Peter Anghelides - Another Life

He offered her the Mage’s sunglasses. ‘I can see your real details. You’re in Cardiff. You’re logged in as Egg Magnet, but your user ID is m.tegg@caerdyddnet.net .’

She took the sunglasses from him cautiously. Peered through them. ‘What’s an IP address?’ she asked. She could obviously see more information about him through the sunglasses. ‘And what’s Torchwood?’

‘IP address is like the phone number of your computer. That’s how it knows where you are. And Torchwood…’ He paused to consider this. ‘There’s so much more to tell you about Torchwood.’

Megan handed the sunglasses back to him. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘that’s weird. The picture on my screen just got a whole heap better. How’d you do that, mate?’

‘All part of the service.’ Owen didn’t know how, but wasn’t going to tell her. An unexpected bonus by sharing the sunglasses through the Torchwood system, probably.

‘The detail in the graphics is fantastic. Look at that! You can see chips in the brickwork. And your outfit, mate… wow! Hey, mine isn’t too shabby either!’ She stood up and twirled around. Owen’s heart fluttered for a moment, because spinning around was the method by which players left the game. But Megan’s avatar gave a little bow, and then sat down next to him again. ‘It’s my day off work,’ Megan explained, ‘I’m back on duty this evening and then overnight. Thought I’d spend Sunday morning bumming around in here. Shouldn’t really be playing the game, I suppose, but it’s a bit addictive isn’t it? Mind you, I was pissed off when I got banished to the Sin Bin. I was about to log off. But now… well, here we are.’

Owen wondered if she was going to log out of the game after all. He blurted out, ‘Can we meet up?’

‘We are meeting up.’

‘No, I mean in Cardiff. I’m in Cardiff, too. Now. I want to discuss something with you. In person. Make you an offer, sort of.’

Megan laughed, and nudged him with her shoulder. ‘I remember that from the night we first slept together.’

‘At the college ball,’ he smiled.

‘It really is you, isn’t it, Owen?’

‘It’s not that kind of offer,’ he said.

‘Yeah, that’s what you said then, too.’

Time to be more assertive, Owen. Take the initiative, if you want her to understand Torchwood. That’s what Jack Harkness would do in this situation.

No, screw Jack Harkness. It’s what Owen Harper would do.

‘I’ll prove it, Megan. If you want to. You can ring me. Now, on my mobile.’ He gave her the number. Got her to read it back to him, to make sure she’d written it down.

Then he logged out of the game.

He eased his head out of the helmet-mounted display. The games room came back into focus around him. He got up from his terminal and had a big stretch.

The large window to one side looked down onto the lower floors of the Hub. He could see lights on in the Boardroom, where Toshiko had been working earlier. She’d looped the sponge thing on a thread around his neck, and then left him to do his own thing while he ran through the decontamination. She had phoned up to him a couple of times, and he’d abruptly told her to leave him alone. He examined the Geiger counter now, and saw that the reading had improved but was still too high.

Owen sat quietly at a table by the pinball machine, and thought about Second Reality . The initial excitement of it, then the disappointment when he found out who the participants really were, and their humdrum reality. They had to go back to that when they logged out of the game, back to their drab personal first realities. He at least could come back to this, to Torchwood. Even if he couldn’t be more like his avatar in the game.

Owen pulled his shirt collar away from his neck with a couple of fingers, and studied his pectoral muscles through the gap in the material.

His contemplation was interrupted by the sound of his mobile phone. The display told him: ‘Unknown Caller’, and a phone number he didn’t recognise.

Megan was calling him.

He was back in the game.

They drove through the pouring rain. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire stretched off into distance as far as Gwen could see. Warning signs on the enclosure flashed past at regular intervals: ‘Ministry of Defence Property’. After she’d seen a dozen of them, she’d worked out that the rest of the wording on them was the stilted formality of the Official Secrets Act describing the risk of arrest and prosecution for ‘unauthorised persons’.

Eventually, Jack pulled the SUV over onto a grass verge. A painted notice on stout poles indicated they’d reached Caregan Barracks, home to Y Cymry Deheuol , the Southern Welsh Regiment. Parked under this sign, also angled up on the verge, was Gwen’s black Saab.

Toshiko got out of the Saab and walked towards them, clutching a plastic bag under one arm. Gwen wound down her window so that they could talk.

‘Only just got here myself,’ said Toshiko. She held out the keys to the Saab. ‘Want to swap?’ Gwen accepted the keys and got out.

Toshiko took the passenger seat, next to Jack. ‘Here’s your shirt,’ she told him, and passed him a tissue-paper parcel from the plastic bag. ‘I chose you a blue one. You know, for a change.’

Jack wriggled about in the driver’s seat as he started to remove his jacket and braces.

Gwen stood in the rain, feeling it soak into her hair, wondering how much longer he was going to take. She saw that Toshiko had demurely faced away from Jack as he pulled on the fresh shirt.

While he dressed, Jack leaned across the car a little so that Gwen could hear him through the window. ‘Let’s be cautious with the armed forces, OK? In the face of alien weirdness, the military instinct is to involve UNIT at the first opportunity. We can do without that kind of hassle. Follow my lead.’

‘Any other last-minute pearls of wisdom?’ Gwen asked him. ‘Only I’m getting drowned out here.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Toshiko. ‘You should see it in Cardiff now. Much heavier than here, and still deteriorating. The worst seems to be confined to the Bay area. It’s like a microclimate.’

‘Microclimate as in “tiny amount of sun”?’ retorted Jack, and put the SUV into gear again. ‘We might as well be in Manchester.’

Gwen drove after them through the entrance. They showed their IDs and, after some further consultation, the sentries lifted the red-and-white-striped barrier to allow them in. A jeep with two armed soldiers escorted them past the crisp tramping of a drill practice, and into the visitors’ parking area. One soldier was a stocky youngster with Slav features, the other was tall enough to look thin in comparison.

The army buildings were squat, low affairs. Grim and dreary in the afternoon’s grey light, with wide and shallow-sloping roofs that glistened in the rain. Few had more than one storey, white stucco walls with aluminium-framed windows punched into them at regular intervals. One of the buildings had a second storey clad in stained dark timber, and it was towards this that the soldiers steered them.

The Torchwood team walked together between their escorts, Toshiko in the middle.

‘What can you tell us about the base commander?’ asked Jack.

Toshiko was able to read information off her PDA as they walked. ‘Daniel Yorke. Lieutenant-Colonel. Queen’s Gallantry Medal 1988. Played hockey for Combined Services. Graduate of Sandhurst. Did special duties in Afghanistan. Were you looking for anything in particular, Jack?’

‘Just hoping to make polite conversation.’

There was a laminated notice affixed to the wall outside the base commander’s office. It detailed, in brief, the expectations of soldiers at the barracks. The list started with ‘Selfless Commitment — to put others before you’, went through ‘Courage’, ‘Discipline’, ‘Integrity’, and ‘Loyalty’, and concluded with ‘Respect for others — to treat others with decency at all times’.