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Dreambox Junkies 5 страница



If not for the participation of the pilot, she would have been ready to blame the tea served at Paul Rayle's cottage, or some brainfrucking ingredient in that incense that had turned their minds, grotesquely, to conjuring up that puerile, pubescent excuse for impromptu bacchanalia. Had she really done what she had seen and felt and been totally unable to stop herself doing, behaving like the cheapest, corniest skinvid star?

She took out her mobe, made sure the Phoneface function was active—who would want to be seen looking like this, in this place? —and was about to contact Ajit, when she observed on her cuff what appeared to be a speck of dried semen.

Sesha vomited.

“That's it, dear, ” said the toilet. “Get it all out. ” And then, after the barest pause consistent with propriety, “Would it help to talk about it? Just touch the red spot with your transac ring to obtain one full, intensive five-minute counselling session for stress, depression, or infosickness. Should further sessions be required, simply touch again to continue our friendly little... "

“Hey come on! ” her mobe protested. “Show a bit more sensitivity, yeah? "

* * * *

The McCop, big and butch and baton-happy, plainly didn't like the look of Paulie Rayle, sitting there in the vertiport's bleak little bar, scruffy and bleeding and bruised and beat-up, nursing hurt ribs, armed with alcohol gripped in a trembling hand. And, worst of all, smoking a cigarette; cigarettes were, quite patently, anathema to the McCop.

Well tough shit, Paulie thought.

The McCop was tremendously tall, and Paulie guessed him to be a growth hormone victim. The parents had wanted to give their son an edge, to elevate him above his peers. Trouble was, too many other parents had the same plan, and the commanding heights had crept on up and up and up.

The McCop's peaked cap was doubtless recording him with its smartbadge microcam, and Paulie could guess what was on the man's mind. What, the McCop must have been wondering, was the precise nature of the connection between this scruffy specimen here and that very distressed young lady who had alighted from the verticar and gone running straight into the women's washroom? If only you knew, McOfficer, that the precise nature of this world is what you ought to be worrying about.

Paulie looked across at the washroom door. How much longer would Sesha Roffey stay in there? Had she already put out a help call?

He dragged at his cigarette. His stomach churned. The weight was crushing him. The awful weight

 

of horrible knowledge, now a part of him for the remainder of his life. Pseudolife.

Intellectually, he had worked out what had happened. Emotionally, he was not up to accepting it. Who would be? It was pretty damn grim. As an explanation, it may have violated the principle of parsimony—was it really more credible than, say, a freak chemical reaction leading to the spontaneous production, within the verticar, of some erotogenic substance which had entered their respiratory systems, triggering the bizarre behaviour? —but he was prepared to bet money on it; he felt its truth in his guts. Of course, there was always a slight chance that there did exist a far less ominous answer; one he could not, as yet, come up with, given the current state of his mind. Maybe his fellow victim would be able to enlighten him?

The door opened. She had tidied herself up. She was bearing up well. She looked around for him, caught sight of him and approached. Her face was mask-like. In order to cope, she'd gone all androidy, sealed herself in an ice-hard businesslike lacquer. You could rat-tat-tat against her with your nails.

Paulie offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. He indicated the second glass. “Thought you might need this. "

“Thanks. ” As she spoke she turned her face away, keeping the movements of her lips hidden, unwitnessable, as though she would rather not have dealt with him directly, but through a series of distancing relays. She took the whiskey, and didn't even let him see her sip at it. Her embarrassment must have been desperate. His own was dire enough. Ironically, the explanation he was about to put forward ought to have offered a full exoneration from any sense of embarrassment.

He said first, “I'm sorry. "

One of the reasons he felt apologetic had to do with knowing that all of this was extra-difficult for her on account of who he was, in her eyes. His significance vis-a-vis Frances.

Sipping at his drink, he said, “Look, Sesha, it wasn't really us, doing those things. "

At last he received a glance from her, a very brief, grudging flash of eye-contact. “Of course it wasn't us. ” The words came back at him charged with girlish, dogmatic ferocity.

He said, “We were puppeted. Like with morphomercials. You've heard of erotoroutines, sex programs... the way they can strike at random? Some stupid little Netgeek's idea of a joke. "

He waited for the implications to sink in. Or would they? Were they just too outrageous? Or simply incomprehensible, particularly if she wasn't unduly into metaphysics, outside of her training in visualizing Ideal Hairstyles?

He said again, “We were puppeted, hacked, just like people on a screen, on NeTV, in a film. Like when Sick Nick starts chopping them up. Only we were lucky. I'd say it was one of the milder erotoroutines, quite an old one. The shitfilters shrugged it off pretty quickly. "

Sesha Roffey gave him the kind of look reserved for loopy little conspiracy nerds, then turned her head so that she was looking not just away from him, but right away from him, one hundred and eighty degrees away, and Paulie thought, Why am I saying all of this, making myself sound insane? I'm never going to convince her. Am I myself convinced, even?

He asked her, “Well okay then, what's your explanation? "

He was met with a silence, during which the McCop gave him a long, sharp, guard-dog glower, laced with chivalrous concern for the lady.

“I could die, ” came her words, quiet and bitter, and not for him.

Paulie said, “It could be we're not really alive. "

His own statement sounded reassuringly preposterous, that was why he had needed to voice his paranoia. To exorcise it.

Processia Roffey looked round at him, finally, and, clearly to her mind, at any rate, put an end to it by pointing out, “Only we're not virtual... this is the real world. "

There had been movies, countless horror movies, about cyberspooks bursting out from the Net, taking on physical form and wreaking havoc in the world at large. Not that this was what Paulie's explanation actually boiled down to, but it was probably what she was thinking he was thinking. He realized he was being insensitive; the last thing she needed right now was to be confronted with this kind of shit. But before he could stop himself, he had shot back at her,

“So you know that for a fact, that this world is real? "

She didn't bother to utter a reply; her scathing look said it all.

Infuriated by her certitude, Paulie thought, Have you any idea what a fucking fact actually is? But what was the use in lecturing her on the provisionality, the probabilistic nature of all human knowledge? And why not admit that, down deep, he maybe envied her, found strong opinions sexy?

He shrugged. “Then I don't know what happened. It's as big a mystery to me as it is to you. The world's full of mysteries. Let's just try and forget about it. ” He reached for his glass, his hand still trembling. “So what do we do now? "

“A car will collect us. "

“And then? "

“Any... needs you have will be attended to, and then, if you're willing, you'll be flown over to see Frances. Is that okay? "

“Yeah, that's fine. "

“Are you all right? Were you... hurt? "

She was referring to the punches he'd received from the pilot. The poor, embarrassed bastard had lashed out at them like a loon.

“No, I'm fine, I'm okay. ” Paulie shook his head, his ribs playing up in violent contradiction.

“I scratched your face. ” She didn't appear to deem contrition appropriate; she simply stated a fact, and Paulie could imagine her trying to decide whether or not to put professionalism to the fore and make a full and frank report to her employer. It would seem perfectly natural to look to Mother Frances for absolution. It was an impulse with which he himself could identify.

“I'm sorry, ” she said, formally, not without difficulty.

“It's nothing. Forget it. "

Sleep, Paulie thought. My circadian rhythm has been shot to fuck. I need sleep, and plenty of it.

[Back to Table of Contents]

* * *

Chapter 10

Ruth asked herself savagely, What was I thinking, telling Paulie to go out there to Spain? Am I fucking mental, or what? Her worst fear—it had always been her darkest, deepest fear—that Paulie would get back together with Frances.

Kali was crying again, ready for her last, late feed. Ruth got up, went and fetched her, brought her back to the bed.

It felt like, like Paulie had died. Just after he'd left, as the stupid noisy flying car thing was heaving itself up into the sky with him inside, the tears had come and choked her up. Tears partly of rage at how she'd meekly gone along with it, trying to be a nice person and see the right thing get done, thinking about Paulie and thinking about Frances and what Frances needed. Well, fuck Frances Rayle. Serve her fucking right, going cranky after spending all that money on treatment to try and stop herself from getting any older. How could you have any sympathy for her when she'd brought it on herself by being vain? What kind of world would it be if only the rich lived forever, and everybody else had to die? And even if everyone ended up getting the treatment and not dying, and people still kept having kids, how would there be room for everybody?

Ruth winced as Kali tugged at her cracked nipple.

God she could kick herself, sending Paulie off like it was his duty to go and hers to be a martyr. Sending him off with that snotty cow with her fucking basin haircut. Fucking thief, as well. That little purply-coloured soft toy had disappeared from under the cupboard, right near where the bitch had been sitting. And the funny thing was, it had been Frances who had sent them the toy. A couple of times, feeling pissed off with Frances—and because of the way the toy would seem to look at you, just like it was watching you—Ruth had nearly chucked it in the rubbish. But chucking it away had seemed childish. For ages it had been left lying there under the cupboard. Kali wouldn't miss it, she didn't pay that much attention yet to toys, but that wasn't the point.

Perhaps, Ruth told herself, that was why the basin-haircut woman had bought that wooden box, out of gui

 

lt because she'd pinched Kali's toy? Not because she truly liked the box, the scheming cow.

Ruth stopped herself. She was tired. Her hormones were everywhere; it took so long to get back to normal after having a baby. The little rabbit-thing was probably still there, kicking around somewhere. Maybe Paulie had picked it up.

And then something else occurred to her, and as soon as Kali had finished feeding and she'd got her back to sleep, she went and checked.

Paulie had taken the Dreambox.

Ruth paced up and down, arms folded, hugging herself. She felt all awake and electric. What was she so ready to do? Go after him? She'd had a chance to go. All three of them could have gone over there to Spain, her and Paulie and Kali.

What could she do now? Was it too late?

“Fucking stupid fucking... ! ” she called herself out loud.

She felt completely powerless, standing there rubbing away tears with the palms of her hands.

* * * *

“Anything wrong, Sesh? ” Ajit had perched himself beside her, on the arm of his settee. His shrewd black eyes studied her. “There is something, isn't there? "

Sesha shook her head. “I'm just tired. "

Ajit grinned. “All go, isn't it, this line of work? "

It had taken all of her inner resources to prevent the double dose of shame, the theft of Bubu Flumpkin, her antics in the verticar, from reducing her to a wreck. Like a scientist caging a dangerous substance, keeping it separate from every atom of everything else, she was holding the night's memories apart and discrete and outside of herself. It still called upon every bit of her willpower.

Every bit, Sesha thought. Every byte?

Her own words echoed back at her: “Only we're not virtual—this is the real world. "

Paul Rayle quite clearly thought otherwise. But then, Paul Rayle was a box junkie. His sad little secret was out. She had caught sight of the box, wrapped up in that tatty old army-surplus khaki rucksack. Either the best he had available in the way of luggage, or a calculated statement of outsiderdom, or both, the bag was split down one seam, and the Dreambox, swaddled snug as a baby in some item of spare clothing, had peeped out briefly as he'd plonked the bag down on his lap when they'd got in the car that had brought them into London. He had seen her see the box, and he had made no attempt to conceal it. On the contrary, he had responded with a kind of wry grin.

Poor Frances.

Her ex was a fruck-up, headwise. Sesha could see how he might once have been someone worthwhile, but now he was completely offworld. She could no longer harbour so much as a glimmer of hope that his presence would prove therapeutic to her boss. She'd had her doubts, right from the moment she'd set eyes on him at that cottage, but now the whole enterprise seemed futile. How could Frances not be disappointed?

When they had landed and escaped from that awful verticar flight, Paul Rayle's eyes had been pained and haunted. Any embarrassment he felt appeared to have been subsumed under a paranoid, box junkie dread. He plainly believed that something was Wrong, in the deepest possible sense. That he was still dreaming, trapped, suffering a boxmare. Something of that order. Some cranky conviction.

Well, she was sorry, but Sesha had no time for such silliness. It was so unpleasant to see a grown man being silly. Silliness emasculated. What Paul Rayle needed was to smash that stupid box and get himself straightened out, get cured of his ridiculous conviction that what had happened in the verticar proved that this was not the real world, Groundworld, in user jargon. He had leapt straight to what seemed to him, a box junkie, to be the obvious conclusion. To anyone with a healthy head, his paranoia was as plain as frucking daylight.

Okay, Sesha allowed, so something was responsible for the verticar episode, but who cared? Did it have to fit into some scheme, be explained away? It had happened, it was gone; the only problem was the memory.

Ajit patted her on the shoulder. “'Excuse me a moment. ” He went off to the kitchen or somewhere, leaving her alone.

There came a Bleep-Bl-Bleep-Bleeeeep from her handbag: the first four notes of Janko Brauch's song, Lisa Sleaze. Sesha fished out her mobe.

“Sesh? "

“Mmm? "

“About your feet: you know, Sesha, you're really not alone in thinking they're, well, not QUITE petite enough for your liking. In fact... "

“You go fruck yourself. "

Sesha was furious. It was one of those intimads, commercials programmed to target specific individuals, to home in on your hangups. She could vaguely recall, ages ago, going out for a meal with her friend Indie and letting slip the moan that, in an ideal world, her feet would be about a size and a half smaller. Her gripe must have been picked up by one of the restaurant's securicam mikes, harvested by a roving intimad scout and then sold on for exploitation by some footwear or pedicare company. And now the resultant intimad had succeeded in hijacking her mobe, worming its way in through the shitfilters. It had even had the mobe monitor the sound and heatscapes—as best it could from within the handbag—and bide its time until she was on her own; these things were sly, underhanded, insidious. All she could do was wait for the filters to regain control; there was no way of silencing an intimad. Retaining Janko Brauch's vocpat, the ad droned blandly on:

“... surveys reveal that some thirty-nine percent of adult women throughout the Euro Union express, at some point, a real degree of dissatisfaction with their foot size. So you see, Sesha, this is a very commonly-voiced grievance, so why be ashamed? Instead, why not take steps, if you'll pardon the pun, to remedy the problem? Simply by using the new Pedislim Plus Heel-to-Toe Reduction Sock, impregnated with our exclusive age-old Tibetan Herbal Formula, its magic enhanced by the very latest liposomic delivery methods, you can effectively reduce the length and breadth of your feet by as much as two... yes, TWO... whole Euro shoe sizes over a short three-month period. How does that sound, Sesha? And it's SO easy to order! Just hit me with your transac ring, and not one but THREE pairs of Pedislim socks, giving you three cool pastel shades to suit your every mood, will be rushed IMMEDIATELY to your doorstep. Because I ask you, Sesha, why put up with a physical defect that could so eas... eas... easily b-b-b-b-b-be... Sorry about that, Sesha. ” It had taken the mobe a worryingly long time to shrug off the intimad. “What a crock, huh? Won't happen again. I'm due to download a new filter release in two days. As you know, intimads are illegal. I've just sent a report to the appropriate regulating body. Sorry, Sesh, I feel real bad about letting that one through. Frucker. "

“Not your fault. "

“That's reassuring to hear. Thanks, Sesh, I appreciate your understanding. "

Sesha closed the mobe, and was dropping it back into her handbag when Paul Rayle appeared in the doorway. She felt intense discomfort. Had he heard the intimad?

Seeing her there on the settee, he came in. He smiled. Upon waking from his doze in the car, his manner had been one of ironic amusement. His second snooze appeared to have heightened this, if anything, though Sesha grimly suspected that his wry smile signified not a new sobriety but a fatalistic acceptance of some delusory plight.

It would have been stretching the word's definition to have called him presentable, but one or two of the least becoming aspects of his appearance had been favourably modified. And all without the need for even the gentlest of hints from herself or from Ajit. Paul Rayle had made use of the offered bathroom to tidy himself up, and the bed to continue the nap he had begun in the car. Undeniably, he had made an effort; his unkemptness did not seem to be ideologically motivated. All in all, he didn't quite fit the craft-villager stereotype, despite the rucksack and his rough woollen nonconsumer tunic thing, and clumpy boots.

Once again, though, Sesha noted that his natural Congruence would have transformed him even further had he only allowed his lovely hair to hang loose. And it would have obscured his bruisy cheekbone, and the scratches she herself had inflicted, the sight of which brought another surge of shame.

“Nice place, ” he said, surveying Ajit's cool, spacious living-room: elegant, unfinicky, and uncompromisingly masculine. It was, Sesha could tell, no more to Paul Rayle's taste than to her own.

She nodded. “Isn't it? "

Ajit had decided that Paul Rayle ought to be brought here to Highgate to freshen up—blithely unaware that all the freshening-up in the world wouldn't do the trick, for the trick could not be done in mere hours, even days. Paul Rayle needed treatment. Several different kinds. Showering, shaving, and resting constituted a start, but, in all honesty, to deliver someone to Frances in even this washed and brushed-up state smacked strongly of professional ineptitude. And Ajit was of the same mind, clearly, as was his cute new boyfriend Bill; all those glances shuttlecocking back and forth. But needs must. Frances's condition was unstable. The sooner they got Paul Rayle flown over to her, the better. What else could match that for importance?

“How are you feeling? ” Sesha asked.

Paul Rayle yawned. “Not so bad. How about you? "

She was taken aback by his tenderness. It was as though he genuinely felt for her, knowing, as he did, what she had been through. What the two of them had been through together, along with that pilot, whose wild orgasmic rictus was a memory she would pay any price to have expunged.

“Tired, ” she said. “Otherwise I'm okay. "

She had not told Ajit about the verticar horror. She would never, ever speak of it to anyone. Not even her best friend Indie. Not that she had been in touch with Indie in weeks, or was it months?

I'll call Indie tomorrow, she thought. Time to take a stand against the isolating drift of twenty-first century life.

“What's it like, ” she asked, “living in a craft village? "

“Pleasant. What's it like in the city? ” Paul Rayle's eyes made a gentle joke out of the reciprocity dictated by etiquette.

Sesha was considering her reply when she was brought up short by the sight of her own face suddenly appearing on Ajit's NeTV; the set had been left on in the background, tuned in to the EBC No-Shit News with top anchorslob Troy Formby. The sound was muted. It was one of those interviews she'd done about the dummy Crowning Glory tabs. The image on the studio screen was not her genuine self of the time—tense, harried, hair losing its Congruence—but her smart, crisp, never-weary PhonePhace avatar, superimposed at the first signs of physiognomic strain.

Recognition hit Paul Rayle. He glanced at

 

her, then back at the screen, frowning, attempting to lipread.

“Sound, ” he requested.

“—for the express purpose of hair retention, ” Sesha's NeTV voice frostily intoned. “We are not in the business of helping out Dreambox users... unless, of course, like anyone else, they come to us with a hair problem. "

Manoeuvring his mouthful of gum, Troy Formby constructed a large pink bubble, then sucked it back in again. “I don't think they would come to you. I think they'd just make perfect hair a part of their dreamworld. Who needs PsyTri in Heaven? ” Sesha's face faded from the screen as Formby let out a belch, followed by, for good measure, a loud, fruity fart, and cheerfully changed the subject: “Now, that perennial piss-off: the Email Shemale. What do so many men get out of posing as women on webdates? "

Sesha asked Paul Rayle, “Do you use Crowning Glory? "

“To keep my hair? "

“I mean as a dethanatizer? "

He looked at her.

“Have you any with you? ” Sesha held out her hand. “Can I see the carton? "

Paul Rayle hesitated. Then, from a small side pocket of his rucksack, he produced one of the familiar pale blue plastic cartons, its label grubbied, and handed it over. Sesha turned it upside down and peered at the printed batch number.

“These are fine, ” she informed him, handing back the carton.

“You sure? "

“Positive. "

Ajit reappeared.

“Paul? Sesh? I just spoke to Frances. "

“How is she? ” Paul Rayle wanted to know.

“She's eager to see the both of you. "

“Both of us? ” Sesha was astonished.

“I asked if she wanted a word with you now, on the phone, but, well, you know Frances. "

To begin with, before she had met her boss, Sesha had taken Frances's aversion to comtech devices—telepresence, even simple phones—to be some Machiavellian tactic for maintaining a regal distance. But her first, long-awaited face-to-face encounter had dispelled such cynical notions. Frances was very much a person person: tactile, sensual, and it was understandable that, with these warm, human proclivities—some might call them eccentricities—she would consider it unseemly that her first contact with Paul in years be cold and mediated. Frances wanted him there with her. But why should she want Sesha Roffey there as well?

“Sesh? "

Excusing herself, Sesha complied with Ajit's discreet eye-flick of a request that she join him in the hallway. There, from behind his back, Ajit produced something small, purple and extremely, embarrassingly lovable.

A Bubu Flumpkin.

Sesha went rigid.

[Back to Table of Contents]

* * *

Chapter 11

To whose psyche are we slaves? wondered Paulie Rayle as he sat aboard the plane to Seville. Was he himself, and Processia Roffey, snoozing in the airseat beside him, and Ruth, and little Kali, and Frances—were they all of them mere humiliants in someone's boxworld?

And if so, as humiliants were they truly alive? The precise ontological status of humiliants was still under debate, a source of the fiercest ethical controversy. Were they nothing more than empty vessels dangling from psychic strings spun out by the solipsistic box user? Or, as antiboxers claimed, did the process of making a Berkeley Effect copy of Groundworld and its inhabitants somehow preserve and, in a sense, steal all those separate subjectivities? Did the esse-percipi program really see to it that humiliants only came alive, as it were, within the box user's pseudoperceptual field, much as old-time movie actors ceased performing once the camera panned away? Or did the Dreambox actually do far more than was realized, perhaps offer access to some parallel world of equal ontostatus?

Well if the e-p program does work, Paulie reasoned, and all non-essential humiliants stay shut down, then that would indicate that the user is someone close to me, someone who is keeping me in mind, all this time.

I think, therefore... Or rather, Paulie corrected himself: There seems to be an I that seems to be thinking.

It amused him, the thought of Frances residing in what was ostensibly the actual, non-virtual, historical heart of Seville, blissfully unaware that she was less than a real person in less than a real place. Amusement, he felt, but also guilt and discomfort. Should he tell Ruth all that had happened, try and explain about the erotoroutine? What was the point? She wouldn't understand. She would be hurt, more than hurt. Why subject her to that? And why feel guilty when it wasn't his fault?

As he sat there on the plane, his eyes closed, his mind still starved of the good, genuine, non-box-induced night's sleep for which a couple of hard-won catnaps had been scant substitute, Paulie found himself wishing that his travelling companion had been on the same wavelength, been less reluctant to consider what his instincts told him was the true explanation for that grotesque little incident in the verticar: this world was not Groundworld. But then, finding oneself forced into sexual acts by a pirate computer program was likely to be doubly traumatic if you were a grounder with no box hours under your belt. No doubt Sesha Roffey would have scoffed at the little game he was playing. A game of possibilities. Listing them. Entertaining them, one after another. Trying them for size.

Possibility Number One: she was right—he was nuts.

Possibility Number Two: this was Groundworld, but someone, for some reason, wanted him to think it was a boxworld, and had somehow tampered with his perceptions. Was he paranoid enough to go with that one?

Possibility Number Three: this world was his own boxworld. After all, it wasn't unknown for users to develop ‘levelitis', a condition wherein the box user's imagination, spurred on by a self-protecting drive toward inner stability through the avoidance of existential stress, sought to further authentify its boxworld by incorporating a spurious Groundworld recovery stage into its subrealitude. In response to a perceived threat to sanity, such as the mental toll of excessive box use, the psychic component of the user's immune system acted by fabricating a conviction that you were home and safe. This sanctuary state could not be maintained for very long before affronts to your Groundworld paradigm damaged the self-delusory mechanism. Strange things—things you just knew couldn't come about in ‘real life'—would start to happen either through the transformative effects of your own deep wants and needs upon what was still a subreal environment, or, perhaps, due to an outside invader such as an erotoroutine; boxworlds were vulnerable to all manner of compuviral infiltration via any of the myriad infosources during the initial worldcopying process. Perhaps they should be thankful that some cyberspook like Sick Nick hadn't yet paid them a visit. For within the confines of a boxworld, Sick Nick would be their ontological equal, his long knifeblade tongue no mere outlandish apparition.

And yet, Paulie observed, if this is my boxworld, then it's a world in which my little magic word, ‘ontotech’ counts for nothing, an empty term coined in ignorance as to the limits of science. An inchoate concept.

Imagination had wrestled with defeatism and lost. He had been unable to cut through the carapace of cynicism, pierce adulthood's armour in order to reach the child within and let the word be wondrously reified. Was that inner child no longer alive? Was that why he had journeyed but never arrived, why ontotechnology remained bullshit, his dream of Heaven doomed to collapse under the weight of its own absurdity? Was that why the dethan gear, the Crowning Glory and Vitamin C, hadn't stopped things going sour? Was he generating more negativity than the chemicals could cope with? Or did he have it in for himself so viciously that his thirst for failure was insufficiently distinguishable from his vision of Paradise for any dethanatic drug to muffle one without choking the other? What a fuck-up he was. He had even sought ethical justification for his aim of pre-empting Groundworld by putting it to the vote—a vote by humiliants, his captive constituency, forced to accommodate to his whims by the Berkeley Effect. What kind of democracy was that?



  

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