Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

They experimented. They gave her apartment’s sound-dampening properties a run for its money as they pushed Dracup’s heightened nerve endings to their limits. Afterwards, exhausted, Zabilla had to carry Dracup up the wooden steps to her bed. She laid him down trying to decide how she felt about him. Was he anything more than just a handsome, if severe, game piece? More to the point, what was she to him? A lover? A mentor? A stepping-stone to a better thing for an ambitious player? If so, then he was a much cleverer player than she had so far given him credit for. When she was younger it had been easier to differentiate between Zabilla the person and Zabilla the player.

She looked down at him. He looked peaceful, more innocent, when asleep. She wondered if that was the only time they could be themselves. It wasn’t the first time she had thought this. But dreams contained sensation as well. Even when they slept they were not alone. There was something in the back of her mind. Some sense of disgust at this violation of her sleeping mind, an alien feeling that she hadn’t felt in so long. She tried to suppress it. She had no idea why she was feeling this way. Not when she was so close to winning the audition.

She released a potent anti-anxiety drug into her bloodstream, then a less potent sedative. She had time to climb into bed and roll next to Dracup, feel his warmth, before fatigue and the sedative overwhelmed her and took her where she could be herself.

It was like a sting, a tiny pinprick but it felt deep. She shouldn’t have felt it, but she was a light sleeper and had paranoia routines written into her neunonics. Even then she probably wouldn’t have felt it if it hadn’t been for her heightened nerve endings. She had forgotten to send a chemical signal to dull them before she fell asleep.

She sat up in bed feeling vulnerable and frightened, dragging the sheets around her. She hadn’t felt like this since she was a child. Where was all the fear coming from? she asked herself.

Almost immediately she turned to look at Dracup. He was deeply asleep in a way that was difficult to fake. She confirmed this with physiological readings provided by the medical applications of her nano-screen. Her first thought had been that Dracup was playing some kind of gambit.

She checked her internal systems. There was nothing as far as she could tell, no biological or nano-agent. She checked her nano-screen and the apartment’s security systems. Neither of the systems had detected any kind of foreign presence in the room.

Zabilla was beginning to convince herself that she had been dreaming when the banging on the door started. She jumped and turned to stare at the closed aperture in the wood. Her security systems should have warned her the moment somebody turned into the corridor that led to the door to her apartment. The fact they hadn’t meant that they had been overridden. That and the sound, that particular knock, the sound from a thousand immersions and a million newscasts, meant that it was the heads outside.

Feed from the door sensors to her neunonics confirmed this. Outside, two of the powerful automatons with the enlarged smiling face of the Absolute, pre-ascension, were waiting at her door. The grin on their massive faces looked more obscene and frightening to her now than ever before.

The knock came again. Her mind raced. What had she done? Had Scoular managed to frame her? A bold and clever move if he had, but it had better be watertight or else she would destroy him. Then she thought back to her feeling of disgust, of violation from having the Absolute see inside her mind. She had committed treason. She had gone from being a player to being a loser. The thoughts had come unbidden! It was so unfair.

‘What?’ Dracup sat up, quickly going from rudely woken to completely alert. He turned to look at her. There was no fear in his expression; instead there was a questioning look on his face. It was just short of accusation.

The knock came again. They never knocked more than three times. Now they would override the apartment’s security. The aperture opened. Zabilla’s neunonics told her that Dracup had sent the command. She couldn’t shake the feeling of teeth closing in around her.

The two heavily armoured automatons stepped into the apartment, looking up at the bed. They looked like walking statues, their faces twisted, agonised somehow, sinisterly clownish parodies of the pre-ascension Absolute.

‘Can I help you?’ Dracup asked.

Zabilla wondered when he had become assertive. She controlled the fear. She put on her Game face, quite literally. ‘What do you want and why are you disturbing me at this hour?’ she demanded.

Dracup turned to look at her, raising an eyebrow. On the other hand it was the question of a completely innocent person.

Neither of the heads said anything. Zabilla had pulled her nano-screen in as the heads expanded theirs. There was sparring at a nano-level as their nanites interrogated hers and Dracup’s.

‘What just happened?’ the voice, modulated for psychological impact, asked. She wasn’t sure which of them had spoken.

‘Explain yourself,’ she told the heads.

‘For a moment there was something not of the Game in here,’ the voice answered. She felt coldness creeping through her. The pinprick. The strange thing was that she thought she had heard something that she had never heard before from a head. It sounded like it was unsure of itself.

‘Well, have you found anything?’ she asked.

‘Why were you reviewing your physiological readings and security systems?’ the voice asked, suspicious now. Dracup turned to look at her. He looked suspicious as well.

‘I thought I felt something. A pinprick, but it was nothing, a dream or some half-waking sensation, nothing more. What made you think there was something else here?’

‘It came from the Absolute,’ the voice said.

So the Absolute had been monitoring her as she slept. Again the cold clammy feeling of violation rose inside her. She tried to force it down. Both the heads seemed to be staring at her with the dead black holes in their mask-like faces where eyes should have been.

‘Perhaps the Absolute only felt what I felt?’ she said.

‘Have you found anything?’ Dracup asked impatiently.

‘No,’ the voice answered.

‘Will you be taking any further action?’

There was a pause.

‘Not at the moment.’

The heads turned and left the apartment, the aperture door shutting behind them. Dracup gave her that questioning look again. She wanted to talk to him, to hold him, to take comfort from him, but this would only leave her more vulnerable, and her paranoia, one of the most important qualities of the professional player, would not allow her to show that weakness.

The massive chamber was arched like a Seeder cathedral. The wood had been grown into detailed ornamental patterns. Parts of it were friezes showing the history and mythology of the Game and the Absolute. It showed the Absolute’s journey from a world of toil to the world of leisure and pleasure that was the Game. In which you didn’t have to work unless you chose to. All you had to do was play the most involving game that had ever been created.

The hall had been grown out of the main trunk, its back wall a series of stained-glass windows. Sun shone through, illuminating the dust motes and larger nanite clusters in the air. Zabilla stood next to Dracup, her installation, her gift, in front of her in a covered glass box about the size of a large cupboard. Scoular was to her right, with Carinne and a similar covered box in front of him. He didn’t look confident; in fact, he looked ill.

Zabilla recognised most of the crowd. They were the top players from the arcology within the fields of genetics, biology and biophysics, as well as a number of art critics.