Alternative Dimension

by Kirton, Bill

  He would find out in due course, but nothing he’d imagined would be close to what the police had found when, getting no replies to their knocking on Beatrice’s door, they’d forced the lock and gone inside. The smell immediately told them what to expect, but not the full extent of it. In the dining room, the computer was sitting on the table, its screen still flickering, a chair in front of it. The table all round it was thick with dried blood, blood which had spilled onto the floor and all over the chair. On and around the chair were bones, rags of flesh and a woman’s clothes. And, in the middle of it all sat a tiny kitten, with two white paws and a perfect diamond of white fur between her eyes.

  15 the princess

  Extremes such as that which befell Beatrice were rare, but in a way, there were even worse stories – not stories of gore and horror, but stories of quiet despair. In the life of Rhona Pearl, for example, romance was an unknown word – and concept. She lived in a flat in a tenement building. It had four rooms: one bedroom for her, another for her two kids, a cupboard-sized bathroom and the fourth for everything else. Her husband had left her the previous July, when she told him of her second pregnancy and, since then, she’d hardly been outside the flat, except for necessary journeys to buy food and, in charity shops, clothes for the kids. In some ways, this was a bonus. It meant she didn’t have to wear make-up or buy clothes for herself, which she couldn’t afford anyway. While the kids were awake, she fed them, played and watched TV with them and sometimes looked out of the window at the rows of flats in the buildings across the street. But when she’d got them to bed and eaten a quick snack, she switched on the computer which her husband had left ‘for the kids’ and became a princess.

  Because Rhona was also Angeldust Starshine, concubine of Tristan Malevolans, who was ruler of the entire Alternative Dimension enclosure of StormFront and commander of two battalions of Borgian Exterminators. She didn’t know Tristan’s real name. She knew he had lots of money because he’d bought his enclosure and even offered to buy one for her but, beyond that and the fact that he gave every impression of having an IQ in single figures, he was an enigma. In fact, he’d chosen the name Tristan because his real name was Stanley and Malevolans because he thought it sounded like a cool make of car – a Mazerati Malevolans maybe.

  They’d met when he and a small patrol of Exterminators had marched into a ballroom by a moonlit lake. Their intention had been to rape and pillage but every time they tried to steal something, they couldn’t because the ‘Steal’ level on their Acquire Column was greyed out and whenever they tried to rip the clothes off a woman, she translocated somewhere else. When they tried it on Rhona, she stood her ground and refused to sit on the rape action hooks they’d brought with them. Tristan had also been impressed and intrigued by her use of so many words with more than one syllable. They’d talked, he’d taken her back to StormFront and they’d made love in more ways than Tristan knew were possible, mainly because she knew so many polysyllabic synonyms for ‘fuck’. Since then, she’d been his concubine. He didn’t know what that meant except that it wasn’t a wife and it sounded sexual.

  But she’d been more to him than a good lay. Whenever he had meetings with other warlords, Rhona would keep Angeldust out of sight behind a curtain and prompt Tristan with personal messages. Apart from ensuring that his strategies and tactics were always on a par with those of his enemies, this also added an intriguing dimension to his character. At these meetings, with her guidance, he would unfold delicate strategies which, on the surface, looked straightforward but proved to be far more flexible than others had expected. Once, when Thor DagHald had admired a particular coup, Tristan sat back on his throne, read the secret messages Rhona sent him, then growled ‘The psychology of despair has no evasive potential when disillusion is its counterpoint’.

  Rhona had picked the words at random from an article in a newspaper which had been wrapped around a cabbage she’d bought from the corner shop. Thor nodded sagely and repeated the words to his own concubine when he got home that evening. But then, on the occasions when Rhona was away, Tristan’s responses to questions were mainly confined to grunts or ‘How the fuck would I know?’ Since in Council meetings he seemed to be capable of such meticulous analysis of any situation or strategy, others would interpret these moods as signals that the evil deep within him was too near the surface, overwhelming his intellect, and that they should retire until he found his true voice again. In their eyes, thanks to Rhona, Tristan was simultaneously Beast and DemiGod.

  On Tuesday, Rhona had had a hard day. Her eldest child, Donald, had been sick twice, once at the table and once in his bed. He was running a temperature and it was late before he eventually fell into a restless sleep. His retching had exhausted him, but he tossed and turned for ages before her version of The Dixie Chicks’ ‘Godspeed’ lulled him into oblivion. Her nerves were frayed and she wondered whether she should just watch television, but she’d promised Tristan that she’d be there to help him prepare a speech which he had to give to the Borgian War Council so, with a sigh, she logged on and became Angeldust again.

  ‘Where the fuck you been?’ was Tristan’s greeting.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Rhona. ‘Trouble with the kids.’

  ‘OK. Let’s do it then.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘The fucking speech.’

  ‘Oh, right. What’s it supposed to be about?’

  ‘I dunno. Hang on. They bunged me a note. Here it is.’

  The note came up on Rhona’s screen. It was called ‘Territorial acquisition policy for the Fifth Quadrant’. She skimmed through the headings and saw quite quickly that it was yet another example of bullshit. One of the warlords on the Council was a university lecturer. He’d made sure everyone knew it and, whenever they wanted something to sound impressive, they asked him to write it down. This time, he’d provided the theoretical outlines for a successful invasion of the island of Balthazaria and the Council had asked Tristan to turn them into practical applications.

  ‘OK,’ said Rhona. ‘So you’re going to invade Balthazaria.’

  ‘Are we?’ said Tristan.

  ‘Yes. It’s an island, so how would you start?’

  ‘Boats,’ said Tristan.

  Rhona skimmed down the headings.

  ‘Right,’ she said at last. ‘ That’ll be “The logistical imperatives of marine mobility”.’

  She began expanding the heading and writing what to her were quite unnecessary arguments to say that, if anyone wanted to invade an island surrounded by water, they’d need boats. When she’d finished, she asked the next question.

  ‘What about when you get there?’

  ‘Kill ’em,’ said Tristan.

  ‘Not all of them,’ said Rhona.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’ll need to set up a local administrative structure. If you try imposing an externally manned bureaucracy, you’ll encourage terrorism and, at the very least, civil resistance.’

  ‘Oh, fuck it,’ said Tristan. ‘Just write anything.’

  ‘Cuddle me while I’m doing it,’ said Rhona.

  ‘Oh fuck, OK,’ said Tristan.

  He got up and stretched out on some cushions next to his throne. Rhona tucked Angeldust into his embrace, looked at his huge tattooed arms around her, felt how her breast lay heavy on his forearm and how the buckles and hard leather of his jacket dug into her back. She sighed and started to write.

  She’d got as far as the third heading – ‘Cultural absorption of divergent ethical parameters’ – when she heard the baby start crying.

  ‘Shit,’ she said.

  ‘BRB,’ she typed.

  ‘What d’you mean, BRB,’ said Tristan. ‘I need this fucking thing tonight.’

  But Rhona was in the kids’ room picking up the baby. She looked anxiously at Donald, still asleep but murmuring and whimpering, then carried the baby to the computer, rocking it against her shoulder and singing softly. She had to type with one hand, which didn’t please her war
lord.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Now, are you going to make any special laws once you’ve captured the place?’

  ‘How the fuck do I know?’ said Tristan.

  ‘Well, you must have some idea. Surely you’ve discussed it with the others.’

  ‘What’s to discuss? We sail over, beat the shit out of ’em, fuck their women – end of story.’

  The baby’s crying got louder.

  ‘Oh,’ said Rhona. ‘That’s it, is it? That’s the great warlord’s strategy for world domination.’

  ‘What the fuck you on about? Just write,’ said Tristan.

  ‘No. Fuck you,’ said Rhona. ‘I’ve got a baby crying on my shoulder here and all you can do is give orders.’

  ‘Stick your tit in its mouth,’ said Tristan.

  Rhona looked at the words on the screen and felt a sob rise in her throat. But her anger was stronger than the hurt.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘Write your own fucking speech. Your brain’s in your balls. Give them a squeeze and see what comes out. Hand that over to the fucking Council.’

  And she flicked open her enclosures list, chose a name at random and translocated away.

  She landed in a beautiful park. Clear blue waterfalls cascaded over russet rocks and paths wound away through the trees and grasses to a lake which sparkled in the setting sun. Just what she needed. She looked at the couples lying around on the grass and sitting entwined on benches, and she held her baby closer. A young avatar approached, his clothes and hair betraying him as a newcomer.

  ‘Wanna fuck?’ he said.

  Angeldust turned and walked away. Rhona felt the wetness of her baby’s lips as he tried to suckle at her neck and the wetness on her cheeks as the tears fell silently.

  16 coffee break

  Joe’s teams were forever refining the technology of AD. In fact, for all his wealth, Joe was still more interested in the game as an experience than as the mechanism that kept adding more and more to his financial portfolio. One of the reasons he held out so long against introducing voice contacts was that he wanted to resist the synthesis between real and virtual. For him, in virtuality perfection was possible; that would never be true of normal living. It was as if he was trying to preserve AD from contamination.

  In the end, though, all the other social networking sites had gone beyond using keyboards, not only for typing conversations but for moving avatars around. They were introducing hands-free cameras and infrared depth sensors which read players’ movements and replicated them on screen. While some residents preferred the delays which went with keyboards because of the time it gave them to formulate their thoughts, others were impatient. Words didn’t have that degree of importance in normal life, so why should they in their virtual worlds? It was a complaint that AD had eventually to address and, despite Joe’s reluctance, in its third year of operation, avatars were chatting away in real time and their manipulators were being absorbed even more comprehensively into the online world. For some people, the change was a revelation; for others a disaster. An incident one afternoon in April, just before voice activation was introduced, showed both these effects.

  Aaaaaaaaaa treated Alternative Dimension as just a game – a harmless place where people can make their own or others’ heads explode or strap partners or even strangers to machines and slice pieces off them when they feel peckish or bored. But Aaaaaaaaaa preferred its ordinary social aspect, where people visit friends, have dinner parties, go to restaurants and eat vast meals containing absolutely no calories. That made it the perfect place for entrepreneurial activity. Right from the start, he was looking for profits. He chose his name to make sure that it would be first on every search list, only to find that others, even more sales conscious than he was, called themselves 000aaa and even !!**aaa. But he pressed on and it was he who had the brilliant idea of replicating the operational procedures of chains such as Starbucks and trying to get a coffee shop in every AD location. When the announcement came that voice activation would soon be phased in, he was confident that customers would flock to his shops as eagerly as they had to coffee houses in 18th century London.

  He knew he couldn’t use the Starbucks name without permission, so he tried various anagrams, but that ‘k’ always got in the way and made everything sound hard, aggressive. In the end, he hit on the notion of simply turning Starbucks around and dropping the ‘k’. Which gave him Scubrats. OK, it didn’t sound all that attractive, and he knew that it wouldn’t draw in the upper classes – but then, the upper classes in AD live in private enclosures anyway, never listen to anyone, and have velvet linings in their handcuffs, so they weren’t really part of his target audience. So Scubrats it was. And, even before voice activation, it was a huge success, with franchises everywhere and the distinctive Scubrats logo on tee shirts and thongs from Budapest and Rio to Moscow and the depths of Minnesota.

  For anyone who wanted to get the feel of just how intense the virtuality of AD could be, there was no better place to hang out. The branch on the Transitional Continent, where all the artists and writers gather, has been the inspiration for so many paintings, poems and short stories that it’s become a cliché. Scubrats Rhapsody, The Scubrats Ultimatum, My Love is Like a Scubrats Cappuccino – all are burned into the AD psyche, anthems to the coffee bean and the ultimate in cool.

  Joe admired Aaaaaaaaaa’s enterprise and frequently, as Ross, stopped by in one of the outlets. And it was in one of the New York shops that he heard how traumatic the change to voice activation might be. It was a Saturday morning and, as usual, he was captivated by the energy and life of the flow of avatars. As he slipped into a corner seat with his newspaper and his double espresso, he noticed a pink pig making her way to the empty table beside his. And she was some pig – really classy. Her name tag identified her as Victoria Bacon-Ham, but it wasn’t just the double-barrelled tag that was special; the way she moved, the clothes she wore – everything about her said quality. Her dress was a white silk number, her stilettos flashed and blinged as she walked, and the diamonds around her neck and on her wrists winked galaxies of stars at Joe. She was carrying a white mocha chocolate breve in each trotter. She was a regular at Scubrats because she didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink alcohol but, being a pig, she needed something to get her wired. Coffee was the answer.

  She sat at the table, arranged her dress, leaned forward and sipped at the first cup. She caught Ross’s eye and winked. Ross nodded in reply.

  ‘I figured you as an espresso guy even before I saw your cup,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ said Ross. ‘Why’s that?’

  She shrugged. The flashes from her necklace nearly blinded him.

  ‘The way you dress, move. You’re in a hurry. Need a fast hit.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Ross.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘How about this guy?’

  Ross looked towards the door. An alligator had just walked in and looked around, grinning.

  ‘What’s he going to order?’ asked Victoria.

  ‘I don’t know. Swamp water?’ said Ross.

  She smiled and shook her head. Then, with her gaze fixed on the alligator, she said ‘Macchiato’.

  The alligator didn’t even look at the list of drinks. The server greeted him and asked his pleasure.

  ‘Macchiato,’ said the alligator.

  ‘Amazing,’ said Ross. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘He’s my husband,’ said Victoria. ‘He used to drink Espresso Con Pana but now he prefers foamed milk to cream.’

  The alligator, whose name was Xylophone, carried his cup across to Victoria’s table and kissed her. At least, Joe assumed that’s what he was doing – it was difficult to tell because his lips stretched so far around his face.

  Victoria took another sip and began ‘I was just telling Ross how …’

  ‘Espresso drinker,’ said Xylophone, giving Ross a quick glance.

  Ross raised his cup to him. Alligator
s made Joe nervous. This one’s lips really did go a helluva long way back around his face. So did his teeth. But he, Ross and Victoria carried on typing lines of chat for a while and things seemed amiable enough.

  The place was filling up but Ross was OK. There was only room for him at his corner table. Soon, though, all the seats had been taken except for the two beside Victoria and Xylophone. A fairy arrived. Her name was Misty Mist. She was a tiny thing, completely naked except for a gossamer thread hanging around her hips and obscuring her pubic area. Her wings were almost transparent, her hair was spun gold and she had huge, limpid eyes.

  ‘Strawberry smoothie,’ said Victoria, as she watched her.

  ‘Strawberry smoothie,’ said Misty to the server.

  She picked up the big glass in her tiny hand, looked around and headed for Victoria’s table.

  ‘May I?’ she asked, pointing to one of the spare seats.

  Victoria smiled. Xylophone grinned.

  ‘Nice tits,’ he said as she sat down.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Misty.

  ‘Bit small,’ he added.

  ‘Wait till she has a litter to feed,’ said Victoria. ‘That’ll fill them out.’

  Misty blushed and lifted the smoothie to her lips.

  The door opened again and in came a newcomer. His name was Syd Sod and he obviously hadn’t yet learned about avatar modelling. His head was topped by a solid block of unnaturally black hair and he wore dirty jeans and a tee shirt bearing the AD logo. He stood at the door, seemingly paralysed by what he saw, but the server called across to him, ‘What’s your pleasure, sir?’

  ‘Chocolate frappé,’ said Victoria.

  ‘Chocolate frappé,’ said Syd.