Reaper

  JANET EDWARDS

  REAPER

  End Game 1

  Copyright

  Copyright © Janet Edwards 2016

  www.janetedwards.com

  Janet Edwards asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or localities is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Janet Edwards except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design by The Cover Collection

  Cover Design © Janet Edwards 2016

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Message from Janet Edwards

  Books by Janet Edwards

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  I first met Nathan when I was riding patrol in the body stacks, driving my four-wheeled buggy past rows of identical, dust-covered, white freezer units. For the last four centuries, the population of Earth had been entering those units, leaving their frozen bodies behind them while their minds started a new life in the virtual worlds of Game. The body stacks kept being extended to make space for more of them, so now the vast underground caverns seemed to stretch on into infinity.

  I was startled to see another buggy coming towards me. I’d been working twelve-hour shifts in the body stacks for the last year, arriving at the nearest transport stop at 03:00 hours each day, and collecting the buggy from my shift alternate, Delora. From that moment until I returned the buggy to Delora at 15:00 hours, I’d always been totally alone in these caverns.

  When the boredom and the loneliness got too much for me, I’d stop my buggy, wipe the accumulated grime from the transparent viewing window of a freezer unit, and spend a few minutes studying the face of the person inside it. I’d look for clues to their personality, and entertain myself by trying to guess which of the two thousand Game worlds their mind was living on now. Were they the type of person who’d enjoy fighting battles on Medieval, taming one of the wild horses of Meadow, or casting spells on Witchcraft?

  I must have seen the faces of thousands of frozen Gamers by now, but this was the first time I’d met another human being in the body stacks with a temperature above freezing point. The boy and I both stopped our buggies by the twin pillars that marked the border between Red sector and Green sector, and gazed at each other in silence.

  I saw a boy with straight brown hair who was wearing blue overalls and riding a four-wheeled buggy with green flashes on its black body. He would be seeing a girl with wavy brown hair who was wearing blue overalls and riding a buggy with red flashes. Overalls were the cheapest, most practical clothes available. The shapeless things never fitted anyone properly, but only the glitz crowd bothered about what they looked like in real life. For most kids, the important thing was to decide what they wanted to look like when they joined the Game.

  “I’m Nathan,” said the boy.

  “I’m Jex.” My brain recovered from the surprise and started working again. I was riding patrol on Red Sector Block 2, rows 25,000 to 50,000. Nathan must be riding patrol on Green Sector Block 2, rows 25,000 to 50,000. We’d probably just missed meeting each other on the border between our sectors a dozen times before today, and now random chance had finally led to us coming face to face.

  “It stinks, doesn’t it?” said Nathan.

  I didn’t need to ask what he was talking about. It was 21 April 2519, and the Leebrook Ashton bill had become law barely three weeks earlier. Kids like us were talking about nothing else, and saying it stank was being overly polite in my opinion.

  For nearly four centuries, the law had said that you had to be an eighteen-year-old adult to enter Game. Children with critically serious conditions were exempt from that law, allowed to enter Game early if their lives were at stake, but that was a desperate last resort. Everyone knew that entering Game didn’t just freeze your body’s age, but had implications for mental development too. Those who entered too young would have problems maturing into adulthood.

  The original law about having to be adult to enter Game had existed for good reasons, but the Leebrook Ashton bill had cynically taken advantage of it by increasing the age of becoming adult to nineteen. Now kids like me would be classed as children and have to keep working in the real world for a year longer.

  My eighteenth birthday was less than a month away now. I’d expected that to be the day when I’d step into a freezer unit and begin my true life in Game. Now the Leebrook Ashton bill had moved that day a year into the future, and I was spitting furious about it.

  I was spitting furious, but I was also well aware our buggies monitored everything we did and said. It was unlikely that any of the supervisors would ever bother checking those records, but I still wasn’t going to risk mouthing off about injustice.

  I settled for meaningfully pointing at my buggy. Nathan gave it a panicky look. I guessed that he hadn’t read the bit in his training manual about the buggies monitoring us.

  “You’re almost eighteen too?” I asked.

  “My eighteenth birthday was two days ago,” he said, glancing nervously at the buggies.

  Nathan had been even more maddeningly close to entering Game than I was when the Leebrook Ashton bill became law. I pulled a sympathetic face at him, and we reached an unspoken agreement and dismounted from our buggies. We shouldn’t be stopping work until our mid-shift break, but society had just stolen a year of our lives so neither of us was feeling very dutiful.

  We sat down facing each other, me leaning against a red pillar and him against a green. Technically kids like us shouldn’t be riding patrol here, since it was an adult rated job, but those adults who used controlled droids to work from inside Game were needed for more important work than this. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to want these bodies again. The bodies of players who might want to defrost in future were all kept in short stay facilities. The freezer units in the body stacks only held the players who’d paid their lifetime subscriptions to Game. They had no need to work ever again, their minds were living an immortal, idyllic existence somewhere in the multi-worlds of the Game, and they’d never want to return to the real world.

  They’d never want to return, but maintenance of their bodies was included in the lifetime subscription contract, so control systems monitored the freezer units, and kids like me and Nathan rode patro
l checking for problems. Most days you found nothing, but there were occasional oddities that the freezer control systems weren’t programmed to detect. In the last month, I’d found tree roots projecting through the ceiling, a stream running along an aisle, and a nest of young rabbits.

  Whenever I found a problem, I called my supervisor, an adult called Fraser. He would grudgingly reply from in Game, use a controlled droid to come and inspect the issue himself, and then flag maintenance to take appropriate action. Each call earned him another few credits towards his Game subscriptions. I hoped I’d find as easy a job for myself when I entered Game.

  “Do you work for Supervisor Fraser too?” I asked.

  Nathan shook his head. “Supervisor Laksha is in charge of Green Sector. She’s a mermaid on Game world Aqua.”

  “Fraser’s still deciding where to settle down. He’s just changed world to Meadow.”

  Nathan asked the inevitable question that all kids constantly asked each other. “What Game world do you want to live on?”

  “I’ll be listing Ganymede as my first choice world on my Game application.”

  I smiled as I thought of the picture of Ganymede on the wall of my room. It showed a typical image of the shimmering spider-silk houses scattered along Ganymede’s beaches, with foaming waves crashing onto the sands, and the glory of Jupiter filling the sky. A girl with silver-coloured, feathery hair, and a delicate trail of sapphire-blue flowers across her forehead, was standing in the foreground. That would be me when I was in Game. That would be Jex when I really started to live.

  Nathan raised his eyebrows. “That’s a very ambitious choice. Ganymede’s a popular Game world, with lots of long term players wanting to move there.”

  That was what everyone said when I told them my plans. The more officious ones would add a lecture about how I could only list three preferred worlds on my application. If I failed to get accepted by any of those, then I’d be automatically allocated to any random world that would accept me, so it was silly to waste one of my preferences on an impossibly optimistic choice.

  I gave Nathan my usual answer, but without the withering tone that I used to the kids who lectured me as if I was a total fool. “My father is going to sponsor my Game application. He’s been a Ganymede resident for decades, and is a member of their Admission Committee.”

  “A member of the Admission Committee sponsoring you!” Nathan gave an impressed whistle. “You’re very lucky. My mother calls me every few months from Game, but she’s never offered to sponsor me for resident status on her world, and I’ve never heard from my father at all.”

  I knew that I was incredibly lucky. There was a strict hierarchy among the players in Game, marked by the colour of the bracelets they wore. Resident or visitor applications from players wearing the gold bracelets of lifetime subscription holders always took precedence over those with the silver bracelets of those still paying annual subscriptions. Players with the bronze bracelet of someone in their first year in Game were always last in the queue, so I wouldn’t normally be considered for a world like Ganymede, but the sponsorship of a resident always counted strongly in your favour. The sponsorship of a resident who was also a member of the Admission Committee, combined with my spotless Game record, meant I was almost certain to be accepted.

  “I’m in contact with my mother too,” I said, “though she calls less often than my father. She’s a mermaid like Laksha, but on Coral rather than Aqua.”

  I didn’t mention the fact that my mother had offered to sponsor me for resident status on Coral because I knew she’d never actually do it. I’d learnt as a small child that my mother never kept her promises. When my father said he’d call me next week, he’d do it. When my mother said the same thing, the week would drift on into a month or more before she called, and then she’d act as if we’d spoken only a couple of days ago, expecting me to know all about her newest dress, the party she’d just given, and the latest gossip about her friends.

  I understood why she was acting this way. Talking to me brought back unpleasant memories of the year she’d spent in the real world when I was born, and my mother’s method of dealing with anything unpleasant was to try to avoid it. She liked to pretend to herself and her friends that she was the perfect parent, calling her daughter at least once a week, but the reality was that she kept contact with me to a bare minimum.

  Understanding why she was acting this way didn’t stop her behaviour from upsetting me. Thinking about it was upsetting me now, so I tried to forget about her and focus on my conversation with Nathan. “What Game world do you plan to start on?”

  “I’m trying to decide between Venture and Gothic,” said Nathan. “I’d have been interested in Flamenco as well, but its first language is Spanish. I’d prefer to start in Game on a world that has English as its first language.”

  I blinked. If I was being ambitious hoping to start in Game on Ganymede, then Nathan was aiming as low as possible with his choices. Flamenco, Venture, and Gothic were three of the Game worlds that had opened the previous year. Flamenco would have already been flooded with applications from Spanish speaking players wanting to move there, but both Venture and Gothic would be desperately trying to build up their numbers of residents. Any new player with a respectable Game record should automatically be offered resident status by them.

  It was horribly rude to criticize someone’s choice of Game world, so I tried to make my reply as enthusiastic as I could. “The Game images and descriptions of Venture are very tempting. I may list it as my third preference on my application.”

  “I prefer to apply to a brand new world rather than one that’s centuries old,” said Nathan. “Venture and Gothic have all the latest advances in worldscape and creature design. The ghosts of Gothic are especially groundbreaking.”

  He sounded oddly defensive. I wondered if Nathan’s strange choice of worlds was because he had a black mark on his Game record. Even something trivial, like a bad behaviour flag from a childhood dormitory supervisor, could be enough to destroy his chances of getting resident status on an established world.

  “I’d never considered starting Game on Gothic,” I said. “Everyone advises new players to start Game in a fully human form to ease the transition from real life, and I didn’t think there were any human player forms on Gothic.”

  Nathan laughed. “All the possible player forms on Gothic are fully human when it’s daylight. It’s a shapeshifter world like Coral and Aqua, with one key difference. The players of Coral and Aqua shapeshift individually from human to merfolk form whenever they enter the water. On Gothic, there’s a mass shapeshift of all players triggered by the moon rising in the sky. That’s why Gothic has extra-long nights, twelve hours instead of the standard two hours on most Game worlds, so everyone gets to spend plenty of time in their vampire, skeleton, werewolf or ghost forms.”

  I frowned. “Surely starting Game as a shapeshifter would be even more confusing than being non-human all the time. My mother was a dryad on Nature for three years before she moved to Coral, and she still found it difficult to adjust to transforming between being a human with legs and a mermaid with a tail.”

  Nathan sighed. “You’re right. Shapeshifting is very disorienting, some players can never adapt to it at all, so it would be wisest for me to start in Game on Venture. I’d still love to be part of the mass shapeshift on Gothic though, and I find the idea of being a werewolf rather tempting.”

  I laughed. “You’d choose to be a werewolf rather than ...?”

  I was interrupted by my buggy nagging me. “You are due to commence row 39,118.”

  Nathan’s buggy joined in with the whining a second later, so we reluctantly got back on our feet. “Shall we take our mid-shift break in four rows’ time?” asked Nathan. “We could meet here on the border at row 39,122.”

  I nodded. “Let’s do that.”

  Nathan and I chatted through our thirty minute break on that day, and the following days as well. On the tenth day, we’d just got o
ff our buggies and sat down on the floor to eat our packed lunches when Nathan gave an odd, embarrassed cough.

  “I was wondering if we could spend some time together after our shift ends today.”

  I hesitated. I’d have been happy to meet up with Nathan outside work if all he wanted was casual friendship, but the eager, breathless tone of his voice gave me the idea that he had something much more intimate in mind. Some kids got into relationships with each other before entering Game, but I wasn’t planning to be one of them. Nathan would stand no chance of being accepted as a resident of Ganymede, and he wasn’t the sort of boy who could dazzle me into abandoning my dreams to join him as a werewolf on Gothic.

  I was going to stick to the safely sensible course of action, and save romantic relationships for when I was my true self in Game. I wanted to make that clear to Nathan, but preferably without falling out with him. No phones or other entertainment devices were allowed in the body stacks, so riding the rows of freezer units was hour upon hour of relentless, mind numbing, boredom. Nathan never complained about that, but for me our daily half an hour chat, spent debating the benefits and disadvantages of life on a dozen different Game worlds, was a merciful break in the tedium.

  I tried to phrase my refusal as tactfully as possible. “Working twelve hours a day in the body stacks doesn’t leave me much free time for socializing.”

  I was surprised to see what looked like relief on Nathan’s face at the rejection. I wondered if I’d read too much into his suggestion of meeting outside work. I’d dropped out of the glitz crowd a year ago, and didn’t bother what I wore or looked like any longer, so that seemed the most likely answer.

  Nathan started talking about Havoc after that. We were debating whether Havoc or Abyss were the worst worlds in Game, when my buggy started screaming an alarm I’d never heard before. I leapt to my feet and checked the buggy’s display screen in panic.

  “I’ve got an unscheduled defrost!”

  Nathan’s buggy started shrilling as well. “I’ve got one too,” he said. “Another! Three now!”

  My screen was showing seven unscheduled defrosts, with more appearing every second. I’d no idea what was happening, but I instinctively jumped onto the seat of my buggy, ordered it to head for the location of my nearest defrost, and then called Supervisor Fraser. He didn’t respond. I called again and again, and finally got through.