We are now up to date, and the rest is conjecture. The times are uncertain, and even the best simulation can only see a short way ahead. Still, we can arrive at a few working guidelines. 1: Things might get worse, but they can also get better. 2: Consider the alternatives. 3: The truth is a weapon: anyone who tells you that it doesn’t exist is trying to disarm you. 4: It may be impossible to pin facts down for certain, but that is no proof that facts don’t exist; the facts used in this model are true, in so far as we can check them.
That’s all I can tell you. This is how it feels. It hurts a bit, sometimes, but I made my own choices.
I don’t know where they went, and for now I don’t want to. Because I like not knowing what’s going to happen next. I liked it very much when Michael showed up on the camera in that server room, when I’d reckoned it would have been Aoife. If the game isn’t fixed in advance, then we can still win it. Plus, it’s like I said to Towse, when we met in Vancouver: if I ever need to find them, I will know how.
Acknowledgements
This novel was written with the help of generous bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Canada Council for the Arts. Thanks in particular to Sarah Bannan at Merrion Square. Culture Ireland provided a much appreciated travel grant for a research trip to Palo Alto and the Santa Clara Valley.
Jon Riley, Richard Arcus and Jasmine Palmer at Quercus Books took another chance on me, and Penny Price did excellent work on the copy edit. In Toronto, thanks to Sarah MacLachlan, Janie Yoon, Bruce Walsh, Doug Richmond, and all at House of Anansi Press. Alysia Shewchuk designed an inspired cover. Joanna Reid was kind enough to put local manners on the Vancouver chapter. Thanks also to my agent, Peter Straus, and all at Rogers, Coleridge & White.
This novel’s fictional influences are pretty well flagged in its pages, but I would like to acknowledge a particular debt to Michael Lewis’s gripping non-fiction account of the world of high frequency on-line trading, Flash Boys, which provided the germ of the central idea. Mark O’Connell’s hilarious and terrifying books To Be A Machine and Notes from An Apocalypse offered insight into the strange world of high-tech survivalists and doomsday preppers. For the second book in a row, I must also thank the people behind the Conet Project, which records and monitors the mysterious broadcasts of so-called numbers stations.
I hope that Tom Scharpling, Mike Lisk, Pat Byrne, Jason Gore, and all the other people behind The Best Show will, in light of their own excellent work on the spec script for Grown Ups 3, forgive my own stab at fan fiction in the Vineland chapter. What started as a passing in-joke morphed into a vital part of the plot.
Gillian Whelan and Paul O’Farrell provided hospitality, insight and friendship in Palo Alto. Thanks also to Gabrielle Hetherington in Edmonton and Kerri and John O’Loughlin in Calgary. Nuala Haughey, Maeve McLoughlin, Conn O Midheach, Roisin O’Loughlin, Kevin McCarthy and Jeroen Kramer all generously made the time to read and comment on early drafts of the text. Finally, thanks to my wife Nuala and daughters Bláthnaid and Iseult for their kindness and patience.
If I have forgotten to mention anyone here, please be assured that I will have remembered you just after the book goes to print, and I will be feeling really bad about it.
Author photograph: Crispin Rodwell ED O’LOUGHLIN is an Irish Canadian author and journalist. He is the author of three novels, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Minds of Winter, the critically acclaimed Toploader, and the Booker Prize–longlisted Not Untrue and Not Unkind. As a journalist, Ed has reported from Africa for several papers, including the Irish Times. He was the Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of Melbourne. Ed was born in Toronto and raised in Ireland. He now lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.
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