An hour later he left the motel, a handwritten map in his hand giving directions to a gamer’s café called Boba Fett’s, which looked, according to the Yellow Pages, like the nearest place with a fast public internet connection. Going out on to the street was risky, but the files he had created were large; from the motel they would take too long to upload. It was, he had discovered, early evening. A lurid petrochemical sunset was subsiding into darkness. The air was still warm, and, as he followed his map through the grid of downtown streets, bass lines pulsed out of open car windows and knots of people stood on corners. Happy, relaxed people. Citizens. Consumers. He hurried past.
Outside Boba Fett’s it was all about the sportswear. Also the gold chains, the steroid cream and the hair gel. A huge group of teenage boys were clustered around a double line of cars, smoking cigarettes and conducting arguments in a variety of South-East Asian languages. They kneeled down to check out wheel rims, played with pagers and cellphones, opened doors and trunks to display throbbing sound systems, struck gangsta poses and checked out Arjun suspiciously. They were blocking the sidewalk, and, as he shouldered through them to get to the café, he was stared at, coldly appraised. He realized nervously that he had blundered on to well-marked territory.
As he opened the door, wistful memories of Aamir and Gabbar Singh’s Internet Shack were blown away. He was hit by a wall of electronic sound, a terrifying amalgam of soundtrack music, gunfire and simulated v8 engines. Boys, Vietnamese and Korean for the most part, were engaged in combat with rail guns and lasers and flails and alien pulse weapons. They were decapitating one another, forcing each other off the road, razing their enemy’s cities with balls of flame and devastating his crack divisions with tactical nuclear weaponry. Some wore headphones, lost in solo trance. Others were the centre of knots of excited spectators. At the far end of the room a counter served bubble tea and snackfoods, the twenty-something manager going about his work wearing a pair of yellow foam earplugs. Apart from the board displaying drinks prices and hourly terminal rates, Boba Fett’s was undecorated, a grey cinderblock box with a silvered plate-glass front and an air-conditioning unit bolted to the back wall. Life here took place on screen.
Arjun rented a free terminal and sat down with a beaker of chocolate-flavoured tea. On either side, kids were playing the same first-person shooter game, charging through a complex maze as they twitch-fired at one another, their screens filling with static as their avatars took hits, fading to white when they died. Arjun uploaded his home-made videos to his secret space on the NOIT server, then created an account on a free email service and used it to send messages containing the location to the people he wanted to watch them: Priti, Chris, the FBI and Leela Zahir. Not having an address for Leela, he posted to several newsgroups and discussion forums, and for good measure copied Aamir.
so sis i don’t know where to begin
dear federal bureau is that the correct form of address?
chris i was going to return it but
this is for you leela zahir as a way of saying sorry for all that has happened i have always loved you would never do anything to hurt you but you see I was desperate
When he was finished, he took his disk and left, not looking behind him. He did not spot the pair of boys, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, who detached themselves from the crowd outside the café. As he headed back to the motel, they walked up the street after him, keeping their distance yet careful not to fall too far behind.
We don’t lose.
That was the first principle, the only one that mattered. Whether it was university entrance or getting on to the guest list, people like us don’t lose. In private, his father would have linked it to breeding or something equally dogs-and-horses sounding. In public, unless someone had given him spirits (drink made him belligerent), Mr Swift would consent to put it down to grit or manners or some other factor unique to English upper-middle-class-occasional-churchgoers resident outside London. As far as Guy was concerned, his parents’ parochialism, their belief in the virtue of moderation, their suspicion of pleasure and their obsessive thrift were all so much self-denying rubbish. As if holidaying in Devon and driving a battered Rover made them morally superior! Luckily all the horrible fifties austerity which had produced them, all that dullness still hanging around when he was growing up, had been wiped away. There was money now. Money and balsamic vinegar and Design. Yet despite his subsitution of the future for the past, long boom for stiff upper lip, he still secretly agreed with that basic handed-down premise: We are better than other people. We don’t lose.
Guy’s ‘we’ was different from his father’s, though it would be hard to specify who other than himself was included. He had been through a phase of reading popular-science paperbacks and thought of his success as the outcome of a process of natural selection. We were on top because we were better adapted to the environment of the global city. We took chances and made opportunities for ourselves. We knew how to network, how to manipulate the flows of money and information to produce Results.
Sitting in the plane on the way back from Dubai, he found strength and comfort in this idea. His meal untouched on its tray in front of him, he fidgeted and thought about adversity. So what if he was looking financial ruin in the face? So what if Gabriella might be about to leave him? It was just a question of digging deeper, finding his hidden reserves. When the stewardess took away his tray, he opened up his laptop and began to type, pressing down keys with slow rigid forefingers. This was what you did when things went wrong. You pushed harder. It was another of his father’s traits. If the world is not doing what we want, we have to bend it to our will. Ignoring the tiny figures drifting around on the armrest TV, he typed a new mission statement, a plan of action for his next twenty-four hours. He worked and reworked it until it had been whittled down first to short paragraphs, then sentences, then bullet-pointed phrases and finally four single words. Extreme concision. Total summary:
Jamal
Gift
Office
Eurobastard
JGOE. Jay-go. He started putting it into operation as soon as he landed at Heathrow.
Jamal was an elegant young man who, growing up on the Stonebridge Park Estate in Harlesden, started out in life with fewer options than Guy when it came to demonstrating fitness for survival in a global city. The decision to sell powder rather than rock brought him into contact with an upmarket clientele, and this access, combined with his unthreatening manner and natural business acumen, had allowed him to develop a thriving retail operation catering to the media, advertising, music industry and legal sectors. These days Jamal lived in a windswept gated development in the Docklands, wore Prada and Armani and drove a silver Audi TT. Guy took a taxi from the airport and kept it waiting while he made a short trip up to Jamal’s place, where he found him relaxing with a few friends around a coffee table on which was scattered perhaps £10,000 in cash. After concluding his transaction and saying goodbye to Jamal’s friends (most of whom appeared to be Austrian aircrew), Guy told the driver to take him home.