by Julian Gough
She checks her pockets.
A couple of bright new dollar coins. Not enough . . .
She’s walking fast and, ahead of her, the elevator door opens, and she walks faster, her suitcase juddering and slewing as its wheel sticks. No, I really can’t, I can’t afford to tip. Oh God, he’s going to think it’s because he’s black, he’s going to think I’m like my parents . . . She refuses to meet the bellhop’s eye, almost running for the elevator’s open door, as he angles towards her, trying to cut her off, saying, ‘Ma’am . . .’
21
Her room is clean, empty. She lets go of the handle of her case, and it topples over.
Centre of gravity isn’t between the wheels, bad design, it looks good, slim, but it’s a bad design.
She sits on the bed, and tries to ring Colt, twice, but there’s no reply. The second time, she leaves a message.
‘Everything is fine, Colt. I’ve got a nice room. Ring me if you need me. Make sure you . . .’
No.
‘Happy, ah . . .’
No.
‘I love you.’
She gets up, locks the door, pulls the heavy plush plum-coloured curtains, knocks off the lights, kicks off her shoes, and walks to the bed in the dark. Climbs in, curls up.
It’s so soft. It smells so clean. Knots of muscle loosen, all over her body – it feels like she is melting – until her heart is moving at the speed of Colt’s, and they finally beat in sync.
She sleeps.
22
Colt wakes up early. He’s never woken up alone in the house before; it is the silence that wakes him.
No comforting white noise from the shower at the end of the corridor.
No reassuring clatter of cutlery from the kitchen.
He gets up, and for some reason feels he should move quietly. He had planned to go straight into the game, the moment he woke: but the strangeness of the empty house is a new level that also needs exploring.
First, though, he hauls the little 3D printer out from under a pile of unwashed clothes. He quickly prints the casing he needs, and a couple of the simpler parts. Pockets them, still warm.
As he leaves his room, the house AI murmurs, ‘Mail.’
‘Thanks,’ says Colt, automatically.
He is intensely aware of his soft footsteps, of the silence surrounding them, as he walks towards the front door.
He opens the door. Inhales the dawn air. Cool, fresh.
An overnight delivery drone has quietly left a package, containing the more complex parts he ordered, in the big mailbox. Good.
Behind it, at the back of the mailbox, there’s another package.
Colt takes it out. Hefts it.
Neither light nor heavy.
Turns it.
A handwritten address label.
Colt’s name and address. In his father’s writing.
Colt takes a deep breath, and rips it open.
A mug.
A Doctor Who mug.
Colt’s favourite show, for much of his childhood.
The Doctor, so clever, so kind. So puzzled by human beings, by human emotions.
Sometimes, falling asleep under the poster of Peter Capaldi, Colt would dreamily imagine Doctor Who was his real father, putting him to bed.
Watching over him . . .
Colt examines the mug warily.
Oh, it’s printed wrong.
He didn’t even get me a good one.
Colt’s stomach lurches.
Perhaps it was cheap because it’s got a mistake.
‘I ♥ ♥ the Doctor.’
Oh wait, no. The Doctor has two hearts. All the Time Lords of Gallifrey have two hearts.
There’s a crackling noise in his throat as he reads it again.
‘I ♥ ♥ the Doctor.’
A startled, nervous sound.
It’s only when he realizes that the sound he has just made is laughter that he understands the words and symbols on the mug are a joke.
‘I ♥ ♥ the Doctor.’
‘Funny?’ he says wonderingly. ‘Funny.’
He rotates the mug, examines it. There’s a hasty signature on it, in black.
But why would his dad sign it? Do people do that? Is that normal? Like a birthday card?
No, it’s not his dad’s name . . .
Colt squints, to make it out.
Peter Capaldi.
Colt’s favourite Doctor.
His dad remembered.
Colt’s vision blurs.
He walks around the house, carrying the parcel of parts, the mug.
The mug reminds him, he’s thirsty. Must remember to drink.
He puzzles over why the silence should feel so strange. After all, he spends many of his days alone in the house, working on the gameworld, while his mother works in the lab. A silent house is normal.
No, it’s the silence at this time of day; morning, their best time. The time they really talk. And it’s the knowledge that this silence extends ahead in time: that Mama won’t open the door in a few hours. He’s hearing the future. Life without Mama.
He puzzles over it.
He’d never imagined a future without Mama before. But of course it will happen. Does this feel good or bad?
It’s too early to tell.
He walks softly into the living room, across the rug, pleasant under his feet, and opens the little drinks cabinet that Mama has for guests. That Mama never uses.
He touches all the bottles, left to right, then right to left.
Takes out a half-empty bottle of Suntory whisky. The sunrise swoops and jags through the slosh of dark yellow liquid. There’s a round golden symbol on the old paper label, and Colt lines it up with the sun, so the sun shines dimly through it.
He puts it back, takes out a bottle of Schweppes Tonic Water. ‘Contains Quinine’ says the label.
Explorers used to take quinine to prevent malaria. Cool.
There’s an inch or two gone. Probably flat by now, anyway. He’s never tasted tonic water.
He cracks it open, and there’s a little hiss of carbon dioxide, oh beans, he’s wasted it, she’ll know.
A spurt of panic.
But she won’t be back today. Time to fix it. It’s OK. He lifts it towards his lips, no, don’t touch it.
Germs.
He tilts back his head. Pours some into his open mouth. Fizzy. Not sweet. Metallic. That must be the quinine. Cool . . .
He replaces the cap, puts the bottle back.
Takes out a bottle of vodka. There’s a buffalo on the label.
Hmmm . . . Colt, bemused, studies the buffalo.
Colt likes buffalo. There might not be government, or law, in the semi-mythical Wild West of the gameworld, but there is a fiercely accurate natural ecosystem, intricately interconnected; and the game contains immense herds of buffalo.
So Colt has spent a lot of time designing buffalo, and this one looks wrong.
Wait, now he remembered some European colleague of Naomi saying ‘a gift from my home country’.
Ah, it’s not a buffalo. It’s a European bison.
Polska.
It’s Polish.
Imported.
80 per cent proof.
That’s the one.
He brings the vodka with him to the kitchen.
Assembles everything he needs on the kitchen table. A very traditional, old-school setup. Soldering iron, solder, hot glue gun, coils of wire, see-through plastic bags containing capacitors, resistors, switches, chips of all kinds; the sand-coloured plastic casing and parts he’s just printed; cotton buds from his Mama’s shelf in the bathroom.
Where’s the parcel he ordered? Ah . . .
Colt pops the newly delivered parts out of their neat, light, aerogel package.
He opens the bottle of vodka, pours a little into the cap. Wrinkles his nose at the sharp smell of evaporating ethanol. Dips a cotton bud in the clear liquid.
Begins to clean the contacts on an old physical variable-resistor dial
that he salvaged from a vintage Bang & Olufsen amp. Not practical – they give a nasty crackle if they’re not clean – but Colt likes the retro look.
No, he won’t play the game just yet. He’ll build the booster first.
He doubles over, as though in a car that’s slammed on brakes, as a stab of panicked thought convulses him. Stop! Stop wasting time! Go to the lab! She’ll come back, and you won’t have done it!
And now, real panic.
You need to fix yourself, not the bad reception beyond the ridge, who cares!
Colt hums and nods his head until the thoughts have gone.
He goes back to building the booster. The game really needs a booster. He’s been meaning to do this for months.
23
When he’s finished building the booster, Colt moves through the house, slowly, methodically, looking for extension cords and unplugging them. It’s an old-fashioned house, built without enough sockets, back when everything needed to be plugged in. There are decades’ worth of improvised solutions from the previous owner still in place. Extension cords run unobtrusively along baseboards. Cords emerge from sockets hidden behind wardrobes. Run under rugs. Coil up behind sofas. Loop from rafters.
Once you’re tuned to see them, you see them everywhere.
Colt grimaces. The pattern is illogical. Often, extension cords have been used where it would have been simpler to just unplug a couple of devices and plug them back into different sockets. Most of these extensions aren’t even needed.
He harvests them.
Back in the kitchen with his haul, he looks around. Crouches, looks around again. A very short cord, dangling out of the back of the fridge, plugged into an extension.
Oh, right. Damaged the fridge cord last Christmas, running it over the toaster, had to cut it off short.
But the fridge cord can no longer reach the socket unaided.
He hesitates. He needs the extension cord.
He unplugs the fridge.
‘Colt, are you sure you want to unplug me?’ says the fridge brightly.
Oh yeah. It has a few hours of backup battery, in case of a power outage.
Colt ponders the question.
He has never liked the fridge’s AI. It’s supposed to be child-friendly; but that just means it uses voices from Sesame Street while it lectures him on where to put the milk for optimum freshness.
‘I hate you,’ says Colt, ‘and I want you to die.’
‘OK. I need to have a word with your motherrrrrrrr . . .’ says the fridge in the voice of Big Bird, but Colt has already disabled the AI with a screwdriver before it can notify her that it’s been plugged out, that the temperature will soon be rising . . .
24
Naomi wakes early.
Gets up.
Showers.
Chooses her outfit.
Watches the news in her room blankly for a long time. The soothing wallpaper of other people’s disasters.
An earthquake in Alaska has knocked a small village, on one of the Aleutian Islands, into the sea.
There’s a shooter cornered in a mall in Florida.
Some biohackers have built an airborne version of bubonic plague and released it in their high school in Ohio. The school, and thirty city blocks downwind of it, are under lockdown. She watches the familiar biohazard suits move through the empty streets.
She hasn’t really watched the news since she hit her teens. One morning when she was, what, fifteen, she was watching a live police chase. The guy did a U-turn on the freeway, and got hit by a truck. They showed it over and over. Watching it idly for the third time, something flipped. She realized that a man who had been alive a few minutes before was now dead. That it was real. That he was as real as she was. She turned off the TV, and went to the bathroom, and vomited. Since then, she couldn’t bring herself to watch the news.
Death packaged as entertainment, like Roman gladiator fights . . .
But now it cuts to a World News segment; and the endless catastrophes of weather and war remind her of earlier in her childhood. Her father would explain where these far-off places were, and reassure her that those terrible things could never happen here. She hears his voice in memory, louder than the news, and it is comforting. He wasn’t always a monster. It would have been easier if he were.
When they finally mention Nevada and Las Vegas, in a weather report, she switches it off.
Outside her room, the conference is taking over the hotel. She registers in a daze, gets her name tag and a bundle of stuff she is never going to look at, and wanders the spaces.
Name tags everywhere.
A swarm, gathering.
25
She finds the conference room in which she is due to speak. She is very early. They are putting her on first. She understands, she has no reputation. The carpet in the conference room is startlingly thick.
Why do they have a carpet this thick? Surely there is a lot of dust, dust mites and worse, the problem of dropped food, crumbs, milky drinks spilling and spoiling, that sour smell, so hard to remove . . .
She worries away at this, keeping her head down, staring at the thick carpet as she walks towards the stage, deliberately not thinking about the stage; about standing on the stage; about speaking on the stage in this vast room, with its thick carpet soaking up the sound of her voice.
Spilled milk.
The huge space is almost empty.
Half a dozen people stand huddled together by the edge of the stage, talking quietly.
Scattered among the hundreds of chairs, a few individuals are using the space as a refuge; three read, one writes, two doze.
Someone by the stage looks over, sees her. Strides towards her.
Yaakov.
I’ve missed him.
She hasn’t seen her old teacher since he set up his consilience team at MIT; a big, multidisciplinary unit that puts biologists to work on physicists’ problems, and vice versa.
Much older, white hair now.
‘Naomi!’ His voice is big enough for the room. He slaps her back so hard she sways. ‘Any last tweaks? No? Good. We’ll be delivering the handouts as you go onstage, if that’s OK . . . Ritual! Drama! I was just telling Graham . . .’ he takes her elbow, and leads her toward the stage, ‘. . . yes, come and meet the others . . . I remember when the handouts were done on paper, and if people were interested in your talk, they would follow it, page by page. My God, it was like the wind roaring through the treetops sometimes, as they all turned their pages together . . . I miss paper . . .’ They arrive at the stage edge, and Yaakov releases her elbow. ‘Seul-ki, Graham, this is Naomi Chiang. One of the best students I ever had . . . Let’s all go backstage and relax properly, the green room has decent chairs and lousy coffee . . .’
Backstage . . . soon they would be walking onto a stage, my God, why had she come . . .
26
Colt finally gets the booster running. He puts on his good micromesh suit, fresh from the wash. Adjusts the sensors in his helmet for a while. He’d been all set to play the game, but now he’s strangely reluctant to start.
I’m tired. Got up too early.
His mama is three hours ahead of him now, the sun is higher in her sky. He doesn’t like that thought. I’ll lie down, he thinks. A nap. Yes. He tells the blinds to close. They slide down, till the room is dark. He lies on his bed, closes his eyes.
Before Colt falls asleep, he disconnects real-world mapping, and sets himself walking, inside the other game he’s been playing. He will walk as he sleeps. Away from everyone.
He walks till he falls asleep.
Inside his dreams, he walks.
*
He wakes up inside the helmet. Still wearing the micromesh suit.
And the helmet – triggered by Colt opening his eyes – wakes too; and now he is ingame, in the desert.
Good. That odd reluctance is gone. He’ll play . . .
There’s a panicky voice at the back of his head saying, no, go to the lab; but he ignores it,
ignores it, ignores it.
Think of something else.
Wait. The girl he met last week. Not . . .
Not that he . . .
He uses his developer privileges, checks the sign-ins – wow, so many people playing in India now – but she’s not in the gameworld. He returns to the game environment.
No sign of other players.
No sign of life.
Perhaps a little smoke on the horizon.
He checks the distance travelled during his nap. Not bad. Five miles. He locks it down. And the induction charger he installed in his bedframe has fully powered the helmet as he slept. Good . . . Technically, you’re not meant to charge the helmet while you’re in it, or have a charger under your head while you sleep; but Mama doesn’t know it’s there, and it means he never has to think about power.
As his mind clears, he feels the familiar discomfort. He begins to breathe faster, not because he needs more oxygen, but because he doesn’t; he’s in a panic at the disconnect between his game self, in the game’s desert, walking, and his real self, in bed, motionless; between the sunlight of the gameworld, and the cool dark of his real room.
Fast and shallow; Mama hates it when he breathes like this. He slows it down.
Breathes deeper.
Slower.
Deeper.
Slower.
The panic ebbs.
He could, of course, make real-world mapping automatic on waking.
But then he would be denied the pleasure of turning real-world mapping back on . . . It smoothly walks his game self into a cool, dark cave he hasn’t noticed before.
Yeah, the house works as a cave, nice . . .
He sniffs the air while his eyes adjust. The smell is good. Fresh hay. Yes, there in the far corner. And empty sacks that used to contain corn, animal feed.
Animals shelter here. Shepherds too, maybe.
Here we go . . . His game self lies down, and pulls a torn sack over his legs and body; and his real self merges with his game self.
Full mapping.
He is one with himself. He moves his arm, in the world, in the game. Reaches for the Doctor Who mug full of water by the bed, because his mother has finally trained him to drink enough water, built it into his ritual.
His game hand closes around a clay beaker, left in the cave by a shepherd perhaps. He admires its crude form in the dim light, and drinks real water, game water, from real mug and game beaker, and the map is perfect, and he relaxes.