Alternative Dimension (7 page)

11 girls and boys

It was the beginning of quite a settled period in the evolution of AD. By now, it was such a familiar part of the lives of people all over the world that its magic almost seemed ‘normal’. Men strutted around in their everyday lives as if they really were as handsome and tireless as their AD avatars, women carried the power of their online adventures into their real homes and jobs and knew secretly that they were far more than the predictable creatures their husbands and partners seemed to make of them. The links between the two worlds were subtle but distinctly energising. The evidence of this egregious ‘normality’ was everywhere.

For example, if any of Sammy Preddle’s real friends had known that he spent most of his evenings n AD, they would have found it hard to believe. In fact, ‘friends’ isn’t quite the right word, because he wasn’t close to anyone. There were people he worked with, people who lived in the same apartment block, two ex girl friends who were now married with kids but who sent him emails from time to time, and that was it.

Sammy lived a literal life. Perhaps it was a result of having a mathematical mind. For anyone with imagination, the world of maths was potentially a wondrous place. It implied an ability to handle pure concepts, unrelated to specific objects or images – undiluted thoughts that didn’t even need words to articulate them, the mysterious music of equations and proofs. If that were the case with Sammy, the effect was to seal him in his thinking and keep his dreams and ambitions (if he had any) hidden from the outside world. He lived a life of compartments – always punctual at work, reading the same newspaper every day, watching the same tv programmes, drinking the same wine. The temptation was to assume that he suffered from some obsessive-compulsive disorder, but that would be a mistake. OCD sufferers have profound anxieties and an absolute need to follow specific rituals to maintain an equilibrium. Sammy had no such anxieties and his routines encompassed everything about him. In fact, his life was one gigantic ritual – everything in its place, ordered, secure and … well … normal.

In AD, his transformation was comprehensive. He’d first logged on because he read an article about it in his paper which concentrated on its technical aspects. The complexities of its social systems, the individual freedoms it unleashed, the insights into the human condition it afforded – none of these compared with the algorithms which formed its architecture. His avatar, Sami (so-called because ‘Sammy’ and other versions of the name were unavailable), wasn’t a passport into a world of self-indulgence; it was simply mathematics in action. Sammy used it to test the algorithms which created it. But he was the only one who knew that. To all the people on his friends’ list, Sami was a daredevil. He’d tried everything, from the simplest to the most extreme activities on offer. He’d visited all the research sites, taken the psychological tests, endured stressful situations, had pornographic couplings with women, men, animals and other avatars which fell into no recognisable categories (but which Sammy labelled ‘pseudomorphs’). For a person with no imagination, he made astonishingly wide use of the resources of his virtual world.

Then, true to form, the time came for his summer holiday. He arrived home on the Friday evening, ate his meal (smoked fish with creamed potatoes and peas, as usual), and logged on. Holiday meant a change in routines. The fact that the avatar had done just about everything that could be done in AD was irrelevant. Every night, his activities had been the opposite of the tedium of Sammy’s days in the office, so now that Sammy was on holiday, Sami would have to go to work.

Sammy searched the AD world for an office building with rooms to rent, visited several and eventually chose one in a busy location, full of malls, publishers, real estate agents and insurance offices. The room was on the third floor, accessible by translocation but also by a working lift. It had a desk, a filing cabinet, two easy chairs and some shelving. The rent was 500 virdollars a week. Sammy booked it for two weeks, then translocated Sami over, sent him up in the lift and sat him at the chair behind the desk.

And that’s where he spent his summer holiday. Every morning for the following two weeks, Sammy got up, logged on, and sent Sami to the office. He’d watch him all day, occasionally walking him to the filing cabinet and back to the chair, until 5.30, when he’d translocate him back to his apartment and log off. In the evenings, Sammy would watch tv. His thoughts never strayed to Sami or AD. He was on holiday, so was Sami. The balance between his two lives was preserved. Once again, AD was serving its purpose. If Sammy had known any poetry (which he didn’t), he would have appreciated the comfort and certainty offered by Robert Browning in
Pippa Passes
: ‘God’s in His Heaven, All’s Right With the World’.

* * *

For Anna Barnes-Willoughby, on the other hand, what drew her to AD was its potential for excitement. The moment she heard about it, she knew that she had to try it. In life, she’d followed, almost religiously, the career trajectory that her parents, teachers and community had sketched out for her. She’d never yet taken a drug other than alcohol and even then, her use of it had been discreet, sparing and always correct. She lived in a detached, four-bedroomed house in Surrey. Her husband, a lawyer with a major bank, worked long hours, and her son and daughter were at a private school and only came home at weekends, so she had lots of spare time during the day.

Lunches with friends, hair appointments, shopping and cooking and, of course, her Pilates classes filled some of the hours but the creative urge that she’d been suppressing since her late teens continued to grow and become more urgent.

‘You mean you get to make and dress your own … what did you call it? … avatar?’ she said to Helen, who’d told her about these new virtual worlds.

‘Yes,’ said Helen. ‘Mine’s a nun.’

‘Oh, that’s so sweet,’ said Anna, although she was surprised at the revelation since there was much talk at their Readers’ Group of Helen’s many extra-marital affairs.

Helen laughed.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘It keeps most of the men away, so I can choose the ones I want to spend time with. The minute I find one, my habit comes off and I’m in skin-tight pink lycra which shows everything.’

‘Helen,’ said Anna, both shocked and excited by her words.

‘But that’s the point,’ said Helen. ‘You can be like that there. Anything goes. I’ve had better sex there than I’ve ever had with Don.’

Don was her husband, the non-executive director of six engineering companies and a well-known local rugby player. Anna found him loud, rude and generally unpleasant. But then, all men seemed perverse to her – wrapped up in their own worlds, incapable of understanding the delicacies and refinements that life could offer.

They talked some more about Helen’s experiences as a nun, but Anna was eager to get home and try this wonderland for herself. She made an excuse about having an appointment with her manicurist, then drove home, checked that the phone was in answer mode, and settled at the computer.

The moment she was asked whether she wanted her avatar to be male or female and was presented with a standard, characterless female form, her mind leapt over thirty years back into her past and she was with her first Barbie doll again. She’d been crazy about them. She bought them in all their forms, had boxes full of outfits, herds of ponies, and the pink carriages to go with them, houses, furniture, tea-sets, ball gowns, jodhpurs, swimsuits; Anna was the archetypal Barbie girl.

And now, once more, she was being given the chance to slough off the cares of being a respectable wife, mother and member of a fine middle class community, and play with dolls.

She noticed other avatars, male and female, coming and going around her but, for days and days, she ignored them all and lost herself in refining her avatar’s appearance, buying clothes and accessories and animations that let her walk and pose like the stars she admired so much in ‘Hello’ magazine. The fact that Beebie (her avatar) could do such things made her so much more satisfying than dear Barbie had ever been. Anna could launch her creation onto dance floors, into beach parties, shops and clubs and she looked like and was much closer to a real person than Barbie could ever be.

It was the fulfilment of a dream. Inside the woman who’d become a wife and mother, the girl who’d dreamed with her dolls still existed, as full of fancies as ever, and convinced that this was a world in which the transcendence she craved would be possible.

To begin with she WAS Barbie – or rather, Beebie. In the same way that she saw other residents BEING their dreams – cats, dogs, teddy bears, dragons – it was so wonderful. All these people had rediscovered a childhood passion and were free to revisit it and indulge themselves in developing it further – sometimes to astonishing extremes.

One day, after she’d groomed her pony, taken her shower and was looking through the ‘Wardrobe’ box in her personal files to decide what to wear, the thought of Ken crept into her mind once more. It had happened before but the idea that, with the magic available in this world, a relationship with Ken could go so much further than it ever had in reality, had caused her to shake the thought from her mind.

She was used to sitting stiff-legged Kens and Barbies at picnic tables or in the dining rooms of plastic mansions, holding tiny cups and glasses to their lips. The thought that Beebie might actually be embraced by a Ken equivalent was at first unseemly; she was the embodiment of purity, a perpetual virgin. Even when her brother had crucified one of her Kens on the trunk of a cherry tree when she was nine, the realities of the harsh world in which they lived had still not sullied her dreams.

But now, her living Barbie could … make love. The temptation was strong but Anna quickly rationalised it, decided that it was, after all, only virtual experiences she’d have, and they couldn’t impact on her real marriage. And she began planning how she might find someone worthy of Beebie.

It went without saying that his name had to be Ken. She typed it into the search facility and was delighted, if rather taken aback, to discover that there were over a hundred. Now that she’d decided on this course of action, she was too eager to progress with it to bother reading all their details, so she selected some at random and, in the end, chose one who hadn’t bothered to write anything at all. Her decision was based solely on the fact that he’d joined on the same day that she had. After several deep breaths and a secret smile at how fast her heart was beating, she sent him a personal message.

She’d thought he wouldn’t be there, so she was surprised to get an answer right away. With no time to work out a strategy, she dashed off something close to the truth – her Barbie craze, the attraction of his name, the fact that she hadn’t yet made many friends because she’d been too busy getting Beebie just right – and she was thrilled when he seemed to understand her and suggest that he’d been using AD in exactly the same way.

In the end he suggested they should meet and Anna, more and more excited that Beebie would be getting together with her Ken, agreed, saying only that they should leave it until the following day, to give her time to think through what she wanted and what they might do. Ken gave her a location marker for a street in Paris near the Eiffel Tower and they said their goodbyes.

That night, after a meal of roast chicken with green beans and garlic, she allowed her husband to have the usual perfunctory sex then lay unable to sleep. The next day was endless as she crawled slowly towards the time of Beebie’s appointment with Ken. At last, she logged on and tried on outfit after outfit as she waited for three o’clock to arrive. The second it did, she typed in the location co-ordinates and sat back as Beebie flashed and sparkled her way through the skies to the rendez-vous.

She looked around. Yes, there was the Eiffel Tower, and the streets were lined with boutiques and cafes with tables on the pavements outside them. But there were no other people yet. Her street was empty save for a blue, low-slung Corvette coupé. She turned through 360 degrees just to check, and it was only when she fixed on the car again that she noticed the number plate: KEN 1. She smiled and moved towards it.

‘Hi,’ said Ken, without getting out. ‘God, you’re gorgeous.’

The passenger door of the car swung open and Beebie stooped to get in. Then Anna paused. There was no driver.

‘Where are you?’ said Beebie.

‘LOL,’ said Ken. ‘I’m here. You’re climbing into me.’

Beebie stood and stepped back.

‘I told you,’ said Ken. ‘I’ve spent as much time on my avatar as you have on yours. I’m a 430 horse power, 6.2 litre LS3, with a V8 aluminium-block engine, short-throw six-speed manual transmission, and split-spoke silver-painted aluminium wheels.’

‘You’re a car,’ said Anna.

‘Of course I’m a car,’ said Ken. ‘But if you don’t like this avatar, I’ve got others.’

Anna was relieved, then Ken went on.

‘I’ve got a 6 cylinder, 245 hp Porsche Boxster with 273 Nm maximum torque at 4,600 - 6,000 rpm and a compression ratio of 11.0:1. There’s also a 4.2 litre Jaguar XK Convertible, a Toyota Avensis with sequential automatic transmission, a flat four overhead valve 1486 cc Jowett Javelin with twin Zenith carburettors …’

As his words continued to jump onto the screen, Anna turned Beebie round and began to walk her away down the boulevard. Beebie’s hips swung with the same exotic insolence, but Anna was ready to cry. Why were men always such a disappointment? She sat back in her chair as Beebie continued her stroll and Ken’s words still trailed across the screen.