Alternative Dimension (12 page)

And I refuse to sign this with the name he gave me, so I’ll simply be DR – or Doctor.

Joe shook his head slowly. This was impossible. Or rather, it was maybe the most subtle piece of hacking he’d ever come across – on a par with that time he’d lost control of Red. So that wasn’t just a one-off; the potential for independence lurked in some avatars. He’d need to do a lot of thinking and, if necessary, recalibrate every AD parameter to contain and eliminate it. But, at the same time as his corporate brain was making these necessary calculations to protect his investment, his other, freer self felt an excitement at the possibility that he’d actually been speaking to an avatar free of control from the outside. That would be something worth destabilising the company for.

20 anything’s possible – part one

The depth and variety of experience which AD could provide made it, for some, the main event – one which stripped any real substance from their normal lives. Norman, for example, was an attendant on British Rail, but just one of his AD adventures could have enough reverberations and consequences to fill several volumes. Joe’s dilemma lay in the need to confront the levels of complexity at which avatars operate. If he’d known about Norman and his friends and followed him on a typical visit to his corner of AD, his eyes would have been opened to the real challenge they pose to all our values.

Every day Norman served passengers in the first class compartments of trains going between Manchester and Glasgow. He heard them talking about cost analysis, investment portfolios, punitive corporate legislation and how easy Daphne in Accounts was. Sometimes they shouted into their mobile phones that they were on a train or asked questions about reinforced concrete, statistical projections or evasions of ethical dilemmas. In second class it was different; there he was with people like himself – well, up to a point. It was when he got home, cooked himself a quick meal and logged on to AD that the real Norman emerged.

In his early days, together with all the others whose avatars interacted with his own in their own special ongoing narrative, he’d been a member of the Agatha Christie Appreciation Society. Norman had joined when they were investigating a murder committed several years earlier but, in just a few days, the case was so densely populated with red herrings and diversions that the original crime had been overwhelmed by seven cases of arson, three involving the blackmailing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and four massacres. Norman and a few others decided that this tame level of complexity wasn’t doing the AD medium justice, so they left and now met regularly to push the art of detection to even greater absurdities. The narratives they lived had to stretch credibility, create a new, irresistible logic, rely on allusions, insights, parallels, sub-texts and all those other artistic devices that made surfaces so deceptive.

Each time he activated his avatar, Max Toledo, the scene was the same. He was at the edge of a clearing in a wood, or maybe a park – he rarely left the clearing so he wasn’t sure. At first, he’d chosen it as his favourite spot because it resembled the place he’d played in as a kid, the place where his hand had first felt a breast. Mind you, that wasn’t all that memorable because the breast in question belonged to Jessica Leonard, who was eleven at the time and had breasts only marginally larger than his own. Now, though, it had become the focus of his days, the centre of his social life. The people he talked to belonged only there, had no existence in his other world of trains and lust for the easy Daphne. They materialized out of the bushes or from behind the trees, sat or stood around, did the things they did, then went back to wherever their lives were. They rarely explored other areas of AD since they’d evolved a way of interacting which gave them all an essential role in each other’s world and made them part of a continually renewing puzzle.

Norman, for example, had decided that Max should be a book illustrator. That was easy nowadays, with the software they had. He had a personal file full of sketches which he could adapt for all sorts of scenarios. His present project was the most ambitious he’d ever tried. Two of the clearing’s avatars, Darg and his twin sister Laura, had decided to publish their memoirs in the form of a graphic novel and they’d commissioned Max to create it. In ND, Darg was a Scottish property developer who lived in Italy and Laura was a wife and mother waiting for her kids to reach school age so that she could go back to being a dental nurse in Boston, Mass. They’d never met and had no contact outside AD. They’d only become twins because one of the group’s narratives had called for a theme based on mistaken identity and they’d thought it would add interest  if the two people who were supposed to look identical were twins – but of different genders.

At the far edge of the clearing stood a bench. It had been brought there one day by an avatar who simply called himself The Alchemist.

‘My gift to you,’ he’d said to the people there before vanishing in a sort of golden shimmer.

Max walked across to it now, sat down at one end of it and took out his sandwiches. Avatars don’t need to eat, of course, but he felt this added yet another layer of authenticity to the experience. Today, there was no-one around. Well, only Charlie. Charlie was the avatar of a retired horse trainer in Cheltenham, England. He was sleeping with his back against the smaller of the two oak trees and a horsey book open on his lap. Like his manipulator, he was immaculately dressed, his tie straight, his waistcoat buttoned all the way up, and he seemed always to sleep at attention, his artificial leg ramrod straight in front of him. On the ground, not too far from Charlie, Max could see the scarf Laura had thrown at Darg a few days before. The clearing was quiet but it could sometimes be busier. Max liked it in all its moods. No-one asked him about who he was, what he did.

As he finished his first sandwich, Kate appeared from the direction of the path. Her manipulator, Donna, had been a teacher at a seminary in Australia and had recently divorced her husband because she’d decided she wanted to be a stand-up comedian. She used Kate to test her material, which was always stolen from other people, and (theoretically) to add humour to their narratives. Kate strolled over to the bench and sat on the other end, leaving the maximum possible distance between herself and Max. The silence stretched between them. After a while, still staring into the distance, she said ‘I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but I couldn’t find any’.

Max just sat there, saying nothing. She stared straight ahead, deadpan. More minutes passed. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, then back again. She looked across at Charlie.

‘I was up at the hospital this morning,’ she said. ‘Guy there had just come round after a serious accident. He was in helluva state – screaming, yelling.’ She paused and her manipulator made her look up at the sky, then brush unseen things from her skirt before continuing. ‘He shouted “Doctor, doctor, I can’t feel my legs.” The doctor said “I know you can’t, I’ve cut your arms off.”’

Max nodded. The silence returned. Then came the whistling. From deep in the trees, but getting closer. Unmistakeable. The Biscuit Man was on his way.

The Biscuit Man was Darg. For some reason he’d never revealed, his manipulator had created an avatar with advanced psoriasis and it was the dryness of his appearance that had earned him the nickname. Maybe it was a way of externalising his estate agent’s guilt. Whatever it was, it meant that, if he didn’t take frequent drinks, preferably of blood, his skin began to crack and he walked around in a perpetual snowstorm of epidermal flakes. Today he was sipping from a jug and the red spills running down his chin revealed that it was his favourite tipple. Max could see that it was having the desired effect. The fluid was returning to the pustules in his neck and he was beginning to look like his old self – appalling. He pushed Kate off the bench and flopped down beside Max.

‘Hear about the Swedish Dachshund?’ asked Kate.

‘No,’ said Darg, before turning to Max and asking ‘How’s the book going?’

‘OK,’ said Max. ‘Any more juicy bits to add?’

As he looked at Darg’s neck, he immediately regretted his choice of words. Darg didn’t notice. He scratched his chin. Unfortunately.

‘OK, time to up the erotic content,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you about that chick last year?’

Max wasn’t sure. Darg had had plenty of amorous encounters, although that particular adjective was hardly appropriate. The problem was that, for him, sex was an excuse to bite bits off his partners. The preference for blood had evolved into a liking for flesh.

‘Local girl,’ said Darg. ‘End of September.’

Max searched his memory for reports of mayhem and mutilations that had happened in the clearing the previous autumn but nothing came to mind.

‘It must have been hushed up,’ he said.

Darg shuddered.

‘Too bloody right,’ he said. ‘I insisted.’

‘YOU insisted?’

‘Yes,’ said Darg. ‘You sound surprised.’ His head twitched sharply. ‘Don’t be surprised, Max. You know I don’t like people being surprised, Max, don’t you. DON’T YOU?’

His thin voice had risen to a shriek, the veins popped in his temples and several lesions on his cheek began to suppurate. Max’s visual memory noted their pulsing tones and stored the minute differences the anger was making to Darg’s facial contours. He hoped the software could cope with the subtleties.

‘It’s not that I’m surprised,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s just that it’s usually the victims who seek to suppress the details.’

‘Well … Well … Well … Well …’ said Darg, as if there were no words for what he wanted to convey. ‘This time, I was the victim. I tell you. She was …’

Once again he fell silent, his yellow skin taut over his jawbone. He shook his head. Flakes of skin drifted down, some settling on Max’s sandwich.

‘She was a friend of Donut’s,’ he went on.

‘Laura,’ said Max, quietly. ‘She wants us to call her Laura now, remember?’

Darg squeezed some pink stuff he was holding into a ball and held it close to Max’s face.

‘She’s my bloody sister,’ he said. ‘You can call her bloody Laura if you like, but her name’s Donut, right?’

Max shrugged. His eyes moved to the scarf Laura had thrown at Darg after he’d said she looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. She had her brother’s temper and, Max suspected, could probably match his stories with even bloodier ones. This could be a lucrative two-book deal if he could only manage to keep the two of them just the right side of sanity for long enough.

He raised his hand and said ‘Alright, Darg. It was just that …’

He was interrupted by a rustling noise which seemed to fill the clearing. The air near the bench began to shimmer. It was as if a silver or golden whirlpool was spinning on a vertical axis. They all looked at it in astonishment. This was a first. Kate stood and looked into it. From somewhere inside it came a voice.

‘First stop, Hemming Way,’ it called.

Kate reached into it with both hands, turned her head to look at them.

‘Farewell,’ she said.

‘Two arms,’ said the voice and Kate was sucked into the vortex, which immediately zapped shut and vanished.

‘Good riddance,’ said Darg. ‘Scrawny little bugger.’

Max had noted the colours of the spinning portal and filed them away. He dusted off his sandwich, took a bite and asked ‘Where is … Donut, by the way? It’s a while since I saw her.’

Darg flung away the pink stuff and leaned toward Max, eyeball to eyeball.

‘I’m not my sister’s keeper,’ he screamed.

They were interrupted by a voice whose fruity tones suggested it belonged to a man whose education had cost a fortune. It was Charlie. Darg’s pink stuff had hit him on the cheek and woken him. He’d picked it up and identified it as a tricep, probably female.

‘I wish someone was,’ he said.

Max and Darg both turned to look at him.

‘Was what?’ asked Max.

‘His sister’s keeper,’ he went on. ‘I mean, ever since she first came here, the population’s been decreasing. You should have a quiet word with her, Biscuit.’

Darg leapt to his feet and screamed, ‘STOP CALLING ME FUCKING BISCUIT.’

‘You should be proud of such a name,’ said Charlie. ‘What a horse that was. In all my years as a trainer, I never saw an animal who could come close to him.’

‘Ah, you mean Sea Biscuit,’ said Max.

‘Of course,’ said Charlie, beginning to flick through the pages of his book.

Max looked at Darg. They’d already spoken of his true passion in AD, his absolute need to impregnate horses, male and female, but so far, Darg had refused to allow Max to illustrate any of the couplings he’d described. In turn, Max had never told Darg that Charlie had once trained some of England’s finest horseflesh.

‘Maybe Golden Dreams would’ve got near him but we never got the chance to find out,’ said Charlie, closing his eyes as he remembered his favourite mare.

‘Golden Dreams?’ said Darg.

Charlie’s eyes remained shut. Max just nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Golden Dreams. A chestnut mare. Potentially Charlie’s best ever. Odds-on favourite for the AD Kentucky Derby four years ago. The stable was as secure as Fort Knox. Least, that’s what they thought. Till they found two stable boys with their throats eaten away and Golden Dreams lying in her stall with a kind of spaced out look in her eyes and a cigarette between her lips.’

Darg’s breathing was heavy.

‘A chestnut mare,’ he said.

Max nodded again.

‘The vet checked her over, cleared her to race. Nothing wrong with her, he said. But she trotted around the track like she was in a trance. Came in plumb last. They scoped her out, found her blood was flooded with endorphins.’

‘Four years ago?’ said Darg, in a whisper.

Max looked up at him, saw the expression on his face, and realisation dawned. Wow, what a climax this would make. Guaranteed to shoot the book straight to the top of the lists. He drew Darg back down onto the bench. This would need to be handled very carefully.