The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (18 page)

‘How dare you intrude upon my privacy like this?’ It was almost funny; Somers’ words, choked with arrogance and anger, seemed to belong to another age. Jules and Tonia stood their ground and told him why they thought he owed them an explanation. They insisted he tell them what he knew about Quinton and Adrian Clavering’s death. He said scornfully: ‘I do not owe you an explanation, as you put it. I really know very little. Please go. I am busy.’

‘We are going to stay here in this Rectory until you tell us what you do know,’ said Tonia. Somers crumpled himself resentfully into his armchair and tossed aside his book. Jules noted that he had been reading Euripides’
Bacchae
in Greek
.

‘Yes. Yes,’ Somers muttered to himself. It sounded like an admission of defeat. Tonia reminded Somers that he had dined with Adrian Clavering the night before he died. ‘What was it you warned him about?’

Somers sighed, as people do when they are about to tell a story for the hundredth time; though Tonia was sure he hadn’t told it to anyone else before.

‘Adrian had quarrelled with Quinton. It was perfectly silly. About the siting of a statue of a faun in the garden. Naturally Adrian should have had his way, but Quinton was the strong one. You see, Adrian was besotted with Peter Quinton. He used to be very good-looking, believe it or not: I have an idea he was once an artist’s model. People even say there was a will leaving everything to him. I doubt it though, but Adrian may have told him there was. He could be such a tease. Well, Adrian wanted his own way over the faun, and so, for some reason did Quinton. It became very acrimonious. I tried to reconcile them; in fact that’s why I went to dinner with Adrian that night, a last ditch effort to patch it up. It was no use. Adrian’s love—I suppose that is the word—had turned to hatred. He wanted revenge and he told me what he was going to do.’ For almost a minute Somers stared at the ceiling.

‘What?’

‘He was going to summon Pan.’

‘Christ!’ said Jules.

‘No, Mr Paige. Quite the contrary. And please do not use that name as a vulgar expletive in front of me. I do have some sensibilities left. Yes, Pan. As in Panic. Adrian, had always said that Pan was his favourite God. A childhood reading of
The Wind in the Willows
may have had something to do with it, I suspect. You remember that miraculous chapter, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’? Hence what you call the Folly, Mrs Paige. A bit of an affectation, of course, but . . . He’d found something in a book—I think it was by that awful old charlatan Crowley—it was a summoning and sending ritual. It only needed a few burnt bay leaves and a black cockerel to do it. He had acquired both. I tried to persuade him not to. I really did. I had some personal experience to draw upon. When I left him I honestly believed that he was in a more reasonable frame of mind, but the next morning he was found dead. There was fear all over his face.’

‘What had happened?’

‘Who knows? All I can say is that Adrian was a dabbler whereas Peter Quinton knew a great deal more than we thought. As you’ve discovered. These Gods, they can’t return to wherever they come from without a victim.’

There was a long pause. Somers’ pale blue eyes were watery and distant. He said: ‘Summoning Pan. It’s a thing you don’t do, especially if you’re an amateur, a dabbler. You see my hair? When do you think it went white? Five, ten years ago? No. At Oxford, not long after I was ordained. When I was twenty-five. In one night.’

THE BLACK CATHEDRAL

‘We are still essentially thinking for the computer,’ Jasper Webb would say. ‘We should be devising more ways of making the computer think for us.’

The first time we heard him say it we were impressed, but he said it so often it became tedious. These clever ideas stop being clever if you don’t actually put them into practice. What none of us knew at the time was how hard Jasper was working to do so.

Our company is called Playtronics and we are inventors of computer games. We’re young and we think we’re the best in our field, with some justification. We specialise in adult games: not the usual shoot-em-up crap, but genuinely intelligent stuff that an Oxford don wouldn’t be ashamed of playing. You’ve probably heard of
Austerlitz!
, an amazingly lifelike representation of Napoleon’s famous 1805 victory in which you take command of the Austrian and Russian armies and try to defeat the French. Others have done games based on Napoleonic campaigns before, but none have factored in such complex information on weapons, weather, terrain, even the morale and psychology of the opposing forces. Then there is
Faydo!
in which you take on a character in a turn-of-the-century bedroom farce and have to escape from a compromising situation with your reputation and trousers intact.

Jasper Webb at twenty-seven was probably our most brilliant games inventor. I say ‘was’, though, for all I know, he is still alive, somewhere, in some way. The truth is, he has disappeared, and this is the story of his disappearance. I don’t ask you to believe me; I simply present you with the facts as I experienced them and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

**

We generally operate in teams at Playtronics, but Jasper liked to work on his own until a fairly late stage of development. Because he was recognised as the resident genius, this was tolerated. He didn’t like to let on what sort of game he was thinking up until it was nearly ready. I often knew what he was about before he went public, because I am the computer graphics expert and he used to call me in to put the pictorial detail into his concept.

That August five years ago we all knew that Jasper was working on something big. As usual, we were kept in the dark, but he gave us the impression that it was some kind of architectural game in which one built one’s own structure and could thereafter inhabit it ‘virtually’ and take others on a tour of it via the Internet. It sounded like a promising idea, but whenever we tried to probe further he evaded our questions and went off on an apparent tangent. He would lecture us about the medieval ‘Art of Memory’. Apparently some people in the Middle Ages used to create elaborate buildings inside their heads, and within these imaginary palaces they would put pieces of information they had learnt into certain alcoves or rooms. It was a way of enhancing the powers of memory. Jasper said that the computer, being an artificial extension of the brain, could be used in the same way. He would tell us how we, as computer pioneers, were fulfilling old-fashioned theories of magic and how visualisation was the key. All this seemed pretty good nonsense to us. The cliché about madness being akin to genius was often used, though not by me.

One evening Jasper summoned me to meet him at his flat. The time had come for him to reveal to me what he was working on. There was a streak of showmanship in his make-up, so I knew that he was going to put on a display and that my response to it would have to be a mixture of admiration and enthusiasm. Jasper’s self-assurance was a thin veneer; he reacted badly to criticism.

In appearance he was slender, small and dark with a pale face and protuberant eyes. Occasional flashes of light-heartedness animated his face in an attractive way. He lived on the seventh floor of a newly built complex of flats on the South Bank near Deptford. It had been designed by one of those architects who go in for bare white walls, chrome steel and concealed lighting, and for whom books and pictures are clutter because they are too narrow minded to appreciate any aesthetic except their own. They flatter their imaginative sterility by calling it ‘austere’. Jasper, who had a curiously spiritual turn of mind, called it ‘ascetic’. There was something in this. He had deliberately made his surroundings barren in order to concentrate his imaginative life on the computer screen.

Knowing his passion for punctuality, I arrived on the dot of nine p.m. As he opened the door to me Jasper looked at his watch and said ‘I very nearly had to wait.’ Was this echo of Louis XIV’s words deliberate or unconscious? Was irony, or even self-mockery intended? I have no idea. He gave nothing away. He showed me into his living room. Its most striking feature was a long plate-glass window which looked out over London across the Thames.

Without many preliminary courtesies Jasper sat me down on his black leather sofa and started to walk up and down giving me a presentation of his latest idea. They say—or rather Jasper once told me—that Molière used to test out his comedies by reading them to his cook. Well, as far as Jasper was concerned, I was his cook.

‘It’s a new concept,’ he said. ‘Something that is both game and personal therapy, and psychological investigation. If you think that electronics can’t fulfill those functions you’re not thinking imaginatively enough. I’ve provisionally called it
Know Your Enemy!
’ He paused for effect. I looked at him enquiringly.

‘Tell me: if I were to give you a photograph of someone, could you devise a programme whereby you could create a fully animated virtual image of that person on the screen?’

You must remember that all this took place some time ago, and that IT has since evolved rapidly. At the time his question was perfectly valid.

I told him that there were already such programmes which had been used by film companies. To fit a programme like that into the compass of a computer game would require some compression and simplification, but it could be done.

‘It could be done, right. But could
you
devise a programme which would do it?’ Jasper had challenged me. With studied casualness I said that of course I could. Jasper nodded dismissively and went on: ‘My idea, in its basic form, is that you use that technology to play a game against the opponent of your choice. You construct a fully-rounded 3D image of your enemy and challenge them. It could, of course, be some public figure like a sportsman or an unpopular politician, but I’m thinking more in personal terms. Someone against whom you feel some personal animus, someone on whom you need to work out your aggression, settle a score.’

‘What kind of game are you thinking of?’ I asked. ‘Something violent?’

For the first time in our conversation, I noticed an element of evasiveness in Jasper’s manner. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘I see a more subtle psychological element entering here. I envisaged some sort of game of pursuit and capture. I’ve mapped out a few scenarios. You construct the living image of someone you dislike and you pursue him or her. Eventually you get to capture or even destroy them in some way. Nothing too gruesome, naturally. One doesn’t want to pander to the baser instincts. Of course there has to be a game element. They have the chance to get away. But you can start the game again. It’s like a blood sport without the blood . . . Maybe we should use a dog, or a pack of virtual hounds. That’s an idea.’

I said I was uneasy about it. I said that the people who consider it their business to take offence would do so. They would undoubtedly make use of that ill-bred cliché ‘the pornography of violence’. They would say it could encourage feelings of hatred, racism even.

‘I would argue that it might do the opposite,’ said Jasper. ‘Purge those feelings. Channel them harmlessly away. Like masturbation over pornography. If, say, you have a grudge against someone at the office, you can get rid of all your animus against him.’

‘Like using a picture of his face as a dart board?’

‘Exactly. Only infinitely more subtle and satisfying. What do you think?’

I said that it was ‘an interesting concept’ and tried to suppress the fact that something inside me hated the idea. I turned to look out of his plate glass window. The lights of London below glowed like the embers of a fading bonfire, but the thickness of the glass blocked out almost all sound. It was a silent, safe panorama. A glass clinked behind me. I turned round.

‘Would you like a drink?’ asked Jasper. He opened a silvery door and revealed a lighted fridge full of beer bottles that glistened with cold sweat. Without waiting for me to reply he opened one and poured it into a glass. This he handed to me; his own beer he drank straight from the bottle. There was some significance in this act which I could not fathom, but I was aware of tension in the room.

‘I need you to do something for me.’ He took a colour snapshot out of his pocket and threw it down on the coffee table in front of me. The gesture was so deliberately casual, so perfectly executed that I suspect it had been rehearsed. ‘See if you can make a fully animated computer image out of that.’

I picked it up and saw that it was a photograph of Sam Prentice, a colleague at the office. Sam was the marketing consultant at Playtronics and ever since he had joined the firm there had been an antipathy between him and Jasper. Sam had never really been able to understand Jasper’s working methods—which he branded secretive, volatile and erratic—and he complained that his habits were an extreme expression of the creative mentality. Jasper thought Sam a tiresome pen-pushing bore. On the whole, I took Jasper’s side, but I knew there was a certain naivety as well as arrogance in the assumption that his creations were so great that they did not require marketing. He had made no secret of his contempt for Sam who was just as arrogant as Jasper but with rather less cause. There had also been rumours that Sam and Jasper had been in competition for a girl in the office called Sally, and that Sam had won.

‘Why him?’ I asked.

‘Can you do it, or can’t you?’ said Jasper. I said I could. Jasper put his hand on my shoulder and said in a gentler voice: ‘It’s just a bit of fun. Test out your abilities. If you can do that, it would be a major breakthrough.’

I won’t go into technical details, but I will give a rough outline of the procedure. Using a template of a male human form, I scanned in the photograph and then worked out a detailed series of proportional measurements which could be wrapped onto the face and body so that the features of the subject could be reproduced in a 3D computerised image. It was surprising how close I got to Sam’s likeness just by this method. The programme proved difficult to work out, but wonderfully simple to use. You could hand me a full length photograph of anyone and, in a matter of seconds, I could produce a moving, articulated image of that person, a ‘sim’ copy, fully dressed, or naked if desired. It was a walking statue on a screen; a talking one too. When Jasper handed me a recording of Sam’s voice, edited from a tape made at a meeting, I agreed almost unthinkingly to put a voice to my re-creation. Any scruples I had about its use were drowned in pride over my achievement. I was Pygmalion. Finally I handed the programme over to Jasper and waited for the response.

No praise came from him for my efforts, no criticism, nothing. This was disappointing. Two weeks passed before I heard from Jasper at all, and during that time something happened which may or may not be significant: Sam Prentice had a bad accident.

He was never quite sure what happened, because his memory of the incident was vague. He thinks that he had a fall and suffered concussion as the result of being pursued by ‘something like a large dog’. It happened at night, and insult was quite literally added to injury when Sam’s girlfriend Sally, who apparently did not believe the dog story, said he must have been drunk. Sam took great exception to this and the two split up, Sally leaving Playtronics soon afterwards.

When Jasper contacted me again it was to prepare a presentation of his new game
Know Your Enemy!
for the board of Playtronics. After much debate they rejected it. There was some vague talk of moral objections, that the game ‘might be criticised for encouraging violence or stalking’, but apparently it was the possibility of potentially costly lawsuits which sank the project. If Playtronics were to publish the game, thereby encouraging people to make sim copies of other people without their permission, these sim copies might end up being distributed round the world through the internet. People would probably claim intellectual property rights to their own images in cyberspace and sue for defamation if those images were portrayed badly. Playtronics might be held responsible. Even if prosecutions failed the legal fees alone could break the firm.

Jasper seemed to take the rejection well because soon afterwards he presented the board with another game in which I was involved called
ArtTheft!
and this was accepted. It involved stealing famous paintings from a virtual gallery and placing them in your own private virtual gallery. As with most of Jasper’s games it required strong nerves, physical skill and a degree of intellectual ability. The player could plan the raid at leisure but he would have to execute it by navigating through a sophisticated alarm system in real-time without attracting the attention of the security guards. It was a very exciting new concept and the subsequent commercial popularity of the game quickly re-established Jasper’s status as our leading designer.