A Blink of the Screen

drinks. Or maybe it wasn’t the drinks at all. But sometimes you get the feeling, don’t you, that you can see a little way into the future? Oh, you don’t. Well, anyway. I might not have been entirely in my right mind but I was beginning to feel pretty uncomfortable about all this. Well, anyone would. Even you.
    ‘Wayne,’ I said. ‘Stop right now. If you concentrate, he’ll go away. Settle down a bit. Please. Take a deep breath. This is all wrong.’
    The brick wall on the other side of me paid more attention. I know Wayne when he meets fellow collectors. They have these weekend rallies. You see them in shops. Strange people. But none of them as strange as this one. He was dead strange.
    ‘Wayne!’
    They both ignored me. And inside my mind bits of my brain were jumping up and down, shouting and pointing, and I couldn’t let myself believe what they were saying.
    O H , I’ VE GOT THEM ALL , he said, turning back to Wayne. E LVIS P RESLEY , B UDDY H OLLY , J IM M ORRISON , J IMI H ENDRIX , J OHN L ENNON …
    ‘Fairly widespread, musically,’ said Wayne. ‘Have you got the complete Beatles?’
    N OT Y ET .
    And I swear they started to talk records. I remember Mr Friend saying he’d got the complete seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century composers. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
    I’ve always had to do Wayne’s fighting for him, ever since we were at primary school, and this had gone far enough and I grabbed Mr Friend’s shoulder and went to lay a punch right in the middle of that grinning mask.
    And he raised his hand and I felt my fist hit an invisible wall which yielded like treacle, and he took off his mask and he said two words to me and then he reached across and took Wayne’s hand, very gently …
    And then the power amp exploded because, like I said, Wayne wasn’t very good with connectors and the church hall had electrical wiring that dated back practically to 1800 or something, and then what with the decorations catching fire and everyone screaming and rushing about I didn’t really know much about anything until they brought me round in the car park with half my hair burned off and the hall going up like a firework.
    No. I don’t know why they haven’t found him either. Not so much as a tooth?
    No. I don’t know where he is. No, I don’t think he owed anyone any money.
    (But I think he’s got a new job. There’s a collector who’s got them all – Presley, Hendrix, Lennon, Holly – and he’s the only collector who’ll ever get a complete collection, anywhere. And Wayne wouldn’t pass up a chance like that. Wherever he is now, he’s taking them out of their jackets with incredible care and spinning them with love on the turntables of the night …)
    Sorry. Talking to myself, there.
    I’m just puzzled about one thing. Well, millions of things, actually, but just one thing right at the moment.
    I can’t imagine why Mr Friend bothered to wear a mask.
    Because he looked just the same underneath, idio—officer.
    What did he say? Well, I dare say he comes to everyone in some sort of familiar way. Perhaps he just wanted to give me a hint. He said D RIVE S AFELY .
    No. No, really. I’ll walk home, thanks.
    Yes. I’ll mind how I go.

#IFDEFDEBUG +
‘WORLD/ENOUGH’ +
‘TIME’

    D IGITAL D REAMS
, ED . D AVID V. B ARRETT , H ODDER & S TOUGHTON , L ONDON, 1990
    This was published in 1990 in the anthology
Digital Dreams,
edited by Dave Barrett. I was tempted to ‘update’ this – after all, it’s about Virtual Reality, haha, remember that everybody? I am so old I can remember virtual reality! – but what’s the point? Besides, it would be cheating
.
    I just liked the idea of an amiable repairman, not very bright but good with machines, padding the streets of a quiet, dull, sleeping world. Things are breaking down, knowledge is draining away, and he’s driving his van around the sleeping streets, helping people dream
.
    Now, many years later, it appears rather chilly and maybe quite close to home
.
    Never could stand the idea of machines in people. It’s not proper. People say, hey, what about pacemakers and them artificial kidneys and that, but they’re still machines no matter what.
    Some of them have nuclear batteries. Don’t tell me that’s right.
    I tried this implant once, it was supposed to flash the time at the bottom left-hand corner of your eyeball once a second, in little red numbers. It was for the busy exec, they said, who always needs to know,