BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  It was Nostromo, I could tell by the white sleeves. I screamed. I kicked, I writhed and yelled, it was useless. He held me off the ground, like a rag doll, laughing. The Native American had Dev. They carried us to their camp (we stopped struggling, because it was pointless): tied us up and sat cross-legged, staring at us and grinning in triumph. Up close I was sure they were real adults, and I was scared. But I couldn’t struggle. My head was spinning. Their eyes glittered, and seemed to dance out of their faces. The third cheat, the pirate, was a woman, about six foot tall. She had black shiny hair hanging in wild locks from under her three cornered hat, green eyes with kohl around them, and skin the colour of cinnamon. She stood up, grabbed my head, and stuck a slip of paper underneath my tongue. “They’re short of glucose,” she announced. “Near to blacking out. What’ll we do with them, Mister Parker? Qua’as?”

  “I say we smoke a pipe of peace,” said the Native American.

  He fetched the pipe from his pack, stuffed it from a pouch he wore at his waist, and lit it with a handful of the licheny stuff, dipped in the flame of the fire. I watched him do these things, and my skin began to creep, my heart began to beat like thunder, though I didn’t know why.

  “Mister Parker”, the Nostromo crewman, cut us loose. The pipe went round, and I drew in the ‘smoke’. The sugar rush almost knocked me sideways, but I managed to keep a straight face.

  “Oooh, that was restorative!” gasped Mr Parker.

  “Best drug in the universe,” chuckled the pirate queen.

  “Gonna be our planet’s major export one day—”

  “Moron. The galaxy is full of sugars. My money’s on Bach.”

  They laughed, high-fived each other and kind of sparkled; and I knew why, because I love and depend on glucose too. But the Native American was looking at my brother, and frowning. Dev didn’t look restored.

  We finished the pipe and the pirate queen put it aside.

  “Now,” she said, in a rich, wild, laughing voice. “I’m Bonny.” She tossed back the lace at her cuff and tipped a lean brown hand to the man in the red and black blanket. “This is Qua’as, the Transformer. He’s Canadian, but don’t hold that against him, he’s pretty cool. Mister Parker, our engineer, you have met. So who the devil are you, and why are you plaguing us? Do tell.”

  “Get real,” said Mr Parker, “if you’ll pardon the expression. There are only, what is it now…? Say, fourteen other people trained for this that you could be, assumin’ you are not software dreamed up by Mission Control. Why the kiddy disguises? What was that with the garrotte?”

  “Did no one ever tell you, little sister,” said Qua’as, “that only what is dearest to your heart survives the drop back into normal space? What does that make you? A low-down disgusting violence perv? Eh? Eh?”

  That’s when I realised for the first time that I’d kept my weapons, but Dev’s AK and ammo had vanished when we were wiped. I felt myself blush, I felt that Qua’as was right…

  “What do you mean ‘normal space’—? I demanded.

  “Let us go!” cried Dev. “We’re not afraid of you! You plagued us, you spoiled everything and we tracked you down! Soon as we log out, we’re going to turn you in for corrupting the code and scaring us!”

  But my brother’s voice was thin and frail, a ghost’s voice. The cheats glowed with life, and strength and richness: richer than any game avatar I’d ever heard of. I could feel them, teeming and buzzing with layers of complexity, deeper than my mind could reach—

  “Oh no,” said Bonny, staring at me, and I stared back: thinking she was looking straight at me, myself. Back through the root server, through the real world, into my head, my mind; wherever “Sylvie” really lived—

  “Oh NO!” groaned Qua’as. “You’re real children, aren’t you?”

  “Y-yes?” quavered Dev.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why shouldn’t we be real?”

  Mr Parker smacked both his hands to his cap, and held on to it, bug-eyed. “OH, MAN. We are so busted! GAME OVER!”

  They all started to grin, weird big identical grins, and suddenly, with a rush of relief, I knew what was going on. “Oh my God you’re test pilots! We’ve accidentally hacked into a research level. That’s it, isn’t it…?”

  That explained the weirdness, and the super-convincing feel of everything. Dev and I were copping a sneak preview of a hyper-real immersion scape in development! So now our cheats were in trouble, because the gameplay was supposed to be deadly secret until its launch, but whatever had happened couldn’t be our fault, we were kids—

  The grins slowly vanished. “We’ve been mistaken.” said Qua’as the Transformer, seriously. “We thought you were colleagues, in disguise.”

  “Or law enforcement,” added Mr Parker. “We can insert ourselves into hub games, we do it for light relief. We’re not supposed to.”

  “Come on. You’re test pilots. Game development test pilots.”

  “Close,” said Bonny. “But it’s no scape we’re testing.”

  Qua’as heaved a sigh. “This is not a game, little girl. It’s a planet. You are approximately 560 light years from home right now.”

  My brother cried out, “Mom!”

  He toppled over, his legs still tied, and curled up into a whimpering ball. I kept my head, but I couldn’t speak. I was too busy refusing to believe this insane story. But fear ramped up, like in a nightmare when someone says something unbelievable that you know is true, and fear ramps up, because you know you it’s not a dream, you’re lost for real—

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’d better believe it, kid,” said Mr Parker. “This is not a drill. You are handling the situation, but your friend isn’t.”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Okay, your brother. You have to trust us to get you back, or your brother will die. Not die as in wake up at home. Plain dead.”

  “What are your names?” asked the pirate queen, more gently.

  “I’m Sylvia Murphy-Weston. My brother is Devan Murphy-Weston.”

  “You have full hub access; are those names your access IDs?”

  “Yes.”

  I could tell she wanted to ask more questions, but Qua’as put his hand on her arm. “That’s all we need. We know the situation now. And you know we’re your friends—?”

  He raised his eyebrow at me, and I nodded.

  “So we’re onto it, Sylvie, and you and Devan will get home fine.”

  They freed our legs, and retired inside their shelter: I hugged Dev, and told him we would be all right. Mr Parker came out again, bringing blankets, a warm sugar drink in a skin bottle, and a bunch of jerky strips.

  “Is this the friendly golden spiders?” asked Dev, unhappily.

  “No, it’s another animal, a kind of small eight-legged sheep.”

  “Is it real?”

  “You should be asking are you real, kid. But you are. You’re not a game avatar here. When you dropped into normal with us, you were piggybacked on our translation code, which drew the necessary chemicals and mass out of this planet to make bodies for you two, same as it did for us. You became material. You can eat here, and you can die.”

  “So… so I have two bodies, right now?” said Devan, hesitantly.

  “Yeah. It’s possible, but it’s dangerous.”

  Θ

  We ate the jerky, drank the sweet stuff, and I didn’t tell Dev I thought the “eight-legged sheep” was a little white lie. It was cold as a night camped out in the high range country on Earth: where I have never been in my body; only in an immersion game. We slept, wrapped in the blankets, hugging each other for warmth. We weren’t invited into the shelter. Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up. The pirate had emerged. She glanced at me, and headed up the ravine. Dev was still sleeping. I hesitated to leave him alone, but decided to follow her.

  Where was she going? I hoped for a door in the air, a flaw I could mark somehow, and it would take us back to the hub. She climbed up onto the top o
f a big boulder. I followed, quietly as I could. She was lying with her hands behind her head and the three-cornered hat beside her, just gazing up at the stars. I don’t know stars, but they looked different. They were very bright.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” said the pirate, smiling up into the great jewelled abyss.

  “If it’s bad to have two bodies,” I said. “What about you guys?”

  “We’re fine,” she said. “My other body, which is not much use to me, is on life support back home. I’m in no danger, whatever happens to me here. Your brother Dev is in trouble because he doesn’t have that protection.” She sat up, smiling at me. “But you do, don’t you, Sylvie?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a requirement,” she said. “Don’t believe Mr Parker and Qua’as, this isn’t another planet, that’s crazy talk. It’s an experience that’s going to be available to everyone, like immersion gaming. But right now interspatials – that’s what we call ourselves – have to be a special kind of person. You need to leave a body behind, on full life support, but that’s only half of it. You also need a fully realised non-physical self, and the ability to commit to your non-physical body, as if it’s flesh and blood. Someone like you would be ideal, Sylvie.”

  My stomach turned over, and my heart thumped. For a moment the world went white, sheer nothingness white, and yet she was still with me, I could feel her presence. I fought with myself to stay calm.

  It only lasted a moment. Then the mountain world came back.

  “Now I know you’re faking. Why do you talk like that…? ‘We are so busted’ ‘Oh man’… ‘Game Over’. ‘This is not a drill’… You sound like my kid brother. Are you guys even real? Or are you just bots?”

  She tipped back her head and laughed, full throated. I was feeling very confused, angry and confused, but she’d pushed my buttons, and she knew it. Sometimes I’m very lonely.

  “I’m real as real gets,” said the pirate queen. “What about you?”

  A small rock rattled, behind me, and I heard Dev’s breathing: he’d woken up and followed me. Bonny must have heard him too, but she kept on looking at me.

  “You’ve been stalking us,” I said. “Why did you do that? Creeps.”

  “Maybe to test you out. Maybe it was an audition.”

  Dev scrambled onto the top of the boulder, and stumbled over to grab my hand. He was shaking.

  “Leave her alone!” he shouted. “You’re lying. You’re not special. You’re cheating fools, and this is just a stupid lame glitchy game! ”

  Bonny shook her head, slowly: sad and happy at the same time.

  She was like an outlaw angel, breaking all the rules.

  Θ

  They let us go. I don’t remember anything after Bonny shook her head, but Dev woke up in the hospital, and I woke up in my bed at home. Then it was pure hell for a while. Whatever had happened, whichever scenario you believed, doing what the cheats did without training had hateful consequences. We had the choice between angry, scared, tearful parents; psych tests, medical exams, and the same questions over and over, when we were awake. Or drugged sleep, and the most horrible nightmares. When we skyped each other, Dev in hospital and me at home, we couldn’t do anything but stare, mumbling Bad! Bad! at each other. We couldn’t deal with sentences or anything.

  But I got better. Dev did too, although it took longer.

  The morning after he came home from hospital, I got into my wheelchair by myself: which I hate to do, because it reminds me that I keep on getting worse. Two years ago I could casually sling myself into the chair I had then, now it’s like climbing Everest. I settled my head into the support, I dehooked and rehooked the tubes I needed, which is something else I hate to do, and I whizzed along to Dev’s room…

  I hardly visit my family anymore. They come to me.

  I used to fight like a tiger to keep myself going, and it made no difference, I just got so tired I couldn’t see. Now I love my bed. It’s the only place I have left to stand. Although of course I’m lying down. The only territory I can still defend. My problems aren’t fatal: that’s the worst thing, in some ways. I’m fifteen. I could live for decades like this: treating my brain like a pet animal, and trying to ignore the sad sack that used to be my body. That’s what Mom and Dad still desperately wanted. But I’d talked to them (after recovering from our adventure far faster than my healthy little brother). The Interspatial people had talked to them too.

  It hadn’t been so long, only a few days. Dev was sitting up in bed, looking fine, and that was a relief. “I know,” he said at once. “Mom and Dad told me.” (I was grateful to them). “Are you going to accept?”

  “It’s a terrific opportunity. It’s just like me going to college, Dev, only a college where I’ll be a highflyer, not a sad sack, and I’ll be normal—”

  “Are you sure they’re okay, these Interspatial people?”

  “Mom and Dad have checked it all out.”

  My mom and dad, as you’ve probably guessed, are in the same business. They’d never heard of the Interspatial experiment (it was very secret), before this happened to us, but digital world is their world and now that they’d investigated the research, they were impressed.

  Dev just looked at me, and waited.

  “Okay, obviously there’s stuff we haven’t been told. And there was that strange thing about the game scape being on another planet. But Mom and Dad are satisfied, and—

  I wasn’t sure what was real, and what was cheats. But I was sure about the taste of icy mountain air in my throat. The feel of my muscles pumping, the clear heat of that sun; the power and the intensity of life running through me. If I’d been stalked, and hooked, and reeled in, I didn’t much care. I was willing. It was a victimless crime—

  “And what?”

  “I’m going to accept.”

  Dev took a deep breath, nodded, and rolled with the punch. “Hey, what if I come too? I’d get a terrific education in games development, which is what I want to do. You’d train as an interspatial crash dummy, and we could still be a team—”

  “Not this time Dev. I can’t take you with me. I need you to stay at home, with Mom and Dad, and… and watch my back. ”

  My little brother, my best friend.

  “Because you can’t resist.” said Dev, who sees things. “But you know it could turn out weird. Cool. You’ll have to have a safe word, to send me, that I know and nobody else does—”

  “Something like that. Except nothing’s going to go wrong. ”

  To be continued...

  About the Author

  Gwyneth Jones is a writer and critic of genre fiction, who has also written for teenagers using the name Ann Halam. She’s won a few awards but doesn’t let it get her down. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and two cats called Milo and Tilly, curating assorted pondlife in season. She’s a member of the Soil Association, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, Frack Free Sussex and the Green Party; and an Amnesty International volunteer. Hobbies include watching old movies, playing Zelda and staring out of the window.

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  Notes

  [←1]

  “A hex triplet is a six-digit number… used in computing applications to represent colours” (Wikipedia)

  [←2]

  See “Turtle Soup” Ch. 10 Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.

  [←3]

  See David Seed: “Pynchon’s Herero”, Pynchon Notes N.10 https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/articles/abstract/10.16995/pn.436/

  [←4]

  See “Life Without Genes”, Adrian Woolfson, for a real world guided tour around this concept.

  [←5]