Reaper

  Hawk led the way inside. I looked round nervously for droids, but the long room was empty except for the familiar, regimented lines of bunk beds and storage cupboards. Fifty beds against each side wall. One hundred of them in total. The ones nearest the doors would be taken by the bullies, so you had to walk past them every time you entered or left the dormitory.

  I shook my head, telling myself that this wasn’t my dormitory. I didn’t live here. In fact, nobody lived here yet. This dormitory was yet to open, yet to be allocated the adult supervisor who might watch closely to make sure it was a safe and friendly place, or lazily do nothing while a reign of terror was imposed.

  I saw Hawk was staring at the beds, and gave him a warning look as he opened his mouth. The bomber would have spy eyes and ears watching us now, and the wrong comment would show Hawk had never seen a dormitory before.

  He caught my expression, and hesitated before speaking. “No one here yet. I ...”

  There was a loud buzzing, and then a recorded announcement came from overhead speakers. “Attention children, your dormitory supervisor is about to address you from Game.”

  It was the same words, spoken by the same recorded female voice, that I remembered from my childhood. I instinctively moved to stand by the nearest bed, and turned to face the end wall in the approved respectful attitude. Arms at my side, back rigidly straight, and head slightly bowed. Hawk gave me a single startled glance, before moving to stand by another bed and copy my posture.

  I thought a face would appear on the end wall – irrationally I half expected it to be the centaur face of the dormitory supervisor from my childhood – but instead the wall changed to pure black. Our caller had disabled vision from his end. That meant the bomber could see us, but we couldn’t see him.

  “Why should I help you?” The male voice came from the end wall, and was magnified round the room. The perfectly emotionless, silky smooth tones had to mean that a specialized computer process was being used to hide the speaker’s true voice, but I thought the original voice was male too.

  “Because we would serve you in return,” said Hawk.

  A long pause. “I have Tomath to serve me.”

  Hawk smiled. “Tomath is weak. He didn’t know he was planting bombs. Now he’s found that out, and he’s terrified.”

  “You wouldn’t be terrified?”

  “I’d be exhilarated.” Hawk’s smile widened. “Just imagine all those people waking up in their freezer units. How they must have screamed in terror. How they’d fight to escape. How some of them died of fear.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I want to serve you,” said Hawk.

  There was still no response. I wondered if our rogue Game Tech had gone and we’d lost our only link to him.

  “I want the honour of serving you,” said Hawk.

  The voice finally spoke again. “And the girl?”

  Hawk turned to look at me with a face and eyes that were cold as ice. “The girl does what I tell her to do. The girl thinks what I tell her to think. Don’t you, Emma?”

  I knew he was just acting the part of a killer, but he was so convincing that my voice shook as I replied. “Yah, Michael.”

  Hawk walked across to me and grabbed a handful of my hair. “You do what I tell you to do. Say it, Emma!”

  “I ...”

  He twisted my hair. It didn’t hurt much, but it shocked me enough that I yelled anyway. “I do what you tell me to do,” I gabbled.

  “You think what I tell you to think.”

  He twisted my hair again, and the pain triggered an old memory. I was six years old again, I’d tried to protect a friend, and the bullies had turned on me. Where were those older girls now? Had they taken their bullying personalities with them into Game, or had they changed into kinder people in the years between ten and eighteen years old?

  There was another, harder yank at my hair. I fought away my old memories, and repeated Hawk’s words. “I think what you tell me to think.”

  “That’s good, Emma.” Hawk’s face came close to me, so I could feel his breath against my cheek. “That’s very good.”

  He let me go, and I hugged my arms defensively round myself. “I’ll do whatever you say, Michael. I promise.”

  Hawk turned to smile at the black area of wall. “I want the honour of being your apprentice. I want to follow in your footsteps and learn from the master.”

  “If I take an apprentice,” said the voice, “he must sacrifice everything else to my service. Do you understand?”

  Despite the efforts to hide the speaker’s true voice, I caught an overtone to the word “sacrifice” that chilled me.

  There was a pause before Hawk answered. “I understand, master.”

  The blackness on the wall flickered, and a figure was displayed. It wore a featureless cloak, and the face was a skull shrouded in shadows.

  “I am the Reaper. The worlds of Game will honour and serve me or be destroyed.”

  The wall changed to black again, and then two sets of numbers appeared. A location and a time. I tried to memorize them before they vanished and the call ended, but my brain didn’t seem to be working properly. It didn’t matter. Surveillance would have been monitoring and recording the call.

  Hawk turned and stalked out of the double doors. I scurried after him, eager to leave a place where new dark memories had been added to the ones from my childhood. Neither of us spoke until we’d summoned a two-person pod, grubbier but less smelly than the previous one, got inside, and started it moving.

  Hawk took out his phone, and tapped at it. “Surveillance, the bomber’s call was definitely made in person rather than by an automated process. Did you have time to trace it and get an identity?”

  “The call originated from Game, and we obtained an identity number for the caller,” replied the female voice of surveillance, “but unfortunately there’s a problem.”

  “What problem?” demanded Hawk impatiently.

  “We checked the identity number against our Unilaw records, and it belongs to someone who has not yet entered Game.”

  “You’re sure about that?” I asked.

  “Perfectly sure,” said surveillance. “The identity number belongs to a seven-year-old child who was in real life school when the call was made. We’ve dispatched officers to arrest the boy anyway, but ...”

  “I’d strongly prefer you not to arrest the seven-year-old,” said Hawk, in a strained voice.

  “If you wish, we can recall the officers,” said surveillance.

  “I do wish that.” Hawk stabbed his phone with his finger to end the call, and turned to me. “I can’t believe that Unilaw were going to arrest a seven-year-old child. You were right not to trust their judgement on Tomath, because ...”

  Hawk suddenly abandoned his sentence and started counting. “One, two, three ...”

  He reached ten, and I was prepared for him to start swearing, but instead he swung round and hammered a fist against the pod wall. I guessed that this time mere words weren’t enough to relieve his pent up stress.

  “Our bomber is one of the original Game designers,” said Hawk. “He knows how to fake an identity number on a call from Game. He must know hundreds of other ways to dodge security checks as well. We can’t assume the server complex force field codes are safe from someone like that. He’ll find a way to get the codes and crash more Game worlds.”

  Hawk turned to face me, the movement bringing him closer to me. My nerves were still jangling, so I instinctively flinched back into my seat.

  He frowned. “Are you all right, Jex? I didn’t hurt you back in that dormitory, did I?”

  “No, I’m just a little wound up by the act back there.”

  “You were really convincing as a terrified girl.”

  I didn’t want to admit that was because I’d been genuinely terrified, both of the situation and Hawk’s behaviour. Four hundred years of playing the role of a Game legend had made him a great actor.

  Hawk groaned
. “You did brilliantly, but I made a total mess of talking to the bomber. My whole approach to him was wrong. The bomber isn’t another Marcus. He may lack empathy and guilt, but he isn’t driven by a desire to cause random death and destruction.”

  I was still having trouble thinking. I tried to break free from the lingering effects of fear and force my brain into action. “The bomber called himself the Reaper. That sounds pretty death and destruction obsessed.”

  “Yes, but he didn’t respond to me talking about the exhilaration of killing people. I’d lost his interest until I stumbled on the word honour. That was when he started talking to me again, and his last words told us exactly why he bombed the Avalon server complex.”

  I quoted the bomber’s final sentence. “‘The worlds of Game will honour and serve me or be destroyed.’”

  Hawk leaned back in his seat. “I should have realized that the bomber couldn’t have the same problems as Marcus. It wouldn’t be possible for a Game Tech to keep a fascination with death and destruction hidden for four centuries, and appropriate action would have been taken to deal with him.”

  He ran his fingers through his overlong black hair. “The bomber is driven by something entirely different, a massive ego and a desire for power and glory. He wouldn’t need to hide that from anyone. The whole population of Game accepts the fact we’ve got several overblown egos among the Founder Players, so I can imagine the other Game Techs would feel an original designer of Game had a perfect right to be a little egotistical.”

  I thought that through for a moment. “I think you’re right about the bomber wanting power. That’s why he brought us to a dormitory to talk to us. He was aiming to bring back echoes of when we were small children living in dormitories, and the all-powerful adult supervisor would address us from Game. I suppose you’ll have been immune to that because Michael never lived in a dormitory, but it worked brilliantly on me.”

  “I’m right about the glory too. The bomber was one of the original designers of Game. When it opened commercially, he would have expected a lot of public recognition, but the Game Company brought in regulations that said he had to stay anonymous. For four long centuries, the bomber has been robbed of all the honour and glory for his achievements.”

  “He’d be admired by other Game Techs.”

  “Oh yes.” Hawk waved a hand in dismissal. “The other people skulking in the background of Game would admire him, but the vast player population never even knew he existed. The bomber doesn’t want to cause death and destruction for its own sake. It’s just a way to punish the players for ignoring his achievements.”

  He paused. “I think the bomber is calling himself the Reaper because he designed the original Game worlds, sowed the seeds that grew into the vast Game universe of today, and now he’s going to reap his harvest.”

  “Why would he wait four centuries to do this?”

  Hawk shrugged. “I don’t know. Something must have happened to make him particularly angry. Whatever that was, the Reaper has started his bid for power and glory, and he isn’t going to stop. I expect he’ll crash at least one more Game world to demonstrate that none of our precautions work against him. After that, he’ll speak to the whole population of Game in the same way that he spoke to us in that dormitory. They have to honour and serve him, or he’ll wreak havoc across the worlds of Game.”

  I opened my mouth to ask why the Reaper would want billions of people quaking in fear of him, but closed it again. The bullies who’d ruled my childhood dormitory had enjoyed terrorizing smaller girls. The Reaper was just aiming to do the same thing on a vastly bigger scale.

  Hawk’s voice took on a note of despair. “And there’s nothing we can do to stop him. Surveillance will watch the meeting point the Reaper gave us, they may ambush his controlled droid, but I’m sure the Reaper will be able to fake his identity number when he controls a droid from Game. We’ll be left with no clue to his real identity except that he has an inflated idea of his own importance, and I expect a lot of the original Game designers have ego problems.”

  I was bewildered. “Aren’t we going to meet the Reaper ourselves? I thought you were trying to be recruited as his apprentice.”

  “That was my plan, but I can’t go through with it now,” said Hawk. “You heard what the Reaper said. His apprentice has to sacrifice everything to his service. It’s perfectly obvious what he meant. My stupid act practically offered you up as a victim. The Reaper wants me to take you to the meeting point, so he can prove his power over me by making me kill you.”

  I hadn’t realized that. No, I had realized it, but part of me had been frantically blanking out the knowledge. That was why I’d been finding it so hard to think since the Reaper said the word ‘sacrifice’. My brain had shut down in self defence, because once I started thinking, once I accepted that we had to do whatever the Reaper demanded if we were to have any chance of catching him, there was only one thing I could say.

  I took a deep breath. “We have to catch the Reaper, Hawk. We have to do whatever it takes to achieve that. It’s just a matter of statistics. Over eleven thousand people died in the Avalon world crash. If the Reaper crashes another world, then thousands more will die. I’m just one person so ...”

  I thought my voice sounded unnaturally calm about it. Part of my head was unnaturally calm as well; the part that was telling itself this wasn’t real, just a bad dream. Another part of my head wasn’t calm at all. It was screaming that it didn’t want to die a heroic, self sacrificing death.

  Hawk rubbed his forehead. “I’m not murdering you, Jex. I’ve committed my fair share of sins, but I’m not going to kill anyone, and especially not you. I fought for years in the Battle Arena on Medieval, and when I accepted my prizes I was covered in the blood of my opponents, but the deaths and the blood weren’t real. Killing you would ... Moment!”

  I knew we’d both had exactly the same thought. We didn’t need me to die. We just needed to convince the Reaper that Hawk had killed me.

  Hawk grabbed for his phone again. “Surveillance, we have to stage a fake murder for the Reaper. We’ve a very long way to go and barely two hours to get there. We’ll transfer to the long-distance carriage to gain time, and somewhere along the way you have to help us set things up so Jex can look convincingly dead. I’ve no idea how we do that, but ...”

  I snatched the phone from Hawk’s hand and spoke rapidly into it myself. “The glitz crowd hold fancy dress competitions where the entrants dress up as people from Game and re-enact Game events. A year ago, a group led by a medical cadet called Falcon Rodriguez won the England area championship. They staged a re-enactment of Hawk’s last fight in the Battle Arena, using fake blood, trick knives, and holo effects.”

  I paused to breathe. “I’ll contact Falcon Rodriguez and get him to meet us at the medical cadet accommodation transport stop. I’ll tell him to bring all his equipment for faking injuries, because I need his help to stage a murder to ...”

  I broke off for a second. It wouldn’t be a good idea to tell Falcon we were trying to catch the Avalon bomber, because he was notoriously bad at keeping secrets. “Well, I’ll have to think of a good reason why I’m faking my own murder.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  We were back in our familiar luxury carriage. In one of the seats sat a golden droid. That had been Hawk’s alter ego, and now Hawk was the skinny, dark haired boy sitting facing me. There was something disturbingly surreal about seeing the pair of them together.

  It was even more surreal to have Falcon Rodriguez here with us. Falcon didn’t seem to have changed at all since the last time I’d seen him. I’d told him a paper-thin story about a plan to make my old instructor confess to altering my grades. Fortunately, Falcon hadn’t paid any attention to my reasons for faking my own murder, focussing in on what, for him, was the only important point. We were about to put on a performance, and any performance organized by Falcon Rodriguez had to be absolutely perfect.

  Falcon smoothed a final dab of makeu
p over the fake skin on my neck, stepped back, studied the result, and nodded. “Done.”

  “It itches,” I complained, moving my right hand towards my neck.

  Falcon slapped my hand away. “Don’t scratch the fake skin or you’ll disturb the blood packs underneath, and you ...”

  He turned to point at Hawk. “I want a proper knife flourish from you when you cut Jex’s throat, not those pathetic slicing gestures that you were doing in rehearsal. Remember that when the trick knife cuts Jex’s throat, releasing the fake blood to cover her in gore, it will also trigger the injection of the drug to knock her unconscious and slow her breathing. You should wait for two seconds to give the drug time to work, and then let her go so she slumps dramatically to the floor.”

  “I’m still not sure that it’s a good idea to inject Jex with that drug,” said Hawk.

  The perfectionist Falcon waved a dismissive hand. “Jex said it was vital for her to be a convincing corpse.”

  “Yah, but I don’t want you making a mistake and turning her into a genuine corpse.”

  “I never make mistakes,” said Falcon.

  Hawk closed his eyes for a moment, before speaking in a strained voice. “If you’ve finished work, then we can drop you off at the next transport stop.”

  “I’m staying to watch the performance,” said Falcon.

  Hawk leaned across to adjust the carriage guidance system. “That isn’t possible in this case.”

  Falcon frowned. “You’re just being difficult.”

  “No, he isn’t,” I said. “Thank you for the help, Falcon. I’m very grateful, but this is one performance where you’ll have to settle for watching the replays later.”

  He gave me one of his wide range of sulky looks. “I’m not leaving.”

  “If you stay, our instructor will recognize you, and that will ruin my whole plan to make her confess.”

  He folded his arms. “The instructor will probably recognize you too. I told you that hair dye isn’t much of a disguise. You should let me use flesh coloured wax to make your nose look a different shape.”