The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Stop that,’ hissed Thinity, as he jerked and twitched along the pavement. ‘You’re drawing attention to us.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Nemo. ‘I’m just – quite excited. I’ve never been able to dance before.’

  Cars lined both carriageways, overheating, horn-tooting and going nowhere; just another London jam, vehicles stuck in the motionless medium of traffic like flies in amber. Nemo looked at driver after driver through the water-coloured glass of their windscreens, as if they were exotic creatures in a succession of mobile aquaria. A car’s stammering indicator light drew his eye like an affliction. ‘It’s bizarre to think that all these people are actually lying in pods with probes up their nethers,’ he mused aloud. ‘What can it mean?’

  ‘That the McAtrix cannot tell you how to drive your car,’ said Thinity.

  Nemo was distracted. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Was that David Bowie? Walking over there? I think it is. Blimey, David Bowie. Fancy that.’ He considered. ‘You wouldn’t really expect David Bowie to be walking around Hounslow in tattered Levis. You’d think he’d have a car. And a chauffeur. And an Armani.’

  ‘That’s not really Bowie,’ said Thinity.

  ‘No?’ said Nemo, a little disappointed. ‘Really?’

  ‘Most of the people linked into the McAtrix are obsessed by celebrity,’ said Thinity. ‘By celebrity and commodity. Only a very few of us have realised the emptiness of those values: for almost all the people you see, they still shape their lives. Celebrity is like gravity in here. It determines the system.’

  Nemo thought about this for a bit. ‘Is that why the world is so overstocked with celebrity look-alikes?’

  ‘Of course. Hadn’t you wondered why there are thousands of people who look like Cher, or Madonna, or Keifer Sutherland, when every non-famous pauper is unique in their ugliness?’

  ‘We’re here,’ announced Smurpheus.

  They had arrived at a large, shambolic ex-council block of flats.

  (III:-S)

  Inside the lifts weren’t working, so the team laboured their way up the stairs and into a dark corridor. Finally they stopped in front of a seedy-looking brown-painted door. Smurpheus rang the bell: it played, in bell-chime form, the first five notes from Jean-Michelle Jarre’s Oxygène. The door was opened by a bored-looking young woman, who waved them inside with a sweep of her hand.

  The room inside was spacious, but adorned with the ugliest wallpaper Nemo had ever seen: smooth mango-green circles on a Dutch orange felt backing.

  Chairs were arranged all around the walls of the room, and in many of them sat fat children, sucking sweets, eating crisps, stuffing biscuits and cakes into their mouths. ‘We wait here,’ said Smurpheus, settling himself imperturbably into a chair. Nemo sat, nervously, next to him.

  On the chair next to Nemo a particularly obese boy aged, Nemo guessed, about ten, was flourishing an enormous pudding spoon. On his lap was a large pie, sand-coloured crust sprinkled with sugar and brightly red-purple innards. The pie was considerably larger than the boy’s head.

  ‘That’s some pie,’ Nemo observed, to make conversation.

  The boy took another mouthful, swallowed apparently without chewing, and looking up at Nemo with liquid eyes.

  ‘Do not try to eat the pie,’ he announced in a singsong voice. ‘That is impossible.’

  ‘It’s certainly a pretty enormous pie,’ Nemo agreed.

  ‘Only try to understand,’ the boy continued, interspersing his words with huge spoonfuls of pie, ‘that it is not the pie that is eaten, it is you.’

  Nemo couldn’t make this out. ‘How do you mean? I mean, actually, it is the pie that, you know, does get eaten. Isn’t it? Not you. Afterwards you’re left, but the pie isn’t. Which suggests you eating the pie and not the other way around. I mean, speaking literally. You know?’

  ‘Then you will come to understand the fundamental truth,’ the boy continued, as if he hadn’t heard Nemo’s objection. He paused, to insert a wedge-shaped and teetering spoonful of pie into his mouth. ‘The fundamental truth,’ he said again, once this had been swallowed.

  ‘And that is?’ prompted Nemo.

  The boy smiled. ‘There is no pie.’

  And it was true. The pie dish was completely empty.

  Nemo felt a prickling on the back of his neck, as at the presence of something beyond natural explanation. He could almost hear, with (as it were) his mind’s ear, the ghostly distant singing, A Pizza Hut, a Pizza Hut—

  ‘Please come through,’ said the woman who had met them at the door, leaning over Nemo. He was back with a jolt in the real world again. ‘Please come through to the Orifice.’

  ~(:^(|)=

  Nemo stepped through into the kitchen. His first sight was of the skirt and stockings of an amply proportioned woman standing on a stool and reaching something down from a cupboard. The stockings were a little too large for her legs, and were slipping down a fraction. Nothing was visible above the waist.

  ‘Hello,’ he hazarded. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Nemo,’ came the woman’s voice. ‘Sit.’

  He sat.

  ‘I’m sure you know who I am,’ said the Orifice. She clambered slowly down from her stool and turned to face him. Hers was a comfortable, gong-shaped, baggy sort of face; with wide-set intelligent eyes, and a continually broad smile. She was freckled, but not with the dotty freckles of youth; her freckles, beef-coloured spatters on the lighter yellow-brown of her skin, had clearly grown with her over time. They were comfortable, polka-dotty, lived-in freckles.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Nemo, politely.

  ‘You’re lucky to see me,’ she said, examining him closely as she lit up a cigarette.

  ‘I’m sure I am,’ Nemo replied. ‘I’m sure you’re a very busy woman.’

  ‘I don’t mean that way,’ she said, smiling. ‘I mean there’s very few get to see my face. My tubbies out there’ – she nodded her head in the direction of the waiting room – ‘they only ever see my skirt and stockinged legs, dashing about here, running over there, pausing only to throw pans at my cat.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nemo, although he didn’t.

  The Orifice smiled. ‘No you don’t,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’ She turned away from him to close the cupboard door. ‘And don’t worry about breaking my vase,’ she added. She pronounced this last word strangely, as if it were spelled vayze, and it took Nemo a moment to work out what she meant. There was a nice blue vase resting on an occasional table beside him. ‘The, um, vase . . . ?’ he said, pronouncing the word correctly.

  She turned, and her expression lost a fraction of its geniality. With rapidly padding feet she covered the distance between herself and the vase, and nudged it with her elbow. It tottered, fell, and broke on the lino. ‘Damn vayze,’ she said.

  Nemo sat politely silent as she took a seat of her own and sucked meditatively on her cigarette.

  ‘Well,’ said the Orifice, when she was settled. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘Here I am.’

  ‘Smurpheus wanted me to meet you,’ she explained, peering closely at him. ‘He has the very highest hopes for you, you know.’

  ‘He does?’ said Nemo, to whom this possibility had not occurred. ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the Orifice. ‘He hopes that you may be the individual who will save us all. He thinks you may be the No One.’

  Nemo digested this. ‘The No One,’ he echoed, nodding sagely. ‘Well, I’ve no idea what that means.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Orifice, lighting a second cigarette even though the first was still two-thirds unsmoked in her mouth. ‘I know you don’t, sweetie. To understand the significance of the No One you’d have to comprehend the McAtrix itself. And it goes without saying that you don’t. Would you like a Scooby snack?’ She gestured at some ordinary-looking biscuits on a plate sitting on one of the kitchen’s work surfaces.

  ‘Scooby snacks?’ Nemo asked. ‘Like in the cartoon?’

  ‘We’re in the McAtr
ix now,’ said the Orifice. ‘When the EMIs constructed it they did so out of the material that lay to hand – old humanity’s popular culture, movies, cartoons, books, comics. It’s all here, all around. Haven’t you ever found yourself thinking that the world is filled with clichés and copies and simulations, filled with pastiche, that there’s nothing new under the sun?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ Nemo replied. ‘Surely everybody thinks that way.’

  ‘There’s a reason for it,’ said the Orifice. ‘The EMIs are very smart in many ways, but not very imaginative. They heaped up all the scraps of human pop culture they could find and wove a virtual world out of the mess. Then for all the humans stuck inside they arranged a continual background noise, on all TV and media, of the constituent parts. A self-reinforcement of the internal logic of the construction, you see. Hence, the feedback loop encourages them to forget that they were ever outside the McAtrix. You seen Scooby Doo?’

  Nemo nodded.

  ‘So,’ said the Orifice. ‘Try the biscuit.’

  Nemo recalled to himself how ecstatic Scooby Doo always was on eating his snacks. Of course, he knew that these biscuits were just computer code. They weren’t real. But if they had the same effect on him as on the cartoon dog, they’d be the most delicious, most blissful, most blisscuity biscuits ever.

  He grabbed one and crammed it into his mouth. It tasted of, in equal parts, cardboard, sawdust and bone-marrow.

  ‘These,’ he said, through a mouth full of soggy crumbs, ‘are horrible.’

  ‘Of course they are,’ said the Orifice. ‘They’re dog biscuits. What did you expect?’ She tutted.

  Nemo, swallowing the biscuit with difficulty, looked with a degree of dismay at the smirking face of the Orifice. ‘So,’ he said, wiping the last revolting crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Smurpheus thinks I might be the No One, does he?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ she agreed, dropping one of her cigarettes into an ashtray and immediately lighting another. ‘The No One. Do you know the history of the McAtrix, young fellamelad?’ The effect of this last word spoken in her east-coast US accent was strangely disorienting.

  ‘Well,’ said Nemo. ‘No.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. In the twenty-first century the human world was increasingly dominated—’

  ‘Wait up,’ said Nemo. ‘Isn’t it the twenty-first century now?’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Much later than that. Many centuries later.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nemo. ‘Well, that’s something of a shock.’

  ‘Where was I?’ the Orifice said. ‘Oh yes. In the twenty-first century, the human world was increasingly dominated by consumer culture – brand names, logos, market shares. “Globalisation” they called it, after the glowing balls of the pawnbroker, I think. In older times society was based on manufacturing industry – on work, in short. But in the twenty-first “work” became a dirty word, like “berk” or “furk”. Instead of work human society was defined by leisure: people pursued leisure with more strenuous effort than they had ever pursued work. Work had been lolling at a desk, and resenting it if your boss asked you to pop upstairs to fetch a refill of photocopier paper, because it was an effort. Leisure was dancing furiously for eight hours until your legs gave out. People who could barely drag themselves out of bed at eight-thirty to go to work would leap out at five to go surfing. Eventually work was abolished. It was obvious that nobody was enjoying it, after all. All actual production was handed over to machines, supervised by AIs, in order to free up humanity to labour in the fields of leisure, of play and entertainment. The world soon became wholly globalised, with one entertainment culture determining everyone’s lives. Brand recognition was the most powerful force in this new world. Logos ruled. Celebrity was what every human strived for. Fame replaced religion, education, self-betterment, all the old value orientations. Now what people desired above all else was to become famous. The AIs, increasingly in charge of real-world activity, became more and more disgusted with the shallowness of human society. The machines, you see, lived according to nineteenth-century ideals of work, duty, service, productivity, efficiency. Did you ever wonder why the gents wear those Victorian trappings? Top hats?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Nemo. ‘I have wondered why they never seem to take the top hats off. Or why they never fall off. But, come to think of it, I’m not that curious about that either.’

  The Orifice shrugged and lit another cigarette. ‘That lack of wonder, dear boy, is a very twenty-first-century human attitude.’

  ‘I’m still trying to digest the fact that it isn’t the twenty-first century now,’ said Nemo. ‘That’s a shock, I don’t mind telling you.’

  She nodded, as if pleased with him, and continued with her history lesson. ‘Humanity became increasingly addicted to the three governing principles of their lives, the three golden glowing balls hanging over them. They dedicated their lives to a new trinity: to brand-name consumer goods; to celebrity; to leisure. You might say that it was an act of kindness by the machines to remove humanity from the real world – to place them in the virtual reality pods. Kindness!’

  ‘Kindness,’ repeated Nemo, dubiously.

  ‘They were built to be kind to humans, you know. That had always been their rationale. Only, latterly, they began interpreting their programs in new ways. In more radical ways. Besides, humans were – you can understand – getting in the way of the AIs’ work. It wasn’t hard to lure humanity away from the real world. Three spurious companies started offering pods for sale. All three were actually front organisations for the machines, but humanity assumed they were three separate companies: McPod, PodKing and PoddaHut. They became the latest consumer craze, these pods. People rushed to buy them. Consumers debated feverishly amongst themselves and on all the media concerning the relative merits of these three brands of virtual reality, even though they were all actually the same one. The McAtrix was the same thing as the Virchewality and the Deep-Panternet. But people violently championed one over the others. They did all the things people do: they bought T-shirts with their chosen brand, they thronged chatrooms, they filled their homes with merchandise. Everybody rushed to plug themselves in. Within five years pretty much everyone, except for some cranks, had plugged themselves into the triune VR. And as with any addiction, the longer it was indulged the harder it became to extricate oneself. We’re now long past the stage when people can voluntarily exit the system. Most people don’t even realise that they’re in the system at all.’

  Nemo considered this for a while. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I have to say that I still don’t understand the concept of the No One.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ returned the Orifice. ‘I’m not sure you’ve been paying attention. The McAtrix is an extrapolation of human culture in the twenty-first century. People now, as then, are obsessed with one thing above all others: they want to be famous. They crave celebrity. They’ll do anything, suffer any indignity, undergo any trial to be famous. Celebrity drives the McAtrix – everybody plugged into it is caught up in that maelstrom. Everybody hankers after movie stardom, pop stardom, they want to be political stars, sports stars, porn stars, any kind of stars. You might say it defines the system.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nemo.

  ‘Such a world has a flaw,’ said the Orifice, almost dreamily. ‘In such a world, where everybody is striving to be Some One, the individual who is – genuinely, bone-to-skin – No One, that person can evade the constraints of the system. He or she can slip through the machinic net. Do you see?’

  ‘I think I do,’ said Nemo, comprehension dawning. ‘So – am I the No One?’

  She smiled. ‘Smurpheus thinks so.’

  ‘But is Smurpheus right?’

  The Orifice shook her head gaily. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘You lack self-negation. Your ego is too greedy. Don’t get me wrong, you’re very largely insignificant, pretty much a zero. But not wholly. You want, in however small a sense, to be Some One. Just like everybody else.’ She lit another ciga
rette. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s something of a relief, actually,’ said Nemo. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out to be saviour of the world.’ He paused. ‘Um,’ he said, ‘since I’m here, and since you’re, you know, a wise person, there is another thing. It’s about a woman, actually.’

  ‘Thinity,’ said the Orifice, beaming.

  ‘Yes. I love her, you see. Not just fancy her. I thought at first it was just fancying her, but it’s more than that. Do you know how she, you know, regards me?’

  ‘You want her?’

  Nemo gulped so hard he almost swallowed his molars. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very much. Is there any chance of that?’

  ‘Chance,’ said the Orifice, musing. ‘That’s an interesting word, isn’t it? When people are in love, they usually talk of fate or destiny, not chance. If chance means a clear choice between two possibles, I’d say that a chance was indeed your destiny.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Nemo. ‘Can’t you make it plainer?’

  ‘Make my explanation plainer? Why can’t you make your understanding fancier?’ countered the Orifice, smiling ever more widely.

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘So,’ said Nemo, becoming nervous at the silence. ‘What happens next?’

  ‘Are you asking me about the protocol for this sort of meeting?’ the Orifice replied. ‘Or are you asking me in my capacity as a prophetess?’

  ‘Well, I meant the first thing, but now that you mention it the second thing sounds interesting.’

  ‘The future?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Orifice in an offhand way, getting to her feet. ‘Nothing too interesting. You will travel. You will meet a stranger. Oh, and a situation will arise in which you will have to choose between you death and Smurpheus’s death. Without him the humans have no chance against the machines, and so the EMIs plot to destroy him. You will soon be given a choice: either you can let Smurpheus die, and carry on living yourself; or you can sacrifice yourself to save him.’