8

ALL I CAN see from my hiding place is a painting of an old sailing ship being tossed on the ocean in a storm. There is a thick carpet laid from wall to wall, making me wonder if this is a bedroom. I listen for the sound of the shooter crossing the room to come finish me off, and I’m puzzled by the fact that they haven’t tried to shoot me through the tabletop. There’s a loud sigh and what sounds like a gun being tossed onto the floor.

“Knock first!” a man shouts. “I can’t stand it when you forget the freakin’ rules! I nearly killed you! Dumb-ass!” His accent is from somewhere in the southern states, but all those drawls sound the same to me. I have no idea which particular place he comes from.

I suddenly know why I’m wearing a tux, just like the rest of the staff. I am such a cocking idiot. “Sorry, sir!” I call back.

“Well, come out, then. What did you want?”

My heart still banging away like I’m in a firefight, I stand with shaking legs.

It is a bedroom, with an en-suite on the other side of the room. All beige and white and so neutral it makes me feel like grabbing a few cans of brightly colored paint and just lobbing them around the room so it has some definition. It’s like it’s been designed to be so restful it hardly exists.

Everything is so perfectly coordinated it feels like a high-end hotel room, or something that’s been designed by an AI. Nothing here speaks of a life or a person’s interests, just furniture and generic ceramic ornaments that have complementary colors. There’s another sea-based painting, but that smacks of an AI wanting to create something with flavor. The bed is, unsurprisingly, huge and covered in scatter cushions, which you’d just have to push onto the floor to go to sleep and then put back in the morning. What’s the point of them?

The room is spacious enough for a large sofa and two armchairs arranged around a rug, and a small dining table too. What is that even for? This must be modeled after a hotel room.

There’s a man, alone, on the far side of the room, standing in a circular area that suggests a turret-shaped protrusion on the side of the building. He’s wearing something like a SWAT team uniform, black, functional. No helmet. He has brown eyes, brown hair, and I have no idea who he is. I don’t recognize him. The first person here I can’t place from somewhere in my past. He’s looking at me expectantly. “Errr . . . the butler said you might need a hand, sir.”

“Come over here, then,” he says.

There’s a complex machine next to him, partially assembled, with the latest tray of components resting next to it. He is literally putting it together, pretty much from scratch, and it looks like he’s almost finished it. There are some tools, but nothing useful for my purposes. I approach, cautious, taking in as much detail about the equipment around him as I can.

“I need to know you’re safe,” he says, folding his arms. His legs are slightly parted as he stands there, appraising me. Typical male power stance. Whatever, Mr. Nonplayer Character, I can handle you.

“I’m one of the staff,” I say. “I have clearance to be here.”

He just stares at me. He’s waiting for something more. I stop a couple of meters away, not wanting to push the AI into combat mode, which is usually what happens in an end scene like this. If I stay outside of the NPC’s personal space, I’ll be able to keep it in dialog mode to find out why he’s doing this.

I don’t need to know, necessarily. The other NPCs have told me what he’s going to do. But I want to be thorough. If this is an initiation, I want to look good, and blowing it after all the shit it’s put me through already would be really dumb. He’s obviously waiting for some sort of password or secret handshake or—

The pin! I pull back my jacket and the tiny little CSA pin that I took in the previous level is still there, simply affixed to a different shirt. “Does this reassure you?” I ask, brazening it out.

He smiles, relaxes. “Thank you, sister. Now, shall we do God’s work?”

Sister? Shit, is this some sort of cult?

I smile. “Yes, brother. Could you tell me what stage you’re at?”

He turns away to look at the machine. I could stab him in the back, but I’m still not very confident about how exactly to use myself as any sort of weapon, let alone as a knife. Bobby Bear said something about consequences . . . am I supposed to detonate myself somehow, thereby removing the threat but ending the game?

“I’ve figured out how to put it together; that was tough but not beyond me. Now I’ve cracked it, I just have to finish putting all these in the right places.” He gestures at the remaining components.

I can’t help but think this looks like a sort of stylized puzzle piece. There are markings on the little bits of electronics, hinting that there is a pattern that needs to be identified and followed. But this is a boss fight, surely, not a puzzler? The first NPC in the game pointed me toward it, right at the start of the game. Other NPCs have told me he’s going to kill everyone. As crappy as the signposts are in this game, those have been pretty damn obvious.

Too obvious, perhaps? No, if I start second-guessing now I won’t get anywhere.

“Looking good,” I say. “So, once it’s done, are you ready for the next part of the”—I look at the uniform and consider the way he treated me—“mission?”

“I’m more than ready. I feel good about this, actually. I wasn’t sure if I needed to go through this again, but . . .” He coughs. “Errr . . . I mean, I feel totally comfortable with the mission.”

“You’re going to detonate the weapon?” Shit, I hope I am triggering the right dialog here. I want to understand exactly what he’s going to do, and as long as this NPC believes I’m in the same organization as he is, the fight won’t kick off.

“Sure I am. Only this time, I get to watch.”

This dialog is weird. Like it’s hinting that he’s been training for it, maybe that this has happened before. He’s looking out of the window, gazing across the rooftops of London. “We’ll be safe here. We can watch it from this very window. Watch them burn. All those sinners. All those who refuse to acknowledge the true path to God.”

Oh great, a religious nutjob monolog.

“And it isn’t just a cleansin’; this is protection. That’s what’s really crystallized for me now. We’re protecting the future of humanity by takin’ the purest with us and makin’ sure that none of those bastards can spread their lies anywhere else. One religion—the true religion—will go with us into the stars.”

Oh JeeMuh. This isn’t a coincidence. The designer knows what they did! He’s showing me he does. But why? Why put me through all this awful shit, just to tell me that?

I hold my hands still at my sides, school my face into showing what all men like this want to see: agreement and admiration. Behind that mask are so many questions I am keeping silent. How could the game designer know about Earth? Why not just tell me?

He grabs a couple of the components and starts clicking them into place inside the machine. There are only ten or so left. “Are those the last bits you need?” I ask. “Do you need me to fetch anything else to make it work?”

“No.”

I run through the game in my mind. He made me start in the basement, facing one of the lowest points of my life, then forced me to confront all the loss caused by what those bastards did. And now he’s made an NPC personifying them, giving me a villain to kill right at the top of the building.

This isn’t an initiation. This is catharsis.

And all of a sudden, I know how to kill him. I’ve always known how I want to kill those responsible, and now I can get a taste of it. I swiftly close the distance between us, put my left hand on his shoulder and twist him round. I flatten my right hand, holding the fingers extended, and imagine them as solid as a blade. I thrust it into his abdomen, aiming for just under his lowest rib. His skin splits and I feel the heat and moisture of his innards as I push through and past internal organs and then I am grasping his heart as I roar with rage.

It feels hot and slimy and he gasps, dropping the component that was in his hand, his eyes bulging in shock. I expect him to cough up blood, or make some sort of bubbling gurgle, but there’s just a choking wheeze as he sinks to his knees. His blood is running down my forearm, dripping onto the floor, and I sink onto my knees with him, squeezing, squeezing the life out of his sick fundamentalist heart.

He falls and I relax my hand, letting his body slide off my arm and collapse. Even though my arm is covered with gore, his body looks uninjured. He still looks very dead though.

Yeah, okay, that felt pretty good. I flex my fingers and they feel fine, aside from the drying blood coating them. After standing there for a few moments, waiting for some sort of in-game prompt that I’ve completed the mission or quest or whatever, I go to the en-suite bathroom and clean myself up as best I can. I abandon the jacket and roll the bloodied sleeve up, wishing I’d had a chance to do that before I killed him.

It seems strange that such a gory death has left no evidence on his corpse. Not even a hole in his clothes. It’s like I was able to do an adult-rated kill move within a child-safe game, which this most certainly is not.

The en-suite is obscene. So high-spec and spacious that I feel tempted to have a shower. But I don’t trust this game and I don’t trust the designer behind it. For all I know he could be watching.

With some apprehension, I check my face for blood spatter, but there are only a couple of specks on my throat, which are soon washed away. At least the designer hasn’t dicked about with my face here. It’s the same as it is in the real world. Mum’s cheekbones, Dad’s eyes, my hair its usual dark blond, cropped shorter now than I’ve ever worn it. I run my hand up the back of my head, feeling the velvety fuzz, actually liking it. I didn’t wear it this way for years, unable to divorce it from the memory of being shaved by the hot-housers when I was first processed. It’s longer on the top than they had left it: just enough so I don’t look like one of their inmates.

The urge to cry rises so swiftly a half sob escapes before I even realize it’s happening. With one hand braced against the sink, I cover my mouth until the feeling passes. What is there to cry about? I look at my reflection, at my glistening eyes, and scowl. “Pull your shit together!” I shout at myself, and it’s gone. I feel fine now.

Nothing has changed in the bedroom. His body is still there, which jars me. In zero-gore games it would have faded out by now. I study his face, wondering if I knew him a long time ago and have forgotten him, but he seems just as much a stranger. Surely there is a statement in that fact? In a game populated purely by people I have known—or even just seen regularly—in my life on Earth, the fact that he is the only exception feels important. Is the designer saying that the people who did this are nothing like me or the other normal people I knew? I would have thought he’d be rendered like that boss of mine, but he was somewhere around floor seven.

And, of course, this is nothing compared to the wider question: was this really a way to tell me the creator knows what they did? Or am I overthinking it? I do that with games, always trying to second-guess them, always trying to see the work-around so I can beat it faster. I need to be careful when I next speak to him, just in case I’m wrong. Or he’s working for them.

I mentally stamp on that silly bit of paranoia and go to the machine the boss was building. It looks like an industrial oven; the little bits of electronics were being fitted inside the central space, forming a pattern on the inside floor. There’s what looks like some sort of . . . cannon on the front of the machine, pointing out at the city. No trigger, so I expect it’s activated through an APA for security. I start pulling out the components and doing my best to dismantle it in the hope it’s the trigger for the end-of-game sequence. The more I handle it, the more it looks like a puzzler mini-game to me. Perhaps the game was coded to give me the option of helping him. Or taking him out, changing my mind and then killing everyone else. No, that’s not my rush.

There’s a clunk from inside the machine when I pull the last component out of the central cavity. I crouch down, peering inside to see a section of an internal partition has dropped down, revealing another cavity farther in. The light doesn’t penetrate far enough for me to see what’s inside it. I reach in and my fingertips brush against something cold and solid—a box.

Pulling it out reveals that it’s the same obsidian box as the one that contained the key that opened the door into this game. Nice symmetry.

“Bobby Bear?” I call, and then he comes through the door from the hallway.

I set the box down and pick him up, cuddling him tight. Just one indulgence, just one moment of comfort before I go. I daren’t go back into the other room and seek out my parents. I’m scared I would never want to leave.

But more than that, I’m scared that it wouldn’t be as perfect as I have always imagined it would be.

Bobby Bear’s little arms squeeze me back. “Well done, Dee Dee. You stopped the bad man from doing a terrible thing.”

“If only the real world were so easy, right?”

“It was good to see you again,” he says. “How do you feel about what happened?”

If Bobby Bear hadn’t asked me that same question a million times in my childhood, I’d suspect this was a consumer feedback device. It might still be, but I let myself imagine it’s not. “Okay, I guess.”

“Okay, you guess?” His tone is both incredulous and unimpressed. “All right, how about answering this: do you feel you did the right thing?”

I put him down and look at the body behind us. “Yeah. He was some weirdo full of toxic Christianity bullshit who was about to kill everyone.” I shrug. “But it’s—” I stop myself. Shit. I was about to say that it’s just a poor salve for the wound, given this is just a game and over six months after the real damage was done. I need to be careful.

“But it’s what?”

“But it’s a no-brainer,” I say. “It was obviously the end set piece. And I know some people get off on being the villain, but that doesn’t do it for me, so there was only one way to go. I could have tried to persuade him not to do it, I guess, but from the way he was talking it was clear that reason had left his table a long time ago.”

“Are you going to leave now, Dee Dee?”

I pick up the box. “Yeah.”

“You don’t want to see your parents before you go?”

I look back, into the corridor, hearing the piano and the laughter. “No. They’re not my parents.”

There is a key inside the box, and this one has an ornate O embellished in the grip. I pick it up and a doorframe starts appearing in the floor, just as before. “Bye then, Bobby Bear,” I say.

“Bye-bye, Dee Dee. Take care now. I love you.”

I loved you too, I think, but I don’t say it. I put the key in the newly appeared door now standing in front of me, turn it and go through into my office. The door closes behind me before I give in to the temptation to look back at Bobby Bear to see if he is waving the way I imagine he is. Was. He’s not there and never was. It was just a fucking game.

The familiar slate expanse of my office space is mercifully bleak and feels a world away from the game environment. I look up at the stars, wait a moment to see if I get that weird chatbox thing, and then when nothing comes I say, “End immersion,” with a sigh of relief.

It feels like I sink into my body, then into the bed. I open my eyes and see the creamy white plastic ceiling, hear the quiet hum of the environmental support system and realize that I really hate this cabin. A few seconds later I also realize that I desperately need a piss.

My body’s needs come thick and fast, a new one presenting itself as quickly as I satisfy the last. Tedious meatsack, so demanding.

Once I’ve had some food, I stretch out on the bed again and review my messages. Nothing from Carolina except an acknowledgment of receipt sent by her APA. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad sign. Maybe she has a lot of work on. Then I notice the time and sit up sharply. Maybe it’s because it’s the middle of the bloody night.

JeeMuh, I was gone for hours. It felt like hours . . . but most games skew stuff, tricking the brain into thinking more time has passed in game than actually has. Not this one. I’ve been fully immersed for over six hours.

Usually there’s a notification after two. Just a tiny ping from your APA, no big deal. At three hours in it gets a bit more persistent, reminding you to at least have a drink. Mine is set to boot me out after four hours in a game, whether I like it or not.

That game overrode my own personal safety settings. Furious, I slam my fist into the bed and then I look at my hand, expecting to see a healing gash across the palm, but mercifully there isn’t one. That fucking b—

The message just pops up in that weird dialog box again, the text floating over my visual field like any other, but this time there’s no ping from my APA asking if I want to read it first.

<I think you need to learn some manners.> I type back and immediately regret it. That was far too polite and I sound like some old bastard from some hokey mersive about a small town where everyone knows each other. <I also think you’re a fucking shitweasel.> That’s better.

<Yeah, but what about the game?>

That actually makes me laugh. <You broke almost every rule in game narrative design: you didn’t give me any content warnings, you didn’t ask for my consent in using data you must have mined from my chip or dug out of some dodgy file on this ship, you sure as hell didn’t get permission to use the likenesses and voices of people who’ve died and the final boss was far too easy to kill and it wasn’t that dramatic anyway because there wasn’t any kind of emotional buildup to it.>

He must be twelve. Some fucking twelve-year-old genius who is just so damn arrogant he doesn’t even hear criticism.

This is making me nervous. It feels like there was some sort of tipping point and I was too distracted to notice. This is not edgy. This is not cool or exciting. I’ve only felt like this once before, when I was with a guy in a squat who I kind of liked, who kind of liked me and then there was kissing and all of a sudden I just knew I was not into him. No, not him, the whole sex thing. I’d just been mimicking what I saw other people do, thinking it was what I should do, but then, when it was actually happening, it just felt . . . crap, and I didn’t want to kiss, let alone let it progress any further. Just like back then, there’s no way to leave this situation easily, no door to lock between us if it goes bad.

“Ada,” I say, “can you block this chatbox thing?”

“Please specify the chatbox you are referring to,” Ada replies in its smooth voice.

“The one that’s in my visual field right now, dumb-ass!”

“There is no chatbox in your visual field. Dumb-ass.”

Just like in the squat when I backed off and he kept on coming, I feel the first chill of panic. <It’s late. I need to sleep now. And you need to tell me who you are if you want to keep talking to me.>

The box disappears. I swing my legs off the bed and lean forward, resting my head between my knees, feeling shaky and nauseous. Violated. That’s how I feel. Not because of the chatbox bullshit—though that doesn’t help—but because of that fucking game that dredged my life and muddied everything up again. Something about the way he asked how I felt about killing that man felt . . . sick. Like I’ve been some sort of test subject or . . . I don’t know. It just feels wrong.

I can’t tell anyone though. It would mean they’d want to investigate and I don’t want to be on anyone’s radar, not when I have some serious shit to get done. I can’t even mention it to Carl. Not that I ever confided much in him anyway. I never confided in anyone since Bobby Bear. And he wasn’t even a real person. There is a flicker of self-pity before I snuff it out.

There’s no way I’ll sleep now. “Ada, show me some pictures on the ceiling or something.”

“Are you having trouble sleeping?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you like a neurochemical intervention?”

“No.”

“Would you like me to show you what Japan looks like in blossom season?”

I lie back down on the bed. “Yeah, that sounds good. Show me some blossom. And tell me a story. One that I like.”

“‘The Snow Queen,’ by Hans Christian Andersen . . .”