Psychotopia, p.21
Psychotopia, page 21
Afterwards, she awoke to find Callum clasping her hand.
‘I thought I lost you,’ he said. And then he started crying.
‘The baby?’
‘Fine.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really, absolutely. Everything is good. Considering …’
‘Considering what?’
‘Considering it was a difficult birth.’
‘There are problems?’
‘They’re keeping him in intensive care for now.’
‘Intensive care?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s just a precaution. It’s the best place for him to be. They can look after him there. That’s what we want to happen.’
‘Is he …?’
‘It’s going to be fine. He’s going to be fine. Whatever happens, it’ll be fine. OK? We’ll get through this. You and me. Together.’
He gave her hand another squeeze. She felt her whole body relax as she surrendered herself to a future she could not control. At that moment, she was not afraid, or even anxious. Maybe she was just too exhausted. Or maybe she was calmed by the thought that, whatever else happened, she had got Callum back.
She certainly could have no complaints about the care that was given to little Liam. That was the weird thing about the NLMega. It was so dire and dysfunctional in some respects that it made you want to throw your hands up in despair, or even bang your head against the nearest blood-smeared wall. But then some member of the staff would surprise you by going so far out of their way to help you that you worried for them. That seemed to be how it was going in society in general, as far as she could tell. The world was dividing, and it was not along class, race or religious lines.
It was between those people who still gave a fuck and those who didn’t.
After observing him closely and subjecting him to a bank of tests, they decided that he was a perfectly healthy neonatal boy and returned him to his mother. He was tiny. A tiny mite. But he was full of strength and the determination to live. He latched on to her nipple and began suckling straight away. And she felt a wave of deep, unconditional love transfer into him along with her milk.
Only two days later than scheduled, they were allowed to take him back to Enfield.
As she carried a sleeping Liam across the threshold in the baby seat, she gave a gentle call-out: ‘Hello! We’re home!’
There was no reply. But then she had deliberately kept her voice down so as not to wake the baby. Callum went looking for Siobhan and Birgitte. He came back a moment later to report that the house was empty.
Aimée gave a quizzical frown. ‘I thought you MindMessaged Birgitte to let her know we were on our way?’
‘I did.’
‘Oh. That’s odd. I mean. They’ve gone out? Would you not have thought …?’
‘Yes, well, you know what Siobhan’s like.’
‘Yes.’
The old stone of dread that she had not felt for so long settled again in her stomach.
Callum sent Birgitte a MindMessage to let her know that they were home.
He got back the rather cryptic and not entirely satisfying: We r havin fun.
To which he replied: Tell S new baby brother wants to meet her.
To which came the reply: O yeh sure.
They turned up half an hour later. Birgitte nonchalantly explained that Siobhan had wanted to go to the park. It seemed reasonable, but then again, strange.
Aimée had placed the car seat with Liam still asleep in it on the sofa. Siobhan walked straight past it and went into her playroom, where she busied herself with her dolls.
‘Siobhan?’ Callum called gently. ‘Don’t you want to come and see your brother?’
She looked up, angled her head thoughtfully, before coming to a decision. She laid down the dolls and dutifully got up to come back into the living room. She walked over to the car seat, made a show of looking at Liam, nodded once emphatically, and then went back to the playroom without saying a word.
Aimée and Callum exchanged a look of wry bewilderment, all four eyebrows hiked up as far as they could go.
‘It’s fine … she’s … you know … it’s a lot for her to … she’ll come round. Don’t worry.’
All Aimée could do was let out a deep sigh.
Edie came round to admire her new nephew.
‘He’s beautiful.’
‘He is. Yes.’
‘And how are you?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You look …’
‘What exactly?’
‘A little bit tired, maybe?’
‘Well, yes. You should try this giving birth business. It is tiring. But at least we have Birgitte to take Siobhan off my hands for a while.’
‘Yes. Siobhan. How is she? How is she taking it? The new sibling.’
‘Oh, you know Siobhan.’ But it was a curiously meaningless thing to say. No one ever had the sense that they really knew what was going on inside Siobhan’s mind. ‘She’s dealing with it in her own way. Which is more or less by completely ignoring him.’
‘Ignoring this cutie? How could anyone ignore a face like that! She’ll come round, I’m sure.’
‘It’s quite a big age gap. So … I’m not so sure, actually. I think she resents him and she’ll just grow to resent him even more.’
‘Did you resent me?’
‘It’s not such an age gap.’
‘That’s not really an answer, is it?’
Aimée chuckled silently, enjoying the easy, relaxed intimacy with her sister. They were just joshing each other. The playfulness came from a place of trust and love.
‘Where is she anyhow? I have a present for her.’
‘You’re a good auntie.’
‘The best.’
Aimée looked down at her sleeping son. They were going to be all right. Everything was going to be all right.
And then she heard a new note enter her sister’s voice. A strange, hesitant, grim seriousness. ‘Hey, listen, you know … I saw … him.’
She knew immediately who Edie was talking about.
It was him. Edie was sure of it. She had entered the name Sal had given her – Oscar Winslett – into MindNet and had come up with several images and videos from over the years. He’d changed his appearance superficially, but there was something about his mannerisms that he couldn’t hide. Then, when she’d entered a photo of Winslett into a facial recognition MindNet search, it had thrown up multiple other identities. One of whom was called Charlie Turner. This Charlie Turner had the same curly blond hair and startling blue eyes of the man Aimée had known all those years ago. And the face of Oscar Winslett. MindNet confirmed it.
She was about to show her sister the searches she’d made on her phone but Aimée refused to look.
‘But it’s him! It is him.’
‘So?’
‘What do you mean, so?’
‘I mean, so what? So what if it is him?’
‘Well, we can go to the police. Get him arrested.’
‘What for?’
‘What for? He robbed us. Or have you forgotten?’
‘But we can’t be absolutely sure it is him. I mean, maybe they’re twins? Or doppelgängers.’
‘It’s the same person. MindNet does not lie about these things.’
‘No. I don’t want to do anything about it. It was all so long ago. And … I don’t want to drag it up again.’
‘You’re going to let him get away with it?’
‘It isn’t a question of that. I’m over it. Over all that. It sounds like he’s straightened himself out now as well. Got a job. Maybe he just had a bad patch?’
‘No! I don’t believe this! You’ve got to go after him. What about Sal?’
‘What about her?’
‘He … he’s after her. I think he may even have drugged her and for all I know raped her.’
‘For all we know he may have done a lot of things. But if we can’t prove it, the police won’t want to know. They’ve got enough on their plate these days.’
‘They can do that test on him.’
‘And? What good will that do?’
‘It will prove he’s a psychopath.’
‘I’m not going to do anything about it, Edith. And I don’t want you to either. And whatever you do, please, don’t say anything to Callum.’
Edie shook her head in disbelief. She gave a sharp snort of frustration and incomprehension.
‘Promise me.’
‘I’m going to find Siobhan. I’ve got this present for her.’
Liam woke abruptly with a hungry, demanding cry. Aimée lifted him and pulled him to her urgently.
It was soon after this that the marks started to appear.
LEVEL FOUR, CONTINUED
I don’t want the Spiderpaths to be sub-Spiderman-type creatures. They are either spiders or humans. Not humans with spider powers.
There are some advantages to being in spider form. Evasion of capture, for example. They shrink to tiny size, making them effectively invisible to adversaries.
Also, speed of movement. (Is a spider faster than a human? Someone check this out for me please.)
Disadvantages: relative weakness and vulnerability. It is easier to kill a spider than it is to kill a human. Easier to pull their legs off too. (There could be an interesting loop here: a Spiderpath becomes the spider that facilitates the release of the original protagonist in Level One play? Or in a multiple player version of the game, the player experiences the sensation of having their spider legs ripped off by another player as they escape from the secure unit? I’m just throwing out balls here – it’s for other people to catch them and run with them.)
Something else to consider: when in spider form, the Spiderpaths receive nourishment from eating the insects that they are able to catch. (Is there a way to hack the VR device so that the player actually tastes insect when the Spiderpath they are controlling is feeding?) So the Spiderpath in spider form must catch and kill insects. OK … There must be a penalty for remaining in spider form for too long? Spiders have shorter life spans than humans. (Someone check this out for me, please.) What I suppose I’m saying is that the Spiderpath has to use their spider form carefully. They may run out of spideriness and switch back to human form at an inconvenient moment. We could consider some kind of virtual gauge which tells them how much more spider time they have. They are able to renew or recharge spider time when in human form by performing certain tasks. (When in spider form, eating insects obviously recharges their spider time.)
I suppose what I’m saying here is that we need to put some texture and detail into the Spiderpaths. Character Designers, I’m looking at you. But it’s not just about how these creatures look. It’s about how it feels to be inside them. Let’s set up a brainstorm.
Development notes for PSYCHOTOPIA VR game.
Internal Alpha Games document. Not for release. For approved circulation only.
NINETEEN
I caught the debate live on my way back to New New Scotland Yard. It was a pretty dull affair, to be honest. The usual predictable ding-dong. I mean, it’s always the same, isn’t it, when you line up two people who basically can’t agree what’s black and what’s white. Neither of them is going to shift their position. And you’ve heard them each state their case many times before. So unless you can add some new dimension to the proceedings, you’re just left rehashing the same old stale arguments. I guess that’s why Krystie was so keen on having me take a live Arbus-Lubany test. She did make some brief passing reference to my refusal and tried to turn it into some kind of story in its own right. ‘What does it say when the police are not prepared to undergo the test themselves?’ But the only real answer you can give to that question is that it says the police aren’t stupid.
Of course, Bartholomew Bartholomew wouldn’t consent to be tested. Arbus would. But that would hardly make viralizable screentime. You can bet he’d already tested himself privately and knew what the result would be. Either that, or he knew how to fix the output. He denied that was possible, of course. Apparently there was some secret code built into it that not even he knew because it was randomly generated by a central server at unknown irregular intervals. Yeah, right. If anyone could do it, your money would be on him.
Then when Krystie let slip how much they’d offered me, you can bet they got a lot of incoming with other cops volunteering to take the test on screen themselves. And not just cops – all kinds of people. Some of them I’m sure were Ps. Had to be. Krystie had to turn them all down. ‘I had my reasons for wanting that particular officer to be the one.’ She gave the camera a certain stare that seemed to be meant only for me. Or maybe I was kidding myself? Either way, I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what she meant by it. What did it matter anyhow? We were through for good now.
So yeah, the debate. If you ask me it completely failed to deliver the promised sparks. They just seemed to be going through the motions. Even the participants seemed bored. Bartholomew Bartholomew did his best to needle Arbus and draw him out from his measured scientific stance with his own brand of ill-informed cock-swagger. But Arbus seemed to take the view that it was beneath his dignity to even argue with the man. Whenever BB called into question the legitimacy of the testing, or the reliability of the machines, or Arbus’s qualifications to be in charge of the programme, Arbus’s stock response was along the lines of: ‘If you’d read my paper to the Such and Such Journal of Whatever, you’d know that blah blah blah.’ It was his standard method for closing down any lay criticism, as I knew from my own experience.
I kind of wished I hadn’t turned down Krystie’s offer when I saw the show. For one thing, it would have livened things up. She wasn’t wrong there.
For another, she looked even more fuckable now I knew it was never going to happen again. That’s a special kind of regret. I dare say the French have a word for it. If they don’t, they should have.
For a third thing, it was something Arbus said, his comment on Krystie’s account of a police officer refusing the opportunity to take the test live. (Remember, he must have known the officer in question was me, given our little tête à tête in the studio’s reception.) He said: ‘What that officer has to bear in mind is that his reluctance to take the test is almost certain proof that he is an NP.’
Still, that ‘almost certain proof’ wasn’t quite good enough for me. And I still didn’t put it past Arbus not to fix the result, whatever assurances he was in the habit of giving. I mean if MindNet was prepared to pay me four million MindCoins to take the test, God knows what they would be willing to offer him to fix it.
Everybody has a price. Even scruffy psycho-anthropologist types.
I MindMessaged Arbus later.
That tru wot u sed?
Wot?
Me NP?
Ps luv risk. If u P you’d gamble.
Wot if i don’t trust u?
U can trust me.
2 late now.
His reply didn’t come immediately. So I thought that was the end of the communing. Maybe there was a snafu on MindNet. Or maybe he was in two minds. But in the end the reply came:
Single malt? My round.
Then he MindMessaged me the location of his hotel.
First I had a witness to interview. One Edith Walsh. She was a funny little creature. Birdlike and intense. Something fierce inside her that gave her this weirdly sharp expression. Something had certainly got her goat.
It was a strange one, this. She was all worked up about some guy called Charlie who she claimed had pulled some kind of con on her sister and her and some other people. It was all far too complicated for me. I had a real job keeping up. But it seems this Charlie fella had cleaned out her sister’s bank account and stolen possessions from the house they were all living in. But the thing was it had all happened seven or so years ago.
‘Why didn’t you come forward at the time?’ was my quite reasonable question.
‘Because we didn’t know who he was. He just disappeared. But I’ve seen him now. His name is Oscar Winslett.’
‘I thought you said he was called Charlie?’
‘That wasn’t his real name. Or who knows? Maybe Oscar isn’t his real name. Anyhow, he works at this company called Alpha Games now.’
‘Alpha Games? I know them. Isn’t Random Rage one of theirs? That’s a cool game, that is.’
‘I don’t know! I don’t play VR games. Is that important?’
Like I said, she had something fierce inside her.
I shrugged. How the hell did I know what was important? ‘I don’t know what you want me to do.’
‘Arrest him!’
‘But it’s going to be difficult to prove anything after all this time. He can simply deny it was him.’
‘You do that test on him that you do. The P test. That’ll prove it.’
‘That might prove something, but it won’t prove he was the guy who fucked over your sister all those years ago.’
‘Is that it then? That all you’ve got to say?’
‘I’ve got the streets crawling with active, rampant, florid psychopaths. Smashing up buildings, abducting minors, raping old ladies. That’s happening now. Right now, as I’m sitting here talking to you about some minor felony from ancient history, where as far as I can tell nobody got hurt, except your sister maybe got her pride a little dented? I’m guessing.’
She gave an impatient sigh. As if that was completely beside the point. And maybe it was. ‘You can’t let him get away with it.’
‘What’s his name again?’
She spelled it out for me and I entered it into PolNet. ‘Clean. Nothing. No criminal record. No record of any connection with PGD. A model citizen. Not even traffic offences and everybody has those. Look, I’m afraid I just don’t have sufficient grounds for bringing Mr Winslett in.’
‘He raped somebody.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘OK, I can’t prove it. But he gave her drugs. And she passed out. He must have done something.’
‘Who? What? I … look … even as you’re saying that, you must realize, I can’t do anything with it. Who is the victim? Why isn’t she here making the complaint? When did it happen? I mean, I’d like to help, but I honestly can’t.’
