The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  Debra came out of the house as she parked. Teresa leapt out of the Montego and broke into a run as soon as she saw her, but Debra dodged away. She was carrying an armful of her clothes, and a Sainsbury’s plastic bag stuffed with something.

  ‘Here, I want you!’ Teresa shouted.

  ‘You fucking leave me alone, you fucking weirdo!’ Debra yelled back.

  ‘Get in the fucking car!’

  ‘I’ve had enough of all that! Fuck off, Gerry!’

  She tore away down the hill, dropping garments and stumbling on the uneven ground.

  ‘I’ll fucking get you!’

  Teresa broke off the chase, and ran into the house. Someone had been in and shat on the floor. She ran up the stairs, kicked open the door of the cupboard, and grabbed her guns and ammunition. It took her two trips to get everything outside and into the Montego, but as soon as she was ready she drove down the hill in search of Debra. The rifle was hidden in the luggage compartment at the back, but she had put the handgun on the seat beside her.

  She knew where Debra would be going: her mum had a house lower down on the estate. Teresa stopped the car with two wheels up on the pavement and shoved the gun under her jacket. She ran to the door of the house, kicking and pummelling it with her fist.

  ‘They saw you coming, they did!’ said a woman, leaning over the wall from next door. ‘They’ve done a runner! Good thing too, you little dickhead!’

  Teresa was tempted to blow a sodding great hole in her face, grinning at her over the wall, but instead she whipped out her cock and tried to piss all over the door, but she had dried up. The woman yelled something, and disappeared. Teresa looked around: she knew Debra’s mum’s car, and like the neighbour had said it wasn’t in sight.

  She went back to the Montego, screeched it round in the narrow road and headed away.

  She drove fast until she had crossed the Ridge and was going out into the countryside around Ninfield. The sun beat maddeningly down. A police car went past in the opposite direction, blue strobe lights flashing; Teresa instinctively hunched down in the seat a little, but they were obviously going after someone else, and neither of the two cops even glanced in her direction.

  The right-hand side of the road was thickly forested: Teresa had only a dim memory of having driven along here before, but after a while she saw a sign for a Forestry Commission picnic site next to a lay-by. She was driving too fast to stop, but she went down to the next farm entrance, did a turn, and went back.

  She realized that neither of the guns was loaded; bleeding right! She’d gone after Debra like that!

  She skidded into the parking area in a cloud of dust, and angrily picked up the handgun. She slammed in a magazine of bullets.

  A path led off through the trees, and ahead of her she glimpsed the bright colours of summer clothes.

  She came into a clearing in the trees, where three long wooden tables had been set up. Huge logs lying beside them were used as seats. A young woman was sitting at one of the tables, with plastic cups and plates, scraps of food, and several toys spread all about: a ball, a train, a scribble pad, dozens of coloured bricks. The woman was laughing, and her boy was running around on the grass, pretending to do some stupid thing or other.

  Teresa felt sick at the sight of them, stupid middle-class bastards with too much money and spare time. With a deliberate movement she brought the gun out from her jacket with a wide swinging motion of her hand. She had seen that in a movie somewhere. She cocked the gun. That wonderful sound of efficient machinery, ready for action. She worked the mechanism three or four more times, relishing it.

  The noise had made the woman turn towards her. The fucking stupid child just kept on running about, but the woman was calling to it, holding out her arms protectively.

  As Grove advanced on them, his gun levelled, Teresa thought, I can’t take any more of this!

  She Located, Identified…retreated instantly from the scenario and from the mind of Gerry Grove.

  Copyright © GunHo Corporation in all territories

  A silent darkness fell. Teresa walked home miserably to the hotel afterwards, sick at heart.

  CHAPTER 29

  Although the feeling of being conspicuous never left her, Teresa found that one advantage of her frequent visits to the ExEx building was that the staff began to take her presence for granted. They would let her use the computer terminals more or less whenever she felt like it, and they usually left her alone to browse.

  The database itself was becoming increasingly interesting to her. All complex computer programs seem at first sight to be an impenetrable maze of options, assumptions and usage conventions, and the catalogue of ExEx scenarios was a gigantic example of this.

  The program was always running, always on-line, and was presumably in a constant state of being updated and reprogrammed somewhere in the further reaches of the web. The amount of data it held was clearly beyond the memory capacity of any single industrial computer, and must have been stored in networked sites in different parts of the world. But however large it seemed, it was only a single, closed program. Copyright notices infested it, and warnings about restrictions on usage appeared with monotonous frequency.

  Finding the information it contained, provided you had mastered the syntax of the search engine, was surprisingly fast and efficient. The result of any search—usually a single screen with the information that had been requested—appeared so quickly that it gave the illusion that what you wanted had been placed near the top of the pile so that it might be easily found.

  The simplicity was deceptive, though. When Teresa set the command to browse, and merely scrolled through some of the data in sequence, the sheer scale, detail and extent of what was held in memory were a source of constant amazement to her.

  Again, she sensed limitless horizons. But Teresa was starting to learn that the scenarios were not as she had thought at first.

  A scenario always turned out to have a measurable edge; reality came to an end when memory ran out. No matter how well the programmer disguised it, or fudged it, you could not take a car and drive it away, out of virtuality into reality. You could fly over the whole of Finland, you could cross and re-cross, you could tour the periphery, you could circle for ever over one chosen lake or stream, or you could dart and weave with unexpected turns…and still Finland would calmly and interminably unfold beneath you. But it was always Finland; it was not for ever.

  Where the true unlimited was to be found was, so to speak, in the headings of the scenarios, in the indexes to them. The limitless lay in hyperlinks, cross-references, hyperreality.

  All scenarios ultimately touched, their edges were contiguous. You could approach the same incident from a number of different viewpoints. But the contiguity lay in the fourth dimension: you could not cross the margin from one scenario to the next, unless one was bolted on, London’s West End or Arizona’s Monument Valley bolted on to a film-set of a cowboy saloon, and that counted only as expansion. It made the scenario seem more complex, while in fact it only made it larger.

  The real nature of contiguity lay in the adjacency of memory, hyperlinked by character or situation or point of view. Contiguity was psychological, and it was related to memory, not conscious planning.

  In one scenario a character would be memoratively significant: it might be the elderly woman named Elsa Durdle who drove a Chevy with a gun in the glove compartment.

  That scenario existed for a number of possible reasons. Someone involved with the William Cook case must have remembered Elsa, or had heard her story somehow, or had met and interviewed her after the incident. It could even be so remote a contact as someone who had merely read about her. Whatever the reason, there was enough of her, enough about her, to place her centre-stage in one scenario. Another person, witness to the same central event, or participant in it, might know Elsa Durdle only peripherally: she could be the unnamed driver of the car that drove past police lines, momentarily blocked a policeman’s view.

&nbs
p; Both were true accounts, both were limited by their viewpoint, yet through contiguity they tended towards a concurrence, an agreement on basic facts and images.

  Placed against these two scenarios might be a third one, contiguous to either or both of them, which knew nothing at all of Elsa in person, yet admitted the presence of her car driving through, or past, or in the distance.

  Next to that scenario would be another, and beyond that more. Each contiguous scenario was a step on the way towards the margins of Elsa Durdle’s reality.

  Here, in the on-line computer, with its endless scrolling index headings, each with its own subheadings, and each of those with further subheadings, uncountable generational levels unfolding below, and all of them cross-referenced and linked to one another, virtuality was taken towards its edge and beyond.

  There was no end, only another scenario contiguous to the last.

  Sitting alone in a side office, with the computer terminal to herself, with no one on the staff apparently taking any interest in what she was doing, Teresa eventually found her way to the database of Memorative Principals.

  Guessing what that meant, and reading the screen menus, she entered the name ‘Tayler’ and the subset ‘Jennifer Rosemary’. At the prompt for physical location, to narrow the search parameters, she entered ‘London’ and ‘NW10’.

  Within a few seconds an abstract of scenarios in which Shandy appeared poured across the screen.

  Each scenario was identified by a title, a long code number, a synoptic description, and a tiny video icon. Noticing that there was an option to display the videos, Teresa clicked on the menu, and at once all the video icons changed into tiny frozen-frame images from the opening of each scenario.

  Teresa clicked on one, and a five-second teaser extract ran in the tiny box. The image was so small it was hard to see what was going on, but it was clear that Shandy was ready for action.

  The list of Shandy’s scenarios was long; worryingly long, when you bore in mind the abandon with which she took part in them. Teresa moved the information to and fro, top to bottom, estimating how many Shandy scenarios there were. She roughed a guess at nearly eighty, and then she noticed that the database had a facility for counting successful finds and that the true number of Shandy scenarios presently available was eighty-four.

  Each index heading carried a dozen optional hyperlinks from Shandy: to other people involved with her, to the video clips previewing her scenarios, to adjacent subjects, to library material, to biographical material, to available slots for additional or supplementary scenarios. Information about Shandy’s ExEx world was exploding about her, as her contiguity was revealed.

  Teresa ran a hyperlink search on the list, using the name ‘Willem’, and immediately discovered that Shandy and Willem had appeared in fourteen scenarios together, including the one called Brawl in Wild West saloon—for adults XXX.

  She learnt from this listing that Willem’s real name was actually not Willem but Erik. He was Dutch, though, and he had, as he had told her, been born in the small town of Amstelveen.

  Willem’s own listing as a memorative principal, which Teresa accessed next, was even more alarming than Shandy’s: in addition to the fourteen scenarios he had made with her, he had been involved in a further ninety-seven. Teresa noticed that many of these skin-flicks (as she assumed they were) had been made with a young woman named Joyhanne, herself a memorative principal.

  Teresa ran a search on Joyhanne. She had been born in The Hague, worked for a while as a telephonist (hyperlink to Holland Telecom), but appeared to have been making videos since the age of fourteen. Attached to Joyhanne’s name was another long abstract of porno scenarios (she assumed from their titles). Dozens more options scattered in all directions from Joyhanne’s indexed activities: virtuality was spreading out and away, the known limits of events accelerating to the horizon in every direction.

  For instance, Joyhanne had another regular co-star; this man, a German, had made more than fifty porno (Teresa assumed) videos, but in addition he had made a couple of appearances in real films, both of which were mentioned in reference books (three hundred and fifteen hyperlinks); the author of one of the film books worked in the Humanities Department of the University of Göttingen, which offered more than two hundred and fifty educational scenarios on developmental studies; one of these, which Teresa chose at random, dealt with soft-drug culture in the USA, 1968-75; this single scenario had more than fifteen hundred hyperlinks to other scenarios…

  It was impossible to keep a mental hold on everything.

  Teresa paused, dizzied by the endless choices. She was sidetracking, and getting away from what she had set out to do.

  She returned through the hierarchy to Shandy’s main listing, and used the program’s memo feature to store three coded references, selected more or less at random. One day she might like to visit Shandy at work again: two of the titles she chose were Heat and Dust in the Arizona Desert and Open Top—X-Rated Drive Through Monument Valley.

  Now Teresa selected the hyperlink option, and from this picked out Remote Link.

  From Remote Link came yet more new options: Copy, Date, Edit, Gender, Motive, Name, Place, Significant Objects, Weapon, and many others. Each of these had sub-options: Teresa clicked on Place, and saw a huge list of subsidiary choices: Continent, Country, State, County, City, Street, Building, Room, was just one sequence.

  Again feeling sidetracked, she went back to the entry point of the hyperlink, and picked out Name. At the prompt she typed ‘Elsa Jane Durdle’, added ‘San Diego’ as a locater, and clicked on it.

  Please Wait.

  Teresa was so used by now to the apparently instant response of the program that the appearance of that message made her feel almost smug. Her search criteria were complex enough to slow the computer perceptibly.

  Not long later, in fact in under a minute, the screen cleared and a message appeared:

  248 hyperlink(s) connect ‘Jennifer Rosemary Tayler’ to ‘Elsa Jane Durdle’. Display? Yes​/​No.

  Teresa clicked on ‘Yes’, and almost at once a long list of the codes of contiguous scenarios began to scroll quickly down the screen. Each had its tiny still video image attached to it. The first scenario took place in part of a mocked-up saloon in an improvised film studio in 1990 in the West End of London, and the last on a hot windy day in San Diego in 1950. Events connected them.

  Two hundred and forty-eight scenarios were linked in collective memory. The realities were contiguous; there was no edge.

  The road of extreme virtuality ran on beyond the horizon, as far as the mountains, through the desert, across the seas, on and on for ever.

  She downloaded the codes of the two hundred and forty-eight contiguous scenarios, and waited a few seconds while the printer turned them out. One day, when she had time and credit enough, she might start exploring the links that were said to exist between Elsa and Shandy.

  Teresa next entered the name ‘Teresa Ann Simons’ as a memorative principal, added ‘Woodbridge’ and ‘Bulverton’ as defining physical locations, and waited to see what would happen.

  The computer did not pause. With almost dismissive instantaneity, a screen appeared with her name at the top. A single scenario was noted below. There were no hyperlinks, no connections to the rest of virtuality.

  Surprised at this result, and actually rather disappointed, Teresa clicked on the video icon.

  Her curiosity was satisfied and dampened all at once: such as it was, her only scenario in the whole of ExEx was of the day she had first visited this range, and spent an hour or so on target practice with a handgun.

  She squinted at the allocated few seconds’ preview of herself, noticing mostly the fact that from the rear view her backside looked considerably larger than she had realized. When asked if she wanted access to the entire video, or to enter the scenario itself, she declined.

  With her own information still on the screen, Teresa tried to establish hyperlinks first with Elsa Durdle,
then with Shandy, but at both attempts the program curtly informed her:

  No hyperlinks established from this site.

  CHAPTER 30

  Teresa travelled up to London by train. She wanted to be a tourist, take a few photographs and buy some presents to take home to her friends. She knew her visit to England was coming to an end. One day soon she would have to return to her job; although her section chief had granted her ‘extended’ compassionate leave, with no firm date by which she had to report back, she knew that the Bureau did not allow indefinite leave to anyone. Her time was almost up.

  The train took her to Charing Cross Station in the heart of London. From there it was a short walk to Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, the Houses of Parliament and, eventually, Buckingham Palace. After an hour or two of dutiful trudging around, Teresa had had enough of playing tourist. She took a taxi to Piccadilly Circus, and went in search of Shandy.

  She walked along Coventry Street as far as the point where it became a pedestrian precinct, then walked back again on the other side of the road. While it remained recognizably the same street, many of the details seemed to have changed. Could this be explained by the fact that Shandy’s scenario was set back in 1990, and there had been rebuilding since? Or by the fact that what she had seen was simply a computer emulation of the real place, full of approximations? She wished she had been able to take more notice of her surroundings while there, but as so often happened while inside a scenario, the sheer sensory impact had been extremely distracting.

  She found Shaver’s Place, a short, narrow alleyway leading off to the south, but there was nowhere along it that looked as if it could be used as a studio for making skin-flicks. On the other side of the road, Rupert Street led north towards Shaftesbury Avenue. Halfway along Rupert Street on one side there was, exactly as she recalled, a pub called the Plume of Feathers. Teresa walked in, but as soon as she was inside she knew it was not the same place. Everything about it was different. She looked all around, but there was no one there who looked remotely like Shandy, or even what Shandy might look like after the passage of a few years.