modem dial-up access, so that users are not discouraged from staying online by being charged per-minute standard rates for their calls. After all, not only are your revenues already being massively boosted by the windfall of all these dial-up connections, but it is incumbent upon you to help the UK conquer this new frontier, and other countries are already stealing a march by charging lower rates to go online.
B. Other.
If he was being honest, Ross would have to admit that his enduring bitterness on the subject was more than a little tinged with guilt. It was his initial late-night forays into online Quake and Starfire that accounted for an all-time-record phone bill that precipitated the argument between his parents that signalled the beginning of the end. It started with his dad losing it at Ross, Mum wading in to protect him, and then it became about everything else. It got uglier and more bitter with every thrust and parry, so many things said that could not be unsaid, the crossing of lines from which both parties understood their relationship could not recover.
Deep down, Ross knew it wasn’t his fault. Deep down he knew that the snow was already piled up and waiting, but it hurt like hell to know that he had been the one whose shout caused the avalanche. If it hadn’t been the phone bill, it would have been something else, he could see that now, but not when he was ringside for the last days of their marriage.
It wasn’t BT’s fault either, but they were still cunts.
In the times that followed, his internet use was strictly self-rationed. He would check his emails only a couple of times a day, and cache a load of web pages for offline reading later. And for deathmatch, salvation came on the PC Magazine cover disk, with its ‘multiplayer maps and mods extravaganza’. There was the Reaper for Starfire, and equivalents for most other shooters too.
He and the bots duked it out night after night, a basic training that served him well when his student days came along and, with them, easier net access, a burgeoning variety of servers and eventually clan leagues. No matter where he went, the battle-grounds remained the same. From his fractured family home to his halls of residence, to his first shared flat, when the work was done and the books tidied away, those places were always waiting for him: Scorn, Claustrophenia, The Abandoned Base, Skywalk, The Warehouse, Stronghold Opposition, and, of course, The Edge of Sanity.
And now he was standing in it, actually standing: he could see his feet, his whole body, not just a first-person perspective with a modified 120-degree field of view. Staircases, lifts, platforms, walkways, courtyards, passageways, pools: places to hide, places to snipe, broad sweeps for running and gunning, hidden shortcuts for wounded retreats. This place was so deeply etched in his memory, it was difficult to believe that he had never truly been here before. But as he took in its sights, he was further compelled to wonder how he could really be here now.
Once again, he had found himself in a virtual place that had a direct emotional connection to a troubled part of his past. Once again he had to ask himself whether this was a projection, and contemplate the possibilities that entailed. Then, once again, he thought of Bob, whose very presence surely militated against a solipsistic explanation.
Bob was a guy who knew nothing about gaming, yet he had ended up in the same place, all the more baffled than Ross about where he was. Reciprocally, Ross was non-religious, with no belief in an afterlife, which for Bob undermined the idea that this was his individual hell. Put simply, they didn’t belong in each other’s ‘personal-projection’ scenarios. But, a nagging voice asked, wouldn’t those scenarios throw in somebody who so precisely didn’t belong in order to make you accept them as real?
Ross told the nagging voice to shut the fuck up. He was as fragile and insecure as anybody else, but he’d never been particularly egotistical, which was why it just didn’t fly that this was all about him. Even when Kamnor was winding him up about the prophecy, he had been unable to accept the idea because he didn’t believe that any world revolved around the fate of one individual.
No. Ross had been raised on Scooby Doo. His abiding philosophy had always been that there was a rational explanation for everything, so it would be a pitiful surrender if he despaired of finding a scientific and logical basis for all this.
He could hear the Reaper before he saw him: the signature sound of him picking up armour in a dank little passage that led to the central courtyard. Ross had habitually positioned himself at the top of one of the lift shafts, a vantage point with a view of all routes of entry.
As soon as the Reaper emerged, the bot began firing up at Ross with a machine-gun. The bout hadn’t started yet, but the Reaper wasn’t programmed to make any distinction in his conduct between warm-up and the real deal, and there had never been much scope for exchanging pre-match pleasantries with an entity whose only means of expression was shooting. Here, however, it ought to be different, as he’d never conversed with the Gralaks or marines before either.
From a distance – and from a distance was the only perspective you tended to get – the Reaper resembled a cyborg, but this was a result of being so heavily armoured. He was human in form beneath the cladding, albeit in an even more exaggerated ideal of masculinity than the toughest, most cigar-chomping marine NPC. His formidably muscled arms were thicker than Ross’s thighs, and his designer-stubbled jaw line was so sharp that if you punched it you might not merely break your fingers but sever them completely. He was also so pronouncedly Caucasian that he made Duke Nukem look like a rasta.
Ross called out to him, but was answered only with gunfire. Remembering that he now had another means of contact, he activated the tablet and typed a message.
Bedlam: Can we talk?
Reaper: No talking. We come here to fight.
Sigh.
Bedlam: What about after the match? I’d like to ask you a few questions.
Reaper: Only if you defeat me.
Ross had to hand it to him: from a Stirling bedroom to wherever the hell this place was, the Reaper still had a knack for keeping it exciting by making you want to kill him.
The countdown reached zero and he felt the dissolving sensation before reappearing in a random spot on the map. He didn’t get his bearings as instantly as in the past, but he soon worked out where he was and retained a perfect memory of the layout.
Two things felt very different. First was the sensation of speed. He recalled reading that the ‘always run’ movement within multiplayer was the equivalent of thirty miles per hour, which doesn’t feel like much if you’re on the bus to work, but is really quite something when your metal-clad legs are pumping away beneath your waist. The second was that running at thirty miles per hour along the edge of a fifty-foot precipice is a lot more terrifying when you can actually feel the ground beneath your feet.
He was grateful to be able to brake just as impressively as he could accelerate, and stopped at the brink of a sheer face where the platform suddenly fell away. He previously wouldn’t have thought twice before leaping off unless his health was critical, as a puny five per cent damage hit was the only consequence to consider. Right then, the thought of blithely hopping into the void seemed no more sensible than diving off of the Wallace Monument. He could, as stated, feel the ground beneath his feet, and if he stepped off it, he would feel another bit of ground shortly afterwards, and that second bit of ground would hurt a very great deal.
But an even worse thought, as he eyed the grenade launcher bobbing impossibly at the bottom of the drop, was that he wasn’t looking forward to finding out what it really felt like to have his insides melted by a proton cannon.
One thing that hadn’t changed since he last ‘stood’ there and contemplated this view was that standing there and contemplating the view was not a rewarding thing to do. There were no approaching footsteps to warn him before the first shot struck, and it was fired from as much as two hundred yards away, so prominent, visible and accommodatingly static a target had he made of himself. Suddenly the view was inverted and he was tumbling through the air, fatally face-planting after the briefest of flights.
As he respawned once more, moments after the ground unmercifully struck, so did inspiration.
He had felt no pain. He had no idea what he’d even been shot with, only that the impact had knocked him over the edge and that, presumably, it was not the weapon-strike that killed him, as he had been aware of the fall. He had been conscious of tumbling through the air, and had experienced a sense of impact, but no pain.
He remembered what Sergeant Steel had said, with regard to the marines having the same powers as the card collectors while they were in this place.
‘It’s been suggested the arena might just be a simulation, but it feels mighty real to me.’
Substrate independence. The simulation argument.
In 2003, Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom published a paper in Philosophy Quarterly that in the following years did the rounds among computer geeks, neurologists, SF anoraks and online gamers. (Admittedly these were constituencies that wouldn’t normally be perusing that kind of periodical, but if you were to draw a Venn diagram, Ross would be at the point where they all intersected.)
It stated that one of the following propositions must be true:
One: The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small.
Two: Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours.
Three: You are almost certainly in a simulation.
In short, the argument suggested that if the human race survived long enough, in its endeavours to understand itself, it would surely develop ‘ancestor simulations’: hyper-realistic virtual reality environments in which the minds inhabiting these worlds were themselves part of the simulation. Such advanced civilisations would have at their disposal enormous computing resources, so by devoting even a small fraction of that processing power they would be able to implement billions of ancestor simulations, each containing billions of minds. Therefore, the vast probability would be that you are in one of those billions of simulations rather than the single original reality that spawned them.
Perhaps the training arena was in fact a simulation within the greater simulation that was Starfire. So what if this hyper-real version of Starfire was itself a simulation within an ancestor simulation? What if Solderburn’s Simulacron prototype had inadvertently hacked the ancestor simulation from within and re-routed Ross’s ‘mind’ into the virtual reality of an old game somewhere on that teetering bank of hard drives he had the scanner hooked up to?
That might explain why the game had enjoyed such an extreme upgrade, as it would have been effectively ported to the super-advanced ancestor simulation’s engine, which was merely as ‘real’ as those within it could possibly know reality to be. If they were constructs, then they would have nothing beyond the simulation to compare it to and, like the NPCs in the original Starfire, wouldn’t know that its walls looked nothing like real walls, its ground nothing like ground. This could be a crap simulation engine but how would anyone know the difference if they’d never known true reality?
The bottom line was that the world of Starfire would look, sound, smell, taste and feel as real as the world Ross had left behind. The NPCs would look, sound, smell, taste and feel like real people too. However, their behaviour would be limited by their original Starfire protocols, just as the protocols of the training arena meant that they didn’t feel pain here, and death was not the end.
But why then outside the arena was death not the end for Bob and (he assumed, though was not in a hurry to test) for himself? And what would happen to the Reaper if he went outside? Ross desperately needed to talk to him, and that meant he had to 0wn him first.
He glanced at the tablet. The duel was first to ten frags, and currently the scores read:
Bedlam: –1
Reaper: 0
Not even zero. It had been the fall that killed him, and that counted as a suicide, racking him up a negative mark. But with no pain to worry about, he was sure he could turn it around. He knew the map and he knew his opponent.
He made for the rocket launcher, picking it up just as he heard th
e tell-tale sound of an elevator platform ascending. He knew where the Reaper would emerge, and ran to head him off. They both entered the crate-strewn hangar at the same time, Ross unleashing his first rocket. Before he could pull the trigger to launch a second, he had been cut to ribbons by the Reaper’s chaingun and respawned somewhere else, weapon-free and now two frags behind.
Within a matter of minutes the deficit was nine, Reaper leading by eight frags to minus one. No matter what weapon Ross grabbed, he was barely able to deliver any damage before he found himself messily gibbed, and with the Reaper never having died, the bot always had the full range of weapons at his disposal.
Then Ross got doubly lucky when he picked up the Invincibility rune and a few seconds later heard the splash of the Reaper entering one of the pools. The power-up gave him thirty seconds of being indestructible before it expired, which was long enough to reach the electrovolt gun and undertake the normally suicidal combination of leaping into the drink and pulling the trigger. It scored him a frag and got his score back to zero, but even more importantly, it cleaned the Reaper out of kit. Now Ross just had to get to one of the big guns first and he could start to dominate.
He made it to the proton cannon in a few seconds, then encountered the Reaper holding only the basic machine-gun. The basic machine-gun turned out to be enough.
Bedlam: 0
Reaper: 9
WTF?
He had a horrible thought: had the Reaper’s skill levels been given an extreme upgrade too?
No, he realised. He was just playing like a llama, making all the mistakes he always did when it had been a long time since his last game. He’d even caught himself running past armour to get to a good weapon: utter noob behaviour.
Deathmatch rule number one: it’s not about scoring kills, it’s about staying alive. If you stay alive, you don’t lose weapons, don’t lose points and don’t lose matches.
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