The Extremes

inside and closed the door with a terrific slam.

Teresa thought, Is this right? Did 1 prevent him from shooting Debra? Or was he not going to do it anyway?

. She eased forward in Grove's mind, bracing herself for the onslaught of his crazed thoughts, but a sudden placidity had taken over. He was thinking about the best way to drive to Welton Road. Should he drive to the bottom of the road, and turn back up to the Ridge along Holman Road, or turn round here and go back the way he had come?

The sheer normality of his thoughts was almost more repulsive than the hatred she had experienced before. He had murdered two people in the last halfhour, and threatened two other people with death, yet he could sit calmly behind the wheel of a car and worry about which direction to drive.

Once more Teresa retreated to the back of his mind. She was confused by the way these events were turning out and growing increasingly aware of the sensitivity of a scenario's development.

Grove's case was different from every other scenario she had entered. The details of all or most of the others were unknown to her when she entered the action. But when she first arrived in Bulverton from the US she was already

broadly familiar with what Grove had done, and since then she had researched many more details. She had talked to witnesses, watched videos of newscasts and read dozens of different accounts and official reports. She suspected that material similar to this had been used by the ExEx programmers to develop the very scenario in which she was participating.

The other witnesses would have contributed too: those boys playing pool when Grove went to the Bulver Arms, Fraser johnson, who had witnessed the drugs deal on the seafront, Steve Ripon, who gave Grove a lift in his van and who saw him again later in Battle Road, Margaret Lee, who was terrorized by Grove at the Texaco station, maybe the police who had driven past on their way to the filling station; maybe even the people who lived in the houses she was driving past at this moment!

And the others, the people she had spoken to only briefly, or those who had left town and perhaps had been traced and been paid by the GunHo people for their stones. AR those who had witnessed something of Grove's disastrous adventure, many of whom she hadn't met, nor ever would, some who were still recovering from their injuries, those who would not speak to her because they thought she was a journalist, or for some other reason, those she had never even heard about because what they had witnessed was in nonExEx terms only a confirmation of what others had said they'd seen; those who had fled Bulverton before she arrived in town.

She was trapped in Grove's vile mind, while he drove the car violently through the congested streets of the lower Ridge, and she was able to think out, think back to the real world, where she existed and had listened and taken notes, had accumulated other people's memories of these events in a way not unlike the building of this scenario.

She was tempted then to abort herself out of the scenario, to leave the virtual Grove suspended for ever in the action of driving the car.

The extreme reality she had entered was one she already knew. The physical surroundings were identical to the Bulverton in which she had been living. This was how Nick, Amy, Dave Hartland, the Mercers, all the other witnesses, knew and remembered the relevant parts of the town. And it was how she too remembered them: no surprises for her, except the now familiar simulated veracity, still almost shocking in its details.

Using Grove's eyes, she glanced about as he drove, and she saw graffiti daubed or sprayed on walls, litter left untidily on the ground, dents on the bodywork of parked cars, individual curtains hanging at the windows of individual houses; everything different, everything incredibly detailed.

No one could remember such fanatical details when providing their memories to the ExEx software; no one would say, even to themselves, that in this particular road there were so many houses, so many different colours of house paints, so many different ways of cultivating the small patch of garden in front of every house, so many different ways of letting it grow wild, so many irregularities and patches on the surface of the road, so many parked cars, of such different types and ages, in such different states of physical condition, no one would think to recall that a cat had dashed across the road in front of Grove's car, that through the trees at the top of the hill it was possible to glimpse the traffic moving along the Ridge: a red Norbert Dentressangle truck with its vivid and familiar logo, a white Stagecoach doubledecker bus with an advertising placard for a local computer retail outlet, an orange and white Sainsbury's delivery truck, the glinting roofs of cars of different colours imperfectly seen because of the angle and the bright light from the sky.

People saw such details only subliminally, recording them on an unconscious level of the mind, and so the details went somehow into the scenario, not as facts but as adumbrations for the participants to see and notice and react to, and, in a 1 les.

certain way, to create for themselves as ad hoc necessites'

Details are expected, by instinct or habit: no residential road in modem Britain, or indeed in any developed country, lacked cars parked at the sides of the road. No one would therefore specifically recall them when reliving their memories for the ExEx software, but the cars would nevertheless be included as outlines, and the scenario participants, seeing them because they expected to see them, filled in the details from their own memories, from their own take on the collective unconsciousness, or from their own knowledge of the world.

In this way the participant was more than a passive observer. The scenario responded to and was reshaped by the will, experience, thoughts or imagination of the participant.

Extreme reality was a temporary consensus, subject to the changing whims of all involved.

The limits of the imagination were the only absolutes: in a scenario one could turn a car round and drive away from the main action, out into the open country beyond city limits, and follow the highway to the horizon, and it would usually be as unconsciously expected, filled with convincing detail, awash with impressions of temperature and sounds and objects, and the sensory experiences of being in a car.

But in the end a limit would inevitably be reached, because one could imagine only so much: the road would turn out to roll for ever, you would never reach the shore to watch the sea, the stairs to an Underground station were blocked by a brick wall.

The restriction on the extreme reality of any scenario was the failure to imagine what might lie beyond its edge.

Grove had driven out of the housing estate, and without slowing he barged his way into the traffic moving along the Ridge. Teresa had lost all curiosity about what might be going through his mind, and she remained as far back in his consciousness as possible.