Wildlife (14 page)

Roger's notes do not soar like they used to. His voice is modulated and getting crushed to a singular and irritating drone.

‘I will fight. Obviously I will. But first to Wow-Bang!' he cries. ‘First to Wow-Bang!'

Roger's fingers squirm onto the keyboard like fast worms
onto a warm corpse. There is a furious tapping. Tap. Tap. Tapping. Sap. Sap. Human crackling.

‘Help me!' cries Roger, watching his blurred hands in disgust. ‘I am hitting the keys too hard.'

Knock knock

IT'S AMAZING WHAT
we can do with computers nowadays. The traipsing queue of civilisation that snakes behind us in brown clothes and rubbish shoes should be jealous. (Insert smiley: the angry one.)

That lot. The dead. The past. What do they have? Mud. Silly hats. Inkwells. Glossless lips that mumble the old questions that we no longer mumble. ‘Are we free?' they whisper. ‘Is it good?' they groan. ‘Life, we mean. Is it good?'

Don't answer.

The sky above Wow-Bang is a perfect yellow and a perfect blue. It streaks in the way that all skies would streak, if humans were able to reach up and streak them personally with large, artistic hands. The birds are excellent birds. They are birds of paradise and of prey. They fly in great numbers, silhouetted against an imaginative sun, large wings beating slowly and in unison.

The harbour of Wow-Bang is programmed well. There are white houses bathed in sunlight. There are wooden
walkways. Virtual humans sit on virtual chairs. They chill and chill in the bars and in the cafes. They are looking out at whales in the harbour, just under the surface of the shallow digital sea. The large and docile whales designed and programmed, no doubt, by the whale enthusiasts of the real world. Those who have grown tired of the scarcity of whales and wish to see them more often and so bring them, wrapped in code, and tip them into the sea off the coast of Wow-Bang, shouting, ‘Look, citizens of Wow-Bang! We now have whales! Soon we will have everything we need!'

Life Moberg often comes to the Wow-Bang harbour in the early evening. The harbour is the city's most peaceful district. The only part that is yet to be taken over by fetish clubs, fuck palaces and discotheques. Life likes to walk along the seashore, staring at the whales, of course, and at the perfect sky which appears most beautiful when viewed from the coast. It doesn't attract too many people, this place, so the graphics of Wow-Bang are able to scroll smoothly. One's virtual body doesn't jerk like it does in more crowded places. Here, it is easy to enjoy the impressive, well-programmed, unnatural beauty of Wow-Bang. Here, it sometimes seems possible to breathe.

But of course, in some dimly lit room in the real world, Life Moberg is sitting on a real chair, staring at a screen with her index finger pressed firmly on the cursor keys of a computer. But she sees through that reality and so should we. She ignores the air she breathes. Its taste, temperature and smell. So should we. Life is enjoying Wow-Bang.

She locates an empty jetty and walks to the end. Below her, little red boats bob in the repeating motions of the blue sea. In the distance, the sun is setting, changing to beautiful colours, completing its graphic cycle. It's strange,
thinks Life, even though this sun is fake, it still makes me sombre and keen to reflect. Somehow I still feel its warmth. Life's mind turns to Joe. The boy she left behind.

He wasn't trying to nest in my arse, she thinks. I shouldn't say that to people. It was affection. It was only affection and I just crushed it. But we got too close. We were so close we were touching and the air around us was a cocktail of Joe's real smell and my real smell, and I watched him breathe that odour with closed eyes and pure pleasure. It put me off him. I sniffed it and I winced. I wanted more. I always thought there was a world and a way of life that was . . . I don't know – light without light bulbs, smiles without brains, love without odour and sex without stains. But really, if that's what you want, you can only ever live virtually. Like this.

A shadow floats on the water. Life points her graphic eyes at the sky and sees a large bird flying above her in the blue and the yellow. The bird is too big to be a native program of Wow-Bang. It is a human. A human who has chosen to appear here as a bird. Life realises that it is, in fact, a puffin. The national bird of her homeland, the Faroe Islands. She knows that it is Joe. I know it's you, she thinks, following the flight of the puffin. He does not fly too close to her. He keeps a respectful distance, just flitting back and forth with his black wings outstretched. She considers hovering up next to him. Every citizen of Wow-Bang can fly, not just those who choose to look like birds. But she doesn't join Joe in the sky. She points her head at the ground and teleports away.

Life teleports to the pier on the other side of Wow-Bang harbour and hopes that Joe does not follow her. The sun is disappearing quickly. The digital night is
falling. Life begins turning round aimlessly in a circle. She feels anxious. She considers instructing her hands to cover her face in sorrow, but what would be the point? She considers making her eyes cry. Same problem though. What's the point?

Instead she keeps turning in a mechanical circle. She thinks about Janek Freeman. He'll be in Wow-Bang tonight. Is he everything that Joe isn't? He's solvent, sure, a successful musician, involved in the Wild World. But he's cold. He makes love a bit like a zombie. And he never stopped playing his bass. Nice at first, but it's not the most melodic instrument. He is handsome. But is love really just a medium-paced queue of boys in un-ideal trousers and a variety of shirts and T-shirts, bad shoes, good shoes, strange dicks, standard dicks, underwear, trips away, sayings and hairstyles? Is Janek really the kind of boy that I should kiss while I'm alive? I don't know. Pointless thinking about it, thinks Life. She does not like to reflect. I should not come to the harbour, she decides. I should not watch the setting of this impeccably programmed sun.

Life leans out over the wooden walkway and stares down at the unimpressive tide beneath her. The tide comes in and out rather crudely. Too quickly and completely. Waves should leave wet-looking, dark sand when they retreat, not bright yellow sand. Bad programming, thinks Life, noticing that, below her on the beach, a man is shooting a woman repeatedly in the head with a grey pistol. They're both knee-deep in the water. Circles of red blood keep spurting from the woman's head. They land in the sea and then disappear. You still see bollocks like this, even at the harbour.

As for the Wild World, thinks Life, turning away from
the murder and continuing along the raised wooden promenade, through the fading golden light, I'm not sure the Wild World is quite what I'm looking for. At first, I was impressed by the organisation. Everyone spoke with so much excitement and confidence. People bought me drinks and gave me advice. We snorted cocaine till early in the morning in their Bethnal Green homes. They told me I had a good attitude and that a beautiful girl would go far in the Wild World. But they're using me. I know for a fact that they're using me.

Life notices that the man with the pistol has finished killing the woman. He has climbed up onto the promenade and started killing other people who have just come to stare out at the sea. Although the man looks old, it's likely he's being controlled by a group of teenage dickheads in America, Russia or China, who knows? Life can picture them, gathered round the computer screen in a dark room, laughing, mouths full of saliva, spitting accidentally, shouting, ‘Kill them, kill them all.'

Life stays to watch the man kill four or five innocent, unarmed people but then decides to teleport away. She hasn't got time to die tonight. Not with Janek and Anka Kudolski in town to see her. She hasn't got time to start searching the cemeteries of Wow-Bang for her dead body and then waiting for it to reanimate. Here, death is inconvenient.

Just as Life is teleporting away and the graphics of the Wow-Bang harbour are dismantling, she catches sight of the puffin again. It's flying through the sky above her head, flying at speed towards the murderer, its red beak open with rage.

Roger Hart rises to applaud the cast of virtual actors who are virtually breathless and bowing on the stage above him. There's something about the virtual performance of
Cats
that Roger really enjoys. In the real world, the cat costumes worn by the actors suggest to the audience that it might be absolutely fine to fuck a cat. It positively promotes cat-fucking. Roger finds this odd. But in the Wow-Bang production the cats are pretty much the same as cartoon or video game characters. The spectacle is less erotic, allowing one to enjoy the incredible Rice/Lloyd Webber score.

Behind Roger, also applauding, are about seven hundred teenage avatars. They are Roger's fans, or, more accurately, they are fans of the El Rogerio blog. They agreed that since Roger is turning into a computer, it might be nice for them all to go to a virtual musical together in his honour.

Most of the seven hundred have programmed themselves in quite similar ways. They are all incredibly skinny, limbs literally as thin as cocktail sticks. They are all dressed in tight black clothing with the occasional splash of yellow or pink neon. On top of their big heads, they have outrageous haircuts full of bright colours and large, daring shapes. On their faces they have programmed enormous sad eyes which contrast with their small mouths and barely noticeable noses.

They are all applauding
Cats
along with Roger, mainly out of politeness having actually found the production to be deeply boring. But they feel strangely drawn to Roger, to the man they used to call El Rogerio. In fact, he is close to being a prophet in their massive teenage eyes.

Roger turns to wave at his fans. His Wow-Bang avatar bears a striking resemblance to his real-life appearance before he started getting all technical. He has a large
bespectacled head. Stocky body. Nondescript clothing. He is genuinely moved by the amount of people who have turned out to meet him. He instructs his face to smile as they all cheer and chant his name. I'd have told the truth earlier if I'd known they'd love me more, he thinks. After minutes of cheering, Roger is overwhelmed. He turns to the stage where the cast of
Cats
is a little confused by the rapturous applause. Overcome with emotion, Roger executes them all.

Janek Freeman is frantically searching for a decent dick. He's scouring the boutiques of Wow-Bang's ‘Lower East Side' in a desperate attempt to find a cock that will satisfy Life.

This is Janek's first time in Wow-Bang. He's unfamiliar with the format. He's got less than an hour before he has to meet Life in the Real Arms and his avatar looks alarmingly basic. He's managed to design a head that looks like his own insofar as it's wearing a beanie. He met a man with the head of a rhino who helped him to acquire some clothes. A red T-shirt and a pair of jeans. But as they parted company, the rhino guy said, ‘If you're meeting a girl, be sure to find yourself a good-looking cock.'

‘Where do I find that?' Janek asked.

‘Penis Street, Lower East Side.'

Janek's on Penis Street now, staring into the shop windows wondering what constitutes a good-looking cock. He can see all shapes and sizes. Pierced, tattooed, horses'. He can't decide. He's never had to pick a dick before. He's wondering whether he should try and find a circumcised one to match with real life. Or maybe I should branch out, go crazy, get a dog's dick. This is ridiculous. Life's seen my
real dick, maybe she'll think it's tragic if my virtual dick deviates noticeably.

At the far end of Penis Street, a man wearing a pink tuxedo starts randomly killing people with a machete, so Janek hurries inside Cock Heaven to be safe.

‘Hey there, what are you after?' says a naked man with several penises growing around his waist from front to back.

‘I need a penis.'

‘Sure,' says the man, performing a camp pirouette, causing his belt of penises to fly horizontally like a grass skirt would in reality. ‘Well, our most popular penises are Afro-Caribbean and donkey. Can I ask, do you have a girlfriend here in Wow-Bang?'

‘Yes,' Janek lies, the image of Life flashing through his real brain.

‘And are you together in real life?'

‘Of course.'

‘In which case I suggest you splash out on a realistic and beautifully rendered phallus. One that won't disrupt your sex life in the real world.'

Janek's confused. Through the window of the shop, the guy with the machete is still killing people. Slitting their throats, causing them to disappear.

‘You see,' the penis seller is saying, ‘if I sell you a whale's dick your girlfriend might get used to it. We've found that frequent exposure to a novelty Wow-Bang phallus can breed apathy towards real human dicks.'

‘I don't understand any of this,' says Janek.

‘There's nothing to understand,' says the man. ‘It's just fun.' As he says the word ‘fun', every dick on the man's waist goes hard. It looks like his torso is sitting in a flesh
salad bowl. A minute later and Janek has left the shop. He exchanged thirty Wow-Bang dollars for a six-inch, white, uncircumcised erection.

Anka Kudolski is eating a virtual cheeseburger in Eddie's, a popular fast-food restaurant in central Wow-Bang. She's watching people. Watching as they move awkwardly around each other, their movements stiff and quite random. She watches as people form rough circles and try to start conversations. On the table next to her, a guy and a girl sit down and speak.

‘Where are you from?' asks the girl, she's wearing a latex catsuit and she has whiskers sprouting from below her nose.

‘Detroit. You?' says the man. He's wearing a Chelsea FC kit with the name ‘Lampard' on the back. He's even got the socks.