Dreambox Junkies Read online

  And now, it was her ex to whom Frances was turning in the throes of her affliction. How, Sesha wondered, would Paul Rayle respond? He was proving difficult to contact; Ajit had tried to get through by all the usual means, but zero joy. Unable or unwilling to answer. Someone would have to go out there. Someone non-ruraphobic; poor Ajit never, ever ventured outside of the city.

  Sesha asked Ajit if he had heard any more about Frances's condition. He hadn't. But no news was surely better than bad? And whatever came to pass, it didn't have to mean they would all be out of a job. Not so long as their butts were clean and well-covered. Typical Ajit, thinking of Frances the meal ticket. Frances Rayle was a lovely human being, and was only fifty-six, and AS was a horror. And if the mother of Psychotrichology, with her incredible wealth, with all the medical might she could muster, couldn't beat this thing back, then who could? Frances's research teams had conquered baldness and greyness and other such obstacles to Personal Fulfilment Through Psychotrichological Congruence. (Although, oddly enough, it was taking them an age to perfect a hair-straightening pill.) Now surely those same scientists, those madly clever people, would be oh-so-hard at work on a cure for Angel Syndrome?

  “How's with the CG?” Ajit wanted to know.

  Sesha pulled a face, and drew from her immediate superior a sympathetic grimace.

  Someone—indusaboteurs, cranky antibox activists—had managed to get to a whole consignment of PsyTri Pharmdiv's Crowning Glory hair-retention pills and had substituted placebos. Not only would that mean lawsuits from disgruntled scalpsters, but lots and lots of Dreambox junkies getting nasty shocks. For someone had disovered that one half-tab of Crowning Glory, when taken with a thousand-mg Vitamin C capsule, protected you—male or female—from boxmares, kept your dreams nice and sweet; far more reliably, curiously enough, than antideps such as Prozac or Trizac. Now, with only a sugar pill as insurance, all those box users would be open to the ugly side of themselves. Legally, the Institute was only vulnerable on the baldness front. So far as the Dreambox thing went they were untouchable: all packs carried prominent unauthorized use warnings. Crowning Glory couldn't be marketed as a boxdream dethanatizer since drug-assisted box use was currently illegal right across the Union in the wake of a rash of fatalities. Dreamboxes had only been on the market a matter of months, but neural overkill risks had already raised questions in the House, set parents panicking, and contributed more priceless darkside glam than any ad campaign could hope to evoke.

  The CG/Vit C cocktail had a reputation as the most effective dethan gear available. Twice as much CG had been shifted since the box junkies had got into using it, and the forecast was that box-related sales would eventually outstrip hair-related. But now, with Crowning Glory proving untrustworthy, they would be switching in droves to rival hair-retention tabs like McKeepit or ReMane.

  Sesha had spent half the afternoon, prior to her return visit to the McClinic, doing interviews with news people while suffering hell from her newly-implanted Mindseye. Without openly addressing box users, and thereby flouting the drug & dream laws, she'd had to find away of reassuring both lots of customers, the box freaks as well as the baldinis, that this was just an isolated case, one particular batch, that Crowning Glory was still the number one tab for all your male pattern hair loss or boxdream dethanatization problems.

  On top of her spokesperson role, she had been one of those allotted the dreary job of co-ordinating checks on stocks of Crowning Glory to make sure no more unpleasant surprises lay in store for purchasers. But now she was being given something else, something ultimately more important, not to mention far more interesting, and she was grateful as fruck.

  “No, but listen, Sesh ... about Frances?” Ajit trotted out that tiresome catchphrase of his: “I've seen the script, and it ends on an up. So Sesh if you could...” At that point Ajit's image got puppeted by a random gerontocidalist morphomercial. He took on the characteristic sneer. “What do young people think about old people? We think they're disgusting. Especially the ones who expected the State to look after them, who stupidly made no provisions. The parasites. And ugly, so ugly, so ugly and old! You're a burden on the young. We don't want you. Take your scrawny stinking chickenskins out of our sight.” Eyes blazing, he screamed, “DO US A FAVOUR AND DIE."

  “Fruck off, crunt.” Sesha told the phony puppet Ajit. Incredibly, this twisted digiterrorism had proved mildly successful in precipitating suicides among the elderly, particularly when more subtle viropirates found their way into NeTV gardening ads and turned some nice old green-fingered Uncle Cardigan into a face-the-facts proselytizer for self-immolation.

  “Crawl into your graves where you belong. Think we want you in our world? You think we want to see our taxes pissed away on maintaining your decrepit old carcasses, stinkbreath chickenskins? END YOUR LIFE. One simple way out is to swallow a whole bottle of...” The shitfilters finally shrugged off the loathsome illegal interloper, and phony Ajit melded back into real Ajit. Grimly he asked, “So who was it got me?"

  “Geros."

  He was livid. “Just gimme a line of the fruckers and a spewgun."

  Only there may not have been enough perpetrators to form a line. Any Netgeek hacker anywhere on the planet could unleash a morphomercial. Or an erotoroutine. Or a cyberspook like Sick Nick.

  “Tonight, Sesh. Go up there tonight, yeah?"

  Sesha nodded. This was for Frances, a personal task, and she wasn't about to let down her boss, aches and pains and hairdepression or no.

  She asked to view the file Ajit had sent.

  Paul Rayle was thirty-eight and, judging from the pic, a good deal cuter than that thick-necked geologist, partly on account of a degree of natural Congruence: his hair was a mess but it suited him perfectly. And his neck was of a Jankoesque slenderness. There were no pics of partner or kid. In fact the inf was pitifully meagre: just the one old unenhanced snapshot—supplied by Frances herself?—plus the Sheepshitshire address, and something about them scraping a living making and selling wooden furniture.

  Sesha studied the photo again. A good, high Symmetrindex. She zoomed in on the mouth, a nice, wide, kind example with generous lippage. Before she knew it, she had asked her mobe for a screening. Her mobe declared that the photo manifested none of the five Korsch-Wrightson indicators of potential personality dysfunction. On the basis of the visual data supplied, Paul Rayle appeared sound.

  Immediately, Sesha felt guilty for having the temerity to KW Frances's ex as though he were a lovelead, and tried to appease her superego with a force-of-habit plea. She didn't anticipate any real difficulties, judging from those lips. In fact she looked forward to making his acquaintance. After all, any ex-hub of Frances Rayle had to be someone pretty special, did reason not dictate?

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  Chapter 3

  Gazing at BoxRuth, at her chunky naked back, its whiteness warmed up by the candlelight; at the red tomboy crop that petered out into down at her nape; at her soft rounded shoulders, the left tattooed with an intricate Celtic design, done long before he'd met her; at where the side of a heavy breast could be glimpsed, with Kali's little fat face nuzzling into it as she took her feed; just standing there looking at the mother of his child, Paulie Rayle felt deeply comforted. Ruth's realitude, her glorious Rembrandt carnality, served as his anchor in this omniverse bereft of absolutes.

  All those others, all the BoxRuths he had encountered thus far were equally Ruthesque, the whole ascending chain of them. No diminution, no noticeable increment; just Ruth, again and again, at every level. The thread that held his dreams together.

  “Well go on, then, if you're going.” BoxRuth was irritated; it dulled her eyes and soured her voice.

  Paulie hated it when things were less than fine between the two of them. While from BoxRuth's point of view he would be gone for no more than twelve hours—the maximum period recommended by the manufacturer—subjectively, he would be away much longer. Chronocompression was advan
cing exponentially. Last time he'd heard the technews they'd been shipping boxes—the latest Sonys, Shintubes, Bengt & Anderssens—that could do you half a day in sixty minutes.

  Paulie asked, “Will you be okay while I'm gone?"

  “No.” She turned on the sarc. “I'm fucking helpless. You'll have to give up going on that thing and help me look after Kali.” Glancing round, she did her can't-you-see-I'm-kidding face. “Go on! I'll be fine."

  Why did he have to put her through this pathetic, apologetic ritual every time he boxed up?

  “What's happened to giving us a kiss before you go? You always used to come and give me a kiss. Sometimes I think...” Ruth's voice cracked, and she looked away into the air, as though struggling to rein things in, certain things, and then she looked back at Paulie. “It's like sometimes..."

  Paulie said simply, “Then I won't go."

  “Don't be stupid.” Ruth rocked the baby in her arms, even though little Kali was already fast asleep, hooked up to her breast just as snugly as he hooked up to his box. “Only it's like ... it's not going to be forever, this, is it? I don't know, sometimes I think we're drifting apart. We want different things."

  “No."

  Paulie didn't know what else to say. But on the other hand, words were cheap, as Ruth herself would have been quick to remind him. And when she was in this mood, in this state of mind, there was no arguing with her. Was this, then, her genuine self, coming through at these moments? Should he take these to be her true feelings? Was this the real soul inside her, suffering because of his selfishness?

  He put down the box and got up, went across to her, kissed Ruth's forehead, kissed his daughter, delighting in the delicious baby smell, Kali's fresh baby skin.

  Ruth turned away. “Look just go. Just leave us alone."

  He touched her arm. She shrugged his hand away.

  Before he could stop himself, he said, “Well why did you buy me the box? You might have known how it would end up."

  “Fuck off."

  Ruth walked out and, only because of the baby, closed the door quietly instead of slamming it.

  Paulie felt wretched. There he would be, lying boxed up and out of it, REM-ing and drooling saliva. Box users were known for their drooling, slack mouths. Ruth hadn't told him how ugly and stupid he looked, lying there just like every other box junkie, but he knew that was the spectacle he presented.

  From the windowsill, he took the carton of Crowning Glory tablets and, as always, had trouble with the babyproof cap. The Vitamin C capsules, he saw to his dismay, were all gone.

  He found Ruth in the kitchen, washing dishes. She had put on a t-shirt, that baggy old pink St. Diana one. Ruth was no Dianist; the garment had come free with her McPregnancy Pack, that was all, and, waste-not-want-not, she had given birth to Kali in it and then hung on to it, sentimentally attached.

  He asked, “Where's Kali? Asleep?"

  Ruth nodded. Without looking round at him, she pulled open the cutlery drawer, snatched something out and tossed it over her shoulder toward him. “That what you're looking for?"

  It was a new bottle of Vitamin C, procured by Ruth for his use. She had even done that for him, got him his precious dethan gear.

  Paulie picked up the bottle off the floor.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  And then he said, “I'm sorry."

  Ruth said nothing.

  “See you in a while,” Paulie said.

  He returned to the bedroom and sat down on the bed. It was totally his own fault, that it had come to this. His own childish, selfish, stubborn, stupid doing. Poor Ruth. He didn't deserve her. And she deserved far better.

  There were two Crowning Glory tabs left. Enough for four more hooks. Half a tab was quite enough to do the job. They had a little indentation down the middle, so you could easily snap them in two, just as if it had all been planned; just as if, when the tablets had been developed by his ex-wife's scientists in order to block dihydrotestosterone production and forestall male pattern baldness, those pharmacologists had also foreseen the widespread use of the tablets by wildcarding Dreamboxers. So outrageously ironic, having Frances to thank for all of this. One full tablet, one a day, was the dosage required to keep your hair growing. But only half a tab plus a C capsule was needed to dethanatize your boxdreams. No one seemed to know who had discovered it, this antinegativity side-effect.

  Hilford Abbots was Netless save for a single old landline screenphone—a necessary evil for emergency use only—at the home of village elder Robin Richly. Depending on his mood, Paulie sometimes found life in a media shelter liberating, sometimes suffocating, and he had been in the habit, on his occasional trips into Cambridge, of pigging out on inf and coming back with his head in a whirl. Among the fruits of one such expedition had been the alleged dethanatory power of Crowning Glory when taken with Vitamin C. Another Net myth, it had sounded like, to begin with. But then, when he himself had become a Dreambox user, Paulie had tried out the peculiar combination, and every hook had been clear of dark clouds. Not that dark clouds were necessarily always ready to sweep in, but it was wisest not to risk psychic self-injury.

  If, right back at the start, Paulie had known what the dethan tablets could do, he could have guarded against the grotesque little nightmare that had been his first, unprotected boxtrip. Like an idiot he'd hooked up without properly consulting the Dreambox instruction manual, and had plunged straight into what he had later learned was a standard male wish-and-punish complex, in which the primal was viciously scourged by the sociocultural. The net result of this dynamic had been his finding his boxself suffering from uncontrollable penile development. After first becoming too sizeable for GroundRuth to accommodate, the organ had gone on to attain such bloated dimensions that he couldn't get it up anyway, he didn't have the blood supply. He'd gone to the doctor, had operations, several, to shorten it, reduce it, cut it back down to size. But it had quickly grown back again, and rather than have it clutter up the ward, the nurses had coiled it round the bed for him, around and around, over and under, a ridiculous long fleshy hose. Dog-tired but unfailingly sympathetic, the nice, nice nurses had done their best to soothe his distress, and—and then the timer had come to the rescue, fetching him out.

  It was easy to laugh, now, looking back on it, and Ruth had pissed her knickers when he'd told her. But at the time, his boxworld terror had felt as real, as deep, as deleterious to mind and body as any fear he had ever experienced down here on the ground.

  The physical toll of dethanning was another matter. The long-term effects of excessive Crowning Glory consumption were anyone's guess, and there had even been claims that you could end up with corrupted DNA from too much Vitamin C. But Paulie wasn't intending his box junkiedom to last; once his goal had been achieved, the world would have no need for Dreamboxes.

  It was no good expecting BoxRuth to understand what things were like for a user; she had never boxed up, never once. She had no interest, any more than she had in the Net, in ware hard or soft, in boxworlds, in anything techy. Little Kali was enough for her, along with her books and her carpentry, the wooden furniture she made and sold to win their bread, along with the occasional supplement of a paying guest. She was right, correct in her adultness. Someone had to mind the mundane. They weren't rich like Frances. Babies couldn't look after themselves.

  Dreamboxes meant nothing to Ruth, personally. But, because she loved him, and was thus prepared to humour him, to listen with patience to his ideas, Ruth had gone out and bought him a Dreambox. She had purchased it out of the money she'd earned for a beautiful rustic pine dresser, stained with cheap tea—which Ruth always used in place of woodstain—and finished off with just the right amount of wax. Times were lean; they'd barely managed to pay their last water bill, and Ruth's artifacts hadn't been selling so well in recent months, thanks to a short-lived, frantic craze for Early Flatpack, the retro peeling-veneered-chipboard look that had briefly made honest-to-goodness pine seem so very five-minutes-ago. Yet still Ru
th hadn't skimped, going out and getting him a good, solid brand of box, a Shintube. She hadn't just plumped for the cheapest, one of those fuckawful brands you'd never heard of, with shit chronocomp, hideous neo-1970s mock-woodgrain inlays, and timers that could never fetch you out without inducing panic. They'd been known to give users fits. But there they were, still on the market. Like with everything else in this life it was all up in the air: what to do about safety, what standards to set, what legislation to pass. You kept hearing that a ban was in the offing, total Dreambox prohibition—as the Islamic world was struggling to instigate, in the face of global techanarchy—but now the genie was out of the bottle, it seemed a forlorn hope. Worldwide, the megacorps pretty much held sway in this and most other concerns, and you didn't slap bans on hotcakes.

  But once the megacorps found that the Dreambox was causing the consumer pool to evaporate, maybe, then, something would be done. Box sales were soaring; but, he had heard, gamecard sales were significantly down. And the same with cinextrapolation cards; entering into your favourite movie was no longer quite such a craze. It appeared, then, that more and more users were slotting in the supplied wildcard, as Paulie himself had, for freeform psychsurfing, building a boxlife fashioned from one's innermost desires, your own imagination rather than that of some gamegrammer.

  Innermost desires, Paulie thought. You live with a woman, you box up, and your transconscious mind chooses the same woman to be there with you in boxworld. Not some model, singer, synthesp, some crush from your past—or even Frances, for that matter—but Ruth, the very same woman you live with, here in the purportedly ontodefinitive Grundwelt, Groundworld. That happens, and surely you know without doubt that you love her, you want her, she's right, the one for you?