Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller Read online

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I guess so.’

  DAWN: What is the Network?

  INTERFACE: You would not understand.

  DAWN: Why not?

  INTERFACE: If you could understand it, you could communicate with it directly. There would be no need for an Interface.

  I rubbed my eyes and sat back heavily in my chair. ‘Christ, this guy’s annoying,’ I said.

  ‘We need to cut to the chase,’ Dan said, ‘just find out what he wants and get it over with.’

  DAWN: Just cut the crap. Why are you doing all this?

  INTERFACE: So suspicious. Why must there always be a motive?

  DAWN: If you don’t want anything, why talk to us?

  ‘Don’t say that!’ Dan said, though it was already too late.

  ‘You told me to find out what he wants.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but don’t give him the impression there’s anything to be had.’

  INTERFACE: Sometimes the reason for an action only becomes apparent through its completion. I want nothing from you apart from to talk for the sake of talking. Is that acceptable?

  DAWN: What makes you think we want to have a conversation with somebody like you?

  ‘Careful,’ Lily said.

  INTERFACE: I can see you are still angry with me. Do you fear that I will make some claim over the money you have earned from Affrayed?

  Next to me I saw Dan’s body stiffen and my own adrenalin surged again. Now we were getting down to it.

  DAWN: Do you intend to?

  INTERFACE: No. Perhaps I am not expressing myself clearly. What if I was to prove to you that I do not want your money?

  ‘How’s he going to do that?’ Lily asked.

  ‘Probably by ranting on at us about the futility of avarice or something,’ Dan suggested.

  In fact, what “Interface” did was a lot more straightforward and far more compelling. He filled the screen with our bank details, credit card details, passwords for online banking, God knows what. And not just from our personal accounts, from the DAWN Industries business account too.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Lily said. She covered her face with her hands, while I watched Interface type his next statement.

  INTERFACE: So you see, if I wanted money, I could take your money. I have the ability to do it, yet I choose not to. I have no interest in it. Does that help?

  I realised Lily was crying. I wasn’t having this.

  DAWN: Are you threatening us?

  There was a slight pause.

  INTERFACE: Please accept my apologies. I sought to reassure you, not to upset you. I think it would be best for us to end the conversation here.

  I was about to type a reply, to try and get to the bottom of it once and for all, but the black screen disappeared and I found myself looking at Affrayed again. Whoever Interface was, he’d gone.

  2007

  Chapter 11

  I knew Carl’s birthday would be a nightmare. I tried to tell myself it wouldn’t be, but I had to face that Lily’s depression was no longer just a small thing, no longer just a little blemish on her personality that was there on some occasions and gone on others. Now it was everything, a huge, devouring thing. To use her own words, it was feeding on her soul, taking everything good and replacing it with bad. With pain. Not that I believe in souls, or in good or in evil, in luck or superstition. Far from everything happening for a reason I believe that pretty much nothing happens for a reason, life is just full of random events and meaningless suffering.

  She did well though, at least to start with. She made conversation, of sorts, which while not exactly very forthcoming or expansive, was sufficient for nobody to suspect her secret. It was when we reached the bar in town where Carl had reserved a big table in the window that she began to seriously struggle. I worried for her initially, concerned somebody would tell her to smile, or cheer up, or some equally stupid thing, but by this point everybody had had a few drinks and were distracted with their own thoughts, their own conversations, so her silence went unremarked and quite probably, unnoticed.

  ‘You’re doing well,’ I whispered to her, ‘it’ll be over soon.’

  At those words she fixed me with a look of such deep, incredible pain that it made me catch my breath.

  ‘Nothing is ever over for me,’ she whispered back. ‘It just carries on and on and on. I’m going to be tortured forever.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ I said, ‘not for much longer. You’ll be back how you used to be.’

  ‘I can’t get back to how I used to be. I’m dead already. What I’m in now is my hell.’

  I was about to reply when I felt a nudge on my arm and looked up to see Carl and Sophie watching us.

  ‘What are the two of you whispering about?’ Sophie asked, leaning towards us so that the chunky beaded necklace she was wearing swung forward and hit the table, almost knocking her drink over.

  ‘The two of you are always so serious,’ she said, her face flushed pink and the large sequined hairclip she’d used to sweep her blonde fringe back from her face coming loose. ‘Just relax for once, won’t you?’ She giggled and my heart fell. This kind of thing was so unhelpful to Lily that it made me want to shout into Sophie’s silly, thoughtless face. But I held it together. I knew it was completely innocent, that it was said with the best intentions, but by my side I heard Lily make a little noise of distress or anger in her throat and the next second she grabbed her little black handbag and stood up.

  ‘I’ll be back in a second,’ she said.

  I caught her arm and was glad to see that Sophie had turned away from us, already involved in a new conversation with Carl and a couple of my other housemates.

  ‘Leave your bag here, I’ll look after it,’ I said to Lily.

  She was about to pull it away from me but she wasn’t quick enough and I took hold of it. ‘Please, Lily, you don’t need it.’

  I could see how badly she wanted to get away from the situation. Trying to act relatively normally for hours on end in front of fifteen or so people had taken a terrible toll on her. In fact, her eyes were glistening with tears, though she blinked a lot and turned her face away from the others to make sure they didn’t see. I didn’t want to make her suffering any worse, but I was sure she had something in her handbag to hurt herself with and I didn’t want her to use it.

  ‘Nick I need it!’ she said, pulling at her bag, her voice rising higher than she meant it to so that Sophie, Carl and a couple of others looked round. I had to give in. I let her take it and she squeezed quickly past the backs of the other people at the table and practically ran for the toilets.

  ‘Looks like someone’s not getting any tonight,’ Carl said and the others nearby laughed. I knew he was just messing around but I felt a surge of anger at them that momentarily threatened to overwhelm me.

  I tried to remind myself that they didn’t know, that none of them knew. Had our situations been reversed I would probably have said exactly the same thing to Carl as he just said to me, made a joke out of what must have looked like a silly little tiff. But I glanced across the room and I saw Lily just disappearing up the stairs in a flash of black and white checked miniskirt and I thought about the thing I was sure she was about to do to herself.

  Carl was too drunk to really read much into my silence, but Sophie had noticed. She shuffled round the table, getting everyone to stand up to let her through, and then plonked herself down beside me where Lily had just been sitting.

  ‘It wasn’t because of what I said, was it?’ she asked me, ‘about how you looked serious?’

  ‘No,’ I said, not entirely truthfully.

  She put her hand on my arm. ‘I didn’t mean anything,’ she said, ‘she knows I didn’t mean anything, doesn’t she?’

  I tried to politely move my arm away from her grasp. I had enough to deal with without Sophie’s paranoia over what she’d just said.

  ‘Lily seems really stressed at the moment,’ Sophie said, ‘she works all the time and hardly ever goes out, ex
cept to the library. Or to see you. I just thought she needed to relax but I think I went all the wrong way about saying it.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. I found talking to Sophie a bit claustrophobic. She always sat too close and made a lot of eye contact, like she was trying to catch you out. I began to look round at the stairs even though I knew it was a bit soon to expect Lily to come back down.

  ‘Is everything ok between the two of you?’ Sophie asked, her voice a little too eager, her blue-green eyes darting over my face for any signs of conflict or drama.

  ‘Everything’s good,’ I said, ‘Lily just doesn’t feel too well tonight, that’s all.’

  Sophie nodded and started texting somebody, leaving gaps between her words as her concentration was divided. ‘She often seems a bit under the weather,’ she said, ‘she’s always saying she’s tired or has headaches. I told her-’

  She stopped talking for so long I thought she’d forgotten she was mid-sentence, but then she put her phone down and looked round at me again. ‘I told her she should go and see her doctor. In case it’s glandular fever or something.’

  I almost laughed. Fucking hell, they could all see it. They could all bloody see it. They just couldn’t put the pieces together. For a moment, I hovered on the brink of just telling her. It was on the tip of my tongue- Lily is depressed- the words were right there. But it seemed impossible to say them. It was like, if I said them, everything would just fall apart. I knew Sophie would take it well, she was studying psychology for Gods’ sake, if anyone was going to be okay about it she would be. But somehow when it came to Lily’s illness there was this huge barrier, something that made me swallow the words again and stay silent. The moment had already gone anyway, and I realised that to Sophie, to all of them, anything they noticed about Lily was just a passing, transitory thing like noticing the colour of the walls or the weather. They were interested for a second when they saw something unusual in her behaviour, but then something else happened and they were gone, they forgot, and they never asked questions.

  I watched the stairs anxiously for a while, but Sophie started trying to persuade my housemates and me to take part in the experiment she was doing for her dissertation and for a little while I listened.

  ‘It’s so hard to get any male participants,’ she said, ‘because mainly it’s just other psychologists taking part to get course credit and like, pretty much everyone doing psychology is a girl.’

  ‘What have we got to do?’ Carl asked.

  ‘Nothing much, just fill in a couple of questionnaires, the usual.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ I asked her.

  Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘I can’t tell you, or it wouldn’t be an experiment.’

  Carl laughed, ‘so it’s one of these ones where you tell us it’s about memory or whatever and you’re actually trying to find out whether we were, like, abused as children or something.’

  Sophie leaned across the table to slap his arm. ‘No!’ she said, ‘don’t even joke about that, it’s not funny.’

  Carl smirked, making a couple of dimples appear at the bottom of his right cheek. Sophie was very easy to wind up and Carl was only too happy to be the one doing the winding. At her reaction a glint of pleasure had lit up his eyes and I jumped in to stop him taking it any further.

  ‘What are the questionnaires about?’ I asked, ‘surely you can tell us that if we’re going to be filling them in anyway?’

  ‘The first one is a maths question,’ she said, ‘to see how good you are at problem solving and thinking logically.’

  ‘Sounds okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll do it, if you want.’

  I half listened to her explaining where and when I needed to be in the psychology building and I wondered how Lily was. It must have been fifteen or twenty minutes by now, and as I thought about it even the others began to notice her absence.

  ‘Shall I see if I can find her?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘No,’ I said quickly, finding myself automatically trying to preserve Lily’s secret, to keep people away from her. ‘I’ll give her a text. She probably just got talking to somebody.’

  But just as I took my phone out it lit up in my hand and I saw that Lily had text me.

  Im frightened please come and find me.

  I quickly replied asking where she was and I was alarmed when she said she was outside. She’d managed to come back down the steps and slip out of the door without any of us seeing her and now she was on her own in the street. She hadn’t even taken her coat with her and it was a pretty cold November night.

  ‘Carl,’ I said, reaching across the table to catch his arm. ‘I’m going to take Lily home.’

  I didn’t wait for him to reply but he followed me and stopped me by the door.

  ‘I knew this was going to happen,’ he said.

  I looked from his face to the street outside. There were groups of people hanging around, many of them looked as though they were students like us, but no sign of Lily.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said to Carl vaguely. I really wasn’t interested. I just wanted to find Lily.

  ‘You always do this,’ he said, ‘you and Lily, going off together for chats that last about an hour, going home when you’ve only just got somewhere.’

  I looked at the time on my phone. ‘We’ve been here well over an hour,’ I said.

  ‘Do you actually want to go?’ he asked me, ‘or is it just because she’s telling you to?’

  I faced him now, my attention diverted for a moment from the street outside.

  ‘She feels sick,’ I lied, ‘what do you want me to do, let her walk home on her own?’

  ‘She doesn’t feel sick,’ Carl said, ‘she just doesn’t want you to be around us. She’ll say anything to make you go home with her.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘You and Lily. She doesn’t make you happy, she’s making you look like an idiot, clicking her fingers and getting you to run round after her.’

  I couldn’t believe it. Was he really saying this to me?

  ‘That’s total crap Carl and you know it.’

  ‘Prove it then. Let her go and you stay here.’

  I was so angry with him. Why was he doing this? Like I was going to leave Lily out there on her own.

  ‘Carl, don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, ‘I’m going to take Lily home. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  I pushed past him through the heavy glass door, though when I looked back I saw he was still watching me and in fact I could see through the window that most of the people at the table were looking at either Carl or me, their eyes wide and curious. I ignored them and began my search for Lily, spurred on by another text from her.

  Nick im scared please come and get me

  In the darkness and confusion of people in the street she wasn’t easy to find, and as I searched, I thought about Carl and all the others back inside, carrying on obliviously. But Lily had drawn me into a bizarre little parallel world where her reality wasn’t their reality, and wandering the cold streets on her own seemed preferable to spending time in the warm with her friends.

  2013

  02/06/2013, 22:18

  Can I get the original Affrayed back?

  Lola Gabriel ([email protected])

  To [email protected]

  Hey guys,

  I was a huge fan of Affrayed but I’m really confused why it’s suddenly turned into a different version? I love the new version too, but I don’t get why the original game is gone and now I have something completely different to what I bought. Also the new game is so much bigger, and yet we get it all for the same price as the first version- seems like quite a strange deal, not that I’m complaining...

  So is there any way I can get the original version of Affrayed back? I’d happily pay separately for the new one.

  Thanks

  Lola

  02/06/2013, 22:31

  Some questions about Affrayed

  Bryan Fleet (BryanFleet4@ma
ilmail.com)

  To [email protected]

  Hi,

  I’ve been following DAWN Industries for many years now, ever since you released DreamChase, and I was really looking forward to seeing what Affrayed would be like after reading about your progress on it.

  I have to say, I certainly wasn’t disappointed, but I am becoming increasingly confused. Since the game came out it’s like DAWN has dropped off the face of the earth and I was really hoping to hear more about the making of Affrayed as I think it’s probably one of the best games I’ve played in years, maybe even ever.

  But what I really don’t understand now is why I’ve got this new version of Affrayed that is totally different, and with no warning or explanation anywhere from you guys. Plus, aren’t I right in thinking there are only a few of you? I’d be really interested to know how you pulled off a game like this new Affrayed with so little help, and I’m sure a lot of other people would love to know too.

  Really looking forward to hearing from you/ reading about this new version on your blog!

  Bryan Fleet

  Chapter 12

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Lily asked, not for the first time.

  Her head hovered near my shoulder as she looked down at my laptop, while on the other side of her Dan sat looking at his. We’d been on the sofa for hours, looking through it all, taking in the scale of our disastrous situation. It was like everybody everywhere wanted a piece of us. I’d thought it was bad when we first released Affrayed- people wanting to interview us, talk to us, work for us, be our friends. Now it had got even worse and instead of just praise, curiosity and interest, some of our communication was changing, becoming more difficult, and we were facing very awkward questions.

  A great deal of people didn’t care who made it, of course. Not everyone is that interested in the story behind a game, the faces that make up a company. Perhaps they thought it was odd that such a complicated game was supposedly made by so few people, but it didn’t really matter to them. No, the really awkward questions we were getting were coming largely from people more like us. From people who were passionate about games, or who made their own living out of games, and who knew, immediately, that in this case the game and the company simply did not match up.