Alex thinks of what Perse told him about a bomb at Heathrow, and then, a handspan from his face, a terrified man is trying to prise open the doors by pulling at the rubber flanges. There’s a flat sound and the man’s face is slammed against the glass as stuff bursts from the back of his head. The Cool-Z makes it look like a bad special effect to Alex, too sudden to be convincing.
A policeman, his face hidden by a black reflective visor, bangs on the door with the stock of his pistol. The people inside, Alex included, flinch away. The train starts with a jerk and makes its long rising roar as it plunges into the tunnel.
Half the people around Alex affect the Londoner’s cool weariness of having seen it all before; others are talking, indignant, scared, excited by the rumours floating around. Someone declares, in a plummy authoritarian voice, that summary execution is too good for terrorists, the police should castrate them and hand them over to the people.
Alex thinks of the streetkid, dead in the gutter. The blood and matter spattered on the door’s glass looks black in the carriage’s yellow light. It’s already happening.
Alex makes the change at King’s Cross to the Metropolitan Line. The train is every bit as crowded and slow as the one on Piccadilly, and stops not once, not twice, but three times between stations. Alex changes on to the East London Line and then at last gets a seat on the little Docklands railway train. Two days ago he rode this very same train home in the rain, heartsick and angry. The anger’s still there, but mixed with fear now, and trapped beneath the icy veneer of Cool-Z.
The setting sun burnishes Canary Wharf as Alex walks through underpasses and open spaces to his workshop. Billy Rock’s limo is parked on the weedy tarmac. Alex isn’t surprised. Nothing can touch him at the moment. Loud music shakes the limo’s mirrored windows. Looking through the windscreen, Alex glimpses Billy Rock thrashing about on the back seat, kicking his legs in the air like an upturned bug.
Alex’s neighbour, Malik Ali, is working with the double doors of his workshop unit wide open. A fan droning on the floor pushes the heat around inside. Malik tells Alex that someone saw two men go into Alex’s place, although one was a kid really, one of those rude boy gangster types.
‘What did the other one look like?’
‘Big. Muscles.’
Malik is sewing the halves of a jacket together. He doesn’t stop because he’s on piecework. Alex can feel the vibration of the industrial sewing machine through the thick soles of his construction boots. Its noise drowns out the muffled thudding of the limo’s sound system.
Malik says, ‘You know them?’
‘Yeah, I know them.’
‘Alex, man, you stay for a cup of tea. Maybe they go away. They’ve been in there half an hour now. Arrived just after the woman.’
‘Woman?’
Then Alex remembers Ma Nakome’s promise to send Alice around. Oh shit.
Malik says with a little smile, ‘You’ve not been paying your insurance?’
Alex thinks that Malik would shit his pants if he knew that Billy Rock was inside the limo. He says, ‘Something like that. Let me deal with it, but if I’m not out in an hour, call the police.’
Alex gives Perse’s cellphone number to Malik. It’s not likely Perse would do anything if it came down to it, but it’s all he has.
The little access door is unlocked. When Alex steps into the workshop, Doggy Dog raises his pistol. He’s sitting in the chair by the computer. He makes a clicking sound, jerks the pistol as if in recoil, and says, ‘Now you’re a dead man.’ The pistol is a 9mm automatic, the tried and tested weapon of choice for Yardies.
‘You better not have touched anything in here,’ Alex says, ‘or you’re dead.’
‘Hey, listen to the fat man,’ Doggy Dog says.
The driver is leaning against the stainless steel kitchen counter, arms folded. He shrugs, unimpressed.
‘I mean it,’ Alex says. He feels amazingly calm. ‘There’s some dangerous shit in here. Where’s Alice?’
‘The ho’? Oh, she back there, someplace,’ Doggy Dog says casually. He swivels back and forth in the chair. He is wearing the same Bob Marley T-shirt and bright red shorts that Alex saw him in this morning, but the hat is gone. ‘Don’t you be worrying, bwoy. I wouldn’t be touching your girlfriend, or anything else your scabby white man’s dick’s been near.’
‘I’m going back there to take a look at her. OK?’ Alex makes his appeal to the driver, who shrugs again.
Behind the Chinese screen, Alice is sitting up on the bed with her back against the rails of the brass bedstead. There is silver duct tape over her mouth, more tape wrapped in a fat knot around her wrists and the bedstead. Alex carefully peels the tape from her mouth and she spits sideways and says, ‘The fuckers jumped me, made me unlock the door.’
Alex has forgotten that he gave her a copy of the card that works the lock. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. They seem to have used a whole roll of tape on her hands; he’ll have to find something to cut it with. He adds, ‘I’ve got to talk with them.’
‘That kid felt up my tits, but that’s about all they did. The big bloke told me to be quiet and I wouldn’t be hurt. He took my pager. Get it back, won’t you? Don’t let him walk off with it.’
Alice grins, showing the gap between her front teeth. She’s about two years younger than Alex, and quite fearless. She moves her legs around on the bedspread and says, ‘Come on back here, maybe you can get off on a little bondage.’
‘Does this really excite you? Jesus, Alice, those guys are serious.’ Yet Alex feels his penis flex inside his jockey shorts. There is something exciting about this.
Alice says, ‘They’re losers. Besides, Ma Nakome knows where I am. If I don’t call in soon, someone will be round. What do you say? I don’t mind, with you, and it won’t cost more than twice what we work out on, OK?’
‘How long until your friend gets here?’
‘Maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Keep them talking, Alex. That’s what you’re good at.’
Doggy Dog is rooting in one of the three fridges, the middle one where Alex keeps his supply of Pisant. ‘You don’t got no Coke,’ Doggy Dog says accusingly. He has shoved the automatic pistol into the waistband of his red shorts.
‘I’ll get some for next time.’
‘There’ll need to be no next time, if you do right by us,’ the driver says.
‘Which means you stay away from that bitch,’ Doggy Dog says. He shuts the fridge door. ‘How you know she lives there?’
‘She phoned me,’ Alex says.
‘Bullshit,’ the driver says.
‘Switch on the radio, Delbert,’ Doggy Dog says to the driver, and says over the noise of Capital Radio, ‘See, Delbert, I told you she would try to pull something like this. She isn’t like normal people, that’s what you got to understand. She’s, like, curious about everything. So if she phone this fat fuck, it’s only because she want to know who she be working with. That’s all it is.’
Delbert says slowly and thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know, Dog. This is getting out of control.’
Alex says, ‘Who is she?’
‘One thing you don’t need to know,’ Doggy Dog says, ‘is who she is, or what she does. All you have to do is make the stuff Billy Rock asked you to make. OK?’
‘And give it to you. Wow. Either you guys are really dumb, or you have the biggest pairs of balls outside of a bull elephant. Billy could get tired of listening to his music. Or bored. He could walk right in here, and then what would you say?’
‘He’s a happy camper,’ the driver, Delbert, says. ‘He’s just done himself a load, and he won’t be getting up for at least an hour. I’ve been working for Mr Rock for three years now, and I do believe I know him better than you.’
Doggy Dog takes out his pistol again. He aims it at Black Betty, at each of the three fridges, one after the other. Alex and Delbert watch him. On the radio, a pop song finishes and there’s a bright, bouncing ad about Sanyo’s home virtuality entertainment system.
Doggy Dog says, ‘You be smart, right? I know guys like you. You all think you be better than anyone like me. Delbert, you show him how smart he is.’
The driver pushes away from the counter, says, ‘Nothing personal,’ and punches Alex in the mouth.
Alex sees it coming, but hardly has time to start to turn his head when the driver’s fist slams into him. Light bursts in his eyes. Then he’s sitting on the floor, tasting blood in his mouth where his front teeth have cut into his lower lip.
Doggy Dog is standing over him. Alex looks up at the maw of the pistol. It is a little round black hole in a rectangular profile. Doggy Dog’s finger is on the trigger.
Alex says, ‘Point that thing somewhere else.’
‘Now maybe you’ll begin to forget all that white man disrespect you be showing me. Down on the floor you be no better than anyone else. You listening?’
‘Just nod,’ Delbert says genially.
Alex nods. He can sweep Doggy Dog’s legs out from under him, but unless he can grab the pistol Delbert will be on him in a moment. Alex is probably stronger than Doggy Dog, but he’s pretty certain the big driver is skinpopping one of the commercial synapse enhancers. Most bodyguards do.
‘All you got to do is make the stuff,’ Doggy Dog tells Alex. ‘You don’t tell Billy you done it, and if he asks, you tell him there’s a difficulty. You make something up, won’t take much to confuse Billy Rock. Tell him one more day.’
Delbert says, ‘You listening, Alex? I’m sorry I had to hit you, but you overstepped the mark. I would have hit you in the gut, but that’s risky with a man big as you.’
‘Can I get up now?’
Alex is wondering just when Alice’s backup will get here, and if he’ll be armed. Well, of course he’ll be armed.
‘You stay on the floor,’ Doggy Dog says. ‘I like you down there, your big belly going up and down like you be a woman ’bout to give birth.’
Alex says, ‘You two are crazy. If Billy doesn’t kill you, his uncles will.’
‘Yeah, and how will Billy know unless you tell him? You do that and you be dead. You t’ink me and Delbert here are the only ones on this t’ing? We get hurt, so do you. You and your mother, right. I know where she lives, bwoy. You t’ink about that.’ Doggy Dog tucks his pistol in the waistband of his shorts. ‘We be watching you. Be good.’
Then they’re gone. Alex waits a long minute, looking up at the dusty stays under the concrete slab roof and letting his fear tremble out of him, before he can get up and cut Alice free.
She looks at him and says, ‘I guess you’re not ready for it just yet.’
‘You better call off your backup,’ Alex tells her, and while she uses his phone he sticks his head around the door of Malik Ali’s workshop and tells him everything is OK.
Alice makes a pot of tea, and she and Alex sit drinking it side by side on the bed, just as if they’ve had sex, Alex holds a plastic baggie of crushed ice against his tender bottom lip, taking it away each time he sips the sweet milky tea. Alice wants to know what kind of trouble Alex is in, and he tells her some of the story, but not about the way Billy Rock’s runner and driver are planning to double-cross him, and especially not about their partner. Alex is certain he knows who that is. Those two are too dumb to think of a scam like this all on their own.
Alice rubs at the strings of adhesive the tape has left on her wrists. She says, ‘You could sell the film rights on a story like that.’
‘It isn’t so exciting when you’re in the middle of it.’
Alice sort of looks at him from under her eyelashes. ‘So you’re still not up, huh? Come on, big guy. Didn’t it even excite you a little?’
‘I just had a gun put on me, for Christ’s sake.’
Alice is suddenly angry. ‘Oh yeah? Well listen, I’ve had to do it with a gun to my head. More than once. What happened here is nothing. That kid is nothing. You’ve never lived on the street, you don’t know. Billy Rock wouldn’t really hurt you. He needs you enough to give you protection.’
‘This wasn’t about protection,’ Alex says.
‘It wasn’t anything,’ Alice says. Her anger is gone, as suddenly as it arrived. She adds, ‘Don’t listen to what I say, baby. Maybe I’m a little shook up.’
‘That’s OK,’ Alex says, but it isn’t, not really. Their cosy pretence at happy families has been punctured. He pays her and she promises him she won’t tell Ma Nakome, and then she’s gone.
9 – Artificial Life
Alex finds that he can’t sit down. He prowls around the big workshop, suddenly finds himself kicking the breezeblock wall with his steel-capped construction boots, blazing with an anger that’s spent as quickly as it arose. He has work to do. Work is the universal solvent of care.
He checks the sequencing of the point-mutated genes, then sets up the PCR block incubator. By tomorrow, the polymerase chain reactions, driven by temperature-sensitive DNA-replicating enzymes cycling over and over, will have made millions of copies of the DNA strings which code for the suite of enzymes capable of assembling the hormones. He will have enough copies to guarantee successful insertion into a plasmid, which in turn will be inserted into cells of Bacillus subtilis. Once an active gene is inserted, the bacteria will be transformed into chemical factories that produce the desired product. The particular plasmid Alex plans to use will subvert the bacteria’s protein-making machinery if the culture is fed tryptophan. Instead of making the hundreds of different proteins needed to produce new bacteria, the bacteria will make only the enzymes which make the oddly differentiated doll sex hormones. Two days at the outside, and it’ll be done.
Alex opens a pack of Malaysian army rations—banana curry, fuck—and nukes it in the microwave. While he’s spooning down rice and sour-sweet banana-flavoured pap, he thinks about the package the little girl downloaded into his system buffer. Crack it open, she said, and he’ll know to get in touch with her again.
It’s a risk, but he opens a carton of Pisant and sets to. After all, he can hardly walk up and bang on the door of the house, not after what happened last time.
In fact, cracking the data package is insultingly easy. After he’s decompressed the package, he runs a debugger on its dense lines of codes, which are definitely the algorithmic genes of some kind of a-life critter. Buried in them is a single non-operational line. He extracts it and converts the bin-hex code into ASCII. It’s an address in the Web.
‘Alfred Russel Wallace, I presume,’ Alex mutters.
He could have encrypted the address in half a dozen more subtle ways. Either the little girl’s naïve, or she wants him to think she is. He isn’t certain which is the less worse alternative.
Still, she is his only clear line into the tangled heart of this trouble, he’s certain of that. And if she’s what she claims to be, this a-life creature she’s given him really will solve the edge glider parasite problem.
With some misgiving, Alex loads copies of the new creature into his a-life ecosystem. Just a few of them in one area, because if this does turn out to be some kind of system gobbler, then maybe he can cauterize the copies before they spread too far. Then he puts on the VR goggles, sits back, and watches.
The a-life system has various levels of monitoring. Alex toggles it for the global view, with different organisms appearing as variously shaped icons whose colour indicates how much energy they possess. He seems to be hovering above a green, rumpled table-top world that is teeming with vibrantly coloured flecks. The green world’s edges are sharply defined against the black void in which it floats. The flecks pulse and flicker, as, with each tick of the ecosystem’s clock, the a-life organisms examine and react to the bitstream density and the configurations of other organisms in their vicinity.
There are over two hundred species, close to the stable limits for this type of a-life ecosystem. More advanced a-life freaks are into PondLife systems now, teaspoonfuls of simulated water teeming with simulated protozoans, bacteria, algae and viruses in which Real Life pr
ocesses are modelled on a molecular scale. Alex’s computer doesn’t have the RAM to run something that complicated at anything more than geological speed, and besides, he enjoys the illusion of being a microcosmic God floating benignly over his flatland world.
Most of Alex’s a-life ecosystem has stabilized as a kind of open prairie of small, densely growing plantoids, organisms which feed on the bitstream density of the system just as plants feed on sunlight, air and water. Here and there are islands of scrubby tangles of things like thong ferns, and just off-centre is a patch of triple-tiered jungle, where a kaleidoscopic variety of huge plantoids intensely recycle a bitstream density too low to sustain the prairie.
On the global view this jungle is a fuzzy bump in the table-top flatness of the ecosystem. Animal-like bugoids are reduced to twenty-bit icons. Some move slowly, in herds—herbivores which directly feed on the plantoids. Predators which feed on the information space coding; other bugoids pursue solitary trajectories. Here and there are pulsing masses of clusterfucks, shaded from bright red at the edges through green and indigo to dull dead black in the centre.
The new bugoids, yellow hook-legged snowflakes, don’t reproduce, or not at once. Nor do they feed, or not at once. Instead they move away from the spot on the map Alex assigned them, moving in different directions towards the nearest edge of the a-life ecosystem.
Alex downloads four. One runs straight into a clusterfuck colony and is absorbed. The others reach the edge, which in this system is a real boundary, and move out along it. Several times the new bugoids interact with fuzzy wimps, which bumble along the edge picking up detritus left by more active feeders, but they don’t touch the wimps, even though some are richly red with energy. Twice, the new bugoids avoid the stretched lozenges of healthy edge gliders—and then an edge glider captures one and it is gone, and the edge glider changes colour from green to orange.
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