Marta and the Demons

by Jo Lindsay Walton

Let me give you just one example of how the world simmered and glowed.

  One day, me and Narnia decided we’d go up to the castle car park and just peek out over the city. We’d just dropped some stuff off with the Angels. We were super-busy. But it was the first really sunny day, and we felt on top of the world, so we wanted to stand there.

  ‘Crazy to think they’re all virgins,’ I was telling Narnia.

  We were puffing up this steeply banked, tourist-bunged street.

  ‘Mm?’ said Narnia. ‘Oh. Unicorn.’

  ‘Maybe it’s an angelic thing? I feel like angels have Barbie anatomy.’

  ‘I feel like Michael was hung,’ Narnia stated.

  Under my brow, the band of spangled pressure spread.

  I sniffed and started crying. Then I started laughing, just at Narnia’s mystified look. ‘What?’ Narnia said. ‘I feel like he was!’

  ‘Migraine a-comin’,’ I explained. ‘Need to git to cover.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Narnia muttered, waving her hands in complex patterns. Narnia has incredible grace. ‘Omni bentidoct cyro emperoct . . .’

  There were chunky, eldritch-looking rings on her fingers. When the spell was done, I said, ‘I am touched.’

  ‘Me too,’ Narnia said gravely.

  On the way back down, a hollow-cheeked, freckly young woman with long silver hair stepped from the shadows of a close, and tugged at Narnia’s sleeve. She fished around in her purse and gave Narnia what turned out to be two softgel capsules of butterbur extract.

  She shot me a sweet, strained smile and slipped into the carouselling crowds.

  ‘Myeong,’ said Narnia. ‘Take these.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  With one bright purple fingernail, Narnia tapped her smartglasses. ‘Okay, in a way, that was my demon Skeiron? I used to use Deliverune, but they’re way unethical. So I switched to Wield the Winds, although I do kinda miss the way Deliverune –’

  ‘You . . . summoned her?’

  Those chunky rings on Narnia’s fingers. Motion capture tech.

  ‘When a helper passes security clearance, Wield the Winds overlays Skeiron’s face on theirs. Otherwise,’ Narnia admonished – grabbing my hand and curling my fingers around the capsules – ‘she could have been anybody! These could be poison! Do you need water?’

  Butterbur doesn’t actually stop migraines or anything.

  But still!

  §

   

  We got rich.

  Imitators appeared: PledgePlay, GameBank, LuluLudic.

  They didn’t get rich. We got rich.

  The riches took their usual effect. We started believing our money-spinner could be a world-saver. We started to think we weren’t just powerful, but right.

  ‘We should invest in scotch next,’ said Carly. ‘You know about investment-grade scotch?’

  Me and Carly were drinking getting-drunk-grade gin and tonics in Soho in London. We’d started sharing clothes again. We looked Cool, and also Unheimliche.

  ‘A bottle can be valued at like £100,000,’ Carly told me. ‘A fine malt and a Lalique crystal decanter. Liquid gold, hon.’

  ‘Imagine the pub mark-up,’ I said. I swallowed my cucumber slice. ‘If you were getting a round of drinks, and somebody asked for that . . .’

  ‘Investment-grade scotch pays no dividends. Nobody ever pours it, nobody ever tastes it.’

  ‘Like a game nobody plays. Except maybe gate-crashers do pour it. Like, “Whoa, dude, you were saving that?”’

  ‘Ha, yeah, or market-crashers – if you lose your £100,000, at least you can drown your sorrows. It’s liquid gold. Liquid gold, Myeong.’

  ‘Blood is liquid gold,’ I said randomly.

  My last statement didn’t seem to mean anything. So I tried to focus on what Carly was actually saying. I was trying to be better these days.

  Carly drained her glass and tinkled her ice cubes contemplatively.

  I wiped a bit of drool away and darted my eyes. Ha, Carly hadn’t even noticed me drooling on myself. Today was almost too easy.

  ‘But even gold itself is arbitrary,’ Carly ruminated. ‘People say it’s intrinsically precious, because it sort of shimmers and it never tarnishes, right? They’re so wrong. Gold’s only good for gangsta teeth. Gold is precious by convention. Just like paper money, Myeongy.’

  ‘Talkin’ whisky, sippin’ gin,’ I said, and did sip some gin.

  ‘Gold is just ingot-shaped investment-grade scotch.’ Carly frowned and gave her glass a good old tinkle. ‘Yet in China we’ve dug a hole as big as the Grand Canyon, with its own weather system. Just to get to gold.’

  I nuzzled against her. My own tongue felt like a slice of cucumber in my mouth. ‘You can draw gold threadlike and it won’t turn brittle,’ I told her. ‘And you can drink it. You can put gold flakes in cocktails. Marta made me one. And it’s conductive. And –’

  Carly squirmed away, kind of playful, also kind of irritated. ‘You’re saying, oh, gold is really useful after all? Come on, Myeongy! If it’s so delicious and useful, how come we hide it in vaults and wibble it through our earlobes? Hmm?’

  ‘Gold is only useful because it’s so hard to get to,’ I insisted. ‘Like, it has the opposite of kinetic energy. If gold were an X-Man –’

  Carly sighed. ‘I feel like there used to be other ways to deal with issues?’

  ‘– its special X-man power would be having to leave immediately to Skype with its mom. Gold is only useful on the way up out of the mines. Or tinkling in the river round the cowboy spurs. Damn it!’

  ‘God, Myeong, what? You make me jump.’

  ‘App,’ I said. I had just checked my phone again. ‘App still won’t download. The Narnia app I told you. It’s all wubbly gadooshed.’

  ‘Give it here.’

  ‘Literally babe, it is the coolest thing. Wield the Winds.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  I set it to re-download. ‘I could just summon Scar Nun and be like, “Minion! Tell Carly about the gold!” And somebody . . . like maybe that dude there . . . he’d be all like, “Dudes.”’

  ‘It’s a demonsplain app.’

  ‘No, it’s . . . you weren’t listening.’

  ‘Anyway, shut up! Gold is not precious because it’s beautiful.’ Carly pouted, furrowed her brow at me. ‘It’s beautiful because it’s precious. Even that man looks like he knows that.’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘You were going to summon him!’

  I relented. ‘I know you’re right Carly. Obviously. God, you’re so patronising. Obviously gold is totally pointless. Obviously.’

  It came out harsher than I meant it to. I felt defiant.

  Carly stared at me. Things could turn ugly. ‘Then why were you just saying –’

  Something dawned on Carly. I let my phone tumble into my purse and mustered all my dignity.

  ‘God, Myeongy, you’re such a lightweight.’

  I giggled and shrugged. She was right, I was wankered. Three spreadsheets to the wind.

  I grabbed Carly’s hands. ‘Lover,’ I gasped. ‘The monster we have invented . . . is different from gold and dollars and whisky any kind of money that’s ever existed! It’s the only kind that’s really based in all the stuff people really do!’

  ‘Ha. This may come as a surprise to you, Myeongy, but not everything everyone does is a game.’

  ‘But maybe most of the things most people do is . . . running away from demons?’

  ‘Deep.’

  ‘What if the demons weren’t just demons, but –’

  ‘Angels?’

  ‘Yeah or really cool demons. What if – I don’t exactly know how this would work, but – what if one day our digital money could be work as well as play? World of Work-Craft.’

  Carly disentangled her hands from mine and sipped at melted ice. ‘Like that time Marta tried to transfer you her job, you mean.’

  ‘No, more like, what if we made a kind o
f money, this special magic kind of money . . . and Carly, what if, when you held it, you could see the real value, in terms of what real people had really done, to make that money exist?’

  ‘Like, “WorkCoin”? Like the number of hours . . .’

  ‘Yeah but not just that, you could see the workers too, coming out of the woodwork. Out of the workwork. Out of the drunkdrunk. Our own true selves, wandering out of the walls of the world like golems.’

  ‘Like, “Sweat of the Brow Bucks”?’

  I checked my phone again. ‘Damn it! Come on!’

  ‘Still won’t install? Give it here.’

  ‘Call it something more unsettling. I don’t know, “Leper Coins”? “§crypt”?’

  ‘Oh my God Myeong, how did you make that sound?’

  ‘I think I may have hiccups. What would happen if we invented that? Don’t you think we could . . . do you think we could save the world?’

  There it was.

  ‘Um. Or destroy it,’ said Carly.

  There that was too.

  ‘You’re so weird,’ Carly said, and started butting her head against my shoulder till we both got the giggles. Then I slipped an ice-cube up her skirt.

  That was a good day.

  It was the same day the company got valued at £14 million.

    

  §

  Sex went up.

  For me and Carly, yes, but that was probably totally unrelated.

  But everybody else was having more sex too. This hitherto-vaporware Tinder-rival called Tendr suddenly found an insane new lease of life via vaguely Dispossession-related developments and, brace yourself, the lesbian community.

  Instead of the simple swipe-left to dismiss a potential date, the whole thing was gamified according to complex pathways-to-enthusiastic-consent algorithms.

  So every person who popped up became almost like a sub-boss you had to battle – over minutes or hours or days, all the while learning more