by Eric Brown
‘I read your signature as soon as you entered,’ she said. She looked alarmed. ‘Hal, you’re in danger. Get out of here now.’
He shook his head. ‘Who did this? Who constructed you?’
Her frown was so familiar. ‘I can’t begin to explain. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I want to know what’s going on ...’ He couldn’t bring himself to call her by her name, for all she seemed a miraculous likeness of the woman he had loved. He was in VR, and the real Kim was dead, and this was some clever construct fabricated for some unknown reason by persons just as unknown.
She stared at him. ‘How did you get in here, Hal? How did you find the code?’
‘Where am I? At least tell me that!’
She bit her lip, prettily, and the gesture brought tears to his virtual eyes. ‘You shouldn’t even be here.’
‘Tell me, is this the Methuselah Project?’
Her eyes grew wide in alarm, and he felt the grip of a hand on his arm. He turned, saw a face he recognised. The silver-haired Charles.
His grip was like iron.
When he turned again towards the Kim construct, he saw that she was no longer there.
‘What’s—’ he began.
He tried to struggle, but the sensation was as if he were in a dream. He knew what he wanted to do, but he was robbed of volition, powerless to act or react.
He raised his hands, searched in vain for an exit decal.
Charles pushed him forward, and he was no longer on the greensward. In a dizzying, dream-like transition he saw that he was being marched down a corridor between empty, barred cells. A part of him wanted to cry out that this was VR, that what he was experiencing was not real but some vivid hypnagogic dream, but at the same time the pressure of the grip on his arm, and the absence of reassuring words from Kat back in the real world, filled him with fear.
Charles bundled him into a cell. He stumbled forward and fell to the floor. When he regained his feet and turned, the silver-haired man was gone.
He sat down against the wall. He was in a square, windowless cell. The only light came from a fluorescent strip in the corridor.
He knew he was in VR, lying suspended in gel in Kat’s tank. This was nothing more than a dream, albeit a very real dream. What frightened him was that, unlike every other experience he had had in VR, he was not in control of this dream.
‘Kat!’ he shouted. ‘Kat...’
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he was no longer in the cell.
He was in a familiar attic bedroom. It was his room, the room in the three-storey weatherboard house his parents had owned on Long Island.
How the hell, he asked himself, are they doing this? How were the controllers of this site reaching into his mind and making his memories so real?
He stood and walked to the window, and out there in the middle of the back garden was the majestic oak tree he had loved to climb as a kid.
He turned from the window, and his heart almost stopped.
Eloise and Susanna sat on the floor, Eloise reading a book,
Susanna poring over a chessboard. As he stared, she looked up.
‘Come on, Hal. Finish the game!’
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came.
Then he was aware of the odour of smoke, drifting up the stairs.
‘No!’ he screamed. ‘You can’t do this!’
As if in sadistic delight, whoever was in control of this nightmare chose to accelerate the vision of the attic and the two innocent children. As he watched, frozen, smoke filled the room and flames leaped up the steps, twisting around the wooden balustrades, dancing over the stair carpet. Eloise stood and screamed and Susanna made to dive for the window.
And then the vision halted. The flames stilled mid-leap, Susanna came to a halt, one foot on the ground, her mouth open in a silent scream. Eloise was a statue, paused in the act of standing, knees bent, alarm eloquent in her eyes. Halliday looked around the room. It was as if time had stopped. Flames hung in unnatural suspension, great lianas of brilliant orange twisting through the air, drifts of smoke stilled like floating phantoms...
He saw, then, the young boy he had been. He was sitting on the floor, staring at Eloise.
‘Don’t make me live through this again ...’ he pleaded.
He could not relive again the choice he’d had to make, at the height of the house fire in his fourteenth year. Eloise or Susanna? He could only take one at once down the crumbling, fire-swept stairs, and then come back for the other.
He had made that choice. He had chosen Susanna, and by the time he had returned for Eloise she was dead.
But how didthey know that?
He saw movement. Through a torque of flames like twisted golden silk he saw the figure of the silver-haired man, Charles, stride towards him.
‘Do you really want to go through this again, Halliday?’
‘How... ?’ he managed. ‘How are you doing this?’
‘Oh, we have the power to have you experience the flames all over again, Halliday, and this time die a terrible death in the conflagration. This time, even, we can have both your sisters burn with you.’
‘What . . . what—’
‘What do I want?’ Charles smiled. ‘I want you to get out of here, Halliday. Leave the site. Don’t come back. Don’t even think about coming back. And then when you’re safely in the real world, drop the case. Forget about Charlesworth and the Methuselah Project. Forget about Dah and Long. Go back to your safe little existence with your trips to the Virginia site ...’ He paused there, and smiled at Halliday. ‘Because if we find out that you’ve defied us and continued with your investigations, then you’re a dead man, Halliday.’
He vanished then, with such speed that Halliday almost doubted he had ever beheld the threatening spectre.
And the flames suddenly leapt to life, and the roar of the conflagration deafened him. The heat of the fire singed his skin, scorching the air from his lungs, and his sisters’ screams became unbearable.
He screamed - and then he was no longer in the burning attic.
The vision ceased, replaced by darkness, and the heat of the flames died suddenly. He was in the jellytank, struggling through the cloying gel, Kat’s voice loud in his ears, ‘. . . I lost you, Halliday. What happened in there?’
He emerged with a cry from the gel, standing and ripping off the leads, struggling with the mask until it came free. He stumbled from the tank. The images of the burning room played on in his head, even though he was back in the real world now, back in the safety of Kat’s basement apartment. She assisted him over to the mattress, where he sank down thankfully and accepted the mug of bourbon she forced to his lips.
‘They have a construct of Kim in there!’ he said. ‘They got into my mind ...’
‘Who?’ Kat asked. ‘Who did, Halliday?’
He shook his head, remembering the threat.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, but he knew that it would take more than threats and visions of hellfire to stop him from finding out.
* * * *
Fourteen
Barney Kluger sat on the edge of the bed and stared through the window at the sunlit coastline. Another perfect day in paradise. He had been here around eight days now, each day exactly like the one before. Until, that is, Lew Kramer showed up with that half-assed explanation as to why he was imprisoned here.
He turned and stared at the sleeping Estelle. He tried to recall the feelings he had experienced during his first hour in this site, when he had made love to the construct of his wife. He was sure he had felt something, then - but now when he looked upon her sleeping form he felt nothing. He had been deprived of his other emotions, too. He knew that he should have felt rage towards Lew the other day, anger and frustration at the predicament he was in. The fact was that he felt nothing, nothing at all.
He knelt on the bed, reached out, and slipped his fingers around his wife’s neck. He felt her warm flesh in his grip, her flut
tery pulse beneath his thumb. He saw what he was doing, but was unable to summon any consequent self-censure. He knew that Estelle was only a computer-generated simulation, with no life of its own, but he wondered what he might feel if he were to perform the same act on a conscious, living human being. It would be an interesting experiment. Would he feel nothing then, too?
He increased his grip on the constructs warm neck, throttling her. This, in its own way, was an experiment. How might the construct react to his attack? Would she refer to it later?
He felt the muscles of her throat collapse realistically beneath his fingers. Will the woman wake up and scream at him to stop? Any reaction, he thought, other than her bland repertoire of platitudes and niceties, would make a welcome change.
He dug his fingers into her neck.
She opened her eyes and smiled up at him. ‘Hi, Barney. Let’s go and have breakfast, shall we?’
He let go of her, rolled away and moved from the bed. He felt nothing, not even despair.
‘I’m going for a walk. See you later.’
‘Okay, hon. Back around lunchtime?’
He made some non-committal reply and hurried from the bedroom. He left the villa and walked through the dunes towards the sea.
He tried to work out why the fact that he was imprisoned in this site should have robbed him of his ability to feel anything, love or hate, joy or anger. He had been perfectly capable of having human emotions during that first hour, so what had happened to him since then?
He watched the sea push scalloped lace petticoats up the hard-packed, shelving sand towards his feet. He inhaled, tasted the brine in the air; the wind was warm on his skin. He wondered what was missing from this site to make it truly paradisiacal.
Real people, he thought. Human beings he could talk to and react with. What was paradise, without friends with whom to appreciate it? He thought of Hal, out there in the real world. Was he right at this minute investigating the disappearance of his missing colleague? Barney smiled at the irony of the situation.
Perhaps not. According to Lew Kramer, he was in a time-extended zone. In the real world he had been missing for only a matter of a day or so.
He turned and stared up the coast, towards the stand of pine where, the other day, he had come upon the largest basal rent in the matrix yet. Even now, at this distance, he felt compelled to make his way towards the rip in the fabric of the site, drawn towards the jet-black slick.
He set off, hurrying up the beach and across the foreshore.
He came to the plantation of pines and slowed, peering through the trees. The rent was still there, surrounding a pine tree like a geometrical, inky shadow. He walked towards it, his steps careful as if with a combination of trepidation and respect. He braced his arms against his knees and peered into the fathomless midnight depths.
His vision lost all sense of perspective; he seemed to be pulled into the darkness. He got down on his hands and knees and pressed his nose to the skin of the pool. What had Lew told him about the rent? That close contact might result in short-term cerebral anomalies and sensory dysfunctions? Something like that.
He wondered why he thought that the exec had been trying to hide something . . .
He focused on the tiny golden flecks swirling like spiral galaxies within the blackness, and had the irresistible urge to tip himself head-first through the rent. He felt himself leaning forward, and knew that if he wished to stop himself from falling, then now was the time to call a halt.
But a part of him wanted to fall, to embrace whatever mysteries lurked within the depths. He realised, with a giddy vertiginous rush, that he could no longer help himself. He was toppling through the hole in the fabric of this site. He felt himself drop with a sensation at once helpless and euphoric.
Unlike his first occasion of falling through the darkness, when the techs had tried to pull him from the site after his first hour, now he seemed to be in control of his fall. He had no idea quite how, or by what means he was able to manoeuvre, but it appeared that if he merely thought what he wanted to do, then it would happen. He saw a coruscating swirl of light nearby, and willed himself in that direction.
A second later he was rushing towards the light, and it expanded enormously before him like a supernova. Then he passed through the light and seemed to be flying through the air. He was above a vast concourse crowded with a thousand citizens. They were consulting screens that floated in the air at head height, reaching out and touching the screens and instantly vanishing.
He looked down, to where his body should have been. He had no body. He was merely a discorporeal packet of consciousness, free to wander.
He willed himself to move, and he moved.
He descended towards one of the floating screens. It displayed a dizzying succession of images, a hundred different worlds, it seemed. People were reaching towards certain scenes, and at the second their fingertips made contact with the image, they vanished from sight as if edited from reality.
He was in some vast virtual reality clearing zone, he decided, a concourse that was the gateway to a thousand worlds.
He never realised that VR was this advanced. Or was this merely a Mantoni research and design site, the citizens around him no more than constructs?
He approached a screen. It showed what looked like the devastated surface of an alien planet, crawling with what appeared to be war machines, vehicles like trilobites discharging photon pulses towards other fighting machines. Soldiers in exo-skeletal armour plating danced across the war-zone, firing in a frenzy of destruction. As he watched, individuals selected this site and disappeared.
The scene changed. He looked upon a mountain scene, Earthlike but for the sudden appearance of two tumbling moons in the sky. This screen seemed to show nothing but extraterrestrial sites.
He moved on, taking in a dozen floating screens and their varied contents. He realised that he had somehow attained the ultimate freedom of the virtual world, the ability to roam at will, pick and choose the sites he wished to visit.
He came upon a screen showing what appeared to be a hundred naked people disporting themselves on the beach and foreshore of a site designed expressly for sex. He watched in mixed fascination and horror, the orgy scene offending his old-fashioned sensibilities. The scene changed, thankfully, to be replaced with the image of people skiing through blindingly white snow in a mountain landscape.
He had always wanted to go skiing with Estelle, but for some reason they had never made it.
Now he willed himself to move towards the screen, and he moved. He passed into the image, found himself hovering a metre above the piste as a dozen multicoloured skiers swished by.
What was the advantage of being able to visit all these sites at will, he asked himself, if he did not possess the corporeal form with which to enjoy them? It was all very well being a disembodied viewpoint, but it lacked excitement.
It came to him that he could summon form in the very same way that he willed himself to move - merely by thinking it.
No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he was moving down the mountainside, in possession of a body clad in garish salopets and jinking with the skill of a lifelong skier. He felt the rush of the wind on his cheeks, the exhilarating speed as he raced downhill. Pines flashed by in a vertical blur. He heard a scream in his ears, and realised that it was coming from his own throat.
After perhaps twenty minutes of skiing downhill on a never-ending slope, he moved on. He simply willed himself to leave this site, and instantly he was above the concourse again, bodiless.
It was a measure of his conventional thinking that he began to worry, then, about what Lew Kramer had told him. What if what he was doing did have side-effects? Some unforeseen neurological dysfunction? Would it affect his eventual release from virtual reality, or worse?
He moved himself away from the concourse, and a second later he was rising through the inky blackness of the basal rent. He was moving towards a source of golden light, something wit
hin him intuiting that he was heading in the right direction.
The light expanded, momentarily dazzling him. He was still blinded, and blinking, a second later as he stood beside the jet-black slick of the rent in the matrix, staring down into its depths and wondering if he had really experienced the vast concourse, the snow-covered mountainside.
He stood for a time, lost in thought, and then made his way back along the beach. If he was locked in VR, as Lew Kramer had said, unable to escape, then how was it that he had the freedom of the virtual world? Lew had told him that he could not be transferred to other sites - so why had he lied?
What the hell was happening to him?
As he came through the dunes and approached the villa, another thought occurred to him. When he’d entered the tank back at the Mantoni headquarters, virtual reality had been in its infancy. The first VR Bars had just opened that week, each offering a choice of a few dozen different sites. So was what he had experienced merely some research facility still under development by Mantoni, or...