by Barney Broom
Dr. Light stood in the doorway.
“Couldn’t see anyone around.”
Ignoring Podric’s reply, Light walked past him.
“Know when the first game was invented? The nineteen-fifties – Tennis for Two. This one’s the only model of its type in private ownership. Then there was Spacewar! in the seventies. Those were the days – Atari, Mario and…”
Light inspected a unit.
“Mine. The first game on that console to reach ten million sales worldwide.”
The computer games inventor turned.
“Seeing as you presumptuously entered my private domain, we may as well go to my inner sanctum.”
Without further ado, Archie walked out. Podric shrugged and followed him. Weird guy, this Dr. Light.
Crossing a corridor, the other room was Light’s laboratory. High-tech, a clinical work counter ran its length, behind which electronic equipment had been bolted into a rack. Several PCs and laptops were on the bench. Other computer paraphernalia included an array of hard drives, virtual reality kit, and several pairs of Google glasses – all neatly stored in designer-built trays.
Light handed Podric a similar PlayStation control to Brodie’s. For a second or two, the boy admired its design.
“Not on the market yet… it’ll be out next year. My housekeeper tells me you got into it.”
Podric activated the handset and only took a few seconds to overcome its security block. A wall-mounted plasma screen activated, and he spooled through the half dozen game options available before putting the controls down on the bench. Although apparently paying minimal attention to Podric’s activities, Light was in fact surreptitiously watching him.
“What sort of games level do you play?”
“Championship.”
“Ah.”
For no logical reason, Light sounded condescending.
“I gather you don’t appreciate the finer points of one of mine – Krimon.”
“It’s all right. ’Bit outdated.”
“In what way?”
“Graphics, options… it’s not very difficult.”
Light was annoyed at Podric’s casual dismissiveness.
“The record for Level 10 is thirty-four minutes twenty-eight seconds.”
“Yuh, officially. It’s not on the current circuit now, but I used to quite often get home in under half an hour.”
In years to come Archie Light would reflect that this was a defining moment in their relationship – the boy almost nonchalant, himself acutely agitated.
“I take it you have no objection to my putting you to the test.”
Podric didn’t say anything but picked up the device.
Defeating the Sentinels with ease at early levels, Podric rapidly began moving up the tiered ranks of challenges and within fourteen minutes, was at the game’s highest grade. In spite of himself, Archie’s attention increased as he watched Podric overcome the more difficult obstacles and guide Krimon to total victory in twenty-seven minutes thirteen seconds. ‘Player Wins!’ flashed onto the screen along with a fanfare of trumpets. Some text appeared: ‘Sentinels outta here – easier meat cookin’ in a galaxy near you!’ Podric put down the PlayStation controls.
“The thing is, computer games suck.”
Podric’s statement met with an ominous silence.
“Doctor, Podric – your mum needs to be going soon.”
Brodie’s voice called down from the den. Light slammed the door shut.
“Go on.”
“They’ve got too easy and… there’s nothing new.”
Archie looked at Podric for several seconds. The boy had relaxed and was walking over to some other trial stations, idly turning them over.
“My dad was a pilot in the RAF. He was brilliant and took me to the Air Force Training Centre where they test pilots on simulators. It was great. It was so great that dad got me into virtual reality and I played games all the time. That’s when I got good. I started winning things – won my first VR headset.”
Podric put down a unit and picked up a docking component.
“I played and played every game I could find. So many games. Crazy. Competitions. Championships… But now there’s nothing out there to excite me, which is why I’ve been thinking about another dimension.”
Hitting a key, Podric activated a monitor. It revealed a lot of codex information. ‘The Arch Twister’ was a device Archie was working on which would raise a game’s challenges much more quickly.
“Neat idea.”
He closed the screen.
“When I was playing at the highest VR levels, pushing anything a game could do – sometimes I could almost feel lost inside it and I’ve been thinking how cool it would be to create that. I don’t just mean virtual reality – I mean a player becoming a part of the game, part of the action. It would make any adventure real. That would be something else.”
“Podric, darling, we’ve got to go.”
His mother opened the lab door.
Archie Light was a man with varied talents, not infrequently using them to throw others off balance, and someone used to getting his own way. Not only with her son had he met his match, but also the boy’s mother, who gave a squeal of delight at seeing two pictures of Facel Vegas on the wall.
“Oh, the FV4 and the Excellence. They only made six types, didn’t they?”
Barbara’s eyes were bright. Archie’s jaw dropped, then gathering himself, he looked at this lively woman.
“Mrs. Moon. Your son and I have only just begun our conversation.”
“Well, you’ll have to continue it another time.”
With that, she took Podric’s arm.
“I’m sure we can arrange something.”
Barbara smiled and she and Podric made to leave.
“Your family is…!”
Barbara turned back.
“Fabulous. You should have known Sean. We flew!”
She took another glance at Archie’s Facel Vega pictures.
“Pity they had trouble with the Faciella – real beauty.”
Arriving back at Briony Close that evening, Podric and Barbara were greeted by Amy who had just come in from school. Mother and daughter quickly immersed in the events of the little girl’s day, Podric wandered across their small lawn to the garden shed.
Left by previous owners, nothing much had been done to it. Barbara deposited the few garden implements the family possessed in a corner when they moved in, but what attracted Podric to the hut was the work bench left behind. The vice was a bit wonky but that could be fixed. If he put up some shelves the place would make an ideal workshop for the project evolving in his mind.
Although experiencing deep depression since the loss of his father, Podric hadn’t been so dysfunctional that his brain had stopped working. What he’d said to Archie Light that afternoon had reignited thoughts buried deep in his subconscious these past months.
Activating his mobile, Podric watched Sean’s last communication that he’d saved. His dad’s exuberance was so engaging, it inspired him. In other conversations they’d had about the subject, Wing Commander Moon hadn’t dismissed his son’s apparently crazy idea out of hand.
“You’d be getting into wormholes on that one, Podric. Capture that and I’ll retire!”
Quizzing his father, who had been away serving abroad at the time, Podric received a text with a website referral directing him to the Einstein-Rosen bridge theory – the moving of matter. If he conquered something scientists had never been able to, it would be some accomplishment. But was he really trying to transport himself body and soul?
What Podric wanted was the ability to be able to experience life inside the game. But a game being a fantasy, he sought to encounter adventures as a participant to Krimon and the countless other games’ characters he’d met as a playe
r. It was the feeling of an alternative reality he was after, the sensation – something he could go into and return from at will.
***
For the rest of his week, Podric locked himself away in the Moons’ garden shed, transforming it into a proper workshop.
The vice was strengthened and a soldering iron installed, along with an array of Xboxes, PlayStations and an old PC, complete with hard drives and memory boards. Working long hours, Podric carefully dismantled one of his virtual reality visors and a PlayStation, exploring their contents. He also took a game he knew, Tokyo Joe, activating and deactivating it, following each step carefully as it loaded up.
For three days, Podric worked solidly – playing TJ and experimenting at altering the PlayStation’s controls. Sometimes this caused the game to malfunction or not work at all, but the more he monitored, played and tried to link himself to Tokyo Joe, analysing how its programme was written, the more he realised the complexity of what he was attempting to achieve. It was one thing to talk about immersing yourself in a computer world via some kind of mind path, but surely quite another to bring that about, if indeed it could be.
On Saturday morning, Podric woke to discover that he’d slept at his bench (his mother had put a blanket around him late the previous evening). Going to the kitchen and making himself some coffee, he returned to his workshop, and sat back to ponder the problems facing him.
The previous night he had tried re-configuring some of the Tokyo Joe software. Considering the practicalities of linking the game to his own thought process, Podric felt that it might work if he placed tiny microchips in the frames of his virtual reality headset, syncing his synapse pulse to that of the game. He realised how technologically crude this was, but it was all he could think of at the moment. Setting about the task with a vengeance, neither his mother nor his sister would see anything of him that weekend.
It was one of Barbara Moon’s qualities that whilst she loved her children, she never smothered them. Barbara offered them her non-conformist support unconditionally, which enabled Podric and Amy to develop their own free spirits. Although at times her friends viewed this as rather a freewheeling way to bring up a family, it allowed her children to develop individualistically. The fact that Podric spent forty-eight solid hours working on his idea in the garden shed didn’t overly concern his mother or bother his sister.
Amy had made a new friend, Lilian Bekes. A local girl whose mother claimed Romany blood, Lilian certainly had a Mediterranean temperament: ‘Do anything with my taser gun, I’ll have yer eyes!’ The gypsy lass was surprised by Amy’s reply that her version upped the voltage to render ‘total wipe out!’ But their strange, apparently fearless, bond seemed to unite them.
Barbara spent the weekend working on some marketing ideas for the brothers Tweeney. Her lively input having been recognised, MD Ralph Tweeney had requested that she take over their advertising and B to B trade publicity. Truthfully, this was less grand than it sounded. Technical head Don T had no interest in that aspect of the business at all and Ralph’s idea of a sophisticated strategy featured the tagline ‘guaranteed to dispose of the indisposable’. It was in this reservoir of originality that Barbara had to operate, and she quickly realised she had a challenge on her hands. Ideas for ‘expending vortex’ and ‘waste whirlpool’ advertisements flitted through her visually creative mind as she struggled with the task.
By Sunday night Podric was all in. His mother, still preoccupied with flying detritus engulfed in a swirl of subterranean blades, suggested that he take a break and have some supper with them, resting up for his return to school the following morning. Feeling that in spite of all his efforts he was no nearer to achieving his goal, Podric went over to the house and slumped down in the living room.
“No joy, Pod?” Sitting cross-legged on a sofa opposite flicking cards into an old bowler hat, his sister was her usual idiosyncratic self.
“You don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Trying to make games have another life.”
Too tired to argue, Podric took the glass of red wine his mother offered him.
“Supper in five minutes!”
Barbara sat down beside her son.
“Any nearer to your discovery, darling?”
Podric shook his head.
“You can help me come up with some waste disposal slogans. So far, I’ve only got ‘Tweeney’s twister – whirlpools of waste wiped in a vortex of vapour’, but I don’t think that’s quite right.”
Podric sipped his wine.
“Waste disposal sucks.”
Not thinking anything of his comment, a second or two later Podric was surprised to see his mother in paroxysms of laughter.
“That’s it – that’s the tagline! Waste disposal sucks. Brilliant, darling, I’ll use it.”
Although he slept well that night, Podric woke early. Being a bright sunny morning, he was out of the shower and dressed before his mother and sister were up. Making his customary mug of coffee, Podric walked over to his workshop and sipping the steaming liquid, looked at the jumble of wired clutter lying on the bench.
Picking up his adapted virtual reality headset, Podric didn’t think he’d done a bad job fitting the sensor pads with their encoded microchips into its sides. Looking at the unit, one could barely discern its alterations. Preoccupied with making yet more adjustments, he turned on the PlayStation and activated the tiny new switch.
Some very odd things started to happen. Wearing the visor, Podric was able to view the real world through virtual reality. This was strangely interesting. Looking out of the shed window at the garden, he could also watch a sequence of Tokyo Joe – villains on the run from Japan’s finest attempting to take refuge in a zoo – a kind of double vision. Reality and game.
Part of their efforts to evade capture involved the criminals running through enclosures of dangerous animals, Joe and cohorts in hot pursuit. The hero, cornered by a lion whose jaws started to open, coincided with Podric seeing his sister open the shed door. The king of the beasts was about to devour her and Joe. Podric fired Joe’s stun gun and the animal fell back.
“Come on Podric. We’ll be late for school!”
Japanese hoods apparently turning on Amy, Podric picked off the game’s villains in rapid succession.
“You and your games… I’m off!”
Podric was so transfixed by the activity within Tokyo Joe that he completely ignored his sister.
“Far Ou—”
“Podric?”
The shed door opened again.
Inside the game, things were proceeding at a crazy rate. His mother appeared in his strange vision. Her dressing gown was gathered about her and her hair was in curlers. Yakuza members had commandeered a zoo truck containing some caged gorillas and headed straight towards her. Using the PlayStation’s controls to operate Joe’s stun gun, Podric took careful aim at the driver. Zapping the guy, the gorilla crates flew off the truck as it rolled over, crashing into a snake pit.
“Podric, you must go now, darling – Amy’s already left.”
Closing down the game, Podric’s last vision was his mother in her night attire surrounded by deranged gorillas taking over Tokyo Zoo!
At the bus stop, his sister stood slightly away from the few other pupils waiting for the school coach.
“Success then, mein Bruder?”
Podric shrugged. The bus arrived. Amy looked at her brother mischievously.
“I know you did something.”
The bus stopped and they joined the little queue. Whatever it was that Podric had done wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind, but it was an interesting interim step along the road to formulating his idea for an alternative reality.
5
Outside-in Reality
For Podric Moon, the next few days passed in a strange calm. Having accidentally created a new dimension to compu
ter games – viewing the outside world in tandem with a virtual reality one, he had the opportunity to entertain himself with it morning, noon and night. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, Podric didn’t even go into his garden workshop. It was as if having accomplished what he had, he temporarily needed a break to regroup his thoughts. The stimulus to return to his fantastic computer developments was in fact a jarring one.
Several days after Podric’s return to school, Sergeant Paxman arrived to interview him. The sergeant reported that they had a possible trace on the car that hit him. Their chat prompted an unwelcome reminder of the incident and was compounded that afternoon by Barney Sturridge’s aggressive behaviour.
“Pity it didn’t nail you for good, Moon – techno jerk.”
For reasons best known to the Sturridge family, Barney’s father had started dropping his son at school, so at least the bus run was spared the thug’s loutish behaviour. But since he’d been attending Wendbury High, it hadn’t escaped Podric’s notice that Barney’s bully boy tactics stretched far and wide. A number of pupils younger than Podric were fearful of Barney’s threats and more than a few in his own year, equally so. The lad was a menace.
Podric began turning his thoughts towards teaching the thug a lesson he wouldn’t forget, something that would put him in his place once and for all. Any idea that he might have of entering physical combat with Barney was obviously problematic, the bully being much stronger than he was. No, he would have to outwit him using his brains.
Making a return to his workshop that evening, Podric idly spooled through Tokyo Joe with its ‘Outside-in Reality’ dimension. Slipping off the device, he thought about what he could do to incapacitate Barney – create maximum embarrassment, but make the bully realise he could be vulnerable and force him to back off from his thuggish behaviour.
Aware of the Inter Vth football challenge and knowing Barney would be playing, several people in Podric’s class had expressed concern at the upcoming clash. Currently exempt from games himself due to his accident, an idea began to form in Podric’s mind.
***