by Eric Brown
He considered Wellman’s time-expansion innovation, and the reported development of memory-suppressant drugs. He imagined a time when citizens could make a new life for themselves in VR, create a new identity and live a full and productive existence in some clean, Utopian world without the constant, nagging reminder of self.
He knew it was a futile dream, an escapist fantasy born of a society that had managed to destroy one world and was searching for impossible alternatives.
He moved to the nearest silver column. A woman flashed out of existence before him, and he was momentarily startled by the physical impossibility of what had happened.
He tapped the code into the touchpad on the silver column. Instantly the rectangular screen displayed: Requested site inaccessible from major VR conveyors. Code suggests private access/limited user availability.
After an initial stab of disappointment, he felt the quiet satisfaction of knowing that, with the discovery of the restricted code, the chances were that he was onto something important.
He cleared the screen and typed in the code of Wellman’s time-extended site.
He blinked, and he was no longer in the futuristic Cyber-Tech plaza.
He found himself sitting in a high-backed leather armchair before a roaring log fire. He was in a small room lined with leather-bound books. A mahogany writing desk stood in one corner, a big globe of the world in another. It was as if he had stepped back in time a hundred and fifty years...
The view through the mullioned window to his right still showed the spectacular panorama of Tethys, a landscape of ice and rock stretching to the near horizon of the small moon. Ahead, Saturn was rising visibly, vast and majestic with its encircling system of rings aslant.
A door to his left opened quickly and Wellman stepped through, dressed in keeping with the room. He wore a frock coat, a waistcoat with a fob-watch, and carried a cane.
Halliday stared.
Wellman drew up a chair before the fire and sat down. ‘Halliday, it’s been four days since we last spoke.’
‘Just over a day, my time,’ Halliday said.
‘Roberts told me about the Suzie hologram.’
‘Have the techs come up with anything?’
Wellman shook his head. ‘Nothing, to be honest. Suzie was careful when she reprogrammed the hologram. She gave nothing away. The hologram contains not much more than what we knew about Suzie already, other than her obsession with death and the soul.’
‘She didn’t tell the hologram where she was going?’ Halliday asked. ‘I thought she might have mentioned her meeting with Kim and the silver-haired guy.’
‘She might have, but the memory of the hologram device could be edited. We think Suzie wiped anything she didn’t want anyone to know about.’
Halliday nodded. ‘So ... it looks as though when Suzie disappeared, she went voluntarily?’
‘So it would seem.’ He looked across at Halliday. ‘What about you? Have you come up with anything?’
‘You heard about something called the Methuselah Project?’
Wellman shook his head. ‘Nothing at all. What is it?’
He told Wellman about his meeting with Jimmy King and Anastasia Dah. ‘The guy Suzie and Kim dined with on Thursday night is called Charles - that’s all I know about him. They’re both involved in something called the Methuselah Project. I have a few leads I’m working on. I’ll keep you posted.’
Wellman was nodding slowly, seemingly impressed. ‘In one day you’ve done very well. I’ve had a company detective on the case since the day Suzie vanished, for all the good it did.’
‘I’ve been lucky. Been in the right place at the right time.’
‘As long as you get results, Halliday, that’s all that concerns me.’
‘I also came across a code. I don’t know, it might be nothing. I found it in the history of Anastasia Dah’s jellytank. It contains the initials MP - I thought maybe it had something to do with the Methuselah Project.’
‘Did you access the site?’
‘Tried to. I came up with access-restricted errors, things like that. Maybe your techs will have more luck.’
‘I’ll get them onto it.’ Wellman reached out and took a pen and a writing pad from the desk and passed them to Halliday.
He clutched the pen awkwardly, wondering when he’d last used one. He printed the code on the pad and handed it back to Wellman.
Halliday gestured at the room. ‘Some place, Wellman.’
‘Do you like it? Victorian, circa 1900. A hundred and forty years ago. I like the juxtaposition with the stellar scenery. Striking, don’t you think?’
Halliday smiled. ‘You spend all your time here?’
‘By no means. I still have company business to conduct.’
‘What about pleasure? Leisure time?’
‘I have unlimited access to all the sites, Halliday. When I want to go somewhere, I just import the site into the time-extended matrix, or rather my techs do all that for me. When I use the leisure sites, I have various constructed personas to keep me company, so I’m never alone. From time to time my wife visits.’
Wellman consulted his fob-watch. ‘It’s time I wasn’t here, Halliday. I have meetings to attend. Keep up the good work.’
He stood and hurried from the room.
Halliday remained seated, considering. It was almost midnight in the real world, time he caught up with some sleep. Or he could spend a further hour or two in VR...
On the back of his left hand was the decal to return him to the clearing zone. He hit it and found himself standing in the plaza, bathed in brilliant sunlight. He approached a silver column and entered the code of the required site.
Instantly he was phased from the Cyber-Tech plaza to the reassuring vistas of the Virginia site.
He stood on the ridge path overlooking the burnished blue water of the ocean. To his right, the coastline stretched away to the hazy horizon, an immense panorama of forested hills extending for as far as the eye could see. The sight never failed to fill him with a sense of wonder, and at the same time a throat-tightening sensation of regret.
He made his way down the path, through the pines, to the pebble beach that fringed the bay. His tent was a familiar red blister a hundred metres away in the shade of a fir tree.
Casey, the simulated version, sat on a deck chair. She waved as he approached. ‘Hi, Hal. See anything interesting? I’m just taking a little sun.’
He smiled and shook his head.
He sat on the pebbles beside the tent and she came to him, as he knew she would. She sat beside him and leaned her head on his shoulder. He recalled the last time he had been with the Casey-construct in VR, how he had watched her splashing naked in the shallows ...
Absently, tears misting his vision, he laid a hand on her head and felt her warmth.
‘Hey!’ she said, looking up. ‘Why don’t we go for a walk? Know what I saw earlier, Hal? A whale, a real blue whale out there in the ocean!’
He smiled. ‘Maybe later, okay?’
She returned her head to his shoulder, and he resumed stroking her hair.
He had never really spoken to this Casey, never told her what he was thinking or feeling. He had always assumed that her mere presence would be enough to give him what he had wanted ... which was, what? Companionship? Friendship? The reassurance in VR that he was not alone?
And the hopeless fact was that until the other day he had been perfectly satisfied with whatever Casey’s simulation had given him, or so at least he’d tried to convince himself.
But this version of the real girl was no more than a shallow puppet, a fantasy figure dancing attendance on his warped and inadequate desires. His relationship with her was easy because she was not a real person, did not have thoughts and hopes and desires of her own.
Last night, with the real Casey, he had found how difficult it was to maintain a genuine relationship. The fact was that he’d had to consider her, acknowledge that she had thoughts and feelings that could be
affected by his words and deeds. And he had made a mess of it, had driven her away with his gratuitous show of violence towards Jimmy King.
Casey looked up now and smiled at him. ‘Hey, why so quiet, Hal?’
He stood quickly, spilling her. He walked away, stumbling.
‘Hey, Hal!’ her childish cry sounded behind him. ‘What’s wrong, Hal?’
Choking, he hit the exit decal on the back of his hand and quit the site.
He struggled from the embrace of the gel, his stomach heaving. He hung over the side of the tank and vomited. His head pounded and his body was racked with shooting pains.
* * * *
Nine
Barney walked along the margin of sand made solid by the touch of the sea. When he came to the northernmost extent of the beach, where the sand curved to the point of a short headland, he turned right and walked through stands of shock-haired marram grass towards a plantation of pine trees fifty metres inland.
He had experienced the cosmic void, as he called it, on two occasions after the first. Each occasion caught him unawares, and was all the more terrifying for that. Once he was walking by himself along the foreshore when he was plunged into a blackness at once familiar and strange. He had experienced again the sensation of plummeting through light-years, of being a tiny part of a much larger fabrication. As before, the sensation seemed to last an eternity - and yet, when he emerged from the abyssal fall, he found himself completing the stride he had begun a fraction of a second earlier.
On the second occasion he had been in town with Estelle, strolling along the sidewalk. The darkness had overtaken him, enveloped him and challenged his sanity, and yet when he returned to his senses it was as if no time at all had elapsed.
But what was even more disconcerting was the feeling experienced after these cosmic falls that weeks, maybe entire months, had been removed from his life, great missing chunks of time that registered somewhere deep in his mind despite the evidence of his senses that only a fraction of a second had gone by.
He came to the pine forest and slowed, looking around for the anomaly he had discovered just yesterday.
He had come upon the first of the anomalies, as he called them, three days ago. Since then he had happened upon half a dozen more. The first time, he had been driving the car along the coast road ten kilometres to the south. From the corner of his eye he’d seen a sudden and startling shimmer of blackness, an obsidian lozenge laid out at the side of the road. He braked and quickly reversed, sure that his senses had been playing tricks.
But there it was, lying in the shadow of a pine tree like a puddle of oil. He climbed from the car and approached with a caution born of experience. Even when he was still within metres of the jet-black pool, he was aware of its irresistible attraction. He slowed his pace, but found himself walking on. He stopped two metres away, leaned forward and peered into the slick like someone on the edge of a mineshaft.
His vision had swirled. He was looking down into a miniature version of the blackness he had experienced after his first hour in VR, and on two occasions since.
There had been something subtly different about this blackness, however. It did not posses the all-encompassing and overwhelming quality of the others. He felt he could control it, keep his distance. He was attracted to it, undeniably, but it did not have the power to draw him in and engulf him entirely.
He had remained by the side of the road, staring for what seemed like hours into the mysterious pit that seemed at once to possess a slick jet surface and yet infinite depth.
He had come across other anomalies over the course of the next few days. Yesterday he had found the largest yet, spread like a perfectly level slick of crude across the surface of scrubby ground all around a pine tree, like a shadow too geometrical and intense to be believable. Again it had exerted its mystifying allure. He had stared into its depths, from a safe distance, for hours.
Now he saw the patch of blackness through the trees. He approached slowly, step by slow step, and then lowered himself onto his hands and knees and moved forward on all fours.
He came to the margin of the obsidian pool and stared over the side, like an enchanted child peering into fairyland.
He made out, scintillating in the depths of the jet pool, a million points of firefly light. They were like stars in space, or more accurately like galaxies in the vastness of the universe, for each light was not a point but a swirl made up of any number of infinitesimal individual lights. He felt himself being drawn into the blackness, lured head-first to fall through the space between the galaxies.
‘I wouldn’t get too close to that if I were you, Barney.’
The voice startled him, almost had the opposite effect and pitched him forward in fright. He scrambled away from the jet pool and climbed to his feet.
Lew Kramer stood before him, dressed in the suit he’d been wearing the last time Barney had seen him in the real world. He was a big, lantern-jawed man who carried his weight on small feet with surprising nimbleness.
Lew gestured at the slick. ‘It’s a rip in the reality of the virtual site, an area where the basal matrix has failed to mesh or knit properly.’
‘That makes perfect sense,’ Barney said, sarcastic. ‘What causes them?’
Lew shrugged. ‘Sometimes a lack of configuration, where a glitch in the system has ripped a rent in the matrix - in other words, where our calculations don’t add up. Others are caused by viruses. There are a number of terrorist groups out there opposed to VR. They take great delight in trying to sabotage our systems.’
‘And why the warning, Lew? Why shouldn’t I get too near them? They dangerous?’
‘Not as such, but they can cause certain short-term neurological anomalies and minor sensory dysfunctions should you find yourself caught up in one.’
Barney nodded. ‘Thanks for the warning. I’ll keep it in mind next time I feel like taking a dip.’ He stared at the natty exec. ‘Lew, what the hell’s going on here? I want some explanations.’
Lew held up both hands. ‘And I’ll give you them, Barney. Why do you think I’m here?’
‘Not for a holiday, I’ll bet. This place’d drive anyone nuts.’ He shook his head. ‘What the hell’s happening to me? Why can’t I get outta here?’
Lew nodded. He had the slick PR man’s repertoire of placatory gestures to reassure the concerned client. ‘Right. That’s why I’m here, Barney. I came to tell you that everything’s under control. You don’t need to worry about a thing.’
Barney shot him a glance. ‘Listen, bud, when men in suits tell me that I got diddley-squat to worry about, I start worrying good. What gives?’
‘There was a ... let’s say a minor glitch in the transfer routines when we attempted to pull you from the site.’
Barney spread his hands in a gesture of heartfelt relief. ‘Well, thank Christ for that, Lew. You know, for a minute there I thought I was really stuffed.’ He stared at the man. ‘What the fuck,’ he said, ‘do you mean by a minor glitch?’
Lew cleared his throat. ‘Sometimes subjects... clients ... become too fully integrated into the matrix. It’s a one in a million occurrence.’
‘That’s good to know—’
‘And we’re working around the clock to amend the situation.’
‘Around the clock?’ Barney stabbed a stubby forefinger into Lew’s barrel chest. ‘You tell me you’re working round the clock? I’ve been here days, Lew! What’s the upper-limit immersion time? Four hours?’ He shook his head. ‘What kind of state will I be in when you finally get round to pulling me outta here?’
Lew was holding up both hands and shaking his head. ‘Barney, let me reassure you on that score.’
Barney stared. ‘This should be good.’
‘I know you might find this hard to believe, Barney, but although you’ve subjectively experienced seven days in this site, only one day has elapsed out there in the real world. As soon as the glitch appeared, we reconfigured this site into what we call a time-extensio
n matrix. That’s why it appears I’ve taken my time in getting here. In actual fact we had a few hours’ work to do to stabilise the matrix before I could immerse myself.’
Barney shook his head. ‘So I’ve been in here one day, real time? That’s still way over the safe immersion limit, buddy.’
‘Barney, let me tell you that the upper limit set by the VR companies is merely a safety measure. We’ve been conducting experiments with subjects who’ve been tanked for in excess of two days without any ill effects.’