‘Anyfing else?’ The waitress stood over Jackson holding his empty cup, a second-hand tea bag drooping over the side of the saucer like a recently deceased slug.
Jackson had lost count of how long he’d been sitting in the cafe. An hour perhaps? ‘Another tea, please,’ he said. The waitress simultaneously rolled her eyes and chewed her gum. It was as if the two actions were mechanically connected, one roll of the eyes triggering ten chews, then back to the beginning. Jackson suspected that her particular brand of customer service wasn’t reserved for kids who bought just two cups of tea an hour.
As the waitress sauntered her way behind the counter, Jackson turned back to the message in the centre of his phone screen, with the three pound coins and the pen on the table in front of him.
The MeX logo had given way to a most peculiar image. The message ‘Awaiting Connection’ pulsed at the top of the screen above an animated diagram of a one-pound coin. The animation was made up of several frames. First there was the luminous green outline of the coin. This was followed by an image of the coin with its outer edge now forming a ring, inside which the circular centre section was able to spin freely thanks to a tiny axle. Before looping back to the beginning, the shimmering wireframe animation showed arrows flowing in and out of the coin’s hollow centre section. The suggestion was clear. It was some kind of tiny storage space.
Jackson picked up one of the pound coins and examined it closely. There was nothing about the coin to suggest it was anything more exotic than plain old legal tender. Holding it with both hands, he pushed down hard on the coin’s surface. Nothing. He tried again, this time putting his nail into the raised copper and zinc crown of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The centre of the coin gave way and, as it flipped open, something fell out from inside the hollow mid-section and bounced on the table.
Jackson picked up what looked like a tiny fleshcoloured half-moon. Turning it in his fingers, he examined the mysterious object close up, waiting for the first whiff of recognition. It was no bigger than a pea, a soft, rubbery, minuscule three-sided potato wedge. In a row along one side were three very small shiny metal rivets, just like the ones along the side of the pen top, blue, red and chrome. It was the strangest thing Jackson had ever laid eyes on and he hadn’t a clue what he was supposed to do with it.
He picked up another coin and once again pushed his nail into its face. The coin remained closed. He pressed harder until his thumbnail buckled, making him wince. It seemed that coin number two contained no secret stash; it was a quid, plain and simple.
The third coin was more interesting. It opened with the minimum of force and gave up a disc-shaped plastic screw-top case, fractionally smaller than the coin itself. Jackson carefully unscrewed the top. Inside, floating in a clear gel, was a contact lens.
Beware of cafe toilets, mused Jackson. We can build ourselves skyscrapers and space stations, but, as far as cafe toilets are concerned, we still live in caves.
Jackson edged into the narrow, fan-assisted space, accessed via a door in the cafe kitchen. The room, if you could call it that, was so snug he could sit on the toilet seat with the tiny lens case on his knee and simultaneously wash his hands at the overblown soap dish that masqueraded as a sink. He stared at the miniature screw-top case and pondered what he was about to do. It was a peculiar situation. Here he was, skipping school, about to put in his eye a contact lens, sent to him by an organization he’d never heard of, but that seemed to know all about him. The thought of sticking anything in his eye made him cringe. But what was the alternative? How else could he find out what all this was about?
Jackson looked for a towel, but all he found was ‘Honk if you love Jesus’ etched into the mottled plaster where he suspected a towel holder had once been. Shaking his hands dry, he unscrewed the case and dipped an index finger into the cool gel. The contact lens came out on the tip of his finger. He examined its moist, glassy surface. It was speckless apart from a small grouping of three indecipherable marks etched near the edge. They were so small, it almost hurt to focus on them. Leaning closer to the mirror, Jackson drew a deep breath then popped the lens into his right eye.
It stung like mad. Like his eyelid was on back to front. And whatever Jackson was expecting from the contact lens, it didn’t deliver. His vision was twenty-twenty, just like it had been before. Aside from the constant need to blink and the feeling that he’d been caught in a blinding sandstorm, the purpose of the lens was a mystery.
All of a sudden, a cloudy outline flashed up in his right eye and then vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Jackson sat frozen to the toilet seat, waiting for something to appear again. After a minute or two he realized the ridiculousness of his situation. He was sitting on a rancid toilet lid, staring intently at a wall of yellowing tiles and a tower of bog rolls skewered on a mop handle.
He stood up to leave the tiny restroom and again something flashed briefly before his eye. He walked back slowly through the kitchen. With every step the fuzzy silhouette sputtered in and out of vision, blurred and formless like the ghostly after-image from staring too long at a bright light.
Jackson returned to his window seat and tried to work out what was happening. He leaned down to retrieve the handset from his school bag and a vivid translucent rectangle sparked into life. With his hand firmly on the phone, Jackson could now see what looked like a ghostly cinema screen floating in front of him. Even though he could easily see through it, to the table opposite with a wilted daffodil in a Coke bottle, to the uninterrupted line of cars and buses that stretched up the high street out the window, Jackson could also make out the clear, bright screen with the computer-animated image of a woman’s face on it. And it looked like she was talking to him.
CHAPTER 7
Wherever Jackson looked, the disembodied ghostly face was there, hanging in space. He couldn’t hear her, but she was clearly talking. Next to her was another green wireframe animation, similar to the one he’d seen on his handset. This time it showed the outline of an ear with what looked like the strange little potato wedge from the first coin being placed under a flap of skin at the ear’s entrance.
Jackson went to pull the first coin from his trouser pocket, but as his hand left the phone, the screen vanished. He immediately placed his hand back on the handset and the picture quivered back to life. Jackson had a hunch. He grabbed the phone and dropped it into his breast pocket, puffing his chest out to ensure the phone was in contact with his body. Sure enough, the virtual display rematerialized. With his hands now free, he pulled the coin from his trouser pocket, unlocked it as before and removed the small fleshy device.
As he felt the cold metal rivets of the tiny device slide against the flesh of his inner ear, just as it was pictured in the animation, the woman’s voice became loud and clear. ‘… Stealth Communicator. The power for both this and the Retinal Projector is delivered via the handset or a power repeater in one of your coins.’ So, his hunch had been correct. The contact lens, or ‘Retinal Projector’ as the woman called it, and the grommet or ‘Stealth Communicator’ were powered as long as Jackson was in contact with the handset.
Her voice, that it seemed only Jackson could hear, as clear as a thought, continued: ‘The handset can be left near any electrical power source where it will wirelessly drip charge itself.’ Half of the cafe was instantly filled by a brilliant green line drawing of a sitting room with bright red phone handsets on top of a television, on the floor near a plug socket and on the closed screen of a laptop.
‘The handset power unit will charge in less than an hour. It will hold its charge for around forty hours of continuous use. This presentation will begin again in thirty seconds. Speak at any time to activate speech engine.’ The animation was replaced with the MeX insignia.
Jackson turned to look at the counter, the shimmering letter logo acting like a sniper scope. Princess Chewing Gum was dead centre, leaning forward with both elbows on the counter and chatting to a young guy who must have arrived a couple of minutes a
go. Jackson determined from his prescription cruddy workboots and plaster-encrusted England football shirt that he must be a builder. Jackson caught the waitress’s attention and motioned to his teacup to suggest he’d like another. The waitress rolled her eyes and went back to chatting to her builder boyfriend. Brilliant! thought Jackson. How long will my tea take now? And in a process that took him just a couple of seconds, Jackson’s mathematical blender of a brain took in all the variables that would affect the delivery of his second cup of tea.
Imagining that:
• A was the amount of time the last cup of tea took to arrive in seconds
• J was how long Jackson thought he spent talking
• B was the amount of time builders generally spent chatting when they should be working
• W was the amount of time the waitress spent chatting
• C was how busy the cafe was (measured on a scale from 1 to 5 – with 1 being ghost town and 5 being Piccadilly Circus)
• L, the likelihood of a text arriving for the waitress in the next few minutes (1 to 5, with 1 being unlikely and 5 being definitely)
• T was the time it would take for her to key in a text
• P, the likelihood of text message taking precedence over the making of Jackson’s tea (1 to 5, with 1 being ‘Never! The customer is always first’ and 5 being ‘Customer? What’s a customer?’)
• And I, Jackson’s importance as a customer (1 to 5, with 1 being dumb kid with small change and 5 being regular millionaire generous tipper)
Jackson pictured the formula as the solution to his parched thirst and quickly filled in the relevant values. As far as he could tell, his last tea, A, took about 5 minutes or 300 seconds to arrive. Even by his own admission he was generally disinclined to chitchat, so J = 1 minute’s chat per hour, or 1 second per minute. Jackson knew that builders were famous for spending much of their working day shooting the breeze, so B = 10 seconds. It was Jackson’s opinion that this waitress could easily spend at least fifteen minutes of every hour jawboning, so W = 15. In terms of population, the cafe wasn’t far off a ghost town, so C = 2. Princess Chewing Gum’s seemingly inexhaustible stream of texts showed no signs of letting up, so L = 5 and a text took about thirty seconds to reply to, so T = 30. And there was no way she was going to put a geeky truant’s tea above a text message, so P = 5 and I = 1.
Jackson crunched the numbers until he had the answer.
Seven hundred and fifty seconds, or twelve and a half minutes. Exactly.
In the time it took most people to stretch out a finger and turn on a calculator, Jackson had processed all the available data and found an answer. He’d always been able to do these kinds of sums in his head. They were like mini-games he could play anywhere; like Brain Training without the need for a console. On the way to school he might search for the highest number of consecutive London buses with a prime number on the front of them – the most he’d ever spotted was five: the 37, the 83, the 127, the 109, followed by his school bus, the number 19. Or he would scan the barcodes on food packets for numerical curiosities while he and his dad put the groceries away. He enjoyed the challenge and he liked the feeling that came with a correct answer. It made him feel he had some control over things; while he could be jumped by Tyler Hughes and his gang on his way home from school, or his mother could, one day, just not come home again, there was at least one thing he could rely on.
Jackson checked the time on the yellowing clock above a sandwich toaster with so much cheese congealed round it that it looked like the Fungoid creature from Dr Who. It was 10.40 a.m. Given the time he’d already spent in the toilet, he expected to receive his next steaming cup of stew in precisely eight minutes’ time. Jackson definitely couldn’t wait that long for the surly waitress to grace him with her service before finding out more about MeX. He decided to reactivate the speech engine. ‘Er … anybody there?’
The MeX logo vanished and the shimmering screen that now hung in front of Jackson juddered, as if its reset button had been pushed. Then it was as if someone had just changed channels. A window popped up in the middle of the screen. It looked like a digital picture of a brick wall. Jackson looked down; the off-white surface of the table was a better backdrop than the grimy cafe counter. As he concentrated, he saw the image was actually a video feed, because the tufts of grass at its base were swaying in the wind.
Three smaller windows appeared around its edge. The two on the left contained a live video feed of what looked like the same person. They showed the face of an Oriental boy, around nine or ten years old, wearing a bright yellow polo shirt. Bizarrely, one of the video boxes showed the boy looking down, reading or typing something, while the other box showed the same boy leaning on his elbow, fiddling with his ear. A streaming video of the same person, doing two different things at the same time. Jackson filed it in his mental inbox under ‘weird’. A third window showed the back of a chair with a tweed jacket slung over it.
‘Right, let’s get this show on the road!’ The voice belonged to a smart-looking man who had just dropped into the vacant chair on the third screen. He was dressed immaculately, in a bright pink shirt with a black-and-white spotted tie. There was something familiar about him – that voice and the fine blond hair that receded at the sides to form a widow’s peak. ‘Are communications working OK?’
Jackson wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer, but the two versions of the same Oriental boy both nodded and said something in tandem that sounded like ‘Un’, which Jackson presumed meant ‘Yes’.
‘Ah, the Kojima twins,’ said the man. As the boy in the first box looked up, Jackson realized ‘he’ was, in fact, a girl; the identical figures were twins, and the twins were brother and sister.
‘I’m in esteemed company, I must say. Is it true you both own identical Ferraris?’ said the smart man.
‘Un,’ replied the barely distinguishable pair without offering a smile.
‘Remarkable,’ said the man, whose colourful clothes and bleached blond hair seemed at odds with his air of authority. ‘But you’re not old enough to drive them yet?’
‘Un,’ replied the twins in stereo.
‘Not problem,’ added the girl. ‘We buy own road.’
‘You have your own road? Fascinating,’ noted the man. ‘All that time I wasted at Cambridge when I could have been making my fortune playing video games.’
Then the realization dawned on Jackson. The well-groomed leader of this unconventional video chat was Devlin Lear, billionaire computer geek, whose Lear Corporation all but invented the hardware on which the Internet runs.
Devlin Lear and a brother-and-sister professional gaming team? Jackson was in elevated company. Sure, he could turn a quick buck on Whisper, if he had to. A healing spell here; a sword there. There was always someone on eBay willing to part with a few pounds to avoid hours of needless game play. You could make hundreds of pounds in a weekend if you knew the shortcuts. But this was nothing compared to the pro-gamers he’d read about in countries like Japan and South Korea. That was a whole different ball game. These Kojima twins probably had pop-star status and earned millions in sponsorship and prize money. So what could all this be about? Jackson wondered if the twins had been contacted in the same strange way he had. Perhaps Lear was putting together an all-star gaming team and he and these twins had been head-hunted for a multimillion-pound sponsorship deal. Or could they have been assembled to test a new Lear Corporation game? He’d read about professional games testers and was fascinated by the idea of being paid to play the latest games all day.
There was an abrupt crackle and Jackson almost fell off his chair as his head was suddenly filled with a deafening thrash-metal guitar solo. From the screwed-up faces of his floating chat-room companions, it was clear they were just as shocked by the intrusion. A fourth small video box appeared, containing a dancing teddy bear with a studded black leather collar round its neck. Jackson could just make out a hand rocking the stuffed teddy in perfect time to the blaring musi
c.
‘Ms English!’ Lear’s voice cut straight through the music. ‘Turn off that infernal racket.’
The music stopped and the headbanging teddy dropped from view, replaced by a dishevelled girl, about Jackson’s age, with long shocking-pink hair.
‘Intense, perhaps. But I’ve never heard Nirvana described as “infernal”.’ As she spoke, something that Jackson suspected was a piercing winked at him from below her lip.
‘Allow me to introduce Brooke English, a brilliant young engineer.’ Lear made the dryly spoken introduction for the others’ benefit. ‘But a little challenged in the music department. English, say hello to the Kojima twins, who are joining us from Tokyo, Japan, and Mr Farley from London. At least it should be Farley … it’s hard to see from the inside of his rucksack … or is that your trouser pocket? No, wait a minute, it’s your shirt pocket. Am I right?’
Amazed by the floating display, the dancing teddy bear and the pink-haired rock chick, Jackson hadn’t given a thought to the fact that he’d need to be in front of a camera himself if he was going to join in.
‘Put the solid coin in your pocket,’ said Lear. ‘It’ll power everything in the same way the handset does. It’s a power repeater, you see. As long as the phone is no more than twenty centimetres away, the coin will suck juice from it – then use your skin or clothes to get power to your earpiece and lens.’
Jackson retrieved the coin that had almost claimed his thumbnail and pushed it into his front trouser pocket. He then flipped open the handset and placed it on the table beside his empty mug, its camera lens pointing up at his face.
‘Ah, there you are, my dear boy,’ said the man who had once famously suggested the Moon as a possible location for the massive computer servers needed for future Internet storage. Jackson recalled the interviewer had treated the suggestion with scorn, but he thought it was inspired.
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