The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  ‘If they capture you a second time,’ said Thinity, ‘it will be much worse.’

  ‘Worse,’ echoed Nemo.

  ‘Much.’

  ‘But when they had me in custody before . . .’

  ‘They were going softly on you. They were hoping to use you to get to Smurpheus.’

  ‘So they wanted Smurpheus, not me? Why?’

  ‘Because he knows the way.’

  ‘Because,’ Smurpheus confirmed, ‘I know the way.’

  Nemo nodded. ‘Sounds mystical. The way of wisdom? The tao?’

  ‘I know the way to Syon Lane. You can’t get to it in the conventional network patrolled by the EMIs; but I know how to leap from that network on to a completely different one. The EMIs would love dearly to find that out. They must not. If they discover the way, then they will swarm into Syon House, smashing the windows, breaking the furniture and eradicating the last of the free humans. It would be death and misery. Accordingly, they must not discover what I know. We must exit the McAtrix right away. The longer we stay here, the greater danger we are in.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Nemo, ‘that it wasn’t too clever of you to come into the McAtrix in the first place. Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to let Thinity take me to the Orifice by herself? Did you actually need to come into the McAtrix at all? Wasn’t that needlessly putting yourself at danger?’

  ‘We must be heedful,’ said Smurpheus, ignoring Nemo, ‘of the Orifice’s advice. There must not be a choice between you falling into the clutches of the gents and me falling.’ He paused. ‘I falling,’ he corrected. ‘No, me falling. No, that doesn’t sound right. I falling, me falling, I-me falling.’ An ever so slightly strained expression marked his brow. ‘You get my drift,’ he concluded. ‘Both of us are crucial to the hopes for Syon House. We must both return to the real world.’ He turned to Thinity. ‘If Nemo is unable to slip past the gents on the door, you must sacrifice yourself to allow us both to get away.’

  Thinity gave Smurpheus a penetrating look. It was impossible to tell from the expression alone whether she was agreeing with him in a silently penetrating manner or disagreeing with him in a silently penetrating manner.

  ‘Look,’ said Nemo, his heart hammering. ‘That won’t do at all.’ He debated internally whether this was the moment to reveal his feelings to Thinity: to announce to them both I love Thinity! To shout to the world I can’t live without her lissom latex-clad form. Heed me! Heed Me!

  ‘Go,’ said Smurpheus, shoving Nemo in the small of his back.

  ~:@

  Nemo staggered out into the road, hopping five steps on his left foot with his right foot at a Chaplinesque angle. He was six yards from the corner, in the middle of the street, before he regained his balance.

  There was no alternative now. He was out in the open.

  Here goes nothing, he thought. It was, he considered, a phrase with literal application to his situation. Be no one, he thought furiously as he walked forward. Be nothing. Nothing, no one, nobody, know-all.

  No, not that last one.

  He strode forward. The three gents were surveying the street, turning their heads like lawn-sprinklers left, right, left, right. One of these gents turned his gaze on Nemo as he approached the entrance to the building. Don’t panic, Nemo told himself. I’m nobody. I’m a zero. I’m a nothing. They won’t see me.

  He came closer to the door. He was walking right past them. He was invisible to them.

  He was practically inside.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said one of the gents, placing his hand on Nemo’s shoulder.

  Nemo’s heart did a back-flip on its metaphorical gymnastic mat and landed crunchingly on its head. They could see him. He wasn’t invisible. He thought, the words forming themselves in his brain precisely, Oh crap.

  ‘You can see me?’ he asked.

  The gent put his head on one side, like an intelligent dog trying to make sense of its owner’s command. ‘Naturally I can see you. I must ask you your intention on approaching this building?’

  ‘Approaching the building? What? Why would you think I was approaching the building? What would give you that impression? I don’t,’ he said, laughing carelessly, ‘want to go in this building. Go in this building? That’s crazy talk. Ha-ha! I’m just walking past. Go in this building? Am I insane? Do I look like a madman? Go into the building? Never. Nope. No-no-no. Not me.’ The tension was coiling inside him. He laughed carelessly a second time. ‘No, no, nothing like that. In fact – hey! What’s that over there?’ He pointed behind the gent, and ran as fast as he could at the door of the building.

  He hit the door with a breath-stealing whump, and forced himself through. The revolving door revolved precipitously. Nemo caught a glimpse of a lobby on the other side, and observed, fleetingly, the wrinkled, sad-eyed face of the concierge watching him with some concern before the momentum of the door swept him past. He swung through three hundred and sixty degrees in under a second and the door spat him out, like an indigestible piece of gristle, on to the pavement outside.

  It took him a moment to gather his wits. The three gents were standing looking down at him.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah. I must have, eh, tripped.’ He got unsteadily to his feet.

  The gents’ expressions were more purposeful. ‘You are now in our custody,’ one of them announced with a machinic inflection. ‘Evidently you are a terrorist.’

  ‘Terrorist?’ said Nemo. ‘Certainly not. I am far from being a terrorist. Terrorist, me? I am afraid of terror, actually. You see, it wouldn’t be possible for me to be a terrorist, what with my terrorphobia.’ He grinned at the three gents, in what he hoped was a winning manner. ‘Oh, what’s that – behind you?’

  ‘This ruse,’ the gent declared, with disdain, ‘is hardly likely to distract me twice.’

  Thinity, standing behind the gent, whacked him on the head with a pole. From the noise it made as it impacted the back of the gent’s head, it was a metal pole. It might, once, have been the support to a no-left-turn sign; but, somehow, Thinity had uprooted it from its concrete flowerbed and torn off its single metallic petal, leaving only the pole. It formed a very effective, Little John-ish sort of weapon.

  She swung and clattered the end of the pole into the face of a second gent, and then pushed forward, grabbing Nemo round the waist. ‘Come on.’

  Together they bundled into the revolving door, Thinity still clutching her pole. The door swept through a semicircle and the pole fell forward and lodged in the gap that briefly opened up between the inner entrance space and the upright spar of the revolving door mechanism itself. The whole door wheel stopped in mid-turn, locked, jammed solid. Nemo and Thinity staggered forward into the lobby.

  Nemo could see, outside the building, Smurpheus fighting the gents with desperate hand-flappy gestures somewhere underneath his chin. His fingers and palms slapped and rebounded from the flapping hands of the gents; but there were three of them and only one Smurpheus.

  ‘We must go back and help him!’ cried Nemo.

  ‘It’s no use,’ gasped Thinity. ‘The door’s completely jammed. Our best bet is to get out ourselves.’ She slapped the fabric of the door in her frustration. ‘I’m sorry Smurpheus, but there’s nothing we can do. We must get away!’

  Together they watched as Smurpheus, his eyes the shape of washers, collapsed under a bundle of gents. Through the glass they could hear the noise he made; it was a muffled wu-uh-urg sort of noise.

  Chapter 10

  Another Choice

  As they appeared back in the train, Nemo was saying, ‘They saw me, Thinity. I wasn’t invisible at all!’

  Thinity de-inserted the probe from her own body, and Nemo did likewise. Then they got awkwardly off their chairs. ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Thinity. ‘How can they have seen you, if you’re the No One?’

  ‘Well,’ said Nemo, scratching his chin. ‘It’s true the Orifice did say that I wasn’t the No One after all.’

  Thinity’s fac
e assumed an expression somewhere between aghast and alarmed. ‘She said that?’

  Nemo was suddenly sheepish. His brain was hurriedly trying to calculate what effect, if any, this new turn of events was going to have on his chances of getting Thinity to go on a date with him. ‘Well,’ he conceded, ‘she may have, you know, mentioned, something along those lines.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘I tried to tell you,’ said Nemo, ‘but Smurpheus kept barking at me not to say anything.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Thinity. But, paradoxically, her tone of voice actually suggested that she did not truly consider this new development fantastic in any positive sense.

  ‘I did tell you about the other thing,’ said Nemo, a little whinily. ‘About the, you know, him-or-me thing. Smurpheus or me. Which, when you come to think about it, has come to pass. And I was ready to sacrifice myself to save him; honestly I was.’

  Thinity scowled.

  ‘So what will they do with him?’ he asked.

  ‘They will take him to a dentist,’ replied Thinity.

  ‘Oh,’ said Nemo. ‘Dental hygiene, is it?’

  Thinity looked at him with deepened contempt. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not dental hygiene. They want him to give up the information he possesses, the route to Syon Lane. A dentist is the most efficient way to getting him to talk.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nemo. ‘I see.’

  ‘Come on; we’d better find Tonkatoi.’

  o-|3=K

  They found Tonkatoi, hungover, trussed up with homespun hempen cord in one of the train’s storage compartments. They untied him as quickly as they could. As he was rubbing his limbs and muttering, Thinity piloted the Jeroboam away from its stationary position at Leicester Square station. After a few minutes, Nemo saw through the window of the train as Tottenham Court Road station – eerily deserted, but lit and clean – flashed past.

  She programmed a random pattern into the driving computer, and came back to sit dejectedly with Tonkatoi and Nemo.

  The mood was not a jolly one. Tankatoi explained how he had been drinking with Judas, ‘just a couple’. The next thing he knew he was waking up bound in a cupboard. ‘So Jude’s gone, is it? Judas?’

  ‘Betrayed us,’ said Thinity bitterly. ‘Who could have thought it?’

  ‘And the gents have Smurpheus, do they?’

  Thinity nodded.

  ‘Do you know what I don’t understand,’ said Nemo, as Aldgate flitted by.

  Thinity and Tonkatoi both looked at him.

  ‘These gents,’ he said. ‘Who are they exactly? What’s their beef?’

  ‘Beef?’ echoed Thinity, uncomprehending.

  ‘Their game. What are they about?’

  ‘The gents,’ said Thinity dully. ‘It’s their job to police the McAtrix – to weed out the disruptive elements so that the whole thing can operate smoothly.’

  ‘By disruptive elements,’ said Nemo, ‘I suppose you mean—’

  ‘Us.’

  ‘And by “weed out”? I’m hoping that by employing a gardening metaphor you’re intending to allude to something comfortable, cosy almost – something Middle England, something afternoon tea-ish. “Weed out” sounds to me like a light tug, a little tidying up.’

  ‘I mean kill,’ said Thinity.

  ‘Kill,’ repeated Nemo quickly. ‘Right. I see. Kill as in dead? Or kill as in make a person laugh until tears come out of their eyes?’

  ‘Kill as in dead.’

  ‘And just to be absolutely clear about this,’ pressed Nemo. ‘I mean, I don’t want you to think that I’m a coward, or anything like that.’ He laughed bravely. ‘Certainly not. To be honest, I’m far too brave to be a coward. Which is to say, I’m brave enough wholly to admit my fear, which a coward would be too cowardly to do, if you see what I’m getting at.’

  ‘I see,’ said Thinity.

  ‘So just to be absolutely certain here. When you are, eh, killed in the McAtrix, do you die in the real world?’

  Thinity nodded.

  ‘Right,’ said Nemo. ‘How is that exactly? I mean, when you die in a video game, or in a dream, you don’t die in real life, do you?’

  ‘No, you don’t. But this video game is not like any other you’ve played. Do you want to know why? I’ll tell you why. Because this game was sold to humanity as more lifelike than any other. Do you know what lifelike really means? Do you know the actual definition of lifelike?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Death, of course. The ultimate in lifelikeness is dying. It makes sense when you think about it. In most VR you can do everything you can do in life except die. But in the ultimate VR – in the McAtrix – you can go that little bit further.’

  ‘It’s quite a big bit,’ mumbled Nemo.

  ‘When you die in the virtuality,’ Thinity explained, ‘the AI software governing your avatar and your environment informs the pod in which your body is. The pod then sends ultra-high-pressure superheated water shooting out of the probe inserted inside you. This process is called the Enemathata.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very comfortable.’

  ‘Comfortable,’ said Tonkatoi. ‘No.’

  ‘Does that kill you?’

  ‘It does more than kill you. It liquefies your innards. It explosively pulps your inner organs, your muscles and bones, your brain and marrow, everything. Then the probe reverses its action and sucks the newly deliquescent matter out of the pod.’

  ‘Ugh,’ said Nemo, with genuine feeling. ‘Urrr. Oh. That’s horrid.’ He scrunched up his face. ‘Yuk.’ Then, to make certain his interlocutors knew unambiguously what his position was, he added: ‘Yurch.’

  Thinity was impassive. ‘It’s the essential meat gunk that is supplied to the still-living podders,’ she explained. ‘The machines have calculated that they need far less food to keep people alive this way – no need for waste, because what’s injected into the still-living podders is basically waste already. The lower intestine digests what it needs, and it passes out again, bypassing the stomach. It’s much more efficient than nature.’

  ‘Nature,’ said Nemo dismissively. ‘Tch!’ But his mind couldn’t leave alone the agonising-sounding process of the Enemathata. ‘This injection,’ he said, ‘of superheated, superpressurised water . . .’

  ‘The technology was minimally adapted from cow-processing plants of the early twenty-first century,’ said Thinity blandly.

  ‘But is it painful? Is it a painful way to die?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you could describe it,’ said Thinity, ‘as “ceasing on the midnight with no pain”.’

  ‘But do you feel it? I mean, if you’re plugged into the McAtrix? Surely you’re removed from the experience of your body?’

  ‘Why do you say so?’ queried Thinity. ‘You only think that because most of the time in your pod you have no experience, no distractions from McAtrix life. It’s a sensory deprivation tank. But your mind is still inside your body, even when it’s in the McAtrix. If you’re playing a video game and somebody stabs you in the back of your neck with a pencil, you’d feel that, wouldn’t you? No matter how caught up you were in the game?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nemo.

  ‘Clearly I’ve never died, in the McAtrix or otherwise, so I can’t speak from personal experience. But I’ve been with people when they died, and they tend to roll on the floor clutching their torsos and screaming, “Oh the agony, the agony”.’

  ‘But we’re not in a pod,’ said Nemo eagerly. ‘So that doesn’t apply to us, does it? We’re probably immune from McAtrix death.’

  Thinity shook her head sombrely. ‘I’m afraid not. True, our probes aren’t plugged in to the McAtrix FoodGunk process. But they are McAtrix probes nevertheless, they were scavenged from the system. They exist in an information feedback loop with the McAtrix system – that’s how they operate. If they receive data from the McAtrix, say “it’s raining”, they simulate the sensation of falling rain in the neural channels of your brain. If you think “I’ll walk for
ward” you pass the information through the probe to the McAtrix’s processing units, and your position in the program shifts. You see?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So if the McAtrix sends the information you’re dead to your probe, it causes a feedback short-circuit: the probe burns out, heats red-hot in a moment, and discharges a lethal dose of electricity into your body. You die just the same.’

  ‘Can’t you modify the probes?’

  ‘Not so as they’d still work,’ said Tonkatoi. ‘Believe me, we’ve tried.’

  *B*

  They returned to the compartment in which the chairs were located. There was Smurpheus, apparently asleep, but in fact deeply embedded in the McAtrix.

  ‘Why can’t we just – you know—’ said Nemo, ‘pull the probe out? Sever the connection? It would be like pulling off a VR helmet in the middle of a game. Wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would,’ said Tonkatoi. ‘Only the probe is engaged.’

  ‘Engaged,’ said Nemo, nodding.

  ‘You know what “engaged” means?’ asked Tonkatoi.

  ‘Sure,’ said Nemo.

  There was a pause.

  ‘You know what “engaged” means,’ pressed Tonkatoi, ‘in this context?’

  ‘Not in this context, no,’ said Nemo.

  ‘It means,’ said Thinity, walking over to them, ‘that the probe’s connections are locked into the internal portals. If we pulled the probe out now it would rip out Smurpheus’s innards. Like a bee’s sting.’

  ‘Like a beasting?’ asked Nemo, unsure what the word meant, but disturbed by the sound of it.

  ‘A bee’s,’ said Thinity, slowly and with a certain amount of annoyance, ‘sting.’

  ‘Oh. Well couldn’t we just – you know – cut the wire?’

  ‘Wire?’ asked Tonkatoi. ‘What do you mean, “wire”?’

  ‘The cord,’ said Nemo, ‘that links the probe to . . . I don’t know. I never really understood electronics. But there must be a wire.’

  ‘There’s no wire,’ said Tonkatoi. ‘The probe’s a self-contained unit, broadcasting to connect with the processors of the McAtrix. Wire?’ He pshawed. Nemo actually heard both syllables, the p and the shaw. ‘What an antique concept,’ Tonkatoi added.