A Blink of the Screen (18 page)

I heard from, you know, contacts that at one point the police were considering calling it murder, but what was the point? The way they
saw
it, all the evidence of her still being alive was just something he’d arranged, sort of to cover things up. I don’t think so because I like happy endings, me.

And it really went on for a long time, the memory sink. Like I said, the flat had more data lines running into it than usual, because he needed them for his work.

I reckon he’s gone out there, now.

You walk down the street, you’ve got your reality visor on, who knows if who you’re seeing is really there? I mean, maybe it isn’t like being alive, but perhaps it isn’t like being dead.

I’ve got photos of both of them. Went through old back issues of the Seagem house magazine, they were both at some long-service presentation. She was quite good-looking. You could tell they liked one another.

Makes sense they’ll look just like that now. Every time I switch a visor on, I wonder if I’ll spot them. Wouldn’t mind knowing how they did it, might like to be a virus myself one day, could be an expert at it.

He owes me, anyway. I got the machine going again and I never told them what she said to me, when I saw her in his reality. She said, ‘Tell him to hurry.’

Romantic, really. Like that play … what was it … with the good dance numbers, supposed to be in New York. Oh, yeah.
Romeo and Juliet
.

People in machines, I can live with that.

People say to me, hey, this what the human race is meant for? I say, buggered if I know, who knows? We never went back to the Moon, or that other place, the red one, but we didn’t spend the money down here on Earth either. So people just curl up and live inside their heads.

Until now, anyway.

They could be anywhere. Of course, it’s not like life but prob’ly it isn’t death either. I wonder what compiler he used? I’d of loved to have had a look at it before he shut the machine down. When I rebooted it, I sort of initialized him and sent him out. Sort of like a godfather, me.

And anyway, I heard somewhere there’s this god, he dreams the whole universe, so is it real or what? Begins with a b. Buddha, I think. Maybe some other god comes round every six million years to service the machinery.

But me, I prefer to settle down of an evening with a good book. People don’t read books these days. Don’t seem to do anything, much. You go down any street, it’s all dead, all these people living in their own realities.

I mean, when I was a kid, we thought the future would be all crowded and cool and rainy with big glowing Japanese adverts everywhere and people eating noodles in the street. At least you’d be communicating, if only to ask the other guy to pass the soy sauce. My joke. But what we got, we got this Information Revolution, what it means is no bugger knows anything and doesn’t know they don’t know, and they just give up.

You shouldn’t turn in on yourself. It’s not what being human means. You got to reach out.

For example, I’m really enjoying
Elements of OSCF Bandpass Design in Computer Generated Environments
.

Man who wrote it seems to think you can set your S-2030s without isolating your cascade interfaces.

Try that in the real world and see what happens.

HOLLYWOOD CHICKENS

M
ORE
T
ALES FROM THE
F
ORBIDDEN
P
LANET
,
ED
.
R
OZ
K
AVENY
,
T
ITAN
B
OOKS
L
TD
,
L
ONDON, 1990

As the author’s note says at the end, this was based on a true story. At least, Diane Duane swore it was true, and I wasn’t about to argue. And the story just rolled out in front of me. Fortuitously, not long after I was asked for a story for
More Tales from the Forbidden Planet,
published in 1990 …

The facts are these.

In 1973, a lorry overturned at a freeway interchange in Hollywood. It was one of the busiest in the United States and, therefore, the world.

It shed some of its load. It had been carrying chickens. A few crates broke.

Alongside the interchange, bordered on three sides by thundering traffic and on the fourth by a wall, was a quarter-mile of heavily shrubbed verge.

No one bothered too much about a few chickens.

*

Peck peck.

Scratch. Scratch.

Cluck?

It is a matter of record that, after a while, those who regularly drove this route noticed that the chickens had survived. There were, and indeed still are, sprinklers on the verge to keep the greenery alive and presumably the meagre population of bugs was supplemented by edible fallout from the constant stream of traffic.

The chickens seemed to be settling in. They were breeding.

Peck peck. Scratch. Peck …

Peck?

Scratch peck?

Peck?

Peck + peck = squawk

Cluck?

A rough census indicated that the population had stabilized at around fifty birds. For the first few years young chickens would frequently be found laminated to the blacktop, but some sort of natural selection appeared to be operating, or, if we may put it another way, flat hens don’t lay eggs.

Passing motorists did occasionally notice a few birds standing at the kerb, staring intently at the far verge.

They looked like birds with a problem, they said.

SQUAWK PECK PECK CROW!

In fact, aside from the occasional chick or young bird, no chicken was found dead on the freeway itself apart from the incident in 1976, when ten chickens were seen to set out from the kerb together during the rush-hour peak. This must have represented a sizeable proportion of the chicken population at that time.

The driver of a gas tanker said that at the head of the little group was an elderly cockerel, who stared at him with supreme self-confidence, apparently waiting for something to happen.

Examination of the tanker’s front offside wing suggests that the bird was a Rhode Island Red.

Cogito ergo cluck.

Periodically an itinerant, or the just plain desperate, would dodge the traffic to the verge and liberate a sleeping chicken for supper.

This originally caused some concern to the Department of Health, who reasoned that the feral chickens, living as they did so close to the traffic, would have built up dangerously high levels of lead in their bodies, not to mention other noxious substances.

In 1978, a couple of research officers were sent into the thickets to bring back a few birds for a sacrifice to Science.

The birds’ bodies were found to be totally lead-free.

We do not know whether they checked any eggs.

This is important (see Document C).

They did remark incidentally, however, that the birds appeared to have been fighting amongst themselves. (See Document F:
Patterns of Aggression in Enclosed Environments
, Helorksson and Frim, 1981.) We must assume, in view of later developments, that this phase passed.

Four peck-(neck stretch) and seven cluck-scratch ago, our crow-(peck left foot)-squawk brought forth upon this cluck-cluck-squawk …

In the early hours of 10 March 1981, Police Officer James Stooker Stasheff, in pursuit of a suspect, following a chase which resulted in a seven-car collision, a little way from the verge, saw a construction apparently made of long twigs, held together with cassette tape, extending several feet into the carriageway. Two chickens were on the end of it, with twigs in their beaks. ‘They looked as if they was nest building,’ he now recalls. ‘I went past again about 10 a.m. It was all smashed up in the gutter.’

Officer Stasheff went on to say, ‘You always get tapes along the freeway. Any freeway. See, when they get snarled up in the Blaupunkt or whatever, people just rip ’em out and pitch them through the window.’

According to Ruse and Sixbury (
Bulletin of the Arkham Ornithological Society
, vol. 17, pp. 124–32, 1968) birds may, under conditions of chronic stress, build nests of unusual size and complexity (Document D).

This is not necessarily advanced as an explanation.

Peck … peck … scratch.

Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch.

The collapse of a small section of carriageway near the verge in the summer of 1983 is not considered germane to this study. The tunnel underneath it was put down to gophers. Or foxes. Or some other burrowing animal. What were irresponsibly described as shoring timbers must simply have been, for example, bits of timber that accidentally got carried into the tunnel by floodwater, as it were, and wedged. Undoubtedly the same thing happened with the feathers.

If Cluck were meant to fly, they’d have bigger (flap).

Testimony of Officer Stasheff again:

‘This must have been around late August, 1984. This trucker told me, he was driving past, it would have been around mid-afternoon, when this thing comes flapping, he said flapping, out of the bushes and right across the freeway and he’s watching it, and it doesn’t lose height, and next thing he knows it bounces off his windshield and breaks up. He said he thought it was kids or something, so I went and had a look at the bushes, but no kids. Just a few of the chickens scratching about, and a load of junk, you know. You wouldn’t believe the kind of junk that ends up by the side of roads. I found what was left of the thing that’d hit him. It was like a sort of cage with these kind of big wings on, and all full of pulleys and more bits of cassette tapes and levers and stuff. What? Oh, yeah. And these chickens. All smashed up. I mean, who’d do something like that? One minute flying chickens, next minute McNuggets. I recall there were three of them. All cockerels, and brown.’

It’s a (small scratch) for a cluck, a (giant flap) for Cluck.

Testimony of Officer Stasheff again (19 July 1986):

‘Kids playing with fire. That’s my opinion. They get over the wall and make hideouts in the bushes. Like I said, they just grab one of the chickens. I don’t see why everyone’s so excited. So some kids fill an old trashcan with junk and fireworks and stuff and push a damn chicken in it and blow it up in the air … It’d have caused a hell of a lot of damage if it hadn’t hit one of the bridge supports on the far side. Bird inside got all smashed up. It’d got this cloth in there with strings all over. Maybe the kids thought the thing could use a parachute. Okay, so there’s a crater, what the hell, plant a bush in it. What? Sure it’d be hot, it’s where they were playing spacemen. Not that kind of hot? What kind of hot?’

Peck (Neck Twist)-crow = gurgle/C
²

Cluck?

We do know that at about 2 a.m. on the morning of 3 May 1989, a purple glow was noticed by several drivers in the bushes around the middle of the verge. Some say it was a blue glow. From a crosschecking of the statements, it appeared to last for at least ten minutes.

There was also a noise. We have a number of descriptions of this noise. It was ‘sort of weird’, ‘kind of a whooping sound’, and ‘rather like radio oscillation’. The only one we have been able to check is the description from Curtis V. J. McDonald, who said, ‘You know in that
Star Trek
episode when they meet the fish men from an alternate Earth? Well, the fish men’s matter transmitter made just the same noise.’

We have viewed the episode in question. It is the one where Captain Kirk falls in love with the girl (Tape A).

Cluck?

(Foot twist)
/peck]/Scratch
^{2* *oon}
(Gurgle)(Left-shoulder-preen) = (Right-shoulder-preen) …