by Kirton, Bill
‘I was stupid,’ said Karl. ‘Wrote a stupid program. I wanted a quick quarrel, then … well, like you said, to make up. But making up was hard to do.’
‘Come here,’ said Beebie.
Ken sat beside her on the couch. She curled herself up against him.
‘Forgive me?’ said Ken.
‘Nothing to forgive,’ said Beebie. ‘It was a misunderstanding. We were both silly. Said things we didn’t mean.’
‘Yes. I never want another argument. I just want us to keep loving the way we do.’
‘So do I, my darling,’ said Beebie. ‘But it was interesting, all the same. Exciting even.’
‘Too exciting for me. I thought I’d lose you,’ said Ken.
‘Silly,’ said Beebie.
They clung together, happy to be restored to normal. Eventually, it was Beebie who broke the silence. She nuzzled her lips nearer to Ken’s ear and said, ‘Fucking good argument, though, wasn’t it?’
13 health and safety
When Joe Lorimer came across examples such as these, he felt reassured. People were using AD not just for extremes of experience but also to enrich their day to day lives, to learn to value the simple pleasures as well as the extremes. There was, however, one development in AD that irritated him more and more as he came across its impact on residents’ lives. For all the omniscience of Red Loth and for all Joe’s algorithmic skills, he was powerless before the activities of a group of residents who’d formed themselves into a Health and Safety Inspectorate.
The first he heard of them was when Ross Magee was helping a family build a log cabin in a clearing half way up a mountain in Canada. Building in AD has none of the stresses and dangers of its ND equivalent. The avatars simply produce a block of wood out of thin air then stretch it until it’s the right size for the wall, door, ceiling, or whatever other function it’ll serve. They lie another layer of patterning over it – wallpaper, logs, tiles and so on – and simply stick the pieces together. When the whole house is built, they can then stretch it further to fit their chosen plot or accommodate any extra family members who appear. It’s a quick, satisfying process.
Ross was working on decorating the porch with hanging baskets of flowers when some words appeared on the screen.
‘What d’you think you’re doing?’
He looked around to find two men, one with a clipboard, the other with a briefcase. It was briefcase-man who’d spoken. He pointed at the porch and repeated the question.
‘What d’you think you’re doing?’
‘What’s it look like?’ said Ross.
‘A porch,’ said the man.
His colleague wrote a note on the clipboard.
‘Satisfied?’ said Ross.
The man went to the porch, looked all round it, touched one basket and made it swing, then said, ‘Not by a very long chalk. Got the dimensions of this?’
‘Course not,’ said Ross. ‘It was about the size of a shoe box when I made it. I just expanded it until it fitted the doorway. Anyway, why’re you asking that?’
‘Needs to be at least thirty-seven centimetres higher than the tallest resident or potential guest.’
‘Who said so?’
The man nodded at his colleague who held up his clipboard and showed him some paper headed ‘HSI – Keeping you safe, not sorry’.
‘Never heard of you,’ said Ross.
‘Headquarters are in Brussels but the legislation applies world-wide,’ said the man.
‘Says who?’
‘Article 387, para. 12, sub-section 32a,’ said the man.
He tapped the side of the porch.
‘If you want this to stay here, you’ll need to put up notices of its dimensions. You’ll also need warnings that residents should resize their avatars before approaching within 3.479 metres of the threshold.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Ross. ‘How many avatars have banged their heads on porches?’
‘Thanks to our regulations, none,’ said the man.
‘Crap,’ said Ross. ‘They don’t need regulations. Even if they did bang into a porch, so what? It wouldn’t hurt them.’
‘That’s not the point,’ said the man. ‘They could sue the owner. But not if his signage complied with regulations.’
‘Listen,’ said Ross. ‘I know the guy who designed all this and his idea was to get rid of bloody regulations. He wanted individuals here to be free.’
‘That’s a common error in all forms of government,’ said the man. ‘Individual freedom of expression leads to anarchy – just look at the USA.’
‘There’s no anarchy there.’
‘There would be if their lawyers weren’t so conscientious.’
The man took a few paces towards Ross and stopped beside him.
‘You see, societies need to be regulated,’ he said. ‘People need guidance. They like to know where they stand. There has to be an official line. Everything the HSI does is for the good of AD residents.’
‘Like what?’ asked Ross.
‘Well, next month we’ll be rolling out our “HFE” initiative.’
Ross just looked at him.
‘Health For Everyone,’ said the man. ‘Avatars don’t exercise nearly enough.’
‘What?’ said Ross. ‘Why do they need to exercise?’
‘If they don’t, they’ll get fat.’
‘Avatars don’t get fat. They’re bunches of pixels,’ said Ross.
The man looked at his colleague.
‘Show him,’ he said.
The colleague thumbed through some pages on his clipboard and held it up for Ross to see. He’d revealed a graph showing correlations between physical activity (or lack of it) and obesity. Underneath was the equation p2(4p – β3)(sinπ ÷ √4.65) ≈ Ω10.3.
‘What the fuck’s this?’ said Ross.
‘Quantifiable variables consistent with exponential progressions in a parallax matrix,’ said the man.
‘I’d never have guessed,’ said Ross.
In the end, Joe left the two men with the house builders and logged off. He immediately looked through the central database to find out what he could about these HSI people. They’d begun as a small group in London and spread like a virus through the whole of AD, even sending missionaries to islands in the South Pacific, up the Amazon and into unexplored regions of Africa. People had joined in order to conform to their famous regulations and the movement had gained a momentum to match that of the Catholic Church.
If nothing else, Joe had to admire their commitment to their cause even though its consequences were disastrous. One of the regular major tourist attractions in AD was the quarterly migration of lemmings off various cliffs. Thousands of avatars used to gather to watch the Kamikaze spectacle. Then, one autumn, the HSI insisted that each individual lemming sign an affidavit attesting it was of sound mind and absolving the landowner of any responsibility for its upcoming fate. The forms were long and difficult to understand so instead of a progressively denser flood of fur pouring over the cliff and down into the sea, the spectacle was that of a clifftop crammed with perplexed, agitated lemmings scratching their heads and chewing their biros, with masses more waiting in queues for their turn, and only the occasional plop as an individual completed its form, got it countersigned and was given permission to leap.
The trade in hiring unicorns was badly hit, too, when the Inspectorate insisted that herds be tested regularly for equine ailments from Aural plaques and Bog Spavin to Urticaria and Windgalls. One summer, entire herds in lower Tuscany had to be destroyed when they were found to be suffering all the symptoms of Equine Infectious Anaemia – fever, body oedema and lethargy. In the worst cases, their horns actually started growing downwards into their skulls causing severe personality disorders.
There was the occasional example of an HSI campaign which produced desirable results. As in the case of Zinzan Dill, a research assistant in one of the private AD hospitals. Hospitals in AD are, of course, unnecessary but they do offer particularly rich
avatars another way of displaying their wealth. Zinzan was awarded a grant to investigate the possibility of creating an animation that would, when triggered, produce a subtle blushing effect on an avatar’s cheeks and neck. It was all part of the refinements that Joe had hoped would materialise as residents became more involved with AD’s processes. The problem for Zinzan was that he was rather too enthusiastic.
When he launched his program at a gathering of the hospital’s administrators, it was clear that he’d taken the effect a step too far. He used his own avatar as a guinea pig and, at first, the watching bureaucrats were impressed as they saw the pink wash rising up his neck and into his cheeks. Their approval was soon withdrawn, however, when his colour deepened, his hair started blushing, and blood began dripping from his nose. Within eight seconds, it was also gushing from his ears, eyes and mouth. Fortunately, an HSI member was on hand to halt the demonstration before news of the rogue experiment permeated through to any patients and thus prevented them becoming even richer by suing the hospital for failing to conduct adequate risk assessments.
As Joe logged out of the database, he reluctantly had to acknowledge that organisations such as the HSI were inevitable products of the normalisation of the AD experience. He couldn’t imagine them having any success in dealing with Goths, vampires or any of the sprawling communities of fairies, elves, goblins, dragons and other sprites and monsters in AD, but for the ordinary, timid humanoids, men with clipboards were a sort of reassurance that the world still had form and purpose.
14 cats
The clipboard fetishists preferred to live their safely guarded AD lives in ignorance of some of the extremes in its darkness. Not even the most fastidiously correct HSI inspector could have coped, for example, with what happened to Bob Gantleton. For his AD avatar, Milton Zork, he’d chosen a dark-eyed, dark-haired male in black leathers, but he could see the attraction of being a cat. At first, he hadn’t understood why people wanted to do that when there was such a wide choice of human body shapes and sizes and so much variety in the features you could give yourself. He watched the feline avatars stand there with their ears twitching and their tails swishing from side to side and found his curiosity growing about the actual physical nature of the persons who’d chosen to represent themselves in that way. The more cats he’d met, the more fascinating they seemed to become. There was one in a pale tiger skin who wore bling necklaces and jewels and looked sensational. When she occasionally used one of her other avatars – a blue-eyed redhead with the statutory perfect figure – he felt less inclined to spend time with her.
It was Lucy who explained it all to him. She’d appeared on a dance floor once, weaving her own individual moves among the others, who were all coupled in the tangled intricacies of the samba or else glued together and swaying through one of the slower dances. At one point she’d bumped into Milton and apologised. Milton’s partner, a Goth with red teardrops tattooed on both cheeks, had told her to fuck off and Lucy had stopped and said, ‘My dear girl, I understand that your apparel expresses your desire to resist convention. Such resistance is always the refuge of those who are struggling with a sense of inadequacy. I’ve no doubt yours is very deep and I should feel sympathy for you instead of amused disdain, but telling me to fuck off provokes just one reaction. Shove it up your ass, sister.’
The Goth could only manage another ‘Fuck off’ and Lucy resumed her solitary gliding. But she did take the time to send Bob a personal message and, eventually, the two of them became close friends. Strangely, the Goth was somehow changed by the incident. She spent the rest of the evening complaining of a headache and pains in her neck and, just a week later, she failed to sign on at her usual time and Bob never saw her again.
Milton and Lucy were never lovers, always friends, and hung out together whenever they could. Bob was surprised to find that she liked the occasional visit to a BDSM site and was happy to send personal messages to him while she allowed herself to be strapped to various devices and ill-treated by more or less articulate masters. It was all part of what she called ‘full-on living’. She craved sensations, was always looking for new experiences. As a human avatar she’d quickly exhausted the possibilities but launching herself as a cat forced her to think in different ways.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think I even move like a cat in normal life nowadays. I’m more aware of my body, I can achieve an amazing stillness when I listen for something. My reactions have sharpened. Oh, and I don’t need anyone. I’m totally self-reliant.’
‘Weren’t you like that before?’ asked Bob.
‘Nope,’ she replied. ‘Always needed reassurance, or at least confirmation that I was making the right choices. Not any more.’
‘And you think that’s come from being a cat?’
‘No doubt about it.’
As the weeks and months went by, Bob heard more and more about Lucy’s everyday life. Her real name was Beatrice and she lived alone in a smallish town in the foothills of the Alps. She’d had a husband but one year he went to Rio for Mardi Gras and never came back. She had no living relatives and earned money by proof-reading manuscripts for a publisher in London. Her days were spent at her computer and her only pastime, apart from wandering through various virtual worlds, was to take long walks or ride her chestnut pony in the hills after the sun had set.
Then she told him about Sukie.
Sukie was a kitten who’d just walked through her front door one day, three years before, and sat looking at her. She was tiny, with two white paws and a perfect diamond of white fur between her eyes. Beatrice had picked her up, she’d snuggled into her neck and Beatrice knew that she had to keep her.
Sukie cost her nothing. There was never any need to buy the expensive cat food that was so extravagantly praised in TV adverts as if it was a gastronomic marvel. Sukie always found her own food, coming back from forays into the fields and woods around the house with blood on her face and claws and jumping onto Lucy’s lap to purr and lick herself clean.
‘She’s perfect. So self-sufficient,’ said Beatrice. ‘I could never be as … self-contained as she is. I know you think it’s crazy but she and I understand one another.’
‘Maybe not crazy,’ said Bob, ‘but I think you need to get out more, see some people.’
Beatrice laughed.
‘Sukie wouldn’t like that,’ she said. ‘Sometimes we get sales people coming to the door. She sits just inside watching me as I speak to them, and I can feel her disapproval. Once, I went for a test drive with a man who was delivering my new car and, when I got back, she jumped onto my lap, stood with her front paws on my chest and looked straight into my eyes.’
‘Scary,’ said Bob.
‘Yes,’ said Beatrice. ‘But then she purred and lay against me with her head curled under my chin. But,’ she added with a smile,’ she did give me a little nip in the neck – just to show she disapproved.’
‘What do you suppose she thinks about you talking to me like this then?’ asked Bob, looking at Milton and Lucy sitting on the grass in a park.
‘She’s looking at you now,’ said Beatrice. ‘She always sits on my lap as I type. She watches the screen. I think she knows you.’
‘Not sure I like that,’ said Bob. ‘She might put me in the same category as the car guy.’
‘Oh no. I know what she’s feeling. I don’t think she minds you.’
‘How about the guys at the BDSM places?’
‘She watches. Looks at me now and then, then turns back to the screen. I think it … amuses her.’
‘Bloody hell. A laughing cat … no, a laughing, sadistic cat,’ said Bob.
Beatrice smiled.
Under a tree behind the two avatars Bob noticed two action hooks labelled ‘Temptation’.
‘I wonder what she’d think if we jumped on those hooks,’ he said.
‘She’d hate it,’ said Beatrice.
‘How come?’ said Bob.
‘I just know she would.’
‘So it�
�s funny if other guys carve lumps off Lucy and stick all sorts of bits of metal into her and up her, but not if poor old Milton there puts a friendly arm round you. That’s weird.’
‘Stop, Bob,’ said Beatrice. ‘She understands you.’
Bob laughed.
‘Now I know you’re taking the piss,’ he said. ‘You’re saying she can read too.’
‘Not read, no. But she knows. She and I are … very close. It’s hard to explain. Hard to understand even. We’re cats.’
‘No, Beatrice. You’re a woman. Your avatar is a cat. It seems to me that …’
He stopped. The circle of stars had appeared telling him she was offline and, moments later, Lucy had disappeared.
He thought little of it. She often got cut off – the weather up in the mountains did strange things with her connections and she was sometimes off for a day or more. But when a whole week went by without her reappearing, he was puzzled. They’d been meeting online for over a year and she’d always told him when she’d be going away for any length of time. Sometimes she had to go to London for meetings with the publisher and now and then she liked to go camping in the hills.
After three weeks he was genuinely concerned. If she’d decided to stop logging on, he knew she’d have told him. He searched online for newspapers published in her region, even finding her local evening paper. He read the obituaries and scanned the headlines for news of accidents or mishaps. But there was just silence. And yet he couldn’t just forget about her. It seemed strange to log on knowing that she’d be missing from all their usual places.
Two months later, he still couldn’t get her out of his head and he decided to try to find out what the hell had happened. He knew that she lived on the eastern fringes of her town, at the foot of a particular hill. He wrote to the town’s police department, phrasing his letter very carefully and explaining that he was concerned for the safety of his friend and would appreciate news of her. Two weeks later, he received a reply. It thanked him for bringing their attention to the fact that Beatrice seemed to be missing and regretted to inform him that his friend was dead. They also said that they would be sending two of their officers to see him and they’d appreciate it if he would answer some questions about his relationship with her. Bob was stunned. What the hell could have happened? How was his relationship with her relevant?