PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  * * *

  ‘Alicia!’ says Kieran when I arrive back at the sports hall. Why has he added two unnecessary syllables to my name? Still, he gives me a joint, for which I am grateful. Will it help my throat? Would Kent approve? Who cares? As well as Kieran, the group of people contains Grace; Niila and Mitzi from the plush-toys team in Iceland; the blonde girl, who is introduced to me as Violet; the black tattooed guy called Frank; and a guy I haven’t spoken to before called James (the one I thought looked like a social worker on heroin). Kieran starts giving out photocopied sheets to everyone.

  ‘Where’s Ben?’ I say to him when he gives me mine.

  ‘No idea,’ he says.

  I look at my sheet. It is a map of Dartmoor with no place names. Instead of place names, it has names of animals. In the north is something called Great Bustard. Slightly to the west of this is Sea Eagle. In the south-east, there is a cluster of names: Polecat, Night Jar and Turtle Dove. Woodcock, Raven and Lapwing appear in other places on the map. On the bottom left-hand corner of the map there is a legend in ornate script: Map of Dartmoor Illustrative of its Zoology, it says. Next to this there is a compass rose and a date: 1839. This reminds me of a treasure map. Still no Ben. I don’t know anyone here apart from Grace and Kieran. I wander over to Grace.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ I ask her.

  ‘Psychic orienteering,’ she says, smiling.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Yeah, mad, isn’t it? It’s just another one of Kieran’s crazy ideas.’ She laughs and pushes some of her long black fringe out of her eyes. ‘With just this map and a compass, we have to find our way to … Hey, Kieran? Where is it we’re heading?’

  Kieran stops talking to James and looks around.

  ‘Yeah, good point babe. I probably should tell everyone what we’re doing,’ he says. ‘Right. We will today be attempting to get from our current position, roughly three miles east of Honey Buzzard – I have marked it on the map – to Corn Rabbit, via Goshawk, Moor Buzzard and Buzzard.’

  Niila puts his thin arm in the air.

  ‘How will we know when we are there?’ he asks.

  ‘We will see corn rabbits, of course,’ Kieran says.

  ‘This map’s from 1839, yeah?’ says Violet. ‘Everything’s going to be fucking extinct by now, surely? And what the fuck is a corn rabbit anyway?’

  She’s leaning against the sports hall wall like a sullen teenager, scowling. There’s something about the way she looks that I quite like. She reminds me of someone I used to know as a kid, a girl called Tracey who lived in my village. Violet’s blonde hair is scraped up in a tight, high pony-tail and she is wearing a lot of make-up: dark eyes and almost white lips against a pale, matt face. Her clothes don’t say ‘cutting-edge fashion’ like Chi-Chi and her crowd’s, or even ‘anti-cutting-edge fashion’ like mine and Esther’s. Violet’s clothes are the kind of High Street fashion that real teenagers wear, not the ones Chi-Chi invokes, who always tend to be pop stars or international skateboard champions. Her pink T-shirt doesn’t quite reach the hipster waistband of her blue jeans, and her navel is pierced. James and Frank are laughing at what Violet has said. I get the impression that these four – James, Frank, Violet and Kieran – hang around together a lot.

  ‘What’s the thing that looks like a cat’s arse-hole?’ Frank asks, pointing at his photocopied map. Is that something you could, you know, fall into?’

  ‘I think that’s a quarry,’ says Grace, peering closely at her sheet.

  ‘All right,’ Kieran says. ‘I’m handing you over to James, now, since this is really his experiment after all.’

  I am wondering how I can escape from this. It’s not that it doesn’t sound interesting but I don’t feel part of it at all. Kieran has his gang and, judging from the vibes I can pick up, Grace is here because she is connected to Kieran somehow now as well. Are they an item? It certainly feels like it. Niila and Mitzi form a little unit of their own. They make me think of slender fairies: creatures you’d be more likely to find on a slightly supernatural day out on the moor rather than part of the exploration party. And then there’s me: awkward, alone and feeling more and more ill. James is fiddling with a piece of paper. Shall I make my escape?

  ‘What would you rather be: a Short-eared Owl or a Thick-kneed Plover?’ It’s Ben’s voice, and his breath on my ear.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’

  ‘Slept in,’ he says, smiling. Ben’s smiles are always faintly surprising, as if something so flippant could only very rarely occur on such a serious, bushy-eyebrowed face. ‘So?’

  ‘Um, a Short-eared Owl.’

  ‘Hmm. Me too. I’m not sure I like the idea of thick knees. And I don’t even know what a plover is. What exactly is this?’ He waves the map around, and the small breeze catches it, almost blowing it out of his hand.

  ‘It’s our map.’

  ‘There are no actual places on it.’

  ‘I know. Apparently this is “James’s Experiment”.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ben says, as if this all makes sense now.

  ‘Who is James?’ I ask. ‘What does he do?’

  ‘James is a psychologist. What he does isn’t entirely clear. In my division there’s a little think-tank, all about game theory and education and so on and he runs that. But it only meets once a week. I think he was brought in to work on a couple of educational titles but as far as I can tell, he spends all his time over at the virtual-worlds research centre with Kieran and that lot. The set-up at Reading is a bit weird. It was all designed around the themes of hot-desking and the paperless office. No one has a desk, basically, and it’s hard to know what anyone is doing, or who is connected to whom.’

  ‘And that girl?’ My eye keeps being drawn to Violet. Everything she does – now, for example, she is applying more of her pale lipstick – is utterly compelling. Why would this be?

  Ben laughs. ‘What, Violet? Have you never come across her before?’

  ‘I’ve seen her in seminars. I just assumed she was something to do with plush toys or dolls.’

  ‘Violet has a Ph. D. in pure mathematics,’ he says.

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘It’s not that clear what she does, either,’ he says. ‘But that little team … They’re like PopCo’s élite. Mac and Georges pop in to see them all the time. They’ll find that they haven’t produced anything for a couple of weeks and turn up to find them having a séance. You’d think they would get into some sort of trouble, but no, they really can do no wrong. Incidentally, who do you think Violet is going out with?’

  ‘Um, Frank?’ I suggest. He’s big and tattooed and, I don’t know, their aesthetics seem to match.

  ‘Yeah. Frank. And James.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And they know?’

  ‘Yep.

  ‘Fucking hell.’

  Ben smiles. ‘And now Kieran’s after Grace, of course …’

  I look over at them. They are deep in conversation. ‘Yeah, I noticed that something was going on,’ I say.

  ‘Richard can say goodbye to her.’

  ‘What do you mean? Were they …?’

  Ben shakes his head. ‘No, no. But she’ll be joining Kieran’s team after this, I bet you anything. She is exactly his type. An engineering graduate Goth who knows all about robotics. And she is likely to become the PopCo Go champion soon, too.’

  ‘A trophy girlfriend indeed.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Can people just move divisions like that then?’

  ‘Only if it’s to Kieran’s team. He can choose anyone he wants – anything he wants – and he gets it. He could request Prince William on his team and he’d probably get him.’

  Over by the wall, James clears his throat. I can’t help picturing him and Frank and Violet at it together. I imagine Georges turning up at their offices to see them all, this ‘élite team’. Does he think about fucking her too? I would. My bloody throat hurts
. I fish around for a pastille. It won’t help in the long run but it will take away the pain for five minutes or so. The Aconitum really isn’t working. I probably need another remedy but I’m too fucked to think about which one. And I don’t have any of my books here, either.

  ‘If you look at your maps,’ James says. ‘You’ll see only a few landmarks. The River Meavy, for example, on the banks of which we will, hopefully, find Corn Rabbit later today. The thing that Frank and Grace deduced between them was either a depiction of a cat’s arse-hole or a quarry is actually a tor or hill fort.’

  ‘Where’s Dan?’ Ben hisses at me.

  I shrug. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Did he say he was coming?’

  ‘No.’

  James continues. ‘We will be getting our information mainly from ancestral memories of the people and animals who have lived on the moor, which we will obtain through a process of meditation. Together with this map and a compass, of course. Anyway, this should, hopefully, be an interesting way of getting around and you may find all kinds of memory traces of beautiful extinct creatures, or other things from the moor. When you think you have reached Goshawk, our first destination, ask the Goshawk to show itself to you. You may then see a vision. If you don’t, then perhaps you are in the wrong place. If you do see a vision, make a sketch of what you have seen. I’m sure some of us will need reminding about what a Goshawk actually is.’

  A few people laugh.

  ‘The trouble with this lot,’ Ben hisses to me, ‘is you never know when they’re being serious. This could be completely real, or it could be an elaborate hoax. For all we know, Kieran could have a real map and a GPS unit in his pocket. The actual experiment could be something to do with how we respond to this.’

  ‘Why isn’t Chloë here?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, she hates this kind of thing. It’s too bourgeois for her.’

  Bourgeois. That’s a word I haven’t heard for a long time. I wouldn’t have put it with Chloë, but then I don’t really know anything about her.

  ‘What is the purpose of this experiment?’ Mitzi asks James.

  ‘That’s complicated,’ James says, with a smile. ‘On one level it’s part of my own research into the ways people interact with the zero-point field. On another level it’s part of some ongoing research to do with mapping the virtual world. OK. Shall we get going?’

  Mitzi doesn’t look completely satisfied with her answer but doesn’t seem to care too much. We all start walking down the forest path towards the back of the PopCo complex. I pull out my compass, and tree-shadows fall on it like a zombie’s fingers.

  ‘20 degrees north,’ I say to Ben in a hoarse voice.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asks me.

  ‘Yeah. Well, no. Bit of a sore throat.’

  ‘Yuck.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I just hope it doesn’t turn into anything.’

  ‘Don’t give it to me.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to catch my diseases,’ I say.

  * * *

  Somewhere near Goshawk (or a long way in the direction of what we all think might be Goshawk), I somehow end up walking next to Violet.

  ‘So who’s the grandmother, then?’ she says to me.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The one with the Erdös number of two.’

  ‘Elizabeth Butler,’ I say. ‘Why?’

  ‘I know some of her work. I thought I might. I’m Violet, by the way.’

  ‘Alice,’ I say back. ‘Don’t come too close. I’ve got some kind of sore-throat thing developing.’

  She walks close to me anyway and I can smell rose, and vanilla. She smells powdery, like there’s no moisture in her at all and she could just crumble into dust at any moment.

  ‘You do those spy kits and that code-breaking stuff, don’t you?’ she says to me.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I research puzzles in virtual worlds, among other things. We’re like the real and pretend versions of each other.’ She laughs. ‘The offline and online versions.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, unconvinced. We walk on in silence for a minute or so. I don’t know what to say next. Since we left PopCo Towers, the landscape has changed abruptly. I say abruptly because the change really was abrupt. We came out of the forest, and found a road. The PopCo side of the road was fairly normal: trees, bushes, grass in kids’-colouring-book green. The other side of the road marked the beginning of a wilder kind of countryside. The grass was like a thick yellowing carpet; no hedges or trees. This new grass is springy when you walk on it, and has wild flowers growing in clumps everywhere. The flowers are gorsy or prickly in places and are species that I couldn’t name. I could confidently say I have never been anywhere like this before. I have never really seen proper moorland before this (it was too misty when I arrived here last week) but yet, if you had shown me a picture of this, I could have told you it was a moor. I don’t know why.

  We have just passed a boggy area, which I suggested we didn’t try to cross. I don’t know anything about bogs and marshes but I have read The Hound of the Baskervilles. We scramble down another big dip to find ourselves close to an old stone wall. There are Dartmoor ponies everywhere, and sheep. Some flowers are growing up the wall: wild pink daisies, and some blue flower that could even be Monkshood. The wall seems to be the remains of some kind of battlement. On the other side of it there is a mossy-looking hill with the remains of a stone structure at the top.

  ‘You know, I haven’t been able to look at flowers the same way since I learnt about the Fibonacci sequence,’ Violet says, stroking the pink daisies with her thin white hand as we walk along the wall. ‘I don’t know which is better: simple beauty with no explanation, or knowing exactly how and why seed pods are organised.’

  ‘I can barely remember what the Fibonacci sequence is,’ I say, stopping to look at the map again, and check the compass.

  ‘Didn’t you do maths?’

  ‘No. English.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looks disappointed. ‘I thought you were a fellow maths chick.’

  ‘No. Not really. Not beyond the odd bit of recreational maths.’ I frown, self-deprecatingly. ‘Is the Fibonacci sequence the one that goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on?’ How did I find this in my cluttered mind? I do recognise it as another Voynich memory, though. How much stuff did I learn because of that blessed manuscript? Not enough, obviously, because I never did find out what it contained.

  She beams. ‘Yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘And each new number is the sum of the two before?’

  ‘Yep. And the rate of growth?’

  I smile. ‘You’ve really lost me now.’

  ‘It’s phi, the golden number. Or as near as dammit. 1.618 … and however many decimal places you want to go to.’

  The golden number, phi. Of course. I remember now.

  ‘Flowers have Fibonacci numbers of petals,’ I say. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s pretty much it. And Fibonacci numbers of seeds, and seed-heads. The golden number controls a lot of nature’s patterns.’

  She strokes the petals some more before we set off again.

  ‘You can create your own universes, if you know the code,’ she says. ‘Or you can try, anyway. Do you like videogames?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, nodding.

  ‘Are you online?’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘Part of a virtual world?’

  ‘Oh. No, not yet.’

  Yet. I don’t know why I have said this. Dan and I talked about virtual worlds a while ago, when he started researching Dungeons and Dragons artwork. I was scared of addiction, and still am. I know I would love it inside a world like that so much that I would never come out. Dan said he was scared that they wouldn’t measure up to his idea of what a world like that should be. I almost smile at this recollection. Now I’ve heard about the world he would create, I know why.

  ‘Wait until ours is ready, then try that,’ she says.

  ‘Yours? I didn’t know you were m
aking a virtual world. Someone said that you research products to be sold inside them. I didn’t realise you were building them too … Wow.’

  ‘Yes. Outside of pornography and eBay, virtual worlds are one of the few online businesses that are making money. We have to be doing it. It’s very cool. Like being a God. Some of the programming is pretty boring but the boys do that. I am in charge of the patterns. I’ve been looking at the basic Fibonacci stuff again because of that. I want to write a programme to make the natural landscapes in the virtual world create themselves, just like ours do. You have to build in rules for that, just like whoever created us must have done. The Fibonacci sequence is great. It entirely explains why things like flowers grow outwards, in a circular fashion. You don’t see square flowers, do you? Or naturally occurring straight lines? Isn’t it amazing that there is a mathematical rule for things like that, that nature seems to understand that circles and spirals are the most efficient way to organise things?’

  The grass is longer now as we walk past the hill and the structure and off towards another one. We soon come to a tiny stream, and people start splashing themselves with water. All this walking does make you hot, although I am not hot. I feel shivery all over. While they mess around in the stream, Violet and I stand next to what looks like the remains of a very old train track. I didn’t know they had trains on the moor. It’s all grassed over now; grass claims everything that humans abandon. Violet is applying more lipstick.

  ‘What’s the actual difference between a world and a virtual world?’ I ask her suddenly, frowning.

  ‘Good question. But don’t ever say that to Kieran. He will start talking and not stop for several hours. He thinks we really are gods. He says that the reason there were so many Greek and Indian gods was because they created us just like we are creating Efila – that’s our virtual world – and you need a team to do it. He says the idea of God as an individual is total bollocks. Anyway, the difference between a world and a virtual world is obvious, if you think about it.’