Another Life

by Peter Anghelides

  Owen jutted his chin down awkwardly. The helmet wouldn’t let him bend that far. So he gestured towards the far side of the barber-shop, and positioned himself in front of the wall-mounted mirror to get a full-length view.

  Well, from the reflection, it was undeniable. Glendower Broadsword was broad, tall, golden-haired and very good-looking. And for the first time it was apparent that, within that stout leather jerkin, she possessed a very impressive pair of breasts.

  Once he’d got the hang of flying, Owen was able to zoom around to several locations he remembered from his previous visits to Second Reality. Only now he was totally immersed in the world, and the images and sounds that surrounded him were almost overwhelming. He spent time on a beach, swinging on a tyre suspended from nothing. A giant eye, called Harold, floated unblinking next to him and together they watched the sun set orange over the sea horizon, before baby turtles fought their way across the sand into the surf.

  He visited a slum area adjacent to a bright commercial district, where gun battles raged. Grubby dispossessed zombies stared blankly at their reflections in the smoked glass of passing stretch limos, before succumbing to a vigilante attack. Indifferent law enforcement officers looked on from the corner. Owen watched the same zombie consumed by flame twice before he moved on. The commercial district was a Chicago-inspired cityscape. The streets were covered in stylised flower motifs like giant asterisks, and the trams chattered their way down the hills to the sound of ‘Chasing Cars’ by Snow Patrol.

  He watched a tennis match played on top of a skyscraper. Andy Murray was losing the first set to an unnamed and unranked hippopotamus who had startling white tennis shorts and a savage backhand. Owen eventually moved on in disappointment when he spotted that Murray’s repeated inability to read the hippo’s limited repertoire of passing shots was evidence that they were playing the same four games over and over again.

  Owen also recognised several characters from his previous visits. A tavern owner called Jeremy Cross. Molly, a schoolgirl on a tricycle. Belle and Alexei, twin explorers in pith helmets, who appeared from a caravan in the desert. It was like seeing cartoon characters brought to life as living people. A pirate called Cap’n Ian Sharkchum leapt at him from some overhanging trees in the shadows of a London park, trying to unseat him from a horse he’d borrowed from the Coldstream Guards. He managed to shake Sharkchum off. When the Cap’n had tried the same thing from the same tree on two further occasions, Owen got bored and decided to experiment with mortality.

  He’d located a Russian roulette game in an abandoned snooker hall. He took one of the four seats around a dusty blue pool table, and surveyed the other players. Their faces were lit by the reflected illumination of the shaded strip light overhead. Opposite, Brad Kominsky was a GI, his tight khaki T-shirt half-covered by the empty bandolier across his chest. Brenda Simone looked like a fortune teller, wreathed in the smoke from her fat cigar. And seated next to Owen was Walter Pendulum, a barrel-chested man in a tuxedo but with the head of a giraffe. Walter seemed very impressed with Owen, and batted his long eyelashes suggestively. As a cruel distraction, Owen pointed to the double-action revolver on the table. The gun they would each be using in turn.

  They placed their initial bets, notes fluttering down on the blue baize. Owen could feel his heart starting to race. What was it about putting a virtual revolver to his character’s head that could cause such anxiety? When he picked up the weapon, he knew. In the greater realism of Toshiko’s version of Second Reality, he was actually raising his hand to his own head

  Spin the cylinder. Pull the trigger.

  Click. No shot.

  Owen felt himself relax. He started to breathe again, and tried not to make his relief obvious to the other players.

  Walter Pendulum picked up the revolver. It was obvious at once that his arm was not long enough to reach up and place the barrel against his giraffe-head. Kominsky offered to aim and fire for him, and this started a debate with Simone about whether a killing shot would constitute murder rather than suicide. In the end, Pendulum cranked his neck down and pulled the trigger himself. No shot.

  Kominsky snatched up the gun, spun the cylinder. Hesitated with the barrel to his head. Opened his eyes to stare straight at Owen.

  Pulled the trigger.

  The gun exploded into life. Kominsky’s head dissolved in a mist of blood, and his body was flung back from the table to land in a crumpled pile.

  Brenda Simone recovered the gun. Calmly reloaded from a box of shells on the table. Spun the cylinder. Squeezed the trigger.

  No shot.

  ‘Round’s over,’ she observed coldly. ‘Let’s raise the stakes.’ She stacked up more notes on the table. ‘Call the ante, or take a hike,’ she said to Pendulum.

  Owen watched a huge gulp work its way down Pendulum’s long throat. He was looking at Kominsky’s dead body where it lay in a heap on the snooker hall’s stained floorboards. Pendulum stood up, terrified. Banged his head on the lampshade. Ran for the door, his little giraffe’s tail waggling fearfully through a hole in the back of his tuxedo trousers. They could hear his hoofbeats clank down the metal stairs as he fled.

  Simone transferred her basilisk stare to Owen without blinking. ‘Call the ante, or take a hike.’

  ‘Or bid up the pot,’ replied Owen, and slid all his remaining cash across the table.

  He was surprised again at how breathless he felt. He picked up the revolver, spun the cylinder. His chest tightened as he lifted the gun to his temple. Heard the greased click as it revolved. For a split second before he pulled the trigger, he wondered: ‘What if…?’

  The long trigger pull cocked the hammer. Owen continued to apply pressure.

  The hammer released. Struck the round in the chamber.

  The bullet exploded into his head.

  EIGHT

  The third time that he shot himself through the head, Owen began to suspect something was not quite right. He would find his way to the snooker hall, sit down with the three other people, and play Russian roulette. The outcome was always identical, no matter what he did – using a different route to the hall, sitting in a different seat, firing with his left hand, not raising the final stake. The others survived or died in the same sequence. And he always copped it after Walter Pendulum abandoned the contest.

  This version of Second Reality was more realistic in many ways, but that was only on the surface – the quality of the graphics, the fidelity of the sound, his total immersion in the sensory experience. In the most important way it was less real. Because the whole thing seemed predetermined. The other players had the same backgrounds and experience every time they played. They were just programmed, they didn’t seem to learn. It was so unlike the Internet-connected version, where the advantage of playing with real people was their unpredictability, and the opportunity to riff off their ideas as they participated.

  Owen struggled with the clasp on his helmet and managed to unlatch it and free himself. The Torchwood Hub reappeared around him. He discovered that he’d twisted his chair around several times during his game-play, and now needed to disentangle himself from the wires attached to the helmet.

  Once he’d carefully peeled off the data-gloves, he located his old-fashioned keyboard and typed in a search request. The computer revealed where the locator in Toshiko’s mobile placed her at the moment.

  ‘Did you have fun?’ she asked him when he walked in to find her in the R&R area. Toshiko was lounging on the far side by the 1980s Asteroids machine. A couple of other figures played pinball just behind her. Owen hadn’t been expecting them to come back in this evening.

  ‘Quite impressive,’ Owen admitted. ‘Hi guys. I thought you’d all gone home for the night?’

  As he stepped through the door into the area, he was aware of a shimmering effect around him. He rotated his hands in front of him, examining the front and back of each. He wore a pair of backless gloves in pale deerskin. Glendower Broadsword’s gloves. And now he came to look, he was
also clothed in Glendower’s black leather jerkin.

  He backed out of the room, and the clothes faded silently out of existence. Stepped back into the room, and they soundlessly reappeared on him. He saw the deerskin gloves again, but when he rubbed his palms together he could not feel them.

  ‘I got the projectors working,’ Toshiko explained. ‘So now I have a 3-D rendering of the Second Reality characters in here.’ She stood up and twirled around to reveal she was wearing Penny Pasteur’s smart Nehru jacket again.

  ‘Now that’s even more impressive,’ he admitted. They both appeared in character clothing, but the R&R area was the same familiar jumble of play consoles, arcade terminals and trip-hazard wiring.

  Toshiko smiled proudly. ‘It works out positional information for the characters, but it doesn’t have to paint in the backgrounds any more, so everything is displayed much faster. If I wanted to, I could create a virtual Hub, using the construction data in our systems.’

  ‘What would be the point, Tosh? We can already walk around the real thing.’ He strode into the room to demonstrate his point.

  She pouted. ‘I’ve introduced new characters. Recognise anyone?’

  The two people in the corner turned to look at Owen. They were not Jack or Gwen, as he had originally assumed. Immediately behind Toshiko was Cap’n Ian Sharkchum, who doffed his pirate hat in a sweeping gesture and called out ‘Ahoy, matey!’ Next to him, Walter Pendulum straightened up from playing the pinball machine. He fluttered his long eyelashes and blew Owen a kiss, or at least he made the best effort that a giraffe-headed man can afford. Pendulum cast a last lingering glance over his shoulder before swinging his long neck back to his pinball game.

  ‘The point is,’ Toshiko said, oblivious to all this, ‘we could use this set-up for training purposes. Imagine being able to practise patterns and moves, only without the danger of doing it out in the field for the first time. I’ve been experimenting with projectors here to demonstrate that you can interact with generated images within a 3-D space. Next stage is to create a virtual Cardiff. There’s all sorts of data sources I can use. Positional data from US military satellites, Google Earth, the Land Registry, Public Private Partnership databases, various engineering companies…’

  ‘Interesting,’ admitted Owen. He took a slightly nervous look at Walter Pendulum, but that giraffe neck was still arched over the pinball game. Owen sat down next to Toshiko, smiling. ‘Do you remember the training sessions we had with Jack? God, the bruises and the blood, every day! I thought I’d seen plenty of brutal stuff from my days in A&E. But that was something else.’

  ‘I remember the exercise we did on that freezing day out in the Gower,’ shivered Toshiko. ‘Treasure hunt, he said it was!’

  ‘Treasure hunt, my arse!’ The memory made Owen laugh out loud. ‘Still, it wasn’t as bad as that couple of nights in the Rhondda. I’ve seen frostbite before, but I thought at the end that I’d be carrying my toes home in a box.’

  ‘And Operation Goldenrod,’ recalled Toshiko quietly.

  Owen’s laughter faltered. ‘I saw Jack in a whole different light after that one.’

  Toshiko nodded. Her expression suggested she couldn’t decide whether to relish or regret the whole training experience. ‘That all seems ages ago, and yet…’ Her voice trailed off wistfully.

  Owen watched her eyes. They seemed to be focused on something a long distance away. ‘Before I came here,’ she said eventually, ‘I’d never killed anyone before. Never even thought about it. Oh, I mean, I got angry with people.’

  ‘I’d pay money to see you get angry, Tosh.’

  ‘No, the sort of thing you just say and don’t mean. “I’ll kill that guy if I get my hands on him,” you know. But I’d never even used a gun before. Not a real one.’ Another long pause.

  Abruptly, behind them, the pirate captain loudly cheered on the giraffe-man in his pinball game. ‘Avast behind!’ yelled Sharkchum.

  ‘I think he’s talking about you, Tosh.’ Owen nudged her conspiratorially, and added in an undertone: ‘Can these guys overhear us? I mean, does Cap’n Birdseye understand what we’re talking about?’

  ‘No, he’s just an avatar generated by the game.’ She rattled off a few keystrokes on the console in front of her, and the pirate captain dissolved in a shower of white noise, like a TV being detuned and switched off. The giraffe man continued with the final pull of his pinball game, apparently unconcerned by his noisy friend’s abrupt disappearance.

  ‘Something I noticed in the Second Reality, when I was wearing that helmet thing. It was a big disappointment… Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic achievement, Tosh,’ Owen added hurriedly as he watched her eyebrows rise. ‘But it was obvious that the other avatars were just running through a script. Responding to pre-programmed computer instructions. They weren’t real people.’

  ‘In fleshspace, you mean.’

  Her sarcasm irritated him, but he persevered anyway. ‘Yeah. You know, unreliable, erratic. Unpredictable. With the usual foibles and weaknesses that human beings have and robots don’t.’ He pondered this assertion for a moment. ‘Apart from that robot we trashed in Pontypridd, obviously.’

  ‘Too bad,’ said Toshiko firmly. ‘It’s more secure that way. If you’re that disappointed, I can download a larger amount of game-play data from the server and that will show more options.’

  ‘No, I’m saying I had the same thought that you did, Tosh. Second Reality tests real people’s potential. The more you play it, the better you get, because you start to understand the conventions of the game. So alien monsters in a virtual world won’t freak game-players out like in real life.’

  She was still looking at him blankly. Regular exposure to Toshiko’s non-verbal repertoire had made Owen immune to such obviously faked incomprehension.

  ‘You said it yourself, Torchwood could use this for training. Go that next step, Tosh. Why not use Second Reality for recruitment too? Connect it to the gaming community on the Internet! Find out who’s good at this kind of thing, and approach them to join when they’ve shown enough aptitude? Test out their real-life skills against the kinds of situations we face in our daily lives but that they never would – until one day when it’s too late for them?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ insisted Toshiko.

  Owen was getting into his stride now. Why couldn’t Toshiko accept this? Why was she even working on these enhancements if she didn’t see the potential? ‘Come on! There are all sorts of people we’d never contact normally. Loads of people play Second Reality. Bright kids, CEOs, programmers, surfers, accountants, soldiers, stay-at-home mums… You wouldn’t believe the imagination that everyday people have. There’s one guy who’s created a game that the avatars inside Second Reality play, and it’s so popular he’s licensed it to a publisher. In the real world. They’re gonna release it on video game-players and mobile phones. There was a fashion show using the design sketches and model avatars for the catwalk event in a virtual Paris. Last week I saw a competition to design a new mousetrap, where the mice were the size of donkeys. Where else can you find such a range of skills and abilities and aptitude all in one place? It’s a scouting trip to die for. But only if you plug it in.’

  ‘Not if you value your personal fleshspace,’ warned Toshiko. Her manner was adamant. ‘I won’t hear of this version being connected outside the Torchwood firewall, under any circumstances. And I will chop off your scabbard if I find you trying to.’

  Owen threw up his hands, fake gloves and all, in a gesture of frustration and despair.

  ‘Look,’ she continued. She was doing that earnest voice of hers, the one that she used when she wanted to sound so reasonable that you couldn’t then go and bite her head off. ‘There’s another head-mounted display helmet available, and you could manage with just one data-glove. So if you want some unpredictable interaction with a real human being, give the other glove and the spare helmet to Ianto, and play with him.’

  ‘Ianto?’ Owen blew out a great
long exasperated sigh. ‘Unpredictable? I suppose we could make virtual coffee together.’

  ‘I heard that,’ said Ianto, ‘and I think I may resent it.’

  Owen’s heart sank a little. Ianto’s voice was coming from near the pinball machine. Like Owen and Toshiko, he was wearing a virtual costume. Owen hadn’t recognised him inside the giraffe’s head.

  Walter Pendulum eased his portly frame around the pinball machine and retrieved a tray containing empty cups and a cafetière. ‘Unfortunate timing, I accept,’ said the giraffe with Ianto’s voice. ‘But don’t let the coincidence of me doing this suggest otherwise.’

  Walter waddled off across the games area. As he left the room, his shimmering image transformed back into Ianto. The last thing to vanish as he departed through the doorway was his little giraffe’s tail.

  Owen slumped into his seat, now embarrassed and dejected at the same time. ‘Don’t you ever take a risk, Tosh?’

  ‘When it comes to system security,’ she told him primly, ‘I’m conservative. With a small “c”.’

  ‘Chicken starts with a small “c” too, you know.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot with a big “i”.’

  ‘That Cyclops we found in Pontprennau last month. Now, he was an idiot with a big “i”.’

  Toshiko stood up and loomed over him. She fixed him to his chair with her scowl. ‘Owen. I gave up my social evening to get this thing finished tonight, and all I get is abuse from you? Look at the time. I’m going to go home.’

  ‘Social evening?’ That didn’t sound much like the Toshiko Sato he knew. Dr Sato the programming whizz-kid, first into the office and last to leave every day. This had potential. He grinned at her. ‘You mean… you had a date? What would keep you here if you had a date?’

  She stopped staring at him. Looked away. Blushed a little. ‘If you must know, I’ve joined a chess club. We meet on Saturday evenings.’ She was shutting down the computer system. Owen’s leather jerkin, gloves and boots all glittered and faded. Toshiko was wearing her usual black top and trousers again.