Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

Release! I came to, out of some dumb freeze. Felt like I was breathing, for the first time in hours. The whole trip upwards, a superzoom of quick fire. But how fine everything was now, standing on top of Manchester. All this was mine - the black spaces, the glittering lights. Chill breath of air, first spots of rain, the child at my side, barely struggling.

'Let me go,' she said.

'Not yet,' I answered, throwing the gun to the ground. 'I need you still.' And tearing off the scattermask, throwing it down as well. So much spent trash in my life. A glimmer to my right turned me around. There, oh there! The stairway continued, ever upwards, made but of cloud. It was simple, and so clean, and all I needed to do was carry on climbing. There the pleasure awaited me. There it waited, and what else was there to do? With a violence that shocked me, I gathered the girl off her feet, lifted her up into my arms.

'Please. What are you doing? Stop it, please. Please stop it!'

She had a weight, but it was nothing really, a mere shadow. And the words of the shadow were but textures in the night. Only the staircase mattered, only the golden way. I started to walk towards it, towards the edge of the building. I took a few steps, and the girl was struggling, but nothing I couldn't handle. Within moments, out of another freeze, there I was, balanced on the tip of the night. Below me, and all around, the silent, pained city lay so distant it barely shimmered.

'Muldoon!'

A voice from behind, the clang of a metal door.

'Muldoon! It's me, it's Gumball. What's going on?'

'Stay away.'

'It's the stairway!' cried the girl in my arms. 'She's seen the stairway!'

'Come away, Muldoon. Come away from the edge. We're moving in on the trans. Muldoon, we've got a trace.'

'Stay away, Gumball! I have to do this.'

'Put the girl down, then. There's no need to-'

'Shut up!'

I looked ahead. The girl had gone quiet now. It was a cruel and terrible thing to do, and I don't know what passion drove me there. Only the need to challenge, I suppose. I had to set myself up against the advert, see who was strongest. It could make me kill myself, that was easy. Could it make me kill another, an innocent?

Gently, so gently, I put my foot on the first step. The cloud shivered. The girl held on tight to me, and it was all I had left.

The rain hit me.

Hit me cold.

I stepped back. Unfroze. The stairway shivered again, then became a mere gust of wind and the droplets of the rain, vanishing.

I got the girl safely to the floor, where she ran into Gumball's arms. I picked up the gun and the mask.

'OK, Gumball,' I said, moving towards the door. 'Let's go find the bastard.'

I was only five images old when I got my first Blurb. Mummy Wave bought it for me, a present for my first ever press conference. Oh, she was so proud! Her only daughter, the youngest girl in the street to achieve a press-con.

Imagine the headlines. The in-depth analysis: YOUNG GIRL WITNESSES VICIOUS MURDER. ANGRY MOTHER DEMANDS PUBLIC RECOGNITION FOR GRIEVING CHILD. NEW VIRUS INFECTS GAMEWORLD™. AUTHORITIES AT A LOSS TO EXPLAIN THE KILLING.

This is how it happened: Tommy Smart was my best-ever friend, and I miss his tactics dearly. We were playing Corporate Sleazeball™ on the Game-Pimp™. Tommy was so good, he'd already scored seven freebies, five perks, four liquid lunches and two complete takeover bids against me, easy pickings, before the bad thing happened. At first it was just a whirling shadow at the very edge of my game-vision, like a mild intrusion from reality, nothing to be scared about. Perhaps our collected mummies were calling to us, to come eat?

Before I knew quite what was happening, the shadow shape had pounced on Tommy, hard and fast. It splintered his game-play into a million pieces and then sucked his image clean away. I pulled out of the Pimp, double quick and falling…

Into my mother's arms. Back to the Real World™, as Tommy's image drained away to zero before my startled eyes.

Marketing disaster!

Zero-image is a kind of slow death. Tommy didn't really die, he just became a nobody. I couldn't bear to play with him now that he had no flaunt, no flourish, no publicity value. I guess that being privy to his erasure made me too famous, far too quickly. Whatever, the Commcops™ soon came knocking, and I was hauled off to give the press-con. I had to give this tear-stricken speech about what a noble player Tommy Smart had been. The news hounds asked me a ton of questions about the monstrous virus that had wiped Tommy's image off the map. I said it was a twisting whirl of data-smoke, dark and brutal, like a tornado, only more fashionable. I was already learning how to work the media.

The next morning's editions were full of screen-prints of the Twister Wipe ™ virus, and how it was going to kill all the game-pimping children unless caught quickly. Thus was my fifth image-change achieved.

From 'Media Virgin' to 'Grieving Witness', all in one easy move.

Mummy Wave was so pleased with my press-con that she bought me the pet as a reward for being so open to notoriety. Blurb Worms were rare and expensive in those days, but Mummy had sold my story to one of the more downmarket news hounds.

So, my very first Blurb. I called him Scoop™.

Scoop was only three inches long to start with, and a pale cream colour. I kept him safe and warm in a glass tank filled with earth and sawdust. Following the instructions in the user's manual, Scoop's first meal consisted of five metazine articles about my witnessing the evil Twister Wipe at his play, a mating pair of Vids reproducing my press-con, and the complete series of howlings my mother's exclusive had produced from the newshound.

Mummy Wave threw a launch party to celebrate my exploits, inviting all of the street's residents. I allowed Scoop out of his tank for the first time. By now the Blurb had completely swallowed my hot news story. He'd grown an inch in size with the info, and his once-naked body now sported the colours of my new brand image, my very own logo. tina wave enterprises™, ran the letters along his spine. The Blurb Worm sat lovingly on my shoulder, beaming his messages of goodwill:

Important Press release! Tina Wave is currently recovering from her traumatic experience at the hands of the Twister Wipe. She will not be giving any further interviews until after the publication of volume one of her memoirs.

That was my street name: Tina Wave. Short for Christina Waverly. Just like Blurbs is short for Bio-Logical-Ultra-Robotic-Broadcasting-System. Just like the commcops are really the Communication Police. Because this is the Golden Age of Appearances ™. We don't even call them names, really; rather we have logos, or corporate identities, or else brands or trademarks, copyrighted designs, slogans, tags or communique's.

Nothing is real, and that's how we like it.

Meanwhile, more and more kiddie players were twisted to zero-image. The Wipe-out rampant. The commcops could only patrol the games, like the useless watchdogs that they were, discovering zero, zero everywhere.

My sixth image was 'Lone Vixen'. I retired to my bedroom, and stayed there a whole season, writing my memoirs and formulating my game plan for the public life ahead. Scoop also went into hibernation, enfolding himself in a cocoon of secreted commercials. Everything slowed down; kids worldwide were leaving the Game-Pimp machine alone, egged on by horror-struck parents. Of course, most of the kids really wanted to have a go against the Twister, relishing the image they would gain by killing it. But the parental advice prevailed, and the kids went AWOP: Absent Without Official Play. The Big Pimp's profits took a graph plunge.