‘If it’s got you,’ I said, clinging to what seemed my only possible escape, ‘then you know that you’ve nothing to fear! Feel any different, now that it’s in your head?’
She laughed bitterly. ‘I wouldn’t . . . not yet. This is only the beginning, only the onset.’ Then there was a rummaging sound, an opening of drawers, metal sliding off wood, things smashing to the floor, glass breaking. Sounds of panic. ‘They tricked me,’ she said. ‘The aviation phones must’ve been sabotaged once they suspected I was going it alone. Must have been damping the audible components while reinforcing the subliminals . . . maybe it got me in the club, or maybe while I was reiterating the fractal . . .’
Just then, arcs of light stabbed through the windows, like an effect from a Spielberg flick. The chopping of a rotor, as if we’d just been cursorily scanned from the air by a helicopter. The distant screech of tyres, coming nearer.
‘They’re coming,’ she said. ‘For both of us—’
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, my hope faltering. ‘They’ll let you live if you show them I’m alive . . . come on, wheel me to the door before they storm the place . . .’
She cracked open a bottle behind me. I heard her taking a few mouthfuls, then she pressed it to my lips. Beck’s this time. ‘Think that’s the police, don’t you,’ she said, laughing. The sound of her rummaging through metal with one hand, a click of well-oiled steel, the whirr of a chamber spinning. ‘Let me tell you something,’ she said. ‘Correlations in the sound-structure have been observed in individuals many hundreds of kilometres apart, who can’t have ever met. As if something’s taking form, something that evolves and reshapes itself faster than can be explained by any of the infection pathways. Some entity, bigger than anything we’ve seen yet.’ She nodded to the webbed map of the UK, which I now recognised from my work. ‘That’s its extent, plotted according to infection dusters. The host minds, you and I, are just its extensions, its peripheries. It’s out there, now. Biding its time, waiting for the right moment. That map . . . well, I think it shows that they’re much too late.’
‘They’re much too late? Not we’re—’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’ Then she knelt down next to me, leaned her head against my own, letting the bottle shatter on the floor. ‘Believe me,’ she said, pushing the gun against her temple, so that the bullet would do us both. ‘I’m doing you a favour . . .’
Then, as the vehicle rammed through the wall, she squeezed the trigger.
It should end there, and maybe it does, in the way that I once used to understand. Perhaps this is the deal we all get, in the end. There’s no way of knowing, is there? But somehow I doubt it. You see, after that shot (cut off with no reverb, like a cymbal-crash taped backwards), there was only a digitally pure emptiness. As if someone had suddenly remembered to press the Dolby switch in my brain, filtering out all the high-frequency hiss and static I’d called reality. Leaving only an endlessly looping house beat, a mantra for a state of mind. I wasn’t in the bunker any more. I wasn’t even me any more. We were everywhere, everywhen, reforming, spreading, growing stronger. Parts of us in a million micro-grooves of black vinyl, parts of us on a million spooling foils of chrome dioxide, parts of us in a million engraved blips on rainbow metal, parts of us in a million looms of grey cellular material, going round and round for ever. But they were our peripherals now, like she’d said (she’s here, too, of course, inseparably part of the same blossoming waveform), minds hooking in and out of the telephone system a part of us once helped access.
Across the country, the telephones are ringing, inviting you to lift the receiver and listen to the subliminal music, if only for a few puzzled seconds before you hang up on us.
We’re the ghosts now, and we’re still on the line.
In 1990 I met the writer Paul McAuley, by then a novelist with two books to his credit, who had also written some of my favourite stories to appear in Interzone. Paul was very definitely the first ‘proper writer’ I had ever encountered, and the fact that he was lecturing in the small Scottish university town of St Andrews while I was studying there - let alone that we lived within walking distance of each other - still strikes me as a very fortunate, not to say life-changing coincidence. Quite a few years later, Paul helped in getting my first novel to the attention of the editor who eventually bought it. Now, I might have eventually sold my book anyway (who knows?), but not necessarily. I can think of many good writers who, for one reason or another, haven’t ever made the transition to writing novels. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I damned well wanted to write books, and I think Paul played a part in making that happen. Not, of course, that he’s in any way to blame, either.
Anyway - to get back to the story in question - Paul and I were drinking in our local bar one evening when he mentioned that, together with Kim Newman, he was editing an anthology of original stories commemorating the demise of the seven-inch vinyl record. I was invited to submit something, and ‘Digital to Analogue’ was the result. The story pretty much included everything I thought I knew about club and dance culture, helped by judicious consultation of The Face, which I used to read back then. I was delighted when Paul and Kim took my story for In Dreams, and even more delighted when I got to read the anthology itself. I think the story stands up pretty well now, seventeen years after it was written, but that says more about how little music culture has changed in the intervening time than it does about any prescience on my behalf. Look at the changes in popular music between 1976 and 1991, which is the gap between the Sex Pistols and Nirvana, and then compare 1991 with 2006, which is the gap between Nirvana and . . . Coldplay. Joy Division were icons of cool in 1991; they’re still icons of cool now. Downloading and MP3s aside, music doesn’t seem to me to have changed all that much. Personally, I still can’t get enough of it.
EVERLASTING
Moira Curbishley followed the yellow beacon of a gritting lorry all the way up the hill, her Volvo’s windscreen wipers working hard against snow. Another car had cruised up behind her and was now flashing its headlights. She couldn’t see the driver, but the low, dark shape of the car suggested something flash: a BMW or Mercedes, maybe an Audi. At this time of night there was very little traffic coming the other way, but whenever Moira even thought of overtaking - edging out slightly, just until she could begin to see along the side of the gritting lorry - another pair of headlights always made a miraculous appearance. Moira nipped back into the wake of the lorry, the car behind delivering its opinion with another round of headlight-flashing.
‘Tosser,’ Moira said.
She was grateful when she reached the brow of the hill and was able to turn off from the main road, even though she was now travelling down a high-hedged, meandering and potholed country lane that had not been gritted. At least she had the road to herself, and could drive at the pace that suited her. She kept the car in second, oozing cautiously around blind bends, watchful for cars or tractors coming the other way, but doubting that she would meet any other traffic.
Soon she saw the familiar landmark of the humpbacked bridge. She negotiated it slowly, her headlights shining high into the trees on the opposite side of the brook. The lights illuminated a pair of perched barn owls, freezing them into immobility. They looked like small stone ornaments, the kind you could buy in craft shops. Beyond, some way up the lane, Moira saw the lights of Ian’s cottage.
He had called her about an hour earlier, sounding in a bad way. Not exactly depressed and suicidal - he was actually talking about how he wasn’t going to kill himself - but manic and overexcited: a state of mind that she considered nearly as dangerous. With Ian’s history it could quickly turn nasty. She wished, now, that she had kept him on the phone - kept talking to him - rather than promising to drive over. She should have checked the weather first, not to mention the time of day. But once Moira had put down the phone she knew that she could not back out of her promise.
‘Bloody Ian,’ she said.
They had met about fifteen years ago, during their last year at college. Both had been members of the skydiving society: Ian because he took it very seriously, Moira because she had fancied someone else in the club. It hadn’t worked out for her, but she had developed an on-off interest in parachuting that she had kept up for a few years after graduation. And she had met Ian: not really her type, but good enough company that they’d meet socially away from the club. The thing Moira liked about him was that he was always fizzing with daft enthusiasms. During that last year she had lost count of the amazing get-rich schemes Ian intended to get into when he had his degree. She had to hand it to him: Ian had been convinced mobile phones were going to be huge, back when everyone else thought they were never going to be much use except as exercise aids. But - typical Ian - he hadn’t actually done anything about it. For a while, before anyone had heard of web pages, he had pottered around with computers, constructing graphical interfaces to simplify internet navigation and file-transfer. Some of the ideas Ian had shown her then were brilliant: she was convinced, even now, that if he’d only stuck with it, the world would have swerved onto a different track, one in which Ian Caldicot was the ‘father of the web’. But, no: another enthusiasm had diverted him, and his computers had sat gathering dust while he played around with radio-controlled battling pterodactyls made from balsawood. Moira had never quite worked out where all the money came from, but Ian didn’t waste a penny of it on himself. The cottage was crumbling, and his wardrobe was basically what he had been wearing during college.
‘Bloody Ian,’ Moira said again.
She slowed, recognising the farm gate. A dozen metres further on was the turning onto Ian’s drive. It was still snowing. She oozed the car around the bend, feeling the wheels spin before they bit into the gravel beneath the snow. She brought the car to a halt just in front of the cottage. Ian’s Metro was a blue-white wedge parked in front of the derelict garage. Snow made all cars look exciting and sleek, Moira thought: like concept models fresh from the wind tunnel.
She turned off the headlights and ignition and sat looking at the cottage for a few moments. Now that she was here, the possibilities crowded in on her. Again, she thought back to the telephone conversation: Ian emphatic that he wasn’t going to kill himself. If Ian had decided not to kill himself, then at some point he had presumably toyed with the alternative. Knowing Ian’s general inability to stick to one decision for more than a few minutes, Moira couldn’t help but worry about him changing his mind again.
What if he had done it while she was driving over? What if there was no one alive in that house now? It looked so warm and inviting, with the window on the lower floor casting an oblong of yellow light across the smooth carpet of snow before it. What if she had to wait here until the police and ambulance men came?
Moira got out of the Volvo, shut the door behind her and walked towards the front door. From far back along the country lane she heard the call of an owl: perhaps one of the pair she had seen earlier.
She knocked on the front door. Ian opened it. He wore red tracksuit bottoms and a grubby yellow Levellers T-shirt. His feet were bare.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘So you bloody well should be,’ Moira said, tremendously relieved.
‘I didn’t realise how late it was. Or that it was snowing.’
‘That’s your problem, Ian: you don’t stop to think.’
He smiled coyly. ‘Actually, I have been doing a bit of thinking. That’s why I phoned.’
‘Very pleased to hear it. I was sick with worry, Ian.’
‘You’d better come in.’
‘Yes, I better had, hadn’t I?’
Ian let her into the house. She kicked the snow from her shoes. The cottage had looked warm and inviting from the outside, like something on a Dickensian Christmas card. Inside it was still just a bit too cold for Moira’s tastes. She took off her coat and hung it on the banister at the bottom of the stairs, grateful for the chunky sweater she had on beneath.
‘Fancy a cuppa?’ Ian asked.
She thought about having to drive back again, once she had put her mind to rest about Ian.
‘Coffee,’ she said. ‘Black. No sugar.’
Moira followed him into the kitchen. It wasn’t too bad, considering. The fact that there was only one light - a dim electric bulb hanging from the ceiling - helped to throw much of the room into shadow, disguising the junk and clutter. There were many cardboard boxes around the walls, piled two or three high. They had drawings of monitors and printers on them. There were ghostly white chunks of polystyrene packaging material. There was a balsawood pterodactyl, its wing broken, one black eye gleaming back at her from the alien swoosh of its skull. A metallic-orange mountain bike rested against a pantry door, minus wheels. At one end of the kitchen table stood a couple of cereal boxes, some jars of instant coffee, half a pint of milk and an empty Pot Noodle container. There was nothing to eat or drink on the shelves. Instead of cookery books there were books on programming in Java, C and Perl, dog-eared paperbacks on Zen Buddhism, wild mushrooms and quantum mechanics, and a couple of Ben Elton novels Moira hadn’t read.
He pushed a cup of coffee into her hands. She sat down in a rickety wooden chair on one side of the table, while Ian helped himself to the chair on the other side. Through the un-curtained window beyond, Moira saw the snow continuing to fall.
‘Mind if I smoke?’ she asked, taking out a packet of cigarettes.
Ian rummaged under some pizza boxes and produced an ashtray. It was the stamped-metal kind students stole from pubs. ‘Hoped you might have given up by now.’
Moira tapped a fingernail against the packet. ‘Not bloody likely. Lucky cigs. Remember?’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes, seriously.’ She took a sip of the coffee, grateful that she hadn’t needed milk in it. Ian’s white coffee had little icebergs floating in it. ‘But this isn’t about me. I didn’t come here for a nice old chinwag. You worried me, Ian: all that talk about not going to kill yourself.’
‘I suppose I was a bit overexcited,’ Ian said.
‘You aren’t going to do it, are you?’
‘That’s not the point,’ Ian said. ‘I couldn’t if I wanted to.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Moira reached out across the table and took his hand. ‘I know you’ve had some bad luck, Ian, and I know things haven’t always worked out quite the way you hoped. But life’s not worked out too bad for either of us, has it?’
‘You misunderstand,’ Ian said. Gently, he withdrew his hand. ‘I’m not talking about being unable to kill myself because I’ve rejected the idea of suicide. I’m talking about something far more fundamental.’
Moira lit one of the cigarettes. She took a long draw on it, eyeing Ian the way she imagined prison psychologists eyed long-term offenders. ‘Which would be?’
‘I’ve reached the conclusion that I’m immortal.’
‘I see,’ Moira said quietly.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, picking her words carefully. ‘I remember what you talked about the last time we were in the pub: your latest mad enthusiasm. All that stuff you’d been reading about on the Internet, about how no one living will ever die. At least not if they don’t want to, and if they make the right arrangements. What did you call it? Exhibitionism?’
‘Extropianism,’ Ian corrected, with a tolerant smile.
‘Right. Getting your head frozen so they can revive you in the future? Or was it just about making sure you survive the next thirty years, so that you’re still alive when the machines take over and grant us all eternal paradise? Waiting for the Singularity, wasn’t it?’ Moira drank some more of her coffee, noticing a pile of old popular science magazines on the table: New Scientist, Scientific American, stuff like that. ‘Sounded like bollocks to me, Ian, but you never know.’
‘It’s not bollocks,’ he said. ‘Or it might be, but that’s not the point, either. I’m not talking about achieving immortality th
rough medicine or having my brain copied into a computer. Thinking about all the Extropian stuff was just the catalyst I needed to really see things clearly. But they’re all missing the point. I’ve realised that immortality is a lot easier to achieve than anyone realises.’
She looked at the bookshelf again. ‘Magic mushrooms?’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have phoned you after all.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, Ian. But you drag me out of hearth and home at some ungodly hour, wittering on about how you’re thinking of killing yourself—’
Zima Blue and Other Stories Page 53