'What the hell was that?'

  No answer. You run your hands over your belly to check for damage, but the material is not even torn. They could have warned you there would be an assailant in the system. The man, a Kogi is guzzling the pineapple, thrusting his hips backward and forward like a mating dog.

  'What's going on?'

  Sorry, William. A prank of Jarnier's I think. Let's go back a bit.

  Your shoe reappears and you find yourself standing up. The man has gone. When you move, you bang your head against a rock outcrop. It clangs incongruously, like a hollow metal pipe. Suddenly, you're angry. A tic has started in your left eye. You want to do damage to something.

  They hadn't planned for you to be down here, and the route to the top looks difficult. You compose yourself for a moment and then start climbing. They should write in a couple of steps, a rope ladder or something. If a system offers too much of a challenge, the average punter gives in. Or panics. For a moment you conjure up the image of your body in the girdle, making climbing movements with your arms and legs, groping for a hand-hold in thin air. A sudden sense of humiliation comes over you. Fuck the bastards.

  'Expand.'

  The sides of the gorge slide before your eyes until your head is level with the rope bridge. You tear the bridge from its supports, as flimsy now as a cat's cradle, and throw it into the jungle as hard as you can.

  'Expand.'

  With a virtual height of twenty-five metres, you can see over the tops of trees to the compound in the distance. You step out of the gorge as though it's a ditch and stride towards the village.

  Standing above the six huts and two larger ceremonial houses, you pause to decide which one to choose, and then you bend down and tear one of the smaller huts from the earth. Squeaky human voices protest, and you see two Kogi men the size of rats at your feet. You ignore them and shake the hut. A child falls out, tumbling head over heels towards the ground.

  'Who the hell does he think he is?' the director scowled, watching the screen. 'King Kong?'

  The programmers exchanged glances, but said nothing.

  'Damn Jarnier,' the director muttered, watching the figure on the screen give the hut one more shake to make sure it was empty. 'Where the hell is he?'

  'He's just left.'

  Programming that assault was typical Jarnier. If he wasn't careful, he would push his luck too far one day and find himself off the project. He might be brilliant, but the company had limited patience with mavericks. 'Any problems?'

  'Nothing technical, but he's getting a bit weird.'

  'Give me digital display,' Beecham said, turning the mike on. 'William, this is Dr Beecham. Put that hut down.'

  They waited, but there was no response. Beecham repeated the order. The hut fell, shattering at William's giant feet.

  'And return to zero size.'

  There was a delay of half a minute before the huts rose to meet William. Beecham watched the screen with increasing concern. William's slowness to respond was either rebelliousness, or the man was beginning to come unstuck. Either way, it didn't look good.

  He noticed Julia at the back of the room with her notebook. It took him a moment to remember her name. 'Dr O'Brien, how's it going?'

  The woman looked disconcerted, and he wondered if he'd got her name wrong.

  'A few gaps, but nothing that can't be filled, I think.'

  'All this information is right, is it?' he said, indicating the giant screen. William was sitting in the compound watching a couple of dusty chickens pecking at roots.

  'The detail is mostly right, a few minor mistakes. You've compressed the habitat a lot though.'

  He realised it was nervousness that was making her ill at ease. He remembered her at the tele-interview, she'd been so self-effacing, she'd almost talked herself out of a job. He sat beside her, hands on knees. 'The program is nine square kilometres. And in that we had to fit,' he counted them on his fingers, 'mountain, rain forest, jungle, cloud forest and sea shore.'

  'You've done an excellent job.'

  He turned to look at her. 'We have, haven't we?'

  He could see she wanted to ask a question but was holding back. 'What is it, dear?'

  'The animal attacking William - was it really necessary?'

  He sighed and looked at the woman. This was probably his last project; in a year he would face compulsory retirement. Even if she was one of headquarters' spies, it would make little difference what he said.

  'Not necessary at all.'

  As soon as the virtual jaguar had turned into a man Julia realised what had been done. Jarnier had written Kasindukua, the mythical jaguar-mama, into the program. Julia remembered how interested he had been in the story, quizzing her several times about the details, her interpretation of it. The great Mother, the story went, had given Kasindukua two power objects: a jaguar mask and a blue pebble. Julia had told Jarnier that the jaguar was a symbol of shamanic power, the blue pebble presumably a hallucinogen. By wearing the mask and swallowing the pebble, Kasindukua was given the power to see beyond surface reality - disease was made visible as beetles, women turned into pineapples. The great Mother warned him to use his powers wisely, but he ignored her and began raping women, pretending to be eating pineapples. The first virtual rapist.

  'What's it got to do with reality holidays?' she asked Beecham.

  The older man shook his head. 'Maybe you should ask Jarnier.'

  William had been inside just over sixty hours when Beecham called an end to it. Julia watched the monitor, relieved and worried, as William was unhooked from the girdle. Since the episode with the hut he had been acting strangely, sitting in the dust staring at nothing for two hours, sleeping fitfully. But strange as it was, it all seemed plausible to Julia. She had watched the screen, almost hypnotised by the slow scanning of his gaze, the focus on tiny detail: fingernails, the ragged ear of a pig, a sea shell. The man was disintegrating.

  It was oddly intimate, watching this huge screen. Like eavesdropping on somebody's dream. Though she had felt uncomfortably like an intruder, she had forced herself to stay. While she sat drinking coffee and biting her fingernails, the body of a man was strapped into an iron maiden, lasers firing images onto his retinas, his employers adding pressure to see how much he could take before flipping out.

  Four days on the base had done nothing to quell her disquiet. Reality holidays? She had been prepared to swallow some professional pride so she could see the Kogi in action, but Omnisens had turned her into a playscape attendant. She should have realised when they told her the fee they would pay her. It was suspiciously good for an academic. They were buying her. And now she was part of a team about to turn the Kogi into one more flavour of the month. She could see how it would evolve if the program was a success: fashion houses marketing white cotton tunics, funny little hats, gourd farms producing an assembly line of poporos, green wads of chewing gum to represent coca leaves.

  It had happened before with almost every successful virtuality system; television had nothing on multisensory playscapes as a generator of merchandising. She had seen it with her own kids. Music, clothes, language, every season a different fashion sweeping through school like the plague.

  She was angry at them, angry at herself. The project had been presented as an educational reality holiday, and now it transpired that it was little more than a glorified hunt-and-destroy game. She cursed herself for her naivety. Omnisens, a company with the second largest slice of the entertainment pie in the world - what did she expect? And now they were pushing William to see how long it would take a human being to crack. Well, it looked like they'd found out.

  11

  If I sit with a thermo pad on my feet and my hands between my legs I can just about maintain sensation in my extremities. Fingers and toes, we are told, are the first parts to be abandoned as the body withdraws heat to its core. We can lose our digits, nature's reasoning goes, but heart, lungs and liver need their full quota of hot blood.

  I once saw a man with frostbite, blackened toes as dead as frozen potato chips. I can't think where I could have seen him, I suppose it must have been on TV. I remember how cheerful he was, even though the necrotic stumps of his toes had been amputated, glad I suppose not to have lost more of his body. When they found him - I think he was a mountaineer who had fallen down a crevasse - he had white patches of frozen flesh on his face like a fungal bloom. He was as cold as if he had spent a day inside the ice compartment of a refrigerator.

  I take my gloves off and rub my face. Perhaps I should have brought a mirror to check myself. If I'm to win the battle between frigid entropy and my dancing blood corpuscles, I'm going to have to keep an eye on myself. Keep moving. I waggle my fingers above the typewriter keys. Type to survive.

  I stare at the piece of paper in front of me and then play with the steam of my breath, trying to blow smoke rings. I stop when I taste the snot which has dribbled into the corner of my mouth. Oops.

  For a moment I have one of those insights, increasingly common, of seeing myself displayed for all to see, a pinned butterfly on a cork board. I'm an old man, a nose blue with cold, and snot dribbling down his face. Dribbling while Rome burns.

  Sliding forward, I wedge the thermo pad between my thighs so that my upper legs can warm. Everything aches: my few remaining teeth, my elbows and knees, my hips. This isn't arthritis - it's cold. But I can't get any closer to the electric fire without my clothes singeing. My toes are so frozen they feel as though somebody is standing on them. I look around myself. Trying to heat a room this size is like warming a cave with a couple of candles. If I don't do something about it, my end is going to be swifter and more uncomfortable than I realised.

  I could do it now, walk down to Harry's Store and spend the afternoon tacking some plastic sheets into place. I could make a nice little greenhouse for myself, but I'm suddenly too sleepy to move. Hypothermia, I remember, leads to a constriction of capillaries in the brain, inducing a state of vagueness, clumsiness, fatigue. Double oops.

  There are no new footprints in the snow which lead me to Harry's Store. I follow the same route, crossing the road in the same place, turning at the crossroads to look back at the factory as I did on my first day. The sun is brilliant, the sky blue and clear. The ozone above my head is as thin as melting ice on a pond. I pull my hat down and keep my hands in my pockets. Skin cancer I don't need.

  By the time I reach Harry's, the ache in my toes has numbed.

  I stamp the ice off my boots at the door, trying to get some feeling back into my feet. I'm glad to see the TV is turned off. Harry is on top of a rickety ladder stacking boxes on a high shelf when I come in. He looks down at me. 'Your missus just phoned.'

  I'm too surprised to say anything.

  'She said she'd ring back tomorrow at midday.'

  'My wife? How did she get your number?'

  The old Eskimo shrugs and returns his attention to his shelf stacking. 'When a woman wants a man, she can get awful creative.'

  So, she has found me. Jack must have told Carla where I was going. Bastard - he promised not to. 'What else did she say?'

  'She asked how you was.'

  He gingerly descends the ladder and turns to face me. I'm glad I still have my mask on, for a white sediment of powder - flour or cement dust - is clinging to his clothes.

  I feel ridiculous dragging information out of him, but I have to ask. 'What did you say?'

  'I says you was walking and talking.'

  I can hardly believe this wrinkled Eskimo has actually spoken to my wife. Two worlds in collision. I want to ask Harry how she sounded, but I force the thought out of my head.

  'Have you got any Visqueen sheets?' I made myself pace out the room, estimating the amount of plastic I'd need to seal myself into one end: about 300 square feet. Harry works out how many sheets I'll need. Four will give me plenty left over, so I buy them, along with some tacks and a ball-peen hammer.

  I linger in the store, feeling my muscles relax in the warmth. Harry ignores me, his attention on a radio he's dismantling. What is he doing here? I'm his only customer, and even then he ignores me. The door has jammed shut and it clatters as I tug it open.

  'See you tomorrow,' he calls.

  'Hmm,' is all I can say. Tomorrow at midday. Am I in the same time zone as Vancouver? Is her midday my midday? I'm going to have to think about whether I want to speak to her or not. The telephone in the hands of the wrong person is a dangerous weapon. I feel hunted as I walk down the main street, adding one more set of tracks to the snow. Suddenly my world is smaller.

  I know I don't want to speak to Carla but, goddamit, I do want to know what she's thinking. Damn her inquisitiveness; it's like a tyre iron threatening to break my carefully sealed solitude. She has always done this; poked and probed, partly through love, partly through some feminine urge to possess. I should have insisted Jack didn't tell her where I was going, it was asking too much of her not to contact me. And now she's got me wondering.

  As I cross the street to the factory, something strikes me on the back of the head, just under the rim of my hat. I spin round, ready to defend myself from attack. A bleached bone, probably the thigh bone of a cow, is lying in the snow. I rub my head and look around, but there's nobody in sight.

  I estimate the distance to the nearest building: forty feet at least. If somebody threw it from an upstairs window, they must either have a singularly good aim, or I must be singularly unlucky to have been thus struck. I get the feeling I'm being watched, but I don't know from which direction.

  It takes me the rest of the day to get the sheeting in place. It means standing on a chair on one of the trestle tables in order to reach the ceiling, but I manage not to fall off. I hate heights, convinced the world is going to crumble under me and I'll break a hip or something absurd. It's hard work, and I seem to have less energy with each passing hour, but by the evening a plastic wall, floor to ceiling, is in place. It gives me a living space of about twenty feet by twenty - more than enough for what I need. The sheets overlap in the middle so I can get in and out. There's enough polythene left over to cover the windows if necessary. Basic, I must admit, but effective.

  I keep finding myself at the desk, staring at the paper in the typewriter. I don't know what I have to say. The assumption is that the author is the one who knows, the one with authority, but all I seem to be able to do is raise questions. Questions I can't answer.

  I look round the room for the parrot. I think it must be making friends with me. Although I keep finding its curled white slugs of shit, so far it hasn't scored a direct hit on me. It spends most of its time on the light fittings, asleep or meditating - it's hard to tell which. I've left a small window open just in case it wants to escape, but it doesn't seem interested in the great outdoors.

  At first I resisted naming the parrot, which I realise now is probably some sort of parakeet, but from somewhere a name came to me, and it seems to have stuck: Toto. I cluck my tongue to draw its attention. It looks down at me, crouches for a moment and then launches off its perch. It swoops towards me, and I just have time to bring my mask up to my face. I don't know how much I'm allergic to it, but I'm not going to take any chances. The bird lands nimbly on the platen of the typewriter, tucking its wing tips neatly into place. It looks at me from over its fearsome bill.

  'Well?' I ask.

  Nothing.

  'Shall I speak to Carla?'

  Still nothing.

  I suppose it's hungry. I go to the larder and bring back a packet of sunflower seeds. It tilts its head at the crackling sound of cellophane, and when I tip some seeds out onto my palm, it shuffles a little dance of excitement. It doesn't eat directly from my palm as a pigeon would, but takes a seed in its prehistoric claw and ducks its neck to nibble at it. Bending close to observe it eat, I can see its dry and swollen tongue, hardly a tongue at all, more like an oral digit.

  'Can you speak?' I hold another seed out and as it bends to take it, I jerk it away. 'Say something,' I coax, teasing it with the seed. 'Toto, Toto,' I cajole.

  The bird is shuffling along the platen and ruffling its feathers. I give it the seed and then try again. Its eyes are fixed on the food, and when I jerk it out of reach, it opens its bill, pauses as if thinking and then gives two piercing whistles. The sound is so loud it's like being struck on the side of the head with a heavy object. I offer Toto the seed, but it just bounces up and down on the spot, screeching again and again.

  'Okay, okay.' I drop a handful of seeds on the table, but it has started something it's not ready to stop. The noise is so overpowering I have to walk to the end of the room with my hands over my ears. There is silence while the bird eats. When it has finished I walk back to it and sit in my chair.

  I stare at Toto, and Toto stares back. Extraordinary thing, this close up. Its eyes are as inert as buttons, and even when it slowly winks at me, it just looks like a robot toy pretending to be alive. But it is alive; more than a machine, surely. The bird clicks its beak at me as though cracking an invisible seed. There is a brain of some sort in there. Not much of one perhaps, but there are presumably enough neural connections going on under its feathered skull to create critical mass. I try and imagine the process. Flash-bang! every nanosecond and a Bose-Einstein condensate is pulled out of nowhere like a rabbit out of a hat: parrot consciousness. A whole greater than the sum of its parts.

  What does the world look like through the button eyes of a parrot? When it ducks its head to watch me, what is it seeing? A kaleidoscope? A mountain? Spirit bodies? God?

  A brain the size of a pea, but still unfathomably more sophisticated than the best analogue computer system. And my brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, these rucks and folds of who I am, all tucked neatly into a shell. What do I see when I look at the world? What there is? Or just a version? Fact or fantasy? Fact, and then I'm just a biocomputer of cosmic complexity. Fantasy, and it's a reality machine behind my eyes.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26