The Great Game

If you’re new to the Great Game, please have a quick look at the blurb to your left, where you’ll find a short catch-up introduction.

Two weeks later, large chunks of the country had ground to a halt. Martial law was in place, as strongly as available manpower would allow. Food, power and vital supplies were still being produced, and even shipped around, but anything non-essential was simply not happening. Hysteria was rampant.

Travis hadn’t lied when he’d said that things were grim.

Something was nagging at the back of my mind, though. Something about Overlook. I sat there for a moment, and tried to give the thought room to develop. Operating mainly on instinct, I called up Overlook feeds for some of the now-abandoned former riot zones. Unsurprisingly, they were deserted. Alright, it was the middle of the night, but there was enough trash blown over the streets to make it all look quite eerie. I saw a cat run through shot in one of them, but there didn’t appear to be any people.

Then I switched to the block we’d raided the previous afternoon, and spooled back to the raid. There we all were. I watched us staging, and even slow-mo’ed through the moment when I broke cover by standing up, and then started looking all dazed and confused. I frowned, and jumped back day by day, until the normal bustle of city life reappeared. Eight days ago, everything looked normal — although I could see from the notes attached that the area had been seeing severe disturbances for two days by that point. The next day, it was trashed and empty.

There had to be a moment when the feed switched. I told Overlook to search for non-contiguity, and a little while later, it bumped me forward to the small hours of the morning. The footage was disturbing. A few seconds after 2:12am, it went from being a normal night-time street to something out of a half-assed war zone. Something felt out of place, though. I played it back again, very slowly this time.

There. Five frames of static divided the two states.

I then repeated the examination on a couple more riot sites, in other cities. Each time, there was a short burst of static on Overlook at the point where the incorrect images gave way to accurate ones. The length of the burst varied, but it was always there.

Was it a suggestion of tampering? I went back to the local riot, and ran another contiguity search, this time for either side of when the disturbances were reported to have started. Overlook chewed over it for a long time, but couldn’t find anything. I told it to look from earlier, and then from earlier still.

Finally, after several hours of sitting around, I found something. Six hours before the reported start of the riot, there was a single frame out of place. The image had a flat-colour background, as red as fresh blood. It bore a gold-lettered inscription, a dense passage of writing in characters that I had never seen. I stared at it, utterly perplexed, and flagged the frame up with an ‘Urgent’ note.

It took a couple more hours to get searches to confirm that other events were also preceded by similar — but not identical — passages of writing. I used the time to grab an early breakfast / very late midnight snack, and to freshen up a bit. Travis put in an appearance shortly before 8am, and I immediately called him over.

He looked at the passages of text, and the bursts of static, and sighed heavily. “I don’t suppose you have a theory,” he said.

I shook my head. “Not yet, sir. It would help to know if these anomalies were being inserted into Overlook, or if they were merely being observed.”

“My God, man. Are you suggesting that a street could turn into… into that writing for an instant?”

I shuddered. “No. I’m definitely not suggesting that.” Although… “No. But do we know if there’s any sort of electrical static that matches the static as the signal reverts to true?”

He arched an eyebrow. “No, Taylor. The men on the ground have been a bit busy to be running signal analyses during riots.”

“Well, that might be a place to start.”

“Good chap,” said Travis cheerfully. “Why don’t you get on it?”

“Well…”

“Top notch. We’ve got a few disturbances in striking distance.” He called up a list of trouble spots. “Take your pick.”

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Today’s photo is Eating Static by formica.