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 pi?a 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…
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.
Kominsky snatched up the gun, spun the cylinder. Hesitated with the barrel to his head. Opened his eyes to stare straight at Owen.
Pulled the trigger.
The gun exploded into life. Kominsky’s head dissolved in a mist of blood, and his body was flung back from the table to land in a crumpled pile.
Brenda Simone recovered the gun. Calmly reloaded from a box of shells on the table. Spun the cylinder. Squeezed the trigger.
No shot.
‘Round’s over,’ she observed coldly. ‘Let’s raise the stakes.’ She stacked up more notes on the table. ‘Call the ante, or take a hike,’ she said to Pendulum.
Owen watched a huge gulp work its way down Pendulum’s long throat. He was looking at Kominsky’s dead body where it lay in a heap on the snooker hall’s stained floorboards. Pendulum stood up, terrified. Banged his head on the lampshade. Ran for the door, his little giraffe’s tail waggling fearfully through a hole in the back of his tuxedo trousers. They could hear his hoofbeats clank down the metal stairs as he fled.
Simone transferred her basilisk stare to Owen without blinking. ‘Call the ante, or take a hike.’
‘Or bid up the pot,’ replied Owen, and slid all his remaining cash across the table.
He was surprised again at how breathless he felt. He picked up the revolver, spun the cylinder. His chest tightened as he lifted the gun to his temple. Heard the greased click as it revolved. For a split second before he pulled the trigger, he wondered: ‘What if…?’
The long trigger pull cocked the hammer. Owen continued to apply pressure.
The hammer released. Struck the round in the chamber.
The bullet exploded into his head.