by Guy Haley
"It's a young woman, perhaps mid-twenties, threat levels minimal!" he shouted into his radio. Get to her before the Chinese do, Lehmann, he added via MT.
Otto sprinted through the lines of bunkers, bouncing from their sloping sides, twisting past obstacles and leaping the detritus of long-gone men.
Lehmann thought to him, I nearly have her!
The two of them converged, Lehmann running along the avenue parallel to Otto's. Tree branches whipped at Otto's face, old glass crunching under his feet, Dragon Fire troops sketching trails of fire above him. The girl was running for her life. Habitation in the DMZ was strictly prohibited; the Chinese could execute her just for that.
They cleared the lines of munitions bunkers. The girl was passing through a crack in a set of big double doors into a large building half-sunken into the ground, perhaps once a tank garage.
Otto accelerated as he cleared the ground between the munitions dump and the tank garage. The trees were shorter here, few of them having forced their way through the concrete of the square, the soil on top too thin to support proper growth.
Otto ran through the door and stumbled in shock.
Honour stood there, half in shadow. Her hair shaved, pretty eyes smudged black underneath, pink scar on her head from the mentaug implantation.
"Honour?"
The girl's face wavered and she hit him hard across the head with an iron bar.
Honour vanished. The woman in her place wore a threadbare grey dress with a heavy wool cardigan and fingerless gloves. Long brown hair whipped round as she dropped the bar with a clatter and ran across the garage. Light slanted in through the ceiling where the roof had failed. She headed for a cowled doorway at the back, from which came weak artificial light.
Lehmann leapt over the prone Otto, humour gone from his face under the influence of the mentaug, stone cold.
Otto scowled and recovered his footing. Lehmann caught up with her as a Chinese Dragon Fire rocketed in through a hole in the roof and knelt, covering the door at the back with his weapon.
"Steady there! Steady!" said Lehmann. The girl punched him hard in the throat, and gasped as her fist encountered his subdermal plating. Lehmann caught her by the wrists. He tried English, then Russian. The girl quietened, but her eyes were wide with terror.
Otto approached and spoke to her in Russian. It was halting and heavily inflected, not as good as his English. With connection to the Grid he could run a translation programme, but in the DMZ, where Grid coverage was patchy and officially circumscribed, he had to rely on his own meagre skills.
"We mean you no harm, we will not hurt you. We are looking for Giacomo Vellini, also known as Waldo. Do you know where he is?"
"Fuck you, you German pig!" she snarled at him in Italianaccented German.
"Vellini? You know where he is." Otto remembered something from Waldo's file: family. His mentaug caught his mind searching for the information, and dumped it into his higher consciousness along with a EuPol mugshot. "You are his sister, Marita?" said Otto.
The doors squealed as golden-armoured hands forced them back, crumpling their decayed edges into powder. Valdaire pushed through beneath them, followed by Guan. She panted hard. Though fit, she was no match for the enhanced Ky-tech. Otto was glad to see her. The sight of another woman might calm Marita.
"Waldo?" she gasped.
"Not found him yet."
"This is his sister," said Lehmann.
Valdaire frowned.
"She was heading towards that door down there," Lehmann added.
"You and your black whore will get nothing from me!" screamed Marita, adding a stream of Italian whose vehemence made Otto glad he didn't speak the language. Her defiance was impressive, he thought, but she was still scared, her eyes flicking back and forth between the Ky-tech and the Chinese troopers.
Valdaire was patient. "We really have to speak to your brother." And she reached out to the woman.
Marita flinched. "Don't touch me!" she said in English.
Valdaire withdrew her hand, and explained why they needed Waldo.
Some of the fight left Marita. "You are too late."
"Has he fled?" asked Otto.
Marita gave a choking laugh, halfway to a sob, and shook her ratty brown hair. "He's not here any more."
Marita led the three of them, Commander Guan and two Dragon Fire troops through the door at the back of the tank garage. The Chinese soldiers' armour was too bulky to fit, so they stripped down to their lightly plated undersuits, Guan retaining his command collar, and carried pistols down with them. They took a staircase down into a subterranean complex of rooms. The stairs turned and a long corridor doubled back under the garage. The place was dank. Steel doors were jammed open, hinges rusted solid, water pooled round equipment abandoned a century ago, the concrete ceiling prickly with stalactites of lime leached from the walls. They ascended a short flight of stairs and the area became less derelict. Marita had a home there, of sorts. Furniture scavenged from the base combined with the odd brought-in item made it almost welcoming. She took them into a room that looked as if it had once been a kitchen large enough to feed five hundred men. Much of it was dusty, but one corner had been cleared and decorated with homely scraps, a splash of bright paint, postcards on a rickety set of shelves, old photos gathered from the barracks, mildewed faces of dead Russian soldiers grinning out at a future they'd not foreseen. At the centre of this spot of domesticity an old gas cooker had been patched up and converted to burn wood, its gas vent to the outside jerry-rigged as an impromptu chimney. She asked them to sit at a rusty table in mismatched chairs while she went to a coffee pot atop the stove.
"Your brother was resourceful," said Otto. He spoke German, as the language most present shared to the highest level. Commander Guan set his command collar to translate the conversation into English for Valdaire's benefit. It marched out blandly spoken and overly ornate.
Marita shrugged, shoulders thin under her threadbare clothes. "He tried his best to make something for us here. He was always practical. He used his talents for computers, but he was so clever, it was not difficult for him to learn how to do this. How many people could do the same in our age? Learn how to live in the woods, without machines to help?" She smiled defiantly; there was pride here.
"Why did he bring you here?" asked Valdaire. A short pause while Guan's suit translated for Marita.
Marita returned to the table with a coffee for herself, none for the others.
"I am a Grid addict," she said matter-of-factly. "I have been for most of my life. I got hooked when I was ten years old on the RealWorld Reality Realms. I spent all my time in there. I lost all my friends in the Real. I skipped school to go to jacking parlours. Our parents tried to force me to stop. Clinics, psychiatrists, drugs… I ran away, hitching rides over the Alps. By the time I was fourteen, every minute I was not in the game I was on the street, earning money. I speak good German, yes?"
Otto and Lehmann nodded.
"I learned it sucking the cocks of fat businessmen who liked little girls. All so I could get another fifty New Euros, another few hours of game time. For what? So I could redecorate a room in my castle? Or earn another pony with a silver mane?" She grew angry. "I wasted my life in there. But I could not stop." Her head dropped, hair curtaining her face.
"My brother, he blamed himself. He could always walk away from the Grid. I could not. He introduced me to the Realms. For fun, he thought it would be something fun to do with his little sister…" She stared into her coffee. "He found me, living in a squat in Düsseldorf, after they shut the Reality Realms down. I was filthy, skin and bone. He'd spent so much time looking for me, turning his talents to hacking the old databases to find me through my avatar information. He almost did not. He tried so hard, first to fix me, then breaking into the Reality Realms over and over again to try and get me back in when I sickened more. He went to jail."
"His name suggested he wanted to get caught," said Valdaire.
"You cops, social workers,
do-gooders, psych-men, all such idiots. He didn't," said Marita. "He knew how much money he could make from becoming a celebrity criminal, so he let you get him. That's why the stupid name, that's why he let himself be arrested."
"None of this is on his file," said Valdaire.
Marita's voice grew high and angry. "Because he didn't want it to be! If it weren't for me, you would never even have heard of him. He wanted to keep me out of the hands of the authorities, he didn't want me rewired. But he miscalculated, and the sentence was longer than he thought. When he found me again, I'd become a real junkie whore, hooked on heroin, hating the greyness of real life, hating what was left available online even more. He tried again, he was so patient, he loved me, and I broke his heart so many times. He brought me here. I was almost dead from withdrawal, mad with depression. He did the only thing he knew; he hooked me up. But he did it differently this time, so they would never find us."
"Hooked you up to what?" asked Otto.
Marita smiled. "He was so clever. To the Reality Realms, of course. Not the old one I used to love so much, that was gone. He made a whole world, just for me. He hid it so carefully, a happy place full of life and love, and while I was in there he watched over me, protected and cared for my body out here. He tried to bring me out over and again, but I always wanted to get right back in."
"I never understand Grid addicts. Far better to live a real life that means something," said Lehmann.
"You are a man who is not really a man any more, and you are a soldier, you live a life of adventure others can only get online. And I am an addict. It is a sickness, not a preference." She spat the words out as if they were poison.
Careful, thought Otto on MT, she's unstable.
"You are out now. What happened?" said Valdaire, again waiting through the pause of translation.
"I will show you." She stood, and beckoned them to follow. They left the kitchen and went further along a corridor, to a room that hummed with power generation and the subtle work of machines. Two immersion couches took up much of the space, next to a wall of blank-faced computers. Real immersion couches, with proper vintage medical tech, not like the improvised set-up Valdaire had used to enter Reality 36.
A shrunken figure lay on one of the couches, a v-jack askew on dirty blonde hair, skin brown and shrivelled, lips drawn back in the hard grin of death, eyes small in their sockets. One hand clutched protectively to its chest, holding a dirty blanket in place.
"My brother died. He became sick. He was so good at making sure we were not detected here, and getting us enough to eat, but he could never take care of his health. Mama scolded him for it when he was little, not eating the right food, not wearing his hat and gloves in the cold…" She trailed off. "It was Christmas Flu. A year ago. When he came to get me, he was already very sick. He could not bring me out on his own. He had only enough strength to lie down next to me and put the v-jack on. He was sure he could wait it out, but by the time he realised he was seriously sick, it was too late. He tried to get me, to help him, but died in there, right in front of me. I came out to find his body. I have never been back."
"And you will not go in again?" said Valdaire.
Marita stared at the corpse of her brother. She was frail and dirty, and so small, thought Otto. "Who knows?" she said. "Giacomo's death may have shocked me out of it. I was selfish, addicts are. I've always known it but I didn't give a damn. The pull of it, it's so strong, to live a life in there, many lives… So much better than life…" She shuddered. "I have left myself a reminder, in case I ever feel the need to go back in.
"I turned the dehumidification equipment up to maximum," said Marita, indicating machinery that Waldo must have installed to protect his computers against the damp. "I didn't want him to rot, my brother who threw his life away for mine. He made me a queen and died for it, my poor, poor Giacomo."
CHAPTER 21
Home Sweet Home
Richards was elsewhere. He felt woozy, and yet more alive than he had felt for some time. He corrected himself: while in his copied human body he had been closer to alive than he'd ever been before. What he felt was more like himself.
He was back at the start of the game.
The house sat on the hill like a squat, eyeless demon. The wood around it had burned back to nothing. A few trees remained as contorted black fingers, a few rhododendrons as deformed ribcages, all else fine ash. The path of quartz skulls leading to the door was covered in a layer of soot. A thin gruel of rain fell, hissing as it hit the ground. It smelt of rotten eggs, and burnt the skin.
Background code crackled through the blasted landscape around Richards, giving flashes of insight to the AI that were gone before he could process them. He could hear the roar of the Grid proper. The ground rumbled, and he looked down at his feet. The path flickered and became transparent, and when it did so he saw the whole of the renegade Reality 37 laid out beneath him in schematic form, twin streams of code warring: k52's silver and aggressive, that comprising the ragged and patched Realm a wounding green. For a moment he felt his true terrifying size and importance; he felt at that precise instant he could step away from this place, back to the safety of the Real and his base unit. Back to being Richards, Class Five AI, away from the sham human he was forced to be here.
And then it was gone, and he was a shabby man dying of blood loss in a finished world. His arm hung by his side. His clothes were soaked red. He felt faint to look at it, and the faintness did not pass. He did not have much time.
He pulled the belt from his macintosh, and tied it as tight as he could about his elbow with his good hand and teeth. His body shook. The blood slowed to a trickle.
The house had changed. Where before there were no windows, now there were black glazed holes that looked down upon Richards with rapacious need. The front door was in place, shut tight.
The sky had been swallowed by the Terror. It spun with strange calm over the house, long streamers of black and grey spiralling from its centre. Through it, in migraine-inducing strobes, Richards could see the firewall separating the Realms from the wider Grid, beyond that the Grid itself.
It felt like the last place in the world.
The ground shook with such violence that Richards staggered. A hideous moan came from the sky. It was several seconds before calm returned.
He took a deep breath, and walked to the front door. He lifted his hand only for it to open noiselessly before he touched it.
He stepped within.
The hallway was a mouldering ruin, finery marred by an allencompassing film of mould. Rats had made their nests in the arms of the collapsing leather sofas by the fireplace, the pictures were a mess of violently coloured fungi, the chandelier lay shattered on the floor. Rippled light danced around the walls, though there was no source for it. It was freezing, but Richards shivered from more than the cold. A blast of wind blew down the hallway, shrieking as it went out the door, knocking his hat awry with clammy fingers. Richards hesitated before proceeding any further, leaning against a filthy wall as his strength leaked from his arm. The front door creaked out a warning and slammed, a coffin-lid bang.
"He's somewhere here," said Richards under his breath. "But where?"
He went to a padded door under the left archway, opposite the fireplace, the kind found in gentlemen's clubs, padded with brass buttons and crimson leather. The brass was tarnished, the leather cracked and flaking. It smelt of old wrongs and broken promises.
Richards pushed at the damp leather. The door squeaked open.
He went within. A fire burned in the grate; a quick thing, its tongues probing the edges of its confinement, searching for a way out. Velvet wallpaper had covered the walls, and bookcases lined them. But now the former hung ragged as skin from a corpse, and the latter's leaded glass was cracked and sagged outward. Piles of papers and books, black with damp, lay scattered about the floor. The air was rich with imperial decay.
In front of the fire stood an overstuffed sofa, its back draped with an a
ntimacassar of ancient vintage. Upon the sofa, book open upon its lap, sat a skeleton in reading cap and smoking jacket. Richards approached it quietly. It was long dead.
Despite the dampness of the room it was stiflingly hot. Richards hurriedly glanced about, searching by the dancing light of the fire. All the books were on the floor; the cases were empty. Richards picked one up and it disintegrated into mush, smearing his fingers with lost knowledge.
He closed the door with a click behind him and returned to the hallway. A burst of maniacal laughter sounded from somewhere in the bowels of the house.
Richards sighed, and considered what he would do next. Water dripped steadily from the ceiling: plash, plash, plash. The house groaned. Another wave of faintness passed over him. He forced himself on. There were two more doors on the ground floor, both under the stairwell balcony at the rear of the room. He picked the left.
This door opened upon a more modest part of the house: a stone-flagged corridor with two further doorways. One, at the far end, was sealed by a door of heavy, studded wood; the other, halfway down the lefthand wall, was empty, and it was here he went first. He went down a low step into a dusty scullery, two stone sinks against the wall adorned with brass taps, otherwise empty. A further door opened out into a large kitchen. A big fireplace occupied one wall, filled by a flaking range, a long pine table in front of it. In the far corner a door led outside, ivy creeping around its edges. A broken stoppered jar lay in a pile of salt in front of a smoky window. Two closets were built into the wall, and a large press stood against another. All were mouldering and devoid of content.