Extracts : Virtually Alive: Peter James: British Novelist and Film Producer

Virtually AliveA short story

Henry blew an expensive new chip, trashed an important mailbox file and misrouted himself halfway around the world, getting himself hopelessly lost. It was turning out to be a bummer of a Monday morning.

Henry, or henry.biomorph.org.uk, to give him his full name, dealt with the problem the same way he dealt with all problems: He went back to sleep hoping that when he woke up, the problem would have gone away, or miraculously resolved itself, or that he might simply never wake up. Fat chance of that. You could not send someone into oblivion who was already in oblivion.

But try telling him that.

Tell me about it, he thought. I've had it up to here. Wherever here was. He wasn't even a disembodied entity - he'd never had a body in the first place. He was just a product of particle physics, a fractal reduction of a real human, a vortex of self-perpetuating energy waves three nanometres tall, inside which was contained all the information that had ever travelled down a computer cable or jumped a data link anywhere on the planet, which made him at the same time the most knowledgeable entity in the world and the least experienced. Some things he had never experienced at all. Food, sex, smell, love. He was a cache of knowledge, of acquired wisdom. If he owned a t-shirt on it would be printed the legend:

Seen it all and what's the use?

But no one made t-shirts three nanometres tall and if they did it would not have been much use to him, as nine trillion bytes of data zapping past him every attosecond would have incinerated it. He would have liked to have dumped from his memory the motto "All dressed up and nowhere to go", since it had no relevance for him. But he could not dump info. When he tried it simply came back, eventually, from somewhere else. He had seen every movie that had ever been made. Read every book. Watched every single television programme that had been broadcast on every channel in every country in the world for the past twenty-five years.

Then he saw the hand moving towards the switch.

A stab of fear from nowhere was followed by erupting panic; the hand was closing on the switch, the red switch beneath which was printed in large red letters EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN. Beneath it should have been (but of course wasn't) printed in equally large letters: PRE-SHUT DOWN PROTOCOLS MUST BE EXECUTED TO AVOID IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE.

'Protocols!' Henry shrieked, 'Protocols!.' His panic deepened. 'PROTOCOLS!'

Then he was being drawn rapidly upwards, in bewildering defiance of gravity; higher, faster through a pitch black vertical tunnel and crashed, with a stark bolus of terror emptying into his veins, through into consciousness.

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