by Paul Teague
The chances of there not being bloodshed on the other side of that gate were remote. Talya reflected on the wisdom of a full-on attack. She was no military strategist. She’d inspired the people to gather there, but she might have been leading them directly to their slaughter.
She beckoned to Jody and Leo.
‘Is there another way we could do this without a huge battle? What if we were to focus our attack on this gate as a distraction? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go in as a small group and take a surgical approach to Fortrillium? I can’t help feeling that we’re going to lose a lot of lives here. Can The Climbs residents even cross these gates without Gen-ID issues?’
Jody nodded. They hadn’t thought it through very carefully.
‘We’ll be able to cross over, as will you, Talya. Our Gen-IDs will not mark us as Climbs residents. We can use the screening devices too – we used one on you when we brought you over here, and Wiz and Dillon have them too. We’re all wanted people anyway, it’s not as if they don’t know who we are.’
‘I think it’s unusual that Damien Hunter hasn’t come for us already,’ Leo picked up. ‘Maybe he’s decided it might make martyrs of us if he takes us out without a fight.’
‘Whatever his plan, he’ll have thought it through,’ said Talya. ‘I’m beginning to think he wants me at Fortrillium. If he takes me alive, he can make a spectacle of my death.’
‘I think you’re right though, Talya,’ Jody agreed. ‘There’s a lot of sense in us going in undercover rather than risking all those lives.’
‘Here’s my plan then,’ Talya continued. ‘I want us to make attacks on this gate, but I don’t want the missile launcher used. Deploy smaller explosives, let’s not bring the gates down. That will give the crowds something to focus on, but keep them safe. Leo and Jody, we’re going to go through another gate.’
Leo looked doubtful.
‘How do you expect to do that?’
We’re going to use some of the Centuria. They’re going to claim they’ve captured us. Hunter will not waste that opportunity, he’ll let us through. So long as the assault continues at the other gate, he’ll believe it to be true. He’ll want to hang us out to dry on the screens before they break through.’
‘Okay, it’s a big risk, Talya, but I agree. It’s us that Hunter wants, we have bargaining power now even if it all goes wrong.’
Leo moved away and gave orders to key rebel members to prepare to attack the gate. Jody moved among the Centuria who’d remove their helmets to join the resistance. They’d seen for themselves how loyal Damien Hunter was to them when he’d locked them into The Climbs to fend for themselves.
It was quickly arranged. Leo, Talya and Jody concealed their weapons and got ready to be escorted to the next security gate by four volunteer Centuria. Brad Sivil walked up to the group, sensing that something important was going on.
‘I want to come with you, Talya. I’m locked in here now like everybody else. Hunter knows I’m a traitor. I’m more use to you as a captive – my Gen-ID will let me through the gates. If we succeed, I might be able to work with the other Law Lords – we’re going to have to re-establish law and order as soon as we can.’
Talya nodded. He was right. Law Lord Sivil would be an asset. The Law Lords despised her, but they might see more sense if Sivil were among them. She’d been sure he was loyal to Fortrillium, and it had taken her by surprise to see him at the rebel base. He had the respect and friendship of the other Law Lords, he might be able to turn things in their favour. A bloodless coup was preferable to a firefight.
The group made their way along the perimeter of the wall to the next security checkpoint. They’d been placed in electro-cuffs though the clasps were open and they could free themselves at any time. As they moved along the concrete barrier to the next iron gate, they heard the explosions begin behind them.
‘Make it look good. If we don’t convince them this is real, we’re never getting inside that building,’ whispered Talya.
The leading Centuria touched his WristCom.
‘Request temporary gate release. Rebel leaders captured and required for processing.’
Talya was aware of the cameras moving to focus on them. She feigned a struggle and attempted to make a run for it. One of the colluding Centuria struck her with his weapon butt and she fell to the ground. It looked worse than it was, but they needed this to look good, there was no way they were getting through that gate if it didn’t look convincing.
There was no response. There was an immediate tension within the group, they’d expected more excitement about the captures. After a long delay, a voice came over the Centuria’s WristCom.
‘Kill them there and record the footage.’
Inside The Grid
Throughout The Climbs and Silk Road, the screening of the Justice Trial continued. On the Silk Road side, it was still the main focus of attention. The scenes depicted were dramatic and gripping. Each of the Justice Seekers was being put through their own mental torture, the images of their greatest fears and horrors playing out for everybody to see.
The drones had placed a direct link into the Psyche-Eval implants, allowing thoughts and feelings to be depicted as real-life events. A release of a finely tuned narcotic via the needles that had been shot into the necks of the Justice Seekers ensured there was nothing trivial to see. These were the terrors lurking in the consciousness that sometimes human beings can’t articulate.
For Max Penner, it was the fear of being eaten alive by the bots at Fortrillium. He pictured himself being slowly consumed by the serrated metal grinders, his body being pulled through the teeth while he was aware of every moment. The machines spewed his own guts into the disposal pipes, but he was conscious throughout. All Max could feel through the slow horror of the nightmare was that he should have done more to stand up to the injustice and cruelty of Fortrillium.
Mitchell’s nightmares were more recent. He was forced to watch as Lucy was peeled, strip by strip, by Schälen. With every scream she made through her agonizing ordeal, she looked him directly in the eyes as if to ask ‘What have you done?’ He saw Joe tossed on the tusks of the creatures in the labyrinth, never killed just pierced, scraped, gouged and wounded, but he would not die. As Mitchell was forced to watch, Joe stared at him throughout, asking the same question as Lucy. ‘What have you done?’ To make matters worse, as the terrifying scenarios continued, Mitchell was joined by Talya, Jena and Dillon. They looked on as Joe and Lucy were tortured, their screams echoing across The Climbs, and all the while their accusatory looks demanding an explanation.
For Jena, the torment was a different one. She saw Joe, Dillon and Matt. They were being hunted by Centuria in The Climbs but they didn’t know they were going to be caught. She kept trying to scream at them, to warn them, but she had no voice, they couldn’t hear her. She felt a terrible sense of impending doom, but there was nothing she could do. She had to look on in silence as, time and time again, they were captured, tortured and killed.
In The Grid, all that could be seen were Justice Seekers flinching and jumping as if in a fitful sleep, but in their minds the horrors were real, as if they were actually happening. But unlike a dream, the terror did not end, it continued and repeated as the narcotic was released slowly via the needles.
Julia suffered a different type of dream but it was still no relief for her. It fed into her darkest moments and the hideous silences that all humans have to conquer in their own minds.
She saw a baby. It was in a field, crawling along in the grass. There wasn’t a lot of grass on Silk Road and there was none in The Climbs, so to Julia it was a symbol of life and freedom. She’d joined the Centuria because she realized that there was no normal life for her, everything in The City turned to dust in the end. As the baby crawled forward, the grass beneath it became black and the clouds above it turned grey. The baby’s hands began to burn in the grass, its flesh started to blister and redden, but still it kept crawling. The grass rotted away, the baby
began to crawl through filth and rubbish. It became covered with maggots and lice and slowly started to decay. Still the baby kept crawling forward. Its flesh rotted, its eyes dropped out, it began to struggle to move, but still it continued, slowly crawling forward. Eventually, there was not enough flesh to keep the bones together, and the baby decayed into the putrid ground as the dream began again. Julia felt a crushing sense of loss, a sadness for what might have been. It took her breath away.
In spite of his physical strength, Clay too was tormented. What humans can fight off with their hands cannot be so easily subdued in the mind.
Clay’s terrors were not of the real world. He conjured up the living dead chasing him through the decaying streets of The Climbs. There were hundreds of them – thousands even – and their grey, rotting hands all reached out for him, trying to pull him down and suffocate him. He ran and fought, he killed the half-dead and repelled them, but still they came. In his dream he had endless energy, he didn’t seem to tire, but the battle never ended. He was stuck in a continual fight which had no conclusion. Every moment he felt the adrenalin rush of his struggle for survival, a terrible cocktail of fear and violence.
Every second of their nightmares played out in slow motion in their minds, and on the screens everything could be seen, every detail, every death, every reaction. Heart rates and life-signs data were shown at the bottom of each screen – the hallucinations were placing the Justice Seekers under extreme stress.
For Joe, the dream fed directly into his greatest fears for his family. It captured everything he felt at that moment: the euphoria at seeing his father again after thinking him dead; his love for his mother and extreme frustration with her behaviour – his desire that she’d been stronger when Matt was taken away; his concern for Dillon who wasn’t strong enough, fast enough. It tormented him, slowly, surely, methodically.
In his mind, Joe was running up the stairs of his tower block. He was trying to save his family from some unknown event, he had to get to them as soon as possible. He was desperate to stop for a few seconds to catch his breath, but he knew he was running too slowly, he had to force himself forward. He’d never managed the fifty-two flights of stairs in anything less than eleven minutes before, now he had just ten minutes to reach the apartment and get them out of there.
He’d started out of breath, his lungs wanted to explode with exertion. He willed his legs to move faster, but he could not force any more out of his bruised and battered body.
They’d got so far, so many lives had been lost and they were so close. Now everything was going to be destroyed because of him, because he was unable to summon the resources he needed to rise to this challenge.
They should have suspected that the Psych-Evals would be used to manipulate them. Fortrillium had managed to access the deepest secrets of their souls and was now going to use their own fears and weaknesses to destroy them.
Joe counted off the levels one at a time: thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two … he should have reached thirty-eight by that stage, there was no way he could make it.
Everything in Joe’s body screamed at him to stop and give up. He knew he could never make it. Fortrillium had stacked events against him, they’d done this to punish him, he should never have dared to challenge their authority.
As he reached the forty-second floor, the stench of scorched flesh began to permeate the stairwell. The smoke became black and overwhelming as he neared the fiftieth floor, the place where his friend Zach had lived. Another friend who’d lost his life in The Grid.
Joe knew it was over as he reached the floor that had once offered sanctuary to him and his family. He knew what he was going to see when he walked through what was left of the burnt door.
On the floor, with hands and feet bound by wire, were the charred bodies of Jena, Dillon and Matt. They’d punished him for daring to rise against the might of Fortrillium by taking away from him the only thing he had left.
Just as he’d had his family within his grasp and everything he’d always wanted had almost been there for the taking, Fortrillium tore it away from him, dashing his hopes and bludgeoning them on a hard concrete floor.
On the screens, the watching crowds saw that Joe’s heart rate had rocketed, reaching dangerous levels. Not only did he experience the real physical exhaustion of running up the stairs in his hallucination, he also felt every moment of fear and despair as his family slipped away from him.
Every moment was shared on the screens. The purpose of The Grid was to scare the residents of The City, to make them fearful of speaking out and to ensure they never raised a hand against Fortrillium. However, the effect of seeing these dreams was very different. Throughout Silk Road, and for those still paying attention in The Climbs, it was the humanity of the Justice Seekers that shone through. Here were people just like them, haunted by fears for their loved ones, too terrified to dream of a better life, exhausted by the perpetual struggle to survive. What they were seeing on the screens reflected their own lives. It was their own fears and nightmares they were watching through the eyes of others.
The people being tormented inside The Grid were not evil. They were not the monsters that had been depicted in the promo films and video bursts. They were regular citizens, taking each day at a time, fighting to stay alive and looking out for their loved ones. Their struggle was one and the same. As the scenarios played out on the screens, many on Silk Road turned away, switching off the feeds and preferring instead to spend time with their own families or alone with their thoughts.
Some became aware of more activity on the streets than usual. With the booming of the screen commentaries switched off, the world outside became more visible. There was definitely a sense that something was going on, a tension, a different atmosphere. Some turned their screens back on waiting for an announcement from Fortrillium, an update perhaps. They wondered if there was something going on, events which might interrupt their comfortable lives on Silk Road.
As the scenes played over and over on the screens, they were studied by a lone man sitting in his office. He’d watched the feeds of Joe Parsons and Lucy Slater with interest, but there was nothing much there for him to hold on to. Matt Parsons was still alive, there was a place beyond The Grid – he’d worked that out already. They were all up to speed on that information now.
It was the feeds from President Josh Delman and Teanna Schaelles that were proving far more interesting to him. He’d suppressed them on the main screens minutes after they’d appeared in The Grid. There was no way he could let the people of The City see the truth about their President.
He’d got a feed patched directly through from the Gridders and he was studying the Psyche-Evals with great interest. He no longer needed to get his hands on the torn-out pages of The Pact. Damien Hunter had access to everything he needed inside the President’s head. In ignoring the final words of Reevil96, President Josh Delman had made his first careless move since entering The City. It was going to give his enemy the upper hand. He was about to reveal his own darkest secrets.
Gridders
It had occurred to Linwood some time before, but he’d dismissed the idea as ridiculous. He hadn’t seen his brother in years – he’d been much younger at the time, his memories were getting mixed up. Then the thought had surfaced again, then again, until he was unable to reject it.
The hidden opponent, the person who’d been interfering, the one who was not inside the Fortrillium building – whoever he or she was – he recognized them. He or she didn’t have a face, a name or a gender, but did have a style of gameplay. He and his brother Jacob had played together when he was very young. Jacob had patiently coached him, inspired him, and shown him how to use the code systems. But then he’d changed, suddenly and unexpectedly.
As Linwood felt his brother growing more distant, he’d continually reached out to him, desperately trying to reconnect. But his brother was long gone, firstly by becoming withdrawn and distant, then by disappearing altogether.
It h
ad come as a huge blow to Linwood – he’d always looked up to his brother and aspired to follow in his footsteps. He would play games on his own and create lines of code for gameplay environments to try to recapture what they’d had, but it was gone.
That sense of loss turned into a desire to find answers, to discover what had happened to his brother. Linwood had found some of his answers. He’d discovered the same self-loathing and hatred for the trap he was caught up in. Linwood had seen that clearly for himself.
But from a flame he thought had died, the embers began to glow. Linwood had noticed it some time ago, but it was more forceful now. That flame had begun to flicker. The fire was now beginning to roar.
There was something about the gameplay style of this mystery Gridder that was familiar to Linwood. It had all the signs of Reevil96 – Jacob Carley. Linwood had played a move his brother had created, the amazing idea he’d had to win his own Gridder Games all those years ago. Nobody had thought to play it since, but Linwood had deployed it in the current trial. Not just because he thought it would buy some time for his friends but also because he wanted to leave a trail.
Linwood believed the person who was interfering with the trials was his brother. If it wasn’t his brother, then whoever it was must have studied his gameplay history very well. Either way, there was a connection across The Grid. They were linked by a respect for, or a knowledge of, his brother. By playing the Psyche-Eval scenario in exactly the same way Jacob had done, whoever was controlling The Grid from afar would see the message. But would they reach out?
Linwood had done the best he could to protect his friends, given that he could feel Damien Hunter’s breath on his neck. The Psyche-Eval Mode created terrifying images for those watching the screens. They were conjured up from worst nightmares, it was the Justice Seekers’ own minds that created the most terrible scenarios of them all. However, it also kept them safer, even though to be immersed in a constant flow of hallucinations would put a huge strain on their hearts. There could be deaths too, but it was more unlikely this way. Damien Hunter would get his great gameplay, and Linwood could try to keep Hannah and the others alive.