Dreambox Junkies Read online

  Such technotrivia was normally quite foreign to Frances. In this case, however, an element of poignancy forged a link with the human realm. Once, long ago and very briefly, Sir Kenneth had been her lover and, in some measure, her mentor. And on the first of the two occasions on which she had managed to overcome her distaste and converse vocally with these recorded and aggregated portions of his personality, it had been like speaking with the victim of a dreadful mental illness, every facet cruelly stripped away save one. A monotonous monomaniac. Business business business. How she had longed to regain that warm complicity of old, that undertow of secrets and memories shared. That delightful sense of humour. How she had wished for the man in his entirety, a Sir Kenneth unbowed by death, of sanguine spirits, ready to listen. If only her little experiment had met with more success.

  She had retained Sir Kenneth's love letters, even after her marriage to Paulie. They were, all four of them, beautiful, touching, tender, almost frighteningly fierce, deeply at odds with the cool, dry wit of the illustrious public figure. Although it had not seemed a particularly healthy way of behaving, she had clung to them, loath to let them go. And then, soon after the Institute had taken delivery of the Emulacrum, she had woken up in the middle of the night with a brainwave. Personally, secretly, involving no one else, she had scanned the letters into the Emulacrum. And then, she had talked with it again.

  Patiently, the Emulacrum had explained to Frances that, while it was able to appreciate her motives—and could, if called upon to do so, probably feign with fair verisimilitude an emotional attachment consonant with the material she had supplied—it was woefully unequipped for this form of intercourse.

  Had she imagined it, or had that last word really been so deliciously irony-charged, so knowing, so very like a final farewell, one last momentary, miraculous evocation of the whole man? So perhaps the experiment had not exactly failed.

  She had destroyed the letters, and had no further verbal contact with the Emulacrum.

  How she missed Sir Kenneth now, the ministering father figure—

  For she felt, all at once, so very apprehensive of that which lay ahead of her. Fearful yet thrilled. And needing to share and explore it, when finally it made itself known, as she knew it soon would, with a suitable other.

  And who more suitable than Paulie?

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  * * *

  Chapter 9

  Sesha had purchased a pack of Disnoids from the autodispenser and swallowed four, but she'd vomited them straight back up into the washbasin before they could mellow her out. She couldn't meet her own eyes in the mirror, not even fully alone, there so late at night in the privacy of the clinical white Luton vertiport washroom. Her whole face burned with heat, soreness, and mortification. She had scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed herself clean. There was no shower. If only there had been a shower, a change of clothes. A change of body. Some means of wiping away memories.

  Once more, she found herself sobbing. She retreated to a cubicle. The door autobolted. She sank slowly down into a foetal crouch and, as she had so often done as a little girl in the face of crushing stress, she began to rock.

  “You poor thing,” said the toilet, no doubt alerted by her sobs. “Would it help to talk about it??

  “Get frucked."

  Sesha wouldn't normally have let a dumb device dig under her skin, but AE voices always sounded so sarcastic. She didn't know what Frances thought of Artificial Empathy chips, but she could hazard a pretty fair guess.

  The toilet switched to Diplomatic Silence Mode, and Sesha resumed her rocking. Her nose was no longer bleeding. She threw away her scrunched-up wad of toilet paper. The diagnostic SmarTissue which the spilt blood had caused to change colour was harsh, nasty, cut-price stuff, imprinted with local bedboy agency ads whose Viagric visual frankness had promptly sent her retching anew.

  The nosebleed, along with renewed torment from her unhealed Mindseye incision, had come courtesy of that mad verticar pilot of theirs. As soon as they had all regained control of themselves, of their physical actions, the pilot's way of dealing with it had been to go stark raving apesugar and attack them, giving her a bloody nose and treating Paul Rayle like a punchbag. Paul Rayle had just slumped there and taken it, as though nothing in the whole world mattered any more. She had screamed and scratched and sobbed and wanted to kill herself, and then had remembered her Pepperspray bracelet, and had probably saved Paul Rayle's life by letting the pilot have a faceful of pepper. How they had come down in one piece was a wonder and a mystery; no doubt they had some kind of autopilot gizmo to thank—or curse, for she still wasn't sure whether death would not have been preferable.

  And to think that she had given her Heartmonitor Alarm Bra, with its hotline to the McCops, the night off in favour of her old Penny Pert. For whose sake, exactly? Paul Rayle's? What had possessed her? Was she cracked? You sad tart, Sesha Roffey.

  But how the fruck could it possibly have happened? At first, in that split-second before the pilot had freaked out and attacked them, she had assumed it to be her own private psychotic episode, scary as fruck but, thank God, secret. But then, their eyes had told her otherwise. To find out that the whole sick thing had not been a product of her mind alone. A subjective delusion could surely be explained more easily than could the joint acting-out of a sudden, irresistible orgiastic impulse? A foreign substance in the air? Some psychedelic agent substituted for the microcleansers in the OdourMurder unit? An outrageous, illegal testing of—what?—some top-secret military sex gas?

  If not for the participation of the pilot, she would have been ready to blame the tea served at Paul Rayle's cottage, or some brainfrucking ingredient in that incense that had turned their minds, grotesquely, to conjuring up that puerile, pubescent excuse for impromptu bacchanalia. Had she really done what she had seen and felt and been totally unable to stop herself doing, behaving like the cheapest, corniest skinvid star?

  She took out her mobe, made sure the Phoneface function was active—who would want to be seen looking like this, in this place?—and was about to contact Ajit, when she observed on her cuff what appeared to be a speck of dried semen.

  Sesha vomited.

  “That's it, dear,” said the toilet. “Get it all out.” And then, after the barest pause consistent with propriety, “Would it help to talk about it? Just touch the red spot with your transac ring to obtain one full, intensive five-minute counselling session for stress, depression, or infosickness. Should further sessions be required, simply touch again to continue our friendly little..."

  “Hey come on!” her mobe protested. “Show a bit more sensitivity, yeah?"

  * * * *

  The McCop, big and butch and baton-happy, plainly didn't like the look of Paulie Rayle, sitting there in the vertiport's bleak little bar, scruffy and bleeding and bruised and beat-up, nursing hurt ribs, armed with alcohol gripped in a trembling hand. And, worst of all, smoking a cigarette; cigarettes were, quite patently, anathema to the McCop.

  Well tough shit, Paulie thought.

  The McCop was tremendously tall, and Paulie guessed him to be a growth hormone victim. The parents had wanted to give their son an edge, to elevate him above his peers. Trouble was, too many other parents had the same plan, and the commanding heights had crept on up and up and up.

  The McCop's peaked cap was doubtless recording him with its smartbadge microcam, and Paulie could guess what was on the man's mind. What, the McCop must have been wondering, was the precise nature of the connection between this scruffy specimen here and that very distressed young lady who had alighted from the verticar and gone running straight into the women's washroom? If only you knew, McOfficer, that the precise nature of this world is what you ought to be worrying about.

  Paulie looked across at the washroom door. How much longer would Sesha Roffey stay in there? Had she already put out a help call?

  He dragged at his cigarette. His stomach churned. The weight was crushing him. The awful weight
of horrible knowledge, now a part of him for the remainder of his life. Pseudolife.

  Intellectually, he had worked out what had happened. Emotionally, he was not up to accepting it. Who would be? It was pretty damn grim. As an explanation, it may have violated the principle of parsimony—was it really more credible than, say, a freak chemical reaction leading to the spontaneous production, within the verticar, of some erotogenic substance which had entered their respiratory systems, triggering the bizarre behaviour?—but he was prepared to bet money on it; he felt its truth in his guts. Of course, there was always a slight chance that there did exist a far less ominous answer; one he could not, as yet, come up with, given the current state of his mind. Maybe his fellow victim would be able to enlighten him?

  The door opened. She had tidied herself up. She was bearing up well. She looked around for him, caught sight of him and approached. Her face was mask-like. In order to cope, she'd gone all androidy, sealed herself in an ice-hard businesslike lacquer. You could rat-tat-tat against her with your nails.

  Paulie offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. He indicated the second glass. “Thought you might need this."

  “Thanks.” As she spoke she turned her face away, keeping the movements of her lips hidden, unwitnessable, as though she would rather not have dealt with him directly, but through a series of distancing relays. She took the whiskey, and didn't even let him see her sip at it. Her embarrassment must have been desperate. His own was dire enough. Ironically, the explanation he was about to put forward ought to have offered a full exoneration from any sense of embarrassment.

  He said first, “I'm sorry."

  One of the reasons he felt apologetic had to do with knowing that all of this was extra-difficult for her on account of who he was, in her eyes. His significance vis-a-vis Frances.

  Sipping at his drink, he said, “Look, Sesha, it wasn't really us, doing those things."

  At last he received a glance from her, a very brief, grudging flash of eye-contact. “Of course it wasn't us.” The words came back at him charged with girlish, dogmatic ferocity.

  He said, “We were puppeted. Like with morphomercials. You've heard of erotoroutines, sex programs ... the way they can strike at random? Some stupid little Netgeek's idea of a joke."

  He waited for the implications to sink in. Or would they? Were they just too outrageous? Or simply incomprehensible, particularly if she wasn't unduly into metaphysics, outside of her training in visualizing Ideal Hairstyles?

  He said again, “We were puppeted, hacked, just like people on a screen, on NeTV, in a film. Like when Sick Nick starts chopping them up. Only we were lucky. I'd say it was one of the milder erotoroutines, quite an old one. The shitfilters shrugged it off pretty quickly."

  Sesha Roffey gave him the kind of look reserved for loopy little conspiracy nerds, then turned her head so that she was looking not just away from him, but right away from him, one hundred and eighty degrees away, and Paulie thought, Why am I saying all of this, making myself sound insane? I'm never going to convince her. Am I myself convinced, even?

  He asked her, “Well okay then, what's your explanation?"

  He was met with a silence, during which the McCop gave him a long, sharp, guard-dog glower, laced with chivalrous concern for the lady.

  “I could die,” came her words, quiet and bitter, and not for him.

  Paulie said, “It could be we're not really alive."

  His own statement sounded reassuringly preposterous, that was why he had needed to voice his paranoia. To exorcise it.

  Processia Roffey looked round at him, finally, and, clearly to her mind, at any rate, put an end to it by pointing out, “Only we're not virtual ... this is the real world."

  There had been movies, countless horror movies, about cyberspooks bursting out from the Net, taking on physical form and wreaking havoc in the world at large. Not that this was what Paulie's explanation actually boiled down to, but it was probably what she was thinking he was thinking. He realized he was being insensitive; the last thing she needed right now was to be confronted with this kind of shit. But before he could stop himself, he had shot back at her,

  “So you know that for a fact, that this world is real?"

  She didn't bother to utter a reply; her scathing look said it all.

  Infuriated by her certitude, Paulie thought, Have you any idea what a fucking fact actually is? But what was the use in lecturing her on the provisionality, the probabilistic nature of all human knowledge? And why not admit that, down deep, he maybe envied her, found strong opinions sexy?

  He shrugged. “Then I don't know what happened. It's as big a mystery to me as it is to you. The world's full of mysteries. Let's just try and forget about it.” He reached for his glass, his hand still trembling. “So what do we do now?"

  “A car will collect us."

  “And then?"

  “Any ... needs you have will be attended to, and then, if you're willing, you'll be flown over to see Frances. Is that okay?"

  “Yeah, that's fine."

  “Are you all right? Were you ... hurt?"

  She was referring to the punches he'd received from the pilot. The poor, embarrassed bastard had lashed out at them like a loon.

  “No, I'm fine, I'm okay.” Paulie shook his head, his ribs playing up in violent contradiction.

  “I scratched your face.” She didn't appear to deem contrition appropriate; she simply stated a fact, and Paulie could imagine her trying to decide whether or not to put professionalism to the fore and make a full and frank report to her employer. It would seem perfectly natural to look to Mother Frances for absolution. It was an impulse with which he himself could identify.

  “I'm sorry,” she said, formally, not without difficulty.

  “It's nothing. Forget it."

  Sleep, Paulie thought. My circadian rhythm has been shot to fuck. I need sleep, and plenty of it.

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  * * *

  Chapter 10

  Ruth asked herself savagely, What was I thinking, telling Paulie to go out there to Spain? Am I fucking mental, or what? Her worst fear—it had always been her darkest, deepest fear—that Paulie would get back together with Frances.

  Kali was crying again, ready for her last, late feed. Ruth got up, went and fetched her, brought her back to the bed.

  It felt like, like Paulie had died. Just after he'd left, as the stupid noisy flying car thing was heaving itself up into the sky with him inside, the tears had come and choked her up. Tears partly of rage at how she'd meekly gone along with it, trying to be a nice person and see the right thing get done, thinking about Paulie and thinking about Frances and what Frances needed. Well, fuck Frances Rayle. Serve her fucking right, going cranky after spending all that money on treatment to try and stop herself from getting any older. How could you have any sympathy for her when she'd brought it on herself by being vain? What kind of world would it be if only the rich lived forever, and everybody else had to die? And even if everyone ended up getting the treatment and not dying, and people still kept having kids, how would there be room for everybody?

  Ruth winced as Kali tugged at her cracked nipple.

  God she could kick herself, sending Paulie off like it was his duty to go and hers to be a martyr. Sending him off with that snotty cow with her fucking basin haircut. Fucking thief, as well. That little purply-coloured soft toy had disappeared from under the cupboard, right near where the bitch had been sitting. And the funny thing was, it had been Frances who had sent them the toy. A couple of times, feeling pissed off with Frances—and because of the way the toy would seem to look at you, just like it was watching you—Ruth had nearly chucked it in the rubbish. But chucking it away had seemed childish. For ages it had been left lying there under the cupboard. Kali wouldn't miss it, she didn't pay that much attention yet to toys, but that wasn't the point.

  Perhaps, Ruth told herself, that was why the basin-haircut woman had bought that wooden box, out of gui
lt because she'd pinched Kali's toy? Not because she truly liked the box, the scheming cow.

  Ruth stopped herself. She was tired. Her hormones were everywhere; it took so long to get back to normal after having a baby. The little rabbit-thing was probably still there, kicking around somewhere. Maybe Paulie had picked it up.

  And then something else occurred to her, and as soon as Kali had finished feeding and she'd got her back to sleep, she went and checked.

  Paulie had taken the Dreambox.

  Ruth paced up and down, arms folded, hugging herself. She felt all awake and electric. What was she so ready to do? Go after him? She'd had a chance to go. All three of them could have gone over there to Spain, her and Paulie and Kali.

  What could she do now? Was it too late?

  “Fucking stupid fucking ... !” she called herself out loud.

  She felt completely powerless, standing there rubbing away tears with the palms of her hands.

  * * * *

  “Anything wrong, Sesh?” Ajit had perched himself beside her, on the arm of his settee. His shrewd black eyes studied her. “There is something, isn't there?"

  Sesha shook her head. “I'm just tired."

  Ajit grinned. “All go, isn't it, this line of work?"

  It had taken all of her inner resources to prevent the double dose of shame, the theft of Bubu Flumpkin, her antics in the verticar, from reducing her to a wreck. Like a scientist caging a dangerous substance, keeping it separate from every atom of everything else, she was holding the night's memories apart and discrete and outside of herself. It still called upon every bit of her willpower.

  Every bit, Sesha thought. Every byte?

  Her own words echoed back at her: “Only we're not virtual—this is the real world."

  Paul Rayle quite clearly thought otherwise. But then, Paul Rayle was a box junkie. His sad little secret was out. She had caught sight of the box, wrapped up in that tatty old army-surplus khaki rucksack. Either the best he had available in the way of luggage, or a calculated statement of outsiderdom, or both, the bag was split down one seam, and the Dreambox, swaddled snug as a baby in some item of spare clothing, had peeped out briefly as he'd plonked the bag down on his lap when they'd got in the car that had brought them into London. He had seen her see the box, and he had made no attempt to conceal it. On the contrary, he had responded with a kind of wry grin.