Claire looks at him, turning away from the city below her. “What you saying?”
They’re standing behind Anika, pretty much the same group, but on the other side of the roof. Mary and Anika walk over to join them as they look down into Stokes Croft.
From up here it’s impossible to see any road surface, so many people fill the Croft, with even more pouring in from elsewhere in the city, under the building they’re standing on, and from the side streets. The sound systems are out, dotted here and there like alien monoliths, bass resonating through the architecture. People are dancing, talking, sitting. Smoke rises from makeshift fires and barbecues. Here and there tents have been thrown up by those who won’t or can’t leave. Pure carnival vibes. It’s somehow both friendly and apocalyptic, welcoming and tense at the same time, like Glastonbury Festival or Burning Man dropped into an urban space too cramped and ill-designed to safely hold it.
“Have you seen the chat recently?” Rush is continuing. “Looked at the public timelines? It’s a fucking mess. It’s just full of randoms screaming at each other. It’s impossible to follow anything, impossible to make announcements, get information out… It’s a fucking mess. It’s all conspiracy theories and lies. People making up unsubstantiated shit and other people believing them. The network is stable, but I never thought we’d have this many users, at least not all crammed into this space. It just doesn’t scale like that.”
“Hang on, I thought that was the whole point?” Claire asks him. “The anarchic decentralized network nobody runs?”
“Well… yeah. But not… like this.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I thought it’d be more spread out. Geographically, I mean. Like it’d be citywide, not the whole city trying to get into fucking Stokes Croft to use it all at once.”
“Thing is,” College says slowly, “people leave here and their spex get infected again, and they stop working. So they come back, the client reinstalls itself, and they… they just stay here for as long as they can. Hence the happy campers.”
“Ah well, it’s a hell of a party.” Now Anika flinches at the naïveté that drips from then Anika’s voice.
“Yeah, for now. I’m just worried it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Yeah,” says College, his tone tired and serious. “I saw posts flying around saying someone saw people with guns down there.”
“What?”
“It’s what I heard. Barton Hill crew came down, apparently. Faces I recognize. Trying to hide from the feds.”
“Fuck me.”
“Guns, though? Really?”
“Yeah. Lot of that Barton crew tooled up when things got dicey with the fascists after Brexit, 3D-printed Kalashnikovs and stuff smuggled in from Ireland.”
The idea seems to stun them all, they just stand there, staring at the ever-shifting crowd. Anika reaches for the invisible jog wheel, but Claire shatters the silence.
“So what… I mean, what can we do? How we meant to stop people coming in?”
“Turn it off,” Rush says.
“What?” says then Anika.
“The network. Turn it off. That’ll stop them coming in.”
“Can you even do that?”
Rush glances over at College. “Yeah. There might be a way.”
“We… we can’t do that though, right?” Claire leans against cracked architecture, still staring down into the human maelstrom below. “I mean, this is the point, right? As of now we seem to be the only working network in the city. That’s what we always wanted. What you always wanted.”
“I guess.”
“You can’t turn it off now, man. That’d be giving up. Quitting when you’re winning.”
Rush laughs. “Yeah. Guess you’re right. I guess this is what winning looks like, right?”
“Brave new world, baby.” College slaps him on the back. “This is where it all begins. Viva la revolution.”
“Viva la revolution. I’m just worried we’ve grabbed the wrong people’s attention.”
Rush is looking up into the sky, scanning for silhouettes.
Anika takes off the spex, and the ghosts of her friends disappear.
She stops playback, quits the app.
“That’s it, that’s enough. No more.”
Mary looks at her, disappointed. “Really?”
“Really. I’ve seen enough. You’ve seen enough.”
“But you said you’d help me! Said you’d show me how to find Melody!”
“Melody is dead. They’re all dead.”
“You said you’d help! At least show me where to look for a trace of her, her music. You said!”
Anika sighs, curses herself. For. Fuck’s. Sake. She looks out across the flat, cluttered Bristol landscape.
“Fine. Okay. But we’re not going to find her up here.”
They leave the 5102, fleeing ghosts Anika should never have disturbed, shattered dreams she should never have remembered.
In the underpass they pause by the Croft’s gate. Semipermanent now, but she remembers when it was thrown together.
She fires up the app again.
The space under the 5102 is full of people.
Hundreds of them, all flooding into Stokes Croft, their faces a mixture of confusion and elation. Despite everything she still remembers that feeling, that raw, narcotic mix of emotions. She could taste it in the crowd that day. A very real sense that something had ended, had gone, something huge and fundamental. The feeling that a structure—a way of life, something nobody could really imagine changing—had collapsed. The end of being watched. The end of being tracked. The end of being indentured to it all. The end of capital. The end of security. The end of knowing. The end of safety. The end of being reassured. The end of being connected. The end of friendships. It was all there, in that crowd, sprayed across faces that had been denied sleep and electricity and communication for days—the fear, the uncertainty, the excitement, the thrill. The relief.
She pushes herself against the wall, Mary joining her at her side, so the ghosts don’t brush against them as they march past. Ripped jeans and soiled hoodies. Some carry armfuls of looted treasures; shower gels, alcohol, VR headsets in battered boxes and games consoles trailing power leads from hastily stuffed plastic bags. Already dead and useless consumer electronics. The great ransacking of Cabot Circus, the last archive of civilization.
Her eyes flicker across their ghost faces, trying to scan and judge emotions. For most it’s celebration as they flood in, drawn by the music and the shouting and the dancing. The smell of cooking meat, the rumble of bass. Flooding in to find an outlet, to find answers, to find connections again. The rapture of shaking off the old and finding the new, of dancing in the shattered remains of the failed and dead.
Anika wishes she could hold back the flood, scream at them to go back.
Instead she lets it carry the two of them on, into the human melee that has drowned the streets. Through the bodies she glimpses herself again, like the first time she took the spex from Mary, almost the same frozen moments—dancing to that familiar rhythm, the crowd around her moving as one, those not dancing lost in the confusing rapture of a new network, a new way of doing things. She watches herself, snippets of motion glimpsed in the spaces between the human nodes, and she remembers being that happy. How it felt. They had won! This was it, everything they’d fought for. Everything had fallen—everything they’d fought against—but they’d remained standing. Vindicated, right, victorious.
“Here.” She turns to Mary. “This is what you’ve been looking for.”
Mary looks back at her, confused. Anika can’t make out whether she’s just overawed by the scene or doesn’t understand what she’s saying.