‘Must have been a hell of a catching-up session.’
Juno looked away, as though carefully shaping her response. Something here was delicate.
‘It sure wasn’t easy. It’s happened to a lot of people who’ve found each other, and sometimes it breaks them up. One of them has memories of their relationship that the other doesn’t share, and that can put up quite a barrier. Joe said it was almost like I’d had an affair, but all the weirder because that affair was with him.’
‘Did it break you up?’ Ross asked tentatively.
‘Well, no,’ she said reflectively.
Ross felt a disproportionate sense of relief, pleased to find some reason for optimism in this growing nightmare.
‘That didn’t break us up. It was the fact that Joe was fucking insipid pornalike bimbos as though he was trying out for Team USA in the insipid-pornalike-bimbo-fucking Olympics that broke us up.’
Ross was struggling to think of any kind of response to this, especially with Juno’s eyes blazing into him like he might be held responsible by proxy as the only male in sight. She wasn’t done, either.
‘We got a phrase here: “Hell if you make it, heaven if you want it to be.” Well, before we ran into each other again, that priapic fuck-monkey had decided heaven was a John Holmes movie. Big reunion lasted pretty much until he started suggesting how I might prefer to look. Round these parts that implies a bit more than saying “how about you try on this new negligee”; you hear what I’m saying?’
Juno’s rant would have been intimidating enough on its own, but as the aforementioned only male in sight, and having already been insta-gibbed merely for effect, Ross was fucking terrified.
It must have shown. She looked at the blank ground and emitted a self-conscious laugh.
‘Sorry. Bit of an over-share. I’m feeling kind of raw, fair to say. Look, I hope you find your girl. I’m just saying you gotta be prepared for her not being who you remember. You say you just got here: well she could have been here as long as me. She could be somebody else entirely now, and given our issues measuring time in this place, you better be ready to deal with the possibility that she could have literally seen more cock-ends than weekends.’
She caught herself once more, eyes burning into her whipping boy as she unloaded on him. This time, however, it looked like she either didn’t think she owed anyone an apology or was still too pissed-off to offer one.
‘How about you shoot me again?’ Ross suggested acerbically.
‘Why, you think that would make me feel better?’
‘No. But when you did it before, I felt better than I do now.’
Juno shrugged, still simmering.
‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ she justified.
‘Fuck you.’
They stood there in silence for a while, neither looking at the other, the only sound or movement coming from the lapping of the waves.
Eventually she spoke.
‘I’m gonna leave you to it,’ she said quietly, awkwardly. ‘Wait for my orders. You should use the time: maybe build a house or try out some facial editing.’
‘Aye. You should try some facial editing too: maybe crack your face and make your arse jealous.’
Build Time
Ross sat slumped on a sofa in the huge, glass-walled front room of his beach house, staring out over the sands, the jetty and the black waters towards the dark horizon.
Juno had never said how long she’d be, which Ross understood to be a moot consideration in light of her remark regarding the absence of a frame of reference for the passing of time. Understandably, he was trying not to think too much about the rest of that particular sentence.
You can have anything, she had said, shape the world any way you want. Well, how about a clock or a calendar? Out of curiosity he had begun looking through the sub-menus associated with his private world, and happened across the variable settings controlling solar and seasonal cycles. That, he realised, was the problem: you could have a clock and a calendar, but it would only apply locally, and what’s more, you could change it at any time. Gameworld rules: you could set permanent day, permanent night, or the passing of a month, the passing of a season in the real-time equivalent of an hour.
How did people make appointments round here?
‘Yeah, Jim, I’ll see you at, er, not sure o’clock, on the, er, somethingth of fuck-knows, okay?’
‘Aye, and don’t be late.’
Marooned on his flat and blank personal island, he had little alternative but to experiment with his new toolkit. He watched a cursor float in his field of view, guided by movements of his fingers, its appearance changing as he toggled through its various modes. He could raise the landscape, shape the terrain, choose grass, rock, sand, woodland or water, and it would be instantly real. He could pick up the sand and let it run through his fingers, dip his toes in the stream, smell the scent of the trees. Every last grain, every last drop, every last airborne particle had to be an individual piece of code, ultimately just information. Had that always secretly been true of what he’d considered the real world? And as far as the mind was concerned, did it matter whether that information was analogue or digital, filtered through the senses and couriered along nerves, or fed direct to the brain?
He took a handful of water and drank. He wasn’t thirsty: he just wanted to see what would happen. It was crisp and fresh on the palate, a cold sensation running down his throat. Did this mean he would have to pee? He’d better think about creating a toilet just in case.
He discovered that he could shape objects from memory, merely by concentrating on his recalled mental image of them. This could apply to something as small and basic as a table or as large and complex as an entire house. In the latter case, of course, the image tended to be sketchy in places, but he was then able to add finer detail on a piecemeal basis.
He wondered what it said that after a period of messing around and learning the basics, the first project he truly committed to building was not a futuristic dream-pad or a fantasy castle but a replica of his childhood home. He couldn’t get it quite right, though. The outside started off okay, but became grotesquely skewed as he worked on refining the interior. Some rooms were massively bigger than others; some extremely dense in their detail while others were sparse. His old bedroom was getting on for the size of a tennis court, though the reality had been about sixteen feet by nine. It had been so many things in his mind: battleground, football pitch, rock-show stage, ocean, starship bridge. The room his older sisters had shared was tiny by comparison: it had been physically much bigger than his in real life, but the one in his memory was a cluttered cloister that he was only ever allowed to glimpse before being booted out and having the door closed on him.
His construction both creeped him out and made him sad. Even though he could wander around it, he felt less connection to it than he might to an old photograph. After a while it just started to embarrass him, so he erased it and copy-pasted a Californian beach house, adding a pier that extended out over the gently lapping black water. It was the kind of place he occasionally fantasised about living in because it seemed not only sumptuously opulent, but so removed from the lifestyle he’d always known. It wasn’t just a Californian beach house: it was as though the essence of a hundred Californian beach houses had been distilled and then used to create this place.
And now he was sitting outside it, with nothing to do but wait. He knew he could be sitting there, on hold until Juno’s return, for a very long time, same as he could be stuck here in this alternate domain forever.
There had been worse waits, however; harder unknowings. The time when his mum was battling breast cancer had been full of them. Sometimes those waits were mere hours, other times months, but in either case it had felt like normal life was in suspension, even as it went on around them, even as they lived it.
There had been intense, exhilarating and tantalising uncertainties too. Like when he finally plucked up the bottle to ask Carol out, and her phone rang
on vibrate just as he was saying the words.
He had got as far as ‘I was wondering whether maybe …’ when her eyes had glanced instinctively at the screen.
‘I’m really sorry, I need to take this,’ she had said; then, even worse, as it was work-related and confidential, she had walked away from the table and right out of the coffee shop.
He had sat there analysing the preceding few seconds as though they were the Zapruder footage. The fact she had looked at the phone: did that mean she knew what was coming and was hoping to see a call she could ignore? Had it actually been a call she could ignore, but having sussed what was coming she was pretending it was work so that she could quietly derail it and they could both pretend it never happened?
Round and round he went, until eventually she came back in, smiling apologetically.
‘Sorry. That was important. Well, it wasn’t important, but it was important that I answer it, if you know what I mean.’
‘That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.’
‘So where were we?’ she asked.
Now she could change the subject, and, just as easily, so could he, chickening out with no harm done and a mutual conspiracy in place to forget what almost happened.
But then she took it out of his hands.
‘You were wondering whether maybe …’ she prompted.
Sitting outside his off-the-peg beach house was more like Purgatory, except Purgatory was meant to be heaven’s anteroom. What lay in wait for Ross was frustratingly more indeterminate.
He was being presented with infinite possibilities yet he couldn’t think of one he’d like to choose right now that was more appealing than going home. None of them seemed to have any purpose. If you don’t need to earn and you don’t need to eat and you don’t need to stay healthy and you can’t propagate the species, what’s the point of your existence? Just as weekends become meaningless when you’re unemployed, so a world of play loses its lustre when it isn’t framed by work.
Christ. Just the thought of the word ‘weekend’ made him wince, and would continue to do so for a long time. Cheers, Juno.
He could battle in Middle-earth, explore planetscapes and star systems, journey through past and future civilisations, win wars, fight crime, race supercars, live out endless fantasies, and yet none of it held the same appeal as getting back to his old life. No, that wasn’t true, because it wouldn’t be his old life. It would be different.
He realised everything he had ever done was driven by work. University, house-officer jobs, a training number, then the drive towards medical research opportunities in neurology when he realised his enthusiasms lay away from the clinical. It had all seemed so imperative, so much so that in all that time he’d seldom thought about what else his life might hold, what else he might want to do with himself.
No more.
He’d tell Neurosphere their power charade was over, and the relationship between them was going to be different from now on. They needed him more than he needed them, so they’d better lube up, and be very nice to him if they wanted a reacharound. He wouldn’t live for his job any more. He’d live for Carol and the baby. Work–life balance. Regular hours, a grown-up relationship, responsibilities, a family: that was what he wanted.
Or was he kidding himself? Was that desire just immeasurably pitiful, not to mention cowardly? Did he want to go back to such a comparatively limited existence purely because it was the one he’d always known?
Perhaps.
Didn’t he have a responsibility here too? Solderburn was being held in some no-doubt-hellish prison fortress, the agonies of which Ross could only too vividly recall. The Integrity were trying to control the whole gameverse and condemn its entire population to a pot-luck eternity of being trapped in the limited world of any given game. Wasn’t it selfish to be thinking only of escaping this place and abandoning everyone else here to their fate?
Perhaps.
It was all moot, though. There was no going back.
He gazed into the night sky, wondering about the people who might be on each of those little dots, every one of them another island world. Had they all gone through what he was experiencing now, mourning the life they no longer had before coming to terms with their new one and embracing its possibilities? Were there people out there he already knew? Was Carol out there somewhere? His mum? His sisters? Would he make new friends, forge new relationships and gradually feel the old ties, old wounds fade into memory?
As he gazed and pondered, he observed that one of the lights in the distance was larger than the others, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed this before. Then he realised that it was because it hadn’t been larger before, and with every second it was getting larger still.
It was moving, coming closer. As it grew it transformed from a point of light into an object, lines and shape gradually becoming defined against the black background.
It was an aircraft, and it was headed his way.
It appeared to be travelling slowly at first, until he realised that this was an effect of his head-on perspective and the sheer distance it was covering. In fact by the time it was close enough for him to appreciate just how fast it was travelling, it had already started to decelerate. Wings began extending from either side as it descended, twisting to forty-five degrees almost like a large seabird coming down to settle on the waves. It was quiet, just the low thrum of a power source and the occasional hiss and squeal of servos audible as it made its majestic final approach. Ross was expecting it to splash down with a bump and a spray, but instead it came to rest a foot above the water. It hovered with a gentle bob like it was being repelled by a magnet and its bulk was yet to steady completely.
A gangway rolled forth from the fuselage, connecting it to the jetty, and out stepped Juno. Despite everything, he had to admit he was pleased to see her.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you ever take a ride in a spaceship before?’
Computer Space
The air temperature was cooler inside the vessel, the last of Ross’s bespoke evening warmth shut out with the hum of the power source when the entry hatch sealed. There was still a vibration faintly audible in the interior, but it was quieter than any vehicle Ross had ever travelled inside. He got an impression of near-absolute efficiency, no mechanism in the craft being so profligate as to waste energy by unnecessarily emitting any sound.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been ordered to take you to Silent Hill.’
‘Aye, that sounds a cosy place for a pow-wow.’
‘It’s secure.’
‘If homicidal geometric abstract nightmares make you feel secure, yeah.’
‘Look, I didn’t choose the destination. I just deliver the package.’
The ship accelerated at a rate that should have flattened Ross against the back of his seat with the g-force. Instead his only physical reaction was his stomach lurching with excitement in response to seeing the water and the archipelago of the Beyonderland shoot past at impossible speed. Inside, the ride was a majestic glide, so smooth you could have walked round serving drinks.
‘Just so we’re clear on the relationship,’ he said, ‘am I your prisoner?’
‘You never were. You just woulda had a hard time going anyplace once I put you on your little island. So, technically, you were marooned rather than imprisoned. It’s not for me to stop you going where you want; just that we’re skittish about people we’ve never seen before trying to sneak in the back door to the Beyonderland. If the Integrity gets the whip hand, that’s where we’ll fall back to for our final stand.’
Ross wondered whether her choice of the phrase ‘whip hand’ had been deliberate. She was certainly dropping any ambiguity over being part of the resistance.
‘Does that mean I can have my weapons back?’
‘Not while you could potentially hi-jack my ass.’
‘Couldn’t I just ask you to drop me off and then go my own way? Start looking for Carol?’
‘You could,
but you might find it easier if you made some friends.’
‘True enough. After I did so well with you, maybe I’m on a roll.’
Juno let out what might optimistically be interpreted as a chuckle.
‘Yeah. Really rolled out the red carpet, didn’t I?’
‘You didn’t owe me anything,’ he acknowledged. ‘But I’m relieved, if I dare say it, that you seem to be in a wee bit less scary frame of mind at the moment?’
His voice quietened towards the end, emphasising that this was just a tentative suggestion and please don’t bite – or shoot – my head off if it’s out of line.
‘I’m feeling a little better,’ she said neutrally. ‘Did a little soul-searching after I left. Realised I was taking out my frustrations on the wrong person, so I took them out on the right one instead.’
‘Joe? What did you do to him?’
‘I stole his spaceship,’ she said matter-of-factly, the insouciant tone only serving to illustrate how much pleasure she was concealing by it.
‘I volunteered to bring you in,’ she added. ‘Somebody else is on backdoor watch.’
‘You just couldn’t deny that special chemistry between us?’
‘No, I realised you were my ticket. I’m doing my bit for the resistance but nobody ever tells me shit. I figure if I’m the one who delivers you to the higher-ups, I get to upgrade my clearance.’
Juno made a minor adjustment to the two-handed yoke, climbing ever steeper, ever faster. They passed into the darkness, the lights of islands briefly blinking out, then more appeared, and suddenly beneath the ship there was more water. This happened again and again, faster and faster, the Beyonderland comprising a vast millefeuille through which they were rising more and more rapidly until the multiplicity of tiers became a blur.
Bedlam Page 23