So Nick’s idea of borrowing Finn’s laptop hadn’t been so silly. ‘How did the graffiti operation go?’
‘Oh. Good, if you can call it that.’ The mug Victor put on the table for Nick was shaped like a kraken obligingly clasping two of its tentacles to form a handle. ‘I found the note, went to the address, sprayed and didn’t get caught.’
Victor cleared a few computer magazines out of the way and took out a photo: the wall of a building with the words ‘He who steals our dreams puts us to death’ written on it in expert blue-black letters.
‘A quote from Confucius,’ Victor explained. ‘The person who programmed Erebos is very fond of quotes.’
Nick must have looked confused, because Victor grinned. ‘Get used to the idea that Erebos didn’t invent itself. Somebody out there wrote a source code, just like with any other program. Except that this one is a programming masterpiece. An incredibly brilliant thing.’
Nick could have sworn that Victor’s eyes were damp.
‘Do you know how many years people have been trying to write a program that speaks and thinks like a person? Can you imagine what this development is worth? Millions, Nick! Billions. But the game is being served up to us gratis, like something you find in a box of cereal. Why?’
Nick had never looked at it from that angle before. From the beginning the game had always felt as if he was relating to a living being; he’d never thought about its financial value.
‘Because . . . it’s trying to accomplish a goal?’ he grasped Victor’s question, and was rewarded with a radiant look.
‘Exactly! It’s a tool, the most expensive, ingenious tool in the world. I metaphorically bow down before its creator in humility and worship.’ He sipped his tea. ‘Someone who can pull off something like this doesn’t make random allusions. So what is he saying to us – or rather to the unknown garage owner? “He who steals our dreams puts us to death.”’
‘That he wants to kill him? Or that the other person is threatening him with death?’
‘Exactly. It sounds like a warning to me. At any rate it’s not just some random quote, and neither was it some random address.’
Victor was crumbling a biscuit, while Nick was almost bursting with impatience. ‘And? Who lives there?’
‘Well, that’s not at all thrilling, unfortunately. An accountant, divorced, no children, middle management in a company that exports food. It’s hard to imagine anything more run-of-the-mill. But of course he could be a complete monster in private.’
An accountant. That really wasn’t exciting.
‘Did you find any of the matching pieces of the puzzle?’ Victor asked.
‘I’m afraid not. I only found one ex-gamer who was willing to talk.’ Nick reported on Darleen’s orders – the computer theft, the copied documents and the SIM card. Victor made a note of it all. ‘Who knows – one day things may fall into place,’ he said. ‘Let’s turn our attention to the allusions that are hidden in the game. Maybe they will tell us more. How good are you at Art History?’
Uh-oh. Nick shook his head. ‘Sorry, you’ve got the wrong guy.’
‘Okay, fine. So we’ll start with ornithology. What does Ortolan mean to you?’
‘That’s the enemy the Erebos players are fighting,’ Nick said, happy that he finally knew an answer.
‘Very true.’ Victor twirled his moustache between his fingers; he looked like a magician who was about to conjure a rabbit out of his hat. ‘May I show you a picture of Ortolan?’
There was a picture? ‘Sure, I’d like to see it,’ Nick said.
Victor fetched another laptop from next door. ‘This one is completely Erebos-free. That means we can use it to move around on the internet without the program noticing and giving us a rap on the knuckles.’ He opened the lid. ‘Okay, now search for Ortolan,’ he said.
Nick entered the word in Google. The first hit took him to Wikipedia, and he clicked on the link.
‘Well that’s pretty stupid,’ he declared.
Ortolan was simply a different name for the garden bunting, a songbird long considered a delicacy in France and Italy.
‘It’s extremely confusing, hmm?’ Victor chuckled. ‘And unfortunately I haven’t found out what our Mr Programmer is trying to tell us. But I haven’t the slightest doubt that he wants to tell us something. I’ve discovered something else, too; I’m positive that you’ll like it.’ Victor clapped his hands like a child in front of his birthday cake, put his skull-ringed fingers on the keyboard, and then changed his mind again. ‘No, first I want to ask you something. Were you at any of these sinister Arena fights? There’s one on tomorrow night, and all the heroes are practically wetting their chainmail pants with excitement.’
Nick grinned. ‘Yeah, I took part in one Arena fight. Unfortunately I wasn’t around for the second. It’s pretty exciting. You’ll see.’
‘Excellent. And I suppose you have to register for them, hmm? With whom, pray tell?’
There was no question about it – Victor loved puzzles.
‘The second time it was right in the Arena, with the master of ceremonies. The first time it was with some soldier in Atropos’s Tavern.’
Victor’s grin gave way to an expression of comic disbelief. ‘Did you say Atropos?’
‘Yes. So?’
‘Where will it all end?’ Victor cried in feigned despair. ‘Do children learn nothing at all in school these days? At least tell me whether you noticed anything unusual about this master of ceremonies.’
‘He didn’t fit in with the game. He didn’t look like the other figures; he was . . . wrong, somehow. I always called him “big Goggle-Eyes”.’
Victor was most amused. ‘Terrific – very appropriate. But didn’t Goggle-Eyes remind you of anything?’ He opened his own eyes wide and tried to imitate the facial expression.
‘No. Sorry.’
‘Look at this.’
Victor typed a URL into the browser, and the home page of the Vatican Museum opened. Two more clicks, then he turned the laptop round so Nick could see the screen better.
‘There’s your Goggle-Eyes. Painted by Michelangelo himself.’
It was a few moments before Nick could make head or tail of it. What Victor was showing him was a gigantic painting teeming with hundreds of figures. Jesus and Mary were in the middle, and all around them half-naked people sat or stood on various clouds. Further down a couple of angels were blowing their trumpets, and other angels were pulling people from the ground towards heaven. At the bottom edge there were figures writhing in the mud, and then, to the right of the centre . . . there he was. The master of ceremonies, exactly as Nick knew him from Erebos. Naked except for the loincloth, with the strange tufts of hair on his head and his long stick, which he was swinging as if he wanted to hit the people who sat in his boat.
‘Yes, that’s him,’ Nick yelled excitedly.
‘And do you know his name too?’
‘No.’
Victor sat up straight and put on a solemn face.
‘That’s Charon. The ferryman, who, in Greek mythology, carries the dead in his boat over the river Styx to the realm of death.’
Nick took a closer look at the picture and couldn’t help shivering. Here Charon seemed to be beating the dead across the river.
‘Your Goggle-Eyes’s parents probably also deserve a mention: Charon is the son of Nyx, the goddess of the night . . . and of Erebos.’
Nick’s head was spinning. ‘And what does it all mean?’
‘Hard to say. But perhaps we’ll get warmer if we study the title of Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Take a look!’ He pointed the cursor at the words underneath the photo.
Michelangelo Buonarotti
The Last Judgement
Sistine Chapel
‘At the Last Judgement God separates the righteous from the damned,’ said Victor. ‘It’s not a pretty sight. And I wonder whether the game isn’t doing something similar. Making a selection. Why else would it be so ruthless about eliminatin
g everyone who fails at their tasks?’
‘Isn’t that a bit crazy?’
With a few clicks Victor enlarged the picture to the point where they could see Charon’s facial features in detail. ‘Crazy maybe. But above all it’s meticulous, planned down to the last detail. What was it you said before? The shop where you registered for the punch-up in the Arena was called Atropos’s Tavern?’
‘Actually it was called The Final Cut,’ Nick explained.
‘Oh, my boy, my poor blind boy!’ Victor cried theatrically and typed again. ‘Look at this: Atropos is one of the three Moirai, the Greek goddesses of fate. She is the oldest and the least agreeable; in fact it’s her task to cut through humans’ life threads. The final cut.’ Victor closed the laptop with a sigh. ‘The game gives us very clear hints. The programmer has a particular weakness for Greek mythology. That’s the first thing. Each of the symbols he uses is connected with disaster and death. That’s the second. Combine it with the brilliance of the program and its addictiveness – and . . . oh my. I’d be less worried if I were sitting on a barrel of dynamite.’
Victor didn’t actually look worried though; he looked extremely satisfied. He topped up his cup again and leaned back.
‘That’s all very well,’ said Nick, after they’d both remained silent for a time. ‘But what do we do with our knowledge?’
‘We enjoy being so clever. And keep our eyes out for more hints. Sooner or later there’ll be one that we can use.’
Nick spent the next half an hour watching Speedy become ‘Quox, the barbarian’ in the tower. Victor had supplied him with a pad and a pencil and Nick was making a note of the details he spotted in the tower. The tablets were made of copper; was that significant? He noted down every sentence the gnome uttered, and looked for hidden messages. Kate helped him; she pointed at scratches in the wall of the tower. Nick sketched a copy of them. Was there an image concealed in them, a plan, a name – anything?
Victor was sitting at his computer, driving Squamato across barren heathland with much brandishing of his sword. Every few steps, vipers as tall as a man shot up out of the ground beside him, snapped at him and then disappeared back under the earth. But Victor seemed to have a sixth sense – he always dodged and didn’t get bitten once.
Meanwhile Hemera was standing by a fire with four other warriors, Nurax among them, chatting about the coming Arena fight. Nurax declared that he was aiming for at least two more levels, and that if everything went as planned he might even attempt to win a place in the Inner Circle.
Emily was shifting restlessly on her chair. Nick suspected that it made her nervous to have him looking over her shoulder. He retreated to the next room with his notes, sat on the roses-and-sailing-ships sofa and opened the laptop that Victor had said was clean. The thought that his own computer at home might not be worried him. Was that why Emily had insisted recently that he shouldn’t email her under any circumstances?
If this computer wasn’t being monitored by Erebos, what would happen if he searched for the game on Google?
He entered ‘Erebos’ and found the ‘Erebos – the game’ link that had issued him with a personalised warning on the previous occasion. He clicked on it again now, and the text that was displayed was completely different.
Joy, thou beauteous spark divine,
Daughter of Elysium,
We are entering, drunk with fire,
Heav’nly one, thy holy shrine!
Thy enchantments bind together
What stern custom did divide.
All mankind will be as brothers
Where thy gentle wings abide.
Shaking his head, Nick closed the page. That was familiar to him from a Beethoven symphony. But it didn’t make any sense here. Presumably it was intended as dummy text for non-gamers who happened to pass by. Whatever. On with the research.
Next, Nick entered ‘copper tablet’, and found loads of suppliers of copper tablets. In addition, copper tablets obviously had something to do with the printing of illustrations in old books. That was presumably a false lead.
Next he tried a combination of ‘snakes’ and ‘Greek mythology’. There was Hydra with her nine heads – but Victor’s snakes only had one. He found a snake that wound itself around the staff of Asclepius and one that guarded the oracle of Delphi. None that sprang out of the ground. So far, so bad.
What now? Nick cast a glance through the half-open door to the next room. Everyone was absorbed in their games; only Kate was clattering round in the kitchen. He went to check if he could help her; but the two trays of pizza had already disappeared into the oven.
‘Tell me, what’s Victor’s surname?’ he asked.
‘Lansky.’ Kate turned the thermostat up a smidge, sighed and turned it down again. ‘Other people’s ovens are terrible; my pizzas either turn out soggy or black. I hope you like prosciutto and heaps of onion.’
‘Oh, absolutely. Thanks.’ Nick retreated to his sofa and entered ‘Victor Lansky’ into Google. He found a Victor Lansky in Canada, and one in London. Bingo. Victor was certainly not a dark horse on the computer scene. He even published a small gaming magazine, which only came out sporadically, but had a good reputation in the scene. Ah, and here was something else. One Zobbolino wrote on his home page that he was a good friend of the infamous Victor Lansky.
Victor and I share fond memories of the time when not a single wall or railway carriage was safe from our art. To spray or not to spray – that was never the question. We were the bright gods of graffiti, and if we hadn’t been caught that once we’d still be painting the town red (and every other colour . . . )
Nick read the text through a few times. It clearly stated that Victor had been involved in graffiti and that he’d been caught. Erebos could read, and it made everyone register under their own name. It probably conducted research on every novice. Wow. Erebos draws on information from the internet, Nick wrote down. We hadn’t considered that before. The whole internet? It certainly
scans the hard drive and it maybe even tracks which sites you visit. That makes it practically omniscient.
If that was true, then it probably read the instant message transcript on Nick’s computer of his chat with Finn. That’s how it knew about the Hell Froze Over T-shirt.
Nick would have liked to discuss his observations with Victor, but Squamato was fully occupied climbing a gigantic wall. Impatiently Nick gulped down two cups of tea that were stone cold. He knocked over the third one as he reached for his writing pad again in order to check his notes.
‘Shit!’ He evacuated the pad, about a ton of computer magazines, and his notes – the latter had come off worst.
‘Oh. Problems here as well?’ Emily was standing in the doorway wearing a tired smile; her eyes were red.
‘Yes, I’m all thumbs. Wait, I’ll get a cloth.’ Nick sprinted into the kitchen, located a roll of paper towel and ran back. Meanwhile Emily was using tissues to try to stop the tea from dripping on the floor.
‘How’s Hemera going?’ Nick asked, wiping frantically.
‘She’s wounded in the stomach and leg. The screeching from the headphones was almost unbearable.’ Emily collapsed onto the second-ugliest sofa and yawned. ‘I desperately need a coffee, but Victor doesn’t have any in the house. And I’ve still got orders to carry out today. Nothing difficult, fortunately. But something I don’t want to do.’ She yawned again.
‘I’ll go to Starbucks and get you a coffee,’ Nick offered.
‘It’s too far,’ Emily said, and in the same breath, ‘I’ll come with you. I need fresh air anyway. And a phone box.’
‘For your orders?’
She nodded. ‘Any phone box. That means I don’t have to go right across London, at least.’
Nick had already looked out of the window – to be on the safe side – but hadn’t seen anything in the darkness that looked suspicious. He had another thorough look around from the front door.
‘If someone’s lying in wait for us, they’re cert
ainly well hidden.’ They walked along Cromer Street and turned into Gray’s Inn Road, which was almost deserted at this time of day. Emily glanced over her shoulder several times when they passed groups of young people. Their uneasiness made both of them quicken their pace. They reached King’s Cross station, the first phone boxes came into view, and Emily stopped short. ‘I can’t do it,’ she said soberly.
‘What can’t you do?’
‘Make a threatening phone call.’ She looked up at Nick pleadingly, as if she was hoping he would have a solution to her dilemma. ‘I can’t even try to make it sound nice, because I’ve been told what words I have to say.’
‘Oh. Yes, that’s not pleasant.’ Nick said, fully conscious of how lame that sounded. ‘But look at it this way: it’s for study purposes. You don’t mean it. You’re doing it so we can find out about Erebos.’
‘Except my victim won’t know that,’ Emily murmured.
‘Think of Victor and his Confucius quote.’
‘Unfortunately my message isn’t a Confucius quote. That’s for sure.’ Grim-faced, Emily veered towards the first phone box. ‘I’ll get it over with now,’ she murmured, and fetched some change, her iPod and a note from her shoulder bag.
‘What’s with the iPod?’
‘I have to record the conversation. And upload it. As if it wasn’t bad enough already.’
Nick watched her while she dialled, making a despairing face, turned on the iPod and held it to the receiver. She closed her eyes almost as soon as the ring tone started. Nick heard someone answering at the other end.
‘It is not over,’ Emily said in a graveyard voice. ‘You will never find any peace. He has not forgotten. He has not forgiven. You will not get away with it.’
‘Who is this?’ Nick heard a man at the other end of the line bellow. ‘I’ll set the police onto you all, you damned criminals!’ Then there was nothing except a quiet ‘Damn’ and the engaged signal. Emily hung up the receiver in its cradle.
‘I think I feel sick,’ she said dully. ‘What twisted rubbish. I’ll never do something like that again. And now I need coffee.’