Transmission

by Hari Kunzru

  During the next morning’s daily briefing, Burger faced a barrage of questions. The press, who had seen the international stories on the wires about the plant closure in Montevideo and the data-traffic brownouts in the Far East, wanted to know the worst. Was it emanating from a rogue state? Some hostile underground network? Had any government departments been affected? How would he characterize the economic impact? The New York Times wanted to know whether the administration could confirm or deny that the country was under attack. Burger responded by reminding the assembled journalists that ‘any attempt to compromise or mitigate our ability to function effectively in terms of our critical infrastructure, whether that be in the realm of telecommunications, energy, banking and finance, water facilitation, government operational activity thresholds or the smooth and unhampered running of our essential emergency services, must be viewed as taking place within a framework strongly suggestive of deliberate negativization, threat or hostile intent. We are in the process of investigating and assessing the current situation, and will move with the utmost alacrity and vigour to institute proportionate, reasonable and devastating countermeasures appropriate to the ultimate outcome of that threat assessment.’

  The woman from the Times was not sure if this meant yes or no, but filed a story which made the situation sound very tense indeed. Across America, citizens started to look with suspicion at the computers on their desks. These machines which had always terrorized them in small ways – by crashing, hanging, demanding meaningless upgrades or simply scolding them in the persona of an annoying cartoon paperclip – were now revealed to harbour something more sinister, something with an agenda. This was it, the enemy within, a technological fifth column in the homes of ordinary Americans. By the time talk-radio got hold of it, a consensus had emerged that the attack should be avenged in blood. Calling into a nationally syndicated show, Bobby from Topeka summed it up for a lot of people.

  ‘Torture,’ he said. ‘That’s the only way we’ll find out who’s behind this.’

  Torture who, asked the host.

  ‘Hell, I don’t know,’ said Bobby. ‘Whoever they got to, I suppose.’

  At the boundaries of any complex event, unity starts to break down. Recollections differ. Fact shades irretrievably into interpretation. How many people must be involved for certainty to dissipate? The answer, according to information theorists, is two. As soon as there is a sender, a receiver, a transmission medium and a message, there is a chance for noise to corrupt the signal.

  There is no doubt that legally and morally Arjun Mehta must bear responsibility for the outbreak, but actions have been ascribed to Leela, and hence to him, for which he could not possibly be responsible. There were rumours that the virus was ‘attacking the water supply’, and the claim circulated that the Colville plant shut-down was part of a strategy by a foreign power to contaminate drinking water with (depending on who you spoke to) Cryptosporidium, E. coli or LSD. Alarms, mostly false, were raised in various US government offices, at power plants, dams and military bases. Lack of technical knowledge contributed to the confusion. In Honduras, Leela was suspected of blowing lightbulbs in the Ministry of the Interior. A man in Ottawa papered his bedroom in silver foil, convinced that his son’s PC had started to emit harmful rays. In Bihar, police acting under orders from a regional politician conducted raids on various local markets, confiscating pirated VHS copies of Leela Zahir films which were believed to be ‘spreading disease’. Back in the US, when the administrators of the website for the Houston Airport System discovered that references to George Bush Intercontinental Airport had been mysteriously changed to George Bush is Incontinent Airport they issued a press release accusing the anonymous author of Leela of perpetrating the outrage.

  Conversely, other events which may be attributable to Leela have dropped through the cracks. To this day much remains invisible to the counters and chroniclers, those whose function it is to announce what happened, to come to some conclusion about how it must have been. There were market movements, jitters and shakes, reconfigurations of money and confidence and power that for the most part were not discussed or even comprehended at the time. Leela was in the system like a quintessence, a breath.

  Within twenty-four hours of Leela01 being identified and countered, variants were reported. Some were obviously the work of copycats, crude alterations to the subject line of the delivery email, superficial tweaks to the code. Others were more profound, and analysts were reluctantly forced to classify them as entirely new organisms. Leelas03, 04 and 05 were identified. Leela06 (the so-called RingtoneLeela), which programmed cellphone handsets to play a melody from You’ll Have to Ask My Parents, caused particular alarm. It displayed a knowledge of mobile-telephony systems which shocked the telecoms corporations, forcing them into a hasty security redesign. Ringtone is also one of several Leela variants which have never been conclusively linked to Arjun Mehta, a gap in the record that opens up vertiginous and troubling possibilities. Were other people out there dreaming of Leela Zahir?

  In the first few days of the outbreak, various groups and individuals claimed responsibility. Maoist revolutionaries in Chiapas sent a fax to a Mexico City newspaper announcing that Leela was the latest step in their campaign to cripple the infrastructure of global capitalism. A Lithuanian hacking group called the Red Hand Gang revealed that they had concocted it to demonstrate their superiority to their rivals, the Riga-based HacktiKons. Serial confessor James Lee Gillick III was (as usual) ignored, since he had no access to computers in his Ohio penitentiary. The Shoreditch Brigade, which preoccupied the British tabloids for several days, turned out to be a student rag-week prank.

  Behind the scenes, global law-enforcement agencies took action. Subpoenas were obtained for the logs of service providers. Phone records and news-group postings were examined for clues to the source of the epidemic. In China the government seriously considered shutting down internet access altogether. Gavin Burger announced to the Washington press pack that ‘sources within the computer underground’ were cooperating with federal investigators, and the bulletin boards confirmed that more or less anyone with a record for computer crime was being taken in for questioning, from old school superstars, the Mittnicks and Poulsens, to script kiddies who had been caught defacing corporate websites, people no one seriously believed had the knowledge or motivation to create anything on Leela’s scale. Day by day the atmosphere curdled, became vengeful and uncertain.

  Arjun watched the arrest of seventeen-year-old Thierry Hofmann on CNN. Breaking news: virus suspect held. As technicians carried plastic evidence bags containing hard drives, disks and manuals to a waiting van, the Swiss teenager was led out of the front door of his parents’ Montreux home by a pair of uniformed policemen, a look of absolute incredulity on his face. It was that look which broke Arjun, shattered the screen he had erected to shield him from what was taking place. Even Hofmann’s release the next day could not wipe it away, the panicked turn towards the camera as a hand pressed down on his head to ease him into the police car. Bewilderment and fear. Bewilderment and fear that rightfully belonged to him.

  He curled up among the foil trays and coffee cups, the printouts and crushed corn chips on the floor of his room, and started to cry. Perhaps if he said sorry to the people he had harmed, who had lost their data? Vignettes of forgiveness (I’ll make it up to you, even if it takes a while) spooled through his mental projector. But what about those who had lost money, or couldn’t get an ambulance when they needed one? Were people being hurt by Leela? Had anyone been killed?

  At that moment he understood. Sooner or later they would find him and then life as he knew it would be over. All I wanted was my job back. All I wanted was to work and be happy and live a life in magic America. None of that would count for much in court. Would there even be a court? They were calling him a terrorist, which meant that he would probably just join the ranks of the disappeared, the kneeling figures in the orange suits against whom anything was justified, to whom anyt
hing could legitimately be done. It was the revenge of the uncontrollable world. He had tried to act but instead had made himself a non-person.

  The Dutch steward gabbled a paragraph of corporate communication, his wayward accent reinventing his employers as ‘Europe’s leading locust airline’ and advising passengers of the ‘streamlined chicken process’ planned at UK airports. Gaby, whose own vowels (when she concentrated) had been hammered flat into near-perfect London slumming posh, smiled wryly at the boy’s mistakes, distracting herself from what she always thought about during take-off and landing, which was death. The sudden eruption of light and air into the cabin, the unpeeling of the fuselage – the pictures were compulsive, almost pornographic in their specificity Twice a flight she would imagine the cold sucking wind freighted with pillows and carry-on bags and vodka miniatures and headsets that would rush past her in the final moments of consciousness, and would feel close to the mystery, to the centre of things.

  With a bump the wheels hit the tarmac. Death disappeared in the boredom of the scramble in the aisle, and by the time she walked into the arrivals hall at Inverness she had, as always, forgotten it. They had sent a runner to meet her, locally hired crew rather than Indian, a smug Glasgow film lad all distressed denim and hair gel, chewing gum and smoking a fag while checking himself out in the mirror at one of the concessions. He threw her case in the back of the minivan and in what was apparently his fuck-me voice told her to call him Rob D. On the way down the A82 he spoke a name-dropping monologue to her breasts, and she looked out of the window at the rock and the yellow gorse and the sparkling water of Loch Ness. As far as he was concerned, the whole production was tits-up, the Pakis didn’t know scheduling from their erse and now with these reporters running round he wouldn’t be at all surprised if… When he ran out of opinions he fell silent and played house music on the CD, and she got a chance to look at the notes they had given her.

  They translated the title of the film as Tender Tough, which made it sound as if it was about meat. The plot concerned a disillusioned cop who becomes a gangster after the death of his family in a food-contamination scandal, then is redeemed by a young dancer who shows him the path of peace and righteousness before herself dying tragically in a bungled shoot-out. The stars were a guy called Rajiv Rana and the one who all the trouble was about, the heroine, Leela Zahir. In his publicity photo, Rana was wearing a white wife-beater and leaping through digitally enhanced flames. In hers, Leela Zahir was wearing a baby-blue sweatsuit and peeping out from behind a tree. The publicity materials gave their birth dates and star signs. Rana was in his late thirties. Leela Zahir was precisely twenty-one.

  When Dan Bridgeman had phoned her about the trip, he had presented it as a bad job, a favour Gaby would be doing the company. Bridgeman & Hart made a speciality of handling PR requirements for foreign crews on location in the UK, but that usually meant Americans or French, occasionally outfits from other parts of Europe. A request from an Indian producer was a novelty No one really knew what to do. After all, as Phoebe Hart pointed out at lunch, they had their own media, didn’t they? Mainstream film people knew the basics about ‘Bollywood’: chorus lines and chiffon saris. They also knew that Indians functioned in their own way, had their own publicity and marketing and distribution networks, and one didn’t really need to worry about them. However, the situation had been explained. An off-the-film-page story had broken about their lead star, and they were being besieged by requests from all kinds of media outlets. There was some additional unspecified complication, but on the whole it seemed to be something Β & Η could help with. They wanted someone to firefight. Gaby wasn’t on anything important, so the firm sent her.

  At eight the northern summer sun was still so bright that it felt like mid afternoon. The hills changed colour as clouds passed overhead, cycling through phases of purple and green and brown. They had reached the west coast, near the bridge connecting the mainland with Skye. A narrow road twisted its way between a sheer granite cliff faced with wire mesh and the gravelled shore of Loch Lone, whose disturbed surface looked like a huge scratched sheet of steel. As Rob D. pulled the minivan through the stone gateposts of the Clansman’s Lodge Hotel, she saw her work standing around, watched by a wary local constable. A TV van and a few hire cars had pulled up on to the grass verge, and a scattering of bored journalists, news people from the drab look of them, were smoking cigarettes and making phone calls and eating sandwiches and pissing against the trunks of the conifers in the plantation which ran up to the boundary of the hotel grounds.

  Rising steadily above the water, the Lodge’s driveway ran for about half a mile, executing a gentle arc around the lake shore, until the building itself came into view, a stark two-storey manor house with whitewashed walls and steeply gabled grey slate roofs, set in an acre of immaculate lawn. The building was neither ugly nor beautiful, a functional place whose architecture spoke of Christian modesty and the need to insulate against winter draughts. In the driveway a group of workmen were loading folding chairs and tables into a pair of large catering trucks, buffeted by the wind. Rob D. parked in front of a glassed-in porch and, as he pulled her bag from the back of the van, told her, as if it were a valuable and possibly even classified piece of information, his room number. She suggested he had a wank. ‘Bitch,’ he muttered under his breath.

  Though the exterior of the hotel was stark, the entrance hall (and, Gaby later discovered, the bar, the restaurant and the billiards room) was carpeted in a violent red-green tartan and crammed with a Victorian clutter of stags’ heads, dirks, rusty guns, pewter, banners, cases of fishing flies and golf balls, prints of weeping swains and ruined castles, sporting trophies, sagging furniture and, by the stairs, a dubious-looking suit of armour. At front desk was a sour-faced clerk and a rack of leaflets inviting Gaby to taste authentic Scottish offal cookery, visit a woollen mill and discover the eternal mystery of the Picts. As the clerk looked up her name in a leather-bound ledger, a haggard-looking Indian man appeared and introduced himself as Rakesh, the location manager.

  ‘Are they still outside?’ he asked.

  ‘The journalists? Yes, they are.’

  ‘We have a situation,’ he said, with the mournful expression of a diplomat telling his premier that war is inevitable. ‘It is most delicate.’

  ‘What kind of situation?’ asked Gaby. Rakesh looked nervously at the clerk, who was making no effort to disguise his interest in their conversation.

  ‘Come to Mr Prasad’s room in half an hour. We’ll explain everything.’

  Rocky Prasad was younger than she had expected. He sat by the window looking wistfully at the sunset, his smooth round face like that of a schoolboy who has another hour of maths before break. He could not, Gaby decided, be much older than twenty-five. His neat white polo shirt and pressed jeans reduced his age still further, and she had to remind herself that this was a man who had already directed three feature films and was (or so claimed the cuttings faxed through to Bridgeman & Hart) the great hope of Indian commercial cinema. During the meeting he said almost nothing, whispering intermittently to the DP, another fresh-faced young man whose downy moustache and conspiratorial fidgeting reinforced the schoolboy impression still further.

  The talking was done by the producer, Naveed Iqbal. A portly man in his fifties, he was the only one of the group gathered in Prasad’s hotel room to be attired in (semi) traditional Indian dress, the long tails of his cotton kurta hanging down incongruously from beneath a lemon-yellow Pringle golf jumper. He had the look of a man who had recently been fed and would soon be again. From his Afro-like shock of wiry grey hair to the pouches of dark skin under his eyes, everything about him repelled Gaby, a feeling compounded by the frank sexual relish with which he examined her as she sat down. While he spoke he rubbed his hands together as if it was important to keep them occupied to prevent involuntary grabbing or pinching.

  ‘Do you have midges in proper London, Miss Caro? Or is it only in your northern parts?’


  ‘Midges? You mean the insects?’

  ‘Yes. Biting insects. Very serious bite, Miss Caro. God knows capable of putting actress out of action for days and days.’

  ‘No, they don’t have them. At least I don’t think so. I don’t follow.’

  ‘You see, we are here in Scottish Highlands to picturize an important song, the theme song to our movie. It is very romantic song such as would bring tears to your beautiful eyes, madam, if you spoke Hindi-Urdu language and hence calls for mountains and castles and so forth. It does not call for biting insects, which are also here in romantic Scottish Highlands. Two days ago when preparing to shoot the battlement sequence over at fort location our heroine Miss Zahir has been bitten. Doctor is attending and pronouncing no trouble, top bill of health, but Miss Zahir is insisting all is not well inside, and so naturally concerned we have halted schedule for one day. Yesterday when her first call comes in the morning we are told midge trouble is not yet gone away and also she is having bad case of lost voice due to the cold air and climate. And today also Miss Zahir continues to feel unwell despite the occasion of her birthday and large party planned to celebrate. Miss Zahir is a most sensitive young woman, Miss Caro.’