Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller

by LK Chapman

  ‘We’re meant to stay here. More things are supposed to happen.’

  ‘What?’ I said, ‘what things?’

  But Lily wouldn’t answer. She looked down at the ground and poked at the gravel with her beaded sandals. Dan seemed similarly reluctant to leave and stood beside her uselessly.

  ‘The thing that’s supposed to happen is that Interface wants us to see more of his Network and then kill ourselves,’ I said, ‘do you really want to stay here for that?’

  ‘You’re not giving him a chance,’ Lily said, ‘we have to give him a chance.’

  She seemed so upset that I lifted her chin with my hand, tried to get her to talk to me.

  ‘What is it you think we’re supposed to do now, Lily? Are we supposed to do what I just said? Let Interface show us whatever it is he wants to show us?’

  ‘No,’

  ‘Then what?’

  Lily looked sideways at Dan, then back to me again. ‘We’re supposed to heal the rift between the two of you,’ she said, ‘to make things right again.’

  I searched Dan’s face for any knowledge of this but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘what if we don’t want to?’

  Lily frowned. ‘How can you not want to? You’re best friends, aren’t you?’

  ‘Lily, Dan took you away from me. He’s been encouraging you to put yourself in danger.’

  ‘I’m right here, you know,’ Dan said.

  I turned to him. ‘Oh, I know,’ I said, ‘you’re always right there, aren’t you Dan? Sniffing around after Lily. I found all those other pictures you drew of her by the way.’

  ‘You went through my things?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? You live in my house, you eat my food, you try to steal my wife.’

  Lily grabbed hold of my arm. ‘Stop it!’ she said, ‘stop this. Nick, you came here and did all this to save our lives. Not just mine, Dan’s too.’

  I looked him up and down. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered,’ I said.

  Lily was beside herself. ‘No!’ she said, ‘this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Take it back, Nick, please. I know you didn’t mean that!’

  ‘It’s fine, Lily,’ Dan said. He turned to walk away.

  ‘No,’ Lily said again, ‘stop doing this, stop hurting each other. You know the two of you are only being like this because you care about each other, don’t you? Nick, if you really couldn’t give a damn about Dan, you wouldn’t deliberately try to hurt him.’

  ‘Then what do you want us to do?’ I said, ‘you seem to have all the answers. What is it you want from us, Lily?’

  ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this,’

  ‘What wasn’t? For God’s sake, what is it we’re supposed to do?’

  Lily stared at me for a second or two, her eyes full of fire and doubt.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘we were supposed to go down to the beach below the cliffs. We were supposed to sleep down there. And the three of us would be united again. But I can see it’s never going to happen.’

  I looked at her in confusion for a while. Sleeping on a beach, was that really her answer? But then again, what else was there to do?

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I... I’ll do it. If that’s what we’re supposed to do, then that’s what we’ll do. I obviously can’t fight Interface. The only thing I haven’t tried is cooperating with him.’ I turned to Dan, ‘what do you think?’

  Dan looked at me suspiciously for a while, but Lily nudged him and he nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘whatever.’

  The second he agreed, Lily’s face lit up, and she ran over to Dan’s car to retrieve a blanket from the back seat. I recognised it- it was an old-school woolly tartan one that her grandma had given us a few years ago for some reason or other, and the fact she’d brought it with her implied she’d known for some time that we were “supposed” to do this. For my part, I barely even cared anymore. The sun was just beginning to set, and I was completely out of ideas.

  Lily immediately marched off back the way we’d come with the blanket rolled into a fat sausage under her arm, and Dan and I followed her. I wasn’t sure how she knew where to go, but she soon found some rough steps down to the beach and practically ran down them, seemingly unconcerned about the fading light and the crumbling soil.

  Dan followed behind me, and for a while we both concentrated on getting down the steps without breaking our necks, but then we reached a point where they were more even.

  ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ Dan said suddenly, ‘Lily cried when we drove away. She didn’t want to leave you on your own.’

  He said it in a strange tone of voice- like he was trying to hurt me, or himself, or both. I looked round at him, but as I did so my foot caught a patch of loose gravelly sand and I almost fell except he grabbed my arm.

  ‘Dan, I’m sorry for what I said by the car,’ I told him once I’d got my footing again, ‘but you took Lily away from me. You must have known how much it would upset me, but you did it anyway. I can’t just forget about that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I get it.’ But although his words suggested he understood, his tone was completely at odds with them. In fact, if his voice told me anything, it was that he didn’t understand at all.

  Chapter 53

  Down on the beach Lily kicked off her sandals and buried her toes in the pebbly sand, sighing luxuriously. The beach was deserted, nothing but the formidably dark cliffs, and a rock fall further along, illuminated by the reddish sunset.

  She led us along the sand and we followed her, until she found a secluded spot where the cliff jutted out to our right, and there was a pile of large rocks on our left. She lay the blanket on the ground and sat on it, pulling us down with her so that we sat in a little circle.

  ‘So what now?’ I asked her.

  ‘Now we talk,’ she said simply, as though it really was as straightforward as that.

  ‘Lily-’

  ‘Come on,’ she said. She reached out to intertwine her fingers with both of ours, then she looked pointedly at the space between Dan and me.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ I said, ‘Interface doesn’t need us to hold hands in order to connect us.’

  ‘I know,’ Lily said, ‘but you did it on the hilltop, remember. This is about healing all the hurt between us. If you really want to make things right with Dan again, you should at least be able to touch him.’ She squeezed my hand and I could see how important this was to her, so I reached out until I felt Dan’s fingers but the touch of his skin was too weird, too difficult and I couldn’t do it.

  ‘Nobody is going to see you,’ Lily said, ‘we’re alone down here. Please, just try it. For me.’

  I looked at Dan and he gave a little shrug, then before I could do anything he grabbed my hand himself, and even though I found it intensely unpleasant I grit my teeth and put up with it.

  Now we’d made a sign of our willingness, I felt the Network in my mind again. It started as it always did, with the spreading warmth and care of the presence in my mind, opening it out, filling me with its quiet reassurance. Before long, Dan’s hand in mine did begin to feel nice. It felt like a connection, like I was safe. But then I thought of what he’d done to me, how he had feelings for Lily and wasn’t trying to keep them in check. And gradually I became aware that Dan could feel and “hear” these things I was thinking. That he was listening to me.

  ‘I never meant to hurt you,’ he said inside my head.

  ‘I know that,’ I told him.

  For a little while he was quiet, but I could feel a building of emotion in him, a building of guilt. But when I did hear his voice again what he said surprised me.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you just let me speak to you?’ he said, ‘what did you think I was going to say? Did you think I was going to tell you that I thought Lily loved me too, that I was going to steal her from you? That I didn’t think she loved you anymore?’

  ‘I don’t know-’

  ‘Why would I say that to yo
u?’ he asked me, ‘do you really think that’s what I’m like? I wanted you to listen to me. I was trying to reassure you. I wanted to say that I was sorry. That I didn’t want to come between the two of you, or for this to come between us. I wanted to say that I know Lily loves you and that anything I feel like I have with her doesn’t exist anywhere except in my head.’

  ‘Dan, I didn’t realise, I wasn’t thinking-’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he said in a huge burst of emotion that poured through my mind like burning acid. It was so strange to feel this much from other people, to know what it actually felt like inside his head, how his longing for Lily was like an ache, his guilt and anger and confusion like a poisonous, dangerous mass. ‘You know what Interface said that night in the park,’ he continued, ‘after you saw me and Lily on the sofa? He said that if we didn’t like what had happened we should look to ourselves. And he was right. If you want somebody to blame then it was me, because I had thought about Lily that way. I just didn’t want to admit it, not to anybody, not to myself, but when she asked us to both have sex with her in Affrayed...’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Dan,’ Lily’s thought spilled through, ‘I thought I was just playing around, I’d never have done it if I’d known.’

  ‘You’re not to blame,’ Dan said, ‘nobody’s to blame but me.’

  Then through his words some images appeared in my mind, strange images that confused me, until I realised that what I was seeing was a memory. A memory of Dan’s.

  To begin with I could barely understand what was going on, there was a lot of noise and confusion, people I only vaguely knew. There were two people in a kitchen; one I recognised as Dan’s mum, a large dark-haired woman dressed in black trousers and a sequined silvery blouse, while the other was a much younger woman, and it took me a moment to recognise her as Robyn. The last time I’d seen her she’d been fourteen or so; a funny, pretty, though kind of clingy girl, hanging around Dan while he’d tried to talk to me about DreamChase. Not that he’d ever minded, or told her to go away. But now she was completely different, shouting, screaming, a long black fringe completely covering half her face, so that all I could see was one narrow, glittering eye.

  God knows what had gone before, or what had started the argument, but Dan was trying to reason with her and the only thing in his memory that was completely clear was the moment Robyn turned to him and said, ‘what the fuck do you care? You’re not even my real brother.’

  ‘Oh, Dan,’ Lily’s voice came through, ‘why didn’t you tell us? We never realised she said that to you. I’m so sorry.’

  But the memory wasn’t over yet, it changed into something else, a strange memory where everything was dark and I realised gradually it was later the same night; that Dan had come to stay with us and was sleeping on the sofa. But he wasn’t asleep, he was wide awake, and there were faint noises in the background that I couldn’t really make out, and neither, at this stage, could Dan. But then I realised as he realised, sharing his embarrassment, awkwardness and sense of displacement when the sound clarified into the noise of a bed rhythmically knocking against a wall, and a sudden little giggle that was clearly Lily. Then it was my turn to feel guilty, as I realised that the same night Robyn had said the most hurtful thing to Dan that she possibly could, he’d come to us to get away from it and then had to lie in the dark listening to us having sex in the next room.

  ‘Dan, if we’d known you were so upset, we would never-’ Lily said, but Dan’s memory wasn’t done and her words were lost in the next wave of it, a savage, almost violent image where he imagined that it was him in bed with Lily, not me. It was oddly beautiful in its detail, how he pictured Lily’s fingers gripping the bars of the wooden headboard, holding them so tightly her knuckles were turning white, how he looked down at her hair splayed out around her, strands of it plastered over her face, and listened to her breathy voice as she told him how much she wanted it. I didn’t know when exactly he’d imagined it, but I got the sense it was a while ago, months ago, before we’d even got the new version of Affrayed. More importantly, I understood that once he’d thought it he couldn’t un-think it. That the image had just sat there in the back of his mind, haunting him and twisting his every conversation with Lily into something else.

  ‘Dan, it’s okay,’ Lily said, ‘it doesn’t matter what you thought. It doesn’t matter at all.’

  But before he could react to her reassurance, his mind recalled again that moment Robyn had spoken to him so unkindly, and as that image of her face filled our minds, the way it was turned to him in such hatred and anger, he cried out to her, ‘Robyn...’ and his despair was so strong it made me want to help him; to give him some of my strength, some of our strength, and make him feel better.

  And as I began to long for that, to wish I could use what was in me to help him, Interface lifted us higher, brought us even closer, and I could practically feel all my understanding, concern, sympathy, fuck it, even love, for him streaming out of me into his mind. Because I knew how much what I’d seen would have hurt him. He’d told me way, way back that Robyn was actually his half sister, so I did already know, but he’d said it like he sort of had to, for the sake of clarity. Certainly, he’d never referred to her that way again and I understood as time went on that the bond he’d had with her was deeper than anything I would have expected; that he’d looked after her, protected her and been her best friend throughout the whole of her childhood. At least, right up until he went to university and things slowly began to change.

  ‘She does love you,’ Lily said, ‘no matter what it feels like right now, you are loved.’

  Interface carried on pushing and pushing the union between us, making it so I could feel everything in both of their minds. I had all their memories open to me, just waiting to be revealed.

  Parts of them were becoming part of me, and threads of me seemed to be drifting into them. I became unsure which hands were mine and which hands were theirs, so I wiggled my fingers. But all the fingers seemed to be moving so I couldn’t even tell, and before long I didn’t even care. Whose body was whose didn’t matter. Whose body belonged to who certainly didn’t matter. Everything was as one and we were as one. I saw shapes, colours. I heard sounds, from me, from them, from the sea behind us where the waves broke relentlessly on the shore. I felt pleasure so pure and uncomplicated that it took my breath away and I was consumed by sensation and togetherness. But most importantly, I wasn’t one. I was all. I was them, and they were me.

  Chapter 54

  When I woke up, it was chilly and I shivered. The sky was pale, and the ground felt hard and cold beneath my body. I propped myself up onto my elbow and saw Lily beside me, though she was facing away from me, her body curled into a little ball against the cool air. Then I looked over at Dan, still sleeping the other side of her. He hadn’t even taken his glasses off and they were askew on his face, looking like they must be pressing uncomfortably into the side of his head. But by far the most remarkable thing was that each one of us was completely naked, and as I took in the sight of our bodies pressed together for warmth on the blanket, I started to remember.

  I suppose it was inevitable that such an intense experience of love and a total breakdown of barriers and self-awareness would end this way, and I remembered with amazement that it had not only been Lily who had been the focus of our attention. In my altered, Networked state I could clearly remember touching Dan as well, and the feel of his hands on me.

  Suddenly, Dan stirred and I lay back down, closed my eyes until they were open only a tiny little bit, so I could watch him but he would assume I was still asleep. I wished I could have faced him, but I was too confused about our experience to deal with it just yet. Once I was lying down I couldn’t see him anymore, but soon he sat up and started getting dressed, his eyes darting both to me and to Lily, an expression of astonishment and wonder on his face. Then he turned his attention to her and I realised she had started shivering in her sleep. She seemed, as she often did, such a defence
less little thing, so vulnerable in her sleep, her little body freezing cold, but too exhausted to wake up.

  Dan pulled the blanket out from under his own body and wrapped it around her as best he could, then he stroked her hair with incredible tenderness.

  ‘I love you, Lily,’ he whispered.

  He looked over at me and I squeezed my eyes completely shut, not wanting to risk opening them even a fraction until I was sure he’d looked away, but then I felt him shaking my shoulder and I realised I had to face him.

  ‘Nick,’ he said quietly when I opened my eyes.

  ‘Dan,’ I said, sitting up awkwardly and trying to see where my clothes were.

  ‘They’re here,’ Dan said, picking them up from beside him and handing them to me. Gratefully, I got dressed and though it was still strange to face him, it felt better that I wasn’t naked anymore.

  ‘What we did...’ he said.

  Instead of answering, I concentrated on wrapping my half of the blanket around Lily as well, and I saw the crease between her eyebrows disappear, watched her relax a little.

  ‘Is she alright, do you think?’ Dan asked me.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, we both... you know,’ he lowered his voice. ‘We both had sex with her.’

  As he said it, more memories came flooding back. I remembered little details picked out in the moonlight, how small she had looked even under Dan’s lean body, such a mysterious, lovely little creature, who moaned and arched her back and stared up at the sky full of stars. And I remembered how loving and tender he had been with her, how he’d kissed the scars on her arm just the way I did and told her she never needed to be sad anymore.

  ‘Dan,’ I said, ‘perhaps we can work something out.’

  He looked at me in surprise.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, if you and Lily want to spend some time together every now and again.’

  Dan shook his head. ‘Last night was...’ he looked down at Lily and smiled, ‘it was the best night of my life. But Lily doesn’t really love me. Not like she loves you.’