Transmission

by Hari Kunzru

  He paid the driver, and a concierge came out with an ice-white In Vitro umbrella, which he held over Guy’s head as he made his way into the atrium. The concierge wheeled his case over the tarmac and asked if he had enjoyed his journey. Like all the front-desk staff at In Vitro, this one had an unidentifiable Eastern European accent. Guy disliked it. Eastern Europe did not say customer service to him.

  Inside the atrium a pair of crew-cut men sat on swivel chairs watching a bank of video monitors. The security post was ‘dramatized’, as the Pelham Partnership put it, by being located inside a giant glass oval, reminiscent of an eye, suspended at mezzanine level over the front desk. The development’s blanket electronic surveillance was a major selling point for its corporate clients. Landings, stairwells, gardens, riverside – everything was covered. The oval was intended to be reassuring, a symbol of safety, but lately Guy had found the bored men and their constantly shifting panoptical views were having the opposite effect. He tended to walk a little faster as he passed beneath the smoked-glass camera domes in the car park. Fitting his key into his front door, he felt furtive. Closing it behind him was a guilty relief.

  He ignored the concierge’s parting salute and took the lift up to the fifth floor. As usual the landing was deserted, unless you counted the quasi-human presence of the glossy yucca trees which stood sentinel by each door. Inside, No. 124 smelt unpleasantly of cigarette smoke. A trio of empty Moët bottles and a dirty ashtray stood on the Corian worktop in the kitchen, Gabriella had obviously been entertaining. Shedding his clothes on the bedroom rug, Guy stepped into the shower and stood for a full ten minutes under a transforming blast of hot water. Then he shaved, selected clean clothes from his steel-fronted wardrobe and padded barefoot back across the slate tiles into the kitchen to make coffee at his vast espresso machine, an activity which always gave him a satisfying engine-driverly buzz.

  Guy had known even before he moved in that this was a living space which would require something extraordinary. Feeling both time-and knowledge-challenged, he had (at the suggestion of the attractive brunette property consultant) employed an agency to help him buy furniture. That way, he reasoned, he could be certain everything about his personal environment was in the best possible taste. And so the white leather table with the cutout airport city-code motif, the chandelier made from ceramic castings of compact discs, the vicuña pouffe, the Danish ergonomie salad servers and disposable cardboard fruit bowls, the nest of matt-black powder-lacquered steel cubes by the conversation pit, the cable-suspended Vuitton-print polyvinyl vanity unit on which he had mounted the plasma screen and electrostatic speaker-array, the knitted ornamental pods on the bedroom ceiling and the low-rise smuggled-teak patio furniture on the balcony – all of it was personalized, individual, signature. It was all, every sandblasted bathroom tap of it, him.

  The art had been easiest to choose. At an online gallery (another suggestion from Tania the property consultant) he had clicked on several Cibachrome prints of blown-up urban detailing, manholes and rough sleepers and pigeons and so on, plus a cross-processed shot of an industrial estate in Dalston where he had once been to a launch. Enjoying himself, he had also bought a couple of wall-plaques made out of neon tubing and a sculpture consisting of two interlocking steel circles, based, said the site, on the dimensions of a particular supermodel’s head.

  He slid open the glass doors and sipped his doppio, looking out at the Thames. Traffic flowed over the bridges. A refuse barge went past, headed for a downriver landfill site. As usual, though he loved the view, he found himself thinking how much better it would be from higher up. On the upper storeys of In Vitro were some spectacular penthouses, and at its summit was a single two-storey glass-walled cube with a floating platform floor, an undecorated shell which the developers had yet to sell. Sometimes, catching sight of the building from a distance, Guy imagined himself up in that penthouse, raking all of London with his gaze.

  A few drops of rain landed on his face. As he finished his coffee, his phone rang, playing the hook from a 1980s soft-rock tune. Like his occasional visits to greasy-spoon cafés, his collection of John Holmes videos, his current haircut and the posters of state-socialist leaders in the dining area, Guy’s ringtone was ironic. The caller was Kika, his PA.

  ‘Guy?’

  ‘Kika, hi.’

  ‘How did New York go?’

  ‘They loved it, Kika. Really positive. Their communications VP was totally blown away.’

  ‘That’s great news. So we’ve got the account?’

  ‘They haven’t committed as yet, but they will. Believe.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ She sounded sceptical, which annoyed him.

  ‘Guy,’ she asked, ‘are you coming into the office?’

  ‘Kika, I’m kind of wiped out. I just walked through the door a few minutes ago. Did something come up?’

  ‘Perhaps. Maybe it’s not important, but I think you should know Yves Ballard is here. And he’s sort of – inspecting things.’

  This was bad news. Guy looked behind him at his living area, subconsciously scanning for something to sniff or swallow to counteract it. ‘Yves? What the hell is he doing in the office? I didn’t even know he was in London. And what do you mean inspecting things?’

  ‘You know – looking at stuff? He’s peering over people’s shoulders. Asking them what they’re working on. He says he just wanted to get a feel for our culture. He seemed to know you were away.’

  ‘That fucker. That fucking fucker. He didn’t even have the decency to – oh shit – Kika, do something for me? If he goes anywhere near Paul’s section, try to distract him. I don’t want him looking over any financials until I’m there. I’m going to hop in a cab right now –’

  ‘How am I supposed to do that? He’s just wandering around, chatting.’

  ‘I don’t know. Be creative. Make him tea. Flash your tits.’

  ‘Guy, that’s not called for.’

  ‘Kika, just go the extra mile, OK? I’m coming as fast as I can.’

  ‘Great to see you, Yves,’ lied Guy. ‘Welcome.’

  Yves reached up, shook Guy’s hand and blandly lied back, something about flight connections, chance, a morning to kill. It was an awkward moment. To welcome him to Tomorrow*, Guy had to pretend that Yves was not already ensconced on the Balzac chair in the brainstorm zone, reading through a sheaf of spreadsheets.

  For a second, they stared at each other, then broke eye contact and looked out in opposite directions over the converted Shoreditch factory. Tomorrow*, as Guy liked to remind visitors, was not so much an agency as an experiment in life–work balance. Guy’s stated commitment to his staff was to provide an environment that fostered creativity and innovation, while spurring them on to excellence – an environment that made work fun and fun work. That environment was made up of three floors of open space with large windows, exposed brickwork and polished boards scarred by the installation and removal of heavy machinery, now dotted by random clusters of tables and workstations, the outcome of an unsuccessful experiment with hot desking. In return for Guy’s commitment to them, around eighty people were at that very moment balancing life and work by researching, auditing, analysing, conceptualizing, quantifying and qualifying, visualizing, editing, mixing and montaging, arranging, presenting, discussing, and all the other activities that Guy liked to group under the general heading getting one’s hands dirty at the brandface, by which he meant convincing people to channel their emotions, relationships and sense of self through the purchase of products and services.

  ‘Shall we go upstairs?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Yves. ‘We sit down here. It is comfortable.’ He pointed to a beanbag next to the armchair. The idea of being invited to take a seat in one’s own company HQ was a new sensation for Guy, and not one he found pleasant. The offer of the beanbag was clearly a trap, but he had to make the best of it, so he dragged the bulky leatherette sack to a place where he could at least lean his back against the pinball machine. In this po
sition his eyeline was almost level with Yves’s own.

  Yves nodded sagely, the nod of a man with an INSEAD MBA giving his professional approval of a meeting tactic. Guy noticed with a feeling of impotent rage that the papers in his hands were recent company expenditure records. He forced himself to smile. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go upstairs?’

  ‘It is OK here.’

  Guy had to do something to regain the initiative. To buy time, he pretended he had to take a call on his mobile, and, making a ‘one minute’ gesture to Yves, clamped the handset to his ear and took a walk in the direction of the front desk. Circling in reception, he tried to think. A surprise visit by Yves Ballard could be interpreted in a number of ways, none of them good. Yves was a partner at Transcendenta, the venture-capital firm whose investment had helped Tomorrow* get off the ground. Recently a certain frostiness had appeared in Transcendenta’s communications with Tomorrow*. There was talk of setting performance targets and realizing a near-term capital return. Guy glanced back at the Frenchman. Yves was dressed in the international business-casual uniform he always wore: chinos, penny loafers which showed a lot of argyle sock, a blue cotton button-down shirt with the logo of a conservative fashion house on the breast pocket – clothes as internationally acceptable and context-free as his forty-something face, with its pleasant yet somehow under-used features. Those features had currently composed themselves into a surface of studied placidity, a treacherous ornamental pond of a face. Yves was here to talk money, no doubt about it.

  Guy flipped his phone shut and walked back towards the brainstorm zone, which was thought of by most Tomorrow* staffers as the recreation area, containing as it did soft furnishings, a TV and a PlayStation. Yves was idly examining the antique industrial sewing machine, salvaged by the renovating architects from the building’s previous life as a garment sweatshop. Guy liked to take new members of staff to stand by the machine. Your inspiration should come from there, he would tell them. That hunk of metal understands the true meaning of work.

  ‘You’ve taken on more people,’ said Yves.

  Guy explained the benefits of setting up an in-house production team, and extolled the good job being done by the new researchers. He was gabbling, nervously aware of the direction Yves was taking.

  ‘Look, if we went upstairs, we could both have a proper seat.’

  He tried to make it sound like a joke, but it came out as pleading. Half of the top floor was taken up by an area designed to foster Guy’s own creativity and innovation, a space with a view over the council blocks and repurposed warehouses of east London that he sometimes referred to as his brainscape. In addition to the usual office items, the room contained a daybed, a draughtsman’s table, boxes of unused art and design supplies, a home-cinema set-up and a cabinet filled with a quantity of toy robots and Quentin Tarantino mementoes. It was his place, his domain. If they went up there, Yves would not be able to make him feel so exposed.

  Yves paid no attention to the question. ‘I hear you won a new account?’

  ‘We’re closing the deal at the moment.’

  ‘I thought that was why you went to New York. This new product from Pharmaklyne. The SSRI.’

  ‘Exactly. It was a very productive meeting. Our creative work impressed them. We had a cross-section of young urban professionals make video diaries about their anxiety.’

  ‘But they didn’t sign.’

  Guy was angry at being cornered in this way. ‘Yves, it’s great to see you, but I’m surprised you didn’t schedule this meeting with Kika. We’re working on several pitches at the moment. It would have been easier to fit this in if I’d known you were coming.’

  ‘Of course. But I was in London and wanted to see how things were progressing at Tomorrow* – just informally. I’m here as a friend, Guy. I’m here to support you.’

  The rain had stopped, and a watery light filtered in through the windows. Above Guy’s head a trio of giant red banners, relics of a pitch for a newswire service, fluttered in the draught from an open window. On each was a single motivating word written in an exploded sans serif font:

  Play

  Change

  Inspire

  The newswire had gone with another agency, but the banners had seemed too good to waste. Today, despite their positive messages, they seemed to Guy to be part of Tomorrow*’s problem rather than its solution. For all its organizational innovation, ethos of openness and holistic approach to brand repositioning, Tomorrow* was somewhat short of actual clients. Transcendenta had injected several million Euros in venture capital, but what with the building, the expansion, the post-9/11 loss of confidence and his penchant for really cool business toys, Guy had more or less burned through it. The last proper project, a brand audit for a semiconductor manufacturer, had wound up two months ago. He had a sudden twinge of paranoia. Did Yves know about his expenses? He had startled even himself this past month.

  ‘Maybe,’ Guy moved tentatively, ‘we should do this over lunch?’

  ‘No,’ said Yves. ‘No lunch. That would make us fat.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘We don’t want to get fat. Fat people move slowly. Fat companies too. Things are very bad now, Guy. It is not a time for self-indulgence. I sent one of your secretaries out for sandwiches. We will eat them here and you will point out to me the parts of your business that are really necessary.’

  It was worse than he could have imagined. And Leela had not even begun to do her work.

  Around the world, Thursday, 12 June, was a quiet day. Bombs went off in Jakarta, Jenin and Tashkent. An elderly single-hulled tanker sank off Manila, releasing its load of crude oil into the South China Sea. In Malawi a man was diagnosed with a previously unknown retroviral infection. At London’s Heathrow Airport two dead Ghanaian boys were found frozen to the undercarriage of a Boeing 747.

  As Guy ate bitter sandwiches with Yves, sunrise on Friday was sweeping across the Pacific. Over the Gulf of Mexico a US Navy F16 fighter made brief contact with an unidentified flying object, and at the bottom of a ravine in Tasmania a mother of two was found trapped in her Ford Cortina, having survived for three days on melted snow and packets of Hungry Jack’s barbecue sauce. Arjun was still awake in his room at Berry Acres, staring at his screen. He did not sleep and went into work early, sitting on the bus listening to the soundtrack from Crisis Kashmir, the one in which Leela Zahir plays a soldier’s daughter caught up in a web of terrorism and international intrigue.

  He spent the morning running and checking a patch written by Clay for a common macro virus, yellow dots of tiredness swimming in his vision. People left him alone. Since he had lost his job he was no longer a real person, already fading into memory. He sat at the terminal and watched the clock at the bottom of his screen, waiting for the magic hour. Leela Zahir had been born at 10.12 a.m. on 13 June. If he had managed to do anything, if his code didn’t have some unforeseen bug, it would not be long before the effects were felt. He was so tired that he could barely think. Lyrics from Leela’s big Crisis Kashmir love song circled round in his head.

  O my love, O my darling

  I’ve crossed the line of no control

  I hear your gunfire in my valley

  You’ve tripped my wire

  You have my soul

  I’ve crossed the line

  The line of no control

  Just before lunch, or what would have been lunch had anyone at Virugenix observed such conventions, an excited-looking group of Ghostbusters gathered in Darryl’s office. After a short conversation they moved into the hot zone, and watched something on one of the screens. Arjun, meerkatting over his cubicle partition, knew at once. Someone had sent a sample in for analysis; the game had started. By mid afternoon the entire senior AV team were in the plexiglas-walled room, watching Leela Zahir dance across ten monitors, a jerky five-second loop from the holi dance in Naughty Naughty, Lovely Lovely.

  The thrill was indescribable. Leela, widening her eyes and making a flirtatious ti
cking-off gesture at the viewer, London’s West End briefly visible in the background. And again. And again.

  It worked.

  Arjun knew what was going on behind the eyes and the smile, how Leela was stealing resources from other programs, taking up disk space, making herself at home. How perhaps she was also doing other things: malicious, corrupting things. Now it was just a question of how hard the analysts would find it to counter her. When a bright-eyed Clay strode past his desk, Arjun could not resist asking what was going on.

  ‘Man, it’s the real thing, that’s what’s going on?’ Clay’s voice betrayed his eagerness, his tone rising at the end of each sentence as if this event were putting everything, the whole world, into question. ‘In the last ten minutes we got five different samples from like three places in East Asia? Customer support just took a call from a guy in Auckland which is a place in New Zealand? The CTO of some insurance company? He just had to shut down his whole network, I mean like everything? He was totally freaking out?’

  Clay bustled off, smacking left fist into right palm with college-sports enthusiasm. A little needle of fear made its way up through Arjun’s tired brain. Shutting down a whole company. That was serious.

  As 10.12 a.m. struck the Kiritimati atoll in the Pacific and an unlucky shrimpboat skipper started to swear at his laptop, Guy and Gabriella left the opening party for a film that was a remake of another film and got into a taxi. Guy had barely spoken to anyone all evening. Gabriella, on the other hand, had been the centre of an animated group, telling jokes and receiving cards and mobile numbers and offers of lunch. Guy was too preoccupied to be jealous.