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Cleanliness, by John Greenwood

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day one

We can exclusively reveal that Spencer Leonard, best known in the net as the inventor of DirtTM has been dropped by the software giants Miasma. Rumours have long been circulating in press channels that this long-awaited sequel to the record-breaking interact Sub-Virt is still far from completion after over five years of net silence. When buzzed this morning, Miasma spokespeople refused to comment on the issue. However, Miasma executive Jeff Hasbrook, in an off-net encounter with reports today had this to say…

Spencer clicked the mouse and the text on his screen was replaced with video footage of a man standing outside a large office block, framed by a forest of microphones in thrusting hands. Spencer recognised him. A chauffeur stood to his left ready to usher him into a waiting limo. The camera loomed up to his face, distorting it. He was visibly disturbed by the crush of reporters, and his voice was shaky.

“Mr Leonard has signed to a completely closed-terminal dialogue with Miasma, despite the current situation, as you will all no doubt have discovered by now. The cancellation of our mutual contract will by no means hinder the progress of Sub-Virt 2, which is already near to completion. Expect a release date to be announced within the next six months.”

Lies, thought Spencer, and badly improvised lies at that. The closed-terminal dialogue part though, that bit was true. Spencer had had to buy a filtering program for his e-mail to stop the sudden cascade of questions and requests for interviews from the media. But the part about Sub-Virt 2 – near to completion? It wasn’t even begun, as far as he knew, and he was the programmer.

That was a bad mistake on Hasbrook’s part, that getting caught off-net. Spencer had had some net contact with him during those awful wrangles over the publicity for the original Sub-Virt, and he knew Hasbrook wasn’t like that at all. Jeff Hasbrook was a pure net operator, like all Miasma execs, very reluctant to meet clients in person, uneasy even on the phone. Those reporters must have got access to his personal schedule – somehow. There must be some very sophisticated house-breakers in the press, Spencer thought. He knew that the press hacking issue had been getting worse for years now, everyone talked about it. There should have been a government enquiry long ago. The net press was altogether too powerful, too quick to the scene of the crime. They needed purging, taking down a few rungs. But no way had he imagined the situation this bad. The interact press (who hardly had the influence of the big conglomerate news agencies) hacking into top-level Miasma databanks? There was more ice on Miasma memos than there were memos themselves.

That was a very bad mistake, thought Spencer. Babbling off some made-up press release about Sub-Virt 2 might shut the interact press up for the moment, but as soon as word got out (which it always did) about the game’s real state of development, he’d get lynched. In fact he probably already was lynched the moment Miasma monitored that report. Spencer almost felt sorry for Hasbrook, despite their massive disagreements in the past. No-one liked to have to talk off-net, actually in the street for God’s sake. You didn’t know who you might have to communicate with. All your net privacy and control was gone once you stepped outside. Plus there were the diseases. No wonder Hasbrook had stumbled. It really wasn’t like him at all.

Unless, thought Spencer… unless it was all a bluff. Miasma could have been lying to him all along, letting him believe all that stuff in his contract about complete artistic control, while some anonymous program research group hastily put a game together. If that was true then Hasbrook may have been telling the truth after all. Sub-Virt 2 might be ready without him even knowing it. All that was needed was to use the basic structures he’d been sending in fairly infrequently, and then overlay the original Sub-Virt format with perhaps a few extra levels. Miasma must have seen fairly early on from Spencer’s sketch programs and demos that whatever he was working towards wasn’t something that they wanted to release. He’d spent 18 months working on what he considered his finest achievement, the virtual dust program, perfectly realistic dust with a carefully researched real-time build up, and a linked-in visibility impairment, and the execs had turned around and said, “Fine, now can we start getting these monster models ready for scanning?”

In fact the whole of that little episode with Jeff Hasbrook getting flustered outside the Miasma offices could have been an elaborate sham. Dropping Spencer from his contract could have been planned and timed. They couldn’t but know that the news would be a media bombshell, so they might as well use it to their advantage. Now, thought Spencer, if they really do have a Sub-Virt 2 ready they can walk in to save the day, once everybody thinks that ll hope is lost. They’ll get hyper-exposure on the net press without one PR man having to life a finger. Sub-Virt 2 has been a holy grail for the ranks of the interact magazines for the past few years. Of course they won’t believe Hasbrook about the release date, yet. Miasma will have to wait until everyone is sorely disappointed. But when they do play their ace it will be like the Angel of the Lord spreading good news across the land. And on that sort of platform you could re-release Pac-Man to uproarious applause and rave reviews.

Clever, thought Spencer, and I’m glad it has nothing to do with me any more. He exited the news menus, clicked past the credit transfer authorisation screens, and checked on his net calls waiting list. Ads chocked his ansaprogram. A huge long list of ad calls with their pleading intro messages, trying to seduce him into watching them:

“Vital news – monitor this message immediately!”

“You must click here… there is no other way!”

“Information you just can’t afford to ignore!”

There were perfect illustrations of what Spencer had coined “grey-area politics”. Advertising was being forced through a metamorphosis in these times when the net dominated all. Traditional advertising was already obsolete. You couldn’t force people on the net to be advertised to, like you could with TV, and with the billboards for those who lived outside. It had all become junk-mail that people could just ignore. Most of the calls of Spencer’s screen were obviously ad, and he could delete them without worry (although calls from “Home-Cooked micromeals taste so good!” etc, those sort of ads did their job without you even having to watch them). But there were more cunning ways to get you to monitor ads: ads disguised as official broadcasts, as program errors, even ads disguised as urgent personal calls. The advertisers got more and more devious, and the net-users responded in kind. Spencer had monitored info about programs you could buy to screen out all messages from consumer-product company origins. But the ad execs could get round this by routing their ad calls from anonymous public pay terminals. You could never be sure what was ad, and what might be news that your mother just got hit by a truck. The ad agencies were getting that desperate.

Grey-area politics began when consumer companies moved out of advertising, and started investing in information control. Because although the net-user didn’t generally want the big-lengthy video ads on their monitors, with their deliberately concealed exit menus, they did need to know what was going on. This was fast becoming the retail industry’s biggest tool: if you couldn’t advertise direct, you could restrict all information about your products, so that the net-users had to look for it themselves. And when you did finally find the right menus to see, let’s say, what movies you could monitor, or what food you could get delivered, what did you have to sit through? Ads. It was like the whole-product marketing scheme put into reverse. The basic idea behind the whole net was supposed to be easy-access info, and the retailers were putting a stranglehold on it. They were starving net-users of info. Sometimes you had to pay just to watch their ads. You had to. If you didn’t you just got left behind.

The associated press agencies were the counter-weight to this potential monopoly of information. The press walked a thin line between honest reporting and criminal info infraction. They had learnt to survive the net revolution by semi-legally usurping the large companies’ control over their own product information, and giving that info to net-users, if not freely, then at least a whole lot cheaper. The press agencies could tell you about product releases before even the companies wanted you to know. They employed armies of hackers for this sole purpose. It was a common cliché that news agencies were always swamped with writs, and it was usually true, but they survived. They survived because net-users needed them.

And what Miasma were doing, thought Spencer, was a perfect piece of grey-area manipulation. The interact press will be thinking they’ve got hold of something they shouldn’t have. But they’re playing right into Miasma’s hands. Jeff Hasbrook hadn’t told them anything they weren’t supposed to know, and when the real publicity storm came, Miasma wouldn’t even need to advertise; they’d get the press to do it for them, and the net-users would queue up to pay for it.

Spencer could feel the signs of heavy eyestrain coming on. He’d meant to make a decision about the tunnels today, but had got sidetracked when he started to see his face in the news. Pure narcissism, when he should have been running through a financial adviser program to find out if there was any way to market his game. He promised himself to do it tomorrow and switched off the terminal. He glanced at his wristwatch. Nine hours sold he’d been sat there. Gradually the little white room in which he worked began to impose itself onto his consciousness again. He made sure the keyboard and mouse-mat were all straight, and then went to bed.

day two

In the morning the hot croissant burgers and coffee were delivered at 8.34am as usual. The delivery man had a new uniform, Spencer noticed. He was wearing a jaunty red and black top hat with the Burger-Bistro logo on it, and a matching red and black striped blazer. Spencer took the food box at arm’s length, and hear the man say “Bon appetit, Monsieur!” before he could slam the door shut. He ate his breakfast stood in the hall-way, throwing the box and styrofoam cup into the compactor before vigorously washing his hands in the kitchen sink. He took his shoes off, and went into the terminal room.

It was so quiet in there. He felt, not for the first time, supremely thankful that he’d got the room individually soundproofed, and he sat there for a few minutes enjoying the silence and the white purity of the walls. No windows. No traffic or crime noise in the background. When he got bored of sitting there, he switched on. The first thing he had to do was to stop his order at the Burger-Bistro. He dialled up their customer service program and cancelled his daily breakfast order, then removed his name and terminal number from their e-mailing list, a precaution that would help prevent the build-up of ad calls. Next, because he was in a reckless mood, he let the computer dial up a totally random burger-sendout from the directory. It came up with some Hawaiian place called “Honolulu In’a Sesame Seed Bun”. Must be one of these new connoisseur places, thought Spencer, well why not? He was monitoring a rather nice 3D title site of a tropical island with grass-skirted natives sat around a palm tree eating burgers. “Digitized?” thought Spencer. “No, it’s polygons, but they’re very well done.” He could hardly tell. You must be able to get as close as damn it to top-price Viewsphere digitals with the standard of polygons they’re bringing out now, and for about half the price. It’s a pity they don’t offer you an interact demo of what they delivery staff are like, he mused. That would certainly help him to decide. He ordered there anyway: a pineapple, pine nut and avocado burger and coconut shake, with mango pieslice. Afterwards he felt a slight pang of guilt and dialled up a few chemist retailers, and ordered some cheap cellulite pills.

On a whim, he flipped open the old Sub-Virt box, and stuck in the CD. He needed to get some perspective on this thing, he said to himself, as the dreadful Miasma-commissioned soundtrack came through his speakers. It still looks good, he thought, clicking into the game past the wraparound gothic-stone script of the title screen, even on the terminal it still looks damn good.

He’d originally designed Sub-Virt for one-screen terminals, and he’d had thoughts about selling it through the net, but Miasma had been so impressed with the original that they’d insisted on converting it to full VR. At that time Spencer had thought it a great opportunity, bt now he saw in so many ways how VR had ruined the game. He was monitoring the start position screen: it was a 3D full-on view of a dimly lit stone corridor, with confusing left and right exits suggesting an extremely labyrinthine design. This was nothing new, but Sub-Virt was not just a texture-mapped surface maze. There was a whole 27 cubic km of virtual space and actual fully textured substance programmed into this game. You could cut through the walls on one side of a passage way and you’d find more stone behind it, and more stone, and eventually the walled-up earth (with a specific moisture content depending on depth), before you emerged ­into an adjoining parallel corridor. There were hundreds of pick-ups and finds around the maze; if you needed to you could actually drill your way out. Spencer had actually hidden some professional mining equipment in the maze, concealed beneath false stone slabs, but as yet he didn’t know that anyone had found it. It was actually quite easy to discover once you got used to the depth of gameplay involved; the false stone slabs were obvious because they gave off a slightly different echo under your steps. He’d installed whole catalogues of radar research into the game for the echo effects to be that accurate. It brought him an obscure sense of satisfaction that it was still his secret, even if he’d had to pay a fortune to get hold of the specification and virtual models for the drills. He’d spent weeks simply installing routines to imitate the speed the drills would cut through different types of rock and earth, experimenting with different random-scatter programs to find the right effect of the drilled stone flying out of the hole.

Spencer wandered down a few random passageways thoughtlessly, stopping now and again to examine in magnification the balance of textures on the stone-work. In the game’s heyday there had been a brief fashion for such attention to detail it was one of the reasons that Miasma had allowed Spencer the unusual privilege of working almost entirely on his own. Then the familiar low shuffling sound began to mix with the faint passage of stale air being simulated through the speakers, and Spencer exited the game just in time to avoid the first monster encounter.

He actually felt repulsed by the monsters, but not for the right reasons. It had been one of the hardest impositions of Miasma that Spencer had bowed to. One early, and untypically luke-warm review had made reference to the “pure digitized plasticene”. Spencer still winced at the truth of the accusation. His original idea had been to have only one adversary in the labyrinth, but Miasma had rejected that immediately claiming a reduced market for mythically orientated games. But the minotaur was not what Spencer had had in mind: what he really envisaged, although he had not dared broach this to the Miasma execs, was an invisible monster, perhaps even one that could not be defeated, only evaded for as long as possible. That would then be the object, Spencer didn’t even like the idea of an escape plot. He often thought of himself as a minimalist designer, but Miasma didn’t need art revolutions, they were just looking for that elusive “download avalanche”.

Sub-Virt had the tired old flaming torch method of illumination -it was cheap, Hasbrook had argued, and the shadow programs were reliable. Reliable, thought Spencer, but not realistic. But the strength of the torches was that no one had any clear idea of what sort of light a flaming wooden torch gave off any more. So it didn’t matter that the effect wasn’t right; as long as it roughly resembled all the other torches-in-darkened-underground-Iabyrinth games everyone was happy.

Everyone except Spencer, who could only go as far as to admit to having periods of reduced misery anyway. When he came to consider the basic set-up of Sub-Virt 2 he’d given himself two options: stick with the torches, only get them right, or install a more familiar and accessible method of illumination. After a week of fruitless net-shopping in search of working medieval torches to experiment with, he settled on the latter: electric strip lights, just like the one that slit the space across his ceiling into two rectangles of less intense white. A they did in every home in the country, in every home in the world, Spencer assumed.

As the never-to-be-finished sequel downloaded itself, Spencer drifted into absent contemplation of the terminal room: the calm white lines, unfussy corners, the perfect symmetry that he’d achieved in its design… he sometimes felt ugly and intruding in this paradise of cool white surfaces. That was why he always made sure he was scrubbed and neatly dressed before he entered. And no one else ever came in. Not even bugs: the floor was sealed. There were no windows outside the net.

day three

The doorbell rang. Spencer didn’t hear it, but a message on his screen informed him of its ringing. He went to answer it, letting the door close with a pneumatic sigh.

Spencer’s door chain was installed to allow the door open only enough to allow a burger or pizza box through. He peered through the gap at the bizarrely uniformed delivery person, who thankfully blocked out Spencer’s view of the debris strewn street. The man was middle-aged, oddly enough. Odd because by 40 most people were either onIine or dead, or as good as. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt inscribed with the “Honolulu In’a Sesame Seed Bun” logo, a plastic tropical straw hat and a corporate-enforced smile. All three were dripping wet. It was, Spencer, remembered, November. As Spencer anxiously received the styrofoam box with its relief patterns of palm trees, he noticed something, and shut the door rapidly. The delivery-person -wasn’t that Jeff Hasbrook?

Wow, thought Spencer. He must have been in really serious trouble - not just to get sacked but to be forced out? At his age? Spencer didn’t think the Miasma exec would ever be reduced to that. Everyone knew how violent it was outside. That’s what violence was nowadays: it was what happened to you outside. Spencer had seen it. Once the pizza deliverer had turned up on Spencer’s doorstep on his back, naked, with bloody holes in him. Spencer had a hell of a time trying to find someone on the net to take him away.

Spencer finished the burger-meal. It tasted okay. Like everything. The compactor ground away as he went to have another after-meal shower.

Later, as he did most days, Spencer found himself contemplating the passageways of Sub-Virt 2. He just sat there, watching the strip lights in the stone passageways flicker. He was glad he had got them to flicker accurately. And though it had taken him a few months of extra programming, he was glad they were wired up as they should be, to the electricity generator he’d downloaded from some architectural site and installed miles above on the surface of the earth. For Spencer everything had to be explained: you couldn’t just have electric lights like that. Where would the power come from? The result was that if you dug vertically upwards through Sub-Virt 2’s ceiling, you would, after weeks of continuous play, find yourself outside a fully-functional wind-mill farm, with variable wind-speeds stuck in the middle of the endless flat plains of game-space. Spencer didn’t know what he was going to do when the bulbs cracked.

The electricity also powered the hundred virtual closed circuit cameras through which the game area of Sub-Virt 2 was viewed, at the moment. Although typically, Spencer had installed a statistically accurate probability of breakdown in the cameras, and after two months of almost continuous running, four of the cameras were now “down”. Spencer couldn’t think of a way to fix them that wouldn’t interfere with the aesthetic rules of his private game, short of programming a virtual repair man to go in there with a screwdriver. Nothing could interrupt the internal self-sufficiency of the game. But still, most of the corridors and tunnels were still visible.

There were no monsters inside the labyrinths of Sub-Virt 2. There never would be. Only cold stone, dusty, humid air, and layer upon layer of dirt. Spencer had spent months trying to make the tunnels sufficiently dingy. There was no insect life, but he was working on it. He had a woodlouse all ready to introduce: he only needed to program behavioural patterns, and these were proving difficult and expensive.

That was what the internet had done, essentially. It turned all information into a strict economy. Anything anyone ever knew could be known by you, for a price set by how many people needed to know it.

Spencer was monitoring a small, dimly lit, dead end, where the ceiling supports had partly collapsed. There was no point in these cul-de-sacs, but there were dozens of them. Spencer watched them for hours. They were dead spaces, places that no human mind ever took an interest in. It was almost as if they didn’t really exist.

day four

Spencer had moved his bed to outside the terminal room. The humming of the monitor’s fans lulled him to sleep. He felt on the verge of a breakthrough with me game. The doorbell rang at 8:43am. Spencer went to answer it with more than mild curiosity. Last night while cancelling his order with “Honolulu In’a Sesame Seed Bun” he noticed another burger restaurant it was called Sub-Virt, and with site graphics which were taken wholesale from the game. It was a serious, and as far as Spencer knew, undetected, infringement of Miasma copyright. If he had e-mailed the offices, it would be a matter of minutes before “Sub-Virt Burgers” would go out of business. There was no red tape on the net. Small cases had been settled without the aid of a human judge for several years, although not many people knew. But Spencer was more curious than vengeful, and so ordered a double Gorantha burger for the next morning. (Gorantha was the name of an early end-of-level boss in Sub-Virt. It was Miasma’s name: they had a whole department working on character names).

Spencer opened the door a crack. The delivery person stood there, so small that Spencer had to look down, with the burger bag in its mouth. It was a dog, with a jaunty red and white striped waistcoat and a miniature paper boater strapped to its head with holes for the ears. The dog put the burger bag down on the step. Spencer crouched down and retrieved it. He noticed the bag was waterproof, to avoid problems with saliva. The dog barked, not loudly, twice, and trotted down the steps, out of Spencer’s vertical strip of vision.

The burgers were surprisingly okay. Naming a restaurant after an underground VR game most famous for its darkness and filth did not seem a very astute marketing ploy. The dog was the most puzzling thing. There was nothing in Sub-Virt about dogs. Spencer fed the compactor, and went next shower. As he stood dripping in the cubicle, his thoughts took a new turn. What if the “Sub-Virt” burger bar didn’t exist at all -it might have been a set up by Miasma, in revenge, or for some unimaginable reason. That might explain why yesterday’s delivery person was Jeff Hasbrook. What were they trying to do to him?

Spencer had a very high boredom threshold. That was why he was such a good computer programmer -he never lost concentration. But sitting for nine or ten hours a day watching the non-events in an uninhabited stone maze was becoming almost boring. What Spencer began to do he would never have normally contemplated. But today was an unusual day. He had been served breakfast by a uniformed dog.

First he had to find out what sort of a dog it was. He had no idea. It was large, and wolf-like, with pointy ears and black and yellow fur. He scanned through some pages of his encyclopaedia online and found the right picture: it was an Alsatian. Next he set about trying to find some visual 3D models of the dog. This was considerably more difficult, and the data-search programs were little help, until he came across the right information in a dog breeder’s guide site. There were thousands of hours of video footage of dogs, from all angles and in all positions. There was the Alsatian. He bought the models, downIoaded the footage into his designer, and had a dog. But as yet the dog didn’t do anything. He needed some behavioural programs, and while these were expensive enough for woodlice, for dogs, being so much more complex, they were exorbitant Spencer found a catalogue of animal psychology reports in a Californian university sub-net, and a large amount of semi-secret laboratory test results in the archives of a major corporation. He paid the money, pressing tired fingers onto the credit-transfer authorization panel.

The next part was combining the visuals with the behaviour rules, and this turned out to be a lengthy and dispiriting task. Fortunately there would be little unusual stimuli for the dog once in the labyrinth, which cut out a lot of work, but Spencer had to install the dog’s psychology almost by hand. After ten hours of work he had a dog that would bark, sleep, run and shit at various probability-driven intervals. He sent the dog to sleep in the middle of a white nowhere, and fell asleep himself in front of the terminal, in the middle of a white nowhere.

day five

Next morning the doorbell didn’t ring at 8:43, or at any time. Spencer had forgotten to order breakfast after cancelling his account with the “Sub-Virt” burger bar. He still followed his normal rule though, and had both his pre-breakfast and post-breakfast showers, one after the other. Once in the terminal room he woke the dog up. First of all he constructed an enclosed white room for the dog to explore. It sniffed the walls, pissed in the corners, and then began to whine. He sent it back to sleep while he prepared to open the labyrinth, something he had not done for several months. It was painful -violating the 27 square kilometres of quiet, dark dirt and stone -but Spencer couldn’t see any reason why he should stop now, having paid so much money for his pedigree specimen. It was a simple operation to replace one of the many unused monster programs with the Alsatian. He clicked the mouse one final time, and the dog appeared in his dosed circuit view. He sat back and watched. The dog sniffed the floor, its outline made harsh by the overhead strip-lights in the passageway. For a minute it pawed in a small, nervous circle, unsure of its new environment, the unfamiliar smells of the deep, stale air. Sub-Virt 2 had an artificial atmosphere, but until now it had served no purpose other than Spencer’s artistic satisfaction. Now he had made sure that the dog could smell, and that it would react accordingly. The dog skulked away out of the camera’s range, exploring its new territory.

Spencer programmed the cameras in the maze to switch whenever the dog went out of view, and for the rest of the day he watched enraptured, following his first visitor around the premises. He already had a program of accurate models of excreta -it had been something of an obsession during his research into the DirtTM program, and the dog spent most of the first few hours marking corners with its scent in this way. It did seem genuinely interested - Spencer was flattered. But after a few hours of fruitless sniffing and rummaging, the dog grew visibly unhappy. It slumped in a corner and fell asleep, growling softly in canine dreams. Spencer trained the camera on it and waited. There was still an estimated 200km of tunnels left unexplored. The dog’s image wavered under some slight interference. The cameras were designed to do that. Spencer listened to the silence.

day six

Spencer woke to find the dog desperately licking moisture from the walls of one of the upper corridors. It must have woken during the night. At 8:44am he realized what was wrong when the doorbell failed to ring again: there was no food or water for the dog. It was a crisis. For Spencer knew he could not bring himself to materialize meat inside the labyrinth, nor would he directly alter the dog’s behavioural program to negate the need to eat. The purity of his underground world had been compromised once. That was okay; the dog seemed to be a fittingly sombre inhabitant for the maze. But how to get food in? It couldn’t be done. If he could maybe program a virtual burger delivery-person who might enter the maze from the top…but no. Spencer couldn’t allow all the things he was trying to keep outside to just walk into his private world. Unthinkable. And too expensive anyway, for the sort of detail that Spencer would insist on.

So he sat there, fasting, watching the dog starve.

After a few hours the dog set up a furious howling and didn’t stop. It ran madly down random corridors, eating its own shit, whimpering in corners, trying to jump up at the camera in search of any extreme nourishment Spencer watched, helplessly.

Towards evening the dog began to run out of energy, and settled to desultory wall-licking. It was going to die. Spencer had made sure that it could die, and now he couldn’t stop it. He had developed a lot of affection for the dog, but he couldn’t find any justifiable way of re-opening the system. Half in sympathy, half through forgetfulness, Spencer didn’t eat that day. The dog vanished into one of the few unmonitored corridors where the cameras had bust, in accordance with probability. It made no sound, and didn’t emerge for hours. Spencer worried. He knew that it would be a slow death. There was plenty of water dripping down the walls for the dog to drink. The dog would gradually starve. Spencer watched clouds of faint dust illuminated by the strip-lights dance in a filmy curtain across the passageway. Round the next corner the dog hid, invisible. Spencer glided his hands over the fantastic surfaces of his keyboard and workstation, letting the calm of their matt finish enter him.

day seven

In an area of dead space surrounding the whole net-world, a burger bar delivery-person rang Spencer’s doorbell at 8:43 but got no answer. The burgers were thrown to the pavement, as the delivery-person left the scene. In four minutes they were cold. Within twenty they had decomposed into unrecognizable mush, where they would fail to provide sustenance for even the lowliest denizens of the outside.

In an area of dead space, at the end of a lonely dead-end tunnel, the Alsatian fed voraciously, before wandering off to sleep in its vast and ultimately safe territory. Within hours the many species of bacteria that Spencer had painstakingly downIoaded into the Sub-Virt 2 program began the task of decomposing the unidentifiable remains of the human corpse.

John Greenwood