Alternative Dimension (3 page)

Soon, Joe stopped logging on as Red. But it made no difference. Even though there was no such being, they still worshipped Him.

3 TANGLED WEBS

As Red Loth, Joe had been pitched headfirst into the spiritual yearnings that drove some of the residents in search of yet more manifestations of truth, meaning, and all those other abstractions that got in the way of just living. As Ross Magee, he could get closer to the everyday concerns which bubbled away at neighbourhood levels. He translocated to Australasia and flew around Alice Springs in a thick haze of barbecue smoke, listening to deep discussions about the relative merits of real and virtual lagers and the finer points of crocodile wrestling. He travelled through Europe sampling stereotypical attitudes to food, morality, political corruption and foreigners. All the avatars in the Latin countries were dark, brooding creatures who burst into gesticulating life when talking of women, football and either pasta or corridas, but up in Scandinavia, they were nearly all blonde and still, staring out over the fjords and giving each other looks pregnant with acceptance. Every word they typed on the screen was heavy with strange accents and symbolism.

Joe found this herd mentality interesting and spent some time acclimatising in various places. His frequent trips to the Americas made him wonder whether it had been wise to give residents so much freedom to adapt the in-world environment to suit their own preferences. Each state he visited proclaimed its pride in being part of the USA and yet the differences between them were so extreme that he began to wonder what ‘United’ meant. The south thought the north was populated by effete homosexuals while the north failed to understand the semantic lapses that led their southern counterparts to confuse the words ‘bride’, ‘groom’ and ‘first cousin’. The west claimed to be the true representatives of American history, the east celebrated a long European ancestry. The only thing that united them was a general agreement that Red Loth was American. And, except for a few individuals in Kentucky and Tennessee, every single resident had wonderful teeth.

To the north were the Canadians, who were thought by all to be Americans, but nicer.

Joe was more familiar with the European experience and nowhere did he find more compelling evidence of the comfort of stereotypes. Russian avatars cried a lot, drank a lot, and sang mournful songs. In France, those who bothered to build roads in the cities piled cobblestones across them to save time when the next revolution or strike came round. There was general bewilderment among them at the idea that anyone wanted to be anything other than French. The Germans would pause briefly to smile mirthlessly at this before getting on with doing whatever they were doing very efficiently. And the Dutch, anxious to be inclusive and give equal status to their urban and rural myths, would bend over their tulips, a joint dangling from their lips, look across at their bikes leaning against a windmill and, to the sound of wooden clogs on cobbles and the occasional splash as someone fell into a canal, simply go on being liberal.

When he crossed the Channel into the UK, he immediately felt at home and it was here that he sensed the clear differences between his virtual world and the real one. The stereotypes were just as secure, but there were no industrious shopkeepers from the Indian sub-continent, no plumbers or construction workers from Poland and Eastern Europe and, of course, no Russian plutocrats. As a result, the AD Brits were deprived of the chance to grumble that all these foreigners (except the Russians) were simultaneously taking their jobs and claiming unemployment benefit. Nonetheless, they found their separate ways of bringing the comforts of England, Scotland and Wales into their virtuality.

In the Welsh valleys, among all the people called Morgan and Davies and Evans, he saw rebels – Flocculus Ampersand, Mesopotamia Greasetank, Dib Floncastle and others. He sat on a hill there, listening to massed male voice choirs singing Abide with Me, its glorious, melancholic power punctuated only by the bleating of startlingly attractive sheep. That bleating was replicated in the Scottish glens but there the background chorus was the drone of the pipes and the sizzling of thousands of deep fryers filled with batter-coated Mars bars, slices of haggis and day-old pizzas. There, the avatars strode up to their mountain crofts, their kilts swinging above the heather. Among them he saw the occasional redhead, but most had chosen to go against type and opt for the dark, Mel Gibson look. Only taller.

A few English avatars formed into groups dedicated to serving Her Gracious Majesty and claiming that Britannia ruled the waves, but most embraced the idea that, here in AD, all were equal. The land was dotted with thatched cottages, cricket pitches and the appropriate action hooks for bowlers, batsmen and fielders. The more risqué hooks, those which facilitated carnal pursuits, were concealed deep in the woods and, as well as copulation simulators labelled ‘him’ and ‘her’, there were hooks for flagellation, correction and even self-restraint. The prevailing mood was one of superior self-satisfaction based on the persistence of sound imperial values.

But he found the quintessence of AD Englishness in a group which called itself ACAS. Not the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service which, in the real world, helped to settle industrial disputes, but the Agatha Christie Appreciation Society. They met in a Cotswolds-style pub on a village green. The owner was a member and, in what he saw as an example of Wildean wit, he’d called his pub
The Joke and Cliché
.

The club had no real rules as such except that, each week, they would stage an investigation of a murder or, more frequently, a series of murders. The fact that this was happening in the world of AD meant that they could be as extreme and unbridled as they wished. The role of Miss Marple was often taken by a man and members felt no compunction about changing their stories and introducing the reddest of herrings whenever they felt threatened or in danger of being exposed. They kept stretching the limits of the genre, creating their own parameters, investigating their own freedoms. It was all held in the traditional framework of a village setting, validated by an association with one of the greats of English crime fiction, and yet the self-control for which the English were so renowned (or lampooned) could be discarded.

Joe only got to hear of them because the local vicar was barred from the village because he’d been found instructing a schoolboy (who, in real life, was in fact an admiral in the Royal Navy), in the use of some deviant action hooks in the rectory. Unaware of all this, Joe (as Ross) had met him in an Irish pub and started asking about the usefulness of religion in AD. The vicar, intent on disrupting the cosy circle in the lounge bar of
The Joke and Cliché
, had suggested that there were dark forces at work there and handed over a transcript of a part of one investigation which he’d found in a stack of books of common prayer. The document read as follows:

Transcription of police interview with witness 1337, September 20th 2010

POLICE: We’ve established you were in the car park around seven, right?

1337: Yes. Dorothy felt carsick so I pulled in to let her throw up. There’s a corner behind the waste bins there. Nobody can see you from the road. We often use it to get rid of waste products.

POLICE: OK, but it’s not Dorothy we care about. Or your waste products. It’s you and Mad Mick O’Malley. He was with you, wasn’t he?

1337: Yes. He’s got a medical degree. He was the one who gave Dorothy the emetic.

POLICE: Why did she need an emetic? I thought you said she was carsick.

1337: She didn’t need one. Mad Mick insisted. Wanted to practise, he said. Since she was sick anyway, it didn’t seem to matter.

POLICE: Who had the gun?

1337: Dorothy.

POLICE: Oh come on. Her prints weren’t on it. Just Mad Mick’s.

1337: That’s crap. There must have been some from the French guy.

POLICE: What French guy?

1337: The one who got Dorothy pregnant. That’s why she was sick.

POLICE: Why should he have the gun?

1337: He gave it to her. When they got engaged.

POLICE: Engaged?

1337: Yeah. She refused to have sex with him unless they got engaged first. So he got her one from that priest. As a present.

POLICE: What priest?

1337: The Italian one at St Marks’s. Married to Dorothy’s sister.

POLICE: You’re trying to tell me that there’s a married priest giving out guns?

1337: Only to members of his congregation.

POLICE: This is all crap, isn’t it? All a smokescreen. You’re guilty as fuck, aren’t you?

1337: Well, guilty of some things, yeah. I’m a Catholic. Goes with the territory. Depends what you’re asking about.

POLICE: You know bloody well what I’m asking about – that stripper’s body we found floating in the river.

1337: The one with no arms?

POLICE: No, the other one.

1337: Oh. Well I had nothing to do with that. I thought you were talking about the Milton Street massacre.

POLICE: The what?

1337: The Milton Street massacre.

POLICE: What’s that?

1337: Oh, maybe your guys haven’t heard about it yet. Only happened this morning.

POLICE: And you’ve got something to do with it?

1337: Course not. I live in Denby Lane.

POLICE: So what?

1337: It’s miles from Milton Street.

POLICE: OK, OK, we’ll get to that later. Where was Mad Mick when you were in the car park?

1337: Well, as soon as he saw Dorothy wasn’t throwing up blood, he got the number 17.

POLICE: What? The bus?

1337: Yeah. Said he had a meeting.

POLICE: Who with?

1337: Some plastic surgeon. The one who did Dorothy’s breast implants. Mick’s always wanted to be a woman. He’s having the operation next Tuesday.

POLICE: I’ve never heard such bullshit.

1337: I know, but you try telling Mick.

POLICE: Never mind Mick. It’s your bullshit I’m talking about.

1337: It’s the truth.

POLICE: OK. I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m bringing him in. Where is he?

1337: Probably at Dorothy’s place.

POLICE: Where’s that?

1337: Milton Street.

POLICE: That does it. You’re obviously taking the piss. You’re nicked.

1337: Eh?

POLICE: Article 213, Geneva Convention, reverse police harassment. Failure to acknowledge the legitimacy of procedural processes in investigative protocols. Concealment of substantive evidence of malfeasance and unwillingness to adhere to the basic principles of the fundamental human rights of a law enforcement officer in the service of Her Majesty.

1337: Fair enough.

As he clicked to push the paper into his personal files, Joe felt profoundly satisfied. This made no sense at all but that wasn’t the point. Here were people playing his game, living in his world, reshaping all the distorted trappings of their normality to live their dreams. And they kept coming back, week after week, to live more dreams, to spin their Englishness (or Welshness, or Azerbaijaniness for all he knew), into a new fabric. They lived and felt comfortable in their new dimension. It was normal. It was natural. It was a controlled anarchy.

But there were other dreams, other anarchies, which were less communal and certainly less controlled. Many avatars found ways of using their AD powers to much more disturbing effect. Their exploitation of their freedoms was sometimes violent and revolutionary, but those were so structured that they were eventually as commonplace (and therefore acceptable) as sado-masochism and Anglicanism. But there were quieter, more sinister manifestations which never broke the surface. Individuals whose actions stayed submerged and yet overwhelmed those who experienced their effects. Individuals such as Vixen MacReady.

4 VIXEN’S SECRET

Vixen was the avatar of Jennie Dalgarno. Jennie was twenty-eight, single, and taught Computing Science at a school in the north of England. She’d had only one real relationship, which had turned abusive. Like most women in such circumstances, she’d hidden the effects from friends and colleagues but they all noticed the changes in her when her man disappeared. She was a committed, caring teacher, got good results and treated all the pupils in her classes equally. With other members of staff she was cooperative and polite but she didn’t consider any of them to be friends. Physically, she occupied that area between attractive and plain where only a lively personality can save you. Jennie didn’t have one and so passed through most of life unnoticed. But each evening and for entire weekends, she would lock her doors and shed her anonymity to become Vixen MacReady.

Everyone at the beach club knew there was a mystery about Vixen. She had a friends’ file that split almost equally between men and women and each of them had a story of her kindness, consideration, willingness to help or maybe just listen when their various stresses were getting to them. But they also felt that, for all her openness, there was a part of herself she kept locked away from them. Some had tried to penetrate it, using clever, oblique questions to get her to talk of her life in her own dimension, her past, her family and friends there. She’d responded with her usual honesty and innocence but revealed little and simply suggested that her life was untroubled, ordinary, passive. However hard they analysed her or invented possible traumas, she always emerged with the same smile, the same confidence, and yet the same lingering implication that there was an untouchable part of her crouching in the shadows of her mind.

‘Have you noticed how often she uses the word “control”?’ asked an avatar called Scott one evening as he lay on some cushions with Azzura, his girl friend. Scott’s manipulator, Dan, was in London, Azzura’s was in Adelaide.

‘No,’ said Azzura. ‘Does she?’

‘Lots,’ said Scott. ‘Not in any weird way. It just seems to crop up pretty regularly. Once you start noticing it, you can’t miss it.’

Azzura snuggled into him.

‘Well, I’m glad she’s a friend. She was so sweet to me when I broke up with Card.’

‘Best thing you ever did,’ said Scott, with a smile. ‘We’d never have been like this if you were still with him.’

‘Yes,’ said Azzura, ‘I’m lucky.’

The break-up had come as a shock to Azzura. She and Card had been together for three months and, for some inexplicable reason, Card had suddenly started accusing her of infidelities. He’d invented secret assignations she was supposed to have had and seemed determined to punish her for these imagined wrongs. In the end, he’d just vanished – no goodbyes, no explanations. He just left AD altogether, leaving Azzura hurt and bewildered.

‘It’s not you, honey,’ said Vixen, when Azzura came to her. ‘It’s probably some reality thing. I think he said his wife was having a baby. That’s bound to make him … well, think differently.’

Then she said all the things that Azzura needed to hear, made her laugh, turned her attention to all the other guys around who’d soon be hitting on her now that she was free again. They swam, surfed, lay about on the beach and sure enough, within a couple of weeks, she’d met Scott at a concert and fallen so much in love that she couldn’t understand what she’d seen in Card at all. Vixen laughed at Azzura’s excitement and infatuation when she started describing her new love to her.

‘So,’ she said, ‘he’s a combination of Brad Pitt, George Clooney and the Wizard of Oz.’

Azzura smiled. ‘Yes, and much more. He makes me laugh, he’s gentle – and when we make love …’ she ended the sentence by making a growling noise deep in her throat.

‘You’re disgusting,’ said Vixen.

‘Yes, and it’s great,’ laughed Azzura.

She paused before adding, ‘There’s just one thing. He’s married.’

‘What, here in AD?’ said Vixen.

‘No, for real.’

Vixen shrugged. ‘Most of them are. Don’t think about it. When you’re here with him, different rules apply. Relax. Go where your hunger leads you. And take him with you.’

Two weeks later, they were lying under a parasol on the beach.

‘Haven’t seen Scott for a while,’ said Vixen.

‘No, he’s busy – things to do, his real job, that sort of stuff,’ said Azzura.

‘Hmmmm,’ said Vixen. ‘Well, I hope he keeps his priorities right.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I don’t want you going through all that Card stuff again,’ said Vixen. ‘I just want to be sure Scott’s heart’s big enough for you.’

It was a seed planted. Azzura started asking Scott about his work, his home, his wife. He answered her openly enough but he was guarded, too. Her anxieties about him made her more insistent, made her questions more intrusive. Before, their chats had been about the mysteries of AD, the incredible settings that people had created for wandering lovers, the colours of the perpetually changing skies. Everything had made it easier for them to fall more and more deeply for each other. But now, they sat in forests with glow worms, butterflies and humming birds dancing among exotic flowers, and Azzura could think only of the flat in Clapham he occupied with his wife and the women in the design studios where he worked. For Scott, it became more and more tedious, defeating the object of logging on. He became less eager to spend time in AD, their sessions together grew shorter, and the worm at the centre of their love grew and sucked away more of its substance.

‘I don’t know what’s happened with Azzura,’ Scott said to Vixen one evening. ‘Have you noticed anything?’

‘Not really, ‘ said Vixen.

Then she seemed to reflect.

‘Well …’ she began.

‘What?’ said Scott.

‘Oh nothing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Well, it’s just … I think it’s coming up to the anniversary of when she met Card.’

‘So?’

‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Vixen.

‘She said she was over him. She couldn’t understand why she ever spent time with him,’ said Scott.

‘Well, there you are then,’ said Vixen.

And so it went on. Azzura and Scott both brought their concerns to her, laid themselves bare and she, as usual, smiled, sympathised, made little suggestions, and was always there for them to use.

The summer was fading into autumn when Scott sent Vixen a note asking if he could talk to her urgently. She was with a group of friends, playing a game based on old film titles, but she went home at once and translocated him to her garden. They sat on loungers under the chestnut trees and Scott recounted the last conversation he’d had with Azzura. It was an ultimatum. She wanted a greater commitment from him but he was already as deeply into their relationship as he could be. He was sacrificing aspects of his home life, making more and more excuses to his wife, and yet he couldn’t convince Azzura that he was serious about her.

Vixen soothed him, promised to try to talk some sense into Azzura, and spoke of the difficulties of blending the needs of their two worlds, real and virtual. At one point, he asked if he could sit with her and they shared a lounger, Vixen leaning back against him, his arms holding her.

‘Do you still want to be with her – really?’ asked Vixen.

‘Well, said Scott, with a smile, ‘I could get used to being here with you like this.’

‘Tut, tut,’ said Vixen. ‘I think Azzura would be much better for you.’

‘If only she’d ease up,’ said Scott. ‘Just enjoy us as we used to be.’

‘Well, there is a way,’ said Vixen.

‘How? What do you mean?’

‘It would mean handing over your avatar to someone else’s control for a few minutes,’ said Vixen. ‘But it would give Azzura a different perspective on you.’

‘Hmmmm, not sure I like that,’ said Scott.

‘No, I don’t blame you,’ said Vixen.

‘How does it work?’

‘Just an app. It … well, it doesn’t matter. We’ll think of something else.’

‘Have you seen it working?’ asked Scott.

‘Yes,’ said Vixen. ‘It’s quite impressive. Fun, too, if it’s a friend.’

‘Have you done it yourself?’

Vixen laughed.

‘Lots of times,’ she said.

‘Could you show me?’

‘No, let’s think of something else.’

‘No, you’ve got me interested now. Just show me. Just once.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. In fact, I command you to show me.’

They both laughed.

‘OK,’ said Vixen and, almost simultaneously, a message appeared on Dan and Jennie’s screens with the words ‘Vixen MacReady wants to control you. Yes? No?’

In his study in London, Dan typed ‘Yes’ and waited.

He watched as his avatar got up, leaving Vixen on the lounger. He walked to her house. The door swung open and he went inside and down some steps at the end of the hallway. It was dark; he could see nothing. He stopped. Dan clicked his mouse button to change the environmental controls to midday. Nothing happened.

Then, Vixen was beside Scott.

‘Welcome home,’ she said, and she flicked on the full light setting.

They were in a long room. On each side, there were four cages suspended from the ceiling. In seven of them, naked male avatars knelt in submissive positions. None of them looked up as the light hit them. Vixen walked to the cage beside the empty one.

‘You never met Card, did you?’ she said. ‘Well, you’ll be able to get to know one another now. Compare notes maybe. He’ll be your neighbour.’

And, at home, Dan watched helplessly as Scott undressed, stepped up into the empty cage beside Card’s and knelt on its floor. The door shut, Vixen walked along one side of the room, then back up the other, surveying her flock.

‘Goodnight,’ she said.

‘Goodnight mistress,’ came the chorus of eight male voices.

In London, the image on Dan’s screen faded to be replaced by a simple message. It read ‘Account suspended’, and darkness fell.