She walked through the reception area, looking ahead, zipping up her anorak and wondering if she should pull on
the hood.
'Goodbye, Paula,' she said to the receptionist. 'See you
again.
'Cheerio, Mrs ... Has it started to rain out there?'
Rain? I'm not sure.' Teresa pushed through the glass doors, and walked across the hardstanding outside.
Heat from the sunwhitened. concrete rose around her. The sun was high in a brilliant sky.
Teresa stared around her in amazement: the trees were in full leaf, the distant sea was shining so brightly it seemed silver. the houses of the lower town were softened by a gentle heat haze.
The only clouds visible were on the horizon far away to the south, somewhere over the French coast. Two young women, walking along the road, were dressed in shorts and Tshirts.
Teresa unzipped her anorak, and slipped it off. When she drove up to the ExEx building this morning there had been a cold easterly wind, spotted with ice and freezing rain. She remembered hurrying from her car, keeping her head down against the wind, then, in the reception area, flapping her anorak to try to shed some of the water from it, and mopping her face with a tissue. Now it was midsummer.
She looked around for her car. That morning, the cold morning, she had had to park it against the kerb, a short distance away. She walked towards where she had left it, but a darkred Montego was parked in its place. The two nearside wheels had mounted the kerb and were resting on the grassy verge.
Her own car, the rented Ford Escort, was nowhere around.
Teresa went to the Montego. On its left side was a long paint smear across both doors, and a deep dent, where the car had hit something solid and whitepainted. When she peered in the front window on the driver's side she saw a car radio, pulled from its mount but still connected by wires, discarded, hanging down under the dashboard.
Teresa tried the handle, and the unlocked door opened. Feeling a chill of fear, in spite of the stifling heat of the day, Teresa reached down to the release of the luggage compartment lid.
She heard and felt the lock click open behind her. She went back, raised the lid.
A semiautomatic rifle and a handgun lay on the carpeted floor. Several boxes of ammunition were also there; one had broken open and a handful of rounds lay spilled about. She recognized the handgun as a Colt, the one Grove, and she, had used to kill Mrs Williams and her child in the woods. She had not been able to get a good look at the rifle while Grove was handling it, but now she recognized it as an M16 carbine.
Teresa slammed down the lid then stood there, staring at the car's polished paintwork, trying to think. The sun beat down on her neck. The temptation again swept over her to shrink mentally from the consequences of all this.
She had been in the scenario with Grove. lt was a standard ExEx scenario. In this standard ExEx scenario she had shown Grove how to use the weapons; maybe he would have shot the people anyway, maybe he simply Missed the first time, maybe he wasn't as incompetent as she'd thought, maybe he would have gone on and shot at them until they were dead.
Maybe she was making excuses.
All right, in the real world Grove had definitely shot
those two: Rosalind Williams and her fouryearold child, Tommy. She had seen their names on the town memorial. She had seen video footage of the scene of the crime. She had seen the newspaper files. She had talked to Mrs Williams' bereaved husband, and to other people who had known them.
But until she had shown Grove how to shoot, he had been incompetent. He held the heavy, sophisticated gun like a boy playing with a toy pistol. Inside the scenario.
Had she not done so, what would have happened to his two victims? Inside the scenario.
Teresa turned away from the Montego, leaned her backside against it and stared down the hill towards the distant sea. Although the town shimmered under haze she could see it well enough: the line of low surrounding hills to left and right, making up the rest of the Ridge, the dull modem houses in their stultifying ranks; lower down, the more attractively arranged and time-weathered buildings of the Old Town, then the sea, a glistening silverblue, the distant clouds over France. lt all stretched out before her, endless and inviting.
The rest of England, the seas and the endless sky, the world, spread around her. A short drive to Dover or Newhaven and she could be on a ferry across that sea to France, thence to the rest of Europe. A slightly longer drive to the north and she would be at Gatwick Airport, ready for her flight home. There were no extremes to limit her.
But this was not the reality she had left. This was summer in the streets of the town below people would be driving their cars with the windows down, the sunroofs open and the ineffective cold-air blowers roaring. Pedestrians would be strolling in shorts and flimsy tops.
Shops and houses would have their doors and windows open to the heat. No sun shone like this in Britain's winter, which she had woken
up to, driven in, hurried through, shaken from her coat, only that morning.
It had been a standard ExEx scenario, written by the company that owned the ExEx building. The standard ExEx scenario had undoubtedly been Grove's, set on the day.
Standard extremes, the corporate reality. GunHo scenarios were industry standard.
But Grove had gone on, using other software. Sick of the naked impact of Grove's mind Teresa had withdrawn, leaving him in the unlikely embodiment of Shandy in her porno role.
Presumably he was still there, enjoying what must be for any man a novel sexual experience.
She remembered walking down Coventry Street in Shandy's mind, learning about the girl and the world she inhabited. The flashing logo, SENSH, was comng at them every halfminute or so. 'Doesn't that drive you crazy, Shan?' she had said. No, Shandy replied, you get used to it in the end.
lt had been run as a closing message just now, when she left the scenario.
The scenario she had entered, the industrystandard GunHo scenario about Grove, was not the one she had left: she had been in Vic's homemade software, complete with boltedon bits of London and Arizona, and terrible puns and spelling mistakes.
When she withdrew from that she had returned to the ExEx facility in Bulverton. But it was to a hot sunny day, like the one when Grove went berserk.
lt made rough sense, of course. When Grove entered the Shandy scenario, taking her with him, her only way out was to the reality he had left.
The credit card that was too new to be valid; the cold winter's day that had turned to a heatwave; the Montego parked in place of her car.
She was still in the Grove scenario.
The implications were shocking, and impossible to comprehend fully, but at least she knew how to cope. With a desperate urgency to escape, unlike any she had previously known, Teresa recalled the LIVER mnemonic, and waited for the GunHo logo to appear as the scenario was aborted.
Teresa remained in Welton Road, outside the ExEx building, with Grove's stolen car gleaming in the midsummer sun. Nothing changed.
She had never known the mnemonic to fail before, although Dan Kazinsky had warned all the trainees that it was not infallible.
Standing there, in shock, but focused on what had happened, Teresa remembered a day during training at the Academy, when they had been given a long and technical lecture by a professor of psychology from Johns Hopkins University. This woman had drily explained the theory of mental override within an imaginary world. Several of the trainees afterwards admitted privately that their attention had wandered, but Teresa had taken it all in.