This Other Eden by Ben Elton Page A

girl’s face.
    The
starlet was thrilled. This woman had power attitude. In Hollywood, the more
powerful you are, the ruder you can afford to be, and this lady was rude enough
to be a production head, maybe even a studio chief. The wire-strippers were a
bit of a worry but nobody ever said a career in movies would be easy.
    ‘OK,
but you can’t hurt me, all right? Like, I don’t do that at all, OK?’ the girl
said, slipping out of her dress. ‘No pain, just fun stuff, right? Are we going
in a cubicle?’
    ‘Gimme
the shoes,’ said Rosalie, kicking off her own boots.
    ‘My
name’s Tori Doherty. I’m an actress.’ The starlet said, feeling that she really
ought to get the business side of the transaction sorted out, but not really
knowing what the procedure was. ‘Uhm, maybe you can help me, I don’t know, some
advice perhaps or. .
    ‘My
advice is separate all your garbage, avoid plastic containers and insulate
your loft.’
    Rosalie
pulled off her woollen hat, letting her hair fall to her shoulders. Then,
dressed in Tori’s frock and high-heels, she ran out of the toilet screaming.
The security people had only just arrived at the ladies’ lavatory and Rosalie
pushed past them, shouting, ‘There’s a weirdo in the rest-room.’
    As the
guards ran into the room, Rosalie dived into the panicking crowd. Within
moments she was out of the commissary and trying to find a way off the studio
lot.
     
     
     
    Lost
in Development.
     
    Rosalie was running along
the little sun-drenched lanes looking for an exit. The UV was ferocious and the
skimpy dress she had taken from the starlet was specifically designed to let
just about anything through. Rosalie could feel her skin burning, but she could
not afford to get trapped in a sidewalk BioTube. She blessed the fact that she
had only recently had her pores reblocked. They’d hold for an hour at least,
and if she wasn’t out in an hour, she wasn’t going to get out. On she ran
through the blinding sun, between rows and rows of little pale bungalows. She
turned one way… there were little pale bungalows. She turned another …
there were little pale bungalows. She was in a maze of little pale bungalows.
    ‘Where’s
the exit?’ she said to a strange, distracted-looking fellow in glasses who was
loitering beneath a kerbside shade.
    ‘Why?’
he replied, a weird tinge of panic in his high voice. ‘Is something happening
at the exit? Do you have a deal at the exit?’
    Rosalie
had no time to confer with weirdos. She ran on. Two people, a man and a woman,
were emerging from a little pale bungalow. Rosalie accosted them before they
could get into the BioTube.
    ‘I need
the exit,’ Rosalie demanded.
    ‘We can
give you that,’ said the woman with a desperately ingratiating smile. ‘In fact,
we have a whole bunch of ideas around the theme of exiting. Death, departure,
decay. We have a treatment right here.’
    ‘But
funny,’ the man chipped in. ‘Death meets funny. It’s about what’s happening
now, today.’
    The two
dazed people wandered off into the sunlight together. Rosalie feared that she
had stumbled into an insane asylum, but she was actually somewhere far more
confused and paranoid. She burst into the bungalow which the two people had
just left.
    ‘Where’s
the exit?’ she blurted to the lady behind the desk, a forceful looking woman of
about fifty, cut up to a fairly convincing thirty-five. Her name was Shannon.
    ‘If
your treatment is on micro, leave the chip in the bucket. We accept no other
formatting,’ Shannon said.
    Rosalie
had had enough. The studio security staff would not take long to work out that
she was wearing somebody else’s dress. She had to get out.
    ‘OK,
love, I don’t know what kind of loony-bin I’ve wandered into here, but you
listen to me and you listen hard.’ Rosalie was employing the kind of look and
tone that had cowed whale murderers on the bridges of their own ships and
unmanned SWAT teams in the bowels of nuclear