The physical walking I soon got the hang of, but the rapidly moving pavement beneath me I found disconcerting—not to mention the highly constricting pull and drag of my clothes. Square told me to keep my eyes on the horizon and not look down, and after ten or so laps around the small park I was ready to venture farther.
We walked out of the park and down the street, and I stared at the intricate detail with which the RealWorld was imbued. The stains, the corrosion, the reflections—none of it could be adequately explained or described, and I became fascinated by every facet.
“What’s that?”
“A spider.”
“And that?”
“A dog turd.”
“So that’s what they look like. Who’s that person over there?”
“Which one?” asked Square, tilting his body so his infinitely thin frame of reference sliced in the direction I was pointing. “I don’t see anything.”
But there was something there—a wispy humanlike form, through which I could see the wall and hedge beyond. I had met Marley’s Ghost once when he was doing one of those tedious grammasite-awareness talks, and it was like him—transparent. I’d queued up for autographs afterwards, but when I’d asked him for a personalization, his agent told me to sod off. He wouldn’t sign memorabilia either.
“What did you expect?” Marley’s Ghost had said when I protested. “Albert Schweitzer?”
“Ghosts?” said Square when I explained what I could see. “Perhaps. There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves one to be wary at all times. Just when you think you’ve got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk’s new album, and bam! You’re as confused as you were when you first started.”
We arrived at the Clary-LaMarr Travelport soon after. As in fiction, this was the main transportation hub in Swindon, where the Skyrail and mainline bullet services met. From here you could travel off to the west and Bristol and the steamer ports or east to London and the Gravitube. This was the business district, and the impressively high glassy towers disgorged a constant stream of people, all working together to make Swindon the powerhouse it was, deservedly known as “the Jewel of the M4.” My Swindon was pretty similar, even if it lagged behind by eight years, the time that had elapsed since my series was written.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing towards a steel latticework tower that was being built on a hill to the south of the city. It was only half built but looked large enough to dwarf the skyscrapers when complete.
“It’s part of the Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield that will one day protect a sinful citizenry from God’s wrath—a series of force fields supported by steel pylons. Not even the most powerful smiting by the angriest or most vengeful God will make it through—or so it is claimed.”
“That sounds pretty daft.”
“That’s the whole point,” he said. “It’s meant to be daft. The Commonsense Party’s unswervingly sensible management of the country has left the nation with a woefully high stupidity surplus that needs to be safely discharged. It’s hoped that the extraordinarily pointless and ridiculously expensive defense shield will be enough to deplete the stupidity quickly enough to allow time to more sensibly deal with a bigger problem that’s coming up.”
“What could be a bigger problem than God’s wrath upon his creations and a cleansing fire falling from the heavens?”
“I’m not sure. Something to do with polar bears.”
I sighed. “It’s been a while since I had any concept of current affairs,” I said. “All of this was barely thought of when I was penned.”
“I keep abreast of things,” said Square. “It’s the closest thing to STORY they have out here. Makes me feel less homesick. You’ve been here an hour and you can walk pretty well, so you’re doing okay. The next thing you need to learn is interaction and how humans all manage to live together without descending into chaos. The best place for appreciating this is crowds.”
“Crowds?”
“Right. Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially they’re all the same and reading from the same rule book. To get along you have to appreciate the rules but also know that other people know the rules—and that they know that you know the rules. Get it?”
“No.”
“You will. Observe the crowds for a moment.”
I watched as the thousand or so individuals milled around the Skyrail port, all of them heading in one of six directions and moving on their own yet as one. Astonishingly, without bumping into one another and falling over. It was a most remarkable sight. The wispy Marley-like ones had it even easier, since they could go through the pedestrians just as easily as around them.
“I’m still seeing the transparent humans.”
“How insubstantial are they?”
“Pretty smoky. And they all look so sad.”
This was true. They all wandered about looking very dejected, as if the world were pressing heavily on their shoulders. I had tried to catch the eye of one or two, but they’d steadfastly ignore me and, it seemed, everyone else. I knew about “ghosts” but always thought they were a fictional construct, like some of the odder facets of Japanese culture. However, Square was uninterested in my transparent people and wanted to carry on with my education.
“If you can manage crowd work, you can handle almost anything,” said Square. “You know about flocks of starlings and schools of fish, how they all seem to move at the same time?”
I told him that I had heard of this but not witnessed it.
“Humans are exactly the same when they get into crowds. By using subtle sensory cues and working to a set of basic rules, you can enter a crowd full of people all heading in different directions and come out the other side without touching anyone or causing an accident.”
“How?” I said, looking suspiciously at the swirling mass of humanity.
“Think of it as a subtle dance, where you have to avoid touching anyone. You have to jog and dodge your way around but also have to know when people are going to dodge and jink round you. Give it a whirl.”
I stepped into the crowd, and almost immediately a woman stopped dead in front of me.
“Sorry,” I said, and walked on. I could sense I was disrupting the smooth liquidity of the crowd, and based on the noises people were making, it wasn’t appreciated. I got to the other side of the street without bumping into anyone, but only just.
“Not so easy, is it?” said Square, and I had to admit he was right. I had thought being in the RealWorld would be simple, or at least a lot like home, but it wasn’t. Nothing here was assumed; everything had to be actually done, and witnessed. Weirder still, once something was done, it was gone, and the knowledge of it faded almost immediately into memory. Once or twice I found myself attempting to move backwards or forwards in time before realizing that that’s not how it worked. If I wanted to be five minutes in the future, I had to laboriously run the five minutes in real time, and if I wanted to go back, I couldn’t. It was how I imagined the narrator in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu spent most of his life—trapped in a noisy, brightly colored cage barely two or three seconds wide.
After twenty minutes I could walk through the crowd without too much difficulty, but once or twice I found myself in the situation where the people I was trying to avoid met me head on, and I moved left, and they did, so I moved right, and they did, too, and so on, for up to five times, which elicited nothing more than a chuckle from my dancing partner.
“The old ‘back and forth’ happens a lot when real and fictional people meet,” said Square when I’d returned to where he was waiting for me. “If the Outlanders had any idea we were amongst them, it would be the surest way to tell. That and a certain confusion when it comes to everyday tasks. If you see someone unable to boil a kettle, open a sash window or understand he has an appalling haircut, it probably means he’s fictional.”