eXistenZ (12 page)

“Who? Nader?”

“Not a well-drawn character at all. And his dialogue was only so-so.”

“Yeah.” Pikul considered for a moment. “ ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ That’s the kind of thing you get from parents. How are we supposed to know what he would or wouldn’t do?”

“In a game, you can’t take anything for granted. I know what he said was banal, but maybe there’s a reason for that somewhere, one we haven’t come across yet. Remember, this is still just the first level.”

“So do we blame ourselves for that? The bad dialogue, I mean? Would it still be bad dialogue, no matter who was ported in?”

“The game engine is obviously just getting used to us. It’ll be a bit more daring, a bit more imaginative, once it warms up.”

“There was one thing Nader said, about downloading our new identities. Do you know anything about that?”

“That’s probably Nader-speak for moving us up to the next level of the game. Let’s have a look.”

She fumbled the micropod out of the gel-pak she was holding. Pikul saw it squishing floppily around her hands, like a child’s balloon half filled with warm water. It never seemed to keep still, constantly swelling and deflating, rolling around in her grip. Geller managed to turn it over, where some instructions appeared on the underside.

“Oh, okay . . . that sounds straightforward enough. It says here the pods are so small they can be plugged directly into a bioport. No UmbyCord needed. Here, turn around and I’ll do yours.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Geller?”

“Yes, and no. Yes, I’m sure I know what I’m doing, because this is just a game. No, all this is as new to me as it is to you. Nothing is real. All you have to do is relax . . . and roll with it.”

“Okay, I’m rolling.”

He turned away for her to attend to his bioport, and again felt her hands moving his shirt around in a way he found undeniably sexy. There was a slight pressure on his back, in the region of the bioport. Pikul wondered if his back would be flushing as much as his face, because the simple feel of her hands lightly brushing against his skin set all his nerves jangling.

But then Geller said, “Oh my God!”

“What? Oh-my-God what? What happened?”

“The whole pod disappeared into your back. Did you feel it?”

“What do you mean,
it disappeared?”

“It kind of wriggled in. I was holding it, and then it just sucked itself in.” She bent down for a closer look. A silence ensued; Pikul could hear her breathing, feel the light pressure of her breath on his back. Finally she said, “Yup, it seems to have gone right inside—”

“It disappeared into my back?!” Pikul shouted. “It’s in my spine? It’s worming its way around my spinal column?”

“Don’t panic! It’s only a game.”

“Don’t panic? I’ve got a goddamn living organism, cloned from a two-headed frog, swimming around inside me, and you say don’t panic?”

“Can you feel anything?” Geller asked.

“Yes! It’s the most horrible sensation—” Pikul groped around his midriff, feeling for the presence of the disgusting thing that had penetrated him. Then he stopped. “Hey, no. Now that you mention it, I can’t feel a thing.”

“So it’s okay, then?”

“Well, I don’t like the idea too much, but as far as pain goes, I’ve suffered a lot worse.”

“Has anything happened to your vision? Are you thinking okay?”

In truth, now that he was calming down, Pikul was still thinking how irresistibly beautiful and sexy Geller looked, and how he’d like to— But this wasn’t the time or place for that. It was all a game, as she kept reminding him.

“Yeah, I’m thinking okay,” he said reluctantly.

“You’d better do me as well, then.”

She turned away from him and with both hands raised her shirt. He looked with great pleasure at the slender curve of her bare back, the way her jeans fitted tightly over the luscious curves of her hips and buttocks. She’d lifted her shirt just high enough that he could glimpse the rounded side of one of her breasts. The bioport nestled against the flesh of her young back, closer than Pikul himself would ever dare go to her. How he dreamed of pressing himself right up against her, putting his hands on her, and—

“Get on with it!” Geller said. “What’s the problem?”

“Nothing. I’m making sure I don’t do anything wrong.”

He sighed, then pressed the edge of the micropod against the port. Although she’d warned him it was going to happen, he was appalled at the eager speed with which the thing crawled into the narrow opening.

“It’s gone,” he said in a moment.

“Right inside?”

“All the way.”

He touched the port with his hand. Geller did not move, although if he hadn’t known her better, he would have thought she shivered with pleasurable reaction to his fingers. She stayed put, with her thin shirt seductively raised, her beautiful back virtually bare before him.

Pikul bent low and pressed his lips on her skin, right next to the bioport. Geller did not move or react. He pressed harder, opening his lips to suck and caress the firm, sleekly toned flesh of her lower back.

“What the hell are you doing?” Geller quickly stepped away and turned to face him.

Pikul straightened, looking and feeling guilty.

“Um, I don’t think that was me,” he said. “Not the real me. It was my game character. He took over unexpectedly. I felt it was in role. Obviously I wouldn’t have done that to you. Not here, anyway.”

But he was aching for her. Her eyes blazed with anger, her clothes were deliciously disarrayed.

“Don’t ever do that again!” she snapped. Then she grinned, releasing the tension. “Do this instead.”

She leaned forward, tilted up her lovely face and kissed him hard and passionately full on the lips.

When they disengaged from each other about a minute later, they were both flushed and panting.

“Wow!” Pikul said. “Want to show me that again?”

“Yeah, but let’s think about the situation we’re in.”

“Who needs to think about a situation right now?”

“No, our game characters are obviously programmed to jump on each other. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Let’s jump,” Pikul said, trying to get his arms around her again.

“But it’s only a pathetic mechanical attempt to heighten the emotional tension of the next game level.”

“Okay, it’s pathetic. But it’s good enough for me.”

“No use fighting it, is there?” Her lips were moist, her eyes were gleaming hungrily. Hungry for him.

“No,” Pikul said. “But what about these new identities we have? Do you feel yours yet?”

She moved in on him again, winding one of her arms around his back and caressing his chest with her free hand.

“That sort of thing can take care of itself,” she said, purring sexily.

“I’m worried about my body,” Pikul said, feeling a familiar sense of panic rising in him. The same panic that struck him whenever she came so close.

“Your what? Don’t worry about it.”

“I mean . . . where are our actual bodies? Are they all right? What if there’s danger? Are they hungry?”

“Who cares? They’ll be in Kiri’s chalet, where we left them. Sitting quietly, eyes closed, side by side. Like meditating.”

Geller was undoing the remaining buttons on his shirt. She pushed the garment open and across his shoulders, letting it slide down from his back. She pressed herself warmly against him and started running her mouth over the skin of his chest. He could feel her lips, and the sharper indentations of her teeth.

“I don’t know,” Pikul said. “I feel really disembodied.”

“What are you frightened of, Pikul?”

“This! No, not this! It’s too much. I want you, but I keep being obsessed by reality!”

“Try this,” Geller said.

She took his hand and led it to the vee of her shirt. She popped open the buttons, then pressed his hand inside and slid it slowly across her ripe young breasts. She continued to rest her fingers on his hand as he moved back and forth. Her nipples were erect and aroused, eager for his touch.

“That’s what you call an embodied body,” she said. “Feel how it works. The trick is not to fight the sensation when it comes.”

“Yeah, you said that before. I know that sensation. I’ve known about it in the past.”

He kissed her then, and she responded as passionately as the first time.

They ripped and pulled at each other’s clothes, and by silent consent moved around behind the crates they had first sat on, where there was a shaded space on the floor. They sprawled awkwardly, but enthusiastically. Naked, they began to make serious love, strenuously, passionately, and tenderly. They cared nothing about the physical discomforts of the dirty stockroom. They were simply eager to sate the passion that had been rising in them for so long.

As they rushed to joyful climax, neither of them noticed that around them the image of the game store was beginning to melt away.

[
14
]

His fingers were twitching, as if his hands were still playing gently with Geller’s soft and willing body, but the rest of his body was rigid and unmoving. Pikul found that he was sitting on a hard wooden bench. His legs were folded under another long bench, this one a work surface with a slow-moving conveyor belt sliding along before him from left to right. On the belt there was an endless stream of what appeared to be animal parts: tiny limbs, eyes, internal organs, bodies, tails, claws, horns. They slithered past, seeming to accuse him with their immobile state of brokenness.

Great noise burst in around him as the scene became more coherent: people’s voices, grinding machinery, a crashing of something metal on something hollow, the whining of drills, distant motors, country music played over the P.A., an endless clattering and banging.

Pikul did not look down at his hands, because he did not yet wish to discover at what they were working so expertly. Something was cool and squishy down there. Instead he looked up and around.

He was obviously in some kind of small factory or assembly plant. It was a large Quonset hut, with a high arching ceiling made of corrugated iron or another kind of sheet metal. The hut was long and narrow, built to accommodate the lengthy, slow-moving conveyor belt. There were dozens of dormer windows built into the sloping walls, but without exception they’d all been boarded up. The light that glared down on the occupants of the hut was therefore all artificial, from many banks of fluorescent tubes.

Pikul, thrown into this unexplained activity, was thinking instead about Allegra Geller’s lissome and naked body, joined excitingly to his, melting into his arms, her lips and breath hot on his face. Because it was so recent, so immediate and personal, it was in many ways as if she were still there with him. He knew, though, that by some inexplicable means he was again fully dressed, and that she was apparently no longer anywhere around him.

He looked back at the endlessly moving conveyor belt, its steady sideways flow and its grisly load.

The pieces of organism were sections of reptiles’ or amphibians’ bodies: limbs, heads, chests, spines, hearts . . . sometimes the pieces were as small as single eyes, claws, or nails. The parts had been mutilated, or sectioned, so that each body piece came with some of the nervous system attached; at least, that’s what the tangles of neural tissue looked uncomfortably like to Pikul.

There were other workers on each side of him, and in other stalls beyond, stretching way up the length of the hut. By glancing surreptitiously at what they were doing, Pikul figured they must be selecting various pieces of the gruesome remains and reassembling them in some new way: overhead there was a menacing selection of small, surgical tools—scalpels, clamps, vices, and so on.

A similar range of equipment hung before him too, over his alcove. At first glance everything seemed shiny and new; only when you looked more closely did you see the tiny telltale streaks of blood.

Pikul discovered he was wearing surgical gloves and clean white clothes. A photo ID card was clipped to his shirt pocket, swinging down.

He lifted it and turned it around, so he could read what was inscribed on it.

Larry Ashen, it said. His name was Larry Ashen.

The worker in the next alcove, a long-haired man with a morose look, saw Pikul trying to read his badge. He snickered at him. Mocking Pikul, he made a play of turning his own ID card around to read it. As he did so, Pikul caught a glimpse of the man’s name: it was Yevgeny Nourish.

“Hey, these cards are a pretty damn good thing!” the man said in a deeply accented voice, the sort Pikul was starting to associate with the strangers he kept meeting. “I’m still cold Yevgeny Nourish!”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Nourish,” Pikul said politely, remembering what Geller had said about letting the game take over. He and Nourish shook hands, their gloves squeaking as they pressed against each other.

“What is it you are doing here with us, Mr. Ashen?”

“Just finding my way, I guess.”

“You haff been sent here?”

“No . . . well, maybe yes.”

“Ah. I thought so. They would not tell me when I ask. I say, what is next, what should I be looking for? Give me the clue I need. Do they tell me? No, they send you and let me find out the rules all on my own.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling,” Pikul said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you here alone?”

“Yes. Well, at present I’m on my own, but I’m supposed—”

“And you are new here on the line?” Nourish said.

“I guess so.”

“Well, let me welcome you to the Trout Farm, Mr. Ashen.”

“Did you say to the
Trout Farm?”

“Trout. You know, we are raising the baby trouts from fertilized eggs and then stock the rivers with them.” He waved his hand expansively, taking in the whole building and, presumably, much of the area beyond. Then he laughed sardonically and glanced over his shoulder as if someone might be listening. He leaned toward Pikul confidentially, his long hair hanging forward so his face was partly concealed. “Don’t ask any more than this, Mr. Ashen; it’s still called the Trout Farm. The entire place was being that until two, maybe three years ago. You know, these days it seems like almost every last thing used to be something else, doesn’t it?”