Dreambox Junkies Read online

  Poor Frances.

  Her ex was a fruck-up, headwise. Sesha could see how he might once have been someone worthwhile, but now he was completely offworld. She could no longer harbour so much as a glimmer of hope that his presence would prove therapeutic to her boss. She'd had her doubts, right from the moment she'd set eyes on him at that cottage, but now the whole enterprise seemed futile. How could Frances not be disappointed?

  When they had landed and escaped from that awful verticar flight, Paul Rayle's eyes had been pained and haunted. Any embarrassment he felt appeared to have been subsumed under a paranoid, box junkie dread. He plainly believed that something was Wrong, in the deepest possible sense. That he was still dreaming, trapped, suffering a boxmare. Something of that order. Some cranky conviction.

  Well, she was sorry, but Sesha had no time for such silliness. It was so unpleasant to see a grown man being silly. Silliness emasculated. What Paul Rayle needed was to smash that stupid box and get himself straightened out, get cured of his ridiculous conviction that what had happened in the verticar proved that this was not the real world, Groundworld, in user jargon. He had leapt straight to what seemed to him, a box junkie, to be the obvious conclusion. To anyone with a healthy head, his paranoia was as plain as frucking daylight.

  Okay, Sesha allowed, so something was responsible for the verticar episode, but who cared? Did it have to fit into some scheme, be explained away? It had happened, it was gone; the only problem was the memory.

  Ajit patted her on the shoulder. “'Excuse me a moment.” He went off to the kitchen or somewhere, leaving her alone.

  There came a Bleep-Bl-Bleep-Bleeeeep from her handbag: the first four notes of Janko Brauch's song, Lisa Sleaze. Sesha fished out her mobe.

  “Sesh?"

  “Mmm?"

  “About your feet: you know, Sesha, you're really not alone in thinking they're, well, not QUITE petite enough for your liking. In fact..."

  “You go fruck yourself."

  Sesha was furious. It was one of those intimads, commercials programmed to target specific individuals, to home in on your hangups. She could vaguely recall, ages ago, going out for a meal with her friend Indie and letting slip the moan that, in an ideal world, her feet would be about a size and a half smaller. Her gripe must have been picked up by one of the restaurant's securicam mikes, harvested by a roving intimad scout and then sold on for exploitation by some footwear or pedicare company. And now the resultant intimad had succeeded in hijacking her mobe, worming its way in through the shitfilters. It had even had the mobe monitor the sound and heatscapes—as best it could from within the handbag—and bide its time until she was on her own; these things were sly, underhanded, insidious. All she could do was wait for the filters to regain control; there was no way of silencing an intimad. Retaining Janko Brauch's vocpat, the ad droned blandly on:

  “...surveys reveal that some thirty-nine percent of adult women throughout the Euro Union express, at some point, a real degree of dissatisfaction with their foot size. So you see, Sesha, this is a very commonly-voiced grievance, so why be ashamed? Instead, why not take steps, if you'll pardon the pun, to remedy the problem? Simply by using the new Pedislim Plus Heel-to-Toe Reduction Sock, impregnated with our exclusive age-old Tibetan Herbal Formula, its magic enhanced by the very latest liposomic delivery methods, you can effectively reduce the length and breadth of your feet by as much as two ... yes, TWO ... whole Euro shoe sizes over a short three-month period. How does that sound, Sesha? And it's SO easy to order! Just hit me with your transac ring, and not one but THREE pairs of Pedislim socks, giving you three cool pastel shades to suit your every mood, will be rushed IMMEDIATELY to your doorstep. Because I ask you, Sesha, why put up with a physical defect that could so eas ... eas ... easily b-b-b-b-b-be ... Sorry about that, Sesha.” It had taken the mobe a worryingly long time to shrug off the intimad. “What a crock, huh? Won't happen again. I'm due to download a new filter release in two days. As you know, intimads are illegal. I've just sent a report to the appropriate regulating body. Sorry, Sesh, I feel real bad about letting that one through. Frucker."

  “Not your fault."

  “That's reassuring to hear. Thanks, Sesh, I appreciate your understanding."

  Sesha closed the mobe, and was dropping it back into her handbag when Paul Rayle appeared in the doorway. She felt intense discomfort. Had he heard the intimad?

  Seeing her there on the settee, he came in. He smiled. Upon waking from his doze in the car, his manner had been one of ironic amusement. His second snooze appeared to have heightened this, if anything, though Sesha grimly suspected that his wry smile signified not a new sobriety but a fatalistic acceptance of some delusory plight.

  It would have been stretching the word's definition to have called him presentable, but one or two of the least becoming aspects of his appearance had been favourably modified. And all without the need for even the gentlest of hints from herself or from Ajit. Paul Rayle had made use of the offered bathroom to tidy himself up, and the bed to continue the nap he had begun in the car. Undeniably, he had made an effort; his unkemptness did not seem to be ideologically motivated. All in all, he didn't quite fit the craft-villager stereotype, despite the rucksack and his rough woollen nonconsumer tunic thing, and clumpy boots.

  Once again, though, Sesha noted that his natural Congruence would have transformed him even further had he only allowed his lovely hair to hang loose. And it would have obscured his bruisy cheekbone, and the scratches she herself had inflicted, the sight of which brought another surge of shame.

  “Nice place,” he said, surveying Ajit's cool, spacious living-room: elegant, unfinicky, and uncompromisingly masculine. It was, Sesha could tell, no more to Paul Rayle's taste than to her own.

  She nodded. “Isn't it?"

  Ajit had decided that Paul Rayle ought to be brought here to Highgate to freshen up—blithely unaware that all the freshening-up in the world wouldn't do the trick, for the trick could not be done in mere hours, even days. Paul Rayle needed treatment. Several different kinds. Showering, shaving, and resting constituted a start, but, in all honesty, to deliver someone to Frances in even this washed and brushed-up state smacked strongly of professional ineptitude. And Ajit was of the same mind, clearly, as was his cute new boyfriend Bill; all those glances shuttlecocking back and forth. But needs must. Frances's condition was unstable. The sooner they got Paul Rayle flown over to her, the better. What else could match that for importance?

  “How are you feeling?” Sesha asked.

  Paul Rayle yawned. “Not so bad. How about you?"

  She was taken aback by his tenderness. It was as though he genuinely felt for her, knowing, as he did, what she had been through. What the two of them had been through together, along with that pilot, whose wild orgasmic rictus was a memory she would pay any price to have expunged.

  “Tired,” she said. “Otherwise I'm okay."

  She had not told Ajit about the verticar horror. She would never, ever speak of it to anyone. Not even her best friend Indie. Not that she had been in touch with Indie in weeks, or was it months?

  I'll call Indie tomorrow, she thought. Time to take a stand against the isolating drift of twenty-first century life.

  “What's it like,” she asked, “living in a craft village?"

  “Pleasant. What's it like in the city?” Paul Rayle's eyes made a gentle joke out of the reciprocity dictated by etiquette.

  Sesha was considering her reply when she was brought up short by the sight of her own face suddenly appearing on Ajit's NeTV; the set had been left on in the background, tuned in to the EBC No-Shit News with top anchorslob Troy Formby. The sound was muted. It was one of those interviews she'd done about the dummy Crowning Glory tabs. The image on the studio screen was not her genuine self of the time—tense, harried, hair losing its Congruence—but her smart, crisp, never-weary PhonePhace avatar, superimposed at the first signs of physiognomic strain.

  Recognition hit Paul Rayle. He glanced at
her, then back at the screen, frowning, attempting to lipread.

  “Sound,” he requested.

  “—for the express purpose of hair retention,” Sesha's NeTV voice frostily intoned. “We are not in the business of helping out Dreambox users ... unless, of course, like anyone else, they come to us with a hair problem."

  Manoeuvring his mouthful of gum, Troy Formby constructed a large pink bubble, then sucked it back in again. “I don't think they would come to you. I think they'd just make perfect hair a part of their dreamworld. Who needs PsyTri in Heaven?” Sesha's face faded from the screen as Formby let out a belch, followed by, for good measure, a loud, fruity fart, and cheerfully changed the subject: “Now, that perennial piss-off: the Email Shemale. What do so many men get out of posing as women on webdates?"

  Sesha asked Paul Rayle, “Do you use Crowning Glory?"

  “To keep my hair?"

  “I mean as a dethanatizer?"

  He looked at her.

  “Have you any with you?” Sesha held out her hand. “Can I see the carton?"

  Paul Rayle hesitated. Then, from a small side pocket of his rucksack, he produced one of the familiar pale blue plastic cartons, its label grubbied, and handed it over. Sesha turned it upside down and peered at the printed batch number.

  “These are fine,” she informed him, handing back the carton.

  “You sure?"

  “Positive."

  Ajit reappeared.

  “Paul? Sesh? I just spoke to Frances."

  “How is she?” Paul Rayle wanted to know.

  “She's eager to see the both of you."

  “Both of us?” Sesha was astonished.

  “I asked if she wanted a word with you now, on the phone, but, well, you know Frances."

  To begin with, before she had met her boss, Sesha had taken Frances's aversion to comtech devices—telepresence, even simple phones—to be some Machiavellian tactic for maintaining a regal distance. But her first, long-awaited face-to-face encounter had dispelled such cynical notions. Frances was very much a person person: tactile, sensual, and it was understandable that, with these warm, human proclivities—some might call them eccentricities—she would consider it unseemly that her first contact with Paul in years be cold and mediated. Frances wanted him there with her. But why should she want Sesha Roffey there as well?

  “Sesh?"

  Excusing herself, Sesha complied with Ajit's discreet eye-flick of a request that she join him in the hallway. There, from behind his back, Ajit produced something small, purple and extremely, embarrassingly lovable.

  A Bubu Flumpkin.

  Sesha went rigid.

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  * * *

  Chapter 11

  To whose psyche are we slaves? wondered Paulie Rayle as he sat aboard the plane to Seville. Was he himself, and Processia Roffey, snoozing in the airseat beside him, and Ruth, and little Kali, and Frances—were they all of them mere humiliants in someone's boxworld?

  And if so, as humiliants were they truly alive? The precise ontological status of humiliants was still under debate, a source of the fiercest ethical controversy. Were they nothing more than empty vessels dangling from psychic strings spun out by the solipsistic box user? Or, as antiboxers claimed, did the process of making a Berkeley Effect copy of Groundworld and its inhabitants somehow preserve and, in a sense, steal all those separate subjectivities? Did the esse-percipi program really see to it that humiliants only came alive, as it were, within the box user's pseudoperceptual field, much as old-time movie actors ceased performing once the camera panned away? Or did the Dreambox actually do far more than was realized, perhaps offer access to some parallel world of equal ontostatus?

  Well if the e-p program does work, Paulie reasoned, and all non-essential humiliants stay shut down, then that would indicate that the user is someone close to me, someone who is keeping me in mind, all this time.

  I think, therefore ... Or rather, Paulie corrected himself: There seems to be an I that seems to be thinking.

  It amused him, the thought of Frances residing in what was ostensibly the actual, non-virtual, historical heart of Seville, blissfully unaware that she was less than a real person in less than a real place. Amusement, he felt, but also guilt and discomfort. Should he tell Ruth all that had happened, try and explain about the erotoroutine? What was the point? She wouldn't understand. She would be hurt, more than hurt. Why subject her to that? And why feel guilty when it wasn't his fault?

  As he sat there on the plane, his eyes closed, his mind still starved of the good, genuine, non-box-induced night's sleep for which a couple of hard-won catnaps had been scant substitute, Paulie found himself wishing that his travelling companion had been on the same wavelength, been less reluctant to consider what his instincts told him was the true explanation for that grotesque little incident in the verticar: this world was not Groundworld. But then, finding oneself forced into sexual acts by a pirate computer program was likely to be doubly traumatic if you were a grounder with no box hours under your belt. No doubt Sesha Roffey would have scoffed at the little game he was playing. A game of possibilities. Listing them. Entertaining them, one after another. Trying them for size.

  Possibility Number One: she was right—he was nuts.

  Possibility Number Two: this was Groundworld, but someone, for some reason, wanted him to think it was a boxworld, and had somehow tampered with his perceptions. Was he paranoid enough to go with that one?

  Possibility Number Three: this world was his own boxworld. After all, it wasn't unknown for users to develop ‘levelitis', a condition wherein the box user's imagination, spurred on by a self-protecting drive toward inner stability through the avoidance of existential stress, sought to further authentify its boxworld by incorporating a spurious Groundworld recovery stage into its subrealitude. In response to a perceived threat to sanity, such as the mental toll of excessive box use, the psychic component of the user's immune system acted by fabricating a conviction that you were home and safe. This sanctuary state could not be maintained for very long before affronts to your Groundworld paradigm damaged the self-delusory mechanism. Strange things—things you just knew couldn't come about in ‘real life'—would start to happen either through the transformative effects of your own deep wants and needs upon what was still a subreal environment, or, perhaps, due to an outside invader such as an erotoroutine; boxworlds were vulnerable to all manner of compuviral infiltration via any of the myriad infosources during the initial worldcopying process. Perhaps they should be thankful that some cyberspook like Sick Nick hadn't yet paid them a visit. For within the confines of a boxworld, Sick Nick would be their ontological equal, his long knifeblade tongue no mere outlandish apparition.

  And yet, Paulie observed, if this is my boxworld, then it's a world in which my little magic word, ‘ontotech’ counts for nothing, an empty term coined in ignorance as to the limits of science. An inchoate concept.

  Imagination had wrestled with defeatism and lost. He had been unable to cut through the carapace of cynicism, pierce adulthood's armour in order to reach the child within and let the word be wondrously reified. Was that inner child no longer alive? Was that why he had journeyed but never arrived, why ontotechnology remained bullshit, his dream of Heaven doomed to collapse under the weight of its own absurdity? Was that why the dethan gear, the Crowning Glory and Vitamin C, hadn't stopped things going sour? Was he generating more negativity than the chemicals could cope with? Or did he have it in for himself so viciously that his thirst for failure was insufficiently distinguishable from his vision of Paradise for any dethanatic drug to muffle one without choking the other? What a fuck-up he was. He had even sought ethical justification for his aim of pre-empting Groundworld by putting it to the vote—a vote by humiliants, his captive constituency, forced to accommodate to his whims by the Berkeley Effect. What kind of democracy was that?

  Self-flagellation aside, the big question remained: if this was still his own boxworld,
how long would it be before the timer fetched him out? But what if the timer was malfunctioning? What if the Dreambox itself was in some fashion fucked? It would be up to Ruth, the real BoxRuth, to rescue him.

  Dreambox junkie that he was, he had brought along his box. He could box up, ascend to—to where? Would he be any more safe, deeper within himself? You couldn't go down, you could only go up; to travel groundward you had to wait to be fetched out. And anyway, what point was there in dreaming when he was all out of imagination? It would only make things worse.

  Paulie opened his eyes. Sesha Roffey was still sleeping. The best place for her; she hadn't been able to hide her acrophobia.

  He looked down at the cotton-wool clouds.

  Cloudcopies?

  Possibility Number Three: not he himself, but another Dreambox user, was the demiurge, the secret guarantor of this world. If so, then at what point had the worldcopying occurred, the subjectively undetectable branching-off from Groundworld, the creation of his present, simulacral consciousness? It could, he knew, have taken place at any time, totally unbeknown to all but the box user. It would be happening at every moment of every day, millions of new boxworlds popping into existence, ready to be wrapped around their users, moulded, manipulated.

  So how long would this world survive? If ‘survive’ was the right word. It had been established that—and this was something that no one, even Zeller, could adequately explain—the esse-percipi program notwithstanding, pseudolife within the boxworld would progress according to identical laws of probability, the self-same factors that governed Groundworld. Except that in the boxworld, there would be one additional, pre-eminent set of forces now shaping events: the innermost desires of the box user. What did he or she have in store for his or her private domain? What would be required of them all as humiliants? The changes would happen, and they would be totally unaware of how their world was being altered.