The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  She retraced her steps, remembering the day she had walked along this street, or one like it, feeling the sexy tightness of Shandy’s thigh-constricting mini-skirt, talking about Arizona and Finland. They had left Willem waiting in the pub, and for a while walked to and fro along Coventry Street. Teresa walked as far as the statue of Eros, then went down the steps of one of the station entrances and found that where the virtual London had ended in a brick wall was now the bustling concourse of a busy Underground station.

  She returned to street level, then went back to Rupert Street. Suppressing the temptation to look inside the Plume of Feathers once again, Teresa walked up to the intersection with Shaftesbury Avenue and crossed over, following Rupert Street into Soho.

  The streets here were much narrower. After a few hundred yards she noticed a doorway ornamented on each side by tall illuminated pink plastic panels, obviously portable, into each of which was set a large photograph of several naked and near-naked women. A man, whose face was masked by a clumsy virtual-reality headset, was drawn groping lasciviously towards them. A hand-lettered sign said: Extreme Thrills—Imported—Downstairs NOW—ADULTS ONLY!

  A doorman stood just inside the entrance: he was a youth with short spiky hair and tattooed tears angling down from the corner of one eye, and was incongruously wearing a dark suit with collar and tie.

  Teresa, realizing that this place was selling a version of ExEx, was brought up short by a shocking thought. She knew what was available in ExEx, so it was likely that at least a few of Shandy’s scenarios would be available somewhere in this dive…maybe they even had the cowgirl scenario where Teresa had first found her.

  Teresa’s thoughts instantly raced off towards the edge of reality: she imagined herself venturing into the cellar below this unprepossessing doorway, paying over a sum of money to the youth, entering the scenario in which Shandy played a cowgirl who was enthusiastically screwing a Dutch-accented cowboy, then afterwards leaving again with Shandy, occupying her body and mind, feeling the sexy constraints of her don’t-care clothes, heading out of the studio into these streets around Piccadilly and Leicester Square, then walking north across Shaftesbury Avenue to this spot, to the entrance to this ExEx club, where she and Shandy would venture inside, enter the extremes of unreality…

  ‘What you want, lady? You want inside?’

  ‘No,’ said Teresa, startled by his sudden voice.

  ‘Good prices for ladies. Big discount. Come, I show you.’

  ‘No…I don’t want in. Did you ever hear of a girl called Shandy?’

  For a moment the youth looked disconcerted, a look that was exaggerated by the needle-drawn tears, but then he reached into the back pocket of his pants and produced a small wad of business cards.

  ‘Yeah, Shandy. She here. You want Shandy, you have her OK. We got plenty Shandy. What you want, you like girl-girl with Shandy, or you wanna watch?’

  ‘Do you know who I mean?’ Teresa said. ‘Her real name’s Jennifer. She works around here, in joints like this.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ He held the business cards in surprisingly long and delicate fingers, and with a clean fingernail peeled back the top one. Teresa thought he was about to pass the card to her, with no doubt detailed but unwanted information inscribed, but he gripped it lightly between his thumb and forefinger and scraped at the gap between two of his yellowed front teeth. ‘Shandy. She give big discount for girl-girl. We have plenty Shandy.’

  ‘OK, I get the picture.’

  Teresa turned away, irritated with herself for letting the boy drag her into the exchange, and still preoccupied by what she had been thinking about when he spoke to her.

  What would happen? Inside a scenario, suppose she found a GunHo facility or a dive bar or somewhere else with ExEx equipment, then used it to enter a second scenario?

  What then of virtuality? Would the realities be no longer contiguous, but intersecting?

  ‘Hey, lady!’

  She continued walking away from him.

  ‘Lady!’ The young man had left his pitch in the doorway, and he laid a hand on her arm.

  She snatched it away from him.

  ‘Quit that!’ she said loudly. ‘I’m not interested!’

  ‘You lady, you one of us? You Shandy?’

  His tone was no longer flat and automated, the voice of the shill. An earnestness gripped him. He was pointing at her neck. Teresa saw how young he was, hardly more than in his middle teens. He turned his head away, and laid a finger against the base of his own neck.

  There was a nanochip valve embedded there. It was obvious what it was, but it was unlike any other Teresa had seen. It was larger than hers, and was made of bright purple plastic: it was set in a mount made of some silvery material, probably plastic again but glossed up brilliantly. The valve looked like a cheap stone in a gaudy setting.

  Teresa had always been self-conscious about her embedded valve, thinking that to anyone who didn’t know what it was it must look like something left over from an operation. She usually wore a high collar or scarf in an attempt to conceal it. By contrast, the youth’s nanochip valve was almost flagrantly exposed, a startling flash of colour on the back of his neck, like body-piercing, a fashion statement, a tribal declaration.

  ‘You know ExEx, lady? You real thing! Big, big discount for real ExEx! We find you Shandy, you bet!’

  ‘No,’ she said yet again, but less assertively than before. ‘Look, I know what ExEx is. I was just surprised to find it. Open to the public.’

  ‘Members only. You join! You no come in? Special deal before evenings.’

  Realizing she was wasting her time, and had been doing so from the first exchange of words, Teresa backed away. The youth tried again to lure her inside, but she turned her back on him and strode off in what she hoped looked like a determined way. She soon reached the junction with Shaftesbury Avenue, and had to wait for a break in the traffic before she could cross. She glanced back: there was no sign of the young man.

  She walked to Charing Cross Road, and spent nearly an hour trying to distract herself in one of the big bookstores; after this she returned to the Leicester Square area and went to see a movie. She caught the last train back to Bulverton with minutes to spare; she had not looked at the timetable in advance, and discovered she was lucky to have caught it.

  An hour later, as the train left Tunbridge Wells and moved into the almost unbroken darkness of the Sussex country-side, Teresa, alone in the carriage, closed her eyes and tried to doze. She was body-tired from all the walking she had done in London, but stimulated and alive mentally.

  She had barely been able to keep her mind on the film, in spite of the intrusively loud music and explosive special effects. Something had unexpectedly become clear to her. At the beginning of the show, as she sat in the auditorium waiting for the lights to go down, she had remembered the conversation in the hotel corridor with Ken Mitchell, and the seemingly impenetrable objections he had raised to her presence in the hotel.

  His talk of linear coherence and iterative purity had sounded at the time like code-babble to her, the natural language of the computer geek. But the Shandy scenario had undermined everything. That thought she had had, outside the ExEx dive, about the way reality might be made to intersect, made her think she understood at last what Mitchell had been driving at.

  An ExEx scenario already represented a sort of intersection. It stood at the interface between human variables and digital logic.

  The programmers took people’s memories of certain events, their feelings about the events, the stories they told about them afterwards, the imagination surrounding them, and even their guesses at what the events had actually been, they took all of these and coded them into a form of objectified experience, and made them seem real, or virtually so. Thus were the scenarios derived.

  Mitchell had spoken of what he called reactional crossover: the fact that the ExEx user will inadvertently affect the shape of the scenario, so that on second and subsequent visits th
e scenario will seem to have modified itself to take account of the previous visit or visits.

  From the start she had been all too aware of the interactive nature of ExEx. The only difference since then was her growing understanding of how interactivity was a way of testing the limits of the scenarios.

  Why she should be a perceived threat to the programmers was a mystery to her.

  But that wild thought of the afternoon: entering Shandy’s scenario, moving around within it, testing its extremities, going with ExEx Shandy to the ExEx dive off Shaftesbury Avenue, then entering another ExEx scenario, a simulation within a simulation…

  It couldn’t happen then. Then was 1990, before ExEx had been made publicly available, probably before it had even been developed. The simulation of London that was Shandy’s home would not include the ExEx dive.

  Things had changed since 1990. Sitting in the cinema, as the film began, Teresa had recalled the logical problems that Gerry Grove presented. The guns, and the unexplained passage of time during his final afternoon of life.

  It was known that Grove had been to the Bulverton ExEx building between his first murders, the killing of the mother and her child picnicking in the woods near Ninfield, and his final explosive spree. It was not known what he had done while he was in there.

  When she had asked the staff in the building about this, expecting them to remember, they were vague and contradictory about details. The Grove shooting was probably the single most disruptive event in Bulverton since the upheavals of World War II, but the crucial moment within it was misremembered by those who witnessed it.

  From the point of view of Ken Mitchell and his colleagues, any attempt to recreate the events of Grove’s day had to take account of that visit. Mitchell had said as much.

  Had Grove already intersected two realities on the day of his massacre? Had he entered Extreme Experience?

  Would that explain the mystery of the guns found stashed in the back of his stolen car? It was known what guns Grove possessed, and that he had taken both of them with him on the day. None was found afterwards at the house. Two were found in the car, two were the ones he used. They intersected: they seemed to be the same ones.

  Most of the official reports and media coverage dwelt on the guns Grove had carried and used that day. Some others referred to the guns later found in his stolen car. But none drew these two elements together. There was apparent vagueness, a blurring, a resistance to the idea that there might be conflict between the two sets of objectively checkable facts.

  Nodding off on the almost deserted train, in spite of the draughty carriage and the uncomfortable swaying, Teresa felt that the problem, and also any potential solution to it, was constantly slipping from her grasp. She understood so little.

  The train stopped for a long time at Robertsbridge station. There was no explanation from the guard, or anyone else. The cold night enveloped the train. Two railway workers walked slowly along the platform carrying torches which they pointed approximately at the wheels. There was a conversation up ahead, presumably with the driver. Teresa could hear the voices, but not what they were saying. Train doors slammed. A generator started up beneath the carriage floor. Teresa huddled lower in her seat, dreading an announcement that the train had broken down or was being taken out of service. It was already after 1.00 a.m., and she was desperate to get to her bed. The day had been too long already. Finally, to her great relief, the train continued on its way.

  She could not stop thinking about Grove, especially since she herself had ventured into the scenario of the day of the shooting.

  It was impossible to forget what it had been like to enter his mind. His thoughts, which had come at her like the hot, unwanted breath of an intrusive stranger, had felt as if they were too close to her face. How do you recoil from someone inside whose head you are lurking? It had been a descent, if not into the evil that many people said had possessed Grove, then into a profoundly unhappy and deficient mind, one tangled up with petty fears and motives and revenges. He was clearly sane, but also sick: Grove was mean, dangerous, unreasonable, socially inadequate, violently disposed, unpredictable, riddled with hatred, unloved by anyone around him, unloving to anyone he knew.

  His mind was so blankly unprotected, so obsessed with ferocious irrelevance, that any intrusion would affect it. She could have caused reactional crossover within that scenario, simply by entering it and residing briefly within his mind.

  When Mitchell had talked to her in the corridor outside her room he spoke as if she had already caused the crossover. In reality she couldn’t possibly have done so.

  ‘In reality’…

  The phrase kept recurring. But reality was an assumption that was no longer viable.

  Teresa already knew that some realities were contiguous, she had sensed that others could intersect, and now she was beginning to believe that Gerry Grove must have caused an intersection, a crossover.

  Today, in the aftermath of Grove, in which of these realities were they anyway living? The one in which Grove had left his guns in the back of the stolen car, or the one in which he went back to the car, collected the guns, and took them to the town centre?

  The answer was both, hinted at in the blurring of memory. The crossover Mitchell was concerned with had already occurred. But had Grove caused it, or had she?

  In her tiredness her thoughts were circling on themselves. It was too late in the day to try to think about a slippery subject like this. She kept recoiling from the consequences of her own thoughts.

  At long last, twenty-five minutes after the scheduled time, the train drew into Bulverton. Teresa wearily left her seat, the only passenger to alight, alone on the dimly lit concourse, with no staff in the station. She walked back to the hotel as quickly as she could, her mind focused on one simple intent: getting to bed as soon as possible.

  She crept into the hotel, using the master key Amy had lent her a few days earlier, and walked quietly through the darkened building. The stairs creaked as she climbed them. When she reached her bedroom and closed the door, she did so with a feeling of errant lateness she had not had since her teenage years.

  CHAPTER 31

  In the morning, on her way down to breakfast, Teresa felt that something about the hotel had changed. As she passed the office she realized what it was: on most mornings the radio was playing in the office, and today it was not. This tiny alteration to her temporary routine made her uneasy.

  In the dining room, the four young American programmers were sitting at their table in the furthest corner, and as usual did not acknowledge her arrival. One of the two young women was reading a copy of Investors Chronicle, and was rhythmically pumping an arm-muscle exerciser with her free hand; the other was dressed in a track suit and elasticated sweatband, and had a towel draped around her neck. Ken Mitchell was speaking to someone on his mobile phone, and the other man was typing something on a palmtop computer. They all had in front of them their customary breakfast of high-fibre, organically grown, non-fertilized, non-antibioticly treated oriental pulses (which Amy had told her she had had to buy in expensively by mail order from Holland), but none of them was eating.

  Teresa sat down at her own usual table. Whenever she saw Ken Mitchell she could not suppress her curiosity and irritation about him. He never seemed to notice her—today, for instance, he was sitting with his back to her table—and although she absolutely did not intend to have anything more to do with him, she wanted him to find out she was still there without, so to speak, her having to remind him.

  She had picked up her newspaper from the table in the corridor, and was glancing at it when someone came across to her table.

  Assuming it would be Amy, Teresa looked up with a smile. It was not Amy: a heavily built man with a close-shaved head was standing there, holding an order pad and a ballpoint.

  ‘May I take your order for breakfast, please?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ Surprised, Teresa reached automatically for the printed menu. In her three wee
ks in this place she had grown used to confirming to Amy simply that she wanted the same as she always had: fruit juice, coffee, a lot of toast made with wheat bread. She placed her order. The man wrote it down, and walked off towards the kitchen.

  Teresa had the feeling that she had seen him before, but couldn’t think where. She assumed it must have been somewhere around the town, because she had no memory of seeing him in the hotel. She wished she had taken a better look at him.

  While she was waiting for him to return, the four programmers left their table and walked out of the room. None of them appeared to notice her, and Ken Mitchell was pressing the keys of his mobile phone for another call.

  She sat alone in the silent dining room, waiting.

  After a short delay, the man with the shaved head returned and put down a silver pot of coffee and a large glass of orange juice.

  ‘I didn’t realize you would be wanting wheat bread,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to send out for some. It’ll only be a few minutes. The bakery’s just round the corner from here.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter much. White bread would have been OK.’ Teresa saw herself through this man’s eyes: another damned American picky about obscure food. Although, hell, wheat bread was on the menu! ‘Amy knows I usually like wheat bread, and gets it in for me.’

  He had straightened and was standing across the table from her, holding the tray against his chest.

  ‘Amy’s not here any more,’ he said.

  Teresa reacted to the news with a little start of surprise, but the truth was that ever since she had come downstairs she had been expecting news of change.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she said. ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s fine. She just wanted a break.’

  ‘So you’ve taken over from her?’