Dick rather liked that comparison, until he remembered what eventually happened to the original Messiah. Then he became glum again.
CHAPTER 5
Dick followed Taylor out of the room, down an anonymous corridor, through a door and down another featureless corridor that made the first one look positively exciting by comparison. They entered a small room where three resistance members were working. Dick recognised two of them from the lounge when he first appeared; now they were seated at a bank of electronic machines staring at a small screen and inserting and removing small silver discs.
Taylor introduced them, ‘Dick, meet Susan and Edward, two of our senior members’.
‘We’re so glad you’re here’, said Susan, an attractive woman in her early thirties with deep blue eyes and full red lips. ‘I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you’.
Edward, a dapper, serious-looking man of similar age echoed her sentiments. ‘We’ve heard so much about you and I can’t tell you how relieved we are that you’re here to help us’.
Most of the compliments he received in his career were as phoney as his co-stars’ breasts but this time Dick felt the fawning was genuine and refreshing to hear.
Taylor continued, ‘We have quite rudimentary equipment to copy, edit and distribute pornographic films and magazines. We do this to undermine the government but they’re not what you would probably consider particularly erotic. The Party were very thorough at destroying any surviving films or literature from your time that they considered “unsuitable” for society today’.
Edward interjected. ‘We’re having to work with a sixteenth generation copy of Emmanuelle II with no sound, and a version of Debbie Does Dallas with fifty minutes missing’.
‘You don’t have any of my films?’, asked Dick with an obvious air of disappointment. ‘I’ve made hundreds. Surely some must have survived?’
‘There was one’, admitted Edward. ‘An old copy of Titty Slickers’.
‘It was damaged, though’, added Susan, ‘and we could only salvage part of it’.
‘Well even that must be better than what you’re currently using’, said Dick. ‘Let me see what you’ve got’.
Susan looked past Dick to Taylor who nodded his approval. She located this particular disc and inserted it. After a few moments its contents flickered on to the small viewing screen.
‘That’s it?’, asked Dick after less than thirty seconds.
‘That’s it’, confirmed Susan apologetically.
‘You sure?’
Susan nodded.
‘Sure, sure?’
Another nod from Susan, followed by a shrug.
Dick was depressed. His legacy, and the sum total of his whole back catalogue, was just some opening titles and a ten second close-up of his naked butt. Sensing his extreme disappointment, Taylor steered Dick away and introduced him to a woman in her forties on the other side of the room who radiated what could only be described as naïve childish enthusiasm. ‘Mr. Longg, this is Grace who’s been working on a pornographic magazine’.
Grace blushed and said hello.
‘I’m sure our guest would love to see it’, prompted Taylor.
Grace hesitantly took what looked like a home-produced fanzine from a stack. ‘We put this together from some photos we found’, she added with a hint of pride in her voice that Dick would soon discover was totally misplaced.
Dick thumbed through it and as pornography went, found it one of the most unarousing things he had ever seen. He thought photos of sawmill accidents or toxic waste would have been sexier. The magazine consisted of some old black and white shots of Bettie Page throwing a beach ball, a photo of Jenna Jameson in a bikini, the Venus di Milo, plus some shots from an old Victoria’s Secrets catalogue and a reproduction of the poster of Raquel Welch from ‘One Million Years BC’.
Grace added, ‘I’d heard that people find the idea of two women together quite sexually arousing so I manipulated the images’.
Dick could see that Grace had understood the principle of the idea but not the detail. For a start, Bettie and Jenna were facing opposite directions and it looked as though Bettie was just four feet tall. And as for the photo of Raquel Welch and the Venus di Milo, well maybe someone who’d been raised in, and hadn’t left a monastery for their entire adult life, might have felt a slight stirring in their groin, but that was about all.
‘Not bad’, said Dick, trying not to let his horror show but failing dismally.
Grace detected this disappointment and blushed. Taylor stepped in to save her from any more embarrassment.
‘It’s a start’, he explained. ‘But like the films, it’s all we can do with the tools at our disposal. We can really do with your expertise’.
‘But why don’t you just photograph naked people and make new magazines and films, rather than rely on these relics?’, asked Dick reasonably, adding, ‘Some of those images are about 200 years old, and they weren’t that erotic at the time. You must have your own cameras’.
Edward answered, ‘The Party controls technology and everything they do has been designed to thwart us. We have cameras but photographs can only be printed at outlets overseen by the Party’.
‘But what about digital cameras?’, asked Dick.
Edward looked at him blankly.
Dick elaborated. ‘You know, where you can see the images you’ve taken immediately, and you can save them electronically or print them yourself’.
Edward looked at Dick even more blankly than before.
‘They might have been common-place in your era but the Party made sure they were all withdrawn from use and has not allowed the technology to re-surface’, explained Taylor adding, ‘Except for their own use’.
‘What about video cameras? I know you’ve got these’, continued Dick. ‘Alice showed me a short film of this time’.
‘Those images were taken on such a device stolen from a Party office‘, Taylor explained. ‘The Resistance member who made the recording did so at an immense personal risk. He had to replace the camera immediately afterwards’. With a serious expression Taylor continued, ‘If the Party discovered it was missing there would have been a huge security clampdown, mass interrogations and the eventual discovery of the “mole” within their organisation and their probable execution. The Party will go to extreme lengths to stop equipment like this falling into the wrong hands’.
‘Our hands’, Susan added, although Dick had already realised this.
Dick anticipated the answer to the next question before it left his lips, but asked it anyway. ‘But you have the Internet, don’t you?’
By now Edward’s expression was so blank that Dick instinctively wanted to grab a marker pen and draw two eyes, a nose and a mouth on it – and possibly a little pointy beard for good measure.
‘I don’t think so’, Taylor said. ‘What does it do?’
‘Well, you can send jokes, buy and sell shit you don’t need and search for information and pictures on any subject, especially sex’. Dick thought that was a pretty thorough explanation but added for good measure, ‘It’s a sort of network which links all the computers in the world’.