The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  ‘And when I climb’d higher he made a long leg,

  And chang’d me at once to an Ostrich’s Egg–

  But now Heaven be praised in contempt of the Loon,

  I am I myself I, the jolly full Moon.’

  Eve shouts with laughter.

  I turn to her, grinning. But she is not laughing. Her mouth is twisted by misery.

  ‘So he has spent a fortune on Scientology without asking his wife?’

  She hurls her hairbrush at me.

  ‘So he leaves her all on her own?’

  A box of tissues.

  ‘So he no longer has time for his children?’

  Soon the bed is littered with lipsticks, the book she is reading, a box of earrings, a bottle of Chanel I’d given her . . .

  Le Palais Ideal

  Driving through West Cork, it’s easy to see how people had to believe in giants. They had to have existed. There’s no other way to explain the geology: the hills, piles, hummocks of stone, steep earth cones, occurring at random, sticking up out of otherwise rolling levels. In some places the landscape looks as if it had been tussled by a married giant-couple having a tug-of-war over a blanket, pulling the earth up over shins and chins. Our bedroom in the hotel this morning bore witness to a more pleasant struggle.

  I glance over at Eve. She is turned away from me, watching the fantastic landscape passing outside her window. Why is she so quiet? What is she thinking? Is she regretting that her initiation into cyberspace left us both craving kisses? Why today’s silence? I don’t want to ask. I want to go back to last night. Not to the tunnels of Colossal Cave, but to memories of travels when we were younger and in love. We had always liked roaming together: journeys in India, our happy time in Venice (the gondolier’s curious cry, a oie! – whose ancestry, like that of a certain four letter word, is thought to be untraceable, but which is surely the progenitor of English oi! – probably just meaning l’oeuil or ‘use your eyes’) becoming fluent in the language of birds. We came back through France and went to a village called Hauterîves where there had lived a magic postman, Ferdinand Cheval, known as ‘le facteur Cheval’, Postman Horse.

  Hauterîves. Haut rêves. Or high Rîves? By one of those strange coincidences which the cosmos employs to remind us that the world we inhabit is made of dreams, this too is a must for pilgrims of architecture. Here, eight decades after Kubla Khan, the postman dreamed a fantastic dream. Had he taken laudanum for some ache or ailment? We don’t know. All we know is that while out on his rounds he had seen an interesting stone lying on the ground. He had picked it up and examined it – and, on impulse, slipped it into his sack of letters. That night he dreamed of a palace, marvellous beyond description, and knew that his life’s work was to build it in his garden. It took ten thousand days of patiently picking up stones, balancing his bulging mailbag like a sack of onions on the crossbar of his bicycle, thirty-three years of enduring the quolibets d’un village qui croyait que son facteur était devenu fou. But when the palace was finished, it was a unique and perplexing blend of all possible styles, cultures and civilisations. Picasso admired it and Malraux considered it ‘le seul exemple en architecture de l’art naif’.

  All that you see, passer-by, is a peasant’s handywork.

  Out of a dream I have brought the queen of the world.

  In Hauterîves the postman built for his lifelong love, his wife, a dream castle of stone. Eve and I returned to England and began the search which led to our own leafy Castle Perilous.

  The silence is louder than words. It roars with the Land Rover’s voice as we traverse the turbulent marriagescape.

  Sushi in Stockholm

  Trapped in a hotel room in Stockholm, throat like a leper’s armpit, a solitary bottle of weak beer in the fridge. Too late for the hotel bar, pool, jacuzzi, steam room, supper. Eyeing the Swedish brew with the contempt that alcohol-1%-by-volume properly arouses in a man, I decide to send for something I can taste. Room service takes an age to answer the phone.

  ‘Hey, Mister Bear,’ says a Swedish voice at last.

  ‘Hey,’ I reply. ‘I know it’s late and the bar’s officially closed, but I just got off a plane and I’d appreciate a half bottle of whisky and something to eat.’

  ‘So sorry, sir, the hotel bar is locked.’

  ‘Can’t you unlock it?’

  ‘I am not allowed.’

  ‘Okay, well please send someone out to buy one for me.’

  ‘Normally yes, but it is Sunday. We are not permitted to do this on Sunday.’

  ‘This is a hotel. Surely you must have some alcohol?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he says, thrilled to be helping at last. ‘You will find a bottle of beer in your fridge.’

  I flick on CNN, get out my laptop and open a file labelled Lässe, NuKE. Officially, I’ve flown to Stockholm to help create a European advertising campaign for one of the agency’s clients, a large, dull computer company. The plan calls for me to wake tomorrow and cross the park to our respectable Swedish partner agency where my friend and collaborator Magnus Westerberg works. In reality – rich coming from a denizen of the Vortex! – I have come to meet a viro-anarchist. Lässe Hendriksson, aka the Detonator, is a member of the Swedish chapter of NuKE. He boasts that he is the only guy in Europe still spreading destructive code. Just to complicate things, in the metalight of reality, Magnus is not simply an accomplished ad jingleur but a relentlessly technophile cybergypsy, usually to be found hanging out with the screenwriters at the WELL in San Francisco. He shares my loathing for Microsoft and computer advertising, and also shares my desire to swap ideas with the virus-wallah. I had phoned him to suggest that we might take the Detonator off for a drink, but he swept this aside.

  ‘Nonsense, dear boy, I have everything arranged. We shall entertain him to lunch in the Board Room.’

  Screeching noises from the television set turn out to be a car chase. Cut to big close-up of overwrought teenage driver. The youth swears and a subtitle informs me that ‘javlar’ is the Swedish for ‘shit’. I don’t think this is CNN. Unless beerlessness is deranging me, it appears that the teenager is being chased by a car driven by his knife-wielding mother. The director clearly believes, as who would not, given such a script, in moving the action on. Serial-killer mom catches, incinerates offspring. He dies horribly in flames on stage at a gig where a wild all-girl band, demented versions of the Bangles, thrust their crotches at the camera.

  The TV remote control has a mystifying array of buttons. I jab a few at random. The channel flicks and a naked blonde appears. She is kneeling above an unpleasant-looking man on a bed with grey silk sheets in what appears to be a railway stockyard, giving head with a twisting motion which I instantly recognise to be a species of ucchchushita.

  Stab more buttons.

  A voice from the television says, ‘If you’re gonna lick, lick like you mean it’. The screen fills with large, bouncing breasts.

  Holy shit, it’s Madison.

  Cut. A pair of fighting, screeching, black cats resolves to dark-haired girls engaged in vigorous soixante-neuf. (In the Kama Sutra, this was known as kakila, the lovemaking of the Crow. Fascinating, when you know that Pliny the Elder, bit of a birdwatcher, observed in his Naturalis Historia that ravens mate with the beak, for which reason in the old city of Rome the act of cunnilingus was also known as the Crow. Which culture got it from which? The two countries had links, for Pliny tells us that India sent to Rome a bird which ‘greets its masters and repeats words given to it, being particularly sportive over the wine’. Poor parrot, or siptacus, as Pliny’s informant drunkenly mispronounced it, ‘Its head is as hard as its beak; and when it is being taught to speak it is beaten on the head with an iron rod – otherwise it does not feel blows.’ Strange thoughts, these, for a Sunday night in Stockholm . . . the popular idea that India gave erotica to the west is probably wrong. More likely it was the other way round. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria predates the Kama Sutra by three and a half centuries. The earliest tantras like the B
uddhist Guhysamaja do not appear in India before the 3rd century AD, by which time the Alexandrian stylites and other desert gnostics with fevered imaginations had long since plumbed all available depths.)

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, but was it Madison?’ Magnus asks next day. ‘You never saw her face.’

  ‘Of course it was Madison.’

  ‘How could you know that?’

  ‘No-one else has breasts like that. Besides, they cut to a big close-up and I recognised the stud in her tongue.’

  We’re in the agency’s white-on-white boardroom. Magnus has ordered sushi to be brought in as soon as our guest arrives. His intelligent screenwriter’s gaze, alert for every gyring gimbling nuance of plot, is locked to mine.

  ‘Okay, so I don’t really want to ask,’ he says, ‘but how did you get to know a porn movie star in the first place?’

  An email message comes through on Magnus’s state-of-the-art notebook asking for a phone number in the room where we are.

  Magnus replies immediately.

  Within thirty seconds, the white phone in the corner gives a soft burr. The Detonator, careful man, is calling from the street outside.

  ‘Yeah,’ says the Detonator, ‘how do you know this porno star?’

  I give them a run-down of the Kama Sutra saga from the piracy on wiretap.spies to the scriptjigging in Kissimmee. I tell them about the week of weirdnesses.

  ‘Come on, Bear, on that day you had but a small little ogle,’ says the Detonator who is, like all computer geeks, a large man. ‘You sure know her better than that.’

  In fact I never met her again. But the Detonator is right, I did see a lot more of her. I’d written a script so full of long Sanskrit words that no-one else could pronounce it. Out of desperation, or cheapskatery, I was asked to read it myself and proved so bad a voice artist that a forty-minute soundtrack took twelve hours to dub. We were recording to picture and, after twelve hours of staring at the video I knew the actors’ parts almost as well as they did. Later one of the newspaper reviews spoke of the beautiful photography, but commented on the narrator’s strangely droning voice.

  ‘The hack on wiretap.spies,’ says the Detonator. ‘It is interesting to me. A small action by one person got converted into big bangs in the lives of others. I like this very much. The idea to cause a big explosion with the least trying. You plants one tiny virus. Stand back and – kapow!’

  We talk about viruses. The Detonator is a computer engineer, by day healing the machines which at night he and his friends infect. He sees nothing ironic in this. Like all virus writers, he claims that what he does actually serves computer users, by pinpointing the flaws in their security. He is working on a new virus that will be undetectable, constantly mutating its shape and ‘signature’.

  ‘We have to catch up with the work TäLoN’s doing in Australia,’ he says. ‘We have to do it, not just yakyak about it.’

  It seems that two virus writers, The Unforgiven and Metal Militia, from a rival gang called Immortal Riot, have been chasing the limelight, shooting off their mouths to journalists.

  ‘They told the magazine that virus writers doesn’t harm people, just data,’ says the Detonator, spooning sushi’d crab and sea-urchin onto his plate. They say, “we only make the bombs we doesn’t throw them”. I say this is shit.’

  Magnus, straddling his sushi with unsteady chopstilts, has glazed over. ‘Hey, Detonator,’ he says. ‘Have you ever thought of using viruses in a positive way?’

  The Detonator’s features silently arrange themselves into the question. ‘Now why would any sane person want to do that?’

  ‘See,’ says Magnus through a mouthful of shrimp, ‘Bear and I are in advertising and we have thought of this new way to make a fortune. Forget magazines, forget TV commercials. The next great advertising medium is going to be . . . the computer virus! Think about it. We could spread a virus that at six o’clock every evening pictures on screen a glass of cold beer with the slogan “It’s Tiger Time”. We can have a virus that says “It’s Mother’s Day, call home and tell Mom ‘I love you’”.’

  ‘No, guys, no, no.’

  The Detonator is shaking his head in distress at the idea of virus-writing becoming tainted by commercialism.

  ‘Advertising is already a kind of virus,’ says Magnus. ‘One that infects people with desires.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell the non-plussed Detonator, ‘he talks javlar.’

  ‘So what do you guys do adverts for?’ asks the Detonator.

  ‘Well, next month I’m visiting this big nuclear plant and Magnus is coming along as my guest.’

  Detonator is suddenly alert. ‘Nuclear plant? Then it has got a computer network. An operating system. All we need to know . . .’

  Golden eagles

  Fragments of conversation overheard in a bar on the Beara:

  ‘The goulden eagles are dyin cos the fuckin Kerry farmers kill them.’

  ‘Ah yes and shootin all the bloody seagulls caused the ozone problem.’

  ‘What do you know? Wasn’t it you tellin that German tourist a week back the Reeks is made of ould red sandstone?’

  ‘And what else is it I’d like to know?’

  ‘Nivver ould red sandstone, it’s black mudstone, made of black mud.’

  ‘Yerra, talkin shite again.’

  ‘Me talking shite is it? There’s talk mind that you are a homosexual. What else for is your wife in America and you here?’

  ‘Ah you’re jealous cos I’ve got a son and you haven’t.’

  ‘Does that make me less the man?’

  ‘At least I’ve someone to carry my name forward. Ask me it’s your big belly gets in the way of your auld man.’

  ‘Nivvir mind my belly, that’s a big man ower there, go and tell him. See if ye dare insult him the way ye’ll insult me.’

  Eve and I, engaged on our netquest, waiting, as she points out, in a bar in the far west of Ireland for a virtual nod-and-wink from a man we’d never met and whose real name we do not know, become enmeshed in the blather, and the drinkers, who’ve been all day at a wake and are on their last legs – I later open the door of the gents to find one of them head in hands, trousers round ankles, sound asleep – earn their place in a shenanigans which began with a cryptic instruction left on a computer in an overgrown house in Sussex:

  >login at cronins durrus

  Ours is not an easy story to tell, but the Irish, like the Indians (who never did turn up, or ring, and all knowledge of whom was denied by the Cork newspapers) are inquisitive souls who enjoy a challenge. Three hours later, flushed and Guinnessed, I am still doing my best to explain to our host, a Mr O’Conlan, what Eve and I are doing in the west of Ireland. He, a stout man, sporting a thin film of perspiration on his upper lip, wears an expression of puzzled and porcine desperation.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ Lifts silencing hand, starts summing up.

  ‘You’re looking for a man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A fella here in Ireland.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘But you don’t know his name.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’ve no notion of what he looks like.’

  ‘This is absolutely true.’

  Without warning I am transported to a tiny office over a fish and chip shop in Croydon. Opposite me is a man wearing horn . . .

  Plan 9

  >Corridor in ChemSep plant

  >You are standing in a corridor lined with rusting and corroded pipes, which bear signs like ‘HN03’ and ‘STEAM’. The pipes look about a hundred years old. You get the feeling that you wouldn’t want to be here if they spring a leak. To the south a doorway opens into a huge hall. You can make out the shapes of giant machines.

  >s

  >Entrance to walkway

  You are at the entrance to a walkway high above one end of a huge hall filled with strange machines. The air is filled with a curious gulping sound, as though a giant frog is clearing its throat. The cold electronic bleepi
ng sounds louder here. To the east, the walkway stretches along the northern wall of the main hall, which lies below you.

  >e

  >Walkway, near showcases

  You are following a walkway high on the northern wall of an enormous hall. The walkway is glassed in. To one side are several neat display cases filled with unusual exhibits. A gleaming metal bar wrapped in plastic lies on a table here.

  >take bar

  >You take the metal bar.

  >examine bar

  >The bar is very heavy. You can barely lift it. Examining it, you discover that it is made of uranium.

  >drop bar

  >Oh no you don’t. You are not going to bloody well overreact just because it’s uranium. You know very well that uranium in this form isn’t radioactive. You’re going to hand it nonchalantly back to the guide, who is grinning at you, enjoying your discomfort.

  One tends to think of nuclear plants as shiny temples of science, but this one was built in the 1960s, with banks of needle-flickering dials, like those in old sports cars. The plant reeks of age. Its pipes are stained and corroded, but if the plant is old, the recycling process is antique. No particle physics here, just a bunsen-burner-and-stained-fingers version of nineteenth century chemistry.

  ‘You take the used fuel rods and chop ’em up, and dissolve the lot in nitric acid – same principle as granny’s homemade scrumpy. Now it’s a liquid containing uranium and plutonium nitrates. All you’ve to do is precipitate out these . . .’

  We come to the concrete ‘cells’ where the radioactive gunk is unloaded from the flasks.

  ‘Concrete’s a yard thick,’ says the guide. ‘Inside’s all stainless steel. A man couldn’t go in there, so we use robots like this one here to do the work.’