The Extremes

Later she began to feel cold, so she dragged on her robe and found her hairbrush where it had fallen on the carpet. She sat on the side of the bed pulling the brush idly through the tangles and curls, staring at the wall, dissatisfied with herself, thinking about Ken Mitchell, remembering Andy.

The two men existed with equal prominence in her consciousness, unfairly but undeniably.

For the first time since Andy's death, her feelings about him had been changed by meeting someone else.

Progress towards the rest of her life had begun.

But as she went back to bed, and lay down under the covers, she felt a terrible sense of misery, and a belated but real betrayal of the man she had loved innocently and truly for so many years.

'Sorry, Andy,' she muttered. 'But 1 needed that. Shit, 1 needed it.'

CHAPTER 24

They had parked their satellite van next to her car again, and it loomed massively over it.

Teresa paused at the hotel door, trying to see if the van was in use. She knew that although Ken Mitchell and his colleagues sometimes drove the van away, more often than not they used it as a mobile office where it stood. Today Teresa saw the satellite dish was in position, aligned on somewhere in the sky. At once she ducked back inside the building. Her efforts to extricate her car would inevitably draw her to their attention.

She decided instead to walk up to the ExEx building on the Ridge; the weather was fair, which gave her enough of an excuse, and it would be a chance to see some more of the town at ground level. Anyway, she had had something in mind for a couple of days and this would be a good opportunity to try it out.

She walked down Eastbourne Road towards St Stephen's Church. On this crisply cold morning, with the usual traffic edging noisily past, the shops open and a few pedestrians going about their business, it was easy to imagine the chaos that Grove's outburst must have caused on that afternoon. The traffic here would have been brought to a halt by the vehicles that had piled up in the vicinity of the hotel, but the people in the cars would probably not yet have found out what was causing the delay. Teresa could visualize them sitting with their engines idling, waiting for what they must have thought was a temporary traffic holdup ahead to be

cleared. Those people would have presented easy targets to Grove. Six people had actually died inside cars in this short stretch of Eastbourne Road, but many more were wounded. The rest managed to scramble out of their cars, or found cover until Grove had passed.

Teresa reached St Stephen's Church, which was on the corner of a road called Hyde Avenue.

This was one of the alternative traffic routes up to the Ridge, bypassing the narrow streets of the Old Town, and Teresa herself had already driven along it several times on her journeys to and from the GunHo ExEx building. Next to the church Hyde Avenue was an attractive road, with good houses and numerous trees, but further up it was lined with estate houses and a few industrial sites. Near where it Joined the Ridge, the elevation afforded glimpses of the view across the town, and out to sea, but there were better vantage points and better panoramas in other parts of the town.

Looking at her town map Teresa had noticed that a series of footpaths and alleyways ran between the houses in this part of Bulverton; they were known locally as twittens. With a few road-crossings taken into account, the twittens provided a continuous network of paths behind the houses. Teresa had worked out that she could probably walk most of the way up to Welton Road and the ExEx building by this route.

She crossed Hyde Avenue. On the opposite corner was a tandooni takeout restaurant, and between it and the adjacent building was a narrow alley that led to one of the twittens. The alley was bounded by the walls of the buildings on either side, and overhead by the floor of an upperstorey extension of one of them. The alleyway floor was made of stone flags; as she walked through the metaltipped heels of her shoes set up a clacking that echoed around her.

The traffic noise from behind was quietened by the enclosed space.

Almost at once, in the halflight of the alley, she began to feel giddy. An alltoofamiliar display of brilliant but unseeable flashes began in the corner of her eye, and she paused, overtaken by a rush of familiar despair. She should have known that this was a day when a migraine attack was more than possible: she had hardly slept during the night.

She paused, resting one hand on the wall at her side, looking down at the uneven stone floor, trying to rid herself of the nausea. She wondered whether she should give up her plans for the day, return to the hotel for one of her pills and try to sleep.

While she stood there, undecided, a series of shots rang out in the street behind her.

The sound was so close she instinctively ducked. Between shots she could clearly hear the quick, efficient clicking of the mechanism of a semiautomatic rifle, a sound that in spite of everything continued to fascinate her.

Teresa looked back: she could see a stationary car framed in the rectangle of daylight. A wild imagining came into her mind: cars were already backed up along Eastbourne Road while a new gunman prowled, firing at will.

She hurried back towards the road, scraping herself for cover against the rough bricks of the alley wall. Momentarily dazzled by her return to the bright cold sunlight, Teresa put her hand up to shield her eyes, and tried to see what was going on. She stood in the entrance to the alley, careful not to step out into the open. Vehicles coming down from the Ridge along Hyde Avenue were passing through a green light at the Junction with Eastbourne Road, and turning left or right. Their engines and tyres made the usual loud noise as they accelerated away along this narrow, built-up street. There was no sign of panic, or of anyone carrying or using a rifle.

While she watched, the lights at the intersection changed, and traffic began moving off in the other directions. The car Teresa had first seen framed in the entrance to the alley moved away with the others, the driver glancing back at her with a puzzled expression, no doubt wondering why she had been staring at him so intently.

Still on her guard for the presence of a gunman, or more alarmingly a sniper, Teresa stood warily in the entrance to the alley, watching as the cars and trucks went by. The incident profoundly puzzled her: she was obviously mistaken, in the sense that no one appeared to have been firing a weapon in the street, but the sounds she had heard were so close at hand, and so familiar and distinctive, that she knew she had not imagined them.

When a couple more minutes had gone by she decided to continue with her walk, but the incident had made her nervous. As she came out from between the two buildings the path continued with wire fencing on either side she looked from side to side in case her imagined gunman had moved round so that he was behind these houses and able to see her. Where the twitten turned nightandleft between a junction of gardens, Teresa looked back. The path through the alley was clear, and she could glimpse the traffic on the main road still moving past normally.

Then she looked up.

There was a man on the roof of the house next to the restaurant.

Teresa immediately ducked down and moved into cover, even as she realized that he was no threat to her. She looked back. He had fallen, and was lying head down across the sloping tiles. His foot had been caught by a Joint between two scaffolding poles, and was preventing him from sliding any further. He had been shot several times. A stain of dark blood spread out from his head and chest, down the tiles and over some of the planks on the scaffolding.

Teresa felt her pulse racing, her head thumping, her hands trembling. Conflicting instincts ran through her: to call out to the man, to scream aloud, to run away, to shout for help, to dash across to the scaffolding and try to find some way to climb up and reach him.

She did none of these. She simply stood at the Junction of the path, trembling with fear, looking up at the dead man on the roof.

The sirens of emergency vehicles were approaching, and Teresa could hear a man's voice amplified and distorted by a bullhorn. A helicopter was weaving overhead, about half a mile away towards the Old Town. There was another rattle of gunfire, more muffled than before.

Teresa hurried back down the path, and ran through the covered alley. Moving traffic was framed in the sunlight ahead. As she emerged into Eastbourne Road she saw a woman walking towards her, pushing a stroller with two small children inside.

'A man!' Teresa shouted, but incoherently, because she was short of breath and she found it difficult to form words. 'On the roof! Back there! A man on the roof!'

Her voice was rasping, and she had to cough.

The woman looked at her as if she was mad and pushed past her, continuing on her way.

Teresa wheeled round, looking anxiously for someone else who could help her.

The traffic was rolling by as normal. There were no emergency sirens, and no helicopter moved overhead. She looked left and right: in one direction the road curved away towards the railway bridge, in the other it became indistinguishable as it wove through the clustering of old redbrick terraced houses and concrete commercial buildings on either side.

She looked again at the roof of the house where she had seen the man.

From this position at the front there was no sign of him, and none either of the scaffolding.

That was another mystery: from where she had first looked, the scaffolding was built as high as the chimney stack, spreading across to the front of the building. It should be visible from here. She went back through the alley, hurried along to the place where it turned, and looked back.

The man lay at his steep angle, trapped by the scaffolding.

Close at hand, swelling terrifyingly around her: gunfire, sirens, amplified voices. In the square of daylight, glimpsed through the alley, nothing moved.

Teresa put her hand up to her neck, feeling for the valve.

CHAPTER 25

Teresa had by this time browsed through the catalogue of scenarios often enough to be able to find her way around quickly, but the sheer extent of the range of software, and the complexity of the database itself, still daunted her.

The sense of unfolding endlessness lent her a wonderful feeling of freedom, spoiling her for choice. Each time she clicked on a new selection a range of apparently limitless options appeared; every one of those itself opened up innumerable further choices; each of those led to further levels of choice, endlessly detailed and varied; and each of those choices was a remarkably complete world in itself, full of noise, colour, movement, incident, danger, travel, physical sensations. Most of the scenarios were crossreferenced or hyperlinked to others.

Entry into any scenario gave her a magical sense of infinitude, of the ability to roam and explore, away from the constraints of the main incident.

Extreme reality was a landscape of forking paths, endlessly crossing and recrossing, leading somewhere new, towards but never finding the edge of reality.

Today she made her selections, trying to calculate how much real time each of them would use up, and how long in total she could remain inside the simulations. She had learned, although reluctantly, that she should be spading with her time. Too much ExEx in one day exhausted her.

She confined herself to three unrelated scenarios, and selected the option for repeated entry as required. Two of

the scenarios were the sort of interdiction setups she was used to from her Bureau training, but which for all their sensory engagement were beginning to bore her. However, she was already thinking ahead to her return to the office, knowing that Ken Mitchell had probably made trouble for her. Some interdiction experience while on leave might count a little to her advantage, if advantage were needed. Butler growing feeling of tedium was real, so for her third ExEx she decided to try an experiment: a short scenario which depicted a major traffic accident, the point being that the user had to learn to anticipate and avoid the accident.

After she had made this last choice Teresa continued to browse through the catalogue. She wanted something different, something that carried no risks, no responsibility, no censure.

Gun incidents and traffic accidents were not the sum of life's experiences, she decided. There were other affairs of the mind and body she would like to experience vicariously, especially those of the body.

She was in a foreign country, alone, largely unknown by the people around her. She wanted a little fun.

She had no hesitation in going to the material she wanted to try, but she did have misgivings about the staff here knowing she was using it. The thought of doing it made her throat feel dry with anticipation; the thought of being observed or noticed doing it terrified her.

Before making her selection she therefore turned to the User's Operating Manual lying on the bench next to the computer, and looked for the chapter on security.

The manual had been written by a technophile genius, not a human being, and like many works of its kind it was difficult to read and follow. However, with determination she gleaned the reassurance she wanted: the user's choice of scenario was coded and identified. This was primarily intended for the programming of the nanochips. By default it was information that was available to the technical operator, but the user could alter it if privacy was required.

To activate security measures, the user should select the following option ...

Teresa selected the following option, then made her final choice of scenario. The fact that it was shareware, as she realized at the last minute, gave her an extra edge of anticipation.

She waited while the ExEx nanochips were programmed. Half a minute later a sealed plastic phial was delivered to the desk by the peripheral, and she took this through to the ExEx facility, eager to begin.

Teresa was a gendarme on night patrol in the immigrant quarter of the city of Lyon; it was January 10, 1959.

Her name was Pierre Montaigne, she had a wife called Agnes, and two children aged seven and five. A steady rain made the cobbles gleam; doorways to clubs and restaurants were lit with a single bulb over the lintels; the streets were a noisy chaos of fast-moving traffic. Teresa was trying to think in French, a language she did not know. With an effort and a flaring of panic, she forced herself back to English. Everything was in black and white.

From the start, she recognized a difference: she had more choice, more control, in this scenario. Indeed, as she joined it Pierre Montaigne came to a sudden halt, practically falling forward. Her partner, Andre Lepasse, was obliged to turn and wait for her. Teresa immediately relaxed her influence over the man, and the two gendarmes continued their patrol.

They reached a small, unpretentious couscous restaurant. lt had an unpainted door and a large plateglass window steamed up with condensation. Over the door, a handpainted sign said: La Chevre Algerienne. Montaigne and

Lepasse were about to walk on, when someone inside the restaurant must have noticed them.

The door was thrust open, and an exchange of shouts took place with two men, one of whom appeared to be the proprietor.

Teresa and her partner pushed their way roughly into the restaurant, where a man had taken a young woman hostage and was threatening her with a longbladed knife. Everyone was yelling at once, including Lepasse. Pierre Montaigne did not know what to do, because she could not speak French.

Teresa remembered LIVER.

Berkshire, England, August 19, 1987. She was Sergeant Geoffrey Verrick, a uniformed traffic policeman, passenger in a fastpursuit patrol car on the M4 motorway, fifty miles west of London.

A call came through from Reading police headquarters saying that a shooting incident had taken place in the Berkshire village of Hungerford. All units were to proceed there directly.

Maximum caution was advised. Officer in charge would be ...

Teresa said to the driver, Constable Trevor Nunthorpe, 'Hear that, Trev? Next exit, junction 14.'

Trev put on the blue strobe, headlights and twotone siren, and traffic ahead of them began to clear out of their way. The Hungerford turnoff was the next one along, and five minutes after the first call had come in their car was speeding down the slip road towards the roundabout at the bottom.

Teresa said, 'Give the Hungerford road a miss, Trev. Go right round.'

'I thought we had to go into Hungerford, Sarge.'

'Go round,' Teresa said. 'Take the Wantage exit.'

Leaning the car over on its nearside tyres, Trev swung it through threequarters of the roundabout, then followed

the A338 north towards Wantage. As a result they were heading directly away from Hungerford. The traffic again swerved out of their way, or slowed down and pulled over to the verge.

Another message came through, urging all available units to get to Hungerford as quickly as possible: the gunman had killed more than a dozen people, and was still at large, shooting at everyone in sight. Teresa acknowledged, and confirmed they were responding.

'What's the idea, Geoff?' said Trevor as they drove at high speed the wrong way through the scenario. Fields and hedgerows and gated drives flashed past. 'This isn't the way to Hungerford.'

Teresa said nothing, watching the landscape through the window at her side, blocking out the intrusive banshee whine of the siren, looking out at the sky, the trees, the endless vista of summertime England. lt unfolded around them as they sped along, urging her on to the edges of reality.

Then there was a jolt, and reality was tested to the point of destruction.

As the scenario lurched back, Trev abruptly jammed on the brakes and the car slowed awkwardly, nosing down and sliding at an angle across the dusty road. They had arrived in an instant at the Bear Hotel at the bottom of Hungerford High Street, where a police line had been thrown across the road.

They parked their patrol car, then walked round to the luggage compartment at the back, where the bulletproof jackets were stored. Teresa and Trev pulled them on, then went to work in Hungerford.

Teresa, disappointed, remembered LIVER.

Copyright (0 GunHo Corporation in all territories

There was an electronic buzzing until the words faded. No music, though.

Teresa was driving the curves of Highway 2, north of Los Angeles, through the mountains; it was May 15, 1972. The sun shone down into her opentop, the radio played the Mothers of Invention, she had her girl curled up affectionately beside her.

As they rounded one of the steeper bends a truck on the other side of the road did not take the grade and it tipped to one side, crashing down and skidding towards them, crushing their car with devastating effect.

Teresa was driving the curves of Highway 2, north of Los Angeles, through the mountains; it was May 15, 1972. She braked, hauled the car over to the side of the road and did a U-tum.

Grit and dust flew up behind them, and hovered in the sunlight after they had accelerated away down the hill.

After driving ten miles back towards the city, she took a left on the freeway heading east towards Las Vegas, and settled down for the long drive. The radio was playing the Mothers of Invention, and her girlfriend was rolling a joint. When they came to the desert the road became a blur, the car's engine note steadied, and there was nothing more to do or see.

Teresa waited until she was certain, then recalled the LIVER acronym.

Teresa was instantly aware of heat, bright lights and clothes that were too tight for comfort.

She blinked, and tried to see what was going on around her, but her eyes had not yet adjusted. There were people standing further back, beyond a ring of lights, not paying the least attention to her.

A woman came up to her, and brusquely patted her

forehead and nose with powder. 'Hold still a while longer, Shan,' she said impersonally, then moved back behind the fights.

Shan, Teresa thought. My name is Shan. Shouldn't 1 have known that from the start?

Full of curiosity, Teresa looked down at herself and discovered that she was dressed as a cowgirl. She raised a hand to touch her hair: she had some kind of cowboy hat on her head, making her scalp feel glossy with sweat, and the strings dangled beside her face. She peered down at her chest and found that she was wearing a shirt made out of a cheerful check material. With one finger, she eased forward the V above the top button, and glimpsed a tiny underwired bra made of black lace. She had breasts that swelled wonderfully above the cups, in a way she had always dreamt of. The leather miniskirt she was wearing exposed most of her legs, which she could see were clad in sheer silk stockings. She touched them sensually.

Her fingers discovered what felt like a suspender belt under the skirt. She knew she had panties on, but they were far too tight and they were cutting into her flesh. Her boots were made of white calf, and came up to her knees. They pinched the sides of her feet.

SENSH

She turned to see where she was, feeling the clothes twist uncomfortably against her body and tightening under her armpits. She discovered she was sitting precariously on a high bar stool, next to a wooden counter with a polished surface. Behind this was the space where the barman would work, and on the wall behind that was a tall mirror with an Ornate gilt surround. Teresa could see her reflection in the mirror, and she looked at herself with immense interest and amusement.

Her face had been made up with lavish and exaggerated

features: blackoutlined purple eyeshadow and heavy mascara, white foundation cream, too much blusher, and lip gloss that glistened wetly, like red plastic. The woman's efforts to dull the sheen of perspiration on her brow and nose had been only partly successful. Long auburn curls tumbled from beneath her hat.

Teresa straightened, and by shrugging her shoulders and pulling at the seams of the clothes attempted to make herself more comfortable. She tried unsuccessfully to pull down the hem of the miniskirt.

There was a man standing next to her, also dressed in cowboy clothes. He had a long drooping moustache and a beard, both apparently false, and he leaned back on the counter with one elbow, showing no interest in her. He was holding a tabloid newspaper in his free hand, and was reading the sports page. She thought she should know his name, but apparently that information was also not a part of the package.

SENSH

She looked into the main part of the room, but the bright lights still made it difficult to see the other people clearly. There were at least four men there, as well as the woman who had spoken to her. One of the men was also dressed in cowboy clothes. lt was hard to make out the area beyond them, but Teresa gained an impression of unused space and that this small set, the bar of a western saloon, was the only part in use.

A large video camera stood on a tripod. Another slightly smaller one was being held by one of the men, who was making some adjustment to a battery pack he wore around his waist.

After a few more moments of consultation, one of the men stepped forward to where Teresa could see him. He was short and bald, and was wearing a filthy Tshirt with a cannabis leaf drawn on the front. He raised his voice. To her surprise Teresa discovered he had a British accent.

'All right, everybody, we'll do another take. Quiet please! Everyone in their places. Are you ready, Shandy and Luke?' Teresa said she was, and the man with the big false whiskers put his newspaper out of sight somewhere behind the counter. 'OK, we'll start now.'

Shandy and Luke. Teresa glanced at Luke, who gave her a wink.

SENSH

Teresa had been expecting the director to shout 'Action!', but apparently this was not necessary. Both cameras came into use, indicated by tiny red LEDs that glinted at the front.

Luke at once moved towards her roughly and began grappling with her, his arms round her back, trying to kiss her. At first, Teresa instinctively resisted, but after a few seconds she forced herself to relax and not to try to control the events of this scenario. She felt the areas of her mind and body that were Shandy's also resisting Luke's advances, but with less conviction. After a few seconds of halfhearted wrestling, Luke took the front of her shirt in both hands and tore it open. Teresa heard the familiar screech of velcro, and realized that the buttons were fake. Her exaggerated breasts were revealed.

Shandy turned away and picked up a bottle from the counter. Holding it by the neck, she brought it down on the crown of Luke's head. lt shattered instantly with an unconvincing noise that sounded more like plastic apparatus dismantling than glass breaking. Luke reared up, shook his head, then came back for more.

* * * SENSH

This time he snatched at her bra, hooking his fingers under the scrap of cloth that connected the halfcups. He pulled at it roughly. The bra tore apart as easily as the shirt had done, and fell away from her body instantly. Tossing it aside, Luke sank his face between her breasts, cupping them in his hands and pressing them against his cheeks. Teresa felt the stiff bristles of his moustache scratching against her. She groaned in ecstasy. The man with the handheld camera moved in closer.

She allowed Luke to nuzzle her breasts for several more seconds, but then there was an interruption. The man in the cowboy suit who had been standing behind the lights stepped forward.

He grabbed Luke by the collar, pulled his head back and away from her body, then took a mighty swing with his fist. To Teresa he appeared to miss by several inches, but Luke's head jerked backwards, and he staggered away from her, his arms windimilling. He collapsed into a table and two chairs, which smashed at once. Both cameras briefly recorded this, then returned to their main focus of interest.

Her rescuer was now sizing her up with overacted relish, standing before her and stroking one of her naked breasts with his fingers. Shandy licked her lips, and her nipples became erect. She stroked her hand across the front of his jeans; Teresa was startled to realize that there was already an immense bulge inside them. His hips were gyrating slowly. This went on for some time.

* * * SENSH

Behind them, the director's voice cut in.

'Come on, Shan!' he shouted. 'Get on with it!'

Shandy deliberately delayed a little longer, letting her tongue play temptingly across her lips, but after another annoyed shout from the director she reached across to the zipper of the man's jeans and slowly slid it down.

Teresa was undeniably impressed by what she saw come prodding out of there, and was intensely interested in what Shandy and the man did for the next uncounted minutes.

She stayed to the end of the action, thinking how little she had previously known about certain kinds of sexual performance, how well and enthusiastically Shandy could perform them, how much quick pleasure they brought, but how few of them were ultimately worth knowing.

Finally it was all over. With not much more likely to happen Teresa recalled the LIVER

mnemonic. Shandy was walking towards a shower cubicle, clutching the tiny costume against the front of her body.

You have been flying SENSH Y'ALL

Fantasys from the Old West

Copyroody everywhere doan even THINK about it!!

A piece of inane music, synthesized somehow with a drumming beat and an endlessly repeated sequence of three chords, jangled deafeningly around Teresa as she returned, not entirely willingly, to reality.

Later that evening, alone in her room and stirring restlessly with her memories of the day, Teresa took her notepad from her bag and found an unused page. She regarded it for a long time.

Finally, 'm careful handwriting, she put down the words:

Dear Andy I didn't need that. I'm sorry, and it will never, ever happen again. I enjoyed it, though. I think. It was interesting, anyway.

That wasn't what she had meant to say, wasn't even what she thought. lt hadn't been so interesting. Size wasn't everything. Neither was stamina.

She didn't sign the page, but instead stared at the inadequate words, trying to summon memories of her times

with Andy, the long and happy years becoming so increasingly difficult to recall. The caprice of writing down the flippant words had instantly died, to be replaced by a familiar longing.

He was slipping ineluctably away from her, ceasing to be the person she remembered, becoming instead simply the bearer of a name, the man who had had a past role in her life, someone she recalled as a lover but not as someone making love, except in fragments of memory, incidents that had with time lost their passion. A man, a figure, a lover, a friend, a husband, he had been all of these, but he was becoming more remote from her. He would never know this reality of the years beyond his death in which she had to live without him.

How could he ever have known them? She would never have flown to England for this trip, never have stayed in Bulverton. This had become her life, and it would always be without him. She knew she was ceasing to grieve, that she was therefore losing him, not because he had changed but because she had: she could not prevent herself changing and moving on.

She still had no idea what she would do in her life without him, where eventually she would go, but she knew that this was the way, ultimately, that Andy would have to die.

She left the notebook open while she showered, but before she went to bed she tore out the page and crumpled it up. She threw it in the wastebin next to the door. Before she fell asleep she changed her mind again. She climbed out of bed, retrieved the page from the bin, then tore it into shreds.

CHAPTER 26

Nick Surtees stared in silent disbelief at the contract that 'had just been handed to him by Acie Jensen. What had started out as an ordinaryseeming morning in the hotel, with familiar chores lined up ahead, had been abruptly swept away by visions of virtually unlimited wealth. This cataclysmic event had occurred a few minutes earlier, during a remarkable interview with Ms Jensen inside the large van parked behind the hotel.

The contract itself was a boilerplate, but Jensen said she would let him have this copy so he could familiarize himself with the wording ahead of time. She seemed to assume Nick would want to retain an attorney. There was a blank fine on page 17, where the amount of money he would be paid would be inscribed when the deal was agreed. Ms Jensen had until now appeared to Nick to be a dissatisfied guest, but this morning she had been amiable and relaxed and seemed even to take pleasure in the amounts of money being bandied around. At one point she had drawn Nick's attention to how large the space in the contract was, to accommodate the generous sums available.

The contract itself was a mass of impenetrable legalese, finely printed compact text which filled more than thirty large sheets of paper.

The first page was a summary. This was written in relatively straightforward language, and outlined the intent and effect of the agreement. For most people offered the contract, it was obviously assumed that this would be the

only page they would read. lt explained that in return for payment for full disclosure of

'relevant memorative information' as held by the licensor, the GunHo Corporation of Taipei, Republic of China, the licensee, would have complete and unlimited rights of 'electronic creation, adaptation, development, retrieval and replay'.

Significantly, the most prominent passage occupied the bottom third of the page. lt was printed in large characters and was enclosed in a thick red border. lt said: YOUR RIGHTS. This contract is valid throughout the member states of the European Union as presently constituted, and is written in all official languages of the countries in the Union; this version is in English. Similar validity operates within the U.S.A., but an attorney should be consulted. The contract describes an agreement concerning electronic creative lights to psychoneural memories. All such agreements within the European Union are protected by the protocols of the Treaty of Valencia. Before signing the contract, or accepting payment for your memories, YOU ARE STRONGLY RECOMMENDED TO SEEK COMPETENT LEGAL

ADVICE.

Nick was in a state of mild shock: everything in his life was now centred on those thirtyodd pages of closely printed words. The prospect of suddenly receiving a substantial fortune had the capacity to change a life for ever. It was impossible to pretend away such a sum of money; it couldn't be ignored. No matter what, things were about to change.

For Nick, money had always been something that came in and went out at more or less the same rate, leaving him never rich, never poor, but more the latter than the former. Now, within the last thirty minutes, he had been told that he was on the point of becoming a rich man. Seriously rich. For the rest of his life.

There was no hurry: Acie Jensen had advised him to take his time, to read the contract carefully.

This must be how it felt to win a lottery. Or to be left a fortune by a relative you hardly knew.

Possibilities opened up in all directions, dominated by the petty concerns of the immediate present. In the short term he knew he could at last settle hi ' s bills, pay off his overdraft (a strenuously worded demand from the bank had arrived only that morning), clear his creditcard debts. Then the luxuries would become instantly available: a new car, a new house, new clothes, a long holiday. And still there would be millions left over. Investments, dividends, property, endless financial freedom ...

Nick had come up to the bedroom alone, closing the door behind him. His first instinct had been to rejoice, to find Amy and grab her, dance down the street with her and share the incredible news with her. But an inner darkness had loomed.

lt was not that he wanted to keep the money to himself, but within the first few moments he knew that it signalled the end of his relationship with Amy. The windfall was his ticket out of Bulverton, away from the hotel, and inevitably away from Amy. They were held together only by pressure of past events.

The money transformed everything, and it would release them both, a violent throwing open of the gates. He was trying to cope with an onrush of thoughts: it wasn't the money, because he could and would give half of it to her and still be wealthy beyond his dreams, but its impact on them both.

He felt a tremendous dread and misery rise within him, but not predominating, somewhere out on the edge of his consciousness. lt had to be confronted, though, because it was rushing towards the centre. This windfall had come too

suddenly: where he and Amy were headed was no secret to either of them, but he didn't want it precipitated by a sleazy get-rich deal. Which was exactly what this was.

He went down to the bar and poured himself a large Scotch. There was no sign of Amy, who earlier had been working in the kitchen. He returned quietly to the privacy of the bedroom.

He felt he was going mad: his thoughts were whirling around. Plans, relief, excitement, guilt, dreams, freedom, places to go and things to buy and ambitions at last to fulfil. Then the darker side: a raging guilt about Amy, a fear that all this money would evaporate as quickly as it had materialized, that there was some unannounced drawback, some evil catch that Ms Jensen had not warned him about. He looked at the contract lying on the bed beside him, and again read the warning on the first page.

He decided to follow its advice, and after searching around for his address book he put through a call to an old friend of his who practised in London as a solicitor.

john Wellesley was in a meeting when Nick telephoned, but returned his call a few minutes later. By a massive effort of will Nick had still only sipped his whisky once or twice. Every familiar instinct and habit urged him to drink himself into a horizontal position, but a harder centre warned that he needed to keep his wits about him.

He gave Wellesley a brief if slightly hysterical description of what had been offered to him.

Until he began speaking he had no real idea of the effect the news had had on him. He heard the words tumbling out, and he could hear that his voice was pitched several tones higher than normal. lt took a conscious effort to stop himself babbling.

Wellesley listened in silence, then said calmly, 'Is it, a Valencia contract?'

Nick took a breath, feeling giddy. 'I think so, yes. There's something about that on the front.'

'Is it thirtytwo pages in length?'

'Yes,' Nick said, riffling the sheets and looking at the number on the last one.

'I have to be sure about something, Nick. I know it sounds like an irrelevance, but 1 have to know. Are you asking me for informal advice on this contract, or do you want me to negotiate it on your behalf'

'Both, really. Advice first, 1 think.'

'Would you like to go away and calm down before 1 say any more?'

'Do 1 sound that bad, john?'

'I can't say I blame you. I've done several of these deals before, and they always seem to have the same effect.'

'All right. I'll try to stop gibbering.' Nick swigged the rest of his whisky, tried to concentrate on what Wellesley was saying.

'I'll make it easy for you. The bottom line is that it would be safe for you to sign the contract in the form in which they've handed it to you. There are international treaties that govern these deals. Are you prepared to submit to the electronic scanning did they describe that to you?'

'Yes.'

Acie Jensen had told him about it, but Nick had still been reeling from the news about the money. At times like that you tend not to pay close attention to the rest of what someone is saying.

'OK, so long as you know what's involved. 1 gather it's no more unpleasant than having your blood pressure tested, but 1 haven't done it myself so 1 can't be certain. 1 believe there's no physical risk, but the Valencia Treaty allows you to get medical advice without prejudicing the agreement.'

'I'm not too bothered about that.'

'OK. As for the money: which company is it?'

'They say they're Chinese, from Taiwan.

'Not the GunHo Corporation?' said Wellesley.

'Yes.'

'Congratulations. They're one of the biggest virtualreality players. You're home and dry, Nick. Their contract is always the standard one, so far as 1 know. From your description it sounds as if they're still using it. If they are, it's been tested in all the senior courts: the Supreme Court in the USA, the Appeal Court here, the European courts in The Hague and Strasbourg.'

'You seem to know a lot about it,' Nick said, impressed.

'As 1 said, I've worked on several ExEx contracts in the last couple of years. How much are they offering you?'

Nick told him.

'Not bad. In terms of the going rate, that's medium to high. What's it for?'

'The Gerry Grove shootings in Bulverton. My parents were killed.'

'Of course! 1 should have realized. Bulverton is Just about the hottest ticket in town at the moment.'

'I wasn't even here when it happened,' said Nick. 'I keep wondering if they've made a mistake. lt makes me nervous, in case it's all going to fall through when they find out.'

'That might have been a risk once. Until last year they only wanted people who actually took part in the events, or who were eyewitnesses. But they've been making big improvements in the software. If there are plenty of hearsay accounts, that's apparently good enough. The results wouldn't stand up in a court, but hell, this is rock 'n' roll, this is showbiz. You're living in your parents' house, aren't you?'

'They ran a hotel, which I've taken over.'

'What happened to your parents is probably why they

want you. As 1 understand it, the problem with Bulverton is that many of the best witnesses were killed on the day. it's partly why the virtualreality people have taken so long to get around to it. Look, we've gone over the ground, as far as I'm allowed. The Law Society rules say 1 can't promise you anything in advance, but would you like me to act for you?'

'Er, don't get me wrong,' Nick said, 'but if the contract's as safe as you say, would there be any point in that?'

'Depends if you want more money or not,' said Wellesley.

'Well . .

'You've got something GunHo are obviously prepared to pay for, and in corporate terms they're leaking cash from every pore. Have you any idea of the expected global take from extreme experience this year?'

'No. Until recently I was only barely aware it existed.'

'People used to say that about the internet. A pal of mine in the City puts it this way: if ExEx was a country, it would currently be the second largest economy in the world. lt already has more paying customers every day than all the major soft drinks companies combined. And they charge substantially more than the price of a Coke.'

'Are you saying you can get me more money for this? lt already seems like a ludicrous amount.'

'I can't offer you that as an inducement to retain me. I'm a lawyer, Nick. We operate under rules.'

'What would you say if you weren't a solicitor?'

'Well . . . since it's you. Doubling the principal sum would be the easy bit. With that out of the way 1 could fight them for residuals like TV and movie rights, as well as royalties and translations. 1 can probably get most of them. The important ones, anyway. What about dependants? Have you married that girl you were living with?'

'Amy? No.'

'So there aren't any children?'

'No.'

'That's a pity. There are tax breaks if you have a family.' 4 At this exact moment, tax is the last thing I'm worrying about.'

'You won't be saying that a year from now.'

They talked for a few more minutes. Nick needed time to think and talk, a necessary part of the process of adjustment going on in his head. By the time they hung up, john Wellesley was formally acting for him. Wellesley said he expected that negotiations with GunHo would take about a week to complete, but that he should be able to obtain an upfront payment more or less straight away.

'By the way, 1 shall have to charge you for this phone call,' Wellesley said.

'How much?'

Wellesley told him, laughing.

'That's an outrage!' Nick said.

'Yes, isn't it? But in the time we've been talking you've made approximately fifty times as much as that in interest. You've become my cash cow, Nick. You can't blame me for taking advantage of you.'

Reeling slightly from the shock of it all, Nick went downstairs, knowing that he must talk to Amy as soon as possible. She was still nowhere to be found, so he assumed she must have gone into the town on an errand.

He sat in the bar, the empty whisky glass on the counter in front of him. The temptation to have another drink swept over him, but he resisted it. To put space between him and the temptation, he left the bar again and went to see if he could find Amy. She had become the priority. Nothing more could be thought about, dreamed about, planned for, without her. Suddenly, everything had changed.

He met her coming into the hotel through the door at the rear. She was flushed and hectic, and she was holding a draft contract that looked identical to his.

Amy left the hotel for the rest of the day. After she had gone, Nick found her contract lying on the chair in the bedroom where she usually placed her clothes overnight. He phoned jack Masters and asked him if he would come in and serve behind the bar that evening, and then he went through to the dining room to prepare for the guests' dinners. They were all there, sitting, as usual, at two tables at opposite ends of the room. Teresa Simons sat with her back to the other four. Nick wondered if Acie Jensen would mention the contract to him, but she said nothing.

Nick cooked the meals as quickly as he could, thinking, The second thing I'm going to do is sell the hotel, but before that the first thing I'm going to do is employ a chef There was still no sign of Amy, and by the time he and Jack closed the bar at the end of the evening Nick had convinced himself that she had gone for good. He stayed up until after one o'clock, still restless, wide awake and possessed by the circling thoughts about the prospect of imminent wealth. lt was the most distracting thing that had happened to him in his life, even including those terrible hours after the Grove massacre.

Amy finally returned. She came quietly up the stairs, saw him lying awake in bed, and went through to the bathroom. He waited while she showered, wondering if this would be the last night they would have together, ever.

She said nothing, but climbed in beside him, snuggled up as affectionately as always, and soon they were making love. lt was not the wildest, most exhilarating session they had ever had, and afterwards Nick was preoccupied and sad.

Amy said, 'You've always wanted to get out of this place. Is that what you're going to do now?'

'Why should l?' he said, prevaricating.

'You've got the money, or you will have. There's nothing to stop you any more. Here's your chance.'

'I haven't decided yet.'

'That means you're probably going to, but don't want to say.' She moved around restlessly in the bed, throwing back the covers, sitting up. He could see her body in the darkness, outlined against night light from the uncurtained window. He sat up too, and then could see the high curve of the top of the satellite dish on the van. 'Well, I've been making plans o f my own for weeks. 1 want out, Nick. 1 never want to see Bulverton again, as long as 1 live.'

'All right. That's more or less how 1 feel.'

'I was going to leave you,' she said. 'As soon as 1 could get away. I've never felt so trapped in all my life. You and Jase, the hotel, all that. But this ... everything's changed. It's not the money. It's what the money will let us do. No pressure, no worries about how to make a living. I know money isn't the answer to everything, but it does give us a way out of this.

Couldn't you come with me? If you don't want to make any promises now, that's OK, but let's do whatever we have to do with those people, then get out of town.'

'Did you say you want me with you?' Nick said, amazed. 'Did I hear right?'

'Yes.'

He laughed. 'Say "please".'

'Yes please, Nick. But what about you? Don't you want to go off on your own?'

'Oh no,' he said, meaning it as never before. 'Not now.'

In the morning, after a sleepless night of plans, decisions, fantasies expressed aloud, they went downstairs to prepare the breakfasts for their guests.

Nick said, 'I never want to do hotel work ever again. Of all the underpaid, unappreciated, unsocial, unrewarding jobs . . .'

'Do you realize,' Amy said, as she cleaned out the coffee percolator, and took from the fridge the lowcaffeine, lowsodium, highzinc, economically sustainable non~ exploitative coffee grounds they had expensively obtained from an independent shipper in West London, 'do you realize that this might be the last time in your life you will have to do this?'

'Nothing ever changes that quickly,' he said.

Remind me you said that in three hours' time,' she said. 'At nine o'clock.'

'What's going to happen at nine o'clock?'

'Something 1 spent all day yesterday setting up for you.'

:What is it?'

Wait.'

Half an hour later, with the guests' breakfast preparations complete, they sat together in the kitchen and drank some of their own instant coffee from the jar: high in caffeine, high, probably, in sodium, and zinc contents unknown.

Amy said, 'We shouldn't trust these people an inch. You should get yourself a lawyer.'

'I already have,' said Nick. 'So should you.'

'That's something else 1 did yesterday.'

CHAPTER 27

Teresa was starting to feel selfconscious whenever she went to the ExEx building; she had become a familiar figure to the staff. She was not used to that. She had been trained to be unobtrusive, to function but to stay low. The knowledge that she lay unconscious in the tiny cubicle, while she roamed the inner worlds of ExEx, made her feel more vulnerable than anything else in her adult life. Perhaps it was this, by reversal, that made her feel so at home exploring the actual scenarios. She was the secret intrusive presence in these fragments of drama, the undetected mind, the will that could be exerted to override the programming and yet remain undetected.

She was learning how to push at the limits of the scenarios. There was a freedom involved. At first it had seemed to be one of landscape: distant mountains, roads leading away, endless vistas and promises of an everunfolding terrain. She had tested the limits of landscape, though, with results that were usually disappointing, and at best only ambiguous.

At last she was realizing there were other landscapes, other highways, the inner world of the consciousness, the one she touched directly the moment she entered a scenario.

This was a terrain that could be explored, this was a landscape that had only tenuous limits.

She remembered the way she had felt herself become Elsa Durdle, and liked doing so; how even without speaking his language she had managed to influence Gendarme Montaigne's movements;

even further back, the old FBI training scenarios, when she briefly influenced events, or failed in trying.

Two days after her first visit to the cowgirl skinflick scenario Teresa again exercised the privacy option, and returned to the makeshift film set.

Luke, the actor in the false whiskers, was waiting on the set beside her, reading the sports page of the tabloid newspaper. In Shandy's guileless persona Teresa tried starting a conversation with him, hoping to move the scenario in a different direction, but nothing she could do or say would divert him from his newspaper until they began filming.

When Willem, the magnificently endowed young Dutchman who played the cowboy, came leaping in on cue to throw a false blow at Luke's jaw, Shandy ducked away from him and deliberately went after Luke. But Luke had become inert again, simply lying in the wreckage of the prop furniture he had fallen against.

While the director yelled at her in fury to get back to the action, Teresa withdrew from Shandy, and, with a quick incantation of the LIVER mnemonic, she aborted the scenario.

You have been flying SENSH Y'ALL

Fantasys from the Old West

Copyroody everywhere doan even THINK about it!!

The moronic music Jangled at her again, seeming interminable.

lt was the next day. She returned to being a cowgirl.

This time, Teresa waited passively at the back of Shandy's mind, while the young woman went with remarkably spontaneous excitement through the explicit but now predictable motions of making the video.

When the cameras had stopped, and Shandy and Willem were collecting the various pieces of their discarded costumes, Teresa deliberately moved forward in Shandy's consciousness. She spoke to Willem, and tried setting up a date with him. Willem spoke only a little English, but Teresa/Shandy pestered him until he agreed to meet her

outside f

ri

utsi

or a d ink.

Shandy walked naked towards the shower cubicle in the corridor behind the set, clutching the tiny costume against herself Teresa loved the way the young woman's body felt from inside: she seemed to glow with healthy relish from the series of convulsing orgasms she had gone through, and she walked with an easy grace. A couple of the men who worked behind the cameras grinned at her as she went by.

Once she was inside the shower cubicle with the door closed, her demeanour changed. She spat dramatically on the floor of the shower, growling in her throat, clearing herself out. She put her lips to the coldwater tap, drank a quantity of the water, then swilled some of it around her mouth. She gargled three or four times. When she was showering she washed herself thoroughly, using soapy fingers to clean the parts of her body Willem had penetrated, and lathering herself energetically where he had jetted his seed on to her skin.

* * * SENSH * * *

She took her street clothes from a locker outside the shower, and dressed quickly. She put on light makeup: a little eyeliner, a touch of blush, no lipstick. After a final look in a mirror she went to meet Willem.

Outside, Teresa found they were in London. She was immediately struck by the details: especially the noise, the crowds, the traffic, the red buses, the advertising signs, the dismal weather, the overall sense of minutiae beyond the strictly essential.

Willem led her to a pub in nearby Rupert Street, and sat by himself at an unoccupied table while she went to the bar to order drinks. He had asked for a Dutch imported beer called Oranjeboom, which for some reason made Shandy laugh. She softly hummed a jingle while she waited to be served. The barman knew her and obviously liked her, and between serving other customers chatted to her about someone they both knew; Shandy apparently had a number of jobs around the West End, working for clubs and escort agencies, and in hotels.

Teresa, fascinated by this glimpse into the young woman's life, lost interest in Willem and listened instead to Shandy talking about the people who owed her money, the man (boyfriend? pimp?) who seemed to control her, the hardships she sometimes had to endure, the late nights, the harassment she received from the police, and most of all the problem of her elderly mother, who lived in the Midlands. Her mother was having trouble with a disability allowance that was being reduced by some interpretation of the rules, and which might mean she would have to move to London to live with her daughter. Shandy's apartment wasn't big enough for two, so she would have to move.

SENSH

Teresa thought, This is real! This is Shandy's life! 1 could stay here in her mind, follow her around, see how she lives, what she eats, where she sleeps.

She glanced back at Willem, who was still sitting at the table, waiting for her to return with the drinks, apparently stranded by her lack of interest in him.

The barman slipped Shandy a scrap of paper with a phone number written on it, and she took out her bag, found a diary and placed the piece of paper between its pages. just as Shandy was about to return the diary to her bag, Teresa

decided to have a look at it, and laid it on the counter. She flipped through the pages.

Shandy's real name was Jennifer Rosemary Tayler, Teresa discovered from the first page, where the young woman had filled in her personal details in disarmingly childish handwriting. She had an apartment in London NW10. The entries in the diary the year was 1990, which Teresa wouldn't have known otherwise were mostly phone numbers and amounts of money; on a whim, Teresa led Shandy across to the call box on the wall by the entrance to the toilets, and dialled one of the numbers.

* * * SENSH * * *

A man with a foreign accent answered, and Shandy said, reasserting herself, 'Is that Hossein?

Hi, it's Shan ... Listen, I'm at the Plume of Feathers in Rupert Street. Know where 1 mean? 1

wondered if you'd got anything for me?' A long silence followed, before Hossein said, 'You call me back at ten. 1 work something out.' Shandy said, 'OK,' and hung up. She went back to the counter, and wrote the time in her diary.

Willem was still at the table, patiently waiting. Teresa decided to leave him there, and left the pub. She walked back down Rupert Street to where it Joined Coventry Street.

To one side was an open space bounded by large buildings, full of trees and pedestrians: Leicester Square, she dredged up from Shandy's mind. In the other direction was Piccadilly Circus, which Teresa had not realized was so close. With all the curiosity of a tourist Teresa walked down that way, gawping at the sights. She stared at the statue of Eros for a few moments, then decided she would like to see where Shandy lived, so she walked across to the nearest entrance to the Underground station. She ran down the stairs, Shandy's steeltipped stiletto heels clattering on the

metal steps. At the bottom of the stairs was a brick wall. Shandy stared at it for a moment, then returned to street level.

Another entrance to the station was on the corner of Lower Regent Street and Piccadilly, so Shandy negotiated the crossing through the traffic, and tripped quickly down the steps.

Another brick wall. Determined not to be beaten by this Teresa led the way back to the pub, where Willem was still waiting for her.

* * * SENSH

She sat down next to him.

'Tell me where you come from, Willem she said. 'How do you live? What is the name of the place where you were born?'

'Ah,' he said, staring with habitual eyes at her cleavage. 'I from Amstelveen, which is a little way from Amsterdam to the south, on the polder. You know polder? 1 have two sister, who are both more old as me. My mother and father'

'Excuse me, honey,' said Shandy. 'I got to go.,

She left him there again, and returned to the street.

London spread around her, noisy and crowded. How did they do this? Teresa wondered. We were making a lousy skinflick, budget of zilch, and 1 walk through a door and out here is a whole imagined virtual city of millions of people, crammed with things going on and places to go.

No Underground station, though. Maybe they didn't get around to programming that.

* * * SENSH

As she stood there a doubledecker bus roared by, heading for Kilburn. lt said so on the front: Kilburn High Road. Teresa thought, 1 could get on that bus, see what happens in Kilburn.

People who have lives, share apartments, go bankrupt, fall in love, travel abroad, hold down jobs, get

thrown into Jail, make skinflicks. Is this scenario unlimited? From Kilburn, another busride to the edge of London, and from there into the country? What after that? Another blank wall at the edge of reality? Or the rest of England, out into Europe, then the world? The awareness of unlimited space dizzied her.

She caught the next bus that came along (it said on the front it was going to Edgware), but for an hour it drove around the West End, repeatedly passing the same buildings and stopping in the same places.

Willem was still waiting in the pub when she went back.

'Did 1 get that drink for you?' Shandy said.

'No, but is OK. 1 wait OK.'

She left Willem again, and returned to the street: the weather was as damp and cool as before, and the crowds continued to press past her. Shandy had a way of walking that made her skirt tighten against her thighs with every step. Admiring male glances were flashed at her from many quarters.

SENSH

'Doesn't that drive you crazy, Shan?' Teresa said on an impulse, thinking inwardly to her own mind.

'Doesn't what drive me crazy?' Shandy replied, calmly. 'The guys staring at my tits? That's my job, love. One of them's always the next meal ticket.'

'Not that. The goddamn computer logo that appears every minute or two. And the electronic music that goes with it!'

'You get used to it.' Shandy mentally played the jingle at her.

'Where's it coming from?'

'I think it's Vic. He's like that.'

'Who's Vic?' said Teresa. 'Is that the director? Mister Bad Breath and Zero Personality?'

'No, Vic! You know Vic, don't you? He's the mate of Luke's who does the script, right? Luke's the one who'

'I know Luke. Carry on about Vic. I'm interested.'

'Vic does the script. He's one of those computer geeks with a weirdo sense of humour. Thinks everything he does is funny. That's how Luke gets in, you see. He likes being in the movies, but he isn't, you know, like Willem. Willie with the big willie.'

'I know who you mean.'

* * * SENSH

'Course you do. Well, Luke likes a bit of the physical stuff with me, and 1 never mind, so Vic writes him in before the action starts. Always a small part, a warmup for the punters. Luke's been in all the videos I've done for Vic, and he enjoys a good old grope, but he can't, you know, get it up enough. He's a mate of mine, really. We always have a bit of a laugh about lt.

You've got an American accent. Is that where you're from?'

'Yes,' said Teresa.

'So's Vic. 1 don't know what he's doing in England, but he's into computers and that.'

'So how does he do all this?'

'Do all what?'

Teresa gestured with Shandy's hand.

'London! All these people! The noise, the rain, the crowds.'

'I dunno. You'd have to ask him. You can get cities for computers now, can't you?'

'Cities? What do you mean, you get them for computers?'

SENSH

'On disk, 1 think. Or you can download them, if you know how to do it. You get the whole thing, and just use it. Add it on, somehow. 1 mean, Vic's got all sorts of places he uses as locations. He's into cowboys and that, and so a lot of the programs he does take place out there in the West. you know that set we were just filming in? Well, if you go out the other way, the door at the back, it isn't London at all! It's somewhere in America ... you know, you've seen it on the movies. Where they filmed all those westerns. A lot of desert, and all them rocky mountains with flat tops sticking straight up.'

'Not Monument Valley?'

'Yeah, that's it!' said Shandy. 'Arizona, someplace. He's barmy, is Vic. He just bolts on bits of software as he feels like it. Like, there's one he's got which is Finland. 1 mean, the whole of Finland! 1 play an air hostess on an aircraft, and me and the guy get down to it in a row of seats. Not very comfortable, but we put the armrests up. Anyway, if you look out of the window there's hundreds of miles of trees and lakes. You can make the plane go anywhere you like, but it's always flying over Finland. Can't see the point, myself, because the people who come in, they just want to join in with the shagging, and they're not interested in where we're doing it, right? But Vic must have bootlegged the software from somewhere, so that's what he uses. There's another one he's got, in'

* * * SENSH * * *

'Shandy, do you mind if we go somewhere to talk?' They had been walking along Coventry Street, weaving their way through the crowds, but even in this state of acknowledged unreality, Teresa was acutely conscious of the way she must appear to be talking to herself

'Could we go to your apartment?'

'No, can't do that.' Teresa felt an awkward resistance rising in the young woman's mind. 'I'm only supposed to be in the West End, and that.'

'But you must go home sometimes.'

'Yeah.'

'Then can't we go now?'

'No. 1 don't think so.'

Shandy started fretting with the strap of her shoulderbag.

Teresa realized that there must be a limiting wall in Shandy's mind, like one at the bottom of a flight of steps that should lead to the Underground.

'Is there somewhere else we could go?'

'No, we have to stay around here. Or we could go back to where we were filming. Would you like to go back to the studio and see Monument Valley? I'll take you for a drive. That's another of my jobs. We go to some great places'

* * * SENSH * * *

'Where's the studio from here?'

'Back there.' Shandy indicated a narrow sidestreet called Shaver's Place.

'And that's all there is?' Teresa asked.

'Well ... there's the whole of London! You can do a lot in London. I could take you to the clubs 1 know. I do a live show in one of them. You could help me out in that, now you know what to do. One of the guys is a bit . . . you know, but the other's a real good mate of mine. He's better at it than Willem, not as big, but he really knows how to get me going! And there's another girl, Janey. You'd like Janey. I do a lesbian act with her. She went to America last year on her holiday, and told me all about it.'

'No, 1 don't think so.'

Teresa retreated from the forefront of Shandy's mind, allowing the young woman to assert her own life, so to speak. Shandy promptly changed direction, and walked back towards the pub where they had left Willem. She said hello to several men they passed in the street. She seemed to know everyone around here.

Teresa decided to retreat again, further, abort the scenario at last, but before she did so she reached up awkwardly and felt the back of Shandy's neck.

As she expected, there was

no ExEx valve in place.

This was 1990. ExEx hadn't been available. There was only software set in that period. Teresa recalled the LIVER mnemonic.

You have been flying SENSH Y'ALL

Fanta

She snapped it off before she had to listen to the music again.

Later, as she checked out at the ExEx reception desk, Teresa was presented with a charge to her credit card that was so huge it momentarily dazed her. She was about to protest, when she noticed that her realtime usage had been carefully logged. She glanced at the clock on the wall. She had spent nearly the whole day in virtual reality, and as a result had been charged for six and a half hours of premium time. Night had fallen while she was there.

Teresa signed, thinking of the slug of insurance money she had received after Andy's death, which had remained more or less untouched until her trip to Britain. Her phone calls to the credit-card hotlines in the US had sorted out her billing problems, and increased the credit limit at the same time, but even so she made a mental resolve to use her ExEx time more carefully.

Walking back down through Bulverton's rows of postwar council-built houses, Teresa kept her gaze low, avoiding the dreary sights around her. The dazzle of ExEx was her preferred reality.

She wa . s remembering the way she had experienced

Shandy's walk, with her tiny leather miniskirt constraining her thighs and her stiletto heels clacking dismissively on the paving. Teresa put her hands in her coat pocket, and dragged the garment round her, tightening it in front of her legs to make a tiny reminder of how it had felt to wear that skirt.

She thought about being young and pretty again, of having the sort of legs men admired in the street, the kind of high, prominent breasts that looked good no matter what she wore, and for which wearing a bra was an option. She relished the memory of how Shandy's body had felt from the inside: supple and agile and much used to pleasure. She even loved Shandy's attitude to everyone around her; it was years since she had felt free not to care what other people thought.

In the cold winter's evening, with the sea wind moist in her face and the lights of the depressing housing estate glinting around her, Teresa could not help fantasizing about lovemaking. She imagined she was in a large airliner, flying slow and low, the engines a subdued roar. She would stretch with her lover across the cushions of a row of seats, the armrests raised erect to make room; she would be sating her body, naked and languorous, dreaming of buttes in 'Arizona, while below her the unending lakes and forests of Finland would be slipping deliriously by.

CHAPTER 28

Teresa was in a car, parked on the seafront at Bulverton. Brilliant sunlight poured in on her from the direction of the sea. She was tightening the hotwired connection she had made earlier beneath the dash, stretching forward with her hands, her cheek pressed against the boss of the steering wheel.

A figure stopped beside the car, shading the flood of sunlight. Without looking up at him Teresa straightened and wound down the window.

'You Gerry?' the man said.

'Yeah.'

The man outside pushed his hand through, palm up. Teresa laid six tenpound notes on the hand, and watched as he crumpled them up and withdrew. Moments later, a small plastic bag was thrown in; it flew past her face, bounced on the passenger seat beside her and ended up on the floor.

'Fuck you,' she said automatically, and reached over to pick up the bag. The man was already moving quickly away, weaving through the cars parked along the front. He was tall and thin, and his long black hair was tied back in a ponytail. He wore a dirty palebrown jacket and faded jeans. He hurried across the main road without looking back, then disappeared down a sidestreet.

Teresa weighed the bag in her hand; it felt about right, but she had probably been undersold, as always. She could see the white powder through the polythene, and it ground with the right feeling when she squeezed it lightly between

her fingers. She slipped the bag into her jacket pocket.

As she drove away she saw Fraser johnson hanging around outside the amusements arcade.

He waved to her urgently, but she drove on. She owed Fraser a bit of cash, not a lot, but because of the deal she had just done she wasn't going to be able to settle up with him for a while. Anyway, she would probably see him that evening, and by then things would be different.

She drove towards home, thinking about Debra, the titless bitch, the bleeding bitch with the spotty fucking face, and that lad called Mark who'd turned up with her from somewhere and crashed at her place the night before. In fact, all of them had been at her place overnight, because Mark's mates came along too. They'd gone through her stuff, looking at her lists, asking her stupid bloody questions about what she wrote down.

Because of this she was ready for more aggravation from them, but halfway up the long hill of Hyde Avenue the engine coughed and she pulled over to the side. She left the car where it stopped, the driver's door open. lt was a pile of crap, anyway. It took her ten minutes to walk up to the house where she was staying, the one the Housing Benefit woman had found her a couple of weeks back. The lads had gone. She looked for food, but if there had been any they had stolen it. She did a line of the coke, then put away the rest for later.

She walked round the damaged interior of the house, angry with everything and everyone.

Someone had had a piss on her stuff. Why did people always do this to her? There was another broken window downstairs; it must have happened during the night, because the bits of broken glass were still lying around on the floorboards. There was one of the lads, a kid from Eastbourne called Darren, who'd really wound her up over that window. She couldn't remember

why, now. Probably something to do with Debra, because he was the one who'd run off with her that morning, wasn't it? She couldn't remember exactly. Her fingernails curled into the palms of her hands, and she wished she'd smacked him in the fucking face, like he deserved.

outside, she saw another mate of hers, Steve Ripon, driving down towards the front, and she grabbed a ride with him Steve dropped her outside the Bulver Arms, saying he might call in for a pint later. She didn't want to know. Steve usually got on her nerves. She saw a couple of the lads in the bar, playing pool, so she hung around with them for a while, hoping for a game. They pretended they hadn't seen her, and made jokes about her as if she wasn't there, the sort she'd heard before. Fuckers. One of them said he'd buy her a pi nt but in the end didn't, and made the others laugh at her again, and she had to buy her own. She was hungry, but didn't fancy any of the food. Couldn't afford it.

'Fin going home,' she said, but they didn't seem to hear.

She set off in the direction of Hastings, but it meant walking along the seafront and there was no shade from the sun. She was already feeling light in the head, and the sun only made it worse. She turned off the coast road at the first big Junction, and started walking up Battle Road.

Steve Ripon drove past again, and slowed down. She didn't want another lift from him, so she pretended not to notice.

Through the driver's window, Steve shouted, '01, Gerry! That Debra of yours told Darren all about you.'

,piss Off, Steve!' she yelled back.

'She reckons you can't get it up. That right?'

,Piss off,' she said again, but under her breath. She cut away down an alley, where Steve couldn't follow. After a hundred yards she came out in Fearley Road, which she knew well. A mate of hers had turned over the offlicence

there a couple of years ago, and got done with community service. She was getting fed up with all this walking about and feeling dizzy, so now she was keeping a sharp eye open for something she could drive away in.

On an impulse she went up to the car park built on the flat roof of the All Nights Market, and started trying the car doors. She wanted a car that was fairly new, not an old heap, but most of the really new cars were difficult to hotwire, unless you knew what you were doing. The last car she was going to try before giving up turned out to be the easiest one to take: a dark red Jreg Austin Montego. There was a wallet in the glove compartment (with forty quid and a Barclaycard), a stereo system and a full tank of petrol. Two minutes later she was driving up Battle Road with music playing, heading back to the house.

Debra came out of the house as she parked. Teresa leapt out of the Montego and broke into a run as soon as she saw her, but Debra dodged away. She was carrying an armful of her clothes, and a Sainsbury's plastic bag stuffed with something.

'Here, 1 want you!' Teresa shouted.

'You fucking leave me alone, you fucking weirdo!' Debra yelled back.

' Get in the fucking car!'

'I've had enough of all that! Fuck off, Gerry!'

She tore away down the hill, dropping garments and stumbling on the uneven ground.

'I'll fucking get you!'

Teresa broke off the chase, and ran into the house. Someone had been in and shat on the floor. She ran up the stairs, kicked open the door of the cupboard, and grabbed her guns and ammunition. lt took her two trips to get everything outside and into the Montego, but as soon as she was ready she drove down the hill in search of Debra. The rifle was hidden in the luggage compartment at the back, but she had put the handgun on the seat beside her.

She knew where Debra would be going: her mum had a

house lower down on the estate. Teresa stopped the car with two wheels up on the pavement and shoved the gun under her jacket. She ran to the door of the house, kicking and pummelling it with her fist.

'They saw you coming, they did!' said a woman, lean'

ing over the wall from next door. 'They've done a runner! Good thing too, you little dickhead!'

Teresa was tempted to blow a sodding great hole in her face, grinning at her over the wall, but instead she whipped out her cock and tried to piss all over the door, but she had dried up.

The woman yelled something, and disappeared. Teresa looked around: she knew Debra's mum's car, and like the neighbour had said it wasn't in sight.

She went back to the Montego, screeched it round in the narrow road and headed away.

She drove fast until she had crossed the Ridge and was going out into the countryside around Ninfield. The sun beat maddeningly down. A police car went past in the opposite direction, blue strobe lights flashing; Teresa instinctively hunched down in the seat a little, but they were obviously going after someone else, and neither of the two cops even glanced in her direction.

The righthand side of the road was thickly forested: Teresa had only a dim memory of having driven along here before, but after a while she saw a sign for a Forestry Commission picnic site next to a layby. She was driving too fast to stop, but she went down to the next farm entrance, did a turn, and went back.

She realized that neither of the guns was loaded; bleeding right! She'd gone after Debra like that!

She skidded into the parking area in a cloud of dust, and angrily picked up the handgun. She slammed in a magazine of bullets.

A path led off through the trees, and ahead of her she glimpsed the bright colours of summer clothes.

She came into a clearing in the trees, where three long wooden tables had been set up. Huge logs lying beside them were used as seats. A young woman was sitting at one of the tables, with plastic cups and plates, scraps of food, and several toys spread all about: a ball, a train, a scribble pad, dozens of coloured bricks. The woman was laughing, and her boy was running around on the grass, pretending to do some stupid thing or other.

Teresa felt sick at the sight of them, stupid middleclass bastards with too much money and spare time. With a deliberate movement she brought the gun out from her jacket with a wide swinging motion of her hand. She had seen that in a movie somewhere. She cocked the gun.

That wonderful sound of efficient machinery, ready for action. She worked the mechanism three or four more times, relishing it.

The noise had made the woman turn towards her. The fucking stupid child just kept on running about, but the woman was calling to it, holding out her arms protectively.

As Grove advanced on them, his gun levelled, Teresa thought, 1 can't take any more of this!

She Located, Identified ... retreated instantly from the scenario and from the mind of Gerry Grove.

Copyright (0 GunHo Corporation in all territories

A silent darkness fell. Teresa walked home miserably to the hotel afterwards, sick at heart.

CHAPTER 29

A Ithough the feeling of being conspicuous never left her, Teresa found that one advantage of her frequent visits to the ExEx building was that the staff began to take her presence for granted. They would let her use the computer 1

terminals more or less whenever she felt like It, and they usually left her alone to browse.

The database itself was becoming increasingly interesting to her. All complex computer programs seem at first sight to be an impenetrable maze of options, assumptions and usage conventions, and the catalogue of ExEx scenarios was a gigantic example of this.

The program was always running, always online, and was presumably in a constant state of being updated and reprogrammed somewhere in the further reaches of the web. The amount of data it held was clearly beyond the memory capacity of any single industrial computer, and must have been stored in networked sites in different parts of the world. But however large it seemed, it was only a single, closed program. Copyright notices infested it, and Warnings about restrictions on usage appeared with monotonous frequency.

Finding the information it contained, provided you had mastered the syntax of the search engine, was surprisingly fast and efficient. The result of any search usually a single screen with the information that had been requested appeared so quickly that it gave the illusion that what you wanted had been placed near the top of the

pile so that it might be easily found.

The simplicity was deceptive, though. When Teresa set the command to browse, and merely scrolled through some of the data in sequence, the sheer scale, detail and extent of what was held in memory were a source of constant amazement to her.

Again, she sensed limitless horizons. But Teresa was starting to learn that the scenarios were not as she had thought at first.

A scenario always turned out to have a measurable edge; reality came to an end when memory ran out. No matter how well the programmer disguised it, or fudged it, you could not take a car and drive it away, out of virtuality into reality. You could fly over the whole of Finland, you could cross and recross, you could tour the periphery, you could circle for ever over one chosen lake or stream, or you could dart and weave with unexpected turns ... and still Finland would calmly and interminably unfold beneath you. But it was always Finland; it was not for ever.

Where the true unlimited was to be found was, so to speak, in the headings of the scenarios, in the indexes to them. The limitless lay in hyperlinks, crossreferences, hyperreality.

All scenarios ultimately touched, their edges were contiguous. You could approach the same incident from a number of different viewpoints. But the contiguity lay in the fourth dimension: you could not cross the margin from one scenario to the next, unless one was bolted on, London's West End or Arizona's Monument Valley bolted on to a filmset of a cowboy saloon, and that counted only as expansion. lt made the scenario seem more complex, while in fact it only made it larger.

The real nature of contiguity lay in the adjacency of memory, hyperlinked by character or situation or point of

view. Contiguity was psychological, and it was related to memory, not conscious planning. in one scenario a character would be memoratively significant: it might be the elderly woman named Elsa Durdle who drove a Chevy with a gun in the glove compartment.

xi

ib

That scenario e isted for a number of possi le reasons. Someone involved with the William Cook case must have remembered Elsa, or had heard her story somehow, or had met and interviewed her after the incident. lt could even be so remote a contact as someone who had merely read about her. Whatever the reason, there was enough of her, enough about her, to place her centrestage in one scenario. Another person, witness to the same central event, or participant in it, might know Elsa Durdle only peripherally: she could be the unnamed driver of the car that drove past police lines, momentarily blocked a policeman's view.

Both were true accounts, both were limited by their viewpoint, yet through contiguity they tended towards a concurrence, an agreement on basic facts and images.

Placed against these two scenarios might be a third one, contiguous to either or both of them, which knew nothing at all of Elsa in person, yet admitted the presence of her car driving through, or past, or in the distance.

Next to that scenario would be another, and beyond that more. Each contiguous scenario was a step on the way towards the margins of Elsa Durdle's reality.

Here, in the online computer, with its endless scrolling index headings, each with its own subheadings, and each of those with further subheadings, uncountable generational levels unfolding below, and all of them crossreferenced and linked to one another, virtuality was taken towards its edge and beyond.

There was no end, only another scenario contiguous to the last.

Sitting alone in a side office, with the computer terminal to herself, with no one on the staff apparently taking any interest in what she was doing, Teresa eventually found her way to the database of Memorative Principals.

Guessing what that meant, and reading the screen menus, she entered the name 'Tayler' and the subset 'Jennifer Rosemary'. At the prompt for physical location, to narrow the search parameters, she entered 'London' and 'NW 10'.

Within a few seconds an abstract of scenarios in which Shandy appeared poured across the screen.

. Each scenario was identified by a tide, a long code number, a synoptic description, and a tiny video icon. Noticing that there was an option to display the videos, Teresa clicked on the menu, and at once all the video icons changed into tiny frozenframe images from the opening of each scenario.

Teresa clicked on one, and a fivesecond teaser extract ran in the tiny box. The image was so small it was hard to see what was going on, but it was clear that Shandy was ready for action.

The list of Shandy's scenarios was long; worryingly long, when you bore in mind, the abandon with which she took part in them. Teresa moved the information to and fro, top to bottom, estimating how many Shandy scenarios there were. She roughed a guess at nearly eighty, and then she noticed that the database had a facility for counting successful finds and that the true number of Shandy scenarios presently available was eightyfour.

Each index heading carried a dozen optional hyperlinks from Shandy: to other people involved with her, to the video clips previewing her scenarios, to adjacent subjects, to library material, to biographical material, to available slots for additional or supplementary scenarios. Information

about Shandy's ExEx world was exploding about her, as her contiguity was revealed.

Teresa ran a hyperlink search on the list, using the name Willem and immediately discovered that Shandy and Willem had appeared in fourteen scenarios together, including the one called Brawl in Wild West saloon Jor adults XXX.

She learnt from this listing that Willem's real name was actually not Willem but Erik. He was Dutch, though, and he had, as he had told her, been born in the small town of Amstelveen.

Willem's own listing as a memorative principal, which Teresa accessed next, was even more alarming than Shandy's: in addition to the fourteen scenarios he had made with her, he had been involved in a further ninetyseven. Teresa noticed that many of these skinflicks (as she assumed they were) had been made with a young woman named Joyhanne, herself a memorative principal.

Teresa ran a search on Joyhanne. She had been born in The Hague, worked for a while as a telephonist (hyperlink to Holland Telecom), but appeared to have been making videos since the age of fourteen. Attached to Joyhanne's name was another long abstract of porno scenarios (she assumed from their titles). Dozens more options scattered in all directions from Joyhanne's indexed activities: virtuality was spreading out and away, the known limits of events accelerating to the horizon in every direction.

For instance, Joyhanne had another regular costar; this man, a German, had made more than fifty porno (Teresa assumed) videos, but in addition he had made a couple of appearances in real films, both of which were mentioned in reference books (three hundred and fifteen hyperlinks); the author of one of the film books worked In the Humanities Department of the University of Gottingen, which offered

more than two hundred and fifty educational scenarios on developmental studies; one of these, which Teresa chose at random, dealt with softdrug culture in the USA, 196875; this single scenario had more than fifteen hundred hyperlinks to other scenarios . . .

lt was impossible to keep a mental hold on everything.

Teresa paused, dizzied by the endless choices. She was sidetracking, and getting away from what she had set out to do.

She returned through the hierarchy to Shandy's main listing, and used the program's memo feature to store three coded references, selected more or less at random. One day she might like to visit Shandy at work again: two of the titles she chose were Heat and Dust in the Arizona Desert and Open Top XRated Drive Through Monument Valley.

Now Teresa selected the hyperlink option, and from this picked out Remote Link.

From Remote Link came yet more new options: Copy, Date, Edit, Gender, Motive, Name, Place, Significant Objects, Weapon, and many others. Each of these had suboptions: Teresa clicked on Place, and saw a huge list of subsidiary choices: Continent, Country, State, County, City, Street, Building, Room, was just one sequence.

Again feeling sidetracked, she went back to the entry point of the hyperlink, and picked out Name. At the prompt she typed 'Elsa Jane Durdle', added 'San Diego' as a locater, and clicked on it.

Please Wait.

Teresa was. so used by now to the apparently instant response of the program that the appearance of that message made her feel almost smug. Her search criteria were complex enough to slow the computer perceptibly.

Not long later, in fact in under a minute, the screen

cleared and a message appeared:

248 hyperlink(s) connect 'Jennifer Rosemary Tayler' to 'Elsa Jane Durdle'. Display?

Yes/No.

Teresa clicked on 'Yes', and almost at once a long list of the codes of contiguous scenarios began to scroll quickly down the screen. Each had its tiny still video image attached to it. The first scenario took place in part of a mockedup saloon in an improvised film studio in 1990 in the West End of London, and the last on a hot windy day in San Diego in 1950. Events connected them.

Two hundred and fortyeight scenarios were linked in collective memory. The realities were contiguous; there was no edge.

The road of extreme virtuality ran on beyond the horizon, as far as the mountains, through the desert, across the seas, on and on for ever.

She downloaded the codes of the two hundred and fortyeight contiguous scenarios, and waited a few seconds while the printer turned them out. One day, when she had time and credit enough, she might start exploring the links that were said to exist between Elsa and Shandy.

Teresa next entered the name 'Teresa Ann Simons' as a memorative principal, added

'Woodbndge' and 'Bulverton' as defining physical locations, and waited to see what would happen.

The computer did not pause. With almost disimissive instantaneity, a screen appeared with her name at the top. A single scenario was noted below. There were no hyperlinks, no connections to the rest of virtuality.

Surprised at this result, and actually rather disappointed, Teresa clicked on the video icon.

Her curiosity was satisfied and dampened all at once: such as it was, her only scenario in the whole of ExEx was of the day she had first visited this range, and spent an hour or so on target practice with a handgun.

She squinted at the allocated few seconds' preview of herself, noticing mostly the fact that from the rear view her backside looked considerably larger than she had realized. When asked if she wanted access to the entire video, or to enter the scenario itself, she declined.

With her own information still on the screen, Teresa tried to establish hyperlinks first with Elsa Durdle, then with Shandy, but at both attempts the program curtly informed her: No hyperlinks established from this site.

CHAPTER 30

Teresa travelled up to London by train. She wanted to be a tourist, take a few photographs and buy some presents to take home to her friends. She knew her visit to England was Coming to an end. One day soon she would have to return to her job; although her section chief had granted her ,extended' compassionate leave, with no firm date by which she had to report back, she knew that the Bureau did not allow indefinite leave to anyone. Her time was almost up.

The train took her to Charing Cross Station in the heart of London. From there it was a short walk to Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, the Houses of Parliament and, eventually, Buckingham Palace. After an hour or two of dutiful trudging around, Teresa had had enough of playing tourist. She took a taxi to Piccadilly Circus, and went in search of Shandy.

She walked along Coventry Street as far as the point where it became a pedestrian precinct, then walked back again on the other side of the road. While it remained recognizably the same street, many of the details seemed to have changed. Could this be explained by the fact that Shandy's scenario was set back in 1990, and there had been rebuilding since? Or by the fact that what she had seen was simply a computer emulation of the real place, full of approximations? She wished she had been able to take more notice of her surroundings while there, but as so often happened while inside a scenario, the sheer sensory impact had been extremely distracting.

She found Shaver's Place, a short, narrow alleyway leading off to the south, but there was nowhere along it that looked as if it could be used as a studio for making skinflicks. On the other side of the road, Rupert Street led north towards Shaftesbury Avenue. Halfway along Rupert Street on one side there was, exactly as she recalled, a pub called the Plume of Feathers. Teresa walked in, but as soon as she was inside she knew it was not the same place.

Everything about it was different. She looked all around, but there was no one there who looked remotely like Shandy, or even what Shandy might look like after the passage of a few years.

She retraced her steps, remembering the day she had walked along this street, or one like it, feeling the sexy tightness of Shandy's thighconstricting miniskirt, talking about Arizona and Finland. They had left Willem waiting in the pub, and for a while walked to and fro along Coventry Street. Teresa walked as far as the statue of Eros, then went down the steps of one of the station entrances and found that where the virtual London had ended in a brick wall was now the bustling concourse of a busy Underground station.

She returned to street level, then went back to Rupert Street. Suppressing the temptation to look inside the Plume of Feathers once again, Teresa walked up to the intersection with Shaftesbury Avenue and crossed over, following Rupert Street into Soho.

The streets here were much narrower. After a few hundred yards she noticed a doorway ornamented on each side by tall illuminated pink plastic panels, obviously portable, into each of which was set a large photograph of several naked and near-naked women. A man, whose face was masked by a clumsy virtualreality headset, was drawn groping lasciviously towards them. A handlettered sign said: Extreme Thrills Imported Downstairs NOW ADULTS ONLY!

A doorman stood just inside the entrance: he was a youth with short spiky hair and tattooed tears angling down from the corner of one eye, and was incongruously wearing a dark suit With collar and tie.

Teresa, realizing that this place was selling a version of ExEx, was brought up short by a shocking thought. She knew what was available in ExEx, so it was likely that at least a few of Shandy's scenarios would be available somewhere in this dive ... maybe they even had the cowgirl scenario where Teresa had first found her.

Teresa's thoughts instantly raced off towards the edge of reality: she imagined herself venturing into the cellar below this unprepossessing doorway, paying over a sum of money to the youth, entering the scenario in which Shandy played a cowgirl who was enthusiastically screwing a Dutchaccented cowboy, then afterwards leaving again with Shandy, occupying her body and mind, feeling the sexy constraints of her don'tcare clothes, heading out of the studio into these streets around Piccadilly and Leicester Square, then walking north across Shaftesbury Avenue to this spot, to the entrance to this ExEx club, where she and Shandy would venture inside, enter the extremes of unreality ...

'What you want, lady? You want inside?'

'No,' said Teresa, startled by his sudden voice.

'Good prices for ladies. Big discount. Come, I show you.'

'No ... I don't want in. Did you ever hear of a girl called Shandy?'

For a moment the youth looked disconcerted, a look that was exaggerated by the needledrawn tears, but then he reached into the back pocket of his pants and produced a small wad of business cards.

' Yeah, Shandy. She here. You want Shandy, you have her OK. We got plenty Shandy. What you want, you like

girlgirl with Shandy, or you wanna watch?'

'Do you know who 1 mean?' Teresa said. 'Her real name's Jennifer. She works around here, in joints like this.'

'Yeah, yeah.' He held the business cards in surprisingly long and delicate fingers, and with a clean fingernail peeled back the top one. Teresa thought he was about to pass the card to her, with no doubt detailed but unwanted information inscribed, but he gripped it lightly between his thumb and forefinger and scraped at the gap between two of his yellowed front teeth.

'Shandy. She give big discount for girlgirl. We have plenty Shandy.'

'OK, 1 get the picture.'

Teresa turned away, irritated with herself for letting the boy drag her into the exchange, and still preoccupied by what she had been thinking about when he spoke to her.

What would happen? Inside a scenario, suppose she found a GunHo facility or a dive bar or somewhere else with ExEx equipment, then used it to enter a second scenario?

What then of virtuality? Would the realities be no longer contiguous, but intersecting?

'Hey, lady!'

She continued walking away from him.

'Lady!' The young man had left his pitch in the doorway, and he laid a hand on her arm.

She snatched it away from him.

'Quit that!' she said loudly. 'I'm not interested!'

'You lady, you one of us? You Shandy?'

His tone was no longer flat and automated, the voice of the shill. An earnestness gripped him.

He was pointing at her neck. Teresa saw how young he was, hardly more than in his middle teens. He turned his head away, and laid a finger against the base of his own neck.

There was a nanochip valve embedded there. it was obvious what it was, but it was unlike any other Teresa had

seen. it was larger than hers, and was made of bright purple plastic: lt was set in a mount made of some silvery material, probably plastic again but glossed up brilliantly. The valve looked like a cheap stone in a gaudy setting.

Teresa had always been selfconscious about her ernbedded valve, thinking that to anyone who didn't know what it was it must look like something left over from an operation. She usually wore a high collar or scarf in an attempt to conceal it. By contrast, the youth's nanochip valve was almost flagrantly exposed, a startling flash of colour on the back of his neck, like bodypiercing, a fashion statement, a tribal declaration.

'You know ExEx, lady? You real thing! Big, big discount for real ExEx! We find you Shandy, you bet!'

'No,' she said yet again, but less assertively than before. 'Look, 1 know what ExEx is. 1 was just surprised to find it. Open to the public.'

'Members only. You join! You no come in? Special deal before evenings.'

Realizing she was wasting her time, and had been doing so from the first exchange of words, Teresa backed away. The youth tried again to lure her inside, but she turned her back on him and strode off in what she hoped looked like a determined way. She soon reached the junction with Shaftesbury Avenue, and had to wait for a break in the traffic before she could cross. She glanced back: there was no sign of the young man.

She walked to Charing Cross Road, and spent nearly an hour trying to distract herself in one of the big bookstores; after this she returned to the Leicester Square area and went i see a movie. She caught the last train back to Bulverton with minutes to spare; she had not looked at the timetable In advance, and discovered she was lucky to have caught it.

An hour later, as the train left Tunbdidge Wells and moved into the almost unbroken darkness of the Sussex countryside, Teresa, alone in the carriage, closed her eyes and tried to doze. She was bodytired from all the walking she had done in London, but stimulated and alive mentally.

She had barely been able to keep her mind on the film, in spite of the intrusively loud music and explosive special effects. Something had unexpectedly become clear to her. At the beginning of the show, as she sat in the auditorium waiting for the lights to go down, she had remembered the conversation in the hotel corridor with Ken Mitchell, and the seemingly impenetrable objections he had raised to her presence in the hotel.

His talk of linear coherence and iterative purity had sounded at the time like codebabble to her, the natural language of the computer geek. But the Shandy scenario had undermined everything. That thought she had had, outside the ExEx dive, about the way reality might be made to intersect, made her think she understood at last what Mitchell had been driving at.

An ExEx scenario already represented a sort of intersection. lt stood at the interface between human variables and digital logic.

The programmers took people's memories of certain events, their feelings about the events, the stones they told about them afterwards, the imagination surrounding them, and even their guesses at what the events had actually been, they took all of these and coded them into a form of objectified experience, and made them seem real, or virtually so. Thus were the scenarios derived.

Mitchell had spoken of what he called reactional crossover: the fact that the ExEx user will inadvertently affect the shape of the scenario, so that on second and subsequent visits the scenario will seem to have modified itself to take

account of the previous visit or visits.

From the start she had been all too aware of the interactive nature of ExEx. The only difference since then was her growing understanding of how interactivity was a way of testing the limits of the scenarios.

Why she should be a perceived threat to the programmers was a mystery to her.

But that wild thought of the afternoon: entering Shandy's scenario, moving around within it, testing its extremities, going with ExEx Shandy to the ExEx dive off Shaftesbury Avenue, then entering another ExEx scenario, a simulation within a simulation ...

it couldn't happen then. Then was 1990, before ExEx had been made publicly available, probably before it had even been developed. The simulation of London that was Shandy's home would not include the ExEx dive.

Things had changed since 1990. Sitting in the cinema, as the film began, Teresa had recalled the logical problems that Gerry Grove presented. The guns, and the unexplained passage of time during his final afternoon of life.

lt was known that Grove had been to the Bulverton ExEx building between his first murders, the killing of the mother and her child picnicking in the woods near Ninfield, and his final explosive spree. lt was not known what he had done while he was in there.

When she had asked the staff in the building about this, expecting them to remember, they were vague and contradictory about details. The Grove shooting was probably the single most disruptive event in Bulverton since the upheavals of World War 11, but the crucial moment within it was misremembered by those who witnessed it.

From the point of view of Ken Mitchell and his colleagues, any attempt to recreate the events of Grove's day

had to take account of that visit. Mitchell had said as much. Had Grove already intersected two realities on the day of his massacre? Had he entered Extreme Experience?

Would that explain the mystery of the guns found stashed in the back of his stolen car? lt was known what guns Grove possessed, and that he had taken both of them with him on the day.

None was found afterwards at the house. Two were found in the car, two were the ones he used. They intersected: they seemed to be the same ones.

Most of the official reports and media coverage dwelt on the guns Grove had carried and used that day. Some others referred to the guns later found in his stolen car. But none drew these two elements together. There was apparent vagueness, a blurring, a resistance to the idea that there might be conflict between the two sets of objectively checkable facts.

Nodding off on the almost deserted train, in spite of the draughty carriage and the uncomfortable swaying, Teresa felt that the problem, and also any potential solution to it, was constantly slipping from her grasp. She understood so little.

The train stopped for a long time at Robertsbnidge station. There was no explanation from the guard, or anyone else. The cold night enveloped the train. Two railway workers walked slowly along the platform carrying torches which they pointed approximately at the wheels.

There was a conversation up ahead, presumably with the driver. Teresa could hear the voices, but not what they were saying. Train doors slammed. A generator started up beneath the carriage floor. Teresa huddled lower in her seat, dreading an announcement that the train had broken down or was being taken out of service. lt was already after 1.00 a.m., and she was desperate to get to her bed. The day had been too long already. Finally, to her great relief, the train continued on its way.

She could not stop thinking about Grove, especially since she herself had ventured into the scenario of the day of the shooting.

1

to forget what had been like to enter

it was mpossi

1

his mind. His thoughts, which had come at her like the hot, unwanted breath of an intrusive stranger, had felt as if they were too close to her face. How do you recoil from someone inside whose head you are lurking? lt had been a

descent, if not into the evil that many people said had possessed Grove, then into a profoundly unhappy and deficient mind, one tangled up with petty fears and motives and

revenges. He was clearly sane, but also sick: Grove was

mean, dangerous, unreasonable, socially inadequate, vio-

lently disposed, unpredictable, riddled with hatred, unloved by anyone around him, unloving to anyone he knew.

His mind was so blankly unprotected, so obsessed with ferocious irrelevance, that any intrusion would affect it. She could have caused reactional crossover within that scenario, simply by entering it and residing briefly within his mind.

When Mitchell had talked to her in the corridor outside her room he spoke as if she had already caused the crossover. In reality she couldn't possibly have done so.

'In reality,

The phrase kept recurring. But reality was an assumption that was no longer viable.

Teresa already knew that some realities were contiguous, she had sensed that others could intersect, and now she was beginning to believe that Gerry Grove must have caused an intersection, a crossover.

Today, in the aftermath of Grove, in which of these realities were they anyway living? The one in which Grove had left his guns in the back of the stolen car, or the one in which he went back to the car, collected the guns, and took then, to the town centre?

The answer was both, hinted at in the blurring of memory The crossover Mitchell was concerned with had already occurred. But had Grove caused it, or had she?

In her tiredness her thoughts were circling on themselves. It was too late in the day to try to think about a slippery subject like this. She kept recoiling from the consequences of her own thoughts.

At long last, twentyfive minutes after the scheduled time, the train drew into Bulverton.

Teresa wearily left her seat, the only passenger to alight, alone on the dimly lit concourse, with no staff in the station. She walked back to the hotel as quickly as she could, her mind focused on one simple intent: getting to bed as soon as possible.

She crept into the hotel, using the master key Amy had lent her a few days earlier, and walked quietly through the darkened building. The stairs creaked as she climbed them.

When she reached her bedroom and closed the door, she did so with a feeling of errant lateness she had not had since her teenage years.

CHAPTER 31

n the morning, on her way down to breakfast, Teresa felt that something about the hotel had changed. As she passed the office she realized what it was: on most mornings the radio was playing in the office, and today it was not. This tiny alteration to her temporary routine made her uneasy.

In the dining room, the four young American programmers were sitting at their table in the furthest corner, and as usual did not acknowledge her arrival. One of the two young women was reading a copy of Investors Chronicle, and was rhythmically pumping an armmuscle exerciser with her free hand; the other was dressed in a track suit and elasticated sweatband, and had a towel draped around her neck. Ken Mitchell was speaking to someone on his mobile phone, and the other man was typing something on a palmtop computer. They all had in front of them their customary breakfast of highfibre, organically grown, non fertilized, nonantibioticly treated oriental pulses (which Amy had told her she had had to buy in expensively by mail order from Holland), but none of them was eating.

Teresa sat down at her own usual table. Whenever she saw Ken Mitchell she could not suppress her curiosity and irritation about him. He never seemed to notice her today, for instance, he was sitting with his back to her table and although she absolutely did not intend to have anything more to do with him, she wanted him to find out she was still there without, so to speak, her having to remind him.

She had picked up her newspaper from the table in the

corridor, and was glancing at it when someone came across to her table.

Assuming it would be Amy, Teresa looked up with a smile. lt was not Amy: a heavily built man with a closeshaved head was standing there, holding an order pad and a ballpoint.

'May 1 take your order for breakfast, please?' he said.

'Yes.' Surprised, Teresa reached automatically for the printed menu. In her three weeks in this place she had grown used to confirming to Amy simply that she wanted the same as she always had: fruit Juice, coffee, a lot of toast made with wheat bread. She placed her order. The man wrote it down, and walked off towards the kitchen.

Teresa had the feeling that she had seen him before, but couldn't think where. She assumed it must have been somewhere around the town, because she had no memory of seeing him in the hotel. She wished she had taken a better look at him.

While she was waiting for him to return, the four programmers left their table and walked out of the room. None of them appeared to notice her, and Ken Mitchell was pressing the keys of his mobile phone for another call.

She sat alone in the silent dining room, waiting.

After a short delay, the man with the shaved head returned and put down a silver pot of coffee and a large glass of orange juice.

'I didn't realize you would be wanting wheat bread,' he said. 'I've had to send out for some.

It'll only be a few minutes. The bakery's just round the corner from here.'

'It doesn't matter much. White bread would have been OK.' Teresa saw herself through this man's eyes: another damned American picky about obscure food. Although, hell, wheat bread was on the menu! 'Amy knows 1 usually like wheat bread, and gets it in for me.'

He had straightened and was standing across the table from her, holding the tray against his chest.

,Amy's not here any more,' he said.

Teresa reacted to the news with a little start of surprise, but the truth was that ever since she had come downstairs she had been expecting news of change.

'What's happened?' she said. 'Is she OK?'

'Yeah, she's fine. She just wanted a break.'

'So you've taken over from her?'

'I've taken over everything. I'm running the hotel now.'

'You're managing it?'

'Well, I'm managing it, yes. But I'm the new owner.'

'Has Nick Surtees gone too?'

'It all happened yesterday. I've wanted to run this place for a long time, and I heard Nick wanted to sell up, so we did a deal.'

'Just like that? They were here yesterday, and didn't say anything about it.'

'I think they've been planning it for a while.' Teresa was looking blankly at him. He said, 'My wife will have brought the bread by now. Excuse me.'

She stared after him, as the service door swung closed behind him. The news, trivial though it probably was, went round and round in her mind. She knew that managers of hotels didn't regularly consult their guests about business matters, but both Nick and Amy had seemed so open and willing to talk that she was surprised neither of them had said anything to her.

'Goodbye' would have been pleasant.

She poured her coffee and sipped the orange juice, while she waited for the toast. A few minutes later the man returned.

As he put down the toast racked in the British manner, to ensure more or less instant cooling she said, 'I've seen You somewhere before. Don't I know you?'

'Maybe you've seen me around the hotel. 1 used to come into the bar from time to time.' He rubbed his chin. 'I used to have a beard. I'm Amy's brotherinlaw. David Hartland.'

Then she remembered that day, in the market, this man talking to Amy. There had been something aggressive about his behaviour, but it had been unimportant at the time. And another time, she had seen him leaving the ExEx building.

'So you're the brother of ... ?

'Jason's older brother. That's right. You probably know what happened to Jase?'

'Amy told me.' And her own personal memory of Jase?' lying dead on the roof of the house in Eastbourne Road.

'Jase and 1 wanted to take over this hotel, long ago, when Nick's parents were running it.

Nothing came of it back then, but when 1 heard Nick was selling up 1 didn't want to miss a second chance.' He had stepped away from her while he spoke, and was standing by the service table. He opened one of the drawers and took out a handful of knives and forks, which he wrapped in a cloth he had brought with him. 'Things are changing in Bulverton. Maybe you've heard. There's a lot of new money coming into the town.' He glanced in the direction of the table recently vacated by the four Americans, though Teresa couldn't immediately see the connection. 'People's lives are going to be transformed, and the town will follow. Ten years from now Bulverton will be a different place.'

'So you bought the hotel just yesterday?'

'We haven't done the legal stuff yet, the paperwork, but we shook hands on a deal. Nick's using a lawyer in London. I've got my own. You know how long lawyers take. In the meantime, Nick and Amy wanted to get going straight away, so they left yesterday evening.

Most of their stuffs still upstairs, but we're storing it for them until they want it.'

'Do you know where they've gone?'

'They didn't tell me,' he said, but in a way that Teresa knew meant that they actually had. 'I think it's like a honeymoon, you know.'

She laughed then, but more because this news needed some kind of release than because she found it amusing.

'So a in 1 likely to see them again?' she said. 'I was starting to get on well with Amy.' if

'I wouldn't know. Maybe you're still here in a month or so? But the way they were talking yesterday, it didn't sound like they were planning to return to Bulverton. A lot of unhappy memories here. For them, and for a lot of people.'

'Yes, I know.'

There didn't seem to be anything more to say to that.

Dave Hartland headed back towards the kitchen with his bundle of cutlery, and Teresa started on her rapidly cooling toast. She was upset by the suddenness of the changes in the hotel; it felt almost like a personal affront, that she had offended Nick or Amy in some way.

Of course it couldn't be anything like that or so she hoped.

Teresa had often tried to put herself in the minds of the people in this small town, the sharers of collective grief She knew too well how it felt to suffer an individual loss, but had no idea of how different it would feel to be one of many who survived a massacre. Did it provide more comfort or less, to know you weren't alone? The upheaval, the shock, the sense of betrayal, the guilty feelings of the survivors, the intrusion of the press ... all these were elements of crisis aftermath that were known about and studied by psychologists, but none of their research could explain how it actually felt to be amongst those involved. Before she came to Bulverton, Teresa had thought she might identify with the People here, because of Andy, but the truth was that the

boutiques and craft studios. We want people to bring their kids, so we're going to build an indoor adventure playground, with a gallery where the parents can watch their children and have a few drinks. We're even thinking of putting in a gym, so people can work out before they come in for a drink or a meal. You know the old barn *at the back that Nick and Amy used for storage? We'll convert that. And we're probably going to have an extreme experience facility here as well. 1 was talking to those friends of yours from America. Their company will be franchising ExEx in this country soon, and if 1 move fast we'll be the first private facility on the south coast.'

~ 'You certainly do move fast,' Teresa said, impressed by the man's ambition.

'I've spent all my life in the town, watching this place run slowly into the ground. You know what it's like upstairs: the whole place needs clearing out and starting from scratch. Well, jean and 1 know how to make the place profitable, and we aren't getting any younger, so we're putting everything we've got into this.'

'I guess so.'

Teresa couldn't imagine how much it would cost to undertake a fullscale conversion along the lines he had described, but it must run into millions. Hadn't she seen him running a market stall in the Old Town? That was hardly the sort of enterprise which would develop enough spare capital for an expansion along these lines.

She waited a few minutes longer, but it was clear he couldn't find the hotel records on the computer. It made her impatient, watching him fumble around with simple software, and she knew she wasn't helping by standing over him. She suggested again they could sort out the account later. He seemed relieved to agree.

CHAPTER 32

Thinking about crossover and how to avoid it, Teresa came into a clearing in the trees, where three long wooden tables had been set up. A young woman was sitting at one of the tables, with plastic cups and plates, scraps of food, and several toys spread all about. She was laughing, and her child was running around on the grass, wrapped up in his game.

Teresa retreated as far as she was able, back and back into the recesses of Grove's mind. How could she use his eyes, yet look away?

Grove brought out his handgun from the concealment of his Jacket with a deliberate, wide swinging motion of his hand. He cocked the gun, working the mechanism three or four more times, relishing the sound.

The noise made the woman turn towards him. She saw the gun levelled at her, and panicked.

She shouted in terror to her child, trying to twist round on the heavy log, to get across to the little boy, but she seemed paralysed by her fear. The boy, thinking it was still a game, dashed away from her. The woman's voice became a hoarse roar, then, after she had sucked in her breath, she was incapable of further sound.

Teresa thought, Grove has never handled this gun before!

He was holding it onehanded, like an untrained beginner. She corrected him instinctively.

She steadied his gunhand by gripping his wrist with his free hand, she forced him to alm a little low, to allow for the recoil, and

she made him relax his trigger finger, made him squeeze the trigger, not jerk it.

As the woman at last scrambled away from the log, Grove shot her in the head, then turned his gun on the child.

She was back in the stolen car, with the gun hot on the seat beside her. Teresa's mind was racing defensively: It's only a scenario! lt was real but it's not real now, it happened before, the woman knew nothing, there was nothing I could do to stop it, 1 must not interfere, Grove must continue, that woman and her child were not hurt, it's all imaginary. They were dead months before 1 came to England; Grove killed them without my assistance.

Yet she knew Grove would almost certainly not have killed them without her intervention.

'Shut that fucking noise!'

In her distress she allowed herself to spread forward in Grove's mind, so she could ride in the forefront of his thoughts, to witness his actions without interference. If she went too far forward she became as one with him, Jointly responsible; too far back and she became detached from his raw motives, and so became capable of influencing him. How to strike a balance between the two?

As Grove drove towards Bulverton, Teresa repeatedly shifted mental position, trying to find the place where she could observe most closely without feeling the pressure against her of that hot breath of banal cruelty.

When she was forward, what appalled her most was his lack of reaction to what he had just done. She was still squirming in horror at what she had witnessed, but Grove was complaining to himself. he'd stolen the wrong car, a pile of shit, fucking exhaust making a lot of fucking noise, the only money he had was the forty quid he'd nicked but he didn't want to spend that because he was going to celebrate

later. Where's that bitch Debra? Bet that Mark shafted her last night, the bastard, need more money, should have looked through that woman's bag ...

ill trying to settle somewhere in his mind

Teresa was st' when he slowed the car and swung lt on to the forecourt of a Texaco filling station. Another car was leaving, waiting with its nose out in the main road, indicating left.

The driver

glanced up at Grove as he passed.

Grove stopped the Montego at an angle across the pumps, making lt difficult for any other car to drive in from that direction, then picked up the handgun and walked across to the shop.

A young woman with dark hair Margaret Lee, who had refused to be interviewed by Teresa was sitting alone at the tin, skimming through a magazine spread on the counter in front of her. She looked up as Grove strode towards her between the racks of magazines and bars of chocolate, and saw the gun at once.

After a moment of uncertainty, she leapt back from the counter, one arm flailing in the air. In the same instant, a grey metal security barrier came rattling noisily down from the ceiling and crashed on to the surface of the counter. Several small items stacked there display cards with special offers, airmile vouchers, a box of ballpoints scattered across the floor as they were dislodged.

Teresa felt Grove's anger rising, and he fired the gun several times at the barrier. The bullets made visible dents, lodging in the mesh surface without penetrating. Grove raced across to the barrier and bashed it with his elbow. lt hardly budged.

There was a large notice printed in the centre of the barrier, which Grove scarcely glanced at, but which Teresa could read.

This security barrier is bulletproof, fireproof and

soundproof

IT CANNOT BE REOPENED BY THE STAFF

Do not attempt to force it

An automatic alarm message has been sent to emergency

services

Grove uselessly fired two more bullets at the barrier, then looked around for something to steal. There was a tall refrigerator cabinet filled with drinks, so he shattered its glass door with a couple of rounds. He reached inside and took out two cans of Coke. He kicked at one of the heavy display stands, but succeeded only in shoving it a short distance across the floor. He grabbed some magazines, and thrust them under the arm of his gunhand.

He walked unhurriedly across the forecourt to the Montego, and opened the front passenger door. He threw the stuff he had stolen inside, then laid the handgun on the floor of the car, between the front seats.

He opened the luggage compartment and took out the rifle Holding it with the muzzle aloft, he made a show of snapping the ammunition clip into place, and cocking the weapon. Traffic went by on the main road, only a few yards away, the people inside the vehicles apparently noticing nothing.

Teresa, in Grove's mind, seated immovably behind his eyes, saw everything.

She eased forward to try to enter his mind, but shrank away. His mind was blank, insofar as any mind, can be free of thought. All she found was an almost wordless blur of images: Girl kill find hit fucking stupid door window run

get car ...

Once again, risking intercession in the scenario, Teresa

retreated as far as she dared. Grove was now stepping across the forecourt, heading for the side of the building where a night-cash window was situated.

He came to a halt directly in front of it, raised his rifle and took a steady aim at the glass.

Although there was a light on in the room behind, there was no sign of Margaret Lee.

Grove maintained his stance, and a few seconds later was rewarded when the young woman slowly stood up. She turned to face the nightcash window, and immediately saw Grove pointing the rifle at her.

He fired. The recoil punched against his shoulder, and the strengthened glass shattered into opacity. He fired twice more, both bullets hitting the glass but apparently not penetrating.

Grove went quickly to the window, but the crazing was so fine that it was impossible to see through into the room beyond.

Grove turned and walked back to the car. He slung the rifle on to the back seat, then climbed in and started the engine. Without another look back he stepped hard on the pedal, screeching the tyres, and noisily clouting one of the pumps. He continued to accelerate as he reached the road, swinging on to the carriageway without regard for traffic. He drove frantically towards Bulverton, flashing the headlamps at anyone who was in front of him, and overtaking recklessly.

Inside Grove 1 S mind Teresa felt herself relaxing. Normally, any other person's fast driving, apart from Andy's, struck fear into her heart and numbness into her thoughts, but she knew Grove could not hurt her. Even if he drove headon into an oncoming car she would not be Physically hurt. Anyway, she knew no accident was about to happen, because no accident had happened.

Grove was forced to slow when an empty coach pulled out from a side road, and lumbered heavily along towards

Bulverton. Grove braked the Montego sharply, followed the coach, then pulled out to overtake. Two police cars were approaching, their headlamps on full beam and their electricblue strobe lights flickering. The walling sirens were a deafening chorus. Grove ducked back behind the coach, but as soon as the police cars had passed he pulled out again.

lt was not far to Bulverton. Within a few minutes of leaving the Texaco station they had reached the intersection at the top of the town; straight on led down through residential areas to the town centre, a left or a right took the road along the Ridge. Grove barely slowed for the Junction, but skidded round and took the Ridge to the left. The traffic was heavier here, forcing Grove to slow a little, but still he wove dangerously round the other vehicles, overtaking when he could. Teresa was almost enjoying the sensation of unsafe speed; it was like the thrill of watching a car chase in a movie, knowing that it was all unreal, that there was no danger to her.

She waited for him to take the side road to the industrial estate, where the ExEx building was situated, knowing that this was where he had parked the car and therefore where he must be heading now. As the turning approached she braced herself, knowing that he was going too fast to take it safely. But he was still weaving, and the Montego went past the side road at high speed. He braked a short distance further on, and took the sharply angled turn into Hereford Avenue, the road that ran through the heart of the housing estate. Teresa had a glimpse of the distant sea, light clouds on the horizon, heathaze resting over the town, before the car was wrenched round again into a sidestreet. Teresa recognized the bleak terrace of houses where Grove had been living. The car braked hard to a halt, with two wheels up on the paving stones at the side.

Grove held his hand down on the horn, staring aggres-

sively at the house. Nothing appeared to move within.

'Fucking hell!' he said aloud, and pulled himself out of the car with a violent motion. He wrenched open the rear passenger door, and grabbed the rifle. He went quickly towards the house, making no attempt to hide the weapon, or, for that matter, to conceal himself behind any available cover. At the back of his mind, Teresa could not forget her Bureau training on approaching a building where the command situation was unknown: all available means of cover were to be sought.

As soon as she thought this Grove ducked swiftly to one side, and instead of approaching the house as he had been, going straight up the concrete path towards the door, he crouched down on the far side of the wooden fence, and proceeded more cautiously.

Teresa thought, I'm still influencing him!

She made herself move forward, but the sheer blast of anger and unreason swilling through Grove's mind repelled her.

Holding the rifle aloft, Grove kicked at the wooden door at the rear of the house: it was flimsily made, and it opened without resistance. Grove dashed in. Debra was standing in the main room at the back, cradling a small cat in her arms. She looked pale, undernourished, pathetic and terrified. She was also, Teresa noticed for the first time, pregnant. The cat reacted instantly to Grove, and scrambled away from her, raising weals on Debra's thin forearm which rapidly produced welling spots of blood.

Grove raised the rifle, while the skinny, wretched girl tried to back away, pressing her legs against an open teachest behind her.

Teresa thought, No! This didn't happen! Why didn't he 90 to the ExEx building?

The girl stumbled backwards, scraping her legs on the

metal lip of the chest, but dragged herself around it, trying to hide.

Grove suddenly lowered the rifle, turned away, and without saying anything to the girl walked back through the house. He opened the front door and strode back to the car. He lifted the lid of the luggage compartment and threw in the riffle, then retrieved the handgun from between the front seats and tossed that inside too. He banged the lid down.

Neighbours were watching. One woman pushed her children back into the house, and followed them inside and closed the door with a terrific slam.

Teresa thought, Is this right? Did 1 prevent him from shooting Debra? Or was he not going to do it anyway?

. She eased forward in Grove's mind, bracing herself for the onslaught of his crazed thoughts, but a sudden placidity had taken over. He was thinking about the best way to drive to Welton Road. Should he drive to the bottom of the road, and turn back up to the Ridge along Holman Road, or turn round here and go back the way he had come?

The sheer normality of his thoughts was almost more repulsive than the hatred she had experienced before. He had murdered two people in the last halfhour, and threatened two other people with death, yet he could sit calmly behind the wheel of a car and worry about which direction to drive.

Once more Teresa retreated to the back of his mind. She was confused by the way these events were turning out and growing increasingly aware of the sensitivity of a scenario's development.

Grove's case was different from every other scenario she had entered. The details of all or most of the others were unknown to her when she entered the action. But when she first arrived in Bulverton from the US she was already

broadly familiar with what Grove had done, and since then she had researched many more details. She had talked to witnesses, watched videos of newscasts and read dozens of different accounts and official reports. She suspected that material similar to this had been used by the ExEx programmers to develop the very scenario in which she was participating.

The other witnesses would have contributed too: those boys playing pool when Grove went to the Bulver Arms, Fraser johnson, who had witnessed the drugs deal on the seafront, Steve Ripon, who gave Grove a lift in his van and who saw him again later in Battle Road, Margaret Lee, who was terrorized by Grove at the Texaco station, maybe the police who had driven past on their way to the filling station; maybe even the people who lived in the houses she was driving past at this moment!

And the others, the people she had spoken to only briefly, or those who had left town and perhaps had been traced and been paid by the GunHo people for their stones. AR those who had witnessed something of Grove's disastrous adventure, many of whom she hadn't met, nor ever would, some who were still recovering from their injuries, those who would not speak to her because they thought she was a journalist, or for some other reason, those she had never even heard about because what they had witnessed was in nonExEx terms only a confirmation of what others had said they'd seen; those who had fled Bulverton before she arrived in town.

She was trapped in Grove's vile mind, while he drove the car violently through the congested streets of the lower Ridge, and she was able to think out, think back to the real world, where she existed and had listened and taken notes, had accumulated other people's memories of these events in a way not unlike the building of this scenario.

She was tempted then to abort herself out of the scenario, to leave the virtual Grove suspended for ever in the action of driving the car.

The extreme reality she had entered was one she already knew. The physical surroundings were identical to the Bulverton in which she had been living. This was how Nick, Amy, Dave Hartland, the Mercers, all the other witnesses, knew and remembered the relevant parts of the town. And it was how she too remembered them: no surprises for her, except the now familiar simulated veracity, still almost shocking in its details.

Using Grove's eyes, she glanced about as he drove, and she saw graffiti daubed or sprayed on walls, litter left untidily on the ground, dents on the bodywork of parked cars, individual curtains hanging at the windows of individual houses; everything different, everything incredibly detailed.

No one could remember such fanatical details when providing their memories to the ExEx software; no one would say, even to themselves, that in this particular road there were so many houses, so many different colours of house paints, so many different ways of cultivating the small patch of garden in front of every house, so many different ways of letting it grow wild, so many irregularities and patches on the surface of the road, so many parked cars, of such different types and ages, in such different states of physical condition, no one would think to recall that a cat had dashed across the road in front of Grove's car, that through the trees at the top of the hill it was possible to glimpse the traffic moving along the Ridge: a red Norbert Dentressangle truck with its vivid and familiar logo, a white Stagecoach doubledecker bus with an advertising placard for a local computer retail outlet, an orange and white Sainsbury's delivery truck, the glinting roofs of cars of different colours imperfectly seen because of the angle and the bright light from the sky.

People saw such details only subliminally, recording them on an unconscious level of the mind, and so the details went somehow into the scenario, not as facts but as adumbrations for the participants to see and notice and react to, and, in a 1 les.

certain way, to create for themselves as ad hoc necessites'

Details are expected, by instinct or habit: no residential road in modem Britain, or indeed in any developed country, lacked cars parked at the sides of the road. No one would therefore specifically recall them when reliving their memories for the ExEx software, but the cars would nevertheless be included as outlines, and the scenario participants, seeing them because they expected to see them, filled in the details from their own memories, from their own take on the collective unconsciousness, or from their own knowledge of the world.

In this way the participant was more than a passive observer. The scenario responded to and was reshaped by the will, experience, thoughts or imagination of the participant.

Extreme reality was a temporary consensus, subject to the changing whims of all involved.

The limits of the imagination were the only absolutes: in a scenario one could turn a car round and drive away from the main action, out into the open country beyond city limits, and follow the highway to the horizon, and it would usually be as unconsciously expected, filled with convincing detail, awash with impressions of temperature and sounds and objects, and the sensory experiences of being in a car.

But in the end a limit would inevitably be reached, because one could imagine only so much: the road would turn out to roll for ever, you would never reach the shore to watch the sea, the stairs to an Underground station were blocked by a brick wall.

The restriction on the extreme reality of any scenario was the failure to imagine what might lie beyond its edge.

Grove had driven out of the housing estate, and without slowing he barged his way into the traffic moving along the Ridge. Teresa had lost all curiosity about what might be going through his mind, and she remained as far back in his consciousness as possible.

Through his eyes she peered ahead, looking for the road that led down to the ExEx building.

lt was coming up, two hundred yards or more on the left.

Grove began to reduce speed for the turn, just as she would if she were driving. She was interceding again.

On an impulse, Teresa used Grove's left hand to reach up to the base of his neck. Touching him initially surprised and slightly repelled her: his neck was thick and covered in stubbly hairs. lt was sticky with sweat. She groped around, and quickly found the ExEx valve.

Had it been in place before? Had she found it only because she had expected to?

While she thought about that, Grove took control of the car once more, and threw it around the corner too quickly. The rear wheels swung out, and with an irritated gesture and a muttered obscenity Grove snatched his left hand back to the steering wheel and recovered from the skid. Teresa decided to let him drive in his own way.

Moments later he pulled up in the road opposite the entrance to the ExEx building, and turned off the engine.

CHAPTER 33

Teresa was not sure what Grove was about to do, and her uncertainty had an immediate effect on him.

He reached forward and began to fiddle with the volume and tuning knobs on the car's radio.

They were held on only by spring or clip pressure; when he had pulled them off, the retaining bracket quickly came free, and a few seconds later Grove had managed to release the whole instrument from its mount. The manufacturers had attached a label to the inner case, warning that the radio was protected against theft by an electronic coding system. As soon as Grove saw this he pushed the radio aside in disgust. lt swung beneath the dash on its extruded cables.

He climbed out of the car and walked round to the back. Teresa, realizing that they had come to the pivotal moment in the scenario, watched to see what he would do. This would be when he either took the handgun and the rifle from the car, or left them concealed inside.

As she thought this Grove went past the compartment lid, tapped his fingertips on it in a single gesture of annoyance, and walked across the road towards the entrance to the ExEx building.

She made him glance back once.

lt was for her almost a final gulp of reality, like the last deep breath taken by a diver.

From here, the view of the town was distant, and today the haze made the panorama indefinite without concealing

it. The softness of detail frustrated her; she wanted to devour the view.

Was the blurring of heat haze the way this scenario defined the edge of its own virtual reality?

Grove kicked irritably at a clod of earth, so Teresa let him turn and continue on his way. He pushed open the glass door of the ExEx building, and went across to the reception desk.

Paula Willson was on duty.

Grove took the stolen money from his pocket, and tossed it on the desk.

'I want to use the stuff you have here,' he said. 'That's forty quid ... should be enough.'

Paula said, regarding the loose notes on her desk, 'Are you a member, sir?'

No, he wouldn't be, Teresa thought. Grove would have failed the psychological profiling with the first three questions on the form. She wondered how he would lie his way out of this.

' Not here. Maidstone, I usually go to Maidstone.' Grove reached into the back pocket of his pants, felt around until he found what he was looking for, then pulled out the stiff plastic ID

card. He held it up for her to see. lt blurred in front of his eyes, so Teresa could not check it for authenticity; she knew that if he held it there a little longer it would swim into focus.

Paula took it from him. She appeared to see it in focus, and recognized it. She placed the four tenpound notes in a drawer of her desk, then typed the serial number of the card into her terminal. After a short pause she swiped its magnetic strip through the reader, and passed the card back to him, together with the usual information pack for users of the ExEx equipment.

'That's in order, Mr Grove. Thank you. A technician will assist you when you have made your selection.'

Grove took the card and pushed it back into his pocket, then walked through the inner door.

He, or Teresa, knew exactly where to go. A few moments later he had located an unused computer terminal, and was running the index software, seeming to be every bit as familiar with it as she was.

Her visits to ExEx were all so recent and commonplace that to Teresa it was a continuing shock to accept that she was still inhabiting Grove's body, that what was going on was a merely a scenario. While Grove peeled his way through the introductory screens of information, Patricia walked past the desk, and Teresa made Grove glance up at her.

'Hi,' she/Grove said to Patricia.

'Hello, again.'

Was that Patricia's reply to her, defined from the adumbration of her expectations? Or was it actually to Grove, a known customer and member of the ExEx facilities, perhaps someone Patricia had seen several times before?

Teresa forced herself forward in Grove's mind, to try to minimize any more influence on his decisions. Every thought she had, back there in the recess of his mind, every tiny detail she noticed, became translated into a decision or action taken by Grove. In crossover, she actually became Grove himself. Never before, in any scenario, had she experienced such active response.

She tried to assume a state of mental passivity, and watched the screens of options scrolling by. She wondered what he was looking for; then she wondered if wondering would also influence him. lt made him pause, at least.

She recalled the ease with which she had been able to talk to Shandy, that day in virtual London.

'Gerry?' she said.

'Who's that?'

'What exactly are you looking for?'

'Shut the fuck up!'

This was accompanied by a mental strike against her, a bludgeoning rejection, full of fear and hatred and bullying. Again, what felt like his hot breath welled around her.

She backed away, into the depths of crossover. He hunched defensively and began jabbing at the keyboard with movements that were so quick she could not see what he was doing. On the screen, the various menus and lists appeared and disappeared at dizzying speed.

Once again it occurred to her that her presence in the scenario was becoming unsustainable, that it was time to withdraw. To do that, though, would mean having to retreat from the Grove scenario now, at a point where it was becoming of real interest to her. What Grove had done inside the ExEx building clearly had an influence on the violent events that were soon to follow.

She didn't want to have to start over. Gerry Grove's movements on this day, recorded in such detail inside the scenario, were proving to be timeconsuming and traumatic.

Teresa had never known such a long and exhausting scenario, nor felt so appalled by what she found. She did not want to have to cope again with the banal evil of his mind, Mostly, though, she could not face having to go back to the beginning and experience his murders again, to witness them and either by inaction appear to condone them, or by intervention appear to influence them.

She had come as far as this; now she wanted to see it through and find out what he had done.

His helterskelter progress through the index listings continued; Teresa thought that because he was moving so quickly he could only be choosing selection boxes at random, almost on autopilot, simply clicking on one option after another, uninterested in where it might take him.

Suddenly he stopped, and Teresa felt his body relax slightly. He seemed to lean forward slightly, as if the tension of searching through the screens had been supporting his torso.

The top of the screen said:

Interactive/Police/Murder/ Guns/ 195 0 /William Cook/Elsa Jane Durdle.

Next to Elsa's name was a video frame; a tiny static glimpse of bright sunlight and windswept palm trees, a row of diagonally parked cars glinting in the sun.

The chances of Grove selecting this scenario at random were too immense to calculate. She had always presumed that Elsa was uniquely hers! Teresa felt protest rising in her, but almost at once Grove responded to it and went back into action.

He continued to move swiftly through the hierarchy of options, the computer screen flickering as he somehow anticipated each new menu. Once again, he quit abruptly.

Participatory/Victimenabled

/Interactive/

State

or

County

PD/State

PD/Virginia/Fugitive/Multiple Murder/Spree/Guns/Sam Wilkins McLeod.

The video showed a group of people against a brightly lit and highly coloured background.

For a moment it meant nothing to Teresa, but she made Grove lean forward and look closely at the image, and used the mouse to click on it; at once it expanded to occupy the lower half of the screen.

She was in AI's Happy Burgabar with her husband Rick, in a small town called Oak Springs along Highway 64 between Richmond and Charlottesville. The video frame had frozen on them as the family passed the main course selfselection counter, the vivid colours of AI's unmistakable 1090 dominating the room.

The shock of recognizing this, which was buried under layers of extreme experience deep down, long ago, away somewhere in her virtual life story, produced another automatic response from Grove. The computer images on the monitor began to flicker brightly as he moved swiftly through the lists. Teresa watched the computer display again, feeling helpless.

Her own virtual past was fastforwarding, fastrewinding, while she stared through the eyes of a man she knew was on his way to a massacre.

He paused again, and the computer image steadied.

Participatory/Interactive/United Kingdom/

England/National

or

County/County

Police/Sussex

Police/Multiple

Murder/Spree/Guns/Handgun/

Semiautomatic Rifle/Gerald Dean Grove/Part I.

Immediately underneath it said:

Participatory/Interactive/United Kingdom/

England/National

or

County/County

Police/Sussex

Police/Multiple

Murder/Spree/Guns/Handgun/

Semiautomatic Rifle/Gerald Dean Grove/Part II.

Grove stared at the screen, with the mouse pointer resting on the frozen video image of Part I, ready to start it running. The image was of Grove himself, sitting in a car on the seafront at Bulverton, leaning forward to tighten the hotwired connections beneath the dash.

Deep in the recesses of Grove's mind Teresa thought, He's playing with me. Or I'm playing with him.

She knew she should abort the scenario. She had been completely unprepared for this.

The thought was sufficient to move him. Fatalistically, Teresa watched the screen to see what he would do.

Grove's next choice frame showed a western saloon, where a young woman was waiting to start performing in a

pornographic movie. The video frame had caught Shandy in her offguard moment before the filming began, when she was reaching behind her back, pinching at the material of her shirt, to try to ease the tightness of her halfcup bra.

Grove, of his own accord, enlarged the frame, and with a concupiscence Teresa was forced to share, ogled the tantalizing glimpse of the voluptuous young woman.

Grove's mind, his brain, whatever corrupt organ it was that Teresa occupied, was full of predatory lust and physical greed. He moved energetically, against Teresa's resistance, and slid the pointer to the ExEx box, glinting invitingly at the top of the image.

He stood up, and waited while the nanochips were processed by the equipment.

'No!' Teresa said, to herself, to Grove, out loud, or directly across, or however it was done. 'Not Shandy!'

'Shut the fuck up.' Grove had the phial of nanochips now, delivered at the dispensing peripheral built into the top of the desk, and swung himself out of the seat, out of the booth.

'Whoever the fuck you are, shut the fuck up.'

Teresa had grown up in a world of swearwords, but she had always loathed that expression and the kind of man who used it. lt was invariably a man; women were capable of a lot of swearing, but they rarely used that phrase. She had been trained by the Bureau not to react to abuse from suspects and perpetrators, but that illtempered phrase had always got under her skin, once or twice to her jeopardy.

'Tough shit, lady!' Grove replied to the thought. 'Shut the fuck up.'

'Not Shandy, you bastard!'

'I told you to shut the

Teresa backed off, back as far as she could go, mortified by what was happening, and now unable to control events, except inadvertently.

She glimpsed an understanding at last of how a man like Grove operated. Everything she had experienced of him until now had been, for him, an unconscious blind, a shutting off of his true self The muttered hatreds, the confusion, the vindictiveness, the banality; none of these represented the real Grove. They were instinctive moves, inadequate responses of an immature mind, to a complex and subtle world. Now though, without warning, his true nature had moved in and taken command.

Grove was an obsessive, a monomaniac, capable of focusing on one thing only at any time.

With the inviting view of Shandy getting ready for action, his psychopathic mind had become dominated by the frozen image of her. She had her shoulders turned away as she tried to deal with her momentary discomfort, twisting her body so that her backside and breasts were exaggerated, posed in almost a parody of the traditional cheesecake stance. The video snapshot had obviously been selected for that reason, a visual shorthand of the contents of the scenario. Grove could not know that, but could and did react on a gut level to what he thought he would find.

In his singlermindedness, Grove could no longer be influenced or diverted away. Teresa, a passenger in his mind, could only reside in a well of apprehension, disgust and concern as Grove took over.

This was what it must have been like in Bulverton Old Town on the day of the massacre. She had heard many accounts from different people: Grove seemed invulnerable as he strode through the streets with his guns. His victims were paralysed by their terror of him, or by disbelief at what they saw. No one challenged him until it was too late; only a few people were able to run away or hide. Grove had been impelled not by hatred, or by passion, or even by madness, but by singleminded deterrmination.

Only at the end, when his obsession began to fade, did he become less fixated; then he was quickly encircled by the police, and his murderous spree was ended.

Now, though, in a terrible prelude to what would be happening later, he was in full thrall to his psychopathy.

She realized that she was also in his thrall. Grove was using her. He had already learned from her how a handgun should be held, aimed and fired; he had already found his way to Elsa Durdle, to one of the old FBI training scenarios, then to the scenario about himself, and now he had arrived at the innocent obscenities of Shandy and Willem.

He made her feel as if he was penetrating her cover, crashing in on her life, but the reality was that she was exposing it to him. Her unconscious mind was guiding him, educating him.

Yet she was helpless. While all this coursed through her mind, Grove had walked through to the simulator area of the building and handed over the phial of nanochips to one of the technicians. As the injection apparatus was quickly set up, and connected to the valve on his neck, Teresa braced herself for the shift into the scenario, knowing that aborting herself out of it was the last option she had.

Grove/Teresa became aware of heat, bright lights and clothes that were too tight. He blinked, and tried to see what was going on around him, but his eyes had not yet adjusted.

There were people standing further back, beyond the ring of lights, and they were talking and working, paying no attention to him.

A woman came up to him, and brusquely patted his forehead and nose with powder.

'Hold still a while longer, Shan,' she said impersonally, then moved back into the ring of lights.

Teresa thought, 1 can't take this any more.

Grove said, 'What? Who the fuck is that?'

And Teresa, at last, much later than she should have done, decided to abort. She recalled the LIVER mnemonic, rattled through the words held within the acronym, focused on the system of closure they produced, and withdrew from the scenario.

You have been flying SENSH Y'ALL

Fantasys from the Old West

Copyroody everywhere doan even THINK about it!!

Before she remembered how to cut it off, the mindless electronic music jangled interminably around her.

CHAPTER 34

Teresa returned from the scenario and found herself in the familiar surroundings of one of the ExEx recovery booths. Waking up in reality after the sensory overload of a scenario always involved a profound readjustment, a feeling of disbelief in what she found around her. No return had yet been as concerning as this.

Teresa sat on the bench, legs dangling, staring at the carpeted floor, thinking of Grove, appalled by the thought of what trouble her entry into his mind, might have caused.

A technician called Sharon appeared, and removed and validated the nanochips. At once Teresa was caught up in the practical routines of the business that was ExEx. Sharon led her through to the billing office and they waited for the paperwork to be churned out by the machine. Instead of the fairly prompt appearance of the receipt confiriming the return of the chips, together with a credit card charge slip, this time a message of some kind appeared on the LCD display, invisible to Teresa from where she was standing.

Sharon picked up the desk telephone, and keyed in several numbers. There was a pause, and then she recited a code number. Finally, she said with a glance at Teresa, 'Thanks I'll check that.'

'What's the problem?' Teresa said.

'There's something about the expiry date on your card,' Sharon said. She pressed one of the studs on the desktop, and a piece of paper wound out of the slot. She tore it off. 'Do You happen to have the card with you?'

'It's the one I've always used,' Teresa said, but looked through her bag for it. 'The girl on the desk outside validated it, and it's gone through OK until now.'

She found her Baltimore First National Visa card, and handed it over.

Sharon looked closely at it. 'Yes, this is what they told me,' she said. 'It's not the expiry date.

That's OK. It's the "Valid from" date.' She held the card out for Teresa to see. 'You've started using the card too soon. It doesn't become valid for another couple of months. Do you have the old one with you?'

'What? Let me look at that.'

Teresa took the card. As usual, both validating dates were embossed on it. They looked OK to her; she had been using the card for several months without problem. She thought for a moment. lt had been made valid from August the previous year; now they were in February.

Not valid for two more months?

She slipped the card into her bag.

'I'll give you another,' she said, not looking at Sharon. She searched through her wallet and found her GM MasterCard. Before handing it over she checked both validating dates; she was securely in the middle of the period.

' That's fine,' Sharon said, after a close examination of her own. The transaction then went through normally.

Before leaving the building Teresa went to the Ladies' restroom and leaned against a washbasin, staring down blankly into the paleyellow plastic bowl. She felt drained. Today's ExEx session had been a long one, and because of the awfulness of Grove's mental state it had also been stressful and alarming. She could still hardly bear to think of the consequences of what she had done.

She shrank from this, and other thoughts came at her in ar, onrush of trivial detail, a reaction against the tensions of the last few hours.

There were many practical things she had to sort out. Flight confirmation was one of them; she had made only a provisional booking and needed to hear back from the travel agents.

Then she had to pack her stuff, and check out of the hotel. Get across to Gatwick Airport with enough time to turn in the rental car, check in, go through security, hang around in the departure lounge, buy books and magazines she didn't want, and all that. Flying always took time, but presumably never as much as it saved, otherwise no one would do it. Before she left England she should also check in with her section chief, or at least leave a message in his office. She still had a hunch trouble was waiting for her there; would Ken Mitchell's one hour of effective passion compensate for that? Teresa combed her hair, peered closely at her eyes in the mirror. Gifts, she should buy some souvenirs to take back with her. She wondered if she would have time to go round the Old Town shops before they closed.

She glanced at her wristwatch.

Something was not right. How long had she been in Grove's scenario? What had changed?

The washroom was greypainted, clean, cool. The sound of air-conditioning was loud around her, emanating from a grille high in the wall by the door. Bright sunlight glared into the room through a square window set in the sloping halfroof above her.

A memory of Grove came to her, but she thrust the thought away in panic. All this time in England, circling around the Grove issue, and now she had at last confronted it she shrank away from it.

She wanted only to get home, try again to restart her life without Andy. Out there: she wondered what was out there, in the confusing world made by Grove. She had taught him to shoot. That child, that woman, they might be alive now if she hadn't shown Grove how to hold his weapon correctly.

No! she thought. No, that's not true! Rosalind Williams and her little boy were shot and killed by Grove eight months before. On the day it happened she was in Richmond, Virginia, thousands of miles away. lt was a historical certainty. What she had seen was only a scenario, a recreation of the event which by close observation she had seemed to influence.

. She had taught Grove how to handle his gun. Some influence.

In reaction to these unwelcome thoughts, another flood of personal concerns coursed through her: whether she should sell the house in Woodbridge, move into an apartment in Baltimore or Washington, or relocate right away from the area. She had good friends who lived in Eugene, Oregon; maybe she should make a break with everything, and move to the Pacific North West. In the meantime, should she stay with the Bureau, transfer to another section or station? Or maybe she should think about what did they call it? ~ OCERS. The Optional Corporate Early Retirement Scheme. The Bureau management had been talking up OCERS, as if it was the answer to their many woes of funding, deployment, overmanning, and all the other administrative problems they regularly memo'd to the sections.

Closing her bag she looked up again and caught an off guard glimpse of herself. She should have been ready for it, because she had been staring at the mirror off and on for the last five minutes, but for that instant she saw the reflection of a rather bulky middle-aged woman, her darkbrown hair starting to turn grey, her face not one she remembered or wanted to remember. Standing there in her warm quilted anorak, bundled up against the wintry Weather outside, she thought, How did it happen so quickly? How have the years of my life vanished?

She walked through the reception area, looking ahead, zipping up her anorak and wondering if she should pull on

the hood.

'Goodbye, Paula,' she said to the receptionist. 'See you

again.

'Cheerio, Mrs ... Has it started to rain out there?'

Rain? I'm not sure.' Teresa pushed through the glass doors, and walked across the hardstanding outside.

Heat from the sunwhitened. concrete rose around her. The sun was high in a brilliant sky.

Teresa stared around her in amazement: the trees were in full leaf, the distant sea was shining so brightly it seemed silver. the houses of the lower town were softened by a gentle heat haze.

The only clouds visible were on the horizon far away to the south, somewhere over the French coast. Two young women, walking along the road, were dressed in shorts and Tshirts.

Teresa unzipped her anorak, and slipped it off. When she drove up to the ExEx building this morning there had been a cold easterly wind, spotted with ice and freezing rain. She remembered hurrying from her car, keeping her head down against the wind, then, in the reception area, flapping her anorak to try to shed some of the water from it, and mopping her face with a tissue. Now it was midsummer.

She looked around for her car. That morning, the cold morning, she had had to park it against the kerb, a short distance away. She walked towards where she had left it, but a darkred Montego was parked in its place. The two nearside wheels had mounted the kerb and were resting on the grassy verge.

Her own car, the rented Ford Escort, was nowhere around.

Teresa went to the Montego. On its left side was a long paint smear across both doors, and a deep dent, where the car had hit something solid and whitepainted. When she peered in the front window on the driver's side she saw a car radio, pulled from its mount but still connected by wires, discarded, hanging down under the dashboard.

Teresa tried the handle, and the unlocked door opened. Feeling a chill of fear, in spite of the stifling heat of the day, Teresa reached down to the release of the luggage compartment lid.

She heard and felt the lock click open behind her. She went back, raised the lid.

A semiautomatic rifle and a handgun lay on the carpeted floor. Several boxes of ammunition were also there; one had broken open and a handful of rounds lay spilled about. She recognized the handgun as a Colt, the one Grove, and she, had used to kill Mrs Williams and her child in the woods. She had not been able to get a good look at the rifle while Grove was handling it, but now she recognized it as an M16 carbine.

Teresa slammed down the lid then stood there, staring at the car's polished paintwork, trying to think. The sun beat down on her neck. The temptation again swept over her to shrink mentally from the consequences of all this.

She had been in the scenario with Grove. lt was a standard ExEx scenario. In this standard ExEx scenario she had shown Grove how to use the weapons; maybe he would have shot the people anyway, maybe he simply Missed the first time, maybe he wasn't as incompetent as she'd thought, maybe he would have gone on and shot at them until they were dead.

Maybe she was making excuses.

All right, in the real world Grove had definitely shot

those two: Rosalind Williams and her fouryearold child, Tommy. She had seen their names on the town memorial. She had seen video footage of the scene of the crime. She had seen the newspaper files. She had talked to Mrs Williams' bereaved husband, and to other people who had known them.

But until she had shown Grove how to shoot, he had been incompetent. He held the heavy, sophisticated gun like a boy playing with a toy pistol. Inside the scenario.

Had she not done so, what would have happened to his two victims? Inside the scenario.

Teresa turned away from the Montego, leaned her backside against it and stared down the hill towards the distant sea. Although the town shimmered under haze she could see it well enough: the line of low surrounding hills to left and right, making up the rest of the Ridge, the dull modem houses in their stultifying ranks; lower down, the more attractively arranged and time-weathered buildings of the Old Town, then the sea, a glistening silverblue, the distant clouds over France. lt all stretched out before her, endless and inviting.

The rest of England, the seas and the endless sky, the world, spread around her. A short drive to Dover or Newhaven and she could be on a ferry across that sea to France, thence to the rest of Europe. A slightly longer drive to the north and she would be at Gatwick Airport, ready for her flight home. There were no extremes to limit her.

But this was not the reality she had left. This was summer in the streets of the town below people would be driving their cars with the windows down, the sunroofs open and the ineffective cold-air blowers roaring. Pedestrians would be strolling in shorts and flimsy tops.

Shops and houses would have their doors and windows open to the heat. No sun shone like this in Britain's winter, which she had woken

up to, driven in, hurried through, shaken from her coat, only that morning.

It had been a standard ExEx scenario, written by the company that owned the ExEx building. The standard ExEx scenario had undoubtedly been Grove's, set on the day.

Standard extremes, the corporate reality. GunHo scenarios were industry standard.

But Grove had gone on, using other software. Sick of the naked impact of Grove's mind Teresa had withdrawn, leaving him in the unlikely embodiment of Shandy in her porno role.

Presumably he was still there, enjoying what must be for any man a novel sexual experience.

She remembered walking down Coventry Street in Shandy's mind, learning about the girl and the world she inhabited. The flashing logo, SENSH, was comng at them every halfminute or so. 'Doesn't that drive you crazy, Shan?' she had said. No, Shandy replied, you get used to it in the end.

lt had been run as a closing message just now, when she left the scenario.

The scenario she had entered, the industrystandard GunHo scenario about Grove, was not the one she had left: she had been in Vic's homemade software, complete with boltedon bits of London and Arizona, and terrible puns and spelling mistakes.

When she withdrew from that she had returned to the ExEx facility in Bulverton. But it was to a hot sunny day, like the one when Grove went berserk.

lt made rough sense, of course. When Grove entered the Shandy scenario, taking her with him, her only way out was to the reality he had left.

The credit card that was too new to be valid; the cold winter's day that had turned to a heatwave; the Montego parked in place of her car.

She was still in the Grove scenario.

The implications were shocking, and impossible to comprehend fully, but at least she knew how to cope. With a desperate urgency to escape, unlike any she had previously known, Teresa recalled the LIVER mnemonic, and waited for the GunHo logo to appear as the scenario was aborted.

Teresa remained in Welton Road, outside the ExEx building, with Grove's stolen car gleaming in the midsummer sun. Nothing changed.

She had never known the mnemonic to fail before, although Dan Kazinsky had warned all the trainees that it was not infallible.

Standing there, in shock, but focused on what had happened, Teresa remembered a day during training at the Academy, when they had been given a long and technical lecture by a professor of psychology from Johns Hopkins University. This woman had drily explained the theory of mental override within an imaginary world. Several of the trainees afterwards admitted privately that their attention had wandered, but Teresa had taken it all in.

The psychological principle was that there was a normal inner requirement that reality should be firmly based. Human sensory equipment constantly tested the veracity of the world, and silently reported to the consciousness. Normal life functioned. An ExEx scenario could therefore only function as a plausibleseeming alternative to reality by simulating the sensual information, and this continued so long as the participant gave or implied consent. Reality was suspended while the scenario continued. This meant that recognizing, isolating and consciously rejecting one of the simulated sensory inputs was the only way to escape from the extreme experience.

There were questions and answers, and a short break for refreshments. Later, when the professor had left, Dan Kazinsky said, 'You ought to know that sometimes you'll get stuck in there. The mnemonic won't always work. There's another way out. You got to know what it is.'

He explained about the manual override built into the valve itself.

Teresa reached behind her, located the ExEx valve and felt around the rim of it for the minute tripswitch, concealed within a specially stiffened fold of the plastic integument. When she found it she gingerly eased the plastic apart with a fingernail, trying to avoid straining the sensitive area of her skin.

She had never done this before, except in a dry run in Quantico under the instruction of Agent Kazinsky. She found that the switch was more difficult to flick over than she had imagined it would be, and it took her two attempts to do it. As the tiny plastic device closed with a tangible pressure, Teresa braced herself for the traumatic disruption of an emergency withdrawal.

Teresa remained in Welton Road, outside the ExEx building, with Grove's stolen car gleaming in the midsummer sun. Nothing changed.

She reached behind her, located the ExEx valve and felt around the rim of it for the minute tripswitch, concealed within its specially stiffened fold of the plastic integument. When she found it she gingerly eased the plastic apart with a fingernail, and returned the switch to its former position.

Once, years before, Teresa had been driving her car at night in downtown Baltimore, in the area north of Franklin Street, a part of the city she knew well. Not paying attention she had taken a wrong turn. Thinking she knew where she was she drove straight to what she thought was her friends

address, found a parking space, and got out of her car. As soon as she did, paying attention at last to her surroundings, she knew instantly she was in the wrong place, but she was still none the less convinced that it could not be so. She had driven there many times before, and knew the location well. Yet there were two small stores where the entrance to her friend's apartment block should have been, the streetlights were wrong, the buildings opposite were too tall, too decrepit. For a few seconds, Teresa had been convinced of two conflicting facts, knowing they were in conflict, but no less disturbed for knowing it: that she was in the wrong place, and simultaneously that she was not.

Now, as the hot summer's afternoon lay around her, the brilliant sunlight dazzled her, the rolling heat from the ground smothered her, Teresa experienced the same conflict. Her inability to abort the scenario meant that she was really here, on the day of Grove's mass murders.

But that was eight months ago; it couldn't possibly be so.

Perspiration was beginning to trickle from her hairline, down the sides of her face, so she undid the top two buttons of her blouse, and lightly raised and fanned the material, to try to cool herself She found a tissue and mopped her face ineffectually. (The tissue was already damp: was it the same one she had used to dry her face when she staggered in from the arctic blast this morning?) Standing here in the street she could hardly start removing the warmest of the garments she was wearing: her snugly fitting jeans, and the thick tights beneath. She did have cooler clothes with her, but they were already packed in one of her suitcases at the hotel, ready for the flight home.

Staring at Grove's abandoned car, perplexed by what had happened, Teresa gave it a hard look, then went back across the street to the ExEx building.

CHAPTER 35

Paula Willson was still sitting at her desk, with a fan swivelling slowly to and fro across her.

Pieces of paper on the desktop lifted fractionally as the draught swept by.

'Hi,' Teresa said as she walked in and closed the door. After the blazing sunshine outside the building felt cool.

'How may 1 help you?' said Paula.

'Well, I hope you can help me a lot. 1 want to ask you if you know who 1 am?'

'You were here a few minutes ago, weren't you??

'I was leaving, and you asked me if it had started raining.'

'That's right,' said Paula.

'Can you remember why you asked me that?'

'I was surprised to see you, the way you were dressed. You'd put a coat on.'

'OK,' Teresa said. 'Had you seen me in here before then?'

'I don't think so. 1 think you'd been using the simulators. assumed you must have come in before my shift began. You are one of our customers, aren't you?'

'Yeah, that's right. Look, I'm trying to locate'

'May 1 have your name?'

'I've brought my customer ID with me.'

Teresa wanted to say that she and this young woman had been saying hello to each other most mornings for the last three weeks, but there was no point at all in that. She was no longer certain of anything. She groped in the pocket where she normally kept the plastic card, but it was not

there. She tried her other pockets. Then she remembered: Grove had had a similar conversation with Paula, earlier that day, when he had arrived at this building. To cut short the formalities, Teresa had helped him find an ID card, which he had immediately reached for in the back pocket of his pants, exactly as she had done now. Grove had found an ID card; she could not find hers.

'I'm somewhere in your computer records,' Teresa said. 'Teresa Simons, Teresa Ann Simons.

No E on Ann.'

'I won't keep you a moment,' said Paula, already typing at her keyboard and glancing at the screen. 'No, I'm afraid we don't have you, but we are recruiting new members at the moment, and there's a discount scheme with airmile bonuses if you sign up now. If you would fill in this application form, and can supply a major credit card, we will grant you temporary membership straight away.'

She slid the sheet of paper across to Teresa.

Teresa said, 'I'm simply trying to find someone 1 know, who 1 think is here. I came in with him earlier. Could you at least tell me if he's still in here?'

The expression on the young woman's face remained one of professional reticence.

'I'm sorry. I'm not able to give out information on our customers.

'Yeah, I understand the problem. This is slightly different, I think. 1 arrived with him.'

'I'm sorry,' Paula said again.

'Couldn't you even confirm he's still here? It's Mr Grove, Mr Gerry Grove.'

'I'm not allowed to,' Paula said with an embarrassed look, and a glance towards the inner sanctum. For an instant Teresa glimpsed the friendly and at times informal young woman she had often paused for a chat with on her way in or out of this building.

'Are you allowed to hand out that sort of information to fellow members?' she said. 'You know, if 1 fill out this form?'

'I'll see what 1 can do.' A quick smile of relief flickered across Paula's eyes.

Teresa moved away to one of the seats in the waiting area, and rapidly filled out the relevant details about herself The form was the same one she had completed when she became a member the first time, but it looked subtly different: the print was larger, laid out a little differently, an earlier version of the form she had already handed in.

When Paula saw Teresa signing the form, she picked up the internal telephone and pressed a couple of buttons. As Teresa walked back to her desk, she was saying, 'Hi, this is Paula, on the front desk. I'm trying to trace one of the users. Mr Grove.'

'Gerry Grove,' Teresa said.

'Yes, that's right. OK, would Sharon know? It's a Mr Gerry Grove, apparently. Gerry with a G?' She looked up at Teresa, who nodded. Paula confirmed this, then made an expression towards Teresa with her eyes. 'They're trying to find out. Yes, I'm still here. OK. Thanks.'

She put down the phone and scribbled a long number on a scrap of paper.

'They say they know who you mean.'

'Good! I need to see him.'

'Now hold on, because they say I have to determine his status. They've given me his ID,'

Paula said. She typed at the keyboard, glancing to and from the long number she had written down. 'All right, Mr Grove did check in here earlier.' She looked at the clock on the wall to one side. 'About an hour ago, 1 think.'

'That's about right. Is he still using the simulator?'

'No, it doesn't look as if he is. He didn't log much

machine time. He paid cash upfront, but'

'May 1 see?'

'Well. . .'

But Teresa had moved round so that she was alongside Paula and able to read her screen. lt displayed fairly straightforward text information, showing Grove's name and a scenario reference number that Teresa instantly recognized: it was of course the porno videoshoot, with Shandy and Willem.

'You can see here,' Paula said, tapping the end of her ballpoint against the screen. 'It., looks as if the scenario terminated after a few seconds. You'd have to ask one of the technical people exactly what that means. 1 don't have anything to do with the scenarios. But they can be stopped, can't they? The customer can decide to leave? 1 think that must be what happened here.'

'But after a few seconds?'

'It says eleven seconds.'

Teresa thought for a moment. She remembered arriving in the scenario, the awareness of heat and bright lights, the halfcup bra that was too tight, blinking against the lights, people standing beyond the circle of lights, a woman patting her forehead and nose with powder, then saying, 'Hold still a while longer, Shan,' and moving behind the lights again. She had thought, I can't take this any more, and then she had aborted the scenario. Was that eleven seconds?

'You say he isn't using the simulator now. But is he still in the building?'

'I can phone through for you, and find out.'

'Yes. Please do.'

Again, Paula used the internal phone. She asked if Mr Grove was in the recovery area, and listened to the reply.

She said to Teresa, 'No, they think he must have checked straight out. He's nowhere in the facility.'

Teresa felt a bleak desperation growing in her.

'Did you see him leave?' she said.

'People pass through here all the time.'

'You must know what he looked like. He was wearing Teresa paused, remembering.

'Darkgreen pants with buttoned pockets everywhere, like army fatigues. A green muscleshirt, with oily smears on the front. He came in here and had forty pounds in cash. He tossed it on the desk in front of you. You asked if he was a member, and he said he usually used the Maidstone facility. He gave you an ID card, and after that you let him through.'

'Gingery hair, dirty hands?'

'That's him! Did you see him leave?'

'No.'

'Are you certain? You haven't taken any breaks?'

'Now 1 know who you mean, 1'd know if he'd gone.'

'Then he must still be here in the building.'

All through this Teresa had been holding her new membership application form, and now she gave it to Paula. For good measure she threw down her GM MasterCard beside it.

'That makes me a member, right?'

'Yes, 1 suppose '

'You'll find the credit card has already been recorded. I'll. pick it up in a moment.

She pushed through the door before Paula could answer, and went into the main part of the building. lt took her only a minute or two to establish that Grove was indeed no longer there.

Few members of the staff had been aware of his presence while he was using the equipment; no one had seen him leave.

Teresa hurried outside into the bright sunshine, and went across to where his stolen car was parked.

She stood next to it for a while, staring at the view, the blueandsilver sea, the distant roofs, the quiet streets, the weather in France. Her identity had crossed over into Grove's; she had entered the building with him, and he had left when she did. Where was he now?

A few moments later, she heard the sound of police sirens, in the distance among the houses, down in the quiet streets of Bulverton's Old Town.

She picked up her MasterCard from the reception desk, together with her ExEx membership startup pack, an introductory pamphlet, her airmile certificate, discount vouchers for the first ten hours of ExEx runtime use, a free pen and a complimentary canvas tote bag emblazoned with the GunHo corporate logo. She gave a smile of acknowledgement to Paula and walked into the main part of the building to find a terminal she could use.

The computers looked slightly different from the ones she was used to, but they displayed the familiar GunHo logo. Of the three machines currently not in use she chose the one furthest from the corridor that ran through the openplan office. She sat down and entered the new membership number she found in the promotional material Paula had given to her. No use entering her old number, the one she had learned by heart, so often had she typed it in, After a perceptible pause, the program went into its startUP routine.

Teresa watched the display screens flick from one to the next, and she realized that between this day and the time some eight months in the future when she had been regularly using this system, there must have been a round of upgrades. The software looked much the same as the program she was used to, but it was obviously running at about half the speed. The keyboard and monitor also looked slightly different from the ones she remembered. She had always felt intimidated by the ferocious speed with which the software responded, and this earlier version actually suited her rather better.

The program paused, displaying the principal menu of options. Teresa glanced over it, and felt, without being able to be certain, that there were not as many options as she was used to.