Geller and Vinokur exchanged a strange look. Then, abruptly, Vinokur laughed.
“See?” he said to Landry. “I told you it is glorified veterinarians we have become.” He gave Pikul a more respectful nod. “The eXistenZ game-pod is indeed basically animal in origin, Mr. Pikul. It was cloned from fertilized amphibian eggs, gene-spliced from species-related living organic material. Plus, how shall I say?, a certain stuffing of our own. Synthetic DNA resins they are, mostly. What is making a pod different from the animals is its brain, and of course its memory. The remembering is the key. An awful lot of sophisticated nanotechnology is building into this baby.”
Another look passed between the three of them.
“Only from Antenna Research,” Geller said after a moment, and they all laughed.
“Okay,” Pikul said, feeling he was being let in on a joke for once. “Where do the batteries go?”
“Very amusing.”
Geller said, “He’s not kidding. In spite of appearances, he’s not just a bodyguard nerd. He’s a total PR nerd too.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to keep up,” Pikul protested. “You’ve been working with eXistenZ for years.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” Geller touched the part of his back where the bioport was and let her fingers linger there a few moments, her touch almost affectionate. “We get so close to our work, we always forget how strange it can seem to people who are fresh to it. The MetaFlesh pod ports into you, and you become the power source. Your body, your nervous system, your metabolism, your immune system. Basically, it’s your energy. When you get tired, run-down, the pod won’t function properly.”
While she was speaking, Vinokur was looking all over the body of the pod, his hands raised out of the way. A last visual inspection, just to make sure.
“All right,” he said after he’d completed the check. “Mr. Landry here will finish up the pod work.”
“It’s going to be okay?” Geller asked, simply.
“My dear,” Vinokur said, and suddenly laughed aloud, an abrupt and mirthless burst of sound. He was looking away from her. He paused, staring for a moment out of the window at the distant views of the snowcapped mountains. “You know how we are here in this place! Better than new. Always better than you begin. Trust me. Yes, I am realizing already you must trust me . . . otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“Right.”
“Right,” Kiri Vinokur said, nodding happily. “I’m glad we are still on the same wavelength we always were. Now then . . .” He turned to Pikul. “Mr. Pikul.”
“Yes?”
“We are not wanting any more neurosurges, are we?”
“Sir, I tell you again, it wasn’t me who—”
“Yes, yes, I am hearing what you said.” The man looked testy, somewhat dangerous. He breathed in, and flexed the knuckles of both hands. Curiously, no clicking sound could be heard. “We have agreed it is not you who caused the damage. I am more concerning with what it is that is damaging you.”
“Me?” Pikul said, with a worried glance in Geller’s direction. She signaled with a small hand movement not to respond. “Okay. Tell me what you must,” he said to Vinokur.
“I think it’s time to get that nasty diseased bioport out of you and replace it with one that isn’t going to do any more harm.”
“But I’m kind of getting used to it now, sir,” Pikul said, alarmed at this unexpected turn of events.
“No, it’s doing you no good there. No good at all. All that adverse biofeedback going into your bloodstream. Even a few more hours could be inducing antibody reactions that will take weeks to throw off. I’m not trying to scare you, but we’re talking about the possibility of death here.”
“You’re scaring me,” Pikul said.
“Well, it’s not likely to come to that,” Vinokur said. “We are here to be helping. But we don’t want any more adverse publicity, do we? Any of us. Now, where did I put my bioport puller . . . ? Here it is.”
He produced from one of the lathe benches an instrument that to Pikul’s horrified eyes looked like a pair of spring-loaded fire tongs.
“Mr. Pikul, if you would be good enough to lie down on that couch. And kindly pull up your shirt.”
Pikul saw the look in Geller’s eyes, and with a feeling of terminal dread reluctantly complied.
[ 11 ]
Standing in front of the full-length mirror in the guest chalet, Pikul twisted and strained to see the effect the new bioport had had on his sore, tormented back.
To his largely uninitiated eyes, the new bioport implanted by Kiri Vinokur appeared much the same as the one it had replaced, but the area of skin and flesh around the incision looked and felt swollen, bruised, and tender.
He touched it gingerly with a fingertip.
“It hurts like hell,” he said to Geller, who was looking intently at her repaired game-pod nestling in its case. “I think it’s infected.”
“Does it hurt the same way as the one Gas put in?”
“No . . . it’s found another way of hurting. It’s different.”
“Then apart from the fact that Gas probably caused a little short-term collateral damage to the skin around the port, it sounds normal.” She went over and peered at it, but after a superficial glance merely shook her head. She straightened so she could face him, and looked serious and thoughtful. “I don’t think the port is infected. It’s just excited. I believe it wants a bit of action.”
She rubbed her fingers over it lightly, as you would the head of a child you wanted to encourage. To Pikul’s surprise, this did not hurt at all.
Geller went back to her game-pod and brought out the Y-shaped UmbyCord. She tried to jack one end of it into his new bioport.
Pikul twisted adroitly away from her. “Hey, how about me?” he said. “I really don’t think that I’m ready for action. Me, I mean. You know, the bearer of the excited bioport. What I want is . . . not now. Not here. I feel too . . . exposed. Anyway, can’t we have a break from all this? I’m hungry, we’ve traveled a long way—”
“You’re not panicking again, are you?” Geller said. “Not likely to neurosurge again?”
“It wasn’t me the first time! I keep telling you.”
“Yeah, well. The position is that my baby here has now taken three major hits, one back at the church hall, one at the gas station, and one on the operating table. I’ve got to find out if everything’s okay. If the game hasn’t been contaminated, the pod hasn’t been fucked, that kind of thing. The only way I can do that is to play eXistenZ with somebody friendly. Are you still friendly or are you not?”
“I thought we’d already agreed that I was,” Pikul said.
He swallowed nervously, then, with a feeling of resignation, turned his back to Geller so she could port in. Unable to see her without twisting his head, he sensed her moving around behind him: her fingers brushed his flesh again, a few strands of her hair fell against his shoulder as she leaned over him. At last he felt the connector jack into his port with a quiet but emphatic mechanical clicking. No trouble there, no pain, no humiliating collapse of his legs.
“How does that feel?” Geller said.
“Okay so far. Are you saying this thing will run off my body’s energy?”
“That’s how they work.” She connected the other end to the game-pod. “See? You’re humming along already.”
Something was certainly happening. Pikul watched with interest as Geller expertly twisted the second jack into her own bioport, and took a deep breath.
“All right,” she said. “eXistenZ. Only from Antenna Research. Here we go.”
“This is a game, right?” Pikul said.
“Yes.”
“We play to win?”
“That’s the general idea.”
“Then don’t you think you’ve got a bit of an unfair advantage over me? How can I possibly compete against the person who designed the game?”
“You could beat the guy who invented poker, couldn’t you?”
“Not if he didn’t tell me all the rules.”
“There are no rules in eXistenZ that you need to know.”
“Then I guess—”
But Geller had flicked the nipple on the game-pod, and before Pikul could finish his answer, the chalet began to melt away around them. The walls thinned out, light shone, light faded. Reality shifted.
[ 12 ]
They were standing. They were together. They were inside a building. They were inside a room inside a building. There were people around and many racks of things, but for a few seconds it was impossible to make sense of what they were seeing or even to work out where they might be.
Pikul looked anxiously at Geller, and she looked back.
“So far so good?” he said to her.
“Yes.”
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“We seem to be inside someplace.”
“That’s okay. We’ll survive.”
As the sensation of the reality shift faded, Pikul said, “That was a beautiful experience. I feel . . . just like I always feel! Is that normal? I mean is that how games always start? A kind of smooth dissolve from place to place?”
“That’s how it goes. It depends on the style of the game. You can get jagged, brutal cuts that shock you into responsive action. You get that kind of thing in the martial arts games, or the explore-and-conquer games. Others are slow fades. I find those pretty frightening, because you don’t know what’s going to come when it goes all black. It could be the peacefulness of a sea lying under the moon, or a quiet stretch of countryside . . . or it could be a dark cellar where something’s lurking and about to leap out on you. Those slow fades always freak me out, just a little. Then you can make shimmering little morphs. Or sideways inserts. There are a lot of options. Everyone does something different, puts their own style-stamp on their work. Me, I prefer the dissolve.”
Pikul was staring away from her, around the large room in which they had found themselves.
“I’m starting to get orientated,” he said.
“Me too,” Geller said, looking about her with interest.
They were in a retail store, a cramped, scruffy one. Not an especially small store, but an overcrowded one. Narrow aisles led between dusty racks crammed with software and games package boxes labeled in bright colors. There were pinball machines in every available spare spot, and the kids leaning over these were setting up a cacophony of mechanical clattering, signal bells and electronic bleeps. Lights were flashing everywhere.
The customers, prowling along the aisles, kept handling the products, taking them down, looking closely at the small print, turning over the boxes to read what might be printed on the reverse. Most of them were muttering secretively, sometimes to one of the others, most often to themselves.
Pikul and Geller squeezed their way along the aisle in which they were, trying to remove themselves from the press of unwashed bodies.
At the far end a cashier was working behind an old-fashioned cash register that was sitting on a tall counter. He eyed them suspiciously from time to time, but in general was kept busy looking intently at the mass of customers, presumably watching for attempts at theft.
When they passed in front of the counter, Pikul noticed that the young man—gangly and sallow in appearance, like many of the customers—was wearing a name tag. He was identified as Hugo Carlaw.
They went into another aisle, not as crowded as the first.
“Have you worked out where we are yet?” Pikul asked.
“Yeah, now that I can see it more clearly, it’s easy. I’m stunned! It’s so realistic! This is the game store I used to go to when I was a kid. The very one! This is exactly how I remember it! I’m amazed! It belongs to a Mr. Nadger or Nadder, or some strange, foreign-sounding name like that. I would hang out here for hours when I was a teenager, hoping for a chance to jack into one of the games.” She nodded toward a row of consoles where many young people crowded around the brightly lit and constantly changing color screens. “Just like most of these people, in fact,” she said.
“Are you serious? This is where you were years ago?”
“No, it’s not real. It’s a simulation. Remember, we’re ported together in the game-pod. eXistenZ has complete access to both our central nervous systems. The games architecture we experience in the game will be based on our memories, our anxieties, our preoccupations . . .”
“Not ours,” Pikul said. “Yours maybe.”
“At the moment my memories are probably predominating. But that isn’t necessarily the rule, and your unconscious can and will take over at any time. It’s just that I’m more used to the game than you, I know some of the moves. You’ll catch on soon enough.”
“Are you serious?”
“You keep saying that. Let’s have a look at some of this stuff.” She turned to the nearest rack and began sifting through the packages on display. “Look at this. Games I’ve never even heard of. Biological Father. What the hell kind of game could that be? Hit By a Car . . . not much imagination needed for that one! Shop Rage. Theme Supermarket. Landlords on the Rampage. Beastmaster of Avalon. Viral Ecstasy. Chinese Restaurant.”
“The excitement is mounting,” Pikul said sardonically. “I can hardly wait to play Biological Father . . . a shoot-’em-up arcader, right?”
“Listen to this.” Geller was reading the back of the Viral Ecstasy box. “When you play this, you get to invade a specific human body—you can choose from a whole library of historical characters—then you create ingenious viral strategies to cope with the efforts of the body’s immune system to destroy you . . .”
“That sounds like it’s about as much fun as having our friend Gas put in a sicko bioport.”
“It’s just one of the games I picked up at random,” she said defensively.
“Not entirely randomly. Not if it comes from your subconscious.”
“It might have come from yours,” she pointed out.
“Oh,” said Pikul, who hadn’t thought of that. He swiftly changed tack. “Look, can you explain something to me? All this stuff on these racks reminds me of what we’re doing. We’re in a game, okay, but what precisely is the goal of the game?”
“To win,” she said. “To finish the game ahead of the game. Nothing special about it.”
“No, I mean what’s the objective?” Pikul persisted. “What are the rules? You keep going on about how wonderful eXistenZ is, but you’ve never actually said anything about what it does.”
“Not all games do something.”
“You play them to do something.”
“No you don’t. Some you just play.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that. There aren’t likely to be a lot of thrills in Biological Father. Or none that I can imagine, anyway. But that game isn’t state of the art. Your game supposedly is. What’s the objective, how do you win?”
She sighed, looking him in the eye as if to try to determine how seriously he meant the questions. She allowed her hand to play lightly across some of the blister packs while she answered.
“The beauty of eXistenZ,” she said, “is that it changes every time you play it. It adapts to the individuals who are playing it. The result is that you have to play the game to find out why you’re playing the game.”
“But that’s kind of cheating, isn’t it?” Pikul said stubbornly. “Not to say confusing.”
“It’s not confusing at all. And it’s not a cheat. eXistenZ takes a much more organic approach to gaming than the classic, arbitrary, rule-dominated games. It’s the future, Pikul. You’ll see how natural it feels. Where we are now . . . doesn’t this feel natural?”
“You mean this shop for computer geeks is the future?”
Pikul shrugged his shoulders expressively, trying to show the antagonism he felt toward the dozens of intent game customers crowding the aisles of the store. None of them showed any reaction; indeed, hardly any of them showed any awareness that he and Geller were even present.
<
br /> Pikul looked around and saw something half familiar lying on the shelf beside him. It was a game-pod. He picked it up and showed it to Geller.
“Did you ever see anything like this before?” he asked.
The pod was contained within a gel-pak that was even more bizarre and otherworldly than Geller’s own tissue pod. They both examined it with interest. It seemed lumpier than Geller’s, less well-integrated or developed. Although the flesh was as venous as her pod’s, there did not appear to be the same underlying organic logic, the sense that it had been ripped somehow from a living being. This pod had an arbitrary, thrown-together feeling. They turned it around in their hands, then over on its back. On the underside they came across a corporate logo, and a name: CORTICAL SYSTEMATICS.
A hand reached between them, from behind, and gently but firmly took the pak away from them. They turned to see who it was.
The man was large and bulky with thinning gray hair. He had a pugnacious air and seemed irritated that they’d been showing such interest in the game-pod. Swinging from his jacket lapel was a name badge: D’ARCY NADER.
“This game-pods are most delicate,” he said, in an accent even more fractured and alien than Kiri Vinokur’s. “I’ll haff to ask you more careful to be, when you are hantling them.”
“We weren’t doing any harm,” Geller said. “We’re just interested customers.”
“Ma’am, I do unterstand. But in common wit many retail outlets, we haff to be careful of pilferage and breakings.”
“Yes,” Pikul said. “I can imagine.”
“You know vat a game-pod is?”
“Sure. We’ve just never seen that one before.”
“Cortical Systematics ist the latest and hottest player. Ist not just a new game, but a whole new system.”
Pikul said, “Yeah yeah, I’ve heard all—”
“Will it work with an industry standard bioport?” Geller said, deftly interrupting him.
But Nader was looking more carefully and curiously at them.
“I haffn’t see you two around this place before, haff I?” he said.
“Well, no—”
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