Alpha Omega E-Book

Nicholas Bowling

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Stranger Things meets Black Mirror and Ready Player One in this unsettling, near-future science fiction standalone.Something is rotten in the state of the NutriStart Skills AcademyWith the discovery of a human skull on the playing fields, children displaying symptoms of an unfamiliar, grisly virus and a catastrophic malfunction in the site's security system, the NSA is about to experience a week that no amount of rebranding can conceal. As the school descends into chaos, teacher Tom Rosen goes looking for answers but when the real, the unreal and the surreal are indistinguishable, the truth can be difficult to recognise.One pupil, Gabriel Backer, may hold the key to saving the school from destroying itself and its students, except he has already been expelled. Not only that - he has disappeared down the rabbit-hole of "Alpha Omega"; the world's largest VR role-playing game, filled with violent delights and unbridled debauchery. But the game quickly sours. Gabriel will need to confront the real world he's been so desperate to escape if he ever wants to leave...

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Acknowledgements

Also Available from Titan Books

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Alpha Omega

Print edition ISBN: 9781789093810

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789093827

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2020 Nicholas Bowling. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For JAH

MONDAY

9.30

STEPHANIE BÄCKER lives in a haunted house.

There’s a room on the first floor that creaks and groans and sometimes ejects unpleasant-smelling gases from the crack under the door. She can hear what’s going on in there first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and is starting to suspect that the ghost doesn’t sleep the same hours as she does, or perhaps doesn’t sleep at all anymore. In fact it may not even be possible for the ghost to sleep. Every day she enters the room to scavenge dozens of empty cans of highly sugared and caffeinated energy drinks, navigating the detritus by touch alone, only knowing she is approaching the room’s inhabitant by a strangely heightened humidity around him. Sometimes he burps softly. Sometimes he wriggles and the synthetic upholstery of his chair rasps against his thighs and then falls silent. She likes the sounds because they remind her of when he was a baby. She’ll often stand at the door and listen to him for an hour or more, or will drift around the bedroom, a spectre herself, listening to him burble and groan. The ghost is her son, Gabriel Bäcker, fifteen years old and no longer of this world.

* * *

Stephanie doesn’t realise the package has arrived until she collides with it in the hallway. She goes face-first into the top of it, inhales the rich chemical bouquet of the cellophane wrapping, and then finds herself clinging to the box like a sailor to a shipwreck to stop herself from ending up on the floor.

The most disconcerting thing is not what the package is, or who has ordered it, but how it has ended up inside her house without her knowing. There was no doorbell, no sound of a drone or a DV dropping it off. These are the things that she can hear even in her most death-like sleep. It’s just appeared. Her home is one of the few places she can comfortably navigate without her stick, and a new obstacle like this feels alien and intrusive.

Stephanie rights herself and examines the object with her hands. The package is massive, a plastic slab as high as her shoulder and as thick as her waist. It takes three steps to get from one end of it to the other. Its weight is beyond reckoning, but certainly too heavy for her to lift on her own, which again raises the question of how it has arrived in the hallway so noiselessly. The surface is covered with a residue which is somehow powdery and greasy at the same time, and smells like static. As for the contents, she has no idea, and she doesn’t want to open it in case it’s been delivered in error.

From somewhere in the living room, her PAD pings with the arrival of a new message. She walks back, feeling her way along the wall. It’s something she hasn’t had to do in years, but the package seems to have altered the dimensions of the house and everything seems new. She yells in the direction of the coffee table three, four times until her device hears her and opens her inbox.

“To Stephanie and Gabriel, with thanks for your help,” the message says, out loud, in a voice that sounds like Cary Grant or Paul Newman, or some other old-time Hollywood star whose identity has been bought up and repurposed by the company behind the package.

She listens again. There are no details about the sender. The message seems to have been airdropped by the package itself. Perhaps it’s from Care? Their housing sponsor does sometimes send promotional and “relationship building” gifts to its residents, but Stephanie’s never been given anything of this size or expense. And usually such a calculated act of kindness would be widely publicised, rather than slipped clandestinely into her house.

She returns to the package and calls up the stairs.

“Gabriel?”

No reply, obviously.

“Gabe?”

She knows she can’t reach him in his bedroom, but she likes to say his name aloud occasionally, like a spell that will conjure him back into existence.

Stephanie slices the box’s cellophane with a fingernail and opens the top. The packaging is itself precision engineered and the lid seems to open pneumatically. Another tone from her PAD, which is still in communication with the box. Another message from the reverse-engineered Paul Newman:

“Welcome to your new Alpha-ready 8K TruLife Smart TV!” he says. “We can’t wait to see you In World, Stephanie and Gabriel Bäcker.” Their names are added in a different timbre and accent to the rest of the sentence. “Have fun!”

An HD TV is hardly an appropriate gift for someone with congenital blindness, so whoever has sent the package obviously doesn’t know her at all. Or does know her, knows her very well, and intends the gift to be for Gabriel and Gabriel alone.

Stephanie decides to hide it, at least for the time being. She clears a path in the hallway, then goes around to the end of the package nearest the door and begins to shove it across the laminate flooring, a few inches at a time. It’s tiring, bruising work but after quarter of an hour she’s got it as far as the kitchen. From there she manages to manoeuvre it into the cupboard under the stairs and shut the door. For a few moments afterwards, the voice on her PAD continues to describe the machine’s technical specs until she shouts at it again and it turns itself off.

She makes herself a coffee and sits at the table, quivering with a mixture of fatigue and low frequency terror she can’t quite place. Paul Newman’s voice comes back to her.

“With thanks for your help.”

Yes, she knows exactly who’s sent it, though she won’t admit it to herself, much less to Gabriel. She sits in the darkness, fingers laced around the cup. A whisper of pressure on the floorboards overhead. She tells the microwave to play her favourite adverts while her coffee goes cold.

11.35

IT IS HALFWAY through Second Recreational Period, and Josh Pettit (8B), Alex “Peepsy” Pepys (also 8B) and Kiran Ahuja (8W, but generally considered an honorary member of 8B) are looking at a severed human hand. It is the sort of macabre artefact that most boys dream of finding, and always assume they will eventually find if they just search long enough in the empty corners of the school, but now that it’s actually in front of them, just enough blackened skin on it to hold the bones together, the reality is difficult to stomach. Kiran has already been sick and is wiping his mouth on his heavy silk tie.

“What do we do?” says Josh. “Should we tell someone?”

“I’m going to pick it up,” says Peepsy, crouching and poking it with his stylus.

“Don’t! It’s probably got diseases.”

“Do you dare me?”

“What?”

“To pick it up. We could put it in someone’s locker. Put it on Mr De Souza’s desk.”

Kiran has buried his hands deep in his blazer pockets and is flapping the jacket in a state of extreme agitation, as though he’s trying to put out a fire on the seat of his trousers. He walks in several small circles and then goes and hides behind one of the big yellow excavators that are loitering, unmanned, on the edge of the field.

“We should just go back inside,” he says, his voice now disembodied. “We’re not meant to be here.”

Of course, that’s precisely why they are there. Year 7s and 8s aren’t allowed to leave Recreation Spaces #1–4, everyone knows that. They’re forbidden from even setting foot on the playing fields, and the construction site around the school’s perimeter is totally off-limits, on pain of Demotion or even Expulsion. The official explanation is health and safety related, but there are lots of rumours flying around the lower years of the school as to what’s really being built way out in the greenery beyond the football stadium. It was curiosity, and Peepsy’s incurably optimistic sense of disobedience, that convinced him, and the others, that this reconnaissance mission was a good idea.

“We can’t just leave it,” says Peepsy, skewering the hand through its carpal bones and peeling it out of the mud.

“But if we tell anyone about it then they’ll know we were here.” Josh sniffs long and hard. Everyone is sniffing now. Hay fever is a big problem at NSA all year round.

“We don’t have to tell anyone. We can just take it with us.”

Kiran suddenly squeals from his hiding place behind the excavator. Josh and Peepsy squelch through the puddles in the tyre tracks, the latter still dangling the dead hand from his stylus point like it’s a fish he’s caught. Around the other side, Kiran’s hands are no longer in his pockets, but under his armpits, as though he is physically holding himself together.

“I’ve found the other one,” he burbles. “And there’s that.” He nods to the floor so he can keep his arms safely in place. He is rocking back and forth slightly.

Under the giant bucket at the front of the excavator, five more fingers are protruding from the earth, and next to it the smooth dome of a submerged human head, mud-packed eye sockets just visible above the surface as though it’s trying to watch them in secret.

“This is too weird,” says Josh. “We have to tell somebody.”

“No way! I’m not getting put on a Beta timetable. Or worse. What if we get expelled? Then what do we do? Can you imagine Kiran going to Retail Academy?”

Kiran is trying to be sick again, one arm on the rear tyre of the digger to steady himself, but nothing’s coming up.

“Let’s just go,” he says, a cobwebby bit of saliva streaming from his chin. “I’m going.”

“Me too,” says Josh.

“Oh c’mon.”

But the other two are already leaving. Josh is rubbing his friend’s back awkwardly. Peepsy watches them take the safe route around the back of the stadium to the Design Technology block, the route that he spent so long plotting, which avoids almost all of the cameras but is direct enough to get them to the perimeter and back within the twenty-minute window of each Recreational Period.

Even so, he hasn’t got long until he’s due back in class. He approaches the bits of body under the excavator scoop and looks at them from various angles. A scream of either pain or triumph drifts over to him from one of the other children scampering around the designated play area.

Another loud, satisfying sniff, and he’s unzipping his rucksack and pushing his trainers and PE kit right down into the bottom to make room for his new acquisitions. The screen of his PAD gets a great, dirty smear across it in the process. He throws in the first severed hand, with the stylus still attached, and then gets to work digging out the second appendage, and lastly the skull. He sticks his fingers into its eye cavities like a bowling ball, and with a little twisting and straining it slurps its way out of the mud. It’s missing its lower jaw, and a few teeth, but otherwise looks pretty well preserved. The head fits snugly into the bag, which he rezips and hoists onto one shoulder.

It’s raining by the time he starts back to the main building. The drops are fat and warm, like his shower at home. Josh and Kiran are nowhere to be seen. Behind him the clusters of diggers and drills and cranes and coils of wires and tubing lie dormant, looking themselves like artefacts waiting to be discovered.

Peepsy’s rucksack feels much, much heavier than he was expecting.

12.34

MR TOM ROSEN is surveying the crowns of twenty-four living heads, a palette of blacks, browns and blonds with a single fleck of red in the second-to-back row. All faces are angled downwards, so he can’t see any of the students’ expressions except for occasional manipulations of eyebrows or hairlines to connote concentration, or relief, or sometimes despair. The patter of rain on the window is matched by the patter of twenty sets of fingers on their glassy PAD screens.

Mr Rosen has his own PAD, from which he can see that 25% of the class have finished their primary task and have moved onto the Reflection phase of the lesson. He also has miniature versions of all of the boys’ and girls’ screens on his device, so he can see exactly what each of them is doing at any given time. If need be, he can then project that live-stream up onto the whiteboard at the front of the classroom, which has made for some memorably humiliating situations for students in the past.

“Five minutes remaining,” he says, his voice odd and hollow in his ears after so long in silence. “Project proposals have to be finished by the end of the lesson.” He slots himself carefully between desks, arranged in a six-by-four rectangle, turning corners where the whim takes him.

One of the thumbnail images on his PAD is blinking. Carla Le Maitre-Bridge in seat D2 is cycling through pictures and videos of various kinds of turtle. Mr Rosen looks at them for a moment before locking her screen and projecting it publicly.

“Tell me, Carla, how is a detailed understanding of turtles going to help you achieve a Level 9 in your VAC exams? I don’t remember there being a turtle module in your English and Media Certificate.”

Some of the other students laugh and whirl around noisily in their seats. They fix her with gawping, persecutory looks. Mr Rosen watches Carla slump under their derision, then looks at himself from some imagined point on the ceiling and hates himself for taking a shot so cheap and so rehearsed.

“I was just having a look.”

“Hang back at the end of the lesson, please.”

“But I’ve got to see Miss Sherratt.”

“Then you’ll have to explain that to Miss Sherratt. Hang back at the end.”

Carla Le Maitre-Bridge huffs, folds her arms and glowers out of the window. The playing fields are only visible as a sludgy green blur through the rain and the condensation.

The class reach 96% completion of the task, and the little boxes on Mr Rosen’s PAD light up green as their work is uploaded to be marked. When the bell sounds all the students’ PADs are automatically shut down and disconnected, and they slip them into their red NutriStart-branded neoprene cases and file out into the corridor chattering.

Carla is still staring at, or through, the misted window. Her face is pink and swollen, as though she is either about to cry, or is paralysed with rage, or both. The school’s central heating is still turned on full blast in November, which has not only made the classroom uncomfortably, soporifically hot, but has also brought a variety of exotic teenage odours into bloom.

“Carla.” Mr Rosen perches on the desk in front of her. “I’m going to talk quickly and seriously so you can get to your next lesson.”

She looks at him very briefly, and then down at her hands.

“You have a month until your mid-year assessments. Straight after that you’re going to have internships to think about. You really don’t have any time to waste.”

Carla doesn’t say anything, just traces her finger in little circles on the tabletop. The desks all have a lavender-coloured synthetic covering, supposedly designed by NASA or MI6 or someone, which can neither be written upon nor scratched into, and is velvety to the touch.

“Why weren’t you working on your proposal?”

She strokes the table a couple more times. “I just forgot.”

“Forgot? Despite the fact that twenty-three other people are working on it right next to you? How can you forget to do something that I set right at the beginning of the lesson?”

“I got distracted.” Her face has now gone from pink to tomato red, and there is a sheen on her brow and cheeks that makes her look like she’s been lacquered. “I find it hard to concentrate.”

Mr Rosen slightly downgrades the seriousness of his tone. “That’s what these are for, Carla,” he says, holding up his PAD. “Change your settings. You can block distractions. It’s a Personal Administrative Device. The clue’s in the name!”

He wanted that to come out as a half-joke, but instead it just sounds patronising.

“It’s nothing to do with the settings. It’s me. I feel weird.”

“What kind of weird?”

“In my head.”

Carla now sounds like she has too much spit in her mouth, and her face is very swollen. Mr Rosen’s heart does a little adrenaline-fuelled skip as he realises that the situation is straining the boundaries of normality.

“When you say head—”

That’s when it starts. Carla begins to have the most extravagant nosebleed Tom has ever seen. Great jets of dark blood come shooting out of both nostrils, spattering the desk’s stain-resistant covering and then cascading down the angled surface into her lap. This is accompanied by tears that have been accumulating during the telling-off, giving the impression that all of the fluid is leaking out of poor Carla’s body and within minutes Mr Rosen is going to have a shrivelled husk of a girl propped up in his classroom.

He rushes back to his desk, opening and slamming three drawers but finding nothing resembling tissues, only some old bits of graph paper, which he thrusts under her squirting nostrils. The volume of blood means he has to fashion the paper into a crude sort of bowl, which is very quickly filled. Carla is now crying just from pure terror.

“Let’s get you to the nurse. Pinch your nose. Come on, tilt your head back.” She does so and starts making strange gargling noises. “Forward, I mean forward.” Head between the knees? Or was that for fainting? He can’t remember.

He manoeuvres her out into the corridor, and they half-walk, half-jog to the medical centre.

The NutriStart Skills Academy is in the shape of a giant hexagon, with spiral arms projecting from each corner like airport jetties. The problem with this very regular geometry is that it is almost impossible to know which side of the school you’re on, since all of corridors look identical, and it always takes Mr Rosen twice as long as expected to reach his destination. Today is no exception. They already seem to have turned more than six corners when the blood begins to pour from Carla’s ears. She makes a whimpering noise that sounds more tired than scared, now. She tries to stem the flow with thumbs in her ear-holes and little fingers pressed either side of her septum, as though she’s miming a telephone with each hand.

Mr Rosen leads Carla, dripping, past two classes of horrified Year 7s, past little Gerald Liu with his wheeled suitcase full of textbooks he doesn’t need, who bows and says “Good morning” as though everything is perfectly normal, past a bored-looking porter jangling his keys, past the offices of SMT, whose occupants stir distantly in their ergonomic chairs, and delivers her to the cool blue waiting room outside the nurses’ inner sanctum. By this point she looks like the stuff of nightmares, red and wet from nose to chest, from fingers to elbows.

“Oh Lord!”

The nurse on duty appears and takes possession of the girl with the unfazed efficiency of an army field doctor. She ushers the casualty onto a bed inside the surgery itself. Her boyish hairstyle quivers with concern.

“Yes,” says Mr Rosen, putting his empty, sticky hands in his pockets, “we’ve had a bit of a disaster.”

“What on earth happened?” she says over her shoulder, collecting a range of swabs and bandages and ice packs from different cupboards with amazing speed and fluidity.

“Came out of nowhere. We were just talking.”

“What’s her history?”

“History?”

“Did you check her profile?”

“Profile. No. I should have done that.”

The nurse plugs various bits of Carla’s head with foam. She’s now woozy and quiet.

“Carla? Can you hear me?”

“You just put foam in her ears.”

The nurse somehow manages to glare at him out of the back of her head.

“Carla? What happened?”

“The classrooms are so damn hot,” says Mr Rosen, more to himself than to anyone else. “Why can’t they turn the radiators down?”

Carla’s lips start moving, as though she’s in secret, silent conversation with herself.

“I think we should probably send for an ambulance,” says the nurse, straightening up. “I don’t suppose you know which insurer she’s with?”

“Ah. No.”

“Fine.” She puts her hands on her hips and looks him in the eye for the first time. “Thank you for looking after her, Mr Rosen,” she says, with the implication that he is now redundant and trespassing on her turf.

“I’ll wait out here,” he says.

“Will you?”

“Just in case. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Just as he’s leaving he pokes his head back around the doorframe. “You’ll be alright, Carla.” She looks at him like she’s never seen him before.

The nurse closes the door to the surgery, and Mr Rosen takes a seat on one of the plastic waiting-room chairs. He realises he has yet to complete and submit his Self-Assessment for the previous lesson, so he takes his PAD from his jacket’s inside pocket and syncs it with the school’s network. He’ll have write up a report on this whole incident, too.

A very quiet, monosyllabic conversation is happening in the surgery next door. Poor Carla. Out of interest, he searches for her profile on the NSA MNet. He finds her photograph, smiling, airbrushed, totally unrecognisable. There is a note beneath Medical/Other:

Insurance: United Transatlantic Snacks standard cover. Policy #889800923B (father)

High blood pressure. Hypertension.

Parents are separated. Carla has taken this badly. Do not mention or discuss with her outside of agreed therapeutic process.

Student can become very anxious. Responds poorly to stressful situations.

Concern level: medium

“Medium,” he says, out loud.

While scrolling around the rest of her profile – she’s done some hand modelling for Casio, he notes with interest – the room darkens. There is someone large in the doorway. Something about the bulk of the silhouette tells him it is the Headmaster before he has even opened his eyes.

“Mr Rosen.” The tone of the words is too flat to be either a greeting or a reprimand. More just a statement of fact.

“Hello, good morning. Hi,” says Tom.

The Headmaster is a monolithic being, who has to stoop to enter the nurse’s waiting room. His head belongs on Easter Island, massive, distinctive, and yet totally plain in terms of its features. Tom finds it almost impossible to picture his face when it’s not directly in front of him.

“How is everything?”

Again this remark is blandly non-specific.

“Fine, fine,” Mr Rosen says. He stands and realises how unconvincing this sounds, given that he is covered with blood. “Just a little incident with Carla Le Maitre-Bridge.”

“Year 9.”

“That’s right.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

A pause.

“She had a nosebleed, so I thought I should bring her down here, hand her over to the professionals, you know, ha ha.”

The Head is looking at the door to the surgery, not actually at Mr Rosen. “Yes. Good. That was the right thing to do.”

Tom has never seen anything approaching concern on the Headmaster’s face – never seen anything approaching any kind of expression, in fact – but his massive forehead wrinkles slightly.

Without knocking, he opens the door into the room where Carla is being attended to. Tom hovers outside.

“Oh, hello Headmaster!” says the nurse with just a hint of terror.

“Good morning, nurse.” Tom waits for a surname, but it never comes. “May I have Carla for a moment?”

Even from the other room, the pause that follows is heart-stopping. Tom is suddenly acutely aware of how much he has been sweating.

“Nurse?”

“Now is perhaps not the best time, Headmaster. She’s very weak. She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“She will be looked after.”

“The ambulance is already on its way. Perhaps you could wait until she’s recovered?”

Tom can actually hear the swish of the Headmaster’s huge wagging finger in the air.

“There is no need for an ambulance. It has all been taken care of.”

“Taken care of?”

“Come with me, Carla.”

There are two clicks as Carla’s shoes touch the tiled floor. Then the black shape of the Headmaster stoops back though the door, and guides the girl, who only seems to come up to his waist, out into the corridor. Neither of them makes eye-contact with Mr Rosen as they leave. It takes a long time for the sound of their footsteps to disappear.

“What was that about?”

The nurse shakes her head, and points beyond his shoulder. “Look.”

The window of the surgery waiting room looks out upon the NSA’s car park. He and the nurse watch in silence as a four-wheel-drive vehicle zooms past them, makes a U-turn at the far end, and then comes to an abrupt halt directly outside the school’s main entrance.

Tom feels weirdly like he’s watching TV as the Head emerges from the glass double doors, not making much effort to support the weakened Carla, and approaches the 4x4. Two other men get out. The polished doors gleam, knife-like, as they’re opened. One of the men actually tries to shake Carla’s hand. The other offers her a jacket. Then she is inserted into the back of the car, which disappears as quickly as it arrived.

Mr Rosen and the nurse exchange glances but no words. His pocket vibrates. A reminder on his PAD: Your Period Six self-assessment is now overdue.

13.00

GETTING EXPELLED is the best thing that has ever happened to Gabriel Bäcker.

He has been In World for approaching one hundred hours straight now, and has already accumulated the kinds of resources that his ex-classmates could only dream of. Page one of his inventory includes, but is not limited to:

Level 99 Diamond Armour

Level 99 Diamond Sword (+ Soul Drain)

Level 99 Ice Bow

Pontiac Firebird

Poisoned Apples x 99

Wheat x 999

Fission Reactor (rare) x 2

Rancid Meat (+ enchantments)

Scroll of Defy Undead

Scroll of Infatuation

Gucci Loafers

Whirlpool Aqua 3500E Washer-Drier

Key to Apartment #1, Highrise

Key to Apartment #1, Emerald Hills

Condoms x 999

Dragon’s tooth x 999

Dynamite x 999

Level 99 Plasma Rifle

Level 99 Machete

“Pussycat Club” Membership Card

Nespresso “Flair” Coffee Machine and Steam Wand

Handsaw

Night-Vision Goggles

Lamy E-Z Grip Glitter Gel Pen

NutriStart Protein Power Break fast Capsules (unlimited)

If he were to visit one of the forums now and exchange his goods, he could easily buy up a terabyte of Sandbox on the Game’s fringes, maybe two, to build on as he pleased; to be honest, he could probably just cash in the branded goods and make enough “real” money to move out of his mum’s house, temporarily at least, but there isn’t much point when the Bit-Pound exchange rate is so low, and when he can double what he already has In World twice as fast as he can Out of World.

Gabriel doesn’t think of the NSA much at all now. It makes absolutely no difference to him whether he finishes his internship prep year or not. All of the best jobs are IW anyway, and he’s not going to end up in Sales, or Marketing, or even Semiotics, because he’s better than that. The reason behind his expulsion is the very same reason he knows he doesn’t have to worry. Compromising not just the NutriStart Skills Academy network, but the entire NutriStart Corporate MNet, was no mean feat and it’s only a matter of time before the company, or one of its competitors, comes looking to recruit his technical services. He still considers himself a hero for highlighting flaws in their system, and half expects the school to see it this way too and offer him some kind of reward.

A hand begins to grope at Gabriel’s head and he starts to feel the prickling irritation that accompanies being pulled Out of World too quickly, a psychic gear-change that has caused so much distress that the developers have been forced to include regular in-game warnings, and when exiting the game players are encouraged to spend several minutes watching a special “declimatisation” cut-scene that has been designed to readjust them to the real world. Gabriel’s mum doesn’t understand any of this, and is content to simply tear the VR headset and earphones straight off her son’s head.

“Why are you still on this? You promised you were getting ready.”

The sound of his mum’s voice, which is fuzzier around the edges than the ultra-high-def Alpha Omega soundtrack, and the feel of her warm fingers on his scalp, makes Gabriel almost murderous with rage, and he shoves her with enough force that she stumbles backwards onto his bed, where she stays seated.

“Don’t do that, Gabe. Don’t push me.”

“Then don’t just come into my room without even knocking!”

“I did knock, but you never hear anything because you’re playing your game.”

Gabriel is too angry to speak, and also too ashamed, noticing the saliva that has accumulated on his chin, the stains on his T-shirt, the stink of his body and his bedroom. That just makes him angrier still, angry that his mum should have made him feel this sort of shame.

“Are you dressed?”

“Yes.”

Having a blind parent means that lying about something and getting away with it is so easy it’s boring. He resents her for that, too.

“I mean dressed dressed? For your interview?”

Gabriel puts the VR headset back on, and gives his mum about thirty seconds to fumble her way across the room and locate his head and pull everything off again.

“Gabriel!” He looks up at her and watches her eyes drift around their sockets. Her brow is twisted into a shape that is both assertive and totally hopeless at the same time. “You can’t just not go to school. You have to finish your Internship prep somewhere. This is a Technical Academy you’ve applied for. It’s right up your street.”

“I didn’t apply for it, did I? You just submitted me without asking.”

“At least go to the interview, see if you like it.”

“Tech Academies just train you for data entry. That’s it. I’m glad you think so highly of me.”

“Everyone starts somewhere at the bottom, Gabriel. That’s life.”

“Your life, maybe.”

It’s always a surprise when Gabriel sees his mum start to cry. He always assumes that her eyes are 100% broken, and he finds it strange that they should retain this functionality whilst lacking the ability to do their most important task.

“I’ve made 300,000 Bits in the last six hours,” he says. “Do you know how much that’s worth?”

“I’m not interested, Gabe.” She sniffs and stands. “Please, just go to the interview. Have a wash. Take the bus.”

“I’m not going.”

“Then I’m throwing out the router.”

She’s already left the room and is feeling her way down the stairs before Gabriel can disentangle himself from the headset, and the gloves, and the belt, and when he is finally free his legs feel like they’re full of cold, wet sand and melt beneath him. He can hear his mum clattering around in the living room as he tries to massage the blood back into his muscles. She is using tools.

“You can’t!” he shouts, galloping unevenly after her. “How are we going to get food? And your meds?”

When he reaches the bottom step, she’s already got the black box in her hands, and she’s tearing the fibre-optic cables out of the back. “I’m past caring. Anything to make you understand.” She’s pointing an accusatory finger, but not quite in the right direction. “This is going in the recycling.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“You’ve driven me to this, Gabriel.”

“You’re being stupid.”

“I don’t know what else to do.”

She tugs at another wire.

She plucks another cable from the back of the box.

“Alright, I’ll go!” He has to steady himself on the wall for a moment. “Fuck’s sake.”

They are both panting a little, and the crumpled profile of his mother’s face, her badly styled hair, the drooping cables in her hand, make Gabriel feel unutterably sad, a feeling that the rational parts of his brain have to shout over the top of, for fear that he’ll never be able to have another thought, or another feeling, apart from the sadness ever again.

“Please?”

“Yes. I said yes, didn’t I?”

She slots the router, disconnected and blank, back into its little alcove in the living-room wall. The plaster is flaking from where she’s torn it out. Like all new-builds, the black box is one of the first things to go in, and the house is built around it. Gabriel wonders if taking it out has actually compromised the structural integrity of the building. It looks like it’s load bearing.

She turns in his general direction and opens her arms, which could be a sign of surrender or an invitation for an embrace.

“I do love you, Gabriel.”

“I’ve got to get changed.”

* * *

Quarter of an hour later, Gabriel is standing on his doorstep, his mum fussing over his jacket, straightening his tie, patting down his lapels. Though neither he nor his mum will admit it, Gabriel has put on a lot of weight since they bought the suit – a functional, funereal two-piece – thanks to the combined efforts of puberty and Alpha Omega. The waistband won’t go over his stomach anymore, and has to be slung low, giving his legs a strangely foreshortened aspect. His sleeves have the taut, swollen shininess of black pudding, and when Gabriel needs to adjust his hair or answer his PAD, he has to bow his head a little, since his elbows won’t bend much further than a right angle.

While Mum is fiddling and Gabriel is grinding his teeth, their neighbour emerges from the next unit down and waves cheerily.

“Good morning, Mrs Bäcker!”

She stiffens “Oh. Good morning, Mr Carnoso.”

“Afternoon, I think!”

“Yes. Sorry. Good afternoon.”

Mr Carnoso grins, and his whole head creases. He is fantastically bald.

“Thought any more about my offer?”

“Thinking about it. Certainly thinking about it. Ha ha.”

“You won’t get a better one, so think quickly!”

“I’ll let you know in good time.”

“Good good. Looking smart, Gabe. You off somewhere important?”

Gabriel doesn’t reply.

“He has an interview today,” his mum says for him.

“Really? Oh yes, the tech college. My nephew goes there. Chris. You’ve met Chris, haven’t you?”

Gabriel smiles to himself. He has indeed met slobbering, speech-impedimented Chris, In World, many times, and has subjected him to such a rigorous campaign of harassment, from so many cloned profiles, that the boy simply doesn’t go online anymore.

Mr Carnoso misunderstands the smile. “That would be something, wouldn’t it, if you ended up at school together. You and Chris. We could share the school run, Stephanie? How about that?”

“He has to get through the interview first,” his mum says.

“Yes, of course. Don’t let me keep you. Good luck, Gabe! Enjoy your days, both of you!” He saunters off down the pavement, and somehow Gabriel can see his smile in the back of his neck.

“What’s his offer?” Gabriel says.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re going to be late.”

“What’s his offer?”

“Nothing. He just wants to buy something from me.”

“What?”

“Just something from the house.”

Because of her impairment, his mum has always been particularly susceptible to scams and ruses and unscrupulous people. At his dad’s old house she’d been visited by a man claiming to be a member of “Christ’s First House of Champions”, who’d offered to speak personally with God about returning her sight to her, in return for a small donation. When Gabriel had come home from school he’d found his mum trapped in conversation on the doorstep, while the man’s accomplice was calmly and systematically emptying the place of all of its electronic goods via the back door. It really wasn’t any wonder that his dad hadn’t hung around, after something like that.

Gabriel suspects that this Mr Carnoso business is probably a similar kind of trick, but he doesn’t say anything. In fact, he actually hopes his mum goes ahead with it, as though it’s a lesson she needs to learn.

“Have you got your PAD?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what questions to ask them at the end of the interview?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have their prospectus with you?”

Gabriel pats the satchel hanging by his hip, loudly enough for her to hear. “Yes.”

She sighs, a delayed exhalation from the encounter with their neighbour. “Well, good luck. Don’t be nervous. Be yourself.”

He couldn’t be much further from being nervous. She gives him a warm, dry kiss on the cheek, and waves him off. From the bus stop he watches her waving to an empty street, before she gets self-conscious, runs a hand through her hair, and closes the front door. He can still smell her soap on his skin.

When the bus arrives, Gabriel pays for the journey to the Accenture Technical Academy, just in case his mum works out how to check his travel data, but gets off two stops early, and walks back in the opposite direction, into town, until the high electric whine of the traffic has disappeared and he is surrounded by the faux-marble and chrome of the Heathfield Central Precinct. The sky is the colour of watered-down milk and hurts his eyes; the air is sharp with the smells of espresso and brutally caustic cleaning products.

The neon “AΩ” of the Alpha Cafe is visible from all corners of the precinct, and for a moment Gabriel feels such joy and relief he worries he will actually cry. He swallows hard.

Inside, the cafe is dark and warm and has a savoury-sweet smell about it. He pays for two hours up front, orders a Coke, and once he is settled into his booth retrieves his PAD and his VR set from the satchel, which does not, in fact, contain the school’s prospectus.

Once he is In World, he scans the map, checks his inventory, and heads directly to The Party.

* * *

From: David Graves (MBA), Headmaster, NutriStart Skills Academy 6

To: All parents

Delivered by AIM.

Dear Parents,

Have you tried NutriStart Hi-Fibre Paste Minis? Keep things moving,on the move!

In light of the tragic attacks on the Dermacrem: Healthy Glow All Year Round! Training College and the World of Lentils Practical Academy, I am sure a great number of you will have concerns about the security of the NSA site. As teachers and leaders, our first responsibility is always to ensure the safety and well-being of pupils, staff, parents and visitors. Therefore, aft er last week’s events, I have made it the first priority of the school’s development plan to review the NSA’s security systems and processes, to ensure that our boys and girls can continue with their education and training with total confidence and peace of mind.

The board of directors and myself are currently in consultation with a number of external providers to choose the right security solution for our school. We are looking at a number of initiatives that will improve site safety both internally and externally, and will dramatically reduce the likelihood of damage to school buildings/pupils in the event of a security breach.

Inevitably these improvements will come at a significant financial cost. I feel, nonetheless, that regarding a matter of such seriousness there can be little room for compromise. Discussions with external parties are ongoing, but whatever scheme we eventually choose it is likely that our annual fees will have to increase at a rate significantly higher than inflation.☹

I realise that this will have a considerable impact on many of our families. Please rest assured that individual cases of financial hardship will be assessed by myself and NutriStart to ensure that no student loses out on the education and training he or she deserves. We expect a decision to have been reached by the beginning of the Autumn Term, when of course I shall be in touch again with more details.

On a lighter note, many congratulations to William Oben in form 9V, who has made it through to the third round of the KPMG Youth Accountancy Olympiad. Well done, William!

With my best wishes,

David Graves

Headmaster (MBA)

13.40

AMONG STRATFORD’S high-rises, the classical facade of the HBO Museum of Britain has the appearance of a souvenir from its own gift shop, something you might find on the end of a key ring. It’s not the original building, although it looks identical in virtually every way. The Bloomsbury site was far too valuable a piece of real estate for something as pointless as a museum, and the agreed compromise was to recreate a life-size ersatz model from several enormous 3D printers and ship the whole thing way out east. For Dr Alice Nowacki and her colleagues, the irony of a museum unable to preserve itself is a good source of both amusement and despair.

Alice has just finished her lunch break and is a little late back, vigorously scrubbing chilli sauce from the corner of her mouth. The steps up to the main entrance squeak cheaply under her trainers. She takes a shortcut through the atrium, past the queues for the VR booths and the hologram of Elizabeth II, calls the elevator, and descends to the BIA’s offices.

The British Institute of Archaeology, formerly the European Institute of Archaeology, is a skeleton crew of five men and five women operating out of a sub-basement in the museum. They work in twilight and live in constant fear that someone at Home Box Office will remember they exist and sever what remains of their funding. The kind of archaeology in which Alice was trained – i.e. the actual excavation of ancient sites with spades and trowels and brushes – rarely happens anymore and she and her team spend most of their time cataloguing existing finds and adding them to the archive of objects In World. Once they’re in Alpha, the punters can examine them in far greater detail than if they were just in a glass case, and without any risk of damage or contamination. The real items are then, supposedly, sealed in a climate-controlled storage facility somewhere near Stockholm, though Alice isn’t convinced that they aren’t simply being taken to landfill; perhaps there isn’t much difference either way.

It’s a foregone conclusion that at some point the entire museum – the artefacts, the building, the tour guides dressed as Anglo-Saxons – will be moved In World.

When she arrives at the office, eight of the ten are plugged into their PADs, arranged two or three to a bench. They’re all wearing VR masks and making slow tickling motions with their fingers.

“Hello everyone,” she says, not expecting an answer, and not getting one.

She takes a seat at her own workstation, fiddles with the elasticated band of the headset. She’s just about to dive in when Henry appears in the doorway to the “break out” room. Henry’s hair is platinum blond today, and under the halogen bulbs of the lab she looks positively angelic. In the breast pocket of her tweed jacket are half a dozen vape pens that each blow a different coloured cloud. Alice hasn’t yet made up her mind whether she thinks this is fun and eccentric or attention-seeking and pretentious.

“How was it?” she says. There’s just a hint of New York left in her accent.

“How was what?”

“Last night?”

Alice has a cold flush, and then realises Henry’s not talking about that; no one can possibly know about that.

“What happened last night?” More adjustment of the headband.

“Didn’t you have a date?”

She slumps with relief.

“That was Friday.”

“Right. And?”

“Bad egg.”

“Ah, shucks.”

Alice nods. “He kept it pretty well hidden until the main course. Then he told me that if women hated the patriarchy so much they should stop using men’s inventions.”

“That’s a good point.”

“He thought there might be a way to identify feminists In World and cut off their electricity supply.”

“I see.”

“Then he told me that he still respected me for my role, and that ‘women’s work’ was unnecessarily disparaged because he’d once tried kneading bread and found it genuinely tiring.”

There was a time when both of them would have howled with laughter at this. These days, Alice’s interactions with Meninists and Masculists and all the rest of them are so frequent and so moronic that they inspire a kind of mental fatigue, which perhaps, she wonders, has been the Meninists’ strategy all along – to silence their opponents through sheer boredom.

Henry still has some of the old fire in her, but then Henry has it so much worse.

“Well,” says Henry, “onwards and upwards.”

“I don’t feel like that’s my precise trajectory, but yes, I suppose so. Doesn’t matter. I have Bertha to keep me company for now.”

“Good old Bertha. Now there’s a real woman!”

“I’m going to miss her when she’s gone. Maybe I’ll print a copy of her and hang her in my bedroom.”

“Nice conversation starter, when you finally bring a date home.”

Bertha has been dead for the best part of two thousand years and is missing her head, hands and one of her feet. Since last week Alice has been examining and logging the remaining two-hundred-ish bones of Bertha’s skeleton, before they are uploaded permanently to Alpha and the real things are sent on their final journey to the Stockholm facility. During this time, Alice has had the strangest sensation that she’s gotten to know Bertha better than anyone she has ever met. “Loves the bones of her,” as her grandmother might have said. On more than one occasion she’s been found in the basement late at night, VR headset on, talking animatedly to the woman’s remains.

Alice secures the screen to her face, has a brief and unwelcome flashback to her In World activities the previous night. No, that was someone else, she thinks.

She’s met by the soothing whiteness of the BIA Hub. She adjusts her focus. The rest of the department are all there, hard at work on their projects. This includes Henry, who is staring catatonically at her feet while the “real” Henry is on her lunch break a few feet away from Alice’s chair. Normally this shouldn’t happen, but Henry’s lazy and has a tendency to just take off her headset rather than exit the Hub properly. The space itself looks the same as the basement would look if someone cleaned it, filled it with expensive equipment, and suffused it with divine light.

Bertha is spread out in pieces on Alice’s In World workstation. Alice selects the vertebrae one by one, inspecting and annotating as she goes. Wear and tear around the discs from repeated hard physical labour. More than bread-kneading, that’s for sure. Signs of malnutrition, a hairline fracture, early onset osteoporosis. When she reaches vertebra C4 she finds a great, clumsy notch in the bone from a blade that could and should have been sharper. Bertha was decapitated none too cleanly, it seems.

“Hum,” she says.

“What?”

Henry rests a hand on her shoulder; the weirdness of this, when Alice can see a whole other Henry at a different workstation (still gazing at her shoelaces). Alice takes off the visor. It takes a moment for her dizziness to subside.

“Did we ever find the other bits of Bertha?”

“Are they in the inventory?”

“No.”

“Then I guess not.”

“Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“Not necessarily. They’re probably miles away, wherever Bertha fell. It’s the heads that were taken as trophies.”

“And hands as well?”

“Not so much hands, no.”

Alice hums.

“Where did we find her?” she asks.

“We didn’t find her. EIA found her, way back. Somewhere in Kent, I think. She’s been in storage since before I got here.”

“But nothing else was found at the site?”

“Search me. All the info should be in there.” Henry points to the headset. “What’s wrong?”

“Just seems strange. The missing bits. And if it was some kind of ritual execution, wouldn’t there be others nearby? It’s not the sort of thing you do as a one-off.”

“Maybe there were others. I don’t know. Have a look.”

Alice goes back In World and nudges the icon for the site report. It spills its contents into her field of vision: inventory, satellite imaging, magnetometer results. She pores over it in silence. It has the usual fuzziness of late-twentieth-century photography, but there’s no mistaking what’s in front of her. A barrow of some kind, the burial chambers arranged in a circular, almost hexagonal formation. The complex extends off the edge of the image, truly vast. And yet it seems Bertha was the only thing that was recovered from the site, along with a few of her bracelets.

“Well?”

Henry has started vaping again. The air smells of cinnamon and damp towels.

“I don’t believe this.”

“Alice, I can’t see what you see.”

“They didn’t find anything apart from Bertha.”

“How extensive was the dig?”

“There wasn’t any dig. Just after they found her the site was bought up by a private company.” She scrolls a little further through the document. “Someone called ‘Nature’s Bounty’.”

“Ha.”

“But this is ridiculous. I’ve never seen a burial site like this. It could be the biggest in the country. Someone needs to organise a dig.”

“You know HBO won’t go for that.”

“But look at it.”

“Who owns the site now?”

“Hold on.”

Alice hasn’t felt this excited by her work in years. It feels like one or both of the hotdogs she had for lunch might come back up. She exits the BIA hub, opens the Alpha Maps application and enters the location of the site: High Weald, SE90 9HW. She finds herself suspended like a drone over a real-time rendering of the barrow in its current state. The burial chambers have been replaced with the clean lines of a modern building, its grounds so green and well-manicured they look fake.

A promotional video expands to fill her entire field of vision. A ukulele starts playing, accompanied by some whistled melody. An enormous, forgettable face appears and smiles with its mouth but not its eyes. The letters “NUTRISTART” emerge from its lips. The letters are followed by a tick, and the tail of the tick is animated so it turns into two sprouting leaves. Then the leaves turn into two more cartoon faces, which also smile and wink. The whole thing seems very contrived.

“Welcome to NSA!” says the first, larger face, in a voice that doesn’t belong to it. “You’ve just found the safest educational facility in the south of England!”

13.55

TOM ROSEN has his face pressed against the staffroom window. He’s almost kissing it. He can taste a slight saltiness in the condensation.

“So when are they going to finish the wall?”

“It’s a bit more than a wall,” says Mr Barren of the Marketing (Academic) Department, without looking up from the PAD in his lap. He is swishing nonchalantly across the screen with one finger and digging chunks of a gluten-free NutriStart Goodness Bar out of his gums with the other.

“Well, it’s not anything at the moment, is it,” says Miss Potter, and Tom laughs, even though it’s not actually very funny, nor is it meant to be, but Tom is hopelessly in love with the soon-to-be-happily-married Miss Potter and suspects he will be until the day he’s put in the earth.

“They haven’t done anything for weeks,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of those excavators move.”

The window squeaks as he wipes it again. The sky and the fields are drained of all colour, like they’ve been washed too many times, with the exception of a bright orange line on the horizon where the construction site has been cordoned off. “Wonder what’s happening.”

Tom returns to the seat next to Miss Potter, even though it’s further away than the obviously free one next to Mr Barren.

“I still think they’re drilling for shale gas,” says Miss Potter. “It’s all a ruse. Then BP buy the site from NutriStart, Gravesy gets a couple of million kickback, and he can finally buy himself that flat on the King’s Road.”

“Or a flight back to Easter Island.”

“That’s all construction equipment out there, there’s nothing to suggest anyone’s drilling for anything,” says Mr Barren with his usual talent for shooting a joke dead between the eyes before it’s had a chance to draw breath. “And I actually think that the Academy is possibly more profitable than gas or oil in the very-long-term.” He throws the last piece of his Goodness Bar into his mouth and licks all of his fingers and hums. Darren Barren thinks of his gluten intolerance as a sort of evolutionary advantage, and his general air of superiority seems to stem entirely from this one aspect of his diet.

Tom hates Darren Barren almost as much as he loves Miss Potter, more so since English and Media were part-merged with Marketing (Academic), and they were forced to share classes in copywriting and content management. On top of that, he’s now taken to sitting in the exact spot where Tom and his lady love come to talk during Recreational Periods.

“If it is just a fence, I’m not sure that justifies, like, a 15% hike in fees.” He says this directly to Miss Potter, his shoulder turned ostentatiously to Mr Barren, who doesn’t see because he’s still hunched over his device.

“Well, it’s not just a fence, is it,” Mr Barren says. “It’s a TASCO system.”

“Like the ones they have in China.”

“You mean the USA.”

“I thought they were Chinese?”

“They make them in China.”

Tom is momentarily annoyed with Miss Potter for validating Darren Barren’s role in the conversation, and angles his back to be even more obstructive.

“They use them for gated communities,” says Mr Barren, finally looking up at them. “It’ll monitor everyone coming in and out and be able to track them once they’re on school grounds. It’s linked to the new CCTV and security hardware, so if there’s an intruder he can be isolated automatically with DNATT and face recognition. It’s a pretty impressive piece of kit.”

“Or she,” says Miss Potter.

“What?”

“The intruder.”

“The fence itself is electrified, bomb-proof, everything-proof,” Mr Barren continues. “The only way anyone’ll be able to damage the school is if they organise some sort of airstrike, and I don’t think masculists are quite that well-resourced.” He does a short, snorting laugh and something flies out of his nose.