(That said, it would have been funny had he happened to find a handle for the door at that moment and just walked back out.
‘I know what you are. I know how you got here, and I know the way out too.’
Click. Slide.
‘Oh yeah? Spill.’
‘Oops. Awkward …’)
Iris. It wasn’t just some old woman’s name. It was from Greek mythology: a messenger of the gods. It was also part of the eye. Did that make her a woman of vision?
She’d warned him not to draw attention to himself. Given that the only progressive course of action open to him was to take down half an army single-handedly in the service of destroying the most conspicuous object on the entire surface of Graxis, he wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work.
Maybe she was telling him not to do it, to follow a different course, but he’d missed the part where a case had been laid out for believing she wanted to help him. That was a very dangerous assumption to make. For all he knew she could be an amalgamated incarnation of Angela, Denise and Tracy, sent here to beset him like a maenad and generally mess with his head as punishment for having it jammed up his arse in recent months.
He had no real choice but to plough on, though he didn’t have quite the same boyish enthusiasm for the task as around Christmas ’96. He tried to think of how many maps there were to get through, and wondered how long it had taken him just to make it this far.
He had no sense of time. As Bob had pointed out, it was always day here. He realised that the Reaper’s sense of time would be equally without point of reference. He’d mentioned the marines being here for years, even decades, but how could he know? Decades here could be hours in real time. And equally they could be centuries.
It occurred to him that he had no idea when he’d last eaten, last slept, even last peed, though he felt no need for any of them. Clearly the striking realism of this simulation didn’t extend to everything. Rather depressingly, he wasn’t even sure he still had anywhere he could pee out of.
One appendage he wasn’t lacking in, however, was weaponry. He practised switching between guns, but settled on the double-barrel shotgun for a default. Rationing was required. It would be stupid to use the proton cannon and the rocket launcher on low-ranking enemies, especially as the replacement ammo for the big furniture didn’t begin to appear until much later. Equally, he cautioned himself not to be too conservative either, as he had a tendency to reach the end of games with an embarrassment of kit. Must be the Scotsman in him.
He spotted two sentries either side of a cave-mouth that he knew to be a backdoor route into the big-gun facility. His attempts at a nonchalant approach were short-lived, his cyborg appearance counting for nothing. Evidently the local jungle drums were more reliable than the marines’ regarding the existence of a rogue Gralak. Christ, did they have his photo up or something? Fortunately, their communications capabilities still didn’t extend to letting anyone else know that he was on his way, as nobody came running in response to him disassembling these two lookouts.
A doorway inside the cave-mouth took him into the labyrinth that was the artillery complex, perhaps the most vital military installation on the planet.
He encountered a series of unaccompanied Gralaks in narrow corridors, getting the drop on each of them and firing off several rounds before they had time to respond. This was achieved less through Ross’s own stealth than by his enemies’ serial inability to detect anything suspicious about the sound of gunfire nearby, or about the sight, twenty yards in front, of a comrade’s head suddenly exploding in a cloud of blood, shrapnel and whatever that yellow-green stuff was.
He chalked up easily a dozen this way, before reaching a formidable-looking steel door marked ‘Cannon Energy Intensification System Access’ in legible but alien-looking typography. Digital Excess had stopped short of adding another sign beneath that read ‘Ensure lone enemies do not blow up with grenades’ but Ross recognised it as his goal, even if he had got there a little quicker than he remembered.
He approached it, looking for the activation switch, his proximity prompting an LED screen to flicker into life at one side of the doorway.
‘Access Denied: Blue keycard required.’
Shite. Of course. Now he remembered. That was why the Gralaks had coined the term ‘card collector’. And it wasn’t just a matter of finding the blue keycard either: he’d first need the yellow keycard to access the barracks area, where eventually he’d find the green keycard for the power transformer vault, where he’d find the red keycard for the command centre, where … Christ, so many cards to collect, it was like playing Pokemon.
The locked door stood on one side of a crossway where three other passages converged. Ross got his bearings and headed through the one he remembered as leading to the barracks. He emerged into a slightly wider cavern where the metal-grating underfoot snaked between pools on either side, damp running down the bare rock walls.
He sensed movement in front of him, and looked up to see a figure climb down a ladder from a steel walkway linking the entrances to two tunnels bored higher up the cavern walls. Ross was about to shoot when he saw that the figure was human. Then, more than that: he recognised her.
How did she get here? And entering from the upper levels?
‘Iris,’ he called out, as she dropped the last few feet from the ladder.
She turned to see where the voice had come from, then promptly got off her mark, disappearing up the tunnel ahead.
Does her own thing, Steel said.
Ross hared after her, so intent upon pursuit that he simply ignored several sentries rather than waste time shooting them. They in turn took off after him, all of them clattering through the passageways until it sounded like Test Department were sound-checking.
He rounded a bend and came in sight of the next tunnel intersection just in time to see her leave it, but at least he saw which exit she took. She went hard right, rounding that big rock with the two boxes of shotgun shells resting on top of it. Something about the rock disquieted him, however: some residual sense of negative association about picking up shotgun ammo at that particular spot, despite replenishing his supplies being a generally desirable thing to do.
He sussed what it was roughly a nano-second after barrelling out into thin air and dropping on to the floor of a broad subterranean expanse large enough to accommodate an entire regiment of Gralaks, as illustrated by the entire regiment of Gralaks that was currently occupying it.
She had led him into an ambush.
Not a team player.
No shit. Or maybe she was: just not his team.
A hail of fire began coming his way, prompting him to run for cover, of which there was precisely none. This was why the shotgun shells on the rock had sparked an ominous vibe: he’d died so many times in this place they should have named the map after it: Rage-Quit Hollow.
The Gralaks were shooting simultaneously but they weren’t programmed to understand fields of fire, so they were all just aiming at him and letting rip, mostly hitting where he had been a second ago. Nonetheless, he was taking plenty of hits and going through his ammunition like popcorn without making much of an impression upon their numbers.
Then he spied a crack in the cave wall: now he remembered. Not only was that crack the key to surviving this area, it had to be where Iris had gone too.
He kept circling, gradually making his way around rather than doubling back through the concentrated hail of Gralak weaponry. He was hurting badly but the overall damage was generalised, meaning that blasts to the legs registered as pain without impairing his ability to run at thirty miles an hour. It felt like driving with a migraine. He just hoped Iris hadn’t gobbled up all the virtual Ibuprofen when he got into the hidey-hole.
She hadn’t. The caduceus symbol was the first thing he saw, and he fell upon it like a rattling skag-head, while behind him Gralaks banged dumbly against the outside edges of the narrow channel like a budgie nutting a mirror. With the health hologram vanis
hed, he was relieved to see that Iris hadn’t bagged the ammo cache either, but this was only in keeping with the overall absence of any sign of Iris being there.
He squinted deeper along the wall, in case she was hiding in the shadows, but saw only more rock, the two sides meeting in blackness. Then a slight move of his head revealed that the blackness was not uniform. It looked like a trick of his vision, just as staring into any darkness would eventually present morphing shapes within the void, but this anomaly was definitely outside his head.
Then he realised that it was not an object, but an absence.
Ross sidestepped his way along the cave, squeezing his form into the ever-narrowing gap, and as he did so the dark grey shaft widened, its tone minutely lightening. Then all of a sudden he could no longer feel rock at his back, or under his feet for that matter. He took one more crucial pace forward and the dark grey seemed to be all around him.
It wasn’t, however. It was above him, below him and in front of him, but not behind. When he turned to see where he had emerged from, he saw Rage-Quit Hollow as though a wall of the cave had vanished and been replaced by a force-field. He could see the Gralaks still queuing up around one spot like it was the only bog for miles, but they couldn’t see him. They looked just as tangible as before, standing only yards away, but there was an invisible barrier between him and them: the fourth wall. With a surge of excitement he realised what he was looking at. The crack he’d just edged through was a clipping error: a place where the margins did not fully overlap.
He was outside the map.
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File 2 of 3
Client to Server: Keep Alive
They were coming for him now.
Through ducts and vents, corridors and shafts, along cables, infrared waves and lasers, like a mob of angry villagers whipped into hysteria by the Hackerfinder General, they were coming for him. The hardware had moved on a bit from pitchforks and flaming torches, but the principle was the same, particularly with regard to their unified purpose, murderous zeal and complete absence of independent thought.
Setting ‘Hounds unleashed’ = TRUE
But then, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being pursued by the homicidally militarised and ludicrously over-weaponed security resources of a vastly powerful corporation intent on a seductively rewarding but utterly amoral atrocity was not being pursued by the homicidally militarised and ludicrously over-weaponed security resources of a vastly powerful and entirely amoral corporation intent on a seductively rewarding but utterly amoral atrocity.
Granted the bard of Reading Gaol had probably never been paraphrased quite so elastically, but the point was that at least Ross had their attention. They were hunting for him both physically and digitally, hardware and personnel despatched to possible locations, tracer-daemons scurrying after his scent at the speed of light wherever they detected his forbidden presence within the system. He was in none of those places, however. They were looking where he wanted them to look, snagging all his trip-wires like a blind giraffe blundering through washing lines. Signals blinked all across the grid to show him where they’d taken the bait, swarming over his phantom login attempts like ants over a half-chewed caramel, while visual feeds showed him the hardware and meatware responses.
The Neurosphere buildings in the Silicon Valley campus were first, each of them spiking power usage as their automated internal surveillance systems thrummed with activity. Crab drones clacked across a thousand acres of ceiling tiles and heating ducts like the world’s biggest and most annoying percussion section; nanite clouds gusted through ventilation systems with missionary enthusiasm, like a sentient fart determined to be smelled. Doors were thrown open by centrally controlled servos and kicked open by security personnel boasting even less autonomy. It didn’t matter whether those doors were in front of supply cupboards, corner offices or startled employees halfway through curling one. Ross Baker had to be found.
They had anticipated what he would try to do. That was why they had initiated their emergency protocol and locked out all external connections, something as unthinkable in this day and age as a telecom firm cutting off all its own phones.
Setting ‘Wagons circled’ = TRUE
There was a cold if desperate logic to it, though. It meant that the only way to get into their system was on an internal node. In order for Ross to carry out his plan he’d need to physically enter a Neurosphere building, at which point they could clap him in irons and lift the embarrassingly conspicuous and thus share-price haemorrhaging alert.
Tampa followed Stanford. Chicago followed Tampa. Boston. Philadelphia. Montreal. Building after building, city after city, the crab drones scuttled, the nanites nebulised and the tracer-daemons chased their binary tails. Ross’s ability to monitor all of this was a reassurance, but it was also a vulnerability. Sooner or later, some entity was going to notice the wire it had just digitally tripped; then it was only a matter of time before Neurosphere traced the location to which all of this information was being relayed.
They wouldn’t detect the hack when it came, however, any more than they could detect an individual raindrop falling upon the ocean in a storm. Not only was it too small to be noticed, but it wasn’t even in a form they would register. The very means of interface was so archaic, it was the equivalent of trying to hack Microsoft back in the 1990s by sending them punch-cards through the mail. The beauty was that nobody would recognise the form as a threat. The corresponding drawback, of course, needed no elaboration.
For a start, it would be done using a keyboard and a mouse as input devices, and output was via a monitor. He didn’t care to recall how long it had been since he had physically needed to look at an external display device, let alone rattle the chiclets. He could recall, though, if he wished. He could recall to the date, hour, minute and second, should he choose, with absolute precision and accuracy. There was nothing Ross couldn’t remember any more: his blessing and his curse; the fruits of his worst ever good idea or his best ever bad one.
A smile played across his lips as he thought of the last time his hands fell upon such keys. He had known that these had not been not true sensations, but analogous approximations rendered by the millions of tiny sensors on each of his fingertips: a near-perfect memory of flesh, though near-perfect was never quite near enough. Nonetheless, the feel, the touch of those grey plastic squares had sent something thrilling inside him, and he almost laughed to see where his hands had instinctively come to sit. Traditional typing technique dictated the left-hand digits rest upon a, s, d and f, the right on j, k, l and the colon key. However, Ross’s right hand had gripped the mouse and his left middle finger gone instantly to the w, his index and third fingers alighting on d and a respectively, his thumb on the spacebar, pinkie on ctrl.
You won’t get anywhere with this company if you sit there playing games.
Zat a fact?
No, they wouldn’t see this coming. They were looking in the wrong places, on alert for the wrong threat, from the wrong source, on the wrong continent. All of which would have made him feel a damn sight more optimistic if the definition of success for this ingenious hack was something a bit more substantial than the equivalent of those punch-cards being successfully popped through a slot in Microsoft’s front door by a whistling postie.
Setting ‘Farting into thunder’ = TRUE
This wasn’t merely a matter of penetrating some impregnable digital citadel. This impregnable digital citadel was at the heart of a fortified digital super-state the size of a planet. Success in this enterprise constituted something akin to gaining entry to the basement of the remotest outbuilding of the outermost satellite suburb of the least strategically significant city on the furthest continent from the impregnable digital citadel, and the only door out of that basement would be triple padlocked from the outside. But gaining entry to that basement was the only chance he had.
He triggered some more of his phantoms. Sydney. Tokyo. Beijing. That would have them
panicking, as it belatedly occurred to their American-centric sensibilities that he could be anywhere on the planet. They’d be accessing airline manifests within seconds, only to tangle themselves in the mesh of false trails he had laid. After that, they would be leaning on border authorities, but Neurosphere had leverage with too few of them in order to rule out enough possibilities. He could be anywhere.
Perhaps it was this that prompted them to think beyond the places they were trying to protect, perhaps it was desperation, or perhaps it was just cold thoroughness, but a short time later they really went on the offensive, despatching resources to track him down rather than hoping to catch him on their turf. Within minutes of his phantom attempt in Moscow, there was a Secatore unit smashing in the front door of his home, explaining their actions to local law enforcement as an intervention in response to ‘a credible threat to one of our executives’.
It was here that the penny finally dropped, when one of the monosynaptic vandals, following a strictly unwritten but slavishly observed protocol, went off in search of the house’s internal security servers in order to erase the records of their neighbourly visit. He found that a subsidiary visual feed was being routed off-site, which prompted someone further up the line to deduce that wherever they went looking for Ross, Ross was already looking at them.
His warning systems lit up like George Square at Christmas as the tracer-daemons finally found a trail worth following, pinging his sensors repeatedly. They knew where he was now. Ross had estimated that once they had his location, the best-case scenario was that he’d have a maximum of three minutes to evacuate, and maybe three more if he chose to stay until they came through the door. He stood firm at his post. He wasn’t looking forward to Neurosphere’s hospitality, but he’d always known what his duty would entail.
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