look at the rifle while Grove was handling it, but now she recognized it as an M16 carbine.
Teresa slammed down the lid then stood there, staring at the car's polished paintwork, trying to think. The sun beat down on her neck. The temptation again swept over her to shrink mentally from the consequences of all this.
She had been in the scenario with Grove. lt was a standard ExEx scenario. In this standard ExEx scenario she had shown Grove how to use the weapons; maybe he would have shot the people anyway, maybe he simply Missed the first time, maybe he wasn't as incompetent as she'd thought, maybe he would have gone on and shot at them until they were dead.
Maybe she was making excuses.
All right, in the real world Grove had definitely shot
those two: Rosalind Williams and her fouryearold child, Tommy. She had seen their names on the town memorial. She had seen video footage of the scene of the crime. She had seen the newspaper files. She had talked to Mrs Williams' bereaved husband, and to other people who had known them.
But until she had shown Grove how to shoot, he had been incompetent. He held the heavy, sophisticated gun like a boy playing with a toy pistol. Inside the scenario.
Had she not done so, what would have happened to his two victims? Inside the scenario.
Teresa turned away from the Montego, leaned her backside against it and stared down the hill towards the distant sea. Although the town shimmered under haze she could see it well enough: the line of low surrounding hills to left and right, making up the rest of the Ridge, the dull modem houses in their stultifying ranks; lower down, the more attractively arranged and time-weathered buildings of the Old Town, then the sea, a glistening silverblue, the distant clouds over France. lt all stretched out before her, endless and inviting.
The rest of England, the seas and the endless sky, the world, spread around her. A short drive to Dover or Newhaven and she could be on a ferry across that sea to France, thence to the rest of Europe. A slightly longer drive to the north and she would be at Gatwick Airport, ready for her flight home. There were no extremes to limit her.
But this was not the reality she had left. This was summer in the streets of the town below people would be driving their cars with the windows down, the sunroofs open and the ineffective cold-air blowers roaring. Pedestrians would be strolling in shorts and flimsy tops.
Shops and houses would have their doors and windows open to the heat. No sun shone like this in Britain's winter, which she had woken
up to, driven in, hurried through, shaken from her coat, only that morning.
It had been a standard ExEx scenario, written by the company that owned the ExEx building. The standard ExEx scenario had undoubtedly been Grove's, set on the day.
Standard extremes, the corporate reality. GunHo scenarios were industry standard.
But Grove had gone on, using other software. Sick of the naked impact of Grove's mind Teresa had withdrawn, leaving him in the unlikely embodiment of Shandy in her porno role.
Presumably he was still there, enjoying what must be for any man a novel sexual experience.
She remembered walking down Coventry Street in Shandy's mind, learning about the girl and the world she inhabited. The flashing logo, SENSH, was comng at them every halfminute or so. 'Doesn't that drive you crazy, Shan?' she had said. No, Shandy replied, you get used to it in the end.
lt had been run as a closing message just now, when she left the scenario.
The scenario she had entered, the industrystandard GunHo scenario about Grove, was not the one she had left: she had been in Vic's homemade software, complete with boltedon bits of London and Arizona, and terrible puns and spelling mistakes.
When she withdrew from that she had returned to the ExEx facility in Bulverton. But it was to a hot sunny day, like the one when Grove went berserk.
lt made rough sense, of course. When Grove entered the Shandy scenario, taking her with him, her only way out was to the reality he had left.
The credit card that was too new to be valid; the cold winter's day that had turned to a heatwave; the Montego parked in place of her car.
She was still in the Grove scenario.
The implications were shocking, and impossible to comprehend fully, but at least she knew how to cope. With a desperate urgency to escape, unlike any she had previously known, Teresa recalled the LIVER mnemonic, and waited for the GunHo logo to appear as the scenario was aborted.
Teresa remained in Welton Road, outside the ExEx building, with Grove's stolen car gleaming in the midsummer sun. Nothing changed.
She had never known the mnemonic to fail before, although Dan Kazinsky had warned all the trainees that it was not infallible.
Standing there, in shock, but focused on what had happened, Teresa remembered a day during training at the Academy, when they had been given a long and technical lecture by a professor of psychology from Johns Hopkins University. This woman had drily explained the theory of mental override within an imaginary world. Several of the trainees afterwards admitted privately that their attention had wandered, but Teresa had taken it all in.
The psychological principle was that there was a normal inner requirement that reality should be firmly based. Human sensory equipment constantly tested the veracity of the world, and silently reported to the consciousness. Normal life functioned. An ExEx scenario could therefore only function as a plausibleseeming alternative to reality by simulating the sensual information, and this continued so long as the participant gave or implied consent. Reality was suspended while the scenario continued. This meant that recognizing, isolating and consciously rejecting one of the simulated sensory inputs was the only way to escape from the extreme experience.
There were questions and answers, and a short break for refreshments. Later, when the professor had
