Alex thinks this is a pile of shit. There’s as much unrest here as anywhere in the States: it’s just that the American population is better organized and more heavily armed. The Christer coalition used nerve gas and helicopter gun ships in Houston.
He says, although he knows Perse will not rise to it, ‘Strong on law and order, that’s how you like it?’
Perse smiles sourly. ‘I got another sweet case today. Matter of fact, I was pulled off it to come down here. Some bloke filling up at a petrol station early this morning got the shit beaten out of him. Three guys in a van jumped him, stabbed him, cracked his skull with a two by four, then drove his car over him, back and forth, back and forth, three or four times. Broke his legs. Then one of them took off in the bloke’s Mercedes, and the other two followed in their van. They lost control of the van on the Chiswick Flyover, and they’re down at the nick right now. Still don’t know what happened to the Merc.’
‘So what has that got to do with you?’
‘The poor bastard they beat up was carrying half a key of DOA. But that wasn’t why they beat him up. Know why they did it? He was black, and these shitheads saw his white girlfriend coming out of the petrol station toilet. What a sweet world, eh? So I’m a busy boy, Sharkey. Tell me about your meeting with Billy.’
‘You fucked up my deal, didn’t you? I don’t care if it was Billy Rock’s pet Chief Inspector who actually sent in the squad cars—someone had to tell Billy in the first place. You did it so I’d stay in the hole with him. Admit it, Perse, you’re going after him again.’
‘Even if you pay off the loan, Sharkey, you never will pay off the debt. You know that. And then there’s the protection. Why are you pissing and moaning at me?’
‘Everyone knows you have it in for Billy Rock.’
Perse fixes Alex with his patented heavy-duty Look, and Alex knows he’s pressed the right button. He is caught in the middle of the war of Flatfoot Perse’s fucked-up foot.
Perse says, ‘You keep your mouth shut, you little shit. You can’t even begin to know the favours I’ve done you. Stop complaining and tell me what Billy Rock wants from you.’
So Alex tells Perse about Billy Rock’s plan to breed dolls, and the job he’s been given. It isn’t as if he has any choice, and besides, he doesn’t think that he’s doing anything wrong, grassing like this. Cops are part of the information economy like everyone else—there’s even a bulletin board called Cop Watch which posts information on police operations and techniques. According to the anarcho-liberationists who set it up, the police check it out more frequently than anyone else.
Perse thinks it over, then says, ‘Billy Rock has to have someone else working for him. Some kind of rogue biotech company, perhaps. You know Billy Rock never had an idea of his own in his life.’
‘Of course he has someone else. He more or less told me.’
Or at least, the kid, Doggy Dog, did. Alex hasn’t told Perse about his suspicions concerning Doggy Dog.
Perse says, ‘I’ll see what I can find out. It might be a way in. You can talk to this guy, one hacker to another.’
‘Why should I help you?’
‘You’re paying Billy, what? Five K per month?’
‘Something like that,’ Alex says, sweating because Perse is almost bang on the nail. He adds, ‘With what I’ve told you, you can have Billy Rock on a plate. Isn’t that enough? The Hyundai Magic Doll Corporation won’t be too happy if someone starts hacking their patented genome. You have violation of copyright right there, and definitely a slew of broken biotech regulations.’
‘The point is being able to prove it,’ Perse says, lighting up another cigarette. He smokes Craven As, not being a man who likes to compromise. The first two fingers of Perse’s right hand are stained nicotine yellow to the knuckles. He sneers when Alex takes out one of his Benson and Hedges, and says, ‘What Billy’s asked you to do would earn him nothing more than a fine and a slap on the wrist, if that. But if you get close to whoever put Billy up to this, then we have a lead on a conspiracy to defraud. I’m just a street copper, thank Christ, but I’m sure the commercial enforcement boys would be glad of the case.’
‘And I’ll be a material witness. Fuck off, Perse.’ Alex knows what happens to witnesses against the Triads.
‘You won’t have to testify,’ Perse says coolly.
Alex lights his cigarette. ‘I’m sure. And I’d still be in debt to Billy’s family, or someone else will have the paper, so what good does this do me?’
‘I’ve always looked after you, Sharkey. No one will finger you for this.’
Alex says, ‘I don’t have to stay around to get whacked by Billy’s family. I can move on, operate anywhere. I just need a little seed money.’
Alex has already thought it through. The hormone specs are straightforward. He isn’t worried that he can’t do it; he is worried that once Billy Rock’s people test everything out, Billy will decide that Alex Sharkey is disposable.
Perse says, ‘You’re a London boy, like me. Where else are you going to go?’
‘Somewhere cool,’ Alex says. ‘Finland, maybe.’
‘They’ve got malaria in Finland, these days.’
‘Sweden, then. Iceland. What does it matter?’
‘They’ve got leprosy in Sweden. A holdout from the Middle Ages. The one place it never went away. And then there’s the radioactivity. Don’t you worry, Sharkey,’ Perse says, stubbing out his cigarette, ‘I’ll look after you. It’s time I got back to work. It’s starting to stink in here.’
Alex walks with Perse to the crime site. The sun is brutal, and when Alex puts on his big black hat Perse laughs and says it makes him look like a nun in drag. Perse limps slightly, favouring his right foot. That’s the one that was run over after Perse stopped Billy Rock’s limo with the intention of shaking it down, a month after he’d been relocated to the Drug Squad. Billy Rock just laughed and ordered his driver to move on. The driver was a nervous get-away merchant who pulled away so fast he left smoking rubber on the tarmac. So fast that Perse couldn’t get his foot out of the way. The limo’s rear wheel went over it and broke twelve bones. Then gangrene set in and Perse lost two toes. More importantly, Perse lost so much face that he spent all of his time trying to nail Billy Rock, until one of Billy’s tame Chief Inspectors put a stop to it by sticking Perse with a case-load of unsolved drug-related murders. And now, two years later, it’s started all over again, with Alex piggy-in-the-middle.
Cars are parked on either side of the road, with goods piled on their bonnets: TVs, portable phones, bootleg CDs and cassettes, clothing, cased computers, VCRs, CD-ROM players. There are operators who can open a carton, slit the plasticwrap, slip out the goods and replace, it with a slab of concrete weighing exactly the same, and reseal the wrap and carton so sweetly you’ll never know until after you’ve bought it. At the corner, a white van is parked with its door cracked a handswidth at the bottom. People are queuing to buy, bending to pass money through the slot and receive their packet or tube, shuffling off to find a quiet spot to get their hit. A skinny guy lurches up clutching a leather coat, saying they can have it for ten pounds, five pounds, he needs the fare home, that’s all…There’s blood still wet on the coat’s orange fake fur collar.
Perse says to Alex, ‘One of your customers?’
‘Maybe one of the Wizard’s ex-customers.’
‘You’re not really a hard bastard, Sharkey. Not like you pretend to be. You should get out of the game.’
‘I’m not doing anything against the law.’
‘Not now, perhaps, but in a few weeks psychoactive viruses will be illegal. And once upon a time you were benchtesting new narcotic substances for a well-known pot-boiler who even now is serving a long stretch for possession with intent. You were lucky you were caught with nothing on you, and even luckier that no one fingered you.’
‘I was held in jail for six months and released without trial.’
‘But that doesn’t make you innocent, Sharkey.
You know that.’
‘I know you think no one’s innocent.’
‘How is the Wizard these days?’
‘Making methamphetamine out of household chemicals. He’ll be richer coming out than he was when he went in. He once told me that he used to say to the people he sold stuff, “This is going to kill you. It’s going to destroy your life and ruin your world.” They bought it anyway. They still buy DOA, even though it’ll kill them if it isn’t properly cut, because it’s such a fantastic high. With a name like Dead On Arrival the punters think it has to be. But I don’t deal in stuff like that.’
Alex really doesn’t like hard drugs. The thing about something like heroin is that it only works on people with clinical or subclinical depression. Any normal person feels nothing but nausea and lassitude after their first taste and doesn’t understand why anyone would want to try it twice, but one little girl told Alex that the first time she smoked junk she felt this click in her head, like a door opening into a world of sunshine. The psychotropic viruses Alex hacks are more subtle, enhancing highly specific states of consciousness, and totally non-addictive. The problem is that the government doesn’t see it his way.
Perse says, ‘All the same, word is that someone’s interested in you. I’ve heard that the spooks might be on your case. They pulled your jacket, although don’t worry, it’s clean.’
Alex laughs. It seems the only sane response. ‘What kind of spooks? Five?’
‘There you go. Something along those lines.’ Perse isn’t smiling.
They’ve reached the crime scene. A couple of uniformed officers chat beside an ambulance waiting with its doors wide open. Just inside the cemetery gate, yellow tape is stretched to make a rough square amongst blackened headstones. Stevie Cryer, Perse’s boyish partner, is watching a forensic tech work on two bodies lying on plastic sheeting.
Perse says, We’ve got the Colombians trying to muscle in again. I don’t know why anyone should be interested in a small-time artist like you, Sharkey, unless you’re servicing some MP someone wants fitted up. What haven’t you told me?’
Alex says, ‘If my jacket is clean, what could they know?’
‘They have these tricks. Want to hear one? They call you up, put a subliminal signal on the screen. You come around with a blinder of a headache, and you can’t remember spilling your guts.’
Alex thinks about how he woke up this morning. He says, ‘If you want me to help you with Billy Rock, then find out more about this spook stuff.’
‘That’s the spirit, Sharkey. And if you hear about someone trying to shift a half a key of DOA, let me know, I’m still after the shithead who took off in the Mercedes.’
Perse lifts the yellow tape and ducks under it and leaves Alex standing next to Stevie Cryer. Cryer is a lanky, amiable fellow, tough but straightforward. Alex likes him a lot more than he likes Perse. Today, Cryer is dressed for the heat, in baggy blue shorts and a long-sleeved grey T-shirt, a floppy straw hat perched jauntily on his thinning blond hair. He says, ‘I hear you’re making some new kind of gear, Alex. Is that why you can afford those snappy threads?’
Alex says, ‘I have a problem with your partner.’
Cryer fixes Alex with his washed-out blue eyes. He always looks wearily amused, as if he’s seen everything the world has to offer and isn’t impressed. He says, ‘You’ll just have to work it out with him.’
‘It’s about Billy Rock. Perse is starting it up again.’
‘That’s his call.’
‘Has he talked to you about it?’
Cryer says, ‘Well, that’s between him and me.’
‘I’d hate to see you get involved.’
‘Where is this heading, Alex? You have something to tell me?’
‘I’d like to think I can call you if I need to. If things get out of hand.’
‘We’re always there, Alex. Excuse me now. I’ve got to deal with a couple of dead people.’
5 – Deep Hacking Mode
Alex spends the rest of the day making a list of what he will need to realize Billy Rock’s order. The way to go, he decides, after running a matching search that compares the putative doll hormones with a library of equivalents, is to buy commercially available bacteria which have been gengineered to produce the cocktail of hormones used in Hormone Replacement Therapy—the secret of the Prime Minister’s post-menopausal vigour—and use site-specific mutagenesis to alter the plasmids which have been inserted into them.
It is an old technique, one that harnesses the boundless mutability of bacterial metabolism. The serfs of the biosphere, bacteria are easy to manipulate because they have a simple genetic structure. Unlike plants and animals, which package their genetic information into as many as a hundred separate chromosomes, each an immensely long complexly folded string of DNA, bacteria have a single loop of DNA which can be augmented by smaller satellite loops, plasmids. Bacteria exchange plasmids promiscuously. Naturally occurring plasmids add capabilities like antibiotic resistance; artificial plasmids can be inserted to transform bacteria into self-replicating factories that will synthesize a single product on command. Site-specific mutagenesis will selectively alter the DNA of the plasmids of the gengineered bacteria Alex plans to purchase, so that they will manufacture doll-specific hormones instead of human hormones.
The site-specific mutagenesis and plasmid reinsertion will take a day. After screening, Alex will grow up a batch of suitably transformed bacteria in his little bioreactor, and after three or four days he’ll have enough purified hormones for testing.
It’s late in the night when Alex has finished, but compared to his own work this is a trivial project. The essence of gene hacking is nothing more than altering the sequence of nucleotide bases along a DNA helix. Once you’ve identified which genes you want to modify, the rest is no more than simple wet chemistry using technology as old and tried as manufacturing enzymes for biological washing powders. Designing psychoactive drugs and viruses is of an entirely different order of complexity.
Alex read George Gamow’s classic, Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom, when he was a kid. The book was lent to him by a teacher who glimpsed a spark in the surly quiet fat boy who hardly ever talked to anyone, who seemed to live inside his head most of the time. The book clicked with something in Alex. It helped him define what he wanted to be; one of the mind tools he uses to engage in the zen-like deep hacking mode needed to work out his complex syntheses is to imagine himself as a nucleus at the heart of an atom, fat and happy and strong, binding his swarm of electrons and watching the reactions around him.
Organic synthesis is still a black art resembling alchemy, in that all operations have to be conducted in an exact and precise way that approaches ritualization, often for complicated reasons that are difficult to fully figure out. Many psychoactive molecules are big and complex, and often their effect depends on the way in which the chains and rings of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen are doped with single atoms of phosphate or sulphur. Working out how to get those atoms in exactly the right place, and knowing just where the right places are, intuitively understanding the subtle interactions that twist and bend molecular conformations in new and interesting ways, is what Alex is good at, better than any of the so-called expert systems used by big drug companies. And that’s only half the story, because after something is synthesized, the impurities have to be removed. Any intelligent school kid can make LSD from readily available chemicals—the trick is to purify it of the secondary products which can cause anything from recurrent flashbacks to pseudo-Parkinson’s.
The interface between psychoactive molecules and the intricate metabolic and ionic processes which sustain consciousness is fractal, sensitively dependent upon a myriad initial conditions. Before the Millennium, it could be crudely disrupted by drugs like Prozac, which interfered with the subtle checks and balances of serotonin metabolism. Most psychoactive drugs are no better. But now there are psychoactive RNA viruses which stimulate single points on consciousness’s fractal surface.
The DNA made by psychoactive viruses, though, cannot make new viruses, and it is not inserted into the host genome. Instead, it manufactures enzymes which in turn synthesize chemicals that are normally present only when the host neurone is activated, enhancing the particular fractional state of consciousness controlled by the infected neurones. Because the viruses can’t replicate, and because the unbound DNA they make is ephemeral, users need to buy a hit every time they want to turn themselves on. If you can hack a psychoactive virus that targets an interesting component of consciousness’s Gestalt, you can make a lot of money very quickly.
So far, Alex has only been successful with two strains of virus. One, Serenity, was actually hacked by someone else; Alex simply cracked its code and pirated it. The other, Ghost, was quickly broken by other gene hackers, and Alex has put its full details on shareware bulletin boards, with a request for a token contribution from anyone who uses the information. Perhaps half the users pay. It’s pin money, but useful pin money, because Alex has more than used up his capital making a more potent variant, HyperGhost. And now all psychoactive viruses are about to be made illegal. Which is why he’s doing this dumb piece of gene hacking for Billy Rock, instead of getting on with his real business.
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