Bold as Love (34 page)

Sage rubbed the skull’s browbone with his masked fingers. ‘I told him I already have a life, and he should look for a struggling outdated instrumentalist in need of a part-time job… But he might do that. There’s no shortage of them around here; and our friends in the suits can’t be trusted. Prem, and whoever is backing him, offer the Westminster Government a more malleable leader for the CCM, they’d probably jump at the chance.’

‘Fuck. Are you going to tell Ax?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘I hope he pays attention.’

They both knew Ax would not pay attention. Ax would continue to come and go as he pleased, drive around alone in that instantly recognisable black Volvo, park it wherever he liked. Unarmed. No bodyguards. He would go on treating Benny Prem like a difficult sessions musician with an unlovely personality, who sadly can’t be fired. Go on living his fearfully public life in this fearfully changed world as if he was a private person with no enemies, and the date some mythical year in the early nineteen sixties.

Fiorinda needed a new publishing strategy. She’d decided she hated the idea of being a solo artist, dancers and costume-changes, yuck, disgusting. Playing with DARK at the May concert had reminded her how much she missed the band, and in some weird way the aftermath of that concert had made her realise what she must do
.
Simple: accept that the band would always belong to Charm, and convince Charm to take her on again as an associate, songwriter and vocalist. No control-struggle, no more fist-fights, just sometimes I play with DARK, sometimes I don’t. However, if she was going to do this, she had to detach herself from lambtonworm.com, the North-East artists’ co-op that had brought out both
No Reason
, the DARK album, and Fiorinda’s solo album,
Friction.
There was nothing wrong with lambtonworm, but the co-op was run by Charm Dudley’s best mates, and that wasn’t going to work. She had to take her solo work elsewhere. Production, publishing, marketing, all of that. How do you begin?

Life goes on. Career decisions have to be made. On the night of the twenty-fourth of May she was alone in the new place in Brixton. They had two floors, the ground floor was going to be studio and offices. There were two more floors above, flats belonging to other folk. It was late, Ax was playing with the band somewhere: she was sitting up with a spliff and a bottle of red wine, surrounded by unpacking debris, secretly plotting. What, me set up my own cyberspace company? Before she’d tackled the Volunteer Initiative she wouldn’t have dreamed of such a thing: but she’d had to learn. She was more confident with information technology now.

There were plenty of Fiorinda sites (most of them best ignored), and of course she was on DARKspace, but she’d never had an internet presence of her own. She still didn’t want one. She liked being mysterious, being difficult to access. Okay, without the web they’d all be either corporate slaves or nowhere. She’d had that lecture. The Heads, needless to say, had been in this business since it was born… But without exactly yearning to be one of those dreadful corporate slaves (perish the thought), she couldn’t help thinking, surely all this part, shopfront, sales and marketing, is somebody else’s job?

I’m a child of capitalism. I don’t want to be Renaissance Girl.

So, find another co-op. But that seemed kind of a wussy option.

She clicked around, looking at
SweetTrack.
(the Chosen);
Tone.
the Somerset artists’ outfit started-up by the Preston brothers, now run by other people.
Whitemusic.com
, which was the Heads, and
Tide.
(Sage). Amused by the different personalities, thinking, I could talk to Chip and Verlaine, or even Shane Preston, get some advice. NOT Sage. Not the Heads. Couldn’t have those heavyweights taking charge, that would never do. Pity there were no women she could ask. But the only female nethead in the Counter Cultural Think Tank had been killed on Massacre Night.

Tiring of the investigation, she sneaked a guilty look at some of the stranger Fiorinda stuff: and some rather unbalanced DARK/Fiorinda fanpages. Bit unfortunate for the project of disarming Charm Dudley’s resentment. Well, I can’t help it, she thought. I didn’t
plan
to be the fucking Crisis Sweetheart.

Benny Prem’s approach to Sage had scared her. Maybe Prem had scared himself, too. Today at the San, he’d come sidling up to her and asked, ‘Fiorinda, what does PoMo mean? Does that stand for post modern?’

‘Black music, lot of people on the stage, lot of four beat melody. It stands for Post Motown.’ She’d returned his trademark uneasy smile, blandly. ‘That’s an old name for Detroit. Mo town, Motor Town.’

‘I find it difficult to keep the jargon straight, I’m afraid I give offence.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she’d said. ‘No one expects you to understand.’

No, Benny, there’ll be no repercussions. You just make my flesh creep, same as you always did. Ax had displayed complete lack of interest in Prem’s wooing of the Cornish Pretender. This casual attitude, my dear Ax, will bear further discussion… But now Fiorinda had crashed.

She wasn’t surprised. The internet was always crashing. She wasn’t alarmed, only annoyed, when she found she couldn’t shut the screen down. Shook the remote control, considered throwing it against a wall or dropping it hard onto the uncarpeted floor. Better not. Finally she unplugged at the wall and booted up again. Same screen, still frozen. A message in gothic font slowly growing in size.

GOD MUST BE A MUSCOVITE.

Fiorinda got stubborn, and decided to call the Heads, in Battersea. They’d know about GOD MUST BE A MUSCOVITE, how bad it was and how to fix it. Unfortunately, her phone wasn’t working. Typical. The maisonette didn’t have a landline connection yet, so that was about it… She tried a couple of cable channels, to make sure the tv reception wasn’t buggered. Normal rubbish.

Went to bed and read a book.

One of the two viruses involved in what happened on the night of the 24th came out of the Polish Counterculture. Its name was Ivan, it was supposed to attack Russian sites, as a protest against one of the ongoing Russian Federation wars. The other was English, she was called Lara, and she meant no harm to anyone, she was just expert at getting around and exploring places. On the night of the 24th, Lara escaped from a hackers’ meet, and she and Ivan got together. Within minutes, Ivan/Lara had wrecked Euronet leisure-and-reference: had destroyed huge swathes of big science, research and academia; had been downloaded into the cellphone system, and was doing appalling scary things like crashing air traffic control, power-station and water-pumping software.

A few years before the effect would have gone global in no time, but the internet, or nets, had been re-engineered with exactly this situation in mind. Between the virtual boundaries of the signatories of the World Internet Commission there were complex, fractal bulkheads, designed (among other policing functions) to contain infection. The people of Europe, from Belarus to Portugal, from Sicily to the Baltic, were the ones who woke up with a real problem.

Ironically, apparently Ivan never made it into Russian cyberspace.

The English public didn’t panic, not even when certain hardliners eagerly claimed responsibility on Gaia’s behalf, and promised Worse To Come. There’d been so many demon viruses that fizzled out, so many cataclysms that had turned out to be not so bad (such as the Tour). Emergency preparations went into gear, but most people assumed it would be over soon.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Ax went to check how Sage was getting on.

Ax had been helping to nail the myriad ways Ivan/Lara could fuck the infrastructure of English civilisation: getting to some of them in time, others not. Thank God the Internet Commission had forced its signatories to maintain a worst-case scenario drill. At least they had a plan… Nothing had been said, but he was sure the high-powered bureaucrats he was dealing with must know he had a warehouse implant. Did that matter? He was too tired to think about it.

Sage had been drafted onto the assault team—a European network of legendary hackers, academic and state security cryptographers, robotics experts; modern artists, even rockstars. Ax knew very little about this effort, except that he’d heard one of them say, on a podcast, that Ivan/Lara would be defeated within ten days, or it would be beyond control. The limit seemed arbitrary, but it had stuck in the mind. So this was half way.

The Heads’ studio was a converted warehouse, right by the river. George answered the entryphone. Peter and Bill were off on volunteer shifts, the show must go on. Ax went up to the impossibly cluttered room with the wide windows overlooking Battersea Reach, where Sage was working on his piece of the puzzle: Sage with a wireless wrap around his eyes, lying in a big, heavily designed-looking padded chair, a bank of monitor screens in front of him, his masked hands moving over the boards. He’d been at it for ten hours this session, George had said: catheter-job, as they called it. But Sage was like that when he got stuck into something: incapable of taking a break. It wasn’t a
bad
sign.

Ax stood and watched. The first time he’d known there must be something more than a giant drunken toddler behind the skull-mask, had been when he noticed (ignorant as he was), the complexity of those immersions. That flood of weirdly sensual, brain-battering sound and light was
built
, bit by fucking bit. Listening to Sage and Peter Stannen talking about what they did: shooting strings of code at each other, computing the rainbow, could be chilling. It made you think that this was how Sage handled the skull’s beautiful repertoire of emotions: shuffling telephone numbers. But it was impressive.

Maybe they’ll sort it, he thought. We could get lucky.

‘Hi, rockstar.’

‘Hi.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Have a look.’ The masked little finger of Sage’s right hand moved a slide: a dizzying landscape of hills and valleys appeared on the centre screen, faux-3D: a cratered plain, an array of glassy smooth volcanic cones, the impression of immeasurable vastness.

‘You any the wiser?’ inquired the skull, malignly.

‘Something to do with probabilities, statistically preferred solutions.’

‘Well done.’

Ax peered at another monitor. ‘Who’s
Theodosius the Dacian?
’

‘Romanian bloke. We met ’im when we did the East Bloc tour. Computer artist, good one. He’s bonded labour to some division of World Entertainment: they bought him, they own everything he does, and they do nothing, just sit on it… Is he bitter? Very. He ripped us off…can’t remember how. Tickets? Venues that didn’t exist?’ Skeletal fingers kept tapping keys, shifting slides and toggles, but the landscape didn’t change, that Ax could see. ‘George doesn’t like him. I got into a correspondence, never sure whether it was friendly, always, you can fuck off rich lucky crass no-talent, I’m better than you…which you endure because, you know why… And here we are, talking about how to fuck Ivan. He’s my cellmate, him and Arek. You know Arek Wojnar?’

‘Music publisher? Shit, yes I do.’

‘Also hacker… Small world.’

‘You’re working in a virtual reality?’ Ax looked closer at the dizzying landscape, ‘In there?’

‘Nah.’ The skull kept staring ahead, the wrap around its eyesockets looking very weird. ‘I never had much time for frolicking around in cyberspace dressed as the Easter Bunny, if we could spare the bandwidth. I wear my mask on the outside. The machine I’m using is standalone. What you see there is an image of what my cellmates and I are trying to do, but we’re working separately. I prefer to have their chat as lines of type, it’s less irritating. But I can talk to them; and I can send them updates in plain code by cable. For a while longer,’

There was a glowing ball rolling up one of the slopes. As Ax watched, it slipped back. ‘Can you tell me anything I’ll understand?’

‘Oooh, okay. Look, this is part of a reconstruction of the original Ivan.’

The landscape on the centre screen vanished, replaced by a lot of code.

‘Ivan is…slow. Polish anti-Russian comment. That’s where GOD MUST BE A MUSCOVITE comes from, in whatever language you’re using. Apparently it’s a quote from a letter of Chopin’s…meaning, God’s always on the side of the bastards. Ivan slows things up a tiny amount, but over a few billion iterations, it clogs the works. That’s what Ivan
does.
Very simple. What Ivan is, is
fucking outrageously complicated
. This is not some plug-the-modules late-capitalist-slacker conceptual art. This is a class act. The shits who put Ivan together could have got a fucking
nobel prize
for this kind of coding. But no, they are hippies. They prefer to tear things apart. And that’s why I’m in on this, by the way…there.’

Sage pointed at a section of teeming code, at random for all Ax could tell, with a virtual finger. ‘That’s from
Morpho
. I wrote that.’

The Heads’ first album, which had burst on the world like a solar flare, a new dimension: telling a retro-handicraft guitarist he might as well pack it in. If Ax had been prepared to listen.

‘Oh. So…if you wrote it, then you must be able to unwrite it?’

‘No such fucking luck. I was a lot cleverer when I was seventeen, and the
Morpho
code is back at the dawn of time by now. Precambrian. I haven’t a clue.’

‘What about Lara? What does she do?’

‘Oh, Lara. Bless her. What d’you think she does? She wanders around looking for things. She jumps, she runs, she can get into impregnable strongholds, and she is…strangely attractive. But you knew that. Lara is also seriously over-determined, extremely complicated: a labour of love. You should be proud of these people, Ax.’ The hands moved with bitter precision, doing something that made the ball hop around in a wistful way, like a bored toddler…‘They are genuine post-futuristic
artisans.
We have the guys who wrote Lara on the team, as you probably heard: couldn’t turn themselves in quick enough, and they are very sorry. They can’t help much. She’s back at the dawn of time too. Trouble is, nothing we already thought of works. This is like,
chaotic alien molecular biology.
Oh, someone will work it out. Someday. But it’s not going to be me. Other problem, worse than the weirdness of Ivan/Lara, is the revolution. Trying to contain a really smart virus, never mind zap it, under pan-European CCM Crisis conditions, is fucking impossible.’