Bedlam

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘How come they’re so interested in me?’ Ross asked. ‘Why did you call it in?’

  ‘Firstly, you were claiming to be a recent arrival. The only newcomers to show up in a very long time have been our friends in black, so naturally anyone else making their debut is going to pique suspicion. Secondly, you said you had seen Solderburn; more than that, you said you knew him in the old world.’

  ‘What’s so special about Solderburn?’

  ‘For one thing, he’s been MIA for about half of forever. But mainly it’s because he’s one of the Originals.’

  Ross recalled her previous use of this description and realised he’d misinterpreted it.

  ‘They’re kind of the elders of this place. They were the first ones here, but most of them have dropped off the radar to stay free of our new playmates. It became pretty clear that the Integrity were targeting the Originals because they were essentially both the architects and pioneers of free travel between gameworlds. Solderburn’s disappearance goes way back before the advent of the Integrity, but the other Originals have gone underground as a direct result of their arrival.’

  The blur of tiers ceased as the ship shot through what must be the uppermost of them, heading into blackness.

  ‘So we’re flying to Silent Hill? How does that work? Why aren’t we using a warp transit?’

  Ross tried not to make the question sound like he was wondering how Juno could have forgotten that she had the option. She had thawed a little but he reckoned she wouldn’t have much tolerance for him in any way annoying her, especially in the confined space of a cockpit.

  ‘This is the quickest route. We’ll warp to Silent Hill from Calastria, but to get to Calastria purely by warp transits, we’d have to go via five other worlds, and in most of those the distance between the point of entry and the next transit we’d need is pretty huge. You know how big Graxis is, right? We’re talking journeys three and four times that. Sure, there’s vehicles, even aircraft, but on some worlds there’s also armies of NPCs to negotiate, not to mention Integrity.’

  ‘But how can we get to another game by spaceship?’

  ‘You gotta understand that this whole realm effectively exists in two forms: what we perceive and interact with, and the true nature of its fabric, which is digital. I ain’t telling you there’s no Santa Claus if I say this is all code, am I?’

  ‘No, I got that part way back. Little fuzzy on how I can be inside it, but I gather so is everybody else.’

  ‘And do you understand how computers store information? Random-access memory?’

  Ross could almost feel a surge of power being diverted to his dickish-behaviour restraint systems in order to hold back the vast well of smug and self-important twattery that such a question had the potential to unleash. His safeguards condensed a statement outlining his biog, qualifications, academic honours, publications and entire CV into three words.

  ‘Fair to say.’

  ‘Well that’s better than I’d claim, so forgive me if my terms of reference are a little blurry. But as I understand it, data gets written to random memory locations, meaning consecutive pieces of code won’t be at adjacent addresses: they could be any distance apart. So on a hard drive with a ton of games written to it, the RAM address for, say, a wall in Starfire might be right next to that of a floor in a completely different game. Conversely, the RAM address for a chair in Starfire could be massively distant from the address for the floor it’s standing on.’

  ‘The spatial distance between places is something we perceive, but it’s illusory?’ Ross suggested. ‘In truth, we’re always moving between billions of addresses?’

  ‘Except the spatial distance isn’t entirely an illusion. There is a spatial relationship between objects, and a navigable spatial relationship between all the worlds. You can traverse both the spatial and the digital.’

  ‘So, essentially, warping is using the digital juxtapositions to take a shortcut through the spatial.’

  ‘You got it. But sometimes the spatial route is quicker. So we can fly from the Beyonderland and make our way to Calastria entirely along the spatial plane.’

  ‘Does that mean anyone with a ship could land on my island?’

  ‘No. As you said, it’s like vampires: nobody can cross the threshold without an invitation. They can land up close, can even dock with that little jetty you built, but until they’ve got permission to come ashore, that spatial relationship is an illusion, because they’re never setting foot on your turf.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring. I’d hate someone to break in while I’m gone and steal all the nothing that I own.’

  Ross watched worlds go past through the ship’s windows, just tiny dots with vast distances between them. He recalled the endlessness when he had keyed in a noclip cheat then risen up through a map and just kept climbing. You could go on and on until the world of the game was just a speck, but that was only the game’s 3D engine keeping the map in geometric perspective. What was this space that all these gameworlds could simultaneously occupy? It had to have physics, rules. Even the fact you could fly through it, the very fact that it was space, meant it had to have protocols. Somebody must have assigned them. And if it was all so vast and so complicatedly getting on with itself, what were the chances that a noob like him was going to find a way out of it where everyone else had failed?

  He realised he’d better start learning how to adapt, get some pointers about making a life here.

  ‘So how do you occupy yourself, when you’re not escorting strays like me across the empty wastes?’

  ‘Mostly I walk. I explore. Every city, every forest, every dungeon, every cave, every world. I keep looking.’

  Ross nodded. He didn’t need to ask what for. He just wondered how long this had been her life, and whether she even knew.

  He cast an eye over the console panel in front of Juno, taking in the controls, dials, screens and read-outs.

  ‘What you after?’ Juno asked.

  ‘I was going to ask how long till we get there, but then I remembered it would be pointless. Nobody here knows what the time is.’

  ‘That ain’t strictly true. How could we organise anything otherwise? There’s a clock on your tablet that shows universal time. It doesn’t display by default, so maybe you didn’t see it yet.’

  She instructed him quickly on how to bring it up. It read two days, fourteen hours and twelve minutes.

  ‘When I say universal time, I just mean it’s a program set to run independently of local settings, calibrated the same on all tablets.’

  ‘Does this read-out state how long I’ve been here?’

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily relate to real time. It’s just a mutual standard.’

  ‘So how long does yours say you’ve been here?’

  ‘It doesn’t show how long you’ve been here, only how long since you activated the tablet.’

  ‘And how long is that, in your case?’

  ‘That’s a personal question, honey. You don’t ask a lady her age.’

  She offered him a knowing smile but he could tell there was something else beneath it. She was hiding behind conventions of politeness, but he didn’t get to press the matter, as Juno’s attention was sharply turned to something she had spotted on one of the monitor panels.

  It was a screen that had been blank and, Ross assumed, off or redundant, but now there was a white dot blipping just inside the edge of it.

  ‘Is that another ship?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup,’ she replied, not taking her eyes off the controls. She couldn’t have said much less, but her tone and manner were enough to convey that she was on edge. A keyboard layout appeared in the black sheen of the console and she typed in some commands, then manually altered their course using the yoke.

  ‘Should I be worried?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to ascertain. We were on course for a convergence before I made a correction. If they correct their course to renew the convergence, then yes, you should be worried
.’

  ‘The Integrity?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Integrity don’t know about this: about the space routes.’

  Ross was incredulous.

  ‘How could they not?’

  ‘Same way an ant don’t know there’s a world beyond the ant farm, even when it can see through the glass. It’s right in front of them but they don’t understand what it means. It’s only a matter of time before they get there, though.’

  ‘But isn’t the Integrity made up of people who have lived here same as you, with the same knowledge?’

  ‘No. They’re not just a recent phenomenon, they’re recent arrivals. At first some folks thought they might be a kind of NPC, accidentally generated by one of the gameworlds, but they’re too smart for that to be true. They’re sentient, self-aware and adaptable, but they’re incomers, so they’ve got some catching-up to do.’

  ‘So who’s in the other ship? Or rather, who are you hoping isn’t in the other ship?’

  She gave him a stony look, advance warning not to say anything stupid.

  ‘Pirates.’

  He failed.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘No, humorously. They’re fun pirates, like at a children’s birthday party.’

  Her tone indicated last-warning irritability.

  ‘What can they do?’

  ‘Blow us out of the sky if we don’t give them what they want.’

  ‘And what do they want? We don’t have anything.’

  ‘One: they don’t know that. We could have all kinds of cargo. And two: at the very least they know they’ll get inventory contents. Out here, people in transit are likely to be carrying items that hold value in hundreds of worlds: weapons, ammo, supplies, food, health, currency, even experience points from RPG worlds. Everything’s a potentially tradable commodity.’

  ‘But why? They could have any kind of lifestyle or experience they want here, couldn’t they?’

  ‘Every world has its own rules, but the one constant is that, wherever you are, the more stuff you got, the easier it is to get along. So in one sense they’re just cheats. You can be whatever you like in the gameverse, and some people like to be assholes. You give them a universe of unlimited possibilities and they just become unlimited assholes.’

  The monitor flashed, accompanied by a discordant chime that was never going to be used on an ice-cream van. There was a line drawn on the screen between the other ship’s position and a newly projected convergence.

  ‘Shit,’ breathed Juno. ‘They’re coming. Gonna try and throw a net over us.’

  ‘You mean like a tractor beam?’

  ‘No, I mean literally a net, so they can force-dock or just hold us where they want us.

  ‘What kind of defences have we got? Shields? Lasers? Photon torpedoes?’ he suggested hopefully.

  Juno’s stern look said no. ‘In every gameworld, if you got a ray-gun, there need to be protocols that dictate what damage the ray-gun does. We’re between worlds. Out here, the protocols are very basic. They just govern movement in three dimensions: basic spatial physics. Unfortunately one of those basics is the principle that two objects can’t occupy the same space, so out here it’s seriously old-school. No tractor beams, no lasers, no explosives: just down and dirty ballistic hardware.’

  ‘Cannonballs?’

  ‘Cannonballs from distance, then harpoons, grapples and claws for pulling your ship apart. If your ship gets destroyed, you’ll be left floating out here, with no propulsion.’

  ‘Can’t you suicide and respawn?’

  ‘No spawn points in range. You know that weird sensation when you die, where everything’s dissolved? You’ll be left in that state until a ship with an on-board spawn point passes close enough, which given the scale of space …’

  Juno punched in some more data and gave the yoke a sharp turn, keeping her eyes on the display that was projecting convergence. Ross could see she had radically changed the angle of vector, which meant only one thing.

  ‘Can we outrun them?’

  Juno held up a hand, her gaze still locked on the monitor. Silence filled the cockpit for a long few moments. Then the display refreshed itself, erasing the line, and Juno seemed to relax just a little.

  ‘It would appear so. They’re heavy. Not fast enough for direct pursuit. Must have been hoping they could get closer before their intentions became clear. Need to keep a lookout though, in case they try to flank us with a shot.’

  Another few moments passed, only marginally less tense than those that had preceded them. No ordnance issued from the other ship.

  ‘Looks like they’re not risking it. Would take a hell of a lucky pop to hit us from this distance. We’d have time enough to make evasive manoeuvres. Of course, a salvo aimed at five or six projected positions would improve their chances, but they’d still be gambling a lot of ammunition at long odds.’

  ‘So, panic over?’ Ross said optimistically.

  ‘For now. Best stay sharp, though. They don’t always hunt alone.’

  ‘You got it. Where are the controls for our cannon?’

  ‘We don’t have one. Why do you think I was so worried?’

  ‘We don’t have one? Why not?’

  ‘Whatever bells and whistles you might trick out your ship with in any given gameworld, once you cross the line into the big black, they no longer apply. So when you’re equipping a ship for out here, you only have three attributes you can assign: speed, armour and weaponry, and you gotta prioritise according to your needs. Every ship has the same complement of points to spread around, so if you want a tough hide and a big gun, you’re gonna be slow.’

  ‘Whereas we’re fast but we can’t hit back?’

  ‘Very fast with a little armour. I prefer to be able to manoeuvre my way out of trouble.’

  ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly as well?’

  ‘Risk/benefit equation, kiddo. You don’t encounter pirates very often, and when you do it’s more advisable to run away than go toe to toe.’

  He couldn’t argue with the logic, as it was the same as had served him well since primary school.

  Epic Holiday

  As they made their descent, Ross could see the world of Calastria take shape, growing from a small white blob into a blurred blooming of colour, from smudge to doodle to map to recognisable landscape. It was surrounded by a ring of dark blue ocean, within which there were different shades of green covering meadows, forests and plains, the reddish-brown of mountain ranges, blue-black lakes and rivers, and a huge, nebulous grey haze covering about a third of the island.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Cloud, I guess. Rainforest maybe. There can be totally conflicting climate zones side by side,’ Juno offered.

  Juno had told him Calastria was the world-environment for a role-playing game called The Exalted, though nobody referred to it by that name any more. Similarly, she advised him that people would better understand him if he referred to Graxis rather than Starfire, but this wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, as clearly the plethora of warfare shooters offered multiple incarnations of the same places.

  He remembered seeing conceptual art for the world of Calastria on a gaming site. The Exalted was the next in the Sacred Reign series of RPGs, though according to the article, the projected release date was still at least eighteen months off.

  Solderburn did say he’d been in sequels to games that weren’t due for years, and what made this even stranger was the fact that, according to Juno, Solderburn was one of ‘the Originals’, the elders of the gameverse. Given how cagey she had become regarding what it read on her own personal odometer, how long might Solderburn have been here? It melted Ross’s head trying to think about this. It wasn’t simply that time here didn’t have a consistent frame of reference: time here didn’t appear to make any bloody sense at all.

  Juno guided the ship in low towards the ring of sea that surrounded the land. Too low, in Ross’s judgement, as unless she fl
attened out her angle of approach they were going to hit the water nose-first. He refrained from saying anything, at least for another few seconds, until he felt compelled to observe that crashing into the drink was starting to look unavoidable.

  ‘That’s the plan,’ Juno reassured him, moments before the ship cut through the surface of the waves with no greater sense of impact than someone throwing a bucket of water at a car windscreen. The vessel continued its progress in a steady glide, powering through the hazy gloom. Ross saw shoals of fish shoot past the windows, and much larger shapes moving deeper in the murk.

  ‘We have to come in unseen,’ Juno explained. ‘This is not a world where you’re supposed to show up in a spaceship. If you’re landing in some sci-fi metropolis, nobody’s gonna be suspicious of where you started your journey, but if the Integrity have eyes here, it’s gonna start their wheels turning in ways we really can’t afford to encourage. This would be a good time to consider your wardrobe too.’

  Ross looked at his options. He found that a new line in medieval attire had appeared in his inventory, and that Juno had restored his weapons. He chose an outfit that wasn’t going to make him look too much like he was about to star in panto, and was about to ask Juno how he looked, only to be rendered speechless by how she did.

  She had changed into some goddess of war, her armour sculpted around her to convey what he could only interpret as a formidable, aggressive femininity. It shone in steel, all sleek lines and sharp edges, unmistakably female but equally unmistakably not a costume intended to please or even consider male eyes. She looked intimidatingly bad-ass in a way that was quite simply not available to the grubbier sex.

  ‘Told you I had some flavours,’ she said. ‘You like?’

  Ross just gaped, and possibly trembled a little.

  ‘You, er, made that yourself?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s what pisses me off about this place. You could be any incarnation of womanhood you can think of – so why do so many choose to conform to some fifteen-year-old dork’s idea of it? Even in a world like Calastria, they’ll still choose an appearance that’s defined by sexuality. Do they think the guys try to look sexy when they’re suiting up to fight dragons?’