‘Loophole’s doing AR work for his production company. Why?’
Gabby folds her arms, examining me through her screen as if I were some particularly knotty firewall. ‘Conrad. I don’t mean to pry, but why can’t you just ask him these things yourself?’
‘I don’t know him.’ It’s all I can think of. I can hardly tell her about my mother. ‘He’s famous, and I don’t know him at all.’
In the end, and before I can buck up the courage to contact him myself, Bryon Vaux calls me.
Vaux’s production company is buying up immersive technologies. With them, he plans to smear movies across the real. This is where his current creative ambitions lie: in characters who’ll share your breakfast coffee. In plot beats played out on your journey to work, and confrontations staged in streets you already know. He imagines dreams woven through the real, and all the dreamers dreaming.
That Vaux now wants to buy Loophole outright comes as no surprise. If the purchase goes through he will almost certainly fold the company into his existing operation, dismantling it in order to get at its motive element. Ralf is Loophole’s golden goose, and Vaux is perfectly well aware of the fact. Were it anyone else’s commercial manoeuvre, I’d be cracking champagne along with the rest of the management team, glad of a profitable sale. Vaux will pay well for the company and we will all be winners.
But it is not anyone else. It is him. Bryon Vaux.
He invites me to his club. It’s very different from the one Ralf and I belong to, and not somewhere I would have associated with Vaux at all, recreating as it does the ambience of certain private schools. It caters to a clientele that has stepped from these schools to exclusive universities to remunerative jobs in the public arts like well-bred children stepping stones across a river. It occurs to me that the club has not been chosen with his comfort in mind at all, but mine.
‘How long have you known Michel, then?’
I expected the conversation to centre around Ralf. Our golden goose. Mention of Michel is an unexpected gambit – though of course Michel is the author of the Shaman series, source of Vaux’s wealth.
‘Michel told me about you.’
I’m surprised. ‘He did?’
Vaux smiles. ‘You grew up together, I understand. And it’s the strangest thing. I think I stayed at your hotel a while.’
I feel as though I am falling through a door I thought was locked.
‘Conrad, would you walk with me a while?’
A few minutes later, from the balustrade of an industrial museum overlooking the Forum, I weave my fingers before my eyes. The horse and rider rearing up at the centre of the square refuse to appear. They have entirely vanished. They might never have been. There isn’t the faintest visual stutter. My God, we’re good.
Vaux is sitting beside me on the bench, his hands resting on his knees, big and soft and furred as though they were a couple of pets drowsing on his lap. His feet are small, shod in pale leather handmades. It’s an effort for me to maintain my sense of distance, or, indeed, any cautious reflex at all. If it wasn’t for the steel sheen in his eyes – contact lenses over eyeballs that are already mostly plastic – I might, God help me, even be returning his smile by now.
Aside from a handful of brute physical details – his albino-white hair, his height, the cast of his face – little about Vaux meshes with my nightmares. I am finding it impossible to associate his bulk or his bigness with the brutality I remember. His hands, his boots.
‘I took Ralf out to dinner last night.’
‘Uh-huh.’
His eyes, like mine, are silver-lensed and hard to read. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Of course I mind, Bryon. But I imagine you, being you, scared the living daylights out of him.’ I contemplate the Forum, its soapy white neo-classical columns, its shallow steps and elegant black street furniture and at its centre – an aching absence where its central monument should be. Already I am finding it difficult to remember what the horse and rider looked like. Now that my eyes have registered their absence, the statue is being scrubbed from my memory, washed away as swiftly as a dream.
Loophole’s development team, swimming in all the money and resources Vaux has thrown at it, has hit a serious snag. Now Vaux wants to see if I can spot it on my own.
‘Hang on.’ I study the gap where the monument once stood. ‘I think I see it.’
A family of tourists – mum, dad, two children with backpacks – are making their way in front of the arch on the south-eastern corner of the square. As they pass behind the absent column, they stutter and vanish. A second family appears, identical to the first. Mum, Dad and the kids walk across the road, clear the statue’s occlusion fan, and disappear, one by one. Another identical family appears, several yards in front of the group that’s just vanished. Christ. The glitch. The fault.
‘That took you about eight minutes.’ Vaux smiles. With silvered lenses in his eyes, the expression is predatory. ‘Not bad.’
Vaux has another meeting. I leave him at the mouth of the metro, and walk alone through the Ministries, trying to clear my head.
One by one we are transforming the spaces we have cleared. Here, for example, the ministry buildings have been replaced by paint-blue ponds where no birds swim. Lawns. Forests. We have entirely levelled a square mile south-west of the forum, filling the gap with potato fields that our great-grandparents’ generation would recognise. Hedgerows bend and sway.
Walking through this rusticated city, the air tastes fresher, though of course I know it’s just as muggy and polluted as always. With grass under my feet – albeit imaginary grass – I have become attuned to subtle gradients. I’ve learned to navigate, less by what I see, but more by the lie of the land under my feet. I can picture in my mind’s eye the organic shapes into which the city has been plugged, and which, after so many centuries, it has still not altogether erased. Little by little, and in unexpected ways, we are rubbing the city away to reveal the pattern of a forgotten land.
The mind juggles maps very poorly. Now that I am growing used to our clarified and minimal city – city as park, as field, as bucolic blank, like something out of one of Michel’s later, gentler post-apocalypse tales – I am finding it harder and harder to navigate the city as it really is. The truth is, I don’t like going out without my lenses now. An unaugmented walk through the stews of the city, hemmed in by its buildings, assaulted by its aniline palette, my concentration shattered by all its overlapping signage, leaves me feeling increasingly uncomfortable. My heart chatters. My breaths grow short and painful. I need a break.
I need a friend.
Airport security have to let us disembark eventually, and Gabby is at the gate to meet me. ‘Looking good,’ she smiles. She hefts the bags off my trolley. She wants to show me she’s still got her strength.
We climb into a cab.
The altitude here is serious; even in the city centre, there is still snow on the ground. Crowds in expensive coats gather around stalls selling mulled wine and buttered rum. We pull up before the cathedral. Gabby’s apartment is high up in a retail and hotel complex nearby. ‘Bloody hell, Gabby, what does this cost you?’
‘Nothing. I hacked their booking server.’
‘What will you do when they find out?’
‘Sleep under the desk at work. Busk outside the Cathedral.’
I can’t be entirely sure that this is a joke. The apartment is well-appointed, perfect for bringing home women of a certain age – the divorced, the curious, the incorrigible – and ideally suited to ejecting them again in the morning.
‘Do you want to freshen up? I’ve booked us a table for nine.’
The apartment has a wet room. A shower that wraps you up in a warmly scented tropical rain. Towels as big as blankets. Coming out, I find Gabby watching an international news channel. She lifts her hand to grasp mine. ‘Good to see you, Connie.’