scenario, had she experienced such active response.
She tried to assume a state of mental passivity, and watched the screens of options scrolling by. She wondered what he was looking for; then she wondered if wondering would also influence him. lt made him pause, at least.
She recalled the ease with which she had been able to talk to Shandy, that day in virtual London.
'Gerry?' she said.
'Who's that?'
'What exactly are you looking for?'
'Shut the fuck up!'
This was accompanied by a mental strike against her, a bludgeoning rejection, full of fear and hatred and bullying. Again, what felt like his hot breath welled around her.
She backed away, into the depths of crossover. He hunched defensively and began jabbing at the keyboard with movements that were so quick she could not see what he was doing. On the screen, the various menus and lists appeared and disappeared at dizzying speed.
Once again it occurred to her that her presence in the scenario was becoming unsustainable, that it was time to withdraw. To do that, though, would mean having to retreat from the Grove scenario now, at a point where it was becoming of real interest to her. What Grove had done inside the ExEx building clearly had an influence on the violent events that were soon to follow.
She didn't want to have to start over. Gerry Grove's movements on this day, recorded in such detail inside the scenario, were proving to be timeconsuming and traumatic.
Teresa had never known such a long and exhausting scenario, nor felt so appalled by what she found. She did not want to have to cope again with the banal evil of his mind, Mostly, though, she could not face having to go back to the beginning and experience his murders again, to witness them and either by inaction appear to condone them, or by intervention appear to influence them.
She had come as far as this; now she wanted to see it through and find out what he had done.
His helterskelter progress through the index listings continued; Teresa thought that because he was moving so quickly he could only be choosing selection boxes at random, almost on autopilot, simply clicking on one option after another, uninterested in where it might take him.
Suddenly he stopped, and Teresa felt his body relax slightly. He seemed to lean forward slightly, as if the tension of searching through the screens had been supporting his torso.
The top of the screen said:
Interactive/Police/Murder/ Guns/ 195 0 /William Cook/Elsa Jane Durdle.
Next to Elsa's name was a video frame; a tiny static glimpse of bright sunlight and windswept palm trees, a row of diagonally parked cars glinting in the sun.
The chances of Grove selecting this scenario at random were too immense to calculate. She had always presumed that Elsa was uniquely hers! Teresa felt protest rising in her, but almost at once Grove responded to it and went back into action.
He continued to move swiftly through the hierarchy of options, the computer screen flickering as he somehow anticipated each new menu. Once again, he quit abruptly.
Participatory/Victimenabled
/Interactive/
State
or
County
PD/State
PD/Virginia/Fugitive/Multiple Murder/Spree/Guns/Sam Wilkins McLeod.
The video showed a group of people against a brightly lit and highly coloured background.
For a moment it meant nothing to Teresa, but she made Grove lean forward and look closely at the image, and used the mouse to click on it; at once it expanded to occupy the lower half of the screen.
She was in AI's Happy Burgabar with her husband Rick, in a small town called Oak Springs along Highway 64 between Richmond and Charlottesville. The video frame had frozen on them as the family passed the main course selfselection counter, the vivid colours of AI's unmistakable 1090 dominating the room.
The shock of recognizing this, which was buried under layers of extreme experience deep down, long ago, away somewhere in her virtual life story, produced another automatic response from Grove. The computer images on the monitor began to flicker brightly as he moved swiftly through the lists. Teresa watched the computer display again, feeling helpless.
Her own virtual past was fastforwarding, fastrewinding, while she stared through the eyes of a man she knew was on his way to a massacre.
He paused again, and the computer image steadied.
Participatory/Interactive/United Kingdom/
England/National
or
County/County
