Rod Rees - The Demi-Monde - Winter

The Professor gave a disdainful laugh. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Vampires indeed! There is nary an extended canine nor an aversion to daylight in the whole of the Demi-Monde. No, better to say that Demi-Mondians have a requirement for a dietary intake of at least ten millilitres of blood each week. Most of them take it mixed with alcohol, which they call Solution because it provides, literally, a “solution” to all their cares and worries.’

‘But where do they get the blood from?’

‘Oh, that was very simple to organise. There are a number of Blood Banks in the Demi-Monde and each week the DemiMondians are credited with twenty millilitres of blood. What they don’t consume they can save, trade or convert into cash.’

‘I don’t understand, Professor,’ protested Ella. ‘If they only need ten millilitres and they are being credited with twenty, how can blood be one of your disharmonics? There’s an over-supply of the stuff.’

‘Ten millilitres is the absolute minimum a Demi-Mondian needs to survive: they crave much, much more. They can survive on ten millilitres a week but they don’t find it much fun.’

Ella eyed the Professor carefully. ‘I hate to be obtuse, but so what?’

‘Unfortunately there was a programming error.’ The Professor ignored the glare this admission provoked from the General. ‘Whilst the Dupes inhabiting the Demi-Monde crave blood, they don’t actually have any blood… not in their bodies, anyway. But whereas the Demi-Mondians are bloodless, ABBA programmed those visiting the Demi-Monde – the General’s neoFights – to have their full quota of five litres of virtual blood… blood that on the Demi-Monde black market is worth a fortune.’

‘Ah…’

‘Ah, indeed. The Demi-Mondians took to hunting down our soldiers – or Daemons as they call them – capturing them, strapping them to a drip and then milking them of enough blood to keep them docile but not enough to kill them. Their human POWs became not so much milchcows as blutcows.’

‘Jesus, that’s horrible.’

The Professor nodded. ‘Unfortunately it was not as awful as the realisation that if we unhooked the POWs from their connection to the Demi-Monde without them having “returned”, so to speak, they would be left here in the Real World as vegetables. Remember that for our neoFights the Demi-Monde is the only reality: they are completely unaware of the existence of the Real World. The last thing we wanted was a grunt getting drunk in the Demi-Monde and spilling the beans to any locals in earshot that they were only a piece of digital mapping. That sort of SNAFU wouldn’t be helpful to maintaining the integrity of the simulation.’

‘We have tried to amend this by giving neoFight officers some partial recall…’

‘Protocol 57,’ interjected the Professor but the General ignored him.

‘… but as this is a facility available only to officers we won’t burden you with it. Suffice it to say that for those unfortunate neoFights captive in the Demi-Monde, to bring them out prematurely would mean that though their bodies would be with us, their minds would be lost in cyberspace. They have become, in the parlance of the Demi-Monde, the Kept.’

‘Let me get this straight. You sent men into the Demi-Monde and they were captured by Dupes?’

The General didn’t look happy. ‘I know it sounds a little farfetched, and believe me we have made efforts to remedy the situation, but the simple answer to your question, Miss Thomas, is… yes.’

‘But didn’t you try to rescue them?’

The General sighed. ‘Yes, we did but the Dupe leaders were too quick for us. All the Sectors closed the access ports – the Portals – that lead to and from the Real World. As a result of this debacle we now have seventeen of our men trapped in the Professor’s little simulation.’

Ella shook her head. ‘Look, I don’t wish to seem brutal, but this Demi-Monde of yours sounds like a most trippy place. Why don’t you just cut bait and close it down?’

‘Well, apart from the fact that it would cost the lives of seventeen good men, there is another consideration. Somehow, Norma Williams, the daughter of the President, has become lost in the Demi-Monde.’

Ella couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Norma Williams? Just what the fuck were you doing letting Norma Williams into this hellhole?’

The General nodded towards Professor Bole for an explanation. At least the Professor had the good grace to look awkward. ‘As I have said, the Demi-Monde is a self-governing and self-supporting cyber-environment. It is also self-protecting. The leaders in the Demi-Monde – crazed and paranoid as they are – concluded, correctly as it happens, that we in the Real World were a threat to them and so they moved to abduct someone we would be unable to sacrifice: the President’s daughter.’

‘But how did they do that?’

‘We don’t know,’ admitted the Professor. ‘We believe the abduction was organised by Aleister Crowley but how he did it, we just don’t know. What we do know is that Norma Williams is active inside the simulation.’

‘Well, send in another rescue squad.’

‘As I have told you,’ intoned the General gloomily, ‘the DemiMondians have closed all access Portals: we can’t get anybody in. Fortunately there is still one exit Portal working but that’s in the middle of NoirVille Sector and NoirVille is a very dangerous place.’

‘So, if there is no way into the Demi-Monde, why are we sitting here talking? You’re screwed.’

The General and the Professor exchanged looks.

‘Not entirely screwed, Miss Thomas,’ answered the General. ‘It would seem that Professor Bole here is of a whimsical turn of mind. In the early days of designing the Demi-Monde he persuaded one of his designers to create a Dupe jig that was never utilised. It was to serve, in the argot of the computer world, as a “back door” into the Demi-Monde.’ The screen on the side wall changed to show the picture of an alleyway. ‘This is an alley in the Rookeries, the Anglo-Saxon Sector of the Demi-Monde.’ The scene shifted, the view focusing on a doorway at the end of the alley illuminated by a red gas lamp.

‘Gas lights?’ queried Ella. ‘Why are they using gas lights?’

‘We locked the Demi-Monde’s technology at that which existed around the year eighteen seventy. The US Military insisted that the simulation displayed a fairly primitive technological modality, such as would be available to belligerents in Real World Asymmetric Wars. So it was agreed that the technology in the Demi-Monde be held at a Victorian-era level. That’s why they’re still using gas lights: they haven’t yet figured out how to harness electricity.’

Yeah, right.

As the camera zoomed in on the doorway, Ella saw the sign over the door which read ‘The Prancing Pig’.

‘The Prancing Pig is a pub in the slum area of the London docklands,’ advised the Professor. ‘A horrible pub in a horrible place.’

The zooming didn’t stop there; it kept going until it had tightly focused on a hand-written notice – rain-stained and tatty – nailed to the pub’s door. The notice said:

‘A “chirp” is…’ began the Professor.

‘I know what a chirp is. A chirp is a female jazz singer.’ Ella shook her head. ‘Oh, you must be joking.’

‘I should explain,’ said the General evenly. ‘When the DemiMonde was originally being populated, the good Professor here thought it would be a great joke to advertise for a thing that could never be: to wit, a black jazz singer performing in a rabidly white Sector. And he created a Dupe to match.’

Once again the General nodded to the Captain and once again the screen shifted, this time showing the picture of a Dupe. The girl shown was tall, had tawny black skin, was slim, big-eyed and – ignoring the Victorian-style gown and bonnet the Dupe was wearing – looked a lot like Ella. It was almost as though ABBA had been expecting her.