Teresa slammed down the lid then stood there, staring at the car’s polished paintwork, trying to think. The sun beat down on her neck. The temptation again swept over her to shrink mentally from the consequences of all this.
She had been in the scenario with Grove. It was a standard ExEx scenario. In this standard ExEx scenario she had shown Grove how to use the weapons; maybe he would have shot the people anyway, maybe he simply missed the first time, maybe he wasn’t as incompetent as she’d thought, maybe he would have gone on and shot at them until they were dead.
Maybe she was making excuses.
All right, in the real world Grove had definitely shot those two: Rosalind Williams and her four-year-old child, Tommy. She had seen their names on the town memorial. She had seen video footage of the scene of the crime. She had seen the newspaper files. She had talked to Mrs Williams’ bereaved husband, and to other people who had known them.
But until she had shown Grove how to shoot, he had been incompetent. He held the heavy, sophisticated gun like a boy playing with a toy pistol. Inside the scenario.
Had she not done so, what would have happened to his two victims? Inside the scenario.
Teresa turned away from the Montego, leaned her backside against it and stared down the hill towards the distant sea. Although the town shimmered under haze she could see it well enough: the line of low surrounding hills to left and right, making up the rest of the Ridge, the dull modern houses in their stultifying ranks; lower down, the more attractively arranged and time-weathered buildings of the Old Town, then the sea, a glistening silver-blue, the distant clouds over France. It all stretched out before her, endless and inviting.
The rest of England, the seas and the endless sky, the world, spread around her. A short drive to Dover or Newhaven and she could be on a ferry across that sea to France, thence to the rest of Europe. A slightly longer drive to the north and she would be at Gatwick Airport, ready for her flight home. There were no extremes to limit her.
But this was not the reality she had left. This was summer; in the streets of the town below people would be driving their cars with the windows down, the sun-roofs open and the ineffective cold-air blowers roaring. Pedestrians would be strolling in shorts and flimsy tops. Shops and houses would have their doors and windows open to the heat. No sun shone like this in Britain’s winter, which she had woken up to, driven in, hurried through, shaken from her coat, only that morning.
It had been a standard ExEx scenario, written by the company that owned the ExEx building. The standard ExEx scenario had undoubtedly been Grove’s, set on the day. Standard extremes, the corporate reality. GunHo scenarios were industry standard.
But Grove had gone on, using other software. Sick of the naked impact of Grove’s mind Teresa had withdrawn, leaving him in the unlikely embodiment of Shandy in her porno rôle. Presumably he was still there, enjoying what must be for any man a novel sexual experience.
She remembered walking down Coventry Street in Shandy’s mind, learning about the girl and the world she inhabited. The flashing logo, SENSH, was coming at them every half-minute or so. ‘Doesn’t that drive you crazy, Shan?’ she had said. No, Shandy replied, you get used to it in the end.
It had been run as a closing message just now, when she left the scenario.
The scenario she had entered, the industry-standard GunHo scenario about Grove, was not the one she had left: she had been in Vic’s homemade software, complete with bolted-on bits of London and Arizona, and terrible puns and spelling mistakes.
When she withdrew from that she had returned to the ExEx facility in Bulverton. But it was to a hot sunny day, like the one when Grove went berserk.
It made rough sense, of course. When Grove entered the Shandy scenario, taking her with him, her only way out was to the reality he had left.
The credit card that was too new to be valid; the cold winter’s day that had turned to a heatwave; the Montego parked in place of her car.
She was still in the Grove scenario.
The implications were shocking, and impossible to comprehend fully, but at least she knew how to cope. With a desperate urgency to escape, unlike any she had previously known, Teresa recalled the LIVER mnemonic, and waited for the GunHo logo to appear as the scenario was aborted.
Teresa remained in Welton Road, outside the ExEx building, with Grove’s stolen car gleaming in the midsummer sun. Nothing changed.
She had never known the mnemonic to fail before, although Dan Kazinsky had warned all the trainees that it was not infallible.
Standing there, in shock, but focused on what had happened, Teresa remembered a day during training at the Academy, when they had been given a long and technical lecture by a professor of psychology from Johns Hopkins University. This woman had drily explained the theory of mental override within an imaginary world. Several of the trainees afterwards admitted privately that their attention had wandered, but Teresa had taken it all in.
The psychological principle was that there was a normal inner requirement that reality should be firmly based. Human sensory equipment constantly tested the veracity of the world, and silently reported to the consciousness. Normal life functioned. An ExEx scenario could therefore only function as a plausible-seeming alternative to reality by simulating the sensual information, and this continued so long as the participant gave or implied consent. Reality was suspended while the scenario continued. This meant that recognizing, isolating and consciously rejecting one of the simulated sensory inputs was the only way to escape from the extreme experience.
There were questions and answers, and a short break for refreshments. Later, when the professor had left, Dan Kazinsky said, ‘You ought to know that sometimes you’ll get stuck in there. The mnemonic won’t always work. There’s another way out. You got to know what it is.’
He explained about the manual override built into the valve itself.
Teresa reached behind her, located the ExEx valve and felt around the rim of it for the minute trip-switch, concealed within a specially stiffened fold of the plastic integument. When she found it she gingerly eased the plastic apart with a fingernail, trying to avoid straining the sensitive area of her skin.
She had never done this before, except in a dry run in Quantico under the instruction of Agent Kazinsky. She found that the switch was more difficult to flick over than she had imagined it would be, and it took her two attempts to do it. As the tiny plastic device closed with a tangible pressure, Teresa braced herself for the traumatic disruption of an emergency withdrawal.
Teresa remained in Welton Road, outside the ExEx building, with Grove’s stolen car gleaming in the midsummer sun. Nothing changed.
She reached behind her, located the ExEx valve and felt around the rim of it for the minute trip-switch, concealed within its specially stiffened fold of the plastic integument. When she found it she gingerly eased the plastic apart with a fingernail, and returned the switch to its former position.
Once, years before, Teresa had been driving her car at night in downtown Baltimore, in the area north of Franklin Street, a part of the city she knew well. Not paying attention she had taken a wrong turn. Thinking she knew where she was she drove straight to what she thought was her friend’s address, found a parking space, and got out of her car. As soon as she did, paying attention at last to her surroundings, she knew instantly she was in the wrong place, but she was still none the less convinced that it could not be so. She had driven there many times before, and knew the location well. Yet there were two small stores where the entrance to her friend’s apartment block should have been, the streetlights were wrong, the buildings opposite were too tall, too decrepit. For a few seconds, Teresa had been convinced of two conflicting facts, knowing they were in conflict, but no less disturbed for knowing it: that she was in the wrong place, and simultaneously that she was not.
Now, as the hot summer’s afternoon lay around her, the brilliant sunlight dazzled her, the rolling heat from the ground smothe
red her, Teresa experienced the same conflict. Her inability to abort the scenario meant that she was really here, on the day of Grove’s mass murders.
But that was eight months ago; it couldn’t possibly be so.
Perspiration was beginning to trickle from her hairline, down the sides of her face, so she undid the top two buttons of her blouse, and lightly raised and fanned the material, to try to cool herself. She found a tissue and mopped her face ineffectually. (The tissue was already damp: was it the same one she had used to dry her face when she staggered in from the arctic blast this morning?) Standing here in the street she could hardly start removing the warmest of the garments she was wearing: her snugly fitting jeans, and the thick tights beneath. She did have cooler clothes with her, but they were already packed in one of her suitcases at the hotel, ready for the flight home.
Staring at Grove’s abandoned car, perplexed by what had happened, Teresa gave it a hard look, then went back across the street to the ExEx building.
CHAPTER 35
Paula Willson was still sitting at her desk, with a fan swivelling slowly to and fro across her. Pieces of paper on the desktop lifted fractionally as the draught swept by.
‘Hi,’ Teresa said as she walked in and closed the door. After the blazing sunshine outside the building felt cool.
‘How may I help you?’ said Paula.
‘Well, I hope you can help me a lot. I want to ask you if you know who I am?’
‘You were here a few minutes ago, weren’t you?’
‘I was leaving, and you asked me if it had started raining.’
‘That’s right,’ said Paula.
‘Can you remember why you asked me that?’
‘I was surprised to see you, the way you were dressed. You’d put a coat on.’
‘OK,’ Teresa said. ‘Had you seen me in here before then?’
‘I don’t think so. I think you’d been using the simulators. I assumed you must have come in before my shift began. You are one of our customers, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Look, I’m trying to locate—’
‘May I have your name?’
‘I’ve brought my customer ID with me.’
Teresa wanted to say that she and this young woman had been saying hello to each other most mornings for the last three weeks, but there was no point at all in that. She was no longer certain of anything. She groped in the pocket where she normally kept the plastic card, but it was not there. She tried her other pockets. Then she remembered: Grove had had a similar conversation with Paula, earlier that day, when he had arrived at this building. To cut short the formalities, Teresa had helped him find an ID card, which he had immediately reached for in the back pocket of his pants, exactly as she had done now. Grove had found an ID card; she could not find hers.
‘I’m somewhere in your computer records,’ Teresa said. ‘Teresa Simons, Teresa Ann Simons. No E on Ann.’
‘I won’t keep you a moment,’ said Paula, already typing at her keyboard and glancing at the screen. ‘No, I’m afraid we don’t have you, but we are recruiting new members at the moment, and there’s a discount scheme with air-mile bonuses if you sign up now. If you would fill in this application form, and can supply a major credit card, we will grant you temporary membership straight away.’
She slid the sheet of paper across to Teresa.
Teresa said, ‘I’m simply trying to find someone I know, who I think is here. I came in with him earlier. Could you at least tell me if he’s still in here?’
The expression on the young woman’s face remained one of professional reticence.
‘I’m sorry. I’m not able to give out information on our customers.’
‘Yeah, I understand the problem. This is slightly different, I think. I arrived with him.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Paula said again.
‘Couldn’t you even confirm he’s still here? It’s Mr Grove, Mr Gerry Grove.’
‘I’m not allowed to,’ Paula said with an embarrassed look, and a glance towards the inner sanctum. For an instant Teresa glimpsed the friendly and at times informal young woman she had often paused for a chat with on her way in or out of this building.
‘Are you allowed to hand out that sort of information to fellow members?’ she said. ‘You know, if I fill out this form?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ A quick smile of relief flickered across Paula’s eyes.
Teresa moved away to one of the seats in the waiting area, and rapidly filled out the relevant details about herself. The form was the same one she had completed when she became a member the first time, but it looked subtly different: the print was larger, laid out a little differently, an earlier version of the form she had already handed in.
When Paula saw Teresa signing the form, she picked up the internal telephone and pressed a couple of buttons. As Teresa walked back to her desk, she was saying, ‘Hi, this is Paula, on the front desk. I’m trying to trace one of the users. Mr Grove.’
‘Gerry Grove,’ Teresa said.
‘Yes, that’s right. OK, would Sharon know? It’s a Mr Gerry Grove, apparently. Gerry with a G?’ She looked up at Teresa, who nodded. Paula confirmed this, then made an expression towards Teresa with her eyes. ‘They’re trying to find out. Yes, I’m still here. OK. Thanks.’
She put down the phone and scribbled a long number on a scrap of paper.
‘They say they know who you mean.’
‘Good! I need to see him.’
‘Now hold on, because they say I have to determine his status. They’ve given me his ID,’ Paula said. She typed at the keyboard, glancing to and from the long number she had written down. ‘All right, Mr Grove did check in here earlier.’ She looked at the clock on the wall to one side. ‘About an hour ago, I think.’
‘That’s about right. Is he still using the simulator?’
‘No, it doesn’t look as if he is. He didn’t log much machine time. He paid cash upfront, but—’
‘May I see?’
‘Well…’
But Teresa had moved round so that she was alongside Paula and able to read her screen. It displayed fairly straightforward text information, showing Grove’s name and a scenario reference number that Teresa instantly recognized: it was of course the porno video-shoot, with Shandy and Willem.
‘You can see here,’ Paula said, tapping the end of her ballpoint against the screen. ‘It looks as if the scenario terminated after a few seconds. You’d have to ask one of the technical people exactly what that means. I don’t have anything to do with the scenarios. But they can be stopped, can’t they? The customer can decide to leave? I think that must be what happened here.’
‘But after a few seconds?’
‘It says eleven seconds.’
Teresa thought for a moment. She remembered arriving in the scenario, the awareness of heat and bright lights, the half-cup bra that was too tight, blinking against the lights, people standing beyond the circle of lights, a woman patting her forehead and nose with powder, then saying, ‘Hold still a while longer, Shan,’ and moving behind the lights again. She had thought, I can’t take this any more, and then she had aborted the scenario. Was that eleven seconds?
‘You say he isn’t using the simulator now. But is he still in the building?’
‘I can phone through for you, and find out.’
‘Yes. Please do.’
Again, Paula used the internal phone. She asked if Mr Grove was in the recovery area, and listened to the reply.
She said to Teresa, ‘No, they think he must have checked straight out. He’s nowhere in the facility.’
Teresa felt a bleak desperation growing in her.
‘Did you see him leave?’ she said.
‘People pass through here all the time.’
‘You must know what he looked like. He was wearing…’ Teresa paused, remembering. ‘Dark-green pants with buttoned pockets everywhere, like army fatigues. A green muscle-shirt, with oily smears on the front. He came in
here and had forty pounds in cash. He tossed it on the desk in front of you. You asked if he was a member, and he said he usually used the Maidstone facility. He gave you an ID card, and after that you let him through.’
‘Gingery hair, dirty hands?’
‘That’s him! Did you see him leave?’
‘No.’
‘Are you certain? You haven’t taken any breaks?’
‘Now I know who you mean, I’d know if he’d gone.’
‘Then he must still be here in the building.’
All through this Teresa had been holding her new membership application form, and now she gave it to Paula. For good measure she threw down her GM MasterCard beside it.
‘That makes me a member, right?’
‘Yes, I suppose—’
‘You’ll find the credit card has already been recorded. I’ll pick it up in a moment.’
She pushed through the door before Paula could answer, and went into the main part of the building. It took her only a minute or two to establish that Grove was indeed no longer there. Few members of the staff had been aware of his presence while he was using the equipment; no one had seen him leave.
Teresa hurried outside into the bright sunshine, and went across to where his stolen car was parked.
She stood next to it for a while, staring at the view, the blue-and-silver sea, the distant roofs, the quiet streets, the weather in France. Her identity had crossed over into Grove’s; she had entered the building with him, and he had left when she did. Where was he now?
A few moments later, she heard the sound of police sirens, in the distance among the houses, down in the quiet streets of Bulverton’s Old Town.
CHAPTER 36
She picked up her MasterCard from the reception desk, together with her ExEx membership start-up pack, an introductory pamphlet, her air-mile certificate, discount vouchers for the first ten hours of ExEx run-time use, a free pen and a complimentary canvas tote bag emblazoned with the GunHo corporate logo. She gave a smile of acknowledgement to Paula and walked into the main part of the building to find a terminal she could use.
The Extremes Page 30