Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  Which was just as well. We didn’t really need to rehearse our songs anymore. We had played them so many times before, there wasn’t that much room left for improvement. The only thing we were lacking experience in was playing in front of a live audience. We had done that only once, at our school gym a couple of months back, in front of 150 of our peers and a bunch of teachers and interested parents. It was fun and went quite well, but none of us had the ambition to turn Puerity into a proper live band. Except Tummy maybe. He had quite enjoyed the sight of 150 people screaming and shouting and banging their heads to our music. Tummy wasn’t used to that kind of positive feedback from anyone. He was a less-than-average student, which didn’t make him too popular with most teachers, his parents never approved of anything he did, and for most our fellow students he was just that fat, obnoxious kid who farted in class and made crude and silly jokes that were never funny. But when we were on that stage at the school gym, he suddenly grew eight feet tall and burst with confidence. He surprised everyone, even us. None of us had ever seen him like that, doing something really well and being visibly proud of it. We only played for half an hour that day, but Tummy rocked the stage as if there was no tomorrow. He completely exhausted himself. After the gig he spent ten minutes with his head down the toilet bowl puking his heart and soul out, and when he came out, his face was beaming like the full moon, and he raised his fists and shouted, “Rock’n’roll!”

  So, apart from Tummy we weren’t really ambitious as a band. I played the drums, Ginger played the keyboard, and Julian and Tummy played guitar and bass, but none of us ever seriously contemplated a career in music. The only reason we started Puerity in the first place was that we all had to do something for the annual music, arts and sciences festival at our school. It was mandatory. Everyone at school had to get involved in some kind of project; prepare a musical performance, paint a picture, build a model of the solar system or—if you were more daring—of a plutonium atom. It was like our school’s own version of Britain’s Got Talent, only that this year’s winners wouldn’t get to play at the Royal Variety Performance, but at our school’s 200th anniversary. And the winners, well, that was us. We had won the crowd over with our rendition of I Vow to Thee, My Country by taking the original tune composed by Gustav Holst and rearranging it into a proper rock anthem. Everyone loved it, and suddenly we found ourselves faced with the daunting prospect of having to provide the musical entertainment at the school anniversary. Fortunately, there would only be time for three songs.

  A few minutes after Tummy had left, my phone rang. It was Tummy.

  “Michael,” he said, “I’m at school. Something is going on.”

  “What are you doing at school in the middle of the night?”

  “It’s on me way home, remember? Anyway, there are lots of cars, and delivery trucks, half a dozen of them.”

  “Delivery trucks?”

  “Yes! They’re unloading huge boxes and carrying them into the school.”

  “Boxes? What kind of boxes?”

  “Just ... boxes, damn it! They have stuff printed on them but it’s too small to read because for some reason I must have forgotten to bring a bloody telescope! And I can’t get any closer because Richardson and me dad are there.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yes,” Tummy hissed. “The tall one with the dark hair who’s married to me mum, remember? What’s with all the questions, Michael? You need to get over here and have a look at this. Something is not right.”

  Tummy usually had a tendency to exaggerate and blow things totally out of proportion. However, something indeed didn’t seem right about this. Our school building was old, but it had been completely refurbished inside and out only two or three years ago. There was no obvious maintenance work that needed to be done immediately, and even if there was, in the current economy the local council was unlikely to have the money for it. And even if there was work that needed to be done and the money to do it, why would they start doing it in the middle of the night and just a few weeks before the end of term and the beginning of the summer holidays?

  “Don’t go away, Tummy. We’ll be right there.”

  “We’ll be right where?” Ginger asked after I had hung up.

  “At school,” I said. “Something is going on.”

  “Oh well. I have to go home anyway,” Ginger said. “Might as well make a little detour.”

  When we got to the school a few minutes later, it looked like bloody Victoria Station. The entrance was brightly lit, and there were cars and delivery trucks and people everywhere. Tummy was hiding behind a tree some 50 metres away on the other side of the road.

  “Finally!” he said when he saw us coming.

  “What’s going on?” Ginger whispered. “What is your dad doing here?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” Tummy hissed back. “Me dad usually doesn’t ask for me permission every time he leaves the house!”

  I took my binoculars out of my backpack to get a closer look. Richardson and Tummy’s dad were standing by one of the cars. Mr Lewis was holding an open laptop computer and talking to Richardson who kept nodding and stroking his fuzzy beard. Meanwhile, men in blue boiler suits were carrying boxes into the building. Most of the boxes had a familiar looking logo printed on them.

  “MMC Tech,” I said. “It looks as if those boxes contain electronics equipment.”

  “New computers maybe?” Ginger asked.

  I shook my head. “Look at the size and shape of those boxes. I don’t think we’re getting computers with 92-inch flatscreen monitors. But either way, it’s very odd because I don’t see how in this economy anyone would be able to provide a school with that amount of brand new equipment. I mean, we’re talking about tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds here.”

  “Michael,” Julian said, “can you run the number plate of those trucks?”

  “I probably could. But not from here. I’d have to do it from my computer at home. Not sure if I want to do that, though. Hacking into a government agency like the DVLA isn’t exactly a misdemeanour. I mean, we’re talking jail time here, so I’d much rather explore safer options first.”

  “I see,” Julian said. “By the way, is that a phone number on the side of those trucks?”

  “Yeah.” I took my phone out of my pocket. “MINDY, can you run a phone number for me, please?”

  MINDY was a computer program that I had been working on for the last two years. It was supposed to be a personal assistant that was using the resources of hundreds, thousands, even millions of other computers that were connected to the Internet. Once launched, MINDY would build a giant cyber network that could be controlled from the originating computer. MINDY worked like a human brain. Every computer that was connected to MINDY was acting like a human brain cell. One brain cell may not make much of a difference on a scale of a brain with hundreds of billions of cells, but if you connect enough of them, you end up with a brain that could be as powerful as any human brain. To the effect that if MINDY had enough computers at its disposal, let’s say a billion or so, it should even be able to develop some sort of artificial intelligence. At least that was the theory. I hadn’t quite reached that point yet, but I was getting there.

  “Yes, Michael,” MINDY said.

  I told MINDY the number, and a moment later she said, “This number is registered to MMC Media Supplies, Wandsworth, SW18.”

  “What exactly does MMC Media Supplies do?”

  Tummy chuckled. “Supplying media?”

  “I wasn’t asking you, Tummy,” I said. “MINDY, what does MMC Media Supplies do?”

  “That information is not available.”

  “Do they have a website or something?”

  “MMC Media Supplies does not have a website or something.”

  “MINDY, when was MMC Media Supplies registered, and by whom?”

  “MMC Media Supplies was registered three weeks and two days ago by MMC Holdings PLC.”

  “Well done, MINDY,�
� Ginger said. “Who would have thought that an MMC company is owned by MMC Holdings?”

  I chose to ignore Ginger’s sarcasm. Of course it didn’t come as a big surprise that MMC Holdings owned MMC Media Supplies. It’s not as if the name MMC was unknown to us. MMC’s various companies were ubiquitous and omnipresent in all our lives. The Maddock Media Corporation owned TV and radio stations, newspapers, Internet Service Providers, and phone companies, not only in Britain but all over the world. Almost everyone I knew was a customer of MMC in one way or another. Our own TV subscription service at home was provided by MMC Vision, and my own mobile phone carrier was MMC Mobile. I was well aware of all the latest developments in the world of media and entertainment technology, not least because of MMC’s rapid expansion into consumer markets all over the world in the last ten years or so. Especially in the last couple of months MMC had been mentioned in the news almost on a daily basis because business and consumer watchdogs kept raising concerns about an emerging MMC news and entertainment monopoly. Which made it even more surprising that MMC Media Supplies had never been heard of and were now supplying what looked like obscene amounts of electronics equipment to our school.

  “MINDY can only access available information,” I said. “She can’t do the thinking for us. Not yet anyway. The fact that MINDY can’t find any detailed information about MMC Media Supplies is a piece of valuable information in and by itself. Nothing MMC does goes unnoticed in the media, not ever. Yet here we have a new MMC company that nobody ever heard of, complete with a business address, a phone number, a fleet of vehicles and, apparently, employees. That’s sort of strange, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it’s a right old mystery,” Ginger said, sounding noticeably bored. “So what are you going to do about it, Sherlock?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  I kept looking through my binoculars. They were still looking at that computer screen, Mr Lewis was still talking, Richardson was still nodding and stroking his beard. Eventually, one of the workers in the blue boiler suits came up to them and said something. They both nodded, shook his hand, and then the fleet of trucks took off. Mr Lewis closed his laptop computer and put it on the back seat of his car before he and Richardson disappeared into the school building.

  “Show is over,” I said. “And we are none the wiser.”

  “Well done, Double-O Nothing,” Ginger said to Tummy. “I’m sure you’ve unearthed a major conspiracy. Can we go home now? It’s getting late.”

  “Hell yes,” Tummy said. “Me mum is going to kill me.”

  I looked at Tummy. “Tummy, do you like spy movies?”

  He shrugged. “I guess.”

  “How would you like to be a spy?”

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 3

  How would I like to be a spy? Well how about not at all, Michael?

  You see, the thing is, it was a special hobby of me three friends to wreak havoc, and it wouldn’t be the first time for me to unwillingly get involved in some sort of urban gorilla warfare action against ‘the system’. One night a couple of months back we had been out and about on the streets, and they suddenly thought it would be a hilarious idea to mess with the traffic lights at the crossing right here in front of our school. Michael had used me as a step ladder. He stood on me shoulders, pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket and changed the colour filters of all the traffic lights. He put the red filter at the bottom, the green in the middle, and the yellow one on top, and when we walked to school the next morning, there was complete chaos on the roads. The others had a hell of a great time watching it, but then again they weren’t the ones who had to explain those muddy footprints on the shoulders of their coats to their mums.

  There was this other time when we snuck into our school in the middle of the night. Technically we were breaking in, although we didn’t really break anything. Our school had this brand new super high-tech security system that worked with smartcards rather than keys. Not a single door in our school had keyholes anymore, just these small slits that you had to swipe your smartcard through to open the door. It took Michael three days after the system was installed to hack it and to make his very own smartcard that would open every single door in the building. So one night we broke into the school and went to the chemistry lab where Julian and Ginger poured some chemicals together to produce artificial bacon scent. Then they went to the central control unit of the brand new air conditioning system and gassed the whole school with it. The next day was the first time the school canteen ran out of food at lunch time because we all had been forced to smell the scent of fried bacon all day.

  “Seriously, why do we have to keep doing these things?” I asked them back then. “I mean, what’s the point?”

  Michael looked at me. “The point is to throw a spanner in the works. To pour sand into the clockwork.”

  “But why?”

  “The ultimate goal is to slow down the machine and eventually make it stop,” Julian said. “To give people time to think.”

  I still didn’t get it. “Think about what?”

  “Who cares?” Ginger said. “As long as they think about anything. Because right now most people don’t think at all. Millions and millions of little cogwheels that just keep turning and turning, and they have no idea what they’re even doing.”

  “Or why,” Julian added.

  What can I say, me mind is very sensitive and not equipped to withstand peer pressure.

  Michael looked through his goggles again. “They’re in Richardson’s office on the third floor. Enough time.”

  He pulled an SD memory card out of his pocket. “Tummy, I need you to get into your dad’s car and insert this into his laptop.”

  “What the bloody hell, Michael? Why me? Why do I always have to do these things? Why don’t you do it?”

  “And what am I supposed to tell your dad when he comes back and finds me on the back seat of his car?”

  “Well, what am I supposed to tell him?”

  “The truth,” Michael said. “You were on your way home, saw his car and hopped in to catch a ride.”

  “That is not exactly the whole truth, though, is it?”

  “No, but it’ll do. At least that excuse will work better for you than it will for me because he’s your dad, not mine.”

  “Bloody hell, just give me that bloody thing!” I grabbed the SD card from Michael. “Now what exactly am I supposed to do?”

  “Put in your earphones,” he said. “I’ll call your phone and walk you through it.”

  A minute later I found meself sneaking up to me dad’s car like a bloody burglar.

  “Tummy, can you hear me?” Michael said into my ear.

  “Yes, Michael, I can bloody hear you!”

  “Good. Your dad is still up in Richardson’s office. The car is parked under the tree, so even if they looked out the window they wouldn’t see you get in. Just don’t slam the door too hard.”

  As I reached the car, I looked up. Michael was right. Through the foliage of the tree I couldn’t see the windows of Richardson’s office. I slid into the backseat of the car, quietly and elegantly like a snake, and closed the door.

  “Very good,” Michael said. “Now take the laptop. There should be a card slot at the front of the case, right in the middle.”

  “Found it, but there’s a card in there.”

  “Take it out.”

  “Got it.”

  “Is it an actual memory card or just a plastic dummy?” Michael asked.

  “Looks like just a piece of plastic to me.”

  “Excellent. Looks as if he’s never used the card slot before. Probably doesn’t even know it’s there. Now all I need you to do is to put the SD card I gave you in the slot.”

  “And then what?”

  “Nothing. That’s all.”

  “How is that supposed to work? The computer isn’t even running!”

  “Relax, Tummy,” Michael said. “Just put the card in. The next time your dad powers up his computer,
MINDY will give me remote access to it and erase the contents of the card. Your dad will never know, and if he should ever find the card, it will be completely blank.”

  “If you say so, Michael.”

  “I say so. And you better do it quick, because your dad has just left Richardson’s office.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  I put the memory card into the slot, but it wouldn’t fit. My heart started beating faster and I was beginning to sweat.

  “Michael!”

  “What is it, Tummy?”

  “The bloody card doesn’t fit! I can’t put it in properly!”

  “I need you to relax, Tummy,” Michael said. “Make sure that the bevelled corner or the card is on the top right hand.”

  I turned the card around and put it in the slot again. It snapped into place.

  “Got it, Michael!”

  “Well done. Now get the hell out of there. Your dad will be down any moment now.”

  I put the laptop back on the seat and pulled toe door handle. The door wouldn’t open.

  “Michael!”

  “What is it now?”

  “The bloody door won’t open! I can’t get out!”

  “Child-safety lock,” Michael said. “The man has a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old. What on earth does he need a child safety-lock for?”

  “Oh I don’t know, Michael,” I said. “How about I hand him the phone when he catches me here and you ask him yourself?”

  “All right, all right. Try the passenger door in the front. Do it now!”

  I got on my feet and tried to squeeze meself through the gap between the front seats. I have been overweight for all me life, and apart from the usual bullying and mockery by the slimmer people, I never had a problem with me body. This was the first time in me life that I wished I was as skinny as Julian, because no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I twisted and turned, I couldn’t get to the front seat.