The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (39 page)

She went up and was
dismayed to see Nicholas’s personal assistant, Tracy Wordsworth, already
changed and limbering up. She almost turned and left, but then Tracy saw her
and smiled and it was too late, she was committed.

It was murder! If this
was what it took to get down to a slim ninety kilos like Tracy then maybe Maddy
would be better off sticking to her natural weight. After barely five minutes
she hurt. Deep inside, her muscles were trembling with the effort of moving and
stretching in ways the body just wasn’t designed for.

“It gets easier every
time,” Tracy reassured her, as Maddy resorted to watching from the side.

Thank goodness for the
cakes. Or rather, thank goodness for Dr Bull’s new NutriMentPlus, which was
being trialled in the Amenity Centre today. It knew exactly what she wanted,
and almost as soon as the interval started, Maddy was drawing deeply on a
toffee-cream smoothy (with extra choc-shavings). She looked around at the
shabby interior of the gym. The high windows showed blue sky. She remembered
the feelings of being uncontained when she was outdoors, and she remembered the
taste of the air. “I’m going outside,” she told Tracy. Fresh air would be far
more beneficial than sitting here feeling guilty and looking at svelte young
women doing things she could only dream of. You could get that on the vee,
after all.

Tracy hesitated, then
said, “I think I’ll join you. If you don’t mind, that is.”

Maddy, smiled. It was a
mad kind of day. Things were just happening, unplanned, unpondered.

Out in the main
concourse, the kids seemed to have given up on their games early. They were
drifting out of the great darkened rooms lit only by vee screens and going .. .
outside. The ExerThighsTM escapees followed.

“It’s a lovely day, isn’t
it?” said Tracy.

Maddy looked around. It
was. The air and sun were good.

This was far better than
sitting in the gym and feeling bad. Out on a grassy area, some kids had a ball.
Maddy recognized it from the vee: the sims of the old greats playing against
each other. The kids were playing soccer. They stopped to watch, part of a
growing crowd drifting out to enjoy the sunny day. It was really quite exciting
... quite revolutionary.

After a while, the ball
came towards them and, as if by instinct, Maddy swung a foot at it. She made
contact, and the ball flew back into the melee. Tracy squeezed her arm and
winked at her. “Come on, Maddy,” she urged. “Let’s show ‘em!”

They trundled out from
the crowd of onlookers and, more by surprise than skill, Tracy took the ball
off the feet of one of the young lads. She kicked it roughly in the direction
of Maddy, who lumbered towards it. A kid chest-high to her, but almost as broad,
got there first and paused with a foot triumphantly trapping the ball, then he
saw that she was not going to stop and raised his arms protectively. Maddy
barged into him and some part of her made contact with the ball. A big cheer
went up, and then she realized that others from the watching crowd were joining
in, too.

One, however, remained
aloof. One member of the crowd stood back, watching, making notes, talking into
a phonemic stuck to his jaw. Gideon Eden had a job to do, an experiment to
observe, to report upon. Outbreaks of spontaneity have to be observed minutely
if they are to be understood.

In which Nicholas van Pommel is
consternated and Dr Bull and Gideon,
his assistant, reach a critical point

She woke. She wished she
hadn’t. She felt as if she had been dragged back and forth over a cattle grid
(she was a great fan of
The Farm).
It hurt when she moved. It hurt in
different ways if she lay still.

She filled the bath. She
would need to get a bigger one, if her ExerThighs
^TM
regime made no
difference. The hot water helped a little. She had grass stains on her knees,
grass mowings in her hair. Bruises. One big one on her shin from where one of
the little buggers had caught her.

She slumped on the sofa
and called up the vee. She really must tilt the screen a little. Some day. “Nicholas?”
He popped up in a buddy window — still labelled “sweetheart” instead of “buddy”
she saw, with a mixture of guilt and amusement.

“Maddy,” he said. He
seemed quite animated today. “Are you okay? Did you hear about the uprising?”

“Uprising?”

“At the Amenity Centre.
People just upping and leaving their screens. Going
outside.
Rowdiness!
Unruliness! Anarchy!”

“I was there,” she said
softly, wondering what had happened to their long silences.

He stared at her. “You were there? You were affected?”

She nodded, feeling
slightly defensive. “I went outside. It was a nice day. Tracy was there, too.”
She wondered about mentioning the football, but decided to defer that in the
good old Sunny Meadows fashion.

“What’s happening?”
Nicholas said, shaking his head.

It was only then that
Maddy, too, wondered what was happening, or more specifically, what had
happened the day before at the Amenity Centre. So many people, just getting it
into their heads to do something different . . . It wasn’t
bad,
though,
was it?

“What if this insanity
spreads?” he added.

What indeed?

“Bud and Suze are back
together again,” she told Nicholas. “She should know better by now.”

He paused to think, then
nodded. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he said.

Over in Dr Bull’s old
house, they were discussing matters more weighty than the state of Bud and Suze’s
half-scripted relationship.

“Well, Gideon?”

“All is ready.
Preliminary trials are complete. The technology appears robust enough to cope,
and we have observed the impact on the populace.”

“At last. Now we can
extend the experiment to all of Sunny Meadows. Let operations commence!”

In which it will be seen that the epidemic invades
the entire town, and what effect it produces

In the following weeks
the madness, instead of subsiding, became more widespread. No corner of Sunny
Meadows remained untouched by moments of spontaneity and enthusiasm, by
altercation and dispute and simple acts of
doing.
The streets, normally
deserted save for the automated delivery vehicles, saw people out in the fine
weather. Walking. Adolescents gathered in great crowds to play football with
the one football known to exist in Sunny Meadows. Screen buddies visited each
other, in person, and they watched
Bud and Suze
or
Celebwatch
or
Truth
or Dare?
together, all in the same room.

Maddy’s neighbours, old
Mrs and Mr Oliver, started having rather noisy parties with their good friends
the Blanchards. In a very short matter of time, Maddy’s neighbours were Mrs
Oliver and Mr Blanchard, although the parties continued apace. Maddy didn’t
know what to make of it all (although it rather tickled her to see the colour
back in her neighbours’ cheeks), but Tracy told her that this kind of thing was
happening all over. “Life is speeding up,” Tracy told her. “People aren’t just
sitting back — they’re grabbing their opportunities with both hands. Have you
seen Nicholas lately?”

Maddy shrugged. They
were outside the Amenity Centre again, the ExerThighsTM class having moved
outdoors to take advantage of the extended fine spell. Not that anyone really
knew if this weather was unseasonably good or merely typical — whatever, they
could still make the most of it. She wondered what Tracy meant by her mention
of Nicholas. Perhaps she was planning to seize him with both hands. Maddy
looked at her new sort-of-friend and knew she couldn’t possibly compete.

“Okay, exergroup, time
to get back to it!”

Maddy scrambled to her
feet, not wanting to be last into position. Claude, their Thinstructor
^{TM (PENDING)}
,
thumbed the soundbox and the beat started pumping out. Copying his actions, as
well as she could, Maddy shifted from foot to foot with the music, pointing to
the sky, pointing to the thigh, pointing to the sky . . .

The music drew unwanted
attention. Some kids who had been playing soccer now stopped and shuffled over
to watch and gesture and gurn, and then . . . point to the sky, point to the
thigh . . . a whole crowd of them aping the rigorous, scientifically-devised
routine of the ExerThighs
^TM
programme.

It came to a head when
Denise Mackay (down ten kilos since starting the programme, but still packing a
mighty haunch) stopped it mid ab-flex and yelled, “Will you kids just fuck off
and die?”

They stared at her.
Everybody stared at her. Denise was the mildest, meekest, most god-loving
grandmother you ever could hope to meet, in Sunny Meadows or almost anywhere
else. She did flowers in vases and she always took trouble to smile at ever,
one she passed, just to be sure she covered all the ones whose faces she
half-recognized but whose names wouldn’t come.

She stood there, hands
on hips. Just daring any one of them to be stupid enough to react.

Someone is always stupid
enough. Indeed, Dr Bull, although not present at this incident, had many years
before published a paper that empirically demonstrates this very point: if a
situation requires someone to do something stupid, you can always find someone
stupid enough to do it.

Little Danny Rogers
burst out laughing. He couldn’t contain it. He was there at the front of the
crowd, and this old, round woman was glaring at them all, using language she
must have learnt from the vee because oldies didn’t speak like that in the
normal run of things.

Her eyes locked on him.

She screeched and took a
great stride towards him, and then another. She was on him in seconds, an
impressive act in itself. Danny Rogers barely knew what had hit him, let alone
what had landed on top of him, squeezing the air from his lungs and the urine
from his bladder.

After a second or two of
rather bemused silence, broken only by an old woman’s squawking and a small boy’s
rather muffled protests, one of the gang of youths tried to haul Denise Mackay
off their compatriot. The old woman swung an arm and caught him in the jaw with
a fleshy elbow. As he stumbled back, all hell broke loose. Teenagers piled in,
at least a few of them subsequently staggering back shortly afterwards; then
Claude bellowed at his class, “That’s one of ours, that is!” and threw himself
into the battle in support of Denise.

Maddy followed Tracy in,
body-checking a dreadlocked young girl as she did so. She would have more
bruises in the morning. And aches, and pains, and she would have to try to soak
it all out in the bath, and she would both regret it and puzzle over it. She
knew all this. “Take that, fuckwit!” she yelled, punching a tall,
barrel-bellied boy in the chest.

Back in Dr Bull’s grand
old house, he and his assistant were somewhat removed from events. They thought
this advisable because, while it is not possible to predict the detail of
spontaneous chaotic flourishings, the generality can be all too predictable.

“There is fighting at
the Amenity Centre,” Gideon told his master. “And I believe a young people’s
rave event is to take place in Festival Fields this evening. The Advisory Board
have reached three decisions at their latest vee-meeting—”

“Unprecedented!” gasped
the doctor, his eyes flaring with excitement.

“—and someone has
painted the entire frontage of Dewberry Mall.”

“Colour?”

“Many, Dr Bull. Many.”

The doctor chuckled.

“Doctor . . .” Gideon
hesitated, as if about to broach a sensitive subject. “Do you think that,
perhaps, and in the light of current happenings, we might have misjudged the
levels? Do you not think that they are a trifle high?”

Dr Bull fixed him with
his staring eyes, and the young assistant might easily have seen in that look
just a hint of the madness that had spread through Sunny Meadows. “We have only
just begun, my boy! If anything, I’d say that the levels are too low. This is
an experiment, not a humanitarian exercise.”

In which the Sunny Meadownians
adopt a heroic resolution

It was not long
afterwards that the long-running, off and on (although mostly, it must be said,
oft) dispute with the neighbouring New Town development was fanned into sparky
life, once again. New Town, which was both older than Sunny Meadows and not
really a town at all, but more a sprawling suburban stain (pretty much like
Sunny Meadows, after all, then) had, until this point, been blissfully
unaffected by the madness recounted in these pages. Indeed, many residents of
New Town must, by now, have long since put aside any memory of what was, for
those of Sunny Meadows, a festering
casus belli.

As a great man once
said, winning is not everything, it’s the
only
thing. He also said that
a game of football is hardly a matter of life and death — it’s more important
than that. And what’s more, you only sing when you’re winning. On that bitter
day in February 1974, New Town Athletic won, and then they sung about it and
forgot. But Sunny Meadows Wanderers lost, by a single goal, scored from the
penalty spot after a decision made by a short-sighted, dim-witted, one-sided,
black-shirted representative of Beelzebub.