Another Life (8 page)

And then he didn’t need an explanation about this new system any more. He could see what she meant. He could experience it, right now. Because the world had come to life.

He was in the Lunatic Fringe. Sitting in one of the barber’s chairs. Only they weren’t the blocky shapes in primary colours that he’d last seen on his flatscreen display. These looked like cracked red leather, the machine stitching clearly visible, some of it fraying on the arms where a thousand previous customers had levered themselves in and out of position for a haircut.

The chipped linoleum floor was strewn with hair clippings, patches of black and brown, blond and ginger that bore witness to previous customers. One of the previous customers, Kvasir, was still there, also on the linoleum, his body and limbs spread out clumsily in the scattered hair. His severed head, still implausibly in its horned helmet, lay against the bottom of the panelled wall, with black blood coagulated around the base of the neck. ‘Change for a tenner,’ remembered Owen. The realism of the dead body in front of him somehow made the earlier fracas more embarrassing.

He turned at the sound of horses clopping by the shop window. A neon sign flashed beside the entrance door, weirdly illuminating the armour of the passing pedestrians. Something alarmed a passing horse. The animal gave a shrill whinny, and it half-reared up. The mounted rider attempted to rein it in, but the horse’s nostrils flared and it reared again. A nearby maid in a mob cap shrieked in surprise – ‘Oh my Lord!’ – and dropped her bundle of provisions.

‘What do you think?’ asked Toshiko’s voice.

He considered for a moment. ‘Nice tits. You look good in pink.’

Penny Pasteur was standing in front of him, talking in Toshiko’s voice. She tutted and sighed. She held out her bare arms and waggled her fingers in the air. The bangles on her wrists jingled as she moved, but Owen could also hear keys clicking, as though she was using an invisible typewriter. Penny spun on her heel like dancing a pirouette, and was instantly transformed.

Now she looked more like Toshiko Sato, down to the skin tone and short, black hair. Instead of a fluffy pink bikini she wore a smart black trouser suit, with a Nehru jacket buttoned up to the neck. Owen pouted, and pointed to a martini glass and cocktail shaker on the kitchen counter beside her. ‘I see you haven’t finished the washing-up either.’

‘Don’t make me slap you,’ she warned him. ‘This was the nearest character I could use to interact with you. Unless you count him.’ She indicated the headless corpse. ‘I think I’d better tidy him up, don’t you? Nothing stays dead for very long in here.’ She typed in mid-air again, and Kvasir’s corpse snapped silently out of existence. ‘There, I’ve even mopped the floor. I’ll leave the dishwashing for you.’

‘This is just amazing, Tosh.’

‘Tell me I’m a genius.’

‘You’ve made your bum smaller, I notice. Are you glamming yourself up?’

‘You can talk,’ she retorted. ‘Have you seen yourself? I think you may have issues. “Glendower”, indeed!’

He squared his broad virtual shoulders. ‘So what? It’s a computer game, not a psychology session. I have to admit, I am gobsmacked. This is fantastic, even for you.’

‘Did I mention that I’m a genius?’

‘You’re a genius.’ He stood up and stepped towards her, but banged his knee on an invisible desk. He could hear pencils and DVD cases scattering onto the floor, though he couldn’t see them.

‘Stop, stop,’ urged Toshiko. ‘You have to stay sitting at your desk. Don’t go wandering off! You’re still attached to your computer.’

Owen fumbled behind himself for his office chair in the real world, and settled back into it as though it was the leather barber’s seat.

Toshiko glided over to him with an unfamiliar sinuous grace. ‘Try gesturing with your data-gloves. They can move you about as though you’re using your keyboard.’

Owen tried a few movements. At first he managed to upend himself, which had the disorienting effect of giving him an inverted view of the barber-shop while his body told him he was still the right way up. Soon he’d mastered the gestures, and was striding around the Lunatic Fringe as though he owned the place. Which, virtually speaking, he did.

‘When I get it sorted out,’ Toshiko explained, ‘it’ll be able to use positional info from the cameras and sensors here in the Hub. The tracking devices in our mobile phones. That kind of thing. And the resolution will be good enough to be close to real life.’

‘Fleshspace,’ he told her.

‘Eww. What?’

‘That’s what players of
Second Reality
call the real world.’

‘One day, I’ll be glad to welcome you to the real world, Owen.’

‘I don’t imagine I could do this in fleshspace.’ He reached out and fondled virtual Toshiko’s breast through the material of her Nehru jacket. The sensors in his gloves pressed softly against his fingers and the palm of his hand. A series of smacks on his real-world head made his ears ring. ‘Ouch! Come on Tosh! Stop slapping my helmet.’

Toshiko’s attack ceased. ‘I bet you wouldn’t say that to Penny Pasteur if you made contact in fleshspace.’

From outside the shop came the sound of a shrill whinnying. Owen wafted a gesture, and his virtual self walked to the front of the shop. A hunter was half-rearing up, snorting nervously, startled by something. A maid in a mob cap and a dusty overcoat was shying away from the creature.

Owen grabbed for the door handle, in the hope of rushing out and pulling the maid to safety. Before he could seize it, the door wrenched itself open, and he was in the street. The maid leapt to one side with a cry of ‘Oh my Lord!’ and dropped her bundle of shopping. A large ham bounced out of its wrapping and onto the pavement. By the time the hunter’s rider had calmed the creature, the maid had recovered her composure and her ham. Owen watched her scurry away down the street.

Toshiko peered at him through the shop doorway. ‘You must be Prince Charming,’ she told him. ‘Go on, slap your thigh for me.’

Owen re-entered the shop. The door closed, and the shop bell tinkled prettily behind him.

Toshiko tutted. ‘Glendower Broadsword. You’ve tried to create an avatar for the game with no weaknesses or flaws. People aren’t like that in real life. No one’s a fairy-tale character, all good or all evil. And neither are characters in the game.’

Owen growled at her. ‘Well, my character is. Like I said, this isn’t a psychology session.’

‘You’re in denial.’

‘Very good,’ smiled Owen. ‘I can hardly dispute that statement.’

‘Well, be careful what you wish for, Prince Charming.’

‘I’m glad you’re not my Cinderella.’

Toshiko wiggled her typing fingers, and looked out of the window expectantly.

Owen followed her gaze. A huge sphere of metal and glass crashed out of the sky and onto the pavement, crumpling and distorting as it came to rest. Owen nearly leapt out of his real-life office chair with shock.

For a second, he thought the whole thing had dropped onto a couple of white horses in the street, before he saw that they were shackled to the tangled remains of the shape. They were apparently unharmed, but still attached to the wreckage by golden reins. Two coachmen in pink waistcoats staggered back to their feet, and helped a beautiful young woman to step gingerly from the strewn debris of her coach. As she brushed gingerly at the shards of glass on her iridescent ball gown, the coachmen spun on their heels and transformed into rodents before scurrying off. The coach was now merely the remains of a large pumpkin splattered on the pavement. The woman’s ball gown had dissolved into smutted rags. When she saw them, she gave a little cry of despair and proceeded to limp off down the street through the uncaring pedestrians.

‘All right, Tosh. Do you think I could have a go now?’

‘I’ll leave you to it, Owen.’

‘I certainly prefer the real Penny Pasteur. I’d love to see what she’d make of this.’

Toshiko threw him a disapproving look. ‘Her graphics wouldn’t be this good, for a start. She’d only have her current computer. Assuming it is a she, and not some hairy-arsed fifty-year-old bloke taking you for a virtual ride while he secretly plays with himself in a late-night Internet cafe.’

‘You paint a lovely picture.’

‘For some of these game-players,
Second Reality
is just an escape from the dull reality of their daily routine. They can be brave confident characters, instead of sad antisocial losers. They can visit places they can’t afford. They can even have sex with complete strangers. Lots of them. It’s literally a different life for them, Owen. It’s an addiction. Who knows who Penny Pasteur really is?’

‘I think I know her pretty well by now.’

A horse whinnied in the street outside. A woman’s voice shrieked, ‘Oh my Lord!’

Owen offered Toshiko his most winning smile. ‘So let me find Penny on
Second Reality
. Really get to know her with these fantastic new… what did you call them? These fantastic new interaction gestures.’ He waved his hands at her, and for a moment found himself floating in mid-air.

Toshiko shook her virtual head. ‘No way. I have downloaded a broad selection of different avatar profiles from
Second Reality
’s main server on the West Coast. You can have fun interacting with them while I finish off the freestanding version of this. So there is no need to connect this to the Internet, Owen. We want to keep this well away from the black-hats and the hackers. This version of
Second Reality
should not make
any
kind of connection through the Torchwood firewall.’

‘What’s your problem with hackers?’ grumbled Owen. ‘You’re a genius, you can handle them.’

‘It’s not me I’m worried about,’ she retorted, ‘it’s you. You’re a security liability because you have no idea what you’re doing on a computer. I mean, you haven’t even got the hang of creating your own avatar. Do you realise that you originally based yours on a female wrestler?’

‘Female? What, with these shoulders?’ Owen flexed them for effect.

‘Yes,’ replied Toshiko. ‘Take a look – you have nice tits of your own.’ She gave him a little wave and melted away into nothing.

Owen jutted his chin down awkwardly. The helmet wouldn’t let him bend that far. So he gestured towards the far side of the barber-shop, and positioned himself in front of the wall-mounted mirror to get a full-length view.

Well, from the reflection, it was undeniable. Glendower Broadsword was broad, tall, golden-haired and very good-looking. And for the first time it was apparent that, within that stout leather jerkin, she possessed a very impressive pair of breasts.

Once he’d got the hang of flying, Owen was able to zoom around to several locations he remembered from his previous visits to
Second Reality
. Only now he was totally immersed in the world, and the images and sounds that surrounded him were almost overwhelming. He spent time on a beach, swinging on a tyre suspended from nothing. A giant eye, called Harold, floated unblinking next to him and together they watched the sun set orange over the sea horizon, before baby turtles fought their way across the sand into the surf.

He visited a slum area adjacent to a bright commercial district, where gun battles raged. Grubby dispossessed zombies stared blankly at their reflections in the smoked glass of passing stretch limos, before succumbing to a vigilante attack. Indifferent law enforcement officers looked on from the corner. Owen watched the same zombie consumed by flame twice before he moved on. The commercial district was a Chicago-inspired cityscape. The streets were covered in stylised flower motifs like giant asterisks, and the trams chattered their way down the hills to the sound of ‘Chasing Cars’ by Snow Patrol.

He watched a tennis match played on top of a skyscraper. Andy Murray was losing the first set to an unnamed and unranked hippopotamus who had startling white tennis shorts and a savage backhand. Owen eventually moved on in disappointment when he spotted that Murray’s repeated inability to read the hippo’s limited repertoire of passing shots was evidence that they were playing the same four games over and over again.

Owen also recognised several characters from his previous visits. A tavern owner called Jeremy Cross. Molly, a schoolgirl on a tricycle. Belle and Alexei, twin explorers in pith helmets, who appeared from a caravan in the desert. It was like seeing cartoon characters brought to life as living people. A pirate called Cap’n Ian Sharkchum leapt at him from some overhanging trees in the shadows of a London park, trying to unseat him from a horse he’d borrowed from the Coldstream Guards. He managed to shake Sharkchum off. When the Cap’n had tried the same thing from the same tree on two further occasions, Owen got bored and decided to experiment with mortality.

He’d located a Russian roulette game in an abandoned snooker hall. He took one of the four seats around a dusty blue pool table, and surveyed the other players. Their faces were lit by the reflected illumination of the shaded strip light overhead. Opposite, Brad Kominsky was a GI, his tight khaki T-shirt half-covered by the empty bandolier across his chest. Brenda Simone looked like a fortune teller, wreathed in the smoke from her fat cigar. And seated next to Owen was Walter Pendulum, a barrel-chested man in a tuxedo but with the head of a giraffe. Walter seemed very impressed with Owen, and batted his long eyelashes suggestively. As a cruel distraction, Owen pointed to the double-action revolver on the table. The gun they would each be using in turn.

They placed their initial bets, notes fluttering down on the blue baize. Owen could feel his heart starting to race. What was it about putting a virtual revolver to his character’s head that could cause such anxiety? When he picked up the weapon, he knew. In the greater realism of Toshiko’s version of
Second Reality
, he was actually raising his hand to his own head

Spin the cylinder. Pull the trigger.

Click. No shot.

Owen felt himself relax. He started to breathe again, and tried not to make his relief obvious to the other players.

Walter Pendulum picked up the revolver. It was obvious at once that his arm was not long enough to reach up and place the barrel against his giraffe-head. Kominsky offered to aim and fire for him, and this started a debate with Simone about whether a killing shot would constitute murder rather than suicide. In the end, Pendulum cranked his neck down and pulled the trigger himself. No shot.