Doughnut Read online

  “Yes.”

  “With a tablespoon?”

  “Yes.”

  Max looked hurt. He was so very good at it. “Well, tough,” he said, “because all the spoons in these parts are made of wood, and they’d snap. You’ll just have to wait till we get home. Which won’t,” he added firmly, “be long now. Will it?”

  Theo made an exasperated gesture. “Max, you arsehole,” he said, “what are you doing here? You should be on the Disney planet.”

  “Which is exactly where I would be,” Max replied angrily, “if it’d been up to you. And chances are, I’d have been Tigger-fodder by now, so it’s just as well I used a bit of initiative and escaped, isn’t it?”

  “Max—”

  “And why exactly are you trying to get these innocent, Arcadian people to abandon their sustainable, eco-friendly technology and start building gas engines? What harm did they ever do to you?”

  “Max.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up.”

  First time in their joint lives it actually worked. Even then, Max’s reaction was to sulk. He folded his arms and sat down. “Max.”

  “Hm?”

  “For pity’s sake, how did you get off the Disney planet? You didn’t have any of the kit. No YouSpace bottle, nothing.”

  Max did one of his insufferable smirks. “Oh, that,” he said. “I just used my head, that’s all.”

  “Makes sense. It’s big enough, God knows. What did you do?”

  “Oh, I was really brave,” Max said. “You remember where you abandoned me, in that cave? Well, after a while I couldn’t stand it any more, so one night I sneaked out, walked to the village, somehow managed to creep past the heavily armed guards without getting shot, broke into a bakery store and stole a doughnut. It was still pitch dark and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, so I dragged myself all the way back to the cave. As soon as the sun rose, I looked though the hole in the doughnut, just like you told me to, and guess what happened? Nothing.” He gave Theo a furious scowl, then went on, “Absolutely nothing at all.”

  “Max—”

  “So I asked myself,” Max went on, “is my dear brother playing funny games with me, or is it just he’s so stupid he can’t even—?”

  “Doughnuts don’t work like that,” Theo said wretchedly. “It’d have worked for me, because the bottle was user-specific, but I’d have had to take you with me. And anyhow, the bottle’s broken now, so it wouldn’t work at all.”

  “Theo.” Max blinked twice. “I know drivelling’s what you do best, but there’s a time and a place for everything, so please stop. Thanks,” he went on, before Theo could explain his explanation, “but I’d sort of gathered the doughnuts weren’t working. So I had to think of something else.”

  “What?”

  Max’s face suddenly changed. For Theo, who’d known him for so very long, it was quite an extraordinary moment; almost as if Max had cut himself, to reveal blinking coloured lights and circuitry under his skin. “I’m not sure, really,” he said. “To be absolutely honest, it wasn’t anything to do with me. I was sitting on the floor of the cave, wondering what I’d done to deserve being shafted and abandoned by my own brother—”

  “Max.”

  “When suddenly,” Max went on, “there was the most amazing bang, dust started coming down from the roof, and a huge great hole appeared in the floor. It must’ve caught me off balance, because the next thing I knew was, I’d fallen through the hole and landed on one of those ghastly see-through sidewalks they’ve got around here. And I’ve been here ever since,” he concluded, “settling in and becoming really rather popular, though I say so myself. Mind you, wherever I go, people just seem to like me. It’s a gift.”

  Theo opened his mouth, but no words seemed to want to come out and play.

  “Oh, and there’s one other thing,” Max went on. “Doesn’t actually seem to matter particularly much, but it’s still as weird as a dozen ferrets in a blender. Take a look at this.”

  He took his left hand out of his pocket and extended it, fingers splayed. The centre of his palm was translucent.

  At last, Theo found a word. It was, “Um.”

  “Theo?” Max narrowed his eyes. “I can tell from your face you’re not quite as surprised as you ought to be. Does it mean something? What?”

  Before Theo could find a way of not answering, the door flew open. Theo swung round and saw the man he’d first encountered when he arrived. He was scowling at them, either through barely controlled rage or because of the strain of holding a powerful-looking catapult at full draw.

  “That’s him,” the man said. “Get him.”

  Half a dozen men in green smocks, also wielding catapults, pushed past him, grabbed Theo and shoved him up against the wall. The room was filling with people. Max tried to make a discreet exit, but they grabbed him too, although rather more politely. In the squash, Theo could just see the girl who’d found him. She looked furiously angry.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” someone said.

  The crowd parted to let through a very old man, leaning on a stick. He tottered forward and examined Theo’s face through a lens on a piece of string round his neck. Then he glanced down at the ancient scrap of paper he held in his left hand. It was a newspaper clipping.

  “Yes,” the old man said eventually, “that’s him all right. That’s Theo Bernstein.”

  There was a deafening roar of angry voices, abruptly cut short when the old man raised his hand. “Well?” the old man said.

  Theo nodded. “Yes, I’m Theo Bernstein,” he said. “But how did you—?”

  The rest of the sentence was washed away by the surge of horrified gasps. “You admit it.”

  “Well, yes.”

  The girl burst into tears. Several catapults creaked ominously. “You’re the Theo Bernstein who blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider?”

  Sigh. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “He admits it,” someone yelled. “What’re we waiting for? Chuck him off the edge, quick.”

  But the old man shook his head, and the crowd calmed down a little. Then someone said, “This can’t be right, you know. All that stuff happened a thousand years ago. He doesn’t look a thousand years old.”

  The old man gave the speaker a withering stare. “In fact, the explosion took place two hundred and seventy-three years ago.”

  “All right, he doesn’t look three hundred. It can’t have been him.”

  “Look at the picture,” the old man said angrily, brandishing the clipping under the sceptic’s nose. “It’s him, it’s the same man.”

  “And he’s admitted it,” someone else called out. “Quit fooling around and chuck the bastard, before he blows all of us up as well.”

  This suggestion met with considerable popular support, but the old man hadn’t finished yet. “Just to make sure,” he said, and turned to Theo once again. “You freely and sincerely admit that it was you who blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider?”

  “Yes. Well, if you’d asked me that this time yesterday I’d have said yes, no question, but since then I have reason to believe that—” He looked round and decided not to try explaining about what Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz had told him Pieter might’ve done. They didn’t seem to be in the mood. “Yup,” he said. “It was me.”

  This time the old man didn’t have to impose silence. Everybody seemed too stunned to speak.

  “You blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider,” the old man repeated solemnly, “thereby causing the ecological catastrophe that made our world uninhabitable and forcing the survivors of our race to forsake the surface and adopt this wretched, primitive existence among the clouds.”

  “Yes – I mean, what? I didn’t—”

  A deafening chorus of booing and jeers, which the old man had some difficulty in damping down. In the end he had to stamp his little foot. “You didn’t realise,” the old man said scornfully. “Well, perhaps you didn’t. I’m inclined to doubt that, tho
ugh. After all, there’s the evidence of the note.”

  “Note? What note?”

  “The note you left,” the old man said grimly, “on your desk at the Institute, written in your own distinctive, very untidy handwriting.” From his pocket he produced another piece of yellow, crumbling paper. “Would you like me to read it to you? It says—” The old man cleared his throat. “I did it to rescue my brother Max. Mr Bernstein,” the old man went on, folding the paper and putting it away. “That sounds very much like a confession to me.”

  Uproar. The girl, in floods of tears, was yelling, “Chuck him! Push him off the edge!” Then the man who’d been there when they arrived roared for quiet, and everybody stopped shouting.

  “That other man,” he said. “When they met, just now. That one called him Max.”

  Suddenly, every eye in the room shifted to the far corner, where Max was trying unsuccessfully to hide behind a very small chair. “That’s what he said. He said, hello, Max. I heard him.”

  The old man’s eyes were bulging out of his head. “Is it true?” he demanded breathlessly. “Is this Max?”

  “Um.”

  “Well?”

  Theo took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “No, it isn’t. I thought it was, but it’s definitely not. I never saw this man before in my life.”

  The old man gripped his shirt front with both hands. “You’re sure about that, are you?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Don’t know why I ever thought it was him. For a start, my brother Max was quite good looking.”

  Theo glanced at his brother, who was clearly torn between wanting to be good looking and fear of death. It was touch and go for a moment. Then Max said, “He’s right. I never met him before. He’s definitely not my brother.”

  The old man squinted at him. “How would you know?” he said quietly. “You’ve lost your memory.”

  That seemed to settle the issue. They hauled Max out of his corner and frogmarched him and Theo out of the hut on to the invisible walkway. They were chanting, “Horrible! Horrible!” Theo had no idea how many of them there were, but it was considerably more than six.

  They pushed them forward until their feet were right on the edge. The wind sawed at Theo’s face, sharp as a blade.

  Oh well, Max said inside his head. You tried.

  He turned and looked at his brother. It was a little late to forgive him now, but –

  Just not hard enough. Typical. You always were a useless bastard.

  Then something nudged the small of his back, and he toppled and fell.

  It occurred to Theo, as he fell and fell and fell and fell, that if he’d had his wits about him he’d have pointed out that, since he’d lost his memory too, nothing he’d said by way of admission or confession could be taken as reliable evidence, and all of it should therefore be disregarded. Or, if they were suddenly prepared to admit such evidence, at the very least they’d have to listen to Max when he told them he’d never met Theo before. It was, he felt, a pretty good point, and it was a real shame he couldn’t go back up there and make it.

  You wouldn’t think you could get bored falling to your death, but it all depends on how far you have to go. Usually, it’s just ten or twelve storeys, and you’ve only just got time to do the engulfed-with-terror thing and blurt out a quick blanket repentance of sins before you touch down and lose a dimension. But when it’s a really, really long drop, there’s a definite risk of ennui. Theo watched his past life flash in front of him, which took up maybe a second and was thoroughly depressing. He had his moment of regret about the unmade losing-his-memory argument. He turned his scientist’s brain on to figuring out clever ways of surviving a drop from twenty thousand feet and came to the conclusion there weren’t any. He hated Max – that used up a whole second and a third. And then he simply ran out of things to do. Not good enough, he felt. On a trip this long, the very least they could do was serve a simple meal and screen an in-fall movie.

  It was only when he was very nearly there, and the wild blue sea was plainly visible below him, so close that he could see the white beard of froth on each tumultuous wave, that an idea struck him and made him gasp. Even while it was flashing through his brain like electric current across a sparkplug, he couldn’t help howling with rage and fury at the inopportuneness of it all. Ten minutes earlier, and he’d have had the answers to everything, the whole bloody stupid mess, at his fingertips – in time, just possibly, to sort it out and get himself and his worthless brother to safety. As it was –

  Theo sat up.

  He’d got water in his eyes, his ears and up his nose. He coughed violently and spat out a mouthful of it. On all sides, the waves rippled and heaved.

  He was in a bath.

  And why not? It was, after all, water, and everything is just a matter of scale…

  No! He shuddered with rage, slopping water over the side and on to the floor (carpeted in a sort of neutral beige). It’s not fair, it’s not right, I shouldn’t be sitting in a warm tub engulfed in patchouli-scented suds, I should be dead –

  He played that last phrase back and decided he was overdoing the moral indignation just a little bit. Even so, he was genuinely angry. He was a scientist, dammit. Inexplicable phenomena – magic, he glossed scornfully – just wasn’t on, even if it saved him from a watery grave.

  He lay back and stared at his little pink toes, which rose up out of the froth like ten bashful mermaids. I was falling. They shoved me off the edge, and I fell. I hit the water and here I am.

  Which reminded him. He sat up, and caught sight of something on the white-wood-chipped wall. It was a framed embroidered sampler, which read –

  You Are Here.

  No map, just the words. Ah well.

  He completed the survey, which revealed a heated towel rail, over which was draped a white towelling robe with a YS monogram on the pocket. He did a double-take, then, as the implications sank in, breathed a long sigh of relief. YS could only stand for YouSpace. In which case, this environment was something to do with the program (or, as he preferred to think of it, Pieter’s fault) and he wasn’t dead and in some sort of ghastly, logic-defying, scientifically impossible, Dawkins-baiting afterlife –

  – And, now he came to think of it, he was safe, and well, and not in the slightest bit drowned, and Max was nowhere to be seen. He let out a long, long sigh of sheer joy and flopped backwards, shooting a tidal wave of suds over the bath rim and on to the floor. I’m alive, he realised. That’s really quite nice, actually.

  The joy didn’t evaporate. It faded very slowly and gradually, roughly at the same rate as the bathwater cooled, from snugly warm to tepid to blood heat, until he decided it was time to (a) get on with the rest of his life, and (b) get out of the bath before he caught his death of cold. He put on the bathrobe, pushed open the door and found himself on a landing, opposite a door. He pushed that open too. He saw a small, nondescript room with two old, comfy-looking armchairs, a slightly out-of-shape sofa, a TV set and no windows. He shrugged and went in.

  The TV set was on. It was broadcasting soft white noise and showing black and white lines, but when he walked in front of it, the noise stopped and the screen turned blue. Then text started to roll up it, Star Wars intro fashion, while an orchestral arrangement of ‘Killing Me Softly’ played in the background –

  Muted congratulations!

  If you’re reading this, you’ve found the YouSpace Clubhouse. Welcome!

  The YouSpace Clubhouse is a facility provided free of charge exclusively to YouSpace users. If you are not a registered YouSpace customer, please leave now through the door in the west wall. To make the door appear, say Door.

  About The YouSpace Clubhouse. The YouSpace Clubhouse is available to all YouSpace users as a communal area, social networking arena and leisure and recreational facility. To access the Clubhouse, input Clubhouse into your personal interface module.

  Why Muted Congratulations? We note that you didn’t enter the YouSpace Clubhouse using your personal in
terface module. Therefore, you have accessed the YouSpace Clubhouse using the LastChance™ facility, an integral part of the YouSpace program.

  About LastChance. LastChance™ is a function of FailSafe™ For YouSpace, the pre-installed YouSpace personal safety manager. If, during your YouSpace experience, you should encounter a situation inevitably resulting in certain death (such as, for example, getting killed) YouSpace will automatically transfer you to the YouSpace Clubhouse during the last fraction of a microsecond of your existence. Since linear time does not pass inside YouSpace, you can now exist indefinitely within the YouSpace Clubhouse. While here, feel free to enjoy the wide range of leisure and educational facilities and gourmet cuisine provided for your comfort and wellbeing. Please note, however, that should you leave the YouSpace clubhouse (by walking through the door in the west wall accessible by saying Door; see above) you will immediately die. Please note that LastChance™ and FailSafe™ are registered trademarks of PVG Enterprises (Holdings) Inc.

  Theo’s mouth opened in a silent, wordless scream. He staggered, backed awkwardly until he bumped into one of the armchairs, and collapsed into it. For a long time, he could do nothing but sit, staring at the screen, trying to find a handhold that’d help him climb out of the well shaft of horror and despair he found himself in. Not alive after all, a voice kept saying in his head. True; and not dead, either. Instead, stuck in perpetual standby mode, in a small living room with light blue wallpaper and a slightly tatty beige carpet.

  Finally, after a great deal of frantic scrabbling, slipping and falling back, he found the handhold, clung to it and hauled himself back up into the daylight of partial hope. True, he was as good as dead, trapped in a horrendous Sartre-esque nightmare of grotesque semi-existence, from which there was no way out other than total oblivion. But, he told himself fervently, it could have been so much worse, given the circumstances of his arrival. He might (he shivered from head to toe) have been trapped in this godawful place for ever and ever with Max –

  “Theo?”

  This time, the scream was neither silent nor wordless. True, the word was only “Nooooo!”, but that was the best he could do by way of eloquence under the circumstances.