Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller Read online

  I couldn’t think how to answer. Not carrying on was unthinkable and carrying on was equally as unthinkable; the idea of sitting down at my desk and starting from scratch was like a nightmare. I was sure that if I attempted it I would literally go mad.

  ‘Lily,’ I said, ‘I can’t...’ but I wasn’t sure what specific thing I even wanted to tell her I couldn’t do. I couldn’t do any of it. I couldn’t do this situation, full stop.

  Lily looped her arms around my neck and rested her forehead against my hair. For a while we stayed that way, her body little comfort in the face of such a horrible situation. Dan and I had built up DAWN Industries from nothing. Sure, it wasn’t all that successful, but it was ours and one day we’d hoped to make it work. I listened to Lily’s soft breathing and I tried to pretend it wasn’t real, that Affrayed was there just as it had ever been, incomplete and imperfect as it was.

  All of a sudden the door slammed open, jolting us from our thoughts.

  ‘Guys, come on!’ Dan said, buzzing with excitement.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  Dan gestured madly for us to follow him. ‘Come on,’ he said again, ‘it’s coming back!’

  Chapter 3

  Initially I thought he must be losing it, but it turned out he was absolutely right and the files were pouring back in as quickly as they had left.

  ‘Where are they coming from?’ Lily said to nobody in particular.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dan said, ‘but it’s all coming back. All our work. It’s going to be okay!’

  Lily laughed in relief and out the corner of my eye I saw her and Dan throw their arms around each other.

  ‘Is it all there now?’ Lily asked me when she’d calmed down a little, ‘is everything back like it was?’

  I scrolled through the files and they seemed to be in order. But I couldn’t get my head round what I’d seen- all the files just returning like that. Where on earth had they come from? How had it happened?

  ‘Open something,’ Dan said.

  I opened one of the files and it took me no more than a few seconds to establish two important things. Firstly, this was our game. I could remember writing this part of it. Secondly, what I was looking at was not as simple as our work returned to us in its original form.

  ‘Is it okay?’ Lily asked, ‘is that Affrayed?’

  ‘Yeah...’ I said.

  ‘Yeah... but?’ Dan asked.

  I sat back in the chair and pulled my hand through my hair as I frowned at the code on the screen.

  ‘But?’ Dan asked me again.

  ‘Well, I didn’t write this,’ I said at length.

  Dan leaned forward and looked closely at the screen.

  ‘Yeah, you did,’ he said, ‘that’s Affrayed. It’s our game.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but this isn’t my code. Look at it. What I wrote wasn’t like this. This is far too neat, far too clean. It’s too... it’s so... elegant.’

  Who was I kidding? It was too bloody good. I mean, I know what I’m doing, don’t get me wrong, but this had been written by a real expert.

  I looked over my shoulder at Dan and Lily and saw they were sharing a confused expression.

  ‘What are you saying, Nick?’ Lily asked, ‘either it’s your code for Affrayed or it isn’t, surely?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan said, ‘maybe you just made a better job of it than you thought you did.’

  I sighed quietly. I knew they didn’t believe me but code probably all looked about the same to them, especially to Lily. But I knew what my work looked like and this wasn’t it. I decided I’d look at another file to see whether that was the same, but once I went back into the folder again I noticed that in amongst names I recognised there was other stuff. There were far more files than there had been originally.

  ‘What is all that?’ Dan asked as he noticed too.

  Tentatively, I opened one of the strange new files and what I saw was, quite frankly, incredible.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Lily asked, ‘it’s all messed up.’

  Had the other code not been such high quality, that probably would have been my conclusion too because what I was looking at certainly appeared to be nonsense- it was full of random characters, completely unintelligible. But I felt sure it was far from nonsense.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan agreed with Lily, ‘that’s not even code is it?’

  ‘It’s been obfuscated,’ I said.

  ‘It’s been what?’ Lily asked.

  Dan started drumming his fingers against the desk again as he looked at it. ‘You think so?’ he said when he’d studied it a little, ‘it’s one hell of a good job if it is.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Lily said.

  ‘Somebody’s deliberately made this hard to read,’ I explained, ‘logically, it’s all valid code, but they’ve put all this other crap in so an actual person can’t make any sense of it.’

  ‘Why would somebody do that?’

  ‘Damned if I know,’ I said, ‘I mean, there are reasons for doing it, some people even do it for fun-’

  ‘Run it,’ Dan said eagerly, ‘let’s find out what it does.’

  ‘Wait,’ Lily said, ‘if you don’t know what it does, is it a good idea to run it? What if it does something bad or it wrecks your computer or something?’

  Dan laughed without humour, ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ he said, ‘we’ve already lost our game and had it replaced with God knows what. That’s about as bad as it gets.’

  ‘I know,’ Lily said, ‘but isn’t there any way you could get some idea what it is before you run it? Nick, can you do that?’

  I looked at the code and thought about what she’d said. She had a point- there was no way I could be certain that the code was just an innocent piece of our game. For all I knew it could do anything. But I was curious. If I was right, and it really was valid programming, then it had been done by somebody with extraordinary skill, too much skill for me to contemplate spending a quick few minutes trying to decipher it. If I wanted to see what it did any time soon, I had to just take my chances. And although I agreed it was suspicious, and I was nervous, I still thought the most likely thing we’d see would be our game. After all, the code I’d been able to read had formed part of Affrayed, so it stood to reason all the rest of the files would be part of it too. Of course, even if it was the game that didn’t necessarily mean we were safe. There could still be something else going on in the background; some hidden, malicious little bit of code, but I was prepared to take that risk.

  I waited anxiously for the program to start, holding my breath, hoping for it to be okay, hoping for it to be Affrayed, and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, any fears I had were instantly forgotten as instead I sat speechless, stunned into silence by what I was seeing.

  It was the game. There was no doubt about that. But I suppose I thought that if we were to see the game we’d see it as I knew it- the old version with all its problems and work still to be done- options that when you clicked on them didn’t do anything yet, or where the art was missing because Dan hadn’t finished it, bits that were buggy, in need of attention. In short, the version of Affrayed I was expecting was more like a giant to-do list than a videogame.

  But the version of Affrayed I saw wasn’t a to-do list. It was not under development. It was finished, and it was beautiful.

  The title screen and menus alone were enough for Lily to say ‘wow,’ and for Dan to slap his hand against the desk and say, ‘fucking yes!’ while I stared at it all in open-mouthed astonishment. Everything about it was so slick and polished, but not in a characterless way, it just had the kind of effortlessly beautiful design that looks simple but takes a lot of hard work to achieve. But if the look of Affrayed was excellent, the gameplay was off the scale. I found myself totally immersed, slipping immediately into that state of being at one with the game, of feeling in control and competent and experienced- yet also challenged and excited. I felt like I was at risk when I played it, yet I also felt it was wit
hin my grasp to beat it.

  I’d almost forgotten Dan and Lily were sitting beside me until Dan said, ‘it’s like they reached into our heads and made it real.’

  I knew exactly what he meant. At its heart, Affrayed wasn’t a particularly complicated concept- it was almost like a big game of hide-and-seek, where players stalked each other through convoluted and confusing spaces until they were the last one left standing. But what we’d spent a lot of time on was how to bring it to something beyond that. The game wasn’t just about finding and killing everybody as fast as you could, a specific player would be allocated as your first target and once you’d dispensed with them you progress to hunting the player they were targeting and on it goes, gradually becoming more and more intense as the number of remaining players decreases. Everything we did was designed to increase the sense of uneasiness, fear and paranoia. We wanted to make people’s hearts beat faster, get them jumping at shadows. All the different threads that together made up the completed game had to work together to further that vision, give it a presence, an atmosphere.

  What I was playing wasn’t even the truest experience of Affrayed, as it was really supposed to be played online against other players and all I was doing was playing against the computer. But it didn’t matter. I could already see it was perfect.

  ‘It’s finished,’ Lily said softly, ‘it’s completely finished.’

  With difficultly, I tore myself away from the game and pushed the keyboard and mouse over to Dan, who immediately took over from me.

  He shook his head several times as he played, eyes fixed on the screen.

  ‘How is this...’ he said at one point, ‘I mean, I don’t even...’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  We played for hours, taking in every tiny detail of Affrayed, while Lily watched silently at my side.

  ‘Here,’ I said to her when I remembered she was there, ‘why don’t you play?’

  Lily started to get up to swap places with me and then changed her mind. ‘I’m awful at this sort of game,’ she said.

  ‘Go on, Lily,’ Dan said, ‘you should try it.’

  Lily hovered halfway out of her chair and in the end I made the decision for her by getting up myself.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ she asked.

  Dan was about to tell her but I stopped him.

  ‘You’ve been watching us play,’ I said, ‘just try it. I think you’ll pick it up pretty quickly.’

  Lily rolled her eyes at me, though the corner of her mouth was turned up in a little smile.

  ‘This isn’t fair,’ she said, ‘I hate it when you watch me play things, I feel like I’m in an exam.’

  She was happy enough to start playing though, too curious to wait any longer, and watching her was fascinating. I always have enjoyed seeing her play games because she often reacts so differently to Dan and me and finds certain games more intuitive than others, but instead of her behaviour in Affrayed showing me design faults as it sometimes did in other games, it just showed me more about how the game was right. Because she could play it. Even though it was the type of game she tended to struggle with, she picked it up easily. She could understand the spaces and move around them, she could react quickly and in the way she wanted to, whereas normally she’d end up in a blind panic and forget how to do anything. It wasn’t that she was bad at videogames full stop- she could play some types of games easily as well as I could- but up until now games like Affrayed had seemed like an enigma to her.

  As she sat hunched forward at the desk, Dan and I exchanged a quick glance and I saw in his face exactly the same thoughts that I had. Not only was Affrayed beautifully designed and beautiful to look at, it had managed to achieve something extraordinary in that it transcended whatever barrier similar games normally put up for Lily. It seemed impossible that something the right level of challenge for me could be the right level of challenge for her. But it was. It was like the game was universally easy to grasp; like it was just so intuitive that the little issues of learning how to play and putting what you’d learnt into practice were minimised almost out of existence. One thing was for sure, Dan and I could not have made it. We could never have made it. We could have done a good job, maybe even an excellent job, but never in our lifetimes could we have managed to put together a version of Affrayed quite as incredible as this one we’d been given.

  Chapter 4

  When the room was lit up with daylight streaming through the curtains and I started to hear cars in the street outside Lily suddenly sat bolt upright and turned to check the clock in the kitchen.

  ‘Shit,’ she said as she pushed her chair back.

  I looked round at the clock myself and saw it was only half past six.

  ‘It’s not that late,’ I said, ‘stay a bit longer.’

  ‘We’ve got wedding flowers to deliver,’ Lily said, ‘I need to get ready.’

  She stayed on the spot though, looking from us to the clock, eyes huge in her little face. It was obvious she wanted to stay with us and play Affrayed.

  ‘Can’t you say you’re sick or something?’ Dan asked, ‘we need you to stay here so we can talk about... this,’ he inclined his head towards the screen where Lily’s game of Affrayed was still going.

  Lily started to almost bounce up and down on the spot, raising her heels out of her fluffy slippers then back in again.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Not even for one day?’ Dan asked.

  ‘No,’ Lily said. She looked so torn that I stood up and put my arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’ve never skipped a day’s work in your life before. Mum’ll get Kimberley to cover you.’

  Lily buried her hands in her hair for a second and then made up her mind.

  ‘I’ve got to go in,’ she said, ‘it’s Kim’s day off, it’s not fair.’ She looked longingly towards the game again before rushing out of the room and a minute or two later I heard the shower running.

  ‘Shame she can’t stay,’ Dan said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘If we release Affrayed,’ Dan said slowly, ‘you know, this version of Affrayed, it would change a lot of stuff for us.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Because it would do well. I mean, we know it would do well just from the few hours we’ve been playing it. Hell, we’d hardly need to even test the damn thing. I could get away from mum and Robyn, you and Lily could afford to rent somewhere bigger, or even buy. We could-’

  ‘We didn’t make it, Dan,’ I said.

  Dan looked down at the desk. ‘I know.’

  ‘We can’t sell a game we didn’t make. If it got out it would ruin our reputation.’

  ‘But Affrayed was our idea,’ he said, ‘whoever made this stole our idea.’

  ‘I know, but-’

  ‘Who did make it anyway?’ he said, ‘why would somebody do that?’

  He closed Lily’s game and went back to the main menu, hovering the mouse over the bottom option, “credits”, and I was amazed I hadn’t thought of looking at them sooner.

  He paused before he clicked it though and looked across at me as if waiting for permission.

  ‘Well, we’ve got to know,’ I said.

  Lily came back into the kitchen while we were looking at the credits and she’d changed into her work clothes, black trousers and a black polo-neck with “Winterbourne Flowers” embroidered in gold, swirly letters. She stood behind us and looked over our shoulders as she piled her hair up on top of her head and secured it into a lopsided bun.

  ‘The credits!’ she said. ‘What do they say, who did this?’

  Dan and I showed her what we had already discovered.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she said, ‘those are your names.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘and that’s it.’

  Lily frowned and tried to tuck some loose curls up into the bun. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘Neither do we,’ I said.
/>   ‘God, I don’t want to go,’ she sighed, but then she took a deep breath. ‘Text me if anything else happens,’ she said, ‘I’ll get back as soon as I can, I promise.’

  She turned to leave but I suddenly thought of something and caught her arm.

  ‘Nick,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘look, just... don’t mention anything to mum about this. I don’t feel like I want anybody to know.’

  When she’d gone Dan and I carried on staring at the credits as if by doing so we might make some new information appear.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked me, ‘I mean, seriously, what the literal fuck is this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think Lily’s right and the code does something malicious?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s possible. But even if it does it still doesn’t make much sense. Whoever is behind this has put an incredible amount of work into the game. They couldn’t have done this overnight, it would take ages. And if you wanted to hide something nasty why put it in something this complex? It’s a very strange thing to do.’

  ‘Well, they don’t want to take any credit for what they’ve made, that’s for sure,’ Dan said. We looked back at the screen again in silence, gazing at our names and wondering what it meant. The whole thing was so bizarre. It wasn’t even as if they had just left the credits how they were originally- Dan and I hadn’t even made them yet. Whoever it was had purposefully created them to say that the game was made by DAWN Industries, by me and Dan.

  ‘There’s got to be an answer somewhere,’ I said, ‘maybe there’s something within the game, or online, or-’

  ‘In all that messed up code?’ Dan suggested.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, sighing inwardly. Going through it would be a nightmare, but I was going to have to try.

  ‘We need to go over everything,’ I said, ‘everything we were given last night, everything people have said online about Affrayed, anyone who’s making anything similar.’

  Dan groaned and closed his eyes for a moment.

  ‘Unless you’ve got any better ideas?’ I said.