I felt odd, out of place with what Rav said, like I was watching a play. That saddened me, but I could see he was nervous, so I smiled even though I was nervous as well and I didn't know how I was meant to be with him. What with me being a recent split.
In myself I felt the same as when I spoke to Rav in the bar on the slices, when I spoke to him as the Proto, and how I felt about him was no different, but he obviously didn't feel the same. "How does this normally go, when you speak for the first time to the other splits?"
Rav nodded. "Good question." He started to walk towards a bench, and I felt my viewpoint move with him. "I don't know. Much the same as this really." He sat down on the bench. "I heard that your Proto has been found dead on holiday. I didn't know he was going to France?"
"France? No, I'm sure it should be Switzerland."
"All the same," said Rav and sighed. "But he's dead Joe, I can't believe. Your Proto's dead."
"Hmm," That made me feel weird again, and I noticed how vivid everything was around me, I could see the individual strands of grass and the deep dark brown of his eyes. It was like I was the Proto and Rav was talking about an impostor. "Do you know how he died?"
"No, no I don't."
I felt myself sneer, as I was feeling annoyed. The talk with Rav wasn't going where I thought it would. But so what, that the body everyone called the Proto wasn't here any more, Joe Latif still existed in me and the other splits. I bit my lip, I realised I couldn't say all that I felt to Rav; he was looking down, kicking his feet, he looked quite upset.
"But don't forget that Joe Latif does still exist."
Rav's face dropped, "I've never had someone close to me die before."
"Joe Latif is not dead!" I blurted out, and then saw the look on his face.
"I can't believe - Um, I had better go." And the park disappeared as he terminated the connection.
* * * *
From France and the split-ops labs Joe Latif-Proto headed across the border to Switzerland. He decided to become a holiday maker resorting in the Alps so he could try his hand at skiing on real world snow. And if there was going to be a threat to his life in that body, he thought it was best to keep it in a public place.
On the first day in Berne the Proto stayed at the most expensive hotel in town. He hadn't been on a slice since well before the split and the migraines had stopped since he had kept his embedded router switched off, but he was getting itchy feet. He would sit for hours daydreaming about being on the slices, he didn't know if his router would even work if he switched it back on, it had been off for so long.
Some places have a life that can only be experienced first hand, but whenever he saw someone who was on the slices, even on an overlay, he would stare at them and try to work out which slice they were on, mumbling his thoughts out loud instead of experiencing the Berne that stared back at him. He was biting his nails, furrowing his forehead, snapping at people he was encountering. The receptionists at his hotel tried to avoid dealing with him, they muttered about him behind his back, but he didn't notice.
Going back to his hotel at the end of his first day he kept hearing an echo of his feet crunching in a new fall of snow along the pavement. He stopped and there was a singular crunch and then silence. He looked behind, but there was no one on the dark empty street. He started walking again, but faster.
When he got to the hotel foyer he waited, just inside the doorway and watched the street, but no one passed.
The next day on a walking tour of the fountains he felt a pricking at the back of his neck like someone was watching him. He turned around, and no one was there. With all of the Swiss chalets, snow and skiing he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched, of being followed.
Later, on an open-top bus between the fountains, the Proto spotted a slice cafe he hadn't noticed before. It made him feel the dread in the pit of his stomach, but he found himself off the bus and standing in front of the door before he realised what he was doing. He stood staring at it, half tempted by the wish for normality and half holding back against the urge, by the fear of being traceable.
"Oh sod it," he said shaking his head and he entered the slice cafe, his hand trembling as he pushed the door open.
Once connected to the slices he decided to contact his Eta.
"Willkommen," said the slice cafe's bot, and then paused. "Welcome, would you like to speak UK English? All payments will be taken from payment card on your person. Please confirm with thumb print."
"Connect me to Joe Latif-Eta at GamesAdvantage US," as he thumbed his card.
The bot paused again and flickered. "Connecting," and it faded away into the background.
The Eta's face appeared in mid-air, his study out of focus behind him. The same expensive loungers were dotted about the room the Proto had visited before, the screens that hung like mobiles were now tucked flat against a wall.
"What the hell are you doing contacting?" he screamed.
"I just needed some normality. The split went -"
Eta tight lipped, shook his head. "But that's a risk. I can't accept the call." and his face and study disappeared.
The Proto shook his head at the empty booth. That had upset him. He stood for a second rooted to the spot. "Oh, well," he shrugged. "I'm here now."
"Yes you are," a voice said in his ear.
"Close all slices!"
The smallhead turned slightly but kept his eyes on the Proto. "This booth!"
A moment later four others burst into the room. The Proto had backed up to the far wall, he could feel the roughness of the bricks beneath his sweaty palms, the inside of his leg went suddenly warm as his sock got wet. A pungent smell stung his nostrils and he realised he'd just pissed himself. "W- w- what do you want?"
A dark haired smallhead stood before him, Joe could see the pores of his greasy pot marked skin.
"What do we want?" Greasy-skin's smile bared rotted teeth. "A good question indeed, my friend."
Joe felt a pang as he recognised the sunglasses Greasy-skin was wearing. They were router-glasses, he had used them as a kid before he was allowed to have an embedded router.
"Well," Greasy-skin looked off to a blank wall. "That all depends," and he turned back to look at Joe, "doesn't it."
Joe tried to see if the door was easy to get to, but it was behind the other smallheads and there was no way around them.
"Are you nervous?" asked Greasy-skin.
"Yes."
Greasy-skin nodded slowly. "Hmm. You're one of those clones, aren't you?"
"No, no. No I'm not," Joe Latif-Proto shook his head.
Greasy-skin scrunched up his face, and rubbed his eyes underneath the dark lenses. "Yeah, but you go to those splitter facilities. We know that. Even if you were born of a woman, you still partake in the cloning stuff. Or splitting, whatever you call it." He paused. "This is stuff we know."
"You see," and Greasy-skin took off his sunglasses to reveal dark brown eyes under a heavy brow. "We have a problem." He scratched his nose with the arm of the sunglasses. "We have a problem created by someone else, and we're cleaning up the mess."
He shook his head, Joe was staring fixedly at him. "It's not a good state of affairs. It's really not."
Joe stared, mouth open at this man. His mind was at once frozen and racing, he didn't understand what was going on but his skin felt like it was crawling up and off the top of his head. Were they going to kill him? But that didn't matter to him, he was greater than just this one body. The body held nothing of any value. Torture scared him, the thought of it was just too much. He wished that if it was going to happen it would be quick, but even through his panic he found himself switching on his embedded router, ready to go online if he needed it.
One of the smallheads at the back looked up, leaned forward and whispered in Greasy-skin's ear.
"It's really very easy to know when someone switches on those routers. So switch it off."
Joe gagged on the sick rising in his throat. Shit, shit, shit, he
said to himself as he put the router in hibernate, quicker to switch on if he needed it. He looked down and realised that he had been holding his hands up in front of himself palms outwards, his back felt tensed, the back of his neck felt like he had been hit, his legs felt weak so he tightened them to stay upright.
Behind his sunglasses, Greasy-skin faced Joe. "Do you get a lot of migraines?" And raised his eyebrows above the rim of the glasses. "You probably do. It's 'cause of the router," and tapped the side of his head.
Joe let his hands drop, but remained tensed up immobile, frozen to the spot, he could feel his heart pounding through his chest and thumping in his ears.
Greasy-skin paused and thought for a second, rubbing his stubble. "You know what interests me about life? It's all this jiggery-pokery of creating new identities out of thin air. Now, that is gonna cause problems one day. The guardians of the Red King would have stuff to say to you about that, an organisation that if it weren't a different time, I would not be entirely unconnected with."
"This erosion of human identity by cloning, splitting, memory trading, identity holidays for god's sake is going to irreconcilably alter the nature of human thought about identity. It's got to hasn't it? Such a revolutionary experience? People will realise that identity is not the centre of consciousness, and it'll build until there is a tipping point. A tipping point that will sling us head-long into one whole planet realising that human identity is a fraud, an illusion."
Joe realised that a smallhead at the back was looking down at something in their hands, it must have been the device that signalled when he had switched on his embedded router. He caught his breathe when he realised that might give him a chance.
Greasy-skin looked heaven-ward for a second. "What we know to be the truth is that we - me, you, us - we are all just fragments of imagination in the mind of God. It doesn't matter what your God is, or even if you have a God. But we are all eddies in the stream of life, players in a cosmic theatre. And we know the planet mustn't be allowed to wake up to that knowledge, mustn't be allowed to realise that, for to do so would mean the end of everything, the end of life." He paused. "Anyway, the deal we were talking about-"
Joe lurched forward at the group, greasy-skin side-stepped him and Joe piled into the rest. They fell into each other and the device went flying off to a corner of the room. A second later while he felt arms pinning him down, Joe switched on his embedded router and connected to the uplink slice. He struggled against his feelings of vomiting, and their strength holding him against the floor but managed to upload his latest memories including the torture and this encounter to the slice.
Greasy-skin scrambled for the device, and stood over Joe peering down into his eyes. "Switch it off! Or we will switch it off for you. And then we will reclaim what is rightfully ours."
Joe felt the smallheads spit hitting him in the face.
His uploaded memories finished there.
* * * *
As the warm breeze against my face woke me I came aware of the sunlight on my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the leaves above me glowing with the golden light. I could hear shouts and the thud of a football being kicked around, and looked to see match-stick figures running around in a sea of bright green of the lush park. Grabbers and twitchers wandering about muttering to themselves and flinching away from unseeable spectres along the tree lined paths.
I opened our upload slice in overlay, so the park was its background. Sun streamed between the lists of uploaded memories and the ideograms blotted out the matchstick footballers. I played with the 'grams until only the Protos memories were shown. At the top of the list, up in the branches of a gnarled oak that stood before me was the last of his memories from Berne. It was over two months since the smallheads had found him there, an experience I would find out about when I downloaded the memories.
I covered it with an outstretched finger and it grew a surrounding circle of ideograms. There was a loud beep as I started the download, and I felt flowing water down my spine, the memories were coming down from the slice. It was like suddenly remembering long lost forgotten memories as they found and slotted into their places in my mind. I moved the slice to behind me, and left the download running in the background.
I sat there feeling the bench on my back, and feasted on the sweet musty smell of soil. Another rosy scent pricked my nose, as I felt a touch on my shoulder and I smiled. "Hi, Fay."
Her hair tumbled over my face as she kissed me from behind. "I like you more than I liked your Proto, even before he was first split."
"You mean there is a difference? We're all the same person."
"No, no you're not," she shook her head. "You're not as spiky, as obsessional. I like that," and smiled.
"But Joe Latif is - "
Her expression turned stern. "There is no such person as Joe Latif any more, he killed himself."
"But I'm Joe Latif, or an aspect, I have memories of when I was a child. When Joe Latif was a child, and I have a scar from slipping out of the tree in the garden."
"That's just smoke and mirrors."
"That's hurtful. Listen Fay," I matched her stern look and raised it a steady stare, "there is nothing unique about the Proto, about that body. It is all held between us Joe Latif's, that's where the uniqueness is. Thankfully we keep records, I can remember what happened in Switzerland to me, now," and a tear came to my eye.
"That's as maybe," and she slumped herself beside me on the bench, in the sun.
A cartoon rodent appeared at the corner of my vision. "I've found a news story you might be interested in. 'The biggest smallhead router raid yet'. Do you wanna view it?"
I nodded at the gopher, and as I turned to Fay and mentioned it to her, the news slice wrapped itself around me.
I found myself inside the back of a van looking at an armed police officer. A voice within my right ear was talking. "The special projects unit, with me in tow, were at the scene at nine fifteen. The tip-off had supplied details of where the consignment of routers had been stored, and the police were taking no chances."
The van stopped moving and the body I was viewing the scene through got up and followed the other police out of the van. I could feel the confident swagger and physicality of the reporter's body, as well as his heart pounding in his chest. The bullet proof jacket constricted the rise of his rib cage and the tightness around the torso stiffened his movements.
I realised that the reporter was trained in armed response when he grabbed the semi-automatic that hung from his shoulder, I could feel his palms sweating on the rubber grips. His eyes scanned the warehouse front as he followed an officer to the left of the roller-shutter door.
"Clear!"
He turned his head away from the roller-shutter, just before an explosion that rattled it on its railings, and set off an alarm that started whirring above the shouting. It must have blown a lock because there was a foot gap along the bottom of the shutter now.
"In! In! In!"
One officer yanked the roller-shutter up off the ground, and the other police officers jumped up and burst through the opening into the warehouse. Boxes were stacked on pallets up to the ceilings, a room on the right was being emptied of smallheaded men in black suits and sunglasses.
The reporter's voice started again in my ear. "A successful operation, that resulted in the capture of a group that called themselves the Protectors of the Red King. Murder, torture, horrendous injuries to their victims, identity fraud and corruption on an international scale that resulted in investigations of some of the worlds leading router manufacturers in a plot to secretly record the decision making processes of countless of the worlds trend setters."
The warehouse disappeared to be replaced by a TV studio, and the reporter standing in front of an image of the raid. "This is Cameron DeWitt of Senseo News"
The studio disappeared and I was back in the park, with Fay staring into the middle distance beside me.
A couple of seconds later she turned her head to me, sun filte
ring through her hair. "Well, that's cleared that up," she said and smiled.
###
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