Transmission

by Hari Kunzru

  The whole situation was very Old Economy.

  Yves Ballard’s message had been stark. Transcendenta would feel unable to complete a further round of funding unless Tomorrow* cut overheads and generated new business. Without funding, Tomorrow* had cash to last only a couple more months. Yves had been evasive about what might happen, but left the general impression that Transcendenta would not hesitate to pull the plug.

  He drifted back into calculation. Tomorrow* and everything associated with it now depended on three pitches. The one for the SSRI drug he had just made in New York, and two he had to make next week – to a leisure chain in the Gulf, and to PEBA, the new Pan European Border Authority, an artefact of EU integration intended to harmonize the immigration and customs regimes of all the member states. As long as one of them came off, it might be enough to persuade Transcendenta to hold fire. Although, if he were honest with himself, he would have to say the drug company people had not seemed convinced. Two pitches, then. Two chances.

  Gabriella was saving someone’s number into her phone. Sensing him watching her, she angled the screen away slightly.

  ‘Sweetie, have you had any more thoughts about Thailand?’

  ‘Not really, Guy.’ She flipped the phone shut and turned to look out of the window.

  She was not sure how much longer she could stand him. When she first came to London, she was in the same headlong rush that had led her sister to the exit. There was a boyfriend and a magazine and parties. Her father found her and sent money. She tried things, worked in someone’s gallery, even spent a term studying law. All the time she could feel the urge to run bubbling inside and grew increasingly certain that the only way to survive would be to settle, to throw out an anchor.

  Then someone offered her a job coordinating magazine press for a film. It probably worked out because she cared so little for any of it, not the aura of glamour around the industry or the empty grace of the picture itself. Instead, placing stories and chaperoning the cast of young actors as they were interviewed about gangsters and Britishness and what it was like to work with the famous female lead, she discovered if not a calling then at least a distraction. There was a calculus at the heart of a media operation, an assessment of value: what can you do for us, what do you want in return. It was honest. Here human relations were out in the open: you were either on the list or off it, depending on what you had to trade. She worked hard because work dispelled her sister, and the company offered her a contract.

  She had been doing the job for a year, enjoying having her own money, real money instead of the inexhaustible play-money which had killed Caroline. Then she met Guy He came up to her at a boring party and immediately started running lines, old ones: I saw you across, what a beautiful, anyone ever said, such a coincidence. What astounded her was his gall, the impression he gave that the world and all the things in it were listed for him on a menu. Unlike other men she had met with the same confidence, there was nothing mannered about Guy. He was, in that respect, innocent. Life had always obliged, always given him what he asked for.

  Because he would not allow her to refuse, she agreed to be taken out and so unleashed a storm of drinks and dinner, a barrage of delivered flowers. Within a couple of weeks she was confronted with the inevitable: a sofa and a dimmer switch and no good argument against letting him undress her. He did nothing weird or offensive and seemed so happy afterwards that it made her contact-happy too; she felt wanted, chosen. Soon she was turning down other dates to stay in with him at his new apartment. They watched DVDs and ate ice-cream. About once every twenty minutes he got up to survey his river view, talking continually about the future of this or that, the latest, the next wave, the bleeding edge. He always had a stack of men’s magazines and a new gadget whose manual he was struggling to decipher. He was, she decided, quite sweet in an English sort of a way.

  Though he idolized rock stars and rebels, there was nothing self-destructive about Guy. He didn’t want to change the world, just to be in the lead as it moved forward on its preordained path. Gaby herself had never seen much sense in rebellion (things always stayed the same whatever you did), but even she was struck by the unconsciously ruthless way he set about taking pole position in life. Without appearing to try, he always ensured he was first in line. He was the very opposite of Caroline; he seemed to feel no unease about his entitlement.

  Guy drummed out a rhythm on his knees and Gaby watched him. He slid the cab window open and she sat with her arms wrapped round herself as they crossed the river. Evening newsstands were headlining the latest terrorist alert. Somewhere in Victoria they passed a street which had been blocked off by a pair of squad cars. Maybe, she thought, it wasn’t her. Or even him. Maybe it was the city which had gone bad. There was a sourness about, an aftertaste of fear.

  Oddly, she had moved in with him because of his parents. He seemed to find them embarrassing, and she had to wheedle her single visit with flattery and sulking. They drove through Sunday rain to an old vicarage in a Shropshire market town, a house filled with ornamental china, heavy oak furniture and the flatulent smell of a pair of elderly chocolate Labs who spent most of their time asleep in their baskets in the kitchen. Gilly and Edward seemed a little intimidated by their son, and Guy adopted an imperious air around them, self-consciously mocking his father’s opinions and fidgeting over lunch as if to signal his impatience to get away. Gaby found unexpected pleasure in the dog hair and the untuned piano and the row of Wellingtons by the back door. These solid homely things were helpful, even comforting. They seemed to lie behind Guy’s confidence like a guarantee, and it was partly the idea of being connected to them that made her say yes when he suggested she give up her flat and move in with him.

  These days Gaby was hearing that voice again, the one which told her to get out, to smash up all the emotional chairs and tables so there would be no going back, so she could tear down this version of herself and start again.

  The taxi pulled up at In Vitro, and one of the concierges opened the door. They passed through the tall glass doors into the atrium. As they waited by the lift, they both looked for the hundredth time at the vitrine set into the marble cladding of the wall, containing objects found during the building’s construction. There were old bottles, Roman coins, a shoe buckle, a human shin bone.

  Guy liked the presentation more than the things themselves. He accepted the principle that heritage added value; even the past had a future, and though in itself this display was more or less a collection of rubbish, here it was at least contributing to the texture of a contemporary living space. Gaby straightforwardly wished it would go away. It was an unwelcome reminder that beneath her feet was an earth full of household waste and human remains, disposables that even after hundreds of years had not been disposed of. Rising up in the lift, they both felt a sense of relief, of having made a lucky escape from the mud sucking at their heels.

  ‘I wish they would put in some flowers instead of that horrid thing,’ said Gaby. You can’t choose, she was thinking. You can’t choose the things you keep.

  ‘So do I,’ replied Guy eagerly. It was the first conversation she had initiated in almost two hours, and he was keen for it to go further. But he could think of nothing interesting to add about flowers or archaeology. The chance fizzled out.

  They made their preparations for bed in silence, circling round each other and folding clothes, their thoughts soundtracked by the insect whine of electric toothbrushes. Gaby smoked a cigarette on the balcony and Guy took a shower, during which he surreptitiously masturbated, thinking about a fantasy partner who was like Gaby but kinder, less abrasive. Then he set his bedside alarm (which checked its accuracy using a signal sent by an atomic clock in Greenwich) and switched out the light. After a few minutes Gaby slipped in beside him.

  They lay for a while in the dark. Guy thought about pitches. Gaby thought about Guy, about his absurd sense of his own importance, about the way nothing bad had ever happened to him. If there was a buffet table in a room
, he walked straight up and began to eat. If there was one chair, he sat down. Thailand or Mauritius or Zanzibar or Cancún or Sharm el-Sheikh or Tunisia or Bali or the Gold Coast or Papeete or Gran Cayman or Malibu. So many places for Guy. All the same.

  The next morning (by which time variant 01 had infected an estimated 3.2 million individual hosts around the world) Leela started to work her glamour on the life of Guy Swift. Her subject went off to work, leaving his girlfriend in bed, pretending to be asleep. On the journey he flicked through the cab driver’s Sun, skimming stories about paedophiles and TV presenters, a football team buyout, a 34DD publican’s daughter from Surrey. He had slept badly, jerking awake several times during the night, convinced he was late for a meeting. Now he felt as if his mental activity were being filtered through a diffuse obstruction in his brain, something porridge-like in texture and consistency which was preventing key synapses from firing.

  The Shoreditch street on to which the Tomorrow* building faced was of Dickensian narrowness and squalor. At ground level, flyposters and stencil graffiti coated the walls of the high-windowed brick buildings. Someone had dumped an old sofa by the row of council bins. As the taxi grumbled round the cobbled corner and he caught sight of the Tomorrow* banner above the sweatshop door, Guy experienced a twinge of apprehension. Most mornings, unless he was feeling fragile from the night before, the sight of his company headquarters filled him with excitement. Today he had an obscure sense that something was wrong, which was confirmed as soon as he stepped through the door.

  About a dozen people were standing around in reception. Several more were playing a game of table football. They all seemed cheerful, which was probably not unconnected with the fact that none of them was working. In his rare moments of self-doubt, Guy sometimes fretted that some elements of his organization were not a hundred per cent committed to achieving Tomorrow*’s objectives. To counter this he had formulated a tripartite management strategy, fostering (bullet point one) a culture of goal-sharing, (point two) publicly rewarding excellence and (three) eavesdropping on email and phone conversations, hoping to find out who was against him. The need to spy took hold only occasionally, and usually turned up no conclusive evidence. He had held off altogether since the Stoli-fuelled evening when, trawling through the pictures of David Beckham in the receptionist’s outbox, he found a message that referred to him in the course of three lines as ‘his lordship’, ‘fancypants’ and ‘mister quiffy’. The next day, in the midst of his hangover, he had terminated the girl’s contract, citing ‘presentability issues’ (a low-cut top he had previously rather liked) as the reason. He had confided in no one and subsequently the episode had made him uneasy; he was not altogether sure it fitted his ethical profile.

  Confronted by a mob of idle employees, his latent paranoia bloomed forth. Now, of all times, when the very future of the company was at stake, the bastards were going to turn on him. He froze in the doorway, battling an irrational desire to flee.

  ‘Guy we’ve got trouble.’

  It was Caedmon, the network administrator. Guy nodded nervously. ‘I can see that. What the fuck are they doing?’ He turned to his staff, holding out his hands in a placatory gesture. I am your king. Return to your garrets. ‘What are you all standing around for? Come on, people, this isn’t a game. We’ve got the Al-Rahman pitch due in a couple of days.’

  No one made a move to sever his periwigged head with a guillotine. Instead they all started talking, gathering round to profess their fanatical eagerness to be at work and their shock and dismay that they were being prevented from slaking this desire for productive labour by the shutdown of the office computer network. One or two people were genuinely annoyed; unsaved data had been lost; important things had yet to be done. When Guy heard this, his own emotional state started to oscillate between stark horror at the news and relief that his authority was intact. To make any sense of things, he had to drag the sysop upstairs to his office and sit him down on a chair. Caedmon, a shy bespectacled young Welshman with a number one crop and a seemingly infinite number of t-shirts bearing the logos of independent record labels, did his best to explain.

  ‘I had to do it, Guy. The whole network. I didn’t have a choice. About twenty minutes after I got in this morning it just kicked off. Every screen in the place started displaying pictures of this Indian woman.’

  ‘Question, Caedmon. What the hell am I paying you for?’

  ‘Guy –’

  ‘This is so not supposed to happen.’

  ‘I know. I’m really sorry. It’s a virus –’

  ‘Oh, Christ. Please, please, please, do not be about to tell me it’s eaten everything.’

  ‘No, it’s OK. All our data is backed up on to tape. It’s just a question of –’

  ‘Spare me the details. Just tell me how long. When’s it going to be up again?’

  ‘It’s going to be a while. Unless there’s a patch, I think I’m going to have to clean-install everything from –’

  ‘Caedmon.’

  ‘Certainly the rest of the day.’

  An hour or two was what Guy had in mind. That seemed an appropriate amount of time for the situation to resolve itself. Instead he was going to lose a whole day. A vital day. Was he going to have to live for the rest of his life as the man whose company was brought down by a computer problem? A bloody technical hitch? It was like something from a bad b2b ad campaign. Don’t be the manager whose department caught the virus.

  ‘All day? What the hell is that? All day, Caedmon, is no good. It has to be quicker.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Guy. If I had an assistant – but it’s just me –’

  ‘Just you? We’ve got millions of computer people.’

  ‘They’re graphic designers, Guy.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Look, even if some of the others muck in, it’s going to be a while. It’s not just Tomorrow* who are having problems.’ Caedmon mentioned the names of two rival agencies and a bank where his friend was temping. Guy allowed himself to be slightly mollified. He waved Caedmon out. ‘Go on, then. Get on with it.’ The gesture, he noticed, came out with a peculiar flourish. More ancien régime body language. Not a good sign.

  By lunchtime his mood had worsened. Every time he walked somewhere he felt he was mincing. Switching on his laptop, he was confronted by a little pixelated woman and a snatch of screeching violins. He took the machine down to Caedmon, who nodded glumly and told him he would make it a priority. At two he sent most of the staff home. At three he took a call from New York.

  The call confirmed that Pharmaklyne was going with another agency to brand its SSRI. Guy expressed his disappointment, thanked the product manager, and put the phone down. The first thirty seconds passed calmly. Then, shouting inarticulate obscenities, he threw the phone across the room. It felt good, so he followed it up with a promotional paperweight which somehow went off course and shattered the glass doors of the case where he kept his collection. When Kika came in to find out what was happening, she discovered him on his hands and knees among the shards of a bottle of Reservoir Dogs commemorative table wine. He screamed at her to get a cloth.

  Kika helped him mop. Mainly Kika mopped and Guy paced up and down, trying not to mince and muttering fuckfuckfuck under his breath.

  ‘It’s a movie star, apparently,’ she said, gingerly picking up glass with her fingers.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The woman in the picture. She’s an Indian movie star called Leela Zahir. Ranjit said so.’ Guy looked blank. ‘Ranjit,’ Kika prompted. ‘Your senior copywriter?’ Guy nodded vaguely. At front desk, Kika informed the remaining loiterers that Mr Quiffy was really falling to bits.

  As the stress ratcheted up, Guy brooded behind the closed door of his creative space, increasingly self-conscious about the foppishness of his gestures and ever more in need of someone to blame. Caedmon was the obvious target. Hourly he appeared in a more useless and ineffectual light. A problem by definition was someone’s fault, and who else’s might it
be? There was, now Guy came to think about it, something smug about him, with his definitive collection of fanzines and encyclopaedic knowledge of early-eighties new-wave bands. Women in the office babied him. For his birthday they clubbed together to buy him a mountain bike. But when it came to a real emergency, when this happened, who cared whether your geek was popular? He obviously wasn’t up to the job. Guy called Kika and told her to get some computer-security specialists to quote for cleaning up the mess. Then he had a little chat with Caedmon. After that things went rapidly downhill.

  Some time later he found himself standing in the middle of the brainstorm zone, screaming into his mobile phone. Little tears had formed in the corners of his eyes. Junior employees were watching like spectators at the site of a road accident. ‘Do it now!’ he was pleading. ‘Why can’t you just come and fucking do it right now?’

  Disconcertingly, Caedmon had seemed unfazed at losing his job. He frowned and sauntered out of the meeting, saying he would be in the pub if Guy changed his mind. A few minutes later Kika came in to tell him that she had phoned five companies and none was available to help. ‘They said perhaps in a day or two,’ she explained. ‘They said they had to give priority to their existing clients.’ Guy told her she was useless and made some calls himself. He shouted, threatened, got nowhere. Apparently everyone had this thing. Possibly it was some kind of Muslim fundamentalist attack.

  As the reasons for Caedmon’s nonchalance started to dawn, sitting down no longer seemed appropriate. For a while Guy flounced around the building with his phone pressed to his ear. Then he noticed he was flouncing and made an effort to stride with masculine purpose. It made no difference. No one would listen. No one would help. Like many business people he had a quasi-theological view of computers. They were important and mysteriously beneficial, but it was the job of the priesthood to engage with them. Finding himself with no technical support was like standing naked before the judgement of God. He had no idea how to proceed, no way of even gauging the seriousness of his predicament.