The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  The interview is conducted in my office. The agency’s network manager, Pat Sherlock, a dour fellow who has never been known to smile, asks Jarly whether he has had much experience with IBM systems.

  ‘I’ve hacked a few,’ he says and grins. ‘Just joking.’

  ‘We’re using a Microsoft network package,’ says Pat.

  ‘Oh don’t worry, I can easily fix that,’ says Jarly. ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ Pat says, looking doubtfully at me. ‘We do find ourselves doing a lot of running around, sorting out people’s bugs.’

  ‘What sort of bugs?’ Jarly’s asking.

  ‘Oh, programs won’t run from the server, or people can’t access their data because they’ve forgotten their passwords.’

  ‘Passwords?’ cries Jarly in high humour. ‘No problem. See, Mr Sherlock – or should I call you Pat? – I guarantee I will be able to get into any directory on the network. I’m an expert on security. What else?’

  ‘We also give training to teach people how to use the software, which all runs on Windows. Can you help with that?’

  ‘Certainly can,’ says Jarly. ‘Utter crap, Windows. Waste of disk space. I’ll be honest with you, first thing I do when I get a new PC is delete Windows straight off it. Who needs all that shit? You run faster and cleaner from DOS and if you need multi-tasking, in my view nothing beats Desqview. I can easy get hold of that.’

  Pat Sherlock turns to me. ‘Er, Bear, did you explain to Jarly that we are not looking to change our system?’

  ‘Nope,’ I say. ‘But as a matter of fact, I won’t have Windows on my disk either.’

  ‘That’s it then,’ says Jarly. ‘First thing I’ll do is give the whole system a thorough going over. Shake it about, see what rattles. Then I’ll get on and make some improvements, see if I can’t haul you out of the dark ages. Might just write a little bit of code here and there to iron out the glitches.’ Jarly rubs his hands, oblivious to the look of horror on his prospective boss’s face.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you seem very well qualified. And Bear here is highly recommending you. There’s just the formality of taking up references from former employers.’

  ‘Ah . . .’ I start, but Jarly’s quicker.

  ‘Not a problem,’ says Jarly – this phrase seems to be his new mantra – ‘I’ve got my references right here. From my last two employers. I’ve had just the two – employers that is – since leaving college.’

  He hands the sheets over to the network manager, who reads each one before laying it on the sofa beside her. There is something uncannily familiar about the overblown coat of arms on the first one.

  ‘Most impressive,’ says the agency manager. ‘So during your two years with Gawain Neterprises . . .’

  Pantisocracy with field voles

  >You are in a birch wood. Trees depart in all directions. A gash in the foliage reveals a steep sided valley in whose depths you hear the tinkling of a small stream.

  Something white at the bottom of the valley attracts attention. A woman climbs down to retrieve it. Holds it up. A sheep’s skull. We are in a wood, walking in single file through thinnets of birch with a pale sunlight falling. Someone stops to point out a hazel nut that has been savaged by a dormouse, and the creature’s nest, hidden in a honeysuckle vine. Eve makes an impressed face. Our fellow walkers are enthusiasts. All at once I have a feeling of knowing this place, of having been here before. Yet I’ve never been down this lane until today, nor met the wood’s owners, nor even dreamed that the wood was here, tucked away behind a hill I thought I knew quite well. Sussex is like that, full of surprises.

  I say this to my neighbour, a stout woman in a parka labouring up the slope.

  ‘What’s really surprising’, she says, ‘is that it’s here at all.’

  Apparently there had been a plan, scotched just in time, to build an estate of houses on this land. The woman puffs out her cheeks, leans on her stick. She informs me that since the war – which in England still means the Second World War – eighty percent of woodlands have vanished. Many song birds are facing extinction. The previous weekend she had gone to distribute food parcels among tree-dwellers who are obstructing construction work on a controversial new road.

  ‘Nice children,’ she says. ‘But they don’t half pong.’

  Eve and I are at a meeting of a local smallholders’ group. After the walk through the woods to examine works of hedging and dredging, we repair to the house of one of the members for an earnest discussion about ponds. A piece of hornwort, taken from a plastic bag, is passed from hand to hand. A woman asks if Great Crested Newts will eat this stuff. In a corner, a large man who looks like a snuffly badger is talking in a low serious voice about the best way to tackle blanketweed: ‘Chuck in barley straw – not in lumps, mind – clumps in string bags, and don’t forget to weight it down.’

  I am a little bored and begin to imagine that the people in the room are characters from my secret life. Instantly the badger is transformed into the dour moderator of a boring newsgroup. In the corner I am unsurprised to see Jesus Slutfucker and Coleridge in discussion. Geno as ever is fuzzily shapeshifting; Coleridge, his shabby, large eyed, droop-lipped self, is talking animatedly of the utopian community, the pantisocracy, he and Southey intend to establish on the banks of the Susquehanna river. Virginia Woolf, herself once a Wealden smallholder, said that when she thought of Coleridge all she saw was a swarm of buzzing words. Ditto Geno? These two are talking about what, I cannot hear. No-one notices them. Lilith says that reality is for people who cannot cope with fantasy. Actually, I think I’m just losing my mind.

  Yes I am losing my mind. I do know the woods in which we’ve just walked. I remember now. A few nights ago, on the Vortex, I’d strolled with Luna in woods like these: Luna at her most imperious, her cape of feathers glittering blackly in the moonlight. Uncanny. The person who created those spinneys and copses must have known a wood like this, for he captured it precisely, down to the thin puddles where gnats will breed when the weather warms, to the details of clay slopes smeared by sliding boots, fallen moss-muffed branches and black ponds. He must have looked deeply at a real wood, then transplanted it to the collective imagination of cyberspace to be a refuge from the suffering, dying world of reality, to be a world that never dies.

  For the people in the room, discussing hornwort and crested newts, Sussex is itself a kind of cyberspace, a land more of the imagination than reality. They are, for the most part, escapees from London who came south in search of a dream. They bought six and ten acre smallholdings in which they raise crops, chickens, pigs. Many of them are trying to slide quietly back into the past. One of our members lives in a hut, firing charcoal and splitting willow withies to weave sheep hurdles as people did in the same woods seven hundred years ago. He is often to be seen at country fairs, brewing tea in a storm kettle and demonstrating his homemade wooden shave-horse. Another of his specialities is the besom, or witch’s broom. He binds bundles of birch twigs onto hazel poles around which run deeply indented spirals, the scars of attempted strangulation by honeysuckle. ‘Some people tie string round ‘em,’ he says. ‘But to me that’s cheating.’

  To create a utopia you can turn back towards Eden, or forward to science. The big themes of the human imagination – freedom, the quest for meaning in life, yearning to escape oppression of all kinds, the creation of political and moral utopias – all these are also themes of cyberspace. People recruit on the net for help in making utopias in the real world: to found a colony on a Caribbean island, on twoscore acres of land in Florida, aboard a ship. On the net you may buy title deeds to land on the moon and Mars. Some want to carve out virtual states within cyberspace.

  Mera joota hai Japani

  Yeh patloon Inglistani

  Surr pe laal topi Russi

  Phir bhi dil Cyberistani

  The old Bombay film hit – quoted and ingeniously translated by Salman Rushdie in Satanic Verses, here corrupted by me – could be a
cybergypsy national anthem, since the republic of Cyberistan has already declared its independence and applied for membership of the United Nations.

  Oh my shoes are Japanese

  Tirr-ousers English if you please

  My red Russian hat I tip, see,

  Yet my heart is Cybergypsy.

  A man from the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group has come to talk to us about the rules and procedures for filling ponds. You cannot divert streams, even if they are on your own land.

  ‘What anal-retentive asswipe made that rule?’ calls Geno.

  Another man, who farms on the banks of the Cuckmere (ah for the free Susquehanna) says that the water authority charges him for the water that drains off his fields into the river.

  ‘Ah well,’ I say, ‘we’ll just have to use water from our well.’

  ‘Nope. You have to have a permit to extract water, even from your own well.’

  ‘Then, sir,’ says Coleridge, ‘we will collect rainwater.’

  ‘Need a permit, if you collect more than 20 cubic meters.’

  Such an attack on individual liberty is unthinkable. Was it for this that the French Revolution gave people a dream of freedom? That the American Revolution made it come true?

  ‘It never was true,’ says Geno. ‘What about Waco?’

  The badger nods. ‘We’ve had an explosion of voles,’ he says sombrely, ‘and that’s brought along the owls.’

  A call from Anita

  Morgan, huge and hulking in his purple cape, sits on Shades and grieves. Why has he made himself twice normal size? It renders him merely monstrous. He sits there, a giant brooding shape as shadows crawl into the room. (Light and darkness have of late become matters of negotiation between Morgan, who always wants it to be night, and whoever else is there, which today is just me and Gristle the Inedible Enchanter.) Sometimes there are ferocious arguments about what time of day it ought to be and the scene flashes from day to night, suns and moons rising and wheeling across the game like glowing balls in the hands of a juggler. Outside, in the real world, it is daylight. A grey day over London.

  I settle warily beside him. Morgan is apt to flip gender abruptly, which I always find disconcerting. He had begun her career as Morgana the (sic) le Fay, spinner of cloud castles. Then, having attained witchhood, she changed sex to become the wizard Morgan. She’d always been big. Sitting beside him was to feel dwarfed by her meta-physical presence and the weight of his misery.

  Gristle telegraphs me from somewhere out in the game, ‘Watch out, he’s in a bloody awful mood.’

  ‘What’s up?’ I semaphore back to him.

  ‘Sorry . . . was fighting Morloch,’ comes the reply after a delay. ‘Dreamdancer’s gone awol.’

  I give Morgan a hug and say hello.

  He types to me, ‘Hello Bear, do a multi-who.’

  >mw

  1: Morgan, Bear and Gristle

  2: Zeon, Savannah, Wizzo, Mglwlxyz, Hypatia and Branvell

  3:

  4:

  5:

  6:

  7:

  8:

  ‘I’m at my wits end,’ says Morgan. ‘Look at game 7.’

  ‘It’s empty.’

  ‘Dreamy was supposed to meet me there an hour ago.’

  ‘Yes, well?’

  ‘Bear, we have a rendezvous every day at the same time. She hasn’t made it for a week. She knows I’m waiting here. She knows I’m desperate to talk to her. I’m afraid she’s just vanished.’

  ‘She’ll be over in a minute,’ I tell him.

  Morgan shakes his head gloomily.

  ‘No, it’s been like this ever since she found out about the flat. She blames herself.’

  ‘What? For your mortgage problems? Why should she? It’s Calypso who should be begging your pardon.’

  ‘No, no,’ says Morgan. ‘Dreamy blames herself for getting ill when I’ve already got problems with the flat. I’ve told her that I don’t care about the flat. Her health is what matters. But now . . .’

  I’m in my office on the fourteenth floor of the ad agency looking out over London. I’m playing Shades. It’s lunchtime. The creative department have departed in a squadron of taxis that, near the top of Tottenham Court Road, will peel off in different directions to target restaurants in Charlotte Street and Soho. Only Scabby’s left, and he’s next door with his binoculars, hoping that the nurse in the hostel across the road will forget to close her curtains again.

  ‘I’m in two minds what to do . . .’ Morgan tells me.

  One of the phones on my desk rings. A woman’s voice says, ‘Hello, is that Bear?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Hi Bear, this is Anita.’

  ‘ . . . because if I act possessive it could backfire,’ types Morgan.

  ‘Anita . . . ?’

  ‘Anita Roddick.’

  ‘ . . . she said that to me quite a few times . . .’

  ‘Weren’t you expecting my call?’ asks the woman on the phone. ‘Bear I have just read the advert you did for Amnesty about the Kurds. I was in a taxi and it made me cry. So as soon as I got back to my office I rang Amnesty.’

  This has got to be a joke. I don’t know Anita Roddick. Why would I be expecting her to phone me? A practical joke, then. But who can the muffin be? Someone in the agency? Or, more likely, I’ve been set up by someone with a sense of mischief who can see I’m on Shades?

  ‘I said I wished she would just accept the money . . .’ types the relentless Morgan. ‘Not worry about taking it.’

  ‘I told Amnesty that I’m willing to swing every Body Shop in Europe behind them,’ says the woman on the phone, ‘For a month. Internationally.’

  ‘ . . .but she is too honorable.’

  ‘Morgan gives a gloomy laugh,’ my screen informs me.

  ‘ . . .And so I said I’d ring you,’ says the woman on the phone, ‘to ask whether you’d agree to work with my team.’

  ‘What I’m wondering is, should I contact the hospital direct and just pay them without her knowing . . .’ confides Morgan.

  ‘I thought we could do window posters, a pamphlet to explain Amnesty’s work . . .’ says the woman.

  ‘ . . . she said she’d never talk to me again if I did.’

  ‘Bear, I am so fired up about this. Will you work with us?’

  ‘Morgan, have you and Dreamy set me up?’ I ask, but he has vanished. I do another >m(ulti)w(ho), which lists players on all eight games of Shades. He’s on game 7. Then he’s back.

  ‘I just zipped off and phoned her home, she’s still not been back there,’ reports Morgan. There is a stuttery anguish in his typing.

  What an actor. What a performance. But he has given himself away. His jilted lover is just too preposterous to be believable. Nobody could be that much of a wimp.

  ‘Bear, what the fuck am I to do?’

  No. Morgan can be that much of a wimp.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Bear? Are you there?’ asks the woman.

  Then it clicks. Branwell and Hypatia are on game 2. This is just their sense of humour.

  ‘Sorry Hyppie,’ I tell her, ‘game’s up. Good try, but old uncle Bear can spot a fake a mile off.’

  ‘Hello? . . . Bear? . . .’

  ‘Excuse me a second . . .’

  The other phone is ringing. It’s my client from Amnesty. ‘Bear, you’re about to get a call . . . you’ll never guess who . . .’

  A tale of two cities

  The other phone’s ringing. It’s Diane from Amnesty. ‘Bear, you’re about to get a call . . . you’ll never guess who . . .’

  ‘Hello . . . ? Hello . . . ?’ says the woman on the line.

  ‘Ah hello, yes . . . Anita?’

  ‘Did you just call me a hippie?’

  ‘No no,’ I say. ‘Someone on the other line.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right,’ says the woman, clearly impatient to get back to business. ‘Bear, that was a terrible story, about the Kurdish town . . .’

  ‘Sorry,’ I type to M
organ, ‘can’t talk now . . . Phone.’ Hug him and leave him there, a lonely figure huddled under the ruined arch that is the main entrance to the city of Shades, whose streets are choked with rubble from some long-ago disaster that broke its walls and emptied it of people – and then, without any effort, this ravaged place dissolves in my mind to another town, equally unreal, of broken houses and tumbled masonry, doorways in which lie bodies wrenched by unimaginable agonies, a puddly lane where a woman lies face down in her own reflection, cradling a child whose nose and mouth she was trying to cover with her shawl before death loosened her wrist – the arm that hugs the child never let go so the baby died with her face pressed to her mother’s cheek.

  We’d started working for Amnesty that October, 1990. My art director Neil Godfrey and I did our presentation to Diane, a pretty Frenchwoman in a fur coat who chainsmoked through the meeting.

  ‘Let me tell you what I don’t want,’ she said. ‘I am not interested in ego, cleverness and advertising shít. I want to get this through to people – every minute people like you are leading your daily lives, someone is being tortured or killed and it’s your fucking responsibility to do something to stop it.’

  Our first task was to run an ad about the human rights crisis in Iraq. A couple of months earlier Saddam Hussein’s tanks had rolled into Kuwait. Hundreds of foreigners were being held hostage. Almost daily Amnesty received reports of new atrocities and this was what Diane wanted to do the ad on. Neil and I were unsure. Since Amnesty could do nothing for the hostages nor anyone else caught in the mess, we felt we’d merely be jumping on a bandwagon. Our ad would be asking people to join Amnesty. But why should they? If appeals and threats of force from governments had failed, what could Amnesty do? But Diane was adamant.

  The newspapers in which our ad would appear were joyously reverting to the jingoism that had boosted their sales during the Falklands War. But there was one question no-one was asking: who had supplied Saddam with his weapons of mass destruction? I went to see James Adams at the Sunday Times. He had written a book about the arms trade and one passage haunted me. It was a description, quoted from the Washington Times of 23rd March 1988 (when I was just settling into the normal daily life of Shades), of what had happened a week earlier in the Kurdish town of Halabja.