There was nothing there. His inventory was blank. Weapons, costumes, power-ups, accessories: they had all been erased. All he had were the clothes on his back, not even any shoes.
But it got worse. He could feel a familiar disturbance in the air, and hear the sound of huge, powerful wing-beats.
‘Oh fucksocks.’
There was a nerve-rending shriek also, shaking the air with its shrill vibrato, but not like he remembered. Some instinct in Ross gave him the motor skills to pull himself into a cowering ball, yet, despite his horror, he couldn’t help but look at the monster as it descended. That was when he saw that it wasn’t what he feared. Instead he watched the Sandman descend upon the back of a winged beast that looked like what you might get if a pteranodon shagged a giant raven and the resulting eggs were left to incubate in a vat of toxic waste.
‘How’s my pissing with this cock?’ he shouted, as the flying mutant unleashed a deluge of orange fluid from somewhere between its legs, the liquid cutting down the Integrity ubersoldat and several of his troops like a water-cannon.
The creature alighted on the grass with a thump, the Sandman gesturing to the still-reeling Ross and Juno to climb aboard as quickly as possible. Walking was like trying to use tweezers in a mirror, but they supported each other on to their unlikely saviour’s back, albeit in an ungainly tangle that was probably as mutually obstructive as it was helpful.
The creature took to the air once more, Ross clinging on tight to clumps of feathers as it climbed steeply with beats of its mighty wings.
‘There’s another transit further down the valley, in the forest,’ the Sandman told them. ‘It’s at the centre of a shrine. It’ll take you to Jerusalem.’
The winged mutant banked sharply to escape blasts from the respawned ubersoldat’s evil, soul-goring gun, then soared above the plain, where in an impressive feat of multi-tasking the Sandman was taking on the Integrity’s ground forces. Ross saw a huge god-like hand hovering above the meadows, dropping entire rows of houses on top of the advancing troops, while hundreds of NPC villagers engaged the invaders, launching fireballs from catapults, their archers firing a hail of arrows.
Ross wondered how all of this activity might be affecting the Sandman’s steering and navigation, but they were holding a straight course along the edge of the mountain, heading for the forest. Behind them, towards the sea, Ross could see the grey haze rising beyond the mountain as the corruption grew and spread.
Just as on the other side of the mountain, the Integrity had a portable spawn-pod from which its resurrected troops were spilling again like popcorn. Orchestrating his efforts from his HUD, the Sandman piled more buildings upon those already laid down, deciding that obstruction would be more effective than destruction when the dead were popping back up again so close to where they’d died.
That was when the tanks opened fire. No missiles, no lasers, no artillery. They just erased the buildings, like Ross had witnessed at the monastery. Then, with this impediment removed, they turned their weapons on the NPCs and erased them too.
The god-like hand swooped down and made a grab for one of the tanks, its fingers big enough to flick the thing into the sea, but instead of picking it up, they passed right through it like it wasn’t there. Within the protocols of the gameworld, they were an object that couldn’t be lifted.
In that moment, everyone who witnessed it understood that it meant certain defeat. The Sandman might be a god here, but whatever the Integrity were, his powers didn’t apply to them.
Ross glanced downwards. There were now trees beneath them, though the mutant raven seemed to be skirting the edge of the forest, still holding the same course. He hoped this meant the huge NPC knew where it was going, but he suspected it just meant that the Sandman’s attention was focused upon the battle on the plain, where the hand tried again, grabbing for another tank.
Juno shouted a warning and Ross looked around immediately. Cresting the hill on a thermal, gathering deadly speed as it soared above the treetops, flew the ghastly abomination that had taken Solderburn.
The Sandman, immersed in concentration elsewhere, reacted only a fraction of a second after Ross, but the delay was critical. The two winged horrors collided, Cuddles blindsiding the raven with shuddering impact. Ross was knocked clear off the raven’s back, his fists clutching huge feathers as he tumbled through the air, while above him the creatures gouged and tore at each other, cries echoing across the valley.
He was aware of a shape falling alongside him. He could only catch brief glimpses as he spun towards the ground, but the glimpses were enough. It was Juno. She was dead. There was a hole the size of a tree-trunk punched clean through her, armour and all, by one of the maenad’s claws or spikes.
He smashed through roughly forty feet of branches and hit the ground with a disorienting but fortunately damage-free thump. He took a moment to stop his head spinning and climb to his feet, finding himself a few yards from the perimeter of a system of concentric stone circles. The Mobius icon told him the transit was at the centre.
He heard a horrific combined roar and shriek from above, one part war-cry and the other part death-scream. A few moments later the mutant raven hit the forest floor in two huge bloody pieces, while Cuddles flew off clutching its prey among its arms, suckers and tentacles.
Single Player
It was a one-way transit. He materialised in mid-air, falling towards a conveniently placed hay cart, where he landed in the welcoming embrace of a generously cushioning pile of straw. Jerusalem, Sandman had said, and Ross identified it as twelfth century, not from any profound historical knowledge but from the manner of his fortuitously soft landing, which told him this was Assassin’s Creed.
He felt the heat right away. The Sandman’s world had been bathed in the gentle warmth of an English autumn, whereas this was fierce, a constant prompt to seek the sanctuary of shade.
Ross ran on soft feet from the cart’s location in a quiet yard along a dark and narrow alley into a bright and noisy public square. He scanned the crowd, expecting to see Integrity soldiers closing in from anywhere, and looked up for a possible escape route. At first he saw only a chaotically ramshackle skyline, but when he concentrated for a moment he could make out figures shinning poles, skirting ledges and sliding along ropes. It was like the world’s biggest soft-play area. Thus the way to stay truly covert was to remain anonymous within the crowds on the street. It was a world built for stealth and climbing, but in practice only the NPCs didn’t realise that the easiest way to spot your quarry was to look up.
He crossed the square towards the shaded side and sought the refuge of a bustling coffee house, where he sat down at a table deep in the cool gloom of the interior but with a clear view of the door. His nose had been full of spices since the moment he hit the square; cinnamon, cardamom and cumin carried bounteously on the warm air. In here, their traces were still detectable, but largely overwhelmed by strong coffee and an unmistakable scent of hash.
He didn’t think he was hungry, but when the landlord put down a plate of dates and sticky sweetmeats, he found himself compelled to tuck in. You could eat here, he deduced: you just didn’t need to. If there was a food-energy protocol invoked, then, given the physical exertions people came here to enjoy, they’d have to spend as much time stuffing their faces as scaling buildings.
The rules of the world dictated that he wasn’t required to eat or drink, but something more primal in him needed to, the same instinct that had driven him to come in here to seek rest and shelter. He had escaped the Integrity and the corruption, but the Sandman’s revelation and what had happened since was something he couldn’t outrun, and now that he had stopped to catch his breath, it was crashing in upon him like waves.
Juno. Christ. Where might she be now? He couldn’t help but recall how he had convinced her to take him to the Sandman. Sounds like I got nothing to lose, she had said. Now she was most probably in the Integrity’s hands, trying to deal with the knowledge not only that she�
��d never see her daughter again, but that she’d never actually seen her before.
The word headfuck seemed insufficient, not to mention in-accurate. He had never had a head; never had a fuck, for that matter.
He’d never had a life.
He was not a human being. He had never been one. He had never visited the real world. He had never lived in Stirling, never worked at Neurosphere.
He had never met Carol. He might find a version of her in this world, but it could be a version of her from a few years in the future, as had happened to Juno and Joe. She might hate him by now. Maybe she lost the baby, maybe she had a termination, maybe she moved on to someone else.
Ross watched the coffee dregs swirl at the bottom of the cup, gritty and dark, a level of detail and authenticity that nobody at Ubisoft ever programmed. He was aware that the drink didn’t physically exist and, even more acutely, that neither did he, but that didn’t change the fact that it had been a bloody good cup of coffee: black as night, sweet as honey, hot as hell. He had tasted it once before, he realised, on holiday in Turkey. Did his own memories feed back upon themselves to enhance his perceptions here? Would someone who had only ever drunk lattes from Starbucks see, smell and taste something different if the bustling tavern owner served them the same cup?
His memories, he realised, were still his. Every molecule in the human body was replaced every seven years, so the physical matter that was processing his thoughts and memories had already been switched out several times. Memories were just code, and it didn’t matter whether the system processing them was digital or organic.
This was his life now: his realm, his world, his universe. He had to accept it. He had to embrace it.
He had to lose Ross Baker and truly become Bedlam.
Double Agent
She had never quite got used to the dying and respawning thing. Sometimes it was a convenient route out of a situation or merely the quickest way to get from one end of a world to another, but it just felt wrong. It was like that feeling people described as someone walking over your grave, but to the power of ten. However, it was a breeze compared to warp transit. Moving between worlds she could just about handle, but something about the instant transition left her feeling as though she’d just woken up from a drug haze or a coma and didn’t know how many days she’d missed.
Actually, truth be told it was always worse when this place was the destination, so maybe it wasn’t the warp itself that was the problem, but the jolt from vibrancy, colour and hubbub to this monochrome monastery. It seemed all the more stark for the contrast being so sudden, like someone had cut the power while you were watching a movie. The sounds in her ears shut off without echo and not even the smells in her nose lingered past the instant she materialised here.
She glanced at the floor beneath her, clean and black, the matt texture preventing reflection as if it would grudge passing back the light. You’d expect to see some grass, some dirt, if you’d just walked through a door from a bucolic idyll, but nothing adhered from the world she’d left.
She had spawned in the familiar spot and begun walking the geometrically precise corridors, taking perhaps her tenth new route through the place. Lurgo, Ankou’s snivelling functionary, had remarked to her recently that she really ought to opt for a spawn point closer to the boss’s chambers, but she explained that she always forgot again when she was out in the worlds. Nevertheless, it was good to see some deference being shown these days, both from Lurgo and from the clone-drones who patrolled the place. Things had come a long way since the trial-by-combat credential checks. The only time she had endured any hassle after that was when she forgot to change back to her own face after clearing out that resistance cell in San Andreas. She had killed about eight guys before she worked out what was wrong.
Awkward.
They were okay about it. She had worn a hundred faces around these worlds, so it was inevitable that she’d show up in the wrong one at some point. Everyone was just grateful it had happened here, so no cover was blown.
She found Ankou exactly as she always did, standing in the centre of his operations room surrounded by the dozens of feeds that stared down from a tessellation of screens, like a concave inversion of a fly’s compound eye. One monitor was gazing down from on high above a battery of retention grids, thousands upon thousands of hexagonal black cells, ready and waiting. Their time was almost at hand. On another she could see the corruption eating up the last of the god-gameworld where they’d taken their most recent Original scalp.
She couldn’t help but marvel that Ankou never seemed to leave this place, never took advantage of what was out there, especially given that it wouldn’t be out there much longer. Okay, the guy had a job to do, but there were sights to be seen, fun to be had – and if you were utterly amoral, the possibilities were only limited by your imagination.
Perhaps that was the problem: Ankou didn’t really have an imagination. It made him perfect for this task, immune to the intoxications of such an environment, but it also made him vulnerable in ways that he would, by the very definition of his weakness, never be able to anticipate.
But then, that was what he had her for, wasn’t it?
‘You have news,’ he said.
From his blank intonation it was difficult to tell whether this was a question or a statement, though in truth it made no difference, because if it was a question, then both parties knew the answer had better be in the affirmative, otherwise what the hell was anyone doing disturbing him? It was, in fact, difficult to tell much about his emotional response to anything. His face was black-on-black, and that was when he chose to show it to you. There were times when it remained fluid and semi-formed, the effect of which was to make most people all the more anxious to please him, in the hope that some rapid display of affirmation would grant them reassurance.
This didn’t wash with her, however. The power balance here was delicate, and she never wanted him to forget that he needed her more than the other way around.
‘The Sandman is in custody,’ she reported, keeping her tone matter-of-fact, making sure she sounded neither eager for approval nor in any way surprised by her progress. ‘I have also deployed several units to the Aperture Science complex and expect to apprehend Sleepflower within the hour.’
‘Sleepflower,’ he repeated. ‘I must confess there were times when I thought she would never be tracked down.’
‘Since the operation on Pulchritupolis it’s been a chain reaction. Every resistance cell we mop up, we let at least one fugitive get away so that they can lead us to the next one. The Originals are falling like dominoes.’
‘You are quite inspiringly duplicitous. Are you absolutely sure you’re not me?’
‘If you’re looking to flatter yourself, the very fact that you can afford me should suffice.’
‘Touché. And sincerely, kudos. I’ve started thinking of this little stratagem of yours as Operation Gift That Keeps On Giving.’
‘Unfortunately nothing lasts forever,’ she admitted. ‘The price for us taking down the Sandman was that Bedlam now knows the truth about what he is.’
‘Our useful idiot. I’ve almost grown fond of him.’
‘He’s no longer useful, and perhaps not such an idiot either. Fortunately he still has no idea who the double agent is.’
Ankou glanced at the compound of screens, his windows upon a multiplicity of worlds, on one of which Bedlam now walked incognito.
‘What is he doing?’ he asked her.
‘Pursuing a pointless quest for answers. It’s time we brought him in. There’s no upside to leaving him free to wander out there.’
‘True enough. He’ll just be drifting aimlessly.’
‘Unless he gets help,’ she reminded him. ‘After all, there is still one extremely dangerous rogue element out there.’
The Endgame
In the personal biopic running in his head, this was the self-discovery montage bit in which he wandered, silent and contemplative, while Michael MacL
ennan played on the soundtrack, singing about how the wolves were chasing. He passed from world to world, his transits unobserved, his presence inconspicuous. He let his Mobius strip guide him. It took him to the great public conduits between games, huge tunnels, rents and ruptures in the walls of this reality: once-open borders, now guarded and controlled by troopers in that creepily shimmering black. He would walk right past them, seemingly going about his business, indistinguishable from any other inhabitant or indeed NPC, and he would follow the pulsatile icon to the occult portals known only to those who could be trusted to keep them secret.
He disguised himself upon entering each new world, and gradually this action became a matter of reflex, as did the brandishing of only appropriate and contextual hardware, despite the arsenal he was steadily amassing. Where he could avoid conflict he took the discreet option, and when the mood seized him, he honed his skills, but he only fought in character, and took a few dives when he feared his growing prowess might attract attention.
He built up a map of the connections he had used, just following the daisy chain of where each transit took him, feeling like Mr Benn as a change of clothes was the only clue as to what might await him when he walked through the next door. He saw games he recognised and games he didn’t, in the latter’s case sometimes due to radical remodelling. The renovation job that had been done on Painkiller to make it a trendy Bohemian hang-out was, frankly, a travesty, but on the other hand, the altered-gravity theme park that had been created from Prey was considerably more fun to spend time in than the game itself had ever been.
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