Another Life

Walter seemed very impressed with Owen, and batted his long eyelashes suggestively. As a cruel distraction, Owen pointed to the double-action revolver on the table. The gun they would each be using in turn.

They placed their initial bets, notes fluttering down on the blue baize. Owen could feel his heart starting to race. What was it about putting a virtual revolver to his character’s head that could cause such anxiety? When he picked up the weapon, he knew. In the greater realism of Toshiko’s version of Second Reality, he was actually raising his hand to his own head

Spin the cylinder. Pull the trigger.

Click. No shot.

Owen felt himself relax. He started to breathe again, and tried not to make his relief obvious to the other players.

Walter Pendulum picked up the revolver. It was obvious at once that his arm was not long enough to reach up and place the barrel against his giraffe-head. Kominsky offered to aim and fire for him, and this started a debate with Simone about whether a killing shot would constitute murder rather than suicide. In the end, Pendulum cranked his neck down and pulled the trigger himself. No shot.

Kominsky snatched up the gun, spun the cylinder. Hesitated with the barrel to his head. Opened his eyes to stare straight at Owen.

Pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded into life. Kominsky’s head dissolved in a mist of blood, and his body was flung back from the table to land in a crumpled pile.

Brenda Simone recovered the gun. Calmly reloaded from a box of shells on the table. Spun the cylinder. Squeezed the trigger.

No shot.

‘Round’s over,’ she observed coldly. ‘Let’s raise the stakes.’ She stacked up more notes on the table. ‘Call the ante, or take a hike,’ she said to Pendulum.

Owen watched a huge gulp work its way down Pendulum’s long throat. He was looking at Kominsky’s dead body where it lay in a heap on the snooker hall’s stained floorboards. Pendulum stood up, terrified. Banged his head on the lampshade. Ran for the door, his little giraffe’s tail waggling fearfully through a hole in the back of his tuxedo trousers. They could hear his hoofbeats clank down the metal stairs as he fled.

Simone transferred her basilisk stare to Owen without blinking. ‘Call the ante, or take a hike.’

‘Or bid up the pot,’ replied Owen, and slid all his remaining cash across the table.

He was surprised again at how breathless he felt. He picked up the revolver, spun the cylinder. His chest tightened as he lifted the gun to his temple. Heard the greased click as it revolved. For a split second before he pulled the trigger, he wondered: ‘What if…?’

The long trigger pull cocked the hammer. Owen continued to apply pressure.

The hammer released. Struck the round in the chamber.

The bullet exploded into his head.

EIGHT

The third time that he shot himself through the head, Owen began to suspect something was not quite right. He would find his way to the snooker hall, sit down with the three other people, and play Russian roulette. The outcome was always identical, no matter what he did — using a different route to the hall, sitting in a different seat, firing with his left hand, not raising the final stake. The others survived or died in the same sequence. And he always copped it after Walter Pendulum abandoned the contest.

This version of Second Reality was more realistic in many ways, but that was only on the surface — the quality of the graphics, the fidelity of the sound, his total immersion in the sensory experience. In the most important way it was less real. Because the whole thing seemed predetermined. The other players had the same backgrounds and experience every time they played. They were just programmed, they didn’t seem to learn. It was so unlike the Internet-connected version, where the advantage of playing with real people was their unpredictability, and the opportunity to riff off their ideas as they participated.

Owen struggled with the clasp on his helmet and managed to unlatch it and free himself. The Torchwood Hub reappeared around him. He discovered that he’d twisted his chair around several times during his game-play, and now needed to disentangle himself from the wires attached to the helmet.

Once he’d carefully peeled off the data-gloves, he located his old-fashioned keyboard and typed in a search request. The computer revealed where the locator in Toshiko’s mobile placed her at the moment.

‘Did you have fun?’ she asked him when he walked in to find her in the R amp;R area. Toshiko was lounging on the far side by the 1980s Asteroids machine. A couple of other figures played pinball just behind her. Owen hadn’t been expecting them to come back in this evening.

‘Quite impressive,’ Owen admitted. ‘Hi guys. I thought you’d all gone home for the night?’

As he stepped through the door into the area, he was aware of a shimmering effect around him. He rotated his hands in front of him, examining the front and back of each. He wore a pair of backless gloves in pale deerskin. Glendower Broadsword’s gloves. And now he came to look, he was also clothed in Glendower’s black leather jerkin.

He backed out of the room, and the clothes faded silently out of existence. Stepped back into the room, and they soundlessly reappeared on him. He saw the deerskin gloves again, but when he rubbed his palms together he could not feel them.

‘I got the projectors working,’ Toshiko explained. ‘So now I have a 3-D rendering of the Second Reality characters in here.’ She stood up and twirled around to reveal she was wearing Penny Pasteur’s smart Nehru jacket again.

‘Now that’s even more impressive,’ he admitted. They both appeared in character clothing, but the R amp;R area was the same familiar jumble of play consoles, arcade terminals and trip-hazard wiring.

Toshiko smiled proudly. ‘It works out positional information for the characters, but it doesn’t have to paint in the backgrounds any more, so everything is displayed much faster. If I wanted to, I could create a virtual Hub, using the construction data in our systems.’

‘What would be the point, Tosh? We can already walk around the real thing.’ He strode into the room to demonstrate his point.

She pouted. ‘I’ve introduced new characters. Recognise anyone?’

The two people in the corner turned to look at Owen. They were not Jack or Gwen, as he had originally assumed. Immediately behind Toshiko was Cap’n Ian Sharkchum, who doffed his pirate hat in a sweeping gesture and called out ‘Ahoy, matey!’ Next to him, Walter Pendulum straightened up from playing the pinball machine. He fluttered his long eyelashes and blew Owen a kiss, or at least he made the best effort that a giraffe-headed man can afford. Pendulum cast a last lingering glance over his shoulder before swinging his long neck back to his pinball game.

‘The point is,’ Toshiko said, oblivious to all this, ‘we could use this set-up for training purposes. Imagine being able to practise patterns and moves, only without the danger of doing it out in the field for the first time. I’ve been experimenting with projectors here to demonstrate that you can interact with generated images within a 3-D space. Next stage is to create a virtual Cardiff. There’s all sorts of data sources I can use. Positional data from US military satellites, Google Earth, the Land Registry, Public Private Partnership databases, various engineering companies…’

‘Interesting,’ admitted Owen. He took a slightly nervous look at Walter Pendulum, but that giraffe neck was still arched over the pinball game. Owen sat down next to Toshiko, smiling. ‘Do you remember the training sessions we had with Jack? God, the bruises and the blood, every day! I thought I’d seen plenty of brutal stuff from my days in A amp;E. But that was something else.’

‘I remember the exercise we did on that freezing day out in the Gower,’ shivered Toshiko. ‘Treasure hunt, he said it was!’

‘Treasure hunt, my arse!’ The memory made Owen laugh out loud. ‘Still, it wasn’t as bad as that couple of nights in the Rhondda. I’ve seen frostbite before, but I thought at the end that I’d be carrying my toes home in a