by Will Self
can not only beat the system … he can capture its commanding
heights … its commanding heights … You got troll feet, says a child
who’s arrived beside Busner’s lofty bench and stands sneering
down at them. Busner smells salty breath … like Ben’s and registers
chewing that, despite its only having claimed his attention this very
moment, still seems to’ve been incessant … The child, whose sex is
non-determinable at least by me … wears a T-shirt with a cartoon
face on it, and Bennishly won’t allow his bright-blue button eyes …
to meet mine. I am … Busner begins – and as he speaks his fancy
hardens into conviction: … a troll. The child’s eyes widen pleasingly
… I’m not a troll, is what Ben had protested: I’m not a troll,
Gramps, or a hacker like that stupid mong, McKinnon … like that
stupid mong, McKinnon … Before Busner can say anything else to
the child, Milla squawks in his ear: A troll, Gramps? What’re you
talking about? – I’m just saying, Ben told me he’s not a troll … To
which she replies: Well, I’m not a troll either! I don’t post any comments
or anything like that – I just keep an eye on his Facebook
page … While this mother talks, the child has arrived at Busner’s
bench. She stands a few yards away, her face twisted by paranoia:
Who’s this dirty old man? What’s he been saying – or, worse, doing,
to her little boy? She pushes the pushchair back and forth on the
gravel path crunch-munch … am I hungry? and would undoubtedly
beard me … were it not that … I’m on the pho-one! Delighted by
this stand-off, Busner watches as the mother – predictably, she’s
anorexic – common enough sequel to untreated post-partum depression –
wrenches the child away and buckles it into the pushchair. Next
they’re on the terrace below, the pushchair’s wheels skitterolving,
while Milla goes on andon, because, however monumental the
orfer’s indifference … we’re meant to be together. It’s this fervent
belief that their love will be requited on some higher plane which
elevates her, Busner thinks, to the ranks of the Tzadikim Nistarim:
the thirty-six individuals alive at any given time whose purpose –
hidden from the world and themselves – is to justify humankind
in the eyes of God. Not that he’s studied the relevant parts of the
Talmud … read my own bar mitzvah portion pho-pho-phonetically,
but in a secular age you’d expect the love of an absent man to
substitute for the love of an absent God … She runs on – Busner
senses tendrils on his nape questing towards the cavernous interior
of Alexandra Palace, and places his grandson in the great and
gloomy hall he remembers from his last foray inside … ten years
ago? Ben Whitehouse-Busner bulky by name – bulky by nature …
stumbling past these botched pantographs of municipality: a bamboo
arras, freestanding screens of neon-indigo nylon ill concealing
gilded stacking chairs piled up to thrice-head-height. Ben has
hybridised with his gaming avatar: he’s stripped to the waist, his
breasts … gynecomastia? are sweat-oiled, lifted and supported … by
those bullet-filled bandoliers. He points the nostrils of his pump-action
shotgun towards the mouth of some grim stairwell, then
pivots round to aim at the back of Gramps’s head! and … fires!
He’s every reason to turn his nose up at me, Busner thinks: after
all, when he was little I saw him all the time – far more than I
did his father, or any of my other children. But then Ben just sort
of … stopped and so did I. The whispering and repetitious lummox
had attended an ordinary secondary school in Cricklewood with
a specialist unit. The teachers were well-meaning and Camilla
was happy enough – Ben was under no pressure to attend classes, or
indeed, so far as his grandfather could ascertain, do anything much
at all. So he didn’t. Simply went there each day and sat around reading
in the woefully understocked library – or fiddled with the
school’s near-obsolete computers. Oh, the pathos! One time, must’ve
been in the boy’s teens, Zack had gone with Milla to meet with
his teachers, and they’d chanced upon Ben, as amorphous and
beige as the sag-bag he was sat on. Just sitting there – only sitting
there, his stimming reduced to the compass of a single finger,
metronomically waggling in front of his starting eyes. But it was
Zack who’d admonished himself: Such a waste … although of what
he wasn’t entirely sure. There was something there, though – even
when little Ben was a blur of repetitions, verbal and physical, at
the very core of him his grandfather had sensed a profound and
watchful stillness … One which, as the years have passed … and the
screens have proliferated, he’s seen mimicked by more and more
people – in the streets, on buses and trains, and no doubt in the
privacy of their own qramped quarters … An epochal signal had
once been beamed from the roof of the People’s Palace – this much
Busner knows: a wooden puppet splintered into its myriad constituent
waveforms, then reassembled a mile or two away by clever
Scotsmen … He’s seen, he thinks, an image of that image of the
puppet’s white face, stimmed into being by cathode rays. Only the
first of a horde of such of such electro-revenants … ghosts of ghosts,
wafting around the world, walking through walls, and welling
up from the illuminated missals they hold ever open before their
beseeching eyes … Busner hunches forward to tie his laces, while
Milla supplies the commentary: Yeah, all right, I’ll admit it – I do
post comments as well – I can’t help myself – but I use a made-up
name – else he might be angry … Which is so like someone who’s
part of a couple. It’s sorta like I’m with him already – you don’t
think I’m crazy, do you, Gramps? Busner’s toenails are mildly fungally
infected, giving them a wood-grained appearance: I’m not a
troll, he thinks, I’m a puppet … And as Milla bores on … he sees
shavings of himself swirl up into the suburban skies. What was it
Ben had said to him, and said again? That a vast amount – though
not the entirety – of the world’s internet traffic passes through the
YouEss’s communications infrastructure … through the YouEss’s
communications infrastructure … which is where it’s grabbed …
Busner sees a fake gold watch, poised for long and painful moments
above a slag heap of miniature teddy bears and silvery trinkets, then
slowly jerking towards the slot … You have to ask yourself, Gramps,
why exactly it is they want so much data … why exactly it is they
want so much data … The systems they have at GeeSeeAitchQueue
are capable of logging in excess of fifty billion events a day … in
excess of fifty billion events a day … No, no! Busner expostulates, of
course I don’t think you’re crazy, Milla! So off she goes again. Such
a waste, he thinks, a life grabbed, winched up, inched towards the
slot, then … dropped … in a
rape field, she told me … poor Milla.
Such a waste … all those sixpences I fed into the machine – where
would it’ve been? Torquay! Yes, Torquay! They’d always put up at
the same seafront hotel, and Zack spent so much time fiddling with
the buttons the grabber became my hand – not that this helped when
it came to getting hold of a fake-gold watch. Rather, he thinks,
this was the origin of my own cack-handedness, this cybernetic
assimilation of the rigged arcade game. He remembers sitting in
the hotel dining room while a deaf waiter unloaded steaming
soup bowls from … a dumb one, which was Henry and Zack’s little
joke. When? Late forties he supposes – Maurice’s companion at the
time had been … Joy! Yes, Joy – Joy came in between a brace of
Barbaras … A brittle woman – and fanciful. One brisk day, watching
the palm trees shiver along the esplanade, she’d said to little
Zachary, Oh, look, darling, they’re all listening in to the same gossip
on their party line … A decent woman, though – and Zack had
liked her. The Brown Windsor dyspepsia lay dumbly waiting in the
shallow bowls. The clock ticked on the mantel – then several
seconds later … tocked. Into this bell jar Zack had insinuated the
following remark: Why don’t you and Joy share a room, Uncle
Maurice? The silence had intensified – then solidified so much … a
pin would’ve floated in mid-air. Maurice took his time dabbing his
dab of a brown moustache with his napkin, and eventually said, Not
everyone is obsessed by the sexual relation, Zachary. What you
said is extremely rude … and embarrassing for Joy. You’d better
go up to your room now … Lying on candlewick rubbing my little
prick … Gulls squawked outside – I imagined them to be ecstatic
cries … Not everyone is obsessed by the sexual relation, Zachary
but he was … After he’d gone I found his weird account books –
double-ledger entries: the totting up of all the arseholes he’d
penetrated and the pricks that’d penetrated him. I was able to
find one for that very day. A hypocrite? Not at all – simple self-preservation.
Came upon him a few years later – very moist in the
morning room at Redington Road, crumpled up his copy of the
Times and exited left … pursued by his demons, and leaving a Du
Maurier smouldering in the onyx ashtray. I smoothed out the page:
BLETCHLEY BOFFIN CONVICTED OF GROSS INDECENCY, and
read it intently: He has absolutely no sense of shame, one of the arresting
officers told the court. He was a real convert who truly believed he was
doing the right thing … Zack wouldn’t have known who the boffin
was if he and Henry hadn’t heard him on the Third Programme a
few weeks earlier, speaking about building a mechanical brain and
whether, if it could be done, the machine would think like we do …
Fake-gold watches grabbed and homosexual code-breakers nabbed,
then annihilated in front of the Knutsford Quarter Sessions.
Where’d the poor fellow lived … Winslow? No, that’s the play …
Wilmslow! And the furtive fumble had been with an Arthur
Murray – but he was a namesake – not related, so no possibility of
dancing away the heartache … As for the mechanical brain known as
Ben – he resembles no relation of mine: it’s Whitehouse features
that’re buried currants in all that … spotted dick. He’s sexless as well,
Ben, for a young man in his early twenties – not a whiff of it. Hardly
his great-great-uncle’s great-great nephew … not everyone’s obsessed
by the sexual relation, Zachary. No, indeed – obsessed, rather, by
quite different forms of command and control … From computers
just like this one, Gramps – computers they have all over the world …
computers they have all over the world … anyone who has the right
security clearance can task the system … can task the system … Which
is really, when Busner stops to think about it, what Milla’s doing to
him right now! Enough, Milla! he barks: That’s enough now! You
can’t be serious about this business with your writer-chap – wasting
your life like this. You’re still young … comparatively. Camilla
doesn’t want to hear this – she’s tasked his system, and now she
owns me … So off she goes – but Gramps fucking Gramps! isn’t
listening to her, but to Ben-from-the-recent-past: D’you know what
Skype is, Gramps? he’d asked Zack as they’d sat peering into the
faraway nearby of his three angled screens … Next year Microsoft
is going to buy Skype, Gramps, and this’ll give them direct access
to the computers of six hundred million registered users … six
hundred million registered users … Thing is, the encryption they use
to keep these users’ communications secure … to keep these users’
communications secure … Well, it was Microsoft which devised the
very techniques the EnnEssAy uses to get around them … to get
around them … Ben’s pudgy fingers pressing the keyboard, shaping
the curious flow charts and garish little logos which blipped
from screen to screen . . . Ben’s salted, infertile breathiness: See,
Gramps … Boundless Informant … Project Bullrun – and this
one is my favourite, it’s called Egotistical Giraffe … it’s called
Egotistical Giraffe … They use it to target something called the
Tor browser … There’d been more palping, and the hectic fourdimensional
data-juggling was infected by septic streaks as Ben
scrolled down: These’re all web sites, Gramps, but not normal
ones – these’re hidden sites … it’s called the Dark Web … it’s called
the Dark Web … But the spooks’re figuring out how to crack it …
how to crack it … They can already invade private networks on
Google and Facebook – GeeSeeAitchQueue has a program called
Tarmac which allows them to intercept satellite communications
… to intercept satellite communications … The product is shared
between the YouEss and the YouKay agencies and their allies, the
Five Eyes … and their allies, the Five Eyes … A few of us have
realised what their real objective is … what their real objective is …
Oh, and what’s that? Ben’s Gramps had asked him ingenuously –
and now, sitting on the bench, looking over towards the Shangri-La
of Epping Forest, he apprehends the city’s ancient and glacial
flow … as Milla’s inexhaustible longing … trickles coldly … chemically
… into my ear. There’d been an odd glint in his grandson’s
usually lustreless eyes when he answered: They want to make it
so nobody nowhere can ever communicate electronically without
their being able to collect that data, store it and analyse it
whenever they want … and analyse it whenever they want … But
why? Zack’d asked Ben. Why do they want all that data – the vast
amount of which has to be utterly bloody inconsequential! … The
woman in the bookshop at Belsize Park told me he’s actually
separated from his wife … There’s nothing on his Facebook
account … Anyway, it’d be ridiculous – so
meone like him updating
his status … On Camilla runs, her data-stream purling as it joins
with the great cataract of telephony meta-data which courses round
this watery world … what’s their objective? Ben may reverence the
factual, but there’s one truth no one wants to crack their molar on:
history is a cock-up from which we’re all trying to escape … Safely
sat in his smelly cave, Ben had simply said, I’m not entirely sure
yet, Gramps – but when I find out I’ll let you know, I’ll let you
know … but when I find out I’ll let you know … Worrying words
which summoned this admonition: There’re a lot of young men –
boys, really – like you, Ben, who get odd ideas into their heads. The
coming of these computer technologies has made fantasists of us
all – we stare at these screens for so long we cannot help sliding into
machine dreams … He had, he thinks, put his arm round his grandson’s
shoulders at this point – but the mannish boy’s eyes remained
locked in oculogyric crisis … However, underlying it all, Ben, are
the same old political realities: states are inherently secretive, this
means they can be very nasty indeed if they think anyone’s encroaching
– whether it be a terrorist organisation, another state, or a young
man in his bedroom armed with a keyboard … Yes! Zack had spoken
straight into that moon-face, and for a couple of seconds he’d
compelled those limpid brown eyes to look into his own. Yet, with
Ben’s mother’s still banging on in his ear, Busner wonders if he
shouldn’t’ve been rather more forceful – certainly not agreeing to pay
for yet more computing power to be installed in Ben’s cave, the floor
of which already writhes with rubberised creepers … Because, while
he’d actually held his grandson’s empty gaze, Zack had had this odd
intimation: The egotistical giraffes are already among us! craning up to
tear the freshest, juiciest data from the top of … the decision tree.
Yes, the egotistical giraffes had arrived, and were well on their way
to capturing the commanding heights! Milla! Busner at last shouts her
down: I can’t talk to you any more not that I have, I’ve got to go …
Camilla’s voice rises towards hysteria: Just say you’ll go along to the
reading and speak to him – that’s all I’m asking … please … And,
