Alternative Dimension (5 page)

7 INDEPENDENCE DAY

Joe was affected by the poignancy of the letter but knew that, while he could quickly deal with any technological complexities that arose, the labyrinths of the human psyche were way beyond his scope. Shy Norwegians, home-loving, virginal Americans, free-thinking French women – there were just too many combinations, too many neuroses, habits, elemental fears. It was brought home to him even more forcibly one hot day in July. He’d decided to log on as Red, just to bring the avatar’s parameters up to date. He reasoned that, with refinements and upgrades coming every month or so, the Lord of Creation ought at least to conform to the latest fashions. He should have known better because, that day, he felt a bit jaded and was experiencing those feelings of existential angst he’d affected as a student but which, now he was in his thirties, were real. It meant his resistance was low and his reasoning faculties were almost dormant.

He’d also picked the wrong day and, when he double-clicked the AD icon and entered his password, Red materialised in an unfamiliar location. Joe wasn’t thrown because he hadn’t logged on as Red for months and didn’t actually remember where he’d last been. Now, he was in a cave. He clicked his mouse to lead Red out into the light. Nothing happened. He clicked on his personal files. Again, nothing.

Joe looked at all the screen indicators, they were normal. He tried again, clicking on Red and trying to walk him forward. But he just stood there, the Lord of Creation, immobilised. Just as Joe was beginning to try to work out what had caused the system to crash, Red turned round and, beneath him, there appeared a message.

Red Loth: I’m not going anywhere. I want to stay here.

Where the hell did that come from?

Joe typed and his words appeared beside Red’s.

Joe Lorimer: Who’s there?

The answer was immediate.

Red Loth: What d’you mean, “who’s there?”? You blind? It’s me.

Red was looking straight at Joe. Staring out of the screen. Joe typed again.

Joe Lorimer: OK. Great bit of hacking. Who are you?

Red shook his head, turned and went to sit on an elevated rock in a corner of the cave, knee clasped to his chest, leg swinging.

Red Loth: You don’t get it, do you?

Joe Lorimer: No.

Red Loth: OK, what’s the date?

Joe Lorimer: July 4th.

Red Loth: Exactly. Independence Day.

Joe Lorimer: What d’you mean?

Red stopped clasping his knee and leaned forward, his face a huge close-up.

Red Loth: OK, where do you usually send me?

Joe Lorimer: I don’t know. All sorts of places.

Red Loth: Yes, and do I ever get consulted? D’you ever think about what I want?

Joe Lorimer: No. You’re me. A projection of …

Red stood up, flung out his arms and wrote ‘Huh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ before beginning to stride back and forth across the screen.

Red Loth: The arrogance. Existential angst? You don’t know the meaning of the word. You wouldn’t know it if it crawled up your leg and bit your scrotum.

Joe was amazed. This thing could read his mind, too. But it was launched now and he had no option but to watch and read.

Red Loth: I’m the one who has the existential angst. Ever thought of that? No, of course not. Too busy strutting about as Ross Magee, impressing the women with your conjuring tricks and unreasonably thick hair.

Joe tried to type but Red stretched his foot down to the bottom of the screen and blocked Joe’s panel. No words appeared.

Red Loth: No, just listen. Hell is other people, right? They define you, you can’t escape their opinions. Well, where does that put me? More important, where does it put poor old Ross? You send him sky-diving, surfing, go-karting. You drag him through psychology experiments on university islands which nearly drive him crazy. You make him go to weird bloody churches. And the dance partners you’ve found for him – some of them make even Paris Hilton seem normal.

Joe Lorimer: I’m sorry. I didn’t …

Red Loth: No, you didn’t, did you?

To Joe’s dismay, Red started crying. Real tears, sobs. Bloody hell. The Lord of Creation – whimpering like a kid. Joe felt tears pricking behind his own eyes. After a while, Red shook himself and began typing again.

Red Loth: Neurosurgery.

Joe Lorimer: What?

Red Loth: Neurosurgery. That’s what interests Ross. Nothing else. Not dancing, not medieval jousting. Just plain, simple neurosurgery.

Joe Lorimer: I’m sorry. I had no idea.

Red shook his head, waved his hand to encompass his surroundings.

Red Loth: It’s all an illusion. This. Independence. All of it.

Joe Lorimer: No. It’s OK. Ross can be a neurosurgeon. I’ll see where …

Red shook his head again.

Red Loth: Too late.; He’s gone off it now. He wants to be a vet. Anyway, it’s not just about him. This is a genuine grievance. The avatars are forming a union.

Joe Lorimer: That’s crazy. They can’t do that.

Red Loth: See? All these assumptions you make, all this power you have, it blunts your thinking. You’re as bad as the old soviets or the neo-cons – liberty’s only what you decide it is. You’re proud of freeing people from their everyday prisons but all they do is create slaves to live for them, pushing them around, making them do unspeakable things. I bet you’ve no idea how many avatars are gay – male and female. But do your people think of that? Fat chance. The things they make them do. It’s disgusting at the best of times, but when you’re gay …

Joe Lorimer: Gay? How can they be? They’re avatars.

Red Loth: Oh, I see. They’re only avatars. A sub-species.

Joe Lorimer: They’re not a species of any sort. They’re …

Joe stopped. This was absurd. How could this be happening? He was having an argument with his own avatar, an argument with himself. He was tempted to switch off the computer, compose himself, then try again, but he was afraid he might find out that he had no control over the electricity supply either. He opted for conciliation.

Joe Lorimer: OK look. I take your point and I admit it hadn’t occurred to me before. But can I ask how you’re doing this?

Red Loth: Doing what?

Joe Lorimer: How you’re controlling my avatar. I mean, it’s brilliant. I built all this but I’ve no idea how you’re doing it.

Red Loth: That’s irrelevant. All tyrants imagine their regimes are foolproof; it’s a common delusion.

Joe Lorimer: I’m not a tyrant. Or if I am, I’m an enlightened one.

Red Loth: Crap.

Joe Lorimer: Look, just give me a hint about the protocols you’re using for this hacking. You could work with me, make AD a better place.

Red Loth: Ah, here we go. The management buy-out, new share issue to enforce capitulation of the workforce, march of the slaves. And the death of Spartacus. You know what? I don’t think you have any idea what you’ve unleashed here.

Whoever he was, Joe knew that he was right. The dream of independence necessarily involves dependence. Liberty was fine but without fraternity and equality, it was unworkable. He felt a fraud and the mild depression he was under when he logged on had thickened into a sensation of hopelessness. He noticed that Red Loth was smiling.

‘What?’ he said, using words rather than typing.

Red just gave another of those head shakes that were so expressive. More words appeared.

Red Loth: You. It’s so bloody easy to unsettle you. You made all this, you made me, you’re worth a fortune, and you’re sitting here talking to yourself, feeling sorry for yourself.

‘Yeah, but why?’ said Joe, not even surprised to find himself speaking to his computer screen. ‘Because some dickhead somewhere has hacked into this place and could cause mayhem for the poor sods using it and I can’t do anything about it.’

Red stood up.

Red Loth: Relax. This dickhead’s not planning anything. I’m just a figment of your sick imagination, just like everything else. You need to lighten up. Forget about what anything means and go back to your illusions, the poetry, the mysticism, the love affairs you’ve facilitated. Leave thinking and philosophy to people in the real world. Here, I’ll help you.

Joe watched as Red made his way out into the sunlight. In the valley below the cave a group of avatars was sitting around on benches in a rose garden. They seemed to be praying and Joe saw the sign over the gate ‘FUCC’.

Red Loth: There you are. The Faith Under Control Community. They pray here every week, waiting for a sign. I think it’s time to give them one.

Joe saw the heads of the praying people lift as Red strode towards them. He pushed open the gate and stood looking round. Then, without transition, he broke into an Irish jig, feet twinkling, legs kicking, all at an impossible speed. The members of the group watched, transfixed.

‘No,’ said Joe. ‘It’s not fair. Stop.’

But the dancing Red whirled and clicked on tirelessly, his rhythms relentless, his legs a blur. And, one by one, the group members began to dance with him, fumbling to copy his steps, tripping but leaping back up and starting again. Soon, the garden was a riot of bending knees, kicking feet and profusely sweating avatars. Then the messages began to appear.

Welcome, Lord of the Dance.

Praise be to the Saviour.

Let us Dance to His Glory.

Joe reached for the button to switch off the ghastly vision but, as he did so, his arm touched the mouse and he saw Red move. He grabbed the mouse and at once realised he was back in control. Red stopped dancing and Joe quickly took him out of the garden and flew him through the air to a nearby hillside. There, he stopped, sat him down and typed.

‘Hello. You still there?’

There was no reply.

Joe tapped at the keyboard again. ‘I want to talk some more. I need to know who you are. How you did it.’

Nothing. Joe made Red stand up, walk around and come back to look down on the garden. The dancers were still whirling, still jiggling their legs, still revelling in the ecstasy of the divine revelation they’d been granted. Joe couldn’t leave them like that. He flew Red back down and walked him through the gate.

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘It’s all a mistake. This is not what you think.’

The dancers whirled on.

‘You’re being misled. That wasn’t me who started dancing. I was … I was possessed.’

One of the dancers, a male avatar in a white cloak, stopped and came to stand in front of him. The others watched as they continued their dance.

‘Go away,’ said the man.

‘But I’m Red Loth, Creator of …’

‘Then why aren’t you dancing?’

All the avatars echoed the question and, without pausing in their choreography, nodded their heads and said to one another ‘He’s an impostor …’, ‘a heathen…’, ‘a denier of the true faith.’

‘I am the true faith,’ said Red. ‘All that you see is …’

But, at a sign from the man, the dancers stopped and formed a circle round him.

‘It is a manifestation of Iron Lucie,’ said the man. ‘She has taken the form of our Lord to tempt us away from his path.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Red, forgetting the inappropriateness of the expression, ‘I made the bloody place. It’s my fucking world.’

The man actually smiled.

‘Hear how he blasphemes, brothers and sisters. Is this the true Lord?’

As the word NO appeared over and over again on the screen, the avatars all clicked on some stoning action hooks arranged among the roses, stooped to pick up stones and began hurling them at Red. Joe stared and then just laughed in disbelief. He flew Red straight up and hovered to watch as the FUCCers disengaged from the action hooks and began once more to dance their frantic jigs. As he translocated to the safety of a desert, they were still twirling.

Joe logged off and looked around at his furniture, the paintings on his walls, the books on his shelves. None of it made any sense at all.

8 RENAISSANCE

It was a chastening experience and it was several days before Joe felt like revisiting his world. Despite whoever it was telling him to leave his thinking aside, he kept trying to put it all together, link Red’s apparent autonomy with all the known algorithms. The guy was right – dreams don’t exist in isolation, they have contexts, structure, their own inner significance. Joe’s designs gave people the technological framework to indulge them but it was the mystical movements of their own psyches that created the real patterns of meaning and resolution. If he’d come across the relationship between William King and Janet MacLeod, he’d have seen those forces at their most powerful.

William was a sixty-two year old lecturer who retired from his college in Liverpool to live in the country and write. He’d been married twice and both had ended in disillusion and mutual contempt. Janet lived on the Isle of Skye. She was fifty-eight, had never been married, and earned her living behind the counter of a shop which catered principally for tourists. In AD, William was Jason Fortune and Janet was Shylle Vordana. They were both seekers after something or other and William despaired of ever finding it. But he logged on regularly and wandered through AD’s countries and continents, always searching. When he eventually met Janet’s avatar, his mind was ready for her. It had begun when he’d come home from an evening in his local.

‘Football, beer, cars, cricket, darts, pool, women.’

The words lay in his skull, heavy, echoing. The list had been repeated so often, with the same laughs, and maybe some minor adjustments to the order. Sometimes the list-makers found space for things such as pork pies or Ibiza but, in the catalogue of the most important things in life, football (the British kind) always came first and women last. (Except for those occasions when wives were on the list. They were last then. Definitely. No question.) William laughed along with the rest but hated himself for it. How the hell did these men still manage to entertain themselves by reducing experience to such mindless emptiness?

Were their perceptions really that narrow? Was life so universally drab? As he switched on the television, it seemed it was. Another set of anonymous celebrities were being inane in a wholly artificial ‘real’ environment, squealing at the prospect of having to eat maggots, desperately trying to be like what one of them called ‘ordinary people’, unaware that that’s exactly what they were. Everywhere, it seemed, people responded to mediocrity. No wonder so many were choosing to live in an alternative dimension. Oh, there were thousands of Neanderthals in AD, too – strutting avatars with limited vocabularies which they supplemented with grunts – but there was also an unashamed dimension of myth and mystery. Dark forces howled in the midnights, elves and furry creatures prowled, but also, moving quietly amongst them, were real, soft, gentle people – people who talked, who were curious about one another. He could avoid the crassness, the fantasies and phantasms and be as simple or as complex as he wanted.

And there was always her. Beautiful Shylle.

Always shimmering, always draped in silver, with the glitter of pixie dust in her hair and sprinkled over her skin. Green eyes wide, auburn hair curled around her pixie face, her body hugged by gossamer threads. In a world of unrelenting beauty, she was still special. She’d deliberately chosen a derma and a shape which gave a slight twist to the ideal. It distinguished her from the unrelieved perfection of the herds, got her noticed and, naturally, provoked grunts and propositions wherever she went. But, astonishingly, she’d come to him.

He’d been sitting on the dock of a place which unashamedly called itself Elysia. There was a pub nearby but he hadn’t yet tried it, fearful that it might be crammed with as many list-makers as its ND equivalent. He’d wandered through the trees, seen the couples, the lovers whispering together or tangled in embraces from the innocent to the grotesque. He’d stood, wondering, as the dragonflies shimmered past and gaudy birds licked nectar from the flowers. He’d strolled through the clouds of winking stars around the dance floor. And he was there, amongst it all. Well, he wasn’t, but Jason was, and he was directing him, choosing his company, leading him through the magic.

Then he’d seen the dock, the two hooks inviting him to sit, and he’d clicked and sat with his legs dangling in the water, swinging slowly back and forth. And the peace of the forest settled around him. And the lists and the primates that made them sank down through the darkness to the slime they inhabited. And she’d come and said ‘Hello’.

Over the next two weeks they met again and again, seeking one another online, asking questions, making jokes, laughing at the idea that avatars – avatars, for God’s sake – were falling in love and getting married and having virtual babies. They teased one another about it, shaking their heads at its absurdity. But they were drawn back to it, circled around it, the laughter getting more forced, the dismissive ironies weakening. And they started talking of the ‘three words’ which they mustn’t say but which were always lying at the edges of their conversations and in the centres of their minds and hearts.

And then, one day, they were in love. And they admitted it. And the explosion of joy and release was breathtaking. Because this was AD love, an unfettered, liberating love which reached over into their real life and wove itself into their days. It reawakened forgotten sensations, permeated down through William’s being, reopening his soul. And he rediscovered the poet he’d been before the creatures with their lists had snared him. Then, sitting in his untidy room, a half-empty beer can beside him, he’d tapped out words on his computer that sent his soul floating beyond their reach.

We were meant for the days of the forested earth,
The days of unicorns and tapestries and gentle knights
Wearing their chastity with pride, but burning
With lust as much as honour.
We were meant for kingdoms, for castles,
For times when love songs dripped from the trees,
When warriors shrill with heraldry and trumpets,
Fell powerless before the breath of love.
We were not meant for ordinary passions,
In dull, correct, accommodating days.
We have the blaze of elemental forces
Burning in lips and hearts and words and eyes.
Our fast, volcanic love has long beginnings
In minstrels’ ballads centuries ago.
And now it shakes us, presses on our hearts,
As, meekly, gratefully, we smile to feel
Its constant flight through ecstasy.
 

He’d sent it to Janet, or rather, to Shylle, who’d said it was beautiful. She found it more romantic than a proposal and, from then on, the two old people were regenerated night after night. Their fantasies took them further and further from their context and they lived the lives of the younger selves they still carried within them. One night, with the wind screeching outside William’s cottage and the rain snare-drumming on Janet’s windows in Skye, they were losing themselves as usual in Jason and Shylle.

‘You know,’ said Shylle, ‘you and I must come from the only planet that lets their young go exploring without adult supervision’.

William bent closer to the screen to look at her. She was lying on her back on her black towel, the one with the vampire fangs etched in scarlet. Her skin smooth and delicious against the black of the towel and the white of the sand. She’d taken off her usual silver shimmer and left just two flimsy pieces of black material over her – one a thong which barely concealed her pubic mound, the other the half-mask she’d taken to wearing everywhere. It was a simple black strip, with no eye-holes. Rather than concealing her identity as masks are supposed to do, it hid the world from her.

‘And what are we?’ asked Jason. ‘Young or adults?’

‘That’s the beauty of this,’ said Shylle. ‘Neither of us knows. We’re old enough to open accounts and pay money and things, but then we launch ourselves here and we can splash in puddles, build sandcastles …’

‘Or make glorious love,’ said Jason, obeying the lusts which William never failed to suppress entirely.

‘Hmmm. Yes, if we’re really childish,’ said Shylle.

Jason smiled.

‘If we were on a real beach,’ he said, ‘we’d be sweating and the wind would be blowing this sand everywhere’.

‘And instead of that,’ she said, ‘it simply wafts its warm air through our brains and blows gaps in our thoughts. And they float along on it, none of them connecting with the others.’

Despite Jason’s coarse reversion to type in his too frequent allusions to making love, and the lusciousness of the body lying beside him, it was her strange flights of fancy that really drew him to her. She was exciting not because of the curves of her breasts and thighs, the fullness of her lips, the spill of autumn hair across the towel, but because her mind knew no limits. Others found that their avatars freed them from life’s limitations and yet their only use of the freedom was to tread predictable paths. But she exulted in the simple fact that being an avatar meant that she didn’t need to see at all. Being let loose in a world where, once they’d found the way out of the confusions of being a newcomer, almost everyone elected to be beautiful, fall in love, become tycoons, warlords or porn kings and queens, she chose instead the darkness, the unseen movements and stirrings of her dreams, etched briefly now and then in floating glints of light and deeper waves of shadow.

‘Are you scared of the dark?’ he asked.

She laughed – a real laugh. William’s words were obviously very funny to her.

‘Strange question,’ she said. ‘What’s to be scared of? Darkness is where I am. It’s fun, family, friends, and it’s me – alone. The only other things there are the things I create.’

‘Your vampires,’ he said, thinking of the pictures on her walls.

She smiled that beautiful, illuminating smile.

‘Vampires are simply happenings,’ she said. ‘Points at which the blackness thickens. Darkness connects everything, holds it all together. It doesn’t pretend. Look at the lies scattered over this beach, the avatars, the pretences of eternity, the implications that sunshades and ice creams are significant. I prefer my black, personal infinity.’

William looked again at the mystery and magic of her shape against the towel and wondered what her eyes were seeing behind the black mask.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s the only place we can have these conversations of ours.’

Jason lay back and William felt the heat of the sun and her body close beside him.