Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller

by LK Chapman

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Dan, ‘let’s walk for a bit.’

  We wandered down to the big grassy park in the middle of the housing estate, Dan moodily kicking a stone along in front of him, though he soon got bored of it.

  ‘Do you know why Amy broke up with me?’ he said, surprising me yet again. He’d always made it sound like it had been a mutual thing before, and though I’d had my suspicions, I’d thought it better to let him tell me whatever made it easier for him.

  ‘No,’ I said simply.

  ‘She got sick of my work,’ Dan said, ‘she hated how I never had any money and I was still living at home. How we never went anywhere or did anything. How I worked weird hours- which I know was my own fault, but still.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. It seemed like the right thing to say.

  ‘Turns out she was holding out for us to release DreamChase,’ Dan continued, ‘she was hoping things would change. But they didn’t, did they? It was just more of the same old shit and she couldn’t do it anymore.’

  ‘You didn’t have to carry on with DAWN,’ I said, ‘I would have understood.’

  Dan laughed then. ‘I did have to carry on,’ he said, ‘see, that’s the really fucked up thing about it all. I knew Amy was fed up of it. I knew she was going to walk away, and you know what, I didn’t actually care.’

  I looked round at him and I noticed he seemed liberated by saying this, like he was making some great confession. ‘I didn’t care,’ he said, ‘because all I cared about was finishing DreamChase. Finishing the game. I made DAWN my whole life, so I couldn’t stop, because as far as I could see, DreamChase, and then Affrayed, were the only reason at all that it was worth me actually being alive. I used to think to myself, I don’t even mind if I die, just so long as it’s after Affrayed is finished.’

  I tried to take it all in. ‘Dan, what are you talking about?’

  He stopped walking and stood on the deserted pavement in the deserted park, the first rays of sunlight lighting up the sky behind him. ‘It’s just like you said,’ he told me, ‘I have a miserable life. A miserable excuse of an existence. And it’s my own fault. I’ve fucked everything up. I’ve fucked up my entire life.’

  I steered him over to a bench at the side of the path where he threw himself down, still seeming on the brink of laughter or tears. It was like what had happened with Lily had made things seem so bleak to him that he’d decided he might as well throw it all out there.

  ‘I really shouldn’t have said your life is miserable,’ I told him, ‘I didn’t mean it, I was just angry.’

  Dan ignored me. ‘Nobody wants me,’ he said. ‘I know how pathetic that sounds, but it’s true, isn’t it? Amy didn’t want me, my dad’s never wanted me, now mum doesn’t want me, Robyn doesn’t want me and I’ve blown things with you and Lily too. The only time I ever felt good was when I was working on Affrayed, but it was doing that that’s made my life like this, it’s made it kind of shrink, you know. Everyone else I know has gone off and got a job and they’re, like five years ahead of me career-wise now. I barely even speak to any of them anymore. I know we’ve made all this money, but I feel like... I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  He turned and looked at me. ‘What am I doing?’

  I thought for a moment. I wasn’t really prepared to answer a question like that, but I did understand what he was talking about. I’d seen my friends from uni get jobs, get promotions, move all over the country- some were in pretty senior roles already. But while they were doing all that I’d been at home, making games, hoping for the kind of success that would one day make my choice make sense. It was daunting sometimes. But I’d chosen a life like that because I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing anything else. And so had Dan. What had happened now, our fake success, had a twisted kind of irony to it.

  The sun had risen sufficiently that I could look out across the park, the grass speckled with dandelions and daisies, my eye coming to rest on the brightly coloured fence around the children’s playground. Empty at this hour on a Sunday morning it made me feel strange, made me feel somehow incredibly, inescapably old.

  ‘You want to know what you’re doing right now, Dan?’ I asked him, and he sat up, interested. ‘Right now, you and me, and Lily, we’re fighting Interface. And we’re in it together. So we’ll draw a line under what happened and you can stay with us, okay?’

  Dan looked down at his lap. ‘I didn’t tell you all that so you’d let me stay with you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but you can. Besides, you certainly can’t sleep in your car; I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.’

  At my insult, he grinned. I’d always taken the piss out of his car, and the fact I was doing so now showed him that things were, if not exactly back to normal, then close enough.

  Chapter 18

  For a while, I was quite happy to just sit next to Dan in the park, listening to the first few sounds of the world coming to life- a car engine in the distance, the birds singing. I had to view what happened between Dan and Lily as an attack by Interface. He’d tried to break us apart, turn us against each other. Why, I couldn’t imagine. But that had to be it, and if that was his game, then I wasn’t going to play.

  I was beginning to think maybe we should walk back- I wanted to check on Lily, to tell her I was sorry I shouted at her, but then Dan’s phone began to ring.

  He frowned as he looked at the screen and I saw that the call was from an unknown number. He rejected it and shrugged. ‘Probably someone trying to sell something,’ he said.

  But then the phone rang again and to our astonishment the number was no longer unknown. There was a name on the screen, and the name was “Interface”.

  ‘Fascinating,’ Interface said, as soon as the phone was answered. Dan put the call on loudspeaker and held the phone between us, his fingers gripping it a little too tightly.

  Even from that one word, I noticed that Interface’s voice was strange. He pronounced the syllables too clearly, too precisely, in a voice that was masculine but sounded engineered and unreal.

  ‘What’s fascinating?’ I asked, taking the lead even though it was Dan that Interface had called.

  ‘Your reaction to my experiment.’

  I saw Dan tense, and I was sure he was about to speak angrily to Interface, so I jumped in first, trying to stay calm and collected.

  ‘So you admit it was you who made Dan and Lily do that?’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t make them do anything. You all felt me in your minds and you let me in.’

  ‘We didn’t know what you were going to make us do!’ Dan said, ‘how could you do that to us? You were saying the other day you wanted to be our friend, what the hell did you think you were doing?’

  ‘Dan, please. Is it so bad?’ Interface said, ‘you and Lily were enjoying yourselves.’

  Dan looked at me, eyes wide with horror, ‘no...’ he said.

  ‘Let me handle it,’ I told him, and I took the phone from between his cool and clammy fingers.

  ‘What you did was unforgiveable,’ I said to Interface. ‘Lily and Dan are friends, they don’t want to have that kind of relationship. In fact, what you did was basically assault, so don’t even try-’

  ‘If you are so against sharing your bodies with each other, why did you do so in Affrayed?’

  Dan and I stared at each other in blank astonishment. Had we actually heard that right? Was he really drawing a parallel between us messing around in a game and what had just happened back in the flat?

  ‘You see, I understand that Lily is your wife, Nick, but then you let her and Dan have sex in Affrayed. So I thought, if you enjoyed it so much in the game, why not in reality?’

  Dan leaned close to me and whispered ‘what the fuck is going on?’

  I was equally as astounded, Interface’s words completely flooring me. Was it a joke? He didn’t sound like he was joking.

  ‘Are you... are you being serious?’ I managed to ask.

 
; ‘I’m always serious.’

  ‘But Affrayed is a video game,’ I said, barely believing I was having to spell this out to him. ‘What you made Dan and Lily do was real.’

  ‘Explain the distinction.’

  I looked helplessly at Dan, but he was just as baffled as I was.

  ‘That’s not... you’re not really asking me to do that, are you?’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Interface said. ‘I have some conclusions of my own, I was just interested to hear your opinion.’

  I heard footsteps behind us and looked around so sharply that I startled the early morning jogger on the path behind the bench. He gave me a puzzled frown and veered out a little onto the grass, giving us a wide berth.

  ‘Well, if you have nothing to say, perhaps I should continue to draw my own conclusions,’ Interface said.

  ‘So, you’re seriously telling me that what you did was an experiment?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Of sorts. It is research.’

  ‘Research into what?’

  ‘Many things. Relationships, sexual behaviour, marriage, friendships. I created a situation. Then I saw how you responded to it.’

  I gripped the phone tightly between my fingers, my skin prickling and my mouth dry.

  ‘How did you do it? How did you get into our minds like that?’

  ‘You let me in.’

  ‘What?’ I said, ‘it’s not like we had a choice!’

  ‘You did,’ Interface said, ‘but you liked it so you didn’t want it to stop. I’m pleased. I hoped you would enjoy it.’

  Dan grabbed the phone from my hand and shouted into it. ‘Enjoy it? We didn’t enjoy it! Have you any fucking idea what you’ve done, you piece of-’

  ‘Dan. Why are you so angry?’ Interface said, calm as ever. ‘Nick has forgiven you. He blames me.’

  ‘I’m angry because...’ he stopped, slowed down. ‘I’m angry because I care about Lily, and about Nick.’ He looked at me awkwardly. ‘I don’t want to fall out with them.’

  ‘That’s commendable. But as I recall you did not take that much encouragement from me to begin engaging in sexual behaviour with Lily.’

  At this Dan threw the phone down onto my lap and strode away from the bench. I watched him for a moment, though he stood with his back to me, his shoulders rigid, and I noticed he was curling and uncurling his fists like he wanted to go and hit something but was trying to stop himself.

  ‘Listen,’ I said to Interface, ‘I don’t know what sort of sick game you’re playing, but I’m telling you now, I’m going to make you pay for this. I might not know who you are, or where you are, but I will find out and I’ll make you sorry.’

  This, finally, seemed to persuade Interface to start acting a bit more considerately.

  ‘What a shame,’ he said, ‘I didn’t realise how seriously my research would damage my relationship with the three of you. That was not my intention. I sought only to understand you better, not to bring you pain.’

  ‘Why don’t you understand us already?’ I asked, ‘you knew what would happen if I saw Dan and Lily like that. You must have done.’

  ‘I had some ideas, yes.’

  ‘Then why do it?’

  ‘I wanted to find out for sure. I wanted to see how you would react.’

  Suddenly, I realised something. How would Interface know how we reacted? He’d stopped messing with our minds by then, surely all he could know about what came after was what Dan and I were telling him now.

  ‘Interface,’ I said slowly, ‘I don’t understand. How could you possibly have seen our reactions?’

  ‘I observed,’ he said, ‘from your minds. Don’t worry, I’m not still doing it. I just wanted to collect my results.’

  I looked up and saw Dan was walking back over. He sat down heavily beside me and looked at the phone.

  ‘How?’ I asked Interface. ‘How did you observe from our minds?’

  ‘Never mind about that. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me,’ I said, ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Perhaps I should tell you what I’ve concluded about your behaviour so far,’ he said, ‘I would enjoy discussing it with you.’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t,’ I said, ‘the only thing I want to discuss with you is who you are and how you’re doing what you’re doing. Who are you really? What is the Network?’

  ‘The Network is a network. It’s not complicated.’

  ‘Then why can’t you explain it better than that?’

  ‘Because I’m constrained by the limits of your understanding.’

  I laughed humourlessly. ‘You mean I’m too stupid to understand?’

  ‘That’s not how I would word it. But you and the Network are currently incompatible. That is why an interface is necessary. You of all people should understand. You work with interfaces all the time, don’t you?’

  I looked at Dan. He looked tired, angry and confused. ‘He manipulated us,’ I said to him quietly, ‘he made you do what you did so he could watch how I reacted.’

  Dan barely looked surprised. But Interface had heard my words.

  ‘That’s not entirely true,’ he said, ‘I didn’t manipulate you. What I did was let you join with me a little, that is, with the Network, and then I let you explore a situation that you had already created yourselves within Affrayed.’

  ‘No!’ Dan said, ‘I would never do something like that, not ever. You made me do it.’

  ‘Really?’ Interface said, ‘perhaps I did. But your minds are my raw material, nothing that I encourage to happen can take place without your cooperation. As to whether it would have happened naturally, I suppose that is unlikely. But you give me what I work with, so perhaps if you don’t like it, you should look to yourselves.’

  …

  ‘What was all that?’ I said to Dan as we made our way back to the flat.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Do you believe any of it?’

  Dan sighed. ‘I’m not sure. But what he said at the end, about what happened already being in our heads somehow, that just isn’t true. I mean, I like Lily a lot; you and her are my closest friends, these past couple of years I’ve spent more time with the two of you than with anybody. And... I do think Lily is very beautiful. I always have. But I swear I’ve never thought about doing anything with her. It’s never even crossed my mind.’

  ‘Yeah, Dan, I know,’ I said, as we reached the front door. I knew he wasn’t lying, not exactly. But there was no denying he looked badly shaken up by Interface’s final statement and pretty confused, giving me the uncomfortable feeling that it wasn’t just me he was trying to reassure with his words.

  Chapter 19

  I looked in on Lily when I got inside and she was fast asleep in bed, curled up on her side, one hand under her cheek. The duvet was twisted round her like she’d been tossing and turning and I was glad that now she was getting a bit of peace.

  I thought about going to bed as well but I could hardly have felt less tired and I didn’t want to risk waking Lily. Instead Dan and I sat at the little dining table in the kitchen, cradling mugs of coffee and wondering what on earth we’d got ourselves involved in.

  By mid morning our conversation was going nowhere and when Lily woke up I suggested that we all go out to get something to eat, feeling that a change of scenery might do us some good.

  We filled Lily in on what had happened with Interface as we walked to the pub, but the conversation was stilted and awkward. Dan seemed barely able to look at her and I was sure he was afraid of giving me the impression he was interested in her.

  Things didn’t improve as we ate. The pub was a modern, cheap and cheerful sort of place, full of young families having Sunday lunch. I liked the noise, the predictability and normality of it, which provided a welcome contrast to the bizarre night we’d just had, but Dan and Lily were obviously still reeling from what they’d done and had no idea how to act with each other. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  ‘Look,
you two, can you please just say to each other whatever you need to say to make this right?’

  Startled, Dan looked up from his laptop, where he was taking advantage of the free wifi in the pub to read through the latest comments on Affrayed’s forums, and Lily put down her knife and fork and pushed her still half-full plate away from her. For a moment their eyes met across the table in silence, and then they both started talking at once, though Lily quickly stopped to listen to Dan.

  ‘I just... I just wanted to say sorry,’ he said, ‘for what I did to you. I feel awful about it. I wish-’

  ‘Dan,’ Lily said, ‘stop it, please. You don’t have to apologise to me. We both... did it.’ She flicked her eyes briefly at me, then looked down at the table.

  ‘I know,’ Dan said, ‘but I feel like I’m mainly to blame. I just really hope that you’re okay and that we can forget about it.’ I watched him as he spoke and by the end of it his face was red right to the roots of his hair, but the tension had got about as bad as it was going to get, and I could already feel the atmosphere between them softening, melting away.

  ‘Neither of you were to blame,’ I said, ‘it was Interface.’

  ‘Nick’s right,’ Lily said, ‘it wasn’t really our fault. I don’t want things to be different between us. I was so worried after what happened. I thought you wouldn’t like me anymore.’

  ‘What?’ Dan said, ‘that’s not how I feel at all! I just want things to go back to how they used to be.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Lily said, holding out her hand across the table. ‘Friends again?’

  He took her hand and shook it. ‘Friends,’ he agreed.

  After that, things were so much easier. There was still a bit of weirdness, the shared memory that something very wrong had happened, but now the two of them had cleared the air we went back to talking about Interface.

  ‘So he definitely said last night was an experiment?’ Lily asked me.

  ‘Yeah. An experiment, research, whatever.’