by Nic Low
I want to argue, but I don’t know where to begin. In my family a crisis was something you solved with cleaning products. I clear my desk in silence, while Umi goes to shut off the back-up generators and double-check that the fire escape is bolted. We herd Old Man Canary out the front door and into the snow.
Leaving? Canary says. No no no.
Yes yes yes, I say. Joe’s going somewhere warm.
Canary’s eyes light up. Warm? he says.
Sorry, I say, putting an arm around his shoulders. Not us.
We stand around while a pug-faced bloke welds steel bars across the door. The acetylene snarls and cracks. The surrounding factories and warehouses are locked and dark. Joe tries to give us money. I try to refuse but end up taking it. Canary starts shouting, and Joe gets upset and leaves without even shaking our hands. It all falls apart so quickly.
I sit in the snow and close my eyes and try not to think. Marie says it’s one of my talents. I try not to think about her packed into the belly of the enormous army plane, holding Jordan close as the noise of the propellers rose to a howl. She could have gotten off, but she didn’t. I hear Old Man Canary muttering as he wanders away somewhere, probably to die. Sleep rough these days, and in the morning they prise you off the footpath with a shovel. Umi’s voice, talking on her phone, fades into the distance, and then there’s just the wind blustering around the factory eaves.
I missed my flight for this.
Footsteps approach, and I open my eyes. It’s Umi. She crouches at my side, her breath blowing clouds. I squint up at her.
Cheer up, she says, grinning. I’ve found somewhere we can go.
Sure, I say, my teeth chattering. The Harrods sale?
It’s close by. And it’s got a furnace.
There’s nothing left to burn, Umi.
There’s one thing left.
What?
Data. C’mon.
It sounds like she’s lost her mind too. But there’s a confidence in her voice that, right now, is as enticing as a hot bath. I stumble to my feet.
We only get as far as the back of the factory. Umi points to the wooden fire escape zigzagging up the wall. The door at the top is set in the old billboard, exactly where Margaret Thatcher’s giant right eye should be. It looks like the Iron Lady’s winking at us.
There, Umi says. I didn’t check the fire door—I unlocked it.
It takes a second for this to register. Something leaps in me.
Oh my god, I say. We can go in the fire escape?
Yes. Joe left me to shut everything down. I just took out the fuses. We turn everything on and we’re live.
What if he comes back? I ask.
Umi smiles. No one comes back. Except you.
We laugh, and I feel weak with relief. My brain’s going ohmygodohmygodohmygod.
Umi boosts me, scrabbling and kicking, onto the bottom rung of the fire escape. I nearly lose my glasses. It’s high and windy, the narrow stairs slick with ice. The whole dim sweep of the frozen docks falls away at my feet. It looks like the Thames is filled with ash. At the top I give the door a tug.
Bingo.
We step through Margaret Thatcher’s eye socket and into her brain.
It doesn’t take long to get everything back online. Umi replaces the fuses and throws the mains switch. Overhead lights ripple and snap on down the rows. The hard drives spin up, and the thousands of servers are soon chattering with life. Straight off there’s a wave of heat from the exhaust vents.
We pull up chairs and sit with our hands held out to the warm air. Blood tingles in my thawing fingers. I keep stealing glances at Umi, her eyes gleaming in the light of the network traffic indicators. She’s a little older than me, tall and solid and lively as a jackhammer. A jackhammer with a posh accent.
So far, so good, she says.
You’re a genius, I say. We just run the place ourselves? Business as usual?
Not quite, she says, looking serious. This winter’s going to be twice as bad as the last. We’ll need a lot more heat.
But you can’t buy heaters anymore, I say.
Heaters? Umi cries. She slaps a palm against the nearest server cabinet. What do you think these are? From now on this isn’t a data centre, it’s a data furnace.
A what?
Umi rubs her hands together. A data furnace. You know how much heat these things pump out. They spend billions cooling data centres everywhere else, but we want the heat. The more data we burn through them, the hotter they’ll get. We boost the traffic and move in here, and I think we’ll survive this winter just fine.
Move in? I say. You mean—together?
If you’re staying.
I don’t have a choice.
Then it’s better with two of us. The building’s secure, and we’ve got back-up generators if the power drops out. But we need to burn a seriously large amount of data to heat this place.
Then we need to make something that’ll go viral, I say.
Exactly! Umi says. She pulls out her phone, and brings up the number one clip on YouTube.
It’s a cranky old man from Blackpool trying to burn his heater. He dumps it in the fireplace and douses it with petrol. The flames get so big his ceiling catches fire. He runs round screaming Oh my god! Barbara! Heat! Heat! The talk shows wanted him, but I heard he died.
You know how obsessed people get with this stuff down in the drought belts, Umi says. These clips get millions of hits, and the bandwidth’s all paid by advertising. That’s what we need.
Millions of hits? I say. Us?
Umi grins. We’ll think of something, she says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.
First we rearrange the servers to maximise their heat output. It takes a couple of weeks to lug the cabinets into tight concentric rings, vents facing inwards. Once we’re done the place looks like an enormous futuristic hedge maze. We leave a space the size of a living room in the middle, and install our desks. I’m glad to finish each day exhausted. There’s less chance I’ll have to think.
When we’re ready to move in, Umi helps me collect a few boxes of clothes and kitchen stuff from my place.
Which of these do you want? she says, looking at the photographs of Marie, Jordan and me on the hall table.
Ah, it’s okay, I say. I’ve got some already.
Really?
Yeah. Anyway, they’re much better looking in my head.
We load the boxes and my bed onto a sled, and drag it down Wapping High Street like some bizarre Icelandic wedding ritual.
Why didn’t you get on that flight? Umi suddenly asks. Her cheeks are red with exertion.
I told you, I missed it, I say.
Bullshit. Umi stops pulling the sled. What happened, George?
I pretend to study a row of eviscerated council flats, standing beside the road like rotting teeth. I don’t know, I say. Guess I couldn’t bring myself to leave all this.
At the factory we place the bed in the centre of the maze of servers. We sleep side by side, for warmth
. After the months I spent sleeping alone in the spare room, woken only by Jordan’s wails, Umi’s breathing is a charm.
Day by day the temperature drops. We experiment with our own videos. The internet’s going mad for footage of British animals snap-frozen into domestic poses. There’s an ice-bound squirrel reclining next to a swimming pool, and a mummified kitten that looks like it’s brushing its teeth.
When I find a dead sparrow in the back of a server cabinet, we stretch out its wings, attach it to a stick and film ourselves taking it out around the ruined city. Sparrow buys a sack of Charity Rice at the bulletproof Tescos. Sparrow hides from middle-class looters: management consultants and dentists in armoured snowmobiles. Sparrow goes scavenging through the ruined halls of the V&A, and falls in love with a stuffed partridge. In the end Umi films me launching the dead bird out the fire escape, into a blizzard.
Sometimes you just know when it’s time to jump! I yell.
The clip doesn’t get much traffic. Afterwards I feel mean.
Every last tree in the city’s been burned, so there’s nothing to suggest autumn, but it’s clear summer has gone. Windblown snow sticks hard against the factory windows. Soon daylight is just a brief translucence, and night after night I’m woken by the cold. I come up from a dream of Jordan, his newborn face spread beneath me like a landscape, veins branching through him like frozen rivers. Then he’s gone, and there’s just the drone of the fans and the thin streams of warm air, and a relentless chill on all sides.
Are you okay? Umi murmurs.
That’s it, isn’t it, I say. That’s all the heat they’ve got.
She rolls to me. I’m not wearing my glasses, and her face is a soft blur.
They can punch out a lot more heat than this, she says. We just need something to really take off.
It’s Joe’s frog-in-the-pot thing, I say. Only in reverse. We’re slowly freezing.
Umi doesn’t reply.
We could put up a tent, I say.
What?
Put up a tent. Trap the heat, and sleep inside?
Sure, Umi says, but she isn’t really listening.
In the morning Umi’s gone, and she’s not answering her phone. There’s a pile of refugee-arrival printouts on my desk and a scribbled note: You were talking in your sleep. I stare down at them for a long time, then put them in a drawer to look at later. I lose the morning watching videos of a heat-deranged Canadian grizzly trying to eat a fishing boat.
Around three I hear the fire door. The wind whistles in off the river ice.
I’ve got it! Umi calls. Time to boost the traffic!
She crosses through the maze of servers, and places a large cardboard box on my desk. Beneath her frost-tangled fringe her face is radiant. She opens the box with a flourish. Voila!
Inisde is an ornate art-deco terrarium: a miniature world of pebbles, lush green plants, and a bowl of water. There’s a handsome golden frog sitting in the water, his tiny chest shuttling in and out.
Where the hell did you get that? I ask.
British Museum of Natural History. They’re evacuating this week.
I squeeze Umi’s arm. That’s brilliant.
Thanks. She beams.
Sarcasm, Umi. What on earth?
It’s the frog in the pot! she cries. Put him in cold water, turn up the heat, see if he jumps, right? You’ll love this.
She hefts the terrarium onto the server cabinet above our bed, then positions a high-resolution webcam. She opens her laptop and brings up the widescreen video of the terrarium in a browser. I can see the fronds on the ferns, the patterning of the frog’s skin. Beyond, the server racks curve away into elegant soft focus. The old industrial machines loom like sentinels.
Beautiful, I say. But how’s that going to boost traffic? And how are you going to heat the water?
Umi’s jittery with excitement. Here, she says, indicating a graph beneath the video. That’s the number of people watching. One for now: us. That’s the power usage of the servers. And this one’s the heat inside the terrarium. I’ve hooked up a sensor.
Oh no, I say. You’re not.
Not what?
That’s—sick! I’m laughing, and a little horrified. You’ve got the video of the frog hosted on the servers underneath the frog, right?
Right.
So—the more people watch the frog, the higher the load on the servers, the more heat they produce? It’ll boil the water—people will cook it just by watching!
Yes! Umi says, clapping her hands. We spam out the link, and people have got to be curious. They visit the page, they push up the server load, the temperature goes up too. Incrementalism, I call it: billions of tiny, innocent actions that add up to catastrophe. Just like the real world.
Just like my marriage, I mutter.
What?
Nothing. So we just boil him to death and then, what, eat him?
Hardly, Umi says, frowning at me. He’s tropical. We’d need about a hundred thousand views an hour before he’s in danger.
What are the chances? I don’t want to be responsible for his death.
That’s the beauty of it! No one’s guilty. The responsibility’d be shared by about five million viewers.
But what if we really hit the big time?
I reckon Little George will jump.
Little George?
Umi smiles. A meme needs a name.
She’s got all the answers. It’s infuriating. There’s a self-assurance planted so deep in her she doesn’t even know it’s there. A bit like a cancer, you could say. Only you wouldn’t, if you were a small man living in very large times. Her confidence is all I’ve got.
Well, then, I say with a grin, Little George must be freezing.
Umi grins back. Shall we?
What the hell are we waiting for?
JUMP OR DIE. Umi’s made a logo, with Little George lifting his head to ponder the question. We plaster it across every social-media channel we can find. I write press releases, and spend days spamming the link to stupid meme sites worldwide. I feel warmer just having something new to do.
By the end of the week four hundred people have tuned in. The temperature hasn’t budged. At night we leave a lamp on beside the terrarium and climb into bed. It’s beyond freezing.
If I wake up dead, I say, you have permission to burn me.
Umi puts an arm around my shoulder. Hey, she says. Most viral stuff takes weeks to get going. It won’t happen overnight.
At eight I wake to the dull buzzing of my phone.
You the frog guy? How long do you give him?
There’s whining static on the line. It’s hard to hear. Who is this? I say.
Paul Sherman, Sunday Mirror. I saw your little stunt on fist-face.com. I’d like to do an interview.
What? When?
I’m out front.
Umi stirs beside me. Whatsit? she mumbles, and there’s the same weird static over her voice. I realise it’s the server fans running at a higher speed. People are watching. Lots
of them.
Journo, I whisper, and her eyes blink open.
Haven’t you been following it overnight? Sherman says in my ear. Where have you been?
Asleep.
Sleep when you’re dead. Or when the frog’s dead. Have a look.
I crawl to my desk and drag down my laptop. Goddamn, I say, exhaling slowly.
Two thousand, two hundred viewers. The graphs show an erratic climb. The temperature inside the terrarium is clocking thirty-four degrees Celsius.
I stand and cross to the terrarium with a duvet round my shoulders. Little George is sitting among the ferns with just his eyes visible. He looks like he’s hiding.
Paul? I say. Come on up.
The story he runs is harsh: ‘Heating Gimmick Animal Cruelty Shocker’. There’s a photo of me and Umi looking smug, and a huge pull quote from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: This could be the first ever crowd-sourced execution. We strongly encourage people not to visit this website.
My god, I say. People will hate us.
Exactly, Umi says. It’s perfect.
She’s right, of course. The article gets picked up by tabloids overseas as a those-crazy-freezing-Brits story. For the next few days traffic hovers at three thousand viewers an hour. It makes no difference to the icy air, but Little George paddles around happily enough.
Then an environmental magazine calls up and drills us on the ideas behind the project. I start to tell the writer how it’s a matter of life and death: we need to heat the factory to survive. Umi grabs the phone and starts ranting about how we’re making a statement about society, industrialisation and the energy footprint of the internet.
It’s garbage but the writer laps it up, and soon there’s a string of stories about how we’re trying to raise awareness about this or that. The internet doesn’t give a shit. We get a real bump in traffic when the Onion runs with ‘Young Brit Programmers Demonstrate Utter Futility of Human Civilization by Slowly Boiling Helpless Amphibian’.
