Each index heading carried a dozen optional hyperlinks from Shandy: to other people involved with her, to the video clips previewing her scenarios, to adjacent subjects, to library material, to biographical material, to available slots for additional or supplementary scenarios. Information
about Shandy's ExEx world was exploding about her, as her contiguity was revealed.
Teresa ran a hyperlink search on the list, using the name Willem and immediately discovered that Shandy and Willem had appeared in fourteen scenarios together, including the one called Brawl
She learnt from this listing that Willem's real name was actually not Willem but Erik. He was Dutch, though, and he had, as he had told her, been born in the small town of Amstelveen.
Willem's own listing as a memorative principal, which Teresa accessed next, was even more alarming than Shandy's: in addition to the fourteen scenarios he had made with her, he had been involved in a further ninetyseven. Teresa noticed that many of these skinflicks (as she assumed they were) had been made with a young woman named Joyhanne, herself a memorative principal.
Teresa ran a search on Joyhanne. She had been born in The Hague, worked for a while as a telephonist (hyperlink to Holland Telecom), but appeared to have been making videos since the age of fourteen. Attached to Joyhanne's name was another long abstract of porno scenarios (she assumed from their titles). Dozens more options scattered in all directions from Joyhanne's indexed activities: virtuality was spreading out and away, the known limits of events accelerating to the horizon in every direction.
For instance, Joyhanne had another regular costar; this man, a German, had made more than fifty porno (Teresa assumed) videos, but in addition he had made a couple of appearances in real films, both of which were mentioned in reference books (three hundred and fifteen hyperlinks); the author of one of the film books worked In the Humanities Department of the University of Gottingen, which offered
more than two hundred and fifty educational scenarios on developmental studies; one of these, which Teresa chose at random, dealt with softdrug culture in the USA, 196875; this single scenario had more than fifteen hundred hyperlinks to other scenarios . . .
lt was impossible to keep a mental hold on everything.
Teresa paused, dizzied by the endless choices. She was sidetracking, and getting away from what she had set out to do.
She returned through the hierarchy to Shandy's main listing, and used the program's memo feature to store three coded references, selected more or less at random. One day she might like to visit Shandy at work again: two of the titles she chose were
Now Teresa selected the hyperlink option, and from this picked out Remote Link.
From Remote Link came yet more new options: Copy, Date, Edit, Gender, Motive, Name, Place, Significant Objects, Weapon, and many others. Each of these had suboptions: Teresa clicked on Place, and saw a huge list of subsidiary choices: Continent, Country, State, County, City, Street, Building, Room, was just one sequence.
Again feeling sidetracked, she went back to the entry point of the hyperlink, and picked out Name. At the prompt she typed 'Elsa Jane Durdle', added 'San Diego' as a locater, and clicked on it.
Please Wait.
Teresa was. so used by now to the apparently instant response of the program that the appearance of that message made her feel almost smug. Her search criteria were complex enough to slow the computer perceptibly.
Not long later, in fact in under a minute, the screen
cleared and a message appeared:
248 hyperlink(s) connect 'Jennifer Rosemary Tayler' to 'Elsa Jane Durdle'. Display?
Yes/No.
Teresa clicked on 'Yes', and almost at once a long list of the codes of contiguous scenarios began to scroll quickly down the screen. Each had its tiny still video image attached to it. The first scenario took place in part of a mockedup saloon in an improvised film studio in 1990 in the West End of London, and the last on a hot windy day in San Diego in 1950. Events connected them.
Two hundred and fortyeight scenarios were linked in collective memory. The realities were contiguous; there was no edge.
The road of extreme virtuality ran on beyond the horizon, as far as the mountains, through the desert, across the seas, on and on for ever.
She downloaded the codes of the two hundred and fortyeight contiguous scenarios, and waited a few seconds while the printer turned them out. One day, when she had time and credit enough, she might start exploring the links that were said to exist between Elsa and Shandy.
Teresa next entered the name 'Teresa Ann Simons' as a memorative principal, added
'Woodbndge' and 'Bulverton' as defining physical locations, and waited to see what would happen.
The computer did not pause. With almost disimissive instantaneity, a screen appeared with her name at the top. A single scenario was noted below. There were no hyperlinks, no connections to the rest of virtuality.
Surprised at this result, and actually rather disappointed, Teresa clicked on the video icon.
Her curiosity was satisfied and dampened all at once: such as it was, her only scenario in the whole of ExEx was of the day she had first visited this range, and spent an hour or so on target practice with a handgun.
She squinted at the allocated few seconds' preview of herself, noticing mostly the fact that from the
