Keeping It Real

by Justina Robson

  After a minute Lila said, “There may be an old faultline running through the east end of town. A Bomb fault. Malachi found it. And somebody’s recording everything in that studio. I put a watcher on it. But I doubt anyone will come to collect. I tripped a telltale.”

  Sarasilien reacted as though he hadn’t heard her. “This Game with Zal, whatever it is, must be brought to an end. If these papers are correct, or even if the people behind them think they are correct whether or not this spell is what they claim, then the Game will get in the way of you doing your duty, both of protecting him and protecting the interests of Otopia, So whatever it is, and whatever the stakes are, and however it must be finished—finish it.”

  Lila bit her lip in silence. Inwardly she rejected his idea as though he’d suggested she drink poison. That resentment was the effect of the Game, she knew, though that didn’t make it any easier to resist.

  The power of Games derived from wild magic which could manifest in any time at any place, even in Otopia. A Game was made when two players, at least one of them an aetheric Adept, came into conflict of some kind within the influence of wild magic—the raw aether produced by the I-space vacuums—which trickled through the space-times of the various realms as water trickles through gaps in the rocks of a streambed. In Otopia raw aether was almost undetectable to humans, being in its least manifest form, and so they were particularly vulnerable to it and often snared, though two humans together, being not Adept but Inept, never formed Games.

  Most Games were like traps, some small enough to step right out of on the instant when you realised they were on, and others big and labyrinthine enough that the hapless victim would never find their way free. You might end up in a duel, or promising away your worldly goods, or falling in love, or slaved to a duty not of your own choosing, depending on what situation you were in when the wild magic curled around the deepest and darkest motivations of your mind. Games waited in moments of unacknowledged intent and personal conflict, especially when a person desired something but denied the desire. Wild magic wanted to manifest secrets, to bring the hidden into the world.

  All the Games so made had their rules of course, be they known or unknown to the players, and once these were tacitly accepted—once a person made any move at all which confirmed their awareness of one of these rules or their awareness that a Game was on—then they were committed to become a player, and must play until the Game was ended by Victory, Defeat or Death.

  The Great Otopian Downswing of 2020, in which the economy had almost collapsed, had resulted from a faery cartel using Games to dupe wealthy human business owners into selling their companies literally for songs. The fraudulent use of Gaming was then made illegal, resulting in a rash of lawsuits in which losing or bound players sought to sue for damages against their co-Gamers (though this did not release them from the Games they were caught up in). Finally, due to the lawyers becoming subject to Games which required them to lose their cases and to a complete inability to enforce payments awarded, all legal intervention had been abandoned and once more it was Player Beware. Gaming had become the subject of science and was studied in Otopian Universities, though it was practised by the elves, the fey and the demons more like an art.

  One feature that was proven was that the rules were determined by the Opener’s intentions, and thus so were the conditions of victory and loss. It was not always clear who the Opener was… Lila did not know whether she had started this Game or whether Zal had, only that elves and humans often fell into them whether they liked it or not. Elves had the upper hand most of the time and enjoyed winning. They liked to play though they denied liking it, unlike demons who were crazy about Games. Humans mostly lost, but the Game magic made both sides do their damnedest to win. Sometimes at all costs. You could get murder transformed to manslaughter with Game pleas, easy.

  This all ran through her mind in the single moment of her annoyance and rebellion.

  Sarasilien caught her arm as she stood up. He was close to her and his andalune stung her sharply with the force of his will; a biting cold grip of compulsion, a taste of acid. “End it Lila. Even if you have to lose.”

  She glared at him and tried to pull away, but he didn’t let her. The look he gave her made her sure that he pretty much understood all that losing might entail, and that it was very little short of her life. She had almost lost that before by playing a deadly Game with elves, and he had freed her from it. Now she must free herself, and he was not about to give her any more assistance until she did.

  “I understand,” she said finally and he let her go. The brief magic that had bound them flared away, silvering mist to either side. Her spirits sank.

  “We all know how it feels to lose,” Sarasilien said, although his words were no apology for winning this time.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lila signed out her heavy armour from the Incon arsenal and loaded it into a backpack. She stowed her additional weapons and other items on her vest and in her bike bags. The armourer, a friendly ex-SAS officer, watched her strip and check each of her guns and their ammunition.

  “Expecting trouble?”

  “My assassination has turned into a likely kidnapping, I think,” she said. It was difficult to talk or think because of the reprimand ringing in her ears. Well deserved, she felt, but that made it worse. “I’ve requested more field support, but I don’t think I’ll be able to persuade my clients to do the smart thing and cancel their public appearances, so it’s all looking somewhat fifty-fifty.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Who?” Lila saw the soldier nod his head in the direction of Sarasilien’s rooms and the Forensics Unit. Clearly from his face he wasn’t so sure. She nodded.

  “Good. Got everything you want?”

  “I can’t carry any more,” Lila admitted. “Who knows whether any of this will count anyway?”

  “You can stop them with this.” The sergeant patted her pack, fifty pounds heavier. “Who cares if they die or not, hey?”

  “Yeah.” Lila gave him a tough grin—at least, she hoped that’s what it was. He was trying to show solidarity with her situation, she assumed, but she’d have liked him a lot more if he’d never made the remark. She shouldered the pack and bags on her own, and they were very heavy so that it was all she could do not to stagger. The fleshy parts of her shoulders instantly hurt with the pressure of the straps. “Have a great day, Sarge.”

  “Sir, yes sir,” he said, giving her a friendly salute.

  Lila let her discomfort show after she’d rounded the corner. She still couldn’t get used to outranking people twice her age, and it was weird commanding his respect when she’d lost Sarasilien’s five minutes earlier.

  The last thing she had to do was check in with her support crew: the medics and engineers who had built her as their first prototype cyborg officer. In the laboratories on the lowest level of HQ she downloaded reports and they uploaded new programs. Experts in everything from computing to dentistry checked the progress of the way that she and the machine were assimilating one another.

  “Got to do something about this. Should get some bushings to fit onto the skeleton to take these kinds of loads directly,” one cybernetics technician said, as they looked over the bruises on her shoulders. “Can you activate the gauntlet systems, Lila? Good. Again?”

  Lila held out both arms and watched her fingers, thumbs, palms, wrists and forearms break up and expand into a hundred different functional devices; a silent, silver storm of motion that was a blur even to her boosted vision. Fanned out they looked a little comical, like the ultimate Swiss army knife. Like this they didn’t seem a part of her at all, and she was able to look at them dispassionately.

  They did the same with her legs and tested the heavy armour connections and the jet propulsion systems in her lower legs and feet. Mostly the technicians didn’t seem to notice that Lila had flesh or a head. They worked on their special little bit of her and muttered amongst themselves. She rather preferred that to
the physiotherapist’s intensive attentions and warm conversation.

  “You’re overdoing it on the cross-country,” said the medical doctor, gently assessing the state of the red tissue where Lila’s muscle and skin fused with the prosthetics engineered biosynthetics and metals. “You’re accelerating the rate of carbon uptake into your bone mass. We’re risking them getting too brittle unless we slow the crystallisation down. The muscle and tendon cells aren’t getting enough time to heal either. Every time you push them they’re going to keep tearing because these load stresses are still higher than they can adapt to. It’s not bad, but the armour power is always going to give you the illusion you’re stronger than your body can take. You’ll break yourself in bits if you’re not careful.”

  “Yeah,” Lila said, having heard it all before. She turned over, checking the time. “Can we speed this up? I have to go.”

  “As soon as Doctor Williams says you can,” said Dr Williams, Lila’s psych, who had been observing at a distance for the duration of the testing, but had now come to Lila’s side. She made the last of some notes with a fountain pen on an old-fashioned clipboard before setting it down. Williams observed the room in an almost bored fashion until the other techs had gone and the two of them were alone. Lila gave the white-haired old woman a smile and began to get dressed.

  “I’m fine,” Lila said.

  “Not what I hear.” Williams sat down beside her on the side of the table, hands in the pockets of her lab coat.

  “Someone with pointy ears been talking to you?” Lila felt bad, and worse that it was coming straight out of her mouth. She sucked a breath in between her teeth. “I mean Special Agent Sarasilien.”

  “He expressed his concern.”

  Williams’ observation, the way she spoke as Lila continued dressing, made Lila acutely aware of her underclothes and the way she put them on. She wanted to hide herself as fast as she could, feeling that her body gave her away all the time and that everyone here seemed to think they had a right to take an inspection on anything they wanted.

  “Everything still regulation and organised. Routines?” Williams asked, for all the world like a grandmother asking whether or not she brushed her teeth each night.

  “I like my routines. They keep everything working,” Lila said, starting to pull on her trousers but deciding that she’d be better wearing the heavy greaves and armoured foot coverings of her active defense gear, rather than trying to carry it all, She began to put them on instead, feeling their additions of strength and power expand her awareness, making her lower legs feel invulnerable, like they were in seven league boots.

  “Okay. So everything’s perfect.” The old woman’s voice dripped with irony. “Did you do what we agreed and take time for yourself? Did you go and get clothes that are not…”

  “I have suits. Proper suits. Designer labels.”

  “Which you wear for work, no doubt”

  “Hello? I am at work twenty-four seven.” Lila glanced at herself in the exam room’s full length mirror and saw an upscaled toy action figure: oversized robot legs, slender silver arms as shiny as stiletto blades, a relatively tiny human torso in a crop top and vest, silver eyes taking almost all warmth from her expression with their harsh statements and the mane of red hair overcompensating for it, too sexy, too West Coast; a doll in a soldier’s clothing. “I had my hair done for this job. All Hollywood. Look, see?” Her hair was dusty, messy, unkempt in spite of the expensive cut.

  “You need another trip to the salon,” Williams said drily. She plucked at Lila’s vest. “You know what I’m gonna say.”

  “And you know that I think it could wait until this job is finished. Yes, I am still a young woman, despite having no arms and legs to call my own, and I don’t think I despise my body any more than those girls down at Glory Beach who diet and pop pills and have surgery to look like faeries and glimms so they get their pictures on the pornopops. So?”

  “Start the talking, or I start signing you off the case,” Williams suggested. “Your advocate down the hall here seems to think there’s something you’re not telling him, and he hinted that it was sexual in nature, so he understood you didn’t want to discuss it with him, but he thinks you should discuss it with someone, and given the fragile status of you, Lila, not as a project and not as an officer, but you personally girl, I think he’s dead right.”

  Lila couldn’t imagine Sarasilien hinting sexual. She didn’t want to. “My personal life is none of your business.” Lila locked her angry gaze on the gentle, amused expression of the psychiatrist and found herself cracking into a laugh. It was a little hysterical.

  “I hear that all the time,” Williams confided, and patted Lila on the knee. “Put the rest of all that hardware on and give me a clue.”

  Lila told her about the Game. “I don’t know if it is—what you said.”

  “Come on Lila! Can’t you even say the word?”

  Lila hung her head and sat back. The table creaked ominously and she had to stand up again before it broke with her weight. Say that the Game was certainly based on a sexual forfeit? The embarrassment made her feel sick. It would have been like being one of those fan girls, worse, because she was supposed to be beyond and above all that teenage, physical stuff. “No, I don’t think so.”

  The doctor shook her head and shrugged. “Okay. That was reasonably honest at least. I’ll let you carry on, unless you’d rather I didn’t. Do you want me to sign you off?”

  Lila straightened and thought about it. As soon as she imagined it, two conflicting feelings came to her. One was profound relief and longing. The other was resentment at the notion she could quit. Her self-doubts were very strong and having Williams offer her the easy way out only made her more aware of them. “No. I can do it.”

  “You’re not thinking that you’re the only one that can? Just because the NSA built you for the price of half an army doesn’t mean you have to take on everything for them.”

  “No. It’s like what you’d call—something I have to do. For me. And for the rest of it.” Lila tried to mean it, but there was a knot of resistance in her stomach that made her feel nauseous as she did so.

  “Okay.” Williams stood up. “You said the magic words of responsibility and autonomy, so you can go. But I want you to carry on with our program just as much as you’re doing with the easy physical stuff, hmm?” She glanced at the heavy bag of ammunition. “If I find you’re stiffing me with a line you’ll be back here in rehab for six months.”

  “I’ll call you,” Lila said, backing away before she had time to change her mind.

  It was a relief to get out of the building. Lila wove through the rush hour and arrived at Solomon’s Folly at dusk to find the driveway beside the house full of cars. Besides the Doublesafe guard on the door a huge scarlet-skinned demon with impressive horns stood outside, smoking. Lila recognised a fellow bodyguard by his evident relief at having time off for doorstep duty, and his severe suit. The human guards told her that this retinue had arrived two hours ago, unannounced.

  “We did all the checks we could,” the Doublesafe guard said and the demon bodyguard bared his teeth and growled, indicating that it had been a matter of some contention.

  “But you didn’t tell me about it,” Lila snapped.

  “The boss, Jolene, said we wasn’t to. Something about no press.” He wasn’t an Incon agent, only an ordinary Doublesafe employee. Lila ground her teeth and glanced at the bull-faced demon guard over the human’s shoulder. The demon mimed peeling a banana and snorted in the human’s direction, his meaning clear—you hired monkeys.

  Deeper inside the house, on the ground floor where the games rooms and other entertaining areas spread out, Lila found most of the band plus a vast entourage of humans, demons and faeries sprawled amid a scatter of open champagne bottles and half-empty plates. Music was just quiet enough to permit conversation between people next to one another. The house servants moved among them carefully, bringing and taking away. Lila, still ca
rrying her pack and bag, saw Poppy get up and hurry towards her. Eyes and faces turned quickly onto her with this attention and through the aid of her sound filtering she was able to hear everything that was said about her,

  “Who’s that?”

  “What is she wearing?”

  “What’s she doing in here? I thought all the chaff was being left outside.”

  Lila ignored the comments. She put her bags down beside a seated demon and his friends and glanced briefly down at him as he looked her up and down with great interest. He was about to touch the bulk of her leg armour with one scarlet finger.

  Lila put on a stiff British accent, “I don’t think you’re ready for this kind of jelly.” She went back to scanning the room. The finger retreated.

  “Whoo hoo, man!” one of the demon’s friends said. “What the hell?” Which was a kind of demonic approval, but Lila barely heard it. She was looking for Zal, excusing herself until she moved around the corner and saw him and the explanation for the massed courtiers.

  He was standing in close conversation with a female demon in a glittering black bodynet and little else. Her coruscating crimson and black skin glowed and shone with the lustre of a fresh conker. Lila knew her immediately, for her sensuous dimensions, fiery cascade of flame hair and delicately lovely features were plastered over every billboard on The Avenue and in every magazine on the stands. It was Sorcha, queen of pop, and that was why the door demon had looked so familiar—he was on most of the paparazzi snaps that Lila had seen Sorcha in, always there, minding her, staring out of shot.

  Zal’s cool, elfin poise and Sorcha’s vibrant, dynamic energy were complete counterpoints and they were so close and secluded that there could be no doubt as to their intimacy. Lila stopped in her tracks but Zal must have heard her because he lifted his head from where it almost touched Sorcha’s and looked up. Lila was aware of a degree of rubbernecking starting up behind her as the room’s hubbub quieted a little and music became audible over the heavy drumbeat. She wondered if Zal was about to order her out too, and was getting ready to fight over it, when he excused himself and came across to her over the empty margin that he and Sorcha had to themselves.