eXistenZ

  People like Ted Pikul, who had so far failed to get a bioport fitted.

  He glared at the crowd and tightened his grip on the electronic wand.

  Witt was continuing. “. . . MetaFlesh uses the standard port, then, but the connecting device itself is completely nonstandard. We call it . . .”

  He turned back to the chalkboard and wrote in large letters.

  “We call it an UmbyCord,” Witt said, and once more expressively tapped the letters. “One word, spelled like this. Capital U, capital C. Get the word right, because you’re gonna be hearing a lot about UmbyCord in the months ahead.”

  “Based on umbilical, right?” It was someone in the front row.

  “Right,” said Witt. “You’re getting the idea of what MetaFlesh and UmbyCord can do together. You’ll also find out, like I did, that you’ve never tried anything quite as much fun, or anything so revolutionary, as this. Tonight, Allegra and I are going to show you some of that. This demonstration is not only free of charge, but it is entirely without obligation to buy. However, we’re pretty confident you can all make up your own minds about that.”

  While they laughed again he turned with a theatrical flourish and indicated the two young assistants behind him and Allegra. They had finished laying out their weird devices on the table at the back of the platform and were now standing attentively at each end of it.

  In a loud voice Witt asked, “Are the MetaFlesh Game-Pods by Antenna Research ready?”

  “Yes, Mr. Levi!” said the first, and “Yes, Mr. Levi!” said the second.

  “And so that these good people here tonight might try the Antenna Research MetaFlesh Game-Pods, how many of the precious prototypes did we manage to bring with us?”

  “Twenty-one, Mr. Levi,” said the assistant at the end of the platform closest to Pikul. She was wearing, Pikul now noticed, a worried expression on her attractive face. Clearly her answer was not the one Witt had been expecting.

  His face clouded and he stepped across to the young woman.

  He said in a voice that did not carry, but that Pikul was able to hear, “Only twenty-one? I thought you brought an even two dozen.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied softly. “But the first three we opened were . . . well, I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Nonfunctioning?”

  “More . . . unhealthy, sir.”

  “Are the others okay?”

  “We think we’re clean otherwise.”

  “Goddamn better be healthy,” Levi snarled, but as he turned back toward the audience his face was radiant once again. “Just checking, folks!” he cried. “We have indeed twenty-one, that’s one and twenty, prototype MetaFlesh Game-Pods all ready for action here tonight. That means that for our first-wave test enclave we need one and twenty volunteers. You don’t have to do much—you simply port in these slave units with the Game-Pod Goddess herself . . .”

  Allegra smiled shyly at this, but already the hall was in an uproar, everyone stretching forward, reaching, pushing against the edge of the platform, imploring Witt to choose them.

  Pikul took a step forward, remembering his brief to protect Allegra Geller no matter what, but he realized immediately that his entire security resources consisted of one electronic wand of untested potential and a soft plastic pink-fone.

  He hoped that Wittold Levi and the assistants had the situation safely in hand. But then, he reassured himself, they must have done this sort of thing before.

  [ 2 ]

  For several minutes confusion reigned in the sweltering hall. The heaving mass of the audience was scrambling to get on the platform, while Pikul helped Levi and his staff fight to keep them off. The atmosphere of enthusiasm was infectious and good-natured, but beneath it there was a distinct sense of fanaticism and obsessive determination by everyone there to be the one, one of the twenty-one, who would be privileged to port into the new game with Allegra Geller.

  Finally, order of a sort was restored, and Levi managed to get the crowd to group itself into four lines of more or less equal length. From these eager participants Levi and his assistants chose the privileged twenty-one by a system of random selection based on the third letter of each persons surname: the first twenty-one in alphabetical order were selected to go on the platform. Once they had worked it out, everyone accepted this system with apparent good grace, and soon most of the audience had returned to their places, and the lucky volunteers were waiting to be fitted with their game gear.

  For each person, one of the assistants undid the heavy-duty snap-locks on the ski-boot plastic modules and split the case open. Inside, packed and protected in an inner case of thick Styrofoam, was the MetaFlesh Game-Pod. This looked like nothing less than a pale, living kidney, both in shape and size and the way the fleshy exterior was resilient and warm.

  Coiled in the “toe” of the ski boot was the UmbyCord for each game-pod. This was a long translucent cord, apparently filled with some kind of transparent viscous fluid. The cord was twisted and sinewy like muscle tissue, and had red and blue veinlike vessels running just beneath the surface. It was Y-shaped, with a connecting socket on each of the three ends.

  As the volunteers were handed the pod and its cord, they fell into reflective silence, holding the bizarre equipment with a sense of awe and reverence. With the material in hand, each player was invited to sit in one of the twenty-two chairs placed in a semicircle facing the audience.

  They were shown how to sit, and the game-pod was placed in a certain fashion on their laps. The UmbyCord was then uncoiled to its full length and one end was plugged into the port on the side of the game-pod.

  The pod rippled in response.

  The first time this happened, the volunteers reacted amazingly. The man on whose lap this first game-pod had been placed pushed back his chair with a scraping of its plastic legs and ripped open the front of his shirt. Half standing, holding the game-pod in place with one hand, he tried to reach behind himself with the other end of the UmbyCord and thrust the socket into the bioport that was already implanted in his back.

  It was difficult for him to reach on his own, so the assistant swiftly moved in to help him.

  Other people began to undo or pull their upper garments free of their waistbands.

  Pikul watched all this with fascination.

  A young woman sitting opposite the first man, not yet in possession of her game-pod, suddenly moaned. Her face was glowing with sweat and her hair was matted untidily around her face.

  “My God!” she said in a low, aroused voice. “Oh my God!”

  She too stood up. Her eyes were glazed. She pulled frantically at the front of her shirt, ripping the buttons apart. When she had the shirt undone, she tossed the garment to one side. She wore no bra. Her chest was already shiny with perspiration. The bioport in her back glistened expectantly, and the woman reached around to grab it, caressing it with her fingers. She started to dribble with the passion of her sudden arousal.

  A female assistant was quickly with her. She made her sit down, then retrieved the torn blouse and skillfully forced her to put it on again. The young woman continued to moan, so the assistant found a dampened cloth from somewhere and administered some cooling pressure to her forehead. Gradually, the woman volunteer calmed down.

  Pikul realized that Levi and his staff must have been through this or similar situations many times before, and were prepared to deal with people’s reactions to the game-pods.

  He leaned forward to look at the bioport on the back of the middle-aged woman closest to him. He had only seen it in magazine photos or on TV.

  The port was flesh-colored and made of soft plastic, and it was embedded somehow in the woman’s back, right up against the base of her spine, just above the belt line. From more than a few inches away it was barely noticeable, resembling a faint operation scar. Close up, it could be seen as finely engineered flesh-ware, made to blend with the human body on which it was installed. The port itself was a small hole, about the diameter of an adult’
s smallest finger. As the woman shifted about in her seat, Pikul noticed that an arrangement of electronic connectors inside the bioport glittered as the bright spotlights caught them.

  Gradually, Wittold Levi and his assistants imposed order. One by one the volunteers sat in the semicircle of chairs, the UmbyCord running around their waists or draped over their shoulders, and plugged into the game-pod on their laps.

  Each game-pod was quivering and rippling.

  When the volunteers were settled, Allegra Geller moved in to take her place in the central chair. Levi helped her with exaggerated consideration, fussing around her, seeing to her every need. Once seated with the others, Allegra clicked open her case with deliberate delicacy and removed the pod from within it.

  One by one the other players connected the spare socket of their game-pods to a central prosthetic pod, thence to Allegra’s own.

  The Master Game-Pod. From Antenna Research.

  Then Pikul was distracted.

  There was a commotion of some kind close to the door and he had to wrench his attention away from Allegra and the others to see what was happening.

  Someone was trying to force their way into the hall past a restraining group of men from the crowd.

  Pikul squinted at the handle of his electronic wand as he hurried through the crowd, and found the On/Off switch. He turned it on. The wand hummed briefly, then continued to vibrate gently in his hand. He wasn’t sure exactly what it would do, but he guessed he was about to find out.

  [ 3 ]

  The intruder was a man in his mid-twenties, wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a shiny leather jacket. He was carrying a large vinyl case. He was in a state of excitement, but not only was that nothing new in this unusual meeting, it might have been caused by his efforts to get past the group of men blocking his way.

  “Hold it!” Pikul said loudly as he approached. He held his wand at the ready. “Not so fast. Let me see your invitation, sir.”

  In response, the young man thrust a card at him.

  Pikul took it and tried to focus on it. It wasn’t easy: it was one of those cards using a holographic ID picture, as well as validating numbers printed in machine-readable type.

  “What the hell is this?” Pikul said.

  “One of your invitations to this meeting, you idiot!”

  “What?” Pikul looked more closely and realized that it was exactly as the young man had said. The wobbling hologram suddenly steadied, to reveal a 3-D picture of the man in front of him, as well as his name: Noel Dichter.

  With his credential established, which he must have known all along it would be, Dichter was already looking anxiously past Pikul into the body of the hall. He heaved on the strap of his vinyl case, easing its weight on his shoulder.

  “Oh God,” he said. “I hope I’m not too late. Did I miss the port-in?”

  Pikul was still trying to assess this newcomer. He seemed no different from the others already present, but exuded a nervous tension that made Pikul wary of him, and Antenna Research, he knew, considered Allegra Geller an irreplaceable asset.

  “Yeah, they’ve started,” he said. “But it’s only the first wave. You can probably be part of the second wave. It’s going to go on all evening.” Pikul again read the name on the card. “Okay, Noel Dichter, let’s see you with your arms up. I have to scan you. Metal and heavy synthetics not allowed.”

  “What is this?” Dichter said, incredulous. “A weapons check?”

  “It’s more for recording devices,” Pikul said through his teeth. He was concentrating on the radio-intensity receptor control on the stem of the wand. “There’s a lot of serious money invested in these games. Industrial espionage happens and, no offense, Mr. Dichter, we got to make sure it isn’t going to happen here. Now, what have you got in this case?”

  “I brought my game-pod,” Dichter said. “It’s got original Marway tissue architecture. Kind of obsolete now, I guess, but I was still hoping . . . Even though I can’t afford one of your Antenna MetaFlesh 15 upgrades, I’ve figured out a method of virtual porting that I thought might—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Pikul said, because for him not much of this made sense. “You won’t need it tonight, whatever it is. Everything’s provided for here by Antenna. Call it corporate hospitality.”

  Dichter suddenly stiffened. “My God!” he cried. “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Is who who you think it is?”

  “That young woman, up on the platform! Is that Allegra Geller?”

  “Yeah,” Pikul said, with almost paternal pride. “That’s her. She’s really something, isn’t she?”

  “What’s a star like her doing here? A product launch in the back of beyond?”

  “Out here in the boonies is where the real people live, you know. Real fans. Just like you, Noel.”

  “Yeah, well, you said it. Just like me.”

  Dichter had scanned clear, so with no further reason to delay him, Pikul handed his vinyl case back and waved the young man in.

  Dichter went across and joined the press of people close to the platform.

  Not wanting any more late arrivals to get in without his say-so, Pikul turned the lock on the door and pocketed the key. Then he wandered back to the crowd, stopping not far from Noel Dichter.

  On the platform, in the center of the semicircle of linked game players, Wittold Levi finished a number of checks on the UmbyCord connectors then nodded toward Allegra Geller.

  “Okay, everything seems to be in order. Are you ready, Allegra?”

  She was looking pumped up, her face tense and elated, her fingers playing restlessly over the soft mound of her game-pod.

  “Sure thing,” she said, her voice almost singing. “This is always my favorite moment.”

  A wave of excited laughter passed through the crowd. Levi stepped down from the platform and went to stand amongst the audience. Allegra looked around at the other players.

  “I’m about ready to start eXistenZ by Antenna Research,” she said, her words faltering a little. She bit her lip. She went on in a much softer voice, making everyone strain forward to hear. “This will be downloaded into all of you. Let me warn you that you’re in for a wild ride, but I’ll be right there with you. Our assistants will be here in reality, just in case there are problems. But nothing will go wrong, because nothing can go wrong. Remember always it’s just a game, a simulation. Don’t panic, no matter what happens. When it’s through, I’ll see you all safely back here. It might seem like a long time while we’re playing, but that’s subjective time dilation. In reality, we will be playing for only a few minutes.”

  Again there was laughter, but this time it was confined to the twenty-one players on the stage. Also, it was now the nervous laughter of people uncertain of what was about to happen to them.

  Allegra quickly brushed a finger over a nipplelike protuberance on the game-pod in her lap.

  Immediately, the other players closed their eyes and went rigid. Their hands, resting on the pods in their laps, stiffened, and the knuckles began to show white. Meanwhile, the game-pods began a rhythmic, peristaltic rippling.

  Pikul moved over to Wittold Levi.

  “Allegra Geller seems shy,” he said quietly. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me that a big star like her would be shy.”

  “That’s what a lot of people like about Allegra,” Levi said. “She spends most of her time alone in her studio, designing the games. I sometimes think she’d be happier if she never had to show them to anybody.”

  “She doesn’t like this adulation?”

  “I don’t know about that. No matter what she says to make people feel good, it’s what she’s doing now that she’s nervous about. Porting in with her fans. She says it’s too intimate, too much of an intrusion.”

  “Then why does she do it?”

  Levi glanced at him, grinning slyly. “I guess you could say we make her do it,” he said.

  “We? You mean the game company, Antenna?”

  “Tha
t’s what I mean.”

  “Why?” Pikul asked.

  That look came at him again, but now Wittold Levi was no longer grinning.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” he said, suspiciously. “Are you with Antenna, or did an independent security contractor send you?”

  “I’m with you,” Pikul said at once. Inwardly, he resented the man’s tone, but he fished in his back pocket for his ID and showed it to Witt. “I’m working through the Antenna management training program. Security is what I’m doing right now, but I want to end up in marketing and public relations.” He held up the electronic wand. “To be completely honest with you, most of what I know about security is confined to knowing how to switch this sucker on and off.”

  Levi ducked back from the wand, which Pikul had waved incautiously at him.

  “Okay, then you’ll know that corporately we’ve spent a fortune developing eXistenZ. We all realize it’s a risky project. Allegra Geller might have to make more changes yet, and these kind of seminars are just about the only way we can convince her there might be a problem.”

  “By a problem you mean bugs?” Pikul said. “You’re saying there are bugs in her new game?”

  “All gameware has bugs, but we can iron them out as part of the testing and evaluation procedure. eXistenZ is a lot more than a game, though.”

  “Yeah, right. It’s a game system. I heard you say that. It’s a kind of emphasis you keep making.”

  “There are some top people at Antenna who are worried that eXistenZ is an intellectual program, too complex, too weird and artsy.”

  “What do you think?” Pikul asked.

  “Me, I think it’s the hottest product Antenna has ever had, marketwise. And Allegra’s not bothered by accusations of being highbrow. Not until she faces her fans. She hates to be rejected in the flesh, so from time to time we bring her out and let her take some of the heat.”

  “I’ve heard that she’s sensitive,” Pikul said admiringly.