by Hari Kunzru
Gabriella claims Leela had a well-thought-out plan of escape, but needed help. ‘I was sympathetic to her,’ she writes, ‘and I hated all the people involved in that film. So I said I would hide her in my room and drive her to Inverness Airport the next morning.’ She did not ask where she was heading after that, but ‘she said she had a friend. A boyfriend, she said, and then corrected herself. He was not a boyfriend, but she’d talked to him on the internet and they were going to meet each other. She did not say any more.’
The next morning, while police were beginning an intensive search that would eventually involve helicopters and teams of divers searching Loch Lone, Gabriella made good on her promise. ‘We said almost nothing to each other during the journey. Then she took her bag and walked into departures. I thought of asking to go with her.’
By the early autumn, the various Leela-variant viruses had been brought under control. Shaken sysops were able to go into work without a sense of dread, and computer-security specialists started to count their money. Of course blame had to be apportioned somewhere, and by general consensus it fell on the Virugenix corporation. With its reputation shredded and its share price locked into a downward spiral, the company’s senior management was forced to resign en masse. Even this was not enough to turn things round, and within a year the Virugenix brand had disappeared from the world’s screens, its assets absorbed by its rivals. From a secret address in Montana, former Ghostbuster Darryl Gant now runs Mehtascourge.org, one of the more extreme Leela research sites, which focuses on hunting down the man he sees behind many of the world’s ills, from his own redundancy to the scaling down of the American space programme.
Gant has his work cut out. There are sightings of Arjun Mehta and Leela Zahir around the world, sometimes alone, sometimes in company. She is seen begging in the streets of Jakarta and talking on the phone in the back of New York cabs. He is spotted one day at an anti-globalization demo in Paris and the next coming on to the pitch in a hockey match in rural Gujarat. He has got enormously fat. She has been surgically altered to look like a European. One persistent report, mostly from Pacific Rim countries, has a young man fitting Mehta’s description accompanied by a South Asian woman of a similar age, ‘tomboyishly’ or ‘punkily’ dressed. They are sometimes seen kissing or holding hands. According to conspiracy theorists, there is only one possible explanation, only one pattern that makes sense.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dan O’Brien of NTK, Fred Cohen, Natasha Staley, Sarah Gordon and Carey Nachemberg for technical advice. Thanks to my father for other kinds of advice. Thanks also to Simon Prosser, Jonny Geller, Donna Poppy and many others at Curtis Brown and Hamish Hamilton.
