An Unfortunate Dimension

2. That’s not my Dog-1

This time it was more normal, more like where Salvador was supposed to be, this might be real life if such a thing exists. He did know this place though. It looked like he was back to the here and now. He was standing on the corner of El Camino and Verdugo street. It felt like he still had a filthy hangover. He started to scan around his surroundings to make sure he was where he thought and check for any signs of pixelation, things vanishing, anything that didn’t sit right, but life simmered on as usual.

As happens in the early stages of the worst hangovers, there was an onset of the deepest embarrassment, that cold shudder up the spine that closes your eyes and starts to tell you what you did wrong last night. You start formulating plans for the apologies you’ll need to make. You may even have to return someone’s front door.

He remembered waking up naked in his car, looking around it for his keys. They weren’t anywhere in the car but finally he saw they were over there, ten yards away on the floor of the mall car park. It was pointless to wonder how. A quick sprint to retrieve the keys wasn’t quick enough to avoid being seen by a woman and her very young daughter, preparing to deposit groceries in their car.

They were suddenly glued to the spot as his bare d**k flapped past them and then his bare arse got back in his car and f****d off. Hopefully the daughter wasn’t too indelibly affected. Salvador quickly checked he was still wearing clothes. Normal clothes. Good. Right now let’s see how normal the rest of the day is.

He shook out the recollection of that apparition skimming along the other side of the street watching him, moving in and out of dimensions but not able to stick in this one for whatever it needed to do.

It was like the moments before seeing a spider. He hated spiders. To him they were ambitious alien invaders hell bent on enslaving and generally sitting on mankind. You know you’ve seen it out of the corner of your eye, you know what it is but you don’t know where it’s gone.

When he was in the mood to see spiders, everything looked like a spider, a piece of mud off his boots, a dropped mushroom from lunch. String tended to gang up on him to form the finest replicas but whatever it was, he was not at ease.

He knew being afraid of spiders was irrational. He’d started his relationship with them in awe of their place in the world, sitting outside Larry Gomez’s place while his parents argued inside. He saw a spider appear in the bushes growing round the top of the gazebo, it approached, analysed and then wrapped up an errant moth trapped in its web.

It spun the moth up like fresh candy floss, injected its digestive fluid into the poor thing and nonchalantly f****d off to consider something else. It returned later for a fine supper courtesy of the melted insides of the moth. An efficient way to feed, if a little cold, and only if it’s confident an even bigger nasty thing wasn’t about to come and do nasty things to it as well.

Larry and Salvador wondered what it would feel like to be encased, stuck fast and then have something drill through your coffin into you and inject oomska to dissolve you from the inside. Having that oomska, mixed with you and sucked back out again at feeding time would not be your problem.

Salvador eased his oncoming sweat and then remembered O’Hara’s. So that’s where the hangover came from but it couldn’t be. He thought the battle was a dream when he was in O’Hara’s but now he’s here was O’Hara’s a dream? It was the past when he was at college, years ago. How could a dream of getting wasted years ago give him a hangover today and what was he doing naked in a car?

If it was a dream, how come he was now standing on the corner of El Camino and Verdugo this sunny morning and not in bed where dreams are supposed to kick you out. Maybe he slept standing up right here like a drunk horse. Maybe it’s still a dream, level three. Salvador thought of his bed, that soft cool, cosy bed. He knew he had a bed. He knew where he lived.

He was dirty and exhausted and luckily of no interest to anyone else. He reminded himself never to expect anything to be as it seemed. There could be cops seeking his bare arse for a variety of reasons but, so far, all was well and calm here.

He hadn’t got any sort of handle on why all this suddenly started happening to him. He never knew how long he had in wherever it was until he was dumped somewhere else.

The whole idea was chaotic. Who knows where he might suddenly emerge, maybe with a beard and some injuries? Maybe it was like narcolepsy, he falls asleep with his face in spaghetti and trips off to some place, returning at a time not of his making. It removed any notion of free will.

He thought about talking to doctors about it but what was the point? The first thing they would do is fumble for the panic button under their desk, possibly insert something into him and then the white van would turn up with two calmly spoken guys telling him everything was going to be alright.

He had no idea which day this was but maybe he could resume his life and resume his quest for the answer to his problem.

‘f**k,’ he said loudly enough to check he wasn’t heard. Being seen shouting at himself in the street wouldn’t help. Things kept piling up, slowing him down but there was only one way through it. Keep trying. Keep fighting wherever he gets jumped. He needed to try and figure out when jumps were about to happen. Maybe then he could figure out how to stop them.

The booze had become a bit of a problem. The longer he didn’t find the answer, the more the booze helped. Booze numbed the gut pain of every new day. It was his epidural. The thing is it sometimes did help address the problem but also landed him in a fair bit of trouble, a tedious irony. And with this who-knows-where-the-f**k-I-am situation, perhaps the booze needed to back off, or not.

He’d had friendly words and some very loving support from the folks round here but, as the months wore on and the bottles piled up, this waned, became more covert whispers, he was drunk again, tragic, scruffy, damaged and angry.

Today he was definitely a mess. He felt like he’d carried through the sweat and dirt and beer from where he’d been before. He looked like someone who should smell bad, might well swear at you for no reason and in fairness, some people deserve and ultimately benefit from being called an asshole for no reason.

Today though he felt feeble, atrophied and hunched up like an old rag tag Fagin battling the cold of a London January, like influenza if it took human form.

On the days he didn’t turn to the bottle, he scrubbed up just fine. That was the Salvador this town knew and loved. They always said they could see his smile coming from round the corner. It was infectious. That was the Salvador they could nurse through this horrible time, this Salvador was harder.

Salvador had skills, computer programming skills. He wasn’t some teenage prodigy or super rich tech maestro but he was solid and adaptable and even more curious. He was just a good coder and innovative. He was a smart hippy, about six two, unusual good looks even with his big nose, the sort of look girls liked.

Smart girls look a little deeper. Sure, physical attraction is important and Salvador’s floppy dark hair and blue eyes just about cleared that hurdle but it’s more a confidence and demeanour thing for smart girls. They want love and naughtiness like the rest of us but they also want a mate capable of knocking up some decent kids and a certain outlook on life, an intuition to match their own, that special something. Salvador was lucky enough to have a bit of that.

Salvador and his team designed and built VR stuff. The company he worked for, Net Nano, was kicked into this world due to two speculative but inspired ideas. Why couldn’t you bounce light off water droplets in the air to see millions of miles round corners? As it turned out, you could, and they did.

The other idea was the cleaning project. Nanobots fly around inside you and clear away cholesterol and other gooey s**t in your arteries, eventually reducing it to newborn levels. The bots latch onto the nasty gooey s**t and each one chews off a tiny amount. When they’re full, they exit via a magnetic outlet point and on it goes. A few sessions over a few months and you could be permanently de-coked. Early on, the extraction side of it hit problems and the bots ended up staying in the bloodstream and making a lot of problems. But the extraction theory was basically sound and here we are with a serious company, now in San Juan over on Great Heights.

Net Nano was one of those places people liked to talk about. The grey, tinted window high security building had to be aliens or some other flavour of conspiracy. Apparently they had military contracts and these people used to say what they did wasn’t software development.’

It kind of was though, give or take this and that, and like it said on the tin, they dabbled in the very tiny. It’d been suggested that Net Nano created tiny artificial intelligent viruses capable of many thousands of miles wind deployment, LA to Hanoi or Kabul to New York.

Salvador was prohibited under penalty of all sorts of horrors to make further comment on it, apparently n*****s and frontal lobes were at risk. That was the thing about government contracts, once you were in, you were in, deep down in. He got the impression from the stooges suddenly materialising onto him from behind doors to check up on him that once they were done he could easily be flushed, loose ends and all that. They just had to keep them dangling with the next idea. Run out of ideas and hold your nose.

The company also more than dabbled in the production of virtual reality environments and that’s where Salvador earned his crust. It was all he ever wanted to do since he first heard about VR. With his current situation, it brought him the chance to design worlds when his own brought no such design.

VR had come a long long way from the massive glove, walk on the moon sized head gear and an orange cube limping around a big lump of monitor. Today’s VR can take you anywhere, murder on the Orient Express or, as one magazine reviewed it. ‘Piss wet through from ancient Egyptian p***y in Cleopatra’s bedchamber’ or you could indeed ‘attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.’

Sometimes there would be a few glitches, shadows, pixelation, some distortion, the occasional mini freeze frame, a bit like that apparition in the street before. Laser fire would freeze and the soldiers would wobble a bit, no way to conduct a serious battle.

It was annoying enough when your PC started dicking about, those days when everything on it needed updating just when you needed it and eventually you forget why you sat down in front of the damn thing in the first place.

But when you’re immersed in a VR programme, any interruption is a deeper interruption. It raises the fury, extracts you from paradise and deposits you in the mundane. Take the controller off any twelve-year-old and see that same fury.

Kids who’d been in VR and then came out of it couldn’t hide their emotions and they were immediately disappointed re-entering the real world. Their little faces all full of parachuting into a volcano to surf on lava were suddenly on the way to school on a Monday morning.

He knew some players lingered in VR space for a short time even when they were out of the programme, only shaking it off some time after they rejoined the real world. That pixelated creature in that laser street can happen, he thought, things could easily vanish and reappear standing in a different spot.

The Net Nano ‘Neuronet’ interactive VR system was next level. It was a system that could make you physically feel your virtual environment. It sent electrical impulses into specific areas of your brain and the brain was fooled into producing the required physical feelings. If you got a jab in the ribs you felt it. If you stubbed your toe you felt it. You could feel a warm sun, a cool breeze and as that same magazine put it. ‘You could definitely feel a blowjob.’ Not only that, it recorded your brain activity when you experienced something and stored it. You could access and re-experience a file of your own emotions. You couldn’t get better than literally controlling your own emotions not to mention controlling the emotions of others, hence the DOD being around.