Wolves (20 page)

I had to get the bag off. I had to find her and take the bag from off her head.

The nights were drawing in. When I got home from school, the conservatory was so cold I could see my own breath in the light of the porch lamp. I stepped inside and reached for the wall switch—

No. I drew my hand back, breathing clouds of light into the dark.

I passed through our rooms and out among the halls and landings of the hotel. The empty rooms nagged at me. The place was virtually mothballed now. Wounded servicemen were no longer being billeted with us, and Dad, with all his worries, had neither the time nor the will to spirit up yet another clientele.

Mum’s presence had held together, by the weight of its demands, a home that made very little sense now that she was gone. Relieved of the pressure she exerted, the place was flying apart – drawing room and dining room and bar and check-in desk. Our own apartments, too, were getting bigger and colder.

No one vanishes like that. A splash and gone. Not there. Not without help.

Help, then. Since she was not found. Not then. Not later. Helped to die. A fear bred in the dark. Who really has the nerve to tape a bag around their own throat? Who really pulls a boot lid down on themselves. More to the point,
how
?

I answered the last question myself, while Dad was out. The boot lid was double-hulled. There was a cut-out in the plastic, strong enough to haul the lid down, if you lay inside. I lay there in the boot, fingering the hole, horrified at the strength of the temptation that gripped me then, to pull the lid down over me, as she had done.

As for the rest, I had no answers. At night I lay awake, haunted by scraps of memory. A haloed figure. Hair as white as mist. His zipper coming down. Insane. Absurd. But in this season of mists and shadows I could not help remembering that I had left her on the platform with him. His erection white and hard and as long as a dagger. His loamy hands.

Dad kept records of our guests on the laptop behind the check-in desk. The photographs all seemed to have been taken in the same room, against the same wall – as though the country’s entire military had climbed one by one out of the same tank, and left by the same magnolia-painted corridor into the bleak, wet light of the same car park.

Everyone sported the same regulation haircut. There were a handful of blonds but none of the ones with the lightest hair – hair that might just be albino-white if they grew it out – looked like the soldier I remembered. Perhaps his hair had turned white after the photograph was taken, bleached by a nameless terror as in a second-rate ghost story.

Face folded into face until I could no longer call to mind what my quarry looked like. So much for that.

D
ogmen have me surrounded. They yip and slaver, waving crude knock-off AKs, their bandoliers glittering in the Middle’s glass reflections of a red and bloated sun. The streets are swimming in their oil-black blood but still they mass, overcoming the city’s defences.

‘Up here!’ A rookie firewoman grabs my hand; a fizzing sensation courses up my arm. ‘Come on!’ She moves up the stairwell ahead of me with an athletic, pneumatic grace. I struggle to keep up with her. Sweat runs into my eyes. Behind me comes a sick and frantic skittering – engineered claws on polished tile. They’re after us.

‘In here!’ She’s found a portal. She pauses, chest heaving, waiting for me to plunge my fist into the fizzing blue-green wall. The amulet on my arm glows dazzling white and the portal shreds itself clear and we find ourselves newly arrived at the municipal command centre, nerve ganglion of the dying city.

The armies of the Augmented are already massing at the gates. The best we can do now is set the place to self-destruct, robbing them of their prize. If they seize control of the city and its weaponry, then there can be no hope for the human diaspora pouring from the gates.

The command centre is built on many levels, balconies and mezzanines. Droids, faceless and beneficent, tend and mend its little fires and short-outs. We move among them as they carry equipment from one place to another.

(The shopping mall, so secure and so surveilled, provided us with countless camera points. Layering real-time AR over its surfaces, tenants and clientele has been a joy. The trouble is the mall itself – it’s far too well-designed. People move round this place so calmly, we have had to cast them as faceless ‘bots’. Even so, their lack of urgency kicks a sizeable hole in a game that is, after all, about action. We should have gone for our first idea and cast the shoppers as zombies. But we had neither the time nor the resources to engineer how the undead might react to a player’s presence. Bared bloody fangs, and flailing arms (barely attached: one falls off and crawls away – a neat sight gag), and the judicious application of projectile vomit – we had all these ideas storyboarded, and abandoned them with reluctance. According to our game bible, the bots – their heads as blank as eggs, their limbs a liquid chrome – are attempting a hopeless repair of the city’s failing systems. Frankly they look like what they are: shoppers, laden with bags and pushing prams, all hidden and homogenised under the most cursory AR skinning.)

A scream is cut off mid-flow by a blinding light and glass shatters. The firewoman hesitates, reels, and turns. A shard of blue glass as big as a meat cleaver has pierced her chest. Blood flecks her mouth as she tries to speak. ‘Kill the . . . the city.’ (Christ, how did this stunt get through QA?) ‘Save . . . the . . .’

She falls into me, already rotting and crumbling as nano-engineered bacteria pronounce her clinically dead and therefore ripe for scavenging. Her breadcrumb corpse collides with me – a shivering rain and a little breeze. And on the breeze, a word – ‘
w-o-r-l-d
’ – and she is gone. My only helpmate on this level. Dead. Kill the city. Save the world. I am alone.

Scritch scratch
.

A dogman has emerged from the portal. Grenades hang from leather belts criss-crossed over its heaving silver chest. Round its middle finger, raised in obscene insult to the human world, the pin, on its little wire ring, still dangles. He shakes it free of its claw and it lands on the floor with a bright sound. The dogman pulls its lips back in a grin and howls. How on earth did this monster get through the portal? The portal’s supposed to be locked to everyone but—

The dogman waves a severed human arm above its head. Round its wrist is an amulet. An amulet like mine.

Oh. Nice.

I run.

Criss-crossing the Middle air, policebots swivel to check my progress. Red warning lights checker the ground before me, slowing me up. Any faster, and the police will shoot. (We cooked this gag up to manage the player’s behaviour in crowded spaces. We don’t want people so taken up by the game that they go rocketing into mothers with prams and old men laden with the week’s groceries. Our bible, wrought in Michel’s deathless prose, does its best to weave these restrictions into the storyline: ‘The city is a strict, borderline-psychotic nanny, and riots and rebellions of the frustrated human populus have brought the predatory dogmen down on the city.’

The policebot is blind to body type. It’ll blast a speeding dogman down as cheerfully as it will me. This makes the chase a game of strategy rather than speed. As I weave past bots (well, shoppers) towards the escalator, the dogman (pure avatar) pursues me on a marginally more efficient trajectory, ever nearer, its breath ever hotter as I—

(Stop.)

I pull the wrapshades from my face. The earpieces, cooling, know to close down the rest of the kit. Item: a plastic mesh threaded through my hair. Item: gluey residues painted on my hands and face. Item: a thin Lycra top threaded with smart elastic – a slick descendant of the kind of vests my father stitched together for blind servicemen. Item: trainers, their thick soles packed with machinery. For all this, I feel a deal less self-conscious now than I did a year ago. A year is a long time in this business, and every part of Loophole’s AR player’s kit has been miniaturised to the point where the wearer can be forgiven for forgetting that it’s there.

The escalator leads to a cool concrete atrium, an airy space which, in its fidelity to the first-person-shooter aesthetic, looks a deal more gameable than our own, digitally generated AR skinning.

The metro here has a double-door system to prevent people hurling themselves inconsiderately onto the line. There’s a man at the end of the platform, in a grey lapel-less suit and smart shoes. He’s weaving and bobbing at his own reflection in the glass wall. The other passengers are giving him a wide berth. It’s going to take a while for people to habituate to gamer behaviour. After all, it took a little while for us to ignore the way people with handsfree phones talked into the air. AR is much more intrusive, and people’s tolerance to its casual public use is far less predictable. The man reaches towards the glass wall, his fingers scrabbling the air. Is he typing? Grappling? I wonder if he’s one of our first-adopters, a party guest, in which case he’ll be heading where I’m heading now, out of the Middle and on to the outdoor launch event organised by Michel’s producer, Bryon Vaux. I should put my glasses back on, go up to the man, test for myself the collaborative side of our game. But I have had enough. I am out of breath, and at the back of my mind hovers the unignorable possibility that the man might not be experiencing an Augmented Reality at all. For all his recent haircut and respectable clothing, he may just be crazy.

The train arrives. I’m finding it hard to shake off the paranoia induced by our game. From where I’m sitting I have a good clear view of six people. A harassed, gimlet-faced woman in a sari. Her bespectacled daughter. A young builder with tattoos who seems determined to sit with his legs as wide apart as possible, as though he were about to give birth. A man whose white facial hair, busy shirt, red-threaded tweed jacket, black boots and expensive retro wristwatch combine in such a messy and confusing way, I’d never be able to identify him in a line-up. Two animated African tourists trying to swap something from one mobile phone to another.

Of these, Glasses Girl, Clown Man and Legs Akimbo have allowed their attention to be snatched away. The girl’s glasses are cheap half-silvered jobs, and from the flickering petrol-sheen smothering her eyes I can just about identify which space-opera she’s watching. The other two are a scarier proposition, their pupils and irises silvered behind active contact lenses. These lenses are probably not AR-enabled, because the men’s heads are too still, absorbed in some reasonably static immersive environment. They’re reading, or more likely watching. Legs’s thumbs are twitching but they’re bare and clean, free of any shiny trail of conductive gel, so his movements are more likely a tic, rather than virtual keypresses.

It shouldn’t be such an effort, seeing what strangers are up to on a train. My heart shouldn’t still be racing, as it’s racing now. The game is over, but it seems to me it’s been replaced, not with any sense of the normal, but with another, creepier, more insidious game.

Ten minutes later I change trains for a more direct service, underground at first, then elevated, that stitches a path round suburban hills, up to and through the highest of the city’s ring of mountains. The city sprawls here because the valley soil is mostly sand. Any building above four storeys tends to keel over – a fact learned the hard way by ambitious ecclesiastical architects hundreds of years ago. All the really tall buildings – the high-rise blocks and the most ancient cathedrals – are built upon the rock outcrops that rise from the flat valley floor like teeth in a gum. The hills are called islands. Isle of This, Isle of That. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Michel, whose game bible climaxes with the city inundated by a rising flood, skinned with burning petrol. This is pure fantasy. We are too far inland for an inundation.

My phone rings.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m running late.’

‘Are you on the train?’

‘Yes.’

‘How far from the stop are you?’

‘About a minute.’ The train is already throttling down.

‘I’ll wait for you.’

‘Cheers, Ralf.’

This evening – and for the first time ever – Ralf chooses the restaurant. Its walls are hung with antique plates, white with multicoloured designs. The proprietress tells us about them – how all the colours come from a single pigment. How you won’t find these plates produced anywhere outside the Levant. It is a quaint assertion, as though her little restaurant could have somehow sidestepped centuries of relentless globalisation.

‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tasted the food.’

‘I’m not knocking anything.’ How strange, though, to be following Ralf’s recommendation.

‘Is Michel coming to this party, do you know?’ Ralf is a fan of Michel’s books. He has a full set of slipcased hardbacks, signed. It’s one of the reasons Loophole has fallen further and further under the spell of Bryon Vaux. Michel’s books are the source material for Vaux’s most lucrative film franchise, and Ralf has wanted to apply Loophole’s every technical innovation to better realise Michel’s world.

When Ralf heard that Michel was going to be writing our game bible, he was like a kid on his way to see Santa Claus. Sadly, Michel has proved every bit as elusive as the real Father Christmas, communicating with us only by written word. I don’t know whether this is just pressure of work, or some personal fall-out from Christmas.

Either way, Ralf is one disappointed fan.

‘Vaux will be there, I suppose.’

Ralf puffs himself up at that. Ralf, as Chief Imagineer, has met Bryon Vaux several times now. ‘I’ll introduce you,’ he says, as though this were a favour specially in his gift. There’s a pomposity comes over Ralf whenever he talks about Vaux. I used to find it touching, but now it has begun to irritate me. It’s not entirely Ralf’s fault. He is now, of necessity, one of the great producer’s gatekeepers. Every digital entrepreneur and failed screenwriter and wooden drama student wants a piece of him.

Our food arrives. Ralf sits back to make room for the proprietress. He has a paunch now. He’s going to have to watch that. I let him order for me, curious to discover what has so excited his retarded palate.