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  The number of deaths overwhelmed me. I’d expected hundreds of people to have died during the emergency defrosts. I’d feared the total death toll might be as high as the over two thousand casualties in the Rhapsody disaster. I hadn’t allowed for the fact that Avalon was an old and popular Game world with a very high population.

  Once I’d absorbed the magnitude of the deaths, the second point hit me. The Avalon server complex had been destroyed by a bomb. I was being questioned by Unilaw about a bombing that had killed over eleven thousand Gamers! This wouldn’t just damage my future in Game, it would utterly destroy it.

  I fought against my panic and tried to answer the bird’s question. “I assumed there’d been a freak failure of the server complex. I worked to the end of my twelve-hour shift and through half of the next one as well to help deal with the defrosts. When everyone had been sent back into Game on other worlds, my supervisor let the people on my shift leave. I was so exhausted that I went back to my room and fell asleep straight away.”

  “Sleep,” the woman repeated the word as if she barely recognized it. “I’d forgotten about that. It’s been such a long time since I needed sleep.”

  The bird glanced sideways. “The girl’s medical chip verifies her story of going directly to her room. There is no record of her accessing any news programmes.”

  “Unbelievable,” muttered the bronze man. He was silent for a moment, and then suddenly threw another question at me. “Why did you want to kill your father?”

  “What?” I realized I’d yelled the word. “I’m sorry,” I added hastily. “You mean that my father died in the world crash? But he can’t have died. It was Avalon that crashed, wasn’t it? My supervisor said Avalon crashed.” I clung to that thought. “My father can’t be dead. He lives on Ganymede, not Avalon.”

  “Your father was visiting a friend on Avalon when the bomb exploded, and died during emergency defrost,” said the bird.

  My father was dead! I felt horribly sick, forgot all about the importance of being respectful to adults, and just wailed my distress aloud.

  “The man in my block who died? That was my father? I didn’t know his body was stored in Red Sector Block 2. The freezer units just have codes. Even when I opened the lid and saw him, I didn’t know. I’d never seen his flesh face. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  “Quiet!” said the woman.

  I put my right hand to my mouth, biting on my forefinger to keep myself quiet.

  “Your father died in the Avalon crash,” said the bird, “but his body was stored in Long Stay Area 11, Yellow Sector Block 3.” Despite its strange, inhuman face and voice, it somehow had an air of sympathy the others were lacking.

  I sagged with relief. The idea that I’d looked at my own father’s body and not known ...

  “In my opinion,” said the bird, “we’re wasting our time interrogating this girl.”

  “She was flagged twice on our system,” said the bronze man. “Once as having a death in her patrol area.”

  “As did thousands of others,” said the bird.

  “And again as having a parental death in the crash,” the bronze man added. “She has also expressed dissent at the Leebrook Ashton bill. That’s a third flag against her.”

  A recording started playing. I was startled to hear Nathan’s voice. “It stinks, doesn’t it?”

  My own voice replied. “You’re almost eighteen too?”

  “My eighteenth birthday was two days ago.”

  “Do you work for Supervisor Fraser too?”

  There was a clicking sound as the recording ended.

  “The dissent was not expressed by her.” For once, the woman seemed to be on my side. “Jex, what is your opinion of the Leebrook Ashton bill?”

  “I was disappointed to have to wait another year before I could enter Game, but I understood the reasons for it,” I said. “Each year, the Game population and number of Game worlds grows, and so does the amount of maintenance work to be done in the real world.”

  What I desperately wanted to say at this point was that the billions of adults in Game should be taking on more of that work. I’d no complaint against the adults who’d recently entered Game and were still working. I just felt the ones who’d paid their lifetime subscriptions, and had been living a life of blissful idleness for decades or even centuries, should be contributing something as well.

  Given the vast number of lifetime subscription holders in Game, each of them would just need to work for a month or two every century to solve the issue of the increasing amount of maintenance to be done. Of course none of them had considered that answer. Rather than spend a few hours using a controlled droid to do simple jobs like riding patrol in the body stacks, they’d voted to dump the whole burden on kids like me.

  I knew that if I said any of those things I’d instantly be charged with the Avalon bombing, so I fought to keep my words and tone of voice totally neutral. “Once adults have paid their lifetime subscription to Game, they’ve no incentive to spend time working. The school leaving age was already down to ten years old, so it couldn’t be reduced any further. That meant the only remaining option was to raise the legal age where children become adult and can enter Game.”

  The bird had been looking off sideways again, but now its head snapped round to stare at me. I’d no idea why.

  The woman made an impatient noise. “You call this three flags against the girl? She was disappointed by the bill, as every child must have been. She failed to save a Gamer due to the appalling size of her patrol area, an administrative matter that must be addressed. Her father died in the server crash, but I can’t see how that could benefit her unless he had a fortune in Game credits to bequeath her.”

  The two Game Techs had been totally silent until now, observing my questioning with unreadable, impassive faces. Now the male Game Tech spoke in a heavily formal voice. “After her father paid his lifetime subscription, he had less than ten credits remaining in his account.”

  “Then we have nothing against her,” said the woman.

  She and the bronze man looked at the bird, and its feathers rippled as it shook its head.

  “The girl lives and works hundreds of miles from the bombing site. There’s no record of her leaving her home area recently or contacting anyone outside it. Release her.”

  I hadn’t realized the bird was the one in charge here, but it had just given an order, and everyone else was hastily nodding in acceptance, even the two Game Techs. That didn’t make any sense. A player couldn’t be giving orders to Game Techs. The insignia on Game Tech faces showed their hierarchy in a similar way to the bracelets of players, and these two only had bronze insignia, but I knew that silver and gold insignia were very rare indeed, reserved for the highest ranks of Game officials. Even if it was true that these two Game Techs had the lowest possible status, they would still be far more important than mere players.

  I was distracted by the door of the room opening. I eagerly turned to look at it, and when I glanced back all the faces had vanished.

  The bird had ordered my release, which seemed to mean I was free to go. I walked tentatively towards the door, and out into the corridor. I’d forgotten which way I’d been brought here, so I took several wrong turnings before I found my way back to the transport stop.

  I hit the buttons on the wall to summon a single-person pod, and one came rushing up along the rails within a minute. I climbed inside, set the pod guidance system to head for the accommodation block where I lived, and sank back into the seat. My mind was busily rerunning what had happened. The world crash, the screaming alarms, the dead man in the freezer unit, those hostile faces accusing me of murder, and the casual way the bronze man had told me that my father was dead.

  My first reaction to the news of my father’s death had been an avalanche of grief at his loss. That grief was still there, but I was guiltily aware that it was mixed with selfish fears about my own future.

  Nobody could enter Game unle
ss at least one Game world was willing to accept them as a resident, and what world would accept me now? Even Havoc would turn down someone who’d been questioned by Unilaw about a bombing that killed over eleven thousand people.

  I’d spent every minute of my life working towards a future that would never happen now. I’d never join the ranks of the immortal Gamers, forever young and beautiful, living their eternal existence of pleasure. The Game self of my dreams, Jex of the silver, feathered hair, had died unborn in the Avalon crash.

  I’d only the haziest idea of what would happen to me now. I might be able to hide the fact I was a Game reject until I was nineteen, but those around me would notice when I didn’t enter Game on my birthday. The suspicious whispers would start then, and gradually grow louder as the months went by and I still didn’t enter Game.

  Sooner or later those whispers would turn into open complaints that a Game reject was living and working with respectable kids. I’d be thrown out of my room, lose my job in the body stacks, and have no option other than to go and live among the other Game rejects in accommodation blocks that were scheduled for demolition. You had to have something very serious on your Game record for all worlds to refuse you as a resident. The rumours said that most Game rejects were involved in violent crimes, and their communities were savagely dangerous places.

  I covered my face with my hands, comforting myself with the darkness and the warmth of my own breath. We’d been taught to do that in nursery, to calm ourselves when we were frightened. It didn’t always work. It wasn’t working now.

  Chapter Three

  When I arrived back at my room, I saw I had less than fifteen minutes before I needed to go back to work. I snatched my phone from where it lay on my bed, set it to play one of the main Game news channels, and listened to a succession of hysterically angry voices while I showered and dressed in clean overalls.

  I didn’t learn any extra facts from all the outrage and fury. Everyone seemed to believe the same thing as the Unilaw officials who’d interrogated me, that some seventeen or eighteen-year-old kids, bitter about the Leebrook Ashton bill, had planted the bomb to get revenge on the players who’d selfishly voted to keep them working in the real world for an extra year.

  I had to admit that was the obvious answer, but making bombs must surely be incredibly difficult and dangerous. Would a group of kids really take so big a risk just to get revenge, or were they actually attempting to force the adults in Game to repeal the Leebrook Ashton bill and do more of the work themselves?

  I paused in the act of brushing my hair, and considered that possibility for a moment. I agreed that the system needed changing, but I was utterly opposed to violence as a way of changing it. I thought with fierce, protective anger of the man who’d died in my area of the body stacks. Over eleven thousand others had died the same way. My own father had died that way!

  Whatever their motives, the bomber or bombers needed to be caught and stopped from ever doing this again. I hoped that Unilaw would manage that, but the fact I’d been on their suspect list didn’t fill me with confidence.

  I was in danger of being late for work and fined half my pay for the day. That seemed a very minor worry now, but I hastily finished brushing my hair into order, and filled my drinking bottle. Since I wasn’t allowed to take my phone to work with me, I turned it off and tossed it onto my unmade bed.

  As I headed for the door, I automatically reached for the sandwich packs that should have been waiting ready on the shelf. It wasn’t until my hand grabbed thin air that I remembered I hadn’t bought any sandwich packs yesterday. I wouldn’t have time to call in at a food outlet to buy any on my way to work, and I’d rather go hungry than eat the overpriced, revolting sandwiches from the vending machines at transport stops. I snatched a couple of nutrient bars from my emergency store and sprinted out of the door.

  I ate my breakfast of one of the nutrient bars on the pod ride, washed down the dryness of it with a few mouthfuls of water from my bottle, and arrived at the body stacks’ transport stop closest to my current patrol position with two minutes to spare.

  I stepped out of the pod, and saw Delora was already waiting on the platform with the buggy. “All quiet?”

  “Finally.”

  She took my place in the pod, and leant back in the seat with a look of bliss on her face. I watched in envy as the pod whooshed off along the rails. Delora’s shift had been off-duty when the bombing and defrosts happened. She hadn’t been questioned by Unilaw, so she still had a future as an immortal player in Game, while I would live and die in the real world.

  I was dead on my feet from strain and exhaustion, but I climbed onto the buggy, wondering if it was possible to ride it in my sleep. “Jex checking in,” I told it, and trundled at standard buggy speed through the entrance to the body stacks.

  “You have new instructions,” the buggy announced.

  I groaned. If I could somehow stay awake, I might manage standard patrol, but nothing that required any thought.

  “Your patrol starting point has changed to row 37,500.”

  That meant backtracking to a point I’d already patrolled, but I was paid to do what the buggy said, not argue with it, so I set off to row 37,500. When I arrived there, I expected to start patrolling the rows of freezer units, but the buggy spoke again.

  “Await further orders.”

  I sat there dutifully awaiting further orders. After a minute or two, Nathan arrived on his buggy, and parked it next to mine. He looked as exhausted as I felt, and clearly hadn’t found time to shower or change his crumpled clothes from yesterday.

  “Await further orders,” his buggy told him.

  Nathan dismounted from his buggy, backed away a short distance, and beckoned to me. I hesitated a moment before wearily climbing off my own buggy and following him.

  “Did Unilaw pick you up for questioning too?” he whispered.

  Nathan seemed to think we were out of range of our eavesdropping buggies. I was less sure about that, but there was little point in worrying about recordings damaging my future when it had already been destroyed.

  “Yah. You had someone die then?”

  Nathan nodded. There was a short silence. I didn’t want to talk about the man who’d died in my patrol area, and I could tell Nathan felt the same way about whoever had died in his.

  “Did you get two Game Techs, a bronze man, a woman, and a bird?” I asked.

  He nodded again. “The man was from Automaton. The woman confused me for a while, then I worked out she was a bald harpy from Cliffs. I couldn’t make sense of the bird at all. I still can’t. There are several worlds where players have a bird form, but they all have faces that are far more human than that one.”

  “Whatever it was, the Game Techs seemed just to be present as observers, while the bird was in charge of the interrogations.”

  “I agree the Game Techs were there purely as observers,” said Nathan, “they didn’t say a word during my interrogation, but the bird wasn’t in charge of anything. The bird, the man, and the woman all wore Unilaw rank badges on their collars, and those showed the woman was a Unilaw Area Commander, while the bird and the man were only Senior Detectives.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know anything about Unilaw ranks, I just know that the bird was the one who decided my interrogation was over. From the way the others instantly accepted the decision, the bird was definitely in charge.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” said Nathan. “If the bird was more important than an Area Commander, why was it wearing the rank badge of a Senior Detective?”

  I sighed. “I’ve no idea, but there’s no point in us arguing over who was in charge of interrogating us. All that matters is the interrogations happened. Our Game records will show that we were picked up by Unilaw and questioned about the bombing of the Avalon server.”

  I dragged my fingers through my hair. I’d accepted the full extent of the disaster now. The Avalon world crash had robbed me of both my father and my futur
e. My mother would react to a situation like this by pretending it hadn’t happened, but I preferred to face up to my problems. I did that now, forcing myself to say the grim words that summed up the utter destruction of all my hopes and plans.

  “We’re both Game rejects now.”

  There was silence for a few seconds before Nathan spoke with a forced optimism. “Perhaps it won’t be that bad.”

  “It’s exactly that bad, Nathan,” I said, with the calmness of despair. “No Game world is going to accept either of us.”

  “We can’t apply to enter Game until we’re nineteen now,” said Nathan. “Unilaw will have caught the real bomber by then. We’ll be able to forget all about the Avalon bombing and carry on with our lives.”

  I winced at his words. “I’ll never be able to forget the bombing, Nathan. I was told during my questioning that my father was on Avalon when it crashed. He died during emergency defrost.”

  Nathan looked appalled. “I’m terribly sorry to hear that.”

  I couldn’t bear to talk about my father any longer, so I hastily changed the subject. “I wouldn’t trust Unilaw to catch a mouse, let alone a bomber, but even if they do it won’t help us very much. I was listening to some players talking on a Game news channel a few minutes ago. They’re utterly irrational with anger about the bombing, and anger like that won’t fade in decades or even centuries.”

  I paused. “Whether the real bomber has been caught or not, the Admission Committees for every Game world will still take one look at the questioning on our records, suspect we were secretly involved as accomplices, and block our applications.”

  Nathan stared bleakly down at the floor. “That’s not fair.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’d learnt as a small child in a dormitory that life wasn’t fair. Those who caused trouble often escaped punishment, while their innocent victims got blamed. I’d learnt the lesson again as a medical cadet, when an instructor dropped me from the training programme to cover up her own mistake. The same thing was happening yet again. Whether the bomber was caught or not, the innocent kids working in the body stacks would suffer because of his or her actions.