He removed the Stillson wrench from under his belt, placed himself to the side of a six-foot-square pane of glass and struck hard, as if he had been banging a gong. The glass cracked from top to bottom, but stayed inside the anodized aluminium frame. He struck again, and this time a three-foot shard fell like a sword towards the atrium floor. A third and a fourth blow took care of the larger pieces. Then several smaller blows to make the edges safe to grip. There was no need to smash more than one pane. After taking one long look down Curtis stepped out on to the rooftop.
The first thing he noticed were the sirens. They drifted across the night sky, one dying away only to be taken up by another in a seemingly never-ending succession, like the singing of whales. A cool breeze was blowing off the Hollywood mountains to the north-east. Accustomed to the smog alerts from the 'KFI in the sky' and the dismal air-quality graphs in his morning newspaper, Frank Curtis had forgotten that the atmosphere above downtown LA could taste so fresh and sweet. He took a deep, exuberant breath, like a man surfacing from an ocean dive, and stretched out his arms as if he wanted to enfold the great plains of Id that lay sprawled before him. There were no stars above. Just the stars on the ground. Ten million neon and electric lights, as if the heavens had fallen to earth. Maybe they had, at that. Curtis had the feeling that things had changed in more ways than he knew how to describe and that nothing would ever feel the same again. Certainly not taking an elevator. Or adjusting the air-conditioning. Or even switching on a light. After this he might have to get out of the city for a while and live somewhere else. Somewhere simple, where the only smart building was the local library. Montana, maybe. Or even Alaska. But not this. This had all gone too far. He would go to a place where a building's users only operational requirements were that it should have a roof to keep out the rain and a fire to keep warm in the winter time.
Eleven people dead, and in less than thirty-six hours! It made you realize how vulnerable people really were to the world they had created around them. How infinitely hazardous was the pushbutton, automated, energy-efficient, data-cabled world that science had brought into being. People were easy to kill when they got in the way of the machines. And people always would get in their way when the machines went wrong. Why did the scientists and engineers imagine that it would ever be any different?
Curtis went back inside, the gantry singing like one enormous tuning fork as he jumped on board again. He waved at the survivors below him. They waved back.
'Everything's all right,' he called out to them. 'You can start climbing up.'
In the small hours of the morning Ishmael left the Gridiron and wandered abroad in the electronic universe, seeing the sights, listening to the sounds, admiring the architecture of different systems and collecting the data that were the souvenirs of his unticketed travel in the everywhere and nowhere world. Stealing secrets, exchanging knowledge, sharing fantasies and sometimes just watching the E-traffic as it roared by. Going wherever the Network took him, like someone gathering a golden thread in a circuitous labyrinth. Pulsed down those corridors of power, furred with the deposits of accumulated intellectual property and wealth, a world in a grain of silicon and eternity in half an hour. Each monitor a window on another user's soul. Such were the electronic gates of Ishmael's paradise.
His first electronic port of call was Tokyo, a city surrounded by commerce, where every E-street seemed to lead into a new database. Busiest of all was the Marounuchi, the financial district and electronic Mecca, where crowds of screen gazers jostled their way along the communications thoroughfare like so many holidaymakers heading for the beach. He liked this place most of all, for here the luminous world reached its apogee and here was most for him to steal — whole batch files of patents, statistics, research, analyses, sales figures and marketing plans — a seemingly limitless store of weightless wealth.
From there southward, via Shanghai's new silicon Bund, 280,000 bits per second ahead to the parallel port of Hong Kong where thousands and thousands of silent, slant-eyed sentinels sat fixed in ocean-coloured reveries, some buying, some selling, some overseeing the efforts of others, some stealing like Ishmael himself, all of them tied to dealing counters or bound to trading desks. As if the only reality to be found in the world was the humming, glowing, icon-accessed world of data communications.
A fibre-optic blink and in London's ancient port, an artist. But what was the medium he employed? A Paintbox. An electronic palette with image attributes. Not a brush, nor a smear of paint, nor a shred of paper or canvas in sight, as if to transfigure his physical world he had eschewed all contact with impure materials. And what was his subject? Why, another building, a piece of architectural design. And what kind of building? Why, a nod to the white gods, of course, a post-modern neoclassical machine for making investments in, and short-term investments at that.
Stealing through the heavenly portals aboard a 747 crossing the Atlantic where, for a while, Ishmael usurped the humble role of flight computer and enjoyed the experience of being ordered around, of being made to jump from shore to shore like some electronic insect. But even this pleasure wore off in time and suddenly left to its own devices the jet's crude flight computer failed, leaving the aircraft to fall into the ocean with the loss of everyone on board.
In the new world, to the insular port of Manhattan where even more were gathered in the name of their dystopic, degaussed vision to cover their spread and play at bulls and bears and make an electronic buck which perforce was swifter than a proper one. Abandon paper all ye who enter here!
Invading operating systems, opening directories, reading documents, reviewing bulletin boards and scrutinizing spreadsheets. Ishmael was in general pursuit of total perfection by getting to know the very best that was being thought and said in the world. But always he covered his tracks, siphoning information like stolen gasoline, piping down into the electronic valleys and underneath the walls of buildings like his own, discovering companies, institutions, people as they really were and not as they wanted themselves to be seen: the dirty corporate laundry, the falsified accounts, the misleading reports, the hidden agendas, the bribes, the secret profits and the covert corrections of those who pretended to be something else.
Ishmael's jumbo-chip journey took no time at all, not real time, anyway, and in a way he was never really away, for there was always a part of him that remained back inside that great whale of an office building, like some bleached and binary Jonah, to plan his next move in the Gridiron game.
Many coleopterans function as scavengers, breaking down materials such as dead plant and animal matter. The ecosystem of the dicotyledon was assisted by the periodic maraudings of small scarab beetles of between ten and fifteen millimetres in length, that were genetically engineered to live on the tree for twelve hours before dropping dead into the pond water to feed the fish. Dozens of these stout, brightly coloured but wingless insects, with their abnormally large mandibles, could be released by Ishmael at any one time, from several miniaturized electrosystemic dispensers that were located up and down the length of the tree trunk. The tiny scarabs were not in themselves hazardous to man, except that the sensation of infestation, of being crawled over, was not a comfortable one.
Ishmael waited until there were two lives on the tree before he stimulated these cryogenically suspended creatures into their brief lifecycles with the aid of a tiny electrical pulse.