eXistenZ by Christopher Priest Page B

town,” Pikul said. “Whichever town this is—”
    “Welcome to D’Arcy Nader’s Game Emporium,” he said. “I am D’Arcy Nader, as you might haff noticed, and I’ll be plissed to help you with anything you might be interested in.”
    “Thank you,” Geller said. “But at the moment we’re just looking.”
    Nader glanced along the aisle, side to side.
    “I think I might haff what you’re looking for,” he said softly.
    “You do?” Pikul said.
    “Follow me, pliss.”
    Nader turned away from them and stepped along the aisle toward the back of the store. Here, there was a warped and grimy door, with no sign on it.
    Nader pushed it partly open, then beckoned urgently to Geller and Pikul. A couple of the other customers saw him signaling and seemed about to go along too. Nader gave them a warning look.
    Geller went through the door first, with Pikul following. Before the door closed behind them, Pikul happened to look back. He saw that Hugo Carlaw, the sour-faced cashier they’d noticed when they arrived, was writing something down on a pad of paper. He looked vengeful and self-important.

    Beyond the door was a dimly lit stockroom, jammed to overflowing with crates and cartons. Long and high vertical racks held a dizzying range of components for computers, old-fashioned game consoles, and parts of organware, nakedly scattered about in varying stages of construction or repair.
    Nader indicated some wooden crates, and Geller and Pikul sat down on two of them, feeling disconcerted by Nader’s sudden air of menace. He prowled around them for a moment, then took down two more gel-paks from a shelf.
    He studied Pikul and Geller, hefting the paks in his hands.
    “All right,” he said. “Who vos it that sent you?”
    “None of your damn business, I’d say,” Pikul retorted. “We’re here and that’s all that matters.”
    Pikul heard himself say the words, and felt a jolt of surprise. Had he disrupted the game already?
    “Hey, Pikul,” Geller said softly beside him. “Don’t blow it.”
    “Blow what?”
    “The game,” she said. “What else?”
    “God, what happened? I didn’t mean to say that!”
    Geller was looking strained, but to his relief, she laughed.
    “I guess it wasn’t you,” she said, “but your character. The game version of you said that. It’s a kind of schizophrenic feeling, isn’t it? But you’ll get used to it soon enough. There are certain things that have to be said by the game players to advance the plot and establish the characters. Those things get said whether you want to say them or not. The trick is not to fight the sensation when it comes. Go with it.”
    “Okay,” Pikul said, feeling somewhat better. “But what you just said . . . should you be saying that in front of him? In front of Nader?”
    “Look at him. He’s in memory-save mode.”
    Pikul glanced back. Nader didn’t appear to have heard or reacted to anything. He was still standing with the gel-paks in his hands, waiting for a reply to his question. His eyes were closed and he was humming the Antenna Research corporate theme song. His only movements were a slight rhythmic waggling of his head and a foot-tapping motion.
    “What’s he doing?” Pikul asked.
    “He’s gone into a game-loop. Programmers do that to save memory, or to avoid the program hanging. In the old type of games, you never saw it actually happening, but we’re talking cutting edge here. Everything is upfront, laid out before the players. It paradoxically adds to the aura of reality to put in reminders that what’s going on is largely unreal or imaginary. Nader’s locked up in the loop and he won’t come out of it until you feed him a proper line of game dialogue.”
    “Which would be?”
    “Whatever you like. But it’s got to be something he can respond to, within his role in the game.”
    “That’s tricky.”
    “No it isn’t.”
    “Yes it is. You still haven’t told me what the object of the game is.”
    “Okay,”