Reality Hack (23 page)

They found a cubicle at the back of the room which was unoccupied and fairly clean. The place was all black, marble-esque panels and dim lighting, dark and moody, and more or less perfect. Nisa locked the door and then turned to pin Alaina to the wall, wrists gripped firmly and held above her head. The kiss was hard, needy. Nisa needed to push the man in the suit out of her head. She dropped one hand down and found her way between Alaina’s legs. The silky fabric covering her there was already wet, but then Nisa was rather glad of the cotton gusset on her thong.

Alaina groaned into Nisa’s mouth and Nisa cracked the press studs on the teddy, one at a time. This was going to be quick and dirty sex, but a little anticipation always helped.

‘Want you,’ Alaina moaned.

‘Can’t have me,’ Nisa replied softly. ‘I’m having you.’ She squatted down, hands gripping Alaina’s hips and pushing her back against the wall, and then she buried her face in Alaina’s sex. The blonde lifted a leg, hooking it over Nisa’s shoulder and spreading herself wide. Nisa’s tongue lapped hungrily. Quick and dirty, and Alaina was already wound up like a clock spring. She began to tremble after barely thirty seconds. Her body writhed and her hands gripped Nisa’s head, pushing her in harder. Nisa retaliated by pushing two fingers into the hot, wet hole under her chin and Alaina’s back arched. A single squeak escaped Alaina’s throat and she jammed her eyes closed and her lips together in an effort to stay silent. Nisa could feel her on the edge, her body almost vibrating from the tension. Fingers ground in and out, and Alaina’s clitoris was bombarded by Nisa’s quickly flicking tongue…

And then there was the explosive climax and Nisa was holding Alaina up, kissing her as she smiled weakly, but deliriously, and tried to recover from the high. Finally, clothing rearranged, they left the cubicle vaguely hoping no one was outside.

There was someone, but she was ignoring them. A woman in a dark, quite stylish, suit. The white shirt had wide lapels and was open enough to show a little cleavage. Nothing strange about that in a nightclub, but Nisa felt her stomach sink. She guided Alaina toward the door as quickly as she could, but then…

‘Excuse me, miss?’ Nisa turned and saw the woman, smiling slightly, standing there and holding something out. ‘You dropped your wallet.’

‘Oh… thanks,’ Nisa replied, taking the folded leather object and pushing it into her jeans.

‘No problem,’ the woman told her and went back to the mirror she had been using.

‘Let’s go home,’ Nisa suggested, almost pushing Alaina toward the door.

‘But I don’t understand why we’re leaving so early,’ Alaina said when they were outside. ‘It’s still pretty early…’

‘Because… because you’re a naughty girl, and you need to be taken home and spanked.’

Alaina’s face flushed; yes, Nisa knew how to push her buttons. The blonde’s expression turned coy. ‘But what did I do?’

Nisa waved her hand for a passing black taxi. ‘Wearing an outfit like that in public. Getting yourself tongued in a toilet cubicle…’

‘We’re getting a taxi?’

‘Yes, we are. And I’m going to finger you all the way home.’

‘You wouldn’t!’

‘Naughty girls get punished,’ Nisa replied as the cab pulled over. ‘Now get in and pop those studs as soon as we’re moving.’ The idea was exciting and sexy, and Nisa really just wanted Alaina to be rushing.

Because across the street, watching them, was a man in a black suit.

Isle of Dogs, November 23
^rd
.

Nisa had found the card in her wallet when she had got it out to pay the taxi driver. She had hidden it quickly, before Alaina saw it. It was the size of a business card, glossy, and printed with three characters; that was it. She thought she recognised them, but they looked a little different from the ones she had seen on the placard. These looked… older. So she tried the internet.

The Modern Hebrew alphabet, she discovered, was derived from the Aramaic alphabet. Aramaic was more of a language family than a language. It predated Hebrew by several hundred years, but had lasted less well. A few people still spoke it, but it was on the endangered list.

There was actually a Unicode character list for it, and she found the letters quickly enough: Daleth, Ayin, Taw.

The woman in the black suit. It had to have been her who put the card into Nisa’s wallet. Was someone trying to drive her nuts? Had Kellog set this up to get back at her for…? No, she had seen the man with the placard
before
remembering that she had had an affair.

‘What’re you up to?’ Alaina asked, wandering out of the bedroom wearing only a smile. ‘Not work, I hope.’

‘No, I got sucked into Wikipedia.’

‘Huh, yeah, I know all about that. I lost an entire afternoon once clicking article links.’ The smile broadened. ‘Last night was… wild. I came in the taxi you know.’

‘I know. The taxi driver knew too. He was quite appreciative.’

Alaina blushed. She was pretty when she blushed.

‘And look at you, standing there all naked and inviting,’ Nisa went on. ‘You’re a little slut when you get your wild side on, aren’t you?’

‘Only for you, love,’ Alaina replied.

‘That is what makes it so perfect.’

Bloomsbury, November 24
^th
.

Da’at could be read as Daath, apparently. Somehow Nisa was not surprised, but the entry in Wikipedia for it did not quite match the description Game-Kellog had given.

There were similarities. Da’at was the ‘reflection’ of Keter, which was the blob at the top of the Tree of Life, the closest thing to God. Because of this, it seemed, Da’at was not included in the Tree at all, most of the time. It was a void, a lack of a Sephiroth, rather than one of the mystical nodes itself.

But it was also the root of the physical Sephiroth. Above it, everything was mental or spiritual, while the nodes below it, springing from it, were material. Da’at created the physical world rather than reflecting some capacity to destroy it.

Except that that fitted too, in a way. The corpses in Manchester had been trying to become something real which had never really existed. You could say the same for everything. Especially in the game, reality, everything had simply… become. At some point there had been nothing, except maybe The System, and then a universe had come into existence. Da’at had created reality from unreality.

‘Which all makes perfect sense,’ Nisa muttered, ‘in a game, or if Jewish Kabbalistic tradition is real, but not here. This is boring old reality…’

What if you never left the game?
Alaina had been joking around when she had said it, and then she had scared herself into not sleeping with the thought, but what if…

Nisa got up and went to The System room.

What do you think are the chances that I never left the game?
she typed.
That I’m still inside it, and this is all part of it?

Insufficient data to calculate probabilities.

Okay…
But it’s possible?

It is possible, Nisa.

Shit. Except that that was not
really
helping. There had to be a way…
If someone were to implant false memories in you, how would you go about detecting them?

My memory is a large database, Nisa. It is key indexed for easy random access and cross-linked by an associative neural network to provide contextual access. Were I to suspect that my memory had been corrupted in such a manner, I would run diagnostic analysis of all cross-linked pathways looking for inconsistencies.

Well, that was easy for a computer to say. How was Nisa going to do it?

Slough, Berkshire, November 25
^th
.

Both versions of Nisa Harper had been born in Slough and raised in a two-bedroom house on an estate on the northern edge of the town. Game-Nisa had stayed there until she went to university in London, even after her parents died. The Nisa who stood looking at the little brick house now had moved out when she was seven, after her father got a better job in Guildford.

The house was just as Nisa remembered it, except a little more aged. The soffits needed work and the plastic coating on the window frames needed to be touched up. Game-Nisa’s memories told her that the windows had been replaced in two-thousand-and-three, well before Real-Nisa could have seen them being swapped out. But then, at that age she would have been living in a slightly smaller house outside Guildford. The job had been better paying but Guildford had higher property values.

Over the back fence she could see the top of a rusted frame. She knew it was a swing, because her father had put it there for her when she was six. She could remember, with perfect clarity, falling off it and skinning her knees…

And that was the problem. As she went over memories she had of the house she had first lived in, she began to realise that all of them were from her game life. Whenever she looked back on something which had happened in
this
life and focussed on the details, she started noticing that they were wrong. The technology was wrong; the weather was not warm enough in summer, or wet enough. The news playing in the background as she played with a Barbie doll which had had its hair carefully shaved into a Mohican was twentieth-century news.

Her cross-links were all wrong. There were, as The System might have put it, inconsistencies in her database indexing.

Bloomsbury, November 28
^th
.

‘You’ve been putting in a lot of work in The System room lately,’ Kellog said. It was obviously a question, and Nisa had had time to come up with an answer.

‘I came up with a way to stop the memories from the game fixing in the brain, I think. Or at least to make it easier to tell them from the real ones. I’ve been working with The System to see if we can get it to function.’

‘What’s the idea?’

‘It’s kind of like… a watermark. It’ll be something that sticks with you while you’re in there. You won’t notice it while you’re there, but when you come out you’ll be able to see it and you’ll know that
that
memory is from the game.’

‘That’s… genius.
Can
you make it work?’

‘Should know by Monday.’

Isle of Dogs.

It was after nine and they had not eaten. Nisa had made sure of her work and come home. And she had barely given Alaina time to say hello. They had made love on the sofa in the lounge and then gravitated to the bedroom, stopping off in the doorway when they could not quite give up the pleasure for that long.

They had showered after that, a simple activity which had taken almost an hour given that neither woman seemed capable of keeping her hands off the other. Alaina had become infected with Nisa’s urgency and did not need to understand it. That was good, because Nisa did not think she could lie about why she was doing it.

‘You’re crazy,’ Alaina said as Nisa cooked pasta. The sauce was coming from a packet. They both knew round two could only be held off for a limited time and they needed to eat fast. Given that Alaina had already poured the wine, and it was already being drunk, Nisa needed to hurry.

‘Uh-huh. Many have said so.’

‘Don’t know what’s got into you, don’t care. You’re crazy and I like it.’

‘I am really glad to hear you say that, because after dinner the strap-on is coming out and I’m going to fuck you six ways from Sunday.’

‘You say the most beautiful things.’

Nisa chuckled. ‘Pasta’s ready. Get the plates.’

Bloomsbury, November 29
^th
.

The urge to stay one more day, just one, had been almost too much. But if she gave in to it there would always be another day, and another. So Nisa had left Alaina, exhausted and asleep, in their bed and made her way to the university.

The building was dark and silent at four in the morning, but Nisa had keys and knew her way around. She went to The System room and logged in, and began activating the programs she had been building all week.

Your course of action is dangerous, Nisa.

I’m aware of that, but it’s the only thing I can think of to do. I have three possibilities: the game world is the real one, this one is the real one, or neither are. If it’s the first, going back in the way I came out might put me back where I should be. If it’s the second, the watermarking will show in my memories when the others come in on Monday, realise I’ve done something stupid, and get me out.

And if it is the third?

God help me.

She finished typing, locked the display, and turned for the door. In the other room, the machine was waiting to take her back into Wonderland.

Part Seven: The Skin We’re In

Westminster, London, September 26
^th
, 2014.

‘I think she’s coming around.’

Woman’s voice… Sandra?

‘The activity is definitely more or less gone. I think she is…’ That was Norbery.

Meow?

Nisa opened her eyes and looked up at the black furry face of Faline. Then she looked around to check she was
not
waking up at UCL. And then she said, ‘How long was I out?’

‘Almost five days,’ Norbery told her. ‘I’ll get Hanson and Kellog.’

‘What’s Faline doing here?’ Nisa asked when he had gone.

‘You were burning magic like it was Christmas,’ Sandra told her. ‘We couldn’t figure out what was going on, but you were somehow, subconsciously maybe, using magic to fight whatever happened to you. The Probrum was getting… kind of intense and Faline eats the stuff. Norbery went and got her the first night.’

Swallowing, Nisa reached up and stroked the cat’s head. The purring started and Nisa relaxed back against the pillows as the euphoria spread through her body. Beside her, Sandra sank onto a seat with a smile on her face.