Thrill switch, p.1
Thrill Switch, page 1
Contents
Foreword
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Acknowledgments
About The Author
People think it’s impossible to kill someone for real in VR. They simply lack imagination.
If you can give someone a seizure by flashing a strobe in their eyes, consider what you can do by hijacking their entire sensory system.
Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Dark.
On. Off. On. Off. On. Off.
Flip the Switch. Reap the consequences.
- Excerpt from the Hyperrealist’s Manifesto
1
RAMA WOKE FROM his nightmare to an even worse reality. His hand was cuffed to a dirty hotel bed. A steady drip, drip, drip from the roof landed on the pillow next to him.
Where was he?
Had his politics finally caught up with him?
Had she?
Rama struggled to sit up. He noticed three hunting knives laid out neatly on the bedside table. They weren’t his. His heart froze. He checked himself for injuries. There were no cuts on his body. No blood on the sheets. Not yet. Rama thought about yelling for help but didn’t. The owner of the blades might arrive instead, as cold and sharp as those implements of pain.
Rama rattled the handcuff around his wrist as quietly as he could. No use. Held tight. He twisted to look at the bedhead he was tethered to. Old. Metal. The frame was joined to the base in a rusted corner. Pushing his weight back, Rama tested the strength of it. The joint groaned and cracked a touch.
A noise in the hall. Rama’s eyes darted to the door. He held his breath. One count. Two. Three. Silence.
Quietly, carefully, Rama leaned back onto the bedhead again. It separated further. Rama rocked back and forth, pulling at the bedhead with his spare hand, eyes trained on the door. He strained with everything he could. No use. He was weak. Skinny. Out of shape. He wished he’d used his muscles more. Had done the workouts recommended for people like him.
Rama pushed back and forth on the headboard with his shoulder, trying to gain leverage.
Another noise outside. Scraping?
Rama stopped his rocking. Waited. The door remained mercifully closed. Rama eased the end of his cuff down the bedhead, onto the cracked joint. He pulled again, hard. The metal around his wrist dug into his skin. Pain lanced up his arm. The thought of those knives digging instead kept Rama trying, desperate, tug after tug. The bracelet of the cuff started to pull through the joint. The metal was now slick with blood that seeped from his wrist.
More scraping in the hall. Rama could feel himself getting frantic, his breath coming in gasps. Sweat joined the drips from the roof.
Still, he pulled.
Almost there.
Rama wiggled the cuffs.
Wrenched.
He pulled free to a groan of metal. Bang! The headboard snapped back into place. The noise sent a jolt through Rama. He scrambled up from the bed and snatched one of the knives from the dresser, holding it in front of him. The blade point shook, as unsteady as Rama’s heartbeat.
No other movement.
Rama crept toward the door and looked through the peephole. Outside seemed deserted. Then something made him pause.
It couldn’t be.
The carpet. Red with yellow swirls.
He was in his own apartment building.
Rama opened the door, creeping out, knife first. He looked left, right. The hallway was empty.
Where had that scraping come from?
No marks on the carpet. No scratches along the walls.
Not waiting for an answer, Rama half walked, half ran toward the lift at the end of the hall. Each door he passed felt like a trap ready to be sprung. His captor could be hiding behind any one of them, watching, waiting.
Rama got to the lift and punched the button again and again.
Down. Down. Down.
The doors slid open. No one inside. The lift’s light flickered off and on. Rama didn’t care. He stepped in and hit close.
Close. Close. Close.
A scraping out in the hall. Footsteps coming. Rama lifted his knife, ready for the worst.
The door shut, cutting off the sound. The lift began to move downward. The dread in Rama’s gut lifted. He dared to hope. Allowed himself to breathe.
The light above strobed.
Darkness. Light. Darkness. Light.
The lift stopped mid-floor.
‘No!’ Rama gasped.
He pushed the ground-floor button again. All went black.
That scraping again. Metal on the door outside. Impossible between floors. Terrifying.
Scrrrrrratch. Scrrrrrratch. Scrrrrrratch.
The light flicked on.
A blade poked through the gap in the doors. Sharp. Deadly.
Rama pushed his body against the back of the lift. The knife stabbed in and out, trying to catch him. It slid up to the top. Down again.
The light went off.
Darkness.
Then on—light glinting against the metal of the blade.
‘Help!’ Rama banged on the side of the lift. He pushed the emergency alarm. Grabbed the phone. No dial tone. Dead. He let it drop, tears welling.
The blade scraped and stabbed at the empty air in front of Rama.
Darkness.
Rama pushed into a corner.
Another noise. Breathing. Not Rama’s. He felt hot air on his face. Smelled rotten meat.
He tried to move away but a hand grabbed his throat. The light came on. No one there.
The invisible hand squeezed Rama’s windpipe. Lifted him off the ground.
Rama choked, knowing this wasn’t real. Not a nightmare either. Something in between.
He gasped for air. His feet kicked.
A pixelated face digitized in front of Rama. Horrid. Half man, half spider. Its pincers dripped venom, moving as the thing spoke.
‘Where is it?’
Rama clutched at the hands around his throat, trying to tell himself this wasn’t real, that he could breathe if he tried hard enough.
‘You’re… working, for her,’ Rama managed to say.
‘Maybe I am her,’ the spider replied.
‘I don’t have it!’
‘Time will tell,’ the spider said. ‘Tick, tock.’
The spider rammed a blade into Rama’s gut. Again and again and again.
Rama screamed in pain.
The spider smiled in delight, then bit down on Rama’s face. Blood sprayed.
The light flicked off again.
Darkness.
2
I ALMOST DID a fist pump when my first murder case came in. Then I remembered it was because someone had died. Rather than look like a total douche-canoe, I smoothed my suit out, grabbed a notepad, and took a self-drive to the crime scene.
Las Vegas streets whipped by. I headed to the Old Strip, its former glitz now a faint glimmer in the center of the city. Over the decades, all the casinos had turned into mass jack-in centers—cheap accommodation for those who spent most of their lives in the virtual world, the Holos. Vegas was no longer the gambling capital of America. Now, we were the virtual hub of the planet. Our secure electrical grid powered servers instead of neon lights. Our towering high-rises were the perfect place to fit the city’s skyrocketing population. Thanks to relaxed laws protecting virtual rape, murder fantasies, and worse as ‘freedom of speech’, people from all over the world flocked here to live out their darkest desires with impunity. It was still Sin City, just in a different way. Give me your poor and your huddled masses, Lady Liberty once said. What she’d really meant was give me your paying customers to plug into our system. That might all change with the new legal proposals coming but, for now, it was full steam ahead into damnation. Not that I took part. The Holos was a sewer. You wouldn’t catch me dead inside. Not since that first trip so many years ago.
I self-consciously fiddled with my tie. I needed to look pristine. Together. A reflection of how I should feel inside. I checked my hair in the derm screen of my wrist-comm. Red bangs snipped as straight as a cutthroat’s razor. Good. At least that part of me looked sharp.
The whole way to the Strip I thought why me? Why this case now? I’d been banging my head in the missing persons unit for a year and hadn’t been granted a transf
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Not Billy, he’s missing.
Not funny, apparently.
The car stopped at the building address I’d been given. This place used to be called Treasure Island. Now it was called the Bolodair Apartments. The elevator ride up to the crime scene was nauseating. Old casino lifts had a habit of jerking upward before smoothing out. The worn carpet along the hallway wasn’t much better. It reminded me of vomit swirls and blood. Or pineapple on top of pizza. Just as disgusting. Since most of the residents of this place spent all their time in digital, the common areas were never upgraded. As long as the connections were fast and equipment state-of-the-art, no one cared about the rest.
A streak of yellow tape at the end of the hall indicated where to go. Standing outside the unit was Gibson, homicide department lead. A bollard of a man. His thick neck and bald head made him look like a giant thumb with a face. Gibson turned to see me. I gave him a thumbs up, figuring it might look like a tiny mirror and keep him happy. It didn’t.
‘Byron?’ he grunted as I approached.
I was a full head taller than him but there were no illusions about who held the most power.
‘Ada is fine, Deputy Chief Gibson,’ I said. ‘Have the scan team been through?’
‘Yes. That’s why I called you.’
Without another word, he dipped under the tape blocking the door. I followed but stopped when confronted with the scene. A VR immersion rig sat in the corner with a limp body strapped into it. The corpse’s back was to us, so I couldn’t see the helmet or head. Its fingers were covered in blood. The plasma dripped into a puddle that spread along the floor. A Holos unit was stacked onto the back wall along with feeding tubes and a store of liquid nutrients. On the far side of the room, black writing was scrawled on the wall. The script was too small to read from this distance.
‘Trauma includes abrasions on the fingertips and a burst eyeball,’ Gibson said. ‘No DNA or fingerprints, other than the victim’s.’
‘Right. So no eye-popping evidence?’ I asked.
Gibson just stared at me.
‘Any security footage of someone leaving or entering the room recently?’ I hoped vainly.
‘Plenty of footage of empty halls,’ Gibson said. ‘The only person that came near this room was a cleaner who found the body this morning.’
My mouth went dry.
‘Cause of death is from a massive loss of blood?’
Gibson nodded.
‘Through the eyes?’ I managed to ask.
‘Through the eyes. Time of death was around midnight last night,’ Gibson confirmed.
This couldn’t be right. My gut clenched. I saw now why I was called here. The serial killer. But that wasn’t possible.
‘You think this might be linked to the Specter Slaughter?’ I asked, point-blank.
‘You did your thesis on it,’ Gibson said. ‘You tell me.’
‘Did the scan team note anything else?’ I asked, grasping for evidence to the contrary.
‘The victim’s blood contains mildly elevated traces of potassium.’
‘Maybe he had a banana addiction?’ I offered, trying to lighten the darkness I was feeling.
Gibson leveled a cold gaze at me.
‘Bananas?’
‘You know, high in potassium?’
‘Is that a professional opinion?’
‘Perhaps an unprofessional one,’ I said.
‘Then give me some actual insight, if you have any.’
I swallowed my creeping dread, looking at the scene again. I didn’t want to say it yet, lest it became real. I straightened my tie again. It was dark crimson, like my hair. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about bloodstains.
‘May I?’ I indicated the body.
Gibson stepped aside to let me through. I tentatively walked up, took the corpse’s wrist, and checked the hands. The fingertips were lacerated like Gibson had said, fingernails all broken backward. I considered the helmet. Scratch marks studded the edges where the victim had clawed his own immersion rig trying to get out. There was something strange about the marks that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. They weren’t exactly what I expected. Pushing that information to the back of my mind, I twisted the body in its rig. The Holos resolution screen had already been pulled up. The corpse’s blood-caked face stared at me, his black eyes bugged out. One of them had ruptured into a gory mess.
I stepped back at the sight. My mind swam. I tried to drag my thoughts to the surface. How could I prove this wasn’t possible without stating the obvious? They’d know the obvious already; wouldn’t have called me if it were that simple. I glanced at the helmet again.
‘Isn’t it standard procedure for a scan team to return anything they moved back to the original position?’ I asked.
‘Yes. So?’ Gibson shifted.
‘So why didn’t they put the victim’s display shield back in place?’
Gibson looked over at the body and frowned. He clicked the comm-screen attached to his wrist and scrolled through some information.
‘Says here it was already open.’
‘That’s odd,’ I clicked my tongue, thinking. ‘If it’s supposed to be a Specter slaying, this guy shouldn’t have been able to turn off his Holos simulation at all.’
Gibson simply stared, waiting for the punch line. He seemed to be growing impatient. Was he going to say it?
‘Could Jazlin Switch have done this?’ he asked.
And there it was, the Devil’s name. Hearing it aloud oddly calmed me because I knew this couldn’t be her work.
‘She’s been in digital confinement for the last seven years. Still is.’
‘But no one has spoken to her in there for five years,’ he countered. ‘Not since her last three interviewers committed suicide.’
‘She’s still there,’ I said. ‘We can see her avatar on the virtual feed.’
I didn’t say that I looked at it every single day, just to reassure myself.
‘And she’s done nothing but sit and meditate in there,’ Gibson said. ‘She won’t respond to audio prompts. For all we know, the footage is on some kind of loop and she’s found a way to jack out of virtual into the real world.’
Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. If that had really happened there’d be more than one body found this morning. Her first slaughter had clocked into the hundreds in a day. I could hear the screams. Feel the shock of people dropping all around me. The terror of dashing to escape my first trip to the virtual world, hoping my dad made it out too. The Holos. The horror. There had been more killings the day after that and again the day after, until they caught her. Almost a thousand people had been murdered in the end.
I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again to steady myself in reality. Actual reality.
‘No one can unsync their mind from digital confinement,’ I said, sounding calmer than I felt. ‘Not even Jazlin Switch. If someone found where she’s plugged in and tried to pull her out manually, she’d die. And good riddance too.’
‘I want you to go in and interview her. Make sure.’
I actually laughed. That wasn’t going to happen. No way, no way, no way. Gibson and I locked gazes—a stare off I had no interest in winning.
I looked over to the body again.
‘It could be a copycat,’ I ventured. ‘Perhaps someone broke in here and killed this guy, making it look like a Specter Slaughter.’
‘Really?’ Gibson raised an eyebrow. ‘No footage. No DNA. No nothing.’
‘But no one has been able to do what she did— kill people inside the virtual world so they die here. Not even close. Filton Fukami confirmed his Holos developers refactored the code that made it possible. How has that changed?’
Gibson stood silent, letting the question hang in the air.
I walked over to look at the writing on the far wall. Neat, block letters read:
IT’S MORE ABOUT MONEY THAN POWER.
Above that was a scrawl in different handwriting.
Free the body and the spirit will soar.
I shuddered. That was something Switch had written in her Hyperrealist’s Manifesto. A blank set of fingerprints signed off the scrawl at the end. It was the mark of a movement Switch had belonged to that prized anonymity as the way to freedom from government and corporate manipulation. It was as if someone was trying hard to connect this to the Specter Slaughters. Really hard. But if this was supposed to have been a Specter killing, the victim must have written it. This was getting more confusing by the minute. I didn’t like it.
