Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller Read online

  She was trying to be kind, and I felt grateful to her, but reminding me of my success just made things even worse and I kept thinking to myself, they really think I did it. They really think I made this amazing game. Of course I wasn’t actually famous, and even though Affrayed had done incredibly well, it’s not like it was a household name.

  ‘Uh...’ I said stupidly as they all waited. Normally, I would have been more than able to cobble some words together, but my mind was blank and as more time went by I felt increasingly daft. Across the table Poppy carried on waiting. She was smiling vaguely, one hand on her stomach, where the bump of a third child soon to join the two sat by her side pressed against the fabric of her green summer dress.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Lily said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I will, I’m just... it’s put me on the spot a bit.’ My mind raced for a moment, then I managed to gather a sentence or two together. ‘Well, as Ian just pointed out, I couldn’t have done any of it without Lily, who’s had to put up with all the time and energy I’ve put into Affrayed. So that’s all I’d like to say really. I’d like to thank Lily.’

  I looked at her and said, ‘thank you, Lily,’ and she blushed and mumbled something.

  ‘Aww,’ Poppy said, ‘that’s so lovely! You should have dedicated the game to her, you know, like they do at the beginning of books and stuff.’

  ‘I dedicated my last game, DreamChase, to Lily,’ I said, ‘and Dan dedicated it to his girlfriend Amy. At the end it said, for Lily and Amy.’

  Poppy laughed, ‘isn’t it romantic,’ she said to nobody in particular. ‘Are they still together?’ she asked me, ‘your friend and his girlfriend?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘they split up a few months after DreamChase was launched, so, like, two and a half- three years ago now.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Well, she must be kicking herself now.’

  I struggled through the rest of dinner feeling like my stomach was full of concrete. I didn’t know what was more intolerable, Lily’s dad and his snide remarks, or my own thoughts, which went constantly back to the fact that I knew this “celebration” and every other word of praise I’d received since the launch of Affrayed was utterly undeserved.

  ‘So, what’s next for you then?’ Lily’s dad asked me as I swallowed my last mouthful of cheesecake with difficulty. ‘Not much point getting a proper job now is there? Not if you can carry on making games like Affrayed?’

  Again, the tension around the table stepped up a notch as if everyone was just waiting for something to kick off, and I heard Lily draw in a sharp little breath at my side.

  ‘DAWN Industries is my job,’ I said, ‘that’s what I’m going to carry on doing.’

  ‘And why not?’ he said, ‘you’d be mad to stop now.’

  For a moment I was so angry with his constant digs at me that I thought I was going to lose it, more so for the fact they were always so cleverly veiled, put across in such a way that if I did retaliate it would seem like an enormous overreaction. But I knew there was only so long my patience would last, so I just made my excuses and disappeared off into the solitude of the downstairs toilet to calm down.

  A few seconds later, there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Nick, it’s Lily.’

  Reluctantly, I opened the door and stepped out into the hall. Even being around Lily felt hard. I just wanted to hide away. But quickly she took hold of my arm and drew me towards the front door, where we would be further from the kitchen and dining room and could talk without fear of being overheard.

  ‘I swear to God, Lily, if that man wasn’t your dad...’ I said.

  Lily squeezed my arm gently. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but you have to try to ignore it. He just doesn’t really understand what you do. He doesn’t realise how hard it is or how much work you put in.’

  I laughed, ‘yeah, because I put a fat lot of work into Affrayed, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lily said, ‘you did before it was stolen from you.’

  ‘I used to dream about this,’ I said, ‘about coming here and saying to your parents, look, I’ve made some money; I’m a normal human being now. If I really had made this version of Affrayed, I could listen to your dad’s little remarks all day and I’d still be smiling. But I didn’t. So I’m still a loser.’

  Lily let go of my arm and looked at me squarely. ‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said, ‘You’re not a loser and you never were. Dad doesn’t know the first thing about what it takes to make a game. You mustn’t listen to him.’ She lowered her voice. ‘The more you get wound up, the more he’ll do it. You know that, don’t you? He wants a reaction.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, one day he’s going to get one. Seriously, if he says one more thing-’

  Lily put her arms around me and spoke close to my ear. ‘Nick, please, just try to get through it. They don’t like us, you know that,’ she pulled away from me a little and I noticed her eyes were shiny with tears, but she blinked a few times and gathered herself together again. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘my parents being nasty to us is something I’ve just come to accept. We’re just not their kind of people. I know... I mean, I’m sure they care about me, in their way, and I suppose they must love me, but... I don’t think they like me. You know, some ways I look at it, it’s almost funny. I swear they think my biggest achievement is managing to get through school and sixth form without ending up pregnant or on drugs and even then I expect they put that down to luck rather than anything I did. That’s the thing, it doesn’t matter what I do, Poppy will always be the good one and I’ll always be the bad one and by association you’re bad too. If I was married to a lawyer or a doctor they’d be just the same. Or, actually, more likely dad would start going on about why somebody like that was bothering with somebody like me.’

  Lily looked up at me suddenly. ‘Not that a lawyer or a doctor is any better than you,’ she said, ‘but you know what I mean.’

  ‘Let’s just go,’ I said, reaching towards the front door, ‘come on, we could just get out of here.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘if we left like that I’d never hear the end of it. And mum’s put a lot of effort into this meal. I know it’s awkward, but they’re trying. They can be rude to us if they want to, but let’s not be as bad as they are.’

  I started to follow Lily back into the dining room, but her mum came out of the kitchen just as I was walking past, almost as though she’d been waiting for me.

  ‘Nick,’ she said, ‘can I talk to you for second?’

  We both started to follow her into the kitchen but mum stopped Lily. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you go and join the others. I just want to have a quick word with Nick.’

  Once Lily had gone her mum closed the door quickly behind us and turned to face me, one pink rubber-gloved hand resting on the work surface.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me,’ she said.

  She narrowed her eyes and I avoided her gaze, peering around the kitchen instead. It was a horrible room. Lily’s mum fancied herself as a bit of an interior designer and in here it looked like she’d tried out several different ideas at once and all of them unsuccessfully. Half the cupboards had been painted lemon yellow, the other half baby blue, there was a large stencilled flower motif on the wall to my right and the windowsill behind the sink was full of ugly little ornaments, of which “comical” china pigs were the most prolific.

  ‘You and Lily spent a long time whispering to each other in the hall just then,’ she went on, ‘and I saw how awkward you both were during dinner. Is she getting ill again?’

  Her eyes were glittering and now she placed her other rubber-gloved hand on her hip, staring at me fiercely.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s fine. We both are. We’re just very tired. It’s been manic these past few months- all the attention the game has been getting, in fact just yesterday I-’

  ‘If Lily got ill again you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Of cours
e I would,’ I said, thinking, yeah, like hell.

  Lily’s mum watched me a bit longer then went back to filling the dishwasher.

  ‘I’m making some coffee in a minute,’ she said, ‘do you want some?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be great, thanks,’ I said. I wanted to leave but I thought that might seem rude so I shuffled my feet awkwardly on the spot and tried to think of something else to say.

  ‘You need a hand?’ I asked eventually.

  She looked around the room, where there were pots and pans all over the place.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘although, if you could just pass me those little plates there.’

  I picked them up and handed them to her. She grabbed them out of my hand and started shoving them into the top shelf a little too violently.

  ‘Is that... all you wanted to say?’ I asked.

  She spun round and looked at me. ‘I’ll never forget what you did, you know,’ she said, the hate behind the words taking me aback. ‘I’ll be civil to you for Lily’s sake, but no matter how much money you make on these games of yours I’m never going to forgive you for what you put my Lily through at university and how you hid it from us.’

  ‘I... what?’ I said. Why on earth was she dragging all this up again?

  ‘I know you’re no good for her,’ she said, ‘I don’t care what she says, I don’t care what you say, she’s my little girl and I know when she’s hurting.’

  I shook my head in disbelief. This was absolutely ridiculous.

  ‘It was the worst day of my life when she married you,’ she went on, jabbing her finger at me, ‘but I just had to sit there and watch it happen. I had to watch my daughter make the most terrible mistake and there was nothing...’

  She stopped herself and ended the sentence with an exasperated sigh, before turning away from me and scooping up a handful of dirty cutlery, giving it a quick rinse before cramming it into the dishwasher.

  ‘I love Lily,’ I said, when I managed to get my thoughts together, ‘and I don’t know what I could possibly have done to give you this impression of me, but I would never hurt her.’

  Lily’s mum stared at me and I was sure she was about to argue further, but Poppy came in and she rearranged her face into a smile, though not quite quickly enough.

  ‘Everything alright?’ Poppy asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘everything’s fine.’

  Chapter 8

  The atmosphere was tense as I drove us back home, the sky a heavy gun-metal grey and the roads almost deserted. After a few minutes Lily turned the radio on but I turned it off again, preferring the dense, impenetrable silence.

  ‘What did my mum want to talk to you about?’ Lily asked.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I said, ‘she just wanted to check you were alright. You know. Whether you were coping with everything.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lily said, ‘okay.’

  For a moment I was tempted to tell her the rest of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to. She had enough to deal with right now; maybe I’d tell her later. Or maybe I’d just forget. That would probably be best for everybody.

  ‘I’m sorry about what my dad said to you during dinner,’ Lily told me, ‘I thought that now at least he’d have some respect for what you do.’

  I made a noise of dismissal. ‘Me and Dan have made an absolute fortune from Affrayed,’ I said, ‘if he had any idea how much...’

  Lily looked round at me. ‘I was surprised you didn’t take the opportunity to tell him.’

  ‘It’s not about the money,’ I said.

  ‘It is to him, though,’ Lily continued, ‘money’s the only thing he cares about. I would have loved to see his face- I’ve been waiting years for the chance to show them how wrong they are about you.’

  I smiled, briefly. But then my mood darkened again.

  ‘I don’t want my success to be about how much money I make,’ I said, ‘I wanted to make something that people thought was good.’

  ‘Thousands of people think Affrayed is good,’ Lily said, ‘people love it, they say it’s one of the best games they’ve ever played!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I didn’t make it.’

  For a while Lily went back to hugging her handbag on her lap and watching the patchwork of different coloured fields that rolled by outside her window.

  ‘Hey, I know what’ll cheer you up,’ she said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her take a big folder of CDs out of the glove compartment and she started hunting through it.

  ‘Here!’ she said. I looked round briefly at the CD in her hand and saw it had 2011: Honeymoon Disc 3!! written across it in her big, swirly handwriting.

  ‘It’s going to take more than that to make me feel better,’ I said.

  Lily fell silent and when she looked at me I saw her eyes had filled up with tears.

  ‘What can I do, then?’ she asked, ‘I want to do something, but there’s nothing, is there?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lily,’ I said, ‘put it on if you want to.’

  She slid it back into the folder of CDs and put it away again. ‘I don’t want to anymore,’ she said.

  I felt awful. She’d put so much thought and love into making all the CDs for our honeymoon, going right back to music we were listening to when we first got together for disc one. I knew she was trying to distract me, but I couldn’t be distracted from something as massive as this.

  When we pulled in to the car park outside our block of flats, I noticed Dan’s old blue Mini parked in one of the visitors’ spaces next to all the wheelie bins.

  ‘Dan’s here,’ Lily said, ‘did he tell you he was coming round today?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  She frowned. ‘Well, I hope nothing’s happened,’ she said.

  It turned out that Dan had fallen asleep in his car and we had to knock on the window before he woke up.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him as he finally got out, his laptop under his arm and a dazed expression on his face.

  ‘Where’ve you been all day?’ he said

  ‘I told you yesterday that Lily’s parents were having a get-together for me.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I told you twice, in fact.’

  Dan grinned. ‘Sorry mate. I don’t think I was listening.’

  Dan followed Lily and me into our flat and sat down immediately on the arm of the sofa, depositing his laptop at the end of my desk.

  ‘So, what’s up?’ I said to him.

  He shrugged. ‘I just wanted to be around people who...you know... know the truth, I guess. Plus, mum and Robyn had this massive row. She went out last night and didn’t get in until half one this afternoon or something; which she does all the time, but for some reason it all kicked off today and they were properly screaming at each other and I just couldn’t hack it anymore.’

  ‘I’m sorry we weren’t here, Dan,’ Lily said, ‘have you been waiting very long?’

  ‘An hour or so, I guess,’ Dan said. ‘I tried to call you, both of you. But your phones were off.’

  ‘I’m getting sick of people contacting me about Affrayed,’ I said, ‘I can’t stand having my phone go off every couple of minutes with all the emails and everything.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Dan said, ‘we got three emails yesterday just from people asking if DAWN is hiring. You see those?’

  ‘No. Did you reply?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan said, looking pleased with himself, ‘I said we haven’t got anything right now but they can send us their CVs and we’ll let them know if something comes up.’

  ‘What on earth did you say that for?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure why it wound me up so much, but for some reason, it really got to me.

  Dan looked at Lily then back to me again. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘it’s just what people say, isn’t it?’

  ‘No!’ I said, ‘not people in our position. How could you even think about giving people the impressio
n we might have jobs come up with all this shit hanging over us? We want to put people off contacting us, not encourage them!’

  Dan opened his mouth and then closed it again.

  ‘Nick,’ Lily said gently, ‘all he did was reply to a couple of people asking about jobs. I don’t think it’s that big a deal.’

  ‘But how could we ever, ever, give people jobs?’ I said, ‘we can’t have people anywhere near this. There’s more than enough people sniffing around as it is, wondering how we got Affrayed done so quick, how we got it done so well, how we did it with only two of us. You know, sometimes I wonder whether we wouldn’t be better selling up the whole thing and washing our hands of it.’

  ‘You want to sell DAWN?’ Dan said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Lily asked me, ‘you never mentioned anything about this before. You’re not really thinking of selling, are you?’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We already have sold out by releasing Affrayed. By lying. I thought we’d just release it and everything would work itself out, but it won’t, will it? We can’t do anything, we’re in an even worse position than we were before. We can’t even touch the money in case the... in case they...’

  I couldn’t bring myself to carry on talking about it, but they both knew what I meant. In all the time since we’d released Affrayed, the only motive any of us had come up with for the people who had really made it was that they intended to blackmail us. It was absurd and I still couldn’t imagine why anybody would do it, but it was the only possible way we could see that the true creators could profit from it. The game certainly showed no evidence of having anything sinister hidden in it, so since blackmail was the only motivation we could think of, we’d decided to make some preparations for it. Right from the start we’d just let the money build up and build up and never spent a penny of it.

  ‘You mean completely selling up, don’t you?’ Dan said, ‘just getting rid of everything. We said we’d never do that.’

  ‘Yes, but we never thought we’d do this either,’ I said, ‘we’d never have believed we’d pretend someone else’s work was ours. We’ve already crossed the line.’