Moments later he pulled up in the road opposite the entrance to the ExEx building, and turned off the engine.
CHAPTER 33
Teresa was not sure what Grove was about to do, and her uncertainty had an immediate effect on him.
He reached forward and began to fiddle with the volume and tuning knobs on the car's radio.
They were held on only by spring or clip pressure; when he had pulled them off, the retaining bracket quickly came free, and a few seconds later Grove had managed to release the whole instrument from its mount. The manufacturers had attached a label to the inner case, warning that the radio was protected against theft by an electronic coding system. As soon as Grove saw this he pushed the radio aside in disgust. lt swung beneath the dash on its extruded cables.
He climbed out of the car and walked round to the back. Teresa, realizing that they had come to the pivotal moment in the scenario, watched to see what he would do. This would be when he either took the handgun and the rifle from the car, or left them concealed inside.
As she thought this Grove went past the compartment lid, tapped his fingertips on it in a single gesture of annoyance, and walked across the road towards the entrance to the ExEx building.
She made him glance back once.
lt was for her almost a final gulp of reality, like the last deep breath taken by a diver.
From here, the view of the town was distant, and today the haze made the panorama indefinite without concealing
it. The softness of detail frustrated her; she wanted to devour the view.
Was the blurring of heat haze the way this scenario defined the edge of its own virtual reality?
Grove kicked irritably at a clod of earth, so Teresa let him turn and continue on his way. He pushed open the glass door of the ExEx building, and went across to the reception desk.
Paula Willson was on duty.
Grove took the stolen money from his pocket, and tossed it on the desk.
'I want to use the stuff you have here,' he said. 'That's forty quid ... should be enough.'
Paula said, regarding the loose notes on her desk, 'Are you a member, sir?'
No, he wouldn't be, Teresa thought. Grove would have failed the psychological profiling with the first three questions on the form. She wondered how he would lie his way out of this.
' Not here. Maidstone, I usually go to Maidstone.' Grove reached into the back pocket of his pants, felt around until he found what he was looking for, then pulled out the stiff plastic ID
card. He held it up for her to see. lt blurred in front of his eyes, so Teresa could not check it for authenticity; she knew that if he held it there a little longer it would swim into focus.
Paula took it from him. She appeared to see it in focus, and recognized it. She placed the four tenpound notes in a drawer of her desk, then typed the serial number of the card into her terminal. After a short pause she swiped its magnetic strip through the reader, and passed the card back to him, together with the usual information pack for users of the ExEx equipment.
'That's in order, Mr Grove. Thank you. A technician will assist you when you have made your selection.'
Grove took the card and pushed it back into his pocket, then walked through the inner door.
He, or Teresa, knew exactly where to go. A few moments later he had located an unused computer terminal, and was running the index software, seeming to be every bit as familiar with it as she was.
Her visits to ExEx were all so recent and commonplace that to Teresa it was a continuing shock to accept that she was still inhabiting Grove's body, that what was going on was a merely a scenario. While Grove peeled his way through the introductory screens of information, Patricia walked past the desk, and Teresa made Grove glance up at her.
'Hi,' she/Grove said to Patricia.
'Hello, again.'
Was that Patricia's reply to her, defined from the adumbration of her expectations? Or was it actually to Grove, a known customer and member of the ExEx facilities, perhaps someone Patricia had seen several times before?
Teresa forced herself forward in Grove's mind, to try to minimize any more influence on his decisions. Every thought she had, back there in the recess of his mind, every tiny detail she noticed, became translated into a decision or action taken by Grove. In crossover, she actually became Grove himself. Never before, in any scenario, had she experienced such active response.
She tried to assume a state of mental passivity, and watched the screens of options scrolling by. She wondered what he was looking for; then she wondered if wondering would also influence him. lt made him pause, at least.
She recalled the ease with which she had been able to talk to Shandy, that day in virtual London.
'Gerry?' she said.
'Who's that?'
'What exactly are you looking for?'
'Shut the fuck up!'
This was accompanied by a mental strike against her, a bludgeoning rejection, full of fear and hatred and bullying. Again, what felt like his hot breath welled around her.
She backed away, into the depths of crossover. He hunched defensively and began jabbing at the keyboard with movements that were so quick she could not see what he was doing. On the screen, the various menus and lists appeared and disappeared at dizzying speed.
Once again it occurred to her that her presence in the scenario was becoming unsustainable, that it was time to withdraw. To do that, though, would mean having to retreat from the Grove scenario now, at a point where it was becoming of real interest to her. What Grove had done inside the ExEx building clearly had an influence on the violent events that were soon to follow.
She didn't want to have to start over. Gerry Grove's movements on this day, recorded in such detail inside the scenario, were proving to be timeconsuming and traumatic.
Teresa had never known such a long and exhausting scenario, nor felt so appalled by what she found. She did not want to have to cope again with the banal evil of his mind, Mostly, though, she could not face having to go back to the beginning and experience his murders again, to witness them and either by inaction appear to condone them, or by intervention appear to influence them.
She had come as far as this; now she wanted to see it through and find out what he had done.
His helterskelter progress through the index listings continued; Teresa thought that because he was moving so quickly he could only be choosing selection boxes at random, almost on autopilot, simply clicking on one option after another, uninterested in where it might take him.
Suddenly he stopped, and Teresa felt his body relax slightly. He seemed to lean forward slightly, as if the tension of searching through the screens had been supporting his torso.
The top of the screen said:
Interactive/Police/Murder/ Guns/ 195 0 /William Cook/Elsa Jane Durdle.
Next to Elsa's name was a video frame; a tiny static glimpse of bright sunlight and windswept palm trees, a row of diagonally parked cars glinting in the sun.
The chances of Grove selecting this scenario at random were too immense to calculate. She had always presumed that Elsa was uniquely hers! Teresa felt protest rising in her, but almost at once Grove responded to it and went back into action.
He continued to move swiftly through the hierarchy of options, the computer screen flickering as he somehow anticipated each new menu. Once again, he quit abruptly.
Participatory/Victimenabled
/Interactive/