Downtime - Marc Platt [39]
The screen, reflected in the lenses of his glasses, made him look unnecessarily studious. He wore a dark wool coat over his Chilly uniform, but he had swivelled the yellow baseball cap into reverse. He wore the headphones only when he could be seen. Even then, he never connected them to the radio receiver strapped to his belt. He didn’t want his head full of that beat, that slow incessant pounding that all the others seemed to need. It wasn’t a cosmic heartbeat or an aid to meditation or clear thought. To Danny, it meant slavish conformity like the metronome beat of the drummer on the galley ships.
He resented the cumbersome terminal and its keyboard. It let him go surfing when he liked. Easy. It unlocked the way into another world where the impossible could be everyday.
But it was limited, man-made. The net could get tangled. He still had to log out and come back down to earth.
It was the same when he went flying, projecting himself out-of-body onto the astral plane – another trick. Soaring at will amid the congregations of stars, freed from responsibility and continuous assessment and lack of cash. Winning through to ever higher levels, higher etheric planes where he saw such beauty and wildness as his mind could not encompass. And once, hovering even higher through pearly clouds in some spiritual sky, he thought he had seen an immortal being, an arch-seraph or even God, its hundred wings beating like feathered torches.
But no matter what world he projected into, etheric or man-made, his physical body stayed anchored to what passed for reality. He was bound. He wanted to sever the silver cord and fly on and on for ever.
Working at the terminal, he consulted a crumpled piece of paper, tapping in codes that had taken weeks to visualize and find.
The screen presented a sequence of status reports on checks for viruses and trojans. Then a synthetic voice read aloud what was being printed.
‘ Good morning. ’
The time and date appeared in the corner.
‘ Please insert your identity code. ’
Working from the paper, Danny input a fresh set of codes.
Almost immediately, the screen cleared.
‘ Welcome to NEW WORLD.
‘ Have the Best One yet. ’
This is where we take the plunge, he thought. He tapped in a sequence that would take him into the administrative database. He had got caught here before, but that was because he had the sequence wrong. For that he had been hauled up before Queen Vic herself.
He’d always had this problem with authority. He blamed the start of it on his dogmatic parents, whose inability to show affection resulted in a home run like a corrective institution.
He was the only boy in the history of School House who volunteered to stay at Brendon for the holidays. Once he chained himself to his bed in the dormitory rather than go home for Christmas. Matron and one of the junior masters had to restrain him physically until his parents, none too pleased, were summoned to collect him. After that, all authority figures reminded him of his father.
Yet his hauling over the coals by the Vice Chancellor, whom he had expected to be the most repressive of all of them, turned out to be about as severe as a barbecue with a favourite aunt. Yes, Miss Waterfield admonished him, but all the time there was a wink behind her tone. It made her sermon seem at worst half-hearted, something to be got out of the way before she broke out the lagers. She had been far more lenient than he would have been with himself. She asked about his family – dodgy subject – and, considering his abilities with computers, how he rated the university mainframe? It was a bit like meeting the real Queen and finding out that she played the lottery