Dreambox Junkies Page 10

  Paulie had known there would be many such claims out there; the Net was overflowing with every kind of crap imaginable shat out by the world's massed ranks of flaky flancases.

  “Another?"

  “Quote: Some of you out there, you people reading this, SOME OF YOU KNOW THIS IS NOT THE REAL WORLD. Things have happened to you, strange, inexplicable things..."

  Paulie listened to a whole bunch of them: reports of events that supposedly couldn't take place within the normal realms of possibility. Stories from all over the globe. Everything from heard-it-a-million-times ‘miracles’ to the sect in Austin, Texas who believed that the entire human race, except for one solitary US astronaut, had been wiped out in 1962 by World War Three. Apparently, an indestructible alien observer who had bemusedly weathered the thermonuclear exchange took pity on the lone survivor and, with the aid of a ‘hyper-advanced Dreambox-type device’ had set about generating thie present world in order to keep the one remaining human from losing his mind through loneliness. The man had since died of old age, and the alien had felt so sorry for us poor pseudohumans that it was keeping the dream going. But for how much longer?

  Paulie was about to call a halt to the parade of paranormality when the mobe dug up a snippet that brought him up short, for it surely had erotoroutine written all over it? Members of a Lutheran congregation in central Copenhagen had found themselves staging an impromptu, involuntary orgy, blame for which was being put on everything from demonic possession to mass hysteria/hypnosis to some form of airborne erotogenic agent released by the local branch of the worldwide gerontocidal terrorist network—practically all the churchgoers were of pensionable age, and four fatal heart attacks had ensued—or even an incredibly callous secret NATO psychotropic weapons test. Suggestions that an erotoroutine had somehow escaped from the Net, assumed biological form and infiltrated physical reality—or even that this world was a boxworld—were not, it would seem, being taken very seriously by the authorities.

  Paulie asked the mobe to check for chronocorrespondence. Of the two hundred and ninety-four hits, one hundred and thirteen cited a common timeframe: between 4 and 7pm GMT on the previous day.

  Paulie thought, While the real Paulie Rayle was asleep, I, this Paulie Rayle copy, was struck off from my Groundworld original, along with all these other humiliants around me in this ontologically inferior world.

  Or had he already been hooked up and dreaming. Was this his own boxworld, still?

  His mind reeled.

  So already, people were beginning to suspect? There had always been a quota of hardcore paranoiacs who, right from the moment they'd first heard of Dreamboxes, boxworlds and the Berkeley Effect, had seen the possibility that this was a boxworld. But now—if he was right, and not himself a rubber roomer—momentum would build and build as more and more boxworld flaws manifested themselves. And then eventually, what? Would millions hook up to their Dreamboxes to try and escape, only to plunge ever deeper into irrealitude? What could anyone do? What would happen if the box was switched off, damaged, destroyed? What if they were on one of those dirt-cheap, bargain-basement boxes, especially vulnerable to entropic declension? Even with the very best boxes, a certain amount of data corruption was, over time, unavoidable, and the user's forebrain could not always be relied upon to rationalize every anomaly.

  For the majority of this pseudoplanet's population, Paulie surmised, understanding of their plight would be a gradual, painful process. For the longest possible interval, they would refuse to be unduly troubled by the increasing proportion of weird phenomena in a world that was already too weird for them. They would regard the disillusioned, knowledge-burdened minority as the latest in a long and tiresome line of doomsday merchants, religious nuts with a hi-tech dusting.

  Paulie thought, What a bleak, dour creed. Or could it be that humiliants have souls? Will God save us? Is that our only hope?

  Except, perhaps, for that same mad hope he himself had once harboured: the hope that the human mind, his own mind, possessed somewhere within itself the power not only to dream up a better world, but to make it the realest of worlds. And yet, whose mind, in this world, was anything more than simulacral? Would it not be fair to assume that the only minds of any depth, the only effectively pseudohuman humiliants, were those entities directly involved with, interactive with, the box user, with everyone else in the world mere cardboard cut-outs?

  My own selfconscious reflections appear to qualify me as one of the Elect, he concluded wryly.

  He asked the mobe, “And what about you? What do you think? How real is this world?"

  “I'm afraid I cannot help you there, Big Boy. Questions of ontology are outside of my scope."

  “You mean you don't care."

  “Well let me put it this way: the lack of that basic human motivational underpinning, a dread of death, imposes a limit on the profundity of my sentience. I would refer you instead to a fellow human of suitably like mind. Do you wish me to conduct a search?"

  “Do I detect a sarcasm chip?"

  “Mine ... I am a Generation Six-B, emphatically NOT to be confused with a common-or-garden Six-A ... is the first generation of mobe equipped with an aptitude, albeit modest as yet, for the recognition and deployment of irony, or something superficially analogous to it."

  “Your filters aren't so hot, though, are they?"

  “Big Boy, you should hear some of the ads that DON'T make it through.” The voice, Paulie could have sworn, registered an affront. “All Shintube mobes ship with the Strictmother Seven, which, as you may have heard, is currently VaticaNet's benchmark filterchip. In any event, I can scarcely be held accountable for the ability of illegal software to out-evolve antipiratory ... You have a call. Hilford Abbots, England."

  Ruth bloomed up onto the screen. Her face looked unrefreshed, left over from yesterday.

  Softly, Paulie asked her, “Are you okay?"

  Ruth nodded. “What's it like in Seville? Nicer than here, I bet."

  “Too tired to take it in right now. How's Kali?"

  Ruth held up their little daughter to the camera.

  “Hello!” Paulie waved. “Hello, Funsize."

  Kali's bewildered saucer eyes were looking everywhere but at him.

  “How's Frances?” Ruth wanted to know.

  “She seems okay.” Paulie shrugged. “I mean I've only spoken to her for a moment, so far."

  “Pleased to see you, was she?"

  “Look don't ask me what she's expecting. I'm not a doctor. In fact I'm still not sure I should've come here at all."

  “No? Why's that?"

  Ruth had lapsed into full-blown sullenness, and Paulie thought savagely, So why did you say I should go to her? Did I mistakenly take the gesture at face value? Was it a test? Am I being unfaithful just by being here?

  He said, “We're both tired.” He forced a yawn to illustrate. Tiredness, he thought. The great catch-all.

  Ruth asked, “So how long do you think you'll be staying?"

  “Not too long. Not once she finds out I'm no use to her."

  “Have you talked to doctors or anybody? What do they say?"

  “No, I haven't, yet. Haven't been here that long.” He thought about showing her the room, doing a full-circle pan with the mobe. But no. Instead, he reminded her, “It was you who said I should come. I was hesitating, if you recall?"

  “You took your Dreambox."

  “I haven't used it.” And then it hit him again, bringing with it a wave of nausea, this was not the true Groundworld, so what the fuck did any of this matter?

  “Is there anything else?” Ruth sniffed and wiped her nose. “Only Kali needs a feed."

  “Talk to you again soon, then."

  He had that tightness in his stomach, that churning, somatic recognition that, as had always been the case with Frances, Ruth's insight surpassed his self-knowledge.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 13

  Coming back from Robin Richl
y's she had Kali facing inward, nuzzling close against her, the two of them pooling their body warmth. Sometimes it was nice for Kali to face outwards in the sling; that way she could see the world around her. But today it was cold.

  Ruth climbed the stile and, instead of going straight back to the cottage, followed the other footpath down to the riverside. Bolo bounded along after her, braked to a halt near the water and sat panting, showing sheepdog sense, knowing better than to jump in, today.

  There stood the willow tree where, last summer, she and Paulie had ducked in under the leaves, hand in hand. Ruth tingled at the memory of it, of the way that Paulie, as a lover, would treat her like the sacred centre of his world. She was starting to feel ready again at last. And where was he? Off in another country. Anyway it was muddy now under the tree, and far too freezing.

  In years to come, they might not be able to return and see the willow again. All of this area, in fact a whole big chunk of East Anglia, might end up under the North Sea before too long, if the climate changed like they were saying it might. Everyone would have had to leave the village. But then, the village had never really felt like home to her. Could any place, in this world?

  Kali was whinging. It was time for her feed. Ruth fumbled with the feeding zip. Another good thing about babies facing inward was the way you could feed them as you walked along, sort of like planes filling other planes’ fuel tanks in the air.

  The sucking put her in mind of Paulie, of the way he too liked to suck on her. It wasn't so bad, now; the two things, the two images, completely different but in one way not so different, were no longer at war. She was more used to motherhood, now. Before, at first, it had been unthinkable that she should let him do the same as little Kali did, that he should even want to.

  “There you go, babes.” She lifted Kali into a better position, a more comfortable one, and held her there against her in the sling. “Did you see your Daddy? Did you see Daddy on the phone?"

  How long would it take? Ruth wondered. How long would Frances keep him there in Spain?

  “Your Daddy loves you."

  Tears welled. What was she doing to herself, soppy cow? What was she worried about? Frances grabbing him back? Anyone would think he didn't have a mind of his own. If he went back to Frances, well, he went back. People did such things. You were always hearing about people walking out on people; they always had, and probably always would. It was Paulie who had walked out on Frances in the first place, after all. And perhaps, Ruth considered, once you'd left one person, it wasn't too hard to do it again. Even old Robin Richly was said to have walked out on two women and left two lots of kids behind.

  Well, she thought, if Paulie wanted to fuck off he could fuck off. He'd been given the ideal opportunity.

  Would you just fucking listen to me? she said to herself. “Eh, Kali? Mmm?"

  Kali ignored her; she just kept guzzling, her little cheek busy pumping in and out.

  There was, Ruth told herself firmly, such a thing as trust. Not that she didn't trust Paulie; it was more that she didn't trust life to be kind to her. Why should it, when it wasn't particularly kind to most people? Why should she be spared being dumped?

  If only poor old Mum had still been alive. When Paulie had first been explaining about Dreamboxes, what they could do, one of the very first things he had said was that it would be a way of bringing her mother back to life. She could hook up and have Mum—and anybody else she wanted—with her there in the boxworld.

  The idea had revolted her.

  It was like when they'd bring to life dead actors with computer tricks and use them in ads. It was like that, a bit, only worse. She hadn't been able to tell Paulie why, exactly; he should have known why, the feeling part should have, never mind the thinking part. She told him to leave her mother alone. She made him promise that, when he boxed up, he didn't have Mum in his boxworld. She knew she must have sounded cranky, and she hadn't minded Paulie dreaming about her, and even about Frances, if that was what he really wanted.

  But not Mum.

  Paulie hadn't come out and called her superstitious and primitive, but he must have thought it.

  “You have a diaper leak,” whispered the sling in its obnoxious little singsong Disney voice. It was American, fancy-arsed and computerized, and was covered in garish stars and stripes, but the padding had looked comfortable when she'd caught sight of it in that charity shop in Cambridge.

  “Fuck off,” she told the baby sling.

  “Is that appropriate language to use in front of an infant?"

  Bolo growled; he was a discerning dog, he didn't like the sling's voice any more than she did.

  “Bol-locks,” sang Ruth with feeling. “Bollocks bollocks bol-locks."

  “I have no record of that term, but it sounds indecent."

  “Balls."

  “Is that appropriate lan..."

  The voice had been coming from a little round flat speaker sewn into the sling's left shoulder strap. Ruth had managed, with her teeth, to rip out enough of the stitching to able to hook her finger in under the speaker and tear it loose, and now she held it in the palm of her hand.

  “...guage to use in front of an infant?"

  She nearly dropped it, the thing was so creepy, still alive, still talking back to her. It must, she thought, be an all-in-one thing, computer brain, speaker and everything, together.

  “SAGRADA."

  The Spanish word, crackling totally unexpectedly out from the speaker, brought forth from Ruth an involuntary yell. With all her force she flung the thing away, sending it skimming across the surface of the water. Three, four times it bounced before sinking out of sight. Ruth stood there shaking, startled, disturbed. The Spanish word meant ‘sacred,’ in the feminine, and the sound of it had stolen the breath from her lungs. For it was like a message, a reminder. But of what, she couldn't say.

  * * * *

  Sesha lay atop the gorg Islamic throw and rested, sinking briefly into something like sleep at its lightest but never quite fully shutting down. Frances, Bubu Flumpkin, that dreadful episode in the verticar. Why had she been summoned here? What did her boss want with her?

  This was only their third, no, fourth, encounter. Frances had always looked stunning, but never quite so radiant. The telotherapy? What, Sesha wondered soberly, were the visible signs of Angel Syndrome? Were there any? It was impossible to believe that someone so vibrant was seriously ailing, might soon be lost to the world.

  And that beautiful, beautiful Spanish guy who had shown them to their rooms! And the house, this place—heaven or what? She had to keep reminding herself that this was the real thing, not PseudoSeville; although poor, frucked-up Paul Rayle would doubtless dispute that. It was galling, the man having been brought here to help when he himself was in dire need of treatment. Frances still felt for him—any stupe could see that. A good start would be to take away his Dreambox. Was he on it now, there in his room next-door, making matters worse for himself? He'd lost the plot, the poor guy. Totally.

  Sesha thought, And so have I, stealing a toy from a baby. She had brought along one of the two the Bubu Flumpkins, hoping to find a way of restoring it to its rightful owner, Paul Rayle's baby daughter Kali. Her conscience demanded that the Bubu be returned.

  A pang of hunger made Sesha realize that she had eaten absolutely nothing since the previous evening's plate of designer pasta back at her flat.

  Cricklewood seemed a world away now.

  And then she thought, The Spanish office. Why don't I ask for a transfer to the Spanish office? All right, so I don't speak the language, but there are ways and means and all manner of hi-tech assists to accelerate my learning. Why not? Why ever the fruck not?

  Sesha got up from the bed. She was pouring herself a glass of the juice that the lovely Spanish guy had brought for her, when there came a gentle little knock at the door, followed by a soft voice:

  “Processia?"

  It was Frances.

  “Sorry to disturb you."

&
nbsp; “That's quite all right. Really.” Sesha stood aside for her boss to enter. So this was the legendary Frances Rayle informality? Enchantment became alarm when Sesha saw how vulnerable Frances looked. Tired, older, under some kind of cloud. Disoriented, almost.

  “I should be letting you rest, I know, but...” Frances heaved a deep sigh. “I can't rely on being ... compos mentis ... indefinitely."

  Sesha was speechless in the face of so frank a confidence.

  “I need someone to look after the Institute.” Frances regarded her levelly. “I believe I may have found the right person."

  Paul Rayle?

  Frances was soliciting her views on the handing over of the Institute to a saddo Dreambox junkie who sneered at PsyTri? The shock turned Sesha's legs to jelly. Was this is a bad dream?

  “I believe you to be eminently qualified."

  “Me?” Sesha couldn't prevent herself blurting it out, to her profound embarrassment.

  “Your record, since you've been with us, is second to none. What's that word?” Frances kneaded her forehead with the heel of her heavily-ringed hand. “Exemplary. You would definitely seem to fit the bill, so far as I can...” She paused, presumably at the sight of Sesha's stupefaction. “Forgive me. The decision is yours."

  Sesha struggled for words.

  Frances eyed her keenly. “Would you at least consider the offer?"

  Sesha could do nothing but nod blankly, excruciatingly aware that she resembled more a besotted schoolgirl than the outstanding employee to whom Frances was appealing, and in whom she did not recognize herself.

  This cannot be, her common sense protested.

  “I know it's right out of the blue,” Frances sympathized, gently touching Sesha's arm.

  “I really don't know what to say."

  “I'd be grateful if you'd think it over.” With a smile, Frances whispered, “You'll be fine."