‘It’s your show, kid. But I expected the Wild Man of Atlanta to come up with something more original.’
That tag has been around Todd’s neck for twelve years, and although he’s shamelessly exploited it whenever he could, he’s getting tired of it. He’s forty next year and, unlike his legend, he can’t hack a story with a babe on his arm and a bottle in his hand. The ride into Atlanta’s firestorm was a freak of fate that’s taken over his life. He says, ‘In a few days I’ll have something you won’t believe.’
‘I believe anything as long as I can verify it.’
The editor, Barry Fugikawa, wears the traditional white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, a green eye-shade, and a smouldering stogey drooping from his pendulous lower lip. He has a crumpled bulldog face borrowed from Walter Matthau in The Front Page. It is one of the vironment’s default morphs. All the experienced hands use default morphs rather than uncool commercial or customized ones—Todd is morphed as a young, fresh-faced Robert Redford, circa All the President’s Men.
Although they’ve interacted a dozen times in the Web, Todd doesn’t know what Fugikawa looks like, or even where he is when he isn’t virched into this simulacrum of a newspaper office, with its endless ranks of empty desks under a low ceiling, and late afternoon sunlight falling through the windows. No one ever bothers to look out of the windows, which show a real-time view of Washington DC. Here and there is a pool of light where one or two figures work at a desk like this one, with its screen you can reach into to manipulate text and pictures, its trash can, its memo tablet and rack of icons and tools floating above an honest-to-God leather-backed blotter.
‘There’s one thing,’ Todd says. ‘I nearly got arrested by this asshole of a UN rep.’
Fugikawa’s desk is checking and then stripping the encryption codes which verify that the data Todd has uploaded are genuine and untampered. These days anyone with a cheap computer deck and a graphics program can hack an image of anything at all. The data-gathering equipment of accredited news agency field reporters embed verification codes in digitized images by changing the least significant bit of some of the millions of eight-bit numbers which define pixel colours. The codes are distributed through the image so that any manipulation by lazy or over-eager field reporters can be detected. Only the news agencies hold decryption keys, and they reserve the right to edit the raw footage.
The desk beeps, and Fugikawa looks up and says thoughtfully, ‘Were you arrested?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Well, next time get arrested. There’s your story. UN repression of the news.’
‘That’s why they let me go. If all you want is stories about reporters, next time I’ll get shot in the head. It isn’t that difficult. Things have tightened up here. Or I’ll get HIV or viral TB from one of the low rent whores in the hotel bar, and die a slow lingering death. You could make a series of it.’
Fugikawa tips a centimetre of white ash into the trash can. His prop cigar never grows any shorter, no matter how long he pretends to be smoking it. He says, ‘You’re the human interest, God save the mark. That’s what the public wants from you. The Wild Man of Atlanta entangled in a situation. They don’t need facts. There are enough facts in the world already.’
Fugikawa is overdoing the cynicism, Todd thinks. Perhaps it is part of the morphing package. He says, ‘Maybe I’m on to a real story this time.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Fugikawa says. ‘Spin the disc. Let’s try and make something from it.’
The copter sets down Todd and his cameraman near the head of the Children’s Crusade and dusts off before the UN copter trailing the column can get authorization to give chase.
The Crusaders move past within swirling clouds of white dust. They are of all ages, all made over as children, in mind if not in body, by fairy memes. Some hold hands. Some play panpipes or beat little drums or shake rattles, making a ragged beat that rises and falls but never falters. Some ride solar-powered trikes or scooters, but most walk, carrying nothing but a minimum of camping gear, the clothes on their backs, a credit card backed by the Crusade’s account at Credit Lyonnaise, and the conviction that they are marching to save humanity as they steadily move across Albania at five kilometres an hour for up to eighteen hours a day.
Until a year ago, the Children’s Crusade was only one of many meme-based cults spreading through the disenfranchized communities at the fringe of the European Union. Then almost all of them were spontaneously or deliberately cured, and a residual core of about a thousand met up at the Albanian border and began a march towards their promised land.
They walk out of white haze into white haze. This was once good agricultural land, but it was virus-bombed by government troops retreating from the rebels, and nothing at all grows there now. Dead corn plants crumble like ashen ghosts under the feet of the marchers.
After doing a couple of takes of his little set-up speech, Todd puts on a face-mask and wanders along the ragged edge of the column. Overhead, the UN copter buzzes back and forth like a furious bluebottle. Todd talks to about a dozen Crusaders. Only one, a middle-aged woman with pendulous grey jowls, makes any kind of sense, but she doesn’t tell him anything new, and then, inevitably, she asks if he’s been saved yet.
‘One kiss,’ she says. ‘One kiss and you’ll live forever. Live free.’
Several others around her take up the chant.
‘Live free! Free! Live free!’
Todd makes his excuses and backs away. Once out of the column, he waves to the pilot of the UN copter as it dips low above him, and jogs up the slope to rejoin Spike.
‘Did you get that last shot?’
Spike pushes up his tele-presence goggles. Their lenses are coated with fine talc. He says, ‘Through a veil of dust. Why doesn’t that fucker fuck off, or what?’
‘He’s waiting for clearance to land. Then he’ll arrest us.’
‘Let’s hope so. I’m not walking back.’
Spike runs the playback for Todd, and tells him that he’s lucky—six months ago the woman would have ripped off his face-mask and French-kissed him without a thought.
‘The fuckers are learning,’ Spike says. ‘The locals don’t take kindly to these things trying to convert them. Being Orthodox, and all that.’
Todd takes off his bush hat and mops a gruel of dust and sweat from the back of his neck. He’s a tall, husky man with a cap of fine blond hair and a craggy, open face. He’s beginning to sweat off his sunblock, and the tip of his nose is sunburnt. He tells Spike, ‘The people who own these farms are mostly Muslims. The rebels are Greek Orthodox, remember? That’s why Glass converted to Orthodoxy. Try and keep it straight.’
‘Glass was an American Muslim before that,’ Spike says, as if that explains everything.
Glass is the Web prophet who has sworn to give protection to the Children’s Crusade. He started his career as Professor of Media Studies at some MidWest arts college, then became a Web host, handling a dozen user groups at once, shaping debate from their endless chatter. He made a fortune with some kind of complexity research that enabled him to identify brief windows of predictability in the seething World Markets, blew most of his money on all kinds of wild research, and moved to Greece, where he constructed a legendary virtual environment he christened the Library of Dreams. A couple of months ago he very publically married Antoinette, one of the newest virtuality supermodels, and now he’s promising to save the Children’s Crusade and bring the Golden Age.
Todd’s contact in Tirana claims he has contacts who can take Todd to Glass. An interview with Glass would earn Todd enough money to keep his creditors off his back for a few months. The latest is his daughter, who is suing him for alienation of affection. Violetta is only seven, for Christ’s sake, and Todd is sure that his bitch of a third wife is behind it. Marcy got the court to stop his right of access, claiming his lifestyle was affecting Violetta’s socialization learning curve, and it’s Marcy’s style to twist the knife once she’s planted it in hi
s back. Even if he wins, Todd will still have to pay off both sets of lawyers, and he still owes fees from the right of access case.
Todd and Spike watch the Children’s Crusade wind its way across the dusty fields. There are poplar trees on the far side of the fields, and a sluggish river beyond the trees, but despite the heat and the dust no one leaves the column.
Todd cracks open a carton of Diet Coke, takes a swig, and hands it to Spike. ‘There’s definitely a story in this. What does a hip guy like Glass want with a bunch of chiliastic brainburns?’
‘Maybe Glass has burned out. Maybe he’s desperate for publicity.’
Spike lights one of the local, loosely rolled cigarettes with a heavy lighter made from a bullet casing. He rubs at the red circles his tele-presence goggles have left around his eyes. He is from South London, tough and bandy-legged and doggedly pessimistic.
‘They’re like the Chinese,’ Todd says, the glimmer of an angle coming to him.
Spike squints off into the distance, where, high above the dust, the lenses of his camera drone reflect flashes of sunlight. He’s set it to dogging the UN copter’s tail, to give its AI practice.
Todd says, ‘The Long March. Chairman Mao. China.’
‘Didn’t we go to China, a couple of years back?’
‘That was Tibet.’
‘Same thing.’
‘You know it isn’t, you bastard.’
‘I know it was where I got the worst case of shits in my life.’
Todd throws the empty Coke carton at Spike’s head. You never get the shits. All you ever eat is McFood.’
‘It must have been a yak burger.’ Spike says. He adds reflectively, ‘That was a good story, the one about the Buddhist underground.’
‘It was a fucking sad story.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s a fucking sad world, boss.’
The Children’s Crusade ambles past at a steady rate through the dusty haze. There are about a thousand people living in the arcology in Denver where Todd has a one room efficiency. In a false name, because three of his four ex-wives have a lien on everything he earns until the end of the century. He has never before thought of all those people around him, like grubs in cells in rotten wood. Here they are. Hot sunlight flares through the white dust. Off in the distance, a second powder-blue copter is making a wide loop over the virus-burned fields, coming in towards them.
‘Here we go,’ Spike says. He takes a final drag from his cigarette, pinches it out and thriftily tucks the fag-end in the breast pocket of his jacket.
Todd says, ‘What would happen if they all scattered, started to make converts? No one thinks of that, right? I mean, how many people in Albania can afford to be on the universal phage programme?’
‘Like vampires?’ Spike pulls his goggles over his eyes. ‘Been done to death, that one. Staked out at the crossroads, through the heart. Try out that speech about the Long March, maybe it’ll be a good opener.’
Out above the column of the Children’s Crusade, the camera drone swoops and turns, racing in ahead of the chopper that will soon set down and arrest them.
Todd and Barry Fugikawa use the footage of Todd making the Long March simile with the column going by behind him, then shots of individuals in the crowd, some still recognizably human, others heavily modified by fairy fembots. Fugikawa pastes in library clips, stragglers crossing France and Germany and the little republics and monarchies of the Balkans, the gathering of the Crusade and the beginning of its final march at the Montenegran-Albanian border. A glimpse of a fairy’s blue sharp-boned face, then a cut back to Todd asking where all these people were going, what was the single thought that drove them, and concluding that as yet no one knows. A shot of the UN copter coming in, with a running strip explaining that minutes after making that statement, Todd Hart was arrested.
Two minutes’ worth of filler for the loop on the Rolling News Channel. No one will remember it tomorrow except the ten thousand or so fans of the never-ending civil wars in the Balkans. Still, in his hotel room, masked and gloved, Todd shivers with a silly burst of excited pride. Even when he’s doing a fill-in job, there’s always the thrill of passing on a revelation from the inside track.
Fugikawa says that the Long March thing is a cliché, but what the hell. ‘No one much cares about this shit except the peepers, and even they don’t really give a fuck.’
‘They would if the meme plague broke out again,’ Todd says, and the editor looks at him, weariness deep in his sad bulldog eyes, and asks if he has a lead.
‘Maybe,’ Todd says, and remembers to have his partial give Fugikawa’s partial a wink. This plague idea is a stone lie, but news is an arena where lies are often the start of a twisty path to some truth or other.
The image of the old woman’s face hangs in the desk’s window. Fugikawa animates it, runs the little loop he’s made of her asking over and over that Todd join her.
‘Don’t get too close,’ Fugikawa says. ‘You don’t want to end up looking like that.’
For a moment, he isn’t Walter Matthau any more, but a fat bald Buddha naked but for a loincloth, with a golden skin and pendulous ears, a third eye painted on his forehead and a white lotus blossom clasped in his folded hands.
Buddha says, ‘Wait for the story to come to you,’ and then he’s Walter Matthau again. He taps his bulbous nose. ‘In the old days they’d call you a stringer, and stringers never did last too long. Lighten up. This isn’t the end of the world you’re reporting here. Just the tag end of a fading cult.’
Todd says casually, ‘Hey, how long have I been in the job?’
‘Long enough to get a rep, and don’t tell me you don’t know it. Do some local colour stories. Let the execs worry about the big picture.’
‘Thanks for the advice.’
‘We don’t like stringers bouncing around the field without guidelines. Even if that stringer is the Wild Man of Atlanta. Read your contract.’
‘My agent read it. She said it was a piece of shit.’
‘But you signed it.’
There’s a knock at the door. Todd says, ‘Gotta go. Maybe it’s the President of Albania with a nightcap.’
It’s Spike. ‘Fairy hunt,’ he says. ‘Everyone’s in. Loosen up, it’ll do you good.’
So Todd spends the next hour chasing through gloomy corridors after a fairy the Reuters correspondent swears she saw going into the emergency stairwell. The other journalists are wrecked on local brandy and kif, and they make a lot of noise as they scamper down stairwells towards the basements and run through bare passageways and disused laundry rooms.
Todd sees a scrap of blue whisk around a corner, gives chase, and runs straight into a tall blue figure that collapses around him in a tangle of blue plastic sheeting and memory wire. The others laugh as he disentangles himself. A camera drone bumps the ceiling, its turret of lenses intent on the scene.
‘You fuckers,’ Todd says. ‘Whose round is it?’
There are drinks, then more drinks. Someone buys the night manager a bottle of champagne to placate him, and he genially asks if any of them are feeling lonely. All the girls and boys are clean here, he says, he makes sure of it himself. The champagne is Bulgarian, and bitter as burnt oil.
Todd gets back to his room late. The deck is still connected, and he virches to the office. Barry Fugikawa is long gone—the newsroom is deserted, which is odd—but the loop they made is playing on the desk’s screen. Todd watches it with what he likes to think is professional satisfaction, and is about to quit when a movement at the far cud of the empty newsroom catches his eye. A burning man is landing on a desk. Flames clothe his skin, form a flickering spectral down around his head. He points at Todd, and then he’s gone.
Todd sends his partial to the spot, suspecting yet another prank. The desk on which the burning man stood is marked with two scorched footprints, and the memo pad is smouldering, its edges crawling with sparks that form and reform in patterns of strange hieroglyphs.
‘Some trick, guys,�
� Todd says to the empty air. He sweeps the smouldering memo pad into the trash can, and goes to bed.
3 – The Brides of Frankenstein
Alex hears Katrina coming up the hill long before she reaches him, first her calls rising faintly, and then a clattering of wooden bells as sheep scatter from her ascent. Alex is lying half-asleep on a steep slope of sunwarmed turf. Below is the town of Gjirokastra, its hills and pine trees and narrow streets, its whitewashed houses with their red and grey tile roofs, the cluster of concrete apartment blocks, pockmarked by last year’s firefights, the minarets of its mosques like unlaunched rockets. Above, the sheer stone walls of the citadel rise from scree slopes. It once held political prisoners of the old communist regime, and there are feys in there now, awaiting shipment to the processing camp on the coast at Vlora. Alex tries not to think about that, but it’s hard.
While he’s been waiting for contact, he has taken to coming up here every day, ostensibly to check his datarats and get the latest news from Max, in reality to escape the attentions of Mrs Powell, a formidable Englishwoman of an indeterminate age who believes, passionately, romantically, completely, in fairies. She came here after a session of dowsing with a map of Europe and a crystal as a pendulum weight, but she is neither stupid nor naïve. She has been to see the citadel commandant about the conditions in which the feys are held, and has protested to the UN about the display on the Kakavia road, all in vain. Since Alex is the only other English person in Gjirokastra, Mrs Powell has targeted him as a potential convert to her cause.
Alex is beginning to believe that it is a kind of divine retribution for his part in helping turn the first fairy. It’s not that he doesn’t like Mrs Powell—in some ways she reminds him of Darlajane B.—but she’s relentless. If he finds Milena, and if she refuses to set him free of the geas she laid upon him so long ago, he’ll set Mrs Powell on her.
Checking the datarats and the progress of the Children’s Crusade doesn’t take long. The computer deck grows an antenna across the turf, a tangle of iron monofilament threads thin as spider silk, and plugs into the Web via a UN low orbit spysat. Alex’s daemon tells him that Max isn’t online, but he’s left a message. It isn’t good news. Hackers have found the backdoor into the Library of Dreams, and while at the moment it’s privileged knowledge, sooner or later someone will post it across the Web.
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