A Blink of the Screen (16 page)

The brick wall on the other side of me paid more attention. I know Wayne when he meets fellow collectors. They have these weekend rallies. You see them in shops. Strange people. But none of them as strange as this one. He was dead strange.

‘Wayne!’

They both ignored me. And inside my mind bits of my brain were jumping up and down, shouting and pointing, and I couldn’t let myself believe what they were saying.

O
H
, I’
VE GOT THEM ALL
, he said, turning back to Wayne.
E
LVIS
P
RESLEY
,
B
UDDY
H
OLLY
,
J
IM
M
ORRISON
,
J
IMI
H
ENDRIX
,
J
OHN
L
ENNON
…

‘Fairly widespread, musically,’ said Wayne. ‘Have you got the complete Beatles?’

N
OT
Y
ET
.

And I swear they started to talk records. I remember Mr Friend saying he’d got the complete seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century composers. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

I’ve always had to do Wayne’s fighting for him, ever since we were at primary school, and this had gone far enough and I grabbed Mr Friend’s shoulder and went to lay a punch right in the middle of that grinning mask.

And he raised his hand and I felt my fist hit an invisible wall which yielded like treacle, and he took off his mask and he said two words to me and then he reached across and took Wayne’s hand, very gently …

And then the power amp exploded because, like I said, Wayne wasn’t very good with connectors and the church hall had electrical
wiring
that dated back practically to 1800 or something, and then what with the decorations catching fire and everyone screaming and rushing about I didn’t really know much about anything until they brought me round in the car park with half my hair burned off and the hall going up like a firework.

No. I don’t know why they haven’t found him either. Not so much as a tooth?

No. I don’t know where he is. No, I don’t think he owed anyone any money.

(But I think he’s got a new job. There’s a collector who’s got them all – Presley, Hendrix, Lennon, Holly – and he’s the only collector who’ll ever get a complete collection, anywhere. And Wayne wouldn’t pass up a chance like that. Wherever he is now, he’s taking them out of their jackets with incredible care and spinning them with love on the turntables of the night …)

Sorry. Talking to myself, there.

I’m just puzzled about one thing. Well, millions of things, actually, but just one thing right at the moment.

I can’t imagine why Mr Friend bothered to wear a mask.

Because he looked just the same underneath, idio—officer.

What did he say? Well, I dare say he comes to everyone in some sort of familiar way. Perhaps he just wanted to give me a hint. He said
D
RIVE
S
AFELY
.

No. No, really. I’ll walk home, thanks.

Yes. I’ll mind how I go.

#IFDEFDEBUG +
‘WORLD/ENOUGH’ +
‘TIME’

D
IGITAL
D
REAMS
,
ED
.
D
AVID
V.
B
ARRETT
,
H
ODDER &
S
TOUGHTON
,
L
ONDON, 1990

This was published in 1990 in the anthology
Digital Dreams,
edited by Dave Barrett. I was tempted to ‘update’ this – after all, it’s about Virtual Reality, haha, remember that everybody? I am so old I can remember virtual reality! – but what’s the point? Besides, it would be cheating
.

I just liked the idea of an amiable repairman, not very bright but good with machines, padding the streets of a quiet, dull, sleeping world. Things are breaking down, knowledge is draining away, and he’s driving his van around the sleeping streets, helping people dream
.

Now, many years later, it appears rather chilly and maybe quite close to home
.

Never could stand the idea of machines in people. It’s not proper. People say, hey, what about pacemakers and them artificial kidneys and that, but they’re still machines no matter what.

Some of them have nuclear batteries. Don’t tell me that’s right.

I tried this implant once, it was supposed to flash the time at the bottom left-hand corner of your eyeball once a second, in little red numbers. It was for the busy exec, they said, who always needs to know, you know, subliminally what the time is. Only mine kept resetting to Tuesday, 1 January, 1980, every time I blinked, so I took it back, and the salesman tried to sell me one that could show the time in twelve different capitals plus stock market reports and that. All kinds of other stuff, too. It’s getting so you can get these new units and you go to have a slash, excuse my French, and all these little red numbers scroll up with range and position details and a vector-graphics lavvy swims across your vision, beepbeepbeep, lock-on, fire …

She’s around somewhere. You might of even seen her. Or him. It’s like immortality.

Can’t abide machines in people. Never could, never will.

I mention this because, when I got to the flat, the copper on the door had that panicky look in his eye they have when they’re listening to their internal radio.

I mean, probably it looked a great idea on paper. Whole banks of crime statistics and that, delivered straight to the inside of your head. Only they get headaches from all the noise. And what good is it, every time a cab goes by, they get this impulse to pick up a fare from Flat 27, Rushdie Road? My joke.

I went in and there was this smell.

Not from the body, though. They’d got rid of that smell, first thing.

No. This smell, it was just staleness. The kind of smell old plastic makes. It was the kind of smell a place gets that ought to be dirty, only
there’s
not enough dirt around, so what you get is ground-in cleanness. When you leave home, say, and your mum keeps the room just like it was for ten years, that’s the kind of smell you get. The whole flat was like that, although there were no aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.

So I get called into the main room and immediately I spot the Seagem, because I’m trained, you notice things like that. It was a series Five, which in my opinion were a big mistake. The Fours were pretty near ideal, so why tinker? It’s like saying, hey, we’ve invented the perfect bicycle so, next thing we’ll do, we’ll put thirteen more wheels on it – like, for example, they replaced the S-2030s with the S-4060, not a good move in my opinion.

This one was dead. I mean, the power light was on and it was warm, but if it was operating you’d expect to see lights moving on the panel. Also, there was this really big 4711 unit on top, which you don’t expect to see in a private house. It’s a lab tool. It was a dual model, too. Smell and taste. I could see by the model number it was one of the ones you use a tongue glove with, which is actually quite okay. Never could understand the spray-on polymers. People say, hey, isn’t it like having a condom in your mouth, but it’s better than having to scrape gunk off your tongue at bedtime.

Lots of other stuff had been hooked in, too, and half a dozen phone lines into a patch unit. There was a 1MT memory sink, big as a freezer.

Someone who knew what they wanted to buy had really been spending some money here.

And, oh yes, in the middle of it, like they’d told me on the phone, the old guy. He was dead, too. Sitting on a chair. They weren’t going to do anything to him until I’d been, they said.

Because of viruses, you see. People get funny ideas about viruses.

They’d taken his helmet off and you could see the calluses where the nose plugs had been. And his face was white, I mean, yes, he was
dead
and everything, but it had been like something under a stone even before, and his hair was all long and crinkly and horrible where it had been growing under the helmet. And he didn’t have a beard, what he had was just long, long chin hair, never had a blade to it in years. He looked like God would look if he was on really serious drugs. And dead, of course.

Actually, he was not that old at all. Thirty-eight. Younger than me. Of course, I jog.

This other copper was standing by the window, trying to pick up HQ through the microwave mush. He looked bored. All the first-wave scene-of-crime types had long been and gone. He just nodded to the Seagem and said, ‘You know how to fix these things?’

That was just to establish, you know, that there was them and us, and I was a them. But they always call me in. Reliable, see. Dependable. You can’t trust the big boys, they’re all dealers and agents for the afer companies, they’re locked in. Me, I could go back to repairing microswatch players tomorrow. Darren Thompson, Artificial Realities repaired, washing-machine motors rewound. I can do it, too. Ask kids today even to repair a TV, they’ll laugh at you, they’ll say you’re out of the Arc.

I said, ‘Sometimes. If they’re fixable. What’s the problem?’

‘That’s what we’d like you to find out,’ he says, more or less suggesting, if we can’t pin something on him we’ll pin it on you, chum. ‘Can you get a shock off these things?’

‘No way. You see, the interfaces—’

‘All right, all right. But you know what’s being said about ’em. Maybe he was using it for weird kicks.’ Coppers think everyone uses them for weird kicks.

‘I object most strongly to that,’ said this other voice. ‘I object most strongly, and I shall make a note of it. There’s absolutely no evidence.’

There was this other man. In a suit. Neat. He was sitting by one of these little portable office terminals. I hadn’t noticed him before because he was one of these people you wouldn’t notice if he was with you in a wardrobe.

He smiled the sort of smile you have to learn and stuck out his hand. Can’t remember his face. He had a warm, friendly handshake, the kind where you want to have a wash afterwards.

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Thompson,’ he said. ‘I’m Carney. Paul Carney. Seagem public affairs department. Here to see that you are allowed to carry out your work. Without interference.’ He looked at the copper, who was definitely not happy. ‘And any pressure,’ he added.

Of course, they’ve always wanted to nail Seagem, I know that. So I suppose they have to watch business. But I’ve done thirty, forty visits where afers have died, and men in suits don’t turn up, so this was special. All the money in the equipment should’ve told me that.

Life can get very complicated for men in overalls who have problems with men in suits.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know my way around these things okay, but if you want some really detailed testing then I would have thought your people’ll—’

‘Seagem’s technical people are staying right out of this,’ snapped the copper. ‘This is a straight in-situ report, you understand. For the coroner. Mr Carney is not allowed to give you any instructions at all.’

Uniforms, too. They can give you grief.

So I took the covers off, opened the toolbox, and stuck in. That’s my world. They might think they’re big men, but when I’ve got the back off something and its innards all over the floor, it’s me that’s the boss …

Of course, they’re all called Seagems, even the ones made by Hitachi or Sony or Amstrad. It’s like Hoovers and hoovers. In a way,
they
aren’t difficult. Nine times out of ten, if you’re in trouble, you’re talking loose boards, unseated panels, maybe a burnout somewhere. The other one time it’s probably something you can only cure by taking the sealed units into the hypercleanroom and tapping them with a lump hammer, style of thing.

People say, hey, bet you got an armful of degrees and that. Not me. Basically, if you can repair a washing machine you can do everything to a Seagem that you can do outside a lab. So long as you can remember where you put the screws down, it’s not taxing. That’s if it’s a hardware problem, of course. Software can be a pain. You got to be a special type of person to handle the software. Like me. No imagination, and proud of it.

‘Kids use these things, you know,’ said the copper, when I was kneeling on the floor with the interface boards stacked around me.

(I always call them coppers, because of tradition. Did you know that ‘copper’ as slang for policeman comes from the verb ‘to cop’, first reliably noted in 1859? No, you don’t, because, after all that big thing ten years ago about the trees and that, the university put loads of stuff into those big old read/write optical units, and some kid managed to get a McLint virus into the one in the wossname department. You know? Words? History of words. This was before I specialized in Seagems, only in those days they were still called Computer Generated Environments. And they called me in and all I could haul out of 5kT of garbage was half a screenful which I read before it wiped. This guy was crying. ‘The whole history of English philology is up the swanee,’ he said, and I said, would it help if I told him the word ‘copper’ was first reliably noted in 1859, and he didn’t even make a note of it. He should of. They could, you know, start again. I mean, it wouldn’t be much, but it would be a start. Often wondered what ‘up the swanee’ really means. Don’t suppose I’ll ever know, now.)