Phone

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,