xox
The book went into the padded envelope she’d bought, and the package into her satchel.
Cassie leant back against the flimsy wall, trying not to think of the insects that might be alive inside. Next door her neighbour was on the phone. You fucking do it, he said. I’m not fucking doing it. She could get out of here, go to Lewis. Find some comfort in him. He’d given her a set of keys, last time she was there; if he was out, she could let herself in, curl up in his bed and wait for him. But if she saw him tonight she knew she’d feel resentment as much as reassurance. Though it wasn’t his fault she’d jeopardised her friendship with Harrie – wasn’t for him she was playing detective – it was easier to blame him than to blame herself.
She let herself slide a little further down the wall. The guy next door would be able to get her something, she was sure. People came to his door at all hours, stayed only a minute or two. She had told Lewis she wasn’t addicted to anything other than Make-Believe, and that was true. But when the world took on a hard shape that had no space for her – when her failures piled on top of her, so she could barely breathe for the weight on her chest – then, there were ways to take the edge off.
Her neighbour might give her a freebie. He’d welcome a new customer, particularly if she worked the next-door angle. Or if he didn’t do freebies, perhaps he’d give her something on account. She got to her feet, stood and listened. He was still on the phone, still arguing. She would wait till he’d finished, then she’d go round and ask. She moved to the door and waited, her fingers poised on the snib. Listening for silence. There: it stretched for thirty seconds, for a minute. She turned the lock, opened her door – and as she did, she heard his closing. Caught a glimpse of him heading for the stairs. Heard his descending footsteps.
She shut her door again. Locked it. Stood with her head down, arms wrapped tight around herself. Then, from the chest of drawers, she pulled an old T-shirt, one of Alan’s. Climbed the ladder to bed, and rolled fully dressed under the covers. Just for a few minutes. Then she’d get up, make toast and tea without milk.
She pressed the shirt against her face. HAPPY EVERYDAYS. A few minutes safe under the covers, with rain dotting the windowpane, dot-dotting like it was all OK. Like everything was OK—
OK—
OK.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There must be a theory that straight lines were detrimental to learning. Throughout the library, desks were kidney-shaped, benches and partitions likewise curved. But rounded lines or no, Cassie’s attempts at research were leaving her uncomfortably aware of the limits of her intelligence.
She’d started with abstracts of studies from the biotech team who’d created the prototype Make-Believe, going right back to the early iterations of a technology designed to be applied in healthcare settings. But so many of the sentences left her none the wiser. She closed her eyes, leant back in her chair. Was she kidding herself to think she would have grasped this stuff, before?
‘Thought we were meeting downstairs?’
Cassie snapped her eyes open, turned to see Nicol standing at her side.
‘Shit, sorry.’ Onscreen, the time read 10.23; they’d arranged to meet at ten. ‘I got caught up with something,’ she said.
‘Looks fascinating, right enough.’ Nicol’s tone was deadpan. Cassie pulled a face, unsure if he was being sarcastic. The text she’d been wading through was tangled with abstract, unfamiliar terms. It was tying her head in knots, but perhaps it was Nicol’s idea of light reading. ‘What’s the assignment?’ he asked.
‘Ah, no – this is personal interest.’
Nicol nodded. ‘Cool,’ he said. He dumped his backpack onto the desk, settled into the seat next to hers and slid his memory card across the table. ‘Anything else come in?’
Cassie shook her head. ‘Holiday slump,’ she said. The library was their rainy-day meeting place, and today it was eerily quiet, the study pods empty, the stacks deserted. The students had vanished in search of what work they could find: hospitality and call centres for the fortunate; for the rest of them, cleaning, or dancing in strip clubs, perhaps labouring on a building site if they could find one that wasn’t mothballed. Only the wealthiest remained, cementing their advantages by taking extra classes. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘it picked up a bit last year once the summer schools kicked in.’ She clicked the card into her screen, transferred the docs, and made Nicol’s payment.
‘Guess I’ll call this time off, then. You’re burnt by the way, did you know that?’
‘I’m …?’
‘You’ve got the sun. Should watch for that. Sign of skin damage.’
‘Yeah, well luckily for my skin there’s no chance of further damage for the foreseeable. But thanks for the concern.’
‘No worries.’ Nicol tilted his head towards the screen. ‘It’s outside your field, no?’
‘Ha. Just slightly.’ Cassie scrubbed a hand through her hair, as if she could rub right through her skull and massage her struggling brain. ‘Ever feel like the thick kid at the back of the class?’
‘Aye, that stuff can be pretty dense, right enough. Be the same in any field, though. Like in psychology or whatever, there’ll be things you’d fly through that I’d never make sense of.’
‘I doubt that. Doubt there’s much you don’t know.’
‘There’s plenty I don’t know,’ he said, easily. ‘Plenty plenty.’ He stood, hitched his pack onto his shoulder. ‘It’s what that Chinese dude says: know how little you know, and that’s the start of wisdom.’
Cassie raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m the wisest woman on earth, then.’
‘But if you need anything translated, oh wise one – techspeak to plain English …’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Might take you up on that.’
When Nicol had gone, she closed the page she’d been studying, switched her focus to more accessible publications: New Scientist, the Financial Times, the Economist, the broadsheets. She flipped past endless opinion pieces on Make-Believe and Imagen, trying to find something meaty, something containing a few facts. She skimmed through announcements of government funding, of key milestones, through a tsunami of publicity around the launch of the world’s first true virtual reality. There were company profiles explaining how Imagen had been set up to monetise the university’s groundbreaking research. Individual profiles of Professor Morgan, the ‘mother of virtual reality’. Breathless pronouncements of world-leading technology and wide-eyed analyses of economic impact. A couple of reports trying to create controversy over the decision by the Department for Innovation to license Make-Believe as entertainment technology, despite the invasive aspects of its functionality; several attempts at exposé from privacy activists and the Campaign for Real Life. Imagen would lift the whole economy. Imagen would be the salvation of the nation. Imagen would turn us all into narcissistic zombies. It was nothing she didn’t know. Nothing the world didn’t know.
The problem was, she couldn’t be sure what she was looking for. But research was like that sometimes, or it was for her, at least. You were blind until suddenly you saw. So she was searching, mole-like: pushing forward in all directions at once, keeping a note of everything she read to avoid going round in circles, and trusting that eventually she’d figure out what it was she was hoping to find.
Her attention snagged on a two-year-old article from the Observer technology supplement. VIRTUAL RETURNS ON A REAL PUBLIC INVESTMENT, ran the headline.
Imagen is emerging as the great hope of the biotechnology sector, thanks to massive government subsidies – but what sort of returns should the taxpayer expect?
In the wake of the collapse of several high-profile UK technology start-ups, it’s hard to overestimate how much is riding on the success of Make-Believe, the groundbreaking new VR from Imagen Research.
This week details were announced of a further £10m government investment in extending and commercialising the company’s world-leading patented technology, which industry
experts predict could have applications ranging from education and healthcare to defence.
With Make-Believe already receiving rave reviews, we examine its game-changing potential in five key areas: healthcare, education, sport, defence and sex.
Healthcare
The future … VR technology presents huge opportunities for new treatments and services. Patients suffering from chronic pain would be able to find relief in imagined, painless virtual experiences; VR could also ease the passage of patients receiving end-of-life care. There are suggestions that the Make-Believe model could eventually be used extensively by mental health service providers as a powerful therapeutic tool. For instance, ‘guided stories’ could help patients to relive traumatic incidents but experience different, more positive outcomes.
The present … Imagen’s VR technology is already being tested for pain management, but there are ethical concerns around its use in palliative care, particularly in patients suffering from dementia: the technology would have to enable medical professionals to monitor the quality of the patient’s VR experience. Similarly, the therapeutic use of guided stories would demand some way for medical professionals to connect and communicate with the patient in VR, and ultimately to control the patient’s virtual experience.
Probability: 2/5
Profitability: 4/5
Education
The future … Educational materials could be developed that would reduce the need for costly equipment and travel, opening up access for all to overseas field trips, remote site visits, complex scientific experiments and so on. Immersive experiential learning could unlock the potential of children with learning difficulties such as dyslexia. Perhaps the most revolutionary possibility is of assessing potential and performance in creative subjects by analysing students’ neurological data – rewarding direct imaginative skill and potential, alongside more conventional creative outputs. A student of choreography could be graded on a virtual ballet featuring hundreds of dancers; an architecture student could submit a virtual building, to scale and in three dimensions.
The present … There is currently no way to integrate pre-conceived educational elements with individuals’ VR experience, and techniques for analysing neurological data are rudimentary: there’s a long way to go before we can fully appreciate, or even share, each other’s imaginative experiences.
Probability: 4/5
Profitability: 3/5
Cassie blinked, and her eyes scraped in their sockets. Two years after this article had been written, education technology was still firmly located in the present. Instead of wandering virtual stacks that arranged and rearranged themselves according to her thoughts, Cassie was stuck in the library reading articles onscreen. Universities were waiting, watching: after investing millions in obsolete Second Life campuses, and millions more in the clunky headsets that had briefly promised to be the future of VR, they were wary of being burnt again.
At the edge of her vision something flickered – the screen, or the lights that buzzed overhead. When she stared directly at them they stared straight back, a constant brightness; maybe the flickering was inside her. Was her. Her, here – not here – here … She tugged a hand through her hair. Clipped the article she’d been reading so she could skim it later, and swiped the screen to pull up the next title in her search results.
Implications of rewiring cellular quorum sensing.
Quorum sensing: it was a term she’d registered a couple of times already that morning. She tapped the words for a definition.
A phenomenon where microorganisms communicate and coordinate their behaviour by the accumulation of signalling molecules.
The wording wasn’t familiar. She raised her hand to call up more detail; let her arm fall. Her edges flickered: here, not here, here—
Not here.
She logged out, shoved back her chair, and headed for the exit.
The light outside was grey and steady. She perched on a wall, half-sheltered from the drizzle by a concrete overhang, and rolled a cigarette, a single paper with a skinny line of tobacco. Sat doing nothing but making a circle of her breath, drawing the smoke in, and round, and out … in, round, out … Doing nothing but feeling human, feeling the drizzle pepper her skin, and the breeze lift the hairs on her arms. Watching the scattering of summer students as they sat and strolled, smiled and chattered to their devices, passing blindly through space. A couple of Chinese girls were sharing an umbrella, talking face-to-face. Cassie pressed her hands into her dried-up eyes. Stupid. So stupid, to risk a friendship – her only friendship – for nothing. She should have approached it differently, thought more about Harrie, about the sort of person she was. Her values, her loyalty, her kindness. Should have asked for help, instead of trying to weasel details out of her, details that in all likelihood Harrie didn’t even know. Expert saboteur; she would have to wait now, for Harrie to be in touch, wait to see whether she’d managed to burn yet another bridge. You take care, yeah? She blinked her eyes open. Under the umbrella, one girl leant towards her friend, their shoulders making a connection. One smile, two smiles. Laughter.
Or maybe she didn’t have to wait. Maybe she should reach out, send Harrie a message. She pulled her screen from the pocket of her jeans, and a crumpled scrap of paper fell to the ground. The Owl Who Wouldn’t Fly. Cassie bent to pick it up. On the back was a picture – a butterfly, missing half a wing – and some torn-off text:
–THCARE
–solely for the authorised recipient and may contain confidential or legally privileged information. Any use without the sender’s explicit consent …
It was a standard email confidentiality statement. Cassie shoved the paper back in her pocket, woke her screen, skipped an ad for a singles site – Sign up for free*, don’t leave love to chance … Started to write a message to Harrie.
Broke off, mid-sentence.
That butterfly. It reminded her of something. Of somewhere.
She retrieved the paper, studied the picture, the fragment of text beneath. She had seen that image recently – hadn’t she? Something similar, at least. But the longer she looked, the more she felt herself drawing a blank. On her screen, she saved her message to Harrie then called up her recent clippings.
VIRTUAL RETURNS ON A REAL PUBLIC INVESTMENT
Imagen is emerging as the great hope of the biotechnology sector … we examine its game-changing potential in five key areas: education, healthcare …
There it was. Healthcare. She jumped to the relevant section.
… the Make-Believe model could eventually be used extensively by mental health service providers … the therapeutic use of guided stories would demand some way for medical professionals to connect and communicate with the patient in VR, and ultimately to control the patient’s virtual experience … Probability: 2/5
All at once she was sitting up straight, clearing her screen, starting to scribble. She didn’t know yet what it meant – how it might fit together, but—
Make-Believe
—she had to catch it before she could lose it. A dashed line:
Raphael House
A butterfly, roughly sketched. The letters beneath:
Chrysalis Healthcare Group?
Another line, another scribble:
Doctors connect with patients?
A fourth line, and she added what she could recall of the definition she’d found in the library:
Microorganisms communicate …
Stopped. Sat gazing at the screen, worrying at the dry skin on her lips.
She knew now – what had happened, what was happening.
She added a fifth line, a final word:
Alan
Stared at what she’d mapped, simple and clear as a child’s drawing of the sun.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Say – just say – it was true.
She was walking, because her thoughts were too frantic to sit with. Her skin felt like tiny electrical shocks were jolting across her, making her twitch.
M
icroorganisms communicate.
A microorganism: like a biomolecule. Like, for instance, the biomolecules that were the basis of Make-Believe.
Was it possible? To communicate within Make-Believe? In the long term, it was what Imagen were banking on: the development of a collaborative mode and two-way communication between users. But it was miles beyond anything they’d planned for when she was still an employee. It was ten years into the future at least.
Just say, though, that she’d guessed right. Microorganisms communicate. Doctor communicates with patient. What exactly did she think was happening?
Start from what she’d seen.
Alan. In distress, in torment, in a state she’d never seen before. Digging at the root of his pain, trying to gouge it out.
The wound behind his ear, long strands of hair sticking. Between the skin and the bump of bone, that thin layer of flesh. A receiver in there; it would have to be tiny. Slender. Even elegant.
She walked, avoiding collisions by instinct, hardly noticing the wet streets, the summer-school students ducking through the drizzle. Instead, she saw mice. White mice in polycarbonate tanks, under strip lights. Shredded paper nests in individual cubes. Like the single beds in the numbered rooms at Raphael House.
Alan was an experiment.
And not only him: the woman she’d seen, in the day room, scrubbing at her skull underneath her ponytail. All of them, maybe, every patient locked in that ward.
And if they were subjects, what was the test? Therapeutic use would demand some way for medical professionals to connect and communicate with the patient … ultimately to control the patient’s virtual experience. It made her think of the twelve-step programme, and the part she’d never been able to buy: the promise of rescue from the madness of addiction. Step two – we believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. A doctor inside Alan’s head. A psychiatrist inhabiting his madness, gazing on his skewed world. Shaping it. Straightening it. Hearing his voices – guiding his visions – working from the inside. Buried in his consciousness, like an engineer rewiring him. Severing this, and soldering that. Mending his brain. It was how Imagen had begun, after all. Where their initial funding and research had been focused: on developing therapeutic applications for VR technology.
A User's Guide to Make-Believe Page 11