The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

They were nodding. Amy spread the electronically coded room key-cards across the top of the counter, deliberately making a clattering noise with them. She wondered how the Americans would allocate the rooms: would the women take the two adjacent ones? The two on the top floor, tucked under the eaves of the old roof, were smaller than the others, but they had a distant view of the sea.

  ‘I guess that’ll be OK,’ said the man who Amy now knew from his registration card was called Dennis Kravitz. He glanced around at the others. They all nodded or shrugged. One of the women—Acie Jensen, according to her card—had taken down a handful of leaflets from the tourist noticeboard, and was looking through them. ‘Listen, we have a van out there with some expensive equipment,’ Kravitz said. ‘I noticed you don’t have a gate on your parking lot. Is there any way we can secure it at night?’

  ‘There’s an intruder light over the yard. If you wish we can put up a parking bar in front of the vehicle to stop someone trying to drive it away.’

  Dennis Kravitz frowned.

  ‘It’s not the vehicle we’re too concerned about,’ he said, pronouncing it vee-hicle. ‘But the equipment we’ve got inside. If the yard isn’t gated, how can we be sure no one’s going to take a look?’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be all right,’ Amy said. ‘There isn’t much crime in Bulverton.’

  ‘That isn’t what we heard,’ said Acie Jensen from across the room, not looking up from a leaflet about Bodiam Castle.

  ‘Not that sort of crime,’ Amy said stoutly.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ the woman said, losing interest. She crossed the room and spoke quietly to the others. They picked up their key-cards and all went towards the rooms without any further remarks. If they’d asked, Amy could have offered to arrange for Nick to help carry up some of their baggage, but they seemed uninterested in having assistance.

  For a while the four Americans moved to and fro in the reception area, picking up suitcases and other baggage from the van in the yard and carrying it in, but before long the hotel had quietened down again.

  True to his promise Nick came down not much later, glanced through some of the paperwork on the desk in the office and then went to the kitchen. Amy stayed on in the reception area, listening to the sounds she could now hear in the building: footsteps on the ancient floors above her head, water moving through the almost equally old plumbing, Nick clattering around in the kitchen. Amy realized that this was the first time the hotel had had more than one or two overnight guests since the few days that followed the massacre. Maybe life in the end really was capable of returning to a semblance of normality.

  Half an hour later Teresa Simons came in again from outside through the main door, gave Amy a friendly smile, then headed off upstairs to her room.

  CHAPTER 18

  Teresa returned to the ExEx building the following morning. She used the two hours of scenario time she had, after all, decided to book, after she had made her timid venture into the shallows of virtual target practice.

  She was however still nervous of plunging fully into unknown worlds of virtuality, and once she was inside the simulations suite she asked the technician to help her.

  ‘Are you a new user?’ the young man said. His lapel badge identified him as Angus Jackson, Customer Liaison.

  ‘I’ve trained with ExEx in the US,’ Teresa said. ‘Interdiction scenarios.’

  ‘Were those terminal, or non-terminal?’

  ‘They were both.’ Believing that there was no longer any point blurring the truth about her job, Teresa described the kind of scenarios she had used.

  ‘OK,’ said Angus Jackson. ‘We have plenty of those. Now I assume you know how to abort a scenario?’

  ‘Yeah, LIVER is what we use in the Bureau.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  Teresa explained the acronym, and at once he nodded his understanding. They had a different mnemonic, but it had the same effect. He left her for a couple of minutes, then returned with the familiar sealed phial of nanochips.

  ‘Let me explain what I’ve done,’ he said. ‘We do anthology packages for new users, and this one is a randomized selection of the kind of scenarios that many law-enforcement agencies are currently using. You will possibly recognize some of them. It’s a real mixture, drawn from a library of about nine hundred different situations. You’ve booked two hours, so either you can surf through the selection until your time’s up, when you’ll be pulled out automatically, or you can abort when you’ve had enough.’

  ‘Are we talking terminal or non-terminal?’ Teresa asked.

  ‘These are all non-terminal. Is that OK?’

  ‘I prefer that. Yes.’

  Teresa roamed around the familiar world of outburst violence, tackling each problem as it was presented to her, using whatever weapons were supplied by the writers of the software.

  In São Paulo, Brazil, 1995, there was a knife fight in a salsa club; this was tricky because of the darkness inside the club, but it took only a single disabling shot to bring the dispute to an end. LIVER. In Sydney, Australia, 1989, a young drug addict had run amok with a handgun; this had a fairly straightforward interdict-and-arrest resolution, but one which she found physically demanding. LIVER. In Kansas City, Missouri, 1967, and still out of breath from the last scenario, Teresa found herself in the McLaughlin siege, one on which she had trained with the Bureau. An ex-cop called Joe McLaughlin had barricaded himself in the house of the wife from whom he was separated, and was shooting at anyone who went near. Because of her familiarity with the scenario, and because she wanted to move on to the next, Teresa went impatiently to the side of the house, forced an entry into the basement and shot McLaughlin on the stairs. Had she been undergoing training Dan Kazinsky would have made her go back and get it right (McLaughlin had only to be arrested), but she wanted to try scenarios she hadn’t used before. LIVER.

  The next scenario was a more complex one, new to her, and it absorbed her from the moment she entered it.

  San Diego, California, 1950: William Cook was on the run from the police, having already abducted and murdered a family of five in Missouri, and with another man as a hostage had driven to San Diego in the car he had stolen from the family.

  Teresa entered the ExEx scenario at the point when Cook’s stolen Pontiac was spotted on Route 8; rather than try a dangerous interception on the road, the police and federal agents had decided to allow Cook to enter the outskirts of San Diego, and either stop him there or arrest him when he tried to leave the car. His progress was being monitored by unmarked police cars.

  It was another scenario in which the sheer quality of the detailed background, and the authenticating details, took the breath away. This was often a feature of the older incidents, Teresa had found. Dan Kazinsky said the explanation lay in the quality of memory. Moments of traumatic experience survive more completely and vividly in long-term memory. Teresa and the other trainees had noticed that ExEx scenarios about relatively recent events were sometimes blurred, as if parts of them had been mentally blocked by those recalling them.

  She entered the Cook scenario on a blisteringly hot day, a sea wind bending the palm trees, making the dust fly at the street intersections, puffing the canopies of shops and swinging the overhead traffic signals precariously. The sky was cloudless, but there was grit from the sandy shore in the burning wind. Clothes pressed against bodies, and hair blew. Shiny, rounded cars moved in leisurely fashion through the streets. A DC-3 of Pan American circled overhead, moving down towards the airfield; the brilliant sunshine glinted off the unpainted wings and engine cowlings. Men in Navy uniforms loitered round a military truck parked in a lot beside an equipment office, where the Stars and Stripes was flying.

  Teresa had no time to take in any more. The scenario was in progress.

  She had a key in her hand, and as she entered the action she was hurrying towards a row of cars parked diagonally against the sidewalk. She was out of breath, and her back and legs were hurting. She reeled mentally, perhaps physic
ally too, at the impact of the sensory overload from the collectively remembered scenario. She was too hot, the wind took her breath away, something in the air flew into her eye. She turned away, blinking hard, needing to concentrate instead on the unfolding of the scenario. She wanted to maintain her own individuality, her own reactions. With the grit out of her eye, she turned back quickly enough to see one of the buildings beside her—some kind of motor-spares or tool store—flicker into solidity as her vision persisted in that direction. It happened so quickly that she might have imagined it, but it was a breakdown in the extreme reality and she found it perversely comforting; even this dazzling technology was not yet one hundred per cent.

  She was moving towards a silver-and-blue Chevrolet station wagon, but again she resisted the scenario and went instead to a green Ford saloon parked alongside. The driver’s door was locked, and the key she was holding would not even slide in. Her hand burned on the sun-hot metal of the door. She gave up and went to the Chevrolet instead. The door of this was unlocked, and after she had slid on to the bench seat, comfortably spreading her large body, she got the key into the ignition at the first try. She wound down the window on the driver’s side.

  A few moments later she was driving north along 30th Street, and at the intersection with University she moved across into the turn lane and took a right.

  It was the first time she had driven a car in an ExEx, and it was exhilarating. Two impressions predominated. The first was a feeling of complete safety: the car could not crash, she could not be hurt, because she could not act alone and could not make her own decisions. The scenario was laid out for her to follow. She had taken the right into University because that was the way she had to go; she shortly came to the large intersection with Wabash Boulevard, and here she took a left, driving on to the highway and accelerating to keep up with the rest of the traffic. The sun was shafting in through the driver’s window, making her arm and face tingle. She wound up the window, and pulled the visor over to help shade herself.

  This action, this decision, was part of the second and contradictory impression: that she could defy the scenario and act independently of it. She could put her foot down on the gas pedal and just drive, keep on going, head east or north out of the town, drive for ever across the great virtual America that lay out there, just beyond her immediate view of the simulation, letting it piece itself together, shaping seamlessly about her, unfolding endlessly for her.

  Instead, she reached into the glove compartment and took out the automatic pistol that was there.

  While she drove she checked it was loaded, then laid it on the seat beside her. She switched on the radio: the Duke Ellington Orchestra was playing an instrumental number called ‘Newport Up’. How did she know that? She’d never listened closely to Duke Ellington in her life, and would hardly be able to identify the sound of the orchestra let alone any individual tracks.

  She stretched back in the seat, drove with her arms straight and her head lying back on the rest, the radio on, the sun blazing in on her, and the wonderful rumbling slow traffic of 1950 gliding past and around her.

  Moments later she saw diversion lights ahead, and a police roadblock. Most of the traffic was peeling off to the left, going around the diversion, but she slowed and signalled to the right, heading straight for the police line. She came to a halt, and pulled on the parking brake with long, solid vibration from the ratchet. An officer walked towards her, leaning down to see into the car.

  Suddenly, she was no longer sure of what she was doing. Had she decided of her own will to drive up to the police line? Or was this what the woman driving the car would have done? The police officer was just a few feet away from the car, a hand extended to indicate she should not drive off again.

  Teresa made an instant judgement: that she had decided on her own initiative not to follow the diversion. She was in control. From long habit she fished into her pocket for her Bureau ID, but it was missing!

  She looked down at herself, realizing for the first time that she was wearing some other woman’s clothes. She was fat! She was wearing terrible clothes! She had runs in her stockings! She grappled at her belt, where she kept her badge, but down there, under the copious folds of her overweight body, sagging down into her lap, there was just a thin plastic belt.

  She glanced up into the rear-view mirror, leaning across to see herself; an elderly black woman’s face, full of mild concern, looked back at her.

  ‘Ma’am, this is a restricted area,’ said the cop, now leaning down by the window. Teresa noticed that it had re-opened itself somehow, while she was driving, while she was distracted from the simulation. ‘Would you reverse up, please, and rejoin the main flow of traffic.’

  ‘I’m Federal Agent Simons, attached to Richmond station,’ Teresa said, but by now the cop had seen the automatic lying on the seat beside her.

  He said, ‘Ma’am, would you raise both your hands slowly and leave the car—’

  But then, maddeningly, the ExEx ended, and Teresa’s mind’s eye was filled with white crystalline light, and her ears roared with static.

  Teresa returned to her own semblance of reality: a small, cool room, painted white, with an overhead strip light. She was lying on a narrow bench, on a cream-coloured paper sheet which rustled as she stirred. There was a distant murmur of air-conditioning, the voices of other people close by in another room or corridor. From the moment she left the scenario Teresa was aware of her surroundings and what she had been doing; this was a major improvement on the traumatic period of recovery that followed a terminal event in the FBI’s training scenarios.

  A technician was standing by the open door to the cubicle. As soon as she saw Teresa stirring, she came fully into the cubicle and stood next to her.

  ‘How are you feeling, Mrs Simons?’ she said, her gaze flicking professionally over her.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No problems, then?’

  She helped Teresa sit up straight, and immediately attended to the nanochip valve on the back of her neck. Teresa, who had rarely been conscious for this procedure, tried to see what the woman was doing. The angle was wrong: she glimpsed a syringe-like instrument being deployed, felt a significant pressure on her neck, a twinge of pain, then a slight and not unpleasant vibration. The technician’s name badge was just about all she could see: her name was Patricia Tarrant, Customer Liaison. As Ms Tarrant removed the syringe, Teresa felt the valve move against a sore spot, somewhere there, under the skin or around the valve itself. She put a hand up, and touched it gingerly.

  Teresa watched as the contents of the syringe—the nanochips suspended in a pale liquid—were transferred to a glass tube, which Patricia Tarrant then placed inside a cabinet at the foot of the bench. She activated some mechanism, and warning lights briefly showed.

  ‘Fine. When you’re ready, if you’d like to come outside we can complete the paperwork.’

  Teresa’s mind was still swimming with the images of San Diego, the hot wind, the open road. Before the technician could leave the cubicle she said to her, ‘That Cook scenario. I’d never come across it before.’

  ‘Cook?’

  ‘William Cook,’ Teresa said, trying to remember. Images of extreme reality still dazzled her memory, tending to confuse false memory with real. ‘1950, San Diego. Something about a fugitive with a hostage.’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ Patricia said. ‘Were you on a random-access package?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Random non-terminal. Anthology scenarios.’ She followed Ms Tarrant out of the cubicle, to a nearby work station with a large computer monitor and a huge number of ring-binder manuals. ‘I wasn’t sure what software you had available, and one of your colleagues suggested I use one of the packages. I was just trying it out.’

  ‘I can look up the scenario for you,’ Patricia Tarrant said, turning to her computer. She began tapping keys, watching the monitor.

  While information began to scroll on the screen Teresa said, as if to help the
technician pin down the scenario, ‘I wasn’t in there as myself, but I could remember who I was and what I was doing. I’ve only ever used FBI scenarios before—’

  ‘Yeah, here we are. William Cook, 1950. We’ve got quite a library of stuff on him. Do you know which scenario it was?’

  ‘I was in the body of an elderly woman,’ Teresa said. ‘She was overweight, out of breath, had a silver-blue station wagon. A Chevy.’

  ‘It must be this one,’ Patricia said, pointing at the screen. ‘That’s the only scenario that’s been accessed this week. That would be you, just now. Elsa Jane Durdle was the witness; age sixty-nine, lived at 2213 North Sea Road, San Diego. I wonder how they found her?’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The people who wrote the software. It’s shareware. You don’t often get witness scenarios from shareware producers. Maybe they happened to know her? No, she must be dead by now. I wonder how they did it?’

  ‘She was a witness? But she had a gun.’

  ‘She did? I suppose that’s possible. I mean, in this sort of interdiction scenario you have to have a gun to use, isn’t that right? The witness might have owned one anyway, and if she didn’t the programmer could have put it in.’

  Teresa sat back, surprised by all this. She fingered the sore place in her neck again. The pain was not wearing off.

  ‘I didn’t know you would be using shareware,’ she said.

  ‘We take stuff from all over. Someone here always checks it out. Or in our head office. If you didn’t want shareware on the roll-through, you could have specified that before we started.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Teresa said. ‘It was interesting. In fact, I’d never been in an ExEx that felt so convincing. I’d like to use it again.’

  Patricia found some Post-it notes, and wrote down the reference number on the top slip. She peeled it off and gave it to Teresa.

  ‘How long is it since you last used ExEx equipment?’ she said.

  ‘I was here yesterday. One of your colleagues supervised me. I can’t remember who it was.’ Patricia nodded. ‘I used the range for target practice, and was only in there for an hour. Apart from that, it’s been maybe a year or two. But back then I was using the Bureau’s own ExEx equipment, so I always assumed the software was the best available. And the training was closely supervised. You can probably imagine how the Bureau operates. I had no idea there were all these other scenarios.’