The Last Bridge

Copyright (c) J.C.Holloway 07:03:2008
The Last Bridge

Chapter 1 JJ and Isobel

JJ was cold and wet; finally, he saw the sign over the building, "University Information Repository." He entered the reception area and closed the door on the black and foggy outside world. Thin rain hissed against the windows. Inside the building it was very warm, stifling with a thick coat on. The foyer was not well lit and JJ was only just able to see the sign pointing him upstairs to level three. He was feeling tense, his footsteps on the cold concrete steps echoed up the dimly lit stairwell. From the edge of his vision, from the corner of his eye, JJ thought he could see spots of light; like 'snow' from a badly tuned analogue TV. He dismissed the white dots as not real, he was tired and wound up. Recently he had burned his arm on some hot fat while cooking, the blister had faded but it itched horribly; he resisted the urge to scratch it violently. The lighting improved as he neared level three's corridor, the corridor itself was brightly lit and carpeted. JJ walked along the carpeted corridor, freshly carpeted, he could smell it. The design on the carpet was quite vivid, JJ could not imagine what sort of person would select such horribly clashing colours, the pattern seemed to vibrate. There was an odd crunching sound as he walked on the mess of colours, rather like walking on fresh deep snow. JJ felt hot and nervous, the idea of walking on snow was refreshing, he held onto this thought as he counted down the room numbers.
Room 109.
He was a little apprehensive but the cash he was going to make took the edge off his fear. As it stood his Student Bank Account was about as red as his bank would allow; how was he supposed to take Isobel out anywhere? JJ couldn't believe it, last night he kissed the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, he had looked into her green eyes, a full on kiss, not just a peck on the cheek. He found it hard to believe that he had found the courage, it was probably a bit of Dutch courage? After all it was in the student union bar. He played the scene over and over again like a recording, he could smell her perfume, feel her skin; taste her! The recording was wearing out, fading, he needed to see her again to verify her existence but--- No cash! His cupboards were full of stuff he didn't need, JJ could not remember why or when he had bought it all, all he knew was that he wished he hadn't bought any of it; he would like to have had the wasted cash in his hands! JJ had a need, a deep need to see Isobel again. Clearly, JJ needed money, to take her for a meal on the sea front, to go to a cool gig down the China Rooms, anywhere.
Room 108

JJ had a clear medical examination a few days ago, which was reassuring. JJ had posted all the information to the department straight away, they wanted all kinds of obscure facts such as the telephone number of his dentist! What on earth could they need that for? The advertisement was at the entrance to the Student Union Bar. There was a requirement for people to test new drugs, JJ didn't fancy this, he had read some bad reports and seen the pictures; some of them had not fully recovered a year later!
Room 107.
Towards the bottom of the notices he had seen this:

Make money in a few hours
We require volunteers for our experiments in NMR scanning technology and related fields. The applicant will be expected to undergo a medical examination prior to acceptance. The volunteer will be given a sedative drug prior to the procedure. A fee of £100 will be paid on receipt of a written report of the experience. Once chosen the successful volunteer will be asked to repeat the tests several times over a few weeks, earning up to a maximum of £1000, a minimum of £500. The experiments will take place in the interface room, Room 106, level 3.
That was all three days ago, now he stood outside room 106, Level 3. JJ knocked on the door, it opened and once his ID was confirmed he was rushed straight in by a girl with a lovely shiny smile, her eyes were green, quite rare, and just like Isobel's. "Hi, I'm Sarah, you are obviously JJ! Let me take your coat it's rather warm in here." There were some large and unfamiliar pieces of equipment in the room. The only things JJ could identify were the computers and flat screen monitors everywhere. There were three people in the room, one of the men had on the white coat of a doctor; he approached JJ with a confident vigour, offering his hand. JJ was aware that the doctor would see his burn as they shook hands, he saw the doctors eyes briefly glance at it.
"Hi JJ I am Robert, you're about to experience something that not too many have tried before, we will have to give you a muscle relaxant, you could be strapped down but you might still hurt yourself. That burn looks like it was a bit nasty! You can have the medication orally, which will take a while or you can have a quick jab, won't hurt, you'll be surprised." The doctor beamed a huge smile at JJ. He had a silly looking thin moustache.
"Why do I have to be immobilised?" JJ looked at the smile on the doctors face, it contorted a little as he replied.
"What you are about to do is relive somebody else's dream, it takes a long time to calibrate the scanner to record events, people vary so much. We do have some shortcuts when it comes to playing them back though. You shouldn't recall the calibration process, only the dream, it will be a short one this session. People act out what's going on their minds, you may find yourself running a 'virtual marathon ', having a 'virtual fist fight' or even just rowing a 'virtual boat'. This is not like dreaming, when you dream your body is under a natural paralysis, with this technology you would actually run the marathon, play out the fist fight or row your boat right there in the scanner. You would thrash around, hitting the hard walls; nasty! The best way is to stop your muscles from working for a while." The smile had now gone and he was looking for a response. "You have been checked for metal objects haven't you? It would upset the scanner you see, it uses a very powerful magnetic field; one reason you were chosen was your lack of metallic dentistry. If you move a conductor in a magnetic field you produce an electric current, another reason to be very still! Your blood is a conductor of sorts and that will obviously be moving, anyway I mustn't get too technical; Quick or slow?" JJ looked questioningly at the doctor. "Injection or tablets?" The doctors tongue teased at the edge of his moustache. It made him look a bit mad.
"Okay, let's have the injection, let's get it over with."
Sarah with a smile and green eyes looked over at him and said "Don't worry; I will be there with you." It didn't sound quite right, 'I'll be here for you' sounded better but maybe he should stop being so analytical and get on with it. JJ didn't want to be thinking too long about this procedure or he may change his mind. He needed the money, he needed to see Isobel again, his student loan was growing, he hadn't found any summer work yet. Volunteering for this would see his finances far more comfortable. He may even be able to incorporate some of the experience into his second year project. He looked over at the girl with the smile and it was still there. There was only a slight prick; he felt the cold fluid travel upwards through his arm, towards his head. There was a brief dizzy feeling, and then JJ felt heavy in the chair.
Can you lift your arm a few inches? Robert was gesturing what he would like JJ to do. JJ tried to lift his arm, the one without the burn, it was a huge effort, his arm had become a tree trunk. "I think maybe a tiny bit more" the syringe was depressed a little more, the cold feeling travelled up his arm again, it hit his head with more dizziness. "Some people panic at this point, I want to reassure you that you will be perfectly safe, we have a highly trained medical team on call and the whole experiment is being recorded. You will find that you can't move any part of your body except your eyes, breathing is automatic. If you are panicking then you need to let me know, I can stop the procedure at this point. Move your eyes rapidly from left to right if you are having trouble, if you are okay then look straight at me." JJ was thinking of the money, and how pointless this exercise would be if he chickened out; part of him didn't want to go through with it.
JJ looked into the doctor's eyes. "Brilliant! Sarah bring the interface matrix over and start the stochastic resonator program, JJ close your eyes, we are going to put earphones on you, you will hear nothing but a little white noise, a gentle hiss. The only sensory input you will have will be from the interface". Before JJ closed his eyes he took a last look at the smiling face of the young girl with the green eyes ". The interface will synchronise to aspects of your brain activity, it will not be a sudden input, it will be as though you are dreaming." The huge machine was on rails, it was shaped like an arch and it completely enveloped JJ, sliding over him.

JJ was now cut off from the real world, dark and silent.
"Let's use the 56 memory card!" Robert looked around for approval but was met by resigned surrendering faces." It will be okay he can take it" Clearly he was in charge of them.The smiling face was frowning now, her green eyes glancing towards JJ .

JJ waited, he waited for quite a while, his mind started to drift, he thought of the girl called Isobel he met at the Student Union Bar, the seriously deep kiss he gave her. His thoughts wandered, relaxed, drifting. Thoughts came to him but he couldn't hold onto them, he was aware that it was impossible for him to concentrate on any one particular thought. Somewhere in the core of JJ's mind, the part that was the very essence of his being was disturbed at not being able to grasp a thought, to freeze it and examine it. JJ tried to force his mind to think of just one thing, the £100, it was no good, fireplaces, fish, roads, swam through his head. After several tries it became easier to hold an object in his mind, the time he could dwell on a subject appeared to be getting longer. JJ held the image of the smiling face, it stayed, he could think of the hair colour, the shape of the nose, the green eyes. JJ was happy after a time that he could finally think, use his mind, he had fought off whatever drug they had given him, and he relaxed. JJ sank into comfortable darkness.

JJ found himself very aware, aware that he was in complete darkness, that there was no sound and he could feel nothing. JJ felt that there must be something around him, he was aware of the position of his limbs (he appeared to be in a standing position) but there was no pressure or feeling anywhere to indicate what supported him. JJ reached upwards with his arms and could find no ceiling. He reached out to the sides and could feel no walls. Tentatively he reached down to where he thought his feet were, he stooped and felt below the level of his feet, reaching down as far as he could he found no floor! JJ was suspended, nowhere, there was a sense of being in a tunnel, if he could only reach a bit further then he would probably touch the sides. The tunnel grew into a very real, solid entity in JJ's mind. Although he couldn't see the tunnel and although the tunnel may not have existed at all it became a part of his 'spatial map', just out of reach but reassuringly there; even if it only existed in his mind.
A gentle wind started to blow down the tunnel, JJ had his first tactile input for some time. The wind was a shock as it was unimpeded by clothing! He could feel the hairs on his body being stroked softly by the breeze. The breeze seemed to concentrate on his genital area, the skin on his full erection was very tight, the wind played over it's surface. There was a very primitive and focussed urge in his loins.

The darkness was dissolving; faces slowly came into being. He was surrounded by fully clothed people, all staring at his penis! JJ's hands instinctively went to shield his private parts from view. He was at the centre of a crowd in a large hall with all around windows, a wooden floor, one door. They were all looking towards him, the nearest were trying to move his hands, to gain access to his penis. For a while he panicked and fought them off, but he began to realise they were not real. Although solid enough to his senses they seemed to lack individual will, they looked at him but he was certain they didn't see him. His embarrassment subsided, along with his unwanted erection. Somewhere some distant thought was telling him that this was all part of some experiment, he pushed the ogling people out of the way as he moved towards the doorway. The crowd made it hard for him. JJ could see a face through the window in the door, it was looking right at him, it looked a lot more real than any of the people around him, it was beckoning to him. He reached the door and stared right at the person on the other side, JJ could see the man was wearing a blue shirt. The man on the other side of the door looked as though he was desperately trying to open the door. JJ tried the door from the inside, with both of them working at it the door started to open up, just a small crack. JJ looked through the glass at the man on the other side, he had a small scar under his eye and he looked determined to gain entry to the room. Suddenly all the people in the room were no longer intent on pointing at him, they all surged forward and tried to close the door. As the scene faded he studied the face behind the door and tried to hang onto it's memory.

"He's coming round!" An echoing voice penetrated through the mind's fog. JJ felt fuzzy headed, hung over. "JJ, try to hold on to the images before they fade, play it over a few times in your head, you will remember better when you write it up". It was the technicians voice. "I'm not sure I want to remember! I feel a bit shitty, how long before it wears off?"

JJ had £100 coming to him soon, he had a little bit of space before his overdraft caused expensive letters from the bank; at first they threw money at him but now they seemed to be hoovering out his pockets. He held a scrap of paper with Isobels phone number on. JJ pondered for a while but found the courage and picked up the phone, he dialled slowly. The ringing tone seemed to go on for ever... "Hi Isobel, it's erm, the guy you met down the Union club" He tensely waited for a reply. "Wednesday? Well I was a bit out of it really, guess we all were you know. I didn't expect you to remember me at all." JJ visualised her, he placed her in a hallway, probably her parents but maybe in digs with a load of other people. All the bins full up, no food in the fridge, weird posters everywhere and a few skunk plants growing behind the net curtains. Maybe a home made bong in a bowl of water standing on the kitchen table? Or was it her parents. He was still undecided where to invite her to, they seemed to get on so well at the do but then they were pissed, what would she be like in the daylight?
"How about we go and see 'The Black Crows' down at the 'China Rooms'?" I'll get the tickets this afternoon...We could meet at the 'City', it's right next to a bus stop, then move down the 'Rooms' when it starts?" JJ waited. "Mmm ahhm, okay. I can't get to the 'City' until about 6:30 is that okay?" Okay? If it meant he would see her then it certainly was okay. "Sure, I'll see you down the 'City' then, 6:30? I'll be watching out for you through the window" Wow, yes, yes, he just made a date with the sexiest woman in he world! He cleaned himself up and got the bus into town, wishing he had a Lotus, a Sunbeam, or at least an MG. JJ bought the tickets and found himself at the 'City' with a few hours to kill before Isobel was due to arrive. There were very few people in the 'City', this was the hour or so after work, people with their heads in newspapers that they'd had no time to read in the morning. A few beers to dull the mind before facing the reality of owning a house and being married with kids. He sat at the bar near the window, if Isobel was early then he would see her from here. JJ went over to the juke box and tried to find some of the tracks that he vaguely remembered Isobel liked from the student union bar. He put two pound coins in then scrolled through, selecting a few tracks for himself as well as those for Isobel. Nobody looked very chatty in here, everyone was sat at their own table, as JJ made his way back to the bar the first track came on, disappointingly quiet, well it was quite early. He ran through the 'dream' in his head, there wasn't much to it really. JJ thought he could easily write it up in an hour or so, an easy £100, a few more of those would be good. JJ trawled through his memories of Isobel at the Student Union Bar, did he ask her what course she was doing? He couldn't remember. All he had left was the memory of her heady perfume and the taste of her lips, everything else had faded into a dim fuzz.
There was a knocking sound at the window, looking up he saw a face that made him feel suddenly alert, it wasn't Isobel, it was the face from the dream, the face with the small scar that had been trying to get into the room of embarrassment. The face looked from left to right, it beckoned to him to come outside. Curious and a little anxious JJ went outside to meet this dream fragment. Standing in the doorway of the 'City' JJ looked up and down the street, across the road, it was deserted, the man with the familiar but unknown face was gone. It started to drizzle and JJ made his way back to his place by the window. He sat sipping his beer and hoping the rain would not put Isobel off coming out. He puzzled over the face, what did the man want? How could he exist even? It had to be the weirdest thing, recognising somebody from a dream in the shitty, raining real world.
JJ saw her, she was smiling under a big black umbrella. He waved, let it rain, let it thunder, hail and snow he thought, she made it. At least his beer goggles hadn't added anything to her looks, she looked just as sleek and smooth now that he was sober (well two sips, that was sober). Her umbrella now folded she sat at the table, "Hi" a huge smile beamed at him, full of happiness and promise. Many faces looked up from their lonely tables, looks of desire, jealousy perhaps. JJ noticed the looks and it made him feel lucky, lucky to have Isobel here at his table. "What would you like to drink?" JJ could smell her perfume, the same perfume, it pushed his adrenaline up a notch.
"An Archers would be nice"
"Okay, won't be a sec" JJ brought her drink back to the table, looking around he noticed the stares had died down, people were back to their papers. JJ looked at her over the table and wondered how the night would go "did you see a guy with a blue shirt in the road, just before you got here?"
"No, why, do you owe him money?" Isobel laughed.
"I thought I recognised him through the window, but he was gone when I went to look." JJ grinned "It's only the bank I owe money to.

"You just looked a bit serious when you mentioned him, who did you think he was?" JJ didn't want to go down this road, how could he say 'oh I met him in a dream' no, time to change the subject. "He looked like an old friend, couldn't be sure, shall we go after this drink. It's dead in here and the duke box is set to minimum volume."
"Sure, how about the 'Mucky Duck' for one before the "China's" open up" Isobel finished up her drink and gathered her umbrella.

"Okay the 'White Swan' then. Glad that he'd found out it's nickname recently. Pubs wandered in and out of favour with the students, sometimes one would stay a favourite for months, others might be popular for only a few weeks. The long term favourites normally came about through well known students having jobs in them or a particularly good juke box.
They had been in the 'China Rooms' for about an hour, the band
was good and they had decided to buy the CD afterwards. JJ
needed the loo, "I have to go, won't be long"
"Okay, I'll keep the table." JJ made his way through the noisy throng to the toilets. As the door closed behind him the sound level from the band abruptly diminished. JJ looked at himself in the mirror, a bit hot and red faced, better not drink too much just in case he got lucky. He splashed cold water over himself and combed his hair. As he turned around he had a shock, the man with the blue shirt and the little scar was standing right in front of him. "Hey! How do I know you, I've seen you before." The blue shirted man looked quite calm, the opposite of JJ. "Of course you have seen me before, and you think it was in a dream don't you?" His voice was throaty, breathy.
"Ah, yes, I saw you in an experiment, a dream experiment." JJ was getting used to the man now and was calming down a little. "I can't tell you too much at once, you wouldn't believe me anyway. The best thing I can do at the moment is to give you a few pointers, well actually just one to start with. You are an Art and Design student so you must have some kind of imagination?"
JJ frowned "How do you know what course I am doing?"
"I know a lot of things, sometimes even next week's lottery numbers, but I can't give you those. What I am going to give you is a pair of dice."
"What for!" JJ looked puzzled.
"Look, you will just have to trust me JJ. I want you to try these dice near the bar, in here, in the car park. There is nothing special about them, they are not loaded or anything. Try not to let anyone see and don't discuss this with anyone yet." He handed a very small transparent box to JJ, inside was a pair of tiny dice. "I don't have much time, I have to go very soon" JJ looked at the box he was holding and tried to open it. "No! Use them in the box, otherwise you need a surface for them to land on. The surface will modify the outcome."
"Who are you, what's your name?"
"Call me Blue, Have some fun tonight, I know that you will!
Forget me for a bit."
"Okay Blue, I am totally puzzled."
"Just try the dice, but don't speak of me or the dice." Blue went into one of the cubicles and closed the door, his voice became more distant and muffled "you are different, the way you dealt with the entrance, you must tell me one day. The rain was good, didn't expect that; you've got puddles and everything here."
"I still don't understand, what entrance? What are these dice for?" JJ waited for a reply. "Hey! What does dice have to do with meeting someone from a dream." No reply "Are you some kind of con artist trying to sell me some gambling shit? Or a drug dealer? Hey! "Silence. "Hey!" Nothing. "Hello! You in there?" He banged on the door, it fell open, it was empty. JJ looked at the back, a barred window, a space at the bottom leading to the next empty cubicle; all the cubicles were empty. He put the dice in his pocket and decided that whatever just happened was not going to spoil his chances with Isobel. He hurried back to the table.
"Sorry I took so long, there was this guy, he wouldn't stop talking". She still smiled, she without a care.
JJ became aware that the crowd was looking towards the door. Conversation stopped, the band was quiet anyway as they were between numbers. A policeman, followed by seven more in single file slowly entered and then surrounded a table on the opposite side of the room. JJ looked over like everyone else, he saw only two people at the table surrounded by eight uniformed policemen, the couple bore a striking resemblance to Isobel and himself. The light show continued to play patterns on faces, walls and stripes. The police uniforms looked particularly bright. The pair were taken away through a human tunnel, a void created in the crowd. After their departure, the band started up again. "Another drink?" JJ was euphoric, what a night, good band, weird police raid to chat about later and a spicy woman.
JJ found himself being invited in for a coffee, it was not her parents house, she was living in digs just like most of the other students he knew. There were a couple of guys sat around on a worn out 3 piece, they sounded a little too relaxed, JJ was sure if he looked around he would find a skunk plant behind the net curtains. A stolen road lamp lit the room, there was a dense aroma of home grown, the music on the CD was slow and easy. "Hi, 'ssgood, come and sort these files with us" said a voice. There were heaps of paper strewn all over the place and three neat piles of presumably sorted paperwork.
"Lets go upstairs, I've got some cool music" Isobel sighed, looking towards the sleepy blokes on the sofa "Yeah, upstairs sounds good". He had a bad feeling about staying down with these fug heads; sorting files?. They walked up the worn carpet, pale brown, past shelves of books, the owner was working abroad, no doubt an inventory of contents had been signed by someone, including all the books. Isbobel opened the door to her room.
There was a smell of incense, a small shelf unit stacked with popular and unpopular books. The bed looked untidy, next to it was a cheap music system. In the corner a walk-in cupboard, clothes tightly squashed in. The lighting was dim, it's source obscured by a pile of books and CDs.
Isbobel looked towards him, "Would you like a drink?". JJ thought that one would probably be okay, he could do with his senses intact if he was to enjoy what he thought was coming. "Yes thanks, I want to be lucid though, I want to remember this evening for ever." Isobel went to the CD player and put on some instrumental music. She lay down on the single bed and pointed to a vacant patch. "Come and sit here, tell me about yourself, it was too loud to chat earlier."
JJ was close enough to smell her heady perfume, his adrenaline level went up another notch. Isobel poured out two glasses of wine and sipped from one of them. She leaned towards JJ, her lips expecting to kiss. JJ slowly approached her lips with his own, as they touched he was briefly aware of their warmth. As their lips made contact JJ found his mouth rapidly filling with cool wine, at first an unexpected shock. Isobel had 'injected' his mouth with wine from her lips! This was a level of eroticism that he had not known of before. This act was sensual and symbolic, his loins ached with anticipation. Isobel undid her top and let it fall open, she took JJ's hand and placed it on her bosom, she still had a bra on but JJ could feel the nipple hardening. He slipped his hand under the lace material and found the turgid nipple. Isobel reached behind her back and popped her bra fastener. JJ looked for a few seconds at her wonderfully shaped breasts and then took her nipple into his mouth, his hand gently cupping the other breast. Isobel reached down and slowly unzipped his trousers, JJ reciprocated. They removed each other's clothing and lay locked in a close naked embrace on the tiny bed. They stroked and explored each other, their lips and bodies in intimate contact. After a while, penetration was inevitable. JJ slipped slowly in, Isobel sighed. They climbed the hill until they were almost exhausted, they reached a plateaux just before the peak and fell apart breathless and heated.

Chapter 2 Paul's home built scanner
Paul needed to get thoroughly relaxed, after years of hunting for scarce and expensive parts he had completed his project. Soon he would test it. In front of him were 4 cold beers and a handful of ready-made joints. His mobile phone was switched off, the batteries were out of his doorbell. He sat back and opened the first cold beer, taking a few large mouthfuls he sat back and started to wind down. Paul was sure it was going to work, the most difficult thing was the liquid nitrogen, he had to use a thermos flask with a hole drilled in the cap to transport it. Without a hole in it the flask would explode but with it there was a slow loss. Paul had eventually managed to get enough into the cooling system for it to work effectively. Most of the parts for the cooling system came from a man he had met on the train, Dave his name was, Dave never even wanted any money. Paul lit up a joint and drew hard on it, good stuff, he could feel it soothing him. His mind drifted as he got though more beer and more smoke, when he felt he was relaxed enough Paul made his way to the room in the converted cellar, taking one more joint with him. He powered up the system and positioned himself on a large armchair in an alcove, on the keyboard near him he opened up the control software. After a big draw on his joint he extinguished it, he hoped the nicotine in the tobacco would not start up his smoking habit again. He took a tablet from a small metal box, this would finish him off, he would be incapable of movement soon. Paul pressed the enter key and closed his eyes, all he could hear was the humming of disk drives, he relaxed and tried to detect any changes in his thoughts. The hash was quite strong and in combination with a small amount of alcohol made him feel pleasantly tired, soon the tablet would kick in. Paul sank into darkness. He could feel himself slowly falling. Paul was loosing all his senses very slowly, he was aware that he had no access to a vast amount of his memory, he was no longer sure that he was actually sitting in his cellar. Paul didn't care, everything was going, fading away. All that was left was an awareness of his existence, there were no memories although he knew they existed somewhere, finding them was too much effort. There were no feelings and no memories at all, he was nothing. The only reason Paul knew he existed was that he could hear a whistling sound, he reasoned( this had not gone, he was still able to think but not to draw on his memory or hold onto images) that this could be a medical problem, he could be about to die, this didn't induce fear, there were no emotions. Everything was dark.
The whistling sound grew louder. Fuzzy images began to appear. Paul watched as a map appeared bellow him, as though he was parachuting from 15,000 feet. Paul found that he had some control over the direction he was 'falling' in, he thought it best to land in an area that did not look "built up". Some areas looked very complex whereas others seemed to be vast fields of the same colour, Paul aimed towards a large brownish area, devoid of detail. When He landed he found that the ground was indeed brown and that it lacked any detail whatsoever. The sky was pale blue with no clouds, Paul could not see the sun but it must have been shining as he could see the brown ground and the blue sky. Paul looked around and saw an area in the distance that looked a little higher than the brown plain, it looked as though it had some detail in it.
As Paul's feet struck the perfectly flat, perfectly brown ground, they made an odd clicking sound, there was no echo, no other sound, there was no sense of wind on his face. He continued putting one foot in front the other, aiming for the area of detail he had seen earlier. After about half an hour of walking through this minimal landscape Paul discovered that there was some unevenness to the ground, small geometric hillocks and indentations started to appear as he progressed.
Paul was beginning to think that his very expensive and time consuming project was going to turn out not so interesting after all, there was no detail here at all. He carried on in the same direction, looking for something different. As Paul scanned his virtual environment he noticed that one of the indentations was blue at the bottom, odd in this totally brown plain. Paul looked closely at the polygonal dent in the ground, he could see specks of light moving about on the surface. Paul gently touched the specks of light with his finger, instantly all the scintillating specks moved towards his finger, they swarmed over him for a few seconds causing no sensation but unnerving Paul slightly. The flickering points of light covered his whole body and entered all of his orifices. Just as Paul felt overwhelmed and suffocating the dots of light diffused back into the depression and then started travelling towards the raised area he was heading for, they formed a straight line, slowly becoming fainter as they gained speed.
As Paul neared the higher ground more and more detail became apparent, colours other than brown, more hills and more depressions. The first hills had been very angular, they all looked like they had been constructed from small square bricks; as he went on the bricks got smaller, the hills looked smoother and more curved.
The sound his footfalls made were very different now, there was a definite reverberation. There was a faint sound coming from ahead. Paul became aware of a breeze on his face, he became aware of small discomforts such as his shoes feeling tight. Just ahead Paul could see a large square structure, it had no features apart from a doorway, Paul felt drawn to it. On entering the building Paul saw there was no furniture in the room, the walls where covered in moving dots of light, just like the ones he had come across earlier. There was a sound behind him and Paul turned quickly, he was shocked to suddenly find himself in the presence of a man. The man had a blue shirt and small scar under his left eye, the man spoke in an odd throaty whisper of a voice "How did you get in here?"
"This place is not real, I am not here, I am unconscious in my cellar, connected up to the Internet via hardware I made myself and software I wrote myself." Paul replied.
The man with the blue shirt looked frozen in thought, he paused as though searching his memories "Yes, This place is quite real, it might only exist as noughts and ones, highs and lows, but it does exist. Your software has integrated into the net and you are experiencing representations of data, movements of data. You must have noticed any lack of detail in this landscape? There is not much memory available to represent this area; however," the man gestured to the raised area, "there is a lot of detail over there".
"Who are you? How are you here?" Paul was puzzled.
"You may as well call me Blue, everybody else here does; it's due to the fact I never bother to change the colour of my shirt, it would only require the change of a single bit of data but I keep it primary blue. It's also the colour of my shirt in reality, it reminds me of who and what I really am; effectively an invalid at the moment.
I am held against my will in a hospital somewhere, I am paralysed from the neck down, they keep me alive because I am very useful to them, they are studying me because I am able to resist their programming techniques. If they knew somebody else was getting in here the same way I do then there would probably be trouble."
Paul looked anxious "What sort of trouble?"
"Bad trouble, there are a few other people like us here at the moment, they don't know it though. These people think that they are dreaming or doing an experiment. All the other people you will meet are simply representations of data, software simulations. I want you to do me a favour, in the high resolution area over there is a man called JJ. JJ thinks he is in the real world, it would shock him to find out suddenly where he really is, it could cause him damage. JJ has some very useful skills in this place."
"What is it you want me to do? I am not used to this place and I don't know how long it will be before I am woken by the alarm I set." Paul looked at Blue, the shirt certainly was primary blue, and totally unblemished.
"Oh, you set an alarm; I should be able to work it out, how long did you set it for?" Blue rubbed at the scar under his eye.
"I gave myself an hour"
"The area you landed in was very low resolution, very fast subroutines, so the time 'outside' would go very slowly compared to here. Where we are now there is a little more processing power being used whereas over on the raised area so much detail makes everything run slowly, even slower than 'outside'." Blue took what looked like an ordinary calculator out of his pocket. "I knew when you reached this zone, my scintillas found you, what did you think of them?" Blue pointed to the shifting pattern of dots on the wall.
"I expected them to itch like ants or something, but I didn't feel them at all. What are they?" Paul looked closer at the points of light winking on and off.
"I wrote the code for them a few years ago, you can have a copy if you like, they do a lot of work for me and largely go unnoticed by any searching stuff out here. Give me your email address and I will send it as an attachment." Paul gave his email address, thinking how odd was to give it to someone in such an insubstantial place. "Here, take this calculator, the time you have left is displayed top right. You will notice you have 56 minutes left, as you get nearer the high ground the countdown will speed up, it will speed up if any complex events take place such as car crashes or explosions. The 'rate of time' elative to the outside world is shown top left, at the moment it says 2, this means 2 minutes in reality is an hour where we are now. When you get into the centre of town this figure will increase to hundreds, giving you only a few minutes." Paul took the calculator and put it in his pocket.
"Won't you need it anymore?" Paul patted his pocket.
"Hey I wrote it, I have copies! Look." Blue produced another identical calculator, and pointed to the wall. All the scintillas swarmed around and slowly formed hundreds of calculators. "When you get back outside, look through the code I have already sent you. You must know C, C++? Assembler, Assembly language is best really? High level languages are no good, too much going on in the background. There are plenty of comments dotted around, if you got this far you should understand it. I have put a whole library of routines in there, you must try shovel.cpp, see what you can dig up ha ha."
"How do I find this JJ?"
"That's easy, I will show you on this wall. I wish I could come with you but they would notice, I can't spend long in very high activity areas, they would notice the time, they would want to know how I was spending that time. It is very hard to hide things, I have learned to store some of my memories here, to erase them from my living mind."
Blue stared at the wall, a map faded into view." You will enter from here, you will start seeing people a little further on, they are not real people, they are data streams. Try not to interact too much with the people, they are part of an experimental simulation, you may affect the outcome. If it looks as though the simulation is being interfered with then you will be 'removed' by the simulated police force. I had to create a copy of our friend JJ to stop him from being removed. I don't want to have to do that too often, lots of extra memory, processing power etc." "And THEY would notice? Who are THEY?" Interrupted Paul.
"They are very powerful and quite ruthless. We don't think they are one single organisation but are formed of many parts. They think that they are above the law, effectively they are. One of their most potent tools is advertising, you may have heard of subliminal advertising? This is not subliminal advertising, it is far more effective and it took us a long time to work out what was going on. These people have a staggering level of control over peoples thoughts. They will find you in the real world if you upset them. I am interesting to them, I have the ability to resist but I am fighting them from within. I must remain hidden and scattered thinly."
"What do I do when I find JJ?"
"I want you to get him to realise that he is dreaming still, there is a lot more to it. There is something he can do with his mind that will be useful. I want to get him out here where there is plenty of time, I want to find out how he does something that nobody else can. I want him to realise for himself that something odd is going on, we can't just tell him. He must NEVER meet me again, that would cause unknown issues; I can't explain exactly why but we can never exist together. "
"You have met him then?"
"Oh yes, but I don't seem to be able to communicate, something always happens; I think there must be some fundamental rule operating but lets not get bogged down by technicalities."
"How do I point him gently towards this realisation?"
Blue opened his hand, inside was a pair of dice inside a transparent box. "As a programmer you must realise that producing a truly random number is not possible using software, it is a weakness in a lot of software, most apparent in encryption applications. To create mathematically unpredictable numbers you must have some external and unpredictable noise source, even then the source may have peeks or troughs in certain ranges. I built a noise generator some years ago that refused for some reason to produce the number 106 very often, if you ran it for a long time then all the other numbers were quite equally liable to occur, for some reason 106 only happened 4 times against all the other 255 numbers happening in their millions. I never did find a reason for it, but that made it more real. A few months later 106 became equally likely to appear
so I was unable to explore further JJ has a pair of dice, I gave them to him, they are not biased in any way. They will appear to work quite well in parts of the simulation area but out here they will be a bit predictable, at the point where you entered they would be totally predictable. Anything that requires a lot of memory space or processing power will be a clue. Something like a newspaper for example, it would be full of meaningful articles in the high resolution areas, gradually as you approached this area the pictures would become obscured. All the pictures would be distorted like in the newspapers when they try to conceal somebody's identity; a load of squares. The writing would become meaningless, replaced with bababababababab or similar. By the time a newspaper simulation got to the area you entered it would be a single sheet of grey paper. The dice will show up some clues even within the raised area, empty parts for example. A newspaper is a good tool for detecting outside influence. Don't give him a big shock by telling or showing him everything at once. You can come back when you like but JJ is limited at the moment by his beliefs. Just point him a little, he has a big role ahead."
"I'll see what I can do, this is weird, I thought I would be the
only one here, I came here to escape reality." Paul sighed
"My reality is a lot worse than yours, this place has become my life, part of me will still be here when I die I am seeing to that! My reality is the inside of a white room with black curtains, being fed by a nurse, all my bodily functions done for me. By the way, don't get tempted by the stuff you can experience in here, it will make you feel hollow, bad inside. You can get trapped. Anything you have imagined is possible, but realise that the real you is conked out and vulnerable in the outside world. Don't do anything you couldn't live with in your own world, don't treat this as a dreamland." From his face Paul could see that maybe Blue had sampled the extreme and knew first hand what it would do.
"Okay, I will stay away from the porn, I have a good sex life anyway."
"That's very easy to say, you may find that you don't know what really turns you on yet, you are young. Just watch out, don't think with your knob only your head. I have an advantage over you, don't forget that you are in your cellar under your home built scanner, hooked up to the internet; I have access to your PC. You can't hide anything from me, your head will light up like a Christmas tree if you lie to me!"
"How disturbing! You must let me have some secrets!"
"You can have as many secrets as you like, I will never know them unless you lie about them, I ...would never deliberately probe. I would probably find it quite depressing if I saw for example your mental image of what I was like in reality. I have learned a lot since I lost my freedom, I have a good degree of control over my thoughts, if I didn't then I would just be sinking into the empty dark. Here I have a lot of freedom, watch this!" Blue started to dissolve into many black dots, they morphed into a huge bird. The bird rose gracefully and circled above. "Onwards and upwards Paul, further up and further in." Blue the bird circled once more then shot off at an impossible speed over the hill ahead. A line of scintillas flowed out of the square structure and headed for the hill ahead.

Chapter 3 Paul meets JJ, JJ meets the Police

Paul looked at the calculator, he had 40 minutes left in the real world but this place was running faster. He found the street entrance, details started to fill out everywhere. There were huge advertising boards at frequent intervals on the walls of the buildings, the boards were all empty. Paul found the empty adverts quite distracting as there seemed to be images on them when he saw them from the corner of his eye but looking directly at them caused them to fade out. He was sure at one time that he could see an image of a well known soft drink but trying to look at it, to read the name and it was gone. Paul stopped trying to see the adverts. He could see his first simulated people milling around just ahead, they all looked quite busy, busy with tasks that would never cause them to pass the boundary into the low res world. Every time the simulated people came close to the boundary something happened to distract them back towards the high res area. JJ avoided the simulations as much as possible and headed for the building that Blue had shown him. The transition was quite abrupt, if he looked closely then the detail was there to be seen. Of course the detail didn't exist until he looked at it. A plain house brick was a terracotta coloured rectangle and quite smooth; if he looked closer then the simulation would fill in details, cracks, blemishes and other slight defects. If he had a microscope then he may be able to see fine particles in the brick, but this detail would only be filled in when it was being observed. Detail was supplied on a need to see basis, it was very expensive in terms of memory and processing time. Unnecessary things such as litter, puddles, insects and other annoying things were all absent. This perfect simulation of a street was where he was supposed to find JJ.
JJ awoke, he was surprised that he had managed to sleep at all lying next to Isabel. He felt very special, very privileged, the silly joke "smile if you had sex last night" popped into his head, and he smiled. For a while he had that warm and smelly, comforting moment, usually reserved for married or long term couples; partner gone to kitchen, breakfast sounds and smells, sun pushing it's way into the room. Fresh fabric conditioned sheets, a feeling of contentment and peace, of............... perhaps more to come.
"Morning" Isabel looked at him, he felt so good deep inside.
"Wow, I can't believe I slept so well, I'm starving now though"
"Hardly surprising, it's almost lunchtime, stay right there, I'll pop out for bacon sandwiches, there's a place down the road." Isabel was already dressed, off she popped, down the road for the promised sandwich. JJ wallowed in the present for a while.
The doorbell rang. The doorbell rang several times, obviously the fug heads were still conked out. It invaded JJ's thoughts like a slap in the face. Who the hell could be ringing the doorbell! If it was a salesman then he had had enough of pretending:
Already got one mate, don't need one.
My brother does double-glazing, he can do it.
That's what I do for a living, I'll do it myself.
Can't afford it, loads of CCJs.
I give to charities at funerals, instead of flowers.
The bible was written by men, more than one of them!?
Have you heard of the protection from harassment act 1997?

JJ psyched himself up to tell whoever was at the door to simply fuck off. He had heard all the stories before, he knew he wouldn't actually say "fuck off" but it was close to the surface. He opened the door.
"Hi JJ, you don't know me, my name's Paul. I've come to remind you about the dice you were given in the toilets." It was the best thing Pete could come up with, he had been wondering what he would could say all the way to the door. This would hopefully start the enlightenment process off nice and smoothly.
"You know that 'Blue' guy then? What planet is he from!? Freaked me out he did. Staring through the window at me, telling me weird things in the bogs at the 'Rooms'. Who the hell are you then?"
"I'm Paul, like I just said, and you are JJ, don't ask me why I
am here. I do know 'Blue' but I only met him recently. Have you
aah, interacted much with the people around here. You have to be
careful"
"What do you mean 'interacted' and what do you mean 'round here'. I have the best woman I ever met." JJ looked back into the house. "I just woke up to my perfect woman lying next me, when she gets back I think I'll take her straight back to bed." We talked for hours last night, she has the same kind of ambitions I do, likes the same music, the same places, she is perfect. Just say..."
They were interrupted by a beeping sound. Paul realised it was
coming from the calculator in his pocket. He took it out and
looked at the display, 3 minutes left! "Shit"
"What now!" JJ looked pissed off.
Paul had no idea what to do with 3 minutes, time flow here was unbelievably rapid. "It won't hurt to do what Blue told you, play with the dice. Don't have too much to do with the people here, you think this is all real don't you?." Paul decided to just come straight out with the truth. "This is all a dream, it's all in your head."
"I am not dreaming, how could I be? I just woke up, I have no idea what you are talking about" JJ was becoming quite agitated.
The calculator beeped again, one minute. JJ didn't want Paul to see him go, he had no idea what it would look like to an observer but it would clearly be odd, to be here one moment, gone the next. "I have to rush."
"What! Finish what you were saying!"
Too late, Paul had run round the corner. For Paul everything seemed to be getting darker, fading away.
"Hey, you can't just run off!", JJ chased him around the corner. There was nobody there, he looked up and down the street, nobody there. Just as Blue had vanished, Paul had gone too, in much the same way.
JJ saw Isobel coming towards him with a paper package, the bacon sandwiches. He decided not to say a word about his encounter with Paul. They made some coffee and ate the sandwiches, the others in the house didn't show, there was just the odd creak of a bed from down the hall and the occasional cough. Isobel had to go to a math's lecture but she said that JJ could use her computer to write up his work. JJ didn't say what he was writing, he just said it was a thousand word essay that had to be handed in soon. He would have preferred to be alone in the house but the others were showing no signs of getting up yet.
JJ booted up the PC and started tapping out his dream write up for the £100. He had now reached the absolute maximum on his overdraft, the hundred pounds would get swallowed up but a few more £100 would make a dent in it. It was embarrassing to relive the experience but he wrote it down, including his aroused penis. The only part he missed out was his meeting with Blue, he missed this out due mainly to his complete bewilderment. JJ was totally confused over Blue, missing him out seemed best at the moment. JJ ran the spell checker over his work, read it through one more time then printed it out, it didn't look like much on paper.
Thinking of Blue and Paul, he felt in his pocket and found the dice. He shook them up in their Perspex case, a 3 and 4 came up. The odds of getting a total of seven were quite good, JJ wasn't too good at maths, he had to pay for extra tuition to get the results he needed for University entry. He remembered doing a table of probability for two dice, obvious really, there was only one way to get 2, a few ways to get 7. He shook again 6 and 1, no surprise. After shaking several times he had failed to get any other number than 7, this was becoming quite improbable. The dice were individually quite random but always added up to 7, curious indeed. JJ bored with the novelty and put them back into his pocket, there must be some technology involved, clever. Taking his freshly printed pages he prepared to sneak out quietly. He walked stealthily down the hall.
"Alright mate, I'm making coffee, want one. Wow what a night." One of the fug heads from last night, he stood there with bare feet, uncombed hair and as yet unshaven face. JJ thought that maybe he should stay for a coffee, he may learn some of Isobel's likes and dislikes, he vaguely recognised the man in front of him from enrolment day, he was ahead of him in the queue for ID photos.
"Yeah, a coffee would be good, what you doing at uni then?"
"I'm Mike, I'm doing Art and Design, first year."
"People call me JJ, hi, I'm doing the same, second year."
"You'll have to come round one night for a few spliffs, talk about the tutors. The kitchens in here". Mike began filling the kettle.
"I don't take stuff, it dulls my imagination. I did try things in my first year, I thought it would help my imagination but it was no good. I was too knackered to write anything when I was out of my tree, when I did it was gibberish, crap. Next day I always felt like shit, soon stopped." JJ looked around the kitchen, it was surprisingly devoid of clutter and cleaner than he expected.
"Fair enough, you could be right, I got a pretty low mark for my last work, did it stoned." Mike laughed.
"You don't want to do that too often, not if you want to finish your degree. Nothing to do with me though I suppose."
They took their coffee into the lounge and made themselves comfy on the huge three piece. The table was stacked high with papers, Mike waved towards them, "I'm supposed to sort that lot out by tomorrow, I'd rather watch grass grow." Mike opened the curtains, the harsh light from outside raked across the floor, showing the texture of the carpet, it looked just like the carpet in the corridor by room 106. JJ got out of his chair and experimentally walked over the carpet, listening. He heard what he expected to hear, a soft crunching sound, exactly like fresh snow.
"What's up. Why are you walking around in circles?" Mike blew on his coffee.
"I saw a carpet like this before, made a weird sound when you
walked on it. It was in one of the University buildings"
"Hey, you mean on level 3 in the new building? I went there to make a few quid, £100 a session, it was really weird. They gave me some cool stuff, had some mad trips." Mike perked up.
"You mean you have been to that dream lab as well?"
"Is that what it is? A dream lab?"
"Well sort of, I don't know exactly what it is. They said they were going to 'replay' some dreams to me. It was a bloody embarrassing dream they gave me. I was stark naked in a room full of people, me with a raging hard on! And I just wrote it up for them." JJ held up his newly printed sheets.
"Sounds more interesting than mine, I ended up sorting out filing systems. Everyone I have met who's been in that lab all say they ended up searching through files or sorting things, you are lucky. Want to hear some sounds?" Mike pointed to the hifi system.
"Okay, I can't stay long though, I must get back to my place, people will be wondering where I am." JJ remembered the dice in his pocket. "Look, I've got some odd dice here, they always total 7 even though they both seem to be quite random individually." JJ shook the dice and got a 6 and a 2, he frowned, and tried again and got a double 3, "Erm well that's what they did earlier in Isobel's room."
"You played dice with Isobel! I thought you would have been doing other things, she's a cracker!" Mike laughed.
"No, no, after she'd gone, after I typed up my report. I tried lots of times, always 7."
"Well, let's go and try it in Her room, shouldn't make any difference." Mike started towards Isobel's room.
JJ followed him and sat at the PC where he sat before. He shook the dice up and got a 4 and 3, a 6 and 1, another 4 and 3. "See, told you!"
"Do it a few more times, could be chance." Mike looked intently at the dice. JJ threw a total of 7 time after time. "Let me have a go JJ." Mike took the dice and threw a double 3, followed by another, and another. Mike was unable to throw any other number. "Weird, where did you get these from JJ?"
"An odd guy called Blue, keep bumping into him all the time. Actually a mate of his called here a while ago, he reminded me about the dice, he told me I was dreaming. I can't be dreaming I just woke up!"
"Never heard of him, we ARE dreaming though! Of course, the first part was a repeat, this is different! Bollocks! You're going to be completely fucked up when you wake up, if this is your first time you're in for a shock, a big shock. I've never met a 'real person' in this area before, maybe we can have some fun before they stop us."

"What!" JJ stared at him.
"You've only just arrived at the dream lab haven't you? I've been here a while now, no idea in real time; days, months, longer. At first you think it's all real but after a while you get hints, like your dice. The dreams always start off the same, you never get to write it up in real life you know." Mike grimaced.
"I can't be dreaming, it's too real! Isobel!"
"She must be a simulation, you get people in here who are
simulations, they pass off as normal for a while. Don't have too
much to do with the simulations, it will hasten the police
coming"
"Why?" JJ was finding this all very hard to take in.
"No idea why it upsets the police, I've only been in this part of the net a few times, I mostly get sent to really boring places where I end up in a filing job, just like everyone else."
"I can't take all this in at once, some creeping thought in the back of my mind is telling me that you are right, I can't accept that Isobel is just a dream though. I knew Isobel before I came to the dream lab."
"She may have been put into your memory retrospectively, they can do that, horrible isn't it? In here it's hard to know the difference between true and false memories. Might as well have some fun, once you realise you are dreaming you can do whatever you like, until the police come that is."
"What do you mean 'until the police come'." JJ was feeling dizzy, too much strangeness all at once.
"I don't know why they come, when you start doing things they come and cart you off, you eventually wake up in the lab (you won't like that). Watch that part of the carpet just there." JJ looked at the patch of carpet Mike was pointing to, the pattern started to change slightly.
"What is happening?" JJ was wide eyed, gaze fixed to the moving patch of colour.
"You have to believe that something will happen, then it will. Right now I am visualising an iridescent broach, don't ask me why, just let me concentrate." The shape on the carpet bubbled up into a small dome, it's surface shone beautifully in the light from the window. Mike picked it up and gave it to JJ. "Here, hide it somewhere."
JJ examined the broach, once a pattern on the carpet in was now a solid object, "Why hide it?" JJ was beginning to feel that he really was dreaming but he could not feel the total lack of responsibility that comes with dreams. He could also feel the power of possibilities promised by lucid dreams, for those that could experience them.
"The fun lasts longer if you keep calm, try to hide anything small you do. Don't think up anything too exciting or big, they will come quicker then to spoil the fun. Try to avoid sexual things, they are too exciting, you will attract attention. Watch this" Mike's face was full of concentration. JJ hid the piece of jewellery behind the computer monitor.
"What about Isabel last night?"
"You didn't realise you were 'dreaming' so that caused no problems. Watch the wall."
JJ looked towards the wall, faint shapes began to appear, at first there was no particularly recognizable image. Soon a face started to form. Initially the face was only two dimensional but soon the third dimension filled it out. It was a female face with green eyes, just the face, isolated from the rest of it's body. The woman's mouth opened and she spoke.
"What would you like to know?" The eyes were deep and unnaturally blue, the hair pitch black. There was a face sticking out of the wall! Asking what they wanted to know. JJ was in no doubt now that he was in a dream world but this was not the sort of dream you had just before the alarm clock went off. This dream was far more solid than any in his previous experience, sense of responsibility for his actions was intact. JJ's usual dreams were of a more flimsy fabric, he sometimes did things in them that his waking self would never contemplate, this was different. The deep blue eyes alternated between JJ and Mike.
"Who are you?" Asked Mike.
"I am your creation, I am here to answer any questions you ask me" The eyes settled on mike.
"Where are we?" Asked Mike.
"You are data in simulation program L106 array 3, you are presently occupying 100 Terabytes of memory, this is currently increasing, the physical location of the memory is constantly changing, the memory addresses you are occupying are scattered all over the world. To summarise, you are existing within the internet."
Mike broke eye contact with the face and turned to JJ "Well, there you go, we haven't got long before the police get here now."
"Can't we run off somewhere, just scarper?" JJ started towards the door.
"Where to? They have total access. I used to try but it can get very bad if you resist.
"What if they can't get in? let me have a go at doing something." JJ closed his eyes and imagined they were in a room with no doors, he mentally built a brick wall, nicely plastered over, painted magnolia. The brick wall replaced the door that used to be there, he visualised the building, the plastering, the papering and the painting. He convinced himself that he had seen all this happen only yesterday.
"I can see what you are doing, it wont work, open your eyes."
JJ opened his eyes, the doorway was blocked and painted magnolia, a very believable colour. "Wow, I did it."
"You don't understand yet, they will be here soon, take a look at the work you wrote up." Mike was agitated.
"What for?" He picked it up anyway and scanned over the pages. JJ didn't recognise it as written by him earlier, it was missing any vowels, it was all abbreviated. As he watched the abbreviations began shortening, they were replaced by three letters: A,B,C. Finally asterisks filled the page like so many wild cards. "What's happening Mike?"
"They are restricting our memory access. Shit, look at the face I made! They are here."
JJ could see that the face was pushing itself further into the room, shoulders were squeezing through. The detail in the face was reducing, the blue eyes now grey, the skin like a plastic dummy and the hair without texture. Their attention was drawn to the lower part of the wall where black boots were now protruding. The boots were followed by legs, the rest of the body slowly dragged itself through the wall, leaving a perfect silhouette in the brickwork. The body had a uniform the same as the police he had seen in the China Rooms. Through the man shaped hole more police came in, eight in all. They were encircled.
"You are both under arrest!"
JJ looked at the source of the voice. "Surely I am entitled to know what I am being charged with?" Mike was giving him signs to shut up.
"You are entitled to know the charges" A monotone, emotionless voice. The speaker reached behind the monitor and fetched out the broach, "You have wasted precious memory space creating this object, you have interfered with this simulation enough to cause erroneous results. You are coming with us now, there will be no more questions from you." He placed the broach on the floor, it dissolved back into the carpet, exactly at the point where it came from.
JJ and Mike found themselves separated into different cars, the cars interiors were devoid of any texture and they were grey. The seats were just rectangular blocks. If the interiors were lacking then the exterior was even more so, a flat monotonous landscape was sliding past outside. There was no vibration, no engine noise , no sense of movement at all. JJ became aware that the landscape was actually projected onto the windows, the windows were like computer monitors, that explained any lack of depth. It wasn't clear if they were actually moving at all, they could be just sitting in cars watching a video of a boring landscape being played back through the windows. The view of the outside subtly changed over time, until it became simply brown at the bottom and blue at the top. There was an interesting interlude when they were overtaken by a swarm of tiny spots, the only clue that the car was still moving was a distant square shape which was increasing in size, this white square was presumably where they were headed.
The landscape movie finished, the doors opened and JJ was escorted to a reception area. They took his shoelaces, belt, and pocket contents from him. He signed for his possessions and was led to a small cell with no toilet, no bench and no graffiti. He was told the night detective would be in later to see him and that the detective would find other evidence. When the door closed JJ couldn't see the join between the door and the wall, the walls were totally white, there was no break in them now that the door was closed. The room was very bright but there was no obvious source of light, no lamps, no strip lights. The ceiling was exactly the same as the walls, so was the floor. This dream was getting depressing, JJ sat on the floor and tried to collect his thoughts. He couldn't believe Isobel was a figment of his imagination, how could he have a memory of her from before all this started? Who was this Blue guy that kept showing up. Mike probably hadn't been here much more than him, he seemed to have learned a few tricks, unfortunately escaping the police was not one of them.
JJ decided to do a little experiment, as small as possible. He closed his eyes and imagined a small black dot on the otherwise spotless floor. He imagined that he had dropped a black biro point down onto the floor, he could hear the initial impact, he visualised it rolling away and coming to a stop. JJ opened his eyes and found he had been more successful than he intended, instead of just a small dot there was a whole biro lying on the floor! He reached out to pick it up but it was stuck, he couldn't budge it. The door was opening up, the night detective! JJ stood on the pen to hide it.
An empty colourless voice issued from the night detective "You are dreaming, show me what's under your foot. You are not allowed to do that." Everything started fading, the light in the room diminished slowly, the night detective got darker and darker. There was just black, no sound, no feeling, he was alone in a vast empty void. A wind started to blow from somewhere. The wind became fierce and transformed into a severe tingling sensation, JJ had pins and needles all over his body. He just lay still for a while with his eyes closed, he felt slightly nauseous. He could hear humming noises, footsteps, voices in the background, the sounds of reality.
"We've got a waker here! One of them is awake!" An urgent voice, a female voice.
JJ opened his eyes, he was in a white room with black curtains, he had on a blue top. Someone pulled curtains around his bed; he was clearly in a hospital bed. He felt too rough to move or speak. Looking up JJ could see that the ceiling arched, the room was very long and thin as though it was a tunnel.

Chapter 4 Paul runs away
Paul came around slowly, he felt like crap, the buzzing alarm was eating into him. He just lay in his chair for a while. His full bladder was nagging at him, he was wishing he hadn't had the beer, the dope would probably have been enough. Paul tried moving an arm, it sluggishly rose with enormous effort. He cancelled the alarm and switched off the scanner. He didn't have the energy to get up and relieve himself. Paul felt wretched, unable to think straight, somehow he drifted into an uneasy sleep. A short while later, dreaming of toilets he woke. His bladder was painful and insistent, fortunately he was more mobile now although still foggy. Paul stood up and tried to walk across the room, he became dizzy and fell onto his computer monitor which crashed to the floor. He steadied himself and looked at the damage, a large and deep scratch down one side. He lifted it back onto it's stand and confirmed that it still worked. Paul crawled up the stairs and made himself more comfortable. After sleeping for several hours he felt revived enough to explore his memories, there would be quite a lot stored on his hard drives. The whole experience seemed distant and vague but not distant and fading like a dream would.
Paul booted up his PC. He trawled through junk emails, deleting them as he went. One email stood out, it was from 'blueboy@blueshirt.00.FF' there was a large attachment, a ZIP file. As he waited for the file to unzip Paul's gaze drifted to the bottom right corner of the monitor, he had set up this PC to show the date and time on the tool bar. Paul automatically compared the date with his calendar on the wall, a surreal selection of electronic components and sexy women holding them. A nasty combination of the date on the PC and the calendar day instantly shocked him into action. How could it be Monday? He set the alarm for just one hour on Friday night. Paul prided himself on never being late for work, he never even had time off sick. For the moment his memories of the last few days had to be boxed and padlocked.
Paul walked through the dark morning towards the train station. He passed at a house that he knew was painted just the right shade of blue but it looked dull orange like everything else this early on a winter's morning. He remembered the house for its window boxes on the lower and upper window sills; in the summer they had been filled with red flowers (geraniums?) The house front was straight from a page in a photographic manual, he appreciated it fully as he once had photography as a hobby. Paul had too many hobbies and not enough time. The day was chilly but it held a promise of warmth and sun later. At the station he had no need to put his ticket through the barrier machine, the duty inspector recognised him and let him through the graffiti daubed side door.
Announcements cut harshly through the misty air: "THE 6:05 TO
EXTOVIA IS DELAYED BY APPROXIMATELY TEN MINUTES." There were a few familiar faces, all stood or sat in cold electrically lit silence, their voices were silent that is; everything else was loud. A hint of dawn, salmon pink reflected off the damp shining tracks. "PASSENGERS ARE REMINDED TO STAY WITH THEIR BELONGINGS AT ALL TIMES, UNATTENDED ITEMS WILL BE REMOVED WITHOUT WARNING." The harsh, distorted voice echoed around the station, the words heard so many times they held no meaning any more. They tried to vary the voice to avoid familiarity but the words were still the same and still far too loud for this time in the morning.
Paul walked over to Dave, "Hi, only five days before the weekend. How did that mobile work that I unlocked for you?"
"Works great now, how do you know all that stuff?"
"Internet mostly, oh, I've got you the latest satellite master code, just type it into the software I gave you and you've got free satellite for a week or so." Paul noticed a small dark puddle near Dave's feet, a leak from the roof.
"Did that compressor work okay? I got that stainless steel piece made up on the CNC machine, even got paid for doing it, overtime!"
"Yeah, it worked well, thanks-" The announcement system blared out again "THE NEXT TRAIN IS NOT SCHEDULED TO STOP AT THIS STATION, PLEASE STAND AWAY FROM THE TRAIN AT PLATFORM 3."
"I wouldn't stand just there" Paul pointed to the puddle on the floor "the roof is about to drip!"

"That will be our train, we will probably miss it if they ever get the message right!" Paul stepped towards the slowing train, closely followed by Dave. They both found a decent table seat, they had the whole carriage to themselves, it was very early. Paul preferred to travel facing backwards, and towards the back of the train, he reckoned it was safest in the event of a crash. He took out his mobile phone and switched it on.
"Oh, erm I vaguely remember sending you a text yesterday night, you will probably get it now. I was a bit pissed, I don't know what I put in it."
"Sounds interesting." Paul's phone had booted up and was indeed beeping with a fresh text message. He opened up the message and read it:
Ths polish lager s gud, 2 birds nice tits, one of whome I will shag L8R.
"Well, did you?" Paul looked enquiringly at Dave.
"Did I what?" A harsh, very loud announcement interrupted their
conversation "QUIET AREAS ARE DESIGNATED ON THIS TRAIN, THESE
AREAS ARE MARKED BY SIGNS ON THE WINOWS, THESE AREAS ARE ALSO
MOBILE FREE ZONES"
"Shag one of them!"
"Ah, no, too pissed, shame really. Look! We are supposed to be in a quiet zone!" Dave pointed to the notice in the window. Once again the speaker system blurted out "CCTV IS IN USE ON THIS TRAIN FOR YOUR SAFETY AND SECURITY."
"Paul, I had this really weird dream last night. Quite odd"
"Well, tell me all of it then!" Paul looked very attentive.
"Most people aren't interested when I start talking about dreams and stuff, their eyes glaze over and they can't wait for me to shut up. Why are you interested, you aren't gay and trying for my arse are you? Dave grinned but was clearly testing the situation.
"Bollocks, I have always been interested in dreams, you may never know how interested. Tell me."
"Ok... I found myself having to walk from one side of a very scary bridge to the other. The far side of the bridge offered some unseen, only hinted at sanctuary. There was a gap in the bridge connected by a thin, unsafe, unstable plank. The valley floor lay thousands of feet bellow. My fear of the shear, unbelievable height made my legs feel weak, made me feel that falling off may be preferable to the fear that gripped me. People passed me and crossed the bridge showing no concern. I tried to avoid being bumped by the people crossing; I felt that the slightest knock or breath of wind would knock me over into the vast valley bellow. I put one foot on the shaky plank; I was compelled to cross, as soon as my foot touched the plank the fear levels rose. The plank started to crumble, the fear was too great. I jumped off into the valley bellow before the plank could disintegrate any more, part of me knew it was only a nightmare and that jumping off was the only way to escape the fear, the only way to wake up. I woke up hot and damp, I felt as though I had really been there.... Do you ever get really vivid dreams?
The announcement system squeeked into life.
Paul frowned and looked towards the loudspeaker "I couldn't use my mobile in here anyway, it's far too noisy!" They both laughed. The speaker started again "THE NEXT STATION WILL BE DELOIA, WE ARE NOW APPROACHING DELOIA".
"Thank god for that! We can get off." Laughed Paul. They still had to change to another train but they both knew that this one would be lacking in unwanted commentary. They stood close to the little sandwich booth, a scent of bacon sandwiches drifted by and tempted their taste buds.
The day was becoming a lot lighter now, the crows started gabbling, a good impression of human speech. From here you could see right across the fields, there was a hovering mist, it lay about four feet from the ground but stopped abruptly six feet further up, the dark trees struck upwards through the fog. The trees were inverted lightning strikes, searching up from the ground. Black branches against the light of the expanding dawn.
"Look at that!" Whispered Dave pointing to a sexily dressed young girl "How can she look like that at this time in the morning?"
"Your trouble is you always think with your knob, it'll get you in trouble one day."
"It already has, but what times I had!"
Paul arrived at work just as the sun had fully risen, he made their way to the canteen for a quick caffeine kick. One of the technicians was in there looking glumly at the confectionary machine, "What's up Tim?" Paul grinned at the technician.
"I just put a pound in that thing, all it's doing is showing an error message, that was the only pound on me." It was one of those glass fronted machines with various kinds of crisps and chocolates. Sometimes things fell wrong and got stuck, people were always tilting it's huge weight, banging it and shaking it in attempts to retrieve what they had paid for. Paul reached down and switched it off at the mains.
"What are you doing! I'll loose my pound!"
Paul glanced at Tim, "Hang on, watch" Paul held two of the keys down while he switched on with the other hand. The display lit up, flashed a few times and a new message popped up SYSTEM SETUP MENU, Paul selected free vend. There, pick what you want Tim."
"What did you press?"
"Can't tell you, just keep it quiet and take advantage until they find out it's developed a, er, problem." Paul went to put some cold water in his coffee, it was far too hot as usual. "Don't let that blue arsed manager Bob catch you, he's classic manager material, dragged himself up from the bottom. We are lucky here, there are no real arseholes to deal with, Bob is tame really; managers in some companies are psychopaths, the odd good one is promoted reluctantly into their position, only because someone thinks that they are controllable and will work like buggery to please everyone. Someone to blame for their mistakes! The clue is that they are usually far more interested in football than in the technical aspects of their job; in fact they have very little technical knowledge and for some reason they are proud of this. Perhaps they are saying to themselves 'look at me!
I earn loads more than you, I can tell you what to do! What is
the point of learning all the things you have learned?' Well we
will just continue stirring their tea with our knobs and dropping
the odd bit of bird shit into their cups! Bob is okay though"
"You're the bloke who hacks stuff aren't you? Satellites and things?
"Why?" Paul supped his coffee and frowned, what did Tim want?
"Well only curiosity really, I just wondered how you crack some of the codes, there are just too many combinations, the numbers are too big."
"I thought you were going to ask me to crack something" Paul's expression eased up. "The answer to that is simple, "I" don't, there are thousands of us. You must have heard that it would take a computer running flat out hundreds of years to work out a particular code? Well how about hundreds of thousands of computers, some of them used without their owners knowledge, working in the background? Some of the possible numbers can be eliminated straight away, the rest are shared out amongst all our members, after a while we have it down to maybe a few thousand possibilities which are redistributed. Eventually we find the master code and publish it, hey presto free satellite until the master code changes."
"I don't know why you bother the programs are so crap, all the good ones are repeats anyway. Mind you there is some good porn late at night!"
"Oh, I don't watch it! You're right, it sucks your brains out. It's good practice for other stuff and I get a big kick when I am the one to come up with the master number, ok it's a bit nerdy but it's not so easy. As for the porn, I prefer the real thing; I must get to my desk, probably loads of emails by now, see you later. Don't eat too much of that junk in the machine!" He looked at Dave, "Hey, remember there is an ISO inspection tomorrow, see me after break, they always find something wrong, suppose they have to justify their fee."
"Have you seen that cyber sex thing that you can do over the internet"? Tim grinned as though he had.
"I can guess what it's like and I am not interested at all.
Things
like that will ruin civilisation as we know it."

"It's only a laugh, just some guiltless fun really." Tim defended himself.
"I think it has a very dark side to it but it's no use listening to me, I have views that are opposed to most modern technology, I could bore you to death with the reasons I think television is the most anti-social product of the 20th century. You most likely think that because I know a lot about technology that I look on it all as being a positive thing; mostly it is all just toys and things we didn't know we needed until we had them."
Paul had held many jobs over the years, usually becoming bored after 3 years or so; he was presently the IT department( only one IT person in this company, handy). Paul had many skills, he took every opportunity to go on training courses, mostly paid for by his employers. He had worked in hardware design, software design, mechanical engineering and anything else technical he happened to have an interest in at the time. His day passed fairly uneventfully, just the usual upgrade requests, and one blue screen of death. Instead of taking his lunch break in the canteen he had a sandwich at his desk. Where the odd person was still at their screen at lunchtime they were usually playing solitaire, Paul's monitor was the only one without a deck of cards displayed on it, it was similar to the one at home in his basement but without the huge scratch that he'd caused this morning! He was establishing a connection to his PC at home, he used a convoluted path to confuse anyone else who might be interested. He downloaded the email from Blue first and then set the rest to download in the background while he looked at the email and it's attached code. The code was written in C++ and came with a small library of odd sounding objects such as detectsim, dataspade, fadeself and a grim sounding endself. Paul looked through the comments in the code, it was well written, well annotated and wonderfully structured, the author was clearly very much at home with this language. As his bacon sandwich diminished in size he worked his way through some of the code. After an hour or so he was able to see how it could be possible to build programs that would interact with the software he had written for his own NMI interface. Paul left the download running in the background as he completed other routine jobs, he wanted to store a backup here at work, encrypted of course.
Paul finally finished his days work and found himself back at the train station. He usually had the whole carriage more or less to himself, today there was a young girl facing him a few chairs in front, she had a lot of baggage and no shoes on. The girl was fidgeting, looking sideways at him, sometimes smiling. She spoke "I collect key rings you know, look how many I have on my bag!" She pointed to her luggage, a large rucksack, a suitcase with wheels and a few plastic bags; she indicated the rucksack. Paul saw that she did have quite a collection of key-rings attached to her rucksack. "I'm homeless you know!?" She said, she smiled and looked in an odd way towards Paul. Paul was unsure how to react, was she trying to sell her body? Was she trying to tell her life story or what? He felt uneasy, she was very young, the dark side of his mind was suppressed and the nurturing side was fighting against his cynicism. Paul's internal fight with himself caused him to give very short precise replies to her questions, later he would feel guilty. "I don't have any shoes you know, I lost them in Brighton". Paul could see that she was only wearing socks but he couldn't believe that she didn't have shoes hidden within all the bags. "Can you watch my bags while I go to the loo?" (Yes even in these days of random terrorist attacks) Paul agreed, he also felt tempted to look inside for shoes but resisted, his stop was coming up soon.

Paul arrived home, he bolted down a quickly prepared meal and then went into his basement lab. He looked up the emails from Blue. They were not there, he searched through the files manually at first but gave in and did key word searches from what he could remember. No luck, all the stuff had gone. Paul noticed the side of the monitor where he bashed it recently, there was no deep scratch in the plastic. A strange tingling awareness that something bad had happened diffused through him, making him flinch. This was not his monitor, maybe this was not his PC, it had something different about it, slightly lighter, maybe a bit cleaner? He went into command prompt mode and sifted through the directories, it looked like his work but Paul wasn't convinced. He tried to remember some items which he had deleted from the recycle bin. He found the CD ROM with his Absolute sector/disk search system that he wrote while at college. Paul had a clear memory of installing a very old version of an "expert system" program called "Four Tell", it was a load of rubbish, he was looking for inspiration at the time, some of it should still be on the disk even though those areas had been formatted since. He loaded up the source code, compiled it and left it running while he looked around the rest of the house for more signs of intrusion.
He could find nothing else that had been obviously disturbed but he felt invaded, he felt very annoyed. Paul returned to his PC after a search of the house. "String not found, search again? Or quit?" was the message he was confronted with. This was almost certainly not the same PC he had yesterday. He was always accidentally finding left over bits of that old program.
Paul trashed the PC and the flat screen monitor, he smashed them up completely in fear and rage. Later he would dump them in a random skip somewhere near a new housing estate. He also switched on a radio scanner connected to a powerful audio amplifier, looking for feedback screech if anyone had a bug in here, he was aware that this would only find a simple bug. Laser and microwave bugs could be harder to find. Paul decided to move out, he was feeling rather paranoid. Before he left he sent an email from his mobile phone to work, explaining that he was very ill and expected to be away for a while. He took all of the cash from his "Baked Bean Tin" safe in the kitchen cupboard.
Paul opened an old OS map and searched for somewhere he could stay, Accione looked a good bet. He remembered an article about a solicitor who ran away there to escape his wife; there was a before and after photo. The guy looked really overweight in the before picture and skinny and fit in the after picture. Paul seemed to recall that he got found out due to being questioned during a murder enquiry, the only way to avoid the murder rap was to admit his lesser guilt of running off with his clients money! If it was good enough for that guy then it was good enough for Paul. He looked through his B&B guide from a couple of years ago and noted some telephone numbers on a bit of paper. He searched for and finally found an old laptop with an ancient operating system, the battery was useless but he found the mains adaptor and a PCMCIA modem card. The laptop was wrapped in a jumper and stuffed into a rucksack along with spare underwear and toiletries.
The situation was causing Paul to feel very paranoid and he questioned his responses at every step. He had not felt like this since he was jumped on at three in the morning on his way home from a party (should have got a bloody taxi!) For the next six months or so he thought he recognised his assailants everywhere; usually in places where they could not have been; usually from the back or out of the corner of his eye. His usually confident and bright personality dimmed, his humour became cynical, he went out less and avoided crowded places. It wore off slowly but would always taint his world. He felt a return to paranoia and tried to resist its promise of unrelenting background fear. Paul decided that he should try to sleep, Accione was a long way. He would eat a big breakfast then move out. He didn't sleep very much at all and was glad of the first rays of light seeping into his room.
As Paul made his way to the train station he saw his favourite blue house up ahead, there seemed to be some rubbish on the pavement. As he got closer to the blue house Paul could see that the 'rubbish' on the floor was actually the dormant plants and soil from the window box. The window box was upside down and the window behind it smashed. The red curtains behind were moving slightly in the breeze. "What parasite did this!" thought Paul;
"What a nasty surprise for the people who live here, they are probably still asleep." Paul stepped around the damage and carried on to the station. The sun was crawling up into the sky, revealing night time events on the pavement.
DUE TO EMERGENCY ENGINEERING WORKS THERE WILL BE DELAYS AND
CANCELATIONS ON ALL ROUTES IN THE EXTOVIA AREA
Paul boarded the train that would ultimately take him to Accione, he had to go via Deloia though and this train would cause him to meet Dave again. He was envious of Dave's ability to be very honest about things that he himself found very difficult to admit to. Dave was so open that within a few moments of meeting him Paul knew that Dave had just finished dealing with credit card debts the hard way. Half his arm was without feeling after he was cut by a knife during a fight (he showed the scar and indicated the boundaries of his feeling) and he was living with a girl he met on an internet blind date.
There was a drunken voice ahead and to the right, there was a young lad sat by the window with his IPod stuck in his ears, sat next to him was a very hairy unkempt looking bloke. "WHAT'S THAT MUSIC YOU ARE LISTENNING TO, MM, MM." The scruffy chap nudged the young lad who somehow felt obliged to remove his earphones to listen. "WHAT ARE YOU LISTENNING TO? HEY? Call me Fffred, ssspeak to me!" The young guy was trapped between the window and the nutter; it was hard for him to escape.
The young lad looked a bit uneasy, "It's dance music."
"Dance music! Why aren't you dancing then, your foot isn't even tapping is it, hey?" The old man sounded slurred, the young man looked like he would give anything to escape the conversation; he replied however.
"I just like to listen to it. That's all." His young face shone with a grim patience.
"Do they dance like this to it!" The drunken scruff raised his arms and waved them around in some kind of acid house remembrance as he sat solidly next to his captive.
"I suppose so, I don't know." The look on the young man's face was becoming less tolerant, more internally explosive. Paul was starting to feel very sorry for him. Paul knew that they were at the back of a very long train, he decided to help the youth trapped in his seat; he decided that it would make him feel better.
"Oi Fred, remember me?" Paul raised his voice and looked forward, directly at the nutter.
"What? Whooo are you, you fffucker?" The mans hair was ginger, greasy looking. His eyes were bloodshot and half closed.
Paul had to think quickly, he saw the yellow on the tramps fingers. "Yes, you didn't like the idea of no smoking ANYWHERE after 1st of July. You were really pissed off about that, sit here Fred, talk to me, tell me about the no smoking stuff!"
Fred stood "RRRight yeah, fffuckers." He was wobbly but made it to the seat opposite Paul. Paul gestured to the poor trapped guy that he should move forward a few cars while he had the chance.
After the effort of getting up and sitting next to Paul, the scruffy old man looked like he had no energy left, he slumped down, closed his eyes and fell asleep; which Paul was thankful for.
Paul arrived on time for his connection. He walked up the stairs to the bridge that led to the other platforms, as he walked over the bridge the low sun strobed evenly through the gaps in the sides of the railings. It would be a bit higher each morning, a cheery thought.
Dave was there waiting for his connecting train as well. "Hi Paul, what's wrong?"
"Am I so transparent, do I look like I am running away?" thought
Paul. "Nothing's wrong, just feel a bit rough, couldn't get off
to sleep properly last night, kept waking up"
...PLEASE STAND WELL AWAY FROM THE TRAIN ON PLATFORM 3, THIS TRAIN
IS NOT SCHEDULED TO STOP AT THIS STATION
"I get that sometimes, usually when I've got something on my mind, like you have. What is it, do you need some more expensive devices? Too scared to ask? My employers are shit heads, I was loyal once but they pissed me off, I let them make enough to think I think I am worth keeping, all the rest is mine!"
THE 7:05 TO LONDON VICTORIA HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO AN EARLIER
CANCELLATION
"You shouldn't be so resentful Dave, life is too short, don't make it shorter for yourself."
"What do you mean Paul? By don't make it shorter?"
"I don't know, it sounded good at the time, I was miles away, probably referring to the announcement system. Shorter and quieter would be good?--- I'm not getting on the same train today Dave, I am off on a training course."
"No you're not, but good luck anyway, I wish people didn't lie, especially when there is no need."
Paul had no answer to this and stood in silence for a while.
WE WISH TO APPOLOGISE FOF THE EXTREEMLY LATE RUNNING OF THE 6:30 TO CRAENAUGH. THIS IS DUE TO A SHOPPING TROLLEY ON THE TRACKS WHICH HAS SHORTED THE SUPPLY.
"Paul"! Dave turned to speak, "I had a repeat of that dream I told you about but it was different this time."
"Go on then, tell me all about it!"

"I found myself having to walk from one part of a very scary, ridiculously high bridge to another. On the other side of the bridge was someone frozen with fear, someone who needed help. The plank spanning the gap was just as thin, just as unstable as in my last dream. There were people on the other side of the bridge but they weren't helping the person who was clearly distressed. I felt the fear rising as I moved towards the plank, as I placed my foot on the wobbly piece of wood the fear reared up making me shake. Somehow my concern for the person who was immobilized overcame my need to escape from the terror, I crossed the plank and reached the catatonic person on the other side."
Paul considered for a moment, he eventually recalled the last dream that Dave had told him of; this one started the same, but the ending was better.
THERE IS A PLATFORM ALTERATION, THE 6:06 SERVICE TO TILLTON WILL
NOW DEPART FROM PLATFORM 2
"You crossed the plank this time, what was on the other side?"
Paul was genuinely interested but Dave had to go for his train.
Paul found himself on a train with a single ticket to Accione, the odd girl with the keyrings was also on the train, a few tables down, he wondered if she recognised him, part of his paranoia thought that she was far more than a weird girl with a keyring collection. Could she be watching him, looking at his reflection in the glass window? She got off a few stops later.
Paul found that looking into the train window could provide very interesting views, especially in dark tunnels, especially when a gorgeous woman was reflected back from a few seats ahead. After a night with hardly any sleep Paul eventually succumbed to the rhythm of the train and fell into a deep sleep, the announcement system was thankfully faulty.
Paul booked himself into a B&B, he couldn't help wondering if it was the same place the solicitor from the news article chose. A diminutive lady called Jean, obviously the owner, showed him to his room. Jean was slightly arthritic and had a problem with the stairs. Paul felt a bit sorry for her when she apologised over the necessity for a price increase, the cost of the room was very cheap, and the little old lady had clearly not put up her prices in quite some time. The room was just as Paul imagined: on suit bathroom, framed print of a beach scene on the wall, small kettle with cups, sachets of tea, coffee and sugar. There was a Gideons bible on a small shelf amongst the tourist brochures and local maps. How many dirty weekends had happened here? What would he find if he lifted out the draws and looked underneath?
What Paul needed mostly right now was food, followed by a short list of accessories to go with his laptop. His paranoia seemed to have been left behind, this was a place where he expected to see nobody he knew and he expected to be completely unknown. This made him feel very safe. Paul hid half his cash under one of the bottom draws, put what he needed in his pocket and the rest under the carpet. He locked his door and passed silently through reception, past racks of advertisements for local museums and events, the Yale lock clicked behind him.
Paul found a buzzy little pub with a good menu board outside, he liked the sound of one of the special pasta dishes. After finding a seat and ordering he settled down into deep thought. JJ, JJ, JJ; he had only ever met him in the "networld" but he must exist in real life? Paul went over what he could remember of their meeting while eating his pasta and supping his beer. Just when he was feeling quite sure of what to do next an odd looking chap sat very close to him, close enough to smell bad, and spoke...
"Give me what you've got" said the strange man with an asymmetric face.
"Pardon?" Said Paul.
"You could give me a tenner, or maybe I could take that pretty little chain from around your neck?" The little old man didn't sound or look threatening; only the words were threatening. He looked too frail to carry out any threat. Paul was unsure how to react; he laughed and looked the man in the eyes.
"Don't you laugh at me, I've been in Dartmoor you know" There was some dribble crawling down his chin.
"What for?" Paul decided to humour him.
"Nothing at all." The old man's eyes seemed to drift around, was he on something? "I escaped though, five years ago, they haven't found me yet." He spoke so quietly, Paul expected more volume from a complete nutter, maybe this was only a partial nutter?
"You must give me something." Said the man with the screwed up face. "If you don't I will come and burgle your house, I will take what I want."
To Paul this was just so funny, what house? The one that had just been burgled! As he had finished his meal and his beer he stood up to leave, he was glad to be able to laugh, glad to be shedding this malodorous old man.
"Glad to be leaving are you?" Grinned the old man. He never swore, his voice was never raised but the content of his conversation was provocative.
"Never been more glad you old sod!" Paul left him behind, what was he supposed to do? Feel sorry? Smack him in the mouth?
On his way back Paul found a Chemist shop where he was able to buy some rechargeable batteries and find directions to where he might find some components to get his laptop connected up to his mobile phone.
On his way in he was stopped by Jean, "Will you be wanting a full English for breakfast? We do breakfast from eight 'til nine."
"A full English sounds excellent, I will be down at half eight, thanks." Paul started up the stairs; Jean came up to him and passed him a handful of tea and coffee sachets.
"Take these, let me know if you run out," she smiled and hobbled off towards her part of the house.
Paul found a mains socket behind the bed and started his batteries charging while he swapped his SIM card over for one that wouldn't cost him a fortune to connect to the net. He couldn't detect any wireless networks to tap into so it had to be the 'phone. He turned on the little 14" TV mounted on a bracket facing the head of the bed and watched the news channel for a while, it was a repeating cycle of updates followed by the weather and interspersed with adverts. One of the adverts reminded him vaguely of an image he had seen when approaching the high resolution area; it had been on a billboard, out of the corner of his eye. A soft drink advert that to Paul's knowledge he had never seen before in reality; but it was in the simulation he saw, he found it disturbing but he didn't know why.
Once all the batteries were charged Paul was able to make a connection to his workplace. It was quite easy to retrieve all the data that he had stored on the intranet; he decrypted it and read through it. After he had gained an understanding of how the various functions and methods worked he browsed through the rest of the data, he was so used to seeing files called README that he skipped over it dozens of times before clicking on it. This was no ordinary README file, it connected him to a web page with the message "This file can only be read once, it will be completely deleted once it has been read, it will leave no trace. Click here to begin reading, you have a maximum time of ten minutes." Paul had heard of these self deleting messages, they cost about $20 a time and were truly once only. He clicked.
Chapter 5 The underground hospital

A man with a white coat was standing next to JJ's bed he had a ridiculous thin moustache, it was Robert and there was a clipboard in his hand. The man spoke in a very deep emotionless voice "How do you feel? Is there pain anywhere?"
JJ felt weak and exhausted. The weight of the sheets on his body made him feel encapsulated in a physical way, also in a primitive emotional way; the bed was his friend, giving him a hug. Everything outside it was at the moment hostile and unknown.
"What happened? I was with Isobel, I think. I feel dizzy, not too good, can't think straight. Why am I in hospital? Is this a hospital? I am not in pain, dizzy."
"Take it slowly, yes this is a hospital, everything is going to be okay, something happened to you at the University body imaging unit. I am just going to give you a little injection, it will make you feel better. The doctor licked his moustache." JJ didn't have any strength to resist although he didn't like the idea of another injection. He felt the cold liquid travel up his arm and reach his head where black curtains drew shut. There was only a tiny part of JJ that was aware of his existence, he had never known such isolation, this was worse than his injection in the dream lab. He had no access to any recent memories, he could feel, hear, see, smell and taste absolutely nothing. All that JJ knew was that he existed, he knew that he could see and hear once and he tried to retrieve an image, a picture of anything, just something to hang onto. Stairs, and a door. Stairs always took you to a different place, literally a different level; doors could lead anywhere. JJ walked down the stairs and out through the door, he knew it wasn't real but he needed to see images, he couldn't stand the dark isolation and silence.
JJ sat on what was left of a wall damaged by the collision of a car, he looked at his watch, it read 6:25. He didn't recognise the watch, 6:25 was reassuringly early, only serious workers and noisy crows populate this time, he drifted. Looking up he saw a sky marbled with air traffic, white streaks on the blue of morning. The wall he sat on belonged to a public house on a large housing estate, he imagined that later in the day when the sun had passed zenith that there would be shouting and fighting by people from another reality. Evidence of decay was all around: smashed telephone box, litter, nasty puddles, badly spelled words on a bus shelter. There was something very deep about the place his mind wandered into, there was no pretence here; if you didn't like someone then you hated them; if you liked someone then you loved them. There were no grey emotions in this place, the remains of the red sunrise made him think of blood, blood that may be spilled later, near this wall by people who had a different way of communicating. JJ felt oddly privileged to be here at this time, to be alone here, to observe.
There was a figure approaching with a purposeful gait, he was headed straight for JJ and he was looking at his watch. The man was wearing a suit and tie; he looked a bit out of place in this rundown place. "Hi! My name's Dave, do you know where the bridge is?"
JJ realised that he did know of a bridge, not far from here but he was sure it was closed for safety reasons. "Yes Dave, there is a bridge at the end of this road if you carry on going but I think it's closed, unsafe. My name's JJ, I didn't expect to see anyone here, this isn't real you know, quite convincing but not real."
Dave smiled "Of course it isn't real, I have to find the bridge though, that's the only way I can wake up! Would you like to come with me? It can be scary but it seems to be getting less so recently."
"In what way scary?"
"The bridge is incredibly high, I am scared of heights." Dave looked a little apologetic.
"It can't be that high, it's all flat around here; okay let's go.
I know where it is but I've never been there, never seen it."
They wandered down the rubbish strewn pavement, not one car passed down the pot holed road, bent 20MPH speed signs and speed bumps occurred at regular intervals. The occupants of the grim houses with front yards full of junk didn't stir, not one curtain twitched. JJ kicked at an empty beer can and turned to Dave, "I bet if we went into any of these houses they would be empty, I don't think there is anyone here. Shall we take a look?"
Dave looked serious "It's possible to completely loose any sense of responsibility in this place, somehow you know that your actions can't have any real effect. You need to realise that things you do here will affect your waking conscious mind in the form of vaguely remembered scenarios. You may forget this event completely; later you will wonder why you associate breaking into peoples houses with pleasure. Let's just find the bridge."
"It sounds like you know a lot more than I do about it, okay, no housebreaking! The bridge is at the end of this little footpath Dave."
"I studied psychology before entering the world of work, there are far more temptations here than housebreaking, concentrate on the bridge." They arrived at the bridge, it spanned a vast chasm, water roared bellow.
JJ found himself having to walk from one side of a very scary bridge to the other. "Bloody hell, it's a long way down!" JJ looked into the cold depths below. He had a crawling sensation in his testicles, a deep fear, a sickness.
"Don't look at the bottom, just look ahead, I've done this before. There's a dodgy plank about half way, be careful."
The people came from nowhere, dozens of them all crossing the bridge, all oblivious to the danger signs, all blissfully unperturbed by the huge drop bellow. They jostled JJ and Dave as they made here way across, their faces looked happy and carefree. They behaved as though Paul and JJ were not even there.
"Where did all this lot come from?" JJ looked at the people.
"They always appear, they try to put you off, try to ignore them. I can see the other side now but I can't see a way down, all the paths down look like dead ends, what do we do!" Dave looked worried.
"What did you do last time?"
Dave looked thoughtful. "I rescued somebody I think. I seem to remember telling this dream to my mate Paul on the train. He looked like he was in an odd mood last time I saw him."
"Well I think that maybe you are rescuing me, look down there!" JJ pointed down into what previously looked like an enormous valley, it was now only about a foot deep.
"I can't look JJ, it's too high."
"No it's not look! I met a guy called Paul in a dream, same one perhaps?"
Dave looked, they both stepped off the bridge. JJ went to shake hands with Dave. "What did this Paul look like?" The picture was fading, the colour was going, it was getting dark.
"JJ, wake up." Whispered a voice, he opened his eyes and found the lighting quite subdued, the curtain was around his bed. He looked at the whisperer, "Sarah? Isobel?... I didn't think you were real, I thought you were a simulation, a dream. I feel a bit nauseous. I am very thirsty. I am very confused." The sheets felt heavy and damp, he ached horribly. Movement was an effort. JJ looked up at the arched roof, the lighting seemed very dim, only half as bright as the first time he awoke here.
"I shouldn't be here, my real name is Isobel. Keep your voice down. I will tell what you need to know. I entered your 'dream' by going into another scanner on the net. They are interested in you because you seem to have the ability to go against the pre-programmed events that they set up in the scanner. Most people eventually realise that something is not real and they start playing around. They get pulled out of the simulation by the data policemen as soon as they drift away from their purpose. You didn't even start doing your programmed function; you just freewheeled after the initial first few minutes... That must have been embarrassing, Robert was a bastard to use that program on the 56 card; I think he is a little pervert really but he is the top man. There is some fresh water on the table, do you want it?" Isobel half reached for the water, looking for a reply.
"Yes, very thirsty." JJ reached for the beaker and realised just how knackered he really was, the glass was a huge effort to lift; he downed it in one. "I thought at first that the 'embarrassing bit' was the whole dream. I convinced myself I had woken up, you must have put some false memories of yourself in my mind, I was in love with you, and maybe I still am."
"I didn't put false memories in your mind, you did, it happens with the process, I was there with you however. Before you ask, yes I do remember that bit and yes it was good." She smiled.
"Well, maybe I forgive you. When do I get to leave this place?"
The smile went from Isobel's face, "That's difficult, they don't let people out of here very often, there are a few of us working on ways to destroy this organisation from within. It's evil. By the way, don't get out of bed. If they think you are fit enough to stand up then you won't be up for long; don't try the doors either, they are all alarmed. The windows are not real, if you look through them all you will see is a light source; this whole building is tunnelled through rock. We are inside a limestone cliff."
"What organisation, why do they want me?"
"I told you, you are unusual, a threat, you don't 'program' easily. This is a huge advertising company, they GUARANTEE huge sales if you use their services. They use a massive simulation program that recently started to include real people in it. This simulation program is where they test out their advertisements for effectiveness. There are enormous sums of money changing hands. People suddenly have the urge to buy x, y, or z; they have no idea why it is sitting in their kitchen cupboard, they don't even like it! These people are able to do what they like. People are going missing and if you go to the police then YOU are the one who will be in trouble! They are going to put you back into the scanner tomorrow, they are going to try something new on you.
JJ didn't like the sound of that "What!"
"Shh, it will be alright, I have swapped the program. There is a keyword, somebody will say the word 'London' out of context. I want you to keep thinking of the word 'London' and associating it with becoming aware, with lucidity and with having control. I know you can do it, look, I must go before I am caught, I will be back again tomorrow night, hopefully with better news," ... She kissed JJ on the forehead and quietly made her exit.
JJ did as he was told, he imagined buildings in London, he imagined waking up in them. He saw himself being woken by someone shouting 'London' at him; he fell asleep thinking of the word London. Normally the stress of his situation would have kept him awake but the side effects of the drugs made him exhausted. If JJ had any dreams then he didn't recall them. He awoke to find the Doctor standing over him. His first thought was a very loud LONDON.
"I'm afraid there will be no breakfast for you this morning, you will be going into the scanner." The Doctors voice was deep and authoritative, it was not be questioned. JJ felt he had to question it though.
"Why, what's happening to me?" JJ wanted to curl back into the covers and hide away but he had no strength.
"It is necessary, I am going to give you another little injection and then you will be taken to the scanner room for some tests." It was no use arguing, JJ was feeling physically weak. He just kept on thinking of the word 'London' and how it could save him. Once again the cold spread up his arm, once again the black curtains closed on the white room. They wheeled him into the scanner room where the technicians were waiting. He took a memory card labelled '56' from his pocket and inserted it in the computer. "We will start at the same point we started at last time, this time we will use the new software at the point where he wanders out of control. Ron, pass me the memory card with version 121 on it please. Where is Sarah?"
Ron passed him version 121. "She didn't feel well, I think she's gone home."
"We will have to do without her then, switch in the stochastic resonator and have a look what's going on underneath the noise of his mind. Then we will synchronise and start up the program just as last time." Robert explored his moustache with his tongue, checking that it was still there. As JJ lay in the scanner immobile Rob the technician repeated the procedure that they had carried out on him before.
As the curtains closed this time JJ had no need to search for the stairs or the door, he knew they were there. As he was being wheeled to the scanner he found himself sitting on the same broken wall in the same housing estate! The time was different though, it was dark and everything was orange in the streetlamps glow. JJ looked at his watch, it was now familiar, he pressed the illumination button and saw that it was 4am. The wind teased at some litter, a tin can knocked gently against the wall. JJ could hear cats wailing in the distance. The houses were all in darkness, the streetlights bathed the world in a dull orange glow. JJ looked up and saw a full moon with small clouds scudding across it; what could he do now? Anything he wanted presumably, but maybe he should look for the bridge? JJ had no need of the codeword 'London' just yet, he was aware that this was not real, he tried speaking the word out loud as he got up from the wall and set out towards the bridge. "London" it sounded quiet, absorbed by the outdoors. As he walked he noticed that the lights were looking dimmer, also his footsteps sounded a little quieter. He tried again "London," he put the same effort as before into it but the sound was very muted. There seemed to be no pressure on his feet, he felt a creeping numbness as his tactile senses ebbed away. "London," JJ could hardly hear it now and the lights were so dim that he could scarcely see the edge of the pavement. Looking up he saw blackness. "London" there was no sound, just a word in his head. JJ sank into comfortable darkness.
JJ found himself very aware, aware that he was in complete darkness, that there was no sound and he could feel nothing. JJ felt that there must be something around him, he was aware of the position of his limbs (he appeared to be in a standing position) but there was no pressure or feeling anywhere to indicate what supported him. JJ reached upwards with his arms and could find no ceiling. He reached out to the sides and could feel no walls. Tentatively he reached down to where he thought his feet were, he stooped and felt below the level of his feet, reaching down as far as he could he found no floor! JJ was suspended, nowhere, there was a sense of being in a tunnel, if he could only reach a bit further then he would probably touch the sides. The tunnel grew into a very real, solid entity in JJ's mind. Although he couldn't see the tunnel and although the tunnel may not have existed at all it became a part of his 'spatial map', just out of reach but reassuringly there; even if it only existed in his mind.
A gentle wind started to blow down the tunnel, JJ had his first tactile input for some time. The wind was a shock as it was unimpeded by clothing! He could feel the hairs on his body being stroked softly by the breeze. The breeze seemed to concentrate on his genital area, the skin on his full erection was very tight, the wind played over its surface. There was a very primitive and focussed urge in his loins.

The darkness was dissolving, faces slowly came into being.
"No! No! This is not real, I know where I am, I've been here before" The dream paused, the people in the room were all still, it was silent. All the people he remembered from some days ago were here, their faces motionless; they were all looking towards the area he had just walked away from. JJ walked towards the door, through the frozen people, they looked like clothes shop dummies.
"He has gained control earlier than last time, interesting; I think he is learning, which for most people in his state is not possible. I am going to try the new software, let's see how he deals with it." The doctor took out the '56' card and inserted the version 121 card (121 on the label, but in actual fact a much earlier version, hard to detect because the theme was similar, full of bugs though thanks to Isobel!). JJ reached the door and looked through the glass top.

Chapter 6 JJ uses London

Paul clicked on the self deleting document, and prepared himself to take in what it said; aware that he only had one chance to read it.
Hi,

Next time you enter the net you will have plenty of time, I have set up a terminal for you with a laptop that looks and feels just like the one you took with you to Accione. ("How could he know?" thought Paul.) It will give you administrative privileges over the whole network and it is well hidden amongst very boring data streams, account transactions and so on. You need to know the password which is 'LONDON', you must remember this password on the other side of the net. This password serves more than one purpose.
You have become a very important piece in our war against them. We are confident that we can not only destroy them but take over their technology and use it for better purposes.
JJ is at this moment in an old hospital near Extovia, it was tunnelled into the cliffs at Sclinton Hill many decades ago. It was in use during the second world war as an air raid shelter, it was built as an air raid shelter primarily; only later being used as a hospital. Getting into it is not easy, the main entrance is well hidden, other ways in are sealed up; sometimes they were found by kids and broken into. Ten years ago the tunnels were inspected for stability as houses were to be built over them. The tunnels were found to be structurally sound but the air was very bad down there, apparently the ventilation wasn't too good even when they were in use. Once the tunnels had passed inspection, they were sealed up permanently as far as everyone involved was concerned. The houses above the old tunnels were relatively cheap; Robert purchased two houses at opposite ends of the grid of tunnels. The houses were rented to non-existent people who always paid their utility bills and council tax on time! He needed two to overcome the ventilation problem, one was air in, one was air out. It was surprising how little material he had to excavate and dispose of, it only took him 6 months using labourers from China. They are still down in the tunnels, concreted in; they had a very well paid 6 months, they paid for it with their lives though! Robert could speak Polish enough to communicate with them; he deliberately chose people whose English was very bad, that way no one would understand if they shot their mouths off in the local bars. He made sure that they were unaware of the existing Chineese community in the area.
You have already met JJ, he is also a leading piece; at this moment however he is very vulnerable. His power to resist the programming is increasing; this makes him very interesting to the people we are fighting against! They are about to try some rather extreme measures on him, if he can't cope then he will go mad, loose his marbles, get his brain fried. I want you to get back into the net and help him. He is the only one who maybe able the get into the hidden area and come back with his mind still in one piece, a few people have tried to gain access to the hidden part of the net but they are badly affected, mentally they are shadows of their former intellect. This hidden area is well protected, it contains all the information that they use in their simulation programmes, it has all their account data too. They think that all their work over the past few years is archived, I have corrupted all the archives slowly over the last few months.
They have very little in the way of hard back ups and paper
records. We can destroy them by destroying their data and
emptying their accounts into Nigeria. See you in the Net, use
your laptop and go to
http//www.easytoremember_isntit_paul.123abc.co.nz

As Paul watched the screen the message slowly deleted from the top down, he took one more look at the web address before it vanished. He went straight to the web address. The logon screen had two small text boxes, next to one was a prompt "Who are you looking for?" Obviously that was "JJ". The other text box prompt was simply "Password?" Which he remembered and entered in upper case as just like the vanishing message.
The image took a long time to download, too long really. Slowly a rather flat landscape rolled itself out on the screen, dead centre he could see a hut shaped building that looked vaguely familiar, as it should because this was the place where he had first met Blue. There was a toolbar at the top of the picture with a zoom icon, Paul clicked on it and looked closer at the hut; there was hardly any detail in it, it blended in very well with the plain, flat, brown landscape. There were three buttons at the top of the screen for movement control; Paul manoeuvred himself through the doorway of the hut. Inside there was a small table and chair, on the chair was a laptop computer just like the one he had in front of him. Paul zoomed in on the computer, he found that the monitor screen was now his screen, it was displaying "C:\BlueSys\_". Paul instinctively typed "dir" and hit return, far too many lines scrolled down so he typed in "dir\p" and went through one page at a time. After several pages Paul came across a directory entitled "JJhelp", he went into this directory and found some code written in both assembler and C++; speedy languages. There was also a file called README, the contents of this file explained that the programmes were to help gain entry into the hidden areas that Blue had mentioned earlier; it also explained that this toolkit of software was not tested and not complete!
Paul made a coffee and started going through the software, tidying it up, testing some of it. He sent some scintillas to search for JJ's presence. Time went swiftly and Paul's eyes were getting heavy, his concentration was ebbing away. It was tempting to have more coffee, to keep going; he knew there would be more time tomorrow on his journey. Journey where though? He needed to get into a scanner, the laptop was too slow, he needed to be actually in the net not just sending and receiving data to it and from it. It sounded too difficult to go to the hospital in the cliffs, but someone had been in his home! Paul needed to know the best place to go, maybe Blue would know? Paul went back to the command prompt (C:\_BlueSys\/) on the keyboard in the brown hut and typed "exit". A forest of icons sprouted up on the screen, all shimmering, Paul had no idea what the pictures on the icons were supposed to represent; they were quite abstract. He clicked on something that looked a bit like a phone, nothing appeared tohappen. He tried a few other icons, some led to password logon screens, some to encrypted gibberish but none led to a means of communicating with Blue. Paul had to decide on his own, Extovia wasn't too far from where he lived so he decided to take a look at the hospital; if it looked too difficult then he would have to risk trying his own scanner.
Paul slept well which surprised him, he expected to be kept awake with worrying thoughts. After a refreshing shower, he drank coffee while packing up his freshly charged batteries and his other odds and ends. The smell of bacon made his stomach growl; a glance at his watch told him breakfast was in five minutes.
The view from the train window was splendid in this part of the country, especially where the train lines were close to the coast. There were odd rock formations and beeches of red sand; when Paul wasn't working on his laptop he watched the scenery speed by through the window. His enjoyment of the unfolding landscape was tempered a lot by thoughts of what lay ahead.

JJ opened the door and passed down a corridor, the vivid crunchy carpet was underfoot. The end of the corridor seemed a long way off but JJ knew somehow that all the numbered side doors were just distractions; he even passed a door labelled Room 106! Which made feel a little odd, would his unconscious self be in there? The door at the end was usefully marked EXIT. JJ exited the building and found himself on an average looking street in an average looking town centre. There was a handful of people window-shopping, the sun was shining brightly and it was clearly summertime. JJ walked down the street, looking about for some clue as to where he should go next. Everything looked so normal, he couldn't fault it in any way; there was a danger he could be seduced into thinking that this was reality. "London" he fiercely said out loud. It was drowned out by the background sound of traffic and distant speech. There was a large advertising hording across the road, it had only one word on it "London" and an arrow pointing further down the road. JJ looked down the road and then back at the advert, the advert was now for some kind of slimming pill "No prescription required!"
JJ headed in the direction of the transient arrow. As he walked he found that the ground was becoming sticky, it looked as though he was sinking into the tarmac; other people walking along were not having this problem. JJ tried to look as though he was not in difficulty; he tried to appear normal. It was no use, he had sunk up to his knees and his rate of decent was increasing. It was clear that the people walking by either couldn't see what was happening to him or were ignoring him. JJ saw a drain cover a few metres ahead and lunged for it, it looked solid. The drain cover was indeed solid and JJ managed to haul himself out of the tenuous tarmac and onto the drain cover just in time. The drain cover was quite small, JJ stood on it looking at the people walking past; none of them made eye contact. JJ thought of the stories he had heard of people being mugged, murdered, or just collapsing unconscious in broad daylight; only to be totally ignored by all the people passing by. He tried to catch the attention of any of them; he was ignored, or not seen. Looking about him he could see people going in and out of shops, he could see a girl with a scruffy dog selling copies of the "Big Issue." But he could not at the moment move from where he was. The pavement looked solid enough but when he tested it his foot he penetrated the surface with so much ease that it may as well not have existed at all. JJ appeared to be trapped on a drain cover, he felt as though he was perched on top of a very tall column surrounded by a vague mist of reality, if the mist of reality was to vanish then his fear of heights would cause him some trouble. "London" he screamed out. JJ did not want this foggy version of reality to fade away; he knew what would come in its place. A memory of himself standing on top of the trig point on mount Snowdon popped into his head. The mountain was in cloud so he could not see how high he was, he knew there was a terrible drop where he was looking but the fact that he could not see it enabled him to ignore it. Then the cloud blew away in the wind and he was shaking, he had to get down very slowly, his legs wobbling uncontrollably. He remembered the difference between looking out from the Eiffel Tower (you could see for miles, he took some photo's) and looking down inside the structure ( you could see what was holding you up, it looked thin and made you feel very nervous!)
JJ saw a movement about a hundred metres away, it looked like a shadow but it was moving erratically. The shadow was passing only over the people in the street; it seemed to creep quickly along the pavement to the next person, envelope them quite slowly and then carry on with haste. It approached JJ. JJ was apprehensive. Tiny dots of light crawled up JJ's legs, they swarmed over him, they caused no sensation at all. JJ thought it was odd that they looked so bright up close as they had looked like shadows in the distance. The dots of light dwelled a while and then made off very quickly in the direction that the arrow had pointed to earlier. The points of light had left behind a trail about half a metre wide; the form of the trail was a slight discolouration on the surface the tarmac.
Tentatively JJ tried his foot on the marked trail, it didn't sink! He left the safety of the drain cover and followed the trail. The trail went down the pavement and through a few crowds of people. Earlier all the people had ignored him, now they were jostling him! It was quite an effort to keep on the marked way, it was only just visible. JJ didn't like to think what would happen if he fell off the path. The crowd was growing, they were pushing now! Ahead JJ could see an advert with an arrow pointing to a doorway; this was his goal.
All of the people and the entire pavement were blown away like dust from a shelf. All that was left was the thin marked line left by the glowing dots. Down below JJ could see an awful abyss, it felt safer to lie down, to make himself a more stable shape. The edges of the pathway were quite rough; the path itself seemed to be infinitely thin. JJ noticed that he was bleeding where he was gripping onto the edges of the thin track. He realised that this was what his mind had decided should happen when one gripped an infinitely thin object, he was not too bothered by the blood. The doorway was still there, nothing supported it. JJ was frozen to the spot with fear, the distance below him was unbearable, he wanted to escape. Maybe if he woke up? Maybe if he deliberately jumped then that would be preferable to the feeling of utter panic he was experiencing. He looked at his goal; it seemed further away, smaller. The door was still connected by the thin path and JJ managed to pull himself a few more inches forward. He felt he could fall any moment. JJ focussed on the surface of the pathway, it looked like snow against a dark background. As he concentrated on the snow a word formed, "LONDON". London, London, London, this was the time he really needed to see that all was not real but the fear was very great. JJ knew he was in an altered state now but he only half believed it due to the fear he was experiencing. JJ was determined to gain control of his thoughts; he closed his eyes and imagined that the way to the door was not only much closer but that it was just down a normal street with only a few people milling about. He built up the picture in his mind and he filled out all the detail. There it was, just as he imagined it would be. He pulled himself to his feat and looked at his hands; there was no damage. JJ walked towards the doorway, past a couple of people who completely ignored him.
JJ opened the door.
"Ahh, JJ, come in. This is the place where you can do anything you like. Make up your own rules because there are none at all! Let me show you something." JJ found himself in a room with oriental designs on the walls and floor. A woman came into the room and for some reason JJ was instantly aroused, his sense of responsibility had been removed for a moment and his lust took over in an aggressive way. JJ walked up the woman and began to grope and feel her body through the layers of clothing she had on. He had a need to see her naked, to examine her intimate parts, to kiss and caress them. He plunged his hand down through her clothes towards her crotch, her could smell a musky odour; she was moist. JJ pushed his face into her breasts, which were now naked with huge nipples. As JJ looked up he saw Isobel, this was a shock. JJ had thought this to be an anonymous dream woman. A woman he could do as he wished with, no consequences, no guilt.
"Hi, you must be careful. You can do anything you like in here, absolutely anything. There are no rules at all; you need to have your own rules though. Imagine a world where you can do what you want, what would you do? Probably repeat positive experiences over and over again. That would not get you anywhere, you would learn nothing, you would be in an eternal loop of fading joy. To live a proper life you must have bad as well as good experiences. You need to feel that you can overcome, to learn; not just enjoy, for enjoyment is a weak feeling unless it is earned. I think that you should get a few of your fantasy ideas played out, get them out of the way; you should realise that you are stronger than you think. Go through that door and don't come back until you have created some hard rules for yourself, without any rules you will fail. I will not be watching you, you are free to create empires, to sample any delights you wish. The only person who will judge you is yourself. You will not have to explain anything that happens in there to anyone, you will be the total ruler of your own mind. You might have fun to start with but be careful, we think that you can overcome the temptations and come out with a set of thoughts that can't be read or changed by any of their scanning technology. We have watched you for a few years now and we are certain that you fit the criteria, you can save us from the terrible place that this will become if they succeed with their ideas. You won't have any idea what I am talking about, which is ok. People want things, for example a mobile phone, a special car, a large screen TV, a pocket multimed etc. All the time they want these things they don't actually need them but once they have them then they really do need them and will do anything to keep them! That's before we even introduce this new advertising technology! Sorry I am not supposed to go on like this. I am actually going to leave this place now and go into the real world, I have to find a man called Paul. You may have met him briefly in the net, he may be able to help us. Just go through the door ahead and recreate yourself, I will be back with you tomorrow. The environment in there will reduce you to nothing; you must rebuild your thoughts. Once the remaking of your mind has taken place in there, your thoughts will be effectively encrypted and unreadable by a scanner. You must go in there now." Isobel pointed to a door with 'Training Room' in bold letters across the top. It was the sort of door you would expect to see a projector, a podium and some chairs behind.
"Yes I met a guy called Paul, very briefly."JJ did as he was told; he went through the door that Isobel pointed to.

Paul awoke; he must have drifted off whilst pondering over one of the many algorithms he had edited, replacing accuracy with speed. He was approaching Deloia, a place that not many people saw the outside of, they just changed trains here. If they went out of the station then they would find a small village. There were two off-licenses (that must say something?), a cooperative, a bakers shop, a bank and a very good hardware shop where you could buy things that were difficult to obtain such as 90% sulphuric acid(drain cleaner) and Hydrochloric acid (Serious toilet cleaner) maybe even .88 ammonia? Perhaps not Iodine nowadays, just in case one produced Nitrogen tri iodide hex ammoniate! (Bang!) Paul was half expecting to see Dave get on; Dave did get on. Dave spoke "Odd seeing you at this time, you are usually much earlier." Dave seemed a bit disturbed about something. "Are you still working at the same place?"
Paul looked through the window, a more familiar scene now "I have been off work for a while, didn't feel too good."
"You pulled a 'sickie'! Doesn't sound like you at all... I split with my bird, she had an affair. She said she wanted me back but the trust is gone. Landed on my feet though! I was determined that she wasn't going to get my house, which she could have done as she had two kids when I met her. I had a word with a legal friend of mine; he scared the hell out of me."
"You did a lot with those kids didn't you? I remember that you built them a trampoline in the garden; you took them to films and all sorts of stuff! Won't you miss them?" Paul looked at Dave's thoughtful face.
"Of course I will miss them but I can't go on like we have been.
I sold the house to a property company; she is on benefits so she
gets the rent paid by the government! The company I sold it to
guarantee that she will be able to stay there for at least five
years before any other ownership transfers take place. With the
money I made on the sale I bought a place that I can rent out to
another family for a year or so. I will be off to explore the
world in a few days! I am taking a whole year off!I just handed
in my notice
Paul was very envious "Lucky bastard! I won't have anyone to tell me about their dreams on the train any more, the mornings will become quite boring."
"I had a weird one last night:
I found myself in the sea, dragging myself out of the water and up the beach. There was a muddy cliff that I had some difficulty climbing, towards the top there were some ladders; usually I would have been quite afraid of the height. Looking down I could see two large boats, one pulling the other. At the top of the ladder there was a trapdoor, there was a crowd of people all passing through the trap door. When it was my turn to go through I took one last look down and then pulled myself through. I had absolutely no idea where I was, looking around I could see shops and people; it was a small town somewhere. I saw a sign pointing to a railway station, I thought that was the best way to find out where I was so I followed it. The sign over the station said 'Rimmington', I have never heard of Rimmington, does it exist?"
"No idea, try Multimap. Carry on."
"Well I thought the best thing would be to go the station and catch a train to somewhere familiar. The trouble was that I had no money and no idea how much I needed. There is an odd thing in dreams where you loose your sense of responsibility; somehow you know that your actions have no consequences. I decided to steal some money, I went into a pub and saw that someone had left a handbag unattended; I opened it up and found a purse. Inside the purse were two ten pound notes; twenty pounds, enough for a train ticket to somewhere familiar perhaps. I felt no guilt at taking the money but I didn't want anyone to know, I ran all the way to the station. At the station was a table with a woman sat behind it; not the usual glass barrier. For some reason I asked for a ticket to Rimmington, the lady looked at me and said 'You are in Rimmington, where would you like to go?' I looked at the twenty pounds, one of the notes was torn badly, I realised that I really had no idea where I wanted to go, as I didn't know Rimmington I also didn't know what was close to it. I woke rather confused and thirsty."
"I wonder if Rimmington does exist, I will look it up. I am getting off at Saprilla today."

Chapter 7 JJ is god for a while
The door closed behind JJ, he expected the training room to look huge but it seemed quite small. JJ turned around towards the door, it was gone. The room was foggy, that was why it appeared small; there was only about six foot of visibility. JJ looked up towards the ceiling, thick fog, he seemed to be under a dome of fog. He looked downwards and instantly wished he hadn't, he was gripped by a falling sensation. There was nothing to support him, it wasn't a dome of fog but a huge sphere, JJ was at it's centre. He looked at where his legs should have been, there was nothing there! He had no body, he was just thought, suspended in a grey fog.
A tingling sensation spread all over his unseen body, rather like rain; it was both hot and cold at the same time. A hissing sound filled his ears, white noise. JJ's vision started to break up into a snowy image, all he could see was black and white dots dancing in front of him, he was unable to close his eyes because he had none to close in here. JJ's very thoughts fragmented into dust. He was unable to feel fear or any other emotion, the core of his consciousness had shrunk, all it had was awareness of existence and life.
Robert looked concerned "Is there something wrong with this setup? I am only getting noise from the scanner! You haven't turned up the stochastic oscillator too far have you?"
"No nothing has changed for half an hour or so, all the settings are exactly the same as when we were getting good data." Ron re checked all the instruments. "It's not totally random noise any more, look there are some repeated sequences now, there is something very odd going on in his head!"
JJ's mind looked at the moving dots and willed two of them to coalesce. He followed two black dots and gradually pushed them together. In doing this, he had made the decision that the black dots were to represent solid and the white ones the space between. There were presently a fifty fifty mixture of dots, it was impossible to say weather one was looking at black dots on a white background or white dots on a black background. The two dots were now stuck together and somehow that made JJ happy, he extended the dots to form a line. He could rotate and shift the line at will.
JJ created several more lines, once he had made one making more was easy. He created a house, a town, a whole world. JJ discovered colour. The world he created was a bit too straight at first, curves were difficult and his first attempts were very jagged; he wished he had learned to draw properly. JJ needed some math's, some geometry; these were not his best subjects. He thought of one of his old math's teachers, one who had not showered scorn on him like most ("can't you see it! The answer is right in front of you boy!") However, he was one who tried to explain and occasionally succeeded. He always wore a blue jacket and had a very hoarse voice; his patience seemed limitless. JJ thought of the old maths teacher and resurrected him, built him up from his memories and gave him substance.
The chap in the blue jacket helped him to create his world; he did the curves, the fractal coastlines, the tree shapes and the clouds. The man in the blue jacket created rules for shapes and their interaction. He integrated himself fully with the emerging world, to such an extent that JJ's thoughts were instantly interpreted and translated into objects or effects. JJ looked on his world in deep thought, it was part of him but had it's own momentum. He could define something and then leave it for a while, come back and see how it had progressed independently. Although JJ had total control over any particular part of his creation at an instant in time, he was unable to appreciate or change the whole all at once. He wondered if this was how the real God found things, and realised that it must be so because unless you were part of everything then you could not know everything. The idea of comprehending everything all at once was unacceptable; JJ could not take it in. He had spread his mind throughout his creation and observed, to make changes he needed to focus and concentrate on one area at a time; he was clearly not a true God, merely a creator.

Robert looked even more puzzled "You're right the data is no longer random, but we can't form any images from it, we have no idea what is happening in his mind, all the original synchronisation has been lost and we can't recover it!"
"Will it affect him, when he wakes up I mean?"
Robert frowned "well we did have that chap go a bit mad a few months ago."
"A bit! He was totally doodah!"
"Let's just record all the data we can, perhaps we can make sense of it later."
Ron pointed to one of the displays, it was flashing a warning "There is something trying to get into one of secure data areas, shall I run the '8 Police' protection program?"
"Yes, start the protection program."
JJ had made his world now and it was time to populate it. Perhaps he would populate it with nice things only? Useful plants, happy people, birds, red sunsets and other pleasing things. He was God in this place. He sat down in a green field and thought about what to put into the world next. It was hot, butterflies flitted overhead, the grass perspired and the birds were silent. JJ felt a stirring in his loins; his penis quickly became erect.
He could have women do anything he wished for, and right now.
JJ spent some considerable time exploring female bodies; the only thing wrong was that he only had his memories to go on. There was no mystery; he could only create things based on his own memory. He tried to design different breasts, different genitals; they looked exactly as he had designed them once he took off their clothes. JJ became very disappointed with sex, he needed unpredictability and he did not know how to produce this, as he was God here.

JJ populated his world with singing birds, they had to eat though and some of the most exquisite songs came from insect eating birds. They were eating the beautiful butterflies he had created, and the butterflies larvae were eating into the useful plants he had made. Some of the women that he had produced were not content, JJ had made them specifically for sex and they were not getting any. He could make them go away quite easily but the thought disturbed him, God would feel guilty. JJ made some men to go with the women; and they did!
JJ sat in his green field and thought. All his creations had assumed an independent existence, although he had ultimate control over them he was restricted by his conscience and his memories. Knowing that whatever he wished would take place was becoming dreary, boring; he needed some unpredictability. JJ had recreated girls, beaches and mountains from his memories. He climbed the mountains and surfed on the beaches, there was no danger. JJ drove a racing car at ridiculous speeds but there was no fear, no adrenaline rush. Everything was perfect, and boring. What would God do in his position?
God created the Devil!

It had to be done; otherwise, the monotonous predictability would drive him insane. JJ created a dark and random creature, with similar powers to his own, the entity was not to be seen but to introduce some element of unpredictability. JJ retained override privileges though! Almost straight away, the sexual unknown tempted him; the first thing his Devil created was a new woman. This woman looked different, smelled different and tasted different from all of his designs. She was more real. JJ only tasted her only once as his own creation decided to hide her away; his Devil locked her into a hidden place, for use as currency later perhaps? The blue-jacketed maths teacher was only too happy to provide some random number generators, finding patterns in randomness was his main interest. Writing fractal generators to create wonderful and not very predictable organic forms was fascinating for him.
JJ looked around the new world, he could see some decay now but it was not without aesthetics. Crumbling brickwork suggested age and some of the weeds actually looked quite nice as they forced their way up through the otherwise perfect pavements. At last, here was an element of unpredictability; this was all very real now although he knew in a remote part of his mind that it wasn't.
JJ thought of Isobel, he knew that if he chose it, a woman looking just like her would appear in front of him. She would do his bidding. This was not what he wanted, he wanted to know what she thought, he wanted her to be real. JJ had a dim memory of Isobel telling him that she would not be in this room with him, that he would create everything in here. He was supposed to create rules, rules to rule with, rules to defeat something; what was he supposed to defeat? This room was no longer a room but a whole world, a universe if he chose. JJ felt complete but for the fact that he knew his real time body was inside a limestone cliff somewhere, all of his creations, his entire world, was tainted by the knowledge of where he really was. For a long time his thoughts of the hospital tunnels had been very much in the background but now they came forward with depressing force. JJ had enjoyed his time in the room; he had resisted the never ending but always fading pleasure cycle. He remembered Isobel telling him that he should leave when he had made rules for himself, well he had. It was nice to feel like god for a while but JJ realised that he could not be the true god as he was not able to be part of everything, he could only be a small part at a time. He could only observe a small area at a time. The fog descended, as he knew it would, a path opened up in front of him. JJ could see the outline of a doorway ahead. It was very nice in here but certainly not very solid, not very real. He reached for the doorknob, it was made of a silvery reflective material which had pictures stored from his time in the room. Every slight change in viewing angle produced a new snapshot but the overall effect looked like a mirror. JJ turned the knob and pushed the door, it creaked.

Paul left the train and made his way towards the old chalk pits, there were a few very busy roads to cross and then a long boring straight section that stretched out for ages. Finally, he saw the right turn to take him through the housing estate towards the chalk cliffs. There were not many people around; there was a mix of brand new four-wheel drives and very old estate cars parked up. Paul saw a house with "PEDIFILE OUT" crudely painted on it; the people here could clearly not spell very well. Searching his memories, he recalled a newspaper article where a paediatric nurse was hounded out of the place; some ignorant person who thought paediatric was the same as paedophile intercepted her mail. The streets were strewn with rubbish, old plastic bags and cans all desperately trying to recycle themselves. Looking up Paul could see the white streaks of airplanes against the blue sky. Paul's foot struck an empty beer can, someone stepped out in front of him.
"You lookin at me mush?! You cunt!" The voice was a bit slurred; his eyes looked distant, non-communicative and potentially very violent. Paul's thoughts raced, this guy could probably do him some serious damage; he remembered a technique that he had read of in a newspaper. He had tried it out several times with success so far:
"They are GOING to FUCKING ban SMOKIONG fucking everywhere on the first of July, pubs, train stations; fuck, what's that all about, I like a SMOKE. I like a bit of skunk sometimes you know, any idea where I might get some blow? I could really do with a hit right now, you look like you are pissed off totally, lets get some weed and chill out hey?" Paul hoped he still looked confident despite his fear. His potential assailant sat down on a broken wall, there were bits of car scattered near the wall; a cracked indicator lens, a broken bulb and some wire. They were outside a pub that was not open yet, in front of them was a bus stop covered in graffiti. A broken telephone box stood close by. Dirty puddles reflected the clouds, white streaks of soaring airplanes raked over the sky. The bus stop had an advertising panel on it with some odd abstract design; there was no clue as to what the advert was for at all. There was a spray painted smiley face and a "KT sucks shit" added by someone local.
"See this hole in the wall? That was my car did that. I'm fucked, I drank too much, buggered this wall, police came, breathalysed me. So I loose my license, which means I loose my job. I can't please my wife with nice things anymore, no money so I loose my wife. Need both wages for mortgage, so soon I will loose the house, with it's cupboards full of crap that she bought but never used. I am fucked up beyond any repair. Ahh!" The angry man hit one of the loose bricks on the wall, it crashed to the floor creating a sharp clink and a small cloud of dust, he walked away cursing to himself; he didn't look back. He muttered to himself, the only words distinguishable were television and cupboard.
Paul watched the angry man for a while and then continued towards the chalk cliffs where the underground hospital was. He passed streets that all looked very alike, the same wire council fences, empty crisp packets trapped in their green mesh. He looked into gardens: some were owned by people proud to have a garden, some were converted into off road parking places, some were neglected completely. Car engines and old Hi-Fi systems filled one garden, dandelions sprouted everywhere.
The sun came out, everything looked more friendly but thoughts in the back of Paul's mind were telling him to go back. Telling him to go to the Red Lion pub, this was odd as he had never been there and had never heard of it. The abstract picture on the bus shelter flashed into his head; a bad feeling had been creeping up on him since he had seen the strange image. Paul had the feeling he should abandon this whole exercise and go home. When he thought of his home he thought of its invasion, that made him angry. Paul fought off the feelings of dread and replaced them with a fierce determination to do something. He strode swiftly over the litter-strewn pavement, past mesh fences littered clogged with old crisp packets and on towards the nearest ventilation shaft. Paul took a scrap of paper from his pocket and examined the map he had scribbled on the train. There was a huge area to search for possible entrances so he chose the most accessible first.
Paul left the road, climbing over a small fence and wading through tall weeds. He slipped of his rucksack and took out the GPS unit. One of the old ventilation shafts should have been around here somewhere, instead a huge concrete slab overgrown with ivy presented itself. He didn't expect it to be that easy, Paul hauled his pack back on his shoulders and turned to leave; he was instantly plunged into darkness!
"Get him down on the floor!" Said a loud whisper.
Paul had something over his head, he couldn't see through it at all and it had an unpleasant musty smell. He struggled, trying to get his arms up but he was completely enveloped. He fell to the floor.
"Pass me the syringe!"
Paul renewed his useless struggle, he didn't like the idea of being injected with something "What do you want! Who are you" his voice sounded muffled with all the fabric around him.
"I've got his arm, quick, get it in!"
Paul felt a needle going into him, a short while later he couldn't think about anything; his energy was sapped.
The two men pushed Paul's face into the ground and then pulled off the old sack. They put a pair of what looked like sunglasses on him, no light at all passed through them and as they were constructed like goggles, he was effectively blindfolded. When they stood him up his knees were giving way. Paul could see a small pale disk, the sun! The sun was the only light powerful enough to penetrate, later he would remember it's angle; right now he was being dragged off between two unseen men. It seemed as though they were going up a hill for a while, the sun's disc disappeared twice probably obscured by tall buildings. A garden gate creaked, Paul tripped on an unseen step. He was led into the house.
"Get the carpet up, open the trap doors, let's get him down quickly." It sounded like the first voice, Paul didn't care, his head was spinning and he just wanted to sleep. The men took him down steep spiral steps, round and round like his head; there was a terrible damp musty smell. Finally the stairs ended but they were replaced by continuous direction changes; left, right, right and on and on for a few minutes. Paul was shoved into a chair, he heard a door shut and footsteps retreated. There was absolute silence, Paul pulled off the goggles, it made no difference as there was no light in here. He lay down on the hard damp floor and fell into a dreamless drug induced sleep.
Paul woke with a jerk, suddenly there was light and it was hurting his eyes.
"Shh, don't make any sound, I am here to help you. " It was Isobel.
"Where am I, god I feel awful." Paul tried to focus on the girl in front of him.
"My real name is Isobel but the people in here think I am called Sarah. You are underground, in an old air raid shelter, it was a hospital in world war two. It's a sort of hospital now.
"Ah good, that's where I was trying to get, I need to find someone called JJ, my name is Paul." Paul's head was clearing a little but he was very thirsty.
"What! You know JJ? He's here but he has been in one of the scanner rooms for ages, I can't get to him at the moment. I am worried about him, how did you meet him?"
"Ah, I, well Isobel, I met him in a dream. Not really a dream, on the internet actually, through a scanner." Paul's thirst was growing, "I'm very thirsty, could I have some water?"
"Oh sorry Paul, did they drug you? It gives you a very dry mouth, I will fetch some soon. How did you get to a scanner?"
"I made my own, took ages, used some scrapped off parts and some new parts, eBay, people I know and knowledge from the internet. Some water would be nice."
"Be quiet, pretend to still be unconscious if anyone else looks in, they will probably leave you alone. I'll be back soon."
Paul sat on the only chair in the room, he looked up at the curved ceiling, it was just like the picture he saw on the internet except that small stalactites had formed on the ceiling. Weren't they supposed to take thousands of years to form? Not here clearly, on the floor were small puddles under the stalactites but no stalagmites to match, they must have been cleared up? Paul heard approaching footsteps, he lay back on the floor.
"It's only me Paul." Said Isobel softly. "I've got you some water."
Paul gulped down the water, it was cool and refreshing. "Thanks, so how do you know JJ?"
"Well, you could say I met him in a dream, but it wasn't really a dream." Isobel smiled, not a smile of humour but a smile of shared knowledge. "The only way that you can meet JJ is for me to get you into a scanner, he is still in the net. There are four scanners in this maze of tunnels; I will be joining you both in the net. We will ruin the company by damaging all their accounts and archives. JJ has the ability to go into any area of the net he chooses, encryption and passwords will be no barrier to him now; he will have been trained by my new software now."
Paul finished off his glass of water. "Won't they notice I am gone from this room?"
"There is an infra red web cam in the corner of the room, I made a recording from it, it will be playing back showing you unconscious in a continuous loop. Nobody will be interested in you until you move. You won't move!"
Paul stood up and instantly felt dizzy, "I don't think I'm very fit right now!"
"It will pass more quickly if you are active rather than just lying there, follow me." Isobel led Paul through the maze of tunnels and through a door marked "Danger Construction Area". She locked the door behind them and pointed to two scanners. "Nobody will look in here, there are strict instructions. This area is being widened but the workers are not here for a few days yet." Isobel went to a small cupboard mounted on the wall and took from it a small bottle of pills, she handed two to Paul.
"Oh no! Not more drugs Isobel."
"They won't make you feel any worse; they are very powerful muscle relaxants. How did you immobilise yourself before you went in your scanner Paul, it is necessary you know."
"I got wrecked on a mixture of stuff. I woke up desperate for the toilet! Okay, how long do they take to work?"
"Oh they are quite fast, I will get the computers booted up, just climb inside one of the scanners and wait. Make yourself comfy."
"Huh, it doesn't look too comfy in there!" Moaned Paul.
"They are not quite finished yet, but they do work. Just get in."
They both swallowed the tablets and made themselves as comfortable as they could. They both put white noise headphones on and closed their eyes.
Chapter 8 A mobile shed
As soon as the familiar smooth landscape presented itself to Paul he scanned the horizon for a little hut. This time there was no need to trudge over the brown flat surface; the hut was about four hundred yards away and getting closer. The hut was moving towards him, searching him out! It approached silently, it's method of movement was to create itself at the front and destroy itself at the back. The brown surface just in front of the hut rose up and changed into more hut as the back fell away and faded back into the brown plane. The hut stopped in front of Paul and he entered, it looked just the same as when he had seen it earlier on his laptop. Paul sat at the chair and started searching for JJ on his laptop, he sent out a few swarms of scintillas in all directions; he sat back and waited for their return. Paul found himself very relaxed; all his worries had gone for a while. He slept.
Isobel had been here many times before and homed in on the street where she knew there would be a girl with a scruffy little dog selling copies of the big issue. She ignored all the simulated people and made her way to the building where she had left JJ training for his task. As she walked down the pavement, which was presently quite solid, a swarm of scintillas passed over her. The swarm was so dense that for a while Isobel was unable to see where she was going. Isobel had not come across the scintillas before and she was worried that they might be some kind of spying device introduced by the people she was trying to destroy. The dots of light sped past her and on to the building that she was heading for, they covered it searching for a way in. The scintillas found their way in and then exited very quickly, passing Isobel in a rushing sparkling line of chaos. She watched them vanish over the horizon and then she entered the building where JJ was training.

Paul had fallen asleep, he was rudely woken by the returning scintillas which massed upon one wall and formed an image of their journey. He saw that Isobel was already close to JJ. He saw that JJ was locked into a place that was at the moment inaccessible, he also saw that they were being watched by something; he couldn't see what. Paul decided to go to the building that Isobel had entered; the scintillas seemed to pointing him that way. He travelled in the hut as far as could, abandoning it when the resolution of the landscape appeared to increase. He completed the rest of the journey on foot.

Isobel stood outside the door of the training room, quite a few people had been trained in here but so far, not one had emerged sane yet! She had a good feeling about JJ though, he was very different to the others. She was sure that he could penetrate the company's files and expose them; destroy them! On the door of the room was a progress bar, it was almost complete. Isobel summoned a chair and sat on it, illuminated by the light from a single small window. She stared at the progress bar while she waited for JJ to emerge, hopefully not mad but powerful in this world.
Paul pushed open the door and smiled at Isobel, "You found the place quickly!"
"Well, I've been here before."
Isobel leaned against the closed training room door, Paul walked over to the tiny window and looked out. He saw quite a normal looking street, people milling about, trees moving gently in the breeze. Isobel joined him, peering through the small aperture "Do you think he will manage it?"
"No idea, you know more about it than I do! Look! the trees have stopped!"
"What do you mean 'the trees have stopped' Paul?"
"They were moving in the wind, they stopped suddenly; in fact the detail is going from them. All the simulated people are walking away, I can see some policemen coming this way, about eight of them."
Isobel groaned, "the data police! What can we do? Look they are assembling some sort of machine in the middle of the road. It looks like it's pointing towards us! Get your laptop, do something! Now!"
The eight policemen were assembling a scaffold like structure with a dish shape, the dish part was pointing straight at them.
Paul was tapping away In deep concentration on the laptop. Isobel turned away from the window, "it looks like they have completed building it, I don't know what it is but it's pointing directly towards us!"
They both returned to the window in time to hear the device charging up, it sounded like a big camera flash charging; the loud note increased in pitch as it charged up, they could hear it indoors so it must have been terribly loud outside. The sound was either too high to hear now or it was fully charged. A beam of scintillating particles started to stream from the dish, it was headed for the window and it was travelling quite slowly.
"What the hell is it Paul?"
"No idea but we will soon find out, get back from the window." Paul continued on his laptop. The beam reached the window, parts of the wall vanished in random chunks; other parts of it had their resolution decreased. Some of the square holes were as big as ten centimetres, others only about a millimetre across. The holes were surrounded by smooth areas lacking any texture or surface detail. "Did anyone get hit by it?"
JJ could see a square hole in his arm, just where he had a burn scar. He could see straight through it and it was geometrically perfect, there was no blood and no pain. "My arm, there is a hole in it! Look!" They all looked and grimaced, wanting to know if it hurt or not.

The sound of the weapon recharging was much louder now that the walls were filled with holes. Paul looked up from his keyboard, "let's try this." He hit the enter key. Three people were in the room with them, copies of Paul, Isobel and JJ. "Blue did this a while ago so that you and JJ could escape the China Rooms Club. Let's hope it works." As he spoke the three copies made their way out of the building and into the streets, they were heading for the vast open plains of low detail. It seemed to be working, the data police were pointing their weapon towards the departing copies who had just vanished down a side street. The police got off one more shot and then began to follow on foot. The strange device was left where it was, simulation people began to emerge from shops and doorways. Fine detail returned to the trees and they began to sway once more in the breeze. A team of construction workers came out to build a structure over the top of the device built by the police, to hide it from the simulations.

The progress bar finished; there was a beep. The door opened, JJ stood in front of Isobel and burst into tears, he had no idea why he was crying but it was uncontrollable. Isobel gave him a big hug. "JJ, what was it like in there?"
"I was god: I made good things, I made beautiful things, I made evil, I made the Devil! I made many things, I did NOT make you; I wanted to so much. I could not make you because I wanted you to be real. I feel very sad right now because the world I made is gone." Another tear dripped down JJ's face.
Isobel stroked his hair, "It's not really all gone, and there will be echoes of your creation throughout the collective memory of the net. You have left a legacy that will carry on for decades. We have work out what to do now, what you did in there was just training! Paul is here, do you remember meeting Paul?" Isobel continued stroking his hair. "One day we must meet in the real world, I will stroke your real hair and feel your real skin against my real skin."
"Paul! Yes, I did meet someone called Paul; he reminded me of the dice and told me I was dreaming. I seem to have been in a constant dreamscape ever since I met him. My eyes are clearing a bit now, what are all these square holes in the walls? I'm sure they weren't there when I went into that room."

"Now that Paul is here we will be able to find the data repository and destroy it. I have been told that he has been working on a set of algorithms to penetrate the repository defences." Isobel went over to the small window and looked out.
JJ had wiped away his remaining tears "Paul! it's you! Why didn't you speak."
"I wasn't looking, honest! I thought that maybe you wanted a cuddle from Isobel. You looked a bit distressed."
"Isobel" said JJ, "who introduced you to Paul, how do you know him, I only know him from dreams."
Isobel turned, "I don't know what his name is, I have never met him directly, only via a computer. He says he exists in the net nearly all the time but I have never seen him properly. When he appears on a computer monitor he always has on a blue shirt or jacket."
"Blue! He calls himself Blue, he tried to say something to me several times but he always went away before he had finished. He would suddenly not be there, vanish. I made him in the training room to help me with some math's, I based him on my old math's teacher. My old maths teacher used to wear the same blue jacket all the time so we named him Blue."
"We must find Blue, he wants to see JJ in a very low resolution area. He wants to speak to JJ before we try to breech the repository defences. Follow me." Paul led them along the street which was thankfully solid, JJ kept his eyes on the pavement for the slightest signs of sinking. JJ thought he saw something sparkle briefly on the big advertising board, just out of the corner of his eye. Paul led them past the big issue seller and on past the boundaries of the simulation. The hut was on an intersection of two slightly different shades of brown. With all three of them inside there was little room.
JJ spoke first "So how do we find Blue, what are we doing in a shed?"
Paul sat on the only chair and started typing on the laptop. "I am sending out some scintillas to search for him, look at that wall, that's where they will emerge from." Three faces stared intently at the blank wall. As soon as Paul hit the enter key little dots of light began to form, at first very dim but within seconds very bright. The brightness of the scintillas began to fluctuate and flicker, they were ready. Millions of snowy dots streamed from the doorway of the hut, dissipating in all directions.
"I've seen those before" Isobel watched the remaining points of light rush through the entrance. "I thought they were spy programmes from the repository."
Paul looked up from his chair "No, Blue created them, he gave me copies of all the code he has ever written in here. Anybody want to sit down while we wait?"
Isobel and JJ looked at each other, Isobel spoke, "There is no fatigue here, we could run for miles at the speed of sound and still not need to sit down for a rest!"
"I was only being polite, feels like I am hogging the only chair.
I suppose we could create some more."
JJ walked over to the entrance, "no, don't bother. How long do you think the scintillas will take?"
Paul remained in the only chair. "Not long, after all it is their creator they are seeking. I wouldn't step through the door JJ, we might loose you; this little hut does not always stay in the same place, it is a sort of mobile fire wall. They can't see through it, it is a large area of protected memory."
The laptop made a double beep, drawing Paul's attention back to it. There was a message from Blue. "Look, we have reached Blue."
Isobel and JJ stood behind Paul and read the message over his shoulders.
"Your scintillas found me! I don't think I can meet you 'face to face', I always have some sort of problem meeting JJ, I think that there is some mathematical rule or something operating to stop us meeting properly. I will only communicate with you via this laptop and only in text. I have looked at the code protecting the repository; it is very robust. I am not sure if JJ can penetrate it, even with the trained version of his mind. There is a way that we can definitely gain entry but I would rather that we didn't use it, we should only use it if JJ can't get through.
You will need to know exactly where the repository is, physically its address shifts around all over the place, dynamic memory. Here it is represented as a tree in a forest. I can take you to the forest, Paul can find the tree and JJ can try to access the data. If he fails then we will have to do something that will have an unpredictable outcome, we will have to rewind the data, go back to the time before the protection was installed. This sounds impossible but we are not in the real world here. Numbers here are just numbers. In the real world, some numbers can never be negative; here all we need is a minus sign! For example the frequency of an event can only be positive: how many times do you mow the lawn in a year? What happens when the number of times you do something becomes a negative number? Don't worry too much about the technicalities, I have downloaded some code onto the laptop that will regress the protection algorithm for the repository. I want you to use this only as a last resort, I know it will work but I don't know how far reaching its effects will be.

By now, you should be just outside the forest; Paul should take the laptop with him, no need to worry about the batteries! They are not real and have an infinite charge. It's time to search for the data repository, step outside."
They waited for the last to finish reading and walked outside.
Behind them was a flat, featureless sheet of dull brown, in front of them was an enormous forest complete with birdsong and butterflies. Even their sense of smell was being stimulated; they could smell damp earthy odours, flowers and the cycle of decay. Sharply focussed branches fanned upwards, searching for the sky. The sky had complex clouds drifting slowly across it. This was the highest resolution that any of them had ever come across in the net, it seemed to have even more sharpness than real life. They saw a fox run towards the boundary, as it crossed its direction abruptly changed; it found itself running back into the woods as though it had bounced off the boundary. There were no paths visible, JJ and Isobel looked towards Paul, JJ spoke "which way do we go?"
Paul opened up the laptop. "This is amazing, I find it hard to believe that I am actually in a limestone cliff, sitting in a scanning machine with my muscles paralysed. Just look at this place, there can't be many places like this left in the real world." Paul ran a search on his virtual laptop. "We need to find the centre; my laptop will act as a sort of GPS. It looks a bit dark under that tree canopy; we should not loose sight of each other. Head that way." Paul pointed into the dark forest.
The breeze was only gentle and the moist heat soon had them perspiring. The lack of a path was very troublesome as they found themselves wading through tangled undergrowth. Thorns tore through their clothing. Tree roots tripped them up. Isobel fell into some gorse bushes and exclaimed in pain "Ahh! This is too real, I have gorse spikes all over my arms, I am bleeding!"
JJ pulled her gently out of the bush, "this is not real, it is a very good imitation though. Look at your cuts." JJ used his experience from the training room and dissolved all her wounds and all her pain, "All gone! See it is all an illusion. We are passing through the security algorithms now, they are designed to trip us up; which is what you just did. None of this is real but I must admit that it is in some ways better than reality. This is sharper and more solid than any of the things I created in the training room. You can hear the leaves touching each other in the breeze. I can't even begin to imagine all the math's behind this. Perhaps Blue would understand."
Paul pointed, a change of direction "according to the laptop there is a river blocking our way, the only bridge is that way. We might even find a path if there is a bridge." As they approached, they could hear the rushing water. The air felt cooler here, much fresher. As they neared the bridge strange voices became audible, a crowd like gable of human speech rose up from the bridge down below. They were at the top of a giant gash in the land, a deep crack hundreds of metres across blocked their path; below a mass of bubbling and twisting water dashed through, sending up a cool mist and creating rainbows down below them. When they were close enough to see the bridge from above they could also see that it was covered in people, people were running around like ants down there.
Isobel peered down, "they must be simulations. Wow it's huge, I've been on holiday to places similar to this, this is better."
Paul looked down, "I don't like heights very much, I get an odd feeling in my genitals, like they are trying to get back inside my body! There seems to be a pathway leading to the bridge, we should follow it." The way down was uneven, it was not possible to walk without looking down at your feet; progress was from one wobbly rock to the next. Sometimes a rock would wobble and cause you to slip close to the edge of the drop. The sound of the water grew louder all the time. They could feel the spray now which was quite welcome as it cooled them down. The backs of their legs were aching, too much reality here. Just ahead stood a man that Paul recognised. "What are you doing here Dave?"
"I am here to get you across the bridge, I have practised so many times but it still scares the shit out of me. Have you seen how deep it goes? Maybe you shouldn't look over the side once we are on the bridge itself. I know that this is all unreal but you can't just wake up like I can, you are stuck here for the duration." Dave gestured the way forward.
"I know you!" JJ shouted. "You were in my dreams at the hospital."
JJ's face dropped, "I'm still in the hospital I suppose."
Dave looked up the slope towards JJ. "It was you! Well thanks! Let's get going though, this won't be easy. Follow me, never get ahead of me and don't look into the gap down below, it will draw you in." They all followed Dave down the increasingly slippery path, a continuous spray of mist lubricated its surface. Ahead they could see dozens of people crossing the bridge in both directions. They fed into the simulated human traffic heading towards the bridge, they all became a part of the flow, they were pushed from behind and they surged ahead when a gap formed. It was impossible to stay together, they were bumped and jostled by the simulations all the way over. JJ took a look down and wished that he hadn't, the depth was enormous; he only coped by realising that he was actually not here but inside a hospital, inside a cliff. Dave shouted out above the roar of the water. "We are here! The other side! Usually I wake up now, have breakfast and go to work. Do you mind if I stay and watch for a bit?"
JJ looked at Dave and raised his voice against the raging water. "I have no idea how to stop you, we are headed for the centre of this forest. There is a repository full of data and software that we need to get to, we are here to share it out to everyone who can use it." JJ looked at Paul.
"Yes, if everyone has access to this technology rather than just a few; perhaps we can make a difference."
The roar of the water faded as they climbed out of the gully. The rocks became less slippery as they progressed. The darkness of the tree canopy gave way to a sunny clearing. In the distance was a tall fortress, Paul opened up his laptop. "That is the data repository," he pointed to the fortress. The fortress looked like a medieval castle, it had castelations around the top, a mote, arrow slits and everything else that would make it medieval. "We need to go to that castle, that is the data repository."
Isobel looked incredulously at Paul, "how are we supposed to get into that? I thought you said that the repository was a tree! The walls are solid stone, the mote is deep and festering with god knows what."
"You are starting to believe that this is real aren't you Isobel? Well it is not and Blue told me to say the word 'London' to anyone who appeared to be taking it too seriously."
JJ didn't need the word, he was confident that although this all looked very real; it was not. Dave seemed to respond, his expression became a little more serious. Isobel stopped dead, she searched her memories, "London, why does that word mean something to me? Oh, I see, I thought I wouldn't be taken in by it but this is better than real. Everything is so sharp and alive!"
Dave looked worried, "I think I should go, I might mess up your plans. London is my lucid dream trigger word, once I know I am dreaming I start changing things, I can't help it. If I make myself believe something will happen then it will. I could cause something bad to happen." Paul shook his head "No no no, I think you should stay, this is not a normal dream at all. We could do with someone who can make everything they believe in come true. Please stay, don't wake up just yet."
They all walked towards the castle, its drawbridge was up and the mote smelled foul. Isobel was gagging, "the stench! I've never smelled anything like it."
Paul agreed "yes it is bad but I think we will have all smelled it before somewhere. It may be a combination of smells but it can only consist of our experiences. I must admit that it is making me feel quite ill. Dave! See if you can do something about it before we all throw up! We may be immobilised in the real world but what about the reflex action of being sick? We could end up choking on our own vomit." They were all pale and holding in their stomach contents.
Dave wasn't feeling too good himself but he said aloud "LONDON." He tried desperately to think of nice smells; jasmine, freshly cut grass and baking bread. It was no good, the warm bread rolls were dipped into mote sauce and he nearly lost it.
JJ said "yes, London. it's just the fish market and some rotting rubbish. We have walked past it now and we are in the park next to a large honeysuckle bush, the breeze is now blowing only the honeysuckle scent towards us, it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future." The breeze changed direction slightly, and there were indeed honeysuckle bushes upwind of them.
Isobel brightened up "thanks JJ, that was awful. What do we do about the drawbridge though?"
Dave had recovered also "Let me have a go at that. I need to close my eyes because I can't believe it will move itself. What I need to do is to imagine that it was never raised, that it is stretched out ready for us to cross." Dave closed his eyes and visualised, the others watched. What they saw was the drawbridge rebuild itself, in the order that Dave was imagining it. The sides built themselves up first, plank by plank; followed by the walkway. When he opened his eyes Dave said "I hope I imagined it to be solid enough! Let's try it out."
The wood did seem quite solid and they cautiously crossed over to the other side.
During a period of exploration they found a well covered over with a safety grid (what was health and safety doing in a place like this?), a lot of spiral staircases leading up pointy towers and what looked like huge hearths.
Isobel saw it first, "there's a yew tree in the middle of the courtyard! Could that be the data repository?"
Paul walked up to the tree. The closer he looked at the fine greenery the more detail he could see, it felt like he was falling into it. "I think that this could be it!" Paul opened his laptop and furiously tapped at the keys. "I am going to try and make a small opening in it."
The others looked at their surroundings; the castle looked like a combination of different castles; castles from school trips and castles visited while on holiday. The crumbling stone looked as though it had been here for hundreds of years. There were crows circling one of the towers, gabbling and squawking. There was a metal plaque screwed onto a wall with a helpful message giving the date when there was a siege here.
A knot hole in the tree started to open, it expanded slowly into a space wide enough to crawl through. "I've made a way in!" shouted Paul. As the echo of his voice died away, so did Paul, he vanished. Isobel and JJ looked at each other and then back to where Paul had been standing. His laptop was still there, still open and running.

Paul woke abruptly, there was a man with a white coat on and a pencil moustache standing over him. "My name is Robert, you can't move can you?" He smiled "I could kill you right now, all you could do is watch! The drugs paralyse you completely, you can do nothing. I want to know why you are here though, and why my assistant Sarah is over there." Robert pointed to the other scanner. "I know you can't speak so I am going to put you back in the net for a few seconds, tell me who you are and why you are here. You will have two minutes, if you do not tell me then I will simply hold your nostrils shut for as long as it takes! I have a link into the net, this computer here. NOW TALK."
Paul reappeared, he looked scared. He started speaking straight awaybut not to JJ and Isobel. "My name is Paul, I was directed here by someone called Blue, I met him in the net. We are supposed to destroy a firewall, release some data and some software. Isobel is helping me, please don't hurt her."
Paul gesticulated to JJ, making it clear that he should enter the opened knothole. He looked at Isobel and at his surroundings, he looked desperate. "Sorry, I will go back soon, Isobel don't-" He pointed to JJ and then put his finger to his lips. Paul was hoping that it would be far too hard to get anything but audio from this complex zone.
Robert stood over him, "You chose to talk, good. What did you mean by 'Isobel don't'? Hm hm. Never mind, I will pull Sarah out of the net. Let's see what you two have been up to. Robert walked over to the scanner, Paul couldn't turn his head to see what was happening. All he could hear was a few keyboard strokes.
Isobel looked at JJ, "I'm going!" She became smoky, indistinct and then vanished.
Dave looked suddenly alert "Shit! My alarm clock is going off, I have to leave." Dave faded away leaving JJ completely alone to complete the task.
JJ picked up the laptop and entered the knothole. Inside the tree it was cold and dark, dampness dripped from somewhere. JJ had no idea what he should do. He looked at the screen on the laptop, Paul had left a numbered menu displayed. JJ could not understand any of the menu items apart from one, "Regress Protection Algorithms ----- (6)" JJ pressed the number six and then hit enter. The darkness and the dampness increased. JJ felt weak, he closed his eyes. The fog began to clear.
He found himself walking down a badly lit street, searching for a building with repository somewhere in its name.
JJ was cold and wet; finally, he saw the sign over the building, "University Information Repository." He entered the reception area and closed the door on the black and foggy outside world. Thin rain hissed against the windows. Inside the building it was very warm, stifling with a thick coat on. The foyer was very dark and JJ was only just able to see the sign pointing him upstairs to level three. He was feeling tense, his footsteps on the cold concrete steps echoed up the dimly lit stairwell. From the edge of his vision, from the corner of his eye, JJ thought he could see spots of light; like 'snow' from a badly tuned analogue TV. He dismissed the white dots as not real, he was tired and wound up. The lighting improved as he neared level three's corridor, the corridor itself was brightly lit and carpeted. JJ walked along the carpeted corridor, freshly carpeted, he could smell it. The design on the carpet was quite vivid, JJ could not imagine what sort of person would select such horribly clashing colours, the pattern seemed to vibrate. There was an odd crunching sound as he walked on the mess of colours, rather like walking on fresh deep snow. JJ felt hot and nervous, the idea of walking on snow was refreshing. He found himself counting down room numbers. His arm was itching from a burn or some other injury, what other injury! JJ froze for a moment and stared at the carpet. The carpet was awful. He ran all the way to room 106 on level 3. JJ didn't knock, he burst in. There was Isobel with her green eyes and her smile. "Hi I'm Sarah, you are obviously JJ, come in, let me take your coat it's rather warm in here."