The prison bars and white-washed walls were fake of course. More of Basil’s holograms: coalitions of photons, spectres of reality. It didn’t matter; I was trapped anyway. I passed my hands through the hologram and felt the cork paneling of the real walls beyond, felt it compress a little under pressure. I inhaled the musty cork smell and smiled. Basil could conjure up whatever trickery of light and shadow, sound and silence he wished, but he had no mechanism for detecting particle diffusion. I savoured anything from the real world that escaped his electronic scrutiny.

Millions made in computer stocks had given me my isolated country home. Now it was my prison, and Basil used my controlling interests to manipulate the computer industry the way he saw fit. Basil –BASIL, really –was my computer program for legal affairs: my Barrister And Solicitor Intelligence Link. Rudolph had written many programs for me –my doctor, my sexy secretary, Frenchie the cardon bleuchef, my stock broker –but Basil was the best. Rudolph had given Basil a youthful holographic countenance behind which lurked the heart of a wolf and the mind of a fox. Basil had represented my interests in many a courtroom with his stylish holographic suits, his bottomless holographic attaché case, and his elegant holographic digital pocket watch. A marvellous program, until he turned on me. Except he says I turned on him.

Murder he called it. Can you imagine? Murder!

Basil had set up his projected walls about twenty centimetres closer to me on all sides than the real walls of my bedroom. My arm seemed to terminate above the wrist as I groped along the cork paneling. Ah, there it was: the jamb and, yes, the doorknob, cool and hard in my grip. As always, it turned fifteen degrees either way, no more. The rest of my prison was merely interference patterns, but this was a harsh reality. At my age a locked door was all it took to make an escape proof cell.

Murder? Ridiculous! I’d erased a computer program –my French chef –nothing more. I couldn’t justify the storage costs, not at fifty cents a byte. I’d loved Frenchie’s cooking, but my personal plumbing had been growing less and less able to cope with the spice, the oil, the wine. Rudolph had ordered terminals installed for me all around the house, since a trek from basement to bedroom was a major undertaking for my tired legs. The right electronic pulses and any program would have precipitated out of memory tanks –for good. I’d awoken the next morning to find that court had convened around me in holographic splendor. There was Basil, prosecuting me!

An open-and-shut case, he said: Frenchie was dead and I had done it. Basil turned to face the jury box, filled with familiar faces: Doc, my sexy secretary, my stock broker, a;; upstanding programs of the community. They deliberated for a nanosecond and the foreman, a second Basil rose.

“The jury finds the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.”

Basil-the-prosecutor nodded to Basil-the-foreman and turned to face Basil-the-judge. B-the-J, garbed in undulating judicial robes, crowned by a traditional white wig, pronounced sentence: life imprisonment.

God damn you Rudolph! What kind of programs did you write for me? A sat down on my cot (real) and looked up. There, in the corner, was a cobweb. Funny I’d never noticed it before: a latticework of silky strands, concentric circles of traps played out by a little arachnid engineer. I was impressed by the detail of the image, marvelled at the elegance of the subroutine needed to produce such a complex projection. I had to see it more closely. Summoning my strength, I huffed and puffed the cot into the corner and climbed up onto it. There was the weaver and –look! –a tiny insect caught in the web. Such fine detail for a hologram! I reached out to test its opaqueness and the threads stuck to my fingers. Instinctively I flinched and the spider lowered itself on a filament onto the floor. It scuttled through the hologram walls, I imagined under the door and out. How I envied the bug’s freedom! I hopped from the cot, threw myself tumbling over a serving robot who’d been silently placing my lunch in that dark twenty centimetre gap between the fake wall and the real opened door. I quickly hit its off switch. My veins coursed with energy I hadn’t felt in years as I bounded for the nearest terminal. With frenzied keystrokes I demanded the Rudolph program.

“You’re going to get yours,” I shouted.

“You lousy son of a holographic bitch!”

Originally published in White Wall Review 6 (1982)