‘Do people actually say halt?’ Ross asked. ‘Or was that an NPC?’
‘I didn’t see. Could have been either. Only way to tell the difference between these jerk-offs and the NPCs is that the NPCs do at least occasionally create the illusion of having minds of their own.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The guys who were holding you? They call themselves–– Shit!’
The water around them seemed to surge and rear up, as though it was suddenly boiling. Solderburn reacted instantly by producing a shotgun and firing, which struck Ross as an odd way to deal with a flood until he saw that it wasn’t water that was inundating them; nor indeed shit.
In all directions, corpses were rising from the watery trench, all of those sunken bodies spontaneously reanimated and none of them very happy about it. It looked like the Gallowgate on a Saturday night.
‘Fucking zombie mode,’ said Solderburn, loosing off another shell into a face that already looked like a butcher’s window. ‘They must have activated it to stop us getting away. I’m low on ammo too.’
Solderburn pumped the shotgun as three more zombies shambled ever closer, converging upon their position, but Ross put a hand on the weapon and tipped it down.
‘You don’t waste ammo on these meat-puppets,’ he said, handing Solderburn the crowbar. ‘That’s what mêlée weapons are for.’
‘So what are you gonna use?’
Ross showed him. He waited until the nearest ambulating cadaver came into range and sent his spike into its head, which he then liquidised with an ease he found both surprising and icky, like cutting into rotten fruit. With his eyes on his work, he was almost blindsided by another zombie attacking from the rear, which was when a twitching reflex and its resultant face-fricassee taught him that he was ambispikerous.
‘Cool,’ approved Solderburn, before burying the crowbar in a zombie’s head.
Ross took the lead after that, Solderburn picking out their path with the torch while he disembowelled and decapitated at least two dozen undead assailants. He was disgusted and yet kind of proud of himself at the same time, like he had felt that time as a student when he got a shag from a girl he didn’t actually like.
‘Okay, this is our stop,’ Solderburn announced, as they reached a metal ladder bolted to the side of the sewer wall. It ascended into a vertical shaft, one intended to facilitate personnel access rather than for draining waste, so it was an altogether easier passage than the route by which Ross had entered the tunnel system.
They emerged into a dark underground chamber, the huge, moss-lined stones forming the walls indicating that it was somewhere both grand and ancient.
‘Monastery,’ Solderburn said as Ross took in his surroundings. ‘We’re in the foundations, so there’s still a bit of a climb before we—’
Solderburn was interrupted by a particularly weathered zombie clattering towards him from the shadows, his greater pace perhaps down to being largely unencumbered by the burden of flesh. Solderburn shattered its skull with an irritated sigh and it dropped to the flagstones in a bundle of bones and tattered cloth.
‘God, enough with the freaking undead already,’ he muttered. ‘What the hell was everybody thinking back in the early twenty-first? Every game from that era, even the hardcore military shooters, there has to be zombies. Between that and the vampires, you’d think it was uncool to have a pulse.’
One of Solderburn’s words literally gave Ross pause.
‘Back in the early twenty-first? How long have you been here?’
‘Probably best if we don’t go there right now,’ he replied. ‘At least not until we’ve established a few other things. Oh, and some place safer to talk might be a good idea too, so we gotta book.’
Solderburn led him up a narrow, winding and seemingly endless stone staircase. Freed from wading through sewer water, Solderburn’s gait struck Ross as another thing that didn’t quite match his memories. For one thing, he had never seen the guy move with anything resembling haste. He was lithe and light on his feet, his steps strangely delicate, an impression that was perhaps pronounced due to its contrast with the ambling port-liness Ross recalled.
‘Would one of the things we need to establish be how we both got here?’ Ross asked.
‘No, because unfortunately that’s the local equivalent of the ex nihilo problem. The last thing I remember before I got here is testing out my latest build of the mapping scanner on myself. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t gonna fry my brain before I unleashed it on anybody else.’
‘Being scanned is the last thing I remember as well,’ Ross said, excited. ‘You scanned Alex first, and he disappeared. But wait: you said you scanned yourself before the trials? Alex and I were both scanned as part of those trials. You were still around.’
‘It was a long time ago, dude. The chronology gets confusing, and I don’t just mean my memory of it. When I first got here, I came across games that weren’t due out for years. I’m talking fourth and fifth sequels to stuff that I’d only read about being in development.’
‘This is unreal,’ Ross said, head spinning.
‘No, dude, I think this is Death or Glory 2, but I can take you to Unreal. I’ve got friends who live there.’
‘Friends? Who live there?’
‘There are a lot of people here who are just like us: one day they’re living ordinary lives, the next they’re in space, or on a Napoleonic warship, or in Middle-earth. And all these people didn’t walk into my R&D lab at Neurosphere, okay? So let’s be clear: this ain’t all on me.’
‘So how did they get here?’
‘Just about everybody tells the same story: last thing they remember is simply going to bed and falling asleep. They don’t know beyond that much, but the thing is man, after a while they stop asking, because it’s pointless. Nobody’s been able to find a way out, so everybody has to find a place to belong and make the best of it. Same as back in the old world, I guess.’
Solderburn put out a hand to signal Ross to stop and remain silent as they approached a landing, the stairs still climbing beyond. He took up position at the side of a heavy oak door, shotgun at the ready, and gave Ross a countdown to throw it open.
Ross twisted the metal ring that formed the handle and shouldered the oak, flattening himself against the wall as Solderburn stepped inside. He was bracing himself for the noise and impact of gunfire, aware that he only had the option of close-quarter combat.
He heard the echo of Solderburn’s footfalls on stone and a flutter of wings, birds startled by this sudden intrusion. They were in a transept, overlooking the nave of a long and lofty church, the flagstones and pews sitting at least twenty feet below. This gallery ran around three sides, excluding that of the main altar, the balusters wider than anything Ross had ever seen before and the gaps between them equally yawning, like someone had taken a normal balustrade and vertically compressed it. He wondered what period was indicated by this architectural anomaly, then remembered where he was and deduced its true purpose: providing body-wide barriers to hide behind during combat.
‘There are literally hundreds of worlds here,’ Solderburn said quietly, leading the way on quiet feet. ‘Maybe thousands. Most people settle down someplace they like, maybe travel around now and then, see the sights, go visit with friends. Some folks just like to wander. And some have preferred to create their own worlds, in what we call the Beyonderland. It’s kinda like a massive complex of digital allotments, though you can’t pop in and out of your little private garden quite so easily as you used to. The resistance keep a close eye on who comes and goes, because so far it’s an Integrity-free haven and they want it to stay that way.’
‘Hundreds of worlds? So how many people are we talking about?’
‘Impossible to say. It’s not like anybody took a census. This place here, and Starfire? They’re on the outer fringes, kinda like the unsettled badlands. Further in, it gets more populous, more sophisticated. We’re not just talking about communities. We’re talkin
g about societies.’
‘How long has this all been here?’
‘I honestly couldn’t say. Time has no meaning here, or at least no frame of reference. It’s a sight to behold, though. Problem is you ain’t gonna see any of it unless we can get our asses out of here.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘Same way you got here from Starfire. There’s a transit in the monks’ dormitory.’
‘Transit?’
‘It’s what we call the hidden gateways that take you from one gameworld to the next.’
Solderburn stopped for a moment, peering over the balustrade as though he had heard something he didn’t like. There was no activity below, but Ross could still hear sirens in the distance. They had made it all the way around to the opposite transept, where there was a small altar facing another oak doorway. Above the altar there was a stained-glass window showing Jesus emerging from the tomb after three days, the stone that was rolled away depicted in a conspicuously ovoid shape. An Easter egg.
‘Gimme a hand here,’ Solderburn said, crouching down at the altar and putting his shoulder against it.
With Ross’s metal bulk brought to bear, the stone slab forming the top of the table slid free, leaving a gap into what was revealed to be a secret compartment.
‘Fill your boots,’ Solderburn suggested, shining his torch inside. Ross found a machine-gun, a Luger pistol and a Panzerfaust. He also spotted an incongruous design on the interior of the secret compartment, a brightly coloured cartoon depicting a buck-toothed green fish.
As Ross lifted each weapon, its predecessor disappeared from his hands. For a moment he worried whether he needed his tablet to change them back, but there turned out to be no link, just post hoc ergo propter hoc. The same action of imagining a key-press still worked, the same as in the training arena.
‘There’s a network of transits interlacing through all of the worlds,’ Solderburn informed him. ‘A few worlds have the minimum of two, some have dozens, each connecting them to somewhere different, but there’s no three-dimensional topology to the links, no spatial relationships. There is a basic daisy-chaining of sorts – world A connects to world B connects to world C – but a different transit in world A might lead to somewhere that’s a hundred links away if you’re taking the long way around. Most transits are so widely known they’re effectively public thoroughfares: tunnels between worlds that see as much traffic as any border back in the old world. You could literally drive a bus through them. Others are entrusted only to those and such as those. The one we’re headed for definitely comes into the latter category.’
‘What about “diegetic trespass protocol”?’
‘That’s why we need the Panzerfaust.’
Solderburn checked the way was clear beyond the door and they proceeded cautiously along a draughty narrow stone passageway with open arches on either side. Ross had the machine-gun primed in his right hand, his left ready with the spike in case of more zombies. They hadn’t seen any since ascending to the transepts; presumably the undead didn’t have a head for heights.
‘The charm-school drop-outs who captured you are a recent phenomenon. They call themselves the Integrity. They’re obsessed with maintaining order, the integrity of the system. They’ve been taking control of more and more gameworlds, intent on sealing the borders, so some of those well-trodden thoroughfares now look like Checkpoint Charlie.’
‘They told me that traffic between the worlds is causing irreparable damage,’ Ross said. ‘That it could cause the whole place to implode. Is it true?’
‘There are rumours that certain worlds have become unstable, like corrupted files, and even that some have disappeared altogether. People talk about “the corruption” like it’s the boogeyman. There’s more than rumours, in some cases. I know of at least one transit that now leads to blank empty space, and nobody knows if it’s just that the link has been broken or if what used to be there is actually gone. What’s also unknown is whether transits are the cause, and not everybody is prepared to take the Integrity’s word for it.’
‘I’m not sure I like being in the “climate-change sceptic” camp on this one, but I would want to see some evidence of cause and effect before I agreed it was a justification for martial law.’
‘You, me and a whole lot of other folks. That’s why there’s a resistance movement.’
Solderburn clenched his fist then opened it again, and, when he did, there was a holographic object in the palm of his hand: a 3D rendering of the Mobius strip Ross had seen twice before.
‘The resistance call themselves the Diasporadoes: as in diaspora, meaning scattering, migrating beyond the homeland. A lot of folks are content to settle where they are, so they don’t see a restriction of movement as a huge imposition, especially with a big scary threat of annihilation skewing the picture. Some of these worlds are vast, after all, and a lot of those same people never appreciated that the world they suddenly found themselves in was actually a game, usually because they never played one before. But those of us who recognised we were in the world of a game, we did what gamers always do: we tested the boundaries, and once we discovered what was beyond them, one world was never gonna be enough.’
Solderburn stopped as the sound of splintering wood rose up from the open courtyard to their left, followed by the crunch of several boots. They both ducked down and peeked over the arch, witnessing the ingress of six identical Integrity troopers accompanied by the hammer-wielding troll that had blootered Ross into oblivion before.
‘I’ve noticed that the concept of Integrity doesn’t preclude borrowing monsters from completely different games,’ Ross whispered.
‘They’re usually a bit more circumspect. Guess they don’t need to worry so much when they’re way out on the fringes, because nobody lives here. I mean, come on, who would? But the fact that they came prepared with this kind of muscle indicates they must have a serious hard-on for you, which is very bad news for us.’
‘Why are they interested in me? How do they even know about me?’
‘The Integrity have got eyes and ears everywhere. I’ve got a few sources myself, but I was a few steps behind on this one. That’s why I headed out hoping to intercept you but ended up having to bust you out of jail. It was tight, dude: if I’d gotten there just a little bit later, that would have been all she wrote. The Integrity, like everybody else, are physically governed by the rules of whichever world they’re in, which is why you were able to break out with the crowbar. But there is a world that they created, where they make the rules, and if you end up there, nobody is ever busting you out.’
They watched the search party proceed into the main body of the abbey, leaving two soldiers posted at the sacristy door. Even as the stomp of their boots and the thumping gait of the troll receded inside, other sounds carried on the air, suggesting a growing encroachment.
Solderburn moved across to the other side of the passage and Ross followed, both of them peering through another arch a few feet above a slope of wet slates.
‘Oh, man, acute lossage,’ he groaned.
Below them the monastery compound was like an ant farm, crawling with black figures, and beyond its walls Ross could see more on their way, both on foot and in armoured vehicles.
‘Looks like the Integrity chose this place for their annual convention,’ he observed.
It wasn’t just the Integrity, though. Ross could see Nazis and resistance fighters converging too, united against the cyborg threat. They were pouring in from all sides, like he had a five-star wanted rating on Grand Theft Auto.
‘Where is this transit, did you say?’ Ross asked.
‘In the dorter. That is, the monks’ dormitory.’
‘I mean, where’s that?’
Solderburn pointed over the rooftops to a building that stood apart from the abbey, though it was still within the monastery’s walls.
‘You see that structure at the end of the avenue of trees, the one that’s totally swarming with Integrity tro
ops?’
‘Naturally. Does this mean they know about the transit?’
‘I don’t think so. There’s a pretty big main transit they use to get in and out of this world. The secret one would be too tight a squeeze for the troll, never mind the vehicles they came with. Ironically, if they knew there was a transit in there, they wouldn’t be guarding it: they’d leave it wide open but station a snatch squad and wait for us to walk into the trap.’
‘They told me it would speed up my release if I told them where the gateway was between Starfire and here. I didn’t, though.’
‘You held out under torture. Way to go, man.’
‘No, I’d have coughed it in no time. They just got off the subject before I could tell them.’
‘Either way, it’s a win. In any given world, once they control all the transits, that’s game over. But as long as there remain covert ways in and out, it can still be pulled back from the brink. That’s what makes this an all-or-nothing gambit. If we get caught heading for the dorter, they’re gonna know why.’
‘Why are they guarding the building then?’
‘They’re not. Looks like they’re just using it as a muster point. They’re sending out search parties and allocating snatch squads. Standard practice is to man the spawn points and wait until you get fragged.’
‘Yeah, found that one out first-hand. How did they know we were in the monastery?’
‘Couldn’t have been too tricky to work out. Follow the trail of decapitated zombies. Plus, as I said, they got eyes and ears everywhere. First thing they do once they got a foothold in a world is take control of the NPCs, and I mean all the entities. So those birds you saw take off, they went from being pigeons to stool-pigeons. And it’s not like you’re difficult to spot, dude.’
‘Yes, if only I’d packed my summer wardrobe,’ Ross said irritably.
Solderburn’s face lit up with a strange mixture of surprise and self-reproach.
‘Shit, that’s it. I almost forgot.’
Bedlam Page 19