by Carl Neville
So-Mee laughed. Shit, I should make the most of the five-a-day flights to Seoul while they’re still around. Anyway. Excited?
Wow, she said, so excited. M.S.H.!
When she got back she discovered an email from Rose Galloway that had a link to a bridge site on which she had mirrored Crane’s Urkive page. She was slightly drunk and had trouble focusing on the different passwords and verifications needed to get access. Great.
Her phone buzzed and she logged out of the portal and back into US infospace to discover it was Kevin, telling her he was going to be back later than he’d thought. An anti-Connaught demo. Kevin said this was the final struggle, he was sure, and maybe he was right, kept repeating the same set of stats: 60% of small to medium enterprises are cooperatively owned, Unionization is up to 75% in the private sector, worker representation on boards is approaching critical mass. The direction is irreversible, look at the rest of the world, he said, there’s no one else out there these clowns can coordinate with, we need to push the process forward.
She would have gone to the meeting too but didn’t want to risk any action that might compromise her travel privileges at this late stage. It was important work, she knew, but she was a little pissed that two weeks before she went he couldn’t be back to spend some time with her. He had made her promise she’d go out to south London while she was there, spend time among the exiled Liberation theologists and Comunismo desde arriba and llama doble y roja groups he was so in love with. Sometimes she thought that was why he got with her, thought she would be more oriented toward the struggles in Central and South America, and instead she’s a geeky PRB-ophile. Well, all that could wait till she got back. She thought about sending a curt reply but instead slipped on the headphones, flicked through the Urkive tabs, clicked on BIOGRAPHY.
Interesting, there were some music files, and ah yes, Counterfactual Records, that made sense. She knew some of these tracks from pirated cassettes of PRB music, officially discouraged, that got circulated among PRB-ophiles, but hadn’t heard most of the stuff on here. A compilation album.
Urkive/Sounds/96/Genre: Passocon/Investigative/Improvised
Artist: Vernon Crane
Title: Counterfactual Musics Vol. 1
Label: KATALAX
Year: 1996
Format: Cassette
Urkived sound files here
Side 1
Hulme Cassette Factory “Pale Crescents” (3.23)
Kahil Killah feat. Gruel Crew “Time Dies” (4.13)
Dentine 9 “Resolution Way” (3:26)
Risehome “Metastatic (Subtle Body Dub Mix)” (5.22)
V. Crane “Field Recording #8” (3:40)
Imploding Sons “(Heat Is A) One-Way Street” (2.59)
Side 2
UnSpool versus CyberKrush “Angelus Novus” (7:20)
{author unknown} “Conjunctural Asides” (6:26)
Chronoleptics “Demolition Dimension/Worldslip” (13:31)
One of the tracks downloaded and began playing automatically — a very trebly drum loop like a series of rapid-fire flint pellets hitting a doorway and a voice, time-stretched and rubbery, snapping back and forth saying, she thought, “pale crescents, pale crescents”. She checked the file, yes indeed, “Pale Crescents”. Fantastic, very PRB-ish, she reflected, but also unlike anything that had come out of the PRB itself, if come out was the right term for a music culture almost entirely based around “the improvised and instantaneous, that has sought to weave sound in all its ephemerality into the very fabric of life”. She could recite that section of A Young Person’s Guide to the PRB almost in full. So, Crane just turned up one day wandering about in the boondocks with all this stuff stuffed in his backpack.
Dentine 9’s “Resolution Way”. Ah, this she knew, this was a track that she had heard under a different name, perhaps. Cranked up, off-centre drums and lunging basslines with a long distorted warble of vocal stretching up out of the tumult. Strange that she had never got to know about Crane through her interest in this. OK, what else was there? Clicked on Recent Uploads.
Urkive/Sounds/Recent/Genre: Passocon/Investigative/Improvised
Artist: Vernon Crane
Title:
Label:
Year:
Format:
Urkived sound files here
Vernon CraneField Recording #4 (0:00:00)
That sounded familiar somehow too, no time listed. Maybe it was a broken file. She had a sip of one of Kevin’s bottles of doppelbock that she’d just liberated from the refrigerator. Should she be downloading across the Partition? Streaming is acceptable but, well, it wouldn’t seem to play, and so she clicked the little down arrow, watched the egg timer start rotating, so slow going back and forth across the Partition, another unofficial attempt to discourage engagement, she was sure. In a year’s time would she even be able to cross it at all? It would probably be quicker if she used Kevin’s laptop and so she pulled it off the table and logged back in to the Urkive, hooked it up to the wireless headphones.
Started clicking around in the Urkive and got so preoccupied that she didn’t notice the file had downloaded and started playing. Instinctively Julia closed her eyes to concentrate: the sound of footsteps and soft panting, a series of shapes, blooming and accreting into great green shards of crystal, looming, monolithic, drawing closer, until they shattered suddenly, her mind flooded with waves of glinting, spore-like grit.
Wow. There and then she made the decision to focus her research on Crane and related work. It seemed there was almost nothing done on it: the mid-Nineties was an interesting moment in PRB history. Once she was in the PRB she would be able to use their domain to search, would find more material, could get in contact with these Counterfactual music people.
The PRB. My Spiritual Home! Well, it is and not just because she loves Captain Tomorrow like all right-thinking people: it goes a little, dare she say it, deeper than that. She remembers the title, though she’s never been able to find the programme again, The Longest Revolution, a documentary she is pretty sure someone lent them and that they watched together, the big, dusty screen, the front-loading VCR, Julia sitting at her mom and dad’s feet.
One of the interviewees used a phrase that struck and stuck with her, “the Feudal remnant”. She asked her mother to explain but it was hard for her to grasp and somehow it transformed into one more creature in her childhood bestiary of fantastic, imaginary evils: some undead, ancient force, like a mummy or a vampire stalking the land. Perhaps that was why the faces she saw on the TV were so pale, so unhealthy and exhausted looking, the land and buildings so drab compared to the sun-blessed, vibrant dazzle of the California day outside. Whatever it was it seemed, if she understood the documentary at all, that the Brits had killed it off at last, lifted the spell, the curse, driven a stake through its heart. Even now she still sometimes dreamt of being chased by something vast and ancient through those mean and echoing redbrick streets, the broken factories and weed-strewn gardens, on into overgrown fields, forests groaning with old growth.
Who would have given that video to them? Her parents didn’t remember, which was strange as her dad was if anything compendious in his memory for what he had and hadn’t seen. Perhaps she had imagined it. Can life really be driven by that? Can one dream something into existence and then spend a life pursuing it? Where would such a dream come from? Up from some haunted, timeless depth, some elemental yearning, a sudden glimpse into another world? Perhaps that’s what childhood is, a standing between all worlds at once, and adulthood is the slow narrowing and shuttering of those worlds until there is just that single narrow hallway.
And what is that room there at the end of the hallway? Who sits patiently waiting behind the door?
She glanced up from the work she was trying to do on her laptop. The news was being shown on a central screen, US networks until they hit the Partition. Tom had somehow arranged a seat on a media-only flight for News Central 24 so probably it would be current affairs all the way.
Vice President Altborg was being interviewed, the closed captions up. She will be glad to get away from this, even for a few weeks.
What’s your economic platform? the host asked.
The response was immediate, intense, Altborg manifesting disdain and barely restrained contempt, she could read it in his face, his thin, tightly drawn lips.
Full Spectrum Weaponization, the captions say. Micro. Macro. Molecular. The autopoiesis of the shockwave. The mutagenic potentialities of Gaussian randomness. Make your contribution to our meta-human becoming.
Why would we?
It’s your duty, Altborg said. You will do your duty under this Administration.
The programme cut to a campaign ad. Black screen, RIFT in large red letters. A picture of Connaught’s face staring up and out at something just beyond the viewer faded in. Then the slogan. RIFT. Dive in, swim deep, become.
With a groan she looked away from the TV, and instead scrolled distractedly through the social media feeds on her phone, and there they all were again, the insane claims and programmes, the outraged reactions.
Would it be so terrible to just leave, get out of here, go live in the Co-Sphere, even if her PhD isn’t finished yet? Cut and run? They would say defect, a word that hadn’t been used for twenty years till this last campaign and Connaught’s barely comprehensible rallies, the wild anti-communism, the threats of purges and expulsions. She watched one with Kevin. Connaught, tieless in the heat, leading his followers in a bizarre call-and-response chant. Defects? Defect! Defective defecator? Defect! De facto fornicator? Defect! Fact-deaf fabricator? Defect!
Well, why not? Should she try to get some work done, prepare for the conference at South Academy that she’d been invited to attend, do the background reading? She knew Patnaik would be speaking, and what an honour it would be to see him. He must be, what, eighty now?
The news channel was focusing on the Games and the PRB now, shots of the Stadium in various stages of construction. Soon she would be there. She likes that at the journey’s midpoint the control of the plane swaps over from the US to the Co-Sphere automatic flight system, like being handed from one giant to another more gentle one, and once you’re halfway there, there is no turning back. No turning back now, Julia!
She sat back, felt a dull throbbing behind her left eye, a migraine coming on perhaps, and reached for her complimentary travel satchel — eye mask, earphones, disposable toothbrush, two Nanivar in a plastic wrapping with the Spoonbill logo on the front. No PRB pharms? She was disappointed, but it was telling too that she would rather have taken something manufactured in another country than she would her own at that point. Kevin had told her to stay away from Spoonbill pharms at all costs. Lots of claims being made about EY and biohacking and Connaught’s team playing quirks in the electoral system. It’s a coup, a putsch, they need to hack the population because they are desperate, they have declared war on their own people! And yet, she found she was popping them out of the wrapper and looking at the slogan printed on it: fly the kaleidoscope skies…
You will do your duty under this administration, she said to herself, and, with a small, almost imperceptible sneer, swallowed them, and sat back.
Julia’s Dream
Her dream? Well this is her dream, to finally visit the PRB. The Nanivar takes hold as the plane bounces slightly under her, hitting some turbulence. Pale spirals intensify and merge into a set of interlocking fractal patterns, whirling slowly before her, mingling with memories, anticipations of the arrival, jumbled images from The Longest Revolution. The old television becomes a tunnel, a cave mouth, a wormhole, a muddy vortex, a whirlpool of glass shards and pixelated mud into which she is being drawn and a memory of, yes, when her parents were out and she put that video back in the VCR and watched it, it didn’t seem to be the same programme. Instead there on the screen she saw a young man, pale, black hair, leaning forward, intense, gazing inquisitively into her room, three green monoliths rotating soundlessly out of the dark, coming closer, something shifting within them, shapes moving, shadow-forms, shadow-selves, and an old song drifting up from the centre of the shadow-world:
She became a star, a star all in the night
And he became a thundercloud and muffled her out of sight
Rain in sluggish rivulets against the window, a bank of dank grey cloud into which they slowly sank thinned to reveal a flat, dark green landscape: quilted fields, a brown river and its tarnished floodplain, the roads falling into disrepair, interlaced, cracked and carless.
She shifted in her seat, the damp land rising up to meet her, an odd thrill deep in her stomach, almost, she thought, in her womb. Funny. The motherland. Still she felt a little better, headache gone, fresher. She had dreamed but could remember nothing of it. Good that it was still midmorning and she had a full day ahead of her.
Touchdown. Disembarkation. The raw air of another planet.
As she waited at passport control she chatted to the friendly, possibly over-friendly, guy she had sensed was discreetly looking at her as she boarded, stowed luggage, used the bathroom, and who had managed to position himself behind her in the queue. She confessed this was her first time here as he delighted in letting her know that he had been back and forth, in fact all over the Co-Sphere, as part of the NC24’s crew, giving her the benefit of his experience, even showing her a picture of his kid, explaining how she was a dead cert for Ivy League in a few years’ time. She engaged, politely distracted, doing the friendly, familiar American thing she thought she better try to rein in once she got through customs, if her friend’s experiences were anything to go by.
The documents scrutinized and stamped, she moved into the scan room and stood smiling tightly for a few minutes until the door opposite buzzed open and the green GO sign illuminated with a flash, imprinting itself on her vision. She was sure she was fine, but still, these formalities were always going to cause a little anxiety.
Suitcase collected from the creaky carousel, she came through the doors, bumped into the definitely over-friendly and certainly horny family man again, offering to take her out and show her around as she scanned the cavernous, near empty terminal, politely explaining, hey, thanks, that was fine, she was meeting a local, and eventually spotted Tom, over by the greeting point, waiting for her, hands clasped behind his back, suppressing a smile that came shining up through his eyes and flushed his cheeks a little. She sensed the family man melting away at her side with a restrained OK, so, sure, catch you around, half laughed to herself.
Tom, she’d forgotten how tall he was.
Julia, he said. Julia, so good to see you again. Welcome to the PRB.
It was raining of course, an April shower Tom assured her, as they headed toward the Softrail hub that would take them into the city centre. How was she feeling? Tiring flight? No, no, she’d managed to sleep. Good, good. Tom told her he had arranged a whistle-stop tour of the city for later that day if she felt up to it and she replied that she did, that she was feeling good, raring to go.
First then, Tom said with a smile, stowing her suitcase in the luggage rack and sitting down beside her as the Softrail pulled out of Terminal 2, we should get you settled in at Alan and Jennifer’s place. They are keen to meet you. Very rare we have guests from California these days, he said. Alan is still up in London at the moment, putting the finishing touches on the Games.
The big event, she said. Is everything ready?
Oh yes, on or even ahead of schedule is my understanding. No doubt there will be a last-minute hiccough or two, but largely prepared.
She smiled.
He half turned to her. Jennifer is preparing a pudding, he said, knowing of your interest in traditional foods and the influence of rationing and then the Autarchy. So, prepare yourself. She’s still very, almost frighteningly active, for eighty, he said.
Wow, eighty. I am sure she must have some amazing memories.
Which she will be more than happy to share with you. At length, he said.
Perfect. She sat
back in her seat and looked around at her fellow passengers. So Birmingham is kind of mixed, right?
For a moment he looked confused. Oh god, yes. The PRB is minority white now, he said with obvious pride, something no other part of the Co-Sphere can boast.
First things first, let me give you your guest ROD.
He presented it from his jacket pocket, it looked like a large computer mouse with a series of five buttons around the side.
She pressed the on switch. It’s like the phones back home, right?
Yes and no, there’s a set of instructions and a Guide you can skip through if you want to get a bit more hands-on, he said, then unaccountably seemed to blush slightly.
The button on the top left, your thumb should be on it already, it’s ergonomic.
Feels snug in the palm, she said. So, should I skip?
Well yes, I think it’s quite intuitive, he said.
A Guide to Your Guest ROD/FAQ
What is the ROD?
ROD stands for Readable Object Device. It is the interface through which citizens of the PRB access information and services.
Why have I been given one?
All visitors to the PRB are given a complimentary ROD in order to access services available to them (dependent on country of origin, please see “What does it give me access to?”, below) to communicate with other users of the Co-Sphere’s main PEN protocol and access non-official domains within the PRB.
How does it work?
The Six Institutions can be accessed through the colour-coded buttons on the side of the ROD:
• GREEN: Health and Care
• BLUE: Education and Training
• RED: Work
• ORANGE: Housing
• WHITE: Transport
• GREY: Leisure
Non-official networks/sites and protocols can be accessed through pressing and holding any of the coloured buttons. This will give you access to a number of routers which can be used to search through the PRB/Co-Sphere’s host of unofficial domains.