Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  Trina leaned forward and interlaced her fingers behind her neck, her forehead almost touching her knees.

  ‘You’ve used every part of me,’ she said. ‘Every single fucking facet of my life you’ve—’

  ‘Hey, spare me the pity party, OK? You should be flattered. People would kill for this.’

  ‘My home,’ she said. ‘My family. My personality. My identity.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Were you looking at my Twitter? Was that how the whole fucking Bennington farrago kicked off? Did you do that too?’

  ‘We didn’t make you send that tweet, did we?’

  ‘But given that I did?’

  ‘Your Twitter profile was a variable we kept an eye on. I’d be lying if I said that we didn’t see certain opportunities in—’

  ‘In turning me over to Teddy frigging Handler and Hugo Bennington? Bangstrom, there was a mob outside my house.’

  ‘I’ll be the first to admit that once England Always got involved things got kind of messy. But still. The data—’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about fucking data, Bangstrom. That was my life.’

  ‘Life is data, Trina. It’s just information assembled.’

  ‘Why tell me? Why tell me all this stuff? If your whole thing is that information is more valuable if it’s collected without the subject being aware, why let me in on what you’ve done?’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Bangstrom, ‘you wanted to know, and now you wish you didn’t know.’

  ‘At least when I didn’t know, I still believed in what I was doing,’ said Trina.

  ‘Tayz isn’t finished,’ said Bangstrom. ‘We need you to complete him. We thought about ways to do that without you knowing, but my feeling was that they were too limited. We’d come to the end of that phase. Now we’re in a new phase. Plus now we actually have a chance to map the complementary data. We’ve done not knowing, now we’re doing knowing. Simple, really.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said. ‘Fuck all of you. You smug, power-crazed fucking—’

  ‘You say you like you’re somehow not us,’ said Bangstrom.

  ‘I’m not you.’

  ‘I think Tayz would feel otherwise.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Tayz is a robot,’ she said. ‘Tayz can never be me.’

  ‘Everyone likes to think that,’ said Bangstrom. ‘But even if it were true, which, I reiterate, it isn’t, you’re still here. You’re still Inside The Building. Even if you walked out right now and never came back, which by the way you can’t, you’d still basically be here. You’d still be us.’

  ‘Why the fuck,’ Trina spat, ‘would I carry on here when you’ve wrecked my life?’

  ‘How have we wrecked your life? We’ve given you a better life. You’ve got a better job, a better place to live. This is an upgrade. Trina 2.0.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Shake your head all you like,’ said Bangstrom. ‘You know it’s true. And besides, you’re asking the question all wrong. You should be asking: why wouldn’t you want to work on this? This is going to change the world, Trina. You really don’t want to be a part of that? All your rhetoric about power and representation and opportunities, and then, when the chance comes along to be right at the heart of everything – literally, to be the change – you honestly expect me to believe you’ll just go, Oh, no thanks, I was happier when my work was meaningless? Come off it. No-one’s that principled. We know you, remember?’

  ‘I can still surprise you,’ she said.

  Bangstrom stepped back, arms spread. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Surprise me. I dare you.’

  Trina said nothing, just stared at her knees, numbed by what she knew, the walls of her No-Go room not so much pressing in as bearing down. This was her future, she thought: nothing more than her past with a thin overlay. The same screen, the same walls. Everything Bangstrom had told her was designed simply to trap her. Now she was NTK. The punishment for not knowing enough was to be told more than you wanted to know. Whatever she shared now, under her new contract, would endanger her. They’d even moved her family in, so that they could endanger them too. Maybe, she thought, she should have walked while she had the chance. But where would she have gone? She thought again about her tweet, about Bennington, about the future of the estate. She thought about systems that didn’t feel like systems, walled gardens within walled gardens, the engineered inability to distinguish freedom from control. Always, she thought, looking again at the blank, soundproofed walls of her No-Go room, they made you feel like you were breaking out, right up until the moment they put you back in the box.

  ‘You want me to surprise you,’ she said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘It’s the last thing left to model. What happens when people find out. What happens when ignorance becomes awareness. Mine’s the last response you need.’

  ‘And now we know,’ said Bangstrom. ‘We know what people do when they know.’

  ‘What do they do?’ said Trina.

  He spread his arms, gesturing to the walls of the No-Go room, briefly inviting a weird embrace.

  ‘They rush right back into our arms,’ he said.

  His smile, his expression of triumph, was one Trina would remember. Late at night, lying in bed, too terrified to sleep, her partners in ignorant slumber beside her, this was the face on which Trina would focus – the smile she would imagine herself erasing.

  Bangstrom turned to the door.

  ‘Take a week to move in,’ he said. ‘There’s no rush to start up here.’

  ‘Start what?’ she said as he reached the door and tapped his swipe card against the reader. ‘What am I even supposed to be doing?’

  The door clicked unlocked. He pushed it open an inch and turned back to her, still beaming.

  ‘Just be yourself,’ he said.

  *

  By the time she got to Deepa’s, it was beginning to rain. The thick, dark clouds that had congealed above the town threatened more than a passing shower. She chained her bike to the guttering and let herself in the front door using the key Deepa had given her. Deepa, it turned out, was finicky when it came to bikes in the hallway and the occasional streak of mud and grease on the wall. The bike had therefore been relegated to permanent outdoor status, another reminder that this was not, and would never be, Trina’s home.

  ‘Is that you?’ Deepa called from the kitchen. ‘We’re in here.’

  Deepa and Jess looked at her as she came in, unable to conceal their desire to interrogate her but just about able to restrain themselves from doing so. She flopped onto a chair and dropped her helmet onto the floor. Again, there was that comic-book sensation of her armour, her disguise, falling away. Only, now it was not so much liberating as terrifying. Even among friends, she felt exposed. She would always, now, feel exposed.

  ‘Well?’ said Deepa.

  They had teas or coffees in front of them on the table. For some reason, the simplicity of the arrangement struck Trina as incongruous.

  ‘I’m in,’ she said.

  ‘They offered you a contract?’ said Jess.

  Trina nodded. ‘I gave them Norbiton, like we talked about.’

  ‘I’ll let him know via Zero and One,’ said Deepa.

  Trina shook her head. ‘The whole thing,’ she said, ‘it’s …’ She tailed off, giving up on her attempt to say what it was.

  ‘Fucked,’ said Deepa.

  Trina nodded. ‘More than we thought,’ she said. ‘Worse than we thought.’

  ‘Everything’s all set up,’ said Jess. ‘Byron Stroud’s ready to leak whatever you give him.’

  ‘More than ready,’ said Deepa. ‘He’s got offers from every outlet going.’

  Jess shifted a little in her seat, as if her clothes were suddenly too tight, but said nothing.

  ‘It’ll be a while,’ said Trina. ‘I’ll have to bed in.’

  None of them had anything to add. Trina closed her eyes and tilted her head back.

  ‘Well,’ said Jess, ‘here
we are.’

  ‘Here we are and here we go,’ said Deepa.

  ‘All day I’ve been wondering how this was going to feel,’ said Jess.

  ‘And?’ said Deepa.

  ‘And I think it will be a long time before I know,’ said Jess.

  ‘You OK?’ said Deepa.

  Realising that Deepa was talking to her, Trina opened her eyes and, with some effort, brought her head back to an upright position.

  ‘I can’t remember ever feeling so tired,’ she said.

  Deepa nodded. ‘Hell of a day,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you rest?’ said Jess. ‘There’s nothing that needs to be done now.’

  Trina nodded. ‘Maybe I’ll just chill out in the lounge for a bit.’

  ‘Shout when you get hungry,’ said Deepa. ‘We can order takeaway.’

  Trina smiled. ‘And there was me thinking I’d come home to a cooked meal,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t really understand cooking,’ said Deepa. ‘Except in a loose, theoretical sense.’

  This made Trina laugh.

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’ she said.

  She stood up, retrieved her bicycle helmet from the floor.

  ‘Kind of draining,’ she said, ‘this whole sticking-it-to-the-man business.’

  She made her way into the lounge and fell heavily into an armchair. She stretched, took off her shoes, and curled herself tightly into its embrace. This was the time she would usually sit and watch television with Bella.

  She reached in her bag for her phone. Mia answered after two rings.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hey,’ said Trina. ‘Just letting you know, it’s all agreed. I took the job, we’ve got somewhere to live.’

  ‘I’m so proud of you,’ said Mia. ‘It’s the right thing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Trina.

  ‘You sound tired,’ said Mia.

  ‘I’m shattered,’ said Trina.

  ‘Get some rest. It’s all over now.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It is all over, isn’t it?’

  ‘’Course it is. That’s it. All sorted.’

  ‘It’s the right thing,’ Mia said again.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We miss you a lot.’

  ‘I miss you guys too. Couple more days and then we can move.’

  ‘Everything back to normal.’

  Trina felt herself about to hesitate, and in heading off the hesitation, she wound up answering too quickly. ‘Yeah. Everything as it was.’

  ‘Carl’s bathing Bella, so …’

  ‘It’s fine, go and help him. Kiss them both from me.’

  ‘Kisses to you too. We love you.’

  ‘Love you too.’

  She hung up, dropped the phone into the cushion-crease in the chair beside her, and closed her eyes again. All fine, she said to herself. Everything back to normal. It was, she realised, the first lie she’d told Mia and Carl. This, she saw, was how it was going to have to be. Each night, she’d come home and tell them work was fine. Each night, she’d shower and change and sit with Bella and, later, fall asleep with Mia and Carl. Together, in their Green-owned home, they’d all keep up the pretence that everything was fine, normal, safe. The secret would gnaw at her. Mia and Carl would sense her evasions. The not-quite-knowing would gnaw at them too. Fear, the inability to share it, would erode her inner and outer life.

  She thought of Tayz, her digital replica, loose in the system, in many ways becoming the system, embodying it, absorbing it. Tayz was programmed, automated. He or she existed only within certain parameters of meaning and experience. And yet, somehow, within those limitations, Tayz was still freer than she would ever be.

  So much of her life, she thought, had been spent chafing against the smallness of her surroundings. How many times had people said to her: Move away, move to the city, be with people like you. And how many times had she answered: It’s not me that needs to move, it’s Edmundsbury that needs to change. The world, she’d always thought, the future, would one day arrive here. It would come to her like it would come to everyone. Now it was here, and it was the opposite of what she’d always imagined. Viewed from a distance, the future was vast and open. Once you were in it, it was tiny. While she’d been scratching at the walls of her own small town, the world had become a small town around her.

  These were her last few hours before it all began in earnest. She could pause, unwind, kid herself that this transitional moment was how life would continue to be: safe, simple, free of fear. From this brief lull, she could extrapolate, in her mind, another life, another future – a liveable, bearable reality. Nothing had yet happened. Nothing was yet real. As long as it could only be imagined, it could still conceivably be true.

  *

  ‘You think she’ll be OK?’

  Deepa shrugged. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘It’s not too late to call the whole thing off,’ said Jess.

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘No.’

  A surging wind flung a petulant fistful of rain at the window. They both looked up. On the kitchen worktop, a small speaker emitted the supposedly soothing sounds of one of Deepa’s ASMR recordings: a sampled loop of rain-noise, layered over the rain-noise outside.

  ‘She’s doing this because she wants to, right?’ said Jess.

  ‘She doesn’t seem the type to do things she doesn’t want to do. But maybe that’s simplistic. I mean, given the choice, she’d probably prefer not to. But I don’t think that choice is really on the table.’

  ‘No.’

  Jess reached in her pocket for a cigarette, then looked around for something she could use as an ashtray.

  ‘Uh uh,’ said Deepa, wagging a finger and then pointing to the back door.

  ‘You can’t be serious. Look at it out there.’

  ‘You want me to show you an image gallery of your lungs? You want my lungs to become those lungs? Call it my contribution to helping you give up. If you tuck yourself in the back door, you’ll stay mainly dry.’

  Jess stood up with an exaggerated and smiling flounce and walked to the back door. She had to counter the force of the wind to get it open. Outside, the rain had reached the point where it had become an all-consuming reality, a hissing din into which she tried to direct the smoke from her cigarette. She wondered how she felt: how much had really changed, how much had stayed the same.

  She’d followed Robert’s activity on Twitter – the death threats, the mounting solidarity. She’d wanted to text him, call him, ask him if he was OK, but she couldn’t. For so many others, she thought, for her, hatred was real. For Robert, it was a career opportunity. It was not the only thing between them that couldn’t be resolved, but somehow it seemed to contain everything between and around them that was irreconcilable. All this time spent wrestling with the differences between them, she thought, and in the end, what they shared had divided them.

  Behind her, she could still make out Deepa’s relaxation recording – a rainstorm reduced to a tinny, single-speaker simulacrum. In front of her, the downpour was a flickering, pixellated screen, the sound a rasping static – white noise layered with its own inadequate copy. She thought of snowy TV sets, hissing radio frequencies, the tinny squeal of dial-up modems. The association of this sibilant racket with devices been and gone gave her the feeling that rain itself was an obsolete technology.

  She let her focus soften until the display of rain was something she looked not at but through, to the frayed hem of reality’s overlay she’d glimpsed so many times before. There was nothing on earth that was not a technology. The climate, thought, her body. What she had been through, what had threatened her, what she had exposed and would go on exposing: all technologies, all systems – corrupted and stalling and glitching out into unpredictable obsolescence, replaced again and again by the technologies that were to come, just as she would be replaced by the versions of herself she imagined and was forced to be. She thought of Julia, Byron, Jasmine: in weightless
motion, out there in the ether. You could live in the technologies of others, she thought, or you could build your own. It was invent or be invented, think or be thought, dream or be dreamed in turn.

  She closed her eyes and surrendered herself to rain-sound. She imagined her face dissolving, lost to the squalling frequency of the deluge. She felt unpacked, dismantled, released from the structures that dreamed her.

  Distinctions began to blur. Sampled rainsound merged with rain-sound. Only the earthy smell of precipitation on soil reminded her what was real. Petrichor, she thought.

  Inside her, an operating switch was thrown. There was the briefest of delays – a suspended, buffering moment before startup.

  And then

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  Thanks and appreciation:

  To Arts Council England and The Society of Authors for generous financial assistance at critical moments.

  To Peter Straus and his colleagues at RCW, whose advice and guidance were invaluable.

  To Mitzi Angel, Emmie Francis, and everyone at Faber, for their clarity and dedication.

  To Will Wiles and James Smythe, for their writerly support and friendship.

  To my family: Sue, Richard, Mollie, Graham, and Marni.

  And most of all to my partner, Zakia Uddin, whose research and writing on Microtasking helped me start this book, and whose patience and belief helped me finish it.

  About the Author

  Sam Byers’ writing appeared in Granta, the New York Times, The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. His debut novel Idiopathy was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prize, and won a Betty Trask Award.

  Also by the Author

  Idiopathy

  Copyright

  First published in the UK in 2018