I gave a startled look at the screens, saw her image had appeared on one of them, and felt myself flush in embarrassment.
“Jex has to leave Game until I’ve caught the Reaper,” said Hawk. “The Game Techs have discovered the Reaper has a deletion weapon. It can erase a player from Game, destroying their mind, and I’m afraid he’ll use it on Jex.”
“It could be years before you catch the Reaper,” I said fiercely. “You may never catch him at all. I’m not going to hide in a United Law facility in real life until I die of old age.”
“You have to leave Game, Jex,” said Hawk. “I understand you’ll hate me for making you defrost, but I’d rather you were alive and hating me forever than have you left as a mindless frozen body in a freezer unit.”
Cassandra gave us a worried look. “I must go to the meeting now, Hawk. Everyone’s already at the Amphitheatre waiting for us.” Her image disappeared.
“I have to go too,” said Hawk. “I’m sorry, Jex, but ... Game command. Request Game world transfer to the Amphitheatre.”
He vanished.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I drew back the drapes covering the great expanse of window in the downstairs room of my house, and stood there for a long time, staring out at the incandescent beauty of Jupiter. My anger had an edge of depression now. Jupiter was even more magnificent than in my dreams, but I’d always pictured my father being here with me on Ganymede, and I could only share its beaches with his memory now.
I blinked away moisture from my eyes, turned my back on the window, and tried to comfort myself with the fact that I was far more hopeful about my relationship with my mother now. I thought back through that last conversation with her. She’d forced herself to speak about a dreadful past experience because she was worried about me. I couldn’t ask her to visit me on Ganymede, it held too many bad memories for her, but perhaps she’d invite me to visit her on Coral one day.
I walked up a spiralling corridor to another room full of clothes and other fripperies. Depression had beaten my anger into submission now. It had been stupid of Hawk to order me to defrost from Game rather than let me make my own decision, but it would be equally stupid of me to react by stubbornly insisting on staying in Game whatever the consequences.
The harsh truth was that if I stayed in Game I wouldn’t be a help but a liability. A team of Game Techs would have to guard me day and night, and I wouldn’t dare to go anywhere near Hawk in case he got himself deleted trying to defend me from the Reaper.
I let out my breath in a long sigh of defeat. I loved my new house, but I had to leave it and go back to the real world. I’d have to spend endless days and nights at a Unilaw facility, waiting for the Reaper to attack Hawk, and knowing there was no guarantee that Hawk would win that fight. The Reaper wouldn’t just be armed with a weapon that could erase Hawk from existence, but could have other items that gave him extra advantages as well.
I sighed, picked up a hand mirror, tapped the glass, and sent a message to Nathan asking him to call me on a secure line. There was only a moment’s delay before his face appeared in the mirror. The scene behind him showed that he was sitting at the bank of screens in his apartment.
“Hi Jex.” He whistled in appreciation. “You look really glitz.”
I saw the expression on Nathan’s face, instinctively glanced downwards at myself, and belatedly realized the dress I was wearing had a hint of transparency in certain areas. The effect wasn’t blatant, just a little suggestive, and I had more important things to worry about right now.
“Hawk wants me to defrost and join you at the United Law facility,” I said bluntly. “He’s worried that the Reaper will be tracking both of us by now, and may attack me with his deletion weapon.”
Nathan’s face twisted in sympathy. “I’m worried about that too, Jex. I understand how much you’d hate leaving Game, but it’s your safest option.”
“I know that.”
“This isn’t a bad place to be,” Nathan added. “I’m having a great time.”
“You’re having a great time playing with Game training texts. I’m not interested in that technical stuff.” I waved my free hand in dismissal. “Forget that for now. I called you because you mentioned the Reaper could have made other enhanced items as well as the tracking item and deletion weapon. He can’t have anything that makes him stronger or faster than other players, can he? If he does, then Hawk won’t stand a chance.”
“The Reaper can’t possibly have superhuman strength, or speed, or anything else,” said Nathan. “All players have exactly the same basic abilities. The sole individual variation is the fitness factor, whether you’ve been training hard or not, and that has only a small effect on things like your strength.”
He paused for a moment. “I’m perfectly sure about this, because the Game Techs wanted to give Hawk temporary superhuman abilities to help him defeat the Reaper. Unfortunately, that’s impossible without redesigning the whole player area of Game.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Yah, though making Hawk superhuman would have set a dangerous precedent.”
“Who cares about that?”
“The Game Techs do,” said Nathan. “If Hawk was given superhuman abilities to defeat the Reaper, then half the fighters in Game would start demanding them for trivial reasons.”
I shrugged. “Since it’s impossible to give Hawk superhuman abilities, it doesn’t matter. Can the Game Techs give Hawk enhanced armour to help him?”
“Armour only reduces the amount of injury from an attack. It couldn’t stop Hawk from being deleted.”
I groaned. “At least the Reaper’s totally limited to using the enhanced items he’s got already. He can’t enter the backstage areas of Game, so he can’t reach the Game Tech systems to ...”
I let my words trail off as a thought nagged at me. I started my sentence again. “The Reaper can’t enter the backstage areas of Game unless he changes back into a Game Tech.”
Nathan gave me a puzzled frown. “I don’t know why you’re looking so worried. You’ve just said the Reaper can’t reach the Game Tech systems, so he can’t change himself back.”
“I accept the Reaper can’t change himself back,” I said urgently, “but he could get the Game Techs to do it for him. He just has to fool them into recruiting him as a new Game Tech!”
“Point.” Nathan had a look of agony on his face. “The Reaper could have set up his new identity with the Game record of a perfect candidate for Game Tech, added himself to recruitment lists, and ... I’ll warn the Game investigation team that they must stop all recruitment of new Game Techs until the Reaper is caught. If he got back into the Game Tech areas, he could use his back door into the security system again and do anything he wanted.”
I knew what this meant for him. “I’m sorry, Nathan.”
“Members of the Game investigation team have been hinting I’d be recruited,” he said mournfully. “It even sounded as if they were considering giving me an exemption from the Leebrook Ashton age rule, the same way they did with you, so I could enter Game and become a Game Tech right away. The Reaper has ruined everything though. I suppose I should have known it was too good to be true. I need to talk to people now so ...”
I nodded. “Bye Nathan.”
I ended the call, and went back down the spiralling corridor to sit by the vast window, with its panorama of Ganymede’s beach and sky. Eventually a disembodied voice spoke to me.
“Player Jex Thorpe Leigh Grantham, resident of Ganymede, you have a player requesting Game world transfer into your home. Do you accept the Game world transfer request from player Hawk, resident of Celestius?”
I stood up. “Game command. Accept Game world transfer request.”
Hawk appeared, dressed in a silver cloak emblazoned with a hawk in flight, and wearing a silver circlet on his black, feathered hair. He saw my stunned expression and blushed.
“Official family meeting. Formal dress required. Coat of arms and crown compulsory. Personally
, I think it’s silly dressing up like this, but some of the family are romantics. The rest of us go along with it as harmless fun.”
“Is the meeting over now?” I asked.
Hawk’s look of embarrassment changed to one of utter weariness. “No, we’re just taking a break to give people time to recover from shock. Initially, the family took the news that the bombs were intended for the Celestius server complex fairly well, but then they started thinking through what could have happened. A third of us dead. The whole Sisterhood wiped out. Avalon can rebuild, but we could never have brought back Celestius without ...”
He broke off before finishing the sentence, and shook his head. “I was thinking things through too, and was hit by just how close Celestius came to disaster. If the two of us hadn’t tracked down Tomath. If we hadn’t fooled the Reaper with that fake murder. If the Reaper had planted the bombs himself using a controlled droid instead of getting me to do it.”
I reached out a hand to touch his arm. “Celestius is safe, Hawk.”
He was under attack by nightmare visions, and barely aware of me. “There would have been another set of bomb craters, my whole family would have been dead or broken, and it would have been my fault.”
This time I gave his arm a shake. “Celestius is safe,” I repeated.
Hawk’s eyes focused on me this time. His face was still twisted in pain, but he was back in reality. “First I terrified the family with the news of the bombing, and then I made things worse by telling them the Reaper has a weapon that can delete players from Game. Perhaps I was wrong to pile all these horrors onto them, but they need to know that they’re specific targets. They’ve got the right to be given an idea of relative risks, and consider their best options for staying safe.”
He’d moved on from picturing nightmares, only to start beating himself over the head with misplaced guilt feelings. I tried distracting him.
“I talked to Nathan. We realized the Reaper might have set things up to get himself recruited as a Game Tech again.”
There was alarm in Hawk’s face now. “We’d better ...”
I interrupted him. “Nathan’s already warning the Game Techs that they have to stop all recruitment until the Reaper is caught. Obviously, Nathan knew what that meant for him.”
“Poor Nathan. Had the Game Techs said anything about recruiting him?”
“He said they’d been hinting about it.”
We sat in silence after that until the disembodied voice spoke again. “Player Hawk, resident of Celestius, you are being offered a Game world transfer to the Amphitheatre by player Cassandra, resident of Celestius. Do you accept the Game world transfer offer?”
“The meeting must be reconvening,” said Hawk. “I hope they don’t ask me too many awkward questions. When people have known you for centuries, it’s easy for them to spot when you’re lying.”
“Player Jex Thorpe Leigh Grantham, resident of Ganymede,” said the disembodied voice, “you are being offered a Game world transfer to the Amphitheatre by player Cassandra, resident of Celestius. Do you accept the Game world transfer offer?”
“What?” I gasped. “Why me? You said that your family meetings were strictly private.”
“Cassandra wants you present as a witness,” said Hawk. “You helped stop the bombing, so the family may have specific questions for you.”
The disembodied voice nagged us. “Response not recognized. Do you accept the Game world transfer offer?”
“Game command. Accept Game world transfer offer,” said Hawk, and he vanished.
I gulped. I was about to face the massed Founder Players of Celestius in the famous Amphitheatre of Game. “Game command. Accept Game world transfer offer.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Amphitheatre was used for the most important meetings in Game. I’d often seen images of it when I watched Game news channels. Its design was based on the old Roman amphitheatres, with an oval, flat area that was surrounded by banks of seating. There was no countryside or city around it. The Amphitheatre was made of glowing marble, and hung alone in the blackness of space, lit by a host of bright stars hanging above it.
The Game Techs adjusted the size of the Amphitheatre according to the number of seats needed. Sometimes it was vast, holding hundreds of thousands of people. Sometimes it was tiny, with just a few dozen players present. Now it was scaled to hold the Founder Players of the Game, fewer than a thousand people.
I stood in the centre of the Amphitheatre, watching the legendary ones arriving by Game world transfer. They were all dressed in either silver or gold, their cloaks bore individual emblems, and their crowns varied from simple circlets to large and ornate creations.
“Jex.” The word seemed to echo round me.
That was Hawk’s voice. I turned towards the sound, and saw him beckoning me to a line of seats at one end of the central area. I went and sat down next to him. We were the only ones sitting here, so I assumed these seats were reserved for witnesses.
“We’ll sit here until we’re called to answer questions,” said Hawk. “Have you been in the Amphitheatre before?”
I gave him a look of disbelief, and he slapped his forehead with the palm of his right hand.
“No, that was a stupid question. You can tell the pressure is getting to me. Well, when you stand up, everything you say is automatically broadcast for the whole audience to hear.” He grinned. “That can be embarrassing if you do it by accident.”
The Amphitheatre seats were almost full now. Mostly with people wearing silver, but there was a thin scattering of gold among them. I studied them for a moment, spotting the familiar faces of my childhood heroes, and worked out the colour system.
“The female Founder Players wear gold, and the male ones silver?”
Hawk nodded. “The Sisterhood wear gold.”
“The Sisterhood,” I repeated. “Am I right in thinking the female Founder Players act as an organized group?”
“Of course they do. They’re outnumbered ten to one by men. At the beginning of the ten year trial period of Game, they had terrible problems. Obviously not with me.” He made a gesture indicating innocence. “I was a nice, shy boy.”
I frowned. “The Game Techs didn’t keep order in the Game back then?”
“Well, they did their best, but remember that they were outside the Game during the ten year trial, and they’d no real penalties they could impose on anyone. Game development had got behind schedule. The Game Techs’ top priority had been getting things like player senses working properly, but even there they’d had to cut corners by leaving out the sense of smell. The world construction was in a much worse state, still riddled with major problems like trees flickering in and out of existence, and there were vast, blank areas where the scenery hadn’t been added at all. With so many other things to worry about, it wasn’t surprising that the Game Techs hadn’t even got as far as thinking of things like Game prisons.”
He sighed. “Once a few of the leading male troublemakers realized they could get away with almost any behaviour, the situation started spiralling out of control. Not that it was always the men to blame, some of the women were stirring up trouble as well, but ...”
He let that sentence trail off, and hurried on with another. “Anyway, the women got together, formed the Sisterhood, and called in all their husbands and friends to help them try to impose a system of law and order. I had to decide if I wanted to stand idly by watching innocent people being randomly attacked, or volunteer to join the Sisterhood’s efforts. I ended up as one of Cassandra’s bodyguards, so Hawk the Unvanquished was right in the middle of the action, killing people.”
I stared at him. “You weren’t really killing other Founder Players?”
“Only when necessary to defend Cassandra, or rescue someone else from trouble. I remember thinking it was like the plot of one of the old style games I’d been playing, where I was fighting to restore order in a war torn land, except this was a game where things like pain were too h
orribly real.”
“But what were the Game Techs doing during this?”
“Throwing fits and threatening to defrost the lot of us,” said Hawk, “but we knew they couldn’t do that. Abandoning the trial would have sent the Game Company straight into bankruptcy.”
He shrugged. “Eventually, things calmed down, and Cassandra and Pendragon organized a series of meetings. The whole family discussed what rules we should impose, and agreed on punishments for misbehaviour. Mostly involving guilty parties being confined to their castles for appropriate lengths of time. We adjusted the rules over the next couple of years, and got everything reasonably settled by the end of the trial period. Celestius has been run according to those initial rules ever since.”
“What are these rules?”
“Given our unique circumstances on Celestius, we needed a few special rules to stop troublemakers disrupting relationships, but the rest are almost identical to the rules in the rest of Game. In fact, the Game Techs based most of the Game rules on ours. A big stabilizing factor in Celestius was bringing in a system where each of the female players acts as sister to some of the men. I was lucky that Cassandra was grateful enough for my help to agree to be my sister. She was married to Pendragon for the first few decades in Game, but then they split up and I optimistically suggested Cassandra and I could be more than brother and sister.”
“Since she’s been married to Thor for over three centuries, I’m assuming Cassandra said no.”
“Cassandra said a painfully polite no.” Hawk winced at the memory. “She explained that she was very fond of me, but her feelings towards me were motherly, if not grandmotherly. She said that was because of the real life age difference, I was eighteen and she was seventy-three, but we all knew we were living in Game permanently by then so I thought age didn’t matter. I assumed it was really because I’d been so ghastly as Michael.”
I laughed. “Michael isn’t as bad as you think.”
“No, he’s much worse,” said Hawk. “Now I can see Cassandra’s point about age. As I told you before, experiences in the dreamlike existence of Game don’t change your personality. Cassandra had lived for seventy-three years in the real world, buried a husband and a daughter, and suffered a long terminal illness. She’s a wise and compassionate woman, while I’m an eighteen-year-old boy with emotional problems. She knows all about my Hawk act, and the fact that you only have to scratch the surface of the legendary hero to find Michael underneath.”