Prologue

Prologue

25 YEARS EARLIER.

Tonight the sky was on fire. It blazed a vivid orange. The combination of blast furnaces working full tilt on the steelworks and a hundred thousand new light sources reflecting off the clouds like an amber coloured dream. And it was raining, the rain slinging down like razor sharp needles in a tangerine coloured wasteland, cutting through the young man's peace of mind.

He was nervous. And he was running. Not sprinting down streets and careening around corners but moving at speed all the same. He dodged through the newly constructed warehouse district careful to watch behind himself for any pursuit. As he looked back he could see, through a gap in the black cut-out shapes of warehouse roofs, the lights of at least forty police cars dancing their multi coloured tango down on New Trafalgar Square.

In the lights, even from this distance,he could see the silhouettes of army trucks and riot shields in the hands of the police. Of men and women marched away in handcuffs, their protest placards trampled underfoot. A clerical collar caught his attention, a priest was being bundled into the back of a police van. He looked old and when he faltered at the door of the van they forced him in, roughly.

So this was freedom, the man reasoned, this was progress? This was the result of the redistribution of power and wealth. Just a different group to persecuted, a different group to be treated with prejudice.

 No matter how technologically advanced humanity got, it was still humanity. Still susceptible to human desires, human failings, human squabbles. It seemed for all the desire of modern thinkers and atheists to argue that the old ways of thinking were not sufficient for this future world, there was one concept in which the medieval Christians were right.

Man was hopelessly lost and going down the drain fast. Prejudice as natural as breathing, hatred growing and growing no matter how “evolved” or “progressive” people got. It didn't seem to matter, hatred and anger and violence just shifted its form and target and began again. Was it inherently human, the man mused, to argue with your fellow man. To want to stand on them to get where you wanted to go, and failing that wipe their voice from existence. So that even if a man did give utterance to an idea that you didn't like, it didn't matter because who listens to the thoughts of the jailed. 

“What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but loses his soul”

The old words came back to him and he asked himself looking back at the HUD spread before him,is that where we find ourselves? Exchanging our souls for a new world? How much is freedom found in the eye of the beholder?, he asked himself.

The package he carried moved and stirred jerking him out of his reverie and reminding him of the task at hand. He needed to finish it. Only two more streets and the package would be safe. 

It took him two hours to cross the two streets. The police had set a roadblock up and so he'd had to get creative about how he got to his final destination.

Gently he tapped on the back door of the small terraced house. 

A man answered. Short but well built, dark hair and dark brown eyes. Frank Ballard, a good man.

They started talking quickly, but softly, their sentences short and efficient.

“So it happened then?”

“Would I be here otherwise?”

“A bad business this.”

“Indeed”

“Its going to be a while before its safe to come back here.”

“It could be a lifetime”

Gently the man reached inside his coat and reached for the package he carried. It was a little girl, maybe two or three, a toddler. She smiled up into the man's face and said his name in her child-like way. His eyes filled with tears.

“I hope not. She deserves to be with her own people.”

“In a perfect world she would be.” The man passed the toddler to Frank Ballard. And then walked off into the night, behind him he could hear his niece wailing for him and then Frank Ballard's soothing voice.

“Come on Esther, you'll see your uncle again soon.” 

But they both knew that what the young man was right and it would be a lifetime until he saw that smile again.

Tonight, Tonight, Tonight on the Cortex, someone was going to die.

Somewhere, out in the electric cosmos that had once been the Internet, someone was going to die.

Somewhere, in the neon coloured jungle of imagination, where millions of people plugged in and dropped out, immersing themselves in their computerised fantasies of their wildest dreams, someone was going to die.

Not that someone dying on the Cortex was that unusual. Someone died on the cortex every night, exploding in fireballs on the zero-g racing simulations or shot down in a hail of bullets in mock World War II combat or viciously ripped apart by another fatality in beat 'em up games that made Muay Thai fighters look like wimps. 

There was a difference though, between what always happened and what was going to happen tonight.

 The other deaths, were all deaths of the imagination, deaths of avatars, temporary pauses in gameplay until the next re-spawn point. They were blips, hiccups in the “life fulfilling and enhancing” experience that the corporations and governments claimed the cortex to be. Just a moment to collect ones thoughts and be ready for the next dare devil jaunt into the fake skies above Pluto or to the depths of the deepest ocean.

Tonight, tonight, oh tonight was going to be different, The Craftsman thought to himself. Tonight, the death would be real. Horribly, tragically, unavoidably real. A death that would begin a cycle that would reverberate across the dancing bridges of fibre-optic neural receptors and receivers that marked the borders of the cortex, and into the physical world.

Grimly pleased with what was to come, The Craftsman stalked the darkening streets of a 1920s New York gangster simulation. As he neared his prey he could feel the heartbeat of his body, somewhere back in the simple geometry of the real world start to quicken. Not that The Craftsman thought of the real world often. He knew he had a life there, but he couldn't remember it, he knew he had a name there but his mind obviously didn't choose to carry it with him into the strangely shaped nether world of the Cortex. But he knew one thing, someone had to die on the Cortex tonight. 

It was an act of mercy. The Craftsman thought. It was the only way to save a man's soul. And The Craftsman was in a saving mood tonight. 

Someone was going to die on the Cortex tonight.