by Oli Smith
‘Wait, don’t –’ she heard Rory call over her shoulder, before he was drowned out by an almighty crash.
Amy turned to see Daryl standing in the doorway. Or at least where the doorway used to be. The wooden frame was now perched at an angle across Daryl’s back and behind him the plaster of the wall had been smashed through in a perfect outline of the robot.
‘– do that,’ Rory finished quietly, standing on tiptoe to look over Daryl’s shoulder and into the room.
Daryl raised a finger and pointed at the Desktop. A small shower of plaster powder tumbled to the floor as he did so. ‘Do not unplug the user,’ he said.
‘What? Why?’ Amy’s hand hovered over the small green power light.
‘It’s dangerous.’
‘More dangerous than getting demolished by an army of robot-bulldozers?’
‘That is unfair.’
Amy rolled her eyes and moved to press the Desktop. In a flurry of movement, Daryl’s arm snapped out. It extended on a piston and grabbed her by the shoulder, pulling her away from the desk.
Amy squealed, more out of surprise than anything else. Daryl’s grip was surprisingly gentle.
‘Hey! Hands off my missus!’ Rory banged on one of Daryl’s shoulder blades with a fist.
‘If he is unplugged before he logs out, his mind will be separated from his body and his body will short-circuit.’ To illustrate his point, Daryl’s face flashed up a smiley face with crosses for eyes.
‘Ouch,’ muttered Amy. ‘Then how does he get out?’
‘He needs to find a save-point. It will store his online character and return his mind to his real-world body.’
‘But he doesn’t know that he needs to save!’
‘I am connected to the network – if he hasn’t moved far from the Tutorial zone I may be able to save him externally.’ Moving Amy carefully aside, Daryl spread his right hand over the Desktop. From the inside of his palm, mini-pistons began to drop down and connect with the surface. The Desktop rippled with light as the pistons began to tap on its surface. It looked as if the finish was being struck by neon-water droplets. Amy thought it was beautiful.
‘Amy, I think you’d better look at this.’ Rory’s voice broke her concentration. She rushed over to where he was standing in the hallway, looking out at the approaching sandstorm.
It was much closer now, and through the rippling grains of glass sand, the pair could begin to make out the large, dark outlines of the demolition robots. They were huge.
‘We’re running out of time,’ Rory hissed urgently and, as if in response, the edge of the storm smashed into one of the outer buildings of the city.
There was a terrible, crunching grinding noise, like nails scraping across a blackboard, only a thousand times louder.
Amy covered her ears with her hands as the building began to shake.
‘Daryl! Tell me you’re done!’ she shouted over the din.
Daryl straightened up, and turned his screen towards them. On it was a sad face.
‘The user has left the area. I am unable to pull him out.’
‘The Doctor! He’s called the Doctor!’ Amy ran over to him and flung her arms up in frustration. ‘There’s got to be something, he’ll do something, that’s what he does, escapes in the nick of time and –’
The tower block shuddered again, longer and louder this time as another building was chewed up by the advancing bulldozers.
‘The nick of time has just run out,’ Daryl stated. ‘We have to go.’
‘No! We’re not leaving him!’ Rory was in the doorway now, his head and shoulders white with plaster dust. ‘You’re a robot! Call them off!’
Daryl shook his head. ‘I am not . . . operating within my programming. They will not listen to me and I can’t risk my actions being discovered.’
Amy and Rory exchanged puzzled glances.
‘What?’
‘What?!’
Daryl waved them into silence, demolishing half the bathroom in the process. ‘I do, however, have this.’ A small hatch popped open in his thigh and he produced a small white sphere that immediately sprouted four legs. He reached down and placed it carefully on the floor beneath the Doctor’s chair. ‘An emergency beacon. It forbids the bulldozers to demolish anything within two metres square of its location.’
They looked at the device doubtfully. It blinked at them. Then, before they could protest, Daryl reached out two massive hands and grabbed them both. Holding them tightly to his chest, he bent his knees with a sharp hiss of hydraulics.
‘Hopefully,’ he finished, before jumping through the wall.
Daryl set Amy and Rory down two miles away on the opposite side of the city. They staggered to their feet, battered and bruised, and turned to watch as the sandstorm swamped the tower block they had been standing in only a few minutes before. The wall of sand dwarfed even the tallest skyscrapers, and they looked on in horror as each one was transformed into a shower of glittering dust.
Rory put a hand on Amy’s arm, but he had no words to comfort her. Soon the city was lost from view.
Amy turned to Daryl and looked at him with hollow eyes.
‘What now?’ she asked.
In response, Daryl turned away from her and crouched. Then beckoned for them to climb onto his back.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we run.’
CHAPTER 7
The Forest
‘Do you think your mount could stop trying to eat mine for just five minutes?’ the Doctor sniffed. He was perched awkwardly on the back of a small, ostrich-type bird. It waddled under his weight and kept scooting off in the wrong direction whenever he wasn’t concentrating.
Blondie was riding a two-metre long tiger. Which was blue.
She had found it prowling around at the edge of the stampede, ready to pick off any stragglers. With a few well-chosen swipes of her sword she had persuaded it to stand still long enough for her to climb onto its back. Once she had done that, the creature was stuck with her.
It snapped its jaws at the Doctor’s ostrich once again and let out a frustrated growl. The noise sent the bird and its rider zigzagging off to hide behind an emerald-coloured tree.
Cautiously, the ostrich poked its head out from behind the trunk and squawked angrily at the tiger. The Doctor’s head popped out soon after.
‘I suppose this is because I’m a level one animal-trainer-rider type-thing, right?’
Blondie nodded. ‘You’re getting the hang of it now.’
‘And I presume you’re on level three trillion and four or something because you’re Little Miss Perfect?’
‘Well, thirty-five at animal training.’
The ostrich stretched out a bony leg to step cautiously out from behind the tree. The tiger growled and the bird quickly returned to its hiding place.
‘Well, if you’re so good, how come you can’t stop your tiger-thing from trying to eat my chicken-thing?’
‘I can. But it’s funnier this way.’
‘Oh, you are a great help.’ The Doctor let out a bitter laugh. ‘It’s the end of your world and all you can think about is making me look stupid.’
Blondie smiled. ‘I’ve always said it’d be nice to die laughing.’ She yanked at the lump of fur behind the tiger’s neck that she was using as a rein and reared it away from the bird. ‘But obviously your sense of humour is only at level one as well.’
Finally the Doctor was able to control his ride, and trotted out to rejoin Blondie. ‘So even a person’s sense of humour has a level here?’ he asked.
‘No, that was a joke.’
‘I’ll shut up now.’
‘Please do.’
They rode on slowly in silence, giving their mounts a chance to rest after the desperate sprint away from Tutorial. The Doctor’s mood saddened as he remembered their panicked dash through the stampeding herd. The cries of the citizens and animals still rang in his ears before the digital sounds that made up their voices were disintegrated into megabytes, then kilobyte
s, then bytes by the relentless advance of the darkness behind them.
But the Doctor and Blondie had stayed ahead of the pack, encouraging their mounts to even greater speeds. Eventually the rumble of destruction faded, and the tidal wave of wreckage was nothing more than a shimmering blur on the horizon behind them.
The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. When he looked over to Blondie he realised that she was shaking, but whether it was with anger or fear he couldn’t tell. They kept on moving.
Around them colourful branches began to spring from the ground, multiplying and blossoming into the flat outlines of trees. They stretched higher, twisting and turning until the pair were dwarfed by a cool pastel forest. Soon they made their way through the paths between puddles of blue light that flowed from the surrounding roots. The Doctor blinked, attempting to adjust his eyes to the mind-bending structure of the world. He didn’t even know whether the sudden appearance of the forest was a trick of the horizon, or if it was truly growing around them.
Blondie spotted his puzzlement. ‘It’s called pop-in,’ she explained. ‘This forest has been programmed to exist here, but when there are no citizens around, the network hides it to save memory. We were running so fast earlier that it was having trouble restoring the trees around us, which is why they seem to grow. Actually, this forest has been here for over fifty years.’
The Doctor gently guided his ostrich over towards the nearest trunk. It was flat and golden, and when he pressed his hand against it, it crackled gently. His palms tingled.
‘If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does the forest even exist?’ he murmured. ‘Fascinating.’
Blondie laughed. ‘Yeah, I forget just how much Parallife must have changed from your world since the players left.’
The Doctor frowned. ‘And how do you know? You’re a part of the network, you’ve never seen the outside world.’
‘No, but I was a player’s character once. We all were.’
The Doctor stopped and looked at her.
‘Do you know what humans do when they’re given a blank canvas in virtual reality? When they get the chance to create a new face and a new body from scratch? They make themselves. And then they go out and make their house, and the streets outside their house, and the sky blue and the trees green. Because humans think that it’s a skill to make things realistic.’ She paused and took a breath. ‘What did you look like on the outside?’
The Doctor looked embarrassed. ‘Well, kinda like . . . this.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So all this, Parallife, is an online computer game where people create their own characters and go on quests and fight monsters and level up and buy shiny swords?’ the Doctor said.
‘It was an online game. And it used to look like the outside world. Although back then the outside world was called the real world.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The humans all left. We don’t know why.’
The Doctor rubbed his chin.
‘Parallife was left empty; all those players’ characters just stored online doing nothing,’ Blondie said.
‘And you, your body and levels and things, you used to be a character? Someone used to play as you?’
Blondie blushed. ‘It sounds weird when you put it like that.’
The Doctor looked up towards the sky that tinged the topmost branches of the trees a golden pink. ‘I guess that also means there used to be a human that looked like you. Once.’
‘I guess so.’
‘Weird isn’t it? Waking up in a body that isn’t yours.’ He looked at her sadly for a moment, then looked away. ‘Hang on a minute . . .’
‘What?’ Blondie shook her head to clear her thoughts. She watched as the Doctor jumped easily from the back of the bird and ran over to one of the trees. It was set back from the path they had been travelling on. Had they not stopped there to talk, he may not even have noticed it.
Something was terribly wrong with the tree.
He knelt down, put his hands against the trunk and pushed his face closer to inspect the damage. The tree had a slash across it, half a metre above the ground, which seemed to run right through it. Above and below the slash the trunk was still coloured with a golden haze. But inside there was only an empty blackness – a slice of nothingness that seemed to ooze from the digital bark. It was dripping something softly onto the forest floor, and the Doctor struggled to work out what it was.
Then he realised. The tree was bleeding numbers.
‘What is it?’ Blondie appeared by his side.
‘I hope you made sure your tiger wasn’t able to reach my bird,’ the Doctor said. He looked over his shoulder to make sure. ‘I said –’
‘Shut up, Doctor,’ said Blondie.
The Doctor turned to look at her. She straightened up, backing slowly away from the tree.
‘I think we should get out of here,’ she said. And it was then that the Doctor realised she was afraid. Very, very afraid.
‘What’s going on? What are these numbers?’ He reached down to scoop up a handful from the pool on the floor.
When Blondie spoke again, her voice was shaking. ‘Nothing, waste data. Something has erased the computer program that makes up the tree so that all that’s left is useless code. Lengths, colours, sizes, shapes – now they’re all just meaningless numbers.’
‘And what can do that?’ the Doctor’s voice was stern.
‘Nothing can do that!’
‘Something can!’ the Doctor shouted back. ‘And you know what it is because otherwise you wouldn’t be so scared!’
‘I’ve never seen one,’ Blondie shook her head and continued to back away. ‘No one’s seen one. Sometimes you can hear them.’
‘Them?’
‘The Defrags!’
‘And what,’ said the Doctor, ‘exactly, is a Defrag?’
‘Listen!’ Blondie held up a hand.
They stopped and listened, but all the Doctor could hear was the rustling of the trees. Then it hit him. There was no wind. And even if there was, would these trees rustle?
The noise grew louder, becoming a harsh scratching hiss that sounded like radio static with the volume turned up to maximum.
‘They’re coming,’ said Blondie.
CHAPTER 8
Defrag
The Doctor and Blondie raced back to the path. They dragged each other over sprouting tree roots and through neon puddles in their haste. The noise was so loud now that they had to cover their ears. Stumbling back onto the path, Blondie hurried to untie her tiger, but the Doctor’s ostrich had wandered off. He whistled, sweeping his head from side to side in an attempt to spot it.
‘Why didn’t you tie it up?’ Blondie shouted to him over the noise.
There was a soft pop, a squawk and the Doctor turned slowly back towards Blondie, who was already on her tiger.
‘It’s gone,’ she said. ‘We need to go!’
The Doctor made to run, but stopped, suddenly confused. The path ahead and behind them was so filled with shadow that it was difficult to tell which direction they had come from. ‘It’s too dark to see anything!’ he shouted.
‘They are the dark,’ she said. ‘The only things to survive the destruction.’
There was a burst of movement behind him, and the Doctor spun around. The shadows were swarming towards them through the trees now, but they were like no shadow the Doctor had ever seen. As they moved, an outline of corrupted orange data spilled onto the floor around them.
But there was something else as well. The Doctor squinted, fascinated, his eyes desperately trying to penetrate the dark. It almost killed him.
The static noise transformed into a scream as one of the Defrags plummeted down towards the Doctor from its perch in a decaying tree. He raised his hands to cover his head.
But the impact didn’t come. There was a thud and the creature seemed to roll away from the Doctor mid-fall, coming to rest only a couple of metres away on
the forest floor. An eerie quiet descended and the noise of the Defrags was softened. The Doctor could hear running water.
‘Did you see that?’ the Doctor turned to his companion. ‘It’s like some kind of force . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘Field.’
From her position on the tiger, Blondie had raised her palm to the sky. From it, a fountain of white energy was pouring upwards. It hung in the air for a moment, transforming into water before arcing down around them in a perfect circle. It was this that the Defrag had hit.
‘It’s a water sphere,’ she said. ‘I designed it myself.’
The Doctor said nothing. He stepped over to the edge of the circle where the Defrags were gathering and pressed his face against the water-screen.
A shattered face looked back. Like a reflection in a broken mirror.
‘There’s something inside the shadows,’ the Doctor breathed. ‘Something broken.’
In response, a curling red claw reached out to prod at the opposite side of the shield. The Doctor recognised parts of the creature as human, or animal, but the jumbled mess that made up the whole was horrific and unnatural.
The creature howled in frustration. It began beating its face and claws against the water in a terrible drumbeat. The rest of the Defrags took up its rhythm until the water dome’s surface became a mess of shuddering ripples.
‘Doctor, I can’t sustain this spell forever!’ Blondie called over to him.
‘Quiet!’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m thinking.’
He got to his feet and began to pace around the protected circle, meeting the gaze of each Defrag as he did so.
‘When did you make this spell?’ he gestured to Blondie’s palm. ‘After the humans left?’
Blondie nodded.
‘Right, and these trees, they’re not realistic, but they’re still based on the human programming of a tree, with the colours and textures changed?’
‘Most things in this world are.’
‘So people have been taking the human-made outfits and features and expanding them to create new objects. Could they create new faces? New clothes and hands and other things I haven’t got time to think of?’