by Julian Gough
When he does get back into the gameworld, he thinks for a moment that he’s gone blind, that he’s triggered a trap. Wait, no . . .
He blinks.
I’m not blind. It’s the test range. The test range is dark. Not totally dark . . .
The sky is completely blocked from view by a trillion black snowflakes, frozen in mid-air.
How can I see them?
He squints.
Oh . . .
Some light leaks from the black snowflakes, like the light given out by piezoelectric crystals under pressure.
He can hear buffalo moaning in the darkness.
Some nodes left, then.
The gameworld is holding on, just.
The immune system is inside the remaining nodes: but it can’t take them. Why so quiet? Why aren’t they fighting?
Oh, poop. The immune system has co-opted Sasha’s code: now both are using it, each to paralyse the other.
Whenever either the immune system or the gameworld frees up resources, Sasha’s snowflakes soak up the processing cycles.
Gameworld and immune system are frozen in a jittery, static embrace.
They’re both so vast, so global, that neither can defeat the other.
But Colt is a new variable; he has changed the balance of the game; he’s brought his own servers with him, his own brilliant code; his enormous remote control. He should be able to use it to break the deadlock, to unlock Sasha’s snowflakes. To retake this one node.
He writes some code, and swings his arms at the frozen flakes. At his touch, they turn white again, and fall gently to the ground.
He clears a space in the black snow-filled air.
A cave in the shimmering darkness.
Flake after flake now turns white and falls, and black turns to white and out and out, up and up, mile high, and all the snow falls as the code runs and the sky is clear and blue and the sun is unbearably bright against the white snow of the frozen desert.
Points of red appear, here and there, in the snow. Expand.
Oh.
Blood from the dead and dying buffalo.
Dead nodes.
Those buffalo still alive, those nodes still potentially under Colt’s control, shake free of the deep snowfall, free of the immune system’s restraints, and trudge towards Colt.
Not many.
Not enough.
OK. Call Dad.
He writes the code, to pull his father into the game, into Colt’s world, as the call is still going through.
Ryan accepts the call.
‘Colt.’
‘Dad . . .’
Colt implements the code.
Ryan appears in the gameworld, behind a desk, in the desert. The game fills out the detail, attaches the desk to the dusty ground. It’s both comical and sinister.
The game sends Ryan 2D visual feedback, on his wallscreen. It’s only fair, that he know where he is. Even if he doesn’t have a helmet, doesn’t have full immersion . . .
Colt wants to see his father; but he also wants to be seen.
They look at each other for a few seconds.
‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this,’ says Colt.
Ryan laughs. ‘You’re cracking jokes now? That’s some . . . transformation.’ He’s looking around his screen, in the real world, in his office. Taking in the gameworld’s version of the test range.
In the distance, the perfect craters of the nuclear tests. Covered in snow.
‘Dad, it’s still trying to kill us.’
Ryan says nothing.
‘It’s not fair, Dad. Just because you two . . .’ Colt stops.
His voice; the pitch has risen. He sounds like a child. How weird is that. Everything was logical and clear, until he heard his father’s voice. And now his own voice is trembling, as his body trembles.
Some old routine, triggered. Well, just got to deal with that.
The game, restless, struggling to map everything, erases the desk. Now it’s just Ryan, in his chair.
The light of the sun loses some frequencies; goes weird, a little bluish; cobalt blue. As they face each other on the blue, snow-swept plain, the illusion the gameworld creates is no longer perfect.
Colt is uncomfortably aware that his physical body is standing in his bedroom; that a drug drone is sniffing around the house; that the hacked, confused, neurotic immune system is trying to resolve two images of the world.
That he could die at any moment during this conversation.
He tries to get his mind and body back under his control. He’s not a kid. Not a kid comes back to him like an echo, an echo setting off other echoes. Setting off memories of when he has said that before.
Back when he was a kid.
Screaming, I’m not a kid.
Memories of his body shaking with anger, as it shakes now.
His new brain is great at thinking logical thoughts – that’s what he designed it for. But, now that his body has joined in, he’s reacting physically, he’s thinking physically.
Every thought is a chemical action. Every action, a thought.
The surges, back and forth, are knocking him off balance.
Ryan is speaking. ‘. . . there’s bigger stuff at stake here, Colt. Your mother’s . . . whatever, discovery, will change everything, and if we’re not in control of that change—’
‘—Dad, nobody can control this change, it’s bigger than . . .’
‘—And if we’re not in control of it, other people, bad people, people who want to kill us, will use it, will use those powers to kill us.’
Colt leans forward. ‘You’re the person trying to kill us, Dad.’
The image of his father freezes for a second. When it unfreezes, Ryan is leaning forward in his seat, too, and now he sounds angry. ‘She can’t just “give it to the world”. It’s not one big happy planet, we don’t live in a fucking Coke ad.’
‘I don’t think she . . .’
But Ryan is not listening.
‘There is no “world”, there’s just a bunch of state actors, and individual actors, and power groups, with different agendas. And the ones most likely to use this to the full, to the limit, without restraint, are not the good guys, Colt. She can’t just give it away.’
‘Dad, missiles destroyed her lab. Tried to kill her. Was that the immune system, or was it you?’
Ryan hesitates.
‘It was you,’ Colt says. Silence. ‘Tell me the truth.’
‘I got a message from Donnie,’ says Ryan eventually. ‘A little late, but . . . I knew she was probably still there. But I didn’t fire those missiles. The immune system was monitoring the calls, it has access to everything we monitor, which is everything . . .’
‘But it couldn’t hear your voices, they’re hyper-encrypted . . .’
‘It didn’t need to, it interpreted the metadata. Someone was unplugging servers, stealing data . . . It worked it out.’
Colt breathes out, relaxes a little.
His father didn’t fire those missiles directly at his mother.
It’s a small enough thing, a technicality, but it’s still a relief. But why should it make a difference? He tried to shoot her. He unleashed the immune system on them both.
Stop making excuses for him.
He doesn’t love you.
No, he loves you. And you love him. This is all a mistake, a mistake.
‘Colt,’ says Ryan, ‘this country is a screwed-up country in a lot of ways, but it’s a lot better than the other ones out there. The ones where they burn down girls’ schools, and stone women to death for being raped, and throw acid in the faces of tourists who wear the wrong clothes . . .’
He’s not talking to me, thinks Colt, as he watches his father’s mouth move. He’s making a speech.
‘. . . The ones where children are kidnapped and tortured and turned into soldiers and forced to go back and burn down their own family’s village. The ones where the government can decide whether you have a kid or not, whether you can do the j
ob you love or not, whether you can read the book you want to or not, see the film . . .’
‘You’re turning into them, Dad.’
‘Bullshit.’ Ryan leans back in his chair.
The sun shifts frequencies, abruptly, and the desert is suddenly a pale green, and Colt has the illusion that he is underwater, that the great inland ocean has returned.
He looks up, and the sky is wrong. Violet. All the colours in the gameworld are wrong.
Father and son stare at the sky, until Ryan looks away, says again, ‘That’s bullshit, Colt. Look, this country doesn’t care what colour you are, and it doesn’t care what religion you are, and it gives you a chance, whether you’re a man or a woman, young or old, rich or poor. This country has something really special, and we are just pissing it away. I don’t mind fighting with one arm tied behind my back – that’s the whole point, that’s what makes us better than them – but we can’t fight with both hands tied behind our back, while handing them our gun.’
‘It’s not a gun, Dad. I’m not a gun . . .’
‘It’s a weapon! You’re a weapon! Look how you’ve just outwitted the best tech we’ve got. A kid!’
And now the light of the sun lurches again, and everything is once more cobalt blue.
A big bull buffalo collapses with a groan into deep snow.
India is falling, thinks Colt.
Thick blue clouds gather on the horizon. It’s going to snow. Without Colt’s full attention, assistance, the gameworld is being defeated. But he can’t break off the conversation with his father. He gazes into his father’s eyes as Ryan speaks.
‘If you can do it, they can do it.’ Ryan stabs his finger towards Colt, and Colt flinches. ‘They’re not going to use this to be nice to each other. That’s just your fucking mother, projecting her Christian bullshit onto the world. The world’s not like that. Great, sure, Christ would have used his new powers to forgive the Romans better. But Mohammed would have used it to kick ass. And Mohammed was right. We didn’t defeat Hitler by sitting down and having a nice talk about his difficult childhood. We didn’t let him off the hook by saying, well he comes from a different culture, they do those things there. When people say they want to destroy this country, do them the honour of taking them seriously. This liberal bullshit, that they’d love us if we just disarmed and apologized for existing. That is condescending, that is showing contempt for their ideas. Treating them like children. They are adults, who have thought about it, and they want to kill us. Fine. I have no problem with that. But I don’t hand them a fucking superweapon.’
‘But there’s hardly anyone feels like that. It’s only a few . . .’
‘Oh that’s bullshit. It only takes a few! How many do you need, to use our own technology against us? Exactly what’s going to happen if she . . .’
‘Dad . . .’
There is a lurch, like an earthquake ingame, as a huge data centre in Singapore is broken by the immune system and goes dark.
The historical, realworld, seismic data that underlies the landscape vanishes.
An earthquake shakes the gameworld as everything adjusts.
The nearby hills shift and settle, as their heaped material shakes.
Craters slip and fill.
All around Colt, hills fall and spread out at the base, as though an invisible god just walked across the landscape, crushing the heights.
Ryan and Colt ignore it, their gaze locked together.
‘Jesus Christ, Colt, real men, women and children, who are alive now, will be dead if you don’t get involved. It’s not too late. Join me; I’ll inform the immune system—’
‘You don’t have access. Not now. It’s autonomous.’
‘I can still influence targeting, if I . . . well, I have my methods. Seriously, it might reassess you. Call off its drones.’ The corners of his lips twitch. It’s almost a smile. ‘I’m its father. It trusts me.’
‘But you’re trying to kill Mama.’
Ryan hesitates. ‘I don’t think I can save her. She won’t change sides.’
‘Dad . . .’
‘Colt . . . I’m trying to save maybe millions of other lives, down the line.’
‘You can’t make me choose this.’
‘Well, then, do nothing.’ Ryan shrugs. ‘But that’s a choice.’
‘And then you’ll kill me and Mama . . .’
‘Colt, my life is over. My career is over. The woman I love hates me. I have nothing to lose. They want to shut down my program. I’ve already broken every rule in the book today. I’m finished.’
An unsettling thought distracts Colt. ‘Will they . . . punish you?’
His father’s abrupt laugh sounds like a dog’s bark. ‘Look around! The only reason I’m still here talking to you is because the entire system is in meltdown, their comms are fucked, and they’re too busy firefighting to work out who started the fire. If they understood what was going on, they’d have arrested me already.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Because I love my country,’ says Ryan. ‘And I made a promise to protect my country.’
‘Dad . . .’ No, I love you isn’t right. That’s what you are supposed to say; but it’s not quite true. ‘You’re still my dad.’ I can’t say . . . ‘But . . .’ I can’t.
‘I had to launch it, Colt.’ And there’s a desperation in his father’s voice that Colt was not expecting, that knocks him off balance. ‘They were going to close the program. Scrap it.’
All that he knows is that he loves his father.
And so he has no idea where the words are coming from, when the words come up, from the darkness, from deep inside him.
And they force their way up, and he’s got to stop them, got to, but they’ve made it, they’re in his throat, opening his throat to speak, and he retches a little, a quick dry retch, and Colt panics, because he has lost control, and who is this speaking them, ‘Yuh, yuh, yuh . . . You,’ the voice is high and wild, and it stutters a little and loops back and starts again, and he recognizes it at last, because it’s the voice he had when he was seven.
The committee has made a decision.
The words speak themselves through him, and he hears them at the same time as his father, with the same surprise.
Colt says, ‘You didn’t protect me.’
‘What?’
This time, Colt says it deliberately, to hear himself say the words. To hear the words which his seven-year-old self has just delivered. To hear the words which are true. To make the words his. ‘You didn’t protect me.’
Colt feels a hand fall on his shoulder, in the real world, and for a wild moment he thinks, Sasha!
But of course, it must be his mother, back from the bathroom.
She’s not ingame.
He refuses to let the game map her.
No, he’s not just speaking to his father now.
‘Mama, you’ve got to join me ingame.’
Without leaving the gameworld, he steps forward in the real world, reaches out blindly, into the familiar mess of his room, finds it. Throws her his old helmet.
She hesitates; she hasn’t entered – hasn’t wanted to enter – her son’s gameworld for a long, long time; but she puts on his old helmet. It smells faintly of Colt; and then his smell is gone, and she smells the desert, the cold, the buffalo, through the helmet’s olfactory unit, as Colt orders the game to map her; and she appears in the test range, as herself, beside Ryan.
Her helmet’s visuals and audio kicks in, a little late, and now she sees Colt’s avatar; sees Ryan in his chair, and she can hear the buffalo dying among the symmetrical craters, in the sad blue light. The thick, strange clouds approaching. She closes her eyes.
You didn’t protect me . . .
But that’s worse, because now she can see him again, so frail, in the bath, and the bruises on his legs, on his chest . . .
‘What the fuck are you talking about,’ says Ryan, ‘I’ve spent my fucking life protecting you, I lost my fucking legs p
rotecting you, and now you—’
‘When I was in school,’ says Colt, but he’s looking at Naomi now, not Ryan. ‘Remember? I came home . . . the first week. And I was having my bath. And my legs were covered in bruises. And you saw them. And you said, how did that happen? And I said, the other boys hit me with baseball bats. And you saw the burns on my arms. And I said, because I wouldn’t smoke a cigarette . . . they put out cigarettes on me . . . And you didn’t do anything.’
‘I didn’t know what to do . . .’ Naomi is trembling.
‘You sent me back.’
Ryan breaks in, ‘She never told me . . .’
‘No, you chose that school,’ says Colt, turning to Ryan. ‘You didn’t check, you didn’t care. I was America too. You didn’t protect me.’
‘We wanted you to be normal,’ says Ryan. ‘To fit in . . . we thought it would . . .’
And Naomi talks over Ryan, ‘When I realized . . . realized how bad it was, I pulled you out of school . . .’
‘You didn’t pull me out of school, Mama. I refused to go. You weren’t strong enough to get me into the car.’
‘We thought you were getting on OK,’ says Ryan, as Naomi says, ‘You didn’t tell us . . .’
‘I didn’t think you wanted to know. Because I had told you, the first week, and you had done nothing . . .’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Naomi quietly. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’
‘But you were my mother . . .’
‘. . . I was only a kid myself, I was afraid . . .’
‘Afraid of what?’
‘Afraid of the authorities. Afraid of the principal, afraid of . . . I thought if I said anything, I might make it worse, they’d take it out on you . . .’
Ryan breaks in, ‘But you never mentioned it after that. You hid it from us.’
‘You couldn’t handle it,’ says Colt to his father in the frozen desert. To his mother, as it starts to snow again. ‘You didn’t want to know.’
‘Oh, Colt,’ says Naomi, ‘you should have told us . . .’
Colt shrugged. ‘I was protecting you.’
The wind picks up, and the snow swirls, thicker now, piling up against their feet, the boulder with its clay vessel, the dead buffalo. His parents say nothing, just look at each other. But there is something different about this silent tension between his mother and his father, something new; Colt’s brain makes the connection, and he says to Naomi, ‘Did you take your pill?’