Patrick Thompson - Execution Plan

‘Nice,’ said Tina. ‘I could do with a mirror, the rain’s played havoc with my hair.’

‘How does this help?’ I asked.

‘It sets you apart from yourself,’ Betts explained. ‘It lets you see yourself in a different way, without the body getting in the way. I just went through all that. Weren’t you listening?’

‘No he wasn’t,’ said Tina. ‘He was looking out of the window and thinking about arcade games.’

She was right, as usual.

‘It’s better with mirrors,’ said Betts. He became less nervous as he expanded on his subject. ‘We block your view of yourself, and let you see parts of your body reflected. You move your left hand, and see your right hand move. That’s the sort of thing. It disassociates you from yourself.’

‘And that’s all I do for the afternoon? And I get paid?’

‘It may be distressing. Some people react to it badly. We’re paying you because you might not enjoy yourself.’

‘Bring the mirrors on,’ I said.

‘Dr Morrison is setting things up. We have to get the line of sight right for your height.’

‘How do you know how tall I am?’

‘You’re about my height. Maybe a little taller. A touch less than six feet. Your eyes are level with mine. This isn’t rocket science.’

It didn’t seem like any sort of science. We were going to stand and look at ourselves in strategically placed mirrors.

‘Isn’t there a control? You have control subjects in experiments.’

‘You’re both control subjects. You’re both going in there, and neither of you will know when you’re the control. It’ll switch between you.’

‘Fine.’

The three of us ran out of things to talk about. I don’t like to provoke conversations. I feel more comfortable joining them once they’re underway. Tina seemed preoccupied. Perhaps she had some buried traumas she was worrying about. Betts began to nibble at the skin around his fingernails. He winced and shook his finger as he caught a live bit. I looked back out of the window. The mountains were rendered faint by low clouds or thick sky. I wondered if the rooms across the corridor had a view of the sea.

‘I’ll see what he’s up to,’ said Betts, leaving Tina and I alone in the room.

‘How’s your hand?’ she asked.

‘It’s mine again. That was weird. I could feel it but it felt like the table was my hand. Or my hand was the table. It felt strange. It’s an illusion, though. It’s not as though my hand became part of the table.’

‘Illusions can be enough,’ she said. She seemed to be on her way to saying something else, and then stopped and looked out of the window. Between us, we were in danger of using the view up. There wasn’t much of it – grey sky, grey mountains, grey fields – and it wouldn’t stand up to much more attention.

‘What’s Dr Morrison like?’ I asked.

‘What do you think he’s like?’

‘Are you examining me?’

‘All the time. You need it. So, what do you think he’s like?’

‘Like a movie mad scientist. Mostly bald and with coloured stuff in test tubes. Getting ready to feed us a serum that’ll turn us into zombies.’

‘He’s about thirty, and he has hair. He doesn’t have test tubes.’

‘Just mirrors?’

‘You can be very negative. We’ll have to see about knocking that out of you.’

‘I’d be careful. Negativity is half of my personality. I don’t know if the rest would stand up without it.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Possibly not.’

She popped her elbows on the table, folded her hands together, and dropped her chin onto them. She looked at the desk.

Neither of us said anything else until Betts came back.

At that time video games were everywhere except in the home. In pubs they stood and twittered in corners. There were little tables with video games built in. Player One sat at one side and Player Two sat at the other, and their mates put ashtrays and pints in the middle of the screen and laughed. There were video games in pubs, chip shops, amusement arcades.

Home machines weren’t advanced enough to play real arcade games then. The best you got was Pong, and a poor version of that. That’d be on a console with wooden sides and huge silver knobs. To play real video games you had to leave the house.

I would walk into Borth with a pocketful of pound notes. Cars crammed with tourists and their kit – lunch boxes, kites, pets – drove around me. There were no pavements and the verges were of swampy mud beneath a thin veneer of moss. The smell of the estuary would wash over you if the tide was out, a rank stink of rot. On the other side of the estuary, a few miles away by boat but half an hour by car because there was no bridge this side of Machynleth, you could see Llandovery. Llandovery was a town which attracted more tourists than Borth but had less car parking.

Out to sea, you couldn’t see anything. There were seldom any boats and never any large ones. There was a harbour over in Llandovery, but the yachts didn’t come our way.

I’d walk past the golf course, watching out for stray shots. These were common and not always accidental. Not all of the locals welcomed students.

The amusement arcade at the near end of town was in a wooden building. It might have been a barn at some time. Now it was full of machines calling for attention. There was a single row of six one-armed bandits, the old ones made without software. They took two-pence coins and had jackpots of twenty pence. The one second from the left had an OUT OF ORDER notice on it for three years. It may still be there, out of order, on its own.

There were penny falls with prizes that seemed to have been welded to the spot. There was a betting game with tin horses on sticks racing around a striped track under a glass dome. There were machines with prizes arranged beneath a claw that would touch them and then leave them where they were.

Past all that, at the back, past the booth containing a miserable middle-aged woman and the spare change, were the video games. There were only three, but they were already taking most of the money. They had bright screens and they made more noise than anything else around. Written on them were instructions in a new version of English.

Not to miss shoot for top score!

Tapping button for super jump!

On the left was a classic Space Invaders, one for the retro crowd even then. Next to it was an Asteroids machine, with its simple vector graphics. Finally there was a Missile Command, the one where you controlled the cursor with a trackball. There was a game for the early eighties. Missiles would drop from the sky towards your cities. You’d launch countermeasures, aiming them with that strange trackball. But the missiles would get through, levelling your cities. Nuclear devastation, mass deaths, game over.

If only Ronald Reagan had seen that console. The SDI money could have gone to something useful instead.

I’d change a pound and slowly feed the machines. Missile Command was cheerily nihilistic, but Asteroids almost pointedly demonstrated the futility of working. You controlled a little triangular spaceship which sat in the centre of the screen. Large irregular boulders – the titular asteroids – arrived and began to move across the screen. Two large rocks, moving slowly: no trouble, you’d think. You’d line up your ship and press the fire button.

But after you shot a large rock, it broke into two quite large rocks, which headed off in new directions. Now there were three rocks to avoid. If you shot a rock, it subdivided into smaller rocks, and those into smaller ones, until the screen was a mass of debris.

Once they were very small, shooting them destroyed them. But by this time, you were in trouble because one of them inevitably caught you unaware and you lost a life.