by Indra Sinha
‘Just show him all the good work,’ I say.
‘No, no, Bear, you do not understand. It is the Kurdish tradition to give a gift to a guest. But you saw his apartment. What gift could we possibly offer to such a man?’
‘What about a nice Kurdish rug?’ asks Handren.
‘What need has he of Kurdish rugs?’ says Sarbast. ‘He who drinks only Krug champagne?’
‘How about some Krug champagne?’ tries Handren.
Something comes back to me, a conversation with my friend, the Indian bookseller Pustaq Keet, whose family originates from a town in what is now the Pakistani part of the Punjab. He told me that in the turbulent times after the partition of India, his father would write songs, often satirising politicians or eulogising heroes of the freedom struggle, and sing them on street corners, hawking the lyrics at six paisé for a demi-octavo booklet. It was an honorable journalistic tradition called qissa, which dated from the days before newsprint and radio, and was practised by thousands of bards all over the country.
‘Sarbast, in Kurdistan are there poets, balladeers, people who turn news into songs and sing them in the mountain villages?’
‘I have not heard of it, but surely it must be so.’
‘In that case, isn’t it likely that there will be songs about the war and about the great friend of the Kurds, Mr Jeffrey Archer?’
‘Certainly it is likely.’
‘We have two days to find such a song, learn the words and tune and get it recorded here in London. When Jeffrey Archer comes to the Centre we will present him with the tape.’
‘Bear, this is impossible. There is only one telephone in Kurdistan and that is a satellite phone in Suleimaniya. It is under the control of the peshmergas, the guerillas. You have to ring and make an appointment and they have to fetch the person you want at the right time.’
Goran
I inform Eve that three carloads of Kurdish musicians and poets are on their way to our overgrown house in Sussex.
‘How lovely’ she says absentmindedly. ‘What for?’
‘To compose a song in praise of Jeffrey Archer.’
‘Oh Bear, what a good idea. Will they be wanting lunch?’
‘I’ve had this idea for a lyric,’ I tell them when we’re settled. ‘Something to get us started: “The great Archer with his bow drives away winter, his arrows melt the snow, they bring messages of hope, they drive back our enemies . . .” ’
The poets just look at me.
I leave to brew tea. Kurds like it black, served in glasses with a sprig of mint (from the herb garden) and a sugarcube to hold in their teeth and suck through. On my return, I find them sprawled across sofas, legs flung over the arms of chairs, sunk in attitudes of deep concentration. The poets are tugging their moustaches. From time to time they reach for their pencils and jot. The musicians hum little airs that tail off into silence. Sarbast, looking worried, hugs his knees. Handren leans back and smiles inscrutably at the ceiling. Without warning, a small man called Goran opens his throat and sings. His words must be telling, because the others break into loud applause. Over lunch, they make Goran sing his song several times.
Cry (a song by Rzgar Goran for Jeffrey Archer)
how many more poison years must pass?
how many autumn-leaf springs?
how long will Zuhak1 glut on our flesh,
our young feed his cravings?
will it never set, this moon of blood?
when will love come back to Kurdistan?
will no-one speak? call an end
to burned barns, beggars in the snow,
dead bairns against whose killers
no voices are raised, no policemen go?
the gases burn us, we howl, we bum to live
when will love come back to Kurdistan?
will the scent of almonds ever again mean
clouds of petals, not death from above?
when will they stop hanging Mem in front of Zin2,
how long will they torture love?
we cry, but in the darkness there is silence,
O God, we are alone, just us and you
1. Zuhak, a tyrant of legend, once ruled the Kurds. He wore snakes coiled round his arms and, the stories say, fed them on the brains of Kurdish children.
2. The Kurdish Romeo and Juliet.
The Butterfly Effect
Eve has been a lot happier since Shades died. ‘It’s another chance, Bear, after your heart warning. It’s time you got back to something like a normal life. Please,’ she says. ‘The children and I need you.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I tell her, ‘this time I’ll give it up.’
But of course, I don’t. The demise of Micronet has left Shades addicts seeking a new fix. Luna & Co., concerned at the number of outsiders who have begun turning up in their woods, do their best to make the refugees unwelcome. They even spread a rumour that the Vortex is a myth. But the homeless nomads soon melt away among the wandering hordes: the cybergypsies are a worldwide nation whose games and bulletin boards span the globe. For me, this is the start of a new era of exploration. One of my favourite discoveries is a San Francisco system called & the Temple of the Screaming Electron, whose sysop, Enigma, publishes a Weird Stuff Source List. A firm called Nuclear Research will sell you, for $15, instructions for making Astrolite, ‘the most powerful non-nuclear explosive ever developed, more powerful than TNT, C-4 plastic, nitroglycerin, or PBXN-1’. A firm in Peoria, Illinois, will kit you out in strait-jackets, leg irons, iron neck-collars, slave helmets, leather undies, ‘all the latest fashions in bondage and restraint apparatus’. From a man in Phoenix you can buy 90,000 volt electroshock batons.
& the Temple of the Screaming Electron is by no means the weirdest cybergypsy system. A few others: Arkham, The Butterfly Effect, Black Axis, The Flying Teapot, Rainbow’s End, Lies Unlimited, Sea of Noise, Fourth Reich, KRoNiC FaTiGue, Event Horizon, Chaos Computer Club, Ninja Cult, Just Mooting, The Bearded Clam, Doomstrike!, The Pig Pen, Quarto Mundista, The Beatles Fan Club, Phantom Zone, Shrine of the Salted Slug, Almost ate 5 Smoked Armadillo, NANoTEkSYBErPHUk.
Without visiting these bulletin boards, you have no way of knowing to what tastes they pander. Most carry underground files. One promotes out-and-out anarchy. One specialises in human rights and environmental action. One or two dabble in pirated commercial software. One is run by a lawyer who has made it a database of legal information. One serves up hardcore porn. One hosts an organisation that is trying to clean up the sad reputation of the net. One was busted by the police (Nasty Ned’s work, it’s rumoured). One is in Vladivostok. One is run by a decent police sergeant who is dedicated to protecting free speech on the net. One is a base for some of the world’s best known hackers. One is rim by the author of a lethal computer virus. And one of them is mine.
The Butterfly Effect is set up as a Fidonet node, to be a focus for human rights and green issues. It carries all our Kurdish news. Every night I take Amnesty’s Urgent Action alerts off Greennet and relay them to Fidonet. We start an online Amnesty group. Old friends Todd and Lori, new to cyberspace, take over part of the board for a ‘personal development workshop’ called Waterwheel. Graeme and I open a members-only section which we call The Cybergypsy Club and Graeme uploads to it a technothriller he is writing about a cybergypsy chief who gets mixed up in a flying saucer flap. Geno calls once in a while but, chary of bills, never stays long, thus proving himself to have more sense than me. Branwell drops in every night at eleven for a game of chess. Luna, taking great care not to leave a traceable number, calls to argue obscure points of hermetic philosophy. Lilith often pops on to tell me about her latest conquests. The Butterfly Effect, a tiny speck of light in the galaxy of systems that form the global net, is soon home to a small group of ragged-arsed philanthropists: a strange mix of human rights enthusiasts, environmentalists, technopagans, cyber-sutrans, virus folk and roleplayers. Among them is a mysterious Irishman who calls himself Gliomach.
Gliomach’s game
The next challenge for our do-gooding company Chaos comes from the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, which wants to know whether a mass media campaign can do anything to promote peace in the province. It seems clear that conventional advertising will achieve nothing. Well-intentioned messages cut no ice in Belfast, where the paramilitaries are in any case the best copywriters. A campaign in the seventies used the slogan ‘Seven years is enough’. All the republicans had to do was insert a / into the first gap and scrawl above it the word ‘hundred’.
Casting about for something that might actually work, we hit on the plan (never before attempted, so far as we know) of basing a campaign on the principles of conflict resolution. The science is in its infancy, but Greennet is linked to a host of other positively inspired networks like Econet, Peacenet and Conflictnet, where we learn that to have any hope of tackling an intractable conflict, each side must:
a) recognise and accept the fact of conflict
b) talk frankly about its fears, grievances and hopes
c) listen to the other party do likewise
d) use structured roleplay sessions to experience the other view
One of our wilder ideas is to create an online roleplaying ‘world’, to be accessed by schools all over Northern Ireland. In cyberspace, children will meet in a context devoid of the labels and tags which identify them as one tribe or the other. Accent, clothes, hairstyle – none of these things matter. They will play the usual Northern Irish game of cross-questioning to place one another, but it won’t be easy when they can never really be sure who anyone else is. All they will know is what the other person tells them. Nothing can be known of them save what they choose to say about themselves. People soon learn that in cyberspace, it is not always necessary nor appropriate to stick with the truths of the real world. Sooner or later, curiosity or mischief will lead them to experience what it is like to ‘kick with the other foot’. Inevitably, they will form friendships, like the one that has grown up between me and Luna, based solely on direct experience of one another.
The world we create will not be like Shades, with its emphasis on conflict. It will be based, like the Vortex, on co-operation, with powers being gained by acquiring ‘social points’ which can only be given by other players. The nicer you are, the better you do. But abandoning the live/die, either/or model makes puzzles harder to devise and rewards trickier to dispense. We need a coder who is willing to take on the complex algorithms of co-operation. I canvas the idea on The Butterfly Effect and one user responds, a stranger who calls himself Gliomach. He can code, is intrigued by our idea. He also happens to be Irish.
The snag is that Gliomach, like Luna, is obsessive about privacy. I tell him that I will be making several trips to Belfast over the next few months and offer to meet him. Gliomach is not enthusiastic. He says it is his policy to keep his net life and real life separate. He refuses to divulge a real identity, or provide an address, telephone or fax number, fidonet node number or internet email address.
‘If you want to meet me, you’ll have to find me first,’ he says.
All he will reveal for certain is that he lives in a remote corner of the country ‘where the Atlantic first sloshes on Irish rock’.
Jarly makes good
We’ve just finished firing the International President. A rag-tag of directors has assembled in the boardroom to hear the official story of his departure. (We all already know the real story.) We are informed that the agency finds itself in possession of a yacht moored in Cannes. Cheers. We are informed that the agency will not be retaining yacht. Groans. Business complete, I hop down the back stairs, hoping to catch Jarly in the computer room before he leaves for the day. I have big news for him.
Remarkable. Past seven, but Jarly’s still at his screen.
Trying to get these figures out, Bear, for the new president.’
‘What are they?’
‘Income and expenditure for our top ten accounts broken down by year, quarter, month – and also job by job. Cross-referenced to figures for similar brands, er, elsewhere.’
‘Oh no, Jarly, you have not . . .’
He chuckles. ‘Despite our moronic managing director, Bear, I can still make good use of my modem.’
‘Jarly, you must not hack our competitors. Please. Promise, and then I’ll pass on the message from our moronic managing director.’
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Fire away.’
‘Well, he’s giving you a pay rise.’
‘What? The same fucker who doesn’t like hobbyist fantasies?’
‘He likes what he’s getting now.’
The agency pays vast sums of money for information, some of it online, much of it in expensive reports. Every month, thousands of megabytes of data flow in from rolling attitude surveys. But Jarly wanted quicker and deeper access to this data than its owners were willing to provide. It was Gawain who told me that Jarly had gone snorkelling in a government think tank. He’d been boasting about it, saying that a hacker’s life is improved by being paid to do what he enjoys. Gawain warned me that Jarly’s ‘econometric studies’ very likely also took in a famous forecasting centre, commercial databases, the National Institute for Economic Affairs, the Office of the Census, various government departments, possibly even a Treasury computer.
The man himself denies all this. ‘I’ve done nowt illegal,’ he says, rocking in his chair. I notice that his old stained trainers have been replaced by a rather natty looking pair of suede boots.
‘I’ve just reorganised things,’ he says, ‘to save meself work. They were doing it the hard way. I did some patches to speed stuff up, short cut stuff.’
I pray the network manager, Pat, never finds out that Jarly has reverse-engineered the software that runs the agency’s systems. Nobody, not even me, knows what else he has been up to, but his innovations have made him a hit with every executive in the place. The team working on the biggest client have asked that he be assigned exclusively to them, offers will soon be winging in from other agencies. Hence the MD’s move. Jarly’s jaw unwires when I reveal what the man intends to pay him.
‘Another thing,’ I say. ‘He’ll give you a company car. Anything you like within reason.’
‘Fuck,’ says Jarly. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck. Shades addict makes good.’
He looks at me thoughtfully. ‘Bear. If I can do it so can you.’
Silk Cunt
Alastair (aldopacific) emails me a polemic he has written against tobacco advertising, which he says promotes a necrophiliac culture that worships death. He is coming to London and wants to visit me at the agency. We speak on the phone. He rails against Saatchi’s work for Silk Cut.
‘That slash in the fabric, the shape of the tear, the colour of the silk, purple, it’s obvious what it is.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a cunt.’
The shock of the word in his soft Scottish voice.
‘It’s a cunt,’ he repeats. ‘Silk Cunt’.
A week later, he enters my office to be greeted by an array of roughs for Benson & Hedges posters. I am dreading his reaction, but in the event he says, ‘I saw you as someone who was on the side of life. How fascinating that you do this sort of work too.’
Alastair explains his theory to me, pointing out that the famous surreal Benson & Hedges posters all contain references to death or imprisonment. A gold cigarette packet inside a bird cage, as the bait on a mousetrap, caught in a Venus flytrap. I suggest that the person who created the images saw the gold box as something precious, tempting. I know from experience that, contrary to the beliefs of its critics, advertising people do not have the time or intelligence to encode messages so deeply. At least not consciously.
‘What if,’ Alastair says, ‘I respond to that gold packet not as a precious thing, but a lure to addiction and death? Suppose I take the health warnings at face value as saying, “I promise to kill you.” ’
‘It means,’ I say, ‘that while I am an advocate of life, I am a
lso a peddlar of death.’
Alastair points out to me the ways in which the ideas on my wall cash in on the death-urge. There are scribbles of a silvery tuna fish lying on a piano keyboard; a bull with the lighted fuse of an anarchist’s bomb poking from its mouth; an insect-like branch clutching the golden pack. Alastair sees the black piano as a coffin, complete with brass keyhole. The fish is clearly a dead thing, as is the ambulatory branch. I explain that the campaign is a series of puzzles, visual presentations of verbal puns. Fish-on-keyboard is ‘piano-tuner’. Ox-about-to-explode signifies ‘a-bom-in-a-ble’. The crawling branch is a ‘walking-stick’.
‘No dark intentions,’ I tell Alastair. ‘I thought of the fish after we had the piano-tuner round. He’s blind. His father leads him in and sits him down at the piano. The explosive bull came from a friend in Cornwall who composes crosswords, he’s hardly very sinister, a friendly wood-elf who likes folk music, real ale and campaigns to save trees. The stick was from a book I had as a child, about a boy who finds a magic walking stick. When he waves it, it whirls him away to other realities.’
‘I know that book,’ shouts Alastair. ‘In one part he finds himself on a desert island being chased by cannibals.’
Cannibals? Death? Well, maybe Alastair is right. Maybe in my search for picture puns, I unconsciously choose the thanatic ones.
I don’t dare to tell Alastair about my other dilemma. The agency has decided to pitch for the account of British Nuclear Fuels, which operates the controversial Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria. The managing director wants me to create the concepts. I go to see a friend in a green organisation and tell her, ‘I need facts to convince the agency that we shouldn’t touch it. These allegations that the place caused leukaemias in Seascale – you must have the facts. Give them to me and I’ll put them to the people here.’