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1. A LETTER TO SANTA - AG 15. Dear Santa, This Christmas time, please can you bring me a Portal. My friend Lennie has a Portal and I have to go all the way over to his house to play in the Game, which is silly and takes forever. If it would not be too much trouble for you, please could you make it one of the Karol Portals, because they are the best, but a Gibsson would be all right, because I know lots of people want Karol Portals and they might of run out. If you don't bring me a Portal of any kind, I will be very cross with you, and I will not leave you any sherry or minced pies next Christmas time. Yours with love, Martin Clarke (aged 7 and a third) Ps. My other friend Dave says that the Game is rubbish and some people got killed when they were playing it, but he is an idiot and thinks that the news is real. Don't bring him anything nice this year. Pps. Would Rudolf be happy with a bit of lettuce, because I used the last carrot for a snowman's nose? 2. BURNING THE LINES OF COMMUNICATION - AG 367 "See the Port?" the two-way crackled. It was old technology, older than the Ports, but it worked. More than that, it was oddly secure. Historically, radio was an unsafe medium, easily hacked. Not these days. These days, it was so antiquated, so unused, that nobody else knew how to work it, least of all the KSF. When Dillon had finally figured it out, it seemed like one of their biggest breaks. Beautiful. Perfect - a way to talk freely, an unsuspected, unbound flight under the radar. "Got it," Aryl watched the shimmering blue oblong for a few moments, wondering if it was actually going to do something. After a while, she figured it probably wasn't. A lot of Ports these days were abandoned, doorways onto nowhere. Players went through and left the door open behind them, just in case. But the Players never came back, and the Ports weren't going to run out of juice, so they just sat there, casually tearing reality another asshole. Aryl adjusted her jacket as she stood, making sure she could reach the inside pockets easily; no weapons, but she could signal the others if she was intercepted. She hummed an old tune and walked over to the Port. It was such a lovely day. The sun was shining, and the woods Aryl was walking through were receiving its light in the most photogenic, photosynthetic manner they could muster. A clump of bluebells sprouted gaily at the border of the Port's influence. Incongruous was too mild a word, but to Aryl it was just another Port, just another piece of the world that wasn't going to be seen by anyone with a mind to appreciate it. She felt nothing, and she knew it. She'd been born in the Game, where wonders and beauty far in excess of this poor copse's wildest fantasies were commonplace. A bit of dappled sunlight and bluebells weren't enough to move her, and that was just the problem. What's the point in living in such a mundane, ordinary world when there were countless billions of other worlds so mind-blowingly wonderful that, in the first days of the Game, they had literally blown players' minds? The tragedy of that, the sheer sadness, was enough to drive the revolution. Most of them were Game-born; there were few births in reality these days. They were led to reality by a sense of over-exposure, the feeling that their souls were somehow stretched thin and translucent by the unending, unstoppable spectacle of the Game. They realised, somewhere inside them, that it was all hollow, that none of it mattered, that they weren't actually doing anything. It's all just a game, the voice in their heads told them. Life isn't about scoring points. They found Ports back to reality - real, solid, old-fashioned reality, back to Earth - and emerged, blinking, into the world that was left behind. It was not, contrary to their expectation, a ravaged, post-apocalyptic wasteland. In fact, it was a rather pleasant sort of place. Human civilisation had been re-absorbed, its towering cities and rapacious infrastructure cracked and mellowed, become overgrown. Mostly. In some places, though, the Game had to be fed. Squat, dark serpents twisted tight around the apple trees of this improbable Eden, the vast Baxter Coil reactors needed to power the CPUs of the Karol-Sakaguchi Game generators. Around them clustered tiny conurbations of the KSF - Karol-Sakaguchi Security Force, the company's private army. They protected the Baxter Coils from any harmful activities, as well as performing basic maintenance. There were also one or two of the company's scientists in these little villages, though mostly they were on alt.reality rotation, never staying in the real world for more than a few months at a time. No-one knew the code for the K-S executives' retreat world, though many of the resistance had tried to find out. 3. THIS NEVER HAPPENED - AG 1 4. PRETTY COOL - BG 14 |
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