Wilde squatted down, grabbed the platform with both hands, and lifted. Jay-Dub lurched against the constraints at the right moment, and over the whole thing went. As people reacted, a cascade of tables toppled as well. Wilde dived across Jay-Dub’s hull, rolled with a kick at the legs of the two men – on their feet now, with steaming stains on their thighs – and a moment later was up and running. A frantic backward glance showed the two men a few steps behind, in his wake of jostled vistors and tumbled furniture.
Circle Square was just ahead of him, the crowd denser.
‘Help!’ Wilde yelled, plunging into the crowd.
‘Proceed no further,’ ordered a booming voice from ahead and above. It might have come from one of the loudspeakers hung from cabling among trees and lamp-posts. Wilde stopped, and looked behind him again. The two men chasing him had halted a few metres away, dithering at the edge of a pavement, just where the end of the narrow street met the parapet of a bridge.
One of them made a move for the inside of his jacket. Before Wilde could react, something else reacted faster. Something spidery and light, a ball of stiff stalks that skimmed over the heads of the crowd and flew at the two men. As it struck them its stalks became flexible, and wrapped around them both, from their shoulders to their thighs.
Confined, they were barely even an object of curiosity. Wilde stayed where he was for a minute as the crowd dispersed somewhat. Then he walked back the way he’d come. As he sidled past the two men he gave them about three metres clearance. They glared at him.
‘Who sent you?’ he asked.
‘Fuck off,’ one of them said.
‘Give Reid my regards,’ Wilde said.
At this the other man made an attempt to burst his bonds, but the multi-armed machine only tightened in response. Wilde continued along to the alley-mouth, and on his way passed two young men, guiding or herding the now empty and damaged platform in the opposite direction.
‘’Scuse me’ Wilde said. ‘See what happened to the other robot? The one this thing grabbed?’
‘Scrammed,’ he was told.
He thanked them, and checked for himself. The most anyone could tell him was that the construction-machine had fled down the alleyway. Wilde took a look along it, shook his head and muttered something to himself, and trudged back to the bridge. He arrived in time to see the two young men departing with the platform, which now had his attackers securely held by its remaining functional crane-arm. The other machine was still there, once more in its spiky-ball form. It rolled over to him like a tumbleweed.
‘Good morning,’ it said. The buzzing voice seemed to be generated by the vibration of some of its stalks. ‘You called for help, within the domain of Invisible Hand Legal Services. I intervened in response.’
‘Thank you,’ Wilde said.
‘Although no binding contract has been entered into, it would be a matter of courtesy to make a payment to Invisible Hand. As a reciprocal courtesy, Invisible Hand would like to offer you a ten-week defence policy, with that payment written off against your first bill if you choose to pay in advance.’
Wilde looked down at the eager machine with amusement.
‘How much?’
‘Twenty grams gold or equivalent.’
‘Very reasonable,’ Wilde said. ‘Do you take cards?’
‘Follow me,’ said the machine.
Wilde slid his card down the slot of the rusty mainframe box. The machine that had come to his aid had led him here and left him.
‘Thank you,’ Invisible Hand said. ‘You have identified yourself as Jonathan Wilde. Your account is that opened originally by the machine known as Jay-Dub, aka Jonathan Wilde, and endorsed in your behalf at Stras Cobol Mutual Bank last night.’
‘Correct,’ said Wilde.
‘I have on my files a case against you,’ the machine said. ‘Do you wish to hear the details at present?’
Wilde looked around.
‘Go ahead.’
Reid’s face appeared in ruddy hologram monochrome behind the machine’s screen.
‘I, David Reid, wish to lay a charge against one Jonathan Wilde, of no fixed abode, namely this: that a robot known as Jay-Dub, property of the same Jonathan Wilde, was used to corrupt the control systems of a Model D gynoid, known as Dee Model, property of myself. If Jonathan Wilde wishes to defend himself legally against this charge, no further attempts will be made by me or my agents or allies to arrest him or to impound his machine. If he does not so wish, or refuses a mutually acceptable court, those attempts will continue. I end this statement this Sic’day morning, fifty-seventh day of the year one hundred and two, Ship time.’
Wilde watched the image dwindle to a ruby bead.
He sighed. ‘How did Reid know I’d be registered with you?’
‘He did not,’ said the mainframe. ‘This message was released to all defence agencies. I have conveyed to the others that it has been delivered. They have no further interest in it, unless of course you choose to have it defended by one of them.’
‘No,’ said Wilde.
‘Very well,’ said the machine. ‘Do you wish to defend yourself legally against the charge?’
Wilde thought about this.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Shadows and lights moved behind the screen.
‘I have a suggestion to make,’ said the machine. ‘There is another case in progress, between Reid and another party, in the matter of Dee Model. Dee Model is also a client of mine. You might wish to consider combining your defences.’
‘I might indeed,’ said Wilde.
‘Wait here,’ said the machine. ‘…You may smoke.’
8
Capitalist Realism
An aeroplane or a helicopter comes towards you on a rising note that climaxes, then dies away; but when you hear the sound of an aero-engine and it maintains the same flat tone for minutes on end, you look up, irritated by that anomalously steady buzz, and see an airship.
I stood on Waverley Bridge in the cool dusk and looked up and saw an airship, low in the sky, creeping up behind me like a shiver on my neck, a blue blimp with ‘MAZDA’ in white capitals on the side. It was the same airship as I’d seen two hours or so earlier, in Glasgow. Almost weirder than a UFO, something that shouldn’t be there, a machine from an alternate reality where the Hindenburg or the Dow Jones hadn’t crashed or the Germans had won the Great War. As I watched it move away like a cloud with an outboard motor, I had a momentary sense of dissociation, as if I shouldn’t be there either. What was I doing here, watching an airship from a windy bridge when I could be on a train to London?
It must have been the heat. The heat in London that summer had been like nothing since the summer of ’76, when I’d spent weeks going from interview to interview, crashing out with pals or in my parents’ home, worrying about the rash of hateful Union Jack stickers plastered everywhere by the National Front. (And meanwhile, in another hot city, Polish workers pulled up railway lines and pulled down meat prices, and almost the state, almost…) And coming back to Glasgow and a drier heat, grateful, walking into Annette’s lab where dissected locusts were pinned in foil dishes of black wax and the smell of evaporating ethanol rushed to my sinuses as I grabbed her and said, ‘I got a job!’
Nineteen years later and still the same job. Different employers, a different college, the students ever younger and more unsure about their presence, let alone their futures. But at least now I had a business on the side, which in good months brought in as much as or more than the job. My polemics in obscure newsletters and journals, and later on obscure Internet newsgroups as well, had – according to my plan, but still to my surprise – resulted in some mainstream attention. A few think-tank commissions, one or two academic journal articles, a chapter in a forthcoming intermediate economics textbook…Annette and Eleanor had, or at least showed, more confidence in my eventually hitting the big time than I did. Sometimes I felt guilty about that.