‘Virtual mode is fine for physical training – in it you have been made aware of your capabilities, but too long in it can affect value judgements. ‘There’s a difference then,’ he’d asked with some sarcasm. Gant remembered the feel of human bones breaking in his hands, the screams, the blood – the sheer terror of movement, past now. The reality you will now experience is really real.’ His speech finished he’d paused before saying, ‘Value judgements.’ He never heard the beat of his heart, never would again. ’Īnd thus it had gone: words spoken while his senses came online, sounds impinging, light illuminating the map of artificial veins in his eyelids, gravity holding him down on a warm but hard slab.
‘I was leading the way down, when it came up the shaft and hit me. Because memory to him could be only as fallible as he wished it, he knew every intonation, every nuance – just as he remembered every vivid second of his own demise: Gazing at the weird view of pink striated sky and twisted shapes, and seeing more with his new eyes than ever before, he clearly recalled the words. ‘It gobbled him up! It gobbled him up!’ the boy replied, bouncing up and down with the excitement of it all. The boy frowned in concentration, but after a moment grinned with delight, knowing the best bit was coming. Then, ‘Now, do you remember what the brother said when his house was gone?’ ‘And it blew his house down,’ the woman completed.
‘It huffed and it puffed, and it puffed and it huffed,’ said the boy.
‘Heroyne,’ he said, blue eyes wide at his own cleverness. The child reached and stabbed down with one stubby finger, leaving a jammy imprint on something that bore only a passing resemblance to a wading bird. She continued, ‘For the brother who had built his house out of flute grass there came misfortune indeed that very night a heroyne came to stand over his house. With the small blond child balanced on her knee the woman managed the awkward task of one-handedly turning a page of the picture book, and ran her finger down the border between text and picture, to set the superb illustration moving – the long legs striding through the reeds, and the sharp beak snapping in silhouette against a bruised sky.
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