I had to ignore the film Vivian had given me and concentrate on my own, so that history would be recorded as I wished, and not as Vivian could release it. I also wanted to distance myself from Vivian, and indeed my other ex-wives, for they were distracting me from Wendy who, even after six months, seemed more and more beautiful to me; I have felt this before about people who scorn me.
My film had become a complete disaster, and although I felt there was still chance of salvaging it, that would require Wendy's cooperation. It felt good to wake on a sunny morning with such thoughts. I could combine growing lust with self-redemption, and begin to exercise my will upon her. But how to begin? I had fired her the night before so I might have some leverage, or at least an opening line...
Wendy said to me, "I didn't think she was your type, Tim."
"Who?"
"Sandra, of course. You two looked very chummy together last night."
"I don't know why she latched onto me like that. I presume she wants something, but I don't know what."
Just then Victor walked past us, adjusting the chinstrap of his blue helmet. He said in passing, as if it was just an abstract thought, "Could you love me, Wendy?" He didn't wait for an answer, but winked as Wendy flashed him a "Piss off, Victor," smile.
I said, "I don't blame him for asking, you know." Wendy looked at me, a vacant stare of resignation. She knew I had to ask. So I continued, "I too would like to ask if you could love me. I would like to do more than that - I would like to answer for you. I want to control your speech as if you were a varibook. I want to make you answer me the way I want you to answer. God, Wendy, when I write I have such control at my fingertips such control. I can control everything in this world except what I want to control most."
She said nothing for a moment, but reached out and squeezed my arm in a manner genuinely affectionate but hesitant, as if it could be interpreted as giving hope. She said then, "Sometimes, Tim, I think it would be easier if you did control my mind. Not necessarily you. Anyone nice."
The bitch. She called me "nice", then walked away to control her movie. God she smelt good, a sensual trace that lingered in my nostrils until I sneezed to hide my emotion.
SCENE: THE TREVORS. IT IS UNIVERSITY AWARDS NIGHT. TWO REALLY CELEBRATED FAMOUS ACTORS ARE AT THE PODIUM.
FIRST CELEBRATED PERSON The nominees for the category of Best Male Actor in a Nominally Lead Role in a varifilm are ...
SECOND CELEBRATED PERSON Victor Lawrence for Operation Rejuvenate Righteousness.
APPLAUSE. FADE TO A CLIP FROM OPERATION REJUVENATE RIGHTEOUSNESS....
SCENE: A STREET IN QUEBEC AT THE END OF THE U.N. PEACEKEEPING MISSION. CHILDREN ARE RUNNING AND GETTING MESSY WITH CANDY, PARENTS ARE BERATING THEM AND COUPLES ARE IGNORING EVERYBODY - ESPECIALLY CLEM O'ROURKE (PLAYED BY VICTOR) AND SUSIE (SANDRA) WHO ARE RIDING DOWN THE STREET ON PATROL PLATFORMS. BOTH ARE DRESSED IN U.N. ARMY UNIFORM, COMPLETE WITH BLUE HELMET AND COMPACT, HIGH VELOCITY, AUTO-RANGING, SELF-TIMING RIFLE. THE DRONE PLATFORMS ARE ENCLOSED BY BULLET PROOF BUBBLES. THEY SPEAK TO EACH OTHER THROUGH THE COMMUNICATION SYSTEM OF THE PLATFORMS.
SUSIE What did you say, Clem?
CLEM I said, when this is all over will you marry me?
SUSIE What?
CLEM Marry me. You know...
CLEM SIGNALS TO HER FROM HIS BUBBLE, SLIDING A RING ON AND OFF HIS FINGER. SUSIE LAUGHS AND GIVES HIM THE THUMBS UP.
CLEM (OVER PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEM) Attention all citizens. This is an urgent announcement from UN headquarters. Attention all citizens.
THE CROWD STOPS TO LISTEN TO HIM.
SUSIE (STILL LAUGHING, BUT EMBARASSED) No, Clem!
CLEM The UN is happy to announce that Sergeant Susanne Clay - you see her in the patrol bubble next to me - wave Susy - Sergeat Clay has consented to be my wife.
THE CROWD IS SILENT.
CLEM Cheer, citizens.
THEY CHEER. CLEM AND SUSIE RIDE OFF DOWN THE STREET.
DIRECTOR (VOICE OVER) Cut! OK, everybody that's a take.
SANDRA LANDS HER BUBBLE, STEPS OUT AND BEGINS TO WALK AWAY. VICTOR FOLLOWS BEHIND HER, STILL IN HIS BUBBLE. HE CALLS OVER THE PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEM.
VICTOR Sandy!
SHE STOPS WALKING AWAY AND TURNS, SURPRISED TO SEE THE BUBBLE THERE.
VICTOR I said will you marry me?
SANDRA The scene is finished Victor.
VICTOR I mean in real life. I'm asking as Victor to Sandra, not Clem to Susie. Will you marry me.
SANDRA (PAUSES TO THINK) Okay.
VICTOR What did you say? I can't hear you.
SANDRA (YELLING INTO THE BUBBLE'S HIDDEN MICROPHONE) I said okay.
VICTOR'S FACE IS BLANK. SUDDENLY HE SCREAMS.
VICTOR Yippee! (HE FLIES HIS BUBBLE TEN METRES INTO THE AIR, LOOPS THE LOOP, THEN LANDS NEXT TO SANDRA. VICTOR JUMPS OUT TO EMBRACE HER.)
END OF SCENE.
It seems to me that silence is generally an expression of thoughtfulness, but it is extremely naive to consider such thoughtfulness innocent, unlearned, untutored or even confused, and I consider it a personal flaw that I do not more often treat silence with suspicion. I include with silence its many related allies - evasion, withheld information and misleading information to name three - which combine to be more powerful than mere mendacity, for they are more easily applied while retaining the mask of innocence. An outright liar can be spotted easily and in most cases is of little interest after exposure, whereas clever misdirection can carry a story to its conclusion, where you will know the perpetrator by their smile. This knowledge, or shall we call it a theory to be less grand and therefore more scientific, has been decreed useless by Nature, for the more human we are the more we can add complexity to smiles, making them entirely unreadable, and so, by default, we trust them if we have no better plan. In this Age of Information we have to interpret everything - even silence.
Everyone was there the day we shot the Montreal street scene, and everyone was smiling. Victor's three American wives and their various attendant families almost provided enough extras by themselves, and since everyone was resigned to being in the film they thought they might as well come and have fun. For it was a grand day; Victor was very happy, bathing in the sun with grandchildren clambering onto his back. He looked like a man who would never hold a grudge.
Naturally it starts one wondering about how children become adults and where they learn duplicity. I shall never address that topic myself since it has defied both the two highest authorities now extant (formal science and television talk shows), and its treatment should probably be reserved permanently to the realm of science fiction, where serious topics receive the supercilious answers they deserve; which represent an honester class of deception than the usual platitudes and clichés.
Wendy was there, happy and disciplined. Victor sacked her on several more occasions, but each time she charmed her way back, so quickly that she was never actually gone. It was always on condition that she marry him, but she never really went away, and work carried on. Charm is perhaps the wrong word, for she neither apologised for speaking to Vivian about the shooting scene, expressed remorse about his near approach to death, nor took any pains to find out why the gun was loaded with live rounds. Nor did she turn on the charm as much as the beauty; it was not the true and undeniable beauty of the surface, but what seemed to be a deeper happiness. It distressed me greatly to see her laugh so easily, tossing her hair lightly aside and smiling. She was making me miserable and laughing as she did so.
"She has no right, has she? With a debauched old infidel like Victor. No right at all." The voice whispering in my ear, hot breathed with fabricated sincerity, was Sandra's. She had latched onto me the night the shooting scene was screened, and had never let go. I had no idea why. Nor did I know why I had yet to say a kind word to her. I felt mildly repulsed, yet she was rich, beautiful, and only a few years older than me. What more could you want? She winked at me and we turned to see Victor and Wendy arguing. She had vexed him by saying something about the incident with the gun. And she had probably vexed him just for fun.
"Victor," Wendy said calmly, "you're purple with rage. That old wrinkly face of yours could be pressed to vintage wine. You're in no fit state to make such rash decisions."
"Rash! You're trying to kill me."
"Well if that wasn't so laughable it would be a heinous accusation."
"It is a h... an accusation." Nobody can say heinous accusation when livid with anger, because while heightened emotions suppress eloquence, one's sense of the ridiculous is more acute than ever. "As we've travelled around the world I've been poisoned, drugged, thrown off buildings and now ... now I've been shot at! It suddenly becomes clear to me that you're the only person that has been with me at every incident."
"Apart from Tim and the entire film crew."
"But none of them has a motive to kill me."
"And what's my motive, Victor? You're just hiring me to make a movie."
"That's what's so infuriating about your motive."
"What?"
"I don't know what it is. But since it can only be superficial - perhaps professional envy? - it is lamentable, and I can only conclude that you are mad. Quite mad. Very dangerous."
"And extremely incompetent," she said, which left him momentarily confused. "Evidently I've failed to kill you about six times now."
"Obviously you're trying to make a movie out of it, which is why it's of paramount importance that I stop you now, before the obvious conclusion. The ending is just too obvious, Wendy."
Wendy laughed, smiling in a way one could consider menacing or alluring, and I'm not sure that they vary so much. I took over as counsel for her case, "The only obvious conclusion is the one you and I wrote in the script, Victor - that we all go back to Sydney and finish making a film of your life. I've told you already what a boring ending it is for a movie, except in the philosophical sense of self-referential artworks and their attendant paradoxes...."
"Shut up Tim," they said together.
"Well don't ask me any more. I quit anyway," I said.
Sandra gave my arm a squeeze. "You tell 'em, kid." Damn her. Wendy was looking straight at us.
"You can't quit," said Victor. "Your job is finished already. The script is done."
"But it seems to need rewriting everywhere we go."
"Only when the past catches up with Victor's memories," said Wendy, laughing and pinching his cheek. "You were a real devil with the ladies, eh Victor? But back to work now, eh? What needs changing in the scene with Sandra?"
"I said you were fired. You're both of you fired."
"Don't be silly. Who will you get to film the altered script of the scene with..."
"There's nothing to be changed in the scene with Sandra."
"Just as well," I said, "for I won't write for you any more. I won't write for anyone who lies to me."
"Oh Tim," he sighed. "Do you want me to apologise? Will that stop you moping?"
"Maybe. Try it. Just don't ask me to marry you."
"Do I apologise for the truth or the lie? Which will make you feel better?"
"It's probably better if you don't tell me what you're apologising for. Just say you're sorry and I'll go away."
He rubbed his eyes, perhaps wondering at fate and the clashing of acquaintances, perhaps just because he was tired. His rage had dissipated, but he was still smouldering angry and, I suspected, unforgiving. He was certainly annoyed by my smirk, and I had never seen Wendy so happy. I smiled at her, wondering at her radiance as the morning sun filtered through her hair when she tossed it over her shoulder with the flick of that narrow, fragile, gentle wrist. I sighed, then I remembered Sandra hanging on to my arm.
"You sigh too much, Timmy," she said. "Come and help me get ready for the scene."
I looked around, but Wendy had turned away, busy with Victor.
She said, "Victor, I think I'll show myself in the audience of the University Awards night. Do you think I should wear my hair up or down?"
He grumbled that he couldn't care less. "You're Australian. Wear it in a pigtail and put pink zinc on your nose."
"Don't do that," I said as I turned away with Sandra. "We'll never get it off the ceiling."
"Or my sleeve," said Wendy. Even Victor and Sandra laughed. The dumbest jokes can defuse anger if they're familiar enough. Their role in confirming intimacy, and breaking it, is perhaps their reason for existence.
Before we had taken a breath from our laughing, Wendy had flitted away, arranging, ordering, throwing her charm and her weight. By now the crew hated her as an unforgiving slave-driver. It didn't matter. All I saw was the gentleness; and they all respected results, even if they didn't understand how she got them. Maybe it is only authors who can really judge characters. Even then we call the characters fictitious, but if a character is to have any semblance of humanity the author must be fooled too.
You won't be surprised to learn that Victor thought an attempt was made on his life while we were filming the Montreal scene. But it was just another in a series of strange accidents, notable on this occasion for its peculiar, though understated, violence. He told me, as he lay in the ground considering his latest survival, that he had decided to stop searching for a killer and would name fate his assailant. The motives and the suspects were too numerous and too mixed, and he wasn't ready to call in the hounds to uncover a villain who might well turn out to be someone he had, did, or was going to love, and more particularly someone who had had the grace to love him. That was the curious conclusion of a bent and bleeding old man lying in the dust with a crowd of suspects milling above his head hoping he would stop breathing. He wanted to laugh at them, but his strength had been used up in survival - both of the fall and of humiliation.
There was a gathering of innocents that day. One must be wary of the homonymity of that word with "innocence", for an innocent person can be separated from a guilty one, yet to cleave innocence from guilt would most likely halve physically the person to whom they were attached. Let us begin the roll call then.
Rhonda was there with Jemima, JC and the children. Wardrobe had fitted them out appropriately as extras, and the children were excited about appearing in their first film, despite hearing from their mother that it would also be their last. It was also their pleasure to test-drive the patrol bubbles. These were round platforms similar to the Show Buzz drone reporters, except that each carried a UN soldier in a glass bubble. They were equipped with microphones and speakers, but were otherwise unarmed.
"Come on, Grandpa," they screamed, and Victor joyfully took them for rides, one at a time, the others running behind screaming, pushing the bubble, trying to run it into a wall or tip it over. But if the UN had done nothing else in the last hundred years, it had learnt how to protect its soldiers from riots, whether it be a thousand farmers armed with machetes, or several children without adult supervision: the bubble floated free, unharmed, and without using force.
Wendy, having no mandate other than her own, was trying to make a film while these monsters were screaming about her set. She borrowed a plastic truncheon from one of the UN soldier uniforms and threatened the children with it, bringing her into conflict with Jemima and JC.
"How dare you beat my children!" shouted Jemima.
"How dare you let them misbehave just because they are related to the man with the money?"
"I've brought them up to misbehave no matter whom they are related to thank you very much."
"Then I should beat you instead."
This confrontation only failed to reach actual blows because at that moment James turned up, screaming onto the set in an unnecessary (and illegally polluting), antique Ferrari. Stepping out of the leather car interior into his leather pants he said, rather predicably, to Wendy, "Why don't you beat Uncle James," to which the children all yelled "Yeah!" and ran around James screaming and laughing. Meanwhile the red-headed blonde in the passenger seat had managed to prise her parts out of the confined space to stand and look at Wendy. I think she was going to say something, for she raised her hand and opened her mouth as if to make an interesting observation, but instead she giggled, straightened her arms and smoothed down her bosom (held in place by her shining, reinforced gymnasium outfit), and said, "Jimmy, the hi-fi won't listen to me."
He shook his head, though with a tight-lipped smile of pride, and said quietly to Wendy, "The more expensive the bimbot the dumber the software." He turned and said to the bimbot, "It's an antique. You don't talk to it. You have to push the buttons."
"What?" But she didn't wait for an answer, preferring to slither back into the car where she attempted to understand the controls of the antique CD player.
James turned back to Wendy. "Come with me after filming," he said. "I'll get rid of the luggage in the passenger seat."
"Will you get those things out of here? This is supposed to be a film about a contemporary U.N. peacekeeping operation. They don't condone illegal cars, and she's probably wearing a fabric made from a non-renewable resource. Be careful you don't become accident prone like your father. Get, get, get!" She chased him back into the Ferrari with a blow from the truncheon. "And don't come back unless you're dressed like a soldier and prepared not to act like one - which shouldn't be too hard since I've seen you act and it always looks like you're acting like someone who can't."
James quietly retook his seat in the Ferrari, where he asked his optional extra a question - probably to explain Wendy's outburst, from which, I suspect, he was unable to detect but not unravel the insult. She shrugged and they left the set, still trying to get the music-player working - or so I assumed, for the windscreen wipers came on for no apparent reason.
Cliff and Vivian were there, as lovey-dovey as ever. They had brought one of Vivian's pathetic dogs, which was quickly abducted by Victor's grandchildren. Once they noticed they each grabbed a U.N. truncheon and lit out in pursuit.
"Bring back Muffy Wuffy," Vivian cried, huffing, her ample mass moving with difficulty. "If you hurt him I'll shoot the lot of you!"
Jemima was behind Vivian, straining to be heard. "Don't you touch my babies!"
Wendy just watched, shaking her head. She could do nothing about the chase until Muffy Wuffy's batteries died, which they must by law lest petbots take over the city.
And Sandra was there, for she was to star with Victor in the scene. She still had hold of my arm, so I was forced to listen to her and Victor chatting idly while the children played. It seems they had never had much to say to one another when they were married, though one could put that down to time constraints. Their marriage was conceived and acted upon while they were still filming Operation Rejuvenate Righteousness. It was over by the time the University Awards came around a year later. He tried to recall their time (more or less) together, but she was taciturn with him. With me she talked incessantly of nothing, and her silence now seemed particularly contrary. It made Victor wonder, too. He said, "You know Sandra, you're the only person who, throughout the filming of this debacle, has not said nothing horrible to me. Are you planning something?"
"You know, Victor," she answered, "it is eight years and 15 days since our divorce." She still hurt; that was easy to hear. In the sunlight she looked ravishingly beautiful, now, for those of us with warts prefer to fall in love with beauty only after we have seen it affected by sadness. She had let go of my arm, so I reached for hers. Victor touched her at the same time from the other side, but she shrugged both of us away.
"We had a good time, eh Sandy?"
"We had a year, Victor," she said, sighing. "We had thirteen months and two days to be precise. I can only give you approximations because the borders of emotions are fuzzy, but I have estimated that three percent of our time was joyful, fifteen percent was active marital harmony, twenty two percent was passive marital harmony - that is we were not in the same room, thirty three percent is unassignable because we were asleep, eight percent was passive disharmony, twenty was active disharmony, and the remaining nine percent was agony, misery and torment."
"So three percent each for agony, misery and torment?"
"Alright, nine percent hell."
I was rather amused by this display of precision, only noting later that it added up to a 110% marriage, but after I came to know her better I could see it was part of her character. Sandra always liked to be precise, to count things, and to confirm that things were orderly. I presumed it was a result of, or the reason for, her college education in science which she left for acting because they told her that she was so beautiful and such a terrible actor that she had no business being a scientist.
She said that acting skills are essential to scientists for two reasons: firstly, one has to be able to bamboozle people into believing you know what you are talking about, and that a page of meaningless algebraic squiggles is a thing of sublime beauty to you, indicating as it does some all-pervading heavenly order, and all this must be done without laughing; secondly, if there is something you do actually understand, you inevitably have to explain it to lay persons, and that involves telling them something they think they understand so they leave satisfied, never guessing that they have no real chance of grasping the first premises of the subject, let alone the logic that flows from them. But she left that world for fame. She also left her fiance there for, although they were still engaged when Victor proposed to her, their worlds had moved into separate orbits.
"So why did you marry me?" Victor asked.
"Don't ask ridiculous questions. Anyway, they're calling us for filming."
I think the success of variable entertainment owes less to the attraction of user imagination, than to user censorship. Few countries retain government censors any more; even though they could play a role, the flow of information in text or image is so pervasive and uncontrollable that a censor exists only to propagate a moralist government view. They are the first to decry the growth of user censorship, for it is obvious that viewers will very rarely censor sex or violence from movies; they are far more likely to watch the scene again from a different angle or, depending on the category of the document and the changes allowed, with different people being killed or pleasured.
Real audiences are most inclined to censor-out all the stuff in which the playwright took most pride: the miserable self-pitying outpourings; the pathetic attempts at humour, and the childishly simple philosophies clouded by easy on-line access to the thesaurus. There is always a character with a prescription for life, someone whose conviction is inseparable from the disputed truth they propound. It may be an old man at a bar with a string of pithy one-liners for passers-by; a felon who has wasted in jail with nothing to do but think; or a bucket of unshakeable faith screaming from a pulpit that we are all going to hell. Even without firm conclusions, there is an implicit resolution that a lack of firm conclusions is a satisfactory resolution. Are we lying to ourselves, or is it a deficiency in a medium which, for practical reasons and artistic traditions, must contain an ending? Victor says that each time he married it was for love, the marriage being the intended resolution of the love story, but when he married Sandy there was also a sub-text. He believed he was obliged to live the life he had created. He was still using the public eye as his opium, and his addiction has never been beaten, though he now can stand far enough away to decide when to use the needle. An actor must prepare, but who amongst us is prepared to let go of life?
I asked Sandra why she agreed to appear in the movie.
"Either I still like Victor, or maybe because I thought it would be fun."
"Not both?"
"I doubt it. If I discover I don't like him any more it will be fun, because the whole idea is ridiculous. But if I do like him I might pity him for the insufferable vanity that has made him do this."
So they filmed the scene in the Montreal street, intending to do it just as written above. Everything went exceptionally well, apart from a slight buzz in the motor of Victor's bubble platform. Wendy told him not to worry about it, for it was easily filtered from the soundtrack. He raised an eyebrow and stomped his foot, perhaps suspecting it had been tampered with. But Wendy laughed at him, then gently kissed his forehead and pushed him back into the bubble. He moved like a puppy picked up by the skin of its nape.
They shot the scene where Clem proposes to Susie in Operation Restore Righteousness, the bubbles landed and Sandra got out of hers. That was the moment when Victor proposed to Sandra in real life, and which we were about to recreate on film. The easiest way for me to tell you what happened next is simply to rewrite the scene as it actually happened, which I can do perfectly because Wendy, as usual, kept filming when things went awry. Afterwards Victor was in no condition to redo the take, and Sandra said she would refuse anyway, but there was more than enough data on film to recreate the scene synthetically. By this time I was beginning to doubt if anyone except Victor wanted to finish the project in any manner at all resembling his intention.
NOT FROM THE SCREEN PLAY OF VICTOR: MY VARIED LIFE BUT WHAT WAS FILMED:
DIRECTOR (VOICE OVER) Cut! OK everybody that's a take.
SANDRA LANDS HER BUBBLE, STEPS OUT AND BEGINS TO WALK AWAY. VICTOR FOLLOWS BEHIND HER, STILL IN HIS BUBBLE. HE CALLS OVER THE PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEM.
VICTOR Sandy!
SHE STOPS WALKING AWAY AND TURNS, SURPRISED TO SEE THE BUBBLE THERE.
VICTOR I said will you marry me?
SANDRA The scene is finished Victor.
VICTOR I mean in real life. I'm asking as Victor to Sandra, not Clem to Susie. Will you marry me?
SANDRA Why the bloody hell should I?
VICTOR (STARTLED) What did you say?
SANDRA (YELLING INTO THE BUBBLE'S HIDDEN MICROPHONE. VICTOR JUMPS) I said why the bloody hell should I? You rotten filthy opportunist. What made me think I loved you? Hey Victor! What made me think I loved you? You knew I was in love with Rory didn't you? Yet you had to ask me to marry you. The great, the famous, the wealthy, the lovely Victor Lawrence asked me to marry him, then kicked me out after one year, one month, two days, four and a quarter hours. And you know what happened in the meantime. Eh Victor? Guess what happened.
VICTOR STARES. HE SHAKES HIS HEAD.
SANDRA I'll tell you what happened. He married his high school sweetheart. Can you believe that, Victor? And she's really nice and she's not even in the movies so I can't even be bitchy about her. And they don't plan getting divorced for bloody years! What about that Victor? (SCREAMING) You rotten bastard!!!
All this while Victor had been standing in his bubble looking stupidly, and in vain, for Wendy to call 'cut'. Nothing of the sort happened. Then about halfway through her tirade I noticed that the bubble was slowly lifting further off the ground. It was of course programmed to do a loop-the-loop after Sandra accepted Victor's proposal, but that would be with a stuntbot - it was safe but Victor was chicken. Sandra also noticed the change in the bubble's height, for she stepped back in surprise just as it jumped erratically into the air. Later she was able to give us her estimate of the vertical velocities reached. At that moment, though, Victor was less rational and was beginning to panic. He clenched the control stick of the bubble so tightly that his rings cut into the flesh. We could see him yelling, but the PA had been turned off, and even his panic could not be heard through the bullet-proof bubble.
Sandra slowly walked away from the bubble. She shrugged, unconcerned about Victor, but seemed to be annoyed that he was no longer listening. She came to me and took my arm. "Have you ever wondered why the U.N. chose these bubble platforms for its peacekeeping work?" she asked.
"No." Since I had seen Wendy again I had lost my attraction for Sandra's chiselled beauty. I looked to Wendy but she was busy calling directions to the film crew.
Sandra said, "They bought them from the US military, who had adapted them from drone fighters. They were the remotely controlled pill-boxes sent to spy on enemy territory, take photos of minefields and the insides of enemy generals' bedrooms - that sort of thing. Anyway the model they sold to the U.N. came with an absolute guarantee that they could not be operated by remote control unless the person riding them became incapacitated for some reason."
"A dead man's switch."
"Yes. How apt."
Victor was now ten metres off the ground, still mutely yelling and bashing his helmet against the walls of the bubble.
"The funny thing is," said Sandra, "whenever one of these things went wrong in action, it was blamed on faulty programming, never on control by an intrusive signal. My old boyfriend told me about it - he was a programmer on the original design team. He watched a lot of senators retire quietly - but rich."
"You mean they sold the secrets of the remote control?"
"You're a bright boy, but awefully cynical," she said, stroking my hair without permission. Just as Wendy looked at us.
I was trying to see if she looked jealous, but an explosion came from Victor's bubble. It was half way through a loop-the-loop when one of the propellors lost a blade, mincing the machinery in the platform with a sream of tearing metal. Out of control now, it fell tumbling to earth. The glass bubble hit first, cracking around its centre then opening like an egg. Victor crawled out then fell onto his face. All the cameras drifted over and floated above him as near as their strings would allow, waiting for a command or to film his face if it turned up.
The most affectionate members of his family came to his aid then, and managed to turn him over. He gasped for air and looked at the faces, all concerned and confused. He began to tremble, and before he passed out he said, "I still think someone is trying to kill me. What do you think? Who would want to kill me? Where's Sandra? It's her this time, isn't it? Where is she?" As his head fell to earth he saw Sandra removing the bottom of the bubble platform and looking at the disintegrated propellor.
UNIVERSITY AWARDS NIGHT. THE TWO REALLY CELEBRATED FAMOUS ACTORS ARE PREPARING TO ANNOUNCE THE WINNER
FIRST CELEBRATED PERSON And the winner of the University Award in the category of Best Male Actor in a Nominally Lead Role in a Varifilm is ...
SECOND CELEBRATED PERSON (OPENS THE ENVELOPE AND LOOKS INSIDE) Victor Lawrence for Operation Impose Righteousness.
APPLAUSE. CLOSE UP OF VICTOR'S FACE SHOWING SURPRISE. CLOSE UP OF SANDRA'S FACE SHOWING DISMAY, LOOKING AT HER WATCH AND STARTING THE TIMER. CLOSE UP OF SANDRA GIVING VICTOR A CONGRATULATORY KISS. VICTOR WALKS TO THE PODIUM. HE KISSES THE TWO CELEBRATED PERSONS AND ACKNOWLEDGES THE APPLAUSE.
VICTOR (LOOKING AT THE STATUETTE) Well. Presumably I need to thank everyone concerned with the film. Well thanks, but I still hate you all. But I've got something else to say. Since I came to Hollywood in 2025 I've done pretty well. I've won an Oscar, three Emmies, and now I've topped it all with a Trevor. I've been preparing for this for thirty years - thirty years and hundreds of films. I was glad to do the work because I believed in ... well not Hollywood. I'm a boy from a small town in an outback country and I've won awards for playing American cowboys and soldiers. I believed in the glory of the fame it has brought me. But I stretched my fifteen minutes to twenty and it's time to move on. I'm tired and I want to go home - after all, is it really for foreigners to write stories about American dreams? So, America - thanks for the money. Thanks for the fame. Thanks for the heartache. It's been fun. If you ever get out of Hollywood, and if you ever get out of California or short pants or the right hand lane, if you even open your eyes when you look across the sea, look me up sometime.
