In THE SPIRAL: Connected Stories & Fragments from the Virtual Future

VOICE/FRAGMENT: 'FALL-OUT' [12XP]

'Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.'

Forster, Howards End

[author note: this fragment was originally written in the 1990s, pre-'The Matrix' movies]

LEAVEN

The window was open. But the body lay sprawled out on the dirty floor, beside a cheap, low bed. A lock of brown hair was plastered to the side of the face that was visible. A sleek headset was tight against the temple and covered the eyes, but the serenity in the arrangement of limbs was awkward and total. The senses of the head were absorbed now in entertainment beyond any consciousness.

This one I will remember, Leaven thought.

Knowing the headset was linked - invisibly - to the smooth black case open on the bedside table, Leaven's pale blue eyes moved for a moment over the lights from the advanced hardware, indicating operations; secrets still alive and deadly within. The head of the unkempt man was positioned near to the case. It was as if it had attacked him as he had slept, pulling him in and sucking another spirit down, out of this world, to where we are all falling. The jaws of the case were still open; hungry, for more...

John Leaven was a few years younger than the dead man had been. Standing outside the door of the low-key hotel room with his fellow agents, he fought to reclaim the rhythm of his breathing that the rapid ascent of the stairs had disrupted. Getting far too old for this. But the fatigue felt deeper this time. Leaven had been tracking Carter and the way into the notorious Bedlam4 simulation for months. And now that he stood so close to where he knew his old friend must be he hesitated. He couldn't afford to hesitate, but in this case the whole trace had been almost too great a struggle. He feared to see what lay now beyond the door, what, he knew, he might never have prevented anyway, if Carter so wished to become it; one more fall-out.


Leaven had involved only a few of his Salvager squad. Pete Hoff squatted against the door-frame opposite, and Jess waited as backup in the badly-lit hallway with a device providing information rarely tricked: a signature jacked in at this location, and no sound from within. Turning the knob and pushing, Leaven let the door swing open...

... and so it was that he saw the figure of his old friend from university so many days, hours and minutes ago sprawled out motionless; frozen in the last posture that its spirit was ever to choose for itself in the air of the world that had moulded it.

'Dead end', he spoke quietly.

GATEWAY

By the time he had soaked up the scene – imprinted it into memory – the door hit softly against the wall. This motion he'd remember echoing as a single instant entailing one end to a part of his life forever, and the challenge before the dawn of another. It was indeed a gateway...

An exhalation of air came from the agents in the hallway. As members of the Salvager squad of Web-Rescue, 'fall-outs' were now a common sight. They were normally in rooms like this where intense freejackers had hid themselves from reality in their advanced addiction to the Web, and probably to drugs. Frequently they were elaborate suicides that had been done online, others a matter of simply wasting away. Often the rooms were empty, for the virtual session might have teased their victims from the windows and cast them into the warm city air, as though their world had been on fire.

And it was their job – his job - to locate these people that included disruptives and hackers, and to 'rescue' them which meant to place them into jail or into rehab. They could be dangerous, even Carter had been dangerous, but whoever and whatever the situation, always such an end continued to wear on him. The weary presence of it. For it was this drab and dusty, top-floor hotel room that held all that remained of another lately receiving, interpreting, struggling organ of a force - a force that had given such powers to it - even those of Carter's defiance against it. It sickened him now, that Carter could seem like such a victim, could have endorsed such an end. And whatever the explanations, the hard evidence was that he was just another form of wounded animal that had bled itself out to here. The wound was just a more elaborate and a tragic one. And he knew this wound.

'Damn it Carter,' he uttered, and his breath was heavy with the sorrow he felt from somewhere deep beneath the cleft of his ribs. There was something clutched in the body's hand and an empty pill bottle had flown to the corner. There would be no more running for this strange, talented spirit; this complex fugitive.

He lingered with the body in the room. It was certainly lifeless. And he knew what the object was that lay beneath the curled fingers of the once dextrous powers of the slackened hand, before he stooped to extract it. It was feeling the texture of it - the small wooden figure - and the personal message it bore to his heart that made him sit down heavily with a sorrow that had been waiting to burn.

He held the carving for a moment and watched his hand clench around it too.

It had been their past, their present, their future, their prize and their gift to their own species and to all life....It had been their only chance for godliness..... It was a world; their world, haunting them ever since it had been... destroyed.