In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  Once away from the school, they spent most of their time looking in shop windows. Here, there were none of the icy, unreachable displays that were scattered about where Dion’s father had his apartment. Instead, the windows were increasingly crammed with marked-down bargains, the prices and quality of which decreased with the social gradient. Hazy winter sunlight would fall across the dusty shopfronts, making it difficult to see the prices. If the viewing was particularly difficult, Dion and his friends would go inside, risking a mouthful of abuse from the shopkeeper who only wanted people inside he had some prospect of selling to.

  “Would you like that?” one of his gang asked Dion, pointing to some particularly over-styled piece of electronics. Dion felt a peculiar pull inside himself at the sight of the object. Yes, he would like it. He would like it very much. He would like to be the person who possessed that thing. But there was a discomfort there too. He tried examining the discomfort but could only conclude that if he was to have that thing, he would have to get it in a way that was utterly unacceptable to his father.

  At first, he tried to ease the discomfort by knocking a bit more style into his gang. He wanted them to look like those groups of city kids you could see on the television, moving like a single animal through the city streets. ‘Hey, Jas,’ he’d say to one of his more regular followers, ‘Haven’t you got a decent top you could switch into? You look like shit in that T-shirt.’ Or, ‘Kemi, quit looking like you just lost your lunch. We need to be together in this.’

  But he still wanted that thing, the thing he had seen in that shop window, the kind of thing that still had him itching inside. Hanging out with a straggle of kids just wasn’t enough. He wanted them to look good, but more than that he wanted them to be effective. So, after Jas had found himself a padded black jacket five sizes too big, and Kemi had taken to be their leading edge rather than tagging along behind looking for cigarette butts, Dion applied some serious training.

  “I told you, look like we’re going somewhere. We need style but we don’t need trouble. People just got to think we’re part of the street, you know, not even question what we’re doing here. Come on, follow my step. Try it.”

  And they fell in around him, as he stilled his thoughts, stepped regularly and let a sense a lightness gather about himself, a transparency, as if he might be blown away in the cold wind that sliced between the buildings. He let his sense of himself as someone with things to do and places to go begin to soften and blur. Thoughts stilled, to be replaced by an awareness that was increasingly drawn in on his surroundings.

  “Boo!” shouted Dion, clapping his hands together, knocking his gang out of the light trance he had put them in, the sudden shock of it making them laugh to cover their unease.

  “Fuck you, Dion, what you do that for? I was just getting into it.”

  “Listen,” Dion said, “That’s what we get deep into when we’re going to lift something. I don’t want to get chased. That’s for kids. If we go into a shop, we got to act like professionals. We got to get serious about this, like it’s the last thing we’re ever going to do. I’ll tell you what we got to do. We got to get control of people’s attention, you know? – The people we’re going to take things from – the people who might take us to the police – back to school – all them. We need to be invisible when we’re doing what matters, and we need them paying attention to just one of us when the others are busy with the action. Listen, I’ll tell you how we can work it, but don’t forget, you got to be feeling right inside. Feel right inside and everything’ll follow.”

  The first time round, they screwed up completely, came away with nothing and almost got caught. Dion was enraged. “I’m not fucking kidding, you know? I am not kidding. This fucking matters to me. I give you good stuff, the best there is, and what do you do with it? You fucking piss it away like this is some game that we can all go home after. We’re not fucking freelancers – we’re a team and that’s the only way it’s going to work.”

  He said he didn’t want them around him. They were a liability. They were going to get him into serious trouble, if they messed around like that again. But he’d give them one more chance and if they blew that, he’d dump them and just do it himself.

  One dropped out – said it was getting too scary – but the others shaped up enough for them to get away undetected with a nondescript little music station that had been sitting, unwired, in a side room of a used-goods shop.

  It was a good enough start.

  *

  Stealing old electronics was not some game Dion could go home after because he knew that one day he wouldn’t be going home. In his parents’ apartment, he spent most of his time shut in his room, thumbing through old magazines, looking at the adverts for music stations, calculators, computers, televisions. Sometimes he reached under his bed and up to where his poster of the tropical island was wedged into the mesh that held up the mattress. He opened the picture out and stared at it for an hour at a time, dreaming of getting a boat and going there with his friends to live a life of freedom and adventure.

  In spending so much time either out of the house or in the corner of the house set aside for him, surrounded by a few treasured possessions, the appearances of Dion’s life increasingly resembled those of his grandmother. Unconsciously, his parents reacted accordingly, becoming increasingly grudging in their treatment of him, making of him an outsider. His mother was expecting another baby and Dion put her offhandedness with him down to that. His explanation didn’t change the feeling though, and he began to spend even more time away from his parents’ apartment.

  Dion soon had the entire territory between the apartment and his school mapped out. The impressions from his first journey were resolved into a series of clearly defined localities distinguished by the quality of the buildings, the kinds of cars parked on the streets, and the attitudes of the people to the gang of truants he led.

  More precisely, the districts were distinguished by what could be stolen, whether it was fruit from an open display, electrical goods from a cheap general store, or sound systems from cars whose alarms no longer worked. Much of the mapping Dion did required long hours of careful observation. His friends would grow impatient but a return of his flashing anger soon silenced them. Anyway, their ‘strikes’, as Dion called his planned acts of larceny, were almost always successful.

  In search of new territories – to make time for their faces to be forgotten in the old – Dion led his gang further east. At first, they remained on foot, but they soon progressed to stealing rides on the public transport. The downhill social gradient his mapping had revealed continued as they headed further out. There was also an uphill danger gradient, as evidenced by the increasingly visible police presence. The area they ventured into had a sour smell that seemed to come from a mix of infrequently emptied rubbish bins, stale cooking, and broad swathes of derelict land used as unofficial tips. There were only the poorest of shops and no industry. The area appeared to be given over to tall, shabby apartment blocks in which were packed an extraordinary number of people. The public buses and overground transits all terminated thereabouts. After several forays, it became clear there was little of value in the district, but Dion still insisted on investigating every corner. He watched the patterns of movement in the transport system: how most vehicles headed back west in the morning full with people; how there was little traffic during the day; and how it all came back in the evening, crammed again with passengers. But Dion only fully realised he and his friends were exploring a borderland when they came one afternoon to a vast complication of motorway flyovers fronted by a band of complete dereliction. It was as if a demolition team had only half-finished the job and some much greater project had simply marched across the broken walls and rubble left behind. The scene conveyed a kind of finality, as if this was the end of the world, and Dion led his band directly into it.

  They picked their way between ruined walls and paused in the cathedral stillness beneath the flyovers, the rumble of traf
fic infinitely distant, like divine breath. Dion said, “Come on, let’s see what’s on the other side,” and headed out beyond the shadows of the roadways into an area that none of them had ever set eyes on before. It was not dissimilar from the world they had just left behind. The tall, shabby apartment blocks resumed their inexorable march, only they were more derelict still. Dion’s friends wanted to go back and he reluctantly agreed.

  Before they turned away, he noticed, painted in rough, angry letters on the end of one of the derelict blocks beyond the flyovers, the words, ‘Welcome to the Waste’.

  12

  Miranda Whitlam continued with her studies in biotech while, under cover of rapid progress, she extended her investigations into the various meanings that had been ascribed to the DNA model of living processes. Thus, while the biotech consultant waited for her to come up with a philosophy, Miranda was finding any number, not all of them commercially directed.

  When they next met, she said, “What you were telling me was that DNA acts as a kind of model of living things and if you change the model, you change the thing. That’s what makes it a focus for idealist thinking – it’s the form at the source of all living appearances. But there’s a mechanical equivalent to all this: there’s the process itself – translation of model into appearance – and there’s the way the process can generate new appearances. Evolution’s very clever, isn’t it; because when the model gets changed, the living thing gets changed, but the change in the model only gets to survive and perpetuate if the changed thing survives successfully. Evolution can’t help but work. I wondered about making that the basis of my philosophy, but it’s entirely impersonal, deterministic and without meaning. It may be true, but people aren’t going to buy into that: it completely excludes them.”

  The biotech consultant looked at her, but only said, “So, are you anywhere nearer a position for your company to take?”

  “I think so, but I need to get clear about exactly how biotech-based energy production works before I finalise it. Can you reschedule my screen-learning so I can get on with the energy issues? Most of what I’m dealing with at the moment is about cows and rainforests.”

  Miranda was already aware that energy-centred biotech would involve engineered microorganisms, and these would be set to work on raw materials it had hitherto been uneconomic to oxidise. She needed to find some detail, though, that would provide the link with the philosophy she had in mind. But as her understanding of biotech-based energy production expanded, it soon became clear the link was evident in the principle of the thing itself rather than any fine detail. People and microorganisms ran along the same lines and that fact was all she needed.

  At their next meeting Miranda said to the biotech consultant, “If people are worried we’re going to exploit and spoil the core of their being in some way, we take them at face value. We run a line that DNA really is the core of their being and instead of exploiting and manipulating, our company has chosen to be instrumental in a great expansion in what that core can do. We run images that tell people they have a core that is a source of infinite energy and all their dreams will come true if we can release the energy from that source and channel it in the right direction. In the campaign, we emphasise how the energy we will produce will be the same energy that provides warmth and light for their children, puts food on their tables, powers hospitals and ambulances. Only this energy doesn’t come from some outside source, something you dig out of the ground, it comes from the same source that lies at the core of their being. So they share in the source of this energy. We tell them the active ingredient in all this is something they share with the whole of the living world, something they are participants in – our company is then merely the benefactor that enables them to do so.”

  The biotech consultant waited some moments, then said. “That seemed to come very easily to you, Miranda. You’ve not picked up on this from somewhere else, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t. And you’ll know from the last time we talked it’s not the first line I’ve considered. But what really interests me is the way DNA can act as a model, and the way we can make changes in how things look by changing DNA. DNA is acting like the executive programmes that put up all your interests on a single screen and let you make changes to your business merely by changing the lines of relationship. DNA is what you reach out and touch when you apply the power to make things different. It’s as if there are twin descriptions of the way things are, and DNA is the real one because it’s at the source.”

  After that, the biotech consultant called Miranda Whitlam his closet idealist.

  ‘I’m not ashamed of it,’ she’d say, and he’d say she ought to be.

  *

  The philosophy took some time to develop as a practical proposition. First, the research base and production facilities had to be structured as community rather than corporate-fronted. Then there had to be a learning programme developed for the sales and customer services staff, one that emphasised involving people themselves in the project rather than merely having them as paying recipients of the company’s bounty. Miranda’s philosophy was novel enough to necessitate everything being designed anew, from the staff image to the door handles on the bioreactor facilities. And there were the engineering and legal substructures to be worked out that could enable the new production system to be accommodated within the peculiarities of any existing national or international energy grid.

  Miranda’s company borrowed an unprecedented amount of virtual capital to fund the plan, but, as the biotech consultant commented, there had never been such an idea in the school before. Some of the consultants, getting wind of what was happening, were even prepared to invest real capital in anticipation of a saleable outcome. It gave the development an added edge for Miranda’s company to know there were real accounts set up that they were drawing on in order to further the project. And it meant they were able to extend their facilities and call on outside consultants. Normally, this only happened on an individual level in the final year, and then it was carefully limited to avoid losses that might hurt. Now, for the first time, a school company was working on an idea that many felt justified genuine risk investment.

  But, the biotech consultant was interested to note, Miranda Whitlam – who should have remained at the core of developments, accruing status and position – took an increasingly back seat as the project built up its own momentum. It was not that she disengaged exactly, rather she treated it more as a job to be done, something to be seen through in as professional a manner as possible. Seeing her own idea becoming realised seemed to give her none of those god-like peaks that others would have been elevated to. Again, the biotech consultant found himself wondering what was missing in Miranda Whitlam.

  “Do you realise you could stand to make a very substantial amount of money indeed out of this, Miranda?” he said to her. For all her apparent detachment, he had noted from the start that she had been extremely quick to sort out the intellectual property rights and her claims to them.

  “Yes, I do realise that,” Miranda replied. “The money could be useful. It could give me the space to go after what I’m really interested in.”

  “Which is...?” – As if he didn’t know.

  “DNA as a model that can be manipulated to change living forms.”

  “But what are you planning to do with that model?”

  “I’m not planning anything yet. Something’ll come up though.”

  *

  The year turned through another full cycle and William Burger sent his usual Christmas card. Miranda still couldn’t think why and still didn’t send him one in return. Again, she felt the year’s passing as a peculiar, disturbing undertow. She told herself she ought to be used to this recurrent feeling the yellowing leaves and the chilly morning air gave her but something happened about this time of year: the school’s tasks would become an empty ritual; she would feel unusually tired; she would find herself worrying about her health. At her lowest ebb she would wonder if she wou
ld still be alive the next spring. As the year deepened still further, Miranda stood with bare feet on the cold wood of her veranda looking down on the tatters of leaf on the trees in the valley and up to the dark grey-green of the firs and the increasingly white mountainsides. She felt herself dying with the year and, rather than concentrate on developing a new project proposal, she focused what little remaining energy she had on going somewhere warm and bright for the winter.

  Her father, she knew, would want to stay in his manor to make the most of the party season and the business opportunities it offered. She told him she had been invited by one of her school friends to fly out to South East Asia for Christmas. Her father understood the value of accepting such offers and acquiesced readily. With the elevation in status her project accorded her, it was then no problem to find an appropriately placed fellow student. Spending vacations with colleagues was, in any case, an accepted norm. It was about cultivating connections rather than deepening friendships and Miranda’s take-it-or-leave-it attitude to other people fitted this well. Most of the children she found herself among had spent their lives moving with their families between interchangeably luxurious houses and apartments, kept by the giant corporations whose appetites their parents were the best able to feed. Who and what were important were the things they were brought up to attend to. Putting down roots, either in places or amongst people, was simply not part of the children’s experience.

  So, successfully anaesthetised by Malaysian heat and light, Miranda spent the Christmas break better than she would have had she spent it with her father. Coming back to the northern winter was uncomfortable, but more bearable than it had been. Then, in spring, when the undercurrent of disintegration had passed and Miranda could barely understand how she could have felt the dying of the previous year so acutely, her idea for selling biotech-based energy production was at last let loose on the market simulators and was, as expected, a runaway success.