Arms Race (12 page)

Bingo.

We step through Margaret Thatcher's eye socket and into her brain.

It doesn't take
long to get everything back online. Umi replaces the fuses and throws the mains switch.
Overhead lights ripple and snap on down the rows. The hard drives spin up, and the
thousands of servers are soon chattering with life. Straight off there's a wave of
heat from the exhaust vents.

We pull up chairs and sit with our hands held out to the warm air. Blood tingles
in my thawing fingers. I keep stealing glances at Umi, her eyes gleaming in the light
of the network traffic indicators. She's a little older than me, tall and solid and
lively as a jackhammer. A jackhammer with a posh accent.

So far, so good, she says.

You're a genius, I say. We just run the place ourselves? Business as usual?

Not quite, she says, looking serious. This winter's going to be twice as bad as the
last. We'll need a lot more heat.

But you can't buy heaters anymore, I say.

Heaters? Umi cries. She slaps a palm against the nearest server cabinet. What do
you think these are? From now on this isn't a data centre, it's a data
furnace.

A what?

Umi rubs her hands together. A data furnace. You know how much heat these things
pump out. They spend billions cooling data centres everywhere else, but we want the
heat. The more data we burn through them, the hotter
they'll get. We boost the traffic
and move in here, and I think we'll survive this winter just fine.

Move in? I say. You mean—together?

If you're staying.

I don't have a choice.

Then it's better with two of us. The building's secure, and we've got back-up generators
if the power drops out. But we need to burn a seriously large amount of data to heat
this place.

Then we need to make something that'll go viral, I say.

Exactly! Umi says. She pulls out her phone, and brings up the number one clip on
YouTube.

It's a cranky old man from Blackpool trying to burn his heater. He dumps it in the
fireplace and douses it with petrol. The flames get so big his ceiling catches fire.
He runs round screaming
Oh my god! Barbara! Heat! Heat!
The talk shows wanted him,
but I heard he died.

You know how obsessed people get with this stuff down in the drought belts, Umi says.
These clips get millions of hits, and the bandwidth's all paid by advertising. That's
what we need.

Millions of hits? I say. Us?

Umi grins. We'll think of something, she says, like it's the easiest thing in the
world.

First we rearrange the servers to maximise their heat output. It takes a couple of
weeks to lug the cabinets into tight concentric rings, vents facing inwards. Once
we're done the place looks like an enormous futuristic hedge maze. We leave a space
the size of a living room in the middle, and install our desks. I'm glad to finish
each day exhausted. There's less chance I'll have to think.

When we're ready to move in, Umi helps me collect a few boxes of clothes and kitchen
stuff from my place.

Which of these do you want? she says, looking at the photographs of Marie, Jordan
and me on the hall table.

Ah, it's okay, I say. I've got some already.

Really?

Yeah. Anyway, they're much better looking in my head.

We load the boxes and my bed onto a sled, and drag it down Wapping High Street like
some bizarre Icelandic wedding ritual.

Why didn't you get on that flight? Umi suddenly asks. Her cheeks are red with exertion.

I told you, I missed it, I say.

Bullshit. Umi stops pulling the sled. What happened, George?

I pretend to study a row of eviscerated council flats, standing beside the road like
rotting teeth. I don't know, I say. Guess I couldn't bring myself to leave all this.

At the factory we place the bed in the centre of the
maze of servers. We sleep side
by side, for warmth. After the months I spent sleeping alone in the spare room, woken
only by Jordan's wails, Umi's breathing is a charm.

Day by day the temperature drops. We experiment with our own videos. The internet's
going mad for footage of British animals snap-frozen into domestic poses. There's
an ice-bound squirrel reclining next to a swimming pool, and a mummified kitten that
looks like it's brushing its teeth.

When I find a dead sparrow in the back of a server cabinet, we stretch out its wings,
attach it to a stick and film ourselves taking it out around the ruined city. Sparrow
buys a sack of Charity Rice at the bulletproof Tescos. Sparrow hides from middle-class
looters: management consultants and dentists in armoured snowmobiles. Sparrow goes
scavenging through the ruined halls of the V&A, and falls in love with a stuffed
partridge. In the end Umi films me launching the dead bird out the fire escape, into
a blizzard.

Sometimes you just know when it's time to jump! I yell.

The clip doesn't get much traffic. Afterwards I feel mean.

Every last tree in the city's been burned, so there's nothing to suggest autumn,
but it's clear summer has gone. Windblown snow sticks hard against the factory windows.
Soon daylight is just a brief translucence, and night after night I'm woken by the
cold. I come up from a dream of Jordan, his newborn face spread beneath me like a
landscape, veins branching through him like frozen rivers. Then he's gone, and there's
just the drone of the fans and the thin streams of warm air, and a relentless chill
on all sides.

Are you okay? Umi murmurs.

That's it, isn't it, I say. That's all the heat they've got.

She rolls to me. I'm not wearing my glasses, and her face is a soft blur.

They can punch out a lot more heat than this, she says. We just need something to
really take off.

It's Joe's frog-in-the-pot thing, I say. Only in reverse. We're slowly freezing.

Umi doesn't reply.

We could put up a tent, I say.

What?

Put up a tent. Trap the heat, and sleep inside?

Sure, Umi says, but she isn't really listening.

In the morning Umi's gone, and she's not answering her phone. There's a pile of refugee-arrival
printouts on my desk and a scribbled note:
You were talking in your sleep.
I stare
down at them for a long time, then put them in a drawer to look at later. I lose
the morning watching videos of a heat-deranged Canadian grizzly trying to eat a fishing
boat.

Around three I hear the fire door. The wind whistles in off the river ice.

I've got it! Umi calls. Time to boost the traffic!

She crosses through the maze of servers, and places a large cardboard box on my desk.
Beneath her frost-tangled fringe her face is radiant. She opens the box with a flourish.
Voila!

Inisde is an ornate art-deco terrarium: a miniature world of pebbles, lush green
plants, and a bowl of water. There's a handsome golden frog sitting in the water,
his tiny chest shuttling in and out.

Where the hell did you get that? I ask.

British Museum of Natural History. They're evacuating this week.

I squeeze Umi's arm. That's brilliant.

Thanks. She beams.

Sarcasm, Umi. What on earth?

It's the frog in the pot! she cries. Put him in cold water, turn up the heat, see
if he jumps, right? You'll love this.

She hefts the terrarium onto the server cabinet above our bed, then positions a high-resolution
webcam. She opens her laptop and brings up the widescreen video of the terrarium
in a browser. I can see the fronds on the ferns, the patterning of the frog's skin.
Beyond, the server racks curve away into elegant soft focus. The old industrial machines
loom like sentinels.

Beautiful, I say. But how's that going to boost traffic? And how are you going to
heat the water?

Umi's jittery with excitement. Here, she says, indicating a graph beneath the video.
That's the number of people watching. One for now: us. That's the power usage of
the servers. And this one's the heat inside the terrarium. I've hooked up a sensor.

Oh no, I say. You're not.

Not what?

That's—sick! I'm laughing, and a little horrified. You've got the video of the frog
hosted on the servers underneath the frog, right?

Right.

So—the more people watch the frog, the higher the load on the servers, the more heat
they produce? It'll boil the water—people will cook it just by watching!

Yes! Umi says, clapping her hands. We spam out the link, and people have got to be
curious. They visit the page, they push up the server load, the temperature goes
up too. Incrementalism, I call it: billions of tiny, innocent actions that add up
to catastrophe. Just like the real world.

Just like my marriage, I mutter.

What?

Nothing. So we just boil him to death and then, what, eat him?

Hardly, Umi says, frowning at me. He's tropical. We'd
need about a hundred thousand
views an hour before he's in danger.

What are the chances? I don't want to be responsible for his death.

That's the beauty of it! No one's guilty. The responsibility'd be shared by about
five million viewers.

But what if we really hit the big time?

I reckon Little George will jump.

Little
George
?

Umi smiles. A meme needs a name.

She's got all the answers. It's infuriating. There's a self-assurance planted so
deep in her she doesn't even know it's there. A bit like a cancer, you could say.
Only you wouldn't, if you were a small man living in very large times. Her confidence
is all I've got.

Well, then, I say with a grin, Little George must be freezing.

Umi grins back. Shall we?

What the hell are we waiting for?

JUMP OR DIE
. Umi's made a logo, with Little George lifting his head to ponder the
question. We plaster it across every social-media channel we can find. I write press
releases, and spend days spamming the link to stupid meme sites worldwide. I feel
warmer just having something new to do.

By the end of the week four hundred people have tuned in. The temperature hasn't
budged. At night we leave a lamp on beside the terrarium and climb into bed. It's
beyond freezing.

If I wake up dead, I say, you have permission to burn me.

Umi puts an arm around my shoulder. Hey, she says. Most viral stuff takes weeks to
get going. It won't happen overnight.

At eight I wake to the dull buzzing of my phone.

You the frog guy? How long do you give him?

There's whining static on the line. It's hard to hear. Who is this? I say.

Paul Sherman,
Sunday Mirror.
I saw your little stunt on fist-face.com. I'd like to
do an interview.

What? When?

I'm out front.

Umi stirs beside me. Whatsit? she mumbles, and there's the same weird static over
her voice. I realise it's the server fans running at a higher speed. People are watching.
Lots of them.

Journo, I whisper, and her eyes blink open.

Haven't you been following it overnight? Sherman says in my ear. Where have you been?

Asleep.

Sleep when you're dead. Or when the frog's dead. Have a look.

I crawl to my desk and drag down my laptop. Goddamn, I say, exhaling slowly.

Two thousand, two hundred viewers. The graphs show an erratic climb. The temperature
inside the terrarium is clocking thirty-four degrees Celsius.

I stand and cross to the terrarium with a duvet round my shoulders. Little George
is sitting among the ferns with just his eyes visible. He looks like he's hiding.

Paul? I say. Come on up.

The story he runs is harsh: ‘Heating Gimmick Animal Cruelty Shocker'. There's a photo
of me and Umi looking smug, and a huge pull quote from the Royal Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals:
This could be the first ever crowd-sourced execution.
We strongly encourage people not to visit this website.

My god, I say. People will hate us.

Exactly, Umi says. It's
perfect
.

She's right, of course. The article gets picked up by tabloids overseas as a those-crazy-freezing-Brits
story. For the next few days traffic hovers at three thousand viewers an hour. It
makes no difference to the icy air, but Little George paddles around happily enough.

Then an environmental magazine calls up and drills us
on the ideas behind the project.
I start to tell the writer how it's a matter of life and death: we need to heat the
factory to survive. Umi grabs the phone and starts ranting about how we're making
a statement about society, industrialisation and the energy footprint of the internet.

It's garbage but the writer laps it up, and soon there's a string of stories about
how we're trying to raise awareness about this or that. The internet doesn't give
a shit. We get a real bump in traffic when the
Onion
runs with ‘Young Brit Programmers
Demonstrate Utter Futility of Human Civilization by Slowly Boiling Helpless Amphibian'.

For a fortnight we watch the numbers rise and fall. The days get shorter, and the
northerly storms pound in. The silos beside the factory collapse into the street
below, and the whole first floor vanishes under snow. A six-day blizzard closes London
City Airport for good, and with it goes the last of the evacuation flights.

Inside the factory, Little George swims and eats and swims. The traffic is growing
just fast enough to keep us from freezing. Umi stands behind my chair while I hit
refresh like I've got a nervous tic.

This is the critical part, Umi says. She massages my shoulders with strong fingers.
Right now we're on the cusp.

When there's a break in the weather one of us has to go out for supplies. I take
my baseball bat and snowshoes,
and prise open the fire door. The icebound city gleams.
It's been weeks since I've felt the sun on my face. Snow is piled so high at the
base of the fire escape that I can hop down from the third floor.