Patrick Thompson - Execution Plan

The way to play Asteroids was not to shoot the asteroids. Even in video games, work only leads to more work.

After spending a pound I’d wait and watch the screens. They were still a new enough phenomenon to keep my attention. After half an hour of that I’d change another pound and feed the machines again. I’d repeat this cycle until the pound notes ran out, and then it’d be back out into the drizzle and back to the college.

Those old machines fetch high prices at auctions these days. In the early eighties no one would consider owning one. No one serious even played them. They were a piece of cultural ephemera, a passing fancy. They were the eighties embodied – flashy, expensive, violent, pointless – and no one noticed. In the twenty-first century we can see them for the revolution they were. At the time, it was only adolescents who gathered around them, throwing in the dole money.

There, Tina was right. I really was looking out of the window and thinking about arcade games.

Dr Morrison didn’t join us for the experiment. His presence, Betts told us, wasn’t necessary. It might influence the results. He passed on his instructions by way of Betts. That didn’t surprise me. Tina had once told me that psychology experiments were eight parts bluff and two parts cruelty. Betts arranged us out of sight of one another in a room with closed blinds and dim lighting. Large mirrors standing on easels were positioned around me. Betts covered them with cloths.

‘I’ll have to ask you how you’re feeling. I have to record it all. I have a cassette recorder, but you’ll have to speak clearly. You will need to look where I tell you to look. I will be touching you as part of the experiment. Not all of the time, but I’ll need to give you the odd prod. Mick, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Remember how I remapped your hand? We’re trying to disassociate you from your senses, and map your Self to somewhere else. Are you both ready?’

We said that we were. I was bearing in mind that everything Betts had said might well be part of the experiment. Eight parts bluff and two parts cruelty, Tina had said.

‘We’ve started,’ said Betts. He’d positioned himself out of sight. The experiment consisted of him removing cloths from selected mirrors, so that I saw myself from different angles. On some of the mirrors there were two or more reflections somehow overlaid.

‘Look to your left,’ he’d say. My reflections would look in all directions. Something would touch me on my left ear, but in the reflected versions it’d be the right ear, or both ears. The thing that had happened with my hand began to happen to my entire body. It began to feel like it wasn’t mine. I would raise my right hand and see my left hand move, or both hands.

I wasn’t sure which hand was moving.

It began to feel the way I’m told meditation feels, the sense of the body slipping away. I was feeling increasingly relaxed.

‘Look to your right,’ Betts said. ‘Tina, what are you seeing?’

She said something that seemed to come from a great distance. She sounded as though she was outside, in the damp landscape. I could see the landscape in the mirrors, presumably reflected from the window. I hadn’t noticed it before.

A tiny figure was running towards the college from the mountains. It seemed to be coalescing from the clouds.

I let myself enjoy the show. No doubt Dr Morrison wanted me to react to the approaching figure, now clearly a human being. Betts would be slyly watching me, waiting to see what I did. So I didn’t do anything. I watched it come.

Whoever he was – it was a male figure, I could tell that much – he was coming too quickly to be real. The mountains weren’t as far away as they looked, being smaller than you thought they were, but they were still a fair distance away. The running man was already close to the campus. He looked dwarfish, no more than four feet tall, a grin you could make out at a distance of several miles playing across his coarse features. He wore baggy grey clothes and pointed shoes.

From a long way away, Tina was making a lot of noise.

‘I can’t see him,’ said Betts. ‘Are you sure?’

The small man was now so close that I shouldn’t have been able to see him. He should have been out of my line of sight, obscured by the angle of the window, but he came straight on.

‘Not supposed to,’ said Tina. ‘Wake him up.’

Not supposed to what? The man was now too close to fit comfortably in the mirrors. He was squashed. He put out a white hand and gripped the edge of the frame.

He said something unintelligible.

I didn’t think this was a part of the experiment. This was something else, getting involved. This was an outside complication.

The small man pulled himself free of the mirrors, climbing out of them as though he was stepping through an open window. He didn’t look quite human. There was something about the set of his features. He shouted something at me, but it was only a noise and there was no sense in it. I stood up. Tina was standing against the back wall, and Betts was standing in front of her.

There was a sound of breaking glass. Silvered shards flew past me. I watched the small man scamper through the door, grinning nastily at us and emitting sounds that, although unintelligible, sounded anything but pleasant. He ran out of sight and we listened as the sounds of his footsteps – slightly scratchy, because of his long toenails – faded into nothingness. Betts chewed his fingers, shaking. Tina was white. There were only the three of us, standing in a closed room with a few mirrors, some of them broken.

That’s why I don’t like mirrors. I don’t trust them. The small man might have been something I imagined, if Tina and Betts hadn’t seen him too. He might have come from the mountains, or the mist, and not the mirror at all. I didn’t care. It was mirrors that I became afraid of, and many years later Dermot had somehow picked up on that.

In the toilet of the club, Dermot let me off the hook.

‘More drinks,’ he said. ‘You need more drinks and less mirrors. Check out the decor in this place. Fucking wild. It’s like a Bronx alleyway down here. It’s like a working men’s club. They still have working men round here? Not that sort of city any more, is it. None of them are. Come on then.’

He led me back to the bar. ‘Now, drinks. What are we having?’

Pints and chasers, he decided. He saw a machine in a dark corner.

‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Bargain. That’s a Joust. Where have they been keeping that then? There are kids in here younger than that machine.’

He called the barman over and exchanged notes for coins.

‘I used to be good at this,’ he said, leading the way to the machine. ‘You’re a programmer , right? That’s what you said you did. Can you program things like this?’

‘I do business stuff,’ I said. ‘Databases.’

‘Fucking wild, that must be a riot. Well take the controls then, you’re that guy over there. That’s a life you’ve lost, put the fucking drinks down and pay attention.’

He was staring through the screen. I was reminded of the man who’d turned up from nowhere and ruined that experiment, but Dermot looked nothing like him. He didn’t feel like him, either. Dermot was merely cheerfully unbalanced, not alien.

He was a lot better at Joust than I was. I was in the low hand-eye co-ordination stage of drunkenness and I couldn’t focus properly.

‘Oi, watch that one. That fucking one,’ he’d say as I missed the bad guys completely. ‘You always this hopeless?’