‘But I’m still alive. Does that mean he failed?’
She shook her head slowly. She looked radiant in the golden light, and I realised that I wanted her intensely, no matter how we had betrayed each other or what lay in the future; no matter that I did not even have a name by which she could call me. ‘I think he got what he wanted, in the end. Most of it, anyway.’
There was something in her voice which told me she was not telling me everything she knew. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I don’t suppose anyone’s told you,’ Zebra said. ‘But Reivich lied to all of us.’
‘About what?’
‘His scan.’ She looked towards the ceiling, the lines of her face defined in golden highlights. Her skin stripes were still faintly visible. ‘It was a failure. It was done too hastily. He wasn’t captured. ’
I went through the motions of registering disbelief, even though I could tell Zebra was telling the truth.
‘But it can’t have failed. I spoke to the copy after he’d been scanned.’
‘You thought you did. Apparently it was just a beta-level simulation, a mockup of Reivich programmed to mimic his responses and make you think the scan had been successful.’
‘Why, though? Why did he feel the need to pretend it had worked?’
‘I think it was for Tanner’s benefit,’ she said. ‘Reivich wanted Tanner to think everything had been in vain; that even killing Reivich’s physical body was a meaningless gesture.’
‘Except it wasn’t,’ I said.
‘No. Reivich would have died anyway, sooner or later — but it was really Tanner that did it.’
‘And he knew, didn’t he? The whole time we were with Reivich, he knew he was going to die, and the scan had failed.’
‘Does that mean he won?’ Zebra said. ‘Or did he lose everything? ’
I reached out and took her hand and squeezed it. ‘It doesn’t matter now. None of it matters now. Tanner, Cahuella, Reivich — they’re all dead.’
‘All of them?’
‘All of them that really matters.’
And then I looked up into the sourceless gold light, for what seemed like an eternity, until Zebra and Amelia left me alone. I was tired; the kind of absolute weariness that feels too much a burden to escape through sleep. Sleep did come, though, eventually. And with it dreams. I had hoped it would be otherwise, but with dreaming came the white room, and the pristine horror of what had happened there; what had happened to me; what I had inflicted on myself.
Later — much later — I returned to Chasm City. It was a long journey back, and it was interrupted by a stopover at the Mendicant habitat, where I returned Amelia to her duties. She had taken it all remarkably well, and when I offered to help her in some way — not really knowing how I could — she deflected all such intentions and asked only that I make a donation to the Ice Mendicants when I was able to.
I promised her I would. It was a promise I held to.
Quirrenbach, Zebra and I arranged a meeting with Voronoff upon our return to the Canopy.
‘It’s about the Game,’ I said. ‘We’re proposing a major restructure of the whole operation.’
‘Why do you imagine it could interest me?’ Voronoff yawned.
‘Hear us out,’ Quirrenbach said, and started to explain the framework the three of us had worked out since our time in Refuge. It was complex, and for a while we did not seem to be getting through to Voronoff. But gradually comprehension dawned.
He listened to what we had to say.
And finally he said that he liked our ideas. That maybe it could be made to work.
We proposed a new form of the hunt; something we would call Shadowplay. In essence it would be similar to the old, underground Game which the city had spawned since the plague. But in every detail it would be radically different, not the least of which would be legality. We would take the Game into the limelight, establish sponsorship rules and a framework which guaranteed coverage and commentary to whoever wanted the vicarious thrill of a manhunt. Our chasers would be more than just rich kids looking for a night’s quick thrill. They’d be hand-trained experts; hunter-assassins. We’d school them in professionalism and construct elaborate personae around them, cults of personality which would elevate the Game to the status of art. We would recruit from the best existing players, of course. Chanterelle Sammartini had already agreed to be our first employee. I had no doubts that she would fit the role perfectly.
But we would change more than just the hunters.
No victims this time. The hunted would be volunteers. It sounded insane, but this was the part Voronoff quickly warmed to.
There would be no prize for the survivors other than survival itself. But with it would come immense prestige. We would have all the volunteers we needed: drawn from the vast pool of bored, affluent near-immortals who filled the Canopy. In the revised form of the Game, they would have finally found a way to inject a controlled edge into their lives. They’d sign contracts with us, detailing the terms of a particular contest: the duration, the permitted range of play and the types of weapon allowed by the assassin. All they would need to do was stay alive until the contract expired. They would be famous and envied. Others would follow, anxious to do a little better: a longer contract; more challenging terms of play.
We would use tracking implants, of course — but they would not function in the same way as the device Waverly had installed in my skull, and which Dominika had so kindly removed at short notice. Assassin and hunted would carry matched pairs, and they would be primed to activate and transmit only when within a certain range of each other — again, covered by the terms of the contract. Both parties would know when that happened — a ringing tone in the skull, or something similar. And in that final hour of the chase, media would be allowed to descend for the first time, witnessing the end — however it played out.
Voronoff joined us, eventually. He was our first customer.
We called our company Omega Point; soon there were others, and we welcomed the competition. Within a year of operation, we had pushed the memory of the old hunt into oblivion. It was not a part of the city’s history that anyone wanted enshrined. And that was the way it happened.
At first, we were careful to allow our clients to survive the terms of their contracts, for the most part. Our assassins would lose their trail at the critical moment or misfire whatever single-shot weapon had been specified in the contract. It was a way of building up an initial client list, so that our name would spread more rapidly.
Once that began to happen, we got serious. Now it was for real; now they really did have to fight to stay alive for the duration.
And the majority managed it. The odds on being killed during a game of Shadowplay fluctuated somewhere around thirty per cent — safe enough so that players were not actively discouraged from participation, no matter how bored — but with enough of an edge to make survival, winning, something to be prized.
Omega Point became very rich indeed. Within two years of my arrival in Chasm City I counted myself amongst the hundred wealthiest individuals — corporeal or otherwise — in the whole Yellowstone system.
But I never forgot the pledge I had made to myself, during the long journey up to Refuge.
That if I survived, I would change everything.
With Shadowplay, I had started. But it was not enough. I had to alter the city totally. I had to destroy the system that had allowed me to flourish; to unbalance the unspoken equilibrium between Mulch and Canopy. I began by recruiting my newest hunters from the Mulch itself. There was no real risk to myself in doing this, for the Mulchers were as adept at the art as anyone I’d find in Canopy — and just as receptive to the training methods I advocated.
Just as the game had made me rich, I made my best players wealthy beyond their dreams. And watched as some of that wealth seeped back into the Mulch.
It was a small start. It might take years — decades, even — before there was a noticeable change to the hierarchy in Chasm City. But I knew it would happen. I had promised myself that it would. And though I had broken promises in the past, I was never going to do it again.
After a while, I began to call myself Tanner again. I knew it was a lie; that I had no right to that name; that I had stolen memories and then life itself from the man who really was Tanner Mirabel.
