But the whole concept of travelling back through time was, for Teresa, almost impossible to accept. She had never understood it on a philosophical level, and anyway she felt that all around her was practical disproof
If entering the Grove scenario, then leaving it, had taken her eight months into the past via the medium of Gerry Grove's disgusting consciousness, how come she had turned up here in the same clothes she was wearing when she left
the hotel this morning? How come she had the same shoulder-bag? Carried the same credit cards? Had the same tissue in her pocket when she needed to mop her face, the first time to wipe away the rain of a freezing day, the second time the perspiration of a heatwave?
More to the point, how had she lost her ExEx identification card, if Grove had not taken it when he needed to?
That wasn't consistent, though. The cards were electronically coded: when Grove gave his (or hers) to Paula, the receptionist had found records of Grove on her computer.
Teresa gave up that line of thought.
Her rental car had also disappeared, and she gave up on that too. All scenarios had inconsistencies, brick walls where you expected an Underground station to be.
lt must mean she was in extreme experience, not living this as part of her own life. But it was no longer the scenario of Grove's day of murder: that was the scenario she had consciously entered, the one that had placed her within his mind, behind his eyes, as a witness to his crimes. She was herself, not Grove in any form.
Although the hyperreality of a scenario no longer surprised her, she had never been able to take for granted the sheer wealth of detail, the tiny plausible details, the irrelevancies, the unexpected and the accidental. All these underlined the sense of a heightened reality.
She could feel it now: looking around, she sought evidence of unexpected detail, and instantly found it.
The nail of her left index finger was broken: she had snagged it the night before when opening a drawer in her bedroom at the White Dragon, and had only had time to smooth down the break with an emery board. lt was the same now as it had been this morning.
Outside the cubicle in which she was sitting was a Swiss cheese plant in a pot, and it clearly needed watering or a spell in direct daylight.
Three of the leaves were turning yellow, and about to fall off. On the far side of the openplan office, barely visible above the partition walls, was a fluorescent light with a strip that needed replacing: at odd moments it flickered quickly, a constant minor distraction at the edge of vision. A dropped or discarded ballpoint pen lay on the floor behind her chair; she had not dropped it, it was not hers, and until this moment she had not even noticed it.
(But moments later she realized that the complimentary pen Paula had given her was no longer where she had placed it, that she must have knocked it off the desk, that the pen was after all hers. Details were maddening.)
Of course, such evidence would also underline the condition of reality, but Teresa had advanced beyond that.
Wherever she was, it was no longer the objectively real world.
But if it was a scenario, why had she been unable to abort it?
'Do you need a hand with running the software?'
A technician, a young man Teresa had never seen before. had paused while he passed the cubicle.
'No ... I'm just trying to make up my mind what 1'd like to do.'
'I'm here to help you, if you require it,' he said. 'You looked as if you were having trouble running the program.'
'It's fine. Thanks.' He could have no conception of the trouble she was having.
She waited until he had gone, then narrowed her eyes and again tried to think.
The rules had changed. When Grove entered the Shandy scenario, all the standard procedures for going into and out of extreme experience had been left behind. This, presumably, was what Ken Mitchell had meant by crossover: he described it as false memory syndrome, post hoc invention, interpretative spin. When she aborted the scenario she had imagined herself into existence here: there had been no corporeal body called Teresa Simons in a simulation cubicle, here, in the ExEx facility, on June 3. Yet she had returned from the Shandy scenario, and still was here.
The logic of the scenarios had been destroyed by Grove. The linearity Ken Mitchell held to be so essential had been given a third dimension, made matrical.
She began to browse as she had done so often before, but whereas previously she had been impelled mostly by curiosity now she had a purpose. She was looking for the area of the database called Memorative Principals, and recalled that when she had been searching for the extra information about Shandy it had not been accessible from any of the main option menus. She tried to remember how she had done it then, but saw nothing that reminded her.
Back at the main screen of options, she finally noticed a small box in the bottom corner: Run Macro. She clicked on this, and to her relief saw yet another huge menu of options. One of these was Connect Memorative Principals.
She typed in 'Teresa Ann Simons', added 'Woodbridge' and 'Bulverton' as defining physical locations, and clicked to see what would happen. Nothing happened. Not even the first scenario she had ever used, the target practice, was on file. But that, of course, was then. Back then, some time in the future, next February.
She typed in 'Gerry Grove', added 'Bulverton' as a location, and then as an afterthought put in 'Gerald Dean Grove' as an alternative name. After a perceptible pause, the computer said that Grove appeared in three scenarios. Teresa ran the list of them. Two were shown as having no
hyperlinks; there was a similarity to their code numbers that made them look as if they were the same kind of thing. The third looked different, and Teresa clicked on the video icon.
lt was in a car, parked on the seafront at Bulverton. Sunlight poured in from the direction of the sea. Hands were tightening a hotwire connection beneath the dash. A figure stopped beside the car, shading the flood of sunlight.
The video preview ended.
A familiar sensation rose in Teresa: that of imminent overload, constantly diverting her to new matters. The program was showing her more information than she could take in. The sequence she had just watched was the opening of the scenario she experienced with Grove: the drug deal, the theft of the car, the taking of the guns from his house ...
This was the scenario she had been in, and had eventually aborted, the one that had trapped her within its time frame. Yet this scenario could not possibly exist today, the day on which the events actually occurred!
Meanwhile, what of the other two scenarios? She hadn't seen them in connection with Grove, in earlier searches of the program.
She clicked on one, and immediately recognized it. Grove had used the range for target practice; the video preview reminded her of the one occasion she had used the same facility.
She let the preview run to its end, then clicked on the other and watched that as well. lt was much the same. She looked at the back view of Grove's stocky figure with dislike.
The range itself did look slightly different, though, from the one where she had recorded her own target practice. Noticing an information button marked ]Location Code, she clicked on it and saw a narrative breakdown of part of the reference number. This identified the range in use as being the GunHo Licensed Extreme Experience facility, in Whitechapel Street, Maidstone, Kent.