Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath

Fish ’n’ Chips scores –1. I appear in the battle log a total of three times. At minute 2:34 Animal reduced me to rubble, at minute 4:56 Princess reduced me to rubble, and on the third occasion, in minute 9, with two seconds of action left to go, I opened fire and punctured Wad’s right upper leg.

      

      Todd and Jim have been watching the action on the Explorers’ Lounge screen.

      ‘You were totally remedial, man,’ says Todd, looking over my shoulder at the mission debriefing. That hurts, actually.

      ‘It was unbelievable. You weren’t even in the battle arena,’ adds Jim.

      ‘Look,’ I carp in my own defence. ‘I decided to take a break, OK? It’s a tactic.’

      ‘That is the fuckin’ lamest tactic I ever seen,’ adds Todd, turning back to his Martian Coke.

      I discover the real flaw in my tactic some minutes later: it has left me buzzing but boastless. I have nothing to talk about. OK, I pressed a few buttons, fired a few shots. But with no approach, no angle, no line. Stallion by contrast, is talking himself up to a group of teens, and Animal and Warrior are standing at the pool table sparring over their respective performances with the particle projection cannon, and the only thing I’ve got to contribute is what it really felt like to be stuck behind a rock ten kilometres away from any of the action. I feel a sudden pang of loneliness. It’s suddenly clear how Buzz Aldrin must have felt as he watched Neil Armstrong thud onto the surface of the moon. Only now it’s too late do I begin to see that the real point of Battletech is the buzz and thrall of camaraderie clinging to the players after the main event is over, when the outcome is clear and none of it matters too much any more, those five or ten minutes of grand and shared intensity, the minutes for which all of us stood in line and drank tepid Martian cola and made stilted pre-mission conversation. Those five or ten minutes of fraternity, the tiny splinters of intimacy, the fleeting alchemical moments, which turn Tim Disney and his ilk into multi-millionaires.

      SUNDAY

      Nancy and I take a picnic up to Muir Woods. Rain has fallen during the night, softening the air and stirring up the smell of leaf mould. Nancy is wearing blue shorts which set off her hair and make her look a decade younger than she is.

      We climb up the path through the woods towards the clearing, from where the Pacific Ocean is visible, creating the illusion of a tiny island of woods drifting unnoticed towards Japan.

      ‘Karin says …’ begins Nancy, gazing down at the leaf mould and forgetting her next thought.

      ‘Who’s Karin?’ I ask and she darts me a strange look, as if puzzled by my tone, then, realizing the question is genuine, shakes her head and waves it away. I’m touched by this habit of hers, this assumption that everyone leads the exact same life as she does, has the same set of friends, the same job, the same taste in food. It’s so intimate and self-involved and scatty, which three possibly contradictory qualities Nancy possesses in equal and lavish abundance.

      ‘I always think the weirdest thing about Battletech and all those geeky games’, she follows, changing the subject, ‘is the mountain of trivia you have to absorb to make any sense out of it at all. It’s such a boy thing. Lists and specs and reams of completely pointless detail.’

      ‘Yeah, I guess.’ I try out another Americanism. ‘But, you know, once you’ve done it, there’s this amazing feeling of shared experience. I can’t really explain it. It’s like any ritual. Church, waterskiing clubs, trainspotting, whatever.’

      Suddenly the trees fall away, and we are out on the grassy plateau, overlooking the ocean.

      ‘Sweetheart,’ says Nancy, adopting a wheedling tone. ‘About the other day, at the education and technology meet…’

      I stop her with my hand, anxious not to spoil the atmosphere, and conscious also that whatever passed between us that day probably doesn’t brook too much explanation or analysis. But Nancy is eager to talk it out. She’s so Californian that way.

      ‘I mean, I think you’re right. Information isn’t the same as knowledge. You can fill every classroom in the country with a thousand computers and link them all up to the Net, and you won’t have taught anyone anything.’

      ‘Is that what I said?’ I don’t recall saying any such thing, though I remember a similar thought passing through my mind.

      Nancy carries on walking along the plateau, gazing down into the water as if draining her breath from it.

      ‘Data doesn’t mean anything on its own. You have to be able to interpret it, relate it to the real world.’

      We find a spot to sit, and pull out a couple of cans of Coke from our picnic bag. I try to drag Nancy away from the subject, introduce the topic of wildflowers, the sky, pretty much everything, but she won’t be drawn. Some nudging gobbet of resentment sticks in my breast. I’m not ready to be disillusioned, dammit. Give me hope.

      ‘You put future education policy in the hands of the computer industry and they’re going to come up with something involving truckloads of computers, obviously.’

      ‘Oh well,’ I say, blandly, ‘it’s early days yet.’

      Nancy wheels round, looks through my eyes into the dark recesses of my head.

      ‘Why the hell are you trying to defend them?’ she says, voice suddenly dark with anger. I adopt an ameliorating smile. Them? Us? Them? By her own account. Nancy is one of them.

      ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ I say, determined to protect my new-found future.

      ‘But the networks will be,’ cries Nancy in return. ‘They already are. In a year’s time you’ll hardly remember life without them.’

      I’ve never seen her in this mood before, so hellbent on sabotaging her own bullish optimism, so bent on spoiling the game. It’s so unlike her. So un-American.

      THURSDAY, FOUR DAYS LATER

      Nancy has flown off to COMDEX, taking her mood swings with her, and leaving me in charge of the house at Strawberry Point. Yesterday, a tomcat came in through the open window and sprayed the kitchen herbs. Mint, flat-leafed parsley, chives all died, thyme survived. Driving out this morning to the plant nursery to replace them before the weekend I realized I hadn’t left the house since taking Nancy to the airport early on Monday. Not once. Three days and nights have passed without my collecting the mail from the mail box, or the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times from the driveway. Three days and nights without opening the door out onto the deck to watch the city across the Bay, without removing the trash, picking up the phone, taking a shower, sleeping in a bed. Three days oblivious to the squabbling din of the redwings in the cypress trees outside, oblivious to the breeze of traffic on the freeway, to the lazy slap of water on the pebble beach below, to the barks of the neighbour’s children, or the tickled hum of the air conditioning. Three days and three nights floating about in the weightless breadth of the network, almost a century of hours with only the owlish whine of the modem, the rushing of lights and the glow of growing words for company.

      The first night after Nancy left, it must have been Monday, I pored through the Net manual but didn’t get very far. Towards dawn, though, I found a dissertation on a computer at Duke University in North Carolina and managed to download it to Nancy’s hard disk. It turned out to be someone’s thesis on genetic reprogramming, which made little sense to me, but the point was that I’d ventured out on the wires and captured something strange and brought it back undamaged and I felt the same satisfaction in that feat as I had in collecting caterpillars twenty years ago. Afterwards I slept for a while on the sofa, then rose again on Tuesday afternoon and made a pot of coffee. I must have been dozing on and off through most of that night, and by the morning I hadn’t accomplished much more than the previous day. A few more files added to the hard disk was all.

      I passed Wednesday on the Whole Earth