by IGMS
"It's nice here," she said.
"I guess," I said. "But I've been here my whole life. Don't you wonder what it's like elsewhere?"
"Sure, who doesn't?" she said. "That's not happening anytime soon. I need to save up."
"I just get sick of it, you know?" I said. "All this carbon-credit allowance crap. Scrimping on food and clothes just so I can spare enough to get to London? When my father was in uni he bought plane tickets and took months just flying from place to place."
"We can travel," Rachel replied. "My father was in Seattle last year. If yourrating's high enough, they'll let you go for something important."
I took another gulp of lemonade, wishing I'd washed yesterday's apple juice out of my flask more thoroughly. I wondered just how rich Rachel's parents were. In all my time at the university, my parents' background had remained a topic I'd steered away from.
"But what if we just want to go?" I said. "We've done our bit. My parents' farm generates more power than it consumes. We eat local, buy everything digital. No car, no flights, no beef."
"You live within your means," she said. I tried to ignore the pity in her voice.
"Yeah," I said. "We do. I've seen the news reports, I know how important it is. But everything's so limited. I just look at my life and think - what can I achieve? I haven't even got the ability to get out of Oxfordshire."
"Hey," Rachel said, waving a hand in the vague direction of where her rep would appear if we'd been linked in. "We're highly repped people now. If the credits are what you're worried about, there are ways of getting around that stuff."
She looked lasciviously past me in a way that made me imagine black market carbon traders, handsome brutish men of danger that could provide her with everything in her desire I could not. Or so my insecurities suggested, although I didn't acknowledge them as such at the time.
"Sure, we can cheat," I said, "But is that better? We might as well burn coal."
She shrugged and began flicking through her network for parties for the evening.
"Why do you do it?" I said. "What made you want to be the 'it' girl at the top of the rankings? You hardly ever go to classes, you're always boosting your rep instead. Don't you want a career?"
"Brendan," she said with a sigh that implied I just didn't get it. "You think a career would be any different? They still have their rep chart. Sure, it's more private and corporate, but it's still the same hoop-jumping and rep-chasing. The further up the charts I get now, the easier it'll be to get ahead in my career. Everyone does it."
"I guess," I said, but inwardly I wondered whether everyone really did think that way.
"Marcus is throwing a house party tonight down by the river." She said. "He's promising something really wild. That producer will be there. Wanna go?"
Her dark eyes were seductive, flecked with a playful green. Her shirt hung open as she leaned forward, soft mouth closing on mine for an indulgent kiss. She wouldn't understand what I wanted to say, but she was still the girl I'd always wished I'd been cool enough to have. What could I say?
"Sure," I told her. "I just have to check on my experiment so my supervisor doesn't fail me."
"Seriously?" Her raised eyebrows told me the story. I didn't need to check my glasses to see my rep falling a couple of points.
"It won't take long." I gave her my best "what can you do" expression, although really I was quite excited to find what the nanoassembler had made. "Stick the party on my events list and I'll see you there in a few hours?"
"Okay," she said. She kissed me again, biting her lip as she drew away with a bemused expression. Then she ran back towards the river. I picked my damp boxer shorts from a tree branch and hauled myself up to walk back to the bus stop.
I arrived at the lab to find Professor Gallagher quite comprehensively back from Japan. He sat at the desk of the nanoassembler, staring at the screen. His eyes were ringed with the effects of a long flight. When I cracked open the door he stood and looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
"Brendan," he said. "Hello."
"Uh . . . hi." I gesticulated behind me. "Sorry I wasn't here, I --"
"Never mind that," he snapped and jabbed a finger at the manipulator screen. "What did you do to the program?"
A yawning pit of panic opened up inside me. I had flashes of being hauled in front of department heads, thrown out of university, sent back to the farm to grow biodiesel the rest of my life.
"I . . ." His face remained inscrutable. I floundered. "I made a few changes to the rhythm. I hope I haven't broken anything."
"Broken?" The professor returned his eyes to the screen. "Brendan, if this is what you call broken, can you do it some more?"
I blinked. He zoomed the screen in on one of the nanostructures.
"Take a look," Gallagher said. "Whatever you did, it worked."
My stomach bottomed out with an altogether different form of panic. Amongst all my fear of failure, I'd never imagine what might happen if I succeeded.
I peered closer at the screen. The spots of the nanoassembler's laser beam moved around the assembly area, picking up buckyballs, nanorods, and functionalised spheres with ease, slotting them together into a vast cylindrical construction with a timing that looked familiar.
"The beat . . ." I said softly, watching the timing of each laser spot's movement. "They're dancing!"
"I'm sorry?" Professor Gallagher said with an odd look.
"I write music," I said. "This morning I tried writing the code in time with one of my songs."
Gallagher watched the screen for twenty silent seconds, tapping his finger against his leg. A smile began to creep onto his face as he worked out the rhythm.
"Well, that's certainly an unusual approach," he said. "We'd never really played with the timing before."
"It seems to work," I said, watching a rod pause a second before attaching to a rapidly expanding grid of nano parts.
"There must be a latency time to the biotin we hadn't considered," the professor said.
"So the chemical reaction needs to be done at a certain speed?"
"Exactly." The professor walked to the door, still looking back at the self-assembling nanomaterials. He straightened his back and looked at me for what felt like the first time.
"Well done, Brendan," he said. "The timing still looks a little off. Play around with it and see if you can't find the best . . . rhythm."
"Okay, sir."
He looked amused at the concept. His hand beat a drumbeat on the doorframe.
"This is good work." His voice had a soft warmth I'd not picked up in lectures. "Work hard at this and we could have a place here for you next year."
"A p-place?" I said. "As a researcher?"
Professor Gallagher nodded. I looked back at the nanoparticles joining together, creating structure from the smallest of building blocks. In all the lectures and laboratory classes, I'd never felt this way about science. It was like having another road opened up in front of me. I admired my discovery and grinned.
"A researcher could make his name on this," the professor said. His voice became firm. "If he was to work hard to ensure his success."
"Yes, sir," I said. "Absolutely."
"Call me Steve," he said. "Hey, see if the nanoparticles like the Prodigy will you? It'd give me a real kick to see them dance to something from when I was your age."
"Yes, Si-- Steve." He began whistling snatches of a Chemical Brothers track. My mind reassembled its map of how the world worked. Professors and dance-music weren't things I'd ever thought mutually compatible. I always thought I'd have to make a choice between my creative side and my work. What was it I wanted to do with my life? Professor Gallagher stopped whistling and opened the door.
"Goodnight, Brendan," he called from out in the corridor.
"Goodnight," I said. I took a deep breath and rushed towards the screen, eager to try all my favourite tracks.
I was just watching nanorods forming a scaffold in time to Led Zeppelin's Kashmir when
my network pinged at me. I stared dumbly at the time, swore and hurriedlyshut the assembler down, grabbed my stuff and headed for the door.
The building was locked up for the night and it took me another fifteen minutes to find a postgrad with a RFID key to let me out. I emerged into the warm nighttime air, running past startled drinkers heading for the bars. It was hard to get back in the mood for pleasing the network when what I'd just achieved was so exciting and yet so utterly unlikely to provide me with rep from the cool kids.
I was two hours late by the time I got to Marcus' house party, sweaty from the run, head still full of nanoscience. I found Rachel deep in conversation in the kitchen with three guys, an 88, an 81 and a 93 sharing a bottle of eighteen-year-old Glenmorangie. By the looks of the demolished bottle, someone had a rich father. In my delay, my rep had fallen back into the seventies.
"Where have you been?" Rachel said. She refrained from kissing me, looking at my ruffled clothes with an exaggerated wrinkle of her nose. I hadn't changed since the park. I realised I still had no boxers on.
"The most amazing thing happened in my experiment," I said.
"Your experiment?" Rachel looked as if I'd thrown rotten meat at her. "You mean work?"
"Well yeah," I said, scratching my head. "I had a real breakthrough."
The taller one, the 93, turned to me. I think I'd seen him in the student newspaper, running for vice president of the union.
"You're not talking about uni are you?" he said. "Once I get out of lectures I can't wait to forget all about it."
"Too right," the 88 said, "Life's too short."
They laughed and poured each other another shot of the whiskey. They didn't offer me any. I was someone who took their classes seriously, which made me uncool. Even the cool kids had to do exams, but they tried to hide the work they did as much as possible.
"This is Phil, Rich, and Xavi," Rachel said. "Phil and Rich were just telling me about their new jobs. They're just about to start working for Esso."
"The green division, of course," Phil said. "Third generation biofuels. Just because it's good for the planet doesn't mean you can't make a shedload of money."
"Plus it's a lot easier to get carbon credits when you make the carbon sinks!" Rich said.
"Uh, sure." I wasn't quite sure if I was supposed to be an active participant in the conversation. Rachel hadn't looked at me once. I was starting to feel like unless I did exactly what she wanted, she would find some new toy to help her move up the social ladder.
"That's nothing," Xavi said in an unfamiliar accent. "You should see some of the solar projects my dad's worked with out in the desert. The scale of what's going on is crazy."
"Xavi's here on placement from Spain." Rich said.
"How'd you manage that?" I asked. "I'd love to go to Spain."
Xavi, the low ranked 81, gave an uncomfortable shrug. Phil, the 93, clapped him on the shoulder.
"It's easier when your dad is the ambassador," he said. "Ain't that right Xavi?"
Xavi didn't reply to him. He turned to me.
"And what is it you do?" Xavi asked.
"I . . . manipulate graphene sheets using a holographic nanoassembler," I said. It wasn't something I would normally have said, but I was proud of the day's success. It felt more real. "Well, actually I write programs that control the computers that do that."
"Oh," Xavi said. There was an awkward pause, then Rich laughed.
"Sounds like a barrel of fun," he said. "Come on Phil, let's go play pool."
"Alright," Phil said. "See you later Rachel."
"Bye!" she said, a little too brightly for my liking. I couldn't help noticing his arm brushing her back as they walked away. I wondered where I stood in all this.
"Well," I said to her, "They were very pleased with themselves."
"So?" she said. "They're interesting guys."
"Sure," I said. "If you like that sort of thing."
"Brendan." She looked down her nose at me. "Don't be a downer. No one wants to hear about your work, it's a party! We're here to get you your big break, remember?"
I did my best to smile. Somehow I'd never thought being with my dream girl would involve feeling like a social outcast.
"Quick, let's see if we can find Gordo."
"Gordo?" I snorted. "Sounds like a stockbroker."
"No," she said reproachfully, "silly. Alex Gordon, the music producer? The whole reason we're here?"
"Oh," I said. "Right. Okay then."
She led me around to the makeshift bar, intercepting a couple of wooden tumblers to dip in the punch bowl. I followed mutely. In all the excitement at the lab, I'd forgotten about Rachel's offer of introducing me to the producer. I became suddenly aware of my appearance, smoothing my hair in the reflection of a picture and checking there weren't any embarrassing messages on my wall.
Gordo was a slightly thickset guy in his late twenties, a bristly goatee hiding rather clammy skin. His local rep was off the charts, and he appeared in the top 10,000 country-wide. Rachel burst into her most seductive smile and positioned us between the producer and the bar.
"Gordo! Hi!"
"Hello."
"Rachel," she said. "We spent some time together at Jack's."
His eyes flickered a light of recognition I wasn't sure I believed.
"Of course," he said with a warm smile. "How are you?"
"Fine," she said. She moved back against the table to let me closer. "Gordo, this is Brendan. He makes some awesome electronica. I was hoping you'd be here so the two of you can chat."
"Is that so?" He turned to me, looking relieved to be talking to anyone rather than Rachel, who hung behind me eagerly. "So what are you called?"
"I'm Brendan."
"No." Gordo frowned. "Your band . . . artist name."
"Oh," I said, scratching my head awkwardly. "I see. It's 'Puppet Lives'."
"Not bad." His eyes defocused as he looked me up on the network. "Ah yes, I remember. Kinda Nintendo Ambient with a little nerdcore?"
I nodded. "That's exactly it."
"Yeah, I listened to your stuff," he said.
"You did?" My ears did a kind of aural double take.
"Sure," he said. "I try to listen to all the local artists."
Rachel leaned into the conversation. She'd redone her lipstick whilst we were talking. It was now a brilliant shade of pink.
"So," she said. "Does Brendan have what it takes?"
"Well, there's no questioning your talent," Gordo told me. I grinned inanely despite my best attempts to look cool. "I'm not sure it's got a huge market though. If you were to remove some of the more extreme high pitched samples and speed the beat up, I think you might have something I'd be interested in. Make it a little more suited for a dancefloor, you know."
He gestured at the writhing bodies in the packed living room behind us. My stomach felt hard with panic at the thought of the suggested changes. I couldn't think of anything worse. He was basically asking me to sell out.
"Uh, that's not really what I had in mind . . ." I said.
"Brendan!" Rachel produced a girly giggle completely out of the character I had for her, and leant her hand on Gordo's arm. "What he means is that it will take some thought to rework the tracks which he has already completed."
"I can speak for myself," I said, glaring at Rachel. "I'm not sure I'd still be happy with my tracks if I made those changes. It's not really me."
Gordo scratched his beard and shrugged.
"Well," he said, "that's up to you as an artist. I can only tell you that I can't sell your work as it currently is."
"I understand."
"If you have a change of heart or make any more dancey tracks, let me know."
He handed me a virtual card, which I slotted into my private contacts. We shook hands.
"Thank you for your time." I said. Gordo nodded and wandered away from the bar, a fresh glass in hand.
"What's wrong with you, Brendan!" Rachel rounded on me when the producer
was out of earshot. "You just threw away guaranteed star status!"
"By sacrificing everything about my music that makes it mine?" I placed my drink on the table, suddenly not feeling like alcohol. "Frankly, I've got better things to do than destroy my soul."
"What's your problem?" she said.
"Don't you want more than just rep?" I said. "Something more?"
"Like what?" Rachel said, scanning the room behind me for someone else to pounce on.
I looked at her and fumed inside. I wondered why I'd been so excited in the first place. This had never been about me or my music, just what I could do to get her in with the in crowd.
"Hey," she said, waving a hand over her head. "There's Franco. He's joining Arsenal next month. Franco! Over here!"
I watched as the athletic 95 made his way towards Rachel with a smile. I had a burning desire to be elsewhere. I thought back to my meeting with Professor Gallagher, how I'd felt like an important part of his plan without having to give up my own.
"I'm going to head off," I said. "I've got a lot to do tomorrow."
Her face turned red.
"Brendan, what the hell do you think you're doing?" She pushed me into a corner so that Franco wouldn't see us. I suddenly realised how short she was, as if the popularity had been hiding it. "This is your chance to make it big, and you're blowing it! This won't come around again."
"If I'm going to make it big with my music," I said, "I want it to be because people liked it, not because I pandered to what gets me the most rep."
"Oh grow up," she said. "You really think you can get anywhere without getting your rep up? This is the way the world works."
"Not the whole world," I said, stepping away from her.
"Fine," she said, rolling her eyes and turning back to the party. "See you around, Brendan. When you change your mind, I'll be here."
"I know that you will." At that moment, I couldn't think of a sadder pronouncement.
I turned my back on her exaggerated welcome of Franco and walked towards the door. One look back into the crowd of drunken party goers and the swirl of rep changes and wall posts flying about their heads made me pause. Then I turned my social network off and walked out into the warm summer air. Rachel spent her whole life trying to make those around her dance to her tune, to try and achieve the life she wanted. I thought of the assembler, and how if I could make the nanoparticles dance, I could have a greater influence than all the rep in the world would ever give me.