eXistenZ (10 page)

Geller looked agitated.

“No, Kiri,” she said. “Don’t do that, however good your intentions. You mustn’t let anybody know we’re here. I can’t be sure anymore that Antenna is completely safe for me.”

Vinokur shook his head with great sadness.

“It has come to this, then. Finally. I understand, I suppose. The company has always been having the bad habit of drawing brilliant and eccentric people into its fold. You and your, er, bodyguard can of course be hiding out here for as long as you like. Several of the guest chalets are free at present. I will make sure you are having fresh towels.”

“Thanks, Kiri!” Geller said. She patted her game-pod case. “But, you know, I’ve really come so you can make sure I don’t lose everything I have in here.”

[
10
]

Later, when they’d settled in, Kiri Vinokur got to work on Geller’s game-pod. He laid it out systematically on the porcelain work surface, using in the first instance a number of dexterous manual handling techniques Pikul could not quite follow. The man’s hands moved swiftly and expertly, like those of a professional masseur. He finally opened the organism up, so it lay spread before him.

Next, the operation itself began. In this, Vinokur was assisted by a technician called Landry, a cherubic-faced middle-aged man. Using his special electronic diagnostic tools, which had the approximate appearance of scalpels that apparently did not make actual physical contact with the pod, Vinokur began the painstaking work of determining what might have happened to the cybernetic brain inside.

“What on earth did you port into, Allegra?” he said, glancing up at Geller over his special clip-on magnifying spectacle lenses.

“Pikul’s bioport,” she replied.

“Really? And could it be that’s what is causing all this damage, you are thinking?”

“The installation was flawed,” Pikul hastily explained. “It was my first time. The port . . . well, it neurosurged. That’s a phenomenon you’re familiar with, of course. We’re pretty sure of it, anyway. But it did it all on its own, without me. Allegra says you can fix it.”

“Whatever happened,” Vinokur said, “it fried some expensive neural webbing. You are seeing?” He was indicating a red/pink pulsing node of cybersynapses. He circled the area with the tip of his electronic scalpel. “Here . . . and here. This cord of response tissue. All this is
kaput.”

Pikul said, “It looks like an animal lying down there. To me it feels like you’re operating on somebody’s pet dog.”

Geller and Vinokur exchanged a strange look. Then, abruptly, Vinokur laughed.

“See?” he said to Landry. “I told you it is glorified veterinarians we have become.” He gave Pikul a more respectful nod. “The
eXistenZ
game-pod is indeed basically animal in origin, Mr. Pikul. It was cloned from fertilized amphibian eggs, gene-spliced from species-related living organic material. Plus, how shall I say?, a certain
stuffing
of our own. Synthetic DNA resins they are, mostly. What is making a pod different from the animals is its brain, and of course its memory. The remembering is the key. An awful lot of sophisticated nanotechnology is building into this baby.”

Another look passed between the three of them.

“Only from Antenna Research,” Geller said after a moment, and they all laughed.

“Okay,” Pikul said, feeling he was being let in on a joke for once. “Where do the batteries go?”

“Very amusing.”

Geller said, “He’s not kidding. In spite of appearances, he’s not just a bodyguard nerd. He’s a total PR nerd too.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to keep up,” Pikul protested. “You’ve been working with
eXistenZ
for years.”

“Okay, I’m sorry.” Geller touched the part of his back where the bioport was and let her fingers linger there a few moments, her touch almost affectionate. “We get so close to our work, we always forget how strange it can seem to people who are fresh to it. The MetaFlesh pod ports into you, and
you
become the power source. Your body, your nervous system, your metabolism, your immune system. Basically, it’s your energy. When you get tired, run-down, the pod won’t function properly.”

While she was speaking, Vinokur was looking all over the body of the pod, his hands raised out of the way. A last visual inspection, just to make sure.

“All right,” he said after he’d completed the check. “Mr. Landry here will finish up the pod work.”

“It’s going to be okay?” Geller asked, simply.

“My dear,” Vinokur said, and suddenly laughed aloud, an abrupt and mirthless burst of sound. He was looking away from her. He paused, staring for a moment out of the window at the distant views of the snowcapped mountains. “You know how we are here in this place! Better than new. Always better than you begin. Trust me. Yes, I am realizing already you must trust me . . . otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Right.”

“Right,” Kiri Vinokur said, nodding happily. “I’m glad we are still on the same wavelength we always were. Now then . . .” He turned to Pikul. “Mr. Pikul.”

“Yes?”

“We are not wanting any more neurosurges, are we?”

“Sir, I tell you again, it wasn’t me who—”

“Yes, yes, I am hearing what you said.” The man looked testy, somewhat dangerous. He breathed in, and flexed the knuckles of both hands. Curiously, no clicking sound could be heard. “We have agreed it is not you who caused the damage. I am more concerning with what it is that is damaging you.”

“Me?” Pikul said, with a worried glance in Geller’s direction. She signaled with a small hand movement not to respond. “Okay. Tell me what you must,” he said to Vinokur.

“I think it’s time to get that nasty diseased bioport out of you and replace it with one that isn’t going to do any more harm.”

“But I’m kind of getting used to it now, sir,” Pikul said, alarmed at this unexpected turn of events.

“No, it’s doing you no good there. No good at all. All that adverse biofeedback going into your bloodstream. Even a few more hours could be inducing antibody reactions that will take weeks to throw off. I’m not trying to scare you, but we’re talking about the possibility of death here.”

“You’re scaring me,” Pikul said.

“Well, it’s not likely to come to that,” Vinokur said. “We are here to be helping. But we don’t want any more adverse publicity, do we? Any of us. Now, where did I put my bioport puller . . . ? Here it is.”

He produced from one of the lathe benches an instrument that to Pikul’s horrified eyes looked like a pair of spring-loaded fire tongs.

“Mr. Pikul, if you would be good enough to lie down on that couch. And kindly pull up your shirt.”

Pikul saw the look in Geller’s eyes, and with a feeling of terminal dread reluctantly complied.

[
11
]

Standing in front of the full-length mirror in the guest chalet, Pikul twisted and strained to see the effect the new bioport had had on his sore, tormented back.

To his largely uninitiated eyes, the new bioport implanted by Kiri Vinokur appeared much the same as the one it had replaced, but the area of skin and flesh around the incision looked and felt swollen, bruised, and tender.

He touched it gingerly with a fingertip.

“It hurts like hell,” he said to Geller, who was looking intently at her repaired game-pod nestling in its case. “I think it’s infected.”

“Does it hurt the same way as the one Gas put in?”

“No . . . it’s found another way of hurting. It’s different.”

“Then apart from the fact that Gas probably caused a little short-term collateral damage to the skin around the port, it sounds normal.” She went over and peered at it, but after a superficial glance merely shook her head. She straightened so she could face him, and looked serious and thoughtful. “I don’t think the port is infected. It’s just excited. I believe it wants a bit of action.”

She rubbed her fingers over it lightly, as you would the head of a child you wanted to encourage. To Pikul’s surprise, this did not hurt at all.

Geller went back to her game-pod and brought out the Y-shaped UmbyCord. She tried to jack one end of it into his new bioport.

Pikul twisted adroitly away from her. “Hey, how about me?” he said. “I really don’t think that
I’m
ready for action. Me, I mean. You know, the bearer of the excited bioport. What I want is . . . not now. Not here. I feel too . . . exposed. Anyway, can’t we have a break from all this? I’m hungry, we’ve traveled a long way—”

“You’re not panicking again, are you?” Geller said. “Not likely to neurosurge again?”

“It wasn’t me the first time! I keep telling you.”

“Yeah, well. The position is that my baby here has now taken three major hits, one back at the church hall, one at the gas station, and one on the operating table. I’ve got to find out if everything’s okay. If the game hasn’t been contaminated, the pod hasn’t been fucked, that kind of thing. The only way I can do that is to play
eXistenZ
with somebody friendly. Are you still friendly or are you not?”

“I thought we’d already agreed that I was,” Pikul said.

He swallowed nervously, then, with a feeling of resignation, turned his back to Geller so she could port in. Unable to see her without twisting his head, he sensed her moving around behind him: her fingers brushed his flesh again, a few strands of her hair fell against his shoulder as she leaned over him. At last he felt the connector jack into his port with a quiet but emphatic mechanical clicking. No trouble there, no pain, no humiliating collapse of his legs.

“How does that feel?” Geller said.

“Okay so far. Are you saying this thing will run off my body’s energy?”

“That’s how they work.” She connected the other end to the game-pod. “See? You’re humming along already.”

Something was certainly happening. Pikul watched with interest as Geller expertly twisted the second jack into her own bioport, and took a deep breath.

“All right,” she said.
“eXistenZ.
Only from Antenna Research. Here we go.”

“This is a game, right?” Pikul said.

“Yes.”

“We play to win?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Then don’t you think you’ve got a bit of an unfair advantage over me? How can I possibly compete against the person who designed the game?”

“You could beat the guy who invented poker, couldn’t you?”

“Not if he didn’t tell me all the rules.”

“There are no rules in
eXistenZ
that you need to know.”

“Then I guess—”

But Geller had flicked the nipple on the game-pod, and before Pikul could finish his answer, the chalet began to melt away around them. The walls thinned out, light shone, light faded. Reality shifted.

[
12
]

They were standing. They were together. They were inside a building. They were inside a room inside a building. There were people around and many racks of things, but for a few seconds it was impossible to make sense of what they were seeing or even to work out where they might be.

Pikul looked anxiously at Geller, and she looked back.

“So far so good?” he said to her.

“Yes.”

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“We seem to be inside someplace.”

“That’s okay. We’ll survive.”

As the sensation of the reality shift faded, Pikul said, “That was a beautiful experience. I feel . . . just like I always feel! Is that normal? I mean is that how games always start? A kind of smooth dissolve from place to place?”

“That’s how it goes. It depends on the style of the game. You can get jagged, brutal cuts that shock you into responsive action. You get that kind of thing in the martial arts games, or the explore-and-conquer games. Others are slow fades. I find those pretty frightening, because you don’t know what’s going to come when it goes all black. It could be the peacefulness of a sea lying under the moon, or a quiet stretch of countryside . . . or it could be a dark cellar where something’s lurking and about to leap out on you. Those slow fades always freak me out, just a little. Then you can make shimmering little morphs. Or sideways inserts. There are a lot of options. Everyone does something different, puts their own style-stamp on their work. Me, I prefer the dissolve.”

Pikul was staring away from her, around the large room in which they had found themselves.

“I’m starting to get orientated,” he said.

“Me too,” Geller said, looking about her with interest.

They were in a retail store, a cramped, scruffy one. Not an especially small store, but an overcrowded one. Narrow aisles led between dusty racks crammed with software and games package boxes labeled in bright colors. There were pinball machines in every available spare spot, and the kids leaning over these were setting up a cacophony of mechanical clattering, signal bells and electronic bleeps. Lights were flashing everywhere.

The customers, prowling along the aisles, kept handling the products, taking them down, looking closely at the small print, turning over the boxes to read what might be printed on the reverse. Most of them were muttering secretively, sometimes to one of the others, most often to themselves.

Pikul and Geller squeezed their way along the aisle in which they were, trying to remove themselves from the press of unwashed bodies.

At the far end a cashier was working behind an old-fashioned cash register that was sitting on a tall counter. He eyed them suspiciously from time to time, but in general was kept busy looking intently at the mass of customers, presumably watching for attempts at theft.

When they passed in front of the counter, Pikul noticed that the young man—gangly and sallow in appearance, like many of the customers—was wearing a name tag. He was identified as Hugo Carlaw.

They went into another aisle, not as crowded as the first.

“Have you worked out where we are yet?” Pikul asked.

“Yeah, now that I can see it more clearly, it’s easy. I’m stunned! It’s so realistic! This is the game store I used to go to when I was a kid. The very one! This is exactly how I remember it! I’m amazed! It belongs to a Mr. Nadger or Nadder, or some strange, foreign-sounding name like that. I would hang out here for hours when I was a teenager, hoping for a chance to jack into one of the games.” She nodded toward a row of consoles where many young people crowded around the brightly lit and constantly changing color screens. “Just like most of these people, in fact,” she said.