A Blink of the Screen

see them for real, sometimes. Nearly fresh corpses can be upsetting, believe me, but this wasn’t because it’d been years. Plenty of time for the air to clear. Of course, I only saw the head, I wouldn’t have liked to have been there when they pulled the sheets back.
    She might have been quite good looking, although of course it was hard to be sure. There were coroner’s stickers over everything.
    ‘Know what she died of?’ asked the copper. ‘Forensic think she was pregnant and something went wrong. She bled to death. And her just lying there, and him in the next room in his little porno world. Name was Suzannah. Of course, all the neighbours are suddenly concerned that they never saw her around for years. Kept themselves to themselves,’ he mimicked shrilly. ‘Half of ’em afers too, you bet.
    ‘He left her for five years. Just left her there.’
    He was wrong. Listen, I’ve been called in before when an afer’s died, and like I said it’s the smell every time. Like rotting food, you know. But Dever or someone had sealed the room nicely, and put her in a body-bag thing.
    Anyway, let’s face it, most people these days smell via a Seagem of some sort. Keeps you from smelling what you don’t want to smell.
    It began with the Dataglove, and then there were these whole-body suits, and along with them were the goggles – later the helmets – where the computer projected the images. So you could walk into the screen, you could watch your hands move inside the images, you could feel them. All dead primitive stuff now, like Edison’s first television or whatever. No smell, not much colour, hardly any sensory feedback. Took them ages to crack smell.
    Everyone said, hey, this is it, like your accountant can wear a whole reality suit and stroll around inside your finances. And chemists can manipulate computer simulations of molecules and that. Artificial realities would push back the boundaries of, you know, man’s thirst for wossname.
    Well, yeah. My dad said once, ‘Know where I first saw a microchip? Inside a ping-pong game.’
    So prob’ly those thirsty for pushing back boundaries pushed ’em back all right, but where you really started seeing reality units was on supermarket checkout girls and in sports shops, because you could have a whole golf course in your home and stuff like that. If you were really rich. Really very rich. But then Seagem marketed a cut-down version, and then Amstrad, and then everything went mad.
    You see people in the streets every day with reality units. Mostly they’re just changing a few little things. You know. Maybe they edit out black men, or slogans, or add a few trees. Just tinkering a bit, just helping themselves get through the day.
    Well sure, I know what some afers do. I know kids who think you can switch the wires so you taste sound and smell vision. What you really do is, you get a blinding headache if you’re lucky. And there’s the people who, like I said, can’t afford a rollafloor so they go hiking through the Venusian jungles or whatever in a room eight feet square and fall out the window. And afers have burned alive and turned into couch crisps. You’ve seen it all on the box. At least, you have if you’re not an afer. They don’t watch much.
    Odd, really. Government is against it. Well, it’s a drug. One you can’t tax. And they say, freedom is the birthright of every individual, but you start being free, they get upset. Coppers seem to be offended, too. But … well. Take rape. I mean, you don’t hear about it these days. Not when you can pick up
Dark Alley Cruiser
down the rental shop. Not that I’ve watched it, you understand, but I’m told the girl’s very good, does all that’s expected of her, which you don’t have to be an Eisenstein to work out isn’t what it’d be like for real, if you catch my drift. And there’s other stuff, I won’t even mention the titles. I don’t need to, do I? It’s not all remakes of
Rambo XXIV
with you in the title role is what I mean.
    I reckon what the coppers don’t like is there’s all this crime going on in your head and they can’t touch you for it.
    There’s all that stuff on the TV about how it corrupts people. All these earnest professors sitting round in leather chairs – of course they never use their machines for anything except the nature programmes or high-toned stuff like
Madam Ovary
. Probably does corrupt people but, I don’t know, everything’s been corrupting people since