‘Hang on,’ he says, ‘I’ll come see you.’
A minute later, here he is, inside the carriage, grinning, in his usual T-shirt-and-baggy-jeans combo. He looks out the window, following my line of sight. He frowns. ‘They’re skinned for me.’
Were I not so conscious of the amount of gear I’m lugging around, it would be easy for me to forget that Ralf – the Ralf sat here, opposite me – is an illusion. Ralf is leaning towards me, eager, earnest, his foot an inch away from mine in the packed and airless carriage. And if I kicked him, my foot would go straight through.
As it is, I’m feeling hot and self-conscious and eager to be done. Even by the chromed, futuristic standards of the financial district, this equipment of mine is absurdly conspicuous. Item: wraparound shades. Item: an electrode stickered not so subtly to my throat, to pick up speech I no longer need to utter. (In a year or two, everyone will subvocalise their calls by choice. This, anyway, is what the pundits are saying.) Item: a headset cradles my head with transparent silicone fingers. (Phoned sounds are crude intrusions – we bypass the ear entirely, and excite the auditory nerve, creating synthetic soundscapes that merge seamlessly with context and environment.)
Ralf tilts his head at me. ‘You don’t seem happy with this.’ His voice comes alive in my head, subtly smoothed and delocalised by the software. The link is not very good – Ralf’s lips move but his voice seems to be coming at me from the back of my head.
‘The thing is,’ (I say, speaking in perfect silence – electrodes parse the throat’s intention tremors into speech) ‘we create phantoms.’ I nod out the window. ‘That’s all they are. That’s all they can ever be. They’re completely ephemeral.’
‘You can interact—’
‘Only according to the narrow rules of a game. You have an object made of light. You manipulate it, scroll through it, open and close it, shrink and expand it. God help you should you ever try to lean on it, or sit on it, or make your home in it, or, well,’ and I nod out the window at our angels, ‘take it out on a date.’
We are leaving them behind now. Illusory Ralf has to turn in his seat to see a processed point-of-view of them as they flex in the sky, invisible to the gardeners, dog-walkers and six-a-side football teams toiling on the ground below. The view vanishes behind the blue glass wall of an office-block.
‘So you interact. Okay. What does that mean?’
Ralf turns back and makes a face. For him, this is an irrelevance. Everything is a game to him. He lives inside the game, and when he is outside the game, he pretends himself inside, for fear of what he might find Out There. The unmediated real. The world. Chaos.
‘Don’t you see? The stuff we make is doomed to a life in inverted commas. We’re not even building in light. We’re building in irony. Everything we make is steeped in the stuff.’
The train makes bathetic, burst-bladder sounds as it slides over the river towards the north shore.
‘You know,’ Ralf says, ‘you worry too much.’ Around him, bleeding away from his stolid outline and misproportioned goatee, I begin to catch glimpses of the wiry, physical man who actually occupies the seat opposite me. He is preparing to stand. His head emerges from out of Ralf’s head, a crocodile cracking through an egg. His arms emerge, Shiva-like, from out of Ralf’s arms. They wave about, collecting newspaper, satchel, umbrella. For a second the men, virtual Ralf and flesh-and-blood stranger, coexist in mythic form. ‘We’re bringing something new to life here. It’s got integrity. You just have to trust it. You just have to look.’
Ralf fractures, winks, and vanishes. The stranger, oblivious, shrugs his coat on.
Leaving the station, I cross the Canal by a footbridge, heading towards the Forum and the quiet, stone-clad purlieus of the Ministry of Trade. As I walk, the bridge’s functional iron latticework clads itself in statuary, dust, and a kinder, more southern light. So far, so unreal. I glance twice towards a newspaper icon, blinking tantalisingly close to my focus-point, and it swims into centre-view, unfurling translucent headlines. Another military adventure going sour.
I near the end of the bridge and enter a world of solid hazards, reading as I go. The platform makes an executive decision about the amount of hallucination a body can cope with, and wraps its architectural dreams back into the struts and braces of the actual bridge. I get back the sound of my leather-soled shoes on the walkway’s iron grillework.
Still the real eludes me. I enter my meeting in the grips of an awful dream where every solid thing, every brick and kerbstone, has come adrift and floats before me, contingent, weightless and untrustworthy.
AR, like most technology, has bathos at its heart. To survive, it must never quite unveil itself. It must always fall some way short of its promise.
Technology is, in the end, just another species of pornography.
THIRTEEN
A couple of days after I found and hid her corpse, Dad began to worry after Mum. Why hadn’t she phoned from the camp?
We knew one other camp regular. Gabby was the daughter of Frankie, the hotel’s long-serving day manager. Frankie visited her daughter every weekend, bringing her freshly laundered clothes and a car boot full of fist-sized bottles of supermarket beer. A veteran of the civil protest movement, she spent Saturday afternoons teaching her daughter and her friends rappelling techniques and how to tie figure-eights. Gabby and her friends were building tree houses and walkways. The forest floor was damp and dirty and vulnerable; come winter, they were planning to take to the canopy.
Every few weeks Gabby came home. ‘Delousing leave’, Frankie called it, and not without reason, since after a month or so ‘embracing the base’ Gabby’s head was a mass of rat’s tails, as though strips of horsehair stuffing from an old armchair had been woven through her hair.
The speed with which Gabby had changed from child to angry young woman was startling. She seemed in one season to have swapped frilly party dresses for fatigues and a webby, moth-holed jumper. She had always been a big girl and after months outdoors her weight had acquired a shape, a purposefulness.
Gabby and Frankie, Dad and I sat in the hotel dining room, around the big table near the fireplace. The mood was sour and frayed. At some point Gabby had decided to meet all Dad’s enquiries with a small, confident smile and, under the pressure of Dad’s unrelenting questioning, it had become a rictus, a sneer of defiance.
Dad was insistent. ‘There has to be some central – some central thing – some centre.’
If the protest movement had had a centre, the gates of the airbase would have been cleared long ago. As it was, the movement pulsed its way around obstacles. When assaulted, it retreated into itself then swelled again, like some science-fiction blob.
‘But there are young girls there,’ Dad fretted. ‘There has to be some protection.’
No one felt they had to point out that Mum had long since ceased to be a young girl.
Gabby was returning at the end of the week and said she would do what she could. All she could really do was pass on our fears. The camp was tenuous and scattered – we were going to have to rely on the gossips to carry the word around the base.
Every day after school I went exploring down by the river. I moved about cautiously, on guard against strangers, soldiers, and above all, Michel. I could not be sure that Michel had abandoned his own fascination with the river. It was Michel, after all, who had invested ‘our river’ with its meaning. It was Michel who had run it, explored it, who tore his skin on its thorns, and imagined its future, and, for all I knew, still wove millennial dreams round its withered, tilting trees and rusting white goods.
I stayed away from the ring of fridges, afraid I might run into him, though what he’d have found to do here, other than fantasize, I could not imagine. Anyway, I didn’t see him.