Excerpt: First Person Shooter

Styx trotted up Lafferty Street, took the steps to the front door of Stohnz’s apartment building two at a time and slapped the floor-level brass button with a paw. The converted flap – a somewhat larger version of the one Styx had fitted when he’d moved into the block four years earlier – opened with a sharp click and he ambled through into the hallway beyond.

Stohnz’s apartment was on the second floor and, as was usual when the young codestitcher was out, the door was ajar. Looks like I’m waiting, then, Styx thought. Tapping a section of skirting board to the right of the doorway to deactivate the security system, he squeezed in through the open door and into the living room.

The apartment had always amused Styx. The outwardly normal front door opened onto a vast white-walled room that would have been absurd anywhere other than in the Wire. Glossy, beech-effect laminate flooring stretched away for the better part of thirty metres both in front and to Styx’s left, very little of it covered by furniture: two black leather armchairs, a sofa in the same style and a coffee table that just screamed flat-pack were about the only nods in the direction of habitation, with the exception of a small desk and chair positioned beneath the room’s huge bay window, where Stohnz had set up his terminal. The walls were almost uniformly bare plaster, two replica pop art canvases the only thing breaking up the otherwise unrelenting sea of white. It was like being in a minimalist TARDIS.

A very untidy minimalist TADRIS, Styx thought as he picked his way through the clutter of Wireware and design equipment that was liberally scattered around the room. The coffee table was all but invisible under the mess of wires, circuit boards and other paraphernalia that Stohnz spent most of his free time tinkering with – so much so that a fair amount of junk appeared to have spilled over onto the floor around it. Sitting proudly atop the table, its nauseatingly twee little face stuck in an expression of mind-melting cheerfulness, was the dog drone. Styx walked up to the table, the urge to launch himself at the thing growing with each step. That wouldn’t have been fair, though. Harry had been right: as much as he might hate it, Styx knew that if he was ever going to get free of the drones he would have to carry on with Stohnz’s programme of upgrades – and that would mean spending at least a while in drones similar to this while Stohnz rebuilt his code pattern.

I just wish he wouldn’t make the damn things so cute, he thought. It’s one thing having to put up with being stuck in a drone, but he could at least leave me a little dignity.

Sighing, he turned away from the table and headed for Stohnz’s games room. Little more than a cramped little storeroom, a hidey-hole for all the junk Stohnz had managed to accumulate since joining the Deep Blue gaming community, it really couldn’t have been further removed from the living room’s understated spaciousness if it tried. The only thing the two spaces had in common was the clutter. For such a small space, Stohnz had managed to cram it with an absolute ton of gaming gear: no fewer than five RPG suits hung on hooks along one wall – “combat EVs,” Stohnz had called them, though Styx couldn’t remember what the acronym stood for. A rack on the wall opposite held an assortment of weapons, from pistols, rifles and submachine guns to swords, knives and even a couple of multi-bladed implements that Styx couldn’t remember the name of but looked like they had been designed to disembowel an entire platoon simultaneously. Each one – and this part of Stohnz’s enthusiastic explanation Styx could remember – was designed for a specific type of game, and while they might have looked vicious, in actuality none of them could do much damage.

Within the Wire gaming fraternity, the weapons were known as taggers. While practically indistinguishable from regular weapons, the edge of each blade and the projectiles in each gun were actually made up of tiny code bundles – “tags” – that activated when blade or bullet connected with another code pattern. The tag triggered a pre-programmed response from the player’s Wire unit, which translated it into a very realistic simulacrum of a real injury. Of course, Stohnz had explained, it hadn’t always been so sophisticated. In the “old days” – which, from what Styx had been able to gather, meant a couple of years ago – a tag would merely result in the affected area of the player’s RPG suit hardening, destabilising or becoming immobile depending on the severity of the hit. The fact that players could now inflict much more realistic injuries on their opponents was progress, apparently. Outside the game zones, the weapons were entirely harmless – a point Stohnz had delighted in proving by “shooting” Styx with one of his pistols. He’d seemed genuinely surprised by the resulting tide of abuse.