by Carl Neville
Animals, vegetables and even minerals, all in the name of pansexualism.
I think it’s polysexualism, she said, pansexualism means that the sex drive is the base of everything.
Aye well, you’d know, Gillespie says, and winks, tilts his glass to hide his irritation at being corrected. He is going to try and get her into bed. No doubt he tried and failed with the young American girl. He was the source of the old joke that used to go round about her, trying to shame her for her promiscuity, how free she was with her favours. “Oh give us bread but also give us Rose’s”. She’s not sure she can forgive him for that and for a moment she almost wishes she had an A-monitor to fend him off with.
Barrow/Tom
At last. All this dead time.
We have analysed your public record, we have concerns, Barrow says. We know you have voted through plets for 70 percent of your mandatory democratic participation engagements, we also…
The plet pushes that way, sometimes it swerves.
Many people would say it reveals the truth of the person’s political orientation.
Slight panic on his face, something buried there.
Barrow’s big hands itch to dig deeper, pull out fistfuls of his mind.
The patch tightens slightly, releases something. He glances down at his own readout, heart rate up, adrenalin levels soaring, intrusive thoughts, impulses.
Someone in analytics will be noticing this and questioning his suitability to be back in active service.
He draws a deep, discrete breath through his nostrils.
I recalibrate it personally every few months I can’t, there are outliers I am sure.
You have traded work hours in off-domain marketplaces, you have also converted work vouchers into currency in order to access unregulated clubs connected to the Enthusiasm and to unregulated pharma.
Well that’s not illegal.
But it is strongly discouraged. As is the use of Evan-Ess.
More panic, his voice leaping out of him, pitched high, repeated swallowing, eyes searching the table.
It’s our data to do with as we please.
Certainly, but as you well know data is vital to our ability to organize society.
All of it?
Do you have something to hide.
Doesn’t SSF hide things?
A flash of anger. Good.
You went to a club near the Enthusiasm, did you enter the Enthusiasm itself?
No.
Scans reveal you have SynDev in your system. What is your attitude to EY, Everlasting Yeah?
I think it’s a tool like any other.
Does your neutrality not make you more susceptible to infiltration? Citizen, where is your commitment?
I am committed.
EY is sexually transmissible. Any sexual contact with EY users?
Fear, guilt, shame, all these antiquated emotions no one is supposed to feel anymore so easily triggered. Barrow almost smiles.
Do I have it in my system? He cranes forward slightly to try and see the read out on Barrow’s Passocon. I have been careful he says, but so many people—
You mean so many people of your acquaintance, citizen. People some might term domestic subversives.
Changes tack, keeps pushing down on the shame.
Infantile Possession Syndrome: you like to own things. Would you like to own land?
No, no.
But you would like to own people?
Perhaps.
Very well, let’s return to your recent activities within the PRB. You brought Julia Verona to Bewes’s house, why?
They offered, they like to have guests, especially Americans. I thought Julia might like an opportunity to talk to people like Alan and Jennifer, I thought we could take a trip out to the stadium together, see the rehearsals.
We know that the poison that killed Bewes was brought in by Julia Verona.
Barrow pauses, lets the impact of the information work its way through his system.
You facilitated her access to the PRB, you facilitated her access to Bewes. You insisted on staying the evening she would be given access to him. Or when you would. It was the first night he had returned home since you had been there, correct?
It is also the case that you blocked out an SSF ROD blackout on the night Bewes died…
Oh, that was…
Recording conversation?
Barrow tries to remain neutral.
SSF1 conversations?
No. We were at dinner and Julia couldn’t follow everything so I recorded it for her that’s all.
Still, you went around an SSF1 block?
PRB 2003701 ROD: Private Cache/Block-Block Activated A Conversation around the Dinner Table, Part 2/4
Bewes (D): Democracy, the people’s involvement at the deepest and highest level, sortition, these things are fundamental to the understanding of what people were in the struggle for.
Squires: Democratic, yes, but within certain limits, in certain areas. We have reached, are about to go beyond, a certain limit. That limit is the point of contention. Who will impose it, who will be the voice of Law? Who will take on that responsibility and face the hatred, the rage, the contempt of those whose own chaos, whose own fantasy of limitlessness you have blocked. We must have… Guardians of the limit shall we call them.
Bewes (D): Forgive me, but now you sound like a conservative.
Squires: Perhaps in this regard I am.
Bewes (D): By invoking the law I assume you mean a higher law than the mere democratic process. Something that transcends it. Necessity. Emergency. You will act against us in order to save us.
Squires: We are caught in an impossible bind, you see. The necessity will only be believed retrospectively once we have heaped ruin on ourselves. The question then is who would want to ruin us?
Bewes (D): Perhaps what you call ruin is the price we will pay for certain truths, certain knowledge.
I didn’t know who the people there were, it was just —
Citizen. Everything goes against your memory, your interpretation of the events, your own behaviour. I believe you are sincere in the claims you make.
A confused hope in his eyes.
But the main trace of the XV2 was found in your bag.
No, no.
These are the facts. The interpretation is something you need to help us with.
The patch is squeezing Barrow’s arm, telling him to throttle back, the suspect’s mental state is chaotic, trying to absorb the new information, the implications. There is a concealed tranquilizer spray in the table and the ceiling set to trip at the slightest indication of a virus triggering. A long pause.
What are the punishments for someone who has been viralled? he asks.
Barrow sits back, here is the tipping point, we have got there quickly enough. It’s a legal grey area, he says, can we hold the citizen who has committed the crime responsible, is it they who have committed it? There are many circumstances to be taken into consideration. What’s certain is that any effort that the interviewee makes in order to address the circumstances they have found themselves in, this has a great effect on what happens next.
It’s just. You know I have been diagnosed with I.P.S., he says and…
Tears in his eyes,
… I just wanted to…
A weeper.
… needed to feel
Just as in the end they all wept.
Pressure on his arm, the patch tightening. Tom lets out a little sob.
He checks his feed, SSF3 telling him the interrogation needs to pause, the subject has become too distressed and for a second, he yearns for the Nineties when—
Barrow shakes his head quickly to dislodge the thoughts as the patch constricts painfully on his arm.
Well, citizen, he says, you have a mandatory rest period. Please reflect on what we have discussed so far.
Rose
At Gillespie’s invitation the Enthusiasts at the next table have joined them now, anything for an audience, and wi
th some shuffling and rearranging there are ten or so at the table; Gillespie assuming a commanding position in the centre, ready to make his presence felt.
The girl next to her, blond hair, light-skinned, one eye bright blue the other deep green, both lenses, probably, is Sixtwo. They have gone back to using the numbers again, the mania for depersonalization. My name is Rose, she says.
How beautiful, Sixtwo says and rolls her eyes up, moves her head about slightly as though examining all the images the word conjures up, savouring an imagined perfume. Rose reminds herself no doubt her lenses are augmented, and she really is viewing a collection of roses, three-dimensional, strewn ghostly yet vivid though the dim, humming Canteen air above them, scent-simulations swirling invisibly in her mind. Perhaps she has set her ROD to trigger around certain keywords, perhaps an algorithm in there is throwing other images at her based on its readings of her responses. Rose discreetly glances at the ROD Sixtwo has held tight to her hand by two plain plastic bands and sees it has been customized with a host of skin patches on her fingers and pouches that are constantly microdosing her, listening to her responses and drip-feeding a supply of smart-drugs and images, interactions, information to her.
So beautiful, she says again.
Sixtwo is herself rather beautiful, enough to make Rose think twice about staying.
I was involved in Counterfactual Records with Rob, she says.
Oh, I know you, yes, she says. You used to lecture at the South Academy and you maintain the Urkive. Yes, I thought I recognized you.
Rose smiles, though it is impossible to know if Sixtwo really knows who she is or if it’s merely the ROD that does. Does it matter, make any difference anymore?
They begin to talk about Crane, has she read the book? Yes. It was circulating widely, everyone was Spreeding it, they liked the maps especially, she said.
Maps?
Yes they were circulating too — vc961-5/5?
No Rose had never heard of it.
The OLF are using them to map out one of the Other Londons, it will become one of the dimensions of the Enthusiasm.
Really? Rose is surprised, what could one want to live there for? But then, the problem of finding the single form of a world, perhaps it was best that those to whom that world appealed could go there.
She nods and sips, the Urkive, the library system, is being bypassed, other methods of communication have opened up, things circulating through semi-private channels in the Overlay, a new non-reality that has sprung up around her and which she only half understands; some new domain in which all the lingering inbuilt deficiencies will be gently eased away. Is it all so new? They had tried something like that in their own primitive way. Whitening out the street names, never using possessive pronouns, giving away the people they gave birth to, breaking up the family unit. Start again, start better, an absolute break achievable in a single generation. They threw a crisp white sheet over everything but the contours and lineaments of the Old World came bleeding through. Perhaps all it really served to do was cover the rubble below, so they went stumbling on, lurching drunkenly, disoriented and misdirected in ways they couldn’t quite see or name anymore.
Tom
A surge of real panic goes through him, he sees the truth of what has happened, he has been selected to go out to the States because they know he is weak and highly suggestible, he was captured there somehow, when or where he can’t imagine. Perhaps Julia is a double agent, she must be, she has come over with the poison and given it to him, and then he has, completely without any conscious control, administered it to Bewes. His envy of Dominic has driven him to it, his anger and frustration at the PRB. None of this seems to be how he feels or understands his own relation to the world but if he has been targeted, they could have seized on his true motivations somehow and…
And if he is part of some wider plot, something involving the South Academy, some attempt to get access to the Games, perhaps this is why Helen has agreed to him stepping away from the opening ceremony, has put the SynDev in his system, perhaps Julia has been here for precisely that reason, to distract him, to make him agree to drop his involvement. What did they do in the Overlay? He can barely remember, it seemed beautiful and transcendent, a great eruption into a world of colour and delight and yet, behind that beautiful façade, there had been dark forces channelling and directing him, screening things off, making him act unconsciously.
He wouldn’t have got involved so deeply if he hadn’t wanted to impress Helen, and now they have traced things back to him. He boasted of his connections to the Games and being able to get access to the stadium through his contacts with Dominic and he worries that there are recordings of him everywhere, in the Canteens making claims about his affiliations to certain groups, possibly enemy agents working out of the South Academy somehow…
And the Timeline, the way it changed as he approached, incontrovertible proof that there is another person inside him who dreams of the destruction of the PRB. And these pranks the OLF are planning at the Games and Field Recording #4, what if…?
He looks at the single clock on the wall. What if something terrible happens?
Looks at himself in the mirror, he knows it is two-way of course, imagines that he is also the other side in the dark room gazing back, leaning forward eyes searching his own face.
Considers for a second trying to claw out whatever is inside him that has brought him to this. Instead he presses the bell.
I want to speak to Barrow, he says.
You are on a mandatory rest period, the voice replies.
It was a prank. Nothing more than a prank. Interrupt the Stanhope piece and the marches with something more modern, that was all, show their impatience with the old ways, the need to make space and room for the new.
No, he says, I am choosing to forgo it. It’s urgent. There is a pause and a few seconds later the door buzzes, Barrow has clearly been sitting outside waiting.
They found the poison in his bag, the Timeline, the role he has relinquished in the Games, and he understands the other half of what Barrow has half-seen: it must be right.
Citizen, Barrow says, the moment is here, unburden yourself.
Rose
The boy next to her seems to have got into something close to an argument with Gillespie.
Was the Autarchy really so desperate as it’s portrayed, really so long? In Day’s End it implies it was almost a decade, whereas really it was what, eighteen months.
Let me tell you, Gillespie says, that it felt like a decade. I was seven years old in Aberdeen when the rigs were getting taken over and the state was sending the army in and circling the town trying to starve us out, turn us against each other. We shut the whole country down, six thousand men, women and children came up from Yorkshire alone, who knows the numbers up from Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham, made sure those rigs became part of the co-operative structure of the new state, that was the key battle.
They took people away in the night, my da, my uncles, some people’s family never came home; they used their private militia and agents where the state had to be constrained, we used ours, turned as many in the army, as many in the police, as we could, without that we wouldn’t have laid the conditions for the Breach.
I didn’t spend all those years at the barricades in Manchester throwing petrol bombs and maintaining the integrity of the Crescent just to have some wee anarchist fops tell me I don’t understand my own history twenty years down the line. You see these old boys you’re tired of being grateful to, the ones whose sacrifice and spirit you want to pour a wee bit of your sophisticated scorn on? Without them you’d be, he starts to laugh, working for a living, 9 to 5, five days a week for fifty years. Can you imagine what a shock to the system that would be? All very nice play-acting that in the Overlay, but that could have been your future but for people like me and, he gestures to a screen up on the far wall showing the opening ceremony of the Games and the old Unions marching around the arena, banners aloft, this pack of old cunts
.
Suddenly Rose feels old herself, excluded, exiled. Caught between Gillespie’s crowing cynicism and Sixtwo’s shining certainty of bliss and resolution. She glances at her again gazing delightedly at Gillespie now, what a curio he is, hard to imagine what images his concluding words might have triggered in her lenses. She manages a half smile at the thought. Wonders how many of the Fire/Stone children were involved in the Enthusiasm, perhaps they really had produced something new, non-alienated, radically collective and it was only now bearing fruit. Could Sixtwo be her daughter?
No, ridiculous, stop this Rose. You should go home, you have the conference tomorrow.
Mixed Enthusiasms
PBS Broadcasting: 2018
Extract 2/3 (Broadcast date: pending)
Farloni (V.O.)
All kinds of rumours and theories circulate around the relationship between drugs developed during the Breach and before the Tashkent accords and the interrelation of different agencies and agents on both sides of the Partition. Claims have been made that one particularly virulent virus, FR4, that leaked from secretive Soviet-supplied laboratories in the contested territories of the 1980s and 1990s has an almost 80% infection rate among the citizens of the PRB and may be transmissible. And spreading.
Cut to Farloni: to camera.
And this is why some claim these (holds up patch) have become mandatory for all citizens. Officially part of the Co-Sphere’s real-time health analytics and allocation departments, they are in reality a way of monitoring and controlling the virus and attempts to hack into it, a kind of constantly updating bio-firewall. A necessary line of defence against our own Governments’ covert attempts at infiltration of the bioware.
Archive footage: McFarlane stepping down from a plane onto American soil. In talks around a large table with Wilhelm Connaught and other leading industrialists.
(Archive footage: Interview with McFarlane)
McFarlane