CHAPTER 3
Alice reached into her bag once more and handed Dick what looked like a bulky pair of ornate opera glasses attached to something that resembled an old leather-flying helmet.
‘Mr. Longg,’ said Alice with a hint of panic in her voice. ‘Please put these on so you can see the world I live in. Time is of the essence’.
Dick examined the eyeglasses and asked sarcastically, ‘What are these? Seven by thirty-fives? Eight by forties? They don’t look powerful enough to see across the Valley, let alone into the future’.
‘Mr. Longg, this is a virtual reality device which will enable you to have a glimpse into my life and my world. You can control where you go and what you see’.
‘I’ve done this before’, Dick said brusquely. ‘You’re not talking to an amateur!’
He carefully put the headset on and adjusted the eyepieces until they were comfortable. An image momentarily flickered in and out of focus before stabilising; an image of what Dick assumed was meant to be a city street in Alice’s time. Dick thought it looked pretty much how you’d imagine the year 2150 to look. Sleek glass and steel high-rise buildings, an elevated modern subway and wide streets full of streamlined cars that hovered just above the ground. As Dick moved his head, his point of view also changed. By leaning forward slightly he walked forward in his virtual reality world. When he leaned back slightly, he stopped.
‘Cool!’, Dick commented. He’d seen this sort of set-up before in a virtual sex game where the participant could take part in a whole variety of different, and very realistic, scenarios. Two years ago a well-known Japanese computer games manufacturer had asked Dick to endorse their new product and invited him to view a demonstration. In front of a roomful of their senior management and the proud company CEO, Dick tried one of the prototypes. After examining the electronic menu he selected a programme where he would be enjoying virtual sex with a silicon-enhanced brunette spread-eagled on a revolving circular bed. To Dick’s immense surprise he found himself on the bed but sodomising a stocky blond man with a hairy back and bushy moustache. The games company execs blamed a ‘bug’ and were very, very apologetic (although Dick was certain he caught some of them smirking and was sure one of them left the room to laugh). Despite the experience just being virtual, Dick felt extremely queasy afterwards and needed a series of cold showers followed by whole body exfoliation before he felt well enough to enter into any more discussions with the manufacturers. When contact did eventually resume it was just one-way; Dick telling them to fuck off.
He shuddered at these recollections but noted how Alice’s virtual reality system seemed much more impressive and realistic. It seemed like he was actually in the year 2150, which he knew of course, couldn’t be the case. One thing perplexed him though. The fashions seemed antiquated and out of kilter with this vision of the future. The women tended to wear unflattering clothes like Alice while the men wore conservative suits and sported beards or moustaches that were so ridiculous-looking they could have come straight out of a 1970’s porn film.
The quality of the image and the detail he saw made Dick wonder how Alice had managed to make this whole scenario look as authentic as it did. But then he remembered where he was, not a million miles from the land of make believe and endless studio back lots where this could have been filmed. Fashion was one thing but how did Alice fake the cars hovering above the ground? Then he remembered how Luke Skywalker’s sand speeder did exactly the same in Star Wars, and that was over 30 years earlier. It wouldn’t be that difficult to imitate. These special effects may have been costly but that only proved that Alice wasn’t just mentally unstable and deluded; she was mentally unstable, deluded and rich. But one thing still bugged Dick. He couldn’t figure out why she’d gone to all these lengths. What did she intend to gain?
These thoughts had caused Dick’s concentration to wander but he re-focussed on the images that played out before him, leaning slightly forward to enable him to walk along the virtual street before turning to enter a large virtual bookshop. Here he made his way along various aisles and soon found himself in the very-well stocked periodicals section. Out of curiosity and force of habit he looked for the adult magazines to see what porn of the future looked like (and although he would never admit it, Dick was secretly hoping for some mention of him in a retrospective feature). The strange thing was that he had trouble finding any adult magazines at all.
After looking along the top shelf he looked at the next shelf down, and the next shelf down after that, but failed to find any porn there too. In fact he looked along every single shelf from eye-level, to thigh-level to, er, well, ankle level and on all of them, adult publications were notable by their absence. The most arousing magazine on display turned out to be the swimwear edition of ‘Sports Illustrated’, except in this case the swimwear was baggy, one-piece bathing suits that covered the whole body apart from the hands, feet and head (although even the head was partially covered by a frilly bathing cap).
Slightly confused, Dick walked out to see if he’d entered some Church of the Latter Day Saints Book Shop, or whether Borders was now owned by the Taliban or Amish, but could find evidence of neither. He continued down the virtual street and reached a busy intersection where a huge video screen mounted on the side of a monolithic building caught his eye. It was broadcasting what appeared to be some sort of public service health advertisement. At first Dick thought it was warning about the dangers of VD or AIDS but it was only after he’d watched the whole commercial that the penny dropped. The pallid looking young man who had lost his girl, his job, his self-esteem and the respect of his entire family was not suffering from a sexually-transmitted infection. He had been caught masturbating. A society with no pornography was one thing but criminalising masturbation was quite another. This future had no place for anyone like Dick Longg. This world that Alice was presenting as her own made Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ look like a jovial uncle. But then Dick asked himself why he was getting upset over a prank film; some sort of scam that Alice was obviously pulling. With a mixture of horror, disgust and annoyance (and a little bit of nervousness thrown in for good measure) Dick ripped the headset off and thrust it back at Alice.
‘It’s not a nice world is it?’ she asked rhetorically.
‘OK. You’ve had your chance. I don’t know how you pulled that stunt but I admit the effects are pretty good’, Dick told her. ‘Now just supposing your whole future deal is right, and you really have come back in time — which I must say, can never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,
Dick was on a roll. The last time he felt this animated about anything was when he campaigned for the establishment of the Adult Film Actors Guild. He’d led the fight to set up this union for porn stars to stop them being exploited and also devised its motto, ‘Let the actors do the screwing, not the film companies!’ (his only regret was the union’s unfortunate acronym which he hadn’t foreseen but by then all the stationery had been printed).
Dick reached for the door handle. ‘Lady, the decision you’re asking me to make is such a no-brainer… that… that… even someone without a brain wouldn’t need to think twice about it! I’m going back on set and suggest that you make yourself scarce as soon as I’ve gone or I will definitely call security!’
Opening the door of the trailer, Dick stepped out. As soon as he surveyed the set and thought about the next scene with Alpine he was instantly aroused. ‘A world without sex?’ he thought to himself. ‘It really doesn’t bear further consideration!’
Dick was walking towards Ron when he heard the exact same noise that occurred when Alice appeared in his trailer, immediately followed by the exact same smell (but not the rose-scented perfume part). If he was surprised when Alice materialised then he was totally dumbfounded when two smartly dressed top-hatted gentlemen appeared out of thin air to his right. He was astounded when one of them raised his arm and fired some sort of pistol at Ron that emitted both a loud, popping noise and a concentrated beam of blue light. The first beam grazed Ron’s shoulder but was powerful enough to spin him around. Another loud ‘pop’ and the second blast caught his upper body. Ron grimaced, screaming the scream of someone you knew would scream no more. He collapsed to his knees and rolled over on the floor, a three-inch hole smouldering in his chest. The whole thing happened in slow motion. Or maybe it just appeared that way as Ron was so heavy-set and lumbering, any progress he made seemed to be in slow motion whatever speed he actually moved at. Although Dick wasn’t sure exactly what had happened he sensed that the rest of the day’s filming was in serious jeopardy.
His first thought was that one of Ron’s many enemies had decided it was payback time. Ron had made many errors of judgement in his time and although he wasn’t homosexual himself, had produced a series of exploitation
