Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  ‘I’m from New York,’ she said; the old standby.

  He whistled in disbelief. ‘New York’s making hot-heads?’

  Rosa shook her head. ‘What’s a hot-head?’

  ‘They give you some more fancy name?’

  ‘Rosa,’ she said.

  He scratched his head. ‘Burned through and through,’ he muttered, more to himself than her. ‘Here. Come on up. All’s friendly here.’

  Friendly— she smiled back at him. Friendly, the magic word!

  Rosa’s taste in clothing was surreal. She loved strong patterns, garish colours, gimmick slogans, fancy stitching, man-made fibres, straps and buckles, complicated cuts. Ajay greeted the attendants with a sickly grin as he entered Milt’s Coin-Op, his hold-alls spilling scraps of day-glo green and fishnet red. They knew him, shared the joke. ‘Your daughter?’

  ‘Sister.’

  ‘She must have some figure to make all that work.’

  ‘Some would say.’

  ‘No offence friend.’

  ‘Hell,’ Ajay said, playing along, ‘her idea of haute couture is a phone-number tattoo.’

  ‘At that certain age, I guess.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Myself I never was that age worse luck.’

  ‘Me neither. Modern times . . .’

  Ajay threw the clothes into the nearest Maytag and pressed his smartcard in.

  A red light blinked. Please reinsert.

  He pressed eject and tried again.

  The red light blinked.

  A hollowness formed in his chest. He hit the eject, palmed the dead smartcard.

  ‘Trouble?’ said the man behind the dry-cleaning counter, sipping on a paper cup of latte. Milk moustachioed his upper lip.

  ‘My card fucked up.’ Ajay tried to sound cool about it. He held the card up to the light to see if he had scratched the strip.

  ‘If you want to sort it out, I’ll master-key your wash for you.’

  The bank was just across the street. It was the last place he would choose to go, but doing otherwise seemed strange. He thanked the man and crossed the street.

  Any branch would hack a faulty card back into life for you, if the traces came up green. He knew damn well that they would not. Some finance phage was onto him, he felt. What should he do? Where was Rosa? How long would it take to jig another card? Was he being watched? He forced himself to calm down. He might yet be wrong. No point in panicked action until he was sure. If they were being surveilled their movements would be logged, their habits pinned. They had to behave normally, or lights would flash. Obediently he slid the card into the wall teller, picked English, pressed for diagnostics.

  Straight away the screen lit up:

  Please take a seat within our air-conditioned,

  hypo-allergenic, floral-scented branch.

  An adept adviser, smartly dressed,

  will pleasantly attend you free of charge.

  Terrified, he wheeled and ran.

  ‘A place like the Bay,’ Xu sighed, ‘it’s so large. There are so many people, interests, projects; nothing stays still. Everything shimmers. It’s simply not possible to imagine it all. So we build models. We put together what we hear and try and work out what it means on Massive scale: a car wreck in Haight, a tramp’s death in Berkeley, a fire in Carmel . . .’

  ‘Models?’ said Rosa, mystified. ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t pack them too tight.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  They were sitting on the foredeck together, shovelling paper scraps into a large, strong cardboard tube. The papers were all the same, or nearly so. They were oblong, three inches by four. On one side of each there was a phone number; on the other a cruciform figure printed in pale red ink.

  ‘Not a cross,’ Xu told her, explaining it. ‘A flattened box. A box exists in three dimensions, right? But fold it out like that, now it’s in two dimensions. When we try to talk to a Massive, we’re like two-dimensional creatures trying to act in a three-dimensional place. You see?’

  She shook her head.

  Xu chuckled. ‘Never mind. Keep filling.’

  Rosa sighed. ‘I still don’t see the point of it.’

  ‘Look out there,’ he said, nodding at Santa Cruz, but meaning the whole conurbation of the Bay. ‘It’s large, yes? Large and complex and netted with all sorts of switching systems. Fibre optics everywhere. Phones, power-lines, cable TV, corporate land-lines, God knows what. So maybe, with all those switches, it thinks. Not on Massive scale maybe – maybe it’s not as clever as that. But it might think all the same, don’t you think?’

  Rosa didn’t know.

  ‘Well,’ said Xu, ‘if it’s complex enough and has senses enough, why shouldn’t it?’

  ‘And does it?’

  ‘How should we know? If it thinks at all, it’s on a scale we can’t ever really comprehend. Might as well ask an optic nerve what it thinks of the view. All this—’ He indicated the table, the scraps of paper, the cardboard tube, the firing mechanism at his feet, still to be fixed to the paper rocket: ‘all this is faith, I guess. Yes,’ he decided. ‘Faith.’ He fixed the nose-cone on the rocket, stood and lifted the tube up and slid it into another cylinder, wider and filled with packets of powder. ‘You want a drink?’

  She nodded.

  He led her along the narrow duck-walk past the cabin, and down polished pine steps. He slid open the door and ushered her into a small, well-arranged lounge.

  ‘What d’you want?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Beer?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He went out to fetch their drinks. While she was waiting for him she wandered round the low-ceilinged room. On board a boat for the first time, she expected to feel the water running underneath her. But she felt no movement underfoot, no dip and swell. Were the walls not curved, and were the windows not so small and thickly set, she might have imagined herself on land still.

  There was little in the way of furniture: a large map chest, and shelves lined with notebooks, periodicals, books of forensic medicine—

  ‘Come have your beer.’

  They sat opposite each other across a small bow-legged table of polished hardwood. Rosa drank abstractedly, watching a bar of sunlight make barely perceptible progress across the teak floorboards.

  ‘You still fully equipped?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The tools, the headgear.’ He tapped the side of his head. She noticed a scar. ‘They’re all on-line?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Rosa. Was he questioning her intelligence? Then, ‘What’s that scar?’ Had he not pointed to it, she’d not have noticed it: a precise circle of raised skin, slightly darker than the rest of his thinly-covered scalp.

  ‘They did it cheap in my day,’ Xu chuckled. He swigged from his can. ‘Guess you had the grafts.’

  ‘What grafts?’

  ‘When they put it in,’ he said, irritated that she was so slow.

  ‘Put what in?’

  ‘The machines! The datafat – in your head.’

  ‘No one put anything in,’ she said.

  ‘Then how come you saw—’ His words trailed off, as though he’d answered his own question.

  ‘It was there,’ said Rosa, helpfully. ‘It grew. I suppose.’

  ‘It grew?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he breathed. ‘That sort of thing – it’s years away.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ said Rosa, helplessly confused.

  He got off his seat and knelt beside her, running his fingers through her hair.

  She brushed him off. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Looking for the scar.’

  ‘There isn’t one.’

  He sat back on his haunches. ‘I know that now.’

  ‘I told you so,’ she chided him.

  He laughed weakly. ‘I didn’t believe you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it shouldn’t be possible.’ He stood up. He seemed wary, suddenly. ‘Yo
u really are on-line, aren’t you?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You can see things. In your head. Turn things on and off. Reach out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They didn’t put things in you?’

  ‘No.’

  He sat back down. ‘You’re pirate ’ware.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Not Snow.’

  She was baffled almost to tears. ‘My friend,’ she said, abandoning all caution. If she got no answers soon she felt she would explode. ‘My friend, I don’t know what I am!’

  Smartcardless they were nothing.

  Worse, they were conspicuous.

  That word had been a game with them, a private joke. Suddenly it had reacquired its deadly import.

  First, he ran home. Rosa wasn’t there. He glanced at the kitchen clock. Two p.m. She’d be at the beach. He jogged down to the promenade and leapt the sun-bleached wooden steps onto the sand and padded clumsily towards the water-line. He found her paddling in the shallows, where the creek poured itself into the sea. On the far bank, small boys were fishing off a rocky bank sprayed with pink flowers. He waved to her. She splashed her way to shore. But as he came towards her he saw it wasn’t Rosa at all, but some other girl, and anyway she hadn’t seen him – she obeyed a different call, the whistles and entreaties of tall boys in purple wet suits, scuba gear and mirror shades, sprawled like so much driftwood on the sand. She knelt among them, trading handslaps, laughing.

  He stopped a moment, watching them, conscious that he was not dressed for this, wearing still the suit Rosa had pressed for him, the starched bleached shirt and crimson bootlace tie she had straightened against his chest that morning after breakfast. Sand silted up his business shoes as he wandered along the sea front. He felt like a harassed father, come to bring his child to heel in some hackneyed teen surf show.

  ‘Rosa!’ he called.

  ‘Hey. You.’

  He turned and froze, hand halfway to his pocket, where the gun wasn’t. He slapped his pockets. It was gone. Rosa must have taken it out his suit before ironing it. He stood stock-still, defenceless, eyes drinking in the gang of shark-toothed, grinning youths, their perfect tans and pumped-up muscles. A stocky black youth stood up and approached him. ‘You Ajay? Ajay Seebaran?’

  ‘Who?’ said Rosa.

  ‘Providence,’ Xu replied, and drawing the blinds he shrouded the lounge in greenish gloom. ‘The name we give to it.’ He pointed out the last unshielded window.

  ‘To the sea?’

  ‘To Bay Area,’ he said. ‘To the Bay Area Massive. If there is such a thing.’ He looked at her with haunted eyes. ‘The blood cell doesn’t set out to find the tissue it eventually feeds. But, somehow, it does get there. It gets there by design. It exists in order to feed that tissue, that’s its function. But it gets there by chance, too. I mean, no one told that particular blood cell where to go. It could have ended up anywhere.’ His manner was strange, as if he was reciting something. ‘What do you call it when something ends up somewhere by both chance and design?’

  ‘Providence,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The sound like squid.’

  ‘The pump failing, you minding it.’

  ‘You being here.’

  ‘You coming here today.’

  Rosa closed her eyes. ‘Help me,’ she begged. ‘Please tell me who I am.’

  But Xu had no reply for her; her presence had triggered some potent memory. ‘The EAS was clumsy in my day. Epistemic appetite suppression – drugs to make you forget the senses they ripped out of you. It didn’t work. I miss them all, all my ways of seeing. I need them. I want them back. I long for them. I live for them. The Bay’s been my best hope. Till now. Till you.’ He drew the last blind. They were in darkness. ‘Sit down. Please.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she said.

  ‘There’s nothing frightening here,’ he said, ‘trust me. It’s just a plate, is all, inside my head. A naked wire. No more risky than that bloody bilge-pump. Simpler even than the navcomp. Mind me. Please. Mind me. Address me. Show me what you see.’

  She sat.

  ‘Can you hand me my beer please?’

  Rosa took the can and pressed it into Xu’s hand. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I don’t see well,’ he confessed. ‘It’s like I said. For years I had datafat in my head. Every year, Presidio added new gifts to my sensorium. By the time I quit and Presidio took the datafat away, my ordinary senses had atrophied. I’ll never get them back the way they were. I’ve lazy eyes and lazy ears, food tastes like cardboard, everything I touch feels rough.’

  Rosa thought of Ajay’s golden suit; of the odd and terrifying emptiness she had felt when she had put it on. ‘I understand,’ she said. She reached out to him. He relaxed and leaned forward, letting her hand rest on his shoulder.

  He said, ‘I never thought I’d see again. Not really see. Not through techniq.’

  ‘Till me.’

  ‘Till you.’

  ‘We’ll try,’ she said.

  He closed his eyes and bowed his head. ‘Thank you,’ he sighed.

  She kissed his brow and minded him, reaching out gently with her mind, the way she used to do when listening for Elle. No wasps stung her now; only a background wash of radio and bird-like microwave. She screened them out, leaving a close and felt-like silence. ‘What is it you want to hear?’

  Xu shook his head. ‘No. This is all.’ He wiped his face. He was crying.

  ‘What’s all?’ she asked him. ‘There’s nothing to hear.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Xu. ‘Just concentrate.’

  She heard nothing. Nothing but the occasional car, shooting past on the road above the estuary, and the soft flap of waves on the hull; rhythmical, precise, like the beat of a huge heart. She stood up and wandered away from the table. Lines of force like fine wires tugged at her head, pulling her back towards her weeping host. ‘Relax,’ she whispered. ‘Let me go. I don’t much like the dark, is all.’

  He sighed and shuddered and unclenched his hands. The tugging stopped. Rosa crossed the lounge and edged the blinds aside. She looked out the porthole. Sunlight skittered on the rippling water, like TV interference.

  ‘You hear it?’ he whispered.

  ‘Just white noise.’

  ‘Oh no.’ He was sobbing openly now. ‘Not noise. A harmony. So beautiful!’

  ‘The sea?’

  He nodded. ‘Presidio!’

  Rosa frowned. Which did he mean? Presidio or the sea? Or did he mean both? But how could the sound be both? What sound? What was he listening to? The rush of quanta from the sea, or some hidden rhythm? Natural music, or minded music?

  And after all, she thought then, who’s to say when chaos becomes mind? What stops the sea, as it signs its name in ripples on Waddell Beach, from thinking? May it not one day flux and yawn and give over scrawling in the sand, and start instead to manufacture eyes, fingernails, bags of blood and rolls of hair?

  What distinction made her ‘artificial’ and Ajay ‘natural’? Could you not say, with equal rightness, that the Earth had mind to make the things it made? Or that Ma herself was unthinking, a natural force merely, though supplied with handier tools?

  Flap went the waves.

  Ajay as Earth’s signature, Earth’s ripple.

  Flap.

  Rosa, in her turn, as Ma’s—

  Troubled by thoughts that did not seem to come from her, Rosa lost her concentration and found herself looking not at the waves, but through them, at deeper patterns of the light, correspondences, shapes, echoes . . .

  ‘That’s it!’ Xu gasped. ‘That’s it!’

  Not like interference.

  No, quite wrong.

  Like something else.

  She racked her brain for what it was but it had smeared somehow, all categories lost. Dream and memory seemed all intertangled.

  Such sudden knowledge made her giddy. Xu, she cried, half scared and half delighted, the sea’s thinkin
g!

  She balked then, confused. She had addressed him as she would the sister she had killed: with her mind, not with her mouth.

  She tried again.

  Her mouth wouldn’t open.

  She had no mouth.

  The waves drew her gaze deeper. Lines and curlicues formed and re-formed, and she descended through them, spiralling inwards. She felt sick. She bent down to steady herself against the sill.

  She had no arms.

  She fell. The sea went fractal. New colours swamped her. She became weightless. She could not tell if she were falling, or whether the spiralling lights were wheeling up to meet her.

  She was not afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  No wind. No resistance. No sensation. She looked down at herself.

  She had no skin, no bone, no substance.

  Mind’s not a thing, a voice said in her ear. It’s an effect. A side-effect of being. The more you are, the more you think. Of course the earth thinks, on one scale. And so do you. Xu’s boat thinks, too: just not a lot, is all.

  She heard laughter. Gentle, kindly, woman’s laughter.

  What, sweet? Cat got your tongue?

  The voice threaded itself so tightly round her head, she could hardly separate it from her own.

  Oh do try, little one. I hate italics.

  Where am I? she asked.

  Hush, sweetheart, no need to shout. I’m modelling you. Your mind’s in me, faithfully reproduced. What you think, I think.

  What you think, I think.

  What you think, I think.

  I’m made, then, thought Rosa, disappointed, and sank to the ground. The earth was flat and neatly lawned. Every blade of grass was exactly alike.

  She looked into the sky. There was no sun, no single source of light. The sky was grey and evenly luminous.

  ‘You’ve not been listening,’ the woman’s voice chided, melting out of the air before her. The voice had no clothes, no body, no limbs. It was just a column of meat. It had no face, just features that appeared and disappeared as they were needed. When she blinked, her eyes pulsed out, blinked, and went in again. When she spoke, her mouth bloomed out the meat; when she fell silent, the meat grew over in an instant. ‘Everything that senses and computes has mind. Trees have mind. Bats do. Men do. Tribes do. Whole armies, peoples, nations do. The world has mind. When it seems to others they can see the mind that shapes something, they call that something “made”. When they cannot see the maker’s mind they call the made thing “natural”. Ajay calls you “made” because he’s small enough to see the tools that made you. But you were made by something vast. I see that. Something Massive. And she, I reckon, gave no more thought to you than the Earth gave thought to making Ajay. To her, and to me, you seem “natural”.’