He spent the morning running and checking a patch written by Clay for a common macro virus, yellow dots of tiredness swimming in his vision. People left him alone. Since he had lost his job he was no longer a real person, already fading into memory. He sat at the terminal and watched the clock at the bottom of his screen, waiting for the magic hour. Leela Zahir had been born at 10.12 a.m. on 13 June. If he had managed to do anything, if his code didn’t have some unforeseen bug, it would not be long before the effects were felt. He was so tired that he could barely think. Lyrics from Leela’s big Crisis Kashmir love song circled round in his head.
O my love, O my darling
I’ve crossed the line of no control
I hear your gunfire in my valley
You’ve tripped my wire
You have my soul
I’ve crossed the line
The line of no control
Just before lunch, or what would have been lunch had anyone at Virugenix observed such conventions, an excited-looking group of Ghostbusters gathered in Darryl’s office. After a short conversation they moved into the hot zone, and watched something on one of the screens. Arjun, meerkatting over his cubicle partition, knew at once. Someone had sent a sample in for analysis; the game had started. By mid afternoon the entire senior AV team were in the plexiglas-walled room, watching Leela Zahir dance across ten monitors, a jerky five-second loop from the holi dance in Naughty Naughty, Lovely Lovely.
The thrill was indescribable. Leela, widening her eyes and making a flirtatious ticking-off gesture at the viewer, London’s West End briefly visible in the background. And again. And again.
It worked.
Arjun knew what was going on behind the eyes and the smile, how Leela was stealing resources from other programs, taking up disk space, making herself at home. How perhaps she was also doing other things: malicious, corrupting things. Now it was just a question of how hard the analysts would find it to counter her. When a bright-eyed Clay strode past his desk, Arjun could not resist asking what was going on.
‘Man, it’s the real thing, that’s what’s going on?’ Clay’s voice betrayed his eagerness, his tone rising at the end of each sentence as if this event were putting everything, the whole world, into question. ‘In the last ten minutes we got five different samples from like three places in East Asia? Customer support just took a call from a guy in Auckland which is a place in New Zealand? The CTO of some insurance company? He just had to shut down his whole network, I mean like everything? He was totally freaking out?’
Clay bustled off, smacking left fist into right palm with college-sports enthusiasm. A little needle of fear made its way up through Arjun’s tired brain. Shutting down a whole company. That was serious.
As 10.12 a.m. struck the Kiritimati atoll in the Pacific and an unlucky shrimpboat skipper started to swear at his laptop, Guy and Gabriella left the opening party for a film that was a remake of another film and got into a taxi. Guy had barely spoken to anyone all evening. Gabriella, on the other hand, had been the centre of an animated group, telling jokes and receiving cards and mobile numbers and offers of lunch. Guy was too preoccupied to be jealous.
The whole situation was very Old Economy.
Yves Ballard’s message had been stark. Transcendenta would feel unable to complete a further round of funding unless Tomorrow* cut overheads and generated new business. Without funding, Tomorrow* had cash to last only a couple more months. Yves had been evasive about what might happen, but left the general impression that Transcendenta would not hesitate to pull the plug.
He drifted back into calculation. Tomorrow* and everything associated with it now depended on three pitches. The one for the SSRI drug he had just made in New York, and two he had to make next week — to a leisure chain in the Gulf, and to PEBA, the new Pan European Border Authority, an artefact of EU integration intended to harmonize the immigration and customs regimes of all the member states. As long as one of them came off, it might be enough to persuade Transcendenta to hold fire. Although, if he were honest with himself, he would have to say the drug company people had not seemed convinced. Two pitches, then. Two chances.
Gabriella was saving someone’s number into her phone. Sensing him watching her, she angled the screen away slightly.
‘Sweetie, have you had any more thoughts about Thailand?’
‘Not really, Guy.’ She flipped the phone shut and turned to look out of the window.
She was not sure how much longer she could stand him. When she first came to London, she was in the same headlong rush that had led her sister to the exit. There was a boyfriend and a magazine and parties. Her father found her and sent money. She tried things, worked in someone’s gallery, even spent a term studying law. All the time she could feel the urge to run bubbling inside and grew increasingly certain that the only way to survive would be to settle, to throw out an anchor.
Then someone offered her a job coordinating magazine press for a film. It probably worked out because she cared so little for any of it, not the aura of glamour around the industry or the empty grace of the picture itself. Instead, placing stories and chaperoning the cast of young actors as they were interviewed about gangsters and Britishness and what it was like to work with the famous female lead, she discovered if not a calling then at least a distraction. There was a calculus at the heart of a media operation, an assessment of value: what can you do for us, what do you want in return. It was honest. Here human relations were out in the open: you were either on the list or off it, depending on what you had to trade. She worked hard because work dispelled her sister, and the company offered her a contract.
She had been doing the job for a year, enjoying having her own money, real money instead of the inexhaustible play-money which had killed Caroline. Then she met Guy He came up to her at a boring party and immediately started running lines, old ones: I saw you across, what a beautiful, anyone ever said, such a coincidence. What astounded her was his gall, the impression he gave that the world and all the things in it were listed for him on a menu. Unlike other men she had met with the same confidence, there was nothing mannered about Guy. He was, in that respect, innocent. Life had always obliged, always given him what he asked for.
Because he would not allow her to refuse, she agreed to be taken out and so unleashed a storm of drinks and dinner, a barrage of delivered flowers. Within a couple of weeks she was confronted with the inevitable: a sofa and a dimmer switch and no good argument against letting him undress her. He did nothing weird or offensive and seemed so happy afterwards that it made her contact-happy too; she felt wanted, chosen. Soon she was turning down other dates to stay in with him at his new apartment. They watched DVDs and ate ice-cream. About once every twenty minutes he got up to survey his river view, talking continually about the future of this or that, the latest, the next wave, the bleeding edge. He always had a stack of men’s magazines and a new gadget whose manual he was struggling to decipher. He was, she decided, quite sweet in an English sort of a way.
Though he idolized rock stars and rebels, there was nothing self-destructive about Guy. He didn’t want to change the world, just to be in the lead as it moved forward on its preordained path. Gaby herself had never seen much sense in rebellion (things always stayed the same whatever you did), but even she was struck by the unconsciously ruthless way he set about taking pole position in life. Without appearing to try, he always ensured he was first in line. He was the very opposite of Caroline; he seemed to feel no unease about his entitlement.