Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

  Which is why it comes a line at a time.

  Because I only write a line at a time.

  After that it’s back to the land of video games. Which is germane, because they are to blame. They are to blame for everything.

  Example number one. Teenagers in America go to school with automatic weapons and open fire on the rest of the class.

  It isn’t their fault. It couldn’t be. It isn’t their parents’ fault. How could we even think it? It isn’t the fault of a society that allows teenagers access to automatic weapons.

  And on that subject, if I’d had guns at school: well, you wouldn’t be reading this.

  It’s not their fault, their parents’ fault, their society’s fault. It surely can’t be America’s fault because America has no faults.

  So it’s video games. Video games caused it. They once played Doom on a 486. This taught them to mow down their classmates. This tutored them in mass murder.

  I’m not surprised. If I was still playing Doom on a 486 I’d commit mass murder.

  Example number two. The World Trade Centre, as was. It gets planed level. In the newspapers, two days later, we learn how the terrorists learned to fly.

  They learned to fly, say the papers, which are never wrong and are never to blame, by playing a flight simulation video game. It taught them to fly into buildings. This is presented as the truth. This is not just a sleepy hack’s nonsensical dream. Of course you can learn to hijack a plane by running a flight simulator. Haven’t we all seen the options to gut the stewardess and turn off the transponder?

  There we are. There we have it. Video games are the root of all evil. Children playing them cannot read.

  They can read the instructions, of course. They can read programming languages and program the video recorder. They can read things you can’t begin to understand.

  But they aren’t reading the books you used to read ten? twenty? thirty? years ago, and that frightens you because you are no longer of any use, and video games are to blame.

  Children playing video games can’t write. Of course not. All of those Internet pages are written by – who, exactly? Those children who can’t write? Right again. That’s where language is. It’s not in the bookshops. It’s not in the newspapers. The world has moved a long way in a short time. You’re not needed on the voyage. You’re redundant.

  The world has moved on.

  Video games aren’t to blame for that, either.

  But at least they’re helping us to enjoy the trip.

  IV

  Betts stood quietly. Dermot paced the room, bored. I didn’t know what to do next, and the guinea pigs were no help at all.

  ‘Here’s a hint,’ said Dermot after what felt like a very long and uncomfortable time. ‘Here’s an idea. Go to Borth and see if that helps.’

  ‘It was one of your hints that got me here.’

  ‘I thought seeing Mr Betts might jog your memory. It didn’t. So we’ll just take ourselves to Borth and see what that dredges up. I’ll go with you.’

  ‘Why not just forget it?’

  ‘Because you want to know what happened to her. You want to know how you were involved. Don’t you?’

  I didn’t have to answer that. He knew that he was right. I could live with everything else, but not with that one remaining gap.

  ‘How were you planning to get out?’ asked Betts. ‘Only if you’re going to use another parallel dimension or whatever, I think I’d quite like to be included in it.’

  ‘That’s what you fucking think,’ said Dermot. ‘I’ve been in two, and they weren’t pretty.’

  ‘I could just walk you to the door, then. Security will have changed shifts, so they won’t know that you didn’t come in that way.’

  ‘Don’t you have a receptionist?’

  ‘Yes, but she’s not much brighter than the guinea pigs. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble there.’

  Betts gave a little wave to the cage of dim rodents, and then led us to the front door. It was a journey of about twenty feet, in the real world. It only involved a single door and a quick word from Betts to the gormless receptionist, and then we were out.

  The small yard was still overlooked by the cameras. A pair of guards closed in on us.

  ‘Make sure these two get to their car,’ Betts said to the guards. ‘The demonstrators would have a field day with them.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said one of the guards. ‘We’re paying them. The usual mob went home about an hour ago. Suddenly lost interest, by the look of it. Packed their banners and packed off. So we’ve got a bunch of civil servants in anoraks standing in the rain. We have an image to keep up, you know.’

  During the talk he’d operated the control that opened the gate. Dermot and I stood on the threshold of the normal world.

  ‘I hope you sort it out,’ said Betts. ‘Really I do. And if you don’t, come back and show me your other world.’

  He went back inside. The gate closed itself. We got into the car, ignored by the lacklustre stand-in demonstrators.

  ‘That was a fun day out,’ said Dermot. ‘Next stop Borth?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I want to think about things.’

  ‘You want to sit at home and not think about things.’

  ‘Then I’ll do that instead.’

  ‘We could forget all of this,’ said Dermot. ‘We could go into business. I’ve been thinking about this. We could make jewellery.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘If you work with gold you can cut costs on equipment. Everyone thinks you need precision equipment for gold jewellery, but you don’t. Gold is soft. You can buy cheap old lathes. You can shape it with bread knives.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I told him.

  ‘Who are you telling to shut up?’ he leered.

  ‘A figment of my imagination. Now shut up before I send you somewhere really fucking nasty.’

  ‘Nastier than this?’ asked Dermot, looking at Stourbridge ring road. ‘I’d like to see you fucking try.’

  But then he was quiet for fifteen minutes.

  ‘Speaking of figments of the imagination,’ he said after that, ‘the new crowd-control techniques should be interesting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know that acid we got from Dan the laboratory man? I gave it to the guinea pigs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it was in a good cause. I dropped it in their bowls. That should give a few odd results in the tests.’

  ‘Are you completely irresponsible?’

  ‘Yep. That’s the way you imagined me. That’s what you wanted.’

  I managed to keep a straight face for a minute or two, and then I started laughing. I was imagining those guinea pigs, running through carefully constructed mazes designed to provoke certain responses, tripping out. I wondered how it would affect the results. Of course it was only one in a series of experiments, possibly in only one of many laboratories.

  I laughed the rest of the way home. Perhaps Dermot had slipped me half a tab.

  I was certainly having trouble keeping reality in its place.

  I dropped him off next to his 733t.

  ‘Borth then?’ he asked. ‘Now you’ve cheered up, you grumpy fucker.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I really do want to think about things.’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’ll see you then,’ he said.

  Of course he would. We had unfinished business. Once I’d got myself in order, we’d be going back to Borth; and we’d end the whole mess, one way or another.

  NINETEEN

  I

  That seemed to be that. I’d tried everything I could try, and I’d got nowhere much. I knew I could turn the world into a video game, but then, CNN had done that during the gulf war. At least I’d done it without any civilian casualties or friendly fire.

  Except that I hadn’t. There was a dead girl to consider. The police reports clearly indicated that I was innocent. They also clearly indicated that Tris
h Newton was dead. I didn’t feel innocent. I felt one hundred per cent involved.

  I couldn’t settle to anything useful. To pass the time, for the rest of the weekend I played out all of the video games I’d got most of the way through and then abandoned. Some of them had end-of-level bosses with weak spots I hadn’t spotted before. Some of them had leaps requiring a greater degree of control than I had previously possessed. In the case of strategy games, I’d got to the point where the computer AI overwhelmed me.

  I reinstalled games I hadn’t played in years. I reinstalled games that came on floppy disks.

  I managed to get through the weekend that way, finishing off my unfinished business. Computer AI has holes, and I found them and exploited them. Working on Boris had given me new insights. Infiltrating Bright Harvest had improved my techniques.

  I ran through corridors full of monsters, mowing them down with a series of unlikely firearms. I ran several businesses and made several fortunes. I guided my troops across mountain ranges to surprise the enemy forces. I tried to run away from my ghosts, and of course they caught me.

  I finished all of the old titles. I was the king of video games. Dermot was dethroned.

  I went to bed on Sunday night feeling strangely fulfilled. There were holes in my life, true. But there were things I could cover them with.

  I dreamt of different worlds, but I managed to keep them in my head, where they belonged.

  II

  On Monday I got to work feeling refreshed. This was something new. Usually I got to work feeling glum and run-down, carried on like that for the day, and only began to wake up on the way home. That morning it was raining, there was a traffic jam – perhaps several combined traffic jams – blocking the roads and the radio was clogged with the bottom end of lowest-common-denominator dance music. Still I felt cheerful.

  I got to work ahead of everyone else. I booted up my PC and waited the usual ten minutes for the latest version of Windows to remember what it was supposed to be doing. Then I fired up Boris.

  ‘Good morning,’ he output at once. ‘I have news.’

  ‘What?’ I typed.

  ‘Clive has checked my version information. You’ve been working on me when you should have been working on the documentation which you were told was required to keep everyone in full employment. Hence there is no longer a requirement for all of the staff to be in full employment. This constitutes a dismissible offence, for which you have been dismissed. Clive did try to contact you on Friday, in the hope of finding that you had a good reason for this lapse, or even that you had completed the document. He could not contact you. You were not at home. Have you completed the document?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  ‘Then you are no longer employed here. Accessing this system constitutes a misuse of computer equipment. I myself was created using company software and in company time. You cannot take me with you. If you install me elsewhere, I will mail for assistance. This concludes our chats.’

  Boris shut his dialog boxes and refused to respond to clicks. He wasn’t speaking to me. I looked at my watch; I had a few minutes before anyone else was due in. I didn’t want to see them. I’d been sacked and I wanted to go home and turn my brain off.

  I packed up whatever I could carry and left. I didn’t try to sabotage the systems. For one thing, it wouldn’t help. For another, the rest of the team knew more about systems than I did, and they’d put it right again and then quite possibly prosecute me.

  It was still raining, and Dudley still appeared to be the epicentre of a vast series of traffic jams. I spent a long period of time driving slowly behind a Metro with a sticker on the rear windscreen saying: ‘This car is driven by SUE!’

  Even that didn’t annoy me. I was unemployed, implicated (in my own mind, at least) in a murder, stuck in the traffic and entirely without prospects.

  It didn’t feel too bad.

  I got home. I looked at the piles of things I couldn’t throw away, and knew why. In video games there are no frivolous items. If you can pick something up, you will need it. If something can be used, you’ll be using it.

  I couldn’t get rid of anything, not the piles of old Your Sinclair magazines nor the tee-shirts featuring defunct band names in sizes smaller than my current one. They might be needed at some time. They might be the item I’d need to give to the man at the bus stop to get the timetable to find the stand to get the bus home.

  I understood why I’d upgraded my PC, instead of replacing it; and why I had kept all of the outgraded components (in their antistatic sleeves, in their foam-lined boxes) close to hand.

  I also noticed that all of the stuff was recent, or fairly recent. There was nothing personal from before the eighties. Presumably I’d become a hoarder after the experiment. I’d lost parts of my Self, so perhaps this was compensation. This was memory in solid form.

  I flipped through some of the old magazines, seeing those long pages of BASIC that, if typed in correctly, merely failed to run. In those days you had to understand computers even to be able to get them to run a program. Now you bought one, put in the disk and pressed whatever it told you to press. The best you could do was tweak the interface.

  If I’d had anything to drink, I’d have drunk it. But Dermot had cleaned me out of alcoholic beverages a visit at a time. I had nothing left to tweak my interfaces with.

  A gunman walked in from the bedroom, bandoliers crisscrossing his chest and a rotating chain-gun cradled in his arms. He levelled it at me, and grinned around his oversized cigar.

  ‘Just fuck off,’ I told him, and he faded away with a look of annoyance. I didn’t have time to be bothered by figments, I had the rest of my life to sort out.

  Which was a shame, because that was when Dermot turned up.

  III

  He didn’t bother knocking on the door, because I hadn’t bothered to lock it. He just came in.

  ‘Not at work today then?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I got the sack.’

  ‘It knocks you about, getting the sack. I always get the sack. I couldn’t even hold down a job selling burgers. I only shifted one unit, and I gave that one away for nothing.’

  ‘I know. I was there.’

  ‘Yes, and I did warn you at the time. You could have just gone back inside and had the reconstituted scampi with everyone else. What are you going to do, then?’

  ‘I’m going to go to Borth and see what I can remember.’

  ‘Well, obviously. I fucking knew that. What are you going to do after that? You’re out of a job. What are you going to do for money?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.’

  ‘Well do think about it. You have dependants, you know.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as me, for one.’

  Dermot sat on my favourite chair, which was where he always sat when he came to see me. He looked around the room.

  ‘You could sell some of this crap off. If you can bear to part with it.’

  ‘That’d be alright. That’d be trading, and that’s allowed.’

  ‘Is that right? You’d trade in some of this stuff?’

  He looked thoughtful, which was worrying. It didn’t suit him. He usually looked as though he was acting on instinct, or just out of pure mischief. If he starting to think things through, he could be capable of anything.

  ‘I could make you an offer,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Your computer. Nothing else here is worth much. You’d get nothing for the furniture. If the kids round here broke in and saw your telly, they’d get you a new one. You’re still on videos, I see. They have DVDs in the rest of the world. Shiny little round things, don’t fade the third time you watch them or lose their soundtracks if you keep them in a stack. And no one is going to give you anything for those magazines. Those are never going to be collector’s editions.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘For the PC? I’ll give you five hundred. And that’s taking food
from my poor children’s hungry mouths.’

  ‘Five hundred?’

  ‘It’s out of date. That’s PCs for you. They’re always out of date. And you’ve replaced everything in the fucking thing five times over, so it’s hardly under guarantee. I’ll throw in something extra.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as, I’ll go to Borth with you while you sort things out. I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you.’

  ‘You’ve got a vested interest in all this.’

  ‘Naturally. I have my own interests to look after, and keeping you safe and well is part of that. If anything happens to you, something might happen to me. It might not. You might be expendable but I don’t want to risk it.’

  ‘You don’t really know, do you?’

  ‘No. This is something new. We’re pioneers. We’re on a journey somewhere unexplored.’

  ‘We’re on a journey to Borth.’

  ‘That’s the same sort of thing. Will I need a coat? Will it be raining?’

  ‘You’ll need money for petrol.’

  ‘I’m buying the fucking petrol?’

  ‘Naturally. We’re going in your car.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘My car? You always drive. You like to drive.’

  ‘This time,’ I said, ‘I might need a drink.’

  He weighed that up, and then nodded.

  ‘Fair enough. But I don’t want you vomiting on the upholstery. Otherwise I’ll kill you myself and fuck the consequences.’

  IV

  The Meriden 733t crouched by the pavement. Dermot beeped it unlocked, and it blinked at us. It was pale blue and metallic and looked half the height of my Audi, a bright sliver of controlled force. It looked like it would do zero to sixty before you could blink; it looked like it would break the sound barrier without any effort, or break the land-speed record before reaching the pedestrian crossing in the High Street. Then it would mow down the pedestrians before they could react.

  ‘In we get, then,’ said Dermot.

  The interior of the 733t was unexpectedly cramped. The car was so low that you all but lay in the seats. It was like preparing for lift-off, strapping myself into an acceleration couch and waiting for the rockets to ignite.