'A man!' Teresa shouted, but incoherently, because she was short of breath and she found it difficult to form words. 'On the roof! Back there! A man on the roof!'
Her voice was rasping, and she had to cough.
The woman looked at her as if she was mad and pushed past her, continuing on her way.
Teresa wheeled round, looking anxiously for someone else who could help her.
The traffic was rolling by as normal. There were no emergency sirens, and no helicopter moved overhead. She looked left and right: in one direction the road curved away towards the railway bridge, in the other it became indistinguishable as it wove through the clustering of old redbrick terraced houses and concrete commercial buildings on either side.
She looked again at the roof of the house where she had seen the man.
From this position at the front there was no sign of him, and none either of the scaffolding.
That was another mystery: from where she had first looked, the scaffolding was built as high as the chimney stack, spreading across to the front of the building. It should be visible from here. She went back through the alley, hurried along to the place where it turned, and looked back.
The man lay at his steep angle, trapped by the scaffolding.
Close at hand, swelling terrifyingly around her: gunfire, sirens, amplified voices. In the square of daylight, glimpsed through the alley, nothing moved.
Teresa put her hand up to her neck, feeling for the valve.
CHAPTER 25
Teresa had by this time browsed through the catalogue of scenarios often enough to be able to find her way around quickly, but the sheer extent of the range of software, and the complexity of the database itself, still daunted her.
The sense of unfolding endlessness lent her a wonderful feeling of freedom, spoiling her for choice. Each time she clicked on a new selection a range of apparently limitless options appeared; every one of those itself opened up innumerable further choices; each of those led to further levels of choice, endlessly detailed and varied; and each of those choices was a remarkably complete world in itself, full of noise, colour, movement, incident, danger, travel, physical sensations. Most of the scenarios were crossreferenced or hyperlinked to others.
Entry into any scenario gave her a magical sense of infinitude, of the ability to roam and explore, away from the constraints of the main incident.
Extreme reality was a landscape of forking paths, endlessly crossing and recrossing, leading somewhere new, towards but never finding the edge of reality.
Today she made her selections, trying to calculate how much real time each of them would use up, and how long in total she could remain inside the simulations. She had learned, although reluctantly, that she should be spading with her time. Too much ExEx in one day exhausted her.
She confined herself to three unrelated scenarios, and selected the option for repeated entry as required. Two of
the scenarios were the sort of interdiction setups she was used to from her Bureau training, but which for all their sensory engagement were beginning to bore her. However, she was already thinking ahead to her return to the office, knowing that Ken Mitchell had probably made trouble for her. Some interdiction experience while on leave might count a little to her advantage, if advantage were needed. Butler growing feeling of tedium was real, so for her third ExEx she decided to try an experiment: a short scenario which depicted a major traffic accident, the point being that the user had to learn to anticipate and avoid the accident.
After she had made this last choice Teresa continued to browse through the catalogue. She wanted something different, something that carried no risks, no responsibility, no censure.
Gun incidents and traffic accidents were not the sum of life's experiences, she decided. There were other affairs of the mind and body she would like to experience vicariously, especially those of the body.
She was in a foreign country, alone, largely unknown by the people around her. She wanted a little fun.
She had no hesitation in going to the material she wanted to try, but she did have misgivings about the staff here knowing she was using it. The thought of doing it made her throat feel dry with anticipation; the thought of being observed or noticed doing it terrified her.
Before making her selection she therefore turned to the User's Operating Manual lying on the bench next to the computer, and looked for the chapter on security.
The manual had been written by a technophile genius, not a human being, and like many works of its kind it was difficult to read and follow. However, with determination she gleaned the reassurance she wanted: the user's choice of scenario was coded and identified. This was primarily intended for the programming of the nanochips. By default it was information that was available to the technical operator, but the user could alter it if privacy was required.
To activate security measures, the user should select the following option ...
Teresa selected the following option, then made her final choice of scenario. The fact that it was shareware, as she realized at the last minute, gave her an extra edge of anticipation.
She waited while the ExEx nanochips were programmed. Half a minute later a sealed plastic phial was delivered to the desk by the peripheral, and she took this through to the ExEx facility, eager to begin.
Teresa was a gendarme on night patrol in the immigrant quarter of the city of Lyon; it was January 10, 1959.
Her name was Pierre Montaigne, she had a wife called Agnes, and two children aged seven and five. A steady rain made the cobbles gleam; doorways to clubs and restaurants were lit with a single bulb over the lintels; the streets were a noisy chaos of fast-moving traffic. Teresa was trying to think in French, a language she did not know. With an effort and a flaring of panic, she forced herself back to English. Everything was in black and white.
From the start, she recognized a difference: she had more choice, more control, in this scenario. Indeed, as she joined it Pierre Montaigne came to a sudden halt, practically falling forward. Her partner, Andre Lepasse, was obliged to turn and wait for her. Teresa immediately relaxed her influence over the man, and the two gendarmes continued their patrol.
They reached a small, unpretentious couscous restaurant. lt had an unpainted door and a large plateglass window steamed up with condensation. Over the door, a handpainted sign said: La Chevre Algerienne. Montaigne and
Lepasse were about to walk on, when someone inside the restaurant must have noticed them.
The door was thrust open, and an exchange of shouts took place with two men, one of whom appeared to be the proprietor.
Teresa and her partner pushed their way roughly into the restaurant, where a man had taken a young woman hostage and was threatening her with a longbladed knife. Everyone was yelling at once, including Lepasse. Pierre Montaigne did not know what to do, because she could not speak French.
Teresa remembered LIVER.
Berkshire, England, August 19, 1987. She was Sergeant Geoffrey Verrick, a uniformed traffic policeman, passenger in a fastpursuit patrol car on the M4 motorway, fifty miles west of London.
A call came through from Reading police headquarters saying that a shooting incident had taken place in the Berkshire village of Hungerford. All units were to proceed there directly.