Alternative Dimension Read online

  As it climbed to yet another climax so extreme that He would have thought it impossible if He hadn’t been omniscient, a male avatar appeared over the crest of the hill. He saw Red Loth and fell to his knees, placing on the earth before him two bare tablets of stone.

  (The ensuing conversation, like most of those in this story, took the form of words typed on a screen. To avoid clumsy repetition, we’ll just convey them as normal verbal conversations.)

  ‘Oh Great Lord of all,’ typed the new arrival, ‘Maker of all that there is. I come from Thy humble servants in search of wisdom. I seek the principles which will guide us on our way through lives dedicated to Thy glory. Show us Thy commandments.’

  ‘Go away,’ said Red.

  The man kept his head bowed but was obviously surprised by this response.

  ‘Oh Lord of the Earth, vouchsafe …’

  ‘I said “Go away”’, said Red again.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Listen, you don’t want a plague of boils or locusts or something, do you?’

  ‘No Lord,’ said the man.

  ‘Then go away.’

  The man hesitated then rose slowly, bowed deeply once more to Red, turned and began to stride back down the hillside. Immediately, the music swelled.

  ‘And turn that bloody music off,’ shouted Red.

  The various instruments stilled in succession and Red sighed and sat down. He’d hoped that his work was done. But the bare tablets still lay where the man had left them. Maybe He should lay down a few rules. There were bound to be some people who needed them, people who couldn’t manage to fend for themselves and needed to be told how to live. He gave a quick nod and typed ‘GABBY’ in upper case. Almost at once, a picksel appeared before Him. She was the angel avatar of one of the many programmers who’d helped him to create the world and carried the pick which marked her calling.

  ‘Yes Lord,’ she said.

  ‘What do you know about commandments?’ He asked.

  Gabby spotted the tablets.

  ‘Ah, they’ve been up asking already, have they?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Red. ‘Some guy with blue eyes and high cheek bones.’

  ‘It was bound to happen. They’re never satisfied. They could just get on with having a good time, getting to know each other but no, they need a cause, a purpose. You’re omniscient, You must have seen it coming.’

  ‘Of course I did. It was just faster than I expected.’

  ‘Well, I did warn you. I told you you’d need your PR machine to be in place.’

  ‘Alright, alright, smartass.’ Red paused, then asked, ‘Am I allowed to call you that?’

  ‘You can do anything, Lord. It’s Your world.’

  ‘Yes, but swearing – not really all that divine, is it?’

  ‘You can forgive Yourself.’

  Red shook His head and muttered, ‘Absurd’.

  ‘Want to make a start?’ asked Gabby.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Right – Your name.’

  ‘I already changed that,’ said Red. ‘It’s an anagram. I did it deliberately so that nobody would know me.’

  The picksel pointed at the tablets.

  ‘Didn’t work, though, did it?’ she said. ‘Anyway, Red Loth is not a good brand – sounds like some sort of reluctant communist. So the first thing You need is rebranding.’

  ‘Alright, smartass,’ said Red.

  He stopped and looked around. No lightning flashes or rumbles of thunder. The rude word hadn’t upset the equilibrium.

  ‘No doubt you’ve already got something in mind.’

  Gabby smiled.

  ‘Well, now You come to mention it,’ she said, and she produced a tablet from behind her back on which was a single word carved in upper case Monotype Corsiva.

  ‘DEM’.

  ‘Dem?’ said Red. ‘Is that it? That’s what your agency’s come up with after all this time?’

  ‘Like it?’ said Gabby.

  ‘Not much,’ said Red.

  So Gabby explained to Him that her team had brainstormed hard before Iron Lucie spoke up.

  ‘It’s an acronym for Deus Ex Machina’, she said. ‘God in the Machine.’

  ‘I know what it means. I speak Latin …’ said Red, impatiently.

  ‘It seemed perfect. And, on top of everything else, it’s the beginning of ‘demos’ – the people.’

  ‘… and Greek,’ said Red.

  ‘Well, what do you think? It’s short, snappy.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ said Red.

  ‘Good. That’s the brand settled. Now we need a credentials document, corporate vision and values, mission statement …’

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said Red.

  He waved His hand to encompass the lands spread below them.

  ‘I’ve created all this. I had enough trouble getting the funding and wasting time in meetings. I came here to get away from that. I’m not going to mess around with corporate communications. That’s your job.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Gabby. ‘But we need just a wee bit of guidance here. Maybe commandments aren’t such a bad idea. We could base our proposals on them. Gives everything greater credibility if we can say that Upper Management is on board.’

  ‘OK, make them up,’ said Red.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Gabby. ‘It would be better if we could actually say it was the word of the Lord. Surely there are some things you’d like to forbid. Things you don’t like.’

  Red thought briefly.

  ‘Anal leakage,’ He said.

  Gabby paused, but only briefly.

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean. But the thing is … Well, there isn’t any.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anal leakage. I mean none of the avatars, animals or otherwise, has a functioning anus.’

  ‘Just an oversight,’ said Red. ‘They will. Shit is part of creation.’

  ‘OK Lord,’ said Gabby. ‘What else?’

  Slowly, with minimal discussion, the two of them drew up a list of the things Red liked and disliked most. He was fond of graven images so that was one instruction – if the people wanted to worship something, that’s what they should worship. He toyed with the idea of circumcision but, in the end, preferred comprehensive castration, including removal of the entire male member. The men amongst the population would not then be encumbered by the genital equipment that made riding a bike or a horse so uncomfortable and generally got in the way. More importantly, they’d be freed from the habitual anxiety about size. Instead, they could collect an appropriate organ from various locations and merely strap it on when it was required.

  And so it went on, Red’s interest in it all waning as its artificiality became more and more apparent. It was only when they came to choosing a name for the religion that He became agitated once more.

  ‘No name,’ He said. ‘The minute you call it something, you limit it, and somebody else comes up with another name, another label – so they start arguing about it.’

  ‘But we need a name,’ said Gabby. ‘You can’t run a campaign without one.’

  ‘Then don’t run a campaign. Listen, I built this place so that they could all have fun – maybe learn a few things, too – but it’s supposed to be a celebration. Of life.’

  ‘Hmm, not much mileage in that,’ said Gabby. ‘People will want to hear what plans you have, where it’s all going to take them.’

  ‘Nowhere,’ said Red. ‘This is it. Look at it. It’s beautiful. Why the hell would they want to be taken anywhere?’

  ‘Ah yes, hell. I was going to bring that up later,’ said Gabby.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Red.

  ‘OK. But I’m sorry, Lord. We do need a name.’

  ‘The only name I could give you would create mayhem. You see, I want them all to get along together, have a good time, enjoy themselves. I want them to help each other. This is for all of them. I want them to share. Equally. That’s it – nothing more.’

  ‘But that’s … socialism,’ sa
id a horrified Gabby.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Red, ‘But call it what you like, that’s why I built the place. So you call it that or nothing.’

  In the end, wisely, they decided to call it nothing.

  And week after week, Red sat there and watched as the world filled with His creatures and they read and either followed or rejected His commandments. And Red didn’t care which they chose to do, because they were free. That’s why He’d given them choice.

  But, in the end, the more He saw, the less He liked, and He began to think that His creation was flawed. Some of them spent money they didn’t have erecting huge cathedrals to His glory, others ‘interpreted’ His words to suit their own appetites. In one case that was literal because the vegetarians went everywhere telling people that DEM stood for ‘Don’t Eat Meat’. In one of the islands, He was surprised one day to see that the women had to hop around in wooden barrels. It seems that the men at the head of their society had decided that the temptation of the sweeping curves of their buttocks and thighs was hard to resist so, to help them maintain the purest thoughts, the offending bits had to be hidden.

  And it became harder and harder to bear the miserable music that rose from the northern European churches, the gaudy statues and paintings of Him that crowded the chapels, front lawns and even the crossroads of southern Europe. And the things some of His American followers did stretched even His capacity for forgiveness. He’d built the world with joy, creating a wonderland for those who inhabited it, and they were dragging it down into misery, accusations, antagonisms and tribal superstitions.

  Soon, Joe stopped logging on as Red. But it made no difference. Even though there was no such being, they still worshipped Him.

  3 TANGLED WEBS

  As Red Loth, Joe had been pitched headfirst into the spiritual yearnings that drove some of the residents in search of yet more manifestations of truth, meaning, and all those other abstractions that got in the way of just living. As Ross Magee, he could get closer to the everyday concerns which bubbled away at neighbourhood levels. He translocated to Australasia and flew around Alice Springs in a thick haze of barbecue smoke, listening to deep discussions about the relative merits of real and virtual lagers and the finer points of crocodile wrestling. He travelled through Europe sampling stereotypical attitudes to food, morality, political corruption and foreigners. All the avatars in the Latin countries were dark, brooding creatures who burst into gesticulating life when talking of women, football and either pasta or corridas, but up in Scandinavia, they were nearly all blonde and still, staring out over the fjords and giving each other looks pregnant with acceptance. Every word they typed on the screen was heavy with strange accents and symbolism.

  Joe found this herd mentality interesting and spent some time acclimatising in various places. His frequent trips to the Americas made him wonder whether it had been wise to give residents so much freedom to adapt the in-world environment to suit their own preferences. Each state he visited proclaimed its pride in being part of the USA and yet the differences between them were so extreme that he began to wonder what ‘United’ meant. The south thought the north was populated by effete homosexuals while the north failed to understand the semantic lapses that led their southern counterparts to confuse the words ‘bride’, ‘groom’ and ‘first cousin’. The west claimed to be the true representatives of American history, the east celebrated a long European ancestry. The only thing that united them was a general agreement that Red Loth was American. And, except for a few individuals in Kentucky and Tennessee, every single resident had wonderful teeth.

  To the north were the Canadians, who were thought by all to be Americans, but nicer.

  Joe was more familiar with the European experience and nowhere did he find more compelling evidence of the comfort of stereotypes. Russian avatars cried a lot, drank a lot, and sang mournful songs. In France, those who bothered to build roads in the cities piled cobblestones across them to save time when the next revolution or strike came round. There was general bewilderment among them at the idea that anyone wanted to be anything other than French. The Germans would pause briefly to smile mirthlessly at this before getting on with doing whatever they were doing very efficiently. And the Dutch, anxious to be inclusive and give equal status to their urban and rural myths, would bend over their tulips, a joint dangling from their lips, look across at their bikes leaning against a windmill and, to the sound of wooden clogs on cobbles and the occasional splash as someone fell into a canal, simply go on being liberal.

  When he crossed the Channel into the UK, he immediately felt at home and it was here that he sensed the clear differences between his virtual world and the real one. The stereotypes were just as secure, but there were no industrious shopkeepers from the Indian sub-continent, no plumbers or construction workers from Poland and Eastern Europe and, of course, no Russian plutocrats. As a result, the AD Brits were deprived of the chance to grumble that all these foreigners (except the Russians) were simultaneously taking their jobs and claiming unemployment benefit. Nonetheless, they found their separate ways of bringing the comforts of England, Scotland and Wales into their virtuality.

  In the Welsh valleys, among all the people called Morgan and Davies and Evans, he saw rebels – Flocculus Ampersand, Mesopotamia Greasetank, Dib Floncastle and others. He sat on a hill there, listening to massed male voice choirs singing Abide with Me, its glorious, melancholic power punctuated only by the bleating of startlingly attractive sheep. That bleating was replicated in the Scottish glens but there the background chorus was the drone of the pipes and the sizzling of thousands of deep fryers filled with batter-coated Mars bars, slices of haggis and day-old pizzas. There, the avatars strode up to their mountain crofts, their kilts swinging above the heather. Among them he saw the occasional redhead, but most had chosen to go against type and opt for the dark, Mel Gibson look. Only taller.

  A few English avatars formed into groups dedicated to serving Her Gracious Majesty and claiming that Britannia ruled the waves, but most embraced the idea that, here in AD, all were equal. The land was dotted with thatched cottages, cricket pitches and the appropriate action hooks for bowlers, batsmen and fielders. The more risqué hooks, those which facilitated carnal pursuits, were concealed deep in the woods and, as well as copulation simulators labelled ‘him’ and ‘her’, there were hooks for flagellation, correction and even self-restraint. The prevailing mood was one of superior self-satisfaction based on the persistence of sound imperial values.

  But he found the quintessence of AD Englishness in a group which called itself ACAS. Not the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service which, in the real world, helped to settle industrial disputes, but the Agatha Christie Appreciation Society. They met in a Cotswolds-style pub on a village green. The owner was a member and, in what he saw as an example of Wildean wit, he’d called his pub The Joke and Cliché.

  The club had no real rules as such except that, each week, they would stage an investigation of a murder or, more frequently, a series of murders. The fact that this was happening in the world of AD meant that they could be as extreme and unbridled as they wished. The role of Miss Marple was often taken by a man and members felt no compunction about changing their stories and introducing the reddest of herrings whenever they felt threatened or in danger of being exposed. They kept stretching the limits of the genre, creating their own parameters, investigating their own freedoms. It was all held in the traditional framework of a village setting, validated by an association with one of the greats of English crime fiction, and yet the self-control for which the English were so renowned (or lampooned) could be discarded.

  Joe only got to hear of them because the local vicar was barred from the village because he’d been found instructing a schoolboy (who, in real life, was in fact an admiral in the Royal Navy), in the use of some deviant action hooks in the rectory. Unaware of all this, Joe (as Ross) had met him in an Irish pub and started asking about the usefulness of religion in AD. The vicar, in
tent on disrupting the cosy circle in the lounge bar of The Joke and Cliché, had suggested that there were dark forces at work there and handed over a transcript of a part of one investigation which he’d found in a stack of books of common prayer. The document read as follows:

  Transcription of police interview with witness 1337, September 20th 2010

  POLICE: We’ve established you were in the car park around seven, right?

  1337: Yes. Dorothy felt carsick so I pulled in to let her throw up. There’s a corner behind the waste bins there. Nobody can see you from the road. We often use it to get rid of waste products.

  POLICE: OK, but it’s not Dorothy we care about. Or your waste products. It’s you and Mad Mick O’Malley. He was with you, wasn’t he?

  1337: Yes. He’s got a medical degree. He was the one who gave Dorothy the emetic.

  POLICE: Why did she need an emetic? I thought you said she was carsick.

  1337: She didn’t need one. Mad Mick insisted. Wanted to practise, he said. Since she was sick anyway, it didn’t seem to matter.

  POLICE: Who had the gun?

  1337: Dorothy.

  POLICE: Oh come on. Her prints weren’t on it. Just Mad Mick’s.

  1337: That’s crap. There must have been some from the French guy.

  POLICE: What French guy?

  1337: The one who got Dorothy pregnant. That’s why she was sick.

  POLICE: Why should he have the gun?

  1337: He gave it to her. When they got engaged.

  POLICE: Engaged?

  1337: Yeah. She refused to have sex with him unless they got engaged first. So he got her one from that priest. As a present.

  POLICE: What priest?

  1337: The Italian one at St Marks’s. Married to Dorothy’s sister.

  POLICE: You’re trying to tell me that there’s a married priest giving out guns?

  1337: Only to members of his congregation.

  POLICE: This is all crap, isn’t it? All a smokescreen. You’re guilty as fuck, aren’t you?

  1337: Well, guilty of some things, yeah. I’m a Catholic. Goes with the territory. Depends what you’re asking about.