Alexis looked back at Kester. He was trying to suppress an idiot grin. As she watched him he laughed out loud.
'They've extended and improved it a bit since you read about it, I expect,' she said.
Kester drifted away from her side towards the fence, his hands reaching to grab the chicken wire. She took hold of his arm.
'This way. We've got a corporate pass for north entrance.'
They entered through the wide quadruple doors, which were constantly greeting people with a squabble of different names. Alexis thought she heard the sharp kick of Kester's name amongst the rabble, but couldn't be sure. Just inside the door, the rush of clients were channelled into eight short corridors, divided by rails of orange boiler suits that were revolving at the same pace as the moving walkway below. There was a beep alongside each of their chests as they approached the rail queue.
'Sizing information,' Alexis whispered into Kester's ear from behind. 'See – the suit alongside you will be your size. It sometimes gets confused though – can't keep up. Don't be offended if it misjudges your girth.'
She giggled as she drew back to take her own suit off the rail, observing Kester's confusion as he realised that everyone was stripping down to their underwear, if they were wearing any. He did the same, wrestled his clothes onto the hanger and managed to clamber into his suit just as he was turfed off the walkway.
'It's a fine art,' said Alexis as they emerged onto the first level. She took his elbow and moved him out of the way of the stream of clients entering behind them. 'You didn't do badly for a first time.'
Alexis drew her hair back into a tight long plait with deft fingers and wound and rewound a band around it. She reached into the pocket of her suit, took out the mesh mask that was supplied with it and slipped it over her head. It was soft on her face and pretty much invisible, except when she turned her head and it ruched up. Kester would be able to see her eyes, the shape of her face, her lips moving behind the mesh, but from a couple of paces away she could be anyone.
'Anonymity,' she said. 'The only way to play.'
Would he realise this was an order? She watched as he looked in his own pocket, found his mask and put it on.
'Right,' Alexis said, nodding. 'There are rules. No funny business – this place is just for play.'
She saw him tense. Play was perhaps the wrong word to use. She would have to draw him in. She grabbed him by the hand and dragged him at a run up the first ramp.
'And not that kind of play.' She looked over her shoulder, hoping her grin was visible through her mask.
All around them were boiler-suited adults, frolicking like kids, shrieking and running, climbing, falling over and rolling on the ground, play fighting. Some faces were masked, others were uncovered and flushed with fun.
After climbing a few staircases they came to a floor which was filled with different coloured rubber hoops, some standing on end, some racked up the way to form ladders.
'OK. Rules are you have to take the same route as me. Catch me if you can – tag!'
Alexis punched Kester on the arm, then ducked through the first hoop. After two more hoops, she realised that he was just standing there.
'Have you forgotten how to play?' she asked.
She glanced around to see that no-one was watching and flashed a nipple at him through the poppered front of her suit. For a second there was no indication what effect it had had, and then he burst out laughing.
'Mrs Farrell,' he said in mock shock, then dropped to all fours and wriggled after her through the first of the hoops, grabbing at her bare feet.
'Lex.' Not Mrs Farrell, not Alexis, not in here. Mrs Farrell was hanging on a rail with several hundred other corporate identities in the basement of the building. 'Call me Lex.'
She squealed like a child and they were off. It should have been so inappropriate. But then that was half the fun. As Alexis grew breathless, she felt a familiar sensation in her chest. A high up ball of excitement – elation, the sort she hadn't felt for years, even here. A silly disconnected elation, the thrill of playing chase. Nothing mattered.
They soon sat in a panting, smiling heap at the side of the play area, backs to the fence. Alexis drew her feet up in front of her like a gangly child. She stared at Kester's gauze mask until she felt sure she was seeing all she could of his face.
'Where to next, cowboy?'
'I can't. I'm knackered!'
'You can, you can. Our meeting's scheduled for two hours.'
'Two hours?'
'You wondered how we all stayed so skinny, sitting in front of our ludicrous desks all day, didn't you?'
Kester laughed, then gazed into his lap for a few moments.
'How about…' He shook his head as if the choice was just too much for him. 'How about…'
'How about the space shuttle level?'
'Space? Yeah!'
They clambered and skidded their way up to the space level.
At the centre of the level was an orrery climbing frame, its arms rotating slowly, sweeping careless climbers from their planets, back to the padded floor. After a couple of goes trying to mount Mars, Kester gave up and staggered towards the chill-out area, where egg chairs styled as planets sprouted from the floor and spangly nets dangled from the night sky ceiling.
'You know, I'm surprised,' Kester said, lowering himself into the core of Mercury.
'Why?' Alexis asked.
'Surprised at how low-tech everything is. I mean there are lots of props and scenery and stuff and it's amazing…but it's all just stuff – there's no clever technology.'
Alexis relaxed and shrugged. She pulled herself up into a starnet, laid back and closed her eyes.
'You spend your working life surrounded by technology,' she said. 'Don't you feel like you want a break from it?'
'Yes. I wasn't complaining about it – I just – I'm surprised. It's nice, but I'm surprised by it.'
'Didn't expect it from City folk.'
'Didn't expect that I would go somewhere in the City that reminded me what good clean fun was like. Is that it? I don't know.'
She didn't speak, let him struggle it out.
'All the wearing and all the stupid behaviour that went before it – the sexual boasting, the drugs, the risk-taking – I don't get why all these people do it when from what you see here it looks like all they want to do is get away from it. Why do they do it?'
It was a good question. Alexis looked around her. People were having fun, but they weren't playing safe. To her right, a man – probably a man – was standing on the top of a tall spaceship, right on the nose. Two of his mates were standing at the bottom, creasing up as he tried to keep his balance, one foot on the uncomfortably sharp-looking tip, the other slipping repeatedly down the cone of the nose. A few seconds later, he fell with a holler, clattered his back on the wing of the shuttle and landed on the matting below, an orange sack of painful angles. His mates' laughter reached a crescendo as he lay groaning on the floor.
'Testosterone,' Alexis said. The word sent her straight back eighteen years to her interview at V:
'Testosterone.'
It wasn't the usual 'what would you bring to the role' response. And from all of the interview candidates for the job, Gaunt probably hadn't expected this answer from Alexis: 28 years old, tall, slim, beautiful. At least it would get her remembered.
'I would have said balls, but that wouldn't be strictly true.' Alexis had already sniffed out Gaunt's liking for a bit of smut and innuendo. 'But I can confidently say that I have high testosterone levels. Aside from escalating my waxing bill it shapes my attitude and fuels my ambition.'
'Your ambition is plain,' the chief interviewer said.
Juno Chen was a handsome and petite Glaswegian of Chinese descent, not much older than Alexis.
'We've seen you in the proof pictures on several of the news sites. Some of the candidates haven't even made an effort to be seen. You, on the other hand, have been pictured engaged, shall we say, with my opposite a
t Stark Wellbury. An ambitious target indeed.'
Alexis permitted herself a smile. By sleeping with him she had put herself well into the right bracket for the job. If he judged her to be of the right calibre to take to bed, that was a pre-stamped seal of approval. And she had made sure she was pictured talking to him at length beforehand – made sure it wasn't interpreted as just an old man risking his reputation for the sake of a nice arse.
'I have been researching the company and I'm aware that relations with Stark Wellbury will be crucial to the success of your biggest new project. Supplying immunosuppressants for one patient group of screen users is one thing, but when they roll out the nanoscreen scheme to all the inner cities and keyworkers in the country – that's a big ramp-up in production.'
Chen stared at her for a moment. Alexis wondered what she was thinking. This was information she shouldn't have. It was a gamble using it. Gaunt looked round at Chen and she nodded.
'You're quite right, of course, my dear,' Gaunt said. 'You are aware though, that we aren't recruiting externally on that project.'
'I'm aware that good relations will be of ongoing importance and that it was sensible to put myself in a position where I already have contacts with your primary collaborators and clients.'
Some of her contemporaries still treated performing outrageous sex acts as an outlet for their frustrated risk-taking sensibilities, something to fill the hole that drug controls and protectionism had left in their worlds. For Alexis it was purely business. She had been one of the first to see how recruiters were treating the gossip pages – a Who's Who of the ambitious and desirable. It had been a trend she'd assured her fiancé wouldn't continue, but with the new nanotechnology being rolled out to everyone in the City people's sexual freedom would be complete. Why wouldn't they continue? Still, if she got the job at V, she wouldn't have to do it any more.
'You've been getting to know our clients too?' Chen asked.
'You could say that.'
Alexis looked down at Kester. So much had changed since she was new in the job like he was. So little had changed.
He was lying as if relaxed. She remembered the feeling of being constantly on guard, on display. It was harder for him. She had been up on the sexual politics of the City from the beginning of her career and had moved with it, managing to make it look effortless, but to Kester it was a whole new world.
'You like it here?' she asked. 'In the PlayPen I mean.'
'Yes.'
'But?' She sensed from his body language there was something more to come.
Kester looked up. There it was, a shadow at his brow. She could see it. He was a grown man with a bag over his head; like the rest of them he had to hide to reveal himself. No. She must stop him from thinking that way. She must help him lose himself once again before he slipped up and called her Mrs Farrell.
'Nothing,' he said, before she had time to say anything. 'Come on – pirates!'
-o-
Kester sat on his couch, eating noodles and inspecting his shins for bruises. He was sure he deserved at least two or three. His two-hour meeting at the PlayPen had completely knackered him, but he felt the most relaxed he had in months. The place was amazing. If it could bring out the fun in Farrell it could bring out the fun in anyone.
He took his Book out and put it on the seat beside him. I've got corporate passes for the PlayPen, he typed, how about it? The first five or six messages he had sent to Dee he had spent hours crafting. They had been long and full of explanation and apology. These hadn't worked. But this would – how could it not? It was just a really cool fun thing to do.
Kester flicked off his wall, slipped on his dressing gown and slippers and went to his desk, leaving the noodle box sitting on his couch. He removed the paper file he kept in his bottom drawer, picked up his Book and wandered out into the lab.
It was late and the lab was empty. On Kester's lead, most of the technicians were starting to work what he considered 'normal' hours. It freaked him a little bit when they did odd shifts. The thought that while he was sleeping there was someone through the wall filling test-tubes seemed sinister to him. Anything could be happening through there. The human testing models for the viruses lived on the same floor too, confined to the isolation suites. It was odd knowing that they were there, cut off, unseen, unheard.
Kester gravitated to the central desk where he had begun his work, sat down and unpacked the file.
The exploded diagram of the screen looked like a car advert to him, like an image of something massive made smaller and not vice versa. It was decorated with highlighter and notes, pointing out which technologies were patented and which were public, which bits might be of use to him in a new screen and which would not. The engineering side had taken him a while to get his head around and the thought of grinding through it had been keeping him away. Hard nanotech was not his strong point. He turned the page over and was calmed by the plain white of it. Taking a pen out of the file, he noted down the names of a few viruses and the basic functions he needed.
'Request Advanced Virology, Seacombe and Witt, Chapter IV,' he said to the ceiling.
The display on the desk in front of him popped up, sliding his papers forwards.
'OK,' he said, chewing on the end of his pen.
Chapter 7
'What do the models think? Are they all showing OK?' Kester asked as they walked along the beluga-white corridor to the lab. The first round of in vivo testing was underway under Gerald's supervision.
'Fine, sir,' Gerald said. 'Hera is finding things a bit itchy, but I'm pretty sure we can find a fix for that before it goes out.'
'I thought they were experienced wearers who could take adverse symptoms OK. I thought that was half the thing with these guys.'
'The more macho ones, yes, but remember, they're usually on serious painkillers. I just feel a little sorry for her. She's so dainty and she fidgets like a whippet when it's getting to her. She's not going to look good walking down the catwalk looking like she's running away from herself.'
'Fair point.'
Kester took a breath and puffed it out. This would be the first time he had seen his results first-hand and his stomach was wringing out. He held in his head the picture his graphic designer Helena had created. Would it live up to his vision, her vision?
It seemed to have come around quickly. The torso testing had been brief – twelve weeks perhaps – thanks to the fact that he had used a tried and tested carrier virus, but introducing non-viral matter and effects was risky. He was confident the torsos had screened out all the versions with less desirable side-effects. Now he got to see it working in practice. This was the fun part. All the more extreme projects he had worked on at the Institute had been taken off his hands for in vivo testing. The stuff he'd done was based only on interaction with human tissue – torso testing. Of course, in those cases the results in the relevant tissue were usually enough to tell you how things would play out in a whole human body. The aesthetics of the viruses hadn't been a particular concern, except where the customer wanted the visible symptoms to be minimised, so for the most part it wouldn't have been pleasant to be involved in that stage.
'I'm guessing your last lot of customers didn't care how much something itched,' Gerald said, smiling to himself.
'I was just thinking about that. About the aesthetic side of things. There were only a couple of times that anyone cared a jot about the visual symptoms of the virus and that was to conceal it.'
'Conceal it?'
'One was for private use. A self-administered treatment I suppose you would call it. Think about it – if you were self-medicating for something you wouldn't necessarily want it plastered all over you, would you?'
'I suppose not.' Gerald's interest was piqued, but they had reached the entrance to the lab. He shifted his weight on his feet for a moment as if he was about to ask something, then changed his mind. 'How are the minions doing?'
Along the ranks of benches, white-coated figures bent over tes
t-tubes and terminals. Each movement made was controlled, focused. Even the breathing of the technicians was restrained. Every now and then, the silence was broken by the whirr of a machine, or the mechanical creak of apparatus unfolding from the ceiling above.
'As you know,' Gerald said, 'we tested a wide range of genoprofiles in the torso testing. In vivo, we're testing on six subjects with different racial origins. In an ideal world, we want the symptoms to be as close as possible in the different subjects.'
'Close,' Kester said as they zigzagged their way across the room between lab benches, 'but Farrell reckons variations are good. Every one is personalised.'
'But you need to know what they're wearing, right? What point's a designer label if it isn't hanging out?'
'Well,' Kester said, shrugging.
'We're keeping the subjects quarantined. You know what people are like. We don't want the virus getting out – being leaked, so to speak. And we don't want any other factors interfering with the outcomes, if you know what I mean.'
'Yes, I think I do.' Kester shook his head. They must recruit for oversexed individuals, he thought. He'd never seen anything like it.
'But we're testing males and females with both of course, so it's not like they're totally deprived.'
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