From the coder of Legions of Dawn MAGNETIC FICTION - ONLY £3.99! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ** SUITABLE ONLY FOR PERSONS OF 15 YEARS OR OVER ** ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ <>------------------------------------------------------------------<> <> These stories are "a cut above the majority of stories <> <> appearing in the small press magazines today" according to <> <> SIMON CLARK - a successful horror novelist!! <> <>------------------------------------------------------------------<> Magnetic Fiction is an addictive collection of strange and terrifying stories, each professionally written and uniquely absorbing. Send your imagination on a wild tour; get your personal copy from F1 Licenceware and be stunned by the book-page presentation, complete with scanned illustrations, easy-to-use textreader with adjustable fonts, colours, borders, print option, hard disk installer and much more! Featuring stories such as: "The Art Of Fear" (read how a girl mingles paint with her own blood and gains power from brutal torture to create the ultimate form of self expression!), "The Customer" (a young store assistant meets a beautiful business woman who tries to convince him into quitting by announcing the world is full of robotic humanoids!) and "Visitcha" (a breathtaking revenge story about a young man, dumped by his shameless, still-at-college girlfriend, who decides to march on into her lesson and KILL her right there and then!)... PLUS amazing contributions from Kevin Murphy (author of "Hell & Gone" - the "Legions of Dawn" novella!!!), Neale Grant (editor of "The Quatermass Experiment"!!), Linette Voller (master of twisted tales!), Flick G-C (the most disturbing subject matter ever?) and Mike Richmond ("Black Dawn II", "Dark Portal" musician, and author of "Revenge!"). MAGNETIC FICTION - THE FUTURE OF PUBLICATION ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This is a taste of it's delights: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BLACK MOSAIC (c) Andrew Campbell 1995 A crack across the face and a scream. "Ahh, Mum!" "Ah Mum nothing! Get outa here you scabby little bitch. PISS OFF!" "But I've nowhere to go-" "I don't CARE!" "Mum PLEASE-" The slam of a door. Birds chirping. Cars passing. A child crying. And then footsteps... slow and aimless... * `The televisions in the garden will need plugs,' she thought as she pushed the gate open with her free hand. The house stood in front of her like huge black tooth: tall, sharp, threatening. On the first flag of the path, she got her rucksack caught on the gate; it slammed shut with a loud clink and she took a deep breath. Nothing happened. The door of the house remained dark and closed. She saw a crow, black, silent and watching her from the arms of a naked tree at the nearest end of the garden, but nothing else alive. `Plugs are okay, I can nick plugs...' she thought as she tip-toed across the hardened soil. There were at least thirty TV's - some big, some small, some half-buried, some upsidedown - but she only wanted one, just one, so she could hide in her room and watch the late shows and the films and talk about them with her peers at school. All the other kids had TV's- it wasn't fair, she HAD to have one, she NEEDED one, TV was a vital part of growing up. A few more years and she'd BE grown up: where was the fairness in THAT? The dark red one below the crow's leafless tree was the latest throw-out. It hadn't rained for days either. Dark red was a funny colour for a TV, she knew that, but as long as she could get it to work she didn't care. She'd dug it half-way out of the frozen soil when a chain rattled and the door of the house squealed open. "Oi!" shouted the Caretaker. "Whatcha doin'?" She stood up quick and secured her rucksack. "Nothin'." "The Programmers sentcha didn't they?" he yelled, stepping clumsily out onto the porch. "Go on you little sprite, sod off!" She edged up against the trunk of the tree. The crow squawked and cocked a beady eye down at her. "Nobody sent me, live down the street, I was just..." she swallowed. "Lookin' at your tellies and I was wonderin' if maybe you could spare one for me." Using two ice-white fingers, the Caretaker flicked something small and black from his shoulder, then scuttled down the garden path, eyes squinted against the sun. He was small- not as small as her, but small for a man- and his clothes didn't do much for his unhealthy appearance: black pullovers, black trousers, black shoes, everything he wore was black, even when she saw him at school. Long silver hair finished off a near-perfect comparison - he looked like a pint of beer. "They don't work!" he barked. "None of em! Why'do think I throw em out? So the worms can watch Brookside?" he eyed her up from trainers to hairstyle. "Besides, you'd never carry one home yourself!" "Well, you're wrong!" she yelled and moved away from the tree. This guy wasn't her Mum - she could be as cheeky as she liked to him. "Strength is in the mind, stupid. Just cos I'm small... so what? I bet I could beat YOU at an arm wrestle." The Caretaker's attitude toward her changed completely. His face ironed out and his eyes opened wide. "What an admirable thing to say," he chuckled. "A young kid like you, who would have thought? What's your name my dear?" "Jackie Cornish." she said honestly, hoping he wouldn't call her Cornish Pasty like her peers did at school. "Very nice," the man nodded, flicking another bodily-attached black thing across the garden. Jackie tried to follow it to see what it was, but lost it in the soil. "Tell me Jackie Cornish, are you afraid of insects?" Jackie tottered from one foot to the other, undecided. "No. Yes- no, no I'm not." she said quickly. "Well... why?" "I was thinking of inviting you in," said the man, looking at his front door. "Thing is, I seem to have been overrun by pests. Cock -roaches mainly. Thousands of the little swines. But if you think you can stand the infestation, I'd really like to show you an experiment I'm conducting. You seem to have the right mind for it." Jackie looked around. The Caretaker's house was fairly isolated; it sat alone on the top of a steep hill and could be seen as a jagged silhouette from almost everywhere - her bed, the kitchen window, even from the school playground if she squinted hard enough. "Maybe I shouldn't." she said, fidgeting. "S'not that I'm scared of creepy-crawlies and stuff, and I'd like to see your house but... what? What's wrong?" The Caretaker's face had sagged like a bag of flour. He crouched down in front of Jackie and pointed with one shaky white finger. Jackie, frightened, put her back to the tree trunk again. The crow protested with another high-pitched squawk. "It's okay my dear, I'm just looking at your eye," said the man distractedly. "Am I mistaken or is it black?" "My mum, she did it," Jackie shrugged. She pulled her skirt up a bit. "Look, she did that to my leg with her rollin' pin." She ran her fingers across a purple-yellow bruise. "Are you a pupil at Stone Bridge?" the Caretaker inquired. "I can't say as I've seen you around, how old are you?" Jackie put her skirt down. "Thirteen... well, in two weeks." "Really?" the man stood up again. "So... how old are you?" Jackie asked, burning with curiosity. The Caretaker glanced at his watch. "Fifty two in four months, ten days, eight hours," he grinned, broadly. "...twenty two minutes and sixteen seconds." "Cool!" Jackie shouted, seriously impressed. "Is that all true?" He began to head back to the house. "It's true, alright," he called. "I could tell you a lot of things you'd probably find... cool." he stopped, half-way to his front door, and turned, showing more teeth than ever. "I even know the meaning of life." he declared. "Woah," Jackie bit her lip. She'd never known anyone who knew the meaning of life before. She saw escape, excitement, something both scary and fascinating in the Caretaker. She'd always known he was far more than what the rest of the kids - not to mention some of the teachers - had labelled him. He might clean the floors before sun-rise and pour saw-dust on your puke when you gipped, but he had an incredible dark secrecy about him too. `And anyway,' Jackie thought as she abandoned the TV and followed him into his huge, black house. `Even if he is a psycho, it'll make a change from bein' beaten up by Mum.' * "I honestly thought you were more punishment sent by the Programmers, my dear." said the Caretaker, leading Jackie through his ridiculously untidy kitchen. "Now I'm gettin' close, I have to watch who I let in." Jackie didn't respond: her skin had goose-pimpled so badly she thought it might stay that way for the rest of her life. The walls of the kitchen were animated with huge, scurrying cock -roaches. They hurried and scampered and crisscrossed on the ceiling, some of them halting, others running on and on until they found shelter. Between the Caretaker's voice and her own shoes tapping on the lino - which itself was alive with insects - Jackie could hear a soft, endless, whistle-like chirping, and the skin-prickling rustle of tiny exoskeletons colliding randomly. "Oh Go-od!" she squirmed when something cracked under her left shoe. A sidestep revealed a crimson flower with a minced cockroach middle- legs still quivering. "Don't mind that," said the Caretaker, waving her forwards. "You ought to see what I'VE done to some of the evil little buggers. Just through here, come on." Jackie cracked two more of the beasts before emerging in a spacious and relatively bug-free dining room, where the Caretaker was already sat down and smiling. "This is my art room." he announced. Jackie inspected the place with undisguised curiosity. It was dimly lit, cold, and stacked with hundreds of jars of insects in every corner and on every shelf. Dead cockroaches stained the walls like exploded poppies, creating an almost likeable wallpaper pattern all the way around the room. She kept on turning, past a big wooden table and four chairs (one of which seated the Caretaker) until she came to a large, black, cross-shaped mosaic hanging on the wall above an empty fireplace. "Like it?" said the Caretaker, voice distorted by a smile. "It's..." Jackie began. She was about to say cool, when she noticed tiny traces of movement in the pattern. She neared the puzzling exhibition with increasing dread, then shouted, "Oh YUK! they're cockroaches! No way!" The Caretaker roared with laughter and stamped his feet. "Yes!" he shouted. "Amazing what you can do with a bit of prittstick." "It's sick," Jackie groaned. "Some of em aren't even dead, you could at least kill em properly first." "Sod that!" The Caretaker pushed back his chair. "Don't you see? That's a map of the world up there. People stored in a big array, some of them alive, some dead- or to put it more accurately- some of them REAL some of them UNREAL." he scratched his chin. "Yes, exactly," he muttered, considering his own idea, before vanishing through another doorway. "This way madam," he called. Jackie pulled a face at the gruesome mosaic. "Sick," she whispered, scrutinizing it's every detail. It was so disgusting she couldn't pull herself away. "Jackie? Come on!" Still muttering to herself how tight the Caretaker was, she reluctantly carried on, deep into the house. * The study: a small, blue-painted room, teeming with wires and TV's and computers and power supplies and cable-connectors and millions more tireless insects. "What happens in here?" Jackie wanted to know. "Hacking my dear," said the Caretaker, rapping the keyboard beneath his latest TV (a white one with a big, black tuning knob). "I guess I should break it to you now before you get any more confused." "Break what to me?" Jackie said, bending down to analyze a complex circuit board poking out of a smashed TV set. The Caretaker stopped hitting keys. "It's a program." he announced, then carried on. "Maybe a game, I'm not sure, but it's definitely some kind of transmission." Jackie ran her fingers lightly across the funny shapes imbedded in the green plastic board. "WHAT'S a game?" she persisted, puzzled to say the least. "Reality of course," the Caretaker yelled. "I'm talking about life. Not all the lives in the world, not the lives of the people down the street, not even YOUR life. I'm talking about MY life. Because Jackie, I'm still undecided as to whether I'm the only Player. I have a sneaky suspicion I could be- in which case, nobody really exists but ME, not even YOU. You're just binary, or hexadecimal- an array of values held in the memory of some ultra-complex VR-computer." he glanced at her. "You're a sprite Jackie. Just a sprite." Most of that speech didn't sink in. `He's probably just trying to show off,' Jackie decided, but she did have one question to ask: "What's `VR'?" The Caretaker laughed out loud. "You mean you're nearly thirteen and you don't know what VR is? My God, I would have thought you'd have created your own 3D worlds on your Dad's PC by now." "My dad's dead." said Jackie casually, then, "I 'aven't got a computer, I 'aven't even got a TV, I told you." "Ah, what does it matter." the Caretaker waved his hand. "You're just a bunch of pixels and variables doing what you've been programmed to do - which is to pester me by the looks of it." Whilst looking around for things she could "accidently" slip into her rucksack, Jackie began to piece together the man's idea. "So I'm not real." she said, touching her own blobby reflection in the screen of a blank, burnt out TV. "So how come I KNOW I'm alive then? YOU could be a sprite for all I know." The Caretaker swung in his seat. "Yes my dear, but you've been programmed to say exactly that, to make me THINK you're alive. If I break into the program, or die for instance, I'll wake up and take off the headset. I'm somebody else in another reality, and no matter what you say Jackie - whether you're another Player in the same game or a cluster of numbers in some gigantic memorybank - I'm RIGHT. We're both a part of some advanced programming experiment, and there's a big one of us isn't REAL." Jackie scratched her hair... and found a cockroach in it. "Shit!" she cried out and hit to the floor. "Shit shit shit!" "Stamp on it," said the Caretaker, arms folded. "Destroy one of your fellow sprites." "I'm not a sprite!" Jackie shouted, hair all jumbled up. She put her hands on her hips, unconsciously imitating her mother when she was angry. "If it's all a game, what happens AFTER you take the headset off? What THEN? Where ARE you?" The Caretaker smiled. "VR within VR. It's a game within a game. Either that, or you make a leap into another parallel dimension. A world that's almost the same as the one you were in before- but not quite." "What a load of bollocks!" she pointed all over the messy room. "I mean it's STUPID! You can't hack into LIFE! Life's REAL, we're ALL real, we're not robots or numbers." The Caretaker's console beeped. He looked at it. "Loaded." he said and made space for Jackie to crouch down. "Look at this. You see all those blank boxes across the middle of the screen there? They're waiting to be filled with either naughts or ones- decided by MY mind." He fumbled around on the cluttered worktop until he found a bunch of dodgy-looking electrodes. He stuck them on his forehead. Jackie giggled, "You look a prick wearin' those, mister." "You won't be laughing in a minute." he snapped, playing with the keyboard again. "Don't you live with anyone?" Jackie inquired. The thought of being alone with a legion of cockroaches made her spine tingle. "A while since, yes. My wife." the Caretaker said, his voice so soft it sounded unnatural- like a completely different person was speaking. "She- she was an incredible woman. No time for trivia, always full of energy. She had to be a Player, she just HAD to be- but I guess I'll never be certain until I break through. We grew older together- stuff your armchairs, your flat caps and your games of Golf on a Sunday afternoon: there was none of that with her, she kept on living." he turned back to his console and looked down at the keyboard. "She died the day I scored eleven on my program." Jackie kept quiet for a minute. She knew it was best. She'd kept silent when Dad had passed away, and Mum hadn't even hit her once. Eventually she coughed to dissolve away the mood. "So... what about your parents?" "When I scored nine, my mother exploded." he whispered harshly. "Before I began Hacking, I believed spontaneous combustion was the result of a rare incident in time: the same person meeting his or her own self come back from the future. One vanishes the other ignites. The only problem with that is..." he shrugged. "It's paradoxical. Makes no sense. It would take a machine beyond even God's imagination to cope with time-travel." Jackie stared at the screen. "Scored nine?" she quizzed. "What do you mean? Have you wrote a game or somethin'?" The Caretaker nodded. "Kind of. Each square flashes for ten seconds with random of zeros and ones. I must determine the outcome using only my mind. If I get twenty ones in a row - not a single zilch anywhere across the board - I break reality." "Eh?" Jackie said. "How do'you do that?" "It's complicated, but it'll work. I know it will." he put his face so close to Jackie's she felt his spicey breath warm her nose. "I finished the program three years ago, and I've been Hacking with it ever since. The first time I got more than six ones in a row, the TV exploded. I tried again and again: each time I exceeded six, the tube blew, hence my rather novel garden. Seven ones, my father was struck by lightening. Nine one's my mother burst into flames. Eleven ones, my wife died of a heart-attack. Thirteen ones: the cockroaches came. Fifteen: the crow outside in the dead tree... I fight it off every morning when I open the gate to go to school to clean it- ready for you lot." his eyes sparkled. "Fifteen is the highest I've ever got, Jackie. Fifteen. Just five more and I'm there. But every step closer brings a new menace. Death is either Game Over, or Game Complete- the way I'm MEANT to lift the headset. But I want to lift it before that time. I want to stop the code despite the Programmer's wrath. I want to wrench off my headset and cause a HUGE syntax error." In the next silence, the idea slotted into place like the final chunk of a jigsaw puzzle, and Jackie looked around the room, quiet, shivering, chewing her knuckles. "So... what's the meanin' of life then?" she said in a thin voice. "To find the answer to the question," said the Caretaker immediate -ly. "Once we've done that, there'll be no more mysteries to solve. We'll become Gods. Or in my terms: Programmers." "Oh." Jackie murmured in a disappointed tone. "So then... do the Programmers make my mum hit me?" The Caretaker took a deep breath, shrugged, nodded. "I guess so." Jackie sniffed up. "What's your real name?" "Martin." "Well listen Martin. I'm not a sprite, I'm a Player, and I don't like the Programmers either. Please... please can I have a go on your machine?" * With a bunch of coloured wires sticking out his head, and his face screwed up so bad he looked like he was constipated, Martin demonstrated how his program worked. His first three attempts were instant failures: he got zeros in the first box each time. Jackie found this highly amusing, especially when he seemed to put so much mental effort into the experiment, but she didn't laugh to avoid embarrassing him. It was attempt number six that disturbed the Programmers: Martin got seven ones in a row, and for what seemed like no reason at all, the TV sparked and banged, the screen shattered into pieces, and blue smoke drifted from the resulting hole. When the buzzing of electricity and the tinkle of glass faded, he and Jackie were left with the smell of burning, and a silence that whistled in their ears. "You see?" said the Caretaker, dragging the ruined TV off his desk. It hit the floorboards with splintering crack, and Jackie jumped. "But- how do you get ones instead of naughts?" she inquired. "Concentrate," Martin shouted, uncovering a fresh TV. He pulled it into place whilst he spoke: "Once you've got the first two or three you can feel yourself drifting back into your own mind. You see Jackie, everything's up here." he paused to tap his head. "Do you get it?" "No," Jackie didn't. "That can't be right. Everything's out here too look, I can wave my arms about and pick things up and-" "Oh yes," Martin agreed, connected up and ready to go again. He brushed his hair back and leaned forwards. "But you'll always see the world through your own eyes, your own brain. You're trapped inside yourself. Just like you have variables and colours and sound effects and smell-effects and taste-effects, so does every object in the game. Weight, chemical-composition, a type of appearance, a reaction to other things: it's all here for YOU - the Player - to believe in, to use and manipulate within the game world." "But..." Jackie was really confused now. "I STILL don't get it." Martin tapped his head again, slower. "If this weren't here, neither would any of this," he arced his arms in circles. "You see? If YOU did not exist, neither would LIFE. You wouldn't be here to play the game. To experience it. To play it out until Game Over." Jackie blinked- and it hurt. If it was a game- it was TOO real. She didn't want to play anymore. Games were for fun- you were supposed to ENJOY them. Being whacked in the face and pounded with a rolling pin by a drunken mother every night wasn't her idea of a good time. Either she'd been forced into this Virtual World as punishment for a crime her real self had committed, or she'd picked a bad character on the title-screen. If it was the latter, she wanted to quit and choose another. "Alright, it's MY turn." she said, waving Martin off his chair. "I want a go." The Caretaker connected her up with electrodes and told her which keys did what. When she was ready, Jackie saw her pallid reflection stare back at her from inside the screen - she looked like a child- version of Medusa, rainbow coloured snakes in her hair. It was an insane image that made her wonder if Martin was just manipulating her into believing in his own crazy, far-fetched fantasy. "Concentrate." he whispered, crouching beside her. "You must want to succeed in scoring in order to make true that score. WHY do you want to break out of the program? Think about that, Jackie. Think about the Programmers sat there watching you play their little game." Jackie closed her eyes and began to think. Immediately, Mum began to scream through her mind in bright white flashes, punching, cutting, breaking bones... "Three in a row," she heard Martin say. "You're doing well, keep going Jackie." ...Mum's boyfriend throwing her down the stairs... punch bag... so much pain... inside... outside... her friends circling her, laughing at her broken, battered face.... "Eight Jackie! EIGHT!" an excited voice. "Keep it going!" ...relatives ignoring her injuries... "what did you DO Jacqueline? Fall of your bike yet again? Clumsy girl!".... "Eleven! My God you're doing incredibly well..." ...people in the streets, clusters of binary, automated models, robots, unreal people... billions of them, swarming the Earth like rats in the sewers... more bright flashes: Mum taking pills, Mum sniffing white powder on the kitchen table... turning to face her, screaming `bitch bitch BITCH' with blood pouring from her nose... "Seventeen." croaked Martin. "It can't be. It can't-" ...the television garden, the naked tree, the crow... "Eighteen! It's a MIRACLE!" ...a sea of cockroaches crackling beneath her weight... "Nineteen- Jackie pleasebecareful-" ...the black mosaic- innocent creatures caught from a crowd, extracted, punished, glued on their backs, legs wiggling, barely alive- black mosaic: symbolic of her pain- her PAIN- The white flashes consumed her. Mind and body merged in a crack of sparks. Fading noise... until silence, and she listened, wheezing and gasping through her brain, for Martin to announce twenty... But there was nothing. Martin had gone. * * * FOR THE CONCLUSION TO THIS STORY & LOADS MORE EXCITING STORIES GRAB A COPY OF MAGNETIC FICTION! YOU WON'T REGRET IT! (end)