Colony worlds, p.44
Colony Worlds, page 44
"I guess we're stuck in this scene, or memory, or whatever it is, until the play ends or moves onto someone else's memory," Scott said, voicing his earlier conclusion.
"Why?"
"Because I can't see a way out. We just drove several miles without crashing through the bloody sensorium wall, which means we must be in our couches on Earth." His words had more heat than he'd wanted. Calming himself, he tapped his head. "It's all up here, but without our implants, we can't override it; can't end the experience."
"But if we haven’t left, then our implants should be there, even if we can't feel them," Leanne said, studying his shadowed face.
"That goes without saying. What's your point?"
"I have carefully pressed every possible point the implant could be, and nothing has happened. What if this is real and not in our heads?"
"That's impossible."
"So is this," Leanne said and slapped him hard across the face.
"What the f...," he shouted.
"Sorry, but that's my point. You felt that. It put an angry stripe on your face and my hand is stinging. How can that not be real?" Without waiting for an answer, she said, "Why did you choose this memory play?"
"The experience," Scott said. Opening his mouth made him wince from the slap. "Why else? After Elysium, life in the Adelaide Dome was tame."
"Same here. Another coincidence? I used to believe in coincidence over conspiracy, but then how is it even remotely possible for you to win a ticket for the couch next to mine? That pushes coincidence beyond breaking point." She paused and subjected him to intense scrutiny. "Did you set this up?" Despite the vehemence of her tone, Leanne's voice was quiet and controlled. She was watching him with absolute concentration, like Kegan used to watch the burning fuse of a skyrocket.
A noise from the back verandah, and Scott, his mind in turmoil, his face stinging, used the distraction not to answer. His son—their son, he corrected—age about eight months, peered through the lowest gap between the thick horizontal rails of the verandah. Leanne's slap and his shout must have drawn the boy's attention.
Unable to resist, Scott called out, "Hi Keg," a nickname he knew Leanne detested. Why did I say that, he wondered, I don't want to antagonise her? He guessed the old habits of their disintegrating relationship back on Earth were fresher in his mind than the much earlier honeymoon phase here. As expected, Leanne landed a hard thump on his shoulder.
"His name's pronounced Kee-gan. You could have called him K or Kee, anything but not..." She refused to say it. "But you chose, then as now, to provoke me."
The toddler, however, showed no reaction until the clatter of falling objects drew his attention the other way. The face of their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Norah, now peered through the top gap, her fingers curled over the railing.
Leanne stepped back as her younger self opened the door and came out to see what the commotion was about. The lights from a car driving towards the T-junction, shone under the house and highlighted him. He froze, looking up as Norah pointed in his direction, but the younger Leanne apparently saw nothing. She picked up Kegan and, leading Norah by the hand, went back inside.
"That's bizarre," Scott said. "When I landed in the main street, everyone saw me, even you."
"Me?"
"The young you up there, looked straight at me and threw me back into the sensorium." He stopped, not sure she'd had the same experience, but guessing since she'd been back there with him, she must have. "What threw you out..." He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness, gazing around at their surroundings, "... of this experience?"
"I, we that is, Mark and I, landed outside The Thirsty Colonist, in McLean Street. Mark went inside to get us drinks."
Scott raised an eyebrow.
Leanne frowned at him. "Bottles of water Scott, he drinks less than you. Can I continue?"
Scott nodded.
"You, wearing that ugly beard, came out of a shop opposite, stared straight at me and I was suddenly back in the sensorium. I was by myself, with everyone around me, you included, slouched in their seats, eyes half closed, twitching, and staring at nothing. I wondered if I should just get up and leave when you reached out and gripped my hand."
"No," Scott said.
"Are you calling me a liar?" Leanne's frown became an angry scowl.
"No, I'm answering the question you asked before Kegan distracted me."
"Why did you ask what threw me back, if you weren’t going to listen?"
"I was listening. In fact, what prompted me to answer your question was you saying you were alone until I arrived."
"Why?"
"Because, when our younger selves passed Julia and me, young Leanne didn’t recognise me. However, when they were opposite The Thirsty Colonist, young Scott recognised you, and this threw you out of the experience, which put you back in the sensorium before me."
"What about Mark? What happened to him?"
"Nothing. He was never there, only your memory of him."
Leanne blinked a few times, looking up at the darkened house that had once been home. "Sorry, I keep forgetting this isn't real."
"Like me, you returned from the sensorium to the beach, an entirely new memory world, a new dream segment, if you will."
"It's a bloody nightmare," Leanne said.
"So, when our younger selves came back along McLean Street, they passed Julia and me again. This time young Leanne recognised me, which threw me out of the experience and I joined you in the sensorium. You can only have been alone there for the few minutes it took the young Scott and Leanne to walk from The Thirsty Colonist to the corner where I was sitting."
"Sitting?"
"Seeing my younger self walking past made me shake so bad I couldn't stand."
Leanne laughed, and Scott smiled. "So, to answer your question is, no, I didn’t set this up. I have no idea what's going on. In fact, I can't tell what's real anymore and as of now I no longer care. Like you, when you wanted me to turn your implant off, I just want it to end." Again, he wondered why he was saying the opposite of what he felt. He didn’t want it to end, but there seemed to be a disconnect between his memories and the way he felt about them now.
"Then what? Are you going to sue the sensorium to get your money back? They said in the brochure, and on the poster and on the screen, 'You won't believe your senses'. They got that right, I don't. The moment the young you recognised me, and threw me back into the sensorium, I realised all our senses are only conduits for external stimuli; what we hear, see, feel, and taste is our brain's interpretation of it."
"So, what about you? What are you going to do now?" Scott asked.
"Since I can't get out, I'm going to enjoy the experience."
"You want me to leave?"
The question seemed logical to Scott. Given their history, he thought she would probably enjoy it more if he left. A huge moon rising between their house and the one next door shone on Leanne's face. She's lovely, he thought, knowing from her frown she would throw the question back at him. He used the moment to look away and think about how he would answer. He found himself drawn to the house, like a rusty nail to a magnet. So many memories, not all good.
"Do you?" Leanne asked.
"No. I don't want to be alone here. It helps to have someone to talk to, without having to explain what the experience means."
Leanne's smile lit up her face, and he could see from the way she watched him, she was her old self and contemplating mischief. Some of her expressions were unforgettable. "I noticed we had clothes in the car. We should get dressed."
They returned to the Gecko, and as they pulled shorts and shirts over their swimmers, Scott wondered what she had in mind. By then, the sky had lightened; night had become morning. Behind them, their younger selves stirred, woken by a cry from Kegan. Moments later, they turned to watch as young Scott left for work.
"It's interesting how the sensorium plays with time," Scott said, already feeling the day's heat gathering strength.
"Want to know what would be fun?"
Here it comes, he thought. "I'll bite, what?"
"Let's go inside. If she sees us, we can pretend we're going to be her neighbours when they finish our house."
Leanne pointed back at the floorboards they had stood under the whole of last night, which had passed in about twenty minutes. The night reminded Scott of the flaw that proved this wasn't real. They hadn’t encountered any nocturnal jumpers, but he kept that thought to himself, saying instead, "Norah pointed at us."
"But the younger me didn’t see you."
"What's changed?"
"I have always seen you, Scott. It's just that sometimes I didn’t like what I saw, but I do now," she said, and smiled at him, the smile of memory, of love that had succumbed to the pressure of living.
The disintegration of their marriage had begun here, shortly after he started shift work. His systems analysis position had moved to the Communication Station, Elysium's vital link back to Earth, on the seaward side of Emma Island. Shift work had involved a twelve-hour working day. He had to drive to the mainland base, ride in a mini-bus with the other shift personnel to the wharf, take a boat across to the Island, and another bus across the island to the station. All up, two hours travelling each way, and an eight-hour shift on site. To his shame now, he also remembered he had enjoyed it, not once thinking of Leanne stuck at home alone with two small children, and no way out.
Touché, thought Scott. Here we are again, and no way out.
"Come on," Leanne said.
The back fence of the old home was a three-foot-high wire mesh, designed to allow the water, which bucketed down during horrendous tropical downpours, to flow unimpeded through all the adjacent properties down to Swift Creek, which ran past the end of their street.
Scott held down the top wires while Leanne climbed over, then quickly followed. Just as they reached the external staircase to the back door, young Leanne, with a load of washing under her arm, struggled against the heavy, out-swinging door onto the tiny landing at the top.
The older Leanne waved to her younger self, carefully descending the concrete treads. "Need a hand?"
Young Leanne ignored her older self. Scott noticed her attention was with her children, listening to them play on the balcony while she went downstairs. He and her older self, stepped aside as she reached the bottom and walked under the house to the laundry.
CA's homesteader team had built the laundry and a tool-shed/workshop into the central bays formed by the pillars. The workshop was the bigger of two, to facilitate and encourage the colonists to make and mend. With limited space on the Tawny Frogmouth, the hibernation ship that brought the colonist to Elysium, CA had decided that all they would need, besides seeds and animal embryos, were tools and detailed plans for everything so they could make what they needed. The exception had been the Emma Island communications station. Everything it needed had been aboard.
The older Leanne leant conspiratorially towards Scott. "You won't remember any of this, but I do. This was one of my better days. I had something to do." They followed young Leanne to the incredibly basic laundry, a concrete slab open on two sides, and watched her load up the washing machine. The jerry-built contraption of scrap material had a wooden tub. Its power source was a small generator, a spare he had purloined from the communications station and had shared among the power-hungry neighbours. What CA didn’t know, CA didn't worry about and the station had agreed they didn’t need to know.
When young Leanne returned upstairs, they followed. He felt like an unseen visitor to a part of his early marriage he had never seen, and hardly ever asked about. He realised now he had been absent for most of his early married life. Working and sleeping used up twenty hours out of every twenty-four for seven days straight, which left little family time. He only saw her and the kids between shifts, but even then, the breaks varied from one to four days. The best, of course, was the four-day break, like having Easter every month.
While they wandered through the house like ghosts, his younger self arrived home, which made him smile. Thanks to the sensorium's arbitrary time periods, his younger self has just had a ten-minute working day.
Although the young couple had very little of their own, the place was messier than he remembered. Watching their interactions, they seemed happy. On reflection, he supposed that at this honeymoon stage he and Leanne were a loving couple. He just couldn't get in touch with how that felt, almost as if this memory projection belonged to someone else. Perhaps it was Leanne's contribution.
They soon learned from the couple that it was his last day on day shift, and they were going out for a takeaway meal. On Earth, the days of takeaways had long gone. People only went got out for fine dining. At home, food processors dispensed carefully balanced meals from basic ingredients using whatever recipe the individual selected.
After the young family drove off, Leanne began tidying the house. Scott joined in, something that would never have entered his head back then. Despite his work at the station being relatively easy, his days were long. Besides, it was a wife's job, wasn’t it? He closed his eyes at the thought, disgusted at how juvenile he had been.
"You’ve changed," Leanne said.
"I know. Tara leaving forced me to take a long hard look at myself."
"Ah, my replacement," Leanne said, mopping the polished floor with an antistatic mop.
Knowing his infant son, Kegan, would soon disorder his father's tiny but growing library, Scott straightened the books, contemplating the soul-searching he'd done after his second relationship failed. He concluded that most of the arguments with both Tara and Leanne had been his fault, not all, but most. He had taken his role as breadwinner and head of the house way too seriously. He was aghast that the sexual equality established on Earth decades earlier could so easily disappear, as if civilised behaviour didn’t apply to colony worlds.
Because their young selves had so little, the clean-up was easy. The place was soon cleaner than he ever remembered. In hindsight, he realised he probably hadn’t noticed the cleanliness or otherwise, in his brief visits home. He had always been too tired or too busy. They had only just finished when they heard the hum of a car as it ran in under the house.
The clean and tidy rooms amazed their other selves and it struck Scott that this had never happened. He can't help but wonder if he had forgotten, or if the sensorium had extrapolated this scene into their memory play, from other patrons. It wasn’t long before the young couple argued about it. His younger self accused his wife of secretly hiring a maid and bemoaned the cost. As usual, rather than deny it, young Leanne fought back and blasted him for all the gadgets he had bought without consulting her.
Scott remembered the arguments. Again, hindsight coupled to experience, told Scott that despite growing up on Earth, he had unthinkingly adopted the colonial attitude. Worse, he had taken it back to Earth with him when CA had forced them to evacuate. Though it seemed strange to him now, but in the end, he had used the constant bickering as his excuse for leaving Leanne. He had thought that in moving into the new relationship, he had dropped all that tightly packed baggage. He hadn't. No wonder Tara left, he thought. I'm a slow learner.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to Leanne.
"Me too," she said, flicking a tear from her cheek, not needing to ask why, or for what, he was apologising.
When the children went quiet, so did the argument, but although the vocal hostility had halted, the glares did not. The young family sat on the floor under the fans and parcelled out their takeaway in silence. The anxious children watched their parents until attracted by the sweet-sour smell of the opened food boxes.
"I can't believe we ever ate such rubbish and fed it to our children," Leanne said, watching them eat. "How did we all stay so thin?"
"How did we survive?"
"How did Norah and Kegan survive us?"
Scott paused at that, already distraught at how his younger self had treated the mother of his two beautiful children. Adding their dietary disasters to the mix made him feel worse, but what choice had he had? Fresh food was hard to get. At least the takeaways had been tasty.
"I'm done," Scott said, his tone a sign of bitter-sweet memories roiling in his mind.
"It wasn’t all bad," Leanne said, reaching out to hold his hand as they walked back towards the Gecko.
Scott didn’t resist, feeling they had come, at least to an understanding, if not rapport.
* * *
In the fading black above them, the stars grew brighter, their twinkle firmed, and smoothed into round spots in a beige ceiling. The immersion experience had finished. More lights came on and everyone's eyes adjusted as the sensorium coalesced around its patrons. Scott was back on the couch, scrunched against its arm on the side next to Leanne's couch. They were so close they appeared to be embracing across the gap. Both were close to tears and holding hands.
Scott turned guiltily to Julia, but there was another woman on the couch with him. That woman was clutching a man on the further couch. Even as he scanned the room, he knew Julia was gone, that she had left early in the show. He must have felt it despite his total immersion in the experience.
The buzz of conversation was loud and getting louder. Some patrons shouted, others cried, clutching partners like it was the end of the world, not just the end of the experience. The range of feelings expressed ran from anger to laughter. Scott turned back to Leanne. She was alone. Only seconds had passed, but he couldn’t recall if she was alone when the lights came up.
"What happened to... what's-his-name," he said unable to remember if she had mentioned her partner's name.
"He left."
"Same here. I think Julia left early. She already had her implant turned off. I guess that would have made it easy to leave."
"Mark was here at the end. I saw him leave with someone else while I was thinking about what we experienced." She paused and studied Scott's face. He nodded now knowing they had shared the same events. "In thinking about what it meant, I was glad to see him go," she finished.
