Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

  ‘There might not be anything wrong with it from where you are. From here, it’s a right state. You ever call old Olaf? Or anyone? If I didn’t come and get you, would you call me?’

  ‘I called Tina. I called the pair of them and asked to go out.’

  ‘Only because you were going off your head. Would you have done it otherwise?’

  He saw that I wouldn’t. As a rule I don’t call people. They can call me if they want. It’s up to them. I’m not going to force myself on anyone.

  ‘No, I thought not. You wouldn’t call Tina and you still fucking fancy her. Jesus wept. I’d walk out and leave you here if you weren’t driving. Well drink up and drive me home so that I can slam the door then.’

  I drank up. The night had gone askew. Dermot changed his mind every twenty or thirty minutes at the best of times. He’d be my friend again before we’d got to Kidderminster. He had two doubles to drink, as I wouldn’t be drinking one. I was driving. Four whiskies would calm him down.

  On the way out he grabbed the youth who’d served us.

  ‘This is our secret,’ he said loudly. ‘Don’t share it with anyone. It’s a gift.’

  He slipped a folded banknote into the embossed breast pocket and gave the youth a punch on the arm. Then he stalked out, but not before telling the diners:

  ‘And you lot can get your eyes back on your meals. Fucking hell.’

  Following him, I felt the disapproval of the diners. What was it with Dermot and gratuities? If he couldn’t tip the staff, he took it as a personal insult.

  By the time we reached the car park he was back to normal, scampering about and notching up views of the building from all available angles.

  ‘Magic,’ he said. ‘Brilliant. They wanted a pub and someone built them a warehouse, and they’re going with it. Excellent place.’

  He ran over to the Audi.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get a move on. I don’t want to spend all night in the car park.’

  ‘Where next?’

  ‘Surprise me,’ he said. He was full of life again. He was like that, full of enthusiasms that lasted about as long as mayflies.

  SIX

  I

  Dermot was enthusiastic about everything. He was always running at ninety-plus. Whatever he did, he did completely. Any new hobby swallowed him, and he’d spend all of the money he earned at his makeshift jobs on armfuls of supporting materials.

  He discovered windsurfing and bought a board and the canary yellow outfit to go with it. He lived in the West Midlands, where the only available water is in canals. There was plenty of wind. There was nowhere to windsurf. He sold the stuff a fortnight after he bought it.

  He did the same with paintball, skiing, skateboarding, chess. He was hopeless at all of them. He was always selling off old equipment at car boot sales, out of the boot of my Audi. I used to drive him all over the place in that car. I didn’t know that he had a car of his own. He didn’t mention it. I suppose that saved him the bother of driving.

  II

  He began to run out of possible enthusiasms. New ones weren’t invented as quickly as he tired of the old ones. He didn’t even sign up for some; he decided he was too old for the umpteenth resurgence of skateboarding, and bungee jumping lacked something.

  ‘Not for me,’ he said. ‘No skill in it, is there? It’s just falling off a building. Anyone can do that.’

  ‘Try getting the length of the rope wrong. Anyway, it’s not the skill. It’s the rush.’

  ‘Won’t be seeing you doing it then, will we? The most fun you have is playing with your computer. Which is a sad thing. That’s a very sad thing to be doing.’

  ‘You’ve never tried it.’

  ‘Oh yes I have, I tried it when you had that Wolfshit thing. It wasn’t as good as my Megadrive.’

  ‘Have you still got that?’

  ‘Sold it. Got bored of it.’

  ‘You surprise me. Here, have a look at this.’

  We were in my flat. We had been thinking of going out for a drink, but we hadn’t been able to decide where to go. I didn’t want to drive all the way out to the Slipped Disc, which had become our local in all ways except geographically. I switched on the PC and we waited the usual three minutes for the operating system to wake up. Lights flashed, and the monitor began to glow. I’d got Terminal Velocity, a shoot ’em up which had you flying a spaceship across the surface of a series of planets and shooting everything you met. I loaded it up.

  Dermot liked it. His spaceship swooped over the rendered landscapes.

  ‘This is better,’ he said. ‘This is more like it. Are there many games like this now?’

  ‘They’re getting there.’

  ‘Nice. Fuck! What’s that?’

  ‘It’s shooting at you, so we can assume it’s not NATO forces.’

  ‘It’s not shooting anymore. Another one goes down in flames.’

  He ran through the rest of my game collection, ignoring the strategy games in favour of arcade-style ones.

  ‘How are the arcades staying in business?’ he asked. ‘Why am I going to go in there, pay fifty a throw for something I can play for nothing at home?’

  ‘You have to pay for the games. And a PC to play them on. You need a fast one for this stuff. You can’t just get one at a car boot sale.’

  ‘How much are they asking?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred.’

  He thought about it.

  ‘I can’t afford that. I don’t have that sort of spare capital at the moment. I’ll have to sort something out.’

  After some time he grew bored of the available games. He was hampered by the keyboard.

  ‘I can’t play these any more,’ he complained.

  ‘I thought you were the arcade king.’

  ‘I am the arcade king. This isn’t an arcade. They don’t have piles of dirty old socks in arcades. This is your fucking flat. I’m not the king of this dump. When are you going to throw some of this crap out?’

  ‘I might need it.’

  ‘Oh yeah. There’s a big market for old computer magazines.’

  There might be one day, I thought. Old Dinky toys were going for large sums at the auctions. Crumpled comics were selling for thousands.

  At that time, the idea of collectable plates was still inexplicably popular. They appeared in all of the Sunday glossies. Dermot said that they were appearing from the devil’s arse. Collectable plates had six characteristics which distinguished them from any other plates.

  Firstly, they cost more than ordinary plates.

  Secondly, they came in sets, and subsequent plates cost more than the first one.

  Thirdly, they were not sold in shops because shops couldn’t shift them.

  Fourthly, they featured a dismal painting by an unknown artist. The painting would be of the reality-rendered-badly school. The subject matter would be small children doing sickening things, small animals doing sickening things, or American Indians doing fluffy things with feathers rather than skinning their captives alive.

  Fifthly, they were in strictly limited editions. The strict limit would tend to be about twenty thousand, which still seemed like a lot of idiots until you compared it to the total population.

  Sixthly, and most pertinently, they would never increase in value.

  The point was, people did pay for the things. People had them on display, perhaps to make it easier for the men equipped with big nets and syringes full of powerful sedatives to find them.

  Computers were becoming part of popular culture. Perhaps one day those magazines would be worth some money. Even the worst of them looked better than a collector’s plate.

  Dermot began to leaf through the magazines, checking out the small ads.

  ‘Where can I get a cheap computer?’ he asked.

  ‘Nowhere legal.’

  ‘Somewhere must sell them. I’m going to get one. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘What, you’re going? We haven’t done anything.’

  ‘I don’t
want to do anything now. I’ve got a mission. I have a meaning to my life. You should try it.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to play these games anymore.’

  He wouldn’t be persuaded. He went home, and I went to bed at nine thirty.

  III

  I didn’t see him for a fortnight. His home telephone rang out unanswered. His mobile made excuses for him. I went out to meals with Tina and Roger. Tina asked where Dermot was. Roger asked if I was feeling alright. I was. I didn’t have any new hallucinations.

  Inspired by the code listings in those old magazines, I decided to write a small game of my own. I stayed up late, trying to get the code right. I wanted to write a new type of game. I wanted to get life into the computer, or at least the illusion of life.

  I began to put together algorithms.

  What isn’t widely understood about artificial intelligence – other than the fact that it isn’t ever going to happen for real – is that it’s what a program shows you, what it tells you it’s up to, that tells you how bright a program is. If it puts up messages telling you that it’s just going through what you’ve input and drawing parallels between that and the output of the romantic poets, you’ll think it’s smart. It might be doing nothing. It might have got into a recursive loop.

  If it actually does take your input and compare your sentence structure to that of Byron, but doesn’t tell you what it’s up to, you’ll think it’s dumb. Dumb and slow. Artificial intelligence has to make a big noise about being clever, like people on late night arts review shows.

  Knowing this, I tried to make a game with a virtual living thing in it. Something that would be perceived as a living thing. Something you could chat with via the keyboard.

  I spent two weeks on it before I realized that it wasn’t going to be done any time soon. Even getting a program to parse English sentences was a nightmare. Getting it to decode the meaning, and then to respond meaningfully, was worse. And that was only the beginning of what I wanted to do.

  I could write code, though. I could write reams of it. I used to do sorting algorithms for fun. I didn’t have anything better to do.

  I watched films where computers responded to any input. Characters typed in ‘Good morning computer, how are we feeling today?’ and the computer would respond. Sometimes it’d have a little bit of a talk with them, ask them how the dog was and whether they’d enjoyed the football at the weekend.

  I started working on it at work. After all, I wrote programs for a living. It wasn’t as though anyone would ever know.

  IV

  I was working for DataThon, a company with a small set of offices on the edge of Kingswinford. The company employed four full-time programmers. We built small applications for small businesses. People would ask for databases, usually. Stock lists. Billing systems.

  We’d build them, and go out and support them when the bugs turned up. DataThon employees didn’t wear suits. They dressed casually. I looked fussy in a shirt – without a tie, I never did get the hang of ties – and black trousers.

  Clive Pinner, the chief programmer and owner of the business, had several pairs of sandals and a comprehensive knowledge of Windows architecture. He was in his fifties and had been interested in computers since encountering one the size of a caravan at his Cambridge college in the early seventies. He would reminisce about the days of punched cards and paper tape. He’d fiddle with system registries when he was bored. Andy Worsthorne was a young programmer who dressed in black. He had been a hacker back when you still needed to be able to write code to be a hacker. He’d been about twelve at the time. He’d been into the Pentagon’s computers, but then, everyone got into those. Tim Winters was in his early thirties and wrote machine code. Sometimes he spoke in it. The four of us were able to write small applications quickly and look after them well. We weren’t going to be driving Ferraris around Dudley anytime soon. But then, neither was anyone else.

  The company also employed Tracy Brady, a woman from Brierley Hill with the bubble perm endemic to that area and seventies footballers. She was a secretary, receptionist, and everything else that required any skills other than typing code into a PC. She interfaced between the coders and the physical world. She was in her fifties, had been divorced a couple of times and had enough grandchildren to populate Stourbridge twice over. She mothered us, which was necessary.

  Clive had been a programmer early enough to catch the first big wave, but didn’t have the business sense to do what Bill Gates did. He just noodled around with software, assimilating knowledge and amassing a good-sized collection of woolly jumpers. He had the last vestiges of an upper class accent, but the nasal West Midland voice – like that of a duck with brain damage – was close to swamping it.

  We did well enough. I was taking home more than twenty thousand a year before adding in bonuses. We got bonuses for completing projects. When we sold a package, the money went five ways. The company got a fifth to pay for new equipment, and the rest of it was split between the human beings, excluding Tracy. She’d get a box of chocolates and a thank-you card.

  I had a fast PC at work.

  We were between projects. I took in my sample code and began to work on my artificial intelligence project in the office. After thinking about things – like, being sacked – I told Clive what I was doing just to keep everything above board. I didn’t want any trouble at work.

  ‘You won’t get it working,’ he said. ‘you’ll never do it. But if you get the Turing prize, I want half of it.’

  V

  After some time spent elsewhere, Dermot returned to the human world. He arrived at my flat with a large bag.

  ‘You’ve got to see this,’ he said. ‘This’ll blow you away.’

  He unpacked a PlayStation and unplugged my PC so that he could plug it in. He connected it to the television and swore as he tried to tune it in.

  ‘Where’s this telly from? The antiques fucking roadshow? Does it run on coal? What the fuck does it mean, automatic level adjust?’

  I took the controls and got my TV tuned to his new machine. He popped a CD into the PlayStation and switched it on.

  ‘I’ve got a Nintendo as well,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to bring the pair of them.’

  He’d finally found a hobby he could cope with. He’d got bored with his Megadrive long ago, but the new consoles delighted him. It was his dream hobby. He could throw money at it. There was always new kit to buy. There were always new titles. There were books about the games, books of tips for people who didn’t know how to play them, books of hidden secrets. There were CDs of the soundtracks of the games. There were new consoles every few years.

  He would turn up with new hardware. He added in lightguns and steering wheels. He had joypads in different colours, and joypads that fought you back.

  ‘Still having fun with the PC then?’ he’d ask. ‘Get me a cup of tea then.’

  We started to stay in more. He’d bring one or other of his consoles and perhaps some drinks from the off-licence. I’d supply the television and provide cups of tea, and fetch extra drinks from the off-licence.

  My job was fine, my life was even, I was coming to terms with just being friends with Tina.

  If that hallucination had been a one-off, I had nothing to worry about.

  SEVEN

  I

  The next hallucination turned up a week later. Dermot was excitedly demonstrating his new steering-wheel-and-pedals combination.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘It’s a brake pedal. Watch the car.’

  I watched the car on the screen as he drove it into everything in sight.

  ‘Your chairs are the wrong height,’ he said. ‘How can I control anything in this chair? How are we doing for beer?’

  We were doing badly. We had a lot of empty cans.

  ‘You can go and get us some then,’ he said. ‘Pop to the off-licence and get six cans. No, twelve. There’s some money in my wallet.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘At
home. I don’t bring it out in case I get mugged. You’re the computer programmer, you can afford it. You’re all on fucking millions. And get some crisps or something.’

  I could afford it, as it happened. I was well-off by Dudley standards. I told him I’d be back soon and walked to the off-licence.

  It was cold outside, but unseasonably dry. Looking down the length of the High Street I could see the castle silhouetted against the grey evening sky. One or two lost stars were out early, making their slow way to the end of the universe. Looking at Dudley, it was hard to believe it hadn’t already happened. A handful of Asian girls shouted at one another excitedly next to the closed post office, comparing mobile phones.

  A square yellow street sweeper was being driven under the market awnings, shoving the litter out into the street. Its driver aimed it at pedestrians when any strayed nearby. A group of three lads looked at me, waiting for me to look back at them so that they could talk it up into a fight. I looked at the castle instead. The chairlifts were running, carrying the zoo visitors over open-topped enclosures holding some of the less dangerous animals.

  Distorted jukebox music came from the pubs, and through their windows I could see fruit machines and quiz machines in attract mode, lighting up in patterns.

  The off-licence was close to the far end of the High Street, close enough to the zoo to hear the animals when they cried out at night. Entry to the zoo was by way of a row of turnstiles set under a long concrete roof shaped into a series of gentle waves. On the same road were two old cinema buildings, long since converted into bingo halls or convention centres. Cinemas are out of town these days. Dudley is out of town, these days.

  Inside the off-licence, students from the residential halls looked for the cheapest drinks.

  ‘Where’s the blackcurrant?’ one asked. ‘We need blackcurrant for the girls.’