Five Minds

by Guy Morpuss

  Normally I enjoy uploading, unlike Alex. It’s the sense of slipping into a clean new skin. You are being poured into a familiar body, settling down until you have filled it to the tips of your fingers and toes and the top of your head. I imagine pouring water into a glass, level with the rim but not spilling a drop. Precise. To me it’s a comforting feeling of coming home.

  But not this time.

  I was crumpled on the ground, one arm awkwardly trapped under my body, staring at a wet, black floor. As I sat up I realised that I was in a game booth.

  What? This couldn’t be right.

  Out of habit, I checked the time. I like to see ‘14:00’ roll across my lenses as I wake. It’s a number that feels comfortable. A nice, soft, familiar number to start the day.

  But this time it was wrong.

  12:29?

  That’s not a number I like. I don’t like three – it’s hard, black, spiky. So I don’t like nine either. Three threes. Horrible. And 12:29 was all wrong. It wasn’t a number that I should have been seeing. This was one of Mike’s numbers. Somehow I was in his time.

  What was I doing in the wrong time, and how had I got there? I had no recollection of coming to an arena.

  I didn’t dare to move until 12:29 had become 12:30. Slightly better. I could ignore the three by focusing on the soft numbers around it.

  I struggled to my feet, slipping on the wet floor. There was a message on a screen on the wall.

  Game aborted

  You have ten minutes to leave the booth.

  What did that mean? I had played thousands of games in my time and had never heard of one being aborted. Besides which, I hadn’t played the game. Mike had.

  A shower cubicle opened up in one wall. I had no time for that. I hated the feel of wet clothes on my skin, but I needed to get out of there.

  I opened the door and staggered down the corridor, struggling to make my legs work. Someone said something as I passed through the entrance lobby, but I ignored them and stepped outside.

  I blinked in the harsh sunlight reflecting off a ruined concrete building across the street. Even the sun felt wrong. It was too low in the sky. I shouldn’t have been seeing it like this.

  There was movement to my right. A man in a long white robe, the hem grey with concrete dust, was standing just outside the doors of the arena. He was waving a black book in his right hand.

  ‘It’s time to repent, my friend,’ he said. ‘You may have won the game, but at what price to your soul? The Lord does not approve of this unnatural trade in time. It is a sin to gamble with what the Lord gave you. Your lifespan is preordained and you cannot run from death for ever. You must embrace it when your time comes.’

  I looked at him in bemusement. When I didn’t reply he walked over to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and stared into my eyes. His gaze was strangely hypnotic.

  ‘You do not look well, my friend. Your body may have survived but your spirit is being torn apart. Do not fear death. As our Lord said, the body that is born is perishable, but it is raised up imperishable. It is born in weakness, but raised in power. You are born in a natural body, but raised in a spiritual body. Come with me, my friend. We can help you.’

  His words were soothing. Another time I might have stayed and listened. Not because I believed any of his religious nonsense, but because I liked the rhythm of his voice.

  I needed to be on my own, though. To work out what had happened to us.

  I shrugged off his grip and turned away.

  He let me go. ‘It’s your choice, Brother, but you will be back. You won’t find peace in these dens of iniquity. Remember the Lord is always watching over you.’

  His timing was unfortunate. As he said that a drone sped down the street towards us, paused overhead, studying us, then shot off in another direction. I rather doubted whether it was being driven by the Lord. Besides, unless the Lord could tell me what I was doing in Mike’s time he wasn’t much use to me. What I needed was peace and quiet.

  The nearest motel was two blocks away. It was cheap and run-down, but it would do. It was fully automated, so I didn’t need to speak to anyone to check in, which was good.

  Once I had showered and printed a change of clothes I felt a little better.

  I sat cross-legged on the bed and logged on. First things first, had I got anything from Mike that would explain this?

  There were two messages, but nothing that helped. There was yet another request for us to choose our new body. He was becoming obsessed. Then one saying that he was looking at EliteCorps bodies. That made no sense at all. We couldn’t afford an EliteCorps body.

  I checked where we were: 24.2 years. What? We had been playing cheap games for scraps of time, and had had almost nothing last cycle.

  I backed up through my messages.

  There were two from Alex. The first complaining about Sierra – again. I sympathised. What she had done to him was unforgiveable. But when you are going to be living with someone for the next hundred years forgiveness is the only option. He was still cross with me for telling him that after Montreal. Their constant bickering was a pain.

  Alex’s second message was more positive, telling us that he had won 2.69 years. Which was a good win, but didn’t explain how we had got to more than twenty-four years.

  Then there was a personal message from Kate to me.

  Ben. I’ve either done something stupid or brilliant. I’m not sure which yet. I’m about to send a group message that tells you how I got us twenty years, but it doesn’t tell the full story. I need you to do a bit of digging.

  I got approached by this andi who said she was trying to get revenge on her husband, and she was offering me twenty years to help. She said she wanted to move her mind into a new body, and needed our help. She seemed a bit highly strung, but it sounded believable and she had the twenty years, so I agreed. We played a game, which she let me win, but she said some crazy things to me. I was tied up and it was all weirdly sexual. I thought I had been scammed and she was going to kill us and take our time. But then she let me win anyway, so it seemed all right. But then I looked for her body and she was gone. I don’t know if she lived. Or how she lived since we have her time.

  She was really creepy. Even more than most andis. And the thing is, I had to give her some admin access to make this work. I am worried she might have been into places she shouldn’t have.

  Can you take a look for her round the park? See if you can find her, and who she is, or was? I don’t want the others to know about this unless they have to. But I’m scared we haven’t seen the last of her. Now we’ve got so much time we should get out of the park as soon as we can.

  See the attached file for her details.

  Cheers, Kate.

  So that explained the twenty-four years. But in answering one problem it presented me with another. Weighing it up, I could understand why Kate had done what she had in return for twenty years. It would have made sense to her, but it was a risk that I would never have taken. The bold die young. The whole point of being a schizo is not to die young.

  And, unlike the white-robed evangelist at the arena, I didn’t believe that the Lord would be raising me up into a spiritual body after I died. I preferred to be the one to choose my next body.

  Kate should never have given up admin access without a full vote. She shouldn’t have changed the system. This was annoying. I’d been concerned about coming to the death park. The thing that had made me vote yes was the thought of playing the latest games in the best arenas. Now that we were here I didn’t want to get distracted from that. So I wasn’t keen on leaving either, despite the time we now had in hand.

  I read Kate’s group message but it didn’t tell me anything new.

  There was nothing more from anyone. Mike must have done his challenge, but there was no message from him saying what had happened, nor any record of it. If he had won then we would have more than 24.2 years now.

  But if he had died we would all have ended up in stasis, and
I wouldn’t have woken in the park. Those were the rules. But if he had lived what was I doing in his time? I checked again: 13:32 – another number that wasn’t mine. Too many threes. I shuddered. I shouldn’t have been awake for another twenty-eight minutes. Had Kate, or Mike, or this mysterious andi somehow screwed with the cycle?

  There were some dark places I could have gone to watch Mike’s game live. But, given the harsh penalties, no one would have been stupid enough to save a copy.

  I sat back and breathed out heavily. Where to start?

  Alex’s game appeared irrelevant to events. All the odd things that had happened had been after Alex had dropped out. The only lead I had was Kate’s mysterious andi.

  I opened the file.

  Amy Bird, a sixty-seven-year-old andi. So thirteen years left to live. She also had 7.5 years that she had earned somewhere. Her visual age was around forty, and she was pretty in a slightly nerdy way. There was no record of her having played any games in the park, but since most games are private that didn’t mean much.

  I started with a general search. She was showing as alive, which made no sense at all. Kate said that she had beaten the andi in a game, and we had clearly taken all her time. So how was she still alive, and where was she?

  I toyed with the idea of calling her. If she answered I could find her easily. But that would let her know we were after her. It was better to be cautious at this stage. I’m not big on confrontation.

  I closed my eyes and began to dig deeper. Now I was going to places where I shouldn’t be. Get caught here and I would be looking at some serious time in stasis. But I wasn’t going to get caught. I knew my way round the systems better than those who designed and policed them.

  An hour later I sat up, stretched, and ordered some food from the primitive wall console. My eyes were sore, my lenses blurred. While I waited for my food to print I reflected on what I had learned about Amy Bird.

  She didn’t exist.

  Sure, there was a superficial record that came up for anyone who did a basic search for her. It showed she was what she claimed to be: an andi with a little over thirteen years left, married to Charles Bugard, no children. She had led a thoroughly uneventful life. There was nothing to raise any alarms.

  But it was all an illusion. Beneath that she didn’t exist. All of her records had been created two months ago. Before then there was nothing.

  So what was she?

  It would have been easy enough for someone to send a dandi to deliver a message. But no dandi had AI anywhere near good enough to fool Kate into thinking it was real. And no one would bother to fake a backstory for a dandi. No – there had to be a human mind inside the body.

  I wasn’t panicking – yet – but this was worrying. There aren’t many who can create a false history that stands up to even cursory scrutiny. And most of them work for CGov. What could we have done to get them interested in us? If it wasn’t CGov that was probably worse. Any private individuals who could do this were not going to be operating legally.

  A panel beeped and opened, and my noodles popped out. As I ate I pondered my next move. The official records were getting me nowhere. There were two options left: look for Mike or look for the andi. Visual records are hard to fake. Of the two, Mike would be easier. I didn’t know where we had been overnight, but I could track back to Kate and follow from there. I knew she had played a game that morning.

  By the time my noodle wrappings were in the disposal unit I had a picture of Kate entering an arena in Borth Street at 7:32. She was accompanied by a dark-haired woman, a match for Kate’s photo of Amy Bird. They were talking. She looked real enough. I moved forward. No one entered or left until 9:14, when the door slid open and Bird left, moving fast. Fifteen minutes later Kate followed.

  For someone whom Kate was meant to have killed, the andi looked very much alive.

  Through various cameras I got a disjointed record of Kate walking down Borth Street and entering a locker motel at 9:43.

  At 10:38 Mike emerged, dressed to race. He crossed the street to a diner, where he spent twenty minutes eating; then reappeared and jogged slowly away.

  At 11:22 I caught him entering the arena on Kingston Street where I had woken. This was a top-of-the-range, multi-room arena. A big step up from the dive that Kate had visited earlier. I was about to flick forward when I saw a familiar figure going into the arena after him – Amy Bird, still very much alive.

  Then nothing until 12:00, when the white-robed evangelist took his place outside the door. Bird emerged at 12:30, talking to a woman I had not seen before. They were moving fast, and brushed past the evangelist, disappearing up the street.

  Five minutes later I appeared, looking somewhat worse for wear, befuddled by my confrontation with the Lord’s apostle. The circle was complete.

  I tried to find the drone that had buzzed us in the street. Nothing. I’d assumed it was ParkGov security, so it should have been easy enough for me to trace. ParkGov had been running a drone a few blocks away at the time, but nothing matching the one I’d seen. Why would anyone be running private drones round the park? Odd.

  So that was it for Mike. He went into the arena, he ran a race, but he never left. I was the one who did. Yet somehow we weren’t dead, and hadn’t lost our time.

  I backtracked, and started a visual search for Amy Bird.

  I eventually picked her up four days earlier, exiting the door of the Death’s Head, a bar in one of the more run-down parts of the park. She was alone. I backed up. She had entered it twenty minutes earlier.

  She seemed to have made a real effort not to be seen. Or she stayed inside a lot. I didn’t find her again that day.

  She reappeared a day later, once waiting outside an arena, a second time back at the Death’s Head, entering this time, and exiting after fifteen minutes. That was it until I got back to what I had already seen: her entering the arena with Kate, exiting it alone, and then at the arena where Mike had his race.

  I sat back. There was not a lot to go on. The lack of sightings for Bird was unusual. Somehow she had stayed hidden despite being in the confines of a death park. Was it possible that someone was deleting sightings of her, or faking them, or both? That would be difficult.

  I dug into the data behind the videos. It all looked real. And apart from me, no one had viewed any of the videos of Bird outside the Death’s Head. The ones where she was with Kate also looked real enough.

  Although there was a difference. The video of Kate and Bird at Borth Street had been viewed 104 times since that morning. But the video of Bird leaving the arena, on her own, hadn’t been viewed by anyone other than me. I quickly flicked through the others. The same pattern continued. Kate leaving the arena had been viewed 108 times. My staggering out of Kingston Street after Mike’s game, 112. Bird leaving five minutes before me, zero views.

  Were we being watched? Why by so many people? I tried to track back to see who they were, but came up against a wall that was going to take much more time than I had to break down.

  It was 17:14. This had taken far longer than expected. What could I usefully do? Someone needed to visit the Death’s Head and try to find out what Bird had been doing there. Andis don’t need to drink, and seldom have alcohol. The type of people who choose to be andis don’t like losing control. Besides, who goes to a bar to drink on their own for twenty minutes? Other than Sierra, perhaps. Bird must have met someone there.

  I didn’t have time to visit the bar myself. Could I trust Sierra to do it? Or wait for Alex, or even Kate? But this was urgent. We needed to find out what had happened to Mike. There were too many odd things going on.

  I composed a few quick messages.

  Mike, I haven’t heard from you since your race, and something has gone badly wrong. I woke in a game booth during your cycle. Let me (and the others) know what is happening asap, Ben.

  All. This is weird. Something has happened to Mike. I haven’t heard from him since his race, and I woke during his time. This isn’t right. If
he messaged any of you, let the rest of us know asap. Something feels wrong. There’s lots of strange things going on. B.

  Kate, everything is wrong today. I don’t like it. I woke during Mike’s time, in a game booth. I haven’t heard from Mike. I have done some digging. The last I can find of Mike he was entering the arena for his race followed shortly after by your andi, Amy Bird. She definitely isn’t dead. And officially she didn’t exist until two months ago. She looks real, but all her records are faked. I don’t know what went on in the arena with Mike but the next thing I know is that I am uploading ninety-one minutes early. I don’t like that. Your twenty years is going to come at a price. I don’t have time to follow up the leads on the andi. I am going to have to get Sierra to do it. I know she’s unreliable, but we don’t have a choice. I’ll ask her to let you know what she finds. Tell me next cycle where you get to. Hopefully by then this will all have blown over, and Mike will be back in touch. We need to get everything back to normal again. I don’t like all this change. I woke at 12:29! It was horrible. I’ve set up an alert so that we’ll be told if Bird is detected in the park again. Keep it to yourself – it’s not entirely legal … Ben.

  Sierra. This is important. I have made this highest priority so read it before you do anything else.

  Things are happening that I don’t understand. Kate may have got scammed by some andi and Mike has disappeared. I have run out of time. I need you to go to a bar called the Death’s Head and find out what you can about this andi [file attached]. She calls herself Amy Bird. She’s the one Kate got the twenty years from, so she ought to be dead but isn’t. She’s been hanging round that bar quite a lot, so maybe someone knows her there.

  Whatever you find out let Kate know.

  Please take this seriously. I think Mike might have been mindwiped. Any one of us could be next. IT COULD BE YOU NEXT, SIERRA! Even if you don’t care about helping the rest of us, do this for yourself. Ben.

  Finally, because I didn’t trust Sierra to do anything, I sent Alex a copy of my messages and a picture of the woman I had seen leaving the arena with Amy Bird. I didn’t have time this cycle to track her myself, but maybe Alex could find her.