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Mick Farren
THE FEELIES
This book is dedicated to the memory of the late Michael Dempsey who demonstrated that, on a bad night, it can take more than one Irishman to screw in a light bulb.
IT WAS THE THIRD TIME THAT JOHN Wilson Heffer had taken a feelie. The previous times, he had only been able to afford a twelve-hour quickie, but since his promotion and the raise that had gone with it, he had found himself in the position, subject to a certain adjustment in his spending habits, to splurge on the whole weekend package. He had been living out the life of Billy the Kid for the past twenty-eight hours and still had another twenty to go, culminating in the famous gunfight with Pat Garrett. Of course, history had been somewhat rearranged for the purpose of the feelie. In this version Billy survived and Garrett was ceremoniously carted off to Boot Hill by weeping whores and the mariachi band from the cantina. The idea of a feelie in which the subject died was unthinkable to Heffer. Only the most perverse entertained the desire to go through the experience of simulated death, and although there were rumors that it did circulate on the underground market, snuff software was extremely illegal.
Even with his raise and his scrimping, Heffer might not have been able to come up with the money for forty-eight hours in the Billy the Kid experience if it hadn't been on the weekend discount list. In the last couple of years, western adventures had fallen from favor, and very few new ones were being made at all. Public taste had changed, and the majority now went for psychedelic space fantasy, the incredibly violent Supersoldier series, and, of course, the fifty-seven hundred varieties of sex scenario that were in the catalog in a section all to themselves. John Wilson Heffer was a traditionalist. He prided himself that he had no time for trends and fads. He still liked the hot sun and the cool dark saloons and the wide-open spaces of the Old West. That wasn't to say that the western fantasies weren't without their share of both sex and violence. In the past twenty-eight hours, he had killed six men, made love to four women, two of them at the same time, drunk three bottles of whiskey, and won four hundred dollars in gold from three pistoleers and a dude in a fancy vest who had just come in off the stage. Unfortunately, he'd had to shoot two of the pistoleers in order to walk away with his wi
He was also aware, however, that hardly anything was perfect. In this case, it was the software. There was a serious imbalance in the sensory inputs. The audio was normal enough; but the olfactory and the tactile were way up, while the visual was right down, indistinct and muddy. The daytime on the streets was all glare and shimmer, while the nights in the saloons were dark, out of focus Rembrandts where he had to rely on impression rather than actual sight.
No matter how deeply he went into the fantasy, a small, objective part of his mind always remained apart from the adopted identity. It simply watched and observed. It was that part of him that was determined that he should say something once the experience was over. The feelie really wasn't good enough. Sure, he was enjoying himself, but that was hardly the point. It was a matter of principle. Once they'd laid you out in the plastic cabinet that was just a little too much like a coffin, co
It had been the smells that had hit him first. His own smell was less than pleasant: a mixture of acrid sweat, old leather, gun oil, and hot metal. The catalog had neglected to mention that Billy the Kid appeared to bathe on something like an a
The overloaded tactile inputs, on the other hand, were something else again. They gave everything a strange edge that, although uncomfortable at times, could also be extremely exhilarating. During the gunfights, when the Colt Peacemaker-an accurate replica of the Kid's own custom-made weapon, the one with the unusual curved, eagle-beak handle-bucked in his hand, the sensation made him feel close to godlike. And the women. In that area, he had no complaints about the tactile overload. Heffer's therapist had told him on a number of occasions that he was too much of a prude to truly enjoy himself, but in this instance, he had broken out and gone mindlessly wild. When he climbed the stairs with a saloon girl on each arm, he was moved to a previously unattainable level of physical delight. They were like a pair of bright-eyed, golden-ski
Billy the Kid/Heffer drank and whored through the long afternoon. In a feelie, the fictional principal never slept, and there were no bad aftereffects. The recipient, on the other hand, technically slept all the time; although his or her brain was racing, the body was under the impression that it was enjoying deep, untroubled REM sleep. Garrett was coming at sunset, and the whole town knew it. A hot, lazy tension was building. Little kids played in the street, antagonizing scorpions with burning twigs. Tongue-lolling dogs stretched out flat in patches of shade under the wooden sidewalk. Someone somewhere was playing a guitar, a mournful Spanish dirge in a minor key, all about love, betrayal, and murder. "The Flowers of Evil." Heffer found that he could understand the lyrics even though he normally couldn't speak a word of Spanish. Inside the cantina, the men of the town sat with their tequila and their slices of lime and watched him. He was the marked one. He was the one who might be dead before the darkness gathered. They watched him for any slip, a word or a look, a shake of the hand, anything that might be a sign of weakness or fear. Billy the Kid/Heffer laughed at them. He had the wild confidence of the young, reckless, and drunk. Pat Garrett, badge or no badge, wasn't going to be a problem.