Once More With Footnotes

"
     
                  "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, a nd 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 copp er 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 r eal."
     
                  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 see them for real, sometimes. Nearly fresh corpses can be upsett ing, 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 h is 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. Ju st 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 helmet s — 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, hardl y 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. Arti ficial 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 a ll 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 marke ted 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 luc ky. And there's the people who, like I said, can't afford a