Armageddon Heights (a thriller) (26 page)

‘You have my word,’ said Napier.

‘You don’t seem too sure.’ His words were icy. ‘Look out there, look upon those people, Robert,’ as Lindegaard made for the door. ‘What you see out there is the power I hold within my hands. The power to do as I please. Never forget that. This is no game, Robert. You’ve got one more chance; don’t screw it up.’

Napier frowned as Lindegaard left the room and closed the door. Was that a threat?

He found he could not observe the still lake of sad humanity laid out in the sterile-looking room like so many dead bodies in a morgue, and pressed the button to close the blinds on the dismal sight.

Lindegaard’s words left him feeling cold and unsettled. Things were fast coming to a head. Lindegaard was closing in on CSL on all fronts.

It was time to make his move.

It’s surprising how the eye quickly adjusts to the dark, Wade thought. Their cell wasn’t as completely pitch-black as he’d first thought. A bright strip at the bottom of the door – so thin it looked like a yellow pencil-line – showed where the light from the tunnel beyond leaked through. As time passed he was able to make out Linda Keegan’s pale face, the faintly glowing whites of her eyes.

‘You expect me to believe that?’ he said, wanting to turn away from her ardent gaze, but the alternative was looking upon the blackness all around them. And also, what she was saying fixed his attention, his body frozen as if in the grip of intense, immobilising fear. ‘I know what I know, and it’s this place that’s unreal, not my life before I found myself in this twisted mess. You’re crazy…’

‘Let’s take this slowly,’ she said evenly. ‘I told you this would be hard to take in. And it never gets any easier doing this on my part. Right, I want you to tell me the name of the regiment you were in before you left the army…’

‘What?’

‘You heard. What was its name?’

‘It’s…’ But strangely he struggled to remember what it was. How was that possible? It was as if a black hole had swallowed it and though he reached down into it, it remained irritatingly just out of reach. ‘I can’t remember…’ he said. ‘It’s…’ He growled in frustration. ‘I don’t
know
…’

‘Which country were you stationed in when the attack on your patrol took place, the one where John Travers was kidnapped by the insurgents? Come on, it’s a simple question,’ she urged.

But again he couldn’t recall it. His brain hurt with the effort. ‘What the hell are you doing to me? Why can’t I remember it?’

‘And the name of the village where the attack took place – what was it called? What were the insurgents called?’

Wade put his hands, still tied by the wire that ate into his flesh, to his head and rubbed his temple. He couldn’t remember.
He simply couldn’t remember!
He tried till it almost hurt to do so
.

‘You’re playing games with me! Screwing my mind up!’

‘You can’t recall any of it, can you? Okay, let’s get a little more personal. What’s your wife’s maiden name, when’s her birthday, when was your daughter born, when is
your
birthday, what do they call your mother and father?’

The questions came machinegun-fast and he reeled under the fire. It was the same blanks he drew. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me… I’ve been drugged, right? Something’s happened to make me lose my memory.’

She shook her head. ‘You haven’t lost your memory, Sam. You can’t remember any of those facts because they were never really there in the first place.’

‘Stop that brainwashing shit now!’ he demanded. ‘Whatever game you’re all playing here, I want out, and I want out of here now!

‘You’ve got to stay calm and listen,’ she said. ‘Don’t go crazy on me now. You’ve got to be strong if you’re ever going to survive. I told you this wouldn’t be easy.’

There was the sound of movement outside the door, a shadow blocking out the strip of light, and then it passed.

‘They’re going to kill us, right? This Cain guy…’ said Wade. The man who looked uncannily like his family’s murderer.

‘Eventually, yes. That’s the way he’s built. It’s in his nature, if you could call it that…’

‘Fine, enough of the riddles. I’m ready. Give it to me straight,’ he demanded. ‘I’ll listen.’

‘We haven’t got long before Cain’s Magwer comes, but I’m betting Lindegaard’s men will be here sooner…’

‘There you go again!’ he said, frustrated. ‘Lindegaard? Who the fuck…?’

‘You’re right. I’ve got to strip this right back,’ she said, taking in a deep breath as if she were preparing to dive into cold water. ‘Your so-called memory loss extends further. You can’t, for instance, remember exactly how you found your dead wife and child, the house, the street, even the details of the room. It’s all very sketchy. You only
know
it happened. Same as you know your ex-army colleague killed them seeking vengeance. And yet other memories are pin-sharp – the ambush by the insurgents in that village, seeing John Travers on TV after his rescue, getting on that coach and heading for Edinburgh, being on the run and wanted by the police for your wife’s and daughter’s murder. Yet you can’t remember buying the tickets for travelling. I’m right, aren’t I?’

The quiet was filled by faint shuffling sounds from outside in the corridor. ‘Yeah, that’s right…’ he said weakly, feeling suddenly exhausted. ‘How’d you know all that unless you’re the one responsible for making it happen? What is this, some form of hypnosis?’

‘Well there you’ve stumbled upon part of the answer. I don’t mean about hypnosis.’

‘You’re responsible?’

‘Think about all you’ve seen and heard – does that sound plausible to you? I mean, does it
feel
real?’

‘If you mean does it feel painfully real then yeah,’ he said holding up his bound, bleeding hands. ‘But if you mean does it all make sense, then no, it doesn’t. My head tells me it’s not happening. It’s not real. Any minute I’m going to wake up.’

‘Would it help if I said to you it isn’t real, any of this, at least, not in the physical sense?’ She gave a short exhalation down her nose. ‘But what is physical sense anyway? That’s what this is all about…’

‘What do you mean, it isn’t real?’

‘It’s all a construct. It’s manufactured, created, imagined, call it what you will…’

‘I feel it, I see it!’ he said. ‘You’re here, I’m talking to you. I can see and touch you. You telling me you’re not real either?’

‘I hate to say this, but while I might appear to be real to you, what you see, hear and feel is not me, not the real me. I’m not Lieutenant Linda Keegan either. I don’t even look like this – hell, I wish I did. What you see is an avatar.’

He paused, then laughed coldly. ‘An avatar? Jesus, come on, lady! And I thought I was the one who was going crazy!’

‘Think about it – you said yourself my explanation for Armageddon Heights sounded like the plot from some kind of B-movie, or a comic book. You weren’t that far from the truth. It’s somewhere on the same spectrum. Armageddon Heights is a game.’

‘A game? You mean all this is some kind of set? I’ve been drafted into someone’s idea of a role-play game? Weird as it sounds, that starts to make sense. Out here in the middle of nowhere, a desert… Why me? Why us? And how’d they get a busload of people out here without getting noticed?’ Suddenly, it didn’t make any sense at all.

‘Role-play, yes, but not a physical game. A computer-generated game,’ she said.

‘A video game?’ He frowned, trying to take it in. ‘But I can see it, feel it…’

‘Armageddon Heights is in the vanguard of a new generation of 3D, virtual reality computer games called Totally Immersive Experiences, or TIE for short. The Heights was the first of its kind and originally developed by an organisation called Lindegaard Software, marketed under its subsidiary company, Mindgames Inc. It relies on major new breakthroughs combining software technology with advances in psychotropic drug chemistry that Lindegaard owns the patents to. At its heart is what’s called informally The Holy Trinity. Firstly it comprises the powerful software to generate a fully realised 3D virtual world – the world you see around you, Armageddon Heights, with all its highly complex environments, of which, trust me, you have only just seen a tiny part.

‘In the virtual world, Armageddon Heights has grown over the years to occupy the same landmass as Canada and is broken into thousands of different zones and sectors, each with its own peoples, environments and challenges. The pixel size goes down to molecular level, it’s that detailed. Secondly, in order to interact with the game and experience it as being completely real, the gamer has to have a tiny chip implanted just under his or her ear. This connects wirelessly with external computer software, allowing the user to enter the game. But that on its own wouldn’t be enough to get the fully immersive experience. For that you need the final, and some would argue the most important part, of the Holy Trinity. And that’s the psychotropic drug tremethelene.

‘Once the gamer is hooked up to the software they are injected with tremethelene. The drug affects the brain in such a way that it allows the gamer to experience everything generated by the software as if it were real – sights, smells, touch, pain, cold, heat, hunger and tiredness. Gamers
occupy
avatars, not simply control them remotely. In fact, once in the game it is, for all intents and purposes, completely and utterly real.

‘At its most basic, the human experience is based upon nothing more than electronic signals to the brain that it translates into meaning – all our senses, the way we view and interact with the world, can be reduced to this process. What the game does is mimic real life to such a sophisticated degree that people cannot tell the difference. Once hooked up, you swap one reality for another, as if you’ve stepped from one universe seamlessly into another. And, to make that experience even more real, when you get injured – shot, blown up, whatever, you really do feel a degree of pain. What’s more there is no unlimited life in the Heights. If your avatar sustains life threatening injuries and it dies, your time in the Heights is over, no matter how far you’ve gone and for how long. You have to buy another avatar and start all over again.’

‘So you’re not you…’ he said, struggling to comprehend. ‘You’re an avatar?’

‘It’s true, Sam.’

‘Which means I’m not me either…’ He closed his eyes tight. All this – everything about him, what he saw, heard and felt – all of it wasn’t real? The sound of his breathing, the pain in his wrists and on his body where they’d hit him with rifles, where he’d been grazed by a bullet – the very woman by his side? That was just too farfetched, he thought.

And yet… ‘But why am I here in the first place?’ he asked. ‘Why did you say the world I thought I belonged to never happened? Has something gone wrong with my hook-up? That’s got to be it. I’m a gamer, and something’s gone wrong with my – my trip.’ The thought caused his insides to screw up. ‘Then who the hell am I if I’m not me?’ he said, fear gripping him. ‘And am I stuck inside some kind of avatar? Is that what you’re saying?’

He made out her eyes in the thin light. They looked faintly sorrowful, he thought, and that had the effect of stirring up his terror more than anything she’d told him so far.

He asked, ‘What is it, Keegan? You’ve got to tell me…’

‘Such a game has its critics, as you can imagine,’ she said. ‘I mean, Armageddon Heights is phenomenally successful; it made all previous games redundant almost overnight, even the latest virtual games that had been developed previously. Everyone wanted to experience the new TIE game, casting away their cumbersome, out-of-date 3D headsets used in other VR applications. Soon, there were millions signing up to have implants and hook up to Armageddon Heights in one of Lindegaard’s specially constructed gaming suites, initially taking hundreds of people, but soon growing to take thousands. Globally, Lindegaard Software has sole rights and dominates the market. It has made the organisation billions.

‘But the problem came when new software upgrades were developed by Lindegaard’s daughter, Melissa Lindegaard, who’d worked on creating the original software. She strove to imbue the characters in the game – who’d already achieved a high degree of sophistication and believability – with even more human-like characteristics. Her improvements allowed the characters to have greater depth, each having a back-story – for want of a better word having their own memories - and an ability to interact with gamers beyond that which traditional programming allowed. They started to become virtual people inhabiting their own unique world into which gamers were transported. This sophistication grew as more upgrades were developed.

‘But alongside that sophistication we saw the first signs of trouble for Lindegaard Software. Certain characters within the game started to go beyond even the flexible restraints of their programming, to act as if they were independently human. They’d become sentient, or as they termed it, had become sentient algorithms. Lindegaard’s reaction, naturally, was to treat the situation like a computer software error, but the game had grown to such levels of complexity that to re-programme entire sections to eradicate the problems was too expensive and laborious, given that each element was inextricably interlaced with neighbouring elements. However, what they discovered was that a sentient algorithm will have stepped so far beyond its original programming that it could be destroyed simply by killing it.’

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Killing it? How can you kill something that doesn’t really exist?’

‘I say kill – I mean by doing what you’d do to a human to kill it in the real world. Shoot, blow up, strangle, stab – you get the picture. And Armageddon Heights is at heart a shoot-‘em-up. That sort of thing happens all the time. So once a sentient algorithm is discovered, Lindegaard’s teams send in the Sentinels. I suppose you could call them virtual hit men. It sounds drastic and unkind, but, like you say, it’s a game and these things don’t really exist, do they? So what harm can it be doing? I mean, people in the Heights are getting killed in very violent ways every day and every night ad infinitum. That’s the fun of it.