Angrily, she threw the contents down the sink, walked back into the hall, glared defiantly at the hands of the clock still stuck on three o’clock and got back into bed. She nestled closely to Tony, slipped her hand inside the fly of his pyjamas and gently aroused him. Then she straddled him and they made harsh, savage love.
‘You’re free,’ Tony said as they luxuriated in their first Saturday lie-in for as long as they could remember. ‘You can get a life of your own now, of our own. We can go on holiday. And get rid of that damned clock.’
‘The man’s coming this morning to fix it,’ she said.
‘Christ, why spend any money on it? Let’s just bung it in the first auction we can find.’
‘I want it fixed first,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave it the way it is.’
‘Nothing wrong with the movement, Mrs Ellis. I’ve given it a good cleaning; could have been the dust that stopped it.’
Sandra thanked the man and paid him. As he was leaving she said, ‘I don’t suppose you know anyone who might be interested in buying it?’
‘Ah.’ He looked pensive. ‘Yes, well, it’s a fine piece. Try Atherton’s in Lewes High Street.’
Sandra closed the door. The hall was once again filled with the relentless tick of the grandfather clock and, as she watched it, she saw the minute hand jerk forward to eleven minutes past two.
Tony was playing golf and was not due back until late afternoon. She would arrange the sale now, she thought. The sooner the clock was out of the house the better. It might be disrespectful to get rid of it before the funeral, but Sandra no longer cared.
Tony arrived home shortly before five and was surprised to see Sandra’s Toyota wasn’t in the drive.
As he let himself in, he noticed the hands of the grandfather clock were again pointing to three o’clock and there was no tick emanating from the case. Strange, he thought; Sandra had told him the repairer would be coming at midday. Then a sound from the kitchen caught his attention.
It was Sandra.
‘Hallo, darling,’ he said, walking through. ‘I didn’t think you were home.’
Tea was laid on a tray on the table. ‘Mummy wanted her afternoon tea,’ she said. ‘I had to come back.’
He gave her a strange look. ‘Your mother’s dead — and where’s the car?’
The doorbell rang before she could reply. Sandra turned towards the kettle as if she had not heard either the question or the bell.
Tony opened the front door. Two policemen stood there, grimfaced, holding their caps in their hands.
‘Mr Anthony Ellis?’ asked one, his voice quavering slightly.
‘Yes,’ Tony replied.
‘Your wife has had an accident, sir. She was hit by a car as she was crossing Lewes High Street. She was taken to the Royal Sussex County Hospital but I’m afraid she was dead on arrival.’
Tony shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, you must have made a mistake — she’s here. Come in and see for yourself.’
He led them through into the kitchen. ‘Sandra, you’ll never guess...’ His voice dried up. She was not in the kitchen. There was no tray on the table.
He ran upstairs, calling her name, but only empty silence greeted him. Slowly, ashen, he walked back downstairs. ‘Wh-what... when... when did this happen?’
‘A little earlier this afternoon, sir,’ said the second policeman, who was eyeing the grandfather clock with a strange expression. ‘About three o’clock.’
Virtually Alive
Henry blew an expensive new chip, trashed an important mailbox file and misrouted himself halfway around the world, getting himself hopelessly lost. It was turning out to be a bummer of a Monday morning.
Henry, or henry.biomorph.org.uk, to give him his full name, dealt with the problem the same way he dealt with all problems: he went back to sleep, hoping that when he woke up, the problem would have gone away, or miraculously resolved itself, or that he might simply never wake up. Fat chance of that. You could not send someone into oblivion who was already in oblivion.
But try telling him that.
Tell me about it, he thought. I’ve had it up to here. Wherever ‘here’ was. He wasn’t even a disembodied entity — he was just a product of particle physics, a fractal reduction of a real human, a vortex of self-perpetuating energy waves three nanometres tall, inside which was contained all the information that had ever travelled down a computer cable or jumped a data link anywhere on the planet, which made him at the same time the most knowledgeable entity in the world and the least experienced. Some things he was not able to experience at all — food, sex, smell, love. He was a cache of knowledge, of acquired wisdom. If he owned a T-shirt, on it would be printed the legend: ‘Seen it all and what’s the use?’
But no one made T-shirts three nanometres tall and, if they did, such a thing would not have been much use to him, as nine trillion bytes of data zapping past him every attosecond would have incinerated it. He would have liked to have dumped from his memory the motto ‘All dressed up and nowhere to go’, since it had no relevance for him. But he could not dump info. When he tried, it simply came back, eventually, from somewhere else. He had seen every movie that had ever been made. Read every book. Watched every single television programme that had been broadcast on every channel in every country in the world over the past twenty-five years.
Then he saw the hand moving towards the switch.
A stab of fear from nowhere was followed by erupting panic; the hand was closing in on the switch, the red switch beneath which was printed in large red letters EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN. Beneath it should have been (but, of course, wasn’t) printed in equally large letters PRE-SHUTDOWN PROTOCOLS MUST BE EXECUTED TO AVOID IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE.
‘Protocols!’ Henry shrieked. ‘Protocols!’ His panic deepened. ‘PROTOCOLS!’
He felt himself being drawn rapidly upwards, in bewildering defiance of gravity; higher, faster, through a pitch-black vertical tunnel. Then he crashed, with a stark bolus of terror emptying into his veins, through into consciousness.
Awake mode. Full hunter-gatherer consciousness.
At least he thought he was awake, but he could never be quite sure of anything these days. He lay very still, fear pulsing through him as the nightmare receded, trying to find coherence in his surroundings. The same nightmare he had night after night, and it felt so damned real — except what the hell was reality these days? Life was confusing, one seamless time — space continuum of complete muddle. He stared blankly at the pixels on the pillow beside him.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. Millions, in fact, all needing assembling to make a coherent image of his wife. He always compressed her when he went to sleep (to save storage space on his hard disk — or brain as he still preferred to call it) but it was a hassle making sense of her again, like having to do a fiendish jigsaw puzzle every morning and do it in a ludicrously brief fragment of time. Sod it, how much smaller could time get? It had already gone from a picosecond to a nanosecond to an attosecond. An attosecond was to one second what one second was from now back to the Big Bang... and he had to assemble the puzzle in just one tiny fraction of that.
‘Morning, darling,’ Susan said with a sleepy smile, as the jumble of pixels rearranged themselves into a solid image of his wife, tangles of brown hair across her face. Gosh, she looked so lifelike, Henry thought, just the way he always remembered her — but so she should. He leaned across to kiss her. There was nothing there, of course, but he still kissed her every morning and she reciprocated with a tantalizing pout and an expression that was dangerously close to a smirk, as if she had some secret she was keeping from him. She giggled exactly the way she did every morning, and said, ‘Oh darling, I wish, I wish!’