Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ said Dallas. But even as he spoke Gates was reaching to tip up the visor.

‘Jesus Christ.’ For one brief, heart-stopping moment Gates had a view of a helmet that was filled with hundreds of long, thin red worms before disgust instinctively made him move away. It wasn’t this movement that saved his virtual life. Rather, it was because of the position he had adopted seconds earlier, kneeling over the top of the head instead of the body, which would have been more typical. The very second after he turned up the visor it was as if the body that filled the suit — if there had ever been a body — was pierced from below by a hundred animal-looking spikes that were as sharp as needles, each of them bright red and two or three feet in length. Gates, already recoiling from the first horror, jumped back at the sight of the second, mute with fright, even as Dallas fired a bolt of boiling electrons into the very center of the spinous suit. There was a bright flash of blue light as the focused beam sliced the suit in half, reducing the center to a mass of molten metal, rubber, and something once animate.

As Gates picked himself off the ground, cursing with fright, Dallas looked at the UHT gun with a new respect.

‘What the hell is that supposed to be?’ demanded Gates.

‘I don’t think it really matters what it’s supposed to be,’ said Dallas.

‘That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t come within an inch of being a goddamn pincushion.’

‘What I mean to say is that we won’t find any logical explanations about things from here on in. Now it’s just a matter of trying to get through this shit with as little pain as possible.’

‘Looking at this particular piece of shit, that’s not going to be easy.’

‘I agree.’ Dallas thought for a moment. ‘Tell me, have you ever had Simsex?’

‘What kind of question is that, right now?’

‘A very important one.’

‘Okay, yeah, I’ve had Simsex.’

‘How good was it? As good as the real thing?’

‘In a lot of ways it was actually better. But then I’ve never had sex on the Moon. Cav says that’s pretty good.’

‘It stands to reason that if pleasure can be more intense in a simulation, then so can pain. You and I may not get killed in a simulation. But is being killed the worst that could happen to us? I mean, the pleasure of sex is over soon after your orgasm. But pain need never end. You know, it’s quite possible that we could get into a situation where we end up wishing ourselves dead. Except that death can never come in here. It’s like something in Greek mythology. Like Sisyphus condemned to roll an enormous rock up a hill for all eternity, or Prometheus bound by chains to a rock and condemned to have an eagle tear out a liver that continually renews itself. It’s probably only inside a simulation that myths and legends can achieve their full potential. Punishments such as those might actually have been devised specifically for a simulation. Do you see what I mean? Death isn’t so bad. It’s the waiting for death that can be intolerable, and yet must be tolerated.’

‘I wish you’d shut up, Dallas. And I wish I knew what that bastard Prevezer was doing right now. If I ever see him again, I’m going to teach him the meaning of reality in a way he’s not likely to forget.’

Rimmer was growing bored. It was hardly very satisfying to torture someone if you couldn’t see them bleed or hear them scream with pain. A victim had to have some kind of relationship with his tormentor, the kind that left an opportunity for him to beg for mercy; otherwise the cruelty inflicted hardly qualified as torture at all, but rather some reduced form of brutality, such as inhumanity or spite. Having set his heart on becoming the personification of pure evil in the eyes of Dallas, it mattered a great deal to Rimmer that those eyes should at least be open and fixed on him. Whatever pleasure he took in torturing Dallas was not served by watching the man’s vital signs and hearing Prevezer’s descriptions of how he had ruptured one simulation with another one more hellish. It was true, Dallas’s pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and body temperature indicated a person who was undergoing some kind of severe trauma, but trying to fathom the reason for each and every surge in his heart rate — at one point it had actually touched one hundred and ninety beats per minute — was proving frustrating to Rimmer. Since Prevezer hardly relished the task of torturing his two colleagues, he was unable to furnish Rimmer with a sufficiently horrific level of detail as to the variety of terror that they were experiencing. It was only with a gun to his head that he had even managed to describe the Sura Fifteen Simworld he had added to the model of the First National Blood Bank:

‘It’s something I developed for Reinbek,’ he had explained. ‘He used to be an interrogator for the Criminal Intelligence Service, but now he works for the Black Hole. And sometimes he wants information from people, and he gets me to use this particular simulation on them. Sura Fifteen’s named after the book in the Qur’an that describes seven portals leading into seven divisions of hell. You said you wanted Antichrist, mister, well you’ve got it. What they’re going through is hair-on-end, cold sweat, blood-turning-to-water, stampeding-panic-attack horror, and I wouldn’t inflict it on my worst enemy. Parts of the model I had to buy prefabricated from some real sado-freaks and mental fuck-ups. So don’t ask me to describe what’s in there in more detail because I just don’t know. I wouldn’t go in that simulation if you promised me eternal life.’

‘I can guarantee you a very short life if you’re lying to me,’ Rimmer had promised.

Two whole hours had gone by since Prevezer had reported that Dallas and Gates had gone through the first portal of hell, and Rimmer had grown tired of the Simworld modeler’s one-word pictures of the numbers he was seeing on the computer screen. Bad. Evil. Ghastly. Grim. Horrifying. Dreadful. Monstrous.

‘How do I know that it’s as bad as you say it is?’ Rimmer demanded, pressing the gun against Prevezer’s nose.

‘You can’t. Not for sure. Not without going in and taking a look for yourself.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

Prevezer said nothing, momentarily distracted by some small change he had noticed in Gates.

‘I know I would,’ said Cavor from the floor where he still lay alongside Ronica and Simou.

‘Shut up,’ snarled Rimmer. And then to Prevezer: ‘This isn’t working for me. Not anymore. Maybe I’ll just shoot them now. Maybe I’ll just shoot you all.’

‘Wait,’ said Prevezer. ‘You wanted confirmation that they’re going through hell? Well look. Look at Gates. Look at his hair, for God’s sake.’

Rimmer bent down and peered through the fretwork of the geodesic dome that covered Gates’s head. There could be no doubt about it. Gates’s hair, uniformly brown when Rimmer had come into the hotel suite, was now distinctly gray.

‘My God, you’re right,’ he breathed. ‘His hair’s turned quite gray. Just while I’ve been here.’

‘You bastard,’ hissed Ronica.

‘Now do you believe me?’ demanded Prevezer.

‘My hair is gray, but not with years,’ said Cavor. ‘Nor grew it white, in a single night, / As men’s have grown from sudden fears.’

‘What’s that?’ asked a delighted Rimmer.

Cavor sat up and repeated the verse, adding by way of provenance, ‘Lord Byron.’ [118] The Prisoner of Chillon, i. (1816). Now if Rimmer would just turn his back, he could take him on.

‘Shut up, Cav,’ ordered Ronica. ‘Don’t you see? You’re only adding to the bastard’s sadistic enjoyment.’