Reaper

by Janet Edwards

  “She was probably afraid that you’d make a public statement about what happened and turn the whole of Game against her. There’d be no way for her to defend herself, because no one would listen to the word of an unknown doctor against a Founder Player.”

  I gave a startled laugh. “I remember the instructor telling me that no one would listen to the word of an unknown medical cadet against a doctor. Anyway, she’s dealt out her own punishment, so I’m forgetting about her now.”

  “What did the insufferably smug Falcon think of you becoming a Founder Player?”

  “Falcon didn’t even mention it. He was too busy talking about the replays of the fake murder, and complaining about you not flourishing the knife enough.”

  Hawk groaned.

  “I don’t think I mentioned before that Falcon’s mother is a big fan of yours. She named her twins Falcon and Eagle in your honour, but Gina always uses her second name because she thinks Eagle is a silly name for a girl.”

  Hawk gave me a wary look. “I get the impression that you’re especially close to Gina. I hadn’t realized she was Falcon’s twin sister.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Gina finds Falcon just as maddening as the rest of us.” I paused. “I’ve had several calls from my mother too. She used to avoid calling me because I was a reminder of the unpleasant time she spent in the real world when I was born. Now I’m a Founder Player, I seem to make her think of more pleasant things, because she’s calling me every day.”

  “Are you happy about that?”

  “Mostly. It was difficult finding things we could talk about to start with, but then Cassandra said she was going to arrange a big party for me to be formally introduced to all the Founder Players. My mother is helping me plan what to wear. Will you be able take time off from playing bait for the Reaper, and be my partner at the party?”

  “Definitely. I ...”

  An automated voice spoke from somewhere above us. “Player Hawk, resident of Celestius, you have an incoming call from player Hercules, resident of Celestius. Do you accept the call?”

  I saw Hawk hesitating, and shook my head at him. “You can’t seriously be considering talking to Hercules.”

  He pulled a face of despair. “I never know what to do in these situations. I can beat Hercules in a physical fight, but I’m no good at his warped mind games. If I accept his call, then I know he’ll say something that makes me have one of my immature Michael moments. If I reject the call, then I know he’ll start sending messages to other people about me, and that will end up causing trouble too.”

  “Do you accept the call?” repeated the voice.

  Hawk sighed. “Game command. Reject call.”

  “Call rejected,” acknowledged the voice.

  “It’s totally irresponsible of Hercules to cause you problems while you’re trying to trap the Reaper,” I said.

  “Hercules saw the surveillance footage. He heard me tell you that I love you. He blames me for him losing Fleur, so he can’t resist trying to get his revenge by messing up my chances with you.”

  “I don’t understand how you can be so heroic about the big things like chasing the Reaper, but go into a blind panic over Hercules playing childish tricks.”

  “It’s easy to be heroic about battling the Reaper,” said Hawk. “It’s much harder to cope with Hercules sticking verbal pins in me. I’m scared that he’ll keep hitting my weak points, making me show you the worst side of Michael, and eventually you’ll get so sick of me that you go off with someone else.”

  The automated voice spoke again. “Player Jex, resident of Celestius, you have an incoming call from player Hercules, resident of Celestius. Do you accept the call?”

  “I knew it,” said Hawk bitterly. “I wouldn’t talk to him, so now he’s calling you to tell you something poisonous about me.”

  “Hercules can’t tell me anything at all because I’m not listening to him. Game command. Reject call.”

  “Call rejected,” responded the automated voice.

  “He’ll call you again,” said Hawk.

  “If Hercules keeps bothering me, I’ll get a Game Tech to block all calls from him. You should do that too.”

  “It won’t work. Nothing ever does. Hercules will find a way to get a message to you that starts an argument between us.”

  I frowned. “When we were in the Amphitheatre, you mentioned Celestius had special rules to stop troublemakers from disrupting relationships. After Cassandra suggested making me a Founder Player, I was too dazed to follow the situation closely, but I remember her saying something about me being under the protection of the Sisterhood as well. Hercules is deliberately trying to cause trouble between us. Surely that isn’t allowed.”

  “Yes, Celestius has rules to stop troublemakers disrupting relationships, and the Sisterhood are very strict about enforcing them, but those rules don’t apply to us because ... Jex, if we have this conversation, then I’m scared I’ll say the wrong thing and we’ll have another fight about you making your own decisions.”

  “What’s the problem here? Talk to me, Hawk. Tell me why the rules don’t apply to us. I need to understand what’s going on.”

  He let his head sag forward for a second as if in defeat. “The rules don’t apply to us because you’ve publicly stated you’re a free agent. That means Hercules can use any tactics he wants to compete with me for your attention.”

  “What?”

  Hawk flushed. “I’m not complaining about that, Jex. I accept that I’d no right to order you to leave Game. I accept that I’ve no right to push you into a relationship with me. I’ve been avoiding even discussing this because I knew ...”

  I interrupted him. “Wait a minute. Back in the Amphitheatre, Hercules came to sit next to me, and asked if I was your exclusive property. He knew I was angry at you for trying to make me defrost, used the word property to make me even more annoyed, and I made the mistake of saying I was a free agent. When Cassandra suggested making me a Founder Player, Hercules grabbed his chance to repeat that in front of everyone. Am I right that he was deliberately setting up a situation where he’d be free to try to split us up?”

  “Yes.” Hawk was watching me very intently. “Hercules is an expert at manipulating people.”

  “I resent being manipulated. I’m beginning to understand why you keep challenging Hercules to duels.”

  “If he hadn’t used the word property to upset you, what would you have said to him about us?”

  I stared across at the sea to avoid looking at Hawk. “I’m not sure. A girl in a bronze bracelet could hardly stake a claim to having a relationship with a Founder Player, so I was leaving it to you to tell people about us.”

  “You aren’t wearing a bronze bracelet any longer,” said Hawk. “On Celestius, the woman is the one who makes any public declarations about the changes in her relationship status. She can decide to be exclusive with one person, or several, or free to any approaches.”

  I risked turning my head to look at him. His expression was one of tense excitement as he waited for me to reply.

  “I’d like to stop Hercules causing trouble between us,” I said carefully, “but I don’t want us to be rushed into anything drastic before we’re ready. If I told people we were in an exclusive relationship, what exactly would that imply?”

  Hawk was grinning at me now. “Exclusive is a statement that you currently aren’t open to receiving other relationship offers. What it means beyond that is your decision.”

  “If I announced we were exclusive, you wouldn’t start assuming anything? We could still gradually work things out between us in our own time? You’d be happy with that?”

  Hawk nodded. “I’ve been waiting four hundred years to have a proper relationship, so we can take all the time you want.”

  “How do I make the announcement?”

  “You call Cassandra, and she’ll message all the Founder Players about it.”

  I laughed, not because the situation was funny, but because it
was so surreal. I thought back to the day I’d been sleeping, exhausted, on the ground next to my buggy in the body stacks. When Hawk the Unvanquished’s controlled droid appeared, I’d hardly dared to speak to him, but now I was publicly announcing I was in a relationship with him. Unbelievable.

  “It’s a shame that I need to keep going off to other worlds, trying to tempt the Reaper out of hiding,” said Hawk. “If we’re entering into an exclusive relationship, then we should be spending more time together.”

  I wanted to suggest I could go with him, but Hawk would have enough problems defending himself from the Reaper without having to defend me as well. I had to do the sensible thing and stay on Celestius where there was no way for the Reaper to reach me.

  And that was the moment that I realized there’d been a flaw in our logic. Perhaps I wasn’t safe on Celestius, perhaps no one was safe on Celestius, because there was a way that the Reaper could have reached here after all.

  I fought to keep my voice sounding calm and relaxed. “I’d like to go home and call Cassandra before Hercules causes any more trouble. Do you think you can stay on Celestius for a day or two at least? We should celebrate the start of our official relationship.”

  “I don’t see any reason why I can’t stay on Celestius for a couple of days. It’s becoming painfully clear that the Reaper isn’t in a hurry to murder me.”

  “I’ll call you later then. Game command. Request teleport home.”

  Hawk and the beach vanished, there was the usual blurry minute of transition, and then I was standing in the great hall of my castle. I hurried towards the nearest mirror and tapped it, but I ordered it to call Nathan not Cassandra.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  “Hi Jex.” Nathan’s face smiled out of the mirror in front of me. “I was hoping you’d ...”

  I didn’t let him finish the sentence. “I’ve thought of something terrifying. Are you sure that no other players can eavesdrop on this conversation?”

  “Are you alone in your castle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s impossible for other players to spy on you.”

  “Good. Can you get Kwame to join me here?”

  Nathan frowned. “It’s against protocol for a player to request a particular Game Tech by name.”

  “Whether it’s against protocol or not, we urgently need to discuss this with a Game Tech, and that Game Tech has to be Kwame because of his specific knowledge.”

  “Oh. Right then.”

  Nathan turned away from me to do something. I waited impatiently for a minute, and then Kwame appeared next to me.

  “You requested the presence of an appropriate Game Tech,” he said.

  “Yes. We need an urgent conference about the Reaper.”

  “Is player Hawk joining us?” asked Kwame.

  “No, he isn’t,” I said grimly. “Hawk has to be excluded from this. Please follow my logic and tell me if it’s right or wrong. The Reaper used an automated process to change himself from a Game Tech into a player with a new identity.”

  “That is correct,” said Kwame.

  Nathan listened in anxious silence as I continued talking. “We believe the Reaper envied the Founder Players because they got the public accolades that he was denied.”

  “That is correct,” repeated Kwame.

  “Therefore, when the Reaper gave himself a new player identity, he’d ideally wish it to be that of a Founder Player.”

  Kwame hesitated, clearly considering saying something, but settled for the standard reply. “That is correct.”

  “There aren’t any new player names on the list of Founder Players, and the automated process used by the Reaper couldn’t have deleted or replaced an existing Founder Player.” This time, I didn’t give Kwame the chance to say anything, I just swept on. “What about a Founder Player who wasn’t in Game at the time?”

  Kwame stared at me for a second before speaking. “Moment.”

  Nathan looked appalled. “The Reaper changed himself into a player just after the bombs exploded. Hawk wasn’t in the Game then. You think that the Reaper has replaced Hawk?”

  “I don’t want to be right,” I wailed.

  We endured at least two full minutes of agony before Kwame spoke again. “Unfortunately, it would have been possible for the Reaper to take Hawk’s place in Game during his absence.”

  “If the Reaper did take his place,” I asked tensely, “what would have happened to the real Hawk when he entered Game?”

  “His stream of consciousness would have been unable to enter its designated position in the Game system,” said Kwame. “His mind would not have survived.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Could that really have happened?” asked Nathan. “Do we have the real Hawk in Game, or do we have the Reaper pretending to be Hawk? The Reaper will have been watching the Founder Players for centuries, so he’d know how to act the part of Hawk.”

  “There’ve been a few times lately when I thought Hawk was behaving oddly,” I said miserably. “He got in a ridiculous panic over me visiting Merlin, when he should know perfectly well that Merlin is only interested in Stella.”

  “Player Jex, you must be aware that player Hawk has grown deeply attached to you,” said Kwame. “The constant stress of the Reaper situation would explain his overreaction to a perceived threat to your relationship.”

  In other circumstances, I might have blushed, but I was far too worried to be embarrassed. “Yes, but was that Hawk overreacting due to stress, or the Reaper misjudging the part he was playing? Is there a way of examining Hawk’s consciousness stream to see who he is? Can you see what he’s thinking?”

  “No,” said Kwame. “Constreams are variable format data, changing their structure from instant to instant, which makes it impossible to access and interpret the data in any particular segment.”

  I didn’t understand any of that except the word no. That was enough. “Hawk’s told me that people can’t change their fundamental personality while they’re in Game. He said it was because Game stores the basic parameters of your personality.”

  “That is a gross over-simplification of a complex issue,” said Kwame.

  “But something like that happens,” I said. “Can you check the parameters of Hawk’s personality before he left Game against those when he re-entered? See if the numbers are the same?”

  “Describing the personality characteristics as either parameters or numbers is seriously misleading,” said Kwame, “but we can attempt a comparison. This may take a little time.”

  Kwame vanished. I stood there, still staring tensely at the spot where he’d been.

  “My impression is that personality characteristics are a sort of cross between a fluid, multi-dimensional shape and a set of equations,” said Nathan.

  He was just an image in a mirror, so I couldn’t strangle him. I had to settle for glaring at him. “Shut up, Nathan.”

  “I’m worried about Hawk too,” he said. “I just thought it would help if I explained what Kwame is trying to compare.”

  “Well, it doesn’t.”

  We waited in silence until eventually Kwame reappeared. “There are noticeable mismatches between the two sets of personality characteristics.”

  I felt my hands clench into fists. “So the Reaper has taken Hawk’s place?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Kwame. “Hawk’s personality could have changed during his time outside Game. You wouldn’t usually expect significant shifts in just a few days, but Hawk went through a series of dramatic and deeply emotional events.”

  I tried to relax my hands, but my fingers didn’t seem to want to move.

  Nathan groaned. “So, how do we work out whether Hawk is acting oddly because he’s scared he’ll lose Jex, or whether it’s because he’s really the Reaper?”

  “I’ll ask him to fight something,” I said. “That will soon tell us if he’s the real Hawk or not.”

  “The Reaper will have taken part in test combats agains
t many Game creatures over the centuries,” said Kwame. “He would be reasonably convincing in a fight.”

  “I’m sure the Reaper could beat most standard Game creatures,” I said, “but Hawk is the only person in Game to have ever defeated the Kraken solo.”

  “You intend to ask Hawk to fight the Kraken?” Kwame thought for a moment. “If the Reaper is masquerading as Hawk, he could still defeat the Kraken using his deletion weapon.”

  “I’ve watched the replays of Hawk fighting the Kraken dozens of times,” I said. “It took him twenty minutes of combat to wear the creature down and go for the death blow. What would happen if the Reaper used his deletion weapon? Would the Kraken drop dead at the first scratch?”

  “That is correct,” said Kwame.

  “Then that wouldn’t look a very convincing fight. The Reaper would either have to make an excuse not to fight the Kraken at all, or fight using an ordinary weapon for a while before grabbing a plausible time to use the deletion one. How long do you think he could last solo against the Kraken? Two minutes, possibly three or even five, but definitely not twenty.”

  Kwame nodded. “It should certainly be possible for a team of watching Game Techs to determine if a victory against the Kraken was legitimate or achieved with the aid of a deletion weapon.”

  “I’ll call Hawk right away then.” I was desperate to get this over with, so I’d know whether Hawk was alive or dead.

  “Player Jex,” said Kwame, “you must be very careful. If the Reaper has replaced Hawk, then he could use his deletion weapon to erase your mind from the Game.”

  “If the Reaper has replaced Hawk, then he has the chance of spending eternity as an adored Founder Player. He won’t want to give himself away by murdering me.”

  “That is correct,” said Kwame. “However, if the Reaper realizes you suspect him, then he may feel he has nothing to lose by killing you.”

  Nathan was frowning. “There’s one big problem with your plan. Hawk could be his real self and still refuse to fight the Kraken. If I had a girlfriend, and she suddenly called me and demanded I fight a hulking great Game monster, I know I’d refuse.”