Hallucinating (35 page)

First affected is the German economy, or meta-economy as it has become since parallel computers linked by optical cable recreated it. The software running the stock market is a mathematical model of capitalist thought, and it is easily recast in the alien mode. The new autonomous music, existing alive like a protoplasm in the European 'Net, remixes the economy. All the data relating to company shares, capital, stock, all the governmental data regarding contracts, fiscal law, relations with the rest of the world, and the entire softsys running the European Union, all these are lost. In its place a warped model appears.

People can go to cashbooths and withdraw ten billion euros; not in cash, but virtually. It seems chaotic, but there is a pattern. Unfortunately that pattern, being alien, cannot be analysed.

The Berlin stock market crash is nothing however compared to the events of the following day, when London crashes. No economic business can be done. Computers ruled everything: they were everything. Now they have gone alien. The pulsating interchange of electronic data has lost its human shape.

Then Wall Street crashes, then Shanghai, and the world is lost.

Economic activity on the global scale becomes impossible to understand. It is happening, but it is alien. How can anybody live when companies go bust in seconds, and beggars become billionaires?

This is how the invasion succeeds.

Global electronic economic activity was an ugly music for the aliens. They have substituted their own. They could not help it.

Part Nine

And Nulight? And Kappa? The lads and lasses of the various bands? What of them?

Listen, only the economically self-sufficient can survive. When Nulight and Kappa realise that the world has changed forever they head for the Westcountry: liberal territory. Zhaman comes along, also Djo and Sperm. The aliens (if they exist) do not pursue them. The trio make for the smallholding owned by Kappa's parents in Boscastle, Cornwall, where they set up an agrarian collective.

This Boscastle collective is named MaxNeef, after a visionary.

It seems that the aliens are only bothered with the so-called civilised regions: urban Europe, North America, Japan and the Tiger Economies, Australia. They ignore South America, India, Oceania. In the remains of Britain much of Scotland and Wales is ignored, as is the Westcountry. The Island of Ireland too is ignored. In these places people are left free to live, since in the past they partook so little of the computerised, too-large, mathematical, inhumane capitalist economic system. In short, everybody previously economically invisible remains that way.

One evening, Nulight and Kappa are down at the harbour. The smell of wild garlic from the hill lane wafts down, mixing with the DMS of the sea. Boscastle is almost empty, just a hundred or so inhabitants now. All non-human scale farming has ceased. At the moment it is every collective for themselves. Later, perhaps, some will link up...

Nulight looks up. In the violet sky he sees coloured lines. They are here.

0: Glastonbury

A freaknik waits by a bus shelter. There's no sign of the number 62. Some bastard is playing Leo Blair's latest album through an open window; there's no escape from the MOR.

"I hate this country," the freaknik murmurs to himself.

And he thinks. He thinks, surely there's something better than this.

Part Ten

Nulight hears footsteps on the paved harbour surface, clattering above the chattering Valency River. It is Kappa, dressed in a ragged T-shirt and tie-dyed tracksuit bottoms. There are holes in her boots and her hair is a mess. But she is smiling, her gait almost bouncy, like a child. Yet all Nulight can do is sigh.

She runs up to him and hands him some optical. "Hey, look what I found. Music!"

Nulight doesn't bother checking out the CD. "Yeah, but I haven't got anything to play it on. Nothing reliable, anyway."

"I think I might be able to put my hands on a CD player in Tintagel."

Nulight sighs again. "We're just scrabbling around here. If we don't pull in a good harvest we're as good as dead. If we're not attacked, that is-"

"Stop being so negative! There's hardly anybody here, we can make this work, it's not like there's thousands of people stealing our grain. You're just going to give up?"

"No. I s'pose not."

"Good," says Kappa. "'Cos I'm not dead yet."