Plume

by Will Wiles

  ‘Here we are,’ Quin said. It was a skyscraper, in data terms, dwarfing the rest of the city, a spire of information. ‘As you can see, there’s a great concentration of active users here – my colleagues.’ His employees. He was scrolling through the pile of icons heaped at this address. ‘Anyone with a BunkMate ID is tinted purple, but – hello! – there’s you in the stack, the regular blue one.’

  jack.bick said the icon, and there was my avatar, email address and phone number. Quin selected me. He was not using any Tamesis interfaces that I recognised – I wouldn’t have been able to pull up any of this information. A bright yellow line appeared on the map, trailing down towards Liverpool Street, twisting about, then shooting off east, towards Mile End. My movements this evening. A squiggle in the streets above Mile End Road, around Pierce’s flat. A loop south of that, through the cemetery park. Another, dimmer line also snaked through the same streets – the walk I had taken with Pierce a couple of nights before.

  Quin pinched his screen. We hurtled to a satellite’s eye view of the city, a faint veil of information passing behind the geographical overlay. And on top, my life: the yellow line, shuttling between Shoreditch and Pimlico, sweeping out to Barking, dangling down to Elephant and Castle. The line was annotated with pointers and dialogues, and intersections with other lines – my searches, information I had referred to, interactions with other users.

  ‘You’ve kept Tamesis online a lot lately, which is good,’ Quin said. ‘But as it happens, the software is pretty good at filling in blanks. Tube trips, for instance. When the Tube gets 4G that’ll be less of a problem. Other gaps. There’s a pub you like around here, on Whitecross Street.’

  My mouth was open. Little could surprise me about Quin’s knowledge of my activities, but it was no less startling to see it flashed up on a cinema-sized screen.

  ‘Is there anyone you’d like to look at?’ Quin asked. ‘Your boss Eddie, for instance? Or … You had several recent interactions with another user …’

  A search box popped up. K-a-y …

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  ‘We keep these capabilities strictly private,’ Quin said, sensing my discomfort. ‘We didn’t build this system in order to spy on people. But the algorithm has to know all this stuff to do a good job, even if no one else does. This is just a party trick for investors. I didn’t show you when you came to interview me, did I? You got the kiddie tour. But you’re family now. Here’s your search history.’

  Quin indexed through my most recent Tamesis enquiries. It was palpably violating, watching him scroll through my insecurities and typos. And he wasn’t idly browsing – he was looking for something.

  He found it. Street crime overlays. Colour washed over London. Violent crime rates by ward; icons indicating individual incidents at particular times. We were not in the secret, all-knowing back room of Tamesis any more, this was the data I had seen when I asked about the best place to get mugged.

  ‘When we first contacted Pierce,’ Quin said, ‘one of the things we were trying to understand was crime. Street crime, burglaries. Tamesis already uses all available police and Home Office reporting and statistics to inform users about crime rates, but it’s very patchy. There’s a psychological dimension that’s all-important and governs how users behave. Call it fear, but that’s not all that it is. And it shapes user decisions: where they go, when, alone or in company. Where they live. And that feeds back into the city. It affects rents and house prices. A street is ill-used at night, so it makes people nervous, they avoid it and it stays little-used. Crime might even rise as the number of possible witnesses falls. Fear isn’t always the result of crime – it can cause crime.

  ‘Pierce offered a fascinating case study. He was independently building his own map of the city, one of reputation and myth, precisely what our data lacked. And he had, in Night Traffic, written a masterful account of urban fear, of the rippling consequences of a single violent crime. Then he said he had been lying about everything. Infuriating. But, you know, when life gives you lemons, update your seasonal produce model and short-sell Del Monte. Do you know why I built Tamesis, Jack?’

  I shook my head. There were all sorts of plausible, reasonable answers I could have given – or insulting ones – but he was just setting up his own, not asking for mine. Let him get on with it.

  ‘No nefarious agenda – it’s what I’ve always said. To bring people together. To create chance encounters, to synthesise social capital, to make innovation and collaboration happen. Because it works. Bringing you and Pierce together – a real leap forward.’

  A zigzag of fingers on the phone screen, and the God Board returned to what it had been when I walked in, the busy real-time overview of the Friday night city.

  ‘What do you see?’

  This time he did want an answer to his question.

  ‘London.’

  ‘Sure. But, this is not a pipe. This is data, the readouts. It’s a dashboard. What’s the real city?’

  ‘Outside,’ I said. ‘Buildings. People.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘The friends we made along the way. Love. The adventure in the heart of a child. I don’t fucking know. You sound just like Pierce, with his fucking riddles. Just tell me.’

  ‘Pierce did have some compatible lines of thought,’ Quin said. He was unperturbed by my reluctance to cooperate. ‘But you were right, about buildings and people, not the friends shit. Buildings and people are the hardware, or the hardware and the users if you want to go on believing in free will. Really it’s all hardware. There’s also software – the information governing the environment, the rules and laws, the socioeconomic structures. And the information is as important as the physical fabric. Maybe more so. You rent, right?’

  ‘Used to.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, forgot. And did you select your flat because it perfectly suits all your needs, or because of the rent?’

  ‘Because of the rent,’ I said. If it hadn’t been for the rent, I would still be living two floors above, in the flat I had occupied with Elise, occupied subsequently by Bella and Dan. But it was all in the same crater now.

  ‘And you only rent because you can’t afford to buy, right? I mean, renting is shit. But that’s just the way we’ve chosen to distribute housing, rather than by lottery, or bureaucrats deciding who lives where, neither of which would necessarily be more fair; instead it’s all done by market rationing, there’s a number attached to each property that sets who can and cannot live there. That information is more important than the physical matter. And again, there’s a psychological dimension. Sentiment. Harder to read, to splash up on a big screen, but it’s there. We’re going to be able to do it, soon.’

  He paused. His eyes glittered with the reflected light of the board. He gestured to it with a sweep of the arm.

  ‘London is a machine, running software. And we can edit that software. We can intervene in the city’s thoughts about itself. We know something, Jack: crime’s coming back. The boom’s over, and a crime wave, it fits the political narrative all round. It’s the next big thing. Moped gangs, acid attacks. The Standard will love it. Fear. Contagion. Property prices will fall.’

  ‘Might not be a bad thing,’ I said, feeling cynical. I couldn’t listen to reminiscences about the crime-ridden, emptying city of the 1970s and 1980s without feeling half jealous.

  ‘It isn’t!’ Quin said, all of a sudden passionate. ‘I’ve seen amazing, innovative business driven to Berlin, promising start-ups smothered in the crib, brilliant men and women driven away! All because the rent is too damn high. You and Pierce had it! You had figured it all out independently, you knew what had to be done! I knew I was right. We had Pierce in mind at first to help us guide the program, but he was too damaged. You’re even better.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I said.

  ‘You’re not well, I know. I thought you were a liar, a fabulist, a joke. But now I see that you’re a trailblazer. You’ve got what we need: you understand the irrelevance of objective truth. You see that experie
nce is plastic, molten plastic.’

  The scent of burning polymers filled my nose and mouth.

  ‘We can steer it, Jack. Tamesis can. If people are afraid, they’ll rely on us even more. We can make sure the right people are affected, made more afraid, and that the innocent are spared. We can drive out the profiteers and the arseholes. We can make the city ours again. The way it used to be, before it went mad.’

  ‘You want to use Tamesis to cause crime?’

  Quin shook his head. ‘To cause fear of crime, for the right people, and to guide and spare the others. To properly distribute fear. And to ensure that crime happens in the right places. Bring the rents back down, take the pressure out of property, and get into it ourselves. Urban regeneration has run its course, Jack. Urban degeneration, that’s what’s next. Controlled. Tailored. And, for the right people, very profitable.’

  I looked from the map, to Quin, and back. Madness, yes. But no more mad than the boiling human pyramid before me, streams of data rising from it into the empyrean of Bunk’s servers. It was the destination, all right, the conclusion: to recognise that the place before us did not exist, that no place did, that it was a fragmenting artefact of 10 million shifting perceptions. To recognise that, yes, what we wrote together in those trails of data could be edited – and would be, whether we participated or not. Here was the future, rising from every phone and computer and device like so much blinding smoke. I could confront it or ignore it, but it was coming. Or I could join it.

  But addicts refuse to face the future. Their whole life is a battle against it, one I had been fighting myself for years. And for good reason. The future contains a simple binary: continue and die, or stop and live. That’s the truth, the only truth that matters. You can evade and manage, and scrape another day or week or month, but it will only work for so long – ultimately, there’s that choice, the one you’ve been making every day without knowing. Now I knew, and tomorrow would be different.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am particularly grateful to my agent, Antony Topping, and to my friends James Smythe and Sam Byers. Adam Roberts, Lee Rourke and Nikesh Shukla all contributed their wisdom and moral support. Anna Minton and Douglas Spencer provided much invaluable reading and discussion. Many ideas were shaped in conversation with Fatima Fernandes. My parents and my wife, Hazel, have been extraordinarily supportive, both now, and then. Philip Crowther gave vital details on the procedures of the emergency services.

  At 4th Estate, my thanks go to Nicholas Pearson for his guidance and patience, and to Katy Archer, Michelle Kane, Matt Clacher, Jordan Mulligan and Morag Lyall.

  This book could not have been completed without a generous and timely grant from the Authors’ Foundation, administered by the Society of Authors.

  The essay mentioned in Chapter 7 is ‘Mugging as a Way of Life’, by David Freeman, and it appeared in the 23 February 1970 edition of New York Magazine.

  I hope that Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park can forgive my fictional portrayal of it, and I urge the reader to discover the reality of this unique and beautiful place for themselves. Learn more at www.fothcp.org

  About the Author

  Will Wiles was born in India in 1978. He lives in London and writes about architecture and design for a variety of magazines. He is the author of two other novels, Care of Wooden Floors and The Way Inn, also published by 4th Estate. The Way Inn was shortlisted for The Encore Award and Care of Wooden Floors won a Betty Trask Award.

  Also by Will Wiles

  Care of Wooden Floors

  The Way Inn

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