SIM (excerpt)

Copyright (C) David J Rodger 2000

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of David J Rodger.







He snapped awake. Sensory static flickered across his vision. He stared up at soft lighting and sterile walls and frowned at the unfamiliar surroundings. Confusion rolled over him. His mind reached out through layers of synthetic neural circuitry to conjure up the command suite.
A moment of mental fumbling then panic. The device wasn't there.
When active the command-suite was superimposed across his natural vision, generated by the pea-sized implant of raw chip memory wet-wired inside his skull. Such implants were commonly called WAM: Wet Access Memory. His mind had gone to it on instinct, a craving for up to date awareness of the situation. What situation? The world; business, money, people, who wanted who for a particular job, who needed who, where were the premiums for the head hunters, the top-slicing of multi-corporate project funds to pay off the man who helped put it all together.
Ulrich Drake, take a bow.
Already this year he had closed the deal on the Heredotus Project, securing 35 million dollars of Euro Federation money for the project members and 4 million dollars for his own deposit account.
The confusion of where he was washed away as the memories swept into his mind. He had been in surgery. The confusion was replaced by an unexplainable tension. Residual effects of the anaesthetic left him groggy and detached from a clear line of thought.
He tried to lift his hands and was relieved to see them; he brought them close to his face, turning them slowly. Short, powerful fingers, wide palms, tanned flesh, fine golden hairs. He clenched them until his knuckles turned white, then relaxed and rested them on the soft linen of the clinic bed.
"Two days under the knife…Goddamn! You better make sure this thing is worth it." He recalled his conversation with Jack Warner, Director of R & D at the Zendori Institute.
Thinking back to it, Jack had never really given much of an affirmation, remaining equivocal behind his resilient straight face with tightly pressed lips and emotionless grey eyes. It was Jack's typical tactic, forcing him to acknowledge that he was accepting the deal because he wanted to. Ulrich knew that it was his own personal motivation that had brought him to this point. Jack did not try to win his trust with medical platitudes about the safety of the new technology.
Then again, Jack had never gone into describing the risks. And Ulrich had never asked him to.




"You made a remarkable recovery, Ulrich." Jack Warner enthused, standing beside his table as Ulrich sampled breakfast within the enclosed pool-bay of the Institute. It was one of the rare moments Jack allowed an emotion to surface to the lined mask of his face: Ulrich guessed there was some genuine surprise in the speed of his recovery.
Ulrich sipped a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He nodded, allowed a brief smile and a self-gratifying shrug at the proclaimed robustness of his health.
"You should be able to leave this afternoon, if you wish."
Ulrich raised the orange juice in the gesture of a toast; "Enjoying the fabulous accommodation you provide here, Jack, I might be inclined to stay another few nights."
A grim smile spread across the Director of R & D's lips. Then he said, "Excellent, I'm sure we have a few trials we could run on you. The labs are running low on rats."
Ulrich chuckled, albeit not without a slight waver of uneasiness. "Can I have the check please."
Without a beat for the humour to settle, Jack said, "Are you heading back to Brussels straight away, or staying in London for a while?"
Ulrich winced in a parody of pain, "Brussels, God no. I'm going back to my den in Bristol, spend some quality time, alone. Play with this new toy you've given me." He tapped his skull.
A blank look passed across Jack's face, as if he were entering a moment of deep thought. A moment later he said: "Bristol, eh? I hear it's a nice place. I should come and visit you sometime."
"That would be superb, Jack! It's a fabulous city. It can offer everything London has without the twenty million sweating burger guzzling irritations."
It took a moment for Jack to understand his reference, then emitted a short guffaw. "Indeed."
"I know I don't need to say this, as I'm sure you're already aware of the fact, but I am slightly concerned about my wet-memory."
"Sorry Ulrich, I should have informed you. I had it taken off-line for a while, just whilst the new nervous tissue we inserted around the sim implant anchors itself properly."
Ulrich smiled, his worries put at ease. "How long before you can give me access?"
"A few hours. You will have it back by tonight."




He drove a chrome finished AC Cobra, a replica of the classic sixties convertible sports car. The powerplant was a custom-rigged 5 litre Marcos V8, which would have been capable of producing 320bhp if using petroleum fuel. The engine had been eloquently converted from raw fossil fuel to hydrogen energy cells, and some intelligent sound engineering brought back the right noise characteristics for the powerful drive.
Heading West out of London onto the elevated premium-toll road, he settled into a comfortable eighty miles per hour cruise toward Bristol. Fiery red and orange light lanced off the gleaming bonnet, and he grinned so widely and tight lipped his cheeks wrinkled up beneath the lines of his eyes.
As a forty-year-old some people would suggest he should not be driving such a car, but Ulrich considered it less of a claim of wealth and success, as a way of expressing his personal satisfaction with his life.
Lorna, the woman he was driving to see, certainly enjoyed being driven out to their countryside jaunts within it. He had told Jack his plan was to spend time alone in Bristol, which he would, after he had spent a couple of nights with Lorna.
Lorna was twenty-four, tall, brunette and lithe bodied; a classically trained ballet dancer now making a small fortune running personal fitness centres along the London-Bristol corridor. She was also married, and their eight-month sex-affair had survived for the sole reason neither of them talked to anybody about the other. Ulrich had never married and never been concerned with raising a family. He had never used the services of a prostitute and never paid for sex, but a number people, usually ex-lovers had claimed he treated people like whores. Old business partners occasionally said the same thing.
Ulrich glanced at his eyes in the slim rear-view mirror. Pale green, verging on grey, their delicate colour drawn out like a rare pigment by the deep tan of his flesh. He took in their intelligent shape and, what he saw as, sexual intensity and mentally stroked his ego for a few moments. Part of his brain held up questions of awe about the technology that now pervaded his body. He recalled his twenties and the almost shocking pace of change brought into society by the advancement of cybernetic implants and the 'clean' surgery that made it possible. The questions were not real queries, they were prompts allowing him to review his own embracing of the technology. One question that did linger, and had for many months, was the growing feeling of pride in his flesh and blood. He found himself holding up his sense of humanity within a light of organic purity. His eyes, for example, were untouched unlike some of the new breed of cybernetic advocates who had gone for total replacement of their eyes with implants that gave them perfect sight, and all the advantages of the digital medium. His eyes were human, and thinking about it now, he wondered what happened on the subconscious level when you looked into a pair of synthetic eyes, when eyes were the windows of the soul?





Lorna had rented an apartment in Clifton, an expensive area of Bristol, which she used to facilitate a life separate from her husband's interest. She was married to a man who was climbing the corporate ranks of a large investment firm. Ulrich knew his name because Lorna had mentioned it once but that was all and he had never asked to know more; he viewed her husband as insignificant to the flow of his life.
Her apartment was on the fourth floor of an impressive Georgian house. A small garden had been flattened with tarmac to give the residents parking space. He squeezed the Cobra into the tiny slot between two matching Audi's then walked briskly into the entrance foyer. Marble floor, wrought iron handrail curving round the stone staircase, landings adorned with occasional rugs and highly decorative plants. It was the scent of those plants that created the familiar smell of the place. The smell invoked sordid memories and heightened his anticipation of seeing Lorna.
He used the spare key-card she had given him and slipped quietly into the front hall of the apartment. A slatted wood staircase to his left rose up to an attic level, which Lorna had converted into an open plan play-room, fitness room and sex haven. Softly closing the front door behind him he stood there a moment, head angled upwards as he watched the enticing flicker of candlelight up there. Music played, ambient and electronic, the type of sound she was into. He already had an erection from the idea of what game she had set-up to tease him with.
The sound of her giggle came down from above and Ulrich grinned broadly.
Then he heard a soft click to his right, a short distance away and his brain rapidly went through the process of thinking it sounded like a light-switch being flicked, which meant there was somebody else in the apartment-
A tiny impact struck his neck. Like an insect sting. Ulrich tried to turn but he was already sinking into darkness.





He found himself on the settee. There were no lights on. A solid shaft of moonlight sloped into the room through a tall window. Trees crowded the space outside the window and for an irrational moment he thought he saw them lean back, as if they had been straining forward watching him.
He grunted as he struggled to lift himself up into a sitting position. Fragments of memory began swirl through the chambers of his thoughts and he recalled the sharp sting in his neck. Frowning, he reached his hand behind his head and felt for any bump or sign of injury on his neck. He could feel nothing, except…..his fingers felt as if they were coated in something dry and slightly sticky. Bringing his hand in front of him, looking at it, he saw it was covered in some kind of dark stain. His mouth parted slightly, a sound of confusion drifting from his lips. Glancing down he saw that his shirt was covered in the same substance, the white cotton fabric heavy with a residual dampness. In fact, so was the settee.
He stood up quickly, his heart beating to an ascending pace as his eyes noted the over turned coffee table, the magazine-readers and eclectic trinkets scattered across the pale carpet. There was a trail of shoe prints across the carpet, stains made from the dark substance. The rest of the large room appeared intact. He walked quickly to the light switch and brought up the lights. What he saw made him freeze in fear, disgust and horror.
Blood.
It was blood on his hands, on his shirt and the settee. The trail of shoe prints was a trail of gore coming from the hall.
Stammering, he called out, "Lorna."
His throat felt dry and tight; his mouth was void of spittle and it was hard to swallow. Sweat rose rapidly across his skin.
"Lorna." He shouted, rooted to the wall with his hand on the light switch.
When no answer came he began trembling, his imagination racing ahead to create a series of gruesome scenarios to explain the trail of blood.
Jesus, what is this? What is going on here?
His eyes scoured the room one more time, and were irresistibly drawn to the bloody shoe prints. His gaze followed them from the sofa, past him and through the door. Then an awful idea struck him and he lifted up his shoe to look at the soul. It was caked in dry and congealing blood, there was a piece of something that looked like gristle caught within a deep groove of the heel. His mouth dropped open and he let out a terrified sound and frantically dragged his foot across the carpet, hoping to dislodge the sickening article.
"Jesus." He was breathing heavily.
Shaking, he turned and followed the bloody trail out into the hall. The shoe prints were in one direction, coming from the attic stairs down.
Drawn now, unable to lock his brain onto the notion to run from the apartment, he slowly walked across the hall and climbed the stairs.
The attic was in semi-darkness, illuminated by three shafts of moonlight from overhead window-hatches. The air was heavy with the smell of blood and burnt meat. The figure of a person was perfectly silhouetted within one shaft of moonlight, strung up within a sex-harness like an awful black cardboard cut-out shape. Could such an outline really belong to a human being? The figure was suspended by ceiling mounted harness straps in mid-air, in an all-fours position, with a strap coming down to a head-rig set so tight it had the head pulled sharply back. The head angle burned itself into Ulrich's brain as his eyes picked up the essential details. The monstrous gap where the front of the figure's throat should have been so that it seemed the head was held onto the body by the bondage gear alone. There was the outline of breasts, and long hair, and the slim gently muscled physique he had spent days longing for.
He reached for the light switch, his hand shaking uncontrollably and brought the full nightmare into sight.
His knees buckled and he dropped to the floor, retching and hyperventilating at the same moment. It was a struggle to stop himself from choking. He blinked rapidly as his face contorted, sweat pouring off his brow. The noise of his vomiting, wailing, gasping and frantic breathing swamped his ears and had the affect of compressing his awareness into a tight bubble within himself for a while. There was almost a perverse sense of peace, where he could hide from the horror waiting for him until he recovered.
His breathing returned to normal, leaving him kneeling on the floor with his senses resurfacing. He had his head bowed and his eyes fixed on a clean patch of carpet in from of him. The periphery of his vision pulsed with the hyper-tense blood pressure and his brain's manipulation of the grotesque image dangling above his line of sight.
Knowing he had to look, Ulrich breathed in deeply, exhaled a calming breath then raised his eyes to Lorna. He shuddered, his neck and jaw muscles contracting as he surveyed the horrific damage done to her. Arterial blood sprays covered the walls and ceiling around where she hung. Pools of blood covered the carpet below her. There was so much blood on the carpet the stains were still wet with dark rings of congealing crust around the edges. Lorna's throat had been completely hacked away, leaving a thick sliver of muscle and flesh connecting her head to her body. The head was yanked so far back he could almost see into her chest cavity through the ruined mess. Her head was clamped in mask made of strips of leather; her face had been savagely attacked, with a knife or some sharp instrument, the soft flesh slashed and cut deeply multiple times, her eyes had been gouged out and the empty sockets cut around the edges. Possibly the worst damage were the thick lips of flesh where her stomach had been sliced open in one deep cut. The lips of the long wound bulged outward with the weight of intestines ready to fall out of her, although some of the long loops of vivid coloured innards had already slipped out, dangling like thick chords of pink, yellow, purple and red tissue.
He doubled-over as his stomach contracted violently and he retched, bringing up nothing but gastric acid and saliva.
Staggering to his feet, he turned away and used his arm to support himself against the wall by the head of the staircase.
"God, oh- oh, oh God!." He gasped.
The implication of the situation was rapidly dawning on him. A butchered woman, his bloody shoe prints and 'convenient' black out during the time of the murder. The police would see it as open and shut.
He calmed his breathing and fixed his gaze on a gold-painted carving of an angel fixed to the wall around an arrangement of coloured glass.
Two choices.
One: run and damage the slim chance of proving his innocence.
Two: stay and risk spending the rest of his life in jail.
Think.
Starting point: he had been framed.
Why?
A million reasons flooded onto the stage of his mind, but seeing them there, none of them grabbed him as a motive for such a brutal murder.
He brought the command-suite for his WAM into the periphery of his vision, intending to browse through the stored list of contacts to who he felt he could call.
His intention was diverted, however, when he saw the new icon sitting there within the suite. It was the icon for the sim-stim recording wet-ware he had just had implanted; the icon was showing a new recording waiting to be purged.
A new recording.
Ulrich manipulated the sim's software and began to playback the footage. As with any sim the recording overrode the viewer's personal sensorium and flooded it with the recorded experience of the host: the person who made the recording.
The sim showed Lorna giggling and making lewd faces as she was fastened into the sex harness.
Ulrich did not resist as his legs gave way again, he willingly allowed himself to fall against the wall and slump to the floor. The sim appeared to fill in the blank memory created by his blackout.
He watched enough to confirm what he dreaded. A knife appeared in the host's hand (his hand?), the host prodded it against the mask whilst Lorna revelled in what she believed to be play-torment, until the host (he?) jabbed the point of the blade into her eyeball and her screams and frantic struggles swamped the recording.
He stopped the playback and his vision returned to the attic room as it was now.
The sim was of Lorna's murder.
The sim was of him murdering Lorna?
It did not make sense. He had done bad things but never murder. The black out did not make sense.
He wiped silent tears from his face, trying to settle his thoughts into some order.
"What the hell am I going to do?" He hissed to himself. Think-think-think. He realised the tears had smeared the blood on his hands across his skin.
His mind locked onto the memory of the sting-sensation on his neck just before he blacked-out.
Could he have been drugged?
Was it actually his recording? Was he actually the host?
Because a sim was recorded from the host's point-of-view, there was no way to see whom the host was unless that person caught their reflection in a mirror. Ulrich glanced around the attic space to see if there were any mirrors that might have caught the reflection. There were none.
He recalled Lorna had never minded seeing herself on video but had always claimed a mirror tempted vanity and nostalgia for one's youth.
He recalled many things Lorna had said.
Time flowed as he lay slumped against the wall, caught in a maelstrom of aching memories and a flood of tears.

End of Excerpt:

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