Kurt had no idea that Sycamore had been met with such open hostility anywhere, let alone on prime time TV. He was also growing more than a little tired of this idea that he was a pawn in Amos’s grand vision.
“The journalist I saw was a woman,” Kurt said. “And she didn’t seem hostile. It was more, I dunno, blasé. She looked like she was talking about a 0.1% rise in interest rates or something.”
“We’ll find a way to translate it,” Minter said.
“Hopefully. The other thing the SycaNews said was that my funeral is in two days. Do you think we’ll be able to show something in the sky when everyone is there?”
“This,” Minter said. “This footage from HQ, for sure. But two days? I don’t know how much else we can do. It might take me a few hours to recover your vista footage from when Stacy died, or from when you crashed and Amos told you he was giving you a new identity. That’s the big stuff. Because we can show people all we want about privacy violations but a lot of them just won’t care. It has to be the big stuff.”
“So how likely is it that you’ll have something more by the funeral?”
“Close to one hundred per cent,” Minter said. “I’ll have it, but if we’re going to edit it in time we’ll be working non-stop. Is Ernesto still on the computer now?”
“He was when I left.”
Minter picked up Stacy’s laptop again. “I should finish this. Do you want to help?”
Kurt did want to help, and he was glad to see the progress Minter had made. He had already edited some of the Orwall footage and was now working on isolating the worse things that Amos had said during the rest of Kurt and Stacy’s tour.
As Minter ran through footage from the elevator, Kurt heard Amos asking Stacy if people in Italy “hate the French as much as we do”, which made slightly more sense to Kurt in the context of a critical French media than it had at the time.
They picked out some of the moments which would have most impact as part of a rapid-fire video montage. The process was easier for Kurt than it would have been had anyone except Stacy been wearing the camera. He found it painful to hear her voice — even this exaggerated Italian accent version of it — but at least he couldn’t see her smiling face alongside the man who killed her.
Kurt noticed after a while that it was almost one o’clock, the mall’s designated lunchtime. Minter didn’t want anything to eat, so Kurt walked back over to the food court by himself.
Everyone was there apart from Ernesto and Michael. And Mary, Kurt realised, who was probably in the kitchen. The scattered group almost looked like a bunch of stray cats who knew which kind stranger’s door was about to open to deliver their daily sustenance.
Before sitting down, Kurt popped into the workstation to see if Ernesto was still there. He was, with Michael. Michael turned to the door and stared at Kurt like he was trying to scare him away with his eyes.
“What?” Kurt said.
“What what?” Michael shot back.
“What are you doing?”
Ernesto answered before Michael and his Michael-ness could further inflame the situation. “We’re downloading a patch to fix the password vulnerability. Apparently it’s a well known flaw, so maybe Minter isn’t as magical as he makes out.”
Kurt didn’t want to become embroiled in another argument about Minter or the password or anything else. He wanted one thing, so he made that clear. “When will you be finished? We need on today.”
“We’ll be finished when we’re finished,” Michael said gruffly. “Get out of here.”
“Shut your mouth,” Ernesto snapped at him, surprising Kurt as much as Michael.
Michael looked for a second as though he was going to react but then meekly turned his vision back to the screen. If Kurt had had any doubts over who was really in charge, they had just been crushed.
“You’ll get online today,” Ernesto promised. “Don’t worry.”
Kurt left, satisfied enough.
He saw Mary standing behind the only open fast-food counter. The food court’s few dozen fast-food outlets were all lined in a row with no space in between. The open one had a sign above it which said “Pig-Out Pork Pies”. Kurt smiled a little as he remembered the circumstances in which he first met Stacy.
Mary was standing inside Pig-Out, busily putting food on plates and placing them on the counter. Anthony helped out by delivering a plate to each person.
Kurt sat down beside Ty and Lisa, as usual, after saying hello to Harry and Joyce, again as usual. This time he also waved over to Val, who sat alone while Ernesto and Michael were otherwise occupied.
Anthony brought three plates to Val’s table, but she explained that neither his father nor Ernesto would be coming. Ty immediately raised his hand to claim the extra food. This amused Kurt, because it wasn’t as though the portions were small. Anthony gave Ty one of the extra plates and brought the other to Harry and Joyce, who gratefully received it.
Once everyone had a plate, Mary appeared from near the central walkway, since apparently the only way out of the fast-food outlets was to go all the way along the back of the row and out through a door that Kurt hadn’t noticed. She sat down beside Anthony, who had placed her plate beside his.
Kurt liked Anthony. He had liked Anthony from almost the beginning, when he treated him humanely in the south monorail station moments after Ernesto had treated him like a murderer on the walkway below. Minter had since informed Kurt that Anthony ran to Kurt’s assistance and shouted angrily at Ernesto immediately after the punch, which only made Kurt like him more. Ty had said something in passing when they were talking about making Mary feel welcome — “Anthony tries pretty hard” — and that was clearly apparent now as he sat with her and chatted casually about something that was making her smile.
Anthony had even given some clothes to Minter so he could wash his well-worn suit. They were a little short, but Minter had been grateful. It was unusual for someone Minter previously disliked to win him over, but Anthony had more or less managed it. For his part, Anthony had softened to Minter thanks largely to Kurt’s insistence that he meant well.
“So it turns out my funeral is on Friday,” Kurt said midway through his meal, like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Ty’s expression changed to one of quite obvious concern, but Lisa sounded more excited than anything. “That’ll be mad,” she said. “Watching your own funeral and that. Proper freaky.”
Kurt laughed. He liked having Lisa around to make him laugh without trying.
He paused to reflect that he actually liked having everyone around, with the obvious exception of Michael. At first Kurt had been concerned with the mall’s laid back atmosphere and disappointed by the quality and quantity of its inhabitants, but now he wouldn’t have changed it. The actual work of taking down Sycamore using their own systems was something that Kurt and Minter — mainly Minter — could do without any real help. All they needed was physical security and an internet connection, and Ernesto had proven capable of delivering both. Still, having a few extra people around to keep them sane was no bad thing.
When he was finished eating, Kurt decided to take the leftovers from Ty’s second plate back to Minter.
“His eyes are bigger than his belly,” Lisa said. “Always the same.”
“She’s just jealous ’cause with her it’s the other way around,” Ty said.
Lisa slapped him on the shoulder, quite hard but quite playfully. “Cheeky git.”
Kurt left them to it.
~
The food court was very much the hub of daily life in the mall. Whether or not Ernesto had considered the social benefits of having everyone gather in the same place at the same time, they were very real.
During the rest of the day, everyone passed the time in their own way. For Kurt and Minter, this was finishing their work on the video clips they were preparing for Friday’s funeral.
They wouldn’t decide the details of which clips would play when until Minter was looking
at the Emergency Control Interface. He hadn’t built this interface, only the secure log-in system which enabled remote access to it. Still, he knew with absolute certainty that he could schedule a video in the sky at any time and location, and he also knew that he could force a small pop-up into the corner of every consumer’s vision, whatever they were looking at. He hoped that he would be able to instigate a full-volume countdown in everyone’s ears, too.
Preventing Sycamore’s staff from reversing the changes would be the most trivial part, Minter insisted, purely because of how the ECI was supposed to function. Essentially, it was a master override. One of Amos’s greatest fears was a physical attack on Sycamore HQ. But even more than an attack, he harboured a highly irrational fear of an invasion. In his nightmare scenario, a hostile and heavily-armed group would enter HQ under cover of darkness and wreak havoc by messing with the control centre to deliver all kinds of lies and propaganda to Sycamore’s hundreds of millions of Seeded consumers.
To combat this, the ECI enabled Amos or his most trusted employee to roll back recent changes and make new ones from any web browser, anywhere in the world. Fortunately, Amos’s trust in Minter had proven misplaced and Minter had created a third ghost log-in which Amos knew nothing about.
A less fanciful version of Amos’s invasion fear was the possibility that an incompetent or disgruntled employee might gain access to the control centre and proceed to transmit unapproved messages or make other unsanctioned changes. For this reason, control was strictly regimented between departments. Only the senior SycaNews editor could place a bulletin in the sky, for example, and only the head of RealU could authorise any app-wide changes. But through illicit access to the ECI, Minter would be the de facto head of everything.
Kurt had set an alarm on his phone so that he wouldn’t miss dinner. When it went off he was both pleased and concerned; pleased because he was hungry, concerned because editing and compiling a handful of short videos had taken them most of a working day. With the funeral looming only two days away, the timescale was beginning to look too tight.
Minter came with Kurt to the food court. Again, everyone else was already there. This time, “everyone else” even included Ernesto. The only absentee was Michael. Kurt left Minter at the usual table with Lisa and Ty then walked over to Ernesto and Val. He greeted Val then quietly asked Ernesto where Michael was, hoping the answer wouldn’t be “in the workstation.”
Ernesto hesitated. “He’s just finishing up.”
“Still?”
“He says he’s almost done. There was something else he had to do, but I don’t know what. I’ve not been in there the whole day.”
“It’s just that we really, really need to get on today,” Kurt said. “Even if it’s just for an hour before it gets dark so we can get some footage, transfer it onto a USB stick and work on it in Home overnight. Because if we’re going to broadcast something on Friday, we have to make sure it’ll be impactful enough to do the job, so we have to start working on the videos we’ll be broadcasting tonight. Every hour is going to count.”
“There’s no problem,” Ernesto said, which Kurt thought was an odd thing to say. “Michael told me he’s almost done, so you will get on.”
“He said that earlier,” Kurt complained.
“I know, but then something came up. A complication with the patch, he said. Whatever it was, he’s ironing out the kinks. You’ll get on.”
Kurt returned to his table. When he did, he found that two other tables had been joined on to it, one at either side, with the rest of the group crowded around. Mary and Anthony were busy getting the food from kitchen to table, but there were two places set for them, too.
As it turned out, Ty and Lisa had told the others about Kurt’s upcoming funeral. Everyone was weirdly nice to him, as though something had actually happened.
He insisted that he didn’t really want to talk about it, but that it wasn’t necessarily the bad news he first thought it was.
Everyone apart from Minter, who had never liked eating in public, chatted away to each other during the meal. Even Mary found her voice, and she seemed genuinely pleased that everyone enjoyed her cooking.
After everyone had eaten, Ty was reading on his laptop while Lisa and Mary talked about Jamaica, since a burning desire to go there seemed to be something they had in common.
Kurt looked over Ty’s shoulder to see what kind of book he was reading. “Do you have any sci-fi?” Kurt asked, wishing he had brought Stacy’s e-reader, which was overflowing with the stuff.
“There’s not much need for sci-fi these days,” Ty said. “Not with everything that’s going on in real life. Because this whole Sycamore thing is basically one of the holy subjects, right? You get robots who learn how to feel, aliens who don’t really come in peace, and evil corporations who rule through technology.”
“Minter hasn’t quite learned how to feel just yet,” Kurt said. Even Minter smiled. “I wouldn’t mind reading about some aliens, though.”
“Sorry, non-fiction only,” Ty said.
Kurt wanted to say something about aliens almost certainly being non-fiction in some distant part of the universe, but he didn’t.
“What are you reading, anyway?” Lisa asked.
“The Spectacle thing I was telling you about,” Ty said. He turned mainly to Kurt and Minter. “An anti-advertising guy I had on T-Y-T-V a few months ago told me I should read it, and it’s so weird how everything that’s happened since the Seed came out is just like an exaggerated version of what the book says. This book is 50 years old, but Sycamore is the ultimate expression of the kind of cultural disease it talks about: dependence through convenience, appearance over substance, consumerism gone wild...”
“That hippy crap will rot your mind, son,” Harry chimed in.
Ty offered the laptop to Harry. “Guy Debord, dude. Read up.”
“I almost met Guy Debord,” Joyce said. “Back in ’68.”
“No way. Really?”
“Truer than true. I lived in Paris for six years as a girl.”
“For her sins…” Harry joked.
“And do you know what his middle name was?” Joyce asked. “Well, the French version.”
Ty shook his head.
“Ernesto,” Kurt said quietly.
“That’s right,” Joyce said, much impressed. “Guy-Ernest Debord.”
“No,” Kurt said. “I mean Ernesto Ernesto.” Kurt tilted his head towards the workstation door, which Ernesto had just come through and closed behind him. He was walking over to the group.
Ernesto stood in front of everyone and breathed deeply. He looked like he was carrying a heavy load, which wasn’t like him.
“What’s wrong?” Anthony asked.
Ernesto looked at Kurt, almost apologetically, and then back to Anthony. “It’s starting to get dark,” he said. “Ten more minutes then it’s time to think about retiring for the night.”
Minter immediately stood up, threw his metal chair to the ground behind him, and stormed off.
“Minter!” Kurt called after him.
“I told you he was a liar, man,” was all that Minter called back.
Ernesto picked up Minter’s fallen chair and leaned against it. He spoke directly to Kurt. “I believed Michael when he told me it wouldn’t take long,” he said.
“That was six hours ago,” Kurt replied.
Ernesto nodded. “I know, but he said the patch he downloaded to fix the password flaw caused problems with other things. It stopped the 4G from connecting, so he had to download another update for that. And then there was—”
“Don’t lie to my face,” Kurt said.
Everyone else was silent, most of them looking at the table to avoid the confrontation. Ty and Anthony were the only two who paid keen attention to both men. Ty would have sided with Kurt against Ernesto in any situation, but Anthony’s position was more complicated given that his father was the one standing in Kurt’s way.
“Don’t call me a liar,”
Ernesto said.
Kurt didn’t move his eyes from Ernesto’s. If anything, he stared deeper. “Then don’t treat me like an idiot.”
“Listen, Kurt, I think you should—”
“I think you should shut up and tell me this,” Kurt interrupted. “If the 4G couldn’t connect, how could Michael download an update to fix it? Huh? How? If your car doesn’t have any gas, you can’t drive it out to buy some.”
Ernesto hesitated. “I meant it stopped the 4G from connecting properly. He said the signal kept dropping every five or ten minutes.”
Ty and Anthony turned to Kurt, waiting for him to confirm whether what Ernesto said was plausible. His answer was no. “I don’t know if Michael is lying to you, too, or what, but he’s being deliberately obstructive and I need to know why.”
“He’s not being obstructive, Kurt. He’s being thorough. With someone like Minter, however much you want to vouch for him, we have to take reasonable precautions. He’s the whole reason we needed the patch, which is the whole reason for the delay. So if you’re looking for someone to blame, start with him.”
“What do you mean “someone like Minter”?” Kurt asked. “Someone from Sycamore? Michael was working with Amos when Minter was still in school and he’s running your computers! How many times do you need to hear that Minter is here to help? But he can’t when you and Michael keep standing in the way.”
“Tomorrow the workstation is all yours. Michael and I will stay out of your way all day.”
“This morning you told me we would get on this afternoon. Then it was tonight. Now it’s tomorrow? A hundred times I asked you,” Kurt said, raising his voice to its highest volume yet. “And a hundred times you said we would get on today. We needed to get on today.”
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