Lydia manages to sleep past 10:00 A.M. before the domestic wakes her up at Madison’s behest. She was up until four, waiting while the scanner processed every last page, and then she cleared up the study before going to bed, anxious she’d left something out of place, some telltale sign of her presence. She’s become paranoid about Madison finding out what she’s up to: by this point she feels Madison would block her efforts out of sheer spite, and would probably find it laughable that Lydia even considered herself capable of finding the killer, which she doesn’t, really.
Lydia is still lying in bed feeling useless and thwarted and above all tired when the domestic returns with a reminder to get up. She does so and, without bothering to change out of her pajamas, goes downstairs.
Lydia? comes Madison’s voice from the study as Lydia descends the last flight of steps.
Yes? Lydia replies.
I need to make some calls later.
OK.
Local calls. So I’ll need you to translate for me.
Lydia really wants to tell Madison to go fuck herself. She’s suspended. She does not work for Madison. Technically she’s not meant to be working at all. And Madison has more or less told her she’s got no future in the service, so what’s she got to lose at this point? But she still holds out some vain hope that if she doesn’t burn her bridges she might just be able to salvage something from all this.
OK, Lydia says: She goes to the kitchen, makes tea, unfurls her scroll and looks at the program the scanner produced for her. She runs it through an app that checks for code errors and gaps and makes a best guess at how they’re supposed to function, and if it can’t fix them it tries to remove them. The results are rarely perfect but the aim is to prevent these errors causing a complete failure.
Once the check has finished, she tries to run the program, just in case it’s compatible with her scroll (she’s not expecting it to be).
The program immediately starts downloading more files. Lydia panics for a moment—this could be anything. It could be malicious, it could be illegal. It’s probably both of those things. Any moment now her scroll will explode and she’ll be arrested—
But then she looks at some of the new files. Images, animations, sounds and other sensory data, all being gathered together in a folder. She can’t see where these are being drawn from, the address isn’t visible to her—probably she could find out if she knew what she was doing—but it looks to her like these are the components needed to run the game. Someone—possibly Jene, possibly someone else—stashed them somewhere online, but without the game code they wouldn’t work, in fact they’d be meaningless.
Lydia stops feeling worried and starts feeling excited. It really seems like this thing will work—but not on her scroll. It needs a veearr system, and she doesn’t have one, and Fitz didn’t have one either. She’ll have to go and play it at a veebar—there’s one a couple of blocks away—but she doesn’t know the first thing about these games.
But she knows someone who does.
“Now, Mum—you absolutely cannot stream this to anyone else, right? Just help me play it.”
“Yes, love, I get it,” says Mum testily.
It’s not that Lydia doesn’t trust Mum, it’s just default behavior with her—something interesting happens and she flicks her stream on, especially when she’s gaming. And if she ever manages to get early access to anything she always posts a firstlook, which is the easiest and most lucrative type of content there is, if you get on it before the streams get flooded. But Lydia can see the stream they’re on now is padlocked, and Mum assures her she’s not going to set up another. Lydia hasn’t told Mum why this secrecy is necessary, because it would just worry her and they wouldn’t be able to get down to what needs to be done, but Lydia is concerned this means Mum won’t appreciate the importance of it.
It’s late afternoon in Halifax and Lydia has interrupted Mum in the middle of an interminable customer services chat with the tram company over an unpaid fare. She hasn’t taken a tram in months and insists her idee must have been spoofed. She doesn’t want to break off from the call because she’ll lose her place: she went on for a bit about how the “place in the queue” was a ridiculous fiction designed to get you to give up, since the whole thing is run by ayaies anyway and they can deal with thousands of queries at once with no noticeable slowdown. While this was going on, Lydia used the time to transfer the folder containing all the game elements across an encrypted connection. She doesn’t want to install it on the veebar’s own servers—she’s going to play it remotely from Mum’s home system, which should be slightly more secure. The veebar is pretty dead at this time of the morning, its grimy booths being cleaned while monitors show highlights of last night’s action: Lydia has deselected that option on her own session, but suspects there’s still some loophole she hasn’t spotted.
“Has the game installed yet?” Lydia asks.
“This is going in a bloody loop,” mutters Mum.
Lydia is alarmed. “Why, what’s happening?”
“He’s giving me the same answers he was half an hour ago.”
“You mean the ayaie and your tram thing?”
“Yeah. He’s asking me for details of the incident. I don’t bloody know the details of the incident because I wasn’t there, you stupid bloody thing.”
“I thought you were talking about the game.”
“No, that’s nearly done. What am I supposed to do, lodge a complaint with the customer services bots to tell them the customer services bots aren’t working?”
“Mum, I’ll help you with it but can you help me with this game first?”
“Alright, but I don’t see why you urgently need to play it when you never usually touch these things.”
“It’s … someone I know is on a deadline and needs this beta tested and he thinks it might be OK for people with my condition to play.”
“Can’t we both play it?”
No, because it might be dangerous, Mum. “My friend said not to let anyone else play it. Please, Mum, I don’t know how to play these games and I need your help.”
“Right, fine. Starting now.”
Lydia pulls on the hood and it fits snugly around her eye sockets and molds itself to her ears, and the outside world completely vanishes. The smell of the cleaners’ antiseptic is gone. She can’t even feel the warm, stuffy air of the veebar, an aspect she always finds worrying—if your brain thinks you’re cold when you’re actually warm, won’t it regulate your body wrongly? But presumably they’ve thought of that. Anyway she’s not going to be using it for long. She just has to remember not to eat anything, because taste is the one that really goes haywire for her, like static on her tongue.
The scene around her fades up and Lydia finds herself standing in a deserted museum. The opening credits seem to be absent, so with a jerk the game goes into a cutscene: a young man with gang tattoos is hauled through the door of a vandalized exhibition room. There’s obviously some holes in the code—the sound doesn’t stay in sync, half the enpeecees don’t have faces and one wall of the classroom is entirely blank. It’s hard to say whether this is down to errors in scanning the code or if the code was unfinished.
“This is rough as dogs’ arses,” says Mum, whose voice is audible to Lydia but not to the other characters. It’s weirdly like talking to the Logi, she realizes.
“I know, Mum—I need to listen.”
The scene unfolds, with Lydia able to contribute to the characters’ discussion but Mum explains these things last longer only if you start interacting with them, and it’s better to just get them out of the way. It’s not especially well written but explains how the gang came to seize the city, and then outlines which people are still living here in spite of the grim situation and what resources they have. This is where the citizens make a decision to start fighting back, and in the process everyone turns to the player(s), appealing to them to take charge. At this point the game proper begins.
It’s weird playing a veearr. Lydia was always so jealous of the other kids at school who banged on about playing them all the time. It had more effect on her than she ever admitted: she made out she liked being different, because that was better than everyone knowing you hated being different. She was expecting this game to be nothing like the ones she played back then, back before she discovered she couldn’t—but actually it seems very similar. She remembers that uncanny quality in the movements and body language of the enpeecees: how it seems so realistic at first you’d believe you were speaking to a real person, but before long you start to see repetitions and patterns. Bugs and unfinished areas aside, though, it feels very like a real place—it’s a fictional city but seems partly based on New York, for instance the building they’re in looks like the Museum Of Natural & Anthropological History. She’s always wondered why games set in realistic locations are so popular when you can play games that let you be a Valkyrie and slay dragons, or an interdimensional wizard rewriting reality itself. But maybe people don’t want fantasy, they want to feel they’re in control, that they’re playing by rules they understand and that it’s possible to win.
“I really don’t think much of this,” says Mum. “Is it supposed to be retro?”
“No. I don’t know. What do I do now?”
Mum directs Lydia to a wood-paneled room upstairs in the museum that’s been kitted out as a command hub, with a big (paper) map of the city pinned to a wall. During the cutscene someone mentioned the phone networks are all down, which is why there’s an antique corded phone on the desk: a makeshift modification has spliced what looks like a fibo cable into it. Mum tells Lydia there should be a paper notebook in her pocket: Lydia checks it and she’s right, and when she opens it there are telephone numbers scribbled inside. Mum tells her to make some calls, deploy her resources. Lydia’s impressed by how quickly Mum’s got the hang of this.
Lydia listens closely to the people on the other end of the phone as she gives her instructions, listening out for the voice Jene mentioned. But she’s starting to get a headache, and her gums are tingling unpleasantly, and she knows the sickness is going to hit very soon. She looks up and sees a young man standing by the map.
“We just heard from the fire station over in Haverbrook,” he says, pointing at an area of the map. “The citizens there have managed to get inside and they think the engines can be fixed. But we don’t have anyone who can fix them.”
“That gang kid we just picked up is a mechanic,” says Lydia, a detail Mum picked up on from the cutscene. “He’s in the basement.”
“Will he help us?” says the young man skeptically.
“I’ll have a try,” says Lydia, and heads down to the basement. She speaks to the kid, and it takes her about ten minutes but she talks him round and he’s on their side. Mum says this kind of exercise is all about hitting certain keywords and phrases—you find the ones they respond to and then work them in until the character cooperates, it’s like cracking a code. It all seems quite mechanical to Lydia, not as absorbing as she expected, but that might just be because she feels appalling—a travel-sickness feeling in her guts, a sharp pain behind each eye. She feels like her nose is bleeding but each time she reaches up to her face, she finds nothing, and she can’t shake the suspicion her nose is bleeding, just not in the game. The quicker she can get out of here, the better.
Lydia returns to the upstairs office—and the moment she walks in, the telephone rings: a high, loud, resonant trill, full of urgency, a remnant of a more organized world. Lydia feels compelled to act, as if the bell has set her a standard to live up to. This must be something in how the game’s designed—she feels it’s very important she answer the phone. How can they create that kind of reaction just with a sound?
Lydia picks up the receiver and says, “Hello?”
“Thank god,” says a middle-aged man’s voice from the other end. White noise in the background. “I’ve been trying to reach someone for hours…” And he talks about a siege situation in another part of town, clearly explaining where it is and who’s involved. But alongside this Lydia hears another voice, cutting through the first one, speaking to her in Logisi.
“You can hear me.”
The voice is Fitz’s. But it’s in her ear, not her mind. She’s never heard his voice like this before.
“Don’t worry,” the voice continues. “It’s normal to be able to hear me. It’s not important right now that you hear me, but it will be. When you hear me again, be sure to listen.”
It’s like a test message, a placeholder. The kind of thing you say to check if a microphone’s working. Lydia puts the phone down.
“Why did you put the phone down?” says Mum.
“What?”
“You didn’t speak to that man. You just hung up on him.”
“Didn’t you hear the other voice?”
“What other voice?”
“He said ‘It’s normal to be able to hear me.’ You didn’t hear it?”
“No.”
Lydia thinks for a moment. “I need to go, Mum. Thanks for your help.”
“But we’ve hardly even started—you haven’t even gone outside, you can’t know if the atmospherics and lighting are right if you’ve not—”
“I have to go—just delete the game. Promise me you’ll delete it, right?”
“Why?”
“Just promise, it’s important.”
“Alright, but—”
“I’ll talk to you soon.” And Lydia leaves the game and ends the call.