Thief in the Game Page 4

  I say, “People call me Monk.” They don’t. But it is what I look like. I don’t know what else to say.

  He was gone.

  Sleep deprivation

  FOR A WHILE I goofed around in the nearby conceptual art and listened to ambient music, trying to make sure that the thief – Tag – and anyone else who might be interested in observing me was not around nearby. The ambient music should have been relaxing. It was like electronic whale song with some low frequency vibrations bubbling underneath.

  It didn’t relax me, though. I was too unsettled and too anxious to get to my own space.

  If I hadn’t chosen and committed to this avatar, which I only now learned is practically two-dimensional, I would be able to pass invisibly like almost everybody else can. It doesn’t reduce your electronic footprint, obviously. You still show up on the most basic scanner, but only to people who are looking for you. People or machines.

  As much as I needed to upgrade my scanners and my security web, I was in urgent need of a little rest.

  It came as a surprise when I learned that without an actual, physical body, sleep doesn’t happen. Apparently the mind won’t do the voluntary passing into unconsciousness unless it’s attached to the pumps and tubes and wiring of an actual human body.

  Perhaps it could have something to do with the mechanics of the brain, the physical structure, the upper and lower layers maybe. Or perhaps it’s something else to do with the nerve fibers. Maybe they get physically worn or stresses, blasting tiny electrochemical messages around the muscles and organs, carrying data back to the brain.

  All I know for sure is that, when I left mine behind, I didn’t sleep for a long time. I didn’t feel tired, obviously, since I don’t really feel much of anything at all, and so it didn’t occur to me that I would need to sleep.

  And that was a big mistake. It turns out, if the mind, even mine, doesn’t get some of that free-form, undirected, unfocussed downtime every now and then, it just starts to make some for itself. My mind does, at least. After probably a week and a half of not stopping to sleep, thoughts and visions began to blur over reality. Here in the digiverse, between virtu, gameworlds, the infosphere and the buzzes of raw data, reality is a pretty loose concept, so when I saw that I was losing track of it, panic took a grip of me.

  The first time it happened, it began when I was in the middle of a game level. I was being pursued across high, gothic, nighttime city rooftops. Running and jumping, parkour-style. Pretty exciting. Odd things began to edge in, starting with an echoing male recital. Something with a rhythm like an ancient poem but made of words I couldn’t quite make out and that seemed random, like they weren’t connected to one another. It had the sound of a bell, slowed down or under water.

  I thought it was some surreal component to the gameplay at the start, but it had a different quality. And it was familiar in a way that was disturbing. By then shapes and visions waved in front of me. Scenes dragged through a dark, greenish mist, like they were drowned in some thick, viscous liquid. There was a pattern, like a chord of meaning that ran through the visions, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  I had to make a jump from the corner of a ledge down to a sloping tiled roof. When I reached the slope, I missed my footing, slipped and rolled off. Then I tumbled and fell, bumping and bouncing off walls and down to the night street, onto the hood of a cab.

  That sent me all the way back to the start of the level.

  At the level restart, the familiar sounds and rooftop landscape were overlaid with the low, drifting sounds, and the abstract shapes waved from the edges of my vision across the night sky. This was when I learned that, for sure, when I was in a game level, there was, is, no way for me to leave other than completing that level. I can’t pause and duck out; I have to accomplish to the level’s objective.

  Completing a parkour pursuit, followed by a fight to steal a helicopter and a flight out to an island for a final, epic confrontation was pretty challenging while I was beset by increasingly baffling and disturbing hallucinations. So, I kept on dying in all the ways that were possible, being flipped back to start the level over. It became like a living nightmare until I figured I just had to find a place that I could just sit and safely chill.

  Eventually, I just went looking for a space where I could be comfortable and feel safe, and just wait for it to pass. The first place I tried I was in a rooftop toolshed. A game mech busted in and shot me. Then I was back to the start of the level again. Next place I picked was on a quiet ledge away from the action. I fell off.

  Then I stumbled awkwardly up a ladder to the top of a water tower where it turned out I was safe. Naturally my score hemorrhaged in the hours I spent perched on the water tower. When I was finally rested I had to do the whole level over while I was still waking up and that in itself was like a small torture, but I did get out of there.

  It was only afterwards that I was able to realize what had happened. My mind had waited too long for a dream state to give it its freedom, and so it just came right in and took it. That feeling of being in a nightmare that I can’t stop, that keeps grinding over and over, like a Groundhog Day in Hell, I don’t want to go through that, not ever again.

  Now I try to always get rested before the early warning signs start up.

  I learned that if I leave it too long, my concentration just goes to shit. My present preferred path to downtime is a game I found the first time I stumbled into Hope’s. It’s a fanplay hack based an old 16-bit sheepdog game. I fire it up and there’s the comforting, lofi music.

  At first, I have a little fun getting the dogs to round up the sheep. I take them around the hills and in and out of their paddocks, but at the end, I like to get the whole flock of sheep into one long straggly line, with three dogs gently harrying them along, and then I just watch them go around and around against the green hills like a pixelated wooly pearl necklace.

  First I checked over the code I bought from Xak. Patched it up to the network or remote trips, sniffers and sensors. Set some cute custom alarms to go with them. Bleating and baa-ing noises, just for laughs, and a couple of yappy collie dog samples. Then I settled down with the imaginary sheep.

  I wondered about Tag. I had the sense that I had missed something about him. Maybe it was that he was trying to be friendly. I never was any good at judging that.

  Ninja

  TURNS OUT THE SHEEP and dog noises were not a great choice for my new alarms. They started up while I was in a blissed and trance-like state, watching straggly sheep. So, instead of informing me and alerting me to the proximity and possible arrival of an entity with Gabriel-like attributes, the sounds just blended into the soft flow of my digital shepherd dreams, but added unsettling currents. That meant my rest was disturbed without me being alerted. Or woken.

  It also meant that, before I realized what was happening, the entity had gotten pretty close and loomed for a while. Nearby. Very nearby. When I finally awoke, disturbed and panicky, my detector logs were not much help. All I could see was where they had been. That and the fact that now they were long gone.

  All I knew for certain was that someone or something came around. Like it was seeking my out of the way, hidden sanctum, off the beaten track of the deepest core of the remote, almost off grid refuge that is Hope’s. Waking wearily and focusing my unwilling attention, I had to accept the facts. I need a new location for my refuge but more urgently, I need a body. Probably not for long, but very soon.

  Not the kind of a thing you can really advertise for. And if you did, you’d be meeting all the wrongest kinds of people.

  ~~

  PM from Tag. Called me ‘Monk.’ I hadn’t offered any contact details. Still, I was determined not to be annoyed or alarmed. Everyone on the net assumed that it was okay to message anyone they encountered here. Identities were all fictions of one level or another and contact was taken as normal.

  I had no meatspace reality to protect. What I was here was all that I was. But nobody else knew that a
nd I wasn’t about to tell them. It made me very free but at the same time it left me feeling exposed and vulnerable. And there was no coffee. I didn’t miss other kinds of stimulants, but the time it took for my mind to properly reorder and reassemble itself after a rest period was a frustration that I had no cure for.

  Waiting it out was the only option, other than blundering around making bad decisions. I didn’t read Tag’s PM until I’d woken up. As usual, I woke up by reading. News, biographies, crime novels, political theory; my reading speed had never been as great as it’s been since I died, nor my appetite.

  My sleep cycle seems to work best if I rest for between eight and ten hours, once every ten to twelve days. Waking time after that is about an hour and a half and in that time, I can usually read a few novellas, a book of non-fiction – a history or a biography, and about half of a serious novel. So, there are definite plusses to being literally post-human.

  Tag’s message asked if I’d like to teamplay Vulcan’s Finale. And at that moment, that seemed like just what I wanted. An idea was starting to form in my mind.

  We agreed a time. Another message came in:

  Start 2 lvls back 4 th whip?

  I messaged back,

  No. Let’s go on.

  Then I sent one more:

  We can go back for a perfect run later. If you want.

  and Tag replied,

  Kk Gr8 im gud w/ that

  Before going to meet with him, I looked at the meatworld location of Tag’s IP. It was in a city, which was good, as far as I was concerned. Carbondale, up in the North East of USCorp. I checked some maps. Saint Dylan’s was a good-sized hospital facility not too far away from Tag’s apartment. The staff records, and HR records, of a few middle-ranking administrators looked pretty promising. I set up some messages and then I found some nearby hardware suppliers.

  The kinds of boxes, books and connections I needed weren’t so very specialist. Even the battery cells and the generator wouldn’t be too hard to get. Before I headed off to meet with Tag, a buildings manager in Saint Dylan’s surgical unit had already gotten back to me back with something that I thought would be positive.

  ~~

  Tag wore a ninja avatar. Black clothes, a wide, loose black sash, nose and mouth covered in a red scarf. High laced up Doc Marten’s boots and Ray Bans.

  Ominous music started up and stats flicked at the bottom the welcome screen that said ‘PROFESSOR LOVELACE, THE KINGDOM INSTITUTE,’ over Vulcan’s Finale logo. I asked over the game comms, “Have you done this level before?”

  Tag’s head shook.

  I wondered if I should discuss my idea with Tag but I decided it would be best to build some more rapport first. Not like that was among my specialist skills. Being social was something I hadn’t practiced much since I died. But I thought it would be important to try. We needed a bit of bonding, I thought, before I put the idea out there.

  I agonized in the tension between wanting to get it right and getting it done right away. We’d be going through some combat though. The coming level was likely to be stressful. It seemed the right choice. I had to hope that we would bond here.

  I was only going to get one chance and I needed it to be soon.

  The logos faded. A visored and helmeted pilot waved a gloved hand to beckon us into a big chopper with open sides. His manner told us to hurry. As soon as we were aboard, while we strapped ourselves into the seats between the two wide open doors, the aircraft lifted and pitched nose up and lurched to the side, threatening to tip us out.

  Tag actually held on. I figured the simjacket must be pretty effective, conveying the sway through pressure pads. Could have been using a tilting chair, too, but I didn’t see one on the tracker stats. We flew up and out over rugged mountains. The sky became misty white and color gradually drained from the landscape below us. It turned paler and eventually it too became almost completely white.

  The pilot pointed down at the snowy slopes. Packs of big gray wolves roamed in the snow and ice. Over the intercom in our headsets, he said “Those wolves are everywhere. They’re big and they’re very fast. There are quivers of crossbow bolts in the back and they’re tipped with a fast-acting nerve agent. Take as many as you can carry. Bullets only slow them down unless you’re a dead shot.”

  We found the bolts. “I’ll fly you out over the frozen wastes of Ohio, but you’ll have to snowboard down to the lake. You are headed for Professor Lovelace’s institute, right?” he turned to look at us, “I sure hope you get that serum to him in time for him to synthesize batches of it.”

  ~~

  A thought ocurred to me. I got it wrong. I should have made my pitch to Tag before we started the level. If we didn’t complete at the same time, if one of us got killed and the other didn’t or if one of us jumped ahead, I would lose contact.

  There would be no way to know how long for. Being stuck in a game until I completed a level was something I’d never been able to fix. I’d never really tried. I hadn’t ever had a pressure of time before.

  This wasn’t really a pressure of time. It was contact. If I lost contact with Tag, I could lose my chance. My actual life could hang on how I playin this one level of this one damned game.

  Or how Tag did. Losing contact either way could mean disaster for me. And it was time to jump.

  ~~

  We’d locked our feet onto snowboards, and we jumped out of the two side doors. The ten to fifteen foot drop from the moving chopper to the snowy slope was awkward with weighty backpacks full of equipment. Tag had more trouble getting up and balanced for the slope after the impact of landing.

  I guessed that was another sign of the authentic experience of his simsuit. I only had to deal with blue flashing readouts that said,

  WEIGHT

  HEAVY WEIGHT

  And

  DISCOMFORT

  As well as

  COLD

  Tag must have been experiencing some actual versions of those. It had an impact on Tag’s play, too. We rode unsteadily at first, down the steep start of the slope and we swayed to dodge trees and rocks as they came up ahead. Ever closer behind were snarls from the wolves, fast closing in.

  Even with the lithe, snaky twists of his slender hips, Tag was slow getting his crossbow up and aimed. Ahead and far below, the cluster of white domes that I guessed to be the Kingdom Institute sat isolated, about a mile and a half out in the middle of the wide, frozen lake.

  From either side of us, packs of big, pale gray wolves rushed in pursuit. Their fur made them hard to see against the snow. Some I only saw the savage red glow of their eyes. I shot at the ones on my side with the crossbow. It was tough, though, because my body needed to swerve to propel and steer the snowboard. My aim was poor, and I probably hit with less than one bolt in five.

  I had to keep turning, looking forward to steer then turning back to battle the wolves. Over the com, Tag said, “Would it work to stop and shoot them as they came?” The voice was still a synthetic. It sounded like a vintage Anime hero. I listened through to try and catch some hint of Tag’s real, live voice through the transformation, but I couldn’t.

  “They’re too fast. I don’t think we can fire crossbows quick enough, and they’d be on us in no time.” A huge tree trunk loomed up in front of me. I had to lean hard to avoid and went down on my side. I was out of control, looking up, sliding down the slope on my front. Two wolves sped up out of the pack and got closer. I fired crossbow bolts as fast as I could, but I didn’t hit either of them.

  My feet struck something, probably a rock, and I was thrown in the air. A wolf leaped after me. I shot a bolt right between his eyes.

  I was falling. I’d tumbled over a ledge. Tag was near, looking like an air-surfer. Three wolves plunged through the air after him. The wolf pursuing me was inches from my face and the crossbow wasn’t ready to fire. I wondered whether I’d be smashed on a rock before the wolf ripped my throat out.

  Tag shot a bolt and it went straight through the wolf’s
ear. The wolf’s legs kicked. I grabbed hold of it and turned in the air, hoping it would break my fall. It did, as the crunching and wet gristle sound confirmed.

  Game physics

  GAME PHYSICS MODELED ME with the weight and resistance of a solid body. Even though I was, apparently a molded sheet as thin as graphene.

  Tag was ahead now, boarding down the next part of the slope. That gave me the chance to follow behind him. I shot the two wolves closest to catching him. The last one was level with me. My aim was on now, and Tag’s, too. We both shot his throat at almost the same moment and he arced through the air with all four legs out, then landed, sliding on his back.

  Tag and I boarded faster and faster down the slope. There were no more wolves following us, but the slope was getting steeper and more dangerous. We both had to tack and weave to avoid trees, boulders, and fissures.

  The bottom of the slide was sharp, and jagged rocks lined the edge of the frozen lake. We had to make huge heel-side turns to stop in time. The institute looked deserted. There were no lights on and no movement.

  Two snow bikes were parked up by the edge of the lake. The only thing between us and the bikes was the growing line of red eyes and snarling jaws that hunched ahead of us.

  Tag said, “We can’t get them if they all charge at once. Not with the crossbows.”

  Already I had drawn the Glock and the Colt. Even one-handed, I’ve always been a pretty decent shot. While Tag got two wolves down with the crossbow, I nailed four of them with the pistols. No chance as they charged, though. There was only one thing left I could think to use.

  The T’ck’s ax was no use until the wolves were upon me. There were three. I had to chop fast. The first one I cut straight and smooth, right across his neck. Swinging back, I got the second one in the side of his head and he went down. The third wolf, I was out of position and out of time.