Blink.
Confused…
Ella staggered, her head spinning. Her mind seemed to be a whirling muddle of facts and information.
Ill-ucinating…
Her brain was struggling to come to grips with PINC and the mass of data it was trying to upload regarding the Demi-Monde. Only gradually did the torrent of information subside, allowing Ella a chance to reassert control over her thought processes. And as she did so, so PINC’s enthusiasm subdued: now it simply lurked at the back of her mind, waiting like some overeager puppy dog to tell her things she might need even if she didn’t want to know them.
Happier now, Ella took a look around. She was standing in a filthy alleyway pressed between two filthy tenement buildings. It was cold, the pavement was covered with thick snow, and the wind, sharp and biting, cut at her cheeks: so cold that the light from the gas street lamps seemed to have taken on an almost crystalline clarity. She huddled deeper into the thick fur collar of her coat and tied her bonnet a little more securely about her ears, noting as she did so that ABBA had kindly replaced the hair that had been shaved off in the Real World. She wrinkled her chilled nose: the alley stank. It seemed to be the place where the back entrances of a couple of restaurants whose owners were careless about hygiene regulations let out. Waste and refuse overflowed the bins and, even as she stood there, Ella saw a couple of fat rats scurry around. She shivered from cold and disgust.
But although it was an unappetising place, there was no denying that it was very, very real. If Ella hadn’t known that she was now occupying a computer-generated simulation there would have been nothing to suggest that this world wasn’t as real and as substantial as the one she had been inhabiting just a moment before. It even smelt right.
But there were differences.
The colours of the Demi-Monde were out of kilter with those of the Real World. It was as though she were looking through a filter that leached out some colour intensity but at the same time made the light just a little brighter. ABBA had obviously tinkered around with the spectrum: maybe the computer just wanted to add a sepia tone to the Victorianesque atmosphere of the simulation. It was meant to be 1870, after all.
The fact that the gas lights were lit worried her. It seemed too dark to be five o’clock in the afternoon. But even as she pondered she felt herself being given a mental nudge from PINC (she knew it was PINC: it was as though a brand-new piece of information had elbowed itself eagerly into her consciousness) to check the fob watch pinned to the lapel of her coat. The watch showed six o’clock, an hour later than the time the Professor had told her she would be manifesting.
That ABBA had gotten things a little wrong Ella found simultaneously worrying and reassuring. Worrying in that maybe the data held on PINC was similarly flawed and reassuring in that when all was said and done, ABBA was just a machine.
Unfortunately ABBA’s screw-up over the time meant she’d have to go immediately to the audition. There was no time for ‘acclimatisation’, no time for her to chill out in her room: she’d have to jump straight in at the deep end. Taking a long, calming breath – noticing as she did so that the air, laden with soot from the belching chimneys, tasted foul – she marched towards the main street that ran at right angles across the mouth of the alleyway.
She stood there for a moment gathering her courage. Truth be told, she felt just a little panicky: she really had no idea how to go about finding Norma Williams, never mind rescuing her. She was just a girl from the wrong side of the tracks being asked to do something that was way out of her league.
Stop it… think positively.
She adjusted the veil that covered her face. Now that idea of ABBA’s – equipping her bonnet with a veil – was a good one. There was no point in announcing her ethnicity: this was Heydrich-ville after all.
She swallowed hard, trying to displace the lump that had formed in her throat.
God, she was scared.
Ella, baby, just what have you gotten yourself into?
Getting a grip on herself, she stepped out of the alleyway.
Not even PINC could prepare her for what she experienced when she emerged. It was one thing to talk about how congested the Demi-Monde was, about it being a Deep-Density Urban Environment, but it was quite another to experience it. The street – Mile End, according to the grimy sign set high above her head – was full to overflowing with humanity. Never could she have imagined that so many people could be compressed into so confined a place. Oh, she knew from PINC that the Mile End was an important road leading to and from the wharves and docks that lined the Thames on the east side of the Rookeries, but even so…
The pavements were jam-packed with pushing, rushing, shouting, screaming people: bewhiskered men in sombre suits and towering top hats; workmen wearing cloth caps and sullen expressions; women in bonnets and skirts that scraped along the pavement; and children dressed in rags and oversized boots chasing through the press of the crowd. There were also a disproportionate number of soldiers – easily identifiable by their red coats – strutting around looking brave and arrogant.
But the most disturbing thing was that the Dupes populating the Demi-Monde looked so amazingly lifelike: they were indistinguishable from the real thing. This was all the more remarkable because, according to PINC, Demi-Mondians weren’t flesh and blood: although they had a skeleton, over this was layered stuff they called Solidified Astral Ether – SAE in DemiMonde-speak – a pale white organic matter which provided the musculature that allowed the Dupes to move and to think, equipped them with the five senses they needed to interact with the world about them, and gave them the means to take in nutrients and excrete waste products.
For Ella though, the saddest fact was, just like in the Real World, the colour of a Demi-Mondian’s SAE divided people. UnFunDaMentalism taught that the finest, the superior form of the human species was the Anglo-Slavic race – the Aryan race – because theirs was the only race whose external SAE colour matched the internal one. Because this white colour was adulterated in the other races of the Demi-Monde – the UnderMentionables – by UnFunDaMentalist thinking this signalled that all other races were unclean and inferior.
Racial prejudice was alive and well in the Demi-Monde.
Hardly daring to surrender the lee of the alleyway for fear of being swept away by a tide of faux-humanity, Ella took a moment to orientate herself. The Prancing Pig pub was off Sidney Street which lay on the opposite side of the Mile End and to get to the pub she’d have to cross the road. And that was a daunting prospect.
If the pavements were crowded, they were as nothing to the maelstrom of carts, omnibuses, cabs and steamers that were trying – ineffectually – in a storm of honking and shouting and swearing to force their way along the traffic-choked thoroughfare. God, it was noisy: the Demi-Monde was a cacophony of ersatz humanity and all its works.
She shook her head; the thought of trying to lizard through the almost solid jam of vehicles most certainly did not appeal, especially as the road’s surface seemed to be covered by a thick compote of soot, mud, slush and horse shit. One slip and she knew her mission would be ended before it had begun, with her crushed under the wheels of a careless cart or the hoofs of a neglectful dray horse.
Then…
Suddenly the traffic paused as though taking a breath and grabbing her chance she ran, slipping and sliding as she went on the snow-slick cobbles, dodging between the carts of two costermongers parked at the side of the road, sidestepping the steel wheels of a steam tractor, ducking under the flicking whip of a carter as he urged his horses into a non-existent gap in the traffic, ignoring the obscene shouts of a cabby as she obliged him to rein up, swearing as she stepped into a puddle of ice-cold and very scummy water, and finally, with a sigh of relief, skipping – soiled, sweaty and shivering – to the sanctuary of the other side of the road.
For a moment she sheltered in the entrance of a haberdasher’s shop to get her breath back and still her jangling nerves. The Demi-Monde, she decided, was a nightmare. She had never felt so threatened or so endangered by a place in all her life: even Flatbush at its worst had nothing on the Rookeries. Everything about the Demi-Monde seemed designed, if not to kill her, then to make her wish she was somewhere else. She slumped back against the wall, then, cursing herself, stood straight up again: she’d forgotten that every vertical surface in the Rookeries was coated with slimy soot. Now her beautiful fur coat had a beautiful black line down the back.
Terrific.
With a resigned sigh Ella pushed herself back into the current of people, elbowing and shoving in what PINC told her was the direction of Sidney Street. She made it, though her bonnet was knocked askew in the melee and she thought her bustle would never be the same again. Here the street was jammed with swarms of people coming
