The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  It was not far to Bulverton. Within a few minutes of leaving the Texaco station they had reached the intersection at the top of the town; straight on led down through residential areas to the town centre, a left or a right took the road along the Ridge. Grove barely slowed for the junction, but skidded round and took the Ridge to the left. The traffic was heavier here, forcing Grove to slow a little, but still he wove dangerously round the other vehicles, overtaking when he could. Teresa was almost enjoying the sensation of unsafe speed; it was like the thrill of watching a car chase in a movie, knowing that it was all unreal, that there was no danger to her.

  She waited for him to take the side road to the industrial estate, where the ExEx building was situated, knowing that this was where he had parked the car and therefore where he must be heading now. As the turning approached she braced herself, knowing that he was going too fast to take it safely. But he was still weaving, and the Montego went past the side road at high speed. He braked a short distance further on, and took the sharply angled turn into Hereford Avenue, the road that ran through the heart of the housing estate. Teresa had a glimpse of the distant sea, light clouds on the horizon, heat-haze resting over the town, before the car was wrenched round again into a sidestreet. Teresa recognized the bleak terrace of houses where Grove had been living. The car braked hard to a halt, with two wheels up on the paving stones at the side.

  Grove held his hand down on the horn, staring aggressively at the house. Nothing appeared to move within.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ he said aloud, and pulled himself out of the car with a violent motion. He wrenched open the rear passenger door, and grabbed the rifle. He went quickly towards the house, making no attempt to hide the weapon, or, for that matter, to conceal himself behind any available cover. At the back of his mind, Teresa could not forget her Bureau training on approaching a building where the command situation was unknown: all available means of cover were to be sought.

  As soon as she thought this Grove ducked swiftly to one side, and instead of approaching the house as he had been, going straight up the concrete path towards the door, he crouched down on the far side of the wooden fence, and proceeded more cautiously.

  Teresa thought, I’m still influencing him!

  She made herself move forward, but the sheer blast of anger and unreason swilling through Grove’s mind repelled her.

  Holding the rifle aloft, Grove kicked at the wooden door at the rear of the house: it was flimsily made, and it opened without resistance. Grove dashed in. Debra was standing in the main room at the back, cradling a small cat in her arms. She looked pale, undernourished, pathetic and terrified. She was also, Teresa noticed for the first time, pregnant. The cat reacted instantly to Grove, and scrambled away from her, raising weals on Debra’s thin forearm which rapidly produced welling spots of blood.

  Grove raised the rifle, while the skinny, wretched girl tried to back away, pressing her legs against an open tea-chest behind her.

  Teresa thought, No! This didn’t happen! Why didn’t he go to the ExEx building?

  The girl stumbled backwards, scraping her legs on the metal lip of the chest, but dragged herself around it, trying to hide.

  Grove suddenly lowered the rifle, turned away, and without saying anything to the girl walked back through the house. He opened the front door and strode back to the car. He lifted the lid of the luggage compartment and threw in the rifle, then retrieved the handgun from between the front seats and tossed that inside too. He banged the lid down.

  Neighbours were watching. One woman pushed her children back into the house, and followed them inside and closed the door with a terrific slam.

  Teresa thought, Is this right? Did I prevent him from shooting Debra? Or was he not going to do it anyway?

  She eased forward in Grove’s mind, bracing herself for the onslaught of his crazed thoughts, but a sudden placidity had taken over. He was thinking about the best way to drive to Welton Road. Should he drive to the bottom of the road, and turn back up to the Ridge along Holman Road, or turn round here and go back the way he had come?

  The sheer normality of his thoughts was almost more repulsive than the hatred she had experienced before. He had murdered two people in the last half-hour, and threatened two other people with death, yet he could sit calmly behind the wheel of a car and worry about which direction to drive.

  Once more Teresa retreated to the back of his mind. She was confused by the way these events were turning out and growing increasingly aware of the sensitivity of a scenario’s development.

  Grove’s case was different from every other scenario she had entered. The details of all or most of the others were unknown to her when she entered the action. But when she first arrived in Bulverton from the US she was already broadly familiar with what Grove had done, and since then she had researched many more details. She had talked to witnesses, watched videos of newscasts and read dozens of different accounts and official reports. She suspected that material similar to this had been used by the ExEx programmers to develop the very scenario in which she was participating.

  The other witnesses would have contributed too: those boys playing pool when Grove went to the Bulver Arms, Fraser Johnson, who had witnessed the drugs deal on the seafront, Steve Ripon, who gave Grove a lift in his van and who saw him again later in Battle Road, Margaret Lee, who was terrorized by Grove at the Texaco station, maybe the police who had driven past on their way to the filling station; maybe even the people who lived in the houses she was driving past at this moment!

  And the others, the people she had spoken to only briefly, or those who had left town and perhaps had been traced and been paid by the GunHo people for their stories. All those who had witnessed something of Grove’s disastrous adventure, many of whom she hadn’t met, nor ever would, some who were still recovering from their injuries, those who would not speak to her because they thought she was a journalist, or for some other reason, those she had never even heard about because what they had witnessed was in non-ExEx terms only a confirmation of what others had said they’d seen; those who had fled Bulverton before she arrived in town.

  She was trapped in Grove’s vile mind, while he drove the car violently through the congested streets of the lower Ridge, and she was able to think out, think back to the real world, where she existed and had listened and taken notes, had accumulated other people’s memories of these events in a way not unlike the building of this scenario.

  She was tempted then to abort herself out of the scenario, to leave the virtual Grove suspended for ever in the action of driving the car.

  The extreme reality she had entered was one she already knew. The physical surroundings were identical to the Bulverton in which she had been living. This was how Nick, Amy, Dave Hartland, the Mercers, all the other witnesses, knew and remembered the relevant parts of the town. And it was how she too remembered them: no surprises for her, except the now familiar simulated veracity, still almost shocking in its details.

  Using Grove’s eyes, she glanced about as he drove, and she saw graffiti daubed or sprayed on walls, litter left untidily on the ground, dents on the bodywork of parked cars, individual curtains hanging at the windows of individual houses; everything different, everything incredibly detailed.

  No one could remember such fanatical details when providing their memories to the ExEx software; no one would say, even to themselves, that in this particular road there were so many houses, so many different colours of house paints, so many different ways of cultivating the small patch of garden in front of every house, so many different ways of letting it grow wild, so many irregularities and patches on the surface of the road, so many parked cars, of such different types and ages, in such different states of physical condition, no one would think to recall that a cat had dashed across the road in front of Grove’s car, that through the trees at the top of the hill it was possible to glimpse the traffic moving along the Ridge: a red Norbert Dentressangle truck with its vivid and familiar logo,
a white Stagecoach double-decker bus with an advertising placard for a local computer retail outlet, an orange and white Sainsbury’s delivery truck, the glinting roofs of cars of different colours imperfectly seen because of the angle and the bright light from the sky. People saw such details only subliminally, recording them on an unconscious level of the mind, and so the details went somehow into the scenario, not as facts but as adumbrations for the participants to see and notice and react to, and, in a certain way, to create for themselves as ad hoc necessities.

  Details are expected, by instinct or habit: no residential road in modern Britain, or indeed in any developed country, lacked cars parked at the sides of the road. No one would therefore specifically recall them when reliving their memories for the ExEx software, but the cars would nevertheless be included as outlines, and the scenario participants, seeing them because they expected to see them, filled in the details from their own memories, from their own take on the collective unconsciousness, or from their own knowledge of the world.

  In this way the participant was more than a passive observer. The scenario responded to and was reshaped by the will, experience, thoughts or imagination of the participant.

  Extreme reality was a temporary consensus, subject to the changing whims of all involved.

  The limits of the imagination were the only absolutes: in a scenario one could turn a car round and drive away from the main action, out into the open country beyond city limits, and follow the highway to the horizon, and it would usually be as unconsciously expected, filled with convincing detail, awash with impressions of temperature and sounds and objects, and the sensory experiences of being in a car.

  But in the end a limit would inevitably be reached, because one could imagine only so much: the road would turn out to roll for ever, you would never reach the shore to watch the sea, the stairs to an Underground station were blocked by a brick wall.

  The restriction on the extreme reality of any scenario was the failure to imagine what might He beyond its edge.

  Grove had driven out of the housing estate, and without slowing he barged his way into the traffic moving along the Bridge. Teresa had lost all curiosity about what might be going through his mind, and she remained as far back in his consciousness as possible.

  Through his eyes she peered ahead, looking for the road that led down to the ExEx building. It was coming up, two hundred yards or more on the left.

  Grove began to reduce speed for the turn, just as she would if she were driving. She was interceding again.

  On an impulse, Teresa used Grove’s left hand to reach up to the base of his neck. Touching him initially surprised and slightly repelled her: his neck was thick and covered in stubbly hairs. It was sticky with sweat. She groped around, and quickly found the ExEx valve.

  Had it been in place before? Had she found it only because she had expected to?

  While she thought about that, Grove took control of the car once more, and threw it around the corner too quickly. The rear wheels swung out, and with an irritated gesture and a muttered obscenity Grove snatched his left hand back to the steering wheel and recovered from the skid. Teresa decided to let him drive in his own way.

  Moments later he pulled up in the road opposite the entrance to the ExEx building, and turned off the engine.

  CHAPTER 33

  Teresa was not sure what Grove was about to do, and her uncertainty had an immediate effect on him.

  He reached forward and began to fiddle with the volume and tuning knobs on the car’s radio. They were held on only by spring or clip pressure; when he had pulled them off, the retaining bracket quickly came free, and a few seconds later Grove had managed to release the whole instrument from its mount. The manufacturers had attached a label to the inner case, warning that the radio was protected against theft by an electronic coding system. As soon as Grove saw this he pushed the radio aside in disgust. It swung beneath the dash on its extruded cables.

  He climbed out of the car and walked round to the back. Teresa, realizing that they had come to the pivotal moment in the scenario, watched to see what he would do. This would be when he either took the handgun and the rifle from the car, or left them concealed inside.

  As she thought this Grove went past the compartment lid, tapped his fingertips on it in a single gesture of annoyance, and walked across the road towards the entrance to the ExEx building.

  She made him glance back once.

  It was for her almost a final gulp of reality, like the last deep breath taken by a diver.

  From here, the view of the town was distant, and today the haze made the panorama indefinite without concealing it. The softness of detail frustrated her; she wanted to devour the view.

  Was the blurring of heat haze the way this scenario defined the edge of its own virtual reality?

  Grove kicked irritably at a clod of earth, so Teresa let him turn and continue on his way. He pushed open the glass door of the ExEx building, and went across to the reception desk. Paula Willson was on duty.

  Grove took the stolen money from his pocket, and tossed it on the desk.

  ‘I want to use the stuff you have here,’ he said. ‘That’s forty quid…should be enough.’

  Paula said, regarding the loose notes on her desk, ‘Are you a member, sir?’

  No, he wouldn’t be, Teresa thought. Grove would have failed the psychological profiling with the first three questions on the form. She wondered how he would lie his way out of this.

  ‘Not here. Maidstone, I usually go to Maidstone.’ Grove reached into the back pocket of his pants, felt around until he found what he was looking for, then pulled out the stiff plastic ID card. He held it up for her to see. It blurred in front of his eyes, so Teresa could not check it for authenticity; she knew that if he held it there a little longer it would swim into focus.

  Paula took it from him. She appeared to see it in focus, and recognized it. She placed the four ten-pound notes in a drawer of her desk, then typed the serial number of the card into her terminal. After a short pause she swiped its magnetic strip through the reader, and passed the card back to him, together with the usual information pack for users of the ExEx equipment.

  ‘That’s in order, Mr Grove. Thank you. A technician will assist you when you have made your selection.’

  Grove took the card and pushed it back into his pocket, then walked through the inner door. He, or Teresa, knew exactly where to go. A few moments later he had located an unused computer terminal, and was running the index software, seeming to be every bit as familiar with it as she was.

  Her visits to ExEx were all so recent and commonplace that to Teresa it was a continuing shock to accept that she was still inhabiting Grove’s body, that what was going on was a merely a scenario. While Grove peeled his way through the introductory screens of information, Patricia walked past the desk, and Teresa made Grove glance up at her.

  ‘Hi,’ she​/​Grove said to Patricia.

  ‘Hello, again.’

  Was that Patricia’s reply to her, defined from the adumbration of her expectations? Or was it actually to Grove, a known customer and member of the ExEx facilities, perhaps someone Patricia had seen several times before?

  Teresa forced herself forward in Grove’s mind, to try to minimize any more influence on his decisions. Every thought she had, back there in the recess of his mind, every tiny detail she noticed, became translated into a decision or action taken by Grove. In crossover, she actually became Grove himself. Never before, in any scenario, had she experienced such active response.

  She tried to assume a state of mental passivity, and watched the screens of options scrolling by. She wondered what he was looking for; then she wondered if wondering would also influence him. It made him pause, at least.

  She recalled the ease with which she had been able to talk to Shandy, that day in virtual London.

  ‘Gerry?’ she said.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘What exactly are you looking for?’ />
  ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  This was accompanied by a mental strike against her, a bludgeoning rejection, full of fear and hatred and bullying. Again, what felt like his hot breath welled around her.

  She backed away, into the depths of crossover. He hunched defensively and began jabbing at the keyboard with movements that were so quick she could not see what he was doing. On the screen, the various menus and lists appeared and disappeared at dizzying speed.

  Once again it occurred to her that her presence in the scenario was becoming unsustainable, that it was time to withdraw. To do that, though, would mean having to retreat from the Grove scenario now, at a point where it was becoming of real interest to her. What Grove had done inside the ExEx building clearly had an influence on the violent events that were soon to follow.

  She didn’t want to have to start over. Gerry Grove’s movements on this day, recorded in such detail inside the scenario, were proving to be time-consuming and traumatic.

  Teresa had never known such a long and exhausting scenario, nor felt so appalled by what she found. She did not want to have to cope again with the banal evil of his mind. Mostly, though, she could not face having to go back to the beginning and experience his murders again, to witness them and either by inaction appear to condone them, or by intervention appear to influence them.

  She had come as far as this; now she wanted to see it through and find out what he had done.

  His helter-skelter progress through the index listings continued; Teresa thought that because he was moving so quickly he could only be choosing selection boxes at random, almost on autopilot, simply clicking on one option after another, uninterested in where it might take him.

  Suddenly he stopped, and Teresa felt his body relax slightly. He seemed to lean forward slightly, as if the tension of searching through the screens had been supporting his torso.