"Does it have a chance of working?" I ask. He pauses for a moment then nods. "Then I want it."
He taps his console and my phone buzzes. I look at the screen of my phone. It displays an access card with the name KADEN on it. "It's a username for a game" he says.
He gives me directions to the Kraal, a bar on the outskirts of Salt River, making me repeat them to make sure I have them. "Ask to use the White Room," he says as he leads me to the door. I nod, but he catches my eye. "It has to be the White Room. You can't reach Kaden any other way."
I exit Waterfront City and walk until I hit a Congolese internet café called the Rat Tunnels. The atmosphere is humid and the sounds of French and Portuguese come from businessmen engaged in video chats.
I call Matt. And not only because he was a med student before he joined the cause. He looks tense, like he's looking for a reason to disconnect.
Matt: Hey, long time, it's been five, six months? Drew: Longer. Matt, I really need your help.
Matt: Drew, we've been over this, I can't come back, ISU'd take me out as soon as I landed.
Drew: Don't worry I wouldn't inconvenience you like that. I buried mom and dad on my own, I wouldn't expect you to come back for a little thing like me being sick.
Matt: You're sick again? I thought that was under control? Drew: Well a lot has happened in the ten months since I last spoke to you.
Matt: Drew, please–
Drew: So right now I need your help, ok? If you do one thing in your life for me, make it this.
Matt: I've always–
Drew: Please, just listen. You've still got contacts in medical research right? I need you to find out about a drug called Lofadril.
But the moment I say the word "Lofadril" the connection cuts off. The proprietor strides across the room and looms over me.
His hands are tattooed with badly-rendered holographic ink that glitches as it shows violent sexual scenes; prison tattoos.
"What you doing, eh? he asks.
"I was just chatting," I start, but he cuts me off.
"You used a banned phrase. If ISU picks it up, they're gonna disconnect me. How I'm gonna live then?"
"I just need to–"
"No, you need to leave," he says.
It's not a request.
The Kraal turns out to be a grungy games arcade and strip club. One corner is dedicated to kids jacked into VR units; the slick grey pods that have become more commonplace than slot machines. Sickness and rising petrol and food prices have sent people from reality in their droves. "Your mind can hardly tell the difference," a faded sticker proclaims.
There's a screen in the corner showing a news report about the Left Hand of Allah, the Somalian jihadist group that had absorbed Yemenite and Pakistani terrorist cells after they had finally been pushed out of the Middle East.
The barman, a bearded, rough-looking Afrikaans guy, is watching it. "There's going to be a major war in Africa soon, you mark my words," he says as I walk up to the bar. "I hear they're offering heroin money to recruits."
"Heroin too," I say.
"Let's hope it makes their little child soldiers slow on the trigger," he says laughing. "Are you drinking?"
"A single Harm's Way," I say. It's the only drink I really know – a cheap local whisky, an offshoot of the biofuel industry.
I down the potent liquor which burns my throat. "Games look busy," I say.
"They are, some of these kidpsychos have started setting up drips so they don't have to leave their little cytopia," he says. We watch as a kid takes off his VR mask and stands staring at the room trying to focus his eyes. "Reality must be a real bad comedown."
I can't think of a way to do it, so I just blurt it out. "I need the White Room."
The smile drops off his lips.
"Never heard of it," he says.
I show him the card on my phone. He grunts and motions for me to follow him. He leads me to a completely white room with a wireless VR unit. "20 minutes," he says.
I go through the motions of creating an avatar, choosing the Randomise button to select a set of looks and skills and then hit Incarnate. Immediately I'm in a bright square, bustling with avatars.
The place has the feel of a carnival, disjointed and confusing. Lacking a plan, I make my way toward a crowd standing in the middle of the town square. They're crowding around a beautiful avatar. I feel love pour from my heart at the sight of her. I know immediately that she's a Sylb, one of the class of specially designed avatars, a perfectly synthesized being.
"The real world is pain," she says in a silky voice. "But look around you." Her arms sweep around her causing a shower of stars to erupt from her hands. "A world created by a benevolent and giving corporation," she says. "Why would you ever want to leave?"
I'm ripped from my reverie by a punch to the kidneys. I hadn't bothered with safety settings, so the pain really hurts. I turn to see a grinning leprechaun creature with wild orange hair. "You're falling for a Corporate troll, newfag," it scoffs. "That's so tacky."
I don't know what to do next, so I just say, "I'm looking for Kaden."
The thing grins. "No shit, you're in the White Room. Come on. Nobody else can see me." He takes my hand and we jump to a crumbling Grecian temple carved into the side of a rock face. The creature gestures for me to go inside, gives me a royal wave and then blinks out of existence.
I push the carved doors open and enter the dim temple. Huge angelic wings curl and uncurl behind an elegant naked woman that stands in the centre of temple floor.
"Another lost soul," Kaden says in a languid, silky voice.
"Not lost yet," I say, "but definitely losing".
Her wings unfurl to full stretch. I feel a surge of awe in her presence. Kaden sees it and smiles. "None of us are who we seem here," she says. "Are we?"
"It's a game, an illusion, that's the idea, isn't it?"
"And yet you come here for redemption in Fleshspace," she says.
"It's my last chance," I say, "without this I can't carry on."
Kaden inclines her head, "I'm here to help, not to stand in your way."
The code on my phone gives me one object in my player's inventory, a scroll. I pull it from the air and hand it to her. She looks at it and nods. She in turn gives me an object, a small golden bell.
"That will be stored as code in your phone," she says. A map to a pharmacy on Loop Street appears in the air and I grab it to store on my phone too. "Show the code to the pharmacist. He'll give you the account details for the payment."
"Kaden," I say. The avatar looks at me. "It's OK, right? I mean, there are no side effects?"
She blinks out as she disconnects.
Kara looks up and smiles as I enter, gently rocking her baby niece in her arms. She looks like a mother, she'd make a good one. Emma, the older one, six now, hugs my legs as I walk in and tells me dozens of things about her day without stopping for a breath. I smile and listen, running my fingers through her curls as she reads excitedly from the schoolwork she projects onto the wall from her phone.
After she finishes, I gently extricate myself and go into our room, closing the door behind me. I take three of the capsules from the package and line them up on the basin. Three little pigs. Three blind mice. Three chances.
After my parents died in the riots and Matt took off to join Godima, I didn't think I'd last long. I'm not a survivor. But I'd surprised myself. Sometimes it's a matter of just putting one foot in front of the other. I gulp down the pills in quick succession.
Kara puts the baby on my lap and I rock it gently. Her ancientlooking face stares up at me quizzically. Emma climbs up next to me and tries to get her baby sister to smile by making a puppet with her hand. There's a contentment one feels with children, and for a moment I truly understand why Kara wants one of her own.
I'm sitting rocking when my head explodes. I look down and see a snarling creature, a monster with ghoulish eyes and flesh peeling from its face. It's snapping at me, teeth ripping at my ar
m. I scream and push it to the floor. There another one next to me and I lash out to stop its advance, but a third demon looms over me.
Then come the patterns. Patterns crawling across everything, writhing, like a curtain of fire ants digging holes in my vision. I scratch at my face to get them off and feel wetness on my fingertips. The snarling things advance. I know something is not right but I can't think. There is a knife on the kitchen table.
Oh God I need help. Something is seriously not right.
Agent HK
This is always the worst part. The waiting. Waiting for the first media reports of the massacre. He'd rip as many people apart as possible before something stopped him. Rage drugs. Military-grade neurotropics, a cocktail of steroids, PCP and pure adrenaline enhanced with nano that rips through the blood-brain barrier. Street name: Hatepills. Discontinued after a platoon had been dosed with them and gone zombie on a routine mission in the Rural.
They'd find anti-corporate material in his apartment. Data linking him to known resistance groups through his brother and directly to the Lioness herself. Media channels were primed for the full scoop. Embedded casters would have photos of the bodies "leaked" to them. It was like driving a spike into the heart of the resistance.
My debriefing with Shaw is quick. Debriefings are a necessary part of the process. Back in the bad old days agents had been known to do stupid things. Phone the families of victims and beg for forgiveness. Put service weapons in their mouths and squeeze.
"Do you feel remorse?" Shaw asks. I shake my head. People would lap it up. The titillation of it all happening so close. Inside the mind of a terrorist, a killer. One of the bad guys.
But they would feel safe because the good guys are protecting them. Thank God, I'm protecting them.
Featuring a gritty, dirty, urban selection of the hottest
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