The dogman waves a severed human arm above its head. Round its wrist is an amulet. An amulet like mine.
Oh. Nice.
I run.
Criss-crossing the Middle air, policebots swivel to check my progress. Red warning lights checker the ground before me, slowing me up. Any faster, and the police will shoot. (We cooked this gag up to manage the player’s behaviour in crowded spaces. We don’t want people so taken up by the game that they go rocketing into mothers with prams and old men laden with the week’s groceries. Our bible, wrought in Michel’s deathless prose, does its best to weave these restrictions into the storyline: ‘The city is a strict, borderline-psychotic nanny, and riots and rebellions of the frustrated human populus have brought the predatory dogmen down on the city.’
The policebot is blind to body type. It’ll blast a speeding dogman down as cheerfully as it will me. This makes the chase a game of strategy rather than speed. As I weave past bots (well, shoppers) towards the escalator, the dogman (pure avatar) pursues me on a marginally more efficient trajectory, ever nearer, its breath ever hotter as I—
(Stop.)
I pull the wrapshades from my face. The earpieces, cooling, know to close down the rest of the kit. Item: a plastic mesh threaded through my hair. Item: gluey residues painted on my hands and face. Item: a thin Lycra top threaded with smart elastic – a slick descendant of the kind of vests my father stitched together for blind servicemen. Item: trainers, their thick soles packed with machinery. For all this, I feel a deal less self-conscious now than I did a year ago. A year is a long time in this business, and every part of Loophole’s AR player’s kit has been miniaturised to the point where the wearer can be forgiven for forgetting that it’s there.
The escalator leads to a cool concrete atrium, an airy space which, in its fidelity to the first-person-shooter aesthetic, looks a deal more gameable than our own, digitally generated AR skinning.
The metro here has a double-door system to prevent people hurling themselves inconsiderately onto the line. There’s a man at the end of the platform, in a grey lapel-less suit and smart shoes. He’s weaving and bobbing at his own reflection in the glass wall. The other passengers are giving him a wide berth. It’s going to take a while for people to habituate to gamer behaviour. After all, it took a little while for us to ignore the way people with handsfree phones talked into the air. AR is much more intrusive, and people’s tolerance to its casual public use is far less predictable. The man reaches towards the glass wall, his fingers scrabbling the air. Is he typing? Grappling? I wonder if he’s one of our first-adopters, a party guest, in which case he’ll be heading where I’m heading now, out of the Middle and on to the outdoor launch event organised by Michel’s producer, Bryon Vaux. I should put my glasses back on, go up to the man, test for myself the collaborative side of our game. But I have had enough. I am out of breath, and at the back of my mind hovers the unignorable possibility that the man might not be experiencing an Augmented Reality at all. For all his recent haircut and respectable clothing, he may just be crazy.
The train arrives. I’m finding it hard to shake off the paranoia induced by our game. From where I’m sitting I have a good clear view of six people. A harassed, gimlet-faced woman in a sari. Her bespectacled daughter. A young builder with tattoos who seems determined to sit with his legs as wide apart as possible, as though he were about to give birth. A man whose white facial hair, busy shirt, red-threaded tweed jacket, black boots and expensive retro wristwatch combine in such a messy and confusing way, I’d never be able to identify him in a line-up. Two animated African tourists trying to swap something from one mobile phone to another.
Of these, Glasses Girl, Clown Man and Legs Akimbo have allowed their attention to be snatched away. The girl’s glasses are cheap half-silvered jobs, and from the flickering petrol-sheen smothering her eyes I can just about identify which space-opera she’s watching. The other two are a scarier proposition, their pupils and irises silvered behind active contact lenses. These lenses are probably not AR-enabled, because the men’s heads are too still, absorbed in some reasonably static immersive environment. They’re reading, or more likely watching. Legs’s thumbs are twitching but they’re bare and clean, free of any shiny trail of conductive gel, so his movements are more likely a tic, rather than virtual keypresses.
It shouldn’t be such an effort, seeing what strangers are up to on a train. My heart shouldn’t still be racing, as it’s racing now. The game is over, but it seems to me it’s been replaced, not with any sense of the normal, but with another, creepier, more insidious game.
Ten minutes later I change trains for a more direct service, underground at first, then elevated, that stitches a path round suburban hills, up to and through the highest of the city’s ring of mountains. The city sprawls here because the valley soil is mostly sand. Any building above four storeys tends to keel over – a fact learned the hard way by ambitious ecclesiastical architects hundreds of years ago. All the really tall buildings – the high-rise blocks and the most ancient cathedrals – are built upon the rock outcrops that rise from the flat valley floor like teeth in a gum. The hills are called islands. Isle of This, Isle of That. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Michel, whose game bible climaxes with the city inundated by a rising flood, skinned with burning petrol. This is pure fantasy. We are too far inland for an inundation.
My phone rings.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m running late.’
‘Are you on the train?’
‘Yes.’
‘How far from the stop are you?’
‘About a minute.’ The train is already throttling down.
‘I’ll wait for you.’
‘Cheers, Ralf.’
This evening – and for the first time ever – Ralf chooses the restaurant. Its walls are hung with antique plates, white with multicoloured designs. The proprietress tells us about them – how all the colours come from a single pigment. How you won’t find these plates produced anywhere outside the Levant. It is a quaint assertion, as though her little restaurant could have somehow sidestepped centuries of relentless globalisation.
‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tasted the food.’
‘I’m not knocking anything.’ How strange, though, to be following Ralf’s recommendation.
‘Is Michel coming to this party, do you know?’ Ralf is a fan of Michel’s books. He has a full set of slipcased hardbacks, signed. It’s one of the reasons Loophole has fallen further and further under the spell of Bryon Vaux. Michel’s books are the source material for Vaux’s most lucrative film franchise, and Ralf has wanted to apply Loophole’s every technical innovation to better realise Michel’s world.
When Ralf heard that Michel was going to be writing our game bible, he was like a kid on his way to see Santa Claus. Sadly, Michel has proved every bit as elusive as the real Father Christmas, communicating with us only by written word. I don’t know whether this is just pressure of work, or some personal fall-out from Christmas.
Either way, Ralf is one disappointed fan.
‘Vaux will be there, I suppose.’
Ralf puffs himself up at that. Ralf, as Chief Imagineer, has met Bryon Vaux several times now. ‘I’ll introduce you,’ he says, as though this were a favour specially in his gift. There’s a pomposity comes over Ralf whenever he talks about Vaux. I used to find it touching, but now it has begun to irritate me. It’s not entirely Ralf’s fault. He is now, of necessity, one of the great producer’s gatekeepers. Every digital entrepreneur and failed screenwriter and wooden drama student wants a piece of him.
Our food arrives. Ralf sits back to make room for the proprietress. He has a paunch now. He’s going to have to watch that. I let him order for me, curious to discover what has so excited his retarded palate.