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Bullets continued to tear painfully into him.
The silence that followed neither lasted an eternity nor felt like one, because Hartland was braindead and unable to measure elapsed time. A few moments after the technician registered that his ExEx session had ended she activated the doorrelease and light flooded into the cubicle where Dave Hartland's body was lying.
The technician's name was Patricia Tarrant, and she was tall and intenselooking, with her brown hair stretched back tautly from her face. She coolly regarded the dead man lying there. He had thrown back both his arms a not uncommon gesture amongst ExEx users.
Patricia brought his arms down, then with some difficulty turned the man on his side. She brought forward the nanosyringe.
She laid it horizontally along the base of his neck, seeking the tiny valve that connected to the nerve cluster next to the spinal column. She slipped the point of the syringe into the opening of the valve, then twisted the plastic integument to seal it. With the syringe in place, she felt under the tiny flap and located the microswitch. She was supposed to use a special tool for this, but she had carried out the operation so many times that she now usually used the simple pressure of her fingertip. She flicked the microswitch, reactivating Hartland's life. He stirred immediately, grunting. One of his shoulder muscles twitched slightly and he drew a breath.
'OK, take it easy, Mr Hartland,' she muttered auto
matically, quietly. 'You'll be all right. Let me know if any of this hurts.'
He lay still, but she knew by the movements of his eyes behind the lids that he was either conscious or fractionally below the threshold of consciousness. To be on the safe side she reached over to the console above the trolley and sent a signal through to the medical team, giving them a green alert. This advised them that a resuscitation was in progress, with no complications expected at this stage.
With the life neurochip reactivated she extracted it into the syringe, then deftly transferred it to the phial placed beneath. Using the sensors she located the remaining nanochips and removed them from the valve with one steady suction of the syringe. When all the tiny modules had been removed, she took the phial to the ExEx cabinet.
What then followed was fully automated. The chips were checked electronically to make sure they were the same ones that had been administered at the beginning of the session, then they were moved to the ultrasonic autoclave and cleansed of any fluids or cells brought from Hartland's body. Each nanochip was then in turn deprogrammed, scanned, formatted and reprogrammed, and stored ready for the next use.
The ExEx cabinet, totally sealed not only against atmospheric and other pollution but also against interference from the user, performed all these operations within four and threetenths seconds, of which by far the longest was the ultrasonic cleansing.
A total of six hundred and thirteen different neurochips had been injected into Hartland's nervous system for his session inside the ExEx equipment, and six hundred and thirteen of them were recovered from him, cleansed and reprogrammed.
After Patricia had completed her resuscitation work, she left the cubicle, leaving Dave Hartland to recover in his own time.
Soon Hartland was sitting up on the edge of the bed, glancing around the bare interior of the cubicle, feeling tired and listless, but as he reorientated, and remembered what had happened inside the scenario, he began to feel aggrieved. After a quarter of an hour, Patricia returned and asked him if he was ready. When he confirmed he was she gave him the releases to sign.
'I'm not prepared to sign anything, Pat,' he said, and thrust the sheaf of forms back at her.
'Not this time.'
'Any particular reason?' said Patricia, apparently unsurprised.
'Yeah. lt was no good. lt wasn't what 1 wanted.'
'Can you at least sign this ones?' Patricia turned over the first three pages to expose the last one. 'You know what it is. lt confirms 1 resuscitated you promptly and correctly.'
'I don't want to commit myself. I'm really pissed off with what happened.'
She continued to hold the page towards him, and after a moment he took it from her. He read it through, and of course it was exactly what she had said it was.
When he had signed it, she said, 'Thanks. If you've got a complaint, you should see Mr Lacey.
He's the administrator in charge of software policy here.'
' It's a pile of crap, Pat.'
'Which one was it?'
'The Gerry Grove one.'
'I was beginning to wonder if it might be. Quite a few people have complained about that.'
'I've been on the waiting list for more than three months. All the hype there was about it. Of all the scenarios I've tried, it's by far the most expensive
'Please ... it's nothing to do with me. 1 know why you're unhappy, but 1 only make sure the equipment works properly.'
'All right, I'm sorry.'
She left the cubicle briefly, and went to her own desk. She returned with another sheet of paper.
'Look, fill out this form, and you can either leave it in reception, or if Mr Lacey's available you can possibly see him straight away.'
'What 1 want is a refund. I'm not going to pay all that money for'
'You can probably get a refund, but it has to be authorized by Mr Lacey. I've put on the reference number of the scenario. AR you have to do is explain why you weren't satisfied.'
He stared at the sheet of paper, which was headed GunHo Corporation Customer Services: Our contract of your guaranteed satisfaction.
'All right. Thanks, Pat. I'm sorry to have a go at you.'
'I don't mind. But if you want your money back I'm the wrong person.
'OK. Sorry.'
'How are you feeling? Ready to return to the real world?'
'I think so.'
Mr Lacey was not in the building that afternoon, so at the invitation of the young woman on the front desk Dave Hartland sat down in the reception area and filled out the complaint form. He crossed out the first few preprinted responses: equipment failure, staff error or neglect, impolite staff, incorrect selection of scenario software, interruption by power failure, and so on, and concentrated on the part of the form headed OTHER?. This had a large space where the customer could describe the complaint in his/her own words. Dave wanted to do this. After some thought he wrote the following:
1.
This scenario was not set in Bulverton, because there are no mountains anywhere near Bulverton, there are no tall office buildings in Bulverton, traffic does not drive on the right, there is no suspension bridge, and no river either. The only reference to Gerry Grove is that his name is used.
2.
This was an Americanstyle police siege, not a gunman prowling the streets in search of his victims, whom my brother was one of, and 1 wanted to know how he might have died.
This did not tell me.
3.