He visited two versions of the planet Stroggos, both the Quake 2 and Quake 4 vintages. They were each rendered equally real, but seemed completely different places, from small properties of the light and the colours it painted, to variations in the architecture and iconography. This was as it should be, he realised: it was two different visions, even if they were imaginings of the same fictional location. The NPCs were different too. The Quake 2 Stroggs shared a surprisingly bawdy sense of humour and were unsettlingly polite to each other in conversation, while their Quake 4 successors were a grumpy shower with a taste for industrial metal that could grate after your seventh straight hour of listening to Rammstein.
And somewhere in the midst of it all, he remembered that this was what he used to enjoy. Down the years, the worlds of these games had been a place of solitude where he could retreat, where he could be alone but not lonely, losing himself in a realm that fused other people’s imaginations with his own. Somewhere in the midst of it all, he stopped feeling sorry for himself, focusing his thoughts less on what he had lost and more on what had been given to him.
He recalled the emotional ties he had to some of these games: the friends they’d been in painful straits, the down-time they’d offered when work was threatening to make Ross a dull boy, the inspiration they’d provided as Scottish rain lashed the windows outside, and the occasions when there had simply been nowhere else he’d rather be.
There were worse places to spend eternity. Then he thought of the Sandman and his sad little world, lonely as only a god could be.
He stood on a balcony overlooking the Nineties designer sleaze of Duke Nukem’s Hollywood, the LA twilight creating a magenta backdrop for the riot of neon on the walls. There was a mouth-watering smell of California-Mexican food on the breeze: chimi-changas, refried beans and turkey mole, so close and warm on the nose that he could almost taste the margaritas that would go with it all. True Lies was playing at the movie theatre across the road, Mötley Crüe blasting out from a bar as both NPCs and civilians dressed in hair-metal garb strutted along the boulevard. Every guy was a rock god or an action hero; every girl a ‘cleavagey slut-bomb’, to quote a fellow computer geek.
It was a party town, built for hedonism. Paradise if you were in the mood, but he could see it getting old very fast, and there was the problem.
What if, as was looking increasingly unavoidable, the Integrity prevailed and shut down all the transits? He would have to make sure he was somewhere he could live with long-term when the wheel stopped turning. Eventually it was going to become a pretty high-stakes game of stick or twist, with the penalty for one move too many being that he might find himself on Barbie World when the doors closed forever.
But that was not the worst that could happen.
His thoughts came back to a conversation with Juno, and something that had bothered him about it since they had witnessed that terrible weapon being deployed in the sands of the horseshoe bay.
If they wipe out all the Originals, she had said, or imprison them in that fortress world of theirs, then that’s the ball game.
But what is the ball game?
Ross had previously thought they were just using the corruption as a convenient threat to get people to fall in line, but now that he knew the Integrity were actually causing it, he realised that what scared him most was that he didn’t understand their goal. If the Integrity got what they wanted and everybody was all walled off in their separate wee worlds, what was in it for them?
Cui bono, as Carol liked to say.
Who benefits?
When he suddenly saw the answer, he felt more tiny, powerless and terrified than ever in his life, and realised that the reason he hadn’t seen it immediately was because it was so utterly enormous. It was like standing in the mouth of a cave and examining a strangely uniform outcrop of jagged rocks, then realising that the rocks were teeth and that this wasn’t the mouth of a cave.
There was something at work here that nobody understood. He’d be sleepwalking into oblivion if he didn’t endeavour to find out what it was.
It was the purposeful stride that first marked her out: the look of quietly going about her business would have been perfectly inconspicuous anywhere but here, where nobody had any business to be going about, and nothing was done quietly. Then, having been drawn to the sight of a figure who had rendered herself more noticeable by trying not to be noticed, closer scrutiny picked out a more specific distinction. She wouldn’t have looked out of place at any of the bars or clubs around here, but her appearance was just a little too individualistic to blend in entirely. She had a punky panache that set her apart from the hair-metal hordes, more Road Warrior than rock goddess, but a goddess by name, certainly.
Iris.
He knew where she was headed. There was a transit hidden in a secret room at the back of a diner down an alley less than a block away. This time, he’d have the edge, and she wouldn’t see him coming.
Ross stayed above her, moving along balconies and ledges, able to stay out of sight because he didn’t need to keep eyes on the target. He was able to choose his spot, and when he got the drop on her, he selected his weapon carefully too. No point threatening to blast her with anything that would just cause her to respawn half a mile away and allow her to make her escape. Instead he drew a bead on her with a locally acquired ice-ray cannon, and made sure she knew what she was looking at. One squeeze on the trigger and she would be stuck fast to the spot.
‘Freeze,’ he said instinctively, after which a little part of him died inside as this new nadir of lameness sunk in.
Iris looked startled for just a moment before reverting to her default demeanour of vaguely pissed-off.
‘I’m glad to see you took my advice and learned not to draw so much attention to yourself.’
‘I’m learning lots of things. Like what I am,’ he reminded her.
‘Yeah, that’s gotta be a tough one. How you coping?’
‘I’m processing it. At quite a high rate of cycles per second as it turns out. You lied to me. You told me there was a way back to the real world. But how can there be a way back to somewhere neither of us has ever been?’
‘I didn’t say there was a way back. I said there was a way out.’
Ross was holding the ice-cannon, but he felt like the one who had just been frozen.
‘Out? To where?’
‘I can’t tell you. I can only take you.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Why can’t you tell me? Have you been there?’
‘No. I’m trying to get there. That’s the part that’s complicated.’
Ross stifled a scream of exasperation.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m Iris.’
‘No, I mean—’
‘You don’t know what you mean. Are you asking who I’m a copy of on the outside? The answer is I’m nobody you’ve ever met. Are you asking whether I’m with the Integrity, or with the Diasporadoes? Well, I’ve got sources in both camps, but a foot in neither. The answer is I’m with me. The answer is I’m Iris, and I’m trying to get out of here because I suspect someone on the outside is gearing up to type “Format C”.’
Ross put his gun away. He knew she wasn’t going to make a run for it, as both were now acutely aware that the other wasn’t the enemy.
‘Where do I fit into this?’ he asked. ‘On Graxis, why did you seek me out to warn me to stay inconspicuous?’
‘You were a new arrival, and therefore, like the Integrity, a part of whatever struggle is going on out in the real world. An oblivious part, clearly, but somebody was playing a card in that game when they put you here.’
‘So why did you keep running away from me after that?’
‘Because I knew the Integrity would be all over you like a rash. I was keeping out of your way because I could see what was going to happen to anyone who stayed too long in your orbit. The Diasporadoes were drawn to you like moths
to a flame, and they got burned, along with two Originals.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I already told you: I’ve got sources in both camps, but a foot in neither, which is the safest place to be. I can tell you this much, though: the Diasporadoes have been compromised.’
‘No shit, Sherlock. I got sold out by the Sandman, one of the precious Originals that the Diasporadoes are so desperate to protect.’
‘I heard about that, but I’m not talking about the Sandman here. He just cut a deal because you brought trouble to his door. I’m saying the resistance had been infiltrated well before that by a double agent who has been feeding information to the Integrity.’
This hit Ross like a fist to the gut, yet even as he reeled he felt like he deserved the blow for not seeing it coming. Of course they’d been compromised. They were cautious beyond the point of paranoid and yet the Integrity kept showing up to crash the party. Skullhammer’s fears had been justified: he’d just been wrong about the traitor.
‘Who is it?’
‘I’m afraid that’s the best-kept secret in the gameverse, and so far I only know the runner-up.’
That was the terrible, deadly beauty of it, Ross realised: it could be anyone. He’d been warned enough times that in this world, anybody could be something other than they appeared, and there was no way of finding out. Christ, it could be Skullhammer, firing off accusations as a double bluff.
No.
To his horror he suddenly saw that Cuddles the maenad might have inadvertently done him a favour.
There was one person who had been with him all along, who had intercepted him before he could make contact with anyone else in the resistance: someone who had expressed disgruntlement about her lot in the movement, complaining how nobody told her anything, of wanting traction with the higher-ups. She didn’t even need to be disenchanted – her whole story could be a lie. She could have infiltrated from the ground level, not attracting undue attention, ideally placed to make her move when the order came or the opportunity arose.
Or the Integrity could simply have abducted the real Juno and put a doppelganger in her place. There was just no way of knowing, which was what made it corrosive even to think about it.
‘So what’s the second best-kept secret?’ he asked.
‘I already told you that too: the location of the emergency exit. Don’t you pay any attention?’
‘I was paying attention when you said it was complicated. I’m guessing there’s a catch.’
‘Yeah, just a little one: it takes an Original to open it. But as it appears we have common cause, maybe you could help me with that, unless you’d rather just wait around for the magnetic heads to come.’
‘The Originals are all in hiding. Deeper than ever, I shouldn’t wonder. I don’t know where any of them are.’
‘You know where two of them are.’
Ross thought she was having a cheap dig about the fact that he had been involved in both abductions. Then he realised that she intended something far worse.
‘You up for staging a prison break?’ Iris asked.
‘From an impregnable fortress at the heart of the Integrity’s purpose-built home-world? Yeah, I’ll just save them the bother of capturing me by delivering myself to their jail.’
‘Who says it’s impregnable?’
‘At the last count? Everybody.’
‘And how many of them have ever tried? At the last count: nobody. That’s why they won’t see it coming.’
‘They won’t need to. How much notice would they require in order to respond effectively to an assault by the two of us? Five seconds maybe? Three?’
Iris was shaking her head in a manner that suggested this wasn’t an idea she had just pulled out of her arse.
‘I’ve been studying the Integrity for a long time, and I’ve got some inside information too. They’re at the top of the food chain, and as a result they’re complacent. They built a fortified home-world, but they’re not geared up for defending it, because, quite simply, they don’t expect to be attacked. It’s a staging post for their offensives. And by the same principle, the thing about their prison is that the security’s all geared towards stopping anybody getting out. They don’t believe anyone would be crazy enough to break in.’
Ross glanced back along the alley, as though even talking out loud about this might be enough to draw an Integrity snatch squad down upon their heads.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s assume for a second – and only for a second – that we are crazy enough to break in. Leaving aside the fact that you are attributing an all-time high efficacy to the element of surprise, once we’ve exhausted that particular dividend and the entire garrison is alerted, how do you propose we then break back out?’
She produced a device, a stubby little baton suddenly summoned into existence in her hand. Upon a squeeze of her palm, it altered its shape to form two semi-circular fans, feathered yet fluid, like liquid ferrite. It was unmistakably Integrity tech.
‘We auto-warp,’ she said. ‘This little beauty creates an instant transit.’
‘Where the hell did you get that?’
‘It wasn’t easy. Some of the higher-ups carry these to allow them to auto-warp back to the Citadel from worlds that they’ve otherwise locked down. But the bottom line is that if we can get ourselves in, this will get us out. So what do you say?’
‘We’d still have to break into a massively fortified base and take on an entire army of absurdly tooled-up enemies just between the two of us,’ he pointed out.
‘I know. Doesn’t that sound like a classic FPS?’
Some Corner of a Foreign Field
‘This is our last stopping-off point,’ Iris told him. ‘When we emerge from this transit, we’ll be a world away.’
They had passed briskly and uneventfully through Half-Life 2, Thief, both System Shocks, three different Halos and finally an obscure Quake conversion called Malice, Ross observing a master-class from Iris in how to remain undetected. As his admiration grew however, he did begin to wonder at the implications for him identifying her – not to mention successfully executing an ambush – back in Duke Hollywood. The inescapable conclusion was that he was the one who had been spotted earlier, despite being in mufti, and that he had only got the drop on her because she wanted it that way. He just hoped she was still such a smooth operator when they got to the Citadel.
‘I can remember when that expression used to imply distance, not proximity,’ he replied.
‘Then put it from your mind, because this next place is the closest thing to the Integrity’s home-world in more ways than one. You know about the enclaves, right?’
Ross remembered Melita mentioning, before Juno had hastily cut her off, how a more radical customisation had taken place on some worlds.
‘No, but I’m guessing it’s not all Calastria and Pulchritupolis, high aesthetics and higher ideals.’
‘The gameverse is like the internet in that the best thing about it is how it can bring like-minded people together. And like the internet, the worst thing about it is how it can bring like-minded people together. There are some nasty little neighbourhoods dotted here and there. Places full of isolationists and fundamentalists: basically people who don’t like anyone different from themselves.’
‘The Islamist one must be a hoot,’ Ross suggested. ‘You can suicide-bomb yourself all day every day and just keep respawning.’
‘Actually, there is an Islamist one, and if you saw it from above, it’s like a chequerboard, full of walled-off compartments. What happens is they get to arguing about whose vision of Islam is the most pure, and a schism forms; then, because they can’t kill each other permanently, each new faction walls itself off from the rest. Then the process starts again.’
They emerged from a copse of trees on to the edge of a fairway on an immaculately maintained golf course, summer sun splitting the cloudless azure above. This was actually a bit of a relief, as it explained the appalling slacks and sw
eater Iris had commanded him to select from the costume options, and he had started to wonder whether they were heading for Fashion Crime World.
They made their way to the clubhouse, passing several players in hover-buggies, all of whom waved by way of polite acknowledgement. Looking across the fairways, Ross could see that there must be at least three courses here, extending to the hills in one direction and the sea in the other, presumably for those who liked the feel of a links. Ross wasn’t a golfer himself, but struggled to deduce what was putting Iris so on-edge about the place. Even a whole world dedicated to the sport was hardly an abomination; different strokes and all that.
As they exited the club’s beautifully iron-wrought gates, Ross saw that it wasn’t a world dedicated to golf. This was merely one facility. Iris led him along the smooth and perfectly clean pavement into a picturesque rural village, a place that looked as though little had changed since the eighteenth century, apart from the hover-cars and, very incongruously, the security systems protecting every house. There were electric gates, CCTV cameras and prowling Dobermans, as though they were expecting a crime wave, yet the village looked like it had never suffered so much as the dropping of a sweetie wrapper.
They came to the village green, where a group of men in whites were enjoying a game of cricket, watched with purring approval by spectators at tables outside a very enticing pub, drinking foaming pints as they relaxed in the shade. Ross was beginning to wonder why something about this was ringing a bell, when he heard the actual ringing of a bell and saw a middle-aged woman in 1950s district-nurse uniform cycling past. Something about her demeanour suggested to Ross that she was an NPC. She wasn’t ‘an old maid bicycling to communion through the morning mist’, but he was starting to get the picture.
‘It all seems pretty civilised,’ he admitted.
‘Yeah. Change your face to something other than white and see how civilised it gets.’
Ross looked again at the cricketers and drinkers. Iris was right: there wasn’t a lot of pigment on show. What was all the more confusing about this was that on his HUD Ross had spotted several ethnic faces in this gameworld’s default skin set, as well as some jarringly scruffy outfits, not to mention a load of World War Two uniforms. That was when he noticed that Iris had eschewed all her usual punkish flourishes and was looking like a 1950s housewife.
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