‘You were at Borth College,’ he said. ‘I checked out your records. They weren’t very hard to find. You might want to consider encryption or at least covering your tracks. If I can find out what you’ve been doing, so can Clive.’
Having delivered his nebulous warning, he went back to his desk and began to infiltrate the police computers. Their security didn’t seem to faze him. Within half an hour he’d got the details of the examination of the wrecked car.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Nothing to tie you to it that I can see.’
It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d put two and two together and get the same result that I got. No wonder he was warning me. He thought I’d killed Trish Newton. That made two of us.
I read the report.
The car hadn’t suffered much damage, considering. The top had been compressed towards the chassis, causing the fatal injuries to the driver. There was no sign of mechanical damage, deliberate or otherwise. The brakes were intact, the accelerator wasn’t glued to the floor, the steering still worked. The tyres were in decent condition, although the rear left was getting close to being illegally worn. No one else had been in the car at the time. If they had, they’d have been left with a very low forehead, as the passenger side hit the ground first when the car flipped.
There were no signs of a collision other than the collision with the tree. There were no signs that another vehicle had been involved.
They’d spoken to the boyfriend, and he was in a virtually catatonic state. The boyfriend was me, helpfully named in the report. I didn’t remember ever being in a virtually catatonic state, but then, I’d lost a lot of memories. Perhaps being in a virtually catatonic state wasn’t something you’d remember. That seemed likely enough.
I’d been somewhere else, anyway. I’d been in the student bar at the time the accident took place. I’d been drinking – there and elsewhere – all night, getting very drunk. This had been confirmed by most of the other students, including Tina. I’d been getting drunk because I’d discovered that my girlfriend was pregnant and – according to other witnesses – I hadn’t been able to cope with the fact. So I’d got drunk, and then I’d got the news that there had been an accident from a policeman, and then I’d turned into someone else.
There were no medical or psychiatric reports. I wasn’t about to ask Andy to find them. I didn’t want him knowing that I’d been technically insane. Of course, he might already know. He’d been my lead source.
I spent the rest of the day working on Boris because I wasn’t able to concentrate on anything more useful. I took the work home, thinking that I’d be able to finish it over the weekend and that Clive would be none the wiser.
IV
That night I wasn’t able to sleep. My mind was running through scenarios. None of them turned out well. I hadn’t heard from Dermot. Perhaps he’d given up on me after I left him in Bewdley. If he didn’t turn up in the morning, I’d need to get into Bright Harvest unassisted. If he did turn up, there might be unpleasantness. Dermot wasn’t subtle. I thought about Tina. Had she duped me into that experiment in an attempt to cure me? Had she been trying to get me to remember? After all, I’d clearly known her before then. The first meeting I remembered hadn’t been our first meeting. I’d already lost memories; the experiment had just added to the damage. It had brought something back, but not the thing we were after. There was a chance that Tina had only been trying to save me.
To pass the time I tried to tidy the flat. It was difficult, because there was no clear space to move things to. Moving a pile of Transmetropolitan back issues only revealed a hidden pile of Your Sinclair magazines. Moving a stack of CDs only revealed a hidden stack of old games on floppies for formats of computer that no longer worked. There were three RS232 interface cables. There was one of those old modems with a phone-shaped indentation that you had to put the handset into. There were several circuit boards and any number of chips in small cardboard boxes lined with dark grey synthetic foam. It was all junk, but I couldn’t throw any of it away. It might be useful.
I gave up on tidying the flat. What I needed was another room, and I wasn’t likely to get one. I turned on the PC and chose the least intelligent game that’d still run slowly enough to be playable.
At eleven thirty, I heard the drunks on the way to their various homes. Thursday was payday in a lot of the factories; Thursday night was drinking away the wages night. In the last half hour before midnight, the taxi companies did most of their business. The sound of lazy minicab drivers leaning on their horns joined the sound of rough male voices.
Gradually, that gave way to silence. I gave up on the game, which was a generic first-person shooter with the usual weapons – handgun, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher – and the usual suspects – dim grunts, very dim grunts, cannon fodder. It was still too complicated to suit me. I needed something truly dumb.
I loaded up an arcade emulator and picked out some early-eighties game ROMS. Arcade games are big cases, mostly full of nothing. They have circuit boards with the games flash-loaded onto them. Some enterprising people managed to get those ROM images and upload them to the Net, and now you can download them and play them at home.
Game ROMs are legal if you own a copy of the arcade game, and illegal otherwise, and no one cares about the difference. Sites carry huge lists of arcade games, and with an emulator you can play almost all of them. Those old games I’d played in Borth at ten pence a go were now available for free.
I put on Scramble, an ancient game in which you controlled a small rocket on its voyage through difficult landscapes. The first level left my first little spaceship short on fuel. The second level took away one of my little spaceships. The third level was impossible.
I ESCAPEd and tried Space Invaders. That was too simplistic. It just felt old, and besides, the old consoles had created the illusion of coloured graphics. The game itself was in monochrome. What they did was put strips of coloured plastic over the monitors of the consoles, giving the appearance of layers of differently-coloured invaders crawling down the screen. On the PC it was all in dreary black and white.
I ESCAPEd again. I needed something different. Perhaps I didn’t want to play anything violent at all. There were very few games that didn’t involve shooting.
I put on Pacman. That was just what I wanted. The titular hero ran around the maze, chased by four ghosts; it was gameplay without any unnecessary extras or distractions. It was pure. It was perfect, and according to Dermot it had got that way mostly by accident.
Dermot had told me one or two things about the game. He’d become a video-game expert, as well as the arcade king.
‘The guy who did it,’ he’d said one night after we’d gone retro and loaded up all of the old arcade games, ‘wanted to make a game that girls would like. So he looked at girl’s hobbies. What do girls do? Eat. All day long. So he had the hero eating little dots. And he didn’t know what it was going to look like. He had the ghosts. He had the maze. But he didn’t know what the hero was going to look like. So he orders himself a pizza while he thinks about it, and he takes out a slice. He looks at what’s left, a circle with a wedge missing. That’s it. That’s his hero. Round thing with an open mouth, eating dots.
‘And do you know what he was going to call it? Puckman. Then they thought what you could do to that name with a marker pen, and they changed it to Pacman. So that’s what he was called. You think there’s some bright plan behind it all, and there isn’t. It’s just coincidences. It’s accidents. These games are all like that. You know why Mario has a moustache?’
I didn’t.
‘Because they didn’t know what his mouth would look like, so they did him with a moustache to cover it up.’
Thinking about that, I wondered whether I’d see Dermot again. I thought I probably would. Leaving him in Bewdley was the sort of thing he’d do to someone just to cheer himself up. He’d think it was funny, once he’d stopped being angry.
I guided Pacman around
his maze. The ghosts moved in set ways – one switched routes suddenly, another paid no attention to you – and you could exploit that knowledge once you’d learned it. But they outnumbered you four to one, and sooner or later they blocked all exits and closed in on you.
I’d heard that there was a bug at level 255. I’d never see it, if there was one. I’d never seen level ten.
Reflected in the monitor, I saw myself sitting in the dark with a cheap gamepad, bathed in monitor light. Behind me stood another man, lit by a different light source. He had that same glow, the brightness of phosphor being battered by electrons. He wasn’t real. He sat on the bed next to me, but I wasn’t doing much of a job rendering him. He didn’t touch the bed, but sat just above it, supported by bad 3D routines. He had pretty good textures but a low polygon count. Even when I only imagined video-game characters, I was too lazy to put in enough work of my own. No wonder Boris was an idiot.
‘I’m not really here,’ the newcomer said. His mouth moved, but it was only drawn on his face and he wasn’t lip-synched. His face was flat, the nose indicated by shading in the facial textures, his ears drawn on under his sketchy hair. He had on dark glasses to save me imagining his eyes. He had on the generic grey-suit-and-black-tie combo of the generic nameless informant who appeared in any number of recent video games. In terms of graphics he was closer to the original PlayStation than a top-end PC with a decent rendering card. His voice, like his appearance, was generic: the toneless American voice I’d been hearing in games for fifteen years.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m imagining you.’
‘Why do that?’ he asked. His voice wasn’t centred on his head, either. It came from the left and right sides of the room.
It was a good question wherever it came from. I didn’t know why I’d dreamt him up. At least he wasn’t trying to run me down, or leaping in through my window while shooting at me, or setting his dogs on me.
‘I’m not that sort of agent,’ he said. I didn’t entirely trust him. Programmers didn’t bother to show weapons that weren’t currently being used. He might produce a pair of AK47s from inside his jacket or haul an experimental disruptor cannon from a pocket. He might simply explode or extravagantly morph into something nasty.
‘As I said, I’m not that sort of agent,’ he said. I realized he was responding to what I was thinking. Of course, he would be; for one thing, I was imagining him and so he knew what I was thinking. For another, characters in video games didn’t respond to your voice. They responded to your hands on the controls. Your voice was out in the real world. Voice recognition was still in its infancy.
I knew this. My mobile phone had voice activated numbers. ‘Work!’ I’d shout at it, and it’d dial for a pizza or call the vet.
The agent shifted and turned to look at me. I’d got the skeletal movement right, at least, but there was too much motion in the neck and his head turned past the breaking point. Nothing broke. He wasn’t made that way.
‘I’m here to tell you things you already know,’ he said. ‘I’m here to tell you things that will not help you.
‘You see the screen? That little character chased by ghosts? Getting nowhere, repeatedly going over the same ground?
‘That is you. That is what you’ve done to yourself. You are only reactive.
‘That’s all,’ he said, and vanished. A glow in his shape stayed in the air for a moment and then faded.
‘Well, fuck you,’ I said to the nothingness he left behind. After that, I went to bed. I’d had enough mysteries for one day. The next day I’d be breaking into Bright Harvest Research Laboratory.
I’d made up my mind. I wasn’t only reactive. I was going to get in there and find Betts. I didn’t know whether that would do me any good, but I was going to do it anyway. With that decision made, a week’s worth of lost sleep caught up with me. I turned off the PC. I barely had enough energy to turn off the lights, and then I fell across the bed and didn’t see anything else for eight hours.
SIXTEEN
I
The next morning I was woken by what sounded like someone throwing gravel at my window. I knew it was Dermot; no one else would do it. Why would anyone go to the trouble of flinging small stones at a window when there was a doorbell?
I hadn’t closed the curtains the night before. I was still dressed in yesterday’s clothes. I’d slept in them.
I went and let him in.
‘Where you dumping me today?’ he asked. ‘I only had to get two fucking taxis and a train from Bewdley. Perhaps you can drop me off at an oilrig or something this time. Got any tea on? Kettle going?’
‘I’m not up yet.’
‘You’re dressed.’
‘I went to bed dressed.’
‘Drunk. You drink too much. I’ll do the kettle then, and you get yourself ready. Tea?’
‘Coffee. I need to wake up.’
‘That’s what I’ve always thought. You need to wake up alright.’
He got hot drinks sorted out while I got myself sorted out. I dressed in black. If we were infiltrating Bright Harvest, I wanted to be inconspicuous. Dermot was wearing his usual tee-shirt and jeans combo, with his insane dark curly hair completely out of control. He was also wearing a pair of trainers three times the size of his feet. They’d spot him a mile away, I thought. I looked like an undercover operative.
‘What have you come as?’ Dermot asked when he saw my outfit. ‘My shadow?’
‘We’re sneaking in.’
‘We’re blagging our way in. You can’t get in looking like that. You look like someone off a late night review programme. You look like a fucking jazz musician.’
‘We’re not blagging our way in. It won’t work. You can’t blag those guards, they’re expecting people to try that. We’re going to sneak in.’
‘And how are we going to manage that?’ he asked, looking dubious.
‘Wait and see,’ I said. He didn’t look happy about that, but he didn’t seem too upset. In fact, he seemed to be according me a little more respect than the usual amount, i.e. none at all.
‘He’s the mystery man,’ he said. ‘He’s the man with the plan. So, what’s the plan?’
‘Wait and see,’ I told him again.
He looked almost impressed.
II
The demonstrators were in the quiet part of their cycle. The banners were waterlogged and heavy, as it was raining. Bewdley under a flood somehow seemed a lot less wet than Stourbridge in the rain. The cameras looking down from the tops of the spiked poles were aimed at the crowd. One of them turned to point at the Audi. Dermot and I sat inside, watching the world being divided into half-second slices by the windscreen wipers.
‘Second saddest sound in the world,’ said Dermot. ‘Fucking windscreen wipers. You know what the saddest is? Rain hitting the bus shelter window. That’s as sad as you can get. If you’re waiting for a bus in the rain you’re on your way to your mother’s house because you still fucking live there.’
‘What about babies crying? That’s a sad sound.’
‘Different sort of sadness. It’s like Eskimos having different words for different sorts of snow. In the West Midlands we should have different words for all the types of depression. That fucking bunch would have one of their own for a start.’
He pointed at the demonstrators. There were still a few children, although not as many as there had been on my first visit. Above them, water dripped from the sharp edges of the razor wire. Water ran down all vertical surfaces and searched for ways off horizontal ones. All of the water only seemed to make everything look grimier, rather than washing any of the grime away.
‘It’d be the same thing as the Eskimos with snow,’ I said. ‘It’d just be different words for rain.’
‘What are we going to do then?’ he asked. ‘What’s your mystery plan, mystery man?’
I’d been hoping that he wouldn’t ask me that. It was going to sound stupid. Which was understandable, because it was stupid. It was insane.
/> ‘I’m going to use sniper mode,’ I said. ‘I’m going to knock out one guard while I’m zoomed in and you create a diversion. Then I’m going to get the weapons from his body and then take the other guard out with them. Then we disable the cameras and head on in.’
‘Sniper mode?’
I nodded. Before he could object I continued.
‘I can put one of my worlds over that one. I did it with that farm where we got the cider. There was a real farm there, and I put a pretend world over it. I can do it deliberately. I think I can. I can replace that building with a video-game building. And we can get into a video-game building because you can always get in. That’s how they’re designed. So you can go round the back and blow up the cans of fuel, and when they open the gates to see what’s happened I’ll take the guards and the cameras out.’
‘We thought you were getting worse,’ Dermot said. ‘Perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps you’re getting much better. What fuel cans are these?’
‘They’ll be there. They’re always there, out of sight of the cameras. Shoot them and they’ll go up, then get back round to the front.’
‘And what am I shooting them with?’
‘This,’ I said, and made a handgun for him.
The night before, I had manifested someone to sit in my bedroom and give me a meaningless hint. Because it had been a non-threatening manifestation, I had been able to concentrate on how it was done. I’d just dragged a stereotypical video-game character out of my head, given him a short script, and set him loose. It hadn’t been difficult. It had been a shame that I hadn’t given him anything useful to say, but I’d managed to create a character.
A gun was simpler to create. I made it an automatic. It turned up on Dermot’s lap, hauled together from nowhere. It looked unreal but solid. There was a name etched along the barrel, but you couldn’t read it clearly because I didn’t know the model numbers or makes of guns. It was larger than a real gun, because that’s how guns are in games. It had no controls other than a trigger.
Execution Plan Page 17