eXistenZ (20 page)

“What’s in that syringe you’re using?” Pikul asked.

“It’s a broad-spectrum sporicide. I’m not sure what the hell it was I picked up in the assembly bay, but all game-pods are congenitally susceptible to spores, pollen, and airborne fungi. Clinically, the RNA of spore infection is usually one of a range of known sequences, and so what I’ve jabbed in will probably help. The main thing is to get to it in time.”

While she was speaking, Pikul had been scratching unconsciously at his bioport. Geller noticed this and fixed him with an intense look.

“You got an itch?” she said.

“Sorry. Am I irritating you?”

“No. Let me see your bioport.”

“What?”

“Let me see it, Pikul!”

Reluctantly, Pikul turned his back toward her. She examined it so closely he could feel the light, passing pressure of her breath on his skin.

“I think I’ve figured out what must have happened,” she said in a low and dismal voice. “It must have been Kiri Vinokur. I can’t believe he would do such a thing. That bastard.”

Pikul could sense the anger in her.

“I thought Vinokur was your friend,” he said, once again feeling the unpleasant rising of paranoia.

“I can’t be sure of anything anymore. He installed this bioport, didn’t he?”

“Yes. I mean, oh no!”

“What?”

“I think I see what you’re driving at.”

“He must have deliberately given you another infected bioport, so that when we jacked in together, my pod would become infected and ultimately die. As would my game system.”

“I’m infected?” Pikul said in sudden panic. “Wait a minute!”

“There was no reality bleed-through after all,” Geller said. “We were thinking about it from the wrong direction. When we were in the game, the poor thing was trying to tell us that it was sick. It was the pod that introduced the theme of disease into the game.”

“The
theme
of disease?”

“It wasn’t real.”

“It might not have been real in the game, but back here in the real world I’m fucking infected! Is it going to crawl up my spine and rot my brain?”

She stared at him impatiently for a moment, but then her expression changed. In a businesslike way she went back to her bag.

“All right, don’t panic,” she said. “I’ve got something that will help you.”

She brusquely wiped away the tears that had filled her eyes while she attended to the pod, and took out a cork-shaped plastic capsule from her bag. She snapped it open to reveal a knurled, pluglike electronic device.

“This’ll fix it.”

“What is it?” Pikul asked.

“I’m going to seal up your bioport with a sporicidal resonator.” She bent over him and began easing the tiny instrument into his bioport. “It uses the UmbyCord pickups for power. It should cleanse all your porting channels of infection in a few hours.”

“Is it going to hurt?”

“Is it hurting now?” she said.

“No.”

“Then it probably won’t hurt later. It’ll give you a little skin buzz when it’s done. Of course, we can’t go back into the game until then.”

“Ouch! It’s hurting now.”

“Sorry. That was me.”

When her hands moved away from him, Pikul pulled down his shirt and turned to face her once more.

“Look, this isn’t over, is it?” he said. “We seem to be out of the game for the moment but that’s surely not the end of it. What has happened here could be critical, if it’s true. Are you really saying that you think Vinokur is an agent of the Anti-eXistenZialists?”

“It’s beginning to look that way. It frightens me, but what other explanation could there be?”

“I don’t know. All I’m sure of is that if he’s one of them, then we really are in the—”

He stopped, because Geller had turned abruptly away from him.

“The pod!” she cried. “Somethings happening! Pikul, it’s dying!”

Sure enough, the pod had started quivering and rippling, turning a livid purple color in streaks. Geller fell to her knees against the side of the bed, reaching out to cradle it.

“I can’t give it any help,” she said dismally. “There’s nothing I can do for it.”

Her head drooped down toward it.

At that moment, without warning, there was a brilliant white-orange flash from outside and their windows and door blew in explosively. Shattered glass and wood flew about their heads.

[
24
]

Geller had been shielded from the worst effects of the blast by the bed, but Pikul was thrown off his feet. He tumbled and rolled across the polished pine floorboards while debris crashed all around him.

The pressure wave passed as quickly as it had come, and after a few seconds of confusion Pikul recovered, impelled by his fear of what the blast might have done to Geller. He climbed incautiously to his feet, the rubble cascading off him. He felt around his body, checking the vital organs. He was bruised and scratched in many places, but as far as he could tell, he’d suffered no serious harm.

He clambered in a state of intense anxiety across the rubble-strewn floor.

The hot glare still shone beyond the now glassless window frame, and waves of heat were billowing into the room.

It was eerily silent, but for the roar of the fire outside their chalet.

He reached Geller, and although she was severely shocked and shaken by the tremendous explosion, she appeared unhurt.

“What the hell was that about?” Pikul asked.

She glanced around the shattered room with a deeply fearful expression. Her face was white and her hands were shaking.

“I’m frightened,” she said miserably. “Pikul, I’m so dreadfully frightened . . .”

They peeked wide-eyed together through the window.

The chalet next to theirs had been destroyed by the massive explosion and was now completely engulfed in flames. Even as they watched, the one remaining upright wall collapsed backward into the inferno, sending sparks flying a hundred feet into the night air. Another wave of heat battered at them. The whole valley seemed to be infused by the orange glare.

“Listen!” Geller said. “People are coming.”

A pandemonium of shouting voices and roaring engines could be heard from lower down the mountain, as the other occupants of the ski club reacted to the catastrophe and started to rush up to this area by any means they could. Already there were men moving around the scene of the inferno outside their chalet, grappling with emergency fire hoses and unrolling them.

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.