Whilst I was at university in Manchester, the local Waterstone's bookshop (a superb source of fantasy & sci-fi stuff) began an initiative to regularly publish a portfolio of short stories by new authors (already published authors were not precluded, but it was anticipated that the service would primarily be of interest to new authors). I duly got hold of the entry requirements.

They were undertaking to publish stories of 7,000 to 10,000 words, which was substantially out of reach of any of my existing short stories, no matter how much I rewrote them! The result was that I wrote a new piece, this one, weighing in at just short of the 10,000 word mark.

Although I submitted it, I never heard anymore about it, so I presume it was never published. Having said that, I think it's quite a good story - as do a couple of other people who have read it, so it's got to be worth a try. Because of its length, I recommend saving this page and reading it off-line, unless you've got a free internet connection.

It was one of those moments so clearly daubed with the paw print of destiny that it became difficult, for that instant at least, to deny the existance of fate. Had the magazine article been a little shorter he would have ended up with a screenful of puppies. Instead his hand failed to contact the spacebar until a fraction of a second after the image had changed. Before him now was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen - hair like honeyed silk, lips like cherries, eyes like any other worthless cliche. She had the face of an angel, but at the moment he was too preoccupied to have noticed.

Not only was she beautiful, lithe and shapely, but she was also naked.

'...so as we have seen, in the latter decades of the twentieth century, and into the early part of this one, the computer industry was dominated by....?'

Paul mouthed the answer - as did almost everyone else watching the lecture. He looked around the theatre for some familiar faces, but found that only one of his companions from the previous night had actually made it in. The place was still quite full of 'real' first years though - one of whom proffered the correct answer.

'Electronics! Precisely. To be more precise, however, it was the IBM compatible Personal Computer which was to be found in every home and office. But, because the PC was based solely on...' the lecturer span on his heels to point at the poor unfortunate who had been foolish enough to speak, '...electronics, it was not in a position to take advantage of the growing field of....? Anybody?'

Again Paul mouthed a response. He didn't know why - it was just instinctive. He could scream it as loudly as possible, if he wanted to, the lecturer still wouldn't hear him. Another of the first years broke through the gurgling hubbub of discussion with his pure toned, unbroken voice. The lecturer's highly trained homing mechanism burst into life, tracking the bright sinusoid to its source and fixing the boy with a questioning stare.

'Opto-electronics?' The voice wavered under the isolating gaze of the lecturer. A quick heel-spin and repetition of the answer brought well earned relief to the boy as Doctor Mitchells continued.

'So, with the introduction of high quality PIN diodes and photomultipliers, it was finally possible to use silicon LEDs for intra-package connections. This, in turn, led to a boom in cheap and powerful optical processing units, which even found their way into some of the aforementioned PCs.'

Paul took the glasses off for a few seconds rest. The mysterious stains on his ceiling began to conjure images in his mind which threatened to break his concentration altogether. He replaced the frames, relaxed his eyes to focus beyond the lenses, and was re-submerged in his virtual connection to the lecture theatre. He hadn't missed much.

'...but it took a small British company, based in Cambridge, to develop the first LWBs. Now, can anyone tell me what LWB stands for?'

Paul's mouthing was accompanied by enough breath to articulate the answer into a low moan, concurrent with the 'real' first year who had been selected to respond: 'lithographic waveguide board?'

'Right! And the company was...? That's right - Photonix. Now the remarkable thing they managed to do was to integrate the waveguides into a solid board, reducing the need for any non-optical components down to an absolute minimum. At last there was a machine with fully optical buses, capable of running at incredible speeds compared with PCs. Furthermore, they offered a far greater degree of parallelism, and they were very, very cheap.'

As Dr. Mitchells began his summary of the lecture, Paul removed the glasses and placed them on the phrenology head that lived at his bedside, and which also stored his hat. A quick stab of a remote control severed his connection with the university and left his computer in standby mode. He let his head drop back onto the pillow and spent the next three hours watching the stains and allowing himself the luxury of recovering from the previous night's binge.

He'd been watching her for over ten minutes, having finally dragged his eyes away from her more obvious charms, but she didn't seem to have moved at all. A few slides and clicks of the mouse-pad on his keyboard was enough to reactivate voice control - he usually left it off, after a night of passion that began with 'remove everything' and culminated in 'yes, yes, yes...' had successfully uninstalled most of his software. He began to talk to the machine.

'List processes. Right, now open a patching window for process "Room simulation V7." Good. Now insert an MPEG encoder, and patch all the AV output from "Room simulation V7" into it. Good. Now close the window and run process "Room simulation V7" in the background, with maximum priority.'

He could, of course, have performed the steps far more rapidly with a mouse-pad and keyboard, but he was planning a long 'net session so was already reclining in his chair, with cold pizza in one hand, and a cold beer in the other.

It was only after his daily fix of the lunchtime soaps that Paul felt ready to face the world. He dressed quickly, due to sharing a house with students for whom money was more important than central heating. A tee-shirt and two jumpers was enough to stave off hypothermia, though a large plate of very hot beans on lukewarm toast was needed before he felt able to function correctly.

He looked at himself in the mirror, using the furthest bristles of his toothbrush to clear the skin of several beans from around his gums. He began to swear at his reflection, disgusted at himself for already falling into exactly the patterns which had led to him failing his first year and having to resit. He'd sworn that he wasn't going to miss any lectures this year - especially not in favour of a night down the pub - yet less than a week into term he'd already failed in that goal.

The most frustrating thing was that he was already a better programmer than most of his contemporaries would ever be. He had vision, knowledge and passion enough to write unique and innovative applications - he just didn't have the academic achievements to prove it. He was far too easily tempted into little projects of his own devising, when he should have been in lectures or labs. If it wasn't programming, it was drinking and socialising. If it wasn't either of those, it was 'net surfing or sleeping. Anything seemed to take precedence over his course, which was a fact that he hated, but which he felt helpless to affect. Why couldn't he just bring himself to work a little harder?

He wandered towards his desk, and flopped into the plushly upholstered chair that was his second home. Leaning forward, he pressed a button on the rhombus before him, taking the computer out of standby mode. A marble textured welcome screen informed him that he was the proud owner of a 'Photonix Anubis - Multiprocessor Optical Workstation.' The accompanying fascinating fact for the day revolved around Photonix' revolutionary placement of the batteries in the UPS to give the Anubis surprising stability, despite the fact that its perceived centre of mass was outside its footprint. 'So tell me something I don't know,' mumbled Paul, before realising, quite smugly, that they probably couldn't.

A few quick taps on the keyboard connected him to the university. He downloaded the lecture notes for the day, then moved back to his home directory to reacquaint himself with the first year coursework. One file in particular, simply called 'RS5,' brought a host of memories flooding back. He decided to email Jack.

'I did it you know.'

'Did what?' Jack tried to sound as uninterested as possible. He hated giving Paul the satisfaction of showing his fascination, but knew his attempts would inevitably fail. Nevertheless, he tried.

'Don't you remember the conversation we had just before the exams?' Paul was fully aware of Jack's attempt to hide his interest, and had every intention of stringing the conversation along non-specifically for as long as it took for Jack to break.

'What, you mean the exams that you failed?' Jack had passed them, although he knew as well as anyone that Paul was the better programmer. Jack, however, was the better academic.

'Yup! They'd be the ones.'

'No I don't remember - you'll have to remind me.'

'Well, we were sitting just here - except that I was drinking lager, whilst you were still under the impression that snakebite and black was a valid tipple even after the age of sixteen. Ring any bells?'

'Sounds like any other night down the pub really - apart from the ones when you get all pretentious and order a Black Russian.'

'Touché my friend. Let me give you another clue then....' Paul took an overemphasised sip from his Black Russian, and let his eyes drift upwards to indicate that he was thinking hard. He swilled the gob of liquid around for a few seconds before letting it slide easily down his throat. 'Would it jog your memory if I mentioned that it has been shown that subatomic particles can only exist at quantised positions in spacetime?'

'You can't mean....? No, that's too much, even for you.'

Paul just looked sickeningly smug.

'You've done it then? You've written the program?'

'Yup! You can come and see, if you want to.'

'Just follow my train of thought here for a bit, will you Jack?'

'Okay Paul, you've got my complete attention.'

'Right. Everything is made up of atoms, right?'

'Uh-huh.'

'And all atoms are made up of smaller particles - quarks, mesons, neutrinos, baryons. Basically all the leptons and hadrons, and anything else that may be in there. I haven't looked into it in detail yet - I'm a programmer, not a physicist. The important point is that ultimately all things are made up of particles, okay?'

'Right...'

'And it's also been shown that all these subatomic particles exist only at discrete energy levels, and at discrete locations in spacetime.'

'Nope, you're losing me now.'

'It's quite simple. All I'm saying is that it has been mathematically shown that these particles can only exist at some locations in space, and not at others. In other words, they move in jumps, rather than by continuous motion. Just trust me on this one, okay...'

'Okay...'

'So everything there is to know about an atom can be summarised in a digital form. Every part of it exists at a defined place - not halfway between here and there, or anything fuzzified like that.'

'Right...'

'So it's possible to accurately store the position and state of an atom inside a computer - provided you've got enough storage space for the figures - without losing any information through quantise errors, or anything.'

'Okay, I can see that.'

'So if you can store and manipulate all the information about a single atom, then why not a group of them? Why not a whole persons worth? Why not a whole room?'

'Why would you want to?'

'Well, just imagine it. A virtual room, with every atom in it simulated randomly. If you wrote a program to give you a sort of slideshow, you could eventually see every combination of atoms that could make up that room. You could see every person that had ever lived, or that ever will live. You could see aliens, mythological creatures, great works of art. You could see anything and everything.'

'And a lot of random crap.'

'Yes, I know. But that's not the point. The thing is that it would be possible. It needs to be done, simply because it can.'

'It can't.'

'Yes it can.'

'Nope. Not every room, at least.'

'Why not?'

'Well, you could never recreate the room in which the computer itself was stored.'

'What?'

'It's simple really. In order to create the room with the computer in, you'd have to model all of the atoms of the computer. In order to do that, you'd need to store the information somewhere. Obviously you can't store it in the computer, because there'd have to be more information than there was space in the computer - you'd always need a system with more storage space than the room you're trying to create.'

'Okay, okay. But suppose I kept it to a simple room, with a finite amount of energy in the system, which could then randomise itself into anything from a cloud of gas to a lump of granite. Assuming I use a room and energy level within the storage capabilities of the computer, the theory is otherwise sound, right?'

'Seems reasonable. Bet you never finish it though. D'you want another brew?'

And so it was that a year ago, Paul failed to turn up for his last exam. Instead he was sitting at home, hypnotised by the lines of code glueing a host of system modules together. The result, after a few pieces of test code to verify the integrity of the idea, was 'Room simulation, version 5' - and a failed first year at university.

'Tee pipe the video output from process "Room simulation, V7" to an image output window.'

The woman, still naked, had moved across the room. Paul hoiked the stereoscopic glasses from the phrenology head, and slid them onto his face. From a couple of coat-hanger brackets that he'd attached to the arms of the chair, he retreived a pair of 'bats' - so called after a wit at Photonix pointed out that a mouse which moves in three dimensions is a bat.

'Close the last video output window, re-routing its input into an immersive 3D visualiser.'

The lasers shot into his eyes, manfesting themselves as a collection of fuzzy lines and shapes. He focussed beyond the lenses and the image snapped sharply into place. A click of the left hand bat, accompanied by the appropriate mystic gesticulations, soon had him walking through the wall of the room and examining every inch of her body.

She was fresh faced, devoid of the artifice of beauty from a surgeon's knife, or photographer's filter. Maybe she wasn't 'stunning' in the accepted sense of the word, but she had a uniquely fascinating bone structure that lifted her cheeks high and chiselled her jaw into an eminently chewable angle.

Her hair, similarly, lacked the coiffured touch of a professional, but instead hung effortlessly in a sun bleached bob that curled around before it reached her neck, and drew his eyes back towards that jaw. Her own eyes were far from spectacular in isolation, but seemed to fit so perfectly with the rest of her visage that it was hard to imagine any better.

He longed to touch her - but his hand just passed through the image. It was tortuous to be unable to hold her, to kiss her, even to talk to her. His fingers traced the arc of her neck as it plunged into the erotic expanse of flesh that separated and shaped itself to form her breasts. Somehow, though, his voyeurism was lost beneath his feelings of sadness. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and yet he could never truly be with her.

He longed for more power, to bring her timeframe in line with his own, but even then, he hadn't written the code to allow interaction. The most frustrating thing was that it was an easy addition, but if he stopped the program to make the changes, he would lose her forever. He pulled his fingers to his lips, brushing a kiss onto their tips. With tears welling in his eyes, and threatening to break the focus of the beams, he touched his hand to the place where her cheek should be, praying that something would change to allow her to feel him. His hand passed right through.

'Kill the 3D output.' His eyes blinked at the change of light levels, then quickly focussed through the plain glass lenses to the LEP screen beyond. He hung the bats back on their wire brackets, closed his eyes, and let his mind drift into fantasy.

'Cool!' Jack somehow managed to pronounce the word as though he was swallowing it. He began to follow his exclamation, but arrested the words into nothing more than a glottal stop, before they had time to form. Paul said nothing, wondering whether the words would be reissued after a little more thought. They weren't.

Both of them were looking at the LEP screen which was tacked to the wall. Paul was comfortably reclining in his chair, whilst Jack had the misfortune to be balancing on an upturned rubbish bin which creaked suicidal threats with each and every movement. The image changed.

'Not so great, that one.' The screen was filled with a fish-eye view of a room which seemed to contain a variety of 'blobs.' The objects themselves were entirely random in shape, size and texture. There were impossibly spikey wooden lumps, smooth and flowing blobs of metal and stone, and even a column of what appeared to be water, caught in stasis at the instant it had begun to collapse. It looked, in many respects, like a gallery of modern sculpture. The image changed once more.

Jack made an 'urgh!' sound as he spotted the pool of what appeared to be vomit in the exact, geometrical centre of the room, suspended by no visible means. The rest of the place was fairly boring - some more lumps, a few gas clouds, and a long wormlike creature coiled in one corner. The deep blue rhombus, with its yellow livery and flashing lights, continued to hum contentedly as it displayed the next scene.

This time there was quite clearly a table, some kind of dwarf elephant, and a few lumps and clouds. Paul swallowed another 'cool' but made no attempts to follow it up.

The next image had a man formed with his left leg embedded in the wall, and his right hand dripping with slime. The fish-eye view distorted him quite bizarrely, prompting Jack to speak.

'Isn't it possible to move the viewpoint?'

'Not at the moment - but it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to write it in.'

With the keyboard and mouse-pad Paul quickly killed the program and launched a code editor. The modules of his source were shown graphically on screen, with links between them to represent the data flow, and colour coded into various levels and to differentiate the system functions. A quick jab at [CTRL-F] let him search for 'camera,' which then panned the structure map until the relevant module was highlighted at the centre of the window.

He hit [RETURN] and a sound bite from an old science fiction series hummed 'confirmed...' at him. The module expanded into another window, filled with multicoloured code and another selection of graphical elements. A right click on one produced a popup menu, currently highlighting 'stationary camera.' He selected the movable equivalent, then added a further feed to a 3D output module, and another from a bat input. Finally he altered the version number to 6. The whole change took less than ten minutes, plus another five for recompilation.

They ran the program again, routing in a secondary input from the bats, and splitting the output to run through the stereoscopic glasses. It took about half an hour to randomise a suitably interesting room - this time predominantly occupied by triffid-like plants, and custardy globules - before they hit the spacebar, and froze the slideshow in place. First they used the bats to zoom the viewpoint around, both of them watching on the LEP screen. Then they took it in turns to don the glasses and 'wander' around their newly created room.

Half an hour later they re-ran the program and explored another room. Ten minutes later they repeated the excercise. In total they ran, danced and walked their way through half a dozen rooms before Jack spoke the one phrase that was to catalyse the rest of Paul's life: 'It's a shame things don't move.'

Paul woke suddenly, slipped back onto the pillow, then jerked himself into consciousness once more. He bounced onto his left elbow, leaning across to the remote that sat by the phrenology head. A mis-aimed fingertip had no effect, but a second attempt caused the screen on the wall to flash instantly to life. She was sitting down.

Leaning precariously from the bed, he was able to flick the chair around on its hydraulic stem. It span easily, forcing him to make a grasping reach for it, in order to prevent it turning too far. He grabbed the leads, flicked them upwards, and watched helplessly as the bats leapt from their brackets, and plummeted un-eponymously to the floor. They landed with a thud.

He reeled them in by their leads, then turned his attention to the glasses. He pulled them from the head, and placed them on his own, before slipping his hands through the velcro loops of the bats, and pulling them tight. An apropriate button press put him in control, and he began to walk through the wall.

He knew the room well by now: there was no door or window by which to guage the orientation, but he had arbitrarily designated the walls as north, south, east and west when he wrote the program. He entered via the east wall, walking straight through the bed that lay alongside it. She was sitting at the desk on the western wall, hunched forward. To her right was the combined keyboard and mouse-pad of what seemed to be a computer terminal - just the dumb sort, he assumed, because there was no obvious system unit. Of course, there was no reason why a random selection of atoms should even produce a unit that worked, so he treated it as a mere decoration, in the same way that he would had it been a vase.

Otherwise the room was almost bare. A bookshelf was fixed to the northern wall, but even this showed signs of non-conformity. For a start, it wasn't horizontal. Secondly, it changed in composition twice along its length - from wood, to some kind of plastic, to a form of rubber which just hung loosely over the end bracket. For a bookshelf, it also seemed to lack any books, and was instead strewn with gravel and a few unidentified blobs. There was also a small rodent, the likes of which he had never seen before, with pink fur and green, distended canines. He didn't really fancy getting too close to it - even if it couldn't touch him.

In the south-west corner, another lump sat motionless. Next to it was a pair of glasses, similar to his own, though there was no sign of any bats. A tuft of hair grew from the floor of the south-east corner, as though somebody had just sunk into the solid concrete floor. Otherwise, there was nothing.

He walked over to where she sat, noticing that the bottom drawer of the desk was now open. He hadn't seen into the drawers before; he could put his head into them, of course, but the only source of illumination he had actively coded was in the flourescence of the walls. If the bottom drawer was anything to go by, he hadn't missed a lot: there was nothing in it but paper and pens.

He looked at her bare shoulders, and followed the line of her vertebræ to the point where she contacted the chair. It was a strange, five legged affair, but upholstered like an antique, with a green leather seat and back, and verdigris tainted brass tacks around the edges. He was suddenly concerned that she might be cold, and wished he could wrap his arms around her - then just as suddenly realised that she might not even have a concept of what 'cold' was.

She was hunched over the desk, with just a small corner of paper protruding from beneath her right arm. He slid his head into hers, cursing the violation of her body and apologising vocally to a pair of ears that couldn't hear him. This was, perhaps, the most bizarre part of his journey. Although dark inside her skull, he nevertheless imagined himself pushing his face through the jelly-like mass of a human brain. It took all his self-control to continue, but even then he nearly baulked when faced with the view of blood vessels from behind the retina. He closed his own eyes, and pushed himself forward another inch.

He held that position for a few minutes before daring to open his eyes. He'd cleared her head, though only just, so that his viewpoint was now just a fraction beyond her own. The match wasn't perfect, so that had anyone been able to look, they would have seen his forehead melding into her hairline, whilst the tip of his nose beat hers, and her cheek bones and jaw stood proud of his.

Looking ahead, he could see now what she had been doing. In her left hand was a pen, and held under the crook of her right arm was the second page of a letter. At least, he assumed it to be the second page, as her handwriting was large, and she wasn't far down the sheet. He couldn't make out what she'd written, but could quite clearly see her name, signed in wavey, open loops, then printed very carefully below: Dr. Diane Baxendale.

Paul had been working hard on the next version of the software. It had taken a few weeks, and several incremental updates, before he felt ready to unleash a fully fledged version 7. He'd invited Jack round for a final beta test, and had even allowed him the privilege of sitting in the comfy chair. Paul himself had taken the bed in preference to the upturned bin.

'Have you changed the randomness of it?' Jack asked.

'No. Why?'

'Well, there don't seem to be any really interesting scenes coming up - not like the last version. It's all just meaningless crap.'

'I think you'll find that's the basis behind the concept of "random."'

'Yeah, but I could be here all year before anything interesting turns up. Can't you do anything about it?'

'Not really. In order to specify what was "interesting" I'd have to give the computer some sort of model of what I was looking for - and then it wouldn't be random. Besides, how do you know that it isn't your definition of "interesting" that's up the spout? By the way, you just missed a roomful of bikini clad, female volleyball players.'

'What!!!' Jack turned round sharply, to find himself looking at a sreenful of brown and green blobs.

'Only kidding.'

'Bastard!'

A couple of minutes later, Paul had lost interest in waiting for his friend. He picked up a magazine from the top of an increasingly unstable pile that was mounting by his bed. He really should read more, he told himself - again. Somehow, though, coding always seemed to take priority.

He thumbed mindlessly through the pages, hoping to spot the one article that had prompted him to buy the thing in the first place. He had no idea what, specifically, he was looking for. For that matter, he hadn't even noticed the name of the publication. He riffled the pages back again, and began to flick through them one by one, occasionally glancing up to see if Jack had become interested.

Just under halfway through the magazine he found the article. It was an eight page spread, and he wasn't sure how he could have missed it previously, given the distinctly tasteless background the artistic editor had selected. He managed to wade through a couple of paragraphs on 'quantum level reflecto-transmissive holography, and its effects on mass storage' before opting for a less heavyweight magazine.

'Was it space?' Paul had forgotten about Jack, and almost jumped out of his skin at the cry.

'What?'

'Was it space? The spacebar? Quick!'

'Wha...erm...yeah. Yeah, the spacebar.'

There followed the sound of a ham-fisted thud on the keyboard, accompanied by a suitable grimace from Paul. Much as he hated to pull himself away from an article on 'the ten best web sites for a Jodrell,' he felt he should check on his friend - and his program. He swung his feet to the floor, and lifted his weight onto them before shuffling the three steps that would take him within leaning distance of the back of the chair.

Jack was already wearing the glasses, waving the bats, and generally wandering around a virtual world filled with blobs, clouds, funny crawling things, and a few variations on common musical instruments. Paul was watching the view from Jack's left eye on the LEP screen, and was starting to wonder what the urgency had been about. Paul wasn't much of a musician; Jack was.

'So when does the movement begin?' Jack asked.

'It already has. You're in the middle of it.'

'Would anyone like to tell these little animal things that they're allowed to move then?'

'Firstly, with it all being random, there's nothing to say that they will ever move. Secondly, it renders at a rate of about one frame every ten seconds.'

'Well, I've been watching for a couple of minutes now, and there's been no change.'

'Well, each frame represents a movement of, at most, a few atoms. You'll have to sit there for quite some time if you want to see any visible effects.'

Jack pulled off the glasses, and extricated himself from the bats. He was, quite clearly, pretty unimpressed.

'You mean to say that you called me over here to see something moving on an atomic scale! It's no better than the last version really, is it!?'

'I wouldn't say that...' but Paul was cut short by his obviously empassioned friend.

'Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you, eh? Well I would!'

Paul flopped back onto the bed, running his fingers into his hair, and gently tugging in open desperation. The stains above his bed stayed still for once, giving no answers, no clues. He sat up, took a deep breath, and in as calming a voice as he could manage, called to Jack. Jack, in turn, span round to face him.

'Right. Here's the way it works: the computer randomly generates a position for each quantum of energy in the system, and determines what form that energy will take - be it heat, light, movement or matter.'

'So tell me something I don't know.'

Paul smiled. Jack had obviously spent far too much time with him. 'When you hit the spacebar,' he continued, 'the program changes so that it's no longer generating random positions and states. Now it simply randomises the data associated with an existing quantum and performs some calculations in Hilbert space to determine which of those randomisations exist within a predefined range of the previous data.'

'Go on.'

'Any data that falls outside that range is abandoned, and the previous value is used. The result is a system in which things can change either state or position - but not both - and which can only change by a certain amount.'

'So why not just raise the limits?'

'Because I'm attempting to simulate a real system. Ideally each molecule would only be able to move by one quantum unit, but in practice it would take forever to see any movement. On the other hand, if I make the limit too large, you get the possibility of weird things happening - like people's arms spontaneously jumping a few feet away from their bodies.'

'But surely you could speed it up somehow?'

'Well, the most obvious solution is to use a more powerful computer - once I've proven the viability of the code, I'm going to compile it for the university's server. Until then, it has to run slowly, since it still has to perform the same number of randomisations for each frame as when it was generating entirely random rooms, and not a series.'

'So you just look at it every few hours, to see what's happened?'

'Not quite. In the code, I've added modules to register any molecules or waves hitting the walls at audible frequencies. Therefore it should be possible to pipe the audio-visual output into a video encoder, in order to watch and walk through a real-time recording of any movement or sound.'

'Right...' Jack's intonation indicated that everything was becoming lucid. 'So you just leave it running for a few hours, days or weeks, then watch the resultant movie. Cool.'

'I'll tell you what: after you've gone, I'll find a really good scene, and set it rendering for a few days. Then on, let's say Tuesday, you can come and see the output.'

'Okay, sounds good to me.'

'Copy output from process "MPEG encoder" to file t-e-m-p-r-y, tempry.'

'File is unterminated. Do you wish me to terminate it for you?' The computer's voice, when it wasn't playing samples of Paul's choosing, was that of a soft toned woman.

'Yes. Then run it through "MPEG cleanup."'

'Confirmed... MPEG cleanup: filetype is 3D MPEG V6. Error found: final B-frame incomplete. Pruning... No more errors.'

'View tempry.'

A window opened on the LEP screen, showing a naked woman walk pensively towards a strange looking bookshelf before turning sharply for her desk. She sat down, opened the bottom of three drawers, removed a pen and paper, and began to write, talking to herself as she formulated the words. A few minutes later, she reached down for a second sheet and leant over it. Shortly after that, the scene froze as the end of the video clip was reached.

'Replay at half speed, piping the AV output to a 3D visualiser and taking viewpoint information from the bat inputs.'

He leaned over and plucked the glasses from the head. Once he was fully kitted up, he walked through the wall, just in time to see her sit down. Again he placed his head into hers, so that he could see what she was writing. It was a memo.

It seemed, however, that there was a problem. Either fate was dealing a spectacularly coincidental hand, or there was a feedback loop somewhere in his system. The memo was addressed to Professor James Lyndon. Apart from the title of 'professor,' that was Jack's name.

MEMO

	
To: Professor James Lyndon
From: Doctor Diane Baxendale

Re: Experimental results from project VP1


Professor,

It seems that this project has brought to light a problem. We're not 
sure exactly of the source of it, but it's looking increasingly likely 
that it's due to a mis-patching of the system.

Obviously this could have severe implications on any other ongoing 
projects.

Works services are 'looking into it' - although I chased them 
yesterday, and they admitted they hadn't started yet. They've promised 
some diagnostic results by tomorrow, so I'll pick them up on my way 
in.

It's possible that it may just be an error on our part, but this seems 
unlikely given the type of problems we are seeing. It would be best if 
you could witness these for yourself, so I would be grateful if you 
could make some time tomorrow to look them over, and to see if the 
diagnostics throw up anything.

I'll be in by 8:30.

Regards,

Dr. Diane Baxendale

After Jack had left, Paul killed the program, then ran it again. Every ten seconds or so a new image flashed before him, but they were invariably too blobby, gassy or just plain surreal to be of any interest. It didn't take too long for his concentration to wane.

He kicked off with his feet, sending the chair sliding backwards until it was stopped by the edge of the bed. He leaned over the arm rest, and picked up the magazine once more. Although he hadn't bought it specifically for the article on 'the ten best web sites for a Jodrell,' he had to admit that it made fascinating reading - and the screenshots weren't too bad either.

At first he tried keeping track of each new image as it appeared, but found it virtually impossible to read in eight second bursts. Resting the magazine on his lap, he decided to concentrate on the screen; the article would always be there, but that one 'interesting' room would only last ten seconds. A dozen more blob filled fantasies flashed onto the screen before the call of the magazine pulled his eyes downwards.

It was only a four page article, and he finished it fairly quickly - although by the time he'd tracked down and read all of the boxouts and captions, he'd taken half as long again. Nevertheless, he closed the magazine to avoid further distraction, and was about to throw it onto the bed when his eyes caught sight of the screen.

Normally he wouldn't describe himself as sentimental. Certainly, he wasn't affected either way by the sight of cute, fluffy animals. In terms of seeing how well his simulation would work, however, he could think of little better, so when he saw the three puppies in the middle of the room his hand leapt for the spacebar.

A flash as the colours in the room changed, was enough to tell him that he wouldn't capture the puppies. Unfortunately the message reached his brain too late, and his fingers were already brushing the keyboard before he realised he had to stop them. He failed.

He pulled his gaze away from the keyboard, in order to see what collection of shapes now filled his virtual room and would therefore be the basis of his first video. His eyes locked instantly onto one thing, though: something he had never expected to see. Something which was beyond his wildest dreams. Standing in the middle of the room was what appeared to be a human being. A woman. A barely describable Venus of a woman. A naked woman.

Paul stumbled through the front door after a particularly gruelling lecture on the benefits of gallium-arsenide compounds over their silicon equivalents, from the point of view of the photon to phonon ratios. Quite frankly, he was mentally exhausted, which in turn was reflected in his physical state.

He leaned steeply forward at the foot of the stairs, aiming to 'fall' up them with the minimum amount of conscious effort. Thankfully there were no bends or corners to negotiate in order to make it to his room, although the door was likely to pose its own set of problems.

'Why,' he wondered aloud, 'do I have to study hardware in such painful detail, when all I want to do is program?' There was no reply, apart from the repetitive beating of a bedstead against a wall. One of his housemates was home, apparently.

He negotiated the trial by doorway with comparative ease. At least this house offered him the dignity of only having to fall onto the door handle - in halls last year he'd been faced not only with having to use a key on at least three sets of doors, but also with that tortuous device that could only have been invented by a teetotaller: the round door handle.

He allowed his bag to fall gracelessly from his shoulder to the side of his desk. It flopped against the leg, then shifted for no visible reason, before sliding from its support to lay helpless on the floor. Paul mimicked the action using his bed and the wall.

After a few minutes he was feeling no better, so decided to stay put for as long as he could practically manage. His magazines were well beyond reach, but he was able to slide the remote control within fingertip grasp, using his right foot. A half-hearted but rapid lunge, slightly hindered by his overcoat, gave him all the power he needed to stay there until his stomach complained. He thumbed the standby button.

The screen flicked instantly into life, showing an empty desktop filled with icons and flip menus. He pressed '1' and was subjected to an afternoon cookery programme. '2' was even worse, with an American chat show. '3' was kids TV, but not the classic kind that he'd enjoyed in his youth; this was loud, abrasive, and not particularly funny. He quickly moved through 4, 5, 6 and beyond. All of them were filled with dire trite for housewives and schoolkids. He jabbed the mute button.

His head dropped back under gravity, until he was looking at the ceiling. It had been quite some time since he'd last allowed himself to be carried away by the stains - about two months ago, in fact, when he was trying to work out where the feedback loop was in his program.

It was the first time he'd thought about the program for about a month. Jack had grown tired of it, and the feedback loop had proved elusive enough to discourage Paul's further involvement. He lifted his head again, and shuffled back until it was resting against the wall. Another manipulation of the remote enabled voice control.

'List processes. Pipe the video output from process "Room simulation V7" to a window. Thank you.'

'Your wish is my command, master.' Another sample from an old science fiction show.

The window opened, showing a view of the room, with the same familiar curves of Dr. Baxendale sitting at the desk. Scraping over the mouse-pad on the remote moved his viewpoint until he was looking directly at her. She was as beautiful as ever, although there was definitely something amiss. He couldn't quite put his finger on it at first, but was sure she looked different. Perhaps it was just that he hadn't seen her for a month.

Suddenly it dawned on him: she was wearing glasses. He panned rapidly around the room, but the terminal on her desk was switched on, and there was no sign of any other goggles. Obviously she was wearing the stereoscopic glasses from the corner.

He leapt from the bed, and snapped his own glasses from the head. He spat the requisite commands as he wrestled with the bats, until finally he was walking through the wall once more. He had a closer look at the terminal screen, but all output had been redirected to the glasses, except for a few debugging messages. He desperately wanted to know what she was viewing - what random collection of photons his program had generated as an image - so closed his eyes and merged with her head once more.

At first he could see nothing but a blurred mass of shapes and colours. Trying to focus his eyes had no effect other than to defocus the whole view from his own glasses. For a few moments he was stumped, before he realised that the lasers in her device would be trained to her focal length. He slid back and forth within her until the view became clear. She was looking at a man standing in a room identical to his own, wearing an overcoat identical to his and waving a pair of bat filled hands around.

'Buggering feedback loop!' was all he had to say.

It was a sunny day in Cambridge as the wind whipped her hair around her face, and caused the ends of it to land in her mouth then stick, saliva smeared, to her cheeks. She pulled into the grounds of Photonix Corp. and proceeded along the wide, palm lined boulevard that had been landscaped deliberately to impress. And impress it did.

She'd seen the building almost every day for the past five years, but it still never failed to invigorate her. It was large and trapezium shaped, with mirrored windows forming tinted and untinted strata, and edged with large yellow pipes. It was been based on the design for one of their earlier mainframes, but the decapitated pyramid design seemed particularly apposite, given their current range. She swung off the boulevard into a smaller parking area, and pulled up in her private space.

Touching the access key to the logo in the centre of the steering wheel was enough to set the on-board computer into life. The engine whined gently into silence, the drivers door opened and all the others locked. As she walked away, the door closed behind her, and the roof and windows could be heard winding into their closed positions. As soon as she heard the final completive clunk, her gently swaying walk increased in pace.

The main doors swung open before her, but spared her the welcoming speech reserved for visitors. Her heels clacked noisily on the marble floor as she approached the reception desk, and all eyes turned to either deliberately watch, or deliberately avoid watching her. The guard at reception definitely fell into the former category.

'Charlie?' The way she raised her eyebrows implied a prefix of 'have you seen...' but her face was so open that there was barely any need to have spoken at all. Viewed in isolation, she posessed what would best be described as 'classic' good looks. But it was the way she walked and talked that raised her above all the cheap imitators that could inevitably be found in such a large company. For a second the guard was lost in her eyes, but a repeated request from her wonderful lips jostled him into action.

'Charlie? Erm... downstairs, I think.' As she turned towards the stairs, walking with that hypnotic swing, he felt almost honoured to have spoken to her.

She made her way downwards, step by step, being careful not to let her skirt ride too far up her thighs. She wore stockings. Everyone knew she wore stockings. But much of her mystique lay in the fact that nobody had ever seen enough of her legs to prove it.

At the bottom of the stairwell was a long corridor, lined with glass panels beyond which were row after row of cabinets. Each set of cabinets disappeared into the distance, all looking identical in their blue and yellow livery. The whole of this floor, and the floor below, was made up of nothing but corridors and cabinets. This was the largest computer in Europe - and almost certainly the world - acting as an international server for banks, businesses, and even some particularly rich and powerful individuals.

As she continued along the corridor, her eyes flitting rapidly to either side, she was stopped by the flash of a white lab coat against the sea of deep blue. She made her way to the nearest door in the glass, then doubled back to the figure. It was Charlie.

Paul finally took the time to remove his coat, dumping it on the floor. He tugged at the back of his chair, which glided out accordingly, then he sat down.

He wasn't actually certain that he wanted to see what she'd been up to for the past month. He didn't know why, but he was somehow anxious about what he would see. For him, the glitches, feedback loop, whatever it was, had tainted her perfection. The fact that she was watching him was also a cause for concern. He felt hypocritical, but at the same time he couldn't help wondering what she thought of him. Was she watching him by accident? Was it something beyond her control, and purely down to the problems in the system? Or was it more than that?

He prayed that she was watching him through choice - that somehow she was attracted to him in the same way that he was attracted to her. But even if that were true, what could he do about it? His only interaction with her was to watch her performing like a caged animal, whilst her only interaction with him was apparently the same. And what if she took the next logical step, and moved her own head into the virtual Paul, as he had done with her. What would she see? Herself? And then what would she think of him? Probably some kind of peeping tom, or pervert.

He had to know, one way or another, what she'd seen through her glasses. What was it that had culminated in an image of him, so perfectly accurate that it had actually scared him. He kept trying to blame it on feedback loops - but how could that really be true? There was no way the machine could know what he was wearing. There was something decidedly unnatural going on, and Paul had to find out exactly what it was.

He refocussed his eyes beyond the lenses until the image clicked back into place. He made his way quickly and directly into her head, then issued the necessary mantra to replay, in three dimensions, her every activity over the past two months.

Half an hour later he removed the glasses, tore off the bats, and lay down on his bed. His eyes filled with tears as the stains on his ceiling became primitive cave paintings, animated against an Artex background. He looked on at the tear distorted images as a lone hunter stalked a bison. Suddenly behind the character, out of nowhere, was a bright light. Paul wanted to call to the man, to warn him, but the words choked him as he tried. Before he could do anything, the man had been engulfed by the light.

She clacked her way back across the hallway, heading for the lifts. Clutched beneath her arm was a wad of paper, courtesy of Charlie, although the facts and figures it bore were not what she'd hoped. As she passed the reception desk, a roosting security guard called to her.

'Doctor Baxendale! Doctor Baxendale!' he crowed. 'Professor Lyndon's here to see you. He asked me to tell you that he's gone up to your office.'

The lift had never taken so long to reach the fifth floor. All the way she was cursing the report under her arm. If only it had shown a hardware problem. But it hadn't, leaving only one likely source for the errors: her own team.

It was at times like this that she loathed being a departmental head. Doctor Diane Baxendale, youngest head of an R & D department in the history of Photonix. She had a reputation to uphold, and right now she could see it slipping slowly away. As if that wasn't bad enough, this program was her baby, her dream. She'd been responsible for a large proportion of the coding in it. If there were errors in the source, there was a damned good chance that they were hers.

As the lift doors opened, she straightened her suit and strode confidently out, despite being a nervous wreck inside. A terse 'coffee please Dave' to her secretary was all she said before pushing the corporately blue door open, and sweeping elegantly inside her office. Professor Lyndon was already seated, and with a coffee of his own.

'Sorry to keep you Professor.' A sharp glance and raising of the eyebrows reminded her that he was 'Jack,' but she still hadn't come to terms with the habits of her relatively new boss.

'What's the problem then Diane?'

'It's the VP1 Jack. We're not sure how or why, but there seems to be some feedback in the system somewhere.'

'What do you mean, feedback?'

'Well, as you know we generated a virtual person. Essentially we simulate all the atoms within a certain range of him, so wherever he goes, he always has an environment to interact with. It can be anything from chairs and tables to other people.'

'So I take it he's not functioning correctly?'

'That's just it. He seems to be fine. It's his environment that bothers us.'

'In what way?'

'Well, we've been following what he says and does for a couple of months now. He seems to have a history, a capacity to reason - even friends, family, goals and objectives.'

'So where's the problem.'

'Somehow, Jack, data from other parts of the computer system are getting jumbled into his virtual world. His computer is one of our own models...'

'And...?'

'Well, things are supposed to be randomised. The likelihood of the computer randomising every quanta in such a way as to give him a fully working model of one of our own machines is so slim as to be incalculable. Then there's other things too: his best friend is a man called James Lyndon - known as Jack. He programs as a hobby - and has written some code for a virtual room which is identical to our own first attempts in the area.'

'Sounds like feedback alright. What have maintenance got to say about it?'

'I just got the diagnostics report from Charlie. I'd hoped they'd just cross-coupled some fibres or something, but everything checks out okay.'

'So it's programmer error then.'

'Looks like it - unless the compiler's got glitches.'

'Possible, I suppose, but unlikely.' He took a deep breath, and expelled it resignedly. 'We're already a fortnight late with this code, you know.'

'I know.'

'Still, it's only for a trade show. Production runs aren't expected until next year. I assume it's stable enough to show to a lot of prodding journo's.'

'It's stable enough - but there's another problem.'

'Another? You'd better go on then.'

She swung round on her chair to face the LEP screen behind her. Against a wood grain background was a banner which read 'Photonix Ra - Ultra-pipelined Massively Parallel Optical Computer System' and was accompanied by a login prompt. She hammered her username and password on the keyboard, and the screen instantly filled with an image of her pet puppies that she used as a desktop background.

'Open a viewscreen on process "Virtual Person 1."'

On the screen was an image of a man, lying on a bed, staring at the ceiling. There wasn't a lot else in the room - a bag, coat, some books, a desk, and a rhombic computer. She seemed a little disappointed that he wasn't using the glasses, but quickly instructed her terminal to display the previous half hour of video footage.

Another window opened over the first, showing the same room, but this time with the man wearing glasses, and waving a pair of bats around. She panned and zoomed until they were looking through his own eyes at the image from his virtual computer. It was a stationary image of a woman, sitting naked at a computer terminal. Jack just raised his eyebrows.

'Do you often work like that?' His words were a poor attempt to disguise the fact that he really wished she did.

'It's taken the data from that set of anthropometric studies we did. Every employee's in there - it just decided to pick me for some reason. And did you notice the phrenology head that we used to test those texture mapping algorithms? And my article on reflecto-transmissive holography? There's lots more, too - look at this...'

She issued a few more commands to the terminal, and the LEP filled with a slideshow of stationary images, taken from various parts of the video footage and culminating in a copy of a memo that Diane had sent to Jack just the previous day.

'It must have taken it from the fax software...' she explained. Jack, on the other hand, was more concerned for corporate security.

'It'll have to go. You've got to shut it down, and go through the code with a fine-tooth comb. I want to know how information is leaking through the system. I want to know if it's software, in which case I want it stopped - or if it's hardware, in which case I want it fixed. Above all, though, I want all output from this program wiped from the system immediately.'

'But apart from the feedback, it was working perfectly. This sort of delay could set the whole thing back by months.'

'I don't care. Security has to be our number one consideration. When you first suggested this software, I thought it was going to simulate a person in some theoretical world, filled with blobs and lumps. This, I'm afraid, is far too close to reality. All output from it has to be wiped.'

Before she could formulate a reply, he swigged the last drains of his coffee and left the room, pausing only for a poignant 'I'm sorry' at the door. She slid her own stereoscopic glasses onto her head, strapped on a pair of bats, and went for a last look around the room that had been home to her virtual person for the last two months.

It was uncannily strange, walking around somebody else's home, whilst they lay there, oblivious to your existance. She examined every part of the room, determined that it should at least be preserved in her mind. She looked at the computer, at the carpet, at the coat laying crumpled on the floor. A small flash of white caught her eye, and she zoomed in closer to its lining, largely exposed by the way it had fallen. There, sewn onto the wall of the inside pocket, was a single piece of fabric, embroidered with a name: Paul Jarrop.

She turned to look at the figure on the bed. Paul Jarrop. At least he wouldn't be anonymous anymore. His chest rose and fell with each breath, and a tear rolled down his face. Otherwise Paul Jarrop may as well have been lying in state. She pressed her right thumb to a button, and flicked the bat towards her, causing her virtual reference point to shift through ninety degrees. A little more manipulation, and she was lying next to him, wishing she could touch him, talk to him, aplogise.

Above her were the yellow-brown stains, standing out like beacons and yet previously unseen. 'Well Jack, you wanted random blobs...' She turned to her virtual companion, and though he couldn't hear her, she felt that her thoughts had to be vocalised.

'I'm so sorry,' she said, tears welling in her own eyes. She blinked them clear, and as the cold liquid ran down towards her perfectly chiselled jawbone, she brushed her hand over the space where his face should have been. 'You know what - you're kind of cute, Paul Jarrop. If only you'd been real...'

She turned back to the blobs, cleared her throat, and spoke again. 'Kill process "Virtual Person 1."'

In a fraction of a second, Paul Jarrop - everything he ever was, and everything he ever could have been - was gone.