Caitlin felt like she had bled onto the page today. Sometimes it just wouldn’t come, but today it had been pure stream of consciousness. Poetry wasn’t cool or interesting to most people any more. Caitlin felt it was difficult to do well and with relevance to the modern world, but today line after line had come out of the platinum-nib fountain pen given to her by proud parents and onto the yellow legal pads. She felt like she was talking to something else, listening to the beat of the city or the world, channelling the words. Normally she hated her work immediately after she’d written it. Sometimes it was hard not to tear it all up and burst into tears, but not today. Today she even took pleasure from the shape of the words on the page, wishing she could publish them in her handwriting rather than through some soulless word-processing package. She was the biggest critic of her work. If she liked it then she knew it was good.
The inspiration had wiped her. The invitation to go out had been half welcomed and half not. She could do with leaving her flat after such an intense day, seeing some actual people, but she felt drained. The answer had been obvious, a little chemical pick-me-up. After all, she was following a trail blazed by hedonists of all stripes.
Red-haired and unconventionally attractive, a little too tall for the more insecure male, Caitlin didn’t stop a room when she walked in, but some attention was inevitable. Single, she was keeping an eye open, but she didn’t panic when she was on her own, like some of her friends. Tonight she just wanted to dance but she needed some fuel.
It was something new. Caitlin was initially suspicious as it looked like an acid tab with a dot of red on it. The girl dealing in the ultraviolet-lit toilets had assured her that although it provided good visuals, it was all about the dancing. Caitlin had let herself be talked into it.
Dancing. Moving to beat and bass. Trying to find that perfect moment. The modern shamanic experience. The lights above her becoming stars, light refracting through the dry ice becoming glowing gaseous nebula. Dancing on the edge of a spinning spiral galaxy. Joy. This was why she did it. This was the moment. To transcend the club. The music receding. She felt something wet under her eye, coming from her ear. She tasted copper in her mouth. She touched her face. Her fingers came away wet. She looked at the other dancers. They were covered head to foot in blood. Above her, space started to seethe like angry bacteria consuming everything.
There wasn’t even time to scream.
Du Bois lay on the bed in his room in Fort Southwick. He liked the room. It was another faceless barracks room. He had felt at home in places like this since he had lived in his first preceptory. His room was part of the officers’ quarters for the contingent of Royal Marines who guarded the facility.
Fort Southwick was one of the grand Victorian forts built on Portsdown Hill at the behest of Prime Minister Lord Palmerston for an invasion that had never come. The huge, squat, red-brick edifice had been used for Operation Overlord during the Second World War, as a NATO communications centre during the cold war and was now part of the Admiralty Research Establishment.
He had the information sent to his phone. He could have had the information downloaded straight into his brain, but he preferred to watch and read and then assign data to his augmented memory. He received the information shortly after he had used his phone’s systems to interrogate the control nanites he had found in Arbogast’s blood.
He hadn’t understood some of the words. Or rather he had understood them but struggled to make sense of how they fitted together. He had learned new terms like RLK, which apparently meant real-life kill. He understood those who killed for belief, profit and pleasure. He didn’t understand insanity, but appreciated it as a motivation. What he didn’t understand was how humanity had become so jaded. Perhaps they deserved their inevitable destruction. He had never felt so old, so divorced from everyone around him, so out of his time.
They were called the DAYP clan. This stood for Do As You Please. They had taken their name from Carroll. Du Bois was of the opinion they should give it back. He understood their criminality. What he couldn’t understand was how it connected to their games. As if it was all part of a computer simulation and they could do what they wanted to whoever they wanted. As if none of it was real and therefore none of it mattered. How had they become so divorced from reality?
They had started life as an elitist gaming clan. Something called an uberguild, apparently. It had taken a while for du Bois to realise that the weapons they were dealing were effectively electronic game pieces for computer games and not real weapons. Even longer to realise that people would pay for these virtual weapons and for high-level characters. This was how the fledgling DAYP had financed themselves. Virtual weapons dealing and organised league game E-sports, where they were known for domination and bullying.
Their first connection to real-world criminality was with a Korean game gang that they contracted out debt collection to. This was also their first connection to offline PKs – player kills.
According to Control, the DAYP recruited from top-echelon game nerds. The super-intelligent, many of them dropouts from top universities. They were recruited online after the DAYP used gameplay to psychometrically measure them, targeting excluded, disaffected sociopaths capable of doing the sort of things that would be required of them. Recently their games had become more sophisticated and capable of influencing people towards such behaviour.
It would almost be funny, except that through dealing in experimental software, hacking, upmarket games discovered via industrial espionage and experimental hardware, the DAYP had come across S-tech and L-tech. Worse, they had learned how to utilise it.
Then the DAYP started seriously hunting for it. They searched the most accurate conspiracy sites, the darkest, dangerous and often most secure parts of the web, looking for info on the tech. Each time they found it, they attempted to replicate it, augment themselves and their technology and then sell it. They were close to controlling the black market in S- and L-tech.
Their dominance of this black market had required a degree of ruthlessness. Initially, influenced by a type of computer game called a first-person shooter, they had used external contractors to do their dirty work and secure the tech for themselves. These contractors were normally security companies who used ex-special forces personnel. However, with access to such a high level of technology, they had started to augment themselves and do their own dirty work with violent enthusiasm.
They were implicated in thefts, murders, rape, slavery and numerous other crimes. Du Bois had seen men given licence to do what they wanted before, but they had not been given the power of near-gods on earth. The DAYP were thought to be based in America, though it seemed that some of them at least were operating in Portsmouth and interested in Natalie Luckwicke.
Du Bois was angry that he had not been briefed on them. Control had told him that his direct experience had made him more useful in dealing with the City of Brass and agents of the Eggshell, though more and more du Bois was starting to believe that the Eggshell was a myth. If they had ever existed they were long gone. It hadn’t been so long ago that the Circle would have never allowed such parasites to get their hands on S- and L-tech. He wished that he had been allowed to deal with these spoilt, evil child fantasists a long time ago.
He got up, poured himself a healthy measure of Scotch and moved to the window. He leaned against the frame, his face lit up by the harsh sodium lights that illuminated the wet concrete and brick of the base. He could see one of the later buildings that had been added to the military facility. Despite being a typically ugly utilitarian design, there was something of the art deco about it. It reminded him of a film he had seen many years ago about a failed utopia. This thought made him smile humourlessly. Beyond that he could see the lights of the city.