Another Life (16 page)

An earlier search of the food district had turned up nothing. He wondered initially if he’d spotted her outside the Surer Square again, when one of the occupants had thrown someone through a window, but the figure had gone by the time he checked out the venue. She wasn’t in any of the streets nearby, nor by the balcony where they’d last talked.

Owen knew she could reconfigure her avatar, but he’d kept looking for that distinctive white trouser suit and the sparkling silver hair. He knew also that she might have more than one persona in
Second Reality
, so he had worn the Mage’s sunglasses to check out everyone’s true identity. It was hard to guess how many people he should expect online right now because, although it was late on a Sunday morning for him now in Wales, it could be any time of the day or night for the other participants all round the world. Their IP addresses told him they were mostly from North America, predominantly East Coast, with a handful from elsewhere around the world. And it was somehow disheartening, a let-down to be honest, to discover that the multitalented ‘Harley Hydrurga’ was actually only Colin Townsend from Wichita, Kansas, and not the juggling seal he appeared to be.

Owen smoothed his hand over the nearby table-top, and it transformed into a display screen. The results of a conventional web search rippled into view on the surface, information from his real world shown to him in
Second Reality
. It told him that Dr Megan Tegg had worked as a Senior House Officer at Cardiff Royal for the past six months. She lived in Whitchurch, over in the north-west of Cardiff. There were a couple of published papers, no criminal history, and no evidence that she was married or divorced or had kids.

What was he expecting after all this time?

A couple of albino twins peered across at his display screen from across the table. He extinguished it with a flick of his fingers and then threw the remains of his cocktail over the twins. They spluttered with indignation, rose stiffly from their chairs and walked quickly away to a nearby phone booth. They were probably trying to phone their mum to have a good cry, decided Owen – the sunglasses told him they were Jane Lawson and Tricia Lawson, using the same IP address in Timperley, Cheshire.

A cheering row of flame-haired midgets wiggled past Owen in a conga, stopping briefly only to light an Eskimo’s cigar with their heads before snaking off into the nearest bar. Everyone around Owen was laughing or dancing or entertaining other enthusiasts. Owen wriggled lower in his chair, frustrated and powerless. This was so stupid. He could drive out to Megan’s place in Whitchurch now. Her real place. Knock on her real door and say, ‘Hi, remember me? I’m the boyfriend who abandoned you in London six years ago. You wanted to get married, I wanted to get away. So, how’s it worked out for you, then, eh?’

His jaw clenched, and the tension rose in his neck and shoulders. He jumped out of his chair and stalked over to where a crowd had gathered to watch Harley Hydrurga. The seal was balancing a stack of chairs on his whiskery leather nose. Owen strode around the back of him, made a little jump into the air and landed as heavily as he could on the seal’s tail. Harley gave a yelp, the chairs all tumbled, and the crowd scattered out of the way.

He wanted to laugh at the reaction and attempted a sarcastic wave at the furious Harley. But his Glendower avatar refused to move. It was as though the figure was locked – like the screen had frozen, except that everyone else was able to move around him.

A stern-looking policeman marched across to him. He looked like one of the Keystone Cops with a handlebar moustache and a comedy truncheon. When he reached Owen, a blue light on his helmet started flashing. ‘Time out!’ said the policeman, and everything started to fade away around Owen.

A couple of seconds later, he found himself standing on an endless square stairway atop a tall brickwork turret. Each leg of the walkway was two metres wide and formed an open square that vanished into a mist far below. It was just like an Escher engraving, except there was some sort of additional, invisible wall that prevented him from leaning over the edge to peer down. A blue sky with fluffy white cirrus clouds stretched in every direction. And on the opposite side of the square stood the distinctively brilliant outline of Egg Magnet.

‘Busted, huh?’ Egg Magnet called. ‘Me too.’

Owen took a few of the steps on his side of the turret, and found he was going uphill. So he turned round and took the steps in the other direction instead. They were uphill, too, so he stopped trying.

‘Where is this?’

Egg Magnet laughed. ‘Hey! First-time offender, nice one! This is the Sin Bin. A place for reflection on your misdemeanours in
Second Reality
. Got to pay the penance before they’ll let you back in.’

‘Pah!’ said Owen. ‘I’ll just log out and log back in again somewhere else.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ Egg told him. ‘You’ll end up here every time you log in, until they decide otherwise. So, whatcha here for, mate?’

‘You first.’

Egg puffed out his chest grandly. ‘Started a fight in the Surer Square. Again,’ he added with perhaps a new note of regret. ‘Now, what’s your crime?’

Owen shuffled his feet. ‘I trod on a seal.’

This amused Egg hugely. The silver-haired figure giggled and giggled. Energised by this hilarity, Egg hared up the steps around two sides of the tower until he stood next to Owen. ‘Nice job! That’s a new one on me.’

‘I suppose I may have upset a couple of twins, too.’

Egg was delighted by this information. He offered his hand. Owen attempted to shake it and realised he was still holding his empty cocktail glass. After swapping hands, he was able to return Egg’s firm grip.

‘You’re Glendower, aren’tcha mate?’ said Egg. ‘I remember you from the other day.’

‘And you,’ said Owen, ‘are Dr Megan Tegg.’

Egg Magnet looked shocked. He tried to take a couple of steps away from Owen. This was more difficult than he’d expected, because it was a movement up the stairs, and Owen was still tightly holding his hand. ‘Says who?’ Egg said feebly.

‘Megan Tegg. It’s an anagram of Egg Magnet.’

‘So what?’ insisted Egg Magnet. ‘So is…’ There was a distinct pause while he worked it out. ‘So is “Get Egg Man”.’ Owen sat down on the stairway, and patted the step next to him. It was wide enough for them both to sit side by side. ‘I know you in fleshspace. In the real world, I mean,’ he corrected himself hurriedly. ‘Er… in the flesh. So to speak.’ Egg seemed to be giving up the pretence now. Or rather, Megan was not pretending any more. ‘How do you know? I haven’t told you anything.’

‘You’ve told me more than you think,’ he replied. ‘Remember what you said about preferring a nice cup of tea to a crappy cup of tea? And what else… oh yeah, that thing about “safe in taxis”? You might as well have suggested we have a kebab-throwing competition in Woodrow Road. Nearest to the late-night postbox wins?’

‘OMG,’ said Egg, oddly.

‘You what?’

‘Oh my God,’ said Megan. ‘You can’t be!’

‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m Owen Harper. Dr Owen Harper, actually. But you’d remember that…’ He showed her the empty cocktail glass. ‘You know what this is? Vodka, tequila and lime. A Hawaiian Seduction. We bought these in the Kington Club. That’s when I told you that joke about Hawaiians.’

‘So you’re trying to seduce me?’ Megan asked.

‘I’m trying to convince you.’

‘What’s the difference, Owen?’

‘So it’s Owen now, is it?’

‘This could be a trick. I’ve read about people like you. People online, they’re not always who they claim to be.’

He offered her the Mage’s sunglasses. ‘I can see your real details. You’re in Cardiff. You’re logged in as Egg Magnet, but your user ID is
[email protected]
.’

She took the sunglasses from him cautiously. Peered through them. ‘What’s an IP address?’ she asked. She could obviously see more information about him through the sunglasses. ‘And what’s Torchwood?’

‘IP address is like the phone number of your computer. That’s how it knows where you are. And Torchwood…’ He paused to consider this. ‘There’s so much more to tell you about Torchwood.’

Megan handed the sunglasses back to him. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘that’s weird. The picture on my screen just got a whole heap better. How’d you do that, mate?’

‘All part of the service.’ Owen didn’t know how, but wasn’t going to tell her. An unexpected bonus by sharing the sunglasses through the Torchwood system, probably.

‘The detail in the graphics is fantastic. Look at that! You can see chips in the brickwork. And your outfit, mate… wow! Hey, mine isn’t too shabby either!’ She stood up and twirled around. Owen’s heart fluttered for a moment, because spinning around was the method by which players left the game. But Megan’s avatar gave a little bow, and then sat down next to him again. ‘It’s my day off work,’ Megan explained, ‘I’m back on duty this evening and then overnight. Thought I’d spend Sunday morning bumming around in here. Shouldn’t really be playing the game, I suppose, but it’s a bit addictive isn’t it? Mind you, I was pissed off when I got banished to the Sin Bin. I was about to log off. But now… well, here we are.’

Owen wondered if she was going to log out of the game after all. He blurted out, ‘Can we meet up?’

‘We are meeting up.’

‘No, I mean in Cardiff. I’m in Cardiff, too. Now. I want to discuss something with you. In person. Make you an offer, sort of.’

Megan laughed, and nudged him with her shoulder. ‘I remember that from the night we first slept together.’

‘At the college ball,’ he smiled.

‘It really is you, isn’t it, Owen?’

‘It’s not that kind of offer,’ he said.

‘Yeah, that’s what you said then, too.’

Time to be more assertive, Owen. Take the initiative, if you want her to understand Torchwood. That’s what Jack Harkness would do in this situation.

No, screw Jack Harkness. It’s what Owen Harper would do.

‘I’ll prove it, Megan. If you want to. You can ring me. Now, on my mobile.’ He gave her the number. Got her to read it back to him, to make sure she’d written it down.

Then he logged out of the game.

He eased his head out of the helmet-mounted display. The games room came back into focus around him. He got up from his terminal and had a big stretch.

The large window to one side looked down onto the lower floors of the Hub. He could see lights on in the Boardroom, where Toshiko had been working earlier. She’d looped the sponge thing on a thread around his neck, and then left him to do his own thing while he ran through the decontamination. She had phoned up to him a couple of times, and he’d abruptly told her to leave him alone. He examined the Geiger counter now, and saw that the reading had improved but was still too high.

Owen sat quietly at a table by the pinball machine, and thought about
Second Reality
. The initial excitement of it, then the disappointment when he found out who the participants really were, and their humdrum reality. They had to go back to that when they logged out of the game, back to their drab personal first realities. He at least could come back to this, to Torchwood. Even if he couldn’t be more like his avatar in the game.

Owen pulled his shirt collar away from his neck with a couple of fingers, and studied his pectoral muscles through the gap in the material.

His contemplation was interrupted by the sound of his mobile phone. The display told him: ‘Unknown Caller’, and a phone number he didn’t recognise.

Megan was calling him.

He was back in the game.

SIXTEEN

They drove through the pouring rain. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire stretched off into distance as far as Gwen could see. Warning signs on the enclosure flashed past at regular intervals: ‘Ministry of Defence Property’. After she’d seen a dozen of them, she’d worked out that the rest of the wording on them was the stilted formality of the Official Secrets Act describing the risk of arrest and prosecution for ‘unauthorised persons’.

Eventually, Jack pulled the SUV over onto a grass verge. A painted notice on stout poles indicated they’d reached Caregan Barracks, home to
Y Cymry Deheuol
, the Southern Welsh Regiment. Parked under this sign, also angled up on the verge, was Gwen’s black Saab.

Toshiko got out of the Saab and walked towards them, clutching a plastic bag under one arm. Gwen wound down her window so that they could talk.

‘Only just got here myself,’ said Toshiko. She held out the keys to the Saab. ‘Want to swap?’ Gwen accepted the keys and got out.

Toshiko took the passenger seat, next to Jack. ‘Here’s your shirt,’ she told him, and passed him a tissue-paper parcel from the plastic bag. ‘I chose you a blue one. You know, for a change.’

Jack wriggled about in the driver’s seat as he started to remove his jacket and braces.

Gwen stood in the rain, feeling it soak into her hair, wondering how much longer he was going to take. She saw that Toshiko had demurely faced away from Jack as he pulled on the fresh shirt.

While he dressed, Jack leaned across the car a little so that Gwen could hear him through the window. ‘Let’s be cautious with the armed forces, OK? In the face of alien weirdness, the military instinct is to involve UNIT at the first opportunity. We can do without that kind of hassle. Follow my lead.’

‘Any other last-minute pearls of wisdom?’ Gwen asked him. ‘Only I’m getting drowned out here.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Toshiko. ‘You should see it in Cardiff now. Much heavier than here, and still deteriorating. The worst seems to be confined to the Bay area. It’s like a microclimate.’

‘Microclimate as in “tiny amount of sun”?’ retorted Jack, and put the SUV into gear again. ‘We might as well be in Manchester.’

Gwen drove after them through the entrance. They showed their IDs and, after some further consultation, the sentries lifted the red-and-white-striped barrier to allow them in. A jeep with two armed soldiers escorted them past the crisp tramping of a drill practice, and into the visitors’ parking area. One soldier was a stocky youngster with Slav features, the other was tall enough to look thin in comparison.