The Illusionists Read online

  ‘Thassit?’ she said.

  ‘It’ll take a few hours to integrate properly with your brain. And it’ll work a lot better after you’ve had some sleep.’

  ‘Can we talk World now, then?’

  ‘Not yet, my Rue. But very soon. A few hours.’

  ‘I can sleep now.’

  Wren grabbed hold of her arm. Without really being aware of it, she had started to fall sideways towards the bed.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t sleep yet. It might not sit right. You need to stay awake as long as you can.’

  ‘Sleep,’ she insisted without any strength. Her head felt enormously heavy and unbalanced. It was the weight of all that knowledge, she thought, and resisted the urge to giggle. She felt Wren squeeze her to his side.

  ‘No,’ she heard him say. ‘Come on. Let’s take a walk.’

  CHAPTER 2

  WORLD

  CHO

  Cho slid into Life, easy as thought.

  It began, as always, with a feeling like listening to the opening bars of her favourite song.

  A tingle.

  A long, wavering note of anticipation.

  A sudden, gentle rush.

  Underneath, there was relief, crashing waves of warm comfort. And guilt that she had succumbed again.

  It took its moment. There was always a boot-up time, a black lag from the surface Life that everyone used; the virtual reality that made trees appear and buildings look beautiful, made a fake sun shine in a fake sky. Surface Life took no time at all – the entire population of World was walking around in it, pretty much all the time.

  But full immersion into Life stole a black lag from you. Some people hated that moment of darkness and nothing. Cho loved it. Anticipation.

  They called it High Immersion Life, or HI-Life. In HI-Life, you could create and explore entire virtual worlds while your body stayed in reality where you left it, unresponsive, as if you were sleeping. You could hide yourself in a fairy land if you wanted to, or a house made entirely out of cheese. There was a place and a party and a game for everything, somewhere, no matter how strange.

  But the one thing you couldn’t hide was your identity. It was understandable. How would you know anyone’s agenda in a virtual reality if they couldn’t be tagged and recognised? There were many, many games and social simulations where you could cloak yourself in an avatar, a representation of you that would look as bizarre or as normal as you desired. But your identity remained the same. Anyone could see who you really were and what you looked like out of Life simply by accessing your profile info. There were no disguises.

  Unless you were a hacker, of course.

  Cho accessed her Life account. It pulled together around her, manifesting as a small, comfortable room. She had spent a long time buying Life products to decorate her room. It was a sanctuary. No one could access it save her. No one could see it save her.

  It was, she liked to think, the absolute opposite of her bedroom in the real.

  Spindly tables had tiny jewelled boxes scattered on their tops with nothing in them. Marble figurines of extinct elephants trumpeted at each other across swathes of red-and-gold glittered cloth. Five clocks hung on one wall, of varying sizes. One was completely transparent, so you could see the mechanisms inside it, but there were no cogs, just a series of tiny hammers poised above rounded nodes. On a table sat a group of interconnected glass candle holders, delicate and winding, and an old-fashioned set of scales. In a corner on the floor, eight marble balls clustered together on a little wooden plate, a couple of them as big as a fist. The kind of balls that looked like star systems or planets, with swirls and whirlpools of colour streaking their surfaces. There was a huge Chinese dragon by one wall, a deep mauve colour, carved and intricate and lovely and almost tacky but not in here, surrounded by this oddness, and it came up to the bottom of her ribs when she stood next to it. There was a thick glass jar of sand, and three keys – giant brass things that were heavy when she picked them up and played with them, which she liked to do. A telescope in one corner. To look at what, exactly? Yet she loved it. It didn’t matter that neither the room itself, nor anything it contained, was real in a physical sense. It looked real. It felt real. That was the beauty of Life.

  Fat icons hung in the air around her head, representations of all the games and social sims she had bought, all the shops she had an account with. They glittered and winked like jewels, enticing. She reached for one and it flew gracefully towards her. Apt because it was a flying game.

  Her avatar in this game was a hawk. She had never seen a real one, and she had never met anyone who had. It was hard to imagine the kind of place where it was normal to have hawks roaming, flying about in the sky as if they belonged there. But she knew there was such a place. It was a place her brother had abandoned her for.

  Being a hawk in this game was a beautifully physical thing. When you took on the avatar, you felt your body shape change. Your torso tilted forward, stomach rounding. Your face elongated, mouth growing hard and sprouting outward. Wings pushed out from your shoulder blades, inch by giant inch. It was a delicate, complex, joyful piece of programming. Cho had contributed some of the code to it. Some people found it off-putting, feeling their bodies change like that. Others, like Cho, couldn’t get enough of it.

  You could play the flying game in multi mode, in a sky full of other avatars as people in Life from across the world played with you. You could compete for points, collecting small trinkets from hard-to-reach places. But Cho preferred single-player mode. Alone in a sky so big it felt limitless, dipping and swooping, and feeling the wind, and doing nothing but being absolutely free.

  She loaded up her avatar, waiting as the code adjusted to her account details. Then she felt herself slowly tipping forward, feet spreading, legs tucking under her. Delicate itching across her back as if tiny mice ran over her skin, their claws skimming her nerve-endings. Sprouting wings and feathers.

  When the avatar had loaded, she entered the game space. Her nest was tucked into a hole halfway up a cliff. She had done it deliberately so that the only way she could leave her starting point was by throwing herself into the sky.

  She felt the wind ruffle her feathers as she peeked a clawed foot over the edge.

  Nothing below.

  Her heart was pounding. It didn’t matter how many times she’d done it before; it felt as real as ever. That was the brilliance of Life.

  She turned slightly, sticking her shoulder out, and rolled downwards into emptiness. She could see a patchwork of vague dark green forest far below. The wind whistled in her ears.

  She fell.

  Opened her wings, trying to catch an updraft.

  For several long, horrible, wonderful seconds, nothing happened.

  Then finally, one slammed up past her belly and buffeted her wings, stopping her descent.

  She floated into the yawning, empty sky.

  FREE! said her mind, ecstatically.

  And then she let it shut off, thinking of nothing but wind and blue. And peace, just for a while.

  In Life, you could become something else completely. You could live a second, third, fourth, seventh existence. You could play endless games and roam worlds that didn’t exist outside of the implant in your head. It was endlessly amazing, endlessly inventive. The most incredible, celebrated artists in World were Life programmers. It was imagination made tangible, shared with millions upon millions of people, all living, working, gaming in it together.

  It was better than the real. It was what the real should be.

  The ultimate in existence.

  And it was slowly killing them all.

  CHAPTER 3

  WORLD

  RUE

  The box glowed, beckoning to her with flickering blue fingers.

  It was surprisingly easy to get used to. A lot of people never switched between reality and Life, preferring to spend most of their waking hours jacked in. For those who didn’t, it was as easy as flicking a switch ins
ide your head, wherever you happened to be at that particular moment. But Rue, with no implant, had to content herself with being holed up in Wren’s room, chained to the box, whenever she wanted to go into Life.

  Wren was gone a lot. It was his job, he said. He never told her exactly where he went, though she asked all the time. Occasionally, he came home very late at night and went immediately to bed. Sometimes he even looked a little bit ill. Once, he’d come home and locked himself in the bathroom for an hour. She’d heard the unmistakable sound of retching. When she banged on the door, he didn’t answer, so she talked to him incessantly through it, threatening to break it down if he didn’t tell her whether he was all right. All she’d got for her trouble was an irritable plea for her to stop banging and that he’d be out in a minute. And when he finally emerged he just shrugged it off, saying he’d eaten something bad at work.

  She wanted to help him, to comfort him. But he wouldn’t allow it, fobbing off her attempts with a small smile and insisting nothing was wrong. He was just busy. And what could she do? She had no way of finding out what was wrong without him telling her.

  Her day currently consisted of this: when Wren left in the mornings, she could use his box and go into Life. When she was hungry, she could go into the social room and order food. He seemed to think that those two things should be enough for her.

  They weren’t.

  He’d told her not to go wandering outside the apartments. Her appearance might get her into trouble. People would automatically think she was a Technophobe. He’d said there wasn’t much to see, anyway, without an implant. She had pressed him as hard as she could, stoically enduring his shutdowns until he’d finally given in and programmed what he called her ‘retinal scan’ into the outside door key, just to ‘stop her incessant questioning’.

  So she went out, exploring the city.

  On leaving for the first time alone, she’d stood outside the building, wrapped up in World clothes that sat funny on her, bunching in places they shouldn’t bunch and stretching in places they really shouldn’t stretch. She had breathed in, nervous and excited. The air was flat.

  She promised herself she wouldn’t go far, in case she got lost. Just wander for a few minutes at a time, checking that she knew how to get back. And then she set out, her eyes widened to catch all the incredible sights that she would undoubtedly see.

  But the thing that really irked Rue was that Wren had been right.

  Without Life, the city was dull. All the buildings were made of the same shade of grey-coloured materials. She didn’t see why exactly that had to be, but Wren just shrugged and said it was necessary as the platform for Life. The streets were uniform and wide, much wider than Capital City streets, but there was nothing much else to say about them. It was hard to remember any detail at all. Everything was so … neat.

  She had money, or credits, as they called money here. Wren’s mysterious employers, whom she was increasingly anxious to meet, had given her enough in her account to last months. She could spend them on whatever she wanted – once she got the hang of spending something that didn’t physically exist in her hand.

  But in Wren’s city, there were no shops to visit, because everything you could ever wish to buy you bought through virtual Life shops. As fun as that was, it didn’t have that tangible thing of going into a store, running your fingers lightly over cotton dresses and silk shirts. Desiring, because you could see and touch and smell those exquisite things.

  Shopping alone was no fun, either. Clothes shopping made her mind inevitably slide towards the trips that Lea used to drag her on, to expensive boutiques and evenings filled with trying things on and giggling while Lea spent more money on a brooch than Rue would see in a month. It was … flamboyant and wasteful, she supposed, to do that. Worlders certainly seemed to think so. Clothes were unbelievably cheap here, and for a while she had been enamoured at the thought of all the new things she could own with just a handful of credits. All the brand-new versions of her she could make.

  There were little eat places dotted about the city streets, where people could meet and order food and drink from the food units there. But all anyone in those places ever seemed to do, once they sat down with their food, was jack into surface Life and talk to each other there. Still, plenty of people went to eat places on their own, so she didn’t feel strange about sitting at a table by herself, even though those solitary people were never really alone – they were surrounded by people in Life.

  All in all there was hardly anywhere outside of Life to socialise, but that apparently didn’t bother anyone because socialising, in World, was arranged.

  According to Wren, everyone went to regular parties at other people’s houses, and held parties themselves in their own houses. You would be messaged the time and place for your next obligatory party, and attend or host you most certainly did; if you missed any, a black mark was put against your Life account. What having a black mark on your account meant Rue didn’t know exactly, but she understood that it wasn’t good.

  The great thing about the system, apparently, was that you got to regularly go to parties for free and, until you yourself were hosting, you didn’t have to organise a thing – your local government team did everything for you. They chose who went to which house and when. They chose who hosted and who didn’t. They chose everything, it seemed, very carefully. Rue thought this bizarre. No one else seemed to, though, so she filed it away as another custom she would have to get used to.

  Wren had promised her that today, finally, something would happen. He had been trying to arrange a meeting between Rue and his manager, Greta Hammond, for weeks. A meeting, at last. Something, anything, to stop the slow, spidery sensation of listlessness that often seemed to creep over her nowadays.

  Sat at Wren’s little desk, the box in front of her, Rue flicked through her Life account. There was a letter sat in her message box, and she waved one hand over it. Wren had shown her how to open her mail, but she still couldn’t get past the sensation that she was performing magic. The letter unfolded without her having touched it. She knew if she jacked out of Life, the letter would disappear. Everything she now saw would disappear, because it wasn’t real. But because enough people had decided that what they saw in one reality wasn’t necessarily more important than what they saw in another, the letter was real. It simply wasn’t real everywhere.

  The letter read:

  Vela Rue –

  I invite you to a meet. Wren has spoken so much of you and I am keen to see you for myself. Would today at fifteen hours be too short notice? Wren will show you to my office.

  Greta Hammond

  She had been told to expect as much from Wren, who had seemed a little short about the whole thing when he had mentioned it to her last night. Quizzing him never helped when he wasn’t in a mood to talk, she had learned. Nevertheless, fifteen hours was the time he had told her to be ready, so here she was.

  She followed the room link at the bottom of the letter. The link would take her to Greta Hammond’s location in Life. Touching it with her finger, she waited as the console flickered.

  There was that blackness again while she dropped into full immersion, and her body in the real went a little limp in its chair, her eyes peacefully closed. Funny how similar descending to full immersion felt to the place in between places, that space of nothing and creeping strangeness that she used to find herself in when she practised throwing her mind in lessons with White.

  It took a moment, but then the blackness passed, and there was Wren’s avatar, standing in Life, waiting for her in front of an ordinary-looking door.

  Wren was out on assignment and away from the house, and had only paused in his day to meet her in Life and introduce her to this Greta Hammond. Rue smiled at him, feeling her pulse skip in excitement.

  ‘I told you fifteen,’ he said. He seemed anxious.

  ‘I know it. I’m not late, am I?’

  ‘Come on, come on.’

  He took her arm and led her
to the door. In a sudden flash of irritation she shrugged him off, and walked through before him.

  The room beyond was the best-looking completely virtual place she had seen yet. Some of the places she’d encountered in Life were often a little flat, as if depth couldn’t quite make the grade. But this looked and felt the part. This was someone’s room, not just a manufactured space.

  The woman before her was petite and lovely, her golden hair done up into a bouffant kind of style and with a little too much paint on her eyes. Her cheeks were patterned with a trace of dark green scales, which set off her colouring handsomely. Wren had told her that Greta was middle-aged – it didn’t show, but then again it rarely did in World.

  Rue shook off her nerves and opened her mouth to say hello.

  ‘You didn’t knock.’

  ‘I wasn’t told to,’ said Rue.

  Greta smiled. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. Her gaze flickered briefly over Rue’s shoulder to Wren, who had come in behind her. She gestured with her hand, something that presumably meant sit. Rue did so, taking one of the hard metal chairs in front of Greta’s desk. Wren took the other beside her. The chair squeaked when he sat on it. It was a perplexing thing, to create a virtual chair that squeaked, but fitted nicely with what Rue had seen of Greta’s personality so far. I’m in charge, said Greta, with everything she had.

  You’re a bit of a sot, aren’t you, Greta? thought Rue, relishing the chance to use a slang word going about Wren’s friends at the moment.

  The World language had settled within her like a blanket. It took an effort to switch between Angle Tarain and World, but she hadn’t spoken a word of her native language for days, so didn’t see this as much of a problem. She still couldn’t quite keep up with the constantly shifting nature of World speak, but could at last talk to people and understand them, even if the data stick had given her a kind of stiff and formal version of the language.

  ‘So. Wren tells me you’re an orphan,’ said Greta, folding her hands together. ‘How can that be?’