TWENTY FOUR

Two a.m. and Johnny was still working.

When he got started on a project, it was difficult to stop. He would live and breathe it. When his body fell asleep, pushed to sheer exhaustion, his mind would dream about it. It consumed him. It became his life, raison d’être, religion.

His fingers hurt, forever sifting the layers of touchscreen, burrowing through the code. But Johnny kept going. He was determined to finish this.

The MAGIC MOMENTS VR: it was good, sure, but it wasn’t perfect. The VR would say things that Becky wouldn’t say. Once, twice perhaps, Johnny’s own mind had too much control over the experience, and Becky didn’t seem real enough to him.

But it didn’t matter.

It was something that Sarah had said which got him thinking. The real Becky was lost to him, gone forever. He knew that, he accepted it. And the Charles 7 incident helped him get over it (in a weird way). Becky’s smile, her habits, her ways: these were things he would forget. She was gone and all he had was her legend. What was important was not how Johnny remembered her, but the fact that he would remember her.

Likewise, the historical Jesus meant nothing. Facts, figures: unimportant. It didn’t matter a damn how he was portrayed by those who wrote about him, whether in the bible or some Netpage nuthouse. It only mattered what the user wanted him to be, needed him to be. After all, the customer was always right.

(Right?)

Johnny knew how important this Jesus project was. The Alt Corp elite were circling Garçon like hungry loan sharks, dangerously close to pulling the plug. Maybe that’s why Garçon was offering him a blank cheque pay rise if he could make this thing work by the end of the week. Of course, if there was any truth in what he’d heard, that cheque was hardly worth a dime.

But Johnny wasn’t doing this for the money. He wasn’t doing it for Garçon either. Johnny had an entirely different reason: he wanted to be distracted. Because despite what he told himself, despite what he was feeling, Becky Lyon wasn’t gone just yet.

In the corner of his touchscreen, the small envelope icon persisted. Still calling him. Becky’s name was written beside it. But Johnny was afraid of that e-mail. Afraid of the many, many things it might reveal.

It wasn’t that he ever thought she’d have an affair. Not since their first year, the early days when Johnny thought himself way too lucky to have a girl like Becky on his arm; when practically every man she walked past was a man who could take her from him. No, Johnny had been feeling quite secure in recent years. Complacent, comfortable, maybe even lazy. In fact, there were even days when he saw Becky as something that wasn’t special or magical.

But that icon in the corner of his screen might say something destructive, something that poured mockery over their whole relationship.

Maybe, as Johnny had suspected, she too had become complacent, and Becky wasn’t one to deal well with complacency. She feared it, like others feared death. For Becky, it was little better than death. Boredom was not something she handled well and Johnny had that small comfort in all of this: her death had been anything but boring. It was violent, tumultuous, tempestuous. But never boring.

The e-mail could change everything or it could change nothing. A flipped coin, 50/50 as it spilled across the screen, telling him exactly what was going through her head on that last day, the day before the hospital and the doctors and the (not so) pretty nurses descended upon them like vultures and ripped their lives apart.

Johnny looked to the screen, its layers spread open, a collage of colours and text and image files dancing literally before his eyes.

That e-mail.