Infinite Detail

by Tim Maughan

  He doesn’t reply, an awkward pause. She climbs down from the tank, hands him back the joint.

  “Y’know, something left over from before,” she continues. She looks at the tank, feels light-headed. Its collage of patterns seems to strobe, a faint stoned memory of ancient GIF art.

  “Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint you, but this is it,” College eventually says, an edge of discomfort to his voice. “An old tank and some solar panels.”

  She looks at him, knows he’s holding something back. “What about the network? You been trying to get it up and running again?”

  College takes a hit, blows out purple-tinted ganja smoke. He shakes his head, scratches his beard. Sheepish. He looks at the ground.

  “It’s gone, Anika. Went the same way as this tank.”

  Anika holds his gaze, even as he tries to look away. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Really.”

  “You sure, College?”

  “What you saying, Anika?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” She can’t decide whether he’s genuinely offended, angry, or covering for something. She can’t decide whether to push him further.

  She lets it hang in the air for a minute, watching him smoke. Then she decides.

  “It’s just … y’know. I was never an expert on how it all worked, that was your and Rush’s gig. But I thought it was meant to be self-repairing?”

  “It is. I mean it was. But that was before we blew the jammers up. You remember us doing that, right? I mean, it was a busy day, but you remember that?”

  She smiles at his trademark dark humor. She’s missed it. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, that was the end of the network. Turn off the jammers and you turn off the barrier to the outside world, to the Internet. With that gone we were just as susceptible to infection as the rest of the world.”

  “Huh.” It’s not quite how she remembers it, not quite how she thought it worked, but okay. Time to try a slightly different angle. “So you never even tried to get it back up?”

  College sighs, irritated. “For fuck’s sake, Anika. I’ve been busy. Look at all this shit, the power, the solar, I built all this. I’ve been fucking busy. I had to get this shit up and running, people’s lives depended on it.”

  “Yeah, of course. I’m sorry.”

  “It just wasn’t ever a priority. Especially not for Grids. And he calls all the shots around here. And he made it pretty clear I wasn’t to waste my time on that stuff.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. He fucking hates all that stuff. Always has. Social media, everything. Hated it when we were kids and hates it now. He made it pretty clear I wasn’t to touch any of it.”

  “But you must have, y’know, experimented…”

  He can’t meet her eyes now. “Anika, I told you. It doesn’t work. And Grids made it super fucking clear to me it was out of bounds. He hates it. Plus maybe—I dunno. Maybe he sees it as threatening his power, or maybe he’s got something he wants to hide, he doesn’t want being dragged up again.”

  “Maybe.” Her head floods with images: firefights, street executions, bodies hanging from lampposts, the last few days of chaos. “Maybe he has.”

  She stares up into the night sky, filled with more stars than she’s ever seen above Bristol. Dead cities bleed no light, she thinks. It reminds her of Wales. She can’t give up now.

  “What about this girl, then?” she says.

  “What girl?” She’d swear he blushes.

  “This girl that everyone says can see ghosts on Stokes Croft?”

  College’s face drops. “That’s nothing. Just some Traveler kid. Gypsy magic bullshit. Urban myth. Where’d you hear about that?”

  “I dunno. Rumors. Stories.”

  “Stories?”

  She’s got him now, she can feel it. “Yeah. Stories. Stories about some girl that puts on her glasses and can see things that ain’t there.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all it is. Stories. Stories about some gypsy girl.”

  “Ah, okay. Nothing more than that?”

  “Nothing. People believe all sorts of bollocks these days.”

  “Then you won’t mind me popping in and seeing her then? Getting her to read my tea leaves?”

  College pauses, sighs. “Fuck you, Anika. Go fuck yourself. Really. Everything was just getting normal around here, and you have to come and stir shit up. As always. Fuck you.”

  Anika smiles at him. “I missed you, too.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Anika looks at him for a second or two.

  “What is it, man? What you holding out on me? What’s up with the girl?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Really?” She knows he’s going to.

  He pauses again. Scratches the base of a dreadlock. Looks around. “Jesus Christ. Okay. But not here.”

  10. AFTER

  “You okay?”

  Mary rests against the doorframe. Grids hadn’t come back from the kitchen, even after she’d heard Tyrone leaving, so she’d come to check on him. She’d found him sitting on the edge of his bed, an open shoebox at his feet, a crumpled photograph in his hand.

  “Yeah. I’m good.” He looks up and smiles, that certain warmth he reserves for her. “Tired.”

  “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

  “You was okay today? With them peoples?”

  “Yeah.” She shrugs. “It was fine. Just like anyone else coming in, really.”

  He nods, smiles again. His eyes fall back down to the photo in his hands. Mary wonders how many people have seen him like this in the last five years. Vulnerable, human. She feels honored, special—but also a sense of responsibility that troubles her. The same burden she feels for everyone that comes into the shop, demanding she gives them closure, wanting her to stitch up the wounds of their loss. But this is worse, because it’s Grids, and so far she’s not been able to deliver.

  She crosses from the doorway to the bed, gently sits down next to him. She knows exactly the photo that he’s looking at before she sees it. The high cheeks, gold hoop earrings, the tightly curled hair in bunches.

  “You miss her?”

  “Yeah.” He looks up at her, and for a second she thinks he might cry. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s seen him like this, but still it surprises her. “Yeah, I do, Mary. I miss her every day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stupid, really.”

  “No. It’s not.” She puts a hand on his shoulder.

  “You’ve—you’d tell me, right? Tell me if you’d seen her? Tell me if you’d heard her, even?”

  “Of course I would.” That twinge of guilt, that burden of failed responsibility, the fear that she’ll never find anything, the sense of being a fraud, a con artist, that she feels every day in the shop. But worse again, because it’s Grids. Because if it wasn’t for him taking her in she’d still be out in the street, or back at the camp digging around in other people’s trash. She silently fights back panic, wondering how long he’ll tolerate her turning up empty-handed.

  “I know you won’t find her … but, y’know. Maybe another photo. Maybe some of her music, yeah?”

  “I know. I’m always looking, Grids, every day I’m out there. I promise.”

  “I know, I know.” He laughs at himself, shakes his head. “Get me. Pathetic. Like those people that come in the shop every day, always looking for someone that ain’t there.”

  “Nothing pathetic about it. Everybody is looking for someone.”

  “I guess.”

  They sit there in awkward silence for a moment, her hand still on his shoulder, unsure what to say.

  “I told you about her, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you did.” Maybe half a dozen times. She knows the story by heart. “Tell me again if you like. It might help.”

  “Nah—”

  “It might help.”

  “Help?” He looks almost offended, as though he’s about to shutter away his vulnerability again.

&nbs
p; “Help me, I mean,” she lies, thinking fast. “It might help me, y’know, find her.”

  “I guess.”

  “I’d like to hear it. Really.”

  * * *

  The last time Grids talked to her it was here, downstairs, in the shadows of the towers.

  It had been nearly a year since he’d last seen her. Their crew was over. They’d drifted apart, College was deep in his studies and computers, the others had all got jobs or kids or prison time, or some combo of the three.

  But she was running with her own crew now. A bunch of teenagers hanging around in the playground that cowered between the half-century-old towers, leaning against the climbing frames, legs dangling from swings. Unpixelated eyes watched him from under hoods and hijabs, caps and shemaghs. It seemed a pretty even mix of races and genders, and the air was thick with the smell of high-grade GM skunk and cheap, sickly sweet supermarket cider.

  But there, in the middle of them all, her head totally uncovered, the breeze gently nudging her oversized gold hoop earrings against her black skin and rippling stray hairs across her forehead, sat Melody. She smiled at him.

  It should have been intimidating—it was at first—standing there as her crew circled him, silently watching. Listening, recording. Two of their cheap, toylike microdrones circled above them. Children that had lived their whole, brief lives under surveillance, that had always struggled to find privacy and space of their own, turning that feeling into power, significance.

  It should have been intimidating, but when Melody spoke, everything else faded away. She made him welcome, made him feel safe. She was older now—they both were—but she seemed grown-up, more formed. Reasoned. Considered. Like the old knee-jerk anger she’d had when they ran together had faded away. She was polite, articulate, poetic—her words peppered with Bristolian and Jamaican slang, tech jargon, and favela speak—but always clear, measured. She spoke purposefully.

  They talked for nearly two hours. Awkwardly at first. Mostly catch-up. At some point she blinked him some tunes—he’d heard her stuff already, secretly he’d never stopped following what she was doing, but this was new material—almost painfully slow synthetic beats, decades-old dub sirens soaked in reverb, her vocals turned into disjointed, contextless consonants echoing through simulations of antique tape-delay machines, pristine numbers being crunched to birth virtual crackle and dust. Sparse, minimal, stripped down. It wasn’t the beats that mattered, she told him, but the spaces in between. His spex’s bone-conduction speakers filled his skull with her bass.

  No more looting, she explained. No more pranks. The only hustle now was the music, and protecting the towers the city wanted to rip down. Protecting their home.

  Grids was confused, at first. Asked her why. Why was she fighting for this place? Why protect this shithole that had been their childhood prison for so long? Hadn’t it always been their dream to escape from here? Hadn’t they fantasized, high and laughing, about watching it burn?

  She paused and looked up at the towers that filled the sky around them, their matrices of windows almost vanishing as they climbed into the perma-drizzle. Her eyes widened as one of the drones dropped in low, hovering and twitching its camera ball to catch her close-up, and Grids wondered if they were streaming all of this, as if even at that point her life was already a global performance.

  When she spoke it was more slang poetry, both nuanced and brutal, reasoned and freestyled.

  She reminded him about the corridors, the stairwells, the entry halls. About how there were no cameras in there. About how it was their space, where they could move, talk, fight, love, play. Unseen. Unmonitored. Unrecorded. Of the many hours—of the many days—of first/third/drone-person footage they streamed and posted of her, none of it was inside those towers. It was a statement: she only ever recorded herself in places where she knew she was being watched anyway, where the CCTV cameras and the ever-circling high-altitude drones could track her. She wouldn’t give away any more than that, and when she entered those towers she disappeared. She was invisible.

  The place they wanted to move her to, her and him and all the other residents after they’d ripped down the towers, was some new-build estate out by the airport, an edge-land construct ten miles out of the city. A sparkling new ghetto of identical buildings, as if they’d all been popped out of the same mold in some giant’s candy factory, topped with solar-panel frosting and pumped full of generic IKEA filling. The council had made this huge deal, she told him, out of keeping all the residents together, of “preserving the community.” Of learning from past mistakes. But that wasn’t the point; every inch of this new estate was under watchful digital eye and ear, dome cameras on every street corner, keyword-triggered microphones embedded in the walls. For their own safety, naturally. But their community wasn’t as obvious as that. It wasn’t the people that mattered, she told him, but the spaces in between. The hidden spaces, the communal secrecy, the unwatched places. The spaces that belonged to them.

  So what if they did stop the demolition? he asked her. What then? What next?

  Fame, she answered.

  Grids laughed, and then realized she was deadly serious. His face flushed with embarrassment. Suddenly he felt small again, insignificant. He made his excuses, said it was good to see her, that he’d check her later, see her around. And then he pulled up his hood and slipped, as casually as he could manage, into the shadows of the towers.

  It was the last time he talked to her.

  * * *

  Grids heard about the Cabot party directly from someone on Melody’s crew, a brief in-box flash, date, time, geotag. The first two were a little surprising—it was a weekday, and seven in the evening. Parties didn’t usually kick off until close to midnight at the very earliest. And then there was the geotag itself, slap bang at the bottom of Cabot Circus Shopping Centre, Bristol’s once-great palace of steel, glass, and consumerism.

  So Grids was there, just before seven that damp Thursday evening. So were a lot of other people, most of them oblivious, wandering around with their children and shopping bags. If he watched them closely he could see them blinking at air, gazing at the scrolling ads and offers that swooped down and surrounded them. And then occasionally you’d see someone stop in the center of the great pit that formed the Cabot’s heart and blink at the air eight feet above them; someone tuned into that party channel, following that illicit hashtag, seeing something the regular shoppers couldn’t: the geotag sphere, hanging in the middle of the mall like a forgotten disco ball. And then you’d see a flicker of confusion, followed by curious excitement.

  Grids started to see faces in the crowd—covered faces—that he recognized. He knew it was them, Melody’s crew, as no one else would have the balls to hide their identities in a space this heavily monitored. Somewhere alarms would be going off, radios chattering, security guards’ spex chiming.

  There was no system, though. No rig, no bass bins, no way he could see of making sound. He thought they must be planning something else—maybe Melody had given up and gone back to her Smash/Grab days and was about to instigate a mass looting—and then the music started. At first he thought it was just in his spex—it was, but not just in the internals, in the bone conductors—it was coming out of the external speakers. He ripped them from his face to try to work out what was going on. He could hear it all about him, tiny and tinny, like a thousand headphones turned up to maximum. It was an impressive stunt, the hijacking of everyone’s spex, and enough to turn the heads of the regular shoppers, but it was hardly doing the music justice.

  And then the bass dropped. From one direction, then a second, and then seemingly from everywhere. Again Grids jerked his spex off to try to orientate himself, to understand what was going on, where it was coming from, and it took longer to work it out this time. When he did, he laughed.

  The music was coming from everywhere. From store fronts and doorways, it poured out of shop sound systems, echoing around the concrete floors and steel balconies, reverber
ating off the glass roof, testing the building’s acoustics in ways that its architects could never have imagined. It was even coming out of the mall’s own, hidden speaker system, the combined force of dozens of bass bins making the whole building shake and hum, stone and steel singing along with the simple, deep five-note dub bass line—the whole of Cabot Circus turned into a giant, all-encompassing subwoofer.

  People, those that knew, those that had come here for this very reason, were dancing. Everyone else was … watching. Dumbfounded. Staring up at the ceiling or hanging over the side of the balconies and walkways, trying to take it all in. Grids heard a few of them chatting, unaware of what was going on, trying to make sense. He heard someone suggest it must just be a publicity stunt, a product launch, some kind of crazed viral, as they grabbed their kids and their shopping and wandered away, uninterested.

  And then in among it all was Melody. Onstage, on the mic. Standing at the top of the stairs between two stopped escalators, flanked by AR graffiti and visuals—apparently now not just limited to the hashtag followers, but shown to every pair of spex under the umbrella of the Cabot’s network, replacing the complex’s own adverts and signs. And above her, reaching up through the glass roof, two ghosts of the Barton towers, like pillars of dust-filled light, archaic but proud giants, seeming to revel in history and importance as they gazed down onto this young monument to triviality and greed, tiny drones spiraling around them like birds surfing thermals.

  For moments—maybe four or five minutes, the length of one of Melody’s stark rhythms—everything came together in unrepeatable harmony. Grids was transfixed, everyone was; but he knew it couldn’t last. Security guards were trying to make their way through the ever-thickening crowd, being held back momentarily not only by Melody’s crew and her loyal ravers but also occasionally by thick-necked shoppers, bored dads, and ex–football casuals, who had stopped to watch the show and didn’t take kindly to being pushed about by rent-a-cops. For tense seconds it felt like it might all kick off, or that the fat security guards would get to Melody and grab her, she was so obviously the focal point—and either way it was all over, Grids knew. Melody knew. Which was why she did it then, why it happened. So fast.