When she parked her car, though, she always turned her implant on again. This of course instantly transformed empty ruined physical London into the lively metropolis that was the Urban Consensual Field, a virtual city in imitation of London as it once was, superimposed by the Hub over what London had become. Clarissa could still just remember those old days: the crowds, the fumes, the lights, the noise, the hectic life of a city in which, bizarrely, it still seemed feasible for millions of physical human beings to casually consume what they wanted of the physical world’s resources, and casually discard what they didn’t. And she craved that bustle and that life, she craved it desperately.
We all had Field implants of course. They were a necessity for dealing with a civilisation that had become, whether we liked it or not, primarily digital. Spliced into our nervous system, they allowed consensual constructs to be superimposed over our perceptions of the physical world, so that we could see the same world that the consensuals saw, hear what they heard and, to a limited degree, touch what they touched. The rest of us invariably took the position that we didn’t like having to deal with the consensual world, but it was sometimes a necessary evil. But for Clarissa it was different. When she switched on her implant it just wasn’t a matter of practical necessity for her, it was more like injecting heroin into an artery. All at once there were people all around her, there was life, there were shop windows and market stalls piled high with colourful merchandise, and the dizzying suddenness of it was like the hit of a powerful drug.
But her addiction wasn’t so much to the Field itself as to the moment of crossing over. After that first moment the experience never quite lived up to its initial promise, for however hard Clarissa tried, the consensual world shut her out. And she did try. She spent hours in the consensual city outside shops and in parks and on street corners making rather pathetic efforts to engage people in conversation, but most people avoided her and some made no secret of their contempt. It was true that a few kind souls suppressed their revulsion at her age and her physicality and briefly allowed her the illusion that she had made a friend, but it was only out of kindness. Even apart from being an Outsider she really wasn’t very good company anyway. She talked too much; she didn’t listen; and, what was worse, however much she might criticise her fellow Outsiders for our existential snobbery, she herself was as much of a snob as any of us and a lot less inhibited about it. She could never resist pointing out to consensuals the shallow and illusory nature of their existence:
“You’re so very nice dear. It’s such a pity that you’re not really here.”
Usually she found herself alone in a kind of lacuna, with people moving aside to pass her by at a safe distance. And in these situations she would often become distressed and start to rant and shout:
“You’re not real you know! You’re just bits of nervous tissue plugged into a computer! You’re far away from here, suspended in jars of nutrients, and the computer is sending you pictures of the real London with all this consensual nonsense superimposed on top of it!”
Terence used to talk like that a lot when he was alive, as haughty old physicals tended to do, but in those days Clarissa always used to criticise him for it:
“Who’s to say our world is more real than theirs?” I remember her demanding of him at one of the physical community’s periodic gatherings, the two of them on opposite sides of a large dining table laden with silver and fine china and cut glass.
Terence declined to answer. Everyone in the room was willing Clarissa to shut up and let us return to our customary state of numbness.
“Come on Terence, who’s to say?” she insisted. “At least consensuals engage with life and with one another.”
She glared up and down the table.
“And what do you think would be left of us if we stripped away everything that had come from outside ourselves, everything that other people had made? We’d be naked. We’d be gibbering imbeciles. Think about it. Even when we talk to ourselves inside our own heads, we use words that other people gave us.”
But that was then. Now it seemed that Terence had been speaking all along on behalf of another side of Clarissa’s own self.
“Don’t look at me like that!” she’d scold the consensuals when they pointed and laughed at her, “You sold your true bodies for the illusion of youth and plenty, but I am real!”
Sometimes, in the middle of one of these rants, she would defiantly turn off her Field implant, making the people and the traffic disappear from her view, houses become empty shells again and all the shop windows with their cheerful displays turn back into hollow caves:
“I can’t even see you, you know!” she shouted, knowing that the consensuals could nevertheless still see her, for sensors across the city pick up the sights and sounds and textures of everything physical and this becomes the matrix within which the consensual city is built. They had no choice but to see her. “I’m in the real world and I can’t see you at all. That’s how unreal you are. I can turn you off with a flick of a switch.”
But though she might like telling the consensuals they didn’t really exist, their opinion mattered to her desperately and she couldn’t resist turning the implant on again to see what impact she was having. (I’ve never known anyone who turned an implant on and off as often as Clarissa did.) Almost invariably they would all be carefully ignoring her.
It was in these moments, when she had thrown a tantrum and discovered that no one was impressed, that things could get out of control. Once, a month or so before her trip to Piccadilly Circus, she found she could get no one to pay attention to her in the streets outside Walthamstow underground station. Rather than admit defeat, she insisted instead on going right down the stairs, arthritic and unsteady as she was, and waiting on the Southbound platform for a train. The platform emptied around her as the consensuals crowded up to the other end.
And then when the train came in, she promptly tried to step onto it. Of course she fell straight through onto the track, it being a virtual train, part of the Field, which couldn’t bear physical weight, only the notional weight of consensual projections. She broke a small bone in her ankle. It hurt a great deal and she began to hobble up and down calling out for someone to help her up. The rules under which the Field operated meant that the train could not move off with her there. Yet she herself was breaking those rules. To the consternation of the passengers she appeared to them to be wading waist deep through the solid floor of the train, looking up at their averted faces accusingly and haranguing them for their lack of compassion:
“Isn’t there a single soul left in London prepared to help an old woman? Have you all lost your hearts as well as your bodies?”
Broken bones – and physical injuries in general – were completely outside their experience, so they would have had some excuse for not empathising with her plight, but actually they would have liked to help her, if not out of pure altruism, then out of self-interest. For she was holding up the train – not to mention the other trains behind it – and she was distressing everyone. Consensuals, unless they are destitute, are uniformly beautiful and, although they die at last, they don’t age in the way we do. Spit never flies from their mouth. Snot never runs from their noses. Their make-up doesn’t smudge. It must have been truly horrific to see this dreadful wrinkled smeary creature wading up and down among them with its head at knee-height, like some kind of goblin out of a fairy tale. But what could they do? They couldn’t lift Clarissa back onto the platform with their consensual hands and arms, any more than the train could hold her up with its consensual floor.