Ogg Read online

  Chapter 16

  There they were, the three of them, in the Peregrine Pratt residence, all seated at the Peregrine Pratt workstation in front of the Peregrine Pratt computer. Ogg was looking at the computer, Antonia was looking around at the general untidiness and disorder, shaking her head with a just-what- I- expected expression, and Perg was looking at Ant.

  “How can you live like this? I’ll have to come round here and clean this place up,” she nagged him. Perg looked pleased. If someone thinks enough of you to nag you, that’s already something.

  “Which bit of virtual reality are we going to roll around in?” Ogg asked.

  “Does it matter?” Perg enquired.

  “I think the most up-to-date would be the most useful,” Antonia suggested. What were you working on yesterday?”

  Perg looked at the floor and spoke in a very small voice.

  “It was about this beautiful girl in a bikini searching for aliens in the desert.”

  “Well, we don’t have to dig deep into your unconsciousness to see where that idea came from,” Ogg laughed. Then he caught Antonia looking at him. A look of fierce intimidation! He had said the wrong thing and no mistake!

  “It seems to me, Perg, that we should have a look at what you were coming up with during that period when Ogg and you couldn’t communicate. There has to be some element of non-humanness about what you were working on, don’t you think? And if we can find out what it was, well, problem solved, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Your word is my command, Ant,” Perg answered. And although Antonia knew it all the time, it was nice to hear him say it.

  The Peregrine Pratt fingers whizzed over the keyboard at breakneck speed, the little mouse arrow flashed fleetingly back and forth across the computer screen and computer image succeeded computer image in a dizzy dioramas of shapes and colours. It was almost magical, and Antonia found herself thinking that Perg, with his computer, was exhibiting more of the outward trappings of a Great Being than Ogg ever had.

  “Is this where we’re going, Perg” Ogg asked.

  “Yes”.

  “Right then! Ready!”

  Suddenly the computer screen expanded to fill their whole field of vision, at the same time changing into a galaxy of stars. For a brief second everything was still, and quiet, so quiet that the imagination, derived of sensory input, took over and played a soft soothing melody in their heads. Then ‘Whoosh!!!’ Both Perg and Antonia were pushed hard into the back of their seats as off they went, ploughing through the dense universe in front of them. They shot up, they shot down, they swerved to left and right, leaving their stomachs behind them. After each violent manoeuvre, they slowed down to let their stomach’s catch up, then , whoosh!!! off they went again. It was roller-coaster, helter-skelter kind of a journey, and exactly what Antonia had first expected when travelling in the company of Great Beings. In the little gaps in the excitement, when she had time to think, she couldn’t help wondering if maybe Ogg was only doing it to outdo Perg’s display on the computer screen. She had come to know that there was a petty side to even the greatest of Great Beings.

  The journey ended with a loop-the–loop and a double barrel roll, and Antonia found herself free-falling in pitch darkness until she hit the ground with a thump, and there she was sitting on her bottom in front of an austere immigration desk in a grey windowless room. Ogg and Perg were nowhere to be seen.

  “Passport!” a grey suited individual (she couldn’t tell its gender) snapped, holding a green hand with six fingers out at her. The being seemed to be totally unfazed by her unconventional arrival.

  Antonia had a good look at herself so see whether Ogg had made any changes to her for this journey, or slipped any useful items into her pockets, like, for example, a passport. As far as she could see - there were no mirrors – she was exactly as she had been in Perg’s apartment. And her search of her pockets revealed only some small change and the lipstick smattered hankie she used to tidy up her make-up mistakes.

  “I don’t have a passport,” she told the thing in front of her.

  “Hmmmm!” it hissed, in exactly that tone of voice you get when you ask a fashion chain shop assistant if she has a skirt in a bigger size.

  They looked at each other, both of them hoping that a passport would magically appear and get them out of the dilemma. When it was obvious that no deus-ex-machina was going to be forthcoming, the customs official tossed its head to one side, and said,

  “That room over there. Go in and wait! And take your luggage with you!”

  Antonia had a look round, but she had no luggage as far as she could see. She could only think that her customs official was like all civil servants, programmed to say certain things in certain situations whether they made any sense or not. So she took herself off, empty handed, through the indicated door and sat at one of the two seats beside the bare table in the small grey empty windowless cell beyond. And she waited.

  Left on her own for half an hour, Antonia had time to reflect and her train of thought started off grey and turned darker as it progressed. What were Ogg and Perg up to? Didn’t they think they had some responsibility for her? After all, Ogg was a Great Being and it was Perg’s computer game she was trapped inside. Between them, surely, they must have some control over what was going on. Why had they left her on her own, with no passport, already half way to some alien prison? She looked around the room. If this was any sort of reasonable computer game, there should be something she could use to get her out of this situation and into the next part of the game. Two chairs, one table, a sunken light in the ceiling she couldn’t even get at. No switch for the light, it was either on all the time or was controlled from outside. The door didn’t have a handle on the inside, so she couldn’t open it to get out. There was nothing else in the room. She felt all over the tables, chairs, walls, and door looking for a secret passage to open, but not with much hope. That would have been too obvious for Perg’s intellect, and she was glad in a way when she found nothing. Maybe this was a part of the game where you just had to wait and see what happened next. All the same, sitting there felt like an awful waste of time and there was the nagging doubt that perhaps she wouldn’t get out at all. When Ogg and Perg did appear, they had better have some explanations and they had better be good ones.

  Eventually, the door opened and something walked in. It was carrying a mass of papers which it dropped on to the table as it sat down. .

  “I’ve brought your file,” it said.

  There had to be a hundred documents there and they didn’t even know her name. Antonia frowned. She remembered this was Perg’s imagination and she wondered what the hell he was up to.

  “Right! So you are the creature who came here without a passport?”

  Who was he calling ‘a creature’? OK, so she was still wearing a dress her mother made, but compared to the him, her or it in front of her, even she looked quite normal. She was just about to say something to him when she realised how stupid she was being. She was in his (she assumed it was a he from his belligerent attitude) world, so his odd green face, pointed nose and horns were commonplace to him. She was the one who was different. Then she remembered she was in the imaginary world of Peregrine Pratt and that meant the absolutely everything that happened here was down to him. So who did Perg think he was, calling her ‘a creature’? It had just better be mistake in his computer programming when he set up his virtual world. She fumed a little. But there was no sense in taking her anger out on the ‘thing’ opposite her, was there? Oh yes, there was! It was just another figment of the Pratt imagination and if she got at it she was getting at its inventor too.

  “Who do you think you’re calling ‘a creature’?” she screamed. Then, lifting her eyes towards the ceiling, she went on, her voice reaching unheard of octaves as she vent her fury at being put in such an awkward situation and being abandon
ed by those two jokers, Perg and Ogg. “And I’m talking to you, Pratt, wherever you are? You and Ogg better get off your backsides and get here right away. Can’t you see I need your help?”

  Her ‘thing’ seemed stunned into silence by her outburst. It stared for a few moments, then fell on the papers spread over the desk and began to write furiously all over them. Whenever Antonia tried to sneak a glimpse at what was being written about her, the ‘thing’ judiciously hid the whole file with a protective arm.

  So she was just sitting there, oscillating between fear of what would happen to her and anger at the lack of Great Being support, when she suddenly found herself careering headfirst upwards towards the ceiling. She put her arms out, absorbed the impact by letting them bend and executed a neat little forward roll. She looked back to see the table, chairs, papers and her ‘thing’ lying on the ceiling beside her. The ‘thing’ got up, carefully rearranged the table and chairs, scooped up the scattered papers, sat down and went back to his writing.

  “What happened?” Antonia asked.

  “Change of gravity. Sometimes the force of gravity goes downwards, sometimes upwards.”

  Well, Antonia realised that you could do anything if you were creating a virtual world. You could people it with all sorts of strange looking creatures, like the ‘thing’ for example. And of course, you could change the laws of nature to whatever you liked. But she wondered if perhaps Perg had gone a bit too far. At least in the real world the laws of nature seemed to be constant, whereas here Perg seemed to have come up with the quirky idea of changing them very few minutes. And what were the consequences of that? Apart from things falling about all over the place as the direction of the force of gravity changed at random. The electric light was still working, so while Perg was sticking two fingers up at Newton he was at least showing some respect for Faraday. So far! But there really was nothing she could rely on. Anything could happen.

  “Do these changes of gravity happen often. Is there a pattern?” She asked, setting out on what she hoped would be a fruitful field of scientific enquiry.

  “From time to time,” the ‘thing ’answered, “but there doesn’t seem to be any pattern. Who can fathom the mind of our Great Creator?”

  Antonia told herself that she would fathom his mind pretty thoroughly when she finally got hold of him.

  “Well, that’s just about it, young lady,” the ‘thing’ suddenly announced. “All I need now is your signature in triple quadruplicate and two passport photos.”

  “I don’t have any passport photos.”

  “There’s a machine in the corridor.” The ‘thing’ pointed at the door.

  Antonia looked at it. The room was effectively upside down now, so the door started half way up the wall. I wasn’t going to be easy to get out of there. She tried looking pointedly at the door and then at the ‘thing’, simpering, but when have women’s wiles ever worked on a civil servant? If she wanted to get out, she would have to work it out for herself. If she put the chair under the door, she could maybe jump up and scramble out the opening, but how would she open the door in the first place. The handle was out of reach, even standing on the chair. It shouldn’t be much of a problem compared to the GPQs she had been pondering of late, so why was she struggling to find a solution? She was supposed this was the difference between philosophical and practical thinking. The first kind didn’t seem to be of much use whenever she was in a difficult situation.

  She had just about resigned herself to sitting on the ceiling and waiting patiently for gravity to revert to its usual direction when she noticed a brush lying on the corner. It was so obviously the ideal arm extension that she wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. Perhaps Ogg or Perg had just slipped it in there when they saw she was in need of a bit of help. If they had, she didn’t know whether to be pleased or angry. In any case, there were times when thought needs to take second place to action, and this was one of them. Antonia whizzed over to the door with the brush and chair, and, standing on one and pushing with the other, she succeeded in opening the door and clambering out.

  The large reception area was now deserted. The desks were hanging ominously from the floor, which was now the ceiling, and Antonia ducked instinctively as she passed underneath them. A few papers were scattered at her feet on the ceiling, which was now the floor, but the use of the counters was of such an ephemeral nature that the inversion of gravity hadn’t produced much in the way of debris. The photo machine was where she had been told it was, hanging uselessly upside down from the floor, which was now the ceiling. Looking at it, Antonia realised that it was unlikely she would be able to persuade it to take her photograph. First of all, there was the problem of getting up and inside it, then she had to find some appropriate coins to put in the slot, and finally there was the tantalising problem of how she could make the coin drop when Perg had made the necessary physical forces act in completely the wrong direction. Real life, as she had discovered, was full of problems, but virtual life consisted of nothing but. So she wasn’t going to get her photos and her pass after all. But, looking around, she asked herself why she needed it anyway. The automatic glass doors went from floor to ceiling, and there was no one around to bar her way. She would just walk out of the place and nobody would know. She strode purposefully to the doors, which opened in front of her, and passed through them to the open air. Free! As she got to the physical limits of the building, she pulled up short. She was, of course, standing on the roof of the building, right at the edge of it, and, when she looked down, which had previously been up, she was staring into a never-ending abyss which passed through a few wispy clouds into a blue nothingness. If she jumped, where would she end up? If the laws of physics still applied, she would fall through the clouds until the force of gravity gave out, and be left suspended floating about in outer space freezing to death and gasping unsuccessfully to fill her lungs with oxygen. Of course, this was Perg’s world, and Perg had already demonstrated a disarming willingness to take liberties with accepted natural laws, so she might be OK. The trouble was, there was no way of knowing. She was sure that Perg wouldn’t let her come to any serious harm, but should she rely on that and make the leap into the unknown? To be honest, it seemed a bit chancy. She sat on the edge dangling her legs into the sky. She needed some time to think.