A Blink of the Screen

the, you know, dawn of thingy, but with afers it stays inside. They aren’t about to go and knock over some thin little girl in cotton underwear coming back from the all-night chippy, not after
Dark Alley Cruiser
. Probably can’t, anyway. And it’s cheap so you don’t have to steal for it. A lot of them forget to feed themselves. Afers are the kind of problems that come with the solutions built in.
    I like a good book, me.
    They watched me very hard when I checked the gas-feed controls. The add-on stuff was pretty good. You could see where it was hooked into everything else. I bet if I had time to really run over it on the bench you’d find he had a little daydream every day. Probably didn’t even properly come out from under. Funny thing, that, about artificial realities. You know how you can be dreaming and the buzzer goes and the dream sort of incorporates the buzzer into the plot? Probably it was like that.
    It had been well maintained. Cleaned regularly and everything. You can get into trouble otherwise, you get build-ups of gunk on connectors and things. That’s why all my customers, I tell them, you take out a little insurance, I’ll be round every six months regular, you can give me the key, I’ve even got a bypass box so if you’re, you know, busy I can do a quick service and be away and you won’t know I’ve been. This is personal service. They trust me.
    I switched off the power to the alarms, cleaned a few boards for the look of it, reseated everything, switched it back on. Et wolla.
    The copper leaned over my shoulder.
    ‘How did you do that?’ he said.
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘there was no negative bias voltage on the sub-logic multiplexer,’ which shut him up.
    Thing is, there wasn’t anything wrong. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a fault, there was nothing to say that a fault existed. It was as if it’d just been told to shut down everything. Including him.
    Valve stuck … that meant too much nitrous oxide. The scene of crime people prob’ly had to get the smile off his face with a crowbar.
    The lights came on, there were all the little whirs and gurgles you get when these things boot up, the memory sinks started to hum, we were cooking with gas.
    They got excited about all this.
    And then, of course, I had to get out my own helmet.
    Viruses, that’s the thing. Started off as a joke. Some kid’d hack into someone else’s reality, scrawl messages on the walls. A joke, like the McLints. Only, instead of scrambling the wage bill or wiping out English literature, you turned their brain to cheese. Frighten them to death, or whatever. Scares the hell out of some people, the thought that you can kill people that way. They act illogical. You find someone dead under an afer unit, you call in someone like me. Someone with no imagination.
    You’d be amazed, the things I’ve seen.
    You’re right.
    You’re clever. You’ve had an education.
    You’re saying, hey, I know what you saw. You saw the flat, right, and it was just like it was really, only maybe cleaner, and she was still alive in it, and maybe there was a kid’s voice in the next room, the kid they never had, because, right, he’d sat there maybe five years ago maybe while she was still warm and done the reality creation job of a lifetime. And he was living in it, just sane enough to make sure he kept on living in it. An artificial reality just like reality ought to have been.
    Right. You’re right. You knew it. I should’ve held something back, but that’s not like me.
    Don’t ask me to describe it. Why ask me to describe it? It was his.
    I told the other two and the PR man said firmly, ‘Well, all right. And then a valve stuck.’
    ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll just make a report, okay? About what I’ve found. I’m a wire man, I don’t mess around with pipes. But I wouldn’t mind asking you a question.’
    That got them. That got them. People like me don’t normally ask questions, apart from, ‘Where’s the main switch?’
    ‘Well?’ said the suit.
    ‘See,’ I said, ‘it’s a funny old world. I mean, you can hide a body from people these days, it’s easy. But there’s a lot more to it in the real world. I mean, there’s banks and credit companies, right? And medical checks and polls and stuff. There’s this big electric shadow everyone’s got. If you die—’
    They were both looking at me in this funny way. Then the suit shrugged and the uniform handed me this print-out from the terminal. I read