Another Life (7 page)

Jack nodded. Sniffed the sole of the removed boot experimentally. Coughed in disgust, and propped the boot on the Vectra’s roof amid the bouncing rain. ‘Yeah, you’re right, it’s been digested. Still being digested, too. See there?’ He pointed carefully with his forefinger.

‘That thing you trod on. The thing Wildman coughed up outside the building site?’

Jack cracked a huge smile. ‘Smart girl.’

‘Still here,’ said Toshiko’s voice from Gwen’s mobile.

‘OK, I think we’re done,’ Gwen told her.

‘Thanks, Tosh.’ Jack raised his voice so that the mobile would pick up his words. ‘End of your shift for the day.’

Gwen let Toshiko say goodnight before ending the call. She pocketed the mobile.

‘I’m starting to worry where else I may have trodden this stuff,’ Jack grumbled. He scrunched up his face in dismay, because he’d just absentmindedly put his unshod foot down on to the rainy pavement. ‘All right. Not looking so cool, now. Time to call it a night.’

‘What about this lot?’ Gwen jerked her head at the corpse. There was so much left to do here, and yet she knew she was exhausted. She felt the sides of her face tighten, but subdued the tired reaction.

Jack peered into the Vectra. ‘I’ll take her back to the Hub. You get our police friends over there to disperse, and then you can go home.’

Gwen couldn’t stifle the yawn any longer.

‘There you go,’ Jack smiled. ‘An honest opinion, openly expressed. I’m boring you. Go home. It’s past nine.’

She checked her watch and was dismayed to find he was right. Where had the day gone?

He was still looking into the car, probably wondering how he was going to move the body. Or maybe move the whole car. The obvious problem was that the unfortunate Jennifer Fallon was still in the driver’s seat.

‘Go home,’ Jack urged Gwen once more. He angled his head to look up at her. ‘Rhys is waiting. You promised me that you’d keep hold of your life, remember? You may even have promised him. Don’t let it drift.’

‘What about you?’

Jack straightened up, and pushed his shoulders back to release the tension. ‘Think I’m going swimming. I’m wet enough already. And it’s time to reconnect with life after all this death today.’

‘Sounds like fun,’ Gwen smiled.

She walked back over to the police cordon, to let them know they were no longer required. The police photographer repacked his camera case with bad grace. The Brummie was trying to object, but Gwen cut short his protests, more snappishly than she would normally.

In the distance, Jack was opening the nearside door of the Vectra and reaching into the passenger seat. Gwen could see the thick woollen sock on his shoeless foot, sodden from his journey through the puddles. He’d still be working long after the rest of the team had finished, as usual.

She dialled home. Told Rhys she was sorry to be late. Again.

Should she be ashamed, or relieved, or grateful that he reacted so calmly? Again. Was he being calm, she wondered, or did he really not care? Or maybe he was watching
Matrix Reloaded
on the DVD. Again.

Rhys told her that he’d saved her some tea, and he promised not to eat it if she got a shift on. ‘Get a shift on’ was what he told the drivers at his office when they were running late. She told him thank you. And yes, he could eat the final strawberry yoghurt if it was reaching its use-by date – she didn’t fancy it tonight.

She listened again for clues in his voice, to anticipate how he might be when she got back to the flat. Tired? Irritated? She let his words wash over her for a while, until she abruptly realised that he’d fallen silent. Asked her a question and was waiting for an answer. She’d let her mind wander, hadn’t been listening properly to him.

She told him sorry, she was a bit tired, and they could have a proper talk when she got home. But as she hung up, she knew that she’d said that to herself every night for the past two months. That’s what their evenings had become. Chit-chat, usually from him about office intrigue, or Banana Boat’s road warrior stories, or Sonja the Secretary’s latest emotional crisis. Telly often. Eating off a tray, some quick meal that Rhys usually cooked. Maybe some perfunctory lovemaking if they weren’t too tired before bedtime.

She was going to walk home now. She gave Jack one last look, then turned towards the main road. The drizzling rain that had clung to her all evening was now a steady stream, splashing in the growing puddles all around her.

Was this her life now? Was this what you expected, she asked herself. Can you continue to keep this from Rhys, from whom you never had secrets before? Or is this something new? Another life that you never expected, never knew existed. Do you have any idea how you got here?

SEVEN

You have no idea how you come to be lounging in the back room of a hairdressing salon called the Lunatic Fringe. But that’s where you find yourself this Saturday night, watching the sunny day fade into memory as a sinuous teenager called Penny Pasteur pours your
piña colada
into a frosted martini glass.

Through the shop window a pair of neon curling tongs rotates and flashes. In the street there’s a bustle of pedestrians heading home. Even from the back room, you can hear their scabbards clank against their leg armour as they stagger off to the stables to saddle up their steeds and gallop away. Penny kisses you, her tongue flicking briefly over your lips and teeth, before she withdraws to the kitchenette to rinse out the empty cocktail shaker. To get there, she has to step over the corpse of an awkward customer, the Norse demigod called Kvasir whose neck you earlier snapped like a brittle branch after that altercation. He should never have insulted your dwarf assistants. And spitting in your eye was the final straw.

You are not the kind of guy who stares at danger with fear in your eyes. The strongest and brightest of your lineage, at six feet ten and fifteen stone you tower over your family physically and intellectually. Your stocky frame belies your litheness, and your twelve years of battle knowledge as a Brandywine dragoon places you in the marksman’s upper quartile for accuracy, speed, and dexterity. Your strongest asset remains your hand-to-hand combat experience, and there are few who can match you in an unarmed close-quarters brawl. Especially tall Scandinavians with long hair who can’t tell the difference between a fiver and a tenner.

The sky outside darkens, presaging a storm. Beware the coming night, for agents of Chaos ride and you may be consumed by their powers.

You consider your clothes. The black leather jerkin covers a thin vest of meshed steel over a pure cotton chemise. The ends of your dark cotton trousers are stuffed into your sturdy black boots. A dragon motif emblazons your left breast.

You have stamina, you have drive. Your overriding ambition is an assault on the Wrestling League, to top it within three months, and to turn professional before year-end.

Beyond the shop window, off into the distance, the shimmering buildings of the Millennium Capitol beckon you. Though first you will need to make your way through the shadowed alleyways that surround Apzugard Bay. Beware the aerial beasts that swoop through the bruising purple sky, the predatory creatures from within the Bay, and the crazed, half-forgotten denizens of the Capitol slums who stand between you and your dream.

The door is ajar. Go forward now! Your destiny awaits!

You are Glendower Broadsword!

Continue? Y/N

‘Glendower Broadsword?’ laughed Toshiko. ‘Put your weapon back in its scabbard, Owen. No one’s impressed.’

Engrossed in the display on his terminal, Owen hadn’t realised she was standing behind him. He clicked an icon at the top of the screen, and the text window minimised to reveal an image of the Lunatic Fringe. A row of barbershop chairs angled off into the distance, distinct shapes in primary colours. Through an inner door, a cartoon image of Penny Pasteur stood paused in a kitchen area, her back to a sink full of washing-up. Penny’s character wore a fluffy pink bikini that barely covered what even Owen would admit were implausibly large breasts. She’d be rubbish at doing the dishes, he decided. How could she see the crockery as she washed it?

Toshiko interrupted these idle thoughts when she took the mouse off him and maximised the text window. ‘No point hiding it, Owen. I read most of it already’ She scrolled down the words. ‘What’s this, you miserable sexist? A serving wench attending to your every need. In a
hairdressing
salon?’ She made a half-hearted attempt to stifle her amusement and retreated back to her own work station.

Toshiko sat at her desk, surrounded by an accumulation of computer spares, alien artefacts, and stacked coffee cups. She eventually lifted her pretty almond eyes to look back at him through the piles of stuff. When she spotted Owen scowling at her, she fell into a new bout of giggling, and covered her mouth modestly with a raised hand.

Owen tried not to rise to this. ‘I thought you’d been working on improvements to this game?’

‘Keep your hair on, “Glendower”.’ She tapped a few more keystrokes at her terminal. ‘I’ve got your enhancements here, as promised.’ Toshiko came back over to Owen. She brought a DVD case and what looked like a motorcycle helmet with an opaque visor at the front. ‘Before we get started, you should log off your Internet connection.’

‘Because…?’

‘Because you’re only going to do this within the confines of Torchwood’s firewall. At the moment, that low-resolution graphics version runs from the
Second Reality
company’s server machines in Palo Alto. Many thousands of people around the world, all simultaneously connected to a shared system. That’s why they call it a “Massively Multiplayer Online Game”.’

Owen clattered away at his keyboard until the screen told him: ‘
Second Reality
– do you really wish to disconnect (Y/N)?’ He pressed Y. ‘See you next time, Glendower Broadsword!’ it announced cheerfully.

Toshiko slotted the disc into the DVD drive of Owen’s machine. The screen flashed up a series of messages, and the hard disk chattered as her software installed itself.

She hefted the helmet into Owen’s lap, and proceeded to plug one of the attached cables into his computer. ‘OK, this should do for now. Put these gloves on first.’ She offered him a pair of bright blue items in a thin material, which Owen immediately recognised as the non-sterile disposable nitrile gloves he used for examinations and autopsies. Only these were now covered in wires and sensors, at the rear, along the side, even on the fingertips. ‘Prototype data-gloves,’ Toshiko told him, ‘adjusted to allow haptic feedback.’

Owen screwed up his face into his ‘what the hell?’ look.

‘Reacts to touch,’

‘So do I.’

‘Careful not to get the wires tangled up,’ sighed Toshiko. ‘All right, put that on now. It’s a head-mounted display system. There are two emissive electroluminescent screens embedded in the visor to give you a stereoscopic image. No, the other way round…’ She helped him pull the helmet on correctly, and he thought that perhaps her fingertips lingered on the nape of his neck for just too long.

‘It’s very dark in here.’ Owen’s own voice reverberated in the helmet.

Toshiko’s voice was muffled now. ‘It’s not switched on yet. Here, pull the microphone up so it’s just level with your chin. That’s for the speech-to-text translation – no need to do any more typing on your keyboard.’

‘Just as well, I can’t see a bloody thing! And what’s that smell?’

‘Cheese and onion crisps, I think. Just be patient, Owen. Right…’

A kaleidoscopic flare of colours made Owen flinch. Even with his eyes closed, he could see the flicker of light on his lids. When he opened them tentatively, a grid of bright green lines on a grey background vanished off into the distance. He moved his head tentatively to one side, and the field of lines whirled around him. When he leaned forward, the nearest lines got closer.

‘Steady,’ Toshiko told him. Her voice was perfectly clear now, playing through the speakers in either side of the helmet. ‘It has six-axis position sensing, so it’ll translate any movements you make into the virtual world. Careful if you twist around, because it’s plugged into your computer.’

‘I think I may be sick.’

Her muffled voice sounded worried. ‘That shouldn’t happen. It’s calibrated to keep in sync with your head movements.’

‘No,’ Owen teased her, ‘I mean that I hate cheese and onion. Ouch!’

Toshiko had rapped hard on the top of the helmet with her knuckles. ‘Pay attention, this is the science bit.’ As she spoke, Owen could tell exactly where she was in the room from the way her voice moved between the two speakers. ‘This is my early prototype. It should keep you happy while I try to sort out my stress test harness for the main implementation without the attached input devices.’

‘Sounds kinky.’

‘Software test harness, you perv.’ He could hear her typing away at his computer keyboard while she set things up. ‘The next stage will be to use projectors so that the user’s not encumbered by the headgear and gloves. A proper, 3-D immersive environment, with natural interaction gestures. So you’ll be able to touch objects, physically sculpt the world to make things.’

Owen nodded, and the green grid nodded with him. ‘You mean I could make things happen by doing stuff, not just by describing stuff?’

‘Exactly. Hang on, nearly there. Yes, there you go. As it is, what you’re wearing there is a thousand times better than the commercially available version of
Second Reality
. I’ve debugged a lot of their stuff, so you’ll get fewer system crashes.’

‘Smartarse.’

‘And as you can see, with the processing power we’ve got available through the Hub, the user environment is more photo-realistic too.’

Owen knew how Toshiko loved to talk technogeek. He was letting her chatter away without trying to understand it, but that last bit begged a question. ‘What do you mean, photo-realistic?’

There was a pause. ‘Ah. Sorry. Let me plug your helmet into the grid.’

Owen could hear her looking for a connection, scrabbling around between his knees. This looked promising…