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.

It took a few minutes of painful stamping and arm-waving to get the blood flowing back to my hands and feet properly, but eventually the cramps faded. When I left the tent, I discovered that the clean-up was starting. Standard procedure was to sanitise first, so bodies would be recovered quite early on.

First priority was to examine the machinery I’d set up, however. The receptors were laid out along the riot barricade, facing into the infected zone, but the analytical equipment was in a tent off to one side of the encampment. I made my way over there, loftily ignoring the various looks I received from the clean-up crew.

There were a couple of corpses outside my machine tent. It was difficult to tell if they had been on guard there, or if they’d just been passing when… Well. It seemed to me that there was something wrong with their eyeballs, but I just stepped over them and went to examine the computers.

My main analytical tool was an electro-magnetic field recorder, a simple piece of kit that just recorded what the local EMFs were up to. In addition to that, Travis had given me a gravity meter, a radiation counter, a filter to analyse the air for pollution, and even a widget which claimed to be able to measure relative strength of different types of sub-atomic force. All of these sensors had been continually feeding into the recording and analysis box, and I had a visualiser dome to play with if I wanted to see the results as a snazzy, media-friendly 3D image.

I didn’t.

I dived into the data. The first thing that struck me was that right from the moment I set up the sensors, the colour force sensor was recording a confinement boundary of almost twice normal. I could tell, because there was a big, friendly analytical note on the screen saying “Colour force: boundary force 1.93x standard”. It was obviously important, because it was flashing. Everything else seemed reasonably normal — at least, it didn’t have alerts.

I thought about calling Control to ask about the colour force, but it seemed like a good way to get slapped with another medical evaluation. The analysis package had some cryptic explanations, and between those and the assorted data stores I was linked to, I eventually managed to figure out that it seemed to imply something was badly wrong with the makeup of physical reality. Swollen electrons and so on. Possibly. Either way, everything I could find suggested it was impossible.

I made a note of that, and went back to the data. There were moments when the local magnetic field wavered frighteningly. It took a while, but it turned out that whenever the rioting Infected had spoken en masse, north had suddenly been deflected straight towards them. That was uncanny.

I pressed on, scrolling through the data. Finally, I found what I was hunting for. Some 90 minutes earlier, there was a burst where the EMF sensors, gravity meter and particle radiation filter all went absolutely mad. I cross-checked with Overlook, and sure enough, it was exactly the same time as the visual feed switched from an impossible scene of ordinary daily life to an accurate depiction of the devastated empty territory.

I started at it for a long moment, then forced myself to get it together.

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Today’s photo is January by Jer Thorpe.