by Steve Mosby
As he said it, another couple of files changed names.
‘We can cope with the Liberty situation, but not with this. At this rate, we think our server will crash within a fortnight.’
‘At this rate, I think you’re right.’ I leaned closer to the screen. Watching little dots. ‘Jesus. And you don’t know why this is happening?’
He shook his head.
‘Not until now. But I’m willing to bet it’s got something to do with the file that Claire stored on here. I don’t know what, though. We’ll need to take a look at it. What was it called?’
‘“Schio”,’ I said. ‘As in the place.’
He tapped in the word and hit [RETURN]. After a few moments of seeming inactivity, the file listing cleared – reduced to one.
schio
‘There it is.’
Dennison hit a button and the name became highlighted
schio
and flashed.
His thumb back-kicked the [RETURN] key. The mouse pointer, unused until now beyond an occasional stutter as his hand knocked the cable, flicked over into an hourglass.
He said, ‘It’s loading.’
It begins with a punch.
Long Tall Jack’s a big man: a six foot five skeleton with a good sixteen stone of fat and muscle resting upon it. You don’t pick fights with Long Tall Jack if you’re a grown man, but this girl is half his size. His fist connects hard, and she goes down flat on the bed. The air coming out of the mattress and the air coming from her sound the same. Not loud. Not anything, really. Her hands go up to clutch at her broken nose, and she leaves them there, like she’s holding her face together. Blood slips out between her fingers.
Jack clambers onto the bed. First one knee. Then the other.
The girl is stunned, so he doesn’t need to be quick, or even very careful. He just bats her legs to either side – once each with his knees – and then crouches between them. He reaches over her with his big hands, finds the neck of her pale blue blouse and rips it: pulls it apart the way a mortician opens the ribcage. For a second, her hands are knocked away from her face, but they return almost straight away. Jack doesn’t even bother to take the blouse off her: he just leaves it in tatters over her arms and turns his attention to her skirt.
That doesn’t tear so easily. He has to pull it off her, and it’s at this point that she realises what’s happening, and she says no. Her hands come down and flutter around his own like a couple of ineffectual birds.No! He ignores her, but then her legs kick a little, and they’re more of an irritation than her hands. He can’t work the skirt down over her kicking legs, and her voice is getting louder and more desperate -No-o-o! – and so he punches her so hard between her legs that the whole bed shakes.
Jack watches her to see whether there’s going to be any more fighting. When it’s obvious that there’s not, he starts moving again. He finishes undressing her, throwing the skirt to one side, and then he climbs on top of her, his elbows pressing down hard on the inside of her upper arms, knocking her palms away from her red, tear-stained face. His hands pull her head right back by the hair. In this surrender position, with her pinned there and sobbing, he starts to rape her.
That’s how it begins.
‘It won’t open.’
Dennison sighed and shook his head.
‘Fuck.’
I said, ‘My friend opened it yesterday. It was okay then.’
He just kept shaking his head.
‘Well, it’s become too corrupted since then. It’s probably irretrievable.’ He narrowed his eyes as though he was trying to see through the screen. ‘Fuck.’
‘There’s no way of opening it?’
‘There’s no way of opening it.’ He leaned back in the chair and linked his fingers behind his head. ‘We’ve tried to get into corrupted files with every program we’ve got, and they just won’t load. Won’t open on anything.’
‘Check the hard drive,’ I suggested. ‘See if she saved a copy.’
‘It won’t be there.’
‘Check it anyway.’
He sighed, but started a search.
‘It won’t be there. If it was, my whole hard drive would have been corrupted by now.’
I stopped biting my nail.
Something inside me thought oh fucking shit.
‘What do you mean?’
He tapped the screen.
‘Well, my guess is that it’s this file that started all the trouble.’ He stared at me, as though this should be obvious. ‘If it was on my hard drive, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have had exactly the same effect. All my files would be corrupted. I wouldn’t be able to run anything.’
His face fell.
‘Oh shit.’
‘Graham got the file off Liberty,’ Isaid. ‘Every computer he linked through will have a copy of that file on it.’
Dennison nodded. ‘How many?’
‘The search took a while. I don’t know. A lot.’
I remembered what Graham had said to me on the phone that morning:
my computer’s fucking up.
‘Shit.’
‘Well, unless they deleted the file pretty quickly, chances are it’s started corrupting their hard drives.’ Dennison settled back. ‘And that’s it, then: no way back from that. I reckon that most Liberty users set the deletion rate at about once a day.’
I said, ‘But some don’t even set it at all. They just do it manually, after a while.’
He looked at me for a second, and then the computer beeped.
[File not found]
He tapped a key and closed the search window. ‘It’s not on the hard drive.’
I thought back to the internet café.
‘I think it’s worse,’ I said. ‘Graham e-mailed me the file as an attachment, earlier on today, but it never arrived. It got lost somewhere on route.’
‘Well it’s out there, then. For better or worse, it’s out there.’
‘For worse.’
I was figuring that millions of pounds’ worth of file damage, coupled with the possible crash of the entire internet was at least as damning, legally speaking, as murdering three criminals. Profit margins have rights, too. I wasn’t sure who exactly they’d charge, but I figured they’d start by arresting everyone they could find on Liberty and then whittling it down. And it seemed pretty likely that me, Graham and Dennison were still going to be there if it got down to three.
Dennison didn’t seem bothered.
‘Maybe. Worse for us. But not from the file’s point of view.’
‘It doesn’t have a fucking point of view.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘It’s a fucking text document. Jesus.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But there’s an implict only there when you say “it’s a fucking text document”, isn’t there? And it’s clearly not only a text document. Look at what it’s done.’
‘This is absolutely insane.’
I felt like a man floating in space who needs to punch something or else he’ll explode.
All I want is to find Amy.
‘Fuck. Wait here.’
Dennison was gone. A creak of the floorboards, and then I felt the vibration of his feet on the stairs.
I sat down in the chair and looked at the screen – bathed myself in its light. I felt empty inside, and it was a weird feeling because actually the whole room seemed just as empty. The dark turned the pillars of paper into weathered, shadowy things that a strong breeze might knock into a flurry of grey, fluttering dust, but there was no breeze in here at all, and so they simply hung there, gathering more. It felt like this room had been bricked up for centuries and only just uncovered – or it would have done without the computer, anyway, which was as incongruous as a laptop in a tomb. The only living thing here, myself included. The screen was giving out an angle of hard light, and I figured that the nicest thing in the world right then would be to fall into it, get pixelated by some sharp, blinding process, and then lie down in t
he harsh brightness of it all. Spreadeagled and warm beneath a radioactive processor sun.
You’re losing it, I thought, and leant my head back so I could stare at the ceiling instead. It was always possible that I might lose it completely and put my head through the monitor, and at least the ceiling was out of reach.
I heard the creak in the doorway and looked back down.
Two things. There was a message on the screen that said:
[You have received 1 new message]
And Dennison said, ‘You need to see this.’
He kept a small black and white television on the side in the kitchen, and the screen was busy with movement as I followed him into the room and took a seat at a small wooden table in the centre. It took about half a second to realise that we were watching a newsflash of some kind, and then about another five seconds for my jaw to hit the table.
‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘This is really, really bad.’
On-screen, a small bland man was reporting exciting news in a voice that was attempting to be calm, failing only slightly. He was telling us – repeating, most likely – that half of the computers in America were off-line. Servers were just collapsing. There were literally hundreds failing every minute.
‘Yes,’ Dennison said, nodding. But his tone of voice was very close to that of the newsreader, and I got the impression that he didn’t entirely agree.
‘You realise,’ I told him, ‘that we’re going to burn for this? They’re going to fucking arrest us. And probably shoot us.’
Nobody knew what was happening, the newsreader told us. Experts were being consulted from all over the world, and there were already reports of servers crashing in several different countries. This was going to be – as I mentioned – really, really bad.
‘Shit,’ I said.
‘We’ll see.’
I shook my head. Dennison was clearly a man who needed his priorities whacking with a hammer, but I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. Graham had sent me the text, and off it had gone, destroying everything in its path. I could only hope that the entire net was brought down by it, because that was probably the only way that – when the dust had settled – we might escape from this anonymously. But that just seemed inherently undesirable. I liked the internet; I wanted it to stay where it was.
On the screen, the newsreader was explaining that a growing number of internet mail accounts and websites were inaccessible. Government sources suspected a hacker of instigating the attack. If so, it was suggested, it would be the worst instance of computer crime in the history of the world. The perpetrators would be fucking arrested, and probably shot.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘At least your e-mail is working.’
Dennison looked at me.
‘What?’
‘You got mail,’ I said. ‘Just as you called me. So your account is still working.’
I trailed off and stared back at him. And then, after a second or two more of this, we got up without a word and went back upstairs to read the e-mail.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The day was beginning to die. There were still a few hours of daylight left, but even so: the sun had broken the backbone of the sky, and now it was falling. The air was that little bit colder and you could tell that the clouds gathering at the base of the horizon were going to stick there and darken, swelling up until they filled the world with dusk and then finally solidified into a night sky. Dennison told me it was raining back in Bracken; he’d heard the forecast while I was in the bathroom being sick.
‘I’ll drive you,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to.’
He shrugged.
‘At the moment, I’ve nothing to hang around for. And apart from anything else, I want to see the texts at that house.’
I’d given him the address of Hughes’ mansion. He’d told me that the texts there represented a new form of life, and that there was no way he was risking them falling into someone else’s hands. And perhaps there was some clue in them as to what was happening.
Ten minutes later, anyway, we were on the motorway – doing pretty much the reverse of the journey I’d made that morning, but at roughly twice the speed. Dennison had a fast car, and he was flooring it. I wouldn’t have cared if we crashed. The cars we were passing were like dreams.
I kept glancing down at the printout on my lap.
A blank e-mail, sent both to Dennison and my own account, but the header information told me everything that I needed to know. Everything, but it also led to confusion and mystery. The attachment, however, was clearer.
I said, ‘It has to be her.’
Well, it had certainly been sent from Amy’s e-mail address: the one that I’d set up for her in the second week we were going out. That address was the only one she ever used. When we first met, she didn’t know much about computers and so I’d said that I’d sort one out for her to save her the bother. Maybe I’d made it out to be slightly more complicated than it was: some stupid attempt to impress her a little. I can’t remember. It wouldn’t surprise me.
‘It took me quarter of an hour to explain what pop mail was,’ I said. ‘Even then, I don’t think she really got it.’
Dennison didn’t say anything. He just concentrated on the road.
‘I don’t think I explained it too well.’
Just show me how to use it, she said.
It doesn’t matter how it works.
Do I need to know how the tv works? No.
Do I need to know how the lightswitch works?
Sidling up to me, sly grin in place.
Do I need to know how you work to use you?
I swallowed the memory. ‘She never changed her password. We used to check each other’s mail all the time. But nobody else knew the password, apart from me.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t think she ever told anyone else.’ I shook my head. ‘I mean, why would she have done that?’
Dennison changed lanes, shifting down a gear. We edged a little faster past a dark grey pickup piled high with the skinned, burned remains of cars. The driver’s arm was resting on the open window-ledge, juddering with the road. I turned to watch him as we passed him. I don’t know why. He looked at me, and then looked away again.
‘I don’t know why she would have told anyone else,’ Isaid.
Dennison didn’t reply.
I turned back, more decisive now. The road was flying by underneath us.
‘I think it really does have to be from her.’
Dennison moved back into the middle lane and we started to leave the pickup behind us. The first few drops of rain started pattering against the windscreen.
Five megabytes of compressed video footage. Three different scenes in all, but spliced together into one long clip, which told a story if you knew some background. There were bits missing, but not important bits: if you were trying to get a particular message across, then the message was there: plain to see. There was even a progression to the separate scenes: the first was in the daytime; the second in the evening; the last at night – sort of, anyway. The grainy texture remained the same throughout, even as the scenes cut, and the closer you got to the screen, the more blurred and impossible it became: just smeary movements, like rain pouring over a painted window.
Scene One.
A man and a woman on a busy street. The sun is shining, but the traffic roaring past gives an artificial, whooshing undertone to the footage that sounds a lot like a strong breeze, or a downpour. The man and woman are walking along the pavement, away from a large, wide doorway, covered over by a green awning. I didn’t need to be able to see the white lettering on it to figure out that it was the train station in Thiene.
The man and the woman are walking away from the camera. The woman is wearing a pale blue blouse and a short white skirt, and she’s carrying an over-the-shoulder handbag, which nestles behind her hips slightly. Curly brown hair, tinged with blonde. Slim. She doesn’t seem to be being coerced in any way, and none of the people
walking around the pair turn back for a second glance, or seem bothered about them. The man is overweight, with slightly sloping shoulders. I don’t need to see his face to know that it’s Kareem.
Cut to-
Early evening, the gloom supplemented by the storm.
Dennison pulled off the motorway, winding his way into the heart of the city. He neglected to slow down, and the air was suddenly filled with a cacophony of car horns as we shot past a line of semi-stationary traffic and cut in at the head of the queue. It was pouring down with rain, and the windscreen-wipers were squeaking back and forth. Dennison was hunched over the wheel, peering out. The red traffic lights were like two gigantic, bloody stars sparkling through the sheen.
‘You’re going to have to tell me where I’m going,’ he said. ‘This town is fucking crazy.’
The stars exploded in a burst of green and we set off with a screech.
‘Head in that direction. That’s the best I can do.’
The great grey lump of Uptown hung in the distance: a drab big top to our carnival city. Dennison weaved through side streets, slicing puddles apart in a watery spray. He slowed down a little, though, which I thought was good. The motorway was one thing, but three metre wide back alleys were entirely another.
We turned onto a minor loop road around the shredded face of the outside struts. The buildings that formed the edge of Uptown tended to be derelict and inhospitable: old tenement houses with windows made from nailed-in steel. You imagined them full of mattresses and needles, and stinking of rot. Dennison would drop me off soon. In the meantime, he sped up a little. Maybe he was afraid that – going under fifty – someone might steal his tyres, and if he was then he had a point.
I looked at the buildings we were passing. No McDonald’s here; no department stores. These were small shops: neighbour-hood grocery stores; shuttered pawnbrokers; greasy bars. There was hardly anyone about. Without much thought, I checked out the pavement by the edge of Downtown, and saw Kareem, walking in the opposite direction. He was wearing a raincoat and a hat, and smoking a sheltered cigarette. I caught a glimpse of him, and flipped around in my seat as we went past.
