by Kevin Barry
The virtual brain crashed. We closed it down.
We didn’t talk for a few days.
*
Then Broiler got hit by the Warsaw Express, crossing the tracks near Alexanderplatz. He was being chased by store detectives from Media Markt. Three flash drives down each sleeve, and some new Intel chips I’d ordered shoved in his underpants. Someone filmed it. It was up on Vimeo for a while, before it was pulled. Flopping and twitching on the tracks, his legs a few metres away.
We played ‘It’s Friday, Friday . . .’ at his funeral, he hated that song.
The day after the funeral, TigerBalm’s friend in Maryland told TB that a law was being fast-tracked specifically to target runaway pop songs. ISPs were to treat them as viruses, with massive fines for facilitating transmission. The law could be through within weeks, tacked onto the latest big cyber-security bill aimed at China. And the main intelligence agencies had made a joint request to add us to their top-level threat list, which meant they could throw everything at us without warrants. And that request could be approved any time. It could have been approved already.
No warrants.
No trial.
No MIT for Cicero.
‘We’re screwed,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’
‘Fuck them,’ I said. ‘It’s not over.’
That night, we rebuilt the perfect song from the ground up, and released it.
*
It fucked up Pakistan first, which we weren’t expecting. But it exploded across Facebook there while everyone was still asleep in Europe and America.
We watched the figures climb. And climb. And climb. It was beyond exponential.
‘People are just looping it,’ I said, awed. ‘They can’t stop listening to it.’
‘And they’re telling their friends. ALL their friends,’ said TB.
And then it started to spread across Europe, time zone by time zone, as people got up, and connected. We couldn’t go to bed, it was awesome.
And then America woke up.
It spread so fast it triggered some latent National Security Agency cyber-defences we hadn’t even known about. The NSA bots tried to auto-kill it, but we’d clumsied them by putting out three versions, one a decoy, easy to kill, two with some really misleading meta-data and a fake intro, so it looked like a legit release. Warner Brothers, because we didn’t like Warner Brothers. The NSA bots started taking down legit songs, and got flagged as hackbots, and neutralised.
The crazy thing was, we hadn’t actually listened to the perfect version ourselves. We’d built a mathematical model, and given it access to our database of stripped-out perfect song elements, and it had assembled the song with the new bass line, the new riff. We’d only run mathematical tests on it, to see had it built right. It hadn’t occurred to us to listen to it. We were working in a very abstract realm those days. Beyond theory.
‘Maybe we should listen to it,’ I said.
‘Fuck no,’ said TB. ‘And then sit here like drooling monkeys for the next week, listening to the same song?’
But every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and the reaction to this was going to be earthquake-sized, and aimed at us. We hadn’t covered our traces enough to hide from something that big. We spent the next few days in our rooms, scrubbing our histories from every server we could. But scrubbing leaves traces too. We were like two guys running backwards in the snow, rubbing out our footprints, always making new footprints . . .
*
For a while, the Internet slowed down. All of it. While everybody linked, liked, streamed, copied, downloaded, forwarded, posted, plussed, burned and listened to, listened to, listened again to the one perfect song.
*
And then the world slowed down. Multitasking is bullshit. If you’re listening to a song that rewards total attention by getting you high, then you are not concentrating on your driving, on your job, on your kids. There were a lot of accidents. A lot. Economies ground to a halt. I mean, with the first version, people had stopped buying music. With this version on a permanent loop, people had trouble doing the fucking shopping. After a few days, the saturation was so total, it began to interfere with itself. If they weren’t using earbuds, people could often hear several versions of the song at once – from a neighbour’s iPad, a shop doorway, a taxi’s open window, a ringtone – which lowered its effectiveness.
Besides, even a junkie, if he gets hungry enough, will eat. Routines bite deep. But it was like wading through molasses. Whatever they did, while they did it, they were listening to our song. The perfect song. Everybody, all the time. We followed it online, with the sound switched off, as it moved from being a novelty item at the end of the news round-ups to being all of the news.
People had worked it out way late. Well, okay, the Americans and the Chinese tried to kill it from day one, but in a lot of countries the song was just considered an irritating novelty for a long while. Too long. By the time countries started treating their local epidemics, it was already a global pandemic.
After a while, it plateaued. People were able to get to work, they remembered to pick up their kids, the song moved to the back of their consciousness. They were listening to it all the time, but their minds were now managing to run workarounds, to get things done. Also, the amount of serotonin in circulation was dropping. Not that it was being reabsorbed – that was thoroughly blocked – just that the old serotonin was breaking down a little, and people couldn’t keep up the rate of manufacture that the song demanded. They weren’t worthy of the Song.
The song was perfect, and they were merely human.
The days went by.
*
It got harder and harder to stay clean. Dad didn’t cry any more. He just moved the hi-fi from the living room, upstairs to his bedroom, and played the perfect song on a loop. I hadn’t told him it was mine. But I’d put in stuff from when he and Mum were happy. The Puhdys, and the Rolling Stones. When he turned it up loud, it leaked into my room, and I’d have to wear earplugs.
I spent a lot of time talking to TB on headphones, but that was dangerous. The net was suffering outages, breakdowns. Everything was neglected, everyone was distracted, all the usual invisible repair that keeps the world revolving was getting half-assed. If the sound cut out in the Sennheisers, I’d hear a bar of the song from Dad’s room, and I’d sweat with the need to hear the whole thing, while my fingers fumbled to crank up some counter-music. It nearly pulled me under a couple of times.
*
I left the house, playing Gaga through my buds, loud. Headed for my old school.
They’d just started renovating another building. Good.
There. Dozens of old mattresses, piled high in one of the skips. It looked like the guys expected some cartoon character to fall out of the sky.
I lugged them home one at a time, and soundproofed the room.
*
You cannot stimulate that much serotonin for that long without a major crash. A wave of depression swept around the world.
And then one day there wasn’t any bread in the shops.
It was like the stories Dad had told me, about the last days of the DDR.
*
We were talking quietly in the dark on Skype.
A blast of light from behind TB, as a bunch of exhausted, depressed Special Operations troops kicked in his bedroom door.
I threw myself off my chair, and rolled under the bed as my door was kicked open. Simultaneous raids, shit. I stared at a Rolling Stones single lying among the dust balls. Tried not to sneeze. ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ B-side to ‘Honky Tonk Woman’, I thought reflexively, and could see the graph of all the analogue relationships between the parts. It started to go around in my brain, the section at the end where the choir kicks in. No, you can’t always get what you want . . . But if you try sometimes, you might find . . . You get what you need.
My room must have been smaller than they’d expected, or they were too adrenalised, because the two stun grenades t
hey threw in bounced straight back out off the mattresses on the wall, and exploded among the second wave of soldiers. Under the bed, my ears rang, but I could still hear.
Boot, boots, boots . . . My guys swore in thick Bavarian accents. Not soldiers, of course. GSG-9, double shit. TB’s were American, SEALS probably, I could still hear them through the Harman Kardons. High level cooperation. Trouble deep.
They hauled me out and snapped on the plastic cuffs. Yeah, Grenzschutzgruppe 9, in full protective gear, plus noise-cancelling headphones. Fit fuckers. Two of them kicked me around a little, while the others unplugged everything in the room and bagged it. Ripped the mattresses off the walls, looking for whatever. The bass end of the perfect song came through my wall, from my father’s room. I could hear him singing.
They kicked in his door and the song got louder, and then cut off as they ripped out the wires, but my dad sang on.
I needed to hear the whole song. The need was so strong I almost got sick.
My father tried to sing the perfect song, but the music was gone.
There was a thump, a grunt. My dad stopped singing.
All the doors were open. A breeze moved through the house, and dust whirled out from under the bed in a little spiral.
Outside, more supercops shouted, and a car squealed to a halt, the perfect song blasting from its open windows.
It started so simply. A line from my mother’s favourite song, a line from my father’s.
The guys who’d taken off their headphones scrambled to get them back on, and dropped me. I lay on the floor. The song spread through me, as layer after layer kicked in. It was like being lifted higher and higher, on waves of warm honey, towards the sun.
It felt like the one time I’d tried heroin, with Broiler. We’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms, in his room, listening to ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’.
And now the song, sample by sample, fired up the memories that came with each song. It was like fireworks, no, stronger: lightning, illuminating scene after scene from my life, there she was, my mother. My father. Broiler, summer, Christmas, my first kiss, faster and faster.
As they dragged him out into the corridor, my father started up again, his voice weaker now.
I strained to see him, to hear him. They kicked him. A grunt. He stopped. I pushed myself along the bedroom floor towards the door, towards my dad, towards the music, with my feet, like an inchworm. Three sets of black boots stepped in front of me, blocked me. I heard my dad clear his throat, say my name.
I spat blood on a boot.
‘Fuck you,’ I said. ‘You can’t stop the music.’
We began to sing.
Saturday, Boring
Lisa McInerney
That she wanted to have sex with him wasn’t a conscious decision. It wasn’t something she had to approach from different angles, like a nugget of truth suspended in a pyramid of excuses. It wasn’t something she had to sit down and think about, one foot underneath her and her heel pressing a reminder against the place she’d soon be inviting him to rest. It wasn’t even something he’d prompted, breathing the suggestion into her ear as valiant fingers traced intentions across her shoulders and down her spine and in the sunken warmth between her breasts. It was just there one day. It just popped into her head like a Looney Tunes light bulb. She was in town with her best friend and they were listlessly thumbing through T-shirts in Penneys when she said:
‘I think I want to have sex with him.’
‘What?’ said her friend. And then, for effect, ‘You what?’
‘Why is that a shock? Why shouldn’t I?’
‘I didn’t say you shouldn’t,’ said her friend. ‘Did I say you shouldn’t?’ And the T-shirt she’d clutched like a bad metaphor slid off its hanger and onto the floor.
‘So, like, you only said You What? because you didn’t hear me? You did, yeah.’
Her friend’s back made a disapproving block as she hunted for the rogue T-shirt underneath the rack.
‘Why shouldn’t I want to have sex with him?’
‘You can be with whoever you like, girl.’
‘I know that.’
There was a pause, heavy as a teacher’s footfall, heavy as the connections her mother made when there was Trouble draped over her daughters’ frames like flashy ball gowns. She glanced around as she waited for her best friend’s back to transform back into her best friend. There were shop assistants with dark shirts and glazed eyes, and harried mothers shouting Come here! Get! at loud children called Dylan and Siobhán, and other fifteen-year-olds, too, maybe even fifteen-year-olds who had just decided they wanted to Do It with their boyfriends and were waiting through a similar hiccup for their best friends to say that was fine.
Her best friend rose again.
‘Does he know?’
‘No.’
They returned their attention to the rack in front of them. Her friend danced her index and middle finger over the brittle, plastic limbs laid out like suspension files in a cabinet marked Saturday, Boring. ‘You know you’ve only been going with him three weeks,’ she said.
‘Nah, I didn’t know that at all.’
‘Yeah, well, is all I’m saying. I mean, it’d be grand if you weren’t going with him but this way you have to put up with him afterwards, you know? And what if it’s not good?’ Her best friend had recently allowed a Shanakiel boy called Rory unreserved access and he’d made an utter hames of it. He’d pawed and scraped and huffed and ignored her afterwards. There was no mystery to her lack of enthusiasm for repeating the process, even by proxy.
‘I don’t care. I still think I want to.’
She wondered if she could trace this sudden longing back to something. A moment, a word, a glance. Was it a longing at all? She didn’t ache for him or anything as explosively stupid as that. It wasn’t a longing; it was just a want. Short, sweet, stocky. An extra, something that snuggled against the fabric of who she already was, like it was totally at home, like it wouldn’t make a fuss if she never called on it or fed it or gave it its due.
He was in the same root class as her in school. They shared a few subjects, the useless ones, like Religion and PE, and English and Irish, too. Not Maths, though. He was in the Honours Maths class. Whatever alien language it was made total sense to him; he didn’t have to think about it. It was just there for him and missing for her, one of the differences between them.
It was the differences she loved. And not just the obvious ones: that she was a girl and he was a boy. Obviously she loved that, the fact that he was taller and broader and deeper and stronger and all of those rough physicalities he carved out space with. But it was also the fact that she was yappy and cheeky and sharp and brave, and he was quiet and thoughtful and prone to speaking in lyrics, as if every second sentence had been mined raw from somewhere previously untapped. As if things he said and did were as often brand new as they were rehashed by routine and habit. And in that sense he was different to everyone, she thought. Now she was close enough to study and pry and she was sure he liked that, too.
It had begun to happen just a few days previously. It was April, and they were just back in school from the Easter holidays – two weeks of suspicious sunshine and warmth that prompted a premature rush on supermarket sunblock and a spate of old women’s warnings. Strip ne’er a clout. Strong possibilities of colds in your kidneys. She’d stripped off anyway. There had been almost a whole week of shorts and dresses and two days hot enough for the beach, two days with him, where she’d watched him watch her with a kind of dazed reverence neither of her grandmothers had ever thought to prophesy. What do you do when a boy looks at you that way? When there’s no threat, just flashes of awe and an unfamiliar timidity that’s a million miles away from the boy he is in the schoolyard or on the street? When you want him as he wants you and every long look brings you closer to that war-torn future every grown woman strides loud-mouthed through? Sex. Betrayal. Turmoil. Confession. Kitten heels.
They were back in school
after that bare-skinned, bare-faced Easter. The bell signalled the end of one class, the teacher left the room, and he stood up, across from her in the front row – he was always made sit in the front row – and stretched his arms above his head. His shirt rose with the stretch, over his waist exactly as her gaze designed it. Just an inch or so. A lazy flash of skin between the white hem and the wet-stone grey of school trousers, and just a hint, the slimmest black line of whatever he was wearing underneath, and she saw and felt smugly possessive. Greedy, in the way greed wants to show off, to swan and smirk and stuff itself while hungrier eyes watch and covet weakly. That quick and careless flash of skin, a part of him that only she could touch, right then, if she wanted to. Hers. Like he’d lost that sliver to her. He saw her watching him and neither of them smiled. That’s it, something might have said to her, a voice of aeons from a place she’d never known she’d want access to. That’s it. It’s happening.
That might have been the source of today’s sudden certainty. Maybe it took that long to translate it. But she wasn’t sure.
Her best friend said, ‘Will he know he’s the first?’
‘Not unless I tell him.’
‘Will you tell him?’
‘Why should I?’
Her best friend shrugged. ‘He might be nicer about it then. Or he might be worse. You don’t know with fellas.’
‘Why does he need to be nice about it?’
Her friend rolled her eyes. ‘You want it to be nice,’ she said.
She wanted it to be nothing – she just wanted it to happen. Perhaps later she’d stick some stipulations on it. That it must be gentle, or fast, or candlelit, or semi-clothed in case someone walked in on them. She’d have to think about it. ‘Yeah well,’ she said. ‘I trust him to make it nice, don’t I?’
‘Do you?’
‘Course I do. I wouldn’t even be thinking about it if I didn’t trust him.’
That was it, laid flat. Experience, her friend’s whittled weapon. But experience without trust couldn’t compete with even the greenest craving.
