Alternative Dimension (9 page)

14 cats

The clipboard fetishists preferred to live their safely guarded AD lives in ignorance of some of the extremes in its darkness. Not even the most fastidiously correct HSI inspector could have coped, for example, with what happened to Bob Gantleton. For his AD avatar, Milton Zork, he’d chosen a dark-eyed, dark-haired male in black leathers, but he could see the attraction of being a cat. At first, he hadn’t understood why people wanted to do that when there was such a wide choice of human body shapes and sizes and so much variety in the features you could give yourself. He watched the feline avatars stand there with their ears twitching and their tails swishing from side to side and found his curiosity growing about the actual physical nature of the persons who’d chosen to represent themselves in that way. The more cats he’d met, the more fascinating they seemed to become. There was one in a pale tiger skin who wore bling necklaces and jewels and looked sensational. When she occasionally used one of her other avatars – a blue-eyed redhead with the statutory perfect figure – he felt less inclined to spend time with her.

It was Lucy who explained it all to him. She’d appeared on a dance floor once, weaving her own individual moves among the others, who were all coupled in the tangled intricacies of the samba or else glued together and swaying through one of the slower dances. At one point she’d bumped into Milton and apologised. Milton’s partner, a Goth with red teardrops tattooed on both cheeks, had told her to fuck off and Lucy had stopped and said, ‘My dear girl, I understand that your apparel expresses your desire to resist convention. Such resistance is always the refuge of those who are struggling with a sense of inadequacy. I’ve no doubt yours is very deep and I should feel sympathy for you instead of amused disdain, but telling me to fuck off provokes just one reaction. Shove it up your ass, sister.’

The Goth could only manage another ‘Fuck off’ and Lucy resumed her solitary gliding. But she did take the time to send Bob a personal message and, eventually, the two of them became close friends. Strangely, the Goth was somehow changed by the incident. She spent the rest of the evening complaining of a headache and pains in her neck and, just a week later, she failed to sign on at her usual time and Bob never saw her again.

Milton and Lucy were never lovers, always friends, and hung out together whenever they could.  Bob was surprised to find that she liked the occasional visit to a BDSM site and was happy to send personal messages to him while she allowed herself to be strapped to various devices and ill-treated by more or less articulate masters. It was all part of what she called ‘full-on living’. She craved sensations, was always looking for new experiences. As a human avatar she’d quickly exhausted the possibilities but launching herself as a cat forced her to think in different ways.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think I even move like a cat in normal life nowadays. I’m more aware of my body, I can achieve an amazing stillness when I listen for something. My reactions have sharpened. Oh, and I don’t need anyone. I’m totally self-reliant.’

‘Weren’t you like that before?’ asked Bob.

‘Nope,’ she replied. ‘Always needed reassurance, or at least confirmation that I was making the right choices. Not any more.’

‘And you think that’s come from being a cat?’

‘No doubt about it.’

As the weeks and months went by, Bob heard more and more about Lucy’s everyday life. Her real name was Beatrice and she lived alone in a smallish town in the foothills of the Alps. She’d had a husband but one year he went to Rio for Mardi Gras and never came back. She had no living relatives and earned money by proof-reading manuscripts for a publisher in London. Her days were spent at her computer and her only pastime, apart from wandering through various virtual worlds, was to take long walks or ride her chestnut pony in the hills after the sun had set.

Then she told him about Sukie.

Sukie was a kitten who’d just walked through her front door one day, three years before, and sat looking at her. She was tiny, with two white paws and a perfect diamond of white fur between her eyes. Beatrice had picked her up, she’d snuggled into her neck and Beatrice knew that she had to keep her.

Sukie cost her nothing. There was never any need to buy the expensive cat food that was so extravagantly praised in TV adverts as if it was a gastronomic marvel. Sukie always found her own food, coming back from forays into the fields and woods around the house with blood on her face and claws and jumping onto Lucy’s lap to purr and lick herself clean.

‘She’s perfect. So self-sufficient,’ said Beatrice. ‘I could never be as … self-contained as she is. I know you think it’s crazy but she and I understand one another.’

‘Maybe not crazy,’ said Bob, ‘but I think you need to get out more, see some people.’

Beatrice laughed.

‘Sukie wouldn’t like that,’ she said. ‘Sometimes we get sales people coming to the door. She sits just inside watching me as I speak to them, and I can feel her disapproval. Once, I went for a test drive with a man who was delivering my new car and, when I got back, she jumped onto my lap, stood with her front paws on my chest and looked straight into my eyes.’

‘Scary,’ said Bob.

‘Yes,’ said Beatrice. ‘But then she purred and lay against me with her head curled under my chin. But,’ she added with a smile,’ she did give me a little nip in the neck – just to show she disapproved.’

‘What do you suppose she thinks about you talking to me like this then?’ asked Bob, looking at Milton and Lucy sitting on the grass in a park.

‘She’s looking at you now,’ said Beatrice. ‘She always sits on my lap as I type. She watches the screen. I think she knows you.’

‘Not sure I like that,’ said Bob. ‘She might put me in the same category as the car guy.’

‘Oh no. I know what she’s feeling. I don’t think she minds you.’

‘How about the guys at the BDSM places?’

‘She watches. Looks at me now and then, then turns back to the screen. I think it … amuses her.’

‘Bloody hell. A laughing cat … no, a laughing, sadistic cat,’ said Bob.

Beatrice smiled.

Under a tree behind the two avatars Bob noticed two action hooks labelled ‘Temptation’.

‘I wonder what she’d think if we jumped on those hooks,’ he said.

‘She’d hate it,’ said Beatrice.

‘How come?’ said Bob.

‘I just know she would.’

‘So it’s funny if other guys carve lumps off Lucy and stick all sorts of bits of metal into her and up her, but not if poor old Milton there puts a friendly arm round you. That’s weird.’

‘Stop, Bob,’ said Beatrice. ‘She understands you.’

Bob laughed.

‘Now I know you’re taking the piss,’ he said. ‘You’re saying she can read too.’

‘Not read, no. But she knows. She and I are … very close. It’s hard to explain. Hard to understand even. We’re cats.’

‘No, Beatrice. You’re a woman. Your avatar is a cat. It seems to me that …’

He stopped. The circle of stars had appeared telling him she was offline and, moments later, Lucy had disappeared.

He thought little of it. She often got cut off – the weather up in the mountains did strange things with her connections and she was sometimes off for a day or more. But when a whole week went by without her reappearing, he was puzzled. They’d been meeting online for over a year and she’d always told him when she’d be going away for any length of time. Sometimes she had to go to London for meetings with the publisher and now and then she liked to go camping in the hills.

After three weeks he was genuinely concerned. If she’d decided to stop logging on, he knew she’d have told him. He searched online for newspapers published in her region, even finding her local evening paper. He read the obituaries and scanned the headlines for news of accidents or mishaps. But there was just silence. And yet he couldn’t just forget about her. It seemed strange to log on knowing that she’d be missing from all their usual places.

Two months later, he still couldn’t get her out of his head and he decided to try to find out what the hell had happened. He knew that she lived on the eastern fringes of her town, at the foot of a particular hill. He wrote to the town’s police department, phrasing his letter very carefully and explaining that he was concerned for the safety of his friend and would appreciate news of her. Two weeks later, he received a reply. It thanked him for bringing their attention to the fact that Beatrice seemed to be missing and regretted to inform him that his friend was dead. They also said that they would be sending two of their officers to see him and they’d appreciate it if he would answer some questions about his relationship with her. Bob was stunned. What the hell could have happened? How was his relationship with her relevant?

He would find out in due course, but nothing he’d imagined would be close to what the police had found when, getting no replies to their knocking on Beatrice’s door, they’d forced the lock and gone inside. The smell immediately told them what to expect, but not the full extent of it. In the dining room, the computer was sitting on the table, its screen still flickering, a chair in front of it. The table all round it was thick with dried blood, blood which had spilled onto the floor and all over the chair. On and around the chair were bones, rags of flesh and a woman’s clothes. And, in the middle of it all sat a tiny kitten, with two white paws and a perfect diamond of white fur between her eyes.

15 the princess

Extremes such as that which befell Beatrice were rare, but in a way, there were even worse stories – not stories of gore and horror, but stories of quiet despair. In the life of Rhona Pearl, for example, romance was an unknown word – and concept. She lived in a flat in a tenement building. It had four rooms: one bedroom for her, another for her two kids, a cupboard-sized bathroom and the fourth for everything else. Her husband had left her the previous July, when she told him of her second pregnancy and, since then, she’d hardly been outside the flat, except for necessary journeys to buy food and, in charity shops, clothes for the kids. In some ways, this was a bonus. It meant she didn’t have to wear make-up or buy clothes for herself, which she couldn’t afford anyway. While the kids were awake, she fed them, played and watched TV with them and sometimes looked out of the window at the rows of flats in the buildings across the street. But when she’d got them to bed and eaten a quick snack, she switched on the computer which her husband had left ‘for the kids’ and became a princess.

Because Rhona was also Angeldust Starshine, concubine of Tristan Malevolans, who was ruler of the entire Alternative Dimension enclosure of StormFront and commander of two battalions of Borgian Exterminators. She didn’t know Tristan’s real name. She knew he had lots of money because he’d bought his enclosure and even offered to buy one for her but, beyond that and the fact that he gave every impression of having an IQ in single figures, he was an enigma. In fact, he’d chosen the name Tristan because his real name was Stanley and Malevolans because he thought it sounded like a cool make of car – a Mazerati Malevolans maybe.

They’d met when he and a small patrol of Exterminators had marched into a ballroom by a moonlit lake. Their intention had been to rape and pillage but every time they tried to steal something, they couldn’t because the ‘Steal’ level on their Acquire Column was greyed out and whenever they tried to rip the clothes off a woman, she translocated somewhere else. When they tried it on Rhona, she stood her ground and refused to sit on the rape action hooks they’d brought with them. Tristan had also been impressed and intrigued by her use of so many words with more than one syllable. They’d talked, he’d taken her back to StormFront and they’d made love in more ways than Tristan knew were possible, mainly because she knew so many polysyllabic synonyms for ‘fuck’. Since then, she’d been his concubine. He didn’t know what that meant except that it wasn’t a wife and it sounded sexual.

But she’d been more to him than a good lay. Whenever he had meetings with other warlords, Rhona would keep Angeldust out of sight behind a curtain and prompt Tristan with personal messages. Apart from ensuring that his strategies and tactics were always on a par with those of his enemies, this also added an intriguing dimension to his character. At these meetings, with her guidance, he would unfold delicate strategies which, on the surface, looked straightforward but proved to be far more flexible than others had expected. Once, when Thor DagHald had admired a particular coup, Tristan sat back on his throne, read the secret messages Rhona sent him, then growled ‘The psychology of despair has no evasive potential when disillusion is its counterpoint’.

Rhona had picked the words at random from an article in a newspaper which had been wrapped around a cabbage she’d bought from the corner shop. Thor nodded sagely and repeated the words to his own concubine when he got home that evening. But then, on the occasions when Rhona was away, Tristan’s responses to questions were mainly confined to grunts or ‘How the fuck would I know?’ Since in Council meetings he seemed to be capable of such meticulous analysis of any situation or strategy, others would interpret these moods as signals that the evil deep within him was too near the surface, overwhelming his intellect, and that they should retire until he found his true voice again. In their eyes, thanks to Rhona, Tristan was simultaneously Beast and DemiGod.

On Tuesday, Rhona had had a hard day. Her eldest child, Donald, had been sick twice, once at the table and once in his bed. He was running a temperature and it was late before he eventually fell into a restless sleep. His retching had exhausted him, but he tossed and turned for ages before her version of The Dixie Chicks’ ‘Godspeed’ lulled him into oblivion. Her nerves were frayed and she wondered whether she should just watch television, but she’d promised Tristan that she’d be there to help him prepare a speech which he had to give to the Borgian War Council so, with a sigh, she logged on and became Angeldust again.

‘Where the fuck you been?’ was Tristan’s greeting.

‘Sorry,’ said Rhona. ‘Trouble with the kids.’

‘OK. Let’s do it then.’

‘Do what?’

‘The fucking speech.’

‘Oh, right. What’s it supposed to be about?’

‘I dunno. Hang on. They bunged me a note. Here it is.’

The note came up on Rhona’s screen. It was called ‘Territorial acquisition policy for the Fifth Quadrant’. She skimmed through the headings and saw quite quickly that it was yet another example of bullshit. One of the warlords on the Council was a university lecturer. He’d made sure everyone knew it and, whenever they wanted something to sound impressive, they asked him to write it down. This time, he’d provided the theoretical outlines for a successful invasion of the island of Balthazaria and the Council had asked Tristan to turn them into practical applications.

‘OK,’ said Rhona. ‘So you’re going to invade Balthazaria.’

‘Are we?’ said Tristan.

‘Yes. It’s an island, so how would you start?’

‘Boats,’ said Tristan.

Rhona skimmed down the headings.

‘Right,’ she said at last. ‘ That’ll be “The logistical imperatives of marine mobility”.’

She began expanding the heading and writing what to her were quite unnecessary arguments to say that, if anyone wanted to invade an island surrounded by water, they’d need boats. When she’d finished, she asked the next question.

‘What about when you get there?’

‘Kill ’em,’ said Tristan.

‘Not all of them,’ said Rhona.

‘Why not?’

‘You’ll need to set up a local administrative structure. If you try imposing an externally manned bureaucracy, you’ll encourage terrorism and, at the very least, civil resistance.’

‘Oh, fuck it,’ said Tristan. ‘Just write anything.’

‘Cuddle me while I’m doing it,’ said Rhona.

‘Oh fuck, OK,’ said Tristan.

He got up and stretched out on some cushions next to his throne. Rhona tucked Angeldust into his embrace, looked at his huge tattooed arms around her, felt how her breast lay heavy on his forearm and how the buckles and hard leather of his jacket dug into her back. She sighed and started to write.

She’d got as far as the third heading – ‘Cultural absorption of divergent ethical parameters’ – when she heard the baby start crying.

‘Shit,’ she said.

‘BRB,’ she typed.

‘What d’you mean, BRB,’ said Tristan. ‘I need this fucking thing tonight.’

But Rhona was in the kids’ room picking up the baby. She looked anxiously at Donald, still asleep but murmuring and whimpering, then carried the baby to the computer, rocking it against her shoulder and singing softly. She had to type with one hand, which didn’t please her warlord.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Now, are you going to make any special laws once you’ve captured the place?’

‘How the fuck do I know?’ said Tristan.

‘Well, you must have some idea. Surely you’ve discussed it with the others.’

‘What’s to discuss? We sail over, beat the shit out of ’em, fuck their women – end of story.’

The baby’s crying got louder.

‘Oh,’ said Rhona. ‘That’s it, is it? That’s the great warlord’s strategy for world domination.’

‘What the fuck you on about? Just write,’ said Tristan.

‘No. Fuck you,’ said Rhona. ‘I’ve got a baby crying on my shoulder here and all you can do is give orders.’

‘Stick your tit in its mouth,’ said Tristan.

Rhona looked at the words on the screen and felt a sob rise in her throat. But her anger was stronger than the hurt.

‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘Write your own fucking speech. Your brain’s in your balls. Give them a squeeze and see what comes out. Hand that over to the fucking Council.’

And she flicked open her enclosures list, chose a name at random and translocated away.

She landed in a beautiful park. Clear blue waterfalls cascaded over russet rocks and paths wound away through the trees and grasses to a lake which sparkled in the setting sun. Just what she needed. She looked at the couples lying around on the grass and sitting entwined on benches, and she held her baby closer. A young avatar approached, his clothes and hair betraying him as a newcomer.

‘Wanna fuck?’ he said.

Angeldust turned and walked away. Rhona felt the wetness of her baby’s lips as he tried to suckle at her neck and the wetness on her cheeks as the tears fell silently.