eXistenZ (21 page)

Vinokur turned to face Pikul and Geller. His face wore an expression of relief and pleasure.

“Thank God I got here in time!” he said. “I’ve been trying to find you.” He waggled the cadaver-gun, looking at it and marveling. “My dog brought me this.”

“But you didn’t get here in time,” Geller said simply and obdurately.

“What do you mean?” Vinokur gestured expressively at the body of Hugo Carlaw.

“The game is dead.
eXistenZ
is finished. And it was you . . . you murdered my game.”

“No, Allegra, I did not. I murdered your game-pod. The game itself is healthy and happy.”

“No.”

“I replicated your pod’s entire nervous system when I was repairing it. It’s standard operational procedure during surgery. Everything that was in the pod at that time is still safe.”

“You made a copy of
eXistenZ?
Kiri, you work for Antenna. You know there’s a total no-copy rule, backed up by summary dismissal if you break that rule.”

“I do.”

“Well then . . . how can you stand there and say that!”

“Obviously I couldn’t if I still worked for Antenna. That’s changed.”

He let the significance of those words sink in.

“You’re going to defect?” Pikul asked.

“I’ve already done so. I’m with Cortical now, and it’s my happy job to plead with you, Allegra. Come over to join us, come to Cortical Systematics. You too, Pikul. Yes, Cortical Systematics . . . you did hear me right. I’ve defected and it’s the best move I’ve ever taken in my life. All the Antenna Research top brass are moving with me—Pellatt, Melzack, Sherrin, all the bright and good people.”

“So now you’re a spy for Cortical Systematics,” Geller said coldly.

“Wait a minute!” Pikul had been listening and thinking. He said, “Geller, Cortical Systematics isn’t
real!”

“What?”

“It doesn’t really exist. We worked it out, you and I. You must remember! Cortical Systematics is just the game version of Antenna—”

Vinokur cut across him, directly addressing Geller.

“You want your baby back, Allegra. Well, you can have it . . . but the only way is if you come over to us.
eXistenZ
by Allegra Geller. Only from Cortical Systematics.”

Geller said, defiantly, “Only from Antenna Research.”

She sat down on a rock, close to where Carlaw had fallen. His submachine gun was beside her foot.

“You’re intending to hang on, then?” Vinokur said, hefting his weapon.

“I have to.”

“But why? Look at that mess down there in the valley. This whole issue of Realism has been completely screwed by them. Everyone involved at Antenna has bungled. If they can’t handle what is basically just a PR situation, how good are they going to be when it comes to something really difficult, like marketing
eXistenZ?
Anyway, how can you ever trust them again? They’ve repeatedly endangered your life.”

Geller stared at the ground. Carlaw’s arm was curled painfully under his body, his back had humped as he fell.

Pikul looked too. He thought, pitying the man, What a way to go, what a place to die.

“So what do you say, Allegra?” Vinokur said.

“I don’t know.”

She sounded as if she’d lost the thread of his argument. Absently, she reached down and picked up Carlaw’s gun. It looked large and heavy in her hands, and she seemed not to know how to handle it.

“Be careful,” Pikul said. “It’s probably still loaded.”

“Yeah, and it’s still cocked,” she said.

“Put it down.”

“Yeah.” Her voice was distant, as if her thoughts were miles away. “You know, this guy Carlaw was actually going to kill me.”

“But I saved you,” Vinokur said. He turned to Pikul. “Can’t you talk some sense into her? I mean, I’ve already said I would expect you to come to Cortical Systematics too. You’d receive a substantial raise.”

“Do they have slots open for marketing trainees?” Pikul asked.

Vinokur was about to answer, but whatever it was he intended to say never made it out of his lips.

In a sudden blaze of violence, Geller pulled the trigger of the automatic weapon. There was a deafening burst from the muzzle and Kiri Vinokur was thrown back onto the jagged rocks. Blood surged from his head, his neck, his chest, his groin.

Geller’s senseless and sudden action finally galvanized Pikul. Not caring what she might do to him, defending herself or warding him off, he lunged at her and swatted the weapon out of her hands. It fell to the rocky ground with a loud metallic clatter. He kicked it away from her, then darted nimbly across to it and grabbed it before she could.

“What the fuck are you doing, Geller?” he shouted. “You killed him!”

“He had it coming,” she said in an uninterested voice. “He killed
eXistenZ.”

“He said he didn’t.”

“As good as.”

“You can’t fucking kill people for stuff like that!” he yelled. “What’s next? Are you going to kill me too?”

“Come on, Pikul!” She threw back her head and let out a giddy laugh. “Vinokur was only a character in a game. You worked that out yourself. I just didn’t like the way he was messing with my mind.”

“You didn’t like him messing with your mind. So that makes it okay to kill him?”

“He was only a game character.”

“But what . . . ? What if my theory was wrong? What if we’re not in the game anymore?”

“We have to be.”

“Are you sure?” Pikul asked. “Are you
really
sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. What you said made sense.”

“That was only me, trying to explain things. But you know more about
eXistenZ
than I ever will. For instance, what about . . . what about that reality bleed-through you were talking about? That must have happened many times before.” She was silent. “Well, has it?”

“Yes.”

“And what about D’Arcy Nader?”

“What about him?” she asked.

“The famous game residue. Remember? And he was dead by then!” Pikul waved the weapon in despair. “None of that makes sense anymore, if you can just kill anyone you think threatens your game! And how do you know this is still the game?” he asked. “How can you be sure?”

She looked toward him, and in the still-glowing glare from the destruction in the valley, he could see that her cheeks were streaked with tears.

“We must be,” she said, and she drew a deep, shuddering breath. “If . . . if we . . . if we’re not?”

“If we’re not, Geller, then you just killed someone real. Someone you knew, someone who had been your friend. A real person.”

She still did not seem to understand. Pikul felt himself driven to his final argument, the one he’d reserved, always buried in him.

“You’ve seen what can happen,” he said. “It’s important for me that you see that.”

“Why important?” she said in a dull voice.

“I have to tell you. Now, at last. It wasn’t by accident that you and I ended up on the run together.”

That finally got her interest.

“Not an accident?” she said.

Pikul raised the automatic weapon in his hands. “No.”

He let it sink in.

She stood up, moved to the edge of the declivity over the valley below. She leaned forward, and Pikul thought she might be about to jump. But she swayed a little, then looked back at him.

“You never had a bioport, yet somehow you were working for Antenna,” she said. “That’s why, isn’t it? You were one of them.”

“I still am,” he replied. “One of them, I mean.”

“But you have a bioport now. Why did you get it fitted? I thought that was forbidden to Anti-eXistenZialists.”

“Not this one. Well, strictly speaking I had to. It was a great sacrifice, but I had to get close to you. I had to make love to you, to my enemy. A terrible sacrifice.”

“Not that bad, I hope.”

“No . . . but still a sacrifice.”

“Why would you do that?” she asked.

“To best understand the person I was sent to kill.”

The new but final realization dawned in her.

“You, Pikul?”

“Yes, me,” he said, holding the gun. “I am the one. Understand that.”

“No . . . you understand this instead,” she said quietly. She pulled what looked like a tiny version of a TV remote control from the flap pocket of her shirt. “Understand that I suspected who you were from the moment you made that fake phone call to yourself in the limo. Understand that I knew you were my real assassin when you pointed the gun at me in the Chinese restaurant. Understand that no one in my position goes unprotected about the world.”

She flicked up a safety cover from the top of the remote, revealing a microswitch. She pointed the device at him.

Pikul tensed his hands on the automatic weapon.

“And understand that you’re a dead man, Ted Pikul.”

Her finger jabbed down on the microswitch, and in the same instant the bioport on Pikul’s back exploded into white flame.

He screamed in agony, convulsing and falling. His frenetic jerking spasms threw him to the rocky floor, bashing his head, his arms, his back against the sharply jagged outcrops. He rolled and squirmed, in unimaginable pain.

Geller danced before him, waving the tiny remote above her head.

“Death to the demon Ted Pikul!” she yelled, shouting her laughter across the wide-open valley below.

Pikul, still barely conscious, hardly able to take in anything other than the violent sensations of his own pain, rolled in convulsing spasms toward the edge of the hill. As his vision dimmed, he found that he could see down into the valley. The last flames were now being extinguished. A thick pall of black smoke rolled through the valley, under the bland, uncaring moonlight.

His mind was dying. The last words he heard before the ultimate blackness flooded in came from Geller.

“Have I won the game?” she was crying in childish glee. “Have I won? Have I won?”

Then another kind of blackness flooded in around them both.

[
26
]

It had once been a simple country church, but was deconsecrated years ago. In recent times it had been used for dances, community meetings, elections, the occasional political rally. The hall was typical of the sort of places where game companies took their product out for market evaluation: it was in a remote country area with a high percentile of known game-software users, the hall familiar to everyone in the locality and cheap to rent, and in addition it was an unobtrusive place for the top VR people to gather. You couldn’t be too careful these days.

There was a platform, with players sitting on chairs. To one side of them was a blackboard on an easel. Their seats were arranged in a loose semicircle, and some of the principal technology of the game was resting on the floor of the platform in the middle of the players. The rest of the hall was filled with an admiring, eager audience, waiting their own turn to evaluate the brand-new game system being launched that night.

There were two security guards, armed only with electronic wands.

Neither of them was Ted Pikul.

One of the guards had a dog on a lead. It was squatting in a bored fashion beside the man, chewing gutturally on something hard.

Pikul himself was on the platform, hooked into the game. He was a player, who earlier had been selected from the crowd, only too eager to be one of the first to try out the new system.

Allegra Geller sat beside him, one of her hands resting companionably on Pikul’s forearm.

Both of them were sitting with their heads tipped forward peacefully. All the other players had their heads tipped forward peacefully.

The audience waited quietly and politely, sipping the glasses of iced tea and chilled mineral water that had been handed out earlier. They were not willing to make any commotion that might precipitate an early end to the game. They wanted to see how this new system worked out on its own. They were going to be next; they all hoped they would be next. These advanced-system game evaluation seminars were legendary for the way in which everyone present was given a turn. No one was left out who wanted to be in.

Even the two security guards would be allowed to put aside their electronic wands and try the system before the evening was out.

No one liked having to wait, though. The suspense was agonizing.

Overseeing the whole event was a woman named Merle. She was not only in charge of setting up and running the seminar, but responsible for the security of the various participants. She was one of the few people there who would not be hooking in to the system that night.

While the game proceeded she kept an eye on the electronic monitors, making sure nothing went wrong from that point of view, but her overall concern was the well-being of the players and what they made of the new system. So she was at her most tense as the game went on, able to relax a little only when it ended.

This was signaled by a general sense of stirring among the players. One of them, whose head had been lolling forward, straightened slowly. Another moved her hand, flexing the fingers gently. One or two people allowed their legs to stretch, or they muttered a barely audible groan of contentment.

Allegra Geller sighed, and her fingers tightened affectionately on Ted Pikul’s arm. He grunted.

The VR sets the players were using did not in themselves represent a breakthrough in technology. At seminars like these the company always relied on tried and tested hardware, temporarily retroadapting the game software to work in the old boxes. When the product was eventually launched, it would be accompanied by its own sleek, state-of-the-art tech kit—difficult for the clone-makers to reproduce, at least for a few months—but at this stage plans had still not been finalized for the hardware.

Tonight the players were therefore wearing conventional VR equipment: the traditional large VR headsets, which input data through the optic and aural nerves and other sensations through paste-on electronic sensors.

These headsets were linked by ordinary wires to the game modules, which rested in the players’ laps.

Again, the technology was reasonably conventional, the only departure from the norm being a thumb-sensor. This was a recessed input/output aperture in the side of the module, into which the player inserted his or her thumb, where more microsensors translated and evaluated the gigabytes of sensory data the program required or generated.