Feed from the door sensors to her neunonics confirmed this. Outside, two of the powerful automatons with the enlarged smiling face of the Absolute, pre-ascension, were waiting at her door. The grin on their massive faces looked more obscene and frightening to her now than ever before.
The knock came again. Her mind raced. What had she done? Had Scoular managed to frame her? A bold and clever move if he had, but it had better be watertight or else she would destroy him. Then she thought back to her feeling of disgust, of violation from having the Absolute see inside her mind. She had committed treason. She had gone from being a player to being a loser. The thoughts had come unbidden! It was so unfair.
‘What?’ Dracup sat up, quickly going from rudely woken to completely alert. He turned to look at her. There was no fear in his expression; instead there was a questioning look on his face. It was just short of accusation.
The knock came again. They never knocked more than three times. Now they would override the apartment’s security. The aperture opened. Zabilla’s neunonics told her that Dracup had sent the command. She couldn’t shake the feeling of teeth closing in around her.
The two heavily armoured automatons stepped into the apartment, looking up at the bed. They looked like walking statues, their faces twisted, agonised somehow, sinisterly clownish parodies of the pre-ascension Absolute.
‘Can I help you?’ Dracup asked.
Zabilla wondered when he had become assertive. She controlled the fear. She put on her Game face, quite literally. ‘What do you want and why are you disturbing me at this hour?’ she demanded.
Dracup turned to look at her, raising an eyebrow. On the other hand it was the question of a completely innocent person.
Neither of the heads said anything. Zabilla had pulled her nano-screen in as the heads expanded theirs. There was sparring at a nano-level as their nanites interrogated hers and Dracup’s.
‘What just happened?’ the voice, modulated for psychological impact, asked. She wasn’t sure which of them had spoken.
‘Explain yourself,’ she told the heads.
‘For a moment there was something not of the Game in here,’ the voice answered. She felt coldness creeping through her. The pinprick. The strange thing was that she thought she had heard something that she had never heard before from a head. It sounded like it was unsure of itself.
‘Well, have you found anything?’ she asked.
‘Why were you reviewing your physiological readings and security systems?’ the voice asked, suspicious now. Dracup turned to look at her. He looked suspicious as well.
‘I thought I felt something. A pinprick, but it was nothing, a dream or some half-waking sensation, nothing more. What made you think there was something else here?’
‘It came from the Absolute,’ the voice said.
So the Absolute had been monitoring her as she slept. Again the cold clammy feeling of violation rose inside her. She tried to force it down. Both the heads seemed to be staring at her with the dead black holes in their mask-like faces where eyes should have been.
‘Perhaps the Absolute only felt what I felt?’ she said.
‘Have you found anything?’ Dracup asked impatiently.
‘No,’ the voice answered.
‘Will you be taking any further action?’
There was a pause.
‘Not at the moment.’
The heads turned and left the apartment, the aperture door shutting behind them. Dracup gave her that questioning look again. She wanted to talk to him, to hold him, to take comfort from him, but this would only leave her more vulnerable, and her paranoia, one of the most important qualities of the professional player, would not allow her to show that weakness.
The massive chamber was arched like a Seeder cathedral. The wood had been grown into detailed ornamental patterns. Parts of it were friezes showing the history and mythology of the Game and the Absolute. It showed the Absolute’s journey from a world of toil to the world of leisure and pleasure that was the Game. In which you didn’t have to work unless you chose to. All you had to do was play the most involving game that had ever been created.
The hall had been grown out of the main trunk, its back wall a series of stained-glass windows. Sun shone through, illuminating the dust motes and larger nanite clusters in the air. Zabilla stood next to Dracup, her installation, her gift, in front of her in a covered glass box about the size of a large cupboard. Scoular was to her right, with Carinne and a similar covered box in front of him. He didn’t look confident; in fact, he looked ill.
Zabilla recognised most of the crowd. They were the top players from the arcology within the fields of genetics, biology and biophysics, as well as a number of art critics.
Shallow stairs led to a raised area in front of the stained-glass windows. On that platform stood the avatar, an automaton with an idealised body of brass complete with suitably intimidating phallus. Its face was a mask of beaten platinum and gold. The Absolute as a pre-Loss God. The sun made the polished metal gleam and sparkle to the point where it was difficult to look directly at the automaton. It was like a genuine religious experience, Zabilla thought. All her doubts of last night were forgotten. The avatars were direct representatives of the Absolute, and this one was here to judge the final part of the audition.
The avatar’s musical tones were still ringing around the hall from its opening address. There had been polite applause, then all eyes turned to Scoular, who was sweating heavily, and Zabilla. She tried to suppress her awe as the avatar turned its imperious gaze on them. She bowed slightly and held out a hand towards Scoular. It would, of course, appear like the gracious gesture of someone allowing their opponent to go first. It was not; it was calculated. She wanted the impact of going last. Scoular probably would have done the same thing, but he looked too sweaty, sick and nervous. When he realised what she’d done, he glared at her.
With as much of a flourish as he could manage, Scoular tore off the sheet covering the glass box. The glass box then disintegrated in front of their eyes, allowing a better look at its contents.
Lying in a nutrient bath were what looked like the torsos of a male and female human, though sex was difficult to tell because they were completely fused together. The semi-human chimerical organism almost rippled against itself in never-ending, distinctly sexual gyrations. Pleasure seemed to be written in a series of artistic blushes on its skin.
There was a degree of art to it, Zabilla had to admit, particularly the blushes and the suggestion of different genders, but at the end of the day it was little more than a pleasure generator. She wasn’t even annoyed that Scoular had upped its output by using heightened nerve endings gained from his espionage directed at her own research.
There was hushed conversation among the crowd. Zabilla felt her contempt for them. Nobody wanted to be the first to compliment or criticise; they wanted to see what others would do first. They lacked boldness, which was why they would never be truly great players.
She looked down as if politely trying to hide a smile. Dracup was less subtle. She gave them time to take in Scoular’s work. He was looking sicker by the moment, particularly as applause seemed less than forthcoming.
Finally, after she felt expectations had been raised enough, she nodded to Dracup, who without a flourish removed the sheet as Zabilla’s glass box began to disintegrate.