Agnetha carefully examined the intricate patterns on the skirt of her tabard where it draped over her knees, and hoped that no one would notice that she was avoiding looking at the spectacle below. Grunthor could not see her because she was on his blind side. Their dais was too high up for anyone in the crowd to see her eyes clearly. Fortunately, the dignity of her position excused her from cheering the high spots of what was being done to the pathetic scrap of humanity strapped to the torturing frame.

   The purpose of the ceremony was to break the spirit of the Terrever. To the audience the screaming of the victims was the sound of the smashing into fragments of what had been an integrated whole: a people bonded to their land, a land now in the possession of Grunthor, a conquering son of the Arklash royal family. This land would now be named Grunthor after him. He was now its king and she was, for now and perhaps for some while, Grunthor’s queen.

   Agnetha’s hands beneath the tabard cradled her swollen belly and felt the movements of their child. Surely a baby son would protect her from the fate of her predecessor, the Lady Delaine. She shuddered at the memory of queuing in the procession of torture victims after her people had been beaten in battle. Grunthor had visited her the night before, and raped her as he had raped several of the prettier girl and boy prisoners. As she was led to the torture table, he had stood up: a signal for the ceremony to freeze in its bloody tracks. For a long moment he stood there, apparently considering her fate and, by implication, that of the Lady Delaine, sitting dignified but surely trembling at his side on the dais. Her fate was sealed, not so much by Grunthor preferring Agnetha, but because it was at the battle against Delaine’s people that a spear thrust had crushed his brow and bitten into his eye socket, bursting the eyeball. In vengeance for the loss of his eye and his handsomeness, Grunthor slowly raised his hand and held it out, palm upwards, to Agnetha. She was led up the steps to him. Delaine was disrobed and taken down to her lingering death. Her robe, this tabard, had been placed over Agnetha’s head.

   And now the people whose art had created the tabard had been overthrown. She wondered if another garment like it would ever be made. It had been taken as peace payment many years previously, when the Arklash collectors had visited Terrever. In return, the Arklash undertook to protect Terrever from foreign invaders. The fact that the Arklash themselves were the most likely invaders was something that the Terrever muttered to themselves, but would not dare utter in protest to the collectors.

   The Terrever people had very little worth taking. Their simple life was based on a diet consisting mainly of wild herbs and fruits, concentrated into areas around the thatched huts by a simple gardening: unwanted vegetation was covered with layers of leaf litter, which made a compost on which seeds from preferred plants were scattered. They also ate raw fish from the rivers and sea, and game dried in the sun was stored for food for the winter; certain reeds and grasses provided them fibre and building material.

   Each year when the collectors came, the Terrever pretended to cooperate with them in hunting expeditions, but led them well away from the wild herds. The collectors usually went away with a few slaves, and the impression that Terrever was a poor land.

   In fact Terrever was a fertile country, with extensive forests and rich soil. Its rocks contained all the minerals that humankind had ever valued. But mining, tilling the soil, cutting trees and burning were taboo – or rather, unthinkable – in the Terrever culture. They were a deeply spiritual people, and they honoured and communed with the conscious web of life. They took seriously the need to keep their numbers stable and, in recognition of this, each spring they sacrificed a newly wed young couple by towing them out into the ocean on a reed fishing raft, and leaving them to starve to death. The sacrificial victims were clothed in tabards made from dyed cloth decorated with tiny fragments of fish bone, shells and fruit pips. They took all year to make. One year the collectors had arrived shortly before the ceremony. They saw the garments and took them as part of the peace payment. Since that year the sacrificial victims had gone to their fate naked; the Terrever would not make the sacred robes again for fear they would be defiled. If they were forced to make them, Agnetha doubted the effect would be so lovely, and she shut her mind to the scene below her and meditated upon the webs and spirals and the detailed pictures of plants and animals, and she imagined the sacrificial victim for whom it was made doing the same during her slow dying.

   It had been almost a century since the ‘discovery’ by the Arklash of Terrever and the five other nations of the lesser continent. Sadly for those peoples, the Arklash royal family had seven sons, and all the territories of the greater continent were occupied by other branches of their family. All but the oldest son had to find a kingdom. Grunthor was the youngest. He was the most skilled at the arts of war and he had won many of the battles for the lesser continent, but the proprieties dictated that each land he won had to be offered first to an older brother, until all were established in a kingdom of their own. At last only Terrever was left. It had been an easy conquest. Two swift raids on the compounds on either side of Terrever Bay had wiped out the nation’s pathetic defence forces. A few weeks of tramping around the country, slaughtering, raping and burning, and rounding up prisoners for torture had destroyed Terrever’s gentle people. Their spirit was already crushed when the formal spirit-crushing ceremony took place.

   As the screaming of the prisoner and the roaring of the crowd rose and fell, Agnetha thought back to the shrieking and thundering of the storm on which they rode the last stage of the long voyage across the Western Ocean to this land, only a few weeks before. The fleet had waited many days just beyond the horizon, until the stormy weather that Grunthor needed had moved over them from the north. He paced the decks in a fury at the delay, having depended on a suitable storm descending, as they were wont to do at this time of year. At last the storm had come, a howling fury of a storm as if to make up for keeping him waiting.

   Grunthor had left her with her women attendants in the great sailing ship as he was rowed ashore. It was early morning, not yet dawn. The heavy wooden ship, its sails furled, dropped and staggered up again in the deep trenches which were sucked open and re-filled as the towering walls of water collapsed from above. She huddled below the deck in the hellish damp dark and imagined the spirits of the storm crying above the roaring water.

   Grunthor had described to her with triumphant relish a few hours later how he and his men had crept from the beach to the Terrever compound, surprising the inhabitants in their sleep. Because of the storm, the few lookouts on the cliff tops had seen them too late to sound the alarm shells. The Terrever people had fought as best they could, grabbing their stone clubs and leather shields as they awoke to the sound of smashing and screaming. It was a total massacre; no time to take prisoners. Grunthor and his men ran swiftly and quietly to the compound on the opposite arm of the bay and slaughtered everyone there also. This bay was vital to the Terrever for fishing, but it was also their weak point and the most obviously in need of defence. Grunthor believed that most of the Terrever defenders would be in the two cliff-top compounds, and that if these were captured, the whole country would be his. He was right; it was a victory unworthy of his skills as a warrior and a leader of armies.

   He told her the tale of the two battles, with much embroidery, as they feasted on the beach later that day, beneath the shelter of the hollowed cliffs. Dozens of carcasses tied up on spears were already dripping fat into the fires. Before they were ready to eat, great bowls of offal: hearts, livers and brains, were passed around. The conquerors dipped in their knives and either sucked the juicy morsels raw or held them to the fire to toast. As they guzzled and boasted, they relished the physical and spiritual nourishment from their fallen enemies. The battle feast initiated the process of rebirth into this new land.

   At the coronation a few weeks later, when all of Terrever was vanquished, the rebirthing continued. This time the Arklash warriors had live victims to first torture slowly to death and then eat. The greater the torment the more total the drawing out of the Terrever spirit, so that the Terrever ancestors would hear and know and wither away, and never haunt the new-born people. Through the agony of this birth, the Terrever would die and the Grunthor would be born.

   Agnetha felt her child move. Soon he too would be born into this new land, out of her agony. Perhaps her lord would grow to be gentle then. She thought of him lying by her side the night before, his henchmen crouched in the corners of the tent. Grunthor needed no privacy for his rutting, and he took no risks with his safety whilst asleep. These henchmen belonged to the Arklash family, were cousins of the royal brothers. They had everything to gain by their loyalty to Grunthor. She however could not be trusted, since slave wives had been known to take suicidal vengeance. After he had taken her roughly from behind, into her anus to make her cry out in pain, he had turned onto his back and was instantly asleep. He lay like a fallen warrior laid out on his bier, his legs straight and his arms crossed over his chest. This apparent vulnerability, a reminder of his mortality, made a tenderness rise up in Agnetha’s heart.

‘Well, that’s my storyframe: if I can call it mine after all your help. Not much to show for all the work we put into it,’ said Amelia, twisting in her pink plush armchair in the viewing room to look at the little audience beside and behind her.

   ‘It’s simply terrific, darling!’ cried Luke, who sat beside her on the front row. He wiped his shiny bald head with his handkerchief and beamed at Amelia and swept the others into a heap of warm approval.

   There were now five people in her audience, all of whom had assisted her with some aspect of the production; someone new had appeared with each stage of her progress. Besides Luke Featherday, her teacher and guide, there was lean and dark Cora Flinch the horror expert, scruffy Oliver Sheridan the frame-playwright, pink and plump Amadine Puleston the costume designer, and gorgeous Dean River the actor. She did not know any of them at all well and, although she had become very absorbed in her first attempt at framing, she did not feel she really belonged in this larger-than-life ‘set’ of dedicated frame creators.

   ‘Fabulous! wonderful! lovely! lovely!’ they all exclaimed.

   ‘Well, do you think,’ she asked tentatively, ‘it’s good enough for release?’ She wanted to ask, and was trying to imply: what about me, have I passed?

   ‘Release? Oh definitely! Folks’ll love it,’ said Luke. The others echoed agreement.

   ‘Well, while we’re here, Kiddy-winks,’ he went on, ‘I’ve got a couple more new frames we could view. Standard stuff, so they could go out straightaway probably.’

   ‘Not too long, I hope,’ said Amadine, restlessly rearranging her plump pink form in the armchair, ‘I’m famished!’

   ‘No, not long, darling. These are just little sketches; plenty of flex potential. You should know: one of them’s your latest, so we’ll keep that ‘til last. The other’s by a new framer, but nothing very original came out of it. It’s a boy’s frame. Quite nice. A boy framed it actually – quite a young kid.’

The boy swam back and waved dismissively behind him.

   ‘Look at that old ship. You said we were going to see something good. That must be at least a hundred years old; monsters like those went out with fusion energy. Show us something smooth, why don’t you? Let’s go home, lads!’

   A triangular space vehicle drifted apparently slowly in a void distantly bounded by a solid silver backcloth of stars. Its steely blue exterior was pitted with scars from accelerating to near light speed through gravelly debris.

   ‘Wait a bit. Have you looked where it’s going?’ the guide grabbed the boy’s arm as he reached the pod and pointed it over to the right. ‘And don’t inhibit your umbilical reeling in; it’s not meant to be a skipping rope!’ The boy let go of the loops of fine cord connecting him to the pod, and it was sucked in until it was taut. He looked along the guide’s arm. The other boys all looked that way too.

   As a distant shape moved aside they could just make out a tiny circle of absolute black, barely discernible in the silver curtain. As their minds attuned to the enormous expanse before them, they realised that the old ship was lining up in an attenuated queue forming a spiral arm about the black dot.

   ‘The dustbin of the solar system,’ the guide explained. ‘The World Federation agreed five years ago now that all nuclear waste and contaminated materials could be dumped in a local black hole. I don’t suppose it’s the most exciting development as far as you guys are concerned, but we think its rather impressive. We’re working on how to take up the disintegration energy that’s given off, but we have to find a way of avoiding wholesale transference of anti-particles to Earth. Do you want a closer look?’

   Without waiting for a reply, the guide closed the transparent gate of the pod and jumped the tiny vehicle nearer to the ‘dustbin’. He left it in resist mode and reopened the gate. He swam out with the boys in tow. They spread out into space around him, their bodies shivering uncontrollably in the turbulent currents which marked the boundary of the hole. Any further and they would be sucked in.

   They watched as the old spaceship approached. As it neared the boundary, for all its huge bulk, it went into a spin. An apex of its triangular body crossed the boundary by a tiny margin and was instantly spun out into a filament which spiralled towards the hole, becoming vanishingly fine. Various unconnected parts of the ship followed its trail. The massive body seemed to melt into strands of molten metal, some shot back away from the hole in their direction.

   The boys whooped with excitement and tried to catch the fragments as they burst into cascades of light energy. One ball of light persisted for some moments, and they tossed it between them and shivered in the shocks it imparted as they touched it.

   ‘Wowee! Over here, get this one before it blows!’ The boy turned a somersault towards a shimmering ball of blue light and gave it a header.

The boy turned freely in the supportive medium. His naked body was suspended in a white space, a globular cell. He turned to face them and waved.

‘Well, that was it. Quite good eh? Lots of flex potential, I think.’ Luke looked around at the group.

   Amelia hastily shut her mouth, conscious that she had been gaping.

   Luke smiled at her. ‘You liked that one?’ he asked.

   Her throat felt dry, and her voice came out husky. ‘That last shot. What was that? It wasn’t … ?’

   ‘The boy framer himself in his cell? Yes. Oh, dear, the unmentionable! I’m surprised you haven’t got over that prudery.’ His voice was light and teasing, but Amelia cringed.

   She struggled to adjust to actually seeing the level of existence below what she had thought of as the real world, but which framers called ‘the basisframe’. She whispered, ‘How was he able to float about like that?’

   ‘All kids’ cells are like that now,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s the new way the dragon provides. The cell is filled with this jelly mesh you can breathe in. It can go solid as well if that’s the sensation you need.’

   ‘I didn’t see any hands – or chute, for that matter,’ said Cora. ‘How do they get fed?’

   ‘You can eat the cell stuff, and wee and crap into it,’ Oliver said. ‘I don’t know what goes on in the medium, but obviously it does what’s necessary. Most of the time you’re unaware of it, of course.’

   ‘What’s the stuff taste like?’ asked Amadine.

   ‘Like something you’re eating in a story. Hamburger maybe for that kid. Caviar or cream cakes for you, eh? Or you don’t know you’re eating at all.’

   ‘Does this type of story only appeal to kids?’ asked Dean. ‘I mean, should we release it recommended for boys only – and girls, of course, if they liked it? Because it might not work without the cell stuff support and mobility.’

   ‘Oh, the old smart recliners are not bad for sensation of movement,’ said Luke. ‘But I think, yes, it is boy’s stuff. I suppose part of it comes from video games. Space Invaders, that sort of thing.’

   ‘Do you have boys’ frames like that now – you know, zapping the nasties?’ asked Amelia.

   ‘We don’t create any new ones. Virtual reality grew up on that stuff,’ said Luke. ‘We do need more of the non-aggressive kind, like that one we’ve just seen – there’s been quite a demand for them lately. It’s possible the dragon puts hormones or something into the males’ diet to suppress aggression. It might have got the idea from what used to be done to most male domesticated animals – usually by chopping off their you-know-whats.’

   Amelia carefully kept her shocked reaction from showing in her face. ‘How is it they still need porn frames then?’ she asked.

   ‘Oh, I don’t think sexuality and aggression have to go together,’ said Luke.

   His remark made Amelia feel better since it touched on her academic speciality. ‘Actually, I looked at that in my research,’ she said authoritatively. ‘In ancient cultures where there was a lot of affection and cuddling, the men were less aggressive and sexually demanding. I think, with men, sex and fighting can be their only ways of touching and being touched. And the late necrotech economic system needed men to be competitive, which is the same as aggressive, so boy children were deprived of affection to make them competitive, so they’d admire the ruthless and successful, expect social inequalities and so on.’

   ‘Interesting theory. Well, we don’t get any actual touching at all, so we must need simulated sex quite badly. Anyway, the dragon can’t actually castrate us, it has to collect spunk for us to breed, and so it has to get us excited. Actually, the other new frame is a soft porn one. This is the one Amadine framed. It’s very soft porn actually; just a nice masturbation aid. If it’s going to bother you, Amelia, would you rather we left it to another time?’

   ‘Oh no, go ahead. I’ve got to get used to this if I’m going to go on with framing – and I would like to, if you want me.’

   ‘Good girl! Here we go then.’

When Amadine appeared at the top of the marble staircase everyone on the lawn below looked up at her, their faces alight with love and admiration. She was perfectly beautiful. From her white-blonde hair, spun into a sugar confection around her softly sculptured face, to the sparkling slippers on her tiny feet, she shone with loveliness. There was not a shade of envy to mar the onlookers’ admiration, because they were beautiful too. Gorgeous male and female creatures, beguilingly attired in pastel silks and satins, paused in their gracious parading to smile up at the new arrival.

   Beautiful also was the scene surrounding them: the silvery grey palace with its little turrets and balconies; the intricately carved banisters festooned with pink garlands; the pale lilac carpet down to the lawn; the emerald grass dotted with starry white flowers; the tiers of rose bushes interplanted with palest blue pansies, blossoming trees trailing their branches; bluebirds trilling over the soft harmonies from a quartet of white wigged musicians, elegantly wielding their bows over their gleaming instruments.

   Amadine descended a few steps and then paused, scanning the faces below for that one special face. She was teasing him. She knew well where his face was amongst the others; she felt the warmth of his gaze as a physical touch on her body, caressing her cheek, her ears, her throat, the swell of her high round breasts barely covered by soft ruched lace. She felt her large pink nipples spring hard and erect as his remote fingers circled them coaxingly. His examination explored the layers of pearly chiffon around her thighs, tossing them lightly aside until he slithered up between her legs and tickled the sticky lips of her wide open and welcoming love channel. At last she allowed their magnetic attraction for each other to draw their eyes into a locked beam. She stepped down towards him, her body rampant with invisible desire. She paused before him, her eyes locked to his, their surroundings a blur of humming colour. They danced. They danced, engaged in erotic stimulation, by the fingers which knew their bodies best.

The scene on the palace steps faded, and instead of the gyrations of the beautiful couple they could see a naked fat woman slumped on her recliner. She was waving one of her arms in the air in a way which bore some resemblance to the movements of the erotic dancers. With the other hand she was expertly masturbating, her flaccid thighs apart and straining rhythmically. A serving hand took a capsule from a thermos jar and carefully pushed it up her vagina.

A bit optimistic, Amelia thought; she looks too old to conceive. Then she noticed that the cell view had not shocked her at all this time, and felt smugly pleased with herself.

   ‘Lovely, darling, delicious!’ said Cora to Amadine. ‘Can’t wait to have a go at that one myself.’

   ‘Yes, it’s great,’ said Oliver. ‘Maybe the transition from the walk down the steps to the feely bit was a bit abrupt though, don’t you think? Too much for user flex, maybe? Might be better worked up a bit there.’

   ‘Would the user always be a woman?’ Amelia asked.

   Amadine said, ‘Well, I thought a woman and a man could take the two main parts, or one or other would be a puppet. With two real participants it could be more of a tease.’

   ‘I agree,’ said Oliver. ‘If lots of people chose it you could have everyone in the scene real, including those lovely musicians. It could turn into a real orgy. I say we release it, with or without the little tweak I suggested. What do you all think?’

   ‘What I think is that a spot of lunch is called for,’ said Amadine, pulling her large pink person out of the plush armchair with surprising agility and waving her outstretched arms in circles to usher the others out of the viewing room. They obediently trooped through the door into the dazzling light of a long narrow conservatory. Beneath the striped shade of a group of palm trees planted in stone sarcophagi a cold buffet was set out on an oval table with a lime green cloth.

   ‘After all Amelia’s blood and gore – or was it Cora’s – I’m so glad there’s no meat,’ said Amadine, eyeing the oysters, smoked salmon, prawns and caviar, various cheeses, fresh fruit, thinly-sliced brown bread and chilled white wine. The others laughed loudly and sat down on the cane chairs with pink and lime flowery cushions.

   Amelia went with the rest of them and sat down, but she eyed the food dubiously, and thought about cell stuff and serving hands. Nothing seemed real enough any more.

   She noticed Luke looking at her. He leaned over and whispered in her ear, ‘Don’t dwell on it. Let what seems to be, be. It’s what life is all about.’

   ‘Nice drop of Sancerre, hopefully,’ said Oliver, peering at a bottle. He extracted its cork with practised skill and poured a tasting amount, with a drop-avoiding twist of the wrist, into one of the twinkling glasses. He lifted the glass to his nose and sniffed. ‘Mmm, not bad. Help yourselves, children.’ He topped up his own glass and passed the bottle on.

   Amadine filled her glass clumsily and caught the drop that dribbled from the bottle on one of her pink painted fingernails. Noticing Oliver’s slight wince, she sucked in a mouthful noisily, leaving a crescent of pink lipstick on the glass. ‘Cheers! Here’s to Amelia’s deliciously nasty storyframe,’ she said. ‘Long may it chill the bored hearts of our users, bless them!’ They chinked glasses, with chortles of mocking disapproval at their own vulgar manners. There was a lull in the conversation as they passed dishes, loaded plates and started to eat. Then they began to chatter, much as they did at the endless parties. Music came on. Some other people wandered in and were welcomed loudly.

   Amelia joined in as best she could, in the food and the gossipy talk, all the while wondering what was going to happen next. Her frame was going to be released, but was that going to be that, or had her career as a framer now been launched? At last she could bear the suspense no longer, and turned to ask Luke, but he had gone, faded out. So she departed too.

Amelia emerged in Celia’s library, deep down in the basement where she had researched the Arklash. The passages leading from the spiral staircase were lined with deep shelves stacked high with blocks of stone on which ancient symbols had been carved, also clay tablets of cuneiform writing and scrolls of paper and animal skin bearing characters in long-forgotten languages. She wandered around for a while, peering at the tablets and scrolls, still hoping for a sign that there had been people resembling the Terrever her imagination had created. She found nothing that held echoes of humans who would not use fire or excavate the ground. She sighed and wandered back to the stairs.

   Careful not to step off into the void at the core of the spiral, Amelia called up to her friend, ‘Celia, where are you?’

   A faint voice floated down, ‘Seventeenth century. Come on up. Try flying.’

   Amelia considered for a second or so attempting to zoom up the centre of the staircase, but could not manage the concentrated intention required. Sighing again, she resigned herself to trudging up the stairs. As she climbed, the crude stone blocks of the lower levels were succeeded by better-shaped steps, later by highly finished and polished stone treads, some of marble. The hand rail also changed from coarse rope to carved stone or wood.

   ‘Nearly here,’ Celia’s silvery voice called down. ‘I’ve made some tea.’

   Amelia craned her neck upwards, and could just see Celia’s pale oval face gazing down from high above.

   At last she made it to the level where Celia had been dusting and arranging the leather-bound volumes on the shelves, and had pulled out some works of seventeenth century scientists which she had stacked on the floor beside the tea table.

   After sitting down, getting her breath back and sipping tea from the delicate china cup Celia handed to her, Amelia peered at the pile of books.

   ‘Galileo, Kepler, Boyle and Newton,’ she noted. ‘Impressive stuff. Are you reading this?’

   ‘Oh, I dip in here and there.’

   ‘Isn’t it all in Latin or something?’

   ‘I suppose I could view it that way. The intos provides. I suspect it reads to me; I don’t think anyone can actually understand the written word any more.’

   Amelia was surprised at her friend being so relaxed about the illusions. For her it was still uncomfortable knowledge: she would rather she had remained in ignorance, but presumably un-learning unpleasant truths was impossible.

   ‘What happened about your storyframe?’ Celia asked. ‘Have they accepted it?’

   ‘Well, yes, but I’m not sure it’s my storyframe. They took out all the good bits. All that was left was a horror story.’

   ‘The users will flex it, won’t they? Isn’t that the idea?’

   ‘Yes, of course. But the ideas I wanted to get across are so hidden they’d need interact mode to get them out. As it is, any user would identify with the Terrever without understanding what was special about them, and set the Arklash into the enemy role, and never know that all humanity is Arklash and there’ve never been people like the Terrever.’

   ‘Well if that’s what you wanted to tell them, no wonder the Virtual Stardom people vetoed it. Quite right too. You don’t want your users to get so guilty and depressed that the intos thinks their lives aren’t worth living and cuts their supplies off.’

   Another of those unpleasant truths; how many more are there? Amelia wondered. Suddenly it was all too much and she burst into tears. ‘Oh, Celia,’ she blubbed, ‘I thought you’d understand; you’re supposed to be my friend. I was trying to do something for the future – to give us all hope. My lovely Terrever – to show how people could live when we get out of this horrible dragon thing!’

   ‘Oh, my poor pet, don’t cry. You’ve done so well with all those funny storyframing people. Why don’t you tell me all about it. I’ll listen, that’ll be a start. You’ve been too busy while it was all going on, and I am interested, really.’

   Amelia looked at Celia’s sweet angel’s face looking so sympathetic.

   ‘Yes, all right. I suppose that would make me feel better,’ she said.

Amelia had not been a regular user of the join-in stories produced by Virtual Stardom, but in an idle hour following a demanding day of research work into patterns of social evolution she asked for ‘something diverting’, and was routed into one of their romances. Just after the usual announcements of forthcoming releases which preceded the entry point, there was a call for trainee storyframers. The advertisement’s gushing blonde female chat-face said that this was the opportunity of a lifetime, and to be sure to take it up right away. On an impulse, Amelia asked the face to ‘tell me more’ and was routed to an interact-face.

   ‘Hello there, Amelia,’ the face beamed at her. ‘I’m Luke Featherday from Virtual Stardom, Trainee Framer Development. I do hope you’re going to give us a try. Storyframing’s great fun, an absolutely marvellous pastime, and you’ll meet some of the most creative and interesting people.’

   ‘Well, I wasn’t really looking for a major time filler,’ said Amelia doubtfully. ‘I’ve got some research work I’m fully absorbed in. I was just going into one of your romances for a bit of relaxation and I saw your chat-face. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

   Amelia felt, rather than saw, the interact-face switch to its owner in real-time. Either her response was not covered by the interact-face repertoire, or she had said something particularly interesting to the owner: she sensed it was the latter.

   ‘You’re a researcher,’ Luke in person responded. ‘That’s great! We are particularly interested in drawing in trainee framers with some serious expertise.’

   Amelia regarded Luke thoughtfully. He had his own distinctive image such as she associated with the entertainment industry, consisting of a visual challenge and a studied ‘look’, but he was certainly not one of the world’s beautiful people. His most noticeable feature was a large ball of a head, smooth, shiny and bald from his straight black eyebrows right over his skull to the line where a fringe of dark hair curtained his neck and ears. Beneath his eyebrows were deep-set black eyes with long lashes. The rest of his face was vanishingly ordinary and oddly still, in contrast to the animated voice it gave out. He wore a black silky shirt, neatly buttoned to neck and wrists, with a large handkerchief spilling from the breast pocket. During the lengthy period Amelia was to know Luke, the only change to his appearance was the colour and pattern of the big handkerchief, with which he constantly wiped, or as it seemed polished, his gleaming brow.

   On that first encounter Amelia decided she liked and trusted Luke. Perhaps it was his warmly resonant voice, exuding sincerity. She instantly formed the impression that there was some serious purpose behind the apparently trivial business Luke was part of. She also decided not to insist on having the serious purpose explained before they were ready to tell her.

   ‘All right, Luke,’ she said, ‘I’ll give it a try. What do I have to do?’

   ‘That’s great!’ he beamed. ‘Welcome aboard the fun wagon!’ Serious purpose notwithstanding, Amelia began to learn that the ‘fun and frolic’ thread had to be kept going, almost as if it were a lifeline. She grinned back at him.

   ‘To begin with,’ Luke continued coaxingly, ‘what we’d like from you is a set of ideas for a new frame: as innovative as possible.’

   ‘That’s tricky,’ she said, carefully keeping her smile going. ‘I’m not a regular user of your stuff; I wouldn’t know if my ideas were new.’

   ‘No probs. The dragon’ll check them out. You’ll get my interact-face telling you whether or not you’re duplicating. We wouldn’t want to cramp your style by specifying any particular theme, but you could try to bring in something from your research field.’

   This was an instruction put tactfully, she could tell. When Luke had faded out and she was alone in her basisframe, her neat little one-room flat, she knew the background for her storyframe would be something to do with contrasting societies.

   So Amelia invented the Arklash and the Terrever: archetypal baddies and goodies judged by the values which had emerged from her own analysis of what it was about Homo sapiens which had led to the development of necrotech. The Arklash could be based on any one of various pre-industrial necrotech cultures. The Terrever were simply the opposite of necrotech, which she had decided meant they would not use fire or excavate the ground.

   She called Luke and explained the idea to him.

   ‘This is a new concept, you say?’ he asked. ‘I mean, not just to framing, but to the academic world?’

   ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, and would have said more, but Luke interrupted.

   ‘That’s what we’re after then,’ he nodded, and then polished his head and beamed at her. ‘Wonderful, great! Go ahead then, and see what you can do with it.’

   ‘Do what?’ she asked.

   ‘Create a virtual world.’

   ‘I wouldn’t know where to start. Is there some sort of training course I should do?’ she asked.

   ‘Not that I know of, pet,’ Luke replied. ‘When you’ve learnt the trade you can set one up; you’re a teacher, aren’t you?’

   ‘Yes, I suppose I am. I give adult education classes on pattern theory.’

   ‘Sounds fascinating, darling, you must tell me about it some time. Anyway, you have a go putting those Akak-what’s-it people of yours into the movies – just go for it and see what comes up. If you get stuck using flicker choice, you might like to try interact mode. You can use my face any time you like.’

   What Luke called ‘flicker choice’ was the normal mode of interaction with the illusion provider, which Celia called ‘the intos’ and Luke called ‘the dragon’. Amelia had used this mode all her life, as did everyone else, but had not until now needed to refer to it by name, although she knew what he meant. In flicker choice mode, the intos offered to the user sequences of options, often with subliminal rapidity, and then selected from and refined the choice by examining the user’s facial expression or voice for indications of satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

   So Amelia set about creating frame views of her contrasting cultures by sitting in her flat, and thinking about the ideas she had thought up. She expected the Arklash to be easy and to appear before her eyes. She had found plenty of useful details in Celia’s library, and decided that the Assyrians from the ancient Near East could be a useful model. They had been suitably ruthless and belligerent, as well as being proficient at technology. She had not found any information about a human culture like the Terrever though, but there would surely be something in the intos archives, they were so vast.

   Amelia sat and sat until her eyes were sore from staring, but the expected visions did not come. All she was offered was some late necrotech documentary television features, and photographs from magazine articles, about popular history, archaeology, anthropology and so on – plus several absurdly unrealistic films about Vikings and Egyptians. The only offering for the Terrever was various tribes of hunter-gatherers, some of whom had survived into late necrotech, but even they had used fire. Luke had been right about flicker choice: it was no use. She projected rejection until all the available images were exhausted. After that she was left staring at the wallpaper.

   She would have to use an interact-face so that she could make explicit vocal demands. Luke’s face was available for her to use, and it had been hovering in the background waiting for her to give up.

   ‘Having trouble?’ the Luke face asked cheerily.

   ‘There’s nothing coming up on ancient civilisations.’

   ‘Nothing suitable for your frame, you mean,’ it corrected her.

   ‘Why is that?’ she asked.

   The face beamed Luke’s calm smile and told her, ‘Virtual reality was invented in 1960, television in 1926, cinema in 1895, photography in 1830. Before that just words and drawings. What did you expect, darling, time travel?’

   ‘What can we do then?’

   ‘Use your imagination, pet; there isn’t any in here.’

   The Arklash first, Amelia thought, and the Terrever will be the opposite. How they use the land: that’s the basis.

The dusty urchin tried to lever the rock, which weighed perhaps half his own weight, into the basket. The jagged shape had wedged itself awkwardly in the neck, and the boy heaved on it to shift it deeper inside. Then he squatted with his back to the basket and pulled the leather strap over his head, lining it up across his forehead. He eased the weight of the rock onto his bent back to carry it from the quarry. The great hole in the landscape was crawling with children engaged in the same task. Adult slaves were wielding iron picks and crowbars to separate lumps of rock. A double crocodile of people wound from the quarry lip, down the hill and across the valley to where the great dam was being built. Those going out were bent double carrying baskets of rocks, those returning were running, forced on by drivers with whips.

The child’s bare feet dented the springy herbs as she crept along a faint animal track at the edge of the sacred wildwood. She was tempted to enter the mysterious green cavern within, but the rule was that to go in was to stay in. To go to the forest was to end this life to dissolve into the timeless cycles. One day she would go, but not yet. She had accompanied two of the grandmothers here a few days before, and watched them walk in, and marvelled as their awkward frail weight was transformed in the shower of light from the canopy to a fey lissomness. She stared in wonder as the grandmothers ran like squirrels up the mossy trousers clothing the roots of the huge trees, and leapt down onto the soft ferns of the forest floor.

   The child peered through at the tumbling sea of undergrowth, but the grandmothers were no longer visible. This time she had come to gather berries from the edge. The fruit glistened in the morning light. She was reluctant to break the necklaces of spider web threaded with dew droplets which hung across the bushes. Stretching on tiptoe she reached out a finger to catch the end of a web and moved it gently and touched it over a branch a little further back. The pretty strings were still intact, and she could ease off the berries, one by one, from the cluster which now protruded beyond the web. She laid the berries in her rush basket and repeated the careful process many times, slowly progressing along the edge of the wood. One time, for all her care, a thread of spider web broke, shedding its dewy beads. She was unconcerned. It was only a game, but a game with the purpose of disturbing the patterns of life as little as possible.

The last tree came crashing down and was stripped of its branches and dragged away by a team of sweating slaves. The tree had been left standing longer than its fellows to provide shelter for the supervisors, but now that all the other trees had gone and the debris had dried sufficiently for burning, it too was felled. A procession of priests and administrators had reached the site, and its dimensions were paced out and noted down by a scribe. One of the priests was handed the fire box. Mouthing some special words for the occasion, the priest lit a taper and set it to one of the oil-soaked torches held by a supervisor who then backed away, bowed low to the priest and marched importantly to the next supervisor, set light to his torch, and returned to his place. One by one the torches were lit, until the great area: once forest, now plantation, was surrounded. At a sign from the priest the dried forest debris was set alight. In a few days, teams of slaves would break up the soil, mixing in the ash, ready for sowing a grain crop to provide bread for the inhabitants of the city.

The children squealed with pleasure as they tumbled in the deep leaves. This part of the wood was in its accessible cycle. Gathering of herbs and fungi was allowed here, and dead leaves and compost could be taken for mulch. When they had had enough of play, the children began to scoop up armfuls of leaves and cram them into the big baskets. When the baskets were full they lifted one each and followed the path out of the wood. They pretended to be weighed down and staggered about, accidentally on purpose barging into each other. The village was not far. When the children arrived they took the baskets to the area where it had been decided they could make a new herb bed, to allow one of the old ones to rest and return to its wild state. They put the baskets down and on hands and knees plucked the wild plants growing on the place for the new bed. They were careful not to disturb the roots or expose the soil. They left the pluckings on the ground. Then they tipped the dead leaves they had collected over the remains of the wild plants. They spread them evenly and weighed them down with rushes. The following spring they would scatter onto the mulch layer the seeds they had gathered earlier from other garden plots and from the forest. They stood around the new bed, pleased with and proud of their achievement. Other villagers came to look and to praise.

Godsfreesonson eased the last cask into the boat. His father, Godsfreeson, looked gloomily at how low the boat now floated. It would not take much of a sea to tip the boat and let the water in over the side. But they dared not send less than the proper tribute: half the year’s production of wine. They only had one boat. There would not be time for a second round trip before the trade winds turned. It had been too good a year. The half that was left would not command a good price in the local market. The family could not eat wine, it had to be sold for money to buy food and other necessities. But they were proud and did not complain. They were highly privileged to be a free family. Godsfree had been freed by his high priest owner in return for some mysterious deed he would not tell of, even on his death bed. As a freeman, Godsfree could have his own sons. Slave men did not breed. Slave women produced priests’ bastards for the next generation of slaves. Godsfree had been awarded a plot of land with his freedom. It was in a vine growing area, so grapes were all he was permitted to cultivate. If Godsfreeson sent less than half their produce as tribute, and the tax inspectors found out, or some jealous neighbour told them, the whole family would lose their freedom, and probably Godsfreeson would lose his life. The heavily laden boat would have to set sail, and the family would have to sell enough wine to buy a lamb for sacrifice to ask the gods for just enough wind, but not too much, so that Godsfreesonson made the journey to the city harbour swiftly and safely.

The mosaic of Arklash and Terrever life grew slowly, but Amelia was satisfied with her progress; she was getting there, bit by bit. A routine had developed: first she thought of an idea for a fragment, then she ordered the Luke face to find a still image of suitable scenery, then she described the people and selected their exact appearance through flicker choice, then she mimed what they were doing, then she told the Luke face to animate the people accordingly for incorporation into the scene.

   She became so absorbed in her two worlds that she was startled when she detected the Luke interact-face transmute into Luke himself. ‘‘Scuse me butting in, Amelia love, but my interact called me in: you’ve put it in worry mode. I think I’ve been neglecting my duties towards your development as a framer. My excuse is you were doing so wonderfully well.’

   ‘And I’m not doing so well now?’ Amelia asked.

   ‘No criticism, darling, just a spot of advice, okay, based on what we’ve found over the years.’ Luke polished his brow and glowed at Amelia. ‘These are little gems you’ve created, but too detailed just for background. We must leave something for the users’ imagination, pet. Must have flexing potential in our frames, okay.’

   Amelia reluctantly had to agree. Flexing was what distinguished storyframes from old fashioned non-interactive ‘films’. A frame had to be just that: an outline for the users to fill in and modify according to their interests and imagination. A popular frame would acquire through use a complex maze of possible routes and variations, but the original framer had to be restrained about filling in detail, so that the first few users who participated in the story had something left for them to create. The frame releasers, such as Virtual Stardom, would ensure that a new frame was picked up by several initial users at once, so that they would give the frame that essential dimension of multiple choice. In theory, the framer could build in several initial choices, but experience had shown that this was best done by users.

   ‘I suggest, pet, that you stand away a bit, and think about the complete frame. You’ve got more than enough background and social context already; what you need now are characters and plot. A good frame has all its components present, consistent, interesting and credible, but only lightly sketched in. That’s the art of framing, Amelia sweety. When you design that course, that’ll be the main lesson.’

   ‘I see,’ said Amelia glumly. ‘What do I do next then?’

   ‘Invent some characters.’

   ‘Well I was working towards that; I’ve got Godsfreesonson and his family.’

   ‘Hmm. I can’t see Godfrey thingy as enough of a baddie for an Arklash character.’

   ‘He’s not bad at all. The Arklash are meant to be a bad society, not bad people. That’s the point I’m trying to get across.’

   ‘Darling, storyframes are for entertainment, not for getting points across. We mustn’t confuse the users: you have to give them nasty baddies and nice goodies.’

   ‘But I thought you liked my idea about contrasting cultures,’ Amelia said forlornly.

   ‘Oh I do, pet – it’s really new. But a storyframe’s not meant to be a lesson in social history. It’s got to have stars. I can bring someone in to help you if you like. Cora Flinch is available; she’s terrific on nasties. I’m having a party at my place tonight. Cora will be there and I could introduce you.’

   After the session with Luke, Amelia felt thoroughly confused about what her role was, but she decided to complete what she had started and go along with whatever the professionals wanted.

   Amelia had so far declined all the party invitations, to Luke’s place and elsewhere, but now she had to go along. When she emerged in Luke’s basisframe, she found it just as she would have imagined: a huge room open to a balcony overlooking a moonlit ocean, plush sofas and thick carpets everywhere, lots of people talking loudly over loud music. Luke led her through the crush to meet Cora Flinch, and Amelia almost laughed out loud at her, she was such a caricature of her specialism. She had a pale hollow-cheeked face, thin lips with a smile that revealed slightly prominent canine teeth but did not reach her eyes, black hair in a snood, and red nails on long bony hands. The three of them retreated to the balcony to discuss Amelia’s frame and Cora was gleefully enthusiastic about taking on Amelia’s Arklash characters.

   The next morning Amelia showed Cora the background fragments, and explained her concept. Cora seemed even less interested than Luke had been in the social message.

   ‘The Terrever mustn’t use fire or disturb the soil,’ Amelia told her.

   ‘Fine by me: they’re not very exciting anyway – but the users should be allowed to change that, so you can’t get too inflex about it,’ Cora said, and then a gleam came in her eyes. ‘Couldn’t they be building a castle, your slaves lugging rocks around?’

   ‘Well, I thought a dam – for irrigation, you know. How a people produce their food is the basis of their culture. Necrotech food production disturbs nature, hence clearing forests for plantations and damning rivers for irrigation. The Terrever would work with nature: that’s how I thought of their gardening.’

   ‘Oh, I think we should have a castle,’ said Cora firmly, and the image changed accordingly.

   ‘I’ll leave you to it, then, shall I?’ said Amelia.

   When she next called up the frame, she found that Cora had got a set of shadowy puppets for the Arklash royal family, including a belligerent young son called ‘Grunthor’. She had pulled in some war-game material, the routine of enslavement and torture was sketched in, and she had just thought of the slave wives idea.

   Amelia called up Luke, wanting to explain that this did not really fit in with her concept, but Luke had seen it and was obviously thrilled.

   ‘Well done, Amelia, pet!’ he gushed, as if she had done it herself.

   The next stage was going to be adding a plot. Luke suggested bringing in further Virtual Stardom assistance. Amelia did not feel the frame was really her own any more, and she accepted the new helper resignedly. At the next party, in someone else’s basisframe this time, Luke introduced her to Oliver Sheridan, an unremarkable looking plump man in a crumpled linen suit, who seemed to know all about what she was doing already. When Oliver had wandered back to the party, Luke took Amelia to the edge of the balcony: this one had a view of pine trees silhouetted on the horizon and a lot of night sky, and they tried spotting constellations.

   ‘Right up above us, that’s the Plough,’ Luke said

   ‘I think I can see Orion, the Hunter,’ said Amelia. ‘Those three bright stars down there are his belt. I wish we could really see the stars – you know, outside the dragon.’

   ‘I don’t know that there’s any such thing as really seeing them. Who’s to say that what you see with the naked eye is real in any absolute sense. And as for telescopes and other devices, you see more, but whether it’s more real …’

   Still gazing at the night sky, Luke went on, ‘I’ve been thinking – might be an idea if you have a break while Oli explores your settings and characters, and sketches out a frameplay.’

   Am I being moved out of this altogether? Amelia wondered. ‘Just what I need, I’m exhausted,’ was what she said.

   ‘You could tell those students of yours about that social pattern stuff,’ Luke said.

   ‘I’m not sure I’ve got any students,’ Amelia said. ‘They’re probably just puppets. No one’s really interested in my ideas. I was quite excited when you seemed to like them: I did think that framing might be the way some other people might actually get what I’m saying.’

   ‘I get it, honestly I do. It’s just that you can’t tell anyone; you can only hide it in there somewhere, and maybe they’ll find it, and think it’s their own.’

Amelia found herself in a women’s lavatory with rows of cubicles and washbasins. ‘Cloakroom’ was what she called it mentally, although there was no provision for hanging cloaks or any other outer garments. She was conscious of aching muscles and panting breath, as after exertion. A bicycle ride and climbing two flights of stairs came to mind. She felt dishevelled and looked for a mirror. There was a full-length one on the far wall and she walked towards it.

   ‘What a mess!’ she said, staring at the image of a middle-aged woman with a lot of wavy greying hair, wearing a green lightweight jacket, and with the strap of a large bag diagonally across her chest. Her legs were enclosed in sagging trousers of a dark red colour.

   ‘That’s not me,’ she declared, ‘not what I feel like anyway.’

   The mirror image changed. Now she saw a young girl, potentially pretty with perfect, unspotted skin, an eager smile and bright brown curly hair. But she was too plump; her limp, flowered frock was too tight; and she wore owlish glasses and had a brace on her teeth.

   ‘Ahh!’ said Amelia, sympathetically, but shook her head.

   The girl rippled through stages of maturity, acquiring small breasts and fining down to a pleasing slimness of body and long legs. The image settled on a young woman with wavy hair pulled back into a high chignon. She was wearing slanting winged glasses, a sack-like pink dress well above her knees. She was bony thin. The eager smile had an anxious fixity about it.

   ‘Go on,’ Amelia commanded.

   The image changed and changed again. The glasses disappeared, replaced perhaps by contact lenses. Hair styles and fashions came and went. At first not ageing noticeable, gradually lines of anxiety betrayed the eager smile and deepened in the softening skin. But then a shift occurred – and the woman had altered at a deeper level. The smile had faded, but so had the anxiousness lines, and a new calmness was apparent.

   Amelia pointed eagerly, but then looked again, disappointed. The image had returned to its starting point. Amelia shook her head again.

   The image continued changing. The hair greyed further and lightened to white. The body spread and then began to shrink again, and then to crumple – stooped, bow legged, gnarled at the fingers – but charmingly draped with floating mauve chiffon. The image finally halted at an ancient crone in a sprigged night-gown. She was almost bald, her scull draped with mottled translucent skin, a few long brown teeth in a dribbling lipless mouth above a whiskery chin.

   Amelia shivered. ‘No, not that one – go back, go back.’

   The image obediently returned once again to its starting point.

   Amelia sighed. ‘Well at least smarten me up. I remember all those years when I was younger, always feeling older than I was, and unattractive – what a waste! Let me at least have a bit of style with my new confidence.

   The woman’s clothes whirled through a myriad of possibilities until Amelia’s eyes were dry from staring and her mind was in a whirl.

   ‘Black, all black,’ she commanded. ‘Long skirt, boots, loose top.’ And it was done.

   ‘Ah, that’s better! That’s me. The hair’s still a mess though. But I’ll fix that myself.’

   The shoulder bag, of tapestry fabric, was still across her chest. Amelia removed it, opened the zip and found on the top a carefully folded black stole, of an open-weave black fabric, subtly patterned in white, which she draped around her shoulders and knotted loosely in front. Then she rummaged in the lower reaches for a comb. Discovering it at last, a brown plastic afro-comb, designed for frizzy or unruly hair, she jabbed at the tangles. The comb did no more than charge the hair with static electricity so she went to one of the washbasins, turned on the tap and, bending down awkwardly, dangled a few hanks in the stream of water. She looked in the mirror above and finger-combed in the dampness. Strands of hair now framed her face unflatteringly; a strong broad face with high cheekbones and firm jaw, the form revealed by her once-firm flesh having fined down into a thinner covering, just beginning to soften and wrinkle. It was an intelligent face, still etched with a few deep lines – permanent scars of her earlier chronic lack of confidence, compensated for by the fixed smile and animated talkativeness.

   She licked her finger and attempted to smooth down the few unruly white hairs in her eyebrows. She smiled at the face and it smiled back. She scowled and it looked sternly back at her. She turned away from it with a shrug and a slight shudder and, shouldering the bag, made her way out of the cloakroom, turned right down the corridor, through sets of heavy fire doors, along more corridors, up concrete stairs, past numbered rooms to the one assigned to her evening class.

   As she walked in she switched on her role: respected teacher and awarder of grades and helpful criticism. Her students seemed out of place in the classroom, as anything warm and living would clash with the cold grey angles and steel and plastic, inexplicably tatty in spite of the robust utilitarian construction. The early-comers had evidently tried to form a semicircle out of the trapezium-shaped tables, presumably designed for flexible disposition, but defying any arrangement which was not rigidly angular. The floor space having been filled with an irregular horseshoe of tables, the table legs made noisy metallic barriers against any attempt to set chairs behind them, let alone settle bottoms, books and bags ready for the business of the evening. However, her entrance provided the incentive for the group to get their settling done and have all their faces looking expectantly towards her by the time the last two or three had hurried in.

   Amelia perched herself on the edge of the table placed for her use. It slid backwards with a jerk, so she moved round it and sat on the chair. They were all there, she noted, and checked by a quick count: twelve would-be storyframers. Never very good at names, she tried to remember some of them.

   There was Simone, a very pretty and curvaceous blonde woman, too cartoon-like, Amelia thought, and wondered if she would drop that look if she stuck with the course. Then there were the two tall thin men with very short hair who always sat very close to each other, a gay couple perhaps. She could not remember their names since she had dubbed them Bill and Ben after two puppet characters from an old children’s TV programme. The thin bird-like dark one was Philip, and next to him Pippa, a Pappagena to Philip’s Pappageno, but they were not a couple, at least not as far as she could tell. There were the four who were usually early, came together and often got in a huddle in discussions. They were Don, Barny, George and Arthur, all youngish and ordinarily good looking, and she was not sure which was which, apart from George, who was the one who always had something to say. Then there were the three quiet ones, two women and one man. Amelia looked at her list. They must be Jane, Hannah and Douglas.

   ‘Good evening, everyone,’ she smiled. ‘I’m glad you’ve all managed to come. So, let’s get on with it. As I’m sure you’re well aware, the next coursework assignment is coming up soon —’

   There was a collective groan from the students.

   ‘– so I think we should stick to theory this time. The essay question is on the very important subject of the patterns of late necrotech, which most of us follow in our basisframes, and for a lot of storyframes too. So I thought we’d study a few passages in the Pattern Mathematics set book to give you some theoretical structure to base your essays on – just a list of patterns won’t get you good marks, I warn you. We haven’t talked about this book before, although I expect some of you’ve had a look at it. What did you think of it?’

   The students shuffled uncomfortably, and sneaked little grimaces at each other.

   George put his hand up, and Amelia nodded encouragingly, ‘Yes, George.’

   ‘I have actually read this book from cover to cover – twice —’

   ‘Oh, George!’ said Simone. The others said, ‘Wow!’ in mock admiration.

   ‘– and I wouldn’t say it’s an easy read. You have to hang on every word, but it’s good stuff when you get into what the woman was getting at.’

   ‘Well I couldn’t get into it at all,’ Pippa piped up. ‘It’s just so theoretical. I mean, it was just solid words!’ She looked around the others, who evidently agreed.

   Amelia smiled. ‘No pictures or conversation, eh? Yes, I know. But that was the usual style of academic books in late necrotech. There weren’t any visuals with the book, not even a picture of the author, Bony Bailey, because she never got the book published; we don’t even know how it got into the system. There was a crude knowledge network in those days. I expect she had access to that, and her ideas eventually got caught up in the info-sweep. Lucky for us, if that’s what happened.’ Most of the class looked as if they wished it never had.

   ‘Actually, I’m not expecting you to understand the whole book. You’re already familiar with the central idea, which is that everything that happens, everywhere in the universe, is still present, although we can’t see it, and that’s what shapes what happens next – it’s a process of growth. Everyone happy with that?’

   They all nodded and murmured, ‘Yes’, ‘Mmm,’ or ‘Sure.’

   ‘I’ve picked out three short passages with a little something extra on top of the basic idea. What we’ll do is divide into groups – three, I think – each group can discuss one of the bits I’ve picked out – and then we’ll compare notes, okay?’

   There was some scraping and clashing as they rearranged the metal tables and chairs, then Amelia handed out the slips of paper onto which she had copied the three passages.

   In view of what Pippa had just said, Amelia gave her group, which included Bill, Ben and Philip the first passage, which she thought was fairly straightforward:

‘If we accept that the patterns of the past persist and accumulate, rather than vanishing as each moment passes, not only can we see why the tendency is for human social patterns to continue in the established way, in spite of the damage caused being starkly evident, but we can also see that we, as a species, cannot leave our collective errors behind us and start afresh.’

   She left them to discuss it, but managed to listen in.

   ‘This is easy,’ said Pippa airily. ‘It’s just saying human society has bad habits.’

   ‘Who’s the one that couldn’t get into it!’ said Philip. The two of them withdrew from the others for a private discussion of the book itself, which Amelia suspected was a disguised flirtation.

   ‘I wonder if it would have made any difference if people had known about this pattern stuff,’ said Ben. ‘I mean, if they’d known that it’s terribly difficult to get out of habits because it’s something physical in the universe.’

   ‘Too late by Bony Bailey’s time though, wasn’t it?’ said Bill.

   ‘She was before bionecrotech,’ observed Ben.

   They withdrew into a private exchange too, so Amelia moved on to give Jane’s group, which included Douglas, Hannah and Simone, the second passage, and hovered a while to see how they got on.

‘Every pattern has a life-cycle: it emerges and forms, by resonance with pre-existing patterns; it continues in interaction with other patterns; and it degenerates and dissolves, like other patterns before it. Any pattern which is disrupted prematurely will re-emerge later and continue to its proper completion.’

   Simone read the passage quickly, pouted and passed the paper to Douglas, then she examined her long nails. Douglas read the passage and smirked back at Simone. She started to play with a loose strip of laminate at the edge of the table top. Then she leant over and whispered something to Douglas. Amelia heard ‘do some storyframing’ and gathered Simone thought pattern theory was a waste of time.

   Hannah and Jane dutifully read the passage several times, and both fiddled with strands of their hair. They started to speak together. ‘No, go on Hannah, you say,’ said Jane.

   ‘Oh, I was just going to say it’s kind of pretty, you know … poetic.’

   Simone raised her eyebrows at Douglas.

   Amelia wished she had mixed the talkative ones around more – and separated the couples or buddies. She was never very good at this sort of thing. She moved nearer to the group and leant between Jane and Hannah.

   ‘Perhaps you could think about what patterns have been disrupted and might come back – if this theory is right, that is.’

   ‘Nature?’ said Simone, to Amelia’s surprise.

   ‘Yes, good! Go on,’ she said.

   ‘Nature got disrupted by necrotech,’ Simone said. ‘Don’t know what it means by “completion” though.’

   ‘I hope necrotech got completed or that would come back too,’ said Douglas.

   ‘Perhaps there’s no such thing as “completion”,’ said Hannah. ‘ I like the idea of patterns all going round and round forever – that’s more pattern-like really.’

   ‘Perhaps the forests come back and then people burn them down, then they come back and people burn them down again, then the fo—’

   ‘Yes, Douglas,’ said Simone, ‘we get the idea.’

   ‘It’s got here “degenerates and dissolves”, so they all get worn out in the end,’ said Jane.

   ‘She might have got that bit wrong,’ said Hannah.

   That was pretty good for the quiet ones, Amelia thought. It seemed to be all they had to say, and the first group had got going again, so Amelia listened in surreptitiously.

   ‘Trouble with bad habits is you don’t know you’ve got them,’ Pippa said. ‘Like, I mean, they didn’t actually know it was necrotech when it was.’

   ‘Fire and death,’ said Philip.

   Pippa nodded. She leant over to retrieve the slip of paper which was in front of Bill, raising her eyebrows to ask permission. He nodded. Pippa and Philip looked at the passage again.

   ‘It made us think of all of us still living necrotech in the dragon,’ said Bill.

   ‘– even though the real necrotech world is over long ago,’ Ben went on.

   ‘We don’t depend on fire and death,’ remarked Pippa.

   ‘Oh, we do a bit on death,’ said Philip. ‘Minerals and stuff for babies must come from dead people.’

   ‘Not dead anything else though,’ said Pippa.

   ‘That’s not what we meant,’ said Bill.

   ‘We feel as if we were still in necrotech,’ said Ben.

   ‘Well, what else can we do – in here?’ Pippa challenged.

   ‘It’s escape from boredom – they needed that in necrotech too,’ said Ben.

   ‘Fantasies, ‘cos there’s nothing interesting going on,’ said Bill.

   ‘Civilisation,’ said Philip.

   ‘Eh?’

   ‘In Greece and all those places, the citizens had nothing to do because the slaves did everything for them, so they invented … well, maths and philosophy – all that sort of stuff.’

   Amelia was intrigued, but George came up to her at that point.

   ‘Can we have our bit?’ he asked. She gave his group the third, trickier, passage and moved over to eavesdrop.

‘The theory of the persistence of the past leads to an interesting alternative conception of time. If we let go the idea that everything that does not change is perpetually copied from one moment of time to the next, but instead leave it in the time it first appeared, we get a more economical model of the universe . The present time can then be conceived as being discontinuous: full of holes, through which the presence of the past is apparent and influential. Only the tiny fragment of the universe which is different from the past exists in any present moment.’

   ‘I remember that section: there’s plenty more on that theme,’ said George. ‘It’s a new geometry of the universe – actually it was the part I liked best.’

   Two of the others started to say something at the same time.

   ‘After you, Barny,’ said one of them.

   ‘I was only going to say it’s mind-boggling stuff,’ said Barny. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said to George, who was probably about to explain it all to them. ‘Don?’

   ‘It’s easier to understand what it’s getting at if you think of just “all people” instead of “everything”,’ said Don. ‘If it says what I think it does, it means we’re mostly all the same person. The only part of yourself you could call your own self would be whatever tiny little bit no one’s ever been like before.’

   Amelia nodded and left them to it to go back to the first group.

   ‘You could say the dragon is like the universe and vice versa,’ Pippa was saying. ‘That bit with “accumulate”: that’s like the archives always building up.’

   ‘And the bit about not leaving errors behind,’ said Philip, ‘That’s like what Amelia said last class about not being able to wipe out your framing mistakes, so we’d better not make any.’

   The others laughed.

   ‘I liked what Pippa said,’ remarked Bill. ‘The universe is like a library where they keep on adding more and more books.’

   ‘And never throw any out,’ said Ben. ‘Even the duff ones.’

   ‘Mostly the stuff’d be like boring log books or account books that are almost the same kind of thing,’ said Pippa.

   ‘Could be the same interesting books over and over again,’ said Philip, looking at Pippa as if she were an interesting book.

   ‘I suppose the dragon logs every single one of every single person’s choices – in their profile, so it knows what each one likes,’ said Bill.

   ‘So there must be billions of choices, all almost the same,’ said Ben.

   ‘If the universe’s cycles, or library, or database, or however you want to look at it, just keep building up pattern stuff, it’s a wonder there’s room for it all,’ said Pippa. ‘I mean, if the universe has to have everything that’s ever happened in it: every moment, all squashed up together, it hardly seems possible. That’s not what it seems like, anyhow.’

   Amelia thought of George’s group’s passage, and wondered if she should have kept the whole class together. But Jane’s group were working it out for themselves, or Philip was.

   ‘The dragon’s intelligent organic,’ said Philip, ‘so it wouldn’t work like a silicon computer. Perhaps it merges the profiles into patterns.’

   ‘It would only need one copy of each selection that’s the same, and only store anything that’s different,’ said Pippa. ‘Ordinary computers could do that.’

   ‘How would it know which selection was in whose profile then?’ asked Bill.

   ‘I don’t know.’ Philip paused. ‘Maybe a particular selection could seem to be in lots of profiles, if you looked at the profiles, but really you’d be looking through the profiles to where the selection was made the very first time.’

   ‘I think you’re a secret pattern book reader, after all,’ Pippa teased.

   ‘The pattern of the whole dragon itself would be mostly holes,’ said Ben.

   ‘So would the universe,’ said Ben.

   Over the buzz of talking came Simone’s shrill voice, ‘This is so boring!’ Amelia cringed, but the buzz carried on. She went back to her table. More fragments of talk reached her.

   ‘There might not be necrotech again if people knew what happened before. … riddled with guilt when we get out. We’ll be nervous of disturbing a fly.’

   ‘… Not our fault.’

   ‘The dragon … conscience.’

   ‘Anything goes in the dragon. Torture, rape … boredom – that’s the killer.’

   ‘… keep to the values of necrotech more or less … pattern still working, even when it makes no difference to anything.’

   ‘… all the same person … was us right through necrotech … live necrotech frames.’

   ‘If we’re all the same person, we’re immortal.’

   ‘… my own person, even if that does mean I’ll die.’

   ‘You’re distorting the concept if you just take the human perspective,’ said George. ‘I think this is a good geometric model. It’s better than having an infinite number of universes – or one universe which keeps vanishing as time passes.’

   ‘Talk about necrotech patterns, George! you’ve picked up rational science. I’d go for intuition myself. I think it’s important to test if a concept feels right by your own experience – what you know. I think someone’s done really well if they manage a single original thought or action in a lifetime. All the rest, that you think is yourself, might as well be what someone was like before shining through the holes of time from the past.’

   Amelia sighed: So you don’t even know what is your own self! Are these students real, or are they all me ‘shining through the holes’ – saying all the things I believe, so I feel someone’s interested? But now even I’m bored with it. I might as well just go.

   She stared at a patch of the wall, cracked plaster and flaking cream paint, and wished herself somewhere else. Obedient to her wishes the patch of classroom wall changed to crimson silk.

   The formica and steel table in front of her had vanished. Instead of sitting on a steel-framed chair, she was enthroned in a great gold-painted carved wooden armchair with pale tapestry upholstery. Her feet rested on a matching footstool on a gorgeous floral carpet, which extended over the floor of an enormous drawing room, with red silk walls hung with two tiers of oil paintings; landscapes above, portraits below. High overhead was a ceiling painting of gods in conference. A log fire crackled in the grate of the marble and jasper fireplace. The tall windows looked out over a formal garden with a park beyond.

   ‘Gorgeous! This is certainly different,’ Amelia said aloud to herself.

   For a few moments, the room was empty and quiet. Then a crowd of people and their noise materialised. It turned out to be yet another Virtual Stardom party. Cora was obviously the hostess. She glided through the crush, which parted before her passage, wearing a black sequinned gown, and bearing a silver tray of little biscuits with swirls of pink or green stuff.

   ‘Darling, you’ve come!’ she gushed. ‘Have a bicky.’

   Amelia took one. She looked around the room and remarked, ‘This is very grand, but I did think you’d have a castle.’

   ‘Oh, this is the nearest thing I could find. Castles are so draughty and uncomfortable. When this lot has gone, you must let me show you around. It’s all here, you know, a complete stately home: it’s got dozens of bedrooms, all with four-poster beds, an absolute maze of passages and creaky stairs, a dreadful damp cellar down below, and a huge kitchen with a full-size spit.’ Cora’s thin mouth spread wide, showing her pointed teeth. ‘I think the site was a castle once upon a time, because there is a little dungeon below the west wing. Outside, it’s quite fantastic! There’s a perfect little Greek temple with an altar, there’s a smelly old witch’s hovel, and the deepest, darkest wood you’ve ever seen.’ Amelia fancied the down on Cora’s pale skin grew almost furry and her eyes gleamed orange.

   Oliver Sheridan was there. He took Amelia aside and sketched out for her his almost completed frame-play. She sighed inwardly to learn that her lovely, gentle Terrever were wiped out by the Arklash, who had become such baddies now that they were cannibals, and they ceremonially ate the Terrever – to tear their ancestral spirits away from the land: perhaps that was a tiny trace of her original conception. Amelia thought about pattern theory: of nothing ever being wiped out, but still present in the past. But Amelia had only dreamed up the Terrever, so perhaps it would not apply to them, which made her feel sad, but she kept smiling, as if her survival depended on it.

   So when Luke wandered up she told him she was delighted with Oliver’s frame-play and asked him, ‘What comes next?’

   ‘Oh, nearly there now. Coming along splendidly!’ Luke beamed. ‘Next stage is working up Oli’s characters a bit. Want another assistant?’

   ‘Yes, fine,’ Amelia smiled back.

   The next helper was called Dean River. He was the framing equivalent to an actor. Luke found him in the crush and brought him over to introduce him to Amelia. He had a young film star face: good bone structure, wistful eyes, sensuous mouth and soft brown hair which kept falling over his face. His idea of party clothes seemed to be a much-laundered pinkish-brown checked shirt over a faded black T-shirt and washed out jeans.

   ‘Hi, Amelia!’ he greeted her. ‘We’re going to have some fun working this one up.’

   ‘How many people will you need, then?’ she asked.

   ‘Oh, just you and me, I think,’ he grinned.

   ‘Me?’

   ‘Don’t you want to?’

   ‘Well, yes, fine, but I don’t know how to do it, and you’ve got so many more experienced people.’ She looked around at the party crowd.

   ‘You’ll be fine. It’s just like flexing, which everyone does, except that, for an initial frame, you have to go lightly, sketching everything in, but —’

   ‘— leaving plenty of flex potential,’ she finished.

   He grinned back. ‘See you tomorrow, then, at the entrypoint.’

The next morning, Amelia emerged at the frame’s entrypoint and found herself on the dais of the great hall of a castle. Dean was already there.

   She looked around. ‘How come the entry’s at the end?’ she asked.

   ‘Oh, people quite like that. The frame’s mostly flashback. It was often done with films.’

   ‘And novels,’ she said.

   ‘Well there you are! – old pattern.’

   ‘What do we do now?’ she asked. ‘Do you play Grunthor, and me Agnetha? How do the users get to have my memories?’

   ‘It’s all your memories the way Oli’s done it. The users can make new routes if they want to, and go on from here. But we have to work from what Oli’s done, so we have to make your memories real. It’s no good having memories in your mind, they have to be in the world. That’s where memories have always been – not in anyone’s brain: the brain’s just a receiver. Where would you like to start?’

   ‘Can we start with the Terrever? The first memory is of the sacred robe being taken as tribute.’

   ‘We should go back further than that, I think. How about doing the sacrifice ceremony, from one of the years before the robe was taken. We’ll be the young couple.’

They emerged on the beach of Terrever Bay.

   Dean looked around. ‘Hmm, I think we need to start in our village, don’t we? I mean, wouldn’t there be a procession? Have we got a village scene? There isn’t one mentioned in the frame-play.’

   ‘I did a fragment about the village gardens. We can build on that.’

They emerged by the children’s mulch bed, in the midst of a crowd of children and adult puppets admiring a pile of dead leaves and rushes.

   ‘Oh good,’ said Dean, ‘you’ve got some Terrever people. We’ll have to deck them all out in appropriate gear. What sort of mood would it be? Solemn or celebration?’

   ‘Celebration, I think. If we’re the couple, we’ll have to have the sacred robes on. They’d be dyed homespun cloth with a design made from tiny pieces of bone and shell and pips.’

Amelia looked at Dean. His shirt and jeans were gone, and he was wearing one of the robes. She looked down and she was wearing one too. She saw vegetation under her bare feet, and fancied she could feel its cool damp unevenness.

   ‘Aren’t the robes lovely!’ she exclaimed.

   ‘Hmm, yes, they’re pretty good. They’re what you just said, certainly, but I think we need something more … er … more magical.’

   ‘How do we get that? I can’t imagine what that would be like.’

   ‘We need Amadine,’ Dean said. ‘I thought we would.’

   ‘Another helper?’ Amelia felt a little disappointed, she was enjoying being in a twosome with this gorgeous young man.

   The other helper arrived, a fat blonde woman in a flowing pink robe who introduced herself as Amadine Puleston. ‘Costumes is my line,’ she chirruped. ‘Ah!’ Her eyes lit up at Amelia’s sacred tabard. ‘I could work that up a bit,’ she offered.

   ‘That’s what we were hoping,’ said Dean.

   ‘Fine,’ said Amelia cheerily, hiding a tinge of regret at another bit of her creativity getting the red pen.

   ‘Okay, honey. We’ll take a break and leave Amadine to it. We need festival clothes for all this lot, while you’re at it. Bye!’

The sacred robe did turn out to be a magical garment when Amadine had finished with it. It looked as if it was made from natural materials, but it also had fractal depth: the closer you looked at it the more detail appeared.

   ‘A user could get so absorbed in those patterns that she’d never get on with the story,’ Amelia said. ‘How come you could get something as wonderful as that out of the dragon with no trouble at all, and I had to struggle for ages to get a pre-industrial culture for the Arklash?’

   ‘Oh, there’s loads of computer art in the archives. A lot of it was natural looking patterns. As for your Arklash —’

   ‘Oh, I know about that really. Luke’s interact-face told me about there being nothing in the archives before photography.’

   ‘That’s not quite true. There was lots of very realistic art. It was all captured in the info-sweep. I’m sure there must be some paintings of barbarians, but maybe only in the off-profile archives, so you had to use inter-act mode.’

   ‘I expect your ideas for the Terrever came from the off-profile archives as well,’ said Dean. ‘I don’t suppose you invented this gardening method.’ He pointed at the mulch beds.

‘I never found anything in the library on any people like the Terrever,’ Amelia said to Celia.

   ‘Perhaps people like that wouldn’t leave any writing. They certainly wouldn’t have written on stone, from what you’ve said, and skins and parchment only survive in special conditions – like being sealed up in jars – and they wouldn’t have made jars because that means excavating clay and firing in kilns.’

   ‘Where did I get them from then? Where in the archives might they be?’

   ‘You never know, some people in late necrotech might have thought up what the opposite of necrotech would be, and had a try at living that way.’

   ‘They wouldn’t have been allowed, would they?’

   ‘That may be why it’s in the off-profile archives.’

   ‘How sad more people didn’t do it – enough to make a difference.’

   ‘The more of them that did, the more likely that it’d be suppressed.’

   ‘Oh, Celia, how dreadful life is! Sometimes I can understand why people like horror stories: it helps you face up to the real horrors, which are so much worse.’

Agnetha carefully examined the intricate patterns on the skirt of her tabard where it draped over her knees, and hoped that no one would notice that she was avoiding looking at the spectacle below. Grunthor could not see her because she was on his blind side. Their dais was too high up for anyone in the crowd to see her eyes clearly. Fortunately, the dignity of her position excused her from cheering the high spots of what was being done to the pathetic scrap of humanity strapped to the torturing frame.

   But she was fascinated in spite of herself. She sneaked a look as one of the spirit doctors applied a hot iron to the girl’s nipple. As she screamed and cried out, ‘No! Help! Mummy, don’t let them!’ an attendant wiped her brow with cool water and moistened her lips; she must be kept alive and conscious as long as possible. Next the doctor took a knife and made a fine cut through her skin from neck to crotch, and began to peel the skin away. As the dissection of body and soul proceeded to the cheers of the bloodlusting crowd, Agnetha drew comfort from the primitive certainty that if this ultimate awfulness was happening to someone else, it could not happen to her. Then, ashamed, she looked back at the patterns on her skirt, imagining the breeze rustling the leaves of the two trees which formed the framework of the design. A squirrel rippled down a branch and spiralled the trunk. Another quick look down at the hall: dogs were scrapping for a finger joint which fell to the ground. At last the bloody mess was handed over to the butchers. Who was next? A tall dark woman, thick straight hair hiding her body like a bridal veil. Head held high, she mounted the steps and then turned to face the dais. She raised her hands, holding the corners of a square of cloth: glowing blue with a design of curling ferns. Grunthor rose to his feet and extended his hand towards her, palm upwards.

I hope that Amelia and her friends

                                    have given you some insight into life in the biotech age. Although it may appear that, as entertainment providers, they were in the minority and not typical, a higher proportion of people in biotech created entertainment than did in necrotech, when it was a commercial business. In biotech there were many similar alterations from necrotech patterns, such that more or fewer people took part in the various roles available. In general, people chose to succeed rather than to fail in the mock necrotech struggles. This continued a trend from necrotech, when mass entertainment provided similar opportunities for ordinary people to indulge in fantasies where they imagined themselves to be the rich and famous.

   It is perhaps surprising that the appetite for horror and physical mutilation, which was a persistent thread in the necrotech psyche, persisted into biotech. In necrotech itself, this blood-thirsty streak manifested itself in socially acceptable and disapproved of forms. You, my reader from necrotech, will be aware – though you may not see it the way we do – that the ritual observance of one of the most popular religions of later necrotech involved the torturing to death of its god, followed by the ritual consumption of his flesh and blood. The same religion elevated to near divine status those of its holy men who were mutilated to death by what was called ‘martyrdom’. And yet, interest in similar horrors for entertainment purposes was frowned upon, until it was brought into the open by the young of necrotech’s final years, when it was readily available in books and films, many of which were broadcast on universally available television channels. It is not for me to endeavour to explain this interest, or the contradictory social standard. It did not disappear, even when the memory of necrotech had faded away. Our Bony Bailey might say that it was one of humanity’s patterns, and part of who we are.

We come now, after generations had lived and died in the green dragon’s care, to the later period when memories of necrotech were losing their appeal, and many people were longing to get out, and imagining what life would be like if they did so. Some of them, like Jeremy Vetch, the subject of the next shift, hoped to make a gradual transition, with the intos helping them on the way.

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