“Oh honestly Terence!” objected Clarissa.
“On each of five storeys,” Terence went on, “there are two parallel corridors half a mile long. Along each corridor there are eight tiers of shelving, and on each shelf, every fifty centimetres, there is another one of you. And there you sit in your goldfish bowls, all wired up together, dreaming that you have bodies and limbs and genitals and pretty faces….”
“Terence!”
“Every once in a while,” the old man stubbornly continued, “one of you shrivels up and is duly replaced by a new blob of porridge, cultured from cells in a vat somewhere, and dropped into place by a machine. And then two of you are deceived into thinking that you have conceived a child and given birth, when in fact…”
“Terence! Stop this now!”
The old man broke off with a derisive snort. Lemmy said nothing, his eyes fixed on the monitor.
“Of course you’re wonderful for the environment,” Terence resumed, after only the briefest of pauses. “That was the rationale, after all. That was the excuse. As I understand it, two hundred and fifty of you don’t use as much energy or cause as much pollution as one manipulative old parasite like my dear Clarissa here – or one grumpy old fossil like me. But that doesn’t alter the fact that there isn’t much more to any of you than there is to one of those pickled specimens I’ve got down on the landing there, or that your lives are an eternal video game in which you’ve been fooled into thinking you really are the cartoon characters you watch and manipulate on the screen.”
“Why do you do this, Terence?” Clarissa cried. Why are you so cruel?”
The old man gave a bark of derision.
“Cruel? Me? You hypocrite, Clarissa. You utter hypocrite. It’s you that keeps bringing them back here, these pretty boys, these non-existent video-game boys. Why would you do that to them if you didn’t want to confront them with what they really are?”
He laughed.
“Yes, and why keep cutting those holes in the fence.”
Clarissa gasped. Her husband grinned at her.
“If you didn’t want me to find out, my dearest, you should have put the wire cutters back in the shed where you found them. You cut the holes so that animals will wander down into the city and lure back more boys for you to bring home. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re not going to try and deny it?”
Clarissa gave a thin, despairing wail.
“Alright Terence, alright. But Lemmy is here now. Lemmy is here!”
“No he’s not! He’s not here at all. We’ve already established that. He’s over there on a shelf in a jar of formaldehyde – or whatever substance it is that they pickle them in. He only seems to be here and we could very easily fix that by the simple act of turning off our implants. Why don’t you turn yours off now if his presence distresses you? Even better, we could unplug the sensor and then even he won’t think he’s here. There’ll be only you and me, up here all alone with our big empty house beneath us.”
Clarissa turned to Lemmy.
“Don’t pay any attention to him. You’re as real as we are. You just live in a different medium from us, that’s all, a more modern medium, a medium where you can be young and strong and healthy all your life, and never grow wrinkly and bitter and old like us. That’s the truth of it, but Terence just can’t accept it.”
But Lemmy didn’t answer her. He was watching the monitor. An enormous articulated truck had pulled up outside the London Hub and was now passing through a gate which had slid open automatically to let it in. Oddly, the cabin of the truck had no windows, so he couldn’t tell who or what was driving it.
“Why don’t you go over there and join them then, Clarissa my dear?” sneered Terence, his old eyes gleaming. “Why don’t you get your brains spooned out into a jar and yourself plugged into the Field?”
Lemmy crept still closer to the screen.
“Hey look! He’s out there! That white animal. Way over there by that big grey place.”
“Lemmy, Lemmy,” cried Clarissa, rushing over to him, “you’re so…”
“Oh for goodness’ sake get a grip woman!” snapped the old man.
He dragged a chair into the middle of the room.
“What you doing?” she cried.
“I’m going to do what you should have done from the beginning. Send this poor wretch home.”
Wobbling dangerously, he climbed onto the chair and reached up towards an invisible object below the ceiling.
“Apologies. There has been a local sensor malfunction. If not resolved in five seconds you will be relocated to your home address or to your nominated default location. One… Two… Three… Four… Five….”
Lemmy was sitting in the corner chair in the cosy, cramped little living room that he shared with his parents, Dorothy and John. John was watching TV. Mouser, their blue cartoon cat, was curled up on the fluffy rug in front of the fire. (The man at Dotlands market had claimed he had an organic central nervous system. Who knows? Perhaps he did. Perhaps at the back of some shelf in the London Hub, he had a small-sized goldfish bowl and his own small-sized scoop of porridge.)
In with a flourish came Lemmy’s mother wearing a new dress.
“Da-da!”
She gave a little twirl and Lemmy’s dad (who looked like a rock‘n’roll star from the early days, except that he smiled far too easily) turned round in his armchair and gave an approving whistle.
“Oh hello Lemmy darling!” said Dorothy. “I didn’t hear you come in!”
“Blimey!” exclaimed his father. “Me neither! You snuck in quietly mate. I had no idea you was in the room!”
“So what do you think then, Lemmy?” Dorothy asked.
“Yeah, nice dress mum,” Lemmy said.
“It’s not just the dress sweetheart. Your kind dad’s given me a lovely early birthday present and got me upgraded to 256 colours. Can you see the difference? I think I look great!”
“Here comes the rain,” said Lemmy’s dad.
They could always tell it was raining from the faint grey streaks that appeared in the room, like interference on TV. Not that they minded. The streaks were barely visible and they made it feel more cosy somehow, being inside in the warm with the TV and the fire going. It had never occurred to Lemmy or his parents to wonder what caused them.
But in that moment Lemmy suddenly understood. The house had no physical roof. It had no physical ceilings, no physical upstairs floor, nothing to keep out the physical rain that fell from the physical sky. In the physical world there was no TV here, no fire, no lights, no fluffy rug, no comfy chairs, no Mouser or Dorothy or Lemmy or John, just an empty shell of brick, open to the sky, a ruin among many others, in the midst of an abandoned city.
“I thought your skin looked nice, mum,” he said bravely. “256 colours, eh? That explains it.”
Dorothy laughed and ruffled his hair.
“Liar! You wouldn’t have even noticed if I hadn’t told you.”
She sat down next to her husband on the settee and snuggled up against him to watch TV.
Lemmy moved his chair closer to the fire and tried to watch with them, tried to give himself over to it as he’d always done before, back in the days before Clarissa Fall let in that white hart from the forest beyond the perimeter.
Valour
Here comes Victor, hurtling through the stratosphere on the Lufthansa shuttle: a shy, thin young Englishman, half-listening to the recorded safety instructions.