|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Site content may offend. Content includes horror, murder, torture, lawlessness, military carnage, Anglo Saxon crudities, occasional adult incidents and George Bush |
|
|
| You are alone on a mountain. It is cold. There is snow and ice everywhere. What do you do? Answer: you build a snow cave. That's what you do, isn't it, Roy? In a snow cave, the temperature will rise until it reaches the melting point of ice. Given the proper clothes and a nice warm sleeping bag, you can be perfectly comfortable at that temperature.
But - But you don't have any clothes. No clothes worth mentioning. Even if you dig a snowcave, you'll still be freezing cold. You can't live at the melting point of ice: 32 degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees centigrade. Without proper clothes, you'll die anyway. Push that thought aside. "A snow cave, then," said Roy. And he started to dig. To dig a snow cave efficiently, you really want a plastic shovel with a nice broad blade. Improvising with a bit of broken wood, Roy scrabbled away at the snow drift, and in due course fashioned himself a snow cave of sorts. By then, it was already night, although the night was lit by the twisting green and blue lights of a sky on fire with the aurora borealis, the northern lights. In real life, Roy would probably have been dead by then. In the virtual world of Bear Mountain, by the time he was finished his hands were virtually non-functional. He crawled into the cave. Freezing! No, it's no good, you need clothes, a survival blanket, something like that. A memory flashed. Tinfoil. A survival blanket is made of tinfoil. The tinfoil reflects the body's heat back at the body. And there was any amount of tinfoil buried in the trah hole three paces east of the crooked pine. During the camping trip, Roy had had the kids police up a whole heap of garbage and bury it there. And it would still be there now. "Unless it's been modelled out of existence," said Roy. Someone had long since got rid of the virtual tents, sleeping bags and backpacks used by Roy's party, so what chance was there that the garbage would still remain? Well - the garbage had been on site when the school party had got there. That suggested that Bear Mountain was not programmed to digest its own trash. No magic sprite or genie was going to make that garbage vanish. Or was it? Well, only one way to find out. Grabbing his piece of broken wood, Roy staggered to the crooked pine and attacked the ground, as furiously excited as Hurtly Turtly and Snugs the Muffin had been when they had started to dig for the treasure of the Pirate Bear. The virtual earth was not frozen solid as real earth would have been. Instead, although it was cold, it was still light and loamy. Friable stuff which broke apart easily under his assault. And there it was - the treasure! Chocolate wrappers and tinfoil used to wrap baked potatoes. And plastic bags. Well, hey, Roy! Great! You can fill the plastic bags with this nice soft virtual dirt, line your snow cave with them. You can patchwork a survival blanked together out of the tinfoil stuff. Or could. If you had hands. Yes. Hands were the problem. Virtual snow was not as vicious as real snow. But, even so, by now Roy's hands had become impossibly arthritic. He could just about get a grip on his bowie knife, but there was no way he could do the delicate work which would be needed to unfold scrunched-up tinfoil and make a blanket out of it. Pretty soon, he probably wouldn't even be able to hold the knife. Beaten? Come on, Roy. Think. You're a high school teacher. Surely you can think your way out of this one. The Jack London story. That was what came to mind. The story about the guy who has to make a fire in the wilderness. Only: his hands have frozen up. The guy thinks about killing his dog, plunging his hands into the warmth of the dog's belly, warming the fingers so they will flex sufficiently for him to get a grip on the matches. Only the dog senses that something is wrong, and runs away. "No good, Roy. You don't even have a dog." No dog. No heat. He held his hands to his belly, wishing he could dig them inside, bury them in the inner warmth. A memory. The trial. What had Geoff Hangolin said? The inside of the body isn't modelled. Why not? Because only crazy people are interested in their own innards. Apply a little logic, Roy. If your guts aren't modelled, what's in your virtual belly? Virtual cotton wool? Yeah, maybe. Or maybe nothing. Maybe you can push your hands right into nothing, glitch the computer system, freeze the program, bring this whole senario to a crashing halt. Or. What if Geoff was lying? What if they have modelled the guts? "It's the only way," said Roy, hauling out his bowie knife. He held the knife two-handed. Cut open your own belly? What kind of crazy are you? That history book - yeah. After the Second World War, one of the defeated Japanese admirals disembowelled himself. Then sat contemplating his own guts. And it took him three days to die. "But there's nothing inside," said Roy. But what if there is, what if there is? What if Geoff was lying, and there's a liver inside? A liver, and two kidneys. And wet intestines. Can you die for real from virtual shock? "Let's do it," said Roy. The illumination of the aurora borealis, now shifting weirdly from green and blue to a bruised purplish-red, glinted on the blade as he hesitated. Then he did it: he sliced his belly open. There was an initial resistance, then nothing. Looking down, he saw a wet mouth opening into blackness. Momentarily, he hesitated. Then dropped the knife and shoved his hands deep into that engulfing mouth. Oh, blessed warmth! It was like pushing your hands into the softness of fur mittens. In moments, his hands were warm, and marvellously flexible. (Obviously, Bear Mountain was no place to train for flesh-and-blood survival. In the flesh-and-blood world, no recovery from cold is so painlessly swift, so effortlessly accomplished). Then Roy felt something move beneath his fingers. With a scream, he whipped his hands out. And a rat poked its head out of the cut in his belly. The light of the aurora borealis gleamed bloody red in its eye. Roy cried out, and battered at it with blood-hot hands. He made contact, and the rat ducked back inside. Oh, great, Roy. There's a sewer or something underneath, you've cut into the collective unconscious of the virtual world, and God knows what else is going to come out. But he had warmth. That was the thing. A source of warmth he could use to get his hands working whenever they threatened to freeze again. Not that he needed that source of warmth. Right now, his body felt furiously hot. Fight or flight. That's what it is. The mind-body link. Your virtual body, or maybe your subjective body, or your virtual body and your subjective body both - one way or another, the fight or flight reaction is working. But you'll get cold later. So, okay. Let's pack these plastic bags with this virtual dirt, and then let's make this tinfoil survival blanket, okay? That was when the rat stuck its head out again. First the rats, then the cockroaches, then the wasps. And then, in the absolute darkness before dawn - the darkness after the aurora borealis, a darkness as intense as blindness - the snake. A boa constrictor as fat as a sewer pipe. Bowie knife, do your stuff! All in all, it was one hell of a night. But Roy was still alive when dawn came. The day was crisp and clear. And windless. And Alcatraz was plainly visible in the distance. So Roy set off for it, emitting occasional rats (and other things) as he went. Roy arrived at three in the afternoon, just as Senator Mikan's virtual limousine was pulling up at the gate, and the senator recognised Roy as Roy came walking toward the car. So did Ashley Belno, who was sitting alongside the senator. "So what's new?" said Ashley, opening the door. "Our lawsuit," said Roy, getting inside. Settling down in the warmth of the seat, he clasped both hands over his gashed belly to keep the rats inside. "We're going to sue these guys for a cool billion dollars, that's what's new." And, speaking quickly in case the technicians of the Plastic Infinity Corporation suddenly realised just how disastrously they had failed, and unplugged him from the virtual reality scenario, Roy unfolded his tale. And, before Roy was done, Ashley had his calculator out and was pushing buttons. A billion dollars? No, sir. That's chump change. A case like this, I think we're looking at some real money.
This story, "Night on Bear Mountain", was first published in Challenging Destiny No. 5 January 1999 (ed. David M. Switzer) (St. Marys, Canada, ISSN 1206-6656) (pp 94-114; 7,903 words) (science fiction virtual reality story).
zenvirus.com. Copyright © 1999, 2002 Hugh Cook. All rights reserved.
|