Pikul and Geller moved away cautiously from their temporary shelter behind the bed.
A figure suddenly appeared silhouetted in the doorway, the light of the fires flickering over his face.
It was Hugo Carlaw. He was cradling a submachine gun in his arms.
As soon as he saw Pikul and Geller, he began to scream at them.
“The uprising has begun!” he bellowed. “The whole place is on fire! Let’s go! You’ve got to get out of here! They’ll be looking for you.”
Pikul said to Geller, “Carlaw the cashier? He’s a game character! How the hell can he be here?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!”
Carlaw strode into the room, grabbed Geller by the back of her shirt and jerked her to her feet. She tried to grab her game-pod, but Carlaw kicked it away from her. It skidded across the floor.
“Leave that piece of rotting meat here!” he said harshly. “It’s done its job. Let it die.”
“But my game!” Geller cried. “My game’s inside. I don’t want my game to die!”
His face rigid with loathing, Carlaw unslung his machine gun and cocked it. He took casual aim at the game-pod, then released a ferocious hail of bullets at it. In a fraction of a second her irreplaceable, almost priceless game-pod had been blown into messy streaks of flesh and organism that spread in an unrecoverable slime over the rubble from the explosion.
Geller whimpered, and seemed to shrink back into herself. With her shoulders huddled, she could only stare silently at the end of her dreams.
Pikul took her hand. “Geller?” he said. She did not respond, so Pikul reached over and swiveled her around so she was facing him. “Allegra!”
She was in shock.
Pikul brought his face just inches from hers. “Allegra, listen to me!” he said loudly, trying to shut out everything around them, including the threatening presence of Carlaw only a short distance behind him. “It’s not as bad as it seems! I think we’re still inside the game. We haven’t moved back to reality, but we must be inside a subset of the game that is supposed to look and feel like reality. No other explanation makes sense. Think about it! First the diseased pod is here with us, now Carlaw is. We know for sure that both are only creations of the game. They come from your subconscious or mine.”
He paused to draw breath, and cast a glance at Carlaw. In silent confirmation of Pikul’s theory, the man now appeared to be rocking gently back and forth. The confusion outside was too noisy to allow Pikul to hear if he was humming.
“If that’s so,” Pikul went on, as the idea took hold, “then your real pod must still be out there somewhere. Somewhere safe. I think we can let this one go, this game-pod. It’s not the real one anymore.”
She nodded. She was still in shock, but had somehow managed to take that in.
There was more shouting outside, this time much closer than before. Then, to their horror, a Molotov cocktail came sailing into the room through the broken window and shattered against the end of the bed. It exploded instantly and the bed went up in a sheet of flame.
All three of them ducked defensively away as the deadly conflagration burst around them.
“Everybody out!” Carlaw shouted.“Now!”
They rushed outside, scrambling over the rubble and broken glass on the ground outside the chalet. The whole area was lit by the roaring inferno of the next chalet. The cool mountain air was frill of the choking stench of burning; the night was alive with flying sparks.
As they stood there, taking in what was happening, there was another explosion. A chalet farther down the mountain track burst into flames.
“Hadn’t we better help?” Pikul shouted, seeing the swarm of people dashing around, trying to do something about the fires. An appliance had materialized from somewhere, and more fire fighters in bright yellow helmets were unrolling their hoses and starting to play water on the flames.
“Help?” Carlaw cried sardonically. “No, you two are coming with me.”
To encourage them, he cocked his semi-automatic gun again, and aimed it at them.
“Up the hill!” he ordered. “Now!”
Another explosion, another fireball, another chalet added to the terrible light in the valley.
Geller hesitated, looking back in anguish at the spreading destruction of the ski club.
“This is all my fault!” she wailed.
“Come on, Allegra,” Pikul said. “Lets do what the man says.”
Carlaw snapped back into action. “Up the hill!” he ordered again. “Now!”
A path led away from the sea of burning destruction, up narrowly through the shrubs and smaller trees, into the peacefulness of the ancient pinewoods above, where the ground was soft with centuries of mold and the air was no longer filled with acrid smoke.
As they climbed higher the sounds of the confusion faded, but still the clouded sky was reflecting a rich, glowing orange light down on them.
[ 25 ]
After a climb of several minutes, the path at last widened and flattened out, and they came to a small area of level but broken rocky ground, where no trees were growing.
Carlaw gestured back down toward the valley. “We can see everything from up here,” he said.
“What exactly is it we’re seeing?” Pikul said sardonically, looking at the destruction below. Two or three chalets were still burning fiercely, their smoke churning into the sky, but most of them were now merely smoldering. There was not one that was still intact.
“You’re looking at the victory of Realism,” Carlaw said. “And you two were a part of it.”
Geller was holding Pikul’s arm.
“It was the death of eXistenZ,” she said. “We two were actually a part of that.”
“Look down, young woman,” Carlaw said. “See what you have made, see what we have done with what you made. Enjoy it while you can.”
His machine gun made a horrible and now all too familiar clicking noise. He raised it casually, pointing it at Geller.
“There’s just one last thing before Reality is once more safe.”
“What are you doing?” Pikul cried. “Surely were on your side!”
“No way! How could you be? How could Allegra Geller, designer of the world’s foremost game system, be on the side of Realism? All her work is profoundly anti-Realism.”
“But my name is Barb Brecken,” Geller said, as if on an inspiration.
“Cut it out, lady! We know who you are. You can’t hide inside the false reality of a game forever.”
“Something’s slipped over the edge here,” Pikul said, turning desperately toward Geller, knowing that this sort of action often had the effect of pausing the game. “Something’s all wrong with this.”
“You have to find a way to help me, Pikul,” Geller said in a small, frightened voice.
“You see our problem, then,” Carlaw said.
He raised the gun once more, and this time his intent was obvious and deliberate. All the previous casualness was gone from his movements. Illuminated harshly against the orange inferno below, he pointed the gun at Allegra’s head and pulled the trigger.
But before the gun fired, he jolted to the side, his head turning violently at a wicked angle. He collapsed on the ground, the gun clattering onto the rocks around him. He lay sprawled at an uncomfortable angle between two jagged rocks, twitching.
Pikul and Geller froze with disbelief and terror.
Kiri Vinokur stepped out from the shelter of the closest trees and advanced warily toward the stricken man. He was holding what looked at first glance like a large dead rat, but that Pikul quickly identified as the cadaver-gun he himself had assembled in the Chinese restaurant.
Vinokur stepped carefully over the broken ground and went up to the moaning body of Carlaw.
Without hesitation, and with a steady hand, he fired the coup de grace into the back of Carlaw’s head. The man jerked violently once more, then was still.
Vinokur turned to face Pikul and Geller. His face wor
e an expression of relief and pleasure.
“Thank God I got here in time!” he said. “I’ve been trying to find you.” He waggled the cadaver-gun, looking at it and marveling. “My dog brought me this.”
“But you didn’t get here in time,” Geller said simply and obdurately.
“What do you mean?” Vinokur gestured expressively at the body of Hugo Carlaw.
“The game is dead. eXistenZ is finished. And it was you . . . you murdered my game.”
“No, Allegra, I did not. I murdered your game-pod. The game itself is healthy and happy.”
“No.”
“I replicated your pod’s entire nervous system when I was repairing it. It’s standard operational procedure during surgery. Everything that was in the pod at that time is still safe.”
“You made a copy of eXistenZ? Kiri, you work for Antenna. You know there’s a total no-copy rule, backed up by summary dismissal if you break that rule.”
“I do.”
“Well then . . . how can you stand there and say that!”
“Obviously I couldn’t if I still worked for Antenna. That’s changed.”
He let the significance of those words sink in.
“You’re going to defect?” Pikul asked.
“I’ve already done so. I’m with Cortical now, and it’s my happy job to plead with you, Allegra. Come over to join us, come to Cortical Systematics. You too, Pikul. Yes, Cortical Systematics . . . you did hear me right. I’ve defected and it’s the best move I’ve ever taken in my life. All the Antenna Research top brass are moving with me—Pellatt, Melzack, Sherrin, all the bright and good people.”
“So now you’re a spy for Cortical Systematics,” Geller said coldly.
“Wait a minute!” Pikul had been listening and thinking. He said, “Geller, Cortical Systematics isn’t real!”
“What?”
“It doesn’t really exist. We worked it out, you and I. You must remember! Cortical Systematics is just the game version of Antenna—”
Vinokur cut across him, directly addressing Geller.
“You want your baby back, Allegra. Well, you can have it . . . but the only way is if you come over to us. eXistenZ by Allegra Geller. Only from Cortical Systematics.”
Geller said, defiantly, “Only from Antenna Research.”
She sat down on a rock, close to where Carlaw had fallen. His submachine gun was beside her foot.
“You’re intending to hang on, then?” Vinokur said, hefting his weapon.
“I have to.”
“But why? Look at that mess down there in the valley. This whole issue of Realism has been completely screwed by them. Everyone involved at Antenna has bungled. If they can’t handle what is basically just a PR situation, how good are they going to be when it comes to something really difficult, like marketing eXistenZ? Anyway, how can you ever trust them again? They’ve repeatedly endangered your life.”
Geller stared at the ground. Carlaw’s arm was curled painfully under his body, his back had humped as he fell.
Pikul looked too. He thought, pitying the man, What a way to go, what a place to die.
“So what do you say, Allegra?” Vinokur said.
“I don’t know.”
She sounded as if she’d lost the thread of his argument. Absently, she reached down and picked up Carlaw’s gun. It looked large and heavy in her hands, and she seemed not to know how to handle it.
“Be careful,” Pikul said. “It’s probably still loaded.”
“Yeah, and it’s still cocked,” she said.
“Put it down.”
“Yeah.” Her voice was distant, as if her thoughts were miles away. “You know, this guy Carlaw was actually going to kill me.”
“But I saved you,” Vinokur said. He turned to Pikul. “Can’t you talk some sense into her? I mean, I’ve already said I would expect you to come to Cortical Systematics too. You’d receive a substantial raise.”
“Do they have slots open for marketing trainees?” Pikul asked.
Vinokur was about to answer, but whatever it was he intended to say never made it out of his lips.
In a sudden blaze of violence, Geller pulled the trigger of the automatic weapon. There was a deafening burst from the muzzle and Kiri Vinokur was thrown back onto the jagged rocks. Blood surged from his head, his neck, his chest, his groin.
Geller’s senseless and sudden action finally galvanized Pikul. Not caring what she might do to him, defending herself or warding him off, he lunged at her and swatted the weapon out of her hands. It fell to the rocky ground with a loud metallic clatter. He kicked it away from her, then darted nimbly across to it and grabbed it before she could.
“What the fuck are you doing, Geller?” he shouted. “You killed him!”
“He had it coming,” she said in an uninterested voice. “He killed eXistenZ.”
“He said he didn’t.”
“As good as.”
“You can’t fucking kill people for stuff like that!” he yelled. “What’s next? Are you going to kill me too?”
“Come on, Pikul!” She threw back her head and let out a giddy laugh. “Vinokur was only a character in a game. You worked that out yourself. I just didn’t like the way he was messing with my mind.”
“You didn’t like him messing with your mind. So that makes it okay to kill him?”
“He was only a game character.”
“But what . . . ? What if my theory was wrong? What if we’re not in the game anymore?”
“We have to be.”
“Are you sure?” Pikul asked. “Are you really sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. What you said made sense.”
“That was only me, trying to explain things. But you know more about eXistenZ than I ever will. For instance, what about . . . what about that reality bleed-through you were talking about? That must have happened many times before.” She was silent. “Well, has it?”
“Yes.”
“And what about D’Arcy Nader?”
“What about him?” she asked.
“The famous game residue. Remember? And he was dead by then!” Pikul waved the weapon in despair. “None of that makes sense anymore, if you can just kill anyone you think threatens your game! And how do you know this is still the game?” he asked. “How can you be sure?”
She looked toward him, and in the still-glowing glare from the destruction in the valley, he could see that her cheeks were streaked with tears.
“We must be,” she said, and she drew a deep, shuddering breath. “If . . . if we . . . if we’re not?”
“If we’re not, Geller, then you just killed someone real. Someone you knew, someone who had been your friend. A real person.”
She still did not seem to understand. Pikul felt himself driven to his final argument, the one he’d reserved, always buried in him.
“You’ve seen what can happen,” he said. “It’s important for me that you see that.”
“Why important?” she said in a dull voice.
“I have to tell you. Now, at last. It wasn’t by accident that you and I ended up on the run together.”
That finally got her interest.
“Not an accident?” she said.
Pikul raised the automatic weapon in his hands. “No.”
He let it sink in.
She stood up, moved to the edge of the declivity over the valley below. She leaned forward, and Pikul thought she might be about to jump. But she swayed a little, then looked back at him.
“You never had a bioport, yet somehow you were working for Antenna,” she said. “That’s why, isn’t it? You were one of them.”
“I still am,” he replied. “One of them, I mean.”
“But you have a bioport now. Why did you get it fitted? I thought that was forbidden to Anti-eXistenZialists.”
“Not this one. Well, strictly speaking I had to. It was a great sacrifice, but I had to get close to you. I had to make love to you, to my enemy. A terrible sacrifice.”
“Not that bad, I hope.”
“No . . . but still a sacrifice.”
“Why would you do that?” she asked.
“To best understand the person I was sent to kill.”
The new but final realization dawned in her.
“You, Pikul?”
“Yes, me,” he said, holding the gun. “I am the one. Understand that.”
“No . . . you understand this instead,” she said quietly. She pulled what looked like a tiny version of a TV remote control from the flap pocket of her shirt. “Understand that I suspected who you were from the moment you made that fake phone call to yourself in the limo. Understand that I knew you were my real assassin when you pointed the gun at me in the Chinese restaurant. Understand that no one in my position goes unprotected about the world.”
She flicked up a safety cover from the top of the remote, revealing a microswitch. She pointed the device at him.
Pikul tensed his hands on the automatic weapon.
“And understand that you’re a dead man, Ted Pikul.”
Her finger jabbed down on the microswitch, and in the same instant the bioport on Pikul’s back exploded into white flame.
He screamed in agony, convulsing and falling. His frenetic jerking spasms threw him to the rocky floor, bashing his head, his arms, his back against the sharply jagged outcrops. He rolled and squirmed, in unimaginable pain.
Geller danced before him, waving the tiny remote above her head.
“Death to the demon Ted Pikul!” she yelled, shouting her laughter across the wide-open valley below.
Pikul, still barely conscious, hardly able to take in anything other than the violent sensations of his own pain, rolled in convulsing spasms toward the edge of the hill. As his vision dimmed, he found that he could see down into the valley. The last flames were now being extinguished. A thick pall of black smoke rolled through the valley, under the bland, uncaring moonlight.
His mind was dying. The last words he heard before the ultimate blackness flooded in came from Geller.