The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  Hole in the wall

  ‘Bear, I’m spending eight hours every day on Shades. Costing a fucking fortune, what with long distance calls and time charges on top. I’ve tried cutting down and it’s like ciggies, it doesn’t work. So I decided to stop it. Just cut off. I just sat up in my room and did programming.’

  Jarly lives in a tiny bare attic which Dimitri had advertised as ‘a commodious studio apartment with built-in kitchen’. The ‘kitchen’ is a cheap plywood cupboard which holds a few pots and some bits of crockery and cutlery. On it stands a small electric oven with a ring on top. The ring is caked with burned-on carbon deposits and the whole thing looks extremely unsafe. (We defrost the chicken by immersing it in a pan of boiling water.) The rest of the furnishings consist of a pine chair, a table carrying his computer and modem and a bed which looks as if Messalina has just entertained a legion in it. Pinned to one wall is a bullfight poster, the souvenir of a long ago trip to Spain and above his bed are some pictures torn from magazines, of Gloria Estefan. His only other possession is a hi-fi with two large speakers which sit on thick layers of newspaper (‘Otherwise the fucking things vibrate and jump about’).

  ‘Park your arse, Bear, while I get this chicken stuffed,’ Jarly says, handing me a dirty plastic tumbler of Mavrodaphne. ‘Only watch out for the fucking . . .’

  Too late. One of the legs of the bed is bent under and if you sit on the edge, the whole thing dips alarmingly. There is what looks like a pool of blood on the floor.

  ‘Have you got a cloth – something to wipe the floor?’

  ‘Just use one of them, it’s what I do,’ he says, waving at a pile of soiled tee-shirts in the corner.

  Our hacked chicken, cooked with figs and Mavrodaphne, is rather disgusting but Jarly wolfs it down. He’s anxious to get the meal finished, he tells me, in order to be rid of the evidence should Dimitri come knocking at the door.

  ‘I’ve to be careful not to pinch too much stuff from down below,’ he says. ‘The bastard comes in when I’m not here. He suspects me, but he can’t prove a thing.’

  Unusually for a cyber addict, Jarly is thin. This is because he’s starving. He tells me that for the last week there’s been nothing to eat except cornflakes and a jar of mango pickle. He spoons pickle onto the dry flakes, dribbles in a little water and mixes it all up with a teaspoon. He’s had this for breakfast, lunch and supper. I recall times when I’ve met Jarly on Shades and he has been weak with hunger, made worse by the fact that Dimitri’s kitchen is right underneath his room and rich Cypriot cooking smells waft up through the wide gaps in the floorboards.

  Jarly can’t afford food but one of the first things he did after he moved in was to have a telephone line installed. Not a telephone, just the line. (‘Don’t need a phone. Don’t want buggers ringing me. All my mates are on-line. Just need a gateway to the net.’) On the tobacco-smogged wall, amid splots of insect gore and smeared crescents of some rich dark stuff which surely can’t – or can it? – be shit, the socket gleams incongruously white. To most people it is just something they unthinkingly plug a phone into – but to Jarly it is a gateway to heaven and to hell. Into it vanishes every penny that he can earn, borrow, or claim in social security benefits. From it comes pleasure, knowledge, pain. It is a plastic vulva awaiting his modem jack, a hollow vein awaiting a needle, a synapse whose long copper nerve – axon and dendrite – receives and transmits signals that connect Jarly’s brain to a vast and chaotic world of the imagination. Jarly’s real life is not ‘real’ life but the life which is lived in the worlds to which this tiny hole in the wall leads.

  Jarly has tried many times to stop, to break his modem habit. He’s tried everything he can think of but, lying on his narrow bed, he knows that sooner or later he will succumb to the whispering of the little mouth in the wall. He describes to me the self-hatred and sweetness of the inevitable moment of surrender, of giving in, letting go, of busy fingers conjuring a fix, the buzz of the modem coming to life, the whistle of connection sliding like a needle into his brain, and the rush of relief as he floats into the game.

  ‘It isn’t like a drug. It is a fucking drug. The pleasure chemicals that happen when you do drugs, Bear? Well the same fuckers are triggered by the modem.’

  Jarly claims to suffer withdrawal symptoms if he is away from Shades for long. His body is tired and full of aches, he can’t keep still, his legs and arms hurt, his head aches and feels too heavy to hold up, his neck and shoulder muscles knot and burn, his eyeballs feel as if they’ve been sandpapered, he is constantly tired but his sleep is broken by threatening dreams and he wakes exhausted. To me this sounds more like the effects of eight hours on Shades than a few hours away from it, but Jarly swears he really does want to give up the game.

  ‘There’s no future in being a twenty-four year old Shades addict, Bear,’ he tells me, and I am not sure whether he sees the funny side of what he’s saying. Probably not, because he continues, ‘Believe it or not, I do think there’s a life after Shades.’

  I don’t believe him. For one thing, wouldn’t he miss the killing? Jarly is a serial murderer, one of those who kill for pleasure. His characters are expert and violent wielders of longsword and axe, hacking their opponents apart in sprays of imagined blood. These fights are no sporting contests, where the outcome is of as little importance as ‘death’ in a paintball game. They are desperate affairs, because so much is at stake. It may have taken someone a hundred hours of play, much of it sneaked in office time at the risk of their job, and cost hundreds of pounds to get a character to high level. Then along comes Jarly who – because he is an expert who is constantly inventing new, nastier tactics – guts them. A few strokes of the longsword and months of play go for nothing. I have seen people scream, cry, sob, become hysterical, slide into depression, do stupid and unforgivable things, after being killed on Shades.

  When we’ve eaten, Jarly says to me, ‘Bear, I really asked you here because I wanted you to see how things are with me. I’ll be honest, I need to ask you a favour.’

  Uh-oh. I know he’s strapped for cash. He’ll ask for money.

  ‘I can’t go on this way,’ says this new, responsible Jarly, ‘Shades addiction is killing me. I’ve been trying to give it up, Bear, but it’s hard, man, worse than ciggies. I’ve got to get some fucking brass together and I need some help. What I need . . .’

  He stops and looks at me, as if embarrassed to go on.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What I really need, Bear, and you could help me here, is . . .’

  Hacker’s Chicken

  Ingredients: For this you need one chicken, about ten fresh ripe figs (squashy and overripe is okay if you don’t look), half a bottle, or better still a whole bottle, of Mavrodaphne (a syrupy Greek red wine a bit like curried port) and (ideally) a dollop of ground coriander seed, a pinch of cayenne pepper, about a teaspoon each of ground cumin and ground black pepper. Plus salt, two large onions chopped, bay leaves, grated lemon, chopped parsley and crushed garlic to taste.

  Method: Chop, mangle, mince and mix together everything that isn’t chicken. Insert into chicken.

  Cooking: Place in an oven preheated to 180°C, gas mark 4, until chicken is crisp brown on outside, or until overcome by hunger, whichever is the sooner.

  Gypsy Caravanserai (Morgan’s story)

  He’s been on Shades for three days without a break, except when he falls asleep at his keyboard and anyone who is nearby sees ‘Morgan the le Fay Wizard fades out . . .’ But he’s soon back, resuming his vigil outside the pub. He is waiting for Calypso.

  On the third afternoon, I beg Morgan to log off and sleep, shave, have a bath. All of us spend too much time in Shades, but no-one, not even Jarly, has ever done a seventy-two hour jag before.

  ‘Bear, I’m okay. I’m tired, but I’m clear in my mind.’

  ‘About what, you silly sod?’

  ‘Clear that she’s avoiding me. She feels guilty I suppose. I want to tell her she’s no need . . .’

>   Of course he can only be talking about Calypso.

  ‘Hang on,’ he says, ‘let’s go to my place.’

  And I’m whirling through the Shades air, summoned by Morgan to his hideaway, the room he was given when he became a wizard.

  Morgan & Calypso’s Hideaway (1024)

  You are in a cheerful room with the uneven whitewashed walls of an old farm cottage. A fire crackles merrily in the grate before which are two comfortable armchairs with brightly coloured throws and cushions on one of which lounges Calypso’s black cat, Bustopher. Around the room are many tokens of Morgan and Calypso’s love for each other. On the windowsill stands a gaily painted model of a traditional gypsy caravan.

  ‘She told me she’d have to give up Shades, because her husband was worried about the bills.’

  ‘Not your problem.’

  ‘Is and isn’t,’ he says.

  ‘Morgan, what have you done?’

  ‘I was trying to help . . .’

  ‘Not you too,’ I say, thinking of all the hours Cabbalist had invested in pleasing Calypso.

  ‘You don’t understand, Bear. Everyone thinks they can judge her, but they’re wrong.’

  ‘All right then, help in what way?’

  ‘Ease the burden a bit.’

  ‘You gave her money?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not like that. My Micronet bills.’

  ‘Racked up by running round the game in Calypso’s frillies?’

  ‘Nah, didn’t do very much of that,’ he says. ‘Didn’t have time or I would have . . .’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Oh bugger it, okay. I’m not sure, but probably not more than 2K. Thing is you see . . . well, I let her use my account.’

  ‘What?!’

  Lending your account to a Shades addict is like handing a credit card to a junkie. At £3 an hour, with a seriously addicted player spending up to eight hours a day on the game, the damage will start at £500 to £700 a month. And Calypso had been on a lot.

  ‘Morgan, close your account. Today.’

  ‘Please don’t overreact.’

  ‘Listen to me Morgan. Talk to Lilith. There’s a list of people as long as your arm who’ve been playing Calypso.’

  After a long silence he says, ‘Yeah, I have been worrying. The last bill was over £3,500.’

  ‘She’s given your account details to other people,’ I tell him, ‘and god knows who they’ve passed them on to. There could be dozens of people playing at your expense. Shut the account.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s like that, Bear. You don’t know her like I do.’

  ‘How well do you know her, Morgan?’

  ‘Believe me,’ he says, ‘I know her pretty well. Take my word.’

  Is this a trace of innuendo? I do hope so. Signs of humour are signs of sanity. At times like this I regret the limitations of cyber communication. I can’t see Morgan’s face, can’t read his expression. If – at the far end of the connection that runs from my modem through suspended and buried telephone wires, zips along miles of coiled metal cables, enters bundles of plastic spaghetti looped in sooty tunnels where trains roar in the darkness, traverses the fizzing electron exchanges of the city, threads its way to the heart of the massive computer in which the sprites of Shades perform their myriad tasks, receiving, sorting, stamping, swapping and posting packets of information, leaves by another set of tunnels and pipes, follows a different route out to the suburbs, is lifted into the air to race along miles of telegraph wire swooping in shining scallops from pole to pole tracking road and railway in frozen moonlight, until it comes at last to a connector on a wall of the house where Morgan lives, drilling through the brick, ingressing to a telephone jack, a wire, modem, screen close enough to be misted by his breath – there had been the briefest tremor of a smile, I have missed it.

  We’ve met in the flesh only twice, Morgan and I. At one meet we sat at the bar, and all the time we talked he was dipping his finger into a pool of spilt beer and tracing liquid faces: circle for face, dots for eyes, dash for nose, half moon mouth, always curved down. He’s a big guy, as big as me, with a softness about his features that makes him seem weak, as though a veil of fine gauze hangs before the large dark eyes, his plump and slightly upturned nose, chubby lips and the rolling acres of his chin. But Morgan is not weak. Not at all. On the contrary, he has a stubborn strength, but never uses it on his own behalf. What looks like weakness is actually kindness, but of that cloying kind which is more often rewarded by irritation than gratitude. This at least is the thanks he gets from Calypso.

  ‘I know her well,’ he repeats. ‘Remember I spent a lot of time with her here. Then we were on holiday in Yorkshire.’

  ‘You saying you slept with her?’

  ‘You know I can’t answer that.’

  ‘So you did. But when? She must be a superwoman.’

  ‘She’s a very unhappy woman, Bear, who is entitled to a bit of happiness. And that goes for me too.’

  ‘She led you all a dance. Ask Lilith.’

  ‘No, that’s not true. If you mean she spent time on the holiday with all of us, well she had to. There were four men, three caravans and a car. Each of us was on our own most of the day. So she’d come and sit with each one in turn. Nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘Why are you so miserable then?’

  ‘Well, after we got back she hardly talked to me and now she has not been on the game for days.’

  ‘I heard that you and she didn’t get on very well.’

  ‘We decided beforehand that we’d appear to quarrel so nobody would guess what was going on between us.’

  ‘You’ve got all the answers.’

  ‘And you’re misjudging her.’

  ‘One of us is.’

  Jarly lets go

  ‘What I really need, Bear, is a job.’

  ‘A job? What sort of job?’

  ‘In your advertising agency. Anyone can think up the kind of crap you see on the telly.’

  Jarly tells me about the incident which to him symbolises the depth of his degradation. He’s on Shades in search of a victim when he’s jumped by a particularly vicious mobile. (A computer generated character which can attack and even kill players. The Crow, the Deer, the Sprite, the Mouse, the Bear, the Morloch: these are some of the Shades mobiles. Most of these cyber-beings can be killed with the major weapons, the rusty longsword, sabre or mild unassuming rat.) Happily for Jarly his battle is taking place on a path where the Strange Little Girl wanders, because ‘touching’ or ‘grabbing’ the Girl instantly restores health. Jarly replenishes the stamina the monster is draining from him. The Girl drifts onward.

  Jarly is still under heavy attack, his strength again being sapped when, to his dismay, a powerful rival appears on the game. Bad news. He can do nothing until his fight is over. To make things worse a situation which has been nagging at him for some time chooses this moment to become intolerable: he can no longer ignore the fact that he’s bursting for a piss. Jarly, trapped at his keyboard until the mobile is despatched, prays that the enemy (one of Barbarella’s) will not sneak up and attack him before he has the chance to quit for a swift relief dash. He hangs on, fighting the exquisite agony in his bladder, rocking back and forth, clenching his thighs, working his sphincters for all they’re worth, his chair-legs rat-tatting on the bare floorboards. The worst happens. As the mobile dies the enemy attacks and Jarly, screaming with frustration, has no option but to remain and fight. The disgrace of running is more than he can bear, the thought of being defeated by his arch rival is unendurable. Barbarella has ‘low-stammed’ Jarly, which is to say attacked him when he is below full strength. Despite this, his skill is such that her character is down to his last gasp, another blow will finish him off when . . . the Strange Little Girl drifts in and restores both to full strength.

  By now Jarly’s bladder is stretched beyond endurance. He must think of something, anything, to take his mind off it. As a boy he’d supported Leeds United. Was only a nip
per, went with his dad to Elland Road. Soccer. What a game. How had it started, kicking a pig’s bladder blown up taut – no! no! no! – think of something else. University! He’d got into multi-user computer games at Essex, home of EssexMUD. Fighting there was similar to Shades. Shades was written by an Essex MUDder. At Essex he’d lived in one of the tall residential towers. There was a craze for dropping condoms filled with water – no! no! no! – occasionally piss – for God’s sake no! – onto passers by. A condom filled with water could expand to a wobbling balloon over a foot long – no! no! no! no! Jarly can’t wait, has to go, must quit, cannot stay. But he’s winning, his enemy’s stam in single figures, one blow will do it. One last blow, and that blow is due to fall. Jarly lifts his weapon . . . and the Strange Litt. . . Teeth clenched, sobbing with frustration and then with relief as a thick rope of urine unravels down his leg, lakes across the floorboards and begins vanishing into the gaps between them, Jarly is yelling with triumph because he has struck his man down, it is his rival’s blood that is running down his legs and onto the floor.

  Dimitri from downstairs is banging on the ceiling and then at his door, shouting for him to turn off the tap.

  Losing it

  I call Geno to find him lamenting that the fuckers at NuKE have gone soft. He’s just checked the latest Hack Report, which records all new virus infections reported from the wild. For months, the only new outbreaks have been his own.

  >we are losing it bear, from a standpoint of where there is plenty of writing going on, but no one is doing any infecting (except me) shit I think I am the only person that I ever hardly read about in the hack report anymore... not that I am banging my own horn, but shit. It is getting sad...

  >hehe, so the rest have taken the line that mike is talking about, of researching, not infecting?