Concrete corridors intermittently lit, travelling swiftly, we pass locked doors with glass windows. There are people I know in there but she will not let me stop and we push on. She is in a silver ski suit, and she moves fluidly, as if she were skiing. Down in a lift in silence, out again into another set of corridors and we're speeding past bright, familiar tags on the walls - FUME KNOWN INSA TEACH -: they have made a huge
piece of intricate
graffiti but I can't read it at this speed, we're gliding as if we were on
roller skates. We pass some strange little creatures travelling in the opposite direction: they're blue and look like smurfs and they're all talking frantically at once. I smile and point them out, but she doesn't hear me through the silver helmet and we keep going at the same
breakneck speed. Down a slight incline, round a corner, and here there are more doors. Magically we glide to a halt in front of one and she opens it.
"Here we are," she says, "this is yours."
And she leaves me. I look round the room. It's small and white, with a blue carpet. One wall is desk, purple sgi machines, monitors, racks of black oblongs with knobs and lights, mixers. Record boxes make patterns on the floor. It looks like my friend's old room, without the dust and gack. There's a comic lying open on the floor. I bend to look, and the pictures start to move, animated manga stylee. It's the girl in silver, she's the comic's heroine. The tale seems to go on and on: she's in a war with some of the little blue smurflike creatures i saw earlier. The drawings and animation are amazing, but the story is dull. I get bored and look away, and there's my friend F with two cups of tea.
"You like it?" he says, nodding at the comic. "I did it all in this," and points to the screen on his desk. I take the tea and look at the software: it looks like the old Alias Power Animator, but with 100 extra amazing menus I long to get at. In a motion capture window there's an image of the corridor as seen from the silvergirl's helmet, and the drawn line images of the comic are appearing at real-time speed, perfectly rendered in another window. I see the graffiti flash past, perfectly drawn. I say wow a lot. I want. He grins.
"Suppose you wanna copy, then?" he says with twinkling eyes, dangling a freshly burnt cd in front of me. I snatch, clutching it gleefully....
I wake up. Arse.