Bedlam Read online

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  The source of the flashing and shimmering on the far side of the passageway turned out to be a huge window opposite, easily twelve feet high by twenty feet wide, through which Ross could see what was outside this building. He hadn’t thought he could ever look into another pane of glass and see a more unsettling sight than the one that had met him only a few minutes ago when he glimpsed his own reflection. Clearly it was not a day to be making assumptions.

  The first thing he noticed was the sky, which was a shade of purple that he found disturbing. It wasn’t so much that there was anything aesthetically displeasing about the colour itself; it was, to be fair, a quite regally luxuriant purple: deep, textured and vibrant. It was more to do with his knowledge of astronomy and subsequent awareness that, normally, the sky he looked up at owed its colour to the shorter wavelengths and greater proportion of blue photons in the type of light emitted by the planet’s primary energy source. What was disturbing about this particular hue was not merely that it could not be any sky on Earth, but that it could not be any sky beneath its sun.

  Worse, its predominantly purple colouration wasn’t even the most distressing thing about the view through the window: that distinction went to the fact that it was full of burning aircraft. There were dozens of them up there, possibly hundreds, stretching out all the way to the horizon. It looked to be some kind of massive extraterrestrial expeditionary landing force, and its efforts were proving successful in so far as landing was defined as reaching terra firma: all of the craft were certainly managing that much. However, controlled descents executed without conflagration and completed by vessels comprising fewer than a thousand flaming pieces were, quite literally, a lot thinner on the ground.

  Ross felt that inrush again, that sense of energy being channelled very specifically to one source, then heard the great boom once more, and this time he could see its source. It was a colossal artillery weapon, sited at least a mile away, but evidently powered by the facility in which he was standing. Its twin muzzles were each the size of an oil tanker, jutting from a dome bigger than St Paul’s Cathedral, and its effect on the invasion force was comparable to a howitzer trained on a flock of geese. Each mighty blast devastated another host of unfortunate landing craft, sending debris spinning and hurtling towards the surface.

  He had no sense of how long he had been standing there: it could have been thirty seconds and it could have been ten times that. The spectacle was horrifyingly mesmeric, but the car-crash fascination was not purely vicarious. Everything Ross saw had unthinkable consequences for himself. Instead of being merely lost in time, he now had no idea which planet he was even on.

  He could see buildings in the distance, only visible because they were so large. The architecture was unquestionably alien, as was the very idea of building vast, isolated towers in an otherwise empty desert landscape. And still something inside him felt like he belonged here, or at least that his environment was not as alien as it should have been.

  ‘It’s an awe-inspiring sight, isn’t it?’

  When Ross heard the voice speak softly from only a few feet behind him, he deduced rather depressingly that he must no longer have a digestive system, as this could be the only explanation for why he didn’t shit himself.

  He turned around and found himself staring at another brutally haphazard melange of flesh and metal, one he decided was definitely the estate model. The newcomer was a foot taller at least, and more heavily armoured, particularly around the head, leaving his face looking like a lost little afterthought. He looked so imposingly heavy, Ross could imagine him simply crashing through anything less than a reinforced floor, and couldn’t picture walls proving much of an impediment either. Wherever he wanted to be, he was getting there, and whatever he wanted, Ross was giving him it.

  ‘Yes,’ Ross agreed meekly, amazed to hear his own voice still issuing from whatever he had become.

  ‘You could lose yourself in it,’ the big guy went on. His tone was surprisingly soft, perhaps one used to being listened to without the need to raise it, but not as surprising as his accent, which was a precise if rather theatrical received pronunciation. Clearly, as well as advanced technology, this planet also had some very posh schools.

  ‘Perhaps even forget what you were supposed to be doing. Such as joining up with your unit and getting on with fighting off the invasion, what with there being a war on and all.’

  His voice remained quiet but Ross could hear the sternest of warnings in his register. There was control there too, no expectation of needing to ask twice. Very bizarrely, Ross was warming to him. Maybe it was the programming, same as whatever was making him feel this place was familiar.

  ‘Yes, sorry, absolutely … er … sir,’ he remembered to add. ‘My unit, that’s right. Have to join up. On my way now, sir.’

  ‘That’s “Lieutenant Kamnor, sir”,’ he instructed.

  ‘Yes, sir, Lieutenant Kamnor, sir,’ Ross barked, eyes scanning either way along the corridor as he weighed his options regarding which direction Kamnor expected him to walk in.

  He turned and made to return to the staging area. Kamnor stopped him by placing a frighteningly heavy hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Are you all right, soldier?’ he asked, sounding genuinely concerned. ‘You seem a little disoriented. Do you know where your unit even is?’

  Ross decided he had nothing to lose.

  ‘I have no idea where I even am, sir. I don’t know how I got here. I have no memory of it. I’m not a soldier. I’m a scientific researcher in Stirling. That’s Scotland, er, planet Earth, and this morning, that being an early twenty-first-century morning, I had a neuro-scan as part of my work. I was still totally biodegradable; I mean, an entirely organic being. When I stepped out of the scanning cell, I found myself here, looking like this.’

  Kamnor’s face altered, concern changing to something between alarm and awe, and everything that it conveyed seemed amplified by being the only recognisable piece of humanity amidst so much machine.

  ‘Blood of the fathers,’ he said, his voice falling to a gasp. ‘You’re telling me you were a different form, in another world?’

  ‘Yes sir, lieutenant, sir.’

  ‘Blood of the fathers. Then it truly is the prophecy.’

  Kamnor beheld him with an entirely new regard, readable even in his alloy-armoured body language.

  ‘The prophecy?’ Ross enquired.

  ‘That one would come from a different world: a being who once took another form, but who would be reborn here as one of us, to become the leader who rose in our time of need. That time is at hand,’ he added, gesturing to the astonishing scene through the huge window, ‘for our world is under attack, and lo, you have been delivered to us this day.’

  Ross half turned to once again take in the sky-shattering conflict in which he had just been told he was destined to play a legendary role. A host of confused emotions vied for primacy in dictating how he should feel. Sick proved the winner. He recalled hearing the line: ‘Some men are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them.’ He wondered if that also applied to heroism. He had no combat training, no military strategy and tended to fold badly in even just verbal confrontations.

  He was about to ask ‘Are you sure?’ but swallowed it back on the grounds that it wasn’t the most leaderly way to greet the hand of destiny when it was extended to him. He settled for staring blankly like a tit, something he was getting pretty adept at.

  Then Kamnor’s face broke from solemnity into barking, aggressive laughter.

  ‘Just messing with you. Of course there’s no bloody prophecy. You’ve been hit by the virus, that’s all. Been finding chaps in your condition for days.’

  ‘Virus?’ Ross asked, his relief at no longer having a planet’s fate thrust into his hands quickly diminished as he belatedly appreciated how preferable it was to the role of cannon fodder.

  ‘Yes, sneaky buggers these Gaians. They hit us with a very nasty piece of malware
in advance of their invasion force: part binary code and part psychological warfare. Devilishly clever. It gives the infected hosts all kinds of memories that aren’t really theirs. Makes you think you’re actually one of them: a human, from Gaia, or as they call it, Earth. It uploads all kinds of vivid memories covering right up until what seems like last night or even this morning. Like, for instance, that you’re a scientist from, where was it?’

  ‘Stirling,’ Ross said, his voice all but failing him.

  ‘See? It’s really detailed. Convinces you that you just arrived here, plucked from another life on their planet. But don’t worry, it wears off. It’s full of holes, so it breaks down: I mean, hell of a coincidence they all speak the same language as us and even sound like us, eh? The virus auto-translates what they’re saying. Don’t worry, you’ll be right as rain soon enough. We find that shooting a few of the bastards helps blow away the mist. So how about you catch up to your unit and help them spread the spank?’

  Ross … was his name even Ross? He now knew officially nothing for sure.

  This couldn’t be true. These memories were his. They weren’t just vivid and detailed, they were the only ones he had. Surely there would be some conflict going on in there if what Kamnor was saying was right. Yet as he stood before this terrifyingly powerful mechanised warrior, it occurred to him to wonder why the lieutenant would be so patient and understanding even as war raged on the other side of the hyper-reinforced window. Furthermore, there was that disarming sense of the familiar, even of positive associations, ever-present since he’d arrived here. For the moment, he’d just have to run with it, see if the mists really did blow away.

  ‘I don’t know what unit I’m with, lieutenant sir,’ he admitted.

  Kamnor reached out a huge, steel-fingered hand and tapped the metal cladding that Ross used to think of as his upper arm. There was a symbol etched there, a long thin sword.

  ‘You’re with Rapier squad. Mopping-up detail, under Sergeant Gortoss.’ He gestured along the corridor in the opposite direction from where Ross had just come.

  ‘Turn left at the first pile of flaming debris and look for the most homicidally deranged bastard you can find. Ordinarily he’d be in a maximum-security prison, but when there’s a war on, he’s just the kind of chap you want inside the tent pissing out.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Ross, by which he meant: ‘Holy mother of fuck.’

  ‘You remember how to fire a weapon, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll come back,’ he replied, making to leave.

  Kamnor stopped him again.

  ‘Well, before you go I would suggest you take a quick refresher on how to salute a superior officer.’

  Kamnor saluted by way of example, sending his arm out straight, angled up thirty degrees from the horizontal, his metal fist clenched tight.

  Ross was inundated with unaccustomed feelings of gratitude, loyalty and pride, driving a determination to serve and please this man. He had read about leaders whom soldiers would follow into battle, kill for, even die for, but never understood such emotions until now.

  He sent out his right arm as shown, his shoulder barely level with Kamnor’s breastplate, clenching his fist once it was fully extended. As he brought his fingers tightly together, a long metal spike emerged at high speed from somewhere above his wrist, shooting up into Kamnor’s mouth, through his palate and into his brain.

  It was a tight call as to who was the more shocked, but Kamnor probably edged it, aided by the visual impact of blood and an unidentified yellow-green fluid spurting in pulsatile gushes from his mouth. He bucked and squirmed but was too paralysed to do anything else in response.

  ‘Oh Christ, I’m so sorry,’ Ross spluttered, trying to work out how to withdraw the spike back into his wrist. ‘I didn’t mean it, I just …’

  But Kamnor was way past listening. He fell to the floor, pulling Ross over with him, his arm still linked to Kamnor’s head by the rogue shaft of steel. The blood subsided but the yellow-green fluid continued to hose, while one of Kamnor’s great feet twitched spastically, clanking and scraping on the metal grate lining the floor.

  Ross heard a hiss of pistons and saw the double door at the end of the corridor begin to separate.

  ‘Oh buggering arse flakes.’

  Through the widening gap he could see six pairs of metal-clad legs making their way towards the passage. In about one second they were going to spot this, and it wasn’t going to look good.

  How did you get this bloody thing out?

  A clench of his fist had extended it, he reasoned, but so far merely unclenching wasn’t having the corresponding effect.

  He opened his hand instead, stretching out his fingers. This prompted an instant response. He felt something twang at the end of the spike, like the spokes of an umbrella, then felt a sense of rotation and heard a soft, muffled whir.

  The incoming troop made it through the doorway as the spike withdrew, liquidising Kamnor’s face and spraying Ross with the resulting soup as though he had lobbed the poor guy’s head through a turbo propeller.

  He turned to face them, the end-piece of the spike still spinning and sending blood, flesh and other matter arcing about the corridor.

  ‘It’s not what it looks like,’ he offered.

  Work–Life Balance

  The doors slid closed with a hydraulic hiss as Ross stepped aboard out of the blustery Stirling rain and headed for his seat, shuffling laboriously along the aisle. He was barely awake. Safe mode: only loading the minimum components required to carry out the very basic tasks involved in getting from his bed to his desk. The bus jostled him pleasantly as it moved off, the feeling of warmth and the lulling rock of motion doing very little to encourage him into a sharper waking state. This was less down to fatigue than reluctance. Never a good sign.

  Setting ‘Autopilot’ = TRUE

  A sound file played in his head:

  ‘Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system …’

  It was the opening of Half-Life, a woman’s soft voice over the PA of a futuristic subterranean monorail taking the physicist Gordon Freeman to work on what would prove to be a cataclysmically fateful day.

  Also not a good sign. Human memory wasn’t random-access. What the subconscious chose to retrieve seemingly unprompted was seldom anything of the sort. If you looked deeply and honestly enough, you could usually trace the connection, and it would tell you plenty about your true state of mind. This voice from the past was telling Ross something inescapably accurate about the present.

  The reason it was not a good sign was that this echo from Half-Life hadn’t been prompted by a reminiscence of playing the game. He was reminiscing about sitting on another bus fifteen years ago, running the same soundtrack in his head as he imagined being on his way into the Black Mesa complex instead of towards St Gerard’s Secondary. That childhood bus had been a buffering period, eight minutes to retreat into fantasy before reluctantly engaging with the indignities, torpor and soul-stomping banality of another day in school. He never wanted to get off, wished the journey was a hundred miles. He couldn’t wait to get out of St Gerard’s. He was planning to go off to uni to study medicine, and once he’d qualified he would look forward to every day’s work as both a challenge and an opportunity.

  Yeah, that worked out well.

  The bus was busy. Ross was squeezed in between a young mum with a toddler on her lap and an old man in an ancient raincoat that was the only thing on the bus smelling worse – considerably worse – than the scrawny hound that accompanied him. Maybe it was for this reason that the mutt decided to position itself at Ross’s feet rather than its master’s. It sat eye-level with his crotch, at which it proceeded to stare longingly and with unbroken concentration, as though breakfast hadn’t quite hit the spot and it was thinking Ross’s balls would be just the thing to fill a hole before elevenses.

  On the other side, the young mum was so consumed by the text exchange she was carrying out with impressive
one-handed dexterity that she failed to notice that her daughter’s face appeared to be melting, presumably as an unforeseen chemical reaction to the toxic-looking cheese string she had given her to eat. Liquid appeared to be seeping from a multiplicity of orifices, mucus bubbling liberally over her top lip on its way to replenishing the layer she had smeared across both cheeks; the southern reaches of her face were swimming in a yellow-tinged paste made up of two parts drool to one part semi-masticated cheddar; and there was something seeping out of one of her ears that Ross really didn’t want to think about. Both of her little hands were awash with a combination of these secretions, the resulting solution given a deeper texture by partially dissolving an earlier sedimentary deposit of biscuit crumbs, and each bend, brake and acceleration of the bus seemed to bring her outstretched fingers closer to Ross’s brand-new neoprene laptop cover.

  To think that Carol said she wanted one of these things loose in the house. She wouldn’t let him eat pizza on her new sofa in case he dripped grease on the upholstery: how would she cope if there was a two-foot snot-goblin burying its face in her dry-clean-only trousers and wiping jam on the curtains?

  Ross looked back and forth between the dog and the child, the latter still glistening with intent and the former continuing to fixate upon his nads like there wasn’t anything else on this bus worth glancing at even for a second. Why didn’t the anorexic mongrel solve both problems by sidling over and licking the self-emoliating rug-rat’s mitts, thus taking the edge off its appetite and its eyes off his clackerbag?

  Some days this bus journey could seriously test his ecological resolve. Today those principles concerning single-passenger car commuting were in danger of being washed away in a tide of baby-gloop or swallowed down the throat of an underfed mutt. So what did it say that he still considered it better to travel horribly than to arrive?

  The view out of the bus windows, where it could be seen through dirt, rain and condensation, revealed the route to be taunting him in a way he hadn’t previously noticed. It seemed that everyone was getting off to spend their day somewhere more interesting than him. The bus trundled through the Digital Glen, an enclave of shiny twenty-first-century high-tech start-ups housed in brand-new steel, glass and pine pagodas. It stopped outside the Hirakumico campus, the electronics manufacturer’s controversially subsidised venture sprawling amid woodland, a man-made loch and the most fastidiously manicured lawns this side of Gleneagles. It drove for several miles beneath the stern regard of Stirling Castle high on the crags, inspiration for a thousand boyhood fantasies and a dozen teenhood custom maps. And then, to flick him a final two fingers, it stopped at the roundabout for a few moments right under the sign for the safari park, the location he most associated with the simple carefree pleasures of growing up. In his memory, it was always sunny there, no matter what the weather when they got into the car to set off; a place where he played games and ate ice-cream with his sisters while barbecue smells blew on the breeze.