Midnight Lamp (25 page)

‘Hey,’ said Dora, ‘Mister? Is this chair for our movie?’

‘Yes, Ms… Devine,’ said the techie, checking her tag. ‘Custom scanned, from-real. Every virtual movie needs a few new properties. This is the armchair for the basement in the Snake Eyes house on the Lambeth Road in London, England, where Ax laid his plans for the Reich.’

‘Is that what he was doing?’ said Rob. ‘I thought he was putting his moves on a certain red-headed babe. But, er, this is not the real, actual chair?’

He had visions of that lunatic Harry Lopez scouring South London for Few memorabilia, and shipping the stuff over by the containerload.

‘We threw out a chair like that,’ mused Cherry. ‘I
think
. Years ago.’

‘Well, no. This one we bought from a Thrift store, and worked on it to make it like the original. I have to say, we really bless you guys for all the news footage, and those natural-environment videos in your homes.’

‘We did it just for you,’ said Felice.

‘Frequently we reverse-engineer, from the code patch to the story content, because it’s impossible to get the object to scan, but if you do too much of that the quality goes. We use a piece of code that was a livid oozing sore from a horror-medical, the firing values say it’s a sunset effect, but something’s
off
—’

‘Gross.’

‘No, ma’am. Just a little
off
: cartoony
.
It’s kinda mysterious, nobody really understands it except the qualia coders, they’re the ones who kick up hell when that happens. The dcd code, direct cortical delivery, will give this the qualia of a real object, and then the emotional track will make it deliver what the scene requires. You see, what it says on the gates, that’s not really true: a rock is never just a rock. A chair is not a chair, it’s an experience. It might be
the chair that nobody noticed
, or
the chair that was filled with horror
, or
the chair where I sat when I first said ‘I love you’ to my baby…
. But direct cortical, what you guys call immix in Europe, we don’t do that here. Those people are mostly freelance, hotshots like Janelle Firdous, too good to be tied to the studio.’

He made adjustments to the rows of toggles on his long desk.

‘Janelle is pretty much God, in our business. I’ve met her. She’s a nice lady.’

They watched the chair, as it waited humbly to be zapped, with fellow feeling. ‘Hey,’ said Cherry, ‘If its avatar gets good notices, will it be a virtual sofa next time? With a hot love scene happening on it?’

This technician wasn’t strong on humour. Maybe the tone of voice didn’t translate. ‘Probably this exact scan is a one-off. Pieces of it might turn up again.’

‘Like pus in the sky,’ murmured Dora. ‘But you don’t do that to
our
avatars?’

‘Not my department, but you guys have a contract, don’t you?’

‘No substantial reuse.’ said Felice.

‘Right. I’m warming up now. You can stay, but please use your eyeshields.’

They moved on, exchanging glances. Scratch the virtual movie career, we don’t want to get mulched down for scrap. We’ll stick with the music biz.

The scanning theatre was
uncannily
like a
Star Trek
transporter room; except for the raked seats that surrounded the flatbed. It filled up while the techies were doing their final checks: Digital Artists suits and Hollywood liberal luminaries elbowing for the best seats. Harry seemed to be doing well. Puusi Meera and Janelle Firdous chose their spot with care, face-on to the laser engineers in their box up above. Kathryn Adams arrived with media friends (in working life she was a journalist). Her uncle had returned to Washington after Memorial Day weekend: she was staying in Los Angeles. She’d convinced her news syndicate they needed the Ax Preston comes to Hollywood story in depth.

‘The whole operation is
so fucking perverse
,’ muttered Chip, suffering badly from audition nerves.

‘We are to be punished for our art,’ Verlaine told him, in hollow tones, ‘The lasers rip us up and suck us into the machines, but only simulacra come back, that’s what they don’t tell you. This is it. Farewell, Merry my lad.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Okay!’ cried Harry, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t have to tell you this but I will anyway,
use your eyeshields
. If you’re seated by an exit, and not fit for those duties, speak to one of the cabin staff. Strap yourselves in. We have lift off.’

No make-up, no script, no music. You read from an autocue (something personal, that you had provided). You move around as you like, and the feed in your ear tells you if you should do something else. You get a ‘rehearsal’, then you do it over again for the lasers. On the flatbed you don’t need an eyeshield, the danger is from stray beams that might escape into the audience. There’s an element of performance, but it’s the technicians who decide if your soul is stealable. If it is, you come back another day to get sunk in a tank of electrolytic goo. If you can’t be mugged, that’s the end of your virtual movie career.

Harry had spent the morning dealing with terrible crises, such as Puusi’s favourite brand of spring water failing to turn up. He was a wreck. He sat with Ax and Sage and Fiorinda, in the character test holding area, and trembled.

‘We can afford a couple of failures. It happens, about one in ten. There are huge stars who can’t cross the divide. We can paste the faces and gaits from file, onto crash-dummies.’ Crash-dummies were the virtual studio’s schematic equivalent of Central Casting. ‘You know we had to audition live human actors for the dummies? Did you hear that story? Screen Actors Guild insisted, but we’re
still using the same thirty scans
, half male, half female. You never need something you can’t find the code for. Thirty people is all we’ll ever need, for all human variety: isn’t that amazing?’

‘Amazing.’

The process sounded simple but was
interminable
, worse than the weariest recording session. However all went well until Harry’s running order (which had a rationale known only to Harry) hit Allie Marlowe. Allie couldn’t do it. Five takes, worse results. In their raked seats the demi-gods and emperors murmured, holding up their eyeshields like opera glasses, turning down their thumbs. Allie was mortified, on the brink of tears. ‘Fuck this,’ muttered Ax to Sage. ‘C’mon. Let’s talk to her, tell her she doesn’t have to do it.’

They took Allie out of the theatre. Fiorinda had a better idea. She got next to Harry, who was sitting looking tragic on the steps up to the flatbed.

‘Bully her.’

‘Oh, no Fiorinda,’ said Harry woefully. ‘It’s not like that. The test is objective. The scan reads the actor’s unique individual physical and empathic presence, that we can genuinely translate into code, or… Or we just can’t. It won’t make any difference how she’s feeling, any emotional state is the same.’

‘I believe you, but get a grip, Allie never got to the lasers yet. She wants to do this, but she has stage fright, and she doesn’t understand that you ignore that feeling. Just tell her she’s on. Make your wishes clear. That’s all she needs, for it not to be her decision. Pretend you’re in charge, why don’t you?’

Harry bit Allie’s head off. Allie tried again, and she was good.

Rob did well. Sage caused consternation, until they got him to take the mask button out of his eyesocket: they had to work around his phone implant. Virtual movie stars can’t have permanent personal digital devices. Ax caused a stir of a different order, because the live audience regarded him as the star of the show. Fortunately, the lasers also liked him. Then it was Fiorinda’s turn. She seemed good. To her friends she seemed really herself, no trace of the after-effects of Billy the Whizz getting eviscerated: very skinny but not
skeletal
, moving with energy, giving them the old calm little Fiorinda grin. But the demi-gods were silent; and they were right. She tried again, the engineers still said no. Harry went and had a confab with Marshall Morgan, the Digital Artists’ CEO.

‘No problem,’ he announced, ‘We’ll test Fiorinda another time.’

Smelly Hugh, Anne-Marie and DK took another couple of hours. They passed.

Afterwards there was the traditional party, on the beach at Harry’s place in Malibu. Stars and execs, techies, media folk and support staff, cheered Harry’s thank you speech. There was a buffet and a bar, waitrons in incongruous black-and-white; there was a Mariachi band and people trying to dance on the sand.

‘Now!,’ said Puusi Meera, leading Ax to a heap of cushions under a spangled awning, and settling her curves beside him. ‘You must tell me everything, I can help. First things first, is she getting enough sex? You, yourself, did a wonderful test. I knew you would. So sexy and such charisma, so strong in your delivery, so responsive. You are truly one of us.’

Fiorinda escaped from her friends, letting the party carry her. She’d never failed an audition before: it didn’t bother her, but she felt self conscious. The nice old bloke who talked to her at movie parties came up, with two frosty bottles of beer, so she went and sat with him near the bonfire. ‘It’s bullshit,’ he said. ‘You’ll go back another day, without the fucking sharks circling, and you’ll be good. I know you will. You’re a performer, aren’t you?’

‘I used to be a singer with a little punk band,’ said Fiorinda, gloomily. ‘That’s all.’ She smiled at him, ‘I’m sorry, but who are you? I can’t just go on calling you, that nice o- er, bloke with the blue eyes, who is kind to me.’

‘It’s Bob. Redford.’

The young Englishwoman nodded hopefully, waiting for more help.

‘Robert Redford.’

‘Auggh! Oh wow! You’re the Sundance Kid!’

‘Hahaha. Yeah, I’m afraid that’s how old I am.’

The Few had circled their wagons: graciously allowing a few movie world Bohemian folk to join them, particularly the ones who had real drugs. They spoke of the Celtic murders, though the subject was utterly forbidden. It’s the Invisible People, said someone, and refused to elaborate. The bastards have police protection, said someone else, and this opinion was general. The murders were reported, but
nothing was made of them…
What does that tell you?

Billy had been a well-known figure, she was a notch up, the breath of the beast on their necks. ‘Poor kid,’ sighed Julia. ‘She’s gone like into water, the surface closes over. You hear her voice, you look around, it’s another girl just like her.’

‘
Did
she do Aoxomoxoa?’ asked the name-tag assistant, whose name the Few hadn’t caught. ‘It was her main ambition. It would’ve been nice, before she died.’

Harry was at the bar, wearing his straw hat for sentimental reasons. He tipped it on the back of his head, and explained to Kathryn’s media friends that this was the hat that Sage had told him to eat, as a Zen koan: which he had yet to understand. ‘Give me enlightenment but not right now,’ said someone: which got a laugh. The mood was upbeat, the problem with Harry’s leading lady set aside.

‘I’m surprised Laz didn’t make it, Sage,’ remarked Harry.

‘Laz—?’

‘Lazarus Catskill? He loves you guys, he’s a big sad Reich fan (no offence-). He was rooting for me to do the movie all along.’ The A&R man peered around, divinely discontented, ‘Maybe his studio told him to stay away. Pixelity, you know, that’s not exactly Liberal Hollywood-’

‘I’m gonna rescue Ax. D’you want to come along?’

The rescue was easy: Puusi had an aversion to Aoxomoxoa, she took herself off. Harry called to Marshall Morgan, the Digital Artists’ CEO, who was passing with Lou Branco. ‘Hey, Marsh! Lou! Come over here and talk to my stars!’

‘Where’s Fiorinda?’ asked Ax, quietly. ‘I thought she was with you.’

‘Fiorinda is getting cosy with Robert Redford. You want me to break it up? Is this code for: leave me in peace with my ripe and voluptuous movie queen?’

‘Lay off. That woman scares me.’

Marshall and Lou were in a relaxed frame of mind. Lou had taken off his sandals: he wiggled his toes in the sand. Harry adjusted his hat, and glowed (It’s not so bad, losing just one, shame it was Fio though).

‘You know,’ said Marsh, ‘There’s something I’m dying to ask, but it’s rude.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Ax.

‘Okay, I know you weren’t in it for the money, and I applaud that. I know this was Crisis Europe, but you were selling like the Beatles: don’t tell me there wasn’t any mazoola. How the fuck did you guys end up so broke?’

Harry frowned. Lou looked taken aback, his new religion cast into doubt.

‘You know those stupid deals bands used to sign, back in the nineteen sixties?’ asked Ax.

‘Yeah?’

‘Where the mansions and the champagne and the private jets would turn out to belong to the management, and the rockstars were left with pocket-money?’

‘Uhuh?’

‘We did that the other way round,’ explained Sage. ‘Apparently.’

‘The Reich belongs to us,’ said Ax. ‘We don’t know how it happened, exactly but we used to make ends meet, hustling scrounging, selling our products, as well as putting in a share of our personal income. The Second Chamber Government kindly took over the books, and the ends have never seen each other since. We’re trying to extricate ourselves, but they have a lifetime lien on our global earnings, and it doesn’t look good. We may rescue the Few and Fiorinda, but Sage and I are fucked. Ruined for life.’

Fiorinda watched them from the other side of the bonfire. What’s so fall-about funny?, she wondered. The bigshots seemed equally puzzled.

There is an inside life and an outside life, she thought. We’re all on reality tv. We spend our days putting on an act, for people we love and people we fear, and people we don’t even know. The years ahead daunted her heart. There’s no cure for what I am… I’ll unpick those little tweaks I made, I’ll keep off the juice: if necessary I will fight another boss fight with a monster, and all the time, I will be faking it. But no one will know. She smiled at her lovers across the firelight.

Goodbye. Fiorinda’s going underground, but you shall never know.

After the tests the Triumvirate decided to take Laz Catskill up on his offer. The cabin was two hours from Hollywood, and there was a helipad. They planned to commute, for the gigs they already had in the diary. This simple retreat was an L shaped architect vision, surrounded by mature pine forest. It had an indoor and outdoor pool, parking for a tank division: and a formidable perimeter fence, complete with watchtowers and a platoon of armed guards, who came as a fixture. At least you couldn’t see the fence from the house. Silverlode, a tiny touristville, was two miles of switchbacks away down a private road. They waited to see what would happen: nothing happened. If Laz had been saying he wanted to talk, but somewhere other than his playpen, he’d changed his mind.