by Tim Maughan
The music ended.
All eyes turned on Melody.
Her vocals stopped.
She said something about how she would die for her people, her community, her ends.
Some cheers went up.
She raised her right hand above her head. In it was something short and stubby, a tube with a switch on one end. A trigger.
Her other hand unzipped her jacket.
A scream went up.
Under the jacket she wore a waistcoat, and sewn into it were thick cylinders, wires.
Someone near me started to panic, pushing others. Someone fell, cursing.
Melody closed her eyes.
Melody’s thumb pressed down on the switch.
All the lights went off, everything plunged into darkness.
A single sub-bass tone enveloped the building, rattling glass and bone.
People screaming, running, pushing.
Emergency lighting flickered on. Grids tried to look back at the stage, thought he could see her being bundled by security, but it was hard to see anything, the dull lighting barely enough to see where he was being dragged by the panicking, fleeing crowd. He fell at least twice, over and across others, and gave up, letting himself be carried toward the exit.
Outside the air was cold, damp, filled with shouts, chaos, and sirens. It was pitch-black still, like every light in the city center had been flipped off. The streets were filled with the dazed and confused, people piling out of shops to try to work out what had happened. The surging crowd behind him pushed Grids off the pavement and into the road, until he was pressed up against the windows of a driverless bus that had seemingly shunted into parked cars before shutting itself down, its trapped passengers unable to open the doors, hammering on the windows while their terrified faces yelled muffled screams at him through dirty glass.
Melody had arrived.
* * *
For the first few days after the Cabot party—if you can call five minutes of beats a party—the networks were convinced it was a serious attack gone wrong. Melody’s little stunt meant she got called an Islamic extremist—she’d never mentioned any religion to Grids—and a terrorist, which even with hindsight still sounds ridiculous. Eventually the truth came out. Her crew shouted about it enough on the blogs and timelines, and the police cleared it up when they charged her with illegal use of electromagnetic pulse devices, breaching the peace, aiding cybervandalism, and wasting police time, after holding her under the terrorism act for a solid week. Were they using her as a scapegoat, as many claimed? It wasn’t like they’d ever be able to get the hackers behind the whole thing—part of Anonymous, or Dronegod$, or one of the many other hydra heads it had split into by then—so holding Melody up as an example was the best they could do. But to be fair, Grids always told Mary, the authorities weren’t the only ones using her for that.
She had authenticity, significance, something her shadowy backers lacked. Even when they were wrecking e-commerce sites and CCTV networks, individual Anon members were far from the front lines, nothing more than cells in DDoS swarms. As much as they protested against the remote-controlled drone assassination policies of the United States, in many ways what they did was just as removed, just as clinical. Both sides keeping their hands clean as they blinked commands from a distance—no troops on the ground, no rioters in the streets. War and protest by proxy. For the politicians it was plausible deniability, for Anon it was making sure their parents or college didn’t find out. Safety in distance.
But you need figureheads, icons people can look up to, martyrs. Despite their claims of lacking leaders, even Anon realized they needed poster children, and not from within their own ranks. It’s hard to buy that a bunch of white middle-class teenagers, who would sell out their mates as soon as the feds knocked on the door, were going to start a global revolution. Melody became one of their symbols, and there were others, picked up by the hacker ’claves—poor, hungry kids around the world with real issues to fight for, communities to support, bricks to throw, nothing to lose. Kids with already dirty hands. It was a good partnership most of the time: kids like Melody got the weight of hacker clans behind them, the hackers got a public figure, and both got plausible deniability about the other—no physical traces, few digital ones. But Grids could never shake the feeling it was all a bit one-sided, the Anon kiddies sitting in their suburban bedrooms while Melody waited in her pretrial cell.
“It’s always how it goes down, you get me?” he told Mary. “Always some white, educated people with some idea of revolution, always some brown, poor kids taking the risks and the beatings.”
Not that she had done too badly out of the deal, in terms of fame and recognition, at least. It seemed to Grids, even in the months before the trial, that whenever he blinked on someone’s pixelized head in Bristol they were listening to Melody, their faces hidden behind their digital masks but their consumer choices open for all to see. She would have hated that hypocrisy, he said, but would have loved the attention. She was a star, finally. Even if she was dividing the city into those that saw her as an attention-grabbing menace and those that saw her as a local hero, it didn’t matter, they all knew who she was. She’d achieved that much, at least.
* * *
At the same time, Grids was trying to keep himself busy. Jobs came and went, and then just stopped coming altogether. Even in the few short months he’d been in prison so much had changed. Shops were closing down, retail jobs disappearing. He spent a couple of weeks standing in the rain in lime-green-and-white waterproof overalls outside the service station at Tesco, plugging recharging cables into driverless cars. Then one day he came into work late to find a robot, some egg-shaped thing with a single stupid fucking arm, doing it for him. It bleeped angrily and told him it was calling the cops when he kicked it with his split, leaking, limited-edition trainers.
Instead he found himself hanging around the still-standing towers, putting a new crew together, building up his rep again. Graduating from looting to dealing, from points multipliers to hard cash.
On the day of the trial, though, he was there. He couldn’t tell Mary why, apart from some deep need to see Melody again.
She didn’t look too bad when they brought her out, just tired. The hoop earrings gone, confiscated. Older slightly, but not much.
Nobody was shocked by the guilty verdict, but when the judge handed down the sentence late that afternoon there was surprise. The public gallery erupted, the air in the courtroom thick with shouting and gavel hits. Two years. Two years in a military academy—the final legacy of the last-ever Labour government—learning “the service ethos, discipline and responsibility, and most importantly learning firsthand from veterans that terrorism is no joking matter,” as the judge put it.
Amid the uproar Grids couldn’t take his eyes off Melody’s face.
A look of shock, but so quick.
Then relief.
Then a smile.
Then a look to someone in the gallery, a family or crew member, another smile, as if to say It’ll be all right.
Then relief again.
It’s easy now to pick those brief seconds apart, says Grids, to understand what was going through her mind. The relief makes sense. If she’d walked out of there a free woman then that might have been it. Game over, back to level one, please return to obscurity. But now, courtesy of an overzealous, attention-surfing judge, she had been handed fame on a plate, her status as teenage pop martyr guaranteed.
And then the lights went out.
It was daytime, so it wasn’t like the courtroom was plunged into darkness, but it still got everybody’s attention, a ripple of subdued panic running through the building, amplified when everybody realized they’d lost connection too. That always made people jumpy.
The judge dismissed the court, security trying to get people out as calmly as possible. There was a crowd on the steps, and Grids couldn’t tell who was more angry, the pro-Melody protesters trying to get through the police cordon or the m
edia realizing there was no Net outside either, no way of tweeting, posting, or streaming.
Car horns filled the air, police trying to guide traffic by hand, as the lights outside Bristol Crown Court had shut down. Over to his right Grids could see another crowd gathered around something, jostling while more cops tried to break them up. He managed to push through the outer layers to see what they were gawping at. Shattered glass crunched under his feet like autumn leaves.
A car, a small Nissan, sat by the curb, its roof smashed open like a crushed egg, as if something had hit it hard from above. At first he thought it was a jumper, a protester taking Melody’s example to its logical conclusion, but there was no blood, no gore; the only entrails were fused from silicon, glass, plastic, and twisted, painted metal.
It was a drone, one of those insectile police ones, fallen from the sky like a swatted wasp.
* * *
Mary doesn’t really know what the networks are, what the Internet is. How can she, when it all disappeared when she was so young? She listens to College and Grids and all the others tell her endless stories about it, but it seems like ancient history to her, lies and mythology. No more real than dinosaurs or spaceships, more distant than China or Africa, less believable than DVDs.
So when Grids tells her this part of the story she can’t visualize it at all, can’t imagine what’s missing now, doesn’t recognize some of the words and places, any of the names. But still she listens, remembers every word he says.
To be fair, Grids doesn’t seem to miss the Internet much himself. From what he says to Mary he tried to stay away from it as much as possible, like it was toxic, bad for you and who you are. And at this time, while Melody was away in that military prison, it was getting even worse. There was talk of all-out war between Anon and a ’clave of patriotic Chinese hackers, both sides allegedly fighting proxy battles for corporate interests, the CIA, Google, or space aliens—take your pick. New viruses and DDoS strategies, bot armies a billion zombie web-cam units strong. Half of Chicago drowned in sewage when something disrupted the water systems there, reports of rolling blackouts across Beijing and Rio. The White House threatening to throw the kill switch.
Then that footage was leaked, the clearing of the homeless camp near Google’s HQ in California. Next thing, their campus in Mountain View was swamped by thousands of protestors. The leaked video had brought them down, but it felt like most of them had some other reason to be there: that unshakable feeling that they’d been fucked over, that they’d been denied something, that they’d had too much control taken away from them and put into the hands of unseen algorithms. They cut some data lines, blocked the driverless staff buses from getting in. Called it a “real-life DDoS.” It was peaceful enough, looked almost fun at first, like some kind of music festival. Until someone started messing around with homemade EMP grenades, and Google’s security team of PTSD-shaken ex-vets got trigger happy. For twelve hours it was nothing but screaming and chaos, footage of hipster kids bleeding out into the streets while Google hemorrhaged money on the markets, until the police finally rolled in with armored cars and drones and shut it all down. Thirty-six dead, 68 percent burned off Google’s share value.
But still they, somebody, managed to keep Melody trending.
It was easier in Bristol, Grids says, she would always have her followers here. He remembers—it must have been six months at least after she’d been sentenced—watching a flock of microdrones sweeping across the surface of one of the Barton Hill towers, spiraling and twisting like a cloud of starlings, spraying paint in their path, guided by some unseen graffiti artist, each pass of the artificial cliff face completing another section of the mural, until she was there, fifteen stories high, looking out across all of south Bristol as if daring the city to forget about her.
Of course, the main problem she had when she eventually got out, eighteen months into that two-year sentence, was that she’d won. Five months earlier, Bristol City Council had announced “an indefinite hiatus pending further feasibility reviews” for the Barton Hill demolition plans, citing financial concerns, but it was hard to imagine Melody hadn’t been a factor in the decision, which was met with cheers and celebration, raves and righteousness from her followers. Grids just wondered what she’d do next.
* * *
Grids says he tried to avoid the news on the day Melody was released, but Mary doesn’t believe him. Even if he had really wanted to, it must have been impossible. Drone-footage snippets on the timelines and punctuating the rolling news, her leaving the school, cars winding down damp Welsh A-roads, awaiting crowds in Bristol. Her emerging on a seventh-story balcony at Barton Hill, waving to fans, that mural surrounding her, looking tired but more militant in her baggy, oversized government-issue khaki stormsuit. The hoop earrings back. An endless collage of imagery, speculation.
Grids tried to get to see her, once. But she was impossible to get near. She had handlers now—hovering around her as she was lit by flashbulbs and shadowed by camera drones—corporate handlers that looked conspicuous by their lack of corporate suits, awkward and anxious panic etched across their you’re-not-on-my-agenda faces as they carpet-bombed you with press releases and hashtagged announcements. Album plans. Tour plans. Sponsorship deals. Remixes. A free homecoming party, open to all.
It was going to be at Cabot Circus, obviously, but this time it was official, organized. Security and police, health and safety. The rumor was that she would trigger something during her set and it would activate her new album, the now redundantly titled Flight Path Estate, which everyone had been downloading on preorder for weeks, and was sitting patiently on everybody’s spex or in their cloud, a dumb bundle of data waiting to be given a voice.
Grids got there early, to try to beat the worst of the crowds. The vibe couldn’t have been any different from the first time, mystery and surprise substituted with manufactured expectation and entitled excitement. The crowd was guided through entrances, faces scanned by drones, as Cabot hummed to the warm-up DJ’s bass tones—they were using the building’s sound system again, but also a professional rig. It sounded better, louder, but safer.
Of course, the whole thing was a gimmick. Like the original party, it was a stunt, but this time authenticity and desperation had been exchanged for marketing and product placement. Grids took his spex off as soon as he got there, the advertisements too much, the timeline buzz too intense. He didn’t even care if it meant he missed the visual aspect of the show, somehow he needed to separate himself from this charade, to stay unconnected, to be tuned out for once. He didn’t know how prophetic that was, at that moment. He didn’t even start to suspect how significant tucking those cheap LG spex away in his jacket pocket would be. How could he?
And then the crowd roared, jostled for a better view, and she was there. Among it all. Melody, onstage, on the mic.
She was working through material that was unfamiliar, the highlights of Flight Path Estate, the slightly unsure crowd cautiously moving with her, holding out for something they recognized. It sounded okay, the new material, echoing sonar blips and drizzly ambiences, cut-up vocals and antique drum machine hits. Grids could sense a nostalgia there, a yearning for parties she’d never seen, friends she’d never have, an era of masked fame and anonymous celebrity that if it had ever existed was long gone now. The 1990s. The failed revolutions, the brewery-sponsored social upheaval, mythological summers of love.
But something was wrong, something spoiled. The minimalism was gone, the starkness. The empty spaces had been filled. It wasn’t the beats that mattered, she had told him, but the spaces in between. They’d taken it from her, the A&R men and the superstar producers, taken what had made her unique, unable to bear that starkness, that inky blackness, that essence of Melody—that disconcerting sense of desertion and loneliness, jarring simplicity—they’d been unable to take it, unable to sell it, the fucking cowards, and they’d filled it with insignificant sound and faux fury. This wasn’t the Melody of industrial estate raves
and squat parties, of Barton Hill protests and media control—it was fake Melody, a simulation, the Melody of billboards and TV interviews, sanitized drums and washed-out timeline retweet echoes.
Grids’s heart sank when it hit him, and he turned to leave.
And then it all changed. Melody changed.
It was that rhythm again. The one from the first time. That final rhythm.
Of course, it was obvious where this was going to go, or so he assumed, but still he stood transfixed, needing to see it play out again. So fast.
The music ended.
All eyes turned on Melody.
Her vocals stopped.
She said something about how she would die for her people, her community, her ends.
The crowd cheered.
She raised her right hand above her head. In it was something short and stubby, a tube with a switch on one end. A trigger.
Her other hand unzipped her jacket.
The crowd roared, people mimicking her, hands in the air.
Under the jacket she wore a waistcoat, sewn into it were thick cylinders, wires.
Melody closed her eyes.
Melody’s thumb pressed down on the switch.
All the lights went off, everything plunged into darkness.
A single sub-bass tone enveloped the building, rattling glass and bone.
The crowd screaming, whooping in joy as one.
A flash lit the stage, blue flame lighting Melody for the briefest of moments, before she disintegrated into a fountain of crimson and cloth, blood and flesh arching high into the dark, still air.
Darkness again.
People screaming, running, pushing.
Grids fell to the ground, the air pushed from his lungs by the stampeding crowd, his skin damp and cold from shock.
