Arms Race (13 page)

London had been grim in summer, but by now it has an austere beauty. I walk the towpath
towards the bulletproof Tescos. Glaciers have formed between buildings, and are
calving tiny icebergs into the streets. The skyscrapers of Canary Wharf push up into
the blue like a range of newly minted mountains. Snowdrifts have softened the lines
of roads and buildings; everything that was once human now seems to belong to an
ancient natural wilderness.

In the backstreets of Wapping a smell like roasting meat reaches me. Smoke rises
from the chimney of an untouched terrace house: a cremation. A small traffic of mourners
goes in and out, and from the house comes the melancholy chime of a hand bell. I
remember going with Marie to the final memorial ringing of Big Ben. The great frozen
bells had shattered like glass.

In the Tescos the fluoros flicker and buzz. Armed guards in black balaclavas watch
me round the aisles. If they see me crying over the carrots, they say nothing. Marie
used to shop here back when the shelves were full. Three per cent cheaper than Safeway,
she liked to say. She'd evolved so perfectly to work the little levers of suburban
life that when the shit really went down, it wrecked her. The Gulf Stream grinding
into reverse, refugees like frightened
cattle, riots outside Parliament, the layered
snow an archive of spilled blood: it wrecked us both.

We watched the chaos on the news like it was happening somewhere else. Life kept
getting worse, and we kept adjusting until we no longer recognised ourselves. Marie
became a thin woman standing at the sink, waiting for a kettle which had already
boiled. I became a man who told jokes.

That's all you do when you're upset, she said. Joke, joke, joke.

Bullshit, I said. Sometimes I clean the oven.

When she got pregnant she stopped talking. Something in her broke. Yet still I told
her things would get better. I refused to give up hope.

I pack my purchases onto my sled, and dry my eyes so they don't freeze shut. As I
drag the sled through the lobby, something catches my attention: two rheumy eyes
peering from a nest of sleeping bags.

Canary! I yell.

Old Man Canary. I'd given him up for dead. The tip of his nose is eaten by frostbite,
and when he manages a grin he's got even fewer teeth. His sparse grey beard looks
like cobwebs.

How'd you like to go somewhere warm? I ask, crouching at his side.

Warm?
he breathes.

He's not in good shape. I end up pulling him along
in the sled. We chatter away,
me doing the talking, him throwing in his chirping monosyllables. I'm halfway through
telling him about Umi's brilliant frog idea when he interrupts. It's the longest
sentence I've ever heard him speak.

Told her yet?

Told who what? I ask, as if there was any doubt.

He grins.

By the time we reach home we're travelling in the dark. The windows across the back
of the factory are ablaze, lighting the giant billboard like a beacon. Melt water
runs down Maggie's face. A chunk of old ice slides from the roof and explodes into
the snow.

Jesus, I say. Now we're cooking.

I help Canary slowly up the fire escape. We push open the door and it's like walking
into a blast furnace. The heat is overwhelming, the exhaust fans so shrill it's hard
to talk. In the flickering firelight of network traffic, the old industrial machines
seem alive with the hiss and roar of steam.

Canary and I wend our way between the servers, shedding clothes as we go. My reflection
paces me in the glass-fronted cabinets. I barely recognise my own skinny shanks,
or the nervous hope on my face.

In the centre of the server maze Umi's at her laptop, dressed only in her underwear.
Her long legs are propped on the desk, and I notice she's carefully painted her
toenails fire-engine red.

Looking good! I say, trying not to stare.

Right back at you! she replies. You know the bookies are taking bets? Five to one
he cooks. What do you think?

I think you should say hello to—

Oh my god! Canary! She crushes the old man's withered chest in a hug. How are you still alive?

Canary shrugs. He looks shy but proud.

Well, it's good to see you. Are you hungry? Did you get food?

I did, I say. But what the hell's happening here? How many viewers?

Smile, Umi says, nodding at the camera. You're live in front of thirty-two thousand
viewers.

Thirty-two
thousand
?

It just jumped with your arrival.

My god. How's Little George doing?

He's in heaven.

I peer into the terrarium. The frog is kicking his back legs in lazy circles.

He seems fine, I say. But how on earth did we get so many—

Wired
. They did a serious story, so now everyone else is taking the piss. It's pushing
massive traffic our way. Check it out.

Umi runs through a series of windows on her laptop. There are a dozen parodies of
our jump or die logo, released within hours of the
Wired
story. Little George has
been
replaced with everything from kittens in toilet bowls to office workers atop
the Twin Towers. There are people trying to make coffee on top of their servers and
an NGO in the Hague crowd-boiling a lobster for charity.

Then the Korean barbecue restaurants caught on, Umi says. You cook your own food
at your table and perform for the cameras. The more traffic, the hotter your barbecue.
People do some wild stuff with sliced pork. Since then we've had three different
crowd-boil kitten hoaxes, and now this. This is genius.

Umi maximises a live stream from three students in the San Diego enclave. They're
already famous for posting videos of a stray cat that looks like Hitler. They've
strapped Hitler cat to a miniature electric chair, attached a little helmet, and
run a bunch of complicated wires down to the servers. Their traffic is going berserk.

The screen blanks. Umi hits refresh. Oh wow, she says. Their servers have been taken
out.

Shit, I say. Crashed? Or hacked?

Dunno. But if they're offline, that's a million people looking for something to watch.
We have to harness that.

Old Man Canary's grown bored of watching the screen. He's got his arms around one
of the warm server cabinets, as if he'd like to dance with it.

Do we really need to boost our traffic? I ask Umi. This is pretty good.

If this is the peak, it's downhill from here, she says.

We've got to keep climbing.

But for how long? When do we pull the plug?

Later. Umi grabs my hand and holds it to her forehead. Feel that heat.

I brush her hair back off her face and tuck it behind her ear. Lovely, I say. But
how long till he cooks?

Jump or die, Umi says with a grin. He'll jump.

I mean, how long before the water's hot enough to kill him?

Impossible to say.

Then shouldn't we shut this down? Before all that traffic finds us?

No way, Umi says. We need it.

But it'll push the load through the roof.

That's the point.

It'll kill him.

He'll jump.

He'll burn.

He'll jump. Of course he'll jump.

How can you be so sure? I demand. How can you be so fucking sure,
all the fucking
time
?

Umi grins even wider. Animals are smarter than humans. There's no way he'll sit there
and cook. It's simple.

Simple?

Simple, simple, simple.

Gah! I shout, and I grab her shoulders and shake them, and we're grappling, skin
on skin, her self-satisfied lips
beaded with sweat, and I'm suddenly thinking about—kissing
her?

Kissing her.

On camera.

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

Umi grits her teeth, and pulls away. Her face is shocked.

Oh, Canary says, eyes wide.
Cold
.

I'm turning from her, my heart a single ice cube, when, without warning, a traffic
spike hits the factory like a physical force. The fans scream, the lights flicker
and dim and the auxiliary generators roar to life like a row of diesel trucks.

Far out, Umi says. She's staring straight ahead at her laptop. CNN just posted our
live stream to their entertainment page. That's mainstream viral.

Umi, I say. Sorry. I—

It's okay, she says. Blame the heat.

It kills me how quickly she accepts an apology. No, I say, I did—

Her smile is jammed on high. It's fine. It gave the traffic a good bump.

It's more than a bump: it's carnage. Within minutes
JUMP OR DIE
is trending all over.
The comment feed is a blur of speculation and outrage. Still greater heat rushes
the room, raking my skin and scorching into my lungs.

My mind fills with footage of the drought belts. That parched desolation. Defeat
sitting behind the eyes like a bad hangover. I try not to think about where Marie
and Jordan might have landed, and I fail. I know I have to get out of here.

Just walk away, I tell myself. You've already done it once.

By now we must be close to red-lining the system. Umi shakes her head every time
I suggest we shut the servers down.

Later, she yells over the blast of the fans. It's only fifty-seven degrees in there.
Heaps more capacity.

But what about Little George? I yell back.

In the camera shot, our heads loom above his terrarium like a pair of heat-stroked
gods. I feel so faint I have to lean against the server cabinet, and I have the sudden
woozy sensation that I'm back at Jordan's birth. Canary's taken off all his clothes.
Umi's trawling back through all the mutations and parodies, looking for a way to
tip this over into an internet-wide smash.

Sixty-two degrees.

Sixty-eight.

I try to summon anger, momentum. The tiny frog reaches the edge of the bowl and turns
and circles round again.

Come on, you little bugger, I mumble. Jump.

He's okay, Umi says, and her voice sounds like it's
been slowed down. She's got a
new parody of our logo up on the laptop screen. This time the image of the frog's
been replaced with two naked figures. A strong, tall woman and a scrawny man, lips
grotesquely puckered.

Fuck.

Superfuck.

I get it.

I take off my glasses, and I have to fight the urge to hurl them across the factory.
I begin to laugh. It seems like such a good joke. Then I'm weeping.

I reach into the terrarium, and poke Little George. He sails away under my touch.

Careful! Umi says. He has to swim.

He's done, I say. We're making soup.

He's still moving.

The water's boiling, Umi. It's us.

What?

It's
us
. You think a hundred and fifty thousand people give a damn about a frog?
They're all waiting to see what
we're
going to do. You and me, and Canary: jump or
die.

I put my hands on her shoulders, and I feel her flinch. We're going to cook ourselves,
I say. We have to shut this down.

She's staring over my shoulder. No way, she slurs.
More.

I follow her gaze. It's Old Man Canary, and in the rising heat he smells terrible.
Umi wrinkles her nose, then smiles.

Canary, she says. Old Man.

He takes my hand, and Umi's hand, and tugs. I realise he's got the fire door open.
Already I can sense the air whipping in off the river ice, and it's the sweetest
thing I've ever felt.

I gather my jackets, and through the heat-crazed air I see Umi hunting for her own
clothes. At least I think that's what she's doing, until I see her dragging something
into the centre of the servers. It's the fridge, from the kitchen.

With unbelievable strength she lowers two server cabinets onto their sides, then
pivots the fridge so that it's lying on its back on top of the cabinets. She vanishes
again.

Come on! I yell, turning to the door.

Canary's still standing in the centre of the maze, cloaked only in his green sleeping
bag, fumbling with the zip. Umi returns with the fire hose. It only takes seconds
to fill the upturned fridge. She retrains the webcam.

Umi! I yell from the doorway.

If she hears me, she shows no sign. I step out onto the first rung of the fire escape.
Words are forming in my addled brain: a speech, a jumbled mess of a thing I've been
putting off telling her since the day I came back to work.

Marie and I slept shoulder to shoulder on the stale airport carpet for a month, waiting
for a flight to god knows where. I never gave up hope. But I woke one morning and
saw her sitting with Jordan in her arms, perfectly still, watching the departure
boards with such dumb patience
that I realised she didn't care what happened. Hope,
for her, was just another kind of resignation. They called our flight, and I told
her I was going to the toilet. She didn't even ask why I was taking my bags.

As I walked away through the chaotic, stinking halls, past migration police with
tasers and dogs, past the people at the bottom of bottomless lists, their heads lifting
to hear the final call for my flight, I wasn't walking away from my son, or from
my wife.

I was walking towards the one person I knew who had not lost hope, and would never
lose hope, even if it killed her.

I throw my snowshoes out the fire escape into the white below. I take one last look
at the world we've created—the server labyrinth ablaze with the internet's lunatic
fire; the upturned fridge filled with water; Umi, grinning confidently, hands on
Canary's shoulders, saying something I can't make out—and then I jump.

SLICK

IN THE beginning, he was just a skinny guy named Simon working a bar in The Rocks.
I'd covered my table with a spread of photos for a Kahlua ad I was working on. The
model was a former Angolan child soldier turned pin-up girl. She had a boa constrictor
wrapped around her, a rifle in one hand and a glass of Kahlua in the other. Her lips
looked like they were about to disgorge something sexy and expensive. This guy brought
me another Johnnie Blue and paused to survey the photographs. He looked like any
other nervous hipster shithead in tight black Levis and Ray-Ban knockoffs till he
opened his mouth. Jesus, he could talk. It was like being hit with a cattle prod.