Peter Anghelides - Another Life

‘Look at you!’ Rhys was standing in the doorway. ‘You’re on the wrong side of the bed. I got up a bit earlier for a wee and a glass of water — all that Tiger we had with dinner, it just went right through me. When I got back, you’d rolled over onto my side. That’s why I had a bit of trouble with your lamp there. Sorry, couldn’t quite see what was what.’ He stooped down by her side of the bed and started to pick up the books and pens and papers he’d accidentally scattered on the floor. ‘You’ve had quite a few restless nights, haven’t you? Since starting this new job. What’s all that about?’ He laughed. ‘Guilty conscience?’

‘Oh, hark at you,’ Gwen retorted. ‘Guilty conscience about my new job? That’s your mate Gaz talking, that is. Like you never have nightmares?’

‘I always sleep well. The sleep of the just.’

‘The sleep of the shagged, more like,’ she told him. ‘Your post-coital coma is what you mean, Rhys.’

He dumped some of the papers on the bedside cabinet, leaned over, and attempted to snog her.

‘Not fair!’ she protested, laughing, as she smelled the Colgate. ‘You’ve brushed your teeth, and I bet I’ve got bog breath.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Well I do,’ she told him. ‘And besides, I need the loo now.’

Rhys stood up to let her out of the bed. ‘I’ll tidy up the rest of this mess I’ve made while you have your wee, then.’

Gwen tiptoed over the cold bathroom lino and left him to sort out the strewn papers. Since joining Torchwood, she’d had restless nights because she woke up with thoughts and ideas and then stayed awake fretting that she wouldn’t remember them the next day. She’d taken to scribbling them on shop receipts and envelopes, and eventually in a small notebook. She trusted Rhys not to nosey around in her stuff, but didn’t trust herself not to lose it, so it was written in abbreviations and codes. Inevitably, that meant her night-time jottings were either in indecipherable handwriting or, when examined in the cold light of morning, just tired rambling nonsense.

‘Is this a new mobile number?’ Rhys called through to her.

She emerged back into their room, still clutching her toothbrush. She wiped one wet hand on her nightie, and took the Post-it note from him.

‘Scribbled out in a bit of a hurry,’ he observed, ‘and not your handwriting. That says “Gwen”, and a number… is that a zero or a six?’

Gwen knew that the scrawled word was “Owen”. He’d shoved his mobile number at her, while giving her some half-hearted cheesy chat-up line. She’d told him to piss off. It was a joke anyway, a gesture, because all the Torchwood phones had everyone’s number programmed in on speed dial. Even so, when she’d emptied the pockets that evening before hanging her jacket in the wardrobe, she’d found the Post-it note still there.

‘Message from the office,’ she told Rhys. Gwen took it with her back to the bathroom, sticking it on the mirror while she had a pee. As she sat, she thought about the dream. Jack in the pool. Owen watching from the balcony.

She got back to the bed, and stooped close to Rhys to get a proper snog. He was sprawled comfortably across his own side, mouth wide open, taking regular breaths.

Gwen listened to Rhys breathing. She went back and retrieved the Post-it from the bathroom mirror. Tucked it into her notebook. Put the notebook on the bedside cabinet. Slipped back into bed with Rhys, and switched off the lamp. Lay in the dark, listening to the ceaseless rain.

Russian roulette was definitely more interesting with real people, decided Owen. And playing it in the Torchwood Hub gave it an added frisson of excitement. There was the danger of being caught by Jack or Gwen or Toshiko, which was just as exhilarating as knowing that he risked getting his brains splattered across his own desk. Though that would be harder to explain than it would be to clear up afterwards.

He sniffed the air in the room, expecting his nostrils to fill with the scent of cordite and freshly sprayed blood. Beside him, slumped against the base of the Asteroids arcade game, the latest gun victim stared sightlessly at the Hub’s high ceiling. It was Kvasir the Viking. One way or another, at someone else’s hand or his own, that dumb Scandinavian was always going to wind up dead.

Owen kicked the dead man’s fur-clad leg. ‘Get up, Kvasir,’ he told him. ‘You’re not as smart as they told me you were. Try again with your next life. I bet you can’t lose four times in a row.’

The corpse blinked twice, rolled over and returned to the table.

After another couple of games, the novelty of combining elements of the Second Reality game with the physical contents of the Hub started to pall for Owen. For the first hour, it had amused him to run the 3-D projectors in the Hub’s games area, but he soon found it distracting to navigate around the solid real-life objects, and a lot duller than exploring the unlimited, uninhibited worlds created by other people inside Second Reality . At one stage, he checked his watch to see that it was already approaching 1 a.m. on Sunday morning. After that, he put the helmet-mounted display back on his head and immersed himself once more in the startling clarity of the images on the stereoscopic screens.

He was keen to meet new characters, in the hope that they were also new people in the real world. You could never tell, because one person might have several avatars in the game. Penny Pasteur had already proved a disappointment. Remembering Toshiko’s words earlier, he’d gone to the Wumpaam district where a Mage called Candlesmith had sold him a pair of sunglasses that showed you what the person’s fleshspace name was. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t work on Candlesmith, but when Owen used them on Penny Pasteur it revealed her in real life to be Donald McGurk Jr., logged in to the game from Minneapolis. And while Donald wasn’t the hairy-arsed fifty-year-old that Toshiko had speculated about, when confronted with his true identity he confessed that he was a thirty-two-year-old Star Trek fan who secretly wanted to be Lieutenant Uhura.

Owen abandoned ‘Penny’ back at the Lunatic Fringe, making good use of an unfortunate accident when she had fallen into a huge pile of rotting fruit that had mysteriously appeared in the street outside the barber-shop. Within seconds, Owen had vanished around the corner and lost himself amid the glittering skyscrapers of the uptown Millennium Capitol, heedless to the wails from Penny and the screeches of the pteranodons that had swooped down from nowhere to peck at her where she lay in the street like a tempting hors d’oeuvre.

More promising was Egg Magnet. In his guise as Glendower Broadsword, Owen picked him up outside the Surer Square, a tapas bar near the centre of Millennium Capitol. He decided that Egg was the most stylish person in the place, because he was dancing on the table-top, and eating fire rather than the queso con anchoas . This endeared him to Owen, if not to the waiters, so he intercepted Egg as he was being thrown out into the street.

They danced diagonally across the cobbled streets of the food district. Owen considered the newcomer’s brilliant white trouser suit and startlingly bright silver hair.

‘What kind of name is “Egg Magnet”?’ he asked.

‘Name of a band,’ Egg replied. ‘How about you? Did your parents read a lot of Tolkien?’

Owen considered his Glendower Broadsword outfit. ‘I’ve always wanted to visit New Zealand. But I never got further than dressing like this. It’s a hobbit I find hard to break.’

Egg Magnet pulled a face. Literally. He seized hold of his cheeks and stretched them like putty into an exaggerated expression of dismay.