‘Did you hear something?’ asked Gates.
‘Just you, breathing away like a pervert.’
‘Don’t blame me, blame the simulation.’ Gates glanced around. ‘Where are we now?’
‘The supplies warehouse. Next stop the water plant.’
The car slowed and then stopped.
‘Why have we stopped?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Dallas, stamping on the accelerator pedal. ‘We just did.’ It was plain from the voltmeter on the dash that there was still plenty of power in the battery. He slid off the seat and lifted the hatch on the front of the car to check the electrical terminals. ‘The connections look okay,’ observed Dallas, but he wiggled the wires to make sure. There was nothing loose. ‘No sign of a problem here.’ He closed the hatch and slid back behind the wheel. But still the car refused to budge.
Gates pointed the gun one way and then the other, as if expecting trouble to arrive at any minute.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I think we’ll have to walk,’ said Dallas, and collecting another life-support pack and his own UHT gun, he stepped down from the car again, with Gates following. They hadn’t walked ten paces when Gates, glancing nervously over his shoulder, noticed that the electric car had disappeared.
‘Dallas,’ he said urgently.
Dallas turned, saw the empty space, and walked back to where the car had been standing just a few seconds earlier.
‘That bastard Prevezer,’ muttered Gates. ‘What the hell’s he playing at?’
‘You could be right,’ said Dallas. ‘It would seem that someone wants to play, anyway.’
‘Bloody simulation,’ said Gates. ‘I don’t like this, Dallas. I don’t like this at all.’
Dallas was about to answer when he noticed the corridor lights beginning to dim. Simultaneously each man hit a switch on his helmet that controlled two pairs of halogen lamps.
‘Let’s go back to the airlock, to the R&R area,’ Gates urged.
‘Why do you assume things will be any better there?’
‘Because I’ve been there already.’
‘You just think you have, that’s all. It’s probably already different from when we were there. Just look what happened to the car. No, there’s nothing to be served by going back.’
Dallas began to advance along the curving corridor, which was now illuminated only by their helmet lights. But the size of the light arc meant there was always part of the corridor ahead that remained unseen. For fifty slow yards neither man said a word, and it was Gates who finally broke the silence: His keener eyes had spotted something.
‘Lying on the floor, ahead of us,’ he said urgently. ‘Do you see it?’
‘I see it.’
Gates led their careful approach toward the object.
‘Looks like a space suit,’ he observed, and then they halted as, still lying on the floor, the suit moved. ‘There’s someone inside it.’
‘Can’t be one of our people,’ said Dallas.
‘I almost wish it was,’ confessed Gates.
‘Although I suppose anything’s possible now that we’ve seen the car disappear.’
The stricken figure seemed to writhe on the floor, and standing over it, Gates attempted to communicate on an open channel. Getting no response, he prodded the figure with the toe of his boot.
‘I suggest you leave it the fuck alone,’ Dallas said.
Gates shook his head. His curiosity was aroused by the discovery that the helmet’s gold-painted visor was covering the clear bubble that would have revealed the figure’s identity. ‘I’m just going to see who it is,’ he said, kneeling down.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ said Dallas. But even as he spoke Gates was reaching to tip up the visor.
‘Jesus Christ.’ For one brief, heart-stopping moment Gates had a view of a helmet that was filled with hundreds of long, thin red worms before disgust instinctively made him move away. It wasn’t this movement that saved his virtual life. Rather, it was because of the position he had adopted seconds earlier, kneeling over the top of the head instead of the body, which would have been more typical. The very second after he turned up the visor it was as if the body that filled the suit — if there had ever been a body — was pierced from below by a hundred animal-looking spikes that were as sharp as needles, each of them bright red and two or three feet in length. Gates, already recoiling from the first horror, jumped back at the sight of the second, mute with fright, even as Dallas fired a bolt of boiling electrons into the very center of the spinous suit. There was a bright flash of blue light as the focused beam sliced the suit in half, reducing the center to a mass of molten metal, rubber, and something once animate.
As Gates picked himself off the ground, cursing with fright, Dallas looked at the UHT gun with a new respect.
‘What the hell is that supposed to be?’ demanded Gates.
‘I don’t think it really matters what it’s supposed to be,’ said Dallas.
‘That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t come within an inch of being a goddamn pincushion.’
‘What I mean to say is that we won’t find any logical explanations about things from here on in. Now it’s just a matter of trying to get through this shit with as little pain as possible.’
‘Looking at this particular piece of shit, that’s not going to be easy.’
‘I agree.’ Dallas thought for a moment. ‘Tell me, have you ever had Simsex?’
‘What kind of question is that, right now?’
‘A very important one.’
‘Okay, yeah, I’ve had Simsex.’
‘How good was it? As good as the real thing?’
‘In a lot of ways it was actually better. But then I’ve never had sex on the Moon. Cav says that’s pretty good.’
‘It stands to reason that if pleasure can be more intense in a simulation, then so can pain. You and I may not get killed in a simulation. But is being killed the worst that could happen to us? I mean, the pleasure of sex is over soon after your orgasm. But pain need never end. You know, it’s quite possible that we could get into a situation where we end up wishing ourselves dead. Except that death can never come in here. It’s like something in Greek mythology. Like Sisyphus condemned to roll an enormous rock up a hill for all eternity, or Prometheus bound by chains to a rock and condemned to have an eagle tear out a liver that continually renews itself. It’s probably only inside a simulation that myths and legends can achieve their full potential. Punishments such as those might actually have been devised specifically for a simulation. Do you see what I mean? Death isn’t so bad. It’s the waiting for death that can be intolerable, and yet must be tolerated.’
‘I wish you’d shut up, Dallas. And I wish I knew what that bastard Prevezer was doing right now. If I ever see him again, I’m going to teach him the meaning of reality in a way he’s not likely to forget.’
VIII
Rimmer was growing bored. It was hardly very satisfying to torture someone if you couldn’t see them bleed or hear them scream with pain. A victim had to have some kind of relationship with his tormentor, the kind that left an opportunity for him to beg for mercy; otherwise the cruelty inflicted hardly qualified as torture at all, but rather some reduced form of brutality, such as inhumanity or spite. Having set his heart on becoming the personification of pure evil in the eyes of Dallas, it mattered a great deal to Rimmer that those eyes should at least be open and fixed on him. Whatever pleasure he took in torturing Dallas was not served by watching the man’s vital signs and hearing Prevezer’s descriptions of how he had ruptured one simulation with another one more hellish. It was true, Dallas’s pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and body temperature indicated a person who was undergoing some kind of severe trauma, but trying to fathom the reason for each and every surge in his heart rate — at one point it had actually touched one hundred and ninety beats per minute — was proving frustrating to Rimmer. Since Prevezer hardly relished the task of torturing his two colleagues, he was unable to furnish Rimmer with a sufficiently horrific level of detail as to the variety of terror that they were experiencing. It was only with a gun to his head that he had even managed to describe the Sura Fifteen Simworld he had added to the model of the First National Blood Bank: