A Blink of the Screen

start. Often wondered what ‘up the swanee’ really means. Don’t suppose I’ll ever know, now.)
    ‘Kids use them,’ he said. You could tell he wanted to use a word like ‘bastards’, but not with the suit around.
    Not ones like these they don’t, I thought. This stuff is top of the range. You couldn’t get it in the shops.
    ‘If I caught my lad with one, I’d tan his hide. We used to play healthy games when I was a kid. Elite, Space Invaders, that stuff.’
    ‘Yeah.’ Let’s see, attach probes here and here …
    ‘Please allow Mr Thompson to get on with his work,’ said the suit.
    ‘I think,’ said the copper nastily, ‘we ought to tell him who this man is.’ Then they started to argue about it.
    I suppose I’d assumed he was just some old guy who’d hooked into one porno afer too many. Not a bad way to go, by the way. People say, hey, what you mean? Dying of an overdose of artificial sex is okay? And I say, compared to about a million other ways, yes. Realities can’t kill you unless you want to go. The normal feedback devices can’t raise a bruise, whatever the horror stories say, although between you and me, I’ve heard of, you know, things, exoskeletons, the army used ’em but they’ve turned up elsewhere. They can let your dreams kick the shit out of you.
    ‘He’s Michael Dever,’ said the copper. ‘Mr Thompson should know that. He invented half this stuff. He’s a big man at Seagem. Hasn’t been into the office for five years, apparently. Works from home. Worked,’ he corrected himself. ‘Top man in development. Lives like this. Lived. Sends all his stuff in over the link. No one bothered about it, see, because he’s a genius. Then he missed an important deadline yesterday.’
    That explained about the suit, then. Heard about Dever, of course, but all the pix in the mags showed this guy in a T-shirt and a grin. Old pix, then. A big man, yes. So maybe important stuff in the machine. Or he was testing something. Or they thought, maybe someone had slipped him a virus. After all, there were enough lines into the unit.
    Nothing soiled though, I thought. Some people who are gone on afer will live in shit, but you do get the thorough ones, who work it all out beforehand – fridge stacked with TV dinners, bills paid direct by the bank, half an hour out from under every day for housework and aerobics, and then off they go for a holiday in their heads.
    ‘Better than most I’ve seen,’ I said. ‘Neat. No trouble to anyone. I’ve been called into ones because of the smell even when they weren’t dead.’
    ‘Why’s he got those pipes hooked up to the helmet?’ said the copper.
    He really didn’t know. I supposed he hadn’t had much to do with afers, not really. A lot of the brighter coppers keep away from them, because you can get really depressed. What we had here was Entonox mixture, the intelligent afer’s friend. Little tubes to your nose plugs, then a little program on the machine which brings you out of your reality just enough every day for e.g. a go on the exercise bike, a meal, visit the bathroom.
    ‘If you’re going to drop out of your own reality, you need all the help you can get,’ I explained. ‘So the machine trickles you some gas and fades the program gradually. Gives you enough of a high to come out of it without screaming.’
    ‘What if the valves stick?’ asked the suit.
    ‘Can’t. There’s all kinds of fail-safes, and it monitors your—’
    ‘We believe the valves may have stuck,’ said the suit firmly.
    Well. Good thinking. Seagem don’t make valves. The little gas units are definitely third-party add-ons. So if some major employee dies under the helmet, it’s nice to blame valves. Only I’ve never heard of a valve sticking, and there really are a load of fail-safes. The only way it’d work is if the machine held some things off and some things on, and that’s purpose, and machines don’t have that.
    Only it’s not my place to say things like that.
    ‘Poor guy,’ I said.
    The copper unfolded at high speed and grabbed my shoulder and towed me out and into a bedroom, just like that. ‘Just you come and look at this,’ he kept saying. ‘Just you come and look. This isn’t one of your bloody electronic things. Poor guy? Poor guy? This is real.’
    There was this other dead body next door, see.
    He thought I was going to be shocked. Well, I wasn’t. You see worse things in pictures of Ancient Egypt. You see worse things on TV. I