I WAS EXPECTING a corridor, like on all the other floors of this building, with doors to apartments running down both sides. The occasional potted plant, maybe, that looks good at a distance but is plastic close-up. Not this.
It’s a single apartment, taking up the whole of the top floor by the look of it, and there’s a party going on just out of sight. I can hear piano music tinkling away, some fancy affair with the murmur of conversation and occasional laughter. There are no signs of violence. Confused, I take a step farther into a huge lobby, my shoes making a crisp tapping sound as I walk. I look down to see the shiny black brogues I used to love to wear with my tux clicking against the polished marble tiles. I’m wearing the tux too, my favorite cummerbund made of the most ridiculous iridescent material, which looks like someone wove it out of rainbows and stardust. It matches my equally ridiculous bow tie.
I wore this to an awards ceremony in Paris three years ago. I didn’t want to go but had no say in the matter and spent most of the evening stuck at a table with a bunch of horrendously dull people. Their astounding lack of social charm and storytelling skills could make the tale of a trip through piranha-infested waters in a leaky boat seem boring. I was up for an award in an industry I didn’t care about, for a job I was forced to do and hadn’t chosen to take in the first place. Thinking there was no chance I would win, I’d downed half a bottle of champagne before my name was read out. It wasn’t nerves; it was the fact that I’d never tasted real champagne before. Carl, snob that he was, always drank red wine, which did nothing for me, and anyway, I didn’t have the heart to drink something I was indifferent to when I knew how many hours he’d prolonged his contract to pay for it.
There was no speech to read, as I hadn’t bothered to write one. It was hard enough standing up, with that real champagne doing very real things to my body. By the time I’d reached the podium, my APA had temporarily shut down notifications on my media feeds, as so many messages of congratulations were flooding in at once, and MyPhys had started to undo the champagne’s work. With each step up the little stairs at the edge of the stage I was feeling more sober and horribly aware of the giant cock-up I was about to commit.
I can remember a moment of awful clarity, as MyPhys artificially flushed out the last traces of drunkenness, which I hadn’t instructed it to do. At no point since hearing my name did I tell it to clean me up quick.
Someone else had.
As I shook the hand of the presenter and took the heavy piece of crystal, all the icons usually in my visual field faded out. I was cut off from making any sort of contact with anyone else. Even though it confused me, the sheer social pressure of having someone shake my hand and then gesture to the podium to signal it was time for me to make my speech kept me moving to the right spot to set the award down and look out over the room as the applause died down.
All I could see was wealth. Half-eaten plates of food made by artisans, left abandoned as if it were junk from a street printer. I hadn’t left a speck of food on my plate and had eaten the dessert rejected by the man sitting next to me. “The ganache here is nothing compared to my own chef’s,” he’d said. “I wouldn’t bother.” When I’d asked if I could have it—my pride not getting in the way of a good meal since I’d known what it was like to experience real hunger—he’d looked utterly appalled. I just grinned, took the plate and tucked in.
None of the people I looked down at from that podium had ever experienced anything like I had. I could see it written all over them without any need to check what their publicly available profiles said. Their privilege was written in the way they treated the serving staff with utter disdain, the ease with which they sat at tables covered in porcelain crockery and silver cutlery and didn’t give any of it a second glance. None of them had had to depend upon their APA to run an Augmented Reality guide during the meal to show them which bloody fork to use for each course. They were too confident, too unimpressed by it all, to be someone like me.
And I hated them. I was going to tell them some truths, I decided. I was going to tell them what their industry was really like. I even took a breath to say it, to speak the words that would have given me at least three black marks and possibly a prosecution, to tell them that I was owned by the network and all of the work that they were acknowledging with this award was effectively forced labor.
But then a sentence appeared across their expectant faces, the text too large for me to ignore. “This is such an honor, thank you.”
I knew then that my boss, my handler, my jailer, was sending that message to me to read out as the beginning of my speech. He knew I hadn’t thought I’d win. He’d been watching and waiting to step in if I did.
I had no intention of reading that bastard’s words out. I grabbed the award again, fully intending to hold it up as I spoke my own words, but then I saw a little blue dot floating over the ballroom floor. The one burned into my brain by the Machine, the one the woman in those electric blue shoes used to “realign my values.”
“This is such an honor, thank you!” I said, as if I meant it, as if it would stop the pain that I still believed would inevitably follow if I hesitated further. And I read every word of it, thanking my boss for his guidance, his support of my career, expounding upon how I could never have got this far without his faith in me. The audience thought the tears were of happiness. That I was so authentic. I spent the rest of that evening hiding in a service corridor in the bowels of the hotel, shaking, trying not to think of electric blue shoes. And when I went back to the office, that same boss gathered everyone together so they could applaud me, saying how moved he was by that damn speech. He put the award on the shelf in the entrance lobby, with the others won by employees, so every morning I could look at it and “feel proud,” he said. All it meant was that every morning I had something to look at to make me hate him just that little bit more. But no one would have ever known I felt that way. The same training—or should I say conditioning—that made it impossible for me to resist when the blue dot was invoked made it easy for me to hide my feelings. They trained me to hide what I thought and felt, and the whole time they thought they were removing those feelings altogether. Like all things put under threat, my emotions simply went underground.
Why the fuck am I wearing a tux that I left in a hotel along with a note saying that it could be given to anyone who wanted it? And the hammer is gone! Fuck! I hate this game so much.
I turn to see that the door has closed behind me and that Bobby Bear has followed me in. “My hammer has gone,” I say to him. “This is a shit game. No narrative flow, no environmental consistency. I need to find another weapon. A decent one.”
“Are you sure about that?” my bear asks.
I frown at him. Is this some sort of in-game assistance? “Kam said there was someone causing trouble on the top floor . . . it’s the last place to go in the building and the most obvious place for the boss fight.”
“I don’t mean do you need one. I mean: do you need to find one? Haven’t you already got the most dangerous weapon there is?”
Just as I’m about to ask him what the hell he is talking about, a memory surfaces, nothing more than an impression of being in my bedroom when I was small, cuddling Bear. There was rain, on the window, yes, that was it, and I couldn’t go out to the park and I was grumpy about it, in the way that only children with the happiest lives can be.
I can’t remember the conversation well, but I do remember him talking to me about something in the world that was bad. I was small, so it was probably something stupid like an ice cream flavor or—
No . . . it wasn’t something stupid at all. It was the fact that some children didn’t have parents and that was why my parents were working with someone to . . . to make it better in some way. It must have been that they were getting ready for some fund-raiser, yes, that makes sense. And I was moaning about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to go with them and Bear was reasoning it out with me.
“I do . . . I remember something . . .” I say to him. “About how horrible the world was and . . . and something about bad people.” Even as I speak, more of it comes back to me, with such clarity I start to wonder whether Bear is making me remember somehow. Is that even possible?
“Yes, we talked about bad people and what we can do about them. Do you remember what I told you?”
And then I see it, clear as day in my head. “You told me that my father said in a speech that we were the best weapons against bad people.” I frown at Bobby Bear. “But that was . . . figurative. Some bollocks to make rich people feel good about giving money they didn’t need to Dad’s favorite charities.”
He just looks at me. Slowly, one of his little fur eyebrows rises. “C’mon, Dee Dee. Do I need to tell you everything?”
“Am I the weapon here?”
“You can be,” he replies. “But it’s a big responsibility. And there could be serious consequences. Are you sure you want to accept those?”
The way he talks to me makes me feel like a little girl again. Everything he says feels like it’s designed to push me along, to make me figure things out, think carefully. Just like he always did. “Yeah, course I do! I’m not here to have a cup of tea with the big bad, am I?”
“All right then, if it’s really what you want.” Bobby Bear’s right paw touches my hand. I feel a slight tingle, which swiftly fades.
“Is that it?” I flex my fingers. “Can I shoot lasers out of them now or something?”
“You’ll know what to do when the time is right.”
Clichéd, but judging by the rest of this game, it’s the only explanation I’ll get, so I take in my surroundings. Aside from a huge silk rug, there are planters with huge ferns and more exotic plants sprouting from them and a console table that looks like it’s made out of pure crystal. Nothing that could be used as a weapon, so hopefully whatever he did to my hand will work.
An honest-to-God butler walks past with a tray of canapés, ignoring me. Hang on. I came in here expecting a fight, a huge, dramatic confrontation with the big bad. Not a bloody soiree.
“I’ll wait here,” Bobby Bear says. “I’m here if you need me, Dee Dee.”
I give him one last look, wondering if I’ll be able to say good-bye to him once I’ve defeated the boss; then I march out of the hallway into a gigantic split-level room. It looks like it was made from an amalgam of every single high-society murder mystery mersive I have ever played in. It’s so big it makes the full-sized grand piano in the far corner look small. It has floor-to-ceiling windows giving panoramic views of London, the same cream marble flooring as the hall, but with a luxurious carpet on the upper area. There are sofas as big as king-sized beds, with beautiful people draped over them like they’re in the middle of some fashion shoot with no photographer.
There are serving staff of all genders and a few drones too, some of the latter on wheels, some in flight, delivering top-ups to glasses and trays of exquisitely arranged chocolates. There have to be more than a hundred people in this room, all of them familiar to me, the guests being various media stars I met in the course of my work. Just as they were on Earth, they are too wrapped up in garnering the most admiration they can to even notice me. The serving staff are made up of people who were at the fringes of my job. The guy who organized catering for those crazy-expensive old-style shoots is serving canapés to a group of actors and it’s the first thing I’ve seen that makes some sort of sense.
A cluster of guests is standing on the upper level, laughing, their attention focused away from the main area of the room. Perhaps there’s some sort of game going on, or an entertainer. Uninterested, I scan the room for anything that hints toward a final boss fight. Nothing. Not even a disagreement between guests. Confused and disappointed, I’m about to leave to see if I can find another room with some sort of glowering monster in it who needs a good twatting, when I hear a voice that stops me dead.
“Oh, darling, sometimes you are just so ultra!”
My father. That was my father’s voice, coming from the upper level! I run across the room, push past the human coat hangers and there he is, with my mother, holding court. They are lying back on a circular sofa, supported by dozens of cushions in shades of brown, my father’s feet being massaged by a young man who in the real world was a trainee director. Dad looks like he did when I was a child: tanned, his blond hair swept back, his eyes—my eyes—that glacial blue of our family.
My mother sits next to him while another woman—someone who was involved in special effects in the real world—is massaging my mother’s hand. She too looks like she has stepped out of the memories of my childhood before it all went wrong, her dark brown hair long and straight and glossy. Oh, but they are so beautiful, so perfect, that my breath catches in my throat.
I want to throw myself onto the sofa like I did as a child, wriggling my way between them to make sure that their love still encompassed me even when they were so deeply focused on each other. They’d laugh every time I did it, and make mock groans and then tickle me and—
But I don’t move. I can’t let myself do it. This isn’t right. They’re dead. They died a long time ago and I am not going to throw myself through the wall I’ve built between that perfect memory of them and the reality. They haven’t noticed me and I back away before they do, reeling, trying to shore up my crumbling resolve as my father laughs again.
I should have expected it, given the stairwell, the nest, the sheer emotional hurricane this gameified hazing has battered me with. Their bodies weren’t on the stairs; that was a kindness, I’d thought, something too brutal for even this arsehole to code in. But somehow this is worse. He must have found the data from Bobby Bear. Must have—
Then suddenly it makes sense. I’d been thinking, like a total fool, that the data on all these people and these phases of my life must have been destroyed on Earth and lost forever. But the people in charge of this trip let me join the crew. They would have mined the entire Internet, trawled through data farms and warehousing to find out everything they could about me. That data must be on the ship server, ready to be exploited by this sick genius. Is he just using the US gov-corp’s thorough research to initiate me into the leet circle? Or is he telling me that they know everything about my life, even the parts I thought no one knew about, like the nest in the basement?
I leave the room via a door to the left of the grand piano, barely taking in the person playing it. Ze is very talented; I absorb that much on the way into the adjoining hallway.
It strikes me that no one has offered me any refreshments or talked to me. Another member of serving staff passes without even glancing in my direction, and to be honest, it’s a relief after the silent stares from the dead bodies on the way up here. I feel like I am invisible, or at least so far down the social ladder that no one deigns to look at me.
Feeling unfocused, I drift to the next room and find a huge kitchen full of caterers. It’s homely though, not made of the industrial steel units found in the top-class hotels, and it’s vaguely familiar. However, I can’t remember ever being in a place like this before. There are pots on a six-ring stove bubbling away, huge trays of ingredients being made into canapés by three cooks working in an assembly line along one of the counters. Thinking that I’d like to try one of them, I head over to steal one of the assembled ones from the final tray, only to find they aren’t food at all. They are electronic components of some sort.
“What the . . . ?” I pull back as one of the waiters collects the tray and carries it balanced on the fingers of his right hand out of the room in the opposite direction from the party.
“Why are you here?” says one of the cooks, right at me.
I blink at her, thrown by the sudden loss of invisibility and the fact that she looks like a woman who sat at the same table as me at that awful awards ceremony. “I’m looking for someone,” I say. “Someone causing trouble up here.”
Then they all turn and look at me. I take a step back. Every single person in this room was at that ceremony. I’m sure of it.
“He’s not in here,” the cook says. “You can’t be looking very hard.”
I ignore the spark of hurt pride the comment causes and scan the room. “I heard something when I was downstairs, but nothing seems to be wrong up here.”
She laughs; then they all start laughing, as if I’d said the funniest thing in the world. “Everyone’s going to die,” she says, still chuckling and wiping a tear away from the corner of her eye. “He’s going to kill them.”
This is the weirdest lead-in to a boss fight I have ever experienced. “Okay . . . so . . . what the hell is going on?”
The cook points out of the room with her knife, in a way no sensible person would in a busy kitchen, in the same direction the waiter just took the tray of components. “He’s through there. We’ve all known it was going to happen. Even our parents and grandparents did. He’s just getting it all set up now.”
I look at the trays in the assembly line. “What is he setting up? Some sort of weapon?”
She nods.
“Well, shit, why are you helping him?”
The look on her face makes me feel stupid. “Do you have another job you could give me? And all my staff?”
“What about the people through there?” I point toward the party. “Do they know?”
“Know about what he’s going to do?” She laughs again, and all of the other staff laugh too, all stopping their work to look at me and laugh, like this is some sort of weird art-house play about social embarrassment or something equally tedious. “Do you think that would make any difference? They don’t care.”
They all have knives. Every single one of them. Even the ones stirring the pots on the stove have knives in their free hands. I look at the racks on the wall, hanging down from the ceiling over the central work top and in the blocks on the countertop that they are normally stored in. Not a single free knife in the entire room. I don’t want to go rooting about in the drawers, not yet anyway.
Shit, am I supposed to deal with the boss with nothing more than a saucepan and enthusiasm?
“If you’re not going to do anything, you may as well leave,” says the cook. “Go outside and get killed with the rest of them if you like.”
“No,” says the cook next to her. “She’s allowed to be here and watch from the window if she likes.”
“Watch everyone in London die?”
“Not just London, darlin’,” he says. “The ’ole bleedin’ world, innit.”
This is too close to the bone to be coincidence, surely? Is the game designer trying to tell me he knows what they did to Earth?
No, that’s ludicrous. How many games have I played where I, as the hero of the piece, have had to stop the big bad from destroying the world? It’s a trope, nothing more.
I have no intention of just sitting back and watching mass murder happen all over again, game version or not. I march out of the room, heading in the same direction as that tray of components was taken, my thoughts bouncing between seeing all of this as a message buried in a sick initiation and trying to work out how to handle it. Pretty much any other game that ends with a violent final boss tools you up as you progress: armor, weapons, whatever. And if it isn’t a violent confrontation, there are usually all sorts of clues and story elements along the way to give an insight into the enemy so they can be defeated in some other, dialog-heavy way.
But this game? This game chucks all of that out the window and then pisses on it. I mean, what kind of thought process went into this? “I’ll make a game. Let’s set it in the player’s old life and visit all those juicy traumas along the way. Hello, player! Welcome to hell. If you look on your left, you’ll see the pathetic attempt to make a home in the basement of the building you once lived in. And if you look on your right, you can see your dead parents, laughing again. Don’t look down! There’s dead people there. All the dead people you ever knew. Ha! I am such a genius!”
Of course, the lack of the usual narrative supports could be his way of trying to make this seem more realistic, admittedly in the most unrealistic way possible. Life in meatspace doesn’t have the same rules, doesn’t lay out the right way to go as clearly as lots of games do. The figurative armor and weapons we need aren’t often laid out in easy-to-access places, scaled to our ability at the time. Well, some people would argue they are, but they’re the same sort of idiots who say that positive thinking helps to overcome systemic inequality.
Thing is, the coder is making so many statements here—or at least I think he is—that it’s just a messy soup of experiences. I’m so uncertain of anything, I can’t see what I’m supposed to be getting out of this, other than some vague promise that it will help me reach my goals. Running up all those flights of stairs might have helped a tiny bit, but I picked my way up here slowly. I suppose there was the whole door-code thing . . . but . . . ah, fuck it. I’m going to take a look at this weapon thing and then come up. If he mocks me, I’ll just mock him back. The invite to the leet server from Carolina will still be legit.
The door leads to a short hallway. I’m irritated by the fact that the programmer hasn’t even bothered to make me want to face the big bad at the end. I mean, I don’t know anything about him. There’s been no tear-jerking scene where I find out he’s killed my puppy or anything. No mission parameters set by someone back at a hidden base somewhere. It makes me complacent, putting my hand on the door and pushing it open without any consideration.
A bullet grazes my shoulder and it burns like a spear thrown from the depths of hell, the bang of the gun seeming to follow several seconds later. Adrenaline spikes; I duck down, hands on top of my head instinctively as I look for cover. A table has been knocked over just a couple of meters away and I dive behind it, expecting more shots, but none follow.
I put my back to the tabletop, draw my legs in and grin. Now, this is more like it!