Heaven is a Place on Earth

by Graham Storrs

  Holding one end of the brick in both hands, she brought the other end down hard on the padlock. She had seen something like this in an old vid – or it might have been the butt of a rifle – and hoped it wasn't just poetic license on the director's part. She hit the lock with a jolt that made her drop the brick, and an ear-splitting crack that seemed to shake the whole shed. To her amazement, the padlock was still intact, but the hasp that connected it to the door frame had been knocked right out of the rotten timber and was hanging by one rusty screw. It came away with a light tug and the door swung open.

  The gloom inside the shed was criss-crossed by bright beams of sunlight coming through gaps and holes in the walls and roof. There were cobwebs and a layer of grime coated everything. The smell was dry and ancient and took her back to a childhood spent crawling into forbidden places. It had the comforting smell of a place where her mother would never find her. It wasn't a big shed and she immediately found what she came there for.

  The old bicycle still had some hints of blue paint on its frame and the chrome on its handlebars hadn't all been bubbled away by the rust beneath it. The brakes were rusted solid and the tyres were flat. The chain was intact but was dry and grey with dust. Despite all the years since she had last touched one, her hands remembered the feel of handlebars, her body leaned just so as she wheeled it out of the shed. She propped it against the shed wall and stepped back to look at it.

  Her father had taught her to ride a bike when she was ten. She had been excruciatingly embarrassed at the time. What did she need to ride a bike for? Nobody rode bikes? Bikes were old. What if someone saw her on it? But her father had insisted, trying to force her to enjoy it the way he had once enjoyed it. He set her a goal; ride up the street and back again all on your own and you don't ever have to ride it again. It had taken her days and days to do it and, as soon as she did, she ran inside and unlatched, rejoining her friends in VR and telling them what a pain in the neck her father was. They all agreed, parents were old-fashioned and weird, always harking back to the olden days.

  It had not occurred to her at the time, but now she saw how much she must have hurt her father. She imagined him standing in the drive with the discarded bike at his feet, watching her run back into the house.

  She found a little can of oil in the shed, almost rusted through. Yet when she tipped it and squeezed, a thin, greenish liquid trickled from its long plastic spout onto the chain links. She didn't really know what she was doing but she knew the old machine needed oil so she slathered it over every joint and spindle, every link and cog. And it seemed to work. With a little pushing and pulling, squeezing and turning, the callipers closed when she pulled the brake handle and the rear wheel turned when she pressed down on a pedal and lifted up the back. With a little experimentation and by reference to various instruction pages and diagrams on the Net, she learned how to attach the tube from the bicycle pump to the valves on the tyres and pump them up.

  Inordinately pleased with herself, she wheeled the bike out the back gate (which refused to open until she had almost demolished it) and onto the road. There was no traffic on this little side-street and almost nothing on the main road except a few robot delivery vans dropping groceries and parcels off at houses along the road. She didn't worry about the robots. She knew they would drive around her or stop if they had to rather than bump into her.

  The bike was a little too tall for her and climbing onto it was a nerve-racking experience. As soon as she managed to get her bum on the tattered seat – but before she could begin to pedal – the thing began toppling over. For a while she was stumped by this apparently insoluble problem, trying desperately to remember what she had done as a child to get the machine moving. Again she consulted the Net but this time there were no helpful suggestions. It occurred to her that she had spent so long finding and preparing the bicycle that she would have been half-way there by now if she'd walked. A gross exaggeration of course but her frustration was starting to get the better of her judgement.

  In the end, a dim recollection from an ancient movie came to her rescue – a policeman with a foot on one pedal, pushing himself along with the other and then swinging his pushing leg over once the machine was underway. She tried it and almost smashed the bike and broke her neck when she failed to get her leg high enough and came crashing to earth in a heap. For a moment the pain in her grazed palms and the indignity of her position brought tears to her eyes.

  What the hell was she doing there, sitting in the middle of the road with a clapped out old boneshaker wrapped around her legs? The whole situation was ridiculous. She had work to do, a living to make. She shouldn't be out in the street wasting her time, a reluctant drug mule for a man she hardly knew and who was probably dead anyway. She stood up and kicked at the bike. Idiotic machine. Why couldn't it just work?

  She took a deep breath and picked up the bicycle again. She hated feeling sorry for herself. It reminded her too much of her mother. And that made her angry. Once more she put a foot on the pedal and scooted herself along the road. Determined not to fail again, she swung her leg up and over and found herself sitting high above the whole rattling, wobbling contraption. For a moment, she was so surprised and scared that she forgot to pedal, then had to grope with her feet to find the elusive things as her speed slowed and her wobbling increased. But, having made it so far, she refused to fall over and start again. She located the pedals and pushed hard. The gears clattered and slipped but the chain stayed on and she found herself in a high gear pedalling fast to keep herself moving forward.

  She emerged into the main road without even having noticed she had reached it and a delivery truck squealed to a halt beside her. She daren't look at it as all her attention was needed to turn the bike before it hit the kerb at the opposite side of the road. By a miracle, she stayed on the bike and made the turn, her heart racing. It was only as she got the mechanical beast under some kind of control again that she realised she had turned the wrong way. New virtual blue arrows from her nav system painted the road surface but she had to miss the next turn they suggested because she just dare not turn the bicycle. But she was ready for the next one and rattled around the corner with a sense of achievement and a surge of pride.

  By the time she had travelled a few more blocks, she had calmed down enough and grown so much in confidence that she was able to remember that she should be using her brakes too. She even considered the possibility of changing gear but didn't manage to pluck up the courage to try that throughout the whole, hair-raising ride.

  Chapter 3

  When she stopped the bike outside the address written on the package, it toppled sideways and she had to hop and jump to get clear of it as it clattered to the road. She picked it up and wheeled it into the drive. One good thing about her madcap journey was that she had not had a spare moment to think about the mysterious Gavin and how her meeting with the drug dealer, or diamond smuggler, or whatever he was, might go.

  Gavin's home was a large, detached house, brick built, on two storeys, a double garage, and a large garden filled with head-high weeds. It was the sight of the weeds that reminded her she was still in minimal augmentation. She latched to the house and street. The lawn became well-tended shrubbery and the house received an instant coat of new paint. She looked back at her bicycle, propped against the gate. The street sensors had picked it up and automatic routines fed her an image with the dirt and rust removed and the chromium restored and gleaming. Spending so much time in minimal aug was giving her a fresh appreciation of the amount of work her implants did to keep the world neat and tidy for her. It was all a grand deception, of course, but a benign one. Who would settle for reality when you could have augmentation?

  She touched the package in her pocket and remembered the shock of discovering it on Cal's table. She turned off all her augmentation again. She didn't know what tricks Gavin's house might play on her senses and she had no reason to suppose he would be a friend. She looked around for a doorbell and didn't see one. Wi
th a sigh, she realised that, if there was one it would probably be virtual like everybody else's. So she knocked on the door.

  She pulled her hand back as if it had stung her. The door swung inwards. It had been pulled closed but was unfastened. Her heart began to race again, seeing why: the door frame was shattered. Someone had kicked the door in from the outside. She stepped back off the porch frightened of what she'd found but unable to decide to run away. She had to give the package to someone. She had to give it to Gavin. But Gavin was inside the house and someone had kicked in the door. There might be an innocent explanation for that but Ginny didn't believe anything that came to her. The package, Cal gone missing, the police snooping around, only allowed for sinister, scary explanations. Someone had gone in there and done something to Gavin. Killed him, probably.

  Still she stood on the drive, wavering. She looked up and down the street. She looked back at the broken door. She took out the package and turned it in her hands. Perhaps if she just went up to the door and threw it inside she could just ride away and forget about it. The police would find it on the floor of the hallway. But that was no good. It would have her DNA on it. She'd heard they could find you from the tiniest traces these days and everyone's genome was on record. They did it at birth when they put in the tag. That's why there was so little crime these days. No-one could get away with anything any more.

  Still she dithered. Now was the time to walk away. She didn't owe Cal anything. She would drop the package in a recycler and that would be the end of it. What the hell did Cal think he was doing getting her involved in all this? She was aiding and abetting criminals. She could go to jail. All for some guy she hardly knew and had a bit of a crush on? No, this had all gone too far. She had to get away from there right now and never look back.

  She shuffled her feet but still she could not go. What if this Gavin bloke was only injured and not dead? Shouldn't she try to help him? Call an ambulance? Give him first aid? But the idea of going into that house and finding a strange man bleeding out on the floor chilled her to the bone. Could she touch him? Would she even have a clue what to do? The only first aid she knew, she realised, was what she'd seen in cop shows and spy vids. What were the chances of any of that actually being real? She saw herself holding the dying man with blood flowing over her hands as she tried to push his exposed intestines back into a gaping stomach wound. Her throat clenched against her rising nausea. But if she called an ambulance, her tag would reveal her identity. They would know it was her. They would know she had been there and left this man to die.

  But they would know it was her anyway. Once the police found the body, they would check the records. The street, the house, would have registered her tag. If she didn't go to them, they would soon be looking for her. The full extent of the trouble she was in washed over her like a giant wave, almost knocking her over, leaving her gasping for breath. Panic was rising in her. She had to get away from that house, she couldn't think while it was standing over her like a giant black cloud.

  She turned towards the bicycle and took a step towards it.

  “Stay where you are.”

  She froze. It was a woman's voice, firm and strong. She knew there would be a gun in the woman's hand even before she turned to look.

  “Come here. Inside the house.”

  The woman was short and thin, about Ginny's age. She wore the ubiquitous overalls and had her hair tied in a ponytail. She was standing inside the hallway as if she didn't want to be seen. The gun in her left hand looked the size of an artillery piece. It was pointing straight at Ginny.

  “Hurry up. I won't tell you again.”

  Ginny took a couple of steps towards her, acting without thought, as if having a gun pointed at you robbed you of your will. But a small desperate hope made her say, “You won't shoot me out here in the street.”

  “Don't kid yourself, darl. Just keep coming and you'll be all right. I won't shoot you at all unless you make me.”

  Ginny walked towards the stranger. She really didn't want to go into the house, but she could see no option. If she tried to run, it would be easy for the woman to shoot her. There was no-one in the street to see her and raise the alarm and anyone inside their houses looking towards their windows would not be seeing her, they'd be looking out on a tropical beach or the rings of Saturn, anything but a drab suburban street. The woman with the gun stepped back to allow Ginny in and, hating herself for being such a coward, she passed through the doorway into the hall.

  It was dark and cool out of the sun, oppressive and claustrophobic. The door slammed shut behind her and Ginny turned to find the woman leaning with her back against it. “In there,” she said, waving the gun towards a doorway.

  “You've got me mixed up with someone else,” Ginny said, feeling she had to say something, convince the woman she was just an innocent passer-by. She almost believed that was true, despite the package in her pocket. Whatever was going on, it was nothing to do with her.

  “Get in there,” the woman said. Ginny did as she was told, walking into a sparsely-furnished room with an old sofa and a couple of armchairs. “Now sit. On the sofa.” Ginny sat, immediately regretting it. In the low, soft upholstery, she was almost helpless. Doing anything quickly to jump the woman or run was now impossible.

  “What are you going to do?” Ginny asked.

  “Fucked if I know,” the woman said. “Who are you and why did you come here?”

  Ginny was confused. How could the woman not now who she was? Basic identity was always available even in the lowest levels of augmentation. With a gasp, she realised she could not see the woman's ID data. She pushed her level of augmentation up but still there was no sign of the woman's identity. When she latched to the house, fully augmented, the woman turned into a person-sized piece of abstract art, standing incongruously in the middle of the floor. In her shock, Ginny almost climbed over back of the sofa, scrambling away from the apparition.

  “Stay still,” the artwork shouted. It slid across the floor towards her, its shape shifting erratically, reconfiguring itself. Ginny stopped. She was panting and wide-eyed with fright. “Turn your aug down, Ellie. What am I? A pot plant? A hat stand?” She laughed, apparently enjoying Ginny's discomfiture.

  The laugh, more than anything, snapped Ginny out of her funk. “You're untagged,” she said, understanding, at last. “The house assumes you're some piece of furniture or something and it's making it's best guess of how to represent you.” Now she knew what was happening, it was fascinating. Systems everywhere must be doing this all the time. Sensors pick up shapes and usually the computers would know what to do with them, like the weeds in the garden that are rendered as flowers and shrubs. But an untagged person was just a tall thin object to the systems – obviously not a person, because it had no tag. So they tried to find some appropriate household item to match it to, mainly so the people in the house – the tagged people – would see it and not walk into it.

  Ginny turned down her augmentation and the statue turned back into a woman. “You can't see my data,” Ginny said and felt stupid when the woman sneered at her. Of course, if you were untagged, how could your implants ask the AR systems for information? Questions filled her head. How did an untagged person buy food? How did they buy anything? How did they do anything? But the biggest question by far was, “Who are you?”

  “After you, Ellie,” the woman said.

  She went to one of the armchairs and sat on the arm, resting the hand holding the gun on her knee. To Ginny, the gun still looked enormous and must have been very heavy. Ginny gave her name.

  “What are you doing here?” the woman asked, not offering her own name in return.

  “I came to see Gavin,” Ginny said, not knowing what else to say.

  The woman stared at her for a long time. “What business have you got with Gavin?”

  A slight trembling began in Ginny's chest and limbs. She felt weepy and tried not to let it show, suppressing the self-pity that was growing in her. After
the shocks and scares she'd been having, and with that gun pointing at her, it was hardly surprising she would have some kind of reaction, but she didn't want this hard-faced woman to see her cry. She kindled the spark of resentment and anger she felt and tried to fan it into defiance. “You killed him, didn't you?” she said.

  The woman laughed that sneering laugh again but Ginny thought she could see something else in her expression apart from contempt. Sadness maybe. Pain. “Oh, he's dead all right. In the kitchen if you want to go and see.”

  Ginny was starting to find her equilibrium again. “Look, whatever all this is about, it's nothing to do with me. I'm nothing to do with all this. Why don't you just let me go and you'll never hear or see me again. I won't say anything about it, ever.”

  “Shut up. How do you know Gavin?”

  Ginny took a breath. The only thing she could think of to do was tell the truth. Maybe then the woman would realise she wasn't any kind of threat and would let her go. “I don't know him. A friend of mine gave me his address.” Which wasn't the whole truth, but she was still reluctant to mention the package unless she had to.

  “What friend?”

  “His name's Cal Copplin.”

  The woman gave Ginny a fresh appraisal.

  “How do you know Cal?”

  “Are you a friend of his?” This was the first hope Ginny had felt since she saw the broken door frame. If the woman was a friend of Cal's... But then she remembered the body in the kitchen and her hope shrivelled away.

  “How do you know Cal?” the woman asked again.

  “I – I just know him. We met. Socially. We've been for coffee a couple of times.”

  The news seemed to irritate the woman. She stood up and took a couple of paces. “Jesus Christ. So he's chatting up women, going on dates, having a fucking social life. The fucking stupid bastard.” She said all this to herself, as if Ginny wasn't there.