‘You must come and see my little house, George,’ she kept telling me – and I had finally, reluctantly agreed.
‘Hi there, Little Rose! How ya doing George?’
The neighbours knew who I was because they were ‘extras’: projections of SenSpace like the houses and the trees. Travel five kilometres to the next identical street and you would find exactly the same people, doing exactly the same things, the same again after ten kilometres, after fifteen, after twenty… When someone moved into a house, the extras who inhabited it before were simply deleted. Only in streets fully occupied by SenSpace subscribers, were the fictional neighbours no longer present at all.
But their illusory nature didn’t stop Little Rose from greeting them:
‘Hello there, Gramps… How are you, Bessy…! Don’t miss out my mailbox will you, Delmont?’
And she looked around at me with a pleased smile, almost as if she expected me to be impressed by the number of people she knew.
Only one person in the street did not greet us, and was not greeted by Little Rose. A pale figure in a white suit, he slunk past, avoiding our eyes.
‘Who is that?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘A subscriber. He moved in the other day to the house next door but two. It’s a shame, there was a really nice friendly family in there before and…’
But now her face lit up. She gestured towards a little house covered in bright pink roses.
‘There it is! Rose Cottage! What do you think?’
So I was shown the striped wallpaper in the lounge, the yellow-and-white in the hallway, the pink in Little Rose’s cosy bedroom. Her bed with its fluffy pink and white cover really felt soft. The room really had a feminine smell of lavender and talc.
‘This is your room,’ said Little Rose, showing me into a sickly pastiche of the bedroom of an adolescent boy. I cringed and was about to protest when a telephone chirruped downstairs.
I looked at Little Rose. She giggled.
‘Yes, it’s a real phone. I’m in SenSpace so much I’ve got it fixed so I can take calls in here. Will you get it for me?’
The phone, the virtual phone, was ringing in the hallway. The electronic projection of my arm reached out and picked up this electronically created mirage.
But the voice on the end was a real one, coming from the outside world.
‘Is this George Simling? I’m phoning about the advert in the paper. I understand you’re interested in making a purchase?’
It was a woman’s voice with a faint German accent.
‘Advert? No. I think there must be some mistake.’
‘No,’ the voice was very, very firm. ‘There is no mistake. I assure you of that. You were interested in making a purchase. If you’ve changed your mind, of course, that’s fine.’
The door to the kitchen of Rose Cottage was open. Beyond it, through the kitchen window, I could see an electronic ginger cat picking its way across the sunlit, electronic garden.
‘Listen, I really haven’t…’
And then, with a chill of pure fear, I understood. It was the call from the AHS.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘I remember now. Yes, I am still interested in making a purchase.’
‘Who was it?’ said Little Rose when I went back upstairs. She’d been trying out different kinds of curtains in her bedroom window, which overlooked an idyllic scene of children playing in immaculate back yards, with the wholesome homes of the City without EndTM stretching away into the distance.
‘Oh, just someone from work,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take this helmet off Ruth. I’ve got a headache. I need some real air.’
26
I met the AHS contact in a café in Mendel District, a relatively poor area which had a large guestworker population. As I’d been instructed, I bought a coffee and sat outside, watching the passers-by and trying to guess which one it would be. She had told me to call her Ingrid and from her voice and accent I had created a mental picture of someone tall and fair and rather forbidding.
In the event though, she was small and dark, and I hardly noticed her until she actually sat down beside me. She wore dark glasses and had her hair tied up tightly in a bun. She shook hands with me without smiling.
‘Finish your coffee,’ she said, ‘and I’ll take you somewhere where we can be alone.’
I nodded. I felt scared but only a little because I couldn’t really believe that this was actually happening.
‘The place I’m going to take you,’ she said, ‘is a cheap hotel, whose rooms are used during the day for… assignations.’
It took me a second or so to grasp what she meant.
‘But don’t get any ideas!’ she said with a small smile.
We made our way to the hotel where an arthritic Greek woman showed us up to a bleak room with a sink and a double bed. Ingrid sat down on the bed. I hesitated, then sat beside her. There was nowhere else to sit.
The room had a lingering smell of sweat. Some couple had been making love here not long before. I wondered what it would be like to lie down on a bed like this with a real human being.
‘This will be our only meeting,’ Ingrid said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the aims and methods of the Army of the Human Spirit. When you have had a couple of days to think about it, I’ll contact you by phone. If you’ve decided you don’t want to take this any further, that’s no problem. We will leave you alone. If you’ve decided you want to join, that’s fine too. We’ve checked out your background and think you could be an asset to the struggle. Good with languages, I gather?’
I nodded.
‘What will happen then,’ Ingrid said, ‘is that in due course you will receive an invitation to attend a meeting of a club of some kind. This will be your operational unit, your cell, through which – and only through which – you will communicate with the rest of the Army.’
From the adjoining room came suddenly a woman’s loud cries:
‘OH! OH! OH! YES! YES! YES!’ she shrieked.
I returned my attention to Ingrid with great difficulty.
‘…once you’ve joined,’ she was saying, ‘it’s not so easy to leave. You could betray the identity of your cell members. You could betray the Army’s plans. It’s very important you realize this.’
The woman in the next room had reached her peak and her cries were now declining in intensity towards a plateau of peaceful pleasure.
‘Oh yes, oh darling, yes…’
Ingrid looked at me sharply, noticing how much I’d been distracted.
‘I really want to be sure you’ve understood this. What I’m telling you is that if you join and then leave, the Army will make an assessment of the security risk you pose and act accordingly. Bluntly, a decision might well be taken that you should be eliminated. It’s harsh, but we’re at war against a dangerous enemy.’
‘I understand.’
Ingrid took some papers from an inside pocket.
‘Read this. It’s the manifesto of the AHS.’
The woman in the next room said something which I couldn’t catch. A male voice chuckled. The woman gave a shout of laughter: ‘Stop! Stop!’
They were having a playfight, I realized. The man was tickling her.
With a huge effort I turned my attention to the manifesto:
‘The purpose of the Army of the Human Spirit,’ it began, ‘is to achieve a world in which the human spirit can truly express itself. We do not believe this is possible in the artificial state called Illyria. We do not believe that it is legitimate or healthy for an elite to cut itself off from the ordinary human beings who feed, clothe and sustain it, and declare itself to be a nation in its own right. Nor do we believe that the human spirit can grow in an environment in which only those things which are measurable are acknowledged to be real…’