“We were. And it’s amazing.”
“That’s a relief,” Vinokur said. “Well, I’ll be leaving you two young people alone again. You can be leaving the tray outside your door when you have finished.”
“As a matter of interest,” Pikul said. “What is it you’ve brought us?”
“Believe it or not, it ist Chinese food. There ist a most wonderful restaurant on the other side of the escarpment road.”
He turned to go.
“Kiri?” Geller said.
“Yes?”
“Have you heard any news yet? I mean, about the eXistenZ test seminar and the shooting that happened there?”
“Oh yes. It was showing on all the TV channels. You’ve never been more famous. Your face ist everywhere, which of course just makes it worse. I . . .”
His voice trailed away.
“What?” Geller said. “Tell me.”
“It ist having an unwanted effect. You know how audience-conscious the whole game world is. Companies like Antenna are positioning themselves in the marketplace. Ist the need to maximize their capital investment. The decision ist nothing to do with me, let me say now.”
“What decision is nothing to do with you, Kiri?” Geller said in a thin voice.
“All right. Don’t be shooting the messenger, ist the only thing I ask. They have announced the possibility that Antenna will indefinitely be delaying the release of your new system. They are wanting to do some market research, quantify some demographics . . . that ist how they are putting it. They want to determine how widespread the support for this fanatical group really is. Me, I’m out of such things. I don’t approve. We shouldn’t bend one degree to extremism, ist where I stand. You know that that’s always been my position. Anyway, a game is a game. That ist all it ist.”
Geller took this in, biting her lower lip. “Shit!” she said. “The rats are betraying me.”
“I knew you would not be being too happy when you found out.”
“Happy isn’t the word,” Pikul said.
“Support for the fanatics?” Geller said. “What does that mean?”
“Well, you know. They’re all coming out of the woodwork now.”
“Who are?”
Vinokur looked away unhappily, and sighed.
“There ist a certain number of people who are taking the opportunity to leap on the antigame bandwagon. You know who they are; they’re always around in the background somewhere. They are being a fact of life for game companies. They are hearing these rumors about what some other people say eXistenZ ist, and they don’t go any further. They don’t worry about facts. Why should they, when their minds are made up? So, they say we haff gone too far this time. Psychologically, medically, socially . . . you name it. Antenna has image-control consultants working full-time on fielding the kind of wild balls they throw at us. So they aren’t a major worry.
“The trouble ist, the real trouble ist, that this plays into the hands of our business competitors. The bottom line ist of course that Antenna ist a corporation to be making money. It’s a business, and money always ist counting. This kind of adverse publicity ist heaven-sent to competitors. They can’t beat eXistenZ on the ground; we all know that. It’s the finest game system in the world. And because of you they can’t even be replicating game shells that look like eXistenZ. So they can’t beat it, but they think whipping up the hysteria against it might be a way of killing it anyway. Or at least putting it back.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m beginning to see that.”
Geller was still looking thoughtfully at the tray of untouched food.
“What can I do?” she said, almost to herself.
“Why don’t we be repositioning you with Antenna again?” Vinokur said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to be contacting the company? Even just to be finding out what they have to say?”
“No, Kiri. Not yet.”
He shrugged, and she gave him a quick, affectionate hug.
“Well, enjoy your meal,” he said. “That’s what waiters say, isn’t it?”
“Okay, Kiri,” Geller said. “We’ll talk with you later.” He was halfway through the door. “And thanks for everything,” she added.
He waved a hand back to them as he closed the door.
Pikul waited until Vinokur’s footsteps faded away down the sloping path outside, then gestured toward the door.
“Your friend Kiri is getting shaky,” he said. “My guess is he’s about to turn you in to Antenna.”
“That sounds like you might approve.”
Her expression was hard and challenging, and Pikul mentally recoiled from her.
“I keep thinking about the choices,” he said. “You know, staying in hiding until everything calms down. That sort of thing. It can’t be long before somebody at Antenna thinks of looking for you here, for instance. Maybe approaching the company now, on your own terms, might be the safest thing.” He noticed that Geller was staring at the tray of food Vinokur had brought. “Are you hungry?”
She grinned at him. “Are you kidding?” she said.
“Me neither. For one thing, I’m terrified of even looking under the plates. How does the thought of sweet and sour tadpole grab you?”
He picked up the tray and moved it to the other side of the chalet room.
“Pikul, what do you think of what Kiri was saying, about there being support for these fanatics?”
“It doesn’t sound good to me. Maybe we should after all stop—”
“We can’t stop,” Geller said. “While we’ve been playing, I’ve noticed some new things about eXistenZ . . . glitches. D’Arcy Nader coming through as game residue has made me think. These things need looking at, and maybe debugging. I don’t know what they could mean to the whole system. They mean to me that I’m not sure the game is okay anymore.”
Pikul sat down next to her and looked as sympathetic as he knew how.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you want to know what I think, what I really think?”
“Sure.”
“You might not like it.”
“I’ll take that chance,” Geller said.
He took a deep breath. Then he said, “Okay, to be honest, I find your game confusing. I’m not convinced I want to go back in there, because I don’t completely believe I’m going to keep coming out again. You know, the sense we might be trapped there. Or that when we do come out, it’s not going to be to the same place we left.”
“That’s part of the game experience,” Geller said coolly.
“Do you really like that feeling?”
“I love it!” she replied. “Look, when eXistenZ is finally released it’s going to wipe the competition off the face of the earth.”
He sighed to himself, realizing that what he’d said was not getting through to her.
“Will it?” he asked.
“You bet! It really will be the supreme game, the one that all the others are judged against.” She shifted position, looking thoughtful. After a while she looked him straight in the eye and said, “Don’t hurt me, Pikul. Not now, after all this. Don’t make me go back in there alone. Keep playing with me.”
“Allegra, I’m worried that the game is going to wipe me off the face of the earth. I’m beginning to think I was right all along not to have a bioport installed.”
She moved quickly, turning around to face him. “But it’s too late for that. And you’re ported in.”
She mischievously flicked the Play nipple on the pod, and before Pikul could react, the walls of the chalet began to melt away around them.
[ 22 ]
There was smoke swirling ahead, brilliantly illuminated from behind by white arc lamps. Two men were silhouetted against the billowing luminescence, working endlessly with raised batons or sticks, prodding, feeling, stroking with them. A long line of people shuffled slowly in the direction of the guards, their faces turned indifferently toward the ground, their shoulders stooped.
Everyone was hemmed in by the walls of a long corridor,
which firmed up around Pikul and Geller as reality took hold.
A large-built woman with a puffy face was walking slowly down the line of people, holding a clipboard. Several sheets of paper were held in place on this, curling and lifting in the draft while she moved along. As she passed each person she peered intently at their ID cards, checking their faces against the photographs and names on the clipboard.
She reached Geller and Pikul, conducting the same check. Her eyes were dull with boredom, her face rigid with fatigue. She muttered their names: Barb Brecken and Larry Ashen.
Recovering from the sudden transition of realities, Pikul glanced down at his own badge to check the identity, then looked across at Geller beside him.
“That was cruel,” he said to her. “You knew I didn’t want to be here again.”
“It wasn’t cruel, it was desperate. We’ve come this far, we’ve got to see the game through to the end. C’mon, Pikul . . . this is a typical case of first-time user anxiety, and you’ve got it bad.”
“Yeah, all right,” he conceded. “But I don’t like it here. I don’t know what’s going on. We’re just blundering around in the dark. This world is unformed, and we don’t know the limits. We only know some of the moves: assembly of bioelectronic parts, the manufacture of undetectable weapons, a Chinese restaurant in the woods, an old trout farm full of mutated frogs. You’ve never explained what the game objectives are, or how we hope to achieve them. All the clues are indecipherable, at least to me. Maybe they don’t even exist. And on top of all that, there are people out there who are actively trying to kill us.”
They stepped forward together as the line moved on. Geller suddenly squeezed his hand.
“That sounds like my game,” she said. “You’re catching on at last.”
They were now within a few paces of the security area at the end of the corridor, and could see that the two guards were frisking everyone who entered. They were using electronic wands almost identical to the one Pikul had been issued at the church hall meeting.
“You mean all this is deliberate?” Pikul said.
“It’s programmed that way, yes.”
“You designed the Chinese restaurant?” he said incredulously.
“No, I designed the parameters within which the Chinese restaurant might be created from the players’ subconscious. We made it all. We’re still making it all.”
“This corridor?”
“Okay . . . anyone can do corridors,” she said. “Game designers have clip libraries of images they can draw on.”
“Yeah, I know all that. Or I’m learning about it. It still sounds like a game that’s not going to be easy to market.”
“But it’s a game that everyone already plays. We call it eXistenZ, everyone else knows it as Existence. It’s life, Pikul. It’s reality. It doesn’t have to be marketed. We simply let the world know it’s ready, and the world moves in and joins eXistenZ. It’s a self-marketing product. It’s wonderful!”
“So you say.”
They each submitted to the electronic test. Pikul was on his guard because he wasn’t sure what the security guards were looking for and if he might inadvertently be carrying it. In fact, he was cleared quickly.
Geller was taking longer. She stood upright before the security guard. Pikul noticed the way the man moved his wand rather too slowly and lasciviously across her body. He scanned her breasts and backside thoroughly. Geller didn’t seem to mind too much. Pikul was about to step forward, get the man off her, when she too was cleared and she stepped across to him.
“Something bothering you?” she said.
“No, Allegra. You wrote everything in this game, right?”
“What’s eating you now?”
“A question I’m always asking myself in this place.” He bit back his feelings because he was learning at last that there were answers or explanations for everything he didn’t like, and he didn’t always like the answers either.
They passed through the security zone and emerged into the long assembly hut. They were not alone: it was the time a new shift was due to begin, and the other workers they’d lined up with were drifting around the enclosed space, moving in a desultory fashion toward their various assembly cubicles. Meanwhile, the workers finishing their shifts were easing off, stretching their arms, turning over the assembly bays to their replacements.
Meanwhile, the conveyor belt continued to move with its sinister load between the bays.
“Remind me,” Pikul said. “What exactly are we looking for here?”
“What Hugo Carlaw told us about. A moldy old wicker basket with a threadbare canvas cover. And it will be found in what he described as a familiar place.”
“Can you think of anywhere in this building that you or I would consider familiar?”
“Your assembly cubicle? Mine?”
“We can skip the one I was using,” Pikul said. “No room for anything apart from the operator and a small box. Let’s start with yours.”
They walked through to the back of the components building and went down the shallow ramp leading to the pod assembly area where Barb Brecken worked. The familiar smell of horse dung drifted into their nostrils. Geller led the way to the last bay, and they slipped inside.
For the moment, no one was there. Several game-pods, in various stages of assembly, lay on the surgically equipped worktables.
Pikul spotted the wicker basket almost immediately. It had been left casually in the farthest corner of the bay, covered by an unmistakably threadbare canvas sheet. There appeared to be something lumpy inside.
He strode over to it and Geller followed.
She knelt down and began to unwrap the sheet from the contents. Pikul stood guard.
“I’d say it’s exactly as advertised,” Geller said, looking down as she lifted the covers away.
In the basket was a game-pod, and when Geller stripped away the final wrap, Pikul could see the whole thing.
It was not in good shape, to say the least. Something biological or organic had eaten away at it, eroding and discoloring the outer shell, infecting the innards. The pod had dark, necrotic patches of hard scar tissue, and where a normal game-pod would be stippled with red, this one had garish streaks of purple.
“God, it’s ugly!” Pikul said. “Even for a game-pod.”
Geller was still staring down at it with a fixed expression.
“Come on,” Pikul said. “Let’s go. We found what we came to find.”
“No, wait.”
Something was exciting Geller; he could hear it in her voice.
“I have a terrible urge to port into that pod,” she said. “What about you?”
“Oh, sure,” he replied, disbelieving what he’d heard. “Yes, you could say I’m desperate to port into that diseased, gangrenous, moldering, dying heap of organism. Let me at it! I can hardly wait.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you,” Geller said.
She straightened and went across to a large pile of UmbyCords draped over a peg. She pulled one of the Cords off at random and quickly checked to see if it was complete and functional. She sat down on a rotten wooden folding chair next to the death-pod’s basket and with a great deal of care ported in one end of the UmbyCord.
“Okay,” she said, “here we go. Will you give me a hand at the back there? I can’t reach around it on my own.”
“You’re not serious, Geller! I mean, this is a significantly diseased pod! Once you port into it, God alone knows what you’ll become. You’ll—”
“Exactly,” she said. “The game unfolds, the next level awaits. Help me with the UmbyCord.”
She pulled up her shirt to reveal her bioport, and with deep reluctance Pikul knelt down beside her. He took the active end of the UmbyCord and slipped it into the port at the base of her spine.
“You satisfied with that?” he asked. “Everything feels good?”
“Yes.”
“How long will it take for the pod infection to take hold of you?”
&n
bsp; “No time at all,” Geller said. Something about her voice sounded unusual, and Pikul glanced quickly up at her.
“And then you quietly port into all the other pods and spread the infection to them . . .”
“Oh, God!” Geller went rigid.
“What’s happening?”
“Something’s wrong. Seriously wrong! Unport me, Pikul, quickly!”
“Okay, I’ll get to it.”
He lifted away the thin covering fabric of her shirt with a snatching motion, but in the few seconds since he’d ported her into the pod, the bioport had swollen up grotesquely. It now seemed to be bulging up and around, like a fist gripping the jack plug. It had turned an alarming scarlet color and bulged perilously at its extremities. He pulled at it, but nothing shifted.
He pulled again, this time tugging it harder.
“Don’t do that!” Geller shouted, doubling up. “Oh God, that really hurts!”
“Sorry. It seems to be caught.”
“That’s obviously not the way. Try something else! Hurry, though! I can feel it starting to get to me!”
Pikul let go of the UmbyCord and looked around for something else to try with.
The death-pod, apparently triggered by Pikul’s attempt to disconnect it from Geller, was starting to convulse in a series of violent peristaltic spasms. Each disgusting ripple produced a consequent response in Geller, who looked as if she was being wrestled to death by the movements. Pikul searched desperately for something to use against the pod.
He spotted a clutch of tools hanging from a long metal rack on the wall. One of the tools was a sharp-bladed linoleum knife.
“I’ll cut you free!” he shouted. “It’s the only way.”
“No!” Geller cried. “Not a cut! I’ve always been afraid of knives.”
“I won’t hurt you.”
With a sense of terrible loathing he slashed violently at the quivering UmbyCord. A lateral gash immediately appeared, with blood fountaining up in a fine spray from the slit. Horrified by what he’d done, and more by the fact that the UmbyCord had not been severed, Pikul slashed again. Then a third time.
The UmbyCord snapped in half at last, and shrank back as if until that moment it had been stretched. Blood was gushing from both ends where he’d made the cut.