Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  “Thank you. Thank you all.”

  * * *

  At the end of his speech, Julian raised his face towards the heavens and spread out his arms like he had done when he appeared on that stage. This time he wasn’t imitating Jesus Christ, though. This time he did it to embrace the thunderous applause and the cheers from the crowd, the love and appreciation from sinners and saints alike. It was breathtaking and awe-inspiring.

  As I wiped away my tears, I turned and looked at Tummy and Momoko. She was leaning against his shoulder, sobbing like a baby, and even Tummy had tears in his eyes.

  Somebody tipped me on the shoulder. It was Tholen.

  “Would it make you nervous if I told you that you’re about to perform in front of three billion people?”

  I frowned at him. “What? But Michael … he texted me earlier. He said he didn’t make it.”

  Tholen shrugged. “All I can tell you is that Julian’s speech went out on T-Vox and every single MMC operated TV channel around the world. Radio, too.”

  I was confused, but I didn’t have any time to think about it, because Julian had already started to introduce us.

  “Please give a warm welcome to my band,” he said. “Tummy on the bass guitar!”

  Tummy planted a quick kiss on Momoko’s cheek, grabbed his guitar and ran onto the stage.

  “Ginger on the keyboard!”

  I walked out onto the stage. It was the first time I saw that vast sea of people in the summer twilight with my own eyes, and it sent shivers down my spine.

  “Unfortunately,” Julian said, “Michael, our drummer, can’t be here tonight, but we have found what I’m being told is a worthy replacement. His name is Richard, although for some reason he insists on being called Ringo.”

  After Ringo had sat down at his drums, we all looked at each other and smiled.

  “Okay, let’s play some music,” Julian said into his microphone.

  And so we played.

  The Third Revelation of Edward Pickle

  In the beginning, the boss was completely oblivious to the existence of Julian Monk. He was an ignoramus, always had been. He never gave a wet fart about what was going on in the world unless it involved himself, or someone presented it to him on a silver platter. That someone was usually me. It was my job to make sure Mr Maddock knew all the things—and only the things—he needed to know.

  When Julian first exposed the British government’s plans for education reform, which were really just the first steps of our plans to expand the MMC Cares model into Europe and America, I didn’t deem it necessary to bother Mr Maddock with the dirty details. It would have resulted in too many questions from the man. I didn’t have the time to go back all the way to Adam and Eve in order to explain to him a situation that I was busy trying to contain. When I picked that school in Finchley to be the MMC Cares prototype in the UK, it seemed like a good choice. It had a headmaster who was a member of the Conservative Party, it had the current Education Secretary as an alumnus, and it was in the Education Secretary’s constituency. What I didn’t know and had no way of knowing was that it also had a student who had a friend whose dad worked at the Education Secretary’s constituency office and who didn’t grasp the basics of computer security. The rest, as we now know, is history. It’s ironic that it was—of all people—one of our very own employees, Miss Suzuki, who played an integral part in blowing what merely should have been a minor inconvenience completely out of proportion and turning it into a major political scandal.

  Shit happens, I guess.

  In hindsight I’m perfectly happy to accept the blame for initially not taking Julian Monk seriously. I thought he was just some silly kid who had no idea what he was talking about. He didn’t seem like a threat. He was way too tall, way too awkward, and way too pretty. How was I supposed to know that he was on a mission? I’m not sure he even knew it himself.

  The overnight success of Julian Monk and Puerity wasn’t all bad news for MMC, though. Their frequent appearances on Inside Momoko, our flagship programme on T-Vox UK, broke one ratings record after another, we had a 25% share in Puerity’s record label Thorex, and each and every single one of the over four million copies of their CD album was manufactured by one of our own subsidiaries. They may have been a pain in the neck, but at least it was a pain in the neck that paid. Puerity catered for a market that we always knew existed, but we never knew how big a market it really was: the market of teenagers and young adults who couldn’t find their emotional, spiritual needs fulfilled by traditional religion; who couldn’t seem to connect to a 2000-year-old institution, even if that institution had a Twitter account.

  Like most people who hadn’t heard of him before, Mr Maddock became aware of Julian Monk when he pulled that stunt in St Peter’s Square on the day of Mr Maddock’s election. Mr Maddock didn’t say a word to me about the incident, which was very odd. I would have expected him to be furious and demand Julian’s head on a silver platter, especially since Julian made bigger headline news the next day than Mr Maddock’s election did. But instead—nothing.

  A few days later when I was snooping around Mr Maddock’s computer, I decided to check his browser history, and it turned out that he had spent the entire night after his election catching up on Julian Monk, from that first public appearance at his school, his rise to fame, the incidents at Wembley and Berlin, to his arrest in Rome. And he still wouldn’t talk to me about it. That’s when I knew that the old man didn’t trust me anymore. It made me furious, because after all I had done for him over all those years, I clearly deserved better. And it didn’t end there.

  A week after his election, Mr Maddock took control of the official papal Twitter account @Pontifex which had previously been maintained by a handful of dedicated staff at the Vatican. Against my express warnings, and after 30 years of me doing everything to keep him away from the microphones, he decided that it was a good idea to engage with people directly through social media. The first thing he did after he had usurped the @Pontifex account was to follow @JulianMonk, making Julian the first and only person any pope had ever followed on Twitter.

  That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the camel in this case being me. I thought it was an incredibly stupid idea. As the leader of the Roman Catholic Church he was supposed to lead, not follow. The man was completely out of control, and with him at the Vatican and me at the helm of MMC, I clearly no longer had any significant influence on him anymore. Now it was just a matter of time until he would do or say more incredibly stupid things, even more stupid than following a 17-year-old pop idol on Twitter, and I knew that when that moment came, I better had an exit strategy in place. I had to ensure that when—not if, when—Mr Maddock went down, he wouldn’t take me down with him.

  At around the same time I became more and more fascinated with Julian. He was a born megastar. He knew how to work the media, he knew exactly what he was talking about, and he knew how to get his message across. The more I thought about him, the more I was overcome by a feeling of melancholy. I had spent the last 30 years turning a bad joke of a cretin, that second-rate TV preacher from Alabama, into the most powerful media tycoon in the world. Without me, that man never would have made it out of that murky TV studio in Huntsville. Without me, that man never would have become Pope. It was me who had made all this possible, and I suddenly couldn’t help but wonder what I might be able to do with a brilliant, charismatic character like Julian Monk.

  At around the time of Julian’s first emergence from obscurity, the head of IT-security at MMC notified me of a potential breach of security at one of our data centres in London. He said he thought he had identified some sort of malicious code, whose origin we couldn’t figure out, that was using memory and processing power of our MMC Connect customers. While we were offering free security packages for all our Internet customers, some of them didn’t bother to install them, either because they already had their own antivirus tools running, or simply because they couldn’t be assed. It was those cust
omers who didn’t give a rat’s ass about their own security, who had their machines hijacked. While that code didn’t cause any obvious harm and didn’t seem to pose any immediate threat to the integrity of our network, our head of IT-security was reasonably worried because of its immense sophistication. It operated with military-grade encryption, and since it never utilized any physical memory, only RAM and CPU time, we had no way of telling where it had come from or what exactly it was doing. All we knew was that it regularly relayed information back to a specific mobile device, but we weren’t able to identify the device, because it was extremely well secured. What we could do, however, was to track the location of that device. I asked our head of IT-security to keep an eye on it and to report back to me regularly.

  At first, the movement profile we detected didn’t seem to make any sense. The owner of the device seemed to spend most of his time in north London, but he would often travel to various different places all across the UK for a day or two and never to the same place twice. Then one day we detected him in Berlin; then in Rome; then in New York City where he stayed for exactly 37 minutes before he returned to London. And then he was in Rome again at the exact same time Julian was at the Vatican after his accident. It was all too obvious that the device we were tracking belonged to one of the Puerity kids. It was pretty safe to rule out the girl and the fat kid. It had to be Michael, the geek, the son of an IT specialist himself. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  The fact that Michael was in Rome at a time when the whole world thought Julian was dead was a piece of incredibly valuable information in and by itself. It showed us that he was incredibly tech-savvy and a force to be reckoned with and certainly not to be underestimated. I had our IT guy write an app for my cellphone that would let me track Michael day and night. That was all the app could do. I couldn’t access the files on his phone, I couldn’t listen in on his conversations. All I ever knew was where he went, and sometimes basic information like that is all you need.

  After Julian had respectfully declined Mr Maddock’s offer to become a poster boy for the Church, Michael had met with the organizers of the Rock for Reason concert half a dozen times. Julian was still presumed dead by most of the world, so it was obvious that they were planning something like a big comeback. But then something strange happened. When the day of the concert came, Michael didn’t go anywhere near Hyde Park. Instead, he made his way to the MMC broadcasting centre in the early evening. With a home-made key card he gained access to our server room, our nerve centre from where he would have been able to hijack all our satellites and all our TV channels around the world. The Rock for Reason concert was being broadcast live on BBC4, but only to the UK and with an anticipated audience of no more than three million. If Michael managed to hijack the MMC network, the concert would go out to three billion people all over the world. I obviously couldn’t let that happen, so when he was about to work his magic on our servers, I stepped out of the shadows and—for dramatic effect—pointed a gun at his head.

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” I said, “but I cannot let you do this.”

  Michael didn’t say a word. He just raised his hands and stepped away from the servers, looking miserable. I could see how his brain was trying to figure out how I knew what he was up to, how I had been able to predict what he was trying to do. I could also see that he knew he was in deep shit.

  “Go on then,” he finally said. “Aren’t you going to call the police?”

  “I would,” I said, “but don’t you have to be somewhere?”

  He frowned at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “Michael, Michael, Michael,” I said and sighed. Then I called two of our security guards. “Please escort our friend Mr Carling here outside,” I said to them when they arrived. “A taxi will be waiting for him.”

  I will never forget that look on Michael’s face as he was taken away, full of disdain for me, mixed with a feeling of disappointment that his brilliant plan had failed. It had been a brilliant plan indeed, to have the resurrection of Julian Monk televised live to a global audience of three billion people. It was so brilliant that it could have been my idea. But I couldn’t let him go through with it, could I? If I hadn’t stopped him, he would have been liable to prosecution under cyber terrorism laws in three dozen countries, and he would—in all likelihood—have spent the rest of his life in prison. The rest of one’s life can be an awfully long time if one is only 17 years old.

  So I did it for him.

  I threw the switch—a couple of dozen switches, actually—and moments later every single one of our TV channels around the world was broadcasting the resurrection of Julian Monk. It was the greatest moment in television history, and I had made it possible. If Michael had done what he had wanted to do, it would have been an act of terrorism and the end of his life. When I did it, it was an executive decision; one that would be explained to the rest of the world as a very unfortunate technical glitch; a glitch that MMC was of course terribly, terribly sorry for.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 18

  When I slumped down in the backseat of the black cab, the cabbie nodded at me in the rear view mirror and took off without even asking me where I wanted to go.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  “I’m supposed to take you to ’yde Park Corner,” he said. “Isn’t that where you want to go, mate?”

  “Of course.”

  I pulled my mobile out of my pocket and sent a text to Ginger. It was a very brief message: ‘I failed.’ Then I closed my eyes, trying not to think about anything, but it’s impossible not to think about anything if you’re feeling miserable. A million things kept running through my head, and I wanted to shout at them to stop, to go away and leave me alone, but of course they wouldn’t do that. They were here to stay, to haunt me until the end of my days, to forever remind me how I had failed. Again. How I had failed my best friend again.

  “All right, mate?”

  I opened my eyes. The cabbie looked at me in the mirror again.

  “What?”

  “I said, are you all right, mate?”

  It was only then that I realized that tears were running down my face. I hastily wiped them away. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Right,” the cabbie said. “You one of me best customers I ever ‘ad, let me tell you.”

  I frowned. “How so?”

  “About ’alf an hour ago this funny old bloke calls me to MMC Centre. Walked up to me and tells me to wait for me passenger. I said, if I ‘ave to wait, I said, I ‘ave to turn the metre on. Then the bloke gives me 200 quid, can you believe it? I said, for 200 quid I’ll be ‘appy to wait all night. But ‘e said it’ll only be a few minutes. And ‘ere we are. You must be pretty important, mate.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not important at all. I’m completely useless.”

  I looked at my watch and tried to make sense of what the cabbie had said. How had it been possible that Pickle had not only anticipated what I was going to do, but also arranged for my transport before I had even made it to the server room? And how did he know that I’d want to go to Hyde Park afterwards? It was where the concert took place all right, but Puerity were not officially scheduled to appear. None of this made any sense to me.

  A few minutes into our ride we found ourselves on a gridlocked Shaftesbury Avenue on our way into Piccadilly Circus. Traffic had come to a complete standstill, and after a while the cabbie said, “Sorry, mate. Must be an accident or something. Looks as if we’re stuck ‘ere.”

  “How far to Hyde Park Corner?”

  “Not far. Mile and a quarter. But in this traffic …”

  “I’ll walk,” I said and jumped out of the cab. “Keep the change!”

  I ran down Shaftesbury Avenue, and when I reached Piccadilly Circus, I could finally see what had brought all traffic to a grinding halt. Drivers had stepped out of their vehicles and joined the pedestrians standing in the street, all of them staring at the big new MMC pow
ered JumboTron towering over their heads. It showed the scene live from that stage in Hyde Park where Julian had just risen from the dead, dressed all in white like an angel, his arms spread out as if to embrace the whole world, and he was about to speak. I was staring at the big screen with the same bewildered expression on my face as everybody else, albeit for a different reason. In the top right corner of the screen I could see the T-Vox logo, and a ticker band at the bottom of the screen read: Due to unforeseen technical circumstances we are currently unable to broadcast our regularly scheduled programme. I had no idea what had happened, but I wasn’t going to complain.

  I decided to stay. I wasn’t going to make it to Hyde Park in time anyway, and I wanted to witness Julian’s speech. Not because I hadn’t heard it before, though. Julian had read various iterations of it to me in the last few weeks, so I knew pretty much exactly where it was going. But I wanted to gauge the reaction of the public. Not the reaction of hyped up fans at a concert venue. I wanted to see the reaction of regular folks in the street.

  It was mind blowing. As soon as Julian started speaking everyone was mesmerised. Even the most impatient drivers fifty or a hundred metres out of Piccadilly Circus stopped honking their horns so they could listen to Julian on their car radios. Many people just stood there, their heads leaned against the shoulders of their partners, spellbound, listening. Others kept wiping away their tears. Spontaneous outbursts of cheering and applause accompanied Julian’s speech throughout and culminated in a thunderous crescendo as he finished. Never before had I seen thousands of people standing in the middle of the road at Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night applauding, cheering, yelling at a giant video screen, and I’m sure I will never see anything like it again.

  * * *