by James Gault
When she got to the coffee shop, Ogg and Perg were already there. Perg had even bought a coffee for her. They were in a far corner, and in the front part of the shop were a group of three girls from her class having ice creams. She walked past them looking the other way and pretended not to hear them when they said ‘Hi Antonia’. She looked over at Perg. His spots seemed to have gone, but his hair was its usual greasy scraggy mess. His t-shirt was clean but not ironed. She wondered if the girls could see them from where they were. At least she wasn’t alone with him, Ogg was there too. There was a coffee in front of Perg and a steaming cappuccino on the table in front of the spare seat.
“We got you a coffee,” Perg said.
She sat down with a muttered thanks aimed more in Ogg’s direction and took a sip.
“Your thoughts seem in a total mess today, if you don’t mind me saying so,” Ogg told her.
She did mind. She minded so much she aimed a kick at him under the table. Her foot went straight through where his leg appeared to be.
“You’re not being invisible again?” she asked him.
“I think it’s more prudent,” he answered.
“My God!” she said out loud, realising that anyone seeing them would think she and Perg were, well, together. And those gossips from her class were in the front shop!
“What’s wrong, Ant”, Perg enquired, obviously concerned.
“Nothing!” she said, crossly. “And don’t look at me! And when you go home, wash your hair!”
There are certain times when women talk, and the only thing men can do is shut up. For all his inexperience with the opposite sex, Peregrine Pratt instantly recognised this as one of those times. He said nothing. Ogg, who of course had an infinite amount of experience of women, and even took the female form from time to time, said nothing either. But there were times when even saying nothing can’t get men or Great Beings off the hook, and this was one of them. Antonia glared at them as if they were naughty boys, which in her opinion they were. An icy silence ensued. It was broken by Perg.
“There are a couple of girls waving at you through the window,” he told Antonia.
She didn’t look. What would she say tomorrow? ‘He’s my probation officer’ would be better than the truth. The cold lack of conversation continued, until Antonia’s mind settled a bit and she could speak.
“Why are we here then?” she asked.
“Social reasons?” Ogg said for a joke, and immediately regretted it. Women’s sense of humour is unpredictable, especially when they are teenagers.
“I’ve got a lot of homework,” she informed him with a frosty look. She had the distinct feeling that Ogg was trying to make fun of her, or that there was some deep lesson buried in all this nonsense. Ogg wasn’t a cruel person, a bit supercilious but Great Beings had some justification for that. Why was he putting her through all this embarrassment? Just for a laugh? She hoped not.
“Perg has had an idea,” Ogg told her. He seemed optimistic.
To be honest, Antonia wasn’t too hopeful. Perg’s last idea hadn’t yielded much fruit. A bit of a sun tan, a special commendation for the history she had mugged up, but nothing in the way of a solution to the threat to future civilisation. But Ogg had taught her that anything not proven false could be true, and she had learned in Maths that six heads in a row don’t make the next flip of the coin less likely to be a head, so there was little to lose by listening.
“Let’s hear it, Perg,” she said, although in a somewhat challenging and ungracious way. Anyone less besotted than Peregrine Pratt would have taken offence.
“Well, as we know, Ogg has been everywhere and, not only everywhere, but at every time as well, trying to find out what’s going on.”
“More than that, Perg! I am still everywhere at all times searching for the explanation. It’s what we Great Beings do.”
“But without success.”
“Without success so far,” Ogg corrected him. Hearing this, Antonia felt a little smug. She knew that what happened in the past could provide no absolute guarantee of the same thing happening in the future, even if Perg didn’t.
“Yes, well,” Peregrine acknowledged. . “All the same, you have to admit it doesn’t look too hopeful.”
“There’s no logical reason for me to admit that. On the other hand, the more options the better. Go on!”
“I simply think we have to look somewhere else.”
This seemed to get Ogg upset, if not a little angry.
“I am searching,” he said in a firm voice which brooked no argument, “throughout the universe and the whole of history. There is nowhere else.”
“In the real world, yes! But what about the virtual world?”
Peregrine Pratt sat back with a glow of triumph on his face. Didn’t this make up for the gaffe about the incoming aliens? Ogg and Antonia were looking at each other in amazement. He had taken the wind out of their sails and put their gas in a peep at the same time. And he could see Ant was impressed.
“What an absolutely stupid, idiotic idea!” she announced.
Ogg intervened. “Wait a minute, Ant! Maybe Perg has got a point”
Suddenly, Antonia felt extremely guilty. She hadn’t meant to blurt her reaction out just like that. It seemed that every time she spoke to Perg, she was driven by some invisible force to say something hurtful. She felt the need to justify herself.
“Well, maybe stupid is a bit strong. But what is the virtual world? It is the manifestation of the imagination of certain human beings. It is their thoughts turned into computer programmes. So, it seems to me, and I hope you’ll agree, that since Ogg is able to read those thoughts, he has already fully accessed the mysteries of the virtual world.”
“I don’t want to upset you, Ant”, Perg began (because he really didn’t want to upset her and he had noticed that she was in a somewhat tetchy mood), “but if you don’t mind me saying so, to hold such an opinion is to betray a lack of awareness of the creative process and its relationship to the unconscious nature of our consciousness.” It was long sentence with big words but none the less impactful for all that. In spite of this expressed fears and polite caveats, he had upset her and she did mind him saying so. Ogg was the one who had the right to criticise her thinking. If she was going allow him to continue to hang around her, which she had to admit she was now actively considering, the least he could do was to be uncritically supportive of her ideas. She was in the process of formulating a suitable witty put-down incorporating a snide reference to his unwashed hair when Ogg interrupted her thoughts.
“Perg could be right, you know,” he pointed out.
“What do you mean?” she answered. “What do both of you mean”, she repeated, looking from one to the other with brows furrowed and eyes narrowed. Perg was trying to defer to Ogg, but Ogg was having none of it.
“No, you tell her, Perg. It’s your idea”.
“All I wanted to say is that when we creators create, we really don’t know where the ideas come from. It’s not as if there’s something rational inside our heads, organising the whys and wherefores and whats and when and hows. It’s a kind of mess which appears inside our heads, presumably from the unconscious part of our mind. Sure, we kind of think logically to make it real, write the code, organise the program structure, but there’s something there that isn’t what you could call our thoughts, so consequently Ogg can’t reach it. But if we go in there, to that virtual world, who knows what we might find out?”
“You mean something hidden that maybe only a psychiatrist can get at, like interpreting a dream?” Antonia asked.
“Yes, but we’re counting on Ogg to be a bit more effective than a psychiatrist.”
“Ogg, could you do such a thing?”
Ogg gave a self-confident shrug. “Doesn’t sound too difficult for a Great Being,”
“Well, I ca
n’t believe you could envisage such an immoral thing! And both of you, too!”
They looked at her, wondering if they would ever understand the vagaries of the female mind. What had they said now?
“It’s bad enough, Ogg, when you fly inside my head and help yourself to my private thoughts and feelings. It’s what Great Beingness is, and I accept it, although sometimes I wish you could demonstrate a bit of self restraint. You don’t need to know everything, but then I suppose you need to know everything to know what you don’t need to know. So it’s something we who are less than Great Beings just have to put up with. But this is something entirely different. We’re talking here about dipping into people’s heads and finding out things about them that they don’t even know themselves. Omniscience is one thing, but this is being all-powerful. It’s dangerous and it’s totally immoral.”
“Psychiatrists do it,” Perg pointed out.
“Only with permission, and even then without much success,” Antonia answered.
“But the end of the world’s at stake here,” Perg protested.
“A Machiavellian argument which sets us on the slippery slope to evil.”
“Can I ask a question?” Ogg intervened. Antonia gave an exasperated sigh. Women should rule the world, she was thinking, because men and Great Beings totally lacked any meaningful concept of right and wrong.
“Why is it wrong for someone to know more about you than you yourself know?”
“My God, Ogg, isn’t that self evident?” Antonia fumed.
“Nothing is self evident.” Ogg suggested.
Antonia had to take a few minutes to think.
“Morality is self-evident or non-existent. Can you tell which?” She said, coldly, straight to Ogg’s face. Ogg didn’t reply.
“Nice one, Ant!” she heard Perg say. That’s what you should be like, she thought, supportive. Supportive with clean hair! She even smiled at him. Thus encouraged, Perg decide the time was right to pursue his idea.
“Don’t you think we just have to go after this virtual world idea?” he asked.
“And just whose secret consciousness are we going to invade? Whose dark unknown secrets are we going to rummage around in? Which great creator of virtual reality are we going to violate without his knowledge?” Antonia was back on her high horse.
“What about you, Perg?” Ogg chipped in. We could go and visit one of your fantasy worlds.
Pergerine Pratt blushed crimson.
“You know all about me,” he flustered, “wouldn’t be much point!”
“We know all about your conscious,” Ogg reminded him, “but, as you said yourself, the unconscious leads us to a whole new world. And if you’re worried about your secret longings for Ant, we all know about that already, so stop blushing.”
“I couldn’t object to invading your world,” Antonia added, “after all, we would be doing it with your permission. And it was your idea, after all! How do we get started?” she added, with a relish poor old Peregrine found a trifle unsettling.