Best of British Science Fiction 2016
Page 9
Chloe had not realised she was doing Reuel’s job. She was as thrilled as an old school adventurer; allowed to decorate his own trading canoe. The “natives” had awarded her a place in their social model!
Maintaining any extraordinary belief, in a world of unbelievers, becomes a conspiracy. She hadn’t expected anyone to break ranks (although Jun had come close). But she was all the more puzzled that she’d been accepted by the team at all. Why had they let her in?
She resigned herself to the isolation. Documenting her own interaction with Pevay was a fascinating challenge, in itself. By day (gaming outside daylight hours was against house rules) they went hunting. By night she worked on the data, which was no longer one-sided. Somebody had quietly decided to give her access to the house’s DW NPC files: a privilege Chloe equally quietly accepted. She analysed the material obsessively; she invented new filters, and still she wasn’t sure. Was she being hazed by these cunning IT freaks? Or was what she saw real? She couldn’t decide. But she was loving the investigation.
Apart from once, when she was detailed to join a groceries run in Matt Warks’s van, she only encountered the gamers if she happened to be in the kitchen when someone else came foraging. Aileen met her by the coffee machine, and congratulated her on settling in so well. Chloe remembered what Sol had said about Aileen becoming her greatest fan. “It’s like you’ve always been here. You understand us, and it’s great.”
Soon after this vestigial conversation she was invited to join a live sortie. She’d been hoping this might happen, having noticed the “any DW gamers” catch-all clause in her permission to publish: but she went to the Rumpus Room feeling nervous as all hell.
Reuel, Aileen and Sol shook her warmly by the hand.
Warks, Jun and Josie nodded, keeping their distance.
Then Aileen gave Chloe a hug, and presented her with the spare Box (which had disappeared from Chloe’s room the night before, when she was absent foraging for supper). It was newly embellished with a pattern of coiling leafy fronds.
“Chloe means green shoots,” explained Aileen, shyly. “D’you like it?”
“I love it,” said Chloe. And she truly was thrilled.
“Be cool,” said Reuel, uneasily. “Real soldiers try to stay alive.”
Chloe didn’t get a chance to embarrass the team with her excess enthusiasm. The mission went horribly wrong, almost at once. They were in the Amazon Basin, with a Frag and Military combined force called “The Allies”: defending the land rights of an Indigenous People. Plans had been leaked, The Allies were overwhelmed. The Empire raiders counted enormous coup and vacated the scene; it was all over inside an hour.
Her brain still numbed by the hammer, hammer, hammer of artillery fire, Chloe blundered about, in the silence after battle, without having fired a shot: unable to make sense of the torrent of recriminations on her sidebar. She ran into someone escorting a roped-up straggle of Indigenous Non-Combatants – and recognised the jousting spike and the samite sleeve. She’d been sure that romantic helm was Reuel’s, but it was the Battle ID of Josie Nicks; or “Lete the Shaman”.
“What are you doing with the Non-Coms, Lete?” asked Chloe.
“Taking them to the Allied Commander for questioning. They might know something.”
“Don’t do that!”
“Nah, you’re right. I can’t be bothered. Someone else can pick them up.” Methodically, Josie shot the non-combatants’ knees out, and walked away. Chloe stared at the screaming heap of limbs and blood. Josie’s victims all had the glowing outline. They were the avatars of human gamers, and seemed to be in real agony.
She ran after Josie. “Hey! Did you know they were real people?”
“Course I did. Non-Coms can be sneaky bastards, prisoners are a nuisance, and it was fun. What’s your problem?” Josie flopped down by a giant broken stump. “You know who I am, Chloe. You interviewed me. A female geek making a name in the industry is judged all the time. I need to be seen to be nasty: and this is the way I relax. Okay?”
She took out her bag of bones and tossed them idly.
“Was it you who convinced the team to let me stay?” asked Chloe. “I’ve been wondering. I know it wasn’t Reuel, and you’re the shaman–”
Josie, looking so furious Chloe feared for her own kneecaps, swept up the bones and jumped to her feet. “No, it wasn’t.” she snarled. “You’re breaching etiquette, Corporate spook. Leave me alone. Find the quick way home and I hope it’s messy.”
Chloe didn’t find the quick way home. There was nobody around to kill her, and suicide, she knew, was frowned upon. She drifted on, avoiding unexploded ordnance, heaped bodies and random severed limbs, until Reuel found her. His helmet decoration was the dinosaur crest. Which made sense; sort of. Minimum effort. He offered her a fat green stogie.
“Lete told me you were upset. Don’t be, Greenshoot. Guys who take the Non-Com option know what they want from the game, and they do us all a favour. I admire them.”
“I don’t understand,” said Chloe. “The whole thing. Look at this, this awful place—”
“Yeah,” sighed Reuel. “Non-fantastic war-gaming is hell. It’s kind of an expiation. Like, we play the bad stuff, but we don’t sugar it.” He’d said the same in his interview. “But hey, I have incredible good news. I was waiting for a chance to tell you in the map, because this is special. Pevay’s going to open a portal!”
“A portal?”
“Into his home world dimension. And I’m going to pass through it!”
The Second Law
The house felt sullen. If the team was celebrating Reuel’s news they were very quiet about it, and Chloe wasn’t invited to share. Maybe she was thought to have jinxed the Amazon Basin event? Or maybe she was being paranoid. She once caught Jun in the kitchen and he silently, poker-faced, made her a cup of tea, but she didn’t dare to ask him how he felt. She finally asked Aileen, who had started messaging her, calling her Greenshoot.
A wounded silence was the only answer.
Chloe started prowling at night again: no longer looking for company, just desperate for a change from her four walls. She couldn’t leave the building in case she missed something, but she needed to think, and pacing helped.
The Darkening World subculture was going crazy. Offers from fans and fruitcakes eager to take Reuel’s place were pouring in. A South Korean woman insisted her son, suffering from an incurable motor neurone disease, would be cured by a trip to another dimension, and pleaded for Reuel to make way. (And pay their air fares). DW sceptics jeered in abusive glee: hoping Reuel would come back as a heap of bloody, inside-out guts. True believers who hadn’t been singled out for glory insisted their alien NPCs knew nothing about this “portal”, and Reuel was a fantasising, attention-seeking loser–
Chloe had no terms for comparison. She’d had no contact with any “alien NPC” other than Pevay. She hadn’t interviewed anyone except her housemates – an exercise that had not been a great success. Her choices had been limited from the start. She’d had to find a game house within reach: she was partly financing herself and couldn’t pay huge airfares. And the players had to speak either English or Spanish–
But how would you know, anyway? How could you tell if you were talking to a “different” DW alien? An NPC is an avatar controlled by the game: code on a server. Anyone who controlled Pevay could have a whole wardrobe of DW avatars. All over the world, interacting with multiple gamers, yet all with the same “alien sentient” source–
It made her head spin.
The Darkening World house was haunted.
The hunter’s prey had become the hunter. Ancestors and elders looked on; offering no protection . . . She spun around and there was Pevay, cut and pasted on the shadows. He turned and led her, his footfalls making no sound, to a dark corner opposite the door to Reuel’s office.
Fox-walking again, she thought. “Why are you following me?” she asked.
“Why do you walk around the house at night?”
“I’m . . . uneasy. Someone’s betraying them, you know. Is it Josie?”
“No, it’s Matt Warks.”
His eyes gleamed. She thought of the eighth person on the beach. Her persistent illusion (recorded in her notes) that there were seven players, not six, living in this game house–
“Oh, right. I decided he was too obvious.”
“Gamers can be obtuse. They tend to believe what they’re told, and ignore what they are not told. It’s a trait many kinds of people share, Chloe.”
“Since we’re talking, what do players call this game, where you come from?”
“Darkening World, of course.”
She noticed he’d dropped the story that he didn’t remember his other life. “But how do they understand what that means? On your planet?”
“Easily, I assure you. Any sufficiently advanced technology–”
“Is indistinguishable from magic. Yeah, I know that one. Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law.”
“I was speaking. Any sufficiently advanced technology destroys its environment.”
Chloe’s spine had started tingling all the way up to her ears.
“There is a Second Law,” added Pevay. “About heat. The same problem, same limits, for my world and yours.”
“Always about heat,” whispered Chloe. “I know that one too. Our peoples should get together.”
The silence that followed was electric. Chloe had no idea where this was going–
“Chloe, when next we meet in the map, we’re going after Enamel 27.”
Fine, she thought. Back to the gameplay. Enough heavy lifting for now.
“Twenty-Seven,” she repeated. This notorious Enamel was rated practically impossible to obtain, on the DW message boards. “Okay, if you say so. Am I ready?”
“With me beside you, yes.”
“Fantastic. Pevay, are you really going to ‘open a portal’? What does that even mean?”
But he’d gone.
She was back in her room before she realised he’d led her to one of the few and tiny blind spots in house security’s surveillance. Their conversation had been off the Warks record.
The Bar-Headed Geese
Logging on from her bunk had worried Chloe at first. She was afraid she’d break something, or run into walls and knock herself unconscious. She was used to it now: she could set the Box to limit her range of real movement. She stood on the shore of a lake, a vast silver puddle, shimmering on a dry plain among huge, naked hills. Her Box told her Pevay was near, but all she could see was a whole lot of birds. All she could hear was a gaggle, gaggle, gaggle of convivial honking. Her eye level was strange, and she’d been deprived of audible speech: she only had her radio link.
The birds must be geese. They were pearly grey, with an elegant pattern of black stripes on their neat little heads. They seemed friendly: not about to attack her for being an outsider, like the vicious troupe of langur monkeys she’d been forced to join, to get the 18th jewel–
The geese rose, in one massed storm of wings. Chloe pushed on the downstroke: tumbled, struggled and found her rhythm in a cacophony of high-powered gunshot. She pushed and pushed until the desert was far below; and her success was glorious.
Her Box told her she’d attained the advanced skill Migrating Goose.
The 27th Enamel was the back-breaker. You got one shot. If you made a second attempt the jewel wouldn’t be there. Chloe’d had plenty of time to regret her eager signing of that contract, but really it made no difference. If she failed to collect all 56 Enamels, and the gamers insisted she couldn’t publish, she’d still have learned a lot. Actually she was glad she was trying for the 27th. It would be so amazing if she made it, and she had nothing to fear. After many hours of absurd daring and insane patience, she’d won 13 Enamels so far. There were plenty more. She could go on pursuing her sidequest for months; for another year, for as long as Pevay was willing to be her guide. That dratted contract said so! Living in the moment, she pushed on the downstroke, folded on the upstroke, and the crumpled map of the high desert flew away beneath her.
Halfway across the ravaged Himalaya; maybe somewhere close to the eroded, ruined valley of Shangri-La, Pevay prompted her to lose altitude. She followed him, spiralling down. Her Box cut out for a moment: then they stood on turf in their human forms, on a precarious spur of rock, surrounded by staggering, naked, snow-streaked heights; like two window-cleaners on a tiny raft above Manhattan. A small grey stupa sat on the green spur.
The flight had been a physical feat of endurance, not just a game-feat. Chloe’s health was nearly spent and her head was spinning. The crucial questions she’d planned to ask on this trip, which might be the last before the portal, had slipped out of her grasp–
“Pevay. You told the team to let me stay, didn’t you? You advised them to give me a sidequest?”
“My role is to offer advice, Chloe.”
“I think you wanted to talk – to someone other than a gamer. You could be anyone, couldn’t you? You could be an animal. You can take any shape, can’t you?”
“Of course, in the game. So can you; Chloe.”
“If Africa’s the Greater Southern Continent, what do you call South America, in Darkening World?”
“The Lesser Southern Continent?” suggested Pevay, patiently.
Some of Chloe’s dearest friends were Colombian, including two of her grandparents. She took offence. “Huh. That’s garbage. That’s insulting. On what grounds, ‘Lesser’?”
“Land area? Population? Number of nations? Of major cities? It’s only a game, Chloe.”
“Oh yeah, dodging responsibility. I think you should say ‘I’m only a game’!”
“Take the jewel.”
Pevay was smiling. There’d be time to discuss what she’d just let slip when she wasn’t dizzy with fatigue. The 27th Enamel shone in the cupped palms of a cross-legged stone goddess, atop of the stupa mound. She had no idea what kind of final challenge she faced: might as well just go for it. Armed and dangerous, worn out and not nearly dangerous enough, she bowed to the stupa, and claimed the jewel. Immediately all hell broke loose.
She was knee-deep in Enamels. They poured out of the sky.
“No!” yelled Chloe, appalled. “NO!!! PEVAY! You sneaky BASTARD!”
“The great hero who secures
Enamel 27,” said her guide. “Has earned all the rest. Congratulations. Your quest is complete and my work is done.”
He vanished. He’d warned her she’d be picking up the jewels in handfuls.
Chloe took off the Box and returned to her shabby bunk: exultant and heartbroken. The Enamels quest was over too soon and she had loved it. She didn’t realise the full horror of what Pevay had done until the next day, when the team told her her stay was over.
The portal would be opened without her.
The 56 Enamels
A year later, long before she’d finished working on her Darkening World paper, Reuel messaged Chloe out of the blue. He was in town, and wanted to talk about old times. They met in a coffee bar, in the city where Chloe had a job at a decent university. Reuel was looking well. He didn’t have pens in his hair. He wore a suit; he was working as an actuary.
“So what happened in the end?” said Chloe. “I mean, obviously I know you didn’t end up stranded on Planet Zog. You came home safe. But what was it like, on the great day?”
Aileen had kept in touch, but Chloe had never had a full account. Recently, when she’d checked the Darkening World message boards, the “alien NPCs” strand seemed to have faded away.
“It’s so cool that you followed the story”, said Reuel. “You were a great guest. Okay, what happened was this.” He frowned, as if trying to recall the details of something he’d left far behind; just for Chloe’s sake. “Pevay opened the portal. I passed through; I returned. I don’t remember a thing about the other place.”
“You don’t remember. Wow. Just like Pevay. He didn’t remember either.”
Reuel shrugged. “I went to wherever Pevay comes from and I came back. My Box hadn’t recorded anything. I didn’t remember: and that’s all.”
“Were you really disappointed?”
“No,” he said firmly. “It’s how things were meant to be.”