I walked on again. On my right the river crawled along. It looked shallow enough to wade across, and slow enough to swim in. Neither of those was true. Every summer one or two swimmers would learn that there was an undercurrent; their bloated bodies would end up tangled in the branches of fallen trees miles downstream. It was deeper and faster than it looked.
On my left were houses with solid stone walls and firmly closed doors. If I had to knock, they might not answer in time.
Someone slithered around the corner by the chip shop, looked my way and edged out of sight.
I thought of the game Dermot had turned up with a few nights earlier. He’d been very pleased with it.
‘You’re the Ripper,’ he’d said. ‘You follow them through the alleyways and wait until they’re somewhere quiet and then wallop! Can you believe that? Can you believe they’ve done that?’
I could believe it. I thought about what Tina had said earlier. She’d said that I might be manifesting things, not imagining them.
The figure slid back into view, sliding close to the houses so as to be in their shadows and coming on.
I wondered how far it was to the car. The long-stay car park filled the gap between the main road and the river. I’d get there faster along the river, but I would be alone. There would be no one around. If that was the Ripper, manifested out of a video game, then I didn’t want to be alone with him. Up into the back of the town, I might see someone walking their dog.
I walked backwards until I reached the corner and then sprinted up a thin alley between waterlogged houses. Over the noise of my own splashing and nervous breathing I heard someone running towards me. They sounded fitter than I did. I ran up to the main road, and at the corner came close to running into a small group of teenagers.
‘Watch where you’re going, man,’ said one.
‘Who dis ofay motherfucker?’ said another, forgetting that he lived in a small English village.
‘Sorry,’ I said. I couldn’t think of an excuse. I could see the car park, which was almost empty. My Audi was parked close to the river.
I’d parked it there so that it wouldn’t attract car thieves, as though Bewdley had any. After all of my running away from the river bank, I’d still have to go most of the way back to it.
There were lights in the car park, I reassured myself. There were other cars. I’d be in plain view of anyone passing, and safely out in the open. I walked to the car the way people walk across contested ground in war films. A wood pigeon threw itself out of a nearby tree with the usual wood pigeon clatter and commotion, and I didn’t jump more than a foot.
I reached the car without being murdered. I’d seen enough tacky horror films to check the back seat thoroughly before I got in.
No one was in there. Perhaps there hadn’t been anyone following me.
I drove back to Dudley.
IV
There was a note from Dermot on the floor inside my front door.
‘Where have you been, you arsehole?’ it said. ‘I’ll be in the Skinned Mule until closing time. Pop down and buy me a drink.’
I popped down. The Mule was at the top of the High Street, opposite a late-night chemists that was closed. It was only ten thirty. It felt as though it should be later. I’d done a lot for a weekday evening – gone out for a meal, heard weird intimations, been stalked by something I’d imagined – and it felt as though it should be midnight. There was still time for a drink or two. The Mule had a late licence because it had entertainment.
That night, the blackboard by the door said, the entertainment was a night of sitar music from the Shiva Brothers.
It was easy to find Dermot. Not many other people were there.
‘Where have you fucking been?’ he asked. ‘Hang on, tell me after you get the drinks in. And get a few shorts too, they won’t stay open late for these tuneless bastards.’
On the tiny stage at one end of the room, two Asian teenagers played instruments like hyperthyroid guitars with thousands of strings. No one was paying much attention to them. Most of the people in the bar watched me buying drinks.
I took them back to the table in instalments and then sat down.
‘Cheers,’ said Dermot. ‘And where have you been all night?’
‘I went to see Tina and Roger.’
‘Did you now? And I suppose you had a nice meal by the river while I was stuck here with this pair of tuneless wankers.’
‘How long does it take to tune those things?’ I asked, looking at the masses of pegs at the ends of the strings.
‘Too fucking long, and that’s why they don’t bother. They just play them out of tune, which is why they sound like two spring mattresses having a fucking wrestling match. All notes, no tune.’
He had a point.
‘What’s the story, then? Why this journey to Bewdley? Did you want to see the fair Tina? Or is there a sheep out there with your name on it?’
‘I’m going to try and find some people I used to know,’ I said.
‘And who are these mystery men? Have you found the missing Shiva brother, the one with the fucking tune? And you’re off to Bombay on the first flight to knock the shit out of him?’
‘It’s about Borth,’ I said.
‘It’s about fucking time. You’ve been moping about that for as long as I’ve known you. You can’t go on being frightened of mirrors. That’s unreasonable. So how are you going to do it? Go back there and see who’s around?’
‘I can’t go back there. Tina’s going to call them and see if we can find Betts.’
‘Who’s Betts? You can’t just drop names on me. I’m not psychic.’
He gave me his evil grin. I ignored it.
‘Betts was the lab assistant. He’s the one who did most of the work in the experiment.’
‘He might still be there. Then if you find him, you’d have to go there to see him.’
‘He didn’t live there. He used to drive off somewhere. I don’t need to go to the college. I can go to his house.’
‘Not by yourself you can’t. Look at you. You need someone to help you on the way. I’m not doing much these days. There are gaps in the market and I’m in one of them.’
I knocked back a whisky. I thought about it. I’d rather have someone with me. I didn’t want to be anywhere near Borth by myself. Dermot was irrational but he was good company, most of the time. He was lively. I had the feeling he’d protect me.
‘You can come along,’ I said. ‘But you’ll have to behave.’
‘On my honour,’ he said. ‘On my dear old mother’s grave in lovely old Kilkenny.’
‘I thought it was Cork,’ I said.
‘That’s where she came from,’ he said. ‘And she went to earth in Kilkenny. You’re getting very suspicious all of a sudden. Hey! You two!’
He was shouting at the Shiva twins. At first, engrossed in playing the most unbalanced musical scales I’d ever heard, they didn’t hear him. That wasn’t about to deter him. I recognized his expression. He’d reached boiling point.
‘Are you two fuckers going to stop fucking about and give us a proper bloody song? Do you know any Black Sabbath there kids? Go on, give us “Paranoid”. For me old friend Mick here. It’s his theme tune this week. He used to like “Hobby For a Day” by The Wall, but he hasn’t listened to that in twenty years.’
He gave everyone a look at his evil grin. Most of the other patrons were smiling. The bar staff had backed away from the bar and had their hands out of sight. They’d be reaching for handily placed chair legs or snooker cues or baseball bats.
The Shiva Brothers ignored him and ran through another number. They’d have sounded better running a tractor over corrugated iron sheets.
‘I told you two to stop it,’ said Dermot, standing at the centre of attention. ‘I wouldn’t ever want to offend anyone’s own taste in music. So I can tell you two to fucking stop it with impunity because no one likes that fucking racket. At Monterey they had to fill people with LS fucking D and cannab
is pasties just so that they wouldn’t all fuck off when Ravi Shankar did his fucking set. No one likes that stuff. I don’t like it, they don’t like it, I don’t even think you two like it so will you for the love of Mary just fucking stop it once and for all?’
A couple by the cigarette machine applauded him. So did one of the bar staff.
The Shiva Brothers left the stage in a huff.
‘There,’ said Dermot, sitting down and acknowledging his admirers. ‘What did I tell you? You need me along. You’d have listened to that all night.’
‘I said you could come along.’
‘Then I will. I’ll call you tomorrow. Now, that deserves a celebration. Drinks all round. Can you afford that?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘I can get them back on stage if you want. If you’d prefer that.’
‘I’ll get the drinks.’
‘Good man,’ said Dermot. ‘And tomorrow we can start our little adventure.’
TEN
I
The next day at work, I tried to clear my mind. Usually work was a good place for that. Normally I could lose myself in code, watch it growing into subroutines, think of ways to make it neater and more elegant. Code nowadays is in tiers. At the front end, where the user sits, are the pretty boxes and buttons. Behind those is a layer of code, shaping the screen. Behind that, there’s the operating system of the host PC. Behind that, there’s the database on its server somewhere, and then the operating system of the server.
All I have to do at work is get the back layer visible to the front layer without it being apparent that there are any layers at all. All I have to do is make a series of layered realities work together.
In my side project, all I had to do was get the computer to respond like a living thing. I wasn’t trying to get it to learn. Neural nets stopped being the next big thing the year before last. All I wanted was something that appeared to be paying attention.
Boris was growing at an alarming rate. There were many screens of code. There were nested routines inside nested routines. There were loops and conditions and functions. For all of that, it still made no more sense than someone at a call centre.
‘Hello Boris,’ you’d type. ‘How are you?’
‘I am fine,’ it would print, then give you a cursor to type with.
‘I’m fine too,’ you’d reply.
‘That is nice,’ it would say. But it’d say that if you told it you were feeling awful. If you typed ‘I was bitten by a rabid dog on the way here, if I don’t get medical attention I’m in for a long and unpleasant death’ it would say ‘How is the weather?’
It wasn’t possible to teach it a response to every possible input. I needed to teach it to interpret what it was told. I needed to get it to spot strands in conversations.
I saved Boris and scrapped most of the code. To pass for human, he’d need a personality. To avoid difficulties, it needed to be a one-dimensional one. He wasn’t going to be moody. He was going to have a single mood and stick to it.
I decided he could be grumpy. I liked the idea of a misanthropic computer.
Besides, that way he could ignore most of the input. It’d look like he was being rude, rather than stupid.
With that decided, many of the more complex routines became unnecessary. I got lost in the code, as I do. Everything beyond the monitor blurred and vanished. My peripheral vision shut down.
It’s almost like meditation, except that it produces something useful. I find video games serve the same function.
II
This is what Les Herbie had to say about video games:
I don’t make much money at this. This job barely pays the rent. I have a few pounds spare at the end of the week.
Could be worse. I could be dead, or Welsh. In Merthyr Tydfil, a few pounds is millions. A few pounds gets you the freedom of the valley.
I get my pounds switched for smaller denomination cash. I prefer it.
Neat. I have bulging pockets. I have holes in my pockets too. Change destroys pockets. Sometimes all of my change gets out and runs down my leg.
This happens where it’s crowded. This happens in the middle of the High Street. This happens as I pick up the Pulitzer.
I take what change I keep to the amusement arcades. You need to go to those places. They’re where the future used to be. Now the future is in cyberspace, which is in your bedroom if you’re an adolescent boy. Cyberspace is full of naked chicks. So is Merthyr Tydfil, if you have paper money.
The difference is that the future has never been near Merthyr Tydfil.
I play arcade machines. Fifteen years ago arcades were crowded places. That’s where the adolescent boys were at, fifteen years ago. Now they’re at home, jacked in, all jacked out. Now I get the places to myself. The machines are huge now. You used to stand in front of them. Now you get into them. They’re exoskeletons. They’re wardrobes. You get in and find the screen and there are rows of buttons.
The instructions don’t help. They’re not in words. Words are the future the same way that Merthyr Tydfil is the future. Words are over and done with. The instructions are in pictographs.
Next to a red button is a sketch of a man crouching. This is the crouch button.
Next to a blue button is a sketch of a man with one arm outstretched. I have to guess what this one is. This may be the button for saluting. It may be the button for waving. It may be the button for throwing.
I get out of the machine. I check the name. That might clue me in.
The name is all trademarks, piled on top of each other. Every corporation in the world has a slice of this thing.
I read between the trademarks. This game is a representation of communist art.
I make most of this up. That part is true. I can’t give you the name, because it’s owned by six corporations.
What you do is, control a character on the screen. You always do that. This one is different. You have to make the character stand in that Soviet artworks way, one arm outstretched, staring off into the distance. The usual nuisances try to shake him out of it.
It’s a dumb game. I spend eight pounds on it. I get the hang of it. I get my guy staring off into the distance.
Why are the characters in Soviet art always staring off into the distance? Because they don’t like it where they are. Because there are worse things than corporations, like not having any money and not having anything to spend it on.
Ask anyone in Merthyr Tydfil, next time you’re there.
But don’t give them my name.
III
I was finding the neatest way to get Boris to store threads – in a good old-fashioned multidimensional array, I’d decided – when Tracy butted in.
‘Telephone for you,’ she said. ‘Tina somebody. She says she has some news for you.’
‘What?’ I asked Tracy.
‘A call for you,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to put it through to your desk?’
‘Yes. Please.’
She put the call through.
‘Hello?’ I said to Tina.
‘Morning,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on to that old college of ours. They need to get someone better on the switchboard, I can tell you. It’s been like talking to the sphinx, all riddles and obfuscation. But the main thing is that neither of our men stayed there. The girl who eventually answered the phone didn’t even remember Morrison. She only sounded about twelve, and we were there a fair while ago. She probably wasn’t even born then. She remembered Betts though. God knows why. Perhaps he tried it on with her or something. Anyway, he left too. He went to work at a college in Herefordshire. It was near a place called Monkland, if you can believe it. I’ve checked on our motoring atlas and it’s a real place. I thought she’d made it up. It’s a tiny place, so this college should be easy to spot.’
‘Didn’t she have the name of it?’
‘She couldn’t find the records. The girl who finds the records was out. You could get to Hereford in about an hour, couldn’t you?�
�
‘I could do. Wouldn’t it be easier to just call them?’
‘It would if we knew what the place was called. I’ve tried to ask Directory Enquiries, but all of their girls were out. I had to talk to machinery. Have you ever tried talking to software?’
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘Not very. I know what you do for a living. Anyway, Directory Enquiries couldn’t help me. You could go to the college. Wouldn’t it be better to talk to him directly?’
‘Better than what?’
‘Well, better than being chased home by imaginary vehicles.’
‘I don’t know whether I want to go near a college,’ I told her.
‘Take Dermot with you. He’d be glad to go along. He’s never got anything to do.’
‘When am I going to go? I have to work for a living. There won’t be anyone around at the weekend.’
‘It’s a college, there’ll be people there night and day. If you’re really lucky they’ll have computers. They might even have a mainframe for you to make friends with. All you need to do is find a lab, and you’ll find Betts. Where else would he be?’
‘Couldn’t he have got a job somewhere else? Moved again?’
‘He’s a lab assistant. That narrows down the employment opportunities. It’s either colleges or Porton Down. Which would you choose?’
‘It’d be a close thing.’
‘Look, it’s up to you. Phone if you want, you should be able to get the number from Directory Enquiries if you have long enough. The name of the place was Monkland.’
She spelled it out for me.
‘A college near there, that should narrow it down.’
‘I’ll try calling them. You really think that finding Betts will help?’
‘He was there, wasn’t he?’
‘He was. That’s what worries me. He was there.’
‘So was I, and that doesn’t worry you.’
I didn’t tell her, but it did. It was playing on my mind. We said goodbye and I put the phone down.
I had the feeling that she was pushing me, aiming me at something. But what other choices did I have? When I got home, I decided, I’d have a look at the motoring atlas.
Execution Plan Page 10
