This Other Eden (28 page)

‘She’s
so strong willed,’ they both agreed. ‘That’s what I like about her, I suppose,’
they both assured each other. ‘Fucking women, eh?’ They clinked glasses in a
positive orgy of mutual understanding. The booze flowed.

‘You
know something, Nathan,’ Max slurred, ‘you are the greatest guy, you know that?
I mean, do you
really
know that?’

‘Listen,
mate,’ the Englishman replied, ‘I love you, no, I mean it, I really do, I
bloody love you, mate.’

Where
truth and fiction merge.

About two thirds through
the JD they decided to have a wrestle. This Was not done in the old-fashioned
method of grappling round on the floor and bear-hugging prior to being sick on
the carpet. You did it via a Virtual Reality link-up which would even be sick
for you if you liked. Max had picked up a couple of disposable helmets at a
Hyper-Mart when he’d got the beer and rye.

‘Let’s
fight it out, old pal,’ he said drunkenly, handing Nathan a helmet.

The
game was called ‘Trial of Strength’ and it enabled a person to find out who was
better at fighting, them or their mates, without getting hurt. What you did was
put on a helmet that was linked to your opponent’s. These helmets read the
abilities of the people wearing them, and your pal’s computerised likeness
would become your adversary in a series of combat situations.

Half
drunk, they shook hands, put the helmets on and prepared to fight each other to
the death from opposite easy chairs.

Inside
the helmets they could both see two masked fighters facing each other. One was
Max, the other Nathan. The first situation was unarmed combat. There was no
contest, Max’s hologram, imbued as it was with Max’s strength and training,
utterly pulverised Nathan’s hologram which was, of course, as weedy as its
controller. The Nathan figure thrashed about helplessly whilst the Max figure
chopped it up, punching it, throwing it, stamping on its head.

From
their respective easy chairs the two real people rocked with laughter at the
thrashing Nathan’s thinkalike was receiving. The disparity in their abilities
was so great it was comical. When the first round was over a little voice
inside the helmets announced that Nathan had better be better with a Ninja
stick, or his ass was dead.

Nathan
giggled, feeling for his drink in the real world, whilst inside the helmet his
hologram picked up the unfamiliar weapon of two sticks connected by a chain.
Max laughed, because it was clear how reluctant to fight the Nathan hologram
was. Max made his thinkalike demonstrate his powers with a stunning display of
Ninja training, whirling and slashing the sticks about his head. They both
roared with laughter and swigged at their drinks as Nathan’s hologram did the
only thing the real Nathan would have been capable of doing, which was to throw
his sticks at the Max figure and launch a massive kick at its balls. The Max
figure simply avoided the kick, spun round and in a single sweeping movement
hit Nathan’s man so hard that the head was actually partially severed.

‘Fuck!
I bloody felt that,’ Nathan shouted out loud, laughing, although of course he
could not hear himself inside the helmet.

‘Looks
like the English guy’s a wimp,’ the little voice inside the helmet said. ‘Maybe
he could use some fire power.’

And
inside the helmets the two holograms reappeared in a bar-room situation, both
armed with handguns. The two real men laughed as the Max figure raised his gun
and fired. The

Nathan
figure shuddered with the impact and was propelled backwards over a table and
on to the floor behind. Max walked his hologram forward to finish the job as
the Nathan hologram screamed. With one hand Nathan’s figure grasped its wound,
holding the other one up towards Max’s figure, as if pleading with it to stop.

‘These
helmets are fantastic!’ the real Max said into the real world. He was getting a
genuine feeling of pain and panic from Nathan’s figure. ‘OK, kid, say a
prayer,’ he said, shouting the way people do when they have earphones on.

Inside
his helmet Max made his figure raise its gun as the wounded Nathan hologram
desperately tried to crawl away, whimpering in agony.

‘You’re
really scared, aren’t you?’ Max laughed to himself. ‘Well, I can cure that.’
But as Max’s hologram took aim, the prostrate Nathan figure shuddered horribly.
It seemed to be convulsing and twitching with pain. Max laughed hugely at the
writhing figure, took another pull at his bourbon and poured computer
graphically generated fire into the hologram on the floor inside his helmet,
finally putting it out of its misery.

‘Eat
lead death, limey redcoat colonialist scum,’ Max laughed. ‘That’s for Yorktown.
I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.’

Then
the holograms suddenly faded and strange visions began to appear. There was a
sudden wash of colour, mainly deep red but with some purple in it, which seemed
to fill the whole of Max’s helmet. Max felt as if it almost filled his head.
Half-formed images appeared and started to swirl about inside the colour. Max
could vaguely make out a woman’s face and a little boy running, then a house.
There were many much less clearly defined shapes. Max thought they might have
been people, or perhaps animals … he could not make out for sure because
all the time flashes of the harsh red and purple kept intruding on the vision.
Max felt a great compulsion to understand the shapes, almost, he thought, to
remember
them but he could not … the red kept getting in the way. A red which,
although it filled Max’s whole helmet, still managed to give the impression of
being somehow jagged.

‘Cool,’
Max murmured to himself, appreciative of the way the game makers had programmed
such an intense and innovative graphics package with which to end the first
part of the game.

The red
wash began to throb. Max wondered if it was throbbing to the beat of his pulse,
it rather felt that way. It was a sort of undulation, a very intense one, also
very uncomfortable but none the less extremely compelling. The jagged quality
of the colour intensified as the woman and the other figures began to fade
away. Max was sorry to see the shapes go. Although he had not understood them,
they had felt very warm, nostalgic even. Max felt sad, he wanted to see them
again. He knew that he could do this by simply re-starting the programme. And
yet, somehow he felt that he couldn’t, that the shapes or memories had gone for
ever, far beyond recall. As they faded away completely, Max felt an irrational
sense of loss. Something was coming to an end. He knew, of course, that it was
just the graphic programme, but it felt like something much greater than that.
Then, suddenly and with shocking violence, the face of Plastic Tolstoy burst
into the helmet, the image one of blinding clarity. That is not to say that the
face which filled Max’s helmet and mind was a perfect likeness of Tolstoy, it
just
was
Plastic Tolstoy. For a moment, the helmet almost seemed to
be
Plastic Tolstoy. But only for a moment the face disappeared as quickly as
it had come, but while it had remained there had been a palpable sense of
outrage inside the helmet. The Tolstoy face wasn’t outraged itself, it was more
that it was surrounded by outrage and suffused by it. Tolstoy and outrage
seemed to be part of the same thought. Max felt the outrage inside himself,
deeply and personally, also a sudden surge of furious anger. Then immediately
after that, so quickly, in fact, as to be almost at the same time, the sadness
returned, a kind of desperate, hopeless sadness that brought tears to Max’s
eyes, which he hoped would not short-circuit the helmet.

The red
throbbing returned, but now it was faded and slow. It went from crimson to pink
and then, on a moment, it was gone altogether, although as it went Max felt
again the face of the woman that he had seen when the display began. After that
he knew that it was over.

‘Intense,
man. That was
weird,’
said Max out loud.

He sat
back in his chair and waited for the next combat situation which was scheduled
to be machine-guns in a cityscape, although he doubted that anything could beat
the display which he had just seen. Nothing more appeared, however, and the
helmet informed Max that his opponent had wimped out and was now disconnected,
hence Max was the champion.

With a
whoop and a holler Max dragged off his helmet and let his eyes readjust to the
mundane reality of the room. Nathan was not in his chair. Max presumed he must
be in the lavatory or something. He called out but received no answer. Then he
realised that he could smell gunsmoke. He had smelt it inside the helmet and
thought it was part of the sensual graphics package. But it was still there.

Then he
saw Nathan’s foot, it was poking out from behind the chair. He jumped up and
ran across the room. There behind the easy chair lay Nathan, face down in a
pool of blood. Almost exactly as the hologram Nathan had been.

‘Shit!
I killed him,’ Max whispered, desperately trying to unfuddle his brain. Max
could see an exit wound at Nathan’s shoulder and an entry wound in the back of
his neck. Nathan had clearly been knocked over the chair by a bullet in the
chest and had been trying to crawl away when the second bullet in the neck had
killed him.

Actual
reality.

Max sat for a while
thinking. Sobering up and thinking. He had not killed Nathan, Virtual Reality
was not actual reality. Nathan had been alive when he had put the VR helmet on
and he was dead now. Max had not moved from his chair in that whole time. At
first he was tortured with vague fears that somehow, in the heat of the game,
he had in some way managed to get hold of a real gun and had instinctively
fired it. But there was no gun, and besides, Max had certainly not pursued
Nathan across the room and shot him in the neck.

Max
knew that there was only one explanation. Nathan had been murdered whilst
playing the VR game. The murderer, or murderers, had entered the house whilst
Max and Nathan were preoccupied inside their helmets, and Nathan had been
killed without ever removing his. He had not seen the murderers. He had died
not knowing who had killed him, or why.

Max
could remember the way the hologram had writhed and shuddered. That must have
been the computer attempting to transmit an image of the thoughts Nathan was
having whilst being shot and propelled backwards over the couch. Then the
holographic figure of Nathan had jerked and slumped, which was clearly the
computer’s mind picture of Nathan being shot a second time whilst blindly and
desperately crawling away. It was then that Max had made his hologram fire
imaginary shots into Nathan’s hologram to finish the game.

After
that had come the visions. Those were the thoughts that Nathan’s helmet had been
transmitting, and which Max’s helmet had attempted to visualise, after Nathan
had been shot in the neck. At that point, the killers, whoever they were, must
have known that Nathan was breathing his last.

Max had
actually watched a computer graphic representation of Nathan’s mind as he had
died.

Chapter
Eighteen

Reading a dead man’s mind

New
recruit.

Rosalie sat looking at
Judy. They were in the cellar of a Mother Earth safe house on the outskirts of
Dublin.

‘So how
do I know you’re not an FBI plant?’ she inquired.

‘Do I
look like an FBI agent?’ replied Judy, who was quite capable of using his
nerdyness to his advantage, if it suited him. One of the few genuine perks of
being a member of an oppressed minority is that you can choose when and when
not to play the card. One minute, objecting to being defined by one’s religion,
race or whichever orifice you choose to take it up. Then the next minute,
claiming special debating rights at dinner parties on the very same grounds.
Sometimes this trick can actually be pulled off in the space of a single
sentence.

‘As a
Bhuddist cat-shagger, I deeply resent the way you seem to constantly categorise
people by their religion or sexuality.’

Hence
Judy, who had spent his life challenging the idea that weedy looking people are
crap, was now attempting to turn this prejudice to his advantage. Unfortunately
for Judy, Rosalie did not suffer from quite such knee-jerk prejudices as most
of his colleagues.

‘You
got me away from the airport,’ she remarked. ‘Awfully impressive, I thought.
Maybe you really do turn into Superman when you get in a phone-box.’

‘Look,
I’ve told you, I’m a clerk with the Bureau, I have been for fifteen years. I do
the green stuff … Other clerks cover commies and God-botherers, I do green.
I’m the guy who writes your diary. I know about everything Mother Earth ever
did, and why you do it. Like, how about this? You remember the guy you knew as
Shackleton? You cut a transmitter out of his arm in the middle of Death Valley
before you hit DigiMac? I briefed him. All the environmental stuff he knew? I
told him.’