The New VR Street Mugger

Don't fuck with glassy-eyed drug addicts. It should be like the first Commandment in a Catechism for stupid people who think it's safe to walk around after dark.

Were there any witnesses? It happened too fast. The new virtual reality Street Mugger asks the guy for a smoke. The guy says he doesn't. Street Mugger gets twitchy, tells the guy not to fuck about, shows him the blade. The guy says to take it easy and tries to punch Street Mugger. Bad move. A single swipe and the guy goes down, gurgling in the gutter.

Now the stolen phone is sticky in Street Mugger's bloody hands. The town a carnival of sirens and flashing blue lights. Cops on every corner. Asking questions. Taking statements. A policeman points at Street Mugger and that's when the car pulls up. A sleek machine, gunmetal finish. The engine grumbles, the electric window hums.

“Need a lift, pal?”

Street Mugger's got the phone, he's got the knife and he doesn't need asking twice. He jumps in, slams the door, cop's fists already hammering on the window. The central locking clunks, the driver shifts into gear, pedal to the floor. The car roars and Street Mugger's stomach flips like he's on a fairground ride he wishes he never got on.

“Name's Jazz.” Black hair, red tuxedo, the driver looks like he's made of plastic. “Going anywhere nice?”

“Get me outta here.” Street Mugger's virtual reality fingers close around his hidden knife.

“Okeydokey.” The tires squeal like abattoir pigs and spots of drizzle dapple the windscreen.

Jazz flicks on the wipers.

“I hate the fucking rain,” he says.

Street Mugger thinks the same.

***

My name is Charley and I designed the new VR Street Mugger game. But stuff is going weird now. Pixels and patterns have spilled into real life pastures. Every time I drive home my car hurtles toward an imaginary dot in the middle of the screen. The vanishing point. It's on my eye-level because you can't bend the rules of perspective. That's the way the game is. It's got to look real or people won't buy it.

My phone buzzes, Beverley's face on the screen.

“How did it go, Hon?” Small voice, big smile.

“Bad news, Babe.” My chest tightens. Numb words. “They pulled the plug on Street Mugger V fucking R. It's not gonna happen.”

Beverly says something, but it's lost in the looming real life headlights.

***

The headlamps sweep across a red and white NO ENTRY sign. The car screeches the wrong way down a one-way street. Jazz curses an approaching cop car, sirens whooping, headlamps flashing. He switches his lights on full beam. The cops shield their eyes. It's a joust. A test of nerve.

“What the hell are those guys playing at?” Jazz drives straight for them, forces the police car onto the pavement and through a shop window. Glass shatters, metal crumples and an alarm bell rattles above them.

“Whooooeeee!” Jazz yanks the handbrake, spins the vehicle in a rubber-burning one-eighty. The window glides down and he grins at the policemen scrambling from the smoking automobile. “Which way you want me to go?” Gloved hands raised, forearms crossed, fingers pointing in opposite directions.

The cops open fire and yell for them to get out the car. Jazz and Frank should be full of holes like Bonnie and Clyde, but the bullets bounce of the windshield like hailstones.

The lion growls, flames pouring from the chrome exhaust. Headlamps like searchlights burn through the November night, freezing the cops in their tracks. Tires scream louder than policemen under speeding cars.

Jazz chuckles, shakes his head like he's remembered a good joke somebody told him. He does his handbrake trick once again, turns the car around on itself. Accelerates. Bumps over the broken bodies and drives to the block-paved streets beyond the bollards.

The pedestrian zone.

***

Beverley holds back the tears and tells me not to worry and a monster freight truck with six full moons for headlights is grinning at me. I swerve, careering through a maze of flashing lights and honking horns.

I slalom through the oncoming traffic. Black zigzags all over the road. The car bounces across the central reservation, out of control, spinning into the night. And then everything stops. I'm sitting in a puddle of piss under a billboard that says FATIGUE KILLS. Fingers glued to the wheel. Feet stuck to the floor.

My reflection in the rearview mirror looks spray-varnished. A waxwork from the London Dungeon. And beyond my wide eyes the world is looking badly bruised. Purples and blacks wrestle in the darkening sky. The golden sun has disappeared.

I unstick myself from the wheel. Massage my unshaven face. Slow deep breaths. I check out the short cut I've carved across the highway, a black fog snaking through a twisted metal barrier. It looks like a work of art.

***

The bollards are made of galvanized steel. Fold-down padlocked poles designed to let the emergency services through if you can find someone with a key to unlock them. Jazz flattens them, turns a sharp left and heads to the town center.

Frank toys with the phone. Scrolls down the list of contacts. Selects HOME. A rapid series of varied tones and the connection's made. It rings twice before a woman picks up.

“Hello?” she says.

“Are you married?” Frank asks.

“What the hell is this? You some kind of pervert?”

“Just wondered.” Frank laughs. He's feeling good now. More in control. He lays back in his seat. Stares through the blood-splattered windshield to enjoy the show. As cool as a kid watching a cartoon. “I killed the guy who owns this phone about half an hour ago.”

A black man with dreadlocks pedals his bicycle. Dark glasses, woolly hat, legs like liquorice sticks. Meandering as if gravity has increased one-hundred-fold. Bike and body bounce over the bonnet. His face thumps into the windshield and then he's gone. He disappears with the bicycle, clattering over the sunroof and into the street behind them.

Jazz slams the brakes. Studies his rearview mirror.

“You believe that? He's getting up!” Jazz slams into reverse, engine whining with insane acceleration. The guy is a staggering Lazarus. Already dead. Under the car. Screaming. Bones cracking like burning embers.

Jazz chuckles, tanned face beaming above his silken tuxedo. Now focused on a bunch of skateboarders further up the street. He shifts into overdrive and speeds toward his already fleeing prey. “I think some skittles need knocking down!”

***

I clamber from the smoking wreckage, stagger from the carnage. The air is damp, heavy with the stench of electrical burning and leaking fuel. Flames already crackling and dancing behind the fragmented windows.

I make about twenty yards before she blows.

I cartwheel across the carriageway in a heatwave of smoke and flying glass. Tumble across the tarmac in a succession of somersaults I never thought possible. And then I'm lying in the road. Star-shaped in the middle lane, staring up at the night sky.

That's when the car from the 3D Version rolls up. A feline-shaped monster, metallic paintwork glimmering in the orange firelight. The motor pulsates and the electric window glides down.

“Need a lift, pal?”

My tongue does a sandpaper circuit around copper-tasting lips.

“I had an accident.” I'm on my hands and knees looking at the guy like a puppy that just chewed up his slippers. “Crashed my car.”

He frowns at the raging inferno. Dark eyes fixed on the blaze as if it's a face in a photograph he can't quite put a name to. His passenger door clicks open and a luminescent hand beckons.

I get to my feet, dust myself down and climb in.

“Name's Jazz,” he says. “Going anywhere nice?”

“I know who you are.” I sink into the quicksand leather seats. “Just get me home.”

“Okeydokey.” The central locking slams. Sounds like a guillotine. Spots of drizzle dapple the windscreen and he flicks on the wipers. “I hate the damned rain,” he says.

“Me too.”

He presses a button on the wood veneer dashboard and we change to cheat mode. The writing disappears off the road signs. Replaced by neon arrows directing us to where we've got to go. We leave the highway next junction, follow the high-resolution road that will eventually get me back to Beverley.

Jazz starts fooling around. Drives on the pavement, takes out a bus stop and some trash cans before taking an incorrect turn down a dark side street. The words WRONG WAY flash in big red letters at the bottom of the windscreen.

“How the hell does it know?” He laughs, an infectious sound that makes me smile. “I'm telling you, buddy, this game never fails to amaze me! How does it always know what I'm up to?”

He takes the next right and we're back on track following the arrows to the main road.

“Hey, buddy.” Jazz nudges me. “That your place?”

“Yeah.” I nod.

My house appears in the middle of the windscreen. A pinprick that lives in the vanishing point on the eye level. We cruise through a blur of Google Earth imagery, a tapestry of panoramic photographs rattling past the perspex windows. But no matter how fast we drive the house remains out of reach.

A dot on the horizon.

Jazz slaps his forehead, curses through gritted teeth. He takes his foot off the gas and slows the vehicle to a halt. “I'm stuck here,” he explains. “I gotta complete this level before I can get over that side of town.” The central locking clunks and my door opens, synthetic eyes fixed on mine. “You're in the game now, buddy. Can't just switch it off and decide you don't wanna play anymore.”

I acknowledge his words with a solemn smile, climb out the car and look around. “What's the best way for me to go?”

Jazz chuckles, gloved hands raised, forearms crossed, fingers pointing in opposite directions. The door slams and he's gone. A plume of poison-smelling fumes dancing in the street. Arrows for road signs stuck to Victorian streetlamps. The opening scene to the 3D Version.

“Hey, dude.” A voice from behind. “Gotta cigarette?”

I turn, squint at a shadow in the doorway. “I don't smoke.”

“Don't mess me about.” The shadow emerges, blade aloft.

“Take it easy.” I hold up my hands, see my chance and swing for the skeletal face. Bad move. He lashes out. Lucky shot. Gets me in the neck and I'm down. Eyes to the floor, a spastic seizure in a crimson puddle.

The guy searches my pockets, grabs my phone and runs into the night.

***

Six-thirty in the morning and Deloris Adair is already thinking about breakfast. She empties the last of the trash in a black plastic sack. Runs a cloth over Charley's computer and sprays a haze of polish on his desk. She shines it up and wonders how anyone could be so damned untidy.

She bags up her dusters. Unplugs the vacuum cleaner, coils the lead and returns it to the cupboard. A quick glance around the office, all spic and span for the man who designs computer games. She closes the door, locks it and heads down the hallway.

Deloris crosses the foyer, scans her ID card and the glass door slides open. She steps outside, checks her watch. Six forty-two. She needs to get moving if she's got any chance of catching that bus. It'll be quicker to cut through the parking lot.

She follows the path around the building and climbs the concrete steps. The sign at the top says AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The gate squeaks, the stink of tarmac heavy from the recent resurfacing. Deloris enters the parking area and turns to the sound of an engine running some twenty yards to her left.

A black Mercedes rumbles in a freshly-painted parking bay, hosepipe coiling from the exhaust into the trunk. She hurries over, raps on the door, cups her hands to the tinted glass. “Anyone in there?” Too dark to make anything out. The handle is cold. It clicks upward. The door opens.

Charley grins in the grayness. White face. Blueberry lips. 3D glasses that don't quite fit. Phone in one hand. Console in the other. The game is running and the phone is buzzing.

LEVEL ONE COMPLETE.

BEVERLEY CALLING.