An Unfortunate Dimension

2. That’s not my Dog-2

VR coders like Salvador raced to create lucrative new signals to make the user feel different things. Naturally most of this early work focused on orgasms enhanced to a frightening and messy degree, mostly for women.

As with most things, a few idiots always came along and had to spoil it. There had been plenty of hacks. Unfortunate players had experienced first the snakebite, which prevented you from using the controls, lost and spinning in virtual space, and then, once you were suitably VR roofied, came the hit. This was what they really wanted you to sit through. In one case the hit was a ten hour acid trip in a coffin instead of ‘Monica comes round for Breakfast.’ It was indicative of the Neuronet’s real power that players failed to simply abort by removing their headgear. To them there was no headgear, where they were was real.

Coca Cola even sponsored the design of some of their VR headsets and added the strapline ‘if you think you’re buzzed now, have a coke.’

Net Nano had been good enough to give Salvador an extended leave of absence to get himself together after it happened. He would have been pointless to them anyway, just moping around, ruining the energy. Once he’d picked up the bottle, they were super glad they did.

Was it all a VR trip? The idea he was dreaming had been shot down because he’d be aware he’s in a dream. Dreams don’t work like that, but VR can. He looked around the edges of his field of vision. He knew the street. Was anything different?

He thought his mind was jumping into the body of himself or whichever creature it might be, jumping into whichever time or place it decided to drop him, the body of Salvador at the time but with today’s head on him, a game character thrown into another level but who’s playing the game? In O’Hara’s, he wasn’t reliving a scene from the past, following a preset, he was adding to it, creating something that didn’t happen at the time, part of a whole new scene, like an overlay of how it might have happened in another dimension. The battle? Who knows. Maybe that was his future?

Back in this sunny street scene, he continued to make some quick moves to try and uncover if all this was VR, but there was still no obvious controller and there had to be a way to control it, and if it was VR, how the hell could they get this place so real? If it was VR, there was a next level company out there designing it. He thought about government conspiracies and new drugs designed to trap people in controlled VR environments. Surely not.

So, what of him in this street right now? He needed at least one more notch cut in his belt. His jeans made him look like some rapper, crotch hung so low to suggest a fictional c**k and balls of epic proportion, the majesty of an elephant c**k transplanted into 501s.

His shirt smelled like his old dog’s bed and he oozed out onto the open space of the sidewalk and tried to convince himself he was ready for the day. His head was still hurting and still numb, which was a concern. The bright sunlight troubled him and he reached for the shades in his back pocket, concealers of excess, the stalker’s friend. He took a breath and absorbed what appeared to him.

Galvanised though he may have been by his anonymity, he was still unsure of these new surroundings, like a duckling approaching the water’s edge for the first time, small flappy advances and retreats until splashdown. He knew where he was but when was it and could some giant reptilian suddenly emerge and start taking bites out of the buildings?

His primary near term goal right now was avoid people. He needed sleep, he knew that. Maybe it was another dimension when he jumped, a place like this but down the rabbit hole. Anyway, the jumps and then trying to analyse the jumps and handling his real life situation ganged up on him and a cool bed was what he wanted.

After it happened and his main problem started, he had to face the very big questions that went through his mind, the realities of life and death. He thought, in the end, what have we got to leave behind for our descendants or any other being that may be here at the time? Would history still be recorded? Surely they’d know we were once apes, then men with big sticks, then hunter gatherers with tools, then farmers with proper tools, and finally men with no tools just little annoying machines, wondering how little they can possibly get away with putting into a big box.

By and large, men were the hunters and women were the gatherers but you can imagine some poor sod, terrified all the time, perhaps more in tune than most with the s**t box era he’d ended up in, trying to avoid the dangerous stuff. He might have joined the girls for a bit of gathering. Maybe it was better for a man to be a hunter than a gatherer, far more sexy, but if you become the peer, the ear and the friend of a gatherer you stay in tune with all of humanity and you might get a bit of saucy cheekiness from time to time in the bargain. And who knows one day, the gatherers may call the shots.

But what would we leave behind? Salvador was a mug for the shows about aliens and space and weird stuff on the discovery channel and one of them covered it. The show reckoned it depends what had happened to us. We store huge amounts of data in deep cooled storage areas but that relies on cooling and maintenance. If that starts to perish over time, whoever stumbles upon our once beautiful world might find only evidence of reality TV shows and consider us a fairly futile waste of air.

They may well giggle at our departing truth, we’d flitted from place to place finding new places to infect and we’d finally shat on ourselves and gone the way of the dinosaurs, coming up a mere hundred and sixty five million years shy of their record. Makes you wonder if anything is really worth it or should we just be concentrating on our next plane of existence. It’s not clear if these temporal worlds are meant for us humans. Maybe they were meant for the dinosaurs.

It was a quiet early morning here on El Camino. The bright warm sunshine hovered over the street and sent the willows lining it to graffiti the colorful shops alongside.

The first place on the right just over from him was Brannigans, the town bakery and cafe. Joe Brannigan had the honour of running the only commercial enterprise to border and be allowed to place tables in the Town Square. He was a cantankerous old relic but he was also a canny operator and he knew some forty years ago that there was only one place to deposit a bakery and cafe here in San Juan, CA.

There were purveyors of various beads and braids, hats and hammocks and the like, owners perhaps formerly of San Francisco. How did they have the patience every day to painstakingly move it all outside, put it up on display and then take it all back inside a few hours later? He wondered if they’ve considered holograms.

You could lay your hands on a damn fine coffee, pancakes, gun accessories, sweet smelling flowers and a general store complete with its very own aproned Nels Oleson.

All was well, the American dream in its own magazine, picturesque perfect, only $3.99 little San Juan, a Southern California jewel.

People behaved themselves here. Respect. Charity and Credit.

There was just one small note of abstract dissent occupying most of town notice board on the Ortega Road side of the square. In bold red paint the words ‘that’s not my dog’ sat effortlessly over the messages beneath. Another Che was alive and well but possibly abusing substances. Its simplicity and confidence with itself was beautiful, majestic. ‘Publish that fucker,’ he thought.

Odds are it was one the town’s smarter high schoolers, little swines, squelching around the place crackling and being generally happy, terrorists. This one was calmly and slowly subduing his prey by base confusion. Delicious, impeccable panache.

‘This could become very watchable,’ he said to himself.

But right now the town worthies, bound like marines by the black arts of gardening, fishing and shooting something, were happy and collected in various locations around town doing their thing, the majority of them over there at Brannigans.

The sun unfurled flora and fauna to the new day. A few people were gathered across the street at Brannigans, a pre-work breakfast. An older lady slipped over the road with the mobility of a far younger woman and dropped a letter in the box and many flavours of birds fevered around the willows.

And then something entered the scene that immediately diverted him from anything else, something that slowed time and demanded his attention. He was seeing everything else fine but suddenly there was pixelation, a kind of flickering just before the signal drops. There was something over there appearing, or trying to appear from the mini-market next to Brannigans. What this again? It looked like a girl? It was a girl. She flickered in and out and vanished only to reappear instantly further in her stride and then, after someone banged the top of the TV, there she was in full vision. She’d crackled and faded into the scene like the apparition did in that battle street. The case for being in a VR game strengthened.

She was about his age, hoodie and leggings of a curious green hue, tall, slim and delicious with shoulder length blonde hair. She’s the reason ‘girl’ sounds like it does. He was sure he knew her from somewhere but couldn’t quite place her.

She was struggling to keep her little black dog tethered while she opened her car door to insert supplies. She was stunning and understated, graceful, elegant, at ease with herself, at ease with those around her and emitting this addictive power. The way her hair fell and a little piece of ear would stick out like an elf, the way she skipped rather than stepped off the curb, hugely important, the way even her untied shoelace could taunt a man. This was a girl that captured you and drew you to wherever you were in her scene. And then he got it.

‘Camille,’ said Salvador again louder than he’d hoped. ‘Oh my f*****g God.’ He hadn’t seen her since they were about thirteen. It was Camille. ‘Scrunchie.’ She liked to wear scrunchies, long since out of fashion, no reason other than that, few quips from the other girls but trends were of no interest to someone that looked like Camille.

Camille was awesome and so pretty, not fluffy cheerleader in-your-face, actually-kinda-not that-pretty-close-up pretty, Camille was another level. She was grounded, kind, sweet, never had a bad word for anyone. The thing was, she was lonely. The girls couldn’t compete with any aspect of her. She had symmetry and a smouldering intellect and that frightened the boys away too. They wouldn’t go near her. But Salvador did, like he’d known her forever. Jesus, with the sun beating down on him in this street, he closed his eyes and he was there. It was the last time she’d sit on her own in recess.

‘Can I sit here?’

‘Possibly, how do you feel about that, Floyd?’

‘Good, confident actually, definitely sat down earlier, kinda do it a lot, reckon I got it.’

‘Then be seated.’

‘Nice hat.’

‘Its not a hat, its a scrunchie.’

‘Looks like a hat.’

And that was that. Camille was Salvador’s best friend and soon became a friend who kissed him a fair bit and then he fell in love with her, his first love, well perhaps apart from Cindy Hawkins, who also showed him her pants when he was eight. He hadn’t seen her since then. Jesus, so she’s back in San Juan and there she was the other side of the street to him now.