Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  From the pages of The Record, a near-dystopian vision of England emerged. The country was overrun, under threat, increasingly incapable. Hordes of immigrants massed at its borders. Its infrastructure frayed at the seams. Basic morality was eroding at an alarming rate, worn down by tolerance, permissiveness, turpitude. Darkin found this both terrifying and reassuring. Like any long-standing Record reader, he read not to have his fears assuaged, but to have them confirmed.

  If you believed The Record, there was no such thing as an honest politician, only a succession of swindling careerists clinging to the Westminster bubble. Every so often, The Record would proclaim one, lone politician to be different – so different, in fact, that they were barely a politician at all. This time around, that man was Hugo Bennington, vocal rising member of England Always, a once-ridiculed but determinedly plucky party making a surprising noise in parts of the country, such as Edmundsbury, hitherto ignored by the self-serving shitshow of London-centric political wheeler-dealing. That The Record had decided to endorse Bennington so unequivocally was, even to Darkin, little surprise. Bennington had written a column for The Record for a number of years, and still did so. That Darkin was particularly enamoured with Bennington despite a long period of profound political disinterest was also little surprise. Not only was Bennington Darkin’s favourite columnist, he was also, as Bennington himself so often reminded everyone, a local lad, born and bred. There was no beating around the bush with Bennington, no political correctness or fashionable concession. He called it like he saw it, and did so in a language you didn’t need a master’s degree in bullshit to understand.

  This morning, Bennington was on good form. His last column had been about Muslims. This one was about equality.

  Let’s begin, dear reader, with a quick test. Answer me honestly.

  Equality: is it a good or a bad thing?

  Easy, right? I bet you had to think for all of half a second before you were able to answer me with absolute certainty. Why, equality’s a good thing, Hugo! And I agree. Of course equality’s a good thing.

  But what if I put the question another way? What if I asked you instead: Is there such a thing as too much equality?

  In this country, housing is scarcer than it has ever been, yet immigration continues to rise. Unemployment among working Britons still isn’t coming down fast enough, yet time and again we hear that companies must have quotas to ensure that for every white Englishman they employ they must also hire three foreigners, two women, and at least one homosexual. Doesn’t matter who’s more qualified for the job. Equality says you have to hire ‘equally’.

  Anyone who reads this column knows how strongly I believe in tolerance, just as I believe in fairness. It’s only right that we should try to share what we have with those who have less. But what we have in Britain now is a society that asks those who work to share their earnings with those who scrounge; those who have grown up here to share their hard-fought space with those who have just arrived; and those who deserve their place to share it with those who merely envy it. This is the real cost of equality run riot: a Britain in which there is nothing left to share.

  It was rousing stuff. Darkin only had to look around him to see the proof of Hugo’s point. What was there left to share? Simply because he couldn’t see the people who’d profited from his loss, didn’t mean they weren’t out there, creeping closer, eyeing what little Darkin had left.

  A knock at the door startled him. They were probably, he thought grimly, already here.

  *

  Deepa’s office was just along the corridor from Jess’s, but it was effectively a different world. Jess’s workspace was bare, almost anonymous; Deepa’s teemed with her preoccupations. Photos covered the entire wall beside the door and had crept across to consume much of the space around the window. Above her desk, the pictures were three or four deep, curling at the edges and pulling away from their pins. Huge-breasted, sad-eyed twenty-somethings beckoned the viewer towards their chat and cam sites; naked couples assumed by-the-numbers positions in a series of spartan bedrooms; late-middle-aged women in retrograde lingerie promised, in lurid fonts, that they were just around the corner and desperate to fuck.

  The visuals were at odds with the audio. Online for around eighteen hours a day, then struggling to sleep for two, then asleep for perhaps three before battling to wake for the hour that remained, Deepa had developed a range of coping strategies for her digital burnout, one of which was a growing addiction to the accidental ASMR of premodern artisanal activity. As Jess sipped her coffee and tried to avoid the gaze of the massed, anonymous women on the walls, and Deepa scrunched her unshod toes into the carpet (another wind-down technique), Deepa’s computer speakers emitted the continuous and arrhythmic sound of chisel on stone. Deepa claimed these hour-long, unwavering streams of analogue endeavour relaxed her, and her collection appeared to be vast. During other visits, Jess had been subjected to thirty solid minutes of someone turning the pages of a book, or what seemed like an infinite loop of someone patiently sanding some wood.

  ‘So he was, what?’ said Deepa, staring at her feet as they gripped the carpet. ‘He was reading web addresses.’

  ‘And times and dates.’

  ‘Like an internet history.’

  ‘But with finer detail. There was part of what sounded like an email.’

  Deepa said nothing. She was still looking at her feet. Deepa’s attention was a complex and often conflicted thing. In much the same way as she never had fewer than ten browser tabs open, she rarely had fewer than four possible loci of focus and thought either. Jess had long ago given up trying to get her full attention and now accepted that Deepa was usually listening, even when she appeared to have no real awareness that Jess was there.

  ‘It was the mask though,’ said Jess.

  ‘I liked the mask,’ said Deepa vaguely.

  ‘It didn’t creep you out?’

  Deepa shrugged, then raised her naked foot to Jess’s face and wiggled her unvarnished toes.

  ‘Do these look normal to you?’

  ‘These what? You mean your toes?’

  ‘My toes, but more specifically my toe nails.’

  ‘They look … I mean, what do non-normal toenails look like?’

  Deepa put her foot back on the floor and turned to her computer.

  ‘Deepa, no,’ said Jess. ‘I don’t need to see—’

  But it was too late. Deepa had already image-searched abnormal toenails and now Jess was being confronted with a gallery of ingrown, fungal, cancerous, and untrimmed, talon-like toenails.

  ‘Deepa, for fuck’s sake. No. OK? Your toenails do not look like any of those toenails.’

  ‘You don’t think they’re kind of … thin? Or papery?’

  Deepa’s extraordinary capacity for digital information came with a range of side effects. The sleeplessness was probably the major symptom, but in the last few months hypochondria had been playing rapid catch-up. She had Web MD bookmarked. Every itch and ache was cross-referenced. In the past fortnight alone, she’d diagnosed herself with three new ailments.

  ‘I was talking about the mask, Deepa.’

  Jess had learned, through trial and error, the complex rhythm of acknowledgement and disregard Deepa required. She became irritated when ignored, but if you followed her distractions too far, the wormhole could prove bafflingly deep.

  ‘It was … I wouldn’t say blurred,’ said Deepa, her toes now momentarily forgotten but the search results still sadly tiled behind her, ‘but indistinct somehow.’

  ‘Maybe a mask made from a poor-quality image?’ said Jess, nodding towards the photographs over Deepa’s desk.

  But Deepa was done with the mask idea. Instead, she’d picked up one of the flyers left behind by the man at the party.

  ‘What don’t you want to share?’ she read. ‘Maybe a blackmail thing?’

  ‘I’m going to be very seriously fucked off if this turns out to be some kind of PR stunt,’ said Jess.

  ‘I
t probably will,’ said Deepa. ‘Everything does.’

  Jess’s brief nod in the direction of Deepa’s collaged image-library had now distracted her. She found the effect of all these layered stares unnerving – a visual white noise that was hard to ignore.

  ‘How’s this going?’ she said.

  ‘It’s endless,’ said Deepa. ‘I’ve abandoned all definitions of progress.’

  Deepa’s research was into what she called Digital Figurants – images of anonymous women long detached from their owners and now folded into the scenery and libidinal economy of the web – either used, siren-like, to lure lonely, late-night browsers onto the rocks of malware-heavy porn sites, or fashioned via 4chan into their own kind of currency; grouped into multi-gig archives and afforded value through erotic exchange. Her project was one of re-identification. She found these women, named them, and allowed them to talk. In doing so, she argued, something personal, something human, was reclaimed from the web’s imagistic swamp. It was both an opposite and complementary angle to that taken by Jess. For Deepa, the dislocation of image from identity was traumatic, abusive. For Jess, the deliberate creation of an identity gleefully unhinged from both the body and the personality that created it was liberating, rebellious. The point at which they met was exactly the space that other theorists contested: the blurry interstice between the real and the virtual, the online world and its unplugged counterpart.

  Deepa typed the web address from the flyer into her browser. The words WE ARE YOUR FACE filled the screen. Behind them, what appeared to be random images flickered at high speed: screen grabs of porn; time codes; an email inbox; snatches of forum chat. The effect was strobe-like, disorienting.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Suspiciously intriguing.’

  Jess nodded wearily. It was something they often talked about: the uncanny, almost wizardly brilliance of viral marketing; the creeping feeling that only something boring could be relied upon to be serious.

  Deepa was still peering at the website.

  ‘I don’t get all this public stuff,’ she said. ‘Why bother getting everyone in one place? If you’re doing something that’s genuinely underground or outsider, why risk being caught or identified? Seems kind of long-winded and resource-heavy to me.’

  ‘Bringing us back to something corporate.’

  They watched the screen quietly for a few seconds. Bits of breast; an erect cock; a credit card receipt; emails redacted with thick black lines.

  ‘People are sniffing around,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Around this?’

  ‘Around you.’

  ‘Well, no-one knows anything except you,’ said Jess.

  ‘Precisely the problem,’ said Deepa. ‘It’s starting to raise eyebrows.’

  Jess nodded. ‘Point taken. I’ll come up with something.’

  Deepa flopped back in her chair and placed her feet on her desk, where Jess, whose brain had not yet expunged the worm of doubt deposited there by Deepa, now stared at them, wondering if indeed the toenails were normal.

  ‘I say this as your friend and colleague …’ Deepa said.

  ‘Oh God, you only ever say that when you’re about to say something I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘I’m worried, that’s all.’

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

  Deepa replied with a simple look. Jess laughed. She put her coffee cup down and stood up.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘On that note.’

  Deepa nodded at the computer screen. ‘I’ll have a little play with this if I get time,’ she said. ‘One of us should probably look into it anyway.’

  Jess’s office was three doors down from Deepa’s, along a fiercely bright, frosted-glass corridor that ran along the front of the private research institute in which they worked. After the softer light of Deepa’s room, the glare was slightly unnerving.

  Jess’s workspace contained almost nothing: a computer, a notebook, a shelf displaying only the most obvious and expected texts. The few clues to Jess’s life and work wore their good taste as a disguise: three Cindy Sherman self-portraits along the back wall, a Japanese Noh mask over the desk.

  She looked at the mask, noting the resonances it conjured in her psyche: the flat, sad gazes of the anonymous women in Deepa’s office; the woozy, rubbery blankness of the man at the party.

  We are your face, she thought. What don’t you want to share?

  She threw a few essentials into her bag, shut down her computer, and stepped out into the hallway, locking her office door behind her.

  Jess wasn’t sure when the architectural love affair with glass was going to come to an end but whenever it was it wouldn’t be soon enough. As politics and commerce had become murkier, so the buildings in which vital transactions took place had become ever more resplendently clear, as if recognising that in the flattened homogeneity of the present all actions, both benign and malicious, now looked the same: a squint at a screen, a series of keystrokes, the choreography of global espionage now no different to the microritual of online shopping.

  Cocooned in her car, cigarette lit, window down, she turned the key in the ignition and backed with excessive assertion out of her parking space. At the barrier, she had to use her swipe card to exit. This, Jess thought, was the cognitive dissonance of working at a research facility so heavily funded by a corporate monolith like Green. On one level, there was more intellectual freedom than at any of the country’s failing, intellectually incapacitated universities. She didn’t have to teach, for one, and although there was an expectation that she publish at least occasionally, there was none of the driving pressure to justify her work or make it profitable. As a result she could, when she was deeply immersed in what she was doing, just about convince herself that she was operating independently. But then she would leave her office, and be reminded once again that although her research wasn’t always as closely monitored as it could have been, she was arguably more observed than at any other time of her life. This was why so much of her work was done off site: to keep it safe, keep it hers. Because who knew in what ways Green might, one day, decide to follow up on their gift of funding?

  Either side of her, the woodland that ringed Edmundsbury’s outer edge began to blur, revealing itself not so much as nature but as a glitch in her optical experience of nature – a screen-smear of something once organic. She imagined she was moving not along a road but through fibre-optic cable, distilled to an infra-red essence. She had a fantasy that this was what happened when you died: you became pure data, informational light travelling at reeling speed, not quite free but fast enough to feel so.

  Situated almost in the centre of town, Jess’s destination – Nodem – had been founded by two self-proclaimed ‘techno-bedouins’ called Zero and One as a reaction against what they saw as the increasing corporatisation of both the web and the infrastructure on which it depended. As far as Zero and One were concerned, privacy was a life-or-death issue, so much so that they had renounced their names in favour of interchangeable binaries. Hooked up to its own off-grid server, and with not just each individual terminal but also the whole enterprise routed en masse through enough layers of encryption and redirection to send even the most hardened practitioner of online espionage screaming into the distance, Nodem aimed to couple that most antiquated of institutions – the internet café – with that most contemporary of demands – internet access that wasn’t monetised, monitored, and morally compromised. It was staffed, on principle, only by Zero and One. No-one had any idea how they were making enough money to stay open. The only people who used the place were the three or four most paranoid people in town.

  ‘Hey,’ said either Zero or One as Jess walked in. Zero and One’s names were indeterminate: they swapped them in order to maintain their anonymity.

  ‘Why don’t you take, er …’ One (or Zero) gestured with unnecessary specificity towards the corner of the completely empty room. ‘Terminal three.’

  ‘Great,’ said Jess.

  ‘Brownie
? Coffee?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Both.’

  Zero/One wiped his hands on his apron, on which was written I Don’t Need GPS to Find My Moral North, and disappeared through the beaded curtain at the back in search of provisions.

  Jess located terminal three and sat down. Nodem was, somewhat incongruously given its supposedly bleeding-edge manifesto of contemporary anonymity, rather homely. Its smell – over-baked brownie; wickedly strong coffee; dust warmed and singed on its journey through multiple CPU heat sinks – was soothingly familiar, its scavenged, mismatched aesthetic strangely charming. The terminals spanned several eras. Keyboards rarely matched screens. Coffee, when it came, would be in a random mug. The brownie would be served on whatever flat-ish device of outmoded data storage happened to be to hand.

  She fired up her terminal and opened a browser. Zero and One’s custom-built operating system was notoriously precarious. Colours spontaneously switched places, random windows strung with forbidding-looking lines of code erupted at will in little clusters and then vanished. Freezes were common, as were grinding, interminable lags in the browser, no doubt due to every keystroke bouncing from Venezuela to Estonia and back again before triggering anything. At times, you could practically hear the hardware wheezing. But slowness was, as Zero or One would point out to anyone who expressed any irritation at the speed of their browser, the point. It was the very need for immediacy, by now hardwired into every inhabitant of the hyper-developed world, that had led to so many people unthinkingly abandoning privacy and anonymity in the name of convenience and rapidity.

  Regardless of whatever ideology of patience lay behind Nodem’s programming, being here too long made Jess uncomfortable. There was always, still, at this lingering, imminent moment as the little sand timer spun calmly in the centre of her screen and she waited for access, a complicated pinball game of emotions ricocheting around in her body. Excitement, a sense of daring, fear. Sometimes it was there from the moment she walked in; sometimes it arrived a little later. Then there was guilt, of course, and finally, always coming last no matter in what order the other emotions chose to announce themselves, a sense of grubbiness, almost shame.