by Tim Maughan
Four people, heading up the center of the mainly empty street.
They’re led by a girl, young—younger than even these two kids on the gate. Dark hair tied back tight, hoop earrings, aging stormsuit a couple of sizes too big for her.
A man, older. Suited. Obvious VIP.
Behind them:
A black kid, apparently unarmed.
A Land Army trooper, full battle dress, assault rifle. Obvious VIP detail.
Anika instinctively flattens herself against cold brick, trying to merge into the shadows, become invisible, hood up. Hand in bag.
She closes her eyes briefly, slows her breathing, recalls her Bloc mantra.
With zero bandwidth there is no calling for backup.
With zero bandwidth the advantage is ours.
With zero bandwidth there is no many.
With zero bandwidth there is no legion.
With zero bandwidth we are singular.
With zero bandwidth there is no time to hesitate.
With zero bandwidth there is only opportunity.
With zero bandwidth opportunity is our only weapon.
When her eyes open again she’s identifying targets—the suit and the trooper, calculating distances, angles.
The trooper first.
No, wait. The suit first. Too good an opportunity to waste.
With zero bandwidth there is only opportunity.
With zero bandwidth opportunity is our only weapon.
She’s no idea how these kids with the guns are going to react. They’re not LA but they’ve obviously got a job to do.
The suit, the trooper, then these two kids.
The girl looks like low priority. Collateral at best.
The kid at the back … the kid at the back is the wild card.
She closes her eyes again, measures her breathing. When she opens them again the group is closer. In line with her predictions.
The kid at the back … the kid at the back is the wild card.
The hand in her bag flexes, exercising fingers, regripping the metal and leather.
Wait.
Wait until they’re close to the shadows.
* * *
“Here. She was here.”
Again faces stare at Mary; the only one not expecting anything flutters in her hands, on that really nice paper.
What none of them, apart from her, can see is that she’s already flipped across, back to then.
Everything is frozen. It’s earlier than last time, before the explosions and the smoke. Before the blood.
She glances around, there’s hundreds of ghost people here, out in the streets, their faces blurred. Different atmosphere, almost happy. She can see bodies in weird static poses, dancing interrupted by the cessation of time.
The girl she’s looking for, though, she’s here. She looks less happy.
There are three of them, in fact—three huddled together. On the left a girl, in the middle a boy, on the right the face from her picture. It takes Mary a few seconds to work out what’s going on, but then it’s obvious. The boy in the middle is injured—a blood-soaked scarf is wrapped around his left arm—and the other two are helping him to stand.
They look strangely out of place, serious faces contrasting with the street-party vibe that surrounds them.
Not contrasting as much as Walker’s face, though, which looks alien here, wrong. The lighting not right, the perspective just off.
“She was here,” Mary repeats. “She’s helping one of her friends to walk. He’s been injured.”
“How do you know?” Walker asks.
“I can see her,” Mary says, allowing deadpan annoyance to seep into her voice.
Walker is unfazed, fake smile gone, a sudden, surprising hint of genuine concern. “Can you hear her?”
“Not now. But everything is frozen now. There’s no sound.”
“Is it always like that, Mary? Are people always frozen when you see them?”
“No, not at all. Usually I can control it.”
“Can you control it now?”
“Of course.” Mary blinks, unfreezes then time.
The first thing that hits her is the noise only she can hear—that overpowering music, those low, thunderous bass sounds that Tyrone loves so much, rattling her glasses, drilling into her skull. That and the shouting and chanting, the drumming, the sounds of celebration and defiance.
And below that, muffled by everything else, the sobbing, the panicked chatting.
They’re not going to let us out
They will
Ahhh god my arm god I think it’s broken
We’re best just getting to some first aid
Ahhh please
Be careful
They’ll let us out really trust me
The two figures are moving now, shuffling really, slowed down by their injured burden.
“They’re heading toward the gate.” Mary is aware she’s talking loudly, to be heard over the cacophony that nobody else can hear, worries it makes her look even more mad. She looks past the trio toward the gate, which is partly obscured by the fog-like mass of a boisterous crowd; she can only just make out Grids’s guards with their antique guns and the darkness of the underpass through the dancing, cheering translucent bodies.
“Can we follow them?” asks Walker.
“Of course.”
And then, before she has time to move, it feels like a third reality is intersecting with the two she’s already struggling to control as something large and swift and purposeful suddenly moves in front of her, blocking her way.
“That’s it, no farther. She ain’t going no farther.”
Tyrone is standing between Mary and the suit, his heart pounding.
“Ah, now … c’mon.”
“No, man. No fucking dice. I’m on orders. She don’t go through that gate, get me?”
“Now, please. We’re only just getting started here.” Walker steps forward, an arm passing by Tyrone to touch Mary gently on the arm.
Tyrone flicks the arm away, with enough force to shock the old suited fucker, enough that he nearly falls backward.
“Serious. Don’t fucking touch her again.”
Tyrone hears a click, ominous. He knows it’s a safety coming off, he’s watched enough DVDs, seen Grids’s boys showing off their tools.
“And you’re not going to be doing any more touching either, mate, step back.” Behind Walker and to his left the LA trooper has his gun raised, aimed firmly at Tyrone. Right between his eyes.
Tyrone throws his hands up, instinctively.
Two more clicks, behind Tyrone. Ozone and the other guy—a white kid with dreads—are moving away from the gate, their guns raised.
“We got a problem, Ty?” Ozone says, tough-guy voice, but Tyrone can hear the quiver of doubt, fear.
“Nah. Nah, Ozone, there’s no problem. It’s cool. Everybody is cool. There’s just been a little misunderstanding here, that’s all. Nothing major. We all just going to walk back to the shop now, all friends, and we going to discuss this with Grids.” He makes eye contact with Walker. “Ain’t that right?”
Flash of fake smile. “Of course.” Walker glances back at the young trooper, nods. In response the trooper slowly lowers his assault rifle. Ty checks behind him, sees the two guards doing the same.
As the rest of the group drift away and head back up Stokes Croft, Tyrone turns to Mary, puts one hand on her shoulder. She’s taken her glasses off, and her eyes look damp.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.” She smiles back at him. “You?”
“Yeah. Think so. Jesus, I thought it was all going to kick off then.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Nah, nah, Mary. Not your fault. I need to stop putting ideas in people’s heads.”
Mary looks at him quizzically.
“I need to stop asking people with guns if they’ve ever shot anyone.”
* * *
Walker climbs into the back seat of the bust-
up old Audi, the upholstery smelling of damp, mold, and dust.
“So?” His driver twists around a shaved head to show him a face mapped with scars, wrinkles, weariness. “How’d it go?”
His security detail slides into the front passenger seat. Doors clunk shut. The driver fights with the ancient ignition briefly and the car pulls away from the curb, starts to roll back up Stokes Croft.
“Well,” says Walker. “It was certainly a pleasant day out. Always good to get out of the office.”
“Get what you wanted, boss?”
“Not sure. Not sure at all.” He sighs. “It all felt strangely … vague to me. I mean, the girl seems genuine enough. She’s telling the truth, mad, or a fantastic liar. I liked her.”
“How old is she?”
“Fourteen, apparently. Interesting accent, couldn’t make it out. Irish?”
His security detail nods. “She’s a Traveler originally. That’s what the black kid told me.”
“Ohhh, maybe she’s got the gypsy magic, then.” Walker wiggles fingers mysteriously. Everyone in the car laughs.
“So, assuming she’s not put the curse on all of us, what do we do next?” says the driver.
“We tread easily, that’s what. Don’t get any ideas about charging in there, they’re jumpy enough as it is. Plus I don’t think even the girl knows what she’s sitting on.”
“Understood. But then … what?”
Walker is staring out the window, watching the walls and the graffiti and the gawping faces that haven’t seen a motorcar in months strobe past. And then it’s all gone, jump-cut away, as the car passes into the dark of the underpass.
They’re in there just seconds, three at most, but in the dark Walker sees memories stir, swirl. A hooded figure, a woman’s face, high cheekbones and eyes he recognizes from somewhere, staring back at him, impossibly familiar.
“Boss?”
“Sorry.” He laughs, quiet and short, embarrassed. “It must be catching.”
“What?”
“I think I just saw a ghost.”
7. BEFORE
Another night, another party.
This time it’s a spacious forty-sixth-floor penthouse teetering on top of a spindle in Manhattan’s Financial District, the walls covered with art and the precisely conditioned air filled with inoffensive commercial hip-hop. Half the crowd here are finance bros of every gender, the other half their partners, all with the kinds of job you can do in NYC these days only if your other half is a millionaire hedge fund manager. Meatpacking District gallery curators. Life coaches. Personal stylists. Social-media brand managers. Artisan cupcake distributors. Food bloggers. Lots of food bloggers.
Rush has barely spoken a word to any of them, but he knows what they do just by glancing around the room. This is the opposite of that Brooklyn party—no upturned skull you have to put your spex in, far from it: not wearing them would seem not just unusual but suspicious. Rude, even. This is an unashamed networking opportunity, a chance for a sliver of the 1 percent to come together and reinforce the connections that make them what they are. Rush just has to look at someone and blink and there it all is, floating around their head, their digital exhaust fumes—their name, their occupation, their social-media feeds. Photos of their beautiful kids, snapshots from their holidays in Italy, sunsets from the decks of yachts. Perfectly curated and out on display, as immaculate and polished as their pantsuits and manicures. Scott told him he’d brought him here so he could check out the view, but he knew it was because he wanted to network himself, on the hope he might find a buyer for some of his art, that he might be able to fulfill that ever-present desperation to be accepted into a circle like this.
The view is impressive, though, there’s no denying that. He’s out on one of the apartment’s two balconies, catching some much-needed air and space. Manhattan both towers above and falls away from him, spires built from concrete and capital giving way to valleys of brick and asphalt. The whole island rolled out in front of him in infinite detail: automated traffic and subway trains snaking across to Brooklyn through the exposed dinosaur rib cages of the bridges crossing the water to the east; to the west New Jersey’s shoreline fading into sunset burned red. As he leans against the railing he’s suddenly aware of being above this vital node in global infrastructure, of floating over a principal network point of global capitalism, and he can almost feel the data pulsing through the city, the buildings shaking from subterranean traffic as the cables that span the globe merge beneath their foundations. He breathes deeply to stave off a sudden rush of vertigo, and looks instead to the horizon, where the skeletal frames of the giant, automated cargo cranes of the Bayonne container port stand against the orange sky. Another network node, an input/output gate, where the capital becomes physical, and physical goods from unseen foreign factories flow into the system as freely as the data.
“Helluva view, huh?” says a voice beside him.
Average white guy, in an above-average suit. Immaculate hair. The very latest Apple spex. Rush smiles weakly. He can’t bring himself to expend the energy on blinking to find out more, looks back out over the view.
“You could say that.”
“Place must have cost John and Christie a bomb. Quite the spot.” He takes a sip from his martini glass. “I’m Brad, by the way.” He extends a hand.
Rush reluctantly takes it. “Rush.”
“Good to meet you. How you know these guys?”
Rush glances back into the crowded apartment. “I, ah, don’t really. I’m just here with my boyfriend.” The word falls out of his mouth easily, but he’s suddenly aware it might be the first time he’s used it to describe Scott. He feels his face blush. “Scott? He knows them. He’s sold them some of his work in the past. He’s an artist.”
“Ah. Gotcha. And you? You an artist too?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.” Although he’s wearing spex, Rush has got his privacy settings locked down tight. His social-media feeds—at least the ones that matter—are secured away from public eyes. Brad can blink all he likes but he won’t see anything. He could, of course, take a snap of Rush’s face and run it through Google, and blink through to any one of the top results: VICE, the BBC, the Times, even, then he’d know exactly who he was dealing with. But perhaps he can’t bring himself to expend the energy either.
“I, ah … I work with computers.” Rush laughs quietly. Doesn’t everyone? “It’s not very interesting, really.”
“Fintech?”
“No. No, not at all. Security, mainly.” He tries to deflect. “And you?”
“Ah, that’s not very interesting either. I’m a trader. Y’know.” He shrugs.
“Oh, really? I didn’t think people did that anymore.”
Brad laughs. “Touché. Yeah, it’s all pretty automated now. Most of what I do is software procurement. I sit in sales pitches for new algorithms all day. Well, not all day.”
“Really?” Rush knows a little about this stuff—mainly the stories everyone heard about how fucked it all is—but it’s fascinating to him. Fascinating and scary. “So that’s high-frequency trading stuff, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“So how’s that work?”
Brad takes a sip from his drink and glances over his shoulder, as if to check nobody is listening. His demeanor seems to change, he seems to relax, like’s he’s just dropped some front he’s been carrying around all day. “Honestly? I’ve no fucking clue.”
“Really?”
“Really. I got no fucking idea how it works.” Brad’s accent slips into something less refined, more honest. More Jersey Shore than Manhattan high-rise. The change is jarring. “I don’t think anybody does. I don’t even think the guys making the algorithms know. I mean, they come to sell me new ones and they don’t have a clue what they do, or how they do it. I mean, they say they do—this one watches for buyers, this one finds leads, this one monitors Twitter, this one reads the Journal and the Times—but then you buy them, they install them for you, and they
walk away. I don’t think they know what they’re doing in there. The algos are all in there talking to one another, they say. But they don’t really know what’s going on. Y’know?”
“I don’t.”
“That’s the point. Nobody does. I mean, I know what my business is meant to be, y’know? I specialize in facilitating trades between various public exchanges and corporate dark pools. It’s making money off other people’s deals mainly, thousands of transactions a second and all that. Like, when I was a kid and I started at Citi it was different. I used to chase my own leads, I’d watch the markets all day. Shit, I even used to call clients on the phone. Now I just sit in the office and watch money scroll across the screen. I mean, that’s if I’ve got meetings. Otherwise I can just sit in bed and watch it while I scratch my balls.”
“Really. Wow.”
“The whole thing is too complicated, man. I mean everything, y’know? It’s impossible for any one person—the banks, the investors, the traders, the Goldmans, the kids writing the code—it’s impossible for any of them to understand what’s happening anymore. The markets are too big and they move too fucking quick. People might know what’s going on in their little bit, in their tiny corner, but otherwise they’re just sitting there letting the algorithms get on with it. Market basically runs itself. Just nobody knows how anymore.”
“Shit.”
Brad suddenly becomes animated, defensive. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, bro! Don’t get me wrong at all. I ain’t complaining. Not in the slightest. It gets a bit dull, but you should see what I banked last quarter. No joke. I’d blow your mind telling you how much money went through my office last year. Trust me, I ain’t complaining.”
“I’m sure.” Rush suddenly feels flushed with anger. Brad seems nice enough—weirdly naïve, even—but Rush can’t shake the realization that he represents everything he hates. All the greed and the ignorance, all the willingness to hand over control to the machines, to take away any sense of human self-determination and to put it in the arms of the network. And all just to keep a few people rich, to squander technology’s potential for real change in order to make a quick, lazy buck.