Moral Zero (25 page)

But eventually, whatever you had set yourself up with would run out.
Mr White would get the warning signs. His virtual body would be as active as ever, but his mind would feel weak and sluggish. His speech would slur. He would become increasingly incapable at simple tasks. Eventually he would just drop, and the connections would cut out.  The Game would cut you off before you died and your vitals flatlined, but only just. If you were technical minded you could fiddle with the settings to keep you in as long as possible. Some Players liked to play it perilously close. If you didn’t have someone around to look after you or an ability to get immediate medical attention then you were fucked once you finally dropped out. Mr White just had to recognise the signs for what they were, that’s all. He couldn’t stay confused. He had to know before it was too late.

It’s up to him.
I’m banned. It’s his call. Red will be out for a week, if he even wants to come back. And he knows fuck all. Couldn’t even use the same body. White might not recognise him, would confuse him further if he did.

He rolled his eyes and then yawned. He wriggled his face into the crook of the couch. Somewhere in the room a cat miaowed.

Not my problem, Johnny murmured quietly.

The City was full of game junkies. The thing was you didn’t even have to leave one game in order to play another. There was no need to return to reality and re-hook up. There were games within games. And each game was connected to a multitude more. You played, you looked, you found a node to another game and you jumped ship. You could always jump back again. It was a network, where each game could connect you from within to a hundred or a thousand different games via hook up nodes. If you could set your body up enough for long stretches inside – and the hardcore noders could have pretty expensive systems keeping their body fed while they were away – if you could get a good enough setup then you could fix yourself for weeks, even months. You might see a guy you thought had died, a guy who had just vanished from the scene and suddenly returned out the shadows like some crack of a ghost, atrophied and shivering with zombie eyes. You hadn’t seen or heard from him in six months and then he was back and then he was gone again.

It needed a certain kind of money to
play it like a drug and not die. There were problems among the poor. Thefts and pushing to fund the habit. Fatalities when the setup didn’t see them all the way. Addictions always better suit the rich. More than half of the Elite in every City were hardcore noders and they lived like they didn’t need to live. That was one of the names for it. Someone who played a lot was called a noder or a jumper or, recently, a nü-hooker. The activity was nodeing, jumping, hooking, playing away, fighting the rabbit, chasing tails, chasing the nodes.

There were
all sorts of games out there. Driving games, shooting games, sports games, live your dream games, open world games, relaxation games, drug games without the drugs, sex games without the sex, go to work games, crime games, prison games; there was recently even a death row game. They were virtual simulations really; for many the term game was stretched thin, just to keep them under the entertainment bracket. It wasn’t clear how a death row simulation could be called a game but it was.

Johnny Black leafed through the manual idly. He stopped at the page titled ‘Rules of Immersion’, and flicked his eyes down through the bullet points carelessly, having already read it numerous times before. The first point was written in
large bold letters and was common to many games, particular the open-worlds:

“
On no account is any User to make reference to playing a game or being in a virtual reality. Our Users pay for ABSOLUTE IMMERSION and therefore anything that counters such goes against the rules of the Game. Words, phrases, and actions drawing attention to the unreality of the experience are considered an Offence. Each Offence will be made clear to all Users that heard it via a warning alarm. NPCs (non-player characters) are programmed to be intolerant of such Offences, to provide further encouragement against repeat offences. 3 Offences by the same User and that User will be ejected from Rule and returned to reality on a temporary ban. Continuous Offences on multiple occasions will result in a permanent ban from returning to Rule.

NOTE: Some Users, upon notice of the Off
ence and the alarm, may also react with intolerance or hostility to the offending User. The reactions of fellow Users cannot be moderated.”

Johnny put the manual down and lay back on the couch. A shadow came over him. Some rumbling beast block
ed his sight.

Who’s my big fat
fluffball? cooed Johnny as the Colonel sat on his face. Who’s my beautiful hairy pussy?

The Colonel miaowed a little and got up and padded around
three hundred and sixty degrees and sat down on his face again.

Mmph
mmph mmph, said Johnny. He shook his face a little.

The Colonel got up and fixed him with a short glare, and then curled up on his belly, facing the other direction.

Silly old pusspot, smiled Johnny. You big furry fatty. He stroked the cat’s back, and she started to purr. How did you get so tubby then? Is that where all the food in my house has gone? Is that why I go hungry, so you can be a tank of a cat?

Purr
purr.

What if I don’t give you any more
food and keep it all to myself?

Purr.

I need to get up you know. I need to piss.

Purr
purr.

Right, well. I guess it’ll have to wait. I’ll just have to wait until my bladder bursts and I piss all over you. Then you’ll be a w
et pussy, won’t you? Won’t you? he said again, tickling the cats ear. He lay there for about ten more minutes and then gave up.

Move Big C,
he said, shifting himself up. The Colonel jumped off his lap and gave him a distinct Face.

You can
come back afterwards Miss Grump.

No purr.

Suit yourself.

Johnny went outside and pissed against his usual rock wall. The urine trailed down the rocks and pooled into a crack which fell down into a gully.

Probably lands on some old fella’s head each time, he murmured to himself for about the tenth time.

He looked at the rock face before him as his stream splashed out
and down like Wasteland gold. There was a drawing there, the best any normal guy could do with some tar and a surface of rough stone. It looked like a child had drawn it but that was the best he could do.

It watched him back and man and drawing gazed upon each other as the stream trickled down. He moved his eyes along its contours, up to its head, down her dark hair. His face betrayed no expression. They shared each other’s company as they had countless times before. It made these pointless bodily functions more meaningful somehow.

The Colone
l miaowed at him pitifully as she pawed her empty bowl. Johnny tousled her hair and wandered to the fridge. It operated, as with the few other electrical items in the house, on its own personal battery and generator. Everything in the Wasteland used personal power supplies; hooking up to a grid was not a possibility. Nowhere in the Wasteland was connected, not by cable or wireless. All the signal towers were in the cities, as were the veins of cables that squirmed underground like a plague of snakes.

The Wasteland was blacklisted from all
utilities. An accepted state of affairs. The various denizens got what they needed from the stores or from the black markets. If they were of a certain disposition then they robbed from others.

A three-time scan of the fridge, poking about into all its corners, reveale
d a complete lack of milk or other liquids, bar one last bottle of water. The food stocks had run down to some jerky, ham, a few sauces and cheese going white with mould around the edges.

It’s that time again Big C,
Johnny smiled, and stroked the cat a few more times, who lightly purred at him.

Johnny
strapped his huge rucksack onto his back and took off, swinging the porch door behind him. There was no need to lock it; if anybody discovered the place, no amount of locks could stop them. It was more of a shack than a house, but it was his home.

It was a long journey to
the Store, and Johnny had to make it around at least once a week to pick up the necessary items. Most of his bag would get filled with large bottles of water which would disappear fast. The heat of the Wasteland beat down hard, and the generator for air conditioning only had enough power to be used at intervals. Beer and meat would also be consumed in reasonable quantities over the course of the week. Large amounts of liquid were imperative as there was no well in the area, and certainly no running water. Plumbing again was a convenience that only existed in the cities.

The walk to the Store, when not weighed down
by goods, he could take briskly and at a good pace. It took him through the rocky hills and the scree-slopes. The desert lowland and the bone plain. To City-dwellers it was all same, but he knew it like the back of his hand. The first dozen times he had crossed the area he had slipped or tumbled or grazed himself in some way, and twice he had twisted his ankle. But that was long ago, and now he could stride and bound with an air of overconfidence.

A chaos of stone
lay between him and the Store, surrounding his house on all sides and enclosing it from the rest of the Wasteland. Jagged, winding rock walls hid the house from anybody until they were right on top of it, and the anarchic terrain could not be ridden over by any dunebike or buggy. Nobody would have considered that there were pickings to be had in this unforgiving landscape, and less than nobody would have thought those pickings to be worth the trouble. And so, the bandits and raiders never strayed much closer than the Store, and they never found the home of Johnny Black.

But they had found his last
. Back when he had a family.

The Store was protected, as much as anywhere in the Wasteland could be. Compared to any other hideout or shanty town in this rough and scavenged country it
was a veritable fortress. There was a metal grid over the outside, like a mesh fence but harder and electrified, and the owner would look at you through the security cameras and lift the gate up if he liked the look of you. If you were perceived as a threat, especially if you were travelling in a group, turret guns encased deep in concrete would fire upon you without warning. You would never be admitted into the Store if you were a party of three or more.

Once you were through the gate, there were two further bulk doors to get through
. To get through the first you had to use the intercom, and signal your full intentions and what you wished to buy or sell. You had to look into the camera and let it take a facial and retinal scan of you, which the owner would then check against a database shared both by the City and by other stores. To get through the second door you had to talk to the owner through a bulletproof glass window. You deposited anything at all on your person that could conceivably be used as a weapon into a metal hatch in the wall by the window, which auto-locked from your side and could be opened only by the owner from his side. He kept your belongings as collateral. When you had finished shopping and the inner security door had slammed shut behind you, then the hatch would open on your side again.

All this was necessary, because if there were any targets in the Wasteland that screamed opportunity to the bandits, they were the stores.

The journey to the Store from his house was about thirteen miles. Anything within about a seven
mile radius of the Store, a Wasteland hot spot, would be scavenged clean by raiders, and so you would never find a Store in a shanty town or even in sight of other buildings. Everyone with any sense travelled a hard distance to the Store. Those who settled close to it did not stay settled long. Sometimes you came across the charred remains of bodies, their smoky flesh blowing ash across the sand. They were people who had meandered, dallied, sat and waited, perhaps even ate their food there. They were people who had been tracked to the Store and hunted away from it.

You were at your most vulnerable
when travelling from the Store. When you were walking away from it the bandits knew you would be returning home, and they were very keen to know where that would be. You had to know how to hide, how to cover your steps, how to change your route back each time, making it unpredictable and wandering, even if you thought nobody was watching. You had to know how to run. And, if it came to it, you had to be prepared to defend yourself. The last outcome was a desperate finality, for your chances were slim to none against a roving band of raiders riding dunebikes and buggies and carrying machetes and shotguns.

Johnny always took the longest, hardest routes to his house. He would travel b
ack on himself, he would lose himself amongst high rocks and down narrow gulleys. He had been followed before, but they had never got too far. It had never come to that last outcome.

Travelling to and from a s
tore was known as “making the death wish”.

His last house had been stuck
out on a plain, just tucked behind a nestle of twisted and leafless trees, back before they had been burned to the ground. Too visible. Too obvious. About eight miles from the nearest store, and three miles from a shanty town. The towns were too small to really fit the name, more just a cluster of shacks and wooden houses, perhaps gathered around a well. Their necessarily simplistic construction and simple furnishings were not much of an attraction to the raiders, but when it came to the Wasteland Johnny often thought of them as weakness in numbers. They were targeted so regularly and stripped so easily that all the inhabitants’ lives were completely subservient to the whims of the raiders. Some of them could expect to be raped several times in their life. A year passing without being robbed or otherwise attacked was considered exceptional. Shacks would be burned down and rebuilt later on. There was a very high mortality rate. Few but the most dispassionate and reticent of folk worn old lived above their thirties. Nobody with an irritable temperament, or any sense of pride or loyalty, to family or friend (there were no friends in the Wasteland) could expect to live past their early twenties. If your daughter was pulled out screaming by the hair, you had to keep your eyes level, with nary a flicker. You had to listen to it all, and keep those eyes and hands steady. After it was over, if you were both still alive, you could not comfort her too much. It would only soften her to future times.