Reaper

  Eventually Hawk spoke again. “I assume your father tried to help when you were dropped from the training programme, but he didn’t have any influence in the medical area.”

  “I never told him what really happened.”

  Hawk looked puzzled. “Why not?”

  I stared down at my hands. “Because the instructor said she’d throw my friends off the course as well if I caused any trouble. I couldn’t put their careers at risk to save my own.”

  Hawk was silent for a full minute before speaking in an oddly careful voice. “Well, I don’t think your instructor should get away with what she did. I’ll get an expert to make a discreet check of the course records, looking for evidence that the instructor changed your grades.”

  I didn’t reply because I was finding it difficult to speak.

  “I can try to arrange for you to continue your medical training as well,” added Hawk. “You could join a class in America, so there’d be no possible problem with your old instructor.”

  I moistened my lips and managed to speak this time. “No, thank you. It would be difficult for me to go back when I’ve missed a whole year of training, and ... The truth is that the whole idea of becoming a doctor has been soured for me by what happened last year, but I appreciate you offering to help me.”

  “I understand your decision.”

  There was yet another long silence. “Anyway,” I said at last, “you can see why the bomber wouldn’t be able to bribe a respectable kid with a lifetime subscription. Trying to bribe a Game reject wouldn’t work either, because someone who can’t enter Game would have nothing to gain by having their lifetime subscription paid.”

  I paused. “Moment!”

  I thought frantically while Hawk waited. “You just cleared the questioning from my Game record,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I threw my weight around as leader of the players’ investigation, and got the Game Techs to access your Game record and remove ...” Hawk broke off his sentence.

  “That’s how a Game Tech bribes a kid to do something obviously criminal,” I said. “They find a Game reject. Someone with such a serious black mark on their Game record that they’ll never be able to enter Game. They offer to clear it. A kid would do anything, anything at all for that.”

  “Jex, you’re brilliant!” said Hawk. “How do we find a black mark on a teenager’s Game record after it’s been cleared? I’m sure our rogue Game Tech will have wiped any audit trails to cover his tracks.”

  “Everyone is allocated a Game identity number at birth,” I said. “Information about your life, first in the real world and later in Game, goes on the Game record for that identity number.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “But Unilaw must keep its own records on people they question, arrest or charge with crimes,” I continued. “A Game Tech shouldn’t be able to touch Unilaw records. Compare Game records with Unilaw records, looking for anyone that’s had problems with Unilaw that are missing from their Game record.”

  Hawk grinned. “Totally brilliant! Get some sleep now, while I contact Unilaw and get them comparing records for us. It will be faster if I do that from within Game.”

  His face abruptly blurred and reverted to an anonymous golden shape. The Hawk in Game had closed down his connection to the controlled droid. Hawk was gone, but I still sat there staring at the discarded droid, my head thinking confused and chaotic thoughts.

  Finally, I took out the new phone that Hawk had given me. I was aching with exhaustion now, but I had to make a call before I went to bed. It was only a moment before Nathan’s face appeared on my phone screen. I watched his weary expression change to one of pure delight as I told him Hawk had given us back our dreams.

  Chapter Ten

  I woke to a world that smelled strongly of fish. I sat up in confusion, and saw the carriage was stationary with the doors wide open. There was no sign of Hawk’s controlled droid, so I went across to look outside. It seemed to be early morning, there were waves rolling in to a pebbled beach, and the fish smell was coming from stacks of empty crates.

  I showered, changed into fresh clothes, and caught up with my laundry. After fifteen minutes, I was ready to face the world. There was still no sign of Hawk, so I headed out to search for him.

  It wasn’t difficult to find Hawk. He was sitting on the beach, throwing stones into the incoming waves, and watching an autoboat towing its nets out at sea. He looked up when I approached, and patted the pebbles by his side.

  I sat down. “Where are we?”

  “On the south coast of England.”

  “Why are we back in England, and what are we doing on a beach?”

  “I can’t think of anything useful to do until Unilaw find a mismatch between records – if they find a mismatch between records at all – so I’m indulging in some nostalgia,” said Hawk. “When I was a child, I used to live just along the coast from here. This is the nearest transport stop to it. Apparently, there’s nothing left where I used to live, but the autoboats do a bit of fishing from this beach.”

  “And the fish are transported in crates. That explains the stink around here.”

  “I didn’t know there was one,” said Hawk. “This droid precisely replicates sight, hearing, and touch, but it has no sense of smell or taste.”

  There was silence for a few minutes before he spoke again. “I was an only child. I lived with my parents in a house on the outskirts of a small seaside town. I remember the summers when I was small, the hot days on the beach, and the cries of the gulls soaring overhead. Life was good until I was about thirteen, then somehow things went wrong between me and the other kids. I can’t even remember what started that now, but I was targeted by bullies and things got messy. I started skipping school and hiding in my bedroom playing computer games. I lived like that for the next five years.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, so I kept quiet.

  “That was when I signed up for the trial period of Game and was flown to America along with the other volunteers. My body must still be in a freezer unit somewhere over there, but my mind has been wandering the worlds of Game for centuries. I’ve explored each new world that was added. Vanity, Automaton, Gothic, Ganymede, all two thousand of them. I was so occupied with the Game worlds that I forgot all about the real one. Now I find it isn’t here anymore. The world you live in isn’t mine, Jex. It’s not just the places that have gone, but the whole way of life as well.”

  He’d been staring out to sea, but now he turned to face me. “Your life must have been so different from mine. It’s not just that you left school and started work at ten years old. You’ve never lived with your parents. You’ve probably never even lived in a house.”

  “A house? You mean houses like there are in Game worlds? No, nothing like that. You live in dormitories while you’re at school. In theory, each dormitory has an adult supervisor in Game who runs the place. In reality, the oldest kids usually run things, and the supervisor only calls you from Game if you’re in trouble.”

  I winced as painful old memories surfaced. “When you’re ten years old, you leave school and the dormitories, get a job, and pay for your own room in an accommodation block. Having my own room at last, locking the door behind me and finally feeling safe, was the best moment in my life.”

  Hawk shook his head. “I was so sorry for myself before I entered Game. I thought I had problems and a hard life, but compared to yours ... The Game did this, didn’t it? The Game and the people like me, the people who were too busy having fun to spare a thought for who was doing the work in real life. Do you compare the childhoods we had with yours and hate us?”

  I was startled. “I don’t know anything about the way childhood used to be.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t. Nobody would bother teaching you about it, and you’d be too busy coping with the world you lived in to wonder how it got that way. All your thoughts are focused on planning for the day you’ll enter Game.??
?

  “That’s right.” I smiled, rejoicing in the fact I would be entering Game now. “I worked out my Game appearance a year ago. Now I just need to decide on my three surnames.”

  Hawk laughed. “I don’t have any surnames.”

  I had to laugh too. “Well of course not. We were taught about Game naming conventions as soon as we started school. Founder Players have no surname. First Wave have one surname. The next two centuries of players have two. These days I’ll need to have three that make me clearly distinct from all the other people called Jex in the Game. I was planning to use one of my mother’s surnames and one of my father’s surnames. Now I think I’ll use my father’s first name, Leigh, as well.”

  “You said that you planned to have children eventually.”

  I nodded. “Not for quite a while, but in ten or fifteen years’ time.”

  “And not just because of the baby bonus payments.”

  Hawk seemed to be quoting something rather than asking a question. Had I said that in front of him? I couldn’t remember, but maybe I had.

  I nodded again. “Especially now. It’s hard to explain this, but my father dying in the Avalon bombing made a difference. I’m a singleton, an only child, like you. My mother defrosted from Game to have a baby because she was desperate to get the credits to pay her lifetime subscription. Now she’s paid that, she’ll definitely never have another child. My father might have had other children, but now he’s dead ...”

  “Were your parents a couple in Game?” asked Hawk. “I’d never thought about having children, so I’m a bit out of date with how these things work.”

  “They were never a couple in a romantic sense,” I said. “They met on Ganymede. Do you remember me mentioning my mother had problems with an ex-boyfriend when she lived on Ganymede?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother spends all her time in Game socializing and designing dresses for herself and her friends, but my father is a member of ... was a member of both the Ganymede Admission Committee and the Ganymede Residents Assistance Volunteers. He helped my mother get the Game Techs to stop the harassment, and he was one of the few people she kept in touch with after she left Ganymede. When she decided to have a child, she asked him if she could use his DNA, and he agreed.”

  I paused for a second. “They’ve been good parents, particularly my father. He always calls ... called me every week or two. That made a huge difference when I lived in the dormitories. The bullies always look for easy targets. Most kids are twins, and those usually stick together and defend each other, so the bullies pick on singletons like me. Singleton kids who had no contact at all from their parents had a very bad time. The fact my father was keeping an eye on me from inside Game kept me relatively safe.”

  I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. “I haven’t heard from my mother since my father died. It’s possible she doesn’t know that he’s dead. It never occurred to me that he might have been on Avalon during the world crash until I was told in that interrogation room. My mother might still think he’s safe and well on Ganymede.”

  Hawk looked sympathetic. “You should call her and make sure that she knows.”

  I frowned anxiously. “I should, but I daren’t risk it. My mother doesn’t like unpleasant things. If I call her and tell her something as awful as the fact my father is dead, I know she’ll cut off the call, and I’m worried she might never contact me again.”

  “I could ask a Game Tech to make sure that she’s been notified of your father’s death.”

  I stared at Hawk, startled by his offer. He’d already saved my future in Game, and I didn’t like to ask him for yet more help, but I’d lost my father and daren’t risk losing my mother too. “That would be very kind of you. My mother is Odele Thorpe Scott Matthys, resident of Game world Coral.”

  There was a pause before Hawk spoke again. “The Game Tech says that your mother was among those officially informed of your father’s death.”

  I gave a sigh of relief. “That’s all right then. It makes sense that my mother hasn’t called me or messaged me since then. She’s avoiding the issue of my father’s death, blanking it out the way she always does with anything bad. I expect she’ll wait a couple of months before calling me, and then never mention my father at all.”

  “That’s a very unfair way to treat you,” said Hawk.

  I shrugged. “It’s the way my mother is. It was my father who told me about the harassment problems she had on Ganymede. My mother has never mentioned them at all. When I was a small child, I used to daydream about training to become a great hunter and fighter in Game, and then fighting a duel with my mother’s ex-boyfriend and killing him.”

  Hawk laughed. “Are you still planning to do that?”

  “I’ve realized there’s a snag with my daydream. The ex-boyfriend isn’t likely to agree to fight a duel with me, and I can’t just attack him without getting into a lot of trouble myself. If he ever tries bothering my mother again, it would be far more sensible for me to complain to a Game Tech and get him sentenced to another spell on Havoc. I’d still like to try some of the hunting and fighting though. Perhaps even join one of the battles against the great monsters of Game like the Kraken and the Behemoth.”

  “I noticed you’d got several battle images on your room wall,” said Hawk, “including one of me fighting the Kraken. That’s because you’ve been studying the tactics I used to kill it?”

  “Yah,” I said, with debatable truth. “Obviously I’d have to train for years before I could think of joining a battle against the Kraken. Anyway, getting back to the subject of having kids, my father’s death has somehow made me feel I’d like to have kids myself one day. I want to keep an eye on them, like my father did for me, and give them a helping hand when they start in Game.”

  There were a few minutes of silence before Hawk spoke. “Things have changed for me too. I knew from the start that investigating the bombing of a Game server complex was going to be a huge challenge, but the situation is turning out to be even worse than I thought.”

  He paused. “I have a theory about how this hunt will end. This situation is like one of the old legends they use as a basis for some of the Game worlds. If you listen to the silly things they say in Game, then I’m a legendary hero. I’m taking on a Game Tech, one of the gods of the Game who is running amok. I think this hunt will end with me saving the Game, but dying myself.”

  He turned towards me. “Don’t laugh.”

  I didn’t feel like laughing. I could see there was a very real danger that a rogue Game Tech would find a way to delete a player who was hunting him.

  “I think I’m going to die,” Hawk repeated. “It’s strange. I’ve had four hundred years of fun and fury, I’ve done so much, but all I can think about are the things I haven’t done. One of them ...”

  He let the words trail off. I waited a moment before speaking.

  “One of them is?”

  “Jex, I’m four hundred years out of date in some matters. This is one of them. I’ve never tangled with this area before, and I don’t know how ... personal ... the thing I want to say is these days. It certainly feels personal to me. I don’t wish to embarrass you, and you are perfectly free to say no.”

  I stared at him. Was he really hinting that ...? No, he couldn’t be.

  Hawk blushed, picked up another pebble, and threw it into the waves. “I’ve never had kids. Now I know I want them. I’d like to be around to keep an eye on them the way you said, but I don’t think I will be. I would like to put on record that you have the right to use my DNA to father your children.”

  I sat there in stunned silence.

  He stared out to sea. “Please say no if you don’t wish to accept. Even if you do say yes, then you mustn’t feel committed in any way. I appreciate you don’t intend to have children for years yet. When you do, this would just be there as an option for you. If you care about someone else by then, want to have his children instead of mine, you’re free to do that.” br />
  “Yah,” I said, in a strangled voice.

  He turned his head to look at me. “You wish me to put it on record?”

  “Yah,” I repeated.

  We both looked at the sea, the beach, anywhere but at each other. It was a while before I could pull myself together enough to speak again. “How could I say no? Having a Founder Player for a father will give my kids a great start in Game.”

  I meant to say it in a light, joking voice. I didn’t manage it, but Hawk smiled anyway.

  “Thanks, Jex. I’m happy knowing you’ll be there to watch over them. You think like me, and I was wondering if one day the two of us could ...” He stopped. “Moment.”

  I waited expectantly for a couple of minutes.

  “We were right about the bomber recruiting a teenager,” said Hawk. “The Unilaw team have found a mismatch between Game and Unilaw records for a boy called Tomath. It’s highly unlikely that it’s just a random record error, because Tomath lives less than thirty miles from the bomb site.”

  “Have Unilaw brought Tomath in for questioning yet?”

  “No. I’ve warned them not to do anything that could alarm Tomath. We need to think very carefully before we make our next move. Tomath may not have known what was in the packages when he sent them off in the delivery trolley, but by now he must have realized they were the bombs that destroyed the Avalon server complex. If Unilaw bring him in for questioning, he’s not going to admit he was involved in something that killed over eleven thousand people. He’ll probably refuse to say anything at all, and even if Unilaw do manage to get him to talk, how much could he tell us?”

  “Not much,” I said. “The bomber won’t have given Tomath any clues to his identity. All Tomath is likely to know is that the bomber is a Game Tech, and we’ve worked that out for ourselves.”

  “Tomath’s biggest value to us is that he may have a way to contact the bomber,” said Hawk, “or the bomber may get in touch with him again to ask him to help with another job. Given all the new security measures protecting Game data, the bomber would surely choose to use Tomath again rather than risk messing around with another teenager’s Game record.”