I WOULDN’T CALL myself a violent man, but there are few things more satisfying than pulling off a perfect head shot from more than a hundred meters away and watching the can’s metal head split open. That’s when the tentacles come out and I switch to a laser cannon with a broader beam, because those things fly around so fast it’s impossible to hit one at a time. When I’ve got a couple of good shots in, the whole creature comes out of the can to scuttle off across the red dust, but I shoot a grenade into its gelatinous rear end before it can get behind cover. Another stain on the surface of Mars and another cheer from Dee. I grin at her and holster the cannon, feeling like the fucking Don of New London, and turn to watch the scientists I’ve saved crawl out from the transporter.
One of them, a woman, comes over to me. I can’t see much of her figure through the thick environmental suit, but she’s pretty. I can’t help but smile at the admiration in her eyes, blue and huge with wonder at my evident skill.
“That was an amazing shot,” she says in a British accent far crisper than mine. “If you have a minute, I’d love to tell you about the new-season selection on offer at Abeline and Colson.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I say, and a dialog box pops up on the right-hand side of my vision.
Would you like to remove in-character ads?
They’re not even in character. How do those gimps in marketing even think this shit works? I’m pumped up from ending a fight that’s lasted at least twenty minutes, and the last fucking thing I want the character—who’s obviously going to give the next bit of plot—to ask me is about whether I want to look at hand-knitted jumpers. I select the “yes” option with a flick of my eyes and confirm the micropayment.
We’ve noticed heightened levels of irritation from in-game ads. Would you like to remove all ads from this server connection?
Oh, I would love to, but I look at the cost and even though it isn’t that much, I know I can’t keep pissing away a few pounds here and there like I have been tonight. That’s the trouble with these violent mersives: once the limbic system gets involved my higher cognitive functions are screwed.
“We carrying on, Carl?” Dee asks.
“Yeah,” I say, dismissing the offer and its accompanying dialog box. “Sorry.”
“There’s another transport that was due to reach the outpost, but they haven’t checked in,” the scientist says, back to the game dialog, as if nothing has happened.
“We’ll look into it,” Dee says, and she gives me that smile, the one she always gives in between fights, the one that promises violent fun.
“Take our ’porter,” the scientist says. “We can make it to the bunker from here. And then maybe afterward . . .” She looks me up and down and then fires a lustful smile at Dee. “Maybe you could both come back here for a debriefing.”
“Yup, we’ll do that,” Dee says, and heads for the transporter’s driving seat as the last of the scientists jump out the back and head off to safety.
“Did you change the settings?” I ask as I strap myself into the passenger’s seat. “I thought the whole sex-starved martian-scientist stuff pissed you off.”
She shrugs. “I just fancied a change. I think the shitty dialog is funny. It’s like those ancient horror classics—you seen those? They were just pr0n, really. And I figured you might need to blow off some steam. No pun intended.”
“Bollocks,” I say, and we both laugh.
She’s right though: I did need this. When I finally got through to her I was almost home, munching on a bag of roasted chestnuts from the only street-food vendor in London that I trust. By then I couldn’t talk about what had happened; I’d already pushed it down too far. She could tell I was upset. “Wanna shoot some shit on Mars?” she’d asked, knowing I needed some way to vent. There’s nothing better than an ultraviolent with a thin-ass plot and great rendering to help me unwind after a case. “Do you think the scientists on Mars know about this game?”
“Are you joking? Half of them probably made a stack of cash recording environmentals for the game company.”
“I wonder if they play it.”
She doesn’t answer, focusing instead on getting the transporter over some difficult terrain. She always drives, because she’s better at it than I am. I don’t mind, but usually there’s a turret I can man to keep me busy. These are nothing more than armored jeeps and there’s nothing for me to do but wait until we reach the next set piece.
I look out of the window at the orange sky, the browns and dusky reds of the martian landscape. Even though I know I’m not really here, it’s not enough to stop it seeming real. I know that what I see is simply a clever combination of images displayed into my lenses and data streamed to my chip, all conspiring to make me see and hear things that are, literally, a world away and not real anyway. The real base on Mars has been in operation for more than ten years and the planet has been studied for the past sixty-odd, and not once has there been any evidence of aliens or indigenous robots or aliens inside robots, as this game has decided upon. The only thing realistic about this is the way it looks and my brain just laps it up, happy to be tricked as my body lies on my sofa, home at last.
If I could, would I jack it all in, sell all my stuff and apply for a secondment to the Mars station? What kind of person would do that?
Someone like my mother. But she didn’t go to Mars. I shudder, forcing my thoughts away from her, a flash of irritation at the journo for stirring that shit up again. I have no desire to leave Earth, no matter how many people and news feeds say I must be desperate to. I’m not the abandoned, tragic figure they want to make me, staring up at the night sky, wishing I had been taken too. Fuck that shit. I’m not what they want me to be.
“You’re quiet,” Dee says.
The orange glow from outside shines through the plasglass visor of her helmet, highlighting stray blond strands around her eyes with bronze and making her pale skin look like it’s being warmed by the light of an ancient forge. I almost tell her about the journo, but I don’t want to say the words he said. If I do that, they’ll feel too real. And anyway, she’s heard me moan about this shit for years; she doesn’t need to hear it again.
“Must be tough at the moment,” she says. “All that talk of the capsule is bad enough but that documentary on top? That’s tough shit for anyone to deal with . . .”
I turn away from the fake martian scenery to look at her, feeling the stress and dread that I’d been trying so hard to escape seeping into this world too. “What documentary?” Had the journo chosen to leave out the fact it had already been made? Or is this another one?
“Shit. You didn’t know?” She bites her lip.
“What documentary?” There have been several over the years, each one a punctuation mark at the end of some tenuous anniversary. The first was when I was ten. After Atlas it was called, and the researchers who made it harangued my father into a nervous breakdown. And that fucking journo had the gall to try to make out that it was a positive thing.
“Well, it’s forty years since they left, and with the capsule being opened and . . .” She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. “I saw it come up on the schedule at work. I didn’t know whether to tell you or not. I thought they might have been in touch.”
I draw in a deep breath. “Someone hassled me on the way home tonight.” I don’t mention the food market. Dee wouldn’t understand. “He said something about a documentary, but it didn’t sound like it had been made yet.”
“Oh, it’s definitely been made already,” Dee says. “They didn’t even e-mail you?”
“They probably tried.” My job is tough and I didn’t choose it, but one perk is better than most at my pay grade: I can buy top-level personal security for only a fraction of its market value. It’s enough to keep the bottom-feeders from finding where I live and hacking my stuff in the cloud and making my life even more hellish. They always find a way to my public in-box though, the one I have to have by law. And at every shitty anniversary or reminder of the day Atlas carried its crew off to follow that lunatic to find God, the in-box is bombarded by interview requests. My APA filters it as best as its algorithms can, but there’s always someone who manages to get through to me. If it weren’t for Dee and her kindness, I wouldn’t even have this break. I can’t afford a private gaming server, and Christ knows how she can on her pay grade. No, I’m not going to cast my professional eye over that puzzle. I’m just glad it’s only the in-game ads bugging me and not some twat trying to get a sound bite in the middle of a firefight.
“But don’t you want to make sure they tell the truth?”
“They’re not interested in that, Dee. They’re interested in a narrative.”
“But don’t you want that narrative to be true?”
I frown at her, but she’s keeping her eyes on the dust and rocks ahead, steering the transporter toward a bright dot on the horizon. “I don’t give a shit about what anyone thinks.”
“Yeah, but the last one said you had ongoing problems as a result of—”
“Show me a person who doesn’t have ongoing problems and I’ll show you an AI. What’s it to you, anyway?”
She glances at me, smiles a little, but something about this is making me uncomfortable. “I just worry about you. Look at you. You’re skinny as hell. You eating properly?”
I let my raised eyebrow express how unimpressed I am. “Dee, I always eat properly.”
“You’re too thin. It must be the stress. I’m not having a go, Carl—I can only imagine how awful it must be. Shit, the things they say about your mother—I mean, that would upset anyone.”
The things they say about my mother. They did upset me when I was a child. I believed them. Before I had the means to filter the news feeds like I do now, I saw what the world thought of a mother who left her baby behind to travel on Atlas. There were chat shows dedicated to decrying her decision, and features on the worst mothers in history in which she was always in the top ten. It didn’t matter that others on that ship had left children too. Five toddlers, ten teenagers, many more adult children. As a baby, I was singled out. And all the other children had been left behind by their fathers. It was as if the media had so much more outrage to pour upon an absent woman than all those absent men.
Everybody judged her as the worst of humanity. I wasn’t old enough to realize that those fucking leeches didn’t have a clue what my mother was thinking when she left on that ship. And just as much as they hated her, they pitied me. I was incapable of understanding that, to them, I wasn’t a person but rather a character in a melodrama of their making. Nothing more.
“Carl?” Dee’s voice is as gentle as it always is, but she wants me to say something and there’s nothing I want to share. “Don’t you want people to know what their bullshit can do to someone?”
I don’t even want to think about this anymore. I scan the surroundings for anything hostile, hoping for something to pop up that I can shoot. I don’t understand why the level designers have allowed such a huge gap between action. The next station still looks miles away, a tiny cluster of lights in the distance. Surely something is about to land and open fire or roll out from behind a rock and take out the engine? It’s like it wants me to sit here and be bored while Dee . . .
While Dee interviews me.
I don’t say anything for a moment, getting a handle on the anger. I can’t believe Dee would have anything to do with those parasites. It’s us against them, surely, like it’s always been. Right from the moment I met her.
A flash of the inside of the shipping container all those years ago, dark save for a single bright coin of blue sky in the roof at the corner. The smell of vomit and urine. The sound of someone weeping in the corner; others muttering to each other in a language I didn’t understand. Hands were wrapped around my fist, holding it still.
“I could have had him!” I yelled into the darkness, the face in front of me nothing more than a glint of light from watery eyes.
“He would have killed you.” Despite the circumstances, I was elated to hear someone else speak English. “Calm down. We haven’t been shipped out yet.”
“So we need to get out before that happens!” I was a teenager, still bruised and bloodied from trying to escape and being rounded up and thrown into the container with the other nonpersons. We’d been tricked into going somewhere with a rumor of paid work off-grid, then rounded up like stray dogs and treated just the same. The woman in the darkness had stopped me from hitting the man who’d thrown us in there. I had almost punched her out instead.
“No, it’s a good thing. I heard what they’re planning to do. We’re going to be hot-housed. If you mark yourself out as violent, it’ll be worse for you.”
“Hot-housed? What does that even fucking mean?”
The hands tightened around my fist and her voice lowered. “It means we have to be smart. You’ve played games, right? Mersives?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
“This is no different. You keep quiet, learn the rules, do the right things at the right times. We get it right, we’ll win the game. Understand?”
“No.”
“Willing to learn?”
“I guess.”
The hands shifted until only one held mine. I uncurled my fist and she shook my hand, mingling our sweat. “My name is Dee.”
“Carlos.”
She pulled me closer until I could feel her breath on my ear. “I’ll watch your back if you’ll watch mine.”
And she did. Dee taught me how to navigate that appalling gov-corp-sanctioned “solution” to the problem of nonpersons on the streets: the hell of hot-housing. On the first day there they told us that we were lucky. That we had a way to become part of society again, and with a place in society we would have rights once more. The hot-housers neglected to mention that those rights would be owned by whoever bought us at the end of our time there, when we’d been sorted and had a value assigned to us and the debt we’d accrued during our imprisonment had been fully calculated.
Hot-housing was nothing more than a prison that had been monetized more creatively. Every aspect of our life controlled. What we did. What we ate. What we learned. Later, what we thought and felt. Life was the inside of a cell or the inside of the machine (even now the hairs on the back of my neck prickle at just the thought of it) or the inside of a virtual training space.
None of the outer doors were locked. They didn’t need to be. Every morning when our individual cells were opened, they’d make us walk past windows to get to the mess hall, just so we could see what was outside.
Miles of barren wasteland. Toxic earth, ravaged by defunct industry from the previous century and too expensive to clean up. In the sky above it, dozens of drones set to patrol in the hope someone would try to escape, funded by the sorts of people who looked for cheap acquisitions for their brothels or labs or other sordid uses.
We were the lucky ones, as they told us every day, because we were bright enough to be trained and strong enough to take the drugs that enabled us to cram ten years’ worth of education and training into less than two. Yeah. So damn lucky.
Dee had been right; being hot-housed was like a game and it had clear rules. Not that there was any enjoyment in understanding that the only way to win was to make ourselves too useful and valuable to sell into menial labor or other terrible places we only heard rumors about. It meant we left that hell with bigger debt; after proving our value we had to pay for the training that enabled us to reach our potential, but, as Dee said, at least after we served out our contract we’d be in a better place to enjoy our freedom.
I used to hate how seeing her again brought it all back so sharply. Now I appreciate how it helps me to remember we survived.
Looking at her now, in the driving seat, I doubt my suspicions. Surely it’s the same as it always was. Surely I’m just being paranoid, the harassment earlier setting me on edge. But this doesn’t feel right. I check my thinking, looking for the assumptions and gaps in the data. It leads back to the same conclusion: she’s trying to interview me for someone else.
“Stop the ’porter.”
“Why? I can’t see any—”
“Stop the fucking ’porter, Dee!”
The tires skid and she kills the engine. “What?”
“What’s going on? You’ve never talked to me about this stuff before, in all the years we’ve known each other. Five years ago you didn’t even mention the thirty-fifth anniversary fuckery they were churning out on the feeds—you just met me online and we shot the shit out of stuff.”
“Look—”
“Then you invite me here, just as all the capsule bullshit gets fired up again, offering a sanctuary from the public servers. There’s no way you can afford this, Dee, not unless you’ve got into some seriously dodgy shit, and you’re not going to risk a black mark.”
“Carl, you’re—”
“And now you’re asking me the kinds of questions a hack would, while the game gives you an oh-so-convenient pause in the action. Did you really think I’d fall for it? It’s clever, I’ll give you that. No breach of privacy per se; no need to do anything to my accounts that could be traced. No, they just used you to get to me the old-fashioned way. Nothing illegal whatsoever.”
Dee’s shoulders slump and she holds up a hand to me as she looks away, whispering, presumably to whomever is backing this sorry exercise. It’s probably some journo or one of the researchers for that damn documentary she brought up. Yeah, they always try to snare me with the whole “Don’t you want to tell your truth?” line.
“They say they just want one exclusive interview, Carl. Not about the capsule. About Alejandro and the Circle. Just one interview and then this server space will be yours for the rest of your life—full privacy, no ads, any game you want.”
I laugh because if I don’t, it’ll come out some other way. I’ve never even mentioned the Circle or Alejandro to Dee; no way I’ll talk to strangers about them. “Tell them to go fuck themselves.”
Dee’s eyes move as if she’s doing something with a dialog box and she takes off her helmet. “Carl,” she says, reaching over to touch my arm. “They’ll draw up a contract promising to show you the edited footage before it’s released. It’s the best way for you to have a voice in this madness. You can’t just keep running away from it all the time. It just makes them more interested in you—don’t you get it?”
“Not you too.” My voice cracks and I look away from her, the old, familiar bitterness of betrayal flooding back in.
“These people are different. You’ll have complete control over what they put out on the feeds.”
“I already have control. I choose who to talk to and who to keep out. It’s none of their goddamn business.” I move away from her. “I won’t forget this. End game and exit.”