terminals more or less whenever she felt like It, and they usually left her alone to browse.
The database itself was becoming increasingly interesting to her. All complex computer programs seem at first sight to be an impenetrable maze of options, assumptions and usage conventions, and the catalogue of ExEx scenarios was a gigantic example of this.
The program was always running, always online, and was presumably in a constant state of being updated and reprogrammed somewhere in the further reaches of the web. The amount of data it held was clearly beyond the memory capacity of any single industrial computer, and must have been stored in networked sites in different parts of the world. But however large it seemed, it was only a single, closed program. Copyright notices infested it, and Warnings about restrictions on usage appeared with monotonous frequency.
Finding the information it contained, provided you had mastered the syntax of the search engine, was surprisingly fast and efficient. The result of any search usually a single screen with the information that had been requested appeared so quickly that it gave the illusion that what you wanted had been placed near the top of the
pile so that it might be easily found.
The simplicity was deceptive, though. When Teresa set the command to browse, and merely scrolled through some of the data in sequence, the sheer scale, detail and extent of what was held in memory were a source of constant amazement to her.
Again, she sensed limitless horizons. But Teresa was starting to learn that the scenarios were not as she had thought at first.
A scenario always turned out to have a measurable edge; reality came to an end when memory ran out. No matter how well the programmer disguised it, or fudged it, you could not take a car and drive it away, out of virtuality into reality. You could fly over the whole of Finland, you could cross and recross, you could tour the periphery, you could circle for ever over one chosen lake or stream, or you could dart and weave with unexpected turns ... and still Finland would calmly and interminably unfold beneath you. But it was always Finland; it was not for ever.
Where the true unlimited was to be found was, so to speak, in the headings of the scenarios, in the indexes to them. The limitless lay in hyperlinks, crossreferences, hyperreality.
All scenarios ultimately touched, their edges were contiguous. You could approach the same incident from a number of different viewpoints. But the contiguity lay in the fourth dimension: you could not cross the margin from one scenario to the next, unless one was bolted on, London's West End or Arizona's Monument Valley bolted on to a filmset of a cowboy saloon, and that counted only as expansion. lt made the scenario seem more complex, while in fact it only made it larger.
The real nature of contiguity lay in the adjacency of memory, hyperlinked by character or situation or point of
view. Contiguity was psychological, and it was related to memory, not conscious planning. in one scenario a character would be memoratively significant: it might be the elderly woman named Elsa Durdle who drove a Chevy with a gun in the glove compartment.
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That scenario e isted for a number of possi le reasons. Someone involved with the William Cook case must have remembered Elsa, or had heard her story somehow, or had met and interviewed her after the incident. lt could even be so remote a contact as someone who had merely read about her. Whatever the reason, there was enough of her, enough about her, to place her centrestage in one scenario. Another person, witness to the same central event, or participant in it, might know Elsa Durdle only peripherally: she could be the unnamed driver of the car that drove past police lines, momentarily blocked a policeman's view.
Both were true accounts, both were limited by their viewpoint, yet through contiguity they tended towards a concurrence, an agreement on basic facts and images.
Placed against these two scenarios might be a third one, contiguous to either or both of them, which knew nothing at all of Elsa in person, yet admitted the presence of her car driving through, or past, or in the distance.
Next to that scenario would be another, and beyond that more. Each contiguous scenario was a step on the way towards the margins of Elsa Durdle's reality.
Here, in the online computer, with its endless scrolling index headings, each with its own subheadings, and each of those with further subheadings, uncountable generational levels unfolding below, and all of them crossreferenced and linked to one another, virtuality was taken towards its edge and beyond.
There was no end, only another scenario contiguous to the last.
Sitting alone in a side office, with the computer terminal to herself, with no one on the staff apparently taking any interest in what she was doing, Teresa eventually found her way to the database of Memorative Principals.
Guessing what that meant, and reading the screen menus, she entered the name 'Tayler' and the subset 'Jennifer Rosemary'. At the prompt for physical location, to narrow the search parameters, she entered 'London' and 'NW 10'.
Within a few seconds an abstract of scenarios in which Shandy appeared poured across the screen.
. Each scenario was identified by a tide, a long code number, a synoptic description, and a tiny video icon. Noticing that there was an option to display the videos, Teresa clicked on the menu, and at once all the video icons changed into tiny frozenframe images from the opening of each scenario.
Teresa clicked on one, and a fivesecond teaser extract ran in the tiny box. The image was so small it was hard to see what was going on, but it was clear that Shandy was ready for action.
The list of Shandy's scenarios was long; worryingly long, when you bore in mind, the abandon with which she took part in them. Teresa moved the information to and fro, top to bottom, estimating how many Shandy scenarios there were. She roughed a guess at nearly eighty, and then she noticed that the database had a facility for counting successful finds and that the true number of Shandy scenarios presently available was eightyfour.
