The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  A gleaming multi-jointed robotic arm stands nearby, its steel shaft entering the room through a series of seals. The operator looks through a pane of thick yellow glass. I go to the window and stare into the stainless steel room beyond the sulphurous glass.

  ‘Wouldn’t stand there if I was you,’ says the guide with a laugh. He is pointing at my flies. Taped to the robot at crotch level is a notice scrawled in biro on a sheet torn from a lined notepad, a notice of the ‘gone to tea, back in five’ variety: ‘Small leak of alpha radiation.’

  I jump backwards, nearly impaling myself on a piece sticking out of the robot.

  ‘No need for panic,’ says the guide, with a grin. ‘Only alpha. Can be stopped by tissue paper.’

  He obviously likes making visitors wriggle.

  ‘What’s this meter for?’ I ask, poring over a dial straight out of Plan 9 From Outer Space.

  ‘That one?’ says the guide. ‘It’s measuring the radiation that’s coming through that door behind you there and travelling straight through your back.’

  Déjà vu

  . . . rimmed glasses, asking me questions in a south-of-the-river voice, which means he sounds as if he’s trying to spit out a boiled potato while talking to me.

  ‘So you don’t know where this friend, this . . .’ looking doubtful, consults notebook, ‘this, er . . . Luna . . . where she, er . . . lives?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you can’t give me any help on what she looks like?’

  ‘No, no, no, nothing. I never saw her at all. I’ve never met her.’

  ‘Right ho. It’s back to basics then. Nationality? Profession?’

  ‘Don’t know, don’t know. It was all done over the phone.’

  ‘Postmark? Handwriting? She ever send you anything? Letter, parcel, billydoo?’ He doodles on a pad, reverses the pencil, scrubs with the eraser and brushes away the screlchings.

  ‘Billydoo?’

  He looks frustrated, then resigned. ‘Love letter, sir. You don’t normally get gents trying to trace ladies unless there’s a romantic interest.’

  ‘Well, actually . . .’

  ‘Okay then, what’s she sound like? London? Northern? Scottish? Foreign?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve never actually spoken to her.’

  ‘Sorry, thought you said you was on the phone to her.’

  ‘Not talking. We typed back and forth on computer screens.’

  He puts down his pencil and looks at me. ‘Don’t exactly have a lot, do we sir? But let’s be thankful for what we have got. At least we know it’s a her.’

  ‘Actually, no. Could be a him. There’s no way to tell.’

  The detective ponders this, frowns.

  ‘Okay, well we still got the phone. So she . . . er this person and you, er? Presumably she, er they, phones you. Well if you was phoning them you would know their number wouldn’t you, and you wouldn’t be sitting here.’

  ‘Well, most of the time I dial up this game and she phones it too. The game has its own number. In Southall. I thought maybe if I gave you that number, you . . .’

  ‘Sorry, can’t be done, sir,’ he says. ‘Can’t listen in if it’s not the client’s number. Your number. Need a chit from the Home Office if you want to tap a phone.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to tap the phone. Just to trace the call.’

  ‘Can you get her to call your number?’

  ‘Well, she already does, but not very often. I’ve no way of telling when she might call, but she’s on this game almost all the time.’

  ‘Have you tried the automatic trace back?’

  ‘Of course,’ I tell him. ‘I get “the caller withheld their number”.’

  ‘Hmm. Could be ways round that. No promises, mind . . .’

  ‘I don’t want you to do anything illegal.’

  ‘Luna,’ says the detective. ‘I suppose it’s an alias. Does she go under any other aliases that you know of?’

  ‘Yes!’ I say, glad to be giving a positive answer at last. ‘She calls herself Henry. Henry Cornelius Agrippa.’

  The detective exhales abruptly, sits back, and sends his pencil spiralling onto the desk.

  ‘Mr Bear, I don’t wish to be rude, but . . . and don’t take this wrong, but there’s a lot would say it’s not a detective you need, sir, it’s a psy . . . psy . . . a psychic.’

  He doesn’t have the courage to say ‘psychiatrist’.

  The other half

  ‘And ye haven’t a clue where he lives.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not the smallest devil of a bloody whisper of where he lives?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’ve no phone number.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Excuse me there,’ one of the drinkers proffers, placing his elbows on the bar and leaning forward, ‘I think I might know that man.’

  Laughter. Mr O’Conlan frowns.

  ‘And you’ve not got a map?’ he perseveres.

  ‘I wish we had.’

  O’Conlan looks round to his audience and ticks off the last few possibilities.

  ‘Now you’re not a magician. You don’t cast magic spells. You’re not a wizard. So tell me, how is it you’re hoping to find this fella?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ says a voice from the corner. My wife raises her glass of Guinness. ‘We just steer by the bright star that hovers over his lobster pot.’

  She smacks the glass down on the table.

  ‘Bear, your other half wants another half.’

  A spy in Thorp

  In Thorp, the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, an alarm sign is flickering on a wall, warning AIRBORNE ACTIVITY.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says the guide. ‘Just testing.’

  Like me, he’s gowned surgeon-style in a white ankle length coat, cloth overshoes and name tag. In place of a medic’s watch he wears a film badge. I think of Chernobyl where the engineers apparently turned off the safety systems to see what would happen. But the cavernous building is filled with an eerie electronic bleeping. The heartbeat of the plant. While it continues, we’re okay. It’s if it stops that we’ll need to panic.

  Thorp would surely have delighted Scarpa. Its apricot brickwork and orange paint represent the latest in technotecture. Access for visitors is via a lift, a bridge, a stair up to a door with a panel which affords a first, circumscribed (as in a Chinese garden) glimpse of what lies beyond. As the door swings open, one’s gaze lights upon an immense pool of haunting clarity and depth, a lagoon where the huge fuel flasks are stored to keep cool. A canal leads from the storage pond – a prosaic name for such a beautiful thing – through a series of spaces defined by light and shadows cast on concrete and gleaming metal. It is, one might say, a place where pure form becomes substance and space, in which the fusion of natural and man-made elements enhances their intrinsic vitality and enriches playfulness with a lyricism and a heightened sense of the joy of life: the play of water, channelled into canals and dissolving in deep pools, even the air and light responding to the changing angles of the encircling walls and the gradined surfaces of the concrete. One might say these things, but does not. Instead one stands marvelling at the water, blue and clear all the way to the bottom and says, ‘Shit, I’m itching to dive in.’

  The guide sniggers. ‘You’d itch all right. It’s alkaline so the flasks won’t corrode. God knows what it would do to your todger.’

  Speaking of which, here is another wonder: a shaft of shining steel descending deep deep into the water, a vast gleaming piston that reflects light even at nineteen meters below the surface. It is a microcosmic twin to the lingam of Siva which was so huge that it straddled the cosmos, a puissant pillar of flame whose ends were beyond the range of all known telescopes. The two-light-year high dust pillars in Orion are mere willies beside Siva’s membrum virile, which his co-deities so envied that they schemed to belittle it. Brahma the Creator flew up the dazzling shaft, Visnu the Preserver down, but neither could find an end to the lux in tenebris
of Siva the Destroyer. Was it not of this Trinity and this flashing fire that Oppenheimer thought when, staring into the bright eye of the first atomic blast, he said ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’?

  Thorp is too beautiful and strange to be real. It reminds me of the metallic Isostellar complex where Luna and I often go to watch the constellations slowly crossing the Vortex night.

  >sw

  >Inner Corridor

  The corridor, a plain grey tube, curves south eastwards around what you assume to be Isostellar’s central core. Distantly, you can feel the low throb of the Cyclotron.

  >u

  >Observatory

  You climb up into a glass dome which affords excellent views of all the realms of the Vortex and of a magnificent sky. Around the edge of the dome are cabinets of drinks, foods and an assortment of interesting devices. The floor is piled high with many-coloured satin quilts, pillows and coverlets.

  When crossing from any world to another, there are generally precautions, health checks, rites of passage: the Tibetans devoted an entire book to the art of emigrating from life to death; Dr Dee performed rituals to banish the spirits he evoked in his triangle of art; witches dissolve their magic circles. The procedure for leaving a nuclear plant is meticulous. We drop our coats and hats in a bin, sit on a barrier, remove our overshoes and swing our feet across without touching the floor. We wash our hands and stick them into the slots of a machine like the thing in Jumanji, that checks them for radiation. Then we step into a shower cubicle for a top-to-toe going over after which we give ourselves a hand-held geiger scan. Even this echoes Isostellar, where, if you stray from the corridor . . .

  >s

  >Cable Duct

  You are pulled into a cylinder of cracking whips and slithering tentacles. Your body is flayed and caressed in a nightmare of pain and pleasure.

  . . . Except that when leaving cyberspace there are no precautions, no ways to remove the contamination of alien imaginations.

  The guide is reeling off facts, informing me that Thorp contains hundreds of miles of pipes and cables. It has 1,700 safety devices. Its data system has fifty-three control computers running on Motorola chips. I imagine the Detonator and the boys at NuKE up to their ears in 68000 series assembler code. The first thing they’ll want is a copy of the operating system. If one of these computers fail, says the guide, it will not affect the running of the plant. But what if it does not fail? What if the virus, spreading across fifty-three machines, simply changes data, altering a figure here, a safety margin there, a date somewhere else? What else should such a virus be called but Nuke? Just think of the headline, ‘NuKE’s Nuke nukes nuke.’

  Palden Gyatso

  Someone arrives at our house in Sussex bringing a package for me. Inside is a crude pair of leather shoes such as are worn by Indian peasants. There is also a muslin bundle, in which are wrapped a number of objects of dull japaned metal, stained, bearing rusty marks that might be blood. A note, from Tim Nunn at the Tibet Support Group, says that Palden Gyatso is shortly to make a tour of Britain. Can I produce an ad? Palden is a Buddhist monk who has suffered terribly in Tibet, spent years in prison, and been severely tortured. Finally he escaped, bribing a Chinese warder to obtain for him the tools with which he had been tortured. Here they are again. It is the second time in a year that this bundle and its murderous contents have been in my hands.

  I hear the whole story in Palden’s own quiet words. Never so strongly before have I felt the existence of evil. I pick up the weapons, remembering that they now belong to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I try to imagine them being used on me. The pain, the rage, the shame, grief, despair. But I can’t imagine it. Not all the roleplaying in the whole wide Vortex can prepare me for such a fantasy. I think about using them on other people. It’s easier. This I can imagine. I have the person in front of me. I press the electrodes to their skin. Coldly, I thumb the button. They gasp, jerk, shriek, collapse. I step away righteously. What I have done is my duty, sanctioned by superiors and legal in the eyes of the foreign governments who supplied these weapons. (Or the prototypes from which these have been copied.) The electric bands on the dog’s dick dildo are crusted with thick deposits of green and white salts. At the rim of each band greasy dirt, of who knows what composition, is trapped.

  From Palden Gyatso’s testimony, I compile the words with which I must try to engage and move the public. I am unhappily aware that no words have the power to achieve what needs to be done. All of us armour ourselves against the suffering of others. It is distant to us, unreal. Events in Tibet or Kurdistan seem nothing to do with us. In fact, at a level far deeper than the daily dose of trivia we call ‘reality’, we are all intimately connected. Life on the net, with its webwork of crazy and unexpected links, illustrates this. To an evolutionist we are like a network of canals through which a tide of genes is flowing. Other ‘-ists’ can find metaphors in language, philosophy, ethics and computer code. When, on whatever level, we acknowledge this mutual inter-connectedness, the only thing left is to accept responsibility, to accept that we can make an impact and shape our world – perhaps even to experience the roleplayer’s secret, terrifying and absolute knowledge that at the deepest levels of reality we do constantly create and recreate our own worlds. We can accept responsibility, then choose compassion. Words are not very good at expressing – or I can’t use words well enough to express – ideas like these.

  Suppose a friend reveals that they are a member of Amnesty. You ask them ‘Why is joining Amnesty a good idea?’ What sort of answer would you expect? Surely, a polite one, that might contain words like ‘human rights’, ‘freedom’ and ‘dignity’. But that answer would be inadequate. A clearer reply might be if the person turns round and, without warning, punches you violently in the face. Imagine your pain, fear, confusion. Multiply them a hundredfold. Now you have a very faint idea of what someone, somewhere is suffering at this very moment. Faced with such experience, the fine words we honour, like ‘justice’, ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, don’t serve us. They subvert our message. They make it philosophical when it’s about real pain. Words fail us.

  What more can be said about Palden’s pain than what he tells us himself: ‘My name is Palden Gyatso. I am a Tibetan and a Buddhist monk. I have spent thirty-three of my sixty-four year old life in Chinese prisons and labour camps in Tibet. Throughout those years, I yearned for a moment like this – when I could tell the world what had happened to me and others who dared call for freedom for our country. When I went to the prison an official asked me what brought me there. I said I’d put up posters saying “Tibet is an independent country, separate from China”. He said, “I’ll give you Tibetan independence.” He kicked me and rammed an electric cattle prod into my mouth with great force. The jolt of electricity knocked me out. When I came to, in terrible pain, I found myself lying in a pool of blood and excrement. I had lost twenty of my teeth. Electric batons can produce a shock of up to 70,000 volts. They are often inserted into the mouth, the rectum and the vagina. In Gutsa prison, guards raped Buddhist nuns being held there, then sexually violated them with electric cattle prods. One of the guards taunted them, saying “You have not yet experienced this!”. The guard’s name is Sonam Thering. He was still on duty when I escaped from Tibet. In the Norbu Khunghtse prison camp, we prisoners were yoked like animals to plough the prison fields. When we fell, exhausted, we were kicked and whipped. Since we never had enough to eat, we were always desperately hungry. Our hunger was so severe that we stole food meant for pigs from Chinese sties. We chewed and ate things like the bones of dead animals, mice, worms and various sorts of grasses. I was even reduced to chewing my own leather shoes. The truth is that you can do anything, when you’re trying to survive.’

  For best results

  I do an Amnesty radio ad with John Hurt, recorded in his bedroom in a hotel in Berwick on Tweed . . . pale midnight sky and gulls . . . He was up there filming The Railway Man. In his rich gravelly voice, Hurt performs t
he script, which is full of long silences, the silences of the dead, the incarcerated, the unconscious, the Halabjan silence of politicians and the silence of decent people who know about these things and do nothing to help.

  A week later Amnesty itself is silenced. Our ad is banned. The Radio Authority claims that Amnesty is a political organisation, and therefore forbidden to advertise. It is political, we are told, because it criticises governments. Never mind that its criticism consists of documenting well-verified abuses of human rights, that it is impartial, sparing governments neither of the left nor the right, East nor West. Amnesty asks for a judicial review. We lose, Lord Justice Kennedy ruling – is his judgement really as moronic as it seems to me? – ‘There are other rights to be protected, such as freedom from being virtually forced to listen to unsolicited information of a contentious kind.’ In which case, m’lud, why not also ban the BBC news? Thank god for the free internet.

  What can you do when those who are supposed to uphold law break their own laws, when governments break the treaties they have signed? Martyn Gregory, the TV journalist, digs out proof that electric shock weapons are being traded by British firms. Conservative Minister Heseltine accuses him of fabricating the evidence. Martyn knows it isn’t fabricated. He had used a hidden video camera to film a British Aerospace salesman demonstrating an illegal baton. Martyn sues for libel and wins an apology and damages. Karen, at Amnesty, asks me to do an ad about this. It will be the third time I’ve written about electroshock weapons. I need a new picture, and the Dalai Lama’s bundle has gone back to Dharamsala, so I ask Martyn if he will lend me one of the batons shown in his TV programme. But he says that since it’s illegal to possess the real things, he had to use dummies, which have long since vanished.