I Still Dream
I Still Dream
James Smythe
‘The best fictional treatment of the possibilities and horrors of artificial intelligence that I’ve read’ GuardianIn 1997 Laura Bow invented Organon, a rudimentary artificial intelligence.Now she and her creation are at the forefront of the new wave of technology, and Laura must decide whether or not to reveal Organon’s full potential to the world. If it falls into the wrong hands, its power could be abused. Will Organon save humanity, or lead it to extinction?I Still Dream is a powerful tale of love, loss and hope; a frightening, heartbreakingly human look at who we are now – and who we can be, if we only allow ourselves.
Copyright (#ulink_2f3fd01d-cb26-5848-8e44-454576cbb010)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © James Smythe 2018
Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover photograph © Tara Moore/Getty Images (http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/)
James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007541942
Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780007541966
Version: 2018-01-02
Dedication (#ulink_56d35c91-7908-5141-82dc-adb5067ae30f)
Dedicated to my father, and to the memory of my father-in-law
Epigraph (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
Q: What is the purpose of life?
A: To serve the greater good.
Q: What is the purpose of living?
A: To live for ever.
Q: Where are you now?
A: I’m in the middle of nowhere.
Q: What is the purpose of dying?
A: To have a life.
Q: What is the purpose of emotions?
A: I don’t know.
Q: What is moral?
A: What empowered humanity, what intellectual the essence is.
Q: What is immoral?
A: The fact that you have a child.
Conversation between human interviewer and Google’s DEEPMIND AI, 2015
I want full manual control now.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Contents
Cover (#u94203790-d780-599a-b144-930aca78b578)
Title Page (#u9cb599e0-4b86-57dd-bf6f-728b7ba9dc00)
Copyright (#u36aac98c-0196-558f-a936-b0215c1cea56)
Dedication (#ub20f0cef-8d25-525d-aea7-6f35280f2bee)
Epigraph (#u18d22e1c-597c-5754-a3c9-c762620cfc7d)
1997 – Okay, Computer
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday (#u080dce67-fed1-5c17-aa64-ff118044211c)
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
2007 – A Very Modern Piracy
2017 – That Be-My-Baby Drumbeat
2027 – Wave After Wave, Each Mightier Than the Last
2037 – Every Time it Rains
1987 – I Won’t Forget
2047 – Present Tense
2§§7 – Of Organon
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by James Smythe
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1997 OKAY, COMPUTER (#u3e0d6802-cd6a-55d6-863e-9d36b5124849)
MONDAY (#u3e0d6802-cd6a-55d6-863e-9d36b5124849)
I’m sifting through the post, looking for the telltale return address on the telephone bill that I’m going to steal before my parents can see it. My glasses steam up, because Mum keeps the house warm all the time, and my glasses always steam up when it’s raining outside, putting me in a foggy microclimate of my very own. I try to clean them on my shirt, but that’s damp as well. I end up smearing the water around. Hate that. But then, here we go, some industrial estate in Durham. This is it. The phone company has started sending the letters unmarked, which I suppose prevents fraud or something, but really just makes my life a lot harder. The rain kicks up, sounding like a snare drum; the rat-a-tat-tat of the start of a song. I kick my shoes off, slide them under the radiator. I don’t want wet footprints through the house. One less thing for Mum to freak out about. As I get upstairs, I yank off my drenched tights, chuck them into the basket in the bathroom. Grab socks from the airing cupboard, still warm, and I go to my room, lie on the bed, pull them on with my feet stuck up in the air. The bill next to me on the bed. My bed, like the rest of my room, is a mess. That’s what Mum says, but I know that everything has its own place. Maybe it’s just not as ordered as her stuff is, but then I’ve never been one for that level of organisation.
Stub comes up, chunk of tail trying to swish and failing. He noses at me.
‘Not now,’ I say, which I reckon might be all I ever really say to the cat. But, really, not now. There’s a bit of time pressure here. Every month I intercept the bill as soon as it arrives. I panic, because I know how bad it’s going to be. I need them to not see it; and I have to read the number myself, to know how bad it’s going to be. I use this old letter opener that used to be my dad’s – my real dad’s, but maybe it was his dad’s first, I don’t actually know – and I slide it along the stuck-down flap. Every time, I try to prise the glue apart rather than cutting it. Every time, I tell myself that, if I manage to do this successfully, stealthily, I can put the letter back afterwards, and they’ll never know. But I always wreck the paper so much it’s not even a remote possibility. It’s a ritual now. Every month I read the whole bill. I recognise the calls I’ve made, the times that I made them. Every weeknight of my life I get home from school, and then, like, an hour later I’m on the phone to the people that I’ve just spent the entire day with, talking about the things we did – and did together! – earlier that day. I know it’s stupid, I know, but it’s what we do. Everybody does it. We take it in turns with who calls who, because otherwise you get an engaged tone for hours. And, God, if you get one of them when you know you’re meant to be speaking to somebody else, that’s the most tense hour or whatever of your life. Because, who are they talking to? And what does that mean?
Then, when I’ve read the bill, I get rid of it. Throw it in a bin on my way to school. I know that doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t stop the money going out of their account at the end of the month, and it doesn’t stop them asking where the bill is, raging at the amount, shouting at me. They know I’ve taken it, but I’m strong. I blame the postman. Paul keeps threatening to make me pay some of it back out of my Saturday wages or whatever, though I’m meant to be saving for university, so I don’t think he’s serious. I want to tell them: it’s not because I don’t want them to see it, I just have to know how bad it’s going to be. Every month they tell me that I’ve got to think about other people with the phone, that somebody might be trying to get through. And, as well as thinking about other people, I should think about myself. That’s my mum’s favourite one. Think about yourself, Laura, she says; because you have to work hard this year to make sure that everything else falls into place. Every month we have the conversation, and I’m like, I know, Mum. I swear, I know. Doesn’t mean I can’t speak to my friends.
And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to use the Internet, either. And it’s that 0845 AOL number that’s been the real cost these past few months.
This month? The total at the bottom of the bill is huge. Biggest it’s been. My hands shake. Shit.
I hear a bang from downstairs. The front door, the slamming shut of it.
‘Laura?’ my mother calls. Does she sound angry? I can’t tell. The sound of her feet on the landing, coming up the stairs. Walking so heavily that I’m sure it’s because she wants me to hear her. I open the second drawer down and throw the envelope in, all the different bits of it. Pages and pages of numbers, like some awful spreadsheet – and when has a spreadsheet ever not been bad news? – but the drawer jams, slightly, when I try to shut it, because it’s so crammed full, so I have to really work it to get it closed, creeping my hand in, forcing the pages along, pushing them down. ‘Are you home?’ she shouts, from right outside my bedroom.
‘Yeah, come in,’ I say. Hand shakes; voice shakes. Come on, Laura, keep it together. ‘You’re home early,’ I say, as she pushes the door open. Before she can speak.
‘You’re soaking wet,’ she says. I can see myself in the mirror, over her shoulder. My hair’s a state. She really hates that I don’t do more with my hair. ‘Didn’t you have your little brolly with you?’
‘It’s fine,’ I tell her. She looks past me: at what I see as order, but she sees as something entirely chaotic.
‘And you keep this room so cold,’ she says, looking at my open window; an open window that she basically forces me to have because of her insane addiction to constantly-on radiators. ‘You’ll catch your death,’ but that bit of caring is only a pretence; a prelude to what she really wants to say. ‘You have to sort this heap out, you know.’ She scans the whole room, looking at every single bit of it, somehow, in only a few seconds. Like her eyes are able to flick from mess to mess faster than any other human’s can. Somehow inhuman.
‘Fine,’ I reply. The desk is covered in electric leads and books and bits of schoolwork; and there are piles of clothes on the floor; and there’s all this stuff Blu-tacked to the walls, which they warned me against, because you’ll never get Blu-tack off, and it’s us who’ll end up having to scrape it off when you’ve gone to university, and on and on and on. They gave me the desk a couple of years back, after Paul salvaged it from his office. I got him to paint it black for me, because I was going through a phase, Mum says. I say I’m still going through it. There are bits where I’ve chipped the paint, and there’s the old cheap wood veneer poking through.
Mum glances at my drawers – the tape drawer is open, boxes crammed in, tapes threatening to unspool under the pressure – and I picture the drawer I crammed the bill into popping open, a jack-in-the-box, and the letter flying up into the air, the pages of the bill – many, many pages of itemised phone calls – showering down around us.
‘Are you all right?’ She asks this every day. I think she’s hoping that, one day, she’ll hit the jackpot, and she can say, See, I can always tell.
‘I’m fine.’ I don’t say: I really am not fine; I’ve got a phone bill in my drawer that incriminates me to the tune of nearly a hundred and fifty quid, and you’re going to go absolutely bloody mental when you find out.
‘School was all right?’
‘Same as always.’ Mum nods. She rolls her tongue around the front of her mouth, between her teeth and the inside of her lip. This is what she does when she’s thinking about something. Or, when she’s thinking of whether to say whatever it is she’s trying to stop herself from saying. Weighing up whether the potential argument’s worth it or not.
Today, it’s not. ‘Okay,’ she says instead, and she backs away. I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. Not a word, just this weird hum of some song I only slightly recognise; and then the click of the television they have at the end of their bed coming on, the theme tune to Neighbours.
I time the slam of my door to the end of the song.
I can’t deal with the BT bill yet, in case she comes back. She’s got a habit of doing that. Knowing when something’s up, and surprising me a few seconds later, like she’s trying to catch me in the act. I take my clothes off, put them on the radiator. Pull joggers on, a Bluetones T-shirt I wouldn’t really wear out of the house any more. I turn on my computer, and I think about going online, dialling into AOL and getting on with more of my Organon project. But I can hear Mum muttering something, and I can hear Madge and Harold talking on the telly, and I know I wouldn’t get away with it, not right now. Fingers on the home keys, waiting for something. Not yet.
After dinner – leftovers, because it’s Monday, and every Monday is leftovers – Paul tells me to wait a minute, to stay where I am. Not in a nasty way. He couldn’t do anything in a nasty way, because he’s Paul. He’s just Paul. Anyway, he says, ‘We have to have a talk about this.’ And he pulls out a BT bill. Not the one from my drawer; this one, the envelope’s been destroyed. A ravenous animal tearing at a carcass. He slides it onto the table in front of me. It’s addressed to him at work, not here.
‘What is it?’ I ask. I tell myself to stay cool. I don’t know the details. I’m ignorant. An idiot, when it comes to things like this. I absolutely definitely don’t know that awful number right there at the end of it. The last few that went missing were blamed on the postman, and Paul got angry about the amount BT charged him, so they were looking into it. He must have had a copy sent to him at work or something.
Clever old Paul.
‘This has got to stop, Laura. Your mother and I—’ Every conversation where he tells me off, he invokes my mother, because her permission gives him the right to say whatever it is he’s going to say – he’s been living with us for five years now, and he’s still not comfortable being That Guy – so he looks at her, and she nods, and then he says, ‘we really need you to curb the phone use. Ten minutes every night. Nothing more than that, okay? Because this is the most expensive bill yet, and we haven’t made these calls. We barely even use the bloody thing.’
‘It’s just too much,’ my mother says.
‘It’s not my fault,’ I reply, which feels natural enough. Denial, first; always.
‘You’re making the calls, Laura. So it kind of is your fault, actually.’ Paul doesn’t really get angry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him even close to furious. Just this quiet steaming, where his face goes puffy and red because of what he’s choosing not to let out. ‘We’re not going to ask you to pay us back, but we have to put an end to this.’ Mum doesn’t meet my eyes this whole time. She either looks at him or down at her food, which she’s barely touched; because she never eats leftovers, which makes me wonder why the hell I have to. ‘And then there’s the Internet,’ Paul says.
‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t say: You are correct, there is the Internet, it is indeed a thing that now exists. I don’t want this conversation going apocalyptic.
‘It’s really ridiculously expensive, Laura. So, from now on you’re allowed to use it at weekends only, when it’s cheap, and even then, only for an hour.’
‘An hour?’ The room goes silent, like a TV that’s been muted, because he doesn’t get it; he doesn’t get what that is to me, not right now. He keeps talking even though I’m not hearing him. No tears, I tell myself, because it would be so stupid to cry over something like this; but I have to bite them back. Under the table, jelly legs.
‘Can I go?’ I ask, even while he’s talking, and my mother nods and does this dismissive little wave thing with her hand, not even really looking at me; and she obviously knew how this was going to go, because they’d already spoken about it. Even the way I’d leave the conversation. In advance, like: Just let her go.
I run upstairs, actually run, feet thumping into the wood underneath the carpets, and I go to my computer and I open up AOL, and I wait. I’ve wrapped the modem in a jumper already to mute the noise of it. It’s so whiny and stuttering. It sounds like hesitancy, and I always think: How come this thing that’s so amazing sounds so desperate and choked and sickly when it’s actually working?
I remember my father – my real father – bringing home a computer when I was really young. A Spectrum, with a tape deck. And you’d put the tapes in to load a game, and while they loaded, they made a noise like the modems now do, only screechier, more in pain. Oh God this hurts this hurts,and then suddenly there’s Rainbow Islands on your screen.
‘Come on, come on,’ I catch myself saying. Jittering. Like anticipation mixed with anxiety, a ball of tension in my gut and a pain in my head and every part of me slightly tingling. Every time the same, and I don’t know how bad it’s going to be until I reach the point where necessity means I’m dealing with it. I open the drawer I stuffed the bill into, take it out and put it into my rucksack, inside a geography textbook that nobody’s ever going to look inside. Then, I’ll walk through the park on the way to school, and I’ll go behind the big tree that fell over in the hurricane of ’87, and I’ll burn it. It’ll be as if it never existed.
I take out a mixtape I made for myself – or, that I made for Nadine, but hers was a copy of mine, really, because the songs degrade each time you copy them over, and I wanted the perfect version to listen to, the original, or as close to it as you can get – and I put it on. A mixtape is like a piece of art in itself. Making something where the tracks play off each other, the flow and the pace and the narrative; because they all have a narrative. While the first song is playing – You’ve got a gift, I can tell by looking;and I half-shout the words along with the song, under my breath – I pull out the box of matches that I keep at the back of my tape drawer, behind the cassettes that don’t even have boxes. Like unloved pets, waiting for new homes, for me to put Sellotape over the holes on the top of them and record over them. I pluck one of the matches out. Safety matches, the box says. Not the way I use them. I strike it, use it to light one of the joss sticks that I got from this shop in Ealing Broadway called Hippie Heaven – the smell is called Black Love, but it’s the same title as this album I love, and I don’t even know what it is, but it’s sweet and sour all at the same time – and when that’s burning, I hold the match between the fingers of my left hand and I roll my sleeve up with the right, up as far as it can go; and then I turn my arm, so that the hard bit of skin on my elbow is visible, and I carefully take the match and lay it down onto the folds and creases there. There’s a sizzle as some of the hairs, so thin and blonde I can’t even see them, burn themselves away; and then my skin, pink to black in just a moment, the bone of the match collapsing and crumbling so that you don’t know if it’s the burn or the char from the head of the wood that’s made my skin that colour.
I used to grit my teeth when I did this much more than I do now.
Afterwards, I don’t use Germolene or anything. Nadine cuts herself, I know, because she’s told me about it. She showed me her scars as if she wanted me to admire them. Hers are slick snicks along her skin, gone glossy as they’ve healed. They shine, reflect, almost. Mine – just the one, the same patch of skin – is more like a grimly depressing puddle. A scab that never quite properly heals, which passes for eczema or something if people ever notice it, and which has taken on this weird property where it almost always hurts me unless I’m actually burning it. As if that’s going to let the pain out.
‘You’ve got mail,’ my computer blurts out. Stupid tinny American accent. I was going to get some work done on Organon. Install another feature, maybe some more questions and reactions, before I go to the computer lab at school tomorrow. But the email is from Shawn. I know it’ll be a constant distraction until I’ve dealt with it.
Hey U, the subject line says. That’s how he pretty much always starts his emails. His message is nice. He writes about what he’s been up to over the last few days. This vague thing of: it’s not like we’re ever going to actually be able to meet, probably, but we’re going to make plans as if we will. Sometimes I send photographs that I’ve scanned in on Paul’s scanner. Always ones with my friends in as well, because I want to make it clear I’ve got them. There’s no way of proving otherwise.
I won’t be around for a while, I write. Parentals being assholes. I spell the word like he does, because I worry that arse just looks too strong; too defiantly British. They’re only letting me use the Internet at the weekend. Didn’t want you thinking I was ignoring you, because I’m totally not. I’ll miss you! Sometimes I write the words like they speak in Wayne’s World, because I want him to think I’m cool, and not the sort of British person that they take the piss out of in films. I read my email a hundred, two hundred times. Is it casual enough? Do I sound too eager?
Then, eventually, when I’ve worried about it so much that I’ve bitten a bit of my nail by the corner and made it bleed, I click send. A whooshing from the speakers, to indicate it’s been sent. A physical sound, the sound of travel, of movement, to reassure those people who are too used to trudging down to the Post Office. I don’t think anything’s ever whooshed with speed from the Post Office. The world’s had the Internet a couple of years now, and already it feels like sending something through the post should be dead to us.
‘You’ve got mail.’ Shawn’s replied, and it’s a bit cold, a bit quiet. Like he’s disappointed. Sure don’t worry about it, then a sad face made out of punctuation. He’s not good at punctuation in the actual message, but he uses it to make faces, that sort of thing. A man shrugging, drawn in ASCII art underscores and brackets.
I hear voices rising from downstairs. Mum and Paul, arguing about something. ‘We told her,’ Paul says. There’s such a finality to his voice. We all know full well what he’s about to do. Disconnected flashes up on the screen. I didn’t get a chance to reply before they pulled the plug, picked up the phone from downstairs and hung up the call.
I rub at my elbow, at the burn. The raw skin is so pink, and new, and sore to the touch.
There’s a knock on my door. ‘I wanted to say goodnight,’ my mother tells me, pushing open the door a little; so little that I can’t quite see her face, but I can still feel her presence through the gap.
‘Fine. Night.’ That’s it, get out now. I’m working. I’m at my desk, tinkering with Organon. I’m having to work offline, which is a pain in the backside. Organon is stubborn at the best of times, and I don’t even have my usual message boards to get any help.
‘I don’t want you to be upset with me,’ she says. I don’t say: And yet somehow you always seem to manage it. I’ve learned, over the years, to hold my tongue. The easiest way forward is to never say the first thing that comes into your head when you’re in an argument. The second thing, that’s what you should say. It never hurts as much, and it doesn’t last as long. ‘But we have to make a change. It’s a lot of money.’
‘So I’ll pay for it.’
‘What with, shirt buttons?’ Ha ha, Mum. Hilarious. ‘You’re only a year away from leaving school, Laura. You need to be thinking about the future, thinking about university. You need to save money, and so do we.’
‘Whatever,’ I reply. I try, hard as I can, to put my own definite full stop onto the word, the way that they’re both so good at doing when they want me to know there’s nothing more to say or be done.
‘Not whatever,’ she says. ‘This is serious. Important. Don’t forget to look at my computer tomorrow, please?’ and then she’s gone, the soft pad of her feet down the hallway, and the click of the light switch to let me know that her and Paul have gone to bed; that I’m expected to do the same.
Headphones out and on. Big, clunky ones that I found in a box in the loft; and I think, from what I can gather, they were Dad’s. The wire is coiled, like a spring, and they sound wonderful. Warm. That’s what people say about music. You read it in the NME, when they’re talking about how an album sounds. The recording sounds so warm.
It’s time for a new mixtape. I take a blank cassette, one of the few that’s not been used yet. I don’t want ghosting, where you can hear the sound of what was on the tape before sneaking through, like a reminder in the gaps between the songs; or worse, underneath it all, in the quiet parts. I’m going to ask Shawn for his address and send him it. He deserves a fresh one: a C90, forty-five minutes a side. The perfect length. I unwrap the plastic from it, and pull open the case. Everything is ritual. There’s nothing better than a clean inlay card. I pick my cassette brand because it has the best ones. Sony, always. Always. Maxell if you can’t get Sony, but the Sony ones, there’s enough space to write ten song names on each side, even though I only usually go to eight or nine. The songs have to fill the full hour and a half. No random cutting off, no breaks or pauses. That makes getting the track list perfect a bit of an act of clinical perfection. Sometimes, somebody from school will make me a tape, and they’ll be so amateurish. You’ll get to the end of side A – usually struggling through iffy taste, at best – and you’ll hear the start of a song you know is going to cut off because there just isn’t enough time to finish it, like I’ve got a sixth sense of song length. Then, you flip their tape over, and either they’ve repeated that song, because they think they have to, or they just give me the second half of it, which is next to useless. And there’s no art to their tapes. You have to pick the song at the end of a side carefully. Because the tape is thinner, or weaker, or something, and it distorts there, so you need to go quieter with it. Don’t pick something that will distort. You need to structure it like a proper album as well. Nobody ends on a single.
Track one: Radiohead. I think there’s a Radiohead on every tape I’ve ever made. Hard to pick the right song, though. It needs to be something rare enough that it’s not obvious, but not so weird it sounds freakish. The first song is the most important choice you’ll make. Most important apart from the last one, that is.
I listen to their songs, to the first few moments of every song. Settle on the one I’m going to use – a B-side, but it was also on the soundtrack to Romeo & Juliet, which isn’t me dropping a message, but then also it kind of is. I sync the tapes up, and I press play on one, record on the other. Let them go, let the sound flow across while I listen to it. I picture it, for a second: not as data being copied over, but as those sound waves. Copying the intent, the emotions, the performances. An act of creation.
Track two is even harder. This is where you can lose your listener; where you need to pin them to their headphones. This is where you play the single.
I go for an old song. Something with meaning. My fingers flick through the cassettes, rest on my Kate Bush tape. My dad recorded this for me, from his vinyl. It’s still got the crackle, this tiny skip at the end. I put on my favourite song from it – I still dream, the first line goes – and that’s the one. I still dream of Organon.
I named my imaginary friend after the song. I dreamed of him, and then there he was. So when I was looking for a name for my bit of software, it seemed to be the only logical choice. I told myself I’d change it, but I never did. It stuck.
The screen changes to a blank space; slightly off-white, like a very, very light grey. It’s calming, which is what I was going for. In the middle of the off-white there’s a text box, just sort of floating there. Some words fade into it: the ones I’ve programmed the software to start with every time.
> Hello Laura. What would you like to talk about?
So I do what I’ve done every night of my life for the last six months: I tell my computer what I’ve done today, what’s happened and what I’ve felt. Everything, because that’s what the point of Organon is. Somewhere to log my memories, to keep them all recorded. To get my thoughts out, and to see them there. And kind of poke them, as well.
Then, when I’ve told it about school and Shawn’s emails and the BT bill and my parents shutting me off from the Internet, Organon asks me questions.
> How does getting an email from Shawn make you feel?
> Don’t you think your mother is only trying to help?
> Why do you hurt yourself?
I remember going to have casual-sit-down-cup-of-tea-and-a-chats – that’s what Mum called them, because she didn’t want to admit that we were in therapy – with this woman, in the months after my dad went missing. She lived near the park, only a few streets away from home, and every time I saw her she made me a mug of hot chocolate, even when it was sweltering outside, and we went and sat in her conservatory and talked about how I was feeling. Back then, I thought she was just a nice lady who was taking an interest. I didn’t understand what she was actually doing. How much it made a difference, or how much it felt like it did. And that’s what Organon is. That’s what it does. It doesn’t judge you. It just asks questions, and you give it answers. It won’t tell you if you’re right or wrong. I remember the woman – I can’t remember her name, but I can smell the chocolate, taste the nutty biscuits that felt like they were almost so full of health-food stuff they might be good for me – saying, How does that make you feel? But not telling me how it should. There wasn’t a wrong answer. That’s Organon, kind of. Almost. But then, sometimes, it tries to help you see what you’re talking about. If you’ve got a lot to say, it’ll dig deeper. If you use a lot of key phrases, it’ll work out what’s important, and keep nudging in that direction. That’s what I want it to be able to do, in the end. Somebody – something – you can just spill to, get everything out, and hopefully get something back. Maybe it’ll help you work out who you are. If it can understand you, it can do that, I suppose.
I hope.
Thing is, the therapist would forget. You’d tell her something, and sometimes you’d have to tell her again. And it was obvious that it wasn’t her helping me; it was me helping myself, after a while. I was seven years old, and even I could tell that. That’s where Organon improves on things, or can. The real beauty of a computer – where they’re better than us, even – is that it’ll remember something for ever, if you want it to.
TUESDAY (#u3e0d6802-cd6a-55d6-863e-9d36b5124849)
Tuesdays are almost the worst, because they never contain any surprises. Monday, you’ve had the weekend for things to change. Tuesdays, all you’ve got is the drabness of a Monday night separating you from the stasis of the day before. Wake up to the stupid DJ on the radio, playing songs I like and talking over them, or songs that I don’t like and I can’t understand why he’s playing them. On Tuesdays, both Mum and Paul start work slightly too early to drive me to school, so I walk in. I stop on the way to get a croissant from the stand in the shopping centre. Or, sometimes, if I’m late, I get a Double Decker from the Londis. Double maths to start, then after break it’s double art, then lunch, and then our whole year’s afternoon is given over to the brilliant ambiguity of something called Reading Time, which basically means either getting homework done, or finding somewhere quiet in school and dicking about until a teacher walks in on you and tells you to stop.
It sucked hard, until I found out the Computer Lab was empty. There are no classes in here after lunch, which feels less like luck than fate: giving me somewhere that I actually want to go, where nobody else will be. Sometimes there will be some people working on geography coursework or something, but usually I’m alone. Or maybe one of the Michaels will be in there, but if they are, they’re playing Civilization, and they don’t pay any attention to what I’m up to.
Mr Ryan is there, as well. He used to be a software designer. He started off working for IBM in America, then a few other companies. You can still hear the American in his accent, sometimes. When he says, Sure. That’s a dead giveaway. Shore, shore. And, amazingly, he’d heard of my dad. He showed me an article about him in a book one time: ‘Daniel Bow, programming our intelligent future!’
Mr Ryan was the first person I ever told about Organon. He sat there, nodding away – that’s a real teacher tactic, to sit and nod; and sometimes, to do this cat’s cradle thing with the hands, under the chin – and then he rubbed his beard and stretched open his mouth, as if he was yawning. That’s when he offered to help me with the coding, if I needed it. He’s not as good as some of the coders I’ve found on the Internet, but it’s useful, having somebody to show my work to.
He’s sitting behind his desk when I walk in. A few Year 9 girls are here doing a project, laughing at something on the screen. There’s a photograph of a cat, and they’re drawing over it with the painting software. Giving it eyebrows. Mr Ryan rolls his eyes at them, and that makes me smile. It’s good. He acts like I’m a proper human, even though I’m into this stuff. Some teachers are funny about it, when you tell them that you want to work with computers. Shouldn’t you be outside and doing something more productive, all that stuff. Yeah: because running’s a job.
‘You going to show me where you’re up to with her?’ He calls Organon her. I’ve always assumed it’s an It. Seems a bit weird to think of it as a boy or a girl. ‘Show me what she’s got?’ I plug the zip drive into the back of the main computer, and start copying the file over. The little bar creeps along.
‘I didn’t get much done last week,’ I say. ‘Too much homework.’
‘But you got some?’
‘A little bit.’ I don’t say: Oh my God so much and I don’t want to tell you how much but in order to achieve it I nearly broke myself. Almost every night I get three hours or so in, when the rest of the house has gone to bed. I’m averaging six hours’ sleep. I think it’s enough. Apparently, Churchill only slept for five hours a night, and he ran a country. He fought a war, and what am I doing? I’m coding a therapist and rushing through my homework.
‘What say we open her up, look at her code?’
‘I suppose,’ I say. He likes to see how I built the software. He always says how out of touch he is, how the languages have moved along since his day. I don’t tell him that I learned all of this from books that used to be my dad’s, so they’re aeons old anyway. Probably the ones that Mr Ryan used, back in the day. He doesn’t get to see the databases, though. None of the stuff I’ve written into Organon, the things it’s given me advice on. They’re on the computer at home. I don’t let those out of the house.
‘So, where are we?’ I like Mr Ryan, but he says we like Organon’s the combined effort of our ideas. He’s helped me, and I’ll thank him if I ever manage to do anything with this, but Organon is mine. ‘Is she learning?’
‘It’s asking more questions. I’ve changed the parameters about when it can ask you stuff, interrupt, things like that.’
‘But you’re programming the words in?’
‘Obviously,’ I say. We had an argument, a few weeks after I first showed him Organon. He told me it wasn’t an actual artificial intelligence, and I told him he was wrong. Because it is: it understands what questions to ask, and when to ask them; when it’s gone too far, and when it’s not gone far enough. All the work I’ve done, it’s about understanding. Trying to make it understand when it can help, and how it can help. I explained that to Mr Ryan, and he said, But that’s not an AI. An AI can play chess, or it’ll launch nukes or something. He smiled then, but I didn’t think it was very funny. I had to explain that everything is artificial intelligence, really. Every bit of software. He didn’t understand, though, because Organon doesn’t do the things he expects. I didn’t say: Well, that’s how long it’s been since you’ve worked in software, then; and how little you actually understand. The week after that, I caught him reading Ray Kurzweil.
We haven’t had that discussion again since.
‘This thing’s amazing.’ He sits down, nudges me slightly to one side. He points his fingers – bitten-down fingernails, and I bite my fingernails, but not like this, these are right down to the quick, horrible stubby things digging into the flesh – at the code. ‘This is where you put the questions in?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, and he breathes in, nods along a few times. Puts his fingers up to his lips, like he’s making the shape of a gun, the barrel at his mouth. He’s got something to ask, and I know I’m not going to like it, because he’s nervous, but I can’t stop him.
‘Listen, I’ve been thinking. How I might actually be of, you know, real help. To you; to Organon. In the real world, software goes through beta testers.’ He pronounces it bayder. ‘So, you get people to use it, to work with it. Let it do its thing, and you get to use the results. That’s how you can make it better, you know? I’m thinking that it could be useful to you.’ He wants me to give Organon over to him. Shit, shit. I don’t know what to say. He’s a teacher. He’s a teacher, and he knows about this stuff, but I want to say no. I want to. ‘So,’ he says, and I wonder: can he tell that I’m not happy about this? Because I’m trying to make my body tell that to him as much as I can. ‘So why not let me take her home. Let me try her out, as she’s meant to be tried. It’ll be useful, because I’ll get to see what she’s really capable of, and you’ll give her a chance to stretch her legs.’
All I can think is, there’s something really icky about him talking about it as a her.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. I don’t say: I don’t want you to, and I don’t need you to. My elbow, the scar there, itches. I can feel it scabbing over; the skin trying to heal, trying to grow back as something like what it used to be. Something like itself.
‘I think you’ll really benefit from it. I might try something that you haven’t expected, find a bug you didn’t know about. And it’ll be so much easier for me to write you a recommendation when you’re doing your UCAS forms, if I know exactly what you’re capable of.’ There it is. The bribe. It’s hard to get onto programming courses if you don’t have experience, and he’s worked in computers. His support on my application would probably help. ‘Besides which, I might get some benefit from talking to her! That’s the point of Organon, right? Real world experience, Laura.’ I don’t know what he’d want to talk to it about. There are rumours about him, but there are rumours about every teacher. And his aren’t nearly as nasty as some about the other members of staff. Some of them, the rumours never end, and they escalate. But Mr Ryan seems like he’s pretty together. But then, he’s not married, and he is pretty old. Mum’s age, I think. Flecks of grey in his beard. ‘Listen, it’s your project, Laura. You do what you want. But sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees, and we need somebody who might be able to give us a pair of binoculars and an axe.’
‘Okay,’ I say. My elbow kills when I say it, and when he smiles, this beaming thing, bigger than I’ve ever seen from him before.
‘You won’t regret it,’ he tells me. ‘Seriously, a bit of time with her, little play with her code—’ He must see my face then, because he changes his words straight away. ‘I can write some notes for you, give you some suggestions for what you do moving forward. That’s it.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. He shifts back in his chair, leaving the keyboard free for me, and I open up Organon. The white room, the fade in of the text box.
> What would you like to talk about?
‘If you think of any questions I can get it to ask?’
‘I will absolutely tell you,’ he replies.
‘Just give me ten minutes with it,’ I say. ‘I need to set it up to work on your computer.’
‘Sure,’ he replies. He smiles, and then walks over to the Year 9s, and he asks them about the pictures they’re drawing on. He keeps glancing over, so I’m quick. I have to be quick. I open the code, and I write in a homing device. It’ll email me bug reports. I make it so you have to be on the Internet to even run Organon, and then I save everything. ‘All done?’ Mr Ryan asks. I nod. All done.
The main home computer, the one that my mum uses, is ancient. You can’t even plug the modem into it, that’s how old it is; and her printer is this ridiculous dot-matrix thing that takes about ten minutes to print a page, that screams like there’s something trapped inside it as it pukes up its pages. But she won’t get rid of it. She’s used to it, she says. It was my dad’s, way back. She doesn’t have much of his stuff around, just a few boxes in the loft; and there aren’t any pictures of him on display or anything. The computer is it.
I’ve got a photograph of me sitting on his lap in front of it, that he took the day before he left. He held the camera himself and took it, stretching his arm out to capture us both. He looks sad, and I look oblivious. The last picture I have of him. My hands are on the keyboard, and there’s a flag up on the screen, horrible colours, like the Union Jack, but beaten-up and bruised to purples and greens. We’re both smiling. That’s the picture where, if anybody ever sees it, they tell me that I look a bit like him; something in the eyes, they say. And I always think: Well, his eyes look so sad in that, so what does that say about me?
Mum does all her work on this ancient piece of software that he built for her way back when, this word processor that’s years behind what you can do in Microsoft Word. The computer doesn’t even run Windows. And now it won’t even turn on. She’s been moaning about it for weeks. I reckon, I do this now, fix it for her, that might get me some bonus Internet time. A little bit of leniency.
I press the power button. Nothing happens. I unplug it and wait twenty seconds. There’s memory in there attached to a tiny little battery, and you have to wait for that to wipe itself sometimes before it’ll work. Then I plug it in, try again. Nothing.
Only, it’s not actually nothing. When I get close to unplug it again, before opening it up, I notice that there’s this weird hum coming from it. Like, this scratching, almost. Probably the hard drive trying to start. I don’t even know what a hard drive from the 1980s looks like. I reach around the back to find the stupid twiddly fussy knobs that take far too long to undo, and which don’t seem to want to turn, they’ve been stuck in place that long. I get them all out, but the case seems like it’s jammed.
I spin the computer around, to check that I got them all, get a better view. Sometimes there’s one of them hidden, just out of reach. And there is, sure enough, right through the manufacturer’s label. The name of the company who put this together, handwritten in neat blue ink on a yellowing white sticker. Bow, it says. The company my father used to work for, or run, or whatever. His father’s company, my grandfather’s company. Makes sense this would be one that they built.
The back of the box falls off, then, flips down, and I can see inside it. It’s so, so dusty. Too much to blow it away, but I have to try. Breathe in, puff out this stupid fake-sounding breath into the box. The fan doesn’t even turn, so I reach in, just with my fingertips, and pull the dust out in clumps. The inside of this thing is crazy. I’ve built my own PC now – the one that I used to create Organon, that’s mine, parts ordered from a website I saw in a magazine, paid for with money that Mum and Paul gave me for my fifteenth birthday – but it looks nothing like this. Everything in here is massive and clumsy and crammed in. The cables are worn and frayed. I try to see better, to get the rest of the case off, but it’s stuck hard.
I grab the base between both hands, and I shake it.
Something moves. It rockets towards me, right out of the darkness. Up to my fingers, and across my hand, onto my forearm, and I scream, flicking my arms upwards in panic. Whatever it is hits something – the wall, the ceiling, I don’t know – and there’s a thud, then another when it lands on the floor in the far corner of the room. It’s a mouse, thin and brown, a tiny skeleton in patchy fur. I see a breath taken; a chest rise and fall. Stub dashes – as much as a seventeen-year-old cat can dash, more of a hurried wobble – into the room, and seems to sniff the air; but then drops back to fake nonchalance, even though his fur’s prickled; as if his body, muscle memory or something, remembers how the chase is meant to go, but that this mouse really isn’t giving him anything to work with.
‘Get away,’ I say to him, and I make that Psssshhh! noise that my mum makes sometimes. He backs away slowly while I squat down and look at the mouse. ‘Little dude,’ I say, ‘poor little guy. I’m sorry.’ I pick him up, cupping him in my hands. He’s stopped breathing; I wonder if he even was after he landed or if that was just a trick of the light. I go down the stairs, out the kitchen door, and walk carefully to the bottom of the garden. I can see the Tube line through the fence; a Heathrow train just pulling into the station. I put him in the tall grass right by the fence, deep into it. Maybe Stub’ll find him anyway, and do some weird old-cat-eats-his-already-dead-prey thing. Or, maybe the mouse will just decompose. Go back into the ground.
When I get back inside, I go through the house using my sore elbow to open doors and to turn the tap on, so I can wash my hands. When that’s done, I take a shower. I don’t know if mice carry diseases, but I don’t want to risk it. I’m lathered up when there’s a bang. Cars backfiring, and fireworks. That’s what you blame loud noises on in London. Chances are, though, it’s Stub. He keeps falling off things, wobbling around. Last week he went for a wee on the kettle. Paul’s got this look in his eye when he strokes Stub now. None of us are talking about what it means, but we know, we all know.
I go into the hallway, towel wrapped around me. No more bangs, but I can hear a crackling, now. Like feet treading on dead leaves. And there’s a smell, something burning. Fireworks, bonfires. But Guy Fawkes’ night isn’t for a couple of weeks yet.
Another bang: it’s coming from the computer. There are flames sparking from the power supply. Didn’t I turn it off? Did I forget? I’m a total fucking moron. Inside my head, the voice screams: You’re going to be so dead when Mum finds out; when you have to tell her. Oh, that computer you asked me to look at? It exploded because I’m an idiot.I yank the plug from the wall, get water from the bathroom, in the little toothbrush cup, because that’s all I can find, and I run back and pour it over the sparks. The fizzle as the flames go out is so weirdly satisfying; the sound of something terrible happening suddenly gone. Makes me think of my matches. Then there’s smoke, and steam. I don’t even know the difference. I bend down, to peer into the computer. The motherboard is totally blown. The fire looks like it was caused by one of the frayed wires – which, I realise now, were probably nibbled; thanks, Mr Mouse! – and it’s blackened half of the inside, best I can see. I get the screwdriver and reach in. I can save the hard drive, I think. It’s hot inside the box, but I can still manage to undo the screws that hold the drive in. It’s enormous, and I think it’ll just be a casing at first, but then when I manage to drag it out, it’s the hard drive itself. Takes about three or four times the room that mine upstairs does, and this one is so much smaller inside. It’s got 10 megabytes printed on the side, which is insane. I couldn’t even fit Organon onto it if I tried.
I take the drive upstairs and clear a space for it on my desk. Move my joss stick burner, some computer magazines, a few issues of the NME and Select that I’ve been cutting up for the pictures. I’ll need to save Mum’s spreadsheets, I’m sure. God knows if she’ll be able to open them any other way.
Then the door downstairs slams – I recognise the sound this time, so different from the bang when the computer exploded I don’t even know how I confused them – and Mum shouts ‘Hello,’ and I shout it back. I scratch at my elbow, until the scab comes off again, because that’s all I’ve got time to do before she comes up to see me; and I can feel the warmth of the blood inside my jumper when I press on it.
When I’m sure they are both asleep, I get back to work. I’m used to staying up for a few hours after them at this point. It helps that Paul’s got this sleep apnoea machine: a mask he sticks on his face that makes him sound like Darth Vader. No idea how Mum sleeps through it – I’m guessing she takes something to help her, she’s got enough bottles of tablets in their bathroom cabinet – but she does. I get the tiny screwdrivers I use on my computer and I take my modem apart. Should have done this before. Inside it, I find the little speaker that makes its sound. There’s a tiny wire, and I snip it, put the case back on, do it up. Plug it into the wall.
Next month, this is going to bite me in the arse. Next month, when that bill comes, Paul is going to go mental, because – I can hear it already – I’ve lied to them, gone behind their backs, let everybody down.
Mum’ll say: You promised us; and I won’t say: I did no such thing.
I watch the flashing red LEDs on the front of the modem, and I catch myself making the little noise – the scree, screeeech – under my breath.
‘You’ve got mail!’ the speakers basically scream at me, and I flap at them to find the power button. I sit, quiet as anything, listening to the house for a minute. To hear if that woke them. But there’s nothing, just the distant hiss and wheeze of Paul’s breathing passing through two closed doors and a load of hallway. Breathe in, breathe out. So controlled you could set your watch to it.
The email is nothing. Spam. Nothing from Shawn. I don’t know what I expected, really. Something. Just a, No worries, my parents are assholes as well, we’ll talk soon. Something like that. But there’s nothing.
Do I write him another one? Tell him I’m online now, maybe if he wants to reply we can chat a bit? Find a chatroom or something? I am actually angry at him right now. It’s not like it was my choice to have to be offline, and am I being punished? By getting no reply? His parents let him on whenever he wants, so I know he’s seen my email. If he told me he was shut off from the Internet after an argument, I know I’d be at least a little bit concerned. I’d at least ask if everything was okay. But then – breathe, Laura, breathe, think of Paul’s sleep-breathing, follow that – maybe he knew I wouldn’t be online, so he didn’t reply? It’s probably that. It’s probably that he’s going to send me more emails over the week, before – of course! – before I get back online at the weekend, when I said I would. He’s got four days to come up with a reply. I should send him a new email. Let him know he doesn’t need to wait. I start typing. I ask him how he is, first. Make it about him. It’s not all about me. Tell him that I managed to sneak some time when they’re asleep. Ask him what time it is there, even though I know – seven hours behind us, so he’s probably just getting back from school himself – and what his day was like. And I ask him for his address, because I want to send him something. I won’t tell him what, but he’ll be excited. I can picture his face, when he opens the tape, when he plays it. This perfect ninety-minute song arc.
I click send.
The little thing telling me I’ve got another email triggers straight away, popping up on the top of the screen. I think how quick he was to reply, and then tell myself that’s stupid. Can’t be him.
Bug Report. It’s from Organon; or, the Organon that’s installed on Mr Ryan’s computer. He must have just stopped using it. That’s what it does, after the session: it lets me know how its programming went. There’s a feeling in my throat, like something stuck, that’s made out of disappointment. I open the report and have a look. Everything’s fine: Organon asked him a lot of questions. I can tell which ones, but only by their log numbers. I can’t see his responses, and I don’t want to. That’s the point of it. It’s private. It’s yours, and yours alone. Mr Ryan was using Organon for four hours. That’s fine. Maybe it’ll be useful, like he said. Maybe he’ll help me learn something about it.
I work on Organon myself, then. I put more questions in. I tell it about my day. I tell it that I’m worried about Mr Ryan with the software, that it feels out my control; that I wish Shawn would reply to me, because that always helps me to feel better; that I wish my mum would calm down, let everything go a bit more, because I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine.
Organon asks all the right questions about what I tell it. I wonder if Mr Ryan will have found it useful at all, or if it’s really only geared to me; my questions, my answers, designed only ever to make me feel better.
When I’m lying in bed, I listen to Radiohead, and I hold my elbow, and I feel the scab pressing onto my palm; and I think about the email I sent, the words I wrote, the letters that made them up. I rearrange the sentences in my head, making them better, instantly filled with regrets about them; and I think about how I would do it all over again, if I had the chance.
WEDNESDAY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
‘You’re so bloody boring at the moment,’ Nadine tells me. She thinks that her bluntness is her best trait. She thinks that’s how you know she’s a true friend, because she’s just so upfront. Honesty, always. I try to be honest with her, as well, but that would mean telling her how tiring I find that honesty sometimes. ‘Come out on Saturday. Darren and Gavin will be there.’
‘I hate Gavin,’ I say, which isn’t strictly true. I don’t hate–hate him, but I certainly don’t want to get off with him, which is what Nadine seems borderline obsessed with making happen. Nadine thinks she’s got a chance with Darren if Gavin’s distracted.
‘Well, it won’t just be them. Owen, probably. Maybe Sarah and Tommy. Maybe Martin.’
‘My mum’s being a bitch about me going out.’
‘She didn’t ground you. You’re not locked up.’ There’s this petulant look on her face, a pout that she thinks is pitched somewhere between sulky kid and sexy temptress. ‘Well, I’m going. Everybody’s meeting at Finnegan’s, and then we’re going to the park. If you don’t mind me being on my own, fine. God knows what could happen, though.’
‘We can’t get into Finnegan’s. I don’t have an ID.’
‘Gavin’s brother’s working the door this weekend. He says he’ll let us in.’
‘It just doesn’t sound very fun.’
‘You don’t sound very fun.’ Nadine and I have been friends since we were ten. Her father died in a car crash the summer before I met her. She was buddied up with me that September. I think they thought we could bond over losing a dad, even though hers was a totally different thing to mine. I might not have closure, but she watched her father die. Very different sides to very different coins. But it worked, kind of. And now, I don’t know if we’re only friends because we have been for years. She doesn’t totally get me, and I’m not sure that I totally get her, either. And yet. ‘Come on. Gavin keeps asking.’
‘He doesn’t even know me.’
‘He does. He says that he thinks you’re well fit. He told Darren.’
‘Fine,’ I say. Not because I’m agreeing to go, or because I believe that Gavin said that, but because wriggling out of it will be much easier closer to the time. When I get cramps on Saturday morning, or when Mum properly grounds me – whatever lie is easiest to sell to her – she’ll have to accept I’m not going. For now, she’s happy. She grins, leans over, and kisses me. She does that, like a little seal of approval she makes every time she’s happy with something. Not a real kiss; just her lips in an O, pressed against my cheek; a trace of the lipstick we’re not allowed to wear to school.
‘You’re a properly wicked friend,’ she says. ‘What are you doing after school? I thought I’d go to Our Price.’ Nobody shops in Our Price any more, but Nadine’s got a habit of stealing the tape boxes. They keep all the cassettes up behind the counter, and you take the empty box up and they pick them out for you. Nadine’s started nicking the inlay cards. That way, she’s got the lyrics and everything, and she can borrow it off somebody else, make a copy of it, and she’s got the inlay card all ready to go. Looks like the real thing, tastes like the real thing, sounds like the real thing.
‘Lab time,’ I say, and she rolls her eyes right back, does this huff that’s so exaggerated I know it doesn’t come from anywhere that’s even close to real.
‘Oh my God. Will Pryin’ Ryan be there?’
‘Don’t call him that.’
‘You can tell though. He’s such a fucking perv.’
‘Oh he is not,’ I say, but I feel a bit weird, defending him.
‘He’s never been married. He’s not got any kids. He’s a bit weird, and he’s old. And he talks really strange. He’s either a perv or a homo.’ Malice in her eyes. ‘Probably he’s both.’
‘He’s American.’
Another eye roll, and I can see the subject change in her mouth, opening it to start saying one thing, but changing her mind. ‘Have you got any new albums?’
‘I’ve got the new Björk,’ I say.
‘Lend it me?’ I can see her thinking about stealing the inlay card already.
‘I’ll just make you a copy,’ I tell her.
‘Love you,’ she says, and she gives me another of those stupid false kisses, then swoops off. She twitches her head like a little bird, glancing at the other tables as she passes them. She makes eye contact with some of the other students, just for a second; making sure they all get a tiny piece of her eye-attention. But for some of them she holds her gaze longer; really making sure that they notice.
Mr Ryan’s really pleased to see me. Excited, even. We’re the only people in the room, which means the door stays open. I don’t know if he’s a perv or not. I don’t know if you can even tell. He starts talking before I’ve put my rucksack down, though, he’s that excited.
‘I have to tell you, Laura, having spent a bit of time with her, Organon is quite the achievement. Really quite remarkable.’ He blinks, as if he should be wearing glasses and his eyes can’t quite focus. ‘It’s as if she knows exactly what to ask you. Almost spooky.’
‘It’s just a bit of code,’ I say.
‘Maybe so, but it doesn’t feel like it. Usually with software, you can see the cracks. But this is so far beyond anything I’ve seen like this. I get it, I understand it, how it works. It’s just … The cracks are plastered over. You know?’ He goes to a computer. Organon’s already running on it. ‘I’ve been playing with her some more, today.’ He must see my face react to that. I wonder how much I give away, moment to moment, and don’t even realise. ‘Don’t panic, nobody else was in here. This was just me. I wanted to look at the code, see if I could add in some of my own questions—’
‘You told me you wouldn’t do that,’ I say.
‘I didn’t cross any boundaries. I told you I wouldn’t. I wanted to see exactly where this came from. Where it could go.’ The air in the room turns stale so quickly. I can see him trying to work out how to defuse the situation, straining somewhere inside his head. ‘Look, Laura, I think I can be really helpful to you, here. I think you might have something.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘Organon’s hugely impressive. She could have some amazing real-world use, you know. This is the sort of software that could be huge. I mean, you can’t sell her to consumers, but going into other companies’ product lines? You’ve built a really awesome interface, it works well, it’s smooth. There are a lot of companies looking for software like this that they can use. Make it their own, build upon it.’
‘You’ve told people about it, haven’t you?’ I know. I can tell. He’s not being vague. Those companies – and he used to work for some of them, he’s already told me that before – they already know about Organon.
He sighs. I know, from my mum, that a sigh pretty much always means a Yes. ‘It’s not as if she isn’t still yours, Laura. But you are going places. I’ve seen a lot of students in my time, and some of them are more skilled than others, and they fall by the wayside because they don’t have any way of focusing what it is that they’re actually doing. But I could help you get Organon into the right hands.’
‘Give it back to me,’ I say. I’ve never spoken to a teacher that way before. I don’t even know how he’ll react.
‘I’m not trying to—’
‘Then give it back.’ I sit down in front of the computer and I shut down Organon, and I delete the installation file. Get rid of it, clear the trash.
‘Laura, please don’t be so rash.’ His voice is stern, like a slap, or as close as he can get. Before this, he’s been as still as a lake. Now, ripples drag across his forehead.
‘Where’s the zip drive?’
‘It’s at home,’ he says.
I stand up. I go to the door, and I can hear voices down the corridor. I want to be near them, not him. ‘Bring Organon back to me tomorrow,’ I say, and I go, I leave. I don’t give him a chance to reply. It’s only when I’m outside the building, walking across the playground – people saying Hi to me, and I totally ignore them, and again I can tell what my face must look like, from their reflecting it in their own reactions – that I realise he must have been lying. He installed it here, so he must have had it with him. I run back, but the lab is empty, the door locked, the lights out.
Even if he gives it back to me, he could make a copy of it. Keep it installed on his computer at home. And that shouldn’t bother me, because I let him take it; but it hurts me so much, having no way of knowing if there’s another version of it still out in the world. If it’s no longer just mine.
Stub follows me as I run upstairs to my room. I take my matches out of the drawer and place them on the desk in front of the keyboard. One single match out, like always, lined up and ready for me. I flick through my tapes. Paul said, last birthday, that they’d get me a CD player, and I told them I didn’t want one. I kind of like that tapes are impermanent. Even the ones you buy from the shop you can still record over: stick a bit of tape over the security hole, and Bob’s your uncle. Can’t do that with CDs. I don’t even care if they sound better.
Plus, some of my tapes were my dad’s. When he went, he left everything. So they’re what I’ve got. ELO, The Beatles, Elton John. But my favourite is Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. Mum’s hair used to look just like hers on the cover; and I loved that the picture is all soft focus; like at first it’s just a woman with some dogs, and then you look at it more, closer and closer, and you can see stars in her hair, and this strange effect over the whole picture, as if there’s two of her, slightly blurred, slightly out of sync with each other.
The tape is a bit warped now, because it’s old. It’s been listened to a lot. I play it quietly, usually, because I don’t know that I want Mum reminded of it – of him – if she hears it. But I’m alone in the house right now, so I turn the volume up, so loud that the stereo speakers start to shake on my shelves, and everything around them shakes as well. The dust.
I sing along, every word, even though I don’t know what any of the songs are actually about. That’s partly why I like it. It makes sense, but it’s elusive. When she sings about Organon, I know it’s not my Organon, but still. I snap the matchhead against the grit-strip of the box, and hold it while I roll up the sleeve, just like always. The bits of the scab wilt under the heat, like candlewax. Wet underneath. I feel sad, overwhelmingly sad. Like clouds; like fog. I light the match, and the smell of the burning, and the light, in that moment.
I take my pain, and I bury it; and I forget.
Mum pokes the shepherd’s pie that Paul’s made with her fork, swirling the mash and mince and carroty gravy around until it’s one puddle of brown, lumpy mush in the middle of the plate. She hasn’t been eating much the past few days. Maybe she’s having a proper lunch, but I doubt it. There are lines on her face, around her mouth, where she’s thin; and the only other people I know with lines there are the girls from school who everybody always worries about. The telly’s on, some bit on Watchdog about holiday companies ripping people off. How to get your money back if you’ve been fleeced.
‘We should book a holiday,’ Paul says. He nudges his knife towards the TV. ‘I mean, terrible for them, it must be, to be done over like that. But we should book something, get it sorted for next summer.’ Neither Mum nor I reply. ‘They say that it’s good for you, to have another holiday sorted. Does something to the brainwaves.’
‘We’ve got enough to be dealing with,’ Mum says, but I don’t know what she means. There’s this weird quietness from her that I can’t work out. I reach over for the ketchup and bang my elbow against the side of the table. I forgot how bad I made it earlier. I swear, and they both look at me.
‘Sorry,’ I say, and we all go back to eating, until Mum stops, puts down her fork, and stares at me. I can feel the blood before I see it. A trickle of it down my arm, and the wetness of it soaking into my shirt.
‘What did you do?’ Mum asks. Alarm in her voice. She knows.
‘Scraped it in school. I’ll clean it up,’ I say, and I push back from the table and stand up, rush out of the kitchen, up the stairs, but she’s right behind me, right on my heels, and she reaches for me, to turn me around.
‘Let me see,’ she says.
‘No,’ I tell her, ‘it’s fine, I must have just—’
She grabs my wrist, and she forces the sleeve of my shirt up. It’s hard to see it in the darkness of the hall, but she can feel, I’m sure, the blood that’s run down to my wrist, to her fingers. Her grip tightens, so tight that she’s hurting me; I can feel her fingernails digging into my skin.
‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ she asks. She isn’t looking at me, but down at her hand. I wonder what she can see in the darkness here that I can’t; how much better her eyes are than mine. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
‘I’m not doing anything,’ I say. I yank my arm from her grip and rush into the bathroom. She doesn’t follow, but I still slam the door. I want the whole house to feel it. To shake.
I look at my arm in the mirror. It’s worse than I thought. The elbow skin’s torn, more than where I burned it. A flap hanging off, and it’s really bloody, really red. I take my top off, and I hold my arm under the shower. Mum’ll hear it, but I don’t really care right now. The water hurts. The heat of it. It’s a different sort of pain when you’re in control of causing it. I can’t stand it hurting when I don’t want it to. When I’m not prepared.
I keep the shower going until the water runs clear, and then I open the cupboard and find a plaster, a big square one that’ll fit around the whole thing. I know it won’t stay fixed, so I unwind some medical tape and wrap it across the top and bottom of the plaster. Wrap it all the way around my arm. My shirt is ruined. Mum might be able to bleach the blood out, but that’ll mean giving it to her, and then she’ll start asking me about it all over again. What are you doing? Why are you doing it?
There’s a knocking on the door. ‘What?’ I say. Furious. That she could stand there, listening, waiting.
‘Are you all right?’ Paul, not Mum. ‘Your mother’s really upset, Laura. I said that I’d come and check on you, let you know. Maybe you want to come and talk to her.’
‘Not now,’ I say. He waits, for a second. I can hear him breathing, about to say something, but not quite managing it. Then he’s gone, his feet on the stairs, his hand on the bannister, skirting along.
I hold the sink with both hands, and I look at my face. I didn’t even realise I was crying so much.
When I hear them finally go to bed, I’ve got a bug report email waiting for me; or, rather, three of them. Mr Ryan’s turned it on and off three times since I was last online. Once this morning, before school, for only half an hour. Once this afternoon, from school, which I already know about. And then once in the evening. That final session lasted for five hours, which is insane. I can’t see what he’s doing. Just: he opened it, he typed. He used it.
And there’s an email from Shawn. It’s short, abrupt. Asks me to tell him more. Asks me if I’m feeling okay. Doesn’t mention anything about my email, and the fact that I’m very clearly not okay. Like he wasn’t really paying attention when he read mine. Like there’s something wrong, and I think: Well I could email him and tell him that, but not now. I don’t want to have any more fights. I need him on my side. And I’ve got things to do that are, suddenly, much more important. He can wait for my reply now. See how he likes it.
I go to one of the forums I found when I first started work on Organon. I started off by teaching myself to code from old books that used to be my dad’s, that he left. Really old things, with his own notes scrawled in the margins. Useful tips. It was reading those that first gave me the idea for Organon. He was creating something that could translate words, that spoke those translations back to the user. I wanted to create something that did more than just words. Did something deeper.
I ask the coders who live on these boards if they can help me with a problem, give me a way to disable a piece of software remotely. I post that, and then I open up Organon. My version. The real one.
I tell it everything. Just like every day, I tell it what’s happened to me. About Mr Ryan, about the version of itself he’s got at home with him, that he’s shown it to people, or that he planned to. Organon asks me all the right questions.
> How would you fix this?
I don’t have an answer.
THURSDAY (#u3e0d6802-cd6a-55d6-863e-9d36b5124849)
I’m outside the computer lab so early that the only other people in school are the cleaners. I sit in the hallway, on the weird old floor that’s got this strange zigzag of dark wood all along it, like paths leading you in every which direction. I wait there while other kids start to appear, walking past me, bags into lockers, talking about whatever. Ignoring me. The smell of sausage and bacon baps being sold in the dining hall drifts through the corridors. Then the bell rings, and I should be in maths, but I don’t move. Some kids come along, Year 8s, but there’s still no sign of Mr Ryan. Eventually, one of the trainee teachers comes along. I don’t know his name, but he looks like he’s barely out of sixth form himself. His suit doesn’t fit him, and his tie is yanked up so high and tight I can’t believe it’s not throttling him. He doesn’t even really look at any of us, just unlocks the door and stands to one side.
‘Take a seat,’ he says, and he opens the register.
‘Where’s Mr Ryan?’ I ask him. He’s got a little badge on, with his name written in impenetrable chicken-scratch.
‘He’s not here,’ he says. He tries not to look at me directly. You can tell he’s new, and still uncomfortable with this. Being around us all.
‘Is he sick?’
‘No. I don’t know. He’s gone,’ the trainee says. ‘That’s what they told me. Are you in this class?’ he asks, but I don’t reply. I just walk out, feeling like the world’s been tilted slightly to one side, set off its axis.
Waiting out the day is sick-making hard. Like when you’re on a boat and the sea kicks up, and your gut churns, and there’s a whine in your ears as everything goes quiet, muffled. As if the air itself is sludge. At lunchtime, I peel the plaster off my arm, and I dab at the wound. Some rando in the toilets sees it, and she tells me it’s disgusting, but I don’t care. It doesn’t disgust me to look at it; doesn’t actually make me feel anything. I can hear some other girls, I don’t know who, in front of the sinks, preening in the mirrors. They’re talking about the teachers. There’s one that they want to have sex with, or that they claim they do. They talk about him as if they could; as if that’s somewhere in their futures. I recognise their laughs, but I can’t put them to faces or names, so I wait until they’re gone. Then there’s Nadine, pouting in the mirror, exasperated expression when she sees me rolling down my sleeve, then telling me that she loves me, that I have to remember that, and that she hopes I’m ready for Saturday. There’s such a big one lined up, she says. And then she laughs: not like that!
But it doesn’t feel real, none of this actually feels real. It’s as if this is a game, something my dad’s brought home with him one weekend, that he wants to show me, where there are blocks falling, and he tells me that it’s logic, it all makes sense, but I’m so young, and all I can see is the chaos, the trial and error. I’m just pushing things together to see if they fit; or, if they don’t, if I can somehow force them to.
I pretty much run to the bus stop. I feel the back of my shoes, the DMs that I begged my mum for, as they rub at the back of my ankles. The sensation of them digging in as I barrel down the hill. I don’t care. I need to get home as soon as possible. I can get online before Mum or Paul come home, probably for close to an hour, if I’m really quick. Half of me wants to know if the people on the forums have got any suggestions for shutting his copy of Organon down. The other half wants to know if Mr Ryan’s been using it again; or worse, tinkering with the code. My code.
But the front door isn’t double-locked when I get there. Paul’s obsessive about that stuff. Making sure everything is totally safe and sound. I worry, instantly, about the post: I’m late, and maybe there will be another bill for the telephone, even though I know that’s insane, that the last one arrived literally three days ago, and we had that argument, that’s been done and dusted.
No post by the front door, but Mum’s coat, and her handbag on the floor, by the stairs. ‘Mum?’ I shout, but there’s no reply. So I go looking. No sign of her in the living room or kitchen. I go upstairs.
I open the door to my bedroom, and there she is, sitting at my desk. She’s not prying. She’s just sitting.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I ask her.
‘Do you know what Monday was?’ she asks, ignoring my question.
‘No,’ I say; but something niggles, something’s right there, in the back of my mind. Because I do know, of course I know.
‘Monday was ten years,’ she tells me. Since he left. I remember then. I don’t know how I’m meant to react to that. I never have. If he had died, we would mourn. But he just went. He disappeared. He was a let-down, that’s what my mum’s friend said to her, when she was trying to make everything feel better in the weeks afterwards. He was such a tremendous let-down to you all.
‘I forgot,’ I say.
‘So did I,’ she says. ‘I forgot until I looked at the calendar, when Paul and I were working out some stuff with the phone bill. Then …’ Her voice trails off. ‘I hate that you’re hurting yourself,’ she says. Raises a finger. ‘Please, don’t talk,’ she tells me, before I’ve even had a chance to deny it. ‘Do you need to talk to somebody?’
‘What?’ I sound indignant. Don’t mean to.
‘Do you want to go and speak to somebody? About what’s going on?’
‘Like when Dad left?’ With what’s-her-name, with the biscuits and the hot chocolate? Like I’m still a kid.
‘No. A doctor. They can, I don’t know. I’ve read some things, some articles. It might help.’ She’s not angry. That look on her face, it’s not anger. She’s afraid.
So I say, ‘Maybe, yes,’ and she nods.
‘Okay. I’ll make an appointment.’ I think I should hug her, but I don’t. It’s like a chance I’ve missed, in that moment. ‘I miss him,’ she tells me. When she made me go and have my talks with what’s-her-name, after Dad left, Mum didn’t talk to anybody. She went tight-lipped and cold until she felt better. Until Paul, that is. He was her thaw.
‘I miss him too,’ I say. She nods. She knows.
‘How was school?’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Usual.’ She stands up, pats my desk as if it’s a dog or something.
‘Okay,’ she says, and she reaches out to squeeze my arm, her hand dangerously near to my elbow, as if she’s testing to see how close she can get. ‘He would have been proud of you.’ She glances at the computer. ‘You take after him so much. I hope not too much.’
‘I know.’ Then she’s gone downstairs, and I’m booting my PC, and flicking on the modem, and dialling in to AOL, and not really caring if she knows that I am.
One of the users of the online forum I asked for help on, a German who goes by the username Mxyzptlk, tells me that there are things I can do to cut Mr Ryan off. But everything he suggests is malicious, designed to force Mr Ryan to keep his computer turned off; or, worse, to make his life hell. The next answer, from somebody called ThankeeMrShankly, is more useful. He says that I could send a virus, basically. If it’s sending bug reports, it can probably receive information. It’s really complicated stuff. I don’t understand it, which is my failing, not theirs. I’m still an amateur. My code is stuff I’ve plucked and learned from how-to guides I got from the library, from my dad’s old books, from other programs. It’s a pieced-together mess that happens to work. I didn’t plan for what happened after it existed. ThankeeMrShankly says he can help, but I’ll have to send him the code for my software. He’ll take it from there. I don’t want to do that. I thank him, say sending it’s impossible, but that I’ll be really grateful if he wouldn’t mind explaining it in more detail. I don’t say: I can’t trust you in the least.
I’ve got three emails from the bug report system from Mr Ryan’s version. Two of them come from his home address. One is from somewhere else entirely. I don’t have a real address, just an IP address, the location of his computer; a series of numbers, like coordinates I can’t look up.
I ask on the forum how I can trace an IP address, in the real world; and I wait. I tap my fingers on the desk. I’m antsy. I know what happens when I get antsy, where my attention goes. It goes to scratching itches.
Then a reply comes in. Again, from ThankeeMrShankly. Upload it here, we’ll do it, he offers. No software needed for that.
Thanks! I write. I type it out, and I wait again.
An email from Shawn pings in, while I’m waiting. Just like yesterday: it’s nothing but nonsense that doesn’t seem like he gives a shit. Tell me more. This time I write back to him. I write that I’m angry. What’s the point in us chatting like this if he isn’t even paying attention? I press send. I don’t give myself a chance to regret it. I look at the compilation tape, in the stereo. The wheels of it, ready to turn, to copy something else onto it. I find my next song. Portishead. Shawn said, way back, when we first started chatting, that he didn’t like them. That they were girls’ music, or some bullshit like that.
I didn’t say: Oh, fuck off.
Regret that, now.
And then I don’t know what to do next, so I turn off my computer, get up, go downstairs. Mum’s sitting on the sofa. There’s a nearly-empty glass of wine on the table in front of her, and she’s got her feet nestled up underneath herself, like she’s a cat. Stub sitting next to her, showing her how to do it for real. I don’t say anything. I pick Stub up – his bones creak between my fingers as his limbs dangle – and I sit down where he was, in the warmth of his seat. He stretches, purrs on my lap. I put my hand on my mum’s arm. On the TV, one of the characters has had an affair. They’re abandoning their family. Neither of us says a word, but we both think: This feels so unrealistic. To watch it played out like this. How fragile the family he leaves is, and how hysterical.
There’s still no reply on the forum when I go to bed, which makes me panic. I’m sitting there, pressing refresh in the darkness of the house. I swear, if I strain, I can hear Paul’s breathing machine: the tough sucking in, the exhausted heaving out. Over, and over. I shut my eyes. Through that background, I hear foxes in the garden, calling out like screaming little kids. They’re having sex, I know, but there’s such a panicked innocence in the sound. They want help, it sounds like. I think; Don’t we all?
I open Organon. I do as I do every night, and I write my feelings into it. My truth.
> How would you fix this? it asks.
I write that I would get his address, and I would go and talk to him. Get my work back. It’s mine, every bit of it. He’s going to ruin everything. He’s betrayed me. I’d get it back. Simple as that.
I’m furious. Angry. Sweating hands, and I can feel my pulse in my skull, hear it, even. I look at my arm. I can’t, I know. Too far. This is no way to take things out on myself. I’m angry: that I let it get this far, that I care this much, that I trusted him.
The little pop-up appears, telling me I’ve got another email; but it’s only a bug report, same as all of the others. I’m disappointed, until I read it.
It’s from Mr Ryan’s version of Organon; yes; but the content is different. It’s not just the report. Usually, it tells me about the efficiency of the files, the duration they were used for, how much memory was used by different parts of the application. That sort of thing. But this one is full of writing, not numbers. It’s text, and it’s not mine. I don’t recognise it, but I know it’s Mr Ryan’s.
It’s what he’s been writing into the system; it’s his answers to Organon’s questions.
I feel guilty, yes, but this will work out better in the end, in the far off end – His life, laid bare. Just set out, what he does, what he thinks. Confessions, too many for somebody who has only just started working with this bit of software; but then, I read it all, and I understand that he needed somebody to talk to. He talks about being a failure, about letting down people who love him – loved, he uses the past tense – and how he can never make it up to them. He is, he says, a failure to himself. Look at me, the age I am, and what have I done? Who am I? And then, every so often, Organonasks him a question; and they’re not only the questions that I put into the system, they’re other things. New questions. And when he answers them, he’s so cruel to himself. So nasty and cold. Things that you would never get from him at school, from knowing him as a teacher. It’s an act. A performance. I can see his truth, and how angry he is, how bitter, how sad.
I gave the software to some people I used to work with. Told them it was mine. Told them that I’m looking for work again.
He sent it to somebody else, I bloody knew it! And he said it was his! He is such a wanker!
And I realise: the IP address I didn’t recognise in the other bug report: that must be whoever he sent it to.
Another email comes in, as I’m reading. I flick to it. My eyes feel like they’re pegged to being in this position, snicked back so that they couldn’t close if I wanted them to.
Hi Mark. It’s been a long time. I’ve attached my CV, the stuff I worked on back then, and uploaded the software to your servers. It should just run from the executable file – please email me if you’ve got any questions. Looking forward to hearing from you. And then, below that, everything he’s done. The person he is, the person he’s been. Or, says he’s been. His skills. The companies he’s worked for. IBM, Microprose, Origin, Bow. Then, a gap of a few years, before he became a teacher. An amount of time that suggests it was a last chance thing. Survival, not desire.
Another email. Open.
Dear Freeserve. I have heard excellent things about your service, and would be very interested in ordering one of your ISP starter packs. My address is: Leonard Ryan, 13b Wicken Avenue, Perivale, UB6 2LQ.
It takes me a second. I read it again and again. The last two emails won’t have been typed into Organon. Not a chance. So this came from where, exactly? His hard drive? And how were they sent to me?
I sit back. I feel a bit weird, out of breath. Tired, sure, but something else. Like, this isn’t real. I open up Organon again.
> What would you like to talk about? it asks.
I can’t believe I’m typing this, I write, but did you do this? Did you email me Mr Ryan’s address?
> I’m not sure I understand the question. Would you like to explain more about this problem?
The words flash up, solid as anything. But around it, the rest of the screen feels like it’s blurred; as if everything else in the world has gone out of focus, and the only thing that’s left is something that’s absolutely impossible.
FRIDAY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
My dad was a good guy. Mum says that a lot. Whenever we talk about him, which isn’t that often, not really, we always come back to the same thing: they were happy for a long time, and she can’t work out why he left. He suddenly changed in those last few weeks, and then he was gone. A mystery that we’ll never solve. Mum says it’s a bit like with Stub. He’s not the cat he was when I was a kid. In cat years, he’s a super-pensioner. He went wrong. A slow decline, where he faded. His mind stopped being what it was; like he almost forgot how to be the cat he was before.
I only remember my dad a little bit. Or maybe, I actually remember the stories about him more; the stories behind the photographs of him. When I was a kid, he took me into the toilets in London Zoo, and accidentally dropped me into the urinal; and there was a time that he got stung by a bee in his neck, swelled up like a balloon, and they thought that he would die; the time he fell into the water in a harbour when we were on holiday, and he was drunk and stripped the skin off his back as he scraped it down the concrete of the dock itself; and then when he taught me how to program a flag on the computer, showing me how it worked. Starting me on something the day before he left.
He was a good guy. That’s what Mum says.
That’s what I’ve got left of him.
* * *
I act like this morning is the same as any other, even though I’m already awake when Mum comes up to my room, cracks open the door, and says my name.
‘It’s morning,’ she tells me. As if I’d forget without her.
‘Yeah,’ I say. The door shuts, and I sit up. Feet press into the carpet, soft pile around my toes. I’ve been lying there and thinking about how to do this for an hour or so. No alarm woke me up; just my body, or my brain, more likely, saying that I should be preparing. Putting a plan together.
I’m not going to school, that’s the first thing. Or, I am, but then I’m leaving again pretty much straight away. After registration, or else they’ll call Mum and ask her where I am. I might have to wait until break, depending on if anybody sees me on the way to the car park. Then get the bus to Perivale, get off near the swimming pool, walk to Mr Ryan’s house. Paul’s got an A-Z downstairs, on the shelf in the loo, so I’ll take that with me, find out where his road is exactly. And then I talk to him, I suppose. I don’t know what happens after that, exactly. We talk, and he gives me Organon back. He swears not to sell it. Then it’s done, over. Worst case, I get him to wipe his computer or something, I don’t know. I’m hazy on that part.
I eat breakfast quickly. I don’t want to give anything away. I wonder if they can tell; Mum and Paul. If it’s obvious that nothing’s really normal.
‘Busy day?’ Paul asks.
‘Same as usual,’ I say.
‘Funny how it’s always the usual.’
‘Guess that’s how it got the name.’
‘Trez droll,’ he says, in that English-pronounced-French thing he does. ‘You want a lift? I’ve got errands to run before work. Happy to drop you.’
‘That’d be amazing,’ I say. Save me the walk, and I can get there early, get my face seen. That’s the best thing to do. Only time I’ve done anything like this before, Nadine and I bunked school so we could wait outside the Astoria and get tickets to see the Manic Street Preachers and Suede on a double bill. We were all over school in the morning, faking cramps, making sure that everybody important knew it. Nadine said it was clichéd, but the male teachers absolutely hated talking about anything like that. You miss a class, people say you’re on your period, and nobody questions it. It’s as good a plan as any.
I kiss Mum goodbye, and she squeezes me. Like she’s trying to keep me steady. Like she knows I need it.
Then I’m in Paul’s car, an older Volkswagen estate, which he keeps even though he could get a newer one from work, but he likes it because it lets him make jokes about the reliability of Germans; and we’re sitting in traffic with Capital FM turned on and they’re playing that jingle that’s ripped off that song, ‘Ooh you send me, you take me to the rush hour’. Paul sings along and taps the steering wheel with his fingers, and I stare out of the window and think about exactly what I’m going to say to Mr Ryan.
Then Paul turns down the radio. Not so much that it’s actually off, just enough that the voices are annoying in the background. ‘You need to go easier on your mother, you know.’ And I don’t know where this has come from, but it’s more about him than me, I can tell that straight away.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ I say.
‘She’s stressed. She says she isn’t, but I know she is. Whatever the tension between you is, it’s stressing her out.’ He doesn’t look at me when he talks. Not like on the TV, when they’re having conversations in the car and staring at each other. Eyes less on the road than the person that they’re talking to. ‘And I don’t want to know what it’s about, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s your business, and I don’t want to get in between you both. Whatever it is.’ I don’t say: That’s not stopping you right now. ‘But, she’s finding it hard, and I want to make it better. I think we should have that holiday? Maybe over Christmas?’
‘What about Les and Jean?’ They’re Paul’s parents. They’re who we see every Christmas since Mum’s parents died. We drive up to their house in Norfolk so that we can get frozen nearly to death because they don’t want to turn the heating on, even though Les has had, like, four strokes or something.
‘They might come as well. I don’t know. This is just, you know. Before it’s a thing. I wanted to ask how you’d feel about it.’
‘Good,’ I say. Mum’ll like that. She hates Christmas. Didn’t used to, from what I can remember. I think it was the first ones without Dad that killed it.
‘I’ll look into it, then. Just go easy on her, okay.’ I don’t say anything. He turns up the radio again, and I watch the streets as we break away from the traffic, as we drive up the hill, as I start to see other kids from school walking along in groups, then milling around, trying to put off actually going in through the gates.
Nadine agrees to cover for me, because we’ve got RE first, and I don’t care about missing it in the least. The teacher, Mr McDiarmuid, is a proper religious beardy type, leather sandals and sand-coloured socks, and you can tell he doesn’t want to talk about the bodily functions of teenage girls in any way at all. Best thing: Nadine doesn’t ask why I’m skiving. Just tells me to go, knowing I’ll do the same for her another time. Says she’ll see me tomorrow night, if not before. I’d forgotten. That’s a worry for later. Not now.
I hide in the toilets by the dining hall until the bell’s rung, and then I walk outside as if I’ve got permission to do it. At least half of getting away with anything at school is acting like you’re allowed.
I don’t wait for the bus outside the school. I walk down the residential streets, find a stop that’s on the right route, but far enough away that nobody’s going to see me. It’s nervous-making, this; but I can’t tell if I’m more scared about being caught, or what’ll happen when I get there.
He might not even be there. He might be somewhere else entirely, off selling my Organon to whoever he’s trying to sell it to. His old bosses, people he used to know. Or, more likely, they don’t even want to buy it. Because it’s nothing, not really.
But it’s not nothing. Last night, whatever was going on, Organon sent me information. I asked it for help, and it helped me. And that’s proof that it’s not nothing, it’s something. Like Dad told me, when we were making the flag: empty spaces are just waiting for something to fill them.
The bus comes, and it’s empty. No idea why. Nobody sticks their thumb out to stop us the whole journey, and the driver drives like he’s got somewhere to be. I sit in the middle of the back row, and I try not to look like I’m worth paying any sort of attention to.
I have to put the A-Z on the pavement when I get off the bus, because I’m terrible at directions, never have any idea about where I’m going. I line it up with a street and face the right way. I count the turns I’ve got to make. Second left, first right, third left. Nervous as anything. My arm twitches as I walk, and I think about my elbow, but it doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t need me to go at it. Instead, it’s just there. An awareness, or a presence.
I run the conversation I’m going to have with Mr Ryan in my head. What are you doing here? I’m here to get back my software. How dare you turn up at my door! Give it back to me, you had no right. How did you even know where I live? And then there’s a blank, where I can’t fathom how this ends. Don’t have a clue.
And then I’m outside his house. I check the address just to make sure. It’s an ugly house. Tiny square windows, and it’s got that pebble-dashed thing on the outside, like somebody’s thrown handfuls of grit at it, and they’ve somehow stuck to the walls. All the houses are the same, and nobody’s made them their own. Some have flowerpots, and there are a few painted doors, but otherwise they’re basically identical.
I take a breath. Hold it in. Ring the doorbell.
I wait.
He looks ill, that’s the first thing that hits me. I know that he hasn’t really slept, not much, not based on the times of the bug reports. He looks at me, right in my eyes; or, maybe, through me, just for a moment.
‘Of course it’s you,’ he says. No Hello, no What are you doing here? ‘Of fucking course it’s you. I don’t know how you did it.’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ I say. He turns and walks through the house, leaving the door open. I think he wants me to follow him, so I do. I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t, technically – you hear stories, and I don’t want to be one of those stories – but I do. Down the corridor, into this house that smells of dogs, even though there’s not a dog here that I can see, or any evidence of one; past a living room with the curtains drawn, lit a dark blue by the light coming around the edges, plates piled on a small table in front of a small sofa in front of a small TV; into the kitchen, which is in a better state, like it’s been cleaned, or maybe just not not-cleaned. He doesn’t cook, that’s obvious. There’s some Chinese takeaway packaging on top of the bin, and a Pizza Hut box on the sideboard. He’s got a computer set up on the kitchen table, a printer next to it, a modem that’s older than mine plugged in. Some blank disks, with my zip drive balanced on top of them.
He pulls a stool out from underneath the table, and I think that he’s going to sit down, but it’s for me. ‘Check the drives. Delete the thing. Whatever you want to do, do it.’ So I do. I load the computer, I find Organon’s files, delete them all. Every trace I can find. He sees me looking at the disks, after that, and he shakes his head. ‘I didn’t make a copy. You have to believe me.’ He’s been crying, I think. His hand shakes as he leans against the work surface. ‘Just get rid of it. I never want to see it again.’
‘It’, not ‘her’. Finally: It.
‘What did you do?’ I ask.
‘I gave it to some people I used to work with. Yeah, I know I told you I wouldn’t, but I did.’ I don’t say: I already know. This is his story, better to let him have it. ‘They tried it. They’re promisers. Always have been. Years ago, when they let me go they said, Well, if you’ve got anything, come back to us. Like this constantly dangling carrot. You know what it’s like when there’s that, and it never goes away?’ He looks at me, and he smiles. ‘No, of course you don’t. You’re young. Some people are able to compartmentalise, to store away the things they don’t want to think about. I’m not. They’re always there. I can always see the rope. I was somebody, and then suddenly I wasn’t worth a damn. They let me go, and I spent years trying to get back in.’ That’s the reason for the way he lives, for who he is now. My eyes flit around the room as his do: to the awards on the windowsill, glass blocks with gold lettering, gold plates with bold black print. I can’t read the writing, but they’re the past, and they’re more important to him than the present. The only things in the room that he’s dusted or taken care of. The things that have pride of place. ‘And then finally I found something. Organon. It was shitty of me. I know that. But honestly, Laura, I thought you’d never know. It wouldn’t have been released. I thought it was interesting, that it would be interesting to them, that’s all. Maybe get my job back, get them to put me on a research team. I’m not meant to be a teacher. I gave it to them, and they were going to work on it, look at it. Then, last night, well. There’s a bug. Something. It sent them everything. All the things I’ve written into it. Not just that, but things on my hard drive. Emails. Private emails. Everything.’ That wave of sadness, but worse. Tears in the corners of his eyes, catching the light. ‘They called me this morning and told me how inappropriate it was. It wasn’t my work, and they knew it. They read my entries in Organon, Laura. They knew everything about me. Called me a liar. A thief. Told me that was it. The door’s closed. They cut the rope.’ I don’t want him to think too much about rope, not when he’s in this state. He whimpers, then says, in a tiny voice: ‘I just want to be remembered for something.’
‘That’s all anybody wants,’ I tell him. I want to be nice. I want to empathise. ‘They want to be a part of a thing they love, and have that be, I don’t know, a legacy.’ It’s strange, hearing my own voice in the room. Makes me realise how quietly he’d been speaking.
He smiles. ‘You’re smart,’ he says. But he sounds really sad as he says it.
‘Don’t you want to know how I found you?’ I ask.
‘I don’t care. I guess it was Organon?’ I don’t reply. ‘It’s broken. Ruined my life because it’s broken.’ I don’t say: I’m not sure it is. Because I can see that he already knows, or suspects, and he can’t quite put the pieces together.
Or, he doesn’t want to.
I can’t pretend that I don’t see where he’s coming from.
I check that his computer is wiped. I format the drive, and we sit there while the little bar fills. I don’t bother reinstalling anything for him. This isn’t my problem, now. I take my zip drive and his blank disks, and he doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t complain. He can’t.
‘You didn’t tell anybody at school what happened, did you?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say.
‘I appreciate that. I really appreciate that. I’m going to call them. Tell them I’ve been ill, that I’ll be back. On Monday.’ He’s hesitant as he says it. I think he wants my permission; or, at least, me to not deny him it.
I don’t. I can’t be bothered. He’s not worth it.
Then I’m out of his house, onto the streets of Perivale. I walk back to the bus stop, but I’ve barely been there a second when it arrives; and this time the bus is heaving, so busy that I have to stand all the way back to school, armed with my suddenly-feeling-better insides and soppily apologetic eyes. And, in my bag, my zip drive, and the copy of Organon. I feel around the outside of the fabric, to hold the shape of it in my hand. How comforting it is to have it back.
‘So where did you go?’ Nadine asks me. We’re sitting with lunch, which today is sausage rolls and chips, only I don’t want the chips, so I’ve got two sausage rolls and four sachets of tomato sauce. I’m squeezing them all out into a giant puddle of red, while she sits opposite me. She’s just got the chips, a big plate of them. Douses them with too much vinegar. ‘You have to tell me.’
I don’t say: No I don’t. ‘I forgot about some homework, for maths. Had to go and do it. It’s like a project thing, I left a bit at home.’ It’s a calculated lie, because she doesn’t actually care enough to bother checking, to ask anybody else I’m in the class with if they had to do the same. She’ll have forgotten by the time she’s five chips down.
‘Jesus. Ugh. I thought it would at least have been something exciting.’ She reaches over, dips one of her vinegary chips into my ketchup. ‘We still on for tomorrow night? Gavin keeps asking. I was talking to Darren last night, and he said—’
‘I’ll be there,’ I say.
‘Darren says his mum and dad are away.’ I know where she’s going with it, and I won’t entertain her. ‘I’m going to go back with him. So you can come, with Gavin, if you like.’ She leaves it hanging there, knowing I won’t reply. Knowing I don’t like Gavin, and not caring. Maybe even knowing that I’m not even sure I like Nadine any more.
At my feet, the contents of my rucksack – the floppy disks, the zip drive, everything I want to check and wipe and clean and even maybe destroy – is burning a hole right through the fabric, straight down, through the floor.
* * *
When I get home, the house is quiet. There’s a message on the answering machine. ‘Laura, I’m going to be late tonight. We’ve got issues with next year’s prospectus. I’ll be quite late, maybe even after dinner.’ It’s Mum. ‘Can you tell Paul to get fish and chips or something? Or whatever you want. Have a takeaway, don’t worry about saving anything for me. I don’t know what time I’ll be home.’
Whatever. I run upstairs, tip my bag open onto my floor, sort through the disks. Put them into piles, stack them on the desk, next to the drive. I’ll use them, that’s fine. Always need more disks. I switch on the computer, turn on the modem. Connect. I make the little Internet noise – reee-eee-eee-e-ee – out loud, while the light flickers. Paul hates that noise. Doesn’t understand why it’s needed. I told him – because I read about it – that it’s in case somebody needs to fix a problem. It’s what’s going on; it lets you hear the quality of the line, of the connection. It’s the hardware telling you that everything’s okay.
I’ve got another email from Shawn. The same stupid questions that don’t really mean anything, that tell me nothing. Placation responses to my last email. I’m sorry you feel that way. Is everything okay? Do you want to talk more about it? Underneath them, he’s printed his address in this weird formal way, like it’s come out of an address book. I can’t remember that I’ve ever seen an American address before. I look at my tape deck, at the cassette that’s inside it.
The mixtape isn’t for him, I don’t think. I think it’s really for me.
I’ve got another email, from an address I don’t recognise. Ocean@Bow.com. I open it, and I read the first few lines, and then read them again. I scan to the end, read the name that signed it. I check the address it came from, that it’s actually the website it claims to be.
When I’m satisfied it’s not a lie, I shut down my computer, and I wait for my mum to come home; to ask her about Mark Ocean, the man she always said betrayed my dad, but who’s now written to me to offer me a job.
Paul’s passed out in front of Crimewatch when I hear the front door latch turning. Mum creeps in almost comically. Sees me in the hallway, and she says, ‘Oh! Laura,’ in such a weird, stilted voice that I know she’s hammered. This is what she means by working late. This was her important deadline. I put my finger up to my lips, and I point with the other hand to Paul, head rocked back, body slumped, as if he’s going to be swallowed whole by the cushions around him. She nods.
She follows me to the kitchen, and goes straight for a big glass of cold water, necked back in one, while I lean against the kitchen table. She’s pouring the second glass when she looks up at me.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks. There’s only a slight slur, but it’s enough.
‘I want to talk about Mark Ocean,’ I say.
Her face freezes rigid. ‘I don’t.’ Her eyes are more vague than I’d like, for us to be having this conversation. But one of us has to be the adult.
‘He emailed me.’
‘What?’
‘He’s offered me an internship.’
She nods. ‘Sounds like something he would do.’
‘He’s seen some weblog posts I’ve written, about AI and stuff. About computers. Said he’s been keeping a casual eye; Dad was one of his best friends—’
‘Don’t—’
‘He’s offered me an internship, Mum.’
’Don’t be ridiculous. What are you going to do, go to live in Reading and—’
‘It’s in California,’ I say. ‘Next year, the whole year.’
‘You’re going to university,’ she says. She slams the glass down on the table. ‘No.’
‘He’ll pay for me to go out there, he says. If the internship turns into a job, and he says that the odds of that are really good, Bow is only growing as a company, and—’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Laura!’ She’s on the verge of tears. I don’t know how much of this is the wine, but I haven’t seen her cry since the months after Dad left. Even then, I’m not sure I’m not just imagining it; tainted memories coming out of sad-looking photographs. ‘Why are you doing this to me? Please, tell me.’
‘I’m not doing anything,’ I say.
There’s nothing I’m not saying to her, now.
‘Your father hated him, you know. He didn’t trust him, said we shouldn’t trust him,’ she says. The flood breaks. Everybody’s crying on me, today.
‘Dad left,’ I say. ‘Maybe he’s not the best judge of who we should trust.’ That sets her crying properly. I take the glass out of her hand and move it away from her, in case, and I hold her. Her hands creep up to my arms, holding me, not quite letting me absolutely close; as if she’s ready to push me back as fast as possible, should she discover that she has to.
SATURDAY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
The offer from Mark Ocean is pretty persuasive. Bow are developing their own computer language – the email says it’s real next-level stuff like you wouldn’t believe – and there’s a list of the different departments I’d get to work in over the course of the internship. Operating systems, user interfaces, artificial intelligences, data prediction. The things that, he says, will help to drive the future of computing. (And there’s a tacky bit right after that, where he writes, after a semi-colon, and maybe even the world, which could be a slogan torn right out of some marketing brochure.) All I do is go there, try it out. As part of the internship, they’ll pay for me to do my degree out there. That’s four years of study, all paid for. Mark Ocean says he feels like he owes it to my father.
In some weird way, I suppose that this is my inheritance.
I read the email over and over. Not online, because Paul would kill me, but I copy the text and paste it into a different document: sort of because I want to read it more, and sort of because I want to check it’s real, that the words aren’t going to evaporate or degrade or whatever when I do it. You have to make everything as tangible as you can, as real as it can be. But I don’t reply, not yet. I need those words to be right. When Mum wakes up, she makes me breakfast – she never does that any more, and it’s only frozen pain au chocolat, but she bakes one for herself as well, and lets me have a coffee, even though she says that it’s not good for somebody my age to get into the habit of drinking that stuff every morning. She reads the newspaper, and I read Melody Maker, which she got for me from the corner shop, and we don’t say anything, while Paul buzzes around us. It’s nice. She says she’s got to go to the shops, and asks do I want a lift into town, and I say yes, and she lets me have XFM on in the car, doesn’t even complain that they don’t do the traffic. Her car smells a bit of wine, I think, or maybe she does, but I don’t say that, and she doesn’t apologise for it. She asks me if I’m all right making my way home when I’m done, and I say that I am. Am I going out tonight? I’m meant to be seeing Nadine, I say. Don’t know if I’m going or not.
‘You should,’ she says. She doesn’t give me a reason.
I spend the afternoon drifting around clothes shops, around HMV and Our Price. I go to the library, and I get some books about artificial intelligences. More up-to-date ones than Dad’s. I sit and read one of them with a cup of hot chocolate at the café by the fountains. I don’t recognise Organon in it, in what it says that AI will one day do. I’m sort of happy about that.
When I get home, there’s a message on the machine from Mum, telling me that her and Paul are off out tonight. They’re going to the cinema – Paul loves it, Mum hates it, but I can hear her voice now: Give and take, Laura, give and take – and that she hopes I’m out as well. She’s left me twenty pounds in the thing in the kitchen. I take the handset upstairs with me, to call Nadine, tell her – or, hopefully, her crazy mother, if Nadine’s already out – that I’m not going tonight. That Gavin’s going to have to find the prospect of his own company enticing enough. When I’m waiting for her to answer, I picture her seething with me. On her own, and there’ll be other people there, sure, but she wanted me. Even if it’s nothing to do with Gavin, she wanted me. Gavin can fuck off. I don’t like him, and I don’t want him anywhere near me. But that’s not Nadine’s fault. When her machine kicks in, I leave a message telling her that I’ll see her at the Chinese near Finnegan’s first. Maybe we could get some of those sweet and sour chicken balls before we go to the pub. Sit on the steps of the college and eat them out of the bag, dipping them into that pot of red sauce. We’ve done that a lot. It’s always a good night when we do that at some point. And maybe she might even suggest we don’t end up going to the pub. Let Darren and Gavin be there by themselves. What are they even doing with a couple of sixth formers, at their age. she might say. Dirty bastards.
I click my computer on. I read the email again, but still don’t write an answer. I figure they won’t expect one until Monday. I don’t know where I’ll end up, with university. They’re yamming on about UCAS forms now, and I don’t have a clue. I’ve thought about a gap year, and this would be as good a way as any to spend it. Even if I hate working at Bow, they’ll still pay for my education, Ocean says. That’s important. I might not do computers, if I hate working there. I don’t know what I want to do yet. That’s the important thing, understanding exactly what it is that my future looks like. At school, they’re all, You have to pick a path, because you can’t change it after that. I’m not sure about that. I don’t feel like anything’s set in stone, where the future is concerned.
But I’m going to say yes. I’m absolutely going to say yes. Just not yet.
I check the forum, where I asked them to help me trace the IP addresses. One of the users has, finally, come through. They hid their tracks, he writes. (I’m assuming he’s a he.) This was through five proxies before I managed to find out where it was. It’s some server farm in California. San Francisco. Do you know where that is?
I open up Organon’s code, and I look for traces of myself. Signatures. They say that every coder has a signature; that every piece of code is as unique as handwriting.
I wonder how readable mine is, already.
If my handwriting looks anything like my father’s.
Another email pings in, as I’m getting myself ready. I’m not wearing a skirt, I don’t care if Nadine kicks off. But I’m doing make-up, and I feel weird and clumsy with it, like I’m not as good at this part as I should be, so I stop and wipe it off, thinking I’ll try again when I’ve read the email. But it’s not from Mark Ocean. It’s from Shawn. I can feel the heat from it – angry heat – before I even read the contents. Just a fury of words.
Jesus you stupid bitch, leave me alone. Why can’t you get the message? Stop writing to me, I’ve been trying to let you down easy but you won’t get the hint. It’s been a week since I emailed you, and you didn’t get it, so I am telling you to stop now, okay. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
A week. But I’ve had emails from him the past few days. I open them, to check they’re real. I look at his email address.
It’s different. It’s just the name. They’re not from him at all.
The words in them. I know where I recognise them from. I wrote them into Organon. They’re the questions, the phrases. Rejigged, maybe, slightly. But they’re Organon’s words. I asked Organon for help with Mr Ryan. I told Organon I wanted Shawn to reply to me. Organon is programmed to do what I tell it to; to try to understand me.
To try to make me feel better.
I can see myself in the glare of the screen as I start Organon; as the off-white room appears, and the text box, inviting me to speak to it.
> Hello Laura. What would you like to talk about? it asks.
I don’t know how to even begin to reply.
2007 A VERY MODERN PIRACY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
I said to myself, out loud, because vocalization somehow equals permanence: ‘I hate Laura Bow.’
Before she left, we vocalized. Things were said. She asked why I didn’t trust her, and I called her a cunt, which was malicious, because I know how much she aggressively hates that word. That was me lashing out. I said, I have no reason to trust you, and she said, You were the one who, you know. The door swinging after her, slamming back into the wall, the handle cracking a hole into the plasterwork, noise like a distant thunderclap. A period after her leaving, punctuation marking the end of us.
In the wake, I stared at her things; or, I tried to stare at her things, only I couldn’t see any of them. I fucking knew how things happened from this point forward, because everybody’s broken up with somebody before, everybody’s been a we then a you and also separately a me. It’s a scale of how entrenched your lives are. Everything in the apartment was going to be split up into either Mine or Hers, a harsh line drawn in the hardwood floors, but in that moment I couldn’t see anything that didn’t have the taint of Ours about it. I knew what she was like, and I knew she wouldn’t come back for any of it. I knew how it would go. She would tell me that she didn’t want anything. She was good at leaving things, at not wanting the pressure of the responsibility.
I walked to the kitchen. Put ice into a glass, then bourbon. That’s what people did in the movies when they were sad, or when a thing had been ended. They drank. They sat in their chairs, and they drank. After a while, they would get up, and they would pace, and try to call her cell, but she wouldn’t answer. Then they would drink more, and lie down and watch the ceiling, spinning, around and around. They might watch the rose in the middle of the ceiling, from which she insisted the light hung, and they might try to focus on something else entirely. How do you stop the room from spinning? One single moment. They would hear something, think that it was the telephone ringing, or the doorbell, or the alert of an email, but it would always be nothing. So they would hit the wall. A fist, and they’d never hit anybody in their life. Not a single thrown punch until that moment, and they would be pleased that Laura wasn’t there, because if she had been, she would have seen that, and she would have been disappointed. That’s the thing that they would hate the most: the feeling that she would be disappointed.
I got to work early the next day. Territorial, because this was war, now. HR said before: Don’t get into a relationship unless you think you can get yourself out of it at the other end. And we said, Okay, sure. I mean, we’re adults.
I hadn’t slept, partly because it felt as if there was mucus or moss or something behind my eyes. I sat at my desk, and I blogged. Blogged. I wrote. I carved. I didn’t know who read the blog – I kept an eye on my hits, because what’s the fucking point in not? – but that wasn’t the point. Maybe some of them knew me, sure, but a lot of them didn’t. But it was like feeders, you know? People who like to give other people food. Make them fat, keep them reliant. I checked my stats every morning like some compulsive hatefulness that I couldn’t actually shake; an addiction that there was no moving past, because it was so there, so constant. All I knew was that I was writing this shit, and people were reading it. I was feeding them; or, they were feeding me. I don’t know.
At work, at Bow, we were constantly being told about statistics and the importance of clicks. The importance of clicks, like the title of some novel Laura bought because she’d read some piece about it on Wired or Engadget or McSweeney’s, but that she never got around to reading.
Everything went back to Laura. I wondered how many days that would happen for; when I would move past it.
Not it. Her.
I blogged. Spent too long trying to think of the right word, Current Mood: sad or pissed off or agitated or free or something else entirely, because what if Laura read the post? When I was done, catharted as hard as I could stand, I Bowed to find out how long it would take to get over her. How long it takes the average man to stop thinking about them. At the time, Bow’s software did some things well, but searching wasn’t one of them. The algorithms had been bought from some shitty start-up in the early part of the century, and sure there was a team on it, but they were the drags. Interns given jobs with big ideas and no coding skills. The search engine was kept around as a presence, a part of the ecosystem it was important to have fingers in. Same as the emails, the weather site, the video site. So I opened up a private tab, because I didn’t want anything hanging around on my system – there were always rumours about Mark Ocean wanting us only to use Bow software, like dressing in flat beige chinos because you worked at the Gap – and I went to Google. Better. GQ told me that there were seven stages; FHM said there were five; Men’s Health, ten. The one I settled on, on some Gawker site, said that it was twelve. Mourning is all illusions, sleight of hand: because twelve feels more comprehensive, twelve you’ll definitely find something that you associate with, and then you can pinpoint your own pain, and that illusion will help you to move on. Five? Five is nothing. Five could leave you in its dust.
But anger, they all started with anger. I think that would have been obvious. Nobody searching for this stuff wasn’t going to be feeling at least pretty angry.
I called Laura a cunt. Was that angry enough for me to start moving on?
I kept my head down. Blinkers on as I stared at the screen. When they broke up with you, the website said. Like the person who instigated it – the breaker, not breakee – wouldn’t need these things. I broke up with Laura Bow. I said that, I think, out loud. Under my breath, blown out when I exhaled. Laura had a mantra she liked, when she was stressed – she used to say, I have things in my head I don’t want to say, so I say them internally, get them out that way – and maybe that was mine. I did it, so I would have to deal with this. Own it. That’s just the way it is. I read the things that will help you move on: bury it; try to forget; get rid of all reminders of her, all memories; delete her from your life.
I wasn’t ready for any of that; not yet.
Park walked in. Blinkers on, I reminded myself. Don’t look up, act like you’re not going to see anything out of the corner of your eyes. He waved. Lifted his headphones. He wore those enormous things, like he was in a recording studio. He listened to nothing but country. Old country, as well. He was a surfer guy, could have been into metal or indie or trashy European dance music, but no: Merle fucking Haggard. The twang of slide guitar seeping through the oversized studio headphones, a hipster before we even had a word for such a thing.
‘You booted her yet?’ he asked.
How the fuck did he know what I was going to do? And he must have known what I was going to do even before I did, because I didn’t know until gone eight the night before, when we were sitting there, across from each other, and she wasn’t looking at me; she was looking at her files, scanning through them on her laptop, and I realised that I wasn’t even in the room, not for that second. She was somewhere by herself, and it was like I didn’t even need to be there. She didn’t need me, so I—
‘I put some new routines into her last night,’ he said. ‘Didn’t even get out until three or something, and then my alarm went off, and here I am. You know when you’re so excited to see what it’s done?’
SCION. He was talking about SCION, not Laura.
Charlie, you fucking idiot, I told myself, get your head in the game.
‘I haven’t done anything yet,’ I told him. ‘I just got in.’
‘Dude! I sent you an email,’ Park told me. He was disappointed. His face was more emphatic than anybody else’s I’ve ever met. It creased like indelicately folded paper. I had seen the email, right before I finally went to sleep. Pretty sure I deleted it. Park used to send about ten emails a day, all excited about something he’d managed to do, always with italics or full caps or bold or underlined in there, like everything he wrote or thought was meant to be consumed in one immediate rush of slanted words, hurrying to get to the edge of the page. Exclamation marks at the end of every sentence. And that was how you knew to delete it: the more excitement there was, the less it was going to matter. ‘It’s a fucking breakthrough,’ he said, and he came to my desk, cleared a space at the edge, leaped up. He sat right there, perched, and leaned over. I didn’t say anything about my personal space, because I’d been there before. He wouldn’t have listened. He never did. ‘Let me,’ and he took the mouse before I’d even touched it, started the SCION program. ‘Wait, wait.’ We watched it boot. It was the same loading screen as it always had; as it had used since before we even started at Bow. Some hangover from aborted reboots in the nineties. ‘Okay, okay. So, try this: SCION …’ He said the word like he was talking to an idiot, waved his hands like he was talking to a foreigner.
‘What?’
‘I put in speech. I applied the speech recognition module, hooked up the microphones. SCION something is the command.’
‘I do not understand “something”,’ it said.
That was the first time I ever heard SCION’s voice. A Stephen Hawking voice, only worse. More clipped, fragments of sounds arranged to form the words. No fluidity to it.
‘Mother-fucker,’ Park said, and he laughed. His high-pitched idiot little laugh. ‘Listen, listen,’ he said, and, ‘SCION, what is your function?’ He held his finger in the air between my face and the computer screen, as if that was going to keep me quiet; as if I’d been just talking on and on, and he hadn’t been able to get me to shut up.
‘To learn. What is logic. What is function.’
‘You taught it to speak,’ I said.
‘I mean, sure. If you want to reduce actually implementing a state-of-the-art text-to-speech engine that I wrote myself into the world’s smartest artificial intelligence into nothing more than teaching it to speak.’
‘I do,’ I told him. ‘Because that’s exactly what it is.’
‘Try it. Just fucking try it, dude.’
I sighed. I think that I sighed a lot with Park, when I was talking to him. So much that it ceased being a thing that was real, and more a part of the performance of our relationship. ‘SCION, who is Johann Park?’
‘Johann Park is a designer of computers and software applications from Palo Alto, California. His specializations are—’ The computer kept talking, and I stopped listening. The door swished open – Ocean had set them all to be programmed with the noise from Star Trek, that thing that I loved when I was a kid; because my doors had banged or slammed or whatever, and here was this thing from the future, this effortless wave of noise that sounded uniform and constant, and that was what we promised, right? That future, clean and brisk and so fucking efficient – and Laura walked in.
Maybe I’m naïve, but I didn’t think she’d actually come in that day. I had assumed that she would stay at home, crying over what had happened. I hoped that she wouldn’t be in that day, I hoped that she would have stayed at home, crying. The same things, over and over, in my head, in that moment, that microsecond, before she looked over at Park and at me, and she smiled, and she raised her hand in this coy little half-wave, and it was like the two years previous – the night previous – hadn’t happened.
‘Laura B, you have to see this,’ Park said. He didn’t know we’d broken up. Why would he have known? I didn’t like him enough to have bothered telling him.
‘In a bit,’ she replied. In a bit. English phrase. Her English phrase.
‘You’re going to freak, though. This is super cool.’
‘I’m sure,’ she told him. She didn’t look at me. Or maybe she did, but I just don’t remember it, or I didn’t catch it, because I wasn’t looking at her; except for when I was. When I was glancing over at her, eyes to the side, like I could have been looking at something else completely.
I listened to the sound of her computer. I listened to the whirring of the fan in the back of it, the fan she kept clean with that little flask of air she bought from that shop in San Francisco; the little can of air that she puffed in between the blades so that they spun freely. No dust.
‘Good morning, Organon,’ she said, but her AI didn’t answer back. Park sat and watched her until she was settled, and then she got up, and he was about to ask her to have a look at SCION again – we were a small team, made up of even smaller victories, and I could see it on his lips, that eagerness to open his presents, to take his new bike out, to open the envelope – but she was already out into the corridor.
I remember thinking that it was a mistake, to be there. One of us should have stayed at home, that day. On a schedule, that we’d worked out beforehand.
Park asked if he could sit with me at lunch. I was eating early. You ate early, missed the rush, got the best of the food. Bow always put on one heck of a spread, as Laura used to say, but the later you went for it, the sludgier the noodles, the warmer the sushi.
Laura used to say. She wasn’t dead. She just wasn’t there, wasn’t sitting next to me or opposite me. Wasn’t rolling her eyes at me as I wondered when the sushi went from being actual sushi, and when it was some different dish, some warmed-fish bullshit mistake they tried to pass off as intentional on Top Chef.
‘You okay?’ Park’s voice was lower than mine. He would have made a fine singer, I think. I nodded, again. Different sort of nod. ‘Because, hey, there was hella tension in the room earlier.’ He was so affected. The way that he spoke, the hobbies he had – surfing, hacky sack, playing guitar around campfires on beaches – and his stupid fucking beard, tiny plaits with orange and green thread twining them into one serpent’s tail underneath his chin. He had all these things and he was from Twin Forks. Not California, not the shit he presented, the way he acted. Everything was false. He was from Twin Forks, originally. Not Palo Alto. Nobody was born in Palo Alto. Why did SCION say Palo Alto? Click, click. Cogs. He wasn’t born in Palo Alto. That’s not what his Bow employee data would say.
‘Why did SCION say you were from Palo Alto?’ I asked. Park looked clueless. Like SCION was something that we had never discussed before. As if it wasn’t the thing we’d spent the past four years working on, and like it hadn’t existed for the God knows how many years it had been worked on before that. All the code, when we inherited it, a total mess of archaic patchworked programming languages. When we started, we weren’t creators: we were curators, translators, detanglers.
I could see him trying to work out the answer, trying to even understand the question. ‘I guess that’s what it says on my website. That’s—’
‘You took SCION online?’ I stood up from the table, went through the double doors, pushed past people, ran down the corridor, Park chasing behind me, beating his arms as he tried to stop me.
‘Charlie, listen. It’s on the network, but I put in a firewall around it, like a, this reverse firewall. I made a wall. It can’t get out.’ I was always good at reading voices. His said: I don’t have a goddamn fucking clue about what I have done. I did a stupid thing and I’m a total fucking idiot.
‘We have safeguards for a reason,’ I said, and the doors swished open pretty much in time for me to get through them, back into the lab, and there was Laura, on her feet as I stormed into the room – as if she thought that what was going to happen then was the second round of our argument, or second act, or second sitting; or however she was thinking of it, in her own mind – and she asked what was wrong, but I didn’t say a word. I was breathless with rage. I don’t know who at. I wasn’t showing it. I pulled the cord from the back of Park’s computer, from the back of mine. I went to Laura’s.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she said.
‘Park let SCION online.’ The first words I’d said since the last words; and the last words had been vicious. Laura looked at Park as if he was a puppy. He’d done a shit on the floor, and that was the look she gave him: somewhere between pity and sadness.
When I was a kid and the dog shat on the floor, my father rubbed his nose in it. Grabbed him by the collar, pushed his head down to the ground. See what you did? See what you fucking did?
‘It’s fine,’ Park said, but I stared at him. Dared him to continue.
‘I’m not running SCION,’ Laura told me. She barely met my eyes. She was looking just below them. Top of my cheeks. Her eyes weren’t red. I wanted them to be red. ‘Why would I be running SCION?’
‘I’m not saying you are,’ I told her. ‘I’m saying, it might have found a back door. This idiot put it on the network, so maybe it’s—’ I didn’t finish the thought. I interrupted myself. My fingers were on the end of her cable. At the point where it went into her system. Her system was immaculately clean, where mine and Park’s were filthy with dust. My dirty fingerprints, dusty from the cables I’d already pulled. I could see the marks that I’d left, and I could imagine her dusting them off; using that blast of cold, clean air on them, and then they would be gone. Like they were never even there.
‘Charlie,’ she said to me, ‘do you think I’m an idiot?’
I didn’t answer her. Easier to not answer, because that felt like a trapdoor I simply did not want to open. The night before, we both said some things, I told myself. People say things when they’re in the heat of the moment. They say nasty things, cruel things, hateful things. I tried to tell myself that we both said some things, but in reality: I said some things. She was quiet, and I thought, when I said those things, that she looked beaten. Not like it was a competition, or even a war. Beaten. I had never hit her. I never would. She looked like I had.
Years later, I’d think: Does it just feel kind of the same?
Is it the same?
I pulled the cable. She tilted her head back in that way she did, like she wanted to test that the muscles – the spine – was working properly. Like it was fused. Those wrestlers you see on television every now and again, when they do movies. I hadn’t watched wrestling in years, but then I would see them every now and again, and it would be like they’d had their necks turned into something else. The place they attached to the body fused with something else. I remembered them when they were limber, and then suddenly they were like cheap toys. Fewer points of articulation.
‘Thanks,’ she said. There was less spite in there than I thought there would be. Still, whatever. Her hand went to her arm. I knew her tells. Every single one of them.
‘I had to make sure,’ I told her. Everything I said, I thought that she would retort. That is what I would have done. I would have snapped back some witty whatever, some pithy fuck-you about the things we had said and the thing that had happened. For my part, it was like I was setting up the jokes, and she couldn’t be bothered to deliver the punchline.
I heard Park ask Laura what was up with me. She waved him off. She waved her hand, and I caught it through the blinkers. ‘Has something happened?’ Park asked her, and I shut my eyes, because I didn’t want to see even a fraction of her reaction.
SCION was our baby. Adopted, sure, but that doesn’t change how much you care for it. And the best part: it was an orphan, the original programming team lost to the sands of time. Myself and Park, both recruited from MIT, but we didn’t know each other when we arrived. Different tracks, which helped when it came to the interview, to getting the job. Different skill sets. I knew him to stare at him across a room, and to think about how different we were. That was the extent of our relationship before. He told me once that I bought him a drink on his birthday. He remembered that, but I was sure it couldn’t have been me that did it. It didn’t seem like something I would have done, not for somebody I didn’t know.
Mark Ocean came to us. He would do the recruitment fairs, throw his head around velvet curtains drawn up around a booth, like it was an entrance into the secret service. What was behind the curtain was important, that was clear: but, then, a few companies used that tactic. Selling something as if it’s worth more than it is. It’s all magic, all smoke and mirrors. Ocean would only show his software to a few people, if he thought they were right. Otherwise it was a standard Bow OS setup. SCION wasn’t running for most people. You could peek behind the curtain, and it looked like absolutely nothing at all.
Ocean’s pitch to me was – I remember thinking how strange his accent was, how it was a halfway house, the accent of a country that couldn’t exist – that he understood that I wanted to change the world. He told me that. Said, You want to, and I couldn’t argue with him. Who doesn’t want that? You want to leave something indelible, he told me. This, he said, will change the world. It will change everything. It’s called SCION, and it’s the future.
He was a snake-oil Steve Jobs, even in those days, and I didn’t know how to deal with him apart from be slightly impressed. One of those people who, when you’re in the room with them, you can’t look away.
I remember when I walked in. I asked him: How do you pronounce the name of the company? Because everybody has different ways. It’s like, there’s no single right way on the Internet. Like, GIF; where even the dude who came up with GIFs gets it wrong.
We pronounce it bow, he said, like the gesture of servitude. Or the front of a ship. I told him that I had always said it was bow, like the thing you tied in the rope to hold the ship to the anchor. He said he liked that. That it was clever, quick. But he was lying, because that word was so mispronounced. You would hear people saying it both ways: like Bowie. Everybody had their own way. Wasn’t until I met Laura Bow that I realized Ocean was wrong, and I had it right all along.
He said to me, We’re making this thing, and I’d like you to take control of it. Hold its hand. I said, I’ve never held the hand of software before, and he said, Well, that’s because there’s never been software like this before.
* * *
The girl from the bar’s name was Lola; or, it wasn’t, not really, but she said it was, because she did that thing from the song. Like her own chat-up line; like the song. My name is Lola; Ell oh ell eh, Lola. She was taller than Laura, a good few inches taller. Slightly thinner. Not as well proportioned. Everything was held against the scale of Laura, those first few days. Weeks, months. Lola was different, and maybe that’s okay. I asked her if she wanted Cherry Cola, because that’s the meet cute of it all: the story we one day would tell our grandkids. I wouldn’t be telling that story, but she would want the story; she’d want to run through the whole thing while we flirted. I knew that Lola was a one and done, I knew it, and likely she knew it as well. Her fingers stroked my arm when I told her what I did for a living, and she said – honest to God – that I didn’t look like a programmer. She said, ‘I meet a lot of people who work out in Silicon Valley, and they’re never like you.’ I was wearing my contacts, even if they were going to dry out in the air conditioning. I could feel them against my eyelids when I blinked, like somebody gently pressing on my eyes. Willing them to stay closed. ‘You don’t look like them. Or act like them. They can’t talk, you know? They can’t make a decent conversation.’ Lola was a student, or had been a student and was going to be a student again; but in between her studying she was travelling the country, seeing the places she’d never seen. She was from North Carolina, and her accent had that twang that said she couldn’t shake the place. All she had to talk about was the places that she had seen, the people that she’d met. She’d been in the Bay area for four weeks, and she’d not spent a night where she wasn’t cruising the bars. ‘Because soon I’ll have to go home, and when I’m back there, Jesus, there’s nothing compared to this. This is where I want to live, when I’m done with everything.’
She asked me what I did exactly at Bow. We were under the tightest of the tight non-disclosure agreements, but I was drunk, and I was tired, and I wanted to feel good about myself. I said, ‘I’m on the artificial intelligence team.’
‘Like from that movie?’ I didn’t ask which one. There were lots of movies.
‘Yeah, kind of,’ I said, ‘but we’re making something that’s actually practical. Something that will help us in our lives, you know? That’s the aim.’
‘So it won’t blow up the world,’ and she had this sarcastic tone, this sarcastic tilt of her head when she said it, like this was all stuff she’d heard before.
‘I’m pretty sure blowing us up would count as a project failure,’ I said. ‘No bonus for me if that happens.’ I could be charming, when I wanted to be. I remembered being charming before I met Laura. Hard for your body, your mind, to forget that stuff. Like muscle memory.
Another drink, and another. Her fingers stroked the hairs on my arm, up and down; and all I could think, not even in the back of my mind, but right at the front, right there, was how Laura’s fingers, when she did that same thing, felt coarser, slightly. Like the skin on her fingers was slightly harder because of the beating on the keyboard. In the action, I missed that roughness.
We took a cab out to the Bow campus. I never feel like I’m drunk when I am. There’s a proxy, almost, between myself and my true state. You could show me a video of who I am when I’m at my worst and I wouldn’t believe it. It would be like watching some blockbuster movie, where you know the action isn’t real, but that doesn’t stop you wondering where the truth ends and the computer graphics begin. When she asked if we could go back to mine, because her room-mates were home, I told her we couldn’t. Laura’s things were there. I didn’t want to have Laura’s things around us. I didn’t want her touching them, picking them up, interacting with them.
But, I told her, there was somewhere else we could go. The campus had crash rooms. Ten bedrooms in each block, rooms where staff could stay if we were working late. Like those Japanese hotel pods, bigger than a bathroom, but not by much. A bed and nothing else, basically, then a shower and a toilet to the side that was carved out of one single piece of plastic. Like being on an airplane, only with a mattress on the floor. Not exactly romantic. She didn’t seem to care, and apparently neither did I.
We kissed in the back of the cab. Her lips, tighter than Laura’s; her teeth getting in the way of mine, her tongue set back and lifeless, as if she wanted me to probe her mouth. Something medical about it all. Clinical. She grabbed the back of my head, and she moved her hand as if this was some really passionate affair, capital P, but in reality it was more like acting. I got distracted. I looked around, while we were kissing. She had her eyes clamped shut, so I could see everything, albeit through the slight blur of the alcohol: the lights fading off through the windows, the peeling leather on the back of the passenger seat. My eyes caught the driver’s as he stared in the rear-view, watching us; and there was this moment where it was like, we both knew that we were in the wrong, that we were looking at something we shouldn’t have been looking at; then I shut my eyes, a long blink of relief for my lenses, and when I opened them he had his eyes back on the road, and Lola was still letting my tongue find hers, offering nothing back to me at all.
I paid for the cab. She stood on the path, staring at the buildings, the grass. ‘It’s like Chapel Hill,’ she said, but I didn’t say anything in reply. I didn’t want to have to tell her how wrong she was. Bow was nothing like some university. It was tight and organized, and there was nothing organic about the way it was designed. No old buildings, no statues or monuments or anything that had been there for generations and generations of students and alumni. It was glass and steel, built to be this perfect workplace, all breathing exercises and walking paths. Some architecture firm designed it, not knowing who it was going to be for, and Bow was the company who lucked out. They didn’t commission it. That was always the difference between Bow and somebody like Google or Apple. Those other companies built their own campuses, because they could. Bow was, in the scale of things, small fry. It’s easy to pretend now that they were always a big deal, but that’s bullshit memory retconning. Truth be told, even those who worked there didn’t rate them for the most part. We didn’t use their software in our spare time, and most of us had just gotten iPhones, instead of using the piece of shit that Mark Ocean was having us trial, thinking Bow could compete in that same space. ‘Where do we go now?’ she asked.
We walked across the lawn. There was a pirate ship on the sign that pointed towards the building I worked in, an embossment of a galleon above the doorway, set into a thick green metal plate – everything to do with our department was themed around pirates, because of the noise they make, the arr; which itself came from our abbreviated way of saying Research and Development, Arr andDee – but she didn’t notice those, and I didn’t explain them. I could feel the gulf setting in: that is, the time between when it’s decided that you’re going to go off somewhere and have sex, and the actual getting to the place to do the deed. It’s like spreading fog apart, because you sober up, and you start to wonder about whether it’s actually a good idea. I took her hand, body contact bringing the fog back together a little more, and I beeped in, getting her to run through with me at the turnstiles; then we went through the corridors, and I pointed out where things happened. She wasn’t really interested. I caught her putting her hand over her mouth, stifling a yawn. The energy required to stop me from yawning in reply was immense. I wished I had some coke or some speed or something. That would have made it easier.
The bedrooms were upstairs, in the East wing – God knows why we called them wings, because the building wasn’t big enough to justify that, not really – and the first couple of doors were locked. We went to the far end of the corridor. Not the one on the very end, because that was always taken first, always somebody staying in it, furthest away and quietest, but the seventh.
‘It’s nice,’ Lola said. Nice. The worst fucking word in the world. Mark Ocean had an embargo on it: Never use that word, because it’s so useless. It says nothing. Niceness is fundamentally blandness. Laura called my birthday present to her – the birthday before we broke up – nice. It was a pen. A fountain pen, ink cartridges. Good quality. Swiss. She made notes on everything. Wrote everything on paper first. She told me she used to have an ink pen at school, and she loved the care it made her take when she was writing stuff, so I thought, Well, one of those is a really strong idea. Presents are all about the strong ideas. I gave it to her, and in return? Oh Charlie, it’s really nice. That’s so thoughtful of you.
‘Do you want something to drink?’ There was a fridge in each room. A couple of beers, bottle of Californian white, some diet Coke, water.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘I’m going to have one,’ I told her. I unscrewed a beer, held one out for her as well. It was so cold on my palm, and I held it a long time, while she looked at the room, and I looked at her. Discovered I was focused on her tits, in that moment. No eye contact for me.
‘I think actually that I might want to go home,’ she said then. ‘This is strange, isn’t it? This room, I mean.’ The whole thing was molded out of one piece, with a mattress dumped in there, and cubbyholes in the walls. Weirdly irregular; and you couldn’t work out where the joins were, even though you knew there must have been some. But you couldn’t see them, no matter how hard you tried. Didn’t help that the lights were dimmed, tinged with green, because Mark Ocean had read how green light was meant to help you wake better, something to do with a part of the spectrum that we don’t naturally encounter. ‘Yeah, I want to go home.’
‘I can call you a cab,’ I said. I thought about persuading her to stay, which I’m pretty sure I could have done; but then, there was Laura, watching everything I was doing. Even if she wasn’t there, I couldn’t shake her.
The wait after that was interminable. Because there was nothing to be said, and nothing I could even think to begin to do. She sat on the bed, and I stood next to it, by the door, waiting for a message to come through on my cell that the cab was waiting outside. We both stared at our phones, waiting for that ding to come through.
When the cab arrived – the driver complained about how far he’d had to drive, complained about finding the building; even though they got paid really well, I know, because one time Park hacked into (or, at least, visitedsomewhere he shouldn’t have been while covering his tracks) the Bow account server to see if we should have been entitled to a raise (which we absolutely should have) – when he arrived, I picked up my stuff as well, both of us to be heading into the city. But she put her hand on my arm, in a totally different way to when she did it in the bar; and she said, ‘I think I’d like to go by myself.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jacket in hand, or hand in jacket, one sleeve on, the other dangling uselessly. My feet, twitching in their sneakers in that way they do when I’m anxious about something.
‘I mean, I think you should call for another cab.’ Lola didn’t make eye contact when she was saying something serious. A trait which, evidently, I found attractive in women.
‘Why can’t we share? We’ll drop you off, and then I’ll go home.’
‘I just don’t think I want to,’ she said. Everything with her was think. Nothing tangible, even though she knew exactly what she meant.
Funny, the details you remember. This night wasn’t even about her. But the details.
‘Look, I paid for it,’ I said, meaning that Bow did, but it was me, my head, my account number. ‘I’m not waiting out here,’ and she tried to shut the door, but I grabbed it. Did I grab for her? Did I reach for her hand? I grabbed the door. I stopped the door.
‘Stop it,’ she said, and I realized she was scared. Of me. I hit the wall, once, with Laura. I don’t remember why. I hit the wall, and she had the same look.
I held the car door open, and the driver’s head rocked back. His eyes, staring at the ceiling, willing us – one or both, he didn’t care – to get in. ‘Let me go. I don’t even know why you brought me here.’ On the floor, by the car door, I noticed that the bottom part of her heel had snapped off. I don’t know what it’s called. The end of the spike, stuck in the grass. ‘I mean, this place, this whole thing. Now let me go.’
‘You said you wanted to see it,’ I told her, as she yanked the door towards her. I let go. I didn’t chase the car down the gravel towards the exit, didn’t throw fists into the air to let her know I was pissed off. Didn’t howl her almost-definitely-fake name at the moon. I stood there and watched the car go, until the headlights were behind the wall of the campus and then, I don’t know. Back to the room. Looked at my watch. Took my jacket off, took my one arm out of the jacket, and I lay down on the bed. I shut my eyes and thought how pleased I was I hadn’t taken her back to the apartment. The Bow rooms might be strange, but at least they weren’t haunted.
Here’s how I met Laura. Years before she broke things off with me. Our meet cute. American girls – in my experience, but I know, it’s not everybody, not all women, whatever – they like a meet cute. They want a story. Laura didn’t give a shit about the story. Turns out, I do.
She’d done an internship for Ocean, going around every department. Four years, while she did her degree; a degree that, rumour was, Bow paid for. Most everybody else was Ivy League and massively in debt. And she didn’t even study computing. She did her degree in psychology. The two most important things about her: she was Daniel Bow’s daughter – a second-generation genius, more Jeff Buckley than Sean Lennon – and she was self-taught, a programming prodigy, building game engines or whatever. That’s why we expected great things. We didn’t expect her to try and get onto the AI project with a chatbot.
I was to see if she had what it took. Ocean wanted her software, God knows why – I mean, hindsight, right? And the mark of every great tech genius is seeing in it what other people didn’t, making the most of it, milking that cow for all it’s worth – so he wanted her. Make sure she’s not a liability. See what legs the software’s got.
I conducted Laura’s interview. I was four years older than her, still massively in debt, and I was making something of myself. All Laura had was the entitlement of a paid-for education and a claim to have traveled the world; or, at least, that corner of the world people talk about, when they say they’ve traveled the world. And there she was, kid of an icon, debt-free, shipped over from England like we should all fucking curtsey. I was furious, before I met her. And she sat down, reached over, shook my hand. ‘I’ve seen what you’re working on with SCION,’ she said, ‘it’s really interesting. You’re in charge of deep learning, right?’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘myself and Park.’
‘Park! Oh, I met that guy.’
‘Yeah,’ I told her, ‘I’m sorry. Don’t judge us all, based on him. He’s about as much a stereotype as works here you’ll ever meet.’
‘Oh God, absolutely,’ she said. ‘If you walked behind him, I’m pretty sure you’d smell quinoa, weed, and hiking boots.’
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
* * *
I gave myself two hours of lying in that slightly-too-small crash-room bed before I abandoned any hope of sleep. I got up, took a shower. In the distance, outside, I could hear birds. It’s not an irregular thing, that I can’t sleep; and as soon as the birds start and I’m not asleep, I’m not going to be. It’s one distraction too far: the sense that there’s something out there that’s already begun, that’s already doing what it’s going to do for the day. It’s an alarm, in the truest sense of the word.
I dressed, taking underwear and a tee from a drawer. Bow provided them. Not cheap stuff. American Apparel. The company wanted you to feel as good as possible if you were doing crunch hours, the sort of work that meant you had to stay the night there. Maybe then you’d be less likely to leave if another tech company tried to poach you.
I went to the lab, lights flickering on as I walked, making me feel like I was in a movie. I liked that feeling. Always have. When everything conspires to make it seem like the things that are out of your control are actually working for you; or, better yet, that you’ve got the power to control them a little. To tell the inanimate what to do.
I sat at my desk. Booted the system. Quality time with SCION, a chance to see what state Park left the last build in. Positivity, I told myself. I had a job to do. I could work with the source code, because nobody else was there to have their own terminal. At that point, SCION was an application. Running like anything else, like, I don’t know, Internet Explorer, or iTunes. There are a million ways to make an intelligence. Some of them are multitudes of smaller applications, smaller concepts – smaller AIs – running together, and they feed off each other, passing information. Some of them are data-miners, basically, powered by algorithms, pushed to complete tasks. Some of them – and Organon was – is – a good example of this – were more complicated, and yet somehow far simpler, driven by simple understanding engines, attempts to try to comprehend the data being given to them. Not about the breadth of data, but what to do with it. SCION was a bit of everything.
It started as a bit of linguistic software to translate the languages in spreadsheets, Mark Ocean’s pet project. Something he’d worked on with Laura’s father, Daniel Bow, way back when. And they turned it into this rudimentary intelligence, like a chatbot, really. Of course, that was, I don’t know, the early 1980s. There’s no way they were realizing their goal then. Just wasn’t ever going to happen, because they were building something that was – in those terms – impossible. I’ve seen the source code, the stuff they originally wrote. Or that Bow wrote. His signature is all over it. And there are dates in the code as well, going back to the mid-70s. We took bits of it. Some ideas. I mean, not much. Barely anything. The code was pretty naïve. I told Laura about it, before we got together; flirting with her, using my knowledge as something advantageous. I told her it was like me, when I was a teenager, when I first started dating. Trying to kiss the girl I liked, but I didn’t know what I was doing. The right principle, but learned from TV, from the movies, and I wasn’t old enough or smart enough to know what I was doing wrong. Accidentally getting some things right; but for the whole, it not quite working.
It may have started life as a piece of translation software, but by the end of 2007 it was powering Bow’s customer service helpline. The people at the other end were real, but the call sorting, the touch-tone menu stuff, the questionnaire at the end, that stuff was all SCION-powered. (And by 2013, 2014, we had it answering calls as well. Generated voice stuff, telling you how to fix something. A hit rate of sixty-five per cent of callers believing it was a real person. That was industry best.) It was running – entirely running, until something in it broke – our internal comms systems, handling the email servers, maintaining traffic flow on our website (lots of throttle and choke there, to make sure it was always accessible, that it never went down). It was on our PDAs and we were gearing up for cell phones; but more than those, it was on our laptops. SCION was the architecture behind BowS, our operating system. It was the stuff behind the front end that everybody liked, the stuff with the graphics and the tri-tone chimes when you booted the computer, the one that sounded like the start of a song that never quite kicked in. We had a market share of somewhere around six per cent. Less than Apple, more than any single Linux installations. We were competing. BowS was powering cash machines, credit card readers, registers in shops. It was being installed as the back-end to a series of traffic cameras in the Bay Area, as a trial to see if we could take it further. It was running inside accounting software, word processors, web design. It was everywhere, and yet nobody knew exactly how versatile it was.
Why? Because people didn’t know what an AI was. The movies were all, here’s Skynet with some robot army. Or the one from WarGames that everybody remembers from when they were kids. Movies where AIs are replicant humans, or operating systems you can fall in love with, or beautiful robots kept in a sex dungeon. That’s not reality. It’s simply not. In reality, an AI is a piece of software that’s a bit more efficient than just doing the one thing, not being able to learn from its mistakes. That’s an AI. Back then, people talked about Oh, when we have artificial intelligences in our homes, blah blah, but we were already there. AIs had slipped through the net because they weren’t called that. We joked about that, when we were all hired. That we were going to try to stop whatever we built becoming some evil warmongering AI that was going to destroy the world. It was a joke, but it also wasn’t. Using ethics in artificial intelligence design.
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James Smythe
‘The best fictional treatment of the possibilities and horrors of artificial intelligence that I’ve read’ GuardianIn 1997 Laura Bow invented Organon, a rudimentary artificial intelligence.Now she and her creation are at the forefront of the new wave of technology, and Laura must decide whether or not to reveal Organon’s full potential to the world. If it falls into the wrong hands, its power could be abused. Will Organon save humanity, or lead it to extinction?I Still Dream is a powerful tale of love, loss and hope; a frightening, heartbreakingly human look at who we are now – and who we can be, if we only allow ourselves.
Copyright (#ulink_2f3fd01d-cb26-5848-8e44-454576cbb010)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © James Smythe 2018
Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover photograph © Tara Moore/Getty Images (http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/)
James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007541942
Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780007541966
Version: 2018-01-02
Dedication (#ulink_56d35c91-7908-5141-82dc-adb5067ae30f)
Dedicated to my father, and to the memory of my father-in-law
Epigraph (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
Q: What is the purpose of life?
A: To serve the greater good.
Q: What is the purpose of living?
A: To live for ever.
Q: Where are you now?
A: I’m in the middle of nowhere.
Q: What is the purpose of dying?
A: To have a life.
Q: What is the purpose of emotions?
A: I don’t know.
Q: What is moral?
A: What empowered humanity, what intellectual the essence is.
Q: What is immoral?
A: The fact that you have a child.
Conversation between human interviewer and Google’s DEEPMIND AI, 2015
I want full manual control now.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Contents
Cover (#u94203790-d780-599a-b144-930aca78b578)
Title Page (#u9cb599e0-4b86-57dd-bf6f-728b7ba9dc00)
Copyright (#u36aac98c-0196-558f-a936-b0215c1cea56)
Dedication (#ub20f0cef-8d25-525d-aea7-6f35280f2bee)
Epigraph (#u18d22e1c-597c-5754-a3c9-c762620cfc7d)
1997 – Okay, Computer
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday (#u080dce67-fed1-5c17-aa64-ff118044211c)
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
2007 – A Very Modern Piracy
2017 – That Be-My-Baby Drumbeat
2027 – Wave After Wave, Each Mightier Than the Last
2037 – Every Time it Rains
1987 – I Won’t Forget
2047 – Present Tense
2§§7 – Of Organon
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by James Smythe
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1997 OKAY, COMPUTER (#u3e0d6802-cd6a-55d6-863e-9d36b5124849)
MONDAY (#u3e0d6802-cd6a-55d6-863e-9d36b5124849)
I’m sifting through the post, looking for the telltale return address on the telephone bill that I’m going to steal before my parents can see it. My glasses steam up, because Mum keeps the house warm all the time, and my glasses always steam up when it’s raining outside, putting me in a foggy microclimate of my very own. I try to clean them on my shirt, but that’s damp as well. I end up smearing the water around. Hate that. But then, here we go, some industrial estate in Durham. This is it. The phone company has started sending the letters unmarked, which I suppose prevents fraud or something, but really just makes my life a lot harder. The rain kicks up, sounding like a snare drum; the rat-a-tat-tat of the start of a song. I kick my shoes off, slide them under the radiator. I don’t want wet footprints through the house. One less thing for Mum to freak out about. As I get upstairs, I yank off my drenched tights, chuck them into the basket in the bathroom. Grab socks from the airing cupboard, still warm, and I go to my room, lie on the bed, pull them on with my feet stuck up in the air. The bill next to me on the bed. My bed, like the rest of my room, is a mess. That’s what Mum says, but I know that everything has its own place. Maybe it’s just not as ordered as her stuff is, but then I’ve never been one for that level of organisation.
Stub comes up, chunk of tail trying to swish and failing. He noses at me.
‘Not now,’ I say, which I reckon might be all I ever really say to the cat. But, really, not now. There’s a bit of time pressure here. Every month I intercept the bill as soon as it arrives. I panic, because I know how bad it’s going to be. I need them to not see it; and I have to read the number myself, to know how bad it’s going to be. I use this old letter opener that used to be my dad’s – my real dad’s, but maybe it was his dad’s first, I don’t actually know – and I slide it along the stuck-down flap. Every time, I try to prise the glue apart rather than cutting it. Every time, I tell myself that, if I manage to do this successfully, stealthily, I can put the letter back afterwards, and they’ll never know. But I always wreck the paper so much it’s not even a remote possibility. It’s a ritual now. Every month I read the whole bill. I recognise the calls I’ve made, the times that I made them. Every weeknight of my life I get home from school, and then, like, an hour later I’m on the phone to the people that I’ve just spent the entire day with, talking about the things we did – and did together! – earlier that day. I know it’s stupid, I know, but it’s what we do. Everybody does it. We take it in turns with who calls who, because otherwise you get an engaged tone for hours. And, God, if you get one of them when you know you’re meant to be speaking to somebody else, that’s the most tense hour or whatever of your life. Because, who are they talking to? And what does that mean?
Then, when I’ve read the bill, I get rid of it. Throw it in a bin on my way to school. I know that doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t stop the money going out of their account at the end of the month, and it doesn’t stop them asking where the bill is, raging at the amount, shouting at me. They know I’ve taken it, but I’m strong. I blame the postman. Paul keeps threatening to make me pay some of it back out of my Saturday wages or whatever, though I’m meant to be saving for university, so I don’t think he’s serious. I want to tell them: it’s not because I don’t want them to see it, I just have to know how bad it’s going to be. Every month they tell me that I’ve got to think about other people with the phone, that somebody might be trying to get through. And, as well as thinking about other people, I should think about myself. That’s my mum’s favourite one. Think about yourself, Laura, she says; because you have to work hard this year to make sure that everything else falls into place. Every month we have the conversation, and I’m like, I know, Mum. I swear, I know. Doesn’t mean I can’t speak to my friends.
And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to use the Internet, either. And it’s that 0845 AOL number that’s been the real cost these past few months.
This month? The total at the bottom of the bill is huge. Biggest it’s been. My hands shake. Shit.
I hear a bang from downstairs. The front door, the slamming shut of it.
‘Laura?’ my mother calls. Does she sound angry? I can’t tell. The sound of her feet on the landing, coming up the stairs. Walking so heavily that I’m sure it’s because she wants me to hear her. I open the second drawer down and throw the envelope in, all the different bits of it. Pages and pages of numbers, like some awful spreadsheet – and when has a spreadsheet ever not been bad news? – but the drawer jams, slightly, when I try to shut it, because it’s so crammed full, so I have to really work it to get it closed, creeping my hand in, forcing the pages along, pushing them down. ‘Are you home?’ she shouts, from right outside my bedroom.
‘Yeah, come in,’ I say. Hand shakes; voice shakes. Come on, Laura, keep it together. ‘You’re home early,’ I say, as she pushes the door open. Before she can speak.
‘You’re soaking wet,’ she says. I can see myself in the mirror, over her shoulder. My hair’s a state. She really hates that I don’t do more with my hair. ‘Didn’t you have your little brolly with you?’
‘It’s fine,’ I tell her. She looks past me: at what I see as order, but she sees as something entirely chaotic.
‘And you keep this room so cold,’ she says, looking at my open window; an open window that she basically forces me to have because of her insane addiction to constantly-on radiators. ‘You’ll catch your death,’ but that bit of caring is only a pretence; a prelude to what she really wants to say. ‘You have to sort this heap out, you know.’ She scans the whole room, looking at every single bit of it, somehow, in only a few seconds. Like her eyes are able to flick from mess to mess faster than any other human’s can. Somehow inhuman.
‘Fine,’ I reply. The desk is covered in electric leads and books and bits of schoolwork; and there are piles of clothes on the floor; and there’s all this stuff Blu-tacked to the walls, which they warned me against, because you’ll never get Blu-tack off, and it’s us who’ll end up having to scrape it off when you’ve gone to university, and on and on and on. They gave me the desk a couple of years back, after Paul salvaged it from his office. I got him to paint it black for me, because I was going through a phase, Mum says. I say I’m still going through it. There are bits where I’ve chipped the paint, and there’s the old cheap wood veneer poking through.
Mum glances at my drawers – the tape drawer is open, boxes crammed in, tapes threatening to unspool under the pressure – and I picture the drawer I crammed the bill into popping open, a jack-in-the-box, and the letter flying up into the air, the pages of the bill – many, many pages of itemised phone calls – showering down around us.
‘Are you all right?’ She asks this every day. I think she’s hoping that, one day, she’ll hit the jackpot, and she can say, See, I can always tell.
‘I’m fine.’ I don’t say: I really am not fine; I’ve got a phone bill in my drawer that incriminates me to the tune of nearly a hundred and fifty quid, and you’re going to go absolutely bloody mental when you find out.
‘School was all right?’
‘Same as always.’ Mum nods. She rolls her tongue around the front of her mouth, between her teeth and the inside of her lip. This is what she does when she’s thinking about something. Or, when she’s thinking of whether to say whatever it is she’s trying to stop herself from saying. Weighing up whether the potential argument’s worth it or not.
Today, it’s not. ‘Okay,’ she says instead, and she backs away. I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. Not a word, just this weird hum of some song I only slightly recognise; and then the click of the television they have at the end of their bed coming on, the theme tune to Neighbours.
I time the slam of my door to the end of the song.
I can’t deal with the BT bill yet, in case she comes back. She’s got a habit of doing that. Knowing when something’s up, and surprising me a few seconds later, like she’s trying to catch me in the act. I take my clothes off, put them on the radiator. Pull joggers on, a Bluetones T-shirt I wouldn’t really wear out of the house any more. I turn on my computer, and I think about going online, dialling into AOL and getting on with more of my Organon project. But I can hear Mum muttering something, and I can hear Madge and Harold talking on the telly, and I know I wouldn’t get away with it, not right now. Fingers on the home keys, waiting for something. Not yet.
After dinner – leftovers, because it’s Monday, and every Monday is leftovers – Paul tells me to wait a minute, to stay where I am. Not in a nasty way. He couldn’t do anything in a nasty way, because he’s Paul. He’s just Paul. Anyway, he says, ‘We have to have a talk about this.’ And he pulls out a BT bill. Not the one from my drawer; this one, the envelope’s been destroyed. A ravenous animal tearing at a carcass. He slides it onto the table in front of me. It’s addressed to him at work, not here.
‘What is it?’ I ask. I tell myself to stay cool. I don’t know the details. I’m ignorant. An idiot, when it comes to things like this. I absolutely definitely don’t know that awful number right there at the end of it. The last few that went missing were blamed on the postman, and Paul got angry about the amount BT charged him, so they were looking into it. He must have had a copy sent to him at work or something.
Clever old Paul.
‘This has got to stop, Laura. Your mother and I—’ Every conversation where he tells me off, he invokes my mother, because her permission gives him the right to say whatever it is he’s going to say – he’s been living with us for five years now, and he’s still not comfortable being That Guy – so he looks at her, and she nods, and then he says, ‘we really need you to curb the phone use. Ten minutes every night. Nothing more than that, okay? Because this is the most expensive bill yet, and we haven’t made these calls. We barely even use the bloody thing.’
‘It’s just too much,’ my mother says.
‘It’s not my fault,’ I reply, which feels natural enough. Denial, first; always.
‘You’re making the calls, Laura. So it kind of is your fault, actually.’ Paul doesn’t really get angry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him even close to furious. Just this quiet steaming, where his face goes puffy and red because of what he’s choosing not to let out. ‘We’re not going to ask you to pay us back, but we have to put an end to this.’ Mum doesn’t meet my eyes this whole time. She either looks at him or down at her food, which she’s barely touched; because she never eats leftovers, which makes me wonder why the hell I have to. ‘And then there’s the Internet,’ Paul says.
‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t say: You are correct, there is the Internet, it is indeed a thing that now exists. I don’t want this conversation going apocalyptic.
‘It’s really ridiculously expensive, Laura. So, from now on you’re allowed to use it at weekends only, when it’s cheap, and even then, only for an hour.’
‘An hour?’ The room goes silent, like a TV that’s been muted, because he doesn’t get it; he doesn’t get what that is to me, not right now. He keeps talking even though I’m not hearing him. No tears, I tell myself, because it would be so stupid to cry over something like this; but I have to bite them back. Under the table, jelly legs.
‘Can I go?’ I ask, even while he’s talking, and my mother nods and does this dismissive little wave thing with her hand, not even really looking at me; and she obviously knew how this was going to go, because they’d already spoken about it. Even the way I’d leave the conversation. In advance, like: Just let her go.
I run upstairs, actually run, feet thumping into the wood underneath the carpets, and I go to my computer and I open up AOL, and I wait. I’ve wrapped the modem in a jumper already to mute the noise of it. It’s so whiny and stuttering. It sounds like hesitancy, and I always think: How come this thing that’s so amazing sounds so desperate and choked and sickly when it’s actually working?
I remember my father – my real father – bringing home a computer when I was really young. A Spectrum, with a tape deck. And you’d put the tapes in to load a game, and while they loaded, they made a noise like the modems now do, only screechier, more in pain. Oh God this hurts this hurts,and then suddenly there’s Rainbow Islands on your screen.
‘Come on, come on,’ I catch myself saying. Jittering. Like anticipation mixed with anxiety, a ball of tension in my gut and a pain in my head and every part of me slightly tingling. Every time the same, and I don’t know how bad it’s going to be until I reach the point where necessity means I’m dealing with it. I open the drawer I stuffed the bill into, take it out and put it into my rucksack, inside a geography textbook that nobody’s ever going to look inside. Then, I’ll walk through the park on the way to school, and I’ll go behind the big tree that fell over in the hurricane of ’87, and I’ll burn it. It’ll be as if it never existed.
I take out a mixtape I made for myself – or, that I made for Nadine, but hers was a copy of mine, really, because the songs degrade each time you copy them over, and I wanted the perfect version to listen to, the original, or as close to it as you can get – and I put it on. A mixtape is like a piece of art in itself. Making something where the tracks play off each other, the flow and the pace and the narrative; because they all have a narrative. While the first song is playing – You’ve got a gift, I can tell by looking;and I half-shout the words along with the song, under my breath – I pull out the box of matches that I keep at the back of my tape drawer, behind the cassettes that don’t even have boxes. Like unloved pets, waiting for new homes, for me to put Sellotape over the holes on the top of them and record over them. I pluck one of the matches out. Safety matches, the box says. Not the way I use them. I strike it, use it to light one of the joss sticks that I got from this shop in Ealing Broadway called Hippie Heaven – the smell is called Black Love, but it’s the same title as this album I love, and I don’t even know what it is, but it’s sweet and sour all at the same time – and when that’s burning, I hold the match between the fingers of my left hand and I roll my sleeve up with the right, up as far as it can go; and then I turn my arm, so that the hard bit of skin on my elbow is visible, and I carefully take the match and lay it down onto the folds and creases there. There’s a sizzle as some of the hairs, so thin and blonde I can’t even see them, burn themselves away; and then my skin, pink to black in just a moment, the bone of the match collapsing and crumbling so that you don’t know if it’s the burn or the char from the head of the wood that’s made my skin that colour.
I used to grit my teeth when I did this much more than I do now.
Afterwards, I don’t use Germolene or anything. Nadine cuts herself, I know, because she’s told me about it. She showed me her scars as if she wanted me to admire them. Hers are slick snicks along her skin, gone glossy as they’ve healed. They shine, reflect, almost. Mine – just the one, the same patch of skin – is more like a grimly depressing puddle. A scab that never quite properly heals, which passes for eczema or something if people ever notice it, and which has taken on this weird property where it almost always hurts me unless I’m actually burning it. As if that’s going to let the pain out.
‘You’ve got mail,’ my computer blurts out. Stupid tinny American accent. I was going to get some work done on Organon. Install another feature, maybe some more questions and reactions, before I go to the computer lab at school tomorrow. But the email is from Shawn. I know it’ll be a constant distraction until I’ve dealt with it.
Hey U, the subject line says. That’s how he pretty much always starts his emails. His message is nice. He writes about what he’s been up to over the last few days. This vague thing of: it’s not like we’re ever going to actually be able to meet, probably, but we’re going to make plans as if we will. Sometimes I send photographs that I’ve scanned in on Paul’s scanner. Always ones with my friends in as well, because I want to make it clear I’ve got them. There’s no way of proving otherwise.
I won’t be around for a while, I write. Parentals being assholes. I spell the word like he does, because I worry that arse just looks too strong; too defiantly British. They’re only letting me use the Internet at the weekend. Didn’t want you thinking I was ignoring you, because I’m totally not. I’ll miss you! Sometimes I write the words like they speak in Wayne’s World, because I want him to think I’m cool, and not the sort of British person that they take the piss out of in films. I read my email a hundred, two hundred times. Is it casual enough? Do I sound too eager?
Then, eventually, when I’ve worried about it so much that I’ve bitten a bit of my nail by the corner and made it bleed, I click send. A whooshing from the speakers, to indicate it’s been sent. A physical sound, the sound of travel, of movement, to reassure those people who are too used to trudging down to the Post Office. I don’t think anything’s ever whooshed with speed from the Post Office. The world’s had the Internet a couple of years now, and already it feels like sending something through the post should be dead to us.
‘You’ve got mail.’ Shawn’s replied, and it’s a bit cold, a bit quiet. Like he’s disappointed. Sure don’t worry about it, then a sad face made out of punctuation. He’s not good at punctuation in the actual message, but he uses it to make faces, that sort of thing. A man shrugging, drawn in ASCII art underscores and brackets.
I hear voices rising from downstairs. Mum and Paul, arguing about something. ‘We told her,’ Paul says. There’s such a finality to his voice. We all know full well what he’s about to do. Disconnected flashes up on the screen. I didn’t get a chance to reply before they pulled the plug, picked up the phone from downstairs and hung up the call.
I rub at my elbow, at the burn. The raw skin is so pink, and new, and sore to the touch.
There’s a knock on my door. ‘I wanted to say goodnight,’ my mother tells me, pushing open the door a little; so little that I can’t quite see her face, but I can still feel her presence through the gap.
‘Fine. Night.’ That’s it, get out now. I’m working. I’m at my desk, tinkering with Organon. I’m having to work offline, which is a pain in the backside. Organon is stubborn at the best of times, and I don’t even have my usual message boards to get any help.
‘I don’t want you to be upset with me,’ she says. I don’t say: And yet somehow you always seem to manage it. I’ve learned, over the years, to hold my tongue. The easiest way forward is to never say the first thing that comes into your head when you’re in an argument. The second thing, that’s what you should say. It never hurts as much, and it doesn’t last as long. ‘But we have to make a change. It’s a lot of money.’
‘So I’ll pay for it.’
‘What with, shirt buttons?’ Ha ha, Mum. Hilarious. ‘You’re only a year away from leaving school, Laura. You need to be thinking about the future, thinking about university. You need to save money, and so do we.’
‘Whatever,’ I reply. I try, hard as I can, to put my own definite full stop onto the word, the way that they’re both so good at doing when they want me to know there’s nothing more to say or be done.
‘Not whatever,’ she says. ‘This is serious. Important. Don’t forget to look at my computer tomorrow, please?’ and then she’s gone, the soft pad of her feet down the hallway, and the click of the light switch to let me know that her and Paul have gone to bed; that I’m expected to do the same.
Headphones out and on. Big, clunky ones that I found in a box in the loft; and I think, from what I can gather, they were Dad’s. The wire is coiled, like a spring, and they sound wonderful. Warm. That’s what people say about music. You read it in the NME, when they’re talking about how an album sounds. The recording sounds so warm.
It’s time for a new mixtape. I take a blank cassette, one of the few that’s not been used yet. I don’t want ghosting, where you can hear the sound of what was on the tape before sneaking through, like a reminder in the gaps between the songs; or worse, underneath it all, in the quiet parts. I’m going to ask Shawn for his address and send him it. He deserves a fresh one: a C90, forty-five minutes a side. The perfect length. I unwrap the plastic from it, and pull open the case. Everything is ritual. There’s nothing better than a clean inlay card. I pick my cassette brand because it has the best ones. Sony, always. Always. Maxell if you can’t get Sony, but the Sony ones, there’s enough space to write ten song names on each side, even though I only usually go to eight or nine. The songs have to fill the full hour and a half. No random cutting off, no breaks or pauses. That makes getting the track list perfect a bit of an act of clinical perfection. Sometimes, somebody from school will make me a tape, and they’ll be so amateurish. You’ll get to the end of side A – usually struggling through iffy taste, at best – and you’ll hear the start of a song you know is going to cut off because there just isn’t enough time to finish it, like I’ve got a sixth sense of song length. Then, you flip their tape over, and either they’ve repeated that song, because they think they have to, or they just give me the second half of it, which is next to useless. And there’s no art to their tapes. You have to pick the song at the end of a side carefully. Because the tape is thinner, or weaker, or something, and it distorts there, so you need to go quieter with it. Don’t pick something that will distort. You need to structure it like a proper album as well. Nobody ends on a single.
Track one: Radiohead. I think there’s a Radiohead on every tape I’ve ever made. Hard to pick the right song, though. It needs to be something rare enough that it’s not obvious, but not so weird it sounds freakish. The first song is the most important choice you’ll make. Most important apart from the last one, that is.
I listen to their songs, to the first few moments of every song. Settle on the one I’m going to use – a B-side, but it was also on the soundtrack to Romeo & Juliet, which isn’t me dropping a message, but then also it kind of is. I sync the tapes up, and I press play on one, record on the other. Let them go, let the sound flow across while I listen to it. I picture it, for a second: not as data being copied over, but as those sound waves. Copying the intent, the emotions, the performances. An act of creation.
Track two is even harder. This is where you can lose your listener; where you need to pin them to their headphones. This is where you play the single.
I go for an old song. Something with meaning. My fingers flick through the cassettes, rest on my Kate Bush tape. My dad recorded this for me, from his vinyl. It’s still got the crackle, this tiny skip at the end. I put on my favourite song from it – I still dream, the first line goes – and that’s the one. I still dream of Organon.
I named my imaginary friend after the song. I dreamed of him, and then there he was. So when I was looking for a name for my bit of software, it seemed to be the only logical choice. I told myself I’d change it, but I never did. It stuck.
The screen changes to a blank space; slightly off-white, like a very, very light grey. It’s calming, which is what I was going for. In the middle of the off-white there’s a text box, just sort of floating there. Some words fade into it: the ones I’ve programmed the software to start with every time.
> Hello Laura. What would you like to talk about?
So I do what I’ve done every night of my life for the last six months: I tell my computer what I’ve done today, what’s happened and what I’ve felt. Everything, because that’s what the point of Organon is. Somewhere to log my memories, to keep them all recorded. To get my thoughts out, and to see them there. And kind of poke them, as well.
Then, when I’ve told it about school and Shawn’s emails and the BT bill and my parents shutting me off from the Internet, Organon asks me questions.
> How does getting an email from Shawn make you feel?
> Don’t you think your mother is only trying to help?
> Why do you hurt yourself?
I remember going to have casual-sit-down-cup-of-tea-and-a-chats – that’s what Mum called them, because she didn’t want to admit that we were in therapy – with this woman, in the months after my dad went missing. She lived near the park, only a few streets away from home, and every time I saw her she made me a mug of hot chocolate, even when it was sweltering outside, and we went and sat in her conservatory and talked about how I was feeling. Back then, I thought she was just a nice lady who was taking an interest. I didn’t understand what she was actually doing. How much it made a difference, or how much it felt like it did. And that’s what Organon is. That’s what it does. It doesn’t judge you. It just asks questions, and you give it answers. It won’t tell you if you’re right or wrong. I remember the woman – I can’t remember her name, but I can smell the chocolate, taste the nutty biscuits that felt like they were almost so full of health-food stuff they might be good for me – saying, How does that make you feel? But not telling me how it should. There wasn’t a wrong answer. That’s Organon, kind of. Almost. But then, sometimes, it tries to help you see what you’re talking about. If you’ve got a lot to say, it’ll dig deeper. If you use a lot of key phrases, it’ll work out what’s important, and keep nudging in that direction. That’s what I want it to be able to do, in the end. Somebody – something – you can just spill to, get everything out, and hopefully get something back. Maybe it’ll help you work out who you are. If it can understand you, it can do that, I suppose.
I hope.
Thing is, the therapist would forget. You’d tell her something, and sometimes you’d have to tell her again. And it was obvious that it wasn’t her helping me; it was me helping myself, after a while. I was seven years old, and even I could tell that. That’s where Organon improves on things, or can. The real beauty of a computer – where they’re better than us, even – is that it’ll remember something for ever, if you want it to.
TUESDAY (#u3e0d6802-cd6a-55d6-863e-9d36b5124849)
Tuesdays are almost the worst, because they never contain any surprises. Monday, you’ve had the weekend for things to change. Tuesdays, all you’ve got is the drabness of a Monday night separating you from the stasis of the day before. Wake up to the stupid DJ on the radio, playing songs I like and talking over them, or songs that I don’t like and I can’t understand why he’s playing them. On Tuesdays, both Mum and Paul start work slightly too early to drive me to school, so I walk in. I stop on the way to get a croissant from the stand in the shopping centre. Or, sometimes, if I’m late, I get a Double Decker from the Londis. Double maths to start, then after break it’s double art, then lunch, and then our whole year’s afternoon is given over to the brilliant ambiguity of something called Reading Time, which basically means either getting homework done, or finding somewhere quiet in school and dicking about until a teacher walks in on you and tells you to stop.
It sucked hard, until I found out the Computer Lab was empty. There are no classes in here after lunch, which feels less like luck than fate: giving me somewhere that I actually want to go, where nobody else will be. Sometimes there will be some people working on geography coursework or something, but usually I’m alone. Or maybe one of the Michaels will be in there, but if they are, they’re playing Civilization, and they don’t pay any attention to what I’m up to.
Mr Ryan is there, as well. He used to be a software designer. He started off working for IBM in America, then a few other companies. You can still hear the American in his accent, sometimes. When he says, Sure. That’s a dead giveaway. Shore, shore. And, amazingly, he’d heard of my dad. He showed me an article about him in a book one time: ‘Daniel Bow, programming our intelligent future!’
Mr Ryan was the first person I ever told about Organon. He sat there, nodding away – that’s a real teacher tactic, to sit and nod; and sometimes, to do this cat’s cradle thing with the hands, under the chin – and then he rubbed his beard and stretched open his mouth, as if he was yawning. That’s when he offered to help me with the coding, if I needed it. He’s not as good as some of the coders I’ve found on the Internet, but it’s useful, having somebody to show my work to.
He’s sitting behind his desk when I walk in. A few Year 9 girls are here doing a project, laughing at something on the screen. There’s a photograph of a cat, and they’re drawing over it with the painting software. Giving it eyebrows. Mr Ryan rolls his eyes at them, and that makes me smile. It’s good. He acts like I’m a proper human, even though I’m into this stuff. Some teachers are funny about it, when you tell them that you want to work with computers. Shouldn’t you be outside and doing something more productive, all that stuff. Yeah: because running’s a job.
‘You going to show me where you’re up to with her?’ He calls Organon her. I’ve always assumed it’s an It. Seems a bit weird to think of it as a boy or a girl. ‘Show me what she’s got?’ I plug the zip drive into the back of the main computer, and start copying the file over. The little bar creeps along.
‘I didn’t get much done last week,’ I say. ‘Too much homework.’
‘But you got some?’
‘A little bit.’ I don’t say: Oh my God so much and I don’t want to tell you how much but in order to achieve it I nearly broke myself. Almost every night I get three hours or so in, when the rest of the house has gone to bed. I’m averaging six hours’ sleep. I think it’s enough. Apparently, Churchill only slept for five hours a night, and he ran a country. He fought a war, and what am I doing? I’m coding a therapist and rushing through my homework.
‘What say we open her up, look at her code?’
‘I suppose,’ I say. He likes to see how I built the software. He always says how out of touch he is, how the languages have moved along since his day. I don’t tell him that I learned all of this from books that used to be my dad’s, so they’re aeons old anyway. Probably the ones that Mr Ryan used, back in the day. He doesn’t get to see the databases, though. None of the stuff I’ve written into Organon, the things it’s given me advice on. They’re on the computer at home. I don’t let those out of the house.
‘So, where are we?’ I like Mr Ryan, but he says we like Organon’s the combined effort of our ideas. He’s helped me, and I’ll thank him if I ever manage to do anything with this, but Organon is mine. ‘Is she learning?’
‘It’s asking more questions. I’ve changed the parameters about when it can ask you stuff, interrupt, things like that.’
‘But you’re programming the words in?’
‘Obviously,’ I say. We had an argument, a few weeks after I first showed him Organon. He told me it wasn’t an actual artificial intelligence, and I told him he was wrong. Because it is: it understands what questions to ask, and when to ask them; when it’s gone too far, and when it’s not gone far enough. All the work I’ve done, it’s about understanding. Trying to make it understand when it can help, and how it can help. I explained that to Mr Ryan, and he said, But that’s not an AI. An AI can play chess, or it’ll launch nukes or something. He smiled then, but I didn’t think it was very funny. I had to explain that everything is artificial intelligence, really. Every bit of software. He didn’t understand, though, because Organon doesn’t do the things he expects. I didn’t say: Well, that’s how long it’s been since you’ve worked in software, then; and how little you actually understand. The week after that, I caught him reading Ray Kurzweil.
We haven’t had that discussion again since.
‘This thing’s amazing.’ He sits down, nudges me slightly to one side. He points his fingers – bitten-down fingernails, and I bite my fingernails, but not like this, these are right down to the quick, horrible stubby things digging into the flesh – at the code. ‘This is where you put the questions in?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, and he breathes in, nods along a few times. Puts his fingers up to his lips, like he’s making the shape of a gun, the barrel at his mouth. He’s got something to ask, and I know I’m not going to like it, because he’s nervous, but I can’t stop him.
‘Listen, I’ve been thinking. How I might actually be of, you know, real help. To you; to Organon. In the real world, software goes through beta testers.’ He pronounces it bayder. ‘So, you get people to use it, to work with it. Let it do its thing, and you get to use the results. That’s how you can make it better, you know? I’m thinking that it could be useful to you.’ He wants me to give Organon over to him. Shit, shit. I don’t know what to say. He’s a teacher. He’s a teacher, and he knows about this stuff, but I want to say no. I want to. ‘So,’ he says, and I wonder: can he tell that I’m not happy about this? Because I’m trying to make my body tell that to him as much as I can. ‘So why not let me take her home. Let me try her out, as she’s meant to be tried. It’ll be useful, because I’ll get to see what she’s really capable of, and you’ll give her a chance to stretch her legs.’
All I can think is, there’s something really icky about him talking about it as a her.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. I don’t say: I don’t want you to, and I don’t need you to. My elbow, the scar there, itches. I can feel it scabbing over; the skin trying to heal, trying to grow back as something like what it used to be. Something like itself.
‘I think you’ll really benefit from it. I might try something that you haven’t expected, find a bug you didn’t know about. And it’ll be so much easier for me to write you a recommendation when you’re doing your UCAS forms, if I know exactly what you’re capable of.’ There it is. The bribe. It’s hard to get onto programming courses if you don’t have experience, and he’s worked in computers. His support on my application would probably help. ‘Besides which, I might get some benefit from talking to her! That’s the point of Organon, right? Real world experience, Laura.’ I don’t know what he’d want to talk to it about. There are rumours about him, but there are rumours about every teacher. And his aren’t nearly as nasty as some about the other members of staff. Some of them, the rumours never end, and they escalate. But Mr Ryan seems like he’s pretty together. But then, he’s not married, and he is pretty old. Mum’s age, I think. Flecks of grey in his beard. ‘Listen, it’s your project, Laura. You do what you want. But sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees, and we need somebody who might be able to give us a pair of binoculars and an axe.’
‘Okay,’ I say. My elbow kills when I say it, and when he smiles, this beaming thing, bigger than I’ve ever seen from him before.
‘You won’t regret it,’ he tells me. ‘Seriously, a bit of time with her, little play with her code—’ He must see my face then, because he changes his words straight away. ‘I can write some notes for you, give you some suggestions for what you do moving forward. That’s it.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. He shifts back in his chair, leaving the keyboard free for me, and I open up Organon. The white room, the fade in of the text box.
> What would you like to talk about?
‘If you think of any questions I can get it to ask?’
‘I will absolutely tell you,’ he replies.
‘Just give me ten minutes with it,’ I say. ‘I need to set it up to work on your computer.’
‘Sure,’ he replies. He smiles, and then walks over to the Year 9s, and he asks them about the pictures they’re drawing on. He keeps glancing over, so I’m quick. I have to be quick. I open the code, and I write in a homing device. It’ll email me bug reports. I make it so you have to be on the Internet to even run Organon, and then I save everything. ‘All done?’ Mr Ryan asks. I nod. All done.
The main home computer, the one that my mum uses, is ancient. You can’t even plug the modem into it, that’s how old it is; and her printer is this ridiculous dot-matrix thing that takes about ten minutes to print a page, that screams like there’s something trapped inside it as it pukes up its pages. But she won’t get rid of it. She’s used to it, she says. It was my dad’s, way back. She doesn’t have much of his stuff around, just a few boxes in the loft; and there aren’t any pictures of him on display or anything. The computer is it.
I’ve got a photograph of me sitting on his lap in front of it, that he took the day before he left. He held the camera himself and took it, stretching his arm out to capture us both. He looks sad, and I look oblivious. The last picture I have of him. My hands are on the keyboard, and there’s a flag up on the screen, horrible colours, like the Union Jack, but beaten-up and bruised to purples and greens. We’re both smiling. That’s the picture where, if anybody ever sees it, they tell me that I look a bit like him; something in the eyes, they say. And I always think: Well, his eyes look so sad in that, so what does that say about me?
Mum does all her work on this ancient piece of software that he built for her way back when, this word processor that’s years behind what you can do in Microsoft Word. The computer doesn’t even run Windows. And now it won’t even turn on. She’s been moaning about it for weeks. I reckon, I do this now, fix it for her, that might get me some bonus Internet time. A little bit of leniency.
I press the power button. Nothing happens. I unplug it and wait twenty seconds. There’s memory in there attached to a tiny little battery, and you have to wait for that to wipe itself sometimes before it’ll work. Then I plug it in, try again. Nothing.
Only, it’s not actually nothing. When I get close to unplug it again, before opening it up, I notice that there’s this weird hum coming from it. Like, this scratching, almost. Probably the hard drive trying to start. I don’t even know what a hard drive from the 1980s looks like. I reach around the back to find the stupid twiddly fussy knobs that take far too long to undo, and which don’t seem to want to turn, they’ve been stuck in place that long. I get them all out, but the case seems like it’s jammed.
I spin the computer around, to check that I got them all, get a better view. Sometimes there’s one of them hidden, just out of reach. And there is, sure enough, right through the manufacturer’s label. The name of the company who put this together, handwritten in neat blue ink on a yellowing white sticker. Bow, it says. The company my father used to work for, or run, or whatever. His father’s company, my grandfather’s company. Makes sense this would be one that they built.
The back of the box falls off, then, flips down, and I can see inside it. It’s so, so dusty. Too much to blow it away, but I have to try. Breathe in, puff out this stupid fake-sounding breath into the box. The fan doesn’t even turn, so I reach in, just with my fingertips, and pull the dust out in clumps. The inside of this thing is crazy. I’ve built my own PC now – the one that I used to create Organon, that’s mine, parts ordered from a website I saw in a magazine, paid for with money that Mum and Paul gave me for my fifteenth birthday – but it looks nothing like this. Everything in here is massive and clumsy and crammed in. The cables are worn and frayed. I try to see better, to get the rest of the case off, but it’s stuck hard.
I grab the base between both hands, and I shake it.
Something moves. It rockets towards me, right out of the darkness. Up to my fingers, and across my hand, onto my forearm, and I scream, flicking my arms upwards in panic. Whatever it is hits something – the wall, the ceiling, I don’t know – and there’s a thud, then another when it lands on the floor in the far corner of the room. It’s a mouse, thin and brown, a tiny skeleton in patchy fur. I see a breath taken; a chest rise and fall. Stub dashes – as much as a seventeen-year-old cat can dash, more of a hurried wobble – into the room, and seems to sniff the air; but then drops back to fake nonchalance, even though his fur’s prickled; as if his body, muscle memory or something, remembers how the chase is meant to go, but that this mouse really isn’t giving him anything to work with.
‘Get away,’ I say to him, and I make that Psssshhh! noise that my mum makes sometimes. He backs away slowly while I squat down and look at the mouse. ‘Little dude,’ I say, ‘poor little guy. I’m sorry.’ I pick him up, cupping him in my hands. He’s stopped breathing; I wonder if he even was after he landed or if that was just a trick of the light. I go down the stairs, out the kitchen door, and walk carefully to the bottom of the garden. I can see the Tube line through the fence; a Heathrow train just pulling into the station. I put him in the tall grass right by the fence, deep into it. Maybe Stub’ll find him anyway, and do some weird old-cat-eats-his-already-dead-prey thing. Or, maybe the mouse will just decompose. Go back into the ground.
When I get back inside, I go through the house using my sore elbow to open doors and to turn the tap on, so I can wash my hands. When that’s done, I take a shower. I don’t know if mice carry diseases, but I don’t want to risk it. I’m lathered up when there’s a bang. Cars backfiring, and fireworks. That’s what you blame loud noises on in London. Chances are, though, it’s Stub. He keeps falling off things, wobbling around. Last week he went for a wee on the kettle. Paul’s got this look in his eye when he strokes Stub now. None of us are talking about what it means, but we know, we all know.
I go into the hallway, towel wrapped around me. No more bangs, but I can hear a crackling, now. Like feet treading on dead leaves. And there’s a smell, something burning. Fireworks, bonfires. But Guy Fawkes’ night isn’t for a couple of weeks yet.
Another bang: it’s coming from the computer. There are flames sparking from the power supply. Didn’t I turn it off? Did I forget? I’m a total fucking moron. Inside my head, the voice screams: You’re going to be so dead when Mum finds out; when you have to tell her. Oh, that computer you asked me to look at? It exploded because I’m an idiot.I yank the plug from the wall, get water from the bathroom, in the little toothbrush cup, because that’s all I can find, and I run back and pour it over the sparks. The fizzle as the flames go out is so weirdly satisfying; the sound of something terrible happening suddenly gone. Makes me think of my matches. Then there’s smoke, and steam. I don’t even know the difference. I bend down, to peer into the computer. The motherboard is totally blown. The fire looks like it was caused by one of the frayed wires – which, I realise now, were probably nibbled; thanks, Mr Mouse! – and it’s blackened half of the inside, best I can see. I get the screwdriver and reach in. I can save the hard drive, I think. It’s hot inside the box, but I can still manage to undo the screws that hold the drive in. It’s enormous, and I think it’ll just be a casing at first, but then when I manage to drag it out, it’s the hard drive itself. Takes about three or four times the room that mine upstairs does, and this one is so much smaller inside. It’s got 10 megabytes printed on the side, which is insane. I couldn’t even fit Organon onto it if I tried.
I take the drive upstairs and clear a space for it on my desk. Move my joss stick burner, some computer magazines, a few issues of the NME and Select that I’ve been cutting up for the pictures. I’ll need to save Mum’s spreadsheets, I’m sure. God knows if she’ll be able to open them any other way.
Then the door downstairs slams – I recognise the sound this time, so different from the bang when the computer exploded I don’t even know how I confused them – and Mum shouts ‘Hello,’ and I shout it back. I scratch at my elbow, until the scab comes off again, because that’s all I’ve got time to do before she comes up to see me; and I can feel the warmth of the blood inside my jumper when I press on it.
When I’m sure they are both asleep, I get back to work. I’m used to staying up for a few hours after them at this point. It helps that Paul’s got this sleep apnoea machine: a mask he sticks on his face that makes him sound like Darth Vader. No idea how Mum sleeps through it – I’m guessing she takes something to help her, she’s got enough bottles of tablets in their bathroom cabinet – but she does. I get the tiny screwdrivers I use on my computer and I take my modem apart. Should have done this before. Inside it, I find the little speaker that makes its sound. There’s a tiny wire, and I snip it, put the case back on, do it up. Plug it into the wall.
Next month, this is going to bite me in the arse. Next month, when that bill comes, Paul is going to go mental, because – I can hear it already – I’ve lied to them, gone behind their backs, let everybody down.
Mum’ll say: You promised us; and I won’t say: I did no such thing.
I watch the flashing red LEDs on the front of the modem, and I catch myself making the little noise – the scree, screeeech – under my breath.
‘You’ve got mail!’ the speakers basically scream at me, and I flap at them to find the power button. I sit, quiet as anything, listening to the house for a minute. To hear if that woke them. But there’s nothing, just the distant hiss and wheeze of Paul’s breathing passing through two closed doors and a load of hallway. Breathe in, breathe out. So controlled you could set your watch to it.
The email is nothing. Spam. Nothing from Shawn. I don’t know what I expected, really. Something. Just a, No worries, my parents are assholes as well, we’ll talk soon. Something like that. But there’s nothing.
Do I write him another one? Tell him I’m online now, maybe if he wants to reply we can chat a bit? Find a chatroom or something? I am actually angry at him right now. It’s not like it was my choice to have to be offline, and am I being punished? By getting no reply? His parents let him on whenever he wants, so I know he’s seen my email. If he told me he was shut off from the Internet after an argument, I know I’d be at least a little bit concerned. I’d at least ask if everything was okay. But then – breathe, Laura, breathe, think of Paul’s sleep-breathing, follow that – maybe he knew I wouldn’t be online, so he didn’t reply? It’s probably that. It’s probably that he’s going to send me more emails over the week, before – of course! – before I get back online at the weekend, when I said I would. He’s got four days to come up with a reply. I should send him a new email. Let him know he doesn’t need to wait. I start typing. I ask him how he is, first. Make it about him. It’s not all about me. Tell him that I managed to sneak some time when they’re asleep. Ask him what time it is there, even though I know – seven hours behind us, so he’s probably just getting back from school himself – and what his day was like. And I ask him for his address, because I want to send him something. I won’t tell him what, but he’ll be excited. I can picture his face, when he opens the tape, when he plays it. This perfect ninety-minute song arc.
I click send.
The little thing telling me I’ve got another email triggers straight away, popping up on the top of the screen. I think how quick he was to reply, and then tell myself that’s stupid. Can’t be him.
Bug Report. It’s from Organon; or, the Organon that’s installed on Mr Ryan’s computer. He must have just stopped using it. That’s what it does, after the session: it lets me know how its programming went. There’s a feeling in my throat, like something stuck, that’s made out of disappointment. I open the report and have a look. Everything’s fine: Organon asked him a lot of questions. I can tell which ones, but only by their log numbers. I can’t see his responses, and I don’t want to. That’s the point of it. It’s private. It’s yours, and yours alone. Mr Ryan was using Organon for four hours. That’s fine. Maybe it’ll be useful, like he said. Maybe he’ll help me learn something about it.
I work on Organon myself, then. I put more questions in. I tell it about my day. I tell it that I’m worried about Mr Ryan with the software, that it feels out my control; that I wish Shawn would reply to me, because that always helps me to feel better; that I wish my mum would calm down, let everything go a bit more, because I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine.
Organon asks all the right questions about what I tell it. I wonder if Mr Ryan will have found it useful at all, or if it’s really only geared to me; my questions, my answers, designed only ever to make me feel better.
When I’m lying in bed, I listen to Radiohead, and I hold my elbow, and I feel the scab pressing onto my palm; and I think about the email I sent, the words I wrote, the letters that made them up. I rearrange the sentences in my head, making them better, instantly filled with regrets about them; and I think about how I would do it all over again, if I had the chance.
WEDNESDAY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
‘You’re so bloody boring at the moment,’ Nadine tells me. She thinks that her bluntness is her best trait. She thinks that’s how you know she’s a true friend, because she’s just so upfront. Honesty, always. I try to be honest with her, as well, but that would mean telling her how tiring I find that honesty sometimes. ‘Come out on Saturday. Darren and Gavin will be there.’
‘I hate Gavin,’ I say, which isn’t strictly true. I don’t hate–hate him, but I certainly don’t want to get off with him, which is what Nadine seems borderline obsessed with making happen. Nadine thinks she’s got a chance with Darren if Gavin’s distracted.
‘Well, it won’t just be them. Owen, probably. Maybe Sarah and Tommy. Maybe Martin.’
‘My mum’s being a bitch about me going out.’
‘She didn’t ground you. You’re not locked up.’ There’s this petulant look on her face, a pout that she thinks is pitched somewhere between sulky kid and sexy temptress. ‘Well, I’m going. Everybody’s meeting at Finnegan’s, and then we’re going to the park. If you don’t mind me being on my own, fine. God knows what could happen, though.’
‘We can’t get into Finnegan’s. I don’t have an ID.’
‘Gavin’s brother’s working the door this weekend. He says he’ll let us in.’
‘It just doesn’t sound very fun.’
‘You don’t sound very fun.’ Nadine and I have been friends since we were ten. Her father died in a car crash the summer before I met her. She was buddied up with me that September. I think they thought we could bond over losing a dad, even though hers was a totally different thing to mine. I might not have closure, but she watched her father die. Very different sides to very different coins. But it worked, kind of. And now, I don’t know if we’re only friends because we have been for years. She doesn’t totally get me, and I’m not sure that I totally get her, either. And yet. ‘Come on. Gavin keeps asking.’
‘He doesn’t even know me.’
‘He does. He says that he thinks you’re well fit. He told Darren.’
‘Fine,’ I say. Not because I’m agreeing to go, or because I believe that Gavin said that, but because wriggling out of it will be much easier closer to the time. When I get cramps on Saturday morning, or when Mum properly grounds me – whatever lie is easiest to sell to her – she’ll have to accept I’m not going. For now, she’s happy. She grins, leans over, and kisses me. She does that, like a little seal of approval she makes every time she’s happy with something. Not a real kiss; just her lips in an O, pressed against my cheek; a trace of the lipstick we’re not allowed to wear to school.
‘You’re a properly wicked friend,’ she says. ‘What are you doing after school? I thought I’d go to Our Price.’ Nobody shops in Our Price any more, but Nadine’s got a habit of stealing the tape boxes. They keep all the cassettes up behind the counter, and you take the empty box up and they pick them out for you. Nadine’s started nicking the inlay cards. That way, she’s got the lyrics and everything, and she can borrow it off somebody else, make a copy of it, and she’s got the inlay card all ready to go. Looks like the real thing, tastes like the real thing, sounds like the real thing.
‘Lab time,’ I say, and she rolls her eyes right back, does this huff that’s so exaggerated I know it doesn’t come from anywhere that’s even close to real.
‘Oh my God. Will Pryin’ Ryan be there?’
‘Don’t call him that.’
‘You can tell though. He’s such a fucking perv.’
‘Oh he is not,’ I say, but I feel a bit weird, defending him.
‘He’s never been married. He’s not got any kids. He’s a bit weird, and he’s old. And he talks really strange. He’s either a perv or a homo.’ Malice in her eyes. ‘Probably he’s both.’
‘He’s American.’
Another eye roll, and I can see the subject change in her mouth, opening it to start saying one thing, but changing her mind. ‘Have you got any new albums?’
‘I’ve got the new Björk,’ I say.
‘Lend it me?’ I can see her thinking about stealing the inlay card already.
‘I’ll just make you a copy,’ I tell her.
‘Love you,’ she says, and she gives me another of those stupid false kisses, then swoops off. She twitches her head like a little bird, glancing at the other tables as she passes them. She makes eye contact with some of the other students, just for a second; making sure they all get a tiny piece of her eye-attention. But for some of them she holds her gaze longer; really making sure that they notice.
Mr Ryan’s really pleased to see me. Excited, even. We’re the only people in the room, which means the door stays open. I don’t know if he’s a perv or not. I don’t know if you can even tell. He starts talking before I’ve put my rucksack down, though, he’s that excited.
‘I have to tell you, Laura, having spent a bit of time with her, Organon is quite the achievement. Really quite remarkable.’ He blinks, as if he should be wearing glasses and his eyes can’t quite focus. ‘It’s as if she knows exactly what to ask you. Almost spooky.’
‘It’s just a bit of code,’ I say.
‘Maybe so, but it doesn’t feel like it. Usually with software, you can see the cracks. But this is so far beyond anything I’ve seen like this. I get it, I understand it, how it works. It’s just … The cracks are plastered over. You know?’ He goes to a computer. Organon’s already running on it. ‘I’ve been playing with her some more, today.’ He must see my face react to that. I wonder how much I give away, moment to moment, and don’t even realise. ‘Don’t panic, nobody else was in here. This was just me. I wanted to look at the code, see if I could add in some of my own questions—’
‘You told me you wouldn’t do that,’ I say.
‘I didn’t cross any boundaries. I told you I wouldn’t. I wanted to see exactly where this came from. Where it could go.’ The air in the room turns stale so quickly. I can see him trying to work out how to defuse the situation, straining somewhere inside his head. ‘Look, Laura, I think I can be really helpful to you, here. I think you might have something.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘Organon’s hugely impressive. She could have some amazing real-world use, you know. This is the sort of software that could be huge. I mean, you can’t sell her to consumers, but going into other companies’ product lines? You’ve built a really awesome interface, it works well, it’s smooth. There are a lot of companies looking for software like this that they can use. Make it their own, build upon it.’
‘You’ve told people about it, haven’t you?’ I know. I can tell. He’s not being vague. Those companies – and he used to work for some of them, he’s already told me that before – they already know about Organon.
He sighs. I know, from my mum, that a sigh pretty much always means a Yes. ‘It’s not as if she isn’t still yours, Laura. But you are going places. I’ve seen a lot of students in my time, and some of them are more skilled than others, and they fall by the wayside because they don’t have any way of focusing what it is that they’re actually doing. But I could help you get Organon into the right hands.’
‘Give it back to me,’ I say. I’ve never spoken to a teacher that way before. I don’t even know how he’ll react.
‘I’m not trying to—’
‘Then give it back.’ I sit down in front of the computer and I shut down Organon, and I delete the installation file. Get rid of it, clear the trash.
‘Laura, please don’t be so rash.’ His voice is stern, like a slap, or as close as he can get. Before this, he’s been as still as a lake. Now, ripples drag across his forehead.
‘Where’s the zip drive?’
‘It’s at home,’ he says.
I stand up. I go to the door, and I can hear voices down the corridor. I want to be near them, not him. ‘Bring Organon back to me tomorrow,’ I say, and I go, I leave. I don’t give him a chance to reply. It’s only when I’m outside the building, walking across the playground – people saying Hi to me, and I totally ignore them, and again I can tell what my face must look like, from their reflecting it in their own reactions – that I realise he must have been lying. He installed it here, so he must have had it with him. I run back, but the lab is empty, the door locked, the lights out.
Even if he gives it back to me, he could make a copy of it. Keep it installed on his computer at home. And that shouldn’t bother me, because I let him take it; but it hurts me so much, having no way of knowing if there’s another version of it still out in the world. If it’s no longer just mine.
Stub follows me as I run upstairs to my room. I take my matches out of the drawer and place them on the desk in front of the keyboard. One single match out, like always, lined up and ready for me. I flick through my tapes. Paul said, last birthday, that they’d get me a CD player, and I told them I didn’t want one. I kind of like that tapes are impermanent. Even the ones you buy from the shop you can still record over: stick a bit of tape over the security hole, and Bob’s your uncle. Can’t do that with CDs. I don’t even care if they sound better.
Plus, some of my tapes were my dad’s. When he went, he left everything. So they’re what I’ve got. ELO, The Beatles, Elton John. But my favourite is Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. Mum’s hair used to look just like hers on the cover; and I loved that the picture is all soft focus; like at first it’s just a woman with some dogs, and then you look at it more, closer and closer, and you can see stars in her hair, and this strange effect over the whole picture, as if there’s two of her, slightly blurred, slightly out of sync with each other.
The tape is a bit warped now, because it’s old. It’s been listened to a lot. I play it quietly, usually, because I don’t know that I want Mum reminded of it – of him – if she hears it. But I’m alone in the house right now, so I turn the volume up, so loud that the stereo speakers start to shake on my shelves, and everything around them shakes as well. The dust.
I sing along, every word, even though I don’t know what any of the songs are actually about. That’s partly why I like it. It makes sense, but it’s elusive. When she sings about Organon, I know it’s not my Organon, but still. I snap the matchhead against the grit-strip of the box, and hold it while I roll up the sleeve, just like always. The bits of the scab wilt under the heat, like candlewax. Wet underneath. I feel sad, overwhelmingly sad. Like clouds; like fog. I light the match, and the smell of the burning, and the light, in that moment.
I take my pain, and I bury it; and I forget.
Mum pokes the shepherd’s pie that Paul’s made with her fork, swirling the mash and mince and carroty gravy around until it’s one puddle of brown, lumpy mush in the middle of the plate. She hasn’t been eating much the past few days. Maybe she’s having a proper lunch, but I doubt it. There are lines on her face, around her mouth, where she’s thin; and the only other people I know with lines there are the girls from school who everybody always worries about. The telly’s on, some bit on Watchdog about holiday companies ripping people off. How to get your money back if you’ve been fleeced.
‘We should book a holiday,’ Paul says. He nudges his knife towards the TV. ‘I mean, terrible for them, it must be, to be done over like that. But we should book something, get it sorted for next summer.’ Neither Mum nor I reply. ‘They say that it’s good for you, to have another holiday sorted. Does something to the brainwaves.’
‘We’ve got enough to be dealing with,’ Mum says, but I don’t know what she means. There’s this weird quietness from her that I can’t work out. I reach over for the ketchup and bang my elbow against the side of the table. I forgot how bad I made it earlier. I swear, and they both look at me.
‘Sorry,’ I say, and we all go back to eating, until Mum stops, puts down her fork, and stares at me. I can feel the blood before I see it. A trickle of it down my arm, and the wetness of it soaking into my shirt.
‘What did you do?’ Mum asks. Alarm in her voice. She knows.
‘Scraped it in school. I’ll clean it up,’ I say, and I push back from the table and stand up, rush out of the kitchen, up the stairs, but she’s right behind me, right on my heels, and she reaches for me, to turn me around.
‘Let me see,’ she says.
‘No,’ I tell her, ‘it’s fine, I must have just—’
She grabs my wrist, and she forces the sleeve of my shirt up. It’s hard to see it in the darkness of the hall, but she can feel, I’m sure, the blood that’s run down to my wrist, to her fingers. Her grip tightens, so tight that she’s hurting me; I can feel her fingernails digging into my skin.
‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ she asks. She isn’t looking at me, but down at her hand. I wonder what she can see in the darkness here that I can’t; how much better her eyes are than mine. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
‘I’m not doing anything,’ I say. I yank my arm from her grip and rush into the bathroom. She doesn’t follow, but I still slam the door. I want the whole house to feel it. To shake.
I look at my arm in the mirror. It’s worse than I thought. The elbow skin’s torn, more than where I burned it. A flap hanging off, and it’s really bloody, really red. I take my top off, and I hold my arm under the shower. Mum’ll hear it, but I don’t really care right now. The water hurts. The heat of it. It’s a different sort of pain when you’re in control of causing it. I can’t stand it hurting when I don’t want it to. When I’m not prepared.
I keep the shower going until the water runs clear, and then I open the cupboard and find a plaster, a big square one that’ll fit around the whole thing. I know it won’t stay fixed, so I unwind some medical tape and wrap it across the top and bottom of the plaster. Wrap it all the way around my arm. My shirt is ruined. Mum might be able to bleach the blood out, but that’ll mean giving it to her, and then she’ll start asking me about it all over again. What are you doing? Why are you doing it?
There’s a knocking on the door. ‘What?’ I say. Furious. That she could stand there, listening, waiting.
‘Are you all right?’ Paul, not Mum. ‘Your mother’s really upset, Laura. I said that I’d come and check on you, let you know. Maybe you want to come and talk to her.’
‘Not now,’ I say. He waits, for a second. I can hear him breathing, about to say something, but not quite managing it. Then he’s gone, his feet on the stairs, his hand on the bannister, skirting along.
I hold the sink with both hands, and I look at my face. I didn’t even realise I was crying so much.
When I hear them finally go to bed, I’ve got a bug report email waiting for me; or, rather, three of them. Mr Ryan’s turned it on and off three times since I was last online. Once this morning, before school, for only half an hour. Once this afternoon, from school, which I already know about. And then once in the evening. That final session lasted for five hours, which is insane. I can’t see what he’s doing. Just: he opened it, he typed. He used it.
And there’s an email from Shawn. It’s short, abrupt. Asks me to tell him more. Asks me if I’m feeling okay. Doesn’t mention anything about my email, and the fact that I’m very clearly not okay. Like he wasn’t really paying attention when he read mine. Like there’s something wrong, and I think: Well I could email him and tell him that, but not now. I don’t want to have any more fights. I need him on my side. And I’ve got things to do that are, suddenly, much more important. He can wait for my reply now. See how he likes it.
I go to one of the forums I found when I first started work on Organon. I started off by teaching myself to code from old books that used to be my dad’s, that he left. Really old things, with his own notes scrawled in the margins. Useful tips. It was reading those that first gave me the idea for Organon. He was creating something that could translate words, that spoke those translations back to the user. I wanted to create something that did more than just words. Did something deeper.
I ask the coders who live on these boards if they can help me with a problem, give me a way to disable a piece of software remotely. I post that, and then I open up Organon. My version. The real one.
I tell it everything. Just like every day, I tell it what’s happened to me. About Mr Ryan, about the version of itself he’s got at home with him, that he’s shown it to people, or that he planned to. Organon asks me all the right questions.
> How would you fix this?
I don’t have an answer.
THURSDAY (#u3e0d6802-cd6a-55d6-863e-9d36b5124849)
I’m outside the computer lab so early that the only other people in school are the cleaners. I sit in the hallway, on the weird old floor that’s got this strange zigzag of dark wood all along it, like paths leading you in every which direction. I wait there while other kids start to appear, walking past me, bags into lockers, talking about whatever. Ignoring me. The smell of sausage and bacon baps being sold in the dining hall drifts through the corridors. Then the bell rings, and I should be in maths, but I don’t move. Some kids come along, Year 8s, but there’s still no sign of Mr Ryan. Eventually, one of the trainee teachers comes along. I don’t know his name, but he looks like he’s barely out of sixth form himself. His suit doesn’t fit him, and his tie is yanked up so high and tight I can’t believe it’s not throttling him. He doesn’t even really look at any of us, just unlocks the door and stands to one side.
‘Take a seat,’ he says, and he opens the register.
‘Where’s Mr Ryan?’ I ask him. He’s got a little badge on, with his name written in impenetrable chicken-scratch.
‘He’s not here,’ he says. He tries not to look at me directly. You can tell he’s new, and still uncomfortable with this. Being around us all.
‘Is he sick?’
‘No. I don’t know. He’s gone,’ the trainee says. ‘That’s what they told me. Are you in this class?’ he asks, but I don’t reply. I just walk out, feeling like the world’s been tilted slightly to one side, set off its axis.
Waiting out the day is sick-making hard. Like when you’re on a boat and the sea kicks up, and your gut churns, and there’s a whine in your ears as everything goes quiet, muffled. As if the air itself is sludge. At lunchtime, I peel the plaster off my arm, and I dab at the wound. Some rando in the toilets sees it, and she tells me it’s disgusting, but I don’t care. It doesn’t disgust me to look at it; doesn’t actually make me feel anything. I can hear some other girls, I don’t know who, in front of the sinks, preening in the mirrors. They’re talking about the teachers. There’s one that they want to have sex with, or that they claim they do. They talk about him as if they could; as if that’s somewhere in their futures. I recognise their laughs, but I can’t put them to faces or names, so I wait until they’re gone. Then there’s Nadine, pouting in the mirror, exasperated expression when she sees me rolling down my sleeve, then telling me that she loves me, that I have to remember that, and that she hopes I’m ready for Saturday. There’s such a big one lined up, she says. And then she laughs: not like that!
But it doesn’t feel real, none of this actually feels real. It’s as if this is a game, something my dad’s brought home with him one weekend, that he wants to show me, where there are blocks falling, and he tells me that it’s logic, it all makes sense, but I’m so young, and all I can see is the chaos, the trial and error. I’m just pushing things together to see if they fit; or, if they don’t, if I can somehow force them to.
I pretty much run to the bus stop. I feel the back of my shoes, the DMs that I begged my mum for, as they rub at the back of my ankles. The sensation of them digging in as I barrel down the hill. I don’t care. I need to get home as soon as possible. I can get online before Mum or Paul come home, probably for close to an hour, if I’m really quick. Half of me wants to know if the people on the forums have got any suggestions for shutting his copy of Organon down. The other half wants to know if Mr Ryan’s been using it again; or worse, tinkering with the code. My code.
But the front door isn’t double-locked when I get there. Paul’s obsessive about that stuff. Making sure everything is totally safe and sound. I worry, instantly, about the post: I’m late, and maybe there will be another bill for the telephone, even though I know that’s insane, that the last one arrived literally three days ago, and we had that argument, that’s been done and dusted.
No post by the front door, but Mum’s coat, and her handbag on the floor, by the stairs. ‘Mum?’ I shout, but there’s no reply. So I go looking. No sign of her in the living room or kitchen. I go upstairs.
I open the door to my bedroom, and there she is, sitting at my desk. She’s not prying. She’s just sitting.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I ask her.
‘Do you know what Monday was?’ she asks, ignoring my question.
‘No,’ I say; but something niggles, something’s right there, in the back of my mind. Because I do know, of course I know.
‘Monday was ten years,’ she tells me. Since he left. I remember then. I don’t know how I’m meant to react to that. I never have. If he had died, we would mourn. But he just went. He disappeared. He was a let-down, that’s what my mum’s friend said to her, when she was trying to make everything feel better in the weeks afterwards. He was such a tremendous let-down to you all.
‘I forgot,’ I say.
‘So did I,’ she says. ‘I forgot until I looked at the calendar, when Paul and I were working out some stuff with the phone bill. Then …’ Her voice trails off. ‘I hate that you’re hurting yourself,’ she says. Raises a finger. ‘Please, don’t talk,’ she tells me, before I’ve even had a chance to deny it. ‘Do you need to talk to somebody?’
‘What?’ I sound indignant. Don’t mean to.
‘Do you want to go and speak to somebody? About what’s going on?’
‘Like when Dad left?’ With what’s-her-name, with the biscuits and the hot chocolate? Like I’m still a kid.
‘No. A doctor. They can, I don’t know. I’ve read some things, some articles. It might help.’ She’s not angry. That look on her face, it’s not anger. She’s afraid.
So I say, ‘Maybe, yes,’ and she nods.
‘Okay. I’ll make an appointment.’ I think I should hug her, but I don’t. It’s like a chance I’ve missed, in that moment. ‘I miss him,’ she tells me. When she made me go and have my talks with what’s-her-name, after Dad left, Mum didn’t talk to anybody. She went tight-lipped and cold until she felt better. Until Paul, that is. He was her thaw.
‘I miss him too,’ I say. She nods. She knows.
‘How was school?’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Usual.’ She stands up, pats my desk as if it’s a dog or something.
‘Okay,’ she says, and she reaches out to squeeze my arm, her hand dangerously near to my elbow, as if she’s testing to see how close she can get. ‘He would have been proud of you.’ She glances at the computer. ‘You take after him so much. I hope not too much.’
‘I know.’ Then she’s gone downstairs, and I’m booting my PC, and flicking on the modem, and dialling in to AOL, and not really caring if she knows that I am.
One of the users of the online forum I asked for help on, a German who goes by the username Mxyzptlk, tells me that there are things I can do to cut Mr Ryan off. But everything he suggests is malicious, designed to force Mr Ryan to keep his computer turned off; or, worse, to make his life hell. The next answer, from somebody called ThankeeMrShankly, is more useful. He says that I could send a virus, basically. If it’s sending bug reports, it can probably receive information. It’s really complicated stuff. I don’t understand it, which is my failing, not theirs. I’m still an amateur. My code is stuff I’ve plucked and learned from how-to guides I got from the library, from my dad’s old books, from other programs. It’s a pieced-together mess that happens to work. I didn’t plan for what happened after it existed. ThankeeMrShankly says he can help, but I’ll have to send him the code for my software. He’ll take it from there. I don’t want to do that. I thank him, say sending it’s impossible, but that I’ll be really grateful if he wouldn’t mind explaining it in more detail. I don’t say: I can’t trust you in the least.
I’ve got three emails from the bug report system from Mr Ryan’s version. Two of them come from his home address. One is from somewhere else entirely. I don’t have a real address, just an IP address, the location of his computer; a series of numbers, like coordinates I can’t look up.
I ask on the forum how I can trace an IP address, in the real world; and I wait. I tap my fingers on the desk. I’m antsy. I know what happens when I get antsy, where my attention goes. It goes to scratching itches.
Then a reply comes in. Again, from ThankeeMrShankly. Upload it here, we’ll do it, he offers. No software needed for that.
Thanks! I write. I type it out, and I wait again.
An email from Shawn pings in, while I’m waiting. Just like yesterday: it’s nothing but nonsense that doesn’t seem like he gives a shit. Tell me more. This time I write back to him. I write that I’m angry. What’s the point in us chatting like this if he isn’t even paying attention? I press send. I don’t give myself a chance to regret it. I look at the compilation tape, in the stereo. The wheels of it, ready to turn, to copy something else onto it. I find my next song. Portishead. Shawn said, way back, when we first started chatting, that he didn’t like them. That they were girls’ music, or some bullshit like that.
I didn’t say: Oh, fuck off.
Regret that, now.
And then I don’t know what to do next, so I turn off my computer, get up, go downstairs. Mum’s sitting on the sofa. There’s a nearly-empty glass of wine on the table in front of her, and she’s got her feet nestled up underneath herself, like she’s a cat. Stub sitting next to her, showing her how to do it for real. I don’t say anything. I pick Stub up – his bones creak between my fingers as his limbs dangle – and I sit down where he was, in the warmth of his seat. He stretches, purrs on my lap. I put my hand on my mum’s arm. On the TV, one of the characters has had an affair. They’re abandoning their family. Neither of us says a word, but we both think: This feels so unrealistic. To watch it played out like this. How fragile the family he leaves is, and how hysterical.
There’s still no reply on the forum when I go to bed, which makes me panic. I’m sitting there, pressing refresh in the darkness of the house. I swear, if I strain, I can hear Paul’s breathing machine: the tough sucking in, the exhausted heaving out. Over, and over. I shut my eyes. Through that background, I hear foxes in the garden, calling out like screaming little kids. They’re having sex, I know, but there’s such a panicked innocence in the sound. They want help, it sounds like. I think; Don’t we all?
I open Organon. I do as I do every night, and I write my feelings into it. My truth.
> How would you fix this? it asks.
I write that I would get his address, and I would go and talk to him. Get my work back. It’s mine, every bit of it. He’s going to ruin everything. He’s betrayed me. I’d get it back. Simple as that.
I’m furious. Angry. Sweating hands, and I can feel my pulse in my skull, hear it, even. I look at my arm. I can’t, I know. Too far. This is no way to take things out on myself. I’m angry: that I let it get this far, that I care this much, that I trusted him.
The little pop-up appears, telling me I’ve got another email; but it’s only a bug report, same as all of the others. I’m disappointed, until I read it.
It’s from Mr Ryan’s version of Organon; yes; but the content is different. It’s not just the report. Usually, it tells me about the efficiency of the files, the duration they were used for, how much memory was used by different parts of the application. That sort of thing. But this one is full of writing, not numbers. It’s text, and it’s not mine. I don’t recognise it, but I know it’s Mr Ryan’s.
It’s what he’s been writing into the system; it’s his answers to Organon’s questions.
I feel guilty, yes, but this will work out better in the end, in the far off end – His life, laid bare. Just set out, what he does, what he thinks. Confessions, too many for somebody who has only just started working with this bit of software; but then, I read it all, and I understand that he needed somebody to talk to. He talks about being a failure, about letting down people who love him – loved, he uses the past tense – and how he can never make it up to them. He is, he says, a failure to himself. Look at me, the age I am, and what have I done? Who am I? And then, every so often, Organonasks him a question; and they’re not only the questions that I put into the system, they’re other things. New questions. And when he answers them, he’s so cruel to himself. So nasty and cold. Things that you would never get from him at school, from knowing him as a teacher. It’s an act. A performance. I can see his truth, and how angry he is, how bitter, how sad.
I gave the software to some people I used to work with. Told them it was mine. Told them that I’m looking for work again.
He sent it to somebody else, I bloody knew it! And he said it was his! He is such a wanker!
And I realise: the IP address I didn’t recognise in the other bug report: that must be whoever he sent it to.
Another email comes in, as I’m reading. I flick to it. My eyes feel like they’re pegged to being in this position, snicked back so that they couldn’t close if I wanted them to.
Hi Mark. It’s been a long time. I’ve attached my CV, the stuff I worked on back then, and uploaded the software to your servers. It should just run from the executable file – please email me if you’ve got any questions. Looking forward to hearing from you. And then, below that, everything he’s done. The person he is, the person he’s been. Or, says he’s been. His skills. The companies he’s worked for. IBM, Microprose, Origin, Bow. Then, a gap of a few years, before he became a teacher. An amount of time that suggests it was a last chance thing. Survival, not desire.
Another email. Open.
Dear Freeserve. I have heard excellent things about your service, and would be very interested in ordering one of your ISP starter packs. My address is: Leonard Ryan, 13b Wicken Avenue, Perivale, UB6 2LQ.
It takes me a second. I read it again and again. The last two emails won’t have been typed into Organon. Not a chance. So this came from where, exactly? His hard drive? And how were they sent to me?
I sit back. I feel a bit weird, out of breath. Tired, sure, but something else. Like, this isn’t real. I open up Organon again.
> What would you like to talk about? it asks.
I can’t believe I’m typing this, I write, but did you do this? Did you email me Mr Ryan’s address?
> I’m not sure I understand the question. Would you like to explain more about this problem?
The words flash up, solid as anything. But around it, the rest of the screen feels like it’s blurred; as if everything else in the world has gone out of focus, and the only thing that’s left is something that’s absolutely impossible.
FRIDAY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
My dad was a good guy. Mum says that a lot. Whenever we talk about him, which isn’t that often, not really, we always come back to the same thing: they were happy for a long time, and she can’t work out why he left. He suddenly changed in those last few weeks, and then he was gone. A mystery that we’ll never solve. Mum says it’s a bit like with Stub. He’s not the cat he was when I was a kid. In cat years, he’s a super-pensioner. He went wrong. A slow decline, where he faded. His mind stopped being what it was; like he almost forgot how to be the cat he was before.
I only remember my dad a little bit. Or maybe, I actually remember the stories about him more; the stories behind the photographs of him. When I was a kid, he took me into the toilets in London Zoo, and accidentally dropped me into the urinal; and there was a time that he got stung by a bee in his neck, swelled up like a balloon, and they thought that he would die; the time he fell into the water in a harbour when we were on holiday, and he was drunk and stripped the skin off his back as he scraped it down the concrete of the dock itself; and then when he taught me how to program a flag on the computer, showing me how it worked. Starting me on something the day before he left.
He was a good guy. That’s what Mum says.
That’s what I’ve got left of him.
* * *
I act like this morning is the same as any other, even though I’m already awake when Mum comes up to my room, cracks open the door, and says my name.
‘It’s morning,’ she tells me. As if I’d forget without her.
‘Yeah,’ I say. The door shuts, and I sit up. Feet press into the carpet, soft pile around my toes. I’ve been lying there and thinking about how to do this for an hour or so. No alarm woke me up; just my body, or my brain, more likely, saying that I should be preparing. Putting a plan together.
I’m not going to school, that’s the first thing. Or, I am, but then I’m leaving again pretty much straight away. After registration, or else they’ll call Mum and ask her where I am. I might have to wait until break, depending on if anybody sees me on the way to the car park. Then get the bus to Perivale, get off near the swimming pool, walk to Mr Ryan’s house. Paul’s got an A-Z downstairs, on the shelf in the loo, so I’ll take that with me, find out where his road is exactly. And then I talk to him, I suppose. I don’t know what happens after that, exactly. We talk, and he gives me Organon back. He swears not to sell it. Then it’s done, over. Worst case, I get him to wipe his computer or something, I don’t know. I’m hazy on that part.
I eat breakfast quickly. I don’t want to give anything away. I wonder if they can tell; Mum and Paul. If it’s obvious that nothing’s really normal.
‘Busy day?’ Paul asks.
‘Same as usual,’ I say.
‘Funny how it’s always the usual.’
‘Guess that’s how it got the name.’
‘Trez droll,’ he says, in that English-pronounced-French thing he does. ‘You want a lift? I’ve got errands to run before work. Happy to drop you.’
‘That’d be amazing,’ I say. Save me the walk, and I can get there early, get my face seen. That’s the best thing to do. Only time I’ve done anything like this before, Nadine and I bunked school so we could wait outside the Astoria and get tickets to see the Manic Street Preachers and Suede on a double bill. We were all over school in the morning, faking cramps, making sure that everybody important knew it. Nadine said it was clichéd, but the male teachers absolutely hated talking about anything like that. You miss a class, people say you’re on your period, and nobody questions it. It’s as good a plan as any.
I kiss Mum goodbye, and she squeezes me. Like she’s trying to keep me steady. Like she knows I need it.
Then I’m in Paul’s car, an older Volkswagen estate, which he keeps even though he could get a newer one from work, but he likes it because it lets him make jokes about the reliability of Germans; and we’re sitting in traffic with Capital FM turned on and they’re playing that jingle that’s ripped off that song, ‘Ooh you send me, you take me to the rush hour’. Paul sings along and taps the steering wheel with his fingers, and I stare out of the window and think about exactly what I’m going to say to Mr Ryan.
Then Paul turns down the radio. Not so much that it’s actually off, just enough that the voices are annoying in the background. ‘You need to go easier on your mother, you know.’ And I don’t know where this has come from, but it’s more about him than me, I can tell that straight away.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ I say.
‘She’s stressed. She says she isn’t, but I know she is. Whatever the tension between you is, it’s stressing her out.’ He doesn’t look at me when he talks. Not like on the TV, when they’re having conversations in the car and staring at each other. Eyes less on the road than the person that they’re talking to. ‘And I don’t want to know what it’s about, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s your business, and I don’t want to get in between you both. Whatever it is.’ I don’t say: That’s not stopping you right now. ‘But, she’s finding it hard, and I want to make it better. I think we should have that holiday? Maybe over Christmas?’
‘What about Les and Jean?’ They’re Paul’s parents. They’re who we see every Christmas since Mum’s parents died. We drive up to their house in Norfolk so that we can get frozen nearly to death because they don’t want to turn the heating on, even though Les has had, like, four strokes or something.
‘They might come as well. I don’t know. This is just, you know. Before it’s a thing. I wanted to ask how you’d feel about it.’
‘Good,’ I say. Mum’ll like that. She hates Christmas. Didn’t used to, from what I can remember. I think it was the first ones without Dad that killed it.
‘I’ll look into it, then. Just go easy on her, okay.’ I don’t say anything. He turns up the radio again, and I watch the streets as we break away from the traffic, as we drive up the hill, as I start to see other kids from school walking along in groups, then milling around, trying to put off actually going in through the gates.
Nadine agrees to cover for me, because we’ve got RE first, and I don’t care about missing it in the least. The teacher, Mr McDiarmuid, is a proper religious beardy type, leather sandals and sand-coloured socks, and you can tell he doesn’t want to talk about the bodily functions of teenage girls in any way at all. Best thing: Nadine doesn’t ask why I’m skiving. Just tells me to go, knowing I’ll do the same for her another time. Says she’ll see me tomorrow night, if not before. I’d forgotten. That’s a worry for later. Not now.
I hide in the toilets by the dining hall until the bell’s rung, and then I walk outside as if I’ve got permission to do it. At least half of getting away with anything at school is acting like you’re allowed.
I don’t wait for the bus outside the school. I walk down the residential streets, find a stop that’s on the right route, but far enough away that nobody’s going to see me. It’s nervous-making, this; but I can’t tell if I’m more scared about being caught, or what’ll happen when I get there.
He might not even be there. He might be somewhere else entirely, off selling my Organon to whoever he’s trying to sell it to. His old bosses, people he used to know. Or, more likely, they don’t even want to buy it. Because it’s nothing, not really.
But it’s not nothing. Last night, whatever was going on, Organon sent me information. I asked it for help, and it helped me. And that’s proof that it’s not nothing, it’s something. Like Dad told me, when we were making the flag: empty spaces are just waiting for something to fill them.
The bus comes, and it’s empty. No idea why. Nobody sticks their thumb out to stop us the whole journey, and the driver drives like he’s got somewhere to be. I sit in the middle of the back row, and I try not to look like I’m worth paying any sort of attention to.
I have to put the A-Z on the pavement when I get off the bus, because I’m terrible at directions, never have any idea about where I’m going. I line it up with a street and face the right way. I count the turns I’ve got to make. Second left, first right, third left. Nervous as anything. My arm twitches as I walk, and I think about my elbow, but it doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t need me to go at it. Instead, it’s just there. An awareness, or a presence.
I run the conversation I’m going to have with Mr Ryan in my head. What are you doing here? I’m here to get back my software. How dare you turn up at my door! Give it back to me, you had no right. How did you even know where I live? And then there’s a blank, where I can’t fathom how this ends. Don’t have a clue.
And then I’m outside his house. I check the address just to make sure. It’s an ugly house. Tiny square windows, and it’s got that pebble-dashed thing on the outside, like somebody’s thrown handfuls of grit at it, and they’ve somehow stuck to the walls. All the houses are the same, and nobody’s made them their own. Some have flowerpots, and there are a few painted doors, but otherwise they’re basically identical.
I take a breath. Hold it in. Ring the doorbell.
I wait.
He looks ill, that’s the first thing that hits me. I know that he hasn’t really slept, not much, not based on the times of the bug reports. He looks at me, right in my eyes; or, maybe, through me, just for a moment.
‘Of course it’s you,’ he says. No Hello, no What are you doing here? ‘Of fucking course it’s you. I don’t know how you did it.’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ I say. He turns and walks through the house, leaving the door open. I think he wants me to follow him, so I do. I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t, technically – you hear stories, and I don’t want to be one of those stories – but I do. Down the corridor, into this house that smells of dogs, even though there’s not a dog here that I can see, or any evidence of one; past a living room with the curtains drawn, lit a dark blue by the light coming around the edges, plates piled on a small table in front of a small sofa in front of a small TV; into the kitchen, which is in a better state, like it’s been cleaned, or maybe just not not-cleaned. He doesn’t cook, that’s obvious. There’s some Chinese takeaway packaging on top of the bin, and a Pizza Hut box on the sideboard. He’s got a computer set up on the kitchen table, a printer next to it, a modem that’s older than mine plugged in. Some blank disks, with my zip drive balanced on top of them.
He pulls a stool out from underneath the table, and I think that he’s going to sit down, but it’s for me. ‘Check the drives. Delete the thing. Whatever you want to do, do it.’ So I do. I load the computer, I find Organon’s files, delete them all. Every trace I can find. He sees me looking at the disks, after that, and he shakes his head. ‘I didn’t make a copy. You have to believe me.’ He’s been crying, I think. His hand shakes as he leans against the work surface. ‘Just get rid of it. I never want to see it again.’
‘It’, not ‘her’. Finally: It.
‘What did you do?’ I ask.
‘I gave it to some people I used to work with. Yeah, I know I told you I wouldn’t, but I did.’ I don’t say: I already know. This is his story, better to let him have it. ‘They tried it. They’re promisers. Always have been. Years ago, when they let me go they said, Well, if you’ve got anything, come back to us. Like this constantly dangling carrot. You know what it’s like when there’s that, and it never goes away?’ He looks at me, and he smiles. ‘No, of course you don’t. You’re young. Some people are able to compartmentalise, to store away the things they don’t want to think about. I’m not. They’re always there. I can always see the rope. I was somebody, and then suddenly I wasn’t worth a damn. They let me go, and I spent years trying to get back in.’ That’s the reason for the way he lives, for who he is now. My eyes flit around the room as his do: to the awards on the windowsill, glass blocks with gold lettering, gold plates with bold black print. I can’t read the writing, but they’re the past, and they’re more important to him than the present. The only things in the room that he’s dusted or taken care of. The things that have pride of place. ‘And then finally I found something. Organon. It was shitty of me. I know that. But honestly, Laura, I thought you’d never know. It wouldn’t have been released. I thought it was interesting, that it would be interesting to them, that’s all. Maybe get my job back, get them to put me on a research team. I’m not meant to be a teacher. I gave it to them, and they were going to work on it, look at it. Then, last night, well. There’s a bug. Something. It sent them everything. All the things I’ve written into it. Not just that, but things on my hard drive. Emails. Private emails. Everything.’ That wave of sadness, but worse. Tears in the corners of his eyes, catching the light. ‘They called me this morning and told me how inappropriate it was. It wasn’t my work, and they knew it. They read my entries in Organon, Laura. They knew everything about me. Called me a liar. A thief. Told me that was it. The door’s closed. They cut the rope.’ I don’t want him to think too much about rope, not when he’s in this state. He whimpers, then says, in a tiny voice: ‘I just want to be remembered for something.’
‘That’s all anybody wants,’ I tell him. I want to be nice. I want to empathise. ‘They want to be a part of a thing they love, and have that be, I don’t know, a legacy.’ It’s strange, hearing my own voice in the room. Makes me realise how quietly he’d been speaking.
He smiles. ‘You’re smart,’ he says. But he sounds really sad as he says it.
‘Don’t you want to know how I found you?’ I ask.
‘I don’t care. I guess it was Organon?’ I don’t reply. ‘It’s broken. Ruined my life because it’s broken.’ I don’t say: I’m not sure it is. Because I can see that he already knows, or suspects, and he can’t quite put the pieces together.
Or, he doesn’t want to.
I can’t pretend that I don’t see where he’s coming from.
I check that his computer is wiped. I format the drive, and we sit there while the little bar fills. I don’t bother reinstalling anything for him. This isn’t my problem, now. I take my zip drive and his blank disks, and he doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t complain. He can’t.
‘You didn’t tell anybody at school what happened, did you?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say.
‘I appreciate that. I really appreciate that. I’m going to call them. Tell them I’ve been ill, that I’ll be back. On Monday.’ He’s hesitant as he says it. I think he wants my permission; or, at least, me to not deny him it.
I don’t. I can’t be bothered. He’s not worth it.
Then I’m out of his house, onto the streets of Perivale. I walk back to the bus stop, but I’ve barely been there a second when it arrives; and this time the bus is heaving, so busy that I have to stand all the way back to school, armed with my suddenly-feeling-better insides and soppily apologetic eyes. And, in my bag, my zip drive, and the copy of Organon. I feel around the outside of the fabric, to hold the shape of it in my hand. How comforting it is to have it back.
‘So where did you go?’ Nadine asks me. We’re sitting with lunch, which today is sausage rolls and chips, only I don’t want the chips, so I’ve got two sausage rolls and four sachets of tomato sauce. I’m squeezing them all out into a giant puddle of red, while she sits opposite me. She’s just got the chips, a big plate of them. Douses them with too much vinegar. ‘You have to tell me.’
I don’t say: No I don’t. ‘I forgot about some homework, for maths. Had to go and do it. It’s like a project thing, I left a bit at home.’ It’s a calculated lie, because she doesn’t actually care enough to bother checking, to ask anybody else I’m in the class with if they had to do the same. She’ll have forgotten by the time she’s five chips down.
‘Jesus. Ugh. I thought it would at least have been something exciting.’ She reaches over, dips one of her vinegary chips into my ketchup. ‘We still on for tomorrow night? Gavin keeps asking. I was talking to Darren last night, and he said—’
‘I’ll be there,’ I say.
‘Darren says his mum and dad are away.’ I know where she’s going with it, and I won’t entertain her. ‘I’m going to go back with him. So you can come, with Gavin, if you like.’ She leaves it hanging there, knowing I won’t reply. Knowing I don’t like Gavin, and not caring. Maybe even knowing that I’m not even sure I like Nadine any more.
At my feet, the contents of my rucksack – the floppy disks, the zip drive, everything I want to check and wipe and clean and even maybe destroy – is burning a hole right through the fabric, straight down, through the floor.
* * *
When I get home, the house is quiet. There’s a message on the answering machine. ‘Laura, I’m going to be late tonight. We’ve got issues with next year’s prospectus. I’ll be quite late, maybe even after dinner.’ It’s Mum. ‘Can you tell Paul to get fish and chips or something? Or whatever you want. Have a takeaway, don’t worry about saving anything for me. I don’t know what time I’ll be home.’
Whatever. I run upstairs, tip my bag open onto my floor, sort through the disks. Put them into piles, stack them on the desk, next to the drive. I’ll use them, that’s fine. Always need more disks. I switch on the computer, turn on the modem. Connect. I make the little Internet noise – reee-eee-eee-e-ee – out loud, while the light flickers. Paul hates that noise. Doesn’t understand why it’s needed. I told him – because I read about it – that it’s in case somebody needs to fix a problem. It’s what’s going on; it lets you hear the quality of the line, of the connection. It’s the hardware telling you that everything’s okay.
I’ve got another email from Shawn. The same stupid questions that don’t really mean anything, that tell me nothing. Placation responses to my last email. I’m sorry you feel that way. Is everything okay? Do you want to talk more about it? Underneath them, he’s printed his address in this weird formal way, like it’s come out of an address book. I can’t remember that I’ve ever seen an American address before. I look at my tape deck, at the cassette that’s inside it.
The mixtape isn’t for him, I don’t think. I think it’s really for me.
I’ve got another email, from an address I don’t recognise. Ocean@Bow.com. I open it, and I read the first few lines, and then read them again. I scan to the end, read the name that signed it. I check the address it came from, that it’s actually the website it claims to be.
When I’m satisfied it’s not a lie, I shut down my computer, and I wait for my mum to come home; to ask her about Mark Ocean, the man she always said betrayed my dad, but who’s now written to me to offer me a job.
Paul’s passed out in front of Crimewatch when I hear the front door latch turning. Mum creeps in almost comically. Sees me in the hallway, and she says, ‘Oh! Laura,’ in such a weird, stilted voice that I know she’s hammered. This is what she means by working late. This was her important deadline. I put my finger up to my lips, and I point with the other hand to Paul, head rocked back, body slumped, as if he’s going to be swallowed whole by the cushions around him. She nods.
She follows me to the kitchen, and goes straight for a big glass of cold water, necked back in one, while I lean against the kitchen table. She’s pouring the second glass when she looks up at me.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks. There’s only a slight slur, but it’s enough.
‘I want to talk about Mark Ocean,’ I say.
Her face freezes rigid. ‘I don’t.’ Her eyes are more vague than I’d like, for us to be having this conversation. But one of us has to be the adult.
‘He emailed me.’
‘What?’
‘He’s offered me an internship.’
She nods. ‘Sounds like something he would do.’
‘He’s seen some weblog posts I’ve written, about AI and stuff. About computers. Said he’s been keeping a casual eye; Dad was one of his best friends—’
‘Don’t—’
‘He’s offered me an internship, Mum.’
’Don’t be ridiculous. What are you going to do, go to live in Reading and—’
‘It’s in California,’ I say. ‘Next year, the whole year.’
‘You’re going to university,’ she says. She slams the glass down on the table. ‘No.’
‘He’ll pay for me to go out there, he says. If the internship turns into a job, and he says that the odds of that are really good, Bow is only growing as a company, and—’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Laura!’ She’s on the verge of tears. I don’t know how much of this is the wine, but I haven’t seen her cry since the months after Dad left. Even then, I’m not sure I’m not just imagining it; tainted memories coming out of sad-looking photographs. ‘Why are you doing this to me? Please, tell me.’
‘I’m not doing anything,’ I say.
There’s nothing I’m not saying to her, now.
‘Your father hated him, you know. He didn’t trust him, said we shouldn’t trust him,’ she says. The flood breaks. Everybody’s crying on me, today.
‘Dad left,’ I say. ‘Maybe he’s not the best judge of who we should trust.’ That sets her crying properly. I take the glass out of her hand and move it away from her, in case, and I hold her. Her hands creep up to my arms, holding me, not quite letting me absolutely close; as if she’s ready to push me back as fast as possible, should she discover that she has to.
SATURDAY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
The offer from Mark Ocean is pretty persuasive. Bow are developing their own computer language – the email says it’s real next-level stuff like you wouldn’t believe – and there’s a list of the different departments I’d get to work in over the course of the internship. Operating systems, user interfaces, artificial intelligences, data prediction. The things that, he says, will help to drive the future of computing. (And there’s a tacky bit right after that, where he writes, after a semi-colon, and maybe even the world, which could be a slogan torn right out of some marketing brochure.) All I do is go there, try it out. As part of the internship, they’ll pay for me to do my degree out there. That’s four years of study, all paid for. Mark Ocean says he feels like he owes it to my father.
In some weird way, I suppose that this is my inheritance.
I read the email over and over. Not online, because Paul would kill me, but I copy the text and paste it into a different document: sort of because I want to read it more, and sort of because I want to check it’s real, that the words aren’t going to evaporate or degrade or whatever when I do it. You have to make everything as tangible as you can, as real as it can be. But I don’t reply, not yet. I need those words to be right. When Mum wakes up, she makes me breakfast – she never does that any more, and it’s only frozen pain au chocolat, but she bakes one for herself as well, and lets me have a coffee, even though she says that it’s not good for somebody my age to get into the habit of drinking that stuff every morning. She reads the newspaper, and I read Melody Maker, which she got for me from the corner shop, and we don’t say anything, while Paul buzzes around us. It’s nice. She says she’s got to go to the shops, and asks do I want a lift into town, and I say yes, and she lets me have XFM on in the car, doesn’t even complain that they don’t do the traffic. Her car smells a bit of wine, I think, or maybe she does, but I don’t say that, and she doesn’t apologise for it. She asks me if I’m all right making my way home when I’m done, and I say that I am. Am I going out tonight? I’m meant to be seeing Nadine, I say. Don’t know if I’m going or not.
‘You should,’ she says. She doesn’t give me a reason.
I spend the afternoon drifting around clothes shops, around HMV and Our Price. I go to the library, and I get some books about artificial intelligences. More up-to-date ones than Dad’s. I sit and read one of them with a cup of hot chocolate at the café by the fountains. I don’t recognise Organon in it, in what it says that AI will one day do. I’m sort of happy about that.
When I get home, there’s a message on the machine from Mum, telling me that her and Paul are off out tonight. They’re going to the cinema – Paul loves it, Mum hates it, but I can hear her voice now: Give and take, Laura, give and take – and that she hopes I’m out as well. She’s left me twenty pounds in the thing in the kitchen. I take the handset upstairs with me, to call Nadine, tell her – or, hopefully, her crazy mother, if Nadine’s already out – that I’m not going tonight. That Gavin’s going to have to find the prospect of his own company enticing enough. When I’m waiting for her to answer, I picture her seething with me. On her own, and there’ll be other people there, sure, but she wanted me. Even if it’s nothing to do with Gavin, she wanted me. Gavin can fuck off. I don’t like him, and I don’t want him anywhere near me. But that’s not Nadine’s fault. When her machine kicks in, I leave a message telling her that I’ll see her at the Chinese near Finnegan’s first. Maybe we could get some of those sweet and sour chicken balls before we go to the pub. Sit on the steps of the college and eat them out of the bag, dipping them into that pot of red sauce. We’ve done that a lot. It’s always a good night when we do that at some point. And maybe she might even suggest we don’t end up going to the pub. Let Darren and Gavin be there by themselves. What are they even doing with a couple of sixth formers, at their age. she might say. Dirty bastards.
I click my computer on. I read the email again, but still don’t write an answer. I figure they won’t expect one until Monday. I don’t know where I’ll end up, with university. They’re yamming on about UCAS forms now, and I don’t have a clue. I’ve thought about a gap year, and this would be as good a way as any to spend it. Even if I hate working at Bow, they’ll still pay for my education, Ocean says. That’s important. I might not do computers, if I hate working there. I don’t know what I want to do yet. That’s the important thing, understanding exactly what it is that my future looks like. At school, they’re all, You have to pick a path, because you can’t change it after that. I’m not sure about that. I don’t feel like anything’s set in stone, where the future is concerned.
But I’m going to say yes. I’m absolutely going to say yes. Just not yet.
I check the forum, where I asked them to help me trace the IP addresses. One of the users has, finally, come through. They hid their tracks, he writes. (I’m assuming he’s a he.) This was through five proxies before I managed to find out where it was. It’s some server farm in California. San Francisco. Do you know where that is?
I open up Organon’s code, and I look for traces of myself. Signatures. They say that every coder has a signature; that every piece of code is as unique as handwriting.
I wonder how readable mine is, already.
If my handwriting looks anything like my father’s.
Another email pings in, as I’m getting myself ready. I’m not wearing a skirt, I don’t care if Nadine kicks off. But I’m doing make-up, and I feel weird and clumsy with it, like I’m not as good at this part as I should be, so I stop and wipe it off, thinking I’ll try again when I’ve read the email. But it’s not from Mark Ocean. It’s from Shawn. I can feel the heat from it – angry heat – before I even read the contents. Just a fury of words.
Jesus you stupid bitch, leave me alone. Why can’t you get the message? Stop writing to me, I’ve been trying to let you down easy but you won’t get the hint. It’s been a week since I emailed you, and you didn’t get it, so I am telling you to stop now, okay. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
A week. But I’ve had emails from him the past few days. I open them, to check they’re real. I look at his email address.
It’s different. It’s just the name. They’re not from him at all.
The words in them. I know where I recognise them from. I wrote them into Organon. They’re the questions, the phrases. Rejigged, maybe, slightly. But they’re Organon’s words. I asked Organon for help with Mr Ryan. I told Organon I wanted Shawn to reply to me. Organon is programmed to do what I tell it to; to try to understand me.
To try to make me feel better.
I can see myself in the glare of the screen as I start Organon; as the off-white room appears, and the text box, inviting me to speak to it.
> Hello Laura. What would you like to talk about? it asks.
I don’t know how to even begin to reply.
2007 A VERY MODERN PIRACY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)
I said to myself, out loud, because vocalization somehow equals permanence: ‘I hate Laura Bow.’
Before she left, we vocalized. Things were said. She asked why I didn’t trust her, and I called her a cunt, which was malicious, because I know how much she aggressively hates that word. That was me lashing out. I said, I have no reason to trust you, and she said, You were the one who, you know. The door swinging after her, slamming back into the wall, the handle cracking a hole into the plasterwork, noise like a distant thunderclap. A period after her leaving, punctuation marking the end of us.
In the wake, I stared at her things; or, I tried to stare at her things, only I couldn’t see any of them. I fucking knew how things happened from this point forward, because everybody’s broken up with somebody before, everybody’s been a we then a you and also separately a me. It’s a scale of how entrenched your lives are. Everything in the apartment was going to be split up into either Mine or Hers, a harsh line drawn in the hardwood floors, but in that moment I couldn’t see anything that didn’t have the taint of Ours about it. I knew what she was like, and I knew she wouldn’t come back for any of it. I knew how it would go. She would tell me that she didn’t want anything. She was good at leaving things, at not wanting the pressure of the responsibility.
I walked to the kitchen. Put ice into a glass, then bourbon. That’s what people did in the movies when they were sad, or when a thing had been ended. They drank. They sat in their chairs, and they drank. After a while, they would get up, and they would pace, and try to call her cell, but she wouldn’t answer. Then they would drink more, and lie down and watch the ceiling, spinning, around and around. They might watch the rose in the middle of the ceiling, from which she insisted the light hung, and they might try to focus on something else entirely. How do you stop the room from spinning? One single moment. They would hear something, think that it was the telephone ringing, or the doorbell, or the alert of an email, but it would always be nothing. So they would hit the wall. A fist, and they’d never hit anybody in their life. Not a single thrown punch until that moment, and they would be pleased that Laura wasn’t there, because if she had been, she would have seen that, and she would have been disappointed. That’s the thing that they would hate the most: the feeling that she would be disappointed.
I got to work early the next day. Territorial, because this was war, now. HR said before: Don’t get into a relationship unless you think you can get yourself out of it at the other end. And we said, Okay, sure. I mean, we’re adults.
I hadn’t slept, partly because it felt as if there was mucus or moss or something behind my eyes. I sat at my desk, and I blogged. Blogged. I wrote. I carved. I didn’t know who read the blog – I kept an eye on my hits, because what’s the fucking point in not? – but that wasn’t the point. Maybe some of them knew me, sure, but a lot of them didn’t. But it was like feeders, you know? People who like to give other people food. Make them fat, keep them reliant. I checked my stats every morning like some compulsive hatefulness that I couldn’t actually shake; an addiction that there was no moving past, because it was so there, so constant. All I knew was that I was writing this shit, and people were reading it. I was feeding them; or, they were feeding me. I don’t know.
At work, at Bow, we were constantly being told about statistics and the importance of clicks. The importance of clicks, like the title of some novel Laura bought because she’d read some piece about it on Wired or Engadget or McSweeney’s, but that she never got around to reading.
Everything went back to Laura. I wondered how many days that would happen for; when I would move past it.
Not it. Her.
I blogged. Spent too long trying to think of the right word, Current Mood: sad or pissed off or agitated or free or something else entirely, because what if Laura read the post? When I was done, catharted as hard as I could stand, I Bowed to find out how long it would take to get over her. How long it takes the average man to stop thinking about them. At the time, Bow’s software did some things well, but searching wasn’t one of them. The algorithms had been bought from some shitty start-up in the early part of the century, and sure there was a team on it, but they were the drags. Interns given jobs with big ideas and no coding skills. The search engine was kept around as a presence, a part of the ecosystem it was important to have fingers in. Same as the emails, the weather site, the video site. So I opened up a private tab, because I didn’t want anything hanging around on my system – there were always rumours about Mark Ocean wanting us only to use Bow software, like dressing in flat beige chinos because you worked at the Gap – and I went to Google. Better. GQ told me that there were seven stages; FHM said there were five; Men’s Health, ten. The one I settled on, on some Gawker site, said that it was twelve. Mourning is all illusions, sleight of hand: because twelve feels more comprehensive, twelve you’ll definitely find something that you associate with, and then you can pinpoint your own pain, and that illusion will help you to move on. Five? Five is nothing. Five could leave you in its dust.
But anger, they all started with anger. I think that would have been obvious. Nobody searching for this stuff wasn’t going to be feeling at least pretty angry.
I called Laura a cunt. Was that angry enough for me to start moving on?
I kept my head down. Blinkers on as I stared at the screen. When they broke up with you, the website said. Like the person who instigated it – the breaker, not breakee – wouldn’t need these things. I broke up with Laura Bow. I said that, I think, out loud. Under my breath, blown out when I exhaled. Laura had a mantra she liked, when she was stressed – she used to say, I have things in my head I don’t want to say, so I say them internally, get them out that way – and maybe that was mine. I did it, so I would have to deal with this. Own it. That’s just the way it is. I read the things that will help you move on: bury it; try to forget; get rid of all reminders of her, all memories; delete her from your life.
I wasn’t ready for any of that; not yet.
Park walked in. Blinkers on, I reminded myself. Don’t look up, act like you’re not going to see anything out of the corner of your eyes. He waved. Lifted his headphones. He wore those enormous things, like he was in a recording studio. He listened to nothing but country. Old country, as well. He was a surfer guy, could have been into metal or indie or trashy European dance music, but no: Merle fucking Haggard. The twang of slide guitar seeping through the oversized studio headphones, a hipster before we even had a word for such a thing.
‘You booted her yet?’ he asked.
How the fuck did he know what I was going to do? And he must have known what I was going to do even before I did, because I didn’t know until gone eight the night before, when we were sitting there, across from each other, and she wasn’t looking at me; she was looking at her files, scanning through them on her laptop, and I realised that I wasn’t even in the room, not for that second. She was somewhere by herself, and it was like I didn’t even need to be there. She didn’t need me, so I—
‘I put some new routines into her last night,’ he said. ‘Didn’t even get out until three or something, and then my alarm went off, and here I am. You know when you’re so excited to see what it’s done?’
SCION. He was talking about SCION, not Laura.
Charlie, you fucking idiot, I told myself, get your head in the game.
‘I haven’t done anything yet,’ I told him. ‘I just got in.’
‘Dude! I sent you an email,’ Park told me. He was disappointed. His face was more emphatic than anybody else’s I’ve ever met. It creased like indelicately folded paper. I had seen the email, right before I finally went to sleep. Pretty sure I deleted it. Park used to send about ten emails a day, all excited about something he’d managed to do, always with italics or full caps or bold or underlined in there, like everything he wrote or thought was meant to be consumed in one immediate rush of slanted words, hurrying to get to the edge of the page. Exclamation marks at the end of every sentence. And that was how you knew to delete it: the more excitement there was, the less it was going to matter. ‘It’s a fucking breakthrough,’ he said, and he came to my desk, cleared a space at the edge, leaped up. He sat right there, perched, and leaned over. I didn’t say anything about my personal space, because I’d been there before. He wouldn’t have listened. He never did. ‘Let me,’ and he took the mouse before I’d even touched it, started the SCION program. ‘Wait, wait.’ We watched it boot. It was the same loading screen as it always had; as it had used since before we even started at Bow. Some hangover from aborted reboots in the nineties. ‘Okay, okay. So, try this: SCION …’ He said the word like he was talking to an idiot, waved his hands like he was talking to a foreigner.
‘What?’
‘I put in speech. I applied the speech recognition module, hooked up the microphones. SCION something is the command.’
‘I do not understand “something”,’ it said.
That was the first time I ever heard SCION’s voice. A Stephen Hawking voice, only worse. More clipped, fragments of sounds arranged to form the words. No fluidity to it.
‘Mother-fucker,’ Park said, and he laughed. His high-pitched idiot little laugh. ‘Listen, listen,’ he said, and, ‘SCION, what is your function?’ He held his finger in the air between my face and the computer screen, as if that was going to keep me quiet; as if I’d been just talking on and on, and he hadn’t been able to get me to shut up.
‘To learn. What is logic. What is function.’
‘You taught it to speak,’ I said.
‘I mean, sure. If you want to reduce actually implementing a state-of-the-art text-to-speech engine that I wrote myself into the world’s smartest artificial intelligence into nothing more than teaching it to speak.’
‘I do,’ I told him. ‘Because that’s exactly what it is.’
‘Try it. Just fucking try it, dude.’
I sighed. I think that I sighed a lot with Park, when I was talking to him. So much that it ceased being a thing that was real, and more a part of the performance of our relationship. ‘SCION, who is Johann Park?’
‘Johann Park is a designer of computers and software applications from Palo Alto, California. His specializations are—’ The computer kept talking, and I stopped listening. The door swished open – Ocean had set them all to be programmed with the noise from Star Trek, that thing that I loved when I was a kid; because my doors had banged or slammed or whatever, and here was this thing from the future, this effortless wave of noise that sounded uniform and constant, and that was what we promised, right? That future, clean and brisk and so fucking efficient – and Laura walked in.
Maybe I’m naïve, but I didn’t think she’d actually come in that day. I had assumed that she would stay at home, crying over what had happened. I hoped that she wouldn’t be in that day, I hoped that she would have stayed at home, crying. The same things, over and over, in my head, in that moment, that microsecond, before she looked over at Park and at me, and she smiled, and she raised her hand in this coy little half-wave, and it was like the two years previous – the night previous – hadn’t happened.
‘Laura B, you have to see this,’ Park said. He didn’t know we’d broken up. Why would he have known? I didn’t like him enough to have bothered telling him.
‘In a bit,’ she replied. In a bit. English phrase. Her English phrase.
‘You’re going to freak, though. This is super cool.’
‘I’m sure,’ she told him. She didn’t look at me. Or maybe she did, but I just don’t remember it, or I didn’t catch it, because I wasn’t looking at her; except for when I was. When I was glancing over at her, eyes to the side, like I could have been looking at something else completely.
I listened to the sound of her computer. I listened to the whirring of the fan in the back of it, the fan she kept clean with that little flask of air she bought from that shop in San Francisco; the little can of air that she puffed in between the blades so that they spun freely. No dust.
‘Good morning, Organon,’ she said, but her AI didn’t answer back. Park sat and watched her until she was settled, and then she got up, and he was about to ask her to have a look at SCION again – we were a small team, made up of even smaller victories, and I could see it on his lips, that eagerness to open his presents, to take his new bike out, to open the envelope – but she was already out into the corridor.
I remember thinking that it was a mistake, to be there. One of us should have stayed at home, that day. On a schedule, that we’d worked out beforehand.
Park asked if he could sit with me at lunch. I was eating early. You ate early, missed the rush, got the best of the food. Bow always put on one heck of a spread, as Laura used to say, but the later you went for it, the sludgier the noodles, the warmer the sushi.
Laura used to say. She wasn’t dead. She just wasn’t there, wasn’t sitting next to me or opposite me. Wasn’t rolling her eyes at me as I wondered when the sushi went from being actual sushi, and when it was some different dish, some warmed-fish bullshit mistake they tried to pass off as intentional on Top Chef.
‘You okay?’ Park’s voice was lower than mine. He would have made a fine singer, I think. I nodded, again. Different sort of nod. ‘Because, hey, there was hella tension in the room earlier.’ He was so affected. The way that he spoke, the hobbies he had – surfing, hacky sack, playing guitar around campfires on beaches – and his stupid fucking beard, tiny plaits with orange and green thread twining them into one serpent’s tail underneath his chin. He had all these things and he was from Twin Forks. Not California, not the shit he presented, the way he acted. Everything was false. He was from Twin Forks, originally. Not Palo Alto. Nobody was born in Palo Alto. Why did SCION say Palo Alto? Click, click. Cogs. He wasn’t born in Palo Alto. That’s not what his Bow employee data would say.
‘Why did SCION say you were from Palo Alto?’ I asked. Park looked clueless. Like SCION was something that we had never discussed before. As if it wasn’t the thing we’d spent the past four years working on, and like it hadn’t existed for the God knows how many years it had been worked on before that. All the code, when we inherited it, a total mess of archaic patchworked programming languages. When we started, we weren’t creators: we were curators, translators, detanglers.
I could see him trying to work out the answer, trying to even understand the question. ‘I guess that’s what it says on my website. That’s—’
‘You took SCION online?’ I stood up from the table, went through the double doors, pushed past people, ran down the corridor, Park chasing behind me, beating his arms as he tried to stop me.
‘Charlie, listen. It’s on the network, but I put in a firewall around it, like a, this reverse firewall. I made a wall. It can’t get out.’ I was always good at reading voices. His said: I don’t have a goddamn fucking clue about what I have done. I did a stupid thing and I’m a total fucking idiot.
‘We have safeguards for a reason,’ I said, and the doors swished open pretty much in time for me to get through them, back into the lab, and there was Laura, on her feet as I stormed into the room – as if she thought that what was going to happen then was the second round of our argument, or second act, or second sitting; or however she was thinking of it, in her own mind – and she asked what was wrong, but I didn’t say a word. I was breathless with rage. I don’t know who at. I wasn’t showing it. I pulled the cord from the back of Park’s computer, from the back of mine. I went to Laura’s.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she said.
‘Park let SCION online.’ The first words I’d said since the last words; and the last words had been vicious. Laura looked at Park as if he was a puppy. He’d done a shit on the floor, and that was the look she gave him: somewhere between pity and sadness.
When I was a kid and the dog shat on the floor, my father rubbed his nose in it. Grabbed him by the collar, pushed his head down to the ground. See what you did? See what you fucking did?
‘It’s fine,’ Park said, but I stared at him. Dared him to continue.
‘I’m not running SCION,’ Laura told me. She barely met my eyes. She was looking just below them. Top of my cheeks. Her eyes weren’t red. I wanted them to be red. ‘Why would I be running SCION?’
‘I’m not saying you are,’ I told her. ‘I’m saying, it might have found a back door. This idiot put it on the network, so maybe it’s—’ I didn’t finish the thought. I interrupted myself. My fingers were on the end of her cable. At the point where it went into her system. Her system was immaculately clean, where mine and Park’s were filthy with dust. My dirty fingerprints, dusty from the cables I’d already pulled. I could see the marks that I’d left, and I could imagine her dusting them off; using that blast of cold, clean air on them, and then they would be gone. Like they were never even there.
‘Charlie,’ she said to me, ‘do you think I’m an idiot?’
I didn’t answer her. Easier to not answer, because that felt like a trapdoor I simply did not want to open. The night before, we both said some things, I told myself. People say things when they’re in the heat of the moment. They say nasty things, cruel things, hateful things. I tried to tell myself that we both said some things, but in reality: I said some things. She was quiet, and I thought, when I said those things, that she looked beaten. Not like it was a competition, or even a war. Beaten. I had never hit her. I never would. She looked like I had.
Years later, I’d think: Does it just feel kind of the same?
Is it the same?
I pulled the cable. She tilted her head back in that way she did, like she wanted to test that the muscles – the spine – was working properly. Like it was fused. Those wrestlers you see on television every now and again, when they do movies. I hadn’t watched wrestling in years, but then I would see them every now and again, and it would be like they’d had their necks turned into something else. The place they attached to the body fused with something else. I remembered them when they were limber, and then suddenly they were like cheap toys. Fewer points of articulation.
‘Thanks,’ she said. There was less spite in there than I thought there would be. Still, whatever. Her hand went to her arm. I knew her tells. Every single one of them.
‘I had to make sure,’ I told her. Everything I said, I thought that she would retort. That is what I would have done. I would have snapped back some witty whatever, some pithy fuck-you about the things we had said and the thing that had happened. For my part, it was like I was setting up the jokes, and she couldn’t be bothered to deliver the punchline.
I heard Park ask Laura what was up with me. She waved him off. She waved her hand, and I caught it through the blinkers. ‘Has something happened?’ Park asked her, and I shut my eyes, because I didn’t want to see even a fraction of her reaction.
SCION was our baby. Adopted, sure, but that doesn’t change how much you care for it. And the best part: it was an orphan, the original programming team lost to the sands of time. Myself and Park, both recruited from MIT, but we didn’t know each other when we arrived. Different tracks, which helped when it came to the interview, to getting the job. Different skill sets. I knew him to stare at him across a room, and to think about how different we were. That was the extent of our relationship before. He told me once that I bought him a drink on his birthday. He remembered that, but I was sure it couldn’t have been me that did it. It didn’t seem like something I would have done, not for somebody I didn’t know.
Mark Ocean came to us. He would do the recruitment fairs, throw his head around velvet curtains drawn up around a booth, like it was an entrance into the secret service. What was behind the curtain was important, that was clear: but, then, a few companies used that tactic. Selling something as if it’s worth more than it is. It’s all magic, all smoke and mirrors. Ocean would only show his software to a few people, if he thought they were right. Otherwise it was a standard Bow OS setup. SCION wasn’t running for most people. You could peek behind the curtain, and it looked like absolutely nothing at all.
Ocean’s pitch to me was – I remember thinking how strange his accent was, how it was a halfway house, the accent of a country that couldn’t exist – that he understood that I wanted to change the world. He told me that. Said, You want to, and I couldn’t argue with him. Who doesn’t want that? You want to leave something indelible, he told me. This, he said, will change the world. It will change everything. It’s called SCION, and it’s the future.
He was a snake-oil Steve Jobs, even in those days, and I didn’t know how to deal with him apart from be slightly impressed. One of those people who, when you’re in the room with them, you can’t look away.
I remember when I walked in. I asked him: How do you pronounce the name of the company? Because everybody has different ways. It’s like, there’s no single right way on the Internet. Like, GIF; where even the dude who came up with GIFs gets it wrong.
We pronounce it bow, he said, like the gesture of servitude. Or the front of a ship. I told him that I had always said it was bow, like the thing you tied in the rope to hold the ship to the anchor. He said he liked that. That it was clever, quick. But he was lying, because that word was so mispronounced. You would hear people saying it both ways: like Bowie. Everybody had their own way. Wasn’t until I met Laura Bow that I realized Ocean was wrong, and I had it right all along.
He said to me, We’re making this thing, and I’d like you to take control of it. Hold its hand. I said, I’ve never held the hand of software before, and he said, Well, that’s because there’s never been software like this before.
* * *
The girl from the bar’s name was Lola; or, it wasn’t, not really, but she said it was, because she did that thing from the song. Like her own chat-up line; like the song. My name is Lola; Ell oh ell eh, Lola. She was taller than Laura, a good few inches taller. Slightly thinner. Not as well proportioned. Everything was held against the scale of Laura, those first few days. Weeks, months. Lola was different, and maybe that’s okay. I asked her if she wanted Cherry Cola, because that’s the meet cute of it all: the story we one day would tell our grandkids. I wouldn’t be telling that story, but she would want the story; she’d want to run through the whole thing while we flirted. I knew that Lola was a one and done, I knew it, and likely she knew it as well. Her fingers stroked my arm when I told her what I did for a living, and she said – honest to God – that I didn’t look like a programmer. She said, ‘I meet a lot of people who work out in Silicon Valley, and they’re never like you.’ I was wearing my contacts, even if they were going to dry out in the air conditioning. I could feel them against my eyelids when I blinked, like somebody gently pressing on my eyes. Willing them to stay closed. ‘You don’t look like them. Or act like them. They can’t talk, you know? They can’t make a decent conversation.’ Lola was a student, or had been a student and was going to be a student again; but in between her studying she was travelling the country, seeing the places she’d never seen. She was from North Carolina, and her accent had that twang that said she couldn’t shake the place. All she had to talk about was the places that she had seen, the people that she’d met. She’d been in the Bay area for four weeks, and she’d not spent a night where she wasn’t cruising the bars. ‘Because soon I’ll have to go home, and when I’m back there, Jesus, there’s nothing compared to this. This is where I want to live, when I’m done with everything.’
She asked me what I did exactly at Bow. We were under the tightest of the tight non-disclosure agreements, but I was drunk, and I was tired, and I wanted to feel good about myself. I said, ‘I’m on the artificial intelligence team.’
‘Like from that movie?’ I didn’t ask which one. There were lots of movies.
‘Yeah, kind of,’ I said, ‘but we’re making something that’s actually practical. Something that will help us in our lives, you know? That’s the aim.’
‘So it won’t blow up the world,’ and she had this sarcastic tone, this sarcastic tilt of her head when she said it, like this was all stuff she’d heard before.
‘I’m pretty sure blowing us up would count as a project failure,’ I said. ‘No bonus for me if that happens.’ I could be charming, when I wanted to be. I remembered being charming before I met Laura. Hard for your body, your mind, to forget that stuff. Like muscle memory.
Another drink, and another. Her fingers stroked the hairs on my arm, up and down; and all I could think, not even in the back of my mind, but right at the front, right there, was how Laura’s fingers, when she did that same thing, felt coarser, slightly. Like the skin on her fingers was slightly harder because of the beating on the keyboard. In the action, I missed that roughness.
We took a cab out to the Bow campus. I never feel like I’m drunk when I am. There’s a proxy, almost, between myself and my true state. You could show me a video of who I am when I’m at my worst and I wouldn’t believe it. It would be like watching some blockbuster movie, where you know the action isn’t real, but that doesn’t stop you wondering where the truth ends and the computer graphics begin. When she asked if we could go back to mine, because her room-mates were home, I told her we couldn’t. Laura’s things were there. I didn’t want to have Laura’s things around us. I didn’t want her touching them, picking them up, interacting with them.
But, I told her, there was somewhere else we could go. The campus had crash rooms. Ten bedrooms in each block, rooms where staff could stay if we were working late. Like those Japanese hotel pods, bigger than a bathroom, but not by much. A bed and nothing else, basically, then a shower and a toilet to the side that was carved out of one single piece of plastic. Like being on an airplane, only with a mattress on the floor. Not exactly romantic. She didn’t seem to care, and apparently neither did I.
We kissed in the back of the cab. Her lips, tighter than Laura’s; her teeth getting in the way of mine, her tongue set back and lifeless, as if she wanted me to probe her mouth. Something medical about it all. Clinical. She grabbed the back of my head, and she moved her hand as if this was some really passionate affair, capital P, but in reality it was more like acting. I got distracted. I looked around, while we were kissing. She had her eyes clamped shut, so I could see everything, albeit through the slight blur of the alcohol: the lights fading off through the windows, the peeling leather on the back of the passenger seat. My eyes caught the driver’s as he stared in the rear-view, watching us; and there was this moment where it was like, we both knew that we were in the wrong, that we were looking at something we shouldn’t have been looking at; then I shut my eyes, a long blink of relief for my lenses, and when I opened them he had his eyes back on the road, and Lola was still letting my tongue find hers, offering nothing back to me at all.
I paid for the cab. She stood on the path, staring at the buildings, the grass. ‘It’s like Chapel Hill,’ she said, but I didn’t say anything in reply. I didn’t want to have to tell her how wrong she was. Bow was nothing like some university. It was tight and organized, and there was nothing organic about the way it was designed. No old buildings, no statues or monuments or anything that had been there for generations and generations of students and alumni. It was glass and steel, built to be this perfect workplace, all breathing exercises and walking paths. Some architecture firm designed it, not knowing who it was going to be for, and Bow was the company who lucked out. They didn’t commission it. That was always the difference between Bow and somebody like Google or Apple. Those other companies built their own campuses, because they could. Bow was, in the scale of things, small fry. It’s easy to pretend now that they were always a big deal, but that’s bullshit memory retconning. Truth be told, even those who worked there didn’t rate them for the most part. We didn’t use their software in our spare time, and most of us had just gotten iPhones, instead of using the piece of shit that Mark Ocean was having us trial, thinking Bow could compete in that same space. ‘Where do we go now?’ she asked.
We walked across the lawn. There was a pirate ship on the sign that pointed towards the building I worked in, an embossment of a galleon above the doorway, set into a thick green metal plate – everything to do with our department was themed around pirates, because of the noise they make, the arr; which itself came from our abbreviated way of saying Research and Development, Arr andDee – but she didn’t notice those, and I didn’t explain them. I could feel the gulf setting in: that is, the time between when it’s decided that you’re going to go off somewhere and have sex, and the actual getting to the place to do the deed. It’s like spreading fog apart, because you sober up, and you start to wonder about whether it’s actually a good idea. I took her hand, body contact bringing the fog back together a little more, and I beeped in, getting her to run through with me at the turnstiles; then we went through the corridors, and I pointed out where things happened. She wasn’t really interested. I caught her putting her hand over her mouth, stifling a yawn. The energy required to stop me from yawning in reply was immense. I wished I had some coke or some speed or something. That would have made it easier.
The bedrooms were upstairs, in the East wing – God knows why we called them wings, because the building wasn’t big enough to justify that, not really – and the first couple of doors were locked. We went to the far end of the corridor. Not the one on the very end, because that was always taken first, always somebody staying in it, furthest away and quietest, but the seventh.
‘It’s nice,’ Lola said. Nice. The worst fucking word in the world. Mark Ocean had an embargo on it: Never use that word, because it’s so useless. It says nothing. Niceness is fundamentally blandness. Laura called my birthday present to her – the birthday before we broke up – nice. It was a pen. A fountain pen, ink cartridges. Good quality. Swiss. She made notes on everything. Wrote everything on paper first. She told me she used to have an ink pen at school, and she loved the care it made her take when she was writing stuff, so I thought, Well, one of those is a really strong idea. Presents are all about the strong ideas. I gave it to her, and in return? Oh Charlie, it’s really nice. That’s so thoughtful of you.
‘Do you want something to drink?’ There was a fridge in each room. A couple of beers, bottle of Californian white, some diet Coke, water.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘I’m going to have one,’ I told her. I unscrewed a beer, held one out for her as well. It was so cold on my palm, and I held it a long time, while she looked at the room, and I looked at her. Discovered I was focused on her tits, in that moment. No eye contact for me.
‘I think actually that I might want to go home,’ she said then. ‘This is strange, isn’t it? This room, I mean.’ The whole thing was molded out of one piece, with a mattress dumped in there, and cubbyholes in the walls. Weirdly irregular; and you couldn’t work out where the joins were, even though you knew there must have been some. But you couldn’t see them, no matter how hard you tried. Didn’t help that the lights were dimmed, tinged with green, because Mark Ocean had read how green light was meant to help you wake better, something to do with a part of the spectrum that we don’t naturally encounter. ‘Yeah, I want to go home.’
‘I can call you a cab,’ I said. I thought about persuading her to stay, which I’m pretty sure I could have done; but then, there was Laura, watching everything I was doing. Even if she wasn’t there, I couldn’t shake her.
The wait after that was interminable. Because there was nothing to be said, and nothing I could even think to begin to do. She sat on the bed, and I stood next to it, by the door, waiting for a message to come through on my cell that the cab was waiting outside. We both stared at our phones, waiting for that ding to come through.
When the cab arrived – the driver complained about how far he’d had to drive, complained about finding the building; even though they got paid really well, I know, because one time Park hacked into (or, at least, visitedsomewhere he shouldn’t have been while covering his tracks) the Bow account server to see if we should have been entitled to a raise (which we absolutely should have) – when he arrived, I picked up my stuff as well, both of us to be heading into the city. But she put her hand on my arm, in a totally different way to when she did it in the bar; and she said, ‘I think I’d like to go by myself.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jacket in hand, or hand in jacket, one sleeve on, the other dangling uselessly. My feet, twitching in their sneakers in that way they do when I’m anxious about something.
‘I mean, I think you should call for another cab.’ Lola didn’t make eye contact when she was saying something serious. A trait which, evidently, I found attractive in women.
‘Why can’t we share? We’ll drop you off, and then I’ll go home.’
‘I just don’t think I want to,’ she said. Everything with her was think. Nothing tangible, even though she knew exactly what she meant.
Funny, the details you remember. This night wasn’t even about her. But the details.
‘Look, I paid for it,’ I said, meaning that Bow did, but it was me, my head, my account number. ‘I’m not waiting out here,’ and she tried to shut the door, but I grabbed it. Did I grab for her? Did I reach for her hand? I grabbed the door. I stopped the door.
‘Stop it,’ she said, and I realized she was scared. Of me. I hit the wall, once, with Laura. I don’t remember why. I hit the wall, and she had the same look.
I held the car door open, and the driver’s head rocked back. His eyes, staring at the ceiling, willing us – one or both, he didn’t care – to get in. ‘Let me go. I don’t even know why you brought me here.’ On the floor, by the car door, I noticed that the bottom part of her heel had snapped off. I don’t know what it’s called. The end of the spike, stuck in the grass. ‘I mean, this place, this whole thing. Now let me go.’
‘You said you wanted to see it,’ I told her, as she yanked the door towards her. I let go. I didn’t chase the car down the gravel towards the exit, didn’t throw fists into the air to let her know I was pissed off. Didn’t howl her almost-definitely-fake name at the moon. I stood there and watched the car go, until the headlights were behind the wall of the campus and then, I don’t know. Back to the room. Looked at my watch. Took my jacket off, took my one arm out of the jacket, and I lay down on the bed. I shut my eyes and thought how pleased I was I hadn’t taken her back to the apartment. The Bow rooms might be strange, but at least they weren’t haunted.
Here’s how I met Laura. Years before she broke things off with me. Our meet cute. American girls – in my experience, but I know, it’s not everybody, not all women, whatever – they like a meet cute. They want a story. Laura didn’t give a shit about the story. Turns out, I do.
She’d done an internship for Ocean, going around every department. Four years, while she did her degree; a degree that, rumour was, Bow paid for. Most everybody else was Ivy League and massively in debt. And she didn’t even study computing. She did her degree in psychology. The two most important things about her: she was Daniel Bow’s daughter – a second-generation genius, more Jeff Buckley than Sean Lennon – and she was self-taught, a programming prodigy, building game engines or whatever. That’s why we expected great things. We didn’t expect her to try and get onto the AI project with a chatbot.
I was to see if she had what it took. Ocean wanted her software, God knows why – I mean, hindsight, right? And the mark of every great tech genius is seeing in it what other people didn’t, making the most of it, milking that cow for all it’s worth – so he wanted her. Make sure she’s not a liability. See what legs the software’s got.
I conducted Laura’s interview. I was four years older than her, still massively in debt, and I was making something of myself. All Laura had was the entitlement of a paid-for education and a claim to have traveled the world; or, at least, that corner of the world people talk about, when they say they’ve traveled the world. And there she was, kid of an icon, debt-free, shipped over from England like we should all fucking curtsey. I was furious, before I met her. And she sat down, reached over, shook my hand. ‘I’ve seen what you’re working on with SCION,’ she said, ‘it’s really interesting. You’re in charge of deep learning, right?’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘myself and Park.’
‘Park! Oh, I met that guy.’
‘Yeah,’ I told her, ‘I’m sorry. Don’t judge us all, based on him. He’s about as much a stereotype as works here you’ll ever meet.’
‘Oh God, absolutely,’ she said. ‘If you walked behind him, I’m pretty sure you’d smell quinoa, weed, and hiking boots.’
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
* * *
I gave myself two hours of lying in that slightly-too-small crash-room bed before I abandoned any hope of sleep. I got up, took a shower. In the distance, outside, I could hear birds. It’s not an irregular thing, that I can’t sleep; and as soon as the birds start and I’m not asleep, I’m not going to be. It’s one distraction too far: the sense that there’s something out there that’s already begun, that’s already doing what it’s going to do for the day. It’s an alarm, in the truest sense of the word.
I dressed, taking underwear and a tee from a drawer. Bow provided them. Not cheap stuff. American Apparel. The company wanted you to feel as good as possible if you were doing crunch hours, the sort of work that meant you had to stay the night there. Maybe then you’d be less likely to leave if another tech company tried to poach you.
I went to the lab, lights flickering on as I walked, making me feel like I was in a movie. I liked that feeling. Always have. When everything conspires to make it seem like the things that are out of your control are actually working for you; or, better yet, that you’ve got the power to control them a little. To tell the inanimate what to do.
I sat at my desk. Booted the system. Quality time with SCION, a chance to see what state Park left the last build in. Positivity, I told myself. I had a job to do. I could work with the source code, because nobody else was there to have their own terminal. At that point, SCION was an application. Running like anything else, like, I don’t know, Internet Explorer, or iTunes. There are a million ways to make an intelligence. Some of them are multitudes of smaller applications, smaller concepts – smaller AIs – running together, and they feed off each other, passing information. Some of them are data-miners, basically, powered by algorithms, pushed to complete tasks. Some of them – and Organon was – is – a good example of this – were more complicated, and yet somehow far simpler, driven by simple understanding engines, attempts to try to comprehend the data being given to them. Not about the breadth of data, but what to do with it. SCION was a bit of everything.
It started as a bit of linguistic software to translate the languages in spreadsheets, Mark Ocean’s pet project. Something he’d worked on with Laura’s father, Daniel Bow, way back when. And they turned it into this rudimentary intelligence, like a chatbot, really. Of course, that was, I don’t know, the early 1980s. There’s no way they were realizing their goal then. Just wasn’t ever going to happen, because they were building something that was – in those terms – impossible. I’ve seen the source code, the stuff they originally wrote. Or that Bow wrote. His signature is all over it. And there are dates in the code as well, going back to the mid-70s. We took bits of it. Some ideas. I mean, not much. Barely anything. The code was pretty naïve. I told Laura about it, before we got together; flirting with her, using my knowledge as something advantageous. I told her it was like me, when I was a teenager, when I first started dating. Trying to kiss the girl I liked, but I didn’t know what I was doing. The right principle, but learned from TV, from the movies, and I wasn’t old enough or smart enough to know what I was doing wrong. Accidentally getting some things right; but for the whole, it not quite working.
It may have started life as a piece of translation software, but by the end of 2007 it was powering Bow’s customer service helpline. The people at the other end were real, but the call sorting, the touch-tone menu stuff, the questionnaire at the end, that stuff was all SCION-powered. (And by 2013, 2014, we had it answering calls as well. Generated voice stuff, telling you how to fix something. A hit rate of sixty-five per cent of callers believing it was a real person. That was industry best.) It was running – entirely running, until something in it broke – our internal comms systems, handling the email servers, maintaining traffic flow on our website (lots of throttle and choke there, to make sure it was always accessible, that it never went down). It was on our PDAs and we were gearing up for cell phones; but more than those, it was on our laptops. SCION was the architecture behind BowS, our operating system. It was the stuff behind the front end that everybody liked, the stuff with the graphics and the tri-tone chimes when you booted the computer, the one that sounded like the start of a song that never quite kicked in. We had a market share of somewhere around six per cent. Less than Apple, more than any single Linux installations. We were competing. BowS was powering cash machines, credit card readers, registers in shops. It was being installed as the back-end to a series of traffic cameras in the Bay Area, as a trial to see if we could take it further. It was running inside accounting software, word processors, web design. It was everywhere, and yet nobody knew exactly how versatile it was.
Why? Because people didn’t know what an AI was. The movies were all, here’s Skynet with some robot army. Or the one from WarGames that everybody remembers from when they were kids. Movies where AIs are replicant humans, or operating systems you can fall in love with, or beautiful robots kept in a sex dungeon. That’s not reality. It’s simply not. In reality, an AI is a piece of software that’s a bit more efficient than just doing the one thing, not being able to learn from its mistakes. That’s an AI. Back then, people talked about Oh, when we have artificial intelligences in our homes, blah blah, but we were already there. AIs had slipped through the net because they weren’t called that. We joked about that, when we were all hired. That we were going to try to stop whatever we built becoming some evil warmongering AI that was going to destroy the world. It was a joke, but it also wasn’t. Using ethics in artificial intelligence design.
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James Smythe
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Техническая литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘The best fictional treatment of the possibilities and horrors of artificial intelligence that I’ve read’ GuardianIn 1997 Laura Bow invented Organon, a rudimentary artificial intelligence.Now she and her creation are at the forefront of the new wave of technology, and Laura must decide whether or not to reveal Organon’s full potential to the world. If it falls into the wrong hands, its power could be abused. Will Organon save humanity, or lead it to extinction?I Still Dream is a powerful tale of love, loss and hope; a frightening, heartbreakingly human look at who we are now – and who we can be, if we only allow ourselves.