eXistenZ Page 11

  The game plan at this level did not appear to provide dialogue for them, so although Pikul was anxious to discuss events with Geller, he said nothing. Instead, they held hands and walked along quietly, savoring the fresh smell of the trees, the warm sunlight, and the sounds of the river. They were not alone in their silence.

  Soon they saw a building in a clearing ahead of them. It was an ordinary Victorian red-brick farmhouse, standing amidst the trees. Nothing about it suggested Chinese connections, other than a sign that had been planted on the lawn in front of the building:

  Mona Zhang’s Beijing Cuisine

  Still continuing to follow the trickle of other lunching workers, Geller and Pikul walked across the lawn and past this sign. They went inside.

  Soon they were sitting at a round, Formica-covered table. At its center was a lazy Susan serving wheel. Various small platters of samples and appetizers were resting in the compartments of the wheel.

  Pikul glanced around at the interior of the restaurant.

  Most, but not all, of the other tables were occupied by their fellow workers. There were still plenty of vacant spots, should others arrive later. The mood in the place could not be described as cheerful: many of the people were sitting around in sullen, suspicious silence. A restaurant dog, a mongrel with a great deal of heavy, collielike fur, was basking in the corner of the large room, taking in the warmth from a pane of sunlight.

  The silence that had fallen as they entered the restaurant hung around them, making Pikul apprehensive. Geller, however, stayed calm, at least on the surface. She sat elegantly at the table, her hands resting lightly on the shiny surface. Pikul glanced around at the other diners, sensing in some horrible but incomprehensible way that he already knew many of the people around him. How could this be? They were only figments of the imagination.

  To his relief, the fact that he was staring back at them seemed to have the desired effect, and within a few moments a semblance of normality had returned to the restaurant.

  After a few minutes a waiter approached their table. He was a young, athletic Chinese, wearing a white jacket and neatly pressed dark trousers. He was carrying a tray with rice and tea.

  “We have a nice fresh sea bass today,” he said, placing everything down on the table. “Shall I bring it for you?”

  Geller glanced first at Pikul, then to the waiter, and shrugged in agreement.

  Pikul, though, raised himself slightly in his seat and looked the waiter in the eye.

  “No,” he said. “We will both have the special.”

  The waiter looked stunned. It seemed to Pikul that a chill wave of reaction flowed across the other diners in the restaurant. Many of them were looking across the room toward their table.

  The waiter had started to rock back and forth, and was pursing his lips, presumably preparing himself for a burst of corporate humming.

  “Did you hear me, Chinese waiter?” Pikul said firmly “We want the special. We—want—the—special.”

  The waiter unlocked, and blinked.

  “The special is for, ah, special occasions,” he said. “I am not able to bring you the special.”

  “I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  “The special is for, ah, special occasions,” the waiter said again. “I cannot bring you the special.”

  “But this is a special occasion,” Pikul said. “It’s . . . I mean, it’s . . .” He waited for inspiration, believing that the game script must be there to help him out. Geller was watching him with amused curiosity. “It’s . . . her birthday!” he finally got out, waving his hand in an explanatory fashion toward Geller. “Yes, it’s her birthday today.”

  The waiter locked up again for a few moments, but then unfroze.

  “A birthday is indeed a special occasion,” he said. “I will therefore bring you the special.”

  He walked away toward the serving door.

  “And make it snappy!” Pikul called after him.

  The waiter paused, then turned and bowed slightly.

  “You will certainly find it . . . snappy, sir,” he said.

  “I guess the special isn’t popular,” Pikul observed to Geller.

  “I guess not.”

  “But you know, really, don’t you?” he said to her, looking insistently into her eyes. “You don’t have to guess about what’s going on here, like me. I mean, you built all this into the game when you invented the system. It’s your game, your private universe.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Pikul. I don’t know what’s happening here, any more than you do. It’s one of the principal features of eXistenZ that you still have to learn and appreciate. You have to find out what it really is, what the game creates. Anything is possible once you start playing, and it’s outside the control of the code of the game. The code of the game simply does not contain it.”

  “So you’re telling me, just for a simple example, that as of this moment you don’t know what the special is going to be?”

  “Correct. I don’t.”

  “Or why we ordered it?” Pikul went on.

  “I do know that, as it happens. We ordered the special because another game character told you to order it. eXistenZ is a character-led game. What the players do is imagine a number of parameters, based on their unconscious wishes, their experiences, their memories, sometimes they’re based on their deliberate desires. The characters we meet in the game are a part of this process: they might be people we’ve heard of, or would like to meet, or people we once knew long ago in our real lives and have forgotten about. They can even be historical characters. Sometimes the characters in the game are the other people you’ve ported into the game alongside. At the moment, for instance, you are clearly imagining me and I’m imagining you, so we both exist in the game. eXistenZ, you see. The characters predominate, though. It’s as simple as that. If one of them tells us something, or gives us a task to perform, then that is the direction the script of the game will be taking. It’s a clue we can’t ignore. But that’s basic game-playing.”

  “I want to put the game on pause,” Pikul said. Geller looked at him in surprise. “The game can be paused, can’t it?” he said. “I mean, all games can be paused. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, of course. But why do that? Why stop it now, when it’s just starting to get interesting? Aren’t you dying to find out what’s special about the special?”

  Pikul fidgeted with the lazy Susan, rotating it with his fingers. Tempting snacks made of golden batter and noodles and dim sum went circling slowly past.

  “Look, I have nothing against the game,” he said. “It’s just that I’m starting to feel a bit disconnected from my real life. I’m kind of losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there’s an element of psychosis involved in this sort of game. I mean, I no longer know where my body really is, or where reality is . . . or what I’ve actually done, or not done. These things can be pretty important, you know.”

  Geller selected a dim sum as it circled past her, and examined it in her fingertips before putting it in her mouth. She chewed it contemplatively.

  “What you’re saying is a good sign, Pikul,” she said. “I mean, it’s a good sign in terms of you appreciating the game. It means your nervous system is frilly engaging with the game architecture. The game is a lot more fun to play when it starts to feel realer than real.”

  “Yeah, let the fun begin,” Pikul said.

  He pushed back his chair and stood up. He took a deep breath, then screamed at the top of his lungs.

  “eXistenZ is paused!” he yelled, making the cutlery on the next table rattle in reaction. “The game is on hold! eXistenZ stops right here!”

  The other diners all turned to stare at him in surprise. But by then the Chinese restaurant was already melting away.

  [ 17 ]

  Pikul was sitting on a bed with a beautiful woman who was smiling up at him from where she sprawled across the covers. He thought gloomily, If that’s
not Allegra Geller, I’m dreaming. Then he thought, If I’m not dreaming, then I’m dead and I’ve gone to Heaven.

  It was . . . and so he wasn’t and he hadn’t.

  The walls of the guest cabin at Kiri Vinokur’s ski club gradually solidified around them, revealing and outlining a tangibly real Geller lying an intimately short distance away from him, connected to him by an equally substantial-looking UmbyCord. Her MetaFlesh game-pod lay between them amid the kicked-up humps of the brightly colored covers of the bed.

  Pikul tried to speak but made only a liquid burbling noise. He waited, watching reality reform. When it seemed complete, he tried again.

  “Did I do that?” he said.

  “Did you stop the game, you mean? I think you did.”

  “Wow,” he said with conviction, if not with a great deal of subtlety.

  “So how does it feel?” Geller said to him, smiling.

  “How does what feel?”

  “Your real life . . . the one that was so important for you to come back for.”

  “Sitting here with you on a bed feels completely unreal. For any number of reasons.”

  “So that wasn’t what you wanted.” She shifted position, straightened the untidy bedcovers, laid the game-pod more in the center of the space between them. “And reality in general? How does that feel?”

  “Pretty good. I’m sure you knew that was going to happen.”

  “I suspected that pausing the game like that would bring us back here to the ski lodge. But you’re stuck now, aren’t you? You’ve got what you wanted, what you thought you wanted. But you also want to go back to the Chinese restaurant because something engrossing was happening there. You didn’t know what it was, but it was at least something interesting. Here . . . there’s nothing happening. We’re safe here, but safety is ultimately boring.”

  “Geller . . . what’s that you’re chewing?”

  She worked her jaw a couple more times, and ran her tongue over her teeth. “Is it bothering you?”

  “No. What is it you’re eating?”

  “I don’t know. Something spicy.”

  “Is it dim sum?”

  She swallowed quickly, clearing her mouth. “No. Not dim sum.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. What are you implying, Pikul?”

  “I’m having trouble with all this,” he said. “Reality doesn’t feel so real anymore. I’m not sure that here, where we are now, is real at all. As far as I’m concerned this also feels like a game. Sitting here on a bed with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.” He looked away from her for a moment, thinking hard. Then he said, “Did we really make love together?”

  Her reaction was instant. “Definitely not!”

  The sharpness of her tone surprised him.

  “At least that much is clear,” he said. “At least as far as you’re concerned. You’re not in any doubt.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because it feels to me as if we did,” Pikul said. “I have extremely clear memories of doing it, of liking it, and of wanting a whole lot more of it. You seemed to feel the same way. At the time, I mean.”

  “No . . . our game characters had sex with each other. That’s the sort of thing that happens inside eXistenZ. But it wasn’t real, it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t make assumptions about you and me based only on that. Things would be different if we were to do it together for real.”

  Pikul thought about that for the moment. She had said, if we were to do it for real . . . while to him it felt as if they already had.

  “I’m actually just like that,” he said after a while. “I mean, the game character who made love to you . . . he’s exactly like me. If you liked what happened with the game character . . . well, I want you to know you got the real Ted Pikul in there, in the game store.”

  “Before you get any more ideas up and running, I can assure you that you didn’t get the real Allegra Geller there. I mean the game character didn’t.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She stretched over, raising her face to his, and kissed him gently but affectionately.

  “In real life I tend to lose control. It can get seriously messy.” She allowed him to return her kiss, and for a few moments Pikul thought she was about to give him a seriously messy time. But then she added, “Come on . . . let’s port in and go back to the game.”

  “Aw . . . not yet.”

  “We can’t leave the game where we did. It was about to get interesting.”

  “Okay, but afterward?”

  “Afterward is what we do next. That’s a promise, or maybe even a warning.”

  “All right,” he said, and grinned happily at her. He reached down to the game-pod and flicked the Play nipple.

  The room began to dissolve away from them.

  [ 18 ]

  The Chinese restaurant quickly reformed around them, with light and noise and movement swimming into life.

  The lazy Susan was still revolving slowly after Pikul had propelled it with his hand. Geller continued to chew her dim sum. As she swallowed the remains of it, the waiter approached their table bearing a large tray of dishes. He set them down proudly on the lazy Susan.

  “Special order for the birthday girl,” he said. “Enjoy your meal.”

  Pikul and Geller stared at the dishes.

  Each one contained an assortment of cooked reptiles and amphibians: frogs with bamboo shoots; deep-fried lizards in sesame seeds; a huge toad set upright amidst stuffed mushrooms, with a couple of pieces of corn pushed into his eye sockets; a soup thick with noodles and boiled newts; slices of roast snake with oyster sauce. The lazy Susan slowly drifted round and round, bearing this bizarre but strangely beautiful feast before them.

  “My God,” Geller said.

  “You take the words right out of my mouth.”

  A single saucer-shaped bowl had a compartment to itself, and as it moved on toward Geller, Pikul pointed it out.

  “Recognize a friend?” he said.

  Geller took a closer look: it was the two-headed salamander that had ridden on the truck with them from the gas station.

  Pikul gulped. “Two heads and six legs,” he said. “I think I’ve lost my appetite.”

  The waiter was still hovering beside their table.

  “Not hungry anymore?” he said. “Great shame, great pity. Mutant reptiles and amphibians provide new and previously unimagined taste sensations. Secret Oriental recipes.”

  “Well, yeah,” Geller said. “Thanks, but no thanks. No offense, mind.”

  “Shall I clear all this away?” the waiter said.

  Pikul caught the glimmer of expression that had passed over Geller’s face. She was indicating: this is the special, this is something special, a game character told us to choose it.

  “No, it looks terrific,” Pikul said decisively. He glanced back at Geller, who was nodding slowly. “Thank you. We’re happy.”

  “Very good,” the waiter replied. “Enjoy.”

  This time he walked away, holding his tray at his side.

  Pikul looked thoughtfully at the array of animals lying before him, then reached out and selected the toad with mushrooms. He scooped the toad onto his plate, but returned the mushrooms to the lazy Susan.

  With precise movements he began breaking the toad’s muscular limbs off and stripping away the meat.

  “Pikul, what are you doing?”

  “I don’t know.” He’d bitten into the side of the toad, feeling the flesh spreading as his jaw clamped down on it, and the bones of the animal’s skeleton breaking and separating. His mouth filled with the oily, meaty flavor of meat. “I find it disgusting, but I can’t help myself!”

  “That’s great!” Geller wrinkled her nose in disdain at him. “You can’t help yourself.”

  “This isn’t my choice,” he said with his mouth full. He swallowed, then took another bite. This time he took a leg. After he’d chewed on it a few times he turned the limb around with hi
s fingers, then stripped the soft meat from the bone by pulling against his teeth.

  He looked up from what he was doing. He had now dismembered the toad, with many of its largest bones lying on his plate. He set to work on the deep-fried lizards, scraping off the sesame seeds, pulling away the stringy flesh and laying out the tiny bones on his plate. Everything was stir-fried to perfection: the meat fell neatly from the bones.

  Pikul’s fingers were slimy and gobbets of melted fat were dripping from the ends. As before, when he’d been sitting by the conveyor belt, his hands carried on their work of their own volition.

  “I’m interested in what you’re doing,” Geller said when he seemed to be flagging.

  “Interested?” Pikul said, glancing down with horror at what he was doing. “You think this is interesting?”

  “Yeah, it’s fascinating to watch,” Geller said. “It’s a genuine game urge, obviously something your game character, Larry Ashen, was born to do and is good at. Don’t fight it.”

  “Actually, I did start out by fighting it. But it didn’t do me any good, so I’m just rolling with it for the moment.”

  As he spoke his hands were snapping one of the toad’s long thigh bones and twisting a strip of frog-sinew around it to form an angled piece. He and Geller watched with horrid fascination as his hands quickly pushed all the various pieces together, slotting them in with shreds of skin, gristle, and sinews to hold them in place, and using the amphibians’ own joints to form swivels and cogs and other moving parts.

  The grotesquely twinned neckbone of the six-legged salamander was the last piece to be put into place. It seated itself neatly with a distinct click, and as Pikul held up the assembly, it was clear that the necks had formed the mechanism of a trigger.

  He was holding a cadaver-gun almost identical to the one that had been used in the assassination attempt at the church.