Alternative Dimension (8 page)

‘OK, HOW ABOUT A CITROEN DS WITH A PRESSURISED NITROGEN SUSPENSION SPHERE AND BUTTERFLY VALVE CARBURETTOR?’

12 settling down

It had been a chastening experience for Anna, but the magic of the Barbie-Ken story never fades, and she quickly convinced herself that her car-Ken had been an aberration. This time, when she called up the list of Kens again, she made sure she read the information they’d given about themselves – either as avatars or in their normal lives. When she read that one Ken was, in fact, Karl Andersson, a forty-two year old geologist in Iceland, who liked reading, cycling, hill walking, log fires and sunsets, she felt a stirring of interest, especially as he was also unmarried. The details he hadn’t given were that he still lived with his mother, he’d had girl friends but was too shy to risk commitment or even to get much beyond kissing them, and that AD was his preferred reality.

He turned out to be a regular male avatar without the pushiness of most and Anna was so sweet and gentle in her dealings with him that he even agreed to reshape his avatar to resemble the original Ken, (with shorter hair and no stupid grin). They built a house together, bought clothes, furniture, even a car (which Ken let her choose). For Karl, the interest shown by Anna was a totally new experience and he was determined not to hold back. He bought so many action hooks – for eating breakfast together, gardening, cooking, dancing and even kissing quite passionately – that he began to take an interest in the programs which produced the animations. His research was purposeful as he accessed the instructions, pulled them apart and saw how the movements were captured and regenerated in the computer. In the end, he thought ‘I can do this’.

His idea was to create hooks which would help him to mark the special nature of his relationship with Anna/Beebie by taking it into areas not available to others. There were already almost unlimited actions couples could perform, from the most innocent through progressively more frantic sexual variations to scarcely imaginable perversions. But Karl’s dreams were nothing like as extravagant. He sought instead the unique comforts that came with gentle domestic routines, the very things that were missing from the existence of a virgin approaching middle age who still lived with his mum.

Gradually, he introduced Beebie to evenings spent toasting marshmallows, sitting almost motionless watching TV with only the occasional glance and smile passing between them as they enjoyed the programmes, or washing up together in total silence. Whenever he clicked on his ‘mowing the lawn’ hook, Beebie would automatically stand up, get out the ironing board and start pressing shirts. If he sent her shopping, his own avatar would go with her and stand around in the shops fidgeting and looking at his watch more and more frequently. For Karl, the comforting automatism of an intensely normal couple was highly satisfying.

Anna, on the other hand, soon tired of it. At first, the fact that Beebie and Ken were so demonstrably a couple was cute. They really were doing the things she’d done with her own Ken and Barbie way back. But the silences became oppressive and the distance between Beebie and Ken began to grow.

‘This is fine, honey,’ Beebie said to Ken one day. ‘But it’s not going anywhere.’

‘Where would you want it to go?’ asked Ken.

Beebie had no answer.

‘I don’t know, but it’s too calm, too perfect. We need something to remind us just how perfect it is.’

This didn’t make much sense to Karl. Anna tried explaining it to him.

‘You’re so sweet, we belong together, but it’s all on the one level.’

‘It’s a level I love, my darling,’ said Karl.

‘I know, sweetie, but … but … well, think of how nice it’d be if we ever had to make up.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well, if we had a quarrel …’

Ken laughed. Beebie went on.

‘… No, really. Just a tiny spat. Then we’d feel sad at the rift, we’d want to be back to where we were again, and the making up would be so sweet.’

Karl still didn’t understand, but the fear of losing Anna’s love set him thinking.

Over the next few days, Anna occasionally saw that Karl was online but, apart from walking in, giving Beebie a quick kiss on the cheek, then leaving again, Ken made little attempt at contact. He spent all the time in his shed in the garden. She began to wonder whether Karl had misunderstood her and was drawing back.

She got her answer eight days after the original conversation about making up. Beebie was sitting in the lounge, flicking through a fashion magazine when Ken walked in, kissed her on the cheek and set two action hooks, just labelled ‘him’ and ‘her’ on the coffee table.

‘What’s this, honey?’ Beebie asked.

‘A surprise, baby,’ said Ken.

‘Oh you’re such a tease. Give me a clue. Pleeeeaaase.’ The last word was drawn out on the screen, making it into the equivalent of a babyish pout.

Ken smiled then Karl clicked on the hooks. They both disappeared – the ‘him’ into Ken and, simultaneously, the ‘her’ into Beebie.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, stop being such a fucking baby,’ said Ken.

To Anna’s amazement, Beebie threw the magazine down, stood up and yelled ‘Me? What about you, asshole? Bringing even more shit into the house and expecting me to be impressed. Loser.’

‘Yeah, I feel like a loser, stuck with a frigid bitch like you,’ yelled Ken.

In Surrey, Anna felt the heat in her blushing cheeks. She’d never said such things before, and even though Beebie was pacing about saying them now, they were nothing to do with Anna. In Reykjavík, however, Karl had a broad grin on his face and his mother called up to ask what he was laughing at.

‘Nothing, mother,’ he called back as he watched Ken grab Beebie by the arms and hold her so that he was staring straight into her eyes, their faces inches apart.

‘Day after day I sit here listening to the shit you speak,’ he snarled. ‘Crap about dresses, broken nails, the wrong coloured lipsticks. Shit, shit and more shit. You make me puke.’

Beebie tried unsuccessfully to break free.

‘Let me go, you bastard,’ she screamed. ‘If you weren’t such a pathetic asshole we’d be doing more interesting things, living a little, instead of being stuck in this shitty house.’

‘When have you ever done anything interesting?’ said Ken, shaking her. ‘You’re just a fucking clothes horse, an empty-headed bimbo with tits for brains.’

‘Huh, any brains you ever had disappeared the minute your balls dropped,’ yelled Beebie.

And so it went on, their insults getting richer and richer as the program Karl had written chose from the extensive list he’d sourced from the
Mammoth Book of Domestic Repartee
. There were some silences as Ken stared out of the window and Beebie dabbed her eyes with a hankie but mostly, they yelled about each other’s inadequacies, irritating personal habits, sexual shortcomings and dubious parentage. Anna learned words she’d never heard or seen before and Karl’s English got better and better, although he’d need to be careful to choose the contexts in which he could use the new vocabulary.

At last, he pulled his keyboard towards him and typed ‘Oh darling. I’m so sorry. Forgive me.’

Nothing happened. The only words that appeared on the screen came from Beebie.

‘You couldn’t satisfy a mouse with what you’ve got.’

‘Huh, its bloody droppings would have more sex appeal than you do,’ shouted Ken.

Karl smiled but nonetheless felt a little anxiety. He’d forgotten to override the program before trying to repossess Ken. He pulled down the general AD menu and clicked on ‘animation override’ before starting to type again.

‘Oh baby, I’m so, so sorry,’ he wrote.

‘Fuck off, dickhead,’ yelled Beebie.

‘Bull dyke bitch,’ shouted Ken.

Karl’s anxiety grew. He clicked on the override again and again but the two avatars continued to circle one another and hurl obscenities. Then the horrible truth dawned. The override was designed for legitimate, in-house animations. His own didn’t have the key they needed to engage with it. He’d just assumed they would and so he hadn’t bothered to create hooks for the making up afterwards. Until he did, Ken and Beebie would continue this dance of mutual vilification.

He logged off and began working on the new programs, hoping they would have the power to counteract the highly effective quarrelling hooks. Each day he logged on and found Ken and Beebie still at it, tireless in their search for and discovery of new slurs and abuses. In order to test his making up efforts, he created two new avatars and set them quarrelling. He tried prototype after prototype on them and at last managed to design one powerful enough to make them stop and respond to his normal commands again. He tried it several times, then logged on and took the new hooks into the lounge.

He ignored the calls of ‘Pygmy-dick’ and ‘Pustule’ from Beebie and ‘Rancid whore’ and ‘Shagnasty cow’ from Ken, and clicked on the hooks. They vanished as before and an uncanny stillness fell.

Hesitatingly, he typed ‘Darling?’

There was a long pause before Beebie’s words appeared.

‘What happened?’ she said.

‘I was stupid,’ said Karl. ‘Wrote a stupid program. I wanted a quick quarrel, then … well, like you said, to make up. But making up was hard to do.’

‘Come here,’ said Beebie.

Ken sat beside her on the couch. She curled herself up against him.

‘Forgive me?’ said Ken.

‘Nothing to forgive,’ said Beebie. ‘It was a misunderstanding. We were both silly. Said things we didn’t mean.’

‘Yes. I never want another argument. I just want us to keep loving the way we do.’

‘So do I, my darling,’ said Beebie. ‘But it was interesting, all the same. Exciting even.’

‘Too exciting for me. I thought I’d lose you,’ said Ken.

‘Silly,’ said Beebie.

They clung together, happy to be restored to normal. Eventually, it was Beebie who broke the silence. She nuzzled her lips nearer to Ken’s ear and said, ‘Fucking good argument, though, wasn’t it?’

13 health and safety

When Joe Lorimer came across examples such as these, he felt reassured. People were using AD not just for extremes of experience but also to enrich their day to day lives, to learn to value the simple pleasures as well as the extremes. There was, however, one development in AD that irritated him more and more as he came across its impact on residents’ lives. For all the omniscience of Red Loth and for all Joe’s algorithmic skills, he was powerless before the activities of a group of residents who’d formed themselves into a Health and Safety Inspectorate.

The first he heard of them was when Ross Magee was helping a family build a log cabin in a clearing half way up a mountain in Canada. Building in AD has none of the stresses and dangers of its ND equivalent. The avatars simply produce a block of wood out of thin air then stretch it until it’s the right size for the wall, door, ceiling, or whatever other function it’ll serve. They lie another layer of patterning over it – wallpaper, logs, tiles and so on – and simply stick the pieces together. When the whole house is built, they can then stretch it further to fit their chosen plot or accommodate any extra family members who appear. It’s a quick, satisfying process.

Ross was working on decorating the porch with hanging baskets of flowers when some words appeared on the screen.

‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

He looked around to find two men, one with a clipboard, the other with a briefcase. It was briefcase-man who’d spoken. He pointed at the porch and repeated the question.

‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

‘What’s it look like?’ said Ross.

‘A porch,’ said the man.

His colleague wrote a note on the clipboard.

‘Satisfied?’ said Ross.

The man went to the porch, looked all round it, touched one basket and made it swing, then said, ‘Not by a very long chalk. Got the dimensions of this?’

‘Course not,’ said Ross. ‘It was about the size of a shoe box when I made it. I just expanded it until it fitted the doorway. Anyway, why’re you asking that?’

‘Needs to be at least thirty-seven centimetres higher than the tallest resident or potential guest.’

‘Who said so?’

The man nodded at his colleague who held up his clipboard and showed him some paper headed ‘HSI – Keeping you safe, not sorry’.

‘Never heard of you,’ said Ross.

‘Headquarters are in Brussels but the legislation applies world-wide,’ said the man.

‘Says who?’

‘Article 387, para. 12, sub-section 32a,’ said the man.

He tapped the side of the porch.

‘If you want this to stay here, you’ll need to put up notices of its dimensions. You’ll also need warnings that residents should resize their avatars before approaching within 3.479 metres of the threshold.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Ross. ‘How many avatars have banged their heads on porches?’

‘Thanks to our regulations, none,’ said the man.

‘Crap,’ said Ross. ‘They don’t need regulations. Even if they did bang into a porch, so what? It wouldn’t hurt them.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said the man. ‘They could sue the owner. But not if his signage complied with regulations.’

‘Listen,’ said Ross. ‘I know the guy who designed all this and his idea was to get rid of bloody regulations. He wanted individuals here to be free.’

‘That’s a common error in all forms of government,’ said the man. ‘Individual freedom of expression leads to anarchy – just look at the USA.’

‘There’s no anarchy there.’

‘There would be if their lawyers weren’t so conscientious.’

The man took a few paces towards Ross and stopped beside him.

‘You see, societies need to be regulated,’ he said. ‘People need guidance. They like to know where they stand. There has to be an official line. Everything the HSI does is for the good of AD residents.’

‘Like what?’ asked Ross.

‘Well, next month we’ll be rolling out our “HFE” initiative.’

Ross just looked at him.

‘Health For Everyone,’ said the man. ‘Avatars don’t exercise nearly enough.’

‘What?’ said Ross. ‘Why do they need to exercise?’

‘If they don’t, they’ll get fat.’

‘Avatars don’t get fat. They’re bunches of pixels,’ said Ross.

The man looked at his colleague.

‘Show him,’ he said.

The colleague thumbed through some pages on his clipboard and held it up for Ross to see. He’d revealed a graph showing correlations between physical activity (or lack of it) and obesity. Underneath was the equation p2(4p – β3)(sinπ ÷ √4.65) ≈ Ω10.3.

‘What the fuck’s this?’ said Ross.

‘Quantifiable variables consistent with exponential progressions in a parallax matrix,’ said the man.

‘I’d never have guessed,’ said Ross.

In the end, Joe left the two men with the house builders and logged off. He immediately looked through the central database to find out what he could about these HSI people. They’d begun as a small group in London and spread like a virus through the whole of AD, even sending missionaries to islands in the South Pacific, up the Amazon and into unexplored regions of Africa. People had joined in order to conform to their famous regulations and the movement had gained a momentum to match that of the Catholic Church.

If nothing else, Joe had to admire their commitment to their cause even though its consequences were disastrous. One of the regular major tourist attractions in AD was the quarterly migration of lemmings off various cliffs. Thousands of avatars used to gather to watch the Kamikaze spectacle. Then, one autumn, the HSI insisted that each individual lemming sign an affidavit attesting it was of sound mind and absolving the landowner of any responsibility for its upcoming fate. The forms were long and difficult to understand so instead of a progressively denser flood of fur pouring over the cliff and down into the sea, the spectacle was that of a clifftop crammed with perplexed, agitated lemmings scratching their heads and chewing their biros, with masses more waiting in queues for their turn, and only the occasional plop as an individual completed its form, got it countersigned and was given permission to leap.

The trade in hiring unicorns was badly hit, too, when the Inspectorate insisted that herds be tested regularly for equine ailments from Aural plaques and Bog Spavin to Urticaria and Windgalls. One summer, entire herds in lower Tuscany had to be destroyed when they were found to be suffering all the symptoms of Equine Infectious Anaemia – fever, body oedema and lethargy. In the worst cases, their horns actually started growing downwards into their skulls causing severe personality disorders.

There was the occasional example of an HSI campaign which produced desirable results. As in the case of Zinzan Dill, a research assistant in one of the private AD hospitals. Hospitals in AD are, of course, unnecessary but they do offer particularly rich avatars another way of displaying their wealth. Zinzan was awarded a grant to investigate the possibility of creating an animation that would, when triggered, produce a subtle blushing effect on an avatar’s cheeks and neck. It was all part of the refinements that Joe had hoped would materialise as residents became more involved with AD’s processes. The problem for Zinzan was that he was rather too enthusiastic.

When he launched his program at a gathering of the hospital’s administrators, it was clear that he’d taken the effect a step too far. He used his own avatar as a guinea pig and, at first, the watching bureaucrats were impressed as they saw the pink wash rising up his neck and into his cheeks. Their approval was soon withdrawn, however, when his colour deepened, his hair started blushing, and blood began dripping from his nose. Within eight seconds, it was also gushing from his ears, eyes and mouth. Fortunately, an HSI member was on hand to halt the demonstration before news of the rogue experiment permeated through to any patients and thus prevented them becoming even richer by suing the hospital for failing to conduct adequate risk assessments.

As Joe logged out of the database, he reluctantly had to acknowledge that organisations such as the HSI were inevitable products of the normalisation of the AD experience. He couldn’t imagine them having any success in dealing with Goths, vampires or any of the sprawling communities of fairies, elves, goblins, dragons and other sprites and monsters in AD, but for the ordinary, timid humanoids, men with clipboards were a sort of reassurance that the world still had form and purpose.